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Michael Malice: Anarchy, Democracy, Libertarianism, Love, and Trolling | Lex Fridman Podcast #128


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The following is a conversation with Michael Malice,
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an anarchist, political thinker, author,
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and a proud, part time, Andy Kaufman like troll,
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in the best sense of that word,
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on both Twitter and in real life.
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He's a host of a great podcast called You're Welcome,
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spelled Y O U R.
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I think that gives a sense of his sense of humor.
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He is the author of Dear Reader,
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the unauthorized autobiography of King Jong Il,
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and The New Right,
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A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics.
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This latter book, when I read it,
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or rather listened to it last year,
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helped me start learning about the various
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disparate movements that I was undereducated about,
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from the internet trolls, to Alex Jones,
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to white nationalists, and to techno anarchists.
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The book is funny and brilliant, and so is Michael.
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Unfortunately, because of a self imposed deadline,
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I actually pulled an all nighter before this conversation.
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So I was not exactly all there mentally,
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even more so than usual, which is tough,
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because Michael is really quick witted and brilliant.
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But he was kind, patient, and understanding
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in this conversation, and I hope you will be as well.
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Today, I'm trying something a little new,
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looking to establish a regular structure for these intros.
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A first, doing the guest intro, like I just did.
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Second, quick one or two sentence mention of each sponsor.
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Third, my side comments related to the episode.
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And finally, fourth, full ad reads
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on the audio side of things,
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and on YouTube, going straight to the conversation.
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So not doing the full ad reads.
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And as always, no ads in the middle,
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because to me, they get in the way of the conversation.
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So, quick mention of the sponsors.
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First, SEMrush, the most advanced
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SEO optimization tool I've ever come across.
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I don't like looking at numbers,
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but someone probably should.
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It helps you make good decisions.
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Second sponsor is DoorDash, food delivery service
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that I've used for many years
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to fuel long, uninterrupted sessions of deep work
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at Google, MIT, and I still use it a lot today.
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Third sponsor is Masterclass, online courses
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from the best people in the world
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on each of the topics covered,
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from rockets, to game design, to poker,
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to writing, and to guitar with Carlos Santana.
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Please check out these sponsors in the description
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that I hope to have
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some conversations with political thinkers,
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including liberals and conservatives,
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anarchists, libertarians, objectivists,
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and everything in between.
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I'm as allergic to Trump bashing and Trump worship
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as you probably are.
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I have none of that in me.
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I really work hard to be open minded
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and let my curiosity drive the conversation.
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I do plead with you to be patient on two counts.
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First, I have an intense, busy life
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outside of these podcasts.
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Like it's 4 a.m. right now as I'm recording this.
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So sometimes life affects these conversations,
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like in this case, I pull an all nighter beforehand.
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So please be patient with me if I say something
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inelegant, confusing, dumb, or just plain wrong.
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I'll try to correct myself on social media
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or in future conversations as much as I can.
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I really am always learning and working hard to improve.
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Second, if I or the guest says something about,
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for example, our current president, Donald Trump,
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that's over the top negative or over the top positive,
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please don't let your brain go into the partisan mode.
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Try to hear our words in an open minded nuanced way.
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And if we say stuff from a place of emotion,
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please give us a pass.
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Nuanced conversation can only happen
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if we're patient with each other.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review the Five Stars and Apple podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Michael Malice.
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There was a Simpsons episode where he starts mixing
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like sleeping pills with like pet pills
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and he's driving his truck and I'm like,
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I wanna see what happens if he mixed Red Bull
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and Nitra cold brew.
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There's a lineup of drugs.
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This is gonna be so fun.
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Yeah, let's start with love.
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Yeah, so one thing we'll eventually somehow talk about,
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it'll be a theme throughout, is that you're also Russian.
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Yes.
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A little bit less than me, but.
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How, why?
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Cause I'm from Ukraine.
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Oh, you're from Ukraine?
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From above.
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Okay, wow.
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No, because you came here a little bit
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when you were younger.
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Yeah.
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I came here when I was 13,
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so I saturated a little bit of the Russian soul.
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I marinated in the Russian soul a little deeper.
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I haven't told anyone this,
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but I'll be glad to tell you, Davidish.
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I haven't been back since I was two.
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And next summer, it looks like me and my buddy,
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Chris Williamson, who's also a podcaster,
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he's British, Modern Wisdom, he looks like Apollo.
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Looks like we got a videographer.
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Which Apollo?
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Apollo Creed?
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The god, he looks like the god Apollo.
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Yeah, he's like a model.
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I thought you were talking about Rocky.
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So, we're gonna go for the first time
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to see where I came from.
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Which is in Ukraine.
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We're gonna go to Lvov and either St. Petersburg or Moscow,
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probably St. Petersburg, or both.
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It's gonna be intense.
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It's gonna be a lot of panic attacks, I feel.
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And your Russian is okay?
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Yeah.
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How do you think?
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Good?
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Do you understand?
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No, you can't talk Russian in Ukraine,
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or it's like they get offended.
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Yeah, but then you also wanna go to Russia.
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Yeah.
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I don't know.
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For me, there's several people in Russia
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I wanna interview on a podcast.
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So, one of them is Gagarin Perlman,
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which is a mathematician, and the other person is Putin.
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You know what my favorite Putin story is?
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Do you know this?
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No.
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When he had Merkel with him, do you know this story?
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No.
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Merkel's scared of dogs, like petrified of dogs.
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So, he brings in his like black lab.
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It's a Labrador, it's like the sweetest animal,
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and it's all over her, and there's pictures,
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and she's sitting like this, and she's terrified,
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and he's like, what's wrong, Angela?
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He's just completely trolling her.
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Yeah, he's aware of the sort of the narrative around him.
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Yeah.
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And then he plays with it.
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Yes.
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He enjoys it.
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It's a very Russian thing.
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My friend wanted to do a film about me.
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He goes, I realized you guys aren't like us at all.
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You're just like, look at us,
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and then I started telling him stories
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about the upbringing, and he's like, oh my God,
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and as I'm telling them, I'm like,
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wow, this stuff is really crazy, like how we are wired.
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Who's the we?
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Your friend is?
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The Russian, the friend's American.
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I'm saying the way Russians are brought up,
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and the way, maybe, I don't think it was just my family.
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I bet you had similar things.
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Here's an example.
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I was, I had a buddy staying with me.
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He had a problem with his roommate,
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so he crashed at my place, fine.
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I went to the gym, and I come back,
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and he goes, oh, there was,
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and my apartment building is four four apartments,
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so it's not like a huge thing.
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He goes, oh, there was someone knocking at your door,
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so I told him blah blah, and for me,
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and I wonder if you're the same way,
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if I'm at someone's house that's not my own,
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and someone knocks on the door,
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I wouldn't even think to answer it.
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Like if I had an apple here, maybe I'd eat it,
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I'd cut it, whatever.
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I'm not gonna, it just doesn't enter my head
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to smash into my face.
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The thought of answering the door, if it's not my house,
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it would never enter my head.
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Would it enter your head?
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No, but why?
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But he's an American, so someone's at the door.
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He goes and opens it, even though it's not his house.
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I would never do that.
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I would never think to do that.
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That is so strange that you pick some very obscure thing
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to delineate Americans and Russians.
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I don't think that's obscure,
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because I think it speaks to how we perceive strangers.
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With Americans, everyone's friendly,
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and with us, it's like, no, no, you have that moat,
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and I think that percolates into many different aspects
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of how we relate to people, and I have to undo a lot of that.
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That's true.
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You're right, there's the relationship I formed there
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where in Russia, we're very deep and close,
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and then there's the strangers, the other,
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that you don't trust by default.
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It takes a long time to go over the moat of trust.
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For a long time, until recently,
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whenever I said anything to anyone,
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my brain ran a scan that said, if this person turns on you,
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would this, can they use this against you?
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And I would do this with everything I said with strangers,
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and after a while, it's like, you know what?
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Maybe they will, but I'm strong enough to take it,
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but this is not how Americans think.
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Or here's another one.
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Let me ask you this.
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Sorry, I'm taking over the interview.
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People ask about advice for work, right?
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Like I had this, there was this party I went to,
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and basically everyone had their own problems,
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and everyone else gave their advice, right?
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And someone's having a problem with a coworker,
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and the advice these Tupoy Americans gave them is,
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oh, sit down and have a talk with them.
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And to me, this is like the last case, last resort.
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Like first, you have to see what you can
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without showing your hand, showing your vulnerability,
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only when everything hasn't worked out,
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or you're like, all right, let me sit down with you
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and try to have it out with you, probably.
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But for them, the first thing is like, sit down and be like,
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oh, you're causing me problems, blah, blah, blah.
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So I perceive that right away as a threat,
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that this person sees an antagonism between us,
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and also as a weakness that I'm getting to them.
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So my reaction isn't how do I make it better?
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My reaction is to reinforce my position
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and see what I can to marginalize them, usually.
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I haven't worked in a corporate setting in a long time.
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But it's not, I don't approach it the way an American would.
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Like, I'm glad you came and talked to me.
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Now I probably would, because it's gonna be a friend.
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So you attribute that to the Russian upbringing,
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as opposed to you have deep psychological issues.
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I think those are synonymous, don't you?
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Wait, would you think differently, maybe a few years ago?
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I don't know, I think you lost me at the,
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because you kind of said that,
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you're kind of implying you have a deep distrust
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of the world, like the world is.
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I think the default setting would be distrust, yeah.
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But I would put it differently,
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is I almost ignore the rest of the world,
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I don't even acknowledge it, I just savor,
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I save my love and trust for the small circle of people.
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I agree, but when that person is being confrontational,
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or as they perceive it, as being open,
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now there's a situation, how would you handle that?
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Like a cold wind blows, you just kind of like.
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Yeah, but it's not like this is an opportunity
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for us to work out our differences, it's a cold wind.
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It's not a hug, that's my point.
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Americans think it's a hug, a cold wind.
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You're so suspicious, what it really is, is a cold wind.
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I'm so humane, it's not something to be scared of,
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it's a cold wind, it's a good person.
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But it's not, this is great, but it's not a source of,
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like I'm not suspicious of, like I'm not anxious,
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I would say, or like living in fear
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of the rest of the world, I'm more.
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Oh, I agree, but you're not receptive to that person.
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That's all I'm saying, and they are.
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Got it, so speaking of which, let's talk about love.
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Which requires to be receptive of the world, of strangers.
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How do we put more love out there in the world,
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especially on the internet?
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One mechanism I have found to increase love,
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and that's a word that has many meanings
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and is used in a very intense sense
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and is used in a very loose sense.
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Can you try to define love?
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Sure, love is a strong sense of attraction
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toward another person, entity, or place
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that causes one to tend to react
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in a disproportionately positive manner.
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That's off the top of my head.
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Disproportionately.
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Yes, so for example, if you.
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Why not proportionately?
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Because if someone's about to, who you love,
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is about to get harmed, you're moving heaven and earth
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to make sure, or like a book you love.
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I love this book, like you're going through the fire
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to try to save it, whereas if it's a book you really like,
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it's like, oh, I'll get another one.
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And a book's kind of a loose example, but.
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So you're going with the love that's like,
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you're saving for just a few people,
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almost like romantical, like love for a close family.
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But what about just love to even the broader,
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like the kind of love you can put out
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to people on the internet, which is like just kindness.
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Sure, I would say in that case,
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it's important to make them feel seen and validated.
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And I try to do this when people who I have come to know
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on the internet, and there's a lot,
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I try to do that as much as possible
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because I don't think it's valid
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how on social media, and I do this a lot myself,
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but not towards everyone,
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it's just there to be aggressive and antagonistic.
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You should be antagonistic towards bad people,
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and that's fine, but at the same time,
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there's lots of great people.
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And especially with my audience,
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and I would bet disproportionately with yours,
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there's lots of people who are,
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because of their psychology and intelligence,
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are going to be much more isolated socially than they should.
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And if I, and I've heard from many of them,
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and if I'm the person who makes them feel,
link |
00:13:21.180
oh, I'm not crazy, it's everyone else around me
link |
00:13:24.180
who is just basic, the fact that I can be that person,
link |
00:13:27.700
which I didn't have at their age,
link |
00:13:29.520
to me is incredibly reaffirming.
link |
00:13:32.460
You mean that source of love?
link |
00:13:34.100
But I mean love in the sense of like,
link |
00:13:36.140
you know, you care about this person
link |
00:13:37.700
and you want good things for them,
link |
00:13:38.760
not in a kind of romantic way.
link |
00:13:40.140
But I mean, you're using it in a broad sense now.
link |
00:13:42.460
Yeah, but you're also a person who kind of,
link |
00:13:44.900
I mean, attacks the power structures in the world
link |
00:13:52.060
by mocking them effectively.
link |
00:13:54.740
And love, I would say, requires you to be
link |
00:14:00.780
non witty and simple and fragile,
link |
00:14:04.660
which I see it as like the opposite of what trolls do.
link |
00:14:08.220
Trolls are, if there is someone coming after what I love,
link |
00:14:15.220
there's two mechanisms, right, at least two.
link |
00:14:18.740
I go up and I'm fighting them,
link |
00:14:20.780
and in which case you are getting hurt in a knife fight,
link |
00:14:24.660
even if you win the knife fight,
link |
00:14:26.420
or if you disarm them and you preclude
link |
00:14:30.100
the possibility of a fight and you drive them off
link |
00:14:32.420
or render them powerless,
link |
00:14:34.100
you keep your person intact as yourself
link |
00:14:37.860
and you also protect your values.
link |
00:14:39.660
So how do you render them powerless?
link |
00:14:41.660
As you just said, by mocking them.
link |
00:14:43.220
One of the most effective mechanisms for those in power,
link |
00:14:46.300
we're much closer to Brave New World than 1984.
link |
00:14:48.980
The people who are dominant and in power
link |
00:14:51.060
aren't there because of the threat of the gulag or prison.
link |
00:14:54.700
They're there because of social pressures.
link |
00:14:56.420
Look at the masks.
link |
00:14:57.960
I was on the subway not that long ago in New York City.
link |
00:15:01.560
No one cared who I was until I put off the mask.
link |
00:15:04.060
I was in the subway that long in New York City.
link |
00:15:06.100
And I put this on my Instagram.
link |
00:15:07.140
I've told this story before.
link |
00:15:08.300
There was an Asian dude in his early 30s.
link |
00:15:10.100
He was like in Western clothes.
link |
00:15:11.380
It's not like he had a rickshaw or something.
link |
00:15:13.420
An older man in his 50s stood up over him on the subway,
link |
00:15:16.860
screamed at him, said, go back where you came from.
link |
00:15:20.440
You're disgusting.
link |
00:15:21.280
I'm gonna get sick.
link |
00:15:22.220
If you think this guy is a vector of disease,
link |
00:15:23.920
which is your prerogative, why are you coming close to him?
link |
00:15:25.820
Why are you getting in his face?
link |
00:15:27.380
And what?
link |
00:15:28.380
Sorry, so it was because he was Asian?
link |
00:15:32.100
It was both.
link |
00:15:32.940
It was the not having a mask gave him the permission
link |
00:15:37.580
to act like a despicable, aggressive person toward him.
link |
00:15:41.180
And the point being, a lot of these mechanisms
link |
00:15:44.980
for social control are outsourced to low quality people
link |
00:15:49.260
because this is their one chance
link |
00:15:50.620
to assert dominance and status over somebody else.
link |
00:15:53.240
So the best way to diffuse that
link |
00:15:54.940
isn't with weaponry or fighting.
link |
00:15:56.820
It's through mockery because all of a sudden,
link |
00:15:58.980
their claims to authority are effectively destroyed.
link |
00:16:01.760
So let me push back on that.
link |
00:16:02.980
What about fighting that with love,
link |
00:16:06.940
with patience and kindness towards them?
link |
00:16:10.940
I don't think kindness is,
link |
00:16:12.860
I think that would be a mismatch and inappropriate.
link |
00:16:16.060
There's Superman, there's Batman, okay?
link |
00:16:18.180
And Superman's job is to help the good people
link |
00:16:20.020
and Batman's job is to hurt the bad people.
link |
00:16:22.120
And I will always be on the Batman side
link |
00:16:25.200
than the Superman side.
link |
00:16:27.340
Both work silly tight costumes.
link |
00:16:29.880
One has pointy ears.
link |
00:16:31.660
Both are ridiculous, so let's.
link |
00:16:33.460
One's a billionaire who gets, he's swimming in trim.
link |
00:16:36.220
Which one is a billionaire? Batman.
link |
00:16:37.900
Okay, I'm undereducated on the superhero movies,
link |
00:16:42.900
I apologize.
link |
00:16:44.420
Okay, but you're just saying your predisposition
link |
00:16:48.260
is to be on the Batman side,
link |
00:16:50.540
is to fighting the bad guys.
link |
00:16:54.660
Yeah, and it's what I'm good at.
link |
00:16:57.340
That's what you're good at.
link |
00:16:58.540
But just to play devil's advocate,
link |
00:17:02.500
or actually, in this case, I am the devil
link |
00:17:04.580
because it's what I usually do.
link |
00:17:06.380
Well, I'm the devil, you're the angel's advocate.
link |
00:17:08.460
Exactly, to be the angel advocate, yeah.
link |
00:17:12.280
Is like, I feel like mockery
link |
00:17:17.820
is a path towards escalation of conflict.
link |
00:17:20.380
Yes, in many ways, yes.
link |
00:17:22.100
So you're not, I mean,
link |
00:17:25.000
it's kind of like guerrilla warfare.
link |
00:17:28.520
I mean, you're not going to win.
link |
00:17:31.440
I am winning, we're all winning.
link |
00:17:32.760
We're winning on a daily.
link |
00:17:33.900
This is my next book, we're winning.
link |
00:17:35.680
We've won before, I'm not joking.
link |
00:17:37.400
The topic of the next book.
link |
00:17:39.040
Yes, it's the white pill.
link |
00:17:40.600
The white pill.
link |
00:17:41.440
Is that we're gonna, we are winning.
link |
00:17:43.660
The most horrible people are being rendered
link |
00:17:46.300
into laughing stocks on a daily basis on social media.
link |
00:17:49.080
This is a glorious thing.
link |
00:17:49.920
This is good, I so disagree with you.
link |
00:17:52.120
I disagree with you because there's side effects
link |
00:17:54.120
that are very destructive.
link |
00:17:55.940
It feels like you're winning,
link |
00:17:57.520
but we're completely destroying the possibility
link |
00:18:00.360
of having like a cohesive society.
link |
00:18:04.640
That's called oncology.
link |
00:18:06.720
What's that mean?
link |
00:18:07.840
Curing cancer.
link |
00:18:09.060
No, I, yeah.
link |
00:18:09.900
Your concept of a cohesive society is, in fact,
link |
00:18:12.880
a society based on oppression
link |
00:18:15.720
and not allowing individuals to live their personal freedom.
link |
00:18:20.120
Oh, so you're a utopian view of the world.
link |
00:18:22.520
You're the utopian.
link |
00:18:23.420
You're saying cohesive society.
link |
00:18:24.760
I'm saying I don't need that.
link |
00:18:25.820
I'm saying there's gonna be conflict.
link |
00:18:27.620
Right, there's gonna be conflict.
link |
00:18:29.120
You and I are disagreeing right now.
link |
00:18:30.320
That's not cohesive.
link |
00:18:31.360
Doesn't mean we like each other less.
link |
00:18:32.600
Doesn't mean we respect each other less.
link |
00:18:34.520
Cohesive doesn't, it's just a euphemism
link |
00:18:37.040
for like everyone submitting to what I want.
link |
00:18:39.960
No, I mean, cohesive could be that.
link |
00:18:43.720
It could be like enforced with violence,
link |
00:18:48.160
all that kind of stuff,
link |
00:18:49.000
sort of the libertarian view of the world,
link |
00:18:53.200
but it could just be being respectful
link |
00:18:57.240
and kind of each other and kind towards each other
link |
00:19:00.400
and loving towards each other.
link |
00:19:02.660
I mean, that's what I mean by cohesive.
link |
00:19:04.620
So when people say free, it's funny.
link |
00:19:07.600
Like freedom is a funny thing
link |
00:19:10.000
because freedom could be painful to a lot of people.
link |
00:19:15.940
It's all matters how you define it,
link |
00:19:18.000
how you implement it, how it actually looks like.
link |
00:19:20.280
Sure.
link |
00:19:21.120
I'm just saying it feels like the mockery
link |
00:19:26.880
of the powerful leads to further and further divisions.
link |
00:19:31.460
It's like it's turning life into a game
link |
00:19:36.360
to where it's always you're creating
link |
00:19:40.280
these different little tribes and groups
link |
00:19:43.040
and you're constantly fighting the groups
link |
00:19:48.340
that become a little bit more powerful
link |
00:19:50.280
by undercutting them through guerrilla warfare kind of thing.
link |
00:19:53.400
And that's what the internet becomes
link |
00:19:54.920
is everyone's just mocking each other
link |
00:19:56.760
and then certain groups become more and more powerful
link |
00:19:59.240
and then they start fighting each other
link |
00:20:01.840
and they form groups of ideologies
link |
00:20:05.600
and they start fighting each other in the internet
link |
00:20:07.560
where the result is it doesn't feel like
link |
00:20:12.440
the common humanities highlighted.
link |
00:20:14.600
It doesn't feel like that's a path of progress.
link |
00:20:19.360
Now, like when I say cohesive,
link |
00:20:21.400
I don't mean like everybody has to be enforcing equality,
link |
00:20:25.840
all those kinds of ideas.
link |
00:20:27.240
I just mean like not being so divisive.
link |
00:20:31.920
So it's going back to the original question of like,
link |
00:20:34.440
how do we put more love out in the world than the internet?
link |
00:20:37.440
I want divisiveness.
link |
00:20:39.780
Oh, you see, you think divisiveness is that?
link |
00:20:41.120
That's the goal.
link |
00:20:41.960
That's very interesting.
link |
00:20:42.780
It's the goal.
link |
00:20:43.620
So you started this conversation
link |
00:20:44.920
where you're talking about you have love
link |
00:20:46.100
for that small group.
link |
00:20:47.440
I think we both would agree to have a bigger group
link |
00:20:50.240
would be better,
link |
00:20:51.080
especially if that love comes from a sincere place.
link |
00:20:53.560
I think our country,
link |
00:20:56.400
I wrote an article about this four years ago
link |
00:20:57.680
that it's time to disunite the states and to secede.
link |
00:21:00.900
This country has been held together
link |
00:21:02.280
with at least two separate cultures
link |
00:21:04.160
with dumb text and string for over 20 years.
link |
00:21:06.800
There's an enormous amount of contempt
link |
00:21:08.800
from one group toward another.
link |
00:21:10.800
This contempt comes from a sincere place.
link |
00:21:12.880
They do not share each other's values.
link |
00:21:14.900
There's absolutely no reason,
link |
00:21:16.680
just like any unhealthy relationship
link |
00:21:18.360
where you can't say, you know what?
link |
00:21:19.640
It's not working out.
link |
00:21:20.960
I want to go my own way and live my happiness.
link |
00:21:24.400
And I genuinely want you to go your way,
link |
00:21:26.440
live your happiness.
link |
00:21:27.360
If I'm wrong, prove me wrong.
link |
00:21:28.800
I'll learn from you and take lessons and vice versa.
link |
00:21:31.860
But the fact that we all have to be
link |
00:21:33.320
in the same house together is not coherent.
link |
00:21:35.680
And that's not love.
link |
00:21:36.500
That is the path towards friction and tension and conflict.
link |
00:21:40.700
Do you think there's concrete groups?
link |
00:21:43.960
Like is it as simple as the two groups of blue and red?
link |
00:21:47.040
No, it's also very fluid
link |
00:21:49.920
because you and I are allied as Jewish people,
link |
00:21:53.560
as Russians, as males, as podcasters.
link |
00:21:57.040
You're an academic, I'm not.
link |
00:21:58.560
So we're different, but we each are a Venn diagram,
link |
00:22:02.800
even within ourselves.
link |
00:22:04.440
And I can talk to you about politics
link |
00:22:07.000
and then we can talk about Russia stuff.
link |
00:22:08.640
And then you could talk about your work,
link |
00:22:10.840
which I don't know anything about.
link |
00:22:12.100
So that'd be where you're way up here and a way down here.
link |
00:22:14.400
So there's lots, every relationship
link |
00:22:16.280
with just between individuals, it's very dynamic.
link |
00:22:18.920
So how do we succeed?
link |
00:22:20.640
Like how do we form individual states
link |
00:22:22.640
where there's a little bit more cohesion?
link |
00:22:25.900
Sure, and voluntary cohesion.
link |
00:22:27.720
So the first step is to eliminate
link |
00:22:31.600
and the concept of political authority as legitimate
link |
00:22:35.360
and to denigrate and humiliate those
link |
00:22:38.200
who would put themselves in a position
link |
00:22:40.800
in which they are there to tell you how to live your life
link |
00:22:44.200
from any semblance of validity.
link |
00:22:46.600
And that's starting to happen.
link |
00:22:48.440
If you look at what they had with the lockdowns,
link |
00:22:50.680
Cuomo and de Blasio, New York,
link |
00:22:53.320
I was tired a couple of weeks ago.
link |
00:22:56.000
And I said to my friend, oh, just click, maybe I have COVID.
link |
00:22:58.440
And he goes, it's not possible, like what do you mean?
link |
00:23:00.640
And he goes, we haven't had any deaths in like two months.
link |
00:23:04.780
And there's only like 100 cases a day for like two months.
link |
00:23:08.080
And I go, you're exaggerating
link |
00:23:09.300
because everything was still closed.
link |
00:23:11.040
And I looked at the numbers and he wasn't exaggerating.
link |
00:23:13.900
And there's no greater American dream to me
link |
00:23:16.880
than an immigrant family comes to the states,
link |
00:23:19.920
forms their own little business.
link |
00:23:21.820
Maybe mom's a good cook, it's a restaurant,
link |
00:23:23.420
dry cleaner, fruit stand.
link |
00:23:25.260
And those people aren't gonna have a lot of money.
link |
00:23:27.980
Those are the first ones who lost their companies
link |
00:23:30.320
because of these lockdowns.
link |
00:23:33.600
Cuomo, who's the governor of New York,
link |
00:23:35.160
opened up the gyms, he said, you're clear to open up.
link |
00:23:38.080
De Blasio said, and we don't have enough inspectors,
link |
00:23:40.340
you're gonna have to wait another couple of weeks.
link |
00:23:43.080
To regard that as anything other than literally criminal
link |
00:23:45.880
is something that I am having a hard and harder time
link |
00:23:49.460
wrapping my head around.
link |
00:23:51.120
You said, I mean, that's something
link |
00:23:52.600
I'm deeply worried about as well,
link |
00:23:54.280
which is like thousands, it's actually millions
link |
00:23:58.380
of dreams being crushed, that American dream
link |
00:24:01.280
of starting a business, of running a business.
link |
00:24:03.720
What about all the young people who you and I
link |
00:24:06.240
have in our audiences who are socially isolated at best,
link |
00:24:10.080
and now they can't leave their homes?
link |
00:24:12.840
Isolation and ostracism are things
link |
00:24:15.100
that are very well studied in psychology.
link |
00:24:17.240
These have extreme consequences.
link |
00:24:19.320
I read a book called Ostracism, and this wasn't scientific,
link |
00:24:22.640
but basically the author was a psychiatrist,
link |
00:24:24.400
psychologist, whatever, and he had one of his colleagues,
link |
00:24:26.880
they did an experiment, let's for a week,
link |
00:24:29.080
you ostracize me completely.
link |
00:24:30.600
We know it's an, and he goes, even knowing
link |
00:24:33.040
it's the experiment, the fact that he wouldn't
link |
00:24:34.680
make eye contact with me and the fact that he ignored me
link |
00:24:37.040
had an extreme emotional impact on me,
link |
00:24:40.880
knowing full well this is purely for experimental purposes.
link |
00:24:44.020
Now you multiply that by all these, the suicide,
link |
00:24:46.360
the number of kids who were thinking about suicide
link |
00:24:48.000
was through the roof during all this.
link |
00:24:50.160
And my point is, until these people,
link |
00:24:53.300
it's gonna, I would predict like 2024,
link |
00:24:55.800
that's where we're gonna have to start having conversations
link |
00:24:57.840
about what personal consequences have to be done
link |
00:25:00.140
for these people, because until then,
link |
00:25:01.720
they're gonna do the same thing.
link |
00:25:03.400
So you think there's going to be society wide consequences
link |
00:25:06.120
of this that we're gonna see, like ripple effects,
link |
00:25:08.800
because of the social isolation?
link |
00:25:10.440
I know, I mean, we also need to talk about consequences
link |
00:25:13.280
for Cuomo and de Blasio, because if politicians
link |
00:25:16.440
respond to incentives, and the incentives are there
link |
00:25:18.820
for them to be extremely conservative,
link |
00:25:20.800
because if you have to choose, as Cuomo said
link |
00:25:22.560
in a press conference, between a thousand people dying
link |
00:25:25.160
and a thousand people losing their business,
link |
00:25:26.480
it's not a hard choice, and he's right.
link |
00:25:28.360
But at a certain point, it's like, all right,
link |
00:25:30.860
you're losing both, you're making these decisions
link |
00:25:35.120
and not having consequences for it,
link |
00:25:36.900
and you're gonna do it again the next time,
link |
00:25:38.740
so we need to make sure you're a little scared.
link |
00:25:41.200
And I don't know what that would mean.
link |
00:25:42.880
But you're laying this problem, this incompetence.
link |
00:25:48.920
I don't think it's incompetence,
link |
00:25:50.080
I think it's very competent.
link |
00:25:51.720
I think their job is to be able, yes.
link |
00:25:54.600
But you're laying it not at the hands of the individuals,
link |
00:25:59.000
but the structure of government.
link |
00:26:01.400
It's both, yes.
link |
00:26:03.360
How would we deal with it better
link |
00:26:05.760
without centralized control?
link |
00:26:07.980
Well, we didn't really have centralized control,
link |
00:26:09.440
because every country and every state
link |
00:26:11.160
handled it in a different mechanism.
link |
00:26:12.840
But a city has centralized control, right?
link |
00:26:16.240
No, that's not true.
link |
00:26:17.080
So Cuomo and de Blasio, they had a lot of disagreements
link |
00:26:19.400
over this over the months, and this was actually
link |
00:26:21.200
a source of great interest and tension.
link |
00:26:23.520
De Blasio wanted, at one point, was talking about
link |
00:26:26.160
quarantining people in their homes.
link |
00:26:27.840
Cuomo was like, you're crazy.
link |
00:26:29.920
Same thing with the schools, same thing with the gyms,
link |
00:26:33.040
and there were other such examples.
link |
00:26:35.840
But the point being, this was an emergency.
link |
00:26:38.240
World War I, I talked about this on Tim Poole's show,
link |
00:26:41.920
was very dangerous, because it gave a lot of evil people
link |
00:26:45.680
some very useful information about what the country
link |
00:26:48.160
put up with and what they can get away with under wartime.
link |
00:26:51.160
And this set the model for things like the New Deal
link |
00:26:53.680
and the other things of that nature.
link |
00:26:55.880
It is undeniable, you're a scientist,
link |
00:26:57.480
so you understand this perfectly well,
link |
00:27:00.240
that this lockdown gave some very nefarious people
link |
00:27:04.080
some very valid data about how much people
link |
00:27:07.440
were put up with under pressures from the state.
link |
00:27:13.320
So fundamentally, what is the problem with the state?
link |
00:27:16.120
Its existence.
link |
00:27:17.240
Okay, well, but to play angel's advocate again,
link |
00:27:22.240
angel's advocate again, you know,
link |
00:27:25.120
government is the people.
link |
00:27:28.200
Come on, do you really think this?
link |
00:27:31.880
As best I think as possible to have representation.
link |
00:27:35.560
Can you imagine if you have an attorney?
link |
00:27:37.200
You're like, oh, you can't have the attorney you want.
link |
00:27:38.760
You're gonna have this guy who you absolutely hate
link |
00:27:40.240
who you share no values with, why?
link |
00:27:42.320
Because he drives, I mean, leaders, political leaders,
link |
00:27:45.280
and political representation drive the discourse.
link |
00:27:48.240
Like the majority of people voted for him or whatever,
link |
00:27:53.000
however you define that.
link |
00:27:55.040
And now we get to have a discussion,
link |
00:27:58.560
well, was this the right choice?
link |
00:28:01.120
And then we get to make that choice again
link |
00:28:02.720
in four years and so on.
link |
00:28:04.080
First of all, the fact that I have to be under the thumb
link |
00:28:06.640
of somebody for four years makes no sense.
link |
00:28:09.160
There's no other relationship that's like this,
link |
00:28:10.680
including a marriage.
link |
00:28:12.200
You can leave any other relationship at any time,
link |
00:28:14.440
number one.
link |
00:28:15.320
Number two is.
link |
00:28:16.160
You could always impeach.
link |
00:28:17.480
Well, they did that.
link |
00:28:18.320
Part of it I'm just saying that the mechanisms
link |
00:28:22.520
are flawed in many ways, yeah.
link |
00:28:24.400
Yeah, right, and so that's number one.
link |
00:28:26.960
Number two is it doesn't make sense
link |
00:28:29.720
that if I don't want someone to represent me
link |
00:28:32.880
that because that person is popular
link |
00:28:35.240
that they are now in a position to.
link |
00:28:36.600
So having representation and having citizenship
link |
00:28:40.600
based on geography is a prelandline technology
link |
00:28:44.320
in a post cell phone world.
link |
00:28:45.840
There's no reason why I have to,
link |
00:28:48.080
just because we're physically in between two oceans,
link |
00:28:50.760
we all have to be represented by the same people,
link |
00:28:52.960
whereas I can very easily have my security
link |
00:28:55.500
be under someone and switch it as easily
link |
00:28:57.480
as cell phone providers.
link |
00:28:58.720
So, okay, but it doesn't have to be geographical.
link |
00:29:01.080
It can be ideas.
link |
00:29:02.600
Sure.
link |
00:29:03.440
I mean, this country represents a certain set of ideas.
link |
00:29:05.280
Yes, it does.
link |
00:29:06.120
It started out geographically.
link |
00:29:07.680
It still is geographic.
link |
00:29:08.520
It was both.
link |
00:29:09.360
It started off as ideas as well.
link |
00:29:10.200
But like, it was intricately.
link |
00:29:12.520
I mean, that's the way humans are.
link |
00:29:14.640
I mean, there was no internet.
link |
00:29:17.120
So it was, you were geographically in the same location
link |
00:29:19.760
and you signed a bunch of documents
link |
00:29:21.160
and then you kind of debated
link |
00:29:22.520
and you wrote a bunch of stuff
link |
00:29:24.500
and then you agreed on it.
link |
00:29:26.480
Okay.
link |
00:29:27.320
You understand that no one signed these documents
link |
00:29:29.480
and no one agreed to it.
link |
00:29:30.680
As Lysander Spooner pointed out over 150 years ago,
link |
00:29:33.760
the constitution or the social contract, if anything,
link |
00:29:36.760
is only binding to the signatories.
link |
00:29:38.940
And even then they're all long dead.
link |
00:29:41.440
So it's this fallacy that somehow,
link |
00:29:43.700
because I'm in a physical place,
link |
00:29:45.880
I've agreed, even though I'm screaming through your face
link |
00:29:48.500
that I don't agree,
link |
00:29:49.560
to be subordinate to some imaginary, invisible monster
link |
00:29:54.440
that was created 250 years ago.
link |
00:29:56.280
And this idea of like, if you don't like it,
link |
00:29:57.960
you have to move.
link |
00:29:58.800
That's not what freedom means.
link |
00:29:59.920
Freedom means I do what I want, not what you want.
link |
00:30:02.080
So if you don't like it, you move.
link |
00:30:04.520
Okay, just to put some, I don't like words and terms.
link |
00:30:08.280
One, one, one, zero, one, one, one, zero, one.
link |
00:30:09.680
Yeah, exactly.
link |
00:30:10.520
Is that what your language is?
link |
00:30:11.600
It is, I'm translating it all in real time.
link |
00:30:14.520
But would you call the kind of ideas
link |
00:30:18.120
that you're advocating for
link |
00:30:19.960
and we're talking about anarchy?
link |
00:30:21.560
Yes, anarchism, yes.
link |
00:30:23.300
Okay, so let's get into it.
link |
00:30:24.560
Can you try to paint the utopia
link |
00:30:29.640
that an anarchist worldview dreams about?
link |
00:30:33.600
The only people who describe anarchism as utopia
link |
00:30:36.240
are its critics.
link |
00:30:37.520
If I told you right now,
link |
00:30:39.620
and I wish I could say this factually,
link |
00:30:41.240
that I have a cure for cancer,
link |
00:30:42.880
that would not make us a utopia.
link |
00:30:45.200
That would still probably be expensive.
link |
00:30:47.280
We would still have many other diseases.
link |
00:30:49.000
However, we would be fundamentally healthier,
link |
00:30:51.880
happier and better off, all of us.
link |
00:30:55.000
Than democracy.
link |
00:30:56.080
So, sorry, I jumped back from the cancer.
link |
00:30:58.680
No, than democracy or government.
link |
00:31:00.640
So it's only curing one major,
link |
00:31:03.640
major life threatening problem,
link |
00:31:05.560
but in no sense is it a utopia.
link |
00:31:08.120
So what, can we try to answer this question,
link |
00:31:12.120
same question many times,
link |
00:31:13.640
which is what exactly is the problem with democracy?
link |
00:31:17.640
The problem with democracy is that those who need leaders
link |
00:31:19.960
are not qualified to choose them.
link |
00:31:22.640
Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them.
link |
00:31:28.160
So.
link |
00:31:29.080
That's the central problem with democracy.
link |
00:31:30.560
Not all of us need leaders.
link |
00:31:32.400
Right.
link |
00:31:33.240
So, what does it mean to need a leader?
link |
00:31:38.600
Are you saying like people who are actually
link |
00:31:41.360
like free thinkers don't need leaders kind of thing?
link |
00:31:44.240
Sure.
link |
00:31:45.480
That's a good way of working.
link |
00:31:46.520
But like, you don't, okay.
link |
00:31:47.880
So do you acknowledge that there's some value
link |
00:31:51.920
in authority in different subjects?
link |
00:31:56.000
So what that means is,
link |
00:31:57.880
I don't mean authority, somebody who's in control of you,
link |
00:32:00.080
but.
link |
00:32:00.920
But you're doing the definition switch.
link |
00:32:04.120
Because.
link |
00:32:04.960
I am, I am.
link |
00:32:05.800
You're right, you're right.
link |
00:32:06.640
It's unfair.
link |
00:32:07.480
Okay, that was bad.
link |
00:32:08.320
But that's what they do.
link |
00:32:09.160
That's their trick.
link |
00:32:10.040
Yeah.
link |
00:32:10.880
And this is one of the useful things,
link |
00:32:12.240
by the way, that's this total sidebar.
link |
00:32:14.080
If people ask me for advice,
link |
00:32:15.480
I always tell them if you're gonna raise your kids,
link |
00:32:17.000
raise them bilingual.
link |
00:32:18.680
Because I was trilingual by the time I was six
link |
00:32:20.800
and that teaches you to think in concepts.
link |
00:32:23.080
Whereas if you only know one language,
link |
00:32:24.680
you fall for things like this,
link |
00:32:26.120
because using authority in the sense of a policeman
link |
00:32:28.560
and someone has authority in physics,
link |
00:32:30.480
it's the same word.
link |
00:32:31.560
Conceptually, they're extremely different.
link |
00:32:33.520
But if you're only thinking in one language,
link |
00:32:35.480
your brain is going to equate the two.
link |
00:32:37.680
And that's a trap that people
link |
00:32:38.960
who only speak one language have.
link |
00:32:40.240
For sure.
link |
00:32:41.080
But even if you know multiple languages,
link |
00:32:42.800
you can still use the trick of using
link |
00:32:44.520
the worst of your convenience.
link |
00:32:45.680
Yeah, absolutely.
link |
00:32:46.520
To manipulate the conversation.
link |
00:32:48.080
But you weren't trying to do that,
link |
00:32:49.320
but you fell into that.
link |
00:32:50.240
I accidentally did it.
link |
00:32:51.240
Yeah, you're right.
link |
00:32:52.080
We all tend to do that if you only speak one language
link |
00:32:53.960
and think in one language.
link |
00:32:55.000
But if, I guess let me rephrase it.
link |
00:32:57.600
Are you against, do you acknowledge the value
link |
00:33:02.360
of offloading your own effort
link |
00:33:07.040
about a particular thing to somebody else?
link |
00:33:09.280
Absolutely.
link |
00:33:10.120
Like an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor,
link |
00:33:12.880
absolute, a chef, infinite.
link |
00:33:15.080
Isn't that ultimately what a democracy is?
link |
00:33:18.560
No.
link |
00:33:19.400
Broadly defined, like you're basically electing
link |
00:33:21.600
a bunch of authorities.
link |
00:33:22.920
Using the word you in two senses.
link |
00:33:25.080
Using the word you meaning me as an individual,
link |
00:33:26.840
not using you as a mass.
link |
00:33:29.040
Yeah, as a mass, not you as an individual.
link |
00:33:31.520
Right, so I would absolutely want someone
link |
00:33:34.240
to provide for my security.
link |
00:33:35.680
I would absolutely want someone to negotiate with me
link |
00:33:38.160
for foreign power or something like that.
link |
00:33:39.840
That does not mean it has to be predicated
link |
00:33:42.440
and what lots of other people who I do not know
link |
00:33:44.680
and if I do know them, probably would not respect,
link |
00:33:47.280
think about.
link |
00:33:48.160
It's of no moral relevance to me.
link |
00:33:51.600
Nor I to them.
link |
00:33:52.760
So do you think this kind of,
link |
00:33:54.240
there could be a bunch of humans that behave
link |
00:33:57.840
kind of like ants in a distributed way.
link |
00:34:01.440
There could be an emergent behavior in them
link |
00:34:04.880
that results in a stable society.
link |
00:34:06.960
Like isn't that the hope with anarchy
link |
00:34:09.040
is like without an overarching.
link |
00:34:13.320
But ants, I mean ants are the worst example here
link |
00:34:15.600
because ants have a very firm authority.
link |
00:34:17.720
The queen?
link |
00:34:18.560
Yeah, and they're all drones.
link |
00:34:20.560
They're all clones of each other.
link |
00:34:22.360
Yeah, but so if you forget the queen,
link |
00:34:24.880
their behavior, they're all,
link |
00:34:27.600
well from your perspective,
link |
00:34:28.960
from your human intelligent perspective,
link |
00:34:30.760
but from their perspective,
link |
00:34:31.800
they probably see each other as a bunch of individuals.
link |
00:34:33.920
No they don't.
link |
00:34:34.760
Ants are very big on altruism
link |
00:34:36.800
in the sense of self sacrifice.
link |
00:34:40.880
They do not think the individual matters.
link |
00:34:42.440
They routinely kill themselves
link |
00:34:44.800
for the sake of the hive in the community.
link |
00:34:46.840
But they, see that's from the outside perspective,
link |
00:34:49.280
from the individual perspective of the individual,
link |
00:34:51.560
they probably, they don't see it as altruism.
link |
00:34:57.600
Right, but they view and they're right
link |
00:35:00.360
because the ants life is very ephemeral and cheap,
link |
00:35:02.760
that it's more important to continue this mass population
link |
00:35:06.240
that one individual ant live.
link |
00:35:08.720
Like bees are another even better example.
link |
00:35:10.600
The honeybee, when they sting,
link |
00:35:12.040
they only sting once and they die.
link |
00:35:13.720
And they do it gladly because it's like,
link |
00:35:15.440
okay, this community is much more important than me
link |
00:35:18.160
and they're right.
link |
00:35:19.840
Yeah, okay, so fine, let's forget.
link |
00:35:22.280
I'm being pedantic, but it's important, I think.
link |
00:35:24.440
I'm not just being pedantic
link |
00:35:25.440
for the sake of being pedantic.
link |
00:35:26.480
But there's something beautiful that I won't argue about
link |
00:35:29.360
because I do, there's an interesting point there
link |
00:35:31.920
about individualism of ants.
link |
00:35:33.400
I do think they're more individual.
link |
00:35:35.160
But let's give your view of ants that they're communists.
link |
00:35:40.200
Okay, let's go with the communist view of ants.
link |
00:35:42.680
Okay, yeah.
link |
00:35:44.440
But they're still a beautiful emergent thing,
link |
00:35:46.880
which is like they can function as a society
link |
00:35:51.320
and without, I would say, centralized control.
link |
00:35:57.800
Yeah, I agree with you.
link |
00:35:58.640
It's another argument.
link |
00:35:59.480
So is that the hope for anarchy?
link |
00:36:01.040
It's like you just throw a bunch of people
link |
00:36:03.200
that voluntarily wanna be in the same place
link |
00:36:05.520
under the same set of ideas
link |
00:36:06.880
and they kind of, like the doctors emerge,
link |
00:36:10.400
the police officers emerge,
link |
00:36:12.600
the different necessary structures
link |
00:36:15.160
of a functional society emerge.
link |
00:36:17.000
Do you know what the most beautiful example of anarchism is
link |
00:36:20.640
that is just beyond beautiful
link |
00:36:22.520
when you stop to think about it?
link |
00:36:23.360
I'll see Twitter.
link |
00:36:24.240
I'm not being tongue in cheek.
link |
00:36:25.400
Okay.
link |
00:36:26.240
Language.
link |
00:36:28.040
There's infinite languages.
link |
00:36:29.720
Language, the things that language can be used for
link |
00:36:33.040
are bring tears to people's eyes quite literally.
link |
00:36:36.240
It's also used for basic things.
link |
00:36:38.960
No one is forcing us.
link |
00:36:40.200
We speak two languages each at least.
link |
00:36:42.640
No one's forcing us to use English.
link |
00:36:44.440
No one's forcing us to use this dialect of English.
link |
00:36:47.800
It's a way, and despite there being
link |
00:36:50.920
so many different languages, lingua franca emerge,
link |
00:36:54.760
the language that everyone is, Latin.
link |
00:36:56.600
Even in North Korea, they refer to the fish
link |
00:36:59.080
and the different animals by the Latin scientific note.
link |
00:37:02.600
No one decided this.
link |
00:37:03.800
Sure, there's an organization
link |
00:37:05.240
that sets a binomial nomenclature,
link |
00:37:07.280
but there's no gun to anyone's head
link |
00:37:08.920
referring to a sea moth as a Pegasus species.
link |
00:37:13.480
And when you think about how amazing language is,
link |
00:37:16.880
and in some other context would say like,
link |
00:37:18.840
well, you need to have a world government
link |
00:37:21.320
and they're deciding which is the verbs
link |
00:37:23.240
and you have to have an official definition
link |
00:37:25.120
and an official dictionary.
link |
00:37:26.720
And none of that's happened.
link |
00:37:28.120
And I think anyone, even if they don't agree
link |
00:37:30.520
with my politics or my worldview,
link |
00:37:32.840
cannot deny that the creation of language
link |
00:37:35.800
is one of humanity's most miraculous,
link |
00:37:39.080
beautiful achievements.
link |
00:37:40.760
Absolutely.
link |
00:37:41.600
So there you go.
link |
00:37:42.440
There's one system where a kind of anarchy
link |
00:37:45.960
can result in beauty, stability,
link |
00:37:49.560
like sufficient stability,
link |
00:37:50.920
and yet, flexibility to adjust it and so on.
link |
00:37:55.680
And the internet helps it.
link |
00:37:57.680
You get something like Urban Dictionary,
link |
00:38:00.440
which starts creating absurd, both humor and wit.
link |
00:38:05.120
But also language and syntax and jargon,
link |
00:38:07.360
immediately you size people up.
link |
00:38:09.240
If you say vertebral, I know you're a doctor,
link |
00:38:12.080
because that's how they pronounce it, the spinal column.
link |
00:38:15.080
I'm sure in your field, there's certain jargon
link |
00:38:17.200
and right away you can know if this person's one of us
link |
00:38:18.840
or not.
link |
00:38:19.680
I mean, it's infinite.
link |
00:38:20.840
I mean, I don't need to tell you.
link |
00:38:22.280
It's emojis too.
link |
00:38:23.480
Yes, there's so much there to study with language.
link |
00:38:25.640
It's fascinating.
link |
00:38:26.480
But do you think this applies to human life?
link |
00:38:30.320
The meat space, the physical space?
link |
00:38:32.160
Yes.
link |
00:38:33.000
So that kind of beauty can emerge
link |
00:38:35.480
without writing stuff on paper, without laws.
link |
00:38:40.040
You could have rules.
link |
00:38:40.880
You don't need, they don't have to be laws.
link |
00:38:43.280
So.
link |
00:38:44.120
Enforced by violence.
link |
00:38:45.680
Like that's what, what's a law?
link |
00:38:48.160
A law is something that is unchosen.
link |
00:38:50.160
A rule is something.
link |
00:38:51.000
If I go to my pool, you know,
link |
00:38:52.920
I sign up to be a member of pool,
link |
00:38:55.000
on the wall there's certain things.
link |
00:38:56.400
It's like, you know, certain number of people in the pool.
link |
00:38:59.000
No peeing in here.
link |
00:39:00.080
Good luck enforcing that one.
link |
00:39:02.000
And so on and so forth.
link |
00:39:03.080
Well, that's the problem.
link |
00:39:04.080
Aren't you afraid that people are gonna pee in the pool?
link |
00:39:06.920
That's not as my big concern as mass incarceration,
link |
00:39:10.920
as the fact that the police can steal more money
link |
00:39:13.240
than burglars can.
link |
00:39:14.480
The fact that innocent people can be killed
link |
00:39:16.560
with no consequences.
link |
00:39:18.240
The fact that war can be waged
link |
00:39:20.320
and with no consequences for those who waged it.
link |
00:39:24.640
The fact that so many men and women are being murdered
link |
00:39:27.000
overseas and here,
link |
00:39:28.360
and the people who are guiding these are regarded as heroic.
link |
00:39:31.120
So you think there might,
link |
00:39:32.040
that in an anarchist system,
link |
00:39:34.480
there's a possibility of having less wars
link |
00:39:38.600
and less, what would you say, corruption
link |
00:39:42.400
and less abuse of power?
link |
00:39:44.680
Let's talk, yes.
link |
00:39:45.640
And let's talk about corruption
link |
00:39:47.080
because, and I made this point on Rogan,
link |
00:39:49.880
you and I, again, the Russian background,
link |
00:39:51.960
we realize that when it comes to corruption,
link |
00:39:55.160
American is very naive.
link |
00:39:56.880
Corruption they think is, oh, I got my brother a job
link |
00:39:58.960
and he's getting money on the table.
link |
00:40:01.000
That's not, when we're talking about like state corruption,
link |
00:40:04.160
things that are done in totalitarian states
link |
00:40:06.040
and even to some extent in America,
link |
00:40:07.280
like Jeffrey Epstein, Jillian Maxwell,
link |
00:40:09.200
things that Stalin did, things that Hitler did.
link |
00:40:11.640
When the CIA was torturing people at Gitmo,
link |
00:40:14.160
they had to borrow KGB manuals
link |
00:40:16.320
because they didn't know how to torture correctly
link |
00:40:17.720
because they never thought of these things.
link |
00:40:20.040
It's very hard for us to get into the mindset
link |
00:40:23.320
of someone who's like a child predator,
link |
00:40:25.720
someone who, let me give you an example
link |
00:40:27.840
from my forthcoming book.
link |
00:40:28.800
There was a guy who was the head of Ukraine in the 30s,
link |
00:40:31.840
I forget his name.
link |
00:40:33.200
Now these old Soviets, they were tough.
link |
00:40:34.840
I mean, they pride, Stalin means steel.
link |
00:40:36.840
They pride themselves and their cruelty
link |
00:40:39.160
and how strong they were.
link |
00:40:40.720
And this was the purge.
link |
00:40:42.080
Stalin is trying to, killing lots of people left and right
link |
00:40:44.840
and his henchman, Beria had the quote,
link |
00:40:48.320
find me the man and I'll find you the crime.
link |
00:40:50.400
They would accuse someone and they would torture him
link |
00:40:52.840
until he talked and confessed
link |
00:40:54.640
and then he had to turn people in.
link |
00:40:56.480
And they took this guy in like beginning of the year,
link |
00:40:59.200
I think it's 36, 38, he was head of Ukraine.
link |
00:41:01.480
By May, he's arrested.
link |
00:41:02.960
And they take him to the Ljubljanka, the basement
link |
00:41:04.680
in the red square where they're torturing people.
link |
00:41:06.640
And they did the works on him.
link |
00:41:08.440
And he was a good Soviet and he stood up.
link |
00:41:11.120
Who knows what they did to him?
link |
00:41:12.400
He didn't talk.
link |
00:41:13.560
So they said, okay, one moment.
link |
00:41:16.280
They brought his teenage daughter in,
link |
00:41:18.200
raped her in front of him, he talked.
link |
00:41:20.680
So when we talk about corruption,
link |
00:41:24.280
we would never in a million years think of this.
link |
00:41:26.920
That's not how our minds work.
link |
00:41:29.560
So when you're talking about states
link |
00:41:31.960
and people where you don't have ease of exit,
link |
00:41:35.760
where you are forced to be under the auspices
link |
00:41:38.600
of an organization creating a monopoly,
link |
00:41:41.480
that leads to in extreme cases,
link |
00:41:44.440
but in not as extreme cases, really nefarious outcomes.
link |
00:41:49.040
Whereas if you have the option to leave
link |
00:41:53.000
as a client or customer,
link |
00:41:54.880
that would have a strongly limiting effect
link |
00:41:58.040
on how a business and what it can get away with.
link |
00:42:01.440
But don't you think maybe,
link |
00:42:03.200
I don't know who the right example is,
link |
00:42:04.640
whether it's Stalin,
link |
00:42:05.720
I think Hitler might be the better example of,
link |
00:42:08.840
don't you think, or Jeffrey Epstein perhaps,
link |
00:42:12.720
don't you think people who are evil
link |
00:42:15.280
will find ways to manipulate human nature
link |
00:42:20.640
to attain power, no matter the system?
link |
00:42:23.720
Yes.
link |
00:42:24.560
And like the corollary question is,
link |
00:42:27.920
do you think those people can get more power
link |
00:42:31.800
in a democracy, when there's a government already in place?
link |
00:42:37.920
It's easily they get more power, more dangerous
link |
00:42:39.800
to have a government in place.
link |
00:42:40.760
First of all, sociopaths don't know for their charm
link |
00:42:43.040
and for their warmth.
link |
00:42:44.720
Here's the two situations.
link |
00:42:47.120
In a free society, I'm a sociopath, I'm an evil person,
link |
00:42:51.000
I'm the head of Macy's.
link |
00:42:53.040
In a state society, I'm an evil person, I'm a sociopath,
link |
00:42:55.640
I'm the head of the US government.
link |
00:42:57.320
Which of these are you more concerned with?
link |
00:42:59.240
It's like night and day.
link |
00:43:00.560
So you would have far more decentralized military,
link |
00:43:03.320
you would have far more decentralized security forces,
link |
00:43:08.460
and they would be much more subject
link |
00:43:10.120
to feedback from the market.
link |
00:43:11.760
If you have an issue with Macy's
link |
00:43:14.800
or any store with a sweater, look at that transaction.
link |
00:43:18.320
If you have an issue with the state,
link |
00:43:20.880
hiring a lawyer costs more than a surgeon.
link |
00:43:22.880
To even access the mechanism for dispute
link |
00:43:25.640
is going to be exorbitant and price poor people
link |
00:43:27.740
out of the market for conflict resolution immediately.
link |
00:43:30.980
So right away, you have something
link |
00:43:32.240
that's extremely regressive.
link |
00:43:34.640
And even though this is touted as some great equalizer,
link |
00:43:37.520
it's quite the opposite.
link |
00:43:38.780
So in current society, there's deep suspicion
link |
00:43:41.140
of governments and states.
link |
00:43:43.260
Not really.
link |
00:43:44.800
Like just your example of Macy's,
link |
00:43:46.640
I mean, don't you think a Hitler could rise
link |
00:43:49.400
to be at the top of a social network
link |
00:43:51.600
like Twitter and Facebook?
link |
00:43:53.180
Okay, let's suppose Hitler ran Twitter, okay?
link |
00:43:56.320
Let's take this thought experiment seriously.
link |
00:43:58.440
Literally what could he do?
link |
00:43:59.760
So the only tweets are gonna be
link |
00:44:01.240
about how much the Jews suck, right?
link |
00:44:02.760
Okay, fine.
link |
00:44:04.400
Okay, all the cool people are leaving.
link |
00:44:07.040
There could be some compelling,
link |
00:44:09.560
like you said, evil people are charming.
link |
00:44:12.920
There could be some compelling narratives
link |
00:44:14.620
that could be with conspiracy theories, untruths,
link |
00:44:18.920
that could be spread like propaganda.
link |
00:44:22.340
Every criticism of anarchism is in fact a description.
link |
00:44:25.560
Well, the strongest criticism of anarchism
link |
00:44:27.460
are in fact descriptions of status quo.
link |
00:44:29.400
Your concern is, under anarchism, propaganda would spread
link |
00:44:34.160
and people would be taught the wrong ideas,
link |
00:44:36.080
unlike the status quo?
link |
00:44:37.680
That's not even a criticism of anarchism.
link |
00:44:39.960
I'm not actually criticizing.
link |
00:44:41.560
It's an open question of,
link |
00:44:45.720
it's an open question of in which system
link |
00:44:48.360
will human nature be able to thrive more
link |
00:44:54.280
and in which system would the evils
link |
00:44:57.480
that arise in human nature
link |
00:44:59.240
would be more easily suppressible?
link |
00:45:02.000
That's the open question.
link |
00:45:03.320
It's a scientific experiment
link |
00:45:05.000
and I'm asking only from my perspective
link |
00:45:07.280
of the fact that we've tried democracy
link |
00:45:10.400
quite a bit recently and maybe you can correct me,
link |
00:45:14.280
we haven't yet seriously tried anarchy on a large scale.
link |
00:45:18.000
Well, we don't need to try to,
link |
00:45:19.680
so anarchy isn't like a country, right?
link |
00:45:21.520
It's like saying, well, if anarchy works,
link |
00:45:25.320
how come we've never had an anarchist government, right?
link |
00:45:27.280
So anarchism is a relationship
link |
00:45:29.620
and language is an example of this.
link |
00:45:31.140
It's a worldwide anarchic system.
link |
00:45:32.720
You and I have an anarchist relationship.
link |
00:45:34.000
There's almost no circumstances
link |
00:45:35.400
that we'd be calling the police on each other.
link |
00:45:37.720
I mean, I'm asking the same question
link |
00:45:39.880
in a bunch of different directions
link |
00:45:41.720
out of, born out of my curiosity,
link |
00:45:44.360
is why is anarchy going to be better
link |
00:45:49.280
at preventing the darker sides of human nature,
link |
00:45:52.000
which presumably your criticism of government.
link |
00:45:54.720
Because of decentralization.
link |
00:45:56.820
So the darker side of human nature is an extreme concern.
link |
00:46:00.160
Anyone who says it's gonna go away
link |
00:46:01.800
is absurd and fallacious.
link |
00:46:04.120
I think that's a nonstarter
link |
00:46:05.260
when people say that everyone's gonna be good.
link |
00:46:07.220
Human beings are basically animals.
link |
00:46:08.660
We're capable of great beauty and kindness.
link |
00:46:10.840
We're capable of just complete cruel
link |
00:46:13.660
and what we would call inhumanity,
link |
00:46:15.320
but we see it on a daily basis even today.
link |
00:46:17.920
And what's interesting is the corporate press
link |
00:46:21.340
won't even tell you the darkest aspects
link |
00:46:23.680
because that's too upsetting to people.
link |
00:46:25.320
So they'll tell you about atrocities and horrors,
link |
00:46:27.700
but only to a point.
link |
00:46:29.320
And then when you actually do the homework,
link |
00:46:31.020
you're like, oh, it's so much worse than,
link |
00:46:32.600
like that thing about Stalin, right?
link |
00:46:34.120
So we know in a broad sense that Stalin was a dictator.
link |
00:46:38.040
We know that he killed a lot of people,
link |
00:46:41.080
but it takes work to learn about the Holodomor.
link |
00:46:44.040
It takes work to learn about
link |
00:46:45.540
what those literal tortures were
link |
00:46:47.640
and that this is the person who later,
link |
00:46:49.680
FDR and Harry Truman were shaking hands with
link |
00:46:52.320
and taking photos with
link |
00:46:53.360
and was being sold to us as Uncle Joe.
link |
00:46:55.600
He's just like you and me.
link |
00:46:57.820
So when you have a decentralized information network
link |
00:47:03.260
as opposed to having three media networks,
link |
00:47:06.040
it is a lot easier for information
link |
00:47:08.560
that doesn't fit what would be
link |
00:47:09.900
the corporate America narrative to reach the populations.
link |
00:47:13.840
And it would be more effective for democracy
link |
00:47:16.380
because they're in a much better position to be informed.
link |
00:47:18.400
Now, you're right.
link |
00:47:20.220
It also means, well, if everyone has a mic,
link |
00:47:22.260
that means every crazy person and with their wacky views.
link |
00:47:25.560
And at a certain point, yeah, it has to become,
link |
00:47:28.480
then there's another level,
link |
00:47:29.660
which is then the people have to be self enforcing.
link |
00:47:32.120
And you see that in social media all the time
link |
00:47:34.040
where someone says this, the other person jumps in.
link |
00:47:37.240
You think, but isn't social media a good example of this?
link |
00:47:40.600
So you think ultimately without centralized control,
link |
00:47:44.960
you can have stability?
link |
00:47:48.720
What about the mob outrage and the mob rule,
link |
00:47:52.280
the power of the mobs that emerge?
link |
00:47:54.800
Power of the mob is a very serious concern.
link |
00:47:58.720
Gustav Le Bon wrote a book in the 1890s called The Crowd.
link |
00:48:01.480
And this was one of the most important books I've written
link |
00:48:03.440
because it influenced both Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin
link |
00:48:05.960
and they all talked about it.
link |
00:48:07.360
And he made the point that under crowd psychology,
link |
00:48:11.040
human lynching is another example of this.
link |
00:48:13.480
None of those individuals or very few
link |
00:48:16.100
would ever dream of doing these acts.
link |
00:48:19.520
But when they're all together
link |
00:48:21.160
and you lose that sense of self, you become the ant
link |
00:48:23.680
and you lose that sense of individually,
link |
00:48:25.740
you're capable of doing things that like in another context,
link |
00:48:29.120
you'd be like, I should kill myself, I'm a monster.
link |
00:48:32.280
So you're worried about that, but doesn't the mob have more
link |
00:48:36.160
power under anarchy?
link |
00:48:37.560
No, the mob has much less power in anarchy
link |
00:48:39.840
because under anarchism, every individual
link |
00:48:41.880
is fully empowered.
link |
00:48:43.360
You wouldn't have gun restrictions.
link |
00:48:47.960
You would have people creating communities
link |
00:48:50.040
based on shared values.
link |
00:48:51.820
They'd be much more collegial, they'd be much more kind,
link |
00:48:55.000
as opposed to when you're forcing people
link |
00:48:57.520
to be together in a polity
link |
00:48:59.400
when they don't have things in common.
link |
00:49:01.360
That is like having a bad roommate.
link |
00:49:03.720
If you're forced to look like jails,
link |
00:49:06.120
if you're forced to be locked in a room with someone,
link |
00:49:09.920
even if you had first liked them,
link |
00:49:11.480
after a while, you're going to start to hate them
link |
00:49:13.480
and that leads to very nefarious consequences.
link |
00:49:16.800
So as an anarchist, what do you do in a society like this?
link |
00:49:21.160
Thrive.
link |
00:49:22.720
I think I'm doing okay.
link |
00:49:24.720
No, I mean, there's an election coming up.
link |
00:49:29.720
There's, as you talk, You're Welcome
link |
00:49:36.080
is one of the 15 shows that you host.
link |
00:49:40.080
It's down to one.
link |
00:49:44.120
Okay, it's down to one.
link |
00:49:46.020
But I'm a big fan.
link |
00:49:49.440
You talk about libertarianism a little bit.
link |
00:49:52.440
I mean, is there some practical political direction
link |
00:49:57.440
in terms of we as a society should go?
link |
00:50:01.160
I don't mean we as a nation.
link |
00:50:03.000
I mean, we as a collective of people
link |
00:50:04.640
should go to make a better world
link |
00:50:07.520
from an anarchist point of view.
link |
00:50:09.200
Sure, I think politics is the enemy and anything.
link |
00:50:13.680
How do you define politics?
link |
00:50:14.680
The state, the government.
link |
00:50:16.340
So anything that lessens its sway on people,
link |
00:50:19.960
anything that delegitimizes it is good.
link |
00:50:23.440
I wrote an article a few years ago
link |
00:50:25.400
about how wonderful it is that Trump
link |
00:50:27.620
is regarded as such a buffoon
link |
00:50:29.900
because it's very, very useful
link |
00:50:32.080
to have a commander in chief who's regarded as a clown
link |
00:50:35.160
because it's gonna take a lot
link |
00:50:37.280
to get him to convince your kids to go overseas
link |
00:50:39.920
and start killing people and making widows and orphans,
link |
00:50:42.320
as well as those kids coming home in caskets.
link |
00:50:44.440
Whereas if someone is regarded with prestige
link |
00:50:47.200
and they're like, oh, we need to send your kid overseas.
link |
00:50:49.680
Oh, absolutely.
link |
00:50:50.920
I mean, this guy's great.
link |
00:50:52.340
So that is a very healthy thing
link |
00:50:54.440
where people are skeptical of the state.
link |
00:50:57.120
But there's a lot of people that regard him
link |
00:51:01.080
as one of the greatest leaders we've ever had.
link |
00:51:04.640
Yeah, Dinesh D'Souza, he's another Lincoln.
link |
00:51:08.560
When you talk shit about Trump
link |
00:51:10.440
or talk shit about Biden,
link |
00:51:14.840
I'm trying to find a line to walk
link |
00:51:16.840
where they don't immediately put you into
link |
00:51:19.720
this person has Trump derangement syndrome
link |
00:51:21.600
or they have the alternative to that.
link |
00:51:25.240
I'm more than happy
link |
00:51:27.100
when people are preemptively dismissing me
link |
00:51:29.480
because then I don't have to waste time engaging with them
link |
00:51:31.600
because those people would be of no use to me.
link |
00:51:33.640
When I was on Tim Pool recently, Tim Pool's show,
link |
00:51:36.540
Tim Pool's known for his little hat.
link |
00:51:38.740
I got a propeller beanie motorized
link |
00:51:40.520
and it was just spinning the whole two hours.
link |
00:51:42.560
I know, like a 1950s thing.
link |
00:51:44.280
The point being I wore it because there's lots of people
link |
00:51:47.480
who would say, I can't take seriously someone
link |
00:51:50.080
who wears a hat like that.
link |
00:51:51.400
And my point being, if you are the kind of person
link |
00:51:53.640
who takes your cues based on someone's wardrobe
link |
00:51:56.680
as opposed to the content of your ideas,
link |
00:51:58.560
you're of no use to me as an ally.
link |
00:52:01.200
So I'd be more than happy you preemptively abort
link |
00:52:04.600
rather than waste our breath trying to engage.
link |
00:52:07.220
This is a very, very deep thing that you and I disagree on,
link |
00:52:10.200
which is, this goes to the trolling versus the love,
link |
00:52:14.500
is I believe that person instinctually dismisses you
link |
00:52:19.040
on the very basic surface level.
link |
00:52:21.320
But deep down, there's a wealth of a human being
link |
00:52:27.600
that seeks the connection, seeks to understand deeply
link |
00:52:32.320
to connect with other humans that we should speak to.
link |
00:52:36.000
Yeah, you and I completely disagree.
link |
00:52:38.200
See, you're saying.
link |
00:52:40.040
I'm saying there's no mind there literally.
link |
00:52:42.400
Okay, so I naturally think the majority of people
link |
00:52:47.400
have the capacity to be thoughtful, intelligent,
link |
00:52:55.440
and learn about ideas, ideas that they instinctually
link |
00:53:01.960
based on their own current inner circle disagree with
link |
00:53:07.200
and learn to understand, to empathize with the other.
link |
00:53:10.160
And in the current climate,
link |
00:53:13.480
there's a divisiveness that discourages that.
link |
00:53:15.680
And that's where I see the value of love of encouraging
link |
00:53:20.680
people to strip away that surface instinctual response
link |
00:53:27.280
based on the thing they've been taught,
link |
00:53:29.480
based on the things they listen to,
link |
00:53:31.120
to actually think deeply.
link |
00:53:32.560
Have you ever had gone to CVS or Duane Reade
link |
00:53:36.880
and your bill, how much you owe them is $6,
link |
00:53:40.240
and you give them a $10 bill in a single
link |
00:53:42.240
and watch the look on their face?
link |
00:53:44.520
You watch them void their bowels and panic
link |
00:53:46.760
because you've given them $11 on a $6 bill.
link |
00:53:49.600
This is not a mind capable or interested
link |
00:53:52.560
in thoughts and ideas and learning.
link |
00:53:54.280
No, you're talking about the first moment
link |
00:53:57.000
of a first moment where there's an opportunity to think.
link |
00:54:02.440
They are desperate to avoid it.
link |
00:54:05.640
No, they're just, it's.
link |
00:54:07.080
And incapable of it.
link |
00:54:08.720
I just, they have the same exact experiences
link |
00:54:12.480
I have every single day when I know it's time
link |
00:54:15.120
for me to go out on a run of five miles
link |
00:54:18.040
or six miles or 10 miles.
link |
00:54:20.320
I'm desperate to avoid it, and at the same time,
link |
00:54:24.320
I know I have the capacity to do it,
link |
00:54:26.520
and I'm deeply fulfilled when I do do it,
link |
00:54:28.960
when I do overcome that challenge.
link |
00:54:30.360
You are one of the great minds of our generation.
link |
00:54:33.200
You are telling me that any of these people
link |
00:54:35.080
can do anything close to the work you do?
link |
00:54:38.200
Not in artificial intelligence,
link |
00:54:39.800
but in the ability to be compassionate
link |
00:54:45.280
towards other people's ideas,
link |
00:54:48.320
like understand them enough to be able.
link |
00:54:50.440
Passion requires a certain baseline of intelligence,
link |
00:54:53.360
because you have to perceive other people
link |
00:54:54.680
as being different but of value.
link |
00:54:56.040
Yeah, exactly.
link |
00:54:56.880
That's a sophisticated mindset.
link |
00:54:59.520
I think most people are capable of it.
link |
00:55:03.240
You don't think so?
link |
00:55:04.080
No, and nor are they interested in it.
link |
00:55:06.720
But in that kind of,
link |
00:55:08.920
if you don't believe they're capable of it,
link |
00:55:11.760
how can anarchy be stable?
link |
00:55:15.040
If you have a farm, there's one farmer and 50 cows,
link |
00:55:18.200
it's very stable.
link |
00:55:19.480
You're just not, you're not asking the cows
link |
00:55:21.480
where to farm things.
link |
00:55:25.240
Yeah, but the cows aren't intelligent enough to do damage.
link |
00:55:29.560
Cows certainly, bulls,
link |
00:55:31.520
because they could do a lot of damage.
link |
00:55:32.400
They could trample things, they could attack you.
link |
00:55:34.800
Cows are like, how much do they weigh, like 4,000 pounds?
link |
00:55:36.960
Can you connect the analogy then?
link |
00:55:38.480
Because like.
link |
00:55:39.320
Sure, you can't expect that.
link |
00:55:41.120
Yeah.
link |
00:55:41.960
Saying a cow is a cow isn't a slur.
link |
00:55:44.640
It's not saying you hate cows.
link |
00:55:46.000
Cows, or even, let's say,
link |
00:55:47.640
the example I always use with good reason is dogs, okay?
link |
00:55:51.440
I always say to study how human beings operate,
link |
00:55:53.680
watch Cesar Millan,
link |
00:55:55.120
because human beings and dogs have co evolved.
link |
00:55:57.080
Our minds have both evolved in parallel tracks
link |
00:55:59.480
to communicate with each other.
link |
00:56:00.880
Dogs are, can be vicious.
link |
00:56:03.520
Dogs for the most part are great, wonderful,
link |
00:56:06.320
but you can't expect the dog
link |
00:56:08.760
to understand certain concepts.
link |
00:56:11.280
It's not an, and now most people are offended.
link |
00:56:13.040
Are you saying I'm like a dog?
link |
00:56:14.160
If you're a dog person like I am,
link |
00:56:15.880
this is actually a huge compliment.
link |
00:56:17.080
Most dogs are better than most people,
link |
00:56:19.800
but to get the idea that this is something
link |
00:56:22.960
that is basically your peer is nonsensical.
link |
00:56:26.640
Now, of course this sounds arrogant and elitist
link |
00:56:28.400
and so on and so forth,
link |
00:56:29.560
and I'm perfectly happy with that,
link |
00:56:31.320
but it is very hard to persuade me or anyone
link |
00:56:34.480
that if you walk, George Carlin has that joke,
link |
00:56:36.480
think how smart the average person is,
link |
00:56:37.960
then realize 50% of people are dumber than that.
link |
00:56:40.400
If you walk around and see who's out there,
link |
00:56:42.200
these people are very kind.
link |
00:56:43.800
They are of value.
link |
00:56:45.080
They deserve to be treated with respect.
link |
00:56:47.800
They deserve to be secure in their person.
link |
00:56:49.880
They deserve to feel safe and to have love,
link |
00:56:52.840
but the expectation that they should have
link |
00:56:56.360
any sort of semblance of power over me or my life
link |
00:56:59.240
is as nonsensical as asking Lassie to be my accountant.
link |
00:57:03.120
So, but that goes to power,
link |
00:57:05.960
that not to the ability, the capacity
link |
00:57:09.880
to be empathetic, compassionate, intelligent.
link |
00:57:12.880
What, if I were to try to prove you wrong?
link |
00:57:16.160
That's a good question, okay.
link |
00:57:17.880
What would you be impressed by about society?
link |
00:57:24.080
How would I show it to you?
link |
00:57:25.720
That's a good question.
link |
00:57:26.560
How would you show it to me?
link |
00:57:27.400
Because I think something has to be falsifiable
link |
00:57:28.960
if you're gonna make a claim, right?
link |
00:57:30.680
So what would it?
link |
00:57:33.960
Because we both made claims
link |
00:57:35.400
that aren't a kind of our own like interpretation
link |
00:57:39.040
based on our interaction.
link |
00:57:40.760
Like when I opened Twitter, everyone seems to say.
link |
00:57:43.640
Why do you only follow one person?
link |
00:57:44.800
Who do you follow?
link |
00:57:45.640
Who's the one person you follow?
link |
00:57:46.800
Stoic Emperor.
link |
00:57:48.040
I follow a lot of people.
link |
00:57:49.640
I have a script.
link |
00:57:50.640
I have a script that I have an entire interface.
link |
00:57:55.880
So I think Twitter is really.
link |
00:57:58.760
This is real love.
link |
00:57:59.760
It's not ironic love.
link |
00:58:00.920
I love watching it and I'm sure you do too.
link |
00:58:04.200
I love watching a quality mind at work
link |
00:58:06.360
because when someone has a quality mind,
link |
00:58:08.260
they're often not self aware.
link |
00:58:10.360
I catch this on myself of how it operates
link |
00:58:12.780
and then when other people see it,
link |
00:58:13.920
they're like, oh my God, this is so beautiful
link |
00:58:15.440
because there's such an innocence to it.
link |
00:58:17.340
But like when I opened Twitter, I'm energized.
link |
00:58:21.760
There's a lot of love on Twitter.
link |
00:58:23.160
People say like.
link |
00:58:24.080
I love Twitter.
link |
00:58:24.920
I agree.
link |
00:58:25.740
You don't think I have a lot of love on Twitter?
link |
00:58:27.060
My fans pay my rent.
link |
00:58:29.000
I mean, I don't know your experience of Twitter,
link |
00:58:32.400
but when I look at your,
link |
00:58:33.440
which is a fundamentally different thing.
link |
00:58:35.560
I'm saying my experience from the.
link |
00:58:37.560
So maybe you can tell me what your experience
link |
00:58:39.320
is like as a human.
link |
00:58:40.360
So when I observe your Twitter,
link |
00:58:43.040
I think, I wouldn't call it love.
link |
00:58:48.040
I would call it fun.
link |
00:58:50.440
Yes.
link |
00:58:51.280
And because of that, that's a different kind of,
link |
00:58:54.680
that like love emerges from that
link |
00:58:56.840
because people kind of learn that we're having,
link |
00:59:00.500
this is like game night, like.
link |
00:59:02.360
Yes.
link |
00:59:03.780
You know, we can talk shit a little bit.
link |
00:59:06.320
We can, and you can even like pull in,
link |
00:59:10.400
you can make fun of people.
link |
00:59:11.600
You can have the crazy uncle come over
link |
00:59:13.760
that is a huge Trump supporter,
link |
00:59:16.720
somebody who hates Trump and you can have a little fun.
link |
00:59:19.480
I get it.
link |
00:59:20.320
It's a different kind of thing.
link |
00:59:21.140
I wouldn't be able to be the,
link |
00:59:25.340
you're the host of game night.
link |
00:59:26.840
Yes, yes.
link |
00:59:27.680
So I wouldn't be able to host that kind of game night.
link |
00:59:30.240
I imagine you programming your robots
link |
00:59:32.840
and you're asking what is fun
link |
00:59:34.300
and it just starts sparking.
link |
00:59:35.640
Yeah, exactly.
link |
00:59:37.300
Yeah.
link |
00:59:38.140
What is fun?
link |
00:59:38.960
So the robots in my life that survive
link |
00:59:42.480
are the ones that don't,
link |
00:59:45.680
that like survive that whole programming process.
link |
00:59:49.820
So they're kind of like,
link |
00:59:51.140
they're kind of like the idiot from Dostoevsky,
link |
00:59:52.880
they're very like simple minded robots.
link |
00:59:56.880
Fun is moving a can from one table to another.
link |
01:00:00.320
That's game night for our kin.
link |
01:00:03.440
You know, one of my quotes is,
link |
01:00:04.720
and I think about this every day
link |
01:00:06.440
and I mean it with every fiber of my being,
link |
01:00:09.180
we're born knowing that life is a magical adventure
link |
01:00:11.520
and it takes them years to train us to think otherwise.
link |
01:00:14.780
And I think that Willy Wonka approach,
link |
01:00:16.560
it's a very Camus approach.
link |
01:00:17.800
It's something I believe with every fiber of my being.
link |
01:00:20.660
I try to spread that as much as possible.
link |
01:00:22.780
I think it is very sad.
link |
01:00:24.600
I'm not being sarcastic.
link |
01:00:25.720
It comes off as condescending.
link |
01:00:27.520
I mean it at face value.
link |
01:00:29.000
It's very sad how many people are not receptive to that.
link |
01:00:31.760
And I think a lot of those functions,
link |
01:00:32.880
how they were raised.
link |
01:00:34.060
And I could have very easily with my upbringing
link |
01:00:37.040
have not maintained that perspective.
link |
01:00:40.360
And there's a lot of,
link |
01:00:42.720
I have a lot of friends in recovery like AA
link |
01:00:45.180
and they have an expression,
link |
01:00:47.000
not my circus, not my monkeys, right?
link |
01:00:49.200
That you can't really take on other people's problems
link |
01:00:51.920
on your own at a certain point,
link |
01:00:53.120
they have to do the work themselves
link |
01:00:54.560
because you can only do so much externally.
link |
01:00:56.840
And there are a lot of very damaged people out there.
link |
01:01:00.560
And they're damaged people who revel in being damaged.
link |
01:01:04.440
And they are damaged people who desperately,
link |
01:01:07.000
desperately, desperately wanna be well,
link |
01:01:08.960
who desperately wanna be happy,
link |
01:01:10.280
who desperately wanna find joy.
link |
01:01:12.180
So if I can be the one and as arrogant as this sounds,
link |
01:01:15.840
I'll own it, who does give them that fun
link |
01:01:18.400
and to tell them it doesn't have to be like you thought.
link |
01:01:21.120
Like it could be, it's gonna hurt, it's gonna suck,
link |
01:01:24.140
but it's still a magical adventure
link |
01:01:25.820
and you're gonna be okay,
link |
01:01:26.800
cause you've been through worse.
link |
01:01:28.080
Like that, if that could be my message,
link |
01:01:30.040
I would own it all day long.
link |
01:01:33.080
And so what does adventure look like for you?
link |
01:01:35.560
Cause I mean, it actually boils down to,
link |
01:01:37.240
I still disagree with you.
link |
01:01:38.620
I think trolling can be
link |
01:01:41.880
and very often is destructive for society.
link |
01:01:45.020
Yes, I want to destroy society.
link |
01:01:46.720
That is the goal.
link |
01:01:48.940
I want to help many people.
link |
01:01:50.600
Unironically, okay.
link |
01:01:51.800
Unironically, yes.
link |
01:01:54.760
What do I do with that?
link |
01:01:55.840
Okay, so.
link |
01:01:56.680
Whatever you want.
link |
01:01:57.500
Do what thou wilt is the hall of the law.
link |
01:02:00.200
Like I just wanna,
link |
01:02:01.120
so you're hosting game night
link |
01:02:02.440
and I just wanna play Monopoly.
link |
01:02:04.140
I wanna play, what's it, Risk.
link |
01:02:07.560
Okay, I wanna play these games.
link |
01:02:08.920
And you're saying. Those are aggressive games.
link |
01:02:10.560
Yeah, I was trying to think like of a friendlier game,
link |
01:02:12.840
but they're all kind of aggressive.
link |
01:02:15.600
Battleship.
link |
01:02:16.440
Axis and allies, you know, fun stuff.
link |
01:02:20.760
But like, so that's an adventure,
link |
01:02:24.220
but you're saying that we want to destroy everything.
link |
01:02:27.760
Even like the rules of those games are not.
link |
01:02:31.600
You voluntarily agree to those rules.
link |
01:02:33.480
The point is if someone comes in
link |
01:02:35.200
who no one invited to game night
link |
01:02:37.420
and are telling you, no, when you play Monopoly,
link |
01:02:40.080
you have to get money when you land in free parking
link |
01:02:42.720
or you don't, it's like, who are you?
link |
01:02:45.320
We're having our own fun and you smell.
link |
01:02:49.680
I don't know, but there's an aggressive.
link |
01:02:52.960
There's an aggression.
link |
01:02:53.960
Let me speak to that, which I think you're picking up on.
link |
01:02:56.460
I had a friend named Martha, Marcia, excuse me.
link |
01:02:58.440
She ran something called cuddle parties,
link |
01:02:59.720
which people laughed at about a lot back in the day.
link |
01:03:02.000
And the premise of the cuddle parties,
link |
01:03:03.260
everyone got together and cuddled, right?
link |
01:03:04.760
And it's like, ah, ha, ha.
link |
01:03:05.680
Then you stop to think about it
link |
01:03:06.720
and you realize physical contact is extremely important.
link |
01:03:09.620
And a lot of people don't have it.
link |
01:03:11.000
And if this is a mechanism of people getting that,
link |
01:03:12.720
it actually is going to have
link |
01:03:13.560
profound positive psychological consequences.
link |
01:03:15.400
So after she explained it, I'm like, okay,
link |
01:03:17.320
we laughed at this because it's weird.
link |
01:03:18.600
And now that I think about it, this is wonderful.
link |
01:03:20.560
And I asked her about like the tough question,
link |
01:03:23.560
I go, what if guys get turned on?
link |
01:03:25.800
And on their website, it even has a rule,
link |
01:03:27.640
like do not fear the erection, right?
link |
01:03:28.840
Because it's going to be a natural consequence
link |
01:03:30.200
of physical proximity.
link |
01:03:31.400
And the point she goes, she said this,
link |
01:03:33.000
I think about this all the time.
link |
01:03:34.520
People will take as much space as you let them.
link |
01:03:38.560
It is incumbent on each of us to set our own boundaries.
link |
01:03:42.840
We all have to learn when to say,
link |
01:03:44.400
no, you're making me uncomfortable.
link |
01:03:46.240
If someone doesn't respect your right
link |
01:03:48.460
to have your boundary to be uncomfortable,
link |
01:03:50.180
this person is not your friend.
link |
01:03:51.800
Now they can say, I don't understand.
link |
01:03:54.300
Like, why is this okay?
link |
01:03:55.460
Why is that not?
link |
01:03:56.360
Let me know you better so I'm respectful of you.
link |
01:03:59.280
But if they roll their eyes and they're like,
link |
01:04:01.020
get over, I'm going to do what I want,
link |
01:04:02.320
this person is not interested in knowing you as a human being.
link |
01:04:07.160
Okay.
link |
01:04:08.000
And that is the aggression.
link |
01:04:08.820
You have to draw those lines.
link |
01:04:10.180
I mean, but that's a very positive way
link |
01:04:13.440
of phrasing that aggression.
link |
01:04:14.880
I'm a very positive person.
link |
01:04:17.000
But the trolling, there's a destructive thing to it.
link |
01:04:20.040
Yes.
link |
01:04:20.880
That hurts others.
link |
01:04:22.320
Yes.
link |
01:04:23.160
But it's not bad people.
link |
01:04:25.320
I only troll as a reaction or towards those in power.
link |
01:04:28.460
Okay.
link |
01:04:29.300
So maybe let's talk about trolling a little bit.
link |
01:04:31.080
Because trolling, when it can, maybe you can correct me,
link |
01:04:36.000
but I've seen it become a game for people
link |
01:04:38.000
that's enjoyable in itself.
link |
01:04:41.520
I disagree with that.
link |
01:04:44.280
That's not a good thing.
link |
01:04:45.520
If you are there just to hurt innocent people,
link |
01:04:48.680
you are a horrible human being.
link |
01:04:50.800
But doesn't trolling too easily become that?
link |
01:04:55.000
I don't know about easily.
link |
01:04:55.880
Let me give you an example of where trolling came from.
link |
01:04:58.720
The original troll was Andy Kaufman.
link |
01:05:01.160
He was on the show Taxi.
link |
01:05:02.720
He was a performance artist, not a stand up comedian.
link |
01:05:05.440
And this is a quintessential example of trolling.
link |
01:05:08.080
He had a character where he was basically
link |
01:05:10.680
like a lounge singer.
link |
01:05:11.520
He had these glasses on and just a terrible singer
link |
01:05:14.920
and so on and so forth.
link |
01:05:15.740
And he denied it was him.
link |
01:05:18.000
And he came out and I'm blanking on the guy's name.
link |
01:05:21.320
I can't believe it.
link |
01:05:22.160
Tony Clifton.
link |
01:05:22.980
Wow.
link |
01:05:23.820
Yeah.
link |
01:05:24.660
He came out in the audience and he goes,
link |
01:05:25.680
you know, my wife died a few years ago.
link |
01:05:28.160
Every time I look at my daughter Sarah's eyes,
link |
01:05:29.880
I can see my wife.
link |
01:05:30.760
Sarah, come out here.
link |
01:05:31.600
Let's do a duet.
link |
01:05:32.560
And Sarah was like 11, sits on his lap.
link |
01:05:35.000
They start singing duet.
link |
01:05:36.400
Her voice cracks.
link |
01:05:37.560
He smacks her across the face.
link |
01:05:38.960
What the hell are you doing?
link |
01:05:39.840
You're making an ass out of me in front of these people.
link |
01:05:42.160
She starts crying.
link |
01:05:43.520
The audience is booing and he goes,
link |
01:05:45.520
don't boo her, you're just gonna make her cry more.
link |
01:05:47.620
Now it ends.
link |
01:05:50.160
This wasn't his daughter.
link |
01:05:51.280
It wasn't even a child.
link |
01:05:52.120
It was an actress.
link |
01:05:52.940
This was all set up.
link |
01:05:53.780
He's exploiting their love of children
link |
01:05:57.280
in order to force them to be performers.
link |
01:05:59.320
That is trolling.
link |
01:06:01.000
No one is actually getting hurt.
link |
01:06:02.760
It's a humorous, though twisted exchange.
link |
01:06:05.680
If you go online looking for weak people
link |
01:06:10.240
and you are there to denigrate them
link |
01:06:13.000
just for them being weak or in some way inferior to you,
link |
01:06:16.440
that is the wrong approach.
link |
01:06:18.760
I am best on the counter punch.
link |
01:06:21.320
A lot of times people come to me
link |
01:06:23.440
and they'll be like, I hope you die.
link |
01:06:24.880
You're ugly.
link |
01:06:25.720
You're disgusting.
link |
01:06:26.540
And there's this great quote from Billy Idol,
link |
01:06:28.080
which I'm gonna mango here, something effective.
link |
01:06:30.120
I love it when people are rude to me,
link |
01:06:31.640
then I can stop pretending to be nice.
link |
01:06:33.580
Then you start fights.
link |
01:06:35.400
Now it's a chance for me to finish it
link |
01:06:37.200
and make an example of this person.
link |
01:06:38.920
But that's very, very different from
link |
01:06:40.880
I'm gonna go around and humiliate people
link |
01:06:42.960
for the sake of doing it, in my view.
link |
01:06:46.320
And I can see how one would lead to the other.
link |
01:06:48.440
Yeah, but that's my fundamental concern with it.
link |
01:06:50.920
So my dream is to put, use technology,
link |
01:06:55.580
create platforms that increase
link |
01:06:58.940
the amount of love in the world.
link |
01:07:00.500
And to me, trolling is doing the opposite.
link |
01:07:05.980
So like Andy Kaufman is brilliant.
link |
01:07:09.760
So I love, obviously, it sounds like I'm a robot thing.
link |
01:07:12.960
I love humor, okay?
link |
01:07:15.480
Humor is good.
link |
01:07:18.320
One, one, one, zero, one, one, one, one.
link |
01:07:21.000
But like, it's, I just see like 4chan.
link |
01:07:25.600
I see that you can often see that humor quickly turn.
link |
01:07:29.440
Yeah, because what happens is a lot of low status people,
link |
01:07:31.920
this is their one mechanism through sadism
link |
01:07:34.920
to feel empowered, and then they can hide behind,
link |
01:07:38.400
well, I'm just joking.
link |
01:07:40.200
Yeah, like there's this dark thing.
link |
01:07:41.360
Yeah, that's not acceptable.
link |
01:07:42.520
That's something you can't have.
link |
01:07:43.360
There's a dark LOL that people do,
link |
01:07:45.760
which is like they'll say like the shittiest thing.
link |
01:07:49.000
Right, because they feel. And then do LOL after.
link |
01:07:51.040
Like, as if, I don't even know like what is happening
link |
01:07:55.240
in that dark mind of yours.
link |
01:07:56.920
Because they are feeling powerless in their lives,
link |
01:08:00.520
and they see someone who they perceive as higher status
link |
01:08:02.880
or more powerful than them, or even not appear,
link |
01:08:05.080
and they, through their words,
link |
01:08:07.040
cause a reaction in this person.
link |
01:08:09.500
So they feel like they are, in a very literal sense,
link |
01:08:11.680
making a difference on earth,
link |
01:08:12.920
and they matter in a very dark way.
link |
01:08:15.200
It's disturbing.
link |
01:08:16.400
This is not, I mean, it's unfortunate
link |
01:08:18.240
that that term trolling is used for that,
link |
01:08:21.200
as opposed to what Andy Kaufman does,
link |
01:08:22.960
as opposed to what I do.
link |
01:08:24.400
It really is a sinister thing,
link |
01:08:29.040
and it's something I'm not at all a fan of.
link |
01:08:31.680
How do we fight that?
link |
01:08:33.880
So, like a neighboring concept of that
link |
01:08:37.260
is conspiracy theories, which is.
link |
01:08:39.760
I don't think they're neighboring at all.
link |
01:08:41.560
Well, let me give a sort of naive perspective.
link |
01:08:45.300
Maybe you can educate me on this.
link |
01:08:46.640
From my perspective, conspiracy theories
link |
01:08:49.800
are these constructs of ideas
link |
01:08:52.920
that go deeper and deeper and deeper
link |
01:08:55.440
into creating worlds
link |
01:09:01.240
where there's powerful pedophiles controlling things,
link |
01:09:06.860
like these very sophisticated models of the world
link |
01:09:11.840
that in part might be true,
link |
01:09:14.160
but in large part, I would say,
link |
01:09:15.960
are figments of imagination
link |
01:09:18.560
that become really useful constructs.
link |
01:09:22.080
Self reinforcing.
link |
01:09:23.120
Self reinforcing for then feeding,
link |
01:09:26.600
like empowering the trolls
link |
01:09:29.840
to attack the powerful, the conventionally powerful.
link |
01:09:34.880
I don't think that's a function of conspiracy theories.
link |
01:09:37.120
Now, let's talk about conspiracy theories,
link |
01:09:38.680
because one of my quotes is,
link |
01:09:39.580
"'You take one red pill, not the whole bottle.'"
link |
01:09:41.920
This concept that everything in life
link |
01:09:45.560
is at the function of a small cadre of individuals
link |
01:09:50.480
would be, for many people, reassuring,
link |
01:09:53.200
because as bad as it looks, you know they,
link |
01:09:55.880
whoever they are, it's usually the Jews,
link |
01:09:57.940
aren't gonna let it get that bad, that they will pull back.
link |
01:10:00.840
Or the black pill is that they aren't intentionally
link |
01:10:05.820
trying to destroy everything,
link |
01:10:07.280
and there's nothing we can do and we're doomed.
link |
01:10:08.880
And there's an amazing book by Arthur Herman
link |
01:10:10.500
called The Idea of Declined Western History.
link |
01:10:12.840
It's one of my top 10 books
link |
01:10:14.320
where he goes through every 20 years
link |
01:10:16.360
how there's a different population that say,
link |
01:10:18.200
"'It's the end of the world, here's the proof.'"
link |
01:10:20.640
And very often, the proof is something
link |
01:10:22.140
that is kind of self fulfilling,
link |
01:10:24.080
where it's not falsifiable.
link |
01:10:26.520
And we both have to think of ways
link |
01:10:27.760
to falsify our claims from earlier.
link |
01:10:29.660
So it is a big danger.
link |
01:10:32.520
It's a big danger online, because very quickly,
link |
01:10:35.840
if someone who you thought was good,
link |
01:10:38.580
but now is bad on one aspect,
link |
01:10:40.280
well, they're controlled opposition,
link |
01:10:41.800
or they've been taken over,
link |
01:10:44.080
or they've been kind of appropriated by the bad people,
link |
01:10:47.740
whoever those bad people would be.
link |
01:10:49.920
I don't know that I have a good answer for this.
link |
01:10:52.880
I don't think it's as pervasive as people think.
link |
01:10:56.040
The number of people who believe conspiracy theory?
link |
01:10:57.840
Right, I mean, and also conspiracy theory
link |
01:11:00.200
is a term used to dismiss ideas that have some currency.
link |
01:11:04.240
The Constitutional Convention was a conspiracy.
link |
01:11:06.800
The Founding Fathers got together secretly
link |
01:11:08.440
on this war to secrecy in Philadelphia,
link |
01:11:10.040
said, we're throwing out the Articles of Confederation,
link |
01:11:11.520
we're making a new government, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
01:11:12.960
And Luther Martin left, and he told everyone,
link |
01:11:15.320
this is a conspiracy, and they're like,
link |
01:11:16.580
yeah, whatever, Luther Martin.
link |
01:11:17.920
So, and Jeffrey Epstein was a conspiracy,
link |
01:11:20.160
Harvey Weinstein was a conspiracy,
link |
01:11:21.680
Bill Cosby was a conspiracy.
link |
01:11:22.720
They all knew, they didn't care.
link |
01:11:24.880
Communist infiltration in America,
link |
01:11:26.600
there's a great book by Eugene Lyons
link |
01:11:28.760
called The Red Decade.
link |
01:11:30.160
They all knew every atrocity
link |
01:11:32.960
that was done under Stalinism was excused in the West,
link |
01:11:36.920
and if you didn't believe it,
link |
01:11:37.960
oh, you've got this crazy anti Russia conspiracy.
link |
01:11:40.280
So it's a term that is weaponized in a negative sense,
link |
01:11:43.700
but that does not at all imply
link |
01:11:45.640
that it does not have very negative real life consequences
link |
01:11:49.200
because it's kind of a cult of one, right?
link |
01:11:52.280
Like I'm at home with my computer,
link |
01:11:54.080
I bang into this ideology,
link |
01:11:56.120
anyone who doesn't agree with me,
link |
01:11:58.160
they are blind, they're oblivious,
link |
01:12:00.120
mom and dad, my friends, you don't get it.
link |
01:12:02.880
We were warned about people like you,
link |
01:12:05.260
and I think there's a very heavy correlation,
link |
01:12:08.440
and I'm not a psychiatrist, of course,
link |
01:12:10.040
between that and certain types of mild mental illness,
link |
01:12:12.480
like some kind of paranoid schizophrenia
link |
01:12:14.600
and things like that, because after a certain point,
link |
01:12:17.160
if everything is a function of this conspiracy,
link |
01:12:20.200
there's no randomness or beauty in life.
link |
01:12:22.920
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can say
link |
01:12:25.240
anything interesting about it in the way of advice
link |
01:12:28.160
of how to take a step into conspiracy theory world
link |
01:12:34.440
without completely going, like diving deep,
link |
01:12:37.540
because it seems like that's what happens.
link |
01:12:39.720
People can't look at Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
01:12:42.500
I can tell you what the advice I'd have
link |
01:12:44.000
is, seriously and rigorously, without going,
link |
01:12:48.040
because you can look at Jeffrey Epstein
link |
01:12:49.760
and say there's a deeper thing.
link |
01:12:52.320
You can always go deeper.
link |
01:12:53.880
It's like Jeffrey Epstein was just a tool
link |
01:12:55.840
of the lizard people, and the lizard people are the tool.
link |
01:12:59.760
Well, they say Satanists, in this case.
link |
01:13:04.400
Somehow, recently, very popular,
link |
01:13:06.520
spedophiles somehow always involved.
link |
01:13:08.720
I'm not understanding any of that.
link |
01:13:11.820
Legitimately, I say this both humorously and seriously.
link |
01:13:15.160
I need to look into it, and I guess the bigger question
link |
01:13:18.960
I'm asking, how does a serious human being,
link |
01:13:21.920
somebody with a position at a respectable university,
link |
01:13:25.920
look at a conspiracy theory and look into it?
link |
01:13:28.160
When I look at somebody like Jeffrey Epstein,
link |
01:13:30.600
who had a role at MIT, and I think I'm not happy,
link |
01:13:35.600
personally, I wasn't there when Jeffrey Epstein was there.
link |
01:13:42.760
I'm not happy with the behavior of people now
link |
01:13:45.880
about Jeffrey Epstein, about the bureaucracy
link |
01:13:49.360
and the everybody's trying to keep quiet,
link |
01:13:51.600
hoping it blows over, without really looking into any,
link |
01:13:55.840
looking in a deep philosophical way
link |
01:13:59.560
of how do we let this human being be among us?
link |
01:14:03.760
Can I give you a better example that is conspiratorial?
link |
01:14:08.000
The Speaker of the House,
link |
01:14:09.000
the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House,
link |
01:14:10.960
Dennis Hastert, was a pedophile.
link |
01:14:12.960
He went to jail.
link |
01:14:14.480
The Democrats don't throw this
link |
01:14:16.040
in the Republicans faces every five minutes.
link |
01:14:18.320
Not even Democratic activists.
link |
01:14:19.640
I find that very, very odd, and not what I would predict.
link |
01:14:23.600
Now, I'm not saying there's some kind of conspiracy,
link |
01:14:26.200
but when it comes to things like sexual predation,
link |
01:14:28.980
which is something that I'm very, very concerned about.
link |
01:14:31.640
I have an uncle now.
link |
01:14:32.480
My sister just had her second kid recently.
link |
01:14:33.880
He's adorable.
link |
01:14:36.360
It's something that I don't understand.
link |
01:14:40.760
It feels as if there's a lot of people
link |
01:14:44.120
who want this to all go away.
link |
01:14:45.780
Now, I think it's also because we don't have
link |
01:14:47.800
the vocabulary and framework to discuss it,
link |
01:14:50.200
because when you start talking about things like children
link |
01:14:52.240
and these kind of issues, we want to believe it's all crap,
link |
01:14:55.600
because it's, for those of us
link |
01:14:56.880
who aren't in this kind of mindset,
link |
01:14:58.440
the idea that this happens to kids and happens frequently
link |
01:15:01.160
is something so horrible that it's just like,
link |
01:15:03.720
I don't even want to hear it,
link |
01:15:04.800
and that does these children and adult survivors
link |
01:15:07.320
an enormous disservice.
link |
01:15:08.720
So I don't know that I have any particular insight on this.
link |
01:15:11.340
But see, how do you, the Catholic Church,
link |
01:15:14.800
again, there's all these topics that.
link |
01:15:17.120
Public school teachers are far more proportionately
link |
01:15:20.000
peders of children than the Catholic Church.
link |
01:15:21.940
Man, I don't know what, you're right, you're right.
link |
01:15:24.640
Perhaps I've been reading a lot about Stalin and Hitler,
link |
01:15:29.640
somehow it's more comforting to be able to.
link |
01:15:32.840
Yeah, because it's there, and then.
link |
01:15:34.320
And then, and then the atrocities that are happening now,
link |
01:15:38.520
it's a little bit more difficult because.
link |
01:15:39.920
There was a New York Times article, sorry to interrupt you,
link |
01:15:41.600
where they had people tracking down child pornography.
link |
01:15:45.320
And I think the article said they didn't have enough people
link |
01:15:47.560
just to cover the videotapes of infants being raped.
link |
01:15:51.400
And we can even wrap our heads around reading Lolita,
link |
01:15:54.520
like, okay, she's 14, 12, okay, it's still a female.
link |
01:15:57.440
An infant, it's something that,
link |
01:15:59.760
again, like with the Stalin example,
link |
01:16:01.480
we sat down here for a hundred years,
link |
01:16:02.740
we would never think of something like this,
link |
01:16:03.840
think of it in a sexual context, it makes no sense.
link |
01:16:06.600
So, and the fact that this is international,
link |
01:16:08.820
okay, we eliminated completely in America.
link |
01:16:11.280
Well, then they're gonna go find,
link |
01:16:12.760
there's infants all over the world,
link |
01:16:14.240
there's video cameras all over the world.
link |
01:16:15.840
So then it has to become a conspiracy
link |
01:16:18.420
because someone has to film it, I'm filming it,
link |
01:16:20.780
you're buying it, your kid.
link |
01:16:23.120
It is literally a conspiratorial,
link |
01:16:25.520
not in the sense of like a mafia conspiracy
link |
01:16:27.360
or some government illuminati,
link |
01:16:29.360
but there is our networks designed to produce this product.
link |
01:16:33.980
See, but like what I'm trying to do now,
link |
01:16:38.480
and part of the, one of the nice things
link |
01:16:40.360
with like a podcast and other things I'm involved with
link |
01:16:43.000
is removing myself from having any kind of boss
link |
01:16:46.720
so I can do whatever that helps.
link |
01:16:48.200
Oh, it's so wonderful, that just happened to me,
link |
01:16:50.280
it's the most wonderful thing ever.
link |
01:16:52.480
So I could do, I can actually, in moderation,
link |
01:16:55.520
consider like look into stuff.
link |
01:16:57.760
Careful though, I was gonna write a book about this
link |
01:16:59.880
that people pointed out,
link |
01:17:00.920
you sure wanna do this research?
link |
01:17:02.960
Because if you start Googling around
link |
01:17:04.040
for this kind of stuff, it's on your computer.
link |
01:17:06.660
Oh, in that sense, I'm more concerned about,
link |
01:17:09.800
you know, it's the Nietzsche thing,
link |
01:17:11.080
looking into the abyss, like you wanna be very,
link |
01:17:13.760
I believe I can do this kind of thing in moderation
link |
01:17:16.660
without slipping into the depths.
link |
01:17:19.280
I think that's intelligence, that's like,
link |
01:17:23.520
I recently quote unquote looked into like
link |
01:17:26.760
the UFO community, the extraterrestrial,
link |
01:17:30.640
whatever community.
link |
01:17:32.040
I think it always frustrated me
link |
01:17:34.560
that the scientific community like rolled their eyes
link |
01:17:37.240
at all the UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:17:40.040
Even though there could be fascinating, beautiful,
link |
01:17:42.760
physical fun, like, first of all,
link |
01:17:44.720
there could legit. Like ball lightning.
link |
01:17:46.320
The ball lightning, right, that's at the very basic level
link |
01:17:49.960
is a fascinating thing.
link |
01:17:51.840
And also, it could be something like,
link |
01:17:57.040
I mean, I don't know, but it could be something interesting,
link |
01:17:59.500
like worth looking into.
link |
01:18:02.080
My grandfather was an air traffic controller
link |
01:18:04.240
back in the Soviet Union.
link |
01:18:05.800
And he said, we saw this stuff all the time.
link |
01:18:08.280
These are planes that were not moving
link |
01:18:09.800
or whatever things that were not moving
link |
01:18:11.400
according to anything we knew about.
link |
01:18:13.400
So it's absolutely real.
link |
01:18:14.640
He's not some jerk with an iPhone in his backyard.
link |
01:18:18.040
This is a military professional who understood technology,
link |
01:18:22.640
who knew where the secret bases were.
link |
01:18:24.120
So if he's telling me, it doesn't mean it's Martians,
link |
01:18:27.700
but he's telling me there's something there.
link |
01:18:29.160
And there are many examples of these like military people.
link |
01:18:31.560
These aren't some layman who sees a store.
link |
01:18:33.320
Yeah, these are legit people.
link |
01:18:34.160
Yeah, and so you can dismiss,
link |
01:18:37.560
when you're talking about professionals
link |
01:18:38.680
who are around aircraft all the time,
link |
01:18:40.280
who are familiar with aircraft at the highest levels,
link |
01:18:42.440
and they're seeing things that they can't explain,
link |
01:18:45.000
they're clearly not stupid
link |
01:18:46.240
and they're clearly not under form.
link |
01:18:47.360
So there's different ways to dismiss it.
link |
01:18:49.880
For example, you were saying
link |
01:18:53.240
that trolling is a good mechanism.
link |
01:18:55.520
I'm against that, but I'm not dismissing it
link |
01:18:57.980
by like rolling my eyes.
link |
01:19:00.480
I'm considering legitimately that you're way smarter than me
link |
01:19:04.240
and you understand the world better than me.
link |
01:19:05.800
Like I'm allowing myself to consider that possibility
link |
01:19:08.200
and thinking about it.
link |
01:19:09.040
Like maybe that's true, like seriously considering it.
link |
01:19:12.960
That's what I feel the way people should approach
link |
01:19:17.120
intelligent people, serious quote unquote people,
link |
01:19:20.040
scientists should approach conspiracy theories.
link |
01:19:22.400
Like look at it carefully.
link |
01:19:26.680
First of all, is it possible that the earth is flat?
link |
01:19:29.400
It's not trivial to show that the earth is not flat.
link |
01:19:32.560
It's a very good exercise.
link |
01:19:33.720
You should go through it.
link |
01:19:34.560
Yes.
link |
01:19:35.400
But once you go through it,
link |
01:19:36.400
you realize that based on a lot of data
link |
01:19:41.120
and a lot of evidence,
link |
01:19:42.360
and there's a lot of different experiments
link |
01:19:43.680
you can do yourself actually
link |
01:19:45.600
to show that the earth is not flat.
link |
01:19:47.200
Okay.
link |
01:19:48.040
The same kind of process can be taken
link |
01:19:50.840
for a lot of different conspiracy theories
link |
01:19:52.960
and it's helpful.
link |
01:19:54.120
And without slipping into the depths of lizard people
link |
01:19:58.640
running everything.
link |
01:20:00.520
That's where I've now listened to two episodes
link |
01:20:06.240
of Alex Jones's show
link |
01:20:08.600
because he goes crazy deep
link |
01:20:12.120
into different kind of worldviews
link |
01:20:16.880
that I was not familiar with.
link |
01:20:18.240
Right.
link |
01:20:19.120
And I don't know what to make of it.
link |
01:20:20.560
I mean, the reason I've been listening to it
link |
01:20:22.000
is because there's been a lot of discussions
link |
01:20:25.520
about platforming of different people.
link |
01:20:27.280
Yeah.
link |
01:20:28.120
And I've been thinking about what does censorship mean?
link |
01:20:30.880
I've been thinking about whether,
link |
01:20:34.320
because Joe Rogan said he's gonna have Alex on again.
link |
01:20:39.320
And then I enjoyed it as a fan,
link |
01:20:43.640
just the entertainment of it.
link |
01:20:45.240
But then I actually listened to Alex
link |
01:20:48.880
and I was thinking,
link |
01:20:49.720
is this human being dangerous for the world?
link |
01:20:53.120
Like is the ideas he's saying dangerous for the world?
link |
01:20:55.520
I'm more concerned with the Russian conspiracy
link |
01:20:57.400
that we had for three years.
link |
01:20:59.120
The claim that our election was not legitimate
link |
01:21:01.560
and that everyone in the Trump White House
link |
01:21:02.900
is a stooge of Putin.
link |
01:21:04.320
And the people who said this had no consequences for this.
link |
01:21:07.200
Alex Jones doesn't have the respect that they do.
link |
01:21:10.060
These are both areas of concern for me.
link |
01:21:12.080
But he might if he's given more platform.
link |
01:21:15.320
So like the people who've,
link |
01:21:18.280
and I'd be curious to,
link |
01:21:19.760
I'm also a little bit,
link |
01:21:22.280
I don't know what to think about the idea
link |
01:21:24.080
that Russians hacked the election.
link |
01:21:27.200
That it seems too easily accepted in the mainstream media.
link |
01:21:30.480
Hillary Clinton said that how they did it
link |
01:21:33.940
was they had ads on the dark web.
link |
01:21:37.620
Now you and I both know what the dark web is.
link |
01:21:40.360
So the possibility of ads on the dark web
link |
01:21:43.040
having a proportional influence on the election
link |
01:21:47.140
is literally zero.
link |
01:21:48.380
Perhaps I should look into it more carefully,
link |
01:21:50.060
but I've found very little good data
link |
01:21:53.860
on exactly what did the Russians do to hack elections.
link |
01:21:58.220
Like technically speaking,
link |
01:22:00.080
what are we talking about here?
link |
01:22:01.320
Like as opposed to these kind of weird,
link |
01:22:03.780
like the best thing there's a couple of books
link |
01:22:05.640
and like reporting on like farms.
link |
01:22:09.360
Like it's.
link |
01:22:10.200
Troll farms, yeah.
link |
01:22:11.020
Troll farms.
link |
01:22:12.080
But let's see the data.
link |
01:22:14.720
Like how many exactly?
link |
01:22:16.720
What are we talking about?
link |
01:22:17.720
Like what were they doing?
link |
01:22:19.880
Not just like some anecdotal discussions of,
link |
01:22:22.960
but like relative to the bigger,
link |
01:22:26.700
the size of Facebook.
link |
01:22:28.720
Like if there's a few people, several hundreds,
link |
01:22:32.120
say posting different political things on Facebook
link |
01:22:36.640
relative to the full size of Facebook.
link |
01:22:39.680
Let's look at the full size.
link |
01:22:41.680
Right, you're thinking like a scientist.
link |
01:22:42.800
The actual impact.
link |
01:22:43.640
Yeah.
link |
01:22:44.480
Like, cause it's fascinating the social dynamics
link |
01:22:47.480
of viral information of videos.
link |
01:22:50.440
When Donald Trump retweets something,
link |
01:22:53.800
I think that's understudied the effect of that.
link |
01:22:56.520
Like he retweeted a clip with Joe Rogan
link |
01:23:01.880
and Mike Tyson, where Mike Tyson says
link |
01:23:05.480
that he finds fighting orgasmic.
link |
01:23:08.960
I don't understand that, but they'd be fascinating
link |
01:23:10.880
to think like what is the ripple effect
link |
01:23:12.640
on the social dynamic of our society
link |
01:23:16.740
from retweeting a clip about Mike Tyson.
link |
01:23:19.640
What's your favorite Trump tweet?
link |
01:23:22.320
I tuned them out a long time ago, unfortunately.
link |
01:23:26.800
I have, this goes to the,
link |
01:23:33.080
you and I have a different relationship with Donald Trump.
link |
01:23:35.400
You appreciate the art form of trolling.
link |
01:23:37.360
Sexual versus nonsexual.
link |
01:23:38.200
Nonsexual, yeah.
link |
01:23:39.560
So I tend to prefer Bill Clinton.
link |
01:23:44.320
He's more my type.
link |
01:23:45.160
No, I'm just kidding.
link |
01:23:46.000
I don't know.
link |
01:23:47.240
You don't like that consent stuff.
link |
01:23:48.760
No, the consent, no.
link |
01:23:50.060
No, you appreciate the art form of trolling
link |
01:23:53.460
and Donald Trump is a master.
link |
01:23:57.060
He's the da Vinci of trolling.
link |
01:24:00.140
So I tend to think that trolling
link |
01:24:03.580
is ultimately destructive for society
link |
01:24:05.860
and then Donald Trump takes nothing seriously.
link |
01:24:07.940
He's playing a game.
link |
01:24:09.100
He's making a game out of everything.
link |
01:24:10.500
He takes a lot of things seriously.
link |
01:24:11.420
I think he's very committed to international peace.
link |
01:24:14.620
Sorry, I shouldn't speak so strong.
link |
01:24:16.780
I think he takes, actually, yes,
link |
01:24:18.900
a lot of things seriously.
link |
01:24:20.500
I meant on Twitter and the game of politics.
link |
01:24:25.260
Yeah.
link |
01:24:26.100
He is, he only takes.
link |
01:24:29.540
Irreverently.
link |
01:24:30.460
Yeah.
link |
01:24:31.300
Yeah.
link |
01:24:32.140
And I appreciate it.
link |
01:24:35.100
I just would like to focus on
link |
01:24:39.140
genuine, real expressions of humanity,
link |
01:24:43.380
especially positive.
link |
01:24:44.660
Well, this is one.
link |
01:24:45.580
This is my favorite tweet.
link |
01:24:46.620
My fans got it lasered, etched,
link |
01:24:48.780
and put in a block of Lucite for me.
link |
01:24:50.940
And he said, every time I speak of the losers and haters,
link |
01:24:54.940
I do so with great affection.
link |
01:24:56.740
They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up.
link |
01:24:59.500
That's an actual Trump tweet.
link |
01:25:00.740
It's my favorite one.
link |
01:25:03.580
And that's kind of nice.
link |
01:25:04.580
And that's love.
link |
01:25:05.420
That's love.
link |
01:25:06.260
That's kind of nice.
link |
01:25:07.100
Great affection.
link |
01:25:08.620
That, I mean.
link |
01:25:11.300
Exclamation point.
link |
01:25:12.420
I broke Lex.
link |
01:25:19.220
What is love?
link |
01:25:21.500
Yeah, the sparks are flying.
link |
01:25:22.900
But I have to kind of analyze that
link |
01:25:25.860
from a literary perspective,
link |
01:25:27.500
but it seems like there's love in there.
link |
01:25:29.860
Like a little bit.
link |
01:25:30.700
Yeah.
link |
01:25:31.540
It's a little bit lighthearted.
link |
01:25:32.940
Cause he's saying, even when I'm going after them,
link |
01:25:34.900
don't take it so seriously.
link |
01:25:36.260
Yeah.
link |
01:25:37.100
That's nice.
link |
01:25:37.940
It is nice.
link |
01:25:38.780
That's acknowledging the game of it.
link |
01:25:39.980
Yes.
link |
01:25:40.820
That's nice.
link |
01:25:41.980
He's not always.
link |
01:25:43.460
There's some things he's very, very vicious.
link |
01:25:45.020
Yeah.
link |
01:25:45.860
Very vicious.
link |
01:25:46.700
He's done things that I can tell you about
link |
01:25:48.540
that I'm like, this is a bad person.
link |
01:25:51.180
What do you think about one of the,
link |
01:25:53.100
okay, listen, I'm not,
link |
01:25:55.340
for people listening,
link |
01:25:56.420
I do not have Trump derangement syndrome.
link |
01:25:59.700
I don't, I see,
link |
01:26:01.660
I try to look for the good and the bad in everybody.
link |
01:26:05.580
One thing, perhaps it's irrational,
link |
01:26:07.900
but perhaps because I've been reading history,
link |
01:26:10.340
I, the one triggering thing for me
link |
01:26:14.540
is the delaying of elections.
link |
01:26:18.460
I believe in elections.
link |
01:26:20.100
And this is the part that you probably disagree with,
link |
01:26:24.820
but I, you know, I believe in the value of people voting.
link |
01:26:29.420
And I just seen too many dictators,
link |
01:26:32.340
the place where they finally,
link |
01:26:34.180
the big switch happens
link |
01:26:36.340
when you question the legitimacy of elections.
link |
01:26:39.780
Who's been questioning the legitimacy of elections
link |
01:26:41.540
for the last three years?
link |
01:26:43.100
I've only heard Donald Trump do it last year,
link |
01:26:45.660
but the last three years you're saying somebody else?
link |
01:26:48.540
You don't think, not my president, illegitimate,
link |
01:26:51.340
we're not gonna normalize him as president,
link |
01:26:52.980
Russia hacked this election, impeached,
link |
01:26:55.540
you're not a real president.
link |
01:26:56.380
You don't think that's questioning the legitimacy of 2016?
link |
01:26:59.140
Nah, it's a good, I haven't been paying attention enough,
link |
01:27:02.100
but I would imagine that argument has been,
link |
01:27:05.780
that I haven't actually heard too many people,
link |
01:27:08.900
but I imagine that's been a popular thing to say.
link |
01:27:12.340
Okay, I, but nevertheless, that's a part,
link |
01:27:16.620
that didn't, that's not a statement
link |
01:27:19.420
that gained power enough to say
link |
01:27:22.500
that Barack Obama will keep being president
link |
01:27:27.100
or Hillary Clinton should be president.
link |
01:27:30.380
Newsweek had that article,
link |
01:27:31.340
how Hillary Clinton could still be president, Newsweek.
link |
01:27:34.100
No, but she's not.
link |
01:27:35.780
That's what I'm saying.
link |
01:27:36.620
My worry isn't, my worry isn't saying
link |
01:27:41.220
that the election was illegitimate
link |
01:27:43.020
and people whining at a mass scale
link |
01:27:45.500
and then Fox News or CNN reporting for years
link |
01:27:49.340
or books being written for years.
link |
01:27:51.060
My worry is legitimately martial law.
link |
01:27:54.900
A person stays president.
link |
01:27:57.860
So here's the issue.
link |
01:27:59.140
Like there's a phase shift that happens in a dictatorship.
link |
01:28:02.500
I did a book on North Korea.
link |
01:28:04.260
I'm not someone who thinks dictatorship should be taken
link |
01:28:06.900
lightly.
link |
01:28:07.740
I'm not someone who thinks it can't happen here.
link |
01:28:09.940
I think a lot of times people are desperate
link |
01:28:12.220
for dictatorship.
link |
01:28:13.100
So I am with you.
link |
01:28:14.100
And I think this is something,
link |
01:28:15.460
if you're gonna hand wave it away,
link |
01:28:17.020
everyone else hand waved it away.
link |
01:28:18.380
Hitler's never gonna be chancellor.
link |
01:28:19.500
He's like lunatic.
link |
01:28:20.340
Oh, please.
link |
01:28:21.180
He's a joke.
link |
01:28:22.020
He's a joke.
link |
01:28:22.860
They couldn't find a publisher for Mein Kampf in English
link |
01:28:24.900
because this is some guy from some random minor party
link |
01:28:28.140
in Germany spouting nonsense.
link |
01:28:29.500
Who's gonna read this crap?
link |
01:28:31.220
So I completely agree with you in that regard.
link |
01:28:33.260
I don't think we're there.
link |
01:28:34.300
My point is Donald Trump this year
link |
01:28:37.820
had every pathway open to him to declare martial law.
link |
01:28:42.580
The cities are being burned down.
link |
01:28:44.460
He could have very easily sent in the tanks
link |
01:28:47.260
and people would have been applauding him from his side.
link |
01:28:49.500
You make me feel so good right now.
link |
01:28:50.540
But am I wrong though?
link |
01:28:51.620
No, I...
link |
01:28:52.460
What he did, he tweeted out to Mayor Wheeler of Portland.
link |
01:28:56.020
He said, call me.
link |
01:28:58.420
We will solve this in minutes, but you have to call.
link |
01:29:03.180
And he sat in his hands and they said, oh, it's his fault.
link |
01:29:06.500
The city is burning down.
link |
01:29:07.500
He's not doing anything.
link |
01:29:08.340
And he goes, I'm not doing anything
link |
01:29:10.100
until you ask me to do it.
link |
01:29:12.220
So I think that is,
link |
01:29:13.980
even if you think he's an aspiring dictator,
link |
01:29:16.900
that is at least a sign that there is some restraint
link |
01:29:20.700
on his aspirations.
link |
01:29:23.380
Can I just take that in as a beautiful moment of hope?
link |
01:29:29.380
So I'm gonna remember this moment.
link |
01:29:30.700
I'm gonna miss Ted Cruz, beautiful Ted.
link |
01:29:33.660
I'm gonna remember that.
link |
01:29:34.500
I mean, I should say that perhaps I'm irrationally,
link |
01:29:39.740
this is the one moment where I feel myself
link |
01:29:41.580
being a little unhealthy.
link |
01:29:42.980
I don't think you're being irrational.
link |
01:29:44.140
I think there's an asymmetry
link |
01:29:46.300
because it's kind of like, okay,
link |
01:29:48.500
either if I leave the house, it's like Russian roulette.
link |
01:29:51.100
Yeah, maybe it's like a one in six shot.
link |
01:29:52.700
I'm pulling the trigger, I'm killing myself,
link |
01:29:54.340
but that's one in six.
link |
01:29:56.140
That's not, and the consequences are so dire
link |
01:29:59.340
that a little paranoia would go a long way.
link |
01:30:01.660
There's something that.
link |
01:30:02.500
But you can't go back.
link |
01:30:04.140
Yeah.
link |
01:30:05.220
It's an asymmetry, yeah.
link |
01:30:06.580
The thing is, the thing that makes Donald Trump new to me,
link |
01:30:11.660
and again, I'm a little naive in these things,
link |
01:30:14.620
but he surprised me
link |
01:30:19.620
in how many ways he just didn't play by the rules.
link |
01:30:23.900
Yeah.
link |
01:30:25.220
And he's made me, a little ant in this ant colony,
link |
01:30:30.500
think like, well, do you have to play by the rules at all?
link |
01:30:34.460
Right.
link |
01:30:35.300
Like, why are we having elections?
link |
01:30:38.180
Why did you say, like, it's coronavirus time?
link |
01:30:41.500
Like, it's not healthy to have elections.
link |
01:30:44.780
Like, we shouldn't be, like, I could,
link |
01:30:47.140
if I put my dictator hat on.
link |
01:30:48.820
Nancy Pelosi said that Joe Biden shouldn't debate.
link |
01:30:52.180
Yeah, did she?
link |
01:30:53.940
Yes.
link |
01:30:54.820
She says she shouldn't dignify Trump with a debate.
link |
01:30:56.980
He's the president.
link |
01:30:57.820
He could be the worst president on earth,
link |
01:30:59.180
evil, despicable monster.
link |
01:31:01.020
I'll take that as an argument.
link |
01:31:02.100
So she's playing politics, but she's.
link |
01:31:03.660
I don't think that's playing politics.
link |
01:31:04.780
I think when there's a certain point where things get,
link |
01:31:08.100
when you start attacking institutions
link |
01:31:10.220
for the emergencies of the moment and acting arbitrarily,
link |
01:31:14.020
that is when things are the slippery slope.
link |
01:31:15.940
Yeah, so you're saying debates is one of the institutions.
link |
01:31:18.900
Like, that's one of the traditions to have the debates.
link |
01:31:21.020
I think the debates are extremely important.
link |
01:31:23.300
And now I don't think that someone's a good debater
link |
01:31:25.420
is gonna make a good president.
link |
01:31:26.540
I mean, that's a big problem.
link |
01:31:27.780
But you're just saying this is attacking
link |
01:31:29.140
just yet another tradition, yet another.
link |
01:31:32.300
You know, like, how if you're dating,
link |
01:31:33.300
if you're married to someone
link |
01:31:34.220
and someone throws out the word divorce,
link |
01:31:35.660
you can't unring that bell, you threw it out there.
link |
01:31:38.020
I'm saying you don't throw things out like that
link |
01:31:40.260
unless you really are ready to go down this road.
link |
01:31:43.620
And I think that is,
link |
01:31:44.660
there's nothing in the constitution about debates.
link |
01:31:46.540
We've only had them since 1980,
link |
01:31:48.220
but still, I think they are extremely important.
link |
01:31:51.060
It's also a great chance for Joe Biden
link |
01:31:52.780
to tell him to his face, you're full of crap,
link |
01:31:55.140
here's what you did, here's what you did,
link |
01:31:56.260
here's what you did.
link |
01:31:57.100
So fascinating that you're both, you acknowledge that,
link |
01:32:01.300
and yet you also see the value
link |
01:32:03.820
of tearing down the entire thing.
link |
01:32:06.300
So you're both worried about no debates,
link |
01:32:09.500
or at least in your voice, in your tone.
link |
01:32:11.260
There's a great quote by Chesterton.
link |
01:32:13.940
I'm not a fan of him at all.
link |
01:32:15.520
But he says, before you tear down a fence,
link |
01:32:17.180
make sure you know why they put it up first.
link |
01:32:19.260
So I am for tearing it all down,
link |
01:32:22.580
but there's something called like a controlled demolition,
link |
01:32:24.300
like building sevens, or there's.
link |
01:32:26.460
Allegedly.
link |
01:32:29.500
We knew we were in Tel Aviv.
link |
01:32:32.540
Hashtag building seven.
link |
01:32:34.460
We knew we were in Tel Aviv.
link |
01:32:36.060
Wow, you're faster than me.
link |
01:32:37.700
You're operating in a different level.
link |
01:32:40.580
I need to upgrade my operating system.
link |
01:32:43.260
I told you Windows 95.
link |
01:32:45.260
You're trying, yeah.
link |
01:32:48.580
Building seven.
link |
01:32:49.660
If you're gonna, it's like Indiana Jones, right?
link |
01:32:52.340
If you're gonna pull something away,
link |
01:32:54.220
make sure you have something in place first,
link |
01:32:55.820
as opposed to just breaking it,
link |
01:32:56.980
and then just, especially in politics,
link |
01:32:59.540
because it escalates.
link |
01:33:00.940
And when things escalate without any kind of response,
link |
01:33:04.220
it can go in a very bad, that's when Napoleon comes in.
link |
01:33:07.060
So what's your prediction about the Biden Trump debates?
link |
01:33:14.300
Again, I just have this weird,
link |
01:33:16.700
maybe we'll return to maybe not in this,
link |
01:33:19.660
how do we put more love into the world?
link |
01:33:22.380
And one of the things that worries me about the debates
link |
01:33:26.540
is it'll be the world's greatest troll
link |
01:33:32.860
against the grandpa on the porch.
link |
01:33:36.460
Who crapped his pants.
link |
01:33:37.540
Yeah.
link |
01:33:38.660
And it will not put more love into the world.
link |
01:33:42.380
It will create more mockery, like.
link |
01:33:46.500
Joe Biden did a great job against Paul Ryan in 2012.
link |
01:33:50.660
Paul Ryan was no lightweight.
link |
01:33:51.820
No one thought he was a lightweight.
link |
01:33:53.180
Joe Biden handed Sarah Pail in her ass in 2008,
link |
01:33:56.700
which isn't as easy to do as you think,
link |
01:33:58.100
because she's a female.
link |
01:33:59.020
So you're gonna come off as bullying.
link |
01:34:00.340
That's something you have to worry about.
link |
01:34:01.740
So the guy isn't,
link |
01:34:04.820
I think he is in the stages of cognitive decline.
link |
01:34:09.140
So I think it's going to be interesting.
link |
01:34:11.980
I want it to be,
link |
01:34:13.620
like Mike Tyson beating up a child,
link |
01:34:18.100
cause it'll be a source of amusement to me.
link |
01:34:20.860
But I don't know how it's going to go.
link |
01:34:22.220
Is it possible that Joe Biden will be the Mike Tyson?
link |
01:34:24.820
Yes, because in his last debate with Bernie,
link |
01:34:27.020
he was perfectly fine.
link |
01:34:28.500
And again, the guy was a sender for decades.
link |
01:34:30.380
And I don't think anyone,
link |
01:34:31.740
if you looked at Joe Biden in 2010,
link |
01:34:35.020
would have thought this guy is going to be,
link |
01:34:36.620
have his ass handed him a debate.
link |
01:34:37.940
You wouldn't think that at all.
link |
01:34:39.260
So I don't know who we're going to see.
link |
01:34:41.460
Plus he's got a lot of room to attack Trump.
link |
01:34:45.100
So I'm sure he's going to come strapped and ready
link |
01:34:47.500
and he's going to have his talking points
link |
01:34:49.460
and watch Trump dance, try to tap dance around him.
link |
01:34:51.980
And if he's in a position,
link |
01:34:52.820
I don't know what the rules of the debate are,
link |
01:34:54.260
to actually nail him to the wall,
link |
01:34:56.820
it might actually,
link |
01:34:57.660
I'm sure he's going to have a lot of lines too.
link |
01:34:59.420
The problem is Trump is the master counter puncher.
link |
01:35:01.860
So like when Hillary's had her line,
link |
01:35:04.180
she's like, well, it's a good thing that Donald Trump
link |
01:35:06.820
isn't in charge of our legal system.
link |
01:35:08.460
And he's like, yeah, you'd be in jail.
link |
01:35:10.260
It's like, oh, lady, you set him up.
link |
01:35:13.980
That's painful to watch, those debates.
link |
01:35:16.700
I mean, there's something, I think it's actually analogous.
link |
01:35:20.500
I've come to think of it,
link |
01:35:22.060
your conversation with me right now,
link |
01:35:24.660
some Sleepy Joe, I'm playing the role of Sleepy Joe.
link |
01:35:28.900
I actually connect to Joe because there's,
link |
01:35:32.940
I'm also incontinent.
link |
01:35:35.180
There's like these weird pauses that he does.
link |
01:35:37.540
Yes, he does.
link |
01:35:38.620
I do the same thing and it annoys the shit out of me
link |
01:35:42.300
that like in mid sentence,
link |
01:35:44.940
I'll start saying a different thing and take a tangent.
link |
01:35:49.380
I'm not as slow and drunk as I sound, always.
link |
01:35:54.460
I swear I'm more intelligent underneath it.
link |
01:35:56.460
I'm slower but less drunk.
link |
01:35:57.660
Yes, exactly.
link |
01:36:00.140
But the result, one of those is true, but not both, yeah.
link |
01:36:03.700
And Trump, just like you, are a master counter puncher.
link |
01:36:09.140
So it's gonna be messy.
link |
01:36:11.860
Here's the other thing, in all seriousness,
link |
01:36:13.380
Chris Wallace is the moderator.
link |
01:36:15.340
Chris Wallace has interviewed Trump several times
link |
01:36:17.300
and he was a tough, tough questioner.
link |
01:36:21.360
So I don't think he's gonna come in there
link |
01:36:23.700
with softball questions.
link |
01:36:25.160
I think he's really going to try to nail Trump down,
link |
01:36:28.220
which is tough to do.
link |
01:36:29.620
I like him a lot.
link |
01:36:30.660
Yeah, and he's like, Mr. President, sir,
link |
01:36:32.880
that's not accurate, blah, blah, blah.
link |
01:36:33.920
He's done it.
link |
01:36:34.760
And Trump gets very frustrated
link |
01:36:36.340
because he doesn't just let him say whatever he wants
link |
01:36:38.060
and he hits him with the follow up.
link |
01:36:41.980
I guess he's on Fox News.
link |
01:36:43.700
And I listen to his Sunday program every once in a while.
link |
01:36:49.260
He gives me hope that, I don't know,
link |
01:36:51.260
there's something in the voice that he's not bought.
link |
01:36:55.260
There's no question he's gonna take this seriously,
link |
01:36:57.260
which I think is the best you could hope for in a moderator.
link |
01:37:00.720
It feels like there's people that might actually
link |
01:37:03.100
take the mainstream media into a place
link |
01:37:05.740
that's going to be better in the future.
link |
01:37:08.260
And we need people like him.
link |
01:37:09.740
You mean like Robespierre?
link |
01:37:11.160
What do you mean?
link |
01:37:12.000
Like taking the mainstream media to a better future.
link |
01:37:14.380
Like bring out the guillotines.
link |
01:37:17.980
See, you put your anarchist hat back on.
link |
01:37:21.060
I don't think Robespierre is much of an anarchist,
link |
01:37:22.540
but yeah, I get what you're saying.
link |
01:37:24.220
You don't think there should be a centralized place for news?
link |
01:37:26.940
There isn't now.
link |
01:37:27.800
Well, that's what mainstream media
link |
01:37:31.720
is supposed to represent, and it's broken.
link |
01:37:33.440
Well, it's not whatever, what do you call that?
link |
01:37:36.840
A place where people traditionally said
link |
01:37:39.680
was the legitimate source of truth.
link |
01:37:44.320
That's what the media was supposed to represent, no?
link |
01:37:47.200
That's their big branding accomplishment.
link |
01:37:50.240
That was never true?
link |
01:37:51.840
Yeah, because here's what happens.
link |
01:37:53.520
We remember the Spanish American War,
link |
01:37:55.720
remember the Maine, we have to take Cuba,
link |
01:37:58.160
yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, right?
link |
01:38:00.840
Then record scratch, and then we're all objective.
link |
01:38:04.200
Like when did this transition happen according to people?
link |
01:38:06.480
When you were saying that the Kaiser
link |
01:38:08.160
is the worst human being on earth?
link |
01:38:10.280
When you were downplaying Stalin
link |
01:38:12.280
and downplaying Hitler's atrocities?
link |
01:38:14.280
When you were saying we had to be in Vietnam?
link |
01:38:16.280
At what point, WMDs, when did it change?
link |
01:38:19.080
It never changed.
link |
01:38:19.920
You just are better con artists at a certain point,
link |
01:38:22.360
and now the mask is dropping.
link |
01:38:23.620
Yeah, but don't you think there's, at its best,
link |
01:38:27.280
like investigative journalism can uncover truth
link |
01:38:32.320
in a way that like Reddit, subreddits can't?
link |
01:38:39.080
You know, Reddit, sure, I agree.
link |
01:38:41.560
At its best, absolutely, that's not even a dispute.
link |
01:38:43.820
But like, don't you think like fake it until you make it
link |
01:38:48.740
is the right way to do it?
link |
01:38:49.880
Meaning like the.
link |
01:38:51.100
Fake the news?
link |
01:38:52.320
No, no, no, I meant the news saying like,
link |
01:38:55.800
we dream of doing, of arriving at the truth
link |
01:38:59.960
and reporting the truth.
link |
01:39:01.240
They don't say that.
link |
01:39:02.080
CNN had an advertisement that said this is an apple.
link |
01:39:04.680
We only report facts.
link |
01:39:06.040
That's a lie.
link |
01:39:07.120
No, that's now, and now it's clear things have changed.
link |
01:39:10.920
They haven't changed.
link |
01:39:11.800
You're just more, you're more aware of their chicanery.
link |
01:39:15.960
But, okay, so the.
link |
01:39:17.880
How many people died in Iraq?
link |
01:39:19.320
Because Saddam Hussein was about to launch WMDs.
link |
01:39:22.760
Who had consequences for this?
link |
01:39:24.000
No one.
link |
01:39:25.400
This isn't a minor thing.
link |
01:39:26.480
This is lots of dead people.
link |
01:39:28.760
Yeah.
link |
01:39:30.040
And also, I mean, dead people, it's horrible,
link |
01:39:34.240
but also the money, which has, like we said,
link |
01:39:36.520
economic effects that.
link |
01:39:37.680
Marianne Williamson, I think it was, had the,
link |
01:39:39.560
or Trump, both of them had the great point that goes,
link |
01:39:41.860
that's like a trillion dollars.
link |
01:39:42.720
How many schools would that build?
link |
01:39:43.640
How many roads would that build?
link |
01:39:44.480
Even here, why are we building hospitals in Iraq
link |
01:39:46.880
that we destroyed when we could building hospitals here?
link |
01:39:49.000
It makes no sense.
link |
01:39:49.840
It's horrifying.
link |
01:39:51.760
So who's responsible for that?
link |
01:39:53.200
Like who?
link |
01:39:54.720
Alex Jones.
link |
01:39:55.920
No, I meant for, well, so who's responsible
link |
01:40:01.680
for arriving at the truth of that,
link |
01:40:04.560
of speaking to the money spent on the wars in Iraq?
link |
01:40:09.360
This is one of the great things about social media.
link |
01:40:11.800
Twitter, you have faith in Twitter.
link |
01:40:13.160
Not specifically Twitter, but yeah,
link |
01:40:14.720
social media's the whole, what anyone could.
link |
01:40:16.320
Here's another great example.
link |
01:40:18.240
Before, if you were talking about police brutality
link |
01:40:22.160
or these riots, you would have to perceive it
link |
01:40:24.880
in the way it was framed and presented to you.
link |
01:40:26.800
Nicholas Sandman's another example.
link |
01:40:29.120
Breonna Taylor, all these things.
link |
01:40:30.280
Well, we don't have footage of her.
link |
01:40:32.160
You would have to perceive in the way that it's edited
link |
01:40:34.160
and presented to you by the corporate press.
link |
01:40:35.920
Now everyone is a video, has a video camera.
link |
01:40:38.300
Everyone has their perspective.
link |
01:40:39.900
And it's very useful when these incidents happen
link |
01:40:42.840
where you could see the same incident from several angles
link |
01:40:45.360
and you don't need Don Lemon or Chris Wallace
link |
01:40:48.000
to tell me what this means.
link |
01:40:49.040
I can see with my own eyes.
link |
01:40:50.880
Yeah, I've been very pleasantly surprised about the power.
link |
01:40:55.560
See, the mob, again, gets in the way.
link |
01:40:58.280
They get emotional and they destroy the ability
link |
01:41:03.520
for people to reason.
link |
01:41:05.040
But you're right that truth is unobstructed on social media.
link |
01:41:09.960
Like if you're careful and patient, you can see the truth.
link |
01:41:14.520
Like for example, data on COVID,
link |
01:41:16.640
some of the best sources are doctors.
link |
01:41:19.920
Like if you wanna know the truth about the coronavirus
link |
01:41:22.480
and what's happening is there's follow people on Twitter.
link |
01:41:27.400
There's certain people that are just like sourcing them
link |
01:41:29.200
from me versus the CDC and the WHO.
link |
01:41:32.040
It's, that's fast.
link |
01:41:33.680
I mean, well, it's kind of anarchy, right?
link |
01:41:36.160
Yes, it is.
link |
01:41:37.000
It's not kind of, it is anarchy, yes.
link |
01:41:38.940
I mean, well, there's some censorship
link |
01:41:41.720
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:41:42.560
You have censorship under anarchy
link |
01:41:43.920
in the sense that you're talking about.
link |
01:41:45.000
Like people get kicked off of Twitter.
link |
01:41:47.480
That's a drawing backwards.
link |
01:41:48.320
How do you kick somebody, okay.
link |
01:41:49.600
So, I mean, it's a.
link |
01:41:50.920
Private company.
link |
01:41:52.360
Private company.
link |
01:41:54.360
Most people wouldn't say Twitter is working,
link |
01:41:56.720
but that's probably because they take for granted
link |
01:41:59.420
how well it's working and they're just complaining
link |
01:42:01.320
about the small part of it that's broken.
link |
01:42:03.920
Yeah.
link |
01:42:07.840
Okay, another question about.
link |
01:42:09.360
You feel better?
link |
01:42:10.240
No, by the way, I mean, I had a personal gripe
link |
01:42:15.960
with the situation about the, not a personal gripe,
link |
01:42:19.940
but I felt overly emotional about the possibility
link |
01:42:25.920
that there will be some of Donald Trump
link |
01:42:29.440
messing with the election process,
link |
01:42:31.760
but you made me feel better.
link |
01:42:33.040
Good.
link |
01:42:33.880
Like saying like, if he had a bunch of opportunities
link |
01:42:36.560
to do what I would have done if I was a dictator,
link |
01:42:42.760
I would, the first time those riots over George Floyd,
link |
01:42:47.080
I would have instituted martial law.
link |
01:42:49.880
Do you know what I remember very vividly?
link |
01:42:52.080
Is after 9 11 and everyone was waiting for George Bush
link |
01:42:55.160
to give his speech and he had 98% approved rating.
link |
01:42:57.920
And I remember very vividly,
link |
01:42:59.040
cause if he had said we're suspending the constitution,
link |
01:43:03.000
everyone would have cheered for him.
link |
01:43:04.140
Like he couldn't get enough support at that time.
link |
01:43:06.400
And he didn't do it.
link |
01:43:07.800
And I can't say anything really good about George W. Bush.
link |
01:43:10.720
I'm not a fan of his to say the least.
link |
01:43:12.480
So I think you and I, and other people who are familiar
link |
01:43:15.880
with totalitarian regimes to some extent from our ancestry
link |
01:43:19.500
or whatever, from research should always be the ones
link |
01:43:22.880
freaking out and warning,
link |
01:43:24.640
but we should also be aware of we got a ways to go
link |
01:43:28.980
before it's Hitler.
link |
01:43:30.560
And thankfully there are a lot of dominoes
link |
01:43:34.360
that have to fall into place before Hitler.
link |
01:43:36.360
It's like the game secret Hitler, it's a board game
link |
01:43:38.400
before Hitler becomes Hitler.
link |
01:43:40.100
Like it's not, especially in America,
link |
01:43:43.080
there's lots of things that have to happen
link |
01:43:45.600
before you really get to that point.
link |
01:43:47.600
I mean, FDR was for all intents and purposes a dictator,
link |
01:43:50.460
but even then the worst you could say,
link |
01:43:52.400
and this is not something that you should take lightly
link |
01:43:54.580
was internment of Japanese citizens,
link |
01:43:56.540
but they weren't murdered.
link |
01:43:58.040
They weren't under lock and key in the sense of like in cells.
link |
01:44:01.800
So things could have gotten a lot worse for him.
link |
01:44:04.120
We have to, I mean, Hitler is such a horrible person
link |
01:44:06.560
to bring up because.
link |
01:44:07.400
He's Mussolini.
link |
01:44:08.480
Yeah, Mussolini is better because Hitler is so close
link |
01:44:12.840
and connected to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
link |
01:44:15.600
There's all this stuff that led up to the war
link |
01:44:17.400
and the war itself.
link |
01:44:18.240
Say that there was no Holocaust,
link |
01:44:20.760
Hitler would probably be viewed differently.
link |
01:44:23.440
Yes, I should think so.
link |
01:44:24.680
Well, I mean, but.
link |
01:44:26.920
You think, that's a very controversial stance.
link |
01:44:29.020
You think Hitler would be viewed differently
link |
01:44:30.240
if it wasn't for the Holocaust?
link |
01:44:31.620
Well, I mean, but it's a funny thing that the,
link |
01:44:38.840
I would say the death of how many, 40, 50 million.
link |
01:44:44.720
I mean, I don't know how you calculate it.
link |
01:44:46.920
It's not seen as bad as the 6 million.
link |
01:44:50.920
Oh yeah, because of Mao and Stalin.
link |
01:44:52.780
Yeah, but it's interesting.
link |
01:44:56.260
I'm working on it.
link |
01:44:57.320
You're working on it.
link |
01:44:58.160
Yeah, the next book I'm talking about.
link |
01:44:59.000
Reminding, well, it's good.
link |
01:45:01.040
I'm glad a good writer is,
link |
01:45:02.480
because the world's not reminded.
link |
01:45:03.800
My last book, The New Right,
link |
01:45:05.080
I had to deal with something like the Nazis.
link |
01:45:06.440
And one of the points they make is,
link |
01:45:07.560
how come everyone knows about the Holocaust,
link |
01:45:09.020
but no one knows about the Holodomor?
link |
01:45:10.640
And they're right.
link |
01:45:11.660
We should know about this,
link |
01:45:12.700
because it is a great example of both
link |
01:45:14.640
how the Western media were depraved,
link |
01:45:17.360
but also what human beings are capable of.
link |
01:45:19.680
And those scars are still,
link |
01:45:22.320
many Americans think Russia and Ukraine are the same thing.
link |
01:45:25.080
Oh, Trump's in bed with the Ukrainians,
link |
01:45:27.100
Trump's about the Russians,
link |
01:45:27.940
they think it's the same thing.
link |
01:45:29.440
For us, it's complete lunacy.
link |
01:45:31.720
But this is the kind of thing where Pol Pot
link |
01:45:33.760
is another example,
link |
01:45:35.240
where people have no clue of what has been done
link |
01:45:38.320
to their fellow man on the face of this earth,
link |
01:45:40.000
and they should know.
link |
01:45:41.420
How much of that do you lay at the hands of communism?
link |
01:45:43.920
How much are you with like a Jordan Pearson
link |
01:45:46.480
who is intricately connecting the atrocities,
link |
01:45:51.200
like you're saying, 1930s Ukraine,
link |
01:45:53.880
where people were starved?
link |
01:45:56.200
I recently, my grandmother recently passed away,
link |
01:45:58.400
and she survived that as a kid.
link |
01:46:02.120
Which is, those people, I mean, they're tough.
link |
01:46:09.040
They're tough.
link |
01:46:09.880
Like that whole region is tough,
link |
01:46:11.960
because they survived that,
link |
01:46:13.280
and then right after, occupation of Nazis, of Germans.
link |
01:46:19.640
How much do you lay that at communism as an ideology,
link |
01:46:24.440
versus Stalin, the man?
link |
01:46:27.920
I think Lenin was building concentration camps
link |
01:46:31.040
while he was around, and slave labor.
link |
01:46:34.120
I don't, I think it's clearly both.
link |
01:46:36.840
There are certain variants of communism
link |
01:46:38.600
that were far, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev,
link |
01:46:42.640
the reason the Soviet Union fell apart,
link |
01:46:44.600
and this is kind of, I'm gonna spoil the end of the book.
link |
01:46:47.000
There's an amazing book called Revolution 1989,
link |
01:46:48.920
it's like the most beautiful book I've ever read,
link |
01:46:50.620
by Viktor Sebastian, he's a Hungarian author.
link |
01:46:53.300
And basically what happens in 1989,
link |
01:46:55.320
Poland has their elections,
link |
01:46:56.520
and then in 1990, they kind of let in
link |
01:46:58.600
the labor people to the government.
link |
01:47:00.360
And people start crossing borders in the Eastern Bloc,
link |
01:47:04.480
and you had Hanukkah from Eastern Germany,
link |
01:47:06.260
and Ceausescu from Romania calling Gorbachev,
link |
01:47:09.360
because those are the two toughest ones,
link |
01:47:11.080
by communist standards, they go,
link |
01:47:13.040
they're just escaping, we're gonna lose everything.
link |
01:47:16.280
You gotta send in the tanks, like you did in Hungary,
link |
01:47:18.040
like you did in Czechoslovakia in 68.
link |
01:47:20.540
And Gorbachev goes, I'm not sending the tanks.
link |
01:47:22.280
And they go, dude, if you don't send in the tanks,
link |
01:47:24.960
it's all done, and he goes, nope, I'm not that kind of guy.
link |
01:47:28.360
And they were right, Ceausescu was personally shot
link |
01:47:31.920
with his wife up against the wall,
link |
01:47:33.520
Hanukkah, I forget what happened to him,
link |
01:47:35.240
but they all self liberated.
link |
01:47:37.460
My friend who was born in Czechoslovakia,
link |
01:47:39.840
his mom was pregnant under communism,
link |
01:47:42.220
and she never even imagined he'd be free,
link |
01:47:43.840
and he was born under free.
link |
01:47:45.560
And they were all looking around,
link |
01:47:46.960
all these countries that self liberated,
link |
01:47:48.720
because they're like, this is a trick, right?
link |
01:47:50.440
They're trying to figure out who's like not good,
link |
01:47:52.520
so that they can arrest us on mass, and they didn't.
link |
01:47:54.840
So even within communism,
link |
01:47:58.880
there are bad guys and better guys.
link |
01:48:02.480
But we talked about anarchy, we talked about democracy.
link |
01:48:06.080
Do you see, like there's democratic socialism
link |
01:48:09.240
conversations going on in the popular culture,
link |
01:48:13.400
socialism is seen as like evil, or for some people, great?
link |
01:48:18.580
Sure.
link |
01:48:19.840
What are your thoughts about it as in a political ideology?
link |
01:48:24.160
Evil.
link |
01:48:25.360
So you're on the evil side?
link |
01:48:26.480
Yes.
link |
01:48:27.320
Fundamentally?
link |
01:48:28.140
Yes.
link |
01:48:28.980
What is it, you know, what makes it evil?
link |
01:48:34.880
What's like structurally, if you were to try to analyze?
link |
01:48:38.040
Sure, I'd say three ways.
link |
01:48:39.920
Morally, no person has the right
link |
01:48:41.720
to tell another person how to live their life.
link |
01:48:44.920
Economically, it's not possible
link |
01:48:46.520
to make calculations under socialism.
link |
01:48:48.440
It's only the prices that are information that tells me,
link |
01:48:51.780
oh, this is, we need to produce more of this,
link |
01:48:53.380
we need to produce less of this.
link |
01:48:54.880
Without prices being able to adjust
link |
01:48:56.480
and give information to producers and consumers,
link |
01:48:59.940
you have no way of being able to produce
link |
01:49:02.040
effectively or efficiently.
link |
01:49:03.520
And also it is, it turns people against each other.
link |
01:49:08.120
When you force people to interact,
link |
01:49:09.920
when you force them into relationships,
link |
01:49:11.320
when you force them into jobs,
link |
01:49:13.040
and you don't give them any choice,
link |
01:49:14.380
when there's a monopoly, the consequence of monopoly,
link |
01:49:17.120
everyone's familiar with ostensibly under capitalism,
link |
01:49:19.760
but somehow when it's a government monopoly,
link |
01:49:21.520
all those economic principles don't work,
link |
01:49:23.000
it doesn't make any sense.
link |
01:49:24.280
But there's force in democracy too,
link |
01:49:26.180
it's just you're saying there's a bit more force
link |
01:49:29.040
in socialism.
link |
01:49:32.240
But that's interesting that you say
link |
01:49:33.580
that there's not enough information.
link |
01:49:34.880
I mean, that's ultimately,
link |
01:49:36.680
you need to have really good data
link |
01:49:40.360
to achieve the goals of the system,
link |
01:49:43.080
even if there's no corruption.
link |
01:49:45.680
You just need to have the information.
link |
01:49:47.240
Which you can't.
link |
01:49:48.200
And capitalism provides you
link |
01:49:49.840
a really strong source of real time information.
link |
01:49:58.560
And if capitalism at its best and cleanest,
link |
01:50:02.640
which is perfect information, is available,
link |
01:50:05.560
there's no manipulation of information.
link |
01:50:08.360
That's one of the problems, okay.
link |
01:50:11.760
Can we talk about some candidates,
link |
01:50:13.760
the ones we got and possible alternatives?
link |
01:50:17.200
So one question I have is, why do we have,
link |
01:50:21.920
within this system, why do we have the candidates we have?
link |
01:50:27.800
It seems, maybe you can correct me,
link |
01:50:30.960
highly unsatisfactory.
link |
01:50:35.640
Is anyone actually excited about our current candidates?
link |
01:50:39.520
I'm kind of excited,
link |
01:50:41.040
because no matter who wins the election,
link |
01:50:43.200
it's gonna be hilarious.
link |
01:50:44.420
So that is something that I'm excited about.
link |
01:50:46.240
From a humor perspective.
link |
01:50:48.520
Is that what the whole system is?
link |
01:50:50.040
So that's one theory of the case,
link |
01:50:52.120
is the entire thing is optimized for viewership.
link |
01:50:55.960
Yeah.
link |
01:50:56.800
And excitement by definitions
link |
01:50:59.240
of like the reality show kind of excitement.
link |
01:51:01.540
I think it is,
link |
01:51:04.320
if you look at what happened with Brett Kavanaugh,
link |
01:51:06.820
this is not a career that would draw people
link |
01:51:11.680
who are, you might say, quality.
link |
01:51:14.600
Because no matter who they are,
link |
01:51:15.960
there would be a huge incentive from the other team
link |
01:51:18.800
to denigrate them and humiliate them
link |
01:51:20.960
in the worst possible ways.
link |
01:51:21.980
Because as the two teams lose their legitimacy
link |
01:51:25.200
among Gen Pop, it's gonna get harder and harder
link |
01:51:27.880
for them to maintain any kind of claims to authority,
link |
01:51:30.640
which is something I like,
link |
01:51:32.080
but which does kind of play out
link |
01:51:33.600
in certain nefarious ways.
link |
01:51:36.080
So people, the best of the best,
link |
01:51:37.980
are not gonna wanna be politicians.
link |
01:51:40.100
Yeah, because I could have a job,
link |
01:51:42.520
or have a job interview and I'm running Yahoo or whatever,
link |
01:51:45.720
or I could, for 18 months, have to eat, you know,
link |
01:51:49.200
corn dogs looking like I'm going down on someone
link |
01:51:51.280
and shake hands and have all this,
link |
01:51:53.600
my family and on social media daily
link |
01:51:56.440
called the worst things, for what?
link |
01:51:58.880
And then I'm still not guaranteed the position.
link |
01:52:02.020
But the flip side of that, like from my perspective,
link |
01:52:05.520
is the competition is weak.
link |
01:52:08.240
Meaning, like, you need a minimum amount of eloquence,
link |
01:52:13.240
eloquence, clearly, that I don't,
link |
01:52:16.120
the bar which I did not pass.
link |
01:52:17.880
I don't think either of them would be considered
link |
01:52:19.560
particularly eloquent, Biden or Trump.
link |
01:52:21.260
No, I know, but that's what I'm saying.
link |
01:52:22.800
The competition, like if you were,
link |
01:52:26.500
wanted to become a politician,
link |
01:52:28.200
if you wanted to run for president,
link |
01:52:30.300
the opportunity is there.
link |
01:52:32.120
Like if you were at all competent.
link |
01:52:33.800
Like if you had, so like Andrew Yang is an example
link |
01:52:36.320
of somebody who has a bunch of ideas,
link |
01:52:37.840
is somewhat eloquent, like young, energetic.
link |
01:52:43.760
It feels like there should be thousands of Andrew Yangs,
link |
01:52:47.160
like that would enter the domain.
link |
01:52:49.280
He went nowhere.
link |
01:52:51.440
Well, I wouldn't say he went nowhere.
link |
01:52:54.200
He generated quite a bit of excitement.
link |
01:52:55.760
He just didn't go very far, that's, okay.
link |
01:52:59.820
You don't have to run for president
link |
01:53:01.040
to generate excitement with your ideas.
link |
01:53:02.360
You could be a podcast host, I'm not even joking.
link |
01:53:04.240
That's right, that's right, that's right.
link |
01:53:07.780
And he's both, Andrew Yang.
link |
01:53:09.920
Oh, he's a podcast?
link |
01:53:10.840
Yeah, he has a podcast called Yang Speaks.
link |
01:53:13.560
Oh, okay, cool.
link |
01:53:19.720
Oh, wow, the music of the way you said, yeah, cool.
link |
01:53:24.500
It's the way my mom talks to me
link |
01:53:25.880
when I tell her something exciting going on in my life.
link |
01:53:31.640
Oh, that's nice, honey.
link |
01:53:32.780
Oh, you made a robot, that's cool.
link |
01:53:35.880
A mixed coffee?
link |
01:53:36.720
Oh, you're still single, though, aren't you?
link |
01:53:38.800
I wonder why, I wonder why.
link |
01:53:43.120
Make yourself a robot wife?
link |
01:53:44.800
Give me some robot grandchildren.
link |
01:53:49.160
Okay, but first of all, okay,
link |
01:53:53.640
let me ask you about Andrew Yang
link |
01:53:55.120
because he represents fresh energy.
link |
01:53:58.960
You don't find him fresh or energetic, you know?
link |
01:54:02.180
Like, is there any candidate you wish was in the mix
link |
01:54:07.220
that was in the mix you wish was
link |
01:54:09.360
one of the last two remaining?
link |
01:54:11.260
Yeah, people like Marianne Williamson, I thought was great.
link |
01:54:14.840
Tulsi, I thought was great.
link |
01:54:16.520
Amy Klobuchar got a bad rap.
link |
01:54:18.780
I think she held her own.
link |
01:54:21.260
Smart, she wasn't particularly funny, that's okay.
link |
01:54:24.080
I think she was nonthreatening to a lot of people.
link |
01:54:26.240
What did you like about them?
link |
01:54:28.160
I guess I just named all women, that's interesting.
link |
01:54:29.640
It wasn't even intentional.
link |
01:54:31.540
Tulsi, I liked that she was aggressive,
link |
01:54:33.480
has a good resume and is not staying the course
link |
01:54:38.520
for the establishment.
link |
01:54:39.760
Marianne Williamson, I like because she comes from a place,
link |
01:54:42.720
from what it seems, of genuine compassion.
link |
01:54:45.040
Maybe she's a sociopath, I don't know.
link |
01:54:47.160
I read her book and it actually affected me profoundly
link |
01:54:50.600
because it's very rare when you read a book
link |
01:54:53.280
and there's even that one idea that blows your mind
link |
01:54:55.500
and that you kind of think about all the time.
link |
01:54:56.840
And there was one such idea in her book
link |
01:54:59.000
about she was teaching something called A Course
link |
01:55:01.560
in Miracles in Hollywood.
link |
01:55:02.560
I think she still teaches it.
link |
01:55:04.120
And this was during the 80s, the height of the AIDS crisis.
link |
01:55:07.540
And all these young men in the prime of their life
link |
01:55:09.840
were dropping like flies.
link |
01:55:11.760
And she's trying to give them hope.
link |
01:55:13.180
Well, good luck, they're dying, no one cares.
link |
01:55:16.240
And they're like, you can't tell us
link |
01:55:17.760
that they're gonna cure this, that's a lie.
link |
01:55:21.480
And she goes, what if I told you they're not gonna cure it?
link |
01:55:25.420
What if I told you it's gonna be to like diabetes?
link |
01:55:28.180
They cut off your foot and you're gonna go blind.
link |
01:55:30.560
Would that be something that you can hope for?
link |
01:55:33.200
And when you put it like that, it's like, yeah.
link |
01:55:34.920
Like if you're talking to someone like a homeless junkie
link |
01:55:36.760
and you're like, you could be a doctor,
link |
01:55:38.080
you're a lawyer or a lawyer, like cool story.
link |
01:55:39.840
Like you could have a studio apartment
link |
01:55:43.400
with a terrible roommate and a shitty job.
link |
01:55:45.880
But when you're on the street,
link |
01:55:48.400
cooking breakfast in a teaspoon and you hear that,
link |
01:55:51.360
you're like, wait, would that really be so bad?
link |
01:55:53.360
Is that really so much worse than this?
link |
01:55:54.800
No, and it becomes something.
link |
01:55:56.240
So when she put it in those terms, I'm like, wow,
link |
01:55:59.040
this woman that really did a number on me
link |
01:56:01.700
in terms of teaching people how to be hopeful.
link |
01:56:04.760
Small steps, I guess.
link |
01:56:05.920
But it's also, then it becomes less of I need a miracle
link |
01:56:09.120
to be like, oh, this is really manageable.
link |
01:56:11.520
Yeah.
link |
01:56:12.360
And it's absurd to think it's impossible.
link |
01:56:15.000
What about what's your take on Unity 2020
link |
01:56:17.920
that Brett Weinstein pushed forward?
link |
01:56:22.920
It was DOA, he couldn't even stand up to Twitter.
link |
01:56:26.360
Dead on arrival.
link |
01:56:27.200
Dead on arrival.
link |
01:56:28.040
He couldn't even stand up to Twitter, let alone,
link |
01:56:29.520
or to Facebook, they got blocked,
link |
01:56:31.040
let alone to Facebook.
link |
01:56:31.880
It was not hugely problematic, by the way,
link |
01:56:33.660
that Twitter would block that.
link |
01:56:35.640
Not at all.
link |
01:56:36.800
I don't know why they blocked it,
link |
01:56:37.900
but I believe, I don't know what problematic means.
link |
01:56:40.440
That's a word that does a lot of work
link |
01:56:42.560
that people wanted to do conceptually.
link |
01:56:45.600
The idea that Unity is taking the rejects from each party
link |
01:56:49.680
and we're gonna have something that no one likes
link |
01:56:52.000
and therefore it's gonna be a compromise is absurd.
link |
01:56:54.480
The last time we had this kind of Unity ticket
link |
01:56:56.720
was the Civil War, where you had Andrew Johnson
link |
01:56:59.440
from the Democrats and Lincoln from the Republicans.
link |
01:57:01.640
This was not something that ended well,
link |
01:57:03.720
particularly nicely, for both halves of the country.
link |
01:57:05.960
So that's the way you see it is,
link |
01:57:08.320
like the way I saw it,
link |
01:57:09.720
I guess I haven't looked carefully at it.
link |
01:57:11.520
I haven't either, to be fair.
link |
01:57:12.560
Yeah.
link |
01:57:13.600
The way I saw it is emphasizing centrists, which is.
link |
01:57:17.120
How is Tulsi a centrist?
link |
01:57:19.200
Tulsi was involved?
link |
01:57:20.040
Yes, he's trying to push Tulsi
link |
01:57:21.440
on like Jesse Ventura or something.
link |
01:57:23.280
Oh.
link |
01:57:24.280
So, okay, I don't know.
link |
01:57:26.360
I don't know the specifics.
link |
01:57:27.200
As a scientist, you also know centrism
link |
01:57:28.880
is not a coherent term in politics.
link |
01:57:30.560
But see, now you're like, what is it?
link |
01:57:34.320
Pleading to authority and my ego.
link |
01:57:37.600
No, no, I'm pleading to how you approach data.
link |
01:57:40.240
If someone is saying the mean is accurate,
link |
01:57:42.680
that only mean, I mean, the mean could be anywhere.
link |
01:57:45.040
It's a function of what's around it.
link |
01:57:46.200
That mean is true.
link |
01:57:47.080
I don't even know what centrists is supposed to mean,
link |
01:57:49.680
but what it means to me, there's no idea, a centrist.
link |
01:57:55.160
There's more of a center right or center left.
link |
01:57:58.600
To me, what that means is somebody
link |
01:58:00.600
who is a liberal or a conservative,
link |
01:58:04.240
but is open minded and empathetic to the other side.
link |
01:58:13.200
Joe Biden had the crime bill.
link |
01:58:15.600
Joe Biden voted for Republican Supreme Court justices.
link |
01:58:18.360
Joe Biden voted for a balanced budget.
link |
01:58:19.920
Joe Biden voted for Bush's war.
link |
01:58:21.760
And I'm sure probably I haven't looked this up,
link |
01:58:23.120
the Patriot Act.
link |
01:58:23.960
Joe, if you want a centrist, you have Joe Biden.
link |
01:58:26.040
Yeah, okay.
link |
01:58:26.880
He's worked very well with Republicans.
link |
01:58:28.400
That argument could be made.
link |
01:58:29.360
Of course, everybody will always resist that argument.
link |
01:58:33.440
It's indeniable.
link |
01:58:34.280
In fact, during the campaign,
link |
01:58:35.920
some activists started yelling at him at a town hall.
link |
01:58:40.840
Not yelling, just saying, hey, we need open borders.
link |
01:58:43.560
Joe Biden says, I'm not for open borders.
link |
01:58:45.520
Go vote for Trump and literally turn his back on the man.
link |
01:58:48.840
And this is during the primaries
link |
01:58:50.200
where it would behoove you to try to appeal to the base.
link |
01:58:53.960
And of course, you can probably also make the argument
link |
01:58:55.840
that Donald Trump is center right, if not center left.
link |
01:58:59.240
Well, I mean, he's very unique as a personality.
link |
01:59:04.200
But if you look at his record,
link |
01:59:05.480
and first of all, his rhetoric,
link |
01:59:06.680
you can say is not centrist at all.
link |
01:59:08.480
But in terms of how he governs,
link |
01:59:10.480
the budgeting, I mean, has been very moderate.
link |
01:59:13.480
It certainly hasn't been like draconian budget cuts.
link |
01:59:16.080
The Supreme Court, you could say, okay, he's hard right.
link |
01:59:18.320
Immigration, you could say in certain capacities,
link |
01:59:20.280
he's hard right.
link |
01:59:21.160
But in terms of pro life, what has he done there?
link |
01:59:24.520
In terms of, so in many other aspects,
link |
01:59:27.440
he's been very much this kind of me too Republican.
link |
01:59:30.720
But certainly the rhetoric,
link |
01:59:31.560
it's very hard to make him the case that he's a centrist.
link |
01:59:33.720
So you don't like,
link |
01:59:35.160
is there any other idea you find compelling?
link |
01:59:37.840
What I like about UND 2020 is it's an idea
link |
01:59:41.720
for a different way, for like a different party,
link |
01:59:46.200
a different path forward.
link |
01:59:47.640
So ideas, just like anarchy is an interesting idea
link |
01:59:51.680
that leads to discourse, that leads to.
link |
01:59:53.520
I don't think it's interesting at all.
link |
01:59:54.600
And here's why I don't think it's interesting.
link |
01:59:56.560
Sweden has eight parties in its parliament.
link |
01:59:59.920
Iceland, population is like 150,000.
link |
02:00:02.000
They've got nine, I think it was.
link |
02:00:03.280
Czech Republic has nine, Britain has five.
link |
02:00:06.080
So the claim that two parties
link |
02:00:08.680
is the censorious of speech,
link |
02:00:12.160
but three, oh, now all of a sudden,
link |
02:00:14.200
it makes no sense, doesn't port to the data, number one.
link |
02:00:16.640
Number two is Donald Trump demonstrated
link |
02:00:18.800
that you can be basically a third party candidate,
link |
02:00:21.080
sees the machinery of a existing party
link |
02:00:23.880
and appropriate to your own ends as Bernie Sanders.
link |
02:00:27.080
Bernie Sanders has never been a Democrat.
link |
02:00:29.320
Major credit to him for that's not easy
link |
02:00:31.560
to be elected as Senator as an independent.
link |
02:00:33.040
He's done it repeatedly.
link |
02:00:34.200
So these are two examples of ossified elites
link |
02:00:37.440
right for the picking.
link |
02:00:38.280
But to have a third party makes no real sense.
link |
02:00:42.880
Speaking of which, a party you talk about quite a bit.
link |
02:00:47.000
And let's look, this is a personal challenge to you.
link |
02:00:53.160
Let me bring up the Libertarian Party.
link |
02:00:55.520
And the personal challenge is to go five minutes
link |
02:00:58.840
without mocking them in discussing this idea.
link |
02:01:03.160
So first of all, what?
link |
02:01:05.160
I'm being trolled.
link |
02:01:07.440
Okay, I'm being trolled, okay, I'm being trolled.
link |
02:01:10.600
I'm being trolled, okay, this is good.
link |
02:01:13.320
Do you remember the fun friends?
link |
02:01:14.720
There was an episode where Chandler
link |
02:01:16.000
had to not make fun of people.
link |
02:01:17.560
Like, can you go one day Chandler?
link |
02:01:19.200
And Phoebe starts telling him about like this UFO she saw
link |
02:01:22.800
and he's like, that's very interesting and nice for you.
link |
02:01:27.840
This is exactly that.
link |
02:01:29.280
So a true master would be able to play
link |
02:01:31.120
within the game, within the constraints.
link |
02:01:32.880
So no, I'm pretty sure you'll still mock them.
link |
02:01:36.320
But no, no, I'll stick to the rules.
link |
02:01:38.480
Five minutes, easy.
link |
02:01:39.640
So first of all, speaking broadly about libertarianism,
link |
02:01:42.680
can you speak to that, how you feel about it?
link |
02:01:44.840
And then also to the Libertarian Party,
link |
02:01:47.000
which is the implementation of it in our current system.
link |
02:01:49.680
So I think libertarianism is a great idea.
link |
02:01:53.720
And I think there's many libertarian ideas
link |
02:01:56.000
that have become much more mainstream,
link |
02:01:58.120
which I'm very, very happy about.
link |
02:01:59.600
I remember there was an article in either New York
link |
02:02:02.280
or New Yorker Magazine in the early 90s,
link |
02:02:05.160
where they talked about the Cato Institute,
link |
02:02:06.720
which is a libertarian think tank.
link |
02:02:08.440
And they refer to the fact that Cato was against war
link |
02:02:11.960
and against like regulation with a wacky consistency,
link |
02:02:16.200
because they didn't know how to reconcile these two things.
link |
02:02:18.560
I don't remember what the two things were,
link |
02:02:19.520
but I remember that expression wacky consistency.
link |
02:02:22.120
And it wasn't even, we were all taught,
link |
02:02:25.160
and this is very much before the internet,
link |
02:02:27.160
that there's two tribes and if you're pro life,
link |
02:02:30.720
you have to hate gays.
link |
02:02:32.480
And if you're for socialized medicine,
link |
02:02:34.960
that also means you have to be for free speech.
link |
02:02:39.760
It was just this very, and like there's a whole menu
link |
02:02:42.080
and you got to sign it to all of them.
link |
02:02:43.440
And that menu is terrible.
link |
02:02:45.720
They hate America, they want to destroy it.
link |
02:02:47.480
Oh my God, those are horrible evil.
link |
02:02:48.920
This is the menu you want.
link |
02:02:50.280
And the Libertarian Party to some extent,
link |
02:02:52.600
and just libertarians as a whole said,
link |
02:02:54.280
you know, you can do the Chinese buffet
link |
02:02:57.080
and take a little from column A, a little from column B
link |
02:02:59.480
and have an ideology that is coherent and consistent,
link |
02:03:03.840
an ideology of peace and nonaggression
link |
02:03:07.600
and things like that.
link |
02:03:08.760
The Libertarian Party takes its model
link |
02:03:12.600
from like the early progressive and populist parties
link |
02:03:15.240
from the early 20th century,
link |
02:03:16.680
which were not very effective
link |
02:03:18.400
in terms of getting people elected,
link |
02:03:20.840
but were extremely effective
link |
02:03:23.240
in terms of getting the two major parties
link |
02:03:25.240
to appropriate and adopt their ideas and implement them.
link |
02:03:27.960
And in Britain as well, the liberal party got destroyed
link |
02:03:30.440
and became taken over by labor
link |
02:03:32.200
as the alternative party to the Tories
link |
02:03:34.840
and have those ideas basically become mainstreamed.
link |
02:03:38.640
So I think that, and the libertarian,
link |
02:03:40.480
my friend who passed away, Eric, I miss him dearly,
link |
02:03:43.520
was their webmaster and his whole point is,
link |
02:03:46.000
if you don't think of that in terms of a party,
link |
02:03:47.680
in terms of getting people elected,
link |
02:03:49.080
but if you think of it as a party
link |
02:03:50.320
in terms of getting people educated about alternatives,
link |
02:03:53.880
then there's enormous use for that.
link |
02:03:55.800
That was his perspective.
link |
02:03:56.720
And I don't think that's an absurd perspective.
link |
02:03:58.720
But here's some libertarian ideas
link |
02:04:00.160
that have become extremely mainstream.
link |
02:04:02.400
War should be a last resort.
link |
02:04:04.720
This is something we were taught as kids and we all say,
link |
02:04:07.120
but for many years, it's been like,
link |
02:04:09.280
they don't think of it as a last resort.
link |
02:04:10.440
It's like something's bad, well, it's like the first instinct.
link |
02:04:12.960
Now it's like, let's really give it a week, just a week.
link |
02:04:15.480
Like what's going on in Syria?
link |
02:04:16.800
Is there really gonna be a genocide, the Kurds?
link |
02:04:18.840
You know, things like that.
link |
02:04:19.680
So that's one.
link |
02:04:20.520
Another thing is drug legalization.
link |
02:04:22.880
This was, you know, when you and I were kids,
link |
02:04:25.000
oh, it's crazy.
link |
02:04:25.840
Only hippies wanna smoke pot.
link |
02:04:27.240
Now it's like, I was on a grand jury.
link |
02:04:30.000
And I'll point out what people make is,
link |
02:04:32.440
are you sure that the 16 year old who's selling weed,
link |
02:04:35.960
let's say selling, should his life be ruined?
link |
02:04:39.640
Should he be imprisoned with rapists and murderers?
link |
02:04:41.920
Like if you say yes, say yes,
link |
02:04:44.800
but you have to acknowledge that that's what you're meaning.
link |
02:04:48.880
And then a lot of people are like, wait a minute,
link |
02:04:50.760
there's gotta be a third option
link |
02:04:52.080
then he has no consequences or he's imprisoned
link |
02:04:54.720
with a rapist.
link |
02:04:55.560
I'm not comfortable with either of these.
link |
02:04:57.640
And I think the other one is an increasing skepticism.
link |
02:05:01.160
This libertarians were on top of this first
link |
02:05:02.800
and the hard left of the police.
link |
02:05:05.280
As of now, asset forfeiture steals more from people
link |
02:05:08.360
than burglaries.
link |
02:05:09.200
What people don't know about what asset forfeiture is,
link |
02:05:11.320
if the cops come to your house and they suspect you,
link |
02:05:13.840
you haven't been convicted of using your car or your house
link |
02:05:17.680
or whatever in terms of selling drugs,
link |
02:05:19.960
they can take whatever they want.
link |
02:05:22.440
And then you have to sue to prove your innocence
link |
02:05:25.200
and get your property back.
link |
02:05:26.320
It's a complete violation of due process.
link |
02:05:28.240
People don't realize it's going on.
link |
02:05:29.480
It's a great way for the cops to increase their budgets
link |
02:05:31.880
and it's legal.
link |
02:05:32.960
And libertarians were like the first big ones saying,
link |
02:05:35.640
guys, this is not American and this is crazy.
link |
02:05:37.920
And now increasingly people on conservatives and leftists
link |
02:05:40.760
like, wait a minute, this is...
link |
02:05:42.680
Even if you are selling drugs, like they take your house,
link |
02:05:44.640
what are you talking about?
link |
02:05:45.800
So I think those are some mechanisms that libertarianism,
link |
02:05:49.240
though not by name, has become far more popular.
link |
02:05:52.560
Yeah, it's interesting, so the idea, yeah, a coherent set
link |
02:05:55.960
of ideas that eventually get integrated
link |
02:06:00.120
into a two party system.
link |
02:06:01.240
Yeah.
link |
02:06:02.080
The war, that's an interesting one.
link |
02:06:03.200
You're right.
link |
02:06:05.000
I wonder what the thread there is.
link |
02:06:07.400
I wonder how it connects to 9 11 and so on.
link |
02:06:11.080
I think the Patriot Act.
link |
02:06:13.800
Patriot Act, okay.
link |
02:06:14.640
For people who are politically savvy,
link |
02:06:16.800
we're like, oh, okay, this is not a joke.
link |
02:06:20.720
This is really a crazy infringement of our freedoms
link |
02:06:24.120
and both parties are falling over each other
link |
02:06:27.040
to sign into law and the Orwellian name.
link |
02:06:30.320
You don't wanna...
link |
02:06:31.160
How can you be against patriotism?
link |
02:06:32.400
What kind of person?
link |
02:06:33.240
You know what I mean?
link |
02:06:34.080
So I think for a lot of people,
link |
02:06:34.920
especially both civil libertarians on the left
link |
02:06:37.240
and a lot of conservatives who are constitutionalists
link |
02:06:39.400
are like, wait a minute, this isn't...
link |
02:06:41.000
I'm not comfortable with this.
link |
02:06:42.280
And I'm also not comfortable with how comfortable everyone
link |
02:06:44.120
in Washington is with it.
link |
02:06:45.680
You're right, probably libertarians
link |
02:06:48.760
and libertarianism is a place of ideas,
link |
02:06:52.160
which is why I have a connection to it.
link |
02:06:57.560
Every time I listen to those folks, I like them.
link |
02:07:00.400
I feel connected to them.
link |
02:07:01.520
I would even sometimes, depending on the day,
link |
02:07:03.440
call myself a libertarian.
link |
02:07:05.200
Well, we're all the spectrum, so that's why.
link |
02:07:06.600
We're all on the spectrum, yeah.
link |
02:07:08.280
But when I look at the people that actually rise to the top
link |
02:07:12.480
in terms of the people who represent the party,
link |
02:07:15.600
this is where five minutes ran out, right?
link |
02:07:18.120
I could go, I'm allowed.
link |
02:07:19.760
You can go, why are they so weird?
link |
02:07:22.320
Why aren't strong candidates emerging
link |
02:07:26.800
that represent as political representatives
link |
02:07:31.880
or as famous speakers that represent ideology?
link |
02:07:38.120
I think libertarians tend to...
link |
02:07:40.320
I think Jonathan Haidt in his book, in his research,
link |
02:07:43.040
he's a political scientist and he does a lot of things
link |
02:07:45.000
about how people come to their political inclusions
link |
02:07:46.720
and what factors force people to reach conclusions.
link |
02:07:50.840
And he found that libertarians are the least empathetic
link |
02:07:53.640
and most rationalistic of all the groups.
link |
02:07:56.120
And by that, he means like they think in terms of logic
link |
02:07:58.120
as opposed to like people's feelings
link |
02:07:59.640
and that has positives and has negatives.
link |
02:08:04.320
And we have the A, B testing with Ron Paul.
link |
02:08:07.120
Ron Paul ran for president as a libertarian nominee.
link |
02:08:10.600
He was the nominee.
link |
02:08:11.680
He got pretty much nowhere in 1988.
link |
02:08:14.040
Then he ran as a return to the Republican party
link |
02:08:16.080
as a congressman for many years from Texas.
link |
02:08:18.040
He ran for the presidency in 2008 and 2012.
link |
02:08:22.480
And in 2008, he stood on stage with Rudy Giuliani
link |
02:08:26.560
and told him that they were here in 9 11
link |
02:08:29.080
because we're over there,
link |
02:08:30.360
which would have been a shocking, horrifying taboo
link |
02:08:33.840
a few years earlier.
link |
02:08:35.080
Many people were like, holy crap, this is amazing.
link |
02:08:37.320
Giuliani was all offended and Ron Paul's like...
link |
02:08:39.160
I took some guts by the way.
link |
02:08:40.640
Yeah, you did.
link |
02:08:41.940
When I heard that, it was so refreshing.
link |
02:08:44.160
Not what he said, but the fact that he said something
link |
02:08:47.200
that took guts.
link |
02:08:48.280
It made me realize how rare it is for politicians,
link |
02:08:53.440
but even people to say something that takes guts.
link |
02:08:56.040
Well, it's also the idea that like you can't,
link |
02:08:58.680
even if you think America has a right
link |
02:09:01.120
to invade any country on earth as much as it wants
link |
02:09:03.980
and kill people as a consequence of war
link |
02:09:06.540
and blow up their buildings and destroy their country,
link |
02:09:09.360
you can't with a straight face
link |
02:09:11.040
not expect us to have consequences,
link |
02:09:13.800
even if they're consequences from evil people.
link |
02:09:15.940
Even if we're 100% of the good guys
link |
02:09:17.620
and they're 100% of the bad guys,
link |
02:09:19.060
those bad guys, some of them are still gonna try
link |
02:09:21.080
to do something.
link |
02:09:22.300
What happens next?
link |
02:09:23.480
You know what I mean?
link |
02:09:24.320
So that kind of concept that there's any American
link |
02:09:27.360
culpability, we're America, we are the good guys
link |
02:09:30.960
by definition, we're not culpable,
link |
02:09:32.400
to have people start thinking about
link |
02:09:34.120
what if there's another way?
link |
02:09:35.520
You know, what if we're not there
link |
02:09:37.120
and then they're not here
link |
02:09:38.080
and we're kind of doing a backdoor,
link |
02:09:39.600
we're talking so different scenarios.
link |
02:09:41.840
So the fact that he got so much more traction
link |
02:09:44.560
as a Republican, the fact that Donald Trump
link |
02:09:47.560
who came out of nowhere became not only the candidate,
link |
02:09:50.680
but the president tells people,
link |
02:09:52.980
it's like getting a book deal, right?
link |
02:09:54.840
You can either go, there's three choices.
link |
02:09:57.460
You can either self publish, mainstream publisher
link |
02:10:00.540
or independent publisher.
link |
02:10:03.200
The independent publisher is the worst of all choices
link |
02:10:05.920
because you're not getting a big advance,
link |
02:10:07.960
they're not gonna be able to promote you a lot
link |
02:10:10.580
and they don't get the distribution.
link |
02:10:12.920
Mainstream, I've done mainstream and self, right?
link |
02:10:15.480
With self, I don't have the cred,
link |
02:10:18.280
the respectability of a mainstream or the cache.
link |
02:10:20.560
It can be a New York Times bestseller.
link |
02:10:22.640
Right, it takes a lot of work,
link |
02:10:24.340
but I get a lot more of the profit.
link |
02:10:26.980
If it looks good on the shelf on Amazon,
link |
02:10:28.640
it looks identical, so on and so forth.
link |
02:10:30.420
With the mainstream, the benefits and costs
link |
02:10:32.420
are pretty much obvious to most people.
link |
02:10:34.320
So the same thing, it's like you can either
link |
02:10:35.780
be an independent like Ross Perot
link |
02:10:37.840
or you could be, just seize one of the party apparatus,
link |
02:10:41.180
which the benefits are enormous there.
link |
02:10:42.880
But in terms of going third party,
link |
02:10:45.160
I don't know the libertarian party apparatus
link |
02:10:47.080
other than maybe some ballot access
link |
02:10:48.880
is really that efficacious.
link |
02:10:50.720
And then you're gonna have a lot of baggage.
link |
02:10:52.600
Cause if you hear independent, Jesse Ventura, Ross Perot,
link |
02:10:56.080
you think of the person.
link |
02:10:57.400
Now you have to define yourself
link |
02:10:59.360
and you have to defend the party.
link |
02:11:01.200
That's two bridges for most people.
link |
02:11:03.160
So, brilliantly put, okay, let me speak to you.
link |
02:11:09.080
Cause I'm speaking to Yaron Brooks soon.
link |
02:11:12.240
Yeah.
link |
02:11:14.180
I like him.
link |
02:11:15.020
Yeah, so, but that, another example, I was.
link |
02:11:19.140
Ask him to tell you a joke about Ayn Rand,
link |
02:11:21.480
if he can do it.
link |
02:11:23.820
So there, that's one criticism I've heard you say,
link |
02:11:26.900
which is they're unable to speak to any weaknesses
link |
02:11:30.980
in either Ayn Rand's or objectivist worldview.
link |
02:11:34.320
Yes.
link |
02:11:35.280
That's really, well, you put it,
link |
02:11:38.320
I know you're half joking,
link |
02:11:39.620
but that's actually a legitimate discussion to have.
link |
02:11:43.320
I'm not joking at all.
link |
02:11:44.440
Because that's, to me, one of the criticisms
link |
02:11:47.520
and one of the explanations why the world
link |
02:11:49.280
seems to disrespect Ayn Rand, the people that do,
link |
02:11:53.640
is she kind of implies that her ideas are like flawless.
link |
02:11:58.640
No, she says they correspond to reality.
link |
02:12:01.380
Yeah, right.
link |
02:12:02.260
That's the term she uses.
link |
02:12:03.620
That, I mean, objectivist, it's in the name.
link |
02:12:08.260
It's, you know, it's just facts.
link |
02:12:10.980
Like, it's impossible to basically argue against
link |
02:12:14.140
cause it's pretty simple, it's just all facts.
link |
02:12:16.780
Well, that's, it's possible to argue against,
link |
02:12:18.340
but she would say she's never met a good critic
link |
02:12:20.820
who can argue the facts out of misrepresentation.
link |
02:12:22.900
And she's not entirely wrong.
link |
02:12:24.100
She's often caricatured,
link |
02:12:25.140
cause she has a very extreme personality
link |
02:12:26.860
and extreme worldview.
link |
02:12:28.180
But that to me, I mean, some people,
link |
02:12:30.060
there's a guy named in the physics mathematics community
link |
02:12:32.700
called Stephen Wolfram.
link |
02:12:34.660
I don't know if you've heard of him.
link |
02:12:35.500
Wolfram Malfoy?
link |
02:12:36.340
Yeah.
link |
02:12:37.160
Okay.
link |
02:12:38.000
He has a similar style of speaking sometimes,
link |
02:12:39.700
which is like, I've created a science,
link |
02:12:44.180
but that turns a lot of people off,
link |
02:12:46.540
like this kind of weird confidence.
link |
02:12:48.820
But he's one of my favorite people,
link |
02:12:50.420
I think one of the most brilliant people.
link |
02:12:52.520
If you just ignore that little bit of ego
link |
02:12:56.060
or whatever you call that,
link |
02:12:57.900
that there are some beautiful ideas in there.
link |
02:12:59.620
And that, for me, objectivism,
link |
02:13:03.420
I'm undereducated about it.
link |
02:13:06.380
I hope to be more educated,
link |
02:13:08.380
but there's some interesting ideas that,
link |
02:13:10.420
again, just like with UFOs,
link |
02:13:14.300
not that there's a connection between the two.
link |
02:13:15.460
Don't bring that up for your own.
link |
02:13:16.460
He won't like it.
link |
02:13:17.300
He won't.
link |
02:13:18.140
My friends like UFOs.
link |
02:13:19.100
Oh, no, no, no, this interview is over.
link |
02:13:21.180
That's a good yarn.
link |
02:13:24.060
Okay.
link |
02:13:25.180
But you know, you have to be a little bit open minded,
link |
02:13:27.500
but what's your sense of objectivism?
link |
02:13:31.500
Are there interesting ideas
link |
02:13:32.780
that are useful to you to think about?
link |
02:13:35.580
I own her copy of the first printing of The Fountainhead.
link |
02:13:38.420
So that should tell you a little bit
link |
02:13:39.620
about how my affection for Ms. Rand,
link |
02:13:41.540
how heavy that goes.
link |
02:13:44.220
Ayn Rand does not have all the answers,
link |
02:13:46.000
but she has all the questions.
link |
02:13:47.660
So if you study Rand,
link |
02:13:49.060
you are going to be forced to think through
link |
02:13:50.900
some very basic things,
link |
02:13:52.140
and you're gonna have your eyes open very, very heavily.
link |
02:13:54.920
She was not perfect.
link |
02:13:56.060
She never claimed to be perfect.
link |
02:13:57.340
She was asked on Donahue,
link |
02:13:59.460
is it true that according to your philosophy,
link |
02:14:01.260
you are a perfect being?
link |
02:14:02.500
She said, I never think of myself that way.
link |
02:14:05.100
And she said, but if you asked me,
link |
02:14:06.460
do I practice what I preach?
link |
02:14:07.580
The answer is yes, resoundingly.
link |
02:14:10.220
She's a fascinating woman.
link |
02:14:13.340
What is really interesting about her,
link |
02:14:15.480
and this is something you'd appreciate personally,
link |
02:14:17.820
is when you read her essays,
link |
02:14:19.380
she'll have these weird asides.
link |
02:14:21.740
And it looked like she was talking about art,
link |
02:14:23.020
and she'd be like, and this is why the US
link |
02:14:24.220
should be the only country with nuclear weapons.
link |
02:14:25.900
And when you follow a brilliant mind
link |
02:14:28.220
making these seemingly disparate connections,
link |
02:14:31.340
it's something I find to be just absolutely inspiring
link |
02:14:33.660
and awesome and entertaining.
link |
02:14:36.140
I think there's lots of things about her
link |
02:14:38.500
that people like Yaron would make uncomfortable.
link |
02:14:43.420
Well, like she, they,
link |
02:14:45.420
so objectivism, like any other philosophy,
link |
02:14:47.660
has all these techniques to kind of hand wave away things
link |
02:14:50.860
you don't wanna talk about and like pretend it.
link |
02:14:52.820
So they talk about things like having
link |
02:14:54.380
no metaphysical significance, right?
link |
02:14:57.020
So what that means is like, well, what about this?
link |
02:14:58.620
Ah, I don't wanna talk about it.
link |
02:14:59.700
Like it doesn't matter.
link |
02:15:00.620
Like it literally means in fancy philosophical terms,
link |
02:15:02.900
it doesn't matter.
link |
02:15:03.860
Or they will say correctly,
link |
02:15:06.120
that it's very twisted in our culture
link |
02:15:09.580
that when we have heroes, we look for their flaws
link |
02:15:12.520
instead of looking for their virtues.
link |
02:15:13.940
That's a hundred percent valid perspective.
link |
02:15:16.420
However, if I'm sitting here telling you
link |
02:15:19.540
that I think this woman is a badass,
link |
02:15:22.020
and she's amazing and she should be studied,
link |
02:15:24.660
but there's also these idiosyncrasies,
link |
02:15:26.640
they don't wanna hear it.
link |
02:15:27.900
Because they, and I think it's very convenient for them
link |
02:15:30.340
because there's a lot of things she did that were,
link |
02:15:32.220
here's an example.
link |
02:15:33.380
Rand was very, very pro happiness and pleasure.
link |
02:15:36.720
She was very pro sex, which is kind of surprising
link |
02:15:39.420
looking at her and how she talked and how strident she was.
link |
02:15:41.820
As a result of this, she never got her cats fixed
link |
02:15:45.000
to deny them the pleasure of orgasm.
link |
02:15:46.960
So her male cats are spraying up her entire house.
link |
02:15:50.000
Like that is, I mean, that's her putting her philosophy
link |
02:15:53.420
into practice, but it's still gross.
link |
02:15:55.900
So that's the kind of thing where I don't think he'd be,
link |
02:15:58.180
another thing is Rand had an article on a woman president
link |
02:16:01.940
and she said a woman should never be president, right?
link |
02:16:04.500
Now, when Rand says things that are too goofy for them,
link |
02:16:06.980
they say, oh, that's not objectivism,
link |
02:16:09.660
that's her personal preference.
link |
02:16:11.160
It's like, she did not have these lines.
link |
02:16:14.360
Objectivism was always defined as Ayn Rand's writings,
link |
02:16:18.200
plus the additional essays in her books.
link |
02:16:20.180
So if this was in part of those books,
link |
02:16:22.240
this counts as official objectivism,
link |
02:16:24.060
but they pretend otherwise.
link |
02:16:25.220
So that's another example.
link |
02:16:26.420
Plus she was, and I bet you she was on the spectrum
link |
02:16:30.140
to some extent, I'm not joking,
link |
02:16:31.300
I'm not using that derisively.
link |
02:16:32.700
She was of the belief and not inaccurately,
link |
02:16:36.460
because that humor is used to denigrate and humiliate.
link |
02:16:40.900
And she was thinking about the Jon Stewart type
link |
02:16:42.660
before there was a Jon Stewart.
link |
02:16:43.860
And a lot of times, like how I use mocking,
link |
02:16:46.540
but she was resentful, correctly,
link |
02:16:49.340
that a lot of times people who are great and accomplished,
link |
02:16:51.880
little nobodies will make a punchline
link |
02:16:54.940
just to bring them down and despise her.
link |
02:16:56.700
Here's an example I just thought of.
link |
02:16:58.140
I remember when it was, must have been the 90s,
link |
02:17:01.140
they had a segment on MTV of all these musicians
link |
02:17:04.740
who were making their own perfumes, right?
link |
02:17:07.460
And this girl grabbed Prince's perfume,
link |
02:17:09.340
and before she even smelled it, she had the joke ready.
link |
02:17:11.100
She goes, oh, this smells almost as bad
link |
02:17:13.220
as his music lately.
link |
02:17:14.380
It's like, first of all, I'm sure the perfume's fine.
link |
02:17:16.300
And second of all, this is Prince.
link |
02:17:18.140
He's one of the all time greats,
link |
02:17:19.700
and you can't wait to denigrate him.
link |
02:17:22.820
And part, I wanna be like, how dare you?
link |
02:17:25.660
Like as if this perfume in any way,
link |
02:17:29.380
in any way mitigates his amazing accomplishments
link |
02:17:32.020
and achievements, you horrible person.
link |
02:17:34.060
But I do have some great Ayn Rand jokes,
link |
02:17:36.580
and he would not be happy about them.
link |
02:17:38.500
The perfume thing, the problem with it is just not funny.
link |
02:17:40.980
Oh, he sucks, okay, great.
link |
02:17:43.460
Not that they dared to try to be humorous,
link |
02:17:47.380
because I don't know why you mentioned John,
link |
02:17:48.780
because John Stewart can be funny.
link |
02:17:50.460
Right, but he taught a generation,
link |
02:17:53.260
you still see this on Twitter,
link |
02:17:55.060
where things have to be inherently sarcastic and snide.
link |
02:17:58.900
But isn't that, I mean, aren't you practicing that?
link |
02:18:00.900
No, I use irony, not sarcasm.
link |
02:18:02.740
Here's an example.
link |
02:18:03.580
When people, like you say something,
link |
02:18:05.180
and someone replied, it'd be like,
link |
02:18:07.000
last I checked, blah, blah, blah, blah,
link |
02:18:08.740
and I'll say that, I go,
link |
02:18:09.860
what do you think saying last I checked added to your point?
link |
02:18:12.060
You're giving me valuable information and data,
link |
02:18:14.500
but you are trained to believe
link |
02:18:16.440
that it has to be couched in this sneering.
link |
02:18:19.460
It doesn't, just give me the information.
link |
02:18:21.140
This is useful information.
link |
02:18:22.460
Yeah, that's true.
link |
02:18:24.060
It's a knee jerk.
link |
02:18:24.940
But see, John Stewart did it masterfully.
link |
02:18:27.060
Correct, and they don't.
link |
02:18:28.060
And they don't, it's like people who copy comedians,
link |
02:18:30.860
certain comedians, you try to copy them
link |
02:18:34.840
and use everything in the process of copying.
link |
02:18:37.060
Yeah, yep, okay.
link |
02:18:40.120
But in terms of the philosophy of selfishness,
link |
02:18:44.920
this kind of individual focused idea,
link |
02:18:47.880
and I imagine that connects with you.
link |
02:18:50.860
Yes, and I think it would connect with more people
link |
02:18:52.960
if they understood what she meant by it.
link |
02:18:54.300
Nathaniel Brandon, who was her heir
link |
02:18:55.800
until she kind of broke with him,
link |
02:18:57.160
and he was a co dedicatee of Atlas Shrugged,
link |
02:19:00.400
said no one will say Ayn Rand's views with a straight face.
link |
02:19:04.200
They won't say, I believe that my happiness matters
link |
02:19:08.200
and is important and is worth fighting for,
link |
02:19:10.480
and that Ayn Rand says this, then she's dangerous.
link |
02:19:13.040
Now, it's very easy to say
link |
02:19:14.560
this could have dangerous consequences
link |
02:19:16.340
if you're a sociopath,
link |
02:19:17.600
but to put it in those terms, I think is extremely healthy.
link |
02:19:21.220
I think more people should wanna be happy.
link |
02:19:23.000
And I think a lot of us are raised to be apologetic,
link |
02:19:26.640
especially in this cynical media culture,
link |
02:19:29.360
that if you say, I wanna be happy, I wanna love my life,
link |
02:19:32.400
that it's just like, okay, sweetheart.
link |
02:19:34.240
And the eye rolling,
link |
02:19:35.680
and I think that's so pernicious and so horrifying,
link |
02:19:37.960
this is why I'm a Camus person,
link |
02:19:39.480
because Camus thought the archenemy was cynicism
link |
02:19:41.400
and I could not agree more.
link |
02:19:42.840
Like if you're the kind of person,
link |
02:19:44.080
if someone likes a band and you're like,
link |
02:19:45.400
oh, you like them, blah, blah, blah,
link |
02:19:46.600
it's like, this gives them happiness.
link |
02:19:49.160
Now, there's certain exceptions,
link |
02:19:50.000
but if it gives you happiness, it's not for you,
link |
02:19:52.360
that's cool.
link |
02:19:54.160
Okay, this is beautiful.
link |
02:19:55.800
I so agree with you on the eye rolling,
link |
02:19:59.340
but you see the best of trolling as not the eye roll.
link |
02:20:04.100
Correct, of course not.
link |
02:20:05.320
The best of trolling is taking down the eye rollers.
link |
02:20:08.920
I'm gonna have to think about that.
link |
02:20:10.120
Okay.
link |
02:20:10.960
Because I kind of.
link |
02:20:11.780
Have another Red Bull.
link |
02:20:12.620
Yeah, I was, yeah.
link |
02:20:15.660
Because I put them all.
link |
02:20:16.500
My blood type is Red Bull.
link |
02:20:20.880
I kind of put them all in the same bin.
link |
02:20:22.800
Okay.
link |
02:20:23.640
And they're not.
link |
02:20:24.460
They're not.
link |
02:20:25.300
They're not.
link |
02:20:26.140
Okay, all right.
link |
02:20:26.960
Here's another example of trolling.
link |
02:20:29.160
I was making jokes about Ron Paul,
link |
02:20:30.600
he just had a stroke, right?
link |
02:20:32.720
And someone came at me and they're like,
link |
02:20:35.080
blah, blah, blah, blah.
link |
02:20:36.000
You know, you're ugly.
link |
02:20:37.440
I hope you have a stroke.
link |
02:20:38.520
I hope you're in the hospital.
link |
02:20:39.440
And I just go, I just did have a stroke on your mom's face.
link |
02:20:42.280
So they came at me and now they got put in their place.
link |
02:20:47.040
With a subpar, I mean.
link |
02:20:50.320
I wasn't clever.
link |
02:20:51.280
You weren't clever.
link |
02:20:52.400
Not particularly, no.
link |
02:20:53.640
Well, one of your things you do, which is interesting,
link |
02:20:57.000
I mean, I give you props in a sense,
link |
02:20:59.280
is you're willing to go farther than people expect you to.
link |
02:21:03.840
Yes, that's fun.
link |
02:21:05.180
Yeah.
link |
02:21:06.020
In fact, I'll probably edit out like half of this podcast
link |
02:21:09.480
because the thing you did, which she kept in,
link |
02:21:12.560
should mention, is Michaela Peterson now has a podcast,
link |
02:21:15.920
which is nice.
link |
02:21:16.840
I guess, was it on her podcast?
link |
02:21:18.400
She was on mine.
link |
02:21:19.220
She was on yours.
link |
02:21:20.060
We did both, but this is when you're referring
link |
02:21:21.400
to when she was on mine.
link |
02:21:22.400
She was on, yeah, right.
link |
02:21:23.560
And you went right for the, for the.
link |
02:21:27.880
So I'll tell you what it was.
link |
02:21:29.040
You don't have to paraphrase.
link |
02:21:29.880
I opened up, I say, you know, she's Jordan Peterson's dad.
link |
02:21:32.560
And as many people know, sorry, he's her dad, yeah.
link |
02:21:36.200
He's had a long issue with substance addiction.
link |
02:21:39.880
And I said to her, you're most famous
link |
02:21:42.800
for being Jordan Peterson's daughter.
link |
02:21:45.360
Many people, he's changed so many lives around the world.
link |
02:21:48.160
And he's been such an enormous influence to me personally
link |
02:21:51.720
that I've started taking benzodiazepines recreationally.
link |
02:21:54.760
And she's like, oh my God, Michael, it's so horrible.
link |
02:21:58.520
Yeah, because you pulled me in with this,
link |
02:22:01.140
cause you're talking, I mean, you know,
link |
02:22:02.920
cause he's going through a rough time.
link |
02:22:04.360
Now she's going through just everything was just,
link |
02:22:07.400
you pulled me in emotionally.
link |
02:22:08.920
I was like, this is going to be the sweet,
link |
02:22:11.560
Mike is going to be just this wonderful.
link |
02:22:14.640
And then just bam.
link |
02:22:16.080
So that's, that's, that's, that was props to you on that.
link |
02:22:21.000
It wasn't, whatever that is, that is an art form
link |
02:22:24.720
when done well, it can be taken too far.
link |
02:22:27.800
My criticism is it, that feels too good for some people.
link |
02:22:33.160
What do you mean?
link |
02:22:34.000
Oh, they're too happy being a reverend
link |
02:22:35.960
cause to show that they don't care about anything.
link |
02:22:37.320
That's another form of cynicism though.
link |
02:22:38.960
Right, so I, cause you think it's possible to be a troll
link |
02:22:42.440
and still be the live life to its highest ideal
link |
02:22:46.960
in the Camus sense.
link |
02:22:48.080
I try, that's kind of my ideal.
link |
02:22:51.080
I believe it's not, it becomes a drug.
link |
02:22:55.840
I feel like that takes you,
link |
02:22:57.080
like I think love ultimately is the way to experience
link |
02:23:01.860
like every moment of every day.
link |
02:23:04.240
You don't think that was an expression of,
link |
02:23:06.800
I honestly think, let's split hairs here
link |
02:23:09.680
cause I think this is something of use here.
link |
02:23:12.080
I do think that me,
link |
02:23:15.960
me being able to make her laugh
link |
02:23:18.560
about this year of hell she was in
link |
02:23:21.240
does create an element of love
link |
02:23:23.380
and connection between me and her.
link |
02:23:25.080
Yeah, but I know she would say that.
link |
02:23:28.080
Yes, it wasn't that.
link |
02:23:30.800
It was what you said in combination
link |
02:23:33.600
with the sweetness everywhere else, the kindness.
link |
02:23:37.460
It's a very subtle thing,
link |
02:23:38.960
but like, it's like some of the deepest connection
link |
02:23:41.960
we have with others is when we like mock them lovingly.
link |
02:23:46.040
Yes, correct.
link |
02:23:46.940
But like there is stuff, there's kindness around that.
link |
02:23:51.800
Sometimes it's not in words,
link |
02:23:53.000
but in like subtle things.
link |
02:23:55.180
Cause it creates an air of being familial.
link |
02:23:58.760
Like we're through this together.
link |
02:23:59.760
Yeah, that's missing,
link |
02:24:02.480
that's very difficult to do on the internet.
link |
02:24:04.380
I agree with you.
link |
02:24:05.740
I agree with you.
link |
02:24:06.580
That's why my general approach on the internet
link |
02:24:10.700
is to be more like simple, less witty
link |
02:24:15.240
and more like dumbly loving.
link |
02:24:19.320
But that's not your core competency being witty.
link |
02:24:23.080
Uh, me?
link |
02:24:25.280
Yeah.
link |
02:24:26.280
But I can be witty.
link |
02:24:27.800
You can be, but I'm saying that's not your core competency.
link |
02:24:29.760
I'm not saying you're bad at it,
link |
02:24:30.860
but I'm saying that's not where you go like organically,
link |
02:24:34.600
especially with strangers.
link |
02:24:36.800
I just feel like nobody's core competence on the internet
link |
02:24:40.200
is I guess if you want to bring love to the world,
link |
02:24:43.320
nobody's core competence is given the current platforms,
link |
02:24:47.840
nobody's core competence is wit.
link |
02:24:50.360
It's very difficult to be witty on the internet
link |
02:24:52.560
without while still communicating kindness.
link |
02:24:55.460
Like in the same way that you can in physical space.
link |
02:24:59.520
I'll give you another example.
link |
02:25:00.400
Someone came at me and they were like,
link |
02:25:03.920
they gave me a donation.
link |
02:25:04.880
People do this all the time.
link |
02:25:06.200
And they go, oh, like I started reading your books
link |
02:25:09.800
cause of my wife and you know,
link |
02:25:11.480
now watch your shows together, keep up the good work.
link |
02:25:14.980
And I go, what does her boyfriend think?
link |
02:25:17.440
So that is an example of wit and love
link |
02:25:20.440
because that person feels seen.
link |
02:25:23.000
I'm acknowledging them.
link |
02:25:24.320
I'm also making a joke at their expense.
link |
02:25:25.880
We know it's a joke.
link |
02:25:27.280
So I think language is often used in nonliteral ways
link |
02:25:31.960
to cue emotional and connectivity.
link |
02:25:34.100
It's difficult, but what you've done
link |
02:25:37.060
is difficult to accomplish, but you've done it well.
link |
02:25:39.600
I mean, you've been doing these live streams,
link |
02:25:43.320
which are nice that people give you a bunch of money
link |
02:25:45.200
and donations and stuff.
link |
02:25:46.440
And then you, you'll often like make fun
link |
02:25:49.040
of certain aspects of their questions and so on,
link |
02:25:51.040
but it's always lovely.
link |
02:25:52.200
That's not from love.
link |
02:25:53.040
That is genuine annoyance
link |
02:25:53.880
cause they ask me some really dumb questions.
link |
02:25:54.700
But they're still underlying, it's not even,
link |
02:25:57.840
like there's a kind person under that
link |
02:26:00.400
that's being communicated.
link |
02:26:02.280
That's interesting.
link |
02:26:03.120
But I don't know if I get that from your Twitter.
link |
02:26:05.640
I know I get that from the video,
link |
02:26:07.520
something about the face, something about like,
link |
02:26:09.560
Yeah, of course.
link |
02:26:10.400
The physical presentation.
link |
02:26:11.220
The more data, the more easy it is
link |
02:26:13.440
to convey emotion and subtlety.
link |
02:26:15.160
Absolutely, if you only have literally black and white
link |
02:26:17.200
letters, it's going to be, or whatever,
link |
02:26:19.000
white and black, if you have night mode,
link |
02:26:20.640
it's going to be a very different,
link |
02:26:21.720
it's much more limited information.
link |
02:26:23.640
Yeah, but this is the fundamental thing is like,
link |
02:26:27.720
Here's another example.
link |
02:26:28.560
Like if they had access to my face,
link |
02:26:30.180
like a lot of times some people don't know who I am
link |
02:26:32.240
and they come at me, call me a Nazi antisemite, right?
link |
02:26:34.840
And I start talking about the Jews
link |
02:26:36.240
and just how terrible the Jews are.
link |
02:26:37.840
Now all my audience knows I'm Jewish
link |
02:26:39.360
that I went to yeshiva.
link |
02:26:40.200
So they're sitting there laughing
link |
02:26:41.480
cause this person is making ass of themselves.
link |
02:26:43.440
That person has no idea.
link |
02:26:44.880
But if there was video, then they would be like,
link |
02:26:47.440
okay, wait a minute, something's up.
link |
02:26:48.760
Yeah, something's up.
link |
02:26:51.000
I don't know.
link |
02:26:52.800
I think it's entertaining.
link |
02:26:53.760
I think it's fun, but I just, I don't think it's scalable.
link |
02:26:57.400
And ultimately, I'm trying to figure out
link |
02:27:00.240
this whole trolling thing.
link |
02:27:01.960
Cause I think it's really destructive.
link |
02:27:04.780
I've been the outrage mob, the outrage mobs,
link |
02:27:08.920
just the dynamics of Twitter has been really bothering me.
link |
02:27:12.640
Okay.
link |
02:27:13.480
I've been trying to figure out if we can try to build
link |
02:27:18.120
an alternative to Twitter perhaps
link |
02:27:19.800
or try to encourage Twitter to be better,
link |
02:27:22.140
how to have nuanced, healthy conversations.
link |
02:27:25.720
Like the reason I talk about love isn't just for love's sake.
link |
02:27:28.840
It's just a good base from which to have
link |
02:27:31.840
difficult conversations.
link |
02:27:33.020
Like that's a good starting point.
link |
02:27:34.520
Because if you start, like I would argue that
link |
02:27:38.720
the kind of conversation you have on Twitter is fun,
link |
02:27:42.600
but it might not be a good starting point
link |
02:27:44.640
for a difficult, nuanced conversation.
link |
02:27:46.640
Well, I'm not interested in having
link |
02:27:48.200
those conversations with most people.
link |
02:27:49.800
No, I know, but.
link |
02:27:50.880
So I agree with you.
link |
02:27:52.200
Your point is valid.
link |
02:27:53.080
Yes, but like I'm saying, so if we were trying to have
link |
02:27:56.680
a difficult, nuanced conversation
link |
02:27:58.960
about say race in America or policing,
link |
02:28:02.320
is there institutional racism of policing?
link |
02:28:06.320
Okay.
link |
02:28:07.160
There's the only conversations that have been nuanced
link |
02:28:10.800
about it that I've heard is in the podcasting medium.
link |
02:28:13.680
I agree with you.
link |
02:28:14.520
Which is the magic of podcasting, which is great.
link |
02:28:17.000
But that's the downside of podcasting
link |
02:28:21.160
is it's a very small number of people.
link |
02:28:24.200
Even if it's in the thousands, it's still small.
link |
02:28:27.680
And then there's millions of people on social media
link |
02:28:30.360
and they're not having nuanced conversation at all.
link |
02:28:32.920
They're not capable of it.
link |
02:28:34.040
That's the difference in your thoughts.
link |
02:28:35.120
They have no minds.
link |
02:28:35.960
I believe they are.
link |
02:28:36.800
So that's the.
link |
02:28:37.620
There's no data that shows this.
link |
02:28:38.460
Both of us aren't being not scientific.
link |
02:28:41.560
You don't have data to support your world either.
link |
02:28:43.400
You're making the claim.
link |
02:28:45.640
Well, you are too.
link |
02:28:46.680
No, I'm not.
link |
02:28:47.500
If I'm looking at an object, the claim that it has in mind.
link |
02:28:51.000
Well.
link |
02:28:53.080
No, what?
link |
02:28:54.660
No, your claim is that people are fundamentally stupid.
link |
02:28:58.120
Are you a martial artist?
link |
02:28:59.680
Yes.
link |
02:29:01.200
How's it feel?
link |
02:29:03.280
I just judo on you.
link |
02:29:05.000
Yeah.
link |
02:29:05.840
But you really don't think people are deep down
link |
02:29:10.120
like capable of being intelligent.
link |
02:29:13.480
No, not at all.
link |
02:29:14.880
Not deep down, not surface.
link |
02:29:16.000
I'm not joking.
link |
02:29:16.840
I'm not being tongue in cheek.
link |
02:29:18.000
I'm not being cynical.
link |
02:29:18.860
I do not at all think they have this capacity.
link |
02:29:22.320
I'm gonna think.
link |
02:29:23.160
Cause you're being so clear about it.
link |
02:29:24.580
You're not even.
link |
02:29:26.280
I'm gonna have to think about that.
link |
02:29:27.120
You know why?
link |
02:29:27.960
Here's evidence for my position, not proof.
link |
02:29:31.400
And this is of course data that is of little use,
link |
02:29:33.740
but it's of interest.
link |
02:29:34.960
A lot of times when you have an audience as big as mine
link |
02:29:37.220
and people come at you,
link |
02:29:38.760
not only will people say the same thing, the same concept,
link |
02:29:42.080
they'll say the same concept in the same way.
link |
02:29:44.360
That is not a mind.
link |
02:29:46.740
Yeah.
link |
02:29:47.580
That's surface evidence.
link |
02:29:49.280
You're saying this iceberg looks like this from the surface.
link |
02:29:52.680
I'm saying there's an iceberg there
link |
02:29:54.300
that if challenged can rise to the occasion
link |
02:30:01.400
of deep thinking and you're saying.
link |
02:30:04.200
Nope.
link |
02:30:05.040
Nope.
link |
02:30:05.960
It's just frozen water.
link |
02:30:08.680
Isn't that the Russian expression?
link |
02:30:11.600
That's ice cream.
link |
02:30:12.840
No, not.
link |
02:30:14.600
Doesn't it mean like no one's there?
link |
02:30:17.360
Actually, I don't know.
link |
02:30:18.180
Yeah, it means like, yeah.
link |
02:30:19.800
Yeah, it's like thought.
link |
02:30:20.880
It means.
link |
02:30:25.480
Okay.
link |
02:30:26.320
Well, so you're challenging me
link |
02:30:28.360
to be a little bit more rigorous.
link |
02:30:29.960
I think I'll try.
link |
02:30:30.800
I'm not challenging you anything.
link |
02:30:31.920
I'm just saying.
link |
02:30:32.760
No, not challenging me,
link |
02:30:33.580
but like I'm challenging myself based on what you're saying
link |
02:30:35.720
because I'd like to prove you wrong
link |
02:30:37.900
and find actual data to show you're wrong.
link |
02:30:42.400
And I think I can, but I would need to get that data.
link |
02:30:46.400
That's funny you said, I think I can.
link |
02:30:47.720
When they were working on my biography, Ego and Hubris,
link |
02:30:50.700
the title I had suggested was
link |
02:30:52.200
The Little Engine That Could But Shouldn't.
link |
02:30:54.160
And they didn't like it.
link |
02:30:57.320
I think that's a great title.
link |
02:30:58.600
That's pretty good, yeah.
link |
02:31:00.160
Speaking of biographies, I mean,
link |
02:31:01.720
I read your book or listened to your book.
link |
02:31:04.080
Listened to.
link |
02:31:04.920
There's an audio book from you, right?
link |
02:31:05.920
Yeah, I did the audio, yeah.
link |
02:31:06.960
Yeah.
link |
02:31:08.000
You read it?
link |
02:31:08.920
My Golis, yes.
link |
02:31:10.160
Okay.
link |
02:31:11.000
So this was a.
link |
02:31:12.360
I didn't do Yaron Brooks voice in the book.
link |
02:31:14.120
I did all the different voices
link |
02:31:15.160
because he has a lisp
link |
02:31:16.000
and I didn't want to sound like I was making fun of him.
link |
02:31:19.120
Yeah, I don't remember you reading it,
link |
02:31:21.540
but I was really enjoyed it.
link |
02:31:23.520
No, okay.
link |
02:31:24.360
It was good.
link |
02:31:25.180
It was like a year, a year and a half ago.
link |
02:31:26.240
This I can prove.
link |
02:31:27.380
It's just.
link |
02:31:30.780
Well, let me at a high level,
link |
02:31:32.260
see if you can pull this off.
link |
02:31:33.660
If I ask you, what's the book you write about?
link |
02:31:38.920
It's about a group of people
link |
02:31:42.740
who are united solely by their opposition to progressivism,
link |
02:31:46.740
who have little else in common,
link |
02:31:49.080
but who are all frequently caricatured and dismissed
link |
02:31:53.380
by the larger establishment media.
link |
02:31:56.400
But you give this kind of story of how it came to be.
link |
02:32:00.220
Sure.
link |
02:32:01.060
And to me, like we're talking about trolls,
link |
02:32:03.540
but the internet side of things is quite interesting.
link |
02:32:06.860
So first of all, how does alt right connect?
link |
02:32:10.020
So the alt right is the subset of the new right,
link |
02:32:13.960
which feels that race, not racism,
link |
02:32:16.780
is the most or one of the most important
link |
02:32:19.620
socio political issues.
link |
02:32:21.200
Are any of those folks like part of the mainstream
link |
02:32:27.240
or worth paying attention to?
link |
02:32:29.240
None of them are part of the mainstream.
link |
02:32:30.420
The alt right, by definition,
link |
02:32:32.220
they would be part of the mainstream.
link |
02:32:33.800
They would not be part of them.
link |
02:32:34.920
No, they would not.
link |
02:32:36.160
I don't know that any of them.
link |
02:32:38.640
Well, worth is not a position.
link |
02:32:40.000
I'm not in a position to say worth.
link |
02:32:41.840
I would say that it is of use
link |
02:32:45.360
to be familiar with their arguments
link |
02:32:48.200
because to dismiss any school of thought,
link |
02:32:51.320
especially one that has historically gained leverage,
link |
02:32:54.680
especially one that has historically gained leverage
link |
02:32:57.020
in very dark ways, especially in America,
link |
02:32:59.520
in Europe and other places,
link |
02:33:01.200
just to say, oh, they're racist.
link |
02:33:03.080
I don't need to think about them.
link |
02:33:04.340
It doesn't behoove you.
link |
02:33:07.220
So what lessons do we draw from the 4chan side of things,
link |
02:33:13.400
like the internet side of the movement?
link |
02:33:16.200
Tits or get the fuck out.
link |
02:33:19.000
Can you define every single word in there?
link |
02:33:21.120
Tits or breasts or get the fuck out.
link |
02:33:24.080
That's from 4chan.
link |
02:33:25.520
Okay, what's it mean?
link |
02:33:28.160
Oh, sometimes like a woman will appear in 4chan
link |
02:33:29.960
and they'll just reply, tits or get the fuck out.
link |
02:33:34.480
I'm trying to understand what that,
link |
02:33:35.640
oh, oh, that's a way.
link |
02:33:41.400
I just, very slow.
link |
02:33:44.360
Oh, so that's, okay, so that's very disrespectful
link |
02:33:47.680
towards female members of the community.
link |
02:33:52.520
I don't understand.
link |
02:33:53.600
There's rules to this community
link |
02:33:55.080
and one of them is we're not very good with women.
link |
02:33:58.760
Is that, that's one of the rules?
link |
02:33:59.600
It's more of a principle than a rule.
link |
02:34:02.280
It's a principle?
link |
02:34:04.080
We're not going to ever get laid.
link |
02:34:06.240
That's fundamentally the principle.
link |
02:34:07.900
Is there other principles?
link |
02:34:08.740
But we are gonna get pics.
link |
02:34:10.240
Pics.
link |
02:34:11.080
Sometimes.
link |
02:34:11.900
Sometimes on the internet.
link |
02:34:12.740
Sometimes they GTFO.
link |
02:34:15.120
Okay, so is there other actual principles of,
link |
02:34:19.960
so like it's, from my maybe naive perspective
link |
02:34:24.360
is they have like the darkest aspects of trolling,
link |
02:34:26.660
which is like take nothing serious,
link |
02:34:28.780
make a game out of everything.
link |
02:34:30.440
That's not 4chan per se.
link |
02:34:31.840
One of the things that you will learn in 4chan,
link |
02:34:34.200
which I think is very healthy,
link |
02:34:35.880
is if you have an idiosocratic or unique worldview
link |
02:34:39.500
or focus on an aspect of history or culture,
link |
02:34:42.020
you'll be able to find like minded people
link |
02:34:43.760
who you will engage with you and discuss it
link |
02:34:45.400
without being preemptively dismissive.
link |
02:34:49.000
That's an ideal that they.
link |
02:34:51.000
Well, it's not ideal.
link |
02:34:51.840
It's something that happens a lot.
link |
02:34:52.840
Now 4chan's not really,
link |
02:34:53.880
like Paul is their board with politics,
link |
02:34:56.480
but they will get into some,
link |
02:34:59.000
like the people there are much more erudite than you'd think.
link |
02:35:01.880
So they do take,
link |
02:35:03.080
my perception was they take nothing seriously.
link |
02:35:05.260
So there's things that they take seriously,
link |
02:35:07.360
like discussing ideas.
link |
02:35:08.640
I'll give you one example.
link |
02:35:09.620
There was a video someone posted
link |
02:35:11.280
of a girl who put kittens in a bag
link |
02:35:13.200
and threw it in a river.
link |
02:35:14.420
And they found out where she was within a day
link |
02:35:16.080
and got her like arrested.
link |
02:35:17.500
So yeah, they do take some things very seriously.
link |
02:35:20.960
Okay.
link |
02:35:21.800
But that's like an extreme that,
link |
02:35:24.200
I mean, that's good.
link |
02:35:25.080
First of all, that's heartwarming
link |
02:35:26.200
that they wouldn't somehow turn that into a thing.
link |
02:35:29.440
That feels like more of a, what is it?
link |
02:35:31.780
What's the other one?
link |
02:35:32.620
8chan?
link |
02:35:33.440
8chan's twice as good as 4chan, yeah.
link |
02:35:36.020
That's their slogan.
link |
02:35:38.240
But it feels like they're the kind of community
link |
02:35:40.500
that would take that kitten situation
link |
02:35:43.520
and make a mockery of it.
link |
02:35:45.080
Yeah, they're darker than 4chan.
link |
02:35:47.440
I don't even, I'm not allowed to talk about 16chan.
link |
02:35:51.320
I'm already overwhelmed clearly by 4chan lingo.
link |
02:35:57.000
I literally wrote down in my notes,
link |
02:36:00.960
like in doing research for this conversation,
link |
02:36:04.400
I learned the word pleb.
link |
02:36:06.920
And I wanted to ask you what this pleb means.
link |
02:36:09.440
Do you know what pleb means?
link |
02:36:10.480
No.
link |
02:36:13.480
I saw, I mean, actually, no, I don't.
link |
02:36:16.280
You know what a pleb is?
link |
02:36:17.720
I just, I don't know what a pleb is.
link |
02:36:20.080
Like a plebiscite or plebeian.
link |
02:36:22.300
Okay.
link |
02:36:23.140
But does it mean something more sophisticated?
link |
02:36:27.080
No, it's a very unsophisticated mechanism
link |
02:36:29.060
of being dismissive.
link |
02:36:30.700
Of like the regular people.
link |
02:36:32.760
Yeah, or someone who comes at me on Twitter.
link |
02:36:35.300
Okay.
link |
02:36:36.140
All right, so back to the 4chan alt right.
link |
02:36:39.360
Wasn't the...
link |
02:36:40.400
Those are very different concepts.
link |
02:36:41.720
Don't conflate them.
link |
02:36:43.560
But which internet culture was the alt right born out of?
link |
02:36:48.720
Well, alt right was more born of blogs.
link |
02:36:51.180
And people had different blogs that were posting
link |
02:36:53.440
what they call like racial realism,
link |
02:36:55.080
which is scientific racism, so called.
link |
02:36:57.520
And breaking down issues from a racialist perspective.
link |
02:37:00.440
So that wasn't, 4chan is much more dynamic.
link |
02:37:03.760
It's a message board.
link |
02:37:04.760
It's very fluid.
link |
02:37:06.600
So it doesn't lend itself
link |
02:37:08.040
to these kind of in depth analysis of ideas or history.
link |
02:37:11.560
But it spreads them.
link |
02:37:12.800
Like it...
link |
02:37:13.640
It spreads them as memes, yeah.
link |
02:37:15.200
And you know, but...
link |
02:37:16.360
But it's not an essential mechanism
link |
02:37:18.520
of the alt right, historically?
link |
02:37:20.800
No, no, no, no, no, no.
link |
02:37:22.320
So it was mostly about blogs.
link |
02:37:24.160
Okay, so what do you make of the psychology
link |
02:37:28.040
of this kind of worldview?
link |
02:37:29.600
When you have...
link |
02:37:30.440
This goes to your conspiracy theory subject earlier.
link |
02:37:33.840
When you have a little bit of knowledge about something,
link |
02:37:36.460
about history that no one's talking about,
link |
02:37:39.000
and there's only one group that is talking about it,
link |
02:37:42.160
and you have no alternative answers,
link |
02:37:45.340
you're going to be drawn to that group.
link |
02:37:47.300
So because issues about race, anti semitism, homophobia
link |
02:37:51.600
are so taboo in our culture,
link |
02:37:53.880
understandably there's good reasons.
link |
02:37:55.320
If you start putting things like,
link |
02:37:56.560
how old should you be to have sex with kids
link |
02:37:58.680
and just have regular conversations,
link |
02:38:00.120
eventually some people are gonna start
link |
02:38:01.280
taking some positions you don't like.
link |
02:38:02.520
So some things have to be sanctified to some extent.
link |
02:38:04.600
They're the only ones talking about it.
link |
02:38:06.440
You're gonna be drawn to that subculture.
link |
02:38:10.640
And where does the alt right stand now?
link |
02:38:13.080
I mean, I hear that term used...
link |
02:38:15.360
So the term has been weaponized by the corporate press
link |
02:38:18.320
for people that they want to read out of society.
link |
02:38:22.440
So it's used both on individual levels,
link |
02:38:24.320
like people like Gavin McIngus, Milo Yiannopoulos,
link |
02:38:27.360
some others.
link |
02:38:28.760
I mean, I think they've referred to Trump as alt right.
link |
02:38:31.780
And it's become a slur, just like incel or bot,
link |
02:38:36.600
that has become largely removed from its original meaning.
link |
02:38:39.720
Do you have a sense that there's still a movement
link |
02:38:41.840
that's alt right or like...
link |
02:38:43.000
Yeah, they call themselves now...
link |
02:38:44.440
Okay, so there's something called the dissonant right.
link |
02:38:47.440
And they say, we're completely not like the alt right
link |
02:38:49.720
because the alt right's A, B, and C, and we're B, C, D.
link |
02:38:53.180
There's a huge overlap.
link |
02:38:54.420
It's very much the same people.
link |
02:38:57.000
Is there intellectuals that still represent
link |
02:38:59.200
some aspect of the movement?
link |
02:39:01.360
I mean, sure.
link |
02:39:02.400
Are you tracking this?
link |
02:39:03.240
Not that much anymore.
link |
02:39:05.200
I think they're...
link |
02:39:06.920
I don't find it particularly as...
link |
02:39:10.360
Now that the book's done,
link |
02:39:12.240
I'm looking more into history for my next book.
link |
02:39:15.840
You mentioned communism?
link |
02:39:16.920
I'm gonna talk a lot about the Cold War.
link |
02:39:19.620
So this kind of stuff has largely fallen away
link |
02:39:22.040
from my radar to some extent.
link |
02:39:24.000
And it's been a very effective movement
link |
02:39:27.080
to get them marginalized and silenced.
link |
02:39:29.720
So they're not as deep of a concern
link |
02:39:32.920
in terms of concern or not,
link |
02:39:34.520
just their impact on society.
link |
02:39:36.480
Yes, it's much lessened, yeah.
link |
02:39:38.440
So as a troll on Twitter, in the best sense of the word,
link |
02:39:42.220
what do you make of cancel culture?
link |
02:39:45.960
I think it's Maoism.
link |
02:39:47.400
I mean, corporate America has done a far better job
link |
02:39:50.160
of implementing Maoism than the communist party ever could.
link |
02:39:52.640
You had this meeting not that long ago
link |
02:39:54.320
from I think it was Northwestern University Law School
link |
02:39:56.520
where everyone on the call got up
link |
02:39:57.920
and said that they were racist.
link |
02:39:59.420
I mean, this is something that legally
link |
02:40:01.160
you should be very averse to saying,
link |
02:40:02.920
even if it were true.
link |
02:40:04.240
And it's this kind of concept of getting up
link |
02:40:06.500
and confessing your sins before the collective
link |
02:40:08.780
is something completely.
link |
02:40:12.200
Oh, sorry, they admitted this of themselves?
link |
02:40:14.160
Yeah, they were like,
link |
02:40:15.080
because they're saying because they're white,
link |
02:40:16.200
they're inherently racist.
link |
02:40:17.040
So my name's John, I'm a racist.
link |
02:40:18.560
My name's this, I'm a racist.
link |
02:40:20.360
You hear it and you're like, okay, this is Looney Tunes.
link |
02:40:22.720
So you're saying that, wow, that's so much,
link |
02:40:25.240
you took a step further.
link |
02:40:26.440
So you're saying there's like a deep underlying force
link |
02:40:30.040
that cancels culture.
link |
02:40:31.720
It's not just some kind of mob.
link |
02:40:33.560
Well, it's not a mob at all.
link |
02:40:35.060
It's a systemic organized movement being used
link |
02:40:40.720
for very nefarious purposes
link |
02:40:42.320
and to dominate an entire nation.
link |
02:40:45.160
How do we fight it?
link |
02:40:46.120
Because I sense it inside.
link |
02:40:48.520
You know, I used to defend academia more
link |
02:40:51.520
because I still do to some extent.
link |
02:40:58.480
It's a nuanced discussion because, you know,
link |
02:41:02.000
like folks like Jordan Peterson
link |
02:41:03.840
and a lot of people that kind of attack academia,
link |
02:41:06.800
they refer, they really are talking about gender studies
link |
02:41:10.220
at certain departments.
link |
02:41:11.280
And me from MIT, you know,
link |
02:41:13.960
it's the University of Science and Engineering
link |
02:41:15.820
and the faculty there really don't think
link |
02:41:20.820
about these issues or haven't traditionally thought of,
link |
02:41:24.060
but it's beginning to even infiltrate there.
link |
02:41:26.260
It's the, you know, it's starting to infiltrate engineering
link |
02:41:30.700
and sciences outside of biology.
link |
02:41:32.500
Like let's put biology with the gender studies.
link |
02:41:35.360
Like I'm talking about sciences
link |
02:41:36.980
that really don't have anything to do with gender.
link |
02:41:40.140
It's starting to infiltrate and it worries me.
link |
02:41:45.580
I don't know exactly why,
link |
02:41:46.700
like I don't know exactly what the negative effect
link |
02:41:49.560
there would be, except it feels like it's anti intellectual.
link |
02:41:55.780
Oh yes, of course.
link |
02:41:57.340
And I'm not sure what to,
link |
02:41:59.020
because on the surface,
link |
02:42:02.260
it feels like a path towards progress.
link |
02:42:05.340
At first, when I'm like zoomed out, you know,
link |
02:42:08.740
just like squinting my eyes, you know,
link |
02:42:11.700
not even in detail looking at things,
link |
02:42:13.940
but when I actually joined the conversation
link |
02:42:15.780
to like listen in the conversation on quote unquote diversity,
link |
02:42:20.320
it quickly makes me realize
link |
02:42:23.820
that there's no interest in making a better world.
link |
02:42:29.900
No, no, it's about domination.
link |
02:42:31.340
It's about getting, yeah.
link |
02:42:33.500
It's a way for, if you are a lowest status white person,
link |
02:42:37.780
using anti racism is the only mechanism you will have
link |
02:42:41.080
to feel superior to another human being.
link |
02:42:43.380
So it's very useful for them in terms of fighting it.
link |
02:42:48.160
One of my suggestions has been to seize
link |
02:42:50.500
all university endowments,
link |
02:42:51.980
which are the crystallization of privilege
link |
02:42:54.140
and distribute that money as reparations.
link |
02:42:56.660
So be very effective by turning two populations
link |
02:42:59.040
against each other and strongly diminishing
link |
02:43:01.360
the university's intellectual hegemony.
link |
02:43:04.260
The universities are absolutely the real villains
link |
02:43:07.020
in the picture.
link |
02:43:08.000
Thankfully, they're also the least prepared
link |
02:43:10.180
to be aggressed upon.
link |
02:43:12.140
And after the government and the corporate press,
link |
02:43:15.460
they are the last leg of the stool,
link |
02:43:17.320
and they don't know what's coming,
link |
02:43:18.460
and it's gonna get ugly, and I cannot wait.
link |
02:43:21.380
So this is where you and I disagree.
link |
02:43:22.900
Part one, yeah, we disagree in the sense
link |
02:43:25.740
that you want to dismantle broken institutions.
link |
02:43:30.800
I don't think they're broken.
link |
02:43:31.640
They're powerful.
link |
02:43:32.460
They're working like by design.
link |
02:43:33.300
I think for over 100 years,
link |
02:43:34.940
they have been talking about bringing
link |
02:43:36.820
the next generation of American leaders,
link |
02:43:38.700
which is code, for promulgating an ideology
link |
02:43:42.340
based on egalitarian principles and world domination.
link |
02:43:47.540
Let me try to express my lived experience.
link |
02:43:50.180
Okay, sure.
link |
02:43:51.900
My experience at MIT is that there's a bunch
link |
02:43:56.460
of administrators that are, the bureaucracy,
link |
02:44:00.300
that I can say, this is the nice thing
link |
02:44:03.980
about having a podcast, I don't give a damn,
link |
02:44:06.100
is they're pretty useless.
link |
02:44:07.540
In fact, they get in the way.
link |
02:44:09.380
But there's faculty, there's professors,
link |
02:44:12.480
that are incredible.
link |
02:44:15.140
They're incredible human beings
link |
02:44:16.580
that all they do all day, they're too busy,
link |
02:44:20.580
but for the most part, what they do all day
link |
02:44:23.660
is just like continually pursue different
link |
02:44:26.940
little trajectories of curiosities
link |
02:44:29.580
in the various avenues of science that they work on.
link |
02:44:33.100
And as a side effect of that, they mentor
link |
02:44:38.140
a group of students, sometimes a large group of students,
link |
02:44:40.740
and also teach courses, and they're constantly
link |
02:44:43.300
sharing their passion with others.
link |
02:44:45.900
And my experience is it's just a bunch of people
link |
02:44:49.220
who are curious about engineering and math
link |
02:44:52.160
and science, chemistry, artificial intelligence,
link |
02:44:55.060
computer science, what I'm most familiar with.
link |
02:44:57.700
And there's never this feeling of MIT
link |
02:45:01.220
being broken somehow, like this kind of feeling.
link |
02:45:04.700
Like if I talk to you just now, or like Eric Weinstein,
link |
02:45:08.300
there's a feeling like stuff is on fire, right?
link |
02:45:11.540
There's something deeply broken.
link |
02:45:13.900
But when I'm in the system, especially before the COVID,
link |
02:45:19.020
before this kind of tension, everything was great.
link |
02:45:22.680
There was no discussion of, even diversity,
link |
02:45:25.360
all that kind of stuff, the toxic stuff
link |
02:45:28.100
that we might be talking about right now,
link |
02:45:30.020
none of that was happening.
link |
02:45:30.960
There was a bunch of people just in love with cool ideas,
link |
02:45:35.060
exploring ideas, being curious, and learning,
link |
02:45:37.300
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
02:45:38.540
So I don't, my sense of academia was this is the place
link |
02:45:43.380
where kids in their 20s, 30s, and 40s can continue
link |
02:45:47.860
the playground of science, having fun.
link |
02:45:50.740
It's, if you destroy academia, if you destroy universities,
link |
02:45:54.100
like you're suggesting kind of lessening their power,
link |
02:45:58.100
you take away the playground from these kids
link |
02:46:00.180
to play.
link |
02:46:01.860
It's gonna be hard for you to tell me
link |
02:46:03.500
that I'm anti playground.
link |
02:46:05.020
Yeah, well, I guess I'm saying you're anti
link |
02:46:07.100
certain kinds of playgrounds, which is.
link |
02:46:08.980
Yeah, the ones that have the broken glass on the floor.
link |
02:46:10.820
Yeah, I am against those kinds of playgrounds.
link |
02:46:14.220
No, you're, you're, you're.
link |
02:46:18.060
Yes. Nope.
link |
02:46:18.900
See, see.
link |
02:46:19.740
Now you see, now you listen.
link |
02:46:21.460
Now you, now you wait.
link |
02:46:22.940
Yeah, I would say you're being the watchful mother who,
link |
02:46:27.460
the one kid who hurt themselves in the glass.
link |
02:46:29.860
One kid, it's an entire, it's generation after generation.
link |
02:46:32.420
I'm not a watchful mother.
link |
02:46:33.260
I'm the guy with the flamethrower.
link |
02:46:34.660
No, I, I, I understand that.
link |
02:46:37.780
But you're using the one kid who was always kind of like
link |
02:46:41.220
weird, aka gender studies department.
link |
02:46:44.180
Okay.
link |
02:46:45.020
That, that hurt themselves on the glass,
link |
02:46:47.340
as opposed to the people who are like,
link |
02:46:49.220
obviously having fun in the playground and not playing
link |
02:46:53.900
by the glass, the broken glass.
link |
02:46:55.580
And they're just, I mean, to me,
link |
02:46:57.960
some of the best innovations in science
link |
02:47:00.180
happen in universities.
link |
02:47:02.060
Okay.
link |
02:47:02.900
You can't forget that universities don't have this
link |
02:47:07.020
liberal, like politics literally in every conversation
link |
02:47:13.100
until this year, until this year,
link |
02:47:15.180
there's something happening.
link |
02:47:16.500
But every conversation I've ever had had nothing to do
link |
02:47:19.420
with politics.
link |
02:47:20.260
We never, Trump never came up.
link |
02:47:22.220
None of that ever come up.
link |
02:47:23.840
Nothing.
link |
02:47:24.680
Like all this kind of idea that there's liberal, all that.
link |
02:47:27.340
But that, that's in the humanities.
link |
02:47:29.820
Yeah.
link |
02:47:30.660
But do you think MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
link |
02:47:33.460
might be a little bit of an outlier?
link |
02:47:34.740
Yeah, that probably is.
link |
02:47:35.900
Yeah.
link |
02:47:36.740
But I, I don't, I honestly don't think when people
link |
02:47:40.540
criticize academia, they're looking at,
link |
02:47:43.860
they're in fact also picking the outliers,
link |
02:47:46.700
which is they're picking some of the quote unquote
link |
02:47:49.460
strongest gender studies departments.
link |
02:47:51.300
This is nonsensical.
link |
02:47:52.140
When I was at Bucknell, it was a college student.
link |
02:47:55.060
We had to take, you know, we had a bunch of electives
link |
02:47:57.580
and I wanted to take a class on individual,
link |
02:47:59.500
American individualism.
link |
02:48:01.140
One of the texts of the five that we had to read
link |
02:48:04.440
was Birth of a Nation, the movie about the Klan.
link |
02:48:08.300
So there's no department where these people
link |
02:48:12.720
are not thoroughgoing, hardcore ideologues.
link |
02:48:17.400
This is not a gender.
link |
02:48:18.240
That's the humanities, that's the humanities.
link |
02:48:19.340
Fine, all the humanities, not just gender studies.
link |
02:48:21.940
Okay, fine.
link |
02:48:22.780
I can give you.
link |
02:48:23.620
Theory, English, all of them, every university,
link |
02:48:27.100
as you know, has it mandatory in the curriculum
link |
02:48:31.620
they have to take a bunch of these propaganda classes.
link |
02:48:35.700
I look forward to YouTube comments
link |
02:48:37.580
because you're being more eloquent
link |
02:48:39.680
and you're speaking to the thing
link |
02:48:40.940
that a lot of people agree with
link |
02:48:42.340
and I'm being my usual slow self
link |
02:48:44.220
and people are going to say not very nice things about me.
link |
02:48:46.980
Don't say anything that nice about Lex, please.
link |
02:48:50.100
Let me try to just.
link |
02:48:51.020
Just shoot up a school.
link |
02:48:52.940
That would be preferable.
link |
02:48:54.380
There he goes again.
link |
02:48:55.720
Only the teachers.
link |
02:48:56.560
Going to the darkest possible place.
link |
02:48:58.300
That's sunshine, baby, schools.
link |
02:48:59.700
That's where everyone goes to be happy, playgrounds.
link |
02:49:01.620
There he goes, dark ear.
link |
02:49:04.360
Just dives right in, just go dark
link |
02:49:07.500
and then just comes back up to the surface.
link |
02:49:10.620
I don't have to feel this way anymore.
link |
02:49:13.300
Just one day in the world.
link |
02:49:18.340
You're probably a figment of my imagination.
link |
02:49:19.920
I'm not even having this podcast.
link |
02:49:21.260
Well, after 18 Red Bulls, I'm surprised
link |
02:49:23.140
you could see anything.
link |
02:49:24.580
This is like Fight Club.
link |
02:49:25.580
Red Bull gives you delirium.
link |
02:49:27.020
Yeah.
link |
02:49:29.500
I got into it with Ed Norton yesterday on Twitter.
link |
02:49:32.360
Oh, really?
link |
02:49:33.200
Yeah.
link |
02:49:34.020
Is he like the rest of the celebrities?
link |
02:49:35.940
Yeah, he's like, oh, this is an existential threat
link |
02:49:38.060
to America, Trump's a fascist.
link |
02:49:39.540
He's delegitimizing the Oval Office.
link |
02:49:41.340
I said, what an odd endorsement of Trump.
link |
02:49:44.220
Well, you should have went with a bad pit.
link |
02:49:45.620
He might have a different opinion.
link |
02:49:46.980
That's true.
link |
02:49:47.820
So Fight Club reference, okay.
link |
02:49:49.980
This conversation is over.
link |
02:49:52.620
It's interesting.
link |
02:49:53.460
I'd like to draw a line between science and engineering
link |
02:49:56.020
and science not including like the biological aspect,
link |
02:50:00.860
the parts of biology that touch
link |
02:50:03.620
and humanities and biology.
link |
02:50:04.980
Like I feel because humanities,
link |
02:50:08.060
if you just look at the percentage of universities,
link |
02:50:10.720
it's still a minority percentage.
link |
02:50:13.520
And I would actually draw a different,
link |
02:50:16.260
I think they serve very different purposes.
link |
02:50:18.340
Sure.
link |
02:50:19.180
And that's actually a broken part about universities
link |
02:50:22.340
about like, why is some of the best research
link |
02:50:27.060
in the world done at universities?
link |
02:50:28.300
That doesn't, like there might be a different,
link |
02:50:31.340
like MIT, it feels weird that a faculty.
link |
02:50:34.540
Yeah, these are conceptually different things.
link |
02:50:35.900
Like we do research and we teach,
link |
02:50:37.160
why is this the same diagram?
link |
02:50:38.000
Yeah, it feels weird.
link |
02:50:38.900
But that's just, but I'm also,
link |
02:50:40.860
I'm coming to like the defense of the engineers
link |
02:50:44.680
that never talk about,
link |
02:50:45.980
I'm not like, my mind isn't,
link |
02:50:49.260
I'm not like deluded or something
link |
02:50:51.000
where I'm not seeing the house on fire.
link |
02:50:53.940
I'm just saying, I am seeing the house
link |
02:50:55.780
because I also lived in Harvard Square.
link |
02:50:57.320
I'm seeing Harvard, but in.
link |
02:50:59.580
And you see the tanks coming?
link |
02:51:00.740
They're coming, Lex.
link |
02:51:01.660
They're coming.
link |
02:51:02.500
It's gonna be so beautiful.
link |
02:51:03.340
It'll be like the American beauty, the plastic bag.
link |
02:51:06.140
I just won't be able to stop crying
link |
02:51:07.260
because it'll be so beautiful.
link |
02:51:08.180
Yeah, I can already see it.
link |
02:51:11.220
But the engineering departments where like,
link |
02:51:14.620
I believe that the Elon Musk's of the world,
link |
02:51:18.100
that the, like the innovation
link |
02:51:20.660
that will make a better world is happening.
link |
02:51:22.980
And like, let's not burn that down.
link |
02:51:25.200
Cause that has nothing to do with any,
link |
02:51:27.280
like they're all like sitting quietly
link |
02:51:29.260
in the, while like, while the humanities
link |
02:51:32.740
and all these kinds of diversity programs,
link |
02:51:34.180
they're not having any of these discussions.
link |
02:51:36.700
Listen, my Soviet brother, you both know,
link |
02:51:39.180
we both know that ice water runs in our veins.
link |
02:51:41.460
So if you're calling for mercy,
link |
02:51:42.820
that is not how I'm wired,
link |
02:51:44.420
but I'm not closing the door.
link |
02:51:46.500
Yeah, I'm actually realizing now,
link |
02:51:48.540
so for people listening to this,
link |
02:51:50.660
I'll probably prepend this in saying that
link |
02:51:52.660
I'm even slower than usual.
link |
02:51:54.940
I didn't sleep last night,
link |
02:51:56.540
but I feel I'm actually realizing just how slow I am
link |
02:52:00.820
and how much preparation I need to do.
link |
02:52:03.100
And if I would like to defend aspects of academia,
link |
02:52:06.740
I better come prepared.
link |
02:52:08.500
I don't think you need to defend them.
link |
02:52:09.680
I think I'm granting you your premise freely.
link |
02:52:12.600
No, you might be.
link |
02:52:13.620
Okay.
link |
02:52:14.540
I don't think the world is.
link |
02:52:16.340
But actually you just defeat your own argument
link |
02:52:18.420
because it is not at all have to be the way
link |
02:52:21.540
that a phenomenal research institution like MIT,
link |
02:52:24.580
which no one disputes,
link |
02:52:25.940
has to also be an educational establishment.
link |
02:52:28.740
These two things are not at all necessarily interconnected.
link |
02:52:32.140
But then you have to offer a way to separate.
link |
02:52:34.580
Correct.
link |
02:52:35.420
But like, I'm not a big fan, everybody's different,
link |
02:52:38.940
but I'm not a fan of criticizing institutions
link |
02:52:41.100
without offering a way to change.
link |
02:52:43.340
And especially when I'm like, have ability to change,
link |
02:52:46.060
I'd like to, yeah, I'd like to offer a path.
link |
02:52:49.300
Like.
link |
02:52:50.140
What if they were in students, they were all mentor,
link |
02:52:51.700
like, what's the opposite of a mentor?
link |
02:52:55.940
Mentee.
link |
02:52:56.780
Protege?
link |
02:52:57.600
What's the term when you like.
link |
02:52:58.440
Graduate students.
link |
02:52:59.280
When you work at a place, like interns,
link |
02:53:01.300
not an intern, it's not the word I'm thinking of.
link |
02:53:02.860
But anyway, like basically they're working there
link |
02:53:04.900
instead of going to college there.
link |
02:53:06.660
It's possible, but it's going against tradition.
link |
02:53:08.820
And so you have to build new institutions and.
link |
02:53:11.780
And have these engineers building new things, that's crazy.
link |
02:53:15.100
These research engineers,
link |
02:53:16.420
where they're going to be building things.
link |
02:53:18.980
Well, one of the things, cause you're kind of a.
link |
02:53:21.300
Apprentice, that's the word I was looking at.
link |
02:53:22.600
Apprentice.
link |
02:53:23.440
Which is ironic, we're talking about Trump
link |
02:53:24.620
and we couldn't think of the word apprentice.
link |
02:53:26.740
Yeah, well done.
link |
02:53:28.260
We should both be fired.
link |
02:53:29.100
You're fired.
link |
02:53:29.940
Yeah, there you go.
link |
02:53:31.780
These Russian Jews, so quick with their wit.
link |
02:53:34.480
Okay.
link |
02:53:35.320
But the thing is, you're a fan of freedom.
link |
02:53:37.700
I am.
link |
02:53:38.940
And there is intellectual freedom.
link |
02:53:42.260
People, this is what I was trying to articulate,
link |
02:53:45.180
I'm failing to articulate,
link |
02:53:47.100
but there truly is complete intellectual freedom
link |
02:53:50.260
within universities on topics of science and engineering.
link |
02:53:56.100
I believe you, I agree with you.
link |
02:53:57.980
I don't think it's going to take much persuasion,
link |
02:53:59.540
but I'll give you an example.
link |
02:54:01.460
When that, I'm sure you know more details about this
link |
02:54:04.620
than I do.
link |
02:54:05.560
When that scientist engineered that probe
link |
02:54:09.580
to land on that comet,
link |
02:54:11.740
and the articles are written
link |
02:54:12.980
because this Hawaiian shirt he was wearing
link |
02:54:15.240
had like pinup girls on it,
link |
02:54:16.380
which I think his female student sewed for him
link |
02:54:18.380
or something, or his ex girlfriend.
link |
02:54:19.820
And he had to apologize.
link |
02:54:21.600
This is what Rand was talking about.
link |
02:54:23.620
That the great accomplishments of men
link |
02:54:26.440
have to say I'm sorry to the lowest,
link |
02:54:29.260
most despicable, disgusting people.
link |
02:54:32.420
Yeah, I don't know.
link |
02:54:34.240
Let me bring this case up because I think about this.
link |
02:54:37.860
This might not mean much to you,
link |
02:54:39.060
but it means a lot to certain aspects
link |
02:54:41.140
of the computer science community.
link |
02:54:42.540
There's a guy named Richard Stallman.
link |
02:54:44.740
I don't know if you know who that is.
link |
02:54:46.980
He's the founder of the Free Software Foundation.
link |
02:54:51.280
He's like a big Linux.
link |
02:54:52.260
He's one of the key people
link |
02:54:53.340
in the history of computer science,
link |
02:54:54.900
one of those open source people, right?
link |
02:54:56.800
But he is like, I believe he's one of the hardcore ones,
link |
02:55:00.260
which is like all software should be free.
link |
02:55:02.740
Okay, so it's very interesting personality,
link |
02:55:05.360
very key person in the GNU,
link |
02:55:07.260
just like Linus Torvald, key person.
link |
02:55:10.160
So, but he also kind of speaks his mind.
link |
02:55:13.500
And on a certain chain of conversations at MIT
link |
02:55:20.100
that was leaked to the New York Times,
link |
02:55:22.300
then it was published, led him to be fired
link |
02:55:26.460
or pushed out of MIT recently, maybe a year ago.
link |
02:55:30.660
And it always sat weird with me.
link |
02:55:32.740
So what happened is there's a few undergraduate students
link |
02:55:38.860
that called Marvin Minsky.
link |
02:55:41.220
Not sure if you're familiar with who that is.
link |
02:55:42.700
I've heard the name.
link |
02:55:43.540
He's one of the seminal people in artificial intelligence.
link |
02:55:46.460
They said that they called him a rapist
link |
02:55:49.960
because he met with Jeffrey Epstein.
link |
02:55:53.020
And Jeffrey Epstein solicited,
link |
02:55:58.180
these are the best facts known to me
link |
02:55:59.980
that I'm aware of, that's what was stated on the chain,
link |
02:56:02.820
is he solicited a 17,
link |
02:56:04.740
but it might've been an 18 year old girl,
link |
02:56:07.020
to come up to Marvin Minsky
link |
02:56:09.160
and ask him if he wanted to have sex with her.
link |
02:56:13.580
So Jeffrey Epstein told the girl.
link |
02:56:16.800
She came up to Marvin Minsky,
link |
02:56:18.140
who was at that time, I think, seven years old.
link |
02:56:20.680
And his wife was there too, Marvin Minsky's wife.
link |
02:56:23.220
And he said no, or like awkwardly saying no thanks.
link |
02:56:28.220
And that was stated in the email thread
link |
02:56:34.420
as Marvin participating in sexual assault
link |
02:56:39.460
and rape of this unwilling sexual assault.
link |
02:56:43.460
And it was called rape of this person, right?
link |
02:56:47.460
Of this woman that propositioned him.
link |
02:56:50.500
And then Richard Stallman, who's, he's kind of known for this.
link |
02:56:55.500
He's very, he's, you make fun of me being a robot,
link |
02:56:59.220
but he's kind of like a debugger.
link |
02:57:01.140
He's like, well, that sentence is not,
link |
02:57:03.140
what you said is not correct.
link |
02:57:05.300
So he like corrected the person,
link |
02:57:08.540
basically made it seem like the use of the word rape
link |
02:57:13.760
is not correct, because that's not the definition of rape.
link |
02:57:16.660
And then he was attacked for saying,
link |
02:57:19.140
oh, now you're playing with definitions of rape.
link |
02:57:21.100
Rape is rape is the answer, right?
link |
02:57:23.780
And then that was leaked in him defending.
link |
02:57:27.220
So the way it was leaked,
link |
02:57:28.460
it was reported as him defending rape.
link |
02:57:35.260
That's the way it was reported.
link |
02:57:36.940
And he was pushed out and he didn't really give a damn.
link |
02:57:40.940
It's, he doesn't seem to make a big deal out of it.
link |
02:57:44.420
He just left.
link |
02:57:45.260
He made an example of him.
link |
02:57:46.460
They made an example and that,
link |
02:57:48.020
and that everyone was afraid to defend him.
link |
02:57:51.700
So like, there's a bunch of faculty.
link |
02:57:53.220
One.
link |
02:57:54.060
Dude, you're from the Soviet Union.
link |
02:57:54.880
Doesn't this hit close to home for you?
link |
02:57:58.540
I don't know what to think of it.
link |
02:57:59.580
It hits close to home, but it was basically,
link |
02:58:03.100
at least at MIT, now MIT is such a light place with this.
link |
02:58:06.660
It's not common at MIT,
link |
02:58:08.460
but it was like 18, 19 year old kids,
link |
02:58:11.100
undergraduate kids with this kind of fire in them.
link |
02:58:14.380
There's just very few of them,
link |
02:58:15.920
but they're the ones that raise all this kind of fuss.
link |
02:58:19.140
And the entirety of the administration,
link |
02:58:23.060
all the faculty are afraid to stand up to them.
link |
02:58:26.740
It's so interesting to me.
link |
02:58:28.320
Like, I don't know if I should be afraid of that.
link |
02:58:31.860
You don't think you should be afraid
link |
02:58:32.980
that someone who's trying to be specific
link |
02:58:34.900
when it comes to charges of violent assault
link |
02:58:37.260
is looking for that clarity,
link |
02:58:38.620
can get their life out of search of his room?
link |
02:58:40.660
Let me give you more context.
link |
02:58:43.420
There's a little bit more context to Richard Stallman,
link |
02:58:46.020
which is.
link |
02:58:46.860
He was also a rapist.
link |
02:58:47.700
No.
link |
02:58:49.260
I left out that part.
link |
02:58:50.100
He liked raping people.
link |
02:58:51.100
But he's had a history through his life
link |
02:58:55.900
of every once in a while wearing the Hawaiian shirt with,
link |
02:59:00.020
like he would make.
link |
02:59:01.220
He's a fat.
link |
02:59:04.180
Sorry, but he's a fat unattractive.
link |
02:59:06.940
Like what Trump referred to the hacker.
link |
02:59:08.780
Yeah, yeah, the guy in the basement.
link |
02:59:11.220
That's Richard.
link |
02:59:12.060
Okay, I love.
link |
02:59:14.560
He is what he is.
link |
02:59:16.420
He like, he would eat his own.
link |
02:59:18.420
He would pick skin from his feet in lectures
link |
02:59:20.780
and just eat it.
link |
02:59:21.620
No.
link |
02:59:22.460
Okay, yeah.
link |
02:59:23.280
Those videos of him doing that.
link |
02:59:24.660
I'm not joking.
link |
02:59:25.500
He must really be behind the spectrum then.
link |
02:59:26.920
Yeah, okay.
link |
02:59:27.760
Oh, yeah.
link |
02:59:28.980
And you know,
link |
02:59:32.220
I think in his office,
link |
02:59:36.140
door, he wrote something like
link |
02:59:41.080
hacker plus lover of ladies or something like that.
link |
02:59:45.820
Like something kind of.
link |
02:59:47.500
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
02:59:48.940
Unprofessional.
link |
02:59:50.140
Yeah, unprofessional.
link |
02:59:50.980
And a little creepy.
link |
02:59:51.940
Yeah, yeah.
link |
02:59:52.780
No, that's fair.
link |
02:59:53.600
So he was also.
link |
02:59:54.440
So they're looking for an excuse to get rid of him,
link |
02:59:56.580
it sounds like.
link |
02:59:58.020
No, he was just, who's they?
link |
03:00:00.700
The administration.
link |
03:00:02.700
Yeah, probably, probably.
link |
03:00:04.060
A lot of times what people don't realize,
link |
03:00:06.020
and this would be my defense of cancel culture.
link |
03:00:08.580
A lot of times when someone gets fired
link |
03:00:10.140
over something like this, this isn't why.
link |
03:00:12.260
This is just giving them cover to get rid of them
link |
03:00:14.540
without getting a lawsuit.
link |
03:00:15.620
Yeah, but it's still.
link |
03:00:17.660
Right, so I think, I guess what I'm trying to communicate
link |
03:00:21.460
is he was a little weird and creepy
link |
03:00:23.500
and he may not be the best for the community,
link |
03:00:27.380
but that's not necessarily the message it's sent
link |
03:00:30.460
to the rest of the community.
link |
03:00:31.780
The message is sent to the rest of the community
link |
03:00:34.340
that being clear about words
link |
03:00:37.020
or the usage of the word rape
link |
03:00:39.180
is like you should call everything rape.
link |
03:00:41.940
That's basically the message it was sent.
link |
03:00:44.500
Or you should call it we say rape, rape.
link |
03:00:46.880
It's about submission.
link |
03:00:48.380
I think you'd be very happy to know
link |
03:00:50.580
that there's a lot of people,
link |
03:00:52.060
and she's very crucified of this,
link |
03:00:53.340
like Betsy DeVos, the performance department of education,
link |
03:00:56.060
who are aware of this.
link |
03:00:58.140
They are aware that this completely contradicts due process.
link |
03:01:01.520
They're aware of how a rape accusation
link |
03:01:03.740
is something not to be taken seriously,
link |
03:01:05.560
but because it's not to be taken seriously,
link |
03:01:07.180
it has to be also taken seriously in the other context
link |
03:01:09.460
that once that word is around a male,
link |
03:01:12.060
this can ruin his entire life.
link |
03:01:13.700
That's the sticky thing of the word.
link |
03:01:17.380
Like I, like I think about this a lot that,
link |
03:01:24.860
like how would I defend it if somebody,
link |
03:01:26.540
like I've never, I can honestly say
link |
03:01:28.260
I've never done anything close to creepy in my life
link |
03:01:32.500
like with women.
link |
03:01:34.860
But you wouldn't know it if you had, right?
link |
03:01:36.460
That's the thing.
link |
03:01:37.300
A lot of these creepy guys don't think they're creepy.
link |
03:01:39.120
They think they're being cute.
link |
03:01:40.940
Yeah, but I'm just telling you,
link |
03:01:42.020
even like, fine, let's say, right,
link |
03:01:45.860
let's say I'm not aware of it.
link |
03:01:47.180
But the point that I am aware of
link |
03:01:50.060
is that somebody could just completely make something up.
link |
03:01:52.580
Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
link |
03:01:54.180
And like how, what would I?
link |
03:01:55.820
No, he denied the charges.
link |
03:01:57.340
There's an article around everything he did, supposedly,
link |
03:01:59.540
and it goes, Mr. Friedman denied the charges, yeah.
link |
03:02:02.620
But what creeps me out?
link |
03:02:04.340
That happened, can I interrupt?
link |
03:02:05.420
Zora Neale Hurston is one of my favorite writers.
link |
03:02:07.420
She's from the Harlem Renaissance.
link |
03:02:09.780
She wrote, Their Eyes Are Watching God,
link |
03:02:11.420
and a couple of other books.
link |
03:02:12.460
She was just an amazing, amazing figure.
link |
03:02:14.300
Her biography is called Wrapped in Rainbows.
link |
03:02:16.680
It's just a masterpiece.
link |
03:02:17.800
I think I read it one day.
link |
03:02:18.780
Can't recommend her enough.
link |
03:02:19.780
Fascinating, fascinating woman.
link |
03:02:21.640
During the 30s, I think it was, or 1940,
link |
03:02:24.780
she was out of the country.
link |
03:02:26.340
She was accused of molesting a teenage boy.
link |
03:02:29.860
She wasn't in America.
link |
03:02:31.900
This could be proven.
link |
03:02:33.220
So it's absolutely false, not even a question.
link |
03:02:36.060
She was indicted, and she wanted to kill herself
link |
03:02:39.900
because she's like, people are gonna see these things,
link |
03:02:43.820
and they're gonna think maybe there's some truth to it.
link |
03:02:45.460
Maybe it's voluntary.
link |
03:02:46.920
What they're just gonna, and you could understand
link |
03:02:49.180
why she'd be suicidal over this.
link |
03:02:50.940
So yeah, this is something that's been going on
link |
03:02:52.940
for a long time, and the fact that it's becoming,
link |
03:02:55.560
I do agree, it's important.
link |
03:02:57.180
I know a lot of women who have been sexually assaulted,
link |
03:02:59.580
more than I'm happy that I know.
link |
03:03:01.560
And if I know that many, that means there's more.
link |
03:03:03.820
So I think it's a good idea that they feel seen,
link |
03:03:08.540
that they don't feel wounded, they don't feel damaged,
link |
03:03:10.540
that they could talk to their friends.
link |
03:03:12.020
And I'm like, man, this sucks is happening to you.
link |
03:03:13.920
And I don't think you're a slut.
link |
03:03:15.720
I don't think you're asking for it.
link |
03:03:16.860
I think you feel violated.
link |
03:03:17.860
I think it's gross.
link |
03:03:19.180
Talk to me.
link |
03:03:20.020
I do think that that's important.
link |
03:03:21.940
And I also think it's important though,
link |
03:03:23.820
when things get kind of in a frenzy,
link |
03:03:26.540
that a lot of people are like,
link |
03:03:27.820
yeah, I also had something happen.
link |
03:03:29.500
And very quickly the line between he grabbed my boob
link |
03:03:33.200
and he violently raped me,
link |
03:03:34.900
I don't think these two things are the same at all.
link |
03:03:37.080
I think they're both sexual assault,
link |
03:03:39.020
but in terms of what someone can deal with the next day,
link |
03:03:41.820
the next month, 10 years later,
link |
03:03:43.620
I don't think they're similar scenarios.
link |
03:03:47.420
I had Juanita Brodrick on my show
link |
03:03:49.240
and hearing her talk about her alleged rape by Bill Clinton
link |
03:03:53.820
was very disturbing for me, very disturbing to hear.
link |
03:03:56.940
Because it was like half an hour.
link |
03:03:58.800
So we think of these things and think,
link |
03:04:00.300
okay, hold her down, blah, blah, blah.
link |
03:04:01.960
And then it's done.
link |
03:04:02.800
Half an hour when,
link |
03:04:03.660
just even someone physically holding you down
link |
03:04:05.460
for half an hour.
link |
03:04:06.620
Like not even a sexual assault.
link |
03:04:08.300
Like that's traumatic.
link |
03:04:09.980
You think, your brain's gonna think, am I gonna die?
link |
03:04:12.460
When I zoom out,
link |
03:04:14.040
I think that ultimately this is gonna lead
link |
03:04:16.860
to a better world.
link |
03:04:18.700
Like empowering women to speak to those kinds of experiences,
link |
03:04:24.460
the benefit of it outweighs the...
link |
03:04:27.500
The issue is whenever people are given a weapon,
link |
03:04:30.300
some are going to use it in nefarious ways.
link |
03:04:33.300
And that's the lesson of history.
link |
03:04:34.540
Males, females, whites, blacks, children, adults.
link |
03:04:38.580
When people are given a mechanism to execute power
link |
03:04:40.980
over others, some are gonna use it.
link |
03:04:43.500
Can I ask you for a therapy thing?
link |
03:04:46.480
Sure.
link |
03:04:48.620
On trolling, in a sense.
link |
03:04:51.520
Because I mentioned somebody making up something about me.
link |
03:04:55.060
I feel, because I wear my heart on my sleeve,
link |
03:04:59.560
I'm not good with these attacks.
link |
03:05:01.960
Like I've been attacked recently,
link |
03:05:03.820
just being called a fraud and all that kind of stuff.
link |
03:05:06.420
Just light stuff.
link |
03:05:07.300
Like I haven't, you know, it was like, it hurt.
link |
03:05:11.880
Okay, well, let me help you.
link |
03:05:13.460
Maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker.
link |
03:05:15.860
No, I'm serious.
link |
03:05:16.700
Here's why.
link |
03:05:17.860
In New York, a lot of times you'll be walking
link |
03:05:21.140
with your friend and a homeless person will come up to you
link |
03:05:24.660
and start yelling things at you.
link |
03:05:26.740
Your reaction isn't in those circumstances.
link |
03:05:29.740
Let me hear this out.
link |
03:05:31.360
Your reaction is physical safety and getting away.
link |
03:05:35.060
Now, it's not impossible that that homeless person
link |
03:05:38.500
is actually saying the truth.
link |
03:05:39.900
This happened to a friend of mine.
link |
03:05:42.020
This guy wasn't homeless
link |
03:05:44.340
and he's walking down the street on Smith Street
link |
03:05:46.940
and he's just talking out loud.
link |
03:05:48.640
And he goes, why they call them hipsters?
link |
03:05:50.600
What are they hip to?
link |
03:05:52.020
And she chuckles.
link |
03:05:53.420
And he goes, what are you laughing at, fatso?
link |
03:05:55.180
You start something, I'll finish it.
link |
03:05:57.220
And she just couldn't move.
link |
03:05:59.060
And it's like, it's my main problem
link |
03:06:02.460
because that's the first thing he went to.
link |
03:06:04.340
And I don't know that I have any advice,
link |
03:06:07.980
but when you hear something like this,
link |
03:06:11.020
I think you need to be better in terms of boundaries.
link |
03:06:13.580
I think you should not perceive this as a fellow human,
link |
03:06:16.220
but as a crazy homeless person,
link |
03:06:18.780
because if this fellow human,
link |
03:06:21.460
if I thought that you were a fraud in some context,
link |
03:06:24.660
that's a very weird word to use
link |
03:06:25.900
because fraudulent podcaster, these are real mics,
link |
03:06:29.020
but if I thought.
link |
03:06:29.860
Well, a scientist or a human.
link |
03:06:31.900
Sure, but I would ask myself,
link |
03:06:33.720
is this person in a position to make this judgment
link |
03:06:36.420
or are they backing it up?
link |
03:06:37.880
Are they saying, here, your conclusions were wrong,
link |
03:06:40.620
here's some mistakes in your data
link |
03:06:42.620
and you can engage with them in ideas,
link |
03:06:44.660
but whenever someone uses a word
link |
03:06:46.140
to entirely dismiss your life
link |
03:06:48.000
without having the knowledge of your life,
link |
03:06:50.620
you do not have to take that seriously.
link |
03:06:53.660
I appreciate that kind of idea,
link |
03:06:55.280
but some things aren't about data,
link |
03:06:58.300
like I see myself as a fraud often
link |
03:07:02.060
and it's more psychology of it.
link |
03:07:06.800
If I can reduce something to reason,
link |
03:07:09.120
I can probably be fine.
link |
03:07:11.140
My worry is the same as the worry of teenage girls
link |
03:07:14.580
that get bullied online.
link |
03:07:16.260
It's like when I'm being open and fragile on the internet,
link |
03:07:20.140
it affects me in a way where I can't,
link |
03:07:22.460
the reason doesn't help.
link |
03:07:23.980
So it helps me, but.
link |
03:07:24.820
You don't block people enough.
link |
03:07:26.220
I'm very heavy with the blocking.
link |
03:07:27.420
No, so yeah, I block.
link |
03:07:29.180
Very heavy.
link |
03:07:30.100
I block, it's helped a lot.
link |
03:07:31.860
Any aggressive banality, I block immediately.
link |
03:07:34.420
I also think time is gonna help.
link |
03:07:36.380
I don't think you're,
link |
03:07:37.540
like you didn't grow up wanting to be a podcaster, right?
link |
03:07:40.260
That wasn't your aspiration.
link |
03:07:41.740
So in some sense, you are gonna feel like a fraud
link |
03:07:43.660
because you're like, I don't have any training for this.
link |
03:07:45.140
I have a training for a scientist.
link |
03:07:46.460
I can talk to you about artificial intelligence
link |
03:07:48.040
for literally hours, but in terms of this,
link |
03:07:49.980
like I don't know what I'm doing.
link |
03:07:50.980
I'm kind of, so when they call you a fake,
link |
03:07:53.580
it's like, yeah, you're kind of right
link |
03:07:55.140
because like I did kind of stumble into this
link |
03:07:57.740
and this is not my pedigree.
link |
03:07:59.720
So I think that kind of probably speaks to you
link |
03:08:01.940
on some level.
link |
03:08:02.780
Well, but they're attacking not the podcast thing,
link |
03:08:05.220
but more like the same,
link |
03:08:07.260
people call Elon Musk a fraud too,
link |
03:08:08.860
which that's the way I rationalize it.
link |
03:08:11.120
Like, well, if they're calling him a fraud
link |
03:08:13.980
and they're calling me a fraud,
link |
03:08:17.100
like even if you have rockets that go into,
link |
03:08:20.420
like if you successfully have rockets
link |
03:08:22.260
landing back on earth, reusable rockets,
link |
03:08:26.300
you're still being called a fraud, then it's okay.
link |
03:08:30.980
Not necessarily.
link |
03:08:31.820
It could be that he's not a fraud.
link |
03:08:32.640
You really are.
link |
03:08:35.060
That's, but it's not resonating with you
link |
03:08:36.940
because your brain knows the logic.
link |
03:08:38.140
So you can't trick yourself.
link |
03:08:39.260
But yeah, yeah.
link |
03:08:42.620
But I don't know, this whole trolling thing,
link |
03:08:44.940
you seem to be much better at seeing it as a game.
link |
03:08:50.740
You know why?
link |
03:08:51.780
Because you are under the delusion
link |
03:08:54.380
that every human being is capable
link |
03:08:56.220
of intelligent reasoned decisions.
link |
03:08:57.940
Still think I'm right.
link |
03:08:58.780
And I perceive them as literally animals.
link |
03:09:01.460
So when a dog starts barking,
link |
03:09:03.780
all it's saying is that the dog is agitated
link |
03:09:05.820
and this is not going to change my life one iota
link |
03:09:08.260
other than crossing the street, perhaps.
link |
03:09:09.940
Yeah, I'm going to prove you wrong one day.
link |
03:09:12.900
You're going to kill yourself
link |
03:09:13.900
because they can drive you to it.
link |
03:09:15.540
The first shoot up of school.
link |
03:09:17.540
But if I don't, I'll prove you wrong.
link |
03:09:19.340
I'll bring the data.
link |
03:09:20.660
And they'd be like, you're right, Lex.
link |
03:09:22.300
I have the receipts.
link |
03:09:23.340
I have the receipts.
link |
03:09:24.980
Okay, so we mentioned Camus.
link |
03:09:27.660
Oh yeah, I love him.
link |
03:09:29.260
Is there, this is a question that people like love
link |
03:09:34.340
when I ask.
link |
03:09:35.500
I'm a really smart people.
link |
03:09:37.380
What it is, love?
link |
03:09:39.660
No, what books, let's say three books,
link |
03:09:44.780
if you can think of them, technical, fiction,
link |
03:09:47.940
philosophical, would you, had a big impact on you
link |
03:09:52.060
or would you recommend to others?
link |
03:09:53.700
Sure.
link |
03:09:54.540
The Machiavellians by James Burnham.
link |
03:09:56.940
This is a book about how politics works in reality
link |
03:09:59.820
as opposed to how people imagine it working.
link |
03:10:03.380
Mentis Moldbug, who's a figure in these circles,
link |
03:10:05.660
who's respected by a lot of people.
link |
03:10:07.460
I was giving a talk and there was a bunch of panelists
link |
03:10:10.380
and we were asked, what book would you recommend?
link |
03:10:12.620
I said, The Machiavellians.
link |
03:10:14.020
Independently of me, that was the book he had recommended.
link |
03:10:17.060
It's out of print, it's hard to find,
link |
03:10:18.580
but that would be one.
link |
03:10:19.860
Is that his book or no?
link |
03:10:20.900
James Burnham, it came out in 1941, I think.
link |
03:10:23.620
So can you pause on the, what's his?
link |
03:10:26.820
Mentis Moldbug.
link |
03:10:28.180
That's a code name, right?
link |
03:10:29.740
That guy's pen name.
link |
03:10:31.060
Curtis Yarvin, that's his real name.
link |
03:10:33.460
He swims in your circles.
link |
03:10:35.620
Which circles?
link |
03:10:36.460
He does some kind of programming.
link |
03:10:37.300
Oh, he's originally a programmer.
link |
03:10:38.660
Yeah, he comes up as a person that I should talk with
link |
03:10:43.740
or I should know about, but then I read a few of his things
link |
03:10:46.820
and they seem quite dangerous.
link |
03:10:49.180
They're very long and verbose,
link |
03:10:50.780
but I think he's an amazing thinker.
link |
03:10:53.100
Yeah, but.
link |
03:10:53.940
But he's the one who had the idea
link |
03:10:54.780
of sending the tanks to Harvard Yard.
link |
03:10:56.460
But doesn't he have like,
link |
03:11:00.380
he has some radical views.
link |
03:11:01.300
I forget what they are.
link |
03:11:02.140
Very radical views, yeah, he wants a military coup.
link |
03:11:06.620
But you're saying he's a serious thinker
link |
03:11:08.420
that is worthy of, not worthy.
link |
03:11:11.780
I don't know that you would enjoy
link |
03:11:13.200
having a conversation with him.
link |
03:11:14.340
I think a lot of people enjoy seeing it happen,
link |
03:11:16.140
but I think it would be a lot of talking past each other
link |
03:11:18.220
and it would be interesting.
link |
03:11:20.660
What do you agree?
link |
03:11:21.500
I didn't agree with him to watch.
link |
03:11:22.340
What do you disagree, okay.
link |
03:11:24.100
What do you agree, what do you disagree with him?
link |
03:11:25.380
I agree with him that politics has to be looked at
link |
03:11:28.900
objectively and without kind of an emotional connection
link |
03:11:33.200
to different schools.
link |
03:11:34.580
I talk about him a lot in my book on the New Right.
link |
03:11:38.280
Disagree, I don't think a military coup is a good idea.
link |
03:11:42.140
He doesn't think anarchism is stable, I disagree.
link |
03:11:47.060
I mean, me and him, I did a live stream with him
link |
03:11:49.140
which just dorked out a lot about history
link |
03:11:50.460
and people who've fallen in the memory hole.
link |
03:11:52.820
So, I mean, he's got a lot of writing, so.
link |
03:11:56.220
So, you know, the sense I got from him
link |
03:11:58.980
was that if I talk with him,
link |
03:12:01.580
a lot of people would be upset with me
link |
03:12:03.740
for giving him a platform.
link |
03:12:05.220
Yeah, I think he's on that edge
link |
03:12:07.220
where they want to read him out of
link |
03:12:09.620
what is acceptable discourse.
link |
03:12:11.500
What's his most controversial,
link |
03:12:13.460
I mean, you keep mentioning the tanks.
link |
03:12:15.220
Is that the most controversial viewpoint?
link |
03:12:17.120
Does he have a race thing?
link |
03:12:18.340
No, the alt right doesn't particularly like him
link |
03:12:21.420
in many ways because he's not a big on the race thing.
link |
03:12:24.140
I don't know what would be his most controversial view,
link |
03:12:27.580
to be honest.
link |
03:12:28.580
I think because he is radical in terms of his analysis
link |
03:12:33.220
of culture, anytime someone's a radical,
link |
03:12:34.960
that is dangerous.
link |
03:12:35.800
Yeah, it's dangerous.
link |
03:12:36.940
Okay, book, so that's one.
link |
03:12:39.100
The Fountainhead.
link |
03:12:40.180
The Fountainhead.
link |
03:12:41.260
Which is a, I would say.
link |
03:12:43.380
Not Atlas Shrugged?
link |
03:12:44.300
No, and if you read Atlas Shrugged
link |
03:12:46.180
before reading The Fountainhead,
link |
03:12:47.140
you're doing yourself an enormous disservice.
link |
03:12:48.660
Don't you dare do it.
link |
03:12:49.980
On the philosophical or because the novel is better?
link |
03:12:52.380
On every level.
link |
03:12:53.220
Fountainhead's a better novel.
link |
03:12:54.580
Fountainhead's superfluous if you read Atlas Shrugged first.
link |
03:12:57.140
Fountainhead's about psychology and ethics.
link |
03:13:00.460
It does not have to do with her politics
link |
03:13:02.260
other than its implications.
link |
03:13:03.820
So it's by far the superior book.
link |
03:13:06.020
The third one.
link |
03:13:08.140
Ooh, this is a good one question.
link |
03:13:09.500
Let me see.
link |
03:13:10.340
There's so many good books out there that I love.
link |
03:13:13.180
I'm going to, this is not really my third choice,
link |
03:13:16.300
but I'll throw it out there because I,
link |
03:13:19.220
this is such an important worldview,
link |
03:13:21.140
especially for people on the right.
link |
03:13:22.820
Are you virtue signaling?
link |
03:13:24.180
No, this is counter signaling.
link |
03:13:26.780
Thaddeus Russell's book,
link |
03:13:27.860
A Renegade History of the United States.
link |
03:13:29.620
His thesis is that it's the degenerates
link |
03:13:33.240
that give us all freedom.
link |
03:13:36.020
And things like prostitutes, things like madams,
link |
03:13:38.580
things like slaves, things like immigrants,
link |
03:13:41.540
because they were so low status,
link |
03:13:44.420
they could get away with things
link |
03:13:46.000
that then people who are higher status demanded
link |
03:13:47.940
and so on and so forth.
link |
03:13:48.900
So I think that thesis,
link |
03:13:50.540
and it really has extreme consequences in thinking.
link |
03:13:57.340
And no, Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.
link |
03:13:59.900
That's, those are the four.
link |
03:14:02.740
Is that his best?
link |
03:14:03.580
I haven't read any of his stuff.
link |
03:14:04.700
The Righteous Mind is the only one you want.
link |
03:14:06.060
Okay, that was four, but of course.
link |
03:14:10.340
Forget Thaddeus Russell, put Haidt in there.
link |
03:14:12.540
Of course he would.
link |
03:14:14.080
No, forget Thaddeus, those are the three.
link |
03:14:17.380
So we talked about love.
link |
03:14:18.820
Let me ask you the other question I'm obsessed with.
link |
03:14:22.740
Are you, do you ponder your own mortality?
link |
03:14:26.300
I do, a lot, especially now that I'm an uncle,
link |
03:14:29.780
especially now that I have like these younger people
link |
03:14:31.860
that I mentor.
link |
03:14:33.640
I was just yesterday, my friend, John Girguis,
link |
03:14:36.140
who did my theme song for my podcast,
link |
03:14:37.700
who did the book cover for Dear Reader,
link |
03:14:40.900
who's like the most talented person I know.
link |
03:14:42.940
His song came on the iPod at the gym
link |
03:14:45.460
and I almost messaged him.
link |
03:14:46.500
I go, you know, one day one of us is gonna bury the other
link |
03:14:48.900
and it's gonna be really sad.
link |
03:14:50.420
And I thought about that and it was kind of like,
link |
03:14:52.080
oh man, that's really gonna suck.
link |
03:14:54.020
And I don't know which scenario would be better.
link |
03:14:56.380
Like I will be very sad if he's gone.
link |
03:14:58.660
I'm sure he'd be very sad if I'm gone.
link |
03:15:01.540
I mean, what do you, are you afraid of it?
link |
03:15:03.420
No, you know, Rand had this quote about how
link |
03:15:08.180
I won't die, the world will end.
link |
03:15:10.340
So I've had enough experiences that I am,
link |
03:15:13.580
I've really, at this point,
link |
03:15:16.980
and everything's icing on the cake.
link |
03:15:18.820
So if you, if I were to kill you
link |
03:15:20.800
at the end of this podcast, it feels painless.
link |
03:15:24.420
That would be okay?
link |
03:15:25.260
Yeah, you know why?
link |
03:15:26.620
Does anyone know you're here by the way?
link |
03:15:28.340
You know why?
link |
03:15:30.460
Just asking for a friend.
link |
03:15:32.140
Here's why, there's that wit.
link |
03:15:34.620
Save that for Twitter likes.
link |
03:15:37.420
Do they call you Sasha?
link |
03:15:38.940
No, I'm a Lyosha.
link |
03:15:40.300
Oh, that's my sister's husband.
link |
03:15:41.940
Okay, so here's why.
link |
03:15:45.580
I strongly believe,
link |
03:15:47.260
and this is a very kind of Jewish perspective,
link |
03:15:49.520
that you just have to leave the world
link |
03:15:50.980
a little bit better than you found it.
link |
03:15:52.340
That all you could do is move the needle a little.
link |
03:15:54.420
And one of the things I set out to do
link |
03:15:56.500
with Dear Reader, my book on North Korea,
link |
03:15:58.860
I was at a point in my career where I could do something
link |
03:16:01.420
to make a difference instead of just writing,
link |
03:16:02.740
like coauthoring books for celebrities,
link |
03:16:04.500
which I'm very proud of, but are neither here nor there.
link |
03:16:07.540
And I thought, all right, I know how to tell stories,
link |
03:16:09.780
I know how to inform people, I know how to entertain people.
link |
03:16:12.140
If I move the needle in America, who cares?
link |
03:16:14.420
We got it really good here.
link |
03:16:15.740
If I move the needle in North Korea a little bit,
link |
03:16:18.360
the cost benefits through the roof.
link |
03:16:20.300
I never thought of that actually.
link |
03:16:22.380
I never thought of Dear Reader from that perspective.
link |
03:16:24.820
So when I set out to write it, I'm like, okay,
link |
03:16:28.000
what can I do?
link |
03:16:28.840
I'm not gonna be able to liberate the North Korean regime.
link |
03:16:30.740
What I can do is the camera right now is focused on,
link |
03:16:34.620
at the time, Kim Jong Il, now Kim Jong Un.
link |
03:16:36.980
And I can do just this a little bit.
link |
03:16:38.940
And I go, behind that guy, who you think is funny clown,
link |
03:16:42.700
there's millions of dead people.
link |
03:16:44.500
There's children being starved.
link |
03:16:46.220
There's people who are performing
link |
03:16:47.860
because they have a gun to their kid's head.
link |
03:16:49.620
And if someone put a gun to your kid's head,
link |
03:16:51.060
you'd put on those dancing shoes real quick.
link |
03:16:53.160
And I and others have managed to change the conversation
link |
03:16:57.420
about North Korea in terms of look at those silly buffoons
link |
03:17:00.660
to those poor people.
link |
03:17:02.940
So the fact that that little thing I can say
link |
03:17:05.620
with a straight face, I did,
link |
03:17:07.740
doesn't make me a great person,
link |
03:17:09.380
but it does make me someone who, if I have to go tomorrow,
link |
03:17:13.060
I can say I did a little bit
link |
03:17:15.600
to make the world a better place.
link |
03:17:17.780
What do you think is the meaning of life?
link |
03:17:21.060
I think the meaning of life is...
link |
03:17:26.380
Why are we here?
link |
03:17:27.620
Oh, well, I'm a Camu person.
link |
03:17:29.560
So I'll give the Camu answer.
link |
03:17:31.340
So there's two types of people.
link |
03:17:33.740
Those who know how to use binary...
link |
03:17:35.020
No.
link |
03:17:35.860
There's...
link |
03:17:36.700
Thanks for relating to the audience.
link |
03:17:41.620
One, one, one, zero, zero, one, two.
link |
03:17:42.940
Two?
link |
03:17:45.300
Down vote.
link |
03:17:47.540
What kind of radical freak is this Lex?
link |
03:17:50.100
So, and I use this example of my forthcoming book.
link |
03:17:53.340
You go into a countryside, a mountainside,
link |
03:17:56.060
and you see a blank canvas on an easel.
link |
03:17:59.020
And one kind of mentality goes,
link |
03:18:00.620
this is just a blank canvas.
link |
03:18:02.860
This is stupid.
link |
03:18:03.700
This is what am I looking at?
link |
03:18:05.020
And the other type goes, what a great opportunity.
link |
03:18:08.300
I'm in this beautiful space.
link |
03:18:09.780
I have this entire canvas to paint.
link |
03:18:11.460
I could do anything I want with it.
link |
03:18:13.280
So I am very much of that type two person.
link |
03:18:16.620
And I hope others start to think of life in that way.
link |
03:18:21.940
You and I have both been more successful
link |
03:18:23.700
than we expected to, especially growing up,
link |
03:18:25.900
and in ways we did not expect.
link |
03:18:28.620
And when you're young,
link |
03:18:30.020
you are so intent on driving the car.
link |
03:18:33.020
And after a certain point,
link |
03:18:34.220
you realize it's not about driving the car.
link |
03:18:35.780
It's you're being a surfer,
link |
03:18:37.300
that you can only control this little board
link |
03:18:39.280
and you have no idea where the waves will take you.
link |
03:18:41.060
And sometimes you're gonna fall down
link |
03:18:42.160
and something's gonna really gonna suck
link |
03:18:43.140
and you're gonna swallow some saltwater.
link |
03:18:44.800
But at a certain point, you stop trying to drive
link |
03:18:47.440
and you're like, this is freaking awesome
link |
03:18:48.820
and I have no idea where it's gonna go.
link |
03:18:51.860
Beautifully put.
link |
03:18:53.380
I know I speak for a lot of people.
link |
03:18:54.980
First of all, everyone loves the game you play
link |
03:18:58.820
on the intranet.
link |
03:18:59.660
It's fun.
link |
03:19:00.740
You make the world not everyone.
link |
03:19:02.220
Today, oof, they came for me hard.
link |
03:19:05.220
But it makes the world seem fun.
link |
03:19:08.540
And especially in this dark time, it's much appreciated.
link |
03:19:12.580
And we can't wait till the next book
link |
03:19:14.580
and the many to come
link |
03:19:15.580
and to hopefully many more Joe Rogan appearances.
link |
03:19:18.580
You guys do some great magic together.
link |
03:19:20.300
This is fun.
link |
03:19:21.140
It's, you, yeah, you're one of my favorite guests on this show
link |
03:19:26.540
so I can't wait.
link |
03:19:27.500
Especially if you can make it before the election.
link |
03:19:30.700
Thanks so much for making today happen.
link |
03:19:32.260
I'm glad you came down.
link |
03:19:33.740
You're awesome.
link |
03:19:34.580
Thank you so much.
link |
03:19:35.400
What a great compliment.
link |
03:19:37.160
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
03:19:38.820
with Michael Malus.
link |
03:19:39.940
And thank you to our sponsors.
link |
03:19:41.820
SEMrush, which is a SEO optimization tool.
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03:19:46.180
DoorDash, which is my go to food delivery service
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03:19:49.620
and Masterclass, which is online courses from world experts.
link |
03:19:54.980
Please check out these sponsors in the description
link |
03:19:57.100
to get a discount and to support this podcast.
link |
03:20:00.560
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
03:20:02.760
review it with five stars and up a podcast,
link |
03:20:04.940
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon
link |
03:20:07.620
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
03:20:11.280
And now let me leave you with some words
link |
03:20:13.380
from Michael Malus.
link |
03:20:15.220
Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.
link |
03:20:19.900
Thank you for listening.
link |
03:20:20.980
I hope to see you next time.