Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZee_5h55mo
[Music] cheers so this is for you oh thank you so much your own it's got a little jerry label on the back of it this is uh your own but in the side little thing oh yeah um this is a part of a thing we did with fight for the forgotten yeah which is um i don't know if you know what that is but it's a charity that my friend justin wren put together they built uh wells for people in the pygmy uh pygmy population in uganda and in the congo as well and so they did a thing with buffalo trace where we picked out one very specific batch and they they literally gave us a barrel of whiskey so we have what's one giant bottle and then a bunch of these bottles to give out to guests so there you go nice oh man this feels strange i uh you know i've got to tell you in the late 90s i watch news radio all the time so you know get the uh you know feels uh feels weird having a drink with you yeah it feels weird just being me so it's weird it's weird for people to feel weird to meet me so that's that's odd too um so your book uh is uh speaks to my heart did you bring a copy ah i did not you have a book with you no i have a book with me this is a this is a book by my friend adolf reid so it's about growing up in new orleans under jim crow and like kind of how the south and the country has changed and how it hasn't changed so uh this is good stuff but okay cool well that's a good book too but tell everybody about your book yeah so my book is called canceling comedians while the world burns a critique of the contemporary left and i wrote that a while ago so that was before we went through this like surreal experience where during weeks that the united states and russia have been like closer to the brink of war than the cuban missile crew you know than they have been since the cuban missile crisis somehow we've had new weeks of news cycle about joe rogan you know i don't know i don't know how that happened
yeah i'm a controversial character apparently apparently yeah and apparently those controversies are the most important thing in the world well the most important thing in the world in media is ratings and unfortunately outrage is what sells and uh if you could be upset at something and so there's like a perfect storm with me first of all it was uh questioning the covet narrative and then it was having on doctors who also questioned the covet narrative and then it was me getting coveted and recovering very quickly but taking the wrong medication in their eyes and then it was you know like posting up the brought to you by pfizer videos and like showing like these these people like bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies and then it's all the other things it's like every clip that we talked about before the podcast like every clip that i've ever said taken out of context and if you smush them all together how horrible it looks but it's not really it's it's not really that they think it's important it's they don't give a [ __ ] what's important they're just trying to stay alive and they're trying to get as many views as possible and they're trying to escape what is this undeniable the demise of modern mainstream news well that's the yeah we were talking about this a little bit before uh before we started and i think what's really i mean whatever this is not like a mind-shatteringly original insight or whatever you know lots of people have said this but i think what's really gone on is that the economic collapse of traditional media has meant that the profit incentive now is just a cater to whoever you have left right so so if you have you know like if you're on fox then like you know whatever like couple million conservative old people are you know watching at a given time you want to give them the narrative that's going to keep them scared and angry and watching the news if you're on msnbc then you know you spend the entire trump
years talking about russia you know because like that's what like that's what scares their audience yeah uh and uh people don't uh you know and one thing that that really disturbs me about this i mean like the book is about all of the things that people who i basically agree with are getting wrong right so in other words like i'm a socialist i'm a columnist for jacob magazine are you a straight-up socialist are you a democratic socialist because i know that you you've been represented as a democratic social yeah so i mean look the reason i put democratic in there right you know which uh you know which i wish i do but you know the reason i put democratic in there is because there are obviously countries that have existed that have you know called themselves socialist that have uh you know not had things that i care about like you know free speech and you know multi-party elections and and so i certainly don't want to associate myself with that but look i mean short term i care very much about you know having you know socialized health care about uh about having you know like tuition free higher education so people can go to school without being having to be in debt for like decades which is obscene i mean that's ridiculous yeah i'm with you 100 of both those things you know and um and i do think that like the the level of inequality that we get from our current system is indefensible that in other words uh that if one person has more than another just because they like chose to work harder then like that's one thing right i could you know like right that you know i would you know person a wants to stay home and watch netflix and you know person b you know one that wants to work uh for for more hours then like you know person you know person b should get more money i am totally fine with that but what bothers me is when you have these massive inequalities that have huge effects in people's lives that are linked to things that aren't under their control and i think we have a lot of that too i would agree with you 100 um my position on this whenever people push back against the concept of
socialism or when i was supporting bernie sanders for president i was saying that we'll look at all the things that are technically a socialist concept that we accept like the fire department imagine if you had to have money to get your fire put out like we don't think that like if your house burns down we call the fire department they show up our taxes fund the fire department that is essentially a socialist endeavor i mean it's a socialist institution yeah it's it's taken outside of the it's taken outside of the market it's provided just as like a right that you should have just for being a person right you know you shouldn't have to do anything special to get your house put out if it's on fire and you also shouldn't have to do anything special to get treatment if you're sick right to go to to go to college in the first place it seems to me that a lot of people who like don't think that there should be a higher minimum wage are the same people who will go turn around and say oh if they wanted to make more money they should go back to school but then they don't want to pay for that right so exactly you know which one is it right like should they be paid more doing what they're doing or should they go back to school because if it's none of the above then it sounds like you just don't think those people should have like good lives or at least you don't have a plan to help them have good lives what's fascinating to me too is when you look at public school versus public services like the fire department fire department people get paid well it's a good job if you're a member of the fire department i have friends that are in the fire department it's good benefits the hours are cool because you get to work like 24 hour shifts you sleep there you work there you like my friend ray was a far uh fireman for years and he would say like he worked like a few days a week and then you know there were long shifts and they weren't always called to fires so sometimes they're just cooking and working out and hanging out around the firehouse but it's a great job great it's it's like a job that people look forward to getting it's it's difficult
to get how come that's not the same thing with teachers like what what kind of a [ __ ] world do we live in where teachers don't get paid well i mean i'm not saying fire department people shouldn't be paid well of course they should be paid well they should be paid great it's a [ __ ] very risky job it's very valuable to the community but [ __ ] so is teaching how is there such a disparity so is teaching and it's crazy that there are so many people who look at k-12 teachers and say like oh how come you know how come they get summers off or you know whatever you know or like don't like the uh you know which no it's ridiculous so stupid and they don't um you know and i guess what gets me is when people see someone like a unionized school teacher who has some good benefits a little bit of job security not nearly as good as it should be like we've been talking about right you know but like and they say oh well why should they have those things when i don't instead of saying well how can i get those things yes right so i can have them too yeah you know because it doesn't you know it doesn't benefit you right as an ordinary person if like somebody who has a job like that is paid less in fact what it does is it's bad for your kids if they go to public schools because the kinds of things that teachers unions want like smaller class sizes are things that are you know like the conditions that they teach in are the same conditions that the kids are are learning in right so i think it actually benefits everybody like i think that uh finland uh supposed to have the best public schools in the world by a lot of um by a lot of metrics the best school system you know in the world uh they actually don't really have private schools in in finland and you know it's very strong unions you know people are certainly you know certainly getting a better deal as teachers there than they they are here but so many people think the solution is to you know is to privatize things or you know is to you know that's the solution if there's no other options i mean if
you like if you're a guy right now and you have a child and you have enough money to put them in a really good school you have to pay for versus a really shitty school that you get for free that makes sense yeah i don't blame anybody for making that decision as an individual i mean like what i would i shouldn't have to make that decision yeah exactly i think what we should have are like excellent public schools so that like everybody can just do that imagine i mean imagine that that's controversial like literally one of the most important things for the future of our society is raising children correctly and educating them by correctly meaning like given giving them the opportunity to grow and pursue their interests and find out where they fit in life and have enthusiastic well-paid teachers not people that feel like they're being taken advantage of and [ __ ] with and just just exhausted all the time well it's weird too because a lot of the same people who are hostile to that will say when they're talking about like corporate ceos like oh you can't complain about how much they're paid because they have to be you know like like you have to have that as an incentive or they're not going to give you the best work if they're not being paid you know 500 times more you know than people who work there uh but it's like wait a second so so why does that logic go for like teachers or other public employees that like if if they're paid more you know then you're going to get you know then you're going to get a better performance out of them why is it only ceos well it's just we have a very distorted set of values when it comes to like what's important and this is again not saying that fire department people are not important they're [ __ ] hugely important i respect them very much and i'm glad they get paid well but i mean they should get the it it should be like that with all of what i would think of social services services for the community that we would gladly pay for for taxes fixing infrastructures fixing roads the problem i think with a lot of people is they just don't trust government to handle the money well they think that you're going to get a lot of bureaucracy it's going to be bloated
there's going to be a shitload of people that are working they're not going to resolve it it's going to be sort of that same situation when if you donate to charities and then you find out that like 90 of the money goes to infrastructure and bureau and you know just some of those shitty charities where so much money goes to the people that are working there that very little of it goes to the actual charity itself of course that's the private sector too but yes it is it is with everything but you know i i guess i would just say one thing about the bureaucracy thing because like i know that that's something that's like an easy association lots of people's minds right you know that like more government means more bureaucracy and if you're thinking about people who are like petty gatekeepers you know who are like going to be able to approve or deny something it's like very natural to like resent people like that yeah uh but what i would say is that who what what situation is actually going to give bureaucrats more power is it going to be if you have something like medicare for all for example where or you know just like how public schools already work right the case k through 12 that like every kid has to be educated you know like like you know to go through a special process so if it's universal programs then you don't have what you have with means-tested programs where there's somebody who's like looking over your application and deciding whether or not you know you qualify and you know deciding which hoops you have to jump through and like that really seems to me like where bureaucrats are really going to get you know most of their power and that's not to say like when i was saying that i'm not saying that like there are no legitimate complaints about like any of the agencies that do these things of course there are right of course you know but what i would ask though is what the what the options are right so cause if you privatize something then you're still you know you're still having decisions be made by you know decision makers who you know who you
don't necessarily you know like might be very distant from you but the difference is at least when it's public then you know theoretically right you can at least elect the people who are you know who are overseeing it whereas if something is like subcontracted out to a private corporation then like that's not even true anymore right like there's another layer in between you as like an ordinary person and control over this this institution i mean like if uh you know if the federal government does anything bad then we can you know theoretically uh get you know get rid of them although i think there are a lot of very undemocratic things about america's political system that make it way harder to do that i mean the fact that we've only got to political parties that are basically allowed to participate at all the the fact you know like we go on and on we could money that's involved in getting these people elected yeah the money definitely right uh absorbance amounts of money from special interest groups yeah no question right so um like i think it's i think we've got like you know we've got like a little bit of democracy there not nearly as much as we should right but like jeff bezos isn't up for election by anybody right like like like he's just there right so like if you have you know like if for example you know you you didn't have like the uh public post office right it was it was just like amazon you know taking the you know like amazon trucks and that's it then now you're talking about an institution that uh that there's no democratic control over right there's some like a little bit of indirect control in the case of the the post office which you know by the way i would point out that like when conservatives talk about you know bureaucracy and inefficiency and stuff like that they always bring that up but like if you actually look at polls like 90 of americans like the post office the
post office is amazing they can get a [ __ ] letter across the country with less than a dollar right yeah how crazy is that yeah you could write the cost for a stamp i said that now yeah it's like uh i know it's less than a dollar it's it's been a while since i actually uh yeah like i think my wife usually likes i just email stuff to [ __ ] mail [ __ ] anymore but like but the fact that you can take a letter from austin to like rural alaska for a buck for a buck is [ __ ] bonkers is ridiculous and no private company would would have the uh the incentive to to do that right you know and and i think that that's uh like one of the things that bernie sanders was talking about uh the two times he ran for president you know it's not one of the things that was played up the most is um postal banking you know which is the idea that you could have like basic banking services offered at the post office which they actually do have in some scandinavian countries and that basic banking service like deposits and yeah withdrawals and stuff like that at the post office at the post office which is uh because it's a public institution that already exists everywhere right you know their their post office is all over the place so they would sort out money as well as mail what if the money goes to the wrong places like the mail sometimes goes i get mail from wrong people sometimes well the mail does sometimes go to the wrong places i would point out if you look at like two wrong people you know fedex versus the you know versus the post office you know it's it's the the i don't i don't actually think the uh the failure rate you know is uh is worse with uh with the uh the usps no we have a problem with ups here we get our [ __ ] packages get stolen yeah and they just leave them here and we're not here and someone snatched it yeah well i don't know that's uh you know if the alternative is they uh they put the thing on the you know put the [ __ ] thing on the door man we'll come get it you got a lazy ups driver but your subject like at home i got a great guy but it's it's like you're subjected to the whoever the [ __ ] it is it's running
that route you know unfortunately no fair enough right but uh but what i would just point out is this that like right now there are a lot of people who for one reason know that they can't get a bank account right you know that they have uh that um i mean the most like extreme case might be like somebody who's who's like homeless you know so they don't have an address but like even short of that right they're people who for one reason or another have trouble getting a bank account so you have all these like parasitical like you know check cashing businesses and stuff like that yeah that like prey on people like that and i think having some kind of public alternative would like go a long way to to helping with that issue there are countries that already exist you know so so i think that like in the short term like the stuff that makes sense to me is finding ways you know where it makes sense it might not always make sense right you know but finding ways that you can expand what's not just like you have to find some private corporation to do it for you uh but that can be within the sort of um you know the public uh the public sphere and then look i mean there are things that we'll probably always need um you know private businesses for i'm under no illusions about that you know that you you know if you don't want to have like the way grocery stores were in like the soviet union in 1985 or whatever right you know you you have to have uh you know like there are certain things price signals and you know firm failure you probably do need to have but i do think like at the sort of outer edges of what i would like that it would be good if it was a long-term goal to move towards having it be more of a norm that that you know workers like own like a lot of a lot of private businesses you know that there are you know if you look at like the mondragon corporation in spain you know that that that has like 80 000 you know worker members you know who own that you know you have like the equivalent like an operating agreement which is
like the equivalent of a union contract but there's no like separate boss to negotiate with um and you you know might not necessarily directly elect managers because there could be things that are like you know technical things that you know managers have to do that like you want that to be more of a traditional job application but you can at least elect the people who who hire them and even if i could like you know whatever like a magical genie would just like somehow grant me you know that like all of my political preferences were we're satisfied in ways that i don't think they're going to be any time soon given all those problems with america's political system we talked about earlier but like even if that happened i don't think that like every single business should have to be like that that if you you know like hire a guy to you know to to do like graphic design for your podcast for 10 hours a week or something that they have to have like voting rights and cooperative like that would be silly but i think that you can i think we could move towards an economy where that was like a much more common thing and i think they'll be way better off because the way it is in like the kinds of corporations that dominate the economy right now where you'll get like amazon workers who um are like sometimes like working at the warehouse and then they have to have like a second job at night uh and their boss literally has enough money off of that to buy his own spaceship right that that strikes me as a level of of inequality that's really hard to justify by the principles that we kind of started with well what do they pay at amazon they are they so it's graciously underpaid uh i don't think that they're egregiously underpaid by the standards of the standards the of like you know corporate america as a whole i think i think it is up to you know 15 now uh i'd have to check the exact numbers but i think that the but like what i would what i would question is just this though right like when you're dividing up right like the revenues that the whole company is
making then you say like there are lots of ways that if you are in a cooperative and people could vote on pay scales there are lots of things you could do to convince somebody you mean like employees vote on pay scales yeah like if you have like a worker cooperative right right you know then the problem with that is a lot more workers than there are jeff bezos's and if they decide to say like we we should get most of the money okay but they put but what do you think what do you think jeff bezos is is doing like what's the uh um right now coke he's doing coke and he's banging his girlfriend on a yacht he's living like a guy who's got 183 billion dollars i go into space going to space on a rocket ship looks like a dick he's shooting a giant metal dick up into the heavens he's literally trying to [ __ ] space yeah that's what he's doing that's what he's supposed to do when you make that kind of money with my fascination with jeff bezos is his transformation from nerd to like this like muscle looking guy he looks like a jiu jitsu black belt he looks like a tank it's kind of crazy and he's now he's got he used to have this like very respectable normal wife and now he's got this bombshell girlfriend it's kind of hilarious i love it i love a good cliche i really do i love the fact they have to take down a bridge because he made a yacht that is so [ __ ] big in order for it to get out of the place where they're making it they have to disassemble a [ __ ] bridge and he's like yeah disassemble the bridge the [ __ ] man why do you need a yacht so big what are you doing what are you doing he's just out of control but that's like i feel like everyone that gets to that level of wealth seems to go out of control yeah no it definitely does it definitely does seem that way right and then their their kids in many cases start out of control because they grew up their
entire lives like having this like level of wealth that makes it easy to get anybody to do whatever you want that's part of the problem the other part of the problem is there's no time to be with the kids right so when you're working and you're the ceo of amazon i mean the [ __ ] hours that guy was putting in is probably insane he's probably working when he was working he's not ceo anymore but he's probably working 16 hours a day how the [ __ ] can you instill some sort of sense of normalcy in your children when you're never home right it's not really possible it's and so then and you compensated with two gifts and yeah now he's too busy you know coke and you know going into space and and banging his bombshell girlfriend yeah i i feel what you're saying do you think that do you have hope for uh i mean there seems such a polarization in this country there's uh people that i completely disagree with on the right that are like pull yourself up very bootstraps all that stuff like that that is nonsense talk when people talk like that i'm like jesus christ man not everybody is starting from the same position it's it's a crazy disparity right and until we address that as a society until we look at these impoverished communities that have been impoverished for decades and decades and decades and you know if you really want to talk about where my real feelings of socialism lie my feelings of socialism are there are communities and it's not just inner cities it's like appalachia it's these coal mining towns like we have to dump money into these places and help these folks because if you don't you're going to have people that come out of there and they're going to cost you exponentially more money and all the problems they create in their own lives and other people's lives with whether it's crime or whether it's drug addiction or whether it's whatever despair that comes out of these horrific starting points that these people are from that can be fixed and this is like where i'm a bleeding heart and yeah i mean it can be fixed but like it sure hasn't been even addressed not even addressed there's no talk whatsoever about looking at communities like baltimore and saying hey this has been [ __ ] from the
beginning like what do we do like look at the red line laws they instituted look at the fact that the saint what was his name woods what was the uh the cop that we had on michael woods he was on he was a police officer in baltimore yeah and he uh was working there and one of the things that he noticed was they found a wrap like a you know a arrest sheet from like the 1970s and it showed all of the same exact crimes that they're dealing with in the current time all in the same areas and they were all happening this in the like the same thing was going on all the different arrests for violence and drugs and all this different stuff and he was like jesus christ this is not like and he felt this feeling like i'm i'm in a system that's broken like you're not going to fix this like you're just going to keep arresting people and you you keep having this you know the systemic equal inequality in this area that's just been [ __ ] from for decades yeah no absolutely i mean i think that because by the time you're dealing with that on that level you're you're treating symptoms you know that like it's it's already the problem has uh has already happened and you know don't get me wrong i know people commit crimes for all kinds of reasons i'm not saying it's all economic but like also i don't see a lot of like kids in the suburbs joining gangs right like there is a reason there is a reason for that right the things that like really drive up the violent crime rate you know are things that have a lot to do with poverty and inequality and i think that if you you know you talked about appalachia i mean like the obama administration's like response to like all the cool you know like the sort of misery caused by all the coal mines closing was to you know just kind of sprinkle the region without having to learn to code [ __ ] well that's exactly it right because like they put up these technology training centers so it's essentially telling people to learn to code because like yeah if you're like a 50 year old laid off coal miner you'll definitely get the coding job and preference over the 22 year old kid you
know who just uh who just graduated it's absurd and and then like trump came in and he said he was going to bring the jobs back and there are fewer jobs there than you know than ever right i mean i don't think that i don't think any of these people are are serious about helping working-class people either in places like baltimore or in places like appalachia because you know i think the i think the democrats increasingly the kind of liberalism that's dominating the democratic party right now i think isn't really about that i think that what it's really about is trying to have like a more diverse ruling class like i know that sounds like an oversimplification but i really think a lot of it's just about that right you know that like what they like to the extent they're concerned with social justice what they're concerned about is disparity you know that you have more black people than white people who are you know living in poverty and going through a criminal justice system and all this stuff and that's absolutely true right that that is and that is completely a result of the fact that you know up until the 1960s we literally lived in an apartheid country you know that in much of the united states you know you know we had uh jim crow laws you know on the on the books you know and and i think this i think the horrible racial history of the united states is the reason for that but what's the goal right is the goal is what you account as justice having like exactly demographically correct proportions of every group living in poverty it's also this like all of that stuff like it's ridiculous i was just gonna say like the republicans are even worse right i mean like republicans when they claim that they're like big populists now it's like well what do you actually want to do do you want wedding care for all do you want you know like they don't support any of that stuff what's also their positions are weaponized you know and it's there's so much polar i think it's very unhealthy to have two positions a red position in a blue position because people are so
malleable they're so easily manipulated and they want to be a part of a tribe and they'll just subscribe to these ideas and then they they take comfort in the fact there's other people that agree with them so they get in these facebook groups and they they just like you know talk about stuff that everyone else in their little echo chamber agrees with and and they feel like the whole world should bend to their will and it's just yeah i mean it's a bizarre time absolutely i mean that i mean we um you know what we were talking about earlier about the fact that the collapse of traditional media means that everybody gets to curate you know their own little media yeah right you know that's a problem too right it's so easy now to just like expose yourself to absolutely nothing all the time except people who agree with you because yeah if there are only a couple million people watching like one of the you know traditional networks at any given night then you know what's their profit incentive their profit incentive is to like relentlessly pander to whatever audience they have they have left so if you know if you're fox you know you you scare old you know conservatives and you know whatever like the msnbc has their own version like we were talking about but i think that like this is why i try to like go out and do debates all the time because which like some people and this one of the things i talk about in the book right some people on the left don't like that right they say that like if you're um you know if you're like if you talk to a bad person basically right you know they'll say like oh you're platforming yeah you know that that person that's so stupid which is a word i hate so much but they have uh but i get that more than anybody because i i you know people want to say that i'm like a fake liberal because i talk to conservatives and i'm friends with some conservatives like that is the dumbest [ __ ] thing to ever you we need to communicate with each other we're supposed to be in a community the community is the human race first of all and then the united states second we're supposed to be a community and if they're i have a lot of
friends that have completely different perspectives than me i have a lot of friends that are like very christian i have friends that are very muslim i have friends that have you know no religious affiliation whatsoever i have friends that are right-wing and left-wing and i don't i don't mind all those things as long as you're not a suppressive person you're not suppressing people that have an opposite position or an opposite perspective like why not what are we doing here aren't we just talking to each other shouldn't we like communicate with people that and but when i have people on you know you'll i'll get all this pushback like or someone like ben shapiro ben shapiro's a lovely guy you meet him get to know him he's very nice i don't agree with him a lot a lot on a lot of stuff yeah i mean look if if i love the guy sure i mean look if if you know ben shapiro ever wanted to like come on my show and argue with me i would i would 100 percent do that i bet he could okay well you know but he talks really fast you got to be careful because it's hard to keep up with him it's like his [ __ ] brain is on a different rpm whenever i talk to him i try to slow things down slow down youngster [Laughter] that's awesome but he's very enthusiastic yeah i don't agree with him on a lot of things particularly on gay issues he thinks that gay folks shouldn't just they should just not do it which is it's this which is ridiculous like you're gonna strangest position i just don't understand that so so like you if you're gay you have like a moral obligation to just be celibate for your entire life no you're supposed to actually engage in heterosexual sex yeah okay but what's amazing is that this is this is where it falls apart right because this is all based on ancient writing yeah like because god said this like who said god said this who are these [ __ ] people and what else did they say god said did they say anything about zombies they say anything about people coming back from the dead like what did god say i mean how much did they say that
doesn't make sense did they say anything about parting oceans and like did anybody like lead someone to a place and part a c because that doesn't seem real maybe someone was lying yeah right that's that's uh that's like yeah i mean anybody who does anybody who knows gay people right like dude i have gay friends that are like you could never tell they're gay because they don't you know they just seem like a man and then i have gay friends like oh no straight guy acts like that yeah they're like gay from space right there yes he's super gay like when you meet a super gay person that first of all they enjoy behaving that way that is how they like to talk that's how they like justin martindale is a great example my friend justin he's gay as [ __ ] but he's hilarious i mean he's hilarious with it he's like he's a joyful gay person you wouldn't get confused when you're around him you wouldn't say what do you think this guy is like that guy's gay you know but like that's how he is man this idea that he is the idea he's supposed to make a choice to have sex with women like [ __ ] yeah that's that sounds like a good deal for the woman too jesus uh yeah poor woman he's closing his eyes thinking about beards and [ __ ] it's so dumb yeah and and i think uh and also i mean we could talk too about like okay so there's the party in the red sea stuff there's also the like slavery in the bible right like that's uh oh god like a ton of it you know and then treating women to second class citizens condoning slavery there's a lot of murder in the in the bible for different disrespecting people like how about that uh the the one guy when uh the kids call them bald and they see the [ __ ] faces the kids they killed the bear the kids because they called the kids because they called him a bald guy like what the [ __ ] coming from a bald person let me tell you something that's an overreach that's a ridic but it's this you don't think if like some kids tease you about that they deserve the death penalty listen i think there's some things that are fascinating about religious traditions that i think they can act as a scaffolding for moral behavior and some of the like the
kindest nicest people i know are christians and i think that there's something about that sort of structure that that religious structure when i was younger i was much more of uh what you would say like a traditional like agnostic or atheist like i thought it was dumb i thought the religion was dumb i don't think it's dumb anymore and i think it's greatly beneficial to some people and i think it does give them a structure and if you jordan peterson said something that really made a lot of sense to me he said it's not whether or not i believe in god he goes but if you live your life like god exists you will have a higher quality of life and it's that if you live your life like you are a part of this enormous community of loving beings that are all connected to this higher power and that you have this like moral obligation to be a good person and that there's great value and benefit in that and then there's there's a spiritual path to take of a righteous person who's really trying to do good in this world and i think for a lot of people religion can act as a scaffolding to substantiate and enforce those kind of positive traits and positive paths of life and i think there's great benefit in that i think it's there's great good in that yeah i mean look i'm an atheist but uh you know but i have tremendous respect for uh christians who get what you just described out of it i i have to say there are christians who get very different things out of it right you know that they that they want to like you know ban abortion and make gay people go back in the closet and all that stuff you know but like but look i mean i i think like cornell west you know i i think that's a that's a christian i have yes immense respect for have you ever met him uh no no i i've um he was on uh like so i used to do a segment on the michael brooks show and i think he was on that at least at least once i missed that guy yeah he was great yeah he was he was he was uh he was one of my my closest friends for the last couple years before he uh before he passed that was fun too man he was a
very he was funny he's a very funny guy what he would do good impressions the like nation of islam obama and you know [Laughter] he was just a really thoughtful interesting guy who knew a shitload about politics and you know and about socialism and he was a really good guy to sort of defend these positions of democratic socialism too because he didn't seem like a bad person you know like when and even in critiquing other people that this this disagreed with him i felt like he did it for the most part pretty reasonably yeah well i think that one thing that he really got and i actually think he helped me to get you know since in the you know in the year since i met him is that um like a lot of people who who agree with with his position with my position uh don't think nearly enough about what's going to be appealing to like most ordinary people right now that they have because like if you're just you know like which is one of the reasons i wrote the book that like that stuff was starting to drive me crazy you know that like it seems like what a lot of people want to do is be part of an in group and like yell at everybody who who doesn't you know who isn't like already on board with like every single thing on on a checklist and and that's just not gonna that's just not gonna work right i mean that's like like if you actually care about this stuff right like if you think yeah i i think that we have like a grotesquely unequal society i think that you know i think we need to have national health care we need to you know not fight all these wars around the world all of that stuff and like you're actually talking about this stuff because you care about it which let's be honest not everybody does i mean some people politics is like a weird hobby for them right you know but like if you really care about that stuff then you want to present that in a way that's going to appeal to ordinary people who haven't read everything that you've read who who aren't like necessarily don't have all the same like subculture you know sensibilities uh that
that you have so like yeah i mean it drives me it drives me crazy when i see people who who want all the things that you know all the things that i want who are instead of trying to you know find ways that they can explain this to people who might like you know agree with them on some things disagree with them on some things like a lot of people like most people aren't like centrists in the way that the media means when they say centrist right which is like the you know whatever socially liberal fiscally conservative all that stuff right you know like like most people i think just have weird combinations of views right which is because like if you spend all of your time thinking about politics and tweeting about politics and all that stuff you're like kind of an unusual person most people don't do that they have other things that they have to do so they might have political reactions to things they have political impulses but like they haven't necessarily thought through every single thing you know to probably don't have the time yeah of course you don't want to get involved deeply into the weeds and politics you're gonna it's tremendous amount of hours for years and years and years just to get a base understanding of what's going on that's why it's so impressive when you talk to someone who really does know a lot about politics like whenever i talk to like my friend kyle kolinsky whenever i talk to him about politics like that [ __ ] knows a lot like so when we had the end of the world podcast when it was the election um this past year when we brought him i brought him up you're the voice of reason like you actually understand what's going on here and he called it every step of the way see all these people that have like these conspiracy theories about trump like oh the million votes he explained he's like the mail in votes are going to be majority democrat votes yeah and he goes so if you look at trump getting way ahead in places like pennsylvania and there's a couple of these other states he's like this is what's going on there's a lot of the republican folks are going to show up and they're going to vote in person and then the mail-in is going to be overwhelmingly democratic
and then he's probably going to lose a lot of numbers overnight and they're like oh he went we went to bed and he was ahead but then he's like kyle kalinski explained it explained it all on the podcast clearly called it just caught and that's because that's a guy who's been like really studying politics at a like a very comprehensive level for a long time and he can give you the like the real information about it yeah and most people like you said they they don't have the time i mean especially when you're in a increasingly precarious economy where lots of people like might have a couple of jobs and like drive an uber on the side you know like just just because they're trying to do you have time unless you're just listening to podcasts all the time and you know like a really educational podcast on yeah on on politics like and even then you're going to get a cursory sort of understanding of it yeah absolutely so i mean i think that what you know what you should really be when you approach people to to try to convince them of the things that are that are important to you like you shouldn't start from a place of do you you know do you have all the like right you know you have all the right positions right like all of this stuff uh because you know by definition look if everybody you know if everybody agreed with me about all this stuff we'd be living in a very different country right now right you know like so so i think that you need to assume the real question like is does somebody have like values that are just like totally incompatible with mine and or do they just have like economic interests that are gonna like lead them to like they're never gonna agree with me right like like like jeff bezos and i are never going to agree on like what tax rates should be for obvious reasons right you know like i would like you to talk to him though i think that'd be an interesting conversation i don't i've never heard him discuss money in terms of like wealth and taxes and things i wonder what his position is on that i feel like there's a system that's in place that you would almost be negligent if you didn't take advantage
of it if you're a guy who's making a lot of money and this is this is how you could pay x amount of taxes and this is like these are your deductions and this is like the law you follow the law to a t and then the rest of it you can give out charitably if you choose to but like i wonder what his position is on all that stuff like when you've got that kind of money yeah i mean i think that my suspicion is that it starts to look very different right you know once you get all that cash right you know like you're gonna you know like you're gonna feel very it's really hard to convince somebody that like who's benefiting that much from the way things are now did you see the image of him at the new year's party with his girlfriend no jimmy help me out this is so important because someone needs to superimpose this with a an image of jeff bezos from like 1989 like what he looked like when he started amazon versus what he looks like now i mean when did he start amazon must be in the 90s right because it was an online book thing yeah and he was like this kind of nerdy guy now look at him and look at his girlfriend i mean this is amazing look at he's got [ __ ] heart in his defense this was actually a um party that was for um it was like a disco theme party so you're supposed to dress like this so everybody dressed like that they all dressed silly it was just it was a fun party so he had these glasses they were like heart-shaped lenses and he's got this bombshell girlfriend who's leaning on him i love it i love excess i love when people are preposterous yeah yeah i love it no i mean fair enough like and again i don't blame anybody as an individual for like taking it like like look if if you're told here are the rules right that this is like that everybody has to function in like within reason like if you're not like you know doing some things that i do think you know bezos has done but like you know but if you know but there are like a
list you know like if you're not like busting unions and this and that right then like look if you look at that just look at how it started how's it going they did it someone did it ah look at that that's [ __ ] amazing that's amazing work hard folks and you don't have to be a dork imagine shave your head get a bombshell girlfriend whoo i love it happy days are here billions of dollars hundreds of billions not hundreds of millions sir hundreds of billions that's outrageous yeah no i mean is on track to be the first trillionaire right it's uh that's what this is oh there's trillionaires out there yeah okay are there because i thought they were saying like in 2020 they were saying that like at the end of the okay no the trillionaires are all non-public okay see if you think about like the royal families they they don't have to disclose their wealth these people that have literally they own countries yeah i mean if you think i mean i don't have to name the country but there i know for a fact because i have talked to people who are in fact billionaires who are very wealthy business people that laugh and they've told me the royal families in some of these countries are worth trillions of dollars and they don't have to disclose it so when you get this public list of who the richest people in the world are that's the richest people publicly that you know like they have to disclose it they're not oligarchs they're not people that are in charge literally in charge of the oil all the oil in a particular part of the world where billions of dollars are coming out every day like come on there's a shitload of money involved in that yeah and i mean the thing is even if you're not like one of those people right like you know that the non you know non-public trillionaires uh you know from those countries that you're talking about like one thing that i think people often don't think about enough when they think about stuff like this is okay if you have a system where you're gonna get
like wealth gaps that extreme right you know that you can you can have people who are trillionaires maybe or who at least have hundreds of billions of dollars then you're just not going to have political democracy the way that we should have it because you know the idea that like everybody's going to have the same amount of influence right on the government is just it's ridiculous you know once you get to that level right because like if you work at an amazon warehouse and you want to like call your congressman you'll be lucky if you have a conversation with an intern but jeff bezos can make a phone call to biden yeah no absolutely take a couple extra advil and let's have a conversation i need to be awake for this one yeah yeah which which you might have to for but yeah what happened to the left where somewhere along the line this is to get back to your book the subject that we started with what happened to the left where they are willing to they there's something that happened where they became ex the side that accepts censorship and even promotes it and my my thought is that something morphed during the time where social media became it became a tool of a lot of right-wing people and uh this is actually like pre-trump but was certainly accentuated during the trump administration it's like people had a chance to anonymously say things through social media that maybe they wouldn't say around the office because like say if you have like 10 people in your office and nine of them are democrats and you're a republican you really have to keep your mouth shut right but when you get on twitter you can talk all kinds of crazy [ __ ] or reddit or whatever and then all the other people that agree with you they they get attracted to you and then you form these echo chambers and then some of them are very aggressive in sort of pushing these ideas out and we
saw that a lot with like milo yiannopoulos and there was a lot of like these like very influential online right-wing people that were you know they had like cheers from the fans and they had like these throngs of supporters and they silenced those guys they pulled those guys off social media they found out that it was effective to do that and then it became a thing that they got really into where they're into silencing dissenting opinions and it's gone so far that they're doing it to left-wing people that step even remotely outside the bounds of the orthodoxy remotely outside the bounds of what they consider to be the rigid this is the rigid maintaining of this ideology they step outside of that they silence people and they're pulling videos down left and right off of instagram and tick tock and and and twitter in some ways twitter's like less censorship oriented even though people think of twitter as being like a very censored place it's one of the more lenient online platforms but what the [ __ ] happened yeah i mean the milo case is interesting actually because i think that um i mean i understand that like he got kicked off of twitter and that was definitely part of it but like uh he was still riding pretty high after that happened like i think that in milo's case and this is what you know when i you know kind of try to tell people that like the ways that like some people on the left like want to like deal with figures like this like forget morality for a second they're just not gonna work right so so like here's what i mean by that right that like milo's career was built on people trying to like you know stop him and heckle him and you know stop him from speaking and all that stuff you know that like my view on that guy is that honestly you know he wouldn't be that interesting if he just showed up on a college campus and like just talked and nobody you know nobody interrupted him but like that was why like because he was like oh he's like speaking edgy forbidden truths and like you know it was the dangerous ideas to her that's what it's called like i think where milo really got uh drop like like where milo like was really ended
right and i'm not saying there aren't other cases they're more like what you're talking about but it seems to me that where milo was really ended was when the right dropped him after the age of consent stuff like he he was gonna speak at cpac and they cancelled that he's his book deal you know got dropped but but it wasn't just the right dropping him i mean that was uh across the board people dropped him well i i mean everybody else had always hated him right but then like after that happened right you know that was just a thing where it felt like um it was so unacceptable to so many people yeah that it was it's very rare that one idea becomes a thing that completely stops all the momentum that someone had like he was a very popular cultural figure and then he vanished yeah because essentially been not just deep platform but removed from the cultural conversation yeah i mean like a week before that happened he was on bill maher right you know that's that's so oh and then wild yeah and bill maher was praising him and you're wearing him which which i wild do not think milo yiannopoulos deserves but they but yeah look i think that um i mean i think that there are a couple things uh going on there uh with the um with with censorship i mean i would push back a little on on the idea you know that the the right isn't like plenty pro-censorship in lots of ways like like i think i think i wouldn't say that okay well i think so we disagree on no i think that people politically like the silence they're opposing their opposition when someone opposes their position i think they like to do that what i think is like the left is traditionally been the aclu which those jewish lawyers supported the idea of nazis being allowed to say whatever they want because they said that this the counter to that the opposite of that is the suppressing speech and it's a terrible dangerous road to go down and the answer though absolutely bad ideas is not silencing those ideas it's better ideas that's my position and that's an old
school liberal position but that doesn't exist that much in the left wing of today yeah i mean that's 100 my position i i think that um and and i think that it's really dangerous that a lot of people like even though most of the stuff you're talking about is driven more by like uh mainstream liberals um that like it's not like you know whatever you know people running like these insanely profitable social media companies right it's not like they want all the stuff i want right you know but like but uh but i i see way too many people on the left going along with it and i think it's super short-sighted right because like how did it happen though do you think it happened by what i'm saying that like they found it was effective for silencing people they felt was problematic so they just adopted these ideas and then they sort of shifted their their their ethics i think there's some of that i think that i think the lot of it is that a lot of people feel powerless to change the world in any way that actually matters and so they end up getting sucked into these like culture war distractions about who said what in 1995 that we can like get mad at them about and you know what the you know whatever like just just whatever like weird nonsense people are arguing about this week right the green eminem you know and and like some of this stuff is part of that right like they have a that like if you don't like if you can't actually you know change the world like create a more equal society or whatever you can at least get somebody fired you can at least get somebody kicked off and then you felt like you've won something and i think that that's again i think it's incredibly dangerous because like people who want for example you know spotify to to kick you off you know there's a there's a move on you know petition you know for them them to do that uh that like what i always say is even though and the thing that really gets me about the calls for censorship is okay i think there are principled reasons that you know free speech is important and we should have like open
you know open debates about controversial ideas i think they're ways that we have a better society if we do that but also i think it's it's crazy that anybody who basically agrees with me about politics would support uh increased corporate censorship right because if you have like some like social media company right you know that's that's going to be on you know like they're going to have you know some ceo who's partying like bezos that you know in that picture you know like is uh are they you know whose side are they going to take with their future things where people say that something is misinformation right exactly you know exactly and by what definition is it misinformation because the problem is that every every political argument is to some extent an argument about facts right like that like in 2002 even though my position was you know as like a college like anti-war activist was that even if saddam hussein did have weapons of mass destruction and still be against the war because you know i think the rationale still wouldn't have made sense to me but like that was like part of what people were arguing about was whether there was massive weapons of mass destruction in iraq and look if you had social media companies in 2002 in the way that you do now and they had misinformation policies who would be more likely to get bound for misinformation people who said who agreed with the you know the government agreed with the new york times said there were wmds or people who thought that like bush administration officials were conspiring to lie to the public right you know like and i think that who's gonna like if there's something that comes out tomorrow about like some horrible labor practice at amazon uh who are these companies more likely to side with right you know people who say yeah they did this thing right or uh or the company's saying no it's it's it's a lie it's misinformation and i i think the the issue with free speech is always who gets to decide right right like uh
and i think this is the same reason i mean look this is the same reason i don't like um you know i don't like the uh with the crt laws either right because i i don't like the idea that there are going to be people who are second guessing you know uh what happened in some you know some classroom to say like was this too close to like you know to to one of these ideas that we don't like right did you talk to your students about something that like flew a little bit too close to the sun of crt and that that makes me much crt you're talking about critical oh yeah sorry yeah i'm sorry critical race theory um yeah and i think that like actual critical race theory there are parts i agree with there are parts that i disagree with but i don't want to live in this i want to live in the kind of society where when there's so like some controversial idea that's out there you know like that like people can talk about it and debate about it and like if you can you know like you could discuss it with students in a classroom like i think ideally the way that education should work it should foster critical thinking like instead of like this is exactly what you should think for sure you know you should be encouraging students to like you know to think about it you know more clearly and to argue about it and to you know and to decide um and to decide what they think right you know beca like ultimately if you want people to be citizens in a democracy right to the extent that we have one of those like that's that's what you want like that's that's how you want them to grow up i hope yeah absolutely you want discussion this the way you sort out if you're an observer the way you sort out who has the better argument is to watch them discuss you remember the gore vidal and um you know which is a great documentary what is it called best of enemies best of enemies it's a fantastic documentary which shows that i mean this is the difference in our culture today versus then these guys i believe is on abc
these guys had this like really highly rated debate series i think they did like how many of them they do six of them or something like that i don't remember how many but they did a few yeah they did quite a few so they were going back and forth um and william f buckley was a famous conservative gore vidal was a famous liberal and they had these fascinating discussions and they did them on national television and uh they became this point of discussion through the entire country in the world where people sat down and you know some people took buckley side some people to gorvidal side and this is how we sort things out we don't sort things out by silencing people we don't sort things out by saying you have an unacceptable position because it doesn't fit in with what i'm saying or it causes this or that and it's just an it's a it's a dangerous way to to set a precedent because you're filtering ideas you're filtering ideas through your own standards and i don't think that's good because i i think it's it's it's bad for you too it's bad for your ideas because your ideas can't stand the vetting of of an opposing position then your ideas might suck and you maybe should look at them so maybe you're lazy and you don't want to go through the the hassle of debate or of like serious discourse but if your ideas can't handle that kind of a discussion you probably shouldn't have them you shouldn't adopt them you shouldn't be holding on to them that's my position on all this and i think this whatever someone's trying to silence someone this it's more political than it is anything it's more this person has an incredible amount of influence and they don't align up very rigidly with what our ideology is and they could cause us problems if they discuss certain things in an unorthodox way and we don't like that so we're going to silence them and we're going to pretend that they're something that they're not and we're going to do that openly and it's going to be obvious yeah and i think and i think especially like look
if you think the status quo is totally fine that like everything is the way that it should be i can i guess understood [ __ ] thinks that i don't know that's a crazy argument there's not a single person alive that thinks everything's perfect right is there i i mean if so i haven't met them i never met him but i don't think he can have that argument yeah so i mean if you think that there are things that are really seriously wrong with the society that you live in right now have discussions then then you like the last thing that you want to do is to make it harder to get your ideas out about that out there so uh you know so people can people can talk about them people can you know people can can hear about them right like i think that if you you know if you want um if you want to have like you know in my case you think that like we have you know we have way too much economic inequality i think it's particularly crazy to support like more corporate censorship yeah because again who do you think who do you think is gonna get censored right like like if it's uh you know i mean if there's some starbucks worker who's like you know got fired when they're trying to organize a union and starbucks says that no they weren't really fired for that it was really you know because they you know whatever showed up lately you know they showed up late um i mean okay so somebody's lying right uh do we want you know twitter or whatever platform to be making decisions about like who's lying and like oh which which of these sides is misinformation uh i don't right like not just because like i support free speech though i do but also just because like i don't i don't trust at all right you know that they're gonna take the side that i would want to on that of course and so one of the things that i talked about when i made a video recently when they said that i was setting saying misinformation and i was saying well look at what used to be misinformation just a few months
ago that's now fact there's like the lab leak theory the lab leak theory if you said that before you get kicked off with social media now it's on the front cover of newsweek the idea that if you get vaccinated you can still spread covid and you could still get covet that was crazy talk rachel maddow was on television saying the virus stops with you you can't spread it you can't catch it it stops with you if you're vaccinated that's not true we know that's not true so that was if you said that i think people who are vaccinated can still catch covet and they can still spread covet that would be misinformation but now that's accepted as fact there's a bunch of those yeah i mean i think in that case i think that might be less like um you know people didn't know that and more just kind of rachel maddow's an idiot because like if you um you know because what they always said is like the eff like you know whatever it is even for like the original version of covet uh that you know wild coved whatever they call it right they like you know whatever 90 something you know percent you know like uh rate of effectiveness of like pfizer or uh but if you read the literature that's not really even accurate i mean what you know but but this is the thing like whatever you think the effectiveness rate is right like it was never a hundred percent and if and if like rachel maddow thought that it was 100 that's like that one seems more like an issue of like rachel maddow not understanding you know medical science but again i don't i don't want so that would make it misinformation right yeah so it's the same thing that's my point yeah sure i mean i mean like actually so here's an example i completely agree with at the beginning of the pandemic um like back in was like march you know 2020 maybe until sometime in april uh fouchy the cdc everybody was saying uh don't wear a mask right you know and you know as we established i'm not some you know like there are a lot of things that i would rather spend my time on than like trying to sort through all the coveted stuff but like even i at the time was like wait a second that doesn't make sense why not right like you know what why would that
like the reasons they were given didn't make sense to me and then they kind of said i mean like i know some people say that's an oversimplification but i think if you go back and look at is this kind of what they said oh we lied about that so that like all the mass wouldn't get you know get back that's not an oversimplification simplification at all that's exactly what they said and and which is crazy to like the thing that's crazy to me is like okay if you're gonna do that i don't think you should have done it but if you're gonna do that like you have to resign after that right like once you've once you've like shown that you were willing to like lie lie to people like like like if you think it's important that people trust you know medical authorities which you know i mean i can see why public health crisis you know that you think that was important yeah like what's gonna undermine that more right people um you know random people on the internet uh you know like saying things that you know that might not be true about it or you know or people going on podcasts you know who uh who might say things that are wrong or like the cdc like admitting that they were lying about something something important that's gonna that's gonna undermine that that's gonna undermine that like crazy and i would not have wanted people who are pointing things like this out at the time that like oh the stated reasons why mass was supposed to be bad didn't really make sense which they didn't right you know because it was like well it's going to encourage people to be reckless and it's like well okay that's an argument it's like seat belts i think that was the uh that was one that was one that they used right now but not fouchy i don't think fouch used that argument yeah i think the who did uh like i think that was like if you go with their website i think that's one of the things that they said there at one point uh but they'd also say well people don't know how to use them properly so like they're gonna like end up it's gonna end up being more dangerous uh you know there were a bunch of things they threw out
none of it quite seemed to add up you know even at the you know even at the time and then again then they came out and said no actually like it's not like the science changed right you know when that happened and i and i think that um i certainly wouldn't have wanted people who are pointing that out to not be able to do that because of some misinformation policy don't you think that the issue really was that people were afraid and when people are afraid then they'll support harsher measures to ensure safety and one of those measures would be to silence people that may be spreading information that could get people in trouble so they're willing to compromise their values because they think there's a greater good to be had like there's a different time and that's one of the more dangerous things about a thing like a pandemic because people will compromise their positions because they feel like there's a greater good to be achieved and so we need to silence these people like this was during the presidential campaign and this is one of the things that i found out um that that i was really shocked by the twitter band uh brett weinstein had a thing that he had put together called unity 2020 and the idea was instead of this rigid uh two-party system we have people the left and people the right what if you had like a really reasonable person a well-balanced person from the right and a really reasonable well-balanced person from the left and we brought them together very popular people and put together like a party and called it like the unity party and so he made a twitter page and and twitter banned the page and what was the reason to give some [ __ ] reason but the reason was they were terrified that these popular podcasters and people were going to take votes away from the left because these people like weinstein and his wife or their progressives i mean they taught at a very progressive university there's a lot of people that are progressive that feel disenfranchised with some of the standards of the democratic party and they weren't really interested in a guy like biden who's this career politician who's basically full of [ __ ]
and having him be president like aren't there more reasonable more attractive alternatives so they put together this thing and twitter [ __ ] banned it and i think the reason why they banned it is the same reason why they changed the standards of presidential debates after ross perot was in the elections back in the 80s was it the 90s what was that uh 92 that was the first time and then i think you ran again in 96. that this this is exactly the same they were worried that like that can [ __ ] up an election if you get enough people that say hey you guys are making a lot of sense i'm gonna vote unity 2020 if that becomes a big thing like and the republicans aren't going to vote unity 2020 they're going to stick with their base they're going to stick with their guy they're trump people we've got a guy he's our winner and they were worried and concerned i think that this unity 2020 thing even if it's like 10 000 votes in this place and 5 000 yeah it doesn't take that much to it doesn't take that much to swing elections no definitely not uh yeah i mean look i certainly wouldn't have voted for you 2020 i think that the democrats and republicans are too close together in their positions already right there's there are too many things where they uh that they basically agree on that i don't like uh you know but but i certainly don't think that you should be banned it's crazy but that's the thing about these social media platforms is that they've become too big they're they they have too much influence it's not as simple as like this is uh a private business they can do whatever they want like this private business is the way that people distribute information to billions and billions of people the idea that facebook is just a private business is bananas because it literally influences worldwide elections and it comes standard on your phone in many countries it is the internet to a lot of people in other countries the idea that that's just a private company is crazy well the thing that's particularly crazy to me is like look i understand like a like a conservative or a libertarian you know who'd say that oh they're private business they could do
whatever they want because that's what they would say about everything right you know like private businesses should be able to do what they want and like you know and obviously you know i'm a i'm a socialist i really disagree with that right but like what's crazy to me is when people who are on the left who say that who want there to be more you know lots of restrictions that i agree with right you know on private businesses then turn around and say oh this isn't really a free speech issue because it's like a private business it's like wait a second guys because it supports their their desires you know which one is it right i mean like like as uh you know because if you if you are on the left and i don't mean like if you're a liberal but like if you're a real leftist uh then i would say that you know a lot of the core of like your world view is that you understand that private businesses can have a crazy amount of power over people's lives and that can be you know in certain respects as dangerous as as you know the power of governments and and of course the two are not unrelated right because private businesses like we're talking about earlier have a crazy amount of influence over what the uh over what the government does so like do you like i think wanting private corporations to be more powerful because you think that it's gonna silence like just the people that you don't like that's the problem seems like it just it just always seems like you haven't thought this through at all no but that that's the problem and this is where i come to you with this like how do we get people on the left to realize that this is a tremendous error and that is not just i understand that they think that short term this is beneficial because they can silence people they disagree with but to understand that for i mean it sounds a little grand but for the human race this is a terrible thing to have this is a terrible thing to have because you're discouraging discourse and it's one of the most important things that we have is the ability to talk things out the ability to find out how a person thinks and to consider how that person thinks and whether or not that
would apply to you like can i use these thoughts is that do they have a point that i haven't considered is there something about the way they're looking at the world that maybe there is a perspective that i have either ignored or i just haven't been aware of that will enlighten me and change the way i look at things maybe i look at a person coming from a different walk of life from a different part of the world or different what a different education whatever it is like let me take in their point of view and see see if this is helpful see if i can help see we can we we need more friends than we need enemies we don't need more enemies so this silencing people oh you're just creating enemies you're polarizing we need communication we need to most people want the same thing when i turn in terms of like what do you want from life you want your friends your family your loved ones to be happy you want to be able to pursue your interests and your dreams and your goals you have these ideas and these projects you want to do these goals you want to achieve you want to be able to pursue those and you want to not be hampered by [ __ ] while you're trying to do that and you also want to be a good person like that's universal stuff then it comes to like well what is a good person like what should you be allowed to do what you should you not be allowed to do how do you infringe upon the rights of your neighbors with your ideas do do you support the community with your ideas is it beneficial to people and these are all where things get weird and then we get ideologically driven into a left or right category and i believe that many people that are either on the left or on the right are just looking for a gang they're just looking for a gang to be in and they find it and they just adopt their positions and they adopt this predetermined pattern of thinking and this ideology that they subscribe to because other people on the left do it or other people on the right do it and when you do it those people on the right are like yeah good for you good for you ben you're thinking the right way now you're on our side and there's like
for human beings there's a great feeling of camaraderie that comes with that you're part of a tribe it's very attractive and it's it's that's a problem yeah and i think it's also a problem when like how are the tribes being divided up and is it in a way that's going to actually advance the things that you want right like if um if it's really about like different regions of the country or like you know for the diminishing number of people who still watch cable news you know which cable news channel you know you you you watch uh and you know basically it's it's like you know red team versus blue team culture war stuff right then then i guess the question is are you ever going to get the kinds of systemic changes that would really help people to do a lot of the things you just talked about right like have like um you know be able to you know for example like lots of people can't spend very much time with their families you know because because because they have to work all the time you know lots of people can't do the things they want to do in their life because you know they can't go to school you know because you know like higher education because you know they can't you know they can afford it or they they don't want to be like saddled with decades you know of of debt about it uh and and so the question is like how are you going to achieve those things and if you're if there's somebody standing in the way who who is it actually right is it somebody who's a member of you know the elite who has like genuine power right and who's whose interest might not like coincide with with your interest right because like they're you know like if you had a union at your workplace or if you had like you know then their profits would go down or if you taxed them more to pay for some of the things we were talking about you know like that you know like that would be bad for them is it them or is it like your uncle who
like you know whatever like like you know voted for trump or something right like like is is which which one of those people should should you get bad about and i think that the problem is that a lot of people are trained to just like fixate on this whatever just passing [ __ ] is going on in the news cycle you know that like what are people mad about this minute you know it's it's gonna be something else in 12 hours right you know but like there's this sort of constant outrage cycle that i think is fed by the profit incentives of media companies because they have to hold on to the audience they have left well also they have advertisers yeah a lot of those advertisers brought to you by pfizer they have these ideas that you have to subscribe to and if you don't subscribe to those ideas then they don't want to support your program and this is like either a said or unsaid thing it's like i was listening to this uh thing where these people were talking about uh people in positions of power like how do you get these like sort of cookie cutter politicians are they told what to do or are they the kind of people that will do what they think and say what they think other people want them to say and i think there's a lot of that there's a lot of they don't really necessarily have these principled positions what they're doing is they're saying the thing they think that people want them to say they they're saying the thing they believe people want to hear and that that's going to advance them in their career and they're these you know we don't have to name the names but we know these people these cookie cutter type politicians we know are full of [ __ ] but they say things that are the right things to say given the current political or social climate yeah i mean look remember and um and they'll also say what they think they have to say like at a given point and then it's like completely forgotten six months later sometimes right like that like think about uh the 2020 election like all of those democrats
who some of them said at the beginning of the primaries that they agreed with bernie about medicare for all but even the ones who didn't right they would all say oh we at least think there should be this public option where everybody should be able to maybe buy into some sort of public health insurance whatever and that was like the entire debate there were like a hund you know whatever i don't know how many democratic debates there were it felt like a million but they have like however many there were this was always at least like 20 minutes of like every single one of those like they would go on and on about this but then like somehow now that's just disappeared right nobody's like like uh like now biden's president it still says on his campaign website you know that that never got taken down right that he wants there to be this public health insurance option kamala harris who said at one point that she agreed with bernie about medicare for all is the vice president a lot of these other people are you know pete butterjudge you know said he wanted at least medicare for all who wanted and like he's you know he's in the cabinet there are all these people who are back to being senators and it's it's like well that's what they you know when they had to position themselves to win that primary they said that they cared about like all you know the millions of americans who don't have health care or the like millions more who maybe even do have health care how about they said they were going to decriminalize marijuana and release everybody that was in jail for it yeah when's that happening exactly it's all [ __ ] like it's all [ __ ] but that that is the sort of stuff that we're talking about they don't really believe these things they're saying these things because they believe this is what people want to hear and that gets those people out to the polls that get that's get to get those people out to the booths and gets them to vote and this is unfortunately where we find ourselves as a culture until we can read minds and elon musk hurry up with that technology we need to be actually able to read people's minds so yeah i don't know i don't know that i want to be able to read my mind you're going to read his
mind too though and you're going to see oh my god um why did you write this book yeah i wrote this book because i was pissed off uh like i think more than any other book that i've written it came out of like intense frustration that i was feeling at that time because i saw a lot of people who i think like on paper you know they agree with me about like most of what i've said tonight maybe not the you know maybe not the free speech part but like you know most of the rest of it like um who were doing all these things that seemed to me like they were either feeding into these absolutely ridiculous side shows that like stop people from actually focusing on these issues that we're talking about you know like you know the the title right the title example uh you know canceling comedians you know people who would like freak out you know about like what dave chappelle says in a stand-up special as if like the things that you say in a stand-up special or like an editorial that you're writing for the new york times about like exactly what you want to happen right like every every sentence you know dave chappelle has said in the stand-up special is literally what he thinks uh and you know and i think that like one to anybody you're trying to appeal to to like actually build some kind of like political program to actually accomplish any stuff i've talked about like what does that make you look like that makes you look like an overgrown hall monitor right nobody is going to want to follow that person anywhere nor should they right like that they cause because that's that's just incredibly damaging and unappealing and and and i wanted like i mean it's funny because i i think that like when i sort of use that as the example in the title right like i was kind of trying to come up with like the most ridiculous example that i could come up with right like you know that like people would be like
you know in terms of like ridiculous priorities or sort of people being like weird moralistic schools like you know what would be the biggest example not getting mad at like corporate ceos who bust unions not you know not getting mad at like you know politicians who commit war crimes uh but you know or or you know like maybe you get mad at those people too but like somehow you know my my friend i disagree with him about a lot a lot of things a lot of things but the uh but he is my friend dave smith you know heard him talk about the outrage budget how dare you disagree with dave smith about anything [Laughter] well i'm pretty sure that he disagrees with a whole lot of things you agreed with i said earlier but no it means awesome i'm just joking yeah but no i mean like but i think he is a i think he's a good guy and he's um you know i mean i've i've been you know i've been on the show several times and um his wealth perspectives yeah he has because you may agree or may not agree but you can see where where he's coming from yeah i could see where he's coming from and the other thing that i i really respect about him is that i think that like a lot of a lot of libertarians like even though they'll like agree on paper you know like that like with you know yeah we shouldn't be fighting you know we shouldn't be fighting these wars you know we should like there shouldn't be all these people in prison or whatever it seems like in practice what really gets them excited is like tax cuts right and i think that uh and i think dave is genuinely not like that i think that he actually like do like devotes way as far as i've ever been able to see he actually devotes way less time to stuff like that than to like the united states back in this genocidal war in yemen that's the big thing with dave it's it's uh interventionless foreign policy and the corporate backing of these horrible regime change wars that's that's the thing that he hates more than anything and the the actual cost of human lives and suffering you know he's a deeply compassionate
person he really firmly opposes these things and he wants to talk about them whenever he can and it's it's one of those things where i mean he talked on my podcast about how that got him kind of booted off of those political talk shows on cable yeah because nobody wants to hear about dead kids in yemen like exactly what they want to hear about exactly it's like whatever culture we're thinking people are screaming about each other you know whether that you penn swimmer should be able to compete with women yeah by the way i love the thing that i love most about that example is whatever you think about it right like and i you know i mean look if if i had to like actually think about it i probably yeah whatever let them you know i don't care right you know but like that whatever you think about it like the idea that everybody's gonna get this excited about something that happens in ivy league swim meet right like that they hate like it's like really that's what you care about like rich kids like swimming like that that's uh that's not really what i care about right look i know that's not what i want people to care about so so i mean what it's also but it's it's a lightning rod for this discussion of like what is a woman yeah and but this is a new part of the ideology this is a new discussion like what makes a woman is it biology or is it how you identify is how you feel or is it your chromosomes and this when it comes to sports sports is where the rubber heat hits the road and that's why it's this sort of it's like see we told you there's a difference when someone's lapping people and they're they're identifying as female but they're a biological male and they're destroying the competition but when they competed as a biological male which was just a little while ago they were not very good they were okay but they weren't they weren't nowhere near the top ten and now they're dominant they're the number one in the country like this is a it's a it's a very interesting discussion of where the rubber meets the road in terms like what defines who you are and and also like are we talking about how you
treat a person or are we talking about competition and so there's a reason why men can't compete with women like uh as a biological male you if who identifies the biological male you are not allowed to compete in a women's division there's a reason why there's a division between men and women so when we make this distinction what what is the criteria that we allow someone to cross that distinction and be a female or be a male and this is nothing to do with cruelty or bigotry or discrimination this is just a discussion about what is a woman and what is a man and sports are a great way to sort that out when it comes to this particular aspect of it the physical aspect of being a female or a male another is birth you know like can you get pregnant can you give birth i mean if there's a competition like who's going to create the most babies and it's males versus females and it's people who identify versus as a female versus people who are biologically female well the biological females are going to dominate that competition yeah well it's you know probably a good thing that we don't have uh giving birth competitions but right now right oh you know what i'm saying the rubber beats the road in terms of like these ideological discussions which are valid discussions they're valid discussions because i've met a lot of trans people that like i had blair white on the podcast recently i mean when you meet blair white you there's not a [ __ ] doubt in your mind like this is someone who for whatever reason the nature and genetics have given the wrong sex to a person that is distinctly female yeah i mean as far as like the actual rules for like sports leagues i know i'm sure you know way more about this than i do but like i have a i know different like sports have handled it differently in terms of the requirements that like it's not necessarily an absolute thing like um you know tran you know trans women can or can't you know compete like sometimes you know there are like hormone requirements and stuff like that
you know that there are there are different ways of trying to do you know what the hormone requirements are though no that's where it gets weird i've i have no idea right the thresholds um for many sports it means handled differently in different places but there's a guy named derek he's got a website called uh it's a silly name of a website it's called more plates more dates it's like something he created a long time ago but he's he doesn't i don't think he necessarily has a degree in chemistry and biochemistry but he has a deep understanding of it and the way he was breaking down the amount of available testosterone that a biological female has like the threshold versus what's acceptable for a trans woman to compete against biological females and it's substantially more like it's on the outskirts of like physiological normality yeah i mean again i don't i don't know what like if there's a good compromise here that would like help like you know that would maintain a reasonable level of fairness you know without you know without just saying like you know i think there are like legitimately a couple different you know a couple of different values that you have to balance to like try to figure that one out i would say that i think like most contexts like you know most of the things that trans people you know who are like advocating for you know more anti-discrimination laws etc are talking about are not going to be nearly as hard as like this kind of like edge case about you know about sports right yeah i know i agree with that you know because like i think it's mostly like can you be like you know like employment and housing and you know and all of that stuff and and i think it is like i think it is important that you know that you have um you know that you do you have you know civil rights laws that you know that that cover everybody now i do think that because of some of the weird dynamics of this particular issue right like you know you're going to get like things that are harder calls right you know like like this like sports yeah and i i i again i just like in terms of
like what some sports leagues should require in terms of you know hormones or whatever like i have absolutely no idea but again i i think that it's this is um this is not like in terms of things that i'm gonna get like mad about right you know on an on a day-to-day basis right like well you would if you had a daughter that was competing against that person yeah maybe you know been training their whole life to be an elite swimmer in a dedicated massive amount of time and someone came around that had a uh a massive biological advantage yeah although of course if i had a trans daughter you know then then i'd want to make sure that whatever the rules were were going to be fair to her too which is why like again you know like what the right sort of exactly where the rules should be set do you think if you had a trans daughter and your trans daughter competed as a male for many many years and was just sort of mediocre and then all of a sudden competed as a woman and started dominating don't you think you'd feel a little bit of guilt i mean i guess it depends how much like how much she was um you know like how much we're talking about right like because like i think in that in that swim meet case the uh the u pen the u pen thing that you mentioned earlier if i'm remembering right like and maybe you can correct me on this like like what i know about this is like scrolling through twitter you know like you know what i saw but like i don't think that she even won by that much did she or did she giant amount giant amount what what how much did she win by i thought she was okay let's find out she's breaking records i mean she's breaking records in in multiple meets oh yeah yeah i mean again i mean this is the thing it's like there's a video of her literally lapping the other female swimmers and this is again this is when we're talking before one of the things we brought up is the lakota culture has this uh term this term is called the heyoka and the hiyoka is the sacred clown it's a part of their
culture where someone makes fun of everything and it's like a sacred part of their culture where they subject everything to mockery and anything that can't stand up to mockery anything that like viciously defends itself against mockery that's an illegitimate thing yeah another thing that the lakota people had was what their version of a transgender person was it's like a true spirit or something it was also a sacred part of their culture because it was a wise person that understood both genders and this person you could come to and they had a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man because they essentially were both and so there they had a deep amount of respect for people who are trans in their culture and i think that's a great way of approaching it that whenever you have these unique circumstances someone who is biologically male but clearly is much more of a female sometimes more of a female than a lot of biological females who are much more biologically female much more oriented towards male thinking and male behavior i mean this all of this is good for everybody it's it's good for us to accept and it's good for us to learn from these perspectives of these people that have very unique and and different but also common in terms of like when you have giant numbers of people like hundreds of millions of people you have quite a few people that have these experiences and we can learn from them and instead of discrimination and i mean i don't necessarily think sports is a discrimination though that's where it gets weird because like there's again there's a reason why we make a distinction why males compete against males and females compete against females and i think we need to sort that out and that but you don't you don't think like um like do you think that there is some sort of reasonable compromise to be arrived at there or what's your position with physical sports it's a problem because there's so many benefits to
being a biological male there's so many benefits the size of the lungs the size of the heart the physical strength the fact that you're gone through puberty and that's the difference between someone who goes through puberty and maybe someone who doesn't right so and then there's the ethical dilemma about that like should you do that because there's a great deal of people that have not done that and wound up becoming gay men and so is that what it like what's the right choice and who can make that choice and when do you have the ability to make that choice should you be able to make that choice as a child should you wait till you're an adult you know we we there's a lot of decisions that we don't allow people to make until they're of grown age like tattoos you can't get your face tattooed when you're four but you can when you're 24. you know it's it's it's i mean i'm not saying that they're the same thing but what i am saying is that we but it's but it's so hard it's a hard issue right it faces many dilemmas that require discussions and compassionate comprehensive discussions and the only way you can do that is without censorship well yeah i mean i've obviously completely agree on that i mean i think that the you know youth transition thing uh you know again i think that this is like this is a a little bit of a hard case because i think that on the one hand yeah you're absolutely right i mean the idea like you know no sane person thinks that like little kids should have complete medical autonomy and just like get to like do whatever they want that would be ridiculous but at the same time like not getting a tattoo when you're a kid isn't gonna like have some like really bad effect you could just wave and it's fine right like whereas like with something like this if you do have that experience that you know that you're that you feel as if you're like trapped in the wrong you know kind of body uh which you know i'd imagine could be like incredibly traumatic if that's not dealt with we can only imagine you know
yeah exactly like i i literally don't know but it sounds like it neither of us know but i i think that like then like having to go through what from your perspective is the wrong is the wrong puberty right i mean like the stakes are higher tattoo thing right now what does that mean in terms of like what level of medical gatekeeping there should be or like what the clinical practices should be i'm like the last person to to say yeah i'm the last person to say too i just think it has to be something we can discuss sure the problem is when people want to suppress people's ability to make choices and when people want to suppress people's ability to discuss these things i don't think that's good for any of us i mean these are very complicated human issues and by human issues i put them in the same category as a lot of other things that are very messy they're complicated to talk about they're human issues yeah you know and that this is one of them yeah no i mean it's certainly it certainly is and i also think that again it goes back to like one of the big points in the book which is that i don't want like people who might be like if you've thought about one of these issues we're talking about a lot right like and you and you you think like you have um and you might get very impatient right with people who who you think are you know are wrong about them you think that they they have you know they haven't thought about it as much as you maybe uh then and you know you think that they're not like sensitive enough to like what people might need then like if you're just sort of writing somebody off right you know that like they're done because because they're not like you know they haven't evolved to exactly where you think they should evolve to yet i think that that's bad on a human level that's just a bad way to interact with people uh yeah and and i also think that it's i think it's bad uh politically because you know somebody could like on some like incredibly messy sensitive issue
right you know like like they could um you know like they could they could land somewhere different from you on that and i'm not saying that like there isn't a bottom line like i think there is a bottom line i think like non-discrimination laws stuff like that right like i think that's incredibly important but i think that if you're writing people off based on that stuff when it could be that there are all these other things where you could actually get them on board with what you want right and instead of saying like you know when you when you said in 2020 that you were probably gonna vote for bernie and there were people who there are people who freaked out about it and a lot of that was like bad faith it was like ginned up by supporters of other candidates but there were people who were like you know real leftists who uh who were like mad that like bernie the bernie campaign like put out that like video where they were like yeah you know clipping that and that that seemed crazy to me right like like michael michael brooks and i wrote an article for jacob about it at the at the time and like like it just seems to me like you know whatever like the idea that instead of being like oh hey good like here are all these things we could agree on right we think we should have health care and you're willing to like support this and by the way like if you you know if you really care about you know trans people i mean like i think you know bernie sanders was probably your guy right it made like that they he's the you know he wanted to fund you know transition costs you know part of medicare for all you know like that that would be that would be the most you know pro transposition but like if you're gonna say like i you know somebody you know like if you think oh joe rogan is wrong about like exactly how like sports you know the sports issue should be you know should play out so i don't care that there are all these
other things right that he that he agrees with us about i don't care if he's willing to support this thing that would be incredibly beneficial you know like we just need to like cast him out right say like say like no we just want nothing to do with you or maybe like once you agree with us on 100 of everything and like you know repent right you know then maybe then maybe we'll have something to do with you i think that that's i think that's a i think that's a stupid and i think it's a self-defeating way to like try to do politics and i think it's i think it's also just a bad way to live your life well i agree with you that um writing people off because they don't share all of your opinions is ridiculous and it's not the way you get people to to take your position it's the opposite they're going to push back they're going to push back and you're going to reject people because they don't agree with 100 of your positions they're going to they're going to dig their heels in that's a natural thing with human beings it's not they're not going to go well the goose will change no that's not what they do man they they [ __ ] dig in yeah nobody's ever said like you know like nobody's ever been in like an argument on you know whatever facebook where you know somebody you know like somebody says you know somebody says that they're a terrible person and they're you know whatever they're uh you know they're a fascist or a stalinist or whatever it is they're being accused of being right you know and said oh you know what you're right you're right good point good point good point right you know now i get it right you know like that's that's not actually how you how you appeal to you know to human beings at all i mean like anybody who knows like that's like that's something that like i think an alien within like 10 minutes of interacting with people would recognize is not gonna work right i mean like i think if you talk to people like their people like you um you know like you're taking what they're saying seriously like if you
if you think they're wrong you can like try to explain why you think you think they're wrong and you can show them how the things that you want might actually help them i mean it's not always going to work there's no guarantee because that's just life you know there's no guarantee but i mean like sometimes it'll work and the other thing's just not gonna work so what positions did you take uh in your book that you got pushed back from oh boy uh so yeah well there were there were a few uh although i will say most people who got mad at the book didn't read it like most people of course why would they bother reading it when they could just get mad yeah i mean they were like what if i read it like clouds my judgment because now i agree with you on some things i'm trying to say [ __ ] you yeah exactly like there were there were so many like the number of people who got mad about the book before it came out just based on the title or the just wanna have another drink before you talk about this oh yeah absolutely yeah please you might need to refill this is really good thank you buffalo trains yeah that's good stuff um so yeah the number of people who got mad about it before it came out versus the number after i think is really revealing but uh but um that's hilarious i mean it it's literally true but i think that people the people who did read it who got mad which is not most people who read it but the people who did read it who got mad i think there were a few things uh one of them was about the um the andy noe incident from 2019 you remember this the antifa thing where they threw milkshakes at them and stuff that they um that and in general the part of it where i was criticizing you know antifa that they that like i think that they i think there are a lot of people you know who at least maybe not a lot of people in the world as a whole but a lot of people within a certain kind of subculture who have you know convinced themselves that uh
that like i don't know it's really important that people be using these kinds of like you know street tactics to like because they think in their heads that it's always like germany in 1933 and like you know nazis are about to take over or something which is delusional but they um you know i i think if you you know one of the points that i make about that in the book is that uh if you think about like what was actually going on in you know germany in the early 30s when you had uh you know like nazis who were like going around and like smashing up like trade union halls and like you know and and fighting with people and like socialist and communist parties and stuff why would any like you know why would corporate america have to bother with any of that now right they're already winning you know just fine you know without it right like so i don't know what you're saying okay so sorry let me sorry let me let me back up like okay try to be clear about this so i think the idea that fascism is what's like on the horizon in america i don't think makes sense because i think that arose under very different circumstances than the than what we've we've got right now i think that uh the role that like the things that um the things that fascists were doing in like germany before they took over there italy before they took over there were in response to the perception that the system was under threat and there would be like maybe even like communist revolution and this was like the only thing that you know the only thing that like you know the wealthy elites could kind of turn to to to stop that from happening you know would be like allying with with uh with you know like german entry business interests aligned with hitler and that's just such a radically different situation than the united states now that i think the idea that you'd be obsessed with like street fighting with um you know with like the few people who like you know the richard spencer types or whatever
just seems i i think that's i think that makes no sense i think that it's it's a i think it's a diversion i mean i think it's a distraction honestly you know from things that actually matter more and i think that it's really dangerous when people would make excuses for um behavior like attacking andy no because i it's um because if you think about that like the things that here's the thing that most disturbed me right when that happened that i would see people who would be defending that uh online who would say well you know he's not like really a journalist you know because like whatever they would say about him right you know he's like a propagandist or he's like really siding with like the proud boys or one of these groups or you know whatever and it's like the misinformation thing right like who gets to decide right what counts as a journalist and i certainly don't want that decision to be made by like individual vigilantes right the problem with antifa is the name yeah you're calling it antifa like anti-fascist like you're like well of course of course i'm andy fascist right who wouldn't be that's the problem it's but like let's define fascism put put up the definition of fascism and this is part of where the problem lies like when we discuss fascism whether we're discussing the connection between the corporate interests and the government or like what is the what is the the technical definition of what a fascist is so like just google is okay okay yeah here fascism a form of far-right authoritarianism ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in the early 20th century of europe there's other definitions of that though that's the wikipedia definition the problem with wikipedia is sometimes it gets ideologically captured a political philosophy movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed
by a dictatorial leader severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition i don't see that in our country here's the other one though a tendency towards or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control the problem with that is when you're trying to control by violence and street action and throwing milkshakes at people you're trying to control the way they behave and they think and that's a form of fascism it's a kind of fascism what you're doing is in a sense you're intimidating people into not opposing your perspective you have large groups of people they incite violence they lit the [ __ ] uh apartment building of the the portland mayor portland one of the great things about it is it's the least fascist place on earth it is literally the most open-minded progressive city on the entire continent you don't think nazis are about to take over portland there's not a [ __ ] chance and yet that's the stronghold of antifa and that's the place where they find the most fascism they have to combat against it's a form of bullying it's a form of gangs it's a they're trying to enforce their ideology and unfortunately the [ __ ] mayor has let them go so far with it that even he's pushing back now he's calling for greater police protection and they're they're trying to enforce laws now and arrest people and because he was being targeted so much that he turned it around and is like we have to do something about these people like now you think now you think like it's it's like a gang man it's like they they get they're into this ideology and they're into this whole community of like stopping these fascists and they're looking for them when they don't even exist the technical definition of fascism is not running rampant in [ __ ] portland it's just not no no it's not and i think that like if you want to say like uh there are like far right groups who might commit hate crimes etc then like first of all i actually don't think that
a lot of people who do stuff like this would be like just i'm skeptical that like they're really gonna be the ones who are who are gonna you know do something there but like if do something there in what way oh that like that like that like if you have like actual fascists who are like showing up with guns right you know they're gonna run yeah yeah i mean like like i don't think i don't think most people who sign up for stuff like this this is a point michael brooks made to me like after the um in michigan and 2020 there were um there was a like some protests at the state capitol over lockdown stuff where like lots and lots of people actually had guns there and he was like oh where's where's antifa here right you know like yeah you know why not right and is that when they were trying to um kidnap the governor that was the fbi led operation uh that was that was before that but that was that was like that was related yeah it was the same kind of stuff so i mean like the protests were like real the the governor plot seems like that was just the like equivalent for this stuff it was ginned up by the yeah it was like one of those it was like one of those cases like with the post-9 11 security state where you have some like you know mentally ill muslim loner who like the fbi spends like two years convincing them you know to join there you need to blow your shoes up fake terror plot they finally say yes and they arrest them you know like like it seems like way too close to that for comfort but i guess i guess the thing that's that might connect to some of what we were talking about earlier about antifa is i think that the reason one reason why people end up like obsessing with like about like marginal far-right groups like the the proud boys are not about to like you know march on washington and like you know and and install you know whoever also that guy the [ __ ] head of the proud boys was in the fbi too that's true
that's that was the craziest thing when when that turned out there was the one guy who was um what was his name enrique something or another who turned out to be an fbi informant and he was the the head of the proud boys they were always interviewing him on television yeah after uh yeah it's like gavin mcginnis who started it as a larp he started literally as a joke like it was it was based on a broadway musical that's why they called it proud boys they were joking around and then it became a thing and then a bunch of people once you created an organization then a bunch of people can join it and then they infiltrate it and then they decide to radicalize it yeah proud boys leader enrique tario was an fbi informant like what in the [ __ ] man yeah it's like in the during the mccarthy period when like half of the people at like some like little local communist party meeting would be fbi agents because they were devoting so many resources to like trying to to stop this like very marginal um you know this very marginal group you know so people were upset at you because of the andy no thing that you didn't think that was i mean and obviously it's just not a way to treat a person no no it's beat him up and he's the if you ever met andy he's this tiny asian gay man yeah right the idea that this guy is this jack-booted thug that's there to take down you know democracy is [ __ ] preposterous no no it is and and i think that the um and i think that like the problem is like when you make an obvious point like hey uh there's absolutely no justification for like physically attacking this guy you know that they uh that like uh that that's that's that's insane behavior that like this is um this serves no good purpose you know whatsoever that like a lot of the things that people said about it at the time when they were trying to justify it were you know turned out to be [ __ ] which is also true uh that um also you know and also by the way i don't want to set the precedent that like we're gonna have street violence where people who like
you know somebody decides they don't count as a real journalist and and that they're like helping bad people or creating dangerous effects or something and they could just attack them like i mean why you know i mean i'm sure i've you know i'm sure i've written lots of stuff for jacob that people would say that about right what is this this is the other thing like what defines a journalist like how do you decide who is and isn't adjourned do you have to be connected to a specific organization because there are many people that are connected to specific organizations that are propagandists do you have to have a degree in journalist journalism because there's many people that have a degree in journalism that are liars and they work for gigantic corporations and they spew out all the nonsense that this corporation wants them to say like what is a journalist no do we have a rigid criteria for what is i mean couldn't you not be a person who believes in the truth who decides to dedicate yourself to discussing things and researching things and doing it in a a very honest and like doing it as a person in good faith and putting out the information as you've discovered it like isn't that journalism like who decides who's a journalist yeah but certainly nobody at wikileaks uh had a journalism degree and i'm really glad that that exists right how about edward snowden was what he did does that count as journalism yeah i mean i've heard people say that glenn greenwald's not a journalist which is ridiculous preposterous because i mean he broke um i mean you know he like whatever you think about glenn or his politics or any of that stuff i mean just from a journalism perspective like first with the the nsa revelations and then again in brazil you know with uh you know with the material that like helped free the former president you know who is unjustly imprisoned um like that that's i mean that's the most important stuff that journalism can do right so if that's not journalist you know if that's not journalism right like
i don't know why journalism what is journalism it's important once you go to stub stack you're not a journalist anymore yeah and i think that the and i think that's incredibly dangerous because you could imagine i mean look you don't have to imagine you could just look at what actually has happened with julian assange right that they that like um that you know like the the government says like you know that oh there's no freedom of the press issue here because that's not really journalism he's just like some kind of you know enabler of terrorism you know because he he did this uh that's certainly not a road that i want to go down but the problem is you as obvious as so many of these points are that like it's there's absolutely no good justification for physically attacking a non-combatant you know like somebody who isn't like going again right like mocking and laughing when you hit him in the head with a [ __ ] milkshake like what it was that no it's you know it's terrible behavior you so like you make that obvious point you make the point we're just making about journalism and it's it's like on the face of it you think okay this is like this is all obvious but the problem is it's that like team like rooting for your team behavior that like you're willing to accept horrible behavior as long as it's enforcing your ideology yeah and then if and then if somebody like me said you know says that i think that you know like you know that that i think this is bad then oh see so you're not being loyal to the team right like you're siding with andy noe who's on the other team and you know you're you're siding against people who are you know who are on your team you know so like they'll just have a reaction to that that's not actually about like the thing itself or like showing what's wrong with the argument yeah and i mean i should be really clear i'm not like i had andy know on my podcast and i was skeptical of a lot of things he was saying one of them the traumatic brain injury from that i was like what kind of brain injury do you have from that like what are you talking about man yeah i know originally they like there was these reports that there was like
concrete that was like mixed to the milkshake somehow listen i watched him get hit with that that's like that's not what gives you brain damage i know what gives you brain damage yeah you gotta get you gotta get hit like if that guy got hit with a [ __ ] piece of concrete he would go down yeah okay he's not just gonna take it on the chin and keep walking and get a traumatic brain injury from a milkshake yeah it's silly no and look and i think unless there were some other shots that he took that weren't on camera and i think i think andy know like as somebody like the issue is not do i like andy now because i actually don't right i mean like i think what don't you like uh so uh he wrote an article uh that was uh i think it was for collette i'm not sure about that part right might have been somewhere else but he wrote an article about visiting britain where he was claiming basically that there were like you know parts of london that were like under sharia law or that you know like it uh and his evidence was that uh was that there were like no drinking signs that like it's since been pointed out that like other like non-muslim neighborhoods they have the same things right because you're just not allowed to drink in certain places you know under generally applicable laws uh i think that he's you know and and i think that i think that probably in general right like he's a provocateur yeah i think i think he's uh i think he's a provocateur and i think that he's um i i too have a lot of questions you know about about the honesty or at least the commitment to sort of checking things you know before you before you go into print with them uh and and my sense is that you know his his politics are completely different from mine but none of that matters for this right like none of that is the point right i don't want just like you know if we're talking about like you know should we have a taboo against like physically assaulting journalists yeah physically assaulting people you disagree with you know then like yeah we should and it should be anybody right
you know but like also i think that you know it shouldn't depend on whether you think they're honest it shouldn't depend on any of that stuff right you know that that's that that's just is not something that should be happening and i think it's a bad door to uh i think it's a bad door to open up and but i you know i think that that's something in the book that people a lot of people i shouldn't say a lot of people most people who got mad at it never cracked it open but like you know but like it's a lot some of the people who did get mad at it you know because they read it had a problem with that i think some of the dave chappelle stuff in the first chapter because you know they thought i was like defending the transphobe you know like i think that that was you know that that was an issue with some people um they you know trying to uh you know i think that uh this stuff in uh later in the um you know in the book um that just in general um i think a lot of people who got mad about it sort of misinterpreted the sort of main claim in a crazy way right that like you know in other words that they thought that the main thing that i was saying was that like online cancellation is like the the most important part of problem in the world or you know something like that and that's not what i think uh you know what i think is that this is not a way that you should act towards people one because on a human level it's just a toxic way to operate and two if you actually want to win people over to ideas that you think are important so you can accomplish something that's important in the real world then getting bogged down in all of this kind of you know online [ __ ] throwing and you know trying to get people fired and all that stuff for all the reasons that we're talking about i think it's the i think it's like the worst most counterproductive thing you could do i think there's also a real issue with
communicating through social media it's such a you know it's it's a way of communicating that takes away so much of what it is to be a human to be a human is to look at a person to have a conversation with them look them in the eyes to talk about things in depth to recognize their perspective and allow them to talk so you give them there's a sense of camaraderie you're you're two human beings expressing ideas with social media you're just printing something out and you're throwing it out into the ether and then the other person responds and that you don't see each other you don't you're trying to be biting and nasty and the way you win is through vitriol it's a shitty way to communicate and one of the best ways to get attention is to be the biggest [ __ ] like that's that's how people get attention online to say the most mean the most vicious thing that you can and yeah it's like a fun little game totally and you get validation for being like the first person to like throw you know throwing the first stone right and people like support you because they wish they had said it or they don't want to be the person who sticks their neck out but they'll like it because the yeah go get them yeah or get them ben yeah or they just don't like or or they just like you know they like to tweet ha right you know that like we got that guy and then they just never think about it again or sometimes like if they thought about in the first place like like i gave um you know there's a uh there's a guy who um i am wendell potter you know who this is no okay so wendell potter used to be a health insurance executive uh and he would like lobby you know congress on behalf of health insurance companies and then at some point in the past like i think like maybe 15 years ago or something i'm not sure about the timing he uh he decided you know like he had a crisis of conscience about doing that and he uh he he left the industry and he you know he he started like what he's done since then is he just campaigns for medicare for all right so this is this is a this is a really good person and um
he had um i remember back in with this this was like spring 2021 maybe wendell potter tweeted out something like the fact that people don't understand how much medicare for all would help us even during this time when people are losing on health insurance you know because of you know economic disruptions all this stuff shows uh how many people bought the lies that i used to tell you know when i was a health insurance executive and this guy who i'm not going to name because i don't want to like you know shame this guy that's not the point right you know but like is this guy quote tweeted that right like he just probably saw it on his feed and you know he didn't really know his problem he quote tweeted it and said and i quote oh my god this [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] actually admitted it uh and that got like 20 000 likes before enough people like told him who wendell potter was that he finally like took down the tweet and what gets me about that example is that if whoever if the guy who originally tweeted that had literally just clicked on wendell potter's name on the top of the tweet that would have taken him to their pro you know his profile picture where he would have seen like all these you know like names that like have like for medicare for all the title and he would realize like what point he was making when he tweeted that but why would you do five seconds of research about somebody before denouncing them when you can get that little endorphin rush from like you know you're a piece of [ __ ] on twitter and then you know who likes is who's that he's a writer he's got a very interesting perspective on this and he calls twitter and social media processed information the same way processed food is bad for you that processed information ultra processed where it's down to instead of a conversation with someone it's down to quote tweeting a thing completely out of context and trying to ruin them oh my god this piece of [ __ ] just admitted it like that kind
of thing that's an example of like ultra process information and when he said that it was like one of those aha movement moments where it's like that's what it is that is the thing that separates human beings and normal human interaction between social media interaction it's too easy to do it's too simple it's like basically like fast food or like some sort of processed [ __ ] snack it's terrible for you it's terrible for your brain and people engage in it easily yeah and much like those other examples the profit incentives of the companies that run it you know are all in favor of people doing all this stuff because the more people are doing that the more the more minutes per day their eyeballs are on twitter sure but i think that's almost a simplistic version of it because i don't think they meant that i don't think they created it in order to get people to do it that way i think they created it is like when you go back and look at twitter what it initially was it was like you would put at and then your name is like is going to the movies like you would even talk about yourself in the third person you know like at joe rogan's going to the gym like that's how people did it and then slowly but surely it became a way where people espoused opinions and then it became arab spring and then like it became all sorts of different ways that people express themselves like this idea that it started out with this insidious notion i i don't think it necessarily started out with an insidious notion but i do think that the ways that it's changed over time uh are ones that like just just the fact that like uh that like you know likes and retweets and all that stuff are part of it i do think uh it's a kind of feedback mechanism like you know uh john for sure john ronson's uh book uh so you've been publicly assumed yeah like he talks about that at the end he uses the analogy of those uh like electronic speeding signs that'll show you as you like drive by like what the you know how fast you're driving and you know what the uh and
what the speed limit is and he points out that on paper there's no reason that should work because they're not giving you any information you don't already have right every car has a speedometer in it that like tells you you know how fast you're driving a normal low-tech speed sign would tell you what the speed limit is but just that moment of validation that you get from driving past and see the two numbers come together actually does seem to get people to drive more slowly and it reduces actions there are tons of studies about this that show that it does that and in that case it's that kind of like immediate feedback loop of validation is a good thing but in social media that kind of immediate feedback loop of validation that like you're going to get you know 10 000 people who you know like and retweet you know because you said uh you know you said somebody's a piece of [ __ ] or you know whatever uh is is incredibly toxic i think it makes it harder for you know harder to communicate with people it makes it harder to even listen to what somebody who disagrees with you thinks for long enough that you could think about how to convince them you know that uh to try to persuade them of of your point of view uh and it makes us even more atomized than than we are already right you know like if you spend um you know if you spend all of your time scrolling which again maybe it wasn't the original intention but i think that like the more time people spend scrolling through their social media feeds right you know the better it is for the bottom line of these companies would you agree with that oh for sure yeah and it's also hugely addictive with the likes and the retweets and all that stuff they just made things incredibly addictive and the numbers when people look at numbers they want to look at how many likes they get for something and then when they find certain things that get more likes they gravitate towards those things you've seen the the social dilemma the documentary uh i actually haven't seen it but i know what it is it's really good it's really good it highlights a terrifying future because they're essentially saying like this leads to like this massive polarization of these uh perspectives in
this country and it's like it's like almost like setting us up for a civil war yeah i mean i don't think there's gonna be a civil war but i do think that uh i do think that you're gonna get a lot of more people who get all of their sort of emotional connection to politics is about like getting mad at people who are on the other team and not even getting mad at people with power who are who are on the other team right but just like getting mad at whoever right like like i like the way that after the 2016 election uh something that i felt like i hadn't seen before was the amount of time that people were spending talking about you know trump voters just like ordinary people who voted for trump and that seems crazy to me because i mean especially after 2020 you know where like the you know the turnout was ridiculously high on both both both sides so like you've got like 70 however million people that you're just gonna like write off right like they're just like unredeemable you know like that they're basket deplorables yeah they're just uh they're just irredeemable deplorables like i don't know how you think that you're gonna accomplish anything right like like if you they're not thinking like that though yeah they're not thinking in this like broad perspective they're not like looking at like what's best for the human race what's best for the community of the united states or my city or my my country no they're not thinking like that i'm just thinking like what feels good what feels good is like [ __ ] you trump supporter yeah no exactly exactly like not like look i mean one of the you know like one of the reasons i always thought that bernie sanders would have won the 2016 election if he'd been the nominee is that there are i'm not saying all of them i'm not even saying most of them but i think there's a chunk of people who voted for trump in 2016 who absolutely would have voted for bernie i think so too yeah i don't have any doubt in my mind i think there's a lot of people who want a person that has like a legitimate
like a really well thought out perspective that they have been consistent with their entire career that's bernie sanders like and he really does look out for the working person yeah it really does look out for working families and if you go back and like see clips from him from like the the 1980s right it's all the same all the time so this book why why comedians like what about comedians that yeah yeah so uh i mean i think that's an example of a larger thing but i think it's a really interesting example right so i think the larger thing that's an example of is that when people this is my claim about why a lot of people on the left get sucked into this right you know when people feel like they have no real power to change anything like big and structural that actually matters they they get sucked into picking fights that they think they can't win right if you can't win what the ones that matter right you know like like then find a way to care about you know the stuff uh that is not going to uh change uh change the world for better but you know but you derive some kind of satisfaction from so if it's like you know yelling at dave chappelle you know then like that's that's something that uh that's something that can can scratch that itch you know if it's if it's antifa right like look the things that actually create like misery for working people in the united states or big structural things that can't be solved by punching anybody in the face right you know that that's not gonna that's not gonna work but you know you can get diverted to uh to you know to finding someone uh finding someone you uh you know you can punch and you know you get like that sense of satisfaction and i think that i think that what the comedy example really shows is the way that people get sucked into this way of viewing the world that's all about individual moralism right is this person a good person or a bad person is that person a good person or a bad person and it becomes just this like constant inventory of the soul and i think that
we're doing that so much that we almost don't even notice that we're we're doing it it just almost like goes without saying that like that's how you would interact with this stuff and so i think that comedy you know as a form of entertainment and when it's really good as a form of art you know as as something that can you know help us kind of look at you know look at the world around us at a slightly different angle you know than we would in the normal course of things you know because it kind of holds things up in a you know in a different way um i think that that can only work if it's operating in a space where people aren't constantly thinking about like oh is this uh you know is this guy a good guy or a bad guy is is this is this joke that i'm about to tell you know like something that is is morally acceptable or not right you know like like if you're in that space i don't think you're going to be able to uh i don't think you're going to be able to to do it right um that's an interesting thought that people will attack things that they think that they can have an impact on instead of going after these big impossible problems that seem insurmountable yeah i mean look perfect example think about the summer of 2020 after the murder of george floyd there was this wave of protests and riots and unrest that was like without precedent in a very very long time if ever right and all of that was originally about police violence but how much has actually changed in terms of how policing works in the united states since then there are some cities that cut budgets for a while most of them have put it back they you know but in terms of things like how easy it is to hold a police officer accountable you know if uh if they you know if they use violence in an unjustified way
i don't think that's i don't think that's gotten much much better well it's changed in new york city in new york city police officers can be civilly liable now yeah and that's a good step you know i think that i think that i don't think it's a complete solution uh because for one thing i think a lot of people who are most likely to end up these situations are not in a good position to afford you know good civil rights you know good legal representation i know sometimes in a high profile case you'll get people doing it pro bono you know who are good lawyers but you know again i think it's a good step i don't i don't think it i don't think it addresses most of the problem but i think it's i it's something i support for sure but here's the thing i think that much more than people like you know actually changing how police swing works in america is a really heavy lift but what's really easy is you know getting you know every you know corporation in the world to like put out some sort of black lives matter thing right like that's that's easy because it doesn't cost them anything like why wouldn't they just do that it's also good for business sure yeah uh or capitalism yeah yeah yeah i mean that's the thing like this awoke signaling that you know that your business is a part of the good side and that you should support this business yeah no absolutely again like it does it you know like like it earns them some good will it doesn't cost them anything why wouldn't they do that right like that doesn't um that does very little to solve like anything that uh than any of this stuff is supposed to be about but uh but again it's it's it's easy right or like when you know people like knocking down statues which don't get me wrong i don't think there should be statues of confederate generals you know in in cities you know i mean i don't think that's something we should glorify but i also saw a lot of like after the really bad statues came down people started going after gray area statues and you know it's in george washington's
tattoos what's interesting about the civil war the civil war statues is many of them actually came up they were put up during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and they're really cheaply made these shitty responses to the change that was happening in the country yeah right so again i think that like should you have like should there be statues to robert lee robert e lee no i don't think so but i also think it's revealing that people end up getting spending this much time on these purely symbolic things right you know like we got rid of all of the really objectionable statues and now we'll say well how about george washington how about whatever right and then you you search for things that you know you can change the name of it right you know like my you know my mom has gotten really into uh to bird watching in her retirement and she told me that there's like some kind of warbler that's named after a confederate general the people are like trying to like get that changed it's like okay you're really like you know they're digging deep they're digging deep right warblers that's kind of weird though you know like if you have like a hitler warbler you're like [ __ ] weed celebrating like yeah no and like whatever i mean i guess a t-shirt is that sure i guess if i were if i were he had a warbler with a [ __ ] wing up in the air like a nazi like hey hey yeah yeah yeah but again why did you why comedians in the title and like yeah yeah so so i think that i think because i think it's a example that makes it really dramatic because comedians don't and really can't exercise political power they might you know influence to a certain extent the way that people think about certain things but um nobody's you know nobody who's who's doing comedy is uh is making decisions you know that that directly uh directly impact uh people's lives so so if you were actually trying to to do that you know like if you're actually trying to affect real change this doesn't make any sense what i think
it is is it's a symptom of how extreme this kind of moralistic approach to politics can get right that like you're this concerned with like constantly you know testing you know whether somebody is a is a good person or a bad person or they ever said anything that you know that might show them to like to really be a bad person and nothing could ever just be a bad moment right that you know that that it has to be like this is the moment where you really revealed the you know how toxic your soul was or something you know rather than just like you said something stupid because sometimes people say things that are stupid you know that uh like i think that that kind of moralism when it's applied to comedy i think that that's i think that that's like maybe the most extreme symptom of of what i'm talking about because it's one thing even to get mad at somebody because like of something they wrote like in an editorial right that they're they're telling you like exactly what they think should happen you know that like if i you know if i write you know if i write something for jacobin and you know some people get upset about that okay at least it's jack of an article i'm literally saying exactly what i think right but if you're doing you know a um account like so so that last uh dave dave chappelle special at netflix you know that people people got mad about and which by the way i you know hadn't even watched but since i had ridden this thing you know people kept asking me what i thought and i finally watched it and i thought that the way that it was portrayed as if it were this like just festival of transphobic you know hatred or posture it was ridiculous that in fact the overall theme of the special as far as those issues go was about him like moving towards a place of greater understanding and you know and like and it's also kind of a love letter to his friend that committed suicide for supporting him was attacked for supporting him and then she jumped off a [ __ ] building and committed suicide this was like an homage to this person's life this long
part of like i worked with dave during the entire time he was piecing that together because we started doing shows in austin like uh november of 2020 i mean it might have even been earlier than that and we were working together while he was putting it together and he was responding to this idea that he was transphobic and he was saying like this is so crazy like this is who i am and this is about this person who when i was accused of being transphobic this person defended me and was dragged by people and there's been some talk of whether or not like how much of that was creative license because like people have tried to find like what the tweets were how many of them were dms like we don't know i mean i don't think you could dismiss that or how many of them or people who actually knew her personally but then committed suicide and like this is like trying to make it's the highest form of comedy in a lot of ways because you're trying to take this like socially sensitive issue and extract laughs from it which is very difficult to do but in no way was it transphobic in no way was it hurtful or cruel or or mean well i mean i mean actually he's like he spent a couple of minutes of the special explaining why the bathroom was north carolina were cruel and like at the end like when he's talking about his dead friend like one of the crucial moments comes when he's describing their like back and forth you know when he he had her open for him and yeah and it's hilarious yeah which is a hilarious thing but there is this like really moving part of it right at the at the end where you know he you know she's she tells him you know like uh i want you to recognize that i'm going through a real humid experience and like it really sinks in in that and the idea that watching this would make somebody more transphobic yeah just just seems absurd to me but what people did right is they literally quoted individual sentences that he says in it like like there's one point in the special where he says
uh i'm a turf right turf standing for transition yeah radical yeah it's like okay but literally within like two minutes of him saying i'm on team turf he says i'm not saying that i don't think trans women are women it's like well hold on right like you know if if you take both of those literally right those those two those two don't go together right but of course that's not how comedy works that's like thinking that like somebody who writes a novel that like every sentence of the novel is like what they actually personally think is is true but i i think and i've got to think that a lot of people who write articles like this must understand that on some level right that they that like this is not how comedy works but i think that you know sometimes it's like bad faith they're you know they're just being dishonest definitely some of that but like also i think that like sometimes if you get this invested in like making these like moral indictments of people over these culture war battles then you're just not even pausing to think about that like you're just like trying to find evidence like you're just like like sifting through it to like find like it's like uh you know freddie de boer the commentator no okay so freddie deboer is a is a writer uh he wrote a really good book about the education system called call to smart and he has this essay from a few years ago called planet of cops where he says that it seems to him that like increasingly everybody you know in the culture is is a is a cop now right what he means by that and you know he develops the metaphor he says things like you know oh there's the new movie that people are getting excited about you know well give me you know give me two hours and 500 words and i'll find you your indictments right you know that it's it's like that's sort of constantly sifting through things to like find evidence that people have have committed some kind of sin or or or infraction
and and i think that like that's how people are approaching that like when they wrote these articles you know about you know how oh my god did you know that dave chappelle said that he was on team turf you know nothing that's special like look there's a mission right you know you gotta you gotta get those indictments right so you just have to sort through all all of it until you can find something that you know that looks like a a smoking gun of of evidence and and i think that it's like it's a obviously it's a terrible way to write about anything but i think what what's interesting to me about the example of comedy is that it's sort of the most absurd possible application of of doing that because i mean just just to be like simplistic about it for a second right like if you're saying something to stand up special like generally speaking not every sentence but like you're saying it because you think it's funny right that's which is just a different thing from saying something because like oh you know here is exactly what i think right you know it's like the example that we were talking about before the podcast which i'm not going to do because it's actually in my act now that someone put a quote that i said oh yeah what a piece of [ __ ] i and i'm like hey you got to put the whole quote because there's like a lot more to that and it's clearly joking but it's that thing that they do is also because someone is getting a disproportionate and exorbitant amount of attention and when someone is like a dave chappelle or myself who's got a disproportionate amount of attention there's so many people that want to look at that and go flaws holes pep keg throw rocks like and it's a normal thing to have this sort of uh reaction to someone who you feel either their take on things isn't valid or it's not this it doesn't align with your own or you there's a reason why you're more morally superior to them because your
position is better you know yeah no i think there i think there's a lot of that you know and and it's also i mean it kind of goes back to we're saying earlier about the uh the you know blm protests in the aftermath and all that stuff like if you get somebody like if um i mean obviously in a case it's high profile it's like dave chappelle like netflix isn't gonna dump him because like why would they do that like that would just be putting like a lot of money on the uh well not only that but there's no reason to right here's the thing it's like if dave chappelle was saying all trans people would die should die and you know we they're not human okay yeah get rid of them right everybody would agree to that you shouldn't put that on your network but you cannot look at any of the things that he said and rationalize any of these accusations that people have towards them he is not that guy he's a lovely guy if you meet him he's one of the kindest nicest sweetest guys and that's who he really is and it's really striking too because if you remember when all this was going on there was like a week of the news that was all about how there's gonna be this huge walkout of trans employees at netflix you remember this yeah they took like a lunch break it was like five of them yeah there were like five people and it's not even clear that they all worked at netflix oh most of them didn't and then the one of them that was there they found a whole bunch of racist [ __ ] that she had put on twitter and they're like hey and then not even jokes just like racist stuff it's like god damn it i don't i get what's going on these are like they're humans humans are flawed and you know just because they said a thing that was incorrect doesn't mean that their whatever position they have they can't have a good perspective on something yeah and what and what kills me about that example is at that very moment that that was going on right that there was this like super hyped up you know walkout that like got all this attention there was like you know two people on their lunch
break or whatever like at the same time there was the john deere strike going on and that was that was you know thousands of people you know were were out on strike for uh to you know to get better you know wages and working conditions john deere the tractors yeah yep yep the the workers yeah yeah if you go um if you go i leave you but i mean yeah i never heard a peep out of that yeah well that's the thing right so like you compare the scale of the two things and then you compare the scale of the coverage right one of them is jokes yeah but it's also jokes from the greatest living comedian that's part of the problem it's like you and also a guy who you uh you sort of associate with left-wing values and progressive values and you want them to fall in line and i think that's part of the blowback is that you know they they want to shame him into falling in line with their ideals and one of the things that he said like when he we talked about the special and we this is we did a show together and he did this speech at an arena and he's like like i am not going to comply with the way you you know want me to think and want me to behave that's not what i'm doing yeah and again like what's his response going to be realistically like he's he's just going to um keep talking [ __ ] that's what he's gonna do right i mean it's gonna be funnier and funnier right you know but like he like the idea that like saying like he's a terrible person he's a transphobe like is gonna get him to like see things more from your perspective in fact he talks about this in the special right that like he you know he has the thing about the woman who like followed him out to the parking lot or whatever to you know to give him a hard time and the point is that like all of that like his reaction was just [ __ ] you right you know like of course it is right you know but like then like actually meeting this trans woman and like having this you know like like you know like you know having the interactions that they had and like having that mean something to him right like that that um like that did way more probably to get
him to see things the way that people were yelling at him wanted him to see them than like people just like saying you know that like because if if you say like if somebody wants to like shut you down or silence you or like berate you until you you know you stop thinking what you think then i i mean maybe like if somebody's powerless enough they'll just shut up because they don't want to deal with it right you know but like otherwise like one thing it's not going to do is to get them to say okay now i see you're right right especially like they might say their perception they might say the words if they think they have to right but they're not going to think it right now when you wrote this book like what what inspired you yeah so i think there were a few things that that had been uh that have been going on and it kind of all started to uh to build uh for for a while that i was i was getting frustrated that a lot of people who i align with on most things uh were getting sucked into what i how the way i see it in the book right that they're that like that these these kinds of uh what i call pathologies of powerlessness right you know that you're because you know that you can't you know accomplish things that actually matter you end up uh getting sucked into all of this nonsense you spend all of your time trying to prove yourself to other people you already agree with you know and and to um and to denounce you know people for for not agreeing with you in ways that are not gonna you know lead to a single person getting health care a single workplace being unionized you know any of those any of those things um and and i think there were a few examples that like were really starting to get to me at the um at the time so uh one of them uh was uh what happened uh i remember in 2019 the democratic socialist of america which is you know organization i'm a
member of you know i think it's i think it's flawed but i think it does good stuff you know i encourage people to do that but uh they had this convention actually in atlanta where i live and in which um you know i didn't you know i mean i i was there for like a minute because i was like meeting with my editor but like i didn't go to the thing itself i kind of hate sitting through meetings like in general in life you know but in uh but there was this montage of of clips that that came out afterwards uh that like you know tucker carlson you know played on fox news and stuff like that of uh people announcing all of these bizarre like rules that like you weren't allowed to like clap at the convention because there might be people with like rare noise sensitivities and and just things like this and of course you know the like right-wingers who compiled that were cherry-picking like the worst most ridiculous moments from a weekend but is that what the one where this person is like point of privilege is that you were a part of that i wasn't part of that but you're in that room while that was going down uh yeah i i wasn't in the room at that minute right come on man that is no that's ridiculous it is ridiculous here's what gets me about this right that's like okay granted the worst moments have been cherry picked but also it's not you know they're not being made up right like this stuff actually happened right and also it's not even like there was somebody in there with like a hidden camera right to get this footage right they were streaming it to them oh no they know that i mean it doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous and also the lady calling everybody comrades yeah i'm like you know what what do you what is what's going on here i mean i think that like what's going like what gets me about this is that knowing that this is the face you're showing to the whole world right right that like anybody in the world who wants to tune in and watch this can do that you're still doing this stuff like was it uh somebody yeah the point of privilege thing i think was
uh you stop using gendered languages it's hilarious because it just shows like what are we [ __ ] concentrating on you're mad that people are there's chatter because you're easily distracted how about get the [ __ ] out of here then why are you in a large crowd of people what do you do with the movies what do you do at a bus station shut the [ __ ] up like you want everybody to comply yeah as you've got some weird tick right and why are people doing that because like you said they can't be i assume they're not going through their entire lives right you know trying to to get people to do this stuff like maybe they are maybe they are they're activists at work too maybe they're just really annoying yeah i mean if so if so they're probably winning over a lot of new converts all the time but they but you know by doing that was that the most annoying time in that meeting or were there more annoying times during that conference yeah i mean uh the stuff uh the stuff that i saw you know which was which was not you know which was not that much of it but the stuff i saw like the things that made it into that montage were the most annoying things that i saw but like i guess what gets me about this is that knowing that everybody in the world can see this if you're still acting this way right then what that shows me is that you do not care at all like how any you know normal person is going to react to seeing this and i know there are people who get this twisted when i say normal person all i you know it's like oh do you just mean people who are you know whatever right you know like fit some demographics or something no when i say a normal person i mean like people who aren't like bathed in this political subculture so like stuff like that starts to seem normal to them right like just anybody who's you know of any background any you know any race sexual orientation whatever who doesn't like you know who doesn't spend all day every day thinking about politics right is gonna see this
and say wait what but i don't even think that's a politics thing i think it's just a social issue it's and i don't think they're thinking at all that everyone's going to see it i don't think that was even a consideration at all i think in that moment they were very self-indulgent and they had the access to a microphone and they couldn't wait to yap and that's part of the problem with people you just can't wait to as a person who yaps professionally i mean look that's why i mean i said earlier that i hate meetings this is one of the reasons why right that they that like it's it's always every every time i've ever had to go to a meeting for anything you know there's always there are always people who talk just because it's important to them that they like hear themselves talk about oh yeah like it's awful um you know that's why it's funny that's why that video is funny i mean that's not a version of that that's like the the super ultra progressive version of that yeah and it's uh and you know i get that it's funny it's it's also like like seeing you know seeing people who are supposedly fighting for all the things that that i am like act that way is also like painful it's like what what's wrong with you right like why why would you why would you do this right you think you need someone there to go calm down francis yeah i mean that's i think you do right and that's part of the problem that's part of why i wrote the book because i guarantee you however many hundreds of people that were there in that that hall right you know where that was happening there's a lot of eye rolls there's a lot of eye rolls there's no way there weren't tons of eye rolls right like like i i you know i actually think the very limited amount of time that it was around that weekend i think i heard a few people you know do the verbal eye rolls to me by the way my friends say that sometimes just for a joke having a conversation like point of
privilege and they'll just spit out something yeah right um and it's like i i think but the thing is people most you know most everybody who's who's uh who's rolling their eyes uh i mean i think i actually think my friend kale brooks was there might if he might have actually he might have actually like uh uh had a um like i think somebody came actually came over to his table and uh they were you know and like told them to like not clap and you know they were like what's what's what's wrong with you uh and like are you clapping you're ruining life you know they actually did have a little thing about that but they uh is are you supposed to do this are you supposed to yeah i i think so or something i used to do in the jazz dude that was like a beatnik thing right yeah and that's uh and and like but most people who are gonna roll their eyes aren't gonna say anything because you don't want to be the guy who's you don't be an [ __ ] yeah exactly you're not there to be an [ __ ] right like you're there because like you actually care about the issues that your organization is about you didn't sign up for this so you could spend your time arguing with crazy people about whether clapping is okay right uh so i think it's a very understandable impulse but i think what what i started to realize when i was thinking about examples like this is that for a long time like it's not like i didn't know that there were a lot of people who were ridiculous in ways like this or a lot of people who were like unhelpfully moralistic you know and in ways like the you know what was talked about in the comedy chapter of the book or you know who uh would excuse things that shouldn't be excused like in the end you know you know part like but i think what i always told myself was look none of this matters that much like some people some leftists are idiots but whatever like in the greater scheme of things it's not that you know like we live in a world where there are you know imperialist wars and union busting etc etc etc this is such a minor irritation
then like why spend time talking about it and thinking about it but then at a certain point my perspective started to change because i actually think that the fact that there are all of those other issues that are more important is a reason to try to get people to stop acting like this because if you actually care about doing something about those bigger issues then if you look to like any like just you know working class onlooker you know who you might be trying to you know who like ideally you'd want to reach out to right right if you look like this lunatic who's like getting mad at people because they're clapping instead of doing whatever they're supposed to do with their fingers you know then they're not gonna have anything to do with you who can blame them gotta weed out the freaks yeah it's like some people just they can't see the forest for the trees right yeah that's yeah they're they're concentrated on this one thing when what you're trying to accomplish is this more inclusive view of socialism and how socialism could fit into our modern culture and instead they want they want you to not clap or not talk and don't please watch your idol chatter and the noise you make i'm easily distracted like oh my god self-indulgence it's like it's a real problem with any group and when whenever people are trying to be like ultra sensitive and ultra progressive and ultra open-minded you open the door for annoying people you open the door for people that just need a tremendous amount of attention yeah and there's got to be a way that you can you know square the circle of saying like okay look uh are there obviously you know should there be more accommodations for disabled people and like society as a whole than there are sure right uh but anything you could call a disability should like you crank the dial of accommodation up to 11 like like all times you know no right like like like should should you uh
should you care about like you know not uh you know discriminating against trans people absolutely absolutely yes does that mean that like you need to be constantly on guard for like anything that somebody says in a comedy set that could be like interpreted if you look in just the right light no right and i think that if you think especially that the things that should be the biggest priorities are about the actual distribution of material resources you know who who has you know who has health care you know how much inequality do we have you know how how's uh you know like like have we like built up the labor movement all you know all of these things and trying to get the united states to not have this like kind of imperial world policeman you know foreign foreign policy which by the way as we've been like in these we were talking about earlier right in these last weeks while people have been you know freaking out about you know whatever's going on in the news about you know things that joe rogan said 15 years ago or about what whoopi goldberg said on the view or whatever like we're about to go to war yeah exactly right like this is you know i mean however slim the chance like the fact that there's the standoff with with uh with russia that like that has the potential if that happened right i mean that would be an absolute like human catastrophe right even if it stayed conventional that that that would be yeah like that would be ridiculous and by the way is one of many many reasons that i wish bernie sanders were president right now because he put out an article in the guy in the op-ed about how important it was to uh in the guardian to about how important it was to you know negotiate to like stop this you know from from from escalating and i'm not you know i'm not sure that i don't know what's gonna happen but like when i see like biden canceling you know the meeting with putin you know like i i get i get nervous and and i think that like
given how destructive that would be right like that's that's gotta be you know like that's gotta override almost everything else right now just in terms of like how important it is that we that we stop acting like this i don't know why the united states has to have the kind of role in the world where we're you know negotiating about what happens in ukraine at all right like why is it important that the united states have this you know be like present in everything that happens it's a weird role everywhere on the planet you know that they that uh that you know when uh you know when the united states invaded panama i think that was totally unjustified but you know like the you know gorbachev you know what wasn't like involving himself you know in in that right you know because the soviet union didn't uh didn't have that that role in the world and i'd rather that we didn't either i'd rather that like instead of having like however many hundreds of military bases the united states has all over the entire you know like every part of you know every part of the world right now and constantly fighting these like low-level drone wars that like most americans have like forgotten that they're even happening you know in in distant countries like i think that i think that if we redirected the kinds of resources that we spend on having this role in the world to taking care of of people's material needs in ways that you know it wouldn't fund all of it but it would do a lot it would do a lot well listen man i really enjoyed our conversation thank you for doing this it was a lot of fun yeah thank you so much for having me my pleasure thanks for the buffalo treasure enjoy the whiskey and uh tell everybody where they can find you on social media and uh where they can get your stuff sure so um i have a show called give them an argument which you can find in youtube and all the usual podcast places i write for jacob magazine you can find me there
and as far as all the links to everything in this book and other books and everything else just go to benburgh.com that's probably the easiest way to find everything social media as well it's on there yep social media you know twitter's at ben burgess but all the links are on there all right all right thanks brent thank you so much my pleasure all right bye everybody [Music]