Joe Rogan is a stand-up comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. In this episode, we talk about how he got started in comedy and podcasting, and how he went from being a martial arts competitor to becoming one of the most successful podcasters in the business. Joe also talks about his love for the art of archery, and why he thinks archery should be a part of your every day life. Joe also gives us some insight into his background in martial arts, and what got him interested in the podcasting world, and some of the crazy things he's been up to in the past few years, including how he built a studio and built a business out of his living room in order to make a name for himself as a podcaster and creator of his own show, "The Joe Rogan Show." Thanks to our sponsor, MVMT, for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns. Get into MVMT and join the Movement Movement Movement movement movement. See why the movement keeps growing! Get into the movement movement movement and get 15% all year-round off your favorite watch and accessory collection. Get your first pair of watches and accessories for $95 or more at mvmt.co/jointhemovement and save 15% on your first purchase! Get in touch with me and I'll send you an ad-free version of the show! and we'll give you 5% off your first month of the month and a free shipping on your next purchase. Thank you for listening to the podcast! Joe Rogans and I hope you enjoy the Sunday Special with me! XOXO, Joe and I will see you again next week! xoxo, Joe - The Sunday Special! - Tom and I xo <3 Tom and Sarah - Sarah Sarah, . , : & Sarah :) - + (The Sunday Special With Joe : ( ) ~ ( ) - (Song: "The Monday Special with Joe's Theme Song: ) (feat. ) & Sarah's Music: "Solo Song: "Feat. , "A Little Late" by: "Let's Talk About It" by ) ( ) & (Music: "I Can't Believe It's Not Good Enough?
00:00:00.000We're trying to strengthen the way we view the world and take in as much information as we can and see that information for what it truly is, not what we want it to be.
00:00:16.000Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Joe Rogan.
00:00:19.000We're going to jump into the interview in just a moment because this is awesome.
00:00:22.000But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at MVMT.
00:00:27.000MVMT has come far from being crowdfunded kids working out of a living room.
00:00:30.000In the past year, they've not only introduced a bunch of new watch collections for both men and women, but they've also expanded to sunglasses and
00:04:00.000And the quality of my thoughts and the way I think about things was always
00:04:05.000It's one of the most important things to guide you through life and I'm like I am putting my future brain in jeopardy and I was seeing it around me from a bunch of other people that were in the gym that were professional fighters and that were getting brain damage.
00:04:18.000I was essentially seeing them starting to slur their words and I was seeing this effect.
00:04:25.000And I knew I had to get out somehow or another.
00:04:27.000And luckily, one of my friends, my friend Steve Graham, who I'm good friends with to this day, talked me into doing stand-up comedy.
00:04:34.000Talked me into going up on an open mic night when I was 21.
00:04:57.000Do you think that there is... I'm worrying about this about the NFL, and I wonder if it also applies to MMA.
00:05:02.000Do you think that there is always going to be MMA?
00:05:05.000There's always going to be NFL boxing?
00:05:07.000Do you think these things are always going to exist, or do you think that as a society we're going to transition away from those as people start to become more concerned about brain injury, for example?
00:05:15.000Like, I've seen the NFL's ratings decline because people seem to be really worried about concussion levels.
00:05:21.000I think in the recent future we're going to have these things, but I think in the distant future we're probably not going to.
00:05:27.000I think we're going to move away from them because of the damage that they do.
00:05:30.000Unless there's some radical new medical technology that can regenerate brain tissue to the point where you don't have to worry about brain injuries, which is not outside the realm of possibility.
00:05:40.000Medical science, what they're doing with stem cells and exosomes and all the different
00:05:57.000Until then, until some radical new technology comes on, I think it's probably going to be less and less people that are interested in having their kids sign up to play football.
00:06:08.000Definitely have less and less people interested in fighting since traumatic brain injuries have been revealed to be, you know, really
00:06:17.000Prevalent in kids that are involved in, like, football, even at, like, Pop Warner and high school levels, and in fighting, I mean, just from the time a kid can hit hard, you know, like, you're in, you know, like, one of the good things about martial arts, teaching kids young, is when you teach them young, they can't really hurt each other yet.
00:06:35.000So even when they're hitting each other, it's all very light, and they're learning technique and movement before there's real consequences.
00:06:42.000And then as they get older though, you know, if you're sparring when you're a teenager and you're sparring when you're, you know, in your early twenties, you're absolutely giving yourself brain damage.
00:07:25.000And that's really the best way to describe it because you're trying to do something to someone who's trying to do something to you and genetics and knowledge and technique and discipline and drive and focus, these are all factors that are mixed up in this thing and you're trying to figure out who's going to come out on top.
00:07:42.000I mean, I wonder if maybe that's the reason that MMA is going to keep growing as the NFL declines, is honesty in marketing.
00:07:47.000When you watch MMA, you're watching people get the crap kicked out of them.
00:07:50.000You're watching people bleed and your bones get broken.
00:07:53.000The NFL has been promising for years that basically everyone's fine, that it's all just watching people hit pillows.
00:07:57.000And then you see them later and they can't walk and they're falling apart.
00:08:00.000MMA, I do wonder if there is a certain element of channeling just the human drive, particularly the male drive, for aggression in watching these kinds of sports.
00:08:08.000Because I know a lot of genteel dudes who
00:09:23.000And which gets us to, you know, one of the topics that you and I have talked about before, which is sort of these gender differences between male and female.
00:09:30.000As you've been watching the last, it's been probably a year and a half since we last talked.
00:09:33.000What do you think of sort of the movement that's continued to pace to get rid of these gender differences that you've been seeing in society more broadly?
00:09:41.000It's very strange because it's science denialism.
00:09:45.000And the left is all about science until it comes to gender.
00:09:50.000And once it comes to gender, they don't want to hear about studies, they don't want to hear about genetic differences between males and females, they don't want to hear about preferences or any studies that show that
00:10:02.000People with higher testosterone tend to go towards certain activities.
00:10:07.000People with lower ones tend to... They don't want to hear about that.
00:10:09.000They want this weird thing where you're not even having the Boy Scouts anymore.
00:10:30.000I suspect it's people that don't enjoy certain aspects of male versus female competition or male versus male competition.
00:10:40.000And the way that they feel like they can sort of diminish that is to try to make the whole subject seem like as if it's fruitless and there's nothing there.
00:11:02.000Within the last half a decade, it's become this hugely politically charged subject where you, what, like I saw, my wife was reading this thing that she had to fill out today and she goes, look at this.
00:11:16.000She goes, it says, what do I identify with?
00:11:26.000And I'm like, okay, what percentage of the people are we placating with this?
00:11:32.000And it's so bizarre it actually has medical consequences.
00:11:34.000So I know a lot of doctors because I've said many times my wife is a doctor and there are cases now where doctors are walking into a room and it says on the chart that somebody is of a particular sex and they're not of that sex because they're writing the sex they perceive themselves to be.
00:11:49.000So you know I heard a story about one patient who came in and was having lower abdominal pain.
00:11:54.000Well, if you're a boy versus you're a girl, that's going to make a pretty large difference into how that diagnosis goes.
00:11:59.000Shouldn't at least a doctor know what sex you're born with?
00:12:02.000It's totally wild and it's all this attempt to level, I think.
00:12:06.000Everything, the attempt to just get rid of natural differences between human beings and pretend they don't exist.
00:12:12.000Like, we all want everybody to obviously have equal rights and equal liberties, but that's not the same thing as saying that everybody is going to be equally strong in a fighting ring.
00:12:21.000What do you think is causing all this?
00:12:23.000I mean, I think what's causing all of this is that there's a deep desire right now in a free society to try and figure out why some people succeed and some people fail, and we're never allowed to say that there are natural issues at stake.
00:12:34.000And I understand the resistance to it based on race, right?
00:12:38.000So for example, you see a lot of people who will say you can't ever talk about racial differences in IQ because
00:12:43.000That is going to lead toward this racist conclusion that your race defines your IQ, which is, you know, a silly conclusion.
00:12:48.000Like, there are racial differences in IQ based on kind of group statistics, but that has no relevance to the particular individual standing in front of you.
00:12:55.000And so you saying this black guy is stupid because he's black is racist.
00:12:58.000You saying there are group differences in IQ because every study ever done has shown group differences in IQ, not even based on racial groups necessarily, but based on different groups generally between
00:13:08.000There are differences in IQ, actually.
00:13:11.000If you show that, at least from young age 2 to like 12, if you mention any of these things, then you're overriding the idea of a tabula rasa human being who can be created in whatever image you want.
00:13:23.000Like, what people really want is to correct the cosmic imbalances, as Thomas Sowell says.
00:13:27.000I don't know, what do you think is behind it?
00:13:28.000I think you're hitting the nail on the head, and I think there's a tremendous amount of white guilt involved in it as well.
00:13:35.000I mean, because basically what the IQ tests are showing when they do study differences in IQ and races, you're showing the rise of the superiority of the Asian race.
00:13:46.000I mean, Asians dominate those things, and everybody is sort of just like, well, let's not talk about that.
00:13:53.000Let's talk about white and black, because that's more convenient, and it's easier, and they could find a victim, and they could find a perpetrator.
00:13:59.000And what you're also seeing, like, there's a lot of Asian groups that are furious because they're getting discriminated against about getting into colleges and universities.
00:14:07.000They have higher standards, because they have such a high percentage of Asians that are getting into the universities.
00:14:13.000It's very strange because they're not vocal about it, and they're not publicizing it, and they're not screaming racism in the streets, but they're the victims of it.
00:14:22.000They actually are the victims of hard work and success and excellent genetics.
00:14:28.000And the differences in culture are really the place where we should be putting most of our focus, because when it comes to natural imbalances, there's only so much that you can do, right?
00:14:36.000I'm not going to be fighting you in a ring anytime soon because I'd just get destroyed.
00:14:39.000But when it comes to cultural differences, that's the stuff that we can correct for.
00:14:44.000And instead of doing that, what we tend to do is we tend to pretend that the cultural differences are not brought about by immediate decision-making by parents.
00:15:00.000We can't put our heads around it exactly, but it's something that's making us imbalanced.
00:15:04.000And so the way to fix that is by getting rid of all imbalances that we see.
00:15:09.000And so if there's an imbalance between men and women, we'll just pretend that that doesn't exist anymore, and that it must have been caused by something that we can't quite control.
00:15:15.000Yeah, it's definitely not an objective way of approaching the issue.
00:15:19.000I think there's a host of different factors that play into every community, right?
00:15:24.000There's the echoes of the poor behavior of the people that live there before you, all the consequences of other people's actions that have affected all the people around you.
00:15:33.000People going to jail, people that have experienced racism, people that have experienced poor treatment by law enforcement, massive distrust around you, very difficult to excel in those environments.
00:15:45.000You're constantly like running away from gangs and headed home.
00:15:48.000I don't think we should hold those people up to the same standards as we should.
00:15:52.000People that grow up in very safe middle class communities where they don't have to worry about all this stuff.
00:15:57.000I think there's a bunch of different factors and everybody's looking for one.
00:16:15.000Whatever IQ differentials there are, it's unclear how much is explained by genetics and how much is explained by environment.
00:16:20.000But some is clearly explained by genetics and some is clearly explained by environment.
00:16:23.000As soon as you say that, everybody suggests that you are operating in a racist space.
00:16:27.000So it's as you say, when it comes to data, like this happened with Sam Harris when he was being interviewed by Ezra Klein.
00:16:32.000Right, Ezra Klein just went after him for suggesting that science is science.
00:16:36.000Well, science is still science, even if you don't like the science, and it seems like the same thing should apply when it comes to biological differences.
00:16:42.000In a second, I want to ask you about the comedy world, because that's obviously the other area in which you exist.
00:16:46.000But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
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00:17:38.000So, you're scheduled to have on Roseanne.
00:17:40.000What do you make of the Roseanne follow-up?
00:17:41.000Do you think that ABC was right to dump her show after her bizarre tweet about Valerie Jarrett?
00:17:47.000Well, what's interesting is just saying that she was going to be on my podcast, she said it, and then I got all these tweets that were saying, boycott Joe Rogan, the UFC should fire me for having this racist on my podcast.
00:17:57.000Like, no, I'm going to have a conversation with one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, a person who I deeply respect, who I think is mentally ill.
00:18:06.000She is on a host of different medications.
00:18:11.000She was pushed to the brink of exhaustion doing that television show and she's made some very poor choices with some of the things that she said.
00:18:19.000She would be the first to tell you that and I don't think that you, I don't think you could get an understanding of her from a tweet or from, you know, a one sentence
00:18:32.000description of what she did, I think you need to hear her and hear her talk.
00:18:37.000She's going to be the first person to tell you she's crazy.
00:18:46.000But it's also why she's such a brilliant comedian.
00:18:49.000And she's always been what you would call a sh** stirrer.
00:18:52.000You know, if people don't remember, like when she used to, when she sung the national anthem and grabbed her crotch and spit on the ground and everybody went crazy, that's Roseanne.
00:19:01.000You know, and I think people wanted to turn her into this lovable mother.
00:19:06.000There's this, like, thing that people do when life gets weird, which is, like, where it's at right now, where they want to look back to the past, where things just made sense.
00:19:16.000Can't we just bring back the Roseanne of old?
00:19:25.000And they don't realize, like, she's tweeting crazy shit about someone looking like they're from Planet of the Apes, which, by the way, she said she didn't even know that that woman was black.
00:19:35.000And she's just telling this to me on the phone.
00:19:59.000As soon as I read Soros, I just put the phone down and walk away, because it's all, like, lizard people, and Alex Jones, and interdimensional child molesters, and George Soros is patrolling the marijuana.
00:20:49.000A lot of celebrities, the attempt to mainstream them as normal human beings, and you see this from both sides.
00:20:54.000I think to a certain extent, you saw the Republicans did this with Kid Rock, where suddenly Kid Rock was going to run for Senate in Michigan.
00:21:24.000The level of nuttiness in this town is so high, and yet the halo effect that we have about celebrities is that, well, if they're famous and I see them on TV, that must mean that they're smart in real life.
00:21:39.000And what it is, is when you evolved, when all of us lived thousands of years ago, we'd look to the most successful member of the tribe, the one who was older, the one that everybody revered.
00:22:40.000It's perpetrated through, and this is not by a grand conspiracy, but through media.
00:22:44.000Through being able to put them on a YouTube screen, or on a television, or a laptop, or wherever you're digesting it.
00:22:53.000And the knowledge that when you're watching a clip where Kanye West is talking about running for president, and you look down at the number and it says, oh my god, 24 million people have watched this.
00:23:40.000This is what's strange about taking the word of celebrities over the word of professors or of public intellectuals or of people that have actually carefully considered all these things that they're discussing and have a lot of information.
00:23:57.000And they're basing these conclusions and these statements on a long history of research.
00:24:04.000And this is not what you're going to get from Kanye.
00:24:19.000Like, Piers Morgan, I mean, we both have our thoughts on Piers Morgan, but one of the things he wrote, like, he corrected him, and he's like, no, you're never going to be president, you know?
00:24:30.000He shouldn't tweet that, because that's exactly what Barack Obama said about Donald Trump.
00:25:19.000And I think you should be able to vote online.
00:25:21.000I absolutely think you should be able to vote online.
00:25:23.000If you could do your taxes online, if you could bank online, and do all the different things that people do online, you should be very easy to register, and you'd get a much more balanced
00:26:26.000But I think what's good about having someone who is widely regarded as being incompetent as president is that it's entirely possible that we might come to a point where we have to rethink the way we run and structure our government.
00:26:42.000So I'm actually more encouraged by his presidency than you are.
00:26:44.000I think one of the reasons is because the checks and balances worked.
00:26:47.000So I think when last we talked, we said, you know, is Trump going to just run roughshod over the entire system of government?
00:26:52.000And the reality is that no, he's done some stuff at the executive level, but the stuff that he's done at the executive level should never have been at the executive level anyway.
00:26:59.000It should have been all legislature stuff.
00:27:01.000So when you talk about what he's done with the EPA, my feeling is that we should have a Congress that makes the actual law on the environment.
00:27:08.000We shouldn't have a group of unelected bureaucrats who make the actual law on the environment who we can't get rid of if we don't like.
00:27:13.000And so having them write these broad laws that are then delegated to Donald Trump's friends over in the executive or Barack Obama's friends over in the executive to then interpret and change and do all this stuff with takes power out of the hands of
00:27:25.000The human beings who are actually elected to do it and who we can throw out.
00:27:28.000I can't throw out the EPA administrator.
00:27:30.000So one thing that's been good about Trump is, and this is the argument I've made to people who don't like President Trump is, you don't like President Trump?
00:28:06.000I've been encouraged by the fact that the system is more durable than I thought it was.
00:28:10.000I think that the founders were smart enough to build in a bunch of checks and balances that the president, as much as we tend to think of him as the guy who runs everything,
00:28:49.000I think it would be better if we had a more competent system.
00:28:52.000And I agree with you that the checks and balances have... We've shown that he can't just throw everything out and just run Trump mania all across the country.
00:29:03.000I think there's definitely some positive to that gridlock.
00:29:32.000If you want to get rid of the ID requirements and retain the actual you need to know what you're talking about requirement, I think I could live with that.
00:29:59.000But to have a test and have someone say, well, you have to be required to understand, have a rudimentary understanding of what you're talking about in order to make an opinion that could literally affect 300 million people.
00:30:13.000A lot of people would say that's bad because then what about, are you saying that people have to have a certain intelligence level in order to vote?
00:30:21.000Is this like, are you at the door of eugenics?
00:30:25.000Well, I think it's not a bad idea to say that if you're going to vote on really important issues, like whatever those issues are, whether it's funding the military or abortion or whatever it is, you should have an understanding of the subject.
00:30:52.000Half of voting right now is just virtue signaling, like demonstrating to the public at large, to people at large, what this vote means to you.
00:30:58.000So as Hillary Clinton campaigning on, if you vote for me, you'll show that you voted for a woman.
00:31:01.000And if you vote for Barack Obama, you've shown that you vote for a black guy.
00:31:04.000If you're voting for Donald Trump, you're sticking a middle finger to the system.
00:32:17.000I mean, you're gonna always have people, you're gonna have more people upset with you and there's more righteous indignation, I think, than I've ever seen in comedy.
00:32:25.000I've had more people furious at me for what are clearly jokes than ever at any other time in my career.
00:32:33.000Because you make something that's clearly a joke and then somebody writes down the transcript of the joke and now you have to explain the joke.
00:32:38.000Well, that immediately kills it because as soon as you explain a joke, it's no longer a joke.
00:32:42.000So if you make a joke that's politically incorrect, and then they write it down, and everybody who heard you at the time knows that you were making a joke, if they write it down and then you have to explain it, you've automatically exited the realm of jokes, and so now you're trying to explain the statement as true or decent, and that's not the point of the joke in the first place.
00:32:59.000And you miss the context, you miss the way it was delivered, you miss the tone, you miss everything.
00:33:06.000But what they're doing is they're just trying to find targets.
00:33:09.000And I think that's one of the things that's happening with Roseanne, that's one of the things that's happening whenever anybody screws up in the media.
00:33:17.000You just get these people that they want a target.
00:39:20.000And there's a lack of reality that you have to adhere to this narrative.
00:39:26.000And if you're not adhering to this narrative, then you are some horrific person who is a product of the past, and you're a part of the patriarchy, and it's not an honest discussion.
00:39:42.000If you see all the people that are involved in this, you know, air quotes, intellectual dark web, the one thing they have in common, all of them are going, what in the f*** is everybody talking about?
00:40:16.000I mean, I think that the concepts that seem to have united this group of people, who again are all over the place on everything from religion to free will to politics, is one, we all like data and we're interested in data.
00:40:27.000So if you present us with data, we're all happy to take a look at it and maybe change our opinions based on the new data that you're presenting to us.
00:40:40.000And three, that we're all, I think, big into the idea of treating people as individuals.
00:40:44.000That if you're going to treat me as a member of a group, I'm really not interested in talking to you, and I'm not interested in being labeled as a member of a group either.
00:40:50.000So we're a group of people who don't like groups, basically, which is kind of hilarious.
00:40:55.000That is exactly what it is, a group of people who don't like groups.
00:40:58.000But we're also very friendly and kind.
00:41:01.000And I'm sure you and I disagree on a bunch of things, but we agree on a lot of things as well.
00:41:06.000But what I like about you is you're a very reasonable, intelligent person.
00:41:55.000Like these battlegrounds, the lines that people are drawing in the sand, and if you're on the other side, you're the f***ing enemy and you need to be shut down and stopped.
00:42:22.000The last three years, I now have to have at least a two-man security team at every college campus, and usually it's more than that, based on what the police are telling us about reports in advance.
00:42:30.000Now, half the time nothing materializes, but a few times things have materialized, and it's been trouble, and that sometimes happens.
00:42:37.000Where do you think this level of anger is coming from?
00:42:40.000Because it appears to me that that's what's new.
00:42:42.000Like, these political divides have always existed.
00:42:44.000These political divides between right and left, or political divides between people who are more interested in collective solutions versus individual solutions.
00:42:51.000Why do you think people are so pissed all the time?
00:42:54.000I mean, they're just... You can feel it in the air.
00:42:56.000Like, the eagerness to stomp on somebody's face is really strong.
00:43:00.000That's why when the Roseanne thing happens, it can't just be like what you're saying, where, okay, she's a mentally ill person, maybe you have to take the show off the air, maybe that's the proper response, but...
00:43:07.000She might actually have a problem here.
00:43:15.000I think people, they're on a team, they want their team to win, and they want their team to win by any means necessary, and they feel disenfranchised because we have a president
00:43:27.000You know, Donald Trump, I mean, he is who he is, and he stands for a lot of things that they find abhorrent.
00:43:33.000And you have a lot of people now that are calling themselves Antifa, and they're literally by their own actions acting in a fascist manner, and they're calling themselves anti-fascist, and they're putting bandanas in their face, they're hitting people with bike locks, and they're engaged in violence.
00:43:50.000And the left is using violence as a means to solve
00:43:55.000These differences that we have in ideas and opinions.
00:43:57.000They're shutting people down like Christina Hoff Summers.
00:44:33.000But the anger and the vitriol and the violence that's attached to it is something that's completely new and was always associated with right-wing thuggish mobs.
00:44:43.000It was always associated with hate groups, like the KKK or something along those lines, you know, neo-Nazis.
00:44:51.000But you're seeing this level of violence from the left now, these weird, like, university professors and these dorky people that are saying, burn this motherfucker down, and people are cheering in the streets, and white people are the problem, and there's so many people that are tenured professors.
00:45:09.000That are getting away with saying, like, ridiculous, crazy sh** and calling out for violence.
00:45:45.000And some of that is natural and some of that is stuff that's fixable.
00:45:49.000But one thing that is certainly true is that the notion of a governmental invasion of rights against any of these groups, this is not something that is commonly happening.
00:45:56.000It's not that the government is cracking down on black people or Hispanic people or, at this point, even gay people.
00:46:00.000And yet there's this level of anger that feels like riots in the 1960s.
00:46:04.000I want to talk a little bit more about that in just a second.
00:47:16.000My theory is that everybody has broken down into tribalism because it used to be that we were a larger tribe.
00:47:21.000Meaning that the way that you defeat local tribalism is by creating a larger tribe that everybody feels a kinship to and a membership to.
00:47:28.000So in the United States, you had people who've had tribal kinship to state governments.
00:47:32.000And then after the Civil War, that basically went away because the federal government stepped in and stopped slavery through war making power.
00:47:39.000And then people felt a general kinship to the federal
00:47:59.000And it used to be that the tribe for America was called America.
00:48:03.000And that tribe was bonded by a certain set of creedal values, values of individual rights, values of personal virtue, that these things had to be combined.
00:48:11.000You had to be a good person to your neighbors, but at the same time the government had no right to come in and take your stuff and force you to be a nicer person.
00:48:20.000You voluntarily were going to be a nicer person to your neighbors because you thought that was the right thing to do, but it wasn't the government's job to come in and force you to be nicer to your neighbors because that would be fascistic and overbearing and tyrannical.
00:48:31.000And that's gone away because people don't feel like they have to be nice to their neighbors.
00:48:35.000And I think part of that has to be connected with lack of communal institutions that, you know, I'm not saying everybody has to go to church, but people who are in churches tend to get along better with each other in the church.
00:48:45.000And people who are outside the church and people inside the church.
00:48:48.000Doesn't mean that you got to pick a church, but it does mean that we have to have some sort of communal institutions.
00:48:52.000And right now we are savagely tearing apart each of our communal institutions up to and including things like the NFL, where suddenly things where we would bond over that, like Super Bowl Sunday was a bonding time for the country.
00:49:03.000We can't bond over anything right now because all of these creedal values have been dissipated by our own personal malevolence toward each other.
00:49:12.000I think it's a great point, too, about the benefit of religion is that you do have these ideas and values that are shared amongst this community and group.
00:49:21.000And when you are an atheist or an agnostic, I mean, you don't really have that group other than, like, what you're getting from a lot of atheists.
00:49:30.000You get this really hardcore, progressive ideology that is, in many ways, like a religion.
00:49:36.000And I think there's probably some real merit to what you're saying.
00:49:40.000Robert Putnam makes this point in his book Bowling Alone.
00:49:43.000He talks about this new fascination with diversity, and diversity is our strength, and this whole line.
00:49:50.000And he was a big believer in this, Robert Putnam, this professor of sociology, he's a big lefty, and he says that diversity was our strength, it was his guiding kind of
00:50:18.000Then ethnic diversity is great, because then you get a bunch of people who are fighting for the same purpose, and the guy next to you is your brother, doesn't matter if he's black or white.
00:50:24.000You see this with people who you talk to who are in the military all the time.
00:50:26.000When they talk about people of different races in the military, this is usually the way they talk about people of different races in the military, which is very different than the way people talk about race in the United States more broadly.
00:50:35.000You also see this in churches, but communal institutions have declined so markedly
00:50:40.000That the only way I think that we're going to be able to have a system where we can all live with each other is to reestablish some sort of, some form of communal talking with each other.
00:50:47.000Even if it's just forums like this one, where we're talking with each other and, you know, if we did this live, we'd get thousands of people to show up just to hear us talk to each other.
00:50:55.000Even those sort of communal institutions need to exist.
00:50:58.000Otherwise, we're going to completely polarize.
00:50:59.000I mean, I think it's one of the dangers of the Internet.
00:51:04.000But one of the dangers of the Internet is that it's all personal to you.
00:51:07.000You don't actually have to go out and be with other human beings.
00:51:09.000You get to hide behind the screen and tweet nasty things at each other.
00:51:12.000Yeah, you also can find this group of like-minded people and you share an echo chamber.
00:51:16.000That's another real issue for confirmation bias.
00:51:20.000I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense and I think that we do need community.
00:51:26.000And I think the more people like you and like Sam Harris and Eric and Brett Weinstein
00:51:34.000People who are open-minded, people who are willing to discuss things politely with people and not shove their ideology down other people's throats.
00:51:44.000The more we exchange information with each other, the more this idea of being able to communicate like this becomes popular.
00:51:50.000And I think there's real benefit in that.
00:51:52.000I think there's real benefit in these kind of podcast-style discussions because of that.
00:51:57.000Because you can sit down with a person that maybe doesn't share the same opinions with you and you can talk things out and maybe disagree, maybe argue, but be polite to each other and realize that a lot of these ideas that we have, we have these predetermined notions of the way we think things should be.
00:52:16.000And if you don't fit with my predetermined notions, then there must be something wrong with you.
00:52:34.000Can we stop demonizing people that disagree with us?
00:52:36.000I think the principle that I think also unites everybody, and this is why everybody's getting labeled conservative really,
00:52:42.000Because everybody that we've been talking about here, in the end, actually does believe in personal responsibility.
00:52:47.000Believes in taking responsibility for your own actions.
00:52:49.000And you can be on the left and still believe in taking responsibility for your own actions, but it seems like so much of the left has dumped out of that.
00:52:55.000And you're seeing that increasingly on the right, too.
00:52:57.000I think that a lot of President Trump's appeal during the actual election cycle is him saying, I'm going to come in and solve all your problems.
00:53:55.000My favorite part of that piece was there was a part of that piece where they suggest that Jordan Peterson is in favor of what he called enforced monogamy.
00:54:02.000And so their suggestion was that Jordan actually wants to shackle women to men.
00:54:41.000Like, this is not... I mean, this is like a weird way of engaging with the press, but he's so comfortable with these idea puzzles and bouncing them around and using them almost as intellectual exercises that he'll do it publicly with someone who is looking for flaws in his armor.
00:55:01.000This is what you do so well, by the way, on your show.
00:55:03.000I was trying to explain to somebody why your show is so popular, because it's a unique thing, what you do.
00:55:09.000And what I said to them is that when I look at you as a host, or when I look at you as a thinker, you're somebody who's taking people along an intellectual journey, and you're taking the journey with them.
00:55:18.000It's like being on a road trip of ideas with you on your show.
00:55:21.000Do you think that's a pretty good description of what you do?
00:55:29.000When I have smart people on and I go through their thought process, I feel like I get a little rub from that.
00:55:35.000I understand the way they're viewing the world with their completely different life than me.
00:55:40.000I think there's a great value in that.
00:55:43.000I think that's one of the things that people get out of the podcast, is they're getting the same thing that I'm getting while I'm sitting there talking to these people.
00:56:16.000I really have no idea where it's going to go.
00:56:19.000But I am enjoying the fact that because the podcast is popular, I can get really interesting people on, like Howard Bloom, or Jordan Peterson, or you, or all these fascinating people and have these great conversations.
00:56:40.000The way to communicate with people, allowing people to talk, actually listening to what they're saying, engaging them on their ideas, not just waiting for my time to talk, which is what so many people do.
00:56:49.000I mean, it's also led me to understand how rudimentary most people's conversation skills are.
00:56:56.000When I'm watching people, even in really important meetings, just talk over each other and disregard what each other is saying, there's no lack of...
00:57:06.000Solid communication skills that I think you really foster on a podcast.
00:57:11.000And these conversations that we have, I think one of the best things about them is that you're getting an insight into how other people think and it allows you to examine the way you think.
00:57:26.000And you, just by virtually listening to this person through your headphones or in your car, you're comparing your thought process to their thought process.
00:57:34.000And I think, ultimately, we're trying to strengthen the way we view the world, and strengthen our clarity, and take in as much information as we can, and see that information for what it truly is, not what we want it to be.
00:57:49.000So in that journey of what you're doing, you have a very wide variety of guests.
00:57:52.000I know you've gotten flack for a lot of the guests that you've gotten on various sides, including flack for having me on your show.
00:57:57.000How do you perform the gatekeeper function?
00:57:59.000How do you decide who is just not worth having on your show?
00:58:01.000Or is there anybody who you think is just not worth having on your show?
00:58:03.000I just I like talking to people you know I mean if I want to talk to someone I want to have on my show I'm gonna like I told you I'm gonna have Ted Nugent on my show that's probably gonna be the most pushback other than Alex Jones of anybody that I've ever had but I don't think it's my job to not talk to people that I want to talk to I think it's my job to even if someone's
00:58:24.000I mean, there's got to be some horrible people out there that I would never want to talk to.
00:58:28.000That I just don't like the way they speak.
00:59:02.000You know, if I have Kat Zingano on, or George St.
00:59:04.000Pierre, we're going to talk about fighting for a lot of the time.
00:59:07.000And then if I have on Jordan Peterson, or Sam Harris, or whoever else I might be interviewing, or Robert Shock, or you, we're going to talk about different things.
00:59:15.000You know, you can like it or you don't like it, but there's plenty of people that like it, so I don't care.
00:59:21.000Again, you have that eff you money, so you're in good shape, so who cares?
00:59:25.000But having that, the wherewithal to understand that if you're enjoying it, if you like what you're doing, that's contagious.
00:59:36.000You know, these conversations, interesting conversations are contagious.
00:59:40.000Like, I am interested in people that are engaged in interesting conversations.
00:59:45.000And when I listen to podcasts and I listen to people discussing things, and I know that they're really locked into this conversation, it's fascinating to me.
00:59:52.000I mean, and we don't get enough of that.
00:59:55.000In this world, we are dealing with, you know, you're in offices, you're in cubicles, you're dealing with human resources, and there's demands on the type of things you can discuss and what you can get in trouble for.
01:00:09.000And most people, for at least eight hours out of their day, they are locked down with this rigid, conformed way of communicating and speaking.
01:00:20.000It's very frustrating and it doesn't represent your thoughts.
01:00:23.000It represents these patterns that you're expected to follow in the world of business and commerce and, you know, office space, you know, politics.
01:00:33.000And I just think it's very, very frustrating for people and it's not natural.
01:00:37.000And I think that's one of the reasons why people yearn for uncensored conversations.
01:00:41.000Well, I mean, that's what you're going to get if you go to the Joe Rogan Experience, and it is amazing.
01:00:46.000If you haven't listened to it, first of all, if you're listening to this, I'm sure you've listened to Joe's show.
01:01:01.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
01:01:15.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.