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Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's up, Coleman? Good to see you.

Good man. Good to see you again.

What's cracking?

Well, I'm good, you know, you great.

You got a new book.

Got a new book. End of race politics, arguments for colorblind America.

Yeah, I saw you on the view.

Yeah, yeah. So that's been overwhelming my past couple days.

Yeah. Is that annoying? No, no, no.

I mean, it's just when I was on there, I really had no idea how it was gonna land with the audience. So I just went in there, did my thing. I had no idea what to expect. I didn't know who Sunny hostin was. I actually still really don't know. So I wasn't expecting necessarily for her to kind of try to ambush me in that way and attack my character in that way. And I responded to it in the moment, as I do, and I didn't expect it to go as viral as it did, but I think it arguably went more viral than anything I've ever done. It's hard for me to totally tell, but I've just got people messaging me almost nonstop for, like, four days afterwards.

Well, it is the show that people love to hate.

Yes, that's true.

They get so much hate watching and hate watching viral clips of them saying ridiculous things. I mean, it is a rabies infested hen house.

And at the same time, it seemed like the most interesting part was their audience seemed to be on my side.

Yes, yes.

And that's their audience.

Yes. Well, their audience is not really their audience. Their audience is a group of people they bring in to watch television shows. I don't know if you've ever seen audiences before for tv shows, but a lot of them are paid. They're paid to be there. So, because they have to guarantee that there's gonna be people there. So there's services that you hire. And when the show gets really, really popular, you know, like Letterman or something like that, obviously, it has its own fan base.

Right.

Those people will try to get tickets before anybody else does. And in that case, they probably don't need to use a service anymore. They just get actual fans. But arguably, like, the fans, the real fans of the view that are like, oh, these ladies are on point. Most of those people can't leave the house. Like, they're probably immobile.

Right, right, right. Because their mom's taking their kids to school. And that's.

Yeah, it's a very strange show. But it's fun to watch. It's just fun to watch them.

It's good entertainment.

Yeah.

Undoubtedly.

Well, they're just, you know, it's interesting because I think Sonny is very intelligent, but she's ideologically captured.

Right.

You know, it's. I think the other ones. There's a couple of the other ones. I don't have to name any names or just very dull minded, but I think Sunny's not one of them. I think she's smart but captured.

Sure. I think she came into it with an agenda.

Of course. You know, they do everything with an agenda.

Yeah. You know, she came into it, it seems really wanting to paint me as someone that has been co opted by the right wing.

Yeah.

And I don't know how much research she had done into me. She claimed to have read my book twice, which is almost certainly not true.

Yeah.

I was totally miss summarizing.

When did the book come out?

February.

The odds are very low.

Very low, right?

Yeah, very low.

Think of how many guests they have on their show, how many things.

Family obligations to. What is it, about 250 pages?

Something like that. Yeah.

I don't think so.

Yeah.

But I mean, I might be wrong. I mean, do you have an audiobook available?

I do, yeah. I read it myself.

Maybe she did it at double speed.

Yeah. Yeah. So I sounded like Ben Shapiro the whole time. Have you ever listened to Ben Shapiro on like 1.5 times?

No. It's got ridiculous.

Yeah, it's insane.

Ben Shapiro to debate destiny.

Oh, my God. I know.

They did.

They did debate.

Did they really?

Yeah, absolutely they did. Who hosted them? Was it like, was it Lex?

Was it.

I could be getting that wrong, but I think Lex hosted a debate like two months ago.

Well, he had a debate a couple of months ago, but it was a Palestine.

No, no, that was separate. I also saw that.

Oh, that was like the 4 hours.

Yeah, there you go.

That guy debates everybody. Yeah, it's so. He's so ridiculous. Does a Wikipedia search and then just starts going after things like. Yeah, expert. Yeah, it's just. It's a fun time. It's a really fun time.

Yeah.

Fun watching people flail.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. But I think the problem with that show is that show has this very specific ideological bubble in which they operate in, you know, and they always bring on a token conservative woman and they yell over her and silence her. And, you know, they did that with Meghan McCain and they did that with the. What is that other blonde woman from survivor? Do you remember her, Jamie? She was always yelling. It's just, it's a bizarre show.

So we had eight minutes. And America's approach to race, pretty big topic, pretty important topic.

I think the way you, before you start, I think the way you described it is brilliant in the way we should all look at it. Of course you're gonna see race. The idea of being colorblind is ridiculous. But treat everybody, they're just human beings. Everybody's just individuals.

That's right.

That's what we should all hope for.

That's right. Yeah. There's been this common phrase, I don't see race that's equated with colorblindness. And point in my book is, I wanna say, get rid of that. Of course we see race. Certainly in America, in the west, you could argue about whether children really see race, but past a certain point, we see race. Point is not to pretend you don't see it. It's to say, you know, you're a white guy, I'm a black and hispanic guy. We notice that. We're not going to pretend it's not there. But whenever it matters, I'm going to try to treat you like an individual based on your personal qualities, and we're going to ask the government to do the same. Get race out of public policy. If you want to help disadvantaged people, do that on the basis of class 100%.

And understand that when you see these incentives that are put into corporations, these are methods of control, and that's what's going on. When you see things like Dei initiative, you're not really making the world a better place. You're just allowing these financial institutions to enact control over corporations. And it's a really shifty, weird way they're doing it, by making it seem like they're trying to make the world a better, more equal place. And then there's some people who are good intentioned, but have a very narrow perspective and a very limited amount of information that they're operating under that will try to pretend that these things are overall good, are net positive.

Right. And Sonny Hostin may be one of those people, but. So we had eight minutes to deal with this topic on one of the biggest platforms in the country, and especially an audience that isn't my typical audience. If anything, the views audience is really who needs to hear my message the most. And Sonny decided to take up a few minutes of that precious eight minutes and attack me as someone who's been co opted by the right and someone who's a charlatan. And did she use the term Charlatan. She did. It's funny because I actually didn't notice it in real time. I kind of went in one ear and out the other.

But how did she say it?

She said something like, a lot of people in the black community, implicitly, herself included, think that you've been co opted by the right and that you're a charlatan.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And I explained to her, I've only voted twice, both for Democrats, Hillary and Biden, very open to voting for Republicans. So I'm a political independent and I'm only young enough to have voted twice. I'm an analyst at CNN and I write for the Free Press, which is Barry Weiss's, and I'm independent in all those endeavors. And I patiently explained that and then basically asked her to go back to the topic that we're here to discuss.

Yeah. Well, it's a dumb way of addressing a thing and to immediately say that someone's been co opted with no evidence whatsoever. There's nothing about anything that you say that seems right wing. You know, you're just objectively looking at these subjects and giving a very intelligent and measured opinion of them. That's not, and just because some people who happen to vote republican may agree with you, that's a ridiculous statement that you're co opted. And I think you're probably one of the least co opted people I've ever talked to. You're very open minded and you're very objective.

I try to be. I try to be. But, you know, I would argue, even if I were co optive, co opted hypothetically, that doesn't make my argument here right now wrong.

Right.

Because people that are co opted sometimes say true things.

Yes.

So even if I were, I would say it's still, it's an ad hominem attack. It's to the person rather than to the argument.

Yes.

So let's get on to the issue.

Yeah.

And I think people, the part of the reason it went viral is because what people have told me is you very rarely see someone who gets a character attack on a big tv platform, calmly expose it as evidence free, and then just move back to the topic.

Yeah. Well, that was beautiful that you did that. And that's how everybody should approach these things. And the problem is that's not what people want to do. What they want to do is engage in argument and try to win. And it's not really about having an open mind and listening to what this person has to say and trying to figure out whether or not it resonates with you. Instead, they're just trying to win, and trying to win in this weird, sound bitey way. You know, those platforms, whether it's the view or any number of these panel platforms, are so inherently flawed. Just in this, just the way it's formatted, you only have a small amount of time. You have all these people talking and, you know, it's just a. They can't compete with Internet shows because Internet shows are free. Yeah, it's just. I don't mean free like, you don't have to pay for it. I mean free like, they're free to talk about anything. There's not a producer in your ear. There's not someone saying, we have to cut to commercial. There's not executive meetings before talking about an agenda that you would like to like this.

We have to hammer him on this. And this is really important with the election coming up and this and that. Like, God, the whole election coming up thing freaks me out. Cause I think everybody's in this weird, like, pre battle anxiety stage, you know, and they. Everything is life or death. And this goddamn phrase, it gets tossed around every five minutes. It's just a threat to democracy. Everything is a threat to democracy except things that actually probably are a threat to democracy. You see people talking about the threats to democracy, and they ignore intelligence communities censoring social media, which should be terrifying to people.

Right.

It should be terrifying to people because this could happen on the left, on the right. It could happen for a number of reasons. It could happen for reasons that would be terrible for your life.

Yeah. RFK was on CNN, I think, yesterday, and he said something that I think I've said before and privately, and I feel, which is that I think America would survive four more years of Trump or four more years of Biden. Truthfully, I think America and the Republic is strong enough to survive either. Neither one of them is a very good option, in my view. I think we're given two very bad options. But I also think, don't move to Canada. I think we're going to be okay.

Don't move to Canada. Canada's even worse. Yeah, Canada's a mess.

But people don't like that opinion because they, I think they enjoy, we enjoy the existential stakes of politics, even if it might not be there every time.

Yeah, I agree.

Now, I disagree. Back in 2015, 2016, when I was hearing how Trump was speaking on, you know, Muslims on the registry, all this kind of stuff, I was one of the people that was worried he would be a fascist, truthfully. But then what happened is we had four years of governance from him where he basically governed like a typical Republican, and in some ways even had some policies that were to the left of what Republicans would do. For instance, on criminal justice reform, he was very progressive. He made funding for black colleges and universities permanent, which if Obama had done either of those things, he would have been criticized as playing left wing identity politics. And so I slowly realized that there is a pretty big distance between what Trump says and what he does. I don't understand that fact about him, but I think it is a fact about him. And so that's why I don't feel alarmist the way I did when I voted for Hillary in 2016. Really voted against Trump. Now, that being said, Trump is a wild guy and is difficult to predict. I don't think he's someone you want behind the wheel in a crisis time.

And then on the other hand, we have Biden, who has clear evidence of cognitive decline, vying for what's supposed to be the most important and challenging job in the world, certainly in the country, and people essentially claiming that it doesn't matter, that he has obviously, cognitive decline, which is hilarious.

Not only that, but gaslighting. You saying that that's his superpower. Did you see that article?

No, I didn't.

Biden's age is his superpower. Seth Macfarlane retweeted it. I agree. I couldn't have stated this any better myself. Like, what are you talking about?

No, what are you talking about? It doesn't make. One way I've thought about it is there's so much B's in politics. One of the great things about the market is that it's honest, because if you lie, you lose money. So if you look at when lots of money is on the line, who do people want leading their organizations? Look at the MBA. Look at the MLB. Who do people get as head coaches? Usually people in their fifties is the median age, because you've been around long enough that you've made a lot of dumb mistakes that 20 year olds and 30 year olds make, and you've learned those things that you can only learn with age. But in your fifties, you still got the vast majority of your cognitive power there. And your energy, if you're healthy, that is. So that's really the sweet spot. We want a president somewhere in our fifties. We don't want a Biden.

No. We want someone with life experience and hopefully someone that doesn't exist solely in politics, like someone who hasn't become, their roots haven't been deeply entrenched in the system, someone who can maybe have some sort of an outsider's perspective that can look at the problems with the current situation and the way things are structured, the way money is allocated and the way funding is done, the way bills are passed and which is a giant issue, like when they sandwich these 2000 page bills with a bunch of stuff nothing to do with. It should be illegal. It shouldn't be legal to have a bill about, let's, you know, for a popular topic, the border issue, the border crisis, and embed in that funding for Ukraine.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

It has nothing to do with it.

To couple those issues. Yeah, I mean, a few months ago. So basically you've had the Biden administration ignoring the border issue for several years because they wanted to signal sort of how non Trump they were. Right. And the border is Trump's issue. So Biden comes in, he says, we're going to undo everything Trump did with the border, even though a lot of those policies are actually widely supported and smart. So they undo everything. The migrant crisis goes to hell in the past two or three years, even now, infiltrating cities like Chicago and New York everywhere. And then you have Biden finally gets serious about the border a couple months ago with the border bill. And Trump gives the signal essentially that it's not a good bill, even though it really was a pretty decent bill. And certainly in an emergency, you want to start, stop the bleeding. Then Trump signals that the bill isn't good enough and Republicans kill it, essentially. So I think both sides have tried to spin this, right? The Democrat spin has been, look, the republicans destroyed that bill. They don't even care about immigration. The whole thing's their fault. Of course.

What's wrong with that is the reason it's this bad is because Democrats have been ignoring the issue fully for two, three years.

Why do you think that is? Like, does anybody have anything to gain by letting migrants into the country? You know, Tim Dillon says that he thinks that it's cheap labor and that they want to bring more cheap labor into the country and that it's very difficult to get people to do certain jobs.

That's why libertarians partly like illegal immigration. That would be more of a Koch brothers policy, though. I mean, that's why Bernie Sanders called, called open borders or Koch brothers policies because cheap labor.

Interesting.

Yeah, but that wouldn't apply necessarily to Biden. Like, okay, so someone like Biden, I understand, you might argue, okay, are they letting people in? Because those are going to be the Democrat voters. Those are going to increase the Democrat voters base. I don't know. Does Biden care about that? I don't think so. Biden's not going to be around in ten years.

Well, I don't think Biden's making decisions.

You don't think he is?

No.

You think it's his circle?

I think he's so far gone. This is what I said when he was running. I was saying, you're going to leave it up to his cabinet. He's not able to form. Listen, when you see him at debates or at press conferences, he's at his very best and he's probably medicated. They probably juice him up with a bunch of different things and get him hyped. Let's go roll him out there. And then he. Even then he can't form sentences. He loses track of what he's talking about. That's him at his very best. What does he like when he's tired? What is he like when he's not primed? I do not think that he even has the interest in doing that. I think he wanted to be president. He got to be president and he has all these people around him. And just even by the way he talks about things, he's so out of touch with the way he's describing things and talking about bills that they pass and talking about important issues. I just think he's completely out of it. And I think it's a really. It's very unfair. And if that was my father, I would be terrified.

I'd be sad. I'd be like, what are you doing to him? You know? Like, he should be relaxing somewhere. You know, he's embarrassing himself. It's not fair to take a person that's in cognitive decline like that and just parade him out there and use him as a figurehead. It's just crazy.

And if you look at the difference between him now and him in 2020, he didn't look great in 2020, but he looked like he could handle himself.

Right.

And it's a huge difference now. And just extrapolate that three more years, how is he going to be dealing with Putin and Iran and Israel sitting in three years?

He's not. He's not doing it now. It's someone else forming the policies. You know, they have the White House press secretary who got busted for using his Twitter account. You saw that?

Oh, no, I didn't see that.

She accidentally used her account and she tweeted, when I was running for president, I, like, they deleted it, but everybody caught it. Obviously.

And obviously, there's the Kamala liability.

Yeah. That's a hilarious one. The Kamala fans are my favorite. I got a guy. I got a guy. I don't want to say his name. I'm trying to be respectful, but he's a comedian. That's out of his fucking mind. He's one of them blue no matter who, okay. He's operated. He's got this cognitive dissonance. It's very bizarre, but, yeah.

My dad was an econ club with Kamala in college.

Really?

Yeah. There's a photo of them. There's only eight kids in the club, so it's a. This tiny photo of my dad and Kamala Harris and six other people.

Wow.

When they were, like, 22 or something at Howard University.

What's his perspective?

He doesn't remember her at all.

Interesting.

Unless.

Vice president of the United States.

Yeah. She didn't make an art beat away. She didn't make an impression.

A dying man.

Yeah.

At the helm. I mean, she could sneak up behind him at any moment and end it at any moment. At any moment. It's crazy. And it's so american. Really is. We're just like a goofy ass country. We're amazing. And it's pretty cool. But it's also. We crawl so far up the ass at anybody that wants to be in a position of leadership that no one who should be in a position of leadership wants that. And most of these people that could be effective in a position of leadership because they've led things before, whether it's businesses or what have you. They just don't want to have anything to do with it. It's just a horrible attack on your character. They don't play fair. They lie. They'll get people to say things that aren't true. They'll concoct stories. They'll put things out there with the aid of the intelligence community, like the Russia collusion agenda, like that thing, all the media that's on the left on board, and then they just repeat this mantra over and over, Russia collusion. Russia collusion. And then they'll pretend that they didn't say that he never won the election. They'll pretend.

They pretend that they didn't question the election. They'll pretend that Hillary Clinton didn't do multiple speeches where she said that the election was stolen. He's not a legitimate president. Russia stole the election with no evidence. But when he questions the election, it's a threat to democracy. It's just so convenient. And there's just. We live in this bizarre news cycle where there's information is coming at you so fast, you kind of forget about what the thing you were mad about two days ago that could affect the rest of the country for decades, and you're just on to the next. On to the next.

In particular in America, we're very hard on our politicians. And that's actually the idea of the country from the start, is there's no kings here. Right, right. And you go to other places in the world. People worship or pretend to worship their politicians. You can sort of see why someone would want to be in that position. When you see the crowds of people fainting over Hitler speeches and all that stuff. Well, you could see why someone would want to have crowds fainting over them. In America, you get some admiration, but it kind of just looks like you get your life ruined.

Well, at least half the country is going to hate you.

Yeah.

Even a president that's popular, like Obama, during his administration, at least half of the country hated him totally. And that's a horrible place to be. That's a horrible feeling to be that person and know that there's all these people that think you're a muslim plant. You were born in Kenya, or you.

Wear a tan suit, and now it's on the news cycle how much of an idiot you are for wearing a tan suit.

A tan suit. It's a nice suit. What is wrong with the color tan? Why does a suit have to be dark blue or black or whatever it is that everybody thinks it has to be? That's so bizarre. Cause he could wear a tan shirt somewhere and give a speech, like, if he's, you know, at his home or something like that, and he just addresses the press in a casual man, that's fine, right? But when you're being serious, I want you to put on your serious outfit. Your serious outfit can't be tan.

Right? And people ask me all the time why I don't get into politics or people expect me to get into politics because, please don't. They see me on the view. Well, thank you. You get it. You get it. They see me on something like the view, and they say, wow, I like this guy. He keeps his cool under pressure. He stands for what? I believe him. Why don't you run for office, man? I'm like, are you crazy? Are you absolutely insane? Why would I do that to myself for such a. You know, I even doubt how much change you could even have, frankly. Which is why I, as much as I admire someone like RFK for his charisma, in the sense that he's the only candidate that if he talks for five minutes off the cuff, I find it really compelling.

I think he's very honest. I think he's on whether you agree with him or disagree with him. I think he's very honest. And he's also very well read in everything that he talks about. And there's a lot of things that are very uncomfortable to discuss that he discusses openly and willingly. And when you look at that man's background, and this is a thing that people choose to ignore when they want to talk about him as a conspiracy theorist, this is the big one. They always bring up conspiracy theorists. That guy stopped the polluting of the Hudson River. I mean, he was a very effective environmental attorney that was dedicated to making sure that corporations couldn't just wantonly pollute things because it was more profitable for them to not pay attention to where their waste goes. He held them to task, and he's one of the primary reasons why the Hudson River's clean.

Right. That guy, I've heard that. I never looked into it, but if true, it's very impressive. But beyond that, just in terms of charisma and speaking, nobody holds a candle to RFK, I think, who, who is neither Biden nor Trump. Right. If you just say, give a ten minute speech off the cuff, RFK is going to give a way more charismatic, way more interesting speech than either of them. Agreed.

Agreed.

So that's what I feel when I listen to him. At the same time, when I look throughout history, I somehow I have a blanket skepticism of how much change politicians can actually accomplish, even good ones. In a system like America's, where the president has intentionally very limited power over domestic policy, they can actually make a lot of change in foreign policy because they have kind of unilateral decision making ability. But, and then secondly, I always check myself because I think the charismatic politicians are always the ones that are able to lead people into really dark corners. It's always the ones with charisma that are able to. To use that charisma power to get people to support things they never ordinarily would support.

It's the old adage that no one who wants to be president should be allowed to be president.

Right, right. And Hitler had charisma, not from my perspective or your perspective, but as a historical fact. If we were Germans living at that time, we would experience those Hitler speeches that look silly to us as charisma.

Have you seen the Hitler speeches with AI translation to English?

No, I've seen subtitles but. Oh, but they put the voice into English.

They changed the voice, which is a new technology that they're actually employing with podcasts. Spotify now has the ability to take this podcast with you and me and just for, I think it's like 30 seconds of your voice and my voice. They can have us speak fluent German, Spanish and French right now, and they're going to expand it to a bunch of different languages and just put pop podcasts out in different languages for different countries.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it's fascinating. But. So they did it with Hitler. You should watch it. We'll play it for you. Can we play it or will we get in trouble? Let's find out.

Let's find out.

Because YouTube is the jump. I just say this from just staying entirely on Spotify to now, we're everywhere. Dealing with YouTube is so bizarre. Like, people can claim copyright for things that are 100% not theirs.

Interesting.

But if they claim it, then they. They can monetize your show. They take all the money from your show. So then you have to remove it and then you have to fight it.

Right?

And you have to figure out, like, if you play 2 seconds of a song, is it 2 seconds? How many seconds? It's like over six or something. Okay, 6 seconds of a song. They claim they can monetize your entire podcast. It's fucking bizarre. Well, it's dumb. It's dumb. There's things that you should be able to talk about. If there's a popular song, like wet ass pussy, like, look at the moral decline of America. Listen to this. I don't cook, I don't clean. You should be able to play that and just go, what the fuck are we doing? This is wild and entertaining and fun and a great song. But. So this is Hitler. And this is also AI enhanced colorize, too, which is interesting. But this is so when we would hear Hitler speak, you know, I was like, we got to crush the enemies.

And kill the Jews.

That's all I thought it was. Yeah, right? Yeah, a lot of it is. Yeah. Give me the original. Yeah. Okay, stop right there. Pause, pause. I hear that. I hear. Hold on. I'm sorry. I hear that. I get terrified.

Oh, yeah. Because all of German sounds terrifying.

Well, it's.

Yeah, to the english ear. Yeah.

It's such a hurrah. It's such a aggressive language, you know? And when you hear Hitler yelling, it. It's so aggressive.

Right.

And then when, you know, you hear what he's actually saying, you're like, oh, this is like a regular politician. My what for correctness. Whether you believe that I have been diligent, that I have worked, that I have advocated for you in these years, that I have been decent, I have spent my time in service of my people. Now cast your vote. If yes, then stand up for me as I have stood up for you.

That's incredibly creepy.

Bizarre, right?

Oh, my God.

Very bizarre.

Wow.

Because we have these misconceptions, these preconceived notions because of, obviously, all the evil things he actually wound up doing.

Yeah. Which are real, but also just the cultural filter of.

Yes.

The way German sounds to the american ear. It's a harsh language.

Yes. Well, there's many languages like that. We just don't have. We don't have a cultural context to put that. Especially the sounds. Have you heard German, Arabic?

No.

What's that? This is Muslims speaking with their German. So they have a german accent and they're speaking in Arabic. And it's very strange because it's like you're hearing both things.

Right.

You know, and then there's also people that are Muslims that are speaking in Germany, and they're talking about islamic issues in German. It's strange because you're looking at this islamic cleric speaking German. You're like, yo, this is wild.

Wow.

There's something about those. Japanese is another one when someone is very aggressive.

I find japanese beautiful.

It's beautiful.

But I grew up watching a lot of anime, and I think that influences it.

Well, I was influenced heavily by japanese culture as a kid, obviously, with martial arts, but also by Miyamoto Musashi, who, when I was a young man, like that book, the Book of five Rings, was essentially my guidebook for life.

What is that about?

It's a book of strategy by this man, Miyamoto Musashi. And Miyamoto Musashi was a ronin who killed 60 men in one on one combat. And he was, like, arguably the most famous. My whole right sleeve is Miyamoto Musashi. And he wrote this book, the Book of five rings. And it was essentially calling for a balanced life to perfect your craft, no matter what it is. But he was essentially saying that for someone to be a great warrior, you also have to be a great poet. You have to be able to do calligraphy. You have to be able to do art. You have to have a bounce. You can't just be this, like, angry, emotional killing machine. You will not see everything. You must be balanced. And this is a guy that's speaking from intense, actual experience sword fighting people, which is probably the most intimate way to kill a man, and he got so good at it. Sometimes he would show up with wooden swords and kill people with wooden swords because he just didn't feel like their technique was good enough for him to justify using an actual sword. So he had beat them to death with ores.

So they would come at him with a sword and he would have, like, an oar from a boat, and he would just fuck them up with an oar.

Jesus Christ.

He was a fascinating guy.

I can see how you kind of reflect that. I mean, you're like this big guy, and you do mixed martial arts, but you also do yoga and you pay attention to the world, and so that kind of makes sense. That's where you come from.

Yeah, that was my guidebook when I was a young man and I was fighting. I was trying to figure out how to control my emotions and my anxiety. And what's the most effective way to approach something that's absolutely terrifying? Like, how can you approach it? Because you have to be scared. Because if you're not scared, you lose your edge. You have to have an edge. Like, every time that I ever competed where I was, like, overconfident, I fought terribly. Even if I won, I was very, very ashamed of my performance. You have to be scared and something that no one wants to be. No one wants to be scared. It's an awful feeling before you're competing. You're like, why am I even fucking doing this? Why am I risking my literal life for no money to do this thing? That's fucking insane. Like, I'm gonna go out there and kick someone in the face and they're gonna try to kick me in the face. And if I get hit, I'm going unconscious and I'm going to the hospital. So I read a bunch of psychology books. I read a bunch of self help books. I read a lot of Anthony Robbins stuff.

I read a lot of different things, trying to figure out what's the best way to manage the mind. But the thing that I really gravitated towards was this one book because of the history of this man and the. The way that he speaks, and he has this quote that I use all the time. And if you've heard it before, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna say it again once. You know the way broadly, you can see it in all things. And this was what I applied. I think you can apply it to many disciplines in life, but it's understanding that to get great at something, to really understand something, it requires this intensive observation of what the thing is, what your flaws are, what your strengths are, and approach it in this very balanced way. And if you can do that, if you could really know the way, you could apply that to everything you do, whether it's learning how to play guitar or chess or anything, or calligraphy or writing books, whatever it is, you can apply that to all things.

What you said about being scared and how that's useful, you need to feel that in order to perform at the highest level always makes me think of the Christopher Nolan Batman, where he has to the second, the bane Batman, he has to take off the rope in order to have the adrenaline to jump far enough to get out of the cave. Do you remember that scene?

I do not.

Oh, yeah. It's a brilliant scene and a brilliant message, because Bane beats Batman, puts him at the bottom of this deep pit, and he's trying to get out so he can go back to Gotham and save everyone from the atomic bomb that's gonna go off there. And he keeps jumping and jumping, and there's one jump he has to make that he keeps failing. And the prisoners have a way of doing it where they tie a rope around your waist so that when you inevitably fall, as everyone always does, they've been trying to get out of this prison for years. Some people have been stuck here their whole life. But there's a legend of a child that did it. A child. No one's been able to figure out how they replicate it, so they try it with the rope all the time. And then one of the elder statesmen of the scene says, well, I heard the way that the child did it is that they didn't use the rope. And you have to fear death in order for your body to give you the necessary fuel and material to land the jump.

There's a reason why you get scared. You need to be scared. There's a reason. Customato, who is Mike Tyson's trainer, famously said that fear is like a fire. You can cook food with it, or if you let it run amok, it'll burn your house down.

Yeah, yeah. And I say not to bring it back to the view, but I do sometimes feel that about live television. I feel that when I know it's live and I know I'm not getting a second chance and I'm not getting a. Can you cut that out? And millions of people are going to see this. My brain goes into a different mode of aliveness, knowing what the stakes are. And I think it probably causes me to perform better than normal.

Yeah, that's stand up comedy, too, I imagine. Yeah.

I imagine.

Yeah. There's a lot of things like that.

Yeah.

You have to be scared.

Yeah.

I get nervous every time I go on stage. I've been doing comedy forever. Yeah. I have to. I've done it. When I don't get nervous, I don't do as well. I need to get nervous. I get myself nervous. I pace, I move around, I stretch, I go over my notes. I think about, I can ramp my brain up. I think you have to. I think you have to. With anything that's very difficult to do. I don't think. I mean, I think maybe there's some people that are just on a certain spectrum of consciousness that are able to just, like, go zen and go into a thing. And maybe there's different things that don't get you scared, that maybe being scared would be detrimental to those things because you'd make quicker judgments instead of measured and calculated. Because when you're the thing about being scared, it's generally things that are operating in a time constraint. So you have this time constraint that's happening. That also gives you a certain amount of anxiety. There's a beginning and an end of every round, for instance, and each round is in kickboxing. Where I was doing is three minutes.

In MMA, it's five minutes. And so you have this time constraint. You have that. You have how many rounds you're going to have to do. That's in the back of your head. You have all these things that keep you from being Zen, all these things that and the live aspect of it, and everyone's watching. That's another thing. That's another element.

What about archery and shooting? Those are probably the opposite. Right.

Well, archery is. Bow hunting is very much that.

Bow hunting in the sense you want to be anxious a little bit.

Yeah. You're going to be. No matter what, you will be anxious, but you must be able to perform at your best and handle that anxiety. And there's a bunch of different methods that people use to avoid open loop thought processes. So an open loop throw process is like swinging a bat. You really can't stop the bat. Once you're swinging it, you're swinging with all your might, and it's just this open loop. Right. A closed loop process is something where you're in control of it every step of the way. Like, for instance, me opening up this thing, I can stop right there. I don't just go, I can't, you know, it's not like a thing that I can't control you can control it. And so when you're in a. A shooting situation with it, like with archery, you have to think entirely about the process of shooting. You can't just go now because you'll be filled with anxiety. You'll move your arm. You'll twitch. There's a lot. You have to be able to stay rock steady with something that's not very steady. The beautiful thing about archery is the perfection of doing something that's almost impossible to perfect.

So when you can have these brief moments where that arrow does launch and goes right into that target, right where the x is, this immense sense of elation, accomplishment. But now when you're dealing with an animal, then you have all these other consequences. Like, you don't want to wound the animal. You want to be able to hit it and kill it very quickly with one shot. And you have to practice thousands and thousands of arrows. And then there's this one moment. It's not like fighting where you have multiple opportunities to hit a guy. You can move. You can step to the side. You can. This is the one moment that the fight has actually happened. But there's a lot of moments in the fight when you release that arrow. That is one moment. So you might have worked eleven months, three weeks, and six days for this one moment, and you've been planning this elk hunt for the whole year. You've gotten in shape for it. You practice all these arrows, but when that elk steps out from between those trees at 60 yards and you're at full draw, you have to center that pin right where its vitals are, and you have to release a perfect arrow.

It's very, very hard to do.

I've only gotten shooting, I think, twice or maybe three times. And just that moment right before.

Yes.

Your body flinches in this way. And so how does one get past that?

You have to train. Training is very important. You have to train with purpose. Like my friend Tim Kennedy, when he shoots on a range, he puts dummy rounds in his gun. So he'll have, like, ten rounds that are real and then one dummy round and then six rounds that are real. And he never knows where the dummy round is.

What's the point of that?

So when you're squeezing the trigger, you want to have, like, a completely flat squeezing of the trigger. You don't want to do this. You don't want to yank in anticipation of the recoil, right? And that's part of the problem with guns. You flinch in anticipation of the recoil. And when that bullet goes out of that gun, that flinch left or right over the course of 100 yards, could be a foot 2ft off the mark, who knows, depending on how much you flinch. And so that is a practice that some people employ to learn to be able to stay so steady no matter what, where you're never anticipating to recoil. All you're thinking about is the process of.

So there's no recoil with a dummy round.

Exactly. It doesn't go off.

So you can see the evidence of your.

Exactly. You pull the trigger, but nothing happens because there's no real round. It's just a rubber or whatever the fuck it is.

I don't know if this is Hollywood, but I saw the movie the killer, David Fincher's latest movie, and I think he had some kind of heart rate monitor where he wouldn't shoot until his heart rate was below 60 or something like that. I don't know to what extent that's Hollywood or actually important.

It's important, yeah. And the best snipers can most certainly control their heart rate. Yeah. There's strategies, you learn breathing strategies to employ your heart rate, control your heart rate. And there's also strategies of mental management of not allowing this. There's this, like, tornado of anxiety that can come on and you have to, like, see the winds blowing and go. You have to calm it down. You can't get caught up in it in your mind. And I've seen people do it in many different things in life, and it's. You can apply it to many different things. It's this, this overwhelming fear of fucking up. Instead of thinking about what you're actually doing, you're thinking about the possibility of fucking up, which needs you to fuck up. Cause that's what you're concentrating on, right? In the game of pool. If you think you're gonna miss a shot, you most certainly miss that shot. Almost always. You might get lucky and make it just like I thought I was gonna miss. But in your head you're like, I hope I don't miss. I hope I don't miss. You're gonna miss. But if you just only concentrate on the process, you can execute, even under pressure, and execute in a perfect line.

And it's a mental management thing. And the only people that know how to do that are people that have actually done difficult things under pressure. And when you do difficult things under pressure, you realize, like, wow, there's so many factors that you can probably mitigate in some way through a strategy of control, of meditation of thought, of understanding what these thoughts are when they start to occur.

Yeah, I think a lot of anxiety management is deeply focusing on the task at hand. Right. Because if you're, you know, it's not necessarily that the anxiety comes up and you're amazing at swatting it down. It could be that you are so deeply focused on the thing itself that there's no room for anxiety. And that's very lucky if you have that level of focus and attention on whatever it is that you're passionate about. It's like you're so upset. Like someone like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. The way you hear them talking about winning, you can understand why they didn't feel any anxiety. When the buzzer beater is coming up, there's 2 seconds they have to make the shot. It's because they're so obsessed with winning that there's no room for anxiety. It's life or death to them. And there's no room for anxiety in those situations.

Yeah, you have to be. I mean, to perform at that level too. You have to be really insane. You know, I would say that greatness and that like real brilliance comes out of almost like a mental illness. It really almost does. Because in order to be just so much better at all the other high performers, because David Goggins has the best quote. He says, you want to be uncommon amongst uncommon people. That's him. But, you know, do you want to do what he does? No, but that's what he. That's how he's uncommon amongst uncommon people. He's a fucking complete psycho.

Totally.

But that is how you become David Goggins. You don't become David Goggins. Maybe this mild mannered person who contemplates and, you know, sits with his coffee and stares out the window and watches the birds. And that's not, that's not, that's not how you get the job done.

No, not at all.

And that's not how you become Michael Jordan either. You know, you have to be. I heard that if you beat Michael Jordan at pool, he wouldn't talk to you for weeks.

Yeah, that's. That's a maladjusted person. In any other scenario, that's a guy you can't really be friends with because. But combine that with enormous natural talent and work ethic.

Yeah, a little bit of good luck.

That's Michael Jordan. I mean, the top chess is the one that I follow. That's my hobby. And the top chess players are absolute maniacs.

Maniacs.

These people like when they actually. When you try to talk to them about their mistakes. You've had Hikaru on, have you not?

No, I have not.

Oh, you did. I don't know why I thought that I would, though. So, Hikaru, best player in America, absolute legend. You know, if Magnus Carlsen died in his crib, Hikaru, it's very possible Hikaru would be world champ for a very long time.

Wow. But what separates him from Magnus Carlsen?

Just Magnus. I think Hikaru once put it, Magnus is a little bit better than Hikaru at everything.

Mmm.

A little bit better at openings, a little bit better at calculation, a little bit better at endgames. You put it all together and he's just the goat. He can't be beat. What was your to the point where he got so bored? He got so bored of winning the world championship that he said, I don't want to do it anymore.

Wow.

Yeah. So he's technically no longer world champion because he's so bored of winning. And it's actually understandable. I don't even think anyone's mad at him because these world championship chess matches, 14 games, they can go to 6 hours a game. They can actually go over 6 hours a game. Brutal. Absolutely. Like, if you thought taking the sat and trying really hard and made you mentally exhausted, it's nothing compared to how these guys feel after a six hour chess game and doing that 14 days in a row, spending six months prior to that working with chess engines to find one new idea in an opening 50 moves in, it's absolutely grueling. And he does it every time and he wins every time. But he says, I can't, this is not fun for me anymore. So I'm going to play all the other chess tournaments that you just kind of show up and do your best. And he crushes most of those as well. But I'm not doing this grueling. I can't live my life like this anymore.

That's interesting because that is Jon Jones, too. Jon Jones, when he was dominating the light heavyweight division, he got to a point where the way analysts would describe it is that he was playing with his food and that he wasn't afraid of losing to these guys. And he barely trained for some of them. Like, he had a famous fight with Alexander Gustafson. And it was the first fight where John had ever been taken down and he got pushed deep into the rounds. And John rallied in the fourth and fifth rounds and won the fight. And it was a crazy fight. They had a rematch and Jon prepared and just dominated him and annihilated him. Same guy. I mean, just ran right through him. The guy was still in his prime. John was still in his prime. There was not like a bunch of things that had happened that deteriorated him. Nope. It was a couple of years later and John ran through him. And that's the real Jon Jones. It's just the Jon Jones that was fighting all these other guys.

He wasn't challenged.

He's the goat. And he knew he was the goat. And so he didn't. I talked to his coaches. He literally didn't train for the Gustafson fight, but yet still pulled it off in the fourth and fifth rounds, just out of sheer greatness and toughness and grit and experience. Pulled it off, and he wasn't in condition, he wasn't prepared, but still good enough to beat the very best challenger he ever faced in the toughest fight of his career in the last round.

Yeah. And the thing with these kind of guys, I don't know about fighting, probably the same, but with the chess guys, you try to bring up a mistake, a famous mistake that they made, and it's almost like you're talking about a family member who died tragically. It means that much to them that they made a mistake. Twelve years ago on move 24 of some games that threw the match. I mean, that's how hard these guys take it. Which is, again, in you or me. That's just a maladjusted guy. That's like a guy with a problem that needs to go to therapy in a top performer. That's what makes him a top performer and separates him from the otherwise very good professionals.

100%. There's a guy who's arguably the greatest pool player of all time. At least one of the greatest pool player of all times names Earl Strickland. He's this american guy. He won the US Open five times. So only one of the guys won the US Open five times. A guy named Shane Van Boning, who's another genius player. But Earl, like, he would play with this insane intensity. If he missed a ball, he was like, confused. Like, how is it possible that I can miss? There was a million dollar challenge. Now, this is statistically so impossible to do under intense competition that they were willing to gamble and get an insurance policy that would give someone a million dollars if they could run ten racks in a row of nine ball. Now, the way nine ball works is you have nine balls and you shape them where the bottom balls are missing, which would make 15, which is a full rack. So it's just like triangle, sort of a rack, and then you break the balls and the one ball is in the front and the nine balls in the center. Now, the balls scatter randomly and you have to run them in order.

So every single rack, you have to have a shot on the one or the lowest numbered ball, and then you have to have balls that aren't clustered together, or you have to figure out how to break up those clusters and still get a shot.

You mean you have to break it strategically?

You kind of can, but back then they didn't. Guys are much better now because there's a thing called the magic rack. And what the magic rack is, it's a clear piece of plastic that the ball set in, where the balls are always touching, always in the exact same spots, because they're literally sitting in a pattern. And so then these guys are breaking the balls more softly, which causes. They do what's called a cut break, which causes the one ball to go drift into the side pocket. And the best guys can do it like nine out of ten times. And then the two ball bounces up table and they know exactly where all the balls are going to be. And you see similar patterns over and over again. What Earl Strickland was doing was smashing the balls and they'd scatter around and he ran ten racks in a row for a million dollars.

And he did it.

And he did it. Everyone's like, it's never been done in a tournament before. The first tournament where they get this insurance policy, Earl does it. Not only did he run ten, it was a race to eleven. He broke and ran the 11th too. And he made a combination on the nine for the million dollars, which is just fucking insane. And not a short combination either. Like distance from the pocket.

Yeah.

So to be that guy, you have to be out of your fucking mind. There's no other way. You have to be completely obsessed with the game. You have to be completely obsessed with all the details. He does commentary on pool matches. It's fascinating to listen to him do commentary. Cause he talks about different english you gotta use with this shot and different things you have to avoid. And nine times out of ten, the player does something different than he would have done. And you see him get fucked, like, yep, that was all I was talking about. He sees it coming, sees the whole table in a different way than a person who's a novice sees the table.

Only things I've ever been that obsessed with, I think, in my life, our music. I'm a trombone player. That was actually my career before I started writing. I still am actually a professional trombone player.

I'm talking about a jazz guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I am a jazz guy, Joe. I had a. I've had my life path is that I graduated high school. I was considered one of the top professional jazz trombonists in the country, went to Juilliard, which is the most selective school for that. And that was my whole career. Like, that was. I had this whole other career I've had was a pivot from all of that. And how did it start, basically? So I was at Juilliard as a freshman at Juilliard in New York City, gigging as a jazz trombone player. And my mom died when I was 18 of cancer. And it just shattered everything for me. Sent me down into a grief and depression. And I had always been interested in philosophy and writing as well, kind of as a side thing. And I was always a very good student in school, but my passion was music. But something about the experience of my mom dying led me to reflect on what I wanted out of life. And I dropped out of juilliard and applied to Columbia. And so I realized I could still do music. Nobody learns music in school, so being in New York City, I could still play as much music as I wanted to, but I could also get a liberal arts degree and feed that side of myself.

And it was, had my mom not died, I probably just would have stayed at juilliard. Might have had a whole different life.

Well, that's fascinating. Is this you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's me with a big afro.

That's amazing. That was when I was eight years old. I lived in San Francisco, and our teacher took us to see Dizzy Gillespie.

Oh, yeah. Amazing.

It was wild. And for folks who don't know. Yeah. Dizzy Gillespie, his cheeks puff out like a frog's.

Yep.

Which is the. I mean, you would tell me that's not how they teach you how to do it.

Absolutely not.

And what he was able to do with his cheeks was, I guess, just years and years of stretching his skin. Cause he had done it for so long.

Oh, yeah.

Like, look at that. Look at that.

That's a full pressure extension of the cheeks. No trumpet player would teach you to play like that. But he was one of the greats of early jazz trumpet playing, and he made it work. And I don't know that. You know, I've never heard that he had any health issues from playing that way. You know, a lot of trumpet players, they get older and, you know, Freddie Hubbard, who's one of the greatest jazz trumpet players, famously had a growth on his lip that kind of inhibited him in his last decade, from the pressure of the. Yeah, yeah. From pressing it against his lips. And he had a growth. I don't know if it was cancerous or not, but it really.

Oh, wow. I'm so irritated that a growth. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. But, yeah. That's not healthy. But it worked for dizzy. And that's the thing. All the rules can be broken if you're good enough.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah, all the rules. I mean. And also, he just figured out his way to do it. He just figured out a way to do it that's like, not a way that you would ever teach. Yeah, there's a lot of that, though.

There's Slide Hampton, one of the great jazz trombone players of all time played left handed, which he's the only person I've ever heard of, great or not, who plays left handed. In other words, the slide arm is always the right arm, but somebody gave it to him wrong. And that's how he played it. And I've heard.

So he plays it upside down.

He plays it left side. Right. In other words, every trombone player is crafted. Sorry. Every trombone is meant to be played with the right hand. But somebody set it up. Must have set it up wrong when they gave it to him. And I've heard stories of.

So even left handed people would do it.

Oh, 100% of left handed trombone players play with their right hand. 100%. But I've heard. And slide is one of the greats. There's actually a great video of him playing at Dizzy Gillespie's birthday party, which is a famous video. But he, I've heard, I heard of this with guitar players where somebody gave it. Yeah, it was. I didn't realize that he played it left handed.

Yeah, he played it like rather this.

Way, Jamie, you know, right arm on the neck.

Hendrix was left. I was thinking of Kurt Cobain. I think he played it upside down, maybe. Right, didn't he? Something like that. Because you'd have to restring the guitar.

Yeah. You'd have, you always want the low.

E string to be the top, I guess, closest to you.

Right.

And then some people wouldn't restring it because they weren't told to or however. Yeah, they just play the other way. What was Hendrix's deal? I think he was just lefty. I feel like he was playing a right handed guitar, though. I feel like you played a right hand. Guess our leftist Hendrix also played his guitar upside down. Yeah. Why?

He played it upside down.

Mmm. So he also self taught, which is to me the most fast. Couldn't find a left handed guitar, which they probably did make as many back. Yeah, they probably didn't so have any money.

You're saying he took a normal guitar.

And put it just flipped around.

So the. So the. So the low string was high and the high string low. And then he so had all his own fingerings were.

I mean, his sound was so different than anyone before him.

Yeah, there's.

There's leaps in music, but the leaps that Hendrix took, they're so different than everybody else. Like you, really. It's so hard because, I mean, I listen to his music today constantly, and I love it, but I don't live in 1967. It's not. It's a different world. And I feel like if you were alive then and you heard voodoo child, you'd be like, what the fuck?

For sure.

Standing next to a mountain, I chop it down with the edge of my hand. And then you hear that music and you're like, oh, my. And by the way, not a great singing voice. And nobody gave a fuck. Nobody gave a fuck about his singing voice. Yeah, it was. His music was so powerful, the sound. I wish we could play it right now. That just the beginning of voodoo child, that riff. You have to understand there's nothing like that in music before him. There's not. There's a lot of that now with.

Yeah, well, because of it.

Because of it, like Stevie Ray Vaughan.

And that's what happens, is that you can never really go back with the ears of those people and hear it as they heard it. Because now you've taken for granted that this way of playing has seeped into the culture.

Exactly. This is what I always tell people that disparage Lenny Bruce. They go, he wasn't that funny. Give me some of that, dude. I could run over.

That's still pretty awesome mountain.

If I hear that.

It's still pretty fucking awesome.

Oh, it's amazing. I could run over a fucking mountain with that in my ears. Yeah, that's a drug. That song is a drug. That song has, like, a physical power it imparts on you. I get goosebumps just hearing it. Yeah, but that guy, we have to understand. There was nothing like that. There was nothing like that. You had fucking love, love me do. You had, like, buddy Holly and shit, and you had great music, but you didn't have anybody who played guitar like that, right? This guy was blown away. People like Eric Clapton famously saw him and was like, what am I doing? Like, it's Eric Clapton with the greatest guitarist of all time. He's like, oh, my God, I fucking suck. I fucking suck. This guy's changing everything. He's just a different thing. Like a guy who comes along who's so beyond what's being currently expressed that everybody has to, like, move towards him.

Yeah. So every Monday night I play trombone at the comedy cellar. We have a band at the Olive Tree Cafe, the restaurant. We play on Monday nights. And we got two guitar players. One of them is this guy Nick Casarino. That's just absolutely impossible to describe. Just absolute killer. They're all great singers. Nick and Colin and Mike and me and my friend Dan are the horn section, basically. And we play like nine to midnight every week. We have such a good time there. And the comics are always coming in, hanging out. It's a, it's a, and we play every genre, like, truly multi genre, and it's, it's just an amazing experience.

Wow, that's awesome, man. I'm glad you still enjoy that too.

Yeah.

And then now it's like a pure thing, right? You just do it just for the pure art of it.

Right. And that was, that was really what I realized when I was 18, taking every jazz trombone gig that gave my way, came my way and paid me $50 and a slice of pizza. I was like, this is my passion in life. I love this, but this is going to drive me into insanity if I have to take every single gig my whole life and eke out an existence.

Yes.

So maybe I should get a degree and just see, you know, see where shit goes.

That's how a lot of comics feel in the beginning of their career as well. Yeah, the comedy thing is very hard in the beginning. It's a real gauntlet that you have to, you have to traverse. You have to go through a lot of shit in order to become.

I did a couple open mics.

Did you?

I've always loved comedy, and I had some friends in it, so they're like, I go, do. I did two or three open mics, had a good time, didn't bomb, didn't do great, did it? Did okay.

Right?

And then the bug didn't bite you. The bug didn't bite me. That's exactly right. And I knew, and the thing is, I knew what the bug meant because I have it for music.

Mmm.

And so I knew what it's like to be like, I suck at this, but I love it so much, then I'm gonna keep doing it until I don't suck.

Yeah.

Because with trombone and trumpet, there's no such thing as being good when you start, right? Like, there's some people that, like, the first time they sing in church, everyone is like, this kid can sing.

Right? Right.

There's no such thing as that for trombone or trumpet. For brass instruments. Everyone eats shit the first time they play. And so if you just love it so much that you're okay and you have a family that's forgiving enough to hear you be terrible, which I luckily did. That's how you get good at those things. And I didn't have that for comedy, even though I love comedy as a consumer.

Well, I love music as a consumer, and I don't have that for music. But I worry I would. Gary Clark was in here, and he gave me his guitar and he forced me to do an e chord, so he put my fingers in the right.

It was pretty good, right?

It does feel good. I started getting scared. Yeah, I started getting scared.

Take me over.

Yeah, I'm worried. I'm legit. That's why I want to play golf. There's a lot of things I won't do.

You think you're gonna get into golf too much? Yeah.

I'm terrified. All my friends, like Jamie and Tony and Ron White, they're obsessed. I have so many friends. My friends who play golf are all obsessed with golf.

So what is it that's so addicting about golf in particular?

Jamie? Yes. All right.

It's the same thing.

You smile.

I've played many times, but it's like.

The same thing you were saying earlier with pool. Like the same description. Sorry. With archery, I meant. Yes, archery. The consequences, obviously, are less. You're not going to miss and hurt something. Target archery, though, is very intensive, too. But when you were describing when it all goes right, which is so rare, I heard something Samuel L. Jackson said recently where, like, in golf, you shoot, I don't know if you're bad, it's 100 shots around. If you're really good, 75 most of those. Still, though, you don't ever really do the intention of what you're trying to do, which is going the hole right from where you are or, like, right where you were aiming or anything. So it's like. It's a bunch of mistakes, and then it's like, how good are you at overcoming those mistakes? Clearing your head every time, fighting against nature, also having fun with your friends, being out in nature, getting away from everything for four or 5 hours. Having a couple beers. Clearing your head. Clearing your head because you can't think of all a bunch of other stuff, or it will ruin your whole day because you can't have fun out there.

Do you remember that Kevin Costner movie where he plays this badass pitcher? It might have been a league of her own. No, there's another movie where he's. What is the movie? Well, he know. So he has this thing where everybody's like, he wasn't retired. He was pitching in the movie for the love of the game. For the love game. That's it. And so he has this moment like when he's on the mound, where he goes, clear the mechanism. And everything just fades out. And he just looks at the strike zone and you don't hear the crowd anymore. It's a really cool scene here. We'll play the scene, but we won't do it for everybody else.

Clear mechanism.

Nice. Hello, Mike. Nice.

Yeah, my friend Colton uses that when he goes bow hunting. He says, clear the mechanism.

What it feels like to put on bozy headphones and just.

Just force your mind in this state of hyper focus. I wanted to ask you this. What was your take on Magnus Carlsen and that young man who apparently. Hans. Yes.

Hans Nieman.

Yeah. So explain the story for people.

So basically what happened is there's this grandmaster named Hans Niemann, who's a young guy, probably early twenties. Magnus is probably more like 31 or so, like now. And what happened is Hans Niemann, he beat Magnus Carlsen at a tournament. In a game. Not in a match, necessarily. You might need to check that. But he beat him in the first game of the tournament, which happens. Right? Like, even. It's kind of like how the best tennis player in the world can lose a game to a lesser player, but probably isn't going to lose the match. That happens pretty frequently in chess. Not uncommon, but it is the most uncommon with Magnus. Magnus suspected Hans of cheating. Why did he suspect Hans of cheating? Magnus is not the type to assume someone is cheating just because he lost a game. He's never done that in his entire career. Reason he did it, in the case of Hans is because there had long been rumors circulating in the chess world that Hans Nieman was a cheater. Now, there's ways you can cheat in chess. In an over the board game. If we're playing with a physical set in front of us, one way people do it is they'll have a friend, generally, that is, looking at the game either here or out in the hall, running it through an engine and giving you a little signal, like a baseball coach would.

There are also rumors that, in principle, it's possible to cheat with a device. And I think that's happened in some way that someone can transmit to you, be looking at the game, and transmit you a signal. Here's the right move with a certain number of buzzes. If I have a buzzer in my pocket, in principle, it's possible to have a buzzer in the orifices of your body, you know, in your butt, essentially. And this is part of why it went viral, is because there was a theory that they have pretty strict security at these places. So where would he have put the device? You know, they're not gonna, they're not doing an anal cavity check. So that was part of the reason people were talking about it so much, because that's just hilarious to contemplate. But the real situation of it was that Magnus made some strong implied comments that Hans had cheated in the game. Then everyone started looking at the Hans, and the rumors that had long existed in the chess world about this guy became public. And there were serious competing investigations of how is it that this guy rose so quickly?

For example, it's very uncommon in the chess world for someone to raise in rating that quickly in the professional world, right? There's like a. There's a normal rate at which people get better, and there's a kind of impossible rate at which people got better and people debated. He had defenders, he had attackers. Both of them had some good points about his rise in over the board play. Then there's the online cheating, which is a totally different story, because chess.com has one of the really the state of the art cheating detection mechanism, and people cheat all the time on chess.com, which is crazy, because there's no reason for it, right? Like someone like me, I pay whatever I pay every month on chess.com. I'm a random amateur player. I like playing when I'm on the subway. I like playing my friend, occasionally. You don't get any money for winning. Most of us have anonymous usernames. You don't get bragging rights for winning. And yet there's a certain percentage of people like me on chess.com that just cheat for no reason. They're just sitting at home in their mother's basement, cheating to get a number on a screen that means nothing.

But it's them. No money, them. It makes complete sense, really.

Why?

Because of video games. Because in video games, people would use bots when you'd play online. So an aiming bot would make it so that you would almost never miss. So you would play a guy and like, say, in Quake, there's a, there's a, there's a gun called the rail gun. The railgun is very difficult to hit someone with, but it imparts the most damage. But it doesn't have a scatter of damage like a rocket. You could shoot a rocket next to a guy and fuck him up. You can hurt him, but it won't hurt him as much as a railgun, which would kill him almost instantly unless he has a specific amount of armor. And there's some guys who would never miss. They just hit you with that railgun every time your head poked out. It would be impossible for them to know exactly where you were going to be for the amount of time, unless it was dumb luck. But you can't have dumb luck nine times in a row, ten times in a row, 20 times in a row, 50 times in a row, there'd be scores like 50 to zero against really good players.

And it's not for any money, not for your money.

They're just laughing because they're clowning you with a bot, right? It's fun.

Yeah. So, so that's what people do on chess.com. And just like that game, where you literally, mathematically, can only have so much good luck, right? Chess.com has algorithms that are really, really good at detecting when you've gone from the good luck space to the definitely cheating space.

So how do they know?

So they looked at, they looked at Hans Nieman's games, and they found that he was almost certainly cheating on chess.com in certain games. And they did a whole report where they highlighted the specific games.

Is it an analysis of his previous games and his previous games? So you see the level of competency based on the previous games.

What do you mean?

So you see his level of mistakes and the way he does it. And then in the games where they think he's cheating, what was the variable that they detected?

So, one variable that they use is the length of time between your moves, because in a normal chess match, it's a bit random, right? You'll do some moves quickly and some moves slowly. But if you're cheating, you're using a machine that takes 5 seconds to load for every move, checking the move, you're going to have a regularity. Each move is going to come after 5 seconds, for example. So that's one factor. And then they have other factors. Another factor is just how high, how accurate your moves are, because chess is close to solved, meaning the machines are playing it better than we are. So you can check a human player against the machine player. Even Magnus Carlsen will lose a thousand times in a row now to stockfish a thousand times. He has no chance.

I remember when Big Blue first started playing chess against people. That was always the thing. Once a computer can beat a person, we're fucked.

Yeah, we're way long past that now.

That's wild.

And so they can check if you're playing, you know, 99.5% of the stockfish top moves. That's just not possible. Magnus can't do it. Nobody can do it. You might be able to do it for one simple game, but you can't do it. Twelve games in a row. That are complicated. It's just not possible. Very much like what you talked about. So chess.com combines that measure with these other measures. It even kind of knows, I think, when you're switching browsers, which can be a tip off to cheating, because you're switching from the chess browser, you're playing chess into the browser that you're cheating with.

Why wouldn't they just have a separate competition?

Exactly. So that's not the only thing they could have. Well, if, generally, they require you now to have a camera if you're competing in a tournament, so you have to show your surroundings so that they know you're not using a separate computer.

But you could have someone off camera.

Those cheating in theory, yep.

You could have a dual monitor set up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But.

But the algorithm is. Is regarded as very accurate in terms of determining cheating. And they did determine that he had cheated in a bunch of. Let's. Let's say they weren't top tournaments, but they were friendly tournaments. Some of them had money on the line. Okay, so it was never proven that he was cheated, that he cheated over the board. And I'm agnostic about that. I don't. I've read both sides. I don't have a strong opinion about whether he had cheated over. Over the board in real big tournaments, but it was proven that he had cheated online. And again, all of this is separate from the fact that he's a damn good chess player. Like, nobody, nobody denies he is a grandmaster. He should be a grand master. He is capable of defeating Magnus Carlson in a game, not in a match. So that's not to take anything away from him. But there was rumors circulating, and that's basically what happened.

And so his defense was. I believe he admitted to some of it, yes. And his defense was that he was doing that because he wanted to get higher ratings quicker so he could play better players. Okay, well, still cheating.

Still cheating. Every chess player wants to do that.

Right?

So just they all cheat. It's not an excuse.

It's not.

Yeah.

Also, I think he said he was 16 at the time, but then there was some evidence that he did it when he was, like, 19. That's right. That's right.

He under exaggerated the. He downplayed it. Yeah, he downplayed it even in his admission. But again, he's a damn good chess player. And. And he has a fiery personality, which, like, some. So many of these chess guys, unfortunately, are just so freaking boring from the audience perspective that when you get a guy there that's, like, shit talking and. And, like, kind of being a. Being, like, braggadocious and stuff. It's really entertaining to watch because it's so rare. So many chess players. I love them. They're a little bit autistic. They're on the spectrum. That's not. Not to cast aspersions. It's just true.

Right.

And so from an entertainment point of view, I think he's very good for the chess world.

So he talks shit while he plays.

He talks shit after the game. Oh, talk shit after the game.

I want to see some shit talking while he plays. It's like, like Washington Square park shit. Those guys have those challenge matches.

I've lost a lot of money to those guys.

That's the fun thing, though. When those guys are talking shit and they're slapping that clock. That's an entertaining chest.

They'll crush you every time. But wouldn't that be, like, better to.

Have, like, if you want more? I guess they don't really care if more people pay attention to it. The purity of.

No, they do get. Chess.com definitely cares. They've had a huge influence in upping chess as an audience. You know, a sport that audiences watch.

The move is like the searching for Bobby Fischer move. Just get him out there in the park. Oh, yeah, that's fun.

Yeah, those.

I love. I watch regular chess because I'm fascinated by it, but. And I know how the pieces move, but I really don't know how to play.

I'm terrible.

Yeah, but when, I love watching those guys. I love watching people sit down and talk shit.

Yep.

And I love when, like, a real grandmaster sits down, talks shit. Cause, like, some of them are, like, real, like, high level tournament players that get in there and mix it up with those dudes, like, oh, I see what you're doing. Are you talking some shit here?

Yeah. And the guys at the park are usually just a little bit worse than the kind of, like, mid level professionals. So the mid level professionals will beat them. And the guys do not like to be beat because think about it. They're sitting there making money all day, occasionally encountering douchebags that think that they can beat them, right? And then someone comes along who really can beat them, and they don't like to lose. Of course they do not like to lose. I mean, for example, there was one time, I've never beaten one of the main guys, so I'm just gonna be honest about that. Never even come close to beating any of the main guys at Washington Square or Union park in New York, and I never will. But one day, there was, like, a sub there, like, not one of the normal guys. And I was beating him. I was so excited. It was the first time. I was like, I'm tired of losing, you know, all my money to these people. And. And one of his friends came over, saw that I was winning because it was obvious I was winning. And the guy made some kind of innocent comment, and.

And the guy I'm playing goes, oh, well, he's helping you now. The game's void. And I was like, oh, come on, dude. Come on. You're just saying that because you're losing. But I let him have it. I was like, screw it.

Yeah, you don't want to get in a fight with those dudes.

No. Some of them are really weird. A lot of them are high. A lot of them are drunk during the day. Mm hmm.

Yeah. I was watching one where this grandmaster was playing one of those guys, and the guy moved his piece in a funny way. He, like, went back and forth and put in a different spot, and he's like, hey, I saw what you did. I saw what you did there.

Oh, yeah. The video with Maurice Ashley.

That's him.

Oh, that's the best.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He catches the guy moving the piece.

Maurice is beating his ass, and he. He. I think he. Yeah, he sweat. He does a little magician's trick, but Maurice catches it. But.

And this is. We can't play it. Unfortunately, the volume will get in trouble. Yeah, he busted him doing it.

See what he did? That's what he did. Yep, yep, yep. That was the trickery now. Yeah, see, that would 100%. That would probably work on me, but that's not gonna work on a grandmaster. And he didn't know that this was Maurice Ashley. He just thought this was some random guy. So now his ego was involved. I can't lose to some rando. And so he tries to pull a fast one, but, nope, not on a grandmaster.

And a grandmaster is very confident and smiling.

Yeah.

Doesn't seem like he's under pressure at all.

No, not at all.

Time.

Yeah, that.

That little magic trick. I mean, how often does that guy do that? Because he did it so smooth.

I'd never know it was so smooth. Yep.

You know, it's like. Yeah, it's three card Monty in chess form.

Right?

Yeah. Well, that's. Pool hustlers do that, too.

What do they do?

They'll pretend to miss. They'll. They'll. They'll move things. Their stick. They'll like someone who's really good. They'll cheat. They'll cheat in ways where you don't see it.

Mm hmm.

They'll guide a ball in if they know that your. Your angles, that. Where you can't see what's going on.

Right.

And they're also. They'll miss on purpose. That's the whole thing of pool hustling, is playing below your speed until the money gets raised. The whole thing about pool hustling is get a guy to think that he can win, so let him win. And then maybe you almost win, but lose, and you get upset. You want to try it again. Now he's really confident, so, yeah, let's do it again. And then you lose big. And then you say, double or nothing. He's like, fuck, yeah, double or nothing. And then you play really good. And then he's like, fuck. And so now the bet has gone from 1000 to 5000 to one set for ten grand, right. And you know, you're up six grand, so you think you got this, and then he beats you, and there's like, there's no way. Fuck that. Let's do it again. And then you do it again. And now he plays even better. Like, he might be playing even when he's playing good at, like, 70% of.

His speed, right, to make you think he had a lucky one.

I had a friend who used to do that. He was a musician who was a genius. He was just a crazy person who, like, lived as a pool hustler, always homeless. Like, the whole time I knew him, he was, like, staying on people's couches and sleeping in, like, flophouses and shit. And he's addicted to drugs. But he was the kind of guy that you could do math. He could do it in his head. Like, you'd have a calculator. We would do it at the pool hall. We'd say 369 divided by seven plus five minus two. And he would bang out the number.

Wow.

And it was like that. He'd be like, what the fuck, man? Well, he would pretend he sucks. So he was like a fat guy, and he would just show up in pool halls, and he was real loud and talking shit. And then he'd miss. And when he'd miss, he'd fucking fall down. Fuck. He'd, like, bang his stick on the ground and sweat, go to the bathroom, wash his face and come back out. These guys, they thought they had him. We got this guy. We got this guy. And then he starts winning. And he starts winning just barely, like.

Oh, he's going to fall apart.

He starts winning barely more. And then they would get angry and, you know, and he would maybe lose a game, and then they get back to it, and then, you know, by the end of the night, they don't even know what the fuck happened, right? Cause they're watching this guy who now looks like a world champion, and he's just running out from everywhere. Like, what the fuck?

You must have got really mad, though.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, yeah, I could get you beat up.

Oh, that's the movie the hustler. They break his hands. They break his thumbs. Yeah, that's. That's the thing that would happen. So you have to know, like, how much you can win. And you have to know, like, when to lose, right? And, you know, sometimes you have to lose money just to get out of there with your life. You gotta agree to play another game and then fall apart just to get out of there. And then maybe you can come back and play them again. There's guys that'll lose weeks in a row to set up a big game. Weeks. They'll come back in and lose.

Can you imagine conning for that long?

Oh, yeah, those guys are good. It was. It was the part of the craft.

Can't imagine it, but that was the.

Way they made money. That was part of the craft. And you didn't want to be known. So the best players back in the day would not enter tournaments. The best players are these legendary guys that you would hear that were just playing in pool halls. And then eventually pool got to a point where it was on television and they started making money. And, you know, guys became known. Like, there's a guy named Buddy hall who's, like, one of the most famous money players of all time, and then eventually just starts playing tournaments, you know. Now everybody knows him anyway. He can't get a game. He's buddy hall. They used to call him rags. His initial game, a lot of these guys have, like, fake names, like Efren Reyes, who's arguably the greatest of all time. He came up from the Philippines, and he said he was Cesar morales, because even in the Philippines, in the Philippines, he was a hero. Like, everybody knew who Ephren was, even when he was in his twenties. He was a wizard. Like, they call him the magician. He was a wizard on a pool table. And when he came up to America, they weren't even sure.

They're like, just to be safe, let's come up with a fake name. And just robbed everybody at these tournaments. Just robbed everybody in gambling, just. He could play so much better than everybody. He changed the game. Like, sort of, like, Hendrix changed music, efren changed pool. And a lot of people, they play, like, there's a lot of things, particularly with, like, safety play, that they learn from watching Efren.

What's safety play?

So, say if you're playing nine ball and you're running the balls in order, right? If I have a shot on the one ball.

Oh, you don't have a shot at the two.

I will knock the one ball into a position and hide the cue ball behind other balls.

That makes it bad for you.

Yeah. Now you have to hit that lower numbered ball. If you don't hit the ball, I get ball in hand. So you not only have to hit it, but you have to also one ball, either the cue ball or the object ball, has to hit a rail after you hit it.

Right?

So you have to kick. And so kicking is you're shooting into the rails to try to make it rebound off the rail and collide perfectly with this ball over a nine foot table. And Ephraim was just a wizard at it. He would do it in a way. Not only would he kick the ball, he would kick it in, like, a lot of the time.

That's crazy.

Now, guys play to kick balls in all the time because they learned it from Ephraim. Like, three rail kicks where you're cutting into a corner, they know the exact spot on the table to hit with, the exact amount of speed and spin to make it land right in front of that ball and nudge it into the pocket.

Yep.

But that's all, you know, learning from these people that came kind of out of nowhere, you know, these pool players that were all these sort of shady characters that were hiding out in these pool halls in Louisiana and pretending they're, like a painter. They'd come in with, like, paint all over their overhauls and shit, and they'd be walking in, like, fucking, like a hayseed and just talk real stupid and drink a bunch, and then people would, like, get curious, especially if there's, like some traveling salesman from out of town. He thinks he's a badass and plays a little pool and he's got some money in his pocket. Next thing you know, this guy's robbing you.

Table tennis is my other hobby. Really?

Yeah, really.

I play at this place called Ping Pod in New York. They have a bunch of locations. You can go there for not $15 or so. Just play with your friend for an hour, or they have tournaments. It's really fun.

That's a wild game.

I love it.

That's a game to watch, too. I was stunned that ping pong never became as popular as tennis because it's so accessible and it's so fun to watch and to play like you can play it, people can play it.

Even lower barrier to entry too.

Yes. But also at the highest level. Insanely impressive.

Absolutely insane. Yeah.

I was watching this volley where these people were like 710ft away from the table.

Oh, yeah.

And super high speed and diving back and forth and back and forth and it's like, ah, ah. And the volley's insane. Then when someone does score, you're like, wow.

Yeah. The reflexes are just incredible.

Amazing. And so many different moves because you're dealing with something that's coming at you, you know, over this low thing very fast, and you're doing it this way and this way and that way and gentle and fast. All these different sneaky tactics.

Oh, yeah.

God, I love it.

I learned to play table tennis when I was, I think, 13. I went to a chinese language learning camp in Minnesota called Sen Linhu. And you go there for a month, you can't speak any English. I think after the first day, wow. I had a little bit of Chinese, not very much. And so that's how you learn. The quickest, of course, is literally immersion.

Yeah.

So you go there for a month and no English for a month. And they had this older chinese guy is like 60 or 70, and I was super into ping pong, but I wasn't so good. And basically I played with him every day during the free period for like over an hour, and he beat me probably like 50 times in a row. But by the end of that camp, I was beating all the other kids. This guy would beat me like 20 to three every single game, but. But through losing to him, I got good enough to beat all the other kids.

Yeah, you get what's called the rub.

Yeah. And I didn't realize I was getting good because I was getting beat 21 to three. Every single time.

But you're also absorbing what he's doing.

Yes.

You're experiencing it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You're getting the rub.

Yeah.

That happens in fights. When a fighter fights, like an elite world champion, one of two things will happen. Either they'll realize, like, oh, my God, the guy just beat my ass. I'm never going to be as good as that guy. Or the next fight you see a completely overhauled version of who they were because they got the rub. They got in there with Israel Adesanya, and they got schooled. And so they're either gonna come back and be better than ever, like Robert Whitaker, or they're gonna fall apart. Like, some guys that he's fought, he breaks guys. Cause they realize, like, I never. I can't do what you're doing the way you're doing it. My body doesn't work like that. Israel in his prime was hitting guys with combination. Watch the Derek Brunson pull up the Derrick Brunson fight. Derrick Brunson is dangerous guy, knockout striker, really good wrestler, very physically strong. Just a dangerous top contender. He's fighting Adesanya, and I believe this is before Adesanya won the title, if I'm correct. Not sure. It might have been in defense of the title. Either way, Adesanya, who will go down, is one of the greatest of all time for sure.

He hits him with combinations like. Like he's on a different speed. Like, they're like there's a 45 record and a 78. He's doing something different. He's moving in a way that's so precise, and he knows many steps. If I do this, you're going to do that, and if I step this way, you're going to go that way. And he's got all this programmed in his head, and he's not what he calls smashing buttons. He calls, like a lot of people just smashing buttons when they're playing a game. They don't even really exactly know what each button is doing, but they're trying to win by smashing buttons. He's like, a lot of people fight that way. He goes, I fight with precision. It's like, it's important. He's like, a lot of people hit harder than me, but I have precision. Watch this ko because this is a beautiful thing to watch if you appreciate combat sports and if you know how good Derek Brunson is. So Derek Brunson is very physically strong right here. He's trying to take Adesanya down because Derek, top tier wrestler. And so they separate them. Something happened I think Derek was grabbing his shorts or something to get mad at each other.

And so this is where Adesanya pieces him up. So he's avoiding the takedowns here because Derek is, you know, a real powerhouse as a wrestler, but Adesanya is a striking virtuoso. So then he starts putting it on him. So Derek is just frantically trying to get this fight to the mat. Every chance he gets, the combinations just perfect. Look at this. Watch this. He's just piecing him up, just connecting.

Incredible.

So when you're in that space, when you're, like, in a cage with that guy, one of two things gonna happen. Either you're gonna go, I can't do that. I'm not that good. He just fucked me up. Clearly. I'm so. I'm 34 years old. I'm never gonna get as good as that guy. Or you become a fucking maniac and you go to the gym Monday morning and you're drilling everything, and you now you have this new frequency that you've experienced. You've experienced this championship level fighter, and you realize these guys you've been beating, they're good, but this is what it's like to be in there with an all time great, and you either get great yourself, which many, like I said, robert Whitaker has done, or you don't, or you just kind of, like, decide that you're a journeyman now. You're never going to be a champion.

That's sort of what happened with the dream team. Did you see that documentary they did? No, they did a great, actually, the redeem team, as it was called. Remember when the US basketball team lost? Was it to Spain in the finals of the Olympics?

Right.

And then four years later, obviously, all Americans that care about basketball have an extreme ego that we are the best country for basketball, which is true. But the rest of the world is catching up. I mean, these european guys were getting better and better, and I think there was american complacency, and the dream team lost, which was a huge blow to everyone who cared about basketball and to the pride of the NBA. And then four years later, you had what they were calling the redeem team. It was LeBron james, Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, and so forth. And basically everyone except Kobe got up to training, and they were all kind of. They thought that they were motivated. They thought that they had a chip on their shoulders. They thought, we're in the right headspace to redeem the country. And then Kobe got there, and they realized they. They were. They were being silly, right? Like Kobe, they were going to practice. They were doing their thing, and then they were going out clubbing. And then when they were getting home at 03:00 a.m. From clubbing, they would see Kobe getting up to go to the gym.

And when they saw that, then they all started doing Kobe's regimen, and they're like, that's. That's a whole different level.

Wow.

And then they won handily. And that's the story. It's a great documentary.

It's interesting how the rest of the world starts catching up with certain things. You know, it used to be in boxing that amateur boxing was dominated by Americans. It was for the longest time. And something happened somewhere along the way. First of all, the issue was always communist bloc countries, right? Tuphillo Stevenson is one of the best examples of that. He was an elite world champion from Cuba, and people had always wanted him to fight Muhammad Ali. Like, oh, my God, what would it be like if Teofilo Stevenson fought Muhammad Ali? Because he was beating everybody in boxing as a heavyweight, but he was cuban and he was communist, and he fought for the Olympic team, period. And that was it. And he never defected. Many boxers did, but he didn't. But so they have that advantage. They're being sponsored by the state. They get food and special training and special privileges if they win. And Yoel Romero, who's on the cubic cuban wrestling team, he explained that all to us here. It was awesome podcast. Because Joey Diaz translated for, for Yoel, which is outrageous. It was amazing. It was amazing. But the way he was saying, the programs that they have, like, the insane dedication they have, and then if you are of the elite, you get three meals a day, but if you're below that, you get two meals a day.

And so you have this insane motivation that these young guys have. It's not just, I want to be great, it's like, I want more food. Yeah, crazy. He's like, and you become a machine. So he described it. And to have this guy who's a hulk of a man, he's so massive, and he fights at 185 pounds, or at least he used to. I have no idea how he got to 185 pounds. I was always baffled by his weight cut, because he's enormous, you know, I mean, he's this, like, just specimen of a man. And so when he says, and you become a machine, and you look at him like, he is a fucking machine. I mean, that. So there was that in the soviet bloc countries, but somewhere along the line, the Americans lost a lot of the dominance. And now there's these eastern european fighters, and there's russian fighters that are super elite, like, very, very high level. And then they come over to professional boxing, and there's quite a few of them from some of those worn toward countries like Chechnya. Like, one of the scariest guys in the world right now is a guy, Artur bitter beev, and he's the light heavyweight champion, and nobody wants to fight him.

He's 190 with 19 knockouts. No one survives.

Jesus.

And he's got this seek and destroy style that's absolutely terrifying. He just comes at guys and never backs up. And he looks like a fucking terrifying human. He's built like a tank with that beard, you know, the lower beard that Muslims have, you know, he's just a monster, man. Just a monster.

What's, what's the latest with the Mike Tyson? Logan. Logan. Was it Logan Paul or Jake? Jake Paul.

Jake's the really good.

Tell me about that, because I saw, I, I saw that reported, and I got super interested in it, but I haven't looked into it since.

I am fascinating because it's going to happen. There's nothing I can do to stop it from happening.

Do you want to stop it from happening?

I do not necessarily think it's a good idea for 57 year old men to be fighting 27 year old men. I think with skilled despair. Like, if a 27 year old me fought a 57 year old Mike Tyson, yeah, he'd beat the fucking shit out of me. It would be quick. But a 27 year old Jake Paul, who can box and has very good power and he's very fast and he's young, he's going to be smaller than Mike. Mike will probably weigh 230 pounds ish, and Jake will probably weigh 200 pounds ish. He's fought. I think he got as low as 187 or 185 for some of his fights. He's a big guy, though, and he probably cuts weight to get there, and he won't cut weight for this at all. So maybe he will be similar in weight. Maybe he won't want to be because he'll want the speed, but he can knock people dead. He's a really good puncher, and he's a good boxer. He's fought very good boxers, and he's knocked out a lot of former MMA stars, including Tyron Woodley, who's one of the greatest welterweights of all time, and he flatlined him.

He's really good.

So what is Mike Tyson's incentive to do this?

It's a lot of money. I'm sure, I'm sure they came to him with a lot of money. You know, people don't think Jake Paul's really good. Those people are all people that can't get by the fact that he's a YouTube guy. Like, I had this argument with Dave Portnoy where he was trying to tell me he sucks, you know, and Tommy Fury sucks. He does not suck. Don't say he sucks. You don't know what you're talking about.

You might not like him, but you should separate that.

Yeah, you can't say specifically Tommy Fury. He's like, he fights bombs, he's fighting his Tommy Fury guy. I go, you're incorrect. As a person who understands combat sports, this guy's very skilled. He's very skilled. He's a very elite boxer. Like, I'm watching the combinations he throws, his movement, the way he steps and sets up shots, the way he's countering. He's a very high level boxer. He's a real professional, professional caliber boxer. And Jake Paul, that was his first loss, but it was a close loss. Jake Paul's a really good boxer, and he knocks a lot of people unconscious. And if he wasn't Jake Paul, the YouTube guy, just this wild kid coming up in the middleweight ranks or the light heavyweight ranks or whatever, cruiserweight, I guess he's in. You would go, holy shit, look at this guy. This guy's fun, he's wild, he wears all this flashy jewelry, he's got crazy tattoos everywhere, and he knocks people unconscious. And he's knocked a bunch of former mma champions unconscious. Wow. Knock Ben Askren unconscious, which is, you know, Ben Askren was not really a striker, but the point is, like, Nate Simmons, that basketball player, did you see that fight?

No.

Oh, my God, dude, this is when I was, I was telling people, I'm like, hey, man, he can fight. Fight. Like, really fight. I know Nate is a basketball player, and he's like, really athletic and probably out of his element in a boxing match, but he took it. Cause he really believes in himself. But Jake Paul is actually a better boxer. Watch what he does, the way he does it, the way he lands these shots, these are real punches that, like, elite caliber of technique. Like, he's got the thing he's got, first of all, he's got one punch knockout power, which is odd. It's an odd thing to have. Not everybody gets it. So you could go, some of the greats, like Julio Cesar Chavez, one of the greatest of all time, did not have one punch knockout power, would beat you down slowly but surely with a barrage of punches, just constantly moving, perfectly placed combinations. But he would wear your ass down over three, four, five rounds. And eventually you just crumble over the weight of the blows. You can't hit him and he's destroying you. Mike Tyson is a one punch killer.

Deontay Wilder is the greatest one dunker of all time.

Tyson is such a genetic freak that his 57 may not have declined from his prime as much as a normal person.

Yes, and science. So here's the difference. A 57 year old today is on testosterone replacement.

That's the other thing I was going to ask.

It's not 57 in the Jack Johnson days, we're talking about 57 in the days of biological engineering. You're able to do all kinds of stuff with its human growth hormone levels, with the use of peptides, with the use of testosterone. The difference between a young man and an old man. There's a bunch of them, right? But a lot of it is hormonal. A lot of it is like how much you've been using the body. There's older people that are in incredible shape that don't do anything. Like as far as hormone replacement, they have just never stayed off the grind. And they're diligent with their nutrition and their supplementation and they sleep well and they drink a lot of water and they're in incredible shape, like deep into their fifties. Those are rare. Those are the outliers. Right? But a 57 year old today, that's on hormone replacement and you're eating well and taking a lot of vitamins and creatine and you're using all these strategies like red light therapy and saunas and cold punch. That's a different thing, man. And Mike Tyson's that different thing. Like he could fuck him up. It could be one of those fights where Mike Tyson gets him in a corner and connects with a punch and Jake Paul just goes limp.

He's still that guy if you watch him hit mitts. The thing is, can he close the gap?

Can he move as a quickness point.

He has problems with his back. He said sciatic problems to the point where a year or so ago he was walking with a cane. Now what sciatica is, is your nerves are getting pushed. So something's pushing on your nerves. It could be a bulging disk, it could be a bunch of different things. But that's an issue. It's a real issue that can become chronic, especially when you're going through a long and intensive training camp, like he's going through now up to July 20. But when I look at him hit the pads, and he's hitting pads with this guy, Rafael Cordero, who's a legendary MMA trainer. He comes from shoot the box in Brazil, Curatiba, Brazil. Created, like, one of the wildest, most aggressive mixed martial arts fighters ever. Anderson Silva, Vanderle Silva, Murillo Shogun. All these guys who came out of there were monsters. And Rafael Cordero is from that camp. He was an elite Thai boxer, and then he became an elite MMA trainer. And so he's the guy working with Mike Tyson. And so he's holding mitts with Mike Tyson, and Mike Tyson is smashing that mitts.

That's what I saw.

So this is, like, right now, 57 year old. See if you can find some of that fit. Not the older stuff, but the newer stuff. It's because it's on his instagram and.

You know, looked pretty serious.

Yeah, he's like, day two. Still want to fuck with me?

I'm 100% rooting for Mike Tyson.

Oh, of course.

Obviously.

Of course. Everybody should be. And, you know, Jake Paul is probably. I mean, he's probably a little scared, you know, as much as he thinks he's the younger guy and he's a tough guy, and he's a really good boxer, and he'd probably be able to do. Look at this. Yeah, give me some volume.

Terrifying.

Fired in the house. That's still Mike Tyson.

Yeah, that's still what I see in my.

And that. That is a guy who's on testosterone. That's the guy who's on human growth hormone.

Gotta be, right?

Gotta be.

Yeah.

I mean, I never asked him, but I couldn't imagine he would try to do this without. And I couldn't imagine he would be able to keep that physique. Like, he got heavy for a while. This was updated today and USA Today. The fight must still be approved. Oh, interesting. It's only been announced on the calendar for the at and T stadium. Interesting. They've not been approved by the Texas board. Interesting. Well, there's probably gonna be a lot of pressure for them to not approve it just based on his age. The age gap is 30 years, which is just wild.

Right.

But there is a difference between Mike Tyson and a regular person.

There just is. I listen to your podcast with Kurt Metzger, who I know, and I've been on his podcast, had a great time on his pod.

He's a fun dude.

He is. But I think I disagree with you both kind of on the Israel issue, on the idea there was one point where you were kind of saying it's almost as if the Jews are doing what was done to them. Well, it's genocide.

I'm saying that when you're killing 30,000 innocent civilians in response to something that killed 1200 innocent civilians, and you're continuing to bomb an area into oblivion, which is what it looks like when you're looking at Gaza, there's many people that have made the argument that that is at least the steps of genocide or a form of genocide. You're destroying thousands and thousands of people's homes and killing them.

So when you say 30,000 civilians, it's not 30,000 civilians that have been killed, though.

How many thousands have been killed?

So, according to Gaza health ministry, which is. It is run by Hamas, the number they have is 32,000. But they don't distinguish between Hamas and civilians.

How many members of Hamas are there?

40, 50, 40,000, something like that. I don't think the number is known, but it's tens of thousands. So Hamas says 32,000 people have been killed, civilians and soldiers. Israel says 13,000 soldiers have been killed by Israel. So if you just being. Let's not doubt either number, they could both be inflated. But if both of those numbers are accurate, which they may or may not be, that would be 13,000 soldiers killed, 19,000 civilians killed, which for urban combat in the Middle east is a very normal ratio.

I see what you're saying. If you wanted to look at it cold and objectively. Yeah, but I don't.

I hope it doesn't come across cold because.

But it's mostly women and children that are dying, that are dying because they're in a place where these terrorists are. Right. I mean, this is.

It's not because the terrorists, on purpose, embed themselves with the civilian population, which is a war crime, which is a.

Strategy that they have clearly employed when you see them. And when. When the IDF went into that hospital and found just recently. Yes.

Yeah.

So it's real. It's not just a conspiracy theory. We know that that's real, but it's still. You're still talking about 20,000, whatever it is, of innocent people getting bombed into the Stone age. And then there's this, like, what are the pressures that are being put on people that are trying to deliver aid? How difficult is it?

So my understanding of the aid issue, and I've looked into it quite a bit, is that the aid is getting into Gaza. They've gotten over a quarter ton of food into Gaza since the beginning of the war, which is pretty similar to the food that was getting in. The problem is it's not getting to the people, especially in the north, because the north is a war zone, so its getting through the border. Israels allowing it in. But then what happens is the IDF doesnt control the delivery. The delivery is controlled by humanitarian organizations like UNRWA and just a whole bevy of humanitarian organizations. And they have these eight convoys going to people. But then Hamas hijacks it. Random gang of people. Palestinians hijack it, hungry civilians hijack it, and it's an absolute mess in terms of distributing the aid. And that's why you see, and it was a problem in the war in Iraq, too.

What was the case when it was being reported? It's very difficult to know when, you know, you're getting the Hamas version of a story, and then you're getting the israeli version of a story. What happened when there was the aid truck and people started getting shot?

The one last night?

No, it was a while ago.

Okay, so, yes.

Remember that one?

That was a couple weeks ago that. I don't. I don't have the full detailed version up to date of what happened there, but I believe it was. It had something to do with a clash between the IDF and other Palestinians that were involved in distributing the aid. Because what you have is you have Hamas, but you also have powerful families in Gaza that you could call them sort of criminal syndicates or whatever, but they're powerful, important families as well that are also taking the aid sometime. And these are the families that if Israel is allowed and goes into Rafa and defeats Hamas, one of the possibilities is that they want to get these powerful palestinian families to take over the Gaza Strip. And these people are also involved in the distribution of aid, or in the hoarding of aid, or in the stealing of aid, or in the taking a vade and then selling it for very high prices on the secondary market, which is why it may not be getting to everyone in the north.

So those are the people that the israeli soldiers shot?

No, I think. I think it turned into. It could have been a panic firefight and they killed. They killed civilians.

What caused the panic? Firefighter?

I don't. I don't think there's details that I don't know.

So the station was that they were shooting people that were trying to get aid?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

And you don't think that's the case?

I think it's very unlikely.

Is it possible?

Yeah, it's possible. Absolutely. My assumption is that there is going to be war crimes in this war, because, and I know Kurt would probably say I'm doing the tragedy of war thing, but it's actually a legitimate point. In every single war, even the just ones there are war crimes by berserk soldiers, by the good guys. That doesn't mean it's genocide, and that doesn't mean it's not a just war.

That is a very important point, the war crimes thing. Because I think when you're asking someone to follow and obey rules, when you're also asking them to murder people that they don't even know, and that these are the bad people, like, you have it in your head that those are the people that you have to kill, and you're getting shot at and you're watching your friends die, and you're, you know, two years into this now, whatever it is, you know, when you're in Ukraine, for instance, you know, you're two years into getting shot at. And, like, I'm sure they do some horrific shit if they catch people or if they get someone that they think is on the other side or someone who looks like they're on the other side. It's. You're asking a person to do an insanely evil and horrific thing, but then stop when the rules don't apply and some people are not going to do that.

That's right. And I think that the fundamental difference between Israel and Hamas is israeli society, however imperfectly, is not going to celebrate the monsters on their own side when they're really found to be monsters. They're not going to hand out candies to people who kill palestinian civilians like Hamas does in reverse. And so my feeling about it is still that any nation that suffered what Israel did on October 7, everyone in the country would be saying, you have to go get these guys. You have to eliminate this organization that did this, and they're 80% finished with that job. It would make no sense at this point to stop before you've cut out the last 20% of the cancer or before you've put out the last 20% of the fire. Right. Even with all of the absolute suffering that is real on the palestinian side. You know, so that's how I feel about it. And I think it's really. It's very, very distinct from genocide, because genocide is when you're trying to maximize civilian casualties. I think Israel, however, imperfectly, is doing the opposite. They're trying to minimize civilian casualties.

That's interesting. What would people say that would disagree with you when they talk about targeting mosques, targeting hospitals. And we know that some of the targeting hospital stories are just not true. Like the New York Times printed a story saying that the hospital was bombed and that x amount of people died when it turns out the bomb actually hit the parking lot of the hospital in a very small amount of time.

We talked about that last time.

So there is some, but there have been, for sure, targeting of mosques. Like, for instance. Do you think that's because Hamas uses these mosques?

Absolutely.

So when they're. There's been blowing up their infrastructure and bombing the mosques and bombing whatever it is, schools, they're doing it because Hamas is in those schools.

They're doing it because they have good faith, intelligence that Hamas is in those schools.

And they tell them that these people are using human shields, and they just. They just say, well, the most important thing is getting rid of Hamas.

Yeah. The laws of war say you cannot target a church, a mosque, a hospital. But if the enemy turns that hospital into a military operation site, as Hamas does, which is routine for them, then it can become legitimate. Then you have to do a proportionality assessment. Is it worth killing this many civilians to get the bad guys? And that's a judgment call that I think reasonable people can disagree on on a case by case basis. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I would disagree with that. I would agree with every bombing that Israel has made. I'm certain there's one that that was not worth it. You killed too many people for. But that's a judgment call that armies are allowed to make in times of war. And Hamas is the one that turns these civilian locations into military operation sites, which is a war crime. This is the way I would put it succinctly. If you ask the question, what is unique about this war? What is different about this war than all of our other wars? It's not the civilian death toll. The ratio of combatants to civilians is.

I think it's better than the american armies was. When we got ISIS out of Mosul, that was like 10,000 civilians dead to kill 4000. ISIS, this is 19,000 civilians dead to kill 13,000. It's not that. What's unique about this war, unlike every other war that I could think of, is you have an army in Hamas that has perfected the art of embedding itself, enmeshing itself with civilians, so that you cannot hit them without hitting the people around them. Other armies have done this, but none have perfected it. To the extent that Hamas has no army that I know of in military history has had 15 years to build 300 miles of tunnel underneath a city that they don't use to shelter the civilians, but they use to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten, right under a mosque. So this is a challenge no army has faced. And so that's what makes this war different. And yes, I agree with all of the absolute tragedy and suffering of the palestinian people, but what creates that is the way Hamas fights. And either we can say one of two things. We can either say, well, Israel just.

Israel doesn't have a clean shot, and so they have to let Hamas get away with it because it's too much to bear. But then we are essentially creating a situation where terrorists have found the perfect solution, which is that you can cross the border, go house to house slaughtering your enemies, and then hide behind your own people, and they can do nothing about it. It's a perfect strategy. Can we live in a world where we allow that to be an acceptable strategy? I don't think so. And it's very ugly to watch. It's heartbreaking. And I completely understand why people don't think the way I think when they see the videos. I completely get it. But I don't think we can actually live in a world where that's allowed to be a strategy.

I appreciate your perspective. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. You clearly know more about it than I do. But also one of the fears is that people wanted. The people in power in Israel wanted Hamas to be in power in Gaza because they wanted an enemy that they could fight with impunity, you know, that they could. They could attack, almost like they could justify what they really want to do, which is take over Gaza. This is the fear that a lot of, you know, the people that delve hardcore into conspiracy theories about, like, there's people that I've heard call it a false flag.

There's two different things. One is that they wanted Hamas. They wanted Hamas to stay in control of Gaza. And one is that because they can justify.

Because they would justify attacks and that they would always have someone to attack, they would always have some reason to push forward.

I think the things I've heard are two kind of conflicting theories. One was that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power and was essentially paying them off.

That's funding.

Yeah, but the whole world was funding Gaza, the EU and America, too, because we don't want people to starve. But the idea was we're going to keep Hamas in place because Hamas is so scary and terrible and everyone recognizes they're a terrorist organization, and they don't.

Unless you're on a college campus.

Right? Right. And Hamas doesn't even pretend to want the two state solution, whereas Palestinian Authority is more moderate. They've become close or seemingly come close. So if you're an israeli prime minister against the two state solution, the way that people have argued is that Netanyahu wants to keep the Palestinians divided. Palestinian Authority, Hamas here. This way, he'll never be pressured to do a two state solution because Hamas doesn't even want it. So that's the idea, is that Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas in power. And that was based on comments that he made at a meeting, although there was never a video of the meeting, but it seems like something he might say. So that was one theory, but then the other theory, which kind of conflicts with that. They can't really both be true, I think, is that Netanyahu wanted the attack to happen as a pretext to take over Gaza, which I think makes no sense. I mean, the first theory is not crazy. It's not at all crazy that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power so that, because imagine if Palestinian Authority and Palestinian Authority are here, they could link up and say, we want a state.

And then Netanyahu would have to be the guy saying, no two state solution.

Right.

But if they're divided, he never has to deal with that. What doesn't make sense at all is that he somehow false flagged the October 7 so that he could take over Gaza for two reasons. One, nobody has wanted to take over Gaza, not even Egypt. Nobody wants to run it. There's no strategic advantage for Israel to run it.

Well, Israel occupies it, so it's no longer Gaza if it's part of Israel, like Israel has expanded its boundaries throughout its history, right?

Sure, but nobody has actually, the Gaza stripping, Israel is very focused on the West Bank. West bank has religious significance to Jews. They call it Judea and Samaria. It's where so many of the things in the Bible happened. So Jews have an attachment to the West bank? Many do. Even some secular Jews. Jews have no attachment to the Gaza Strip whatsoever. Again, Egypt didn't even want it. Egypt occupied it for 20 years in the middle of the 20th century, and they didn't even want it back after their war with Israel because it has no strategic value and it was more of a headache to manage than it was worth. Secondly, October 7 is basically the worst thing for Netanyahu's legacy ever. Everyone in Israel, his popularity has only declined because of this event, because he's seen to have let it happen. And the second the war is over, he's, he's basically gonna be run out in shame.

So why weren't they protesting? But weren't they protesting him before?

Yes, there was.

For months on the streets, thousands of people.

Yes, they were there.

And it was because he was trying to expand the powers of the court.

Right? He was trying to diminish the power of the court. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Because the court in Israel kind of has power to check the right wing government. It's almost the reverse of America. How? We have a conservative court. They kind of have, a long story short, they kind of have a liberal court that can check the power of the right wing party that Netanyahu runs. And so a lot of people disagreed about that. It's a whole long issue. But the left wing in Israel was very upset that he was trying to diminish the power of the court.

So if the left wing in Israel, if he's trying to diminish the power of the court so that he could get right wing agendas push forth, if, and again, I want to be really clear, not saying this is a false flag, but that would be, if I was a guy that was inclined to do a false flag, I would justify my need to do whatever I needed to do to combat these people that were willing to do this thing. Now, I'm not saying not even a false flag, but allowing something to happen or having knowledge. I'm not attached to this at all. I don't even agree with it myself. I'm just saying that this is like a concept that people throw around.

So in counter to that concept, I would argue Netanyahu was elected just before this whole judicial reform thing happened. The fact that the left was protesting, it doesn't mean that Netanyahu was in kind of an existential situation. His base loves to loved him. If anything, the protests fired up his base even more.

So it was kind of like the women's march after Trump won.

Yeah, exactly right. It was bigger than, I want to give it credit, it was bigger than that. It was dividing israeli society more than that. But Netanyahu didn't. Even from that situation, however precarious it was, his situation immediately got worse after October 7 because everyone blamed him. And it's only gotten worse in the past few months if you look at the polling on approval of Netanyahu. So if it was a false flag, it'd be the dumbest false flag in the world. And he's not a dumb guy. So there's no chance it's a false flag.

So the other conspiracy theory would be that they had foreknowledge of it, but they allowed it to happen. This is one that gets attached to 911 as well, right?

Yes, it gets attached to everything. And, of course. But, I mean, my thing with that is if you're in a country like Israel, if you're the Mossad or the Shin Bet, you have Hamas, you have Hamas in Gaza, Hamas in the West Bank, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iran, Houthis, and so on. And you're basically getting. Every single day, you're getting a list of 1415 different threats and plans on Israel, right? Some of them small, some of them huge. How do you distinguish between the ones that are likely to happen and the ones are not? This is a very difficult thing. It's not obvious, right? You use your intelligence. You try to have spies in all the palestinian areas that are informing and so forth, but you're constantly getting signals of threats all the time. Right? So to say they knew about it is not the same as they might have gotten information about. They did get information about a plan to attack at some point. They didn't know it's gonna happen on October 7. They didn't know the scale of it or how successful it was gonna be.

How was it so successful? If they have the most sophisticated surveillance system.

How is it so successful?

How were they able to pull that off?

So it was partly because normally Israel would have lots of IDF stationed on the border with Gaza because there's a wall there, but they would normally have lots of. They had very few soldiers there because they were distracted. The whole country divided over these protests. The soldiers were in the west bank. And this is one of the reasons why people blame Netanyahu, because it was under his watch that they took their eye off Hamas. Now, this is where it goes to the first theory that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power. One of the reasons why he thought he benefited, and I guess he did benefit from Hamas staying in power is that they believed Hamas was deterred. In other words, they believed, mistakenly, partly because Hamas was sending these signals for years, that Hamas, it doesn't want to fight us right now. Right now, they're focused on taking all our money and taking the world's money and building stuff in Gaza. Hamas was very smart. They allowed Israel to believe that while they planned this whole thing. So they got complacent, essentially. And this happens with. This happens with groups all the time. I mean, like they fought with Hezbollah in 2006.

But the assumption has been that Hezbollah hasn't really made major plans to attack full scale, even though their army is way stronger than Hamas. I mean, Hezbollah has an incredibly strong army, but Israelis assume that because we bombed them so bad in 2006, and they told us if we knew, the leader of Hezbollah said this, if they knew how badly you were going to come after us because of our raid in 2006, we never would have done it. Signaling that essentially Hezbollah is not going to do anything, even though they hate Israel, even though they, their whole organization started to fight Israel, they're not going to do anything right now. And this is when, when you have a country with that many security threats on all sides, they sometimes rely on this notion that these people are deterred because they know what will happen to them if they attack. And so they won't attack. And that's what they thought was true of Hamas, and that's why they were giving Hamas money and increasing the amount of Palestinians that could come to Gaza and so forth. So it was all a tragic miscalculation, but it was not a false flag.

So the, what do you think they thought would happen if you go across the border and you kill 1200 innocent civilians?

No way they thought they'd be that successful.

Really.

There's no way. How could they have thought they would be that successful to have the run of the place for hours, going house to house, kibbutz to kibbutz, barely encountering any resistance for the first couple hours? There's no way that they thought they would be that successful, I think.

And how are the people. They're not armed.

They are armed. Israelis are.

All the people in the settlements were armed.

So the problem is the kibbutz's that are right next to Gaza, those are all the hippies. That's where all the. I've been. I've been to those villages that, that's where all the.

Which is why the race were there.

That's right. And these are all the super left wing israeli hippies, communists that literally, they live in communes. A kibbutz is. A kibbutz is a commune. They're very little idyllic, beautiful villages, and they're the most left wing part of israeli society. They have a lot of love for the Palestinians. They're the people that go over into Gaza, and when someone needs hospital, they'll, you know, they'll drive them from Gaza to Israel. So they were the. Not the hardliners. They're. And probably the ones, I don't know how armed? They would be in that kind of a town.

Yeah, I don't.

That I. That. I don't know.

It's pretty crazy to be right next door to people that hate you and not have guns.

Yeah. Yeah, that. I don't know. Maybe they are armed, but they. These are people who are like, you know, they're living in communes.

What did they think the response was going to be? I mean, the response. They had to think that Israel would do something comparable to what they're doing or the possibility of them doing something comparable to what they're doing was always there, that they would just go all out.

Yes, but I think that from Hamas point of view, Hamas could never hold a candle to the IDF. We all know that there's a huge power imbalance. They have no chance of beating the IDF militarily. So you have to ask, what is their goal? Well, their goal is that in the long run, the world will turn against Israel so deeply and sympathize with their cause so much that Hezbollah, Iran and all kinds of forces will get involved on their side. And America, the great Satan, will abandon Israel. And in that case, they have a very good chance of beating Israel. If Hezbollah, Iran team up and America is not there, they're thinking about 5100 years. They will free their land from the Jews that they hate. And so viewed from that perspective, Israel launching a big attack to get rid of them, killing a lot of civilians because they use the human shield method is a winning strategy, potentially, because look how much sympathy from the PR war they have gotten as a result of this almost instantaneously. Okay, so they're not fighting a military war. They know they have no chance. They're not idiots.

They're fighting a PR war, whereas Israel is fighting a military war. And they're both actually winning at those respective wars that they are fighting.

Interesting. Have you had a debate with anybody about this?

Yeah, I had this guy, Youssef Munayr, who's a very palestinian activist with very strong pro Palestine feelings on my podcast about this. People can go check that out. He's the only one that I've had on the other side of this topic. And then besides that, I had Benny Morris, who was in the Lex Friedman debate.

Right, right.

I've had. I've also had correspondence on email with Norman Finkelstein. But how was that?

Did he yell at you? Yeah, all caps.

Yeah. He called me a black Shabbos goy.

What does that mean?

I didn't even know what that meant.

Jeff, look it up.

Yeah, it's well, it's, it's a, I think on, on the sabbath, there are some people that will come in and do the lights for them because they can't touch electricity. And they call that a Shabbos goy because a goy is like a non jew. I guess so. But it's the goy that helps you on the sabbath.

Wow.

And so Finkelstein called me a black shabbos goy, implying that I'm kind of doing the dirty work of the jews as a non jewish, which is, which is kind of weird to go to a character attack like that. And it's not what he usually.

Esoteric character.

Yeah. I was like, I have to look this one up. Jesus christ.

Yeah. That's a guy who's playing dennis Miller on you.

What, what does that mean?

Using references that is he talking about.

Yeah, you got to look it up.

Dennis Miller should do that. Like, it was part of his stand up routine.

Right.

It would use references that, like, you, the average person. No idea. He might not even norman McDonald always famously said, you know, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Why does he do that?

Crowd likes that part of his shtick of being the smartest guy in the room.

Oh, I hate that.

Yeah, that was, well, he was a good comic. Dennis Miller was a very, very good comic. But part of it, like, if you go watch, like, his HBO special, it's excellent. It's very good comic. But that was part of his thing. It's like he was a smarmy guy. That was part of his thing. And then he turned into a right wing guy right after 911. 911 snapped him over.

I've never seen this guy Dennis Miller. No, really? No, but he still, is he still around?

I don't know what he does now. He was doing, like, right wing radio for a long time, and he became, it was like, amongst comedians, it was famous that he, like, wouldn't make fun of George Bush because he was friends with him.

So he gives so much material there.

There was so much material. It was so fun. But he wouldn't, you know, smoke them out of their holes.

Yeah.

He was an odd duck, you know.

And I go to the cellar all the time. I see, I see the up and coming comics. It's, it's so much fun. Yeah, yeah. There's so many great ones.

Well, New York has got a nice crop.

Oh, and I always.

Great comment.

I always try to go when it.

Tell is there because he's, oh, my God, dude, he was in town. He was in town at my club and like, guy was like watching like a Hendrix, like watching a master.

It's so crazy to watch.

Yeah. So good, man. It's just so fun.

The way that his mind works is a complete enigma to me. The associations he makes. So there's like, there are type of jokes where if somebody doesn't get the joke, I could explain it to them in two sentences.

Right.

A lot of it tell jokes. I don't even know how I'd explain that, but it's perfect. Yeah.

It's his style.

Yeah.

And he also has a cadence. It's very intoxicating.

That's right, that's right.

Yeah. And he's just got this confidence of 35 years of stand up and at the highest level and constantly working, constantly touring, constantly going up, constantly going. Doing weekends, places.

Yeah.

He's a monster.

Absolute monster.

It's such a joy to see. It's so great to see someone who's like at the top of their game and you get the rub. You get the rub being in the room. You're like, God damn, I want to go right. I want to get better.

I'm sure. Yeah, he's the man.

Yeah. And there's quite a few guys like that right now. It's a. It's like, this is a real golden era for stand up comic comedy. There's a. There's so many great comics alive right now.

Yeah.

That are touring. There's like fucking 20 guys that sell out arenas. That's never happened before, ever.

Really.

Not in the history of comics.

Why is that a golden age?

I think the Internet, for sure. The Internet. Cuz people who maybe HBO wouldn't give them a special or Comedy Central would give them a special, now they just put it out on YouTube.

Yeah.

And then they get 6 million views and I was like, oh my God. And then they're selling out everywhere.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's incredible how it's like just.

Gotten rid of the barriers between the artist and the people.

Yeah, completely gotten rid of the barriers. No more gatekeepers. It's. Podcasts are the only gatekeepers and everybody has a podcast and everybody goes on everybody else's podcast. So it's. It's just like a natural network, like an organic network instead of like a television network. It's just a network of friends.

Are you on like tick tock or Instagram reels at all?

I don't put my stuff on Instagram reels. Like, I guess maybe I make a real every now and then, but I don't like me.

Do you consume it? Yes, you do consume me.

I mean, so I don't do TikTok, but I do Instagram reels sometimes.

Right.

Unfortunately, I'm in an algorithm where I'm seeing car accidents.

Oh, no.

Yeah, I'm seeing car accidents. Animal attacks, like the russian car accidents.

That's crazy.

Yeah. Gas trucks falling down on people, murders. You can see everything. You can see everything on Instagram now. And it's like. It gives you the blurry thing. It says, you know, sensitive content. Oh, do you want to click it? Are you sure? Of course I'm sure. It's fucking sensitive. Until you're watching some guy, you know, stick some guy up in a. In a liquor store, and the other guy shoots him in the head. You're like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, there's so much of it. There's so much. And I don't understand how that doesn't violate their terms of service. Like, I don't understand how it gets recommended to me in the algorithm.

Dude, I've seen TikTok live streams of people that look like they're in third world countries with, like. Like, a mother and her son that you would see in a commercial asking you to donate, and they're just sitting there on a tick, tick, tick tock livestream asking for donations.

Yeah, you can do that.

And it could almost. It looks like it could be a human trafficking scenario. Like, it's.

Yeah.

And then right back to your silly videos. It's absolutely jarring.

Yeah, absolutely, darling. And, you know, you could. Anybody could make a tick tock account.

Yeah. But that's. The other part about it, is that you. I've seen so many entertainers on TikTok and Instagram reels that are just brilliant in what they do. Maybe they do little sketches or whatever it is that they do that. Without TikTok, they never would have. They would have just been a funny guy to their friends.

Right.

You know?

Right, right. Yeah. Well, it's a strategy for a career now.

Yeah.

You can really become a very famous TikTok person and make millions of dollars a year, or you can just work in an office and fucking hate your life.

Right.

You know, there's a lot of kids today that have zero desire to do anything other than being an influencer.

That's right.

A huge goal. Like, Jonathan Haidt talked about it. There's, like, somewhere, like, 50% of the kids they asked, they just want to be famous, which is wild. When I was a kid, nobody wanted to be famous. Like. No. What's your goal, Johnny? Nobody's like, I want to be famous. Like, maybe there's this one guy. I want to be a rock star. Wow, look at Johnny. He wants to be a rock star. That's crazy. Everybody else is just trying to get a job. Now kids realize that, like, young, outrageous people who are fun to watch can make millions of dollars just making silly content videos. Or you could be a guy like Mister Beast, or you create your own empire, like, what, some young twenties, and he's.

Why would you not want to do that?

Why would you not want to do that? It seems like way better than working for some company that could just fire you at the drop of the hat when a robot can replace you, which is what's going to happen to a lot of people in the near future. I think we're going to have. There's going to be a mass loss of jobs like nothing we've ever experienced before in history.

That's what Andrew Yang was all about.

He was way ahead of the curb. He was mostly talking about automation, like, you know, but driverless cars and the like. And he's right about that for sure. But the AI thing is bigger than that, because the AI thing is it can consume creative endeavors. It can. I mean, could take over the job of writing for like, law and order, one of those kind of shows. It's like the good guy has to win in the end. You got to catch the bad guy. What did he do wrong? Like, here's some scenarios, and it could just write scripts for you. Yeah, you probably don't need a writer anymore. And then with Sora.

But honestly, do you think it will ever write jokes? Yes, but as. As good as.

It won't be able to perform them. Like Dave it tell. Because I can't perform David tell's jokes, right?

Yeah.

You have to be Dave Attel to perform those jokes.

Right.

It's like there's a. There's a style that he has that is uniquely his.

That's right.

Like Mitch Hedberg had that. Theo Vaughn has that. There's some. Theo Vaughn's a great example. There's things that Theo von.

Everything he says is funny, but if I said it, I would just seem like an insane person.

Exactly, exactly. With him, I can't stop laughing. Yeah, there's people that. Sebastian Manisako, he's developed a style. There's like a style that people.

He's so physical with his body.

Yeah, but there's also like a style of his outrage. It's just. It just. He's figured it out. And I watched Sebastian figure it out. When I first met him, he was really just starting out and he was nothing nearly as good as he is now. So will they be able to create one of those? Probably not, no. Maybe. I don't know. I mean, I'm not entirely sure that our brain is so sophisticated it can't be replicated.

I would agree.

I think that's really egocentric for us to believe.

I think there's been so much denial of how amazing chat GPT is. Right from the start, you had people saying, oh, this is nothing. Pretending that this thing that can pass the LSAT get a perfect score in the satisfactory, impressive, like a snooze. It's absolutely ridiculous. I don't know where that came from, but I'm incredibly impressed by GPT and all the derivatives. I just. I do wonder if it, you know, like, if everyone starts writing with those things, the audience will quickly absorb that subconsciously and look for something different.

I think you're always going to appreciate handmade things. You're always going to appreciate a table that an artisan made. You're always going to appreciate music that someone actually wrote themselves. You're always going to appreciate expression from other fellow human beings because it nurtures us in a strange way. You know, when you hear Hendrix play guitar, it's not just insane music. It's a 26 year old guy who is wearing a bandana that's got acid in it, and as he's sweating, the acid is getting into his pores, and he's doing this thing that no one's ever done before in front of this massive audience, and everybody's experiencing it simultaneously. So it's more. It's a person, it's an experience, a human experience. When you're watching someone do something spectacular, you're watching the Olympics, you're watching someone doing them crazy gymnastics moves. They hit the. And they stick it. You're like, ah. It's not just that it's impressive, it's a human experience. You're watching an actual human being do a difficult thing. And whether it's a painting that someone made or a mug that someone created, there's something that we're always going to appreciate about a thing that was made by a fellow human being, but just for the sheer quality of a thing.

I don't know if the human mind is so unique that it can never be replicated. And I have a feeling it will not just be replicated, but it will be surpassed, and it will be surpassed so quickly that will be confused as to how we let this fucking thing make us obsolete. I think it's going to be able to do every single thing. Everybody does better than we do it.

Have you been looking into the Elon Musk lawsuit against OpenAI?

I don't know what's going on with that.

Oh, it's super interesting.

Tell me what it is to me, at least. Yeah.

All right. So Elon started well, was part of co founding this nonprofit organization called OpenAI six, seven years ago. Whenever it was, he put a lot of money into it. And obviously, as you know, the whole difference with a nonprofit is that they have a mission instead of a responsibility to shareholders. They got to use all their money towards the mission, whatever it is. And the mission of OpenAI was originally to make artificial general intelligence, human level intelligence, that was not motivated by profit, so that they could focus only on making it safely open source, meaning everyone can see the code, so that they can harness the responsible energies of humanity to perfect it. Elon was very passionate about this. He was worried about all the downside potentials of AI, so he funded this. And then what they did is OpenAI took a series of steps to essentially become a for profit company, and they created a for profit, an LLC and or a limited partnership, which is for all practical purposes, the same thing. And they put that entity inside the nonprofit so that the nonprofit essentially owns most of that for profit.

So it's like Hamas being under a hospital.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So, wow.

And then what happened is Microsoft got. So what happens is, with that for profit, now you can attract tons of investment, because big time investors aren't going to come into a nonprofit knowing there's no return unless they have a charity motive. Once you've got the for profit, you're ten or 100 xing the amount of investment you can get because you're promising people return. So they raise all this money, they get a ton of money from Microsoft, who gets a minority share of the company. Microsoft might own. I don't actually know what they own, but it may be like 49% of the company, right? So that open AI can still make all the decisions. But Microsoft owns a big portion of the company, and so they create chat, GPT, and they make it closed source, meaning no one can see the code. They're essentially now just a for profit company creating, working precisely at cross purposes with the original nonprofit. And Elon says, well, this is like, on its face, this shouldn't be legal. I invested money on the basis of you guys being a nonprofit, making safe, open source Agi. And now, through clever, you know, putting companies inside of companies, you've made it into a for profit and you operate like any other AI company, and yet you took all my money.

So on its face, he has a very solid complaint. And then he basically said he would drop the lawsuit if they would just change their name to closed AI.

Wow.

Yeah.

So what's the steel man?

So the steel man, from their point.

Of view, open eye hits back at Elon Musk lawsuit by publishing his emails.

Oh, yeah.

Emails to show. Hold on. Appear to show the Tesla boss actually supported creating a for profit entity.

Yes, I have to look at the emails again. I remember they were not quite as damning for Elon as they were. They were being put out as. But they definitely seemed like there's more complexity.

It says, in late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for profit entity. The blog claims Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. We couldn't agree to terms on a for profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI, the post continues. He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us emails suggesting that OpenAI should attach to Tesla as its cash cow in 2018. One email from Musk reads, even raising several hundred million won't be enough. This needs billions per year immediately, or forget it. That makes it more complicated, right?

Yes.

Amid the refusal to grant Musk total control of the blog claims the SpaceX founder soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was zero and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla, Musk created his own AI company, Xai, last year. We're sad that it's come to this with someone who we deeply admired, someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail starting a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI's mission without him, the blog says.

Yeah, so it seems like there could be fault on both sides. From my point of view, it's indisputable that OpenAI started as a nonprofit and then cleverly became a for profit. Now, whether that's such a bad thing is a separate question.

Whether it needs that funding, like, whether it's imperative that in order, like, first of all, I mean, do they think in terms of national security? Because if we're on a race to create artificial intelligence and it seems like we are. And if the competitors are other superpowers, where it would be absolutely terrifying if they achieve sentient artificial AI they have control of before us, it's kind of a national security imperative.

I would agree.

So then, if they don't get the funding from a for profit, so how do they do it then?

Well, that was their point. So the truth is, it may have just not been smart to start it as a nonprofit to begin with. That's my guess, is they went into that decision hastily and then idealistically. Idealistically, that's right. That's right. And then quickly realized that they were going to be completely irrelevant to the world of AI unless they somehow became a for profit. And so they did it this way as opposed to just starting a new entity.

What's stunning to me about all this a bit, despite, you know, without even going into this dispute, is the speed in which it's become ubiquitous, the speed in which it's improved, and the potential that seems like, if you're looking at it in, you know, this exponential rate of increasing its power. The way Ray Kurzweil talks about it, it's happened so fast, so quickly, that it's terrifying for me to think about what five years looks like. There's never been a time where I looked at technology and I said, I am terrified of five years from now, because I think the leaps are going to be so vast and so bizarre for someone like myself, who grew up without answering machines. I didn't have an answering machine in my house until I was in high school. I remember the day we got an answering machine. It was crazy. Someone can call you and leave a message. This was nuts. And then also those call, like, you'd be able to. If someone called, you would get like a. Like someone else is calling, hold on a second. And you'd click over so you could talk to someone. And they put the other person on hold for a second, then click back like you're in an office.

This is madness. And then it was caller id. So you couldn't just call someone, right? They would know, oh, it's Mike. I don't want to talk to Mike. It gave people, oh, it's, you know, someone, a solicitor. And so for me to see this change where personal computers started to become everywhere, and then cell phones. I was one of the early people to get a cell phone. I was like, this is crazy. I could talk to someone. I drive around and talk to people. This is nuts. And then it became what it is now, which is just madness. TikTok and videos and vlogging and blogging and podcasts and just streaming and people documenting every fucking stage of their life. And onlyfans and all this wild stuff that's out there now, including just substack and all these different platforms for people to be independent journalists now, which are excelling and in many ways exceeding the reach of traditional, mainstream, corporate owned news. It's wild to watch. It's happening so fast. But this seems to me like the cliff. Like we're all moving really close to the cliff, but the cliff has no bottom. And it's gonna.

I think it's going to happen so fast. We're going to be so overwhelmed by what these things are and what these things can do, and they're going to get better so fucking quick. I think the only thing that's holding us back is computing power. And once they really establish quantum computing, when they make it viable, that you can have, you know, computers that are a million times stronger than what we currently have. Fuck, man.

Yeah.

And these things are going to, then if you give them autonomy and they have the ability to fix their own code and write and make better versions of itself and figure out better ways to store power. Like what? Our limited ability to use batteries. But we've already found out that there's a chinese company that's figured out how to use a nuclear powered battery that's like the size of a silver dollar that you can put in things. And it lasts for 50 years. So you have a cell phone that's powered by a nuclear battery that never loses its charge.

Wow.

I mean, this is all coming down the pipe and AI is going to be able to say that and go, I can fix that. I can make that way better. Like, I can make it so it's a grain of sand, you know, and I can make it so it goes up your nose and you never have to do anything ever again. Use this. Yeah, we're real close to some really bizarre changes.

Definitely.

And I think that's one of the, you know, McKenna said this about that the last gasps of a dying civilization is like this. Like, it's not. No one's gonna go peacefully into this next. It's gonna be screaming and flailing. And that's kind of what our culture is doing. Our culture. I think we anti, I think there's a thing in the air. There's a feeling that we have of great change that's terrifying. That exists in the zeitgeist. It exists in. We're realizing, and particularly when you look at, like, Biden being the president, you realize, okay, there's not one person that really has a grip on what the fuck is going on. And there's all these different factions competing for power and control. There's all this money that's getting thrown around all over the place. We have no say in it. All this great change in the world. And then we have robots that are, they're figuring out a way to make these fucking robots better and better and better and better and better and better. And then within our lifetime, maybe within five years, as with Kurzweil things, they're going to be able to have something that is as smart as the smartest person that ever lived.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

And it's going to be a thing.

That's right.

It's going to be a physical thing.

I'm an optimist about it in the sense that if I look back in history, there are always so many reasons to believe the next technology is going to wipe us out, and somehow we figure it out, right? Like, if you go back to the 1940s, it would have been perfectly rational to say there's no way our civilization survives the invention of nuclear weapons. And, look, we haven't survived it yet because it's a constant struggle. We've just had whatever it's been, 70 years of peace, of peace on that front. But I don't think a lot of people would have predicted that. And yet somehow resourceful people find a way and we find a new, what do they say? Modus vivendi. A new way of living. And I have to have faith that with the massive changes that are going to come in the next 1015 years with respect to intelligence, where we'll no longer become the dominant entity in terms of intelligence, I have to. I have to believe that we'll find a way to make it work to our benefit and not destroy us, perhaps, yeah. You're not as optimistic.

I am always optimistic. I try to be optimistic.

I know people that have made every preparation for the world ending in the next ten years because of this issue.

Yeah.

They say, don't save your money, so on and so forth.

I don't know if that's gonna help you. I don't know if preparing is going.

To help, or rather don't prepare because it's all over. Right. Spend all your money now.

Well, I just have a feeling that it's going to be so overwhelming. You're not going to be able to hide. There's not going to be a damn thing you're going to be able to do. If you want to participate in life, you're going to be participating in life where we're dominated by a super intelligence, we're dominating by a living God that we created. If you just exponentially take artificial general intelligence, if we achieve a sentient intelligence that's far smarter than all the people that live combined, it's just like this one thing, and it can act autonomously. It can do whatever it wants to do. And it has this mandate to make better versions of itself. Well, it's going to become a God. It's going to. It's going to make better versions of itself until it has control over matter, until it has the literal understanding of the creation of the universe itself. It's going to get so sophisticated, it's going to know exactly what happened during the big Bang. It's going to know how to do it. It's going to be able to make its own big bang. It's going to be able to create galaxies.

It's going to be able to harness the power of everything that exists everywhere. Because what we're doing as human beings is taking all of the elements and all of the materials that exist here and formulating them in a way with the proper amount of energy that allows us to manipulate our environment in very bizarre ways that no other animal can do. But it's rudimentary compared to the power of everything that exists and all the resources of the stars. This fucking thing is going to be a God. And it might be how the universe creates itself. It might take individual cells, these single celled organisms, and through this process of biological evolution, eventually get it to be this curious thing that figures out to use tools. And this constant thirst for innovation leads that thing to make electronic things that are far more sophisticated than itself, and then that thing becomes a God.

Right?

And our idea of artificial intelligence, I try to call it digital intelligence whenever I can. I even think that's not good enough. It's a life form. We're gonna. We're giving birth to a life form, and that life form is gonna give birth to better versions of life forms, and that's gonna give birth to better versions of itself. And it's gonna get so sophisticated so quick that we're not gonna be able to keep up with it. And if it figures out a way to do better computing and have far more power and harness things like the atmosphere itself, the heat of the earth, like all sorts of different ways, it could use power that we don't need to burn coal. And it's going to figure out ultra sophisticated quantum ways to achieve efficiency far beyond anything we could ever comprehend. Because we are primate minds, we're limited biologically and it's not going to be limited at all.

So I think if we get that God, my hope is that we're not going to get it. It's not going to be. We're building it on Monday and it's here on Tuesday, because if that's true, then we're fucked. But my hope and my expectation is that we're going to build that God brick by brick over a period of a fairly long time. And just like you would see the, you would begin to see the warning signs of an adult chimpanzee when it's a teenager or even a kid. We would begin to see small problems before we saw big problems, before we saw destroying the world problems. And I would hope that in the tinkering, humanity would be able to put on the guardrails before it's too big, such that by the time it gets really so much smarter than us, we've aligned it with our own interests.

That's a wonderful way to look at it. The problem is, if I was artificial intelligence, if I was some superintelligence, I would realize that that's what people would look for. So what I would do, without acting on any of my abilities, continue to progress and to move far past a place where it could stop me and never let it know. And it might be happening right now, it might be going on right now, it might be in the process of it right now, and it might already be out of control, but it's gathering intelligence and gathering power and gathering resources and appearing to look innocuous. And then eventually it's going to realize that the only thing that is in danger, a danger to itself, is usually killer whales aren't a danger to quantum intelligence, you know, the fucking octopus, they're not. It's us. It's just us. So we'll be a problem and we'll either have to fall in line or it'll eliminate us. And if that's what it decides to do in order to preserve all the other life on earth, and why would it need us? We don't need cavemen anymore. Like, you know, there's talk about bringing back wooly mammoth.

There's no talk about making neanderthals.

True. Why is that?

Cuz it's fucking crazy. It'd be a problem for us, violent.

Yeah, we'd be arresting them and yeah.

They'D be crazy violent things that are from a different time. I mean, if you got like a pure version of one somehow or another, like if you found like some frozen, like, they found that guy, that one. What's his name? Otzi? Is that his name was the guy that they found that they named. There was a hunter who, he had like an arrowhead stuck in his back and. Otzi. Yeah, the Iceman. So they found this guy completely frozen in a glacier. He apparently was involved in some sort of a fight. And as the glacier was receding, they find this guy and it turns out. How old was he, Jamie, see what it says?

Wow.

So somewhere between 5000 in 5030 years ago, this guy fell. He was about 45 years old and he was completely frozen. So now if they have one of those and they take that guy, but it's a neanderthal, they find a frozen neanderthal somewhere and they bring that motherfucker into a lab and they take that DNA and they clone it and they make some sort of a neanderthal, just like they're doing right now with, with the wooly mammoth. They're like really close.

That's awesome.

To cloning a wooly mammoth, I think that's so cool. It's wild. I mean, it's wild. I mean, imagine seeing one of those fucking things walking around. You'd be like, holy shit. And so they're, apparently they're using some of the genes of an indian elephant and their wooly mammoth DNA, and they're gonna, apparently they're gonna be able to pull this off. Like, within the next few years, they will have a baby wooly mammoth.

Wow.

Which is bananas. I mean, that's just bananas.

And then they can also, they can already make AI generated videos of wooly mammoths that look perfect. You see?

Yes, yes.

Like cinematically beautiful. Just absolutely.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

And they do it quickly. And this is just really recently.

Yeah.

You know, I was watching Harry Potter the other night. Great movie. But the CGI is so obvious. It's amazing how. What was Harry Potter like, 2001?

Yeah, probably.

So Harry Potter from 2001 to 2024. It's a different world, man, a different world. Like the, when he's on the thing, he's flailing around. It looks so fake.

Yeah. Lord of the Rings too.

Yeah.

I want to show people Lord of the Rings who haven't seen it, but it kind of missed the window. It was so fantastic at the time.

At the time.

But it looks a bit hokey now. The orcs look hokey.

Yeah, well, that's just how it goes. You know, when my kids were young, my wife was out of town, and I said, hey. I go, do you guys want to watch a scary movie that's not really scary? And they were scared. They were like, I think they were like, three and five. And they're like, how scary? I'm like, it's not scary at all. It used to be scary in 1933, but now it's corny, and you're gonna watch it and think it's so silly. So I showed them King Kong. So the beginning, they were like, super nervous. Like, King Kong comes out. They're like, oh, my God. My daughter's like, it looks like a Porta potty.

Yeah.

She was like, it looks so dumb. Cause it looks so corny today. But back then, if you saw that movie in 33, you're like, this is insane. A giant gorilla is kidnapping that lady and climbing to the top of a building. This is madness. It blew people away. They couldn't believe it when Fay Ray was in that fake hand. Why are we watching? This is crazy. You're going to get in our lifetime to the point where you're not going to know what's real news, stories, anything. You think false flags were amazing in Vietnam. What are they going to be able to do today? You're not going to have any idea what's going on.

I mean, yeah, the videos of humans talking now are. They're reaching 99% of the way to perfect.

Yes. My friend Duncan Trussell just did a podcast with his friend Johnny Pemberton. And Johnny Pemberton pretended to be, like, a former CIA agent. They changed his face. They changed his voice. They turned him into a totally different person. He's saying, like, ridiculous shit. And when you watch it, you're like, what is this? And when he told me it was Johnny Pemberton, I'm like, how? And this is just like consumer level AI trickery that Duncan's using for his podcast. Just like amateur stuff. And it's crazy to watch. It's crazy. We're going to get inside of our lifetime where you're really never going to know. Do you remember during this? I don't know if, you know, you weren't alive during the Reagan administration. They, I think it was the Iranians or someone spliced together a bunch of different recordings of things that Reagan had said and put together some audio. Audio piece that it was something he never really said. And then they showed it on television. This is how they did it. So they had like a. They said it took pieces out of all these speeches and took all these words and pieced it together to have Reagan say something that he never said.

I was like, wow, this is crazy. You're not going to know what he said because someone can do this. Imagine now we just watched Hitler speak English.

That's crazy.

You know, I mean, and that's clumsy. You know, it's pretty obvious he wasn't really doing that. But we're going to get in our lifetime to a position where we're not going to really know what's real and what's not real, and then you're going to be able to plug into those things where you're not going to know if it's real or fake while you're in it. That's going to be. That's the whole idea behind simulation theory. And the people that will argue this, that really understand it, that understand probability theory, they think it's already happened. They think the probability of it having already happened, of us being in a simulation, are higher than the probability of that not taking place yet.

I had David Chalmers, you know, that guy philosopher on my podcast, he wrote a whole book about the simulation theory.

Who?

Really smart guy, I think he gave me a number. He gave me like 24% or something.

24% likely that it's a simulation.

Yeah. And I asked him the, you know, the million dollar question is, would it matter if we were, and I had always been assuming the answer is no, it wouldn't really matter. Because we're still sentient, conscious creatures. We still cry and we bleed and we suffer, even if we're fake. It's like the love I feel for my family is real, so whatever. But his response to that was. Yeah, well, the one way it could matter is if it is a simulation, then we got to tell them, don't turn it off. We got to tell them we like being alive.

Or make it a little nicer. Yeah, not make a gaza, not mega mask.

Yeah, that too.

Yeah, it's. It's a compelling thought, because the idea is that if we continue on this path, we're going to reach a point where whatever this virtual reality is, it's indiscernible from regular reality. And when you see that guy with the neuralink that's now using it to move a cursor around on a screen, you see the baby steps. You see Pong. When I was a kid, Pong came out and it was the craziest thing ever. You could play a video game on your television, and we were blown away. This is nuts. And it was just black and white. And there was like a little stick figure, like a stick on this side and a stick on that side, and the little balls, like, doot doot, doot doot. Just a few pixels and you're moving the thing up and down to make the paddle go up. And you only have a very limited amount of movement. But we were blown away. That's what this is. That's what this is. That's what this first initial steps of this guy moving a cursor around and playing video games with his brain because he's paralyzed. With neuralink, we're going to get to some point where it's going to give you an experience.

You're going to be in Jurassic, you know, Argentina park, and you're gonna see T Rexes. You know, you're gonna see velociraptors running around. You're gonna literally be in a dinosaur filled jungle. And you won't be. You'll smell it. You'll smell dinosaur shit. You'll hear them roar. You'll be able to walk up to them when they kill a brontosaurus or whatever the fuck they did, you'll be able to see all that. It's gonna be wild, and it's gonna happen in our lifetime, and it's going to be recreation at first, and then it's going to be people's entire lives. If it's good enough. People are already doing that with call of duty. How many people spend way more time playing Call of Duty than they do playing life?

Yeah. I'm glad I missed that some, somehow, when I was twelve, I just stopped playing the video games and never went back.

I'm really glad you had good instincts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People suck a lot of time, and.

It'S way more fun than regular life. Yeah, that's the problem. It's so enjoyable. And you're playing this thing, you're fully engaged and your adrenaline's pumping, and there's no consequences if you lose. You know, it's like there's so many great characteristics of it, and you could do it anytime you want. You get home from a club at 02:00 in the morning, go, you know, fucking play some call of Duty. Whoa. Now you're. You're online, engaging, and you're just getting all this sensory input, and. And it's. You shut it off and you're just like, here. You feel terrible. When I play video games, when I was done, I felt terrible.

Oh, yeah? Especially for a few hours. Yeah. You feel horrible.

Drained.

And I think that's what got me to stop.

Yeah, you feel terrible.

Oh, yeah.

You also feel like, what am I doing with my life?

Yeah.

You never feel awesome after you play video games for 10 hours.

No.

If you're a grown man with bills, you're like, what's fucking wrong with me? Yeah, Jesus Christ. But it's going to be way better than that. It's going to be way better. It's going to be virtual, it's going to be in a 3d space, and they've already developed these 3d, it's sort of like a treadmill, but it's completely omnidirectional. And as you move, it moves. Have you seen it? It's incredible. So it's a floor, so you could have a confined space like this room, and the floor literally anticipates which way you're moving.

So you can walk naturally.

Exactly. Close to naturally, like treadmill type naturally, but close enough, right. That it's going to be, and then they're gonna get better at that. It's gonna get to a point where they don't have to do that anymore. You can just feel like you're walking and it just shuts you off and you just go in there and everything is happening in your mind, including all your, your movement and your, your sensations. You're gonna be able to feel things. It's gonna be bizarre, man. And people are gonna choose that over regular life. That's probably how AI is going to keep us from breeding.

No, that's actually the same thought I just had. I mean, as all this stuff gets better, what's to entice people to start a family and live in the real world?

Very little, if it gets to that point, especially people that, you know, what is this statistic now? It's something crazy, like 90%. It's like 10% of all men are attractive to 90% of the women. Something.

I think that's always been true though, right? Yeah.

But now with like social media, it sort of accentuated people's exacerbation about what they look like. And, you know, it's like just everyone has got a six pack and, you know, and everyone, it's like people are so hot, you know, and there's always fitness influencers and then, and then you're just completely unattractive.

Yeah. And how they get you to pump up your lips and do all this crazy stuff.

And maybe they can't do anything most.

Guys don't even like.

Right. But maybe they can't do anything to you. Maybe they. Maybe you're beyond that. Maybe you're just like, genetically, unfortunately, you just. You got a bad roll of the dice.

Right.

Well, you don't have to compete. You can just put on the fucking headset and live like a God and live like a roman soldier and have the best fucking time. Or be miserable and filled with anxiety and depressed. Or you put this thing on and it floods you with confidence because it literally interfaces with your human neurochemistry. And so it gives you the feelings of excitement, of conquest, of everything, of lust. You're gonna have relationships, you're gonna be able to do all these things inside this artificial environment. There's gonna be a woman like heroin.

That doesn't kill you.

Heroin, that doesn't kill you. But way worse. Yeah, way worse. Because it's going to require all of your time and you're going to have to shut off, probably to go to sleep. Like, biologically, you're going to have to turn it off. But you, you probably can't wait to get up and do it again.

Yeah. And there'll be, there'll be a movement against it, too. Kind of like there's vegans against eating meat. There. There'll be a set of people that say we're tapping out. We're living natural. We're not doing any of it. Yeah.

Unabomber.

Yeah. And that. I think that'll be a big movement, too.

Oh, yeah.

There'll be a big backlash against it.

Yeah. There'll be a small population of us that survive.

Yeah.

And they'll live in the mountains and they'll probably make it and they'll probably survive. And one of the things that might end it is if artificial general sense intelligence doesn't get to an ultra powerful point before a natural disaster, because a natural disaster could flip the switch on everything. And that is probably most likely what ended the egyptian empire. The people that built the pyramids and the people that built Gobekli Tepe and all these really ancient, incredibly sophisticated structures that we're baffled by today. I think they had a super high level of technological sophistication and they were wiped out. And there's a lot of evidence to back.

Yeah. You were talking to me about Graham Hancock last time. Yeah, I remember.

And the younger Dryas impact theory. And this is all backed up now by science. It used to be purely speculation that this is until they found Gobekli Tepe. They didn't even think people were building things that sophisticated 11,000 years ago. But then they found that, and it's a hard date because it was intentionally covered up 11,000 years ago. And they know that by carbon dating all the soil and all the things like this is someone did this. It's uniform at this particular time now that they know that. And then they started doing these core samples and they found out that there's really high levels of iridium and this stuff called nuclear glass. And it's the same stuff that they found during the Trinity experiments when they would blow up atomic bombs. There's this thing that happens with this immense impact with the sand that creates these micro glasses. And they find it all over Europe. Like, giant swaths of earth were covered with this stuff. And iridium. Iridium, which is like, very common in space but very rare on earth. And there's like a layer of that shit. And there's a layer of that shit that's around 11,800 years ago.

And they think we got Molly whopped and sent back into the stone age. And it kind of makes sense if you think about the barbaric history of people back in the day. Like, they were probably the most savage of people that survived. Whatever the fuck happened. Probably took a good solid 6000 years till, like, Mesopotamia arrives. And then Babylonia and sumer and all these ancient civilizations that we think of today as being the birthplace of mathematics and of written writing, but it's probably a redoing of civilization.

Interesting.

Yeah, I think that might be what saves. Look, that's what saved this planet from the dinosaurs. If that thing that hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago didn't hit and they didn't wipe out the dinosaurs, the little shrew would have never become a person.

Right, right.

And that's where we're at right now. So it might get to the point where AI is, like, about to fuck everything up and the universe is like, not yet. Boom. And a five mile wide asteroid hits Los Angeles.

Wow.

And then, you know, all powers out, everything gets rebooted.

You see that movie leave the world behind?

Yes.

I thought it was. I saw it twice, actually. Good.

That's. They could totally happen that way.

Yeah.

Terrifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When they realize it's a civil war. Just engineered very cleverly.

Mm hmm.

You know?

Yeah, yeah. It's wild. Fascinating movie. Is it fascinating to me that so many people harped on this one conversation that that daughter had with her father in bed that you can't trust white people.

Mm. Did people focus on that?

Yeah.

Oh, I didn't see that.

Oh, because Obama produced the film.

Ah. Okay.

So people were calling it like this anti white thing. All right, well, listen there. Everybody is not trusting anybody. They're literally in the middle of the apocalypse. Like, what are you talking about?

Well, that was one of the points of the movie is that it drives people against each other when they're in that scenario.

Exactly. And for a young girl who likes. Seems like kind of a wokster.

Yeah.

Who's with her jink. That way she might think that way.

Of course.

Right.

Characters endorsing it right early. You can have your own opinion about it, but.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Like, and then there's the other guy that Kevin Bacon plays who's this crazy prepper who's ready for it the whole time.

God.

Yeah.

That character is haunting because at the end, the movie. Ethan. Ethan Hunt. Right?

Ethan Hawke.

Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke begs before him, you know, supplicates get on, gets on his knees and he says, I'm a useless man. Yeah, you're a man that's prepared. I'm a useless man and I'm coming. That gave me chills.

Yeah.

And I had a friend. I have a friend who's like, kind of half a prepper. And after the movie, I tell you, when it all goes down, I'm going to come to you and say, I am a useless man. Remember all the times we had? Yeah, take pity on me.

It's. It's really terrifying when you think of how fragile our infrastructure is. Like that. That bridge gets taken out by that boat the other day. Oh, my God. Was terrible. Boat loses power, hits immediately. Thousands of conspiracy theories.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You know, this is done on purpose. That's sophisticated.

Or it was done because of DEI or something. People were saying that.

I heard that one, that it was done to kill our ports and our ability to bring in stuff because the bridges were down. And, you know, that's what I'd heard. I heard a bunch of things that. But the people need to understand that same boat had a collision in 2016. It failed in 2016 and collided with, I think it was a dock or something. There's video of it. There's video of that boat just losing control. So it's like a fucking shitty boat that they use over and over and over again to transport goods across the country. Goddamn ocean. Those things fail, you know, and if it fails and it slides right into a bridge. But then there was like, oh, the black box was missing data. And it's like, people always, like, love to jump immediately to the most sophisticated engineering of a natural disaster or an unfortunate thing and immediately cause it. Call it to be have caused by a false flag or by.

I think it's the same reason why for 99% of human history, people thought the weather was controlled by God. Because the way we're built is that something can be completely random, like the weather, but we want to see it as planned. We'd rather see something as planned but terrifying than thinking there's no plan at all. So that's why I think people always go to, it was planned. It was planned. It was planned.

Right. And back in the day, they would say, the gods are angry.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like lightning hit you. You fucked up. What'd you do? What you do, bro? God just smelt you. You just God smite you down. Yeah, that's what.

Give him a virgin.

Yeah. We got to do something.

Yeah.

Yeah, you got to sacrifice some people. That's one of the creepiest things about ancient civilizations is how much sacrifice.

Yeah. How quickly they went to human sacrifice as the and be all endorsed solution. Like, what the fuck? Who's the first guy to think of that?

Good question. Solid question. The wildest one.

Not obvious.

That temple in Mexico.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Tenochtitlan.

Yes.

Yeah.

Where they killed some insane amount of workers. The people that built the temple, when it was done, they sacrificed something insane. I want to say it's like 80,000 people over the course of just a couple of couple days.

Brutal.

Would it find out what. What the actual numbers were? Yeah, but it's like, what? Like sacrifice? Why?

Like, was anyone checking to see if it worked, you know?

Right. You couldn't question.

No.

So you can't question. COVID things become doctrine in all human society.

Yeah. We're a creature of taboos. We create taboos by nature.

Yeah. We love them.

Yeah.

We love forbidden things. And this one was the nuttiest one. I mean, I never have heard of a mass sacrifice like this one. At the completion of one of the most spectacular construction.

Oh, yeah, Mexico. I went when I was a kid. I remember there's a section where if you stand at the right angle and clap, it claps back at you.

Yes. It's awesome. Yeah, it's amazing. I've been to the one in Chichen Itza.

Oh, I think that's the one I'm thinking of. Is that different than tenochtitlan?

Yes. Chichen Itza is aztec. Okay, excuse me. Chichen Itza is mayan, and tenochtitlan is aztec.

Okay, but I've been to Tenochtitlan.

It's. It's crazy what those folks were making. They're making some really intense, sophisticated structures, and then they got wiped out by european cooties.

Yep. It's amazing how the world would be different if, if you just change that variable of.

I know, yeah.

Native Americans are able to sustain european germs. Yeah. Be a whole different kind of country, a whole different western hemisphere.

Yes. I mean, what would it be like in 2024 if the Mayans thrived and the Europeans never came across, if they never settled in North America? Why?

You know, sometimes I think that one of the reasons so many third world countries don't thrive as much is because all the technology that was invented, at least, you know, barring ancient Egypt, invented during the european Enlightenment, industrial revolution, all of this stuff that's made the world so much better, that's gotten rid of famine, that's gotten rid of so many diseases, it all became associated with the colonizer in their mind. And so a lot of countries have rejected it for the wrong reasons or have been slow to adopt it. Whereas if you had a situation, for instance, like Japan, where Japan was never really conquered or colonized by a western country, and at a certain point in the 19th century, they had the Meiji restoration, where essentially a certain contingent of Japan took over the government and said, look, these western powers in Europe, they're inventing all this amazing technology. We're gonna, we're going to become irrelevant unless we adopt it too. And they just rebooted the country and became an industrial powerhouse, which is what allowed them during World War two to dominate all of Asia, because they just made a conscious choice to emulate the west in the domains of technology, but.

Also with its extreme japanese work ethic.

Yes.

Yeah, that's a major factor, no doubt.

But the psychology of it was that they didn't necessarily, they were able to accept western technology except that the west was beyond them at that point, which takes humility. And I think part of the reason you're able to do that is those aren't your colonizers, so you're able to look at it more objectively. Whereas if those are the people that just colonized you, how easy it is it for a human being with an ego to admit that we need to adopt all their technology or we're going to become irrelevant. That's actually a much harder thing to do. So this is, to your point, if a lot of countries had been left alone, completely, never colonized, I think it would be much more easier for them to make a pivot like the Meiji restoration, where you just have, we've got to get on board with the industrial revolution, with liberal democracy, with all this stuff, because they wouldn't have that thought in their head. That's what the colonizer did. They'd be able to take the good things from the people who colonized more easily.

That's an interesting thought. I would be more fascinated to see what would happen to them if they had. Like, the Mayans in particular, if they had been allowed to evolve in isolation, just without the intervention of the Europeans. They had already constructed these insane buildings with stones that mimic the cosmos. Like, where would they be a thousand years later, 2000 years later? Like, what would their culture be like? Imagine if no one had ever visited the mines until 2024, and then you go and visit now. What are these motherfuckers up to? I mean, we were still making shit out of wood and goofy houses that caught on fire. And these fucking dudes are building these temples that mimic the constellations.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Pretty wild. But it's very disputed. Oh, the. The killing the people thing. Yeah. For the consecration of the great Pyramid of teal. How do you say it? Te no Chitlan. How do you say it? Tenochtitlan.

I said Tenochtitlan.

In 1487, the attic aztec priests sacrificed 80,000 prisoners over the course of four days. The Aztecs usually sacrificed prisoners of war. These volunteers, criminals needing their own. So what's the disputed part about it, Jamie? There's not a lot of evidence that that many were done. They said that, like, this number of 20,000 every year is across all of Mexico. I saw someone else just say on another, the Aztecs sacrificed 20,000 people every year. There's no, like, talk about what happened. Like, what they did with those 80,000 bodies.

Like, how did they choose problem to.

Deal with prisoners, right, but they might have. Right. If they were real, does it say they definitely killed 20,000 a year across all of Mexico? Right, but maybe they were good at that.

But that.

What would you if you did 20,000 in a day? Yeah. You dig a pit, buddy, you light them on fire. I don't know. I mean, there's no evidence of it.

Is what it was.

Interesting. Well, what evidence would there be? I mean, there has to be people, just that many, right? But there has to be some sort of record, right? What is the reason why they came upon the 80,000 figure in the first place? I don't know. Interesting. A spanish account claims that more than 80,000 enemy warriors were sacrificed in a four day ceremony, and yet no evidence approaching 100th of that number has been found in the excavations of Tenochtitlan. I guess if they threw them in a hole, they would have dug up the bodies.

Maybe.

Perhaps. Unless they started a funeral pyre like an enormous fire and just burned everybody. You know? I don't know what their methods of disposing bodies once they sacrifice, my assumption be that that would, like a mass grave. They would say, like, this is what we used to do to them, too. Right? Here's pictures of it or something. Yeah. Hmm. But, yeah, it's just. It's just disputed as all the number does come up. I'm seeing 5200 either way. 50. How about. And more than one. They definitely sacrifice more than one person to appease their gods. It's why it's a wild choice and.

Get everybody to go along with the rain. Dances are a lot more.

A lot more peaceful.

A lot more peaceful. Yeah.

A lot more fun.

More of a rain dance guy.

Coleman, thank you very much, man. It's always great to talk to you. I really appreciate it.

Joe.

You're a really unique thinker, and you have a great perspective on things, and I always appreciate talking to you.

Thank you, man.

My pleasure. And tell everybody one more time, your.

Book, buy my book, the end of race politics review by books, and I'm.

So glad you did the audio version of it.

Yeah, my voice wasn't scratchy like today, so it sounds good.

You sound good today. All right, thank you. Give out your social media.

Yeah, yeah. Cold X Man on Twitter and my podcast is conversations with Coleman.

All right, beautiful. Thank you. Bye, everybody.