#1383 - Malcolm Gladwell

Nov 13, 2019

Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, author, and public speaker. He is the host of the popular podcast "Revisionist History" and his new book "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know" is available now.

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deal so go to athletic greens.com / Rogan and you can claim this offer 20 free travel packs valued at $79 with your first purchase and you can also claim this offer in the UK and in Europe using the same URL that's athletic greens.com / Rogan do not miss this all right folks my guest today is one of my personal favorite authors he's the author of outliers it's a fantastic book he's writing a bunch of great books and he's got one now called talking to

jurors I love them and I really enjoyed talking to him and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did please welcome Malcolm Gladwell The Joe Rogan Experience trained by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day

hello Malcolm Hey Joe how you doing I'm doing very well you sound like you good good that's always a good sign but it's through headphones it's very interesting because I've been listening to talking to strangers uh-huh I like that you narrate your books it's very frustrating with someone who's a great speaker does not narrate their books so thanks for doing that no actually I kind of enjoy I used to hate that process

with my first one and then I've grown to enjoy it because of you when you say your book out loud you see it in a different way like oh you know you get a little bit of a different perspective on it well I'm a giant fan of your work man particularly outliers I really loved that book very Illuminating and sort of peels away the the mystery of talent and so tell me what you're doing what is this talking to strangers I'm into about I'm in the

second chapter right now oh I see well that was that was a book about I was struck by how many of the kind of high-profile cases that we got obsessed with were at their root about the same thing which is the individuals were two people didn't know each other well had an exchange and they got each other wrong so you know everything from Amanda Knox to Bernie Madoff to the

to Larry Nasser at Michigan State to Jerry Sandusky at Penn State and then to the signature case which the book is organized around which is the Sandra Bland case member though young woman Texas it gets pulled over by the side of the road yeah they're all at rude fundamentally the same problem which is there's a there's an exchange between and exchanges goes wrong and the question is why that's what I began to get really fascinated by is you

this point in human evolution Evolution we have got this thing about talking to strangers down hmm and we clearly don't and we're being pushed to talk more and more to strangers right in a kind of globalized world and if we're bad at it that doesn't bode well does it well I think there's also an issue today with people not learning the necessary skills and how to talk to people because so much communication is done digitally yeah that's it

it seems to be a giant issue with young kids they're more Awkward initially talking to people than I think I remember yeah yeah yeah I think that's probably you forget how much I mean adolescent adolescents used to be this one one long rehearsal in how to be a normal human being right conversation and now the rehearsal it's like they were also got cut in half and you know instead of getting to the point where we play basketball

basketballs were still just doing Wind Sprints or so you know mmm right no it's actually playing a game and I'm playing the game I'm butchering the metaphor you I know what you're saying nothing the Sandra Bland case how does that one fit in because that one that that girl was pulled over the cop was 10 she was failure to signal right I mean it's a bullshit thing it's a bullshit thing and she started lighting a cigarette he told told her to put the cigarette out and it all escalated from there

that she said she doesn't have to put the cigarette out and then he says he's got a light her up he's screaming at her he pulls her out of the car he rests her and then is there controversy about whether or not she committed suicide in jail there he is I don't get into that okay because it seemed that seemed unlikely that she was killed that you as opposed to getting so yes it seemed likely that she was killed versus she committed suicide

I think that someone would commit suicide being in jail for 3 Days especially one of the things that you highlighted in the book and you actually played in the audio version of it her little sort of affirmations you know and she was she sounds very positive and upbeat and calling everybody kings and queens and it was everything thanking God and being very thankful and being aware of of life and humility and just graciousness and gratitude

it didn't seem I mean obviously you don't know and what kind of dark things can happen to a person when they're incarcerated for three days for a bullshit reason without maybe that's the straw that broke the camel's back but she did have you know she had a complicated emotional history she had previously I tried to commit suicide and she had she was emerging from quite a difficult period in her life and went to Texas to start anew

thief and so there is an interpretation like I said I don't really have strong feelings on this particular part of the story but there's an interpretation that says here's a woman who's emerged from very difficult period in her life goes leaves you she was in Illinois she drives half across the country to start over and on the first day that she arrives in Texas to start over she gets pulled over by a cop and by the way she had thousands of dollars in outstanding

tickets so she had a history of this bullshit stuff with cops where you know the the same trap that many poor people in this country get into which is they get the police use people as an ATM right they like set them off for a non trivial things and when they can't find when the campaign to find they get another fun and when you know you have that ghost she was part of in that trap so here she is trying to start over

difficult time gets first day she gets to Texas she gets pulled over again and she in her mind it's the same she's like oh my God I tried to start over and I can't yeah and then she's in jail and she can't make bail and you know there's a scenario where you can see that she just began to despair don't they take away your shoelaces and do Old Town Texas yeah are they doing things by the book and I mean I find the whole thing about I went to that town when I was reporting

book and you know the it's kind of hard to be to kill to kill someone and get away get away with it requires a level of expertise in four thought that struck me was not present in that little town in Texas I mean a certain time it's just not I don't they're not lat do not think in this is these are not people playing chess right I think they it's just encountered it with this

cop and he's not very good at his job and he gets way over his head and he completely missed reads her and he pulls her off to jail probably deeply regrets the whole incident and they're all embarrassed in sitting around and hoping it'll just all go away and meanwhile she's all alone in a prison cells spiraling deeper and deeper into depression I mean it's I think it's almost more tragic that she commits suicide she committed suicide it's insane that you can keep someone in jail

jail for three days for failure to Signal it seems like there should have been an initial review of the circumstances that led to her getting pulled out of the car in the first place and the cops should have been fired immediately they just look you're screaming at her because she lit a cigarette yeah in their own car we well this is fascinating and I feel like I don't know you and I are probably the same age there's this so the cops 29 if you grew up with cigarettes you have a different understanding of the meaning of lighting a cigarette

that so what's happening in the encounter is he pulls her over what he does is he sees her coming out of this University campus and while she still on campus property she rolls through a stop sign and then he notices that she's got out-of-state plates and she's a young black woman and she's driving a Hyundai like not a not a Mercedes Benz and he thinks ha I'm going to check this out so he she pulls onto the road and he drives up behind

and her aggressively he speeds up behind her so what does she do well what any of us would do she gets out of the way thinking oh he's a he's going to he's going to you know the scene of an accident or something I better get his way she pulls over to get out of his way and he goes oh you didn't use your turning signal and he pulls him up pulls her over and put him behind her and by the way whenever I hear a fire department truck or a police car coming and I pulled over to get out of the way I do not use my turning signal right you just get

the way it's reflexive right so her immediate thought is what he does is like oh this is bullshit and he tricked me and he knows what he's doing that's exactly what he wanted he wanted to get her in situation because it's all a pretext he just wants he think so maybe there's something weird with her so then here we have this all on tape of course because this is in this is one of the reasons I was captured entirely on the dash cam the officers dash cam it goes up to the window and he says

he looks at her and he realizes she's agitated why because I haven't she's pissed off and he was ma'am is there something wrong and she's like well you know I want to know why I'm below over boola and then he goes back to his car and he comes back to her and he later says in a deposition that when he goes back to his to his vehicle to check on her license and registration he begins to develop suspicions that she's up to no good she's got drugs or guns and so she comes back and they commenced to have this

increasingly heated conversation and she lights the cigarette because she's trying to calm herself down and this is my point you and I who grew up in an era where people smoked all the time no that one of the principal functions of lighting a cigarette was to calm your nerves and in her mind I think in her mind she's trying to signal to the cop let's deescalate this and I'm one of the ways I'm going to show you that I want to deescalate this is I'm going to take a moment

and I just cigarette and just take it down a notch and let's have a real conversation he doesn't understand the meaning of that gesture and he thinks oh she thinks several things he thinks one she's messing with me she's defying my authority by lighting a cigarette she's going to blow smoke in my face or something you know nefarious or she's gonna like take the lighted cigarette and put it out of my he has those kind of weird crazy fantasies this is what he said you

position oh yeah he so even on the level I try and identify in the book all of the different ways and this is when I come back to the case at the end of the book I go through this in more detail all the different ways in which he completely misunderstands her and one of them is he doesn't understand the meaning of lighting a cigarette in a moment of tension and that's you know still more evidence why you need if you're a cop or anyone dealing with a stranger you need to slow down and just not jump to any conclusions because

there's so much you can miss

what it seemed to me when I listened to it initially and then I listen to it again and your audio book there's a thing that happens with police officers and I've never been a police officer but I was a security guard for a brief period of time and I recognize it in myself and I recognized in a lot of people that I work with is that you start treating the other people like the other like it's us and them it was us the sky worked at great great Woods it's a performance center in Mansfield Massachusetts like this

and we would catch a lot of people smuggling booze in things like that and there was an attitude that you got and I was only there for one summer but there's an attitude of they were they were the bad people you were the good guys it was us and them and we stuck together and they weren't us and cops get that a hundred times worse because there's guns involved and they can get shot at we've all seen videos of

got cops pulling people over and he says can I see your hands please and guy pulls out a gun and shoots out them we've all seen those videos those are this is always in the back of the mind of cops yeah and I think that was just a guy who as you said 29 years old is a young guy he's not that bright not good at communication and he is this attitude that he's a cop and that you have to listen to the cops because he's them and you're you yeah and that that's like when he

telling her to put the cigarette out and she's saying I don't have to do that and he's saying get out of your vehicle and she's saying I don't have to do that and then he's screaming at her I mean that's that's all right there I mean it seems like to me he wants compliance he wants her to listen he does yeah he does what he gets it's funny the what's remarkable about that tape which I must have seen 50 times and which has been viewed on YouTube you know even a couple million times is how quickly it escalates yeah

no the whole thing is it's insanely short yeah you you would think if I was telling you the story of this you would think oh this unfolds over 10 minutes and it doesn't it unfolds over a minute and a half and that what I remember years ago I wrote my second book blink and I have in that book a chapter about a very famous Infamous police shooting in New York case of Amadou Diallo I remember that remember that when we shot like 40 times by cops

and one of the big things I was interested in talking about that case was how long does it take how long did it take for that hole

terrible sequence to go down so from the moment the police developed suspicions about Amadou Diallo to the moment that Amadou Diallo is lying dead on his front porch how long how much time elapsed and the answer is like two seconds it's bumbu is like and I had a conversation with actually here in the valley with Gavin de Becker has he ever been on your show no fascinating guy we were

three experts security expert incredibly interesting guys friends with Sam Harris I know that yes yeah and he was talking about this question of time that when you're a security guard guarding someone you know famous a lot of what you're trying to do is to inject time into the scenario instead of you don't want something to unfold in a second and a half where you have almost no time to react properly and what you want to do is to undo it to unfold in 5 seconds if you can add a

I'm making this up I can't remember his exact term but basically what your job is is to add seconds into the the encounter so that you have a chance to intelligently respond to what's going on and so he was hit this great riff about how good Israeli secret secure Secret Service guys are and one of the things they do is they're they're either not armed or they don't they're trained not to go for their weapons and

situations because it's point is so say you're guarding the president your body man but the president you walking through a crowd somebody comes up to you like pulls a gun wants to shoot the president it's point is if you're the secret security guy and your first instinct in response to someone pulling a gun is to go for your own gun you've lost a second and a half right your hands got to go down to your your whole focus is on getting to your own gun and in the meantime the other guy whose guns already out

has already shot you've lost you need to be someone who forgets about your own gun and just focuses on the on the man in front of you right and protecting the president but it was all in the context of time is is really crucial variable in these kinds of encounters and everything as a police officer you should be doing is slowing it down wait you know analyze what's happening and that's what he doesn't do the

in this instance speeds it up right he goes to Defcon you know she lights a cigarette and within seconds he screaming at her this is a you know a parent shouldn't do that I mean let a little police officer by the side of the highway right but the difference is he knows she's not a criminal

I mean he must know it's bullshit he's pulling her over because he's trying to write a ticket and the way he's communicating with her when she lights a cigarette it's like she's inferior like he this is not someone who's scared he's not scared of a perpetrators not scared that there's a criminal in the car about to shoot him he's not scared of that at all he wants utter total complete compliance and he's talking to her like like he's a Drill Sergeant the Kent

can't both those things be true

how so well in that so in the deposition he gives which I get to the end of the book and I got the tape of the deposition it's bad it's totally fascinating it's like he's sitting down with the investigating officer in the looking into the death of Sandra Bland and he's got I don't know how long it is two hours and he's walking them through what he was thinking that day and he makes the case that he was terrified that he was convinced he says he goes back to his squad car a boat

thumbs up and to submit through some evidence to support this so he pulls her over and he goes to the passenger side window and leans in and says ma'am you realize why I pulled you over blah blah and is he okay because he/she doesn't seem right to him she gives him her license he goes back to his squad car and he says while he's in the squad car he looks ahead and he sees her making what he calls furtive movements so he's like furtive movements also he thinks she's being all kind of Jumpy and you don't know

isn't he just says I saw her moving around in ways I didn't make me happy and then when he returns to the car he returns driver side which is crucial because if you're a cop you go driver side only if you think that you might be in danger right he doesn't if you go driver side you're exposing yourself to the road the only reason you do that is it when your driver side you can see the it's very very difficult if someone has a gun to shoot the police officer who's pulled them over if the police officer is on the driver side right you have an angle

on the passenger side so why does he go if he thinks she's harmless is no reason to go back driver side I think this guy I think these two things are linked I actually believe him he constructs this ridiculous fantasy about how she's dangerous but I think that's just what he was trained to do he's a paranoid cop and then why is he so insistent that she be compliant for the same reason because he's terrified is like do exactly what I say because I don't know what the what's going to happen here

right and she's you know I don't know I I don't think those two those two strains of of interpretation are mutually exclusive hmm that's interesting it didn't sound like he was scared at all it sounds like he was pissed that she wasn't listening to him yeah I didn't I didn't think he sounded even remotely scared I felt like he had I mean we're reading into it at right right I have no idea but from my interpretation was

he had decided that she wasn't listening to him and he was going to make her listen to him yeah that's what I got out of it I didn't get any fear and I thought that version of it that he described just sounds like horse shit it sounds like what you would say after the fact to strengthen your case well the so there's another element in here that I get into which is I got his record as a police officer it's a bit on the on the force for I forgot 9 10 months and we have a record of every traffic stop here

mermaid and when you look at his list of traffic stops Uris you realize that what happened that day with Sandra Bland was not an anomaly that he's one of those guys who pulls over everyone for bullshit reasons all day long so I think I've forgotten exact number but in the hour before he pulled over Sandra Bland he pulled over for people for other people for equally ridiculous reasons he's that cop and he's that cop because he's been trained that way right

kind of quotas strain strain of modern policing which says go beyond the ticket pull someone over if you if anything looks a little bit weird because you might find something else now if you look at his history as a cop he almost never found anything else his history is a copy in fact I went through those I forget how many hundreds of traffic stops he had in nine months if you go through them he has like once he found some marijuana on a kid and by the way the town in which he was working as a college town so I mean how hard is that

I think he found a gun once misdemeanor gun but everything else was like pulling over people for you know the the light above their license plate was out that that's the level of stuff he was using he did this all day long every day so he's like to him it's second nature yeah pull her over like who knows what's going on she's out of state she's young black woman was this comparable to the way the rest of the cops

force in his division did it well I looked at I didn't look at the rest of the cops on his voice what I looked at were State numbers to the wherever there are several American states give us like North Carolina for example will give us precise complete statistics on the number of traffic stops done by their police officers and the reasons for those stops so when you look at that so I have the I look at the North Carolina

numbers for example in the North Carolina Highway Patrol it's the same thing they're pulling over unbelievable numbers of people and finding nothing like night you know 1% less than 1% hit rates in some cases of being hit right being finding something of Interest so like the pulling over 99 people for no reason or to find one person who's got you know a bag of dope or something in the car you cannot conduct policing in in a civil society

Eddie like that and expect to have decent relationships between law enforcement and the civilian population yeah no question but doesn't that sort of support the idea that he's full of shit that he was really concerned that she had something he had never encountered anything well or or this was the one the fantasy and he's had his so what so the question is why does he keep doing it if this is got who day in day out pulls over people for no reason and finds nothing and continues to do it now there's two explanations one is he's totally cynical and thinks

this is the way to Be an Effective police officer exclamation number two is this is a guy who has a powerful fantasy in his head that one day I'm gonna hit the jackpot I'm gonna open the trunk and is going to be 15 pounds of heroin and I'm going to be the biggest star who ever lived I think there's also a rush of just being able to get people to pull over this the compliance thing which is another reason why he was so Furious that she wasn't listening to him yeah and she kept a cigarette lit yeah or she was listening but not complying yes yeah

what are the laws I mean are you allowed to smoke a cigarette in your car when a cop pulls you over how does it work like that yeah I mean of course yeah we can't stop you from a gauging they can't tell you to put out your cigarette there's no law that go he could have said mean no there's no law I mean by the Colorado two things the courts historically give enormously way to the police officers in a traffic stop as opposed to a person to person stopped but but

no I I mean this is about what he should have said is he could have said ma'am do you mind I would prefer if you put out the cigarette while we're talking or I'm allergic to smoke or whatever I mean he's a million ways to do it nicely he said yeah but he's he's a jackass about but he's I mean he's basically doing the job like a jackass he's doing a jackass version of being a cop well so this is so this is one of a really really crucial

in the argument of the book which is

I think the real lesson of that case is not that he's a bad cop he is in fact doing precisely as he is was in trained and instructed to do he's a he's the ideal cop and the problem is with the particular Philosophy of Law Enforcement that has emerged over the last 10 years in this country which has incentivized and encouraged police officers to engage in these incredibly low reward activities like pulling over

a hundred people are to find one person is because something wrong that is become enshrined in the strategy of many police forces around the country they tell them to do this I have a whole section of book right go through in detail of one of the most important police training manuals which is you know required reading for somebody coming up and which they just walk you through this like it is your job to pull over lots and lots and lots and lots of people even if you only find something in a small percentage of cases

why that's what being a proactive police officers all about right so they are trained at that phrase go beyond the ticket is a is a term of Art in police training like you got to be thinking you sure you pull them over for having a tail light that's out but your look you're thinking beyond that is there something else in the car that's problematic that's to try to find so there he was being a dutiful police officer in the the answer is to re-examine our

philosophies of law enforcement not to not I mean you can't dismiss this thing by saying oh that's just a particularly bad cop right that great but I don't know if he's any worse than you know he's just doing what he was trained to do that's the issue should be treated with him and efferent right that is the issue right the issue is there this is standard practice to treat citizens that are doing nothing wrong as if they're criminals yeah and pull them over and give them extreme paranoia and freak them out yeah I I find

I was home I'm Canadian and I was home in Canada small town Canada couple weeks ago and I saw in the back you know how these guys always have their often had a slogan on the side of the car the back of the car so in my little Hometown and Southwestern Ontario sleepy you know Farm country the the slogan on the back of the police cars is people helping people so Canadian right it is so clean it's awesome like the external understand this is a country

tree with very very low levels of gun ownership which means that a police officer does not enter into an encounter with a civilian with the same degree of fear or paranoia that the civilian has a handgun right which is a big part of this regardless of how one feels about gun laws in this country the fact that there are lots of guns mean makes the job of a police officer a lot harder and every police officer will tell you that in Canada the you don't have that fear but it's also Canada and its small town Canada and so when you encounter a police officer in

will Town his like he's people helping people he's like he's like driving like a Camry and he's you know he's like this genial person who's really camera means I forgotten exactly what they're dry they're not like they're not driving ex-coworkers yeah explorers painted black with like big bull bars at the front right and then you go you know I was you go I mean even in La you know I like the cars are painted black and white they them so they look for

ferocious I mean the whole thing is that what it is to look ferocious do I just look they identify as police to connait to a Canadian looks to me it looks a little why do they have to paint them black for that's nothing Oakland Raiders I mean it's like what do you think they should pay them something mild and like bright yellow something lovely something wobbly like a nice can you imagine like a teal or lime green well that would be yeah because there's a lot of black cars a lot of white cars on a lot of teal cars it's go

so it would stand out like oh it's cop is pink car but you know this kind of symbolism right matters right right you all expecting an image Sheriff Joe Arpaio who makes all of his prisoners wear pink yeah yeah that's kind of thing well I mean to against his point though how many women shoot cops isn't that an insanely low number yeah I mean insanely low I mean what are the numbers mean it's probably almost

an existent guys pull over women I don't think they're worried about being shot I really don't I think it's horseshit I think it's all after the fact yeah he was trying to concoct some sort of an excuse I'm going to excuse for is he still on the force I know here has either he's kicked off for I forgotten the precise language they use but for basically being impolite to a civilian but yeah I don't think there's a lot of I don't know

I mean I still think we're saying the same thing which is the thing that's driving him his motivation is not rational right and if you were a rational actor you would never engage in an activity where 99.9% of your police stops resulted in nothing burn your he's he is often some weird kind of fantasy land for a reason which is that's what in certain jurisdictions in this country that's what law enforcement has come to look at look like

that's that's problematic it's a huge problem yeah the Power Trip aspect of it I mean you know I've often said what would they do you know because there are certain out there certain areas where police officers do have quotas or they have to write a certain amount of tickets what will they do if no one broke the law for six months welcome to the show that's what small town Canada yeah it's right it's not what would they do I mean I really be curious like what would happen to the numbers like because you boy

you're saying that these people is an ATM there really do mean people are their glorified Revenue collectors they're pulling people over trying to write huge tickets and I believe is North Carolina where you're talking about that's got this creepy law that they've recently I think they've recently changed it where you're allowed to just confiscate people's money because if you see like I pull you over hey Malcolm why do you have three thousand dollars on you yeah you have $3,000 in cash what are you doing with $3,000 Kimmy

that money and they take it and you have to prove that you weren't going to buy heroin or by illegal guns or whatever and then most of that money wound up going to the police department yeah so they used it to like build a fucking gym for the cops or whatever I mean he's literally they had an incentive to keep the money and is that North Carolina that they did that there's a number of states that have Carolina that have this confiscation civil four people lost yeah and they're really gross do they still have that orders

I mean I know it's check extremely controversial and people are up in arms and Furious that you know their money has been stolen people on the way to buy a car for instance you know and they get pulled over in the Kabul just take all the money this is what I talked a little bit about the Ferguson case in my book later on tonight this is what Ferguson was ultimately about the focus in the Ferguson case was whether the officer in that case is Darren Wilson what he did and didn't do to Michael Brown but the real

story when the barber just has investigated the real story is not being kind of chinos to it is that that that the police department in Ferguson was being run as a revenue-generating arm of the city government and people in city government were directing the activities of law enforcement to maximize revenue and at this is incredible stories of there's one story where there's a guy who's just been playing basketball and he's sitting in his car

parked by the basketball court like cooling off after play basketball cop roles in pulls up behind him and ends up writing eight tickets including accuses the guy being a pedophile gets him for one of these you get some is putting a false name on his driver's license when his driver's license his real name was like Michael and his driver's license had Mike like that's the level of eight tickets right that was routine practices

and so you you know you there's a reason why a kid like Michael Brown in Ferguson is gets really angry at law enforcement because law enforcement was a completely discredited institution in that City for years and years and years and years and years they had been basically praying they had been praying on the on the low-income community of that town so of course relationships between the population and the cops had reached a low ebb that's a real

you know there's a it's funny the one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was then the kind of conversations we have around these things Frozen is a great example 95% of the conversation about Ferguson was just about trying to break down what happened between a cop and Michael Brown and the issue when we finally look at it in a systematic manner we realize oh no it's not about that it is about a system that had been in place for years and years and years and years when which the the the African-American population that

town had been preyed upon by the police department that is the broader and you cannot come to an understanding of what happened with Michael Brown until you willing to engage that case on that much more broader systemic level

when you make the title of this book talking to strangers are you do you have a goal that you're trying to achieve are you trying to illuminate certain aspect of communication you trying to highlight issues that people have had with these stories like the Michael Brown story or yeah I mean I'm trying to

I wanted to start with the premise of why are we so bad at you know like I tell the story in the book of the Larry Nasser Case of Michigan State which ones are that's the guy remember the doctor for the gymnastics team oh yeah turns out to have been sexually molested file yeah you Jennifer so there you have a case where everyone thinks they know this guy he's their friend he's this gifted doctor the parents are willingly bringing their kids to to be treated by him the parents are in

room while he is abusing their kids and they don't see it the kids are saying something weird happened in the parents are dismissing it so I wanted to that's a good example of a phenomenon that I wanted to try and explain which is how is that possible how can we think we know someone and be so completely wrong how can you take your kid to a doctor and think the doctor is the greatest possible doctor and he in fact what he's doing is abusing you

your child in front of you right and that's a very similar kind of problem to Bernie Madoff people invested their life savings with this guy not not little old ladies in Dubuque sophisticated Savvy incredibly intelligent investors handed over millions of dollars to this guy who was not even true I mean the Madoff fraud was so outrageous he didn't even bother to him

he didn't even put it in t-bills I mean he just spent it it was just like crazy what's T bills treasury bills oh I mean he wasn't even he was he was 100% sociopath fraud yes and people over the course of 20 years wrote check after check after check after check to him thinking was This brilliant investor you know it's like that's a puzzle that's what I want to get it like people did recognize as something was wrong

wrong right you're the were financial analyst that were saying that this doesn't make sense a few of them but it's funny there's a my favorite story on the in the Madoff chapter is the greatest hedge fund in the world is Renaissance Technologies these are the guys out in Long Island who have had like 30 percent returns for 25 years they're like all PhD are you know AI genius literally Geniuses and they found themselves

his before bit off was busted they found themselves with I think 30 million dollars in a Madoff fund because of some complicated transaction and they're all Geniuses so they look at what made us doing it again and I don't look good like that doesn't make any sense to me and so like what should we do we have 30 million dollar stake in a fund and we don't understand what the guys doing and you would think logically they would sell their stake they don't because it's returning know it did in fact it's not even returning that their own legit returns are twice

is his illegitimate returns they're making they actually make the point that his returns it really low for us like there's no reason for us to keep their money but they don't sell what and so that's what I was trying to stand like they can't even you know there's this notion I'm talking about is called default to truth which is this idea from a researcher called Tim Lovin which is as human beings we are trusting engines we are evolved to give people the benefit of the doubt and once you understand that and why do we do that because it's the right move 99%

percent of the time most people are being truthful and if you have is your strategy I'm going to believe what people say it makes you fantastic friend a wonderful person to work with it means that you can you know skate through the world with a minimum of fuss if you're the parent like person is a person whose life is a nightmare right because they are suspicious of everything that moves so we evolved

to be trusting engines because that makes your life easier but the best part of human people want to mate with you like if you want to talk an evolution in terms about who passes on their genes nice people pass on their genes it given the choice between having a child with a crazy suspicious paranoid person or a loving trusting person you choose a loving trusting person a hundred percent of the time so multiply that out times a million years of human history you realize trusting genes beat

no jeans every day of the week right so that's what we are what credulous by by by evolutionary choice so those guys at in the Renaissance there are no different they may be smarter than the rest of us but they're not constructed differently their inclination is to believe people and like well I don't know guy says he's a good investor me why not let's hang on to it see what happens right that's their motive they don't they don't you don't get to run a organization as

cessful as Renaissance Technologies if you're some crazy paranoid person right how would you even invest in anything if you were crazy and paranoid there was a lot of people that were really intelligent than invested in Bernie madoffs hedge fund to Steven Spielberg was one of them you lost it shit ton of money oh yeah I mean look at the roster list there isn't a you cannot point to an unsophisticated investor on the list of people who lost the most money from the every one of them was smart that's strange it's so great it's great like think about like and by the way

getting a decent return in the market is super easy you you go to Beto Vanguard and they you know they'll give you the market return your in your ass on that hard but these people like they wanted to do something fancier and they and that's what happened well he when you realized what a sociopath he actually was is in the interviews after he's caught or he's demanding certain things and complaining about certain things he doesn't seem to have any remorse no no he wants better

treatment he wants better food he doesn't seem to have any remorse that he's you know literally robbed people their retirement yeah ruined the last part of their lives where they thought they were going to have a considerable sum of money to sit back and just enjoy their grandchildren know now they're broke now they're poor yeah and now they have to figure out a way to get by and eat he doesn't give a shit he did he doesn't in fact what's weird there's so many things weird about the Madoff case one of them is we forget

it he doesn't get caught he turns himself in right and he turns himself in because not because he's screwing up because he's quote unquote so good because remember the financial crisis hit in 2008 and his clients are losing so much money on their legit Investments that they go to man up and say can I have some of my money back from you I got to pay off all the stuff I've done that it's gone sour so like in effect no one ever caught him he get

get caught by a once-in-a you know one-in-a-million circumstance where he's the only one making any money for his clients so they come after him my point is if you if you're totally rational and you look at this you say here's a guy who managed to bamboozle the most sophisticated people in the world to the tune of billions of dollars for 25 years he only gets caught because we had a once in a lifetime Financial meltdown isn't the rational lesson of that that we should all be Bernie madoffs

Ray is like super easy it's like not that hard I could all I have to do is you know he dressed really nicely I get really nice office space on the east side of Manhattan whatwhat did he actually do nothing really didn't invest in anything you just moved to other people's money around and he ran a Ponzi scheme he spent a lot of it and how does son's not catch on to this it's good question because they're not being but one of them committed suicide right that's right and

so it's an open question of how much they do how much anyone else knew I you know the older I get the more I believe in the powers of particularly within within family denial is something now I don't find hard to believe hmm so your ability I've now heard so many stories of you know a parent is some kind of monster and family members just won't see it

it just can't bring themselves to go that so did they know something everyone knew there was something slightly fishy and what Bernie was doing but they never went so far as to think that he was just making it up so they knew something was up but they didn't know it was a hundred percent horseshit they thought that he was so there were some people thought that he actually had Investments but he was there was a suspicion for example he was front-running that because he had a larger business

sort of managing the deal flow in the NASDAQ that he would get Advanced word of where money was flowing and he would jump ahead of the queue by stocks before other people did and profit off the when the stock would rise he would just sell in profit of that difference so there was a feeling that he had a dubious kind of illegitimate strategy that nonetheless legitimately made him a lot of money so people like well if so long as he can get away with it and I can profit off it I'm fine

but the truth is he wasn't doing that at all into this he was just he was he had his he had some Confederate in the Attic of his company essentially making up trade orders from scratch I mean they were just making shit up did how many people got arrested I forget I think they took I can't remember the exact number I think they got he had two Confederates I think he went down with him that's it I think it's what it was he in retrospect it's a really it's one of these crazy it's one of these

you think you know that whole institutions would have fallen yes no this did you ever hear the conversation that he had I believe it was recorded somehow on a phone or something or maybe it was after he was in jail where he's talking about trying to get money back from one of his biggest investors the guy had gotten like a billion dollars from him over the years that's right yeah right yeah he's like you got to give the money back he's like fuck you I'm not giving you shit yeah and you know then this

this crazy conversation where he's basically telling this guy look you knew this was bullshit and you are making money off this and now you know yeah yeah so so this is like the clever so you think about this that guy I know she's actually talking about yeah so it's a game thus to let's just do a let's do a a a hypothetical scenario okay you have a friend who's an incredible salesman and is gone around Europe and Saudi Arabia and raised

in our fund 20 billion dollar fund and they're promising a 20% return a year on your investment right so you give them a million you're getting two hundred thousand dollars a year back from this thing you know it's all bullshit but no one else does what is the rational thing for you to do the rational thing for you to do is to take your onion million dollar investment is to take the two hundred thousand dollars that is made made in quotation marks every year out of the fund so you say most people you know when you invest in

in stocks and only what you do is you check the box I want my I want any dividends or earnings reinvested in the fund don't check the box take the real cash so if you're investing with this phony friend of yours for 20 years you're going to get two hundred thousand dollars a year for 20 years that's four million dollars you will make four million clear of your out of your 1 million initial investment in in 20 years right that's

art if you know what's going on so that's what some people did with Madoff they're like yeah I don't know what he's doing these returns are pretty fantastic I'm just going to take all my earnings off the table every single year so they are the ones who the real winners of this whole thing with those people because this money is not real that money's coming from other investors is the things being made actually what happens with them like if a guy does make all these millions of dollars like that one guy he had to so give some of it back

yes it when happens is they appoint remember they appoint a after the Scandal breaks and been made up is invested they bring in a kind of supervisor potential supervisor who has the power to clawback winnings from money from the people who took who took cash off the table so but not everyone had to claw back in the question was how far back do we go so if you were investing if you were invested with Madoff 25 years ago and you took

you know 10 million off the table between 1990 and 1993 do you have to give that up too like it gets complicated also how can you prove that he was doing the same activity back that actually exactly oh it's a conversation I really wish I could remember where I was hearing this conversation but somebody had recorded Madoff talking to this guy tell them look you gotta give that money back yeah yeah yeah my schwab fun looks better and better all the time it's just so scary to me

that mean finances in the stock market and all that stuff is always looked like magic like what is going on there what are they doing they're moving these numbers around like when you see the ticker tape Roll by like what what is all that if you don't have any understanding of it it's like a foreign language yeah and so you're hoping that all these Geniuses can't be duped all these people throwing their tickets up in the air and everybody this is really goodbye cell they all know what's going on you don't know what's going on but hey there's a lot of things that you know that they don't know and this is just how the world works yeah turns out no turns out the people

people that were involved in this crazy very difficult to understand thing didn't know it either like they barely can understand it and this guy was just stealing money in some weird way and if the stock market didn't crash if we didn't have some sort of a depression who knows how he might still be in operation today he would soak without without the crash of 2008 there's a very very strong possibility that pretty Madoff would still be going gangbusters all he has to do

keep surviving is to take in enough money to cover withdrawals yes so there's some like we said there's a some portion of people who withdrawing their winnings he just needs to make enough to get new enough new money to cover their withdrawal so he's got a fifty billion dollar hedge fund and let's imagine there's a billion and withdrawals coming out every year he's got a raise a billion now if you're burning you already have 50 something hard to raise another

and particularly because he had people all around the world and he was giving them the huge fees to raise money for him so that's the other way that the root of the people who really made money from him were the people who had I forgotten what it was but you would be say you're you're you're Joe the financial guy in Zurich you have a whole bunch of wealthy European clients Bernie would let for every for every million you raised for Bernie Bernie would let you keep I forgot what it was a hundred

and I mean it's a nice base that's real money yeah she just kick back 902 Bernie and keep a hundred grand and that your favorite free and clear no one's climb that back right that's those guys got very very very well very very wealthy that's weird money is sitting in your house that stealing built God that's got to be strange so what can be learned in terms of communication from The Bernie Madoff story well the boot

he made up story and the

all in all of these ways but this one in particular goes to this question of we really think we're good at spotting liars and we're not so virtually every profession that is invested in you know in an investigation of human beings has some belief that you know we know how to figure out is like yes and the truth is nobody does and if someone tells you they are good at spotting Liars there's a 99% chance that they're lying so that the evidence

the see if you could think if we did an experiment here where I had a hundred people parade through this office right now the studio right now and every one of them made a statement in front of you and some wood long as someone tell the truth and I asked you Joe tell me who's lying who's not yours accuracy rate your success rate would be 52 to 54 percent other words slightly better than chance you might as well flip a coin it's not me but if you don't and that's

about you anyone in that chair watching these people parade in front of us is going to do a slightly bit better than chance and the reason was that he better than chance is there are small fraction of people who are such epically bad Liars that there's just we're not going to lose those people like week those are obvious one thing that you can tell those if it's an area of your own personal expertise right like if someone tried to talk to you about what it takes to write a book and get a book published and get a book on the New York Times bestseller list

and they were just making things up you would you would okay so that so this is oh so now you're talking about separate thinking specialist That's content-based So if I pretend to be a UFC fighter you're going to spot my liar my lies in 5 minutes because you know more about the content than I do but let's remove but there you're not catching me because I look like I'm lying you're catching me because I'm saying something that's bullshit I have a good story about that I really have a good start I used to think that I was really good at spotting Liars

and then I met this guy I met him through a friend and that's I'd given myself a pass and then I met him through this friend he was a friend of a friend so I just assumed he was okay because my friend is very good friend and this guy was claiming to be this Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and he was writing for this online magazine that was like a well-read magazine in the martial arts world and it was the Abu Dhabi combat club they're responsible for this big the Abu Dhabi

submission World Championships is the biggest championships in the world is very highly regarded High Prestige this guy was talking about these fights that he had had and you know people bullshit a little bit so you give people a little bit of room for that but then he was talking about this particular particular move that he had pulled off in a fight that he had just learned from my friend and it's a very difficult move to called The Twister it's basically a guillotine from wrestling

and set up from position called side control it's really complicated you have to wrap someone's leg around you have to roll onto your left shoulder you have to get behind them they have to grab their arm put it over your shoulder grab ahold of their spine and it's essentially like a spine locked a very difficult move to pull off and it takes a long time to master the steps it takes a long time to understand the position so this guy learned it and then a couple days later claimed to have pulled it off in Thailand

and it was like it's like one of those scenes in a movie with a record scratches and everybody just goes what and I remember we were like what's going on so then my friend winds up rolling with him rolling his sparring it's you do Jiu Jitsu rolling and he comes back to me and goes there's no fucking way that guy's black belt it doesn't even make sense he goes he's like he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing like this is really weird so he winds up having this conversation

National conversation with them on the phone while I'm in the car is talking to him and he goes I want to know what you are because you're not a fucking black ball so tell me what's going on it says he no no my black belt in Japanese Jiu-Jitsu it's different it's not time goes out what he tells got to go fuck himself time goes on the guy winds up killing someone he winds up murdering this girl that he's having sex with murdering her husband and he gets caught driving around hurt his car

the guys car after he's killed the guy and then he winds up trying to recruit a friend to kill someone it's like this whole big thing and he winds up going to jail and he's in jail now but I remember thinking okay you don't know shit about catching and spotting Liars because you didn't you didn't spot that guy's being completely full of shit like I thought it was a little full of shit but I didn't know he was a like a complete sociopath and a murderer yeah so this is an interesting question

using that scenario would you have done a better job if all I gave you was the transcript of this guy speech so there's this is a there's a lot of interest in this question the community people who study deception so there's many different I can suppose I'm trying to improve my ability to spot lies I can we can do three things I can listen to you face-to-face as you're telling me something as either true or false I can we

this entirely on the telephone so I don't see you I just hear you or I can just read the transcript of what you say and try to decide whether it's true or false and it seems to be the case that we're better when we just when we remove Sight and Sound and all we have are this the word to plain words on the page there was the nurse what being present does is it introduces all kinds of

of noisy information that just distracts us from the core question of whether the truth is being told so maybe it was maybe if all you had was a transcript and as this guy is describing this particular what was the name of the movie Twister the Twister maybe as you're looking at the way he described and all you're doing is focusing on the precise way in which he describes this very very intricate move and you would realize oh he actually doesn't understand what he's talking about and you would have seen it clearly in that moment if you but maybe there was something

this presentation that threw you off the scent it was the move itself it see because if he just said oh I got it I got the guy in an armbar well a lot of people catch people in our bars it's a very common move you learn it first day of Jiu-Jitsu yeah you can catch someone someone makes a mistake in your white belt and they reach up and you grab their arm you can catch an armbar yeah Twisters very difficult to pull off very difficult yeah it's only been done in the UFC

maybe once I think Chan sung Jung the Korean zombie pulled it off once he may be the only guy maybe one other guy ever yeah sky was delusional that ever so it was it was horseshit and the only thing that we were taking into consideration like he was fight supposedly fighting in Thailand which turns out there was no fight at all he's a complete liar yeah the only thing that we were taken into consideration was maybe this guy fought a scrub like he could have fought someone who really didn't know anything and he said let me try the Twister on them

but then that's like you have to be beating the guy so badly you just would end the fight you wouldn't do a twister on him the only time you do a twister as if you're a highly skilled Grappler and you think you could put someone into position that they don't understand because it's a confusing position it's a position that there's a common position called back Mount where you would choke someone or you would transition to other moons from there and he was almost there but not quite there because you're caught you're kind of on the side so even season Grapplers

really make mistakes and get caught in the Twister but you have to be a fucking wizard to pull that off on somebody yeah it's not something you have to be really good it's not something that you can just do so when he said he did it we were all like what it wasn't if he said he had kicked the guy knocked him out oh that well that happens all the time yes he punched a guy hit him with an elbow and cut them the referee stopped the fight all that stuff is real that happens all the time he chose this one signature move of my friend Eddie

and we were both like there's something wrong here man yeah something wrong here there's a hilarious version of the sun I'm a runner and I'm on all the running message boards as one called let's run which is system and they're constantly catching people who lie about their Marathon times it's hot it's a hilarious that well there's all kinds of reasons but a lot of it is it starts with the eyeball test so they'll be a you know because a lot of marathons have to take pictures of the participants at various points during the race and some will claim to run like

a 240 Marathon now 240 you did really good run it's not world-class learning beside very good to be serious to rent your foot so they'll eyeball someone who claims to run 242 say now I mean he's just looking at them 10:00 10:15 extra pounds right there they should be they should look like they've been running a little bit look totally fresh as a daisy right now they're what are they doing wearing those shoes no 240 marathon is like is that kind of processed and then because the second order where they do complicated

it analysis of splits and they do all this kind of thing but it often begins with the same thing it's like you just guys trying to claim to be this and say yeah no no that's right that's not working that's like a I love those Insider e well I have this thought about how much culture has shifted through the internet and how much cultural shift again in the even more astronomical way once we can read minds and I don't think we're far away from that I think we're a few decades away from some technology that allows

as people to establish intent and to see thoughts and I think they're very there's some sort of theoretical work they're doing on this right now and there's there's different models that they're trying to achieve I think that's going to eliminate a lot of the bullshit of communication and I think it's going to happen really quickly just like Google sort of eliminates a lot of the bullshit of people telling stories about something at some of those what what

wait a minute what year and they go good that didn't happen and they can find out like almost instantaneously I think we're going to be able to figure that out with people I think there's going to be a way where you can where we can see intent and we can read minds I don't think we're far away from that yeah I mean I know this neural link thing with Elon Musk is very elon's very hush-hush about this is different sort of electronic brain interfaces that they're trying to

experiment with yeah I wouldn't wouldn't you worry be that if we read were able to read someone's thoughts mmm intentions what we would in fact discover is even more confusing than what we know now in other words maybe what's inside my head right now are 35 different thoughts and intentions warring at with each other murder scenarios yes mercenary then Malcolm just sort of keeps everything everything I'm Thomas surface supernormal

I think it's totally true think about it most of us there's any number of things think about that yeah the list of the list of possible things that could come out of my mouth at this very moment is infinite right it is infinite there are at this very moment God knows how many scenarios swirling around my head about what should I say next right and why is my intention to try and make you laugh to impress you to piss you off to disagree with you II agree with you I mean if we can

go on and on and on all those are in play so you really want to look inside my head and get you're not going to get clarity he's going to be a mess or we're going to realize we're all a mess yes like it would make us feel a little bit better like oh everybody's out of their fucking mind but would you want that yes you would yes I'm endlessly curious about I know my mind is such a mess there's so much chaos going on there I want to know what's going on other people's I want to know how fucked up am I alright

my normal is it so standard here's my fear I've many fears about this kind of thing but my fear would be as follows that I cannot count the number of times when I have had reactions to things that people have said in the moment that turn out to be wrong deeply in badly wrong and one of the things that I have learned as an adult is too deeply distressed those kinds of reactions and to wait and very often what will happen in my case sometimes the waiting takes a long time

I'm the kind of person who sometimes a month will pass and I will think back on a situation and I'll think oh my God I totally misunderstood that this person who I thought was a jackass is actually someone you know a lovely person who I should give a second chance to or whatever that comment that someone made that I thought was stupid is in fact extremely thoughtful and insightful this will happen weeks months later whatever if you were able to read my

mind in the moment you would judge me for my mistake and not give me an easy way to correct it and it was you trap me in like what if this would have had a reaction to something you said in this conversation which I've said Jesus can't believe that that's dumb and then I'm driving back to LA tonight and I think oh actually oh that's really interesting and thought about the time I don't want you to short-circuit my learning process about you I want I want to give me the

of my my six hours of thinking about what you said and allow me give me that kind of time to come to a reason that insightful conclusion about how I feel that's interesting but we're talking then about only one person having the technology because if you both have the technology and there wouldn't be any issue you wouldn't be confusion as to why someone was saying something you'd be--you'd you have a much clearer path to understanding their thought process and their intent behind it really

yes get a mean if one person has it right then yeah I get it yeah if I can read your mind oh I said something and Malcolm thinks I'm a retard like you know there's that but there's another there's another possibility that both people have it and this is also one of the things that would be fascinating about this is one of the things about forbidden words is forbidden words carry with them intent they have automatic intent right but you can say

the exact same word and have different intent behind it if we could understand clearly what your intent is then taboo words would automatically become meaningless it wouldn't mean it's not about sound you make it's not about forbidden sounds always what it's about is thoughts yeah and what you're trying to convey and what's happening to you as a human being who are you like what what what is your process for the way you communicate what is your process for the way

you're trying to develop these thoughts in your mind and express them to people well well part of the problem with that is language right and part of the problem with making certain aspects of our language forbidden is you limit people's ability to colorfully communicate and express themselves in certain ways I think that alone just eliminating that alone eliminated in confusion and also highlighting you know you could highlight real

homes with people's thoughts in the way people communicate but also eliminate many problems so you'd say oh he doesn't mean that like you could see what he means like this is what this is where his mind is you could see you could literally see the thoughts yeah yeah I guess I would also let me let me get let me throw another complicating Factor it still leaves the question of cultural context yes of course one of the things I got really interested when I was writing my book was how our kind of cultural frames of

reference profoundly complicate our attempts to understand other people and so in your scenario where I have some kind of window into your thinking and intention I still need to know in order to make sense to you I still need to have a very clear idea of the cultural kind of rules of the road that you're using and they're likely to be different from mine and or particularly if you know I mean I'm a Canadian you're not but imagine if the

between us was more profound if rise you know then you still like like I was is a really cool thing I've been obsessed with with memory I'm doing things I'm memory in my in revision history this coming season and I was reading about this really fascinating experiment which is done with Korean and American college students adults essentially and what I do is I give you three circles

paper circles and one is past when its present when his future and I say those are three concepts represent those three concepts with these three circles so the American kid has passed here present in the middle future over on the right three independent circles the green kid puts all piles all three circles on top of each other

now what does that mean I don't know what that means it means something interesting right it means that they don't they're not separating these three modes the way that we are there certainly coming at experience with a very different set of assumptions so maybe so I think of the Civil War is a long time ago but if I'm Korean maybe the Civil War is as present in My Kind Of Consciousness is something that happened last week is that maybe that's not what that means I'm not exactly sure I'm sort of guessing

because I don't know the I haven't fully investigated but the point is there are I've just given you one random example there are a great way incredibly different rules that different cultures use to organize experience so if I'm looking at

you and reading your thoughts I have to know those rules because those rules are sorting out how people so this is only this is not I'm not to I'm not dissing this notion of that you're talking about I'm saying that it needs to have another layer as well a cultural Earl a cultural are which kind of alerts me to how you're organizing experience not certainly makes sense it's it's interesting when you think about like the Tower of Babel write like this this idea that one

in time everyone spoke the same language and God sort of set it up so that it was we're never going to be able to really communicate with each other because everybody has a bunch of different languages and we'll never figure it out that was that's the sort of crunched up version of it if there was a way to change the way like all languages are essentially little symbols that are written down on paper or typed out and then sounds you make with your mouth and they convey intent

if there was a way to do another version of language a universal version of language that's eventually adopted but I'm reading this book about these people that were kidnapped by Native Americans and they were assimilated into the tribes they learn the language and is happen over a course of a couple of years and I was thinking like what would that be like if you you know that's how you learn a language or kidnapped by you know what I mean yeah like you got but if there was a new language

how long would it take for adults to learn a new language if someone came up with a new language of completely Universal characters and this language is conveyed through this technology rather than through your mouth so it's your your your thoughts your thoughts interface with some sort of Technology it creates whatever hieroglyphs some sort of visual language that we all agree upon and then this is universal this is you

Universal throughout all cultures yeah and the only thing that we'd be confused about assumptions and rules as far as like what's okay well you could do that can't you can't we kind of do that already in a sense that we could have a universal language and then we have a device you know sitting on our phone or something yeah that when we I'm in you know I'm in some for I'm in Bulgaria and I'm ordering coffee I speak into the device and it simply translates either translates

directly in the Bulgarian that's actually not that hard no or it translates this into this common language that the Bulgarian translator services and if you think of the technology at a slightly more advanced level than it is now it could be done in a very seamless way like it doesn't have to be some bulky box it could literally be that I am speaking in English and what you're hearing is there's a filter and what you're what you're hearing is this other language I mean

well don't don't Google buds or whatever they are there they are you know they are pod version of those Google things I think there's something some technology that actually enables you to instantaneously translate that yeah there's some doing for you yeah I know you hate for Google to have one more thing over us right it's like not enough that they should control 9/10 of our life yeah well so going to let them control our communication I remember as a kid we days to love Doonesbury did you reduce yes

is a hilarious thing and Doonesbury where I forgot who uncle duke or somebody is going to China and his uncle Duke Hunter has Thompson yeah he was and he was appointed Ambassador I think he was imported American ambassador to China and its and that was a joke and he would go and he would meet with like the head of the president China and he would say the most incredibly incendiary outrageous things and the translated never translated what he said would turn he would say this rageous offensive thing and the translator is saying you know

the flowers are blooming today I just thought I was hilarious yeah Jamie had a thought once that hieroglyphs 420 2019 are essentially emojis oh yeah it's kind of

I mean what's your sort of was saying yeah like the internet you have to translate English into bits in order for the computer to translate it into an emoji it's almost I feel like that's almost what you're saying although it's not exactly it's a Bing is a beginning step yeah it's exam 1 2 yeah it just seems like this is not the best we can do North noises with your mouth and then you know learning English is incredibly complicated for someone who speaks Mandarin and vice verse yeah you know it's all very

very what if we all said hey look this is some new version of a language like whenever there's a whether it's contact or whenever the some movie about extraterrestrials though is a team of scientists and linguists and Geniuses to get together and they go look we're going to establish a universal language they communicate with these people and Close Encounters of the Third Kind it was music du du du didn't do that they would figure out some way we're going to figure out a way to talk if we

had some enormous Financial incentive or some enormous crisis was in playing we had to all communicate with the same language and so remember when they were trying to push the while you're from Canada the metric system was actually real over there was very little that was in high school they were trying to push the metric system yeah and I remember there was like a concerted effort they're like we're going to have to learn the metric system Goods the universal system at the whole world uses an they gave up the United States gave up what

why was this possible in Canada and not possible in the United States because we're assholes you guys are 20% less assholes at least 20% there I don't know how's that possible I've always thought because I grew up in Boston which is also cold I've always thought cold weather made assholes because it's like you just like fuck it's called fuck that fuck you fuck you because Boston is filled with people that want to get drunk and fight and then the lot of them are really mean which is a great place to grow up you develop a thick skin and

you look like as a comedian it's a great place to start out and do comedy if you learn how to do it right I don't think Boston is mean because of the cold I think yeah I think he's Canadian well the coldest parts of Canada like you know I know lots of people lots of members of my family are from Winnipeg which is seriously cold nicest people nicest people yeah thanks doesn't make any sense it doesn't that's why I said it doesn't my theory sucks yeah - kids be children of very rough immigrants and they say

Aiden these communities and every ghost yes exactly that's what I am so the immigrants of these people that were willing to take a risk and get on a boat and there wasn't even YouTube videos to watch these are Savage people that made it over here and they're really rough and they had rough childhoods and they raised rough children and The Echoes of that persist on the east coast of the United States we the amount of drinking that went on in Irish

communities is it's funny cuz I stumbled across years ago I was I've always been obsessed with drinking alcohol affect have chapter that on it in this book but so years ago turns out that the place in America where alcohol studies as they're called we're really birthed was New Haven which makes person attitude yeah makes perfect sense so in the 50s a bunch of people get really really interested in understanding how drinking works and it in New Haven of course you have the perfect

because you have two very large groups of immigrants you have Irish Italians right in all of knowing that you've got those two to work with and of course they could not be more different in the way they drink so even in immigrant Italian communities in the 50s these are people who are in terms of volume of alcohol consumed way up at the top there drinking with every meal they're making you know why non from the backyards they are but the levels of alcoholism are

noticeable the amount of like social dysfunction associated with drinking Camp I mean it's just not as negligible these are the healthiest triggers you can imagine side by side are the Irish I don't need to tell you that story is very different let me actually what is it it's super interesting question you've got so they're not one groups not richer than the other they come to America not the same time but their 19th century early 20th century come to American law

numbers there are some you know Irish culture looks a lot too but it was Catholic right now to maybe Catholic in different ways but there's a sir on the surface these are you think that they would use the bottle in the same way no the Irish are the the Irish the men are slinking off to the pub and in Italy everyone's gathered around a steaming bowls of pasta and drinking like one and a half glasses of wine mild homemade wine with your dinner it's like night and day

yeah it's unbelievable is it because one is a whiskey culture because Whiskey's rough stuff I mean you really can't have much before you're off the rails yeah there's some of that yeah I did the the attachment to Wine in the Italian Community probably saves them a good deal of their of alcohol-related heartbreak I don't know too much about the actual is there a difference between the way different alcohol effects is the

is the wine alcohol actually affect you by volume by by by the actual percentage of alcohol does it affect you differently than beer or differently than whiskey or differently tequila because that's what people always say oh if I drink tequila I get crazy like people always have these stories but is that true if you have you had a certain percentage of alcohol if we equalize yes equalize the the alcohol concentration is it all the same in here yes because for me wine

wine makes me warm and friendly and it makes me sleepy and it mean it doesn't make me energetic whiskey makes me crazy like I think it's a crazy drug I think when people drink shots of Jack Daniels they just want to go whoa they want to get crazy want to do dumb shit it makes them want to do dumb things shots in particular makes people want to do dumb things makes people get crazy makes people loud it makes people Irish right

yeah it's better you saying well I'm swimming quarter Irish I can get away with it for a little while only a quarter that's it yeah mostly Italian oh I see you're at the cusp of these two drinking tradition yes yes oh I see but Rogan you're fool enough fresh you're fooling us with Rogan yes yes because we would think that you were majority Irish with that yes yeah and I could be dark Irish if you looked at me he would yeah I'm will I'm you know I am a reserved English

Jamaican Jamaicans not big drinkers in in the same kind of the difference actually fascinatingly of the many weird alcohol facts if you look at young people like let's like a college-age young people in America and look at their drinking habits the black students drink and get drunk markedly less than white kids real

all differences in drinking Behavior by race in that at that age Asian students don't drink much either drinking is like a it's like a it's like a white thing it's a crazy white thing increasingly enough or problematic drinking I've always thought that was fascinating this fascinating I don't know the I don't know why that's so as it's revered in our culture more it's yeah I mean getting fucked up is celebrated in white culture well this you know in the alcohol chapter of my book The

I talk about all the strange things that have happened with drinking patterns on campus and I was struck in doing that chapter I was interested in the connection between drinking and drunkenness in sexual assault on campus Because all of those the overwhelming majority if you talk to people who study sexual assault on campus they will tell you that you almost never see one of these cases where both parties aren't drunk right it's which doesn't explain

in them entirely but it's a huge factor in making sense of what happens and when you dig into that you see these like really weird patterns first off when I was in college I did not know and I went to college in Canada not a teetotaling population I did not know a single person who's ever been drunk blackout drunk

and then now if you talk to a 20 year old college student in America they will name friends of theirs who get blackout drunk on a weekly basis what is the drinking age in Canada and what was it when you were in college what has it cause you was 18 yeah I think that might be a big factor I've been talking to friends about this about Europe about how in Europe particularly in Italy and France you're allowed to drink wine at a very young age yeah and the taboo

to aspect of it the forbidden fruit all that goes away it's a just it's a I don't think young kids should be drinking because I think it's terrible for your brain development but I think there's a thing in keeping them from drinking or making it illegal where it becomes so taboo and so intoxicating that they can't wait until they can legally do it or they try to get ahold of it before it's legal and it has a certain excitement to it that just doesn't it doesn't have in

it's of Europe yeah you've given it up kind of so there's all kinds of the things that are new are way less beer and way more hard liquor so hard liquor when I was in school and Canada in the 80s 95% of what we drank was beer it's just not there wasn't any whiskey or even or tequila or a vodka in our party's it's just beer beer kegs keg parties yeah really hard to get blackout drunk on beer I mean black out to get the blackout you've got to be you got to get

like I forgot what the exact number that and drinks or something well it's point you gotta blow like .18 or something I forgotten with us have a magic number where people set for everybody because some people they just get dribble eyes like there's some dudes they'll have a couple of drinks and they get shark eyes you know those those dark like expressionless eyes like hey man you still here yeah like they're just wandering around like like a like a person with doll eyes there's with the issues in there with your shoes back on his just I'll point

does your hippocampus shut down and you cease to be able to have the ability to make memories so that's just that's a very narrow clinical explanation of so they may be a whole different set of manifestations of drunkenness that have to do with alcohols effect on other parts of your brain right the blackout is just about your hippocampus and past a certain blood alcohol concentration your hippocampus just goes offline essentially you just pull the plug on the end cap and then so

and it's coming in is being stored wow so you can continue to communicate I could be blackout drunk right now but does it vary with people does it the number well so yes it would it would it would vary depending I think I'm drinking history in yeah but I mean as a there is it's there's a kind of a there's a consensus figure where most people I wish I it's in my book I wish I could remember I think it's something like .16 or something like that

that if you think of the if the lab the level legal level for drinking forums for driving is .08 I think it's roughly 2x that level and most people at that level will be at risk we'll have at least the beginnings of memory impairment so that feeling when you get really drunk at a party and the next morning you can only remember little bits and pieces of what happened that night that's because your your hippocampus was posed at your moment of peak intoxication your hippocampus was

going to shut down and just wasn't taking any new members really interesting too because some of our most interesting minds and some of the best communicators relied on alcohol heavily Mike and it made that like Hitchens made him a more interesting Communicator when he was drunk when he would have a drink you know I mean right like you would be on Bill Maher you could tell he was he was lit and and and he was so eloquent and so

slit but that beautiful phrasing so remember though that's his an interesting point and a crucial point about blackout which is your hippocampus doesn't necessarily control your your how articulate you are how fluid your speeches it's just about memory so Hitchens could have been the most articulate person in the world in just and but the next morning he would not have remembered a single thing he said on Bill Maher I mean I'm assuming if he was drunk he was black out no but but you don't know this fascinating stories in the literature about

but when people were discovering blackout in the 50s and they would they would be these stories like they would some guy would come in would wake up in Las Vegas and he would say what am I doing in Las Vegas like and they would go and he would see his clothes hanging in the closet and he would say what is going on and then he would like go down to the desk and say what and it's all you checked in last night and he would look in his wallet and he would see you get a plane ticket from Cleveland and they would reconstruct and is a

in fact this very story was told in the one of the big sites medical journals in the 50s the guy reconstructs he's a Salesman living in like st. Louis who gets really really drunk and then his hippocampus shuts down and he continues to function so it goes gets in his car drives to the airport buys a plane ticket goes to Vegas does he does notice in Vegas does whatever he does in Vegas and then wakes up like two days later oh my God hippocampus is suddenly back online what am I doing in Vegas that

two days two days so what is like what is it you can you like that was my point I could be black out right now and still communicate and you wouldn't know it I don't it's not like you can tell I can't tell whether you have a headache can I write no clue so you don't know what's going I mean until we come up with that machine that you were talking about you can't tell that my hippocampus isn't working except if you answer if you ask me the same question this is how you the only way you can do it you had a party you think someone's

blackout ask them the same question over and over again and see if they respond like say why are you asking me so literally I would say wait did you say you heard you're a quarter Irish and then I would just have to wait like say five seconds and say Joe did you see her a quarter Irish and in a certain way you say Malcolm white stop it if you don't say that your blackout drunk but if you do if you could you be blackout drunk and still have like a

tiny memory well he may just ask me that okay so the hippocampus doesn't shut down all at once so what it does is it shuts down slowly so let's imagine we're both doing shots so after I mean I'm quite sure your capacity I'm I mean you're like I'm half your weight am I but I don't know what you are you're like 200 pounds I'm 126 okay so we're going to deal with alcohol very differently but let's assume we're doing shots of tequila

but there's a point where things start to get hazy so you might remember that I asked you that question you might not and then as we keep drinking in our blood alcohol levels get higher and higher at a certain point your hippocampus will completely like the off switch has been thrown so it goes from being sluggish and impaired to just being down like and what brings it back

well you're out but alcohol level has to fall to the point where it can work again so you fall asleep and over the course of eight hours of sleep you know your alcohol is processed by your liver blood alcohol Falls hippocampus snaps back into action wow what a ridiculous drug to be our most socially acceptable drug totally and then the Vegas thing where they give it to you for free of course the in a place where you can gamble which is really sneaky

yeah that's one of the weirder laws ever that a person could literally lose their house while they're blackout drunk crazy I mean in retrospect imagining you were were we let's do a little ranking thing here we have three vices and I'm I know exactly where you're going to be going with this but we have three things we want to prioritize dope alcohol

smoking right cigarettes cigarettes you can ban one actually rank them in order you could we can start from scratch I'm saying Joe was starting over okay what you say goes rank new week so right now The Way We have dealt with these is smoking is is becoming the most taboo of those three cigarettes mmm marijuana second and alcohol is the one that we have the least

Innovations about right my argument would be that that list is exactly backwards

that it should be alcohol should be the most taboo marijuana should be actually not exactly backwards it should be alcohol the most taboo cigarettes the second most marijuana the third that's how I would do yeah I would agree with that yeah yeah so we're basically we have it completely upside down but I think for some people

like

look there's obvious obviously terrible things that happen to you when you smoke cigarettes but every time is it is it pot I see I've smoked a cigarette or two before shows like I've smoked a city I mean or two I've never smoked two in a row but I've smoked a cigarette before I've done shows like Dave Chappelle gave me one of his cigarettes recently Tony hinge Clips give me a cigarette I'm not a cigarette smoker but there's something cool about the Head Rush that you get when you smoke a cigarette I

Tate to say that this is a person who's done a lot of drugs I've done a lot of smoked a lot of pot and I've done psychedelics and I'll talk about them openly I have hesitation about telling people that I have enjoyed a cigarette well because because it's because I think it's so bad for you it's I think when I talk about doing mushrooms I think mushrooms are good for you I think it makes you freak out I think it it illuminates parts of your Consciousness that I think a lot of

guard and protect and shield and I think sometimes doing something that breaks down those walls is good for you ultimately overall there's a little bit of an adjustment period but I think you learn something about the normal State of Consciousness I don't think you learn much when you smoke cigarettes I just think there's this a little bit of a Head Rush that you get out of it but I know so many people that are sick from cigarettes so many people that can't quit them so many people that have died from cancer I mean I personally have known

several people that have died from cancer from smoking cigarettes yeah so I hesitate in saying it but I don't want to be dishonest I've had them yeah I don't smoke cigarettes though I've never bought a pack of that's a cigar smoke cigars I like them sometimes I just think it's a terrible it's a terrible thing to get hooked on yeah yeah and as I would say the same thing with alcohol I know people that have had real problems with alcohol that have been alcoholics and

they have to go to the meetings and you know they're on 12-step programs and you know I would never offer them a drink but if you said hey let's do a shot right now let's celebrate with is a wonderful conversation let's have a glass of whiskey I can have a glass of whiskey and not drink again it doesn't bother me okay I don't have that whatever that is yeah but some people do yeah I hesitate hesitating glorifying that to yeah and for young people scares the shit out of me if I see I've

we drank for the first time when I was probably like I was in high school I think is probably 14 or 15 first time I ever got drunk with my friends you know we got ahold of some Jack Daniels or something and maybe throw us the Irish legal drinking age yes well it's just friends you know listening to Classic Rock and getting drunk in Boston but the it's it's something I occasionally enjoy I enjoy alcohol I like having a drink of wine with a glass of wine with a meal

I like having a drink with friends occasionally but I don't have a problem with it and I know people who do and so I feel weird talking about it knowing those people that do have a problem with it yeah yeah with pot though the people that have a problem with pot it's rare and it's usually people that have some sort of a nun I do believe there there is an issue with people having some sort of an underlying schizophrenic issue that could come from especially high doses if they smoke

a lot of pot and one night they can have a schizophrenic episode I've actually seen it particularly from Edibles have seen it but that's to me that's absolutely the least taboo and I think there's a lot of benefits to pot I think Pop makes you more sociable I think it makes you friendlier maybe some people get paranoid from it but I think that's what that really is is marijuana Illuminating how vulnerable you actually are yeah that we sort of protect ourselves from this overwhelming exes

tential angst that you get when you get high on pot yeah and people say I don't like it makes me paranoid well you know the reality is You're vulnerable we're all very very very vulnerable and we just somehow another make it to look how old are you 56 I'm 52 we made it we made it to Sage somehow or another despite all the paranoia we got here we don't have to I mean it's like really you know life is crazy we're in these metal boxes with combustion engines you know like

trusting the people next to us going 60 miles an hour paying attention not looking at their phone you know it's like it's very very well and then weekend planes and who knows the fuck's going on with the engine this guy's flying it over the sky it's we're very vulnerable all the time just diseases and you know not to mention you know war and all sorts of other things that could fall where it all right yeah I mention everything earthquake fire yeah fires yes no my my thing on this

it is simply the collateral damage yeah the so leave the individual out of it and ask how much Social damage is caused by any of those things and got an alcohol and act number one just by the five Bible yeah you don't make it you know what's amazing to me is how the people who make alcohol have get a free ride it's incredible to me that like if I said to you that I was on the board of Philip Morris you would say that's not

it's pretty screwed up yeah and you would see would be you know problem with it if I said that I'm you know I'm on the board of Anheuser-Busch you probably would hit me up for tickets to the Super Bowl hmm right this is that see where is there's no in terms of the amount of social damage what out what Anheuser-Busch has created has produced a hundred times the social damage then what Philip Morris is produced yeah right like you know so it's like it's five always puzzled but I don't know how it got in our heads like

to treat one like it's completely taboo and the other we kind of shrug you know the there are a bunch of was reading about this recently how many colleges accept not just accept alcohol advertising and sponsorship but you go to a college football game and you know Bud Light will have will be an active sponsor of the event will have some huge relationship with the school this is crazy

he's crazy writers like this is the drug that is causing so many problems for young people particularly on campuses and the schools are hand in glove with the manufacturers of it because it's socially acceptable because it off to worry about repercussions because we give it up we give it a flick and the way that they would never have Marlboro Marlboro yeah oh my God people would pick it yeah whereas it's not you know I don't know this is true the strange kind of we were so messy people are so messy and that is it

that's a very good example of how messy we are

do you I'm I'm now

I didn't really for some reason I hadn't realized you were from Boston why are so many comics from Boston it's a hard place is that what it mean women drunk guys there's no am I right am I right in thinking there just seemed to be like why is it every time I turn around and I listened to some comic and they say well when I was growing up in Boston I'm of course your father's a lot it's a lot there's a lot and there are specific kind of its like the audience is there have a very short attention span

they are they're not going to coddle you if you suck they will boo you off the stage it's terrible for your self-esteem when you're young yeah but it feels good but it's it doesn't just build character it builds the correct approach towards an audience that you have to realize these people do not let these people got babysitter's they spent money they're here they could have been in the movie they could have done a lot of the recreational activities they've chosen to come to the comedy club stop fucking around get to work like like treat this like this is and the consequences of

of bombing of horrific right the feeling is it's one of the worst feelings a person can have yeah so we when was the last time you bombed it's been a while since I bombed but I've heard jokes that ate shit yeah well that's this is there's a process that I go through every two years I put out a special and then I write a new one and during the process of writing a new one you don't write it in a vacuum you write it and then I bring that stuff to The Comedy Store and fortunately with The Comedy Store you're doing 15 minutes Etc

with you know 15 other talented people so you you don't have to be up there for a long time and you get it in the comp the comic store also the audience is very unique in that a lot of them understand that they're going to see these guys like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock and workout comedy how I see they know it's working properly understand that and like you could joke around about it like that bit sucks I swear to God it's going to be good in about four months Tippets that bits in the oven right now because

Concepts that you have that you go there's got to be a way to make this work but that way that I just did is not the way you always trust the reaction you get another words you don't tell a joke it bombs and you say actually I think it was their problem not mine never that's never their problem there's not a chance in hell you can have a bad audience where a good joke doesn't go over because they're drunk and they're not paying attention to their heckling that's possible yeah but that's the anomaly the it's if you have a bit and you think it's a great been the audience doesn't laugh

laughs they're right you know maybe another audience would laugh maybe you're doing it in the wrong demographic or what have you but most likely that joke sucks yeah and most likely you have these ideas and you need to figure out how to rework them like Chris Rock told me that that he's at his that famous bit that I love black people I hate the n-word right that bid he said it took him a year to work out a

year he said it was bombing he couldn't get it to work right it will fuck up his act but he knew there was a way to do it and then it became one of the greatest bits of all time it became this incredible classic bit but that was from him grinding just chipping away at it reworking it bringing it on stage it eats shit you bring it back you go over it you ponder it you ask questions of other great writers like what do you think you know and they're like well I've been test maybe that and then you try it again

and it keeps doing it he did does it a hundred times or 200 times and then eventually it becomes bulletproof and then he gets it down to that form that you see it on his comedy special where it's just boom punchline bam punchline boom punchline bam and people like that because it's so good but there's a process to doing that and sometimes you have this idea in your head and you like I think there's something there I don't know I just got to figure out how to get into their head yeah and then I got to figure out how to make it in a way what's the most power

we'll wait for people to digest this idea because comedy is essentially a massive gnosis right you're getting the audience to allow you to think for them for a brief period of time and so if you're at your best the punchlines are sneaky they come where you don't expect them you take people on this ride they're assuming because they letting you think for them that you're a thoughtful person you're not going to make them feel bad for liking you and that's one thing that people really hate you say something mean or something thoughtless you portray

yeah yeah you betrayed their trust because they've trusted you to think for them yeah so you have to be considerate about people's sensibilities and feelings you know and when you're especially when you're breaching a sensitive issue like it you have to you have to dance you have to do you have to figure out a way to make this thing compatible to people thought patterns it's funny I you know I don't I'm not a stand-up comedian but I give a lot of speeches like in in conferences and

puppies headings which is a very in some ways a very different animal in some ways quite a similar animal and I've been doing it for 20 odd years now and the thing I'm always that blows me away is how different audiences are hmm like and one thing that you after doing it for about 10 years you start to get a little bit smarter about reading the room at the beginning to know who they

they are and what and it's you know it makes a difference like there are some some audiences are generous and they will if they see the the my case the punchline is not necessarily a joke but it's the payoff to whatever story I'm telling some people when they see it coming if you think about as a line they'll reward you the minute they see it they see it off in the Horizon yeah and I'll be like oh it's coming and they encourage you yes yes some people

we'll wait until the last possible moment and in some people will wait a beat after the punch line is over and then think about it and reward you those three audiences make that makes a world of difference in how you tell the story in your expectation going in in you know because if you if you think it's an early rewarding audience and it's a late rewarding audience you can get you'll be 10 minutes in and you're totally bummed out because you think it's a disaster but in fact it's not like and then

you get I develop all of these short hands about audiences I don't know if they're true or not but in my experience I remember once giving a talk to a group of Engineers on a early on a Monday morning in Minneapolis in February so it's freezing it's 8 o'clock in the morning they're engineers and they're all white guys they're like Norwegian right an incredibly thoughtful interesting audience listened to every word but they are not going to reward you

until they have thought about what you said and they'll wait like you know there's a five second lag between whatever payoff you give and their response right if you go I've also give it a talked to like a group of teachers in New Orleans so there you have a room that is largely female that would be much more diverse so maybe 50% black for example 20 percent Hispanic 30% white just way more they're going to reward

Lord you the minute they see it coming their teachers first of all so their whole thing is about listening rewarding you know seeing the best in something and celebrating it I mean completely different if you go into the engineers in Minneapolis and the teachers in New Orleans with the same expectation you're going to it's going to be a disaster yeah right teachers just want to find a way to love you right and and also their women women I think my experience are far more

generous than men as audience I don't know if overall yeah probably yeah but so that like and I took a long time to figure that out because you for the longest time I would walk away from someone I would think from some toxin would think I just did committed the worst possible offense you're doing a different thing though it's your dance is very different write your first of all you're giving these speeches and you're doing it in these corporate environments you're doing it in conference rooms I would imagine and a different

and of halls and yeah Bright Lights yeah I'm doing it at comedy clubs theaters in arenas so comedy clubs they know what they're getting into their in and it's set up like if you go to the comedy store or the Improv right it's a low ceiling it's a great hot mic is great sound system there's opening acts that warm everybody up before I get there the stage is set and it's an

Armament that it's been established for decades this is a place to go to hear people tell jokes yeah you're doing it you're it's a your you don't have an opening acts you're doing it they don't even know if you're going to be funny they don't know what you're going to do you're going to talk yeah you got to talk about they've been sitting in the same air conditioned arena for six hours one small break I mean it's like they're and this thing to really doing work like yes you know so it's a it is a very very different yeah it's a super interesting

Ting I find it incredibly rewarding and I also find it it's sort of it reaffirms my my my kind of faith in humanity for some reason interesting I really I'm very very happy that I started doing sir doing it years and years ago but just to communicate with large groups of people that reaffirms her faith in what way because I'm always struck by how open I think a lot of the rhetoric in our society now about how Divided We Are

and level that I just think it's I think we're divided online on any talk to people person to person we find a way to find Common Ground yeah and you go to these meetings and you know that half of the room voted one way another half voted the other way and that doesn't come up right doesn't block half of you from appreciating have them appreciating what you're saying they're totally open to to As Long As You Are respectful and take the time to explain what you think and why and what and how it matters to them

them then people will listen and engage in ask really good questions and I don't see so funny the Washington is divided and online is divided I don't I just don't see it else mmm maybe I'm not getting a an accurate picture of the whole country but in in these you know give a talk at the group of whatever Educators in New Orleans yay you don't see this I think when it comes to political discussions that's when people get really divided because I think they feel like

supposed to be divided as really interesting video that I watched yesterday where Donald Trump jr. was getting heckled by these alt-right characters from not being right wing enough I was like holy shit like this this but I I took a lot of pleasure in watching that play out not because I want Donald Jr to get heckled but because this is what I've always said there's people that are just extreme and it doesn't matter if they're in antifa or if

are in the proud boys if they're far left or far right it's the same thing they're just finding an ideology and they're taking it to the extremists level and they're angry at the people aren't woke enough or they're finding an ideology and they take it to the first level and they're angry people that are not separatists that aren't white supremacist they're angry people that like Mexicans at all the any Mexicans I mean there's there's people that are that racist that are mad at subtle racism they're mad at people that there's just people that are

dream and you can't make everyone happy it is impossible and some people don't want to be happy they want to find ways in which you're not woke enough there they're concerned is not the overwhelming good of the world Harmony peace love compatibility communication and Community that's not their concern is their concern is finding ways you're wrong so finding ways that they're right and ways that you're that you're wrong so they'll

they'll find some reason why you're not woken up so it who my response to that was it was slightly different although I think a lot of what you're saying is accurate the reason they got upset with him was that he wouldn't do a QA yes okay yes okay now as someone who's on his book tour and is done been doing this for 20 years let me just say you have to do the QA yeah the QA is symbolically crucial it's like everyone says okay everyone sees you get up there and you

you are prepared bit and I was like okay fine I know you can do your prepared bit but you're asking me to spend $20 on a book on what I want to know is are you someone who is meaningfully engaged in the ideas that you're talking about in your book right so QA is where you prove that to me yes proving your thoughtful prove you care about the stuff prove that you wrote this in someone else didn't prove all those things yeah he wouldn't do it sorry thought it was weird because he just did the view which is like the

the worst way to have a QA I had fun of you but I'm saying in that situation there's everyone's talking everybody over everybody yeah you really don't get a chance to express full thoughts yes yeah if he can hear you if he could do the view he can still be do Q&A at you floozy UCLA forgotten what was it was it really was it but what was interesting too is that what he was using as an excuse was that the the the left-wing media is going to take

his quotes and take them out of context dude I said I've no sympathy for him well in that case no didn't make any sense doesn't make any sense like any sense just say something intelligent and meaningful and you'll be taken seriously that's the way the world works well there's a whole video I mean if someone takes it out of context you could always like show the entire video hey that's out of context here's why is he playing the helpless credits and he's not wear this thing well I mean I someone who's in you know like I said in Arabic I got no sympathy for that either that's what you

that's what you do listen I have no sympathy for me either in that in this case I do not think it's it's been found it very amusing his wife or girlfriend forgotten what she is which of those things she is she she then disses The Crowd about how the only the only way they could get dates is online because nobody would do you see that it's like rule number two after rule number one is do the QA rule number two is don't diss The Audience by by telling them they're all losers like it's just not what do you

well this piece you know that's a thing where people want to just get get you you got them so they want to get you people are booing fuck you you're a loser no no is there a loser yeah you know it's just noises instead of going love love you have a good one guys take care but instead you're right do the QA instead don't don't don't even you know it's not that hard to answer questions I think there's a real problem with answering questions in front of a crowd

though where people screaming out things I think real thoughtful conversation should be had one-on-one and it's it what if like we you and I having this conversation it's great but if there was a third person they're talking to we would have to work that guy in or that girl in we'd have to figure out when she's talking when we're talking and if you got another person okay now you got a real problem now you have four people and it's very difficult if you watch those panel shows some for some reason the network news shows post-election pre-election their

they've still haven't figured that out they'll get seven people on they think it's like more the merrier and like the like the pregame shows on NFL Sunday thanks I got so many guys each one of them says once at us and they're talking over each other and everybody's trying to get a sound bite off everyone has this prepared thing this is zanger I'm going to get that Trump guy with this one and they're ready for it and they trying to interject in someone's talking over them and excuse me I'm talking and then it degrades we have been I want to use the opportunity of being on the show to issue a challenge to double jump

Junior oh like just call me up done and I will accompany you on your book tour and interview want you onstage respectfully will do let's let's do a QA you and me ask you questions I'll do it do you want to do that yes that's something you want to do why do you want to do that I think will be fun what do you think it'd be fun about it well I think it would be in without saying anything that's going to know him to not do it okay yeah so let's be clear about a couple things Okay this not

it would not be a stunt I'm not doing it to do gotcha I would like to read his book thoughtfully and engage with him in the ideas in it and do we see for myself exactly thing I was talking about before is is he does he want to meaningfully engage with those ideas with someone who doesn't necessarily share them right right and that would be for its I would ask for an hour mmm and we can do it in lieu of audience Q&A if he likes I'll just have a

conversation with the Wednesday so just a conversation in front of an audience that would be interesting you don't you see that would you pay to see that yeah I would let's do a his book title is the same as my 2016 Netflix title it's triggered I got their first child on beach by three years that's question number one else they done I noticed that title of your book is the same as stove why are you biting Joe Rogan stuff what's going on over there he probably didn't know it existed

Marv almost released his HBO specials triggered to really yeah I was going to call it triggered to but at least he sent me an e-mail apologizing you know when you get it you want to get there early well you know it's not my term I wouldn't really care if Bill used it or if Donald Trump jr. used it we did obviously has he done or Dawn he's gone to feel calm Dawn that's good question isn't he Donald Trump jr. online but they think they distinguished the dad is Donald oh so they call him

him I don't know that's one of things I could ask presumably in our face off maybe we should do I my limiting it to an hour well yeah let's go Rogan rules let's go like two hours yes me and dodgy died in the second hour we really get into it yeah because that's what happens you could keep it together people can keep it together for 45 minutes you can't keep it together for 3 hours 3 hours you know who a person is you know I once gave a talk in Colombia and the Colombians are take themselves in the best way very seriously right they consider themselves

of the most cultured people do that America yeah they and their they can't they think they speak the most beautiful Spanish and I'm told they may as well they may well do and so I was talking with the was going to go this little kind of lecture tour of major Colombian cities and I was talking to the organizer and and text and a question you ask is well how long I should talk for some period of time and then we'll do qal how long do you think I should talk and the guy goes I don't know house three hours

he was dead serious and you realize like this is the same so when Fidel Castro would give those six hours speeches you realize it's not just I mean Castro a little bit crazy but there's also the our park there are cultures that have an expectation that if you're going to go and hear somebody speak it's not going to be over in 40 minutes right you have to commit to the to the experience and they literally want to me to start at 9 and ended noon weren't the early

campaign speeches for people running for president and the early days this country weren't they like that as well I believe there were long Affairs yeah and then then you get the Gettysburg Address which is what is it six minutes or something hmm so there's oh no what was it the inaugural I forgotten one of Lincoln's most famous speeches very brief is incredibly brief and you realize in that context where people are used to hours and hours and hours what an extraordinary mean it is think about Lincoln as a kind of

badass Entertainer not Entertainer performer so he walks into a world where everyone thinking they're going to be there for two hours he sets up there and he's done in five minutes you realize what a just a power move it is is that lastic like this is a good movie Magic him imagine him so he comes into his like AIDS and says this holds it up and it's you know you've seen it in the in the Lincoln Monument on the mall it's two paragraphs you know

Ford what is it I'm not Canadian four score and seven years ago yes blah blah blah blah blah two paragraphs they must have been like what these people traveled by horse and cart for hours to your USB connection yeah right yeah that's it such a great move it is a good move right we're still talking about it today yeah yeah it's unbelievably beautiful I every time I go to the Lincoln monument and read that I am moved to tears it is insanely gorgeous Bros as a writer

are you must appreciate like economy of words using the right words and the right place and having the right impact and my friend are he has a piece of paper that he has glued to the top of his laptop from Hemingway to quote says the first draft of everything is shit it's true and there's something about someone nailing writing someone just writing something that you go God damn he's just fucking nail that yeah

yeah there you have to maintain the trick is always even though it's false you have to you have to hold in your heart the conviction that there is a way to say this perfectly and beautifully yeah right you can so even when you're in draft one or two or five and it's not there yet you have to believe it's possible and the many you lose that belief that it's possible it's over here when you when you write do you write on paper first and then start typing

like how do you how do you opposite type and then print it out because there's there's certain things structural things you can only see I think when it's on the page and you've got to put all the pages in front of printed out though you don't write longhand at all dude print it out and then we'll I know then I will annotate that draft with a pen so I will do longhand absolutely there's a there there's a night I'm very I think that our thinking is actually quite sensitive to the

the mode that we're using yeah so you think differently when you're typing on a keyboard than when you have a pen in your hand and I think it's not a not one is better than the other they're both good they're just different and yes make sense to use both yeah I agree it's been particularly for me my notes before I go on stage I always write out longhand I mean right out I write my comedy though on my thoughts essay the writer Mall out on a keyboard I'd write typing and then when

about to go on stage like the hour or so before a show I'll write out index cards and sometimes I'll write out entire pits if it's a bit I'm working on and it's kind of new I'll write it all out and it helps tremendously with my memory yeah but something about writing things out but writing to me on paper is so slow it's so slow for me to actually write the words for me to get the thoughts out I want to get the thoughts out with a keyboard because I can just type I can do it quickly I can

get it done what I don't do what a lot of people do do is voice-to-text I don't do that never done that yeah but wait I have a question that occur to you when you saying you're talking about that schedule that you're on that you do us every two years we tell so are you starting when you when you have to sit down and write new material are you starting cold or do you have in the previous year where you can have building up little bits and pieces that you're now putting together yeah I always have little stuff that I lay aside

like I have I have pages and pages of shit that never went anywhere and so I'll go back over that and go man this maybe doesn't take that out there and then I'll introduce all so the usually there's a window of time like say if I my special I film it in July it might not are until August or until October rather so in that window I have those four months to try to create material so what I'll be able to do

in that window say I have a bit that I know works because it's on the special I'll do that bit because the people haven't seen it yet and then after that bit I will sandwich in some new stuff and I'll try to make that new stuff come alive and then I'll add a bit after that I know is good then I'll sandwich and some new salt get make like a like a club sandwich of shitty jokes it's sandwiched in between like legit bits and then one of them will catch fire oh my God this one's Alive Now good

you go back can you see a trajectory in your comedy like when you go back and look at something you were you were a joke that you may have done I don't know eight years ago do you how do you react to it does it I don't work I don't but if I did I probably somewhat I would definitely see flaws I would God that's too wordy or that's that's clunky or that's fit for store I don't like how I acted that out or I don't like maybe that wasn't done yet you know there's a there's a cooking period

added and everybody has a different take on it I've been my friend Anthony Jeselnik has a three year cycle and he might be right he takes the first year he just does clubs in LA and develops material the second year he goes on the road and he goes to comedy clubs in the road the third year he takes at the theaters and then he's ready to film at the end of the third year yeah and you know his last special was excellent but he's just very good comic very good writer but his process might be

right there's some guys that were doing it on a one-year cycle they were doing a new special every year and I don't think that's right that's got to be yeah it's too hard it's not just too hard the material suffers its half cooked a lot of his gooey on the inside it's just not ready yeah this is not done me some of the bits are really good then some of the bits aren't and you have to fill the whole hour and the problem is also when you're doing a special every year you have your own audience so those people love you so they're laughing at stuff that's not even that good

like you have to you have to be doing that in front of a bunch of people that didn't expect to see you yeah that's that's hard to do so a lot a lot of weird tricks you can play on yourself as a comic you know you could think you're better than you are or that the bits are better than they are or that you you don't have to worry about things anymore you don't have to grind you have to throw yourself into the Gladiator pit that is The Comedy Store in a Tuesday night but you do you do there's no other way if you want to be top-notch

have to do the things that top-notch people do there's a Sinister I mean there's no there's no books written on this there's no University course but all the best people will tell you there's a process this is the process you know it's one of the weird art forms in that no one teaches it there's litter anybody who does teach it is terrible there's no one who can this I've never seen like a we're real world class headliner sells out theaters who teaches a course on Comedy never

seen it you know and I couldn't teach you how to do it anyway because your way of doing it would be very different than Jamie's way of doing it which be very different than Steven Wright which is very different than Sam Kinison it's like everybody's got their own weird little thing that makes them funny it's a matter of what is the process how do you how do you get it out who is your candidate for I was loving any particular field there's the Insiders Choice and then there's the popular choice like the most hilarious one is if you ask an

protect who their favorite architect is 99 times out of a hundred you will never have heard of a Target it's always some obscure German guy from like the 30 you know or some like you know experimental Dutch guy who did not even one building and it's like amazing if you you know it's like some you need a church outside of Antwerp and it was it little ones my bag it's always that so who's the who's your insiders I would say The Insider a pic is Dave Attell

because Dave Attell is probably one of the greatest comics of all time it doesn't get enough love because he has no social media presence he wears the same hat and the same shirt and the same jacket and the same pants every day he does no thought whatsoever about his look all he does is just write new and better jokes constantly he's one of the most prolific Comics but he still still have a hard time selling places out and it doesn't make any sense although lately

he and Jeff Ross have done this thing called bumping Mike's where they go onstage and they sort of work together and they talk shit like Jeff will say something funny and then Dave will say something funny and Dave will do his bits and Jeff will make fun of them and they'll go and it's really entertaining and they do a series of shows doing that and that is elevated his profile and for that I'm very very thankful long was he survive in the wilderness he's been out there forever he's have a show on Comedy Central way back in the day called what was it goes on yeah insomnia thank you and it was like

he would go out after shows and they would you know go do weird things in these towns and he would get blackout drunk and he was an alcoholic at the time and he was getting hammered drunk and then he quit he got sober and rare in comedy that someone gets sober and becomes much better but that's what happened with Dave he's a much better comic now than even was then and what it so and what's your when you see someone like that perform and you're you

someone who was extraordinary talented and good what is your emotional reaction to it do you run home and re-examine all the stuff you're doing the I mean what's it certainly inspiring yeah when someone's really good I always want to write that that is the feeling I always Kaka go to work at it work but also I've cherished and held on to like a like a sacred Ember that I'm trying to keep keep alive my fan my my my love of being a fan of stand-up comedy

like I like watching it I'm a fan I love it a guy like going to see it like to this day like I'm working with my friend Joey Diaz tonight who I think is the funniest guy alive I'm happy I'm gonna go see comedy I'm going to see him like that I'd still like watching I still enjoy it I didn't for a while in the early days it was to I was too ambitious and I was judging myself versus them and if someone had a really great joke I wish I thought of it instead of enjoying

it I'll go God why didn't I think of that and that's a it's poison and then I realized luckily I got very lucky that I figure this out early on like you know couple two or three years and I was like I used to love comedy like why am I not loving common because I'm doing calm that's the dumbest fucking thing in the world the reason why I got into stand-up comedy was because I loved watching it now all the sudden I don't like it because I'm jealous or you know or a makes me compare myself to them and I don't like the feeling

or it makes me what is that that's so dumb and then I realized it thankfully and I had a shift and I caught myself yeah and I have managed to cherish and nurture that being a fan that feeling of being an actual fan the enjoyment of stand-up comedy I nurture that so that that to me is critical so when a guy like David tells on stage I can enjoy it I enjoy it I just can I can sit there like an audience member

for and just laugh but are you gonna smash question is when you sit in an audience of 17 you stinking aliens with watching Dave Attell okay are you experiencing him differently than the audience is because you are professional like him I'm sure somewhat but I try to shut down the analysis part of my brain as much as possible I try to shut down like why did he write it like that why doesn't he do it this way I try to just be a fan I try to just watch you know but I'm sure

I know some things are coming or I know the way I would do it or I know Dave very well so I know how he would do it I'm sure there's some sort of a difference between but that's like the same as immediate musician right if you're a musician if you're a guitarist and you watching an amazing guitarist even though they're really good you probably like okay I see what he's doing he's doing this thing like you understand technically like a turn I was my worried as I get older is that increasingly my reactions are simply versions of I would have done it

that's not how I would have done it right right as opposed to so if sake pumpkin comes to me for advice my first I think about oh that's here's the advice I'd like to give on this piece of writing my first someone actually was talking to a friend of mine yesterday brought to me an essay she's working on credibly interesting essay about the role of women in cinema and I give out so we're walking around and I'm telling her my response to it and

after I give it that I first thought was wait did I just say if I was doing it I was I would have done it this way and it was did I you know did I just simply impose my own standards and preferences on her which is not advice that's actually the that's the worst thing which you have to do is inhabit her mind and fix it according to her own intentions and yes I'll and I my I'm constantly paranoid about the notion that I am not

not being truly empathetic at the moment of giving advice I'm just projecting my own and I think that's that's something that happens when you get so when you become so sure of your own methods and professional personality that that's you know that's the kind of I wouldn't have done that when I was 25 because I didn't know what it meant to be to write a Malcolm Gladwell thing where I was just going to be acting as a human being but now I kind of have this thing

and in my skull yeah you have a method I have a method I'm going to try to mix it up but it's probably still riding everybody's method is Dipper ticket with writing right everybody's method is very different yeah everybody's voice is very different there's some key things with comedy one of them is as I said before the economy of words it's very important in comedy if you see the punchline coming too far out it loses impact with the more words you use but if you can get the punch line to the people before they see the punchline come

and that's a gigantic impact that's what my friend Joey Diaz does better than anybody he does he does it better than anybody he sneaks things in on you yeah yeah this reminds me of a long is very lines I've often thought this was the one of the greatest jokes like CIU probably those joke a lot in terms of economy this is the most economical great joke I've ever heard my life and it's from my God I forgot his name this is a polygon forgotten his name

Norm what you look like

he was he was in a lake Bell movie Lake Bell yeah he's an incredibly had his own show on it'll come to me the joke was you know those signs in bathrooms in restaurants you know all staff should wash their hands after using the bathroom right especially Earl

it's so embarrassing it's two words that transform the Ricky Gervais no no it's specially Earl especially so it's like I cannot go into a bathroom anymore without thinking of that joke it's so fantastic it's like you know you didn't like it takes this you know I don't need to explain the joke too it's just a mate two words have created this lasting image of Earl

it's subverted the whole bathroom thing it's I can't go to the bathroom and your head its burned into my head I was it Jamie it's I cannot believe I could I so humiliated I can't remember his name it was in New York kind of Indie comic okay but I just like that Rogue L know but we're getting close even close you know it'll come to me but he but that's like I'm I am amazed by the two words part mmm like it's just

that you can do it with two words just strikes me is the same reason why I'm obsessed I've always had an incredible love of television commercials really yes because the good ones the idea that you can communicate something emotionally powerful or funny or meaningful in 30 seconds is so badass like 30 seconds is nothing right and there are people whose job it is to communicate in some of the

not the run-of-the-mill like 80% of them are relatively straightforward they don't but there are there's a handful that are just magnificent there was one I mean there's a million examples of great ones but there was one really beautiful one

which was a Heineken Dad I've got no I've forgotten again the song they used were a bunch of kids jump in the back of a cab and they start singing a bell div Devoe song and the cab driver they're all young cool hipsters they're all crammed in the back and they're all like a little bit tipsy and the cab drivers this like crusty old school guy and it comes to the chorus and he

chimes in and it's just this moment it's 30 seconds and it's fantastic as you don't you're not expecting that you're thinking you see the Crusty old it's like a Boston cab driver right like some grizzled Irish guy who's like 70 years old and he's three and you think oh you must hate these kids because they're young and beautiful and their tips he has a Friday night and he's driving a cap and then the song comes on the radio and they all start singing along in their kind of drunken way and then he just joins in and this writer was right

it's fantastic and it's 30 seconds like somebody a really great and funny like the remember the Wendy's lady where's the beef oh yeah you'll never forget that one forget it three words where's the beef an image old lady screaming open it up a cheeseburger looking for the beef yeah like I mean how could you not how can you not take off your hat and person who came up with that yeah right if I gave you if you're if you're set with 30 seconds

squirt yeah let me really really hard right and you have to make a point you're trying to sell something yeah try yourself Jerry Seinfeld was going to open up an advertising agency for a while he had thoughts about I know he had done a couple of commercials and apparently he had written some of the commercials and he decided that he was going to write commercials yeah he was going to do that I think he's got so much Seinfeld money's like fuck that why am I working what am I doing I've got a billion dollars in the bank I just go back

more portions I mean his his he doesn't just have a billion dollars in the bank is more coming in coming in yeah it's like constantly coming yeah there's no it's like a yeah it just seems too big to does he did he get this Larry David have the same deal that he does I do not know I would love to know that first I would like to know that too I don't think he does and I would imagine he doesn't but I think he's probably extremely wealthy but he has in my opinion the most underrated sitcom of all time and Curb Your Enthusiasm there's times that I've watched that show

where I've been literally weeping laughing like holding my sides laughing yeah and it's so odd the way he does it you know do you know how he writes things yeah they have like a place where they like okay you're trying to sell me a toaster and Jamie's trying to stop me from buying that toaster but you're mad at Jamie and you're trying to be persuasive at me at the same time that's how they write so it's they just do multiple takes with really talented people and they find Magic

yeah it's Chris I mean it's crazy how open-ended it I've talked to different guys that have been on the show yeah about how they do it it's amazing that you have to love the amount of trust you have to have in your fellow actors yes yeah but it's kind of that's lovely yes particularly contrasted with this incredibly tightly controlled anal writing process that's in place in so many of those shows yes yes yes but it's also why that shows seem so organic yeah

no I mean there's talking over it sounds real it's like I had trouble watching it because it was too real to me I was just cringing with all of the social awkwardness he's just constructing one socially awkward situation after another right and I couldn't because I couldn't distinguish it from real life yes I just I just couldn't bear it much it was it was too much about it did you ever see the one where he has he's over the rapper's house krazee-eyez-killa is he though and the rapper has scar

bass player 24/7 I mean it's Larry David with this rapper it is fucking magic man it's magic it's so good the genius yeah well he's a legitimate genius there's no doubt about that and you know he's also like a real legit Oddball like you drives a Prius you know he is that schlubby guy is probably worth 500 million dollars or something crazy but you know he's not that kind of schlubby guy that's the way he he that's who he is yeah those

guys were in my right they were in New York like barely scraping by forever yeah yeah well he was a stand-up and he and Jerry knew each other from back then and you know he was a weird stand up like it's was an acquired taste it wasn't wasn't you know it wasn't yeah burned down comedy clubs who which Comics are not to your taste I'm not saying that you don't like I mean that are not to your taste that is whose humor just doesn't kind of

well no bunny I mean not that I can think of offhand I don't I wouldn't pay attention one of the things I've gotten really good at as I've gotten older is not paying any attention to things I don't like yeah just just letting it just slide right out of my brain and onto the floor and I'm not interested in it's just I spent so much time when I was younger and stupider worrying about things I don't like being upset if things had don't like well that sucks why do people like that what the fuck's wrong with them

and then realize like what a gigantic waste of resources that is in or just a huge waste of energy yeah that I don't care anymore you know as long as they're not stealing material as long as I'm not Vic make you know doing something terrible to other Comics victimizing as long as I'm not doing that I really don't care so when they're doing well good luck Zen yeah I try Jimmy and it's not it's not a mean it's not a hundred percent it's it's constantly a work of

yes but my philosophy is rooted in some sort of a pragmatic understanding of how my own brain works yeah like you don't you only have so much time and you only have so much energy and if you're wasting your time on things that you don't like that have nothing to do with you people like something like and that's how I feel about music and and movies and so many things there's so many things that I just don't like them at all but some people do I mean you know some people will that I think their music is done

shit but they'll have full Staple Center of people rocking out well I must be wrong it's not me it's not them it's just like everyone's different people have different tastes some people like really cheesy rom-coms they like it they really enjoy it they seek comfort in this movie where you know it's going to work out in the end it's going to it's not like in the end of fucking meteors going to land on the building and kill everybody and the the screen is going to Splatter

her with blood because you know their bodies explode you're not going to see that in this movie and this movie everything's going to work out great it's just like by that I have that feeling about Law and Order In fact what am I I've no idea why anyone would ever watch that show notes and one of my secret goals in life is at some point I would like to be appointed executive producer of Law and Order and I want to do ones that completely subverted franchise so we get you through your all everyone knows exactly how every one of those shows is always going to turn out right and I want to get to minute 47

and just go on some Savage you turn that just appalls and outrages absolutely and then I'll be done I'm just I'm quitting and I'm walking down to the black yeah about fuck and don't tell anybody that Malcolm gladwell's taken over no yeah it'd be totally honest I would push just gently push Dick Wolf aside let me have this one and we're going to like completely and we'll have it you know the the villain the will actually be one of the prosecutors that's what we'll do or something right along those lines and every episode ends like know

oh Country for Old Men style or the shit's over you like what the fuck exactly what but there's something there's a drug in those where they're comforting and that people know that the bad guys going to get caught in the good guy don't know this is a random thought but I don't know any men who watch them and I'm coming to the belief that they are there's something there actually for women and there are a very comforting kind of reassuring fantasy about how

how the world works that he that you know the system is so I had continued my this is incredibly complicated theory that I developed ones about these kinds of things so there's we all know what a western is yes a western is where is conceptually a world in which there is no Law and Order and a Man shows up and imposes personally Law and Order on the territory the community right so

there is also a Eastern what is an Eastern and Eastern is a place where by contrast is a story where they're like at the straight who's four types the Eastern is where there is Law and Order there are so there are institutions of justice but they are have been subverted by people from within so an Eastern would be the Serpico is an Eastern it's a crooked cop who is it's the bad

who has you know screwed up the there's lots of tons and tons of Hollywood movies are are Easterns the northern is the case where Law and Order exists and Law and Order is morally righteous system works Lon show Law & Order is a northern it's a functioning apparatus of Justice which reliably and accurately produces the right the correct result in confronting criminality every single

all day when it's on TV the southern is where the the entire way the southern is all John Grisham novels are Southern's they are where the entire apparatus is corrupt and where the reformer is not an Insider but an outsider so in in every John Grisham novel the same the opposite I love John Anderson has be clear but they are perceived from the same premise which is the system is rotten to the core and only this white knight who comes

from the outside can save us so in the western there is no system in the northern there's system it's fantastic in the in the Eastern the system is reformed from within but in the southern the system has to be reformed from without huh that's my complicated so I feel like anything you can place all art about Law and Order about criminal World criminal justice into one of these four categories and the so the

Brits love the northern so what is you know all of the famous British detective stories are always really becomes Sherlock Holmes yeah is it Northern it's like the system is like and you know there's no corruption in the police department they may be bumbling and Charles got to help them out but no one's you know off on some there's no there's never a case where there's a rotten cop who's selling out every

is there a modern version of the western because Westerns all seem to take place between the time of like fifteen sixteen hundred and eighteen eighty there is solely charge you read the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child no but I watched one of the movies those are westerners those westerns there's you'll never the whole thing about a question is can you find the police can you find the police officer in a I I challenge you to find a police officer in a leech on

novel they're not nowhere to be found Reacher is a retired the hero is a retired army investigator he's not even in the Army anymore and it's just roaming around the country solving crimes on his own and he'll confront some massive criminal conspiracy and he never calls the cops right that's the whole premise that's so Western you can't call the cops in the classic Western because there's no cops to be found right here in Montana On the Border but reach her it's a it's a 21st century Western

turn so he doesn't call the cops because he doesn't feel like it it's just like they never appear like and he just murders everyone out on his own and then he gets on the train and goes to the next place they're amazing I love them so much do you write fiction no never I mean I I read so many Thrillers I read like I mean I'm probably read

how many do I hear 50 60 70 really I read you know when you go in the airport that's a lot into the Hudson News and you see all those there's a whole like wall of the strollers I have read every single one of that's means you're reading more than one a week yeah easy yeah wow that I read on top of that I read by serious stuff but I devour people send me Publishers send me these things in the mail just because I don't have to buy them anymore they just said they know that I'm obsessed likely

child's although he didn't with his most recent Lee Childs publisher for years you'd send me galleys the main I did cellular not recent happen I think they've forgotten me fucked up fucked up what are you consuming all of it reading or does it any of it book on tape now I'm reading at all yeah I mean I'm reading them in

Breakneck speed and I'm but I do there's a guy I'd love I love one of my favorites is Stephen Hunter who writes the you know they made some movies of his stuff Bob Lee Swagger these sniper movies they're fantastically well written and those the minute he comes out with a new one I read it the instant I mean I have to it's just like there's just such Delights and ever heard always so good really yeah so good hmm anything with the word sniper and it is generally one of his books and

shooter with Mark Wahlberg was one yeah and say that was a good guess but they're the books are fantastic I would recommend them wholeheartedly um how do you have the time to read all these books well that's my job not being Thrillers but my job is reading books literature yeah you know I read very quickly I suppose but I don't watch a lot of TV I just watch a little bit of sports don't really watch much so it is not a lot competing for my

attention but you know I know the book that I will read tonight at dinner so when you set out to write a book do you have a premise stewing in your head where it's just like throbbing we like that's it that's the one or do you halfway in I'll get it I'll start oh so you start a book with a little colonel they'll be a story I'm interested in I'll write it up and then I'll see where we're going to go from there like they'll be every one of my books began

a very very simple one chapter with the I didn't I didn't know what surrounded the chapter but there was something in the book in talking to strangers I got interested in these spy stories these that story of tell of of Ana Montes the Cuban Spy Who Rises to the top of the American intelligence establishment I began with that and I went and talked to the guy who caught her and he had such a fantastic interview with him and that just got me incredibly excited and that got me

this whole thing about here's a woman spying in plain sight for Castro at the top of the American intelligence establishment for 10 years no one catches her even though she's not some master spy she has the codes that she's using in her purse and the radio she's using in a shoebox in her closet like we're not talking about James Bond right and they she does it and no one even comes close to it they all like wow really really smart people and that was such a fascinating notion that even

in the most sophisticated and by definition paranoid agency in the American government they're spies I get away with old stuff like to think anybody ever gets away with it to retirement and then as never else oh absolutely in fact really so I go and I interview the guy who caught this woman Ana Montes and I'm leaving to go back to try back he's in a small town in Wisconsin and I you know as one does I turned off my tape recorder and put it in my bag and I'm walking back

to my car because I'll walk you to your car it's like okay and we're walking down the street and he begins to tell me another story even better than the one I went there to talk to him about which of course my typical is no longer running so don't have the story anymore what the fuck and the story was basically oh there's another bigger spy out there I now know I now realize there is this one thing out there right now well this was three years ago to there was one three years ago that's out there was actually just retired at the implication was they're still there they're bigger and I really was one of those

things where when he put together all the pieces to catch this one woman and a Montes he realized oh there's someone else and then he retired whoa he's like the implication was he couldn't get anyone else interested in finding the other bigger one but he knew there was someone out there but he didn't know the specifically who there were no he knew there was someone I forgot of course because it was his tragic thing where I tried off Mighty find him except back how didn't you just hold on stop stop stop let me put this back on do you think you would have told

you the story if your tape recorder was running don't think so fuck

it's kind of great it's a great he was incredibly after Siri comes in hey Siri record the Gladius right he was it's Chris but I think you know if you're in that world you just assume yeah they all assume they're Spies Like We have them we have them in there's so it's like they're not as maybe they're not as worked up about it as we are I don't know yeah there's there was a story recently where Iran assassinated some people that they

acted were CIA spies and I always wondered like how many people are spies and like you know Homeland style living in some other country assimilating into their culture getting jobs in organizations mm even in terrorist groups yeah infiltrating what a crazy way to live your life well there was a story I told him what a my podcast episodes Region's History season two I think that I ran across I love reading these memoirs

of like mid-level retard Intelligence Officers and tons of them and people only read them and I love there just because invariably like in the middle of the book The tell you some they'll just drop some crazy story and this guy that was the former general counsel to CIA wrote his Memoirs really interesting Memoirs in the middlee tells a story about how the CIA CIA a guy who was a really big deal terrorists in the 70s

and 80s really big deal has a change of heart and comes to the CIA and says I no longer believe in what I'm doing I'd like to work for you and proceeds to work for the CIA for some period of time unknown period of time and he's the he's way up high in Middle Eastern terrorist organization and that fact leaks to the New York Times and a reporter for the New York Times basically

rise a story outing him and the CIA frantically tries to get in touch with him to warn him and he vanishes they think he was killed fuck that reporter because they're it was a very interesting if you're reporting you have something like that though that's what the episode is all about because your whole job is to release information your whole job is to report on things so here you have this bombshell of a story that will make you look like a hero but it could get someone killed

what do you do fuck what I didn't realize is that there's a established pattern of people at the intelligence services and editors of newspapers talk all the time yeah about things like this like so they have Arrangements yeah they haven't put that in this case the arrangement didn't work

Malcolm you're awesome let's wrap this up thank you really appreciate I really appreciate you work I've like I said I've been a gigantic fan for a long time so this is a real treat for me and would you do this again I would be delighted to thank you thank you very much appreciate you bye everybody thank you friends and thank you to our sponsors thank you to athletic greens you can get their awesome offer 20 free travel packs valued at $79 with your first purchase you can also claim this offer in the UK and Europe using the same URL that's athletic greens.com Rogen go there

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the mother fucking cash app download the cash app from the app store or the Google Play Store and use the referral code Joe Rogan all one word you will receive ten dollars in the cash appleson $10 to Justin wrens fight for the Forgotten charity thank you my friends much love to you all bye-bye