00:00:34.000Yeah, they're very nice people indeed.
00:00:36.000And for the French to look down on people after the Second World War, it takes a lot.
00:00:39.000For folks listening to this, we're in Toronto right now.
00:00:42.000This is the first time I've met Stefan.
00:00:44.000I met him just a few moments ago down in the lobby, but I've seen a lot of your internet videos.
00:00:50.000And I was particularly impressed with several of them, but really the Trayvon Martin one.
00:00:55.000I think you covered that better than anyone I saw online, on TV, in the media.
00:01:02.000You gave a real, you know, the quote, the Fox fair and balanced, you gave a real fair and balanced approach to that subject.
00:01:11.000And to me personally as a human being, that was one of the most frustrating events of our day.
00:01:20.000Not just because a young man lost his life, not just because Of the race-baiting that went on with it, but the cloudy, muddy thinking that I felt was perpetrated by the media and by politicians and by all these people that were looking to capitalize on that event.
00:01:39.000The thinking was so disingenuous and they were showing these photos of him when he was like a fucking baby.
00:03:52.000I wonder, there's no proof of this yet, it's all bullshit hypotheticals, but I wonder if this guy was a black guy and apparently he had a real chip on his shoulder about, you know, I'm not going to get ahead because they hate me, the whitey hates me and all that.
00:04:06.000He had a real chip on his shoulder about being black and trying to get ahead in a white world or whatever.
00:04:10.000I wonder if the degree to which they did not intervene in his obviously escalating mental health problems was because they were afraid that he was going to launch some complaint about racism or something like that.
00:04:20.000I wonder if that actually scares people off from dealing with people just like they're human beings because they're afraid of that card getting pulled and then getting dragged into something god-awful.
00:04:28.000Yeah, well, it's almost like we're still responding to the echoes of the imbalance of the past, you know, the slavery era echoes and the civil rights era echoes of the 50s and 60s.
00:04:41.000It's almost like we're still not even, the ship hasn't, We haven't made it level yet.
00:04:48.000It's almost like that's why this stuff is still tolerated.
00:04:52.000It's very confusing to me though when it's so obvious and so blatant like it was in this case.
00:04:59.000It's also very frustrating to me because as a person who deals With a lot of martial artists and a lot of people with anger issues who have become really incredible members of society and really admirable human beings,
00:05:17.000people who have learned to harness this Frustrated energy that a lot of young men have if they grow up in confused households or whether they're absentee parents or bad neighborhoods or whatever the factors are that lead them to be these angry people, that can be channeled and it can be channeled into a way that develops character and it doesn't happen.
00:05:37.000So when I see a guy like Trayvon Martin do what he does and get shot and die and all this, I see a massive loss of potential just as a human being, a young human being.
00:05:49.000You know, a young human being that commits crimes or does bad things when they're 18 is not even necessarily a bad person.
00:05:55.000What they are more than anything is just misused potential and misguided.
00:06:00.000A human being is so incredibly complex.
00:06:01.000There's so many facets and aspects to being a person and developing as a productive member of society that it needs guidance.
00:06:09.000And most people don't get that guidance.
00:06:12.000And it's up to them to kind of find it.
00:06:14.000I mean, you see an unbelievable tragedy like that.
00:06:17.000I always think of like all the The turns and the steps and the other possibilities that might have happened.
00:06:23.000Early intervention, some teacher somewhere, some relative or someone who would have just seen something going off the rails and really stepped in and made a difference.
00:06:32.000I think that tidal wave can be stopped early.
00:06:34.000I think once it gains real momentum, it's tough later on.
00:06:51.000We would live in a different world, but it is very, very, very difficult to do.
00:06:55.000Incredibly difficult to pull someone out of that momentum, the momentum of being a bad person and almost reveling in it, which is a big aspect of gangster rap and art culture.
00:07:07.000Well, you know, they've done some really interesting studies, because just over the last 10 or 15 years, they really see inside the brain For the first time ever, these fMRIs, they can really see inside the brain.
00:07:18.000And they've found people who've been identified as sadists, and they show them pictures of people being hurt intentionally, and their happy joy centers light up.
00:07:35.000Everyone has a soul and we're all kind of equal, all made in the image of God and this and that and the other.
00:07:40.000According to the people I've talked to and the research that I've done, there are some real predators among us who really are not kind of like us at all.
00:07:47.000It's somebody who sees some cat being driven over and he giggles and finds that really quite thrilling.
00:07:54.000I mean, I don't even know what species that is, but I think there are enough people out there that they make life kind of difficult for the rest of us.
00:08:12.000Yeah, well, so, I mean, this is the fascinating thing about epigenetics, right?
00:08:16.000So, I mean, when I was a kid growing up, there was this nature versus nurture.
00:08:19.000Like, you got your genes, that's what you're born with, right?
00:08:21.000And then maybe you can influence it a bit with nature.
00:08:23.000But what they're finding out now is that genes turn on and off depending on experience.
00:08:27.000So they found that if you have a particular gene and you're a boy and you are physically abused as a child, almost for certain you're going to end up on the bad side of things.
00:08:36.000Like you're going to end up violent, aggressive, criminal, jail, whatever, right?
00:08:40.000Now, if you don't have that gene you're abused, likelihood, but it's less.
00:08:43.000And so certain genes for aggression get turned on and strengthened based upon your experiences.
00:08:47.000You can end up, like twins who grew up in different households can end up with different genetics based on their environment.
00:08:52.000That's what's so important about, you know, something I focus a lot on is the parenting, parenting, parenting.
00:08:57.000It seems to me so many people are out there and they're just so messed up.
00:09:00.000Like you just, you can't rewind and you can't send them down a different path.
00:09:03.000But if you kind of look at the next generation, the next generation, what if we could get the percentage of people spanking their children down from 90%?
00:09:11.000I mean, it seems so weird in the 21st century that that's how parents are really focused.
00:10:03.000But you realize that the hierarchies and everything that we have, the wars, the prisons, for prisons you need prison guards, for wars you need soldiers.
00:10:11.000You can't get healthy, happy, well-adjusted people to go out and do that kind of stuff.
00:10:15.000So I think our whole society relies upon the maltreatment of children and if we didn't have that, a lot of people who got a lot of money and power right now would kind of find themselves out in the cold.
00:10:24.000Yeah, I don't necessarily think that it's engineered that way, but I certainly think it takes advantage of the situation at hand.
00:10:30.000Yeah, I don't think there's a secret cabal.
00:10:32.000It's a secret handshake, but lions get together to hunt gazelles.
00:10:35.000They don't have to plot it out in some smoky room ahead of time.
00:10:38.000It's just their instincts to go get the gazelle.
00:10:43.000That that is what's happening, that they're trying to keep people down with a lack of education.
00:10:47.000That's why there's such little funding for schools, and they're trying to keep people poor, because poor people don't raise their kids correctly, and so on and so forth, and then it continues.
00:10:56.000I think we have an instinct for domination as human beings.
00:11:01.000Animals do too, and they don't have secret cabals of Rockefellers in smokey rooms organizing everything.
00:11:06.000I think we just have an instinct for domination, and it plays itself out, but I don't think it's something written down and handed out in secret braille scrolls or something like that.
00:11:23.000If we control the Middle East, we want to control Africa.
00:11:27.000It's a natural thing that if we do a certain thing, we will continue to do it and try to push the envelope further and further until we hit some sort of a wall or resistance.
00:11:38.000I think in America, we are starting to see that wall build up and gain momentum.
00:11:44.000The wall of resistance against the Syria invasion was bigger than anything that I'd ever seen in my entire life.
00:11:51.000I'd never seen, universally across the board, the entire country go, fuck this.
00:11:56.000This might be the first war that's actually stopped.
00:12:01.000In history, this would be the first war that popular resentment and resistance has actually stopped.
00:12:08.000Against all the financial military industrial complex momentum that is in the States, which is huge.
00:12:14.000I don't know if you know the fact that the people who voted yes for the war in Syria get 86% more funding for the military industrial complex than the people who voted no.
00:12:22.000They're just voting to send money and blood to the donors.
00:12:26.000But the fact that it might actually be pushed back and the fact that the Russian guy Putin is telling the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to not have a war.
00:12:36.000I mean, what kind of upside-down universe should we be living in, you know?
00:12:39.000Not only that, but Putin said a really interesting thing about claiming that citizens of the United States are exceptional, and how dangerous that is, and about how we are all just human beings, and to have anybody Established as being the exceptional people is a very dangerous idea.
00:12:59.000For the United States to promote this idea that we as Americans are different, he's absolutely right.
00:13:07.000If an individual displays that characteristic, they're called entitled or narcissistic, which means that just good things should come to me no matter what.
00:13:14.000If they're not brought to me, I'm just going to go take them.
00:13:17.000That's a really dangerous personality trait, but somehow it's elevated through the magic of patriotism into wonderful stuff.
00:13:25.000And as I get older, I find it even more fascinating because a guy like Obama, I'm 46, a guy like Obama is just a couple of years older than me.
00:13:33.000So it's not like this thing where when I was a boy and I would look at the president, yeah, they were way up there, they were different.
00:13:40.000They were always a part of this system already, political system, educational system, skull and bones.
00:13:47.000But this Obama guy was the first guy that doesn't fit that mold to me.
00:13:54.000And the concept of me being a president is just the most ridiculous thing of all time to me.
00:14:00.000But this guy is essentially my, obviously more educated than me, but essentially my age.
00:14:04.000And I find it amazing how he has gone from being this This political outsider, this rebel, this guy who's going to change this and close Guantanamo Bay, and then all of a sudden he gets in and he's exactly the same thing that we've seen time and time again over the last eight years.
00:14:26.000More drones, more detainees, and the only reason he ended the war in Iraq was quite fascinating and tragic, you know, if you have hope for the guy, right?
00:14:35.000The reason that they had to pull their troops out of Iraq was that Iraq was going to start holding the troops criminally responsible for what they were doing because they were facing such resistance from the population for the occupation.
00:14:45.000They finally said, okay, you guys don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card anymore.
00:14:48.000We're going to start applying international military law to your troops.
00:14:51.000And Obama's like, okay, fire up the airplanes.
00:14:54.000We're going to pull those buggers out because they're going to be subject to the rule of law, and they had to get them out that way.
00:14:58.000Well, how about what he wrote on his own website, the change.org website, about whistleblowers, and then removed it?
00:15:06.000You know, after he was called out on it after the Edward Snowden case.
00:15:10.000They said, like, what did you say about whistleblowers?
00:15:12.000What did you say about whistleblowers who were exposing illegal activities when you were running for president?
00:16:19.000I think what we're in right now as far as the whole privacy thing is this strange transitionary period to a point where I think ultimately there will be no privacy.
00:16:29.000I don't think that's bad because if we were all really cool and everyone was really nice to each other, privacy wouldn't be as important.
00:16:39.000It becomes important when people violate privacy and there's stalkers and there's people that fuck with people and people that have agendas.
00:17:35.000It's like these two bullet trains going across the landscape, right?
00:17:38.000And the technology of control versus the technology of illumination, I think, are really, really battling.
00:17:43.000And we've got to keep pushing the gas to stay ahead because we've got this incredible thing.
00:17:48.000You mentioned it in a show recently, like the gatekeepers are down, right?
00:17:51.000And we can have this conversation, broadcast it directly to people.
00:17:54.000Nobody has to tell us what we can talk about.
00:17:56.000Nobody tells us what words we can use or what concepts we can explore, anything like that.
00:18:00.000Which is unprecedented, except maybe for the Gutenberg press in like the 15th century when they printed the Bible and started handing it out to peasants in a language they could actually understand, because before that you had to know Latin and all that kind of crap.
00:18:15.000They started to develop their own thoughts about it, and that broke down the monopoly of the Catholic Christendom, which had been around since the Dark Ages.
00:18:22.000So when you get information to people, you fragment the central narrative.
00:18:33.000They had wonderful central narratives about the role of the white race to dominate all the other races and Germany's manifest destiny in Europe.
00:18:40.000Communists had a great story about the rise of the proletariat, destruction of the middle classes and the end of the bourgeoisie.
00:18:46.000Narratives that are really well-inflicted and universal and incredibly dangerous.
00:18:52.000So we've got this massive air strike on a central narrative which comes directly out of this technology, which is where you can get exposed to viewpoints that you never would have been exposed to before.
00:19:01.000Do you think before the internet, American media would be playing anything that Vladimir Putin said about Syria?
00:19:05.000You'd never even know the guy said anything about it.
00:19:08.000Now you can get it all and you can connect with people.
00:19:11.000I want to talk about the comedy stuff where I think the connection stuff was really a good theme in the show last night.
00:19:16.000But there's a race because the degree to which we can shatter the central narrative and individuate what we're doing in the world is, you know, they're racing with us to try and control and make us afraid to communicate with each other and afraid to get to the truth.
00:19:29.000And I really view that as a pretty important race over like the next 10 years.
00:19:55.000The idea that a group of human beings decide to control water, I feel like that's an act almost of terrorism, of social terrorism.
00:20:03.000The idea of keeping water from people that need water, the idea of keeping oil from people.
00:20:08.000If we all agree that we're going to use oil, the idea that one person can decide who owns this shit that has been in the ground for millions and millions of years just because you planted a flag on a patch of dirt, it's fucking craziness.
00:20:21.000But that's where all the influence comes from.
00:20:24.000The influence comes from this massive amount of money that you can gain by controlling, monopolizing natural resources.
00:20:30.000And it's just like when they used to be able to monopolize the information that was received.
00:20:36.000Just like when William Randolph Hearst basically controlled most of what information got out to people when he ran newspapers.
00:20:44.000That's a dangerous aspect of our world that is eventually, I think, going to crumble under the weight of its own bullshit.
00:21:28.000But the great thing is once you shatter that central narrative, you realize there's such a vast amount of conflicting information and opinions and perspectives, and I don't know what the hell is true half the time.
00:21:38.000So I think that it breeds a kind of humility.
00:21:41.000That is the opposite of the desire to dominate.
00:21:43.000The desire to dominate is, well, I know what the hell people should do, and by God, I'm going to make them do it.
00:21:48.000I know they shouldn't smoke marijuana, and if they fucking smoke marijuana, I'm going to round them up with cats in blue uniforms and throw them in a prison cell, you know, where 200,000 times a year they get raped.
00:21:59.000In America, more men get raped than women.
00:22:02.000So when you feel like you just know how the hell everyone else should live.
00:22:06.000The way we should help the poor is take money from these guys by force, give it to a giant bureaucracy and have little drops of it drip down to the poor to keep them in a dependent state so they keep voting for more and more government.
00:22:17.000If you really feel like you know exactly how people should live and what they should do, then you've no problem bringing out the airstrikes of the military and the police and the prison system.
00:22:25.000But if you're humble and you realize that we're pretty much retarded about everything, there's a few things that I'm good at, but most of it, you know, I'm not going to drill my own teeth, I'm not going to do my own appendix, I barely even clean my own house, right?
00:22:36.000But once you get exposed to a vast amount of contradictory information, you realize just, Like, we're all kind of stupid, and that's why we should be humble and not order each other around at the point of a gun, which we're so addicted to doing these days.
00:22:47.000Chance would kind of add a great quote about that, about the bonfire of enlightenment.
00:22:53.000As the bonfire of enlightenment grows brighter, the surface area of ignorance becomes more illuminated, and you realize the more you learn, the more there is to learn, and then it becomes impossible.
00:23:05.000Well, human knowledge doubles every 18 months these days.
00:23:08.000There's just no possibility that anyone can be anywhere close to mastering any significant portion of it.
00:23:14.000I think that's great, because I think there's a real danger in claiming the kind of arrogance that comes from especially very highly educated people in specific areas.
00:23:25.000If you're very highly educated in a specific area, they oftentimes are arrogant about things that they're ignorant about.
00:23:30.000And it's interesting to watch that become an impossibility.
00:23:34.000You're faced with such a massive amount of data that's just online, on my Twitter every day, I'm exposed to dozens and dozens of fascinating stories about science.
00:23:45.000We should spend a week or two on each one.
00:24:15.000I'll explain it to someone and I'll say, this is an amazing thing that just came out today, but I don't know what it means.
00:24:22.000Some geometric object that explains the interactions of particles.
00:24:25.000As long as my shoes don't turn into sharks that eat my feet because of some quantum flux, I'm okay with it.
00:24:30.000I know it does some creepy shit deep down.
00:24:32.000I know, also, by the time it comes to the level of your sense, it all cancels out and this is still going to be a table tomorrow.
00:24:39.000But deep down in the roots of matter, some really crazy shit is going on.
00:24:42.000Yeah, a subatomic particle is blinking in and out of existence, existing simultaneously in two different places, in motion and still at the same time.
00:24:52.000Basically what they're saying is that the heart of matter itself, the smallest measurable portion of reality is magic.
00:25:03.000I mean, that's really what they're saying.
00:25:04.000You know you're going to get emails from physicists saying, don't call it magic.
00:25:34.000It's so strange, but that is the accepted smallest measurable part of the universe.
00:25:41.000It's amazing when you really start to think about what we know about nature, nature being fractal in so many different ways, the universe itself being fractal, and then when you get down to the smallest measurable The components of reality itself being this strange fiction almost world.
00:26:46.000I think we're kind of getting there in a really painful, difficult way.
00:26:50.000I think we're kind of getting there because we've got this narrative And in the future, I guarantee you, it's going to be completely insane to look back and say, if people ever believe this shit, I mean, you know, the guys who cut their own balls off to go join that comet, you know, you look back and you say, wasn't there someone who said,
00:27:06.000you know, when you're bringing out the pinkish years and taking off your tighty-whities, there's got to be someone who's saying, We're kind of going in the wrong direction here, but I think in the future they can look back at us like that and say, what were they thinking?
00:27:18.000Like, we have these geographical areas called countries, and in those countries we have a tiny group of people with all the guns in the world, and they tell everyone else what to do, and somehow we think this is going to work out fine.
00:28:03.000Well, I'll make sure it gets normalized.
00:28:08.000I think the enormity of the times we live in, it's really easy for us to not notice it.
00:28:15.000It's so normal to just be able to call someone on your cell phone.
00:28:18.000It's so normal to be able to get on the internet and just get information.
00:28:21.000I think the enormity of this as far as what that's like in comparison to having to go to the library and to getting your education from a school, which you're getting...
00:28:32.000If you're taking science, you're getting it from this professor, and this professor is going to recommend these books, and there may be a completely opposing point of view that you're never going to be exposed to.
00:28:41.000Whereas if you Google something, and then Google that phrase, and then debunked, man, I can't tell you how many fucking times I've had someone send me something, and then I'll say, Google what you just sent me, and then debunked, and then let's talk.
00:28:56.000And if you haven't read that stuff, then don't talk to me, because if you only get one site, it's not any site at all.
00:29:02.000You're getting this weird sort of confirmation bias-y thing that exists.
00:29:07.000I've heard that argument as to why the internet is bad.
00:29:11.000One of the bad things about the internet is you seek out like-minded people and you sort of confirm each other's biases and get together and pat each other on the back.
00:29:20.000Sort of, yes, but I feel like those are just little camps outside of the wilderness of information, which is New York City.
00:29:29.000You might have a tent where all you assholes get together and say that the Earth is 6,000 years old, but you're an hour's walk from Manhattan.
00:29:41.000Well, I don't remember all those people talking about a unity of narrative and seeking out like-minded people really complaining about, say, the church that I grew up in, or the public school that I grew up in, where I was taught that, you know, governments are necessary, beneficial, wonderful, and, you know, we fought the Second World War to defend against national socialism, and we won.
00:29:56.000Like, we had, we already had that narrative.
00:29:58.000Now people are fragmenting into their own narratives, but that's still way better than one monolithic nonsense pile that we're all supposed to imbibe, right?
00:30:06.000It's also like, as a human being, what we have been given is this insane amount of potential in the mind and in the body's ability to manipulate matter and nature, but yet we don't have a real direction book.
00:30:23.000And we're sort of figuring out the abilities of this mind and the possibilities of society and our interactions with each other and the accumulation of information that we can all rely on each different aspect of our culture to contribute,
00:30:42.000whether it's history or science or mathematics and all this stuff comes together and the potential of it is almost unfathomable.
00:30:50.000It's almost impossible to really truly wrap our heads around.
00:30:54.000And we only figure out how to do things right by trial and error.
00:30:58.000We have to fuck up and then go, well, we can't do that again.
00:31:01.000And we have to drop a nuclear bomb and go, well, that's a disaster.
00:31:05.000And we have to, you know, We have this incredible device, the human mind, and we have very little idea of how to utilize it properly or even less control or engineer thought into how to develop people properly and to try to I mean,
00:31:31.000when you see the president on television, what do they always deal with, the leader of the free world?
00:31:36.000They're constantly dealing with conflict and loss and finances, and they're dealing with all these things that are important to people that are developed.
00:31:45.000But how much thought is actually given to developing people?
00:31:49.000When was the last time you heard the President of the United States talk about what we really need to do is focus on the lowest rung of our ladder, the weakest link in our chain of human beings, and strengthen that.
00:32:01.000Wouldn't we be a better country if we had less losers?
00:32:05.000Isn't that something we should concentrate on?
00:32:09.000There's never talk about enriching poor neighborhoods or setting up community centers, finding ways to help young children that don't have guidance.
00:32:36.000And we look at it in terms of, you know, it's almost like going from Presidential run to presidential runs, like these four-year terms that they do.
00:32:51.000In a way, it's almost like the idea of having a president and having these small four-year terms.
00:32:57.000It's like you're always going to concentrate on just problems as far as conflict and money.
00:33:03.000You're always going to concentrate on what's on the tip of people's tongues all the time, but not on the engineering of society.
00:33:09.000Yeah, it's all cure and no prevention.
00:33:11.000It's all just playing whack-a-mole with whatever fucking crisis is coming up at the moment.
00:33:15.000And it's not, how are we going to make it so the society can be sane in 40 years?
00:33:20.000We don't care about any of that stuff.
00:33:21.000I mean, that's why there's a national debt.
00:33:23.000That's why there's war, because it's just about getting elected.
00:33:25.000Like the Federal Reserve just said, well, we're going to keep Buying $85 billion worth of US Treasuries, even though we said we were going to stop, because there's going to be an election coming up.
00:33:33.000And what do they care if they pass the bill to the unborn?
00:33:36.000I mean, they're going to be long gone.
00:33:37.000So we have this weird society that does these really narrow time slices, which is just all about whack-a-mole and satisfying the noisiest people and keeping those people.
00:33:46.000But the actual work of preventing in the long run, which is so easy.
00:34:13.000And if we had that, if we had that as a society, I can virtually guarantee you there would be almost no criminality.
00:34:20.000I agree, but don't you think that there's an economic aspect to that that really can't be ignored?
00:34:24.000You have the ability to do that, and very few people do.
00:34:26.000That's the real issue, is that so many people, you have a working mom and a working dad, and the kids, by the time they see their parents I mean, they're ready to go to bed.
00:34:36.000I mean, it's four or five o'clock at night if they're lucky.
00:34:39.000Most of the time, they see their parents afterwards, so it's six, seven, you know?
00:34:43.000And they've been in there since eight o'clock in the morning and they're exhausted and everyone, they've got to feed them, bathe them.
00:34:47.000They don't really have time for quality interaction.
00:35:05.000Statistically, factually, scientifically, kids who are in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience exactly the same symptoms as those who've been abandoned by their mothers.
00:35:14.000They experience maternal abandonment at a very fundamental level.
00:35:24.000So this idea that you can just march people off to work, hey, it's great for the government.
00:35:29.000I mean, the government loves it when both parents work because then they've got two taxes, two tax bases, two tax cattle out there spitting money into the treasury, plus then they've got to put the kid in daycare so then there's somebody else who they can tax who's taking care of the kids.
00:36:57.000It's so easy for us to say, you know, my wife is a stay-at-home wife, a stay-at-home mom, and, you know, we have three children, and, you know, we're very fortunate, and everything works out great.
00:37:07.000But in a unique financial situation, that can happen, whereas I have a lot of friends that are not in that situation.
00:37:13.000They're trying to raise children, and they're also trying to put them in daycare during the day, and, you know, the wife just went back to work because we have bills, and this and that.
00:37:22.000And you see it, and it's not the way a child wants to develop.
00:37:44.000Do you think that's just a desire for materialism and some sort of a rationalization that you can...
00:37:51.000You can go after both, that you can acquire all these things and keep up with the Joneses and just have someone else take care of the busy work of taking care of your child while you do that?
00:38:04.000I think what happened was, and this sort of happened in the 60s and 70s, right?
00:38:08.000So in the 50s, this whole amazing series of labor-saving devices came out, which freed women from the endless drudgery of, you know, your dishwashers came out and laundry machines and vacuum cleaners and all that kind of stuff, right?
00:38:20.000So basically, a huge amount of work was done by machines now, which freed up women.
00:38:25.000And of course, a lot of them were like, oh, okay, great, I'm going to go workforce whatever, right?
00:38:28.000But I think what's really been downgraded is the skills required to be a good parent.
00:38:33.000I mean, I've done some tough stuff in my life.
00:38:36.000I started this crazy show and all that kind of stuff.
00:38:39.000Nothing to me is more exciting and challenging than being a dad.
00:38:42.000I mean, I know it's a cliche and everyone's always the most wonderful thing, but it really is an incredible thing to do, especially if you don't do any of the aggression stuff, because then you've got to come up with other stuff, right?
00:38:51.000Other ways of dealing with conflicts, other ways of dealing with, quote, bad behavior.
00:38:56.000Now, if you're just spanking your kids and yelling at them, I guess it's not that challenging and hell It's a hell of a lot not fun, right?
00:39:01.000Because all you're doing is spending your whole day trying to control someone who doesn't want to be controlled.
00:39:05.000So I think that because we've got this hit them and put them in timeouts and send them to bed without dinner and yell at them or whatever, I mean, that's retarded.
00:39:26.000But because we've still got the hitting and the yelling and all of that, it's retarded.
00:39:30.000And so people say, well, this is stupid and not fun, so I'm going to go to work.
00:39:33.000But it's only stupid and not fun because you're yelling and hitting.
00:39:36.000If you didn't do that, it would be really engaging.
00:39:39.000And it's the most important aspect of our society, the most important aspect of our families, the most important aspect of our communities is developing good human beings.
00:39:48.000And it's one that we leave to everybody.
00:39:51.000We just go, look, I know you fucked your whole life up, but take care of this person.
00:39:55.000And that person will in turn transfer everything that you've taught them and any way that you've fucked them up or made them better.
00:40:02.000And they're going to Go out into the world and spread that energy, and it literally changes the tone of our entire society and culture.
00:40:10.000And it's fascinating when you see different cultures all throughout the world, if you study the different ways they interact with their children, How vastly different the culture itself becomes because of these styles of interaction.
00:40:24.000And our culture, which is thought to be universally one of the most materialistic, selfish, childlike cultures, is one of the cultures that embraces this idea of the two parents working,
00:40:40.000the childcare, this idea of how we've decided to Promote becoming a human being.
00:40:48.000It's one of the most awkward, weird examples of it on Earth.
00:40:54.000Could you imagine, Joe, could you imagine it's your anniversary?
00:40:58.000I know you got married a couple of years ago.
00:40:59.000You've been with your wife a long time, right?
00:41:16.000I'll call up someone we don't know, and I'm going to pay the minimum wage to go out for dinner with you.
00:41:23.000Now, they may not speak great English.
00:41:25.000I mean, they've never met you before, but I'm sure it's going to be pretty much the same as going out for dinner with me, your ever-loving husband.
00:41:31.000So, let me just make that call to the agency to send out some half-broken English-speaking guy to go out for dinner with you, and it's going to be exactly the same.
00:41:38.000She'd be like, no, it's not the same, because you're my husband.
00:41:42.000But why the hell would we think parenting is any different?
00:41:44.000I mean, how the hell do you replace the bond of you grew the child in your belly and you breastfeed the child and you know that child?
00:41:53.000But I'm sure some minimum wage stranger who's rotating in and out of that job every four months is going to be exactly the same as a parent.
00:42:00.000And the consequences to society are significant.
00:42:03.000And it's very frustrating to me when I communicate with people that are, especially women, that are single, that are thinking about having a child on their own.
00:43:17.000Again, not that they all turn out that way, but when you see these significantly negative elements, a lot of it gets traced back.
00:43:23.000There's this theory that says, economists are working this out fairly well, they say that if marriage rates had stayed at the 1970 levels, because marriage rates are really low these days, and marriage is not necessarily the same as two people committing to stay together while they raise a kid,
00:43:40.000but we would have almost no deficit in government spending if marriage rates had stayed As they did in 1970. You know, when majority, fast majority, got married, stay married, and so on.
00:43:51.000Because marital disintegration, I mean, huge rise in welfare state, huge rise in criminality costs, huge rise in everything you can think of in society.
00:44:00.000If you trace back the deficit, a lot of it has to do with this breakdown of the family, which is I mean, some people say it's all engineer and I don't credit the ruling class with that much deviousness.
00:47:29.000It's not like you could grow tomatoes.
00:47:31.000Like, you can grow your own tomatoes, but when you deal with anything that affects your consciousness, you have to have The government has to step in and allow you to do so.
00:47:52.000Well, I think as long as you don't sell it, I mean, I think you can make your own stuff at home or whatever.
00:47:56.000But I think with tobacco, you need like a big, you know, in certain places and a big crop and stuff like that, and processing it is really hard.
00:48:03.000Whereas pot, you just grow it and smoke it.
00:48:04.000So I think it would be really tough, you know, because we measure economic productivity in this weird way.
00:48:09.000You know, like if someone gets sick, the GDP goes up.
00:48:13.000I mean, surely sickness is a bad thing and the GDP should reflect a negative result.
00:48:17.000But, you know, they go spend a lot of money on treatments and suddenly it's like, woo, we're richer.
00:48:21.000Same thing, if you then have people smoking pot that they've grown themselves, your GDP is going to take a huge crater and then all these people are going to be out of work who supply all this horrible stuff to people and so on.
00:48:32.000The way we measure stuff now, it's just completely insane.
00:48:35.000It forces everyone into these really, really bad decisions.
00:48:38.000Yeah, one of the things you said that I really agree with about how boys are so much different than girls when it comes to learning.
00:48:46.000I just recently started volunteering at my daughter's school, and she's in kindergarten, and I watch boys do, you know, you volunteer, like you have these tables set up, and you have to, everyone has to put together this little book and cut these pieces out and put it in order,
00:49:02.000and You watch boys do it as opposed to girls, and they're a different animal.
00:49:06.000I mean, it's a completely different thing.
00:49:26.000I always felt like, I can't wait for this fucking bell to ring so I can run out of here.
00:49:31.000I thought at the time, well, obviously, I'm not very smart and I'm not going to be good at school.
00:49:36.000It wasn't that at all, but what it was was, I'm not designed for this.
00:49:41.000There is a society, and this society has a broad spectrum of human beings, and we have various tasks that we will do and we will be really good at, and we'll have Different occupations that we can choose, and different ones suit different personalities, but this fucking cookie-cutter shit that they do in school,
00:49:57.000they want everyone to be the same way, because that's all they have money for.
00:50:03.000We have the ability to stick you in this class from 9 a.m.
00:50:06.000to whatever, 2 p.m., and do this stuff, and then we need you to listen, and then you go, and then you leave, and we give you a grade on it.
00:51:04.000My daughter's really into this right now.
00:51:05.000Like, we have toads that live by our house, and we have a froggy pond not far away, and she's learning a lot about how to handle things delicately, how to play with them and all of that.
00:51:35.000And number two, of course, is that dads have vanished from so many households.
00:51:38.000And this is why, in the last 15 years, sociopathy, one of the most malignant forms of destructive personality traits, sociopathy has doubled in the last 15 years.
00:53:49.000That she had functional knowledge of a murder scene.
00:53:52.000And the woman who was a neurologist felt that it was very dangerous because she said, there can be functional knowledge of something based on how much have they talked to you about this crime scene?
00:54:03.000Have you formulated imageries in your head?
00:54:06.000Have they shown you photographs of this scene?
00:54:07.000Have they, like, what places, and how do we know, what aspect of it relies on personal creativity?
00:54:14.000Or the imagination to sort of conceive and play it out in your head and then that this is registered on the fMRI.
00:54:24.000Fascinating, fascinating stuff where we're getting to really understand the various components of what makes us a human being.
00:55:18.000And then they had them close the book and then the book stuck a new word that made it exactly the opposite statement.
00:55:25.000I now agree with this thing that I formally condemned as evil.
00:55:28.000They opened it up and they asked them, can you just read that again and tell us what you think?
00:55:32.000About 70-80% of the people would read it again and completely agree with the exact opposite statement that they've made, not three minutes before, and had great reasons for it.
00:55:49.000Yeah, we all have to fight this tendency, for sure.
00:55:51.000Well, I've had real issues with people when you talk to them about past events and they start giving an incredibly distorted, self-serving version of it, and I wonder whether or not they really believe this or not.
00:56:02.000I'm a big proponent of if I criticize something, I criticize myself first.
00:56:10.000Because I think that if I criticize a various aspect of human nature, like memory, my memory is fantastic and yet fucking terrible.
00:56:19.000When I do the Ultimate Fighting Championship, when I do the broadcast for the fights, I can rattle off statistics.
00:57:48.000There's various things you can remember.
00:57:49.000I remember how to use this espresso machine because I've done it.
00:57:52.000I know I push the little carton in there and I press that button and the junk comes out.
00:57:56.000But, you know, the reality of my day, like what went on today, is just snapshots, like weird flashbacks of food I ate and the jokes that we'd tell.
00:58:12.000I think one of the emerging aspects of technology that I'm incredibly fascinated with is the symbiotic relationship that we're starting to have with computers, machines, Google Glass.
00:58:23.000I think we're going to develop an artificial way of recording things, an artificial way of recording life that's going to be like, I'm going to be able to, you know, Stefan, please check out my day.
00:58:33.000I'm going to drop off my day and you're going to roll with like, holy shit, weren't you fucking terrified in this?
00:58:53.000And so they're saying, look, I mean, for my court case, you guys know his cell phone was here when he was talking on it, and they say he was here, but the cell company doesn't have records.
00:59:03.000You guys can get this guy out of jail, and the Freedom of Information Act, they're just hammering these guys, trying to get facts out to get people out of jail or put people in jail.
00:59:11.000I think they don't want to really completely admit that they are recording everything.
00:59:16.000I mean, when Obama addressed that situation...
00:59:18.000It's easier to record everything than some things, right?
00:59:55.000It's a very strange aspect, but again, as we were talking about before, I think we are in an adolescent stage of this relationship that we have to technology and this relationship that we have to information.
01:00:06.000I think, ultimately, it's going to get to a point where there is no boundary between your information or my information.
01:00:12.000I think where that really gets weird is with money.
01:00:14.000Because money essentially right now is just ones and zeros.
01:00:18.000And when you get down to this finite point of this finite barrier and that barrier breaks and there is no boundary between anyone and information, money is just information.
01:00:30.000It can start getting really fucking weird.
01:01:08.000We live in the weirdest time when it comes to money as well because of the whole collapsing of the banks and the bailouts and the president getting on television and saying that he's going to limit the guys who we bailed out.
01:01:20.000He's going to limit their fucking bonuses to half a million dollars.
01:01:40.000Well, Obama, of course, you know, there's some theories that one of the main reasons he got elected was he took the most money of all the candidates from Wall Street, from the financial companies.
01:02:30.000I mean, the corporation is just this abstract fiction that people make up to shield themselves from legal consequences.
01:02:35.000So, everyone's like, oh, well, they got fined, so they're, you know, somehow the J.P. Morgan executives are out that money, and it's like, no, they're not.
01:02:41.000I mean, they're never going to get thrown in jail for anything.
01:02:45.000Never going to get thrown in jail for things that the average person would be locked up for the rest of their life if they were involved in fraud at that level.
01:02:54.000If they were involved, I mean, just think about Just think about when people go to jail for what they do with the stock market, for manipulation of the stock market.
01:03:07.000How much different is that, really, than what goes on with the banking crisis?
01:03:12.000You're talking about moving money around.
01:03:14.000You're talking about manipulating things and figuring out a way to profit from these manipulations.
01:03:19.000How is insider trading any different from what these guys have done?
01:03:24.000If you want to talk about manipulating the stock market, the Federal Reserve buying The treasury bonds is because nobody else wants those pieces of shit, frankly, right?
01:03:32.000I mean, the Chinese are sick of them, the Indians are sick of them, the Japanese are sick of them, because they know that they can't possibly be redeemed without hyperinflation or some other default, right?
01:03:42.000That's either a soft or a hard default.
01:03:43.000They know that that stuff is junk, so the Fed is buying them just to prop up the prices, and they're doing that so all the other governments don't have to admit that they're basically toilet paper, Zimbabwe.
01:04:31.000Gas is cheaper now than it was in 1960 if you pay for it in silver.
01:04:34.000If you pay for it in this paper shit that they hand around pretending it's money, it's really expensive because it's been devalued so much.
01:04:40.000When I first came to Canada in 1977, I was like 11 years old.
01:04:46.000You know, now and within like 10 years it was like a buck because they're just printing all this crazy money.
01:04:51.000Printing money is a great gig because you get to hand it out to all the people who are voting for you and then the inflation hits like two years later and nobody can connect the dots.
01:04:59.000And plus, everyone blames the local supermarket for raising the prices as if they want to, right?
01:05:03.000But all this central printing money stuff is just really, really dangerous and it brought down the Roman Empire in exactly the same way.
01:05:09.000They just kept putting more and more crap into their money until what was silver denarius, which was originally 100% silver, it ended up being like 1.5% silver with basically zombie teeth and hair and shit thrown into it, right?
01:05:22.000And it just destroys the entire economy and there's going to have to be this huge reset in the global economy soon.
01:05:30.000What's fascinating is that now that we have this incredible access to information and now that people like you are putting this stuff out there, it's become part of the narrative.
01:05:44.000It's not just a matter of it goes wrong and it takes years for people to put the pieces together and then you have to go to school and learn what's wrong.
01:05:51.000It's really right in front of your face what's wrong.
01:06:06.000Can we somehow or another Bitcoin our way out of this?
01:06:10.000Well, there's a long-term solution, which I think is multi-generational, which has to do with treating kids better and raising them rationally and not using aggression on them and all that.
01:06:19.000The short-term solution, I think, is just trying to invest in human capital, trying to convert paper currency into something tangible like real estate or gold or something like that.
01:06:28.000I think those are sensible strategies that lots of people who've been on my show and all these economists all talk about.
01:06:34.000I think what's going to happen in the short run is obviously the government's going to run out of money.
01:06:38.000No matter how much they print, they're just going to run out of money.
01:06:42.000Then what happens is there's going to be talk of sacrifice.
01:06:46.000Now, not the kind of sacrifice like, forget the second car, stay home with your kids that we've been talking about before, but like real hard-nosed sacrifice.
01:06:52.000And they're going to say, well, we've spent beyond our means for so long, you've seen this happen before in history, and they just basically turn on the dependent classes.
01:06:58.000They expect the welfare recipients to live on less, social security recipients to live on less, and they'll just start squeezing the dependent classes because that's the biggest single bill.
01:07:07.000And also, you will see, which of course is the goal of a lot of overseas terrorists, you will We'll see the US begin to withdraw the imperial presence in the world.
01:07:15.000They've got over 700 military bases all over the world.
01:09:28.000It's certainly not, but I think as far as the amount of time and energy and focus and then the maintenance and the control of your emotions during a contest, because you're literally putting your health on the line and your consciousness,
01:09:45.000I think it's one of the reasons why it's so incredibly exciting.
01:09:50.000And the discipline, I can't remember the name of the fighter, but you're saying it's one guy who keeps a list of everything he wants to accomplish by his bed and reads it.
01:09:56.000First thing that he gets up in the morning and just really focuses on that stuff.
01:10:01.000Yeah, they both hate each other in Twins Valley.
01:10:04.000Let me spin you a theory because we're talking about the fighting stuff.
01:10:07.000I was watching the show last night and I was thinking about why is this occurring?
01:10:14.000People could be doing anything with their time and money and they're coming here to see some really funny stuff.
01:10:19.000And I was thinking about a lot of the stuff that you and the other two comics talked about is pretty visceral, right?
01:10:26.000I mean, you've got this great phrase that you use, the monkey energy.
01:10:31.000You know, like you've got this crazy monkey energy when you can't pay your mortgage and, you know, but you've got to go out and do something physical because your body thinks there's like a tiger jumping at you and stuff like that.
01:10:39.000And I was really struck by, you know, Dick Farr jokes and stuff like that.
01:10:43.000I mean, cum jokes and stuff like that.
01:10:46.000But I think it's really interesting the degree to which people respond to that, because it's not polite conversation.
01:10:50.000I've never seen a sign outside the box office relative to yours that says, the most extreme possible language will be used.
01:10:58.000If you like Jane Austen, your head is going to explode in here.
01:11:02.000I have had that same sign since the 1990s.
01:11:06.000It was actually that sign I put up It's on my first CD, which is called I'm Gonna Be Dead Someday, which I released in 1999. And that sign was something that I started putting up in comedy clubs because I got tired of people complaining.
01:11:20.000And they said, this show will contain the most extreme content imaginable.
01:13:11.000And these are all sorts of really common experiences that we really can't talk about because we live in these refined abstracts of countries and religions and clubs and all that.
01:13:20.000But here, at this level, we really do, I think, connect in a very visceral way.
01:13:24.000And there was so much talked about in terms of connection.
01:13:26.000And I think the audience is laughing because we never get to talk about how we connect.
01:13:46.000And I think a lot of your work has to do with that.
01:13:48.000And fear factors also involve that really primal stuff, primal fears that people have confronting them and overcoming them.
01:13:54.000People watching that, I think, can really connect with that fear, with that desire for the money and the fear of the circumstances and all that.
01:14:00.000Well, the primal fear of competition itself, the fear of failing, The fear of overcoming adversity or not being able to.
01:14:08.000That's a real part of being a person is the challenges of life itself.
01:14:14.000And with Fear Factor, it was a stupid show.
01:14:16.000Don't get me wrong, I don't have any grandiose ideas of what that show was.
01:14:19.000You didn't come up with any taglines for that, right?
01:14:25.000It was entertaining and I know people enjoyed it, but what was fascinating to me was I have a background in martial arts and in competition, more importantly.
01:14:35.000I fought most of my life from age 15 to age 22. It's basically all I did with my time.
01:14:41.000And so I understand what it's like to be confronted with a daunting task.
01:14:46.000I understand what it's like to be standing there when the referee looks at you and goes, You know, and then looks at the other guy and goes, are you ready?
01:14:53.000You know, in that moment, that like, here it is.
01:14:56.000Like you're stepping off a cliff, right?
01:14:58.000It's a very strange thing for us to just say, ready, go, and then go do something.
01:15:02.000It's really hard to do, to anticipate.
01:15:04.000And also, as human beings, we can calculate all these different variables.
01:15:08.000And one of the things about being an intelligent person and facing a difficult competition, whether it's fighting or anything incredibly hard, is like, You are aware of the variables.
01:18:11.000I walk into that, I'm like a fine red mist of nothingness in about 10 seconds.
01:18:15.000A person has been, they've prepared their entire life for this moment.
01:18:20.000And it's not just the no way that you get when you're getting bit by a shark, but it's also knowing that that no way is coming every fucking day, getting up at 5 a.m.
01:18:31.000when the alarm clock goes off and eating healthy and running and making sure you get the right amount of rest and take the right amount of vitamins and all that knowing that you have that instinct to say no way, but so does he.
01:18:43.000And that's not going to be good enough.
01:18:46.000You're going to have to control your body, control your mind, develop your skills, and have an intelligent approach to this very difficult task in front of you.
01:18:56.000And you've talked about when you were a kid that you saw violence in your home, which I'm, of course, incredibly sorry.
01:19:02.000Is it true that for a lot of these guys, they come from some rough backgrounds, some aggressive or violent backgrounds?
01:20:58.000Who gets to pick on people and get away with it?
01:21:01.000That is a part of being a human being.
01:21:04.000And it's also a part of being a human being that, as you said, is developing in a society where children are not being raised correctly.
01:21:11.000If a child grows up with martial arts, As a young boy, you'd be incredibly embarrassed to be a bully because that is the worst thing you could ever be in a martial arts class.
01:21:22.000I am a black belt in jiu-jitsu and I roll on a regular basis, roll meaning spar, with people who are complete novices.
01:21:45.000But the point is, if I humiliated them or beat them up or something like that, It would be a massive embarrassment for my school, a massive embarrassment for me as a martial artist.
01:21:58.000Everyone in class would hate me because of it.
01:22:01.000There are people like that that do bully and try to hurt lesser ranks or novices.
01:22:26.000There's always going to be people picking on people and people making fun of people, but bullying is specific, like ganging up on people and tinninating them.
01:22:34.000That is one of the scariest aspects of growing up.
01:22:37.000And it motivates a lot of martial artists to learn.
01:22:44.000So ultimately it's like this terribly negative force channels itself into an incredibly positive thing that really became a developing factor for every aspect of my life.
01:22:53.000It became a real vehicle, I love to use the phrase, a vehicle for developing human potential.
01:23:03.000You find out, because it's so difficult, you find out what you can do, and then other things become easier.
01:23:09.000Yeah, I think the mastery of anything is really challenging, often great things for self-esteem.
01:23:14.000Now, when you started taking the martial arts, what happened with the bullying?
01:23:17.000I mean, did you end up beating people up, or did you end up having the confidence that they then found weaker prey?
01:23:22.000I've had very few physical altercations outside of competitions.
01:23:27.000You know, I have like one or two small ones in high school that were really no big deal.
01:25:08.000And the need for physical movement and the need for just activity and all these different hormones and chemicals that your body just naturally produces, they have to be satisfied.
01:25:23.000And I think it's a huge part of balancing your perspective in life, balancing your view of the world, just to exercise these things out of your system.
01:25:33.000And for boys especially, a huge, huge part of being sane.
01:25:38.000Yeah, certainly learning how to manage aggression is really important.
01:25:41.000I think one of the, yeah, I'm a strong atheist, and I think one of the things that was really harmful about religion was this idea that we are antibody, that we are souls trapped in this prison of the flesh, and we're, you know, aimed to be these rockets that rise up to meet the glory above and so on,
01:25:58.000Feeling that the body is somehow, and it's very explicit in some forms of Christianity and other religions too, that the body is Satan's device to draw you away from God, the lusts and all that, all the stuff that the comedians make fun of and celebrate, I think.
01:26:12.000Because it's funny and it's an enjoyable place to be.
01:26:14.000And I think that this hostility towards, it's called in philosophy the mind-body dichotomy, that we're this glorious mind tracked to this horrible fleshly corpse kind of thing.
01:26:23.000And I didn't really get that when I was young.
01:26:27.000When I was 20, I went to the National Theatre School.
01:26:30.000I was going to be an actor and a playwright.
01:26:31.000I did some of that for a bit, but what they did there, which I thought was amazing, was real body work, which I'd never been exposed to before.
01:26:51.000When I did this bodywork, which was like the Alexandra Technique, which is a body repositioning technique, we did gymnastics, we did sword fighting, we did stage fighting and all that kind of stuff, which is in some ways more challenging.
01:27:05.000We did stretching and I got into yoga and stuff like that.
01:27:10.000And I'm always encouraging this in my show, because I deal with a pretty hyper-intellectual audience, and I keep trying to remind people, you know, drive your brain back into the body.
01:28:03.000And I think the people, you know, in terms of you saying, how do we heal the world?
01:28:06.000I think our bodies detect immorality a lot quicker than our brains do.
01:28:11.000Like, yeah, I have those people, they come around, you're like, Oh man, there's something not right about this guy.
01:28:15.000I don't know if body language, they may look perfectly normal or whatever, but there's a slight vacancy in the eyes or something like that or an overly stiff body posture or something like that.
01:28:23.000I think that if we could see I think we can see those people,
01:28:39.000but I think we can mostly see them with the body, not with the brain.
01:28:42.000Because the brain, we can talk ourselves in and out of stuff.
01:28:44.000But the body, I think, really connects at a very visceral level with The people around us.
01:28:48.000And I think if we could train people to be more in the body, I think they'd be better at detecting bullshit and better at detecting bad people and shunning them.
01:28:54.000And then we'd kind of isolate them and quarantine them, not breathe with them, not have them over fucking up our kids.
01:28:59.000And I think then we'd be able to pass that gene out of the pool, so to speak.
01:29:03.000Sorry, that's a hell of a long rant for me.
01:30:02.000The ecosystem is even within the mind.
01:30:04.000There's this great therapy called internal family systems therapy, which basically says that we don't have a single self.
01:30:10.000We are a competing ecosystem of our parents and those who want stuff from us and some of our own needs, which is also to please those who want stuff from us.
01:30:20.000If you think that you've got one ego, you end up being a kind of tyrant.
01:30:24.000Because all these other voices in your head that are telling you to do stuff or encouraging you to do stuff, kind of clamp them down because we need unity.
01:30:31.000But I think the idea that we are always in a state of negotiation with ourselves is really positive.
01:30:37.000I spent years in therapy and I think it's just fantastic to work for that kind of approach that we have.
01:30:41.000I call it the Mico system, like me is an ecosystem.
01:30:44.000And it really is a lot of give and take.
01:30:47.000And a lot of negotiation with yourself.
01:30:49.000And of course, if you can negotiate with yourself, I think you'll end up with a society where people negotiate with each other.
01:30:54.000I think that the people who are tyrannical with their own identity end up being tyrannical with others.
01:30:59.000I think that the way the world is out there is very much a mirror of the way we live internally.
01:31:03.000And if we can be more at peace in negotiating with ourselves and recognize that we should not have a single dominant authority within ourselves, but everything is a negotiation, you know, do I want to work out or do I want to have a nap?
01:31:13.000I mean, I have those negotiations with myself all the time.
01:31:15.000And that way I can negotiate with my wife and my daughter and my listeners and all that.
01:31:19.000And I don't have a tyrannical part of myself that says, well, you've just got to do this, goddammit, no matter what.
01:31:24.000Because I'm always afraid that if that's the way it is for me in here, that's how it's going to translate to the world out there.
01:31:30.000I always feel that the The most massive structures in the world are the governments, states, armies, and all that.
01:31:37.000Just a reflection of how we deal with ourselves internally.
01:31:39.000And I think trying to get people to relax about how they deal with themselves internally and negotiate more than dictate, I think is really important.
01:31:46.000I'm completely rambling, but I hope that makes sense to you.
01:31:48.000No, it makes total sense and the rigidity.
01:31:50.000Being rigid and not being able to be flexible about things is also a huge issue.
01:31:55.000The ability to alter your ideas about things and not feel like you're a loser because you changed your mind.
01:32:01.000The ability to admit mistakes and to be able to express where the mistake went wrong and what you believe now.
01:32:14.000One of the things that I see in people that I admire is the ability to admit you're wrong, the ability to admit mistakes, the ability to admit personal failures, and then the ability to grow from learning about that mistake.
01:32:27.000One of the things that I find to be one of the most incredibly weak and Intolerable things is someone who cannot admit they're wrong.
01:32:34.000I can't communicate with people like that.
01:32:51.000One of my favorite writers is Charles Dickens, or you take Shakespeare.
01:32:54.000Charles Dickens wrote like 35 novels, of which like four or five are famous.
01:32:59.000So he's the best novelist that we've ever produced as a species, and he's got a success rate of 20%.
01:33:06.000You know, Shakespeare wrote like 54 plays, hundreds of sonnets, and of his plays, maybe 10 are like regularly produced, you know, the Hamlets, Othellos, Motion to Venice and all that.
01:33:15.000So he had a success rate of about 20%.
01:33:18.000So the greatest conceivable geniuses in human history have a success rate of about 20%.
01:33:22.000I've had some of my biggest breakthroughs from failures.
01:33:26.000From my disgust in the failure or my discontent and my recognizing where I went wrong and then my re-energizing and refocusing.
01:33:38.000I can literally point to the moments on stage like the worst bombings in the history of my career and then the giant leaps that I made in progress after that.
01:33:49.000And now, to this day, if I have a set that's not so good, I recognize that I hate that, so I will now refocus, and that this is a good thing.
01:33:57.000Because this taught me, well, you got a little sloppy there, or you got overwhelmed by responsibilities, or you didn't put enough focus in it, whatever it was.
01:34:05.000Now is the time to recognize that just like every other time in the past, you are now going to grow, and you'll be better than you ever were before.
01:34:13.000I did one show, and I thought I did the right research, but I didn't at all.
01:34:17.000I did a show on healthcare, and then this woman who was a doctor, who was pretty high up in the profession, she wrote me this long email detailing every single thing that I got wrong in my show.
01:34:28.000And so what I did was, you know what, I'll just read this whole email.
01:34:59.000When in the middle I go, okay, I'm full of shit.
01:35:01.000Because actually they proved it in 1972 that this is, you know, and I think that's really, really, really important.
01:35:07.000Especially when you have this weird responsibility, like, as I know that you do, you have a massive following online and a lot of people very much respect your opinions and your thoughts on things and consider them very highly.
01:35:20.000So when you say something or you go over something and then it turns out that it was incorrect or your original assumption was based on some bad information, it's so important to be flexible like that.
01:35:34.000It's so important to be honest like that.
01:35:35.000And so that people recognize that you're a human being and everyone who's listening is a human being and we're all essentially in the same boat together.
01:35:43.000One of us may have focused more on a particular topic or one of us may have more talent in a particular area.
01:35:54.000Especially when you put out a lot of shows, you're just going to get stuff wrong, and you can't be an expert in everything, and that's no question that you have to read.
01:36:01.000And you also want to model that behavior for people, right?
01:36:03.000Because if you're the defensive guy who can't admit that he's wrong, The kind of people who are going to end up being comfortable with you are not the kind of people you want to have around.
01:36:14.000You want to have that force field that repels the people who want that because that's not a good place to be.
01:36:19.000I have a very critical forum and sometimes critical in a bad way.
01:36:23.000There's a lot of cunty behavior, a lot of people are just really negative people, but a lot of really intelligent people too that I really rely on.
01:36:30.000Sometimes if I have a show that doesn't go well or if I Something happens or there's a dispute about something.
01:36:37.000I think it's hugely important, especially if it's honest and it's intelligent, because that wasn't available before.
01:36:44.000And one of the resources of the internet that's so fantastic to me is that you can get opinions and you can get intelligent ideas from people that you would never be able to contact with 10, 20, 30 years ago.
01:36:56.000And now you can get them and you can interact with them in real time and it's a beautiful thing and it's so enriching and it's so important for your personal growth and for the growth of anything you're trying to do to have these intelligent people giving their point of view.
01:37:08.000You may or may not agree and that's one of the things I find along the way.
01:37:12.000I'll read a really intelligent review of why something that I did was not right and I'm like, I see where you're coming from but I disagree entirely.
01:37:21.000I can respect that, but I don't like that.
01:37:23.000I don't like this that you're saying is good.
01:37:59.000So I talk to a lot of libertarians, and libertarians, God love them.
01:38:03.000Greatest people in the world, but if you make one factual slip, like six million guys are going to come down with you, like wiki references coming out their eyeballs.
01:38:11.000So the other day, I was like, I said something about tigers in Africa, right?
01:38:15.000You know, and like six million people emailed me, Dear God, how can you believe that there are tigers in Africa?
01:39:58.000I really felt that this was essential to add to you.
01:40:00.000And I don't know if you ever figured this one out, but I watched the stuff you did on circumcision.
01:40:04.000Because we did, it was Mike's idea actually, we did a video on circumcision as well, which started off with a video of someone getting circumcised, a baby.
01:40:12.000And it's like, if you can watch that and still go ahead with it, I mean, Lordy, check yourself in and get some meds, right?
01:40:17.000But you had a question about, because I think in the show, We got the opinion that women said that sex with uncircumcised penises was better.
01:40:26.000I think you were looking that up in the show, and I don't know if you ever got the answer, but I think we found the answer through various experimentation with fruits and vegetables.
01:41:18.000First of all, those studies are heavily suspect.
01:41:20.000They rely on self-reporting and stuff like that.
01:41:23.000And secondly, let's say it does reduce AIDS a certain amount.
01:41:26.000Which has not actually been proven to do, it's actually kind of dangerous because then the guys think, well, I'm circumcised, I don't need a condom.
01:41:33.000But even if you are circumcised, they still say, well, for God's sake, wear a condom if you want to.
01:41:37.000So it can actually be kind of dangerous and increase the spread rates if people believe that.
01:41:41.000There was a recent study that said that a 60% decrease in AIDS infections.
01:42:15.000The penile cancer thing, even the American Society of Pediatrics, because they say, you put penile and cancer together, you usually will get a man's attention.
01:43:05.000I mean, sorry to put it bluntly, and you have to put shit in to wedge it, because the baby's born with the force being adhered, physically adhered to the penis.
01:43:14.000Anyway, we don't have to go into the gory details of deaths and mutilations, which are numerous, but the idea that it still exists is troubling to me.
01:43:34.000The only thing that I see is perhaps a justification of the old ways, and the fact that it's been done for so long, that it's been established.
01:43:41.000Well, and people say, I want the son to look like the dad.
01:43:44.000And I mean, how often are your son and your husband comparing penises?
01:44:15.000But if you totally worshipped him and you thought he was the best guy ever and this is what men do, you would be most likely to re-enact it.
01:44:21.000Well, I actually did until I saw that.
01:45:24.000But she realized at that moment, like this is not happening.
01:45:27.000And she packed up our stuff and we were gone.
01:45:29.000But I'll never forget the feeling of disappointment.
01:45:33.000When you're a child you hope that your father is a hero and to know that he's not.
01:45:39.000So I think for me it was this very young introduction to close violence.
01:45:46.000Violence within the household was sort of a defining factor why I was terrified of violence and why I wanted to learn to defend myself really early on.
01:45:57.000The idea that someone could just do that to you or that someone could do that to their wife or someone could do that to my mother.
01:46:08.000And do you as a dad, I mean, I know me as a dad, I mean, the idea that I would ever see that look on my daughter's face where I would fall from grace, doesn't that terrify you?
01:46:19.000You know, constantly trying to be like some statue of perfect fatherhood or whatever, but the idea that I would disappoint my daughter in that fundamental way where she'd have that crossroads with me and no longer look at me in that same, you know, look up to kind of way.
01:46:34.000I really think about that like every day.
01:46:43.000You know, I couldn't imagine, you know, I mean, If I even raised my voice to my daughter, it's like, come on, seriously, you can't do that.
01:47:42.000It's just such a failure of character and such a negative, selfish impulse to hit someone like that.
01:47:54.000One of the major things that's wrong in human interaction is the ability to hurt each other, to wantonly reach out and injure each other and hate and express our ignorance in such a violent and selfish way.
01:48:35.000And I think violence always makes you smaller than your victim.
01:48:38.000And I calculate I'm going to hit a four-year-old.
01:48:40.000I mean, are you really so far out of options as an adult with all the choice in the world that you actually have to end up hitting someone so tiny and dependent?
01:48:47.000I mean, that makes you way smaller than that.
01:48:49.000I was reading some account of a guy who was losing custody of his child.
01:48:56.000And I was reading this articulate, well-written account of the horrors of the legal system until I came upon this thing where he said that his daughter went back, the daughter was three, went back to the wife and told of a mild spanking that he gave her.
01:49:32.000They throw a temper tantrum, hover over them, communicate with them until it's over, and then give them a hug and say, I love you no matter what.
01:51:35.000If you're spanking, it's to deter behavior.
01:51:37.000It's to change behavior, which means the child has to hate and fear it.
01:51:40.000And I wish people would just be honest about it, but they can't even be honest with themselves, and then they get mad at their kids for lying.
01:51:46.000The categorization and this thing that we do where we make one thing better than another thing, even though it's exactly the same, like spanking is better than beating, you know, but they're the same goddamn thing, you know?
01:51:59.000Like, how about this, I mean, it's sort of unrelated, but not really, this thing that's going on with With this deploring of chemical weapons, that somehow or another murdering people with chemicals in that fashion is way worse than using drones.
01:52:16.000These robots that shoot Hellfire missiles into buildings and kill 98% innocent.
01:52:29.000They're so bad at killing only the targets.
01:52:32.000The idea that these are pinpoint, precise...
01:52:35.000I mean, it's fucking terrifying shit, but yet Obama will be on TV talking about how these chemical weapons, we have to deplore the actions of a father holding his children, begging for them to get up.
01:52:49.000What about the fucking kids you blew up from the sky?
01:52:51.000What about rockets launched from robots like some Orwellian nightmare flying around cities with night vision where someone's got a remote controller in Nevada and they're pressing the fire button and launching these missiles?
01:53:07.000This idea that we need to take military action.
01:53:11.000We need to kill because people have killed.
01:53:14.000We need to go murder innocents because innocents have been murdered.
01:53:17.000Syrians are killing Syrians, so to solve that we're going to kill some Syrians to show the Syrians not to kill the Syrians.
01:53:22.000And we're going to do it with pinpoint strikes.
01:53:24.000Meanwhile, they know for a fact they're going to move innocents and civilians into those areas that are high-risk military targets.
01:53:30.000They're going to move prisoners into those areas.
01:53:36.000And you know, I mean, the terrifying thing about, it's not just American weapons, it's modern weapons in general, is the fact that they will fuck with entire populations' genetics.
01:53:45.000Like, this is something, I just did this study, this sort of Review of the Syrian stuff and America's outrage at chemical weapons.
01:53:54.000Without even getting into Vietnam, where millions of people were destroyed by these unbelievably horrendous weapons.
01:54:00.000The only thing America didn't use was mustard gas and nuclear weapons.
01:54:03.000Everything else, they just threw from bombers down on this population.
01:54:06.000In Fallujah, in 2007, they used this white phosphorus, which is basically just exploding glue that melts human beings.
01:54:12.000And they just fired it indiscriminately into the city.
01:54:16.000And they use these depleted uranium shells, because they're good at piercing armor, of which there really wasn't much of in Iraq anyway.
01:54:22.000But this stuff has a half-life longer than the planet itself.
01:54:25.000And it so screws with the genetics of the population, because it goes into the dust, it goes into the lungs.
01:54:29.000There's been a 600% increase in leukemia.
01:54:31.000And in the years after this Fallujah attack, run by America, by the special forces, by the army, 50% of the children were born with birth defects.
01:54:42.000And a guy, a geneticist who's gone to study the city, says that he's never seen a more compromised, is a nice way of putting it, basically a more fucked up genetic population.
01:54:51.000This is going to go on for generations.
01:54:53.000These genes have been completely destroyed by these weapons.
01:54:56.000And then they're saying, well, you know, this guy in Syria, he used these chemical weapons and so on.
01:55:02.000It's like, but at least that stuff is not going to completely rewrite the genetic code of the population for generations to come.
01:55:08.000Well, haven't they denied the use of depleted uranium, even though there's a lot of evidence that shows that they did?
01:55:13.000And I had to apologize to people because I was talking about where they used all these depleted uranium and all these guys from Serbia, right, and say, well, we don't count?
01:55:21.000I mean, they used it with us, too, with the same effects.
01:55:24.000And then that's also the cause of this gulf war syndrome that all these people have come back with horrible illnesses that mirror radiation sickness and then the government has denied them medical treatment and said there's nothing wrong here, there's nothing going on here.
01:56:32.000Yeah, you know, that old joke about BMWs, what's the difference between I'm going to tell a joke to a comedian, so I'm going to talk to a porcupine and a BMW and then a porcupine and the pricks are on the outside.
01:56:41.000Other than the BMW factor, very, very nice people.
01:56:45.000I must bring them in from Costco or something.
01:56:46.000That's also always going to be the case when people are privileged or when they have more money or when they feel like they've worked harder and the other people are weak and lazy.
01:57:29.000And to mistake that for personal virtue is a really great failing because it really kills your empathy.
01:57:36.000And on the flip side, it's also an incredible weakness that people have when they point to successful people going, oh, they're going to love you.
01:59:10.000Not only that, it's one of those things that when you see someone on a camera, you see them on a screen, you see them and this weird alpha male primate thing that we have where we think that the person who gets to talk is special.
01:59:27.000The person that's on camera is special because that would be like the leader of the tribe or something.
01:59:31.000There's this weird They've sort of hijacked our human reward system with media.
01:59:38.000And so because of that, when you see someone who's on film and someone's crying, you give them incredible accolades.
02:00:43.000Because he was such a brilliant guy and so good at ad-libbing.
02:00:47.000That what he would do is we had an amazing executive producer, Paul Simms, brilliant, brilliant guy who created the show, the head writer and executive producer, and a great writing staff as well.
02:00:56.000But Paul was really open to us experimenting.
02:00:59.000So they would give us a framework, they would give us a script, but Dave would rewrite entire scenes.
02:01:05.000And so, so much of what we did on that show was ad-lib, almost maybe 50%.
02:01:09.000So it wasn't just about reading people's lines being easier.
02:01:18.000So my stumbling into a sitcom, it was because of a bunch of lucky factors.
02:01:25.000Luck number one, that they saw me on MTV. They got to saw my comedy special, or MTV, Half Hour Comedy Hour, when I was on This television show where I did like 10 minutes.
02:01:59.000And even that, I mean, to do the half-hour MTV special, I bet you it was a hell of a lot of work.
02:02:03.000And that comes out of years on the road, and knowing how to work an audience, the timing, and what works and what doesn't, and all that, so...
02:02:28.000Maybe you'll have a couple of good lines that you've accumulated or you've developed over the course of your life some observations that you think are really funny.
02:02:40.000Not when people pay 30 bucks for a ticket and then they say, wait.
02:02:44.000I mean, I was just amazed, because the hour and twenty that you were on stage last night, it flew by for me.
02:02:49.000You know, and I mean, are you saying, according to your memory, it kind of flew by to you.
02:02:53.000But I'm thinking, the amount of work, I mean, the amount of material that's written and discarded and tested and discarded, the amount of concentrated work that does an hour and twenty of making people laugh.
02:03:02.000I mean, man, tip of the iceberg last night, huge amount of work underneath.
02:03:06.000When I'm not working on other things, if I'm not doing the UFC or if I'm not working on my podcast, I am always thinking of stuff.
02:03:15.000But it's also, I've kind of designed my life In that the creation of material outside of the actual sitting down in front of the computer and writing, which is critical.
02:03:34.000You have to do the writing down notes and stuff is important too, but the actual sitting down and crafting the bits and putting them in order and figuring out a way.
02:03:43.000You free ball when you're on stage and let it come when it's on stage because when you're on stage you never know what the hell can happen.
02:04:20.000But you have to do that, because if you don't, people don't want to follow your train of thought.
02:04:24.000What you're doing when you're doing a stand-up performance is not just telling a bunch of jokes, but you're borrowing someone's consciousness.
02:04:46.000Because if you're talking like, I have seen a million comedians.
02:04:49.000And there's so many that I've seen that they start talking and I go, I gotta get the fuck out of here.
02:04:53.000I can't listen to this guy's mind because what he's doing is he's got like a one-stop, like his premises are short, they're obvious conclusions.
02:05:01.000They don't build nicely, which is a challenge to you, right?
02:05:55.000You know, it's not empty calories, right?
02:05:57.000Because there's a lot of thought in what you do.
02:05:58.000Well, last night's set was particularly rich in ideas because some of the new things that I've been working on are...
02:06:07.000There's a lot of stuff that I'm working on about this sort of weirdness of progressive thought lately, like this really aggressive progressiveness that's going on where people are denying reality and they're doing it so because they feel like people have been marginalized in the past,
02:06:24.000which is true, but it doesn't mean you spring it back the other way.
02:06:27.000You say a bunch of stupid shit that doesn't make any sense.
02:06:29.000Yeah, or you judge people harshly for judging people harshly.
02:06:49.000These feminists are protesting These students, and screaming in their face, these students that want to go see this man talk about men's rights and about that you hate women and all this, and they're incredibly aggressive.
02:07:05.000The only hate I see is in the protesters.
02:07:07.000The only hate, and by the way, incredibly ignorant to what this guy's actual words are.
02:09:21.000And if the woman was not working during the time of the marriage, I think there should be some sort of compensation, something fair and something reasonable.
02:09:28.000Yeah, some of the assets that he developed by focusing on whatever.
02:10:12.000And on top of that, he had to pay for her lawyer while they had gone through divorce.
02:10:16.000And here's where it gets really crazy.
02:10:18.000She went to every lawyer in town and consulted with them, every good lawyer in town that she knew of, so that he could never use them as counsel.
02:10:27.000Oh, because they had a conflict of interest?
02:11:18.000And everything that's on team penis can go fuck itself.
02:11:21.000And that was the feedback, the blowback that I got for a joke about male feminists.
02:11:27.000Yeah, I've stepped on that landmine a couple of times, and I'll keep going back to it, because it is an important one.
02:11:33.000Men in the legal system, not just with divorce, but the sentencing disparities between men and women, what they call the pussy pass, it's horrendous.
02:11:40.000Didn't you call feminism Marxist with pennies?
02:11:44.000The original quote was socialism with tits.
02:11:47.000But that was a bad character in one of my novels.
02:11:50.000I just called it socialism with panties.
02:11:53.000And it's very true because, I mean, and then people call, oh my god, that's so terrible.
02:11:56.000I just went through all the founding Matriarchs of the feminist system.
02:12:00.000They're all Marxists, all leftists, and so on.
02:12:02.000And also, if feminists are so pro-woman, then where are they with Margaret Thatcher?
02:12:07.000Margaret Thatcher was like the first leader of a Western country.
02:12:17.000Ayn Rand wrote the most influential book outside the Bible and the second most Influential book, according to the New York Times Review, of books after the Bible, you know, reshaped Western philosophy in many ways and Western politics.
02:12:36.000So, I mean, I have these sort of suspicions when they're sort of, is it the leftist ideology or the pro-woman?
02:12:42.000Now, if it's the pro-woman, then they should be incredibly positive.
02:12:46.000Where are the feminists when people insult people like Ann Coulter?
02:12:50.000Where are the feminists when people insult Sarah Palin?
02:12:52.000You know, like Bill Marver called her a cunt.
02:12:55.000I mean, that's really pretty vicious, like publicly, openly, right?
02:12:58.000I mean, because they're on the right, and they're considered to be on the right, so they get a pass when people go, you know, but you then say something bad about a woman on the left.
02:13:07.000So I think that it is more left than it is pro-woman, because when they choose between their politics and the gender, they always seem to choose the politics over the gender, and that's why I say it's leftist rather than pro-woman.
02:13:19.000I agree, and I think there's a lot of really emotional and non-objective thinking attached to feminism, and there's a lot of really strange...
02:13:28.000One of the more recent ones that I find incredibly strange is there's this new trend of accusing men of rape if they have sex with a woman who has had something to drink.
02:13:39.000This is a broad, sweeping thing that's going through the internet in a lot of these It's really weird because there's a lot of it in what they call a skeptical community.
02:13:52.000The skeptical community seems to be integrated with a lot of male feminists and feminists, and this is something that they've adopted, this idea that somehow or another skepticism and this idea that they combine.
02:14:06.000I don't know if you're aware of the case, the Michael Shermer thing?
02:14:30.000But it's the idea of that being the skeptic community.
02:14:33.000I mean, one of the things you learn as a skeptic when you're breaking down any idea Whether it's a religious idea or whether it's an idea about an event that took place is that a person's eyewitness account of any individual event is suspect and that it's one of the worst forms of evidence.
02:14:53.000And it doesn't mean that a terrible thing didn't happen to this person.
02:14:56.000But it does mean that if you look in the context of the way it was explained in this guy's blog is that she was put in a position where she couldn't consent.
02:15:10.000And then the corroborating evidence that he uses in this blog is that a woman went to a party with this guy and he kept getting her drinks and he was flirty and she got drunker than she usually does and that's it.
02:15:23.000That's the corroborating piece of evidence that the man and a woman who are both adults were drinking together and she got drunk.
02:15:32.000You talk about removing yourself from personal responsibility.
02:15:36.000This guy was responsible for you getting drunker.
02:15:47.000How is it possible that a person who believes in the power of being a woman could think that a woman is so much weaker than a man that she can't control how much liquor she consumes when she's around a man?
02:16:01.000That the man somehow or another, by being with her and drinking with her, forces her to consume more than she normally would?
02:16:13.000The whole point is that, okay, yes, you had diminished capacity while you were driving, but you were responsible for drinking and getting in the car.
02:16:19.000It's the one time when we're willing to alleviate someone of their own personal responsibility, and only women.
02:16:42.000But that has taken, and this is a long dark road that as a man, and you know, I'm sorry that if you're a woman, it's really hard to get this.
02:16:50.000We have had so much negativity over the past 40 or so years hurled at masculinity that, I mean, we were like half criminals just for breathing.
02:17:00.000I mean, if you look at the role models on TV, how men are portrayed, you know, the Homer Simpsons and the American Dads.
02:17:08.000We're all just idiots and sex-crazed and irresponsible and stupid.
02:17:13.000And the amazing thing is that it's true that if you look at the bell curve of intelligence, for women, it kind of spikes in the middle.
02:17:20.000So many more women are of average intelligence than men.
02:17:23.000Now, you still have your brilliant women, you still have your dumb women.
02:17:26.000But if you look at the bell curve of male intelligence, much flatter, which means that we have a lot more geniuses and a lot more complete idiots.
02:17:33.000And what's happened is everybody's focused on the idiots among men and have completely begun to ignore all the brilliance that men bring to the world, all of the amazing, incredible inventions that men bring to the world.
02:17:43.000And it's just we're focusing on this low cluster, which is incredibly biased.
02:17:47.000It's like saying, okay, well, blacks in America, they commit a lot more crimes.
02:17:50.000And we're just going to focus on that and say, that's all the blacks are.
02:17:52.000That's all we're going to portray as blacks as criminals and blah, blah, blah.
02:17:56.000But the sexism of portraying men as idiots, because we happen to have more cluster as a gender on that side, and completely ignoring all of the incredible stuff that brilliant men bring to the world, is incredibly sexist, and it's really hard for people to see.
02:18:10.000I mean, like, the idea that, you were talking earlier, the idea that a woman can competently raise children without a man around is just taken for granted now.
02:18:19.000Men are essential to the healthy raising of children, but the idea that we would recognize that as a society is just, we're just, they're disposable.
02:18:26.000It's also a very unfortunate situation in regards to feminism that a lot of people are dealing with their own personal experiences that they've had with a few asshole men in their lives in regards to them not being sexually attractive or not fitting into a certain social group or not.
02:18:43.000And then they have somehow or another extrapolated that, that all men are pieces of shit and rapists or a massive amount of them need to be curbed and laws need to be changed and if you get drunk with a girl and you have sex with her, you're a rapist.
02:18:56.000I mean, and a lot of this is based on their own negative interactions with men and the stereotype of feminism, unfortunately, There's a meme online, this is feminism.
02:19:08.000And it's a woman holding up a sign saying, I'm a feminist.
02:19:26.000But the type of person that is a large, unattractive woman is going to deal with, immeasurably, it's going to be so much harder for her to find people who are sexually attracted to her, for her to find healthy relationships.
02:19:43.000It's an unfortunate reality in this world that if you are not sexually attractive, you are not going to have as easy a ride when it comes to the opposite sex.
02:19:54.000Well, I mean, but sexually attractive and 300 pounds, I mean, somebody who's 300 pounds is, for most people, going to be sexually unattractive.
02:20:01.000But if they sort of lose weight and exercise, that's sort of a different matter.
02:20:04.000That just comes down to a basic human competence.
02:20:06.000But one of the things that I've thought of, like I grew up with a single mom, and we lived, because single moms are usually broke, right?
02:20:14.000And so when I grew up with a single mom, everyone around me has single moms as well.
02:20:18.000You know what's interesting is that the kind of men who float through the single mom world, they're not always the best kind of men, right?
02:20:27.000Because the really competent and successful and intelligent men aren't trolling the girlfriend farms at the single mom, you know, low rent housing ghettos, right?
02:20:35.000And so I think what happens is a lot of these women have grown up In single mom households or in this sort of environment.
02:20:42.000And so who are the men who are floating through that?
02:20:49.000They don't tend to be the very best specimens of masculinity.
02:20:53.000And so I think the breakdown of the family has created an environment where a lot of girls growing up don't have a positive male role model in their life.
02:21:00.000And the kind of men that they see floating through their mom's beds tend to be kind of trashy.
02:21:03.000So they're like, well, this is masculinity.
02:21:05.000It's also very unfortunate that in the criticism of masculinity, you've removed a lot of allies by blanket generalizations of men.
02:21:13.000You removed a lot of people like myself, who I can't support you on that, even though I'm an entirely pro-human being and pro-equality.
02:21:23.000But when you make these mass generalizations and call someone a men's right advocate asshole, These are nonsense statements, and it's unfortunate that I guarantee you, and it's not saying that all feminists Feminists are unattractive, or all feminists are not sexually viable,
02:21:41.000but I guarantee you almost all of them have had a lot of negative experiences with men.
02:21:47.000And it doesn't mean that all men are negative.
02:21:49.000And it doesn't mean that there's not people out there that you would assume would be assholes that are actually very nice people.
02:21:56.000But you've got this idea that it's easier to define the world by these rigid dimensions that you've sort of set up for yourself.
02:22:05.000When I read things that are from this feminist point of view, they're so often aggressive.
02:22:34.000And I find it really weird when really intelligent people attach themselves to these feminist ideas.
02:22:42.000Yeah, but the problem is, you know, in Canada here, I had a guy on my show, a great guy, Bill Gairdner, who wrote The End of the Family, and he pointed out that There's a revolution that occurs, I think, that initially is necessary, and I think this is also with blacks in America,
02:23:56.000I mean, there may be other problems, but that's not the problem, right?
02:23:59.000Like, I don't support a lot of, you know, let's deal with polio victims because we got this vaccine and we don't really have polio victims anymore, right?
02:24:05.000So the whole point of a revolution is to defund itself, to end, for people to move on with their lives.
02:24:10.000But what happens is when you have a government, you get these voting blocs and you get, like in Canada, over the last 10 or 15 years, the Canadian government's given $300 million to feminist groups.
02:24:20.000That's not coming from Canadian women or Canadian men, for that matter, because, you know, a lot of it's kind of been dealt with.
02:24:25.000But these groups continue by poking these scabs and by continuing these grievances and by finding the Trayvon Martin situation, blowing it up into a race war and all this kind of stuff.
02:24:34.000A lot of the stuff has been dealt with, but because the government's still giving the money, they still need to whip up these kinds of hysterias just to justify their own existence.
02:24:42.000I mean, the whole point of revolution is to end.
02:24:45.000The whole point of, I want to deal with measles is get a vaccine and end measles.
02:24:49.000You don't keep taking the same amount of money year after year, but if you have a government funding it, then you have to manufacture these grievances, which just keeps things going and getting worse.
02:24:56.000The point of revolution is a resolution.
02:25:25.000Oh, officer, he stole my coffee because I changed my mind after the fact when he left.
02:25:29.000Well, the idea is that a man can lie to a woman in order to get in bed with her, and then if she can prove that he did that, that he's a rapist.
02:25:36.000Because he tricked her with his words.
02:25:38.000Yeah, because of course women have a lie.
02:25:40.000I mean, they don't use makeup, they don't puff up their tits, they don't ever falsify any of their opinions.
02:25:44.000They don't pretend to like a man because he's wealthy and hope to get pregnant with him either.
02:25:48.000I mean, I don't see any feminists that are decrying that, and that's a horrible affront to womanhood to think that the only way that you can make a living is to lie to a man and make him Get you pregnant so that you can get money from them from then on.
02:26:00.000I mean, feminists, true feminists should be horrified by that.
02:26:04.000Yeah, we'll focus on the false rape accusations.
02:26:06.000The false rape accusations, which in some studies are 20, 30 or 40 percent.
02:26:11.000There's a study in the Air Force where they actually, even women who've withdrawn their accusations, 20, 30 or 40 percent of rape accusations, in some studies, who knows what it is universally, Are false.
02:26:23.000And women should be coming down so hard on women who make false rape accusations because they make it so much harder for the women who actually have been raped because then there's that problem or false paternity.
02:26:32.000And the problem with false rape accusations is that very few women face repercussions for them.
02:26:36.000Now, in my book, if you accuse someone of a crime and you lied, you get the punishment they would have gotten.
02:26:45.000This football player who's recently been released, he got on tape, this girl admitting that she lied about him raping her, and her family received a million dollars, or $850,000, and now they have to pay the money back.
02:27:00.000But that's the extent of her punishment.
02:27:02.000This guy went to jail for five fucking years, and now he's trying to re-pursue...
02:27:07.000And what if he didn't have that recording?
02:27:52.000Lying about a rape is just as horrible.
02:27:53.000Well, they will often get a man raped in prison.
02:27:56.000Yes, and this idea of withdrawing consent and that somehow or another you can do that and turn a guy into a rapist, that's a hating thing.
02:28:08.000What you're doing is you're hating someone who's manipulative.
02:28:12.000You're hating someone who can con you into bed.
02:28:15.000But that's been what men have been trying to do since the beginning of time.
02:28:20.000Like, you're hating the game of courting a woman.
02:28:24.000And there have been men that wear shoes that they would never wear, and watches they would never buy, and cars they don't give a shit about, and apartment that they decorate just to get the woman to believe that they're like this.
02:28:42.000The first time I came over his house back when he was single, he had Jack Kerouac on the road, sitting on his night table, opened up with like...
02:29:45.000You know, I've always, I have this thing when I say to people, and I think a lot of times we lie and pretend, a big part of us, because we're not happy with who we are.
02:29:52.000We're not really, and we like to be, we like to wish that we were someone better.
02:29:57.000I always tell people, be the person that you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid.
02:30:02.000You want to really live your life optimally, you want to really be an admirable person, be the hero of your own story, and be the guy that you pretend to be when you try to get laid.
02:30:11.000And if you can find people who love you for who you are, I mean, my God, isn't that easier?
02:30:15.000The problem with the pretense is, you know, it's fine in the moment, but man, you got to keep that shit up.
02:30:19.000And you have to love yourself in order to be loved.
02:30:23.000If you have all sorts of flaws that you don't fix and you don't like various aspects of yourself that you don't correct, What normal person in their sensible mind would want to engage in a long-term relationship with someone that's incredibly flawed, knows it,
02:31:29.000What are you bringing into a relationship?
02:31:31.000Until you're happy with who you are, until you're just a reasonable person who's objective about your own actions, And objective about your own path in life and enjoying your own path in life, you're not worthy of a healthy,
02:31:48.000You haven't gotten your own shit together yet.
02:31:50.000Well, and this is terrible, I think, dichotomy where, you know, women get married to guys hoping that they'll change and guys get married to women hoping that they won't.
02:32:00.000You're not going to cut that long hair when you have kids, right?
02:32:03.000You're going to keep exercising, right?
02:32:04.000You're still going to look great and all that.
02:32:07.000The idea that you're with someone in the hopes that they'll change is just completely insane.
02:32:12.000It's like buying a Buick and hoping it's going to be a boat.
02:32:34.000I have a friend and his girlfriend, he went to the bathroom and his girlfriend was confronted by my other friend's girlfriend about the kind of car he drives.
02:32:45.000Because he drove a sports car, he had a Ferrari, he's a wealthy guy.
02:32:48.000And the girlfriend was like, why do you let him drive that car?
02:33:53.000And he was not allowed to buy a sports car.
02:33:56.000Not to say anything great about having a sports car, but I don't understand.
02:33:59.000If you're going to be a capitalist, if you're going to be a materialist, which they clearly were in this big, giant house, you should be able to buy whatever fucking car you want.
02:34:06.000If you're really going to bust your ass and work 12 hours a day, I'm not saying there's any great honor or nobility in buying a Ferrari, but if you really want a Ferrari and you've got a lot of money, buy a fucking Ferrari.
02:34:19.000That reminds me, best moment in your Peter Joseph interview, because I'm doing a debate with him on Monday, because we have some slightly different ideas about how the future should go.
02:34:28.000And we have a debate, and so I listened to your show with it, which is really enjoyable, and I love the bit.
02:34:34.000He said, you know, they could make better cars.
02:34:37.000The Ferrari, they could make that better.
02:37:45.000I think we all together can work things out by talking and exchanging ideas and exchanging opinions and agreeing and seeing each other's points of view.
02:37:57.000We can all help each other, but the idea that one person is going to be the moral authority or the voice of wisdom, it's a very dangerous position.
02:38:06.000I mean, there's a few things that I'm comfortable saying people shouldn't do, but outside of that, I have no I have no idea what is going to make you the happiest in life.
02:38:21.000I mean, man, if we can start pointing guns at each other, if we can start having these crazy laws, stop throwing people in jail for the wrong bits of vegetation, I think that would be a great step forward.
02:38:29.000Let's just start pointing guns at each other to get stuff done.
02:38:32.000Outside of that, I have no idea what people should do to make themselves happy.
02:38:36.000That's because you're legitimately intelligent.
02:38:39.000Half the time I'm not even sure myself.
02:38:40.000You sit there and say, what should I do with my day that's going to make me the happiest?
02:38:44.000It's nice to have the choice or whatever, but as to what other people should do, who they should be with, and what careers they should follow, that's really impossible.
02:39:24.000And by the way, the people that I've met that are mixed martial artists, they're fighters, they're some of the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
02:39:30.000And one of the reasons is that they've conquered their ego to a certain extent and that they have a much better control over it because they're being checked over and over again on a daily basis in the gym.
02:39:40.000Oh, discipline is a highly underrated virtue.
02:41:18.000They take four-year-olds and they sit them down and they say, you can have two marshmallows now, or you can have four marshmallows if you have one now and wait.
02:41:36.000And they've tracked these kids through life.
02:41:38.000And they find that consistently, those who are able to defer gratification just do a hell of a lot better.
02:41:43.000I bet you there were times when you got up to do Fear Factor and you're like, If there's one thing I don't want to do today, it's fear factor.
02:41:49.000That was 90% of the time we did fear right now.
02:42:00.000Just have the discipline to do it when you don't feel like doing it.
02:42:02.000The deferral of gratification, I'm sure with the training, there's times when you get your ass kicked or you pull the muscle and you're just like, well, I've got to go back and do it.
02:42:08.000Or there's times where like that cheesecake looks like I'm drooling like a tsunami here.
02:42:13.000And I think that kind of discipline...
02:42:15.000So you say that the fighters are like really great guys.
02:42:18.000I think it's because they probably really work that muscle of discipline to the point where they have a coach, they have a set of personal responsibilities, and they don't let themselves step outside of that.
02:42:28.000And so there's a kind of security in people who have a lot of discipline in whatever field it is that they're working in.
02:42:33.000I really like being around people who've got a lot of discipline because you know they're not just going to do some random shit.
02:43:06.000I know you said yours is a little bit, you know, grab what you can as far as your career goes and a little bit on the less than planned side, but do you have sort of an idea of where you want to go?
02:43:15.000Five years, you know, ten years kind of thing?
02:45:16.000I mean, you, you can teach and you, you have a certain amount of, like, there's certain moves that I can, uh, teach someone in Jiu Jitsu, but could I teach you Jiu Jitsu mastery?
02:45:28.000Something you have to pursue on your own and most likely you'll never achieve.
02:45:32.000You might be masterful over one particular skill level, but then someone else come along that is much more skillful than you and master you.
02:45:42.000It's a constant series of levels and it's fairly infinite.
02:45:48.000And then there's also the physical challenges and athletic ability and all sorts of intangibles that different people bring to the equation.
02:45:56.000But I think that in pursuit of those things is where you find yourself.
02:46:00.000And that the really interesting aspects of it is the growth that you achieve in those things, whether it's through the growth in writing or comedy or anything difficult, those things manifest themselves in the rest of your life as well.
02:46:52.000I think it's broadened my perspective immensely to be able to have these kind of conversations like you and I sitting down here for hours just chatting.
02:47:00.000I think it's really difficult to pull off in the real world.
02:47:04.000Unless we're agreeing to have a podcast, it's really hard to just set aside three hours where we're just going to talk.
02:48:11.000When I was in the business world, we'd have clients come up, and I'd always want to take them to a comedy club, because it sure beats a movie, right?
02:48:17.000And so I used to go see a lot of comedy.
02:48:19.000I did a little bit, you know, just some amateur shit when I was in school.
02:48:35.000I think what you guys do is like fantastic.
02:48:38.000I think it's just a real ray of sunshine in human life.
02:48:41.000And what you give is you give permission for people to be funny themselves, to have fun, and the joy that you guys have.
02:48:48.000The one of the things I love most about stand-up, you know the breaking bit, and you did it a couple of times last night, where you You did something that's so funny that you yourself found it funny because maybe it was unrehearsed or something spontaneous or you had a thought because that seeing somebody have joy in the moment is really, really enjoyable.
02:49:09.000There's some people that do like fake breaks and they'll laugh at their jokes a fucking billion times in a row and every time you'll see them they'll laugh at it the same way.
02:50:24.000I'm not going to tell you your job because of course you know it a million times better than I do, but what I really love about the stand-up is just that openness, the honesty, the vulnerability, and the energy.
02:50:33.000It's funny that you just call it generous because a lot of people think of it as selfish because the only reason why you're being vulnerable is because you're hoping that you're going to get a laugh.
02:52:31.000I'd forgotten about him because, you know, I try to blank out on politics as much as possible because I know it's like dandelion fluff in the wind that'll sting your eyes.
02:53:35.000I wanted to ask you, because I... This is something that I ask of pretty much anybody who I think is a thinker, looking at this crazy life that we live.
02:53:46.000Do you have a positive outlook for humans, for culture?
02:53:54.000Do you think that we're going to work this out?
02:54:23.000So, I don't believe that I'm along for the ride.
02:54:26.000I am not a big movement in history kind of guy, you know, like Hegelians or Marxists, sort of, you know, bullshit and technical, but they all believe that these big historical movements and, you know, the zeitgeists I don't believe that.
02:54:42.000I believe in the single great willpower individual theory of history.
02:54:47.000That when people who have ability and intelligence and passion and commitment, they're the ones who make the world go in a particular direction, right?
02:54:56.000Founding Fathers did it one way, and it went, I think, in a pretty positive direction.
02:55:01.000You know, once the slaves and women got caught up with the all men are equal kind of thing, it went in a pretty positive direction.
02:55:07.000If you look at Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, it went in a very bad direction.
02:55:11.000If you look at the Soviets, the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin and company, it went in a seriously bad direction.
02:55:21.000It killed like 70 million people in the Soviet Empire, right?
02:55:46.000You take a stand as best you can and you shine that light as bright as possible.
02:55:51.000And then most people will simply go one way or another based upon the willpower of the individuals that they listen to and the clarity and the focus and humility of the people they listen to.
02:56:00.000So I think that it goes the way we want it to go, but it's not going to go there unless we make it go to a better place.
02:56:08.000I think that's a brilliant way of putting it, too.
02:56:10.000I think we do get energized from others, and the people that do have power and influence do have almost an obligation to energize people with ideas.
02:56:21.000Yeah, look, if you know how to do the heimlich and someone's choking on a fishbone, Go help that person.
02:56:26.000If you can swim and someone's drowning, go help that person.
02:56:29.000If you have ideas to make the world better, you think you're legit.
02:56:32.000I don't believe in unchosen positive obligations.
02:56:36.000If you choose a contract, then you're bound by that contract.
02:56:38.000I don't think you have to, but you're kind of a dick if you don't.
02:56:41.000If you're like, oh, I don't want to give that guy tracheotomy because this ravioli is really good, even though you could and saved the guy's life, it's not like you should be thrown in jail for that, but it's really douchey.
02:56:50.000And I think if you have verbal abilities and you have skills and you have energy and you have education and you have some capacity, given now how easy it is to broadcast to the world, By God, you kind of owe it to the future.
02:57:05.000You know, because all the great stuff that we have was people putting themselves on the line in the past.
02:57:10.000You know, all the great, like the freedoms we have, the political freedoms, all people fighting hard, and a hell of a lot harder than we have to fight.
02:57:17.000You know, the guys, the founding fathers, they faced down the British Army, for God's sakes.
02:57:20.000They could have gotten muskets through the head, right?
02:58:14.000And so the problem is that bad people are just anal and motivated and douchey and power hungry and they just work like assholes to get power over others.
02:58:24.000And good people are like, well, I really want that power because I'm happy and I'm in love and, you know, I've got a great life and so I really don't want to boss everyone else around.
02:58:30.000But we have, through this technology, we don't have to have political power to have an effect.
02:58:34.000And we don't have to be a professor and teach maybe 5,000 people in our whole career or write some book that maybe 10,000 people read.