Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIlI-Se-pk8
hello David here we go we're live we're doing it yes we're doing it what's going on man don't be I enjoy your show I really do thank you it's a pleasure to watch you you're very smart guy man you and like I said we're just talking about it you're very reasonable in this world I think there's so much of this the YouTube political world the YouTube commentary world where people are so [ __ ] toxic you know this there's so much negativity there's so much what they call dunking on people there's so much dunking you do a little dunking some of its warranted it is warranted yes but I don't know if it's beneficial to the to the people doing the dunking yes or even to the cause I think it is temporarily well sometimes it's good because it showed it mocks people's positions and it makes people realize hey that is a ridiculous position so if you're on the fence or if you're not really quite sure how you feel about things and you see someone get mocked for a ridiculous position that maybe you've even shared for a little bit right maybe maybe you haven't explored it deeply and you see someone who has explored it deeply sort of expose all the flaws in this line of thinking it's good but my thing what I'm I and I interview a lot of people on the ride and a lot of people on the left and I just hate all this conflict that I'd say the unnecessary conflict I think is when you when you watch television today and you see and Tifa fighting with the you know Trump supporters and all this all this weird conflict I don't I don't necessarily think that most of it is is necessary necessary well I think the Devils in the details yeah so like as an example if you want to bring together I don't know people who are on opposite sides of the climate debate for example good luck sure right well why is part part of that you could argue is if one side just does not accept science right how can you really bring those people together it doesn't mean you need physical conflict to resolve it in fact I completely agree with you the physical conflict is totally counterproductive but at a certain point on some issues I understand why there's like an in Traktor to the debate where it seems completely impossible to move forward because
whichever side you're on I would argue that I'm on the right side of these issues and others would disagree when you're far apart in a way that you can't even agree as to like what the starting-point facts are about the conversation how do you even how do you start I have some ideas as to how I try to do it but it's very tough it is very tough I just don't think dunking on people always like constantly [ __ ] on people is necessarily the way to do it yeah and I think it's important to distinguish between just straight up at homonyms where someone is wrong and bad because I think they're a bad person or they're an idiot or whatever to recognizing when somebody is a participant in bad faith in a conversation yeah – when someone has maybe fallen prey to audience capture or whatever else might be kind of influencing what what and how they're doing I think that those criticisms are legitimate but yeah you got to stay away from just ad hominem yes yes I agree and I think that it's just so common today it's it's it's it's also extremely attractive the the YouTube algorithm you know as far as comments go I mean you know it actually kind of encourages it and so does Facebook so does you know anytime there's a social media platform that is ad dependent one of the best ways to get people to engage is to have something they disagree with so they can get angry yes until it becomes no longer brand safe according to whoever's running the platform right I mean right you go back to April 2017 where I woke up and saw that my YouTube channel made 19 cents the previous day and i text kyle kolinsky and i say i think there's like a glitch is it like it says i made 19 cents and he says it says i made 35 cents or something like that something's going on and it was the beginning of like ad pocalypse woman wait oh yeah and that was a rough three week period and so so it's you know encourage the debate and the battle of ideas so to speak and all of this stuff until advertisers get worried and they say you know our ads are showing up on stuff that's a little it touch-and-go for us that's a weird one to me because I YouTube has always been a secondary thought for me the the first thought was the audio version of the podcast and in fact when we were
uploading it to YouTube at first I was like why are we even doing this I guess why not some people probably want to watch it and then somewhere along the line it became at least close to as big as the audio version of it and then maybe even more significant because one of the things that the YouTube version has is the comment section which is often a [ __ ] dumpster fire but it at least there is some sort of like a community engagement aspect of it that doesn't really exist in iTunes so I can in iTunes it's sort of it's in a vacuum right sure but when the ad pocalypse thing happened I was like hmmm what was going on here it wasn't it wasn't my primary focus so it wasn't terrifying but people that only did YouTube and people that relied on that for their living I mean it's a huge blow it was huge and at the time I'm trying to think back I think maybe like around 30% of my entire shows revenue was coming from YouTube at the time so it was not everything but it was still significant right I mean I have staff and overhead and all of that stuff so just overnight 30% going away is huge and that's why I've tried to move to the model of telling my audience you can skip all of this stuff you know even some of these other you know super chats and all of this other stuff like we run a membership program on my website I control a hundred percent of it so it's not a patreon deal we're on patreon but it's not big for us the way I think about it is as long as I mean listen yeah there's you know marijuana companies that are having trouble even processing payments but assuming like stripe and PayPal don't say you can't even accept payments anymore David Pakman right I control the entire process on my website so when people pay their six bucks all but two point nine percent gets to me and when ad pocalypse happened I saw it as a maybe blessing in disguise in that I could now explain to the audience here's the problem with these algorithms here's the problem when it goes from I am fighting white supremacist content – an algorithm can't distinguish between that and white-supremacist Khan oh that's bad for me yeah right when I interview Richard Spencer mmm I obviously don't agree with Richard Spencer but can an algorithm figure out
that there's a difference between an interview I do with Richard Spencer and white nationalist propaganda I don't know but we can kind of get around all that if you just go directly to me and that's why my focus has been growing that those direct did you interview Richard Spencer yeah did you get [ __ ] for that yes yeah that's a weird one right and you know um I'm sure you're aware that uh that what is it called the date in society that the Kin whether there was a woman who made a bunch of connections like Joe Rogan knows David pac-man and Joe Rogan also knows Alex Jones Alex Jones must be friends with David Pakman like the man yeah it's like one of those minds you know like let's and it was really weird it's like guilt by association I saw a couple of them there was like an initial one which means you're thinking of then there was a map of like the YouTube sphere specifically yeah yeah yeah and this idea that everyone's like a part of a grand conspiracy to help each other out and push right ideology even though you know a lot of people that were labeled as right or aren't right like who like me oh I'm not right at all my sense is your politics are pretty left on most stuff although I don't I mean I don't know you personally beyond just seeing your shows but maybe the critique is based on because I think that those maps were based on what is the YouTube algorithm suggesting mm-hmm and so that may not be in line with your personal politics right it's just maybe what we're talking about like if you're interested in conflict if you're trying to get engagement that that's the way to do it like you know if you to out YouTube algorithm is constantly suggesting people like Ben Shapiro or having McGinnis or whatever and those videos come up over and over again sure and I mean so a lot of those people's channels do really well on YouTube so if you interview someone who has a channel themselves there's a very good chance that the algorithm if they're watching your interview with that person will say well here's a lot of their stuff and then once you click there the the algorithm very quickly starts to build a picture of every individual user mm-hmm if you watch your interview with ben
shapiro and then it takes you to a daily wire video right then it takes you like the daily wire second-stringer guy and then you're off who knows where right that's it's all machine learning right I mean that's all the most part yeah that's uh it is it's a troubling aspect of that thing that they do where they suggest the next videos which didn't used to be a thing it used to be you would go to YouTube you would watch a video right and then you would go find another video right they didn't suggest anything and then somewhere along the line I don't remember what year it was but this started happening and then they start Auto playing the next video autoplay yeah I think there was a some kind of recommendation thing very early on but initially it might have been restricted to just other videos from the same channel you're watching probably and at a certain point it started to recommend other things and I don't know if you look at your analytics and see what percentage of your views are coming from that recommendations feed from other stuff hmm but it's significant for a lot of YouTube channels the the tagging your videos and getting the right meta data on them in order to bring an audience is an important thing so it's a double-edged sword in some sense it sounds it sounds like you know to get back to what you were saying about so rich labelled you Oh is Richard okay you know I was gonna say it they labeled you is right but you're not right dude well it's just it's disingenuous I mean I've said it over and over and over again I've never voted for a Republican in my life I voted independent for Gary Johnson just because he did my podcast okay and I wasn't happy with Clinton and I wasn't happy with Trump just like this is just gross I'm just gonna vote for Gary Johnson I mean I didn't think he was gonna win you know I had almost no chance when you didn't know where what aleppo was right I was like that was his he was his scream you know like what's-his-face from New Hampshire and Howard Dean Howard Dean yeah Barney also I assume if I'm sure it wasn't going to Joe yeah but people conveniently will just as or they'll say that like you're a Trojan horse they're like a pretend left-wing / who's really just pushing right-wing
ideologies well which one which which right-wing ideology is it gay marriage is it what is it I put I'm on the left on everything except maybe a second Amendment right I think the criticism that could be levied if one wanted to make it into a criticism would be if you engage with right-wing ideas that you don't agree with right like I take you at your face you know face value that you don't agree with a lot of the stuff that your right-wing guests say one could make the argument that by not challenging those ideas it's implicitly lending them more credibility than maybe you think they should have that's interesting because what I try to do with people unless something saying someone saying something egregious I try to let them talk I want to know how they feel I want to know what their thought process is and so instead of just challenging a minute on everything I want them to elaborate right and I feel like by doing that I get a sense of how they've come to that conclusion and whether it's logical right whether it's when they're there they've actually used their thoughts and they've really calculated and thought this is the position I take and this is why and I a lot of people don't know there's a lot of a lot of times we challenge people in their positions you find out like they don't really know what the [ __ ] they're talking about and that the best way to find that out is to let them talk yes I can – someone's on climate change right that was I mean there's the Socratic method of questioning you know which is why do you think that and how do you know that that's true etc etc and sort of some other questions that that come from it which I do as well I mean I think I don't know to tie it to the Richard Spencer interview that I did some of the criticism I received after was from people on the left I mean the people I would assume it was most of it was people in the law for doing the interview yes or for what I said in the interview for ready okay yeah for doing the interview at all the criticism was more from the left right for what I said in the interview the criticism was more from the right from people who just agreed with Richard Spencer like what things did they agree with that it is inevitable that people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds simply
will not be able to coexist together peacefully and were better off trying to figure out how can we separate people based on their membership in ethnic or religious groups separatism I mean literally separatism that's sad it's it's a sad thought that you just can't get along with people that do other things that that are interests interested in other things that come from other places that have different religions that have different points of view like why you oh well they they have a series of you know decades of what they call scholarship supporting their view but for the context of my interview I made it abundantly clear that I didn't agree with that stuff right yeah and my view is and everybody can have a different view about how they do interviews my view is if I just allow the the what I consider to be disgusting views to be spread out right you know like a spray bottle just spray them everywhere and not do anything else I can't say that I'm doing something that I think is valuable I don't feel like it's valuable so my my approach is are the ideas known enough to be worth refuting that's number one if it's some weird conspiracy theory that has not even any following whatsoever I'm probably not going to choose to even entertain it because it's irrelevant in sort of always so my first question is is was Richard Spencer relevant at the time all right was rising this guy was considered by many the sort of creator of the alt-right he was growing a following in the context of the Trump candidacy at the time or maybe administration I don't remember when it wasn't real it was I think 2016 or trying to remember when it was I don't remember when I first heard his name yeah how did he become how did he come to prominence I don't know the sequence but I think he had a wet and alt-right website that had articles of some kind and then he that website became more known and that [ __ ] terms so talk alright you know alt left the centrist argues did all these different labels are so I'd rather talk about issues I can't either it's so clunky but so you know first thing was I did want to interview him but if I had felt
I wouldn't be prepared to make it abundantly clear that I don't agree with the guy and I think his ideas were terrible I wouldn't have done the internet right so the problem I had with the critiques from the left of me doing that some who said the last thing we need to be doing is giving this guy a voice that's often how they say it or a platform my response was this guy's getting interviewed in lots of other places that aren't even challenging him right I'm at least making an attempt here to get something in the record that there are arguments against these ideas these are bad ideas and I don't want to be part of the diffusion of just the ideas themselves but I wanna be pushing back I'm gonna have to watch that now now when you did do that like what was his response was during the interview what was his response to your pushback uh I mean he had answers you know he was well prepared and I don't know if there were they were unique or new arguments that I was making but there was no argument to be made that I was letting him just parrot white nationalist talking points unopposed which I wouldn't I just wouldn't feel good about that right it's not how I do interviews yeah and then the left was upset that you're giving him air quotes a platform a very small portion of the left I want to be super clear that's Bill Leff I mean my audience is very left and almost everybody understood what I was doing mmm ten years ago I was interviewing the Westboro Baptist Church most people understood what I was doing they were more prominent at the time but there was this sliver of the left that just didn't want the conversation to take place and I always struggle with this because as you can see I have no problem criticizing that sliver of the left my concern is getting like overly wrapped up to criticisms of the left that are only held by these like nish slices yes and that's why I try to avoid going further than necessary into those criticisms like I think there are more serious critiques of the left to be made hmm beyond anti speech or want to limit speech or whatever I mean there's more so that's that's a pretty big issue well I don't I don't actually agree that it exists on a significant portion of the
left like I think a bigger issue for example like if you said what is like a serious issue that the left needs to contend with right now yeah I would say a more serious issue is if you look at the progressive accomplishments the early 20th century for example like 1905 to 1925 and the New Deal accomplishments that the Left had in the time of FDR what was different I think then then the left now is that you didn't have to be completely in line with a specific set of policies or ideas mhm and I worry that now there's a little bit of the left maybe having this idea that if you're not in line on all of these issues whatever the checklist is so to speak you're not really worthy of being a participant in what is clearly a leftward move in sort of the average Americans political orientation I don't want to see that prevent progress right yeah that's the that's the hard tribalism right that's that's where the the line gets drawn you're with us are against us and there's one way to think there is there is a lot of that I mean I saw it with health care recently mm-hmm with health care I don't think that you can make any serious case from the left that health care is fine and the for-profit employer connected system that we have is working but I don't think there's any progressive case to be made for that where people will differ is what about Medicare for all versus some other system system that looks more like Canada's or the UK or Germany or whatever and I've already started to see like when I say on my show I'm kind of agnostic on this like the system we have is a disaster we need a system that will get coverage to everybody the the numbers can be made to work any number of different ways we've looked at it but 80 percent of people on Medicare I believe it is have some additional coverage they either are still working part-time or full-time and get coverage that way or they're poor enough to be on Medicaid the point is Medicare for all doesn't solve every issue right it's way better than what we have but here's like a dozen other possibilities looking at other countries there is a portion of the left that doesn't like that because I'm saying I'm against Medicare for all I'm not saying that what I'm saying is there are a number of different ways to
improve upon the system we have all of which sever this relationship between usually your employer and these for-profit insurance companies yeah we be open to that really don't understand private citizens that don't want easy access to quality health care for everybody that confuses the [ __ ] out of me like have you ever been hurt have you ever been sick yeah have you ever been broke right do you want to be broke and have no access to health care no one does no one wants anybody they care about to not have access to health care of all the things that we concentrate on this country there's two things that that drive me [ __ ] crazy that people just dismiss education and health care the idea that you have to like my buddy Greg Greg Fitzsimmons he's sending his kid off to school how much they say that it was sixty five thousand dollars a year for both of his kids for each of his kids so you know he's got two kids that that's that hurts my head you even think about spending a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year just on if you're a regular person with a regular job how the [ __ ] do you do that impossible it's impossible it's just so much [ __ ] money and then that's not even paying for housing and food and transportation and books and everything else that you're gonna need to and to make it more difficult for young people to succeed is one of the worst ways to make a stronger country if you want a strong country you want educated people that get to pursue their dreams and the idea that we are so willing to spend so much money on these costly regime-change Wars and flying troops overseas these places that they don't want to go no one no one wants it to happen and it's trillions of dollars and people are fine with that but you talk to them about some sort of socialized education system and people freak out and think you want to turn us into communists well I think what is really important to understand is that the facts you just laid out don't matter to people see this as an issue of what do people deserve what do they deserve so if you say to a fiscal conservative you know if you consider the amount that the employee pays for premiums plus the employer plus your co-pays plus coinsurance but you can put it all together into some amount and you
explain to them there's lots of great analyses that have been done tell us that with roughly the same amount of money maybe a small payroll tax in addition with roughly that same amount it all could be done with a single-payer system that covers everybody it's the same you're taking all of these individual risk pools where you have different for-profit insurers and then you have systems for people that don't have enough money Medicaid you have systems for people that are over 65 Medicare you put it all together you spread the risk far wider the employer no longer has to pay their part of the premium the employee no longer pays part of their premium to the for-profit insurance company the numbers work they're still not going to say you know what that that sounds great it's actually pretty fiscally conservative let's do it because at some point there is a portion of the right that just doesn't think people have earned health care they just haven't earned it they have education or education that's right and it's very hard to change people's minds when that's their view I think it's might be George Lakoff who I believe calls it strict father morality which is like how would a really strict father treat a child who comes to them and says hey you know what I figured out a way that we can all have health care the strict father even if the numbers make sense would say I'm gonna teach you a lesson you haven't earned that health care either because you don't work or you don't make enough money or you're on disability whatever the case may be how do you convince someone to change their mind when that's their worldview yeah how do you when it's an ideologically based decision and you're on Team R or Team L you know what which which group of ideas do adopt right yeah the UK system sucks you talk to people that get health care over in the UK it sucks but at least they have a system it's just not the same quality health care that you get in America same with my friends in Canada I have friends in Canada that have come down here to get surgery because they find better doctors over here because ransall was going to Canada to get his that is why was that why did he do that the best place is in Canada the best place for hernias for that type of hernia I believe you hmm
I mean here's the thing even in saying the UK system and the Canadian system neither one is that good right those two systems are totally different right so it's I feel a little socialized medicine they are both well yes in some sense I mean the Canadian system is administered at the province level so the province is sort of like the market instead of having all these sub markets attached to individual for-profit insurers at the provincial level that's how its organized the UK has the National Health Service where they're actually they don't actually run the health care facilities but they are the ones who are contracting them so it's sort of like the the health care facility still is its own entity it's not that you're going and the government is the employer of the doctors so to speak but they're contracting with the healthcare facilities but the point I want to make is that there are criticisms of all of these systems but they're different ones so when we say and the British and Canadian systems aren't that good right let's figure out in what ways each is not that good because there are different ways whether you're talking about health outcomes early detection cost per treatment whatever mm-hmm you really have to drill down and figure out and what way are we saying it's not as good yeah what I'm saying is that there's no perfect system there is no perfect systems are right but I believe that most of the best doctors in terms of like North America at least are in the United States I'm sure there's probably some very good doctors in Canada that do specialized medicine but I think really good doctors are incentivized by profit I really do I think there is some motivation for if you spend so much money for medical school and you you bust your ass you want to make a lot of money and some of the best doctors earn a really good living that I think I think limiting their uh their ability to earn that money won't incentivize people to be excellent so a couple different things I mean number one to be clear we're now starting to get into a little bit of broader economic philosophy like I'm a capitalist I'm for social democracy which is a mixed system that's a capitalist system that says we're going to invest tax revenue in a particular
way to make sure that no one falls below a certain level so my just to contextualise that my point of view is not from one of becoming a socialist country and I think we share those views I think so a lot of doctors will say that even though on sort of on paper in a socialized medicine system they might make less for a particular procedure for example or something like that a lot of them are still in favor of those systems because it would drastically reduce their overhead so there's an all of this apparatus that includes medical billing and coding both on the insurer and and at the healthcare provider end the hospital and the insurance company both are battling over what is it that was done right what are the codes that apply here and how what are reimbursement rates there's fraud when it comes to that and that requires an apparatus for investigating and adjudicating that that adds more and more cost so I don't think it's as easy I don't think it's as obvious that under those systems at the end of the day a doctor that owns a PCP group for example or an orthopedic clinic or whatever the case may be I don't know that it's that clear that they end up taking home less money hmm that's interesting I'd wonder if in practice that would play out that way maybe maybe I'm talking about just like high-end orthopedic surgeons that do knee surgeries for athletes and things along those lines they often would be outside of whatever insurance apparatus we're talking about anyway a lot of those folks are often being paid out of pocket anyway yes so it's less in beliefs some at least some so for the average person's experience I think it's less relevant yeah then there's also liability insurance which is extremely expensive that's a giant issue with with doctors it's a huge expense it is yeah I mean I think it is necessary mm-hmm there's a question as to whether it's organized in the best way I know less about that component than some of the other ones you know the education in health care those are the two things that I think we can both agree and we need to invest money on and we need to figure out some way to make that more accessible yes yes and I don't understand people that don't think that and if that's what that is the strict father mentality they're just the only
thing that it makes sense to me is that you don't want people who are kind of half-ass in college just right did that can just get it I think that that comes up a lot you know you hear about so-called three college which is it's free it's we're saying we're paying for it through taxation really important to point that out it's it's just not for everybody that's okay I mean I think that that that sometimes gets lost and yes there are more and more jobs that require college degrees even though you could make the case maybe the college degree is not actually necessary but it's a way to sort of thin the herd of applicants in order to just make hiring you know more more practical but I do think that it's okay to say that college isn't for everybody but the same ideas that apply to so-called free college meaning college paid for through education could apply to trade school they could apply to retraining programs there's a whole bunch of other ways that it could be done yeah no I agree yeah I just the college is not for everyone thing is more true now than ever before particularly with certain technology studies you're learning things during your four years at a university that are just gonna be completely outdated by the time you graduate in in what kind of program for example Jamie what he did with audio engineering oh I see okay you went to school for audio engineering by the time he got out it was all useless yeah but but that was not a four-year bachelor's program right it is now oh it is now okay I when I went there it wasn't available for that but since then they have made that available and that's awesome in the time that YouTube has made basically education free for a lot of people sure so I mean I think with that the issue is in my mind that when you consider the cost relative to the earnings potential as you pointed out when you learn about $68,000 a year or you know I went over this I guess taught at Boston College and I think it was like 64,000 all and something like that depending on what field you're going into it's it's almost impossible to pay that off ever so some at some point something needs to change and this kind of gets us into the technological automate automate and an unemployment stuff of what happens as computers and
Technology start to replace jobs and that's where I think there's a pretty clear line between a free-market capitalist a social democrat like self and actual socialism like what should happen with the gains that come from those technological advancements but as far as the education piece is concerned it's completely unsustainable the way it is now I knew about you before this happened but then I really kind of got on board with you when someone was trying to get you fired from Boston University and I remember in college Boston College sorry and I tweeted it and I was like right like what what is this this is greatness so it's a woman named Amy Siskind who I don't know other than that incident where you had a disagreement about something it wasn't yeah it wasn't toxic it wasn't hostile I think said I didn't explain what you said in what she what she'd said that you disagree with so we may be able to even find the tweet but she tweeted something the gist being that she would not be supporting any candidate in 2020 who's white or male I think that that was the justice and I responded I'm going from memory here the gist was something like isn't that the definition of racism you're sort of preemptively excluding someone from consideration on the basis of race and in that case gender if it was white and there is right there yeah there's work I will not submit candidates in the Denver area unless you slept through midterms women were our most successful candidate biggest dem vote getters in history Obama oh wait Hillary 16 white male is not where our party is at and it is our least safe option in 2020 right so I said isn't there something not progressive about preemptively dismissing a candidate based on their race and gender I feel like there's a word to describe that as a progressive I won't be jumping on board yes so will you basically didn't even say it's racist right you said there's a word to describe that yeah and that's a very polite way of disagreeing with someone I thought it was polite and she tried to get you fired yeah she contacted as far as I know so okay I don't I'm going by what she said she said she contacted Boston College and told them not to allow me to teach there that's insane and Boston College since I'm just an
adjunct I'm not on staff when I'm not teaching like during the three months of the semester I'm employed there and the other nine months I'm not so I think Boston College said he's not currently employed here and I think that that's basically as far as it went but I did talk to some other faculty there who were aware of the thing that was going on that's a crazy thing to do mmm just I think so it's a nasty mean thing to do to like what someone can't disagree with you and it's a very good point I think she probably got upset because you made a very good point and tweet started coming her way and a lot of people they read those [ __ ] comments and people get toxic in those comments yeah random strange people that you don't know and then you're forced to you know look at their opinions and their criticisms and their insults that incident started me down the path of drastically limiting my social media use good for you yeah I mean that that was the beginning and then it became I mean you know this way more than I do because I think on all platforms you have roughly ten times the following that I do no matter what you do post or whatever if you look at what the feedback is it's extraordinarily toxic and horrible negative stuff that is only a distraction to what I'm trying to do and most of it probably isn't but I hadn't of all on yesterday no more round weekend yeah and one of the things that he brought up it's so so huge it's so true is that you can have ten positive things but that one negative will outweigh the ten positive in your mind you and your maps aleut yeah absolutely especially if you're a person who's self-critical or a self objective you're analyzing your behavior was that good was that bad right and then you read that one bad comic [ __ ] are they right you don't read all the people that say you're great Oh brilliant loved it yeah [ __ ] you loser Oh absolutely I mean when I announced I was going to be doing your show if you look at what the comments were almost all this is awesome great left-wing voice talking to Joe Rogan go get him David this is such a great opportunity can't wait to watch you faceplant oh geez and that's the one where I'm like man are they right so I
don't know I'm just trying to limit the amount that I'm honest or – yeah one thing I am doing though because I mean my show is in part as successful as it is because of social media so I can't ignore that right you don't have to engage I don't have to engage and I also can just say I will check our networks in the morning then I'll spend the whole day I'll do my show I'll do what I need to do and then before I sign off for the evening I'll check it and that's a terrible idea because what if you read the worst [ __ ] right before you eat dinner or go to bed well no it'll be like five pm five hours – cool and it's way better and weekends I'm almost I mean people are like David you're still tweeting on the weekends a lot of those are like pre scheduled tweets where I'll just sit and schedule some stuff and I am trying to stay off it and it's been really great I mean we looked at our phones yesterday we did a sober October podcast with my four friends yeah we looked at our phones to look at phone usage and I use my own four hours a day on my phone for hours a day average book that's a lot what app did you use to measure it it's something on your iPhone oh okay yeah you have a Android we have a similar thing yeah yeah yeah four hours of screen time like ooh that's not good they're adding it to the computer too so it's gonna combine you'll know how much you're looking at all screens mm-hmm yeah but if you're writing well we're gonna count that kind of sure stare at the screen that's hard work [ __ ] hey that's what you guys are making for the phone just as Burke sorry man yeah well Bert's arguments not good it's he doesn't right that's ridiculous one thing I did that actually is useful is I used to have my social apps on the home screen and Cal Newport and some others have said you got you got to get rid of those he actually advocates getting rid of the apps altogether so that you have to go on a computer and choose to go to facebook.com or Twitter I I haven't gotten there yet but even just removing them from the home screen makes me significantly less likely to even pull them it's it's two clicks yeah to swipe up and scroll over to the app right but even just getting them off the home screen keeps me off of them
significantly that's smart that makes sense yeah I need a certain amount of access to those things with my business right scheduling shows and things along those lines but yeah it's not good for you I mean I think one of the biggest realizations is that people don't really miss you that much they don't hear from me for a couple days like that's one of the things where the idea of needing constant engagement comes from sort of like a slightly narcissistic point of view where like people are going to notice if I don't tweet for from Thursday night until Monday morning or do anything right they really don't they don't they don't there's a lot of other people to pay attention yes there are a few people that tweet on you that that are kind of crazy and that want to hear from you all day long yeah but they'll get used to it they'll get used to you they will vanishing and I don't know I mean Cal Newport it has have you had a mando okay he wrote deep work and then more recently he wrote digital minimalism and he goes into detail about just the effect of write it down my phone but it feels sacrilegious to take it out right now yeah I mean he goes into detail about this stuff and just about you know the we need more uninterrupted periods of concentration for what is the book called again deep work and then digital minimalism and they're both I interviewed him recently really just solid very solid stuff awesome yeah what were we just about to get into oh so we're this woman Amy Siskin did you reach out to her when she did that and privately yeah no no did you reach out publicly uh well you did publicly declare that she tried to get you fired right yes I did did she respond I don't know because she blocked me oh god damn it she blocked you over that and yeah Jesus that is so sensitive what what is Twitter for right is it just to fall in line is it just to agree with everything someone says with no questioning whatsoever what's extra interesting about is she blocked me on Twitter but then I treat my facebook profile basically as public so I post stuff on there it's the same whether you're friends with me or not and I had posted something totally innocuous about I was at a restaurant or
drinking and espresso on it I don't even know what it was mhm she showed up there and commented that she had called Boston College and told them not to you know not to hire me or to fire me or whatever also hosts about you having an espresso it was just a personal post right but the point is she determined that the exchange was worthy of blocking me on Twitter but then she came to my personal Facebook page and said I'm calling Boston College and telling them to fire you there's a word for that guys really if you there's a gang but there's a big one yeah this is a four letter one I just don't understand why someone would want to do that to someone why can't you disagree why can't yeah and she's just upset that you pointed out a glaring problem with what she was saying yeah apparently and you know the thing is I don't I the way I operate I don't think even necessarily that she's a bad person I just assumed that she has you know some emotional thing going on she could have had a terrible date as far as I know someone near and dear to her died that day I am if someone near and dear to me died I wouldn't necessarily be on Twitter your Facebook or post about you drinking an espresso fair fair toe people I'd try to get you fired but my approach is I just I really do assume most people are pretty good people and even when we have disagreements I tend to give the benefit of the doubt that if we could only talk the way we're doing yeah we could figure out 95% of the disagreement I agree with you maybe not all of it right but most of it so I don't begrudge her I mean yeah I don't actually behave in a way I wouldn't behave but who knows what she had going on you know I mean it's yeah well it didn't get you fired so it's not that bad but if it did that would have been horrible it would have been a different situation yeah would have been probably good publicity yeah probably helps you I think so you get excited about that the reason I'm thinking back actually to a conversation I had at where someone said to me if you do get fired it's the best possible thing that'll happen right it would just be fantastic and it didn't because I wasn't actually employed there at the time
that's the irony of it well this is the thing that the falling in line the the no room for deviation from the ideology sure this is this is a giant issue that I have with both both parties it's and I think it's one of the reasons why people are in these parties to begin with I don't necessarily think that people have clearly thought out every single aspect of whatever party they aligned with I think they fall in line and they adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior that seems to be attractive at the time and then they fall in line with whatever that party is saying I think that is a giant percentage of people when someone deviates from that like you did someone who is also clearly a progressive and clearly a left-wing person and you're criticizing something and very very politely and that she just goes haywire over that that's the thing right it's like are you responsible for the people who also comment on your post and this is this is where we're getting to this like Vox thing that's happening with steven crowder right now right are you responsible for the reaction to what you post cause if you look at what steven crowder said to that if we don't people don't know the story steven crowder got into it with this guy who is a writer for Vox who is he's gay his Twitter handle is gay wonk Alice maza yeah so it's not that he's hiding that he's gay talks about it all the time he's kind of effeminate and steven crowder mocked that and he mocked that in these videos where he was criticizing Carlos's position on an Tifa it specifically what I saw and in in doing that he called him this queer Mexican this like and he's doing it in a ribbing way he's doing in a joking way and then Carlos maza posts all these horrible tweets that came his way and apparently he got docked so people got his phone and they were saying debate steven crowder who's getting all these text messages in and all this hateful stuff that was coming his way so the question is who is responsible for that hateful stuff if steven crowder calls him queer is what is queer okay is lbgtq what do we do there what do we do if the queue isn't is he is it okay to call somebody who identifies as gay if he calls him the gay little Mexican is that is that bad like what is how bad is that like
what is that you're saying but so you feel what I'm saying here it's like do I know where you're getting at let's zoom out a little bit right and then we'll get into okay man where do you even start with this cuz it back here right if we will analyze the specifics in a second oh maybe but first if you look at the policy the Terms of Service of YouTube there's a verge article from yesterday before a few days ago earlier this week before YouTube had made the decision to D monetize steven crowder well they made the decision to not act and it just say that it didn't violate my terms of services and right today as I got in here Jamie informed me that they made a decision to demand that's right so in the article where they made the decision not to act they actually put what YouTube's Terms of Service are with regard to bullying and harassment my reading of it and we could go through them if we could pull him up we could go through it line by line if we wanted my reading was that the that definitely did break the terms and conditions that was my view as I looked at what it was that was done by steven crowder and what the terms of service are just matching it up not looking at the comments what was it specifically it was specifically targeting an individual on the basis of sexual orientation but he wasn't targeting him on the basis of it he was mentioning that with his bad ideas he was targeting his bad ideas in regards to an Tifa a lot of that he was dismissing in Tifa but if you look at Crowder's video and i can't believe i spend so much time doing this but i don't like a whole hour on this two days ago yeah he was talking about how Carlos just dismisses and tifa's being not that big a deal and that there's bias in the media whenever there's anything negative that happens if you look at the overall picture and then Crowder goes on to talk about all the assaults all the murders that there were sexual assaults there was rapes there was all these things that happened with an Tifa he was talking about all these different people that got maced in the face all these people that got hurt and and he's highlighting all like this is not something to easily dismiss sure and that the FBI had labeled an Tifa a terrorist organization
so so far it's just politics it's just what it what does he think what do I think so far it's just that part of it and along the way he's like yeah but the queer little Latino says this yeah and when he does that that's where it's like okay what is he doing is he ma he's kind of mocking him right and he's mocking him by saying he's queer but he says he's queer or he says he's gay yeah but that's like saying I mean listen just because the n-word is in rap songs it doesn't mean that any that it's defined to go right but the n-word is not in like it's not like then LBGT n you know I'm saying it's not like a part of their their organiz you're suggesting that because a certain word is sometimes used self-referential II by members of a group that any use of it from the outside is by definition not problematic and I'm just saying it's more complicated and you've got certain specifics I'm going from memory but wasn't steven crowder also wearing a shirt that said [ __ ] with the a with an ass FIGS wink wink nudge nudge it said socialism is for FIGS okay he's calling a gay a is a fig instead of an eye as he's calling a gay guy Oakland rocks yeah yes yeah I mean in total it's not crazy no so no they said there's is certainly an argument that but I don't necessarily think the t-shirt is for Carlos Mesa I think that's a t-shirt that it just has because he thinks it's funny and because Che Guevara who is on the shirt is that is one of the weirdest things that people worship that guy he was a horrific human being a mass murderer a terrible sociopath a psychopath and because he looks good involved in the Cuban Revolution look good with a beret on you know he's he became for a long time I mean it's kind of died off but he became like the woke poster boy I'm from Argentina I know I don't know yeah I we born there yeah no kidding yeah yeah so I mean listen here's luckily my country bro I made it so listen I think that I do appreciate what you're saying and I agree with you to a certain extent I believe that when YouTube yesterday said we looked at the content in total and we don't think it violates our Terms and Conditions I disagreed with them I thought it very clearly violated their terms and
conditions where I am thinking about it now is the application of those terms and conditions violations because a similar thing happened with Alex Jones as well which was there's lots of ways smaller players that are violating these same terms and conditions but nobody knows about them YouTube doesn't know about them they don't get any attention because they have no audience so I think there's the question of the application of these terms and condition conditions in a way that's sort of fair and is not ultimately going by the public blowback or reaction to situations because that that's how I'd pocalypse 1.0 and again I think it was a coke ad appeared on an obviously racist video on a channel with like 800 or a thousand subscribers hmm The Wall Street Journal I think it was did an article saying look at these screenshots of these advertisers on these crazy racist videos mm that led to blowback because YouTube didn't want to lose money and ultimately that's what this is about I know that there are people who say YouTube has an inherently left-wing bias others say YouTube has a right-wing but whatever YouTube's bias is towards corporatism and profit yes that's fundamentally what it is and but as a company they have a left-wing bias I don't know that in what sense well in the sense that the woman is the CEO of YouTube has talked about it pretty openly like the fact that she doesn't what was it that she had gotten into what she oh well first of all was the the James d'amour thing you know she was talking about the Google memo and she was talking about how it was incredibly damaging the damaging damaging stereotypes against women which it just wasn't it's not accurate is homedepot a right-wing company because the CEO supports Trump that's a good question I'm basing it on that they're a part of Facebook and Facebook is pretty clearly left-wing we say Facebook Google oh sorry Google they're part of Google I meant Google Google is a very very left-wing group and it's all Silicon Valley which is almost entirely left-wing biased so I think we have to distinguish between the personal political biases of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the broader place that Google has in the sort of corporate sphere mm-hmm Google is part of the group of huge multinational corporations
that lobbies for a particular tax policy to avoid paying taxes and legally that is not a particularly left-wing thing to do Google is part of the large tech companies that in order to avoid serious regulation of their businesses have come up with this idea of regulating themselves okay which I know is a topic self-regulation that's come up before on your program in a variety of ways so those are not left-wing things and if you want to make the case that as a company it has a left-wing politic in the outward-facing world you have to have something more than just a lot of their engineers live in Palo Alto and our hipsters who go to coffee show what do you think I think that in in terms of the place that it occupies within the economic system we have they are not very different from all of the large corporations that are pushing against regulation pushing for ways to avoid taxes period so in terms of economic decisions yeah I mean listen if if we want to talk about how the personal politics of the employees translate to policy we can do that but we need to be able to make some specific claims about how it does what I'm saying is we know the way in which the structure that Google is a part of leads to advocating for things that are center-right corporatist capitalist the status quo of tax shelters havens and not paying taxes regulating ourselves etc etc well that's what's interesting about this Crowder thing is they're ultimately the decision was to allow him to have his freedom to post videos on there but the punitive aspect of it is they're gonna reduce his ability or eliminate his ability to make money Frank well I should say reduce right because he could couldn't he put videos put ads up in his video yeah sure so like we want one thing that I do is we we kind of split off the ad sales from my show into an ad agency and we're doing ad sales not just for my show but for other shows as well and those include ad placements that are not like the pre-roll ads on YouTube it's the host is actually talking about a product or whatever right it's a read you know a live reads sort of thing unbox therapy does a lot of that hmm yeah that's where I first saw those who did some pretty extensive ones okay so of course you can do that and yeah that
there's nothing so he can do that but he can't just collect revenue like I'm assume he's been doing before he has a significant number of followers I think is his YouTube subscribers are more than three and a half million so it's it's very high yeah more than me and they've just eliminated his income right comes out of YouTube and this was their decision based on his his way of talking about Carlos Mesa that's that's what happened yeah yeah I mean so what what are the concerns to me it's not that he didn't violate terms and conditions like I said I think he pretty clearly did the concerns to me are is YouTube only going to even look into these circumstances or instances when there is a public outcry the answer is probably yes because why would they look into stuff nobody's paying attention to what seems like they've changed their decision based on public outcry based on Carlos bayes's reaction in the initial decision I happen to think their initial decision was the wrong one but I have a sort of broader concern here which about the fairness of the application and also the distinguishing between content that is promoting whatever falls under any of our definitions of hateful or whatever content and those who are fighting against it so is it because he mentioned his sexual orientation and that he called him a lisp II little queer or whatever he called him more queer Mexican and if he just called him a [ __ ] idiot and he received the exact same amount of hate would you still think that that was a good move no I mean I think that it would not fall under what they are now claiming is the justification for the D monetization it would be different because it would have the same result the only difference would be they wouldn't be attacking his sexual orientation specifically because of crowd that's the only difference its policing speech you know it really is hears so who gets to decide if not the private businesses what their rules are that's where the real question comes up right tulsi gabbard believes that it's a First Amendment issue and she believes that everyone should have the freedom of expression and then as long as you're not doing anything illegal you're not putting anyone into danger by
giving up their address or daxing them or something along those lines or making overt physical threats right that you should be allowed to do that because that's what the freedom of speech is all about and freedom of speech when you eliminate social media in this country is your your freedom is basically just yelling yelling out in public yeah you're you're in this weird place it's as a culture as a culture it's unprecedented really in terms of the waters were navigating right now there's a couple different things to so I like the principle like my principle is we do almost no moderation on any of our platforms that my program is on my only thing that I tell my team is if you see something that really seems to be illegal it's calling for violence it whatever these are we have a very very high bar before we will remove anything and quite frankly we're just too busy what do you mean by that I'm confused like who's not your videos whose videos yeah so if we find out on our videos someone is posting endless comments oh yeah my personal view is if it's not illegal I just just let it all be there yes that's my personal view and that's a great principle to have well we don't touch them we do leave them alone even though we get accused of it but the the question is YouTube at one point in time had thrown out there that they were gonna make people responsible for the things that were in their comments I exactly remember that but it didn't ultimately think they backed out but very quickly when they realized that places like yours right which like your average video gets how many thousands of comments a lot and many of them anti-semitic and how would you yeah and how would you even be able to look at all those and you would have to be 24/7 monitoring embrace you've also got people that are watching your videos from overseas at all times of the night yep so I think that the principle of only only illegal content will be removed is great that's a personal principle however I think that there is no serious case to be made that a private company can't say these are our Terms of Service and if you want to I mean it's sort of almost a conservative principle right the idea that unless illegal things are going on we are not going to tell a business how it is that
that it should be run and that's where I think a lot of right-wingers start to stumble on this issue because they're calling for a very invasive form of government regulation they're calling for the government to step in and even break up these organization serves they've gotten too large but you're hearing that from the left as well yeah well I think there's a different there's a difference though between Elizabeth Warren saying we should separate the social platform Facebook from the ad sales revenue generating piece of it that's one thing that falls under antitrust that's different than saying the government should come in and it should tell anybody who runs a social network that you can't even you can't do anything unless the content is illegal because there are financial considerations right I mean there's lots of content that would not be illegal but it would make a platform a video platform like YouTube not financially viable because advertisers would see it and they'd say oh we're not going near that right so I have a very hard time taking what is a very authoritarian perspective that the government should come in and say this is how social networks should be run now if you want to change the law here's the way it could be done if you want to change the law and argue that these platforms have gotten so big that they represent more of a town square so to speak then okay maybe you could pass a law that changes how they would be regulated but that's typically the type of stuff the right is against because it is more regulation it is more regulation but it's regulation to keep a private company from regulating against free speech do you see what I'm saying it's it's a sneaky kind of regulation it's a regulation that's enforcing the First Amendment and the people's ability to freely express themselves if we're admitting or if we're agreeing that we are entering into this new world yes where this that's my position as it is a town square and I feel like everybody should be able to communicate the really unfortunate unsavory aspect of it is when someone gets harassed like Carlos Mesa was because of this where people are sending him all these homophobic tweets and all these getting text messages and all this [ __ ] that's that's the unsavory and
unfortunate aspect of it how do you stop that I don't know how you stop it I don't know exactly how you stop it but I think it would be useful I mean one thing is when does a platform get big enough in your mind that it would qualify for this like Town Square designation well for sure YouTube let's talk about that one because that's the one we're on I mean [ __ ] goddamn it it's huge okay jag antic so are there other types of businesses through which communication happens that you think should be regulated in the same way that's not really clear so I'll give an example if you start regularly sending people via UPS similar things to some of the content that exists on YouTube and UPS says we're getting reports that you're sending people harassing stuff we don't want you as a customer here's the questions a question though isn't there a difference between someone sending something to a physical address and someone sending something just let's say to you when your social media apps are on the third page your phone and you have to swipe all the way over to get them and open it up and you have to read them if you want to find them well you don't necessarily have to read them there's a difference in a practical sense but I guess the question is would we want the government would you similarly want the government to enforce for telephone companies if you are harassing getting harassing texts and you report it and report it that's a different thing I think I think what is coming to your phone and the phone is ringing I think that's another step that's another step towards invasive it's a big gray area yes is the phone ringing is it a phone call where the text is it whatsapp message read that text right yeah no I feel you I guess the quite where I hesitate and again speaking of someone from the left who believes regulation of businesses is an important thing I would want to be really sure about how it exactly it is that the government would step in and mandate essentially that their view has to be listened to over the Terms of Service that a private company would wish to have yes I feel like when you give people a gun they start looking for targets and that is a very common thing
if you give people the ability to censor and if you give people the ability to censor based on their political ideology or based on what they feel is offensive where other people don't it's a slippery slope and I think that that can that can lead to all sort that woman what does her name again the one who Amy Siskin imagine her young in charge of a social media platform she tried to get you fired from Boston College for something that was incredibly polite right that is what I'm talking about is their very action that very same type of thinking that she tried to impose on you that's what I'm worried about well they're worried about people that are really strictly trying to promote their ideologies and what they think is okay and not okay and it's very slippery because there's a lot of weird people out there that believe a lot of weird things and want other people to conform to those weird things and we sort of have to decide like that's why I'm bringing up this crowder thing like do I think that what he said was good no it's not nice to call someone a little less be queer it's not nice it's kind of mean you know and especially when that guy wasn't even engaging with him but he's making fun of him he's a comedy show he's mocking them so the question becomes like when when is that mocking considered homophobic and when is it just ribbing right and that's his position his position is that it's just ribbing this is the problem with a discussion that is only about the principle so like a lot of our conversation for the last 15 minutes has been what is our principle about what types of business regulation is okay for the government to do and is not okay right or when we talk about free speech what should do we have a principle of anything short of illegal content versus something that is more strict hmm the reality is that it's a there's a more gray area yeah we're trying to sort of regulate the way people communicate with each other so it's it's not it's like if someone said that to someone in a bar a cop would not arrest them like yeah you listview a little queer you know that would be like oh that guy's an [ __ ] but the bar would be perfectly within their legal right to say we don't we don't want you in here you're making our
customers uncomfortable and nobody would say that it would be against the law for the bar to say you got to go and that's a good point if they were doing it to their face but what if he was in a corner talking about this guy that wasn't there and he was saying yeah so he's talking about an Tifa this lispy little Mexican queer if you came along and decided to kick the guy out of the bar then it would I mean listen at some bars if you go into the corner and you yell about a lispy mexican queer they're going to ask you to leave and it still would not be illegal and the bar would still not be doing anything right but that's a bar right that's a private business where people are physically there yes isn't there a difference between that and something like YouTube which again falls more in line with like a town square maybe that's what we need to revisit because so much human communication is now happening across these platforms I would imagine most of it or most of it we we need to maybe stop drawing this arbitrary distinction that in-person is a completely different thing yeah over the Internet I mean maybe it's not increasingly maybe it's more the same yeah I this is some torn here right on one side I say well it seems like they still allow him to have his freedom of expression because he's still on YouTube he still is able to upload his show on YouTube he will have to find other ways to make money sure so one part of me looks at it that way and no one has a right to monetize on YouTube right right so in a sense they haven't violated his First Amendment rights because he's still able to express himself but then you go as a company they've made a punitive decision to eliminate his ability or is it radically reduced his ability to make an income off of their platform that seems like and I'm not supporting that they did it but that seems more reasonable as a decision right to say we're gonna demonetised you that seems more reasonable but the problem is there's no alternatives there's nothing remotely like YouTube to avert there's an alternative to YouTube for him to regain that same level of monetization yes or for people that share his viewpoint and share his ideology and share his positions and there's no right wing YouTube's my point
and there's this like I would challenge the idea that YouTube is is left-wing I mean in terms of its enforcing its policies how so I mean they just this just this particular issue but this isn't this isn't a left-wing how is this a left-wing enforcement I mean they think it is because Carlos Mesa is progressive and because the the argument that he was making is a very left-wing progressive argument and this is what crowder was going after he was going after the argument in the process of going after the argument he mocked his sexuality in his appearance I can assure you if it was focused merely on how much of a problem ant Aoife is this would not have happened I mean I think we both know yeah for sure yeah no it's all about the mocking the guys sexual orientation and looks that's worth if Carlos Massa were a gay Republican and the exact same thing happened do you think the outcome would have been different yes why I just don't think people be interested oh well that's a dip but but so that gets to the real crux of it which is my real concern with this is YouTube only getting involved and even publicly saying what they're doing about a channel right when it becomes very public and it starts to have the possibility of impacting their bottom line and and saying yes this is too hot we're getting out well in that sense what Carlos did once it was revealed that YouTube was not going to take action was very effective absolutely I mean he started tweeting like crazy and people jumped on board he connected it to the LBGT movement and and then it became this thing I mean the other side of this is I mean I don't know if we even want to go into identity politics so to speak but there has I've read some comments on some of the few articles that have been written about this that are saying that this is effectively YouTube's enforcing a defense of identity politics so to speak and I think that that's just again opening up the door to the the incredibly broad application of that term I'd done a small thing I don't even really fully understand that but I don't know and I don't even know if that's a path we want to go down to talk about like the identity politics component of what's going on with a lot of this relation to find what you mean by the
identity politics of it I mean listen so I guess in order to defined it define it I it would be good to point out that I have been critical of quote identity politics on the left in a very limited way that I think it is actually damaging while at the same time recognizing that identity is a really important thing to consider when we think about sort of how the world should be organized so like for your audience who may not know when identity politics is used you know like like a knife to enforce that because of someone's identity their opinion supersedes and is the opinion that is the valid one over everybody else because of membership in some kind of group I'm against that I think that's extremely destructive it would be very incorrect to believe though that identity doesn't play a role and that we shouldn't understand how one's identity might make us think differently about certain issues I mean any example would sure would would make that pretty clear you know I as an immigrant to the United States do I get some privileged position to decide what policy should be over all native-born Americans because I emigrated here no that would meet be me using identity politics as like a mallet or a cudgel but as someone who did emigrate here we should recognize that I may have things to say about it which would be valuable and worthy and important to sort of think about that's my sure on a short haul text well you're just not interested in the hierarchy of oppressed people I'm not interested in the oppression Olympics and they're not interested in using identity to silence ideas that could be perfectly good we're coming from someone who is not a member or checking a certain box the exact nor am i I strongly believe in the individual and I think it's one of the most important parts of a collective group of human beings like a country then we we recognize that we're all different and there's a lot of weirdness amongst us but we're individuals I'd like to treat people based on who they are not what classification they fall under now do you think that that bad version of identity politics that I mentioned is a big problem on the left or not a big problem I'm curious I think it's certainly a problem but I think it's a vocal minority problem that's
what I think I think if you just regular people that are on the left that are working jobs and having families and doing their hobbies and they just have left-wing ideas I don't think the vast majority of them hold those positions I think those positions are things that people use as revenue I mean not as revenue but it's like they get points from it you know they get points from certain types of behavior that they support certain types of thinking that they support and it lets you know you got woke social justice points well then we agree yeah I mean I Jenna asked because I genuinely didn't know I mean I've heard you talking about identity politics of college campuses when you look at like what happened in Evergreen State yeah Brett Weinstein it's very disruptive yes and no I mean I do think that it's disproportionately a problem I think it's a small problem like you're saying I think a lot of the problem exists in the college campus setting but I mean even at Boston College you know I had sort of maybe been incorrectly indoctrinated into the idea that this was really a problem everywhere on college and I had an incident the details of which wouldn't be appropriate to talk about but with a student when I taught at Boston College that because of the circumstances and the identities involved I was ready for it to go into this is going to be resolved the wrong way on the basis of the toxic identity politics and I'm hearing is existing on college walk this is and it was not it was the exact opposite so I think the same way that when you look at Yelp reviews people who had a bad experience are way more likely to go and write about it yes these individual stories get way more attention than the percentage of the problem that they represent I I believe you're probably correct about that but when you see videos like Nick Nick Christakis getting just shouted down at Yale by a group of students and the support of the students and that kind of [ __ ] you say well it is real it does exist it's real it exists I think that sensible people on the left like me call it out but I want to be careful imagine that you had someone from Kato on the show which is sort of like a traditional conservative or American Enterprise Institute maybe is
like a better example and a lot of the conversation was about getting them to talk about or denounce the alt-right for example hmm yeah I'm sure they would do it but how much should a EEI denounce the outright when that's like a different thing that that's an example yeah it's a very good analogy yeah I think we oftentimes are responding to this very vocal minority yes and those are the people that are most invested in getting these ideas pushed through and they're there it's also people that you know for a lack of a better term they're probably mentally ill and I only mean mentally ill in terms of like have like legitimate diseases but in terms of their thought patterns they're probably obsessive I mean I've had friends that were especially friends that were heavily involved in this kind of stuff before and it was very damaging to their mental health this type of stuff being politics being woke left-wing shout out at people attacked people politics okay but anything realized somewhere on the wand and then one of them my friend Jaime kill Steen was they turned on him and then you know devastated his life and he realize along the way like oh Jesus Christ like what what was I doing like I was checking my Twitter every five seconds and insulting people left and right and attacking people just to get everybody say yeah go get them and you know it's showing everybody how woke I am and how progressive I am and it becomes a weird sort of a point system like you're trying to score points you're trying to gain favor with your party there's a lot of that I think it's really important though so there's people on the left and right who get pulled into political wellness whether it's I'm now Tea Party in 2010 people get sucked into Tea Party on the right and Tifa whatever these are all groups with different sort of followings they're not all the same whatever yeah I do think that there is a difference between getting extremely passionate about the idea that everybody should have access to just basic health care then getting extremely passionate about the idea that we need to go out of our way to shut down every abortion clinic in the country I think there's just there's a difference so I don't want to participate in a false equivalency between well you got very
far left and very far right people and they're the same and you've got Center left and center right and they're the same it's just two sides of the same coin like obviously I have a perspective that is based on my politics I'm glad to debate any of these issues with anybody who wants to on the merits but I don't want to make the false equivalency I mean listen when you look at anti-defamation league numbers for example the vast majority of of hate incidents in the United States are coming from the right we could talk about other ways that the left is active we could talk about what it means or how things should be categorized but that's the reality and so I want to make sure I don't play a false equivalency game my audience would crush me if I did that number one but I think it's just wrong I think it's wrong to do that no I bear it out I think you're right there and I also think that these false equivalency kind of conversations are they're ridiculous because each individual conversation about each individual issue deserves its own discussion yes and to say what about this what about that those what about isms those are the the death of any real rational discussion assurance they go on forever there they go on forever there's no I mean it's like scroll that this is why scrolling Twitter endlessly is a problem because there's really no end you could always scroll a little to it to the end right yeah I mean yeah the it's the new tweets are coming fast it's the same with a lot of those what's grammars ever done that just scrolled until their phone died just charge it wake up in the morning and just scroll down all day how long does it take I think you wouldn't because the new content appears fast right because the algorithm yeah but you still never run out now just keep going no there's a few things I don't know if this would be interesting to go into but there's a few things that I've found have been somewhat successful in conversations with people who really disagree with me and at least like lowering the temperature a little bit and getting people to maybe engage in a good-faith way one of them is how do you think I came to my position mmm so you might be for total free-market
for-profit health care I am for a system where the government is more involved and even if you can't pay you get care before we even start if I say how do you think I arrived at my position yeah that has been pretty useful another example is I think this came from Peter Boghossian who I think you've had on yes the de feasibility question which is what evidence if I presented it to you would bring you over to my side I'm not saying I have that evidence or that it exists but give me a framework as to what is keeping you from seeing this my way because sometimes that exists the person just doesn't know about mm-hmm those are two tools that I have found super useful in trying to make some headway with people who are hyper partisan and very escalated with a lot of these issues yeah that makes sense yeah it's it's very difficult to have good-faith conversations with people when you disagree with them you know and you have to have discipline and you have to have some sort of a sense of self yeah and you have to know how to be calm and kind you know the-the-the descent into insults and dunking on people one of the one of the reasons why I at the beginning of the conversation I was saying that I've one of the things I enjoy about your your YouTube videos is you're a very reasonable rational person and you don't get crazy and animated and insulting and I think there's we need more of that because I think even though you're not going to convert some people there's a certain section of the population that disagrees with you that's just going to write but there's a significant number that I'm gonna go hey this David Pakman guys he's reasonable he's making a lot of sense he's intelligent well my goal is and I think that it's sort of working and that we have a lot of Trump supporters who are paid subscribers to my show a lot we have some are they taking notes maybe they are to the boss but my my goal is my goal is yeah that would I mean that that would be an interesting day if I wake up and Trump has responded to one of my videos about him what would you do I think it'd be a good day well that's what Colbert did that was how funny was that when Colbert was on TVs like Donald yeah how did you not know that you shouldn't respond to me right yeah yeah yeah that's rule number one it's an
important one unless you want to create a shitstorm of a very certain you know my goal is I don't pretend to be neutral I think neutrality is almost always false because on most issues people they're not indifferent I mean neutral is another way of saying indifferent you could be conflicted in neutral you could be conflicted in neutral but I try to at least be objective and transparent and how I arrived at what I believe so you can disagree with my conclusion you can even come to me and tell me the facts I've used to reach the conclusion or incomplete or wrong but I'm completely genuine and how I arrived there and I think that that is why we have some I mean yeah there's obviously if you look at YouTube comments there are right-wingers that watch my show but choosing to support it financially is a different thing and I get emails from conservatives who say I don't agree with your conclusions but I do find that you're at least reasoning through the issues in a way that resonates with me and I want to support the fact that you're doing that that's outstanding that's a huge victory there really is in a sense in my eyes in this day and age I think this is the most polarized time I can remember as a 51 year old man looking back at you know my history of paying attention to social issues and the way we communicate with each other and just the partisan attitudes that people seem to have I don't I don't I mean I think it's probably because of Trump that's a giant part of it but it's also just a sign of the times of social media I think it's in part engineered by the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter and and all these other social media companies utilize and it's also been engineered by Bath bad-faith participants and people that are actually manipulating it I don't know if you've paid any attention to sam Harris had a fantastic podcast with and we had one with her as well Renee Durr esta when they'd arrest analyzed all of the various accounts that the IRA had created with the internet research agency that was responsible for all of these fake accounts that people thought were black lives matter accounts or pro-southern secession accounts or all these different accounts that were very polarizing and are arguing with other people that these were just Russians
that were working for this organization that was specifically trying to start chaos they were specifically trying to start arguments and when when you you see that and then I mean that's a factor that's a giant factor that kind of [ __ ] is a factor and that that is sort of become part of the sport of social media has been arguing absolutely I don't do it I don't engage but I do go on Facebook sometimes and someone makes an abortion post and I just watch the chaos like oh my god yeah it's in or anything having anything to do with Trump or anything having anything to do with the Second Amendment or anything that has anything to do with the wall or immigration so I don't know that people are actually in larger disagreements right they were previously I think that yes Trump has coarsened the language and the way in which it's now acceptable to talk about a lot of these things that's number one I think the social media algorithms like you're pointing out reward the most extreme and polarizing comments and reactions in an ever feedback loop where the most polarizing initial tweet generates a more responses than less polarizing tweets and then the sub responses that are most polarizing and an aggressive do the exact same thing and it's never-ending feedback loop I think it's all those things but I don't know that people are having bigger disagreements than in times past I just think that they're public in a different way well there's more disagreements because people have more opportunity to disagree so they have more opportunity to engage and particularly in talking about people that are addicted to their phones and it's coming from a guy uses [ __ ] phone for hours a day right I'd like to think that one hour that is productive but I know that three hours of his me staring at butts on Instagram look at muscle cars and watch and then how much are you on like a computer I don't know I didn't I don't have that that data right but it's not as much and the good thing about it is most my [ __ ] I'm doing on the phone most of my computer work unless I'm laying in bed I just watch embarrassingly enough I watched YouTube videos on pool that's what I watch real I go to bed yeah that's why I play pool yeah so I watch like professional pool
matches before I go to bed cuz it's not harming yeah it's relaxing and I analyze positions that's interesting I do the same thing with chess oh that's what I there's like chess streamers it's similar yeah that's cue could kick back and sort of its you're engaged but it's nothing crazy and it's also kind of stimulating in an intellectual way right yeah and it's different than politics yes yes yes like on weekends when people you know like my mom will you know I want to talk to me about politics oh and I'm just like I did this all week mom yeah juh mom watch your show she does and she watches other shows and my family's super political so really I so on the weekends if it's Saturday I'm right in the middle of my break period because they left wing oh yeah thank god yeah of course I mean imagine could you arise some mean dad calling you up what the [ __ ] is wrong with you David I might have had two defu ah Dee foo mmm yeah yeah anyway indeed I think that there's more opportunity as they're saying – yeah listen to disagree with people more opportunities you argue and in those more opportunities you're seeing more conflict and I think more polarization and I think again the social media algorithms and all the other nonsense that gets I think there's I really do believe that the the feeling that I get but it also might be because a big part of my job is being on the internet so maybe I'm more engaged with it RV Oaks excuse it a little bit yeah but I think so in practice in Matt let's imagine that the disagreements are equal to what they've always been but there's more opportunities to disagree and the algorithm favors more escalate a disagreement than rational conversation the effect is that you might meet someone with whom you have 80% in common in terms of your political views mm-hm but the circumstances in which you engage with that person are going to be on the 20 percent that you don't so it makes it seem as though you just have very little common ground with anybody right because the eighty percent agreement becomes background and the social media platforms the debates happening on YouTube elsewhere are focused only on like the most divisive
fraction of one's entire political views and that's I think what the problem is hmm but it makes sense because most people agree that I don't know gas stations I mean just to pick something innocuous most people agree that it's good to have a regulatory system that makes sure that when you think you've pumped five gallons of gas you've gotten five gallons of gas yes it's so uncontroversial that nobody's going to talk about it like it makes sense that the focus is going to be on the disagreements where it's damaging is then when you meet people in real life and it's hard to relate or even be in the same room because only those differences are sort of like played up or real yes yes yes yeah yeah that that conflict gets highlighted you have conflict bias yeah yeah I I don't know where I see this going that's one of the more interesting things about particularly with social media and like things when you come to this Crowder situation I don't know where this is going because I didn't know this was ever going to be a thing I had never really considered that there was going to be some digital town square that we were all to be enjoying whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever it is that might even need regulation yeah that might even need regulation but getting back to the crowded thing the issue that you so you agree with it in the sense that he was mocking this person's sexual orientation and appearance I agree with the assertion that YouTube's Terms of Service as written were violated on the basis that he was singling out an individual and the characteristics that that individual was being targeted with or spoken about were sexual orientation in terms that that the Terms of Service say is not allowed is that different in your opinion than someone singling something out for what you believe is their mental incompetency well that mental in company near agree more that they're that they're mentally ill or cognitively limited cognitively limited mocking their ability to think walking their intelligence mocking their decisions mocking their the way they talk and then encouraging other people to do the same thing and then that person gets harassed based on their intelligence based on their performance
on particular YouTube videos and conversations and there's active harasser so there's people that do that is there a difference between say what Sam cedar does to Dave Rubin what is Sam do to Dave Rubin he has I don't know that I seen that video dozens of videos don't say that video he has dozens of videos where he's just dunking on Dave Rubin so I I mean I I have some as well I believe that they are substantive that's my view is that my videos about Dave Rubin are substantive I really I don't really watch any left-wing stuff because I want to try to isolate myself enough to make sure that what I'm saying are my ID and that I'm not taking them so I am sure friends motion comic and oh that's interesting in comics do though I don't know but if there's some specific examples we could comment about them but I think that there to your first question there is a difference between going after someone for sexual orientation then going after them for the fact that they say things that are wrong or don't know stuff until you're making fun of someone who has an actual handicap of some kind some kind of you know limited cognitive limitation that would be a disability of some kind then you are mocking someone for a disability but the resulting effect of the harassment the the see this is what I was getting at before with Crowder like what Crowder said was one thing but one of the things that Carlos Mesa was just discussing was what the people that had watched Crowder what they were doing how they were going after him as if see that and that is a real discussion like what what happens when you say something about someone and then your fans agree and then they take action which I didn't see that in the steven crowder decision that the reaction was part of YouTube's evaluation now I may just have missed that but I didn't see YouTube say that part of the calculation had to do with what other people were doing I don't think they did say that I don't think they would but I think Carlos Mesa did say that it was one of the things that he was talking about this endless assault that he's experienced well he's right to call it deplorable I think we would agree with that I think your question is more about whether you choose who's responsible for it yeah
these anonymous people that can just lash out at someone and insult them out of nowhere ultimately they are responsible those people are those people those people however so there's this term stochastic terrorism I don't know if you're familiar with no I'm not the Catholic terrorism is the idea that if you have a big enough audience and you go and every day you're talking about someone should really do something about a particular politician you're doing it every day you're doing every day at a certain point given a large enough audience and enough repetition of that and the fact that there's like a distribution of people's emotional states cognitive capacity etc it is statistically probable that someone from that audience is going to go and try to do something about whoever it is that you're targeting that individual who the show and is hammering on this person day after day after day they're not going to be legally responsible for that person from their audience who went and did something that there's no way that you're going to hold them legally responsible under the current legal system that we have but you could argue that it is irresponsible in some way not to understand that your consequences have actions of course the person who goes and does the violent act is the primary person who is responsible right but as long as you're not calling out for that act how do we make this distinction that someone is encouraging that act or someone is at least inspiring that their judgment calls I mean listen I can go on my show and I can speak in vague terminology or specific terminology you know imagine that there's a local business that I don't like I could go on my show and I could say this business did this and I need everybody in my audience to show up there and to make it impossible to get in and patronize that business that's very clearly on one side of the gray area I could instead say you know there's a business I could say the type of business but I not not name it if it's a small enough town people would know exactly what business I'm talking about and I really don't like the way I was treated there and if only there was some way that someone could do something about it the effect could be the exact same right I don't know how you measure
when it's on one side yeah it's like yeah right you could somehow or another remove your yeah you could somehow or another make it so it's yeah I'm agreeing with you yeah you could remove your responsibility for the action and some sort of while it's just got interesting I was just I was trying to find a tweet from aza about him sending or asking people to flag Crowder's videos did you get the one where he has people to go assault people with milkshakes and only ate them at every turn you just tweeted an hour ago or at 12:30 that to clarify this is responding to Carlos Massa to clarify in order to restate monetization on this channel he will need to remove the link to his t-shirts oh so it's the figs t-shirt yeah oh well that's all he has to do he specifically asked about that and then they were oh that's nice to do Wow that's why using that's pretty pretty straightforward it's pretty straightforward yeah this shirts stupid but you know he's a comedian I mean that's what Crowder's doing and in his doing the thing about Mesa he's mocking him for his appearance but Carlos Mesa specifically encouraged people to throw milkshakes at people that disagree with him and to harass them publicly and humiliate them so one thing doesn't justify the other no it doesn't have that but that is more egregious how fasting people to assault people and asking people to physically humiliate people in person in my opinion is more egregious I don't agree with mocking his physical appearance physical appearances that's just what it is you know but the sexual orientation aspect of it it's like yeah I get it I get it it's not it's not nice how far do you think this is just a comedian thing goes because I hear that a lot in just excusing things that are saying he's trying to do comedy right so he's trying to make fun is he yeah hold on but make comedy and making fun of someone are two different things like I don't do comedy but I will sometimes make fun of things people say right but Hays doing it to be funny he's making fun of things specifically to be funny and sometimes you know when you do that you go too far you cross lines I genuinely did not realize that Crowder does a comedy show oh yeah yeah he's so
when he so show is a comedy show Wow yeah a lot of it is funny he does some funny [ __ ] he really does whether you agree with him or disagree with him he's done some hilarious bits I genuine I'm I'm reacting in real time because I had no idea he has this bit he does about this French socialist he puts on a wig and pretends to be this different person he's pretend to be a transgender person he's pretended to he's done a bunch of these infiltration videos will go into these ridiculous organizations and ask them questions but it's very much a comedy show dressing up like a trans person's funny it is if you're funny I if you're good I mean mrs. Doubtfire it wasn't that funny and that's what he was doing he was dressing up as a woman he was dressing up as a woman right he was dressing up as a woman and that's a great movie I agree with you there there's some funny [ __ ] and yeah my gosh look how many times in live color did they dress up like women there's there's some humor to someone who is a man who's dressing up like a woman sure that can that can be and I shouldn't comment specifically on crowder doing it if I haven't seen it no he's got some funny [ __ ] he does you know and I'll take [ __ ] for that for saying that he's funny makes me laugh that's why I'm staying quiet yeah I know I understand I I get it I don't agree with him you know constantly going on and on about this guy being queer are calling him ELISA pee little queer but he's doing it to try to be funny so the question is when can you do that to be funny and apparently with YouTube you can do that and be funny as long as you yeah that's actually it even that's even weirder now it's weird that they just if he removes a t-shirt link a link to the t-shirt oh he can still sell it he just can't link to it from YouTube I think that's what they're saying that's so minor that it's hard to I mean it isn't because it's sort of an encouraging people to buy it and then YouTube would say well if you have an ad on that then you're encouraging homophobic behavior and we can allow that with our monetization policy I mean it's minor in the context of everything else that's wrapped up in this yeah I buy it might be an important fun you know revenue-generating t-shirt I mean I think so much of this again
these disagreements on issues it comes down to what you and I were talking about before that if two people are in a room together 95% of what they're talking about you're gonna agree on when someone's making a video on someone if they just say a [ __ ] David Pakman mad I here's my deal with that guy and then you just ranting thing is I hate his [ __ ] neck I don't like his shirt and his face is stupid when people do stuff like that like it's just it's a it's a terrible way to communicate because it's first of all you'd have to be a real [ __ ] to say most of the things that people say about things and they're dunking on them in person you have to be it you need to be a bad person yeah so you know the person's gonna see it so you're just deciding I'm gonna be a bad person pretend I'm not a bad person because I'm gonna do it in a way where they're not in the room so I'm just gonna [ __ ] all over them give them my my real opinion sure but it's not like a real it's not like you and I are at dinner and you're like you know if it [ __ ] this guy and the that's that's how people talk yeah but when you're doing that but you're doing it you're broadcasting it I think we're all learning in this process of doing podcasts and video blogs and all this stuff we're all learning that you're not alone you are doing this and you're saying it in a way that that person's gonna see the same could be applied to dave rubin and sam cedar dunking on them all time and it's kind of the same thing in michael roberts as well it's the same sort of thing there that that's what they're doing yeah there's saying things that they wouldn't say if he was there in person right but sure okay well today we're sitting around having lunch together talking [ __ ] about some stupid thing that he said the night before yeah that that's fine and I don't think I mean whether or not you would say something in person doesn't tell us whether it's a fair or unfair critique true I think it's fair to say I try to avoid strict at homonyms I will I mean listen we're all trying to get it build an audience right so at a certain point yes like I will pick titles that I think are the most interesting titles to get people to watch the thing or whatever or I'll use vocabulary that I might not use in person but at least what I'm trying
to do is make it as substantive as possible and to sort of like justify how I came to my conclusions yes that part of it in in-person conversations usually will not lend itself to like screaming or violence or whatever if that part is the focus I completely agree with you on that yeah I think we'd be better off if we did try to communicate with but when you do in comedy that goes out the window it does but cut even comedy aside I agree with the principle communicate battle of ideas marketplace of ideas very very big ideas we all want to hear about and what are the best ideas and let's rank the ideas there are people whose views are so extreme that you can't really bring them to the table as reasonable negotiating partners for figuring something out right like Richard Spencer sure or or even I mean okay americana louis farrakhan who I've spoken out about many times imagine that we want to figure out what the tax rate should be something that politicians have to do all the time if you have a group of people who believe that we need a 25 percent flat tax and a group of people who want you know like an escalating progressive tax that gets as high as 70 percent on income over 10 million whatever right like fill it all then all those people are going to be able to have a conversation if someone comes in who says any taxes that the government collects are a form of slavery how do you integrate that into the conversation about how to set tax rates hmm you can't right yeah so all of this stuff you know there's this new movement now which i think is great about long-form conversations going in-depth figuring out what our disagreements are like I'm for all of it I'm absolutely for all of it I thought you do it I do it I do it okay but where I do think that there's like a lack of pragmatic reality to it is some people's ideas are so extreme that they can't in any sensible way be incorporated into an actual good-faith discussion of how society should be organized that is the problem with having conversations in scale right and that's the problem with Twitter and with YouTube that you're dealing with millions and millions and millions of human beings and when you have that
broad spectrum of humans you're going to have people on the far ends of both sides and at a certain point there a decision has to be made about who actually gets to participate in the decision making conversation right it's great for everybody to have a voice on taxation on Twitter but imagine if there was a significant portion of our elected officials who straight-up think taxes or slavery like I just don't know how that becomes integrated into a decision about tax policy right I think the the argument would be that bad ideas should be combatted with good ideas not with silencing someone and that when you do silence someone you just sort of create this blockade where the idea builds up behind it and then the opposition to your perspective builds up and then people start picking teams and picking sides and and I honestly think that that's something that's going to be going on right now with the soul Crowder Crowder Vox thing I think people are going to pick sides and they [ __ ] love it people love a good conflict to get into there's a lot of people in the cubicles right now that are weighing in and and firing up and there's people that want to Docs him again and these people want to infiltrate his Facebook and its Twitter that's what people do yeah you're dealing with me I mean what does Crowder have 3.5 3.8 million something like that I mean I think what you have to also remember is it's not just the reactions that are sort of like tailored to continue the escalation I mean in the end maybe Crowder personally in his personal life does refer to people he perceives to be gay or who are gay as queers I don't know or he uses the word [ __ ] I have no idea but he didn't use that word the t-shirt has the asterisk I guess it's a goof it's it actually as a fig it doesn't have an asterisk the okay or an A is a fig it's four figs it's the idea it's an I got it but okay it's a goofy joke fair my point is I don't know you know any sensible person who lives in the West and has access to media like steven crowder or whoever knows that the use of that language has a very specific path that instead of reactions that it's going to trigger so specifically that shirt the shirt and john-carlos maza as a queer Mexican or
whatever the phrase see that that's a weird one the what the queer one is a weird one because it's what it's with lbgtq like what is like here's a good one right National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ok n-double-a-cp you can't call people color people sure but that organization was named yes a long time at sure and it's it's more acronyms than anything else at this time Sam but it's not right you both we both know what the acronym with the individual letters or words in that acronym are I think the word queer is not a derogatory word but the or it cannot be dependency [ __ ] queer Yeah right sure I mean listen it's the same way with Jew right I'm in a family thing and it's a bunch of Jews or whatever that's a word that can be used in a way that if someone shows up if Richard Spencer shows up or one of his followers and goes to a bar mitzvah and talks about this room full of Jews the word is the same word yes we're talking about two very different things that's a good point but should he be allowed to say this room full of Jews allowed I mean it's not illegal no it's not illegal he is allowed right he is allowed but where does it like this roomful where does it get toxic well if Richard Spencer shows up at a Bar Mitzvah and yells about this religious I think it's gotten toxic yeah that's a good subject to break this stalemate of this subject not stalemate but this you know sort of end this anti-semitism right seems to be ridiculously on the rise and that that's stunning to me hmm that shocked me when I why because the Internet the internet sort of exposed anti-semitism that I didn't necessarily know existed I see at the levels that existed that I knew there was anti-semites but I didn't know they were so brazen and overt well they've gotten brazen since January of 2017 okay I don't know that Donald Trump has created anti-semites in fact he probably hasn't well his son in laws – son-in-law is Jewish his daughter converted to Judaism etc but I think that Richard Spencer told me we know that Trump is not literally a white nationalist who is going to talk about let's take control back from the Jews but we see him as the closest thing to what we would like he talks about people
from Mexico he talks about [ __ ] countries etc so it's just emboldened the movement it doesn't necessarily create but people from Mexico and [ __ ] countries that doesn't necessarily really equate with Israel no well anti-semitism in Israel all sorts you totally surprised exist you could be against the current Israeli administration as I am like Benjamin Netanyahu and still call out anti-semitism against Jews in the short States for example or whatever I see what you're saying it doesn't one is not directly linked to the other but if you're a group that already has these views and then you see a guy who opens his campaign talking about they're sending rapists and criminals but some I'm sure are good people and I don't want people coming here from [ __ ] countries what about Norwegians whatever it's a signal yeah it's a signal and I've spoken to former KKK people some of whom are really interesting people to talk to and they know exactly why it's appealing because they see the signals in the vocabulary and the non whistling so I think it's just brought it out into the forefront I don't know that new anti-semitism has necessarily been generated although it being in the forefront probably does start to get some people kind of curious like oh maybe all the problems are because of the Jews I don't know hmm it's just I guess they find groups of like-minded folks and they they join along right is that the anti-semites yeah that they find them online and then you can stumble into it where you ordinarily wouldn't be around people that are having those discussions that can happen and a lot of the people that I've talked to that got into those beliefs and then out of them said that they got in usually on a community level there was something about the community that was appealing to like gangs gangs or in the case of you know KKK and white supremacy people that had a bad home situation and they found a group that would accept them like partially they would accept them because they were white right and then they got pulled into the beliefs and eventually they sort of got out of them yeah it's just so you think the rise of it in 2017 there's more anti-semitism or you think it's more or overt I believe it's
moreover because tremors the president yeah and you know groups that track these incidents like the anti-defamation league and others they have the data and there have been increases mmm yeah it's it's stunning to me you know you see it online in so many different places yeah and I just don't remember seeing it before or not like that not that's you'd run into it so often or people calling people to Zionist shills yeah I mean that's an important thing to talk I mean people call me that all the time and you know I feel like that is an issue where I try to speak I mean chill to me just that you're saying one thing but with some kind of other agenda that you're trying to push in some way in other words you are you're being in some way deceptive about your actual intentions in what you say so I think when people call me a Zionist shill what they mean is I'm talking about one thing with the secret goal or below the surface goal of actually promoting some action by the state of Israel I think that's the idea of a shill but you know I mean I opposed to the current prime minister in Israel I've made clear that isn't he in trouble right now yeah I mean he's been in tentative trouble for a long time his wife is in trouble as well I believe but that I mean the problem is and I know that there are people on the left and right that when I say this will I mean I'm gonna get crushed from what I'm about to say sometimes when someone says Zionist shill it's related to your view on the israeli-palestinian conflict sometimes when someone's has sinus shell it's cover for just wanting to insult someone for being Jewish or anti-semitism you got to look at every instance one by one yeah and sometimes people just like saying things – yeah yeah it's a popular thing to say especially they find out that you're Jewish absolutely it's like a thing yeah it's a thing to say it's a little weapon to use it absolutely is do you find this is sort of an abstract question but the overall like doing this show and and having this increased ever increased exposure do you do you enjoy it are you are you weirded out by the interactions with all the people do you feel pressure by all the comments and do you feel like a little bit of anxiety from all the social media aspects of it
I I do so I enjoy the idea that people are listening to my ideas and either agreeing or disagreeing but they're considering them and then integrating it into how they figure out what they think about the world around them that's awesome I do get weirded out by sort of like safety security stuff that sometimes comes up which I try not to even like put too much attention on because I feel like it just feeds and gives people ideas and people who you know come up to me and I mean I'm more curious to actually hear your thoughts about this come up to me and you know they may not necessarily see the world the way I see it and I'm unsure sort of like what are their intentions type of thing I mean I it gives me anxiety and it gives people that are close to me anxiety for sure yeah because your profiles just if you keep doing this you're very good at it thank you you're gonna continue to get more and more popular yeah and I mean I guess it's a double-edged sword I mean I don't know like when you do a comedy show afterwards is it kind of like a free-for-all where people can come up and chat with you sometimes yeah yeah and do you get skittish no you don't yeah most people are nice I agree the vast majority people are nice I agree they they come to see you there usually fans and I just want to take pictures say what's up I guess it's a little different when what you do is like overtly political yes versus other areas like if yes an actor comedian doing great things racecar driver right you are in a much more conflict driven profession yeah no sense yeah I mean I have political people on like you but I'm you know I'm not entirely engaged in politics like you guys are right yeah I don't know I mean I do worry that no matter what happens in the next few elections I don't know how we reverse the radicalization polarization effects of the social media echo chambers that we've been talking about and I only see that as further I mean we could still accomplish good things while that's going on like I think if we elect the right people maybe we can get good things done but in parallel there is this like hyper radicalized polarized narrative that's going on and I don't
see any way that that's going to turn around I wonder myself I do I and and I'm very very confused by it because I don't see any long-term solution for this other than some radical change in the way human beings communicate with each other and that I've contemplated that and hypothesized in theory and I really think that it if what has changed the way we communicate is technology and this immersive immersive aspect of social media technology the fact that we carry these devices with us all the time that allow us to communicate and allow us to read other people's communications and/or watch other people's communications and I have a concern that this is going to escalate with each each expansion and each innovation in terms of like what and I don't know what it would because no one saw the internet coming if you go back 30 years ago no one ever thought anything was going to be anything like it is now well Al Gore did haha I bet he did but if you could but if you go 30 years from now me what are we really looking at what what what what what is this world going to bei I don't think anybody has an idea I think we have no idea and I think it's going to be if you look at the trend the trend is not towards calming people down and giving people space and ya allowing people to meditate more know that the trend is to get more and more immersed right the trend is for us to get closer and closer to each other to remove boundaries rube ound reach for information and ideas and even in long term contemplations of this I've all often thought that everything right all of our communication is basically ones and zeroes it's all information it's all the words and thoughts and videos and now you're getting into cryptocurrency now cryptocurrency is essentially ones and zeros it's all digital everything's digital and the bottlenecks if any bottlenecks are there at all the bottlenecks are slowly but surely getting removed this the the bots the blockades and the walls I think we're going to probably experience some sort of a level of immersive technology in our lifetimes that's going to change the way human beings communicate period and that we're gonna look back at this time like huh remember when we thought that
like social media our rights were like the big deal yeah I am I was recent I used to have more of like a techno utopian view and it started to sort of change partially because of some of the sci-fi I read we are aiming so everything but most recently so like 15 years ago I read the Richard K Morgan book altered carbon and at the time I was like this has to be made into something that's the one that's on Netflix now and then like a year ago Joel Kinnaman was in the series and it is just awesome and it was good the series is quite good the series is quite good yeah and I really like Joel Kinnaman and I you know Richard K Morgan I interviewed who wrote the book years ago but that genre started to move me away from techno utopianism and technology's just gonna solve so many problems because it also is going to create new problems that we don't even yet know about so as an example I went all the back all the way back to the beginning when humans went from hunter-gatherers and figured out we can domesticate some crops we can start agriculture and settle and be in one place that was the acceleration of what we know of as wealth ownership what it was like the start right so much of what we had I mean agriculture allowed people to be able to live and do stuff other than find food which developed specialists who created technology which created army right like it all came from agriculture in that way mm-hmm but tons of bad stuff came from it as well right the beginning of the concept of a sedentary lifestyle came from agriculture diseases that we got from animals and then that we brought other places and they killed tons of people so I've kind of adopted that view to technology now which is yeah all the cool stuff we can imagine and improvements I'm sure will be there but problems we aren't even aware of yet are also going to be there yeah I agree with you 100% that's what I meant by looking back at this social media problem I think we're gonna have a far more invasive problem I think I think we're going to probably have some sort of a wearable thing that allows us to communicate through thoughts sure well thoughts would be a next step but at minimum I mean replacing you don't need the screen on your phone right you
have contacts that are connected to something and everything is just displayed I mean there will be steps Jaime whatever happened with that Microsoft thing that we were looking at remember they had like the little mouse that was dancing in your hand friend that was dancing in your hand like I meant it magically yes that was available it wasn't much as Microsoft has hololens and they're on hololens too but they've moved more towards like a commercial applications for it as opposed to like consumer availability there are consumer availability AR things coming out right now they're what Apple just showed at their WWDC event this month or actually on Monday is really cool it's still just like watching through that phone though they're not I don't think anyone's made the device like a glasses type AR thing yet because the field of view isn't right they haven't mastered that either projecting light into your eye which is what magic leap does are projecting onto the glass thicker than looking at which is what I think hololens and the other thing does right so to figure it out yet Betamax versus VHS race to see who thinks so yeah but like that oculus quest which is different just also just came out is really cool and there's they're so close so much closer they could be within a year or two or something could come out at the end of this year that hasn't been announced we're very close the question is like how much is that going to affect daily life right with augmented reality yeah yeah the other one that relates to that also is right now you at least can put your phone away right what happens when the line between the technology and the body is I have a bit about it I'm very concerned I really am and just a think we're giving up agency to something that has no feelings for us at all well there's no I mean I think the problems people have in practice often are different than the ones I mean there's no transparency with a lot of the the companies that are developing these technologies and setting up the algorithms and whatever there's really no transparency about what it is that's going on what the end goals are what the broader effects on society are going to be I know you've had Jonathan hight on who has talked a lot about the
disproportionate effect of social media on suicidality particularly in young girls relative to boys it's been years now that this stuff has been around and we're now kind of figuring that out so it's inevitably we're behind always in figuring out what the effects are because you know time to measure it and that as things advance more and more quickly whatever damage is potentially going to be done will happen even faster yes yeah that's what the concern is that we are always behind and that it's sneaking into our lives before we have any idea of how dangerous it is sure I mean this happened with you know the food the canned and processed food revolution of the 50s and 60s mhm it was slower but it was the same type of thing where all of these advancements in being able to make food last longer via how it was processed and stored it all sounded awesome at a time when food would just go bad then we started learning about all the bad things that come with it exactly yeah anything more before we wrap it up I think that's it oh I so two things I wanted mention someone when I announced that I was going to be on the show companies started contacting me saying we will give you money if you work our name our product into the conversation what's new product I'm not gonna say but I do want to talk about car insurance briefly have you heard that that's happened to other guests no you haven't interesting that's interesting yeah wow that's a weird sneaky thing yeah and no one's ever paid me to do that no one's paid you no no no one's ever paid me to to have an like a conversation on a podcast oh but one company did want to advertise and they wanted their CEO to come on the podcast and discuss their product and I was like give me like an infomercial I was like no and they're like what you've talked about people before that have had products before I go yeah because I like their product right and I think what they're doing is cool right is zero financial investment in their product I only did it because I like it sure well I mean people my audience knows that we do sponsored stuff like your ads whatever I disclose it I'm clear and my approach is I'm super upfront with my audience which is listenmi to only like half a percent of you are paying for a membership the
memberships are six bucks a month I know like 80% of you can afford it like half a percent are doing it that's fine I'm gonna keep doing the show but I'm gonna put some sponsored content up you don't have to watch it I'm in a market as such period and I feel like for the most part we have kind of an understanding of how it all works there's nothing wrong with it as long as this products that you actually enjoy and again that you maintain that transparency and that honesty absolutely wrong with that if I don't have that with the audience I don't have anything right and I asked been asked to compromise it you haven't yeah for sure yeah like it would be worth so much you know yeah I mean there's this moral hazard sort of situation that exists with insurance where the people who don't really need the insurance are the ones that the insurance companies want to insure right the people that are more likely to use the insurance the insurance companies are like we're gonna have to charge you six times as much type of thing right it's easier to get the sponsorship money from stuff that's less interesting or less aligned or whatever mhm and I don't know I mean it's an ongoing battle I don't talk to any of our advertisers like we have a team that handles all of that and that is great but they're you know there are still calls to make about like what is on this side of the line what's on that side of the line yeah I try to make the right calls no I think you're doing a great job I appreciate your show I appreciate your time thank thanks for coming down here literally where they could find you deepak man on PA KMA an on I'm on Twitter at D Pakman I'm on where am i I'm on Instagram at David Pakman and my website david pakman.com all right thank you David I think it's calling me [Music]