The Wolf makes a guest appearance on the 100thousand Podcast and discusses a variety of topics.
wolf
get away from those sheep bollocks
you're listening to the wolf
and the shepherd podcast broadcasting
from fort
worth in the great state of texas now
get ready for this episode of the wolf
and the shepherd
welcome to this episode of the wolf and
the shepherd today we got
uh something a little bit different so
the wolf went on another podcast
uh with a good friend of his and did a
guest appearance
and we're gonna get to share that so
wolfe tells just a little bit about your
guest appearance
well it's actually somebody i've known
for almost 20 years
and i coached them at soccer but alas
they grew up
got married had a kid and started a
podcast
oh nice yeah all right well cool well
you're not going to hear
any more out of my voice so maybe that's
a blessing in disguise
who knows but all right let's let's give
a listen to the wolf's guest appearance
on the
one thousand podcast this is the 100 000
podcast we are an audio magazine
keeping it 100 exploring a thousand
topics i'm your host ruby avihana and
today
we are talking with tristan abbott
tristan is a soccer skills coach here in
dfw he was actually my coach when i was
at
uh lake country as a middle schooler uh
so we'll get into that a little bit but
uh
yeah soccer and skills he's got my uh
got my foot skills a lot better than
where i was
um he also does uh cyborg he is a cyber
security contractor and a podcaster at
the wolf and the shepherd podcast
it is in the top point five percent of
all podcasts in the world
so we're just a little bit ahead of him
on the list
we're not even close to what he's doing
uh but really really good stuff there
tristan van thank you so much for
joining me today i really appreciate it
thank you i'm really pleased to be here
i'm a bit concerned about the name
the hundred that sounds like a lot of
effort to put in in one go
yeah the hundred thousand yeah uh we
have to keep it 100 so i can't i can't
do any 99
97 none of that i'm used to keeping it
at round about 40.
to be honest yeah okay we'll just hit
the
yeah well uh thanks for jumping on with
me today uh
i mean you are most well known for i
would say right now and
and getting a lot of attention for the
wolf and the shepherd
in the podcast that you guys started um
tell me a little bit about that tell me
a little about
jumping in the podcast game was this
something you had wanted to do for a
while was it just kind of a
whim that became a dream and became a
reality really quickly or
how did you guys jump into it i think
for me it wasn't anything that i ever
set out
to do i think even when i was on the
path to doing it
i still wasn't that on board my friend
uh max who's the shepherd in the wharf
in the shepherd podcast
he had the idea at the beginning of
covert that
people were going to be home a lot more
maybe listening
you know to podcasts and
we've been sitting around talking for
about five years not about the same
thing we're normally quicker at solving
problems than that
but he had this idea that hey look we
just sit around and talk about
random stuff anyway why not let's just
do a podcast on it put it out there
and i said no for about six months
and one day he just said hey let's just
record something
and it was terrible but i think we did
end up releasing it
and we kind of went from there and now
we're about 92
93 episodes in and it's certainly become
easy
you know you just go in there and you
just have fun you sit down and talk
but i certainly wasn't something i was
on board with to begin with
because it sounded like a lot of work
but once you get into it it's really not
much work at all yeah yeah well what um
how did you guys come up with the name
the wolf and the shepherd now i know
that the wolf has been a persona of
yours that you've carried since uh
since i was a a wee 12 13 14 year old
yeah i'd had that nickname since i was
about
five i got it from watching an episode
of scooby-doo
and they came across a werewolf and
scooby and shaggy would obviously you
know try and hide every time they heard
the wolf howl
and i think about a week later
in recess i was playing soccer and each
time i scored i'd howl
and so i ended up like the nickname the
wolf and that's how i got it now
as for the wolf and the shepherd podcast
my friend came up with this idea would
it be cool if the wolf
and the shepherd actually just sat down
and talked to each other and realized
that
they're both really just doing a job you
know the shepherd's trying to look after
the sheep the wolf's just trying to feed
his family yeah and they might find out
they have a lot more in common
more in common than they don't have and
so that was the premise or at least the
kind of a
philosophical backdrop to it and my
angle was well maybe the wolf and the
shepherd are the same person
you know like you go into duality that
it's different aspects different
personality traits that sometimes you
have to be the wolf in your own life
sometimes you have to be the shepherd
yeah so that sounded all very complex
and you know existential but really it
was just the first kind of name we came
up with after
sitting around for a bit yeah so there's
nothing there's nothing super deep in it
and we
i think we actually came up with those
explanations to try and sound a bit cool
after we'd actually come up with a name
so yeah well that's that's kind of how
things
i mean that's how things work for this
podcast i always think sitting around
going like okay what do i name this i'm
just not very good with titles in
general um
uh and i was like just trying to think
through i was like well what do i want
to do with this
well keep it real i want i want people
to give
you know 100 when they come here and i
want them to to be fully honest so
100 and i want to talk about a lot of
different things and i thought well what
about
what about the 100 000 and just call it
the 100 000
and stick two things together which
actually mean two different things i
looked it up
there was no podcast that had that name
i looked it up online didn't have
anything else wasn't going to be
you know riding on somebody else's
coattails and somebody else's name so
i just went with it i mean it's a simple
i think some people make these like oh
we got to have this existential right
discussion about well what do we want
this to be about and
you know do years and years of research
and it's like no we just we kind of came
up with the name
and our explanations almost came later
that's
it's interesting how you guys did that
uh yeah i mean you guys
and you guys talk about a ton of
different topics we like
i mean the the tagline for the show is
talking about a thousand different
topics
but i think you guys do that to the nth
level in the nth degree uh
we got three different episode titles
here from february of this year so i'm
just going to read them off
the amish cancel culture and j-pop right
i mean i don't i don't know how
how different three different topics
could be on the same podcast
how did you guys come to that because i
would say this the conventional wisdom
is
for new podcasters you have to be so
niche
that you gain an audience through the
niche because you're you're hitting
a point that nobody else is hit it seems
like i would say you and i's
podcast in this way are kind of zagging
on that and saying no
we'll we're going to actually talk about
a large variety of different topics
yeah i think your approach in that you
know you're gonna keep it real and give
a hundred percent
we decided we were not gonna go either
of those routes that
we're far from keeping it real and 100
it might be a cumulative total for the
week if we recorded three podcasts so
maybe we gave like a third effort in
each one but
yeah we never really took that we wanted
it wanted it to stay pretty casual
and in terms of the topics again just in
natural conversation across the years we
spoke about
random things and i think when i've
perhaps eavesdropped on conversations in
the past between people i always find
obscure topics or things you normally
wouldn't hear people talk about
more interesting than just somebody you
know discussing something you've heard
you know discussed maybe a dozen times
that week already in terms of the topics
we pick
we figure that you know there's not
perhaps much
integrity from a i guess perhaps a
journalistic
view because you know you say take kpop
right it's big business
and there are k-pop experts out there
now
if you told somebody you met somebody
and they said hey yeah i'm an expert on
k-pop
although you might give a little bit of
kudos and respect to the fact that this
person is expert on k-pop
in your head you're still thinking well
that's a bunch of crap yeah yeah
and so when we did a podcast on k-pop
we did it from the point where max the
shepherd knew
nothing about it whatsoever hadn't even
heard about it and my knowledge of it
came from annoying intro ads on youtube
which i couldn't fast forward through
fast enough okay and about 20 minutes of
research and so
that was enough to do a podcast on kpop
yeah so obviously it had
a lot of humorous approach to it what
was the point of it
you know perhaps how does it compare to
western culture of
you know boy bands and all this stuff
and you just run with it
now half of what we said perhaps in that
podcast might be completely untrue
because the sources for our data
weren't well checked or double checked
but that's how we do a lot of our
podcasts
okay because that's what reflects
natural conversation
people make points where they have very
shaky ground for perhaps being
definitive about their opinion but it's
just what they've heard what they've
read and again
nowadays because most people's
information comes from the internet
there's a good chance it might be
complete crap but we just run with it
anyway we don't put in any disclaimers
other than don't
sue us because we don't have any money
but yeah
yeah i mean we'll we'll run with
anything i mean i don't think there's
any topics which we won't touch
the only one we had difficulty with we
tried to write a podcast on clowns
really and i spent two or three hours
actually researching
clowns and couldn't really find anything
which
would set the podcast in one direction
or another other than doing the history
of clowns you know going back to court
jesters and all this type stuff and even
going back to egyptian times
there was nothing really you could run
with to make it interesting
you know i mean you could be sitting
there and be like yeah i don't really
find clowns funny i hate them
i don't really find them scary blah blah
blah and that's
it yeah you know in terms of pop culture
that's
that's it you know most adults don't
find clowns funny and
they've been in a few horror movies
outside of that clowns don't really have
much
day-to-day touching of your yeah life as
such everybody knows what one is but try
and hold a conversation about clowns for
two minutes
uh uh modern family where one of the
guys is
right but so i'm not actually talking
about clowns right about people yeah you
dressed like a clown
and now i'm on to a different topic yeah
that's interesting uh so did you did you
guys say
did one of you say hey we should do
something on clowns and then you
couldn't find a path
way to do it did somebody was it a
listener that that
uh that wrote in or how did you guys how
do you guys come up with the
that topic in particular well i come up
with most of the topics
i do most of the pre-production work and
i sat down on for some reason i don't
know what triggered it it might have
been seeing krusty the clown on tv or
something
i thought oh yeah i'll do one on clowns
because we had done i can't remember the
clowns one
was before or after we did one on the
amish
and i thought well if i can get a
podcast out of the amish i can get one
out clowns but apparently not
so okay and actually i saw some amish in
the wild last week i went to colorado
and um it's the rocky mountains
and this coach pulled up and a whole
bunch of amish people got off some with
iphones so they're obviously cheating
um but yeah it's weird so i took i think
i actually took more photos of the amish
than i did of the mountains just because
it was surreal
i hadn't really kind of seen them in the
wild before other than like on
you know tv right yeah yeah
well you you've given me a you give me a
challenge with clowns maybe i can yeah
i'm gonna a thousand topics maybe
that'll be one of the the episodes that
i figure out and
maybe i'll have you on for that now i
think i think if i could get somebody
who's an actual clown a professional
clown
okay you know not one who's been
convicted for
you know pedophilia or something you
know get an interesting guest on
just a day-to-day life of a clown
because i know there's this
i don't know if it's this romantic type
image that
you know the face is painted smiling but
underneath they're really sad and all
that crap but
um i think i'd like them just to sit
there and be like
yeah it's just a job but i can't say i
enjoy it but it's easy and then you know
i put
some makeup on the face go you know
throw some
foam pies around for 30 minutes collect
my 200
check and then i go home yeah and i
think that's probably
maybe the same as people who play santa
at christmas you know they put the suit
on collect paycheck go home i don't
think they have any intrinsic link with
santa
right you know i think it's the same
thing with clowns and that's probably
why it doesn't have that much leg work
in it
i think we could have got together and
found a bunch of funny news stories on
clowns people dressed as clowns doing
ridiculous things
but i felt we'd probably done that too
much with other topics it would just be
maybe a photocopy of another podcast but
this time it's a clown
doing ridiculous things right you know
yeah well
i think the most popular the popular
version of that right or somebody that
it comes to mind when i think of clowns
i think of
the clown prince of crime who's the
joker right right you saw the
newer movie that came out with joaquin
phoenix yeah they explore it but i mean
it doesn't have much to do with clowns i
mean he does
play a clown which is kind of different
than some of the other takes on the
joker
um and that is it's for sure a more i'm
sure you've seen it
i'm gonna yeah you've seen it yeah but
it's
uh definitely the sad clown and and the
sad
demented clown and the sad demented
mental unstable clown uh but
i mean those are those are the i mean
i'm again i'm trying to rack my brain
for like
pop culture references and it's the
joker john wayne gate
and yeah maybe some some tv shows or
something yeah i can't really think of
any
well i think there's always been
something slightly sinister about
clowns which why
you know perhaps over this last five six
years
you know it's translated into a new kind
of horror movie genre
obviously stephen king's book it you
know had its first
major tv you know adaptations like
decades ago
but clowns have always had a bit of a
creepy thing to them even though they're
supposed to be this symbol of
you know mirth
as such i think when you go back to
their original
connections and even if you go back to
say i don't know you look at
what's that greek demigod pathos you
know one face
smiling the other one frowning and again
going back to this duality two aspects
of the same personality
but you're wearing a mask to really hide
what's going on underneath
you know with clowns i think like i said
there's always an uneasyness with them
but kids don't see it when you're a kid
it's like oh it's a clown it's somebody
dressed funny but they only start
becoming sinister and a bit scary when
you're growing to an adult where
normally
those type of things would be the other
way around you'd be like with a kid oh
there's no reason to be scared of that
yeah but they're not scared of a clown
but then you know they get 10 years
older and it suddenly becomes creepy you
see it
clown on the side of the road instead of
the kid laughing you're driving kind of
like all right i know i'm in a school
zone but i'm going to be going 60. yeah
yeah yeah wow no i i hadn't really
i hadn't thought of how that kind of
gets flipped because you're right if i
saw a clown stopped on the side of the
road
i'm probably not stopping to help them
change the tires right i don't think so
yeah versus you know if somebody's
dressed like a i don't know
uh a doctor or i know a firefighter or
something anybody else basically any
other costume i'm not thinking oh what a
weirdo but
it's the clown yeah i'm blowing right
past you there's got to be
easier ways of getting famous and being
the victim of some clown who's
raped and murdered you at the side of
the road so plus you know i'm figuring
if you can afford the clown outfit
you've also got some type of roadside
assistance service which you should be
calling in
rather than relying on random people to
stop and help a clown
change a tyre oh man success rate's
going to be low to be honest
it's going to be low gotta be pretty low
you probably go you probably go into it
i gotta get i gotta get triple a to come
help me because i'm not gonna be able to
do it
all right um well okay so clown episode
didn't work
right tell me your favorite episode so
far maybe not the best one maybe not the
one that got the most downloads but just
your personal
oh man i just i love this episode was it
a guest was it just you and
and your co-host going back and forth
well i think there's been a few
in terms of interviews we keep most of
them
pretty serious because we let the guest
drive it you know if it's the topic
which
might have some room for humor we will
kind of navigate
you know to various kind of ports of
humor just to kind of keep it
interesting because not every topic is
interesting we actually
had a guy come on who dug holes for a
living
and we before we had him on we thought
all right the questions we're going to
ask him kind of what's the deepest hole
you've ever dug if you know if you ever
dug down and
you know discovered something freaky
like you know hit a buried body
or come across something like what on
earth is this you know discovered a
dinosaur
yeah you know digging holes for oil so
anyway it turns out this dude who digs
the hole so he
digs like between 12 and 18 inch holes
and he tends to do it in people's
backyards if they're like
having a foundation for like a patio or
something put down
so that's probably on us we should have
done a bit more research
and because i could beat that guy we
didn't get i get lower than 18
oh my goodness we didn't uh yeah we
didn't discover the depth of his whole
digging until about five minutes into
the podcast
and it was like oh let's try and drag at
least 30 minutes out of
shallow whole digging so um
you know you went there do you have any
funny stories kind of thing
no not really oh my goodness now if you
actually go back listen to that episode
max and i we do actually run completely
to the point where not where the guest
is shut out but
we take control and try and steer it
to it's something listenable now that
episode still isn't great
yeah i wouldn't go back and listen to it
personally but um
you do get people who are a challenge
you think it's going to be an
interesting topic and it's really not
yeah and yeah but i think one of my
personal favorites had a guy
on called landon who's an aba therapist
for
you know children on autism spectrum
okay and he had worked with my son
and you know he was a really interesting
guy i mean i've had a hundred
conversations with him before about
steph
but you know him telling his story of
why he's involved in it his vision and
his understanding why he likes working
with kids
although it was a very personal issue to
me i found it a very interesting
you know topic as to why somebody would
go
that route because if you want to work
with kids it's not the easiest route
because you're not
seeing neurotypical kids you're seeing
kids which
you know internally and externally you
know
are going through various issues and it
can be quite heartbreaking
you know but you need people like that
in the world who will work with people
who
struggle yeah um you know to make the
world a better place i mean
you know you've got relatives if you've
got elderly relatives who are sick or
need care you need people
even though it's a heartbreaking
profession in a way
you know to be able to step up and not
break down
all the time in tears not be overcome
emotionally and so i think
i think that was probably one of my
favorite serious
serious interviews we did because it was
a very personal thing
and it opened my eyes to something which
i don't think i could do although i have
a good relationship with like
you know kids and stuff having worked
with them for close to 30 years
i think kids in any type of turmoil or
distress
i'm too sensitive to be able to work
with that i'd just be
i just come home and cry all night till
i fell asleep yeah
and then wake up and probably cry some
more but right yeah
well i got an interesting question not
on our list at all but
why do you think like occupations like
that or or people that work in hospice
care or
uh or mental health professionals people
that really do
have to do work that is i would say
significantly more
taxing maybe emotionally why do you
think that they're not
rewarded with higher salaries and things
like that like do you think it's just
they don't really generate revenue like
maybe you know the ceo of a
of a fortune 500 company that's
generating millions and billions of
dollars worth of revenue
because i think that most people and
society would say
man those people wow what a you know
what a servant even if you're not a
christian or even don't come in from
that standpoint you would say man
somebody that works with
um with children that are on the
autistic spectrum
like wow that must be a really special
person and so i guess my question is why
why don't we reward them more
financially why don't we see that uh why
don't we see that follow maybe the
the respect that's given to them just
generally well i think in
almost any occupation in the united
states and perhaps the western world in
general that
people are rewarded for the amount of
money their
occupational work brings in not
necessarily the
value socially of what they do people
talk about teachers
and they tend to be polarized in terms
of views of teachers are overpaid or
underpaid
and perhaps some of the more prominent
news stories
over the last few months where you have
people refusing to go back to school and
teach in person even though the data
regardless of your thoughts on how
danger cove it is
that the data says young people are very
little
danger there's more i think today
there's actually been more people
died as an adverse reaction to the
vaccine
at a young age than there have actually
died of covid at a young age
and so incredibly ironic so
you know young people are not at risk
and for a teacher to say well i don't
want to go back in the classroom because
i don't want to put myself at risk well
you know if you do believe in you know
the effectiveness of masks or the
covered vats in etc
there's got to be a point where you run
out of excuses that
you know what you're just lazy you don't
want to go back you know zoom education
is no way to get an education
the number there's actually been more
kids committed suicide
where either the notes that have been
left or the conversations they've had
with family members or friends that
you know when they've described the
depression from the isolation
encode then again young people who have
actually died from covets so for
this has been her horrific for kids
and for them to have you know pretty
much
their entire social life taken away you
know with school not being in operation
and then these teachers a year later say
no it's too early to go back
you know they've been sitting on the
backsides collecting the paychecks you
know they don't want to
do anything but the zoom calls they
don't want parents to be able to see the
zoom calls to see what they're teaching
and stuff and those type of teachers you
think kind of well yeah they're overpaid
because they're not doing anything but
then again you have these other teachers
who
you know they see a kid who's struggling
they go out of their way to try and help
that kid and they do that continually
for you know 20 30 years they make huge
difference in kids lives those type of
teachers yeah they're not paid enough
but
the problem is on a case-by-case basis
you know we don't have that ability to
sit down and be like oh yeah this
teacher is worth this this teacher is
worth that
now if by what the teachers did they
were bringing in sponsorship money
somehow
sure we figured out okay you know i
talked to little timmy's dad in second
grade and his
you know construction company is going
to build a new fence for the school for
free
and that teacher gets a ten thousand
dollar bonus because the school had you
know thirty thousand dollars set aside
to put
you know to pay for this fencing that's
the kind of model
throughout society basically how people
get paid the amount of money you bring
in the value you are to that company
reflects
the value in terms of money now that
doesn't reflect the social value of
somebody in the job they do
but that just happens to be a society we
live in you know you're paid for
what money you bring in people will
criticize
the ceo of kroger for
you know maybe taking home a 10 million
paycheck last year even though he
employs tens of thousands of people
yet the same people won't bat an eyelid
if beyonce makes 75 million dollars from
a
world tour where she employed 30 people
for four months
you know so i think people look at it
very differently with a certain amount
of bias
and it's it's a very
kind of fake sympathy in some ways i
think because it goes out the window
very quickly yeah um
so along along those same lines which
would you say is
more valuable would you say like the
social aspect so let's say
let's say somebody uh is you know has
all the influence
in the world because the community sees
them as valuable versus
uh an engineer that nobody knows about
but he makes
you know uh 20 million dollars a year
something
you know something very significant that
would set him aside from the rest of
society
i mean which which would you say is more
valuable that 20 million dollars without
maybe the notoriety or the the influence
or the person that has
you know all the influence in the world
in the community they're in well i think
people come from two different
viewpoints says the jealousy viewpoint
that if somebody's making more money
than you for doing something you
consider
less work or less skilled than there's a
certain amount of jealousy
which comes in they're equally
i think people when they observe
other people's lifestyles have a very
i guess dimmed view
of what people do or they take
i guess the description of what that
person does from what they see on tv
they don't really understand
the ins and outs of things you know i
mean imagine like a vet
okay people a lot of people think oh
yeah that's a nice job other than you
having to put animals down
but again that that wouldn't be a job i
could do i couldn't
be there and have a kid crying over
their dog i'm just to be able to put
down i'd be in tears all day long
doing it and it takes a special type of
person to be able to do that
but you think of the number of people
you know have pets probably almost
everybody you've ever known has had a
pet
yeah and at some point you know
obviously pets die
and you know having somebody who hate
who makes that process
easier for you you know keeping your pet
healthy and then when it comes time for
your pet
you know to be put down somebody makes
that whole transition easier
to me i mean that's a job i couldn't i
couldn't do
but i look at some other jobs and i
think well yeah i could do that
you know i sat down read a book watch
the youtube video i could do that now i
know that's kind of
underplaying the perhaps the amount of
work you know you need to do some jobs
but
generally i observe i look at some jobs
and think yeah i could do that yeah
you know and i think the value people
place like i said it's
it shifts people like oh dude i mean
during the pandemic you know people were
oh doctors and nurses deserve you know
so much more money for dealing with this
well
yeah it's a job for one right and
believe it or not
you know there are a lot more dangerous
things in the world of being a doctor
and a nurse than
covet but all of a sudden people like oh
now they deserve more money
you know what about the guy what about
the technician who's working in the
laboratory where they're trying to find
a cure for cancer and his entire job all
day long
you know maybe works 50 hours a week is
cleaning off slides clean out petried
issues making sure that room's spotless
so people
how is he not just as valuable as that
guy he's
technically maybe just a cleaner lab
technician or whatever
but the importance of what he does to
make sure you know laying the groundwork
that people can go in there and work off
the bat and have confidence what they're
working with is untainted
you know people like that have a great
value so i really kind of dislike
placing i guess
a value on what people contribute
especially when
i don't really understand perhaps how
they
how that wage is set i mean who sets
you know the going rate for you know
what a lab technician gets
is it the value they provide you know is
it
obviously people are better at cleaning
than others i mean if i go in there and
clean then you know ebola's going to
break out before lunchtime
you know so you get some people they
might be you know incredible
yeah at it so but the point is if i went
in there
as an entry level and i'd be paying i'd
be being paid the same amount of money
is somebody
went in there and did it and was awesome
at it same thing you know you think
musicians
i mean there's so many musicians who you
can listen to and think well this is
horrible
right but you know they're millionaires
many times over and then you've got you
know maybe
an indie artist or somebody you hear you
know when you're out at a restaurant you
think
this is really good and this person's
you know maybe being paid 20
for the hour yeah you know it's not a
case on what you bring to the table
it's really what you bring to the table
for other people which sets your wage
yeah no that's that's a great point it
it really is and and there's a lot more
factors than just
skill level right because like in using
musicians is a great example because
some of the greatest musicians
will never you know they won't have the
right marketing they won't have the
right
uh promoter they won't have the right
for whatever number of different
various factors they'll never be more
popular
even though their skill level is higher
than you know some of these
now especially with the the invent of
auto tune i mean
so many of these singers really you best
you just need a body
that is able to do all the things that
the people in the back are kind of
pulling
strings on and now you have a pop artist
right
um and you don't actually need vocal
talent which you would think would be
the
well who has the best vocal you you sit
around a table and you're
in a music studio and you're thinking
well how do we get how do we get more
how do we sell more records
well we need the best vocal artists like
that's not even what they're looking for
right they're thinking
we're going to do this map we're going
to create this star and all we need is
the person
who will be able to fit almost similar
to like a movie role right when you
when you script out a movie except this
is this is real life but you hear these
music producers
and music executives talk about this
that we're looking for a certain type of
person
and yet there's somebody at the
applebee's down the road that has more
vocal talent
yeah and i think that's that's a little
bit different between
i guess actors and singers because
right up perhaps into the 70s
for you to be a musical artist i think
you did actually have to have some
talent and be able to sing
sure there were a few novelty exclusions
to that
but if you were a singer you were
expected to be able to sing
okay but you know you take the early 70s
mid 70s
probably the pre-punk era
where it was more about the passion in
the music than perhaps
the quality of musicianship you take
punk as a whole and the new wave
movement which
followed you had a lot of front men and
front women in bands who
the band was personality driven and
attitude driven and lyric driven
and perhaps the ability of the guitarist
the lead guitarist and the singer
wasn't as great as perhaps in the past
but the character and identity of the
music
certainly carried a lot more weight in
terms of identifying with
listeners and perhaps splitting society
into genres
um for once people have the choice to
listen to one thing or another as
opposed to what you were presented with
right you know i think before music was
like okay we've got 12 different flavors
of milk here which one do you want
you had to drink milk the only
difference was it's a slightly different
taste and flavor whereas music then
split into being very very different
from each other yeah do you think like
it was just the
the advent of the
like the technology getting a lot better
and and maybe i mean the stones and the
beatles obviously
you know they they started incorporating
and they they carry a lot of the
uh i guess the the fame
for you know the beatles specifically
well they started doing sound that you
know nobody had heard before and they
were doing all these different
they were experimenting with different
musical styles you think it was them do
you think was technology do you think is
there a different factor that i'm not
even
putting in place well i think you know
using the beetles and the stones as an
example the beetles were presented as
more of a clean
cut type thing and the rolling stones a
little bit more rebellious and yet
now you look back and you read the
biographies and
you know make another band and they were
both the same in terms of living things
to excess
you know especially john lennon and
you know you know for the beatles and
keith richards probably with the rolling
stones
you know two people who led you know
pretty interesting lives
pretty deviant type lives but one was
presented in the media as
one way and you know they were wholesome
band the beatles went
which then you know the reality was
probably far from that i mean the
drinking the drugs everything else but
it was pretty much hidden
and it's really just the equivalent of
perhaps
you know the 90s version of backstreet
boys versus nsync
you know really it's the same category i
can't believe
the same you just split in the same
audience i can't believe we're comparing
them though i mean i know what you're
doing
but just in my mind i recoiled it but
it's a popularity
contest yes and the reasons might be
very trivial for like
you one over the other but i mean even
if you take the musical style you listen
to something by the beetles like helter
skelter
that says brash and archaic
as a lot of the stuff the stones did in
terms of style
and so i think the division between
beetles and the rolling stones was
kind of paper thin it was just how they
saw a market
somebody thought okay we're going to go
over the rebellious market we're going
to go after that
awesome market where you know the
beatles think mostly love songs
all those type things until they went
add a little bit
too much influence from psychedelics
um but you know i think nowadays
people want to find something they
belong to
and i remember when the smiths came out
you know we didn't have internet didn't
have anything else and you'd listen to
the smiths and
most people didn't really like them they
found them a bit depressing and it was
coming off the back of you know the kind
of new romantic
type movement with like duran duran
stand out ballet
you know flucka seagulls all that type
stuff where the music was all very
uplifting and all
you know almost kind of like glam pop
went from glam rock to glam pop glam
synth pop but you had the smiths
and it's very melancholy you could call
it depressing but
a lot of people kind of identified with
lyrics in those
songs and felt
that they didn't have anybody to talk to
those things about things were too
personal this was in the day where
especially if you're a guy you had to
suck it up if you're feeling depressed
well suck it up put on a smile
yeah put on the clown pain right yeah
that smile on regardless how you feel
underneath
and people didn't know there were other
people out there who felt like that
because you just didn't talk about it
yeah it was easy to get disillusioned
and stay disillusioned
and i think you had a whole generation
of people who stayed disillusioned their
whole life because they had no
outlet you know socially with friends or
family to talk about weaknesses
something like unrequited love can mess
up
two or three years of your life because
you're pining you know for somebody and
yet you don't tell anybody you don't
tell the target of that
you know love and people go through it
and they feel almost like they're freaks
like nobody else is going through it
and musical lyrics you know again with
the example of the smiths you found a
way to identify as like somebody's
singing my song and talking about how
difficult
this is and but then you're feeling like
this is truly a personal relationship
between me and this band and
these lyrics because they apply to me
and then you don't know but there's 10
other million people out there
feeling exactly the same way but with
the beauty of the internet
and social media people were able to
find each other
you know other than okay i'm going to go
to this and watch the smiths who knows
who's going to turn up and then you're
there among
30 other thousand people who feel
exactly the same way as you do and now
it's easy to find those groups
and live that type of inclusion 365 days
a year
now you can be yourself because you can
find somebody else to identify with
you know that opportunity didn't used to
exist and i think that's why there's
probably been more focus on mental
health over this last 10 15 years
because people more willing
to speak knowing that there's other
people suffering like
i'm suffering because what was the
benefit before about speaking up about
weaknesses other than perhaps showing
that
you've got weaknesses right you wouldn't
think it would help somebody else
yeah vulnerability wasn't seen as a
positive trait right right now you got
people like brene brown who's like
championing vulnerability and so now it
almost seems like there's almost this
olympics of
who can be the most vulnerable yeah i
think it's i think it's done
too far i mean i know i know people joke
about it
but both people on the left and the
right joke about this whole
nanny culture now where people need to
be kept in diapers until they're
you know 18 years old in a way
that you can't let them make their own
mistakes now i know
both you and i growing up you know we
made
mistakes and some of them were great
teaching points some things the teaching
points don't come out until years later
because
if you don't understand the motivation
of
why you did something perhaps that
learning point
doesn't come out until you do understand
why you did that thing
and i read a book maybe about
20 years ago and one of the most
frequent
things people all around the world say
at some point
and multiply multiple times during their
life is if i could go back in time
i would change or i wouldn't do this or
i would do that
and the truth is if you did go back in
time without the benefit
of that knowledge of that event you
would more than likely make that exact
same choice again because there was a
reason why you made that choice
what you think is something off the cuff
and just a random choice
isn't there's a reason you chose tails
you were always going to choose tails
now it might be a one in a thousand
there might be something but now you're
going into this whole alternate universe
what would have made it
suddenly turn to heads at that time but
you feel there's no motivation for you
choosing tales
but there might have been a hundred
different things which made you choose
tales
and you choosing that tales that one
night
may have led you to having that extra
shot of alcohol which
makes you drive home and you shouldn't
hurt when you crash you could have
killed somebody
and so something is insignificant as
tossing the coin and choosing
had a great deal of influence on it and
so you could say oh i could go back in
times i'd chosen heads well no you
wouldn't have you'd have gone back in
time and chosen tales
yeah well and and some of the ways that
we even know how memory works now right
and they
they did this uh i can't remember which
research group did it but they did it
with
using 911 and saying uh so like the day
after 9 11 they pulled in
something like a thousand different
people and they said give your your
recount of your experiences on the day
of 9 11. this is like 9 12
and like the week after that and so they
got pretty well right so people remember
usually yesterday and the day before and
those kind of things and even a week
you can have a pretty good memory of
what happened so they what they did was
they compared them they brought them in
a year later
and they tried to have them say like
what was your experience that day
compared it i think they did it five
years
and then at 10 years i believe and they
showed how and they would play it for
them at like the 20-year mark
they're playing this is what you said
the day of this is what you said
a year later this is what you said five
years later and what they realized was
your brain starts to take you know
it can't make a 100 clear picture of
what you remember that day
and so what it does is it pulls these
pulls these memories from other places
that you're not aware of and certainly
you know the researcher has no
idea but it begins to build these
stories and you believe they're true
and nobody can convince you of them
unless you know somebody says listen
here's your voice from the day after
saying what you did
but if you would ask that person you had
at the 20-year mark where were you
they said oh i well i walked out of the
room and i went left
and you're telling them no you don't
understand you actually went right and
so
i go down that point to say our our
brains i'm sure with some of this stuff
remember these different you know poor
choices or choices that we made
and we forget the reasons for why we
even made that choice in the beginning
because it didn't work out for us right
so we erase it or we take it as oh we
that was just a bad choice
rather than i bet if we went back you
know uh if we had a time machine went
back in the moment like you said
i think we would realize and not with
every choice right you can't just say
this is every single choice
but i think that play is a bigger factor
i think we remember
and our memory uh betrays us at times
yeah i think a certain amount of that is
self-protectionism
we all have things which trigger us
more than others and some whether it be
visualizations or
sounds stick with us more than us and we
tend to cut out things we find
uncomfortable
mostly on a subconscious level you'll
find your subconscious will rewrite your
memory of something to make it palatable
some experiences or memories can be so
extreme that your subconscious
tries to shut it out altogether and
anything which might
act as a trigger to bring back that
memory
um again your subconscious works over
time to try and
i guess soften that trigger so it
doesn't bring back certain memories but
it's funny you bring up this topic
because literally last night
talking earlier about my son who has
autism
he's going through a period at the
moment where on my phone
he's constantly going through the album
of his own photos right from when he was
born
and i've got about 3 000 photos and
videos on my phone of him
but i also have on a jump drive
i don't know maybe like about 500 photos
and videos which i copied onto the jump
drive and i plugged into the xbox and
actually show on the big tv
and recently he's been wanting to see
those videos and photos
on the tv and on the phone and sit there
and just kind of look
and i was trying to think why is he so
subtly obsessed
and it kind of came to me that you know
with his autism
because of the his sensory
needs and wants are very different to
ours
that he might find something overbearing
in terms of like say maybe the sound of
air conditioning that might be the
loudest thing and he can always hear
it even though you and i might not even
be able to notice it and so his memories
of a certain situation might be oh yeah
i remember sitting in that room
i could hear the air conditioning and
the light was very bright
now you and i might go sit in that room
like not be
particularly bright and we might not be
able to hear the air conditioning
but his memory of that is you know
different different than ours and so
when he went through his childhood his
early childhood having autism
his memories of certain situations are
more sensory based
and it's based upon how he felt that
time
you know what his senses took in and
another child a neurotypical child you
know without autism
his if he did exactly the same things
might have completely different memories
and recollections
and i came up with this theory actually
last night
that i think the reason he's now looking
at these photos and videos
is he's going back almost rewriting his
own memories because what he remembers
might not be accurate or might have the
wrong exaggeration or waiting on a
specific thing where a lot of the other
experiences
he might have completely ignored they
didn't take in and now he looks back and
it's almost like a new experience he can
see himself and be like
oh yeah i remember that toy over there i
remember this i remember this day
because of something completely
different of why he would have
remembered it before so he's almost like
going back and reverse engineering and
rewriting his memory seeing things how
it's you know how i saw it perhaps
through my eyes or how he would have
seen it through his eyes if he was
neurotypical and it's
kind of a bizarre thing but you can see
him when he plays videos over and over
he gets fixed perhaps on things which he
might not have taken in at the time
and so yeah that's uh we do remember
things differently but
i mean my biggest memory about 911 if
you go back to that
some people the image of the planes
crashing into the towers was the most
iconic memory from that day but you know
i've been in a war zone you know i've
seen people die i've seen planes crash
and stuff so to me
yeah as bad as it was it wasn't you know
i guess as
uh touching
i don't know what the right word is
because everybody
unless you were there were kind of
isolated from a bit and in some ways i
think
that made things almost a little more
difficult because
it happened in the united states of
america we're in a different state but
we were still watching it on tv in the
same way as somebody was watching it
on a tv in new zealand yeah you know
that it felt like part of our close
community but again here in texas i mean
i can't
remember how far away new york is at the
moment but you know we're still
it's still a great distance yeah
say hi hi what are you eating
i think many people remembered 9 11 in
different ways
dependent upon what affects them
a lot of people were very
shocked and still in shock to this day
at seeing the
sight of planes going into the world
trading center but
you know when you've been in a war zone
and you've seen planes crash you've seen
people die you get a little bit
desensitized to that
part of it i think the part which stayed
with me the most was perhaps a couple of
days afterwards and some footage on a
late
night news station of people putting up
posters of people who were still missing
who hadn't been
found and there was a group of maybe
half a dozen people pinning
pictures of kids wives husbands to this
small wall
and the camera zoomed out and it must
have been about 200 yards of water as
people just pinning
posters and missing people and that
impacted me more than
the visualization of you know the actual
planes hitting themselves just the loss
and the not knowing of people
you know around that that hit me more
than
the visual aspect of the actual day i
think that's what i remember more i
guess the actual emotional
and social aspect wow
yeah yeah i mean i remember it i was uh
12 i was in sixth grade science class
was
it was mrs roberts it was miss robert's
class right i can remember mrs jordan
coming she's the assistant principal
she comes through she says something to
her and you can tell i mean even when
you're 12 you can start to pick up on
the adults and you can you can tell it
was tense but you
had no idea right then she explains mrs
robert our science teacher
right sits here and explains to us tries
you know
the best as she can what just happened
and
the first thought that i'm thinking as a
12 year old is what's the world trade
center i don't even know what it was
i had no clue the impact um but then i
can
i can remember little things like going
to lunch and coming back from lunch and
some kid being like
yeah there's two planes that are coming
here to texas and i remember being like
what are they gonna hit in texas like
what are they gonna do
you know it's just these rumors so you
can only imagine what it was i can only
imagine what it was on
the adult scale but you know for kids
who have no compass like they just have
no idea that
there were certain kids that were
terrified i mean they were terrified
that planes were going to come
hit their house right and i'm thinking
like they're only going to hit things
that are important
and just this callousness toward i
didn't feel that i mean i didn't feel
like oh my gosh people died i
i just didn't get it yet i mean as even
as a 12 year old
i mean so those are like my memories
around it are very much
more like i think we just as a
as an american society i would see you
know we see things like while people
coming together and uniting around it
and
there have been some definitely some
opposition to president bush at the time
but he was so
new that it was kind of like this and
then
it seemed like the world the world the
world for the most part but definitely
the united states kind of coalesced
around this idea with
uh yeah with with coming together
and it's interesting i mean you can take
this as either any way that you would
like tristan from here because i'm
throwing a whole bunch of stuff at you
but it seemed
i kind of thought covid was gonna be
that for this generation and it seems
like it's not
it does not seem like something that's
coalesced together it seems like we've
become
more divided more uh
what's the word but more polarized i
don't know so you could take that any
direction that you'd like from there
yeah i feel
if you took 30 seconds of footage from 9
11
perhaps you made a montage right
you could communicate effectively with a
little
narration to perhaps a kid in 100 years
time and they would understand the
impact
perhaps that would have on society i
think with covid
because it was heavily politicized right
from the word go and we have had
information which was written in stone
one month and then apparently
we find out it's written in silly putty
you know it's not
it's not accurate and
certainly young people have been least
affected
by it and the majority of people don't
perhaps know anybody who's died or has
been seriously
sick with it i had covered for
maybe an evening i wasn't sure whether
it was allergies or not
but tested positive for the antibodies
and hey you had covet
you know my son had it my girlfriend had
it my son's mom had it
and you know nothing i mean it was
really really nothing it didn't impact
us at all
and we don't know anybody who's been
really sick with it i know
tons of people have had it but
everybody's
just had the kind of mild cold symptoms
really
so you know it hasn't had such a
widespread
impact on everybody and so because
everybody has a completely different
experience
i don't think it has that unifying
factor where you could just show perhaps
like i said the images from the world
trade center with some narration
probably show that to any kids in any
country in the world
of a certain agencies or kids and they
would see that
and you know they would understand what
type of impact that would have
you know it's visually disturbing and
you can understand the aftermath
now in terms of damage i think it's very
difficult
for younger people and you said you were
12 at the time to understand
truly what terrorism is because it was
never an attempt to kill as many people
as possible
it would have been a lot easier to have
smuggled a bomb into a sports stadium
you know crash the plane into a stadium
while the game's going on
you know why not go while the yankees
are playing you know
so it wasn't about loss of life it was
about destroying
previously untouchable things like the
pentagon
or iconic things such as the world trade
centers that we can strike at the heart
of you know western civilization and
affect the things that matter
you know loss of life you have to
remember you know the united states had
been through
two world wars in the previous century
and had massive loss of life
over a longer period perhaps you know in
vietnam as a lot of
loss of life and so you know lives
when you put them into large numbers
become less meaningless than when
they're in lower figures if you say like
nine people
you know died in a fire that has more
impact
than 30 000 being people being
killed in perhaps a country in a you
know landslide or something
right you know that once numbers get so
large it desensitizes you your mind
can't cope
with or can't break down that amount of
individual suffering so you group it
together and then you don't identify
with something once it becomes in such a
large group
all the individualism kind of goes away
you forget
that's 30 000 individual stories it just
becomes one story and that story is
about a landslide that killed a lot of
people
right it's interesting you say that
because like using that as an example
like the death of kobe bryant
last year about about 18 months ago now
because there were eight there was
eight people there was the pilot there
was his daughter and then you know
five other i think it was young girls
that were basketball players
um and i mean for a lot of reasons that
had a lot of impact but i think because
it's interesting that you say the small
number because i thought that i was like
man it's really only like eight or nine
people and it's interesting because
when i was young too i had to speak to
the other point
uh one kid his name was dakota he was
like
well why didn't they hit three mile
island like that's a nuclear thing that
could have like you know blown up why
didn't they why didn't they crash planes
into that
and that's the way i thought of it i was
like yeah why did they go i mean 3 000
people that's a lot but
that's i thought the same thing well
texas motor speedway holds 250 000
people
but it was more about the symbolism
right it was more about
the i didn't understand terrorism and i
remember my you know i'm trying to
understand it as a 12 year old
uh and i think you know it took years
before i was like
oh this is why it's not necessarily the
numbers
yeah i mean i think if you read
something like the art of war
you understand terrorism
as a tool to try and achieve
something because if they had attacked
something like three mile island
the retribution would have been on such
a scale
you know it doesn't matter how you try
and spin it
you know to your populace that hey we
attacked america we gave america a
bloody nose but when america turns
around and drops
you know three atomic bombs on you in
retaliation for attacking three mile
island and wipes out 50
of the population it doesn't matter how
much spin or how much pr
you know you have on your news channels
the fact they've just wiped out half
your country be like yeah we probably
better not do that again you know it's
not as
you don't count that as a victory giving
the giant a bloody nose it's like yeah
and they're all cheering but when the
giant comes and stamps out your entire
village to death
it doesn't feel quite so much as a
victory and so you know people perhaps
you know misunderstand terrorism as an
objective as
what it's trying to achieve it's
my new victories to
continue a power hold in those countries
a lot of the time like hey look we
we can do this we can strike anybody
anytime we want
which again it might be true in a
respect
but as fanatical as some
of these terrorists are they're also
smart enough to realize there's only so
far you go
before you know you can either poke the
sleeping bear too much
yeah well and they only have as much
firepower right because the ski that was
a scary thing everybody was like well
what if one of these guys gets a nuke or
what if what if iran develops the
program well again that's not
um not something difficult
getting old of you know plutonium
uranium making a dirty bomb
is not a difficult thing in today's
society i mean anybody can go online
and pretty much build anything as long
as you have
what you need and certainly you'd think
if china hated us as much as the press
try and make out
that they would have financed a rogue
country or individual
you know it's not difficult to say take
somebody who's dying of cancer who may
be in their 50s
and they have a poor family and
somebody comes to you from an
intelligence agency of a country like
china and says hey look
we know you're dying anyway strap this
bomb to yourself we're gonna get
get all the papers sorted out you go to
this country you blow yourself up in a
stadium
we promise you we'll take care of your
family we'll make sure that your family
is given enough money so that you know
your children your children's children
all your relatives are all going to be
taken care of that would have happened a
thousand ten time
ten thousand times over if that was
truly the aim
you know of a country like china or
russia to do damage to the united states
i mean they could
pollute the water system they could make
sure that
nobody would feel confident enough to go
to a shopping mall
or do anything if they really wanted to
but they understand that the
consequences of retribution
again you can only push it so far and
what might seem like
a major incident like 9 11 it certainly
was a message to the rest of the world
like
united states aren't untouchable
but that was probably as far as you
could push it i mean we did go
we did retaliate with a kind of
immediate somewhat war
if you could call it a war but now i
think most terrorists
are part of a more
insular closer to home type plan than
really
you know going for world domination i
mean they realize that you know just
hitting the world trade centers
america's not going to be forget it then
you know we'll turn
you know we'll suddenly follow islam or
your sect of islam whatever it is
um yeah it's and you know what's been
interesting is
you know a lot of the anybody that was
speaking
against the united states going to war
or anybody that was saying well
this is a result right it got you know
you talked about the pr people in the
spin
well this is a result of colonialism
this is a result of the united states
you know in in foreign affairs and
they're doing this and and now we have i
mean
right now as we're recording this we
have this massive pull out where
uh president bide is pulling our troops
out
and as quickly as we're pulling out the
taliban is sweeping in and i mean we we
see it they're taking back
all of the control that we had while
we're there and that and then it becomes
i'm interested to hear your uh to take
this in a little different direction
i mean you coming from england you guys
i mean if colonialism was a thing right
you
you guys had the kingdom that's right
the earth yeah and so how do you
i guess how do you balance you know the
united states influence
as a protector of innocent people
in afghanistan but also saying well we
have a responsibility
to our folks here at home um and you
know and and
like to your point it's not about the
loss of life because i think it was like
22 people have died
in the last year total like in you know
2020 that died in in afghanistan and so
it's not about oh we got all these boys
dying overseas
but it's more about the idea that hey
we're pulling them out
so that we don't continue if i'm
understanding right what he's saying
well we don't want our influence
there we don't need to be there they can
rule themselves
and so i guess what's the what is the
balance between you know that
isolationism
and setting our own house in order and
still standing up for the rights of
people that are
in these kind of countries well i don't
think first of all you're ever going to
please everybody
um you know usually using a sports
reference and one reference i
like to use especially in regard to
soccer when you're coaching is that
when you divide teams up and you give a
kid a vest
right you have this vest which you've
bought from the store or online and you
give it to the kid and
most of the time it doesn't fit because
it's that one size fits all
but what one size fits all more accurate
would be one
size fits nobody because they're always
going to be people who are too tall too
short too that too thin
it's never really going to fit ideally
and so one size fits all really does
become
it disenfranchises more people than
whatever but you can live with it and i
think america's role in the world as
long as it's not too extreme
that the rest of the world
i guess puts up with it because they
don't want to get involved for one
i think they see the mess in the middle
east
and realize that if it goes unchecked
certainly three or four
rogue nations getting hold of you know
the capacity to be able to build nuclear
weapons is unsafe even if you're a
country like switzerland which
tends to keep neutral through everything
but the thing is if
you know if i bombed your apartment
complex across the road it's not going
to not have an effect on you
and it's the same thing with countries
you have to understand that
if your neighbor in a country which is
the enemy of somebody else then you're
going to get
you're going to be affected one way or
another and so the rest of the world
they like to say oh america's a big
bully it gets involved in foreign policy
where it should
shouldn't but secretly they kind of
welcome it because they see the need for
it
but either don't have the strength or
influence themselves to do it
or they just too scared because
you know not every country has the
ability to be able to fight a dirty war
and we've found out
right going back through from vietnam
you know right up to date in afghanistan
fighting dirty wars is a long drawn-out
process with
very little victory to celebrate
you know when you hear on the news that
oh we killed 30 taliban
commanders people don't understand what
scale and what
that means i mean so we killed 30 it
would have killed 50 what difference
would that have made it would have only
killed five
what does that make and it's hard to
measure success
yeah and people traditionally have
measured wars by either you've won or
lost them
and all right the war is over we're
bringing everybody home
was that a victory i don't know i don't
know you could count
afghanistan as a victory that was an
area of the world which has had a power
vacuum which
everybody whether it be tribes uh
russian interference or us going over
there everybody's tried to fill that
vacuum but it's never worked i think
afghanistan
is one of those places in the world
where it is tribal and you're always
going to have tribes fighting and there
will never be peace because the people
who actually
indigenous to that area they've come
from a tribal history they used to be in
tribal i don't think there's anything
just going to
unify those people because there's
hundreds if not thousands of years of
bad blood
you know yeah it's it's very different
than
i think we've grown up i'll just say for
myself i mean i've grown up in a
the idea of a nation state is just the
way that people i just assumed oh that's
how they organized themselves oh i'm an
american this period
you know this group of people is this
but even like using a country like
germany
where like yes they're all german but
you have like the kingdom of bavaria or
you have like
hundreds of different identities yeah
even in there and then you go well
take it to afghanistan who like they
don't
nobody there is saying like i'm i'm from
afghanistan like that's
that's where i see my identity they see
themselves right like you said like a
tribal identity yeah
and so they don't fit in the boxes that
uh maybe maybe you could say the west
but let's let's just say the map makers
for black and better term the people who
draw
maps like and say oh well all these
people now identify
you see this with the kurds um in iraq
and
uh but yeah i think it's hard for us to
understand that because we just assume
i'll just say for myself i guess i just
assumed growing up
oh well they see themselves that
afghanistan those people are the bad
guys that's just how i saw it i didn't
see
well osama doesn't see himself as a
leader of afghanistan he sees himself as
a leader
of of more of an idea and more of a
tribal
uh chief rather than a president right
yeah do we have i mean maybe i don't
know maybe i'm
way off in the weeds but it doesn't seem
like we have good categories and so we
can't really
we westerners can't see that and
understand it maybe
or maybe i'm off maybe a that doesn't
make it well i think we felt
part of the pressure on the world stage
especially when it comes to
foreign policy is that we're taught in
the western world from a very
young age that if you see something
which
you perceive as injustice that you're
almost just as bad as the perpetrator if
you don't get involved in trying to stop
it
and america as a nation i feel
you know there are people who feel we
shouldn't get involved under any
circumstances unless it's a direct
attack on our soil
but the majority of people feel like we
should be standing up for
you know the innocent the afflicted if
we
what we think we can clearly see as a
victim that we need to go and confront
the bully and either
you know give them a hard enough warning
so that they don't do it again or
completely remove the bully
you know from existence and there is
that
i think it's something which we all grow
up with because that's what we're taught
that you know if you see injustice
then you know if you do nothing then
you're just as bad or maybe
even if you're not as bad you can't come
out of it with any type of credit
just because you didn't get involved in
the bullying yourself doesn't make you
any better a person if you stood by and
watched that person getting bullied and
so
i think we grow up with that in our
psyche and i'm not sure
outside of the western world what other
cultures if they grow up with that type
of thing
i don't understand what it means to
grow up within a rational hatred
which has been preached you entirely by
media and propaganda to the point where
you never question it
but then we could turn around and be
like okay well why do people
you know have a mistrust of russia or
china i mean we haven't gone to war
against either
country yet we had a cold war but that
was more like you know a couple of had
an argument and not talking to each
other
yeah you know it wasn't really a war war
but
you know our propaganda in the west did
enough to make us mistrust
china and russia and you know we accuse
them of human rights violations but we
put the microscope on ourselves in our
own history whether it be
you know from where i'm from in england
or you know here in the united states
it's not like we're innocent
of you know yeah definitely not
you know throwing our aggression around
the world and
i guess looting the resources when it
suited us
so yeah it's um yeah it's difficult i
don't think there's any right or wrong
answer about interventionalism
certainly if something happens and we
didn't get involved
there's a certain weight of individual
guilt and national guilt
if that thing then gets worse so it's
like well okay we could have prevented
it
but then obviously you're gonna meet the
other side of people being like we
shouldn't get involved it's not our war
it's not our place
i don't think there is a right or wrong
answer i think most recently
we saw this with syria right civil war
starts about 10 years ago 2011
uh it's clear assad is bashar al-assad
like he is
he's obviously been a tyrant over his
people i mean
maybe maybe not i'm lebanese and my dad
is from lebanon
and uh we won't get into all that but
syria played a major role
in oppressing the lebanese people for a
long time so obviously i'm i'm coming
from a big place of bias here when i
talk about
assad specifically but even on the world
stage
once you know president obama said you
know he drew up
drew on quotation marks drew a red line
and say well if chemical weapons are
used
now i'm going to do something and then
there wasn't the response
and then it was like well should we
shouldn't we and it was like
you know it seemed like this weird dance
up and again i
i don't have the right answer
but it seemed like well what is the
world's responsibility
when we clearly see somebody doing
something and you're right there there
isn't a clear-cut
answer it's like well how many people do
they have to kill before we call it
genocide and the u.s tried to
define that but i yeah i don't have a
good
answer i mean what what is the
responsibility of a country
right where we do have resources we do
have influence
well i think perhaps you know the united
nations if it fulfilled
the role that it
said it was set up for
there would be no need for
interventionalism from countries like
the united states but the united nations
are like a paper tiger
theoretically they have all this power
because they have representatives from
every country in the world
at a debate table but the un
outside of perhaps advisory
powers doesn't really carry any weight
the united states doesn't need the
united nations i don't know
really any country on earth that really
needs the united nations because it
doesn't give the smaller countries a
voice they're very rare
they're not on the important security
councils and trade councils
um it's like being invited to a seminar
where you never get the chance to speak
or do you
you know give your opinion but you're
supposed to feel valued just because
you're in the room but
the end of the day there's no difference
between you're sitting at home and
listening to the same people talk just
being in the room doesn't change
anything
but my experience of the united nations
you know going back to the yugoslavian
civil war
i was there uh with the military and
yeah and uh bosnia herzegovina and just
south of sarajevo
a kind of military intelligence role and
the u.n basically allowed genocide to
occur
they the rules they placed on their
peacekeepers and the movement of the
peacekeepers you know they moved them
around like a game of chess where they
didn't want their own
pieces to be taken and
it was yeah i mean it was complete mess
i mean you take the
genocide in rwanda uh
cambodia anywhere around the world the
united nations has done nothing
outside of issuing statements of
condemnation and the peacekeeping
forces are always put in
visual places which have no impact
you know the uh bounties on the blue
helmets the u.n and
because nobody's going to retaliate the
united nations don't have
an army as such where if somebody
you know bombs you know and kills 200
united nations
peacekeepers what they're going gonna do
nothing they're not gonna do anything
yeah you know you bomb 10 us troops
we're going to come in there and
retaliate and do something about it the
united nations they're pretty much
toothless in that respect and
you know i don't feel that having a few
countries
having influence around a table
at the united nations has any better
outcome
for the world than if the united nations
didn't exist
you know i think it's all the united
nations are
handling it it's like it's like a bear
looking after your baby i don't i don't
feel that confident
about well i'm not even a bear i'd say
it's more like a jackal because the
bear's quite a majestic strong animal or
can fend for itself whereas the jackal
sister
you know eating road kill a lot of the
time i mean they can be aggressive but
yeah i just don't see the value of the
united nations really don't but that's
the same with a lot of world
organizations you know the world health
organization i mean it's so
so corrupt yeah um you can't trust
anything they say
it's funny how again that's been
politicized during the pandemic you know
people like oh you need to trust the
world health organization but at the
moment um
world health organization and the cdc
are in direct
loggerheads over something at the moment
i read it yesterday but i can't remember
exactly what it was and it's like
well look they don't agree so who do you
follow do you follow the who you do
follow the
cdc because i remember when this
pandemic first came out
and you know the world health
organization said yeah it can't be
transmitted from human to human
right uh then there was the whole masks
won't do anything because the size you
know the micron size of the virus will
get into your eyes even if it doesn't
get
you know your nostrils through your
mouth and will get through most most
masks anyway or
you know if it's on surfaces then again
the mass is going to be useless um
so yeah it's it's been difficult going
through this not having anybody you can
really trust
because you don't believe anybody
doesn't have a motive
behind it and it you know i'm a
conservative
mainly fiscally than anything else
but i didn't really trust the left or
the rights
you know version of things during it i
know it's i think you can see that
certain people have used it for their
own advances
but in terms of the moses to lead us
you know across the wilderness there
certainly isn't anybody not any
politician not any medical body which
i would trust to be that moses i'd just
watch and see if moses
got there safely before i'd follow him i
think
yeah it's well it's interesting that you
say that
because i i would say
strategically not speaking politically
or anything but if i was just
what do i know the 31 year old so i can
i can figure it all out right
um but if if president biden
wanted to bring a lot of um
what's the word i'm looking a lot of
confidence uh for those that have
not been vaccinated i feel like
the strategic move would be give a lot
of credit to president trump
who like did so much work on the front
end right right to say
because then well anybody that doesn't
trust you they probably trust him
probably right that not everybody falls
into that but yeah the majority of
people would say they trust one of those
two men
so if you're just thinking strategically
and if the goal is
we just need to get this shot you know
we need to get the jab into as many
people as possible
why not give credit to the guy who did
move the ball forward
and you basically kind of picked it up
and and yes and
both guys i think if you're if you see
that as a valuable thing
of what you know of getting the vaccine
out there and certain people don't
see that as well that's not valuable i
don't see a lot of value in it but
if you do it seems like strategically
that would be the move
but i think the polarization says we
can't give him any credit for it
because then there will be those on our
side who knock us
and the people on that side that we want
to influence they probably still won't
trust us
anyway right but i think the people in
the soft middle would go well if both
sides are sitting here and they're
actually working together on this
i could probably get behind it versus i
mean i think there's people
maybe you and i and some people that
would agree with us that would go well
i actually would be more worried about
it if both sides are agreeing and trying
to
you know push one certain agenda
on us i don't know if you have any
thoughts on just the of that
strategically and
maybe the polarization and if that is
more important if us being in our camp
being right is more important than
actually accomplishing the things that
we
you know were for lack of a better term
hired but
elected to do well i think obviously the
polarization plays a
role but common sense went out of the
window pretty early on
with a certain proportion of society who
wanted to be told
how to think where to walk how to eat
and you still have these people who are
driving around in cars by themselves
double mast
because you can't be too careful but
don't use any common sense or spend five
minutes
to research on the internet and i'm not
talking from political websites and
opinion websites but actually the
science behind
you know transmission of any type of
infectious disease especially
respiratory
ones that there are certain
things you can do which will lessen your
chances of getting it
and there are certain activities you can
do which will increase your chances of
getting it
but there are certainly some things you
can do which make no difference
whatsoever
yet there are still a lot of people in
that holding pattern of doing things
which make no difference whatsoever
and it's because of political reasons
it's not because it has any practical
reasons any helpful reasons and in terms
of the vaccination
you know when you've got one party which
spends most of its lifetime
projecting this my body my choice and
then all of a sudden wants to
not force but getting close to it in
some of the language
you know force everybody to take what
by any definition of any other period in
history would describe this
as a experimental vaccine
that it's become
a political thing oh you're not
vaccinated you know you must be you know
republican or conservative or
you know this person's driving they've
got two masks on and a
you know beekeepers outfit they must be
a democrat
and you know when you go out towards the
edges
those characterizations are true
you know you mentioned something earlier
about
you know average life expectancy okay
and i can't remember that whether this
was on mike or off mike
but i think it was awesome i think it
was off might be you talking about
average life expectancy in the time of
jesus and
you know when you take out all the
people who died
because of disease malnutrition
uh people basically killing them
and you take out you know the people who
have
lived to abnormally long ages and you
actually get that middle
perhaps 60 percent the
yeah you can have maybe the average life
expectancy was around 60
right but you take
certain states in the united states to
say oh the life expectancy is only 64.
but you know perhaps if we use an
example of say somewhere like chicago
right if you've got
even 10 people under the age of 25 being
shot
dead each weekend and you'll count on
those in the statistics
you know just one person maybe being
shot dead at 17 years old
has an effect if you group them in with
another nine people of a similar age it
affects the average life expectancy even
though for those other nine people
it has no effect you're trying to find a
correlation which you then apply to
everybody
when in fact you have to treat almost
everybody like an individual because if
you're not making the same
life choices you're not in the same
geographic clary you don't have the same
struggles then
saying the average white american male
has a life expectancy of 77 years
doesn't really mean anything because you
can make choices today
and not commit suicide but you can make
choices today which will end your life
tomorrow
absolutely you can make lifestyle
choices today which may elongate
your life for another 10 or 15 years bar
in something
outside of your control something
unforeseen so
life expectancy is a bit difficult when
you throw it in there but
i think it's a good example to use when
you take popular opinion that
you can't just get rid of the five
percent either side so you take politics
you think all right five percent
radicals on the
far left five percent radicals on the
far right the problem is you then have
the people who are influenced by those
radicals or perhaps
share some of those ideologies and
really you have to perhaps get rid of 15
or 20
in either on either side and take that
middle 60 to get a true representation
on what perhaps an average which might
apply to the majority of people is
because you know i've got friends who
were interested in the whole kind of cue
movement
thing yeah and
to me i looked at it as a bit of a larp
you know a live-action role-playing
thing because there were some elements
of truth
in terms of information into change from
you know documents which
were released from whistleblowers things
which came out which
the american public at large
weren't really aware of but people tried
to tail those bits together
and again like you mentioned earlier
about your friend who has this
feeling that you know this whole deep
state thing that
the dice you know loaded before you even
enter the game which is
which i mean it is true it doesn't
matter whether you're black white
who you are it's loaded because there's
always going to be barriers to entry
sure uh and that can come from anything
from just simple favoritism i mean if
you know two people come for an
interview and there's somebody who
supports the same soccer team as me
or if somebody comes in and they're
wearing something i don't like you have
an automatic bias i don't think it's so
deep people like to blame something like
racism
or sexism but sometimes it's something
far more
shallow which just makes that choice
it's not an
inherent you know dislike towards a
whole section of people it's just
something which
sets you off but now it seems like every
reason has to have this
deep reason for why it was said done or
made and
they try and choose the worst reason for
what it might possibly have been
and then people like oh well i don't
want to be like that and so people end
up conforming so they don't
stand out you know they don't get
accused of things which never even cross
their mind and it's a dangerous time in
politics
not just at the political level but even
people
at the peasantry level people are afraid
now to say something in case it comes
back and bites them in the backside
they're afraid to lose their job because
they post it on facebook that they
didn't like a particular person
yeah you know with a this is the first
time in the world this situation has
existed and so instead of
really bringing up a whole
social group which should be free to
share ideas
and we evolve through these shared ideas
what it's done is given the opposite
effect and people now are just shutting
up
because they don't want to get in
trouble and it's gone almost as bad to
living in a communist regime where you
don't want to speak out against anything
in case you get dragged off in the
middle of the night now i know that's
an extreme example but people are
feeling it's not
too far from that because symbolically
you lose a new job you're losing your
income not being able to take care of
your family
over the long term that's worse than you
just being taken off and just being
arrested and questioned for one night
yeah you know you they can basically
shut your life down and completely ruin
it and use in your family's
livelihood because you expressed an
opinion yeah well
it's interesting you say that because
i've had friends that have said like are
you worried like you're doing you're
doing a podcast like you're putting your
your voice recorded for anybody first of
all to either manipulate
or or they can just pull a clip and they
can you know 50 years down the line they
can say oh this is who you are
right and they said are you worried
about that or i've had people that have
said hey i want to have you on i've said
i'd like to have you on to discuss this
topic and they are
legitimately scared they're like i can't
discuss that topic
right because or maybe i'll discuss it
but i can't discuss this part
and it's not for any you know
intelligence or anything like that it's
literally simply well i'm scared that my
social credibility
and i may lose my job if i express a
certain idea
you know i would say that's on both
sides i have liberal friends that would
say that hey if i say
i support you know this person my my
more conservative
friends here in texas will automatically
you know disown me or vice versa or i
have
you know friends that would on the right
hand side that would say if i do that
it'll sound like i'm i don't know
whatever
just put the easy term oh it'll sound
like i'm racist which is
the worst i mean you can't be called
anything worse than a racist now in
today's
right um even though again 90
something percent of the country would
say racism is a
bad thing i really truly believe that
and yet
it gets thrown out there and you know
for a multi
you know there's there's so many
different factors that could go in but
uh the point i guess i'm making is
people are legitimately scared of these
things and they're scared to the point
that they
they won't even come on here on on a
podcast that how many people i mean
how many people are listening to and
what impact will it actually have
yeah we've we haven't
tried to be too careful on our podcast
in terms of what we say because
it was pretty much communicated early on
that what we say is mostly
tongue-in-cheek
and don't take it seriously yeah and
we will say things which if you took
them out of context
and if you applied them widely as this
is what we believe
then yeah you could come up with some
pretty bad stuff
from some of the things we've said i
mean we don't
you know involve too many racial
conversations and things but certainly
cultural
ones we will will be like you know what
is india worship cows and
things like this and on some platforms
that might be even considered a racist
thing just to raise that question you
know why well why shouldn't they have
you had a problem within his worship
no you know i mean you don't tell me
it's any worse than western kids worship
in tiktok
yeah um no so i mean i don't have any
problem but i'm also not
so bludgeoned down that i don't notice
differences
growing up right from my teens
you know probably until now i mean i've
had a mix of friends from
you know all over the world different
colors different skins and it never
crossed my mind
to put a label on that person in terms
of how i would treat them because of
where they came from or the color of
their skin to me
you're either an a-hole or you're not
yeah you know there's no guarantee
you can come from the most conservative
christian family
and just be an absolute jerk you know
you can be a complete
atheist of you know any racial
origin and be a fantastic selfless
awesome person and so i've always taken
people
you know to see them and well not see
them but as you know i experienced them
but it seems now like if you criticize
somebody and they just
happen to be of another culture or just
happen to be of a different skin culture
sorry skin color that they decide
your actions or words are based upon
that person's skin or not based upon
their personality and they decide that
you said that or did that because of
that person's skin culture sorry skin
color i don't wanna keep saying
skin color or culture and
we don't abide by that rule on the
podcast i mean we will say if it's a
person we don't care what color
they are where they come from they've
done something stupid we'll call it out
if they've done something awesome we'll
call it out you know we don't have any
differentiator
you know yeah yeah it's and it's it's
interesting because
i i don't know
may get in trouble here even even trying
to make this comparison but
uh we talked about 9 11 earlier i mean
life for
like my family got very different after
9 11.
yeah um my dad owned a gas station he
closed on a gas station september 1 2001
in rural in boyd texas so very like
rural
uh yeah rural texas and i can say
his first 10 days versus the time that
he owned that business after
got very very different and versus while
people may have some ignorant ideas
in in rural america they have some very
ignorant ideas in urban america too
sure but but the
yeah but things just changed and i would
say they changed in some
cases with some people they looked at
arab people
as a monolith first of all they right i
mean the difference here but
they looked at arab and muslim and they
put the two together so if you're aaron
you must be a muslim
not sure doesn't always doesn't always
track
um but i mean things as simple as going
to the airport i went to the airport we
visited lebanon in
in the summer of 2001 and the even just
internationally traveling was very very
different
yeah then than it is now
so i think but here's what i would say
but it is also okay
to point out hey all of those hijackers
19 or 21 of them i can't remember the
specific number
but all of them were arab and they were
from arab
countries well most of them from saudi
arabia are in terms of the power
which were issued um but again there's a
lot of conspiracy theories behind that
in terms of well they could have come
from any
country and you know just happened to be
issued sell
saudi arabia passports i mean it's not
hard
i don't know how hard it has always been
i would actually say it's probably
it used to be easier in the past because
there were less
ways you could check the validity of
certain papers and issuance before
certain networks you know came along and
um you know between nations being able
to exchange information travel
information
uh you know criminal
you know pasts etc and so certain
countries have shared this information
and we've made it more difficult for
terrorists to travel
but once you're outside of that
you can pretty much as long as you have
the money i mean you could get
you know yemenis you know passport
tomorrow you know if you had like 400
and you could go you know to the gate at
jfk in new york and they wouldn't be
able to tell whether it was a fake or
not
certainly from looking at it and they
might run it through the system but the
person who bought that past
you know passport from might also know
somebody who works
in the passport issue in office who
might have put it in the system
legitimately for you and so nobody would
know who that person is whether they're
a terrorist
who they are so i don't think there's
any barriers to prevent anybody
you know coming in and doing what they
want outside of perhaps our sleuth our
detective
um chances of eventually
reverse engineering and finding where
this person came from who financed it
what was really behind it
that's where the risk lies i guess of
it's not that you can't get away from
the app but you're going to find out who
was pulling the strings at the end of it
you know and then that retribution comes
along now in the case of saudi arabia
so what that they all came from saudi
arabia you know you could probably find
in
i don't know north tarrant county if you
looked hard enough and you could
actually find them maybe 30 radicals who
would do the same thing
if they had the opportunity in the
funding right you know so you can't
point at country and say oh yeah
everybody from saudi arabia is a
terrorist everybody in iran is you know
a terrorist and they all hate america
and want a new kit
you can't say the thing about you know
people in china because outside of the
ccp
you know we don't know what the average
chinese person thinks about the west you
know we're taught that two billion
people hate us and so we need to be very
scared of china
but that might be the furthest thing
from the truth at the moment it seems
like there's more people
in america who hate america than you
know voices coming from china
so i mean i think it's a very difficult
thing
free speech it seems to only work
one way and that works in the way
whoever's steering the ship
you know you can encourage people to
drive towards the destination you're
already going to
but if you have any let's try sailing
over there
they quickly quell and shut down that
dissenting voice you've just got to
enjoy the trip and
when you get to the destination where
you can walk to that place you wanted to
go
to because we're not taking you there
and i think i don't know what's going to
make it any better it's either going to
get to such an extreme that
almost everybody rejects it or we're
going to split and just go to
completely separate ways because
i can guarantee if you sat somebody down
the other side of the table from
you know perhaps upstate new york or
northern california
they'd have perhaps more in common with
us
than say somebody who lives in south
dallas
in terms of their political views but
equally you know you can take somebody
from
you know southern california and we may
have
nothing in common whatsoever in terms of
political views but personal interests
everything else we might be dead on and
so i think you have to learn not to talk
about
specific things or realize what the hot
potatoes are because
if you put people's back hairs up
immediately yeah
you never get anywhere and so that's why
i say i try to take people how they come
how they treat me how i see them treat
other people and if that's fine
i don't really care who they support
politically who they support
athletically yeah you know i'm going to
try and find the things which
we have in common and you know unless
you're going out
you know murdering old people at three
o'clock in the morning or
doing something abhorrent then i'm not
you know
it's not it's uh you know don't i don't
think there's a good reason to
not give everybody a fair shot you know
yeah it's
it's interesting you said and i guess
we probably have a lot more with in
common
with the rural farmer who is
you know uh whose livelihood comes from
the yellow river
in china who doesn't care about any of
these things that we
care about and i mean even if you take a
metric like
christianity that there's more
christians in china
number wise not not population and not
percentage
but just number but raw numbers there's
more christians in china
than there are in the united states yeah
and you think like
so how how do we have this idea that oh
china
are the bad guys um or china
or maybe you think oh china is great
because you know you're
you like the way they run run things
politically
but i think if we instead of just
assuming
everybody is there we saw this in the
election we saw people didn't understand
why latinos specifically i'm married to
a latino woman and they didn't
understand well why did more latinos
vote for president trump this time than
they did the first time but it's because
there's this
this deep deep misunderstanding of the
culture right and you think
well all latinos think blank but you
really break them down you're family
people
they're usually they're more they're
more family oriented they're more
religious
they're more all of these things that
you would typically go oh that's what a
white evangelical does
yeah and the idea that you have of white
evangelical actually probably
matches up closer with a latino person
who you've never met before
than the white evangelicals that you
seemingly
think are the big bad guys now of course
yeah
now i have a lot of hispanic friends
i've made through you know
coaching soccer and you know just
general social circles and yeah the
majority of them
would identify conservatively certainly
on the fiscal level because they want to
build a stable
you know home and they want to feel like
if i put in the hard work i want to be
rewarded for that hard work
and forget the type of work i do because
i know there's always a stereotype you
know of like oh
you know hispanics it's landscape
gardening or you know whatever form of
manual labor is if it's
like some pariah of a profession
and it's as we first started
talking about i mean those people are
just as important as you know the lab
technicians or anybody else
because again society wouldn't function
it wouldn't function in the same way
and i hate the
accusation from various people on the
right that the more people we let in
we're gonna have
you know less jobs for americans it's
like you know what
if somebody can come into the country
not speaking the language have no
contacts and take a job and earn money
and you've been sitting on your backside
and you're complaining about this person
taking work
i don't think that person is necessarily
the problem in this whole equation now
if you want to get angry at the
government for letting people in
you know and feeling that we can't
perhaps float an extra you know 100
million people
financially you know take care of them
in
certain social welfare aspects i can
kind of understand that yeah let's cap
immigration until a country gets
stronger economically or whatever but
being angry at people coming into the
country
who 99 of them
you know just want a better life but
they're willing to work and they managed
to get a job and they managed to get
money and then people were bitching
about
people who have come in and got a job
it's like we're good for them they came
in
they had no contacts can't speak the
language they know that
a certain proportion of the country is
angry at them if they're coming in
and yet they come in do a job and start
really there's just people just trying
to live a life
do you not honestly think if they have
the choice and we're able to live this
type of standard life in their own
countries they probably would have
liked to have stayed there i mean i
don't want open borders because again
that's
that's a slow suicide you've got to have
some level of i guess
not educational background because there
are certain people who have done very
well and become multi-millionaires
through very little
you know educational input so i think
that's a bad thing and also we don't
know the standard of colleges and what
they're taught in a lot of other
countries so to say
oh you've got a degree you can come in
and apply for a job well why
why not that 17 year old person who
dropped out of school at age 12 to help
feed their family
why should they not be able to come in
and work if they're willing to work
so i think some of the criteria is a bit
you know weird now it's okay if
somebody's been arrested for
you know 400 hardcore drug offenses and
19 murders
perhaps we should stop them at the
border and tell them to do a turnaround
yeah you know we don't we don't kind of
need people like that
but that's not discriminatory on any
type of cultural or racial level that's
purely that person is a piece of crap
let's not have them come in the country
yeah and that's my really only
barrier to immigrants is that yeah we
don't want to be letting people in not
somebody you know was caught with
marijuana when they were 16 you know 20
years ago and now they can't come in the
country for the rest of life because
this is stupid
right right i mean the majority of
crimes involving soft drugs tend to be
victimless crimes it's just that
you know you're paying homage to a
system which
has dug its heels in and been very
strict and almost spiteful in terms of
how it's been applied to people when
it's devastated entire communities of
both colors
and people have been demonized and
removed from the normal system over
something which in probably 20 years 30
years time
will look back and see was actually
pretty inhuman
in a way when you've allowed people to
you know run around drinking alcohol for
the last however many hundreds of years
causing goodness knows how many car
crashes fights relationship
breakups infidelity and all the damage
that's had on society
but you ruin a kid's life because at 15
you know they smoke some part in high
school
so i think you know we've we've
definitely got to look at people
individually on a mass level if that
makes sense as in we shouldn't
discriminate against large groups of
people because of the actions of a few
which again is the whole core of the
thing of racism people's experience of
people of different colours or cultures
they
treat everybody as their first i guess
introductions to that
you know race or culture and we're all
guilty of it i mean if i see
i don't know a black person i will make
certain assumptions about them if they
see a white person they'll make certain
assumptions now is that racism or is
that just
generally historically knowing through
social relationships that there are
differences and what's so wrong about
having differences
i mean that's the worst thing it's like
some of the explanations or definitions
of racism now is identifying differences
in culture
like oh we're all the same no we're not
the same definitely we're not all the
same
and i love the differences this is the
thing unless their differences is they
like to cut their children's heads off
and eat them
you know i'm pretty open to most of the
differences you know people with
different cultures and colors bring to
the table and so to me
recognizing the difference isn't racism
if you're saying oh
you know black people are stupid because
blah blah blah then yeah that's
out and out racism ridiculous right
and the same thing if they turn around
and say that generalize white people
along
those lines it's racism i don't think
there's such a thing as reverse racism
it's just racism period
and you know i i kind of get that stupid
and completely wrong
but if you have to be afraid to talk
about a person
and say certain things because of their
color or culture
when if another person did the exact
same thing you'd have
open season to be able to criticize them
or compliment them then i think that's
very wrong because we're steering a
million miles away from
what mlk is kind of uh vision about
judging people by their character yeah
the character the content of their
character rather than
you know yeah rather than the color of
their skin yeah and so
yeah it shows up in you know little ways
it shows up in
the fact that if i if i'm filling out
any form
and it says like what race are you i
mean
i it's it's been so weird i remember as
a kid going
well do i put white because like some
forms will
will have arab underneath white but it's
like you
and my dad that consider the same race
right which
my dad is is is a dark-skinned arab
yeah he's grown up in a very different
culture than than
british culture it's like how how do
those fit together or am i
asian because lebanon is technically in
asia but are you meaning asian or are
you in the pacific islander and so i
it shows up in so how do you that's
that's a very
simple uh more innocent way to say well
how if you're going to sit there and go
well these people are allowed to be
criticized on this basis but these
people are not allowed to be criticized
well so what what do you do then for
that and
these issues come up in many different
ways i'm just choosing
to use a very innocent one to say so how
how would somebody label if you're going
to label me a certain race
right well and certain people would call
me white
or white passing because of the color of
my skin but the culture
that i was raised in was very different
than that
and even so much to to the point that my
dad would use
language that would say well americans
do this it was very confusing to me
an american who would look at my dad and
say we are americans like what are you
talking about you're a citizen of this
country
how how could this be done so i
i guess the point that i'm making is you
can't right you can't just look at
somebody and say
it's impossible to say oh you're you're
a brit so this is the way you think
because you're a brit
well not far from it right
you could take two brits and you could
be more different right and we see this
uh
last thing i'll say is we see this with
christianity i would say that i probably
have more in common
with for the things that matter with
somebody from
that you know that farms near the yellow
river than i do
with someone who could live next door to
me that would be
the same skin color come from the same
you know maybe they're
they're half white half arab but they're
i idealistically they're a muslim and
they think differently politically and
they think all these things and so
somebody from the outside
could look at us and say oh you guys are
probably really similar you guys are
probably
you guys are basically the same person
and i go no i mean far from it i'd be
you know just from the outside looking
in or from looking at these
uh i said the last thing i'll say
looking at these these factors
i don't think are as big of an indicator
of who a person is
right as other factors that we seemingly
just throw off to the side yeah
and i think you know the labels we put
on people
to protect them actually end up doing
more damage
because you don't get a real experience
of life if
people artificially have to talk to you
in a way that
they're trying not to offend you even
though
you probably wouldn't be offended but
some people are offended on your behalf
and so i've decided in society you can't
say that thing
now if you take hispanics for an example
i mean your wife
some people might look at her and be
like oh she looks slightly asian
yeah right yeah yeah and uh you look at
some hispanic people and they look
middle eastern
right but you know your wife's
family might have been here for 200
years
same thing with some hispanic people who
look middle eastern they might be 200
years yet you might have a white person
walking around who arrived from sweden
yesterday yeah
you know just because you know the color
of the skin is no indicativeness
of you know a connection with a country
you know love for a country again it
comes down
people's actions and their individual
personalities which defines them
but it's too difficult for us to with
however many billion people in the world
for us to go on a case-by-case basis so
we tend to
you know lump people together but we do
it with you know even other white people
i mean if we have to describe what our
people like
from i don't know san francisco yeah
we'd come up with a bunch of stereotypes
we'd come up with things
perhaps not so much from personal
interaction because i can't off the top
of my head
recall anybody i've met from san
francisco but certainly i can recall
news articles from san francisco where
maybe perhaps if i adopt adopted some
rather
odd and unusual social practices such as
pooping on the street
um and you think about the local
government where they've put their money
and why they're not combating this and
this and you come up with this automatic
kind of prejudice or way of thinking
and my first thing i think
if somebody sat down across the table
from san francisco i would
ask them about those things they look
the only kind of view we get
of san francisco from the media
regardless
of whether it be from the left or the
right these are the kind of hot issues
now tell me is this really this bad can
you not walk
down your street without playing having
to play hopscotch with homeless people
poop
i mean is it really that bad or is this
just down to a quarter of a mile area
out of right whatever because you know
things are exemplified and blown out but
when you have very little personal
social interaction to prove otherwise
you start
building this i wouldn't even say it's
prejudice just this
idea or collection of ideas around
somebody and what
their life experience is and what their
attitude to life is
you know and i don't know if you know
maybe
maybe we could take a weekend trip to
san francisco and not experience
anything that we've seen on the news
whatsoever in the last decade
but somebody might go there for an hour
or an experience everything they've seen
on the news
and when we got that we'd have very
different views of what
san francisco is and what san francis
people from san francisco are like
but we do it from even here in texas we
have views on what people from
east texas are like people in west texas
you know southern part of texas are like
people in the panhandle alike
i think tribalism exists at almost
every level i mean we're going to
differentiate ourselves but i think we
differentiate ourselves more to belong
than to actually get push people away we
want to find
something we have in common with people
and stick together i mean kids form
groups and cliques
even in grade school you know well
kindergarten and pre-k
you know groups come together and it's
at that point in time it's about more on
what they have in common and likes and
dislikes
you know you don't get a division of
black kids hispanic kids and white kids
and asian kids you know in pre-k you
find people who you like people who are
friendly people you have something in
common and that's it you run with it
and it's not until you know outside
influences point out
at a later time or date that well it's
kind of a bit odd you hanging around
with that asian person because you know
they come from a country which is not
traditionally that supportive of
you know the united states and you know
we did you know that you know
70 years ago we were actually at war
with this country and you know and
you're supposed to formulate a whole
revised opinion of somebody based upon
history you were never aware of
which is supposed to affect personal
relationships and now i can't mention
this in front of this person in case
you know i offend them and because i
remember like
in grade school i mean with asian people
if somebody said to you
what does an asian person look like
you're gonna
enact stereotypes yeah
you're going to but it's innocent you by
no means when you say like when you're
six years old
you know if you point out that many
asian countries
you know people's eyes are you know of a
different shape
than a traditional western is you're not
being racist you're just pointing out an
actual
factual difference and if you asked you
know an asian kid of the same age what's
the difference between westerners like
what they have around their eyes they
feel like it's not being racist
it's just a fact it's a characteristic
it's a personal characteristic you're
not saying that person's better or worse
yeah he's pointing out a difference
which is a true fact
but now that's considered racist i mean
there was somebody
on the news who was um
i think they'd made a comment years and
years ago
and i don't even like this person so i
don't know why i'm kind of saying this
because it sounds like i'm sticking up
for them but they made some comment
about asian people having squinty eyes
right which technically if you want to
go from it you want to approach it from
a pre-k type of description of somebody
yep okay they do
so i've i've known people white people
with squinty eyes i've known white
people very bulbasized you know those
people it almost looks like their
eyeballs popping out my head
but so well yeah it doesn't affect how i
feel about that person it doesn't limit
what i think they're capable of it
doesn't lessen them in my eyes in terms
of their role of society what they can
achieve so to me
that's not racism it's just me noticing
a difference which
they themselves notice i know this now
if i treat them differently based upon
that
different matter sure you know but
if you start teaching kids hey it's
wrong to notice differences
you know michael's skin's darker than
yours so you need to treat him
differently you know you've got to
walk around now apologizing a lot more
if you happen to win something you've
got to give it to michael because
apparently you know there may have been
some disparities in the way
these things been handed out in the past
so you've got to suffer for it and
you're
bringing up kids with like i said you're
trying to take away the innocence which
you know they had at an earlier age and
get them to carry the guilt which other
people
had the luxury to forego i think yeah
sorry that's a long-winded answer no no
i mean i i think that's a good i think
that's a good place to
i think that's a good place to land is
that yeah i mean
i hope my hope is that in the generation
i mean we both have
uh young boys your your sons not to be
eight my son's about to be
two in a few months and i hope that the
world that we raise them in
i hope that that's not the case that we
can't how do i say this in a positive
that we are allowed to point out
differences
and have discussions like this with
people who
for whatever reason certain groups don't
want to work together people
want to point fingers and say oh you're
the enemy of this person you're
you're not supposed to associate with
them you're not supposed to do this or
you're not supposed to ask that question
because
uh for whatever reason right because
well because their skin color is this
color
is darker so they're less or
yeah very you know ideas oh well they're
the
they're the descendants of kane right
all the way to
well because their skin color is lighter
they have carried a privilege that you
will never get
sure and so you're gonna have to operate
in the world in a way that is
and it's like well i i just hope that
those conversations and so when somebody
says something like that
i hope that there is a conversation
that's allowed to come up to say well
why
or or why is it that way yeah instead of
having to put the brakes on it and say
well
i can't really say anything because if i
share a very honest opinion about this
that maybe doesn't exactly line up with
these certain people
now my phrase and my words will get used
against me and i'll
yeah i'll lose my job i'll lose all of
this or i'll lose all these friends
because i
i voted for a certain person or i didn't
vote for a certain person
um yeah i hope that we can i hope that
we can get to that place well i think a
couple of good examples over the last
two months
sleeping beauty apparently on a new ride
a sleeping beauty ride at one of the
disney
places they had to remove or alter one
of the rides because it shows the prince
kissing sleeping beauty and
the so-called uproar was about that
because she was
in a coma or whatever she was in deep
sleep that
she couldn't give consent to that kiss
and so it was inappropriate and it's
teaching kids that
you know it's okay to kiss without the
person's consent
and you know the second example
um is one where
you know all this going back in time and
you know
rewriting or completely taken out scenes
from old movies
or songs which went 30 or 40 years
uh without causing any offense and then
somebody picks up a line and says like
you know like
baby it's cold outside right they
decided that that sounds a little bit
rapey
in terms of some of the lyrics because
he just wanted to go and so pleased with
her to stay
and stuff and the sad thing is
everything everything come by now all of
a sudden
yeah the sad thing is that it's probably
only
one percent of one percent of
people on the left who actually think
that way and
the other you know proportion of people
on the left or even
if they identify as liberals think that
stuff's just as crazy as we do
but the way it's presented you then have
a large proportion of people on the
right who think
well that must be the attitude of
everybody on the left
but equally you know people on the left
are being taught that
you know everybody on the right are all
you know capital building
insurrectionists and we all you know
hate immigrants and
were all anti every single vaccination
not just this particular shop
it doesn't classify the facts i recall
refused to call it that
um but again it's this one percent of
one percent of people who
you know they make they make the news
because it seems so outlandish and so
outrageous but then we formulate this
view that okay with that's the opinion
of people on the left they think there
are
over 200 genders whereas for all the
democrats i know none of them think
there are 200 genders
yeah you know yeah but
so again it'd be easy to label and be
like oh yeah i don't want to
i don't want to you know socialize that
person they're a democrat
so you know they're going to be offended
at
something i wrote on twitter you know
nine years ago
but truth is people aren't like that but
i think we're being pushed to view that
it is a
huge huge problem and a huge conflict
which
is a daily hourly conflict where in
reality i mean how many people have you
met
day to day week to week month to month
who
really share any of those six stream
views from the left or the right
you know i wouldn't tell i wouldn't be
able to tell with most people whether
they're
democrat or republican even after
talking for 30 minutes unless i ask them
specifically they don't come out
with these radical things of like we
need to overthrow the government or
you know we shouldn't tell our dog you
know good boy because it's you know a
sign in them agenda and they might feel
like they're a female and by calling
them good the other pet you didn't call
good
might now have insecurity issues yeah
the majority of people don't feel like
that just because
a liberal might have said that or you
know some conservative person in east
texas might have said
yeah well it's time for an insurrection
we need to overthrow them don't mean all
people on the right
share that viewpoint you've got oddballs
in society and again even that becomes a
oh well now you're being offensive to
people with mental health well
you know what just tell me what words i
can use and i will find a way to make
those offensive in some way
allow me to i remember there was an old
episode of friends where joey
was i think showing maybe
phoebe or monica they could turn any
word or
phrase and make it sound kind of like
dirty yes
yeah now i can't remember what it was
it's like aunt caroline's apple pie
you know it's like you can turn anything
and make it inappropriate
you know and i think that's where it's
out they just look to make literally
anything
you know inappropriate yeah yeah well
i i think that's a good that's a good
place right there i mean we can
uh yeah we can end on the friends note
we can end on
uh yeah if if you are somebody that does
that
if you are somebody that is so polarized
by some of these opinions
maybe take a second yeah take a second
to actually talk to the person that
maybe
does offend you that maybe their social
media posts uh
you don't like them take a second or or
just try to engage with them
on something other than that and i think
you would be surprised to see
how much you really do have in common
that you really can connect with that
person and
uh there is so much more that is way
more valuable than these
uh these um for lack of better verbiage
but these dumb ideas that seem to
to separate us but also i'd say go ahead
yeah
take some level of personal
responsibility
because it's not all about the other
person being thin skinned
and being offended because you can say
the same thing
say in different ways and it have very
different meanings so we do have care
to everybody to you know how we deliver
our message
i just want to leave on my part with an
example from ricky gervais on one of his
stand-up
tours he said you know the words you say
and the way you say them can have very
different effects he said let me give
this example
he said if uh one of your friends you
haven't seen in about six months
pulls out you know a photo of their
daughter who you haven't seen in a few
years and they show you the photo and
you go oh yeah she's beautiful
it sounds very dismissive like you don't
care you don't care about family
everything else but
if you take too long and you say the
same words he said it can come out even
worse and it goes
so if you take the effort and you're
like oh
yeah she's beautiful he said i can come
across as creepy
yeah yeah the the the phrase i use
uh that that i always
used for that or heard used for that uh
exact idea was
uh well i didn't say you were fat and if
you emphasize
any of those words yeah it's gonna have
i didn't say yeah fat
i didn't say you were fat i didn't say
yeah you were fat i didn't say you were
right so you can do that and and you're
right like yeah
have have fun with that one um you can
have anything
that can say that and you're right
personal responsibility we have to be
responsible and again if you
for myself uh you know looking at it
like
we have a higher responsibility if you
say that you're a christian if you label
yourself that way
you have a higher responsibility to
before your political affiliation
how do you represent god in that now
that doesn't mean that you can't
have strong opinions you can't have
strong opinions jesus had strong
opinions on things
but in the way that you develop them in
the way that you deliver them
i think like you said i think it's
incredibly important of how we do that
and
if you are somebody that calls yourself
a christian you have to say hey my
my first responsibility is ultimately
reconciling
bringing people back to god and so if
there's something that's gonna cause me
to not do that because i get so caught
up on
i really like cheeseburgers and this
person really likes fish and now all of
a sudden we're gonna
separate and we're gonna be different
people and we're not gonna associate
because of something so silly i mean
yeah and people would think oh nobody
would ever do that but just why don't
you just look at the things that you
choose to not uh associate with people
and
sometimes they're not as as ridiculous
as as a change like that
um tristan do you have anything this is
this has been i think this is the
first episode that we've touched on i i
can't even
this was not even the map that we had
set out but i really enjoyed it i really
enjoyed the time i think we we did touch
on almost about a thousand different
topics here
um i appreciate your 40 that you yeah
yeah thank you no thanks for having me
on um
i don't normally have a good
track record of following
the following routes when it comes to
like interviews and podcasts and stuff
so that's
kind of normal really par for the course
yeah yeah
uh well well thank you yeah i appreciate
you guys um
check out the wolf and the shepherd you
can do that on any any podcast streaming
platform you can find them there
um you're gonna like it if you like this
podcast if you like different topics
you're gonna get a lot of different
topics a lot of
a lot of stuff and i i appreciate the
the flavor that you guys bring to these
different topics
yep and uh we don't have any cussing on
there
so it's children friendly yeah uh it's
not always
brain friendly because sometimes we talk
about ridiculous topics
and um check out especially the
in other news episodes because we do
actually
take people from all walks of life all
colors or political backgrounds
and just point out the ridiculous
stories in society just so we have other
people to laugh at rather than ourselves
that's that's a lot of fun that's a
that's a good way to put it well this is
it's been the 100 000 podcast we are an
audio magazine
uh we've kept it an average of 70 today
um and we talked about almost a thousand
topics but we we are
signing off thanks for listening to this
episode of the wolf and the shepherd
podcast
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Podcaster
Rabih is a Samantha’s man and Elijah’s dadda. He drives Uber throughout the plotting how to be a better podcast host at the 100thousand Podcast & Support The Fort. The 100thousand Podcast is all about keeping it 100, exploring a thousand topics. Support The Fort covers the current culture and history of Fort Worth, Texas.