Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / #131: Mike Oppenheim / The 27 Club / Teacher v Administrator / Underground Communities / China

Transcript

#131: Mike Oppenheim / The 27 Club / Teacher v Administrator / Underground Communities / China · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:15
  We're live, Mike. Happy new year, man.
• 0:17
  We're going to close up the year.
• 0:19
  The great episode. I'm really excited about this.
• 0:22
  Awesome. Me too.
• 0:23
  So I, I mean, obviously I, we were just talking, I just did
• 0:27
  your show a couple weeks ago. And I know I, I felt like we
• 0:30
  were cut from a similar cloth as far as, you know, music and our,
• 0:36
  our love for English and our love for teaching and our love
• 0:39
  for podcasting, talking, meeting people.
• 0:41
  And I was like, you know, and then when we talked for probably
• 0:43
  what, 20 minutes, half an hour off air after we finish the
• 0:46
  courting, you know, I was like, there's no way that we're not
• 0:48
  going to have a great conversation and there's no way
• 0:50
  that there's no reason to not stay in touch.
• 0:52
  So I'm really happy you're joining me.
• 0:54
  Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.
• 0:56
  Thank you and I agree. And I think something I enjoyed
• 0:59
  about you and enjoy to continue to enjoy about you is like me,
• 1:02
  you're a lifelong learner, less of a so I like podcast host who
• 1:06
  lean and the I like to learn and listen side, which you are
• 1:08
  definitely so. Yeah, I appreciate that.
• 1:10
  Thank you. Yeah, I'm trying to man, it's
• 1:12
  hard to, but it's hard because I think, I think that for a lot of
• 1:17
  people, when you, as you become established or as you kind of
• 1:20
  make your way through the world, admitting that you were wrong
• 1:22
  about something kind of shakes you to your foundations and your
• 1:27
  roots. And you're like, well, if I was
• 1:28
  wrong about that, like, what else am I wrong about?
• 1:29
  You know, and that's a really scary thing.
• 1:31
  I think a lot of people won't even entertain or have a hard
• 1:33
  time doing. And I think that, you know, I, I
• 1:38
  think that there's I, I think you kind of have to like dip
• 1:40
  your toe in the water a little bit because it is uncomfortable.
• 1:42
  And so you kind of start with small questions and you kind of
• 1:44
  get bigger and you kind of, you know, a smaller trains of
• 1:46
  thoughts and get bigger. And I think that, you know,
• 1:50
  especially at the end of the year, you know, there's a
• 1:51
  Jewish, you know, you got the Jewish New Year, which is Rosh
• 1:54
  Hashanah that everyone, a lot of people know about.
• 1:56
  And you got New Year's. And they're both, you know, I
• 2:00
  think they're two sides of different coins.
• 2:02
  I think what, you know, New Year's is celebrating the end of
• 2:04
  the end of the year and the beginning of a new one with a
• 2:06
  lot of hope. And the Jewish New Year is much
• 2:08
  more somber and much more, you know, reflective and a lot more.
• 2:12
  What did I do this past year? How did I behave?
• 2:14
  Am I happy with my behavior or do I need, what do I need to
• 2:16
  work on? But I think that you're coming
• 2:17
  to both of them, you know, And so, so tell me some thoughts
• 2:21
  that are going through your mind in the new year.
• 2:22
  Tell me a little bit about yourself or going into the new
• 2:24
  year. Tell me about yourself a little
• 2:25
  bit and let's open up the conversation.
• 2:27
  See how we go? See how we go, where we go from
• 2:28
  here? Yeah, My thoughts going into the
• 2:30
  new year are it's been a long time since I shook up a few
• 2:33
  things in my life, and it's because I needed to have the
• 2:36
  discipline to not shake things up to raise a couple little
• 2:39
  kids. But they're getting older and
• 2:42
  I'm getting older, and I kind of see the wisdom now in shaking a
• 2:45
  few things up. So I don't have any, like,
• 2:46
  specifics to offer to your audience or you, but I just want
• 2:50
  to like, try to say yes more often when my inclination is to
• 2:53
  say no. And then also to try saying no
• 2:55
  sometimes when my inclination is to say yes.
• 2:57
  Like it's not a binary, or maybe that's binary, but it's not like
• 3:01
  I want to lean one way or the other.
• 3:02
  I just feel like I'm not complacent, but I don't want to
• 3:07
  become complacent, so I want to put a safeguard against that and
• 3:10
  I do. I totally agree with you that
• 3:12
  we're kind of blessed when you live in America, if you're
• 3:14
  Jewish and and American because you do celebrate both holidays.
• 3:17
  They do come three months apart. And I definitely pay more
• 3:21
  attention to the first one, especially Yom Kippur or less
• 3:24
  Rosh Hashanah actually, because I think atonement is such an
• 3:29
  interesting word To me, atoning. It's not accountability, it's
• 3:33
  different. And as I get older, I actually
• 3:36
  am shocked by how little I have to atone for with like a greater
• 3:41
  circle of people. But what I noticed that I do
• 3:44
  repeatedly and it's my biggest issue in life is it's hardest to
• 3:47
  be nice to the people closest to you.
• 3:49
  It's like it's, it's annoying and it's constantly frustrating
• 3:53
  to me. And, and The funny thing is, I
• 3:55
  don't think my wife is better at it than me.
• 3:57
  I think we're like pretty equally.
• 3:58
  And I wouldn't even say we're good or bad at it.
• 4:00
  It's just that that is the thing that I really want to
• 4:03
  concentrate on in this new year is learning to shut up and wait
• 4:07
  to have like important conversations.
• 4:09
  It's just something I'm like terrible at the second I need to
• 4:12
  have an important conversation, I'm like, now we got to do it.
• 4:15
  There's no waiting. And like, that's immature,
• 4:18
  impatient. And unless it's like there's a
• 4:20
  time bomb going off in the house and we have to get out of the
• 4:23
  house in three seconds. Believe it or not, Mike, talking
• 4:26
  to myself, nothing's that urgent.
• 4:28
  You know, Like, yeah, yeah. That's a good point.
• 4:30
  That's really interesting. And I actually think, you know,
• 4:32
  it's funny because there's 2 is again, two sides of a coin.
• 4:35
  I think that a big problem as a society that people are having
• 4:38
  now that I'm sure you've heard the term quiet quitting, but
• 4:40
  they kind of apply it to everything, you know, whether
• 4:42
  it's work, whether it's relationships, whether it's even
• 4:44
  friendships, you know, we're like, you won't confront
• 4:46
  someone. It's much harder to have that
• 4:48
  conversation. Hey, I don't think this is
• 4:50
  working out or, you know, like I'm looking for another job.
• 4:52
  I'm sorry that, you know, and, and I'm sorry, I know you're
• 4:54
  counting on me, but I, you know, I got to go a different way.
• 4:57
  And most people would literally rather just quit putting in
• 5:00
  effort until the other person gets completely sick of it,
• 5:02
  throws up their hands and says, I don't want to deal with you
• 5:04
  anymore. And then you got the people that
• 5:06
  have to, you know, like what you're saying, like what you're
• 5:08
  describing. I got to, I got to respond to
• 5:09
  everything immediately, you know, and, and there's a sweet
• 5:12
  middle ground, you know, where, Hey, man, and especially, I
• 5:15
  mean, I don't know about your, you know, your, your, I guess
• 5:18
  you're resting emotional state, you know, but, but I think it's
• 5:24
  really important to, we feel things very strongly as they
• 5:27
  happen and to be able to take a breath and literally, even if
• 5:32
  you're waiting on, you know, a couple of seconds to respond or
• 5:34
  a couple of minutes to figure out the right way to say it, a
• 5:37
  lot of you know it, it makes a huge difference because you
• 5:41
  know, there's, it's the difference between reacting and
• 5:43
  acting. It's the difference between
• 5:44
  being, you know, being someone that is constantly exclusively
• 5:49
  responding to the world around them as opposed to being
• 5:52
  contemplative and then and then, you know, acting with
• 5:55
  intentionality. So I think what you're kind of
• 5:57
  describing is just a little bit more intentionality rather than
• 6:00
  reflexiveness, right? Yeah.
• 6:01
  And then I also have a fear that if you come to me with conflict,
• 6:06
  like for example, I was a vice principal for a while.
• 6:07
  It was one of the worst things I've ever had to do.
• 6:10
  I, I, for many reasons, both good and bad, I took the job.
• 6:14
  I did actually my best and I, I'm proud of what I did, but I
• 6:17
  couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand the pressures.
• 6:19
  And one of the things that would happen is, you know, teachers
• 6:21
  would come into me with, with conflict this other teacher, why
• 6:24
  they get this shift. I want this, you know, just, I
• 6:25
  mean, teachers are not immature people, but when they're in the
• 6:29
  office with an administrator, they tend to have a like
• 6:31
  children. And I was a teacher long before
• 6:34
  I was an administrator. And I even noticed that when I
• 6:36
  was 1. So I'm saying that if someone's
• 6:38
  listening and you think I don't understand what I'm talking
• 6:40
  about, my experiential experience is that teachers like
• 6:45
  run a class, but then when they're in the class, things
• 6:48
  kind of breakdown. And and so it was not fun to be
• 6:51
  an administrator in those circumstances.
• 6:52
  And one of the things that I was really fearful of is if you come
• 6:55
  into my office with conflict and I just sit there with like a
• 6:59
  steel face contemplating, it looks like I'm saying no, like
• 7:04
  it, it gives. And so it was like a real like
• 7:06
  hard learning curve for me to be like, I'm your boss and I'm
• 7:10
  going to like have to think about this.
• 7:11
  You know, I might even have to talk to a couple other teachers.
• 7:14
  And, and so I've also noticed that sometimes I feel that way,
• 7:17
  especially in in the marital like realm, because that is what
• 7:20
  I'm really concentrating on the most.
• 7:22
  My kids to a lesser extent, but, you know, they're my kids.
• 7:24
  So they're, there's an actual hierarchy.
• 7:26
  But yeah, yeah, yeah, it's my wife.
• 7:29
  Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.
• 7:30
  Please go ahead with your wife, Yes.
• 7:31
  Oh, it's just like, if she wants to travel, like she said, I want
• 7:33
  to take a vacation and then I just, I'm like, OK, like I need
• 7:37
  to think about that. But she hears that as a no.
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  And I that has so much more to do with like the people in her
• 7:43
  life who said, let me think about that.
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  Like, I don't know her precedence with that word, but
• 7:46
  it did remind me of teaching. And it still reminds me of of
• 7:49
  all that with like just sometimes what you just
• 7:52
  described, even though that is like the peak of, in my opinion,
• 7:55
  maturity, especially in American Society where like, don't take
• 7:59
  no for an answer. Don't wait.
• 8:01
  Like, you know, it's just like rush, rush, rush.
• 8:02
  And so I do think there's something also like deeply
• 8:05
  cultural in this discussion. Definitely, definitely, let's,
• 8:09
  let's talk about the teaching a little bit because I have I, I,
• 8:12
  I teach part time. I'm actually having my, my first
• 8:15
  graduating class this year. My, the 9th graders that were
• 8:18
  the first classroom that I walked into are, are now my 12th
• 8:21
  grade class and they're graduating.
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  And it's, it's really, really cool to see.
• 8:25
  And it's really cool to see what these young men have turned into
• 8:28
  throughout the years. You know, and, and it's so funny
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  because I did not, I, I went into teaching high school
• 8:35
  kicking and screaming. I only wanted to teach 12th
• 8:37
  graders. I wanted to teach college.
• 8:39
  I wanted to teach mature people that are capable of
• 8:41
  sophisticated ideas. And, you know, and then, and
• 8:45
  then I started teaching these 9th graders and I was blown away
• 8:48
  by their creativity, by their, and you know, one benefit to not
• 8:53
  being fully developed is that you're not, you know, your
• 8:56
  prefrontal cortex isn't as developed.
• 8:57
  And so you're not as ashamed or afraid to like you're thinking,
• 9:00
  oh, what's up? I'm going to think about what I
• 9:01
  do, you know, and you're afraid, you're not afraid to be silly
• 9:04
  and, and put out, you put on different accents if you're
• 9:06
  reading or use different voices, if you're, if, if you're, you
• 9:09
  know, reading an assignment in class or anything like that.
• 9:11
  And then you watch them as 12th graders and they say, you know,
• 9:15
  and I actually had one student that he was my he is probably
• 9:20
  just today one of the most creative kids I've I've taught.
• 9:22
  And in 9th grade, he was just just oozing creativity.
• 9:26
  He was just flowing out of him. Everyone assignment after the
• 9:28
  next was just incredible. And this year I tried giving
• 9:32
  them a creative writing assignment is and he said to me,
• 9:35
  right, And he's sitting in the class, he's kind of hunched over
• 9:38
  and like, what's the point in creative assignments, Mr.
• 9:40
  Hirschman? And I like, like, can you come
• 9:45
  here for a minute? And I brought him over to my
• 9:47
  desk and I pulled up like three of his stories that he wrote in
• 9:50
  9th grade. And I showed them to him.
• 9:52
  I said, you know who wrote this? He's like, who?
• 9:53
  And I said, you wrote that dude. He's like, I wrote that.
• 9:56
  I said you 1000% wrote that. And he read through it.
• 9:59
  And he was like, OK, you inspired me.
• 10:01
  I got to get back to it and like, wow, that was all you
• 10:04
  needed. But as far as the
• 10:05
  administration, but, but I do run into conflicts with
• 10:08
  administration all the time because especially it's an, it's
• 10:11
  an ultra Orthodox Jewish school. They technically don't want any
• 10:14
  English music. They technically don't want any
• 10:16
  movies or any kind of exposure to not Jewish culture, which I
• 10:19
  do understand. And quite frankly, I'm in their
• 10:22
  building. So I, you know, so I should
• 10:24
  respect that. I do respect that for the most
• 10:27
  part. And and then I do and, and where
• 10:30
  it has come to a butting heads a little bit is where I insist on
• 10:33
  showing them valuable lyrics to have to do with the relationship
• 10:36
  father and son with Cat Stevens or cats in the cradle.
• 10:38
  And like these kids would never get exposed to anything like
• 10:41
  that. And I have to sit down with the
• 10:42
  principal and he has to have the hard conversation with me, which
• 10:45
  he doesn't want to do and say, you shouldn't be doing this.
• 10:47
  And I have to say, these kids aren't reading Great Gatsby.
• 10:50
  I'm not they, they, they, they, they do a dual curriculum.
• 10:53
  They're in, they're in class from 8:00 AM till literally
• 10:57
  eight, 7:38 PM every day. They're not going home and
• 11:00
  reading The Great Gatsby. So if we're going to work on
• 11:02
  literature, if we're going to work on like the meaning and the
• 11:04
  beauty and the, and the humanity behind, you know, behind writing
• 11:08
  and the ability to express yourself, you got to do it in a
• 11:11
  short, concentrated way. And I think that this, and, you
• 11:13
  know, and especially sixties, 70s counterculture and, you
• 11:18
  know, and I guess social commentary, music and poetry is
• 11:22
  a really great way to get there. But I do understand that, that,
• 11:27
  that, that, that, that that tension.
• 11:28
  And that's why I never want to be on the administration side.
• 11:31
  Tell me about your teaching, your teaching career.
• 11:34
  Yeah, Sure. Well, first of all, I'd like to
• 11:35
  say on behalf of all administrators, you're right,
• 11:37
  they're wrong and on behalf. Of all.
• 11:39
  Administrators, your boss is doing his or her job, his job,
• 11:45
  but with that understanding of his job is to defend the
• 11:49
  monolith like whatever it is. And so in your institution, it's
• 11:52
  Orthodox, Orthodox Judaism. In my institution it was a
• 11:56
  capitalist enterprise of 40 schools annexed from the United
• 11:59
  Kingdom and all over the world, Australia.
• 12:01
  And I was but a puppet in a San Francisco school.
• 12:04
  So my sister. Teaching Francisco.
• 12:07
  Yeah, this is so I I was born in New York, but I was raised in
• 12:10
  California. I grew up next to Berkeley,
• 12:12
  which should explain like, pretty much all of my naivity,
• 12:16
  because I grew up thinking like, naked people ride the bus.
• 12:19
  The world is diverse. People don't say rude things to
• 12:22
  each other. They just think them.
• 12:24
  And so like, for example, like I never encountered anti-Semitism
• 12:28
  until I was 1819 and I moved far away from home.
• 12:31
  So I I like understood like, you know, I learned about the
• 12:34
  Holocaust blah, blah, blah, you know, but it but it wasn't like
• 12:36
  ever an issue where I grew up. Now.
• 12:38
  I mean, there was like, you're different.
• 12:40
  What is wrong with you? You're weird.
• 12:41
  You're a Jew. But that's not technically
• 12:43
  anti-Semitism. That's just kids being, you
• 12:45
  know, so no one ever said anything like like, you know,
• 12:49
  even bordering on like the stuff I actually hear in mainstream
• 12:52
  now, which is crazy to me gearing back to the subject of
• 12:54
  hand teaching, but it does apply.
• 12:58
  So I went to a Graduate School for writing.
• 13:00
  I got an MFA, Master of Fine Arts in creative Writing.
• 13:02
  And as part of the program, they force you to get also a teaching
• 13:06
  degree. And it's to let you teach at the
• 13:07
  collegiate level or lower. English literature writing.
• 13:12
  And yeah, those 3. So like English as in grammar,
• 13:15
  and then literature as in, you know, reading whatever.
• 13:18
  And I had ATA ship and I loved it.
• 13:20
  I mean, it was just like, I was like to care less about writing
• 13:23
  my novels. I could care less about like,
• 13:26
  going out and drinking with my friends.
• 13:28
  Like, I was just like reading pedagogy manuals.
• 13:30
  And I just loved it. And teaching just took over me.
• 13:33
  It's still the greatest joy of my life.
• 13:35
  I consider myself a teacher in many regards, but I missed it
• 13:39
  dearly and I can get into why I switched later.
• 13:43
  But the reason I took the promotion was that I was getting
• 13:45
  married and my my ex-wife, her father just put tremendous
• 13:49
  pressure on me. He's like, if you're going to
• 13:50
  start a family, you can't just be a teacher, especially in
• 13:52
  America, blah blah blah. And I was at a private school so
• 13:55
  it was like very different. I was actually making like less
• 13:58
  money than even regular public teachers make.
• 14:00
  So like he wasn't exactly wrong. The only thing is I did have my
• 14:03
  S together. I had like, you know, I bought a
• 14:05
  condo and had a low mortgage. Like everything was manageable.
• 14:09
  But with that said, I'm glad I took the administrative position
• 14:13
  because I can talk to like teachers like you and and say
• 14:15
  like don't ever take that promotion.
• 14:17
  It it like I feel sorry for your boss.
• 14:20
  I don't care how much he makes it.
• 14:21
  I feel sorry for him. Unless he owns the school and
• 14:24
  he's running it, then I don't feel sorry for him.
• 14:26
  But if you're not the owner and you're in management, you're
• 14:29
  always in middle management, you're not ever the manager.
• 14:32
  Like it doesn't matter. And I learned that in restaurant
• 14:34
  work. I learned it everywhere I've
• 14:35
  been as far as teaching goes. I've taught college writing,
• 14:38
  I've taught junior high school. I taught high school.
• 14:40
  But my main career, nine years was teaching adults at a private
• 14:44
  English language school. So it was adults from other
• 14:46
  countries flying here with visas trying to get good.
• 14:49
  It's actually, it's, it's funny. I mean, this was years after,
• 14:52
  but this is exactly how the 9/11 people got into America and did
• 14:57
  what they did is they went to a school like mine.
• 14:59
  So it's always funny when I hear about like, language schools are
• 15:01
  dangerous. I'm like, not really.
• 15:02
  I mean, we had like too many Saudi Arabian students to count.
• 15:06
  They're great students. They they come like in large
• 15:08
  numbers. That was actually Speaking of
• 15:11
  the Jewish thing. Like at first I was like, oh
• 15:12
  God, what am I? It was like not ever an issue.
• 15:16
  If anything, the issue came from other countries and I won't get
• 15:18
  into it, but it was actually least of all in the Middle East.
• 15:22
  So I don't know, you know how that speaks to like the
• 15:24
  political leaders over there. But as far as like human to
• 15:27
  human, this was the greatest career for me because I just got
• 15:29
  to constantly meet people from other cultures and countries.
• 15:31
  I got to practice cross cultural communication and I got to learn
• 15:36
  by staying in America. I learned more about other
• 15:38
  countries than traveling to them because I would have these
• 15:40
  intimate as you know, like bonds with students.
• 15:43
  I mean, some of them would be my students for years, Others were,
• 15:45
  you know, just a week or two. But I taught, I mean, in a nine
• 15:50
  year career, I taught at least 5000, probably 10,000 different
• 15:54
  students. I the only countries I haven't
• 15:57
  taught are like certain ones in Africa or nationalities is what
• 16:01
  I should say. And I'm still friends, like,
• 16:05
  really good friends with a couple of my students.
• 16:08
  I really like all my colleagues. But what I loved was just
• 16:12
  teaching is your chance to, to like, it's like therapy for
• 16:16
  people. It really is like, you're more
• 16:18
  like their therapist and you're a mentor.
• 16:20
  Yeah. And you're like, your story is
• 16:22
  like actually so heartwarming about that boy because like you,
• 16:26
  you see people like their confidence really wavers.
• 16:28
  And I just remember it was only teachers, whoever could Pierce
• 16:31
  my low self esteem. They were the only people who
• 16:33
  knew how to like get in there with an air tube and just like
• 16:36
  spray it and like conflate it a little bit, whether it was high
• 16:40
  school or college or later in life, but especially grad
• 16:42
  school. Actually it was my grad school
• 16:43
  mentors who were like some of those important.
• 16:45
  So I think I miss teaching terribly.
• 16:48
  I moved to Arizona from San Francisco.
• 16:50
  The school closed during COVID but I was never going to go back
• 16:52
  there. And here they don't even have
• 16:54
  private language schools like that.
• 16:56
  It's just all if I was going to do ESL it would be low income
• 17:00
  students from Mexico with with bilingual skills which I'm fine.
• 17:04
  At I can do that. And it's funny because I
• 17:08
  remember my stereotype was exactly the same.
• 17:09
  I'm like, I'm only going to teach college.
• 17:11
  I'm only going to teach. And then no, like any age is
• 17:14
  fun. Like right now, I play music at
• 17:16
  my daughter's preschool and I go and I play 520 minutes sets of
• 17:21
  like kids songs on my guitar and I sing my brains out.
• 17:23
  I do a color cover of Taylor Swift because for some reason
• 17:26
  all the kids like parents, like most of their parents are your
• 17:29
  age, not my age. So like a lot of Swift music,
• 17:33
  like, you know, and but but the point is it's magical even at
• 17:36
  that age. Like the questions my daughter
• 17:37
  asked me in the car, like being her teacher is going to be like,
• 17:40
  the most fun assignment of my life.
• 17:42
  And same with my other two kids. It's just like, so yeah, I don't
• 17:46
  know. You just told me to talk about
• 17:47
  teaching. I mean I just, I think I know
• 17:50
  this is an unpopular statement, but I'm going to make it.
• 17:53
  Someone said this to me the other day and I'm always against
• 17:56
  this. We should not pay teachers like
• 17:58
  lawyers. We should not incentivize money
• 18:00
  driven people to become teachers.
• 18:02
  We should incentivize teaching for the sake of teaching.
• 18:05
  But we should also provide a huge safety net for these
• 18:08
  teachers. So I am not arguing that we
• 18:10
  should not pay them more. But what I am arguing against is
• 18:13
  this ludicrous idea of like making teaching the pinnacle of
• 18:16
  like achievement tied into money.
• 18:18
  I don't want my doctors doing that in that either.
• 18:20
  I don't want like anyone in a position where ethics and
• 18:22
  morality are going to be that important.
• 18:25
  So lawyers, it's fine. Like your, your job is to break
• 18:27
  contracts and defend me. Like that's fine.
• 18:29
  You know, it's not, it's not quite the same, but I do
• 18:32
  actually think that there's a humility and a love of teaching
• 18:36
  that should be part of and parcel of of the experience.
• 18:39
  So, you know, in general, I just think like universal basic
• 18:43
  income would probably solve most of our societal issues right
• 18:46
  now, like some sort of just basic safety net for all people.
• 18:50
  And, and when people say what about lazy people, I'm like,
• 18:52
  dude, just get all the lazy people out of the stores.
• 18:55
  Like I don't want them working at jobs.
• 18:56
  Like I don't want lazy people doing rivets on an airplane
• 18:58
  wing. I don't want lazy people making
• 19:01
  my line take longer and target, like, you know, I just like give
• 19:04
  them money and let them be lazy somewhere else.
• 19:06
  So I I think there's tons of hard working dedicated people in
• 19:08
  the society and teachers, there is a problem with both the
• 19:13
  hiring and the like job skills and all that.
• 19:16
  Like I think the military has too low of an entrance level and
• 19:19
  I think teaching does, but I don't think the pay should be
• 19:21
  like back. Yeah.
• 19:23
  So. That's that's man you, you OK,
• 19:27
  We got so many places to go with that.
• 19:28
  But I want to I want to talk about the last point because I
• 19:32
  mean, I am that is a really interesting conversation in
• 19:35
  general. I've been thinking for I, you
• 19:39
  know, I like the way you put that where you kind of where you
• 19:44
  kind of are separating. Everyone says a teacher, you get
• 19:48
  paid more. Everyone, you know, it is one of
• 19:50
  the most important jobs. And I actually think that it
• 19:52
  would probably be better. I don't know if, you know, let's
• 19:57
  say enormous salaries are going to make a huge difference
• 20:01
  because enormous salaries lead to corruption as we always find.
• 20:04
  And you know, enormous financial incentives leads to try people
• 20:07
  trying to find shortcuts to get to where they want, you know, to
• 20:10
  get those financial incentives. I think that.
• 20:15
  For people to be teachers now you got to be a martyr or you
• 20:19
  got to be a moron. You know, you got to be one or
• 20:21
  the other and or you could be or you could try to be, you know,
• 20:24
  like I'm trying to. I'm barely straggling the, the
• 20:28
  line where where I've got bills to pay.
• 20:33
  It's I'm not teaching to, to get money.
• 20:36
  I'm teaching, you know, 8 hours a week, 10 hours a week, maybe,
• 20:38
  you know, and, and the rest of my time is devoted to sales in
• 20:41
  the podcast to my family and exercise and whatever.
• 20:44
  But it's hard. It's really, really hard to make
• 20:49
  a living. Most people even, you know, even
• 20:52
  in a hundred $150,000 salaries are having a hard time.
• 20:55
  You can't you can't save money to put aside for a house.
• 20:58
  And and you again, you got to either be a martyr or you got to
• 21:01
  be a moron. And the problem and and we as
• 21:05
  society, like when you meet someone, you say I'm a teacher.
• 21:08
  It's almost an embarrassing thing to say.
• 21:10
  It's like, you know, you can say I'm a doctor.
• 21:12
  OK, Wow. What do you practice?
• 21:13
  You know, I'm a teacher. Oh, yeah.
• 21:14
  What do you teach? You know, what's it like to deal
• 21:16
  with snot nose kids all day? You're like, dude, you were snot
• 21:20
  cutting those kids like 3 months ago, okay?
• 21:23
  And you still act like 1 because you had a crappy teacher.
• 21:25
  So like, let's not talk about it like that and let's, let's
• 21:28
  really try to, to, to realize that like, like we live.
• 21:31
  I, I think that America is on such and this is our biggest
• 21:35
  flaw. I think in with everything.
• 21:37
  We are so short sighted. We have such short term vision.
• 21:40
  We think by quarters, we think by months, we think by, you
• 21:44
  know, like, by we get paid every other week and like all that
• 21:47
  money just has to be spent. And then you just wait for the
• 21:48
  next two weeks and you hope that you got to spend it again.
• 21:50
  And you're like, you don't like, there's no long term thinking.
• 21:53
  There's no thinking about our kids or the future.
• 21:55
  There's no thinking about, you know, there's no, it's just
• 21:59
  kicking the can down the line and hoping for everyone else to,
• 22:01
  to, to deal with it. And, you know, by contrast,
• 22:05
  China, which is doing far better than we are in a lot of
• 22:09
  different capacities, in nearly every capacity really, you know,
• 22:13
  except for, you know, maybe a short few.
• 22:16
  They respect teachers. They really, it's one of the top
• 22:18
  three respected positions there and they and they think in long
• 22:24
  term plants and that's why they can be so patient and so smart
• 22:28
  and that's why they could be invested if you know, for a long
• 22:31
  period of time. And even companies, for example,
• 22:33
  like Amazon, when Amazon started, they didn't, they
• 22:36
  didn't mark a profit for years, you know, and, and, and, and
• 22:39
  Wall Street punished them for that and they didn't care.
• 22:42
  And but it, but it took a, it took a real, real Unicorn to,
• 22:46
  and a real unique kind of player to say we don't care about our
• 22:49
  short term stock prices. If you don't like it, don't
• 22:51
  invest with us. But we're reinvesting everything
• 22:53
  into the future and everything into the growth.
• 22:55
  And we should be doing that as a society for our kids.
• 22:59
  We should be doing as society for families.
• 23:01
  And by the way, even the notion of having a family, which is
• 23:04
  less popular now than ever, is, is literally this long term
• 23:08
  thinking like, it's like, and either do what I want now at
• 23:11
  7:00 PM or 9:00 PM and like not be in bed or not be putting my
• 23:14
  kid to bed. But then in 20 years from now,
• 23:17
  I'm by myself, you know, and I used to, when I, when I was in
• 23:20
  college, I used to visit assisted living homes and I used
• 23:23
  to bring my friends. We used to, you know, hang out
• 23:25
  and make little parties or maybe a couple of people would bring a
• 23:27
  couple of, you know, instruments.
• 23:28
  And this is before I played guitar.
• 23:31
  If otherwise I would have, but, but I, you know, and, and, and I
• 23:35
  used to, and there's a huge, and I used to pop around to
• 23:37
  different assisted living homes. Binghamton, NY, which is
• 23:40
  upstate, had a huge number of assisted living homes because
• 23:43
  it's cheap and it's really easy to make a nice facility for not
• 23:45
  a lot of money. And you can obviously charge a
• 23:47
  lot of money and do whatever you want to do.
• 23:49
  But you know, you you see the difference in the people that
• 23:53
  are there when their families are visiting them every other
• 23:56
  week and their grandkids are coming by and their grandkids
• 23:58
  are hugging them and spending time with them or they're
• 24:00
  called, you know, we always getting visitors.
• 24:02
  And then you have the people that are sitting by themselves
• 24:04
  and like, and there's a woman Maryland.
• 24:05
  And she told me and I and it was such a devastating conversation.
• 24:09
  She was in a shitty nursing home, not even assisted living
• 24:12
  because there's a huge difference in quality.
• 24:15
  I don't know if you know if you're familiar with that whole
• 24:17
  whole world, but she's sitting by herself and she told me she's
• 24:20
  like, I'm just waiting to die every day.
• 24:23
  You know, I'm just waiting to die and, and she's and she's
• 24:26
  like, I thought when I was young, I was going to be cool.
• 24:28
  And I thought it was cool to focus on just my career.
• 24:30
  And I thought it was cool to not, you know, to be a
• 24:33
  independent. And by the way, I'm not saying
• 24:35
  it isn't cool to be independent. It's not, it's, I'm not saying
• 24:38
  it isn't cool to have a career, but there's got to be a long
• 24:41
  term thinking plan where you're like, Hey, hey, like, you know
• 24:44
  what, when I'm 60, you know, it'd be really nice to have a
• 24:47
  couple of kids, have a little community, have a little world
• 24:49
  around me that, that, that, that I can continue loving and they
• 24:52
  continue supporting me. And, you know, you make an
• 24:54
  investment in your kids and then everyone knows that, you know,
• 24:56
  at a certain point in your life, things are, I'm, I'm getting to
• 24:58
  that point where, you know, where things are starting to
• 25:01
  swap, where I'm going to tell my dad, you got to be healthy.
• 25:03
  Instead of my dad telling me, Hey, eat your, eat your protein,
• 25:06
  eat your, you know, drink your milk, go to the gym.
• 25:08
  I got to tell that to him now, you know, and, and so like we
• 25:11
  see that the changes that the circle of life is happening.
• 25:14
  But if we're not investing in tomorrow, if we're not investing
• 25:17
  in a month from now and a year from now or in 10 years from
• 25:20
  now, what are we doing? You know, like we and we're
• 25:23
  seeing the consequences. People are isolated, people are
• 25:25
  lonely, people are sad and well, what's that come from?
• 25:31
  I'm so glad you brought up China because one of the best things I
• 25:33
  learned from my career in teaching was teaching Chinese
• 25:35
  students who would come over and be like, yeah, that's not true.
• 25:38
  No, that's like your government is just completely lying to you.
• 25:41
  Chinese people hate their government.
• 25:43
  They know the CCP is as corrupt as it comes.
• 25:46
  Chinese people don't hate their culture and their culture is
• 25:48
  what you refer to. And it's like 1000 year wisdom.
• 25:51
  And it's about like rice paddies and sharing the water and the
• 25:54
  water from your neighbor drips into yours.
• 25:56
  So it's very important to have a good relationship with your
• 25:57
  neighbor, even if you don't like them.
• 25:59
  It's also important to respect water because water grows all
• 26:02
  the rice. You know, they just have these
• 26:03
  aphorisms. And Japan, I mean it's unless
• 26:07
  I'm missing something and I lived in Thailand for a while.
• 26:10
  All of Asia has this idea of family first, elders first.
• 26:14
  Take care of the people above you and think in terms of 100 if
• 26:18
  not thousands of years. The the individual is not as
• 26:21
  important as the collective society.
• 26:23
  In Japan, for example, when you bow to people who are older than
• 26:27
  you, you bow pretty deep for the Prime Minister, but you bow even
• 26:31
  deeper for the teacher. The deepest bow is for the
• 26:33
  sensei, and it's like reserved only for the teacher.
• 26:37
  Meanwhile, teachers in Japan don't make the most money that
• 26:39
  the two are not tied into each other.
• 26:41
  It's the honor. So I think what you hit the nail
• 26:43
  on the head with was we have no honor for teachers, nor do they
• 26:47
  get paid. And my gosh, what a tragedy.
• 26:49
  What a tragedy to do both. And then also, you know, like I
• 26:55
  said, the barrier to entry. I mean, one thing I also wanted
• 26:57
  to add is there's no one under the age of 25 should be teaching
• 27:00
  high school. There's too much of like the
• 27:02
  pressure of like wanting to be cool and fit in.
• 27:05
  And they're still like, also it would solve like so many cases
• 27:08
  of inappropriate relationships because once you're like over
• 27:11
  25, they look like children, you know, I mean, you know, this
• 27:14
  like, like, like they're not like adults at all.
• 27:17
  And there's no attraction. There's nothing like that.
• 27:19
  But on top of that, there's also no desire to be liked by them in
• 27:23
  like a compulsive way. And so I, I see a huge issue
• 27:26
  with two young people teaching two older people.
• 27:29
  So 25 year olds could teach 12 year olds, you know, and, and a
• 27:32
  21 year old. So I'm not saying you shouldn't
• 27:34
  be able to be a teacher, but the age difference has to be severe.
• 27:37
  And I really do think that there's just a, a lack of honor
• 27:42
  and respect for teachers that like is ushered in by parents
• 27:44
  too. Like that's your teacher.
• 27:46
  And then the other weird thing that you are about to see and
• 27:49
  I'm seeing is your teachers influence your kids like so much
• 27:53
  to the point where I'm like, oh, I see why crotchety people who
• 27:57
  watch Fox News talk the way they do.
• 27:58
  I'm not going to become one of them.
• 27:59
  But I see it. I see the bug of like, my
• 28:02
  daughter came home and told me what her teacher told her about
• 28:05
  911. And remember, I grew up in
• 28:06
  Berkeley. And I was like, whoa, that's a
• 28:09
  really unfair version. Like, give those people some
• 28:12
  credit. Like, you know, like, there's
• 28:14
  the famous joke. Bill Maher got fired from ABC
• 28:17
  after 911 because he said, look, I'm OK with hating the terror
• 28:21
  and all that, but please stop calling them cowards.
• 28:22
  There's nothing cowardly about doing what they did.
• 28:24
  And he got, he lost his job for that.
• 28:25
  But that's kind of my take on 9/11 is like, we, we should at
• 28:28
  least shape the narrative so that like, there's an
• 28:30
  understanding of like why there's anger in that region of
• 28:33
  the world and, and why that anger would fuel such a
• 28:36
  devastating and completely immoral action.
• 28:39
  And so this is also what I think teaching is completely lacking
• 28:42
  is it started as compulsory education in Illinois in the
• 28:44
  1800s. It's goal was just to like
• 28:47
  basically babysit kids and get them up to an eighth grade, what
• 28:50
  we would say now, 8th grade level of education, so they can
• 28:52
  go back to the farm. You know, there was no like
• 28:55
  learning how to learn critical thinking skills, none of that.
• 28:58
  And that's just carried through to 2025.
• 29:00
  And now we have like the Internet is teaching your kids.
• 29:03
  I, you know, you came from a good family and you had a very
• 29:05
  constructive youth. I can just tell like it's pretty
• 29:08
  obvious. But you're, you are from the
• 29:10
  generation where like self education online is like a
• 29:13
  rampant issue. You know, I, I, I am not
• 29:16
  denouncing podcasting as a podcaster who's on a podcast,
• 29:19
  but the podcast host should not have had as much of an influence
• 29:23
  on the election as they did. And the other day they did.
• 29:25
  And that's not because those people are dumb and they don't
• 29:28
  deserve an audience. It's because critical thinking
• 29:30
  skills have not been taught for so many years now that people
• 29:33
  are having trouble even understanding what you just
• 29:35
  said, which is, Hey, why don't you think longer than like this
• 29:38
  minute, like maybe wait to eat that THC brownie until if you're
• 29:43
  like, you know, like, like there's just like this immediacy
• 29:46
  that already happens because of the frontal cortex issue.
• 29:48
  And then the last thing I'm going to say on the note of
• 29:50
  America is we are teenagers. We have no frontal cortex
• 29:53
  development. We are a new country.
• 29:55
  We threw a bunch of tea bags in Ann Harbor and we're like,
• 29:58
  that's it. We're the best ever.
• 29:59
  That's like way too early congratulating like stop, hold
• 30:02
  the presses. We're in year 200 something and
• 30:05
  we're kind of crumbling. Like we're like a marriage
• 30:06
  that's in year 3. And they're like, well, we've
• 30:08
  survived everything. And you're like, whoa, there's
• 30:10
  a. Lot of stress.
• 30:11
  Coming So this is a stress point and I we're really in it I mean
• 30:16
  we're in like a huge like this is the last time something this
• 30:18
  critical happened was like the 1920s I would say and then
• 30:21
  before that it was like in the 1820s it does happen about every
• 30:24
  100 years but. Yeah, the extent of the damage I
• 30:30
  think though has been, I mean, going on and the more I'm
• 30:33
  learning about this and the more I'm reading about this and the
• 30:36
  more I'm talking to people about this, the more I'm realizing,
• 30:38
  you know, how long this this is 75 years worth of damage.
• 30:41
  That's all coming to a climax. I mean, this is since World War
• 30:45
  2 where we decided that we won and that we are now, you know,
• 30:48
  again that would have had in the back that you give.
• 30:50
  Yourself. We won, yeah.
• 30:51
  We can do any. Yeah, right.
• 30:53
  We want that. We can do anything, right.
• 30:54
  Russia threw millions of soldiers at at World War 2 and
• 30:58
  you know, and we provide a lot of manufacturing and you know,
• 31:01
  but I think but since then we you know, we've we got comfy, we
• 31:07
  got cocky and I actually I made the point I make the point to
• 31:10
  show my students every year and every year I'm re inspired.
• 31:13
  Steve Jobs is a famous inauguration speech at Stanford
• 31:17
  and one of the beautiful one of my favorite things that he said
• 31:21
  that we always, I think have to think about because I think it
• 31:23
  really perpetually provides hope in a really useful way.
• 31:27
  Is he said the best thing that happened to him was his failure
• 31:31
  and the best thing that happened to him was getting kicked out of
• 31:33
  Apple. He wouldn't have started Pixar.
• 31:34
  He wouldn't have started next. He was like in the weight and
• 31:37
  the burden of being successful. I didn't realize how suffocating
• 31:40
  it was. I didn't know how suffocating it
• 31:43
  was to be established and to be successful and what I had to
• 31:45
  compromise to maintain that. And then when I found that it
• 31:48
  was all ripped away from me. I would have my wings again.
• 31:51
  I had my I was free. I could do I could do whatever I
• 31:53
  wanted to do. And I actually think that right
• 31:57
  now, I don't think anyone except for propagandized Americans
• 32:01
  would say that we're the best at any very much right now.
• 32:04
  You know, and I don't even think it's necessarily so bad to be
• 32:06
  propagandized. I think national identity is a
• 32:08
  very valuable thing. I think it's very valuable to be
• 32:11
  proud of your family and who you are and where and where you're
• 32:13
  from. And I think that those are all
• 32:15
  really, really integral. And I but I think it's a good
• 32:20
  thing that people are waking up and saying, hey, we got a lot of
• 32:23
  work to do. Like we have fallen behind.
• 32:25
  But now that we don't have that weight of that success, now we
• 32:28
  don't have the weight of, of having to be the number one.
• 32:31
  Now we could be the underdog again.
• 32:33
  And we can be like that 1980, you know, US hockey Olympic team
• 32:36
  against the Russians. And we were young and excited
• 32:38
  and a bunch of guys that haven't played together.
• 32:40
  And then we're going. And then this is new chemistry
• 32:42
  and this emergent of something magnificent from a bunch of
• 32:45
  disparate parts. And that's what America is.
• 32:47
  And then, then and then it stopped being that way and then
• 32:51
  it got hurt. And now I'm hoping and now
• 32:52
  again, because you could do you could look at this in either
• 32:56
  way, you could be very negative and say and listen, we are going
• 32:59
  to have a painful experience. There's no question about it.
• 33:01
  Economically, we are suffering. There was such.
• 33:04
  I'm reading this book right now. It's another it's it's a third
• 33:06
  variation, but it's called Confessions of an Economic
• 33:08
  Hitman. And one of my one of my, I mean,
• 33:11
  the book blew my mind. And I actually got the author on
• 33:13
  the podcast and his name is John Perkins.
• 33:16
  Awesome, awesome dude. And, and one thing that he was
• 33:20
  that he wrote in his book and it makes it's so cool, he goes,
• 33:23
  there's three individuals that have as much money as half the
• 33:27
  country in America right now. He goes, everyone says our
• 33:31
  economy is doing well, right? It's fine.
• 33:34
  He goes if those 3 individuals make 10% on their investment,
• 33:38
  which they tend to or if not more, right, let's say 10% and
• 33:43
  half the population, sorry, half of the, so you have, you know,
• 33:47
  half. So you have half the wealth is 3
• 33:49
  people, half the wealth is the rest of the country.
• 33:52
  If the rest of the country loses 3% of their money and the rest
• 33:56
  stay approximately the same, right.
• 33:59
  So we still have, you could say the economy is still doing well
• 34:03
  because the three people got 10%.
• 34:06
  So when Trump's walking around, and by the way, it's funny
• 34:08
  because I was extremely hopeful for this Trump presidency.
• 34:12
  I was extremely hopeful. I, I saw the unification of
• 34:15
  people that have been historically to the left coming,
• 34:17
  you know, coming not necessarily to the right, but more populist,
• 34:20
  anti authoritarian. To me, it wasn't a question of
• 34:24
  left versus right this election. It was a question of authority
• 34:27
  versus anti authority and populism and the people saying,
• 34:30
  I'm sick and tired of everyone telling us the way that we
• 34:32
  should think and ignoring our own eyes and what's in front of
• 34:34
  us and we want to do something about that.
• 34:37
  And it felt like there was a really strong coalition that was
• 34:40
  also trying to emphasize that. And unfortunately, you see how
• 34:43
  powerful the machine is and it won't go down without a fight
• 34:45
  that even with such a powerful coalition, the second that it
• 34:48
  started or after a couple of months and listen, you know
• 34:51
  what, again, you want to be hopeful you got three more kinds
• 34:54
  of three more years left. So see it at the midterms.
• 34:56
  But you know, like I but I think that the the roof is kind of
• 35:01
  blown open now. I think that people are aware
• 35:03
  now and it's causing widespread schizophrenia almost among
• 35:08
  Americans. We don't know what to believe.
• 35:10
  We don't know what's true. We don't know what to BS or not.
• 35:12
  We don't know whether Trump is a hero or a villain or a moron or
• 35:16
  a brilliant 4D chess player. We don't know if, you know, the
• 35:20
  people running the news networks are full of crap or if people
• 35:22
  are running podcast shows are full of crap now.
• 35:24
  And, and like no one kind of knows where to go and it's
• 35:29
  chaotic and it's messy and it's really, it's scary.
• 35:33
  I think that this is like the, the like America's kind of just
• 35:39
  shattered and it's and, and what whatever is going to.
• 35:42
  And we're, we're, we're in a stage right now where you got to
• 35:44
  pick ourselves back up and put the pieces back together.
• 35:46
  And we don't know what that's going to look like yet, but I,
• 35:50
  I, I really feel like, I think a lot of people really feel like
• 35:55
  they do know what they want. They want opportunity.
• 35:57
  They like they, we've been told for so many years, play this
• 36:00
  game, get a good degree, you know, work for a couple of
• 36:02
  years, save up money and you can put a down pin on the House.
• 36:04
  No, you can't. And then when you again now what
• 36:07
  do you do? So, you know, so I'm really so
• 36:10
  so I, I, even though we're in a scary time and it's very
• 36:13
  turbulent, I think that it's giving us the opportunity to be
• 36:16
  unburdened by the weight of the success that we've had.
• 36:19
  Knock some humility back into US.
• 36:20
  Hey, we could be wrong. Hey, not we don't have the
• 36:22
  answers to everything. I don't know is a really good
• 36:24
  thing to say. Let's figure it out together is
• 36:26
  a really good thing to say. And then let's see what comes
• 36:29
  from there, you know? Yeah, I totally agree.
• 36:31
  And I think what by totally agree, what I especially agree
• 36:35
  with is it's always good to face a challenge and have adversity.
• 36:39
  It never actually is a problem. And also my underlying faith is
• 36:43
  like, this is but a dream. This is but one life.
• 36:45
  Like I don't, I don't actually matter.
• 36:47
  I really am the statistic Joseph Stalin referred to, you know,
• 36:50
  like when I die, it will be a tragedy to whoever calls it
• 36:54
  that, who knows me personally, but it's not really a tragedy.
• 36:57
  I just lived my life and my life was as fruitful and productive
• 36:59
  as it felt to me. It's an experiential process.
• 37:02
  But one of the things I taught, my favorite thing to ever teach,
• 37:05
  my first class I ever got to teach was collegiate critical
• 37:08
  thinking skills. And it was especially logical
• 37:09
  fallacies. That was like the title, the
• 37:11
  course reader and and and so the biggest logical fallacy in our
• 37:15
  country is this lesser of two evil argument.
• 37:18
  And that's why I'm such a proponent of like just teaching
• 37:21
  children critical thinking. Had we taught like slippery
• 37:24
  slope is not actually true. Had we taught like all of these
• 37:26
  like trite aphorisms that people throw into like especially
• 37:30
  election jingoism, it it would have made a difference because
• 37:34
  people would have realized, oh, there are viable people.
• 37:37
  There are people outside of the two parties, There are other
• 37:39
  parties. There are ways to like cast a
• 37:41
  vote in a district level to make effective change.
• 37:43
  But instead most people just like here the, I mean this, I'm
• 37:46
  aging myself, but Mt VS Rock, the vote, you know, and all that
• 37:49
  they do is every four years they say you got to vote for
• 37:51
  President Bill Clinton, Obama, Bush, Trump.
• 37:55
  These are not the people who are going to create the changes.
• 37:57
  They're the people who can help the change that's coming from
• 38:01
  like the bottom up. So when Trump was elected, I was
• 38:04
  not excited only because I didn't like his shmarmy like way
• 38:08
  he talks. But it wasn't to me.
• 38:12
  I wasn't like I, I come from that Berkeley area.
• 38:15
  And so I'm, I'm actually like very careful to distance myself
• 38:18
  from the far left or even like the remotely normal left because
• 38:23
  they never gave him a chance in the first one.
• 38:25
  And then now he's on this vendetta tour.
• 38:27
  So while I while I strongly do not like what's going on in
• 38:30
  politics, I strongly did not like what was going in politics
• 38:33
  my whole life. I've never really seen a huge
• 38:35
  shift. So I feel like the one thing you
• 38:39
  spoke about that that is alarming to me is I, I was a
• 38:42
  part of academia for a while and it, it did get out of hand.
• 38:45
  It really did. But what doge and, and this
• 38:47
  machine did to academia was also inappropriate and not going to
• 38:51
  be helpful. So like crushing the ivory
• 38:53
  tower. And so now this like there's no
• 38:56
  truth. Don't trust your professors at
• 38:58
  Harvard. Don't trust the person who's on
• 39:01
  a podcast like this. Who can you trust?
• 39:02
  What is fake news? What is real news?
• 39:05
  I think critical thinking is the only.
• 39:06
  Solution to all of that. It really is like the only thing
• 39:09
  you have to be able to do is just like think, OK, is it a
• 39:14
  good idea to OK, I used to smoke cigarettes like, and I and I
• 39:18
  loved smoking. It was my favorite thing I've
• 39:20
  ever done in my life. Like literally as stupid as that
• 39:23
  sounds, that's how powerful the addiction of nicotine was and is
• 39:26
  to this day. I saw if.
• 39:27
  I'm smoking cigarettes. I almost commented at the
• 39:30
  beginning. I didn't know if you were like,
• 39:32
  like I was AJ. It's a oh, OK, OK, OK, yeah, so
• 39:37
  and so and I did replace smoking cigarettes with other substances
• 39:40
  because I love like I I watched Kurt Cobain smoke John Lennon in
• 39:44
  pictures. Smoke like all my idols because
• 39:46
  I was a musician first and foremost.
• 39:48
  My whole life smoked. And I thought it was like I had
• 39:51
  to smoke to whatever critical thinking to me is understanding
• 39:55
  why I don't smoke now like, like it's it's understanding that of
• 39:58
  course I could go down to a store or buy a pack of
• 40:00
  cigarettes and every day would incrementally get worse.
• 40:02
  And then someday in my 60's, the doctor would be like, well, your
• 40:05
  arteries are clogged here, here and here.
• 40:07
  And you have, you know, but. I used critical thinking to
• 40:10
  really analyze, like, what do I want to be like when I'm older?
• 40:12
  Do I want to wheeze? Like, one of my heroes is Kurt
• 40:14
  Vonnegut. And he wrote this brilliant
• 40:15
  essay towards the end of his life because he smoked his whole
• 40:17
  life and lived in his 80s, so he was my idol.
• 40:19
  I was like, that's what I'm going to do.
• 40:21
  And then he wrote this essay about how he couldn't see his
• 40:23
  granddaughter's apartment in college because there was no
• 40:26
  elevator, and it was on the 2nd floor.
• 40:27
  And his lungs were so weak he couldn't climb one flight of
• 40:30
  stairs. And I was like, oh, oh, you quit
• 40:33
  smoking. Not so you don't get lung cancer
• 40:35
  and die. Not so it's not about a heart
• 40:37
  attack. It's about like.
• 40:38
  Of your life. Yeah.
• 40:40
  And so and so that to me is critical thinking.
• 40:41
  That's what America needs more of.
• 40:44
  And yeah, it's interesting. When you said like the Trump
• 40:50
  thing, I instantly like bristled because I live in an area where
• 40:54
  it's so unheard of to like talk about him without malice or
• 40:59
  great phrase. Like what you did is actually
• 41:02
  the worst crime imaginable according to consensus.
• 41:05
  Does that make sense? What I'm no, no.
• 41:08
  And I like that about you. And I like that about us.
• 41:10
  And I like that. That's when you said like, we're
• 41:12
  I don't think you use the word kindred spirits.
• 41:13
  But like that is the thing I'm attracted to the most at this
• 41:17
  point in in culture and society in my life is just people who
• 41:21
  can understand that it's not black and white.
• 41:23
  It's not Trump is 40 chess. Trump is the biggest idiot ever.
• 41:27
  It's that Trump is Trump and you're Ephraim Ephraim.
• 41:30
  And I am Mike and like, and that's just a complicated thing.
• 41:34
  And, you know, to go back to the marriage, because I think
• 41:36
  marriage to me is my greatest teacher.
• 41:38
  It's my whole goal, my whole life was to be married.
• 41:41
  And my whole goal now that I'm married is to make this marriage
• 41:44
  last because I love my wife and she is the one for me.
• 41:47
  But it doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make my personality
• 41:50
  and her own personality easy. And it's only by not using black
• 41:53
  white logic that I'm able to have a great relationship with
• 41:56
  my wife. And and when it gets bad, it's
• 41:58
  always because one of us or both of us are saying something like
• 42:02
  you always you are, you know, these like permanent statements
• 42:05
  when we're in permanent beings. Yeah, yeah, definitely,
• 42:10
  definitely. I yeah, yeah.
• 42:14
  Marriage is marriage is a trip, man.
• 42:16
  Marriage is a marriage is a trip.
• 42:18
  And you know what? I and I and I actually, and I
• 42:22
  think that, I mean, we can kind of get into this.
• 42:25
  I actually, I do want to talk to you about music a bunch
• 42:27
  actually, too. I I think that the problem that
• 42:34
  a lot of people have, and I think we talked about this when
• 42:37
  we spoke last, is that a lot of times we kind of jump into
• 42:40
  things in life without having a solid understanding of what we
• 42:43
  want or a definition of what it is we're experiencing.
• 42:46
  You know, and a lot of times if you ask someone what they want
• 42:50
  out of a marriage, I don't even know why they're getting married
• 42:53
  as opposed to dating forever, moving in together.
• 42:55
  Well, what makes marriage different than anything else?
• 42:58
  Or do you want a marriage to be a whole life thing?
• 43:00
  Do you expect to get married 234 times?
• 43:02
  Is that something you want? Is that maybe something you're
• 43:05
  looking for? I don't know.
• 43:06
  But I think that we kind of jump into these or we look at these,
• 43:11
  we look at different parts of our lives, like milestones,
• 43:13
  graduate college, get married. And like these checkpoints are
• 43:17
  supposed to mean that we have now reached a certain level of
• 43:19
  maturity or sophistication or, or evolution, and you still got
• 43:25
  to do all the work. I have so many friends,
• 43:27
  especially coming from the Orthodox Jewish world that have
• 43:30
  gotten married when they were younger.
• 43:31
  And they, they, they thought that and they were having a hard
• 43:34
  time with their identity of finding themselves with their
• 43:36
  passions or, or, you know, whatever it was.
• 43:39
  And they thought that getting married would solve those
• 43:41
  problems, period. Like, I am unhappy, I am lonely.
• 43:45
  I have this XY and Z, you know, not great behavior, you know,
• 43:48
  like I'm feeling not great about where I am with my life or where
• 43:51
  where I want to go with my life. You know what, let me try
• 43:54
  getting married. Maybe that'll help.
• 43:55
  And you gotta do a lot of them We.
• 43:58
  Have another kid. Yeah, exactly.
• 44:00
  Yeah, exactly. And I think I said this with
• 44:02
  you, if you wait to ask the questions till you're already in
• 44:06
  the middle of it, you're too late.
• 44:07
  If you wait to ask the question, what does it mean to be a good
• 44:10
  husband after you got married screwed man, what are you going
• 44:13
  to do? You know, you guys, what does it
• 44:14
  mean to be a good dad? And you and you don't know until
• 44:16
  you have a 5 year old. Guess what that five year old
• 44:18
  just went through five years, 5 integral years of having a dad
• 44:21
  that had no idea what it meant to be a dad.
• 44:23
  So I think that, so I think that we have to kind of like define
• 44:26
  the terms of what we're, of what we're looking for and what we're
• 44:28
  looking to accomplish before we kind of go ahead with anything.
• 44:32
  And it just goes back to that thoughtfulness and just goes
• 44:35
  back to that thinking a couple of steps ahead of what you just
• 44:38
  feel like right now. And we're just short term.
• 44:40
  If we could just gain the wisdom of the East.
• 44:43
  And that's like, it's so funny because like, again, you grew up
• 44:45
  in America and there's no other world.
• 44:47
  There are other parts of the planet except for America.
• 44:50
  You don't learn about, you maybe learn a little bit about Europe.
• 44:52
  You don't know anything about the East.
• 44:53
  You don't know, like you told me, I want to hear about
• 44:55
  Thailand too, you know, and I want to hear about about what it
• 44:57
  was like living there. But there's so much wisdom and
• 45:01
  these people have been around for thousands and thousands of
• 45:03
  years and we're 250 freaking years old and we can't get our
• 45:06
  own crap together. So like, you know, But like, so
• 45:09
  yeah, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I wanna kind of transition to
• 45:12
  music a little bit because you've been a lifelong musician
• 45:14
  and I'm assuming huge fan of music.
• 45:16
  So who are some of your role models?
• 45:18
  Tell me when you started playing.
• 45:19
  Tell me, tell me a little bit about your musical career.
• 45:22
  Sure, the best way to start the story is with a pat story my
• 45:25
  mother always told me, which is when I was a little kid, before
• 45:27
  I could talk, I would stand up in my crib and sing verbatim
• 45:30
  songs that I'd heard. So I always had like a musical
• 45:33
  ear and a musical mind. My grandmother was a prodigious
• 45:36
  piano player. She was not a career musician or
• 45:39
  anything like that, but she was self trained, taught herself by
• 45:42
  ear, and she was just like great.
• 45:43
  So I would visit my grandparents often in Tampa, FL and they had
• 45:47
  a piano in the house and I would just start tinkling around on it
• 45:50
  and I would start writing songs. And I didn't even know that I
• 45:52
  was doing that 'cause, you know, kids are just innocently
• 45:54
  bumbling around. But as I looked back on my life,
• 45:57
  it was clear that I really liked composing and creating music.
• 46:01
  And this is going to come into play as I give this story
• 46:04
  because I'm now a professional writer and what I've carried
• 46:08
  through in every career I've had is writing, composing, making
• 46:12
  like. So it's like writing song lyrics
• 46:14
  was as fun as writing the melodies.
• 46:16
  Performing was never fun. I don't love getting on a stage,
• 46:19
  no. So I was in a band and we were
• 46:21
  playing in New York City and our last show ever, my parents went
• 46:24
  to it and it was in New York City.
• 46:26
  It was like our dream, you know, it was like one of those check
• 46:28
  boxes in the career of a band. Like we finally got good enough
• 46:30
  that we got a Thursday night gig at an actual club that matters
• 46:33
  in Manhattan. We were like thrilled beyond
• 46:36
  words. We drove, you know, 4 hours in a
• 46:38
  van with all our equipment. We loaded up, we had an album
• 46:41
  out. We were like really actually on
• 46:43
  our way. Like I know now as an adult,
• 46:45
  like we were not many people get to our level and then quit.
• 46:49
  Many people get to our level and make the next level.
• 46:51
  But we were definitely like actually doing what a real band
• 46:54
  is supposed to do to get successful.
• 46:57
  And my parents came to me after the show and they said, look,
• 46:59
  your guys music is great, but like you look like you're angry
• 47:02
  on stage. And it's not like it's not a
• 47:04
  look that we've seen. Like we've seen you do other
• 47:05
  things and you look happy and like you don't look happy.
• 47:07
  And I and now there was like a subtext to that, which is our
• 47:10
  band was fighting all the time. So I was actually in like a
• 47:12
  horrible mood that night. But they weren't wrong.
• 47:14
  I't seen it. It wasn't like, what's that?
• 47:16
  Were you the lead guy or vocals or what?
• 47:18
  Was the lead singer and songwriter and like main do you
• 47:23
  or did? You, you play you, you, you.
• 47:25
  Did you play rhythm guitar or did you focus more on soloing?
• 47:29
  Well, it's both. I mean, I was, we had another
• 47:31
  guy who played keyboard or guitar depending on the song.
• 47:33
  So yeah, generally in all of the bands I've played and I've done
• 47:37
  both. I was a lead guitarist in my
• 47:39
  earlier years because I was better than other guitarist and
• 47:42
  that's usually what makes you a lead guitarist.
• 47:43
  But once I always say this to people like the people who like
• 47:47
  brag about how good they are guitar, it's like really silly
• 47:49
  to me. There is like a level that is
• 47:51
  elite, like Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, the guy Steve.
• 47:55
  I like these these people who spend 12 to 15 hours alone in a
• 47:58
  room just practicing classical music and warmups.
• 48:02
  Slash is another one. Actually.
• 48:03
  He's like remarkably talented beyond the average.
• 48:06
  But otherwise you're just a guitarist.
• 48:08
  Like it's not that hard. Like I can play any song
• 48:10
  anyone's ever written before except like Spanish Caravan by
• 48:13
  Robbie Krieger from the doors. And like, you know, there's like
• 48:16
  a few like ones that involve like, you know, certain things I
• 48:19
  just didn't practice enough. But but also they were like
• 48:22
  along my career playing music, I would meet guitarist who are way
• 48:24
  better than me, like way, way way better.
• 48:26
  But I would like write better songs than that.
• 48:28
  And so like you complement each other.
• 48:29
  So my main, yes, I was the front man of a band, but I should not
• 48:33
  have been, I should have always been the second front man.
• 48:36
  I should have been the Keith Richards to the Mick Jagger.
• 48:39
  The that's, that's my role in life.
• 48:43
  Yeah, yeah, I'm a, I'm a vice principal.
• 48:45
  I'm a, I'm a, like everything I've ever achieved in life, I've
• 48:48
  always been #2 like, it's just like this thing where I've,
• 48:53
  because I don't like being in charge.
• 48:54
  I don't like being a boss. I don't like power.
• 48:56
  I I don't like telling my daughters no.
• 48:59
  I don't like that despite what my daughters and wife would tell
• 49:03
  you, I don't like telling them no.
• 49:04
  I was just like laughing 'cause I keep talking about marriage
• 49:06
  and like they would just be shaking their head back.
• 49:08
  Dad loves I have a song I wrote. I write children songs for my
• 49:11
  kids I don't like put them on YouTube and stuff.
• 49:12
  I'm not like going to do that probably actually, there's one,
• 49:15
  but the point is I write them with my skill children and I'm
• 49:18
  trying to, you know, help influence their music careers
• 49:20
  and or their love of music rather.
• 49:22
  And my daughter's favorite song that she and I wrote together is
• 49:25
  called Daddy says no. So I'm laughing extra large
• 49:28
  because the song is Daddy says no, I just want to GoDaddy says
• 49:31
  no, I don't want to grow up. Daddy says no, You know, it's
• 49:34
  just like a joke. But but yeah, I've always
• 49:37
  migrated to the number two position because I'm super,
• 49:39
  super, super organized and I'm really good at like anything's
• 49:43
  done and I have good people skills.
• 49:45
  So I'm a great person to take advantage of in any company or
• 49:48
  structure. Like I'm, I'm exactly what you
• 49:50
  want. I will show up on time.
• 49:51
  I'm paranoid of it offending the employees and my bosses and the
• 49:55
  clients. You know, like I'm just like a
• 49:56
  very people oriented person. I'm not a people pleaser to a
• 50:00
  detrimental level because I worked on it, but I am a people
• 50:04
  pleaser. I'm like a person who wasn't as
• 50:06
  popular as I wanted to be. So I always thought, well, the
• 50:09
  way to be popular is just to be nice.
• 50:10
  It's true, it works, but you also can't be nice at the point
• 50:15
  of like detrimentally affecting other people.
• 50:17
  So I had to learn how to tell people, you know, I don't like
• 50:20
  what you're doing. I don't like this.
• 50:23
  You're good, but you need to work like I run a writing
• 50:25
  workshop now and the reason people tell me they respect me
• 50:28
  and like me and keep coming back is that I'm pretty harsh.
• 50:30
  Like I'm, I'm actually a teacher.
• 50:32
  I tell them like this piece is OK, but you should edit and come
• 50:35
  back like it's missing this. And so with music, it was really
• 50:41
  hard because I, I, it's really hard to be in a band.
• 50:46
  Like my drummer had a on and off again, drinking issue.
• 50:51
  He's fine now. He's not, you know, our bass
• 50:53
  player was dating our guitar player.
• 50:55
  They were a couple that had met in grad school and she was like
• 50:59
  way better at music. Than he.
• 51:01
  Was and so like we needed her in the band because she was the
• 51:04
  second best player. I mean her we complemented each
• 51:07
  other like perfectly, but she was a total pain in my ass.
• 51:10
  I mean, she was just like not and she was like a Cornell like
• 51:13
  scientist. So she was like this like nerdy
• 51:16
  smart girl who like would would like show up to band practice
• 51:19
  right on time after like collecting herbs in a forest.
• 51:21
  Like she was just like, you know, And so like it was like I
• 51:24
  was the only type A person like there.
• 51:27
  I don't know if Type A is the right word, but I was the only
• 51:30
  like, you know, Yeah, but then. But meanwhile, and this is where
• 51:33
  the story gets weird, I wasn't respecting the guy who played
• 51:36
  keyboard and guitar for everything he was doing.
• 51:38
  He was writing amazing songs. He was learning and getting
• 51:41
  better at his instruments, plural, every day.
• 51:43
  He was sending out demo and press kits as before, Like the
• 51:46
  Internet was a viable option for bands.
• 51:47
  You had to, like, physically mail CDs you made and, like,
• 51:51
  approach venues with a demo. It was like a totally different
• 51:53
  world. And he was doing all that.
• 51:55
  So, like, I just wish I could go back in time.
• 51:57
  I know we're all still friends except the bassist.
• 51:59
  She disappeared off the face of the earth.
• 52:01
  But we're still good friends. I, I, I love the person who I
• 52:05
  started the band with, the drummer and the other guitarist
• 52:08
  and I learned so much from it. It was definitely the path to
• 52:12
  success. If I want to go back in time and
• 52:14
  say like this is where I went wrong, I didn't go wrong.
• 52:16
  But we should have stayed together.
• 52:18
  We were like way more talented after two years of playing
• 52:20
  together than most bands are after five.
• 52:22
  We were totally professional. We we lived in the same house
• 52:25
  and practice hours everyday. Our album still holds up in my
• 52:28
  opinion. I got to get.
• 52:30
  Yeah, I got some time. You got to.
• 52:31
  I got to give. Them I'll send you Yeah.
• 52:32
  There's a SoundCloud where I have it up because I don't, you
• 52:34
  know, I'm not going to mail you a CD.
• 52:36
  No offense. I just don't even know where
• 52:37
  they are. Yeah.
• 52:39
  No, no, I'm like. So, yeah, as I get older and as
• 52:42
  I like, I'm at the edge of the Cliff.
• 52:44
  I'm 44. I just don't care that much
• 52:46
  about myself anymore. It's really sad.
• 52:48
  It's actually, like hard to admit that I actually don't care
• 52:51
  that much. Like, I just, it doesn't matter.
• 52:53
  Like, it's like this weird stage in life where you, like, start
• 52:55
  looking at all these things you've collected, like penance
• 52:57
  from a stadium. You went to, like, all these
• 52:59
  things and then you're just like, who am I saving this for?
• 53:02
  Like, who? Like I thought this was for the
• 53:04
  guy who was going to archive me because I was going to be the
• 53:06
  most famous person in the world because that was like, oops, I
• 53:09
  dropped my headphone. I didn't want to be the most
• 53:11
  famous person in the world. It's very important for, like,
• 53:13
  people who are young to understand this.
• 53:14
  I actually thought I was going to be like, that's the level of
• 53:17
  my ego. Like it's not, it's a feeling
• 53:21
  you have and when you read people who are like super
• 53:23
  successful, they all have it. So it's like a similar quality I
• 53:26
  have to these other people. But the difference is the only
• 53:30
  person I could really relate to is Keith Richards Autobiography
• 53:32
  is one of the best books I've ever read in my life.
• 53:34
  It's just my whole life. He's just a deeply
• 53:37
  philosophical, wise man who happened to also just get into
• 53:40
  drugs and alcohol and booze and but guitar was his through line.
• 53:43
  He's mortal. Yeah, he the book is one of the
• 53:47
  best books. He's never going to go.
• 53:48
  He's never going to go. He's he's going to kick around
• 53:50
  for a long, long time. If you read the book, it is
• 53:54
  remarkable how different he is from.
• 53:57
  It is so worth reading. I was blown.
• 53:59
  I'm not a Rolling Stones fan. I'm like, I've mentioned them
• 54:01
  only because I read his autobiography and it changed.
• 54:03
  It changed me for the better. Yeah, I'm.
• 54:05
  I'm like, Rolling Stones are OK. I'm.
• 54:07
  I'm a Beatles guy. If I, you know, between the two
• 54:08
  because my parents were there, but I are better than OK.
• 54:12
  I mean, they're great, but like, it's not about the music for me.
• 54:15
  It's about what the difference between him and Mick Jagger is,
• 54:19
  which is like he would have just been fine playing guitar in his
• 54:23
  poverty. He was super poor growing up.
• 54:25
  I mean, just horrible childhood and he would've been fine with
• 54:28
  that. Mick Jagger would not have been
• 54:29
  fine. Mick Jagger was like, I'm going
• 54:30
  to Business School. I'm getting an MB AI went to the
• 54:32
  finest high school in London. My parents have money, you know,
• 54:35
  blah, blah, blah, and that's why they fought so much in the even
• 54:38
  at one point, like Pseudo broke up without announcing it to
• 54:40
  their fans. Is that Mick Jagger?
• 54:42
  It was never enough. And it was always like we have
• 54:44
  to have the number one record. We have to and you can see it to
• 54:46
  this day, like the way they tour.
• 54:48
  So when I'm relating like music, I'm like a Keith Richards.
• 54:52
  I just love music. I just love music so much.
• 54:55
  It's like all I care about when it comes down to it.
• 54:59
  Like I would give up so many things before I would give up,
• 55:03
  like the ability to hear and love music, so.
• 55:06
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Influences.
• 55:08
  Yeah. Yeah, influences.
• 55:09
  Tell me, tell me some influences of yours and and in what way
• 55:12
  they influenced you because I'm more interested in that.
• 55:13
  Like, yeah, I'm interested in the, you know, the fact that
• 55:17
  James Taylor is associated with an ex-girlfriend or you know
• 55:20
  that and like and and those associations and memories or
• 55:22
  what? Because I'm also finding that,
• 55:26
  you know, for example, I'm a huge Springsteen nut or I was, I
• 55:28
  still am, but I kind of, I've overdid his music a little bit.
• 55:32
  And, and there was a point of my life where his, where his music
• 55:37
  is what I needed. Like I really, really did.
• 55:39
  And like, it spoke to me about that particular point of my life
• 55:43
  and, and, and it helped me discover myself, aspects of
• 55:48
  myself that I couldn't figure out how to put words to.
• 55:50
  And then and then the music and the lyrics were able to help me
• 55:53
  be like, that's me. Like I didn't even know the
• 55:56
  whole time, but that's me too. And like, and that's why these
• 55:59
  people sell out. That's why these people, I don't
• 56:01
  even sell out in a negative way. Sell out, stadium, sell out.
• 56:03
  You know, like The Rolling Stones, I won't stop playing
• 56:06
  when they're 100 years old. That Springsteen's still going
• 56:08
  is because this is a absolute. Like, there, there's something
• 56:12
  in you that the only way you can express yourself is by sharing
• 56:15
  and performing and playing. And the only way for the
• 56:18
  audience to not the only way, but a very potent way and a
• 56:22
  unique way to feel yourself and to recognize new aspects of
• 56:25
  yourself is by participating. So who are some of your
• 56:28
  influences and in what way? Yeah, that's a great question.
• 56:31
  And the way you framed it is great because it makes it easier
• 56:33
  to answer it. One of the things I will say
• 56:35
  just about audiences and performances, you know, even
• 56:38
  back in like when they try to figure out what went wrong and
• 56:40
  right with the Incas and the Mayans and the Aztecs.
• 56:43
  The one thing they all have in common and the Greeks had is
• 56:45
  they would build like huge amphitheaters to create like
• 56:47
  giant sound places because you could smoke all the pot in the
• 56:51
  world you want. You could do any psychedelic you
• 56:52
  want. Music is the drug.
• 56:54
  I mean, if you want to like actually change your brain
• 56:56
  chemistry and feel high, just go to a large, large audience
• 56:59
  that's all singing the same words.
• 57:01
  I mean that hypnotic trance that Bruce being seen and Mick Jagger
• 57:04
  lead, they are but leaders of it.
• 57:06
  You know, it's like, it's really Pearl Jam was one of my favorite
• 57:09
  bands to see live when I was in my 20s because they really pull
• 57:12
  it off. They just have these like, like
• 57:14
  songs that everyone knows the words too.
• 57:15
  And that's the best part of a concert to me is when everyone
• 57:18
  around you is is screaming. Like radio has the other band
• 57:21
  I've seen the most. And just like when everyone's
• 57:24
  like saying like singing karma police together and you know
• 57:28
  that you all get the joke and it's not even a joke.
• 57:30
  It's like real, you know, And it's like, and you know, my age
• 57:34
  again. You guys are all sharing.
• 57:35
  It's a secret. Yeah, yeah.
• 57:37
  So my my I guess My Autobiography of music would be
• 57:40
  Billy Joel was the 1st. Person I really got into.
• 57:42
  I've been to. Many of the shows man I.
• 57:45
  I've never seen him. I've tried to see him so bad.
• 57:47
  Yeah. And he's done with some brain
• 57:49
  issue. And he's, oh man, sick.
• 57:52
  Because when you're describing that piano man dude, I used to
• 57:55
  take. Yeah, he's.
• 57:56
  Performing monthly in Madison Square Garden.
• 57:58
  Yeah, like first or second dates.
• 58:00
  I'd be like the way I tested and then at the end of the concert,
• 58:06
  the lights turn on, he stops playing and everyone's and by
• 58:10
  the way, happens to be a piano man.
• 58:11
  Like he hates that song. Everyone is singing it and like
• 58:16
  you're just like sharing. And that's it's awesome.
• 58:19
  So Billy Joel is, but his deep tracks have a lot of very
• 58:23
  emotional, a very heavy, emotional, eloquent songs.
• 58:26
  Awesome stuff. Also, as a guitarist, Glass
• 58:29
  House is just a guitar driven album and it's incredible.
• 58:31
  So I know he's known for his piano stuff, but I mean it's
• 58:35
  still rock'n'roll to me. Big Shot, My Life, like those
• 58:37
  are all like great guitar songs. So yeah, yeah.
• 58:41
  So Billy Joel was the first. Then I got into just my parents
• 58:44
  record collection, which involved Billy Joel, but it was
• 58:46
  just The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones a little bit, but
• 58:50
  really The Beatles and The Who and The Doors.
• 58:52
  The Doors was my first like my band because my parents had them
• 58:55
  but they weren't bands. So I got really into Jim
• 58:58
  Morrison. I would like read his like
• 58:59
  poetry books. I was hell bent on what's that?
• 59:03
  What are you thinking? Child and he's immature and I
• 59:08
  wish I'd picked the better idol. I mean, honestly, that's what I
• 59:10
  think about him. I think, I think anyone when
• 59:13
  they're 21 can like, twist words the way he did and impress
• 59:16
  people who are 21. And since I love them when I was
• 59:19
  like, I mean, yeah, basically they marketed to like 12 year
• 59:22
  olds. They're like Saturday Night Live
• 59:23
  of bands. Like, they're, it's just like a
• 59:25
  childhood thing. But Jim Morrison, like, I mean,
• 59:28
  first of all, I didn't like my body and I didn't like the way I
• 59:30
  looked. And he looked perfect on that
• 59:31
  first album. And then it was just like the
• 59:34
  peyote and the wisdom and loving Native Americans is something
• 59:36
  I've always felt like really deeply about.
• 59:40
  But I still like their music. And don't get me wrong.
• 59:42
  And The thing is, I do love jazz.
• 59:44
  And I love, like, Ray Manzarks, an amazing guitar keyboardist
• 59:49
  and Robbie Krieger on the guitar.
• 59:51
  So like the three piece. They actually have two albums
• 59:53
  after he died. They're awful.
• 59:55
  But they're also like, you're like, oh, yeah, you guys are
• 59:58
  amazing. It's just like, sorry, you're
• 1:00:00
  missing, like this great booming voice.
• 1:00:01
  But, you know, there's a reason LA Women, all their best songs
• 1:00:05
  are 12 minutes long. And it's because Jim shuts up
• 1:00:08
  and the band, like, rocks. So it is.
• 1:00:10
  It's funny that if you really analyze like what made The Doors
• 1:00:13
  great, it was just like Jim being a front man and then
• 1:00:16
  stepping aside. And even he knew that, to be
• 1:00:18
  honest, I don't think he was as ego driven as people make him
• 1:00:20
  out to be. So yeah, The Doors.
• 1:00:22
  But then Kurt Cobain is what changed my whole life.
• 1:00:24
  Kurt Cobain, he's anti establishment.
• 1:00:27
  He loved punk rock, he was cool, he was different.
• 1:00:30
  All these people who I didn't like hated him.
• 1:00:33
  So that made him even cooler to me.
• 1:00:35
  MTV was scared of him. He wore a dress and talked about
• 1:00:39
  like, gay people as if they're OK, which, you know, again,
• 1:00:41
  growing up in Berkeley, Oakland, like, it was always like, I was
• 1:00:45
  always preoccupied with worrying and thinking I was gay.
• 1:00:48
  And because I technically I'm not it.
• 1:00:51
  I just have a huge compassion for children and that struggle
• 1:00:53
  they go through because of the way people talk about it.
• 1:00:56
  And I think Kurt Cobain did a great job.
• 1:00:58
  Like he wrote in his liner notes on this album.
• 1:01:00
  If you're the kind of person who would like call someone AFAG and
• 1:01:03
  like, you know, bully people, like he just wrote this like
• 1:01:06
  manifesto, like don't buy this album and don't give us any
• 1:01:08
  money and don't come, for God's sakes, please don't come to our
• 1:01:10
  concerts. Like he was like, actually not
• 1:01:13
  willing to like, you know, and actually, this is weird.
• 1:01:16
  This reminds me of Donald Trump. And what I don't like about
• 1:01:18
  Donald Trump, this is the thing I'd like dislike about him the
• 1:01:21
  most. He won't disavow people who
• 1:01:23
  aren't on his ethical line because he cares more about
• 1:01:25
  power and getting elected. I get it.
• 1:01:27
  I mean, I understand that. I think Kamala Harris, to be
• 1:01:29
  fair, probably has the same approach.
• 1:01:31
  I'm not like. It's it's a game.
• 1:01:33
  It's the game. Yeah, it's a game, yeah, but.
• 1:01:35
  And the game. So I love Kurt Cobain because he
• 1:01:38
  didn't play that game. He typically said that and.
• 1:01:41
  And the record label did not want to print it.
• 1:01:42
  And he's like, well, then you can't make this album.
• 1:01:45
  Like, I'm not signing off on it. You have to put this letter in.
• 1:01:47
  And it was a big deal. So, you know, and he he did the
• 1:01:50
  acoustic thing on MTV, but instead of playing all his own
• 1:01:53
  songs, he did like, mostly covers and he and he did covers
• 1:01:56
  of people from Seattle who never made it.
• 1:01:58
  He tried to help all the other people.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah. So yeah.
• 1:02:01
  No Kurt Cobain. There's a reason I think kids
• 1:02:03
  worship him nowadays. There's like there's also some
• 1:02:06
  weird apocryphal rumors that are not true about him.
• 1:02:08
  Like people try to say like, oh, he was.
• 1:02:10
  Yeah. Like I've heard people from the
• 1:02:11
  trans community say that he was like pro trans and trans.
• 1:02:13
  He wasn't. It's not that he was anti trans,
• 1:02:15
  just like no one talked about that back then.
• 1:02:17
  That was not at all. Yeah.
• 1:02:20
  So. So it's not, I'm not disparaging
• 1:02:22
  trans people at all. What I am saying is sorry he was
• 1:02:25
  concerned about specifically LGB not fatigue.
• 1:02:30
  So we didn't even have that acronym when he died like he
• 1:02:33
  when he killed himself that acronym didn't even exist.
• 1:02:36
  Just to make it clear what I'm trying to say but but but
• 1:02:39
  anyway. So he died.
• 1:02:41
  It was a. Huge moment for me.
• 1:02:45
  I wouldn't say I would have committed suicide if not for
• 1:02:48
  that, but I would definitely say that I never got to the three
• 1:02:51
  steps that are closest to it because of that.
• 1:02:53
  Like it because of him, I never tried heroin and I never took
• 1:02:57
  suicidal thoughts seriously enough to even start to approach
• 1:03:01
  them as real. And so it's like a service he
• 1:03:04
  did to me. But I still to this day feel
• 1:03:06
  plagued that man. I mean, heroin is just like,
• 1:03:10
  it's amazing how many people that takes down.
• 1:03:12
  And so I was really getting into drugs when I was way too young
• 1:03:15
  to get into them. And that's because I grew up in
• 1:03:17
  the Berkeley area. You know, again, like these,
• 1:03:19
  like I don't talk up to the California everyone I know from
• 1:03:22
  California, from the cities, San Francisco and and LA, we all try
• 1:03:27
  drugs and alcohol too young. We all like it's just not good.
• 1:03:30
  It's not actually a good idea. I'm terribly worried about these
• 1:03:33
  ads for like pot and stuff that are on like billboards because
• 1:03:36
  when I was a kid, they actually banned like you couldn't
• 1:03:39
  advertise alcohol on TV. Like I actually think those were
• 1:03:41
  good laws. I'm a little weirded out that
• 1:03:44
  they got rid of them all. But I don't think kids need to
• 1:03:47
  see, you know, my daughters have never seen me smoke.
• 1:03:50
  And I'm doing that intentionally because, like, alcohol was hard
• 1:03:54
  enough for me as a kid, Like to understand, like, why are my
• 1:03:57
  parents having this drink that I can't have?
• 1:03:58
  Why do they act weird? You know, just that like
• 1:04:00
  bubbling curiosity. So it's not that I think like it
• 1:04:04
  should be taboo, but I definitely think we're overdoing
• 1:04:06
  the like I'm not such a tangent cuz you asked me about bands,
• 1:04:11
  but I do care so much about this I just feel like.
• 1:04:13
  This is great. This is exactly the way the.
• 1:04:16
  Conversations go. The only mainstream thing I
• 1:04:18
  watch is sports. That's it.
• 1:04:19
  There's nothing else I watch. I just am really into sports
• 1:04:24
  because it's well, and it's starting to lose this, but it's
• 1:04:27
  one of the last things that isn't like tainted.
• 1:04:28
  It's not like reality TV. It's not it's not fake yet.
• 1:04:31
  I'm saying yeah, because I actually think they're really
• 1:04:33
  trying their best to engineer outcomes of games now with
• 1:04:35
  referees, but. We're seeing a lot of that on
• 1:04:38
  me. Yeah, I mean, like way too many
• 1:04:40
  times to call it. It's like, remember five years
• 1:04:42
  ago when people were like, is my phone listening to me?
• 1:04:44
  Is this? And now no one says that.
• 1:04:45
  Everyone's like, of course it's. Listening to you.
• 1:04:47
  That's how I feel about sports. Like, are these refs
• 1:04:49
  intentionally altering the ends of games?
• 1:04:51
  Like that was the question for the last 5-6 years.
• 1:04:52
  I think after this year, it's kind of like, yeah, they are
• 1:04:56
  like, you got to be so much better than the other team now
• 1:04:59
  to win that the refs can't make it something they can, you know,
• 1:05:03
  finesse. So anyway, the what I was
• 1:05:05
  bringing that up for though, is that's the only time I see ads.
• 1:05:07
  Like the only time I see real ads is when I watch the the NFL
• 1:05:11
  especially. And all it is, is ads for
• 1:05:14
  pharmaceuticals, alcohol, junk food, not weed yet because they
• 1:05:19
  haven't passed that law yet. But you know, it's coming.
• 1:05:21
  And my point is it's just like it's so in the military, the ads
• 1:05:25
  for ice in the military and Department of Homeland Security.
• 1:05:29
  And it's just like, oh God, how are kids supposed to like
• 1:05:32
  innocently watch this? Like none of these ads are for
• 1:05:35
  kids. They're all for adults.
• 1:05:37
  And so I don't know, I just, but, but oddly enough, drinking
• 1:05:40
  is down among young people. Oddly enough, smoking pot is way
• 1:05:44
  up. So it's funny that what I'm
• 1:05:46
  watching in our culture is just which accelerator of of escapism
• 1:05:51
  it gets pressed. You know, like gambling, the the
• 1:05:53
  proliferation of gambling. Is AB control by the gambling is
• 1:05:56
  scary as hell because the gambling it's gone to it's gone
• 1:05:59
  to a different degree. I think that the more the the
• 1:06:03
  the more you make these things accessible and the lower the
• 1:06:05
  barriers are to the the lower the cost to entry and the
• 1:06:08
  barriers to entry. I mean, you're just, you're
• 1:06:11
  just, and especially because we are like, I am bombed even with,
• 1:06:16
  I have a medical marijuana card, right?
• 1:06:18
  And I have a dispense and there's a couple of dispensaries
• 1:06:21
  locally that I go to and I, I won't be thinking about weed all
• 1:06:25
  day. And I'll get 6 notifications
• 1:06:27
  about deals they're having and six, you know, emails and texts
• 1:06:30
  and, and notifications, push notifications in the app.
• 1:06:33
  And I'm like, like, and then I'm like, yeah, you know, I kind of
• 1:06:35
  wanted that. And I'm like, what are they
• 1:06:37
  doing? What am I doing to myself?
• 1:06:38
  This is crazy, you know, but, but as far, actually, I'm
• 1:06:42
  curious because I'm really, I want to, I want to keep on the
• 1:06:45
  music conversation for a little bit more, yeah.
• 1:06:48
  A lot more I could have. Saw.
• 1:06:49
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Did you read Wonderland Ave.
• 1:06:52
  that book? No, no, it's.
• 1:06:54
  About a guy, Danny Sugarman, who is the man the publicist for The
• 1:06:57
  Doors and he was in high school while he was he was like 14
• 1:07:04
  while he was a public, he was a publicist.
• 1:07:07
  And the first half of the book is about all the inspiration and
• 1:07:10
  beautiful motivation that goes into like understanding what
• 1:07:13
  about rock and the doors and about you know that culture and
• 1:07:16
  music meant to a kid like him with ADD that his parents got
• 1:07:19
  divorced and he blamed himself a huge part, a huge part of it and
• 1:07:23
  how it is the only escape and understanding environment that
• 1:07:25
  he was in and the only thing that was real and self
• 1:07:28
  expressive. And then the second-half of the
• 1:07:30
  book is and then he he goes. And then I tried heroin.
• 1:07:34
  And the second-half of the book is the most heart wrenching,
• 1:07:38
  painful, honest, raw descript account of a heroin addiction.
• 1:07:48
  And to see and and to read this and to think this kid is
• 1:07:52
  anywhere between 17 and 22 while this is happening.
• 1:07:55
  And like, Oh my God. And you know, I want to
• 1:07:58
  actually, you know, like, there's got to be something to
• 1:08:00
  there's got to be something to the 27 club.
• 1:08:02
  You know, there's got to be something to be like, you know,
• 1:08:04
  like that 27 club, Janis, Joplin, Pigpen, you know, Stevie
• 1:08:08
  Ray Vaughan, Jim Morrison. Like, there's something about
• 1:08:11
  these like, like this. There's something about the the
• 1:08:15
  need to self implode and like, and I think it's actually a
• 1:08:20
  deeply human thing, like to self sabotage ourselves.
• 1:08:22
  I think that's a really big thing.
• 1:08:23
  Yeah. I want to talk about that too,
• 1:08:25
  but do what do you actually. Yeah.
• 1:08:28
  What do you. I want to leave off of that, but
• 1:08:29
  I have to take a two second out of the bathroom break.
• 1:08:31
  That's cool. OK Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:33
  Go over. Go with that.
• 1:08:33
  Cool. All right.
• 1:08:36
  We're live. We're back 27 club.
• 1:08:38
  Yeah. Music.
• 1:08:40
  Yeah, and what's funny is, what's her name?
• 1:08:42
  The British woman with a great voice also died at 27 recently.
• 1:08:45
  Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse, and I'm only
• 1:08:48
  saying this because I think first of all, we've talked about
• 1:08:50
  frontal cortex, and I'm a real firm believer in this. 25 is the
• 1:08:53
  age that actuarial science says we start making healthy
• 1:08:55
  decisions. The decision to kill yourself
• 1:08:57
  because you're addicted to something when you're 27 is a
• 1:09:00
  rational, unhealthy decision, meaning you kind of know by then
• 1:09:05
  you're like, oh, I'm not going to solve this.
• 1:09:08
  Like Keith Richards talks about this in his Autobot.
• 1:09:09
  He says, kicking heroin and staying off heroin was the
• 1:09:12
  hardest thing I've ever done. To this day, it's still like a
• 1:09:14
  thing, you know, And for me, what's relatable is I still feel
• 1:09:16
  that way about smoking cigarettes.
• 1:09:17
  Like, I, I, I don't have to like, stop myself from smoking
• 1:09:21
  again. But like anytime something is
• 1:09:23
  slightly wrong, I'm just like well I should stop smoking.
• 1:09:26
  Like, you know, so I can just. So I think for Amy Winehouse,
• 1:09:28
  Jim Morrison, all these people, you know, especially if you
• 1:09:31
  start abusing and using even just drugs at a young age, it's
• 1:09:34
  such a quick, easy escape because it does technically
• 1:09:37
  work. Whatever your thing is works.
• 1:09:38
  Like for me, alcohol doesn't work.
• 1:09:39
  It's never worked. It gets me drunk, but it does
• 1:09:42
  not solve the problems that my brain is.
• 1:09:44
  Doing. But we does.
• 1:09:46
  So, like, you can see how, like, we're each uniquely.
• 1:09:50
  For some people, it might be ice baths, you know, like, like it
• 1:09:54
  doesn't like people find their fix.
• 1:09:56
  And so we call some of them healthy and some of them not
• 1:09:58
  unhealthy. To me, they're all escapism, but
• 1:10:00
  at what cost to your body? So the 27 Club to me is very
• 1:10:04
  interesting. It's also weird that 33 is the
• 1:10:06
  comedy number. So Belushi, Interesting.
• 1:10:09
  Yeah. I, I don't.
• 1:10:09
  It's just. Yeah, I, I.
• 1:10:15
  And then you said something else that reminded me of something
• 1:10:17
  you should look up. Oh, just as far as the story of
• 1:10:20
  Jim Morrison, him, he and one of the Crosby, Stills, Nash guys,
• 1:10:26
  not Neil Young, but one of those three.
• 1:10:29
  He and Jim Morrison and someone, they all grew up in the same LA
• 1:10:31
  area, and they all had fathers who were high up in the CIA and
• 1:10:34
  military. And there's a theory.
• 1:10:36
  Yeah. OK, so you've heard this.
• 1:10:37
  I love that conspiracy theory only because it backfired.
• 1:10:40
  Like even if it like I want it to be true just to like show you
• 1:10:43
  how funny it is when you try to manipulate society that way.
• 1:10:46
  So I doubt it is true, but it is very interesting that they do
• 1:10:49
  all have that in common. And then they.
• 1:10:51
  And the reason I mentioned is how weird is it that a 14 year
• 1:10:54
  old PR guy was good enough to get them like, you know what I
• 1:10:57
  mean? Like it's so, so.
• 1:11:00
  Yeah. So Kurt Cobain, who died at 27,
• 1:11:03
  like a lot of what he taught me was stick up for what you
• 1:11:08
  believe in, share and bring others up as you rise.
• 1:11:12
  So I'm not like a world famous novelist, but I'm published and
• 1:11:16
  somewhat successful and I'm always trying to help people
• 1:11:18
  under me get published. Understand how hard it is to get
• 1:11:21
  published and how much it does not pay off and like, check your
• 1:11:25
  dreams. Can make me feel better about
• 1:11:28
  that. I appreciate it.
• 1:11:31
  So I self published 4 times and then I finally got a real
• 1:11:33
  publishing contract after having one originally that went belly
• 1:11:36
  up from the 2009 crisis. But the point is, I thought this
• 1:11:41
  is it, I've arrived. And it was the opposite.
• 1:11:43
  It was these people just took a ton of money from me and made
• 1:11:47
  money off of me and I made even less than I did self-publishing.
• 1:11:49
  I sold you all my own PR. You know, the world has really
• 1:11:53
  shifted. But I did hear this recently and
• 1:11:54
  I keep hearing this over and over again.
• 1:11:56
  The only way to make like real money in this world like Taylor
• 1:12:00
  Swift level or any of these people is to convince people
• 1:12:03
  with money that they will make tons of money off of you.
• 1:12:06
  Like it's it's you don't want to sell your music, you don't want
• 1:12:09
  to sell your novel. You don't what you want to pitch
• 1:12:11
  is I'm a money magnet. Like people will be drawn to me.
• 1:12:14
  And you can take most of that if you give me this like chance.
• 1:12:17
  So I say that for young people out there, if you believe in the
• 1:12:21
  legacy model of success, which I, by the way, would not put a
• 1:12:24
  lot of stock into. I was going to say by that, I
• 1:12:26
  don't even think most people even like that's another
• 1:12:27
  institution that kind of just, you know, crashing down with
• 1:12:31
  democratization of of media, you know, is.
• 1:12:34
  Yeah, please. Well, this is good for.
• 1:12:37
  So we talked about humility and about like, like, I think it's
• 1:12:41
  better for all of us to be nominally successful in relative
• 1:12:45
  spheres. Like I think like the village
• 1:12:47
  model is the best. Like, you want to be the best
• 1:12:49
  guitarist in your village, so you're playing for your village
• 1:12:52
  at like, events. But we don't need 1 Taylor Swift
• 1:12:56
  to conquer every city. And I'm not she's not a bad
• 1:12:59
  person from all like everything I've ever read.
• 1:13:02
  She's actually a pretty nice, cool person.
• 1:13:04
  So please, Taylor, I know you're watching this podcast and you
• 1:13:07
  care what I think about you. I actually think a very high
• 1:13:11
  love you. But what I am saying is like,
• 1:13:12
  she would have been fine just being successful in like a
• 1:13:15
  little area of her own, you know, area.
• 1:13:17
  And I think Johnny Carson was like the peak of that.
• 1:13:20
  Like, you know, you had to be on Carson to like make it.
• 1:13:23
  And so this gatekeeper model, I'm glad that it broke, but I
• 1:13:27
  also miss sharing culture with people.
• 1:13:30
  Like, I deeply miss it. Like, Radiohead was one of the
• 1:13:33
  last, like, peak cultural bands that I'll ever be a member of.
• 1:13:36
  Like that tribe now, Radiohead would never be as big as they
• 1:13:40
  were. They would reach like, this
• 1:13:41
  level, you know? So I don't know, how do you
• 1:13:44
  feel? Because you've saw both sides of
• 1:13:45
  this. You're just old enough to have
• 1:13:47
  seen this when it was still happening.
• 1:13:51
  Listen, I think that so I think that no matter what, there's
• 1:13:56
  always going to become gatekeepers and just, you know,
• 1:13:59
  and they and they're and I think just like oil and water, like
• 1:14:01
  you can mix things up as much as you as much as you want and for
• 1:14:04
  a little while, But then at a certain point everything kind of
• 1:14:06
  rise, you know, like the water and the oil just end up
• 1:14:08
  separating. And like, listen, you can make a
• 1:14:10
  very strong argument that like the podcast world has a has some
• 1:14:14
  serious gatekeepers. Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, Andrew
• 1:14:17
  Huberman, you know, like, and a lot of the and a lot of these
• 1:14:19
  guys. And by the way, the question is,
• 1:14:22
  how do you feel about them as gatekeepers And how do you, and
• 1:14:25
  do you trust your gatekeepers? Do you like your gatekeepers?
• 1:14:27
  Are they representative or, or do they do they reflect what you
• 1:14:31
  believe and what you feel should be right?
• 1:14:34
  And then you go ahead and work with it, You know, And I think
• 1:14:36
  that I think that that's really the difference.
• 1:14:38
  I think there's always going to be gatekeepers.
• 1:14:39
  The question is whether or not we respect them, whether or not
• 1:14:42
  we see ourselves in those gatekeepers because it's a lot.
• 1:14:45
  It's right now I don't think anyone from any kind of legacy
• 1:14:50
  studio or media or even even movies and stuff like that, like
• 1:14:54
  you have a real issue. I'm showing my students now Dead
• 1:14:56
  Poet Society for the first time. Very cool.
• 1:14:58
  Talk about a movie to change your life.
• 1:15:00
  My God, and you don't have that, you know, and like you, you
• 1:15:06
  can't you can't get that anyway, except you can't get that.
• 1:15:08
  You have to go to a different gatekeeper.
• 1:15:09
  You can't go to you know, you can't go to Warner Brothers and
• 1:15:13
  make that movie anymore in theaters.
• 1:15:14
  You got to go to Netflix or Amazon and make it for streaming
• 1:15:17
  and that and even though it's different, it's OK, you know,
• 1:15:20
  that's it, that's fine. I think that I think that
• 1:15:23
  there's been here's here's what I, I think that right now there
• 1:15:31
  are a lot of great cultures and like movements that are doing
• 1:15:35
  that are alive and well and that are very embodied and like have
• 1:15:38
  like a whole community. I think that it's not where
• 1:15:42
  we're used to looking. So like, in other words, you
• 1:15:45
  know, like we're used to looking at CNN or Fox for, you know, for
• 1:15:49
  news and we're like, OK, that's obviously not the new place to
• 1:15:51
  get, that's not the place to get news anymore.
• 1:15:52
  It hasn't been for a long time. You know, I'm used to going to a
• 1:15:57
  Springsteen concert to get, you know, my, to get the, to get my
• 1:16:00
  music, you know, fix. And now tickets are a fortune
• 1:16:03
  and I can't afford to go and it's a whole trip.
• 1:16:05
  And then, you know, and then you know, it's in the stadium.
• 1:16:07
  There's no like, you know, the legendary shows where the Roxy,
• 1:16:10
  you know, the legendary shows where, where the little places
• 1:16:13
  are the troubadour, you know, or something like that.
• 1:16:15
  Mad Max's and so and and you do have those kind of movements.
• 1:16:19
  It's just not where people are used to looking.
• 1:16:21
  So I think that I think that these do still exist in like an
• 1:16:25
  alternative way. Billy Strings is, I've been
• 1:16:27
  bringing him up almost every opportunity I can, but he, I
• 1:16:30
  don't know if you've ever listened to him, he's a
• 1:16:32
  bluegrass jam grass musician that goes into country, goes
• 1:16:36
  into Western music and goes and is such an incredible musician.
• 1:16:41
  But he's got a whole following and he's got a whole community
• 1:16:43
  in a whole world and he represents middle America.
• 1:16:47
  He represents John Deere Tractor represents wearing a flannel
• 1:16:51
  shirt and taking some mushrooms and going on stage and having a
• 1:16:55
  great time with everyone for a couple hours.
• 1:16:58
  And so so I think that all I think that the way that all
• 1:17:02
  these quote, UN quote counter culture movements go is that
• 1:17:05
  they almost you have to always kind of seek them out.
• 1:17:07
  And then once everyone like knows about it, that's when you
• 1:17:10
  got to like run and run away, you know?
• 1:17:11
  Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that.
• 1:17:13
  I'm really a Jimmy Buffett biography now and it's not a
• 1:17:16
  good biography. But one thing that he that
• 1:17:18
  they're talking about was, you know, the second that Jimmy
• 1:17:21
  Buffett wrote Margaritaville, you had to leave.
• 1:17:23
  You had to leave, what do you call it?
• 1:17:25
  Where is from key? You had to leave the keys like,
• 1:17:28
  you know, like it became uninhabitable because everyone
• 1:17:30
  went to check it out. San Francisco, same thing. 1 San
• 1:17:33
  Francisco had the Summer of Love.
• 1:17:35
  Everyone started going there and then a combination of the
• 1:17:38
  massive importation of people and the introduction of speed
• 1:17:42
  and heroin into the scene as opposed to psychedelics caused
• 1:17:45
  an enormous implosion that that that that like the city hasn't
• 1:17:49
  really recovered from in that kind of capacity yet.
• 1:17:51
  Like you don't see that kind of great freedom, that great free.
• 1:17:53
  You see a lot of free spirit for sure, but you don't see the
• 1:17:57
  Summer of Love, the Grateful Dead with Jefferson Airplane and
• 1:18:00
  Quicksilver Messenger Service and Country Joe all playing
• 1:18:03
  together. You do get that with the jam
• 1:18:05
  scene Now, you know, fish or tray with fish will hang out
• 1:18:09
  with Billy strings who's playing it was playing with panic and
• 1:18:12
  everyone's going to one another shows and you know, and and I
• 1:18:15
  think that you know, the the so at the end of the day, it's not
• 1:18:20
  that it's not that these don't exist.
• 1:18:23
  It's that these little communities are just where
• 1:18:25
  people aren't used to looking. And then it becomes big enough
• 1:18:28
  and then everyone flocks there and then you got to go somewhere
• 1:18:30
  else. And so I think it's just a
• 1:18:32
  circle. Yeah, it's, you brought up so
• 1:18:35
  many interesting things to me. I want to talk about fish a
• 1:18:37
  little bit. And the other thing I just want
• 1:18:38
  to briefly mention is I realized just now that I'm part of a
• 1:18:41
  writing community here in Phoenix.
• 1:18:43
  And a friend of mine started it and I was early on in it.
• 1:18:48
  And I recently realized, like, I'm in it.
• 1:18:50
  I'm in the thing people try to say they were in.
• 1:18:54
  It does not matter if any of us succeed.
• 1:18:56
  What matters is, like, the camaraderie we've built is
• 1:18:59
  identical to the Paris community to the, you know, so like, it's
• 1:19:03
  weird to like, finally see and respect that.
• 1:19:06
  Whereas like earlier, like I moved to Portland, OR before it
• 1:19:09
  was super popular to move to Portland, OR.
• 1:19:11
  But before you give me too much credit, I was still popular to
• 1:19:15
  move to Portland, OR. Do you see the point I'm trying
• 1:19:16
  to make? There's always the first wave,
• 1:19:17
  the second wave and the third. I am like the most.
• 1:19:20
  I was about to flick you off by accident.
• 1:19:21
  I'm the. Most I'm a second wave, the king
• 1:19:25
  of second waves. Like I just everywhere I go I'm
• 1:19:27
  always in the second wave. The same with investing, like
• 1:19:29
  all my luck in stocks or anything I've ever had is always
• 1:19:33
  picking up on when the first wave just ended and the second
• 1:19:36
  wave hasn't started and then by the time the 3rd wave starts,
• 1:19:40
  that's when it's not fun, that's when it's not cool.
• 1:19:41
  So I think what you just said was great advice.
• 1:19:44
  And then the other thing you reminded me of is when I was
• 1:19:46
  talking about my favorite bands. I didn't get into my 20s, but my
• 1:19:48
  all time favorite band is a Steve Malcolmus and Pavement.
• 1:19:51
  Pavement was his first band and what I noticed that I love about
• 1:19:55
  him is the same thing I like about fish because I don't love
• 1:19:58
  fish, but I definitely like them which I.
• 1:19:59
  Respect them. I need silliness.
• 1:20:02
  I am like a silly person. I'm a silly dad.
• 1:20:05
  I'm a silly husband. I'm a silly teacher.
• 1:20:08
  I like silly comedies. Some it's so weird to know that
• 1:20:13
  that's a minority. Silly is actually never going to
• 1:20:15
  be even like 40% of the comedy window.
• 1:20:18
  And so it's like really funny to me because all my favorite
• 1:20:21
  musicians, all my favorite actors, all my favorite
• 1:20:23
  directors, everything I love, they're always like got that to
• 1:20:26
  them. And and even like my
• 1:20:28
  girlfriends, like I can't date someone unless they're like a
• 1:20:30
  little silly, really. Like they have to.
• 1:20:32
  And so it's, it's interesting because I heard someone the
• 1:20:34
  other day saying like, I just hate silliness and it's so
• 1:20:36
  annoying and I can't get into it.
• 1:20:38
  And I was like, that explains my whole life.
• 1:20:40
  Like I I always thought what I liked would be popular, but I
• 1:20:44
  don't like popular things. And it's not because I'm a
• 1:20:46
  hipster or a contrarian. I just actually am like in this,
• 1:20:49
  just other things. So fish, yeah, Fish to me,
• 1:20:52
  though, is just like the one of the most fun concerts I ever
• 1:20:56
  went to was a fish concert. It was like even it was like
• 1:20:58
  indoors in like a gymnasium, like it wasn't even like a good
• 1:21:01
  setting to see a band and like they made it fun and their fans
• 1:21:04
  were fun and you know, the Grateful Dead, like the the one
• 1:21:07
  thing that they never changed. I mean, they were like awesome.
• 1:21:10
  You know, you mentioned pig pen, but like obviously the roster
• 1:21:13
  changed, you know, with with deaths, but.
• 1:21:15
  That keyboard position? Dangerous.
• 1:21:17
  Yeah, Frank Zappa, he's another great example of like, probably
• 1:21:20
  one of the best guitarist ever, literally.
• 1:21:22
  And just too silly, just didn't give a crap.
• 1:21:25
  Like. And even The Who, The Who is one
• 1:21:28
  of my favorite rock bands ever. You know, they have The Who
• 1:21:30
  sells out. Like they had like a sense of
• 1:21:32
  comedy. I'm a girl.
• 1:21:33
  I'm a I'm a boy. I'm a boy.
• 1:21:34
  And my mom won't admit it. Like, like all.
• 1:21:37
  Yeah. So I don't know.
• 1:21:39
  When you brought a fish, my mind just like completely derailed to
• 1:21:41
  like something that I feel is like so interesting about our
• 1:21:45
  culture and our society as I think Americans really, like,
• 1:21:49
  put up a stiff arm of resistance to silliness.
• 1:21:52
  Like we don't like, we like dismiss children and we say
• 1:21:54
  like, grow up. And I think it comes from the
• 1:21:56
  British heritage, to be honest. I think that's like the stiff
• 1:21:58
  upper lip. And like, you know, like Ricky
• 1:22:00
  Gervais talks a lot about this, 'cause I like to read comedians
• 1:22:03
  writing seriously about comedy. I know it's like the dorkiest
• 1:22:06
  not funny thing ever, but. Yeah, so you're learning the
• 1:22:09
  art. Yeah, I'm learning the art and
• 1:22:11
  like I I've never been a Sam. I did like open mic a couple
• 1:22:13
  times just to see what it was like, but not because I wanted.
• 1:22:16
  To do a. Career easier than I would have
• 1:22:19
  thought because I'm good at public speaking.
• 1:22:21
  I don't understand and I will never understand the leap from
• 1:22:24
  you're good at open mic till you suddenly start getting to do
• 1:22:27
  real gigs. It makes no sense to me.
• 1:22:28
  No matter how many of these people I read and listen to,
• 1:22:31
  none of them have the same thing in common.
• 1:22:33
  So there's not like this. Like I still don't understand
• 1:22:36
  how you go from like because, because here's my problem.
• 1:22:39
  When I showed up for open mic, it's a first come first serve to
• 1:22:42
  sign up on a list at most of them.
• 1:22:44
  So you have to show up at 5:00 PM to sign a list.
• 1:22:48
  That means you'll probably get on at 10:30 to 11:00.
• 1:22:52
  Most people start leaving at 7 like, you know, like as it
• 1:22:55
  starts at six and they're just like I can't take more than an
• 1:22:58
  hour of open. I mean because most open mikers
• 1:23:00
  are horrible, like not just bad. They're like people who know
• 1:23:05
  this is the only like they're people who normally yell on
• 1:23:08
  subways, but they've found like this loophole because they just
• 1:23:11
  because they can write their name basically like they can
• 1:23:13
  show up and like not be so spastic that they're able to
• 1:23:16
  sign a name and then wait to be called.
• 1:23:18
  But, and there's like a 3 minute limit.
• 1:23:20
  So just as you're getting into something, you have to leave.
• 1:23:22
  But the point I'm trying to make is that it was, and again, I
• 1:23:25
  did, I went to support a friend who wanted to be a comedian.
• 1:23:27
  So I had no, I've never have had a bone in me that wants to do
• 1:23:30
  it. I did public speaking as a kid
• 1:23:32
  and I'm funny enough. And as a teacher, that was like
• 1:23:34
  the pinnacle for me. You know how it is like when
• 1:23:37
  you're, when you're hitting it off in a classroom, you feel
• 1:23:39
  like, you know, Dave Letterman, like whoever it is that you
• 1:23:42
  think of. But, but, but I still like
• 1:23:46
  couldn't figure out like, because these people like, so
• 1:23:48
  you show up at 5:00, you sign a list.
• 1:23:50
  If you're lucky, you get on at like the 10 to 1030 range.
• 1:23:52
  So you have to have a job that you're off by 5.
• 1:23:55
  You have to be able to stay up super late.
• 1:23:57
  No one is watching you. And then this is the.
• 1:23:58
  Reason the responsibility to even be around for.
• 1:24:01
  Either and the thing I hated the reason I would never ever, ever
• 1:24:05
  be a comedian is the meanest people were the other comedians
• 1:24:09
  like they would purposely not laugh.
• 1:24:11
  They would like try to like derail you.
• 1:24:13
  And this is I experienced as a musician too, like I don't this
• 1:24:17
  OK, you mentioned Joe Rogan. I'm not a huge Joe Rogan fan
• 1:24:21
  because I just kind of like phased out of his show.
• 1:24:24
  But I was a huge fan of his show for like many years and he
• 1:24:27
  really informed me on this one thing that he still does, which
• 1:24:30
  is there's no finite resource to success.
• 1:24:34
  Like the biggest trapping in America as we think there's only
• 1:24:37
  enough spots for something. And it creates this competitive
• 1:24:40
  BS in all the arts that is total BS.
• 1:24:43
  There's room for everyone. And you should always be
• 1:24:46
  encouraging people alongside you to get better because if they
• 1:24:49
  get much better than you, maybe they'll have you on their
• 1:24:51
  podcast that's doing better. Like, I don't know, like you
• 1:24:53
  could become the most famous podcast person ever.
• 1:24:55
  And then suddenly your number is a special number in my phone
• 1:24:58
  that I'm like bragging about having.
• 1:25:00
  But you know, it's, it's all about like when you people and I
• 1:25:02
  have met famous people before. I've had like, I, I worked in a
• 1:25:05
  restaurant that was annexed to a studio where a lot of famous
• 1:25:08
  musicians recorded. And so I would meet and, and it
• 1:25:10
  was always funny when I would get their number or their e-mail
• 1:25:12
  address because I would just, I've never approached any of
• 1:25:14
  them, but I would just like put them in a special spot and I
• 1:25:17
  would feel special. I'd be like, well, if I ever
• 1:25:19
  need to get into a Spoon concert, Britt Daniels knows who
• 1:25:21
  I am. Like, you know, that like, it
• 1:25:23
  was just like interesting that. So I see how like celebrity
• 1:25:27
  worshipping works, but like I said, I'm not, I, I didn't
• 1:25:30
  disavow myself from Joe Rogan because of politics or anything
• 1:25:32
  like that. It's not like, and it's just
• 1:25:34
  actually he just kind of got old and I feel like.
• 1:25:37
  He yeah. You can listen you, you don't
• 1:25:39
  listen to a certain amount of him and especially 3 hours an
• 1:25:41
  episode, it's only a certain. Amount, yeah.
• 1:25:43
  For sure, sure. But he's such a caring, giving,
• 1:25:47
  loving man. It's like really shaking, dude.
• 1:25:50
  And you know what? It's so funny because we could
• 1:25:51
  do a lot, you know? And it's so funny how our
• 1:25:55
  perspectives in this country, you know, work Joe Rogan could
• 1:25:59
  be like Public Enemy number one, you know, but people that are
• 1:26:02
  responsible for like sending troops to war over like over
• 1:26:06
  nothing and like literally lying about it.
• 1:26:07
  Like those are the most respected people in suits.
• 1:26:10
  And like Joe Rogan has done more to help literally like tenfold,
• 1:26:14
  hundredfold more human beings on this planet than you.
• 1:26:17
  And you know what? If your issue is the way that he
• 1:26:20
  that he approaches COVID or the way that he approaches politics,
• 1:26:23
  which he's so freaking even about, it's insane.
• 1:26:26
  So even about it like. He, it's so, yeah.
• 1:26:28
  So you know what, I think we could do a lot worse than having
• 1:26:31
  him be a gay. I, I think that he's a great
• 1:26:33
  gatekeeper. He is a gatekeeper, but I think
• 1:26:34
  he's a great gatekeeper. And I, I think that I also think
• 1:26:38
  that chaos is, is not always great.
• 1:26:41
  Like, you know, it's not always great to not have a gatekeeper.
• 1:26:45
  And you know what, there should be a standard, but it should be
• 1:26:47
  a universal standard that again, everyone could look at
• 1:26:49
  themselves in about what you were saying before with that
• 1:26:53
  little community with the writers and everything like
• 1:26:54
  that. You know, I think that that is
• 1:26:58
  one of the keys to happiness and success in general.
• 1:27:02
  I, you know, I, it's funny because I have AI live and I
• 1:27:06
  think it's healthy, at least healthier for me.
• 1:27:09
  I have a foot in the 60s and 70s and then, but I don't think I
• 1:27:13
  ever would have survived living in that time in that world.
• 1:27:16
  And then I prefer to read about how romantic everything is and
• 1:27:19
  listen to, you know, interviews and actually live it myself
• 1:27:22
  because I go to an open mic around here and like, it's this
• 1:27:25
  little shop, it's called My Mama's in Daniel in Dania Beach,
• 1:27:29
  My momma's coffee and vinyl shop.
• 1:27:30
  Awesome. And every Tuesday night they
• 1:27:32
  have an open mic. And I've been going for a couple
• 1:27:34
  of years now every now and then. And it's just the like, it's a
• 1:27:39
  scene out of the 60s. You got, you know, a dude that,
• 1:27:42
  that, that bicycled over from the beach and all he has is like
• 1:27:45
  his basket with his guitar. And then you have, you know,
• 1:27:47
  some guy that I saw in a parking lot by Walmart and he doesn't
• 1:27:50
  even perform. He just hangs out for the scene,
• 1:27:51
  you know, and likes all the cover songs that was playing.
• 1:27:53
  And then you have some incredibly talented 3 piece
• 1:27:56
  bands. You're like, how come you guys
• 1:27:58
  aren't like performing like this is awesome.
• 1:27:59
  And then you have the individual and like, and, and you have this
• 1:28:01
  whole setting and, and, and, and it's a, it's a store, It's a,
• 1:28:04
  it's a privately owned business with, you know, a middle-aged
• 1:28:07
  woman that that runs the show. And it's, and it's a scene and
• 1:28:12
  it's a culture and it's community and it's a family and
• 1:28:14
  people love it there and people go every week.
• 1:28:17
  And, and that's what, and that's really what New York was.
• 1:28:20
  That's what San Francisco was. And like, it was grimy and it
• 1:28:23
  was dirty and it was mostly people hanging out And you
• 1:28:25
  occasionally had sparks of just, you know, pearls and, and
• 1:28:28
  incredible inspiration, But a lot of it was just having good
• 1:28:32
  times together, you know, and we, and we like, we left off
• 1:28:34
  with your podcast. I think that the best thing you
• 1:28:37
  could do is having more embodied experiences.
• 1:28:39
  And we're seeing a rise, I think, which is really cool in
• 1:28:46
  martial arts, which I, you know, in general, I think is, is an
• 1:28:49
  awesome thing for people to like participate in also because it's
• 1:28:52
  one of those environments and philosophies really deeply
• 1:28:56
  grounded in the East. And so a lot of the values that
• 1:28:59
  we are lacking as as individuals, you know, so, you
• 1:29:03
  know, you come for, you know, you might start coming to
• 1:29:05
  martial arts because of the sport, because of it's just like
• 1:29:07
  these gladiators. But then when you participate
• 1:29:10
  and you're like, this is, this is not animal like this is not
• 1:29:13
  just two animals ripping each other's head off.
• 1:29:15
  This is this is chess, this is human chess.
• 1:29:17
  This is incredible. And this is also community
• 1:29:19
  rooted in teaching and learning and participation.
• 1:29:22
  And you say, where else could you get that from?
• 1:29:24
  So I think we, I think we need that.
• 1:29:28
  I think that music is a really, really great way of doing that.
• 1:29:30
  And I think that and I and, you know, we got to look at which
• 1:29:35
  communities are getting crushed for the best kind of creativity
• 1:29:40
  and inspiration. It's always been the case
• 1:29:41
  historically, and it's always been the case as far as culture.
• 1:29:44
  You know, listen, when were the Blues better than the 60s and
• 1:29:47
  70s? When it was hardest for, you
• 1:29:48
  know, 50s, sixties, 70s, when it was hardest for the black
• 1:29:50
  community? You know, when was, when was the
• 1:29:53
  jam music any better? The, the, you know, the San
• 1:29:57
  Francisco scene when it was McCarthyism and it was, you
• 1:30:00
  know, this pushback, you know, on like anything that was not
• 1:30:04
  considered traditional and conservative and all those
• 1:30:07
  people felt like they had nothing to do but be the most
• 1:30:09
  themselves. And I think that right now
• 1:30:11
  there's a lot of people that are hurting that could find a lot of
• 1:30:14
  very excellent and and useful creative community outlets,
• 1:30:17
  both, as you know, in music and just in general sharing and arts
• 1:30:20
  and stuff like that. Yeah, And I'll tie this into my
• 1:30:24
  weird, awkward attempt to stand up for Bill Maher and the 9/11
• 1:30:28
  bombers. I'm joking.
• 1:30:30
  But but what they were seeking was community.
• 1:30:33
  And what everyone's seeking is community and all these cases.
• 1:30:35
  And so like from a suicide bomber to like a musician to
• 1:30:38
  like anyone. What I what, what I think is the
• 1:30:41
  great tragedy of this last like 10 years is that I don't think
• 1:30:44
  people realize that like one of the reasons we have a problem
• 1:30:47
  with like in cells and like red pill and all these things and
• 1:30:49
  like male anger, but then also like female anger and, and trans
• 1:30:53
  anger, like both trans anger. Yeah, it's a lot of anger.
• 1:30:57
  And it's because if people are not understanding that like just
• 1:31:00
  respect other people's rights to be in their own communities and
• 1:31:02
  then don't obsess with your community getting bigger and
• 1:31:05
  don't obsess with like growth rates and things like that.
• 1:31:08
  I just read a book from an ex Jehovah's Witness and it was it
• 1:31:12
  was really good. It wasn't like life changing
• 1:31:13
  only because like I'm way past the age where I would have
• 1:31:16
  joined a religion like job business.
• 1:31:17
  But I kept reflecting in the book on like Judaism and trying
• 1:31:21
  to compare like why is this called a cult?
• 1:31:23
  Why is that not called a cult? What is the difference?
• 1:31:25
  You know, because. What do you think?
• 1:31:29
  What I think is that anyone who takes Judaism too far is in a
• 1:31:32
  cult, and then what I think is anyone who doesn't is not.
• 1:31:34
  And I would say Jehovah's Witness, the only real
• 1:31:37
  difference I see between the the two as far as like the
• 1:31:41
  likelihood of it becoming a cult is higher.
• 1:31:43
  Like like so Judaism does have one of the weirdest things about
• 1:31:49
  Jews. I always tell this to like non
• 1:31:51
  Jews is we're not all about proselytizing and welcoming you
• 1:31:55
  into our religion. It's very interesting.
• 1:31:56
  We're like, one of the very few reasons is like, well, you got
• 1:31:58
  to take a lot of tests and you got to study like you want to
• 1:32:00
  like we're not just like, come here, I'll dunk your head
• 1:32:03
  underwater. Now you're one of us.
• 1:32:04
  Like, we're very, very. Like, it's not once you go
• 1:32:09
  through those hoops, you're, you're actually, I mean, like my
• 1:32:12
  mom converted right before I was born, like her.
• 1:32:14
  My dad's mother was like, you know, and my mom's like, I don't
• 1:32:17
  care. I didn't like being Methodist.
• 1:32:18
  So. Yeah, sure.
• 1:32:19
  And then she started reading. My mom is more Jewish than my
• 1:32:21
  dad, like, by far. Like, she converted and she
• 1:32:24
  knows more about the laws. She knows much like my dad's
• 1:32:27
  just like, yeah, I like, memorized the Torah a little bit
• 1:32:29
  when I was 13 and like, you know, I got a bunch of gifts in
• 1:32:32
  them, you know, and. And so it's interesting because
• 1:32:35
  I do the reason I worry about cults and the reason I
• 1:32:38
  specifically to tie it into Judaism, because I'm talking to
• 1:32:40
  you and we're both Jewish, is it really worries me how much
• 1:32:44
  people have convinced people in this country that if you're
• 1:32:46
  Jewish, you must ally yourself with Israel or you must ally
• 1:32:49
  yourself against Israel. Like this, this binary and also
• 1:32:52
  this weird crossing the line between national identity and
• 1:32:55
  religious identity. And so I, I, I really hate how
• 1:32:58
  the world set up Israel, Palestine for all of us.
• 1:33:02
  Like, it made it confusing and hard for everyone.
• 1:33:05
  And I really wish we could just like understand secularism and
• 1:33:09
  understand like what a religion is and understand what a
• 1:33:12
  government is. And, and because I worry for the
• 1:33:16
  safety for the first time ever in my life of my friends and
• 1:33:19
  especially my children for being Jewish in this culture right
• 1:33:22
  now, because there's so much hatred against Israel and it's
• 1:33:27
  becoming anti-Semitism. And it blows my mind because
• 1:33:30
  like, I am an American, I pay my taxes to the American
• 1:33:33
  government. I do not owe anything to
• 1:33:35
  Netanyahu or whoever is going to be running their parliament
• 1:33:38
  soon. And, and I, and it's not that I
• 1:33:40
  don't like them or do like them, it's that they're just like
• 1:33:43
  Spain or Greece or Turkey or China to me or Thailand, like if
• 1:33:47
  they're another country. And so it worries me that we're
• 1:33:52
  geopolitically that we are so strongly allied with certain
• 1:33:55
  nations over others. But the weird thing about cults
• 1:33:58
  is to me, I really get worried when I meet someone who's Jewish
• 1:34:02
  and they're like, well, Israel has to exist because of the
• 1:34:05
  Holocaust. And I'm just like, that's so
• 1:34:07
  like misguided and not appropriate and not helpful for
• 1:34:10
  the conversation. And it's not going to help you
• 1:34:11
  or me. And like, and so I feel like
• 1:34:13
  there's a big schism for me with, with my identity, with
• 1:34:18
  being a Jew because of, because of what I'm talking about, which
• 1:34:21
  is that I worry if I tell someone I'm Jewish right now.
• 1:34:26
  I think, and I, and I really do think this, that they
• 1:34:29
  immediately assume that I like Ben Netanyahu.
• 1:34:31
  I stand up for all of these. Like, I don't even know what
• 1:34:35
  most of Israel's policies are. The October I don't even know
• 1:34:38
  the date was our 6th 7th. That was like a horrible
• 1:34:42
  tragedy. Get in line.
• 1:34:44
  There are so many horrible tragedies like Rwanda, like when
• 1:34:48
  in the 90s was way bigger of a tragedy like like even just and
• 1:34:51
  again, this now sounds like I'm being anti-Semitic.
• 1:34:53
  I'm not. I'm just bringing up we Jews
• 1:34:57
  need to stop saying the Holocaust was the Holocaust.
• 1:35:00
  We need to stop talking about like Israel the way we do, like,
• 1:35:03
  like all of us as part of we need to separate culture,
• 1:35:06
  religion, ethnicity. And then understand that when
• 1:35:10
  you meet someone who says they're Jewish, they may be all
• 1:35:12
  three. They may be one, they may be
• 1:35:13
  two. And so, so when, when you said
• 1:35:16
  talk about it like these are the uninformed yet formed thoughts
• 1:35:19
  in my head after 44 years of like hiding and being open about
• 1:35:22
  being a Jew, depending on where I lived because of how safe or
• 1:35:25
  not safe I felt. And when I, and again, I preface
• 1:35:27
  this with it's really about my children.
• 1:35:29
  It's about like, how much am I like fueling into these two
• 1:35:33
  little kids this identity with like we were the victims of
• 1:35:38
  World War Two more than anyone else.
• 1:35:40
  Like that's not even really actually true.
• 1:35:42
  And it's it's like hard for me to hear that over and over again
• 1:35:45
  because I have people who were in Germany.
• 1:35:48
  So it's not like I don't have like family ties to all that.
• 1:35:50
  But like Hitler was not only collecting Jews and he was not
• 1:35:55
  only attacking Jews. And one of the reasons I like
• 1:35:57
  Kurt Cobain is that's what his attitude was about was like, all
• 1:36:00
  of us are under attack. Like, it's more, you know, And
• 1:36:03
  so I just feel, I feel like maybe it's time for the whole
• 1:36:08
  world to like, start calling religions a community and to
• 1:36:12
  start like just pulling back a little bit of the like, OK, Like
• 1:36:16
  most Jewish people I know don't actually think Yahweh spoke to
• 1:36:20
  like, Abraham specifically and that the Torah was written as is
• 1:36:23
  and that we have experts who translated Aramaic into like,
• 1:36:27
  English, you know what I mean? Like, like most people are
• 1:36:30
  willing to more say like, well, these are traditions and these
• 1:36:32
  like matter, but not that, not that they're actually inherently
• 1:36:39
  more truthful or less truthful than like other doctrines.
• 1:36:42
  And so I, I just think the world would be safer if, if, but
• 1:36:44
  again, like I only am speaking about Jews right now because I'm
• 1:36:47
  Jewish and I feel comfortable that I could easily much at the
• 1:36:51
  danger to my children be talking about other religions, you know,
• 1:36:54
  like, but I know better. I know better than to talk about
• 1:36:56
  Islam, Christianity or other religions because I am not of
• 1:36:59
  them and I, I would be speaking I'll of them and I don't want
• 1:37:01
  them speaking I'll about us. But I feel like Jew to Jew,
• 1:37:05
  there's a lot of PR that needs to be done right now between all
• 1:37:07
  of us. Because I meet people who assume
• 1:37:09
  things and speak about me in front of me.
• 1:37:11
  And I'm like, hey, I really would wish that you wouldn't be
• 1:37:14
  like saying that we all agree on this, you know, I don't.
• 1:37:16
  How do you feel about all that? It must be way more complicated
• 1:37:19
  to be you. It's really complicated I.
• 1:37:22
  Mean I can't even imagine between your job, your parents
• 1:37:24
  and your family, I imagine just those 3.
• 1:37:27
  Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts. I do listen.
• 1:37:32
  I have emotional and religious ties to the land of Israel.
• 1:37:39
  I do think, I think that it is a true and good argument to just
• 1:37:48
  push back a little into it. Maybe we can go back and.
• 1:37:50
  I'm a rare. Curious, I'm not.
• 1:37:53
  I think that what was the, I think the emphasis that everyone
• 1:37:56
  made was that, especially after World War 2, was that after like
• 1:38:03
  throw a dart at a map and the Jews have been kicked out of
• 1:38:05
  there, right? And seriously, like anyone on
• 1:38:08
  the map, you'll find, you know, and you can go to a city and
• 1:38:10
  you'll find a, you know, a synagogue or a shore that was
• 1:38:12
  burned down, Jewish cemeteries from pogroms or anything like
• 1:38:15
  that. I think that that like Judaism
• 1:38:21
  has, is like, is it a race? Is it a religion?
• 1:38:25
  Is it, you know, you know, like what, what is it?
• 1:38:28
  But what is important though, I think is that there should be a,
• 1:38:32
  a place for Jews to ostensibly go, because I do think that.
• 1:38:36
  And again, this goes with our short memory and this goes with
• 1:38:39
  a very short memory. Count how many, you know, how
• 1:38:43
  many persecutions or times there were that we got that we got
• 1:38:46
  kicked out of or mass murdered in, you know, in the last 200
• 1:38:51
  years. And then say, how long have we
• 1:38:53
  been in Amsterdam? How long have you been in
• 1:38:54
  Germany or Poland? How long have we been in Yemen?
• 1:38:57
  How long my grandparents are Yemenite, you know, like how
• 1:39:00
  many, how many, how many, how many generations have we been
• 1:39:03
  there and how many persecutions have we have we experienced
• 1:39:05
  there? That until you say there needs
• 1:39:08
  to be 1 designated place that if anything does happen and
• 1:39:11
  everyone says, yeah, nothing's going to happen, nothing's going
• 1:39:13
  to happen. Maybe it won't, you know, but
• 1:39:14
  there should be, I think a designated place.
• 1:39:16
  Does that mean again that everyone's our enemy that says,
• 1:39:20
  you know, that we don't like what you do?
• 1:39:22
  No, you know, I mean we're, but I mean I, I freaking love
• 1:39:26
  America. You know, I mean, I, I love
• 1:39:28
  America and I criticize it. I criticize it because I love
• 1:39:31
  the philosophy what America stands for.
• 1:39:33
  And no one tells me I'm anti American.
• 1:39:35
  No one tells me I'm a, you know, I'm a racist against, you know,
• 1:39:39
  against Americans. I, I say I don't like the way
• 1:39:43
  that we're, you know, that, that, that, that we, you know,
• 1:39:46
  force other countries to become financially indebted to us and
• 1:39:48
  then push them to give us whatever we want.
• 1:39:51
  I think that's wrong of us. I don't think that as a free
• 1:39:53
  world that preaches freedom, that that's a very good, that's
• 1:39:55
  a very good way to practice what you preach.
• 1:39:57
  You know, that doesn't make me a bad dude.
• 1:40:00
  In fact, that makes me someone that loves the philosophy.
• 1:40:02
  So I'm with you on I'm with you on that conversation of Hey,
• 1:40:06
  man, you're and and by the way, and you know.
• 1:40:10
  This it's woke tactics. It is, it was woke tactics that
• 1:40:14
  did not work out well for the world community when, when
• 1:40:16
  everyone said anything or sneezed in the direction of
• 1:40:18
  anyone that that could be perceived as not a white
• 1:40:22
  straight individual, that they're a racist or a bigot in
• 1:40:26
  any kind of way. And then the, and then it starts
• 1:40:27
  losing meaning and people lose interest and, and, and, and, and
• 1:40:30
  the cry of outrage and the, and you know, the boy that cried
• 1:40:33
  wolf only works a certain amount of times.
• 1:40:36
  And I think that you got to, you got to cherish those times
• 1:40:39
  because there are times that are really real.
• 1:40:41
  The Holocaust, you know, World War 2 was horrible for all
• 1:40:47
  humanity. You know, I, we, we, I have an
• 1:40:50
  emphasis on the, on the Jews that experienced it because I'm
• 1:40:53
  Jewish and my family went through it.
• 1:40:54
  And so that's my relationship to it.
• 1:40:57
  I'm denying the gays, the gypsies, the Russians, the
• 1:41:00
  French. I'm not, you know, anyone else
• 1:41:02
  that went through, you know, any kind of other.
• 1:41:04
  I'm not saying that they weren't participating in it either.
• 1:41:07
  But as far as my like what you said, as far as our heritage
• 1:41:10
  goes, and as far as you know, that's, that's the that's the
• 1:41:12
  scope we're going to look at it through.
• 1:41:14
  To deny that anyone else had an issue in World War 2 is also
• 1:41:18
  crazy. You know, to say that the
• 1:41:19
  Holocaust, that the World War 2 was just about Jews is silly.
• 1:41:22
  You know, it was about every, it was, it was about a World War.
• 1:41:25
  It was about, you know, and I'm teaching my students now wars a
• 1:41:28
  racket, you know, Smedley Butler and you know, and he's and he
• 1:41:31
  got, you know, mysteriously killed right before America,
• 1:41:34
  America got involved in World War 2.
• 1:41:36
  And after he wrote this pamphlet and he and he was writing about
• 1:41:39
  all the relationships that we're on the verge of fraying leading
• 1:41:42
  up to World War 2. And it was everyone and I and I
• 1:41:45
  showed my students, you pulled up a map and he and he listed
• 1:41:48
  all the places and all the politics that was going on.
• 1:41:50
  And like, that's just Russia and Europe, like that's, that's
• 1:41:53
  everyone. And, you know, and then
• 1:41:55
  obviously Asia has its own, you know, history of World War 22.
• 1:41:59
  But I so I think that. Can I ask you a question?
• 1:42:04
  Sure, because the only thing I'm I hear nothing you said that I
• 1:42:07
  disagree with. But what I want to know more
• 1:42:09
  about is no matter what we are, where we are and where we are is
• 1:42:18
  there are people who claim I have no homes and I'm treated
• 1:42:21
  like nobody. These would be mainly
• 1:42:23
  Palestinians. And then there's people who are
• 1:42:26
  Israeli, like, not like you, but meaning Jewish and Israeli, who
• 1:42:32
  say we need a place to feel safe.
• 1:42:35
  If the place you picked doesn't feel safe because of Jordan and
• 1:42:39
  Egypt and these other countries around it, then what I'm really
• 1:42:43
  pushing for, and I know this is. Impossible religious
• 1:42:45
  conversation and that and that goes to religious.
• 1:42:48
  So, so that's my religious, that's my religious investment
• 1:42:51
  in the land and in the particular place.
• 1:42:54
  And I and I have, and I mean, listen, I've been there, you
• 1:42:57
  know, over a dozen times in my life and awesome.
• 1:43:00
  I, I genuinely, genuinely love being there.
• 1:43:03
  And by the way, I mean, you know, most Israelis aren't on
• 1:43:09
  the same page as the way that we treat the Palestinians, you
• 1:43:11
  know, and, and, and the way, and by the way, in most of, in most
• 1:43:14
  of our, most of our wars are, are manufactured.
• 1:43:17
  We know this dude. War, war is, is propaganda and
• 1:43:21
  is war is manufactured in enormous, enormous part and in
• 1:43:26
  our relationships and our perceptions.
• 1:43:28
  But like, it's funny, you know, according to the Jewish, you
• 1:43:30
  know, philosophy, you know, there's a couple of different
• 1:43:32
  what you call exiles and that you know, that happened.
• 1:43:35
  And there's exile of Greece and the exile of Rome and there's
• 1:43:37
  exile of of Babylon and and Rome, which is technically the
• 1:43:42
  third one and the one that we're quote UN quote still in.
• 1:43:44
  And what you know, in that capacity is supposed to be the
• 1:43:47
  longest one and the most difficult one.
• 1:43:49
  It's not Rome isn't Muslim, you know, like all like the Jews
• 1:43:53
  beef is not is not with Muslims. It it need not be and it and and
• 1:43:58
  I'm and I'm A and I'm a strong believer the Jews in the Hevron
• 1:44:02
  world. You know that today is one of
• 1:44:04
  the most volatile, you know, places that you could possibly
• 1:44:10
  spend time for hundreds of years.
• 1:44:12
  Jews and Palestinians that lived there in poverty got along
• 1:44:16
  beautifully, you know, and, and, and sure, there were, you know,
• 1:44:19
  instances where they did in the early 1920s and 1930s.
• 1:44:22
  And that was also, again, largely manufactured.
• 1:44:24
  And, you know, and, and again, you know, people are holding
• 1:44:27
  other people's feet to the fire, their own people's feet to the
• 1:44:30
  fire, you know, respectively to, to, to 'cause that push.
• 1:44:33
  And, and I think that, you know, like you said, get in line and,
• 1:44:39
  you know, everyone has, everyone has pain, everyone has
• 1:44:43
  challenges, everyone has. There's the question really is,
• 1:44:46
  are we going to be looking to the past?
• 1:44:47
  We're going to look into the present, look into the future,
• 1:44:49
  you know, and, and are we going to look to get along?
• 1:44:51
  Are we going to look to say, you know what, everyone should get a
• 1:44:54
  fair shake. Unfortunately, you can't undo
• 1:44:57
  the last 100 years. I don't know, you know, I mean,
• 1:44:59
  if you went back to when, when the when the early Zionists were
• 1:45:02
  were founding the state of Israel, I'm sure that I probably
• 1:45:05
  wouldn't have loved a lot of what they were doing, you know,
• 1:45:07
  and I'm sure that, you know, they didn't love what each other
• 1:45:09
  were doing. You know, there was a lot of
• 1:45:10
  conflict, but they also felt an enormous pressure.
• 1:45:12
  There was an enormous rush to to come up with a state because
• 1:45:16
  World War Two had just happened because the pogroms had just
• 1:45:18
  come to a climax. And, you know, what was going,
• 1:45:21
  what was ultimately, you know, and as far as percentage wise of
• 1:45:25
  people that were killed, meaning I don't know how many millions
• 1:45:27
  of Jews were in the world, but you know, it was not in the
• 1:45:30
  hundreds of millions. You know, like 6,000,000 was a
• 1:45:32
  pretty significant number relative to the population in
• 1:45:35
  the world. So just like people say, you
• 1:45:37
  know, like, oh, only a couple 100,000 Palestinians, like dude,
• 1:45:40
  relative to what? How many people are living
• 1:45:42
  there, you know. And so.
• 1:45:43
  So like, yeah. Like real quick, your
• 1:45:46
  sensitivity is what's missing. Like just to be very honest,
• 1:45:49
  like what I'm pushing back against is your sensitivity.
• 1:45:51
  Your level of sensitivity is not omnipresent among Jews who
• 1:45:56
  talked to non Jews about this. Because it's convenient and it's
• 1:45:59
  not fun and it's not easy. You know, it's, it's really.
• 1:46:02
  That really bothers me because if you just show a modicum of
• 1:46:05
  respect for how hard it is for everyone, which again you did
• 1:46:07
  I'm I'm making sure to make sure you don't misunderstand me.
• 1:46:12
  That's all I'm asking for is just like, and I'm asking for
• 1:46:15
  that from left wing people who hate Israel also is something
• 1:46:18
  look, just admit that it's not easy for any of these people.
• 1:46:21
  And as you know, because you're married and as you know, because
• 1:46:24
  you're like friends with people, you don't create peace by acting
• 1:46:29
  unpeacefully. So like someone meaning both
• 1:46:32
  like at some point, first of all, obviously it's the powers
• 1:46:36
  that be and it's the racketeering and it's the war
• 1:46:37
  and it's a prophet. But but at some point the
• 1:46:41
  underclass has to throw the ruling class over.
• 1:46:44
  And then unfortunately, every example we have of that is utter
• 1:46:47
  chaos in hell. And then just some new person,
• 1:46:49
  you know, was it Robespierre? Was that the French Revolution?
• 1:46:52
  They, they, the guy who led the French Revolution was beheaded
• 1:46:55
  and kicked out afterwards, the, you know, Trotsky was shot,
• 1:46:58
  Lenin died, Stalin was probably poisoned.
• 1:47:01
  Like, you know, the, the good guys who take over from
• 1:47:05
  authority don't end up being good most of the time, not all
• 1:47:08
  of the time. And the ones who do end up being
• 1:47:09
  good are usually assassinated by buy a cabal around them so.
• 1:47:12
  Yeah, yeah, well, that goes back to, you know, and that goes to
• 1:47:15
  my one of my favorite Jerry Garcia quotes, which is anyone
• 1:47:18
  that wants to be a leader shouldn't be, you know, anyone
• 1:47:21
  that anyone that says, hey, I want the crown, you know, I want
• 1:47:24
  the presidency. I want hey, man, get out of
• 1:47:27
  here, man. You know the best, the reason
• 1:47:29
  why the best bands are the best bands because they love music,
• 1:47:32
  not because they want to make 1,000,000 bucks, not because
• 1:47:34
  they want to, you know, get valid is because they want to
• 1:47:36
  express themselves. And that's and that's the best
• 1:47:38
  way to do it. And so the best leaders and you
• 1:47:40
  know, are not to be the people that like the best leaders are
• 1:47:44
  #2 that are forced to be #1 you know that, you know that, that
• 1:47:47
  are not, that they do not want that position.
• 1:47:50
  And they want to, and they want to democratize.
• 1:47:52
  They want to say, hey, I, if you want me to be like the
• 1:47:56
  representation of like what you guys see in yourselves, OK.
• 1:48:01
  But I don't want to tell you how to like, like how to be
• 1:48:04
  yourself. I, I can't do that.
• 1:48:06
  And I think that, and it's easy to, and by the way, there's
• 1:48:09
  something I was talking to one of my students about this too.
• 1:48:12
  Money, money. People value money because it
• 1:48:16
  shows their own worth to them. It's a physical manifestation of
• 1:48:21
  what they're, of what they feel like their contribution to the
• 1:48:24
  world is. And so when they, when I have a
• 1:48:26
  lot of money, I must have contributed a whole lot.
• 1:48:28
  And therefore I'm really smart. And therefore I'm really, I'm
• 1:48:30
  really important. Power is controlling other
• 1:48:33
  people, you know, like money is like the influence, you know,
• 1:48:36
  like a manifestation of, of what you provided.
• 1:48:40
  And then power is a manifestation of how much other
• 1:48:43
  people want to be like you and like how much of an influence
• 1:48:47
  you have on other people and how they.
• 1:48:48
  And that is, I mean, if, you know, evolutionarily and
• 1:48:53
  biologically, we want that because that guarantees us the
• 1:48:56
  best resources, but it's the sickest form of the sickest form
• 1:49:00
  of control. And also devoids all
• 1:49:02
  individuality, devoids people of life, devoids communities of any
• 1:49:06
  kind of spirit that they have. I mean, it's, and you know, when
• 1:49:10
  we talked about again, the, the breakdown of, you know,
• 1:49:12
  institutions, Harvard, you know, I, I had a great poetry.
• 1:49:16
  One of my favorite lines my poetry teacher wrote was I
• 1:49:20
  suspect poetry because it makes inside jokes and talks to itself
• 1:49:23
  too much. You know, like, how are you
• 1:49:25
  supposed to even get poetry if you, if you don't, if you can't
• 1:49:29
  speak it, if you don't understand what it's talking
• 1:49:30
  about, it's not relating to you. The most beautiful poetry is
• 1:49:33
  something that is when I talk about doing a barbecue and after
• 1:49:37
  on Sunday afternoon and my kids are running around.
• 1:49:39
  I have a cold beer that's just getting a little warm in my hand
• 1:49:42
  and I take a bite of a burger and the juice falls out the back
• 1:49:44
  of my hand and everyone can taste that burger and everyone's
• 1:49:48
  mouth could salivate. Or when you when you walk into
• 1:49:49
  that pizza, the shop and you get hit in the nose of the smell of
• 1:49:52
  like that, that, that, that, that, that that's brick oven
• 1:49:55
  and, and, and, and the humans in the room are like, I get that, I
• 1:50:00
  get that. But the second that you go to
• 1:50:01
  that place where you're like, you have to be part of my club
• 1:50:04
  to get my humor. Screw are you man, who are you?
• 1:50:07
  You know, like what about? So I think that all this kind of
• 1:50:10
  comes from the same, everything we've been talking about comes
• 1:50:12
  from the same place, which is the desire to control resources
• 1:50:17
  and people around you for the best.
• 1:50:19
  And what we and what I believe the purpose of religion as a
• 1:50:22
  whole is, is to get beyond that. It's in it's, it's the evolution
• 1:50:26
  of consciousness. We've evolved physically
• 1:50:29
  wonderful, great. We do, you know, that was
• 1:50:31
  awesome. Now we need to evolve our
• 1:50:32
  consciousness in order to get to the next level.
• 1:50:34
  And right now there's forces that are trying to keep us on a
• 1:50:38
  step down on our consciousness. You know, they're trying to keep
• 1:50:41
  us primitive with our consciousness and, you know,
• 1:50:43
  culture wars and, and, and, and politics and all this shit.
• 1:50:47
  And, and it's fun and it's addicting because it feeds into
• 1:50:49
  the, our, into our biological nature.
• 1:50:51
  But the whole point of religion is to get beyond that.
• 1:50:53
  So you know that that's when people talk about the spiritual
• 1:50:56
  battle. That's what it is.
• 1:50:58
  Yeah, it's great because transcendentalism is just using
• 1:51:01
  the word transcend and to transcend the human body and the
• 1:51:04
  lizard brain especially is definitely why religion was my
• 1:51:09
  word invented. But I think before religion was
• 1:51:13
  invented, there was no need for a word like religion because
• 1:51:16
  everyone actually just did live harmoniously.
• 1:51:18
  And you know, an example of this is any biotic community.
• 1:51:21
  Toads don't think I am or am not going to get eaten today.
• 1:51:24
  That fly has value to its life. Toads are just like hungry, eat
• 1:51:28
  full, but they don't like amass toad kingdoms and then start
• 1:51:33
  conquering. You know, so like, I do think
• 1:51:36
  you, and that's kind of what I was saying is I wish there was
• 1:51:39
  like kind of a worldwide missive that said like, hey, there's a
• 1:51:43
  reason everyone picks the religion that speaks to them and
• 1:51:46
  there's, and it's a good thing and it's good to cultivate
• 1:51:48
  these. So should we should have
• 1:51:49
  learning centers everywhere? What what bothers me, because
• 1:51:52
  we've talked, I've talked about Jehovah's Witness versus
• 1:51:54
  Judaism. Judaism is one of the only
• 1:51:56
  religions I know of that encourages practitioners to ask
• 1:51:59
  questions and to constantly seek external things and to learn and
• 1:52:03
  compare and contrast. The Amish actually have a really
• 1:52:06
  cool thing where they tell the kids to leave for six months and
• 1:52:08
  then come back. Run something.
• 1:52:13
  Run Spring. Yeah, something.
• 1:52:15
  Yeah. And I actually like, deeply
• 1:52:17
  respect that. Like that's what I want to do
• 1:52:18
  with my kids is like, and actually that's a good example.
• 1:52:21
  Just because I've talked about my 20s and stuff, I went, my
• 1:52:25
  parents raised me with like no rules except like, be respectful
• 1:52:28
  and be kind. And so that was like a little
• 1:52:31
  bit problematic in my teens because it was like a big, like,
• 1:52:33
  you know, like I wasn't a latchkey kid, but I was like, it
• 1:52:36
  was just, you know, like, as long as you don't get caught or
• 1:52:38
  and get in trouble, we don't really care.
• 1:52:41
  It served me well enough. But the point I'm making is I
• 1:52:44
  did get to like experiment and kind of go to the depths that I
• 1:52:47
  wanted to go to. But I always knew my parents
• 1:52:49
  would welcome me back. And not that they would not be
• 1:52:52
  welcome, you know, but I knew that, like, if I hit rock
• 1:52:54
  bottom, I could call them like, I could actually just like say
• 1:52:57
  it. And so I do feel like we should
• 1:53:00
  all just like, have a little bit of like a runway to play on and
• 1:53:02
  like experiment. And so I think Judaism is very
• 1:53:05
  good for that. I think it's very good for like
• 1:53:08
  saying ask questions. I do have a little bit of a
• 1:53:11
  problem with any religion and most of them do this with like
• 1:53:15
  telling a 1213 year old, you have to make a somewhat
• 1:53:17
  permanent decision about your life right now because I feel
• 1:53:20
  like frontal cortex speaking and all that.
• 1:53:22
  Like, why put that on someone? So, so the it's not that I have
• 1:53:26
  a problem with bar mitzvahs so much as no offense to every 13
• 1:53:29
  year old on earth. You're not a man, you're not a
• 1:53:31
  like you might have adult responsibilities now, but it
• 1:53:34
  should be phrased that way. I don't think it like, you know,
• 1:53:36
  like when I was 13, I don't even know if I had functional sperm
• 1:53:39
  that could, like, impregnate a woman, for example.
• 1:53:41
  Sure, Yeah. But but but I think and and just
• 1:53:45
  to counter that or just to. Respond I'd.
• 1:53:47
  Love to hear about this at least a potential one potential
• 1:53:49
  response is it's all about perception.
• 1:53:52
  And I think that especially the sense of I think that I've found
• 1:53:57
  in my life with adult and with students and with campers, even
• 1:54:02
  when you set, when you make an expectation, when you set an
• 1:54:05
  expectation, people tend to meet it.
• 1:54:07
  If it's a low expectation, people are happy to meet that.
• 1:54:09
  If it's a high expectation and people see that you genuinely
• 1:54:12
  have confidence in their talents and their abilities, then they
• 1:54:15
  want to go ahead and meet that. And I think that a big value
• 1:54:18
  that that provides is when you take a 13 year old who's
• 1:54:21
  brimming with enthusiasm and excitement.
• 1:54:24
  He's watched his whole community and his friends and everyone's
• 1:54:26
  telling him how great you're going to be and how wonderful
• 1:54:28
  you are and this and welcome to being a man.
• 1:54:31
  It encourages images, adult like behavior.
• 1:54:33
  And by the way, he probably won't act like that all the
• 1:54:35
  time, but you're studying to see he definitely won't.
• 1:54:37
  I mean, as a 30 year old, I'll tell you, I don't act like a 30
• 1:54:41
  year old most of the time. So, you know, I think that the
• 1:54:45
  benefit is that, listen, Judaism as far as I'm concerned, is
• 1:54:52
  again, that evolution of consciousness and has a lot to
• 1:54:54
  do with individuality and perception and especially
• 1:54:57
  perception of yourself and taking responsibility in
• 1:54:59
  yourself. And I think that it's a really
• 1:55:00
  good thing to start saying to people.
• 1:55:03
  And girls mature faster than boys, which is why they have
• 1:55:05
  their bottom. That's for a year earlier than
• 1:55:06
  than than than the boys do and could be.
• 1:55:08
  Five years as far as I'm concerned, you know.
• 1:55:11
  I think that, I think that the that the huge value is that is
• 1:55:14
  that a kid starts taking it upon himself to start studying, you
• 1:55:17
  know, like start studying for himself.
• 1:55:18
  A kid takes it upon himself to participate in a community.
• 1:55:21
  And I think that whether or not you want to say practically, are
• 1:55:25
  you a man? No, you're not a man.
• 1:55:27
  But you know what? Start acting like one, dude,
• 1:55:29
  because this is the best way to the best way to learn and the
• 1:55:31
  best way to learn. And there's actually one of my
• 1:55:33
  favorite concepts in in Judaism, there's you have Joseph, who's
• 1:55:39
  the perfect son who never did anything wrong and always passed
• 1:55:42
  every test his whole life. And there's a million different
• 1:55:45
  things that happened to him that were really, really challenging.
• 1:55:48
  And he always seemed to pass the test with flying colors, right?
• 1:55:51
  And the rabbis and the commentaries all have to
• 1:55:54
  struggle to come up with potential things that he may not
• 1:55:57
  have done perfectly because like he nailed every, every test in
• 1:56:00
  the book. And then you have Judah, who
• 1:56:02
  turns out to be the king of Israel and turns out to be, you
• 1:56:04
  know, ultimately we say that the, that the, that the, that
• 1:56:06
  the redemption comes from his family.
• 1:56:08
  And he is far, a far cry from perfect, you know, and he is a
• 1:56:12
  far cry from, you know, that same perfect guy that that
• 1:56:16
  Joseph was. But what the what the value was
• 1:56:20
  is that there is no compensating for the experience of having
• 1:56:24
  made a mistake and learned from it.
• 1:56:25
  There is no, you can't make up for and you have in Judaism in
• 1:56:30
  particular, but throughout life, and I'm sure other cultures in
• 1:56:34
  other communities and other forms of literature and other
• 1:56:37
  forms of spirituality is you got the people that are perfect.
• 1:56:42
  You got the people that screw up and find their way back.
• 1:56:44
  And the people that screw up and find their way back always make
• 1:56:46
  it stronger and always make it better and always greater.
• 1:56:49
  And, and they both play apart from one another, by the way,
• 1:56:51
  because Joseph and Jude are are super, super philosophically and
• 1:56:55
  morally and even historically as like tribes and people tied into
• 1:56:59
  one another very, very strongly. But and Joseph, the perfect guy
• 1:57:02
  lays the way for the guy who had screwed up to come to, to, to
• 1:57:07
  make his way back and then to achieve higher levels and he
• 1:57:11
  ever could have achieved had he been perfect the whole time.
• 1:57:13
  So I think that I think that we like what you said, we live in
• 1:57:16
  a, I think that we should live in a world where play is
• 1:57:19
  acceptable. That and this goes even to
• 1:57:22
  today's world. Someone says something dumb when
• 1:57:24
  they're 15 years old on Facebook and it ruins their political
• 1:57:27
  career or they get fired when they're 30 and you're like, what
• 1:57:30
  are you freaking doing, man? Like this is 15, dude.
• 1:57:33
  Even a year ago I had opinions that I really would, that I know
• 1:57:37
  were wrong, you know, And I'm sure in a year from now I'll be
• 1:57:39
  in conversation. That scandal, and I want to get
• 1:57:42
  back to one other point, but that scandal where the kid was
• 1:57:44
  wearing like a MAGA hat and they got in a fight and like CNN
• 1:57:47
  started talking about him and then they had to like retract
• 1:57:49
  it. And I was like, yeah, that's why
• 1:57:50
  you don't talk about 15 year olds.
• 1:57:51
  Like just shut up. They're little kids.
• 1:57:53
  They have no the number of offensive things I said as a 15
• 1:57:57
  year old pre Internet, let alone Twitter.
• 1:58:00
  Like, I mean, I be thrown in a permanent jail if those are
• 1:58:03
  permanent statements, you know, and I they were just mostly just
• 1:58:07
  awful, awful, misogynistic comments that I was repeating
• 1:58:10
  from song lyrics, you know, just like things that I was like
• 1:58:13
  thought made you mature. But on the note of maturity and
• 1:58:15
  and bar mitzos, I think I came up with a compromise from my
• 1:58:17
  perspective to yours. At the very least, instead of
• 1:58:20
  giving a 13 year old boy a bunch of gifts when they become a man,
• 1:58:23
  they should have to give a bunch of gifts to everyone else and
• 1:58:25
  get nothing because that is like what?
• 1:58:27
  Like to be a dad and a man and like, yeah, like, like it should
• 1:58:32
  be the opposite. Like the incentivization should
• 1:58:34
  not be that you get a bunch of things because if you are
• 1:58:36
  becoming a man, men like like my wife always jokes, like my kids
• 1:58:41
  are like, what do you want for Father's Day?
• 1:58:43
  And I always say in front of my wife, I'm like, I can't tell you
• 1:58:45
  what I want. And it's not sex.
• 1:58:46
  What I want is like, to be left alone for one day.
• 1:58:49
  Like just like to like pretend I'm 25 and I don't have a family
• 1:58:54
  again. Like that would actually be the
• 1:58:55
  gift I want. That's so offensive to my kids
• 1:58:57
  because they can't imagine that like, but it's also not true.
• 1:59:00
  Like, if you gave me 24 hours without my family, I would be
• 1:59:03
  deeply empty and hollow and I would be like sad by like hour
• 1:59:07
  9. I would just miss them.
• 1:59:08
  I would want to be like texting updates to my wife about what
• 1:59:10
  I'm doing. You know what?
• 1:59:11
  Like, I don't want to go on like a bachelor party with a bunch of
• 1:59:14
  guys anymore. Like, I want to be, I, I want to
• 1:59:18
  do all that, but then come home. Like, you know what?
• 1:59:20
  I want to sleep in my own bed and like, like curl up with like
• 1:59:23
  a pillow in the right spot. And like, I don't want to sleep
• 1:59:25
  on like a weird couch in a hotel.
• 1:59:27
  So like getting old is like a weird phenomenon.
• 1:59:29
  And another thing I just wanted to mention because I am going to
• 1:59:32
  run out of time but eventually Speaking of family.
• 1:59:33
  But dude, I could seriously talk.
• 1:59:35
  We have to do this again. Yeah, I'm happy to do it again
• 1:59:38
  for sure. You're.
• 1:59:38
  Also going to be my official person to talk to about being
• 1:59:42
  Jewish in a family because it is the hardest thing for me by far.
• 1:59:47
  Because I just don't. I don't believe in brainwashing
• 1:59:50
  and I don't believe in shunning heritage, and the two are at
• 1:59:53
  odds in my head a lot. Like they shouldn't be.
• 1:59:55
  They shouldn't be. And like we talked about this
• 1:59:57
  off camera last time, but just because a group of people.
• 2:00:00
  Represents manifest something doesn't mean that's what the
• 2:00:03
  philosophy is. You know, just like America
• 2:00:05
  isn't a government and Israel isn't the government and
• 2:00:07
  Palestine isn't Hamas, you know, like, yeah, you're not.
• 2:00:11
  That's not what it has to be. Yeah, no, thank you for that.
• 2:00:15
  But one thing I do want to throw out, because if people who are
• 2:00:17
  watching are more your age than mine, another thing that's
• 2:00:19
  really sad to me is that people my age and older especially, are
• 2:00:24
  making decisions about war because none of us have to fight
• 2:00:27
  in them. It's.
• 2:00:28
  Very. Messed up.
• 2:00:29
  I wanted to swear a lot, but it is like the saddest and weirdest
• 2:00:33
  thing ever to me. So like, you have every right to
• 2:00:35
  talk about like geopolitics, in my opinion, and America, because
• 2:00:38
  like, push comes to shove, your ass is going to be on a freaking
• 2:00:41
  boat with a gun in your hand. So like, yeah, better watch out
• 2:00:44
  how much you shoot your mouth off when like Trump and Biden
• 2:00:46
  and like talk about Russia and like wave, wave sabers, whatever
• 2:00:50
  the hell Saber rattling. It's so offensive to me because
• 2:00:53
  I'm like, because I'm still like, technically, if there was
• 2:00:56
  a real bad WAR 44, they'd probably draft me at the end.
• 2:00:59
  Of if you were quick, dude, you'd be in the front lines
• 2:01:01
  right now. Yeah.
• 2:01:03
  So, but like, oh man, it's just, it's so sad.
• 2:01:07
  I mean, you, you have children. So you know this like deeply.
• 2:01:10
  But like, I can't even watch a scene where a kid dies anymore
• 2:01:14
  in a movie. I can't even like read about
• 2:01:15
  like, and when I hear about a kid who kills themselves, like
• 2:01:18
  it is the saddest thing in the world to imagine raising
• 2:01:21
  someone, instilling them with courage and confidence.
• 2:01:24
  And and then like these kids at school, like she has a bad body.
• 2:01:28
  She doesn't look like Kim Kardashian, you know, and like,
• 2:01:30
  and then like that overwhelms how much a dad can be like, no,
• 2:01:34
  I love you. You're perfect.
• 2:01:34
  Don't worry, we waited out a couple years from now because
• 2:01:37
  the sad truth about bullying is like, it really is that bad.
• 2:01:39
  Like it actually in the moment, like 4 years of being the least
• 2:01:42
  popular kid in a high school. I wasn't that kid.
• 2:01:45
  But I'm saying like watching those kids go through that was
• 2:01:48
  almost harder than like being bullied occasionally because it
• 2:01:51
  was just like it was like, you can't stand up for them.
• 2:01:54
  Like that's suicide at that point.
• 2:01:56
  Well, that's a weird mixing metaphor, but.
• 2:02:01
  It's like. It's really sad that like people
• 2:02:03
  don't understand that like the solution to bullying is nothing
• 2:02:05
  that they're doing right now, you know, and I know, and like,
• 2:02:07
  like, first of all, 100% you get 5 guys together, one of those
• 2:02:11
  guys is going to get bullied. Like it's like, and, and if all
• 2:02:14
  5 have good self-confidence and like good self esteem, then it's
• 2:02:17
  going to be fun, you know, and then hopefully the 5th man out
• 2:02:21
  like the, the, the one who's, you know, getting teased the
• 2:02:23
  most. Hopefully they'll get a couple
• 2:02:24
  good like, you know, ones in on like, but anytime you're not
• 2:02:28
  allowed to talk about like the alpha in the pack and then the
• 2:02:31
  alphas allowed to say whatever they want, that's where things
• 2:02:33
  get dangerous. And that's what high school is.
• 2:02:34
  That's what Trump is. That's what like overall
• 2:02:37
  government is. That's what like all of these
• 2:02:39
  hierarchical. That's where.
• 2:02:40
  Institutions were that's why I'm sick of institution because
• 2:02:43
  that's because that's, you know, man, yeah, it's a great point.
• 2:02:47
  It's a great point. And I think that we that's, I
• 2:02:53
  think that that that's why it's good to have a dude again and
• 2:02:56
  not, you know, that the Rogan mentality is such a healthier
• 2:02:59
  mentality than that. And like the fact that he gets
• 2:03:02
  millions of listeners an episode and that the fact that more
• 2:03:05
  people are encouraged even on smaller platforms like this,
• 2:03:08
  right? Like you and I are just having
• 2:03:09
  this conversation. It's the equivalent of like an
• 2:03:11
  underground open mic that's going on and the fact that
• 2:03:14
  talking about and the message is going to get by the way.
• 2:03:16
  And you know, I, I was talking to my brother about this and we
• 2:03:19
  this could kind of tie into coffin talks and we'll wrap up
• 2:03:21
  for you. Let you get a couple of words in
• 2:03:23
  and and push your podcast. But I saw my brother yesterday
• 2:03:28
  and oh God, I literally just lost my train of thought.
• 2:03:32
  What we just said. What was the point we were just
• 2:03:33
  talking about? We went from bullying to
• 2:03:36
  fighting wars and then, yeah, shoot.
• 2:03:40
  It was bullying. It's.
• 2:03:41
  Weird. I know you had something too
• 2:03:43
  because I could feel it. Oh, I'm trying to think.
• 2:03:45
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was bullying and then it was.
• 2:03:47
  Institutions, Institutions. Institutions.
• 2:03:52
  People in. Power.
• 2:03:54
  It's cuz you started talking about coffin talk and your brain
• 2:03:56
  went into like a different. I did.
• 2:03:58
  I did open mic circuit Joe Rogan.
• 2:04:01
  Joe Rogan open mic podcasting. Hang on, give me two seconds.
• 2:04:07
  It's going to be. We're talking.
• 2:04:11
  It's gone. Forget about it.
• 2:04:14
  Well, the one thing I'll say just because maybe you'll figure
• 2:04:16
  it out while I'm saying this about Joe and specifically
• 2:04:18
  another thing he said as a good example was like people said,
• 2:04:21
  why have you said the N word like many, many, many times on
• 2:04:23
  your podcast? Here's like a clip a real I made
• 2:04:25
  of it and the guy like just came out and said like they're right,
• 2:04:29
  I'm wrong. Very Louis CK at moment, like
• 2:04:31
  the two of them have a lot of. And then he said, I'm going to
• 2:04:34
  just have as many black guests on as I can.
• 2:04:36
  And that wasn't pampering or fake.
• 2:04:38
  He actually felt remorse. He actually wanted to make up
• 2:04:42
  for it. And then what really impressed
• 2:04:44
  me, though, was all these black guests flocked to come on his
• 2:04:47
  show and not because, like, they hated his guts and all that.
• 2:04:50
  They actually came to his defense to say, like, I'm really
• 2:04:53
  glad you're doing this. Thank you for opening up.
• 2:04:54
  Like more so like that to me is like the example that I want
• 2:04:57
  like children to see more of is like and again, I brought Lucy
• 2:05:00
  K, but like his crime was more of a crime and like what he did
• 2:05:04
  was way different. But the point is, real men are
• 2:05:07
  accountable. Real men can admit that they
• 2:05:09
  made an actual mistake, and then they can try to make up for it.
• 2:05:12
  And society needs to give people the room to make up for it.
• 2:05:16
  You can't just say you're persona non grata.
• 2:05:19
  You're out. Like, you have to give people a
• 2:05:21
  redemption cycle. You have to let Michael Vick out
• 2:05:23
  of jail. You have to like, I don't know
• 2:05:24
  if he's a good guy anymore or not, but yeah.
• 2:05:27
  No, but that's exactly the point of, you know, the, you know,
• 2:05:30
  Judah never becomes Judah if he doesn't get that opportunity to
• 2:05:33
  come out, you know, to redeem himself.
• 2:05:35
  And like we definitely those opportunities, you got 3 minutes
• 2:05:39
  to make a last message, last message for this podcast.
• 2:05:43
  I'm sure we'll do another one, you know, in a couple of months
• 2:05:46
  for sure. Last message for today and push
• 2:05:48
  your push your show. Yeah, I think my message is
• 2:05:53
  friendships come in weird places and weird modalities and like, I
• 2:05:57
  now have a friendship with you and it's as simple as that.
• 2:06:00
  It's like, you came on my show, we clicked.
• 2:06:03
  My wife was like, why were you in the room so long?
• 2:06:05
  You went like long. And I was like, oh, no, we just
• 2:06:06
  talked for like 20 minutes after.
• 2:06:08
  And like, and then I open up on this podcast with you and yours.
• 2:06:11
  And then I enjoy myself. And then what's weird that I
• 2:06:14
  didn't understand when I was younger is you and I don't have
• 2:06:16
  to start texting every day and keep in touch and like, like
• 2:06:19
  twirl our hairs in bed at night and like make our wives nervous
• 2:06:21
  that we're going to like run off together.
• 2:06:23
  Like we can just be casual friends.
• 2:06:24
  And then when the time is right, like, you know, the friendship
• 2:06:27
  emerges. So I would just encourage people
• 2:06:29
  to like understand that like we, we talked about like my word is
• 2:06:33
  ghosting, but fading, you know, like, like these two things.
• 2:06:37
  Like I do think the younger generations don't understand how
• 2:06:42
  to let things go. Like, and it's not because they
• 2:06:44
  don't know how, because they're immature or pathetic.
• 2:06:46
  I think it says there's no model for it, which is like, people
• 2:06:50
  used to retire on their own. Now we have like, politicians
• 2:06:53
  just won't retire. And it's pathetic.
• 2:06:55
  Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg screwed over her entire team by refusing
• 2:07:00
  to retire. She should have just retired.
• 2:07:02
  She would have been replaced by a Democrat and then things would
• 2:07:04
  have worked out for their team. Meanwhile, Trump should have
• 2:07:08
  retired, you know, Biden, God, man, that guy should have
• 2:07:12
  retired. Like, so I would just say like,
• 2:07:14
  let things go. Understand that there's a phase
• 2:07:16
  to youth, understand that there's a phase to like partying
• 2:07:19
  your face off. You know, like Amy Winehouse's
• 2:07:21
  problem is she couldn't stop partying.
• 2:07:23
  Jim Morrison, all these people. So to tie it together, what I
• 2:07:25
  really want to express to people is like kindness is king and it
• 2:07:29
  works. And like, Ephraim and I are not
• 2:07:31
  going to agree on every nuance, let alone everything.
• 2:07:33
  But like, we, we didn't like, politely disagree.
• 2:07:37
  We just had a conversation. I couldn't even say like what I
• 2:07:39
  agree or disagree with you on. It's more that like a real
• 2:07:42
  natural conversation involves not fearing conflict because you
• 2:07:45
  trust the other person to not bombastically overreact to what
• 2:07:49
  you say and to feel you out and to like, like, shrug off certain
• 2:07:53
  comments. That's something I've really
• 2:07:54
  gotten better in my 40s is like, just shrug off some comments,
• 2:07:59
  people. So yeah.
• 2:08:00
  Oh, I host a podcast. It's called Coffin Talk.
• 2:08:02
  I also write professionally, novels and nonfiction, and I
• 2:08:07
  love my life. I love what I do.
• 2:08:08
  And if you want to see any or all of it, including music for
• 2:08:11
  my stuff, just go to mikeyop.com, Mikey opp.com.
• 2:08:17
  And that has everything I've ever gotten in my life.
• 2:08:20
  Cool, but but I actually like call to action, that kind of
• 2:08:23
  stuff. I'm horrible at it.
• 2:08:24
  I come from like me. Too.
• 2:08:25
  Don't hate this shit. Awkward.
• 2:08:26
  Yeah, Yeah. So like, whatever, dude, just I
• 2:08:28
  hope you enjoyed our conversation, honestly, and I
• 2:08:31
  hope so. I just talk peace in the Middle
• 2:08:33
  East. Peace, peace everywhere, man,
• 2:08:36
  that's. Peace everywhere.
• 2:08:37
  Hell yeah. Everywhere, by the way, I
• 2:08:39
  appreciate it, man. This is this is Mike, this
• 2:08:41
  awesome conversation. I really appreciate it.
• 2:08:43
  And like you said, we'll do this again soon and we'll call it
• 2:08:48
  there for now. Cool.
• 2:08:50
  I'll wait. OK.