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Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day free speech and why you should give a damn Jonathan Zimmerman why should we give a damn well we should give a damn because Free Speech has been at the heart of every movement for change in this country every great warrior against oppression was also a warrior for free speech but wouldn't it be convenient if we just silence people we disagree with that seems a lot easier for me no it's natural all right it is natural right and that's why we have to resist it like I get it like everyone's experienced that everyone's seen somebody or heard somebody they despise and say God I just want that person shut up right and that's why we have to resist it um there's a lot of very intelligent people that disagree with you in this current political climate unfortunately I think that was exacerbated by the Trump Administration and this desire to like stop a lot of the Q andon stuff and the pizza gate stuff and a lot of these conspiracy theories that people were frustrated that they were taking hold and they were like what do we how do we stop this we got to stop these people from talking right so that's the argument for censorship that's one of them and the other argument has to do with race and ethnicity I mean the other argument is that you know it harms minorities and I think those are different arguments but sometimes they're connected that so you mean censorship against racism saying correct yeah or sexism or homophobia or any of those things yeah it's um I think one of the problems that we're dealing with in today's climate is not just that everything's like hyper politicized and people are really very passionate in debating things online but just the nature of online discourse is so limited it lends itself to like simple sentences you know one you know 140 or 280 you know symbols it's just not enough it's not enough characters to express yourself and then also text you know unless you're writing a book it's hard to get all your thoughts out and and also one of the things that people that study Communications have taught us is that when we have exchanges online they tend to be more unil well we we
will type um things and text things um about somebody or to somebody that we would never ever say to their face of course yeah I don't do that I try really hard to not do that and I stopped I stopped even going back and forth with people on Twitter a few years ago and now I take like about year and a half or so ago I took it even further I don't even read my mentions I don't go in there you know I just and then I just I open Twitter up like once a day to see if something crazy is happening is any place on fire is anybody doing something they shouldn't be doing like what what is happening well yeah I'm an oped columnist in a couple years ago I stopped reading the commentary about the abets you know because it you know generally it's it's not that well informed I mean there are exceptions to that but generally it's just people shooting from the hip and often in a just in a really nasty and derogatory way it doesn't help what do you think about social what is it about social media that lends itself to toxic exchanges because it seems to be I know people that are pretty friendly positive people in person when I meet them they're friendly they hug me and then I see them online I'm like you talk so much [ __ ] like why you doing this yeah well I mean obviously the anonymity is part of right I mean it's you know they're not even Anonymous I I know but but but you can trick yourself into thinking that right it's just it's you and your keyboard right and a bunch of symbols um there is something that's weirdly dehumanizing about it right you can trick yourself into thinking that you're not dealing with other human being it's just a it's just a bunch of text right and then that you know this idea of don't say something to someone online that you wouldn't say to them to their face a lot of people don't like that like no because I I don't want to be uncomfortable but I want to express myself so if I'm around you if I said what I really felt I would feel uncomfortable I don't like it but I don't like what you did or I don't like what you said so I'm going to be like [ __ ] you and I want to say that online from the safety of my own living room again I get that but it's more than a little cowardly right it is a lot cowardly yeah but there's some benefit
in being cowardly too though and this is this is that there are people that for whatever reasons maybe they're socially awkward they don't have uh the courage to say things to someone's face but maybe that person needs to hear them so this is the other the other perspective like in in favor of talking [ __ ] yeah well look again I'm not against social media that would be like being against oxygen now right or air right it's it's part of our our our life stream right I think the question is you know how we can use it in ways that help us communicate and understand each other that should be the question we're asking right um you know how can we put it to positive rather than negative uses well um free speech is not just being able to express yourself now now it's being able to express yourself through these private companies yeah which is very strange so now the Arbiter of free speech is YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and it's like wow like those are the town squares of our world now yeah and you know when I discuss the Free Speech question with my students I often say look anyone in this room is free to make a case for any kind of speech restriction they'd like provided that they tell me who's going to do the restricting yes all right and often it comes down to Jack dorsy you know well it's not really Jack it's really the other people that work with Jack yes right his company in defense of Jack though he he honestly wants Twitter to be wild he wants absolutely he's even he's even proposed a separate Twitter that is completely uncensored or you can have the moderated Twitter no I think that you know in his public statements I think he's been admirably ambivalent about this you know I mean he like do right and I think he before Trump got cut off which I didn't agree with I think dorsy generally had the right idea which is when we see something posted on Twitter that we think is you know wrong or horrible in instead of muzzling it what we're going to do is we're going to add our two cents right and we're going to put a flag on it saying by the way we think this is [ __ ] and here's why and look that's a form of free speech as well right using your free speech to criticize speech that you think is abhorent is an act of free speech Yes uh and I think I think that that seemed to
me to be dorsy impulse rather than musling people adding a voice that tries to inform people about what they've seen do you think that it's also a function of there's a limited amount of time when you're running an election right so like if you only have a few months when an elections rolling around and there's this person who is like getting all these people riled up and saying a bunch of crazy [ __ ] that may not be true and they have a choice to make like you can let it play out its natural course like the um the logical and informed response to bad speech is always better speech like like how do you deal with bad speech you you combat it with debate and more articulate more wellth thought out more sensible speech that's supposed to be so that if a person is on the sidelines and objectively looking into two arguments they look at that one go well that one's that makes more sense this guy's trying to rile people up but he's incorrect and this is why but you only have three months correct and there's a natural time that these things take to play out before you figure out what's [ __ ] and what's not right and also the other thing I'd add Joe is although I agree with the dynamic you just described in order to pull that off you need a certain sort of Education yes right and and and that's why I think I mean you know uh uh one of the things I study is education and I think that's absolutely a critical part of this discussion right it to reason and deliberate in the way you were just describing it that's not a natural act either we don't come out of the womb doing that right we need institu to teach us how to do that and they've not done a very good job of it yeah and and and teaching people how to think about things and how to look at things and analyze things in an objective manner what's going on is he leaning back is that the issue not enough volume um teach teaching people how to think is not necessary like critical thinking skills it's not really highlighted in school especially in high school it's not something that you really spend a lot of time well unfortunately I mean we give rhetorical Obi sence to it but we don't do it nearly enough and when you interview kids about their High School experience
uh and you ask them you know did you really engage in dialogue about substantive questions where there was real debate generally they say no yeah and the problem with debate is oftentimes you're just trying to win right so sometimes people are just very theatrical and very loud and dynamic or they'll they'll touch upon like certain things like you know and that certain things that they think like whether or not it's uh valid to the conversation they'll add those things to it because there's certain social clout to those definely look the hardest thing to do as a young person is to figure out what you really think right not what the people around you are saying your peers or your parents or your teachers what you really think and the problem is we haven't actually created educational institutions that help people do that right you know I mean what they do is they encourage people to mouth things they've heard from others rather than to come up with like okay what do I actually think about this right it also sounds good if you can mouth things that other people have said really well and you can kind of put in your own words sounds smart and and also I mean you know remember if you're in high school you're an adolescent and Adolescence you like we know from developmental psychology they're very attuned to other adolescents right I mean that's what it's about uh you know it's who's cool who's who's cute who's going out with whom you know and so I think there's almost a developmental reason that you would try to sort of tailor your opinions to the people around you but that's not good for you and it's definitely not good for our democracy I mean one way of thinking about all this social media stuff is we're all teenagers now and we're all doing precisely that trying to figure out who's cool and who isn't right and trying to get on the right side and as you were saying demow the right things yeah and be in with the cool kids correct want to be at the cool table in the cafeteria whoever they are right you know and again that's it's not good for you no or our democracy more to the point I was really lucky when I was young and we were talking about this earlier when you asked about my accent that I moved around a lot and uh I think
that was really good it sucked at the time because you know I moved to San Francisco when I was seven from New Jersey to San Francisco and then Florida when I was 11 and then when I was 13 we moved to Boston it was a lot of moving and because of that I didn't develop this like Core group of friends that I grew up with it was you know it was a lot a little chaotic but it forced me to formulate my own opinions about things you know I had a very similar upbringing in different places I actually grew up overseas because uh my parents were in the peace score uh as I was subsequently and so as as an elementary schooler I lived in India and Iran um uh and then I lived in New York and in Washington but uh like yourself I mean for me except for meeting my wife that was the formative experience of my life I would say living in all those different environments as a really little kid because also when you're little you don't know how weird the [ __ ] you're doing is you know it's just because you just do it it's so like in bangal or India my parents sent me to a girl school which took a couple boys in the younger grades because it was the Anga school that was near where we lived and it was actually a fabulous experience uh uh you know to be uh you know like one of a couple boys in a whole room full of girls but nobody told me that that was just bizarre I just did it you know you and that other boy must have been like what are we doing here man yeah no I I but you know it's funny Joe I don't even remember doing that it's just you know like when you're young you just do what's there right yeah yeah uh and you know and and you know I I lived in Iran in the late 60s when you know Teran was this hugely Cosmopolitan place I mean you completely different than it is now right totally different you know what is that like for to have those memories and to see what it's like now where they're I mean they just executed an Olympic wrestler for engaging in a a political protest now it's incredibly depressing and in some ways Iran was really an unlikely place for the Islamic revolution you know I mean Iran is a really it's a pluralist place I mean it's it's a Crossroads and it has been for 10,000 years um and it's interesting you mention Iran because you know when the Pew does these like pro- and
anti-American surveys where they take like a sample of people in different countries and say what do you think of America except for Israel the Iranians like us more than any country in the Middle East yeah I've heard that and and you would never get that from the saber rattling that you see in the newspapers what do you think that is well I think it's because the history of the country is so pluralist you know I mean Iran everyone conquered it right it's a huge mismatch of ethnicities and historically of religions you know um it it obviously had it had big Jewish populations but High populations obviously most of those people have been exiled right but that's very recent history and let's also remember it's a country of about 80 million people and over half of them were born well after you know so you know all they know is this corrupt regime that's that's governed them and they don't like it you know um uh you know there there's a huge amount of dissent in Iran um it's just that I think uh um I mean this is a whole other R but I think the United States and the rest of the world haven't really figured out how to really harness that descent um you know uh I think you know people pick up the newspaper and they imagine Iran as this place of kind of like islamist dittoe heads and it is not that not by any measure wow that's got to be so strange to have grown up there and see this gigantic shift and have these memories of what it was like previously yeah when it was this sort of Cosmopolitan Center it it was people from all over the world I went to an international school and I had friends from you know like you know Hong Kong and South Africa and England but also we can't romanticize and I mean it was a dictatorship and you know in some ways I think my concerns about free speech in some ways stem from that experience as well because I can remember my parents on the you know when they would talk on the phone they would often sort of say jokingly hey you know we better not go there we don't know who's listening yeah well that's everywhere now though right for different reasons right but you know hi NSA well this is a podcast so they're definitely listening to this that's right but your phone right you know when um Edward Snowden uh had to leave the country and you know and Glenn Greenwald
they published that story about the nsa's uh all the you know the [ __ ] that he leaked where there was this widespread surveillance on the American public that that's really disturbing it is disturbing and again the difference is thanks to democracy and Free Speech you and I can critique that we we may not be able to control it we may not be able to end it it's a complicated question but nobody's going to come in the night for my family or for yours because we're criticizing the NSA yeah we can critique it but it's still still exists yes it's very strange it's like you know hey you can't do that you shouldn't have done that oh you're still doing it oh are they still doing it they are still doing it okay well what do we do about that well they're not doing anything with it right now they're not doing anything with it Jesus Christ this is crazy well I forget which comedian made a joke out out of out of this when it it all started during Obama some of the leaks about this and you know uh I forget who it was but a comedian said well look you know I mean Americans said that they wanted a president that listens to everyone here you go that's funny that's whoever you are yeah it's um but that is uh in a sense it's in encouraging self-censorship and that's one of the things about privacy that makes privacy so critical is because if you cannot express yourself without fear of other people listening then there is a component of self self-censorship which is critical to the North Koreans the regime's way of keeping people in line is they have a form of self-censorship correct you know they have everybody tattle on everybody right right right and you know look we have forms of that in this country too and you got to be really careful when you talk about it because it's not North Korea right right of course and and uh you know but on college campuses like the ones that I work at there are forms of self-censorship they're not enforced by like bad guys with sunglasses and baseball bats right right it it's part of the culture unfortunately but you know there's there's now a big survey literature about it that's very upsetting so you know both students and faculty you ask them are you saying what
you think and large numbers of them say no and that includes Democrats and Republicans men and women students and faculty and so it's not North Korea uh it never has been never will be um but those of us who care about freeze Peach should be really upset about it nevertheless well there's certainly rigid ideologies on college campuses but do they get specific about saying what they really mean or think like what is it what are the key subjects well look I I'll give you an example and this was this came up in another book that I wrote there was a survey done of full-time faculty about 10 years ago and the question was do you agree with the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions and it turned out that 40% of the respondents said no now for the sake of transparency I should tell you that I'm in the 60% I think affirmative action has been a net gain for the University it's a complicated question um but I think it's been a net win nevertheless I was upset by the 40% figure not that there were people that disagreed with me I was upset that I hadn't heard from them right they are biting their tongues and that can't be good it can't be even it can't be good for affirmative action right um which could only benefit from people really affirmative action is a complicated question right and you know it cuts to a lot of different really really complex questions and if we're biting our tongues about it we won't get to good answers um and so obviously the people that oppose affirmative action are afraid to do so publicly uh because they don't want to incur the social cause and that's not good yeah that's unfortunate and that is a part of what happens today is the pylon when someone says something that is not on the list of things you're supposed to think or say and you can get piled on yeah and then there's Gil by association right and it goes like this right you know David Duke is an imperial wiard of the KKK David Duke obviously opposes affirmative action you oppose affirmative action Ergo you're David Duke and of course there is no Ergo right I mean this this is a like a fallacy the third grader could see through but it's all around us yeah that's a real problem with today guilt by association yeah it's um there's so many complicated
questions that you often times feel like you have the answer to or you have your opinion on it and then you'll hear a very nuanced perspective from someone who takes a a different stance and if you're open-minded you go oh maybe I haven't considered that point of view and that's one of the real reasons why it's important that you have free speech and you have debate because you don't want to get pigeon hold into an idea that maybe somewhere down the line you might find foolish but you weren't allowed to be exposed to some really good arguments to the contrary right and you know um I think at the end of the day for me this is really a question about learning I mean I'm a teacher that's my vocation right how do we learn from each other and I think that the way we learn from each other is when we're examining as many different sides of a question as we possibly can right that's how you learn like how many people learn from someone that they agree with I don't really remember the last time I did it's like oh Trump yeah I hate him too right and I do loath Trump uh but I don't learn from somebody that loathes Trump because I already loath him right some people have some good loathing points though they do never know no there are different ways to loath Trump I you know you might find out some facts that you weren't aware of about like con construction dealings and no there's plenty to load and there are always new things to learn but I think just the larger point for me is that I think I'm more likely to learn from a conversation with somebody who actually likes Trump precisely because I don't right yeah it's just hard to find rational intelligent people that are open-minded that oppose each other that will sit down and have a conversation where they're not trying to they're not trying to brow beat each other or bully each other into submission they're not trying to win the conversation but they're honestly going okay so why do you feel like that what is it about this that that gets you excited what is it about this that makes you upset okay well I looked at it this way and then I go huh well I don't think that's right because of this and you go oh okay if you can do that open-mindedly with people that you have opposing viewpoints uh I've gotten better at that that's one of the things
that I've I've really gone out of my way to try to listen to to people and try to look at things from their perspective even if I don't agree with it try to just find where they're connecting the dots like how are you doing this okay let me see how you and sometimes it's it's interesting like sometimes you can see the logical fallacies that they've fallen into and you go oh look at that they [ __ ] slip right on there and look I think that's a great ambition but I think that that's the exception because I think most of our media environment promotes the opposite right I mean you know um uh just think of what a news feed is Right a news feed is the events of the day curated according to your search history yeah and your biases yeah and and what an awful image like time for your 2 o'l feed right of of all the stuff that we have curated in order to reinforce your biases that's what it is there is but quite honestly my news feed is uh is pretty it's pretty innocuous my news feed is all like new cars that are coming out and this Jiu-Jitsu match has been postponed and you know it's like yeah it's not all politics right of course mine is not politics I don't care um when I'm looking at when I'm looking at things that are interesting to me I am only looking at things that find that I'm looking for distractions and things that are my hobbies like I'll I'll my newsfeed has professional billiards on it so I'll get like snooker scores or snooker from the UK and I you know when something like deep and meaningful if I'm looking for something if I'm researching something then I go look for that you know I don't like that stuff in my newsfeed because I don't want I'm I figured out like a year or two ago like I'm I'm tired of getting freaked out I don't I don't want to just pick up like Jesus what is he doing now I don't want to do that every time I pick up my phone what's happening what is it North Korea [ __ ] I don't want to do that it's exhausting it's exhausting and I I I don't think it benefits me but I do like to be informed so I you know subscribe to Washington Post I subscribe to Wall Street Journal and New York Times and I'll go there and I'll go on purpose to read right and to read different sources I mean I think that's what we have an
educated people to do and that's what our broader media environment discourages I'm having a hard time finding a good Republican a right-wing perspective that's a news source though yeah what do you know one it's I mean it's hard look I mean you know I you mentioned the Wall Street Journal I mean fiscally yeah but they they're a little social justice e with some of their op EDS yeah I mean I I think that there's a big difference between the news side of that paper and the you know and the opinion page yeah um but you know I think the Wall Street Journal is a really good source you know um and what what I do in the evenings is I just toggle between Fox and Ms NBC because I know that if I were to watch yeah well my wife thinks so I mean the reason though is if I watch MSNBC I'll just see my worldview confirmed do you uh ever read Matt taii substack yeah did you read Rachel matow as Bill Riley no I I I I read about it I haven't read it it's [ __ ] great great he made that same point in uh what's it called hate speech is that his book hate Inc hate Inc is a book that he released last year that's phenomenal I'm just a giant fan of Matt taibe I think he's one of the most important journalists today cuz he's so honest and so open-minded and he's so well informed when he when he goes off on a subject like he has put in the work like when he went off on Savings and Loan crisis or when he went on you know the subprime mortgage business and he had to go he had a actually interviewed him on the podcast about it he had to learn all that [ __ ] like he's a journalist he's not a finance guy and so he had to really understand what kind of [ __ ] these people were involved with and then put it in his beautiful Pros so that it's like it it dances on the page as you get informed about this [ __ ] criminal behavior that led to this you know gigantic financial crash that we endured and and yet at the same time I mean look I think it's great that subac exists and it's great that a fellow like that is on it but the fact that he's on it and that he's not writing for one of our major media companies that says something troubling about our about this configuration still writes r Stone I guess he does yeah he's still a rolling stone contributor um but yes it's listen
and this is I've said this when people say oh I can't believe they wrote that about you that's not true clickbait is what you have to do today if you want to stay alive I don't hate the player it's the game the game is look no one's buying physical newspapers anymore so with the absence of sales of physical newspapers it's all about clicks now if you tell the truth like completely in the title you're going to lose a lot of your business you have to kind of distort things well I should tell you I read two print newspapers at the first thing every morning but I'm I'm like the last American to do that good in fact the the onion ran a great headline a couple years ago that said uh I think I believe it was last Prince subscriber to Boston Globe dies I used to deliver the Boston Globe there you go yeah yeah yeah I used to deliver the Boston Globe Boston Herald and the New York Times um that was my job when I was uh a young man I was a paper boy as well were you yeah yeah yeah Washington Post it's a good job for discipline gets you up in the morning taught me a lot yeah yeah and now I mean well there are a whole bunch of reasons for this but you know the the the most of the circulation is done by adults and cars that's what I did yeah oh he did yeah I did in I had hundreds of houses that I would go to I could make a good living like not really but I can make enough money in a couple hours a day where I didn't really have to have another job right I did the same thing in high school you know my friends worked at you know Sport and goods stores and grocery stores and I got up and delivered the paper and I made more money than they did yeah you just have to have the ability to get up seven days a week early in the morning it's a grind but um but the in the absence of print of print journalism where you could just go and buy a paper copy they lose out so much money because it used to be you know there was the machines you put the money in you pull a paper out and remember there's an honor System you open the box and you get all these papers you're only supposed to take one you remember those days that's an interesting time that would never happen today where you could put a quarter in and you open that sucker you're supposed to take one paper but see there are
other there are other virtues of it I think that we tend to underappreciate and the reason that I read in print is there's a lot of evidence that you retain more that way than you do on a screen you know and uh you know why is that well there it depends on whom you ask but the people that study ey tracking say that for whatever reason when you're reading print your eye goes all the way across on each line uh and on screens it's less likely to do that you can't make this up they call it the F pattern it when when the eye trackers look at what you do in a screen the first line you go all the way across but then the next one as in an F it's a little shorter oh and um when when you give people the same text uh you know in print and and on a screen they just retain more in print and I I tell my students this I say when you can print something out I know you can't always because you will hold on to more I have a Kindle that has that paper screen yeah how is that is that the same I don't know I don't know you know I look like paper and and and look you know I think that obviously things are changing so rapidly right it may well be that future Generations are socialized in a different way and you know their eyes do different things have you heard of uh there's a new product I I've not tried it but I've seen advertising for it's called remarkable oh I read about it it's a a tablet but you when you write on it you write it in handwriting and it can either save it in your handwriting or it puts it into print yeah and it looks like paper like as you're writing on it but you can have you know a gigabyte of of information on this little tablet so like thousands of pages like you could write books on that yeah with just this p and the pencil apparently has a tactile do you know anything about it you ever use it you got did you show it to me yeah just briefly like a month ago a month ago I got it like a while ago you didn't have it set up yeah I just haven't used it I haven't done anything with it but that's what I'm saying you didn't have it set up where you I saw you use it I yeah I don't use it yeah yeah I just show it did you show you you show it to me the Box yeah just like pulled out I was like here check out you like you knew what it was I was yeah it's remarkable why do I
not remember that I don't know cuz it was like 5 minutes my hard drive is so full my my brain hard drive is something is not that important like delete get it out of there but I don't use it that much at all it's just kind of sitting there like my other iPad that I don't use I thought about it as a tool for writing jokes it might be helpful for that yeah because I think there's an app for your phone as well right so you could yeah but it's just writing there's no other apps it does connect to the internet but that's just so you can share stuff think yeah but but you know all these things I think we're so close to these revolutions it's hard to imagine what they're going to do to the way that we think right you know and uh you know there was um think about like multitasking right so there was a guy at Stanford named Clifford nass who died a a year or so ago he's quite young unfortunately and cliffer Nas was the guru of multitasking and what he demonstrated is that multitasking is a hoax and that multitaskers have everyone snookered including themselves so they're not Liars they honestly believe that they can do three or four things at the same time with equal efficiency it's just they can't right they believe it and so much in the media inv is encouraging us both to multitask and also to believe in multitasking right as an article of faith it just turns out to be untrue and he did it every which way with like different sorts of sporting Endeavors and card games and all kinds of different things he said you know do these three things separately and do them together right and if you do them one by one um you do them so much better and this is another message I'm constantly giving to my students like don't believe the multitasking hype um it is a hype it is not true you know turn off everything else and work on one thing and then finish it and then go to the next and it's hard right because that's why it's such that's why it's such a flex when you see a chess master play 10 people at the same time and walk around and like mhm [ __ ] you not today yeah well there are exceptions to every rule right that those people can multitask yes but are they even multitasking cuz it's still the same Endeavor correct the same game yeah yeah they're playing one game yeah I think
there's there's some real truth to that because uh I think most people that I know that multitask they do several things but they I don't think they do them quite as good as if they were only doing that one thing correct correct the interesting thing is they actually believe that they do and I think that was NASA's point I mean that's why it keeps going right is that we we haven't gotten the message yeah yeah that's not a good that's not a good perspective like when you think you're doing something at your best and you're not like look we're all great self- sabator you know and we're all great we're we're not good judges of ourselves we're we're biased right right all of us are why is that yeah well you know Freud said that we're all narcissists at some level right and you know you want to be the the winner right you want to be the person who you know you know beats the team at the buzzer and gets the girl and all these other things and so that makes us incredibly biased judges of ourselves yeah you know and we all radically inflate our our abilities and our capacities but what about people that are very self-deprecating and are objective you think even those people are full [ __ ] I wouldn't go that far you know but they might think they're even more self-deprecating than they are right or or better at self-deprecation than the next guy and we're just we're not good judges of that yeah yeah that's uh very unfortunate and there's probably some exercises to make you more objective yeah but getting getting married has been a good one for me oh there you go you got someone around you like no you don't [ __ ] out here exctly yeah yeah yeah I think um it's it's a difficult thing for people to do to face themselves and to face like what they do good and what they do bad and one when one way I found is to engage in things that don't leave any room for [ __ ] right like martial arts is one of them another one is one of the reasons why I like pool is the balls don't care about your personality they don't care about any they don't care like either make the ball or you do not make the ball like you either can win or you lose like it's really simple in that in that regard there's no but but it's also very complex it's like you either execute correctly or you don't and so if
you do things like that like martial arts in particular is a very humbling thing and I think it's really good in that way that most of the people that I know that are martial artists that are at an elevated state they're really good they're really friendly people they're humble in a lot of ways and one of the reasons why is cuz they're humbled all the time yeah cuz your ass is getting kicked all the time yeah if you know the three of us were all black belts and we were uh training together we'd all be cranking each other's neck every day like you'd be tapping me every day and Jamie wouldd be tapping me and after a while you're like that's not going to happen you just get used to it you just accept the fact that someone got you and you don't right but when you see people that have never lost I have a friend and we had this conversation and one of the things that uh we were talking about was the regret of him not doing sports when he was younger because it like he never learned how to lose he never learned how to take a loss and just not have it emotionally devastate him so to this day like even if he's playing a card game it'll freak him out if he loses like he won't say anything but it'll really bother the sh out of them and some people they you know they don't they don't have a lot of experience in testing themselves so they don't have a lot of faith in their own character and judgment Under Pressure y that's unfortunate but it's interesting Joe that you prefaced all this about with something about kind of what you're good and what you're bad at yeah because you know the other thing I think that psychology has taught us is that actually that's a very bad way to think of yourself that is the more you think about whether you're good at something or not it turns out that generally the worst you do it at that that's right the best thing to do is not to think about it because it turns out that when the brain starts to think about what's good and what's bad it thinks of those in rather static terms so like I'm good at math or I'm not but maybe that's in in action of the thing yeah but maybe not in reflection of the thing right right and it can be both but you know in general the best thing you know when a student asks me like do you think I'm smart or do you think I'm good at
history I always say I don't know and I don't care all I care about is what you've written right that's it you know this is exactly this is not like an existential Judgment of your soul and by the way the more you think about that the worse you're going to do yeah so don't do it don't do it because it it it it makes you think in somewhat static terms and I remember when my kids were growing up like you would often hear oh so and so is good at this and so and so is good at that so and so is bad at this so and so is bad at that and they also they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies right you know and that's not good for anyone either so just just don't think about it just do it yeah right don't think about whether you're quote good at it just do it just do it yeah um but also recognize what parts of whatever you're doing that maybe you need to improve upon absolutely right and you know I think you can more easily do that if you're not thinking in these binary good and bad terms right because if you think you're bad at it like why would you improve at it you're bad at it right yeah well maybe you want to get better at it maybe right but that involves a belief that I think transcends this idea that people are good and bad at things yeah but people do develop proficiency at things and don't think there's some benefit in giving yourself like a little reward or letting yourself be aware that you've achieve some level of proficiency so you're you're there's a benefit to all this discipline without a doubt without a out and we've all experienced that right but I think uh um I think the key at least for me is experiencing the action right you know experiencing whatever it is you're a great Billiards game you know and you you finally able to hit that incredibly complex shot that you couldn't hit before instead of wow I'm a great Billiards player like or I'm not right I hit that shot right so just be more in tune with the action of doing it Judgment of your abilities exactly which is not useful right yeah that's a good point it's very Zen right that's who you're supposed to be like Zen that they actually discussed that in Zen of the art of archery yep there's uh some I believe that's in Zen of the art of arery this thought about you know not
concentrating on the result yeah but just like uh just do it do go through the process yeah you know understand the process concentrate on the process yeah yeah yeah that's the thing with martial arts you know you don't think while you're doing it that uh oh I'm really good at this you really you just think you don't have time for one exactly you have to just do it right right so I'm curious Jo since you were describing kind of all these moves growing up how would you say if somebody were to ask you what have been the most important changes in the way you see the world since you were a younger person either the political world the social world the environment whatever it is like what would you if you think if you compare yourself to your younger self what would you say have been the most important changes and how you think and how you see the world I think the single biggest change that I can remember single biggest shift that I ever had was having children because then I started thinking about everyone as grownup babies I used to think of people as being in a static State like if I met a guy and he was a 40-year-old guy I'd be like oh there's Mike he's 40 and then now I go oh Mike used to be a baby right and then all the weird [ __ ] that happened to Mike in his life and the pros and cons and the failures and successes and the lies and truths and and here he is that's what made Mike that's what made Mike I have a lot more sympathy and empathy for people because of that because I a lot of the people that I see now that are you know [ __ ] if I met an [ __ ] before I'd be like that guy's just an [ __ ] and then now I go oh you know that's a baby that like came out a bad product like what wrong well you think like a historian I mean I'm a historian and you know when when when my kids were younger they would always get annoyed with me and they would say like Dad when you meet somebody why do you always say where you from like that's so annoying and the answer is I'm a historian that's what interests me is you know what what are the communities and what are the experiences that that made you who you are and those things matter yeah yeah yeah it it yeah it's a lot it's everything you know we are the culmination of our
life's experiences and how we've absorbed them along with our genetics along with our environment you know and environment is a critical Factor because it's not just the environment in terms of like the city you live in but the people that you hang around with oh yeah you know and the fact that you made all those moves and what that involved were different sets of people right in different environments that helped a lot hugely important right well I went from San Francisco to Florida in the 1970s and uh that was a big one because uh we in San Francisco we lived uh right near Lumbard Street it was like the heart of the hippie movement it was saw hippies everywhere our next door neighbors were this uh gay couple that used to smoke pot and play the bongos with my aunt she would they would all get naked and go next door and play the Bongos and smoke pot and like with this this couple there were there were it was just a different way to live it was just normal like to be around all these like hippies and like these long-haired guy it was a strange place it was a different place in the 1970s and then moving to Florida it was a total different environment now I remember my friend who's a Cuban kid and his dad was upset that gay people are getting to married or getting the right to get married so he had a newspaper was like God damn it he was like threw the newspaper down at the table he was real upset and I remember being 11 going how [ __ ] dumb is this guy like he he cares whether the gay people get married like why do you care like that is what a weird thing to be upset by right but I remember thinking that when I was 11 like wow like Florida's [ __ ] different right it didn't make any sense to me right but you know I would argue that you learned a lot from that that you wouldn't have learned if you had stayed on Lumbard Street yeah for sure yeah if you if you live in that environment you don't know how other people are yeah you really don't know it's just it's so different yeah it's like I I remember I was 11 also I went to school and then I came home and I asked my mom what the n-word meant and she she goes you know what it means I go no I don't know what it means that's why I'm asking you what does it mean and she had explain it to me I was
like really wow like I never heard it before wow yeah and do you remember how she explained it like what her answer was my mom had me when she was very young MH so she was a little dismissive she was a little like aren't you grown up yet so in a lot of ways it's good cuz the for forc me to like figure [ __ ] out for myself but yeah like I remember when I was in the car with my sister I was about 7 years old and I was asking my mom how babies were made she's like you know how babies are made that was what my mom always used to say you know I go no I don't she goes you're going to I'm going to tell you and you're going to laugh I'm like no I'm not and S goes okay a man puts his penis in a woman's vagina I thought it was the funniest thing and she wouldn't leave me the [ __ ] alone she's like no you you knew it and you were trying to say it so you would laugh no I didn't know you told me now I know I didn't know I was seven and and do you remember how she explained the nword like like she said it was a derogatory term for black people I was like wow I remember thinking whoa so I didn't know what it was I cuz I was 11 you know I guess I guess in San Francisco I hadn't heard it that's the only thing I could think of right cuz where we lived in San Francisco was very diverse it was like uh the kids in my class it was I don't know like 6040 white and black and a lot of Asian too not even not even white black it was like yeah I mean I'm just making up numbers I was it's hard to remember but I remember there's a lot of different ethnicities in my environment and we all hung out together on the playground hung out together it was normal right it was uh it was a really open-minded place man in the 19 70s San Francisco so open-minded everybody smoked pot everybody hated the war and I remember when the Vietnam War ended I was living in San Francisco and I remember really clearly because I was a little kid and I was scared of the war I was really scared um because uh my stepfather had they uh you know he had not got drafted he had gotten out of it you know they do the lottery and he didn't get picked so he was very fortunate that he didn't get picked but he was really scared of it cuz he was of
age at the time oh wow and uh I remember the the war ended and I remember thinking that's great they finally figured out that war is bad and now we'll never we're never going to do War again that's really what I thought so I was a little kid I remember thinking that like now like good I I was born at a good time where they figured out no more war and then Desert Storm happened when I was like 21 yeah and I remember thinking these [ __ ] dummies like I thought we figured this out I thought we're not going to war anymore what is this [ __ ] did did your biological dad Sur in the war in Vietnam no my my biological dad I don't know him oh okay yeah I haven't spoken to him since I was like seven years old wow yeah so do do does he know that you're Joe Rogan his name's Joe Rogan too isn't that funny wow yeah so he must he must right for sure but but you don't know no wow yeah wow wow and and do do we know if he has another family yeah he does he does yeah yeah yeah interesting well and and and and you're you're not uh you don't want to know what he thinks about no Joe Rogan you know what man having kids I could not imagine not talking to my children I can't imagine it I couldn't imagine it yeah so someone not talking to me I'm like okay you know I don't hate him good luck yeah enjoy your life but my stepdad was a really good guy and uh it taught me a lot about about my relationship with my kids like what what you know I know what it feels like to have a biological parent out there and they don't contact you right they don't reach out to you they never find you they never they don't seek you out they don't and you grow up like that going maybe he'll call me one day then never do maybe he'll try to find me never do it's bad but it's good you know what's good about it what's good is it it it makes me understand as a father how important the bond between uh parents and the children are it means a lot it means a lot to me and it's good because it gave me a challenge to understand myself for who I actually am without being under the pressure of uh achieving an image that a father wanted me to live up to or that you know someone else's perspective of who I should be or how I should behave or how
I should think about the world oh that's interesting and I was allowed to think about the world through my own experiences through but didn't your stepdad play that role in some ways he did in some ways yeah he did it's different yes it's always going to be different stepdads and and kids it's always going to be especially if they don't have biological kids of their own because it's a confusing process that happens to you do you have children I do yeah you know what they adults confusing process that happens to you when you have children um when they're babies and then you you and you see them grow up and you're like wow this is like this is a different I have a different life this life is so different now it's not it's not just simple as now there's a baby it's like you're not the same thing anymore now you're a father yes and you have to adjust you have to adjust the way you think and you have to think of the way you communicate with them you have to think of like you're you're helping mold their view of the world and you have to communicate by example Le you have to you know uh acknowledge mistakes you have to uh one of the things I always do is when I whenever I correct my kids with anything I always say listen I did everything you have done wrong I did all of it and this is and I'll tell you what I did i' I screwed up everything I've ever done I'm like I I I made mistakes my whole life I I did things and I lied to my parents I did things and I pretended I didn't I did everything that you've ever done wrong I've done wrong 10 times as bad so I'm not judging you I'm just this just a part of being a person right and I go way out of my way to explain that like so every time something's wrong every time something happens I always go I did all this it's interesting you use the term mold because back to our earlier discussion I think both with parenting and being a teacher and on both I think the other really hard thing is you know how do you also cultivate somebody's autonomy and let them be different from you yeah M Maybe best word right you know but but you have to do both right because there are some things you have to indoctrinate you just do especially when they're younger like we're not going to have a discussion about whether it's appropriate to take your turn or to
take a more pregnant example to call somebody the nword right we're not going to debate that right we're just going to tell you like this is right or wrong but then things get more complicated right because there's lots of gray in the world as well and they've got to figure that out for themselves yeah you got to leave room for conversations too CU sometimes kids just really want to talk to you and try to figure things out with you yes you know and sometimes that helps the most sometimes just like you got to get them alone too when the two of them are together sometimes it's like hey here you got to get like I really love uh taking one kid and going places with them just having conversations I love that too and just letting them complain about school you know what my teacher said you know like wow that's crazy and you know you let them you know let them talk about uh it's interesting when kids kids are really tuned into uninspired people when there's an uninspired person telling them what to do or teaching a class like they're really tuned into it and uh there's a real lesson in that because when kids have enthusiastic teachers they love those teachers they want to tell you about it oh Mrs Wilson she's the best she's so much fun she gets there we all love her and you know it's like it turns out Mrs Wilson loves her job right so when you go there Wilson Smiles at everybody and she's like good job and she high fives kids and right and then everybody's like I love that lady and then there's some people that just want everybody to shut up and they just get mad at you if you didn't do your homework correctly or they y you yep and and they resent you right you know the Mrs will Wilsons of the world they don't do that they understand that you're growing right and people do that in different ways at different rates and they're going to encourage you along the way you know but it's hard to find people like that that requires Herculean patience you know you have to be a special kind of person to be that kind of a teacher yes absolutely but I think there's a great benefit in being around Bad Teachers too and one of the things I was telling my kids one of my uh kids had a really bad teacher last year at their old school and uh I said you know it sounds terrible but there's a great
lesson to be learned being around a very miserable person like that mhm cuz like you need to be exposed to [ __ ] like [ __ ] are important like this person like this teacher would call kids stupid like you need to be exposed and I'm like I know it seems dumb but you need to be exposed to people like that you need to know that they're real and it'll help you appreciate the Mrs Wilson's well I guess I mean Joe you were exposed to somebody that like that with your dad yeah right right yeah right how old were you when he took off well my parents split up when I was five and my mom and my step dad and I and my sister moved to San Francisco when I was seven okay so that was the last time I spoke to him and how old do you were you when you stopped hoping that you would talk to that's a good question I don't know you know I think once I got really into martial arts that's all I thought about and then I sort of buried him with that in my head but I didn't really even realize until I started doing psychedelics and smoking pot thinking how much of an effect it actually had on me huh uh that's when I really thought about it and I'm like wow that really [ __ ] with me when I was a kid and I was kind of in denial about it you know right right which isn't always the best way either no I mean that is um that's really a that's a giant problem with uh poor people that where Sons grow up without father figures they become very angry you know that's a The Angry Young Man it's a real it's a real issue and we just there's this sort of uh unquenchable anger like it's hard to put that fire out you try to put it out and the Cinders are just still there right the Embers are still hot right and so was it was it Marshall Arts that helped you quench The Embers yeah 100% yeah yeah yeah definitely my parents talk about this day there like there's two versions of me there's like the version of me where like like really angry kid and then the version of me that was really and it was postm martial arts wow yeah I just it's a fantastic vehicle for developing human potential and for me it was the right one for some people it's piano right for some people it's yeah yeah it could be anything painting yeah anything anything where you pour
yourself into it and then you learn like you're expressing yourself like whatever this feeling this emotion this energy you have inside of yourself you express it through your art right and for me it was I needed something physical too I needed something where I just got my anger out and you know hitting a punching bag and just something there was something all right physical about it too but then also the discipline of learning something and you must have had some good teachers for that like a very for very very very fortunate that I ran into uh an amazing uh School amazing teachers but I think for for young people learning something and getting good at it is so critical because it teaches you that you used to suck at something but you got better at it through hard work and dedication yeah and that that is applicable to everything right and back to the earlier discussion actually you didn't suck you just thought you did yeah right well I mean you know you you you had an image of yourself as either incapable or you know um just inadequate right yeah right yeah right and most people do you know most people growing up in particular when they're young they have this I mean that's the one thing that young people struggle with I think more than anything is insecurity I think that's also where bullying comes from that comes from insecurity you don't think you see very many secure bullies I'm curious do your kids do martial arts they did for a bit but the you know I don't push yeah I'm not like they'll I let them beat me up I still let them kick me and punch me I got teach because if they can hurt me I'm like if you can hurt a grown man like you you actually know how to do it right so I teach him how to leg kick and stuff um but they got into other stuff they got into other sports they're more they're into sports but you know I want them to just whatever I don't think there's a there's a path there's like your path is different than her path is just go have fun there is not I mean something I love about teaching college students is that they're old enough to start understanding the world but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it and so it's really a magical time I think like 19 and 20 year old human beings are the most interesting people on the planet because they can
see things and they're often very aware of how the world is working but they have no idea what their Ru is going to be in it right and so they're much more interesting than you or me or at least than me because you know like the game is sort of up for me I me you know like I've made my choices I've done the things that I do and that's kind of it yeah that's a good point yeah there's so much potential but also so much insecurity do you remember do you remember being a young man not knowing how it was going to turn out totally and it is scary and frankly it's scarier now I mean and I think you know look I I went to college in the late 70s and it was a different world and I never once remember thinking gee am I going to be like a burden on my parents am I going to be unable to get a job or sustain myself right because the United States I mean it it had like a like a hegemonic role in the world that it does not have now and you know um it it was just a time of much more National confidence I think and you know I I have a lot of empathy for people in my daughter's generation and in my students generation because they don't have that same kind of certitude you know so I do remember kind of wondering but I guess I didn't feel the same sense of pressure or fear like I think that because America still ruled the Ruled The Roost um it was easier to think C it's going to work out but didn't weren't you worried about Russia when you were young and in college didn't you worry about the Cold War and all that ja you know yes and no I mean you know everyone read fail safe and everyone watched movies about you know uh the Cuban crisis and Red Dawn and all of that but let's also remember that I'm not that old and by the time I get to Young adulthood I'm going to turn 60 shortly you look great so do you Joe thank yeah but coming from you that's a quite quite a compliment how old how old are you 53 almost 54 I'll be 54 in a couple months all right all right yeah I mean you know look by the time I get to a young adult I mean the the Soviet Union is starting to implode I mean this is really the Twilight of the Cold War right is the 1980s you know um and uh you know when I was a pecore volunteer uh uh I I remember listening to radio Moscow because I was in Nepal and I had a little shortwave radio and only two
things came in Voice of America and Radio Moscow and Voice of America had its issues and it's own brand of propaganda but just listening even just the sound values of Radio Moscow it was so hilariously poor like I just remember thinking you know this is not like we're going to win this this struggle it's really not a struggle at all you know that's funny yeah yeah because we had this uh we had this distorted perception of the powers of the Soviet Union when I was in high school where that we thought of them as being just like America but over there like in terms of their their fire power and their and their financial uh means and that's what Reagan kind of did to them spent them into a corner well that's part of it and you know and also I mean they just they they didn't do a good job getting things to people right I mean David reesman who was one of my favorite uh authors ever I mean during the height of the Cold War he wrote this great piece where he said if we want to win this all we have to do is just fly planes over Russia and just drop nylon right uh because we know the women want nylon pany hos you can't get them in Russia and you know again once they put those on right they're not going to stand for it and I think you know a version of that actually happened yeah well they realized that communism doesn't provide incentive and and you know like it's not fun to stand online to buy coffee right I mean like you know it isn't no who wants to do that yeah it's uh there was always this fear hanging over head in high school though of a nuclear war yeah no I do remember that and you remember the TV show the day after that might have been a little before your time but you know the it well it's basically a you know a horrible imagination of a nuclear attack right and there were other novels about that alas Babylon was a best seller and it's just kind of what what's going to happen after the big one in alas Babylon by the way somebody trades a jar of peanut butter for a jaguar and the reason is you can't get any petrol you can't get any oil right and the guy's really hungry he's like take my Jag you're not going to be able to drive it anyway wow uh yeah and so you know I I do I do remember that and you know I also remember you know the uh you know
the anti-nuclear movements you know and um uh you know San um and the other campaigns around that and you know Reagan was an interesting figure because you know uh um it it's it's it's true that we often credit him for winning the Cold War um but obviously that that victory was a long time in coming and Reagan also in his own way he trivialized it you know he would make jokes about like when the you know the bombing is going to start you know he would say yeah that the bombing is going to start in five seconds uh and everyone was supposed to laugh about that and we didn't yeah yeah Reagan was famous for that one speech that he made in front of the United Nations where he's talking about how quickly we would come together if we were faced with a threat from an alien world yeah I remember that because I remember all the conspiracy theorists got so jazzed up they're like finally we're going to know the truth the aliens are coming that was like crack for them yeah it was that's the best I mean there is no better distraction for like a giant percentage of the population than to tell them the aliens are coming oh yeah yeah well you know um uh you know HL Menin a 100 years ago he had this great quote where he said something like you know for every deep social and political problem there's typically a solution that is simple attractive and wrong uh and that's what conspiracy theories are right they're simple attractive and wrong you know uh many of them are simple attractive or wrong some of them are surprisingly accurate that's what's scary right well I think unfortunately and this is where the history piece comes in one reason that Americans tend to believe in conspiracy theories is that the government has engaged in conspiracies yes right EX I mean like you know if you're trying to put like LSD on Fidel Castro's um cigar which the United States did right um uh you know then it it it let's just say there's a crying wolf problem and you know it's it it becomes easier for people to believe that the government is engaged in perfidious conspiracies after the government is engaged in a perfidious conspiracy there's a fantastic book called chaos by Tom O'Neal and it's all
about the Manson trials yeah have you ever read it have you heard about it I have not yeah it's amazing it's it's the craziest story because Tom was a neighbor to my friend Greg fit Simmons in Venice and he had been working on this book literally for two decades what happened was he got hired to write a story uh for a magazine on the anniversary of the Manson Murders and so he's writing the story and as he's doing research to write the story he starts realizing like holy [ __ ] like there's a lot more to this than I thought he gets deeper and deeper and deeper into it he finds out that the man thing was connected to these CIA mind control experiment experiments that they were doing during the 1960s and Manson had been for sure sheltered along the way uh released from prison every time he got arrested for something and they were all saying this is above my pay grade we were told to release him and that he was involved in these uh I forget what prison it was but they were doing these LSD experiments on prisoners yes I mean this is one of the most horrible chapters I mean speaking of conspiracy theories I mean you mentioned hallucinations earlier I mean you know the federal government was involved in you know developing and testing these substances during the Cold War and it was very much about the Cold War it's interesting you mention the Soviet Union because the history there is they first developed them because they thought it was going to be a truth serum yes so so you capture somebody from the other side and you feed them this but then when they did these horrible experiments in jails and psychiatric institutes they found out it was the opposite and then they started tout it as something that we would give our agents so if you ever captured you do and then you would just blabber and say the eels are in my hovercraft so you know it it it they always had that that that's one of the terrible Logics about the cold war is you could shift on a dime right and you could basically make the same plea in a just in the inverse way so okay it's not a true serum but now it's something that we can just use so when our agents get caught they won't tell the truth well it was also these agents were given autonomy to to run these tests and these studies and they did some wild [ __ ] one
of them was called operation midnight Climax and operation midnight climax the CIA ran brothel and they would watch through two-way mirrors and they would dose these Johns up and have these poor guys just like tripping on acid and not have any idea what happened and you know they would listen to them talk to the prostitutes it's I mean know it's it's it's an awful chapter and then you know people made pranks too you know you you might have read that like one day in the 50s somebody spiked the punch at Langley like the Christmas punch at a CIA party and a bunch of Agents like checked themselves into into psychiatric hospitals because they nobody told them it was just like oh this is going to be this is going to be mad got someid running around this is going to be zany wow they had some leftover acid from some other creepy experiments well you've been used to doing that to people you probably think it's funny to do it to your co-workers right or you're right and you're just Aus right well they had a hate B Clinic uh free clinic that they operated the CIA operated for decades and they closed it down just a couple months after this book came out they're like okay time to close up shop boys because this book was so detailed and Tom had spent so much time pouring over all of the documents and the data and he had he had dotted all his eyes and crossed all his teas and at the end of it you you read the book and you're like holy [ __ ] right and I think that's where the history piece really important you know I mean conspiracy theory is a huge problem in our society right now there's no question about it but again like conspiracies can occasionally be real and and if you don't want people to believe in them don't do them right I mean you know that's you know don't don't have secret LSD experiments that go for 20 years don't do that yeah I think they went for 40 yeah I know maybe even more um when it comes to free speech what what we have now is just we have words that we express and these words convey intent and thought and the way we perceive the world and and you know we each take in the other person's words and the way they're saying them and try to go okay I see where you're going with this one of the things that weirds me out most about the future is all of
these sort of symic human electronic things gadgets that are being proposed like neuralink like Elon musks thing where Elon told me specifically said you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth but wasn't Joe then in the interview where you shared a blunt with him no no no okay that was two before okay neural link I think was the second interview I did with him or maybe the third I think it was the third not sure right no I think it was the second was it it was the second the second yeah um but when he said you're going to be able to talk without words oh I I meant I was and he was so confident about it he like you're going to be able to talk without words and if anybody else said that I'd be like sure dude but when Elon Musk says that you're like [ __ ] we're going to talk without words like immediately I started thinking well maybe that would be good because it's it's going to be a rough transition but it was probably a rough transition to go from grunts to language but you don't want to go back to grunts no you don't so maybe this is how we cuz biology takes so long to catch up and electronics are so rapid in the technological innovation right so maybe that's how we bypass all of our monkey genetics we get we get someone who's probably a [ __ ] robot to figure out this thing where they cut a hole in your head and and put this devicon that has all these electrodes into your brain and now this monkey's playing pong with his brain do you know about this now I think I read something about it yeah this monkeyy using neuralink yeah yeah well look you know I I mean this smart ass monkey yeah I don't want to play him I'd be scared right this monkey's got some skills yeah that that looks like one of the early video games mhm it does yeah yeah pong it looks like pong I had one of those yeah did you have that well no but um when I was in the Peace Corps my friends and I would play it with flashlights on the ceiling cuz we we we were in Nepal and you know we were in a place with no electricity or running water and one of the we found many ways to amuse ourselves but one was by inventing a beer pong game which you did with a flashlight on the ceiling yeah
that had to be bizarre like being in the Peace Corp in Nepal like how long did you do that for two and a half years wow and pull this sucker up a little closer to you okay yeah yeah yeah is that that good yeah I just want to get it they're very directional to keep the rest of the noise out yeah yeah for sure yeah no I I was very lucky like so many other things in my life I was uh um uh I I was sent to um uh Western Nepal um to a place that was about a 3-Day Walk from vehicular traffic at the time and uh I was the first white person anyone had ever seen um and uh you know some of the kids thought I was a ghost they they called me boot which means ghost in apali wow and uh just as a you know as a young person as a young American uh to um go to a community like that that um and to really become a part of it you know I live with a family that took me in as one of their own oh wow and uh I I named one of the babies that was born which real horic I gave her the name Santi which was my favorite female in the poly name it means peace and I just thought it was so cool that there are people walking around whose name is peace I mean that sounds you probably had friends over on Lumbar Street in San Francisco that had that name that's kind of what it reminded me of but but as as part of that ritual I had to do a number of things incl including eat rat meat and drink cow urine wow and that was the cow urine for sure the rat meat tastes like chicken it's just like the joke right I mean you you cook you cook meat any kind of meat it's mostly going to taste like chicken that's have you ever seen that um there's a a sacred temple in India where they feed the rats every day and the Rats becomes very domesticated yeah and they drink out of the same water as the rats read about it it's really wild to watch man because instead of thinking of rats as being This Vermin pest like we think of them as here where everyone like oh my God it's a rat and they step on it or they run and the Rats run away from you in this Temple the rats don't run away from anybody and these are wild rat you ever seen it they've been they've been socialized yeah have you seen it on video I you need to watch see if you can find a video of it cuz it's very strange it's really interesting because these people are eating with the rats and
they're drinking milk that the rats are drinking it's really crazy the rats look at this the rats are everywhere with these people and these are not pets you know yeah and so they they share the milk with these rats and they don't worry about diseases and look at these rats just hang out and chill it's very straight see the rat running around like they don't have any fear of people cuz they're treated really well and it's it's confusing right because it's like okay is that the way to do it like I don't think it's the way to do it but look at what's happening in New York City like New York have you seen the documentary on Netflix rats I have not yeah it's amazing it's fascinating and it shows first of all what kind of horrific diseases like so many rats carry yeah and and I mean theyve among other things they brought Bubonic plague to different parts of the world yeah fleas the the rats that they found they found them in New York City in Philadelphia and they they they show like what a complicated Society these rats have they have young rats test out the smart older clever Rats the smart rats like yeah some over there kid try it out and they go over there and they die and they're like aha poison well they I mean they're intelligent that's why they've been featured in so many experiments right I mean that's why so many lab psychologists work with rats right in Nepal the reason that you ate a rat was the rat was considered the strongest animal and and you wean kids on it um because you want the kid to grow to be strong really yeah so they would often wean kids and just a tiny little piece yeah yeah uh the cow and that was the only time I actually took antibiotics prophylactically which is something you're you're not supposed to do uh but I just decided that you know I I it was my second year I didn't want to get ill cow urine has some weird uh pseudo medicinal purposes over there they're using it for people that are that are suffering from covid and there was uh yeah there was this like uh this guy from I'm trying to remember the country I don't remember but he was criticizing like how ridiculous this practices of uh giving cow urine to these sick people and how ignorant it was well you know
it's it's funny you say ignorant because for me really what was so important about that experience was just learning how weird I was and that is you know um how weird I was to them you know and how many different ways there are to be human right and so you know um uh I um you know I participated in marrying off one of our sisters right because I'm an older brother a girl's 16 you know time to get her married and 16 oh yeah how old was the dude yeah well you know people would come by and ask for a hand this is what the process was and often bring gifts and I'm there with the other brothers and a guy would come and leave and somebody would say to me well what did you think of him and the first time they asked I said Bo cago which means what does little sister think you know and people just cracked up and I heard about that for two years I would walk to other parts of the district and people would say oh I heard about you you're the guy who ask what bini thinks and the point was that wasn't relevant to them that wasn't what the experience was right um that wasn't a relevant variable and you know I I would explain to them that in my country you actually chose your own spouse and they would say well how do you do that and I'd say well you find somebody that you love and then they would say well then what if you don't love them and then I'd say well there's this thing called divorce you know and what I realized was that the way I thought about how all this should work was just so radically different from theirs and not necessarily Better or Worse right their system had its own logic and it was static it was stable right if you don't marry for love right you're not going to get divorced because you're out of love right that wasn't the purpose of it the purpose was it was social it was familial it had to do with joining communities you know and again I didn't grow up there so that's not what I do or what I would want to do but what I learned was how many different ways there are to do you know how many different ways there are to to be human and um always to resist the automatic assumption that that you're way is the better way you know because we all do that too and by the way I did some of that in Nepal I you know one of my other really enduring memories is my best
student was of the the um the so-called Kami cast which is metal worker which is an Untouchable um it's way down there right it's not as low as a shoe maker and you know they have a cast system right and at the bottom there are people that are called Untouchables because you're literally not supposed to touch them or anything that yes I mean that's how you know shoe makers especially because they deal with with cows they deal with they deal with leather right and and you know um why why and well because the cow is a sacred animal right but you need shoes yes you do right and so in the you know in the the Hindu system evolved to have a cast that did precisely that wow I mean did you communicate with those people at all oh sure what was it like yeah they must have felt terrible well I mean here's the story um the metal workking family I actually went down to their house and I had a meal there and I come back and I tell my Amma that means mother of my family and we were chetri which is way up there it's not Brahman which is the highest and uh that's the Priestly cast but the the chetri are second you know they they were historically the military cast She's Like Baboo that means baby which is what she called me Baboo you you you ate rice at a metal workers's house do you know how filthy those people are you know what were you thinking and I'm like listen Amma I just don't believe in cast you know I think everyone's the same and P.S you know what's going to happen I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm just incredibly ill and I just go outside and I'm puking my guts out Amma can hear me she comes from the other room and she's like listen Baboo you can't say I didn't warn you you know I mean you know uh and and again you know it was really useful for me it's not like I suddenly believe in the cast system because I don't right but I think it's really useful just to have all your assumptions challenged you know and that's really what it did for me and here I was I'm this American I'm making this great statement about how all people are equal well you know what I mean 20 years earlier in my own country they had a cast system right that went back to the 1600s right uh and that was the other formative experience of being in Nepal that was actually the first
place that I started to think about American history what did you when they were talking about the arranged marriage yeah and when you were saying that in your country people get to choose yeah like what did you think about what what is their like how do they explain it to you in a way where it made sense did they attempt to or did they just say this is how it's always been well you know I would say that that the things that are most common sensical to us often we don't have to explain right because they're part of our ether right but I think the logic was this you know that um uh you you you have to create families right and so you have to yeah yeah because you've got to you know you you have to perpetuate the species right right and so you know the the the simplest and the most static way to do that is to have the girls um uh marry guys who can who have enough wherewithal to take care of them right that can bring you something right because it's a reciprocal Arrangement right um and this is what why in rural Nepal at the time people wanted to have boys not girls they used to say chasa cha which means uh the son stays and the girl goes because of course the system was also patol local which means that you know you go and live in the house of the guy that you've married right so in the house I live with the older brothers they all had wives who live there wow right but when the girls got married they had to go somewhere else um so that was yeah well that again and it's it's ironic because believe it or not 20 years later I went back to my village with with my older daughter who was a junior in high school at the time and the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had they had cut a tractor road kind of up half half into the mountains and the first guy that I ran into he just said uh hey where you been like I haven't seen you around they like oh you brought your daughter great let's drink rice wine you know and basically you know some somebody had died and somebody had got married and you know somebody had a kid but the one thing that was really different and this speaks to globalization is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the United Arab Emirates to work you know um and that was ironic too because you know
the old story was the Sun stays and the girl goes right a lot of the sons had gone but they had gone outside of the country and that's the way you know so many of these economies work in in that part of the world you know did you see if the the girl's marriage worked out well again you know Joe it all works out right I mean you know it works out because it was designed for social reasons not for personal ones you know it's not about what she thinks or about what he thinks uh you know it's about kind of you know bringing together families creating communities uh bringing up kids um it wasn't about sentiment although you know I I as I got closer to people in the community I found out that after a marriage was arranged often you did develop feelings for the person often yeah it's just that those feelings weren't the foundation of it right they weren't what spawned it they were an offshoot of it they weren't a cause of it did it make you feel uncomfortable that they were doing that not in the least you know and in fact I mean that was when I started to read history because of course in most parts of the world including where we are right now historically marriage was arranged but I imagine that like if you have this conversation with a feminist for instance they would have a real issue with that andely and also a real issue with your acceptance of it right well again I'm not saying that I accept it for me right I understand you know and and uh because that wasn't my expectation you know um but you know I I think it's it's worth asking ourselves um the degree to which we know we're right right and you know I think that at the end of the day we don't all of us have opinions all of us have biases all of us have learned certain things but learn at hand who was uh you know a famous jurist and federal court judge um he one of one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that um the spirit of Liberty which is really what we're talking about is the spirit that is not so sure of itself and I've always love that right so I'm a human being I have biases opinions very strong ones but I think that the worst human attribute is self-certainty I think it's the most dangerous one you know and uh for me the peace score was just a great
way to challenge that and just say okay look I'm not going to have an arranged marriage and by the way I don't and I'm not going to marry off my daughters um but in another part of the world they do that um and that's decreasingly the case by the way right because these places are modernized remember get the internet what the [ __ ] I can just a guy I really like exactly right and so these you know I mean when we went back to Nepal it did my Village it was in a remote place so it was relatively static but there had been many other changes I mean just think of all these guys going to the UAE to work on construction sites those are sad stories because uh I know that some of the guys that go to that part of the world they go with the expectation of getting paid a certain sum of money and then they take their passport and then they pay them a fraction of that and they live in squala oh it's horrible and I actually went I mean this was an amazing experience I went to teach in the UAE a couple years ago and um uh it was fun for me because every construction site was full of nepalis and so I would just go up to the construction site and start speaking Nepali because I can still speak it and freak these guys out and they would be like okay I've got to take you down the block to the next construction site and I would go there and they would kind of show me say okay say something and I would and they would go ba which is what Nepali do when they're kind of amazed wow but the stories I heard from them about the subject you're describing it was really sobering I mean you know I found great Nepali food there because you know I love Nepali food there's a Nepali food like it's it's um it's fairly similar to North Indian but it's very simple it's rice and lentils and whatever vegetable is in season so that's what I ate for 2 and half years not literally but you know um it's you know uh um uh uh let's just say that you know goat is for a very special occasion when somebody gets married you know um uh uh you know this this is a subsistence community and so what I ate for two and a half years was rice doll and whatever vegetable was in season um it's do doll is lentils okay you know called doll so I was confused so anyway in the UAE I I would eat at this Nepali place and I I I I the same guy would
serve me every night and I said you know I saw this thing in the newspaper saying that you know you have to get a beat up that in Nepali that means a holiday like one day a week or something like that and he said to me in Nepali he said yeah and if I bitched about that they just send me home and hire some other [ __ ] I mean he said this to me in Nepali wow you know um and you know in in in the UAE one of the things I learned is that only 10% of the people are from the UAE uh isn't that amazing yeah that's crazy and the rest of them all imported to work there exactly and here's the other thing about the UAE there are no naturalized citizens really so yeah so what that means is you can come and work for us for sure but you can never be a citizen you can't be us right we're sitting on a pile or you know more specifically a pool of petrol right and we are not sharing interesting and so you know you can work for us but you will not be US vice did a documentary on the guys who built Dubai well built this very specific area and they showed how they live and it was really disturbing really again very very sad you don't have any rights right I mean you know you're there to work but another thing that really stuck with me I was teaching at I I taught an NYU at the time and and we had a campus there in downtown now it's outside of town but one of the students there told me this really disturbing story that's right on point which is she's walking home at night and she thinks that there's this South Asian guy that's kind of following her but you know how it is like you're not really he seemed a little sketchy but you don't know so you S turn a corner and see if he turns it and you know she she gets to where we had our campus and she told the guard that she thought that this guy down the street had been following her and she told me that like the police came in 10 minutes and they took him to the airport it's just like you [ __ ] with us in any way you raise an eyebrow you're out of here bro it's like did she even know if he was for sure no and she felt terrible about it wow I mean you know it's he was just going the same direction right I you know and and she felt awful about it because you know I mean look there we I I think any woman
has been in a situation like that it's it's it's iffy you're not really sure it seems a little sketchy you know and and and that's what she tried to communicate to the G it's like look I'm not really sure right but it's like hey you even raise an eyebrow it's like you have no rights it's scary it's terrifying it's scary because that can you know that can be abused obviously oh yeah yeah someone can just decide for whatever reason that you've done something that you haven't done and Y you're on a plane or in a jail that that you're done you're done the living in other cultures and recognizing that there's just different styles of living that human beings can live in different ways it's very eye openening because we're so accustomed to the way people live here yeah we're so accustomed to it you know yeah it's like um uh I had uh Josh Rogan the um uh Journal jist was here the other day and he was talking about living in Japan cuz he was uh living in Japan at one time and and teaching over there yeah or and doing uh not teaching him excuse me uh he was teaching English right wasn't he teaching English as well yeah like two years yeah he taught English and he was working as a journalist there and um it just talking about how different like the culture is like the culture is so different than it is here and I was saying you know that my experiences over there it almost like Japan seemed to me Tokyo seemed to me like if human beings evolved in a completely different dimension like they're the same they're human beings but they they devolve it they evolved in a totally different style of life but very similar where they have streets and buildings and neon but yet they're really polite and orderly and very disciplined and it's like wow this is crazy yeah it's it's weird how there's these different styles of living like and different gender ideas and norms for sure yeah you know um Italy's another one I've spent a lot of time vacation in Italy and those [ __ ] people just want to relax that's all they do they just want it's so hard to find a gym there like where's the gym like the gym in the hotel was all [ __ ] up like nobody uses this gym like they just want to relax it's interesting you know yeah yeah and look again you know there's something to be said for that I mean my wife and I live for a couple
months in Greece about five years ago cuz my wife had a gig there and one of the things we learned is that if if you went out to dinner with somebody if they invited you out like book four hours it's sort of like Joe Rogan show you know four hours four hours for dinner yeah yeah and multiple courses keeps going you know Ando whatever and uh the the Greeks were hanging out with mostly Physicians because that that's what my wife is and several of them have been to the United States and they said the most barbaric thing about the United States they thought was how quickly people ate and they said you know in the United States we heard somebody say grab a bite what is this grab a bite and they just thought it was barbaric and it kind of is it kind of is yeah but if you want to do what we do that's how you have to live right right and you know not necessarily good again it's like it's I think that's almost asking good or bad that's almost the wrong question right it's like you know human beings are irreducibly diverse and they found so many different ways to be human m you know and the more of those ways you can expose yourself to I think actually the more human you become you know you just see how many ways there are like to cut this pie yeah I think so too I think there's real value in that I've been taking my kids overseas since they were two yeah yeah I just I think it's real important just to take them around people speaking different languages and oh I mean you know as I was saying earlier except for meeting Susan my wife I mean living as an elementary school kid in Asia absolutely the Central event of my life you know and uh you know just um uh I mean just one minor example but it kind of isn't when when we lived in Iran you know my my dad was the director of the peace score so we lived in a very like nice place and we had servants and things like that because you know you're a Westerner living in a in an Asian place and one night uh the the cook we were watching uh clips about the Ali Frasier fight because this was 1969 and um the cook says to me in fary in which I was fluent of course because when you're a kid you can learn a language in three weeks uh he says so this guy Ali and this guy Frasier like they're from your country but they don't look like you what's up with that wow
and and as an eight-year-old in fary I told Maham the cook that African people had been enslaved and brought to the new world and again how I even said that or what sense I made of that I have no idea but what an incredible privilege that I was even in that situation and that I had a that I knew that and that I was put in this position of having to explain it to this Iranian cook who didn't understand it well I mean I I I who knows what sense he made of it I mean really who knows what sense I made of it I mean didn't understand it before you explain right exactly yeah yeah wow uh yeah growing up like that had to be amazing what do you think in I think the four 4our dinner thing there's probably some great Merit into it yeah there's some some great Merit to it rather if you don't have a demanding job so then the question is should you ever have a demanding job how hard you should should you work I mean look that's a reasonable question too a reasonable question like we face that in Greece because you know uh Susan found this kind of funny when it got super hot in the afternoon like at the hospital where she worked they would just send people home yeah they'd say like it's too hot and we would just never do that yeah you know we're just going to closeup shop it's really hot you know go home and take a siesta right uh and you know um uh a lot of our recent experiences have been around medicine because she does a lot of international medicine and another example that I thought was fascinating we went to Chile because she was doing a gig at a hospital there and at noon all the docs sto working and they went to a dining hall a very well-appointed dining hall and had a sit down lunch everyone's beeper goes off and you know Susan spent her whole life in teaching hospitals in America that doesn't happen like if you get like M&M's for lunch you're lucky you know because it's go go go go go go and the Chileans you know noon to one man like there are no patience there's no nothing and you sit down and have a meal and it was it was pretty cool yeah a friend of mine produces uh television shows and he went to Italy to uh film at the Lamborghini factory and uh they just wanted to see like what's it like to put together an exotic automobile like what's it like being on the floor and so
he said they take thre hour lunch breaks they eat pasta and they sleep and he's like no wonder these goddamn cars are so expensive this [ __ ] takes forever to build them he was he was laughing and joking but he was like man the food's incredible and he goes and these people just relax they don't they don't work all day right and and look there's something too that I mean was the Henry Ford of Lamborghini there wasn't one right I mean Ford's genius was to make a car as quickly and as cheaply as you could right that lots and lots of people could drive right and that's not the goal of Lamborghini I think if I remember correctly Lamborghini was created because somebody was working with Ferrari and they're like you know what I can do this better they got I think they got annoyed at how hard it was to get a Ferrari to and so they're like I'm just going to make my own one of these [ __ ] things I think that's how it started and uh you know they've been doing it for almost as long as Ferrari has too yeah but it's like the Italians are great for whatever reason or they have historically been great at food and art y like food and art has been their thing not not so great at skyscrapers you know not so great at there's a lot of things not policing and crime fighting right but art yeah art and passion and and there there's a there's a celebration of leisure and of of just just being just Community just being around each other and having fun and singing and laughing and dancing yeah and it seems like they have their own way of living that suits them in a way that I don't know if our way of living suits us right and I think the jury's out and that's the point yeah we accomplish a lot yes we do but we're all [ __ ] up that too I want to know which country has more uh like anti-depressants and ssris and well I've you know I've seen some of that literature and it turns out you know that um uh these International happiness indexes they kind of confirm the cliche that money really does value happiness so we're happy over here well not as happy as the Danes right the Danes are the happiest the Danes are extremely happy and it and when I say money I'm not just talking about your income right aren't they just happy because they're
beautiful they're so handsome and beautiful women that's that's part of but but really what it is is that you know they have really good health care they have you know uh all education including higher education is free right and it turns out those things make you happy sure right and you know you shouldn't nostalg ISE poverty I think there's sometimes there's this noble savage idea that you know oh the people in such and such a country they're poor but they're very happy No actually they're not and what makes you happy is you know reliable healthare right full employment right full you know you know um uh accessible education and the people that have those things the people that live in those countries are happier yeah yeah they don't create as much Innovation and they don't create as much like World influencing art which is interesting yeah right so you got to wonder like is there a benefit to a certain amount of struggle and what's the sweet spot right what's The Sweet Spot of being a young person and having no idea whether or not you're going to have your bills paid whether whether you're going to be able to take care of yourself what is what's the road map what is your future going to hold versus someone who knows they get a stip in from the government you're always going to have your health care there's plenty of food maybe maybe there's a there's a there's a middle ground I think there absolutely is and I think that's actually where a juncture right now where we're trying to work that out in the United States I mean I think that's what a lot of what we heard Joe Biden talking about in the State of the Union was about did you pay attention to that um some of it right I mean you know you might be the only one you know what I paid attention to and I think this is really to your point the fact that there's been so little what I would call real Republican push back of a sort of there's been a little but of the sort that we saw with the Tea Party in 2008 right where you say no the state's too big big like no we don't want to provide all those Services it seems to me that you know um uh uh if we had what I would call a real Republican party we would be having more of that debate instead it seems to be focused mainly on you know Dr Seuss Mr Potato Head and something
that's happening at the border you know because I think that there is an interesting or there should be an interesting debate about that how big do we want the state to be how many services do we want PE do do we want to provide um what the costs and benefits of that I mean to me that's what I mean those are the big questions right you know and I think that you know there are costs and benefits to that um I'm a diet in the world Democrat I tend to support most forms of State Welfare but that's why I wish we had what I would call more real Republicans of the old variety right who were kind of making the case for smaller government right and making the case for you know allowing you know more room both to rise and to fall and all yeah yeah yeah yeah people who are again that's not my jam uh but I think that we should hear that yeah the the problem with bigger government is government's not good at anything so when they do it bigger it's just more people being incompetent if you could get I mean and I'm not a fan of hiring the private sector to take over important government jobs because I think they would cut Corners too and make it the most profitable and you know instead of the most efficient but it's it's just uh there's there's no like outside Trump is the Republican party right now still it seems like they're still hanging their hopes on him winning again in 2024 yes maybe someone will rise between now and then and you know more nonsense about our cities being a flame and the Border being a crisis you know and both of those are largely invented we we have we have lots of much more serious stuff to deal with we do but the border is kind of yeah I mean look I mean it has been for a long time it's been building for a very long time but you know uh when those reports come into your newsfeed or mine here's what they don't tell you they don't tell you that in the last 10 years immigration declined to a level that we haven't seen since the 1970s it doesn't tell you that in the past 10 years two-thirds of our immigrants have come from Asia not from Latin America and they don't tell you that immigrants of all kinds including undocumented are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans those are all facts like
and everyone should know them and that should put the crisis in a little bit of a different context that's uh probably all very true the difference between immigration and illegal immigration is where when it gets squirrely definitely definitely and that's all worth debating right but we're not gonna but we're not going to have that debate if we're just you know focused on you know oh you know there there you know there's there's there's a caravan that's coming up from Honduras and O and maybe George Soros is financing it I mean look the question of like how many immigrants should come in and also like what do we do with the people that came in here illegally those are real questions those absolutely also the question is like why do you have to have a special skill to be a valid immigrant yeah that's a real good question because like there's a lot of poor people that they've been doing labor their whole life but they want do better for their family but yeah you have to be able to provide a service that makes it valuable for you to enter into America that's right and and I don't know where your uh ancestors come from from but you know uh mine came from you know Poland Russia and Lithuania mine were Italy and Ireland okay and you know they didn't have any of those skills they couldn't get in now yeah exactly or would be it would be way way harder and they got in easy my grandparents just came in signed their name and they were in I mean what did you have to do back then not much yeah the 1920s what the hell you have to do 1925 I mean until they changed the immigration laws so you know my relatives are lucky we got in before 1925 because we restricted it heavily after that and then changed again in the 60s yeah um it's um it's unfortunate that the disparity between the United States and these especially these Latin American countries these people are coming up and literally walking yeah it's it's sad that they don't have better spot down there that's what's [ __ ] up is that they to come up here of course right and you know I I think it it's fair to say that uh some of their woses if you go back in time also have to do with some terrible decision-making activity by the United States that's not to say like we're to blame for it right because that's way
too fasile right right but the United States does not have a good record of uh uh let's just call it political intervention in that part of the world no you know and so you know it it's it's worth this is where the history piece becomes really important you know uh you know if you look especially at you know a country like Panama or a country like you know uh Nicaragua right uh or Guatemala you know you'll see in the past all sorts of American efforts to intervene in the politics of those countries in ways that were fundamentally destructive to those countries and that's real yeah and the Damage continues from The Regan Administration in Nicaragua right yeah and El Salvador yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I remember all that Oliver North [ __ ] when I was a kid you know yeah that's like something out of a movie and a really bad movie by the way but a real movie was really going down it's kind of crazy yeah that they were us and the fact that they were using cocaine sales from uh Los Angeles I interviewed uh Freeway Ricky Ross do you know who he is I do yeah the real Rick Ross Rick Ross came here he was at the LA Studio yeah and um he's a great guy and what a story he has learned how to read in prison became a lawyer and then fought his own case and realized they had given him double Je je you know cuz or you know three strikes you're out yeah not Double Jeopardy but three strikes you're out it's supposed to be three separate instances of you being arrested for felonies yes you can't you can't count one exactly and that's what they did to him and he successfully argued it and got released which is amazing yeah and you know now he gives motivational speeches and he was actually a tennis player in Compton a really good tennis player oh wow yeah before you know he became like a Big Time drug dealer but he was like a big time drug dealer but he was illiterate he never learned how to read until he went to jail and learned how to read so that he could become a lawyer to defend himself that's amazing it's amazing yeah amazing but meanwhile he was getting all that coke and selling all it because they were using him to make money so they could fund the cons the conscious versus the sand Denise does yeah radically nuts radically ABS
nuts yeah that do you play tennis Joe no you know never did I've played it a couple of times but no I'm not I'm not a tennis player yeah why do you play tennis I do I took it up you know I was a basketball player in my youth but there's a reason that you see people that look like me on tennis courts and not basketball courts I I just start to get hurt right what happens tennis would get you hurt there a lot of side the side movement yeah but it's not a contact sport you know what happened with basketball is you know you just you you're in a small space everybody's body is getting wider they're starting to wear these braces and big pieces of plastic and inevitably you're just going to bang into somebody and you fall down yeah and what's cool about tennis is it's not a contact sport so you can just keep doing it and uh I just you know I was getting hurt it wasn't as fun and a basketball friend said to me like do you play tennis and I said well not since I was 18 not really and I went on to the court and I had like the closest thing I'll ever have to a religious experience like the very first time I started hitting and I was like okay done with basketball that was a religious experience tennis it was I mean it was just because because it was just so um it was it was just dramatic and Rapid right it was just like I realized it in one moment you know um but it but it turns out that it it's it's also it's also complicated I mean I'm sure any sport like martial arts is too it becomes a head game as well you know uh I think actually based on what I've read about you you would like it because it turns out with tennis that unless you're very good which I'm not and never will be that almost every point is um is decided based on who concentrates more it really is you know and that's why I mean if you ever gone to like watch you know like somebody like you know Nal of feder play what's amazing about it is not just their athleticism because you can see that in any sport what's amazing is that there are 19,000 people around them and they are so locked in it's just crazy and that's really what it is you know it's just staying in the point and thinking about nothing else g a long time too right they do some of them to five hours five hours oh some of the yeah some of the ones that are you know
that you know where it's best best of you know best of five sets do they take snacks yeah you you can get little Munchies but it's bananas and stuff yeah oh definitely yeah but you know it's it's uh it's really taught me a lot about how important focus is you know I often say to my students like for me that's the only really necessary condition for doing anything you know like I'm not a rocket scientist you know I I know what my limits are in that realm what I can do what I am able to do is focus and for me that is just the absolute necessary condition for anything and Tennis really teaches you that because uh you know if I start thinking about my grocery list or a newspaper column that I'm writing I'm [ __ ] you know um and I you know I'm not in the point anymore sure yeah yeah and you know uh and that's yeah yeah yeah I think there's a mental cleansing aspect of a lot of things a lot of activities I don't play golf but I've been it's been described to me that way same deal and Tennis I'm sure archery I do archery that's that's one things like that the game of pool is like that like if you're thinking about anything else while you're down there you'll [ __ ] up and if you just concentrate on only the game and keep playing it over and over again it's like it clears your mind of problems in a weird way and yet though it can also be a source of them because I've also discovered since I I that I I've taken up tennis that um good begets good and bad be gets bad so you know if you're really hitting it well you can just keep going but sometimes you're just in a rut and you can't get out you know exactly what you're doing wrong and you can't stop yourself and look writing is like that too but what I've discovered with writing is when you get to that that like dark place you just stop right and if you come back to it and look at it with new eyes you'll get out of it tennis court you can't do that you just can't say look I keep [ __ ] with my backand let's just stop playing right what you have to do is just keep [ __ ] up your backand uh which is super frustrating but that it and and and you can't you know you you know what you're doing and you can't stop it and um I guess that's just the nature of competition because I think there are
many things like that like writing but again I I've discovered that it's actually quite simple like sometimes you'll just be writing and every word looks terrible and you just don't have it going on and if you just go outside or do something else and you come back to it you will be able to do it better but if you just sit there and keep trying to mull over it everything will look like [ __ ] because you're just in that rut well there's uh there's some people that think that to concentrate on things you're supposed to do things for a certain amount of time and take take five minutes off on a regular basis yeah that you should never just go all the way through but then there's other schools of thought where you just keep drinking coffee and keep pounding on the those keys yeah and I've done it both ways it's it's very ineffable I mean the thing about writing is you sort of you you kind of start to understand if you've done it for a while why the Ancients all talked about like Muses coming to them right you know if you read you know Homer or anybody after that and they talk about you know people who are creating anything a muse came to them yeah um it does feel that way sometimes you know it's just you know you're suddenly you're really inspired you have a lot to say you can say it and then at other times you're just you're just pulling teeth you know you have an idea but you just can't find like the Muse hasn't come to you yeah yeah but did you ever read step pinker's work oh yeah did you ever read the war of art yeah yeah he's got a really interesting way of talking about the Muse that whether or not the Muse is real if you treat it like it's real and treat it with respect that it'll keep providing you with creative gifts right I mean the the Ancients understood that I mean they they really that right no I'm sorry did I say Pinker I meant pressfield Stephen pressfield did I say Pinker you did I think I did yeah I meant PR I was thinking I was thinking the same yeah um that book War of art I bought a stack of them and I would hand them out to people like when they would come on the podcast just because it was so and it's a small easy read but it's all about being a professional and this idea that if you just summon the Muse and then show up at the same time every day with the intent
to be creative and you're going to put put in the work and you're not going to you know go watch YouTube videos or Google anything you're going to really concentrate only on the writing itself and that the Muse will whether or not it's a real thing you know this idea that there's some some Angelic creative thing out there that bestows upon you creative gifts right but I think pressfield's point is that it's useful to think of it in that way right it gives you a certain kind of Faith right it perspective on religion you know that's Jordan Peterson's perspective on God is that whether or not God exists or not if you behave like God exists you'll live a better life and I'm like that is a there's some real wisdom in that because there's something to it if you really did behave as if some higher power was laid laid out the rules for a better more just more harmonious world and if you follow these World these rules you'll have a better life and that this is all there's a a logic to it and a law to it there is and yet I I know Peterson's Canadian but in the United States I think one of the most important social phenomena of the past 20 years is actually the decline in both um you know Church synagogue mosque attendance and also in the number of people that say they're affiliated with with a you know with a faith yeah um by some measures has gone down 20% um which is radical over how long um 20 years yeah um and I think you know I think again we're almost too close to that to really take its measure um I think the worst interpretation of it is that is that what we've done is we've substituted politics for religion yeah we we we've made politics into a kind of Faith system um where it's you know it's not necessarily it it the the blue and the red they become a sort of religious identity uh and we defend them in the same way I think a real there's some real truth to that you know and I think these things are probably at some level connected you know because I think you know I think uh lots of evolutionary psychologists have have have tried to make the claim that we are joiners and that there is an evolutionary logic to Faith systems you know that they've helped us in all kinds of different ways and we're always going to have some
version of them you know and I think the scariest part of now is for me is that um our political affiliations have become quasi religious um I don't even think quasi maybe flat out flat out Rel pretty much flat out and extremely tribal and uh when you think about if you just analyze the behavior of people in both extremes whether it's the far left or the far right they exhibit remarkably similar traits like pure hatred for the other side inability to look at the virtues of this opposing ideology you know and almost like treating it as if the very nature of reality is at stake yes yes and and I have a purchase on it and you are blind yes right you know I um you know God did not shine on you which is the Protestants versus the Catholics in you know in Ireland I mean it's really crazy right that's what they did you know when they were blowing each other up with the IRA I'm curious Jo are you a religious believer I am not a non-believer I'm not a Believer I don't go to church but uh I would not be surprised if there's a lot more to this existence than we are then we're experiencing in a way that you can measure did did you go to church as a kid yeah I went to Catholic school when I was a little kid MH um we went to you know we went to church but it was um when my parents lit up and when we went to San Francisco all that stopped I just never was your stepdad a Catholic also or just just your mom was when he was a kid as well but they you know it was the 70s they were just hippies but um I I think there's some real benefit to religion for a lot of people and I didn't used to think that when I was younger when I was younger I was a lot more arrogant about it and I thought it was for fools I was like oh yeah a guy came back from the dead and he used to walk on water whatever you know but now I look at it and first of all I understand what the Bible actually is now and it's way more complicated you know it's some people trying to make sense of the world thousands and thousands of years ago as interpreted through multiple languages back to England back to English rather and in a way that you know there's a lot of these ancient languages like if you go back to ancient Hebrew letters doubled as
numbers so there was value in words right like somebody told me once that the word love and the word God have the same numerical value so if you combine the numbers and the letters and it's like it wasn't as simple as when you get the interpretation to Latin or to Greek or to English ultimately what you're you're not interpreting the full meaning in these sentences that there's some intrinsic value that's lost because the the ancient Hebrew version of it was like it just meant a different thing right and it's been transmuted through a million different histories right a million different peoples right and ideologies and in all kinds of ways right I mean heinous and wonderful you know when my students tell me they don't like religion or they don't want to mix religion and politics I'm always like so we shouldn't have a Martin Luther King Day right I mean what do we think he was right what do we think the whole civil rights movement of course you know but it's funny I once asked a group of of students what King's profession was and I got hilarious answers like a lot of people thought he was a lawyer but my favorite one of all was policy expert it's like I have a I have a dream that one day thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit you know the poverty rate will decline 2% but but again I think that speaks to the the kind of uh stigmatization of religion in certain circles in our country especially Elite circles and this idea that it's this conservative principle or this backwards thing and obviously it's been used in those ways but you know I mean if you think about like movements for justice in this country starting with abolitionist right going right straight through civil rights they were all powered by religion yeah and it's it's empowering for so many communities to have this place where people go to worship because they've agreed upon certain kind of behavior when they go to these places and and in agreeing to work hard to be a better person and to tithe some of your earnings and all there's all these different aspects of religion that I think really lends itself to to in empowering the the bond that these people have with each other and what I find fascinating about is that bond that empowering and also that identity they
can work even if you don't believe in God or even think about him yes I mean you know and I feel I'm an example of that I mean I'm Jewish and um being Jewish is hugely important to me the way I see the world the way I think but at the same time I I'm not I'm not a Believer I don't think I don't walk around wondering if there's a God and I rarely go to Sy be surprised if there was a god no I and I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't I mean I'll be honest I just don't give it a lot of thought you know um what I care about is the is the world the world as I can see it the world as I can know it right um and you know uh for me what's really important about Judaism is the charge that it gives you to try to change that world I know this isn't everybody's interpretation of Judaism but it's mine so at Passover you know what do you say you say remember that you were a slave in Egypt right and so that experience that experience of being a pariah which has been so Central to the Jewish experience what that does is that enjoins you to ask okay who's the Pariah now right you it might not be you now right but it's going to be somebody else right and your job as a Jew whoever it is your job as a Jew is to is to seek them out reach out to them try to understand them you know um and and uh you know I my archaeologist friends have told me that speaking of Passover there's actually no real archaeological evidence that Jews were enslaved on mass in Egypt like that there was a mass population transfer like I grew up thinking that that actually happened okay the stuff with the pting of the Red Sea okay there you get into the faith realm but I thought as a matter of History right that that had happened apparently we don't have evidence for it but so what right right does that take anything away from The Exodus story for me it actually doesn't you know um I don't feel that I need any proof on this score doesn't history get real shaky though when they're going back to ancient of course it does like I mean you know oh you you you have to look at shards of pottery and if you you have to look at other things and apparently they found there was um there was some trade as you might guess because there were you know you there were so many different populations that are both in
conflict and in movement and all that right but like I remember somebody told me the like built the pyramids this is not true read that right yeah yeah you know but again you know I so what um you know there's still even if that quote didn't happen and the Red Sea didn't part to me you know just the historic experience that Jews have had you know and especially their experience as being the Pariah as being the outr and fighting back against that um and asserting themselves you know that's what I take away from it especially my duty as a Jew to try to make things a little less [ __ ] up especially for whoever is a slave now and by the way I'm not saying that's how other Jews see it or should but for me it's an example of the power of religion and it's got nothing to do with God right like not to me yeah it's uh guidelines for how to live uh yeah yeah yeah yeah guidin guidelines impulses perspective you know all that and I think you know we need that we need those organizing principles as human beings I think we definitely do and I think we definitely do benefit from that that Community Gathering place where people agree to worship together because if you even again like pressfield called upon the Muse even if you don't even if the Muse isn't real if you treat it like it's real yeah and if you have a place where everybody gets together and they all agree like we're going to be better people because of the Lord and the Lord watches us and the Lord G and the lord taketh away and just think about all the real positive aspects of some of the religious tenants right and and you know I I also think that um uh in part because we're secularizing there's perhaps less awareness of all that and perhaps we should be a little bit more concerned you know about the fact that fewer people are affiliated with the religion you know uh again I don't know what we can necessarily do about that but there's also a lot of prejudice about it there there no question right I mean think of um you know the Play Book of Mormon which by the way I think is brilliant brilliant all right but what if there was on Broadway the book of the Quran or the book of the talmud like can you imagine the [ __ ] storm there would be right you know and everybody be like oh I can't believe you're making fun of
this world origin but with the book of the Mormons we like ha you know well first of all one thing Mormons have a great sense of humor yes they can take it they take a joke really well second there's a thing when you know the guy who made the religion it's a different thing you know it's like one thing like Judaism you're talking about thousands of years of History yeah uh Islam more than a thousand years of History right right I mean that's what's fascinating about the LDS story is it's just quintessentially American right exactly you know it's it's a frontier story right um you know and a 14-year-old [ __ ] artist that's what it's about a 14-year-old [ __ ] artist tricked a lot of people and they kind of know it right but at the same time I mean the historic ironies are so great because you know Republican Mormons in Utah they're like the most Republican people on Earth yeah and yet of course the Republican Party pursued Brigham Young all the way into the the the Great Salt Bas I mean you think that's really where they want to go you think they're like oh this seems like a really habitable place like let's live in the Great Sal [ __ ] dead Lake exactly that SHP in that Lake that's that was as far as the Army which was led by the Republican party was willing to pursue them you know the line was that the Mormons it wasn't just of course that they were you know uh you know they were bigamist or Satanist or whatever you know they uh um they oppressed women uh like slavery oppressed African-Americans I mean that was one of the arguments you know and the Mormons aren't dumb once they create a territory of course they enfranchise women before anybody and they're like oh we're the people like were the people that oppress women like did they vote back in Massachusetts huh they don't that's pretty interesting you know know I mean back to the book of the Mormon I mean I what I think is fascinating how the LDS you know establishment handled that what they did which I thought was super smart was they're like let's not beat them let's join them so you go to Broadway and you get your little Play Bill and I'm sure you've seen this like on the second page there's an ad from yeah the Mormon church from LDS and they're like okay you've seen yeah you've seen the play now look at the
look at the real thing I bet they got a lot of people to join too because of that didn't Glenn Beck join the Mormons like deep into his 40s here's thing about Mormons um I I've known quite a few of them and they're some of the nicest [ __ ] people and I don't know why I don't know what they're doing but they are so friendly and so nice well look one of one of one of the reasons there are many but one is that you know they have this tradition of of mission right yes and so at least on the male side like right you you have to to become an elder you have to go off and um evangelize and that's not going to work very well if you're a dick right it really isn't I mean I I have a old friend and colleague who's a Mormon and he's not a Believer anymore but he served in Italy and he told me that uh doing that was the key to everything he's done ever since because he said John if you can sell that you can do anything man that's interes but it's also not going to work if you're a dick or like if you're walking around in jeans and a hoodie right I mean the Mormons they do it right you know it's like we've we've all seen them right you know and and you know you you've you've got to you you have to be aware and you have to understand your surroundings and how they're different from what you expect I mean it's funny we mentioned the peace score my father was a peace score director in both Iran and India and he once showed me this memo that he sent to Washington just saying send me more Mormons because he said every single Mormon volunteer was fantastic and the big reason was they had already had that third culture experience right they had gone off to you know Argentina or Italy or wherever to do the mission so they had like lived in a place where they were weird and had to learn the language and all that stuff so they were great volunteers wow yeah the craziest story about the Mormon is the Mormon's expansion into Mexico yes and then the fact that there's still these uh families that have these compounds down in Mexico oh and there was that awful episode a couple years ago some of them Mur yeah oh yeah the Mexico story is and the Romney family I mean you know they had branches down there all that yeah it's so crazy like back when it did matter if you lived in Mexico the United
States cuz everybody was on Horseback they were like listen we'll just go down here where we can have 50 wives I mean the other thing for those of for those of us who are Jews another sort of interesting aspect of the whole Mormon story is the Mormons tend to be phos semites they love us man they love Jews so the first Jewish governor in the United States his name is bamberger and he's the governor of Utah and he was he was you know the inheritor of kind of the bamburger I think it was department stores you know about the guy who who uh spent all the money to sequence the Genome of Native Americans because he wanted to find out if they were the Lost tribe of Israel because that's in the Book of Mormon do you know that yeah yeah and and look you know there I mean and it is a lot of it is bizarre but it's also fascinating right and it's funny on the Jewish Mormon thing I mean the other controversy that's come up in the past couple years you know how the Mormons can sort of make anybody Mormon like including well after they're dead really oh yeah yeah yeah and so at one point a couple years ago they declared that Anne Frank you know the Holocaust victim was a Mor and and look each to their own I mean I can understand why plenty of my fellow Jews were offended by that my view was if that's what some Morman dude wants to think they can think it well they think they get their own Planet when they die yeah yeah there's all the the whole eschatology like the whole system is totally fascinating and you know and you can sort of you can again like Anne Frank you can sort of graduate people into it um weird yeah yeah but you know again it's like listen it works for a lot of them and it's they're very nice people but it does leave them vulnerable I have a friend and she left the Mormon church as an adult and she found herself very suceptible to sort of like healers and Yogi type people and and she goes I think what it is is I was so accustomed to just believing in things that didn't necessarily make sense but allowing them to like oh okay and that she's so gullible and she but it was interesting like seeing her as an adult trying to make sense of it as to why what it was that was leading her to be so susceptible yes and I you know I think for the Mormons especially as you were
saying because it's so American and so new uh I think there are a lot of tensions between let's just say the Believers and the historians right because you know once you start studying history of anything it gets complicated and it's not like what you thought and you know the Mormons were involved in we think several massacres of other human beings including this place called Mount Meadows and it's been very hard for people in the Mormon church for some of the Believers to accept that so there's there's always going to be a tension between faith and history there almost has to be I think yeah well the thing about history particularly like history before photographs is there's a lot of [ __ ] like who knows history is Whitten by the there there's ambiguity but but but at the same time you know there's just there there's there's Conquest I mean that's what history is I mean we went to Iceland a couple years ago our family and somebody there told us that as best we can tell Iceland is the only place that was never colonized in the sense that when the Vikings got there there was literally no one there and then by the way after that it became like a whole Game of Thrones [ __ ] which is why Game of Thrones is filmed there I mean there was a million conquerors after that you know um but when the first Vikings came there there was nobody there and apparently that's Swan like that's its own animal so think about that every other place that people move to there are other human beings there right and you know that means they Clash right right it's not the only thing they do they also mix right right but they clash and one team dominates the other one in some way that is the story of History you know and so once you start once you start digging right you find that you know nobody's hands are clean um right you know everyone was involved in some kind of Act of conquest or domination almost right so you know one of the things that we now do in many Elite campuses is at the beginning of any event we'll say now let's remember that we're on lenpy land right or Chu tall land you've probably heard these these sort of new Native American affirmations and look I'm a historian I think it's great that people learn more
about the lpes of the chaks but I'm also a little bit troubled by this ritual because it does seem to imply that like the lpes were just there from time immemorial living in some edenic place instead of like conquering whoever it was that was there before the lenp right and of course that's the native story right they conquered each other right they made they made tribes they made Empires right one team ruled sometimes killed the other um and again that's not I I think there should be much more awareness right of Native American history and I think those affirmations are fine but it also be useful for us to think about again who was there before that team yeah right and um you know those those people were conquered right they were victims but they were also at some point conquerors and almost everybody was certain like the world was a Savage Place back then yes it was it's just how people stayed alive you encountered strangers you killed them yeah I mean when was it that when a boat showed up on your Shores it was a good thing yeah I mean when did that start I think much more recently than most of us appreciate uh for most of human history when people just randomly showed up in a boat it was a dangerous time definitely they might be just there to trade or they might be there to rape and pillage like yes they conquer you right uh you know enslave you yeah right um put you to work for their project right right yeah there's no telling yeah you had to guess that's right that's right yeah it's uh I'm fascinated by Native American history and I'm fascinated by like how long they must have been living here in that manner before white people showed up and then white people show up and within a few years everyone's dead for disease is the big reason for that you know I think some people imagine that you know everyone died in Wars and actually many more people died of disease 90% died from disease yeah yeah um I mean there were certainly a lot of murders but yeah but they just had no you know and that was I'm I'm listening to this book on tape about uh Cortez and uh a lot of the the Spanish explorers making it to Native America or North America rather and one of the things they talk about is the Mayan empire yeah they have this detailed account of
Mayans and I was thinking oh they probably died off from disease too I mean that's probably killed off the Mayan empire because they don't really know they really not sure what happened to the Mayans but if the Spaniards are describing their encounters with the Maya for sure they gave him diseases yeah right they [ __ ] killed everybody else I mean that their disease just swept through the Native Americans and there was millions and millions and millions of them all across the country imagine this one like chichin imagine this one small with this incredible civilization that had evolved over who knows how long built these amazing structures and then gone right the whole civilization abandoned no one there right disease right yeah yeah I think that was a big part of it you know and and I mean to the earlier point I mean you know the conos did horrific things in that part of the world right but of course you know the people in that part of the world did done horrific things to other people well before the KY stor got there you know I mean you know there there were forms of human sacrifice in that part of the world well how about what was the temple that they built I never can pronounce this correctly but there was a temple that they an Aztec Temple that they built where at the completion of it they had a ritual sacrifice where they killed something like 880,000 slaves yeah what I don't remember how to say it teal ton how do you say it yeah it begins with a T yeah yeah say that tootan something like that yeah yeah yeah it's in Mexico City do it say how to say it I don't they don't tell you how to they don't have a pronunciation yes well when um they was there for 695 years wow yeah so when they um when they finished it when they completed it they killed everybody like they did over a weekend right just just a [ __ ] full-on slaughterfest what is the number does it say the number of people that were sacrificed cuz it's something insane where I told a friend of mine he was like that can't be true I'm like let's read it and he's like holy [ __ ] right how long did that take because they're doing it with swords yeah so they're killing 880,000 people
with swords and it's you know I mean this is where things might not 80,000 people but something nut like that this is where things get interesting and complicated and political right I mean look you know the story that we told for most of our history in this country was that colonialism was a beneficent thing right that was developed to basically civilized Savages right and that was flawed in a million different ways and it's great that we've corrected it but right again we shouldn't congratulate ourselves too quickly or imagine that we've got it right when we just reverse things right and say oh you know Columbus and everybody came after them were just you know horrible evil enslavers and everybody that they encountered was some sort of innocent victim you know that actually patronizes the people they encountered I think you know who had their own complex societies with their own divisions and yes often their own brutalities you know but it's it's it you know it there's a politics to all of this there seems to be no historically utopian civilization that we can call upon to say this this group got it right right yeah yeah it doesn't seem like there is right you know except the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco yeah yeah well you see what it is it's like all tribes and all civilizations are made out of people that's the problem you know warts and all yeah humans humans are weird weirdly flawed messy creatures yeah and look I mean thank God for that right I mean that's what keeps things interesting yes well for us for us humans yeah but uh once we become these neuralink things what does it say here 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days yeah so long weekend ouch 84,000 [ __ ] people that is so crazy that is so crazy yeah so and and so we should be able to find a way to to critique what the con sters did and the way they overran these societies without nostalg ising or romanticizing what those societies were so it's not just slaves here it says defeated soldiers were not killed in the battlefield but captured and returned to Tino chitlan for sacrifice the Aztec Raiders were convinced that the end of the world was nigh and butchered thousands to appease the gods this was a
culture obsessed with death they believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing when the Great Pyramid of tenochitlan was con consecrated I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong because I probably am uh was consecrated in 1487 the Aztec recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in 4 days yeah wow Jesus how do they keep those people it's still yeah God 84,000 you know after a while you think that guy's tired when he picks that sword up I'm going to jack him like there's no way he's going to be able to kill 40,000 people in a day he has to be so tired th thousand people every hour with a three-hour break for to take a you know an hour a thousand people an hour so many people look but there's 60 seconds in a minute 6 minutes in an hour how many how many [ __ ] people you have to kill to kill a th an hour it's fast it's a lot of arrows I don't think they're using arrows dude I know I was your I was thinking of your thing from yesterday your Kong I think they just did it with swords but it's like that's one fascinating thing too about ancient civilizations how many of them were obsessed with human ritual sacrifice to appease Gods because they were so terrified of dying that they felt like maybe if we just killed this guy right like maybe we'll keep we'll keep living like the gods will smile upon us yeah or like the Egyptians they just imagine that there was a way for them to be immortal right I mean to live in some tomb or some other thing you know uh what's interesting about to me about the Greeks is that they didn't right and that's why they revered the gods the gods were imperfect too right and they had little jealousies and spats but here's what was not human about them they live forever right and the Greeks understood like our own greatest imperfection is in fact our mortality and what differentiated the gods wasn't you know that they threw Thunderbolts or anything really what differentiated them was that you know they just went on and and we don't yeah yeah yeah have you ever heard of uh Brian mirescu he's um a scholar and an author of a book called The immortality key and uh he came on this podcast and uh explained his work that is now become uh it's it's it's now uh a point of study at Harvard and what
it is is he explored the history of the ritualized use of psychedelic drugs in ancient Greece oh wow yeah how do you say it ulid how do you say eliss how do you say that word m the Mysteries you what is that word like the Alan field thing no no no no no no elus right elus ucini Mysteries is that how you say it yeah I don't know the um they had these rituals these ancient rituals in in Greece that all of these Scholars would go and participate in and they wrote about them in these very romantic ways and people were trying to figure out what the hell was how do you say it ucini that's it so I did say it right um so this right here it says this uh the sanctuary in ancient cre the most famous of the secret religious rights of ancient Greece and he proved by um not just examining um the contents of these a lot of their wine and their beer had been laced with psychedelics and so like from mushrooms uh from different things and many of them from uh Urgot so uh different forms which is very similar to LSD yeah so they would they would add this stuff to their wine and then they would have these incredible ceremonial rituals and during these ceremonies they would learn things and then they were discouraged from doing these things by the Roman Emperor and so they would uh they would then mve their ceremonies he found them what was it in Spain I think I forget but he he tracked the exact same ritualistic and the same depictions of gods and the same pottery with the same the same um psychedelic laced compounds that you could get they could get evidence of it and you know the molecules are still intact yeah amazing amazing amazing stuff I wonder if like Sophocles was tripping when he wrote his plays I mean that would that would explain edus it would explain a lot of things but just the fact that ancient Greece was I mean it was the the original source of democracy right the original source of so much information that all if you go to all the the ancient wise people that we respect and Revere how many of them participated in this ritual in ancient Greece and it's really interesting cuz it was such a hub of thought right and such a hub of innovation in terms of like societal structure and the way we treated people oh and and and I mean obviously one of the ways that they
maintained democracy was by enslaving certain people to do the [ __ ] work right which was a model actually that people like Jefferson invoked you know quite literally they said this is how the Greeks were able to make democracy is they solved the problem of who's going to do the [ __ ] work Jesus yeah that's what's so dark is that people have this ability to dehumanize other people and make people like like you were talking about in Nepal the structure where the shoe maker is the lowest form and a literal Untouchable yeah like you're not allowed to touch them but but look that's not so it's not so foreign to us like what's a what's a wh's only water fountain except for that right right and I think sometimes we forget just how close we are chronologically to that yes you know I mean my my parents lived in the South for two years when my dad was doing his military Service uh in the late 50s and it was all that mhm you know I mean and my brother was born you know when all that was happening and and uh you know I went to the March Washington in my stroller whoa yeah yeah there's a picture somewhere of me in my stroller I was sleeping but my parents went to the mar Wasington and you can tell it's the maram Washington I mean because there's just a certain there's a look to the mar Wasington you've been Progressive from the womb exactly you got OG street cred in the Progressive world but but but actually Joe I don't I mean that's one of the reasons I wrote this book is of course you're right I'm a liberal Democrat but I see free speech as Central to that and the real problem for me on campuses now is that free speech has been coded as conservative so you're right it is in my blood and you know come on I mean I was in the peace score I'm Jewish I have a PhD I'm like a cartoon of a liberal Democrat and if you went on to like you know Americans for Democratic action you took their little test about what's a Democrat I mean you know proun control you know anti- capital punishment you know right down the line each and everyone except I'm a zealot about free speech and for a whole variety of unfortunate political reasons that's now been coted as conservative so at the place I work there are a lot of people generally people that don't know me they've just read things by me that think I'm a republican wow and it just
cracks me up because like why else would be mouthing off about Free Speech because that's a very conservative idea that basically lets white people engage in hate speech that hurt hurts minorities isn't that crazy it is crazy but that's where we are Imagine pigeon ho holding Free Speech into that definition well that's the reason that sign Wilkinson the cartoonist and I wrote the book is we wanted to look backwards to remind really our younger readers that you know Frederick Douglas and Su banthony and Martin Luther King they were all free speech zealots yeah um they had to be why do do you think it's what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation that it's more convenient and there's such a temptation to just silence people that you disagree with that they've ignored the reality of discourse and that it's it's so important to work out who's right and it actually strengthens your position on things it doesn't harm your position and it actually brings more people to your side than it does push them away yeah it does I mean bullying people is not a good way to convince them like you can bring them them to heal right and you can get them to say certain words like mantras right but if you want to persuade them bullying is not a good system no uh you know but but you know it's interesting you know you mentioned discourse and you know we want to Stamp Out things that we think are harmful I mean I think that that's something else really important that's changed I think maybe in the past two decades is you know what I call it kind of psychologizing of politics whereby if you say something I disagree with it's not just that I disagree with it or I think it's wrong for the following reasons it's that you harm me you know you micro me you triggered me you know you you um you hurt my soul your speech is violence exactly you know and I think that's of relatively recent vintage and just like lots of things I think it has complicated Origins and not entirely bad ones I think part of it comes from greater awareness of mental health which I think is overall a plus right but I would argue that this is a place where it's been a minus um uh that is the application of the psychological frame to these discussions um has ultimately
led us to a whole bunch of culde act you know I often say to my students look if if you're microG by something I say in class you tell me you are I basically have one thing to say in response I'm sorry like I didn't want to offend you but I wouldn't have anything else to say I wouldn't say you weren't offended because I don't know that and I wouldn't say say you weren't harmed cuz I can't look into your soul to say that I think I would just simply say it's not my intention right right but this is a lazy way to communicate well because you're you're always a victim and you're always looking to call people out for this and for that it's like and and also I think unfortunately all this rhetoric feeds on itself and it teaches people to feel a certain way yeah right it teaches people to feel a certain harm and look I'm not a sticks and stones will break my bones but name names will never hurt me guy I think words do hurt right but once you make hurt the the the barometer of what you're going to say and not say or allow and not allow I mean forget it there's also intent and words are supposed to convey intent and one of the problems is when you make more and more words magic words that you can't say you limit you do two things one you limit discourse because then you you have less words that you're allowed to use to form your sentence and the English language is so new wants to words can mean multiple things yeah and then two you're you're doing that and you're also you're empowering those words that you can't use so now when someone uses those words like Jesus did he say that you know and the more we add to that pile the more it gives people that are trying to hurt you weapons they have more rocks on their side now and and it adds to the stigma right and it adds to the sense of fear Lenny Bruce did a bit about that in the 1960s remember go like NW NW n say the s word and he' say all these other things and he'd say look you know if we just keep doing that enough then the end of the Riff was he said like no no little black kid will come home crying from school because a white boy called him the nword yes I mean that that was sort of his takeaway like is we have to try to just kind of um deprive these words of their hurt of their power and look there are examples of that in recent history I
mean think about the term queer right I mean when when I was a kid queer was one of the worst things that you could call somebody right and now they are queer studies departments and American universities right because the Lenny Bruce thing kind of worked yeah right you know you kept saying queer queer queer queer queer and you gave it a different set of associations and you defanged it right right that is interesting that's a good example of a word that's evolved yep and become an acceptable word not only that but like preferred and sometimes doesn't even mean gay right like that's where it gets real slipp it doesn't mean necessarily gay it means like I'm whatever I'm queer you know it's it's weird right and and look you know that's good too I mean it's good I think ambiguity is good I think we get into our worst places when again we're too certain too right you know and yes it's going to mean different things to different people it's changing over time it meant something very different when I was a high school kid than it does today and that's that's the good stuff I think I mean need to read each other's minds yeah get back to that little Elon Musk thing we're going to insert maybe yeah maybe that's the that's what's going to get us out of this little game we're playing with language because if people are doing that they're looking to be offended they're trying hard to be offended trying to play a game instead of trying to just rationally communicate with you instead of like trying to find out how you think and expressing thems in a a very polite and maybe even a gentle way right instead of doing that you're playing a game where you're trying to be offended looking to be offended looking to keep someone on the defensive it's annoying it's an annoying way to communicate and it becomes much like tennis is a game it becomes a game right it becomes a game that people play verbally right and a culdesac is really what it is I think in in the sense that it interrupts discussion you know when when I give this rap to my students about how problematic this whole like psychological frame is they'll often say like you're denying our feelings oh it's the opposite actually I would never deny your feelings and it's precisely the undeniability of your feelings that
makes this such a poor venue for discussion like I can't tell you how you're feeling or how you should feel right but what I can tell you is that when you're feeling becomes a trump card right we're not going to be able to communicate anymore right you know uh because you know words do offend they do right and you know I don't go out of my way to offend people but I know that because I'm a journalist and a historian right that sometimes I'm going to write or say things that will offend people I think that comes with the territory you know um and I think if what we decide is that we're never going to offend each other we're actually never going to learn from each other well especially when you're dealing with people that have this broad range of sensitivities like what would offend one person would never offend you and would would offend me would probably be like hor mendous to someone else yeah and and look you know I mean there's a story that that begins our little book uh that is right on point involving Mary Beth Tinker who was the 13-year-old who wore the armband to uh Warren Harding Middle School in De Moine in 1965 armband yeah a black armband to protest the Vietnam War um and uh she was sent home and that uh um uh that later became the Court case Tinker V de Mo um in which the Supreme Court said that uh uh neither students nor teachers shed their their free expression rights at the schoolhouse gate so she's a you know a great symbol of there she is yeah with with her black armband well Mary Beth Tinker isn't that much older than I am and um you ever hang out he's a good friend actually oh it's a he now no no no no she she I thought you said he's a good friend no no um just a you never know a terrific person do they have peace signs that's her uh yeah anyway she um uh she's become a friend and she came up to my class at Penn and she did her her presentation by the way she still has the arm band and he like puts it on students and of course I'm a historian I'm like shouldn't that be in the National Archives like carrying it around like do do you also have a copy of the Declaration of Independence in your purse you know but it's great actually I mean it's a great teaching tool and Mary Beth is absolutely
fabulous so she tells her story about getting sent home and you know eventually getting the ACLU to represent her and um you know becoming what she is which is this kind of great this great symbol and also voice for free speech and the students take it in and they say look you know Miss Tinker you were fighting the good fight right you were fighting the war in Vietnam this Milo yannopoulos clown like this an couter jokester like this Ben Shapiro hoaxer they just hurt people why should we allow them to speak and she had a very I think important and pointed response she said listen at my middle school there were kids who had fathers and brothers and uncles they were fighting and some of them dying in Southeast Asia you don't think they were hurt by this snot-nosed kid wearing this symbol saying that their loved one was risking their life for a lie like you don't think that hurt them like if that's what you think like you're not thinking like of course it hurt them so once that becomes like your you know your barometer your measure of what's going to be allowed as speech forget Mary Beth Tinker you know um forget anything because words do hurt right that in in part was the point right that was the point of the symbol right um again I'm not saying that Mary Beth intended to hurt anybody because I can assure you that she didn't but what I'm saying is it effectively hurt people right because speech especially challenging speech does and the students like take they took this in and they said look you know Free Speech it's just about who has power and who doesn't you know and the people with power they love to talk about Free Speech because they've got power and Mary Beth Tinker is like hold on wait a minute I was a 13-year-old girl speech was the only Power I had and that's really our Point here right is that you know when you start to restrict it in whatever way formally and informally right even with the best of intentions it's people without power ultimately they're going to suffer you know it's people at the bottom that are going to get hurt right um because they need speech more than anybody else before the 1960s students had no speech rights that the that the courts or the
Constitution was willing to recognize so you know if a student said something in school that the teacher didn't like they could just send them home you know know um and it's because of Mary Beth tinker and the other kids who protested that now it's not like that right and of course we can debate the degree to which this should be allowed and should you be able to wear a Confederate flag on your T-shirt or you know an anti-abortion symbol and these are all important things to talk about but even the reason we're talking about them is because Mary Beth Tinker who was 13 who had no power other than her speech stood up for her speech even though yes it hurt people right because speech does that um uh but at the end of the day you know that's really the message that I want our young people to get right is that the real reason I think we need to hold on to free speech is we live in an unequal Society like all societies are and we live in a society with all sorts of unfairness all sorts of Injustice like all societies have all right and if you want to do anything about that you got to let everyone talk that's the only way the only way to make anything better to write anything wrong to write any wrong is to maintain our Free Speech have you ever had a debate with someone who believes that deplatforming is a valid way to all the time what do they say well look I mean again I think with the best of intentions I don't like to question people's motives and I think the people on the deplatforming side I think they believe what they believe for good reasons right um uh they want to protect certain populations at the school especially minorities from some pretty offensive and awful speech you know and I understand that and and I respect it to a degree that is I respect their goal but you know well where to start I mean uh a like who's going to be so offensive that minority students can't hear him or her who's going to make that call B are you sure the minority students are going to be offended how do you know that c aren't you condescending to them just a little if you assume that they can handle this all right and D even if it is offensive to them how do you know they'll benefit by being insulated from it like can we find like a cognitive psychologist or you know anybody who
does like behavior therapy to tell us that the way to help some body who is afraid or threatened by something is to insulate them from it that's not how it works that makes things worse so I mean I'm just I know I'm throwing out a lot there but I think there are many different objections to this and again I want to be totally clear like I'm not questioning that the deplatforming people want to help I'm just questioning whether they do when I was in high school uh Barney Frank came to our school and debated uh some conservative guy with a American flag on his lapel and uh I think I was probably like 14 or 15 years old and they brought us into this Auditorium and uh Barney Frank just demolished this guy he was so so much more clever and interesting and you know just made really good points and um it was it was cool to watch because I got to see one guy's perspective that seemed to me to be um what's a good way to put it it seemed like he was bullshitting but he was bullshitting in a weird like uh he was pretending the world is different than it is and he was going to trick us kids into say in in this way of saying it that was very like almost Hollywood mov esque and uh Barney Frank just dismantled him and I remember sitting there going wow this is interesting like listening these like you this guy had his chance and then this guy has his chance and this guy's got better more well-formed thoughts he's more articulate he's more clever and I like that guy better and it's like that's what you need to see and this idea that everything needs to be an echo chamber is [ __ ] crazy because then you leave out the possibility of these moments where someone does get dismantled and this is what we said earlier the answer to bad speech is not deplatforming it's better speech so we you don't need to take a guy like Milo out of the ecosphere you need to have someone debate him who's [ __ ] good you know and you got to go hey man we got a heavy hitter on this side we got to bring somebody in that really knows their [ __ ] yeah you know I mean Ben chapiro has made a career of trouncing people that were not as verbally skilled as him if you go and look at his Instagram or his uh YouTube page he's fantastic at pointing out logical
fallacies and a lot of these like really uh simple utopian ideas that a lot of these kids bring to him and he points it out and he's got a very fast way talking and you can't compete with him he's very articulate and when he does that these kids just get battered I mean there's like dozens and dozens of videos of him doing that and look back to Milo and even Ben Shapiro I mean you also give these people a lot more power and oxygen when you try to shut them down and that's I think another theme in the history of free speech and censorship right one of the great ways to give somebody a bigger microphone is to try to take it away well we've seen this over and over again I mean the you know the anti-slavery movement is a great example of that I mean there were gag rules in Congress like trying to prevent people from bringing in petitions that were anti-slavery petitions and John Quincy Adams became this huge national hero by the way after he was President right when he was in Congress and he was like our most distinguished ex-president ever he was sort of the leading abolitionist in Congress precisely because he violated the gag rule wow right you know because the gag rule actually gave him more oxygen the point the goal of the gag rule as per the name was to gag Adams it had the opposite effect and censorship almost always does and it's also there's so much censorship that's just so it's just so disingenuous like the the reasoning behind it like one one of the things about Shapiro is they always call him alt-right like no he's not like not even remotely he's he's just conservative he just happens to be a conservative Jew and if you find out if you look into it he was the big like one of the years when he was uh F when he was becoming famous he was the biggest target for anti-semitic hate online the biggest yeah and like he can point to like actual statistics of social media and show you the numbers it's just he's not alt-right you know he's uh conservative and you can't if you don't agree with him that's there's nothing wrong with disagreeing with him but you you form a good argument right form a good argument the guy's a master speaker he's very good at speaking so get a master speaker on the left and and let's do the Barney
Frank thing like duke it out with him in the court of public opinion and let's see what's up and also you know don't try to muzzle him because eventually a it won't work and B you know like it don't have so much hus right that's going to be used against you like it has been and it will be well goes further and further left what's what's actually considered hate speech it gets once you get rid of all the real right crazy psychos right then you start moving into like more conservative but like very reasonable people like [ __ ] them and then then next thing you know yeah it is a moving Target and look this is why the history piece is important too I mean I'm glad you mentioned Barney Frank I assume he was your representative at the time because you were the Newton right I think he was I don't I was he could have been elsewhere right could have been elsewhere in the Boston area anyway you know Frank's a fascinating figure important figure in the history of Democratic party but also in the history of of gay rights right because one of the first out like National figures well I I think the gay rights story is really important to this discussion and here's why you know it won't surprise you that because being gay and gay activity was a legal gay Publications were legal too and they were widely censored across this country and the Supreme Court actually intervened in the 1950s and said that like some of these bodybuilding magazines that were that were popular among uh especially gay men were protected you could do them right that was the trigger of the gay rights movement in this country but right well no not bodybuild in particular but those the those rulings and the fact that you know now it was legal for them to engage in this speech right I mean just think about the way all that activity was tabooed right it's not surprising that those Publications were hugely Central in allowing people to connect in every sense right and so that's a really good example it seems to me right of why speech is so important because you know you take it away and then people people who are stigmatized and people who are oppressed right they won't be able to connect they won't be able to do the things that they need to do to change this world yeah um and
that's the gay rights story it's about their free speech yeah yeah it really is and that that Mo I don't I don't think Barney was out then but yeah probably not and he was uh compete now I remember the guy on the other end was a member of the Moral Majority yeah do you remember them oh of course yeah that guy was a represent I remember Frank made fun of him for his American flag on his lapel well it was started by Terry fwell Terry fwell Senor oh was it really yeah yeah yeah right after what year was that it was really you know late 70s early 80s that was kind of the Heyday and they they were influential in helping Reagan get elected wow well that was the first time that religion was really used in in a political sense right it was during the Reagan Administration make Reagan campaign again I wouldn't say the first time but I would say that Reagan was very successful in weaponizing a certain sort of you know Evangelical Evangelical conservative right let's remember you know Jimmy Carter is an Evangelical conservative right I'm sorry he was he was an Evangelical Christian right um and very openly so but obviously he interpreted that politically in a different way right right yeah yeah um I I think kids and all of us would be way better off if there was open and free debate and if they didn't pull fire alarms when people that they don't agree with started talking and it just seems so strange to me that that's controversial to say in 2021 it seems like there has been a there's a a missing chunk of progress with this adoption of free of safe spaces and Trigger warnings and all this [ __ ] that everybody thinks is just a part of the program now and and you know I would say actually I think the worst outcome is the one that we can't really measure which is just kind of the that the sort of the spirit of self-censorship that attaches to all I mean when you actually try to look at and you see how many trigger warnings literally there have been there haven't been that many um it's just that what you're creating is again a spirit of censorship like what you were talking about before with people being afraid to talk about affirmative action exactly exactly but you know to the point of trigger warnings I mean when I taught at NYU I taught a very big uh big lecture big
sweaty lecture class about the culture wars in American history including many things were're talking about and we did a a unit about pornography and pornography censorship and Regulation and all that and as part of that unit I showed a film actually by an NYU colleague called the price of pleasure which is an anti-porn movie and one of the ways it tries to make its argument is like by including some awful violent misogynous clips and what I would do before I showed that movie is I would just describe in clinical detail what these clips were and just to tell the stud from from what they were from porn movies from this would have been the probably the early a something like that um and all sorts of terrible stuff and look for all and and I would say the students was that unusual back then though that to have that kind of like when did that kind of porn become normal well I think after the internet Revolution I mean you know I would say so somewhere in the late 90s yeah yeah or maybe even later than that because not everyone had people didn't have as much access to the internet I mean anyway to the point of triggers I mean I would tell the students what it was in and I would say like I'm going to show the movie during these times like if you don't want to see that you don't have to come to that right and for all practical purposes that was a trigger warning right and I think in some instances that's legitimate the problem is of course as we get this concept creep where we now drag it over everything right so people I mean there was an incident a few years ago where like kids demanded trigger warnings for bloody movie scenes in a course about horror movies oh boy and I'm like look dude I'm not a bloody movie scene guy either I get that part yeah but what I don't get is selecting a course an elective course on horror movies on horror movies if bloody movie scenes aren't your jam that I don't get it is it is it is silly and there have been all sorts of things like that there have been people who have demanded trigger warnings for down Abby really because there's bad [ __ ] that happens in down ABY right there's like sexual cusion and there's suicide and there's like I mean you know there's
like some ugly stuff yeah you don't get Tri warnings just no no but trigger warnings for those violent porn movies that kind of makes sense CU you're talking about something that's insanely disturbing right and also it's like I wonder what what happened there like how did we go from if you go to the ancient nudie films it was all pretty straightforward just men and women kissing and then eventually having sex right and then you go into the 1980s kind of the same thing like when did the whole violent thing happen like when did that take place well I do think that there were so-called snuff films there were violent movies there were snuff films there were absolutely were you know including some very horrible things I mean I think um uh you know uh I think that uh you know if we had a evolutionary psychologists here they would just say look it's pretty simple what happens is the internet creates a demand for variety right um right uh because it it presents uh an infinite number of possibilities so in the pre- internet days right um you know you can only produce so much material and it probably has to appeal to a fairly wide spectrum right once the internet kicks in right you can slice and dice uh everything to ever narrow audiences right um and so exactly there going to be people with all sorts of you know all kinds of fetishes and all kinds of awful things and you can you can tailor your product to them now where does that fit in your opinion of free speech well look I mean you know uh I I as an educator and as a parent I'm troubled by the fact that lots of young men in this country are getting their sexual education from porn um I'm troubled by that and I I'm glad it didn't exist uh when I was a kid I mean I don't to me the interesting question isn't why 16-year-old boys want to porn it's why they don't do it like 247 I mean I think if it existed when I was a 16-year-old boy I think I would have been very tempted to do that and I think it would have [ __ ] me up in a whole number of ways um but that's not a good argument for getting rid of it that's an argument for trying to promote a different kind of sexual education right porn is sex ed it's just bad sex at you know um uh it it it's a way of
socializing people especially young men um uh to a certain kind of understanding of what sex is or should be and I think a lot of it is a very narrow and flawed understanding but the answer to that is not okay let's get rid of all the porn right the answer to that is for our institutions especially educational institutions to put forth a different model but what about when porn stretches off into violence and then is that that is that protected well look I mean some of it isn't right I mean just by law right the stuff involving minors for example right I mean that's against the law and I think I think almost every reasonable person thinks that that's reasonable look Joe no freedom is truly absolute right no Freedom including Free Speech right you can't call the White House and say that you're going to kill the president is that a quote is that is that a restriction on your speech well of course it is and I think reasonable people think that's a reasonable restriction right I can't say to one of my students I really like that sweater that you're wearing and if you wear it again I'll give you an a right is that a quote restriction on my speech of course it is and by the way one that I'm happy to abide by right um so you know um there is no right of any kind that is absolute right uh I think the only interesting question is which are the kinds that actually should be restricted that's where the question lies that's what I'm saying like right different people have different ideas of what shouldn't shouldn't be okay they will and I guess my plea would be let's have that discussion right let's have a free speech discussion about Free Speech right that is free and unbridled where the person who's making the plea for having all the porn be allowed is an automatically vilified as a misogynist or a woman hater although surely some of the consumers of that product are exactly that yeah let's actually have that discussion so I mean in some ways this goes back to Mary Beth Tinker because you know when the Court ruled that she could wear this armband the court did not say you can say whatever the [ __ ] you want in school at any time because that would be Mayhem right you can't do it what they said is if the school wants to restrict the speech it has to show that there was a threat of
material and substantial disruption to learning and by the way um in that particular case in a school district of 18,000 s kids wore armbands to school wow and there was no apparently during Mary beths told me during the oral argument at one point Thor Good Marshall asked okay um how many kids were wearing the arm they said seven and Marshall said and what exactly were you afraid of like like what was going to be and apparently then Marshall fell asleep which in his later years he was known to do and Mary Beth who was actually at the at the hearing said that's when they knew they had won that's hilarious you so I mean that's a good example right like you just can't you can't stand up in the middle of the class and say you know uh you know you know Mr Jones is the n-word or or the FW right you can't do that and we all understand that right but you can wear an armband and the point is if the school wants to restrict it the onus has to be on the school it has to be on the institution to show why this is necessary like the kid doesn't have to make that plea right the default position should be the kid is a citizen and by the way a future voter right and like the court said like you don't like your your rights don't disappear at the schoolhouse gate in fact the school is where you're supposed to learn about those rights right now this is not by the way a settled question and you may have read that the Supreme Court just yesterday was hearing a case about this it's in Mahone Pennsylvania up near Joe Joe a country near Scranton and this is one I think you would love Joe and I'm surprised you even haven't had the cheerleader on this the cheerleader case this ringing a bell here here's what it is very briefly um 15-year-old kid um she uh uh tries out for the cheerleading team she's on the JV she wants to get diversity and she finds out on a Saturday that she was an elevated diversity when she finds out she's at a convenience store buying something she's I think with her mom she could a drive at the time and she Instagrams to her group chat maybe 200 kids [ __ ] school [ __ ] cheerleading [ __ ] everything okay and remember this is next to the kids in her chat right right but there's another kid on the chat whose mom is like an Assistant Cheerleading Coach right and she shows
it to the mom and takes a screenshot of it and the school like suspended her and said she could never be in cheerleading and um uh there were other disciplinary things too and this case has worked its way up to the Supreme Court and it was heard just yesterday and you know the questions from the justices I listen to some of them because you can do that now um they were exactly on this question they were Now remind me again like how this 15-year-old saying [ __ ] cheer how is that going to disrupt what you do at school oh and by the way do you really want to be monitoring all the chats of all the kids right I mean that's and and and and short sided and that's how they're going to learn like what democracy is like you're going to be monitoring all their internet [ __ ] and saying if what like like you know you're Tyrant it really is you know and it'll be interesting to see how the court rules because again no right is absolute and we can all imagine things that this kid could have done even on her phone in the convenience store that the school might reasonably sanctioned like let's suppose she had shared answers to a test that she wasn't supposed to have access to right that would disrupt the pedagogical process right and it would be reasonable right for the school say no no no you can't do that even though you weren't on school property right she's just expressing herself to her friends and in [ __ ] pis that every teenager uses right I mean you know come on it's funny um if I was the parent I'd be like ah whoever that parent is that send a screenshot they should be forced to pay all the legal fees for all this I don't think that's going to happen and actually you know um the school organizations like the principal organizations and the superintendent organization also the Biden's Department of Education they rallied around the school like they submitted briefs to allow the school to do this and their argument is look you know there's all this terrible bullying going on on the net which is true there's sometimes awful racist [ __ ] we've got to be able to sanction that and I think the response the right response to that is look we have anti-harassment laws right we already have those right and you can use those carefully if you like we can't
give you a blank check right like that's not how America is works or should work like we don't just walk around trying to regulate everybody's texts especially kids oh come on I mean they're just learning how to use these phones anyway this this is a whole new thing over the last couple decades of kids being able to do this exactly there's no real boundaries and real clear set way of using it correctly and especially in group chats people love saying crazy [ __ ] group chats that's one of the funnest things right yeah listen man we just went through three hours believe it or not my goodness and uh thank you I really appreciate it your book is available now right yeah free speech and why you should give a damn Jonathan Zimmerman and and co-authored with sign Wilkinson uh uh who is um by the way the first woman in American history to win the pure prize for cartooning oh all right so there cartoons in here yes she is a giant a genius of The Craft well listen I really enjoyed talking to you thank you very much thank you all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]