Sam Harris

00:00five four three two hello sam harris hey man good to see you happy to be here great i listened to your podcast with jack let's just get right into the jump in the jack stuff yeah because i listen to your podcast with jack and i found something very when i did my podcast with jack first of all was not anticipating the blowback that i received it was stunning uh but um he what what i thought was i was just gonna have a conversation with this guy be fun see what it's like to run this gigantic network that helps people communicate you okay jamie all right helps people communicate and distribute information worldwide what is it like to start something like that up and have it become what it is like have you managed to try to keep up with it and what have the headaches been and right apparently people online particularly the people that want to comment about

00:49this all they wanted to know about was censorship and that was an issue with me there was a question with me but it became a far it was a far bigger question for people online they felt like that i tossed him softball questions um and that i didn't press him yeah and then i listened to your podcast and uh one thing about jack is very smart guy very nice guy but he talks in a very slow and methodical way and when you ask him a question he takes these routes and if you don't want to jump in and press him like you're in this weird situation where he's not totally answering your question but he's talking about the same subject that you're talking like for instance you brought up louis farrakhan right like how is louis farrakhan in good standing on the platform and someone like you know fill in the blank milo yiannopoulos or laura loomer or whoever it was they get kicked off

01:43he never got to that he went around and around and around with you and he recognized this after the podcast i received a lot of blow back he received a lot of blow back so i contacted him and he said he'd be more than happy to come back on again and address all these things and i said okay what i'd like to do is address specific instances of people being censored and he said okay what i'll do is i'll bring in someone from the company that's in charge of that stuff right so i'm starting to put together a picture of what it's like to be a ceo of something as big and he's also a ceo of square he's runs the cash app there's a lot of stuff going on there right so he's obviously busy how much day-to-day involvement does he actually have and who gets censored and why they get censored and how much is he willing to share about that so we're going to find out in the next

02:34follow-up podcast but i got accused of everything from being a shill to being a cuck to being uh and there's also an issue that you've managed to avoid wisely so of advertising the cash apps and advertiser on my podcast so because the cash apps and advertisers are on my podcast right the man had you by the throat exactly yeah you think couldn't ask all those great questions that were queued up the reality is those are the questions i would have asked now that's hard to say because no one's going to believe it but those are the questions i would have asked and i tried not to be too confrontational with a guest but in hindsight i probably could have pressed more particularly on people like kathy griffin calling for doxing for the the the kid with the maga hat on with the native american there was there's quite a few but i noticed that well what was your experience like with

03:24it yeah so it's interesting because you and i have uh we had different interviews because they were timed differently i mean this is it's an interesting topic because this opens the door to all the ways in which our podcasts are different i mean you stream live i sit on my podcast for at least a week so in jack's case it was like two weeks before i released it so i did my interview with him before this flurry of interviews with him came out i mean there's a rolling stone interview there was a uh i think only i think maybe a huffington post interview had come out but basically there was nothing out there so i had no real examples of how he dealt with these questions um or how he talked yeah yeah well i mean slow talking is not a problem for me because i'm one of the great slow talkers so we're in a groove there but he um i i didn't know what his boilerplate was and and how he

04:15would he would answer any of these questions and uh your podcast came out before mine did but mine was mine was before the covington high school catholic circus happened right so the the real missed opportunity for me was just a sheer matter of timing like i you know because the covington thing put such a fine point on everything that's wrong with twitter and the way journalism interacts with it right it was it just you know i think it was uh farhad manju wrote an op-ed the new york times saying twitter has destroyed journalism and and and it was not a crazy op-ed in fact uh after the covington thing and the whole you know and then kathy griffin would have been the perfect example to talk about like well you know why is she still on if she's calling for the doxing right yeah but you know i i think i had a substantially similar interview with him that you did uh because he's

05:08there's two things one is he's great at sort of pirouetting around the the the sharp pointed question of you know what is the policy and why why are you applying it in this seemingly disparate way uh and it seems to skew politically in one direction all the time right but you know i think you also i mean you know i did i think you did naturally we cut him some slack in that he's the ceo of these two corporations he can't be expected to actually know what happened in every one of these micro cases like i think i brought up the case of i think her name is megan murphy i i hadn't even heard of her before that's the lesbian woman she was like a feminist who said sort of the wrong thing uh in the transgender space she said something like men are not women right right right and she got banned and for life or attention i think it was temporary but you know so i raised it and you know he

06:03he obviously can't know exactly what happened in that case or at least it would be surprising to me if he knew so the fact that he doesn't have his finger on each one of these cases and what the what the rationale was and he has this sort of generic answer that what you're seeing you know in public is not necessarily what we're seeing in fact in in virtually every actionable case is not what we're seeing in private with respect to how these people are open opening multiple accounts and doing seemingly nefarious stuff behind the scenes now whether that is true i don't know but i mean i can just say that jack seemed um one i i liked him and he seemed unusually open to talking about anything i wanted to talk about and so i saw one allegation that got hurled at you was that you know you must have been constrained by you know the topics you couldn't touch in advance you must have

06:55had some agreement with him in advance you know it didn't happen with me right now i should address that there was no no discussion whatsoever about what was off limits yeah there was no nothing and he asked for no so in my case i tell all my guests and this is the difference between you streaming live and me not i tell all my guests listen if at any point in this interview you put your foot in your mouth or i put my foot in there we can edit it right like we i want you i want you to be totally happy with what you say over the next two or three hours so if you have to take something again take it again and you know we'll just hide the seams as we go now that virtually never happens right and in jack's case it there wasn't even a wrinkle like that so um but you know i just you know i i recognize it's a high wire act for a lot of these people especially for someone

07:43who's running two publicly traded companies right and um you know so when i invited him on i said i said jack you know we were dming on twitter and i said listen i promise i'm not gonna make you smoke a blunt on video and that that got him so i don't know how you got him but i didn't try to get him to select a bar i didn't even think about it yeah yeah we weren't drinking we were just talking it would have been better if we were drinking because it did seem very stiff um i listened to it after the fact and i mean i get from their anticipation why it would be disappointing i just thought it was kind of boring i thought my podcast with him just wasn't very good i sometimes do too many podcasts and when i sometimes do too many podcasts i think i run low on juice and i'm not as uh i don't know i'm not as engaged or i'm not as fired up about it and maybe i just should have i

08:35definitely should have prepared more for him but i really thought it was just going to be a conversation about what it's like and i thought that would be really easy to do yeah because it's such a unique position to be running something like twitter but he you know i don't know if he was evasive and because he didn't know the things or because he didn't want to talk about the things but there was things like he didn't know exactly why alex jones was ultimately banned he didn't he couldn't recall or didn't know no is that because he couldn't recall is because he didn't want to talk about it or is it because he didn't remember it i mean i don't i don't know i mean you have to you have to be inside his head to get that answer yeah i mean he's clearly got a a very practiced line that he uses to answer these questions and i mean because i you know i know what it's like to have boilerplate you

09:21know i've been on a book tour and you're just basically getting asked the same questions again and again and here he's getting asked fairly pointed questions about you know where twitter's going and he's got you know i don't think this is dishonest i just think but it has this amazing ability to close the door to further inquiry because he he gives you the full maya culpa right up front you ask like what's what's the situation with you know the seemingly asymmetrical banning of people and he'll say you know yeah we really i mean we've got to get much better at communicating our process we're not nearly transparent enough this whole thing is in disarray and my job is to fix it right so it's like a global you know we're up and we're going to get better i promise you right yeah and that doesn't do any good for the people that are already banned right especially but there's not a lot to get

10:12beyond that right in an interview you know yes so it's whether you know i don't think it's nefarious i think it could well be totally honest uh but it does have this this effect of you just keep reaching a certain kind of brick wall that you didn't know was going to be there you know yeah that's i felt that too and i didn't didn't really navigate that very well and that was a big part of the blowback but then the blowback was accentuated when they found out that he sponsors me right because the catch app is one of his businesses and it sponsors the podcast yeah yeah well i had a very similar result and i don't have that that problem so it's you know that i don't think that diagnoses your situation at all but it's very interesting the difference between these business the business models under which we run our podcasts and um just the different i mean just every

11:02choice you make and how to produce a podcast i essentially have made the opposite one you know like streaming live like this the fact that you're so this is just all very interesting to me because i i'm kind of a reluctant student of digital media now because i've just kind of stumbled into this wild west that you know you in large part have invented right i mean this podcasting space was nothing and now we've got spotify you know buying up and it's like a land grab for audio yeah that we were talking about that before the podcast they just purchased some company was it gim what is it called yeah for some un godly amount of money yeah yeah like 200 million dollars they're going to spend 500 this year or something and so it's it's this we're all just making this up and you know i'm maki and you know i've just released a meditation app which is a different business model still and so

11:51now i have these kind of two parallel digital businesses happening in my life and it's um it's just very interesting the decisions you make or are forced to make and the consequences of it and so like the fact that we're having this conversation live you don't even have to think about whether you're going to edit this right because it's streaming live and you know we're gonna when we're done we're gonna turn off the mics and walk out of here and your job is done with my podcast that's not the workflow at all and i i i totally envy this this approach that you have but for a variety of reasons i feel like i can't take it in in my life and so it's it's uh but it is very different it dictates many choices you know down the line which um uh i mean there's a positive and negative but it's you know the positive is what you hear is what we got and we're done after we turn these mics off and

12:44that's and that's not you know that's not how i podcast there's also the visual element of it and the visual element of it and initially was almost like a side effect i mean we we first started it out visually but then when it started going to itunes the itunes aspect of it became the focus the audio version of it rather became the focus but then we decided to stream on youtube and put it up on youtube but it was totally not profitable it was just for for a goof like oh we'll have the video up why not some people like video it was one of those things but then you realize ultimately that youtube becomes a viable source of revenue and then it's also the way a lot of people like to watch it you know and they also like to watch because they can comment under it so that was the other thing that came out of the jack podcast we got into a controversy about comments and about how

13:32comments are deleted or how they're sh they're shown and hidden and what happens because people are accusing jamie of deleting all the derogatory comments the we don't touch any we don't we don't delete any of them we don't do anything to them we just leave them up there and it's a mostly a cesspool but i mean even even on a good podcast there's a lot of crazy that happens on these things but from what we think and jamie correct me if i'm wrong you think that what's going on is that people are marking other people's posts as spam there's that and then brandon also has the theory that a lot of alt-right people are targeted um by the algorithm that youtube uses like in in one case there was a guy who had a pepe the frog avatar and he said like his his comment immediately went to spam and that the other thing is that the comments are curated depending upon who

14:25is watching it and what account it'll be they'll be different sort of yeah they'll propagate different comments to the top it's not a this you can actually change it if you if you prefer to see the most new comment like from your own personal youtube when you're watching you you as a viewer or user of youtube have to make that actual yeah so that that conspiracy theory just heightened the whole thing right okay now they're deleting negative comments like look i don't like doing bad podcasts but i will be the first one to tell you when i think a podcast sucked yeah um that podcast was definitely disappointing it wasn't good mine wasn't good it was like i said when i listened to it i was like god this is kind of boring yeah just wasn't it wasn't juicy there was nothing he we didn't get a flow it wasn't like he and i were just shooting the having a good time

15:11well take that one decision so you have decided to make video a main component of this podcast no it's still probably a small percentage of your actual listens not anymore you know not anymore it's it's gotten to well it's almost 50 50. awesome because it's closing in on that it used to be like 90 10 right yeah yeah okay so you so i have it i don't have a video component and so i just put audio on youtube but i put absolutely no energy into youtube i mean that may one day change but because i don't i don't care what's happening on youtube right so i never see the comments and whenever i look it is as you say a cesspool it's insane i mean youtube is just skews massively right it skews just massively male and it's probably excused very young too so you have a just just like millennial alt-right craziness right it's like like as i say these sentences your youtube

16:02page is just blowing up with hate for me right you got a bunch of you know millennials with their thumbs up their asses just whinging right you know there's a lot of older people too well yeah but i mean it's got to be younger than most of where well first of all i'm not even seeing most comment threads that could possibly respond to anything i put out there now right so i got i don't even look at my at mentions for the most part i spend maybe five minutes a day looking at it that's healthy what's coming back to me but and you were actually helpful in in reformatting my brain on that on that topic but um so because i don't see any of that stuff i mean maybe i'm getting a lot of pain for my dorsey interview but i don't even know about it right and so i'm not having i don't feel like i have to course correct in response to anything now and in large measure it is a consequence of just this

16:48decision that you know i inadvertently made that i'm just i don't have a video component to my podcast at the moment and so i'm not i'm not spectating on you know the feedback on youtube well the feedback thing is interesting because we were just talking about this before the show that with feedback and comments on youtube essentially anyone can comment and if you don't go banning people from the channel which we don't do it's not what we wouldn't do if someone was totally a piece of but we don't so you essentially have this open forum so it's like almost like a message board where people could just sort of comment and it's unlike twitter in that regard because twitter just you know you get abusive and shitty on twitter they just get rid of you if you get abusive and shitty on instagram or on facebook facebook they'll just get rid of you but if you're on

17:35youtube and you're in those comments you could kind of get away with more so i would imagine that people that don't appreciate censorship and want to just just spew out whatever's on their mind that would be the place where they would go especially if it's the same product essentially the only thing different and this is a thing where it got confusing with the youtube people versus the audio people with the audio people it's very obvious that the cash app is a sponsor because it's we say it this podcast is brought to you by the cash app whereas in youtube they're like ah they're hiding the fact that the cash app's a sponsor right we talked about it during the podcast itself but we don't put the ads on youtube we there's ads that youtube puts on but we put the ads on like after the show is over i'll read the ads and we'll insert those into the audio and that will go up to itunes and

18:23rss feeds and all that stuff so the stuff that's on youtube it's abbreviated in the sense that especially the live one doesn't have anything so like this has zero ads and then the ones that will be posted on youtube later it'll have youtube ads right so that's what this so there's a couple of conspiracy theories in that regard there's also apparently an emerging conspiracy theory about that jack was trying to pump up bitcoin because they have some sort of a bitcoin deal have you heard this one i read that but like it's it from what i saw it's not higher than it was at any point it's still right around 3 500 so if there was a pump and dump scheme of some sort then like it it should be like provable on the blockchain i guess i don't know yeah i don't understand that but is there any other component to it i don't know i don't know i don't know where that's coming from i don't even

19:10what did it yeah all he said was that well the cash app sells bitcoin so we talked about bitcoin i think right because you can buy and sell bitcoin through the cash app i should say i think he said something about blockchain technology rendering everything permanent online and yes that was something different though yeah but that that i think that's in regard to comments into anything blog posts blockchain is essentially going to have everything that's online forever but there's so many conspiracy theories about all this stuff it's it's fascinating and as you know we were talking about earlier with your the way you do yours you used to use patreon and now you use your own website after the sargon of akkad incident which you nobly stepped back away from patreon now or not so no belated but whatever on what you think of sargon of akkad yeah well it's not even that it's uh yeah yeah well

20:03there's so many misconceptions about what happened there and i i you know i tried to clear them up on my podcast but yeah there's an interesting implication to not taking ads i i think what's happening and this is much bigger than even podcasting i think um i'd be interested to know what you feel about this i mean you have you are the the the quintessence of the successful ad model in in podcasting right it's like th this is you it's working fantastically well for you and for people like tim ferriss and you know probably mark maron i mean there's there's some it's kind of like a winner take all thing happening in the space where ads are working great um and i am a really also a a highly successful example of the the support model it's like the pbs model or the npr model and what's weird is that i can't like that we you know you and i are both surrounded by people who have podcasts

21:00want to have podcasts and are asking us for advice about how to succeed and how to monetize and like i'm not even in a place where i can recommend my model to anyone else right because it's it's a very you know it's it's very hit or miss i mean i just happen to have developed an audience that will support my work and you had developed that audience previously ironically enough on youtube there's a lot of youtube oh yeah just debates random people putting people putting my content on their youtube channels mostly debates right yeah and as a you know as an author but i mean it was just the podcast grew and i had this sort of forced choice where am i going to go the the the ad route or or not and i found that i mean i have two things to to say you know fairly strongly against ads but one really only one of them applies to me and i don't think it applies to you or tim or or anyone else

21:55i just felt personally i couldn't use ads because of such as what my platform is and and the kinds of topics i'm engaging and it just didn't work i mean there was nothing highbrow enough where i felt like my credibility wasn't getting subtly undermined by by shillingford i mean it could be something that i just legit loved and it could have been the oxford english dictionary you know like you guys is the best dictionary in the world you guys should use it i still couldn't do it and i tried it with the only thing i took on as a sponsor was audible and i did that for some weeks and then just you know i love audible but but it just felt wrong and so i decided to just experiment with a different business model and it's working for me but it's i don't think it can work for most people and i i view that as a problem and and the thing that i i think is is interesting is that

22:47there's this is much bigger than podcasting so you have like you have facebook on the one hand which is just a a totally free platform where the users don't even realize that they're not the customers they're the actual product right the users are the users are having their attention sold to advertisers and it's this enormous business and on the other end of the digital spectrum you have netflix which is just a stark paywall right and um there's no way in but to pay the subscription and you know that's and you know netflix could run ads and get more money if they wanted to but they're you know they're not doing that and presumably won't do that and i'm hoping just generally speaking that the digital future looks much more like netflix and much less like facebook and because i see what ads has ads have done is they've anchored everyone to the illusion of free

23:43everyone expects their digital content for free except in places like netflix right so like if when you release a comedy special when you really release your next hour and you sell it to netflix i would imagine there are very few people in in your fan base who are thinking well joe rogan why didn't he just put that out on youtube right why is this on netflix they sort of understand that this piece of content is belongs on that shelf and that if they want it they have to subscribe to netflix whereas if you did something slightly different but you know functionally the same if you put it on vimeo and charge people five dollars or whatever you know vimeo on demand um you i think you'd get a lot more pain right yeah people would say well you you greedy bastard like if you're already doing great just release your stuff right yeah and i i view that as a problem it's like

24:34it's like a psychological problem people have been anchored to the ad subsidized model more or less everywhere and they expect everything for for free and in my world i'm trying to just to continually brook that expectation and push people into a different sense of you get what you pay for and and so that the hybrid model i've created for myself is i'm putting more stuff behind a paywall right i mean so that this is it's not just pure sponsorship of otherwise free content but i'm i'm very personally i'm very uncomfortable with the idea that if someone actually can't afford it they can't get access to my content so i just tell people if you really can't afford the stuff behind my paywall or you really can't afford my meditation app just send us an email and we'll give it to you for free right so yeah i've heard that i was like this guy's crazy i mean it's actually it's actually in the

25:27pricing in the app store for my meditation app it's like there's the pricing and then below that there's if you can't afford this you know here's here's the email address i think that's fantastic and so that's free yeah i'm splitting it that way but i'm raising prices so it's like it's like a certain because i think everything is too cheap in the in the digital space i think i think we're anchored to i mean there are people who will spend five dollars a day on a cup of coffee every day for the rest of their lives and yet if you told them this podcast or this app that they that they say is incredibly valuable to them is going to cost them five dollars a month they they feel raped right you know so it's know and i completely understand it because i know what it's like to hit a pay wall and think uh i can't get my credit card out again i'm not going to pay for this

26:16i'm going to find this information somewhere else so we've all been anchored to this thing and you know something is going to win in the end i mean you know i think at some point you know it's going to look much more like netflix or much more like facebook and i'm i mean i'm throwing my lot in with the former but you know it really is the wild west well the netflix thing's different because netflix has programs that cost a lot of money to create this podcast is very easy you're my friend i call you up hey you want to do a podcast you come over here i mean obviously we had to pay for all this equipment but other than that it just and bandwidth and rent and all that stuff but other than that it just goes up right whereas you do a comedy special across hundreds of thousands of dollars you have to secure a venue you have to hire staff i mean it's a big deal it's

27:01it's that's and that's an easy thing in terms of like bang for their buck what what netflix will get out of it um if you do a television show i mean my god you you you need to hire hundreds of people there's wardrobe and makeup and set and there's writers and producers and executives and everybody has to go over the script with a fine-tooth comb it's incredibly incredibly strenuous there's a lot going on when you create a television like stranger things or something like that i mean you have so much special effects and so to ask for that for free seems to be to me seems ridiculous well yeah but but except the i mean so i'm kind of spl again i'm running on two tracks here an app is much more like a television show surprisingly than than it is like a podcast but yes but even if it's just a podcast if you want to build something if you want to build a media company like

27:51either like like let's say you were let's say you were asking for support for this otherwise free podcast people don't know what your aspirations are i mean maybe you want to start a podcast network right maybe you ha you're trying to build a a business that is that maybe you have massive payroll expenses that you know so the expectation that the product should always be free closes the door to any of those aspirations if in fact you have them and you know it's like um i mean it's very interesting psychologically because so so i have i've created this network of support for my podcast but i see people do calculations that they would never do in a more transactional space if they were just let's say buying my next book right so like for me offering a free podcast and then saying if you find this valuable you can support it right that for you know from the side of being a

28:48creator of that content it feels like the the most transparent interaction possible because a person can listen for free for as long as they want to just discover how valuable it is and then they can support it to the degree that they find it valuable whereas if i'm selling you a book you can't even read the book before you before you buy it or you have to make the decision to buy it and i'm trying to convince you to buy it because it took me all this time to write it and and you know you're you know it's it's it's transactional with but with a podcast people make calculations that they would never make when they're just figuring out whether they want to buy something it's like like i'll and it's really along the lines of what you just described people say well how much does a podcast cost to produce right like if i knew what you were spending the money on and what it cost

29:39you to to do this podcast well then i would support you right but they're never saying how much does it cost to write a book and if i knew what you were going to spend the money on once you once you were once once i bought this book then i would know whether or not i wanted to buy it you either want the book or you don't right so the problem with the support model and this the problem with patreon and everything else is that it engages the sort of the philanthropy charity side of the brain right and people are worried about what you're gonna do and how much it all cost like how much does this might cost right you know like that that's that's a question that someone is asking when they're donating when they're donating and the problem there is they're not understanding you know just the opportunity cost like i you know i have to decide how to spend my

30:23time am i going to spend 90 of my time on a podcast well that if so that closes the door to virtually everything else i can do right so it's you know it has to become a viable business and so i mean i've recognized now that i'm you know to some degree going against the grain of human psychology in asking for support and now i now i feel like i'm going to ask much less i'm going to tell people what the business model is and and you know and still and remind them of it but i'm personally i'm going to go more and more the in the direction of putting stuff behind a paywall and if people want it then they can support and so it's it's a it's kind of it's sort of netflix the ultimate version of it would be if it were netflix that would also let you get it for free if you really couldn't afford it right that i mean that that that's the guilt-free business model

31:15that i'm i'm converging on now i like it i like how you're thinking and i like the ethics involved in it and i think it's a great thing and when you said it on your podcast i was shocked but it makes sense coming from you um my thought is i'm in negotiation or in discussions right now and i talk to you about this too about building an app and what i want to do with the app is have a set amount of money that you pay per month if you want to sign up for the app and you get the podcast with no ads right so you could either get it from itunes or whatever you google play or google podcast or you can get it from the app and if you get it from the app you pay x amount per month and you get the podcast with zero ads and it'll stream live i'm gonna figure out how to wait to do both of those things my thought going into advertising when i first when i first did the podcast i've been doing

32:04the podcast now for nine years when i first started doing it there was no ads for the longest time it just cost money it cost money to for bandwidth it cost money to put it but i was doing it for fun and i didn't care and i had my my revenue was coming from other sources um a few years ago uh i decided what i was going to do was because i was getting ad well the first ad request was facebook was uh the fleshlight rather and you were the first person to request i killed them to not have the fleshlight on your podcast the first podcast that we did prima donna well it made sense i mean they were disgusting ads too i mean we would get ridiculous and and be really silly in those ads it was just the juxtaposition i just knowing that the mic would go hot and then you know 15 seconds before it would still be ringing in their ears you know if you want to jack off with this fantastic device

32:53you know and here's sam harris neuroscientist but moral philosopher the fleshlight experienced some pretty significant uh positive impact from that i mean their business went through the roof right because of the podcast i mean they really sold a shitload of fleshlights where they told me like some ungodly number like 50 percent of the flashlights they were selling was code word rogan yeah no doubt that's not that i i don't want to picture too much of the armies of people using their product you know so word got around and then as the podcast space started expanding then advertisers tentatively were dipping their toe in my philosophy and it still holds that's like 2006 or seven or you know jaime 2012 12 11 11 yeah i wasn't the first time i was on here was 2011. wow started basically at the end of 2009 so okay 2010 was that you were probably on before yeah you're probably on around

33:502010 or 11. there's no other ads other than the flashlight with you yeah um and then the flashlight dropped off when we started asking for more money they're like i think we hit the point of no return but my philosophy getting into advertisement was uh i'm gonna do whatever the i want to do a hundred percent and have no impact whatsoever on the content of my podcast like whatever advertisers that i choose whatever advertisers that uh i i make deals with they have to understand that there's no way i'm changing the content of the podcast right and if i lose them i lose them i don't care and that was the thought process going in so i never hit up a snag like this cash app jack dorsey thing before where people think that the reason why i was easy with him was because of the fact that he sponsors the podcast it's a very obvious um conflict of interest right but

34:47but people have to realize that if they churn out off your podcast you've got just an endless number of advertisers too many lines yeah so i mean the cash is not a psychological component it's like there's one way of looking at it that they they buy a lot of ads they do buy a lot of ads we do have a good relationship with them but i don't need them if they went away i have too many ads and that sounds gross to say but it is a fact i have many more ads than i have spots for ads so if they went away would not hurt me at all financially because i put a limit on how many ads i do per podcast i also don't ever interrupt a podcast with an ad i don't do that right and because i don't do that that costs me money but i i just feel like the experience of listening to a podcast unbroken is so much better than listening to a podcast we'll be right back with this word from casper

35:38mattresses you know it just it feels gross but in the beginning i'm like look you know where it is you can fast forward but maybe you're into this stuff maybe you need stamps.com maybe whatever the you need those are the ads they pay a lot of money i'm gonna take that money and i'm gonna do whatever the i want and if these guys decide oh you smoke pot or you're too controversial or you talk about this or talk about that we're going to drop you okay that's my philosophy and and i've lost ads i've lost sponsors okay i don't care but if i lost the cash up because i was too hard on jack dorsey or if jack dorsey comes back and i'm too hard on him in grilling him about these people that have been censored i hope he doesn't but i like him he's a nice guy i want to know what the going on there in fact i'm having tim poole come on tomorrow tim pool's an investigative journalist independent

36:27journalist who was uh used to be with vice and he knows a lot about the censorship issue with youtube or with uh with uh twitter rather and he knows about youtube as well but uh with who's censored and why who's removed who's been de-platformed why they've been de-platforming where the inconsistencies and you know where why why is it skewing so heavily right where the people on the right are the ones who are getting banned the people on the left are getting away with a lot of crazy so we're gonna we're gonna get into the weeds with that and if the cash app hears that and they decide to drop me as a sponsor i don't care i really don't care this is a major source of income for me but it's only one source right it's one of the things of being a stand-up comedian working for the ufc and having a podcast and i have a podcast with ads on youtube and and having ads that are on the regular

37:16podcast itself i'm free in a sense to i have plenty of money it's not whether or not i'm starving or worried about paying my bills i'm free to do whatever i want to do well also i should be clear like i don't think because this can sound totally sanctimonious and it's not intended that way i don't think my scruples around at reading ads on my podcast apply to you or or tim ferriss or many other people i mean like tim is the ultimate example tim is somebody whose brand on some level is what i'm going to do is i'm going to go out there and find the best in the world right you know the best shirts the best workout equipment the best and i'm going to tell you about it so i want to know what tim has found right so if tim if tim is reading an ad for something you know that is totally brand convergent for him and i think you're very much in a similar situation if

38:06you're talking about on it or whatever it is it's your own your own part of on it right yes so it's like i should also be clear that i say no to a lot of ads that i don't want like there was one there was a uber for babysitting i was like get the out of here what are you crazy actually so that got recommended to me uh by somebody but uh it sounds like it sounds like it sounds like craigslist for babysitting sounds like a disaster waiting to happen there's been a few that i've said no to like quite a few some of them that are just boring i'm like i'm not reading that i'm not selling that that's stupid but also you're a comic who can send up ads and it's like i mean i think bill burr does this where he kind of trashes the ad as he's reading it because he lost nature box because he told people to go eat apples yeah yeah really he's like go eat a apple so it's i mean that's totally like and

38:52that that's something that's a tool you have in your wheelhouse that has effects down the list like it's one reason why you can stream live without really worrying about it and i i feel i can't like so it's like i mean at the end of the day like if things go completely haywire on your podcast you can say listen i'm a comic what do i know right you could like you can just you can just pull the rip cord yes and you're fine right right i can't do that right right like so like you can't say i'm a yeah so i can't say that yeah right i guess yeah so i mean i can and there's certain circumstances where i should but it's like i should avoid those circumstances right yes um so uh you know i have to prepare more for podcasts and um i feel like i personally i mean it's it's as much as out of concern for my guests as well like i i just you know this is a high wire act

39:47but i want a net normally so that people feel free to be totally unguarded because they know that if we have a spaz attack we can you know we can uh you know even uttering spazz attack will screw some people's careers right we actually had a conversation about a podcast that i talked to you about one of your podcasts where you said that you actually started it over you started it and you're like let's try this again let's just start from scratch yeah yeah i mean i maybe i i think it would i don't think it would be sporting to say which podcast that was but yeah so i had a podcast that went completely into the ditch for the first half hour i mean just brutal and and i said listen there's a really there's a good conversation for us to have here and now i know how badly this can go all right so like now i know just where the track is i have to struggle to keep the train on

40:35and so we're gonna reboot we're going to start again and we'll see what happens and you know the podcast was was not perfect and i got some criticism for it but people didn't understand that we were like you know we had a you know we had i had seen the pit of alligators and didn't want to fall in right you know well it made more sense though when you told me that because i'm like okay it was heated before you even got to go right because you'd already gone through a half an hour of back and forth yeah yeah um i think people need to understand what it's like to do one of these things too because uh you know you do it so often it becomes pretty and you're so good at talking you're such a good orator and you're so articulate that it comes off smooth and easy you're just having a conversation with someone but you're always considering the fact that people are listening to this you're

41:23always saying how do i how do i get more out of him or her how do i take this and how do i get this person to expand upon this how do i you know how do i make this something make something out of this this is one of the things that i felt with jack because he was talking in this way and we're we're really working hard on fixing all these issues i'm like oh jesus i gotta change my gears here and try to figure out because like it's almost like we'd have to restart again every time a question would be answered he would stop talking and i'd go okay the next day so long you forgot what you asked dude well it's almost like i have to restart the momentum of it but well again i'm i'm totally i'm that kind of a speaker so you know i that wasn't a problem but i didn't know what he talked like i'd never heard him talk ever so hearing him talk there and and talking

42:14to him live you know i mean some people are effortless some people like elon took a while like we had to start drinking no that was brutal yeah but so like but that i mean you know how much i tried to micromanage that behind the scenes right thank you for that and you know you guys basically broke all the rules i le i thought i laid down uh and elon did it because elon tweeted y'all be on joe's podcast thursday night at nine o'clock or whatever and so okay this is so but you know i mean i didn't want you guys to go live right i wanted i wanted you to both have a chance to say wait a minute is smoking a blunt really the thing we want to be doing here uh so you know you didn't take my advice and it was what it was we were drunk by the time the weed came out that was what's what's interesting to me is we were drinking from the beginning of the podcast we started drinking whiskey we

43:04both had two or three glasses of whiskey right before the weed came out nobody cared the fact that the ceo of tesla was drunk right like no one cared about that i mean he wasn't drunk but he shouldn't be driving i don't i don't know if that was obvious i i don't know if they saw that you were drinking it was obvious in the beginning we were pouring the whiskey right i mean it was on the table we had ice we were clinking glasses salute i mean it was very obvious yeah i mean the the problem for me there with that podcast frankly was that i feel like you both got unlucky with just where he was in his life at that moment because it's like so what that podcast showcased at least for the first i don't know 90 minutes was just how many user interface problems you could have with elon right like he just he just showed up as kind of fairly weird right he's not he's not always like that by

43:54any stretch i mean he can give a very loose interview and but you were working i mean it was just absolutely heroic work trying to keep that conversation happening you know in the beginning but once we got loose yeah that was good but it was still it's like you know he was just in a space that he was so massively stressed and so overworked and just i mean he had you know fires everywhere that had to be put out and um so i just felt you know as a friend i just felt like okay this is sort of the wrong time to be doing this and this is you know and and so i just felt you know it just felt unlucky to me so um because he's uh again i i you know i see him in in many other moments and he can be um that was that was actually a circumstance where i was looking at the comments right you know and and i was saying okay these these are people who are basically reading him as somebody

44:48who is is much stranger than in fact he he ever is and i could see why they were doing that because he the guy he just seemed in a very stressed space in his life what was interesting he was very different when he first got here versus when the mic came on right right when he first got here he pulls out the blow torch and starts shooting this flamethrower in the middle of the hallway and we're laughing and having i'm like he's gonna be easy this is great right and then we sat down and then stiff yeah right off the bat and i'm i'm just trying to massage it and get them get them get them going although i honestly i think that is another consequence of live i mean i'm not arguing that you shouldn't be live because it it it has a massive advantage for you as well but it is there's just a different feeling like you know if i knew that this was being taped and i could rethink the thing

45:39we're about to say about liam neeson or whatever it is yeah you know it's it's different yeah and so um but well the liam neeson story is a perfect one let's go there yeah let's go there a perfect example of a story where you know if you were liam's friend you would go don't tell that one don't tell that one he's like but i want to be honest yeah like don't don't you could be honest with me i'm not going to judge you if you tell me that someone got raped and you went out with a baseball bat for a week looking for a black man to beat up i'll just kill to kill i'd be like oh jesus christ man like what the was going through your head at that point in time like that's terrible like yeah like i feel awful about it i can't believe that was me but but it didn't happen nothing happened and now you know people are calling him a racist and they don't want him in movies and

46:28well i mean this is this is fascinating to me because again this is a much larger problem with with massive implications we need to think through the whole process of redemption for people in our society right like we we have to understand what are the what are the criteria for successful apologies and for forgiveness right like what like just what because especially i mean we're we're in a world where people are are having their their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent us teenagers yes right and and you know more this this is to dorsey's point things are not disappearing online anymore and at a certain point you know everyone it's just going to be a 360 kind of panopticon view of everyone's life you know there are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there and um i mean the irony here for me is that

47:28you have you know progress progressives and you know people on the far left who receive a disclosure like you know liam neeson's let's take his and they just want you know they just want to see him burned alive right let's let's just do the wicker man on this guy because this is you know this is so awful and yet alongside that these same people on the left are people who have as a as a genuine ethical norm the rehabilitation of murderers right you could be somebody who spent you know 20 years in prison for a crime you admit you committed and there's this norm around redemption and uh so there's you know there's no way to square those two things well they're constantly holding these two contradictions right i mean here's another one women's rights and support of the hijab i mean yeah what yeah this is what's going on there how do you do that you know don't be islamophobic but also

48:25support women's rights and gay rights yeah okay well i think eric weinstein our mutual friend calls these the um the hilbert problems for social justice warriors i mean david hilbert was a very famous mathematician who at the turn of the the 19th century posed a set of problems in mathematics that you know were just you know the on his list of the most desirable questions like the hardest questions and the most consequential questions to answer and so you know eric being a mathematician has flipped that around ironically and said these are these are the questions that social justice warriors have to answer and there are these impossible oppositions of this sort but so the liam neeson thing and you know forgive me if i if there's some detail that has come out that i'm not aware of but my understanding of it is he you know he had a friend who was raped and then he reported this state of

49:16mind this murderous state of mind he was in where he was walking around with i think well he calls it akash i mean that's a british word for like a it's like a small metal club right um it's like a blackjack or like another term for it i think and um looking for a black guy to kill you know like just hoping someone's gonna come out of the woodwork and threaten him so that he could you know kill this guy in this act of instrumental violence because his friend had been raped by a black guy right so it's like any black guy will do now that's that's sort of like the the extra horrific wrinkle to the story right now and he's confessing this as a kind of a symptom of transient mental illness at least as far as i know it's like he's horrified by the fact that he was in this state of mind right can you imagine like i you know liam neeson an actor uh i have everything to lose

50:12and although i don't remember at what point in his life he he said this happened um can you imagine that i was in this state of mind right and this is as you say an all too honest disclosure but it is damn interesting right and it is the kind of thing that we should be able to talk about right and it's not and the fact that this is becoming synonymous with racism seems just wrong given given how he's he described her at least how i've i've heard this because he's saying listen if this had been an armenian guy or an italian or a japanese guy i'd be looking for one of them right i mean what what what this was at least on his telling is the the virus of instrumental violence i mean the the virus of like this is how every blood feud ever in human history gets started it's like you like someone from your tribe killed my brother and now what i want to do is kill anyone

51:12from your tribe right it doesn't matter who right and and that's you know clearly as toxic as it gets you know ethically but that's not racism right that's just that is that we we have a word for it it's it's instrumental violence um but you know yeah obviously he's getting totally pilloried over this but we need we just need to figure out how to talk about how people can redeem themselves once something this unsavory is is revealed about their past whether they reveal it or whether it's just you know found out about them yeah um i mean it is racism though right because he's specifically looking for a black guy i mean i understand that it's a part of the other tribe no but it doesn't suggest that he has us that he disposed that he feels one way or another about black people it's like like if you told me um uh yeah he could he could have said again it could have been

52:14uh an irish guy right or it could have been well i guess he's irish is he scottish or irish um it could have been an english guy right it could have been like any type right it's like the the salience of the tribe is what he was reacting to at least in his description i don't know why you wouldn't take him at his word given that he didn't have to say any of this in the first place right i mean like this is an amazingly honest and unnecessary disclosure but it's um and i don't think people would think of it as racism if he if the story simply was uh you know she got raped by a cop and i was just hoping to go kill a cop right right you know the same story right um and uh so yeah i mean but we're so trigger-happy in our outrage with respect to anything like why do you think that is like what what is going on because outrage seems to be more in season than it's ever been in my

53:09lifetime i don't i don't remember outrage being so just such a it's it's it's recreational yeah there's there's uh i mean it's back to jack i mean a lot it has a lot to do with social media and twitter in particular yeah i mean you have like so so for instance i missed the whole covington high school catholic fiasco basically was ignoring twitter i saw it out of the corner of my eye like man this is interesting this is this is blowing up but i i was so off twitter that i had there was no temptation for a hot take for me right and i saw these people just torching their reputations by taking these like like kathy griffin basically calling for the doxing of these kids you know given all that she has suffered you know from from mob behavior online and she's you know whipping up her own mob it was just nuts but it's normal that's what people do it's what the platform is

54:05calling out of people but it's also when people have been shamed and they've done something awful then they reinforce their base like that now she's like so heavily hard left because the right wing ran after her like anyone on the right that does anything she's calling for her side to go after this person like reinforcing that she's a part of that tribe that she's a part of that left-wing tribe yeah yeah well it's so obviously everyone has a lot to lose doing this especially in a case where all the facts aren't in and if you just waited a beat even the new york times got this wrong the new york times writes an article about the kids in the maga hat that that they have to rescind and the so then as the dust is settling and i see these people some people are doubling down some people are issuing public apologies i see somebody who's actually kind of cr

55:00you know branded herself as you know one of my enemies for so for a reason i can't fathom but this journalist kara swisher uh who um you know she she works for uh recode and and vox now but she's got a big podcast and she's a b she actually writes for the new york times now she's got an opinion piece you know a regular column for the new york times she's a tech journalist and i you know happen to know she doesn't like me because she's tweeted against you know she's said some disparaging things about me on twitter and we had a you know an offline conversation about it but i saw her she said one of the most vatupative and you know fairly crazy things in resp in response to the kids initially and then once more information came out she walked it back and she basically apologized you know good for on twitter and so so i said good for you cara i i just wanted to to support this norm of

55:51acknowledging that you got something wrong and i wanted to do it even i wanted to actually do it for someone who i know really doesn't like me like i mean that was an added bonus for me because that's that's another norm that that i think we should support it's like like we should we should play fair even with our enemies yes and yeah i mean honestly i you know i try to play fair even with people who never play fair with me even someone like you know glenn greenwald or res ocelot i mean people who have just you know lied about me endlessly if i get something wrong about them i publicly apologize for it um so i did this and so this was at the the absolute 11th hour with respect to this this uh you know uh scandal online and when i saw the kind of pain i was getting just for con you know supporting cara in her walk back of this thing at a moment when it was obvious she should

56:43have walked this back i got people saying you know unsubscribing from your podcast you are you know now i know you're a racist you know it was just just pure pain and i just thought wow man that's you know it's like you just touch this thing at its very end and you're you're you know it's the slime gets on you um so yeah it is it's the medium you know it is we had no opportunity to do this before it is the medium and it's also people that don't feel like their opinions are being heard like they want their opinion to be heard they want it to be heard right now and it might not be a very well thought out opinion but they know that they have the ability to blare it out and so yeah they just send it out and that that the ability to do that is just intoxicating for folks and if they can reach you you talked about this with jack there is a there what makes twitter

57:33especially good for this is that everything has the same stature like your tweets no bigger than the other tweet that just called you an yeah that's my kurt metzger uh take on it because kurt masker was a hilarious stand-up comedian he uh he'll write a facebook blog only he only writes on facebook he's like i like how it's set up he's like it's there's a big it differentiates between me and these idiots who are commenting under there yeah although ironically i hate facebook i can't even i mean just the graphic design on facebook i find so offensive that i can't even look at facebook so i use it as a publishing channel but i'm you know i keep threatening in my own mind to just delete the account because i just don't i mean i've only read the comments three times maybe ever yeah and every time i read him it's like jesus christ it's like youtube but alive

58:19i know it's like youtube but with people with their real names it's you know this is a new world that we're living in man and everybody's trying to navigate this thing and figure it out as it goes along and not everybody's doing it well and uh i think this world is going to get more and more intrusive i think this is just the beginning i think we didn't see twitter coming whatever comes after twitter and this is one of the things that i before the podcast i wanted to really talk to jack about to get his take on what he thinks is next down the line because there's going to be something that's more invasive there's going to be something that is more whether it's i think probably something in the line of augmented reality there were probably a decade away from something that makes this look like books look like you know a cork board at a bookstore yeah you know although strangely we're liv

59:09we're living to the golden age of audio here it's like we went full into video and we're poised to go like you know 3d and you know vr and then all of a sudden audio is king well how about phone calls and texts like i remember i called you out of the blue once and it was like what the you think i'm walking through a supermarket somebody said on twitter once it was hilarious that facetiming facetiming me out of nowhere is just like knocking on my door yeah without calling me yeah showing up straight up right like she was angry that somebody facetimed her no it always feels like an old school move to like my book agent calls me you know out of the blue and it's just it seems so old yeah it is just like a knock on the door my friend joey diaz only calls yeah only for years he would scream at you if you text and then recently within the last two or three years he started

60:03texting occasionally right but he only calls well i got so i got to tell you so having released this meditation app has given me a kind of a sanity check on everything else i'm doing which is it's very interesting because so the in releasing the app you know it's like it's firewalled from all the other controversial stuff i'm doing now like i'm not you know in the app i'm not whinging about trump or you know talking about any of the stuff i talk about on my podcast it's just me trying to teach meditation as a largely as an antidote to all of the stuff we're talking about it's like every we've got this as tristan harris says we've got the slot machine in our pocket that is continually gaining our attention all day long and you know in my view a meditation app is like the one thing you can have on your smartphone that completely subverts the technology and it can get you to

60:54actually live a more examined life using the technology right but what's been amazing for me personally is that i put it out and it is the only thing that i have put out maybe ever right where it is it's been received exactly as i've intended right there's no controversy it's just like like the people who are finding it useful love it and they say thank you and it's like they're they're getting exactly what i thought i was putting into it and it's like it made me think what the hell am i doing over here with all of this toxic stuff that has been endlessly maliciously spun against me and misunderstood and you know it's just i mean i have to i have to do both because there's a lot of important things to talk about that are going to be endlessly spun and and maliciously misunderstood but it is it's been so refreshing to have one thing i mean you must get this with

61:50with you know doing your stand up or maybe i don't have a thing i get for everything okay but well or maybe maybe ufc commentary no they come after me for everything well it has just it has been psychologically it's been a revelation to have one thing that i can put out that is just it's just received appreciated and they got what i intended and it's just you know thank you it's just like oh that's possible i had no i had if i ever knew i had forgotten that that that was possible well meditation now it kind of makes sense because the people are going to flock to that are looking to meditate they're looking to improve their mind they're not looking to spew hatred on facebook no yeah yeah i thought that after the podcast with jack i was like jesus christ i should just stick with a podcast with comics because podcasts with comics even if you put your foot in your mouth everybody

62:42knows you're just trying to be funny right you know if you do a podcast and and the thing about the podcast with jack it's not even like i said anything bad it's what i didn't say yeah that was upsetting to so many people but that's such a loaded thing and because of that podcast no there's there's negative to it that blowback there's a lot of you know toxic anger and all that but the positive is what i like the positive that came out of it is me forced to re-examine how i do podcasts re-examine the significance of each individual guest and especially someone that comes with as much baggage you know with that without lack of a better term uh as jack that you're you know you gotta think that there's people listening and there's some questions that you really have to work at you have to you have to push through and even if he's he's dancing and pure wedding i should have

63:33went back to okay why is cathy griffin on your platform yeah like if doc sings bad you want you don't want docs you don't want threats of violence when someone says i want names okay what are you gonna do with these names right what are you gonna do with them what are you gonna do with a 16 year old kid and his names and then when you see the actual the actual video of what actually happened and there's so many people that are still not walking it back still no doubling down a lot of people double down him and here's another little piece of insight my friend matt uh lived in dc and those hats those maga hats they're everywhere there's these little where these kids were that area there's these carts that sell these hats so these kids bought those hats that day it's not like they're these maga kids they're probably just being right they're unsupervised teenage boys their frontal

64:22lobe is not fully formed and they're all together feeding off each other like a pack of gremlins yeah i was a teenage boy you were a teenage boy you know how stupid you used to be yeah yeah i mean i was probably way more stupid than you but i was a mess i i had my moments yeah no i'd be just you get a hundred teenage boys together in a crowd you know on a school trip and you get some native elder drummond in one other one you know some guy's face yeah you know it was amazing what didn't happen right there exactly so no violence no violence the way he handled it all he did is smile yeah like that so i mean listen i'm as biased as anyone against a catholic school kid wearing a maga hat yes it's like you know like given given my back story it's like yeah i'm totally poised to think this guy's an and is likely always to be an but what people read into an uncomfortable

65:14smile right i mean just like the the the shots of his face with the tweets that said you know this is what white privilege looks like this is you know this is this is the everything that's wrong in our society it's just we we have to slow down how about raza wrote have you ever seen a more unjust punchable face yeah come on man you want to punch him yeah because he's smiling which is called razor calls for violence from the left are so disturbing to me because my parents were hippies when i grew up i always thought of the left and we always i've you know i've been called right way i've never voted anything but democratic in my life except for gary johnson right gary johnson was the only time i voted independent or whatever the he was libertarian right but that was just because he did my podcast yeah i'll fall for tulsi gabbard because she did my podcast too but the

66:02the the the left was always very considerate well-read there were there were the people that were more open-minded there were supporting of gay people and minorities that was the left and they were non-violent they were the people that are protesting vietnam when i was a kid also just supportive of the virtue of speech free speech and self-criticism yes right like i mean the the disadvantage of the left against the right has always been there's this self-scrutiny and willingness to wonder whether or not i'm wrong that isn't mirrored if you go far enough right and uh it has there has been so there's been kind of an asymmetric war between left and right you know politically from for much of our lifetime but you go far enough left now and you're you're meeting a kind of totalitarian resistance to speech and it's um yeah it's very i'm just it'll be interesting to see how the

67:01the 2020 campaign plays out but i'm certainly worried that we could totally blow it with some leftist social w yeah uprising wow yeah that would be unfortunate because i think they would just double down the other side we would be better off with some sort of a reasonable centrist right someone who just made sense and you know one of the things that i liked about tulsi is that she's a veteran and you know i mean like she's she seems very reasonable to me but except i i haven't followed her um career closely but it just seems like she's not making the right noises on things like syria and assad yeah i don't know enough about that to comment yeah i don't know enough about assad and the controversy of whether or not he gassed is well not at that point that is i think uncontroversial in terms of what she i mean that is uncontroversial which in terms of what

67:49she is saying about it about him i mean she's capable of putting both feet in her her mouth on that i thought she's she's saying he's not an enemy of america right so yeah i mean again i'm not close enough to it and but i would you know be very circumspect about endorsing her going forward do a little homework because i i think her candidacy is not going to age well that's uh that's uh what do you like who makes sense to you elizabeth warren's now she's the most recent one yeah that she's got the most recent one where she filled out an application she wrote native american on it yeah yeah i mean just having done the dna test yeah playing that game with trump i mean that was that was such a miscalculation well the fact that she released the data and the data is so clear well it's almost like she had to because otherwise he would call her pocahontas to the end of

68:40time but that but then to then have to apologize to native americans for having done that it's just well because the amount of native american is so lit i've been joking around about it that i am like a hundred times more african right when she is native america yeah i'm 1.6 african and she's less than like way less than one percent native american right but this these are this is the sort of masochistic death spiral that people on the left can get into it's like you're like the left i mean i've always said that the left eats its own in a way that the right never does and it's just it's um we have to find someone who can stand outside that circular firing squad right uh and it would be someone who's you know it would be in my view it'd be somebody like a a younger bloomberg right i don't think it's i don't think it's bloomberg but like somebody like a legit businessman who could call

69:34on all of trump's fake business acumen and who's not ethically compromised right but who can who can get stuff done and so right and and definitely not someone who feels the need to pander to the far left on these identity politics issues i think identity politics is really going to be bad for us against trump because so much of the country the crucial sliver of the country you just have to ask yourself who was it who voted for obama and then or twice and then voted for trump right those people aren't racist right those people are sick of being called racist right and and the so what's happening on the left around identity politics and all of these i mean it's not that racism isn't a problem it's not that trans gender issues don't have to be worked out i mean like all of like all of those are legit concerns but the fact that that's the center of mass politically on the left in

70:34in a in a nationwide election against someone like trump i just think that's a absolute recipe for disaster yeah because the people that subscribe to that ideology don't realize that how many people think it's silly yeah you know when you're in the oppression olympics and you're trying to win the gold and for and for how many people it's actually misapplied right it's like there there are many more explanations for voting for trump in addition to racism yeah like yes every racist voted for trump you know virtually so that's fine every white supremacist voted for trump but that's not the story about why trump got elected uh and it's a long story it's it's a there's just much more i mean there are people who just have not um what do you think are not thriving in the current economy you know i mean it's just like you got automation displacing manufacturing jobs you got

71:30the consequences of trade and immigration and uh you have legitimate concerns about uh you have legit there are legitimate concerns about immigration that have nothing to do with racism and so if if you're going to score any hesitation over something like open borders as a sign of your xenophobia and racism you're going to lose virtually everyone who has a sane concern about how to how you you know keep people in how you how you admit the right people into a country right i mean there's their economic concerns and their social concerns and uh yeah i mean and you don't have to be ben shapiro to share some of those concerns right i'm not saying ben shapiro is a racist obviously i'm saying he's a conservative uh and you know takes a more conservative line on on many of these questions than i do but you know it's like you either you either think we just take immigration as the narrow case

72:27you either think you should be able to know who's coming into the country or you don't right now if you if you think you should just have open borders there are two problems with that one is there are many good arguments against that and two i don't know what the percentage is but it's got to be something like 95 percent of americans would be terrified of that prospect right so if you're if any of your platform is essentially saying a concern about immigration is synonymous with racism you know you have a platform that that's going to alienate most people and that's the democrats are totally capable of seeming like that whether in fact that's that's true for for most democrats what do you think is what's the primary factor like what what caused identity politics to reach this boiling point that it's at right now well it is i think in large measure what the internet is

73:25doing to us it's not that identity politics hasn't been a feature of politics for forever but there is a there's the siloing effect there's the the effect that groups become more radicalized as groups because the most extreme voices tend to to pipe up more and then and and everyone everyone who's who's silent i mean there's kind of a diffusion of responsibility around around countering these extreme voices i get you know every you can it only takes a small percentage of extreme voices to cow the rest of a group and and make the group seem like the extreme voices are speaking for the group right you know and i so i think what we have on in both the left and the right we have a small percentage i mean you know the last poll i saw that trying to get this question was something like you know six or eight percent on the tails that are making it seem like these are i

74:25think it's i think it's more of a problem on the left than on the right because i mean the extreme right st is fringe and looks fringe right like the guy the guys in charlottesville in charlottesville with their tiki torches they don't look like they represent the republican party or the or the the um the right the you know conservatives in any general sense they're a symptom of some problem but it's a smaller problem it's a minority problem whereas on the left the extreme voices are have massive sway in you know major companies and tech companies in journalism in academia like like the silencing effect and the reputational cost that's being paid by even very powerful people in all these mainstream forums on the left is is just that's not mirrored on the right you know um and it's i mean so i i don't know if i told you this um certainly didn't say it on a previous

75:23podcast with you but so i was at dinner with a bunch of um silicon valley people and we were talking about i i i was it was at the moment when that that netflix story uh happened where the um where jonathan friedland got fired over using the n-word in a closed-door meeting and and you know it was it was a using the n-word in response to my friend tom seguro who you met earlier yeah right exactly okay special yeah where he said you can't say anymore yeah and then explained like that you know there's words you can't use anymore right didn't even wasn't using it in a joke like calling someone or saying something's but they were and he was saying that that's like using the end right around yeah but he used the n-word in this meeting right and he says it's like using the n-word uh and the just the the mere intonation of those syllables yes was so shocking right uh that

76:17he wound up getting fired right and again he was he was using it in the context of expressing just how careful netflix has to be about speech i mean he was going social justice warrior on himself among social justice warriors and he said this is how worried we have to be and then he gave the magic incantations you can still say which is amazing because it's def i mean in his defense you kind of have to say both words you're not saying the r word right like using the r word is like using the n word around black people and we're getting to some weird weird place with this actually no now i realize why i'm confused about why i think i've talked about this because i did a podcast with chelsea handler which hasn't aired i did it months ago um because she was doing a documentary on white privilege i think and i i i think i'm actually cast as the guy with white privilege in this

77:08documentary boy that's gonna be fun you have white privilege yeah nice so um but i i recorded a podcast with her so anyway so we hit this this point because this had just come out uh then and i think her documentary is probably for netflix so what was her take on it well she was she was basically i mean she was playing the other side of the net for for this you know and you know not um i mean we'll have to see i mean i think i uh at least in my own mind i certainly made sense there and she shouldn't have a lot of response to what i was saying but i i haven't heard the audio or seen the video but the so anyway i was at a dinner with a bunch of tech ceos talking about this problem and one guy who who i won't name who runs a big company that which i won't name said listen you have no idea how deep this goes like i have an hr complaint where there's a guy who

78:10identifies as a furry right he thinks he's a cat and because we don't provide litter boxes in the bathroom right he's he's launched an hr complaint right this is real this is this was told as a real story in in as a counterpoint or in in amplification of the story we were talking about at netflix right so it's like this is and yet this is happening like this is people are having to navigate the ceos of multi-billion dollar companies are having to navigate around this stuff in-house right and i mean the google thing over james demore right i mean that was that was an enormous problem for google right like that was the wheels were coming off as far as i can tell you know from what i've heard um what and how so just that like there was a there was going to be a google mutiny over james damore if he he had to be fired yeah yeah this was this was a big deal at google

79:09that's so interesting and what he and what he wrote was essentially like a you know a b-plus term paper in human biology right and it was like you may you can you can you can push back on some of the science say or but like this was not a malicious distortion of the the state of the science right and and this was not calling for discrimination against women this was just saying listen men and women are different and they've got different interests right and this could account for why there's an unequal representation at the left level of you know software the software development uh and so what like we're on the left we're finding it very difficult to even talk about differences between men and women right that there's you know you start with you know start with a uterus and then you know count from there right that is already a taboo conversation to

79:59have and that you know as we said at the beginning in talking about uh twitter that one writer again i think her name is megan murphy uh she got booted for saying men are not women yeah like i mean that's so so again so politically i'm very worried that unless we resolve that or just cut through it we don't stand a chance against trump in 2020. i was reading a story about a woman who's on some sort of an lbgt uh panel and uh she's a part of some group and she was kicked out of it by a man who identifies as a lesbian and he has a penis right right yeah so and this is a point that think he has a penis i want to be sure he definitely identifies as a lesbian i might have read a twitter comment about how preposterous that was and said the penis part well this is something that andrew sullivan wrote in a recent article on this is that the the transgender thing is at odds with gay rights in a

81:09fundamental sense i mean you can't balance these equations because like gay identity absolutely focuses on the legitimate differences between men and women it's like i'm a man i like men i don't like women that's my situation but once you once you change the your your notion of what you know how gender relates to sex it it begins to erode this this claim on the legitimacy of of uh of of gay identity right the thing is that they're all marginalized so they stick together that's the idea i guess behind it sort of but there's i mean i can only imagine what you know andrew sullivan's twitter feed looks like now because he when he writes these articles i'm sure he's just gets eviscerated by the left you know and he's just you know straight up talking about you know this is what gay rights looks like and this is this is how you can't be a a man with a penis who's identifies as a lesbian right

82:06you know yeah but you can't say that right and you also can't say that a man with a penis is not a woman because if a man with a penis i can say it because because i i can't be fired but but if you do say it you will get a certain amount of hate i mean there's people that are saying that men who will not date trans women who still have penises right they're transphobic and this is i mean there's have you ever uh have you ever met jamie kilstein so jamie and i have a checkered history i don't know if we maybe you and i have spoken about this i've never met jamie but jamie when jamie was social justice warrior number one he went hard he went hard upon me yeah yeah like he just he just was dunking on me endlessly in ways that were totally unfair i mean he was just you know he was he was working very hard to become an enemy and um then he had his his epiphany you know then the social

83:04justice mob came for him over something over almost nothing right over him trying to get laid i mean like they were saying he was a creep or something like that he's trying to hitting on girls yeah i missed the details there but then he came then so then he's since sent me very um uh friendly and apologetic emails about just you know i'm sorry what i did and and you know he want he wants to do a podcast i haven't taken him up on it but um you know that that maybe that could be an interesting conversation he's sincerely apologetic yeah he's a good guy i mean he he and i had our own issue at one point in time um over a podcast that we did versus uh it was remember when the daniel tosh rape controversy like uh do you do you remember this i know who talks not about a rape joke i should say rape joke um some woman in a crowd he was he was on stage and uh he wasn't supposed to be there it

84:01was at the laugh factory and dom herrera put him on stage and uh he goes look i don't have any material what do you guys want to talk about and uh some guy yells out rape and uh that's always helpful and so you know it's like some drunk in a crowd right he goes jesus christ he and so daniel tosh's take on it okay what what's funny about that humiliation violence you know he's he's like berating this guy and trying to do stand up while he's doing this and some woman yells out actually there's nothing funny about rape and he goes wouldn't it be funny if someone just raped her right and everybody starts laughing i do remember and so this woman wrote a giant blog about it and she wanted him to apologize about it and jamie went after daniel tosh as a fellow yes as a fellow comic saying that it's you know like and i was like well she's a heckler the woman heckled like while he was trying

84:53to do do stand up and he's like i'm not going to support rape culture and he's like how the is that rape culture like he's he's clearly making a joke about something she said that was very very patronizing like obviously he doesn't think there's something funny about rape this is he's just trying to work through this ad-lib set that he's doing with some guy who yelled out something that this whole crowd has to respond to he can't just ignore the fact that it happened and go how about fire trucks folks why are they always red you know he can't do that he's gotta he's to deal with what this guy said and so that's what he tosses out there and everybody laughed by the way but also part of his persona persona just he takes it to the edge right yeah yeah so yeah he's he's yeah he's edgy comedian he's funny and you know and jamie and i had this little tit for tat about it but he he's very

85:44honest about his mistakes like when you talk to him and he's he's got great insight because he was that guy you know he was that guy that was going back and forth with people online all day and checking his mentions like couldn't walk down the street more than five steps before he'd pull out his phone and check his mentions to see how people responding to his latest dunking or takedown or you know it's just it's a toxic thing that people are doing it's this you know looking for people that are that are bad and looking for things that are wrong looking for wrong speak it's very toxic it's toxic for the people that are doing it it's toxic for the people that are receiving it it's just it's not a way that human beings would ever communicate in one-on-one i mean i try to to communicate with people the same way online as i would if they're right in front of me i don't

86:31always succeed but i try that's my goal my goal is to try to talk to someone as if they were right in front of me that's clearly not how everybody's handled no no i think road rage is the best analogy of what's happening on social media yeah i've adopted that i've adopted that way of looking at it too and but the only difference is a road rage you know there's like a physiological reason for road rage because you're you're you're in a dangerous situation that you're subliminally taking stuff you're going fast right you're in a metal machine with a bunch of that are probably looking at their phone and everybody's going fast and you could die at any moment if someone goes wrong if you're on a highway like the 405 when you have five lanes going 70 miles an hour it is a miracle that no one dies and every day we do it every day everything's fine yeah well so let's go back to this idea of what

87:19the the actual normative response would be when somebody puts their foot in their mouth or something from their past gets disclosed i mean the the the stupid and indefensible thing they did as a teenager right yeah you know you know like this you know you got these guys who are now um having their careers destroyed for having dressed up you know in blackface or in a hood for halloween or whatever it was i mean i you know i don't i think i think this that one um politician said he's not even in the in the photo but the photo was on his yearbook page or like whatever you put on your yearbook page in high school right um you find out this thing that you no adult is going to defend right but what is the path back what like what like what is the reboot that will that should be acceptable because we don't even know it seems we don't even know what could conceivably work to rehabilitate

88:20somebody's career and yet on this other side we've got people who again are being led out of prison for murders they admit they committed right or rapes they admit admit they committed and they're rehabilitated and we and these are these are stories we're supposed to feel good about right so we have to figure out how to square this um on the left and you know i don't know the way i've been thinking about it is that it has to be intelligible how you are different from the person who committed that thing right right so like if you if you did something that was let's say legit racist when you were 20 and i was like mark mark wahlberg is an example of this i mean he was running around just beating people senseless right and for a racist motives i believe when he was a teenager well a guy lost his eye right yeah yeah so but and i think that was a i think i was a vietnamese guy he attacked or

89:19uh but i mean he was just doing truly indefensible things now i don't know what sort of you know pr moment he has had since or how he's apologized for it or but i mean that was a that's a very different time i think if it was if all that stuff was being discovered about him now there may be no way back to well the problem is with this day and age it could be re-ignited right like even though he's apologized for it and even though that it's been addressed it absolutely could get reignited i mean just talking about it on your podcast is him over right it could yeah i mean and also people have to recognize that there's some things but you can't retroactively instill today's ideas of what constitutes racism on 1985. so if you were in high school in 1985 and you dressed up as mr t right that you know i don't know if that was racist back then i never did it but

90:13i don't know if that's racist like if you had a bunch of gold chains and you made your hair black and or you may made your face black and gave yourself a mohawk he said i'm mr t for halloween right and the pictures emerged today what you did when you went door to door when you were 15 or 12 or whatever you were knocking on people's doors and everybody was laughing oh you're mr t nobody thought it was racist yeah but today but let's take the let's take the hard case let's say you were racist right i mean so i've had this guy christian picciolini on my podcast once who's a you know ex-neo-nazi he's just legit racist right he's got all the tattoos to prove it and now there are major problems with christian piccolini as as i think you know uh that i discovered after that podcast but um so this is not an endorsement of him sorry christian but the the there's a path back i mean so like he's

91:04celebrated on the left yeah he's a former neo-nazi and he's you know yeah i i i discovered him on sarah silverman's uh show on wherever that is hulu and uh you know he's a darling of the left right and darling of msnbc for this redemption story so but what is the you take someone like any of these politicians who have something in their backstory that is ugly my feeling is all there has to be is a transparent and intelligible account of how you are now different of how you can actually honestly look back on this thing and say yeah i am as embarrassed by that as you think i should be right that's not like that is nothing that r that does not represent how i view the world at all now but there's just there's a the spirit of the time on social media again especially on the left and to our you know total dysfunction politically is to never accept any of that i mean there's

92:12there is no apology good enough right and um or the or there's you know the most cynical possible interpretation of your of your apology it's like you're just trying to you're the only reason why you're apologizing is because you want to save your job right um and that you know we have to figure out how to i mean we just need some you know recovery disk that we can reboot from here because it's just not this is going someplace terrible and again to look at it through the lens narrowly politically of you know over the next two years it's it's to the massive disadvantage of the left it certainly is but i don't see any way to fix that like with the current climate and this current attitude where people are engaging in this recreational outrage it fits the climate i don't mean i don't know what would have to happen for people to come to some sort of a realization i mean it

93:08would have to happen to them like it did to james like what happened with jamie kelsey is it they turned on him and he's like oh my god this is awful yeah like i'm what's this and then he realized you know i mean i don't know what other thing could happen well i mean what we're the game we're playing is part of it i mean you and i are in a position to take risks that you know even the people at the top of journalism can't i mean like megyn kelly says one wrong thing and you know it doesn't matter that she's got a 20 million dollar con contract she's just she's fired and when you look at the thing that she said i mean it was just a question yeah i mean she just didn't seem to understand how charged the phrase blackface was right she's just ignorant of that piece of history or something but like you know so she just she she put her foot in her mouth she gave an apology that was just like

93:58you know full-blown hostage video apology just like you know just like i am so sorry you don't even know like here take a sample of my blood and you'll just see my you know you know test my cortisol and not good enough not good enough and they let her say the apology too which is even more crazy they let her come back say the apology and they go good thanks for doing that so but so she no one's job in that space is secure enough where they can take real risks but you know you and i you know you and i could do an interview with louis c.k right like and just process his coming back into stand-up yes and do it in a way where if people didn't like it you just say okay off right this is the conversation we had and i think modeling that more and more i mean i think i think we have to take those risks and people like us have to take those risks and hope to break this spell by having those

94:56conversations in public i would hope that we're having some kind of an impact on it but i feel like we're you know we're throwing buckets of cold water into a volcano i just i just don't know i don't know if it's enough but we have pretty big buckets i mean you have an enormous bucket i mean you're you're reaching more people than the biggest television shows are reaching people aren't aware of this but it's just a fact so it's it's uh so i think that's part of it and then changing the norm somehow of how we engage on social media i think is is another piece yeah i agree i agree with you um the norm on how we engage on social media i think is flavored by two things one the immediacy of it the fact that there's no person in front of you you don't experience their their anger or their fear or their sadness when you say something up but also anonymity and i think anonymity is

95:55good in a lot of ways like for whistleblowers people that work in a certain environment where they want to be honest but they would get fired you know with a very restricted environment but they have maybe a controversial opinion they want to they want to be able to express free speech and they can't they can't unless they do something anonymous and even sometimes people when they do things anonymous they get caught and they get in trouble like i remember there was a guy on 4chan who was you know who would say a bunch of up things like a lot of people do and people uh tracked him down and found out who he was and then sent all these anonymously authored posts to his employer and he got fired and this guy was a father and he had children and he was you know supporting his family and now he's struggling to make a living he's got to try to figure because he wrote

96:43some things anonymously online on a message board and he found recreation and saying up things you know i don't you know i don't know what the solution is but i feel like anonymity it encourages less hospitable behavior did you hear about the professor at a academic conference getting into an elevator and making a just a dad joke so he gets it gets into a crowded elevator in an academic conference and you know someone asks what floor and he says women's lingerie please it's like it's like a dean martin joke or whatever right someone in the elevator was so offended by that that they lodged a complaint and i i've it's been now you know at least a month or so since i heard the story so i don't know if he was fired but like he was fighting for his academic life oh god over this complaint process dean martin joke i mean just like that that in the fullness of time that is going to

97:44seem like some insane witch panic right like there's no such thing as witches and yet people are getting burned alive because of allegations of witchcraft we're in that kind of situation and we we just have to wake up yeah and and so i well you and i don't teach and we're not in in a university and we're not in that bubble i think the people that are in that bubble and they escape that bubble then go to whatever tech company or whatever business they continue that same bubble-like behavior and they want everybody to acquiesce they want everybody around them to behave the way that they've been programmed to think that everybody is supposed to behave and you see that now from a lot of young people you see a lot of young people who are entering into the workforce think that the standards and the norms that they got enforced uh upon them at yale or colombia or wherever they went to

98:39school like that this is how you're supposed to behave social justice is important and this is real and you have to recognize your privilege you have to check your privilege and you have to do this and you have to do that you have to support trans rights you have to call out culture yeah call out culture is a big one that's a big part of it and cancel culture you know like everybody wants everybody to lose their job you want i mean this is the way that things change the way things change is you have to reinforce the fact that there's these new standards and there has to be severe repercussions for deviating yeah so very very much about control i mean jordan goes on about this jordan peterson it's like one of his pet subjects yeah this is where this goes this is all about control and that it's a very slippery slope and when you start telling people what to do and what not

99:26to do and that there's like these these indefensible undebatable standards that have to be reinforced and you can't talk about it like and that's what happened with megyn kelly she's like well how come and they're like get the out of here 60 million dollar job again the crucial moment for me is why is it that the apology isn't good enough that this isn't this but what is by all appearances a sincere apology yes like like where the link there is no link to real racism like there's no link to like oh yeah i want to live in a society where black people have it harder than white people right like okay if that if that's who you are if you're a legit racist well then fine we you know we can understand why we want to boycott your business or we want to you know you know you we want nothing to do with you right there should be massive social pressure against those

100:20kinds of noxious political commitments but if someone misspeaks or it's an off-color joke and they were it's like they weren't trying to offend anyone and they're just you know they wish they could take it back and like and and and that links up with i mean did you see you must have seen the norm mcdonald yes i mean that was brutal yeah right like it's what he was you know he knew he couldn't use the word right because it's like that that's gonna get him in trouble and so i mean it it's hilarious and explain what happened okay so he was he was on howard stern show wasn't he i think i think so he was i could have this wrong but the the gist of this is is right i believe he's on the howard stern show and he was about to use the word so so okay i'll walk this back and now now it's it's coming back to me he was defending he was talking about his friend the the the ordeal that louis

101:19c.k has gone through in this just massive exile experience right he's this massive social shunning uh and he said he he was describing it in a way where it he then got accused that he was he cared more about what louis c.k was going through than the women who felt victimized by louis ck and that was not his intention at all apparently and so when he went to to clarify this he was about to say you'd have to be to think that i cared more about louis c.k's ordeal than the ordeal of these women who had you know felt their careers got derailed right but as the word was kind of was coming out of his mouth he tried to course correct and because he doesn't know what the he's talking about he says you'd have to have down syndrome right right which is worse right it's more specific and it's like and then you got all these parents with down syndrome who have kids with down syndrome who are

102:15just oh my god and so now he's just be he's then he was he showed up on the view right with this this uh on on this apology tour and i mean that's just amazing video to see him on the view surrounded by these these four women who know he's not a bad guy right like they're trying they're trying to they're throwing him lifeline after lifeline and he's so beaten down right and he's so walking on eggshells and you got whoopi goldberg you know trying to just just pull him back you know from the lions and um it should be i mean it should be st so straightforward like it does is it part of norm's goal to cause pain for parents who have kids with mental disabilities right no right i mean like like you you could you can look in you can look into this guy's eyes for for 10 seconds and know that this is not the bigot you're worried about right right before of course you know and um

103:20and yet people just want him destroyed okay i don't know if they still do but it's like the moment like it was you know i think it was a a real concern that his his show would get cancelled i mean like this was well it hasn't been merged for a second season and one of the things that's maybe that's part of the problem he was it is part of the problem he was he was devastated i mean um i'm very good friends with adam egan he's a guy who runs the comedy store he's the talent director at the comedy store and he's been on norm's show he was on norm's he was like norm's sidekick on a show he's a very good friend with norman right and norm really suffered from this in a way that he never suffered from anything in his career in terms of like his own personal feeling like he was devastated by it by the blowback and the reaction and he wanted to come on my podcast and

104:02talk about it but netflix is like get the out of here netflix said no press don't do anything no press okay but so the fact that you can't talk your way out of it yes that's the disease well the problem is not that you can't talk your way out of it the problem is they wouldn't even let him attempt to talk your way out of it because they i think they realize that norm's a maniac and norm is a maniac in the best sense of the word he's one of my favorite comics and he's hilarious hilarious but he's also completely crazy in the best way possible right norm and i randomly in some strange way randomly were seated next to each other on two separate flights oh yeah just randomly right it's crazy like norm again like this is crazy and we had a great time just talking the entire flight and um we were talking about cigarette smoking yeah yeah yeah i used to smoke i'm so

104:50glad i quit terrible for you you know yeah i mean it's just but i you know i just always wanted a cigarette and then i'd be gambling i want a cigarette but but i quit cigarettes it's like how long did you quit and you're like i've haven't had a cigarette in years i'm like oh that's great we land at lax he goes right into a store and buy cigarettes i go what are you doing goes all that talk of cigarettes i just want one now he was lighting it on the way out the door he couldn't get out the door he lit it before he the you know the automatic door he was before it was opening he was lighting that cigarette i was like you're crazy but that's many many comedians are incredibly impulsive and this is norm i mean he just i mean he's got such a he's so off kilter he's got a sort of gary chandling crate like you don't know what's going to come out of his mouth

105:33extemporaneously yes but okay we we have to be i mean let's put this back into the diversity olympics we need some respect for neurodiversity yes right there are people who are somewhere on the spectrum toward autism right there's people who are there's there are spectrums we don't even know about we are we haven't named for sure and everyone is in some weird spot and people misspeak right you there has to be a way back to say that's not what i meant right like like this is like offending people of this type was not my intention at some level that has to be good enough unless you know we open your closet and we see that you've got swastikas you know everywhere you know and um so i i think we we have to we have to hold the line here you know yeah and very few people are in a position to be able to do it i mean you know like you know netflix netflix doesn't feel it can do

106:34it well netflix is just so terrified of continual blowback and they just thought like if we're going to save this show the way to save it is to get him to stop talking right he's just going to just take his other foot and take other people's feet and stuff them in his mouth as well i think one thing that might help to illuminate our understanding of how people behave is what you really enjoy talking about and you really definitely changed my way of looking at things that they're really essentially the concept of free will is a very flawed thing and that you have to really take into consideration who a person is right now and what what has caused them to be this person right now and that a lot of us are operating on this really bizarre momentum of of our past and our behavior and our genetics and life experiences and all these different variables that really need to be taken into account

107:22this idea that you are autonomous and you are the director of your own life is true to a certain extent but it's also very complicated much more complicated than we would like to admit and when you're talking about something that happened when you were 17 like brett kavanaugh or something like that like yeah but jesus christ you know you're going to hold a 55 man 55 year old man accountable to something that he did when he was 17 it wasn't a crime and you're not exactly sure what happened this is all very strange this is very strange stuff well so taking the the red pill on on free will makes you much more forgiving of a lot of this stuff yeah because you see just everyone is an open system no one authored themselves no one created themselves no one no one can directly regulate the effect of every influence that they had or didn't have you know it's like you you are the totality of

108:23what brought you here i mean the universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time and the only thing you've got is your brain and its states and that is that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you your you as a system have have had working on you up until this moment and so the next words that come out of your mouth are part of that process now the people some people find this to be a you know frankly demoralizing picture like they think well okay well you're telling me telling me i'm just a robot but you're a robot that is open continuously open to influence to the influence of you know internally based on its own processes i mean there's like there's top-down control of you know the executive function in the brain to your you know your emotional life say and you're continually open to the influences of culture right you know the

109:23culture is this operating system that you're interacting with in each moment and whatever's getting in can change you in radical ways very quickly there's no telling how much you can change on the basis of one new idea coming your way right now i would argue that that process of change i mean if i say something that changes your view on anything that's not evidence of free will that is evidence of just yet more causality i mean you don't you don't pick the changes that come your way if i if i get you to see something that you didn't see a moment before you're not responsible for the fact that you didn't see it a moment before and you're not responsible for the fact that you now see it it's just like the dominoes just kept falling right right but it does give you this a far more patient sense of um one just just you know all the causes and conditions that that

110:19have created this this odious behavior you're you're now disposed to react to in the world right like like you can everything on some level is more of a force of nature than it is something that you need to take personally it's like if there's a hurricane blowing outside we don't respond to it the same way we would respond to you know al qaeda dropping a bomb on us right it might it might create the same amount of damage but the in in the in the latter case where we have an identifiable identifiable agent right we feel like okay now we're in the presence of human evil and we have to go kill these right now we may have to kill them right because that may be the only way of of putting out this this you know stopping the damage they're they're committed to causing but and we would kill hurricanes if we could kill them right i mean we would you know we would

111:12nullify them but the feeling we have in both cases is very different the feeling you have attributing ultimate authorship to a person's behavior is super uh narrow uh psychologically and ethically and it's you know the feeling of vengeance right like like you don't you you don't you have a you this feeling of vengeance is so natural to get triggered in response to a person it's not natural in response to a wild animal who may have done something terrible right i mean like you would like i mean there have been examples of this where people have taken vengeance on animals and it just looks like a kind of moral dysfunction on the part of the people who did it i mean there's a famous picture of a an elephant that got hung from a railroad crane i think back in the 20s right so like this the circus elephant escaped and it ran you know it just rampaged through the streets and it

112:07trampled you know a few people and the and the people in the in the town i don't know where this was it was a baltimore or someplace were so outraged that they decided to lynch the elephant right like and yet that's there's something uncanny about that sort of misappropriation of agency to an elephant what what is it what is a mistreated circus elephant gonna do when it gets out and is terrified and it's trying to get away from people it's going to trample a few people so we have a very different set of books we keep ethically for humans and but some of it's understandable some of it's inevitable but a lot of it gives us moral illusions that we don't need to have and it gives it gives us a kind of just an inability to take stock of all the variables that are actually guiding human behavior and react to them and mitigate them and disincentivize them intelligently i mean punishment makes

113:00sense not because people really really deserve at bottom whatever their punishments are it doesn't make sense in a in a retro retributive paradigm it makes sense if it if it's the the best tool to discourage dangerous behavior uh and it works right so it's like you know if if you're gonna punish people for things they can't control well that's stupid right because it you as much as you punish them that you're not going to you're not going to moderate the behavior so you have to punish people for things that are actually under voluntary control and it only it only makes sense if it's the only tool to do the job and if the moment you had i mean this is like i may have brought this up last time we spoke about free will but this is really the sort of reductio ad absurdum of where most people are on this topic the moment we really understand human evil at the level of the brain the

114:02moment we understand psychopathy say which is i mean maybe that's not the totality of evil but let's you know certainly center the bullseye once we understand psychopathy as a neurological condition that's governed by genes and environment and we can we can actually intrude at the level of the brain to mitigate it so like psychopathy becomes a disease right it becomes a an injury a syndrome right that we can fix and let's say let's say it's a very simple fix let's say it's a pill right let's say it's just a neurotransmitter imbalance in the presence of that breakthrough we will feel very differently about that species of human evil we will not judge it in the same way because what will happen is you'll give people the pill and they'll say i can't believe i was that dangerous like like the thank you for like like i i'm as horrified by who i was before you cured me as you were right and

114:59it so it'll so so psychopathy in the presence of a cure for it would look much more like diabetes than it looks like evil in the present case and people aren't imagining what it would like what it would be like to be there what it would be like to actually fully understand the underlying neurophysiology here and actually have something i mean there's no guarantee we'll be able to to deal with it in a simple way but it's certainly possible and i mean the classic example is just like the charles whitman example where you have a brain tumor that's causing this aberrant behavior in that case everyone everyone sees okay this is not evil this is a brain tumor that's the tower shooter yeah yeah back in 64 i think um and so but in the same way that a brain tuber tumor's exculpatory there i think a full understanding of the the underlying neurology would be exculpatory

115:58again it doesn't mean you in the meantime you know before we get there obviously we have to lock up dangerous people if there's no way to to help them but the more we see the causes the more we view we view this in terms of just sheer bad luck right like like there are there are people who when they're adults are quintessentially evil who we who and they provoke the greatest feeling of vengeance from us but if you just walk back their timeline you recognize that at a certain they were four years old at one point right they were the four-year-old who was destined to become this terrible person right it's an unlucky four-year-old right you know and so at what point where's the bright line that says okay here's the point where it's appropriate to just hate this person and feel no compassion and on the other side of this line you should just feel compassion because this

116:53person's unlucky there is no such line and a complete understanding of this lifeline in in scientific terms would obliterate any line you think you have right it would just be this cascade of causation and you know adding randomness to the picture doesn't help right it's just the randomness is just you know somebody's in your brain rolling dice you know influencing your behavior that way well that doesn't give you the free will people think they have so there isn't there's ironically there is what seems on some level deflationary of the of the the the gravitas of the human spirit for people opens the door to at least in my view a far more ethical and tolerant and patient and understanding view of of you know human failings and human frailty and just and then at that point you can just have a conversation about what's pragmatic what works what helps people change like in this this person

117:57over here who's doing terrible things is there something we can do to make him a better person well if there is let's do that without all the judgment wouldn't it be amazing if that's how we treated uh these public shaming events like wouldn't wouldn't it be amazing if we gave someone an opportunity to say this is this is what i did this is how awful i feel about this i would never do that again i'm a different person that was 20 years ago or whatever it was and and have everybody join in hey anyone could be you thank you for being honest about who you are now thank you for evolving thank you for expressing yourself in a way that maybe other people who have also committed really um on just unsavory or just unfortunate things in the past unfortunate acts in the past they can feel relieved by the fact that you've grown and evolved to become a better person oh yeah and that you're

118:50you're a different thing now and you are the product of all of your experiences you're not you're not this one thing you're not stuck in who you were when you were 16 years old if you were marky mark and you hit that guy with a stick whatever you know whatever he did you know you're not stuck in that spot forever these don't mar it's not a scarlet letter it's not a mark on your forehead that you keep for life yeah the thing about the liam neeson incident which i find so interesting is that there's a case where i mean what he's revealing about himself is is pretty amazing right it's like it's like he he just decided okay we we need a a truth and reconciliation commission for who i used to be right you know and uh just volunteered this and for me like you know i i don't actually understand that state of mind i mean there are many aberrant states of mine that i can understand i

119:43certainly understand what it's like to to want to harm somebody and you know to feel vengeance and all that but the instrumental violence piece i don't understand i've never felt like okay this type of person wronged me or someone close to me so any any person of that type will do right like that like but that is such a problem the world over in human history that it is it is just fascinating ethically for someone of his you know stature to reveal that about himself and he put it in terms of of of honor i mean it was like it was an honor and this is one this is what what is so dysfunctional about honor culture right this is what this is what we see more in the south than anywhere else in the country and this is what you see basically everywhere you go in the middle east it's just this is what islam inculcates to a degree that's fairly unmatched in in its community

120:39this notion of honor is does link up with this tendency to find satisfaction in instrumental violence like but when you when you try to run that software on my brain that just looks like madness right the idea that any other person will do right of a certain type right that's just you know like i i don't that resonates not at all right and so um it's just damn interesting and the fact that the lesson being taken from this seems to be this is the this should be the end of your career for having talked about this in the way and again you know apologies if there's some part of the story that i've gotten wrong or i'm not missing or missing but it seemed to me that he was always counting this in the the horror and amazement appropriate to to the disclosure like he can't believe he was inhabiting this state of of consciousness and you know it's just an amazing thing to

121:43reveal about yourself i mean so yeah and i'm sure he regrets every second of it yeah and that's that's the wrong punch line yeah right you know the thing that should happen is someone with a lot to lose should be able to say you know how ugly a human mind can be this is an experience i had right this is who i was and you know how much i have to live for and how much i have to lose we have to talk about this kind of mania that can get humming on a human brain right right we see this every time you open the paper you see someone in the grip of this kind of thing right it even happened to me right i think it's an amazing conversation to start and the fact that the result is just you know an and an auto defay uh is is uh is the problem we're we're trying to fight our way through at this point isn't it because there's too many voices i mean there's just so many people that

122:41are reacting to it if he's dealing with uh he's not dealing with three or four or five voices he's dealing with millions of people that get to chime in on this yeah and you get a few thousand of those people that are furious at you you know like you were saying like i mean this it doesn't doesn't that doesn't work i was just about to say it i was going to make a comparison to your podcast with jack that you're not listening to not reading the comments but he's he's getting this gigantic signal from a huge number of people you know so this is all over my google news feed i saw it on yahoo i saw it and all these different uh publications are talking about liam neeson's case and so then everybody starts chiming in and then the virtue signaling ratio is very high and the anger ratio is very high then the people that think he's secretly still racist and doesn't want

123:31to admit it is very high yeah and then there's also the fact that he's a man of wealth and privilege and he's successful and famous and there's got to be a bunch of jealousy that's attached to that and a bunch of people that want to knock him down because he's at a very high hill yeah there's a lot going on there it's like yeah and i i i don't know i feel i i feel for the guy again i don't know him but i just i remember again forgive me if i get this slightly wrong but i i isn't it true that like his wife natasha richardson just died in this freak accident she was scared accidentally fell and hit her head but but honestly she didn't even fall she wasn't moving when she fell she was standing on a ski slope and fell from a standing position and hit her head on the you know the hard snow obviously and i mean it's just it's all it takes yeah it's brutal um yeah so

124:22and on top of that i believe his cousin or his nephew nephew or niece died the same way not the same way in terms of fell skiing but also hit their head and died wow so it's like jesus christ this guy and obviously there's many people out there that experience it far greater tragedies i'm not trying to quantify it but yeah he's uh you know he he tried to talk about a real thing you know he tried to talk about a real thing and he's he's given some interviews since then where he's you know he said look i'm not a racist i'm just telling you i was in such a up state of mind because of this rape that i was willing to do something irrational and horrible yeah yeah but he didn't know it's but he didn't interesting yeah exactly yeah but and but again take it full circle people these same people who are calling for his head are prepared to forgive other people who did do that thing but

125:15it's all it's so dependent like i had mike tyson on the podcast and one of the things that i got when i said it was part of that that was fast so many people were like that rapist this guy that all these different things about him what i wanted to get into him with him was who he was when he was 12 years old when he was a little boy when he met customato and was taught out of box and was hypnotized and this is one of the really important things that came out of that podcast was customato who was not just this boxing legend who took in this young kid from the ghetto that didn't have a family but also hypnotized him hypnotized him to be a destroyer he specifically was saying to him you don't exist the task exists you're going to move forward you're going to bob and weave and rip the body and he was programming this kid to get incredible amounts of positive response

126:04from violent acts violent acts in a boxing ring and that's where he got his identity that's where he got all of his love and so he became this guy and one of the things that i said to him i said did anybody ever teach you how to turn it off and he's like no nobody did like i'm not i'm no mike tyson and i was never like that i was never like that but i was far more violent when i was fighting far more violent far more prone to violence it was my trigger was very short just i was ready thinking about it all the time fighting all the time i fought i probably had a hundred fights i was ready to go like your brain has if you're if you're getting kicked in the face and punched in the face a lot and you're doing it through your developmental period from the time you're 50 for me it was 15 from him it was like 12 or 13. you have a different way of looking at the world because this is also in the

126:55recipes yeah and the recipes are also you might get knocked the out you might get head kicked you might get kicked in the neck with a shin and you know you wake up and your friends are slapping in the face and putting ice on you this is all real and when you have that the the positive that comes from that when you're a 12 year old boy and you're hypnotized by this great man who's teaching you how to fight and you're getting so much love you've never gotten love in your life you've never gotten positive feedback and you're getting so much of it from this and then no one's teaching you how to turn it off and you're wondering why this guy would grows up to become a maniac is punching people in the street is just just crazy and yelling at reporters i'll you in the ass white boy all that crazy that he did yeah he was a maniac i mean there's no no one taught him how to reflect there was no sam

127:43harris app for meditation from mike tyson in 1986 you know he was just a maniac well yeah i mean one problem we have here is that we we don't have a norm around a good norm around mental health yeah and we have we've like zero norms around mental training right so i mean so physical training this is a very good analogy between meditation as mental training which sounds just like just esoteric and woo right so it sounds like new age you know specious nonsense to many people but if you roll back the clock 100 years physical training made no sense there were no norms around him and the only guy lifting a dumbbell was that guy with the handlebar mustache and the leopard you know bikini or whatever he was wearing the freak show right yeah you know the singlet yeah and now we have we have have a total understanding of the norms around physical training yeah like you're

128:40there's just you're actually a freak if you don't do some kind of exercise well those ch they've even changed and evolved over the last decade or so yeah yeah it's gotten far more complicated and nuanced it's continually evolving but the the framework that the paradigm the fact that there's something to do to get better physically and that those those changes matter they they you can engage your body intelligently so as to improve it across you know many different variables flexibility strength that's all totally understood and now we're just refining the protocol with mental training uh and specifically the training of attention and how you respond to the the uprising of your own negative emotion right that is something that has been going on for thousands of years in contemplative mostly eastern context and that's something that you know buddhism really has a lot of specifically a

129:38an asymmetric amount of wisdom to to share on and it's um yeah i mean i'm i'm i'm very excited to be spending more time on it because it's the locus of so much of the fragmentation in our lives now is the smartphone it's like what's happen what this thing is doing to us is continually amplifying not only our desire for our approval but the the ability to to react in a i mean like so there's just no reason to hesitate to condemn this thing that you're seeing like you're you're the this this upwelling of negative emotion you see the out the outrage you feel when you see something on twitter right is it's shortening everybody's views right it's making road rage more of a kind of a general feature of our of our lives and um this is this is all trainable like you can actually you can actually learn that when you suddenly feel anger in response to something that seems to

130:44have you know happened in the world if you just pay attention to the experience of anger if you just feel the end the mere physiology of it and get out of your thoughts about it like you actually you notice thought as a process you let that go you're not continuing to have a conversation with yourself about all the reasons why you should be angry or you should attack this person and you just become interested in in anger as a response the half-life of the emotion is like seconds right it's impossible to stay angry for very long if you get out of the story you're telling yourself about why you should be angry now there are certain situations where anger is is appropriate and it's good to have access to that energy i'm not i'm not advocating that everyone just get lobotomized and not react to anything but until you can actually be mindful i mean mindful is is the

131:38technical word for what what this is and until you can actually get out of the the thoughts and just pay attention to to in this case a negative emotion you have zero choice you're going to stay angry for as long as you stay angry for and people have this experience of being angry for days about things or being angry for hours there's no way to stay angry for more than moments if unless you're just lost in the story and um it becomes a kind of superpower to to be able to say do i need to be angry about this or like how useful is it to stay angry about this and and you can just get off the ride right you can literally like you know i see a tweet from somebody who's trying to destroy my life and i feel this initial you know contraction and i can decide how long i want to feel that way for right and that's an amazing thing to be able to do and it's based on a kind of training

132:38that very few people know even exists and that and and so again it's like you're like i'm now the guy in the in the leopard singlet right but it's um you know more and more we're going to understand that this is just has to be part of everybody's toolkit well it would be amazing if they taught kids that in school if you've got to learn that when you're learning math and history people are doing that my wife actually does that really in high school six-year-olds whoa you can t you can teach mindfulness to i mean in the beginning what they're learning is just basic awareness of their inner lives right like just being able to name the emotion they're feeling is an amazing capacity in a six-year-old like a six-year-old is just acting out something and you're now teaching them to to know in that moment that what's pushing them from behind is sadness or anger or embarrassment it's

133:34like just to be able just to have that recursive ability to reflect that's already a major gain in in kids that age but yeah you can learn it very early actually this was something i was talking about with um stephen fry on on my podcast so stephen was very scared he's he's actually he's adorable he's like what like that nice you're in the presence of just such a nice guy guys like radiates you know decency um but uh he was you know fairly skeptical of just like why would you ever have to train mindfulness or meditation and i mean the analogy that came up came up to me you came up from me on the fly there was that it is actually a lot like learning to read in the sense that none of us remember having the having gone through the ordeal of learning to read right now that learning to read was a hassle right like that did not come easily to most people and yet

134:32now it's just now you if you look at a page of of text in a language you understand you can't help but decode it right it's just effortless and so this i mean this is these kinds of emotional tools and and cognitive tools just the ability to self-regulate emotion in by becoming aware of it as a process that is something that i think we could teach kids much earlier and then we would be in the presence of of young adults who would naturally have a facili a facility for it that where they won't even they wouldn't even remember how hard it was to acquire it yeah what i was talking about earlier with mike tyson and you know his his coaching and his i mean he essentially got mental coaching on how to accomplish one thing mental coaching on how to have the perfect mindset for one thing how to how to how to kick people's ass yeah what he didn't have was mental coaching on how

135:28to deal with the pressures of life especially life i mean almost no one really understands what life is like to be a famous 20 year old heavyweight champion in the world i mean there's no one it had to be it's alien it's got to be alien i mean and to ask this kid to manage this state when you know you're talking about someone who just six years prior was virtually homeless and had no love in his life at all and was being hypnotized by some madman who's a you know a boxing wizard who lives in the catskills and what we were talking about earlier about who you are now versus who you were 20 30 years ago when you meet mike tyson now mike tyson is the sweetest nicest friendliest guy he's so soft-spoken he's really kind he hugs people he's a really nice guy you know and at one point in time he was the scariest on the planet earth yeah there's actually there's

136:25another sort of uncanny valley here in in martial arts training that that i spent a lot of time in when you're training in martial arts and seeing the world through this lens of violence and potential violence but you're training in a way that's never really putting your skills to the test so you're you're basically you're as a young man you're living with this fundamental uncertainty as to whether or not you actually are capable of anything yeah so you're training in like fake martial arts right right or at least martial arts where most of it is a kind of pantomime of violence and it's not being pressure tested so it's not like you where you're competing and you know what it's like to kick someone in the head and it actually works right it's like this is you're sparring but it's all yeah you have to keep everything safe right you know karate yeah um or even if it's full contact you

137:11have headgear and you've got it's just like you're not there's still basic uncertainty right about what's going to go down on the street if you know if it's in the presence of real violence and there you're you know especially as a teenager you're in this fairly toxic state of like sort of always preparing for violence that still is in you know in most people's lives a pretty low order of probability that it's going to occur and yet it's all it's also backed by this fear of you know you just kind of the ego fear of maybe you're just full of right and you're just you're just going to get your ass kicked if this ever happens and with someone like you know someone who's a real obviously someone like mike tyson there shouldn't there shouldn't be any uncertainty about like he's got nothing to prove he's in a bar and somebody says you know what are you looking at at minimum

138:04he doesn't have this fear of like if he if he walks away from that challenge he knows he's walking away not because he was scared maybe he he's going to lose a fist fight with this guy right he's the best boxer on earth at that moment it's it's that he's he's got way more to lose than the other guy like why does he want to be rolling around in a parking lot with some stranger you know so um it's uh so there's this this is very unhappy place that a lot of martial artists are in which is you know they don't actually know what they're they're capable of and they're they're living all the time with this this you know kind of training software running in their heads and it's it's um it's a weird space to be in well it's one of the things that's so great about brazilian jiu jitsu exactly the brazilian jiu jitsu you i mean you're not getting punched and you're not

138:52getting kicked but you are absolutely going full blast and you have a hundred percent confidence once you reach a certain level that you could do that to an untrained person within its frame you are pressure testing it you know that it works yes now you don't you know i would argue there people still lose sight of the fact that in reality people people are punching and they're not training a lot of punching or defense and then there are weapons and then there's a guy's friend who can come up and start kicking you in your head so yeah it's like like how good an idea was it to pull guard when you know someone else can walk up uh but you know yeah it's within its you know within its purview yeah you're not you're you're working out all of your illusions and that's yeah that's that's one reason why so many of us find it addictive you know it's just yeah there's that and there's

139:37also they're so nice yeah jiu jitsu people are so friendly and i think that's one of the reasons why they're so friendly is they're not carrying around all that that a lot of people carry around including you know there's some grown men that have never been in a fight in their life and they get a couple of beers in them and they start talking crazy i'm like hey man you don't even know how to fight yeah you know what do you do it's like crazy it's like someone who wants to jump into a nascar race you've never driven a car like stop and they're talking to some guy with cauliflower ear and they don't even know what that means right yeah yeah it's i mean to to be a human being is complicated to be a man and in the face of altercations with other men is uniquely complicated you know the the kind of altercations that men get into the kind of bravado and chest puffing

140:20and talking and the consequences of those things like you were talking about liam neeson um his wife falling down and hitting her head a friend of mine was working in a bar and uh in long island and uh one of the bouncers got in a fight with some guy and punched the guy and knocked him out the guy fell back hit his head off the curb and died and that happens all the time and people get knocked out they hit their head on the ground they die yeah yeah i actually i did when i before i had a podcast and i was getting my midlife crisis took the form of me getting really back into martial arts again for after a hiatus of maybe 25 years i had a a lawyer who who focused on kind of self-defense law i mean he was constantly dealing with cases where someone is either either claiming self-defense or it's a legit self-defense claim but they're basically screwed i mean

141:10they like they punch someone and that person fell down and hit a fire hydrant and died right like that so they're they're trying to beat a murder rap you know and so i just had him in a blog post had him walk me and i had a bunch of i had two people comment ask questions as well i had matt thornton the who's john kavanagh's jiu jitsu coach asked questions in this blog post and i had uh rory miller who's a self-defense trainer just just to try to flesh out all of the things you should be thinking about when you're the kind of person who is at all preparing for the possible eventuality of violence because people who train with guns or own own guns or carry knives or do martial arts don't actually understand what happens when you know like they they agree to fight somebody or they like like like unless you unless your mo is and this should be your mo to avoid violence at all virtually any

142:19cost right like you're always just trying to leave the premises if there's some sort of challenge that could become violence if that's not your your mo you're just wandering into potential situations where you can find yourself in court for having shoved a guy and he you know fell into the street and got run over right like and then now you're the guy who's looking at the prospect of going to prison for you know for a uh murder or or um you know second-degree murder and so anyway i had him walk me through all the the ins and outs of all of that it was it was a fascinating conversation because yeah there are people who you know they're extreme cases they're they're women who have shot their com totally crazy husband who's like waving a baseball bat at their heads and they're in prison for years for this you know they're just real miscarriages of justice where like the like you would

143:12think that the the the you know it would be very easy to prove that she was in fear for her life in this case and this was it was a legitimate use of lethal force it's just so hard when no one's there yeah if no one's i mean if you have eyewitnesses or if you know it's a public thing that happens and there's video of it but you know if someone does something to someone and no one's around you punch someone and they they get knocked out and they die and you say no this guy was threatening to kill me he was chasing me he was threatening to kill me i was terrified for my life he lunged towards me i saw the opening i took it and now he's dead you could go to jail forever yeah i mean that's that that's a reality i mean you should absolutely without a doubt avoid violence at all costs yeah but you should also know how to fight definitely i think that's very important it's very important yeah

144:02but very few people train so it's like in in the curriculum of beca learning how to fight you know training in in whatever martial art or arts there's in most cases very little time spent training avoidance yes right and that's that's a real missing piece because that is the most important thing to train i mean it's like it's like you you know especially if you have real skills right especially if you're walking around armed right i mean the one the one in interesting psychological corrective that concealed carry does for many people is that once you're walking around with a gun you realize what the problem of of what what any altercation can become right like you're not going to get into a shoving match with somebody if you're wearing a gun on your belt because like if if that escalates you're pulling out your gun and then it's a decision of whether to kill somebody right so you know

145:01and you know i don't have a ton of experience in this area but you know for all the firearm training i've done with people um i just get you know you know i know like former swat operators who are you know just out there they're constantly armed and these are like the last guys who are going to get involved in anything i mean they used to be cops but now they don't even feel any burden to police any like it's like they're just they're retired emphatically retired right um because they just recognize how haywire anything can go for them if you know any any process of conflict gets started and again i think this goes back to understanding how to manage your mind you know when the hits the fan and things go crazy it's it's very difficult for people to maintain a rational state of mind and things can escalate so quickly things can turn to violence so quickly

145:58especially with irrational people or untrained people or people that aren't aware of consequences or maybe can't process it well but and the crucial piece which you know many seasoned fighters and and you know professionals don't have or you know i would think many don't have is this sort of this this valley where your ego concerns are not worked out it's like when you when you've when you feel the emotional burden of a loss of face right so like if jocko willing is in a bar and someone says something you know nasty to him or to his wife jocko doesn't have anything to prove like jocko knows he's a badass right so jocko knows that he just it's time to get out of the bar because he doesn't want to deal with the psychopath who doesn't know who he's dealing with uh but someone who's not trained like jonco right could feel that backing down especially backing down in front of your wife or

146:59your girlfriend that is such an ego blow that you know the temptation to get into this this monkey dance with the other person is just is uh it's impossible to recover from right it's a very dangerous game yeah yeah and people get into it all the time and i've seen so many people get into it that just don't they don't have any cards yeah they're completely bluffing yeah yeah like god damn it man just stop doing this you know i look yeah i've been doing martial arts my whole whole life and i'm terrified of fights i see fights just like get the out of here before this goes bad when it goes sideways you know men are just we have thousands of years of awful dna you know we really do we we're violent hundreds of thousands yeah violence was imperative it was imperative for survival you had you had to be able to react and react quickly and yeah you had to know what to do with

147:51your genes are never going to make it to the next stage which is i mean this is a controversial thing to say and i got in trouble or one of my podcast guests gavin debecker the security guru got in trouble on my podcast talking about the primacy of of intuition here like our intuitions are actually really good for detecting something that makes us uncomfortable about another person right and this is this becomes politically incorrect really fast right because it's like you know if you see a guy on an elevator who makes you uncomfortable you know gavin's advice and i think i think the real saying advice is just don't get on but there are many people who get on just because they want to prove they're not racist right or they're not it's like and i actually know someone who was in a situation like that uh and it didn't work out well and so i mean intuition is bad for so many

148:48things we we have terrible intuitions for statistics and probability theory and it's like we're reliably you know whole careers and nobel prizes have been won on you know people like you know danny kahneman have have shown us how it's not only that our intuitions are bad for for these judgments but they're reliably bad and we can understand there's a there's a structure to how bad they are but for judging people who are dangerous you know who give us the who make who make the hair stand up on the back of our neck for reasons we can't understand um you know where the eye contact was wrong or the or the just the the way they were you know i mean just like a what's called a witness check you know like someone comes up to you and engages you and then they look just they just kind of look to check for witnesses right now like that people don't aren't aware

149:44that that's even a thing yeah right but when like that body language is is very salient to us and and uh there are there are hundreds of things like that that that um we immediately fee that that prompt you know an intuitive response and these are intuitions that are you know from a self-defense point of view are worth listening to because like the worst case scenario is you wind up being a little rude there yeah like like sorry i'm not you know i can't talk but um people are you know people are very dogmatically being kind of trained to ignore those those kinds of intuitions what do you think those intuitions are like what do you think intuitions are like when you meet someone you go well this person feels dangerous like what is that what's happening well there's it's a lot you know the gaze detection is a big one i mean we you know what people do with their eyes is a is a

150:39major variable in just how we feel that you know the the relationship is going um but it's uh and there's there are micro expressions that we notice in in people that we're not aware of noticing you know but like it's just there's this is this is not well understood uh and we're bad judges of whether someone is telling the truth i mean this this has been fairly well studied i mean there are people who you know even people who work for the fbi are not you know much better than chance and detecting whether somebody's lying but there's just we get so much information by you know body language and being in somebody's presence and we get it so fast uh that it's um again and they i mean they're whether we understand it or not there are evolutionary reasons why this is so i mean if we've evolved for anything as social primates we have evolved to detect stuff that just

151:39is a precursor to violent intent in in others right do you think it's just gays or do you think you can sense the energy of someone there's certain movements that people make when they're thinking about hitting you oh yeah yeah yeah they're certain like there's like a twitchiness to them like a while pulled back like almost like a spring or a bow there's like a feeling you get around people that are looking to hit people yeah well there's so again all of that's still vision but there's you know i mean who knows we're detecting pheromones we could be detecting people's level of of stress i mean just how tuned up they are yeah um but and this goes beyond this is beyond just physical violence this is just you know detecting psychopaths who are you know who are manipulative i mean just detecting i mean there are there are ways to spot people lying uh you know i mean just you know they're

152:28they're tells like you know too much information you know like the people who are giving you superfluous superfluous information uh as a kind of over correction they're anticipating that you're going to doubt their story and so they're filling in like blanks that you don't even need filled in right and and it's there are sort of patterns to to sort of to that but and again we we pick up on a lot of this stuff without consciously being aware of what's going on we just know that that's like not a person i want to spend any more time with right uh but you know so there may be more of a literature on this than i know about but a lot of this is not well understood and i mean people like paul ekman have done a lot of stuff on micro on you know micro expressions um that goes back probably 30 years at this point and there are people who are outliers who are great at detecting micro expressions

153:25where they really they they really just understand what's going on but it's it's not edward and ai eventually will be if it isn't there already will be much better than we are doing this i'm so scared of that yeah i'm so scared of them getting that wrong yeah yeah right micro expressions are funny because they remind me of microaggressions which is one of the you know one of the weirder social justice warrior things like things that used to be just slights where someone was just like slightly rude not not even slightly yeah just like where do you come from right that's right speaking on an accident they're like where are you from where are your parents from how dare you yeah how dare you question my authenticity yeah no microaggressions or it's weird that that's actually accepted that this is something they're they're actually pushing in certain schools that microaggressions are a real

154:13a real thing um christina hoff summers just wrote something about uh or she she put something on her twitter today about a yale article that was written today or that was put out today about documenting uh politically incorrect behavior so that someday in the future when someone is running for congress or is up for supreme court or something like that you could go back to their college days and remember when they said something right i mean one of the examples this woman uses in this post was compared a woman to a large animal a woman's body to a large animal in a private text message that she should have uh oh i should have screamed shot i should have yeah and calls this guy in this this article white boy this white boy does this and the white boy with a saccharine smile does that it's like which is like overtly racist like the just the the expression like right in the way that

155:05she's describing it like is it as if this evil character slowly makes his way to run the world and he's been engineered since the time he was in college well that's it's going to happen just by just basically just based on everyone's use of the tools yeah like the you know people are not diligently scrubbing their their digital history and there may in fact be no way to actually do it right and so so they're just they're trailing them you know they're not even aware of what they're trailing in social media so so i i mean maybe maybe that is that will just be a cure for the problem because it'll at a certain point we'll be dealing with people who were basically born they were born on facebook right like they don't even have a moment like they've got their baby picture there and everything that followed right and um then it'll just seem completely untenable like let's just accuse people

156:04of everything yes everyone's guilty everyone has said that dumb thing yeah you know that can be a matter of can be taken the worst possible way and and if they're going to be hung from that then you know no no one will survive well it seems like that's what we're dealing with right now in a lot of cases you know yeah yeah the what i think is really important that what you were saying earlier was that there has to be some sort of path to redeeming themselves that there has to be some accepted way that someone can go about redeeming themselves and we can allow them to re-enter society without constantly bringing it up or judging them by it or always attributing their past behavior to who they are right now i mean look at i mean this should be so simple look at my collaboration with majin nawaz right so like we were on this podcast together yeah majid was scheming to form a global

156:57caliphate i mean the the organization he was part of and he wasn't a jihadist thankfully he wasn't actually blowing people up but he was trying to get nuclear weapons in in pakistan into the hands of the worst possible theocrats right this was his matched with all of his charisma and all of his energy and it's like you know mantra is fantastic and he used to a utterly nefarious purpose in my world right you know if you know how much that is an issue for me it's like my and madrid and i are just buddies now right so all i need is a clear path that he took out of the darkness to understand why he's a valid collaborator now and yeah actually on that point i've i've got people breathing down my neck to tell you that or tell your audience this is how powerful you are joe rogan um that the documentary is coming out on the our collaboration and it's it's out now it's

157:53it can be found out there it's what's called uh islam and the future of tolerance nice and it's actually it's it's not bad it actually captures the spirit of our collaboration very well and if you know see it if only just to recognize how awesome madrid is because madrid is just a superstar and the scariest thing about the state of public opinion in the muslim world from my point of view is just how how hard a job he has to just to have a conversation in that community i mean it's just you know he's so marginalized and he's so reasonable you know but i mean to come back to that original point here's someone who was whose life was purposed toward what what i view as one of the most toxic projects i can think of right you know give the nuclear weapons to the people who want to die as martyrs right that's the project right right and majid is just an absolutely awesome

158:57collaborator now right so there's like we have to there has to be a path through some insane conversation to a reboot the real the worry though for a lot of folks is that you are not really being honest about who you are currently you just want an excuse for for to be relieved except it's so clear in some of these cases like it's clear i me take i mean the norma mcdonald case it's just utterly clear yeah right um and i mean even in megan kelly's case utterly clear like i don't think unless she's got some white supremacist you know side gig that i i'm not aware of she's just like listen i'm clueless i said you know i didn't realize you know well they were looking for an excuse to get rid of her honestly right but i think that even if they weren't i think that still very likely would have been the end i mean it's like even if her show had had better ratings still that

159:54could have been an unrecoverable error what if she was black well no i guess it doesn't work the other direction right the reverse is black and she said what's so bad about blackface well i think she could stay on the air that's interesting i i don't know i mean it certainly would have been easier you know oh yeah i mean like what if oprah said it yeah what if oprah's saying who cares you want to pretend to be diana ross because that was the the the thing was pretending to be diana ross for halloween right yeah you want to be diana ross yeah i mean i got to think they could get away with it but um it's uh i mean it was interesting the the thing that happened with louis c.k and ricky gervais and jerry seinfeld and chris rock yes that was because i remember when that aired i think it was 2011 and i remember there was nothing around that it was just it was totally fine yeah right they

160:44were using the n-word i mean the problem the thing that was kind of dishonest about the the the re-scandalizing of it was that in the context of that conversation it was framed by the fact that they they really were ref referencing one of the more famous pieces of comedy in in history and they were they were referencing chris rock's act using the n word they're they're black people and then they're ends yeah and you louie are an rnn right like you're the only white guy i know who and then they're so they're talking in that context and uh anyway yeah it was it was interesting how that almost i mean that blew back against ricky and and yeah that's one of those things though where they're just looking for more things to be mad at louis for yeah but i mean but ricky was also getting and i think you know chris chris took a lot of yeah he took a lot of for that because he didn't there

161:41was no blowback yeah yeah interesting times yes it's probably a good way to end it yeah we just did three hours yeah it is it is interesting times i mean it's probably the most interesting times of our lives in good ways and bad ways yeah well we're um we're on the front lines of something and you you know i i i don't know if you get enough credit for this but you have like you pushed out into the space that no one even knew existed and i mean you're like i honestly did didn't even know what a podcast was when you know like i learned what a podcast was when i got invited to get interviewed on your podcast the first time you know so it's like it's awesome what what you've created here so well thank you uh it's all it's an accident yeah i just stuck with it yeah stumbled upon it yeah and kept going well i'm good at that keep it up thank you thank you you too yeah

162:36sam harris ladies and gentlemen all right awesome