Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIhHdL2fKiE
[Music] coleman welcome nice to meet you great to be here man what is x factor set your podcast no i wish x factor this is a lauren hill shirt oh i've seen you wear that on more than one occasion you know i just love this shirt oh it's comfortable i look good in it i feel good thank you you do look good um i'm glad you agree with jamie that golf is a problem what kind of problem [ __ ] it's a good problem to have all he cares about is golf these days there's a lot going on in the golf world you know i just i resent golf because my dad is good and i think he really wanted me to be good at least i sensed that and i never was it's such an awkward swing it's a very weird movement i was watching tiger woods swing on youtube yesterday for whatever strange reasons talking about how looking man i'm scared i told you i'm [ __ ] scared of golf i can't i can't do it i don't have that kind of like with every other sport if you're a pretty athletic person you cannot embarrass yourself in a short amount of time right with golf it seems like there's very little correlation between general athleticism and whether you can do this swing so here's a slo-mo of tiger woods and you know what it is is like i was looking at the way his body moves and then i remember hearing about all the different surgeries he's had on his back and i'm like it kind of makes sense if you look at the amount of torque right here is where the torque starts let it drive through like this amount of [ __ ] power it's such a it is such a weird movement of the body and you have to be you have to like be loose and strong at the same time right yeah yeah keep your arms like stiff but your wrists loose and your hips loose but your legs stiff everything's counterintuitive a baseball swing is so much more intuitive to me maybe that's because i played more baseball growing up but i think it is more naturally with the grain of how the body would just like if a caveman just picked something up yeah club he would
swing it more like a baseball bat than like a golf club certainly it makes sense because the golf thing is down low yeah right and so it has you have to stand sideways and it has to go past your legs yeah i'm trying to find this this guy he's a long drive hitter i've seen he's pretty nude he's huge he's a baseball player but he's got this very unique swing he calls it the no wax swing he does a giant baseball step happy billy he blasts the ball too oh my god oh jesus christ but i've tried doing it it really [ __ ] up your entire swing for everything else you're doing it's it's only made for hitting the ball as far as possible which is yeah you can't putt like that but you can you make it accurate and do that you can because the long drive thing you have to hit it within the fairway you can't just smash it as far as possible and count as far as it went it has to be within like the lines kind of thing i can't imagine that there isn't some like giant linebacker type dude that if you could talk teach him correctly they would have immense power like can you imagine if you could teach francis and gano how to drive correctly that ball might never land well there's a picture of the tyson fury swinging which i think he's pretty new to it and he's a giant person he's enormous yeah same kind of thing the amount of torque like yeah he's it doesn't look as impressive you also don't have the other part which is i've been figuring out as i've learned swinging as hard as you can doesn't make the ball go as far as it will is if you swing nice and soft and hit it in the right spot on the club that's the same thing with pool right like with a brake shot and pool you don't want to hit it as hard as you can you want to kind of hit it smooth it's it's strange but that doesn't get out your frustration of hitting a bad shot which feels good too i kind of think breaking a club over your leg when you have a bad shot might be very helpful but it's not etiquette has been terrible why would it be helpful to break a club over good to get out that like because some people want to throw the club or throw a ball when you when you do bad
yeah because you you're frustrated with yourself it's all about yourself you can't get yell at yourself there's players that got in trouble for that because they catch it on mike we've like you've got right right right yeah so like how do you deal with that mind game if you could just break something over your leg i got a theory about why people like tyson fury it's not just because he's awesome but also because he has back fat i have no idea who tyson fury is you don't know who tyson fury is no really it's a heavyweight champion of the world i don't follow it you don't know who tyson fury is no he's one of the most extraordinary heavyweight boxers ever he's six foot nine he's a gypsy and he's a [ __ ] character he call him the gypsy king wow he was very fat at one point in time and then he got pretty thin but he's still in between fights and particularly carries a lot of back fat he does not look quick or particularly strong dude he's amazing it's interesting it's all deceptive first of all he's huge he's so tall i mean he's six foot nine and he just has an immense reach immense reach and he's very talented like it's not just a physical advantage you know those gypsies like i don't know if you've ever seen any of those um documentaries on bare knuckle boxers bare knuckle boxers in the uk it's like the these gypsies from like brad pitt and snatch do you ever see that movie you didn't no are you just reading books all the time just being an intellectual like what are you doing with your time yeah i read books i read articles i record podcasts i make songs i watch documentaries i watch i watch netflix shows they've done documentaries on these people okay there's a whole culture of bare-knuckle boxers that live in caravans they live in like these trailers and they they travel around and challenge each other and because of youtube these guys have videos so they have videos where they're challenging each other like bobby o'donovan you had a [ __ ] bag of shite i'm gonna [ __ ] take you out and they have these like ridiculous youtube challenge videos
how do you think they compare to professional boxers if you put them in a ring it's a different thing when you're doing bare knuckle because you could break your hand so easily so you have to be a little bit more cautious there's a thought like have you ever seen like pictures of old timey boxers they stand like this there's a thought that they were punching like that because they wanted to hit only with these two knuckles in the front right because it's less likely to break your hands right and you know there's also it's probably they just didn't know any better like they didn't you know no one had come along that could punch like mike tyson it had like perfect technique and so they thought that this is probably the way to do it to like hit each other but have you seen this documentary one punch no one punch is a collection of stories of people who have killed someone accidentally with one punch oh wow bar fight single punch they fall down hit their head on a curb side of a table and they die and it goes through their legal stories how they got in the fight and it's just this fascinating recalibration of what you think is possible with a small amount of violence like you never think if you're going to punch someone once that they're going to die i think that maybe you do but i try to tell people you're very close to violence but um i think people who aren't close to it don't realize how quickly things can spin out of control the thing is the hitting the head and this is uh apparently this was in bob saget's uh autopsy they believe that he blacked out and fell back and hit his head and that is uh what caused massive skull fractures in his head and you know some people think like oh my god maybe foul play was involved but apparently there's no way apparently the um door you know he had a key card to get into the door of the hotel no one had been in it since he had been in there no one had left so he opened the door he went inside and you know he had just done a show and apparently he just fainted
and banged the back of his head and then there's a video i don't know if you never see the heather mcdonald video uh the the writer heather mcdonald no the comedian mcdonnell have you seen the video no no see if you can find that you well you definitely could find it's everywhere she's on stage it's kind of it's the craziest video because people think it's joke she's talking about how many vaccines she's had she's like i'm double vaxxed i'm boosted i got the shingles vaccine you know and and she right after saying that blacks out on stage falls back completely bangs her head off the ground and which is how people die so give me some volume on this from the beginning did shows meet and greets no no go from the beginning go for there here covered clear no go from the beginning so i could hear her talking about the vaccines here it goes oh sorry trigger warning yeah i don't mean to brag i don't care but i want you to know double vaxxed booster flu shot and i'm gonna be honest i have the shingle shot too and i still get my period what yes traveled went to mexico twice did shows meet and greets never got covered clearly jesus loves me the most seriously so nice so nice oh boom somebody once oh my lord yeah so she fractured her skull doing that yeah poor woman i mean but that's just a coincidence she was talking about the vaccine while that happened yeah they call it instant pharma which is horrible but that's the phrase that i keep hearing online there was a woman uh on german television that the same thing happened to her recently she was talking about vaccine mandates and talked about how important it is to mandate the vaccines and she blacked out on television while talking about it strange coincidence in the timing of right when the sentence was said and
when she blacked out yeah yeah but the point is falling back like that is [ __ ] super dangerous and a friend of mine uh kevin james in fact kevin james from the king of queens he used to work as a bouncer in a club in a nightclub and one of the guys he worked with got into a bar fight they were um you know telling some drunk that he had to leave whatever and a fight broke out he punches this guy the guy falls back bangs his head off the ground and dead and the guy wound up doing time like the bouncer wind up doing time for that yeah the the philosophers call this moral luck right it's like um we both commit the same action i punch someone you punch someone one of these person has a prior medical condition or just by pure dumb luck ends up tripping hitting their head so we both did the same exact action one of us committed homicide one of us got into a bar fight yeah that doesn't actually speak to which one of us is a more moral human being that's pure dumb luck but the law can treat it as if you're a murderer and you're not right that's moral luck i think it's a very interesting concept texting while driving is another example i've done it i don't do it you know as a as a rule but like i've done it in the past almost everyone has you know there there's someone in the world where the first time they texted and drove they ran over like a five-year-old yeah law of averages says that must have happened yeah and um on the one hand we want to punish those things on the other hand you can't really call that person a moral monster when they're doing something a lot of people are doing and just being getting much luckier with yeah there's an interesting distinction between someone choosing to do something evil versus an evil result like if your son dies because someone was texting and driving it's the most horrible feeling you'd probably be so furious and you'd want revenge you'd want to punish that person
but it's not that they did it on purpose the difference between someone killing your son on purpose that's a that's an evil act this is just thoughtless and [ __ ] luck and also not anticipating consequences and that's why the law recognizes intention as a factor that distinguishes say one murder from a worse murder right yeah and um i think the reason we recognize intention in the law is because clearly all human beings we have this intuition that there's a it's a different type of person who does a thing on purpose then does it by accident one kind of person wishes you harm and probably will keep wishing you harm the other the other kind of person at worst was negligent and i think there is um i think that's a very important observation to hold steady throughout our uh legal and non-legal judgments of people just in the culture right like people want to eliminate the distinction between uh you know saying uh for instance a racial slur directing it at someone and saying saying the word in quotation marks right yeah and i know that you're familiar with the fact that people erase the distinction because i'm very familiar yeah i'm not that clueless that i haven't been paying attention to what's what's going on yeah but the point is the same principle by which we all understand the difference between manslaughter and homicide and so forth should govern the way that we judge people for you know words and everything else right but certain people want to say intentions don't matter uh that that just that can't make sen you know you'd have to throw out our whole legal system if that were true or at least overhaul it and i think that's an important principle to recognize i think the the conversations haven't been had enough whether it is with
someone doing something accidentally and having a horrible result versus doing it intentionally or someone using words versus someone that is actually trying to be racist there's there's definitely a difference in those things and i think we as a society we have rules that we have decided upon and then when someone violates those rules that person is a violator and that person needs to be judged and dealt with because of that i think we have this sort of moral righteousness when it comes to uttering certain words or doing certain things and the the good thing about the the judgment that comes out of that and the inner is is conversations it's like people start having conversations like what is the difference why is it different like what are you allowed to say what are you not allowed to say and why you know it's interesting with with the n-word controversy that that happened here right when that was happening i was watching for the first time ever i'm ashamed to admit the five-part oj documentary from espn from from a while back it's like it's been on my list to watch for a long time i finally watched it and you'll remember there's this moment in the trial where uh you know it's now known that there's probably a mark firm in n-word tape you know like this this uh collect the glove at the scene has a history of using the n-word as a racial slur directing it at people and so forth and chris darden for the prosecution with the jury out of the room he looks at the judge he says we cannot allow the jury to hear this tape and here's why black people cannot hear the n-word and remain objective and the jurors they have to remain objective so we can't we can't allow them to hear we can't admit this as that's fascinating that he's the prosecuting
attorney prosecuting attorney made that argument and then the defense johnny cochran came back on the defense and he said what the hell are you talking about the idea that a black person can't hear the n-word in any context and remain rational remain objective understand the context of it it's patronizing it's condescending it's racist i'm ashamed that you made this argument right and you know regardless of the merits of it his johnny cochran's view was seen to have sort of won the day among among people and they did admit much of or at least parts of the tape and the jury heard the word and basically the argument was among progressive people at that time in the 90s was it's condescending and patronizing to say that every like any example of that word being spoken just like scrambles black people's minds or something and i think there's been a huge sea change in what the progressive argument now is the progressive argument now is much closer to chris darden's point of view that any example of this word being used whether it's in quotation marks um whether you're talking about the word itself or whether it's being hurled as an insult it's all the same it's all so deeply you know shattering of the the inner psyche of a black person so i just i think we at at minimum we should mark how much has changed there and who was making these arguments back then and who's making them now um and i worry that people are basically circling the wagon on an idea that they haven't really thought through if that makes any sense the darden thing i get it from a prosecutor's perspective because he doesn't want them to dismiss this this character in his case which is mark furman who on top of that also has been accused of planning evidence so there's like a two thing going on with mark furman you're dismissing his validity first of all because he's doing something illegal he's planting evidence
and then he might have planted blood too right wasn't that wasn't didn't they think it was alleged yeah people were wondering and then on top of that he might have he might have racist perspectives so like you've got two things going on simultaneously and then also it's like everybody had seen the rodney king video yes this was a big part of the oj case that a lot of people maybe have um forgotten but when people saw that rodney king video which is really one of the first viral videos and you see rodney king on the ground and these multiple white cops beating him with sticks and the fact that those cops got a possible reason it's well what was the what was the story that he was running from them and he was on pcp or something like that like what was the story like why you know i i don't remember the details but the you know the as it dragged on and they they keep beating him more and more senseless yeah it just becomes more and more obvious that there's there's no reason that they had to beat him that much right yeah yeah and and they got off and they got off and so when oj got off everybody was like well we got that one yeah it was it was a thing where they fell it was a revenge mindset yes i think that that's very unhealthy i have to say i don't think i mean listen it's a cliche that two wrongs don't make a right but it's a very it's a very deep cliche it's a cliche for a reason and um like like the notion that because the cops did something completely unforgivable horrible to rodney king and got off for it and and you know that did prove all of the wider in in you know the wider points about the systemic practices of of the lapd that's all valid the fact that people couldn't separate those true and important points from this other trial about this you know this wealthy former football player that quite clearly
killed his wife um you know i think that we have to insist that people be able to think two things at once i mean that's just one example of it but you know it's it's possible to acknowledge everything true and valid about the rodney king case and still say i'm sorry oj is guilty and there weren't that many people um certain that certainly weren't that many black people at the time it seems that we're really emphasizing that bright line that we can think two things at once here folks yeah and it doesn't make us look good to conflate the two it's actually not just well there was a real underlying thought that the the los angeles police department was corrupt and it wasn't just that it was also the rampart division and there was allegations that cops that were involved in that were also involved in the killing of biggie so there was there was a lot of [ __ ] going on with la cops where there was no internet back then so we have to remember back in the day like these discussions were had with people just talking about it at a bar or over the dinner table and no one had like real data to pull from and there was no like real investigative journalism that was being done where you could show it i remember the rolling stone article on biggie's murder it implicated uh rampart i think it was they think they were saying it was rampart cops they think they even narrowed it down to the specific cops they think had something to do with the murder where there was a bunch of ro and they know this was a fact there was a bunch of rogue cops that were doing murders for hire they were they were basically organized criminals that were operating under the gang of the los angeles police department remember like colors remember the movie colors sean penn ice cube or iced tea rather had that song hit song colors it was a song with it was a movie about with robert duvall and sean penn about
corrupt la cops and so we kind of got it through pop culture we got it through conversations but when we when people saw the rodney king beating and then they saw that those guys got off that was one of the very first sort of like public acknowledgements like there's a real [ __ ] problem with this imagine how many rodney kings there were that just didn't get filmed yeah and this is i mean we now live in an age just in the past 10 years really where everyone in america virtually has a fairly high definition camera in their pockets at all times and some police departments have moved to universal body cams and so forth and that's been uh i think that's changed incentives you know almost more than any law that we pass could right the understanding every cop has that when he or she is policing the public the public can simply whip out their phones at any time has i mean that has to seep into the consciousness of police officers knowing that they're being watched and you know that's a double-edged sword though because on the one hand um it's way harder for a cop to abuse someone now now that everyone can can film on the other hand because everyone has a phone in their pocket the availability of bad things happening has just skyrocketed right yeah and in a country with over 300 million people it gives us the impression that horrible things that are actually extremely rare are in fact happening all the time just by numbers just by numbers and i mean the way i think about this is for instance if we talk about uh unarmed civilians getting killed by the cops um unarmed citizens if america were exactly the same but the size of canada like you know one-ninth the population it would mean that we would have roughly
one-ninth the you know interactions between cops and and and citizens and one-ninth of the opportunities for for things to go left and one-ninth of the videos of of cops killing people unarmed and it would seem like it were happening a lot less but in fact the state of the country would be the same right so like just the fact that we have such a large population makes it feel like lightning strike rarity events are happening all the time yeah and the media obviously thrives on that well those are the ones that are very popular and those are the ones that um people want to share but there's a lot of those there's a lot of ones that cops getting attacked too and people don't seem to care about those there's a website that i follow a twitter instagram page rather called police posts go to uh police post there's one that they put up today about this guy um responding to a call and uh this uh man is at the door and the cop is walking towards the door and the guy's saying hurry up she's choking on her own blood something to that extent here yeah play this so do it from the beginning so that you can see don't do do it from the beginning because otherwise it's gonna [ __ ] it all up okay here give me some volume all right here we go so the suspect's saying come on come on she's choking under blood come on so the guy's walking towards the door who's all in the house so as the guys walking towards the house as the guys walking towards the house the guy standing in the you could play it again the guy's standing in the middle of the door and he's got no shirt on and he's saying come on you know she's choking on her own blood and as he comes close the guy just pulls out a gun and just opens fire at point-blank range and lights this cop up this is a thing that you know when we you see horrible interactions between cops and civilians you don't see
too many of those but there's a ton of those and if you follow topsy though certainly well they're terrified cops do you know how many cops have ptsd they they every day see people get shot every day see people get run over by cars like the amount of shock that's in their system and then every time they pull a car over and they have tinted windows they don't know they don't know what's going on inside their car they don't know who the point i tried to make during the the year of the george floyd protests and riots people would often say well look at western europe look at canada look at all of these places uh where they have cops and in certain of these places the cops don't have guns and some sometimes they do how come you're not seeing video how come it's only in america that we're seeing videos of cops killing unarmed people right yeah and uh i mean i think there there's a serious conversation to have to be had about the culture of the american police being being seriously flawed uh at the same time the fact that this happens in america means that policing in america is not the same as policing in in the uk and other countries right america is a country with more guns than people and uh that fact alone means that when a cop pulls over a suspect in america as opposed to in almost any other nation or any of other our peer nations they have a little thought in the back of their mind that is reasonable which says the thing he's reaching into his pocket for could be a gun could be a wallet but it could be a gun in other countries cops don't really have to have that thought because it's always a wallet and and that's a that's a systematic difference between policing and american policing in other nations that makes it harder and makes it makes it a facile comparison to simply say why isn't this stuff happening in western europe there's that but then there's also the history of police violence and abusive police officers in america
that's different than the history of cops in any other place and i think that that has to be taken into account too that there's an enemy perspective that a lot of people have when they look at the cops they think of the cops as the enemy i don't necessarily know what it's like in europe but i've got to think that the polarization between cops and citizens and a lot of it is you know broadcast via these cell phone videos like the george floyd incident it was a girl 17 year old girl filmed it on her cell phone changed the whole world because of that video literally changed the the landscape of of the the way people think about racial interactions in america because of one video right there's so many people that think of cops as the enemy because of these videos and there's so many of these videos if you look at the perspective that people had you know um my parents were hippies in the 60s and you know they grew up during the civil rights movement and they were around during you know marches and protests and when muhammad ali refused to go to fight in vietnam they stripped him of his title and there was there was this understanding of the difference between the way cops treated black people versus cops treated white people but it wasn't on youtube it wasn't available in your so that this data that you're talking about that's disproportionate because there's so many bad ones even if there's millions and millions of interactions it only takes one that becomes viral that will change people's opinions one eric gardner you know one george floyd one video that changes people's perspective on how what what goes down between cops and citizens and what is wrong with the cops this this didn't exist before and so when you see videos like this where this guy who's a cop gets shot at and you see you know these other interactions like we're not getting like necessarily a balanced perspective there's clearly a problem in the way cops deal with all citizens there's clearly uh there's a there's clearly a
culture of abusive police officers in some precincts in some place 100 100 i i remember it's fresh in my mind because i saw the oj documentary but there was um there's some tape that was released of cops like privately talking about black people and they had some horrible name i can't remember what it was but that they thought was hilarious right and it just it was this this moment where it was perfectly clear that they saw themselves as one kind of people and they saw the cells that they were the people they were policing as a totally different set of people unlike them um and that was almost you know psychologically akin to the relationship of colonialism in some way um but but i do want to i mean the way the media has portrayed this issue in in recent years has been to skew the discussion of shootings so as to only show the black victims of these kinds of of these kinds of killings right i i wrote a long essay in 2020 and one of the points i was trying to make in that essay was uh you know unarmed white people get killed by the cops every year in circumstances identical to the ones that we see on our black people getting killed that doesn't mean racism doesn't exist i think the the majority of racism almost certainly occurs in the kind of non-deadly interactions and harassments and racial profiling of people but if we're talking narrowly about killing unarmed civilians you know i took as just as an experiment to show how often this happens i took a single year i closed my eyes and picked it at random and i picked 2015 and just listed 10 different unarmed white people that got shot by the cops and killed that year most of the cops got off one of them is a six-year-old kid and you know these are you know like nobody knows these names because it only gets pumped into the national media when it's a black person which gives the false impression that it only
happens to black people right like everyone knows the the name george floyd as they should but very few people know the name tony timpa i found which is this guy from dallas in 2017 that was killed on camera with a knee on the top of his neck for 13 minutes and the cops joking the whole time it was the closest example to a george floyd that um that i'm aware of in in recent american history this is on video yeah it's on youtube really 13 minutes these cops have their back it wasn't the neck it was the very upper back but you know strangling in the exact same way and this poor guy he's calling out for his mother he's clearly he's clearly struggling and in pain and the cops are joking they're making jokes they're like wake up for school tony wake up for school blah blah blah as he's passing out they're making jokes about how he's and he died and that was 2017 and he was a white guy and um you know nobody very few people are aware that this even happened because of the color of his skin right he wasn't he didn't fit the narrative that this only ever happens to black people and i think that that narrative has a cost which is that we misperceive the problem with these shootings as being only about racist cops i have no doubt some of these examples uh it's like the cop wouldn't have shot if it was a white guy you know the white guy reaching reaching into his pants for for what looked like a gun just it wouldn't have scared the cop so much if he was white i have no doubt that that has happened but in this day and age i think pretty much no cop wants to be than the next derrick chauvin right they when it comes to shootings at least you know they have to be exercising a a pretty unique amount of restraint at least in the past few years and
i think it's you know we have minimized unfairly the role of bad training the role of bad incentives how cops almost never get punished for these kinds of things um that that's starting to change i mean just today kim potter got sentenced to uh to i think about a year in prison for uh uh for shooting the the i forget that the guy's name but what is this case uh kim potter she was a female cop is that the woman who walked in the wrong apartment um she she's the one that uh if i recall the details she thought she was using her taste oh right she says she thought she was using her taser which is i don't know the details of it to judge the plausibility of that excuse but it uh at the very minimum it seems like horrible training it seems like horrible training but i can attest to the fact that people under pressure completely fall apart and some people under pressure fall apart way worse than others there's something about adrenaline and fear and physical violence that narrows people's windows of perception and their ability to make rational decisions they don't know what they're doing they can't i remember i was watching a fight not a professional fight i was watching a street fight at the comedy store i was um at the um we were like in the front bar area and across the street on the other side it was the house of blues and there was these guys that were arguing and they started fighting and one guy literally was his face was like this and he had instigated this and he didn't know how to de-escalate and he was arguing with this guy and like [ __ ] you and folk you and then all of a sudden he's in a physical confrontation with this guy and you see him literally like in full-blown panic fear and he's doing this flailing with his hands like he has no
idea how to hit someone he probably can't believe it's happening and i could just see the constriction of his thinking the full panic in his movement full on just locked in doesn't know what's happening and a car like a bus pulls in front where uh i see these guys swinging and a car pulls in front and as the car passes i see the guy laid out just completely flatlined and the other guy runs off so he got knocked unconscious and he had no business fighting but he was in this oh oh you could see him in this full panic and me as a person who's been around people fighting their whole i see that i recognize it and i'm like this is someone that's probably never done this before and i think a lot of cops panic oh [ __ ] yeah they panic man this has happened before there was a a person uh in oakland i believe who did the same exact thing went to reach for their taser pulled out a gun and shot a guy and it's on video and this was at a um at a uh it's not a subway what do they call that the bart bart system in san francisco and this person same thing just thought they had the taser and pulled out a gun so it's not unprecedented people [ __ ] lock up under panic man i had this guy anthony barksdale on my podcast anthony barksdale was the deputy commissioner of the baltimore police department for years and like i don't know something like starting in 2007 or something like that and uh he was fun fact is that he was the namesake of the character avon barksdale on the show the wire um whoever the the writers were studying the bpd at that time or studying baltimore they took his name made it into one of the main characters it's a great show anyway anthony barksdale is this guy he's from baltimore he grew up in a time of in an area of great violence he told the story about uh being a kid on a sports team and a shooting broke out and his the coach would hide them in a dumpster to to hide them from the bullets so he he grows up you know he grew up he's from the city and he grows up
determined to make a change by becoming a cop and he eventually rises through the ranks becomes um you know uh the commissioner deputy commissioner and um he just you know told all these stories about these tense situations he had got into with subjects that were violent subjects that were mentally ill and um you know one of the biggest assets that he had was that he was very comfortable in physical altercations he's a black belt in jiu jitsu and he was able to de-escalate so many situations without going for his gun because he had a kind of confidence and knowledge that he could use his body to subdue and arrest a suspect without hurting them without hurting himself and he tried to train um i mean he he he couldn't formally through the through the department require bjj training but he would take his people and do and incentivize them um to train and bjj outside of the the official training the thing about jiu jitsu that's different than other martial arts is that you do it full blast like uh a lot of martial arts like sparring is uh very uh very muted like you're kind of like you're not really supposed to spar full blast in right karate class right you're supposed to control your strikes and because of that you don't get to experience the chaos of a real human being trying to take you out and in jiu jitsu because the fact that it's grappling it's unique in that you can go full blast and instead of getting hurt when you get caught in something you could just tap out and keep going right so if someone catches you in an arm bar you just tap you keep going and then you get accustomed to a human being resisting with all of their their might so like if you're in a situation with a person
and all of a sudden it escalates into a street fight you're so comfortable with this kind of confrontation you're so comfortable with the kind of physical chaos that's involved in a human being resisting also there's like a language of the way a body moves that you become very fluid with you understand weight and balance you understand like how to control a person people who don't have any experience in martial arts and they wind up being police officers are [ __ ] dangerous because they're they're relegated to weapons they're all they have is fear they can scare you or they can shoot you they can tase you or they can beat you with a club there's they don't have the ability to control you like if i'm around a person who is my size and they have no martial arts training and all of a sudden this person starts getting threatening with me and they you know they start like saying they're going to kick my ass or something like that my thought is okay what am i going to do to you am i going to hit you or am i going to strangle you that's what my thought is if i know this person doesn't really know how to fight and they're they're saying crazy or they don't have like real experience and they're saying crazy things my thought is not oh my god i'm in trouble yeah you're calm my thought is it allows you to be rational exactly and that is very difficult to acquire that requires decades of training yeah and for a person to achieve a black belt and brazilian jiu jitsu like it's very rare that someone i mean bj penn's the quickest i've ever heard of he got it in three years that's crazy though i mean he was training every day hours and hours a day fully obsessed for most people it's like 10 years plus right so that that is it's like most things you acquire a level of ability over thousands of hours and the level of understanding of what you can and can't do what the way things work if you don't have that and you're a police officer it's like it's like being a writer and you don't understand language it's you know it really is it's you don't have the tools for that job and you know andrew yang said it best he
said every police officer should be at least a purple belt in jiu jitsu i think he's dead right i think it's a great how long would it take to become a purple belt usually it depends on the amount of time that you put into it and how much drilling you do and also your physical attributes you know some people maybe they uh they started off as like a break dancer or a gymnast and they have a huge advantage right huge advantage because you have uh a real understanding of how your body moves you have like a you you have a you have a comfort level with physical movement and you have this just innate understanding of how to balance yourself and and the strength that's involved in that if you come from a background of gymnastics or you come from a background of dance or acrobatics or anything like you have a giant advantage giant advantage in jesus i would argue if we lived in a rational and wise society one of the things that would have come out of the racial reckoning in 2020 was some billionaire or groups of very wealthy people creating some kind of fully funded jiu jitsu training for police officers yeah why isn't that you'd have to require it you'd have to require it there's carlson grayson what is he doing with who is that this is barksdale yeah this is anthony barksdale on the right there um really really uh just brilliant guy he is now a commentator i don't know if he still is but uh when i had him on he was a commentator on cnn now and he's a retired so now he feels he can really speak freely about uh issues in a way in a way that people who are who are still police often feel they can't carlson gracie was the one of the first guys i've ever tried the first guy i've ever trained with i trained with louis herrera as a at um hicks and gracie's place but carlson gracie was the second place i ever trained at that was in hollywood in in the late 90s and uh he was you know carlson gracie was a legend i mean he's a guy that was um
in the early days of no rules fights he was the cleanup guy like when elio gracie lost to certain people they would send in i think voldemort santana was the guy and they send in carlos and gracie to clean up because he was the badass of the family they come in and [ __ ] people up like elio couldn't me and my girlfriend a couple weeks ago we watched the rix and gracie documentary on youtube pixen hixson yeah that's right that's right portuguese yeah right right choke yeah choke yeah it's amazing yes it's one of the greatest documentaries of all time yeah he was so good and still is very unique very unique uh it's an honor to know him and but um hixon was very unique because he had all the things he had first of all his father was elio gracie who was the one of the most important figures in the history of martial arts he was the guy who was a small man he only weighed like 147 pounds and he was out there having these no rules fights with these big giant guys and he relied completely on technique and leverage and develop this system of technique and leverage as applied to the ground game with carlos gracie and with a bunch of the other people like carlson and a few of these other like early jiu jitsu practitioners so he gave birth or you know he fathered rather hixson and hixson was unique in that he grew up with it and also that he was very physically powerful he was unusual in that he got really obsessed with yoga yeah so he had incredible flexibility he was obsessed with breathing so he had this incredible control of his breath and control of his mind because of that and he would do like cold water immersion where he would get into like that's that scene in the in the film where he gets into this freezing glacial river in japan and you know up to his neck and he's breathing this water and he was a completely different type of person that changed jiu jitsu yeah the breathing thing is is interesting i mean i remember you know my mom was super into iyangar yoga
she would take me to yoga when i was like three and i would play with my little action figures while they were doing her thing or whatever and i i was i watched videos of iyangar what is a yangar yoga what's the difference it's uh you know they're just like different strands of yogas yoga from different i don't know what you would call them like grandmasters whatever is iyangar and like vinyasa i'm probably sounding very ignorant to someone who knows about it but a younger yoga was the one that that my mom did and it's it's from this guy ayanggar and there's a video of him on youtube um just like reciting this little poem about the breath and then he does a demonstration and he exhales for about 60 seconds wow she's like how long can you exhale for it just i mean obviously if you're letting that much air through you can do it for a while but there's no pace low enough that i could exhale consistently for a full minute it doesn't even seem real and i you know there's a little part of me that still somehow thinks it's doctored or no just like do it but like he just does it and it's incredible that level of training i showed you the sensory deprivation tank yeah today that we have here um one of the exercises i do is 30 seconds in 30 seconds out that means i take a breath for 30 seconds a slow breath for 30 seconds it's very hard to do i count to 30 as i'm breathing in and then i count to 30 as i'm breathing out wait but i just don't understand how like what's getting trained is it your lung capacity is getting trained your lung diaphragm your lung capacity but also your willingness to tolerate discomfort ah so it's not just like like here if i'm gonna breathe right so like ready ready set i'll take a deep breath she you holy [ __ ] i'll do that [Laughter] and i do that over and over again
and so there's a moment afterwards we you want to go right but you have to resist that so you have to resist that moment and then again and you just do it over and over and over again and it's and do you notice the time you can do it increasing i pro i mean i probably could go longer if i had to go more than 30 seconds but it's [ __ ] hard it's hard to do 30 seconds and 30 seconds out and keep going right but you just did it you noticed progress over time since when you started doing this you you notice what your ability is like sometimes there's a thing where your your body says just quit quit now quit now you know and you have to get over that hump that's the cold water thing too that's a thing like a cold water immersion there's a moment where you get in your body's like let's get the [ __ ] out of here and you have to get past that you have to just accept it and the way you accept it is to concentrate on your breathing like i did a video where i got into a 33 degree um ice bath for 20 minutes and i said well let's see how long i could do it i'll just do it on instagram so i made a video so i posted this video i just sat this camera up and i got into the thing and every minute i'm like one more minute let's do one more minute and i just kept going one more minute one more minute and the whole thing i'm doing i'm just doing this breathing exercise where i'm just so by breathing hard like that one of the things you're doing too is you're tightening up your core so you're kind of heating yourself up a little bit you're heating up your muscles by straining and resisting and you're resisting the cold plunge yeah this is the video i was talking about give me some volume on this but he says a really cool thing in the beginning actually oh [Music] that is inhalation at the beginning he goes the mind is the king of the breath let me hear that great difficulty it's actually a really nice little parable
is the king of the senses and the breath is the king of the mind yeah that should be that should be my ringtone when people call me up mine is the king of the sentences there's nothing cooler than like an indian guru you know a yogi yeah that's why osha was able to uh yeah get away with all that exactly because people fall for that [ __ ] so easily osho's that one thing where uh do you ever see the video where he talks about people being [ __ ] no but the people have you ever heard that oh yeah i have seen that one i'll send it but it reminds me that i'll send it to jamie it's it's so not what you would think of when you think of like a guru you know like i know i have it in here somewhere jamie but i might have a hard time the government by the people of the people for the people but the people are [ __ ] so let us say government by the [ __ ] he's not laughing farther [ __ ] off the retardant [Laughter] but the people are [ __ ] whoo yeah that's uh it's easy to feel that way sometimes it is but it's easy to be cynical you know i think i think the thing about human beings is that you can always find evidence of both you can find evidence of very interesting cool compassionate people that are you know very charitable wonderful to be around giving love everybody and then you can find evidence of [ __ ] there's people that are just [ __ ] you know they don't give a [ __ ] about anybody else but themselves they want everybody else to suffer they want themselves to exceed and to excel you could find those things and i think there's more evidence of both of those things now than we've ever had to face before and it really begs the question like what do you do with your time do you immerse your your
yourself in positive people that are thinking about all aspects of humanity and trying to advance the way they view the world and advance their own perspectives and and enhance their education and and fill their mind up with new ideas or do you just complain do you just [ __ ] about things do you just i mean we're in we were talking before about the uh brazilian version of me today uh before the show where glenn greenwald had uh sent me hit this guy i don't know his name um but he is a brazilian podcaster who is very popular and uh he likes to do his shows intoxicated like i do and apparently glenn said that what he said was he doesn't believe anybody should be de-platformed and he said and someone said like including nazis and he said yeah i don't think you should d platform nazis which as we were saying before was like the original position of the aclu the aclu which a lot of like jewish attorneys were they were saying no we shouldn't de-platform nazis and this is like 30 years after the holocaust right fresh in our mind so for us today i mean this is like 1990 imagine if the holocaust was in the 90s and then today in 2022 we're saying no you shouldn't de-platform nazis and so this guy was saying i don't think you should de-platform nazis and you know i don't think you should de-platform anybody and so a bunch of people started saying he's a nazi and he was saying that's not what i'm saying and they kicked him off of his platform youtube apparently won't let him he still has a youtube account but youtube want to let him start a new account and uh people want him d platformed off of everything and whatever platform he was on where he was getting paid for his podcast he got fired from yeah i mean here's what is this guy's name i don't know how to say that yeah okay it says it right here three years ago video game streamer bruno ayub
decided to start a new podcast flow modeled on the joe rogan experience okay he said uh man it'd be really cool if i did that in brazil since nobody else has told the new york times he interviews comedians academics government officials ufologists drinking alcohol and smoking weed it's the exact same show it's [ __ ] you stole my show anyway it's the new york rise is due in no small part to model developed by his hero as he learned last week aping rogan comes with a risk february 7th conversation the two members of the brazilian congress ayub i hope i'm not saying his name wrong argued that brazil should embrace free speech absolutism including legalizing the currently illegal nazi party said in my opinion the radical left has much more space than the radical right he told us approximately 3.6 million youtube subscribers both should be given space i am crazier than all of you i think that a nazi should have a nazi party recognized by law he added if someone wants to be anti-jewish i think he has the right to be ayub woke up tuesday to thousands of people calling him nazi on social media sponsors pulled funding and government the government opened an investigation into the alleged offense of nazi apologism uh and his podcast production company announced they will be severing ties with a 31 year old provocateur so there you go i mean censorship just almost never works right like every one of the major ideas that rule our world right now right let's say the right loves christianity the left is you know largely secular both of those ideas have at different points in history been highly censored yeah right like christianity was highly censored at one point later it became the law of the roman empire um atheism through i mean has been heavily censored on pain of death for hundreds to hundreds of years and now it's rather mainstream i mean those are big examples of censorship not working in the in the grand arc of history but we also have just
very recent examples you know lab leak you know regardless of what you think about it and i think it's probably true but regardless of what you think about it what's clear is that the attempts to brand it as misinformation did not work in terms of getting people not to believe it it worked for a small amount of time to get people off social media for how long about a year what a year yeah it was enough though it was enough that in many people's eyes that became a taboo subject that was very very difficult to breach you couldn't discuss it until trump was out of office but in the in the long run yeah history shows it just it never works yeah and that's even truer nowadays because way back in the day the catholic church didn't like something they had a decent chance at being able to burn every copy of that book they did that sometimes they're like okay we burned the very last copy maybe someone can reproduce it from memory maybe it's going to bubble up somewhere else but we really burnt the last copy of that book in those cases you can sometimes argue censorship kind of works but even then nowadays the internet you can't burn copies of every book and there's this attempt now from the right to get books banned from public school libraries you know certain books like you know uh ibram kennedy sort of woke racist books like anti-racist baby and like all these ridiculous books that i think are crazy too but i would never say ban them from the public school libraries if that's going to do anything all it does is it hands that author a pr victory where they get to say look they're trying to censor me yeah i must be right about something right and in the age of the internet your kids are going to be exposed to all kinds of ideas no matter what i think as a culture that we need to have this conversation when it comes to ideas i think it's a very very important stand to take that we have to engage with almost all ideas i mean i don't think there's a [ __ ] there's an
argument for eating babies right there's not if someone makes a baby cookbook you start saying there's too many people the roads are crowded we got to eat babies there is a famous uh philosophy paper asking why isn't it why is it wrong to eat babies and philosophy students in ivy league schools will study this paper as a thought experiment like yeah hold on why is it wrong to eat babies and you go through all the reasons it might be wrong and the the point of the thought experiment is not to justify eating babies right it's to get to what your basic principles are like why are things wrong and then from there you build up a world view okay well if that's the reason why something is wrong if it's that suffering the human suffering is inherently wrong now let's apply that principle now that we've worked backwards build up an idea of what other things are wrong and why rather than simply taking for granted that certain things are wrong i think there's also a thing that's going on in this culture today where people want things now and when you have a complex idea that has to be debated like here's one why do we still have deeply impoverished neighborhoods that have been in the same state of crime and of gang violence and have been going on was that a photograph what was that i did not know i hadn't muted officer oh he took a screenshot what i mean why have these civilization why why have these communities stayed in this same state without any government intervention like what what why is that like the the this is a complex issue that if you wanted to discuss it and you wanted to develop solutions and you wanted to like work work out it's going to take a long time and a lot of people are going to have to contribute and it's going to have to be and because of that it's too complicated people just leave it alone they like baltimore is baltimore leave it alone south side chicago is [ __ ] up leave it alone and
it never gets the kind of attention that other simple things to solve get attention like like this guy this is a simple thing to solve in in the eyes of a person who's a sensor or the eyes of a person who is uh who's all for de-platforming people [ __ ] him get him off the air solved it we got a real quick solution it's not a real solution but it's a quick way to solve something and i think something like a thought experiment of why you shouldn't eat babies and if human suffering is the problem now let's expand what other forms of human suffering can we find solutions to that we've ignored right and why are we accepting certain forms of human suffering like why are we accepting the death penalty when we know that x amount of people who are in jail or unjustly compared to your podcast with josh dubin yeah josh that's his name yes yeah that was the innocence project that was really really amazing we've done a series of them and through those podcasts multiple people have been released yeah the the last one we did not the the current last one with the one before that because of that podcast two people released yeah it's amazing he's amazing he's done incredible things and but that's a perfect example it's not [ __ ] easy what he does yeah i mean it requires deep thought he has to have a massive amount of research that he does on each subject he has to educate people on junk science when it comes to physical evidence like there's people that have his hair samples at scenes that clearly show the hair has been pulled from someone's head there that is not a hair that has been left behind so this this hair could have been pulled from a cadaver it could have been pulled from a person that's in jail and that these things sometimes are planted bite mark evidence this is a whole podcast on the junk science that's involved in prosecuting people and how many people are wrongly convicted yeah it's [ __ ] complicated like there's so many things like those whenever we do one of those podcasts we generally spend time talking about general general issues with wrongful convictions and then we'll find like one or two cases and go over those one or two cases and
you realize like just this cursory examination of one of one or two cases takes so much time and so much heartache is involved in these people's lives and a lot of them like they're poor or or some of them don't speak english well and they become patsies and they use them you know because a prosecuting attorney needs to have someone you know a d.a needs to have someone that they pin the crime on and once they decide okay let's go with jorge over here and then boom they just throw everything they can to try to win the case everything and this is it's a giant problem with our legal system and it's a complex problem it's not a problem that's easily solved if you have thousands and thousands of people that are wrongly convicted which we probably do there's probably thousands and thousands of people right now that are in penitentiaries and they're in there for something they did not do that's a big [ __ ] problem i mean that's a giant problem and it's not an easy one it's not like kick this guy off of twitter he said that nazis should be able to talk [ __ ] him you know get rid of his sponsors we're done so that kind of censorship that kind of short-term solution to a much larger problem is foolhardy but i think it's an artifact of the kind of culture that we live in where people want quick easy solutions to things yeah and they want to make a thing into a much bigger problem than it really is what he's saying is not he's not saying it the best way but he's probably a little drunk and he's probably not speaking from my own personal experience like how i do a podcast you get lit and you just start talking but his idea is sound his ideas you shouldn't de-platform people we were talking about daryl davis before this podcast as well and daryl davis who is a guy who is a blues musician who has personally but through his own conversations with people he's gotten more than 200 kkk people and neo-nazis to turn over a completely new life and to give him their outfits give him their wizard costume or whatever the [ __ ] it is and their nazi outfit and this one man just through
having conversations with people and just being this undeniable amazing human has changed the way people think about these racist ideas that they have just by being himself just by not not by censoring people i think that happens a lot that happens more than i mean like daryl davis is amazing and exceptional in many ways but i think that those kinds of changes of heart are actually far more common than you might suppose just kind of observing the tenor of the media in our times like i was just talking to my my friend noam dorman who owns a comedy seller and he's jewish and he has he said over the years he's had a lot of arab people working for him coming from arab countries where they've never met a jew and have crazy ideas about jews like insane and you know he was like i would never use that as a reason not to hire somebody of course and he's like a very pro-israel guy too he's very very proud of being jewish but he they become friends and their ideas about jews change over time as a result of interactions yeah it's it's not uh like again as exceptional as daryl davis is it's not you know that is that kind of thing is happening by the millions in people's lives in ways that will never make it into the media all the time and that's another reason why people underestimate uh others ability to to change their ideas i mean there's this i've heard people argue that you know persuasion is actually not a good strategy persuasion just doesn't work and um you know i think that's that's just not true you know what is true is that people very rarely change their opinions in real time on camera on the shows that you're watching because people myself included have a vested interest in showing that we know what the [ __ ] we're talking about and you know you're actually very unique in this way of you know if a guest shows
you something and it's a fact you haven't seen and it contradicts your belief you will often change your belief in real time right like that no one does that so people watching the media get this perception that well no one's ever changing their mind everyone's just set in their ways but i think the truth is people are changing their minds all the time in private by listening to podcasts by themselves by watching stuff by themselves where they don't pay a reputational price for changing their mind so just because we rarely see evidence of people changing their minds through persuasion doesn't mean it's not happening all the time it happens all the time it happens through experience and hopefully it happens because the person is capable of recognizing their flaws the real problem comes when someone has a belief that's it's not accurate and you stick to it anyway because you don't want to lose and that's a giant problem and in my mind that's a tremendous weakness i don't like finding weakness in me when i find a weakness in me i eradicate it yeah i find it i go okay that's a flaw that's why i changed my opinion in real time because i refuse to support an opinion or an a false idea that i have espoused and i've refused to connect my mind with ideas my mind is not i whatever idea whatever fact that i i think is true if that fact turns out to be incorrect i will abandon it immediately if i can as long as long as i'm sure i think you have to i don't think you're you are your ideas i think you are this thinking entity that is trying to solve as many problems as you can that are around you and that are involved in your life and as soon as you are willing to commit to an idea that you know is incorrect you've done yourself a massive disservice in service of your ego which is the
worst [ __ ] thing that you could ever fuel like you should never fuel your ego it exists whether you like it or not you should try to control it and humble it and to try to keep it to be keep it have it the least intrusive factor in your thought process so the moment the ego gets challenged you have to be able to accurately assess whether or not the information that you have clung to is valid and if it is not valid you have to discard it it's very important yes i totally agree and i was reading the coverage of your cancellation like a week ago in the new york times and there's one article where they had a little box graphic in between the text sort of providing one of these short summary explainers of the whole situation and they said joe rogan's brash personality has been part of his appeal as a podcaster and i mean i i haven't seen or heard the word brash and long enough that i looked it up and it it was a self-assertive in a rude or overbearing way and i thought to myself is joe rogan brash it's like you just gave a spiel about how important it is to say when you're wrong to admit you have an ego have you ever heard a brash or over overbearing person i mean like the definition of overbearing is the guy that never [ __ ] admits he's wrong it doesn't listen and blah blah blah it's like the notion that that you could be described as brash to me it betrayed i was like they're they're not even trying to hide the fact that they just [ __ ] hate you well i think they're like hardcore lefties right and hardcore lefties don't know what the [ __ ] to do with me because i look like a trump supporter
yeah yeah i mean the fact that you're a bald white guy yeah that's muscly and tattooed and i do cage fighting commentary i like guns i hunt i bow hunts right yeah there's a lot of things that don't line up with the fact that i support universal basic income i support universal health care well i was my family was poor when i was young we were on welfare i'll never forget that i'll never forget being on food stamps as a kid i'll never forget wondering if we were going to have enough food to eat right and that in my mind the system worked with my family and they provided us with assistance and then my parents started making money and we got off of welfare and they started doing really well and then by the time i was in high school they were doing great and they had a thriving business so i i got to experience how social systems social support systems and social safety nets can really be beneficial to families and i think they're huge i think they're very very important and i fully fully support that and i am way more left-wing than i the only things that i think of that i think people could point to that are right-wing with me are gun control like i believe in the second amendment because i i believe there's times where you're going to have to if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time if the wrong thing happens the wrong person invades your property tries to harm your family you want to be able to defend yourself we don't live in a world where there's no guns we don't live in a world where it's even and equal and people are unanimously generous and kind and no one's violent that's not the reality of the world we live in and so because the second amendment does exist and because we do have gun rights i don't i don't agree with stripping those rights from people i don't agree with this idea that the problem is guns i think the problem is human beings i think the problem is human beings in human behavior and i
think it's exacerbated by social issues and i think that really one of the better ways to stop violence in this country is to alleviate it at the bottom floor which is poverty poverty and crime-ridden communities and i think it's like one of the most frustrating things to me when i look at our our culture is like what we were talking about earlier that there's there are these communities that have been largely ignored by charitable ventures like they just don't put enough time or effort into it the government will spend trillions of dollars in iraq they'll give no bid contracts to halliburton to rebuild [ __ ] we blew up but they don't do anything with these impoverished communities so i'm a super left-wing in most ways yeah i think so when it comes to the these places that have just had intergenerational poverty intergenerational violence intergenerational single-parent homes redlining laws yeah um i mean the equilibrium we're at at the country in the country right now seems really dysfunctional to me because basically what you have is um you know you have a right-wing media that will they they will talk about things like uh you know the constant drive-by shootings and kids getting caught uh you know usually black kids getting caught in the crossfire and they'll talk about the insane homicide rate for for young black men which is the number one cause of death for for black men in their 20s but they'll do it in a way where you know it's about political point scoring right it's like when tucker carlson talks about you know black on black crime and the problem of homicide you don't get the sense that he's deeply motivated to actually focus on this and and rebuild these communities um and you know maybe i'm slandering his motives but i think you know one doesn't get one gets a sense that the first purpose of raising those points
is to point the finger at democrats democrat controlled cities and uh you know just partisan point scoring right and so that's what you have on the right basically and what we have on the left is anyone who mentions these problems right you mention the fact that homicide is the number one cause of death for for black men in their 20s and for no other race of men and you try to tug at people's heartstrings for these stories of you know little girls dressed up in bumblebee costumes for for halloween getting caught in the crossfire and the wider consequences of growing up in such environments how it dooms kids to to failure and and and so forth um you know it's it's made difficult to acknowledge the reality of the issues and to talk about it in a common sense way without being accused of being a racist right it's like oh you're just talking about black on black crime um if you're white you're racist if you're black you're an uncle tom and basically we don't want to talk about it unless the cops did it right if the cops if the cops kill kill a black person we will shut down everything it's good examples that guy who drove over that crowd of people the christmas parade in wisconsin and they were saying the accident caused by an suv they kept saying that because the perpetrator was a black guy and the black guy who had just gotten out of jail who just got out of jail for trying to kill his uh his i think his kid's mom his his girlfriend trying to kill her with a car so he gets arrested goes to jail gets out on very low bail things like i don't remember how much it was but thousands of dollars not much and then plows over a whole group of people and the coverage was bizarre because they were bending over backwards they're doing mental gymnastics to try to not say this black man drove over all these people these this
random crowd of people because they didn't want to be accused of being racist or they were woke or they were you know what for whatever whatever their reason was for whatever their ideology was for portraying the story in the way they did that's how they decided to portray it to me the most egregious example of this and it was a total indictment of the state of our nation on the topic of race um and how much race thinking just warps people's morality it was the the jasmine barnes case from maybe three or four years ago she was a little girl in in houston that was killed she was shot while in in her mother's car tragically and at first they saw a guy in a in a pickup truck seeming to flee the scene and it looked like a white guy so basically this became it was right around new year's maybe 2019 i think and it became a national manhunt you had you know sean king raised a hundred thousand dollars to for any tips on on who this guy was they had a police sketch of a guy that kind of looked like you and um and you had politicians all across the nation talking about this case new york times covering it every day um and then it turned out about a week later they got a tip they found the guy and it was two black guys and it was a turf war and she got caught in the crossfire the kind of thing that happens all the time in this country right so was the guy in the pickup truck just fleeing the scene or was uh it turned out he he had a some kind of weird story of his own but he was just a bystander he was a bystander innocent bystander um and and so they got they got the two guys that that did it and um there was this you know moment of embarrassment i think among people because what had happened is
everyone thought a white guy who looked you know like who looked apart killed this black girl and they the reason it got any attention was because people thought it was a racist killing that's what every all the politicians were saying this is white supremacy he was a neo-nazi it's but the narrative spun out of control and then at the end of it there's there was this embarrassing moment of of acknowledging that actually in this particular case the human beings that killed this girl happened to be black and the case would have gotten zero national attention had people known that from the start did the national attention continue after they found out that it wasn't a black guy that killed him or did it fizzle out fizzled out and and so you know like if if if a martian came to our society and was studying it and saw this episode the conclusion that martian would come to is okay interesting the american homo sapiens they seem to care a lot when one of the lighter skinned ones kills one of the darker skinned ones but when one of the darker skinned ones kills one of the darker skinned ones it seems they don't care as much that's interesting and they would like report it back to their martian whatever overlords yeah and you know viewed from the outside that's a crazy ethics to have like no no philosopher would argue for that as i mean well some have historically but like no no person would argue for that as an orientation towards the importance of skin color and yet that is the status quo on that subject and the equilibrium we're at is that people on the left don't want to talk about this and therefore can't really solve it and people on the right seem to only want to talk about it when it's a point to score against the left in a philosophy that is otherwise usually opposed to any kind of uh you know social safety net increases
and and so forth so it's a very dysfunctional state we're in as a country which is one of the reasons it's so hard for us to solve this problem the the problem of having two very distinct ideologies is a huge issue too because most people they're kind of in the center of a lot of ideas right like most people like they'll say well you have to be disciplined and you know that's part of the problem with a lot of people in this life is that a lot of people are lazy and a lot of people fall victim to a lot of you know psychological traps and they you know they don't follow through on their life they don't they don't develop discipline they don't they don't do what they need to do in their life and this [ __ ] them up but also what was their childhood like like how what what kind of modeling did they have when they were young what kind of abuse did they experience when they were young like how much psychological damage did they have from their like no one's starting off at the same like starting block like we're we're starting off with wildly different places in life and the right never never once acknowledged that for whatever reason they're they're this the ideology that comes with that if it's if it's rigid if you're just following the doctrine it's like pull yourself up by your bootstraps like the [ __ ] are you talking about man you live in south side of chicago you think you could just pull yourself up by your bootstraps you're crazy like if there was a wild west type neighborhood for white people white people are shooting people the same way people are getting shot in the south side of chicago they would be freaking the [ __ ] out can you imagine if there was a place like that like if tucson arizona was just like shootouts in the street and like what on a a weekend of gang violence in chicago is is occasionally stunning yeah stunning numbers yeah there can be like 50 people shot in the weekend at its worst imagine if that same scenario was playing out in right wing neighborhoods
and right wing all white neighborhoods if they were basically like [ __ ] jesse james in it and just out there shooting each other a very very different discussion what would happen though would it be more sympathy for them or would it be more law enforcement because there's less you know less guilt involved it would be it would be something different that's for sure especially if they grew up in good neighborhoods imagine imagine to feel like people from good neighborhoods with good education like middle class like no excuses and then there's always been this like insane galling asymmetry of like you're caught with a dime bag in the hood meanwhile how many [ __ ] harvard kids are smoking weed in their dorm rooms well even better yet how about the crack laws you know yeah dr carl hart has uh outlied this so so perfectly because that's the guy that does heroin right yeah yeah he's amazing he's a fascinating person but one of the things that he said dr hart said like it's the same physiological effect as cocaine but if you get arrested completely different sentencing structure yeah if you get arrested with crack there's minimum sentences that they have to put you away for if you get arrested for coke it's [ __ ] nothing yeah that's probably the the most galling example i know of of a of a allegedly colorblind law that ends up having a massive disparate impact on people of color massive um i'm sure white people do crack too i know why people have done crack but the difference is that has infested and destroyed black communities and they know that and so to handle the overwhelming amount of crime instead of addressing it at a root level they just decide to just put everybody in a cage right which is crazy so one difficulty with addressing it is uh you know in a way you made this analogy before of we spend all this money overseas trying to reshape and rebuild other countries but we don't spend it at home i think that analogy it works in more ways than one the other way it's useful is that often when we try to spend monies and reshape these countries you know
in the middle east for instance no matter how much money we spend it doesn't seem to make a lasting impact like we can't just rebuild the country the rebuild the culture of the country by throwing money at it because it's not that simple i think that same lesson is is another one of the difficulties with creating healthy vibrant communities out of communities that are intergenerational poverty intergenerational violence which is that okay we can get a bunch of government bureaucrats and people outside the community that want to do good and throw a bunch of money at community programs and so forth but if it doesn't feel like it's coming cred from credible people in the community it may have very little impact um you know role models in general are very important but they usually have to come from the place you're from in order to matter to you right right like me as a black guy who grew up privileged in the suburbs in in new jersey how's an interest you know the average inner city kid looking for a role model to have a better life is not really going to be able to look to me just because we're the same skin color and say well if he he could do it i could do it right it's not gonna work because i'm not from where he's from in order to feel like you can actually do something most people need a person that is from where they're from uh has a similar background to them and nevertheless went on to go to college went on to you know make six figures or something he's like when when you see that then it actually can change you for the most part and and um you know i know this guy bob woodson who who runs the woodson center and the kind of outreach work that he does it really acknowledges that principle which is he will find people in the community you know former gang members pastors at churches and
work with them in a way that you know they know the community they feel it you know their work feels credible it actually has a much bigger chance of of making a difference and this is one challenge with uh getting you know government to sort of throw money at the problem is if they don't understand that principle i'm often skeptical that interventions are gonna work as well as they could i think that's very accurate and i think there's an expression from gambling um particularly from uh playing pool like guys would try to bet double or nothing like they would lose a bunch of games in a row and they'd maybe be down 200 bucks and i'll bet you i'll bet you all of it on one game double or nothing and the expression is you got to get better the same way you got sick like i'm not going to let you win all your money back that quick why would i do that because all i can do is if i lose then i don't have anything now i'm back to zero but if i keep making you bet the same way it's going to take you hours to win your money back like if i've been beating you for five hours and we're playing you know a hundred bucks a set and i've got you down six seven eight nine sets and you say all right 900 bucks how about 900 bucks on this game right now like why would i do that it's gonna i would rather it's going to take a long time right i think that sort of thought process kind of applies to fixing these communities i don't think you're going to take a place that's been [ __ ] since 1910 and make it better in five years i think it's going to take generations sure but i think it's a valuable thing to invest in and i think it should be a thing that should be thought of as i always say this way so i'll say it again if you want to make america great you should have less losers how do you have less losers by giving people a better path by making it so that they don't feel like from the beginning they're saddled down with massive amounts of problems massive
amounts of unsurmountable issues in their community in their life in their personal life and in the the people that they surround themselves with their friends you've got to invest a lot of time and a lot of money and do it with the goal of transforming these places eventually how much time is it going to take we don't [ __ ] know because we've never done it before we've never done it before the only thing we've ever done to a neighborhood is wreck it you know if you look at the worst neighborhoods i mean they've gentrified some places and made them but all they've really done is like they've taken rich neighborhoods and expanded them they didn't take a poor neighborhood and elevate it it's a different thing and i think there's a way to do it and i think there's a way to do it but it has to be done in a way like it has to be addressed nationally it has to be something that's sold to the american people like like there's a lot of the problems that we have with crime and violence and despair and poverty they don't have to exist these things can be where and they can also be a viable profitable business for whatever company can come in and fix these things because if we have government-funded operations overseas to fix iraq why can't we have government-funded operations to fix detroit like why can't we do that i think we can one challenge to both of them is that politicians are always thinking on their election time frame yeah so they've only got two four years for sure to do something and the next guy breathing down their neck is going to run on everything they're doing is wrong right and then say i'm going to reverse obamacare as soon as i get in office right right and what happens is in the best of cases you get people that start good programs let's say you you get past every hurdle of government incompetence and bad luck and lack of funding and you actually manage to establish a really good program in an inner city neighborhood for poor kids an
after-school program that's like tutoring them and they're having fun and it's like pro-social and it's using key leaders in the community and blah blah well then the guy who started that gets like you know gets beat at some point the or the the thing just disappears the program disappears and you've made promises to these people that the program will be around and now it's just ripped they got used to it and now you've ripped it out from under them and um it's uh it's it's it's very difficult that that's another one of the challenges that that makes it tough to actually make these things work the solution to that is perhaps even grosser the solution to that is long terms as president long terms as mayor long terms as governor yeah i mean it's not a good solution because there's a reason why we only allow them to have four four-year terms and you have to get re-elected but look what look what they're doing in china look what they're doing in russia i mean putin's been running russia for a whole long [ __ ] time yep the ccp has been running china for a long [ __ ] time and it's not good but through that they can commit to projects yeah like like uh concentration camps for uyghurs that's on the dark side of it and they also can commit to business projects right they can they're they're so interconnected with corporations that the corporations can't do anything unless it has the best interests of the the chinese people or the chinese government the chinese ccp as a whole like they they work hand in glove and this is something we don't have in america if we had and this is not good i'm not saying you should have but if you had like a 20-year presidential term or a 10-year presidential term where someone had a long time to get good at the job like it's the weirdest job ever because it's the most important job in the world we
have new people do it all the time it's like it's you don't know what the [ __ ] you're doing especially a guy like trump like with no political experience whatsoever all of a sudden he's at the helm of he's the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the world's ever known because he won a popularity contest and he gets to do this job for four years like that's nuts it's a stupid way to handle it but it might be the best way yeah well what's the better way i don't that's the problem there isn't a better way i mean you don't want a dictator but like any other person like if you had a person who is a ceo of a corporation you would want that person to know the ins and the outs of that business you would want them to be if you got like let's just say tim cook at apple tim cook has been at apple for a long time he is a man who's like deeply embedded in the business of apple he understands it from his head to his toes he he's he's aware of all the aspects of you know chip development but i guess the counter argument would be like biden has been in politics his whole life like he understands how the senate works and so forth so does that not count as experience it kind of does it kind of does but not as being well he actually was vice president for eight years right yeah but he's just he's not a good example because he's basically a shell yeah you know like cognitively yes i i just in the fact that that took a long time for people to admit that was one of the things that people were saying that i was a trump supporter during the election because i said i would vote for trump before i'd vote for biden but i didn't vote for either i the reason why i said that is like i was like you don't see this like you guys out of your [ __ ] mind you don't see that this guy can't he's can't talk right anymore go watch videos of him from 20 years ago he was a he's a dummy he said a lot of silly [ __ ] he lied about a bunch of things but at least he was articulate he at least he could like if we see the clarence thomas
hearing where he's talking to clarence thomas about natural law and then clarence thomas later is talking about he's like i did not know what the [ __ ] he was talking about but he's having this thing you know and i know what we're talking about here other people might not know but you know and i know what we're talking about clarence tom's like i don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about but i'm just gonna let you that was biden his whole life i mean obama like famously said during the election he hopes joe doesn't [ __ ] this up because that's what he did like he would lie about his experience he would lie about his background in education he would lie about his record he he would lie about all kinds of things yes he lied about graduating in the top of his class he lied about having more than one degree dude we lied about it marching with mandela oh yeah he lied about his arrests recently he lied about being arrested the first time i was arrested no when the people when people lie i mean it's it's so hard for me to put myself in the position of people that would lie like this you know the other one i think of a lot is joyride at msnbc when she wrote those homophobic things on her blog in 2008 and she said she got hacked yeah i can't i understand white lies i understand certain lies but there's there's some lies where i i struggle to understand what it would feel like to be the person thinking it's a good idea i think there's people that don't value truth they don't value honesty i think they just want to win they just want to get past this problem that they're having and they want to have a solution what's the best solution well you could say you got hacked let's say i got hacked let's go with that and the biden thing is just i think he just always wanted people to think highly of himself we used to do this thing at stitch's comedy club in boston in the 1980s in 1988 in fact and we called it joe biden night because biden got busted plagiarizing other politicians speeches i don't know if you remember that yeah biden ran for president in 88 and
his campaign got derailed because he was quoting i think it was bobby kennedy verbatim verbatim and then there was someone else i think was an english politician and quoting these people verbatim like just like stealing their speeches and i think he blamed it on one of his speech writers did it or whatever but it was such a scandal that we had created joe biden night at stitch's comedy club so like i would go up and i would do your act like we would work together every day i would know your act like i would go up and do your acting you would do my act that's hilarious and people would pick a person and they would go up and do their act and for us it was a howl because like you would see like kevin knox going up there doing steve sweeney's act and it was a thing like that's how much he was known of as a goof then wow so when you say like he's been in politics his whole life yeah yeah but that's not the best example i think bernie sanders would be the best example right because bernie sanders whether you love him or or hate him or whatever you have to admit that the man has principles and he has been behind those principles and he's been incredibly consistent his entire career right so if a guy like that got into office then you're you're you're talking about a man who does understand the inner workings of the system very deeply but is not full [ __ ] and he comes across as the kind of guy that wasn't so hungry to become president right right like he cared more about standing for what he believed in even if it got him no further yeah and those are the types of people we actually want to promote yeah the problem is it's a popularity contest and we found out through trump because with trump it was the first time that anybody was actually popular entered into the popularity contest right these other people were amateurs in terms of like manipulation of the public's perception they were amateurs compared to trump yeah trump was the you're fired guy like he was always funny
i always felt about him like i felt about that bully in high school that's he's a bully but he's so funny he kind of gets away with it yes and you kind of find yourself laughing at him despite yourself and despite the fact that you know he's just deep down he's not a good guy exactly exactly and you justify him not being a good guy because he's in a dirty business yeah you know yeah he's like the lance armstrong of politics yeah like how did lance armstrong win tour de france well he he doped he did drugs he did steroids but everybody else was too well okay you know you know trump was a businessman he was lying cheating and stealing but [ __ ] everybody else did too yeah you know that was kind of the way he would lie way more often and way more just like and he's better at it yeah i'll say my favorite thing trump did like the only of his trolls that i want to make a case was good for the world and good for the country was when uh it was 2020 and every institution in the country was releasing a fake statement about how they were systemically racist and were going to do better and they really cared every corporation that only wants her money was releasing this fake corporate woke thing and princeton university the president of princeton university released a statement saying princeton university is systemically racist this racism harms our black students here and it's the racism is embedded in the structure of the university itself and then trump said all right well if you're confessing i'm going to get the department of education to investigate you and see if you're violating civil rights laws we have many robust civil rights laws in this country that are specifically put in place so that institutions that get federal funding like princeton do not violate the civil rights of its students of course there's a completely [ __ ] investigation trump did not expect to find any racism at you know a hyper
progressive ivy league school at least not any racism against black students it was also a [ __ ] statement by by the the president of the university but it was it was a perfect strategy for exposing the fundamental insincerity of the most people who use this term it's like can you imagine if the pope like admitted publicly confessed that the catholic church has like this huge institutional pedophilia problem and then the cop said thank you for your confession we're going to go investigate this hope you cooperate and the pope said oh what do you mean no don't don't investigate us we didn't really mean it we were just we just meant like pedophilia not like [ __ ] kids it's like that's what the princeton guy does he goes right oh no no no we're not like actually racist we're just like saying that thing that everyone's saying that is that nobody means so that that was a troll that at minimum like no it was no president should use resources in that way and it was totally immature but it did expose a hypocrisy which is that so many people are ready to condemn themselves as in their institutions as systemically racist even when they know they've been doing everything in their power for the past decade or maybe sometimes several decades to be as inclusive as possible to black and hispanic people and to asians and well to asians the asians the weird one right especially with harvard but there's discrimination allegedly against asians and harvard because they do so well they try to make less of them get in like they've they've tailored their their whole enrollment process so that it favors certain things that they think they can at least limit the amount of asian people that are because they're doing so well and again it's not to single out harvard really because the vast majority of elite schools do this there's a graph i i want to say it was from the economist magazine but there's a graph
of california schools and the percent of percentage of asian students at the school and there's one school caltech which has uniquely among california schools in its class not really practiced very much racial rigging right and so as the percentage of asian immigrants increased to this country you could see the perce the percentage of asians at caltech is just rising in tandem like like you might logically expect whereas every other school it's magically just staying flat as more and more asians pouring into the country somehow it's staying at like 14 of your school it's very strange um i mean this has been true of elite schools for 100 years it's like malcolm gladwell had this amazing essay i think in the new yorker maybe over a decade ago where he traces the origin of the essay requirements right why why why do why do colleges require you to like write essays why not just go by the test well that came about because they needed a way of excluding or minimizing the number of jews jews were the asians of that era in terms of they were they were getting they were testing very high and getting into these spaces that protestants uh you know white anglo-saxon protestants really wanted didn't like them so much and were uncomfortable with them and they weren't you know our people in in a way and so they introduced essays um you know extracurricular requirements how are the essays supposed to stop jews from getting in so you can read through the lines of who someone is you know if you ask them personal questions about about uh oh so through those essays their judaism would be exposed and that's how they were discriminating really wow what's going on today is like a discriminatory it's a discrimination mccarthyism almost it's like we're looking for discrimination constantly even though it does exist it's plenty of discrimination there's plenty of racism
plenty of like legitimate homophobia right but then we're looking for it everywhere too and everyone's trying to uh make these grand statements that they're not a part of the problem and then if you don't do that silence is violence and that's that's an issue too that that barry weiss speech on cnn was so [ __ ] fantastic when brian stelter was like oh my god see if you find it jamie it's uh what's on my instagram if you see uh brian stelter's cherub face and uh barry weiss on the other side of the screen but she's basically like calling out how the world's gone mad and silence's violence is one of the things that she lists in this incredible rant that she goes on i forgot to ask her i still haven't asked her whether or not she here play this out millions of americans who aren't on the hard left or the hard right who feel the world has gone mad so in what ways has the world gone mad well you know when you have the chief reporter on the beat of kovid for the new york times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist the world has gone mad when you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women the world has gone mad when we're not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad and that silence is not violence but violence is violence the world has gone mad when we're not able to say that hunter biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing the world has gone mad when in the name of progress young school children as young as kindergarten are being separated in public schools because of their race and that is called progress rather than segregation the world has gone mad there are dozens of examples that i could share with with you and you always say you say a lot of knows this and you say we're not allowed we're not able who's the people stopping the conversation who are they people let work at networks frankly like the one i'm speaking on right now you try and claim that's perfect probably they don't exist that's why
they hate me they can't talk they have shitty conversations it's like let her talk like they don't that's such a bad format it's not even his fault really that's the worst format ever where you're not even in the room with someone like everything's at a handicap you're not in the room with someone you're you're you have a thing in your ear where you're listening to them and they're listening to you and it's on a delay always yeah it's hard they not figured out the [ __ ] delay 2022. i think they're gonna do something where they're transitioning into this uh cnn plus thing which uh you know i know they have a show they're gonna do with don lemon on cnn plus and cnn plus is a streaming platform and i think that when they're no longer um settled down to this uh this format that they have where you have like seven minute segments followed by commercial i think they'll be freer to expand on ideas and have real conversations and hopefully the coverage and the content will elevate and you'll they'll start there's it's not like there's a shortage of intelligent articulate people out there there's plenty of them no i mean intelligence is almost never the problem right in the in these scenarios you know it's what it is is nobody has an incentive to be the first person to raise a point on the other side right that's right like i i had this guy jeff maurer on my podcast a couple weeks ago and he's he used to be the senior writer for john oliver's show and you know like you don't want to be the first writer to ask wait are republicans right about that fact right because you know the odds even if the odds are are low that you you know people start talking about you you start uh people pass you over for a promotion because they see you as a kind
of right-wing guy or something it's not worth taking the risk there's a thing that people do where they think you're secretly right-wing which is hilarious i've seen that on twitter before people call someone like a fake progressive they're like oh yeah you fake progressive like who's aping progressivism like who's who's pretending who's out there pretending who's pretending to be a republican when they're really like secretly a liberal like what is that real i think some people really i don't know whether are they on like cnn or fox news or something like that where they have like they have to be committed to a certain ideology yeah like public people public people i think i don't know is this fake progressives do you think there's people out there pretending to be progressive don't i mean so what do you think barack obama thought about gay marriage in in like 2008 that's a good point you know like do you think he was really against it and his brothers tiffany yeah that's a good point you know and so like that's a political position though as a candidate i think that's different i and i mean really it shouldn't be right yeah well but i mean it's a someone who's a talker someone who's just a commentator i think right or but you see it with people just tweeting like they don't even have any skin in the game they're just they're not even players they're just they're like larping you know and and people call them a fake progressive yeah progressives are very hard on one another they're all so mental they're so judgmental it's it's interesting it's like the the left has become this censoring uh anti-free speech anti like they have like very rigid guidelines or guard rails that you're supposed to stay inside of when you have certain discussions and it didn't used to be that way it didn't use i mean like bill maher is one of the last of the old school liberals
who will still call out the left call out like ridiculous left-wing politics and left-wing policies but there is a backlash happening now and it's getting less and less credible to dismiss it as white supremacy in the alt-right um because you know just yesterday or the day before uh three members of the san francisco uh i think um the board of educators or or whoever's in charge of education in san francisco three of them were recalled uh by voters largely because the asian population of san francisco which is like 30 percent of the city or something really did not like their progressive policies you know they're they're they were trying to they were more focused on renaming schools with with more progressive people at the head than they were in reopening schools they got rid of the test that was used to determine which students get into the elite high school because there were too many asians and they made it into a lottery instead of a test um really yeah a lottery they made it to a lottery instead of a test pushing down the numbers of asians increasing the numbers of black and hispanic kids didn't they do something in new york city recently where they eliminated uh advanced classes i'm not sure if they did gifted classes or something i'm not sure i'm not sure i know eric adams is tends to be opposed to all those kinds of things um i think it was before he got in maybe it was here it is new york city outlines next year that's right gifted and talented program new york city will phase out gifted and talented classes in its schools opting to end a program that critics say entrenched racial racial divides in the nation's largest public school system so this is i mean to me there's this constant slander of standardized tests as racist right because on average black kids don't do as well on them as white kids and for what it's worth white kids on
average don't do as well as asian kids and that disparity is seen by people as evidence of structural systemic racism you know one point to make is that these tests initially came out at you know back in the early 20th century as an effort to identify talented kids from underprivileged backgrounds right like you know smart kids that the system otherwise wouldn't realize or that smart and bring them into an environment uh with other really smart kids like my mom grew up in the south bronx she she went to like totally really chaotic home south bronx in the in the 60s and she took a test and got into stuyvesant right and back then stuyvesant had a very robust percentage of black black and hispanic kids um and a lot of them came from underprivileged backgrounds and got in because of the test right like the test is not racist and and eric adams understands that and and you know he was eric adams in in new york he ran on this anti-crime platform we're going to keep the tests the way they are we're basically not going to bow to anything progressive and he was elected the black and hispanic population of new york came to the polls and said we want that guy in san francisco you know the the the people in charge of education are saying we're getting rid of the tests we're doing all this progressive stuff um one of them basically i think alison collins was her name she tweeted and i think later deleted something saying asians are pretty much like white supremacist adjacent and they're like um they're they're using the techniques of white supremacy in order to succeed in our in in the country and they're akin to the house slaves of the past that used to get close to the masters their house enters in other words whoa and she tweeted that asian community
mobilized they said you know these people discriminate against us they treat us like foreigners uh [ __ ] them let's replace them and they did and so the backlash against progressivism the number one argument people have is it's a racist backlash right it's just an explosion of alt-right you know white supremacy q anon types that are mobilizing and trying to attack progressives how do you make that argument make any sense when you have black and hispanic people in new york rushing to elect eric adams asians in san francisco very liberal city um getting rid of the progressive school board you know how many more of these things have to happen before we realize there is a serious and legitimate argument a good faith argument to be had about all of these progressive positions and you can't just shut people up by calling them racist there's definitely a serious and real argument against a lot of these progressive positions and you definitely have both things happening you definitely do have people who are close-minded who are attacking these things because they don't want open-minded perspectives they don't want open-minded perspectives being talked about and they they want to keep the worlds in a in a sort of narrow lane but then they have a lot of people that are particularly in some communities where people are struggling and working hard and they they want to be acknowledged for their efforts and they don't want to be boxed in by these crazy type of rules where they're getting rid of gifted classes and they're making you know a [ __ ] lottery which is the craziest idea i've ever heard for people that get into colleges that's nuts like what what is the purpose of working hard you're supposed to reward people this idea of a quality of outcome like jordan peterson talks about this a lot how dif how dangerous it is to have a quality of outcome and you know my perspective has always been that you can have a quality of outcome unless you have a quality of effort
and then you have to have a quality of opportunity and those things aren't real like you you can't have you're never going to have there's you're going to have obsessed people you're going to have these folks that figure out a way to be far more successful than other people that's one of the reasons why we love sports when you have a guy like a michael jordan who's just so obsessed with victory and you can see it in his eyes this laser focus and figures out a way to be substantially better than everybody else that's magic for us we love super winners we love and that's equality of outcome eliminates that you the sports are the great testing ground for effort and all the factors genetics intelligence coaching technique the ability to assess problems accurately the great testing ground for that and when you're a person who wants to think that a quality of outcome is a possibility that that's what flies in your face the philosopher robert nozick famous philosopher used to use this thought experiment um about justice and he would basically i think at that time he used like wilt chamberlain as the example because that was a time but you know if you think about the nba no one really very few people are upset at lebron james you know kobe bryant r.i.p and all you know others for the fact that they make so much money because you can see how much better they are than you at the thing and you know that the process by which they got from a to b is untamperable right there is there was there is no paying your way into being great in the nba there is there is certainly uh you know the luck of genetics but then there's there's a lot of genetic great athletes in the world the ones that make it there it's like you know sweat equity is is what got them there and so people have a sense that the process is fair and when people feel the process is fair they don't care about
whether the result is equal you take it to most other domains in life people are not sure the process is fair and um i think that is that's the key difference between when people look at unequal results and complain and when they look on unequal results and don't and i think there is far too much of focus on results what we really care about as human beings is that the process is fair so we should be focused on making processes fair rather than simply looking at the results as if that's the indicator of fairness yeah and opportunities the the equality of opportunity if if possible to achieve would be the most noble goal like give people an opportunity to try things give people an opportunity to experience things give people an opportunity to learn and that's not the case you know there's there's a giant disparity between good schools and bad schools and that's not an insurmountable obstacle that's not something that can't be fixed that seems difficult to fix though very difficult to fix but it's it's not breathing underwater it's workable it can be done you know you know it things change over long periods of time because the economics of a region change industries move in job opportunities open up things change but there's certain things in this country that just have been stagnant there's certain areas that have been stagnant and when people talk about equality that's where it's all [ __ ] it's not all [ __ ] in a quality of outcome it's all [ __ ] in equality of opportunity equality of opportunity though is you know it you're never going to fully we're never going to fully achieve it for sure because so much of what matters in life an effect of the private domain it's like yeah how were your how did your parents raise you right what kind of loving environment did you come from were you abused right like the fact that i had two parents um you know that were highly focused on my education that were teaching me math and reading
me books before i got to kindergarten um that cr that had high expectations so if i came home with like i couldn't i couldn't just like come home with a b and be congratulated right like that's the household i grew up in it's a household a lot of a lot of people grow up in including many of the asian families that get their kids into the elite high schools in san francisco and new york and so forth um you know it's very difficult to substitute for that because so much of what builds you your incentives your personality what you care about your values isn't mediated by policy or by the government but but rather in the home and it's it's very difficult for the government to reach into the home and and uh you know change those variables for the better yeah it's not going to happen we don't respect the government enough to ever allow them to do that anyway yeah that's a undeniable aspect to being a person how your parents treat you how you are educated in the home how you how your parents view problems how they handle things so there was this article in the new york times from a few years ago that i'll never forget because of you know it's one of those articles where you could tell they have a huge problem with people not pointing out common sense points right the point of the article was new york's elite high schools have a problem there's not enough black kids asian kids are essentially unfairly in some way dominating that these schools and it talked about one asian family and it said many no actually talked about lots of them it said something like many asian families scrimp on essentials like food like food in order to pay for test prep that's almost an exact quote from the article in the next paragraph it talks about how the asian kids have some kind of unfair advantage that can't be expected of black and hispanic kids
making these same tests it's like wait a minute wait a minute the last sentence you just said they have to eat less food in order to pay for [ __ ] test prep and now you're telling me they're privileged there's a lot of poor asians in new york um but there is there is a cognitive dissonance there is a privilege in being raised by families that expect a lot from you and put a large emphasis on education correct that is one of the deepest privileges that you can have yeah and that's what asian communities have that's not the kind of privilege this article is talking about necessarily they were trying to say there's some kind of systemic leg up that we're giving these asian families that are like living above uh cleaners and like yeah do you know why that's that thing that they do there's a thing that happens when uh progressive people discuss ideas where they won't go any further like they won't say voldemort they get to this like spot and they just like assume that everybody who is also subscribing the same ideology as them will allow them to get away with this sort of like weird uh cognitive transgression by not exploring this idea by not not recognizing that you just contradicted yourself you're literally just talking about they're so poor they can't even afford food but they decide they'll they'll eat less food to have their kids have good preparation for for tests yeah let's make it harder for them to get in jesus christ but this the hard work um that i mean i grew up around a lot of koreans because i was involved in taekwondo really early i was a junior black belt taekwondo as a kid yeah yeah um and i always talk about my friend jung sick who was a national champion while he was going through his medical residency and he was uh testing like going through college and he would put his backpack on filled with books and run the stairs for exercise sometimes he was a national
champion and he he was like no matter like he was explaining to me like what it was like growing up at his house and like no matter what he did it wasn't hard enough it wouldn't it was not he didn't work hard enough like his father was relentless and that this ethic was pushed into his head at an early age like i always thought that i was lazy oh i was so disciplined but i thought i was lazy and compared to him because compared to a regular person i was crazy disciplined but compared to him i'm like oh my god i'm so lazy like i literally had because he was a good friend of mine i had this guy as an example of like this impossible work ethic and because i wanted to sleep eight hours a day i thought it was a lazy piece of [ __ ] that's the power of culture yeah yeah the power of culture and expectations absolutely either you can't you can't fix that i mean you can't you're not you're never going to i mean that would take for [ __ ] ever and also there's an immigrant mentality like my friend joey diaz likes to call an immigrant mentality like people who come here from another country specifically to do better because they want they live in a place where they don't like how things are and they're like we're going to uproot ourselves and move to a place where we don't understand the [ __ ] language we're going to learn the language and the children of those people and the grandchildren of those people they have specific advantages in that there's a drive that's imparted in them i think that i mean that's probably my my most left-wing position is how pro-immigration i am i would say like i'm i'm probably left of the democratic party in terms of how good i think immigration is for this country um if it's legal certainly i mean we should we we should be able to choose and have a system for who comes here i'm completely in support of that but you know if we had that i would be in favor of totally ramping up the the the you know the number of immigrants we bring here i think it's our great strength as a nation
that people from all over the world want to come here you know contribute to our economy make us competitive increase our population help us compete with with china as as the global dominant power i mean i think obviously so many people are anti-immigration in this country that practically speaking you can't get elected talking how i'm talking but that is really what i think deep down i think people are wrong to to be as resistant to immigration as they are i think you know the kids of immigrants assimilate remarkably well to american culture they speak english they are attracted to the freedom that we have here like america is an attractive alternative to the rest of the world that's a fact yeah um people want to come here including you know af africans you know south asians people of color that are coming to this this allegedly horribly racist society well they see something here that some kind of opportunity here that the rest of the world or at least many places in the world lack and i think like we make it too hard for people to come here legally there are too many loopholes there's too many too many ways in which it's just like you hear horror stories of people with you know visa problems people people that we absolutely want to incentivize to come here right selfishly right there's this attitude that immigration is like this gift we're giving to others no we're taking we're like getting one over as a country on the rest of the world by taking people who want to come here in and i know i mean i know that's like i say that's probably my most left oriented position is immigration
i completely agree with you and i think that to compete like if you want to compete in anything you want to be around people that are obsessed that really want to do well you want to be around people that are really willing to put in the work really willing to come to another place that is uh another continent come over on a boat or on an airplane or even make your way up across the border those [ __ ] people are driven they're driven and that's what you want to be around i mean that's what everybody should want we if you want to leave your you you're stuck in a spot like what what should you do what should you build up your village in guatemala and make it like new york city the [ __ ] out of here you don't have any time for that yeah you got to get to manhattan right you know like we should embrace those people because those people they have they have the courage they have the motivation they have the drive to leave the land of their birth and to try to make it in this ideal of what america is and some of the most fiercely patriotic people that have ever met have come here from communist countries yeah totally my friends that have come here from russia my friends that have come here from different eastern bloc countries or who have parents that experienced communism people from cuba they are fiercely patriotic fiercely pro-american and those are the kind of people that you want to come over here you want them to come over here and raise the bar and and bring that vibration of vibrancy of someone who wants to excel yeah come here because you want to do better for you you want to do better for your family and you want to come over go you want to come to america to kick ass yeah you don't come to america to take a nap right they come to america to kick off sap us of our resources i mean so i think a lot of people on the right they oppose immigration i think somewhere in them they feel if we let all these people in from country like communist countries like china they're going to turn america communist they're going to bring their values with
them and slowly but surely basically all the values that people on the right hold dear are going to just be outnumbered by this influx of people from other parts of the world that don't have these values right you're coming from a country that's a dictatorship no freedom you're you know um and and people are worried i get that the problem with that argument is first of all the people who come here come here because they like here right they like what we're doing here which means you can't take the average foreigner from a country and expect that that's the person that's coming to america no it's not the median person it's the person that sees something of value here that they don't see in their homeland right that's one thing the second thing is the moment you have kids these second generation immigrants they're more fluent in english usually than they are in in the language of their parents and that's a deeper point than just the language it's not just that the language is some exception to an other uh uh you know a rule of thumb where they otherwise are more attached to their homeland values it's that language is a proxy for the fact that they're absorbing american culture primarily because they grew up young here right yeah and so i i think that that argument i i understand why people are afraid of it but it just hasn't been proven true like i just we just talked about san francisco right who is the reason that they voted out hyper progressive uh school board members right asian americans many of whom were actually first generation right they were using chinese ballots okay so if you're conservative that's afraid letting more letting in more people is going to destroy the country i mean that's a perfect rejoinder to your concern right there well not only that but america is unique in the fact that
is literally a nation of immigrants the entire country is founded except unless you're native american you've come from somewhere else whether it's your grandparents or your parents or your great grandparents someone came from somewhere else and built every [ __ ] city here it is so to say we got enough we're full now it it it betrays the ideals that the entire country was founded on and there's a lot of people that live in places where maybe they're relying upon a specific industry and they're worried that someone's going to come here and work for less and they're going to take away their quality of life and that's a fear-based perspective they're gonna do but that can be solved with unions that can be solved with the way you know people have a relationship with their employers and that the employers have a relationship with the people in their community and you can embrace immigrants as being a part of that because you need more skilled people more ambitious people it's good for everybody the idea that it's not good for everybody is a is a famine based perspective and almost all famine based perspectives are terrible yeah because you're just like oh what do we do we gotta prepare for the worst like abundance perspectives are the best when it comes to like advancing a country if you want if you want the country to kick ass you want more people over here that have the desire to kick ass who has a desire to kick ass more than someone who leaves their [ __ ] country leaves their country you you you don't even speak the language that good and you come over here just because you think you have more opportunity that's us that's america that is as american as it gets that's a [ __ ] eagle holding a gun right that's american right absolutely and and you know i mean the other part part of this that's interesting to me is um like what are the cultural attitudes of immigrants that come from you know south asia east asia south america africa are they woke [ __ ] no they're not are you kidding you
know it's the opposite there's this i think there's this lazy assumption that democrats make and this is actually an argument that's been made by some prominent liberal writers and democratic advocates is that the way we're going to beat the republicans is by importing people of color and they're going to be democrats by default because republicans are racist they're gonna run from republicans um we're gonna import people of color and that's how we're gonna beat him it's a pure numbers game right the lazy assumption here is that immigrants who are people of color are basically going to vote like black americans like like a democratic bloc right rather than be persuadable voters that are voting on that can easily be persuaded to vote republican right and that have cultural values that are sometimes more aligned with conservatives than liberals on certain issues um and i mean it's connected to this this general way in which i think white americans get skewered for flaws such as racism that are actually universal human flaws right it's like go anywhere in the world you're going to find bigotry um you're gonna i mean if if you zoom out and talk about historical evils genocide slavery right these are things that have been going on since the beginning of recorded history on every inhabited continent right there's this great book by orlando patterson who's a harvard sociologist called slavery and social death it's like this 500 page tome on slavery and it has a database in the back of the book of every known example a recorded example of slavery since people began writing things down um and it's just immense
it's immense like the the the the normality of cruelty and dominance and killing throughout human history um it just it boggles the mind and one thing i've encountered is that there are people that are extremely parochial in a sense that they almost don't know slavery happened anywhere else in the world right i've heard that argument made it's a hilarious argument yeah i mean it's it it's extraordinarily ignorant especially when you consider the fact that there's literally more slaves today in the world than there were before slavery is abolished in the united states is that true yeah i didn't realize there's that many yeah let's see if that's true let's make sure that's true i'm sure you saw the open markets for slavery in libya which is bananas because you're watching slave markets on youtube yeah which it's though and we we talk about slavery like it's i mean it's in the past tense in our heads you think slavery in the past tense we abolished it um well there's sex slaves that exist today too like there was this big bust in los angeles recently there was like 80 people that were were were busted or were freed rather who were sex slaves they were basically being sex trafficked which is [ __ ] bizarre like that there's slaves right there's people that people have captured and they've forced them into this sexual servitude yeah what does it i didn't catch the specific oh i'm sorry um there are more slaves today than before slavery was abolished in the united states in the world there's more slaves today in the world globally i just think that it's it's just not an open market the way it was in the 1700s right but it's it seems to be this gets back to your point of like people and i i googled that but it's like this is what popped up there's slaves in lots of countries apparently
yeah india is home to the largest number of slaves globally with eight million holy [ __ ] 8 million followed by china with 3.8 million pakistan 3 million north korea 2 million nigeria 1.3 million iran 1.2 million indonesia 1.0 holy [ __ ] democratic republic of the congo 1 million russia 794 000 slaves that is [ __ ] insane there are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now according to a comprehensive new report issued by the australia-based walk-free walk-free foundation this is not some softened by modern standards definition of slavery actual slaves yeah [ __ ] insane okay there's here's one that says 40 million so i i believe 10 to 12 million slaves were taken to the west from africa and something like 14 million were taken to the arab world from from africa so this is where that statistic yeah that would seem to check out i mean so this this this goes back to your point about people miscalibrating small problems and large problems right uh you know we had the 1619 project uh in in 2019 which uh you know a series of articles and poems and essays and podcasts designed to retell the american story centering slavery that's how it was branded essentially and they i mean they pushed this rewrite of history where the colonies revolted against the british in order to preserve slavery which is not true and you know in general the the general tenor of this i mean there was some really good work done in this project but the general tenor of this was to get people to see american slavery in the smallest mine most minute details right so there was one article by matthew desmond which tried to argue that microsoft excel spreadsheets are very similar and have
their root in the kinds of accounting systems that slave masters would use right so that you can see the legacy of slavery in an excel spreadsheet right like that was a serious argument that was made and i just thought to myself what what the hell is going on that you're asking me to see slavery in an excel spreadsheet that's how trivial we've gotten like there there's no other society that for any other reason use the concept of like intersecting lines to account for [ __ ] like really that that's what passes muster as a connection between our current society and our legacy of slavery meanwhile i'm not aware of a single line in this project that's pulitzer prize-winning where they so much as acknowledged that modern slaves still exist right which seems like a a moral miscalibration to me do you think that what's happening with people uh with this discrimination against immigration is a fear that they're but in a sense bribing people from central america and south america that are coming up through the the border they're allowing them to come in and then this this is the the fear that they're going to allow them to vote and the concede is we're going to allow you to vote but remember who got you in here the democrats got you in here we're the one who've allowed you to come through the border even though you're illegal and distributed you throughout the country this that's the big fear right that i think a lot of republicans have about us particularly what's happening at the south border yeah no i think i think that's valid um you know having a huge influx of illegal immigration you know there's there's no doubt that the motives of people who
want folks to vote it's like politicians want to win and they left or right they will often try to rejigger the election laws that they can legally change to give themselves a leg up um republicans do this um i don't think it works so well they try democrats do this um and i think that's a valid concern like to have a border to be able to choose to let people in is is fundamental um so i i definitely wouldn't quibble with that it's just you know if we had that the level of immigration i would calibrate to i think would be way higher than most people because i'm i'm real i really think people far far overestimate the costs of immigration and far underestimate the benefits you ever seen a documentary a day without mexicans no it's a document about los angeles like what would happen if there was no mexicans in los angeles and essentially everything would fall apart yeah everything was shut down so if you are like if you're anti-mexican immigration and you live in los angeles you should probably move because you're anti-la like right the [ __ ] whole thing is run by immigrants and right the the memory oh my god well miami is fascinating because it's a lot of cuban immigrants who are very right-wing yep i mean they've experienced the reality of actual socialism actual communism actual dictatorships and they are not interested in that [ __ ] they're very very pro-democracy pro-united states and they they came over here for a very very good reason and with great cost you know and i think ultimately this thing that they're doing with letting i don't know exactly what is happening that's part of the problem like there's rumors about what's happening versus what's actually happening at the southern border you know the rumors are they're taking people they're letting their processing on letting them through and then putting them on buses and distributing them
around the country and then there's also these people that think you shouldn't have to be united states citizen in order to vote well if you put those two things together i could see where you're kind of allowing you know you see people coming across with biden harris t-shirts on and you've got to want to okay well who gave them to them like is it like is this something you get is there like a guy who's got a stop at the side of the road and you guys make it across the border get your uniform got a biden harris t-shirt for you i mean if there really is some sort of a concerted effort to bring people over here with the the goal of stacking the deck in these democratic cities and making sure they're not taken over by republicans because you're going to allow people who are illegal immigrants to vote and the conceit is since you let them in they're going to vote for you that's where things get a little squirrely one i would you know i'm not even so sure they they would vote for you it's the thing it's like you ask a lot of immigrants what they think about cultural issues about social issues the the and what comes out of their mouths is often the least politically correct least woke thing you could possibly think of right which doesn't mean they would vote republican necessarily it just means i think they're way more up for grabs than democrats want to admit i mean i remember my favorite new york cab story having lived in the city for maybe eight years i get in i get into a cab with this guy who seems like maybe eastern or southern european like maybe greek or maybe something like that and he's one of these cab drivers that is kind of spiritual kind of wants to talk to you have like a little bit of a deep conversation has some wisdom and so i was i was in the mood for it i was like all right let's get let's get deep we start talking about some stuff like having a really good conversation talking about life and uh talking about where he's from how
old he is he's like in his 50s or so i've been driving a cab for like 30 a little over 30 years so i said what's the biggest thing that's changed in this city since you started driving a cab and without skipping a beat he says i picked you up didn't i and we both started laughing out loud because like on the one hand like you know this is one of those comments that if it were written out the next day in the new york times could seem racist to people out of context of the fact that we just had like a really nice heart to heart of a conversation um and a laugh and a laugh about it yeah you know and and he he didn't hesitate he didn't he didn't feel any guilt saying it even though i was black he's just like no whatever um i mean i guess the basic point is oh here's the other other cap story i have in new york you learn a lot from from riding cabs riding in the cat the only time i've ever heard a human being say go back to your country right which is like a cliche of right-wing bigotry right with like white guy right-wing bigotry only time i've ever heard a human being say that was a black woman who was my cab driver or maybe my via driver or something and a like an indian cab driver cut her off she rolled down the [ __ ] window said go back to your [ __ ] country it's like the point being that bigotry and i'm not even sure if she's a bigot necessarily right she was pissed off she had road rage but the the wider point is that bigotry and racism is talked about as if white people invented and perpetuate it and i think that that is that is a deep misunderstanding of its source in human psychology and if pinned on one group of people it gets under my skin because it it's such a deep misunderstanding of
actually where hate comes from and um it prevents us from being able to sort of truly understand that bigotry is a human flaw right it's a flaw that all people are susceptible to and in order to really have an honest conversation about it it can't be a finger pointed at like you're all the problem and we're all perfect that is not a basis on which to start a conversation and that's how the conversation is being had in a lot of places that that situation is kind of interesting because you could say it's bigotry and it it fits all it checks all the boxes of being bigotry but it also could be hey you're a [ __ ] [ __ ] you drive like a [ __ ] go back to where you're from because we don't like [ __ ] over here like you could you could look at it that way and if someone is clearly from another country and they speak with a deep accent are you supposed to ignore that fact when you say get the [ __ ] out of here like it's a way to say get the [ __ ] out of here like stop being a dick like you want to drive like that go back to where you're from i mean it's one of those things it's like she doesn't want to be around people to cut her off if you come over here and everybody who comes over here starts cutting people off the thing about way people drive in other countries uh have you ever been to mexico city never wild wild place first of all crazy pollution yeah like pollution that gives you a headache jesus you're like holy [ __ ] i flew in and as i was flying in i couldn't believe it so i was taking photos from the plane i was like this is bananas i mean just thick dark clouds of pollution and uh a red light is just a suggestion i mean you don't necessarily have to not go with a red light like the [ __ ] you know like in in la it's
it's very common where like say if a light turns red and someone was about to turn they turn anyway they go [ __ ] it i'm gonna go and they they just go because they're so good that's a good l.a self-centered [ __ ] and then they clog up the lane people will [ __ ] you they honk in mexico city that [ __ ] is normal that's what everybody does people were just we were i was in my car i was in a passenger you know i was i was there for the ufc and when i was there there was people just they were just driving like in into the intersection just just cutting each other off i was like wow and the the driver was laughing we were having fun laughing about it and it was like nobody died they're just good at it yeah there's it's it's like if you've seen like in other countries where they have these crazy intersections where people just sort of figure things out what i i remember going to machu picchu when i went to peru and you can either hike up or you can drive up on these buses and the way you drive up is by circling just circle circle circle circling up this mountain many times and the road is narrow and it's a [ __ ] mountain you know like you could just [ __ ] fall off and they do sometimes and there's two-way traffic there's two-way traffic because and and you can't see it's it's a it's a it's a very uh steep you know it's like an oval more than a circle it's not it's not a nice so there's these very steep you can't see around the corner and just you know one every three or four turns there would be another one coming and they'd have to stop right around the corner oh and i was like oh my god how is this normalized why does this i cannot believe this is normalized here what is this where is this at is there paris yeah yeah look how these guys are like the scooters just driving in between cars yeah this is very common in in parts of the world and paris is probably not nearly as bad as like beijing or some places in bangladesh and
yeah i mean people get accustomed to driving around a lot of people and and adjusting and making movements and but those [ __ ] scooter people are asking to die yeah it's real common see if you can find mexico city so you can find an intersection in mexico city because i was blown away it was i was laughing i was laughing hard and the driver was laughing with me because he was like this is just how it is mirror right it's how it is here they just they just drive like that with the on the topic of the smog and the pollution it's like this is one of those things where oh let me see it just shows a lot it looks really nice actually it's it's great fantastic if you're a fan of mexican food god damn i am i love him i love mike so much the food in mexico city's off the charts there's so much variety too but we're saying pollution yeah so you know like i think uh i've always had this lazy assumption that we're sort of living in modernity and i'm we're living outside of the barbarism of the past it's like back in the day they would split your [ __ ] brain in half do these horrible procedures on people they didn't wash their hands they just you know people lived in filth they like [ __ ] in the streets and thank god i live in in this fundamentally different time uh modernity where we've like gotten rid of most of the truly deranged and barbaric and you know crazy practices of the past but i see like the pollution when we enter a world where it's unthinkable to have that level of pollution in a city they're gonna look back at us and say my god these people used to live in pollution and and do lobotomies on people and uh they didn't wash their like that's gonna be
included in the laundry list of past barbaric practices and you know it makes me question whether my attitude that we are living in this other modern times is even justified because we still have so many things to clean up so many things to figure out we do but statistically speaking it's never been safer to be a person that is absolutely safe in terms of medicine and surgeries it's never been safer in terms of the violent crime and and but you're 100 percent right about pollution it's a unique aspect a lot of people don't want to admit that that it's that it's safer and it's yeah that's a weird one people don't want to admit it but it's because they don't want to they don't want to be in denial that it's still a gigantic problem that violence is still a problem but um we we had a climate scientist on the other day and he was uh showing us there's a one there's an area in uh indiana evansville indiana where there's seven power plants in a coal-fired power plants in a 30-mile area and it's [ __ ] nuts the amount of particulate in the area in the air and on it covers things like child's swing sets and [ __ ] and god in the streets it's like dust just these people are just breathing cold dust and they all have like lung problems and it's just like chops years off your life and these poor people are [ __ ] and they're they're in this spot but there's still people today that like you know trump when he was running he was talking about clean coal that's not clean bro yeah that's a terrible way to make energy it's one of the worst ways in terms of like what it does to the environment in terms of like what it's pumps out into the air but when you see this like which is the most egregious example this one area evansville indiana it was horrible like like and they did interviews with these people they're talking about their chess that they can't breathe very good and like oh this is also you could use coal for power plants like while we're in a world that has nuclear
and has solar and has wind like what the [ __ ] and solar and wind have gotten so much cheaper yeah i didn't really realize how much it was they're actually explaining here now texas half of the grid is powered by solar and wow and wind that's amazing yeah pretty insane yeah and it's uh you know it is a gross aspect of our culture a very gross aspect that we are still involved in things that pollute rivers and you know fracking that pollutes underground water and [ __ ] up people's drinking water we could light it on fire you ever seen that what is it gasland gas land right jamie yes yeah gasland documentary where they light the water on fire as it comes out of a faucet [Laughter] it's horrible yeah but gas is cheaper coleman it's cheaper that way god what's what's the big deal a little pollution you just move out of that spot oh okay you got a spot now that's going to be [ __ ] for the next 400 000 years or whatever yeah great terrific but i do i do think there's a limit to the amount of techno technological progress that we will make yeah like i don't think it'll keep going forever or that i guess what i'm saying is i i feel like i encounter a lot of people that are sort of techno-utopians like we'll be able to figure out anything we can think of now we will eventually make it's possible though but i think there will be a limit there'll be stuff we can think of that we'll never be able to do like what i don't know what i just think that if you like if you assume that humans are not the most intelligent possible beings that could physically exist compatible with the laws of physics of the universe which i think is true like we're not sure of course the the most intelligent and like it would stand to reason that there are things it's possible to do there are things the laws of physics don't rule out that we simply aren't intelligent enough to do that like we aren't intelligent
enough to ever figure out i think that's assuming that we're not going to merge with technology in a symbiotic way that advances our cognitive ability and i think that's inevitable but what if what if merging with technology is already something we're unable to figure out because we can't conceptually understand consciousness readily enough well consciousness whether we understand it or not we could still manipulate it the thing about technology and the the symbiotic sort of uh future of humans and technology when you talk to have you ever talked to elon no talk to elon about it he's developing neural ink and neuralink is essentially going to be some sort of an implant that they um they they cut a hole in your [ __ ] head and they put wires inside your brain and change the way you interface with information and and he was explaining to me he goes you're going to be able to talk without words and when he says you're going to be able to talk without words it's not like one of my stoner buddies bro you're going to be able to [ __ ] talk without words i'm like man maybe somebody's right but when he says it he's got a [ __ ] plan and he's gonna start with people that have problems with their uh with neurological issues uh people that have uh nerve damage people that have spinal cord injuries they're going to replace the ability to move and use some sort of computer controlled technology that replaces what the the function of the spinal column then from there they're going to move to human beings advancing their cognitive function they're going to move to changing the way they interface with i'm skeptical they'll get there why so last year i i got a cough it wasn't covered and were you sad was i sad that i wasn't going a little bit yeah i was like damn everybody is everybody hopes they just have a [ __ ] cough yeah and i went to the doctor it just wasn't
going away you know and i'm a podcaster i'm a rapper i'm a musician i need my voice it wasn't going away you still have a little cough now i do a little bit is that the same cause no it's not the same [ __ ] this cough is from omicron which i had like six weeks ago really yeah but it went it had it for four weeks lingered went away for two weeks so it's it's a me thing it's it's not covered it's me my coughs tend to linger a little bit for a long time anyway i went to the doctor and the doctor was very kind he like did an x-ray of my chest for free and just just just kind of be nice i was like listen i'm a pot i really need to [ __ ] get rid of this cough it's been a month i have no idea what to do and um he said you know it's probably just mild bronchitis after you saw the x-ray do you want me to prescribe you anything and i was like what do you why are you asking you're the doctor don't that's why i'm coming here is because you're supposed to say the things tell me the things and he's like i don't know man um he can give you some stuff it's probably not going to do anything but and i was like yeah just just give me everything he's like all right any bacterial um steroids this other thing so that took everything did nothing robitussin over-the-counter cough medicine you know turns out that [ __ ] does not work for everyone it did nothing for me and then i looked up the meta-analysis studies of robitussin in meta-analysis versus a placebo has almost no effect did you know that really yes there are meta analysis compiling studies of robitussin versus placebo that find tiny effect sizes well nyquil used to get you high as [ __ ] did they change it i think they did for sure right yeah that's what robo trip and they had to stop that there was like uh coding in it i think dude once i had nyquil once in the 90s i'll never forget it yeah i was i was sick and i took nyquil and i was laying in my
bed and i was as happy as i've ever been in my life i was like i feel so loved i just feel so like one with everything it was just i was like oh my god i'm so happy yeah i was like this like ah yeah and i remember thinking so this is why people like nyquil i don't think before that time and i was like in my 20s at the time i was like i don't think i've ever really had nyquil right like really had it and especially not as an adult where i could like recognize what's going on i was like i'm so high yeah i mean nyquil even now kind of feels good what is it it used to be codeine yeah that's what i was just looking up dextromethorphan right what was nyquil in the 90s was it codeine it was [ __ ] strong though i mean bring it back how come i can't have it now [ __ ] anyway my point about bringing up the cough story was there are certain problems uh like okay let me put it this way we have intuitions about which are the hard problems and which are the easy problems right and sometimes those intuitions are just way off so it turns out putting a man on the moon was easier than curing the common cough reliably i wouldn't guess that if i were like a human in like 1890 i would have been like they'll probably cure the cough before they put a guy safely in space it turns out we haven't done that and my guess is that the neural link stuff is going to be more like a common cough type of problem where it's like we think we're making progress but it turns out to be so much more difficult than we can even realize that you know it's like 500 years from now and we still haven't gotten it that's possible it's also possible that they do it and then they keep expanding on it and uh they keep innovating and then the
competition starts kicking in and other people start developing new sorts of human brain interfaces and it gets extremely valuable to the point where you cannot compete without it and it becomes a thing where everybody has just like everybody has a cell phone now you know if they can figure out a way to get people to interface with technology where you can literally share data and information back and forth without talking that's an invaluable skill and or ability whether or not that actually is implemented i don't know but elon has a [ __ ] plan and that's the smartest guy i've ever talked to and he talks about definitely not he's explaining how it's going to work he's not like it's not pie in the sky [ __ ] no but i think so this is this goes back to my point about intelligence is often not why people get things wrong it's not that they're not intelligent it's that sometimes when you're in an industry and you have that hammer everything looks like a nail so it's like the people in tech are going to be the ones to overestimate what tech can do precisely because they're in tech yeah just like the surgeon the surgeon is going to think you can solve everything with surgery because he's a [ __ ] surgeon right right and so it's not that they're unintelligent it's that um sometimes you know people tend to overestimate the importance of their industry or the ability of their industry to solve everything it's a systematic bias i think people have across the board so often people with it on the inside are some sometimes the worst judges of the limits of their own enterprise that does make sense however technological innovation seems to be one of the main consistent factors in human civilization and the explosion of technological innovation that's taken place over the last 30 years and particularly over the last you know
whatever it has been since the internet was really fully implemented into everyone's household it's been mind-boggling and i don't see it slowing down and i think that the next logical step is to go from something you carry around to something that's a part of your body and i think they'll do it first for people with injuries and then once they and they've already have that they already have things where they allow people to move a mouse around with their brain they already have things where people with previously paralyzed hands can now use them they have those things the logical sort of technological innovation if you extrapolate from where we are now to where we're going whether it takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years i think the symbiotic connection between humans and technology is probably the only way we beat out artificial intelligence i think the big fear is that someone creates artificial intelligence and that thing becomes sentient and then that thing creates better artificial intelligence far superior to ours and does it very quickly they they find all the flaws that we have and they come up with a new version of us and that we're not going to be able to compete and that is this sort of silicon-based life form will be far more advanced than us but without emotions without all the biological problems that we have without the desire for breed and ego and all it won't be programmed with any of those problems so we'll just seek advancement and technological innovation for whatever [ __ ] reason i don't know why i mean maybe it would have no motivation to do anything it would just stop then its tracks because they would realize that the existence is futile but i think the way to stop that is we become symbiotic and we we integrate with technology and that technology advances our capability and as elon says it advances our bandwidth for accessing information yeah i mean i can't i mean i can't justify this with much more than a gut
feeling but gut feelings are great yeah i mean gut feelings come from somewhere they come from hopefully from years of learning about the world and guessing and being wrong and being right it's where intuitions come from but my intuition tells me that this is going to be one of those problems that we underestimate the difficulty of by orders of magnitude it's like how close are we to understanding the brain anywhere close enough how many neurons are there in the brain again it's a good question it's like how many so many more than you think billions probably trillions i believe yeah i think it's trillions is it trillions i think it is how close are we to truly yes truly to like okay oh god i'm gonna say 3 trillion no i'm going to say 2 trillion 99 86 billion oh okay or close to average average between 80 cents oh it's not that many that's earth when we have optimal uh population density how close are we to understanding the brain it's 86 billion neurons not totally close that's the question that's an understatement of the century we're not even like yeah we're not we're like dipping our toe in to like the pacific ocean it's like the pacific ocean and we like kind of are starting to understand like maybe what water is yes i don't know it's like we're at the beginning and i guess my point is an understanding complete enough to integrate with technology it's not at all obvious to me that we will ever get there you know like we could make progress forever but it can be like asymptotic progress like there's there's an there's an asymptote here and it's what's that word it's like uh well you know like in math like how a graph can like approach the limit of a thing without ever touching it and get
infinitely closer to a line without ever touching it and go on forever like this so it's like if you imagine we make asymptotic progress there's this line that because of our intelligence you know and our our the fundamental fact that we're not wired by evolution to understand the world perfectly we're wired to evolve and reproduce basically on the african savannah right and just like every other animal in the world there's a limit to the things we are able to understand right um that limit for humans is way further than for any other animal but fundamentally it's not infinite and um again it would stand to reason there are problems in the world that we may not we may not even be able to understand the problems much less the solutions i would say probably consciousness so far is looking like one but the point is it's possible we could keep making progress technologically forever but it's asymptotic progress in the sense that there's a line here that we keep approaching and it keeps looking like we're making progress because we are but you know there there's a line we're never going to hit so it can be true at the same time that we keep making progress forever and that there is a limit to that progress that's asymptotic and certain things are um be just beyond that line and my my intuition tells me that merging with understanding the brain and understanding you know silicon well enough to merge them is probably beyond that line but but what if that line is akin to the line of human evolution i mean you go back to australia pithicus and you compare the the the frame of those ancient hominids to a human being you're not talking about that long ago you know in terms of like the the time of life on earth or the term in terms of time of the earth itself we're looking at in terms of our own individual lifetimes yes but what if human beings and i believe we probably are continuing to evolve and advance
and what if that is being shaped and aided by the access to information that we have because of technology so it almost certainly is most certainly yeah so not just a symbiotic use of technology in terms of like being integrated into our own brain and our our own neurology but what if it's happening to us because of that information and so we are advancing our capabilities but we're doing it at a biological evolution scale which is like a slower scale what would that look like for evolution to be responding to slowly to uh like digital and integration these little [ __ ] that's what it's gonna look like we're gonna have a little green big heads and little tiny bodies because we're not gonna need muscle anymore we're not gonna need manpower and we're probably not going to need genitals but we're probably going to figure out a way to breed that's that doesn't sound fun it doesn't have fun but unless it's more fun and less like doing something through some sort of uh hyper realistic virtual reality simulation type thing is more exciting than doing something biologically also because like that episode yes because everything's covered by black mirror every dystopian idea you have but um that's i mean if you look at like the difference between ancient hominids ancient primates and us well that's where it's consistent our heads are bigger our bodies are softer you know and it seems like if you keep going in that general direction this is what you get well that would have to be because people with bigger heads are having more children or something like that and yeah like the mutations that some mutation that makes us smarter leads to more offspring but it's not clear to me anymore that there is a connection between like let's say i have a kid that has some crazy siri like 1 million mutation that gives him 300 iqs is that guy like is he going to do much better reproduct reproductively than like that's good for you only if he designs the matrix yeah and then human beings breed not
through uh biological uh selection like this person looks better they have a better hip to waist ratio you want to have a baby with her this person's taller and more masculine you want to have a baby with him if it gets to the point where that's not how we choose anymore then maybe you will select for the people that are the most intelligent that they can manipulate the matrix i had this guy david chalmers on my podcast he's a pretty well-known philosopher and he just wrote a really thick book arguing i'm sure you're familiar with the argument that we're living in a simulation yeah elon believes it yep so he makes this argue david trummer he's a very rigorous guy he's he's a very logical arguer and he goes through all the objections systematically and um you know it's it's impossible to dismiss the idea that we are and you know my my attitude before talking to him about this was okay this is like one of those thought experiments that's like fun to think about but it wouldn't have any implications for the world it's like if it's a simulation it doesn't matter like this water still is water i still feel and insofar as i ground my ethics in the subjective experience of conscious creatures then it doesn't actually matter whether those creatures are quote-unquote real or digital right that was my attitude before talking to him but then he he came up with some ways in which um it like we should potentially act differently if we are in a simulation because if we're in a simulation then they can unplug the simulation right and so if we are in a simulation then one of the projects of existential risk of our world becomes figuring out why they might plug the simul unplug the simulation and figuring out how we can get them to not
right like how can we signal to the people running the simulation that we really care about our world we don't care if this is like a science like we could be in like a middle school or science experiment or something like oh what would happen if like the chimpanzees like became like more like smarter and then he like you know runs a simulation and that's what we call and the big bang was him like plugging it in or whatever yeah if that's true then is he unplugging the cigar simulation like when school's out and if so does it become a project like do we need a manhattan project of people trying to figure out like how to tell them not to it's kind of crazy and i don't think we should probably actually spend resources on it but like i say that but then when i actually walk through the argument for it it's it's kind of impossible to refute well isn't the simulation possibly like the internet where there's so many different ways to interface with it and there's so many different points of contact so many different connections so many different servers that it's not like something someone can just hit a switch on it's something that is almost like a life force of its own i think the internet is slowly but surely becoming almost like a life force of its own a life force of information sure so instead of like thinking like there's some little green man with his hand on the switch going all these [ __ ] people this chunk and hitting hitting the off switch that it's it's more complex and more integrated than that um i'm not sure it need be though i mean no definitely we have video games that are no more than a switch and if you if you unplug them and destroy the video game it's like if those digital creatures had consciousness which we we don't have any reason to suspect that they do but we also have no idea why the atoms in this package are conscious and the atoms in this table are not right we have no theories that make sense logically
as to why that is true we simply assume it's true and i i i assume this like everyone does i'm not going around thinking that everything is conscious but none of the explanations offered are consistent with our intuition scientific intuitions about everything else it's fundamentally still a mystery consciousness itself yes yeah like like the you know why is it that when you put atoms together so as to make this thing we call a brain that it's something there's something it's like to be that collection of atoms wait a minute aren't those the same atoms that like make up your spleen right how come does your spleen have feelings is it is there a point of view on the world from your spleen it's like we assume there's not i certainly hope there's not but we have no and and and if it's the fact that there's information processing going on with the brain well there's lots of things that process information computers are computers conscious they might be they might be and you go through every one of these arguments that's saying well here's the reason why we're conscious and this this isn't go through everyone um none of them truly makes sense none of that makes sense and it's a mystery and there's this my favorite philosopher on this issue is this guy colin mcginn and he has this idea of cognitive closure which is that you know and i've kind of been parroting it a little bit in the past half hour so just like every animal has a limit in the things that it is able to understand humans have that limit and consciousness is beyond that limit right like you you look you take certain animals you put them in front of a mirror and they they they cannot they just don't know that it's them right because the concept of
reflection of reflected light is permanently beyond their ability to comprehend it's like they can they can identify the problem like it's a mystery to them like oh this other chicken is like moving weird and then other chickens and like usually i can figure that out but it's just a mystery it's like every every way they might pose the question is beyond chicken intelligence and so they'll never answer it right what column again posits is that there are problems that we stand in relation to questions we stand in relation to as humans the same way reflection stands in relation to you know a very dumb animal and that consciousness is one of those problems and the hallmark of one of those problems is that every way we ask the question we don't get a satisfying answer every experiment we do it's not just that it comes up inconclusive it's like we can't wrap our heads around it and it's probably because we're not equipped to even ask the right questions the same way a chicken is not equipped to understand reflection that makes a shitload of sense yeah maybe osho was right [Laughter] listen man i really [ __ ] enjoy this conversation yeah me too we gotta do this again yeah i would love to uh please tell everybody uh how they can find you on social media and find your podcast yeah yeah all your stuff yeah so check out conversations with coleman wherever you listen to podcasts we do videos on youtube um etc follow me on twitter at cold x-man which is also my rap name we just released a big music video that was filmed in ukraine called blasphemy on youtube check it out and i have a new song coming out today called straight a's and so yeah that's pretty much everything conversations with coleman and cold x-man i feel like we could do this for hours and hours and hours but i got to get the [ __ ] out of here yeah so thank you so much i really enjoyed it thank you very much
bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]