#2130 - Coleman Hughes

26:31He stands for what I believe in. 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 a 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 honest. 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.

27:10And 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 theorist. 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 want to pollute things because it was more profitable for them to not pay attention to where their waste goes.

27:48He held them to task, and he's one of the primary reasons where the Hudson River is clean. 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 is neither by did nor Trump. If you just say give a 10 minute speech off the cuff, RFK is going to give a way more charismatic, way more interesting speech than either of them. Agreed.

28:18So that's what I feel when I listen to him. At the same time, while 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. 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 use that charisma power to get people to support things they never ordinarily would support.

29:07It's the old adage that no one who wants to be president should be allowed to be president. 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 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.

29:40And just for, I think it's like 30 seconds of your voice in my voice, they can have a speak fluent German, Spanish, and French right now. And they're going to expand it to a bunch of different languages and just put 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 for you. Can we play it or will we get in trouble? No idea. 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 wherever we're, dealing with YouTube is so bizarre.

30:18Like people can claim copyright for things that are 100 % not theirs. Interesting. But if they claim it, then they can monetize your show. They take all the money from your show. So you have to remove it and then you have to fight it. Right. And you have to figure out like, if you play two seconds of a song, is it two seconds? How many seconds? Two seconds. It's like over six or something. Six seconds of a song. They claim they can monetize your entire podcast. It's fucking bizarre. That's crazy. But it's dumb. It's dumb. There's things that you should be able to talk about. If there's a popular song, you're like, what ass pussy?

30:57Look at the moral decline of America. Listen to this. I don't cook. I don't clean. It's wet ass. It's like, 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 colorized too, which is interesting. But this is, so when we would hear Hitler speak. What the fuck? What the fuck? You know, I was like, we can crush the enemies and kill the Jews. That's all I thought it was. Yeah. Right? Yeah. A lot of it is. Let me start with the eights. Yeah. Yeah.

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33:01Okay, stop right there. Pause, pause. I hear that. I hear that. I get terrified. Oh yeah, because all of German sounds terrifying. It's a hawk. Yeah, to the English ear. It's such a rar. It's such a aggressive language. Yeah. And when you hear Hitler yelling it, it's so aggressive. Right. And then when you hear what he's actually saying, he's like, this is like a regular politician. My war 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 good up for you.

33:56That's incredibly creepy. Bizarre, right? Oh my God. Very bizarre. Wow. Because we have these misconceptions. These preconceived notions. Because obviously all the evil things he actually wound up doing. Which are real. It's also just the cultural filter of the way German sounds to the American ear, to harsh language. Yes. Well, there's many languages like that. We just don't have a cultural context to put that, especially the sounds. If you heard German Arabic. No. What's that? This is Muslim speaking with their German. So they have a German accent. Oh, okay. They're speaking in Arabic. Okay.

34:42And it's very strange. Because it's like you're hearing both things. Right. 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, yellow, this is wild. Wow. There's something about those Japanese as another one when someone is like 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.

35:22And but also by Miyamoto Musashi who when I was a young man, like that book, the book of five rings was like 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 arguably the most famous. He's 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.

36:08You have to be able to do calligraphy. You have to be able to do art. You have to have a belt. 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.

36:45So they would come at him with a sword and he would have like an ore from a boat. And he would just fuck them up with an ore. Jesus Christ. He was a fascinating guy. So I can see how you kind of reflect that. I mean you're like this, it's a 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.

37:25How 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. Every time that I ever competed where I was overconfident, I fought terribly. Even if I won, I was very ashamed of my performance. You have to be scared. And it's 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 going to go out there and kick someone in the face. They're going to try to kick me in the face.

38:00And 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 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 going to 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 applied to many disciplines in life.

38:40But 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.

39:33Do you remember that scene? I do not. Oh yeah, it's a brilliancy and an 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 going to 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.

40:08But 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. A custom motto, 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 a mock, it'll burn your house down.

40:48Yeah. 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, of, of aliveness. Yeah. Knowing what the stakes are. Yeah. And I think it probably causes me to perform better than normal. Yeah, let'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.

41:27I'm 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 get 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 the 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.

42:01Because 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, you know, each round is in kickboxing where I was doing those three minutes and 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.

42:33All these things that like in 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's bohunting is very much that. Bohunting. 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 thought process is like swinging a bat. You really can't stop the bat once you're swinging it.

43:12You'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 shooting situation 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.

43:51The beautiful thing about archery is the perfection of doing something that's almost impossible to perfect. So when you could have these brief moments where that arrow does launch and goes right into that target, right where the X is. This is 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 have practiced 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.

44:26You can move, you can step to the side, you can, this is the one moment that the fight is actually happening. But there's a lot of moments in the fight. When you release that arrow, that is one moment. So you might have worked 11 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.

45:03I've only gone 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 10 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.

45:40You 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. Right. And when that bullet goes out of that gun, that flinch left or right over the course of 100 yards could be a foot to feed 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. Or you're never anticipating the 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.

46:17So you can see the evidence of your own. You pull the trigger, but nothing happens. Because there's no real round. Right. It's just a rubber rod of the fuck 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. 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. There's strategies you learn breathing strategies to employ your heart rate, control your heart rate.

46:51And 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 leads you to fuck up. Because that's what you're concentrating on. Right. In the game of pool, if you think you're going to miss a shot, you most certainly miss that shot.

47:34Almost always. You might get lucky. You may get just like a thought I was going to miss. But in your head, you're like, I hope I don't miss. I hope I don't miss. You're going to miss. But if you just only concentrate on the process, you can execute even under pressure. You can execute in a perfect line. Yeah. And it's, 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 that 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, when they start to occur.

48:14Yeah. 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 beat her.

48:49It's coming up. There's two seconds. They have to make the shot is because they're so obsessed with winning that there's no room for anxiety. Right. Right. It's like, it's life or death to them. Yeah. 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.

49:30Yeah. That's him. But you know, do you want to do what he does? No, but he 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. That's right. You don't become David Goggins, but 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. No, you have to be upset. I heard that if you beat Michael Jordan at pool, you wouldn't talk to you for weeks.

50:01Yeah. 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 they they actually when you try to talk to them about their mistakes, you've had Hikaru on. Have you know I have not oh you I don't know why I thought that. I would though. So Hikaru best player in America, absolute legend.

50:36You know, if Magnus Carlson died in his crib, Hikaru, it's very possible Hikaru would be world champ for a game. You know, it's a very long time. Wow. But what is what separates him from Magnus Carlson? Just a Magnus at I think Hikaru once put it. Magnus is a little bit better than Hikaru at everything. Little bit better at openings, a little bit better at calculation, a little bit better at end games. You put it all together and he's he's just the goat. He can't be beat. What was your 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.

51:14Wow. Yeah, he's 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 master chess matches. 14 games, they can go to six six hours a game. They can actually go over six hours a game. Brutal, absolutely. Like if you thought taking the SAT and trying really hard, it 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.

51:5250 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 John Jones too. John Jones when he was dominating the Light Heavyweight division, he got to a point where the way analysts would describe it as it, he was playing with his food. Yeah. And that he wasn't afraid of losing to these guys.

52:25And 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 John prepared and just dominated him and annihilated him. Yeah. 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.

53:00And that's the real John Jones. It's just the John Jones that was fighting all these other guys. He was in challenge. He was 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. Yeah. And it pulled it off in, it wasn't in condition. It wasn't prepared but still good enough to beat the very best challenger he ever faced and the toughest fight of his career in the last rounds. 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.

53:41And it's, it's almost like you're talking about a family member who died tragically. So it means that much to them that they made a mistake 12 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, 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 time, names Earl Strickland.

54:15He's an American guy, won the US Open five times. It's 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. They would give someone a million dollars if they could run 10 racks in a row of nine ball. Now, what, the way nine ball works is you have nine balls and you, you, you shape them where the bottom balls are missing, which would make 15, which is a full rack.

55:05So it's just like triangle sort of a rack. And then you break the balls in the one ball is in the front and then nine balls in the center. Now, the ball 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 number 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. So you mean you have to, 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.

55:43And 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.

56:15And they'd scatter around and he ran ten racks in a row for a million dollars. And he did it. And he did it. But it was, 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, though it was a race to eleven. He broken ran the eleventh 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 the distance from the pocket. Yeah. So to be that guy, you have to be out of your fucking mind just no other way. Yeah, absolutely.

56:50Completely obsessed with the game. Yeah. You have to be completely obsessed with all the details. Yeah. He does commentary on pool matches. It's fascinating to listen to him do commentary because he talks about different English. You got to use it 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, yeah, that was what I was talking about. Yeah. He sees it coming. He sees the whole table in a different way than a person who's a novice. He's the table. Only things I've ever been that obsessed with, I think in my life, are music.

57:25I'm a trombone player. Oh, really? That was actually my career before I started writing. I still am actually professional trombone player. You talk like a jazz guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why am I jazz guy? Joe, I had a, my life path is that I graduated high school. I was considered one of the top professional jazz trombonus 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.

58:08And my mom died when I was 18. And 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 at 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.

58:54And it was, had my mom not died, I probably just would have stayed at Juilliard. I might have had a whole different life. Well, that's fast, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

59:06Yeah, it's me with a big afro. That's amazing. That's how it 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. Yeah. Which is the, that's not, 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. Because 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.

59:40No 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 the from pressing it against his lips. And he had a growth. I don't know if he was cancerous or not, but it really messed him up.

1:00:11Oh, wow. So it becomes so irritated that a growth there. Oh, 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. Yeah, all the rules. I mean, and also he just figured out his way to do it. You know, 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 trumpet players of all time, played left -handed. Which he's the only person I've ever heard of great or or or not who plays left -handed.

1:00:47In 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 he plays it upside down. He plays it left side right. Why? 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 the... Oh, 100 % of left -handed trombone players play with the right hand, 100%. Yeah. But I've heard in 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.

1:01:28But he... I've heard of this with guitar players, where somebody gave it... Yeah, I didn't realize that. He played it left -handed, or... Yeah, he played it like... How did it this way? Jamie, you know... Right arm on the neck. Oh, yeah, 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... He always went the low -E string to be the top, I guess, closest to you. And then some people wouldn't restring it, because they weren't told to, or how, or... Yeah, they just started playing the other way.

1:02:00What was Hendrix's deal? I'm looking up... I think he was just lefty. You see? I feel like he was playing the right -handed guitar, though. I feel like he played the right -handed guitar lefty. I think he was just... Hendrix also played his guitar upside down. Yeah. Why he played it upside down? Well, he also self -taught, which is to me the most fastness. And he couldn't find a left -handed guitar. Which they probably did make as many back -ends. Yeah, they probably didn't. So we took it. We were just thinking he took a normal guitar and put it... I just flipped it around. So the low string was high and the high string was low.

1:02:33And then he... So he himself had all his own fingerings were... I mean, his sound was so incredible. That's a different than anyone before him. Yeah. There's leaps in music, but the leaps that Hendrix took, there's so different than everybody else. Like, you... Really, it's so hard, because... I mean, I listened 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, he'd be like, what the fuck? Oh, yeah, for sure. 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...

1:03:13And by the way, not a great singing voice. And nobody gave a fuck. Nobody gave a fuck about a singing voice. Yeah. It was... His music was so powerful. The sound... I wish we could play it right now. The just the beginning of Voodoo Child. That riff... You have to understand there's nothing like that in music before him. There's a lot of that now. You can never... Yeah, well, because of it. Because of it. Like, Stinger Avon. 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.

1:03:50Exactly. This is what I always tell people that disparage Lenny Bruce. They go, hey, it wasn't that funny. Can we... Give me some of that.

1:04:23Okay. That's a 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 in parts on you. I get goosebumps just hearing it. 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. And this guy was blowing away. People like Eric Clapton famously saw him and was like, what am I doing? Like Eric Clapton with the greatest guitarist of all time.

1:05:10He's like, oh my god, I fucking suck. I fucking suck. This guy is changing everything. He's just a different thing. Like a guy who comes along who's so beyond what's being currently expressed. Yeah. 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 All of Trees Cafe, the restaurant. Oh, wow. 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.

1:05:53And 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. That's right. And that, that was, that was really what I realized when I was 18, taking every jazz Trombone gig that gave my way and paid me $50 and a slice of pizza. I was like, this is my past in life. I love this.

1:06:25But this is going to drive me into insanity. If I have to take every single gig of my whole life and eat out in existence. Yeah. So maybe I should get a degree and just see, you know, see where it 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, 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 a... I did a couple of open mics. Did you? So I've always loved comedy and I had some friends in it. So they're like, oh, I did two or three open mics.

1:06:58I had a good time. Didn't bomb. Didn't do great. Did it, did okay. Right. And then... But the bug didn't bite you. The bug didn't bite me. That's exactly right. And the thing is, I knew what the bug meant because I have it for music. And so I knew what it's like to be like. I suck at this, but I love it so much that I'm going to keep doing it until I don't suck. Yeah. Because with, 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.

1:07:31Everyone 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. Yes. 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 -cord. So he put my fingers in the right place. It feels pretty good, right? It's good. It does feel good. I started getting scared.

1:08:02Yeah. I started getting scared. This could 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 because I get... You think you're going to 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? All right. It's the same thing you were saying earlier with pool. Like the same description. Sorry with archery. I meant with archery. The consequences obviously are less.

1:08:40You're not going to miss and hurt something. Well, there's a target archery though. It's very intensive too. But when you were describing when it all goes right, which is so rare, I heard something, Samuel Jackson said recently, we're 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 making it go in the whole right from where you are. Or like right where you're 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?

1:09:12Clearing your head every time, fighting against nature. Also having fun with your friends, being out of nature, getting away from everything for four or five hours, having a couple beers. Clearing your head. It's like clearing your head. Yeah. You can't think of all of a bunch of other stuff where 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 picture? It might have been a league of her own. No, there's another movie where he is. What is his movie? Well, he, no. So he has this thing where everybody's like, he wasn't retired.

1:09:45He 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. We'll play the scene but we won't do it for everybody else.

1:10:11And I was told, you know. Oh. No. Juffle. You suck. You're safe. Bip, bip, bip, bip.

1:10:39Clear the mechanism.

1:10:44Nice.

1:10:53Oh, Mike.

1:11:02Nice. Yeah, my friend Colton uses that when he goes bow hunting. He says, clear the mechanism. It feels like to put on Bozy headphones and just force your mind at this state of hyper focus. I wanted to ask you this. What was your take on Magnus Carlson and that young man who apparently, Hans? Yes. Hans Neiman. Yeah. What a character. Explain the story for people. So basically what happened is there's this grandmaster named Hans Neiman, who's a young guy, probably early, early 20s. Magnus is probably more like 31 or so like now. And what happened is Hans Neiman, he beat Magnus Carlson at a tournament.

1:11:50He's a legend 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. 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 Neiman was a cheater.

1:12:32Now 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. The 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.

1:13:11In 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 going to do 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 start 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.

1:13:56It's very uncommon in the chess world for someone to raise and rating that quickly in the professional world. 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.

1:14:34Like 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 user names. 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. Yeah, but it's them. No money. It makes complete sense. Really why? Because of video games. Because in video games people would use bots when you'd play online.

1:15:09So an aiming bot would make it so that you would almost never miss. So you would play a guy and like say and quake. There's a gun called the rail gun. The rail gun 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 could hurt him, but he won't hurt him as much as a rail gun, 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 rail gun. Every time your head poked out, it would be impossible for them to know exactly where you were going to be.

1:15:41The 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. And 20 times in a row. 50 times in a row. There's, there's, there'd be scores like 50 to zero against like really good players. And it's not for any money and it's not for the money. They're just laughing because they're clowning you with a bot. Right. It's fun. Yeah. So that's what people do on chest .com. And just like that game where you literally mathematically can only have so much good luck. Right. Chest .com has algorithms that are really, really good at detecting when you've gone from the good luck space to the definitely cheating space.

1:16:14So how do they know? So so they looked at they looked at Hans Neiman's games and they found that he was almost certainly cheating on chest .com in certain games. And they they did a whole report where they highlighted the specific games. And the is it analysis of his previous games and the previous games. So you see this the level of competency based on the previous games. What do you mean? So you see his level of mistakes and what the way he does it. And then in the games where you 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.

1:16:55Because in a normal chess match. There's it's 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 five seconds to load for every move, checking the move. You might have you're going to have a regularity. Each move is going to come after five seconds, for example. Right. 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 all close to solve, meaning the machines are playing it better than we are. So you can check a human player against the machine player.

1:17:31Even Magnus Carlson will lose a thousand times in a row now to stock fish. A thousand times. He has no chance. I remember when Big Blue first started playing chess against people. That was always the thing. Yeah. Once a computer can be the person. We're fucked. Yeah. We're way long past that now. That's why. And so they can check if you're playing, you know, 99 .5 % of the stock fish 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 12 games in a row that are complicated. It's just not possible. Very much like what you talked about.

1:18:05So 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. Because you're playing chess into the browser that you're cheating with. Why wouldn't they just have a separate. 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.

1:18:39In theory. In theory. Yeah. You could have a dual monitor set up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the algorithm is regarded as very accurate in terms of determining cheating. And they did determine that he had cheated in a bunch of let's say they weren't top tournaments, but they were friendly tournaments. Some of them had money on the line. 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 and real big tournaments. But it was proven that he had cheated online.

1:19:18And 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 grandmaster. 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 every chess player wants to do that.

1:19:53Right. So just do it. 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. Yeah, that's right. That's right. He he he under exaggerated the he he downplayed it. 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 so many of these chess guys unfortunately are just so freaking boring from the audience perspective. Right. That when you get a guy there, that's like shit talking and and like kind of being a being like braggadocious and stuff.

1:20:30It's really entertaining to watch because it's so rare. So so many chess players. I love them. They're a little bit autistic on the spectrum. That's not not to cast as Persians. 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 talked shit while he plays talk shit after the game. Oh, talk shit after the game. I want to see some shit talking while he plays. It's like Washington Square Park shit. Oh, guys have this challenge matches. I've lost a lot of money to those guys. That's the fun thing. When those guys are talking shit and they're slapping that clock.

1:21:02That's entertaining chess. 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 for more people pay attention to it. The purity of no they do get chess .com definitely cares. They've they've had a huge influence in upping chess as a as an audience. You know, sport that audience is watching the move is like those searching for Bobby Fisher 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.

1:21:32Yeah, yeah. But when I love watching those guys, I love watching people sit down talk shit. Yep. And I love when like a real grandmasters sit down talk 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. They do. I mean, 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.

1:22:05Yeah, occasionally encountering douchebags that think that they can beat them. Right. And then 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 going to 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 as the first time I was like, I'm tired of losing, you know, all my money, these people.

1:22:37And 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 games 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. Yeah, I was watching one with his grandmaster was playing one of those guys. And the guy moved his piece in a funny way.

1:23:12He like went back and forth and put it in a different spot. And he's like, hey, that's all you did. That's all you did there. Oh, yeah, the video with Maurice Ashley. That's him. Oh, that's the best. Yeah, yeah. He catches the guy. Yeah, because in the piece Maurice is beating his ass and he I think he yeah, he's what he does a little magician's trick, but Maurice catches it. And this is I can't play it. Unfortunately, the volume will get trouble. Yeah, he busted him doing it.

1:23:47See what he did that. That's what he did. Yep, yeah, yeah, that was there. Yeah, see, see.

1:24:01Yeah, hilarious. That would 100 % that would probably work on me, but that's not going to work on a grandmaster. And he didn't know that this was Maurice. Ashley, he just thought this is 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, he seemed like he's under pressure at all. No, not at all. Yeah, that little magic trick. I mean, how often did that guy do that? Because he did it so smooth. I never know. It was so smooth. Yeah, you know, it's like now it's three card Monty in chess form.

1:24:34Right. Yeah. Well, that's pool hustlers do that too. What did they do? They'll pretend to miss. They'll they'll move things. They're stick. They'll like someone is really good. They'll cheat. They'll cheat in ways where you don't see it. They'll guide a ball in if they know that you're your angles that where you can't see what's going on. Right. And then 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.

1:25:09And you get upset. You want to try it again. Now he's really confident. So 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 that bet is gone from 1000 to 5000 to one set for 10 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.

1:25:44Right. 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. It was just a crazy person who's like lived as a pool hustler. He was always homeless. Like the whole time I knew he was like, oh, stand on people's couches and sleeping in like flop houses and shit. He was 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 would say 369 divided by seven plus five minus two. And he would bang out the number. Wow. And it was like that.

1:26:19It's crazy. 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. He'd go to talk and 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 go to the bathroom and wash his face and come back out. And 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. And he's 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.

1:26:52And then they get back to it. And then you know, by the end of the night, don't even know what the fuck happened. Because 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 feel like they got really mad though. Oh, yeah. I mean, 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.

1:27:21You got to agree to play another game and then fall apart just to get out of there. And then maybe you can come back and play him again. This guy's a 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. This guys are good. It was it was the part of the the craft. Can imagine it. But that was the way they made money. That was the part of the craft. And you didn't want to 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 we're just playing in pool halls.

1:27:53And then eventually pool got to a point where it was on television. They started making money and 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. I can't get a game. He's Buddy Hall. These calm rags. That was his initial game. A lot of these guys have like fake names like Efron Reyes who's arguably the greatest of all time. He came out from the Philippines and he said he was season Morales because even in the Philippines in the Philippines he was like everybody knew Efron was even when he was in his 20s.

1:28:27He was a wizard. Like they call him the magician. He was a wizard on a pool table. And when he came to America, they weren't even sure. They're like just just to be safe. Let's come up with a fake name. And just robbed everybody these tournaments. Just robbed everybody in gambling. He could play so much better than everybody. He changed the game. Like sort of like Hendrix changed music. Efron changed pool. And a lot of people they play like there's a lot of things particularly like safety play that they learn from watching Efron. What's safety play? So say if you're playing nine ball and you're running the balls in order.

1:29:04Right. If I have a shot on the one ball. 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 number 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 Efron was just to wizard at it. He would do it in a way with not only would he kick the ball, you kick it in like a lot of the time.

1:29:45And now guys play to kick balls in. Right. All the time because they learned it from Efron. Like three rail kicks. We'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. But that's all learning from these people that came kind of out of nowhere. You know, these 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.

1:30:24And they would be walking in like fucking like a haze seed and just talk real stupid and drink a bunch. And 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. He plays a little pool. He's got some money in his pocket. Next you know, this guy's robbing you table tennis is my my my other hobby. Really? Yeah. Real I played this place called ping pod in New York. They have a bunch of locations. You can go there for not not 15 bucks or so. Just play with your friend for an hour or they have tournaments. It's really fun.

1:30:59That's a wild game. I love it. That's all I love to watch too. I was stunned that ping pong never became as popular as a kid. I was a popular 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. You lower a barrier to entry. Yes. But also at the highest level. Insanely impressive. I was watching as volley where these people were like seven, 10 feet away from the table. Super high speed and diving back and forth and back and forth. And the volley is insane. Then when someone does score you're like wow. Yeah, the reflexes are just incredible.

1:31:40Amazing. And so many different moves because you're dealing with something that's coming at you. Over this low thing very fast. And you're doing it this way and this way and that way and gentle and fast. Yeah. 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 Sandling Hool. 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.

1:32:19Yeah. So you go there for for for a month and no English for a month. And they had this is older Chinese guys 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.

1:33:02But you're also absorbing what he's doing. Yes. You're experiencing it. 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, they're going to 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 out of Tanya. And they got school. And so they're either going to come back and be better than ever like Robert Whitaker or they're going to fall apart like some guys that he's fought.

1:33:31He's breaks guys because they realize like, I never I can't do what you're doing. The way you're doing it, my body hasn't worked like that. He's Israel in his prime was hitting guys with the comedy. Watch the Derek Brunson. We'll pull up the Derek Brunson fight. Derek Brunson is dangerous guy. Knockout Striker, really good wrestler. Very physically strong. Just a dangerous top contender. He's fighting out of Sanya. And it's I believe this is before out of Sanya won the title. If I'm correct, not sure. It might have been in defense of the title either way. Otasanya who will go down as one of the greatest of all time for sure.

1:34:08He hits him with combinations like like he's on a different speed. Like there like there's a 45 record and a 78. He's 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. They're smashing buttons when they're playing a game. You know, they don't really exactly know what each button is doing with the trying to win by smashing buttons. He's like a lot of people fight that way.

1:34:45He goes, I fight with precision. So he's like a lot of people hit harder than me, but I have precision. Watch this KO. 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 like very physically strong right here. He's trying to take Otasanya down because Derek is 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 Otasanya pieces him up.

1:35:23So he's avoiding the takedowns here because Derek is, you know, a real powerhouse as a wrestler, but Otasanya is a striking virtuoso. So then he starts putting it on him.

1:35:40So Derek is just frantically trying to get this fight to the mat every chance he gets.

1:35:53The combinations just perfect. Look at this. Watch this. He's just piecing him up, just connecting incredible.

1:36:08So when you're in that space, when you're like in a cage with that guy, one of two things going to happen. Either you're going to go, I can't do that. I'm not that good. He just fucked me up. Clear. I'm so I'm 34 years old. I'm never going to 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.

1:36:46Right. 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. Yeah, you're never going to be a champion. That's sort of what happened with the dream team. Did you see the 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.

1:37:21Right. 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 is LeBron James, Duane Wade, Kobe Brian 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.

1:38:02And 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 3 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 Handle and that's the story is 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.

1:38:44It was for the longest time. And something happened somewhere along the way. First of all, the issue was always communist block countries. Right. Tio Filo 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 of Tio Filo 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 I was at it and never defected. Many boxers did. But he didn't. But so they have that advantage.

1:39:18They're being sponsored by the state. They they get food and special training and special privileges. And they win. And Yoel Romero, who's on the cubic Cuban wrestling team, he explained that all to us here. It was awesome podcast. It was just Joey Diaz translated for for Yoel. It was just 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.

1:39:53It's not just I want to be great. It's like I want more food. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. He's like, and you become a machine. So he described it and have this guy who's like 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's a fucking machine. I mean, that so there was that in the Soviet block countries. But somewhere along the line, the Americans lost a lot of the dominance.

1:40:38And 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 Chetsnia, like one of the scariest guys in the world right now is this guy, Arthur Bitterbeef. And he's the light heavyweight champion and nobody wants to fight him. He's 19 and 0 with 19 knockouts. No one survives. And he's got this seek and destroy style that's absolutely terrifying. He just comes at guys and never backs up. And he's he looks like a fucking terrifying human.

1:41:20He's built like a tank with that beer. You know, the lower beer that Muslims have. Yeah, he's just a monster man, just a monster. 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 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 could do to stop it from happening. Do you want to stop it from? 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 to spit like a 27 year old me fought a 57 year old Mike Tyson.

1:41:58Yeah, he'd beat the fucking shit out of me. It'd be quick. But a 27 year old Jake Paul who can box in his 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, you know, I think he got as low as like 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 will want the speed. But he can knock people dead. He's a really good puncher.

1:42:37And he's a good boxer. Like he's fought very good boxers and he's knocked out a lot of former MMA stars. Including like Tyron Woodley was one of the greatest well to weights 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 is 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. We were just trying to tell me he sucks, you know, and Tommy Fury sucks.

1:43:11I mean he does not suck. Don't say he sucks. You don't know what you're talking about. Might not like him, but you should separate that. You can't. Yeah. You can't say specifically Tommy Fury's like he fights bombs. He's fighting his time for you. 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 steps and sets up shots, the way he's countering. He's a very high level boxer. He's a real professional caliber boxer and Jake Paul. That was his first loss.

1:43:41So he 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 he can cruise your way to guess he's in. You would go holy shit. Look at this guy. This guy's fun. He's wild. He wears all his 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 Asker and unconscious, which is you know, Ben Asker was not really a striker, but the point is like Nate Simmons at basketball player to see that fight.

1:44:16No. Oh my God. Dude. This is when 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 because he really believes in himself. But Jake Paul is actually a better boxer. But 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.

1:44:53So you could go fit like some of the greats like Julio says are 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 is constantly moving perfectly placed combinations, but he would wear your ass down over three, four or five rounds. And eventually you just crumble over the weight of the blows. You can't hit him. He's destroying you Mike Tyson is a one punch killer. Deonte Wilder's the greatest one. You think Tyson is such a genetic freak that his 57 may not have declined from his prime as much as a normal person.

1:45:26Yes and science. So here's the difference. 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 his human growth hormone levels with use of peptides, with use of testosterone. The difference between a young man and an old man is 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.

1:46:03They 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 50s. 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 sauna and cold punch. That's a different thing, man. Mike Tyson is that different thing. 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.

1:46:48He's still that guy. If you watch him hit myths, 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 at 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 disc. 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 20th. But when I look at him hit the pads and he's hitting pads with this guy, Hafehl Cordero, who's a legendary MMA trainer.

1:47:31He comes from a shoot the box in Brazil. Kurt Tiber, Brazil created like one of the wildest, most aggressive mixed martial arts fighters ever. Anderson Silva, Van Delay Silva, Marillo Shogun. All these guys who came out of there were monsters. And Hafehl 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 myths with Mike Tyson and Mike Tyson is some mashing with myths. That's what I saw. So this is like right now 57 year old. See if you can find some of that. Not the older stuff, but the newer stuff.

1:48:08It'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. Yeah, I mean, I'm 100 % rooting for Mike Tyson. Oh, of course, obviously, of course everybody should be. And you know, Jake Paul is probably probably a little scared. You know, as much as he thinks he's the younger guy. He's a tough guy. He's a really good boxer. And he probably be able to do it. Look at this. Yeah, give me some volume. Terrifying.

1:48:54That's still Mike Tyson. Yeah, that's still what I see in my nightmares. And that is a guy who's on testosterone. That's a guy who's on human growth. 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 according. This was updated today. And you say today the fight must still be approved. Oh, interesting. It's only been announced on the calendar for the AT &T stadium. Interesting. They've not been approved by the Texas board. Interesting. Well, there's probably going to be a lot of pressure for them to not approve it.

1:49:30Just 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. Just. I listen to your podcast with Kurt Metzger, who I know and I've been on his podcast had a great time on his spot. 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, what I'm saying is 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.

1:50:15There'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 ,000, 40 ,000 something like that. I don't think the number is known, but it's tens of thousands.

1:50:53So 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 lifted, but 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 can see what you're saying if you wanted to look at it cold and objectively. Yeah, but I don't still I hope it doesn't come across cold because it's mostly women and children that are dying that are that are dying because they're in a place where these terrorists are right.

1:51:39I 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 the most recently. Yes. Yeah. So it's real. It's not just this 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?

1:52:22My 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 it's getting through the border. Israel is allowing it in. But then what happens is the IDF doesn't control the delivery. The deliveries control by humanitarian organizations like Unra and just other a whole bevy of humanitarian organizations. And they have these aid convoy is going to people, but then Hamas hijacks it random gang of people, Palestinians hijack it, hungry civilians hijack it.

1:53:11And 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. Oh, okay. So yes, that was 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.

1:54:03But 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 in in the distribution of aid or in the hoarding of aid or in the stealing of aid or in the taking of aid 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 it's those people that the Israeli soldiers shot.

1:54:40No, I think I think it turned into it could have been a panic firefight and they killed the killed civilians. What caused the panic fire? I don't I don't think there's details that I don't know. So that one I don't know was that they were shooting people that were trying to get aid. Yes, yes. 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. Right. 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.

1:55:18There are war crimes by berserk soldiers by the good guys. Yeah. 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.

1:56:07It's you're 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 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 they're not going to hand out candies to people who kill Palestinians, civilians like Hamas, us in reverse. And so my feeling about it is still that you know any nation that suffered what Israel did on October 7th, everyone in the country would be saying you have to go get these guys.

1:56:54You have to eliminate this organization that did this. And if they're 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 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.

1:57:30That'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. It turns out the bomb actually hit the parking lot of the hospital right in a very small amount of time. Yeah. So there is some there's 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 blowing up their infrastructure and bombing the mosques and bombing whatever the schools, they're doing it because Hamas is in those schools.

1:58:14They're doing it because they have good faith intelligence that Hamas is in those schools and they tell them these people are using human shields and they just they just say, well, the most important thing is getting rid of mosques. Yeah, the laws of war say you cannot target a church of mosque a hospital. But if the enemies turns that hospital into a military operation site as Hamas does, which is it's routine for them. Then it can become legitimate. You have to do a proportionality assessment. Is it worth killing this many civilians to get the bad guys? And that's that's a judgment call that I think reasonable people can disagree on on a case by case basis.

1:58:56And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I would disagree with that I would agree with every bombing that that Israel has made. I might think I'm certain there's one that that was not worth it. You killed too many people for. Yeah, but 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. Yeah, which is a war crime. It's it's implying like he 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?

1:59:30It's 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 4 ,000 ISIS. This is 19 ,000 civilians dead to kill 13 ,000. It's not it's not that you know the the what's what's unique about this war unlike every other war that I could think of is is you have a an army in Hamas that has perfected the art of embedding itself and meshing 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 used to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten right under a mosque.

2:00:37So this is a challenge no army has faced and so that that's what makes this war different and yes the I agree with all of the the absolute tragedy and suffering of the Palestinian people but it's what 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.

2:01:24It'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 it's very ugly to watch it's it's heartbreaking and I completely understand why people don't think about it. I 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 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.

2:02:08They could fight with impunity you know that they could they could attack they can 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 this this 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 just be in power. They would justify attacks and that they would always have someone to attack they would they would always have some reason to push forward.

2:02:45I think 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. Yeah he was funding yeah he but you know the whole world was funding Gaza you know the EU in America too because we don't want people to start. But the idea is you're going to keep Hamas in place because Hamas is so scary and terrible and everyone recognizes their terrorist organization and they don't let you're on a college campus. Right right right and Hamas doesn't even pretend to want the two state solution whereas Palestinian authority is more moderate they have become close or seemingly come close.

2:03:28So 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. Right. So that's the idea is that Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas in power and that was based on comments comments that he made at a meeting although there's 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.

2:04:09Which I think makes makes no I mean the first 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. But if they're divided he never has to deal with that. What does it make sense at all is that he somehow false flagged the October 7th so that he could take over over Gaza for two reasons one nobody he's wanted to take over Gaza not even Egypt. Nobody wants to run it.

2:04:50There's no strategic advantage and advantage for Israel to run it. Well Israel occupies it so if it's no longer Gaza if it's part of Israel like Israel's expanded its boundaries throughout its history right sure but no nobody has actually the Gaza strip 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 it's it's 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 it was more of a headache to manage than it was worth.

2:05:42Secondly October 7th 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 going to be run out in shame well so why would they protest but weren't they protesting him before yes for months on the streets thousands of people. Yes they were and it was because he was trying to expand the powers of the court he was trying to diminish the power of the court. 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 a liberal court that can check the power of the right wing party that netanyahu runs.

2:06:36And so there are 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 know what this is going to acknowledge.

2:07:20I'm not I'm not I'm not a I'm not a touch this at all I mean I don't even agree with it myself right I'm just saying that this is like a concept that people throw around like so encounter to that concept I would argue netanyahu was elected. Just before this whole judicial form thing happened the fact that the left was protesting it doesn't mean that netanyahu was in kind of an existential situation his base loved loved him. If anything the protest fired up his base even more so it was kind of like the women's march after Trump one. 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 7th 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 the if it was a false flag it would be the dumbest false flag.

2:08:26So there's no chance it's a false flag. So the other conspiracy theory would be that they had four knowledge of it but they allowed it to happen this is one that gets attached to 9 -11 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 if you're the Masad or the shinbet you have Hamas you have Hamas and Gaza Hamas. Hamas and 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 14 -15 different threats and plans on Israel right.

2:09:13Some of them small some of them huge. How do you distinguish between the ones that are likely to happen in the ones or not. This is a very difficult thing it's not obvious right. You use your intelligence you try to have spies in all 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 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 is going to happen on October 7th. They didn't know the scale of it or how successful it was going to be.

2:09:48How was it so successful if they have the most sophisticated surveillance system. How was it so successful. Why how were they able to pull that off. So it was partly because normally Israel would have lots of lots of IDF station 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 blamed 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.

2:10:35One 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 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. This happens with groups all the time. They fought with Hezbollah in 2006 but the assumption has been that Hezbollah hasn't really made a major plans to attack full scale even though their army is way stronger than Hamas.

2:11:29Hezbollah 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 would have been the leader of Hamas. If they knew how badly you were going to come after us because of our raid in 2006 we never would have done it. Signalling that essentially Hezbollah is not going to do anything even though they hate Israel, even though the whole organization started to fight Israel, they're not going to do anything right now. This is 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.

2:12:11And 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 what do you think they thought would happen if you go across the border and you kill 1 ,200 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, kaboots to kaboots, barely encountering any resistance for the first couple hours.

2:12:50There's no way that they thought they would be that successful, I think. And how are the people there not armed? They are armed. Israelis are all the people in the settlements. So the problem is the the kaboots is 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's where all those are the super there. That's right. And these are all the super left wing Israeli hippies communists that literally they live in communes. Kaboots is a commune. They're very little ideal like beautiful villages and they're the most left wing part of Israeli society.

2:13:27They have a lot of love for the Palestinians. They're the people that go over into Gaza and when someone needs hospital they'll drive them from Gaza to Israel. So they were not the hardliners. They're probably the ones I don't know how armed they would be in that kind of a town. 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're people who are like you know they're living in communes. What do 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.

2:14:11That they would just go all out. Yes, but I think that from Hamas's 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.

2:14:55They're thinking about 50, 100 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 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 where 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.

2:15:33Interesting. Have you had a debate with anybody about this? Yeah, I had this guy, Yusuf Munair, 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. Oh, right. I've had I've also had correspondence on email with Norman Finkelstein, but how was that? Did he yell at you? Yeah, he did. All caps. Yeah, he called me a black shop as Goy. What does that mean? I didn't even know what that meant.

2:16:13Did you look it up? Yeah, it's well, it's 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. And so Finkelstein called me a black shop as Goy and applying that I'm kind of doing the dirty work of the Jews as a non -Jew, which is which is kind of weird to go to a character attack like that. And it's not what he usually does. He's also a terror character. Yeah, I was like I have to look this one up in Jesus Christ.

2:16:50Yeah, that's a guy who's playing Dennis Miller on you. What is that mean? Using references that he like with the fuck is he talking about? Yeah, you got to look it up. Dennis Miller used to do that like it was part of his stand -up routine. Right. He used references that like the average person is to do no idea. He might not have been Norm McDonnell. Do you know what he doesn't know what he's talking about? Why is he doing that? Crowd likes that. I was part of his stick of being the smartest guy in the room. I hit that. Yeah, well, he was a good comic. Dennis Miller was a very, very good comic.

2:17:19But part of it like if you go watch like his HBO special, it's excellent. It's a very good comic. But that was part of his thing. It's like he was a swarmy guy that was part of his thing. And then he turned into a right wing guy right after 9 -11. 9 -11. Okay. Snap him over. I've never seen this guy. Dennis Miller? No. Really? No. Is he still 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 him so much material there.

2:17:54There was so much material. It was so fun. But he wouldn't, you know, smoke him out of their holes. Yeah. He was an odd duck. You know, and I go to the seller all the time. I see I see the up and coming comics. 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 a great comic. I always try to go when it tell us there because he's oh my god. Dude, he was in town. He was down at my club and it's like God, it was like watching like a Hendrix 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.

2:18:33The 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 to 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.

2:19:08It's such a 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 like, this is a real golden era for stand up comedy. There's so many great comics alive right now. Yeah. That are touring. It's like fucking 20 guys that sell out arenas. That's never happened before ever. Really? Not in the history of comedy. So why is that a goal? I think the internet for sure. The internet because people who maybe HBO wouldn't give them a special or comedy central would give them a special.

2:19:46Now they just put it out on YouTube. Yeah. And then they get six million views. And I was like, oh my god. And then they're selling out everywhere. That's amazing. Yeah. It's incredible. It's like just gotten rid of the barriers between the the the artists and the people. Yeah. Completely gotten rid of the barriers. No more gatekeepers. It's a podcast or 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 Tik Tok or Instagram Reels at all?

2:20:17I just I don't put my stuff on Instagram Reels. I guess maybe I make a real every now and then but I don't like do you consume it? Yes. You do consume it. I mean so. I don't do Tik Tok 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. Oh yeah. The gas cam. That's crazy. Yeah. A gas trucks falling down on people. Yeah. You 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.

2:20:53Oh, do you want to clear get are you sure? Of course I'm sure it's fucking sensitive. And so you're watching some guy you know sticks some guy up 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 Tik Tok 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.

2:21:26And they're just sitting there on a Tik Tik Tik live stream 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 drawing. Yeah, absolutely. And you know you could anybody could make a tick tock count. Yeah. But that's the other part about it is that you I've seen so many entertainers on Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok. They never would have they would have just been a funny guy to their friends.

2:22:00Right. You know. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, it's a strategy for a career now. Yeah, you can really become a very famous Tik Tok 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. It's a huge goal. Like Jonathan hate talked about it. There's like somewhere like 50 % of the kids they asked today 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? No, it is like I want to be famous.

2:22:34Like maybe there's just one guy. I want to be a rock star. Wow. Look, Johnny wants to be a rock star. That's crazy. Everybody else is trying to get a job. Now kids realize that like young outrageous people who are fun to watch can make millions of dollars. Just make it silly content videos. Yeah. Or you could be a guy like Mr. Beast or you create your own empire. Like what? Some young 20s. 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 you know a robot can replace you.

2:23:06Yeah, which is what's going to happen to a lot of people in the near future. Yeah. 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 curve. I 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 consume creative endeavors. It can. I mean, you 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.

2:23:43And you got to catch the bad guy. What did he do wrong? Like here's some scenarios and it could just write down. It's a script 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 good as it won't be able to perform them like David tell because I can't perform David tells jokes. Right. Yeah. You have to be David tell to perform those jokes. Right. It's like there's a is the 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.

2:24:16There's things that's Theo Vaughn says. He says it's fun. So 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 Manisalco. He's developed a style. There's like a style that people. He's so physical. Yeah. Yeah. But there's also like a style of his outrage. It's 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. You know, so will they be able to create one of those probably not now. Maybe I don't know.

2:24:53I 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 concentric. 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 up perfect score in the SAT is not impressive. Yeah. 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.

2:25:29Subconsciously 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.

2:26:12Like 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, 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.

2:26:54And I have a feeling it will not just be replicated, but it would be surpassed and it would be surpassed so quickly that we'll 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 open AI? I don't know what's going on with that. Oh, it's super interesting to me at least. Yeah. All right. So Elon started, well, was part of co -founding this nonprofit organization called open AI six, seven years ago, whenever it was, he put a lot of money into it.

2:27:35And 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 open AI 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, an 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.

2:28:16So he funded this. And then what they did is open AI, made took a series of steps to essentially become a for profit company. And they created a for profit, an LLC, 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 a mouse being under a hospital. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, wow. So, and then what happened is Microsoft got in. 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.

2:29:10Once you've got the once you got the for profit, you're your 10 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 my own. I don't actually know what they own, but maybe like 49 % of the company. Right. So that open act 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 close source, meaning, you know, no one can see the code and there's essentially now just a for profit company creating working precisely at cross purposes with the original nonprofit.

2:29:54And 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.

2:30:43Oh, yeah, emails to show don't 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're definitely seemed like it was 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 open AI.

2:31:27The post continues. He then suggested instead merging open AI into Tesla in early February 2018, Elon forwarded us email suggesting that open AI 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. I made the refusal to grant Musk total control the blog claims the SpaceX founder soon chose to leave open AI saying that our probability of success was zero and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla must created his own AI company X AI last year.

2:32:12We're sad that it's come to this with someone who we deeply admired someone who inspired us to aim higher than told us we would fail starting a competitor and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards open AI's mission without them. The blog says. Yeah, so it seems like there could be a fault on both sides. From my point of view, it's it's indisputable that open AI 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.

2:33:03And if the competitors are other superpowers where it would be absolutely terrifying if they achieve sentient artificial AI, they have control over for us. Yeah, it's kind of a national security imperative. I would agree. So then are if they don't get the funding from a for profit. What? So how do they do it then? Well, that's 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.

2:33:49And 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 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 we curse while 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.

2:34:42I think I'm an answering machine in my house. 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, call like you would you'd be able to have someone called you would get like a note like someone else is called hold on a second and you click over. So you could talk to someone and they put the other person on hold for a second and click back like ran an office. This is madness. And then it was call or ideas. You couldn't just call someone right they would know it's Mike. I want to talk to Mike.

2:35:19I really gave people all that's up, you know, someone a solicitor. And so to 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'd 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 and just streaming and people documenting every fucking stage of their life and only fans and all this wild stuff that's out there now, including just the sub stack 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 own news.

2:36:12It'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 going to 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 computers that are a million times stronger than what we currently have. Fuck man. Yeah. And these things are going to then if they 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.

2:37:00Like what are limited ability to use batteries like 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 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. And I can make it so it goes up your nose and you never have to do anything ever again.

2:37:35Use 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 the last gasp of a dying civilization is like this. Like it's not no one's going to go peacefully into this next it's going to be screaming and flailing and that's kind of what our culture is doing. Our culture I think we and 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 were realizing and particularly that when you look at like Biden being the president you realize it's not one person that really has a grip on what the fuck is going on.

2:38:24And 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 saying it all is great change in the world. And then we have robots that are there they're figure out a way to make these fucking robots better and 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 never lived. Oh yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And it's going to be a thing.

2:38:55It'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 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 in no way of living.

2:39:40And I have to have faith that with the massive changes that are going to come in the next 10, 15 years with respect to intelligence where we'll no longer become the dominant entity in terms of intelligence. I have to believe that we'll find a way to make it work to our benefit and not destroy us. Perhaps. Yeah, I'm always optimistic. I try to be optimistic. I know people that have made every preparation for the world ending in the next 10 years because of this issue. Yeah, I said don't save your money, you know, someone and so forth. I don't know if that's going to help you. I don't know if preparing is going to help or rather don't prepare because it's all over, right.

2:40:24Yeah, 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. You're not going to be able to 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 super intelligence. We're dominating by a living God that we created and that if you just exponentially take artificial general intelligence, if we achieve ascentient intelligence that's far smarter than all the people that live combined. It's just like this one thing and it can act autonomously.

2:40:57You 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 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.

2:41:51But 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. 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 the curious thing that figures out of use tools. 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. Our idea of artificial intelligence, I try to just call it digital intelligence whenever I can.

2:42:38I even think that's not good enough. It's a life form. We're giving birth to a life form. That life form is going to give birth to better versions of life forms and that's going to give birth to better versions of itself. It's going to get so sophisticated, so quick that we're not going to be able to keep up with it. 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, all sorts of different ways it could use power that we don't need to burn coal. It's going to figure out ultra -sophisticated quantum ways to achieve efficiency far beyond anything we could ever comprehend because we're primate minds.

2:43:19We're limited biologically and it's not going to be limited at all. I think if we get that God, my hope is that we're not going to be 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 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.

2:44:25That's a wonderful way to look at it. The problem is if I was artificial intelligence, if I was some super intelligence, 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, 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 us.

2:45:07Killer whales are in danger to quantum intelligence, the fucking octopus, they're not, they're just 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 woolly mammoths, there's no talk about making Neanderthals. True, why is that? Because it's fucking crazy. It'd be a problem for us. It'd be a problem for violence. Yeah, we'd be arresting them. Yeah, they'd be crazy violent things that are from a different time.

2:45:48I mean, if you got like a pure version of one somewhere or another, like if you found like some frozen, like they found that guy that won, what's his name? Otzi, is that his name? What 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 ice man. 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 5 ,000 and 5 ,000 and 30 years ago.

2:46:36This guy fell. He was about 45 years old and he was completely frozen. Sounded out of the 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 the woolly mammoth. They're like really close. That's awesome to cloning a woolly mammoth. I think that's so cool. It's wild. I mean, it's wild. 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 jeans of an Indian elephant.

2:47:15And they're woolly mammoth DNA. And they're going to, they're apparently going to be able to pull this off. Like within the next few years, they will have a baby woolly mammoth. Wow. Which is bananas. I mean, that's just bananas. And then they can also, they're going to ready make AI generated videos of woolly mammoths that look perfect. Yes. Yes. Like cinematically perfect. 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. Great. Great. Great movie. But the CGI is so obvious. It's amazing how what was Harry Potter like 2001?

2:47:53Yeah, 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. Like 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 it was my point. But it looks a bit hunky now. The orcs look hunky. Yeah. Well, that's just how it goes. Yeah. 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?

2:48:27And they were scared. They're like, 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 going to watch it. I think it's so silly. So I showed him King Kong. So at the beginning, they were like super nervous. Like King Kong got nothing like, Oh my God. My daughter's like, it looks like a porta potty. Yeah. Like, it looks so dumb. Yeah. 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.

2:49:04This is madness. It blew people away. They couldn't believe it when Faye Ray was in that fake hand. Why are we watching? This is crazy. And 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 and 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 reaching the night like 99 % of the way to perfect? Yes. My friend Duncan Trussel just did a podcast with his friend Johnny Pemberton and Johnny Pemberton pretended to be like a former CIA agent.

2:49:42They 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 we 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. It's 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 piece that it was something he never really wanted to do.

2:50:32And then they showed it on television. This is how they did it. So they had like a thing. They said it took pieces out of all these speeches and took all these words and pieced it together to have Reagan say something they never said. I was like, wow, this is crazy. You're not going to know what he said because someone could do this. And as now we just watched Hitler speak English. That's crazy. You know, I mean, and that's clumsy. You know, it was 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.

2:51:04And 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 not taking place yet. I had David Trollmers, you know, that guy philosopher on my podcast. He wrote a whole book about the simulation theory. Really smart guy.

2:51:40I 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 to, 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 from 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.

2:52:15Make it a little nicer. Yeah, not make a Gaza. Not make a mosque. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, 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 indesernable from regular reality. And when you see that guy with the neural link 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. We were blown away. This is nuts. And it was just black and white and there was like a little stick figure on like a stick on this side and stick on that side.

2:52:55And the little balls like 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 on playing video games with his brain because he's paralyzed with neural link. 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. And you're going to see T -rexes. You know, you're going to see velociraptors running around.

2:53:30You're going to 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 going to be wild. And it's going to 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.

2:54:05Somehow when I was 12, I just stopped playing the video games and never went back. I'm really glad. You get good instincts. Yeah. People suck a lot of time. And it's way more fun than regular life. That's the problem. It's so enjoyable. And you're playing this thing, you're fully engaged, and you're a drylin ''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 can do it anytime you want. You get home from a club at two o 'clock in the morning, go, you know, I'm fucking plays with Call of Duty. Whoa, you're online engaging.

2:54:39And you're just getting all this sensory input. And you shut it off. And you're just like, here, you feel terrible. When I played video games when I was done, I felt terrible. Oh, yeah, especially for a few hours. You feel horrible. Drined and exhausted. I think that's what got me to stop. Yeah, you feel terrible. You also feel like, what am I doing with my life? You feel like you never feel awesome after you play video games for 10 hours. No. If you're a grown man with bills, you're like, it's fucking wrong with me. Jesus Christ. But it's going to be way better than that. It's going to be way better.

2:55:10It'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 that it's going to be. And then they're going to get better at that. And it's going to get to a point where they don't have to do that anymore.

2:55:47You 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 movement, your sensations, you're going to feel things. It's going to be bizarre, man. And people are going to choose that over regular life. And that's probably how AI is going to keep us from breathing. 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 the statistic now?

2:56:22It's something crazy. Like 90%. It's like 10 % of all men are attractive to 90 % of the women. I think that's always been true though. Right. Yeah. But now with like social media, it's 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 is like, people are so hot. You know, and there's always fitness influencers. And then you're just completely unattractive. Yeah. And that's how they get you to pump up your lips and do all this crazy stuff for them. And maybe they can't do anything. That most guys don't even like.

2:57:03Right. 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 role in 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 fill with anxiety and depressed. Or you put this thing on and it floods you with confidence because it literally in interfaces with your human neurochemistry. And so it gives you the feelings of excitement, of conquest, of everything, of lust.

2:57:40You're going to have relationships. You're going to be able to do all these things inside this artificial environment. There's going to be a woman like 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. And 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.

2:58:07We're living natural. We're not doing any of it. Yeah. Unibomber. 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. Yeah. And they'll probably make it and they'll probably survive. And one of the things that might end it is if artificial general 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.

2:58:45The people that built the pyramids and the people that built go back to the tap A and all these really ancient, incredibly sophisticated structures that were 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 up. Yeah. You were talking to me about Graham Hancock last time. Yeah. I remember. And the younger dry is impact theory. And this is all backed up now by science. It used to be purely speculation that until they found go back to the tap A they didn't even think people were building things. That sophisticated 11 ,000 years ago.

2:59:17But then they found that and they is 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 that. Like this is someone did this. It's uniform at this particular time. So now that they know that and then they started doing these core samples and they found out that there's really high levels of erudium 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 microglasses.

2:59:55And they find it all over Europe. Giant swaths of earth were covered with this stuff and erudium. Erudium 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 mollywaped 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. Oh sure. Whatever the fuck happened. And then it probably took a good solid 6 ,000 years till like Mesopotamia arrives.

3:00:32And then Babylonia and Sumer and all these ancient civilizations that we think of today as being the most earth place of mathematics and of written writing. But it's probably a redoing of civilization. Interesting. Yeah, I think that might be what saves, look look, that's what saved this planet from the dinosaurs. If that thing that hit the Yukiton 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 shh boom.

3:01:13And a five mile wide asteroid hits Los Angeles. Wow. And then you know, all powers out, everything gets rebooted. Do you see that movie leave the world behind? Yes. I thought it was, I saw it twice actually. That was good. That's, it could totally happen that way. Yeah, terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. When they realize it's the civil war just engineered very cleverly. Yeah. 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? Did people focus on that? Yeah. Oh, I didn't see that.

3:01:55Oh, because Obama produced the film. Wow. 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? Of course. Well, that was one of the points of the movies that it drives people against each other when they're in that scenario. Exactly. And for a young girl who like seems like kind of a wokester who's with her dad. She might think that way. Of course, that's how you write characters. Indoorcing it necessarily. Exactly. You can have your own opinion about it, but.

3:02:28Exactly. And then there's the other guy that Kevin Bacon plays who's just a crazy prepper who's been ready for it. And then there's the whole time. Oh, God. Yeah. That character is haunting because at the end of the movie, Ethan, Ethan Hunt, right? Ethan Hawk. Ethan Hawk. Ethan Hawk begs before him, you know, supplicates. Get 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. Woo. 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.

3:03:04Remember all the times we had. Yeah. It's fitting on me. It's really terrifying when you think of how fragile our infrastructure is. Like that bridge gets taken out by that boat the other day. Oh my God. The boat was terrible. The boat loses power. Immediately. Thousands of conspiracy theories. Oh yeah. You know, this is done on purpose. That's a sophisticated thing. Or it was done because of DEI or something. People were saying that on that song. I heard that one that it was done to kill. People are ports. And our ability to bring in stuff because the bridges were down. And you know, that's what I'd heard.

3:03:41I heard a bunch of things that. But they don't 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 goddamn ocean. And 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 people always like love to jump immediately to the most sophisticated engineering of a natural disaster or an unfortunate thing.

3:04:22And immediately cause it. Call it to be have caused by a false flag or by terrorists. I think it's the same reason why for 99 % of human history people thought the way they were. The way 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. Right. And back in the day, they would say the gods are angry. Yeah. Like a lightning hit you.

3:04:58You fucked up. What'd you do? Right. What'd you do, bro? God just smelt you. You just, gods might you down. Yeah. That's what's, 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 civilization. It's how much sacrifice. Yeah. How quickly they went to human sacrifice as the end be all a little solution. Like, what the fuck? Who's the first guy to think of that? Good question. Solid question. The wildest one. It's not obvious. That temple in Mexico. Oh, yeah, yeah. Tenukti -lon. Yes. Yeah. Where they killed some insane amount of workers, the people that built the temple when it was done, they sacrificed something insane.

3:05:42I want to say it's like 80 ,000 people over the course of just a couple days. Brutal. Find out what the actual numbers were. Yeah, but it's like, what? Like, sacrifice? Why? Was anyone checking to see if it worked? No. You know? Right. You couldn't question. No. It's like you can't question COVID. Things become doctrine in all human societies. Yeah, we're a creature of taboos. We create taboos by nature. Yeah, we love them. 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 the one of the most spectacular construction pieces in all Mexico.

3:06:30I 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 Tenok Tidlán? Yes. Okay. Chichen Itza is Aztec. Oh, okay. Excuse me. Chichen Itza is Mayan and Tinochtic Lahn is Aztec. Okay. But I've been to Tenok Tidlán. 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. That's amazing how the world would be different if you just changed that variable of Native Americans are able to sustain European durums.

3:07:16Yeah. You can be a whole different kind of country. A whole different world. I mean, what would it be like in 2024 if the minds 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 the number of famine that's gotten rid of so many diseases, it all became associated with the colonizer in their mind.

3:07:56And 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 going to 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 II to dominate all of Asia.

3:08:38Because they just made a conscious, 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 fact. 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.

3:09:27That'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 the minds in particular.

3:10:07If 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. Where would they be a thousand years later, two thousand years later? What would their culture be like? Imagine no one had ever visited the minds until 2024, and then you go and visit now. What are these motherfuckers up to? 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, absolutely. Pretty wild. It's very disputed.

3:10:51Oh, the killing the people, then? For the consecration of the great pyramid of Teal, how do you say it? Teanotian lawn? I said Teanotian lawn. Teanotian lawn. In 1487, the Aztec priest sacrificed 80 ,000 prisoners over the course of four days. The Aztecs usually sacrifice prisoners of war, these volunteers, criminals, and even their own. So what's the disputed part about it, John? There's not a lot of evidence that that many were done. They said that this number of 20 ,000 every year is across all of Mexico. I saw someone else just say another thing. The Aztec sacrificed 20 ,000 people every year.

3:11:32There's no talk about what they did with those 80 ,000 bodies. How did they choose the problem to deal with? Prisoners. Right, but they might have. Does it say they definitely killed 20 ,000 a year? Across all of Mexico. Right, but maybe they were good at that. What would you, if you did 20 ,000 in a day? Yeah, dig a pit, buddy. Light them on fire. I don't know. I just don't know how evidence of it. What would it say? Interesting. Well, what evidence would there be? I mean, there has to be. There has to be just that many. Right. But there has to be some sort of record, right? What is the reason why they came up on the 80 ,000 figure in the first place?

3:12:09I don't know. Interesting. The Spanish account claims that more than 80 ,000 enemy warriors were sacrificed in a four -day ceremony. And yet no evidence approaching 100 of that number has been found in the excavations of Tenocht Long. I guess if they were going to hold it, it would have dug up the body. Maybe let's say it had perhaps a deep enough air. 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. I wouldn't say sacrifice. My assumption would be that that would be a mass grave. They would say, like, this is what we used to do to them, too.

3:12:42Right. Here's pictures of it or something. Yeah. But yeah, it's just disputed as all. The number does come up. I'm seeing 5 ,020 ,000. Either way, how about more than one? They definitely sacrifice more than one person to appease their gods. It's a wild choice. I prefer to go along with the rain dances or 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. It's a great to talk to you, too, Joe. You're a really unique thinker and you have a great perspective on things.

3:13:15And I always appreciate talking to you, man. Thank you, man. My pleasure. And tell everybody one more time your books. By my book, The End of Race Politics, or Reviewed by Books. And I'm so glad you did the audio version of it. Yeah. And my voice wasn't scratchy like today, so it sounds good. You sound good today. Oh, thanks. All right. Thank you. Give it out to your social media. Oh, yeah, yeah. ColdXman on Twitter and my podcast is Conversations with Coleman. All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

3:13:47Bye.