#2130 - Coleman Hughes
2024-04-03 03:10:24
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
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What's up?
What's up, Coleman?
Good to see you.
I'm good man, good to see you again. What's cracking? Well, I'm good, you know?
You're great, you got a new book.
Got a new book, End of Race Politics Arguments for a Colorblind America.
Yeah, I saw you on the view, yeah.
Yeah, so that's been overwhelming my past couple days.
Yeah, is that annoying?
No, no, no, no, I mean, it's just when I was on there. I really had no idea how it was going to land with the audience, so I just went in there, did my thing. I had no idea what to expect.
I didn't know who Sunny Hostin was, I actually still really don't know. So I wasn't expecting necessarily for her to kind of try to ambush me in that way and attack my character in that way. And I responded to it in the moment, as I do. And I didn't expect it to go as viral as it did, but I think it arguably went more viral than anything I've ever done.
It's hard for me to totally tell, but I've just had people messaging me almost nonstop for like, four days afterwards.
Well, it is the show that people love to hate.
Yes, that's true.
They get so much hate watching and hate watching viral clips of them saying ridiculous things. I mean, it is a rabies infested hen house.
And at the same time, it seemed like the most interesting part was their audience seemed to be on my side. Yes, yes, and that's their audience.
Yes, well, their audience is not really their audience, their audience is a group of people they bring in to watch television shows. You know, I don't know if you've ever seen audiences before for TV shows, but a lot of them are paid, they're paid to be there.
Because they have to guarantee that there's going to be people there. So there's services that you hire. And when a show gets really, really popular, you know, like Letterman or something like that, obviously it has its own fan base. Those people will try to get tickets before anybody else does, and in that case, they probably don't need to use a service anymore.
They just get actual fans, but arguably, like the fans, the real fans of the view that are like, Oh, these ladies are on point. Most of those people can't leave the house like they're probably immobile.
Right, right, right, because their mom's taking their kids to school.
It's a very strange show, but it's fun to watch, it's just fun to watch them.
It's good entertainment. Yeah, undoubtedly.
Well, they're just, you know, it's interesting because I think Sunny is very intelligent, but she's ideologically captured.
Right?
I think the other ones, there's a couple of the other ones I don't have to name any names who are just very dull-minded. But I think Sunny's not one of them. I think she's smart but captured.
Sure, I think she came into it with an agenda, of course, you know.
They do everything with an agenda.
Yeah, you know, she came into it. It seems really wanting to paint me as someone that has been co-opted by the right wing.
Yeah.
And I don't know how much research she had done into me. She claimed to have read my book twice, which is almost certainly not true.
Yeah.
Because she was totally mis-summarizing.
When did the book come out?
February.
The odds are very low.
Very low, right? Yeah, very low, because think of how many guests they have on their show, how much time she has.
How many things you have to do? family obligations, Two books, What is it? About? 250 pages.
Something like that, yeah.
I don't think so.
Yeah.
But I mean, I might be wrong. I mean, do you have an audiobook available?
I do, yeah, I read it myself.
Maybe she did it at double speed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I sounded like Ben Shapiro the whole time.
Have you ever listened to Ben Shapiro on Like, 1?
5 times.
No, it's kind of ridiculous.
Yeah, it's insane.
Ben Shapiro should debate destiny.
Oh my God, get the two of them together. They did debate.
Did they really?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely about what? Who hosted them? Was it, Lex?
Was it?
I could be getting that wrong, but I think Lex hosted a debate like two months ago.
Well, he had a debate a couple of months ago, but it was a Palestine-Israel debate.
No, no, that was separate. I also saw that. Oh, they did. Yeah, there you go.
That guy debates everybody. Yeah, he's so ridiculous, he does a Wikipedia search and then just starts going after things like he's an expert.
Yeah.
It's just a fun time, it's a really fun time, it's entertaining, a fun time for watching people flail.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, but I think the problem with that show is that show has this very specific ideological bubble in which they operate in. And they always bring on a token conservative woman. And they yell over her and silence her. And they did that with Meghan McCain, and they did that with the What is that other blonde woman from Survivor? Do you remember her, Jamie?
She was always yelling, I mean, it's a bizarre show.
So we had eight minutes. And America's approach to race pretty big topic, pretty important topic.
Before you start, I think the way you described it is brilliant and the way we should all.
Look at it.
Of course, you're going to see race. The idea of being colorblind is ridiculous, but treat everybody, they're just human beings. yeah, everybody's just individuals.
That's right, that's what we should all hope for.
That's right, yeah. There's been this common phrase. I don't see race that's equated with colorblindness, and the point of my book is, I want to say, get rid of that. Of course, we see race, certainly in America, in the West.
You could argue about whether children really see race, but past a certain point, we see race. The point is not to pretend you don't see it, it's to say you're a white guy, I'm a Black and Hispanic guy. We notice that.
We're not going to pretend it's not there, but whenever it matters, I'm going to try to treat you like an individual based on your personal qualities. And we're going to ask the government to do the same. Get race out of public policy. If you want to help disadvantaged people, do that on the basis of class.
100 understand that when you see these incentives that are put into corporations, these are methods of control, and that's what's going on. When you see things like DEI initiatives. You're not really making the world a better place, you're just allowing these financial institutions to enact control over corporations.
It's a really shifty, weird way they're doing it by making it seem like they're trying to make the world a better, more equal place. Then there's some people who are good intentioned, but have a very narrow perspective and a very limited amount of information that they're operating under. That will try to pretend that these things are overall good, are net positive.
Sonny Hostin may be one of those people. We had eight minutes to deal with this topic on one of the biggest platforms in the country. And especially an audience that isn't my typical audience, if anything, the views audience is really who needs to hear my message the most.
Sonny decided to take up a few minutes of that precious eight minutes. And attack me as someone who's been co-opted by the right and someone who's a charlatan.
Did she use the term charlatan?
She did. It's funny because I actually didn't notice it in real time, I kind of went in one ear and out the other.
How did she say it?
She said Something like a lot of people in the Black community, implicitly herself included, think that you've been co-opted by the right and that you're a charlatan. Oh wow, yeah, I explained to her. I've only voted twice, both for Democrats Hillary and Biden, very open to voting for Republicans. I'm a political independent and I'm only young enough to have voted twice.
I'm an analyst at CNN and I write for The Free Press, which is Barry Weiss's, and I'm independent in all those endeavors. And I patiently explained that and then basically asked her to go back to the topic that we're here to discuss.
Yeah, well, it's a dumb way of addressing a thing and to immediately say that someone's been co-opted with no evidence whatsoever. There's nothing about anything that you say that seems right wing. You're just objectively looking at these subjects and giving a very intelligent and measured opinion of them.
And just because some people who happen to vote Republican may agree with you, that's a ridiculous statement. That you're co-opted. I think you're probably one of the least co-opted people I've ever talked to. You're very open-minded and you're very objective.
I try to be, Yeah, I try to be.
But, you know, I would argue, even if I were co-opted hypothetically, that doesn't make my argument here right now wrong, right? because people that are co-opted sometimes say true things. Yes, so even if I were, I would say it's still an ad hominem attack.
It's to the person rather than to the argument. Yes, so let's get on to the issue. Yeah, and I think people. Part of the reason it went viral is because what people have told me is you very rarely see someone who gets a character attack on a big TV platform. Calmly expose it as evidence-free and then just move back to the topic.
Well, that was beautiful that you did that, and that's how everybody should approach these things. Yeah, absolutely, and the problem is that's not what people want to do.
What they want to do is engage in argument and try to win. And it's not really about having an open mind and listening to what this person has to say and trying to figure out whether or not it resonates with you. Instead, they're just trying to win and trying to win in this weird, soundbite-y way. You know, those platforms, whether it's the view or any number of these panel platforms, are so inherently flawed. Just in the way it's formatted, you only have a small amount of time.
You have all these people talking.
They can't compete with internet shows because internet shows are free. I don't mean free, like you don't have to pay for it, I mean free, like they're free to talk about anything. There's not a producer in your ear, there's not someone saying we have to cut the commercial.
There's not executive meetings before talking about an agenda that you would like to. We have to hammer him on this and this is really important. With the election coming up, God, the whole election coming up thing freaks me out because I think everybody's in this weird pre-battle anxiety stage.
And everything is life or death, and this goddamn phrase gets tossed around every five minutes. It's just a threat to democracy, everything is a threat to democracy, except things that actually probably are a threat to democracy.
You see people talking about the threats to democracy, and they ignore intelligence communities censoring social media, which should be terrifying to people. It should be terrifying to people because this could happen on the left, on the right. It could happen for a number of reasons, it could happen for reasons that would be terrible for your life.
Yeah, RFK was on CNN, I think yesterday, and he said something that I think I've said before privately and I feel, which is that. I think America would survive four more years of Trump or four more years of Biden. Truthfully, I think America and the Republic is strong enough to survive either. Neither one of them is a very good option in my view. I think we're given two very bad options, but I also think, don't move to Canada, I think we're going to be okay.
Don't move to Canada, Canada's even worse, Canada's a mess.
But people don't like that opinion because I think we enjoy the existential stakes of politics, even if it might not be there every time.
Yeah, I agree.
Now I disagreed back in 2015, 2016 when I was hearing how Trump was speaking on Muslims on the registry, all this kind of stuff. I was one of the people that was worried he would be a fascist, truthfully. But then what happened is we had four years of governance from him, where he basically governed like a typical Republican. And in some ways, even had some policies that were to the left of what Republicans would do, for instance, on criminal justice reform, he was very progressive, he made funding for Black colleges and universities permanent.
If Obama had done either of those things, he would have been criticized as playing left-wing identity politics, right? And so I slowly realized that there is a pretty big distance between what Trump says and what he does. I don't understand that fact about him, but I think it is a fact about him, and so that's why I don't feel alarmist.
The way I did when I voted for Hillary in 2016, really voted against Trump now. That being said, Trump is a wild guy and is difficult to predict. I don't think he's someone you want behind the wheel in a crisis time. And then, on the other hand, we have Biden, who has clear evidence of cognitive decline.
Vying for what's supposed to be the most important and challenging job in the world. Certainly in the country. And people essentially claiming that it doesn't matter that he has obvious cognitive decline.
Which is hilarious. Not only that, but gaslighting you saying that that's his superpower. Did you see that article?
No, I didn't.
That Biden's age is his superpower. Seth MacFarlane retweeted it. I agree, I couldn't have stated this any better myself, like, What are you talking about?
No, it doesn't make it. One way I've thought about it is there's so much BS in politics. One of the great things about the market is that it's honest, because if you lie, you lose money. So if you look at when lots of money is on the line, who do people want leading their organizations? Look at the NBA?
Look at the M.L.B, who do people get as head coaches? Usually people in their 50s is the median age? Yeah.
Because you've been around long enough that you've made a lot of dumb mistakes that 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds make. And you've learned those things that you can only learn with age. But, you know, in your 50s, you still got the vast majority of your cognitive power there and your energy. If you're healthy, that is, yeah, so that's really the sweet spot. We want a president somewhere in our 50s.
Yeah, we don't want a Biden.
No, we want someone with life experience, and hopefully someone that doesn't exist solely in politics, like someone who hasn't become. Their roots, haven't been deeply entrenched in the system. Someone who can maybe have some sort of an outsider's perspective that can look at the problems with the current situation and the way things are structured.
Yeah.
The way money is allocated, the way funding is done, the way bills are passed, which is a giant issue. Like when they sandwich these 2,000-page bills with a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with it. It should be illegal, it shouldn't be legal to have a bill about what's a popular topic the border issue, the border crisis, and embed in that funding for Ukraine.
It doesn't make any sense to couple those issues. Yeah, I mean, a few months ago. So basically, you've had the Biden administration ignoring the border issue for several years. Because they wanted to signal sort of how non-trump they were, right.
And the border is Trump's issue, so Biden comes in, he says. We're going to undo everything Trump did with the border. Even though a lot of those policies are actually widely supported and smart, so they undo everything. The migrant crisis goes to hell in the past two or three years, even now, infiltrating cities like Chicago, New York, everywhere.
And then you have Biden finally get serious about the border a couple months ago with the border bill. And Trump gives the signal essentially that it's not a good bill, even though it really was a pretty decent bill. And certainly, in an emergency, you want to start stop the bleeding. Then Trump signals that the bill isn't good enough and Republicans kill it essentially. So, I think both sides have tried to spin this, right.
The Democrats spin has been, Look, the Republicans destroyed that bill. They don't even care about immigration. The whole thing's their fault. Of course. What's wrong with that is the reason it's this bad is because Democrats have been ignoring the issue fully for two, three years.
Why do you think that is like, does anybody have anything to gain by letting migrants into the country, you know? Tim Dillon says that he thinks that it's cheap labor and that they want to bring more cheap labor into the country. And that it's very difficult to get people to do certain jobs.
That's why libertarians partly like illegal immigration. That would be more of a Koch Brothers policy, though. I mean, that's why they, that's why Bernie Sanders called called open borders or Koch Brothers policies, because cheap labor.
Interesting, yeah.
But that wouldn't apply necessarily to Biden, like, OK, so someone like Biden, I understand, you might argue, OK. Are they letting people in? Because those are going to be the Democrat voters, those are going to increase the Democrat voters base, I don't know.
Does Biden care about that? I don't think so Biden's not going to be around in 10 years.
Well, I don't think Biden's making decisions.
You don't think he is.
No.
You think it's his circle?
Yeah, I think he's so far gone and this is what I said. When he was running, I was saying, you're going to leave it up to his cabinet. He's not able to form. Listen, when you see him at debates or at press conferences, he's at his very best and he's probably medicated.
They probably juice him up with a bunch of different things and get him hyped, let's go roll him out there and then he. Even then he can't form sentences, he loses track of what he's talking about, it's that's him at his very best.
What is he like when he's tired? What is he like when he's not primed? Right? You know, it's. I do not think that he even has the interest in doing that.
I think he wanted to be president, he got to be president. He has all these people around him and do you see him? By the way? He talks about things, he's so out of touch with the way he's describing things and talking about bills that they pass, and talking about important issues.
I think he's completely out of it and I think it's a really, it's. It's very unfair, and if that was my father, I would be terrified, I'd be sad.
I'd be like, What are you doing him, you know, like he should be relaxing somewhere, you know, he's embarrassing himself. It's not fair he's to take a person that's in cognitive decline like that and just parade him out there and use him as a figurehead.
It's just crazy.
And if you look at the difference between him now and him in 2020, he didn't look great in 2020. But he looked like he could handle himself right. It's a huge difference now. And just extrapolate that three more years, yeah.
How is he going to be dealing with Putin and Iran and Israel in three years?
He's not, he's not doing it now, it's someone else forming the policies. You know, the White House press secretary got busted for using his Twitter account. You saw that?
I didn't see that.
She, she accidentally used her account and she tweeted, When I was running for president, I deleted it, but everybody caught it, obviously.
And obviously, there's the Kamala liability.
Oh, yeah, that's, that's a that's a hilarious one. The Kamala fans are my favorite.
Are they? Yeah, I got a guy.
I got a guy I don't want to say his name. I'm trying to be respectful, but he's a comedian that's out of his fucking mind. He's one of them. Blue, no matter who.
Okay, you know, he's operated, just he's got this like cognitive dissonance. It's very bizarre.
But yeah, my dad was an Econ club with Kamala in college.
Really.
Yeah, there's a photo of them. There's only eight kids in the club, so it's a this tiny photo of my dad and Kamala Harris and six other people. Wow, when they were, like, 22 or something at Howard University.
What's his perspective?
He doesn't remember her at all.
Interesting.
Unless the Vice president of the United States. Yeah, she didn't make an impression.
One heartbeat away.
She didn't make an impression. A dying man.
Yeah, at the helm, yeah, I mean, she could sneak up behind him at any moment and end it.
Yeah.
At any moment.
Yeah.
At any moment, it's crazy and it's so American really is. We're just like a goofy ass country.
Yeah.
We're amazing and it's pretty cool, but it's also we crawl so far up the ass at anybody. That wants to be in a position of leadership, that no one who should be in a position of leadership wants that. And most of these people that could be effective in a position of leadership because they've led things before.
Whether it's businesses or what have you? They just don't want to have anything to do with it. It's just a horrible attack on your character. They don't play fair, they lie.
They'll get people to say things that aren't true, they'll concoct stories, they'll put things out there with the aid of the intelligence community. Like the Russia collusion agenda, like that thing, and then they get all the media that's on the left on board.
And then they just repeat this mantra over and over Russia collusion, Russia collusion. And then they'll pretend that they didn't say that he never won the election, they'll pretend.
They pretend that they didn't question the election, they'll pretend that Hillary Clinton didn't do multiple speeches where she said that the election was stolen. He's not a legitimate president. Russia stole the election with no evidence, but when he questions the election, it's a threat to democracy.
It's just so convenient, and there's just. We live in this bizarre news cycle where this information is coming at you so fast. You kind of forget about what the thing you were mad about two days ago. That could affect the rest of the country for decades, and you're just on to the next.
I think in particular in America, we're very hard on our politicians, and that's actually the idea of the country. From the start is there's no kings here, right, right, and you go to other places in the world. People worship or pretend to worship their politicians.
You can sort of see why someone would want to be in that position. When you see the crowds of people fainting over Hitler speeches and all that stuff, well, you could see why someone would want to have crowds fainting over them. In America, you get some admiration, but you kind of just looks like you get your life ruined.
Well, at least half the country is going to hate you. yeah, even a president that's popular like Obama during his administration, at least half of the country hated him.
Totally.
And that's a horrible place to be. It's a horrible feeling to be that person and know that there's all these people that think you're a Muslim plant. You were born in Kenya.
Or you wear a tan suit, and now it's on the news cycle. How much of an idiot you are for wearing a tan suit?
A tan suit? I mean, it's a nice suit. What is wrong with the color tan? Why does a suit have to be dark blue or black or whatever it is that everybody thinks it has to be?
That's so bizarre because he could wear a tan shirt somewhere and give a speech. Like, if he's at his home or something like that. And he just addresses the press in a casual manner, that's fine, right?
But when you're being serious, I want you to put on your serious outfit. your serious outfit can't be tan, right?
People ask me all the time why I don't get into politics, or people expect me to get into politics.
Please don't.
Because they see me on the view. Well, thank you. You get it, don't you get it?
No, they see me on something like the view and they say, Wow, I like this guy. He keeps his cool under pressure, he stands for what I believe in.
Why don't you run for office, man? I'm like, Are you crazy? are you absolutely insane? Why would I do that to myself? For such a, you know? I even doubt how much change you could even have. Frankly, which is why I as much as I admire someone like RFK for his charisma in the sense that he's the only candidate. That if he talks for five minutes off the cuff, I find it really compelling.
I think he's very honest, I think he's, whether you agree with him or disagree with him, I think he's very honest. And he's also very well read in everything that he talks about. And there's a lot of things that are very uncomfortable to discuss, that he discusses openly and willingly. And when you look at that man's background, and this is a thing that people choose to ignore when they want to talk about him as a conspiracy theorist.
This is the big one. They always bring up conspiracy theorists. That guy stopped the polluting of the Hudson River. I mean, he was a very effective environmental attorney. That was dedicated to making sure that corporations couldn't just wantonly pollute things. Because it was more profitable for them to not pay attention to where their waste goes, he held them to task.
And he's one of the primary reasons why the Hudson River is clean, right, that guy.
I've heard that I never looked into it, but if true, it's very impressive. But beyond that, just in terms of charisma and speaking, nobody holds a candle to RFK. I think, who is neither Biden nor Trump, right? If you just say, give a 10 minute speech off the cuff, RFK is going to give a way more charismatic, way more interesting speech than either of them.
Agreed.
Agreed.
So that's what I feel when I listen to him. At the same time, when I look throughout history, I somehow I have a blanket skepticism of how much change politicians can actually accomplish. Even good ones in a system like America's, where the president has intentionally very limited power over domestic policy. They can actually make a lot of change in foreign policy because they have kind of unilateral decision making ability. And then, secondly, I always check myself. Because I think the charismatic politicians are always the ones that are able to lead people into really dark corners. It's always the ones with charisma that are able to use that charisma power to get people to support things they never ordinarily would support.
It's the old adage that no one who wants to be president should be allowed to be president, right?
And Hitler had charisma, not from my perspective or your perspective, but as a historical fact, if we were Germans living at that time, we would experience those Hitler speeches that look silly to us as charisma.
Have you seen the Hitler speeches with AI translation to English?
No, I've seen subtitles, but they put the voice into English.
They changed the voice, which is a new technology that they're actually employing with podcasts. Spotify now has the ability to take this podcast with you and me, and just for, I think it's like 30 seconds of your voice and my voice. They can have us speak fluent German, Spanish and French right now. And they're going to expand it to a bunch of different languages. And just put podcasts out in different languages for different countries, that's awesome.
Yeah, it's fascinating. So they did it with Hitler. You should watch it, we'll play it for you. Can we play it or will we get in trouble?
Let's find out. Because YouTube is the jump, I can just say this, from just staying entirely on Spotify to now we're everywhere. Dealing with YouTube is so bizarre. Like people can claim copyright for things that are 100 not theirs. Interesting.
But if they claim it, then they can monetize your show, they take all the money from your show. So then you have to remove it and then you have to fight it right. And you have to figure out if you play two seconds of a song, is it two seconds?
How many seconds? Two seconds? It's like over six or something, okay, six seconds of a song.
They claim they can monetize your entire podcast. It's fucking bizarre, but it's dumb, it's dumb. There's things that you should be able to talk about.
If there's a popular song like Wet ass pussy, like Look at the moral decline of America, listen to this. I don't cook, I don't clean wet ass pussy.
It's like, you should be able to play that and just go, What the fuck are we doing? This is wild, right? And entertaining and fun, and a great song. So this is Hitler, and this is also AI enhanced colorized too, which is interesting.
So when we would hear Hitler speak, I was like, We're going to crush the enemies and kill the Jews, that's all I thought. It was. Yeah, right, yeah.
A lot of it is let me start with the eight seconds of the original.
Okay.
Stop right there. pause, pause. I hear that, I hear that.
Hold on, I'm sorry, I hear that, I get terrified.
Oh yeah, because all of German sounds terrifying.
Well, it's-.
To the English ear, yeah.
It's such a right, it's such an aggressive language, and when you hear Hitler yelling it, it's so aggressive, right? And then when you hear what he's actually saying, you're like, Oh, this is like a regular politician.
My walk for correctness. Whether you believe that I have been diligent, that I have walked, that I have advocated for you in these years, that I have been decent. I have spent my time in service of my people. Now cast your vote. if yes, then stand up for me as I have stood up for you.
That's incredibly creepy, bizarre, right? Oh my god.
Very bizarre.
Wow.
Because we have these misconceptions, these preconceived notions, because of obviously all the evil things he actually wound up doing.
Yeah.
Which are real.
But also just the cultural filter of-.
Yes.
The way German sounds to the American ear, it's a harsh language.
Yes, well, there's many languages like that, we just don't have a cultural context to put that, especially the sounds. Have you heard, German, Arabic?
No, okay.
This is Muslims speaking with their German, so they have a German accent. Oh, okay, they're speaking in Arabic. Okay, it's very strange because it's like you're hearing both things.
Right, then there's also people that are Muslims that are speaking in Germany, they're talking about Islamic issues in German. It's strange because you're looking at this Islamic cleric speaking German. You're like, Yo, this is wild.
Wow.
There's something about those Japanese is another one, when someone is very aggressive. -.
I find Japanese beautiful.
It's beautiful.
I grew up watching a lot of anime and I think that influences it.
Well, I was influenced heavily by Japanese culture as a kid, obviously with martial arts, but also by Miyamoto Musashi, who? When I was a young man, that book, The Book of Five Rings, was essentially my guidebook for life.
What is that about?
It's a book of strategy by this man. Miyamoto Musashi Miyamoto Musashi was a Ronin who killed 60 men in one-on-one combat. He was arguably the most famous. My whole right sleeve is Miyamoto Musashi. He wrote this book, The Book of Five Rings.
It was essentially calling for a balanced life to perfect your craft, no matter what it is. He was essentially saying that for someone to be a great warrior, you also have to be a great poet. You have to be able to do calligraphy, you have to be able to do art, you have to have a balance.
You can't just be this angry, emotional killing machine, you will not see everything, you must be balanced. This is a guy that's speaking from intense, actual experience, sword fighting people, which is probably the most intimate way to kill a man. He got so good at it sometimes.
He would show up with wooden swords and kill people with wooden swords. Because he just didn't feel like their technique was good enough for him to justify using an actual sword. He'd beat them to death with oars, they would come at him with a sword, and he would have an oar from a boat, he would just fuck them up with an oar.
Jesus Christ.
He was a fascinating guy.
I can see how you reflect that you're this big guy. And you do mixed martial arts, but you also do yoga and you pay attention to the world. That kind of makes sense that that's where you come from.
Yeah, that was my guidebook. When I was a young man and I was fighting, I was trying to figure out how to control my emotions and my anxiety. And what's the most effective way to approach something that's absolutely terrifying, how can you approach it? Because you have to be scared, because if you're not scared, you lose your edge, you have to have an edge.
Every time that I ever competed where I was overconfident, I fought terribly. Even if I won, I was very ashamed of my performance. You have to be scared, and it's something that no one wants to be. No one wants to be scared. It's an awful feeling.
Before you're competing, you're like, why am I even fucking doing this? why am I risking my literal life for no money to do this thing? That's fucking insane. I'm going to go out there and kick someone in the face and they're going to try to kick me in the face. If I get hit, I'm going unconscious and I'm going to the hospital.
I read a bunch of psychology books, I read a bunch of self-help books, I read a lot of Anthony Robbins stuff. I read a lot of different things. Trying to figure out what's the best way to manage the mind. The thing that I really gravitated towards was this one book, because of the history of this man and the way that he speaks.
He has this quote that I use all the time. If you've heard it before, I'm sorry, but I'm going to say it again. Once you know the way broadly, you can see it in all things. This was what I applied, I think he applied to many disciplines in life.
It's understanding that to get great at something, to really understand something. It requires this intensive observation of what the thing is, what your flaws are, what your strengths are. And approach it in this very balanced way. If you can do that, if you can really know the way, you can apply that to everything you do. Whether it's learning how to play guitar or chess or anything.
Calligraphy or writing books, whatever it is, you can apply that to all things.
What you said about being scared and how that's useful, you need to feel that in order to perform at the highest level. It always makes me think of the Christopher Nolan Batman, where he has to take off the rope in order to have the adrenaline to jump far enough to get out of the cave. Do you remember that scene?
I do not.
It's a brilliant scene and a brilliant message because Bane beats Batman and puts him at the bottom of this deep pit.
He's trying to get out so he can go back to Gotham and save everyone from the atomic bomb that's going to go off there. He keeps jumping and jumping, and there's one jump he has to make that he keeps failing. The prisoners have a way of doing it where they tie a rope around your waist so that when you inevitably fall, as everyone always does. They've been trying to get out of this prison for years. Some people have been stuck here their whole life, but there's a legend of a child that did it.
A child? No one's been able to figure out how they replicate it, so they try with the rope all the time. And then one of the elder statesmen of the scene says, Well, I heard the way that the child did it is that they didn't use the rope.
And you have to fear death in order for your body to give you the necessary fuel and material to land the jump.
There's a reason why you get scared, you need to be scared, there's a reason, you know. Customato, who is Mike Tyson's trainer, famously said that fear is like a fire. You can cook food with it, or if you let it run amok, it'll burn your house down.
Yeah, yeah, and not to bring it back to the view. But I do sometimes feel that about live television, I feel that when I know it's live. And I know I'm not getting a second chance and I'm not getting a can. You cut that out? And millions of people are going to see this. My brain goes into a different mode of aliveness.
Yeah.
Knowing what the stakes are, yeah, and I think it probably causes me to perform better than normal.
Yeah, that's stand-up comedy, too.
I imagine.
Yeah.
I imagine.
Yeah, there's a lot of things like that. Yeah, you have to be scared. Yeah, I get nervous every time I go on stage.
I've been doing comedy forever. Still. Yeah, I have to, I've done it.
When I don't get nervous, I don't do as well. I need to get nervous. yeah, I get myself nervous.
I pace, I move around.
Yeah.
I go over my notes, I think about it, I ramp my brain up. I think you have to, I think you have to with anything that's very difficult to do.
I don't think, I mean, I think maybe there's some people that are just on a certain spectrum of consciousness that are able to just like, go zen and go into a thing. And maybe there's different things that don't get you scared that maybe being scared would be detrimental to those things because you'd make quicker judgments instead of measured and calculated. Because when you're the thing about being scared, it's generally things that are operating in a time constraint, so you have this time constraint that's happening.
That also gives you a certain amount of anxiety. There's a beginning and an end of every round. For instance, you know, and you know, each round is in kickboxing, where I was doing those three minutes and MMA is five minutes. And so you have this time constraint, you have that, you have how many rounds you're going to have to do.
That's in the back of your head. You have all these things that keep you from being zen. There's all these things that like, well, and the live aspect of it, and everyone's watching, that's another thing, that's another element.
What about archery and shooting? Those are probably the opposite, right?
Well, archery is bow hunting is very much that bow hunting.
In the sense you want to be anxious a little bit.
Yeah, you're going to be no matter what, you will be anxious, but you must be able to perform at your best and handle that anxiety. And there's a bunch of different methods that people use to avoid open loop thought processes, so an open loop thought process is like swinging a bat.
You really can't stop the bat once you're swinging it, you're swinging with all your might. And it's just this open loop, right? A closed loop process is something where you're in control of it every step of the way. Like, for instance, me opening up this thing, I can stop right there.
I don't just go, Ugh, I can't. It's not like a thing that I can't control. You can control it. And so when you're in a shooting situation with archery, you have to think entirely about the process of shooting.
You can't just go now because you'll be filled with anxiety, you'll move your arm, you'll twitch. You have to be able to stay rock steady with something that's not very steady. The beautiful thing about archery is the perfection of doing something that's almost impossible to perfect.
So when you can have these brief moments where that arrow does launch and goes right into that target, right where the X is, this is immense sense of elation, accomplishment. But now when you're dealing with an animal, then you have all these other consequences. Like you don't want to wound the animal. You want to be able to hit it and kill it very quickly with one shot.
And you have to practice thousands and thousands of arrows, and then there's this one moment. It's not like fighting where you have multiple opportunities to hit a guy, you can move, you can step to the side.
This is the one moment that the fight has actually happened, but there's a lot of moments in the fight when you release that arrow, that is the one moment. So you might have worked 11 months, 3 weeks and 6 days for this one moment. And you've been planning this elk hunt for the whole year.
You've gotten in shape for it, you've practiced all these arrows. But when that elk steps out from between those trees at 60 yards and you're at full draw. You have to center that pin right where its vitals are, and you have to release a perfect arrow. It's very, very hard to do.
I've only gone shooting, I think, twice, or maybe three times. And just that moment right before your body flinches in this way. And so how does one get past that?
You have to train, training is very important and you have to train with purpose. Like my friend Tim Kennedy, when he shoots on a range, he puts dummy rounds in his gun. So he'll have like 10 rounds that are real and then one dummy round, and then 6 rounds that are real.
And he never knows where the dummy round is.
What's the point of that?
So when you're squeezing the trigger, you want to have like a completely flat squeezing of the trigger. You don't want to do this, you don't want to yank in anticipation of the recoil, and that's part of the problem with guns you flinch in anticipation of the recoil.
And when that bullet goes out of that gun? That flinch left or right over the course of 100 yards could be a foot 2 feet off the mark, who knows, depending on how much you flinch. And so that is a practice that some people employ to learn to be able to stay so steady no matter what, where you're never anticipating the recoil.
All you're thinking about is the process of squeezing off.
So there's no recoil with a dummy round.
Exactly, it doesn't go off.
So you can see the evidence of your own exactly.
You pull the trigger, but nothing happens because there's no real round, right? It's just a rubber or whatever the fuck it is.
I don't know if this is Hollywood, but I saw the movie The Killer, David Fincher's latest movie. And I think he had some kind of heart rate monitor where he wouldn't shoot until his heart rate was below 60 or something like that. I don't know to what extent that's Hollywood or actually important.
It's important, yeah, and the best snipers can most certainly control their heart rate. Yeah, there's strategies.
You learn breathing strategies to control your heart rate, and there's also strategies of mental management, of not allowing this. There's this like tornado of anxiety that can come on and you have to, like, see the winds blowing and go.
You have to calm it down, you can't get caught up in it in your mind. And I've seen people do it in many different things in life and you can apply it to many different things. It's this overwhelming fear of fucking up.
Instead of thinking about what you're actually doing, you're thinking about the possibility of fucking up, which leads you to fuck up. Because that's what you're concentrating on, right in the game of pool. If you think you're going to miss a shot, you most certainly miss that shot. Almost always. You might get lucky and make it. Just like I thought I was going to miss, but in your head, you're like, I hope I don't miss.
I hope I don't miss, you're going to miss. But if you just only concentrate on the process, you can execute even under pressure, you can execute the perfect line.
Yeah.
And it's a mental management thing, and the only people that know how to do that are people that have actually done difficult things under pressure. And when you do difficult things under pressure, you realize like, Wow, there's so many factors that you can probably mitigate in some way. Through a strategy of control, of meditation, of thought, of understanding what these thoughts are when they start to occur, yeah.
I think a lot of anxiety management is deeply focusing on the task at hand, right? Because if you're, you know, it's not necessarily that the anxiety comes up and you're amazing at swatting it down. It could be that you are so deeply focused on the thing itself that there's no room for anxiety and that's very lucky. If you have that level of focus and attention on whatever it is that you're passionate about, it's like, you're so upset.
Like someone like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, the way you hear them talking about winning, you can understand why they didn't feel any anxiety. When the buzzer beater is coming up, there's two seconds. They have to make the shot because they're so obsessed with winning that there's no room for anxiety, right?
Right, it's like it's life or death to them.
Yeah.
And there's no room for anxiety in those situations.
Yeah, you have to be, I mean, to perform at that level, too, you have to be really insane, you know. I always say that greatness and that, like, real brilliance comes out of almost like a mental illness. It really almost does. Because in order to be just so much better at all the other high performers, because David Goggins has the best quote.
He says, You want to be uncommon amongst uncommon people. Yeah, that's him, but, you know, do you want to do what he does?
No.
But that's how he's uncommon amongst uncommon people, he's a fucking complete psycho.
Totally yeah.
But that is how you become David Goggins, that's right, you don't become David Goggins. By this mild mannered person who contemplates, and, you know, sits with his coffee and stares out the window and watches the birds. And that's not how you get the job done.
No, not at all.
And that's not how you become Michael Jordan either. No, I heard that if you beat Michael Jordan at pool, he wouldn't talk to you for weeks.
That's a maladjusted person in any other scenario, that's a guy you can't really be friends with, right? But combine that with enormous natural talent and work ethic.
Yeah.
A little bit of good luck. That's Michael Jordan. I mean, the top chess is the one that I follow, that's my hobby, and the top chess players are absolute maniacs.
Maniacs.
When you try to talk to them about their mistakes, you've had Hikaru on, Have you not? No, I have not. Oh, I don't know, I thought that.
I would, though.
So Hikaru, best player in America, absolute legend, you know? If Magnus Carlsen died in his crib, it's very possible Hikaru would be world champ for a very long time.
Wow. But what separates him from Magnus Carlsen?
Just Magnus, I think Hikaru, once put it, Magnus is a little bit better than Hikaru at everything. A little bit better at openings, a little bit better at calculation, a little bit better at endgames. You put it all together and he's just the goat, he can't be beat.
What was your take to the point where he got so bored of winning the world championship that he said, I don't want to do it anymore?
Wow.
Yeah, so he's technically no longer world champion because he's so bored of winning, and it's actually understandable. I don't even think anyone's mad at him. Because these World Championship chess matches 14 games. They can go six hours a game, they can actually go over six hours a game. Brutal, absolutely brutal.
Like, if you thought taking the sat and trying really hard made you mentally exhausted. It's nothing compared to how these guys feel. After a six-hour chess game and doing that 14 days in a row, spending six months prior to that working with chess engines to find one new idea in an opening 50 moves in, it's absolutely grueling and he does it every time and he wins every time, but he says, I can't. This is not fun for me anymore, so I'm going to play all the other chess tournaments that you just kind of show up and do your best. And he crushes most of those as well.
But I'm not doing this grueling, I can't live my life like this anymore.
That's interesting, because that is John Jones, too, John Jones. When he was dominating the light heavyweight division, he got to a point where. The way analysts would describe it is that he was playing with his food and that he wasn't afraid of losing to these guys. And he barely trained for some of them, like he had a famous fight with Alexander Gustafson.
And it was the first fight where John had never been taken down. And he got pushed deep into the rounds. And John rallied in the fourth and fifth rounds and won the fight, and it was a crazy fight. They had a rematch and John prepared and just dominated him and annihilated him. Same guy.
I mean, just ran right through him. The guy was still in his prime, John was still in his prime. There was not like a bunch of things that had happened that deteriorated him. Nope.
It was a couple of years later and John ran through him, and that's the real John Jones, it's just the John Jones that was fighting all these other guys.
He wasn't challenged.
He was, he's the Goat, and he knew he was the Goat, and so he didn't. I talked to his coaches. He literally didn't train for the Gustafson fight, but yet still pulled it off in the fourth and fifth rounds. Just out of sheer greatness and toughness and grit and experience.
Pulled it off and he wasn't in condition. He wasn't prepared, but still good enough to beat the very best challenger he ever faced in the toughest fight of his career in the last round.
Yeah, and the thing with these kind of guys, I don't know about fighting, probably the same, but with the chess guys. You try to bring up a mistake, a famous mistake that they made. And it's almost like you're talking about a family member who died tragically, right?
It means that much to them that they made a mistake 12 years ago on move 24 of some game. Yes, that threw the match. I mean, that's how hard these guys take it, which is again in you or me. That's just a maladjusted guy.
That's like a guy with a problem that needs to go to therapy. And a top performer, that's what makes him a top performer and separates him from the otherwise very good professionals.
100. There's a guy who's arguably the greatest pool player of all time, at least one of the greatest pool player of all time. His name is Earl Strickland. He's this American guy who won the U.S Open five times.
Only one of the guys won the U.
S open five times a guy named Shane Van Boning, who's another genius player. But Earl, like he would play with this insane intensity if he missed a ball. He was like, confused.
Like, how is it possible that I can miss? There was a million dollar challenge. Now. This is statistically so impossible to do under intense competition that they were willing to gamble and get an insurance policy. They would give someone a million dollars if they could run ten racks in a row of nine ball. Now, the way nine ball works is you have nine balls. And you shape them where the bottom balls are missing, which would make 15, which is a full rack, right?
So it's just like triangle, sort of a rack, and then you break the balls and the one ball is in the front and the nine balls in the center. Now the balls scatter randomly and you have to run them in order, so every single rack. You have to have a shot on the one or the lowest number ball. And then you have to have balls that aren't clustered together, or you have to figure out how to break up those clusters and still get a shot.
Does that mean you have to break it strategically?
You kind of can, but back then they didn't. Guys are much better now. Because there's a thing called the Magic rack, and what the Magic rack is. It's a clear piece of plastic that the ball set in, where the balls are always touching, always in the exact same spots. Because they're literally sitting in a pattern. And so then these guys are breaking the balls more softly, which causes they do what's called a cut break, which causes the one ball to go drift into the side pocket. And the best guys can do it like nine out of ten times.
And then the two ball bounces up table and they know exactly where all the balls are going to be, and you see similar patterns over and over again. What Earl Strickland was doing was smashing the balls and they'd scatter around, and he ran ten racks in a row for a million dollars.
And he did it.
And he did it. But everyone's like, it's never been done in a tournament before the first tournament. Where they get this insurance policy, Earl does it. Not only did he run ten, it was a race to eleven.
He broke and ran the eleventh too, and he made a combination on the nine for the million dollars, which is just fucking insane. And not a short combination either. Like distance from the pocket. So to be that guy, you have to be out of your fucking mind.
There's no other way, you have to be completely obsessed with the game, you have to be completely obsessed with all the details. He does commentary on pool matches, It's fascinating to listen to him do commentary because he talks about different English. You've got to use with this shot and different things you have to avoid.
And nine times out of ten, the player does something different than he would have done, and you see him get fucked like, Yep, that was all I was talking about. He sees it coming, he sees the whole table in a different way than a person who's a novice sees the table.
Only things I've ever been that obsessed with, I think in my life, are music. I'm a trombone player. Oh, really, that was actually my career before I started writing. I still am actually a professional trombone player.
You talk like a jazz guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I am a jazz guy, Joe. My life path is that I graduated high school. I was considered one of the top professional jazz trombonists in the country. Went to Juilliard, which is the most selective school for that.
And that was my whole career.
This whole other career I've had was a pivot from all of that.
And how did it start?
Basically, so I was at Juilliard, I was a freshman at Juilliard in New York City, gigging as a jazz trombone player. And my mom died when I was 18 of cancer, and it just shattered everything for me, sent me down into a grief and depression.
And I had always been interested in philosophy and writing as well, kind of as a side thing. And I was always a very good student in school, but my passion was music. But something about the experience of my mom dying led me to reflect on what I wanted out of life. And I dropped out of Juilliard and applied to Columbia.
And so I realized I could still do music. Nobody learns music in school.
So being in New York City, I could still play as much music as I wanted to, but I could also get a liberal arts degree and feed that side of myself. And had my mom not died, I probably just would have stayed at Juilliard, I might have had a whole different life.
Wow, that's fascinating. Is this you? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's me with a big Afro.
That's amazing, that's in high school, I think, yeah. When I was 8 years old, I lived in San Francisco, and our teacher took us to see Dizzy Gillespie.
Oh yeah, amazing.
And it was wild. And for folks who don't know, yeah, dizzy Gillespie, his cheeks puff out like a frog's. I mean, you would tell me, that's not how they teach you how to do it.
Absolutely not.
And what he was able to do with his cheeks was, I guess just years and years of stretching his skin because he had done it for so long. Oh yeah, look at that.
That's a full pressure extension of the cheeks. No trumpet player would teach you to play like that, but he was one of the greats of early jazz trumpet playing, and he made it work. I've never heard that he had any health issues from playing that way.
A lot of trumpet players, they get older, and Freddie Hubbard, who's one of the greatest jazz trumpet players, famously had a growth on his lip. That kind of inhibited him in his last decade.
From the pressure of the mouthpiece.
Yeah, from pressing it against his lips and he had a growth. I don't know if it was cancerous or not, but it really messed him up.
Oh, wow, so it just becomes so irritated that a growth fell out there, that makes sense.
Yeah, but yeah, that's not healthy, but it worked for Dizzy, and that's the thing. All the rules can be broken if you're good enough.
Yes, right, yeah, all the rules, I mean. And also he just figured out his way to do it, he just figured out a way to do it.
That's not a way that you would ever teach. Yeah, there's a lot of that, though.
There's Slide Hampton, one of the great jazz trombone players of all time, played left-handed.
Which he's the only person I've ever heard of, great or not, who plays left-handed. In other words, the slide arm is always the right arm. But somebody gave it to him wrong, and that's how he played it.
So he plays it upside down.
He plays it left-side, right. Wow. In other words, every trombone player is crafted. sorry, every trombone is meant to be played with the right hand. But somebody must have set it up wrong when they gave it to him.
And I've heard stories of.
So even left-handed people would do it.
Oh, 100 of left-handed trombone players play with their right hand 100. But I've heard and Slide is one of the greats. There's actually a great video of him playing at Dizzy Gillespie's birthday party, which is a famous video.
I've heard of this with guitar players where somebody gave it.
Hendrix Yeah, I didn't know that, I didn't realize that he played it left-handed.
Yeah, he played it like.
This way.
Jamie, You know?
Right arm on the neck.
Hendrix was left-handed. I was thinking of Kurt Cobain, I think he played it upside down, maybe right, didn't he something like that?
Because you'd have to restring the guitar, yeah, you'd want the low E string to be at the top, I guess, closest to you, right? And then some people wouldn't restring it because they weren't told to, or however. Yeah, they just started playing the other way.
What was Hendrix's deal? I think he was just lefty. I feel like he was playing a right-handed guitar, though I feel like he played a right-handed guitar, lefty.
Hendrix also played his guitar upside down, Yeah.
Why he played it upside down?
He also self-taught, which is to me the most fascinating. And he couldn't find a left-handed guitar, which they probably didn't make as many back then. Yeah, they probably didn't, so he didn't have any money.
You're saying he took a normal guitar and put it to the right.
Just flipped it around.
So the low string was high, and the high string was low. Yeah, so he must have had all his own fingerings.
I mean, his sound was so different than anyone before him. There's leaps in music, but the leaps that Hendrix took, they're so different than everybody else. It's so hard because I listen to his music today constantly and I love it. But I don't live in 1967. It's a different world. And I feel like if you were alive then and you heard Voodoo Child, you'd be like, What the fuck?
For sure, standing next to a mountain, I chop it down with the edge of my hand. And then you hear that music and you're like, Oh my. And by the way, not a great singing voice, and nobody gave a fuck, nobody gave a fuck about his singing voice.
Yeah.
His music was so powerful, I wish we could play it right now. Just the beginning of Voodoo child, that riff, you have to understand.
There's nothing like that in music before him, there's a lot of that now.
Yeah, well, because of it.
Because of it, like Stevie Ray Vaughan.
And that's what happened. You can never really go back with the ears of those people and hear it as they heard it. Because now you've taken for granted that this way of playing has seeped into the culture.
Exactly this is what I always tell people that disparaged Lenny Bruce. They go, Oh, he wasn't that funny here. Give me some of that.
Dude, I could run over a fucking mountain if I hear that.
That's still pretty awesome, that's still pretty, fucking awesome.
Oh, it's amazing. I could run over a fucking mountain with that in my ears. Yeah, that's a drug, that song is a drug.
That song has, like a physical power it imparts on you, for sure. I get goosebumps just hearing it.
Yeah.
But that guy, we have to understand, there was nothing like that, there was nothing like that. You had fucking love, love me. Do you had, buddy Holly and shit? You had great music, but you didn't have anybody who played guitar like that?
Right?
And this guy was blowing away. People like Eric Clapton famously saw him and was like, What am I doing? Eric Clapton was the greatest guitarist of all time. He's like, Oh my God, I fucking suck, I fucking suck.
This guy is changing everything, he's just a different thing, like a guy who comes along, who's so beyond what's being currently expressed. Yeah, that everybody has to, like, move towards him.
Yeah, so every Monday night I play trombone at the Comedy Cellar, we have a band at the Olive Tree Cafe, the restaurant we play on Monday nights. And we got two guitar players. One of them is this guy, Nick Casarino, that's just absolutely impossible to describe.
Just absolute killer. They're all great singers. Nick and Colin and Mike and me and my friend Dan are the horn section, basically. And we play like 9 to midnight every week. We have such a good time there and the comics are always coming in hanging out.
And we play every genre like truly multi-genre, and it's just an amazing experience.
Wow, that's awesome, man. I'm glad you still enjoy that too. Yeah, and then now it's like a pure thing, right?
You just do it just for the pure art of it.
That's right. And that was really what I realized when I was 18. Taking every jazz trombone gig that came my way and paid me $50 and a slice of pizza. I was like, This is my passion in life, I love this.
But this is going to drive me into insanity if I have to take every single gig of my whole life and eke out an existence. Yes, so maybe I should get a degree and just see where shit goes.
That's how a lot of comics feel in the beginning of their careers as well. Yeah, the comedy thing is very hard in the beginning. It's a real gauntlet that you have to traverse, for sure.
You have to go through a lot of shit in order to become.
I did a couple open mics, did you? because I've always loved comedy and I had some friends in it, so they were like, Oh, go do it. I did two or three open mics.
Had a good time, didn't bomb, didn't do great, did okay, right?
And then?
But the bug didn't bite you.
The bug didn't bite me, that's exactly right, and the thing is, I knew what the bug meant. Because I have it for music and so I knew what it's like to be like. I suck at this, but I love it so much, then I'm going to keep doing it until I don't suck.
Yeah.
Because with the trombone and trumpet, there's no such thing as being good when you start, right. Like, there's some people that, like, the first time they sing in church, everyone is like, this kid can sing, right?
Right, there's no such thing as that for trombone or trumpet, for brass instruments. Everyone eat shit the first time they play. And so if you just love it so much that you're okay and you have a family that's forgiving enough to hear you be terrible.
Which I luckily did. That's how you get good at those things, and I didn't have that for comedy, even though I love comedy as a consumer.
Well, I love music as a consumer, yeah, and I don't have that for music, yeah, but I worry I would.
Gary Clark was in here and he gave me his guitar and he forced me to do an e chord, so he put my fingers in the right place.
Feels pretty good, right?
It does feel good. I started getting scared. Yeah, I started getting scared.
This could take me over.
Yeah, I'm worried, I'm legit. That's why I won't play golf. There's a lot of things I won't do.
You think you're going to get into golf too much?
Yeah, I'm terrified. All my friends like Jamie and Tony and Ron White, they're obsessed. I have so many friends, my friends who play golf are all obsessed with golf.
So what is it that's so addicting about golf in particular?
JAMIE Yeah, all right. Look at his smile, look at his smile.
I've played many times.
It's like the same thing you were saying earlier with pool, like the same description, Sorry with archery. I meant, Yeah with archery.
The consequences, obviously are less. You're not going to miss and hurt something you could actually hurt a person. Target archery, though, is very intensive, too, but when you were describing when it all goes right, which is so rare.
I heard something Samuel L. Jackson said recently, where, like, in golf, you shoot, I don't know if you're bad, it's 100 shots a round, if you're really good, 75..
Most of those. Still, though, you don't ever really do the intention of what you're trying to do. Which is going the hole right from where you are, or like, right where you're aiming or anything. So it's like, it's a bunch of mistakes.
And then it's like, how good are you at overcoming those mistakes? Clearing your head every time, fighting against nature, also having fun with your friends, being out in nature, getting away from everything for four or five hours, having a couple beers, clearing your head. But it's like clearing your head. Because you can't think of a bunch of other stuff where it will ruin your whole day because you can't have fun out there. Do you remember that Kevin Costner movie where he plays this badass pitcher?
It might have been a league of her own, No. There's another movie where he's like a retired pitcher, so he has this thing where everybody's like, he wasn't retired. He was pitching in the movie. For the love of the game, for the love of the game, that's it.
And so he has this moment, like when he's on the mound, where he goes clear the mechanism and everything just fades out. And he just looks at the strike zone and you don't hear the crowd anymore. It's a really cool scene.
Here we'll play the scene, but we won't do it for everybody else.
Nice.
Hello Mike.
Nice.
Yeah, my friend Colton uses that when he goes bow hunting, he says. Clear the mechanism.
That's what it feels like to put on bose headphones.
Just force your mind in this state of hyper focus. I wanted to ask you this, What was your take on Magnus Carlsen and that young man who apparently has yes?
Hans Niemann.
Yeah, so explain the story for people.
So basically, what happened is there's this grandmaster named Hans Niemann, who's a young guy, probably early 20s. Magnus is probably more like 31 or so, like now.
And what happened is Hans Niemann. He beat Magnus Carlsen at a tournament in a game, not in a match necessarily. You might need to check that, but he beat him in the first game of the tournament, which happens right? Like, even....
It's kind of like how the best tennis player in the world can lose a game to a lesser player. But probably isn't going to lose the match. That happens pretty frequently in chess, not uncommon, but it is the most uncommon with Magnus.
Magnus suspected Hans of cheating Why did he suspect Hans of cheating? Magnus is not the type to assume someone is cheating just because he lost a game. He's never done that in his entire career. Reason he did it in the case of Hans is because there had long been rumors circulating in the chess world that Hans Niemann was a cheater.
Now, there's ways you can cheat in chess in an over-the-board game if we're playing with a physical set in front of us. One way people do it is they'll have a friend. Generally, that is looking at the game either here or out in the hall, running it through an engine and giving you a little signal like a baseball coach would.
There are also rumors that in principle, it's possible to cheat with a device. And I think that's happened in some way. That someone can transmit to you, be looking at the game and transmit you a signal. Here's the right move. With a certain number of buzzes. If I have a buzzer in my pocket, in principle, it's possible to have a buzzer in the orifices of your body, you know, in your butt, essentially.
And this is part of why it went viral is because there was a theory that they have pretty strict security at these places. So where would he have put the device? They're not doing an anal cavity check. So that was part of the reason people were talking about it so much, because that's just hilarious to contemplate. But the real situation of it was that Magnus made some strong, implied comments that Hans had cheated in the game. Then everyone started looking at the Hans. And the rumors that had long existed in the chess world about this guy became public, and there were serious competing investigations of how is it that this guy rose so quickly? For example, it's very uncommon in the chess world for someone to raise in rating that quickly.
In the professional world, right? There's a normal rate at which people get better, and there's a kind of impossible rate at which people got better and people debated. He had defenders, he had attackers, both of them had some good points about his rise in over-the-board play. Then there's the online cheating, which is a totally different story. Because Chess.com has really the state-of-the-art cheating detection mechanism. And people cheat all the time on Chess..com. Which is crazy because there's no reason for it, right?
Someone like me, I pay whatever I pay every month on chess.
Com. I'm a random amateur player, I like playing when I'm on the subway, I like playing my friend occasionally.
You don't get any money for winning, most of us have anonymous usernames, you don't get bragging rights for winning. And yet there's a certain percentage of people like me on Chess.com that just cheat for no reason. They're just sitting at home in their mother's basement, cheating to get a number on a screen.
That means nothing.
It makes complete sense.
Really, why?
Because of video games, because in video games, people would use bots when you'd play online. So an aiming bot would make it so that you would almost never miss. So you would play a guy and like, say, in quake there's a gun called the rail gun. The rail gun is very difficult to hit someone with, but it imparts the most damage.
But it doesn't have a scatter of damage like a rocket, you could shoot a rocket next to a guy and fuck him up. But it won't hurt him as much as a rail gun, which would kill him almost instantly unless he has a specific amount of armor. And there's some guys who would never miss.
They'd just hit you with that rail gun every time your head poked out. It would be impossible for them to know exactly where you were going to be for the amount of time. Unless it was dumb luck, but you can't have dumb luck nine times in a row, that's right.
Ten times in a row, twenty times in a row, fifty times in a row, that's right. There'd be scores like 50 to 0 against really good players.
And it's not for any money, not for any money.
They're just laughing because they're clowning you with a bot.
Right?
It's fun.
Yeah, so that's what people do on Chess.com. And just like that game where you literally, mathematically, can only have so much good luck. Chess.com has algorithms that are really, really good at detecting. When you've gone from the good luck space to the definitely cheating space.
So how do they know?
So they looked at Hans Niemann's games and they found that he was almost certainly cheating on chess.
Com in certain games, and they did a whole report where they highlighted the specific games.
Can I stop you? Yeah. Is it an analysis of his previous games? that was his previous games, so you see the level of competency based on the previous games?
What do you mean?
So you see his level of mistakes and the way he does it, and then in the games where they think he's cheating. What was the variable that they detected?
So one variable that they use is the length of time between your moves. Because in a normal chess match, it's a bit random, right? You'll do some moves quickly and some moves slowly. But if you're cheating, you're using a machine that takes five seconds to load for every move. Checking the move, you're going to have a regularity.
Each move is going to come after five seconds, for example, so that's one factor, and then they have other factors. Another factor is just how accurate your moves are. Because chess is close to solved, meaning the machines are playing it better than we are.
So you can check a human player against the machine player. Even Magnus Carlsen will lose a thousand times in a row now to stockfish a thousand times, he has no chance.
I remember when Big Blue first started playing chess against people, that was always the thing. Once a computer can beat a person, we're fucked.
Yeah, we're way long past that. Now that's wild, and so they can check if you're playing 99.5 of the Stockfish top moves. That's just not possible.
Magnus can't do it, nobody can do it. You might be able to do it for one simple game, but you can't do it 12 games in a row that are complicated. It's just not possible.
Very much like what you talked about. So Chess.com combines that measure with these other measures. It even kind of knows, I think. When you're switching browsers, which can be a tip off to cheating, because you're switching from the browser, you're playing chess in to the browser that you're cheating with.
Why wouldn't they just have a separate computer?
Exactly so that's not the only thing generally.
They require you now to have a camera if you're competing in a tournament. So you have to show your surroundings so that they know you're not using a separate computer.
But you could have someone off camera that was cheating for you.
In theory.
You could have a dual monitor set up and so on.
But the algorithm is regarded as very accurate in terms of determining cheating, and they did determine that he had cheated in a bunch of. Let's say they weren't top tournaments, but they were friendly tournaments. Some of them had money on the line, so it was never proven that he cheated over the board. And I'm agnostic about that. I've read both sides.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether he had cheated over the board in real big tournaments, but it was proven that he had cheated online.
And again, all of this is separate from the fact that he's a damn good chess player. Nobody denies he is a grandmaster, he should be a grandmaster. He is capable of defeating Magnus Carlsen in a game, not in a match, so that's not to take anything away from him.
But there was rumors circulating, and that's basically what happened.
And so his defense was, I believe he admitted to some of it, yes, and his defense was that he was doing that because he wanted to get higher ratings quicker so he could play better players.
Okay, well.
Still cheating?
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