In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with a friend who has lost 86 pounds in less than 2 years and is now at the lowest weight he has been in over 30 years. We talk about how he did it, what he did to get there, and how to keep it off. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it gives you some food for thought on how you can lose weight, too. Joe is a comedian, actor, podcaster, and podcaster. He has been married to his long-term girlfriend for 20 years and they have 2 kids together. They live in Los Angeles and have been dating for over 20 years. He is a former professional soccer player, and has been a long-time friend of mine. He's been through a lot in his life, and I hope this episode inspires you to take care of yourself and your body the way I have taken care of my wife and kids. If you're struggling with weight, or are struggling to lose it, this episode is for you. I hope it inspires you and motivates you to do what you need to do to get the most out of your day to day life and get the body you deserve. Thank you for listening and supporting this podcast. I really appreciate it. See you soon! - Tom Bell Tom Bell is a good friend and a good human being. Joe Rogans Podcast Check it out! - Thanks, Tom Bell, and the Podcast by Nightly Show by Night, by ( ) . Tom Rogan Podcast by Day, by Night , by Night by Night By Night, All Day by Day by Night? The podcast by Night's Day by By Night by , All Day By Day, , All Day All Day, By Night by Day by Night, By Day By ? & By Night By , By Night by Day, All Night, by Any Other Things In The Joe Experience | And Can I Do This? by Me? , And , I ll Think Like That? & All Day , What I Can I Have A Good Day & More? And I Can t Do This, - And I Can't Have This, I ll Say This
00:00:31.000I just was concerned for your well-being.
00:00:33.000And so I was just saying, if you really are saying that you want to get healthy and you really are saying that you want to play soccer and do all these things again...
00:00:42.000A friend has to be brutally honest with you.
00:00:47.000That's a hard one because nobody wants to hear they're gaining weight or they've gained weight or that they have to make radical changes to their life.
00:00:52.000I'm actually at the lowest weight since I think 88. That's incredible.
00:00:58.000Size waist 33. How much better do you feel?
00:02:01.000So just by having this clear objective that I have to reach makes it that no matter what, I've got to get off the proverbial couch and walk around.
00:03:09.000I weigh myself once a week so that the autocorrective mechanism comes in not when I'm now 227 in terms of weight, but if I've come to Texas and then I go on the scale and I've gained three pounds, well, now I know that I need to correct the following week.
00:03:26.000So these little changes, I mean, there's nothing magical.
00:03:29.000Just doing that I guess if I can add a fourth thing, I removed the all or nothing mindset.
00:03:34.000In the past, I mean, the highest weight I reached, Joe, can you, and you won't offend me, can you, from knowing me for many years, do you know how heavy I got?
00:04:08.000That's the heaviest that maybe I could have been more, that I'm aware of, that I've actually seen it on the scale, was 256. I had gone for my yearly physical, and I got on the scale, and I was 256, which is the average weight for a 6'4 middle linebacker who's, you know, 8 inches tall,
00:05:22.000And that's what's hard for people to do because they really do want immediate results.
00:05:26.000And the way I always describe it, there's a gambling term that you have to get better the same way you get sick.
00:05:32.000It's like if you're gambling, say if you and I were playing pool and I was ahead 100 games and you said double or nothing, I would say, no, no, no.
00:05:39.000You got to get better the same way you got sick.
00:07:44.000So breakfast, I may have one or two boiled eggs.
00:07:48.000Lunch might be my wife and I go to the Peruvian rotisserie place that we probably go to four times in a week, which I'll get a quarter of a chicken with a bit of coleslaw, vinegary coleslaw, not creamy coleslaw.
00:08:01.000I might have one or two snacks around mid-afternoon, which might be things like 100 grams of frozen raspberries, a little yogurt of 70 calories, and then dinner will be a fantastic salad that if you looked at the volume, you'd think,
00:08:17.000my God, how are you losing so much weight?
00:08:18.000But it only has five, six ounces of protein, but it's voluminous so that I feel full.
00:08:24.000I may have another little snack at 8 o'clock, 70, 80 calories, and I've reached my 15, 16, 1700 calories, and I'm Mr. Slim Man.
00:08:35.000Are you trying to lose more, or are you going to maintain this?
00:08:48.000Last time I checked, I was 171. I just need to see a steady state of 165, 167. Now, the actuarial tables, by the way, for a guy my height, they put me at 155, which strikes me as a bit...
00:09:04.000Yeah, those tables, the BMI tables, they don't account for mass and weightlifting, and also you did soccer for many, many years, so you have strong legs.
00:09:39.000Yeah, I do 16. I mean, I occasionally violate it if I feel like it, but it's only because I know I can get away with violating it because I'm so consistent.
00:12:20.000And so if you have that grit, I think it's a path to success.
00:12:23.000Yeah, Pressfield talks about that very same approach and he describes the muse as like a thing that will show up when you show up, that if you show up every day with respect to the muse.
00:12:35.000I don't remember if he gives you the prayer, tells you what the prayer is, but he'll sit down and say a thing, like out loud, Right.
00:13:02.000You know, there is nothing more orgasmic to me, I mean, other than sex, literally, but than the process of creation, right?
00:13:12.000There is a day when I open the laptop where that Word document has zero syllables struck.
00:13:20.000And 12 months later, 16 months later, there is an entire book that's written that hopefully is going to be consumed by many thousands of people, many of whom are going to send selfies.
00:13:58.000I think a lot of the woke stuff that you talk about is all covered in this book.
00:14:02.000And you covered it years ago, too, by the way.
00:14:05.000You were one of the first people to sound the alarm many years ago.
00:14:09.000There's a real problem both in academia and the way students are interacting with ideas and the way people online were interacting with ideas and you were a long time ago saying that there was something going on with people where these these essentially mind parasites It really is what it's like.
00:14:38.000And it becomes very hard to debate ideas, and it becomes very hard to talk about subjects objectively and honestly, because some things are triggering, and some things are offensive, and some things are...
00:14:57.000Just like the whole idea of fatphobia.
00:15:00.000Like, I was watching this video today, and this woman was talking about how people going on a diet, and she was saying, you don't even know yourself, but going on a diet, you're being fatphobic.
00:15:14.000And she breaks this down with this pseudo-intellectual nonsense, because I guess she was an educator.
00:15:19.000And so here you got this sloppy, overweight, lazy educator telling people that it's good to be lazy because if you're not lazy and if you try to become healthy, then you're a bigot.
00:15:37.000We are the only time, this is the only time in this world we're living in in 2022, this era from like whatever it was, maybe 1970, 1980 on, where poor people are fat.
00:16:28.000But really, from an ego-defensive perspective, it's a lot easier for me to adopt that ideology than to do the daily grind that's going to require for me to autocorrect, and therefore I buy into fat phobia and I buy into body positivity.
00:16:45.000Yeah, the daily grind is legitimately hard, but there's support out there.
00:16:50.000The thing that I would say to people that are on the fence, and it's easy to just decide to be body positive, and it's easy to decide to tell everyone you're beautiful no matter what, and to look at someone who's morbidly obese and say, you're amazing.
00:18:22.000She was duped into tweeting a made-up quote of an image of an American adult film star dressed up as a doctor.
00:18:29.000Most recently, she tweeted that the urine and feces of people who had received the jab needed to be separated from general sewage supplies while tests were done to measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water.
00:19:06.000You're allowed to say that someone's Satan.
00:19:08.000But you can't say that they're separating the sewage.
00:19:11.000Like, there's some sort of a program that, like, separates vaccinated from unvaccinated poop.
00:19:17.000Well, you've got to fill this out so we can detail which pipe your poop should be sent through.
00:19:22.000We'll talk about the idea of Ministry of Truth if you want in a second.
00:19:25.000But just to finish the point about the beauty myth, she had written a book in the early 1990s where she argued that women are now winning in all facets of life.
00:19:35.000And the only place where men can still exert control over women is by promulgating the idea of a beauty myth whereby there are universal standards of beauty And so now women, even though they're not literally chained by the patriarchy,
00:19:50.000they're chained by those expectations.
00:19:54.000And so I had tackled that book in my first book in 2007 as a bunch of gibberish that was part of sort of the victimhood narrative.
00:21:08.000When you're around a truly gorgeous woman, it's stunning how people fall in line and they don't know what to do and they stumble over their words and men insult each other in sort of a joking way to try to get a one-up socially over each other in front of the woman.
00:22:11.000So you're right that physical beauty, well, we talked earlier about being 500 pounds and somebody telling you, but people should love you the way you are.
00:22:21.000All other things equal, any person who doesn't weigh 500 pounds and instead weighs within the normal range is going to improve their looks.
00:22:27.000You're not going to turn into Beyonce if you don't have the facial morphology to be gorgeous.
00:22:32.000But we can all improve even on things that seem to be immutable, no?
00:22:37.000And men are certainly attracted to women's personalities and certainly attracted to their energy and how they approach life.
00:22:44.000But the unfortunate truth about sexual attraction is it's largely a body shape and the way, the structure of the face, the geometry of the face.
00:22:59.000Clearly, some people are repulsive because of their personality, even though they're gorgeous.
00:25:35.000First of all, you've got to think that the reason why someone wants to do that in the first place, the reason why someone wants that exorbitant amount of attention was they didn't get enough when they were young, almost always.
00:25:45.000Or they obviously couldn't possibly realize the perks, and maybe that's why they do it.
00:25:50.000But for the most part, it's someone that's making up for something that was missing in their childhood.
00:25:54.000Then you get them in this bizarre system where you have to audition for everything.
00:26:20.000If you walk in there with a fucking Make America Great Again hat on and a Turning Point USA t-shirt, they'll kick you right out of the fucking room.
00:26:27.000You literally won't be allowed to speak.
00:26:30.000If you went into the average casting agent, if you were the best, if you were Daniel Day-Lewis, and he walked in with a MAGA hat on, they always thought, get the fuck out of here.
00:26:40.000They don't want you, because there's a gatekeeper role that's a function of the casting directors and the producers and executives.
00:26:48.000It's part of the weirdness of Hollywood.
00:26:51.000So that accentuates the crazy in these people.
00:26:53.000So you have crazy people, and then they're massively insecure already, and then you have them be chosen.
00:26:59.000So then they bend their personality around.
00:27:02.000It's like, you know, water finds its way.
00:31:14.000Burt Bacharach is arguably the biggest music composer, song composer of the 20th century.
00:31:23.000Pop songs that were big hits in the 60s and 70s from the Carpenters, from Diane Warwick, is this, I think he's Jewish, this Jewish guy who you would never imagine could produce this kind of soul if you're going to be stereotypical.
00:31:38.000He even sang himself with Barbra Streisand.
00:31:43.000He just seems like one of those old school guys who you could sit with and he's going to tell you stories that are going to blow your mind.
00:31:50.000I'm not really too much into celebrities, but if I had to pick two guys I'd like to sit down with, Clint Eastwood, Burt Bacharach.
00:31:55.000Well, you have a great podcast, and when you move out of that communist country you're stuck in, maybe you will be able to get those people on your show.
00:32:04.000I remember I was actually telling someone earlier this morning, I was meeting with some people from UT Austin and the president of University of Austin earlier today, and I was basically saying that Joe told me long ago when I used to do your show in California, he used to say,
00:32:20.000Why don't you just move to California and do your podcast?
00:32:22.000And I think I told you at the time, well, it's not quite as easy for me.
00:32:46.000You comment on things, and you have a very valuable perspective to a lot of people.
00:32:52.000At some time, sometimes being connected to an institution, even though it provides you with security, and it's wonderful in terms of the benefits and guaranteed money, That can sort of hold you back.
00:33:07.000And I don't know exactly if it is holding you back.
00:33:27.000A week ago, I went through a momentary depressive existential crisis on May 2nd, Monday, May 2nd, when it was the deadline to do your taxes.
00:33:40.000So I have basically two main sources of income.
00:33:43.000One is my professor's salary, and then the other is anything else.
00:33:47.000Much of the anything else this past year was the parasitic mind.
00:34:13.000How impersonal the exchange was is kind of what hit me as an existential crisis.
00:34:18.000I quietly, like a good little boy, entered my password into my bank account.
00:34:23.000The box for Quebec government and Canadian government are ticked.
00:34:29.000I put in a very large number in each of those two boxes that corresponds to a large majority of the book royalties that are coming from my neuronal firings.
00:34:40.000You're not taxing me because I sell cups, which I understand that everybody doesn't want to be taxed.
00:34:45.000But this is the most personal form of taxation.
00:35:07.000Yeah, it ends up being about 55. So there's a progressive taxation system.
00:35:11.000And at the highest end, it gets about 53, 54. The highest rate for the federal government is 33. The highest rate at the provincial is 25. So I end up with about 58% just on the income that I made.
00:35:28.000We didn't get into the sales tax, which is both at the provincial and federal level.
00:35:33.000And then all the other, the property tax...
00:35:35.000So I'm left with roughly about a third.
00:35:37.000Now, it's not as though I discovered taxes yesterday.
00:35:40.000I knew about taxes and I've always accepted it.
00:35:43.000It's part of the institutionalized scam.
00:35:46.000But when it's the money that you had taken ownership over it, because it hadn't been taxed at the source, right?
00:35:52.000So that money had gone into my bank account.
00:35:55.000I'm now feeling as though I've built a little nest egg that can allow me to retire early from Concordia, to move to Austin and hang out with Joe and have my podcast here.
00:36:05.000And then very, very coldly, in a dispassionate way, just like a Nigerian prince were speaking to me, I press two buttons and it all goes into a magic cloud.
00:36:32.000So when you tax, though, my thoughts, my neuronal firings, my personal history, I can't imagine a higher form of existential rape.
00:36:41.000I mean, let me just analogize one more thing.
00:36:44.000When you torture someone, say, in a political prison, you will often hear the victim saying, they could torture my body as much as they want, but they could never get my mind.
00:36:54.000Well, the Quebec and Canadian government Got my mind.
00:36:58.000They said that the proceeds of my writing belongs to them, certainly more than it does to me.
00:37:06.000That's an incredible rate of taxation, but I always knew that Canada was really high.
00:37:10.000It used to be that Canada was high, but crime was lower.
00:37:14.000The United States people were friendlier.
00:37:16.000It seems like a great system because you have socialized medicine, you have some sort of a healthcare system up there, although there's a lot of complaints about that as well.
00:37:24.000Your education system, it seems like it's more accessible to people to go to college and things like that, so you're contributing into this pile, which is fine.
00:37:33.000But then, when you have what's a creepy fucking dictator for a prime minister, and that's what he is, the way he behaves, the way he behaved during this thing, and just the disingenuous way that he communicated, it freaked me out,
00:37:49.000because I never thought that guy was like that.
00:37:51.000We had a conversation a few years ago where you were sort of more positive about him.
00:37:55.000I thought he was a handsome fellow with a good vocabulary and seems like a nice guy.
00:37:59.000And before he really leaned into the woke stuff, I just thought he was a kind, sensitive guy.
00:38:04.000And I was like, that's probably a good disposition to be a leader.
00:38:08.000But just the way he labeled those truckers as racist...
00:38:32.000It was just like, I'm going to label them this so that I can impose laws to stop them from doing what is essentially a peaceful protest against something that- So let me tell you about the draconian measures we've had in Quebec.
00:39:05.000The second one was in Naples, Florida.
00:39:07.000And having now habituated so much to being masked under the dictatorship in Quebec and in Canada, it took us a day or two for us to kind of fall into step with everybody in Florida, where I had gone to an event that Dave Rubin had invited me to the first day that I was there,
00:39:26.000and everybody was unmasked, and yet here were the Canadians who were still masked because we had a difficult time letting it go.
00:39:36.000Now, I don't see anybody masked here almost.
00:39:39.000But till today, you can't go into a cafe in Montreal and not be masked.
00:39:42.000A few months ago, we had a nighttime curfew where after 10 o'clock, you weren't allowed to walk your dog.
00:39:50.000Yeah, there was a politician in Canada that just said the science is settled and he's going to mandate if he wins COVID vaccines for young children.
00:40:01.000And it's going to be a part of their normal vaccination process like measles, mumps, rebellion, required vaccines.
00:40:30.000Yeah, I mean, this kind of points back to what we were talking about earlier with getting Naomi Wolf off Twitter, this idea of a ministry of truth.
00:40:39.000Look, science, as I think you well know and your listeners know, the beauty of science is that it truly is epistemologically humble and that anything that is settled in science is settled with an asterisk.
00:41:53.000There is no greater, more offensive lie that you can say than to deny the Holocaust.
00:41:58.000There's nothing more offensive, right?
00:42:00.000The most documented historical event that has led to the systematic eradication of a people in the most industry-level way So there's nothing more offensive than to deny it, yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to exist.
00:42:16.000I may not invite them on my show because I think that it is fruitless, pointless for us to debate what is in it, but they have a right to exist.
00:42:25.000So what does it mean that someone is going to adjudicate misinformation, disinformation?
00:42:31.000No, let the autocorrective process of debate and the scientific method decide that.
00:42:38.000Yeah, and people should know also that your life experience was far more extreme than the average person's.
00:42:47.000When you're saying this, you're coming from Lebanon where you literally fleed for your life, your family fleed for their lives because you're Jewish.
00:43:25.000What you can't do is say, let's go to the corner of 7th Street and 8th Street, whatever, 8th Avenue, and kill every Jew that's at that synagogue.
00:43:34.000So short of incitement to violence, short of defamation, everything goes.
00:43:56.000What people are concerned with, and I think people have this...
00:44:00.000Naive perception about disinformation that there are people out there that are dumber than them and they'll get talked into things that aren't true.
00:44:28.000Because it's not going to trick you, and it's not going to trick me, and it's not going to trick most people.
00:44:32.000And the beautiful thing about someone coming out and saying the world is flat is that other people would say, Actually, they proved the world was around a long time ago and this is how they did it.
00:44:42.000Not only that, we have satellites that fucking rotate around the earth and they go very specific miles per hour.
00:44:51.000Not only that, We've had satellites that are in space that look back and take photos of Earth.
00:44:58.000Not only that, every fucking planet is round.
00:45:02.000So the likelihood that Earth is this weird flat thing that's shaped like a Frisbee, while everything is round like a ball, doesn't make any sense, does it?
00:45:40.000That this thing, this machine of spreading information and also this process of picking a new person every four years, it gives people this sense of urgency, that they have to stop information immediately, right now, which is what led people to make sure that the Hunter Biden story,
00:46:00.000the laptop story, was removed from Twitter, which is pure insanity.
00:46:10.000It's now being openly discussed in the New York Times and the Washington Post and all these other liberal newspapers.
00:46:15.000They wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole before the election for fear that Donald Trump was going to get elected again.
00:46:21.000So, through their own fear of this process of truth, that their truth wasn't going to be convincing enough, they decided to censor fact and news and real information.
00:46:35.000And they did it for the good of the people that were too dumb.
00:46:40.000Look, those people are not going to vote for Donald Trump.
00:46:45.000If you look at the hardcore left people in this country, they're not going to vote for Donald Trump just because Hunter Biden is corrupt, and just because it appears that Joe Biden is corrupt as well, and that they were getting bribes from Ukraine, and he did have a job that he was completely unqualified for, and it was paying an exorbitant amount of money,
00:47:10.000But the point is, this is all real information that was pertinent to our understanding of who Joe Biden is and who his son is and what kind of business dealings were they involved in.
00:47:21.000And shouldn't this demand an examination?
00:47:24.000But they wanted Trump out so bad, they decided to censor.
00:47:27.000Well, this is a fucking slippery slope.
00:48:27.000We both know someone who's been on this show, who maybe remains a friend of yours, less so of mine for reasons that are unrelated to me, who violated deontological ethics when he went on Twitter and...
00:48:43.000He celebrated the fact that Jack Dorsey had taken out Donald Trump's Twitter account.
00:48:51.000Not that it's literally Jack Dorsey, but he had kind of tagged him.
00:49:00.000He violated a deontological principle which says that you never violate a freedom of speech thing.
00:49:07.000But in his case, Orange Himmler is so dangerous That if I have to violate this deontological principle only for this one time, then it is worth doing it.
00:49:19.000It's not unlike Brett Kavanaugh, right?
00:49:21.000What people said, well, sure, he may technically not be a gang rapist when he was 16 going up and down the East Board, raping every single woman in sight.
00:49:30.000But the presumption of innocence here doesn't apply because this isn't a court case.
00:49:37.000So let's not grant him that courtesy of presumption of innocence because it's too dangerous to have a guy.
00:49:45.000So that's where all of those cases come from.
00:49:48.000When it comes to truth, when it comes to foundational principles, be deontological.
00:49:54.000For all other things, be a consequentialist.
00:49:56.000Yes, and it's so important for the dissemination of information.
00:50:00.000It's so important for our collective understanding of what's true and what's not true.
00:50:05.000And when you violate that, and as soon as you make these decisions based on ideological principles rather than based on the true desire to understand objectively the facts,
00:50:21.000And that's where we find ourselves today, which is grossly highlighted and exaggerated by social media because these echo chambers that people get in and then they seek approval and they seek validity from all these other people that share the same ideology and then they all support each other and they virtual signal to each other and then you develop these bizarre Like,
00:50:45.000groups of humans, like, I love following certain people just because I know they're going to tweet ridiculous shit, and then I can go into their little hive mind and look at all these people in their echo chamber agreeing with them.
00:51:07.000Like, if you had told me that there was going to be a pregnant man emoji on my iPhone just five years ago, I would have told you to get the fuck Do you remember, I don't know if I've ever said this story on this show, but I think even if I have, it's worth repeating.
00:51:20.000It's something that I discuss in the parasitic mind.
00:51:22.000Did I ever tell you this story with my interaction with a woman with whom I had a battle about men getting pregnant?
00:51:47.000So postmodernism is the granddaddy of all idea pathogens because it removes the most fundamental epistemological premise of reality, which is that there are universal truths that we can regularly count on.
00:52:01.000There are natural laws that we're trying to discover.
00:52:04.000Postmodernism says there is no absolute truth.
00:52:06.000Everything is shackled by subjectivity, by personal biases, by relativism.
00:52:10.000So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his PhD.
00:52:16.000So he calls me and says, you know, or maybe I've called him, whatever, let's go out to dinner to celebrate.
00:52:22.000So it was myself, my wife, we didn't have kids then, 2002, 20 years ago.
00:52:28.000This is going to speak about your emoji with the pregnant man.
00:52:32.000So it's myself, my wife, him, and he's bringing along a date, a female date.
00:52:39.000He calls me up to say, I just want to give you a heads up that my date for the evening is a graduate student in postmodernism, women's studies, and cultural anthropology, to which I answered, ah, the holy trinity of bullshit.
00:52:55.000LAUGHTER And then I said, okay, I get what you're saying.
00:53:00.000You want me to be on my best behavior.
00:53:45.000So she said, well, there is some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island whereby within their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear children.
00:53:55.000And so by you restricting it to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant.
00:54:05.000Once I recovered from the mini-stroke...
00:54:08.000Having been exposed to her imbecility, I said, okay, well, let me take an example that's perhaps not quite as corrosive and as contentious as only women bear children.
00:54:20.000I realized that was too dangerous ground.
00:54:22.000Is it not true that since time immemorial, sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
00:57:25.000Listen, I come from a background in mathematics before I got into the behavioral sciences.
00:57:29.000There is no field that is as axiomatically free of your identity bullshit than mathematics.
00:57:37.000The distribution of prime numbers is the distribution of prime numbers whether you're Latinx or transgender or two-spirited, right?
00:57:44.000Now, about five, six years ago, on my show, I did one of my satirical pieces where I donned a social justice warrior wig with red coloring because, of course, it shows that I'm ideologically fierce if I have blue-haired color or red-haired color.
00:58:01.000And I facetiously stated that I was introducing, coining a new field called social justice mathematics.
00:58:09.000We don't say the word irrational numbers because that marginalizes mental illness.
00:58:13.000I just went through the whole litany of mathematics.
00:58:16.000Five, six years later, my prophetic satire catches up.
00:58:46.000It is insane and I don't know where it's going.
00:58:49.000Do you have any predictions about five years from now?
00:58:52.000Is there any satire that you have thought about releasing on the world?
00:58:58.000Not that I could think off the top of my head, but for example, I have another series of satirical clips where I do the hiding under the desk.
00:59:11.000I remember once you very kindly said that you really appreciated that the professor of my standing could be such a regular guy and joke around and so on.
00:59:22.000So what I do is I mock the hysteria of the woke people by releasing clips where I'm hiding under the desk because I'm so fearful.
00:59:31.000So for example, Donald Trump is inaugurated.
00:59:35.000I hide and I literally do it I don't know if my acting is very good, but I pretend that I'm so fearful because I'm satirizing the insane hysteria.
00:59:45.000So for example, when he was inaugurated, on my personal Facebook page, you'd have endless professors saying, well, I'm a woman of color.
00:59:55.000Will I be able to still go safely on campus now that he's been elected?
01:00:11.000But it's not going to lead to the eradication of professors of color.
01:00:15.000And so I have a whole series of clips where I feign hysterical fear hiding under the desk.
01:00:22.000The most recent one might have been, or one of the recent ones, I think you'll enjoy the story, So my wife and I go to a cafe every morning after a one-hour walk.
01:00:34.000The barista that was serving her looked like a transgender person.
01:00:39.000So she came to me as we were waiting for our order to be delivered to us.
01:00:44.000And she said, you know, I felt quite...
01:00:46.000I didn't want to make an error in how I was addressing the person because, you know, I didn't know should I... And so I put out a tweet that was meant to be a testimony to how sensitive and kind and empathetic my wife is, that she was very, very concerned to not get the address wrong.
01:01:04.000It was meant to be something aligned with the pronoun Taliban, right?
01:01:09.000But it turns out, about 28 million tweet impressions later over two days, All egged by Valerie Bertinelli, because somehow she's an ally to the LGBT community,
01:02:27.000And so I tweeted about it as a measure of how lovely my wife is, that she was so concerned.
01:02:33.000So, I mean, literally millions of tweets of hate.
01:02:37.000Now, of course, if I were Drew Brees, I would have gone on the record apologizing for having exhibited patriotism towards the flag, and I didn't know that the U.S. flag hurt some of my colleagues.
01:02:53.000But what I did is I released a satirical under the desk clip where I said that all of the stuff that I faced in the Lebanese civil war from Islamic extremists is nothing as scary as the pronoun Taliban.
01:05:50.000I wish everyone, whatever clothes you wear, whatever name you like, whatever...
01:05:55.000Identity you choose, it doesn't bother me.
01:05:59.000What bothers me is when you enforce it on other people and then you promote it.
01:06:05.000And then you make it seem as if it's more...
01:06:09.000For young kids, I've had conversations with kids that are in high school, and one kid was like, it's not just tolerated, it's preferred and rewarded and you're looked down on if you're heterosexual.
01:06:24.000Like, he has friends that are queer, and he has friends that are...
01:06:34.000And you can get away with non-binary and still have sex with girls and date girls, but you just call yourself non-binary, and you can say, I'm a they-them.
01:06:41.000And as long as you don't dress with, like, tank tops and, you know, fucking yoga shorts...
01:06:47.000And so where it's really obvious you're male, you can get away with it.
01:06:52.000It was the weirdest conversation because I was like, what is it like in school these days?
01:06:56.000And he was like, man, I know so many trans people.
01:07:11.000They're awkward socially or whatever, and then they decide to be either non-binary or trans, or they don't want to specify, or they come up with some other gender, or they're pansexual is another one, which is like,
01:07:27.000I guess you're attracted to everybody.
01:08:11.000When it becomes a problem is that in the service of that goal, we end up creating the premise that men and women are interchangeable, indistinguishable, that all differences between men and women must be due to social construction and other idea pathogen.
01:08:28.000So we're murdering truth for a higher noble goal.
01:08:32.000No, I never cede one millimeter of truth for any goal.
01:08:37.000I have to be deontological in the defense of truth.
01:08:39.000Well, that's very brave of you in your line of work because that's not something that is common in professors.
01:09:07.000So imagine if we were to choose our professors in a way that we're not only choosing them based on their IQ, but on intellectual Navy SEAL-ness, if you'd like.
01:09:17.000I mean, on Navy SEAL-ness and their intellectual courage, right?
01:09:23.000As a matter of fact, most professors are invertebrate castrated individuals.
01:09:29.000So they don't have a spine, nor do they have testicles.
01:09:32.000Irrespective of whether they're male or female.
01:09:34.000So they may have all the intelligence in the world.
01:09:37.000As a matter of fact, all of these parasitic ideas originally were spawned by professors.
01:09:42.000So being intelligent and educated does not inoculate you against stupidity, since many of the ones who originated those ideas are the anointed professors.
01:09:52.000What they don't have is intellectual courage.
01:09:55.000And so actually on this trip that I'm meeting you here, I've met some folks that are associated with University of Texas, Austin, and now the new University of Austin, that not only do we share intellectual affinity, but more importantly, we share intellectual courage metrics.
01:10:14.000That's what is required to change the system.
01:10:17.000You know, history is not shaped by fence-sitters.
01:10:20.000It takes bold people, intellectually bold people, and we certainly don't choose our professors based on that trait.
01:10:26.000No, I think that's a great point, that intellectual courage should be a requirement, and that it should be something that we celebrate and cherish and reward people for, based on an objective analysis of truth.
01:11:01.000You're not denying that it takes a double X chromosome and a womb and eggs, and eggs fertilized by sperm inside this viable womb in order for you to conceive and ultimately give birth to a child out of your vagina.
01:11:32.000This is the ultimate cowardice, the ultimate intellectual cowardice.
01:11:37.000Because they're so terrified of the madness of the crowds, as Douglas Murray would put it, that they're literally saying, well, when a man gets pregnant, the baby must come out of his penis.
01:11:52.000But this weird place that we find ourselves in where truth is not as important as adhering to these ideological principles that are clearly inaccurate.
01:12:03.000But the reason why they're parasitized in this way is because they're trying to adhere to a higher noble goal, which is Don't hurt someone's feeling.
01:12:29.000I can chew gum and walk at the same time.
01:12:32.000I could be very socially conscious, as I think I can speak for both of us, but I am a dogged defender of the truth, and I will never concede an inch of the truth in the pursuit of not hurting your feelings.
01:12:44.000I remember one time on a previous show, and I actually took that quote in this book, where you said, but if you pursue forbidden knowledge in your research and it hurts someone's feelings, what then?
01:13:04.000There's a lot of people that get offended by things very easily, and if we start catering to them, we're not going to get anything done.
01:13:11.000There's people that get offended by alarm clocks.
01:13:13.000They don't want to have to be somewhere on time, because they're offended by the idea that they don't need as much rest as you do, or you need less rest than that, whatever the fuck it is.
01:13:23.000The point is that anything can fall into that category as something that hurts your feelings.
01:13:29.000If you have more money than the next person, that could hurt their feelings.
01:13:33.000You should have less money, and we should have even distribution of income.
01:13:48.000So let me apply what you just said in the context of, you know, when you do research in a university, you first have to send it to an institutional review board or an ethics board, right?
01:13:59.000That ensures that the research that you will do adheres to certain ethical principles, right?
01:14:05.000So now let me give you the historical background to this and then tell you how insane it has become.
01:14:11.000So in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which has been referred to as sort of the golden era of social psychology, you could damage a person's sense of self in the pursuit of science, but there was no ethical oversight over that because it was for the betterment of science.
01:14:30.000So let me give you an example of that.
01:14:36.000I'm going to do what's called a false feedback paradigm.
01:14:38.000I'm going to ask you to do an IQ test, and I'm going to falsely give you one of two experimental conditions.
01:14:46.000I'm going to say, hey, Joe, you scored in the 99th percentile of the most intelligent people, and then I'm going to see how you solve a math problem based on this glowing feedback.
01:14:56.000Or I'm going to say, oh, Joe, based on this IQ test, you basically score lower than a newborn pigeon.
01:15:27.000Now, this, by the more recent standards of ethics, which is still fine, would be considered unethical because even if I now tell you I was not truly giving you an IQ test, You'll walk away not knowing for sure whether what I just said is untrue,
01:15:45.000So did he now tell me that I'm not a newborn pigeon because he's just trying to assuage my feelings, but I truly am dumb as a doorknob?
01:15:53.000So it made sense that at some point we erected some ethical mechanisms to make sure that people were not damaged.
01:16:00.000But now we've taken that to your earlier point.
01:16:04.000To such an extreme whereby I can't ask you, are you male or female?
01:16:09.000I have to have a 740 page list of all the different possibilities.
01:16:13.000I can't ask you about your cultural background because I'm going to offend you.
01:16:19.000I can't ask you about your income because that marginalizes maybe some people who don't have good income.
01:16:24.000So basically, I can't ask you anything on an experimental study or a survey because there is no way by which there isn't going to be some road by which some participant may or may not be offended.
01:16:35.000So now when I go through these ethical review processes, that's probably the thing that causes me more stress than actually conducting the study because I know I have to jump through 900 hoops before some moron says, okay, you're now cleared to do your studies.
01:16:51.000And it seems like the academic world rewards this sort of intellectual cowardice.
01:16:57.000Like, if you comply, then you're a part of this group, you're a part of this system, and you're allowed to continue spreading bullshit and getting a check for it.
01:17:08.000And then your new coming group, your incoming students from the 2023 year and 2024 year of the freshman class, they're going to be more extreme.
01:17:18.000With each year, they're going to get more things are going to be on the list of offensive topics, offensive answers, offensive reactions.
01:17:27.000And it makes me wonder where this is going because this is accelerating.
01:17:32.000And even though there's a lot of people like yourself and myself who are older who realize how preposterous this is, the young people don't.
01:17:40.000And they seem to think that not only is this better, that it's required in order to make the world a better place.
01:17:48.000So here's some optimism along those lines.
01:17:51.000I'm hearing from a lot of teachers, meaning teachers at the high school level and so on, who write to me and say, my latest batch of students strike me as being less woke than previous generations,
01:18:07.000as if now the fulcrum is starting to shift.
01:18:09.000So I don't have incontestable empirical evidence, but I'm increasingly hearing that we've kind of reached the singularity, peak wokeness.
01:18:19.000What do you think is causing this shift back?
01:18:22.000It might be that there's been some people who've been fighting this, and now they're getting bigger platforms, so things are changing.
01:18:37.000So Christopher Ruffo is a guy who came out of nowhere, was a journalist, who became the kind of central repository of all things anti-critical race theory.
01:18:55.000He had never planned on being an anti-CRT activist, but through the serendipity of life, he has become sort of the honey badger of anti-CRT. And now there's all kinds of battles that are being won by parents who are finding their spine,
01:19:10.000who are going to these school board meetings, who are saying, I'm tired of this bullshit, right?
01:19:15.000And so it doesn't take much for people to be ignited and find their courage.
01:19:20.000And so I'm getting the sense, again, this is just from the trench that I'm, you know, the reports that I'm getting, that more and more people are now willing to speak out.
01:20:06.000So there's all kinds of little evidence that's coming out to suggest that we might have reached peak wokeness and we're going to, you know, there are now a lot of institutions that are trying to position themselves as a bit less woke.
01:20:20.000And, you know, the University of Chicago Declaration, the Princeton...
01:20:25.000So my feeling is maybe I'm being too optimistic.
01:20:28.000I think we've reached the maximum of the parasitic infestation and may reason rain again.
01:20:34.000Well, may reason reign again and may debate take place again, too.
01:20:38.000Let's let opposing sides discuss things.
01:20:41.000You know, come up with a champion for your left-wing idea and allow that champion to debate someone from the right.
01:20:48.000And then if the person from the right wins, do better.
01:21:00.000Maybe you're going to convince the audience of things.
01:21:03.000When I was a child, when I was in high school, Barney Frank, who was a liberal in Massachusetts, was debating someone from the moral majority.
01:21:12.000And the moral majority was like this- He was the first openly gay congressman.
01:21:20.000Yeah, he is now, and he was the first openly gay, but at the time he was not open.
01:21:26.000So anyway, Barney Frank, who's this brilliant man in my high school, is debating this guy, and I found it fascinating because I got a chance to see two different perspectives, and Barney Frank was just much better.
01:21:40.000He was just more rational, more well-read, and the other guy was sort of this cookie-cutter, rah-rah, conservative, God, liberty, justice for all, that kind of shit.
01:21:51.000He was reading off of a playbook, whereas Barney Frank had a much more nuanced and much more convincing perspective, and it was great.
01:22:00.000It was great because me and all these other kids that were 14, 15 years old got to sit in this class and watch these two people debate.
01:22:11.000The other guy who thinks that abortion is against God and that homosexuality should be outlawed, and that was like one of his perspectives, his anti-homosexual perspective, which was ironic because Barney Frank is gay, but nobody knew that.
01:22:23.000But when that all took place, it was very beneficial.
01:23:19.000Today you can bring Gad Saad, and tomorrow you can bring someone who is completely anti-Gad Saad, and you'd have a great conversation with both, and people reward you for that with a big Spotify deal.
01:23:32.000So there are even very concrete, earthly, non-philosophical reasons to be Open-minded.
01:23:55.000Now, when I have someone from the right on, whether it's Dan Crenshaw or Ben Shapiro, I get accused of being a fake left-wing person, a fake progressive.
01:24:04.000I get all this hate and you moved to Texas and you became a fucking, you're red state and all.
01:24:15.000The mental gymnastics people will go through, even if I argue with them, even if I have them on and I don't agree with what they're saying about many things.
01:24:38.000The next book which I'm just finishing wrapping up.
01:24:41.000It's tentatively titled A Recipe for the Good Life.
01:24:44.000And so I look at all different metrics that have been studied relating to well-being and happiness and I infuse it with personal anecdotes.
01:24:51.000So at one point I talk about, does political ideology affect your well-being and your happiness?
01:24:58.000And so I look at the literature and a lot of the literature finds that conservatives score higher on happiness, to your point, score higher on happiness and well-being as compared to the liberals.
01:26:26.000And they really are conservationists because they actually contribute financially.
01:26:29.000The vast majority of the money that goes to wildlife habitat conservation, that goes to wildlife biologists, it goes to making sure the populations of wild animals are healthy, vast majority comes from hunters.
01:27:06.000So 10% of this act goes to conservation of wildlife habitat.
01:27:12.000It goes to setting up these structures to make sure that these wetlands are preserved for migrating birds and all these animals that require certain populations in order to be healthy.
01:27:26.000They'll either import new animals into these areas.
01:27:29.000Or they will cull some of them so they'll increase the amount of tags that are available.
01:28:07.000There's a few that are liberal that become concerned with regenerative farming, and then some of them become vegetarians, but their body doesn't go well with it.
01:28:19.000It's like they have problems with their health.
01:28:22.000And so then they reluctantly start reintroducing meat, but they want to do it in an ethical manner.
01:28:43.000Republicans to Democrats, certainly within academia, and as you can imagine, it's overwhelmingly tilted to the left, depending on the discipline.
01:28:51.000And some disciplines could be 120 to 0, the ratio.
01:28:55.000I mean, literally not a single Republican.
01:28:57.000What is the discipline where it's more balanced?
01:29:00.000So the most balanced in this particular study I have in mind, which is probably the most exhaustive one that's been done, engineering was 1.6 to 1. Now, 1.6 to 1 is actually very lopsided according to the metrics of stats.
01:29:14.000You know, I mean, there's something called the odds ratio when you're calculating the efficacy of a drug.
01:29:18.000If you get 1.2 to 1, that means the drug is effective.
01:29:26.000You start getting into 5 to 1, 10 to 1, 15 to 1, 30 to 1. And then as you get into the more activist fields, it turns into 60 to 1, 120 to 0. So again, it's not that there is anything inherently less scientific about sociology.
01:29:43.000Sociology could be as scientific as physics.
01:29:45.000The problem is that sociology is more prone to be parasitized by ideology, whereas physics is less prone.
01:29:53.000So the pursuit of these disciplines either makes them more amenable to adhere to the scientific method or less.
01:30:01.000So oftentimes people, again, to go to an earlier point, people think that I am denigrating sociology as a lesser than.
01:30:08.000As a matter of fact, it's probably harder to study social systems involving human beings than to study the chemical structure of a particular compound in chemistry that is a lot more deterministic.
01:30:20.000So there is nothing unscientific about the endeavor of sociology.
01:30:24.000What makes it unscientific is that it doesn't adhere to the scientific method.
01:30:28.000It becomes an activist field rather than a scientific field.
01:30:32.000So if we can get rid of the activism and leave it out of the university, we'll get rid of a lot of this bullshit.
01:30:37.000It's just stunning for a person who's not an academic to see so much intellectual, ideological capture that's involved in so many of these disciplines.
01:30:46.000The Pittman-Robertson Act, did you Google that?
01:30:58.000In the 76 years since its inception, over $7 billion has been collected from manufacturers and has been made available to states, including over $106 million in Mississippi, this partnership of hunters and sport shooters with firearms and ammunition.
01:31:11.000By far, America's largest contributor to wildlife conservation and public access to our natural resources.
01:31:19.000So if you were to ask people their perceptions of which of the two parties is more committed to environmentalists, I'm willing to bet that almost everybody would say it's the Democrats, right?
01:31:29.000Occasional Cortex AOC is someone who, you know...
01:32:24.000I found a poll of a thousand hunters, and they were answering other questions that didn't say, like, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat.
01:32:31.000I bet it's sociologists, but the other way.
01:32:34.000So earlier I was saying about the distribution of Democrats to Republicans in academia, but I found a study that was looking at within medicine.
01:32:44.000So you are an anesthesiologist, you are a surgeon, you are a psychiatrist, you are a dermatologist.
01:32:52.000Does the likelihood of you being Republican or Democrat change across disciplines of medicine?
01:33:05.000So psychiatry, pediatrics scored very, very high on the left.
01:33:15.000Orthopedic surgeons scored Oh, and infectious disease also scored very high on the left, which we might presume from some of the COVID interventions.
01:33:24.000Orthopedic surgeons were a lot more right.
01:33:44.000Well, the thing about hunting in particular that I think leads it to be very high, it's not just the use of guns, which is of course that alone, just firearm laws and regulations, like the people on the left overwhelmingly want to restrict those because it's part of the ideology.
01:34:05.000Hunting is very difficult, especially mountain hunting.
01:34:08.000I would imagine that the people that do elk hunting and the people that do the real high mountain stuff, it's overwhelmingly conservative people.
01:34:25.000And if you're a part of a hunting party and everybody only eats if you do your work, you know, you can't say, you know, you're being fat phobic.
01:34:33.000Like, no, you have to get up and fucking go.
01:34:36.000And if you're 100 pounds overweight, people are going to look at you like you're a problem for the rest of the tribe.
01:34:41.000The fact that we have gotten to a place where there's so much comfort and so much leisure time and people are so protected and insulated by the overwhelming amount of resources that we have that you can make that argument that it's okay to be fat and it's okay to be body positivity.
01:35:05.000Forgive me, I don't mean to be psychoanalytic on you, but your disdain for obesity has come across in many of, at least our chats.
01:35:15.000Is it because you ascribe a particular trait to someone who is willing to let themselves go that is kind of a personal injury to your sense of...
01:35:29.000One of the things that people are upset at something they see in other people, it's things that they would never want to see in themselves.
01:35:40.000I don't like liars because I'd never want to see myself lying.
01:37:44.000And that little reward for hard work and for effort, that's very important for people.
01:37:49.000And especially in this world that we live in, where we have these bodies that were designed to run away from predators and fend off invaders, and they don't get any fucking use at all.
01:39:46.000And so we went to the hospital and very quickly they said, you know, it's a panic attack, which I haven't, I've never had a recurrence of it.
01:39:56.000I can't explain why I had it that time and I haven't had it other times.
01:39:59.000It turns out, by the way, that the attending physician, when we were...
01:41:13.000Especially if you're overweight, I would encourage you to just walk.
01:41:15.000You don't have to do something that hard.
01:41:18.000Now, what I'm about to say next is completely speculative because I've often tried to introspect as to, you know, what caused that particular episode.
01:41:27.000And it kind of relates back to our earlier comment about, you know, how I lost weight.
01:41:31.000So something that I suffered from, not in a clinical sense, but I'm very health anxious in that, you know, because I'm punctilious, because I'm perfectionist, I always worried is something looming in the background.
01:41:47.000It's a lot more looming in the back, and it could be around the corner, right?
01:41:51.000And so, as I was losing weight, but I had never gone to see a physician for several years, I was always ruminating about the possibility that once I see my physician for the first time in three years since I last got my checkup,
01:42:06.000could there be something that ends the party that I'm on?
01:42:12.000And as we were driving to go to get the chicken, And again, I'm speculating, but it makes sense.
01:42:19.000I saw a bus sign ad in the back of the bus, like city bus, that said, you know, could you recognize the signs of a stroke if it's happening?
01:42:31.000And so I think I literally internalized it, got the panic attack.
01:42:40.000By putting it to myself, developed the symptoms of a panic attack that mimic these kinds of things.
01:42:49.000I'm about to die in front of my chill.
01:42:51.000And it just gets worse and worse and worse, right?
01:42:54.000So for anybody who's listening out there, there is hope that you could never have it again.
01:42:59.000But when you do have it, it is a surreal feeling.
01:43:02.000Well, I will speculate as well, and I think that completely makes sense, and also I think it makes sense that you finally doing something about your health and losing weight makes you also anxious about the fact that it took you so long to do it, and what kind of damage have you done in the process?
01:43:17.000Because when you were 86 pounds heavier, which is so crazy for me to say, I can't believe you were actually 86 pounds heavier, but that's how you were when I met you.
01:45:08.000No, it's hard when you haven't been exercising to start.
01:45:11.000Once you have momentum, it's not that hard.
01:45:14.000It's like when people say, Joey Diaz said this, Joey's a very wise man, and one of the things he said about stand-up comedy, he said, it's the hardest, easiest thing you'll ever do.
01:45:23.000Because when he's on, when that guy's on, he, in my opinion, is the funniest guy that's ever lived.
01:45:28.000And when he's on, I've seen a lot of great comedians, and like, you know, there's great, great comedians that are live today, but no one makes me laugh like that guy.
01:45:41.000But getting there required decades and hard work and writing and performing and constantly experimenting with how to deliver material and how to do it correctly.
01:45:54.000Once you've got it though, then it's just about maintaining it.
01:45:57.000That's why you see the great ones like Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle.
01:46:43.000I was fascinated by it because I think what was being discussed is the creative process in generating material.
01:46:50.000And I'm fascinated by that because I can explain my creative process of how I write a book, but I've never attempted to write a set of jokes.
01:47:00.000I could be naturally funny, but I don't know the mechanism.
01:47:20.000I've done a few of them, and I haven't done one in a while, but everyone does it differently.
01:47:25.000Some people write everything in joke form, and they think in joke form.
01:47:28.000Tony Hinchcliffe is one of my favorite comedians, a good friend of mine.
01:47:31.000He writes in joke form, and he thinks in joke form.
01:47:35.000He's the guy, if something happens, if Jamie says something, and Tony has this sly look on his face, I always look at him, and he'll have the perfect line.
01:47:43.000He's like the best off-the-cuff guy I've ever met.
01:47:47.000And he hosts this show called Kill Tony that's on Monday nights on YouTube.
01:47:52.000And the beautiful thing about that show is complete amateurs and professionals and, you know, they all throw their name into a hat.
01:48:23.000But my point was that his specific style of writing is very different than mine, which is I either get an idea and I write it down or put it in my phone or I write in essays.
01:48:34.000So I write essays where I just like a subject, like...
01:49:43.000And then I'll pull that aside, and then I'll try to figure out a clever intro to that, and then maybe I'll try it the other way, and maybe I'll start with the premise first, or maybe I'll start with the pun.
01:50:06.000I mean, I'll take a day off, but I feel like if I don't sit down every day and review my notes and go over my material, I feel like I'm doing it myself a disservice because there's so many bits that I have that are in my act that have been on comedy specials that I've done that just came from sitting down and writing.
01:50:27.000You know, like I was with a friend of mine once.
01:50:29.000And we were talking, and she was laughing about this overweight woman who had all this makeup on and this short dress, and she was looking at this crazy image of this woman, and she goes, what is she thinking?
01:50:45.000I go, I'll tell you exactly what she's thinking.
01:50:47.000She's just letting everybody know, it's not the best ride.
01:51:40.000And so it's baby legs, obviously, because the trial just started.
01:51:43.000I need to figure out if it's even going to work.
01:51:45.000It gets laughs, but I'm like, you always have to realize that if something gets laughs and it's in the news right now, it doesn't mean it's really good.
01:51:53.000It could be that they're just reacting to it because they want to laugh at this crazy fucking trial.
01:51:58.000It doesn't necessarily mean the material's good.
01:52:01.000So you can't rely on the moment being novel, right?
01:52:06.000Like there's this moment and everybody's excited about this moment and they're all aware of it so they're tuned into it.
01:52:12.000It's got to be good a year from now, right?
01:52:15.000Where it's like, if you had to do a joke tomorrow about someone like Brett Kavanaugh being inducted into the Supreme Court, it's got to be good a year from now.
01:53:09.000The combination of these two results in what's called an inverted U-shape, okay?
01:53:13.000So I'm wondering how we would apply that principle, let's say, to the feeling of novelty that you as the comedian experience when you deliver that joke, right?
01:53:24.000The first time you say it, it's exciting.
01:53:27.000The 73rd time that you say it during your tour...
01:53:31.000Are you able to deliver it with as much spice and spunk, or are you entering as the deliverer of the message the negative tedium of the curve?
01:54:09.000And to think that it's just jokes is not totally understanding the art form completely.
01:54:17.000Because everyone knows, everyone that's done stand-up that's had a killer set, when you're killing, you have this feeling where you're just...
01:54:44.000So of all the, I don't think I've ever asked you this, so you've got many hats, you've got this show, you've got the MMA, you do other things, you do stand-up.
01:54:53.000If there is one that I told you you must choose as the one, is it a fair question to ask you that?
01:55:12.000One of the things about it, first of all, I love the sport and it's a great honor for me to be able to do commentary for the UFC and it means a lot to me and it always means a lot to me.
01:55:41.000That's helped by comedy, because I talk live all the time.
01:55:46.000So when I'm at the UFC, and millions of people are watching, and the light goes on, and the camera's pointed at me, and I have to explain what's going on, I have zero feeling of, oh my god, oh, these people are watching, because people are always watching me.
01:55:58.000They're watching me when I do this, they're watching me when I do stand-up, and I'm well aware when I stumble my words, I'm well aware when things don't come out the way I wanted it to, where I'm searching for the correct sentence and it doesn't really fit right, whether I'm not warmed up enough.
01:56:13.000Because there is an intellectual warm-up process, and I'm sure you're aware of that too, that feeling.
01:58:09.000So when I'm talking about technique or I'm talking about style matchups and what's fascinating about it, they know I'm 100% genuine.
01:58:17.000If you're just a sports guy and you're bullshitting, we've had a few of those, sports guys who come in and try to add sports guy terminology that they might use for baseball or for football or what have you, and they try to apply that to MMA, MMA people get mad.
01:58:42.000It's like you're literally putting your health on the line.
01:58:47.000Well, I remember maybe the first time that I came on your show, you said something that always stuck with me.
01:58:52.000You were drawing an analogy between the honesty that is required when you are a stand-up comic and when you're a fighter and you go into the ring.
02:00:06.000And so having that epistemic humility protects me against the prying eyes because I am very modulated as to what I know and what I don't know.
02:00:15.000And of course, Confucius talked about this many thousands of years ago.
02:00:19.000And so I think that honesty element is so beautiful.
02:00:23.000And so people ask me, do you get nervous before you get on Joe Rogan?
02:00:58.000So that people know they can trust you.
02:01:00.000If you're like you are, where you know so much about psychology, you know so much about the mind, you know so much about the way people think and why they think and what the evolutionary basis for those things are, you can enlighten people in a way that they can just accept your knowledge because they know that you're being honest.
02:02:15.000He said, well, we don't do sexy research so we can get on Joe Rogan.
02:02:19.000I said, well, I don't do research so I can get on Joe Rogan, but I can do research and get on Joe Rogan.
02:02:24.000Surely you would think that popularizing your ideas to millions of people Might be worthwhile in addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journal.
02:02:32.000And his answer was, yeah, well, we don't do it.
02:02:34.000He's just saying that because he hasn't been on.
02:05:00.000So in the next book that I'm doing, The Recipe for a Good Life, of course I get into the history of all sorts of cultures that have explored the good life.
02:05:11.000It's not as though I'm the first guy to write about this.
02:05:13.000Probably one of the topics that's been most written about.
02:05:16.000None have been as prolific as the ancient Greeks.
02:05:20.000And so when I saw your thing about Marcus Aurelius, I was about to write you to say, well, I've come to that same realization.
02:05:28.000So as I was doing my research for the book...
02:05:33.000Every time I would get an insight that I thought was original to me, I'd say, that fucker Epictetus has already said it 2,000 years ago.
02:06:29.000Because he was so wise and his decisions for what he would concentrate on and not concentrate on and how he would accept people's flaws and mistakes that they'd made as if they had never made them and this just approach to stoicism and his philosophy on life.
02:06:48.000The Greeks and the Romans, and if you look at the history of these ancient civilizations that dominated the world at that period of time, we can get a kind of an understanding of how they thought about things.
02:07:03.000It's, to me, one of the more amazing things about history is to peer It's almost like we have a little bit of a time machine to peer into the mindset of these people that were so wise thousands and thousands of years ago and that their words are applicable today.
02:07:20.000Well, I mean, that speaks to the universality of the human condition, right?
02:07:25.000So I always tell my students when I'm teaching about evolutionary theory, I say, look, you can use cultural products as fossils of the human mind, right?
02:08:06.000Those are the universal themes that are invariant across time and place.
02:08:10.000And so one of the things that I love about being an author is that I get to be connected through ideas with all of these immortal souls, you know?
02:08:19.000And so it's really a beautiful thing to write and to create and that...
02:08:25.000The fact that I independently thought of something that Epictetus thought 2,000 years ago connects me with him.
02:08:34.000It's just you developed an understanding of human beings and of human nature and you have deciphered from this and extracted some truth and it turns out other people have done the same thing.
02:08:47.000You know, there's a great book called The Immortality Code.
02:08:53.000And it's Brian Mororescu who has gone through ancient Greek culture and all of the Ulyssidian mysteries and looked into all of their rituals and tried to figure out what was going on.
02:09:12.000And one of the things that they've done is going over pottery.
02:09:18.000And finding that there's remnants of psychedelic substances in these pottery jars.
02:09:25.000And so these wine jars, these jugs as pottery, they found that they were imbibing in wine that was dosed with lysergic acid.
02:09:37.000So they had different kinds of ergot and different kinds of things that would produce psychedelic states.
02:09:43.000So all of these, you know, when people would go there to learn and when people would go to have these ritualistic experiences, they were tripping.
02:09:53.000And this is the birthplace of democracy.
02:09:55.000This is the birthplace of a lot of these thinkers, these great thinkers of, you know, that age.
02:10:03.000And of course, Roman emperors forbade it, and they outlawed it, and in the book they sort of detail how it migrated to other countries, and you can find the same remnants in the pottery in these other countries,
02:10:19.000and you can literally track the path of their escape from these areas where they were more restrictive and trying these ritualistic experiences in other places.
02:11:32.000So in The Recipe for the Good Life, I talk about the two decisions that you'll make in your life that are most likely to either impart great happiness or great misery on you.
02:11:43.000Number one, choosing the right spouse.
02:11:46.000Number two, choosing the right job or profession.
02:11:48.000Because most of your waking time is going to be spent either with your family or at your job.
02:11:53.000And if either or both of those impart you great happiness, you're well on your way to living a happy life.
02:12:00.000And so in your case, you've ticked off the...
02:12:03.000I mean, you probably live the most desired life in terms of a pursuit that most people desire to be in your, right?
02:14:25.000So if you don't know yourself, and if you're not honest with yourself in terms of your discipline, your work ethic, the way you treat your friends, the way you treat strangers, the way you are,
02:15:56.000It sounds cliche-ish, but that's really what it is.
02:15:58.000I'd rather be with my wife more than anyone else on most days that I exist than Now, I don't know if there is a recipe to find that person, but if you do find that person, hang on tight.
02:16:52.000But on the other hand, for long-term marital success, you want assortative mating, birds of a feather flock together, on which traits, on shared values.
02:20:05.000Do you, because of your fame and so on, are you...
02:20:10.000Not defensive, but are you guarded in bringing new people into your inner circle, always wondering if there is an ulterior motive to why this person...
02:20:21.000Do you have the mechanism to be able to adjudicate that?
02:20:24.000Because a lot of people are trying to be friends with Joe Rogan, and I need to make sure that you're not a pretender, a user, and someone who's being instrumental in your...
02:20:48.000But you get it by just the way they talk.
02:20:52.000When you're full of shit, one of the things about being a liar or being someone who is dishonest or is acting, you're acting like you're someone who you're not, is you're not good at recognizing that in other people.
02:21:15.000If she was an honest person, just the way she's talking and acting, the fake crying, it would be so brutal.
02:21:25.000But it's so funny because I listened to, I think it was maybe Megyn Kelly's podcast, where it seemed as though everybody had bought into her act.
02:21:37.000No way, even though she's an actress, could she ever fake those emotions?
02:21:41.000Whereas I watched that little snippet and it struck me as inauthentic.
02:22:13.000Well, they either can't read people or they are so biased that they're looking for, like when people were talking about Joe Biden, like Joe Biden's State of the Union.
02:24:18.000When you're a defense attorney in particular, where you have to defend someone who very well might have killed their pregnant wife.
02:24:25.000But technically speaking, if that client were to say to you, I admit to you in private that I've done it, or do you have to go under the...
02:26:00.000Defense lawyers are ethically bound to zealously represent all clients, including those they believe will justly be found guilty.
02:26:17.000So the problem with that is then it becomes like an intellectual exercise for the person who's the lawyer to defend someone who they know is guilty against an inferior...
02:26:29.000Prosecuting attorney that they know is kind of a schlub and that they can sneak by and they've done that in the past with expensive suits and big words and convincing arguments.
02:26:40.000The mafia lawyers surely don't think that those guys are in construction really.
02:26:44.000Not only do they not think it, do you remember when John Gotti was on trial and he had that mob attorney who was fucking excellent, who was built like a brick shithouse?
02:27:38.000By the way, you mentioned earlier how horrific it is when you prosecute someone that you know is innocent.
02:27:44.000Of all the guests I've had on my show, probably the one that on a personal level affected me the most is I had a guy who spent 29 years in prison for a murder which he was eventually exonerated of.
02:27:59.000And I've included him in my latest book because I'm talking again about the recipe for the good life.
02:28:05.000And what amazed me about this guy is how non-filled with anger and hatred and a sense of retribution he had.
02:28:14.000And so I basically coined him, you know, the new Buddha because I was trying to put myself in his position.
02:28:20.000If you stole from me 29 years of my existence, he was so poised and so truly like as if he's a saint.
02:28:28.000And I thought, you're a much better man than I am because if I got out after you've stolen 29 years from me, I think I would want to burn the world down because I would be so...
02:29:02.000He's an ambassador for the Innocence Project and he's a good friend of mine.
02:29:05.000I've had him on multiple times and through this podcast several people have actually been let out of jail because of the arguments that he made in this podcast and cases reopened and people examining things.
02:29:20.000I mean, I'm giving him the portal, but he's so selfless in his work and what he does to try to exonerate innocent people.
02:29:29.000And, you know, we've had fucking tear-filled conversations about this because he's gotten people out that, you know, were immigrants, couldn't speak English well, were unfairly accused, and the prosecutors knew that this person was innocent, and they don't give a fuck.
02:29:45.000Once they have someone in the game, they're trying to win.
02:29:49.000Once the game is going on, they don't say, hey, Your Honor, I think we're wrong.
02:29:53.000I think this guy's innocent, and I'm going to not try to prosecute him.
02:29:59.000Even though we're in court right now, I want to say that I'm on his side.
02:30:20.000And if you know what I know about the whole process of trying someone and convicting someone unfairly about the way they withhold evidence, like we were talking about with Kamala Harris, including genetic evidence, they try to withhold evidence that would exonerate innocent people.
02:30:38.000If I didn't know that, I'd be for the death penalty.
02:30:41.000So philosophically, you're not against it.
02:30:43.000I am for killing people who rape children.
02:30:46.000I'm for killing people who murder your family, killing people who do horrible things.
02:30:53.000I'm all for removing dangerous people that are detrimental to society.
02:31:01.000You don't know because we have a corrupt system.
02:31:03.000And not only do we have a corrupt system, but we have people that have existed inside this corrupt system for decades, and they're really fucking good at it.
02:31:24.000Because people have planted DNA evidence on innocent people.
02:31:29.000They've taken someone's innocent DNA, an innocent person's DNA, and planted it on a body in order to make it look like they committed a crime.
02:31:39.000So then practically speaking, since there is no way to render that probability of malfeasance to zero, then practically you would never be for the death penalty.
02:31:50.000I think it's so hard to know whether or not someone who is saying they're innocent, unless there's overwhelming evidence, unless you have their family members and all these people saying, like Jeffrey Dahmer is a good example.
02:32:26.000So I think we can set the set of criteria that you must reach so that you would feel sufficiently convinced that it has assuaged the possibility that someone is planting.
02:32:40.000It has to be a Richard Ramirez type situation.
02:32:44.000There's so many people that are good people that get fucking railroaded and they wind up in jail and they have poor representation and maybe they can't read and maybe they're just...
02:32:55.000They get fucked and then they wind up getting executed and the killer is loose and free.
02:33:37.000Can I see that statistic, the way they say it?
02:33:39.000It says the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science determined that at least 4% of people on the death penalty, death row, were and are likely innocent.
02:34:12.000So you and I can set up the framework so that our exacting standards, so that nobody falls under 4%, could be met.
02:34:21.000What I don't like is when you have people who say, under no conditions and no possible states of the world is it ever appropriate nor moral to kill someone.
02:34:33.000And I simply don't agree that that's part of our...
02:34:57.000There's a UFC fighter who's one of the all-time greats, Cain Velasquez, and he's in jail now because there was a man who was working at the preschool who molested his four-year-old A hundred times or more.
02:35:12.000Like, they don't know how many times this person did this.
02:35:15.000By the way, that number, before you go on, that number is an actual stat, which I may have mentioned on the show before, that the average pedophile, when they're caught, has up to 100 prior molestation encounters.
02:35:28.000Well, this guy got out on bail and was under house arrest and Cain Velasquez found out and chased him down in his car, shot at him in the car, wound up shooting his father who was driving the car.
02:35:42.000His father, who by the way, was running the nursing home.
02:35:44.000So his father likely knew that his son was a monster.
02:35:48.000Shot him in the abdomen and in the arm.
02:36:37.000So I've had not heated exchanges with my wife, but I always come with the following approach in parenting.
02:36:46.000I don't put my children, who are now a bit older, they're 13 and 10, but growing up, I never put my children in any situation where they could ever be molested.
02:36:57.000Meaning, if there is a man in any situation, my children are never going to be alone with them.
02:37:04.000Now, my wife would argue, aren't you being a bit too punitive in presuming that there's a pedophile hanging around every corner?
02:37:11.000I say, well, I'm not willing to take...
02:37:13.000So the precautionary principle, I'm not willing to take the chance that that person who really seems nice, that neighbor, or the teenage son of their friend...
02:40:05.000I mean, that's the only way we're ever going to really know.
02:40:07.000And until then, there's unfortunately a lot of people that are in bad circumstances, they have poor representation, they get framed, something happens, and then they wind up on death row.
02:40:18.000So until then, it's very hard to support the death sentence.
02:40:23.000I mean, I don't not support it in cases of pure guilt, like we know.
02:40:31.000But there's a lot of places where people thought someone was absolutely guilty and it turned out not to be the case.
02:40:37.000And then, you know, imagine living with that.
02:40:39.000Imagine being a prosecuting attorney and you railroaded someone and sent them down the river, put them on death row, and then had them killed, and then it turns out they were innocent.
02:40:55.000Prior to eventually settling on consumer psychology and evolutionary psychology, I had toyed with the idea of going into criminal psychology.
02:41:03.000I had always been fascinated with the serial killers and so on.
02:41:06.000And I decided, I think, rightly against it because I thought that I might have had the intellectual interest, but my personality would have been severely damaged by being exposed to darkness and evil.
02:41:20.000That's actually one of the reasons why I didn't go into clinical psychology, unlike, say, Jordan Peterson, a friend of both of us.
02:41:31.000I'm empathetic that I think I could have been an effective therapist, but I think it would have been very detrimental to my personhood because I wouldn't have been able to create the demarcation between listening to what was done to you when you were a child And then, oh,
02:41:47.000Let me go and party with my family because all is good.
02:41:50.000And so I think I would have probably blown my brains.
02:41:52.000And so I think in retrospect, even though I've always been interested in forensic psychiatry and clinical psychology and criminal, I picked more uplifting fields of human behavior to study.
02:42:02.000I think you picked wisely and I think you're absolutely accurate.
02:42:05.000I think that same problem applies to police officers.
02:42:08.000I mean, I have many friends that are either former or current police officers, and they tell me the horrific things that they've seen, you know, where they've had to go to a home where a father just murdered the wife in front of the children and that kind of shit,
02:42:26.000They've seen so many horrific, horrific things, and then they come home to their own children, and there's a high rate of suicide among police officers, and I think they're correlated.
02:42:35.000And imagine that we now You know, make them turn out to be, you know, diabolical via the hashtag defund the police.
02:42:45.000But the reality is we should be treating them with the respect they're deserving of because most of us would not be lining up to do their job.
02:42:57.000Well, it falls in line with these people that live in this delusional world where you don't need law enforcement, you don't need laws, and they're just going to be good people.
02:43:05.000And then you get LA, where you get rampant, out-of-control crime, and people just get released on bail for murder.
02:43:11.000They're just out roaming around the streets.
02:43:13.000And if you steal less than 950, it's not a felony.
02:43:17.000I mean, how many fucking Walmarts have to close down and Walgreens have to close down in San Francisco?
02:43:23.000Those drug stores where they just walk in and just start shoveling things into a bag and walk out and no one does anything about it.
02:43:29.000But again, that shows you that having a poor understanding of human nature has downstream bad effects, right?
02:43:35.000So if you think that by definition if you're a criminal, It is never due to your own personal agency, but the culprit is really the society that caused you to become a victim.
02:44:42.000And the problem is there's no rehabilitation mechanism that's involved.
02:44:48.000The friends that I've had that have gone to jail and come out of jail, they're like, you're not getting rehabilitated in there.
02:44:54.000If anything, you get turned into a harder criminal.
02:44:57.000You get taught how to do crimes better and you get to talk to people about how they get caught and how they're going to not get caught the second time when they get out.
02:45:07.000I would imagine that we're going to have to have a much more comprehensive understanding of what it takes to program a mind and what it takes to deprogram a mind and what techniques, what substances are involved in that that can be Effectively given to people?
02:45:24.000Because we know that there's some substances that aid tremendously in alleviating people from whether it's alcoholism or any kind of addiction issues like this Ibogaine.
02:45:35.000There's a bunch of different things that people can do.
02:45:37.000A lot of people that have done psilocybin, John Hopkins studies have shown tremendous benefits in quitting detrimental behavior, whether it's cigarettes or things like that, gambling, drug addiction.
02:45:53.000I think there's Just aging reduces your criminality.
02:46:03.000So just, you know, wait out the curve and you'll become less violent.
02:46:08.000Yeah, but I mean, it's like, how do we let someone become more wise while still protecting everyone else from that person's impulses and urges?
02:46:17.000Especially if that person did grow up in a violent household where they were beaten and everyone in their neighborhood sucks and just...
02:46:28.000The real inequality is the way children are raised.
02:46:32.000The real inequality is what are you exposed to?
02:46:35.000Even in the womb, they've done studies that show that women that are pregnant, and notice I said women that are pregnant, because guess what?
02:46:49.000While women are pregnant, that if that woman is exposed to violence, that her higher cortisol rates in her body and the stress in her body, the adrenaline, all these effects will actually make the child more inclined towards violent activity.
02:47:04.000Because the kid is thinking he's going to be born into a world that's crazy and he's got to protect himself.
02:48:00.000But I think we need to find some way to reach people and let them know this in a way that there's a lot of people that don't have any role models of people that are striving through all this chaos and doing the right thing.
02:48:16.000All the people that they're around, you know, people imitate their atmosphere.
02:48:20.000If everyone in your atmosphere is committing crimes, and there are places in this country and certainly places in the world where that's the case, where you just live in a horrific environment and everyone around you is involved in terrible activities.
02:48:34.000I can't cite it off the top of my head, but that the number one predictors in a home that can serve as a predictor of how well your children will do is how many books are in the home.
02:49:24.000The other thing that I think in terms of parenting that is fantastic is if you treat your children with the dignity that they are deserving of.
02:49:48.000Because I was pissed off that a cop was standing giving out jaywalking tickets to people who were crossing the street when I'm perfectly capable as a 57-year-old man to know if there's an incoming car for me to make...
02:50:02.000But apparently, no, the nanny state has to say when I should cross.
02:50:05.000And so that led to a discussion of libertarianism.
02:50:08.000Well, my giving him the dignity of me speaking to him in a way that I explained this to him, that's what good parenting is, right?
02:50:15.000I don't mean to be tooting my own horn, but it's that you treat your children with the respect that they have a functioning brain.
02:52:12.000I had that, but I also had no one's coming to help me.
02:52:15.000There's no dad that's going to clean up my mess.
02:52:17.000There's no dad that's going to be there to hold my hand and comfort me.
02:52:22.000I had to do it all myself in a lot of ways.
02:52:26.000My stepdad's a very good guy and my mom's a wonderful lady.
02:52:30.000They didn't do bad, but there's something about not having your biological father in your life and knowing that he's out there and that he's not even reaching out to you.
02:52:47.000And yesterday I was asked, I was speaking at UT Austin, I was asked by a young man, how do you deal with adversity?
02:52:54.000I said, well, for better or worse, I have the temperament that if you try to hurt me or if I face stressors in life, I want to then shove it up your ass and succeed even more.
02:53:05.000So the more you throw at me, not unlike what happened with you, The more I'm irreverent to that stressor and I want to defeat it.
02:54:37.000Yeah, you shouldn't do anything unwise.
02:54:39.000Yeah, it's not good to get COVID, but it seems like it's a respiratory disease and we've never been able to stop a respiratory disease from spreading ever in human history, ever.
02:55:51.000There's people that don't agree with some of the things that he says because they're ideologically opposed to him because they're on the left.
02:55:57.000But if you don't have a left or a right, which would be way better for all people to just engage with individual ideas individually.
02:56:50.000Not have people groom your fucking kids.
02:56:52.000That's what's more important than you getting uncomfortable with this word because it's used by people on the right.
02:56:56.000Like, I saw someone as an argument, someone who I think is an intelligent person, say that there should be a block against using the word groomer.
02:57:17.000I mean, constantly, teachers are getting arrested for exposing themselves to children, For masturbating in front of children, for sending nude pictures in front of children.
02:57:28.000Every couple days there's a new one that pops up in the news.
02:57:30.000And how many of those people haven't been caught yet?
02:57:32.000And how many of those people are out there?
02:57:34.000And how many of those people are doing it under the guise of I'm an LBGTQ educator?
02:57:41.000I'm keeping a tally of the amount of hate mail that you're going to be getting.
02:58:09.000So you don't like kindergarten teachers talking about gender identity?
02:58:14.000Well, I think it's important, and I think everyone should know it.
02:58:16.000I think that's why that whole, what they were calling the don't say gay bill in Florida was so infuriating.
02:58:23.000Like, when you're saying that you oppose any sort of legislation that prevents people from talking about Sex and gender identity and sexual orientation with people that are first grade through third grade.
02:58:42.000You oppose anything that restricts that.
02:58:49.000Because if this is open-ended, I've had some fucking idiots for teachers when I grew up.
02:58:54.000Can you imagine if those fucking idiots were trying to convince your child that they should be homosexual or that they should even be straight?
02:59:10.000My point is, imagine if you have a gay child and you have a fucking teacher that's trying to indoctrinate your child into the world of heterosexuality and convince your child that they're going to burn in hell if that child is gay.
03:00:20.000And the typical answer that we get from academic research is that you should only target children with advertising when they know that the intent of the advertisement is to persuade them of something.
03:00:43.000We tell companies, you can't sell cereals to an 11-year-old child because they're too young to protect themselves against the persuasive intent.
03:00:53.000But from this side of the mouth, we tell people, teachers, that it is when they're 7 years old or 6 years old that we should tell them about LGBTQ stuff.
03:01:41.000But what I do know is your cerebral cortex doesn't even fully form until you're 25 years old.
03:01:46.000Your frontal lobe, your ability to be a fully, like, realistically, you shouldn't be able to make any decisions until you're 25. Like, realistically.
03:02:08.000You can convince them to be a suicide bomber.
03:02:10.000Why do you think they get children to wear those vests?
03:02:14.000Because you can convince a child that you're going to go to heaven and you're going to be with Allah if you put on a suicide bombing vest when you're fucking ten years old.
03:02:23.000There's a reason why they do that, and they don't go to 50-year-old guys with PhDs, right?
03:02:28.000Because that guy would be like, wait, how many virgins do I get?
03:02:43.000We're at a very strange place in this country where we're so ideologically bound and we're so connected to our tribe that we ignore all the signs that both sides are doing something wrong.
03:03:23.000So they used their sperm and they created children, right?
03:03:26.000And then I was watching all of these fucking vicious...
03:03:31.000Right-wing, ideologically captured people who were talking about how horrible they were and about this is rent-a-womb and they were talking about how it's satanic and all this sick shit and just shitting all over him and his husband.
03:03:56.000I'm like, man, imagine being that dude.
03:03:58.000And, you know, you go over to that side and you think, you know, well, the right wing accepts me and he loves me.
03:04:03.000And it's kind of a cool thing because I'm a gay guy, but I'm also conservative now and I've been red pilled.
03:04:08.000And then you try to express a little bit about your own personal life.
03:04:12.000And these hateful assholes are coming out for you.
03:04:15.000And he just wants to be a loving father, just wants to be a loving father with his husband.
03:04:20.000And that basically speaks to a point that I make in Chapter 1 of The Peristic Mind where I say, while I will be focusing on idea pathogens of the left, because the ecosystem that I inhabit is academia, so therefore all the bad ideas stem from leftist professors, This doesn't mean that I'm implying that the right cannot be parasitized by bad ideas as well.
03:04:41.000So the fact that I don't focus on the right doesn't mean that I am implicitly saying I support the right and not the left.
03:04:49.000Academia is run by leftists, therefore they're the ones who originate and spawn all those bullshit ideas that I discuss in the book.
03:05:29.000If you ask me what's your view on immigration or on the death penalty, you'd think I'm an ultra-conservative.
03:05:36.000If you ask me about gay rights and transgender rights, you'd think that I am a Portland, Oregon inhabitant.
03:05:42.000So depending on the issue you ask me, I move around to different parts because I'm an ideas guy.
03:05:48.000I think if more people had that commitment, then we wouldn't be quite as tribalized, if I can put it that I'm with you, and I think that's the only way we get out of this.
03:05:58.000Look, I lean far more left than I do right because I grew up on welfare.
03:07:10.000A friend of mine who's an employer, she employs people, and she was saying that some of her employees are saying, I need a mental health day today.
03:07:40.000Get Get the fuck out of here with this.
03:07:41.000You need to be a bit more animated, Joe.
03:07:42.000I get so crazy about it because I know what it is.
03:07:46.000By the way, I see it in my own environment with the number of students who now file for special services through the Office of Disability or whatever it's called.
03:07:57.000So for the first 20 plus years as a professor, I almost had no one.
03:08:02.000Because when you file with them, for example, you'll get 50% more time on your exam.
03:08:07.000But you never find out because it's confidential.
03:08:10.000So I never find out this person suffers from this issue.
03:08:13.000So all I get is an instruction that person X needs 50% more time on the exam, right?
03:08:20.000Well, I used to never have any of these filings.
03:08:23.000And now, in any given semester, I may have, you know, quite a large percentage.
03:08:28.00010% of the students are somehow in there.
03:08:49.000And by the way, those things, thinking in negative ways like that, it becomes a pattern.
03:08:56.000It becomes a part of the way your mind interfaces with the world.
03:09:00.000And it just creates more and more incentive for you to continue those patterns, and those patterns become comfortable.
03:09:06.000Just like becoming a loser, failing, falling apart, not following through with things, fucking up jobs, getting divorced all the time, gambling away all your money, going in, like, all those things are patterns.
03:09:19.000I don't have to tell you, you're literally a psychologist.
03:09:22.000But all those patterns, they're so easy for people to fall into and you can't accept that.
03:09:27.000You cannot accept that because there's been plenty of people out there that have had those patterns to turn their life around and that's what I encourage people to do.
03:09:35.000I don't say the things that I say because I'm a mean person and I want to shit on people that are weak.