In this episode of the podcast, The Gadfather and I talk about his new book, COVID, and how it's changed his life and the way he lives his life. We also talk about how technology is changing the way we live and the impact it can have on our health and well-being. And, of course, we talk about the election and how the economy is doing now that things are starting to get back on track. Thanks to everyone for all your support, stay tuned for more episodes like this and more! Tweet me and let us know what you thought of this episode! Timestamps: 4:00 - How has technology changed your life? 6:30 - How does it affect your health and wellbeing 9:00 - How technology is affecting your life 11:30 - What can we do to improve our health 13:00 -- How technology can help us live better 15:30 -- How can we live a more productive life 16:20 - What are the benefits of technology and social media 17:15 - How it's changing our lives 18:40 - How do we live our lives? 19:40 -- How does technology affect our health? 22:00 | How can you be more productive 21:00 // 22:10 23:40 26:30 | What's the best way to live a better life 27: How can I live my best life 28: What are you going to do the best life ? 29: What do you need to get the most out of your best day 35:40 | How do you have the most important thing you can do the most of your healthiest 36:20 | What s your biggest superpower 32:00 + 33:00 & 35:30 // 35:20 37:30 + 36:00 What s the worst thing you should do with your best chance of getting the most money you can get & 37:40 + 39:00 How do I m going to get more time to live in the most authentic experience 39:30 & 39:50 40:40, 40,000 45,000 + 40,500 41,000+ 44,000,000 = 6,500 + 6 47,000?
00:01:55.000It doesn't feel good, but they don't go all the way up.
00:02:00.000They go kind of midway and they just do it for 10 seconds in each nostril and then they stick it in the machine and you get a result in 15 minutes.
00:02:08.000How much has this whole thing affected your life?
00:02:11.000I mean, other than having to do things remotely and so on.
00:03:00.000There's not a lot of that shit out there headed up to the election.
00:03:03.000Everyone is so twisted and biased, and it's just such a weird, weird time.
00:03:09.000I mean, I want it to be over in hopes that not just the election, but also COVID, so that people can get back to work, which I think will calm people down when the financial situation starts to improve.
00:03:36.000I mean it's been tough over here because I'm on sabbatical this semester and it's at the time when my book came out so I was planning on doing all kinds of world book tours and all sorts of stuff and everything has been shut down.
00:03:49.000So it's been a bummer but at least I get to spend more time with the family I guess.
00:03:54.000As long as people take advantage of this time, you can do some self-improvement.
00:04:00.000People can meditate and exercise and write.
00:04:04.000There's a lot of things you can get done.
00:04:07.000These are minor concerns, I believe, in comparison to the people whose businesses are shut down.
00:04:12.000And the people who've lost family members and have struggled personally health-wise with the disease.
00:04:20.000The number of people that are losing their businesses is just insane.
00:04:25.000And one of the reasons why we left California is because of their draconian measures that they're using to shut things down.
00:04:32.000You know, the initial conversation, they were going to shut it down until they flattened out the curve, and the hospitals were able to accept people, and they weren't overburdened.
00:04:43.000Well, they're not overburdened now, and they still have everything shut down.
00:05:18.000And it makes all the wacky tinfoil hat conspiracy theories actually seem to make more sense than they've ever made before, which is even more terrifying.
00:05:28.000Because people have already been QAnon'd out the ass online, everyone's so crazy already online, and this all gives them, it adds more fuel to the fire, that this is real.
00:05:37.000And it seems to be in a lot of ways, I mean, that they are, they're doing this for political purposes, which is terrifying.
00:05:43.000Yeah, you know, I analogize it to, you know, if you want to raise children well, you need to have, you know, consistent parenting so that the child knows what he or she needs to do to get the strokes and what he or she needs to do if they're going to get punished.
00:05:57.000When you have a haphazard parental style, it's a form of mindfuck, if I might say, for the child because they don't know when to expect your love or your scorn.
00:06:08.000And in a sense, I view the current COVID regulations Akin to an inconsistent parent, right?
00:06:16.000I don't know if tomorrow I'm allowed to invite people over for a small barbecue at my house or not.
00:06:21.000It all seems very sort of flying by the seat of your pant.
00:06:25.000And I think that's what stresses me the most, that I can't really have any sense of What are the regulations in Montreal in terms of what you're allowed to do and not allowed to do?
00:06:38.000And are they as draconian as they are here in the United States?
00:07:04.000So you could certainly walk around the city freely, but most of the things that you and I might do if we're going to leave our house, we can't do.
00:07:17.000So I end up spending most of my time either at home or I go for long walks.
00:07:21.000Is this a national thing or is it a regional thing?
00:07:24.000I think it varies across each province because of all of the provinces for much of the COVID crisis, Quebec and Montreal in particular were some of the hotspots.
00:07:37.000As a matter of fact, where I live was one of the hotspots within the hotspots of Montreal.
00:08:22.000Which is just, they were offering rewards for people turning their neighbors in.
00:08:26.000You know, in the beginning, it made sense because we were worried that two million people were going to die and this was a disease that was going to ravage the entire country.
00:08:34.000But then when you look at the survival rate, it doesn't pan out.
00:08:38.000If we knew coming in to, if COVID, we had all the information that we have now at the beginning.
00:08:44.000If we had all that information now and they proposed the same lockdown, I think people would have resisted.
00:09:03.000I've had a few virologists on my show, and I think you have as well, and several of them have told me that early in the lockdown that they thought that there wasn't a very good cost-benefit analysis in terms of the repercussions of such a lockdown,
00:09:20.000that many of the costs of the lockdown were not being taken into account within the modeling.
00:09:27.000Their position has turned out to be true, right?
00:09:29.000Very few people talk about the missed cancer screenings and the heart disease and the anxiety and the depression and the spousal abuse and the child abuse.
00:09:38.000And so I don't know when that autocorrective mechanism is going to work, but I suspect that people are not going to tolerate this for much longer, I think.
00:10:05.000But now the World Health Organization has come out and said that the lockdowns should end.
00:10:11.000They were saying that the economic despair, suicides, drug addiction, everything is skyrocketed, right?
00:10:18.000And the World Health Organization is saying that the effect of the lockdown has been so detrimental that they don't support this economic lockdown.
00:11:24.000I suspect it's because that's where sort of the intelligentsia end up going.
00:11:28.000And as you know, most of the folks that are within the intelligentsia are typically exactly the people that I discuss in the parasitic mind, the people who are parasitized by all these idea pathogens.
00:11:41.000And so I suspect that You know, if you are an up-and-coming person who lives in Binghamton, New York, no disrespect to Binghamton, and then you want to make it, you move to New York and then you get some degree in the liberal arts college,
00:11:56.000you get parasitized by these idiotic ideas, and then slowly all of these urban areas become ultra-progressive.
00:12:02.000I can't think what would be another explanation.
00:12:05.000There's so few intellectuals and academics that have avoided this.
00:12:11.000How have you managed to be so steadfast?
00:12:15.000You have avoided this from the beginning, and I know you've been criticized, but you come out of it smiling always.
00:12:35.000I think I'm endowed with a happy disposition so that when I wake up in the morning, notwithstanding all of the possible challenges I might face in a day, I'm like a kid in a candy store.
00:12:58.000Which I think protects me against the lunacy because even though, of course I get stressed, of course I get beaten down, my innate disposition is to be smiling.
00:13:09.000And so in a sense, I'm lucky enough to have won the genetic lottery of being someone who views the world through an optimistic lens.
00:13:17.000And I think that's what allows me to fight the fights that I do because otherwise I think I would have beaten down a long time ago.
00:13:23.000I mean, the only way that, as you know, you could survive in the cesspool of academia Saying the things that I say is, first of all, to be, as you said, happy and optimistic, but also to be...
00:13:36.000So I talk about, in Chapter 8 of the book, I talk about, you know, activating your inner honey badger.
00:13:41.000The honey badger is an incredibly ferocious animal, as you know, Joe.
00:13:45.000So he can withstand the approach of eight adult lions.
00:13:48.000The honey badger is the size of, you know, a small dog.
00:13:51.000How could it be that lions are intimidated by the honey badger?
00:13:57.000While I may have a happy disposition, as you know, if you've seen me in some of my battles in social media, I'm also an intellectual honey badger.
00:14:04.000If you come after me, you better come correct, because I'm going to come after you, I'm going to come after your ancestors, I'm going to come after your dead ancestors.
00:15:09.000So, you know, when I went to Stanford Business School several years ago to give a talk, you know, as you might imagine, it's a very, you know, highfalutin, elitist environment.
00:15:21.000The host who took me out that evening prior to my talk, the night before my talk, said, oh, you know, I hear you're going on Joe Rogan.
00:15:29.000I said, yeah, yeah, you know, we're friends, you know, love to go on Joe.
00:15:32.000It's such a great forum to spread ideas.
00:15:43.000You don't think it's a good idea to appear on a platform that allows you to spread your ideas to 10 million people instead of Writing a paper that will be read by you, your mom, two reviewers and an editor.
00:15:54.000Well, I guess he didn't like that response, but the reality is that that's the kind of elitism that you see in academia where, I mean, I'm happy to see that a growing number of academics are coming on a platform like yours because it is insane to not take advantage of such platforms.
00:16:09.000Look, I am in the currency of creating knowledge and then spreading knowledge.
00:16:13.000Well, I could appear on Joe Rogan's podcast for five minutes and have greater impact than if I published 10 papers in the most elite scientific journals.
00:16:22.000So yes, I embrace those forums because pragmatically, it's a wonderful way to have fantastic conversations, right?
00:16:30.000And it's beautiful that brave academics are being rewarded.
00:16:33.000The people that are willing to go on my podcast and other podcasts that might get looked down upon by these scholars.
00:16:41.000They get rewarded by enormous audiences.
00:16:44.000And also curious people that maybe have full-time jobs, maybe didn't go to college, but are curious folks that want to explore these ideas and explore them being described by a person such as yourself who has deeply studied them.
00:17:00.000Joe, do you know how many, and I know you know this already, I don't have to tell you how incredible your platform is.
00:17:06.000I could be walking on a beach in Bahamas, and that literally happened, by the way, where a local Bahamian will come up to me and say, oh my God, Didn't you appear on Joe Rogan?
00:17:20.000And I don't say this to talk about fame, but to demonstrate the kind of platform you've created where I could be in a bathroom in some little town and someone's going to recognize me because I appeared on the show.
00:17:33.000And I say this not because of the recognition factor or the fame, but again, if I am in the business of discussing ideas, I should use every possible tool, whether it be your podcast or if I create my own podcast, any way that I can spread ideas,
00:17:50.000I think a lot of academics don't do it because of an ego-defensive reason, which is they know that they may not be able to pull it off appearing on Joe Rogan, and therefore they denigrate those who can, right?
00:18:03.000Because they've mastered one form of communication, which is You know, the rigid academic paper, that they can do well.
00:19:15.000So we don't create intellectual SEALs Who are willing to go in uncharted, intellectual territories.
00:19:22.000Rather, we create tepid, sheepish academics who stay in their lanes, who never rock the boat.
00:19:31.000And as you and I know, the world is shaped by people who are unorthodox, right?
00:19:37.000Whether it be Sigmund Freud telling us about the unconscious mind, or Charles Darwin developing his theory of natural selection, or Galileo, or Socrates, the world is shaped by those who weren't fence-sitters, right?
00:19:52.000You became who you are with your podcast because you decided to step out of the bubble and create something that no one else had created before, a three-hour intimate conversation with incredible guests.
00:20:05.000I always tell people, yes, you can play it safe, but no one will remember you.
00:20:09.000If you take risks, the great rewards will befall you.
00:20:13.000Well, honestly, the risks, they're not that great.
00:20:25.000I started this podcast smoking pot and talking to my friends on a laptop, and it became slowly but surely a place where I could get guests, And then explore things that I'm interested in.
00:20:37.000And I don't even remember how you and I first got in contact with each other.
00:20:42.000I know we have in common your nephew, Ariel Helwani, who is an MMA journalist for ESPN, and I've known Ariel for years.
00:20:51.000But other than that, how did we even get in contact with each other?
00:21:51.000I expected that the numbers would drop on iTunes because we have this new platform, but since we're on both platforms now, what happened is we just gained new people on Spotify that really maybe were Spotify loyalists.
00:22:07.000I mean, when you wake up in the morning, can you believe that you've become this cultural icon that sort of moderates all these unbelievable conversations with all sorts of incredible people?
00:22:37.000This is – I'm not really – because I'm not qualified, that's probably why I'm qualified.
00:22:43.000Because it works, because I don't have the barriers.
00:22:47.000I don't have the – I don't have the sense to say, well, this is probably not a good person to have on for my career, or this is not a wise topic of discussion.
00:22:58.000I'm going to get a lot of criticism for this.
00:23:00.000Because I don't think that way, that's probably why it's worked.
00:23:03.000I'm going to tell you two things, if I may.
00:23:05.000Number one, I think it's your intellectual curiosity.
00:23:09.000And that's one thing that I always tell my graduate students when they're looking to do their doctoral dissertations and so on.
00:23:14.000You could be the hardest working person and the brightest person if you don't have that intellectual curiosity, right?
00:23:21.000Sort of waking up every day excited about things that you're going to learn that day, then you're not going to be a good scholar, let alone a great host on a podcast like yours.
00:23:30.000And I also think it's exactly what you said, is your honesty, right?
00:23:35.000That comes through on the camera, that there is no BS coming from you.
00:23:39.000And I love the fact, by the way, that you said that you don't modulate who you bring on.
00:23:43.000And let me share my own personal experience.
00:23:46.000I was just contacted a few days ago, and if she's listening now, I'm sorry if I haven't responded yet, I will.
00:23:51.000I was contacted by a Very famous former porn star.
00:24:45.000Let's just sit down and have conversations with interesting people.
00:24:48.000Of course, in my case, my show is infinitely smaller than yours, but it's been successful within my sphere for, I think, similar reasons to why yours has been so successful.
00:24:57.000The porn star thing is very interesting because people avoid even the topic of porn, but yet clearly a lot of people are watching it.
00:25:06.000And a good example, and I don't mean to throw this guy under the bus, is the journalist from The New Yorker who unfortunately was on a Zoom call recently and thought he had muted his video and did not.
00:25:18.000And while he was at work on the Zoom call, decided to start masturbating.
00:27:03.000So the first one is actually one that I discussed in my first book, my 2007 book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, where I was talking about how you can analyze cultural products, including sitcom themes via an evolutionary lens.
00:27:17.000And so I take the example of the classic episode from Seinfeld, Master of My Domain, right?
00:27:40.000The first thing you might remember is that there are three male characters and one female one.
00:27:45.000They all recognize that she has to put in more money into the pot, the bed pot, because it isn't as difficult for women to resist their masturbatory urges.
00:27:57.000Then as each one was losing the bed, meaning they were succumbing to their masturbatory urges, it's interesting to look at what was the trigger that caused them to lose the bed.
00:28:09.000So in the case of Kramer, it's because he is seeing a gorgeous young woman, scantily clad, Doing all sorts of sexy positions as she's exercising.
00:28:20.000So what triggered him to masturbate was the visual imagery.
00:28:25.000Whereas when it came to Elaine losing the bet, it's because she fantasized about becoming the long-term partner, the wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. She wasn't masturbating over the cabana boy who was 18 years old with a nice ass.
00:28:43.000And so that spoke to the differences in terms of the content of the fantasies of men and women.
00:28:50.000And then the second point I wanna make that is also from Seinfeld is there's an episode where George decides to forego sex and by freeing his mind from having to focus on sex, he starts learning a whole bunch of new languages and he's solving chemistry equation problems because 99% of his brain is no longer focused on sex.
00:29:16.000Yeah, that's a real issue with people.
00:29:20.000But again, discussing porn, or especially having a conversation with someone who participates in the actual production and acting, I'll say acting, with air quotes, it's forbidden.
00:29:37.000You get looked down upon for some very bizarre reason.
00:29:41.000It probably has to do with our puritanical shame.
00:29:45.000I'm not sure if we've discussed this before, but even if we have, I think it's worth repeating.
00:29:49.000It's probably many years ago that we discussed it.
00:29:51.000So in one of my other books, I talk about the evolutionary explanation of pornography, and I specifically talk about porn that is directed at heterosexual males.
00:30:05.000Typically, you might think that because men are interested in sleeping with many women, that pornography is going to have one man sleeping with multiple women in a particular scene.
00:30:20.000Whereas, actually the study has been done, scientific study, it turns out that there's a lot more what's called polyandrous depictions in porn.
00:30:28.000Polyandry is one woman with multiple men.
00:30:32.000So why is it that porn directed to heterosexual men has a lot more Scenes with one woman having sex with multiple men, and there it turns out that the explanation comes from something called a sperm competition hypothesis.
00:30:48.000The idea being that men, and actually males in many species, get a rise, literally, in seeing other men having sex.
00:30:58.000So for example, when you are trying to get a stud, let's say a horse or a dog, to mate with a female, you often will make him watch another male having sex, And that will get the rise out of him.
00:31:10.000And so there's some really interesting scientific ways by which you could study a product like pornography, which of course is one of the most – the products that we spend the most money on.
00:31:39.000It's a book that came out in the 90s called Sperm Wars.
00:31:43.000At the time, he had retired, and so he replied to me very graciously and said, look, I'd love to come on your show, but I'm out of the whole thing.
00:31:52.000Now, so let me just mention what his theory was and then what people have said since.
00:31:56.000So he argued in his book and in several studies that he had published that when men ejaculate, they actually have three types of Sperm within their ejaculate.
00:32:08.000There is the traditional sperm that you could think of, sort of the fertilizer, right?
00:32:12.000The traditional, the head with the tail that's looking for the egg to fertilize.
00:32:17.000But then he argued that there are also blockers.
00:32:20.000So these are kind of malformed spermatozoa that actually don't look for an egg, but rather place themselves at the entrance of the reproductive tract of a woman So that it could stop any incoming new sperm from other men.
00:32:35.000And then there are killer sperms that don't look for the egg to fertilize, but look for other men's sperm to kill.
00:32:42.000Now, if that theory is correct, and you're exactly right that there's been contentious points about whether it is as accurate as he said or not, And I think the jury is still a bit out.
00:32:53.000If the theory is correct, this basically argues that women, evolutionarily speaking, would have been extraordinarily promiscuous because sperm within a woman's tract is only viable for about 72 hours.
00:33:08.000So that if men have evolved the chemical weaponry to block other men's sperm and kill other men's sperm, that means that, evolutionarily speaking, women would have been very likely to have mated with at least two guys within a 72-hour period.
00:33:23.000Now, when I mention this theory in front of a crowd, the feminists will come up to me and say, thank you, Dr. Saad, what a great...
00:33:33.000Because that theory supports the idea that women could be just as salacious in their sexuality as men, and that supports the feminist argument.
00:33:42.000If I propose an equally, if not even more sound evolutionary theory that doesn't support the feminist narrative, boo, Dr. Saad, you're a Nazi, boo, boo.
00:33:53.000So it shows you So it shows you what happens when you use ideology to judge the veracity of a theory.
00:34:03.000If it occurs with my narrative, you're a great scientist.
00:34:09.000And anyone that knows your past, if you've described your past and your history on my podcast, the idea of calling you a Nazi becomes incredibly offensive and ridiculous.
00:34:22.000I mean, it's happened many, many times, but most famously was the time when And I know you've become very good friends with Jordan Peterson.
00:34:31.000Jordan and I had been invited in 2017 to speak at Ryerson University, which is a university in Toronto.
00:34:39.000And the title of the talk was The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses.
00:34:47.000And guess what happened to that speech?
00:34:55.000Because, you know, we're these controversial guys.
00:34:58.000And the people who are the agitators who canceled us put out Facebook flyers where they said, you know, neo-Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome in Toronto.
00:35:10.000And so when I wrote and said, well, but I'm Lebanese Jew.
00:35:33.000It's just such a stupid way to discredit someone's ideas instead of having conversation.
00:35:40.000This is one of the weirdest things about our current climate, is that instead of engaging with people on these ideas and discussing them, they look to discredit, and they look to discredit with these disingenuous labels.
00:36:03.000There is something in psychology called a fast and frugal heuristic.
00:36:09.000Most of us, when we're making a decision, don't necessarily sit and weigh all the pros and cons of a multi-attribute choice that we're making.
00:36:18.000Rather, we want to use some simplifying decision rule to arrive at a choice.
00:36:21.000Well, to label your debate opponent, one of these names, in a sense, is a Ugly manifestation of a fast and frugal heuristic, right?
00:36:31.000Because it takes very little cognitive effort for me to deploy it, right?
00:36:35.000I don't have to really engage the merits of your points.
00:36:47.000You know, the typical social media blue-haired person who does it.
00:36:51.000Even academics engage in this form of anti-intellectualism, and that's what upsets me the most, that they should know better, and yet they succumb to the same kind of fascist strategies.
00:37:02.000Well, there's a spectrum of intellectuals as well, right?
00:37:04.000And some of them are simple-minded in many ways.
00:37:08.000I mean, although they're intelligent and although they're well-read and they're scholars, they still...
00:37:13.000I hate to use the word, but they're lazy.
00:37:16.000They don't want to engage in this intellectual gladiatorial combat about their ideas.
00:37:26.000And I would also say that academia has regrettably created...
00:37:32.000If you like, the reward mechanisms for hyper-specialization, right?
00:37:36.000So when you're thinking about becoming an academic, a scientist, you really can sort of follow one of two strategies.
00:37:42.000You can become an unbelievable expert in a very, very narrow area.
00:37:48.000Because that creates economies of scale, right?
00:37:50.000I don't have to continuously go back and check the literature because I really know everything there is to know about this very, very small area of expertise.
00:37:58.000Or you could be a polymath, you could be a broad thinker.
00:38:02.000And regrettably, much of academia promotes the former rather than the latter.
00:38:07.000Now, if you look at my own scientific career, I haven't done the things that I should be doing according to the rules of the academic game.
00:38:15.000Because if I were trying to maximize, you know, according to the rules, I should only be publishing in journals that are within my narrow area of expertise, evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, psychology of decision making.
00:38:30.000But if you go and look at my CV, I've published in medicine and economics.
00:38:34.000In psychiatric issues, in consumer behavior, in evolutionary theory, in bibliometrics.
00:39:10.000I mean, it seems like when a person as intelligent as yourself chooses to take your mind and apply it to other different disciplines and different ideas, that should be rewarded.
00:39:25.000I've been told by colleagues that they were looking at hiring me at some other university, but then when they looked at my CV and saw that I had published in all these different areas, that it looked like I wasn't focused.
00:39:44.000I'll give you a wonderful example of the strategy of not being scattered.
00:39:50.000When I was a doctoral student at Cornell, one of the famous psychologists within my department was a lady who has since passed away, Professor Alice Eisen.
00:40:01.000She was a great noted psychologist, but her entire career was about affect.
00:41:28.000And in a sense, again, not to blow the proverbial smoke up your behind, I think that's what you do.
00:41:34.000Yes, you may not have the fancy degrees, but you come with that intellectual curiosity so that you could speak to Sir Roger Penrose one day and to a comedian whose every second word is F this and F that, and you could pull it off with both.
00:41:50.000Well, I had a conversation with Eric Weinstein about that once, and he was like, imagine what it would be like for someone who didn't know what your podcast was about.
00:41:58.000And they tuned in and saw Roger Penrose on one day and then Joey Diaz on the next day.
00:42:04.000They were like, what the fuck is this show?
00:42:07.000But this show, if it anything, it represents what I'm interested in, and I'm interested in a lot of things.
00:42:12.000I think the term intellectual is such a grandiose and ridiculous term for someone who's a cage-fighting commentator and a stand-up comedian.
00:42:19.000But I am curious, and I'm very fortunate that I do have friendships with people like yourself, and Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, and that I could get a guy like Roger Penrose to sit down and talk to me.
00:42:33.000And many other brilliant people that I've had the pleasure of talking to.
00:42:38.000Are you aware that he won the Nobel Prize?
00:43:26.000And I have to do my best to not mess this up.
00:43:33.000When you and I are speaking, of course we can get very academic and so on, but we can also joke because we're friends and we're both funny and so on.
00:43:42.000Does it intimidate you when you speak to someone like Sir Roger because you don't have that I don't think it intimidates me as much as it confines me,
00:43:58.000but I was so curious to hear his thoughts on things.
00:44:02.000I was fortunate that I had a lot of questions for him, and I really did want to dive into his intellect and try to find out what How he thinks about these things and what he's studying and what his thoughts were.
00:44:17.000So it was very fortunate that I had a deep curiosity about the subject.
00:45:02.000But I also think that because of his...
00:45:05.000I mean, he's been diagnosed as being bipolar.
00:45:08.000I mean, whatever you want to say, whatever mental issues he's had, I think they contribute in some ways to his art because he's so prolific.
00:45:17.000His mind is going in a million different directions all at once.
00:45:22.000And someone who is like that but very different, of course, is Elon Musk.
00:45:57.000Kanye is a very misunderstood person and I think that he doesn't do himself any service by calling himself a genius and all the – but all the – All the Trump stuff.
00:46:11.000He's kind of – he pats himself on the back and pumps himself up and talks about his accomplishments and his financial success and all those different – For whatever reason, those put some people off.
00:46:21.000They don't put me off, but they do put some people off.
00:47:10.000The greatest kickboxer of all time, one of the greatest kickboxers of all time, is Giorgio Petrosian, who is an Armenian who lives in Italy.
00:47:42.000You know, I receive many, many, maybe hundreds of emails from women who will sort of lament the fact that they no longer can meet a man who exhibits that kind of masculinity,
00:48:27.000One of those mandatory sex education tests at the start of last year at university.
00:48:35.000All professors, all students, everybody has to take it.
00:48:38.000And one of the questions, I don't remember the exact words, was, you know, if you see a guy, you know, cat calling a woman on campus, is that a form of sexual violence?
00:48:58.000And it's like, no, it is a form of sexual violence.
00:49:02.000And then they kind of explain it to me as if I were a three-year-old child who hasn't yet mastered the dynamics of being social amongst human beings.
00:49:11.000And so while I might have been satirical about the compliment rape, we have gotten to the stage now where it is mandatory for university participants, whether they be faculty members or staff or students, to take these mandatory sexual training manuals.
00:49:44.000But I've been hit on only a couple times in my life, but a few times where it was aggressive.
00:49:50.000And I was like, what's different is, first of all, the man who was doing it, one particular guy who was doing it, that was the most aggressive that I can remember, was not physically dangerous to me.
00:50:02.000Like, I could have killed him if I wanted to.
00:50:30.000So I don't have the understanding that a woman would have.
00:50:34.000When a woman is being approached by a man, there's a very real concern that she could be raped.
00:50:39.000I don't have that same concern unless someone's drugged me or done something.
00:50:43.000If the man is weaker physically than me, I don't have that concern.
00:50:47.000But I try to look at it from a woman's perspective, and I get how catcalling, if you're a woman, particularly if there's a large group of men, and they say things to you, that's terrifying.
00:52:18.000Everyone knows violence should not be tolerated in a polite society.
00:52:22.000So when you attach an extreme definition, an extreme word that doesn't apply, but you force it into a situation, you're fucking with our definition of the way people behave and think.
00:52:38.000And you're doing it to sort of force compliance into your ideology and what you feel the way people should act and behave.
00:52:47.000And so I've got a psychological mechanism that I explain in the parasitic mind about how you redefine realities so that you can get the victimology narrative that you want.
00:52:58.000And I call it the homeostasis of victimology.
00:53:02.000And so let me explain what homeostasis is.
00:53:04.000So if you think about your thermostat in your room, it is a homeostatic machine because what it basically says is, okay, I'm going to set the temperature at 70. And it's gonna sample the air.
00:53:17.000If it's too hot, it will release the air conditioning.
00:53:23.000So our bodies are made of many homeostatic systems, right?
00:53:28.000If I'm hungry and my blood sugar goes below a set point, I have approach behavior to food, right?
00:53:34.000So many of our physiological systems are homeostatic.
00:53:38.000Many of our psychological systems are homeostatic.
00:53:41.000And so I argue that this The never-ending redefinition of words and context to make it seem as though they are rape or violence or misogyny is what I call the homeostasis of victimology, which is what,
00:54:21.000And there's a similar concept that's called concept creep.
00:54:25.000From an Australian psychologist that argues along the same lines, right?
00:54:29.000And it's exactly the reason, by the way, why someone like Jussie Smollett will engage in, you know, full victimology.
00:54:37.000Because he is basically saying, look, I need to reach a set level of victimology so I can have the right currency to ascend the apex of victimology.
00:54:47.000And if I don't have that narrative, then I will manufacture it.
00:54:51.000And hence, the homeostasis of victimology.
00:54:54.000Well, in his case, it's extreme, right?
00:54:56.000Because he literally, it's fraudulent.
00:54:58.000I mean, literally created a fake attack.
00:55:02.000But this is, you know, we know that...
00:55:06.000I hate the narrative like no one would ever fake an attack or no one would ever lie about being harassed or attacked or even raped.
00:55:47.000And I mean, isn't it incredible how the onus on believing changes as a function of the political affiliation of the supposed victim, right?
00:55:58.000So when, I can't remember her name, Blasey Ford, When a woman came up the night before Kavanaugh's confirmation or whatever to say that 36 years ago it may have happened somewhere and I'm not sure where and I don't know if it happened, I don't have any details.
00:56:16.000When a woman came up against Joe Biden with apparently more evidence, now I don't know the veracity of each of their accusations, but it was certainly the case that the accuser of Joe Biden As convincing evidence, if not more than the former case,
00:56:32.000but now it was no longer hashtag believe all women, right?
00:56:36.000And so it demonstrates to you how ugly these hashtag fast and frugal strategies are, rather than sticking to first principles, which is People are presumed to be innocent unless there is overwhelming amount of evidence.
00:56:51.000We either fry someone or not as a function of political expediency.
00:58:13.000Because I use first principles and my ability to engage in critical thinking to espouse a position on any topic that you wish to discuss with me.
00:58:22.000But I don't think that that's the natural state of most people.
00:58:26.000Most people are, I am Republican, I am, you know, whatever, Democrat, and therefore I must toe the line on issues 1 through 37. And so what I implore people to do is don't be like that.
00:58:40.000Even though it's a natural reflex to want to belong to Team Blue or Team Red, belong to Team Truth if you can achieve that possibility.
00:58:49.000Yeah, in the United States at least, I'm not really that familiar with your political system in Canada, but in the United States it's reinforced because we really only have two parties.
00:58:58.000And so much so that Brett Weinstein created this thing, Unity 2020, where he was trying to bring together conservatives and liberals together and find some common ground.
00:59:13.000And he was promoting this as an alternative to the two-party system, and they were banned from Twitter.
00:59:28.000There are people that work for these social media companies that have since left and now talk about it openly that they did have the freedom to edit things.
00:59:39.000They did have the freedom to delete things.
00:59:41.000And that they sort of took pleasure in doing so.
00:59:46.000Given this leeway, if you felt like something was ideologically opposed to the terms and services of whatever social media organization you're working for, you were allowed to make that distinction.
01:00:43.000And if you find support within your tribe and you have steadfastly adhered to these ideals that the left has or the right has, you'll be rewarded.
01:01:07.000And they're so predictable on both sides, right?
01:01:09.000On the left, you're supposed to be pro-choice.
01:01:12.000On the right, you're supposed to be pro-Second Amendment.
01:01:14.000And we have a series of these different things that you have to adhere to if you're on either side of that line.
01:01:20.000And people take comfort in knowing that there's other people on their tribe that also think that way.
01:01:26.000And they find some commonality in that and they find this camaraderie in their knowledge that this person that they're talking to has also agreed to stay within these lines.
01:01:41.000Look, a quick story that recently happened to me regarding all these social media platforms.
01:01:46.000I posted on all my social media platforms, including on LinkedIn, a post where I basically said, hey, you know, Joe Biden might have been a parasitic nothing for the past 47 years, but just wait next year when in the 48th year he's really gonna,
01:02:03.000you know, solve diabetes and cure cancer.
01:02:05.000There was a satirical thing where I was kind of arguing that he hasn't done much throughout his public life.
01:02:12.000LinkedIn removed it because it violated their community standards of harassment and bullying.
01:02:20.000Well, who was I harassing and bullying, right?
01:02:22.000I mean, I was harassing and bullying a public figure who's running to become the president of the United States, but that was bullying to him.
01:02:35.000So I think guys like, I don't know if you know these guys, and you might want to consider if they're willing to come on your show to have them on, guys like Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz have been trying to, you know, reform the legal,
01:02:51.000you know, taking these social media from being, you know, So that they don't get the protection anymore.
01:03:01.000So that they don't get the protection of, hey, you can't sue us if we do stuff.
01:03:05.000But of course, most of the Republicans and Democrats never want to go after the social media platforms because the ability of all of these top players to fund the politicians, whether they are on the right or left side of the aisle, is so great that most people turn a blind eye.
01:03:20.000But I really can't see this being something that can Well, it was locked out,
01:03:35.000and Jack Dorsey has since stated that they have amended their policy, and that if the New York Post wants to post again, they can, and then they can post the exact same story.
01:03:46.000What they have to do, however, is they have to go back to their original post, remove it, That will reinstate them and then they can repost the exact same story and then they'll have no issues with that whatsoever.
01:03:59.000And he said that in a conversation that he had with Ted Cruz.
01:04:02.000I think that might just have to do with the way their social media platform is structured.
01:04:07.000Jack Dorsey though, I can speak from knowing him on a personal level.
01:04:13.000He is a man that believes in free speech.
01:04:16.000And I think that inside the company he's fighting a battle.
01:04:21.000But he is personally a person that believes that Twitter should be open and that it should be an open platform and he believes in free speech.
01:04:35.000I don't think it's embraced by the vast majority of the people that make decisions over at Twitter.
01:04:41.000And I think that his idea is probably unpopular, but he agrees with the sentiment, the original sentiment of the internet, the ability to distribute information for all people.
01:04:54.000He thinks that all these people that have been deplatformed should have a place, and that the internet should be treated like a utility, and that it should be available to everyone.
01:05:04.000But I think it's very difficult when you're a CEO of something that is a publicly traded company, an enormous company that's arguably one of the three or four biggest platforms for disseminating information on the planet Earth, and was never intended to be that.
01:05:22.000I mean, obviously I sound like a Twitter apologist, but I really like Jack Dorsey as a person, and I think he's a very honest and he's a very interesting human being.
01:05:33.000I think he gets unfairly maligned, but in my conversations with him, I think he really does believe...
01:05:40.000He's actually proposed that there be two Twitters.
01:05:43.000A Twitter that there is some moderation, and a Twitter that's the Wild West.
01:06:52.000Maybe if you had a party over at your house and someone came over your house and they started saying a bunch of really offensive things, you can kick them out of your house.
01:07:05.000But when your house is the world and you get to decide what's offensive and what's not and other people disagree, the problem is you're stifling people.
01:07:16.000And you're stifling the ability for people to make up their own mind as to what is and what isn't offensive, what's correct and what's incorrect.
01:07:23.000And, you know, it's been said a million times.
01:07:34.000It's like you have to win the battle of ideas.
01:07:37.000And much like a lot of these intellectuals that you were talking about that want to silence Alternative perspectives on campus, you see the same thing on social media.
01:07:48.000People that have these ideological perspectives where they've steadfast adhered to this left-wing agenda, they don't want to engage with anyone that has a disparaging opinion.
01:08:03.000They just want to kick those people off, deplatform them, deplatform them, and they yell it out because it's been effective with people in the past.
01:08:10.000They've gotten rid of people like Milo.
01:08:11.000They've gotten rid of Gavin McGinnis and Alex Jones and a lot of these people.
01:08:26.000They've done free speech a disservice.
01:08:28.000And they've created this tyranny of information, where they've decided that they're the ones who get to decide what gets disseminated and what doesn't.
01:08:39.000Yeah, you know, ten years ago, I think it was in 2010, So I have a column on Psychology Today where I publish these short psychology articles on all sorts of interesting topics.
01:08:52.000I haven't been writing for them as often these days, but when I started in 2008, I was a very heavy contributor.
01:08:58.000And at the time, probably the most popular blogger...
01:09:01.000At Psychology Today was an evolutionary psychologist by the name of Satoshi Kanazawa, who is a professor at the London School of Economics in England.
01:09:11.000And he was a very sort of bombastic guy, very politically irreverent, used language that was perhaps at times, you know, unadvisable.
01:09:20.000And he had published an article where he was talking about research, not his research, he was describing someone else's research, where they had done a study looking at Differences in how women across different races were perceived in terms of their beauty.
01:09:38.000And the results had not come out in a way that was politically correct, if you follow what I mean.
01:09:44.000Now, the way that he had handled that particular topic It seemed maybe a bit bombastic.
01:09:52.000But right away, there was a huge call to get rid of him from Psychology Today, which happened.
01:09:58.000But they also wanted to get him fired from his tenure position.
01:10:02.000And I had written an article, and I think I was the only one who had written a public article, where You can still go find it on my column, where I said, you know, purging a blogger sets a dangerous precedent.
01:10:13.000If Satoshi Kanazawa's words are wrong, what better punishment is there than to keep his words up there, because the light of the sun will forevermore condemn him, right?
01:10:26.000What's the point of getting rid of him?
01:10:28.000But, of course, people didn't listen to my warnings, and now it's become common ground to get rid of anybody with whom we disagree.
01:10:37.000Yeah, I go back to – have you ever seen the documentary where – what is his name?
01:11:29.000We don't have these open discussions where an intellectual on the left like Gore Vidal and an intellectual on the right like William F. Buckley can engage in this sort of intellectual combat and we could see who rises and whose ideas resonate with more people.
01:11:47.000And I think it was around that time where Thomas Sowell was smacking down what we today would call social justice warriors when we were all in diapers, right?
01:12:00.000I mean, I think if you go back to the 60s and 70s, some of the interventions that Thomas Sowell had on many of the issues that we're still debating and discussing today, he was doing that in the 60s and 70s when we were in diapers, right?
01:12:14.000This is a guy, by the way, I don't know if you've ever reached out to try to get him on your show.
01:12:18.000This is someone that I think you'd want to have on your show.
01:13:08.000Do you think there would ever be a context where some of the powers that be will kind of wake up to the power of your platform and try to replicate it in mainstream media?
01:13:21.000Or do you think it's simply too corrosive to actually allow two people who have different positions to share the same stage?
01:13:30.000I think the only way to do something like this is to have a very small amount of people involved.
01:13:35.000And when you do something on mainstream media just by definition, you're going to have an enormous group of people.
01:13:42.000You're going to have investors, you're going to have network executives, you're going to have producers, you're going to have writers, you're going to have all sorts of people that And many of them, a vast majority,
01:13:57.000have a very liberal and left-wing ideology.
01:14:02.000And to have the ability to have on whoever you want, you really need a singular person.
01:14:09.000A singular voice, like a singular mind, who is curious about a bunch of different issues, who's not easily influenced by people on the outside and their criticisms and their intimidation.
01:14:23.000People are intimidated by attacks and criticisms and insults, and so they'll change the way they participate, the way they communicate, and what they put out based on that intimidation.
01:14:38.000I'm sorry, that's what happens, by the way, when there are presidential debates where the moderators are typically less than ideal in terms of their expressed bias.
01:15:12.000He contacted people that contacted me to do it, but I never reached out to the Biden people.
01:15:17.000I felt like if they wanted to do it, they would reach out to me.
01:15:20.000And if they did, I would have done it.
01:15:23.000But I just don't think that's a good forum for him.
01:15:25.000I mean, as we've seen, the debates themselves, specifically the last debate, was not good for him.
01:15:31.000But what I would have done is, like when he was saying that I've never said I was going to ban fracking, Jamie would have just pulled up video of him saying, I'm going to ban fracking.
01:15:40.000And that would have been horrible for him.
01:15:42.000It would have been much better in terms of getting some clarity on what he's actually said and what he's actually done.
01:15:48.000And then the other things about saying that his son never received any money from Russia, that's a lie.
01:16:02.000I would have stopped the thing where I go, sir, we're going to pull up these articles and I want you to tell me what about these articles is infactual.
01:16:55.000The idea that you're talking about something that literally can affect the free world.
01:16:59.000The decision of who gets control of the United States of America, what party is in control, and that you're going to put some arbitrary two-minute time limit on these discussions is crazy.
01:18:39.000Why would you not pull up a video that's readily available online and say, sir, we're going to pause here for a moment.
01:18:44.000We're going to play this video and tell me what you meant when you said you were going to ban fracking.
01:18:49.000Tell me what you meant when you said you were going to embrace the Green New Deal.
01:18:53.000Tell me what you said when you said that you were going to do whatever the fuck he lied about and pull it up.
01:19:00.000I think for me, what amazes me about when he says things like that, and I suspect maybe we can say the same thing about Trump, although I can't remember quite the same types of lies.
01:19:11.000Trump usually lies about, you know, my penis is the biggest.
01:19:14.000The women have told me I'm the greatest lover ever.
01:19:21.000Whereas the other guy is basically saying things that are demonstrably false.
01:19:26.000And the only thing I can think of that could explain sort of the chutzpah of engaging in these types of lies It's as if Joe Biden's brain still exists in the 1940s where he doesn't know that there is this thing called Google and computers where we can quickly have Jamie fact check you,
01:19:49.000So in the same way that he does the corn pop story, which is difficult to know if he's telling the truth or not, because again, it happened in the 60s or 70s or whatever, he could say something thinking that it can't be falsified.
01:20:04.000Because how else could you logically explain that he would engage in such lies, right?
01:20:10.000Well, not only that, how is the Democratic Party not saying, hey, this is a mistake?
01:20:15.000And the whole idea that there's a deadline to this process and it all has to be done in a certain amount of time and this is how we have to do it, it's like, boy, it's so weird.
01:20:25.000It's so weird that they're such an important decision.
01:21:00.000If Trump wins, the lunacy will be much greater than if Biden wins.
01:21:07.000I think if Biden wins, of course people are going to be disappointed and upset, but the manner by which that disappointment will manifest itself, in my view, won't be as drastic as if Trump wins.
01:21:18.000I think if Trump wins, I'm going to be hiding under my desk forevermore.
01:22:32.000Sit down at a podcast and have him here for four hours and have him sit down and talk and then stop him when he says things and stop him and go, but hold on, okay, understand, sir, sir, let's check that and tell me Tell me why you said that when you said the biggest attendance ever for his inauguration,
01:22:54.000and then you go and see this big open field, and then you compare it to Obama's inauguration.
01:24:02.000A lot of the media, it's as if the humor module in their brain is completely lacking because I watch when Trump does his trolling.
01:24:13.000And again, people always wrongly presume that whenever I take some position, it is a manifestation of the fact that, you know, I must have posters of Trump in my bedroom, which my wife and I use as foreplay aid, which of course...
01:25:04.000So how do you explain the fact that a Adult with a functioning brain who's called a journalist is unable to recognize that when he says in my fourth term, he is just joking.
01:25:17.000What explains that disconnect in your view?
01:25:20.000Well, I don't think that they can ignore it because I think that they have been programmed to catch people saying outrageous things and expose those things.
01:25:26.000So when he says outrageous things on purpose, they can't help themselves.
01:25:32.000And then people go, but you know he's just joking.
01:25:35.000And they see that juicy carrot and they just run towards it.
01:25:40.000And they don't realize it's on a stick.
01:27:14.000He's a statesman, a perfect statesman, probably the best one we've ever had.
01:27:19.000And I think that there's one benefit of a guy like that is that we look at someone who's a president as a representative of the best aspect of the United States.
01:27:28.000When you look at a guy who came from a single mother, came from poverty, and rose to become a lawyer, a senator, and then ultimately the President of the United States, and you see him and you go, wow, that's an admirable person.
01:27:43.000If that was my son, I'd be immensely proud of the way he speaks.
01:27:50.000Now, if you want to get into policies, if you want to get into some of the things that they've done, it's not as impressive as you would have hoped when he was running for president, particularly in the defense of whistleblowers.
01:28:02.000Their take on whistleblowers in the press was some of the worst that any administration's ever had.
01:28:08.000But you also could say, I don't know how much the president Actually has control of that, how much power they really have.
01:28:17.000I tend to believe that our view of the president is grossly distorted in terms of their real amount of influence over policy and decision making, particularly in terms of national security measures,
01:28:34.000whistleblowers, things along those lines.
01:28:35.000I think the intelligence community has far more power than we believe And I think once a person gets into, and not just the intelligence community, special interest groups, lobbyists, you know, the money and the power that got them into that position leaves them so ultimately compromised that they get into office and then they realize the task at hand.
01:28:53.000And also I think then they're probably briefed on the real problems internationally, the real problems security-wise in the world, the real problems that we have with our national security issues.
01:29:05.000I think they probably have to amend all the ideas that they had, these idealistic notions that they had when they were running for office, and then they have to sort of regather and just have a new approach.
01:29:17.000Obama's positions on a lot of things that he had when he was running for president, like, first of all, how did he never legalize marijuana?
01:29:24.000How did he never federally legalize marijuana?
01:29:31.000Why would you want to keep people locked away when you know that the United States has incarcerated so many people of color for decades and decades for a plant that makes them happy?
01:29:41.000How was it possible that you got out of office and didn't do that your entire time?
01:30:41.000And we know it, especially when you look at the revenue that's been generated by these states like Colorado and California and Washington and Oregon, all these states that have made it legal.
01:30:50.000You realize it would be of great benefit to these places.
01:30:53.000And now there was an article recently about Texas doing it.
01:30:57.000It would be of great benefit financially.
01:31:06.000You can only say that there's got to be some other motivation.
01:31:12.000And that motivation is probably the people...
01:31:15.000That run pharmaceutical companies and all these other special interests that don't want it to be legal because it would fuck with their bottom line.
01:31:22.000And it would interfere with the money that they have coming in.
01:31:26.000And so that's very disappointing to me.
01:31:28.000Very disappointing that Obama didn't do that.
01:31:57.000Yes, but I want to come back for a second too.
01:32:00.000So as a psychologist who studies psychology and decision making, of course, I'm interested in how people make decisions, and in this case, consequential decisions in terms of who's going to be president.
01:32:10.000Back in 2003, I had published a paper looking at the decision rules that people use when choosing presidents.
01:32:20.000And perhaps to your dismay, or perhaps you already have the intuition that this is happening, people don't use We have heavily cognitive justifications in choosing their presidents.
01:32:33.000They use these very emotional-driven, fast and frugal heuristics in making decisions.
01:32:39.000So, for example, when you and I were both speaking about Obama, that he's majestic and he has a mellifluous voice and he speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister and he's presidential, all those things might be true.
01:32:53.000But it's exactly what I think I mentioned once on your show.
01:32:56.000I'm gonna take this to be akin to the cork of a wine bottle.
01:33:02.000There's an expression in Arabic that says, getting drunk by simply smelling the cork of the wine bottle, right?
01:33:07.000You don't actually need to drink the whole wine before you get drunk.
01:33:12.000All you need to do is smell the cork and you're already drunk.
01:33:15.000And I think this is exactly what happens to people.
01:33:17.000They look at Trump, They get drunk by the cork bottle, which basically says what?
01:33:37.000I could have a colleague who hails against Critical race theory and how dreadful it is.
01:33:45.000And then when Trump bans critical race theory as something to be taught to federal employees, he simply can't give him the kudos because, you know, bruh, he's so disgusting.
01:33:57.000That's what I'm angry about, that people lose their ability to objectively look at people's policies rather than at the superficial clues of he looks majestic or he looks like a vulgar ogre.
01:34:26.000And when people catch him saying things that aren't true and he argues with them about it, then you're feeding the fire.
01:34:34.000But also you have to realize, he's made enemies.
01:34:38.000With so many groups, particularly groups of power that have been in place in the United States forever, like the intelligence communities.
01:34:47.000He's the enemy of a lot of the intelligence communities, particularly the FBI. I mean, they've shown that they were actively trying to get rid of him.
01:34:56.000And then there was a lot of the people in the intelligence community that decided that he was going to be someone that they attacked.
01:35:04.000I mean, we talked about it yesterday with Glenn Greenwald where he discussed how Chuck Schumer had openly said that it's so foolish for Trump to attack the intelligence communities and become an enemy of the intelligence community and that it's going to prove to be foolish.
01:35:32.000It's fascinating to see these mechanisms being put into place and these stories like the Steele dossier where he's got Russian hookers peeing on him and all that jazz.
01:35:41.000And the fact that that was printed and they talked about that on CNN and it was printed in major newspapers as...
01:36:10.000He's a classicist who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford who has written a book, I'm promoting his book now rather than my own, but who has written a book about why you should have voted for Trump and so on.
01:36:25.000And because he is a classicist who has studied Greek mythology, he analogizes Trump to the classic example of Sophocles of the tragic hero, right?
01:36:37.000You know, you get the feeling that Trump simply wants someone, maybe because he is narcissistic, he wants someone to say, good job, here's where you did well.
01:36:46.000And the fact that he could never get the mainstream media to even remotely be minimally fair.
01:36:54.000You know, if you ban critical race theory, or if you support, you know, absolute free speech, you should be congratulated for that.
01:37:04.000Irrespective of your political stripe.
01:37:06.000But yet because they simply could never give him any kudos for anything, then his bombastic sort of bragging gets amplified because he is the tragic hero saying, look, what do I need to do to get you to just tap me on the back ones?
01:37:23.000And I think that Victor Davidson's Hanson's analogizing with the classic tragic Greek hero is exactly spot on for Trump.
01:37:32.000But it is unfortunate that he has this desire to get them to pat him on the back because he's never going to get it.
01:37:41.000By the way, you mentioned Glenn Greenwald.
01:37:43.000In the past, I sort of always thought of him as kind of lefty, progressive, don't pay attention to him.
01:37:49.000But I've seen him several times appear on Tucker Carlson, which is, of course, a show that you shouldn't appear on because it's Fox News and so on.
01:37:57.000And I've always found him to be incredibly fair.
01:38:02.000I have to apologize to him here on the record that I thought of him in the past as sort of this really annoying kind of progressive guy, but I actually find him to be incredibly fair-minded in the way that he handles these types of issues.
01:38:19.000And I think that's one of the reasons why he decided to go on Tucker Carlson in the first place, is to expose his way of thinking to a lot of people that may have had these predetermined ideas of him, these prejudiced ideas of him.
01:38:31.000You know, it's funny because he actually had the same opinion of me.
01:38:35.000You know, like when we did a podcast yesterday, he was like, I saw you before.
01:38:39.000I thought he was some guy who platformed too many of these alt-right assholes and he hates trans people.
01:38:44.000And he goes, and then I started listening to your show.
01:38:48.000And, you know, it's easy to have this sort of reductionist perspective of someone and decide, oh, that guy, he's a wacky, leftist, progressive, just ridiculous ideas.
01:39:01.000But Glenn Greenwald is an honest man, and he's a man of principles, and he's courageous, and that's why he released the Snowden papers, and that's why...
01:39:10.000He's done a lot of very important work in Brazil, and he's hated for it by some groups and loved by others.
01:39:17.000He's taken a lot of chances, and I find him to be incredibly intellectually honest, and he's also willing to discuss some real landmine issues, real hot-button topics.
01:39:29.000We got into some of them yesterday, and I respect him very much.
01:40:32.000So I wanted to ask you something, and I hope it's not inappropriate for me to bring it up.
01:40:37.000So you recently obtained a huge deal with Spotify, of course, putting you in a whole new category in terms of wealth.
01:40:44.000Has that reality altered your felt level of happiness?
01:40:49.000And let me explain why I say this, because I receive countless emails from people who say similar things to you, similar things to what you said at the start of our show today, where you said, you know, you always seem so happy and positive and all this kind of stuff.
01:41:05.000And I always try to give them an answer in terms of, you know, what are some pathways to happiness?
01:41:10.000And maybe I'll write my next book on this topic.
01:41:13.000And I always tell people that, you know, don't rely really on money.
01:41:16.000I mean, money in a sense, it's an inverted U. Up to a certain point, having more money makes you happier.
01:41:23.000But beyond that point, it's diminishing returns.
01:41:25.000There's an inflection point where it doesn't really alter your level of happiness in any way.
01:41:30.000Would that be correct of you in that the fact that you've got this huge deal doesn't really alter your, you know, global holistic level of happiness?
01:42:09.000I haven't really changed much about that kind of stuff.
01:42:13.000I think that, if anything, it brings more pressure because once people realize you're making a lot of money and they put you in a different category, then they start criticizing you more.
01:44:00.000Because I remember when I first got my first development deal and I went from being really poor and not having any idea how I was going to pay my rent...
01:44:09.000To having a lot of money in the bank, having like six figures in the bank, and then this huge weight lift off my shoulders.
01:44:18.000I remember the feeling like once I looked at my bank account like, whew, I don't have to worry about my bills for the first time in my life.
01:44:26.000There you were on the increasing part of the curve, right?
01:44:29.000You were, in other words, more money led to greater happiness.
01:44:32.000But then you get to a point where there's diminishing return, whether you have 10 million or 30 million or 100 million, doesn't add one millimeter of happiness to your global life.
01:44:43.000But what it can do is add more pressure.
01:44:47.000And that can actually make you less happy.
01:44:49.000And then you also, like I said, you're the target of more criticism.
01:44:53.000That can make you less happy if you pay attention to it.
01:44:55.000But what I've done is ramp up my physical exercise, my meditation, and my, as in California at least, my yoga.
01:45:04.000I haven't really been pursuing that out here, but I've been doing a lot of exercise.
01:45:07.000And as long as I have physical struggle, like a tremendous amount of physical struggle, I'm really good at letting the rest of it just wash off my back because I give myself so much physical struggle.
01:45:24.000My workouts are so intense that whatever the pain or the frustration or the difficulty of criticism, it pales in comparison to what I do to myself.
01:45:38.000And it sounds like a crazy person's approach to things, but I've really got a method to my madness.
01:45:44.000In terms of the way my mind works, I work out like I'm training for something, like I have some insanely difficult physical task ahead of me that I have to prepare my body for.
01:46:03.000And because I am in this high-pressure, sort of stressful situation with this place that I find myself in where there's a skeleton crew of people, me and Jamie mostly,
01:46:24.000If I just sat around and thought about all those people listening and all the people that are mad at me and all the people that love me and the expectations and the criticisms, I'd lose my fucking mind.
01:46:58.000Do you ever have the noisy brain where you're trying to sleep but you're thinking about 33,000 things?
01:47:06.000Because I'm thinking of someone like you who has multiple careers so that the stressors could become...
01:47:12.000It's not as though you're only a podcast host or only an MMA guy.
01:47:17.000So is there a particular area where it's difficult to shut off your brain because you're uniquely worried about those particular stressors?
01:47:26.000The biggest stressor are my own failings.
01:47:29.000The biggest stressor are my own errors and the things that I've done wrong.
01:47:35.000When I've had a show where I wasn't at my best, or I said something that wasn't accurate, or I said it in a way where I could have done a better job of expressing myself, those are the things that bother me.
01:47:50.000You know, it's so funny you say this because I'm going to relate what you just said to something that drives my behavior.
01:47:57.000So when people tell me, why do you take on all these fights to fight against these bad ideas and it adds so much stress to your life?
01:48:06.000I always tell them that I have, and it's going to speak exactly to what you said about yourself, I have a very exacting code of personal conduct So that I am truly my, you know, my most severe critic because I set the bar very high so that at the end of the night when I put my head on the pillow,
01:48:24.000in order for me to not suffer from insomnia and to not feel like a fraud, I need to know that I've done Whatever I could to contribute to the battle of ideas.
01:48:34.000Now, however big or however small, I don't have Joe Rogan's influence, but I certainly have some influence.
01:48:40.000And so for me to be able to go to bed with my whole personhood intact, I need to feel as though I've done all that I can.
01:48:49.000And that's what compels me to engage in the way that I do.
01:48:53.000And so I really do appreciate what you said about sort of having this Now, it can be exhausting, right?
01:49:38.000But when it comes to my work, I'm pretty ruthless on myself.
01:49:42.000But that's a great regulatory mechanism for keeping sanity with something that's public.
01:49:49.000Because you're doing it publicly, so you are exposed to all these people's perspectives and views and criticisms and praise, and both of them are equally toxic, right?
01:49:58.000The criticisms can change the way you feel about yourself to the point where you could lose all self-respect and hate yourself and just want to argue with everyone who doesn't like you, but also the praise.
01:50:09.000You can get delusional and you can start to think that you are someone special, you are different than the rest, and you don't have to try as hard, and everything you do is amazing.
01:51:45.000And you get better if you pay attention.
01:51:47.000If you pay attention to what you're doing and you are ruthlessly critical and you do have those days where you do something that you don't like, well, then you don't do it that way anymore.
01:51:55.000And then you think about what you did wrong, you think about what you could do better, and you apply that information, and you apply some hard work and some discipline, and you keep fucking going.
01:52:04.000And as long as you do that, you're going to get better.
01:52:06.000Even in something that doesn't seem like you get better at it, like with conversations.
01:52:24.000Yeah, I think more than anything, there's an intimacy in these conversations, right?
01:52:29.000I mean, right now, I could completely presume that there's nobody listening to us, and it's just two guys talking to each other in a very familiar, intimate way.
01:52:42.000And even on my own show, I think that's exactly what happens.
01:52:45.000I often notice when people come on the show before I turn on the camera, They're nervous.
01:52:49.000But then I set them at ease and I say, look, forget about the fact that there's going to be some people watching.
01:52:54.000Just have a normal conversation with me.
01:52:56.000And then within five minutes, you see the morphology of their face change because they really just get into it.
01:53:02.000And I think it really speaks to You know, there's this old kind of adage that, you know, people have short attention spans.
01:53:11.000They want, you know, clips to be three minutes long.
01:53:14.000And my goodness, has your show proven that to be, you know, about as incorrect as you can get?
01:53:19.000Because again, people are, you're speaking in people's brains, right?
01:53:24.000By the way, people were so upset when my latest book, I didn't do the narration because they had so gotten used to my voice I don't want to say hate mail because they were very polite.
01:54:02.000So I don't know if it's because they didn't want to set up the system for me to do it, or maybe they thought it wouldn't alter the bottom line sales.
01:54:10.000But I proposed it, they said no, and I said fine.
01:54:27.000I always tell people when you have as deep and as silky a voice as mine, if I were to narrate my own voice and my own book, it would be distracting.
01:54:37.000So maybe I'm doing them a service by having a nasal guy read the book.
01:55:01.000There should never have been a consideration that anybody else would do it.
01:55:04.000I mean, my only concern, to be honest with you, was...
01:55:07.000I mean, yes, you're right that the whole book should be narrated by me.
01:55:10.000But because I use a lot of sarcasm and humor and satire and the book has a lot of personal anecdotes...
01:55:18.000I was worried that the narrator might not be able to pick those.
01:55:22.000Now, based on what Michael Shermer listened to the audiobook early, before it was released, and he said that the guy did a reasonably good job.
01:55:30.000So I'm going on his opinion, but maybe you're right.
01:55:34.000Maybe I should have done it otherwise.
01:55:35.000Well, Shermer's being very charitable.
01:55:37.000As good a job as that guy could be, it's like, listen, if you wanted to have someone read George Carlin's act, wouldn't that be offensive?
01:55:46.000Wouldn't you want to hear those words from George Carlin's voice?
01:57:41.000And then I wrote some things and I wrote some weird things like my thoughts about sometimes I act as if life is a simulation.
01:57:52.000I act with the knowledge that life is a simulation.
01:57:56.000I literally go and I approach every interaction of my day occasionally with the idea that life is a simulation.
01:58:04.000I did it in a humorous way but in a way that The concept is, of course you know this, if there is a simulation that's so good, you cannot discern whether or not it's a simulation.
01:58:17.000How do we know whether or not we're in it right now?
01:58:19.000And when you talk to really intelligent people that have studied this over and over again, they say it's highly likely that that is the case.
01:58:26.000We will one day reach the point where simulations won't be discernible.
01:58:32.000How do we know if we're in one right now?
01:58:35.000And I was saying that I spend some of my time behaving as if I'm in a simulation.
01:59:08.000The relationship between the author, well, and the publishing house in general, but the editor who's handling your book is really akin to a marriage because you are ultimately sharing with that person the first draft Of your intimate thoughts,
01:59:25.000And so in my case, my editor for The Parasitic Mind was just the perfect guy because You know, when you send off the first draft, I mean, you're scared, right?
01:59:57.000We need to make sure that when people are reading this book, they can't put it down.
02:00:02.000You currently are at, I think it was my first draft I gave to him was 93,000 words.
02:00:07.000He said we need to scale it back to about 70,000 words.
02:00:11.000But he was very polite in sharing that feedback because he knew that it's tough to tell an author who spent time agonizing over every syllable, hey, cut off 23,000 words from your baby.
02:00:26.000But I think you have to come with the humility.
02:00:28.000You can't be the type of guy who says, I am not going to change a goddamn syllable in my book.
02:00:34.000And so I actually took his feedback to heart.
02:00:37.000I did make the cuts and I think the book is much stronger for it.
02:00:41.000So I really think there's got to be this unbelievable trust and intimacy between the editor who's handling your book and yourself.
02:00:48.000If that relationship doesn't work well, I think the book will suffer.
02:00:53.000I don't blame the publisher or even the editor.
02:00:57.000I got the book deal before I had a podcast.
02:01:00.000I don't think they understood that I just like to talk about shit sometimes.
02:01:05.000They wanted me to approach it like a stand-up comic writing a book.
02:01:08.000Like a book with a lot of comedy in it.
02:01:12.000If anybody goes back and reads my old blog entries, they weren't like that.
02:01:17.000Some of them were humorous and some of them were just weird.
02:01:19.000Some of them were just strange thoughts that I have about life.
02:01:23.000And oftentimes, that's how I would write stand-up in general.
02:02:03.000Does the first time that you introduce new material to someone, for example, will you do the bit in front of your wife before it goes out on the road or the first time is in front of an audience?
02:02:21.000Occasionally I'll say something on a podcast and it's funny and then that becomes a bit...
02:02:24.000But most of the time, I have an idea, and the first time I say it, what I'll do is I'll make a shit sandwich, meaning I'll do a bit that I know works, and then in between that bit, I'll sandwich in this new stuff, and then if it sucks, then I'll go on with a proven bit afterwards.
02:02:42.000So it's beautiful if you have material already, because you have a little scaffolding.
02:02:47.000And so one of the things that I do every time I release a Netflix special, You have a special, and then you have all this time off after the special where you have to write a new special.
02:02:57.000So I have usually about three to six months between the filming of a special to when it airs.
02:03:05.000So during that time, I make a lot of shit sandwiches.
02:03:08.000So I have those bits that I know work and then I sandwich in this new stuff.
02:03:12.000And then some of the new stuff is great right off the bat.
02:03:15.000It's rare, but occasionally you have a finished product from the paper to the audience and it works right away.
02:03:55.000And I remember, I mean, I'm going to link what I'm about to say to what we talked about earlier in terms of Trump getting the approval that he wants.
02:04:04.000And I was moved by how you were moved when you first...
02:04:10.000Had Mitzi say to you, hey, you're funny.
02:04:13.000I mean, that in a sense demonstrates that we're all looking for that ego stroke from the person that we care about.
02:04:20.000In this particular case, for you, the holy grail was for Mitzi to give you her imprimatur.
02:04:26.000And once you got it, it was like you had won the Nobel Prize, right?
02:04:30.000Yeah, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.
02:04:36.000When I started out doing stand-up in 1988 in Boston, I had heard about the Comedy Store from everyone.
02:04:44.000Everyone talked about that is where Sam Kinison started.
02:04:47.000That is where Richard Pryor used to perform.
02:04:49.000And you would hear about all the greats, Robin Williams, all these different people who worked out at the Comedy Store in LA. And you would see video of it on television, and you would see these comedians that you knew were the greatest of all time, and they all came out of this one place.
02:05:06.000And there was this one woman, it was her vision.
02:05:09.000And she's, without a doubt, the most important person in the history of comedy outside of comedians.
02:06:18.000It's a small group of people because it's...
02:06:21.000Such a brutal business on your self-esteem.
02:06:24.000It's such a brutal business on your emotions, and it's so hard to get good.
02:06:29.000You know, you could start off kind of good, but to be consistently good over and over and over again, to put out consistent specials, to consistently improve, it's so much work.
02:06:39.000And most comedians, and this is a terrible thing to say, but it's true, they become good and then they start to suck.
02:06:47.000They get to a point where they get that adulation, like we were talking about, and they embrace it.
02:06:54.000The Comedy Store forced you to grind because you weren't just performing for your audience.
02:06:59.000If I was going up on any given night, I'm not just performing for my audience.
02:07:03.000There's people there that are there to see Whitney Cummings, they're there to see Eliza Schlesinger, they're there to see Joey Diaz, they're there to see Anthony Jeselnik.
02:07:11.000Of many, many, many people that are on the lineup, and they're all killers.
02:07:15.000All these comedians would just be, you know, Ali Wong, they'd just be smashing, smashing, smashing, and you go on after them, and you gotta bring the heat.
02:07:23.000And you're also trying to work out new material, and it's a gem, and it's like, it's also, there's like a family aspect to it.
02:07:30.000Everybody's like, especially over the last decade in particular, because Comedy over the last decade, we realized that we don't have to have a famine mentality anymore, because everybody in the past was all competing for a limited amount of slots on television.
02:07:45.000Everybody was competing for parts in a movie or parts on television shows or the host of The Tonight Show, and it was like a very dog-eat-dog sort of environment.
02:07:55.000With podcasts, the atmosphere changed.
02:07:58.000And then it became, no, we help each other.
02:08:29.000One of the best nights at the Comedy Store was Tuesday night because no one was on the road on Tuesday night.
02:08:34.000Because the Tuesday night, everybody would come into town.
02:08:36.000And so the people like Sebastian Maniscalco or all these people that would do Madison Square Garden on the weekend, they would come to the Comedy Store on a Tuesday night to work out new material.
02:09:19.000From 2014 on when I returned because we had been talking about it and that was what that episode of the Comedy Store was all about.
02:09:25.000We talked about it so much on the podcast and we talked about me and I would advertise so often about what a great place it is and I'd have guys like Tom Segura and Burt Kreischer and Ari Shafir on my show and we talk about the fun times we'd have and people were traveling from all over the world to come to this place and We were there because of the vision of Mitzi Shore.
02:09:48.000Because she, in the 1970s, said, the only way this is gonna work is you let these fucking crazy people do whatever they want and find themselves on that stage.
02:09:57.000And all that matters is that you're good.
02:10:09.000She wouldn't give free passes to anybody.
02:10:12.000And all the other clubs, like the industry and the agents, they would all hobnob and come to these clubs because it was their social place.
02:10:18.000They would get free tickets and free drinks, and usually they would become a problem.
02:10:22.000They would talk too much, and they'd get loud, and they weren't listening to the comedy, and they were drinking too much.
02:10:42.000I was going to say, I think that you mentioned earlier that You know, it's a very tough business to be in because of the rejection and so on.
02:10:50.000I think rejection is such a fundamental part of life, right?
02:10:54.000So, for example, when I send a paper to a journal for it to be peer-reviewed, I mean, the rate of rejections in top journals is in the order of 90-95%.
02:11:05.000I mean, so stop for a second and think what that means, right?
02:11:07.000You've just spent two, three, four years working on a scientific project.
02:11:11.000It took you another six months, eight months to write it up.
02:11:14.000You send it to a journal and you have a 90-95% chance of it being rejected.
02:11:20.000And so I always tell my students that, you know, rejection is really part of being anti-fragile, right?
02:11:27.000I don't know, are you familiar with the concept?
02:11:30.000Who's a very good friend of mine, also a fellow Lebanese, right?
02:11:33.000So anti-fragility is something that, I mean, as long as something doesn't kill you, right?
02:11:38.000The old adage is, squeaky doors don't break, which is basically rewording the concept of anti-fragility.
02:11:44.000You know, you and I grow because of the rejections, right?
02:11:48.000And I think a lot of my graduate students oftentimes are disheartened by the odds of a paper being accepted because they say, my God, I'm going to spend the next 30, 40, 50 years operating within a domain of interest where the likelihood of my work being rejected consistently is in the order of 80,
02:14:04.000It could be your attitude that you carry with you on stage.
02:14:07.000You could be too cocky or too confident and not engaging enough.
02:14:17.000It's not humble, but connected to the idea of expressing the bit rather than you killing on stage.
02:14:25.000Some people just want to go up there and be great.
02:14:28.000But what you really have to do is don't think I want to be great.
02:14:34.000What is the best way to get this into people's minds?
02:14:37.000And one of the best ways is to be completely tuned in to what you're thinking and what you're saying, to be locked in, focused, and also it's got to resonate with you.
02:14:48.000You have to really think this is funny.
02:14:50.000And it takes a while to figure out what about it is funny to you because you're so close to it.
02:15:57.000I think I might have discussed this on a previous show, but one of my former postdocs, his doctoral dissertation was on an evolutionary study of humor.
02:16:09.000And the argument was that humor is a sexually selected trait, meaning that humor serves as a proxy for intelligence, right?
02:16:19.000And so to the extent that there are sex differences in the frequency of top comedians, An evolutionary perspective would argue that there are stronger selection pressures, evolutionary pressures for men to be funny as part of their elaborate courtship rituals than there are for women to be funny.
02:16:37.000So, for example, you know, never have the following words been uttered Sure, Linda, you have a gorgeous ass, but you're not funny enough.
02:16:48.000But the other way, it certainly has happened, where a woman sees a gorgeous guy, but he's a dud, he's not funny, he's not engaging, and she decides that he's not the right partner for her, right?
02:16:58.000That's why women can consistently say, I want a funny guy, because they're effectively saying, I want a smart guy.
02:17:04.000I mean, it's hard to be funny and witty and be a dumb guy, correct?
02:17:09.000You're right that it's much harder for women to be comedians, but in part, evolution explains why there are sex differences in terms of the frequency of comedians.
02:21:36.000Just not happy and not necessarily a funny guy off stage.
02:21:41.000But on stage, he was one of the greats.
02:21:43.000But, you know, it's funny because when you said that he was miserable in the fact that he was a comedian rather than a movie star, it kind of, if we circle back to one of the first points that we talked about when we started today's conversation where you said, you know, you're a happy guy and so on, it speaks to the importance of really pursuing something that on a daily basis makes you happy.
02:22:05.000I mean, I get tons of emails from people who say, hey, professor, I finished my bachelor's in this.
02:22:40.000Therefore, it's hard for me not to be happy.
02:22:43.000So someone like this comedian, this regrettable thing where he committed suicide, That mismatch between where he wants to be and where he is every day is a terrible...
02:22:53.000Now, for most people, they don't commit suicide, but they do wake up at 57 saying, you know what?
02:23:42.000And not everybody can be a rock star, right?
02:23:45.000Not everybody can be a famous painter.
02:23:49.000And I don't know, other than what I do and what I've done, my path, I don't know what it would take for someone to be successful in their chosen field.
02:26:37.000I'd have zero regrets in terms of inaction.
02:26:40.000Any regret that I have of action, the things that I've done wrong or people I've wronged or things I've said that I shouldn't have said has made me a wiser person.
02:27:27.000And of course, there is no prescription for how you can guarantee that you can pick the right life partner.
02:27:32.000But really, try to make that decision as carefully as you can, because that itself can be either a source of great happiness or terrible misery.
02:28:02.000If you don't have anything to bring to the table, if you're filled with self-hate and loathing and anger and all the jealousy and pettiness, you're not going to get a person who is a good person.
02:29:26.000The billionaire CEO who works 16 hours a day and is on his fourth marriage and has a bunch of kids that are drug addicts because he was never there.
02:29:39.000But his real life is a shambles because he spent all of his time concentrating on accumulating wealth.
02:29:46.000And accumulating power and none of his time on himself and how he interacts with other people and being a good father and being a good husband and being a good friend and being a decent human being.
02:30:03.000And sometimes those are the hardest things to do.
02:30:06.000It's easy to concentrate on a task at hand.
02:30:09.000If you could just distract yourself from your own barbaric humanity and just think only about accumulating numbers in a bank account.
02:30:17.000I mean, that's Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, right?
02:30:22.000Without giving any names, I have family members who have been of that type, who really have never fostered long-term friendships.
02:30:32.000When I say family members, I don't mean my own family.
02:30:35.000I mean, my family of birth, where they became very wealthy, where they collected Ferraris and Aston Martins.
02:30:45.000And I've warned these family members that life is long and if one day you were to lose your money, and I hope that you don't, the trajectory is not a good one.
02:30:57.000And I hate to say it, but it's turned out that way.
02:31:06.000You should always be accompanied by great quality people around you, but you should certainly have those great quality people as you enter the golden years of your life.
02:31:17.000And I think, regrettably, for some of these high-flying players, They think that the party is going to go on forever and it isn't.
02:31:25.000And so, yeah, you know, choose carefully who you're going to go to bed at at night because that's one of the sources of happiness.
02:31:34.000And also, if you get if you're concentrating only on success in terms of financial success, and that's what a lot of people do that are in business, right?
02:31:42.000You're really your your life is fixated on numbers.
02:31:46.000Your life is fixated on accumulating numbers.
02:31:49.000It's an empty pursuit, but it's also a pursuit that becomes insanely addictive, because you compare yourself to the people around you.
02:31:57.000Mike's house is 4,000 square feet, but my house is 5,000 square feet.
02:32:02.000And then you're happy with it until you realize that Steve's house is 7,000 square feet, and you're like, fuck!
02:32:06.000And he lives in the best neighborhood.
02:32:12.000And I live in a not so desirable neighborhood.
02:32:22.000I mean, the positional economy is a real term that captures exactly what you just said, which is, by the way, it's not so much for many things.
02:32:31.000What makes us happy is not so much some absolute level of whatever the currency is, but that we have more of it than someone else.
02:32:41.000I think I might have even mentioned this on a previous show on your podcast.
02:32:45.000For example, if you ask people, are you happy with your sex life?
02:32:50.000The amount of sex you have is less important than the fact of you having more sex than your close friends, right?
02:32:59.000Which shows you again how much of a hierarchical species we are.
02:33:03.000We use social comparison to decide whether we're happy or not, right?
02:33:43.000But not if all you're concerned about is numbers.
02:33:48.000Not if you're just doing it to try to achieve bigger and greater.
02:33:52.000Like you were talking about the point of diminishing returns when it comes to financial wealth.
02:33:55.000I think challenges are important, like having things that you're working towards, because they give you this sense that in doing these things and getting better, whether it's getting better at playing chess or getting better at tennis or whatever, pick a thing.
02:34:11.000There's something about it that develops your overall human potential.
02:34:15.000When you get better at something, you flex the muscles and exercise the muscles of getting better, of figuring out problems, of being engaged.
02:34:25.000When you're stagnant and just doing the same thing over and over and over again with no change, your mind atrophies.
02:34:33.000It speaks to what you said earlier when you said using the COVID lockdown for self-improvement.
02:34:40.000So, for example, one of the things that I did during the COVID lockdown is I said, because I am now addicted to this step counting thing that's on my iPhone, I said I wanted to always maintain at least 14,000 steps per day.
02:34:59.000I knew that I had to reach that benchmark.
02:35:02.000And it didn't matter if at, you know, 10 o'clock at night, I have to go walking around the block eight times so that I could hit that mark.
02:35:11.000And so by doing that, it gave me great satisfaction because I could look now at the last seven, eight, nine months and see that my pedometer is showing that I've maintained this very specific objective.
02:35:40.000People get addicted to step counts and how much exercise and exertion they put forth in a day.
02:35:45.000And even though it can masquerade as a positive for some people, particularly people with addictive personalities, it can become a real problem.
02:36:05.000Which, by the way, again, shows you all of these incredible connections that today we have.
02:36:10.000In what world would I, a professor of evolutionary psychology and so on, have connected with Jillian Michaels, but apparently she was a fan of my show and invited me on.
02:36:21.000So, again, the social network stuff allows You know, meetings of worlds that you would have never thought possible 10, 15 years ago.
02:36:40.000What she does after, I don't know, but I joked with her at the start of the show.
02:36:43.000I told her that, you know, when I invite people on my show, I have all sorts of illustrious people, most of whom my wife never batted an eye, but when she found out that I was appearing on Jillian Michaels, She said, oh, tell her I'm a fan.
02:37:09.000Well, I'm a fan of people that motivate people.
02:37:11.000I feel as though you've been remiss in pointing to the fact that I'm about 20 pounds lighter than the last time that you saw me when I was on your show.
02:37:22.000I think a little shout-out from Joe Rogan saying, well done, would have been the appropriate thing for you to do, but I'll forgive you.
02:39:12.000There's an ongoing joke now, and I'm sure you probably don't check it because you probably get tagged a million times on Twitter, but oftentimes I will post something decadent I'm eating and then I will write, please forgive me,
02:39:30.000So somehow you've managed to incorporate yourself in my culinary conscience So that every time I eat something bad, Joe Rogan is on my right shoulder, you know, insulting me.
02:40:00.000Like, oftentimes they'll force you into action, you know, and I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but sometimes their feelings need to be hurt a little in order to prod them into action, and you can do that with people.
02:40:20.000Actually, I had written an article on my Psychology Today column defending Jillian Michaels, whom we just talked about a second ago, because she had gone after, but in a very polite way, she had gone after Lizzo saying, well, sorry,
02:40:36.000but I'm not going to celebrate her body because it's not good for her to be this overweight.
02:40:40.000And suddenly she was this monster Nazi because how dare you not celebrate Lizzo's body and so on.
02:41:21.000Because when someone does achieve an amazing body, we know how hard it is to do, especially how hard it is to maintain.
02:41:28.000I mean, Jillian Michaels has had a beautiful body for a long time.
02:41:33.000I mean, that means she's incredibly disciplined.
02:41:35.000Of course, a person like that is going to look at someone who's not disciplined at all being celebrated for her body and go, that's ridiculous.
02:41:42.000And she's right, because there's health consequences to being that big.
02:41:46.000And to ignore those health consequences just to make yourself feel good that you're making someone else feel good about being morbidly obese...
02:42:25.000So when I teach, let's say, marketing in the business school, I say, yes, it's a very effective advertising campaign because it empowers women.
02:42:34.000But if you are a truth purist, you're really peddling BS because we're not equally beautiful.
02:43:06.000Well, because, I mean, of course, women do look at men's physical markers, but not to the same extent, because in a sense, men can compensate for some of their physical shortcomings by doing well in other metrics, right?
02:43:21.000So you could have a guy who's very funny, who's Maybe not the tallest, but he has great personality or a dominant personality.
02:43:27.000But when it comes to physicality, it's difficult to compensate for that.
02:43:32.000You either are facially symmetric or you're not, right?
02:43:36.000So on some traits, we can compensate for them.
02:43:38.000On others, they're sort of deal breakers, right?
02:45:55.000But it's really funny that some of the people that also say that you shouldn't body shame, they're the same type of people that make fun of Donald Trump for having small hands.
02:46:05.000It's like whenever it's convenient, you will forego those rules.
02:46:11.000Well, that's hypocrisy, one of the curses of the human condition.
02:46:16.000Yeah, there's so many curses of the human condition, aren't there?
02:46:20.000Even if we're aware of them, we still can't help fall into those pitfalls.
02:46:24.000That's why there is something called the seven deadly sins, right?
02:46:27.000It's because moral philosophers and theologians were well aware of many of the quicksand traps that we could fall into and they've put them into a easily digestible list for us, right?
02:46:38.000Well, that's why it's important to have psychologists like yourself who can explain exactly what's going on in the mind that's forcing you into these weird little traps and holes.
02:47:03.000It basically is the story of many of the things that we've been talking about all the years that I've been coming on your show, which is there are a bunch of these terrible ideas, these idea pathogens that were spawned on university campuses because it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas.
02:47:20.000And so I trace What these bad ideas are, how they originated, and then I offer solutions for how we can protect ourselves against these bad ideas, how we could vaccinate ourselves against disordered thinking.
02:47:34.000Now, I'm sure these ideas and the way you're describing them make some people uncomfortable, like they upset people.
02:47:42.000Have you had a lot of criticism about this book?
02:47:46.000So far, not too much criticism because I'd like to think that I've done a pretty good and tempered job in presenting the evidence.
02:47:55.000So one of the things that I try to explain in the book is that each of these bad ideas start off with a kernel of truth and some noble cause, but then in the pursuit of that noble cause, the idea gets distorted and it becomes parasitic.
02:48:13.000So for example, When it comes to feminism, equity feminism is a great idea because it basically says that men and women should be equal under the law.
02:48:21.000There should be no institutional sexism.
02:48:25.000But in the pursuit of that original noble goal, we shouldn't then say As do militant feminists say, that there are no innate biological differences.
02:48:35.000Everything is due to a social construction.
02:48:37.000We need to make men and women indistinguishable in the pursuit of the original goal.
02:48:41.000When it comes to transgender activism, it's the same story.
02:48:44.000You and I can both be fully in favor of transgender rights, As I think we both are.
02:48:49.000But that doesn't mean that we reject biology, what I call biophobia, in arguing that a 275-pound guy who's 6'7", who decides to call himself Linda tomorrow, he can fight the MMA against women who are one-third his size.
02:49:06.000And if you say otherwise, you're a transphobe.
02:49:08.000And so what I basically argue in the book is that each of these terrible ideas Started off from a good place, but then it metamorphosized into a complete departure from reason.
02:49:20.000And then I offer ways by which we can sort of retake reason and logic and science from these parasitic ideas.
02:49:27.000Now, when you construct a book like this, do you look at it in terms of how people could potentially criticize these ideas and what arguments they would have against what you've proclaimed?
02:49:41.000Well, what I try to do is offer a way by which it becomes difficult to argue against me because the evidence is too great in my favor.
02:49:52.000I always tell people that when I walk into a room, if I walk with the requisite squagger, it's because I know what I know.
02:50:01.000But I also have epistemic humility, meaning that if you were to today ask me, Joe, give me your position, Gad, on the legalization of marijuana, I would tell you, you know what?
02:50:10.000I simply don't know enough about the story.
02:50:14.000I haven't built, to use a term from my book, I haven't built the nomological network of cumulative evidence that would allow me to pronounce a definitive position.
02:50:23.000And so I think if I've done a good job in the book, I will have communicated to people a way by which when they are constructing arguments, they can do it void of hysteria.
02:50:34.000If I want to prove to you, Joe, that toy preferences are not socially constructed, I can prove it to you by bringing data from across cultures, from across time periods, From across disciplines, showing to you that toy preferences have a biological signature.
02:51:22.000My blood pressure is higher because of that, right?
02:51:25.000So yes, but in all seriousness, I face it both in my public engagement.
02:51:31.000Meaning, let's say, on social media or whatever, but also in my scientific career, as I think you and I might have spoken in the past, I've always faced that consistent debate because many of my colleagues in the social sciences, even till today, are very,
02:51:47.000very resistant to accepting the idea that biology matters when it comes to human affairs, as I think we've discussed in the past.
02:51:54.000And so it's really, in a sense, this book I've been writing it for 25 years because I have seen, you know, I tell in chapter one of the book, I basically say that I faced two great wars in my life.
02:52:07.000The first war was the Lebanese Civil War when I was a child, and the second war has been the war on reason, logic, and science that I have experienced as a professor of 26 years.
02:52:17.000Some of the stuff that is being taught and promulgated at the universities is absolutely insane.
02:52:22.000I mean, people think that I'm making it up, that I'm being satirical when I say these things, but you now see the downstream effect of all those bad ideas, right?
02:52:32.000You're seeing it in the training in the military.
02:52:35.000You're seeing it in political parties.
02:52:37.000So these ideas start off in the universities as some esoteric nonsense, but with enough force, they become mainstream stuff.
02:52:47.000Yeah, well these people graduate from those universities and they go on to enter the workforce with these notions that they have.
02:52:53.000And these notions are reinforced by the other people that are their age that graduated along with them and they want to reshape society and these ideals.
02:53:03.000And then one day they get older and then they get a mortgage and then they get a job and they get a family and they go, what the fuck was I doing?
02:53:11.000But they've already started this process.
02:53:14.000It's interesting that you say this denying of biology and its effect on human affairs is such a strange thing because it's clearly a factor.
02:53:43.000Because imagine if we can argue that your child and mine has equal probability to become the next Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan as Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan.
02:53:56.000We're all born with equal potentiality.
02:54:04.000So again, that speaks to my point earlier, right?
02:54:06.000These idea pathogens free us from reality, but they do so in the service of kind of a feel-good, noble cause, but it is perfectly detached from reality.
02:54:18.000Men and women are not biologically the same.
02:54:20.000We're not all likely to become Michael Jordan.
02:54:24.000Transgender people have every right to live free of bigotry, but they shouldn't compete with biological females if they're trans women.
02:54:32.000And so again, I think the difficulty is that for most people who are social justice warriors, they think that we can't chew gum and walk at the same time.
02:54:40.000I could be for all of these noble causes without ever murdering a millimeter of truth.
02:54:46.000Yeah, and the physical issue is very strange, too, because physical variables, they're so real.
02:54:54.000And to deny that as a factor, as a real factor in who you are and what your potential is, that's one of the reasons why sports are so interesting, right?
02:55:03.000Like, a person like me really doesn't have a chance to compete against LeBron James.
02:55:26.000You get to see these rare people that can do things that you know for a fact if you had a million years to practice, you could never achieve the things that they're doing.
02:55:34.000And it's But by the way, John Watson, one of the founders of behaviorism, argued basically, and I have the exact quote in the book, that, you know, give me any 12 infants,
02:55:49.000I could turn any one of them into the next beggar, the next surgeon, the next athlete.
02:55:54.000So he was basically arguing for exactly the position that you are so rejecting.
02:55:59.000Hey, I could turn you into the next LeBron James If you give me the right opportunity to properly condition you and socialize you, it's insane.
02:56:09.000By the way, even, for example, in psychiatry, until very recently, something as clearly organic as schizophrenia was blamed on the environment.
02:56:20.000You had a schizophrenic mother who hugged you too much or didn't hug you enough.
02:56:25.000Of course, today we look back at that and say, who believed this nonsense?
02:56:33.000So again, it's not as though these ideas are not espoused by otherwise very smart people.
02:56:39.000John Money of Johns Hopkins University Who was one of the original sort of gender is a social construction, used to advise surgeons, well, don't worry about it.
02:56:50.000Do the surgery on this boy and put him in a dress, call him Linda, and he will be a girl.
02:56:56.000Because it was thought that gender is completely due to social construction.
02:57:18.000Like, you're concentrating on something that's a small faction of people that are in the universities and it has no bearing on the real life.
02:57:24.000But then we've seen, like, particularly the protests in Portland, where they went on for like, I mean, I think they're still going on.
02:58:21.000I'll tell you a quick story that just happened to me recently.
02:58:26.000My daughter came to me and told me that her science teacher had an avatar of BLM in their dialogue, in their whatever, Zoom or whatever it was called.
02:58:35.000And I thought that was very objectionable.
02:58:37.000And so I wrote a very polite but firm letter To the principal saying that I didn't think that it was appropriate in the pursuit of her pedagogic responsibilities that a teacher would signal her political affiliations to young children.
02:58:53.000And secondly, I then said, but never mind that, If you look at some of the positions that are espoused by BLM, they're truly grotesque, whether it be the Marxist stuff, whether it be the black supremacism, whether it be the clear anti-white propaganda.
02:59:08.000And so I thought, is this something that's appropriate for a teacher to be doing?
02:59:12.000Well, within a few hours, It was taken away.
02:59:16.000So that was, in a sense, me activating my inner honey badger, right?
02:59:20.000It's not that I just got on a Joe Rogan show to talk about these ideas.
02:59:24.000In my own personal life, I got engaged, and I think that's what everybody needs to do.
02:59:30.000You need to be engaged in the battle of ideas because they have truly severe consequences on our children and their children.
02:59:37.000But there's a lot of people that are afraid.
02:59:39.000They're afraid to engage in the battle of ideas because they don't want to be labeled a bigot and they don't want to cause people to attack them and they'd rather just keep their mouth shut and complain quietly to their friends.
02:59:52.000But earlier we were talking about all of the different frailties that the human condition suffers from.
02:59:59.000I think cowardice is something that I've always said should be added to the long-standing list of seven deadly sins.
03:00:05.000We should have an eighth sin called cowardice.
03:00:09.000Look, I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but the young folks who landed on Normandy weren't given a guarantee of safe passage.
03:00:20.000They knew that most of them were going to be mowed down like little mosquitoes by the machine guns of the Nazis, and yet they said, hey, I'll go, I'll do it.