The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1557 - Gad Saad

00:00:09.000 Hello.

00:00:13.000 What's up, man?

00:00:14.000 How are you?

00:00:14.000 Good to see you.

00:00:15.000 The Gadfather. 0.93

00:00:16.000 You too.

00:00:17.000 How you doing, man?

00:00:18.000 I miss you, man.

00:00:19.000 It's been a long time.

00:00:20.000 I wish we could do it in studio, but I don't think you're allowed to travel from Canada right now, right?

00:00:24.000 I'm not, but I'm so worried about your COVID results that just like My hero Joe Biden told me I need to wear a mask.

00:00:33.000 What do you think of that of marketing?

00:00:36.000 I like it. 0.78

00:00:37.000 The parasitic mind mask.

00:00:39.000 Excellent.

00:00:39.000 Are you selling those?

00:00:42.000 We will be eventually, but my publisher is still working out all the final details.

00:00:47.000 Yeah.

00:00:47.000 All right.

00:00:47.000 Beautiful.

00:00:48.000 Beautiful.

00:00:48.000 I want to know, how are you doing with the COVID? How is the truth seeker, Jamie, doing?

00:00:53.000 Young Jamie's all good to go.

00:00:54.000 He was only really sick for a day because he's young and virile and he takes his vitamin D and zinc and vitamin C and all that stuff.

00:01:00.000 He caught it.

00:01:01.000 We don't know where he caught it.

00:01:02.000 He believes he might have caught it at a bar or on a patio.

00:01:06.000 But really was only sick for a day, but we had to do the right thing, and so we were locked out.

00:01:11.000 He was locked out for 10 days, and he had four positive COVID results in a row.

00:01:16.000 Now five.

00:01:17.000 Did you get one today?

00:01:18.000 Negative.

00:01:19.000 There were negative results.

00:01:19.000 Oh, excuse me.

00:01:20.000 Positive in a good way.

00:01:22.000 Negative in terms of him having the disease, but positive in a good way.

00:01:27.000 And you've always been negative.

00:01:29.000 Yeah, I've always been negative.

00:01:30.000 Oh, good.

00:01:31.000 Fortunately.

00:01:32.000 Yeah, but we're good to go now.

00:01:34.000 So no issues.

00:01:35.000 No one else has gotten it.

00:01:36.000 It's amazing that Jamie is the first person in studio that actually tested positive.

00:01:41.000 We've tested everyone.

00:01:42.000 Today was my 48th test.

00:01:45.000 I've been tested 48 different times.

00:01:47.000 Yeah.

00:01:48.000 Is that the invasive one where they really go up and tickle your brain or is it a less fancy one?

00:01:53.000 They don't have to do that anymore.

00:01:55.000 It doesn't feel good, but they don't go all the way up.

00:02:00.000 They go kind of midway and they just do it for 10 seconds in each nostril and then they stick it in the machine and you get a result in 15 minutes.

00:02:08.000 How much has this whole thing affected your life?

00:02:11.000 I mean, other than having to do things remotely and so on.

00:02:14.000 It's affected everyone's life, right?

00:02:16.000 Doing things remotely, we have actually shockingly done not that many remotely.

00:02:22.000 A lot of the people we brought in and just tested everybody.

00:02:25.000 It's just so much better.

00:02:26.000 I mean, you know, when we're face-to-face, I mean, you and I have been friends for a long time now.

00:02:30.000 How many years have we been doing these things together?

00:02:32.000 Oh, I don't know, maybe eight years or something, at least.

00:02:34.000 It's nice to see you and hug you and to talk and to look each other in the eye, but this is a great second best.

00:02:43.000 Have the metrics changed in terms of your listeners as a function of whether you do it in person or remotely?

00:02:49.000 No, that hasn't changed.

00:02:51.000 The numbers just keep going up because people are at home and they're trapped and they look for content.

00:02:57.000 They also look for honest content. 0.98

00:03:00.000 There's not a lot of that shit out there headed up to the election. 0.98

00:03:03.000 Everyone is so twisted and biased, and it's just such a weird, weird time. 0.98

00:03:09.000 I mean, I want it to be over in hopes that not just the election, but also COVID, so that people can get back to work, which I think will calm people down when the financial situation starts to improve.

00:03:25.000 I think people will be less on edge.

00:03:27.000 It's just such a divided time.

00:03:29.000 It's so unfortunate.

00:03:31.000 But I think we're going to learn a lot from this.

00:03:34.000 I really do.

00:03:35.000 Yeah, I hope so too.

00:03:36.000 I mean it's been tough over here because I'm on sabbatical this semester and it's at the time when my book came out so I was planning on doing all kinds of world book tours and all sorts of stuff and everything has been shut down.

00:03:49.000 So it's been a bummer but at least I get to spend more time with the family I guess.

00:03:54.000 As long as people take advantage of this time, you can do some self-improvement.

00:04:00.000 People can meditate and exercise and write.

00:04:04.000 There's a lot of things you can get done.

00:04:07.000 These are minor concerns, I believe, in comparison to the people whose businesses are shut down.

00:04:12.000 And the people who've lost family members and have struggled personally health-wise with the disease.

00:04:20.000 The number of people that are losing their businesses is just insane.

00:04:23.000 I mean, this is unprecedented.

00:04:24.000 There's nothing like it.

00:04:25.000 And one of the reasons why we left California is because of their draconian measures that they're using to shut things down.

00:04:32.000 You know, the initial conversation, they were going to shut it down until they flattened out the curve, and the hospitals were able to accept people, and they weren't overburdened.

00:04:43.000 Well, they're not overburdened now, and they still have everything shut down.

00:04:46.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:04:47.000 And they're saying now, after the election, after the election is what they keep saying.

00:04:51.000 So they're not even trying to hide that it's political...

00:04:56.000 Jamie and I and the rest of the crew, we were all pretty sick of it.

00:05:00.000 Our freedoms are being infringed upon.

00:05:03.000 It didn't seem like what we signed up for.

00:05:10.000 We never signed up for an autocrat.

00:05:12.000 We never signed up for the government to be able to tell us that we can't work.

00:05:15.000 This is insane.

00:05:16.000 This has never happened before.

00:05:18.000 And it makes all the wacky tinfoil hat conspiracy theories actually seem to make more sense than they've ever made before, which is even more terrifying.

00:05:28.000 Because people have already been QAnon'd out the ass online, everyone's so crazy already online, and this all gives them, it adds more fuel to the fire, that this is real.

00:05:37.000 And it seems to be in a lot of ways, I mean, that they are, they're doing this for political purposes, which is terrifying. 0.87

00:05:43.000 Yeah, you know, I analogize it to, you know, if you want to raise children well, you need to have, you know, consistent parenting so that the child knows what he or she needs to do to get the strokes and what he or she needs to do if they're going to get punished.

00:05:57.000 When you have a haphazard parental style, it's a form of mindfuck, if I might say, for the child because they don't know when to expect your love or your scorn.

00:06:08.000 And in a sense, I view the current COVID regulations Akin to an inconsistent parent, right?

00:06:16.000 I don't know if tomorrow I'm allowed to invite people over for a small barbecue at my house or not.

00:06:21.000 It all seems very sort of flying by the seat of your pant.

00:06:25.000 And I think that's what stresses me the most, that I can't really have any sense of What are the regulations in Montreal in terms of what you're allowed to do and not allowed to do?

00:06:38.000 And are they as draconian as they are here in the United States?

00:06:43.000 Well, particularly in California.

00:06:44.000 In Texas, they give you a lot more freedom.

00:06:49.000 It's really nice.

00:06:51.000 So right now, we're on our second month of pretty complete lockdown.

00:06:56.000 Not lockdown in the sense that you can't go out on the street, but you can't go to...

00:06:59.000 The restaurants are closed.

00:07:00.000 You can only take out.

00:07:01.000 The cafes are closed.

00:07:03.000 The gyms are closed.

00:07:04.000 So you could certainly walk around the city freely, but most of the things that you and I might do if we're going to leave our house, we can't do.

00:07:13.000 I can't go to the gym.

00:07:13.000 I can't go to a cafe.

00:07:15.000 I can't go to a restaurant.

00:07:16.000 So in that sense, it's quite tough.

00:07:17.000 So I end up spending most of my time either at home or I go for long walks.

00:07:21.000 Is this a national thing or is it a regional thing?

00:07:24.000 I think it varies across each province because of all of the provinces for much of the COVID crisis, Quebec and Montreal in particular were some of the hotspots.

00:07:37.000 As a matter of fact, where I live was one of the hotspots within the hotspots of Montreal.

00:07:43.000 And so we were quite concerned.

00:07:45.000 And so we've tried to limit to the best of our abilities going out.

00:07:49.000 But especially in Montreal, where, as you know, you lived in Boston, Winter is coming.

00:07:55.000 So it was easy to kind of go through COVID when it's April, you know, May and June and July.

00:08:01.000 It's going to be a lot more challenging to do the lockdown when it's, you know, minus 20 and I haven't been outside for three weeks.

00:08:08.000 Yeah, what they tried to do in LA is really bizarre.

00:08:11.000 They tried to tell people you can't have people over for like a party.

00:08:15.000 You can't have families over for your house.

00:08:17.000 And they were actually asking people to turn their neighbors in.

00:08:21.000 Yeah.

00:08:22.000 Which is just, they were offering rewards for people turning their neighbors in.

00:08:26.000 You know, in the beginning, it made sense because we were worried that two million people were going to die and this was a disease that was going to ravage the entire country.

00:08:34.000 But then when you look at the survival rate, it doesn't pan out.

00:08:38.000 If we knew coming in to, if COVID, we had all the information that we have now at the beginning.

00:08:44.000 If we had all that information now and they proposed the same lockdown, I think people would have resisted.

00:08:49.000 They would have been furious.

00:08:50.000 The problem is they initially agreed to it thinking that it was going to be way worse than it was.

00:08:55.000 And then when it turned out to not be nearly as deadly as we feared, there was no adjustments made.

00:09:01.000 I hear you.

00:09:03.000 I've had a few virologists on my show, and I think you have as well, and several of them have told me that early in the lockdown that they thought that there wasn't a very good cost-benefit analysis in terms of the repercussions of such a lockdown,

00:09:20.000 that many of the costs of the lockdown were not being taken into account within the modeling.

00:09:27.000 Their position has turned out to be true, right?

00:09:29.000 Very few people talk about the missed cancer screenings and the heart disease and the anxiety and the depression and the spousal abuse and the child abuse.

00:09:38.000 And so I don't know when that autocorrective mechanism is going to work, but I suspect that people are not going to tolerate this for much longer, I think.

00:09:46.000 I don't know.

00:10:05.000 But now the World Health Organization has come out and said that the lockdowns should end.

00:10:11.000 They were saying that the economic despair, suicides, drug addiction, everything is skyrocketed, right?

00:10:18.000 And the World Health Organization is saying that the effect of the lockdown has been so detrimental that they don't support this economic lockdown.

00:10:26.000 But yet the lockdown continues.

00:10:28.000 So now they don't support the World Health Organization anymore, which is like, okay, well, who is the authority now?

00:10:36.000 Who's the authority?

00:10:36.000 Because it can't be the mayor of Los Angeles or the governor of California because they're both so rabidly Democrat.

00:10:46.000 They're so rabidly liberal that it seems like they would be happy to watch the economy tank if they could blame it on Donald Trump.

00:10:54.000 And this is where we find ourselves.

00:10:56.000 I hear you.

00:10:57.000 By the way, is California the most democratic state at the various levels of any state?

00:11:04.000 Would that be true to say?

00:11:05.000 I wonder.

00:11:06.000 New York's pretty democratic as well.

00:11:08.000 It's the coastal cities.

00:11:09.000 It's interesting because maybe I could ask you this.

00:11:12.000 Why do you think cities become so liberal?

00:11:17.000 Because it seems like there's no real conservative cities.

00:11:21.000 Cities almost always go blue.

00:11:24.000 I suspect it's because that's where sort of the intelligentsia end up going.

00:11:28.000 And as you know, most of the folks that are within the intelligentsia are typically exactly the people that I discuss in the parasitic mind, the people who are parasitized by all these idea pathogens.

00:11:41.000 And so I suspect that You know, if you are an up-and-coming person who lives in Binghamton, New York, no disrespect to Binghamton, and then you want to make it, you move to New York and then you get some degree in the liberal arts college, 0.79

00:11:56.000 you get parasitized by these idiotic ideas, and then slowly all of these urban areas become ultra-progressive. 0.95

00:12:02.000 I can't think what would be another explanation. 0.99

00:12:05.000 There's so few intellectuals and academics that have avoided this.

00:12:11.000 How have you managed to be so steadfast?

00:12:15.000 You have avoided this from the beginning, and I know you've been criticized, but you come out of it smiling always.

00:12:21.000 Your attitude is very admirable.

00:12:23.000 It always has been.

00:12:24.000 But you're always smiling through all the nuttiness.

00:12:29.000 You seem to have a great disposition about this.

00:12:33.000 Well, it's a lovely question.

00:12:34.000 Thank you.

00:12:35.000 I think I'm endowed with a happy disposition so that when I wake up in the morning, notwithstanding all of the possible challenges I might face in a day, I'm like a kid in a candy store.

00:12:47.000 I wake up and I'm excited.

00:12:48.000 Oh my God, I'm going to speak to Joe Rogan today.

00:12:50.000 I'm happy.

00:12:51.000 If I weren't speaking to Joe Rogan, I would be working on the next paper.

00:12:54.000 So dispositionally, I'm someone who's happy.

00:12:58.000 Which I think protects me against the lunacy because even though, of course I get stressed, of course I get beaten down, my innate disposition is to be smiling.

00:13:09.000 And so in a sense, I'm lucky enough to have won the genetic lottery of being someone who views the world through an optimistic lens.

00:13:17.000 And I think that's what allows me to fight the fights that I do because otherwise I think I would have beaten down a long time ago.

00:13:23.000 I mean, the only way that, as you know, you could survive in the cesspool of academia Saying the things that I say is, first of all, to be, as you said, happy and optimistic, but also to be...

00:13:36.000 So I talk about, in Chapter 8 of the book, I talk about, you know, activating your inner honey badger.

00:13:41.000 The honey badger is an incredibly ferocious animal, as you know, Joe.

00:13:45.000 So he can withstand the approach of eight adult lions.

00:13:48.000 The honey badger is the size of, you know, a small dog.

00:13:51.000 How could it be that lions are intimidated by the honey badger?

00:13:54.000 Well, because he's ferocious.

00:13:55.000 And so...

00:13:57.000 While I may have a happy disposition, as you know, if you've seen me in some of my battles in social media, I'm also an intellectual honey badger.

00:14:04.000 If you come after me, you better come correct, because I'm going to come after you, I'm going to come after your ancestors, I'm going to come after your dead ancestors. 0.99

00:14:11.000 And so I think...

00:14:13.000 You know, the tenacity coupled with the optimistic outlook is kind of the right cocktail of traits to have to be able to fight the lunacy.

00:14:22.000 You're also a person who embraced early on alternative media in terms of your ability to spread your word.

00:14:29.000 YouTube, podcasts, all these different things.

00:14:32.000 You recognize that there is a real benefit in particularly long-form conversations.

00:14:38.000 Where you're able to express yourself unchecked, uncensored, and really get your full idea out there so people can understand.

00:14:47.000 You're not some bizarre reactionary who's not making any sense.

00:14:50.000 You're a man who has studied this your whole life and you've thought through this very deeply and written about it very accurately.

00:15:00.000 Exactly.

00:15:01.000 And I think I might have mentioned this story before to you on the show, but it's worth repeating.

00:15:06.000 It's actually a story that I discuss in the book.

00:15:08.000 It relates to you.

00:15:09.000 So, you know, when I went to Stanford Business School several years ago to give a talk, you know, as you might imagine, it's a very, you know, highfalutin, elitist environment.

00:15:21.000 The host who took me out that evening prior to my talk, the night before my talk, said, oh, you know, I hear you're going on Joe Rogan.

00:15:29.000 I said, yeah, yeah, you know, we're friends, you know, love to go on Joe.

00:15:32.000 It's such a great forum to spread ideas.

00:15:34.000 And he was very haughty, right?

00:15:36.000 He said, well, you know, at Stanford, we don't support, you know, doing research so that you could appear on Joe Rogan.

00:15:42.000 I said, well, what do you mean?

00:15:43.000 You don't think it's a good idea to appear on a platform that allows you to spread your ideas to 10 million people instead of Writing a paper that will be read by you, your mom, two reviewers and an editor.

00:15:54.000 Well, I guess he didn't like that response, but the reality is that that's the kind of elitism that you see in academia where, I mean, I'm happy to see that a growing number of academics are coming on a platform like yours because it is insane to not take advantage of such platforms.

00:16:09.000 Look, I am in the currency of creating knowledge and then spreading knowledge.

00:16:13.000 Well, I could appear on Joe Rogan's podcast for five minutes and have greater impact than if I published 10 papers in the most elite scientific journals.

00:16:22.000 So yes, I embrace those forums because pragmatically, it's a wonderful way to have fantastic conversations, right?

00:16:30.000 It is.

00:16:30.000 And it's beautiful that brave academics are being rewarded.

00:16:33.000 The people that are willing to go on my podcast and other podcasts that might get looked down upon by these scholars.

00:16:41.000 They get rewarded by enormous audiences.

00:16:44.000 And also curious people that maybe have full-time jobs, maybe didn't go to college, but are curious folks that want to explore these ideas and explore them being described by a person such as yourself who has deeply studied them.

00:17:00.000 Joe, do you know how many, and I know you know this already, I don't have to tell you how incredible your platform is.

00:17:06.000 I could be walking on a beach in Bahamas, and that literally happened, by the way, where a local Bahamian will come up to me and say, oh my God, Didn't you appear on Joe Rogan?

00:17:20.000 And I don't say this to talk about fame, but to demonstrate the kind of platform you've created where I could be in a bathroom in some little town and someone's going to recognize me because I appeared on the show.

00:17:33.000 And I say this not because of the recognition factor or the fame, but again, if I am in the business of discussing ideas, I should use every possible tool, whether it be your podcast or if I create my own podcast, any way that I can spread ideas,

00:17:49.000 I'm going to jump on it.

00:17:50.000 I think a lot of academics don't do it because of an ego-defensive reason, which is they know that they may not be able to pull it off appearing on Joe Rogan, and therefore they denigrate those who can, right?

00:18:03.000 Because they've mastered one form of communication, which is You know, the rigid academic paper, that they can do well.

00:18:10.000 And that's great.

00:18:11.000 I mean, we are professors, we should be publishing academic papers.

00:18:14.000 But why not try to tip your toes so that the public can get excited about your ideas, right?

00:18:21.000 Well, I've had a lot of academics on the show, and I applaud them.

00:18:25.000 I'm happy that they're willing to do that.

00:18:27.000 But I do understand that the environment of academia, it's kind of a thought bubble, right?

00:18:34.000 They're all echoing sort of the same ideas and reinforcing those ideas within each other.

00:18:41.000 But in their defense, this is how it's been forever.

00:18:45.000 I mean, social media and alternative media like podcasts and YouTube, We're talking a decade or two.

00:18:51.000 It's not that much time.

00:18:52.000 This podcast is 11 years old.

00:18:53.000 That's nothing.

00:18:55.000 But doesn't it suck that I always analogize academics to Navy SEALs, right?

00:19:01.000 When we choose Navy SEALs, we're picking people who hopefully have athleticism, have great courage, bravery.

00:19:10.000 So shouldn't we be picking similar traits in our intellectuals?

00:19:14.000 But we're not, right?

00:19:15.000 So we don't create intellectual SEALs Who are willing to go in uncharted, intellectual territories.

00:19:22.000 Rather, we create tepid, sheepish academics who stay in their lanes, who never rock the boat.

00:19:31.000 And as you and I know, the world is shaped by people who are unorthodox, right?

00:19:37.000 Whether it be Sigmund Freud telling us about the unconscious mind, or Charles Darwin developing his theory of natural selection, or Galileo, or Socrates, the world is shaped by those who weren't fence-sitters, right? 0.98

00:19:52.000 You became who you are with your podcast because you decided to step out of the bubble and create something that no one else had created before, a three-hour intimate conversation with incredible guests.

00:20:05.000 I always tell people, yes, you can play it safe, but no one will remember you.

00:20:09.000 If you take risks, the great rewards will befall you.

00:20:13.000 Well, honestly, the risks, they're not that great.

00:20:16.000 That's what's crazy.

00:20:17.000 Especially this podcast, rewarding me, it's hilarious, because I never intended to do this in the first place.

00:20:23.000 This is all just an accident.

00:20:25.000 I started this podcast smoking pot and talking to my friends on a laptop, and it became slowly but surely a place where I could get guests, And then explore things that I'm interested in.

00:20:37.000 And I don't even remember how you and I first got in contact with each other.

00:20:42.000 I know we have in common your nephew, Ariel Helwani, who is an MMA journalist for ESPN, and I've known Ariel for years.

00:20:51.000 But other than that, how did we even get in contact with each other?

00:20:55.000 I think it was through Twitter.

00:20:57.000 Maybe I was communicating with Ariel or vice versa.

00:21:01.000 We got onto a thread together and that's how we first connected.

00:21:04.000 You said, hey, come on my show and so on.

00:21:06.000 And of course, I was very excited to come.

00:21:07.000 That's, I think, how it started.

00:21:09.000 It was through some, you know, connection through Ariel.

00:21:12.000 I don't remember the details, but look where we are now, man.

00:21:16.000 What do we have?

00:21:16.000 21, 25 hours of content between the two of us?

00:21:20.000 Yeah, and when was the last time you were on?

00:21:21.000 How long ago has it been?

00:21:22.000 I think it was December 2018, so almost two years.

00:21:26.000 Well, the podcast is probably five times, six times bigger now.

00:21:29.000 Are you kidding me?

00:21:30.000 Oh, yeah.

00:21:31.000 Are you able to share any metrics just so that you can make me super envious?

00:21:35.000 Hundreds of millions of downloads a month.

00:21:38.000 That is insane.

00:21:39.000 Yeah, it's insane.

00:21:40.000 The weird thing is that when we went over to Spotify, it actually got bigger.

00:21:43.000 The numbers on YouTube and iTunes didn't shrink.

00:21:48.000 We just picked up new listeners.

00:21:50.000 It's very bizarre.

00:21:51.000 I expected that the numbers would drop on iTunes because we have this new platform, but since we're on both platforms now, what happened is we just gained new people on Spotify that really maybe were Spotify loyalists.

00:22:07.000 I mean, when you wake up in the morning, can you believe that you've become this cultural icon that sort of moderates all these unbelievable conversations with all sorts of incredible people?

00:22:24.000 I mean, isn't it incredible?

00:22:26.000 It's incredible in that it's not credible.

00:22:31.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:22:32.000 You're being modest.

00:22:33.000 Yeah, I'm always modest, right?

00:22:35.000 But I'm also honest.

00:22:37.000 This is – I'm not really – because I'm not qualified, that's probably why I'm qualified.

00:22:43.000 Because it works, because I don't have the barriers.

00:22:47.000 I don't have the – I don't have the sense to say, well, this is probably not a good person to have on for my career, or this is not a wise topic of discussion.

00:22:58.000 I'm going to get a lot of criticism for this.

00:23:00.000 Because I don't think that way, that's probably why it's worked.

00:23:03.000 I'm going to tell you two things, if I may.

00:23:05.000 Number one, I think it's your intellectual curiosity.

00:23:09.000 And that's one thing that I always tell my graduate students when they're looking to do their doctoral dissertations and so on.

00:23:14.000 You could be the hardest working person and the brightest person if you don't have that intellectual curiosity, right?

00:23:21.000 Sort of waking up every day excited about things that you're going to learn that day, then you're not going to be a good scholar, let alone a great host on a podcast like yours.

00:23:30.000 And I also think it's exactly what you said, is your honesty, right?

00:23:35.000 That comes through on the camera, that there is no BS coming from you.

00:23:39.000 And I love the fact, by the way, that you said that you don't modulate who you bring on.

00:23:43.000 And let me share my own personal experience.

00:23:46.000 I was just contacted a few days ago, and if she's listening now, I'm sorry if I haven't responded yet, I will.

00:23:51.000 I was contacted by a Very famous former porn star.

00:23:56.000 I won't mention her name.

00:23:57.000 I didn't actually know her work, but I have since gone and done my research on her.

00:24:03.000 And if my wife is listening, it was completely for research purposes.

00:24:11.000 And so anyways, so she reached out to me and said, hey, would you come on my show?

00:24:16.000 You know, I'm a fan.

00:24:17.000 Now, if I were the typical academic, I would be doing all sorts of machinations in my head and calculations.

00:24:24.000 Well, is it good for my brand to be speaking to a porn star?

00:24:28.000 Doesn't it make me look less professorial?

00:24:30.000 And actually, it never even entered my mind.

00:24:33.000 I saw that she had a sufficiently large platform, that she was certainly an intelligent person.

00:24:38.000 And I'm very likely to reply to her and say, hey, let's do it.

00:24:42.000 And I think that comes across with you.

00:24:44.000 There's no pretense.

00:24:45.000 Let's just sit down and have conversations with interesting people.

00:24:48.000 Of course, in my case, my show is infinitely smaller than yours, but it's been successful within my sphere for, I think, similar reasons to why yours has been so successful.

00:24:57.000 The porn star thing is very interesting because people avoid even the topic of porn, but yet clearly a lot of people are watching it.

00:25:06.000 And a good example, and I don't mean to throw this guy under the bus, is the journalist from The New Yorker who unfortunately was on a Zoom call recently and thought he had muted his video and did not. 0.85

00:25:18.000 And while he was at work on the Zoom call, decided to start masturbating. 0.93

00:25:24.000 Jeffrey Toobin. 0.98

00:25:25.000 I wasn't going to say his name.

00:25:26.000 I just want to say that you said his name and not me. 0.99

00:25:29.000 I feel terrible for the man because, first of all, because I masturbate. 0.98

00:25:36.000 I know that's gonna sound crazy, but I do. 0.99

00:25:39.000 And I know there are many men who masturbate. 1.00

00:25:42.000 Well, you're married, so of course you masturbate. 0.99

00:25:44.000 Well, even before I was married, I masturbated. 0.99

00:25:47.000 I'm gonna be honest with you. 0.99

00:25:48.000 I am a lifelong masturbator. 0.88

00:25:50.000 I think I discovered it in my teenage years, and I've been an avid pursuer of it ever since. 0.51

00:25:57.000 I think it's a clarity device.

00:26:00.000 When you get horny, you get very confused.

00:26:03.000 Men who are horny have one thing on their mind, and it's a good tool to eliminate that one thing from your mind.

00:26:10.000 Look, you don't want to be fixated by something.

00:26:14.000 If you're hungry, you should eat.

00:26:15.000 You don't want to be just starving all day.

00:26:18.000 Just eat.

00:26:20.000 I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:26:21.000 But my point is, we all sort of want to pretend that we're not doing that.

00:26:28.000 It's very strange.

00:26:30.000 Intellectually, we all know that we do it.

00:26:32.000 Everyone knows we do it.

00:26:33.000 Everyone does it.

00:26:34.000 Pretty much everyone does it.

00:26:36.000 But when you discuss it, people are like, oh, they roll their eyes, they pull their head.

00:26:40.000 It's out of shame.

00:26:41.000 It's a very strange thing.

00:26:43.000 We have biological needs.

00:26:44.000 And if you don't attend to these biological needs, I believe that you can have very confusing motives.

00:26:51.000 And people that are excessively horny, they're distracted.

00:26:56.000 It's not healthy.

00:26:58.000 Two Seinfeld references that speak exactly to that point.

00:27:02.000 You ready?

00:27:03.000 So the first one is actually one that I discussed in my first book, my 2007 book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, where I was talking about how you can analyze cultural products, including sitcom themes via an evolutionary lens.

00:27:17.000 And so I take the example of the classic episode from Seinfeld, Master of My Domain, right?

00:27:24.000 Where...

00:27:24.000 Remember that show?

00:27:25.000 So the Master of My Domain, of course, is a euphemism for who could withstand their masturbatory urges the longest.

00:27:33.000 And then I say, well, let's analyze that plot line of that particular show from an evolutionary perspective.

00:27:39.000 And so...

00:27:40.000 The first thing you might remember is that there are three male characters and one female one. 0.97

00:27:45.000 They all recognize that she has to put in more money into the pot, the bed pot, because it isn't as difficult for women to resist their masturbatory urges. 1.00

00:27:56.000 So that was the first point.

00:27:57.000 Then as each one was losing the bed, meaning they were succumbing to their masturbatory urges, it's interesting to look at what was the trigger that caused them to lose the bed.

00:28:09.000 So in the case of Kramer, it's because he is seeing a gorgeous young woman, scantily clad, Doing all sorts of sexy positions as she's exercising.

00:28:20.000 So what triggered him to masturbate was the visual imagery. 0.99

00:28:25.000 Whereas when it came to Elaine losing the bet, it's because she fantasized about becoming the long-term partner, the wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. She wasn't masturbating over the cabana boy who was 18 years old with a nice ass. 0.99

00:28:43.000 And so that spoke to the differences in terms of the content of the fantasies of men and women. 0.94

00:28:50.000 And then the second point I wanna make that is also from Seinfeld is there's an episode where George decides to forego sex and by freeing his mind from having to focus on sex, he starts learning a whole bunch of new languages and he's solving chemistry equation problems because 99% of his brain is no longer focused on sex.

00:29:16.000 Yeah, that's a real issue with people.

00:29:20.000 But again, discussing porn, or especially having a conversation with someone who participates in the actual production and acting, I'll say acting, with air quotes, it's forbidden.

00:29:35.000 It's taboo.

00:29:37.000 You get looked down upon for some very bizarre reason.

00:29:41.000 It probably has to do with our puritanical shame.

00:29:45.000 I'm not sure if we've discussed this before, but even if we have, I think it's worth repeating.

00:29:49.000 It's probably many years ago that we discussed it.

00:29:51.000 So in one of my other books, I talk about the evolutionary explanation of pornography, and I specifically talk about porn that is directed at heterosexual males.

00:30:05.000 Typically, you might think that because men are interested in sleeping with many women, that pornography is going to have one man sleeping with multiple women in a particular scene.

00:30:16.000 That's called polygyny. 0.99

00:30:18.000 One man, many women. 0.50

00:30:20.000 Whereas, actually the study has been done, scientific study, it turns out that there's a lot more what's called polyandrous depictions in porn.

00:30:28.000 Polyandry is one woman with multiple men. 0.70

00:30:32.000 So why is it that porn directed to heterosexual men has a lot more Scenes with one woman having sex with multiple men, and there it turns out that the explanation comes from something called a sperm competition hypothesis.

00:30:48.000 The idea being that men, and actually males in many species, get a rise, literally, in seeing other men having sex.

00:30:58.000 So for example, when you are trying to get a stud, let's say a horse or a dog, to mate with a female, you often will make him watch another male having sex, And that will get the rise out of him.

00:31:10.000 And so there's some really interesting scientific ways by which you could study a product like pornography, which of course is one of the most – the products that we spend the most money on.

00:31:22.000 That's so bizarre.

00:31:24.000 So the sperm hypothesis theory, there was a – wasn't there – was it a book or a paper on sperm wars that was later discredited?

00:31:32.000 Yes!

00:31:34.000 I tried to get that guy on my show.

00:31:36.000 His name is Robin Baker.

00:31:38.000 You're exactly right.

00:31:39.000 It's a book that came out in the 90s called Sperm Wars.

00:31:43.000 At the time, he had retired, and so he replied to me very graciously and said, look, I'd love to come on your show, but I'm out of the whole thing.

00:31:51.000 Thanks, but no thanks.

00:31:52.000 Now, so let me just mention what his theory was and then what people have said since.

00:31:56.000 So he argued in his book and in several studies that he had published that when men ejaculate, they actually have three types of Sperm within their ejaculate.

00:32:08.000 There is the traditional sperm that you could think of, sort of the fertilizer, right?

00:32:12.000 The traditional, the head with the tail that's looking for the egg to fertilize.

00:32:17.000 But then he argued that there are also blockers.

00:32:20.000 So these are kind of malformed spermatozoa that actually don't look for an egg, but rather place themselves at the entrance of the reproductive tract of a woman So that it could stop any incoming new sperm from other men.

00:32:35.000 And then there are killer sperms that don't look for the egg to fertilize, but look for other men's sperm to kill. 0.94

00:32:42.000 Now, if that theory is correct, and you're exactly right that there's been contentious points about whether it is as accurate as he said or not, And I think the jury is still a bit out.

00:32:53.000 If the theory is correct, this basically argues that women, evolutionarily speaking, would have been extraordinarily promiscuous because sperm within a woman's tract is only viable for about 72 hours.

00:33:08.000 So that if men have evolved the chemical weaponry to block other men's sperm and kill other men's sperm, that means that, evolutionarily speaking, women would have been very likely to have mated with at least two guys within a 72-hour period.

00:33:23.000 Now, when I mention this theory in front of a crowd, the feminists will come up to me and say, thank you, Dr. Saad, what a great... 1.00

00:33:31.000 You know, lecture.

00:33:33.000 Because that theory supports the idea that women could be just as salacious in their sexuality as men, and that supports the feminist argument. 1.00

00:33:42.000 If I propose an equally, if not even more sound evolutionary theory that doesn't support the feminist narrative, boo, Dr. Saad, you're a Nazi, boo, boo.

00:33:53.000 So it shows you So it shows you what happens when you use ideology to judge the veracity of a theory.

00:34:03.000 If it occurs with my narrative, you're a great scientist.

00:34:06.000 If it doesn't occur, you're a Nazi. 0.98

00:34:09.000 And anyone that knows your past, if you've described your past and your history on my podcast, the idea of calling you a Nazi becomes incredibly offensive and ridiculous. 0.99

00:34:21.000 Isn't it fantastic?

00:34:22.000 I mean, it's happened many, many times, but most famously was the time when And I know you've become very good friends with Jordan Peterson.

00:34:31.000 Jordan and I had been invited in 2017 to speak at Ryerson University, which is a university in Toronto.

00:34:39.000 And the title of the talk was The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses.

00:34:47.000 And guess what happened to that speech?

00:34:50.000 It got cancelled.

00:34:51.000 Because you're a Nazi?

00:34:53.000 No, no, no.

00:34:55.000 Because, you know, we're these controversial guys.

00:34:58.000 And the people who are the agitators who canceled us put out Facebook flyers where they said, you know, neo-Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome in Toronto.

00:35:10.000 And so when I wrote and said, well, but I'm Lebanese Jew.

00:35:15.000 That didn't alter.

00:35:16.000 I was still a neo-Nazi.

00:35:18.000 And so it shows you what happens when people are completely parasitized by political tribalism.

00:35:23.000 It's insane.

00:35:24.000 Not just a Lebanese Jew. 0.98

00:35:25.000 A Lebanese Jew who feared for his life and fled Lebanon because you're a Jew. 0.87

00:35:31.000 Isn't that amazing? 1.00

00:35:32.000 It's disgusting. 1.00

00:35:33.000 It's just such a stupid way to discredit someone's ideas instead of having conversation. 1.00

00:35:40.000 This is one of the weirdest things about our current climate, is that instead of engaging with people on these ideas and discussing them, they look to discredit, and they look to discredit with these disingenuous labels. 0.99

00:35:55.000 And it's very unfortunate.

00:35:56.000 And it's an anti-intellectual approach.

00:36:00.000 Oh, it's unbelievable.

00:36:02.000 You know why?

00:36:03.000 There is something in psychology called a fast and frugal heuristic.

00:36:09.000 Most of us, when we're making a decision, don't necessarily sit and weigh all the pros and cons of a multi-attribute choice that we're making.

00:36:18.000 Rather, we want to use some simplifying decision rule to arrive at a choice.

00:36:21.000 Well, to label your debate opponent, one of these names, in a sense, is a Ugly manifestation of a fast and frugal heuristic, right?

00:36:31.000 Because it takes very little cognitive effort for me to deploy it, right?

00:36:35.000 I don't have to really engage the merits of your points. 0.99

00:36:39.000 You're a Nazi, shut up, we're done. 0.99

00:36:41.000 And as you said, I mean, it is the height of anti-intellectualism. 1.00

00:36:45.000 And by the way, it's not just...

00:36:47.000 You know, the typical social media blue-haired person who does it.

00:36:51.000 Even academics engage in this form of anti-intellectualism, and that's what upsets me the most, that they should know better, and yet they succumb to the same kind of fascist strategies.

00:37:02.000 Well, there's a spectrum of intellectuals as well, right?

00:37:04.000 And some of them are simple-minded in many ways.

00:37:08.000 I mean, although they're intelligent and although they're well-read and they're scholars, they still...

00:37:13.000 I hate to use the word, but they're lazy. 0.87

00:37:16.000 They don't want to engage in this intellectual gladiatorial combat about their ideas.

00:37:22.000 And that's what it is.

00:37:24.000 So, certainly that.

00:37:26.000 And I would also say that academia has regrettably created...

00:37:32.000 If you like, the reward mechanisms for hyper-specialization, right?

00:37:36.000 So when you're thinking about becoming an academic, a scientist, you really can sort of follow one of two strategies.

00:37:42.000 You can become an unbelievable expert in a very, very narrow area.

00:37:48.000 Because that creates economies of scale, right?

00:37:50.000 I don't have to continuously go back and check the literature because I really know everything there is to know about this very, very small area of expertise.

00:37:58.000 Or you could be a polymath, you could be a broad thinker.

00:38:02.000 And regrettably, much of academia promotes the former rather than the latter.

00:38:07.000 Now, if you look at my own scientific career, I haven't done the things that I should be doing according to the rules of the academic game.

00:38:15.000 Because if I were trying to maximize, you know, according to the rules, I should only be publishing in journals that are within my narrow area of expertise, evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, psychology of decision making.

00:38:30.000 But if you go and look at my CV, I've published in medicine and economics.

00:38:34.000 In psychiatric issues, in consumer behavior, in evolutionary theory, in bibliometrics.

00:38:40.000 I don't care where I publish.

00:38:42.000 If you have a problem that I think I could contribute to, sign me up.

00:38:47.000 And that kind of speaks to what we talked about earlier when we were talking about willingness to speak to all sorts of people.

00:38:53.000 It's an openness of spirit, of mind.

00:38:56.000 I'm willing to go to any intellectual landscape as long as it triggers my interest.

00:39:00.000 I don't play by the rules.

00:39:02.000 I like to be free.

00:39:03.000 Well, it's part of being a curious human being, isn't it?

00:39:08.000 Exactly.

00:39:09.000 Well, shouldn't that be encouraged?

00:39:10.000 I mean, it seems like when a person as intelligent as yourself chooses to take your mind and apply it to other different disciplines and different ideas, that should be rewarded.

00:39:23.000 I've been told the exact opposite.

00:39:25.000 I've been told by colleagues that they were looking at hiring me at some other university, but then when they looked at my CV and saw that I had published in all these different areas, that it looked like I wasn't focused.

00:39:41.000 I was scattered.

00:39:44.000 I'll give you a wonderful example of the strategy of not being scattered.

00:39:50.000 When I was a doctoral student at Cornell, one of the famous psychologists within my department was a lady who has since passed away, Professor Alice Eisen.

00:40:01.000 She was a great noted psychologist, but her entire career was about affect.

00:40:07.000 Not affect, affect, right?

00:40:09.000 Your feelings, right?

00:40:10.000 So she studied how does affect affect variety seeking?

00:40:14.000 How does affect affect word completion?

00:40:16.000 So it was basically affect and fill in the blank.

00:40:20.000 So for 40, 50 years, that's all she did.

00:40:23.000 So if you talked to her about affect, she certainly was the queen of the hill. 0.99

00:40:30.000 But if you talk to her about anything outside of affect, She was probably a babbling imbecile, and I apologize for saying that. 0.99

00:40:37.000 May she rest in peace. 0.98

00:40:38.000 She wouldn't be able to get on The Joe Rogan Show unless you talked to her for three hours about affect.

00:40:43.000 To me, she may be a great professor, but she's not an intellectual.

00:40:48.000 An intellectual is one who can go to different intellectual landscapes and engage in great conversations.

00:40:53.000 And regrettably, there are very few public intellectuals today Who have that capacity.

00:40:58.000 But someone like Christopher Hitchens, whom I think you know.

00:41:01.000 Have you ever met Christopher Hitchens?

00:41:02.000 No, unfortunately.

00:41:03.000 He died before I could meet him.

00:41:05.000 I'm a huge fan of his work.

00:41:07.000 This is the kind of guy that you want to be hanging out with at a party.

00:41:11.000 And by the way, he wasn't a professor.

00:41:13.000 He wasn't a professional intellectual, but he was a true intellectual in the old style of European intellectuals.

00:41:21.000 You could sit down with him and talk about art or literature or science.

00:41:25.000 He was well-read about everything.

00:41:28.000 And in a sense, again, not to blow the proverbial smoke up your behind, I think that's what you do.

00:41:34.000 Yes, you may not have the fancy degrees, but you come with that intellectual curiosity so that you could speak to Sir Roger Penrose one day and to a comedian whose every second word is F this and F that, and you could pull it off with both.

00:41:48.000 That's the secret of your success.

00:41:50.000 Well, I had a conversation with Eric Weinstein about that once, and he was like, imagine what it would be like for someone who didn't know what your podcast was about.

00:41:58.000 And they tuned in and saw Roger Penrose on one day and then Joey Diaz on the next day. 0.98

00:42:04.000 They were like, what the fuck is this show? 0.96

00:42:07.000 But this show, if it anything, it represents what I'm interested in, and I'm interested in a lot of things. 0.99

00:42:12.000 I think the term intellectual is such a grandiose and ridiculous term for someone who's a cage-fighting commentator and a stand-up comedian.

00:42:19.000 But I am curious, and I'm very fortunate that I do have friendships with people like yourself, and Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, and that I could get a guy like Roger Penrose to sit down and talk to me.

00:42:33.000 And many other brilliant people that I've had the pleasure of talking to.

00:42:38.000 Are you aware that he won the Nobel Prize?

00:42:40.000 What?

00:42:41.000 In what?

00:42:43.000 Oh, Roger Penrose.

00:42:45.000 Roger Penrose.

00:42:46.000 I thought you meant Jordan Peterson.

00:42:47.000 I was like, what?

00:42:48.000 No, no, no.

00:42:48.000 No, Jordan Peterson.

00:42:49.000 Because you can't really win anything that Jordan Peterson does.

00:42:53.000 Right.

00:42:53.000 No, I am aware that Roger Penrose won it.

00:42:55.000 It's amazing.

00:42:58.000 I think the last time that I appeared on your show, and maybe Jamie can check it, either he was the guest before me or after me.

00:43:06.000 So based on predictive models, I should be booking a flight to Stockholm to receive my own passport.

00:43:13.000 I don't know if it works that way, but maybe it should. 0.83

00:43:16.000 Yeah, he was one of those guys where I was sitting down and as I was talking to him, I'm like, what the fuck am I doing here?

00:43:23.000 How is this? 0.84

00:43:24.000 Who talked this guy into doing this?

00:43:26.000 And I have to do my best to not mess this up.

00:43:33.000 When you and I are speaking, of course we can get very academic and so on, but we can also joke because we're friends and we're both funny and so on.

00:43:42.000 Does it intimidate you when you speak to someone like Sir Roger because you don't have that I don't think it intimidates me as much as it confines me,

00:43:58.000 but I was so curious to hear his thoughts on things.

00:44:02.000 I was fortunate that I had a lot of questions for him, and I really did want to dive into his intellect and try to find out what How he thinks about these things and what he's studying and what his thoughts were.

00:44:17.000 So it was very fortunate that I had a deep curiosity about the subject.

00:44:23.000 But it was certainly intimidating.

00:44:26.000 Right.

00:44:29.000 Are there any guests that you've yet to have that would be sort of, here are my top three.

00:44:35.000 I know you recently had Kanye West.

00:44:38.000 What are some people that you think sort of are, you know, you must have them before this whole ride ends?

00:44:45.000 None.

00:44:46.000 Zero.

00:44:46.000 I don't have that thought.

00:44:48.000 Oh, really?

00:44:48.000 Yeah, even Kanye.

00:44:50.000 I mean, I guess I should probably say this.

00:44:52.000 I kind of avoided talking to him for a long time because I was worried it was going to be not good for him.

00:44:58.000 Because I'm such a fan of his as an artist.

00:45:00.000 I think he's a brilliant musician.

00:45:02.000 But I also think that because of his...

00:45:05.000 I mean, he's been diagnosed as being bipolar.

00:45:08.000 I mean, whatever you want to say, whatever mental issues he's had, I think they contribute in some ways to his art because he's so prolific.

00:45:17.000 His mind is going in a million different directions all at once.

00:45:22.000 And someone who is like that but very different, of course, is Elon Musk.

00:45:29.000 Yeah.

00:45:57.000 Kanye is a very misunderstood person and I think that he doesn't do himself any service by calling himself a genius and all the – but all the – All the Trump stuff.

00:46:10.000 Similar to Trump, right?

00:46:11.000 He's kind of – he pats himself on the back and pumps himself up and talks about his accomplishments and his financial success and all those different – For whatever reason, those put some people off.

00:46:21.000 They don't put me off, but they do put some people off.

00:46:24.000 But I understand why he does it.

00:46:26.000 I understand that he's kind of looking to affirm that he's on the right path.

00:46:31.000 These are markers of success that he could point to. 1.00

00:46:34.000 You can say he's an idiot. 1.00

00:46:36.000 You can say all these different things. 1.00

00:46:37.000 But hey, look at all he's accomplished.

00:46:39.000 Look at what he's done.

00:46:40.000 And if you listen to his music, I mean, he's brilliant.

00:46:44.000 There's no doubt about it.

00:46:45.000 He's brilliant.

00:46:46.000 He's insanely prolific.

00:46:48.000 And his stuff is great.

00:46:49.000 He's never put out a bad album.

00:46:51.000 They're all great.

00:46:53.000 And he's married to an Armenian woman, as is your good friend Gadsad.

00:46:59.000 So that's a commonality that we both share.

00:47:01.000 Well, there you go.

00:47:01.000 I'm a big fan of Armenians in general.

00:47:04.000 I really am.

00:47:05.000 Why is that?

00:47:06.000 Well, there's been a lot of great fighters that were Armenian.

00:47:09.000 Oh, right.

00:47:10.000 The greatest kickboxer of all time, one of the greatest kickboxers of all time, is Giorgio Petrosian, who is an Armenian who lives in Italy.

00:47:16.000 I'm a giant fan of his.

00:47:18.000 There's just been many, many fighters in the UFC that have been Armenian.

00:47:22.000 I'm a fan of, they embrace masculinity.

00:47:27.000 Even though the term toxic masculinity is so bandied about today, in Armenian culture, masculinity is praised. 1.00

00:47:38.000 They're just openly masculine.

00:47:40.000 You know, I like it.

00:47:41.000 I like them.

00:47:42.000 You know, I receive many, many, maybe hundreds of emails from women who will sort of lament the fact that they no longer can meet a man who exhibits that kind of masculinity,

00:47:57.000 right?

00:47:58.000 Because what's happened now, as obviously you know, is Men are so confused, right?

00:48:04.000 Am I supposed to pursue a woman or will I be accused of approach rape?

00:48:08.000 If I give her a compliment, will that be considered compliment rape, right? 0.99

00:48:12.000 Because all these words are now asserted, right? 0.91

00:48:14.000 Is that compliment rape is a real word? 0.89

00:48:17.000 No, no, no.

00:48:17.000 I just made that up.

00:48:18.000 You scared me.

00:48:19.000 I thought we've gone so far.

00:48:21.000 No, no, no.

00:48:22.000 But by the way, I had to do a...

00:48:27.000 One of those mandatory sex education tests at the start of last year at university.

00:48:35.000 All professors, all students, everybody has to take it.

00:48:38.000 And one of the questions, I don't remember the exact words, was, you know, if you see a guy, you know, cat calling a woman on campus, is that a form of sexual violence?

00:48:50.000 Or something to that effect.

00:48:52.000 And I knew what was the answer going to be.

00:48:55.000 And I answered no.

00:48:57.000 And then it kind of prompts you.

00:48:58.000 And it's like, no, it is a form of sexual violence.

00:49:02.000 And then they kind of explain it to me as if I were a three-year-old child who hasn't yet mastered the dynamics of being social amongst human beings.

00:49:11.000 And so while I might have been satirical about the compliment rape, we have gotten to the stage now where it is mandatory for university participants, whether they be faculty members or staff or students, to take these mandatory sexual training manuals.

00:49:29.000 It's insane.

00:49:31.000 I kind of understand why they want people to think differently about harassment.

00:49:36.000 I get that.

00:49:37.000 I mean, I would hate to be... 0.92

00:49:38.000 Look, I've been hit on by gay men, and it's odd. 0.92

00:49:42.000 It's complimentary.

00:49:44.000 But I've been hit on only a couple times in my life, but a few times where it was aggressive.

00:49:50.000 And I was like, what's different is, first of all, the man who was doing it, one particular guy who was doing it, that was the most aggressive that I can remember, was not physically dangerous to me.

00:50:02.000 Like, I could have killed him if I wanted to.

00:50:05.000 So I was like, listen man, stop.

00:50:07.000 But it wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't, the roles weren't reversed.

00:50:13.000 But if it was Mike Tyson who was doing that to me, I would feel terrified.

00:50:18.000 Because if he wanted to beat me up and have his way with me, there's not a lot I could do.

00:50:26.000 It's also called prison.

00:50:28.000 Yeah.

00:50:30.000 So I don't have the understanding that a woman would have. 1.00

00:50:34.000 When a woman is being approached by a man, there's a very real concern that she could be raped.

00:50:39.000 I don't have that same concern unless someone's drugged me or done something.

00:50:43.000 If the man is weaker physically than me, I don't have that concern.

00:50:47.000 But I try to look at it from a woman's perspective, and I get how catcalling, if you're a woman, particularly if there's a large group of men, and they say things to you, that's terrifying.

00:50:57.000 It could be terrifying.

00:50:58.000 I could understand.

00:50:59.000 But it's not violence.

00:51:01.000 The problem with the word violence is you start...

00:51:04.000 Using that word with other, like, silence is violence.

00:51:07.000 No, it's not.

00:51:08.000 Violence is violence.

00:51:10.000 Silence is not violence.

00:51:11.000 You can't bastardize these words.

00:51:14.000 You can't distort the meaning of these words.

00:51:16.000 Because as soon as you do, you're forcing people to comply with, you're resetting language, you're changing definitions.

00:51:26.000 You can't do that.

00:51:27.000 You can say it's very disrespectful, it's rude, and it's intimidating to catcall a woman.

00:51:33.000 I would agree to that.

00:51:34.000 And I would say, I've never done it.

00:51:36.000 I'm not the type of person who, a girl walks by, I'm like, hey baby, that's not, I'm, you know, I've never been raised that way. 0.97

00:51:43.000 I've never, I don't do it.

00:51:46.000 I've never done it.

00:51:47.000 I don't appreciate it.

00:51:48.000 But it's not violence.

00:51:49.000 It's just gross.

00:51:51.000 It's intimidating.

00:51:53.000 It's harassment. 0.99

00:51:54.000 And if I was a woman, I would fucking hate it. 0.97

00:51:57.000 But we need clear definitions. 0.99

00:52:01.000 Words are noises that we make that convey intent. 0.98

00:52:04.000 When you say that it's sexual violence to catcall, you're fucking with language. 0.99

00:52:11.000 And you're fucking with it in order to... 0.99

00:52:14.000 Because everyone knows violence is bad, right? 0.99

00:52:16.000 Everyone knows violence is evil.

00:52:18.000 Everyone knows violence should not be tolerated in a polite society.

00:52:22.000 So when you attach an extreme definition, an extreme word that doesn't apply, but you force it into a situation, you're fucking with our definition of the way people behave and think.

00:52:38.000 And you're doing it to sort of force compliance into your ideology and what you feel the way people should act and behave.

00:52:47.000 And so I've got a psychological mechanism that I explain in the parasitic mind about how you redefine realities so that you can get the victimology narrative that you want.

00:52:58.000 And I call it the homeostasis of victimology.

00:53:02.000 And so let me explain what homeostasis is.

00:53:04.000 So if you think about your thermostat in your room, it is a homeostatic machine because what it basically says is, okay, I'm going to set the temperature at 70. And it's gonna sample the air.

00:53:17.000 If it's too hot, it will release the air conditioning.

00:53:20.000 If it's too warm, vice versa, right?

00:53:23.000 So our bodies are made of many homeostatic systems, right?

00:53:28.000 If I'm hungry and my blood sugar goes below a set point, I have approach behavior to food, right?

00:53:34.000 So many of our physiological systems are homeostatic.

00:53:38.000 Many of our psychological systems are homeostatic.

00:53:41.000 And so I argue that this The never-ending redefinition of words and context to make it seem as though they are rape or violence or misogyny is what I call the homeostasis of victimology, which is what,

00:53:56.000 basically?

00:53:57.000 There is a set point that we need so that we can always argue that our society is evil and sexist and racist and so on.

00:54:08.000 The reality is that you can't identify that sexism and racism.

00:54:13.000 You simply redefine words, redefine concepts so that you could get your set point.

00:54:19.000 You follow what I mean?

00:54:21.000 And there's a similar concept that's called concept creep.

00:54:25.000 From an Australian psychologist that argues along the same lines, right?

00:54:29.000 And it's exactly the reason, by the way, why someone like Jussie Smollett will engage in, you know, full victimology.

00:54:37.000 Because he is basically saying, look, I need to reach a set level of victimology so I can have the right currency to ascend the apex of victimology.

00:54:47.000 And if I don't have that narrative, then I will manufacture it.

00:54:51.000 And hence, the homeostasis of victimology.

00:54:54.000 Well, in his case, it's extreme, right?

00:54:56.000 Because he literally, it's fraudulent.

00:54:58.000 I mean, literally created a fake attack.

00:55:02.000 But this is, you know, we know that...

00:55:06.000 I hate the narrative like no one would ever fake an attack or no one would ever lie about being harassed or attacked or even raped.

00:55:15.000 Of course they would.

00:55:16.000 People lie about everything.

00:55:17.000 The idea that human beings would never lie about something, that is such a gross generalization.

00:55:24.000 There's a reason why there's a word called lie.

00:55:27.000 There's a reason why it's a concept, because people engage in it, and because we can't read minds.

00:55:32.000 And since we can't read minds, people can deceive.

00:55:35.000 And whenever we're allowing people to willingly distort language, we're in some ways at least encouraging a form of deception.

00:55:46.000 Exactly right.

00:55:47.000 And I mean, isn't it incredible how the onus on believing changes as a function of the political affiliation of the supposed victim, right?

00:55:58.000 So when, I can't remember her name, Blasey Ford, When a woman came up the night before Kavanaugh's confirmation or whatever to say that 36 years ago it may have happened somewhere and I'm not sure where and I don't know if it happened, I don't have any details.

00:56:13.000 Well, hashtag believe all women. 0.99

00:56:16.000 When a woman came up against Joe Biden with apparently more evidence, now I don't know the veracity of each of their accusations, but it was certainly the case that the accuser of Joe Biden As convincing evidence, if not more than the former case,

00:56:32.000 but now it was no longer hashtag believe all women, right?

00:56:36.000 And so it demonstrates to you how ugly these hashtag fast and frugal strategies are, rather than sticking to first principles, which is People are presumed to be innocent unless there is overwhelming amount of evidence.

00:56:51.000 We either fry someone or not as a function of political expediency.

00:56:55.000 It's grotesque.

00:56:56.000 It is grotesque.

00:56:57.000 And I'm glad there's someone like you out there that describes these things in a very clear way and explains the mechanisms behind them.

00:57:04.000 But does it frustrate you that we are moving, it seems like, even further in this direction as a society?

00:57:11.000 And do you see a way out of this?

00:57:15.000 I think the way out of it is, and I'm not sure that what I'm about to say is easy to implement because we are tribal animals.

00:57:24.000 Sorry, I'm putting my glasses because it starts getting fuzzy.

00:57:27.000 I'm getting older.

00:57:30.000 Look, I always tell people belong to the tribe of truth rather than to specific political tribes.

00:57:36.000 Now, what do I mean by that?

00:57:37.000 If you come to me and ask me, you know, it's hard to pin you, Gad.

00:57:42.000 Are you conservative?

00:57:43.000 Are you libertarian?

00:57:44.000 Are you liberal?

00:57:45.000 And I will usually answer, well, it's hard to pin myself because I am an issues guy.

00:57:51.000 So if it comes to the death penalty, I might give you a position that you might think I'm conservative.

00:57:57.000 Or when it comes to immigration, you might think I'm conservative.

00:57:59.000 When it comes to social issues, gay rights, transgender rights, I'm about as socially liberal as they come.

00:58:05.000 So I don't belong to a group.

00:58:07.000 I'm not conservative.

00:58:09.000 I'm not liberal.

00:58:10.000 I am a one idea at a time guy.

00:58:13.000 Why?

00:58:13.000 Because I use first principles and my ability to engage in critical thinking to espouse a position on any topic that you wish to discuss with me.

00:58:22.000 But I don't think that that's the natural state of most people.

00:58:26.000 Most people are, I am Republican, I am, you know, whatever, Democrat, and therefore I must toe the line on issues 1 through 37. And so what I implore people to do is don't be like that.

00:58:40.000 Even though it's a natural reflex to want to belong to Team Blue or Team Red, belong to Team Truth if you can achieve that possibility.

00:58:49.000 Yeah, in the United States at least, I'm not really that familiar with your political system in Canada, but in the United States it's reinforced because we really only have two parties.

00:58:58.000 And so much so that Brett Weinstein created this thing, Unity 2020, where he was trying to bring together conservatives and liberals together and find some common ground.

00:59:13.000 And he was promoting this as an alternative to the two-party system, and they were banned from Twitter.

00:59:18.000 Banned from Twitter.

00:59:20.000 They banned his personal Facebook page, and then tried to say that it was an error.

00:59:25.000 But no, it was a conscious decision.

00:59:28.000 There are people that work for these social media companies that have since left and now talk about it openly that they did have the freedom to edit things.

00:59:39.000 They did have the freedom to delete things.

00:59:41.000 And that they sort of took pleasure in doing so.

00:59:44.000 And that you were...

00:59:46.000 Given this leeway, if you felt like something was ideologically opposed to the terms and services of whatever social media organization you're working for, you were allowed to make that distinction.

01:00:01.000 It's very subjective.

01:00:02.000 You were allowed to say, well, this is negative.

01:00:04.000 This is negative towards our election.

01:00:07.000 This is promoting something that's going to damage the Democratic Party.

01:00:11.000 So we're just going to ban the Twitter account.

01:00:15.000 For violating terms of services, it's never been clear.

01:00:17.000 It's still banned.

01:00:19.000 The Twitter account is still banned.

01:00:20.000 And they just do this based on their own personal political beliefs.

01:00:27.000 It's not about truth.

01:00:29.000 It's not about the freedom of expression.

01:00:31.000 You should be free to express the idea that the two-party system has major flaws.

01:00:37.000 And one of the flaws is human beings' natural inclination towards tribalism.

01:00:41.000 We're very aware of that.

01:00:43.000 And if you find support within your tribe and you have steadfastly adhered to these ideals that the left has or the right has, you'll be rewarded.

01:00:56.000 Like, you're a part of us.

01:00:57.000 Yay.

01:00:58.000 Good job, Gad.

01:00:59.000 Or good job, Joe.

01:01:01.000 Like, you have adopted our conglomeration of opinions.

01:01:05.000 And you have stuck to them.

01:01:07.000 And they're so predictable on both sides, right?

01:01:09.000 On the left, you're supposed to be pro-choice.

01:01:12.000 On the right, you're supposed to be pro-Second Amendment.

01:01:14.000 And we have a series of these different things that you have to adhere to if you're on either side of that line.

01:01:20.000 And people take comfort in knowing that there's other people on their tribe that also think that way.

01:01:26.000 And they find some commonality in that and they find this camaraderie in their knowledge that this person that they're talking to has also agreed to stay within these lines.

01:01:40.000 Oh, indeed.

01:01:41.000 Look, a quick story that recently happened to me regarding all these social media platforms.

01:01:46.000 I posted on all my social media platforms, including on LinkedIn, a post where I basically said, hey, you know, Joe Biden might have been a parasitic nothing for the past 47 years, but just wait next year when in the 48th year he's really gonna,

01:02:03.000 you know, solve diabetes and cure cancer.

01:02:05.000 There was a satirical thing where I was kind of arguing that he hasn't done much throughout his public life.

01:02:12.000 LinkedIn removed it because it violated their community standards of harassment and bullying.

01:02:20.000 Well, who was I harassing and bullying, right?

01:02:22.000 I mean, I was harassing and bullying a public figure who's running to become the president of the United States, but that was bullying to him.

01:02:33.000 That's the world we live in.

01:02:35.000 So I think guys like, I don't know if you know these guys, and you might want to consider if they're willing to come on your show to have them on, guys like Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz have been trying to, you know, reform the legal,

01:02:51.000 you know, taking these social media from being, you know, So that they don't get the protection anymore.

01:02:58.000 They're actual publishers, right?

01:03:01.000 So that they don't get the protection of, hey, you can't sue us if we do stuff.

01:03:05.000 But of course, most of the Republicans and Democrats never want to go after the social media platforms because the ability of all of these top players to fund the politicians, whether they are on the right or left side of the aisle, is so great that most people turn a blind eye.

01:03:20.000 But I really can't see this being something that can Well, it was locked out,

01:03:35.000 and Jack Dorsey has since stated that they have amended their policy, and that if the New York Post wants to post again, they can, and then they can post the exact same story.

01:03:46.000 What they have to do, however, is they have to go back to their original post, remove it, That will reinstate them and then they can repost the exact same story and then they'll have no issues with that whatsoever.

01:03:59.000 And he said that in a conversation that he had with Ted Cruz.

01:04:01.000 It's very confusing.

01:04:02.000 I think that might just have to do with the way their social media platform is structured.

01:04:07.000 Jack Dorsey though, I can speak from knowing him on a personal level.

01:04:13.000 He is a man that believes in free speech.

01:04:16.000 And I think that inside the company he's fighting a battle.

01:04:21.000 But he is personally a person that believes that Twitter should be open and that it should be an open platform and he believes in free speech.

01:04:32.000 I don't think that idea is...

01:04:35.000 I don't think it's embraced by the vast majority of the people that make decisions over at Twitter.

01:04:41.000 And I think that his idea is probably unpopular, but he agrees with the sentiment, the original sentiment of the internet, the ability to distribute information for all people.

01:04:54.000 He thinks that all these people that have been deplatformed should have a place, and that the internet should be treated like a utility, and that it should be available to everyone.

01:05:02.000 He believes that.

01:05:03.000 I know he does.

01:05:04.000 But I think it's very difficult when you're a CEO of something that is a publicly traded company, an enormous company that's arguably one of the three or four biggest platforms for disseminating information on the planet Earth, and was never intended to be that.

01:05:21.000 They didn't see it coming.

01:05:22.000 I mean, obviously I sound like a Twitter apologist, but I really like Jack Dorsey as a person, and I think he's a very honest and he's a very interesting human being.

01:05:33.000 I think he gets unfairly maligned, but in my conversations with him, I think he really does believe...

01:05:40.000 He's actually proposed that there be two Twitters.

01:05:43.000 A Twitter that there is some moderation, and a Twitter that's the Wild West.

01:05:51.000 Oh, wow.

01:05:51.000 I actually have had him on my show also.

01:05:55.000 And just like you, I mean, I got the feeling that he's a real genuine, you know, genuine person, really cares about the world.

01:06:02.000 But I think you're exactly right that there are so many different considerations.

01:06:16.000 I agree with you.

01:06:20.000 Do you think that there will be eventually a regulatory mechanism that kind of sets all of these social platforms straight?

01:06:29.000 Or do you think forevermore we're going to be beholden to their BS? I think it's the only way out of this.

01:06:34.000 I think someone has to step in and they have to impose First Amendment protections on free speech on the internet.

01:06:46.000 Right now the internet, the social media platforms, they're thought of as private companies.

01:06:50.000 They can make their own decision.

01:06:52.000 Maybe if you had a party over at your house and someone came over your house and they started saying a bunch of really offensive things, you can kick them out of your house.

01:07:03.000 But that's your own house.

01:07:04.000 It's a private house.

01:07:05.000 But when your house is the world and you get to decide what's offensive and what's not and other people disagree, the problem is you're stifling people.

01:07:15.000 Free speech.

01:07:16.000 And you're stifling the ability for people to make up their own mind as to what is and what isn't offensive, what's correct and what's incorrect.

01:07:23.000 And, you know, it's been said a million times.

01:07:26.000 I've said it a million times.

01:07:27.000 But the answer to bad speech is not censorship.

01:07:31.000 It's better speech.

01:07:32.000 It's more accurate speech.

01:07:34.000 It's like you have to win the battle of ideas.

01:07:37.000 And much like a lot of these intellectuals that you were talking about that want to silence Alternative perspectives on campus, you see the same thing on social media.

01:07:48.000 People that have these ideological perspectives where they've steadfast adhered to this left-wing agenda, they don't want to engage with anyone that has a disparaging opinion.

01:08:00.000 Or a differing opinion.

01:08:02.000 They don't want to.

01:08:03.000 They just want to kick those people off, deplatform them, deplatform them, and they yell it out because it's been effective with people in the past.

01:08:10.000 They've gotten rid of people like Milo.

01:08:11.000 They've gotten rid of Gavin McGinnis and Alex Jones and a lot of these people.

01:08:15.000 They've canceled their voice.

01:08:18.000 I think by doing so, they've done themselves a disservice, whether they recognize it or not.

01:08:23.000 They've done discourse a disservice.

01:08:26.000 They've done free speech a disservice.

01:08:28.000 And they've created this tyranny of information, where they've decided that they're the ones who get to decide what gets disseminated and what doesn't.

01:08:37.000 It's very dangerous.

01:08:39.000 Yeah, you know, ten years ago, I think it was in 2010, So I have a column on Psychology Today where I publish these short psychology articles on all sorts of interesting topics.

01:08:52.000 I haven't been writing for them as often these days, but when I started in 2008, I was a very heavy contributor.

01:08:58.000 And at the time, probably the most popular blogger...

01:09:01.000 At Psychology Today was an evolutionary psychologist by the name of Satoshi Kanazawa, who is a professor at the London School of Economics in England.

01:09:11.000 And he was a very sort of bombastic guy, very politically irreverent, used language that was perhaps at times, you know, unadvisable.

01:09:20.000 And he had published an article where he was talking about research, not his research, he was describing someone else's research, where they had done a study looking at Differences in how women across different races were perceived in terms of their beauty.

01:09:38.000 And the results had not come out in a way that was politically correct, if you follow what I mean.

01:09:44.000 Now, the way that he had handled that particular topic It seemed maybe a bit bombastic.

01:09:50.000 Maybe it wasn't the right words.

01:09:52.000 But right away, there was a huge call to get rid of him from Psychology Today, which happened.

01:09:58.000 But they also wanted to get him fired from his tenure position.

01:10:02.000 And I had written an article, and I think I was the only one who had written a public article, where You can still go find it on my column, where I said, you know, purging a blogger sets a dangerous precedent.

01:10:13.000 If Satoshi Kanazawa's words are wrong, what better punishment is there than to keep his words up there, because the light of the sun will forevermore condemn him, right?

01:10:26.000 What's the point of getting rid of him?

01:10:28.000 But, of course, people didn't listen to my warnings, and now it's become common ground to get rid of anybody with whom we disagree.

01:10:37.000 Yeah, I go back to – have you ever seen the documentary where – what is his name?

01:10:48.000 William F. Buckley.

01:10:50.000 Oh, yes.

01:10:51.000 And what was the other gentleman?

01:10:53.000 He was – Corbin.

01:11:24.000 Oh, thank you.

01:11:24.000 I think was very rewarding for people.

01:11:26.000 And we don't do that now.

01:11:28.000 We don't have that anymore.

01:11:29.000 We don't have these open discussions where an intellectual on the left like Gore Vidal and an intellectual on the right like William F. Buckley can engage in this sort of intellectual combat and we could see who rises and whose ideas resonate with more people.

01:11:47.000 And I think it was around that time where Thomas Sowell was smacking down what we today would call social justice warriors when we were all in diapers, right?

01:12:00.000 I mean, I think if you go back to the 60s and 70s, some of the interventions that Thomas Sowell had on many of the issues that we're still debating and discussing today, he was doing that in the 60s and 70s when we were in diapers, right?

01:12:14.000 This is a guy, by the way, I don't know if you've ever reached out to try to get him on your show.

01:12:18.000 This is someone that I think you'd want to have on your show.

01:12:21.000 I would love to have him on.

01:12:21.000 Yeah, I would love to have him on in person.

01:12:23.000 But unfortunately, that's not really possible right now.

01:12:25.000 But yeah, Thomas Sowell is a guy who's quoted regularly on Twitter.

01:12:28.000 And oftentimes by people that you would think of...

01:12:33.000 I mean, what he's done essentially is had this entire career of doing this well ahead of the curve.

01:12:42.000 And started out his life as a liberal.

01:12:45.000 And sort of along the way, reformed his opinions and changed them and became more pragmatic.

01:12:51.000 And yeah, I'd like to see honest discussions with a guy like Thomas Sowell and someone who disagrees with him.

01:12:57.000 And I guess to do it on prime time now would actually be a waste.

01:13:03.000 Really, we want to do it on a forum like this.

01:13:06.000 We want to do it on the internet.

01:13:08.000 Do you think there would ever be a context where some of the powers that be will kind of wake up to the power of your platform and try to replicate it in mainstream media?

01:13:21.000 Or do you think it's simply too corrosive to actually allow two people who have different positions to share the same stage?

01:13:30.000 I think the only way to do something like this is to have a very small amount of people involved.

01:13:35.000 And when you do something on mainstream media just by definition, you're going to have an enormous group of people.

01:13:42.000 You're going to have investors, you're going to have network executives, you're going to have producers, you're going to have writers, you're going to have all sorts of people that And many of them, a vast majority,

01:13:57.000 have a very liberal and left-wing ideology.

01:14:02.000 And to have the ability to have on whoever you want, you really need a singular person.

01:14:09.000 A singular voice, like a singular mind, who is curious about a bunch of different issues, who's not easily influenced by people on the outside and their criticisms and their intimidation.

01:14:23.000 People are intimidated by attacks and criticisms and insults, and so they'll change the way they participate, the way they communicate, and what they put out based on that intimidation.

01:14:38.000 I'm sorry, that's what happens, by the way, when there are presidential debates where the moderators are typically less than ideal in terms of their expressed bias.

01:14:48.000 And that's why I was very excited.

01:14:49.000 And I think I had even shared when the rumor was coming out that, you know, you'd be willing to moderate a debate between Biden and Trump. 0.96

01:14:58.000 I thought, God damn, that's a great idea.

01:15:00.000 Whatever happened with that? 0.99

01:15:01.000 Did either of their camps reach out to you or did you connect with them?

01:15:05.000 What happened with that whole story?

01:15:06.000 Trump was all in.

01:15:08.000 He was all in.

01:15:09.000 He wanted to do it.

01:15:10.000 Yeah, he tweeted it.

01:15:11.000 I mean, he wanted to do it.

01:15:12.000 He contacted people that contacted me to do it, but I never reached out to the Biden people.

01:15:17.000 I felt like if they wanted to do it, they would reach out to me.

01:15:20.000 And if they did, I would have done it.

01:15:23.000 But I just don't think that's a good forum for him.

01:15:25.000 I mean, as we've seen, the debates themselves, specifically the last debate, was not good for him.

01:15:31.000 But what I would have done is, like when he was saying that I've never said I was going to ban fracking, Jamie would have just pulled up video of him saying, I'm going to ban fracking.

01:15:40.000 And that would have been horrible for him.

01:15:42.000 It would have been much better in terms of getting some clarity on what he's actually said and what he's actually done.

01:15:48.000 And then the other things about saying that his son never received any money from Russia, that's a lie.

01:15:54.000 It's been disproven.

01:15:55.000 It hasn't been disproven.

01:15:56.000 He knows it hasn't been disproven, but he knows that he can say that on the air and no one's going to call him on it.

01:16:01.000 I would have stopped the moderation.

01:16:02.000 I would have stopped the thing where I go, sir, we're going to pull up these articles and I want you to tell me what about these articles is infactual.

01:16:11.000 What's a lie?

01:16:13.000 And are you sure?

01:16:15.000 Would you be willing to say this in court?

01:16:18.000 Would you be willing to risk perjury?

01:16:20.000 Would you say this in front of a judge?

01:16:25.000 Because you could be in real trouble if you did that.

01:16:27.000 But you could just lie in a debate and the moderators don't check you.

01:16:30.000 No one says anything about it.

01:16:32.000 No one Googles it.

01:16:33.000 Why can't they just pull up a story?

01:16:35.000 Pull up a video?

01:16:37.000 I mean, the fracking thing was particularly egregious.

01:16:39.000 Yeah, well, there's only one Jamie.

01:16:41.000 He's right here.

01:16:42.000 We're not giving him up.

01:16:43.000 But someone could have done that.

01:16:45.000 And it would have been much better for the American public to just stop everybody in their tracks.

01:16:50.000 And also, why do they have two minutes to answer?

01:16:53.000 That's so antiquated. 0.99

01:16:54.000 This is so ridiculous. 0.97

01:16:55.000 The idea that you're talking about something that literally can affect the free world. 0.95

01:16:59.000 The decision of who gets control of the United States of America, what party is in control, and that you're going to put some arbitrary two-minute time limit on these discussions is crazy. 0.98

01:17:11.000 It's so ridiculous.

01:17:13.000 And also, the format is confined by these time blocks that they have, this 90-minute time block. 0.53

01:17:20.000 You shouldn't have a 90-minute time block.

01:17:22.000 You should start it at agreed-upon time, 6 p.m.

01:17:26.000 or whatever, whatever you want to do, and then...

01:17:29.000 Work it out.

01:17:30.000 Like, Abraham Lincoln and some of the speeches that he gave when he was running for president, they were hours and hours long.

01:17:36.000 And he was talking without a microphone in, you know, like a town square and discussing these ideas that he had.

01:17:42.000 And they would last forever.

01:17:43.000 And that's how you find out what a person thinks and believes.

01:17:48.000 But now, with the tools that we have available, the fact that they don't use those tools during a presidential debate.

01:17:53.000 Fact check Trump.

01:17:54.000 When he lies about something, pull it up.

01:17:57.000 Show that he's not telling the truth.

01:17:58.000 Show what he actually said.

01:18:00.000 Show what he actually did, as opposed to what he said he's doing.

01:18:03.000 Call him out on it.

01:18:04.000 Call Biden out on it.

01:18:05.000 Let's get to the bottom of this.

01:18:06.000 But even though those tools are available, Mainstream media would have to give away control.

01:18:13.000 They would give away control of their ability to navigate and steer this narrative.

01:18:19.000 The narrative that they're trying to steer, the bias that they're trying to exert on our election process, is really offensive.

01:18:29.000 It should be offensive to people.

01:18:31.000 It should be offensive that they have the ability to Google whether or not Joe Biden really did say he would never ban fracking.

01:18:38.000 And they didn't.

01:18:39.000 Why would you not pull up a video that's readily available online and say, sir, we're going to pause here for a moment.

01:18:44.000 We're going to play this video and tell me what you meant when you said you were going to ban fracking.

01:18:49.000 Tell me what you meant when you said you were going to embrace the Green New Deal. 0.98

01:18:53.000 Tell me what you said when you said that you were going to do whatever the fuck he lied about and pull it up. 0.96

01:19:00.000 I think for me, what amazes me about when he says things like that, and I suspect maybe we can say the same thing about Trump, although I can't remember quite the same types of lies. 1.00

01:19:11.000 Trump usually lies about, you know, my penis is the biggest. 0.99

01:19:14.000 The women have told me I'm the greatest lover ever. 1.00

01:19:16.000 Look at the number of people.

01:19:19.000 It's bombastic boasting.

01:19:21.000 Whereas the other guy is basically saying things that are demonstrably false.

01:19:26.000 And the only thing I can think of that could explain sort of the chutzpah of engaging in these types of lies It's as if Joe Biden's brain still exists in the 1940s where he doesn't know that there is this thing called Google and computers where we can quickly have Jamie fact check you,

01:19:48.000 right?

01:19:49.000 So in the same way that he does the corn pop story, which is difficult to know if he's telling the truth or not, because again, it happened in the 60s or 70s or whatever, he could say something thinking that it can't be falsified.

01:20:04.000 Because how else could you logically explain that he would engage in such lies, right?

01:20:10.000 Well, not only that, how is the Democratic Party not saying, hey, this is a mistake?

01:20:15.000 And the whole idea that there's a deadline to this process and it all has to be done in a certain amount of time and this is how we have to do it, it's like, boy, it's so weird.

01:20:25.000 It's so weird that they're such an important decision.

01:20:28.000 Sorry, I'm just stretching my neck.

01:20:30.000 Sorry about that.

01:20:32.000 Are you willing today to make a prediction?

01:20:34.000 I'm not asking you to tell me who you're voting for, but are you willing to make a prediction in terms of who you think is going to win?

01:20:41.000 I do not know who's going to win, and my concern is it's not going to matter in terms of a sense of peace in the United States.

01:20:49.000 My concern is that if Trump wins, people are going to be furious, and if Joe Biden wins, people are going to be furious.

01:20:55.000 I think there's asymmetry.

01:20:59.000 I think that...

01:21:00.000 If Trump wins, the lunacy will be much greater than if Biden wins.

01:21:07.000 I think if Biden wins, of course people are going to be disappointed and upset, but the manner by which that disappointment will manifest itself, in my view, won't be as drastic as if Trump wins.

01:21:18.000 I think if Trump wins, I'm going to be hiding under my desk forevermore.

01:21:24.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:21:25.000 Maybe you're correct.

01:21:26.000 I hope you're not.

01:21:27.000 You know, I really wish that people...

01:21:30.000 You know, one of the things that Trump said that was really kind of interesting during the debates, or was it?

01:21:34.000 No, it was during the 60 Minutes interview, which was...

01:21:37.000 I don't know if you saw that, but...

01:21:40.000 I saw the one that was...

01:21:42.000 That ran on 60 Minutes, not the one that he released.

01:21:44.000 Did you see both?

01:21:45.000 Yes, you should see the one that he released.

01:21:47.000 Because the one that he released, it's like this woman was so antagonistic. 0.97

01:21:52.000 The way she interviewed him, it's not the way to interview anyone.

01:21:58.000 And it's definitely not the way to interview someone who's going to be the President of the United States.

01:22:01.000 I understand that he overpowers conversations.

01:22:05.000 I understand that he does that.

01:22:07.000 But I also think that this is also a function of the fact that you only have 35 minutes to talk to this guy.

01:22:12.000 And so he can just filibuster.

01:22:14.000 He can just keep going.

01:22:15.000 He can just talk over you.

01:22:17.000 He can ramble.

01:22:17.000 He can say things that aren't true.

01:22:19.000 He can rant and rave and do the things that he does when he does the campaign rallies.

01:22:24.000 It's not...

01:22:25.000 That's not the ideal way to get to him, to really find out what he's really all about.

01:22:31.000 The ideal way would be like this.

01:22:32.000 Sit down at a podcast and have him here for four hours and have him sit down and talk and then stop him when he says things and stop him and go, but hold on, okay, understand, sir, sir, let's check that and tell me Tell me why you said that when you said the biggest attendance ever for his inauguration,

01:22:54.000 and then you go and see this big open field, and then you compare it to Obama's inauguration.

01:22:59.000 It's packed.

01:22:59.000 So many more people.

01:23:01.000 Clearly, there's more people in this photo.

01:23:03.000 Why is that?

01:23:04.000 Is this propaganda?

01:23:05.000 Did someone Photoshop it?

01:23:06.000 Or are you exaggerating?

01:23:08.000 Because you kind of exaggerate.

01:23:10.000 I know it's part of his personality to make fun and exaggerate.

01:23:14.000 He's an entertainer first, right?

01:23:16.000 He's a businessman first, but became an entertainer and knows really well how to say outrageous and then Yeah.

01:23:44.000 They were constantly talking about him.

01:23:46.000 I mean, it was really a brilliant strategy.

01:23:47.000 He would say outrageous things.

01:23:49.000 They would take those outrageous things, put them on TV. People would laugh, and they would go, I like him.

01:23:54.000 And the mainstream media was like, no!

01:23:56.000 Their strategy didn't work.

01:23:58.000 It backfired.

01:23:59.000 Do you feel as though...

01:24:02.000 A lot of the media, it's as if the humor module in their brain is completely lacking because I watch when Trump does his trolling.

01:24:13.000 And again, people always wrongly presume that whenever I take some position, it is a manifestation of the fact that, you know, I must have posters of Trump in my bedroom, which my wife and I use as foreplay aid, which of course...

01:24:30.000 It's not the case at all.

01:24:31.000 I'm just coming as an impartial guy from Canada.

01:24:34.000 I don't have a dog in the fight.

01:24:35.000 And I'm always telling people, well, wait a second, aren't you being a bit too tribal?

01:24:39.000 And so that's really the extent of when I engage the topic.

01:24:42.000 And so I will objectively listen to something that Trump said, and I will crack up laughing because I actually think it's funny.

01:24:50.000 And so, for example, when he says, you know, I guess...

01:24:55.000 When I finish my fourth term running, of course, because he is trolling, right?

01:25:01.000 So they go crazy. 0.73

01:25:02.000 He's a dictator. 0.60

01:25:04.000 So how do you explain the fact that a Adult with a functioning brain who's called a journalist is unable to recognize that when he says in my fourth term, he is just joking.

01:25:17.000 What explains that disconnect in your view?

01:25:20.000 Well, I don't think that they can ignore it because I think that they have been programmed to catch people saying outrageous things and expose those things.

01:25:26.000 So when he says outrageous things on purpose, they can't help themselves.

01:25:32.000 And then people go, but you know he's just joking.

01:25:35.000 And they see that juicy carrot and they just run towards it.

01:25:40.000 And they don't realize it's on a stick.

01:25:41.000 And they're like, where's the... 1.00

01:25:43.000 Give me that fucking carrot! 1.00

01:25:44.000 And they can't get the carrot. 1.00

01:25:46.000 It's very strange.

01:25:48.000 But it's also, he's playing on their strategy, which has always been to catch people saying things that are unfortunate.

01:25:56.000 But he says unfortunate things on purpose.

01:25:58.000 And so it's so confusing to them.

01:26:01.000 He's hacked their little system.

01:26:04.000 See, my feeling is that if you sat down with Trump You could have a fun time with him, but it will always be on his terms. 0.99

01:26:13.000 He needs to be the funniest guy in the room, the coolest guy, the guy with the biggest dick. 0.97

01:26:19.000 And so as long as you grant him that space, he could actually be a fun guy to have dinner with. 0.95

01:26:26.000 Whereas again, from distance, when I look at someone like Barack Obama, I don't get the feeling that I would like this guy. 0.83

01:26:34.000 He strikes me as Haughty, arrogant.

01:26:37.000 And again, I'm basing it simply on the fact that I see how they act from a distance.

01:26:42.000 What's your view?

01:26:43.000 Do you get a similar sort of personal feeling about these guys?

01:26:47.000 No, I don't.

01:26:48.000 I have a completely different opinion on Barack Obama.

01:26:50.000 I think he'd be a great guy to talk to.

01:26:52.000 I'm a big fan of his as a human being.

01:26:54.000 I like the way he communicates.

01:26:56.000 I think in terms of a representative of the United States, you can never find a better person.

01:27:01.000 He's well-educated, extremely eloquent.

01:27:05.000 He's calm no matter what.

01:27:07.000 He's always reserved.

01:27:09.000 The way he communicates is smooth.

01:27:11.000 He's presidential.

01:27:13.000 He's exactly what Trump is not.

01:27:14.000 He's a statesman, a perfect statesman, probably the best one we've ever had.

01:27:19.000 And I think that there's one benefit of a guy like that is that we look at someone who's a president as a representative of the best aspect of the United States.

01:27:28.000 When you look at a guy who came from a single mother, came from poverty, and rose to become a lawyer, a senator, and then ultimately the President of the United States, and you see him and you go, wow, that's an admirable person.

01:27:43.000 If that was my son, I'd be immensely proud of the way he speaks.

01:27:48.000 The way he carries himself.

01:27:50.000 Now, if you want to get into policies, if you want to get into some of the things that they've done, it's not as impressive as you would have hoped when he was running for president, particularly in the defense of whistleblowers.

01:28:02.000 Their take on whistleblowers in the press was some of the worst that any administration's ever had.

01:28:08.000 But you also could say, I don't know how much the president Actually has control of that, how much power they really have.

01:28:17.000 I tend to believe that our view of the president is grossly distorted in terms of their real amount of influence over policy and decision making, particularly in terms of national security measures,

01:28:34.000 whistleblowers, things along those lines.

01:28:35.000 I think the intelligence community has far more power than we believe And I think once a person gets into, and not just the intelligence community, special interest groups, lobbyists, you know, the money and the power that got them into that position leaves them so ultimately compromised that they get into office and then they realize the task at hand.

01:28:53.000 And also I think then they're probably briefed on the real problems internationally, the real problems security-wise in the world, the real problems that we have with our national security issues.

01:29:04.000 I think it's probably terrifying.

01:29:05.000 I think they probably have to amend all the ideas that they had, these idealistic notions that they had when they were running for office, and then they have to sort of regather and just have a new approach.

01:29:17.000 Obama's positions on a lot of things that he had when he was running for president, like, first of all, how did he never legalize marijuana?

01:29:24.000 How did he never federally legalize marijuana?

01:29:28.000 A guy who smoked it.

01:29:29.000 There's photos of him smoking it.

01:29:31.000 Why would you want to keep people locked away when you know that the United States has incarcerated so many people of color for decades and decades for a plant that makes them happy? 1.00

01:29:41.000 How was it possible that you got out of office and didn't do that your entire time?

01:29:47.000 I don't understand.

01:29:48.000 How is it possible that you didn't exonerate a lot of the people that were in jail for nonviolent drug offenses?

01:29:54.000 How did you not reform our definitions of what's legal and what's not legal?

01:30:02.000 What is Schedule 1?

01:30:03.000 What is Schedule 2?

01:30:04.000 What is Schedule 3?

01:30:05.000 How did you not change the laws in terms of what people can be locked in a cage for?

01:30:11.000 And when you're seeing...

01:30:13.000 States like Colorado, then ultimately California and all these other states becoming states where it was legal in the state.

01:30:21.000 Why is it not legal federally?

01:30:22.000 We all understand that it's safer.

01:30:25.000 And people could say, well, why do you worry about marijuana?

01:30:27.000 Because it's a personal freedom issue.

01:30:29.000 And it's not real.

01:30:32.000 The dangers, the reasoning for keeping it illegal, they're not real.

01:30:38.000 They don't work.

01:30:39.000 We know it's propaganda. 1.00

01:30:40.000 We know it's bullshit. 0.99

01:30:41.000 And we know it, especially when you look at the revenue that's been generated by these states like Colorado and California and Washington and Oregon, all these states that have made it legal. 0.99

01:30:50.000 You realize it would be of great benefit to these places.

01:30:53.000 And now there was an article recently about Texas doing it.

01:30:57.000 It would be of great benefit financially.

01:31:00.000 People are still buying it.

01:31:02.000 The United States is not getting the taxes from it. 1.00

01:31:04.000 And it's foolish. 0.58

01:31:06.000 You can only say that there's got to be some other motivation. 0.97

01:31:12.000 And that motivation is probably the people... 0.64

01:31:15.000 That run pharmaceutical companies and all these other special interests that don't want it to be legal because it would fuck with their bottom line.

01:31:22.000 And it would interfere with the money that they have coming in.

01:31:26.000 And so that's very disappointing to me.

01:31:28.000 Very disappointing that Obama didn't do that.

01:31:31.000 Yeah, and I hear you.

01:31:32.000 And I guess from that perspective, you would like the fact that Justin Trudeau did legalize marijuana.

01:31:38.000 Yes, I'd like it.

01:31:39.000 Although I did notice that... 1.00

01:31:43.000 Your views on your boyfriend, Justin Trudeau, has changed greatly from the first time when I told you that he is a schmuck. 0.99

01:31:50.000 You now believe he's a schmuck, but you used to think he was a pretty boy, a lovely guy, right? 0.99

01:31:54.000 He's a beautiful man. 0.99

01:31:55.000 He's beautiful.

01:31:56.000 He's very handsome.

01:31:57.000 Yes, but I want to come back for a second too.

01:32:00.000 So as a psychologist who studies psychology and decision making, of course, I'm interested in how people make decisions, and in this case, consequential decisions in terms of who's going to be president.

01:32:10.000 Back in 2003, I had published a paper looking at the decision rules that people use when choosing presidents.

01:32:20.000 And perhaps to your dismay, or perhaps you already have the intuition that this is happening, people don't use We have heavily cognitive justifications in choosing their presidents.

01:32:33.000 They use these very emotional-driven, fast and frugal heuristics in making decisions.

01:32:39.000 So, for example, when you and I were both speaking about Obama, that he's majestic and he has a mellifluous voice and he speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister and he's presidential, all those things might be true.

01:32:53.000 But it's exactly what I think I mentioned once on your show.

01:32:56.000 I'm gonna take this to be akin to the cork of a wine bottle.

01:33:02.000 There's an expression in Arabic that says, getting drunk by simply smelling the cork of the wine bottle, right?

01:33:07.000 You don't actually need to drink the whole wine before you get drunk.

01:33:12.000 All you need to do is smell the cork and you're already drunk.

01:33:15.000 And I think this is exactly what happens to people.

01:33:17.000 They look at Trump, They get drunk by the cork bottle, which basically says what? 0.93

01:33:22.000 He's vulgar, he's brazen, he's aggressive, he's grotesque. 0.80

01:33:26.000 They don't listen to his policies. 0.76

01:33:28.000 And similarly say with Obama.

01:33:30.000 And I wish people would spend more time actually, as you correctly pointed, engaging the policies.

01:33:36.000 So I'll give you an example.

01:33:37.000 I could have a colleague who hails against Critical race theory and how dreadful it is. 0.97

01:33:45.000 And then when Trump bans critical race theory as something to be taught to federal employees, he simply can't give him the kudos because, you know, bruh, he's so disgusting. 0.92

01:33:57.000 That's what I'm angry about, that people lose their ability to objectively look at people's policies rather than at the superficial clues of he looks majestic or he looks like a vulgar ogre. 0.95

01:34:12.000 You see what I mean?

01:34:12.000 I do.

01:34:13.000 I do.

01:34:13.000 And in that sense, he does himself a disservice in a lot of ways.

01:34:17.000 Well, a lot of people had hoped that once he got into office, he would become presidential, like he would shift.

01:34:22.000 That was the hope.

01:34:24.000 It absolutely didn't happen.

01:34:26.000 And when people catch him saying things that aren't true and he argues with them about it, then you're feeding the fire.

01:34:34.000 But also you have to realize, he's made enemies.

01:34:38.000 With so many groups, particularly groups of power that have been in place in the United States forever, like the intelligence communities.

01:34:47.000 He's the enemy of a lot of the intelligence communities, particularly the FBI. I mean, they've shown that they were actively trying to get rid of him.

01:34:56.000 And then there was a lot of the people in the intelligence community that decided that he was going to be someone that they attacked.

01:35:03.000 And that's just crazy. 0.98

01:35:04.000 I mean, we talked about it yesterday with Glenn Greenwald where he discussed how Chuck Schumer had openly said that it's so foolish for Trump to attack the intelligence communities and become an enemy of the intelligence community and that it's going to prove to be foolish. 0.97

01:35:21.000 As a threat.

01:35:22.000 The intelligence communities were going to go after him, and they obviously have.

01:35:27.000 That seems to me...

01:35:29.000 It's fascinating to see it. 0.98

01:35:32.000 It's fascinating to see these mechanisms being put into place and these stories like the Steele dossier where he's got Russian hookers peeing on him and all that jazz. 0.71

01:35:41.000 And the fact that that was printed and they talked about that on CNN and it was printed in major newspapers as...

01:35:49.000 You know, a possible true story.

01:35:52.000 All that is so bizarre to see.

01:35:54.000 It's so bizarre to see his personality flaws amplified and weaponized and did not concentrate on just the policies.

01:36:02.000 But in many ways, he's done that to himself.

01:36:05.000 Yeah.

01:36:06.000 Do you know who Victor Davis Hanson is?

01:36:08.000 No, I don't.

01:36:10.000 He's a classicist who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford who has written a book, I'm promoting his book now rather than my own, but who has written a book about why you should have voted for Trump and so on.

01:36:25.000 And because he is a classicist who has studied Greek mythology, he analogizes Trump to the classic example of Sophocles of the tragic hero, right?

01:36:37.000 You know, you get the feeling that Trump simply wants someone, maybe because he is narcissistic, he wants someone to say, good job, here's where you did well.

01:36:46.000 And the fact that he could never get the mainstream media to even remotely be minimally fair.

01:36:54.000 You know, if you ban critical race theory, or if you support, you know, absolute free speech, you should be congratulated for that.

01:37:04.000 Irrespective of your political stripe.

01:37:06.000 But yet because they simply could never give him any kudos for anything, then his bombastic sort of bragging gets amplified because he is the tragic hero saying, look, what do I need to do to get you to just tap me on the back ones?

01:37:23.000 And I think that Victor Davidson's Hanson's analogizing with the classic tragic Greek hero is exactly spot on for Trump.

01:37:32.000 But it is unfortunate that he has this desire to get them to pat him on the back because he's never going to get it.

01:37:39.000 He's never going to get it.

01:37:40.000 You're right.

01:37:41.000 By the way, you mentioned Glenn Greenwald.

01:37:43.000 In the past, I sort of always thought of him as kind of lefty, progressive, don't pay attention to him.

01:37:49.000 But I've seen him several times appear on Tucker Carlson, which is, of course, a show that you shouldn't appear on because it's Fox News and so on.

01:37:57.000 And I've always found him to be incredibly fair.

01:38:02.000 I have to apologize to him here on the record that I thought of him in the past as sort of this really annoying kind of progressive guy, but I actually find him to be incredibly fair-minded in the way that he handles these types of issues.

01:38:17.000 I mean, do you agree with that?

01:38:18.000 I couldn't agree more.

01:38:19.000 And I think that's one of the reasons why he decided to go on Tucker Carlson in the first place, is to expose his way of thinking to a lot of people that may have had these predetermined ideas of him, these prejudiced ideas of him.

01:38:31.000 You know, it's funny because he actually had the same opinion of me.

01:38:35.000 You know, like when we did a podcast yesterday, he was like, I saw you before. 0.99

01:38:39.000 I thought he was some guy who platformed too many of these alt-right assholes and he hates trans people. 0.98

01:38:44.000 And he goes, and then I started listening to your show. 0.99

01:38:46.000 He's like, oh, he's not that at all. 0.94

01:38:48.000 And, you know, it's easy to have this sort of reductionist perspective of someone and decide, oh, that guy, he's a wacky, leftist, progressive, just ridiculous ideas.

01:39:01.000 But Glenn Greenwald is an honest man, and he's a man of principles, and he's courageous, and that's why he released the Snowden papers, and that's why...

01:39:10.000 He's done a lot of very important work in Brazil, and he's hated for it by some groups and loved by others.

01:39:17.000 He's taken a lot of chances, and I find him to be incredibly intellectually honest, and he's also willing to discuss some real landmine issues, real hot-button topics.

01:39:29.000 We got into some of them yesterday, and I respect him very much.

01:39:33.000 I mean, he strikes me as...

01:39:35.000 The journalist that we had 20, 30 years ago.

01:39:39.000 The real truth seeker.

01:39:42.000 Yeah, of course we all come with our political preferences.

01:39:45.000 But once you put on the hat of the journalist, you're supposed to keep those at the door.

01:39:49.000 And he really strikes me as a journalist of a bygone era.

01:39:53.000 And so kudos to him.

01:39:54.000 Hats off.

01:39:55.000 Yeah, I respect him a lot.

01:39:57.000 I think there are generalists like him, Matt Taibbi.

01:40:00.000 There's quite a few of them out there that are sticking their neck out, and they take a lot of attacks because of that.

01:40:07.000 But we need more of them.

01:40:08.000 We need more people that are going...

01:40:12.000 We're good to go.

01:40:28.000 Yeah.

01:40:29.000 Can I switch topics completely?

01:40:32.000 Sure.

01:40:32.000 So I wanted to ask you something, and I hope it's not inappropriate for me to bring it up.

01:40:37.000 So you recently obtained a huge deal with Spotify, of course, putting you in a whole new category in terms of wealth.

01:40:44.000 Has that reality altered your felt level of happiness?

01:40:49.000 And let me explain why I say this, because I receive countless emails from people who say similar things to you, similar things to what you said at the start of our show today, where you said, you know, you always seem so happy and positive and all this kind of stuff.

01:41:05.000 And I always try to give them an answer in terms of, you know, what are some pathways to happiness?

01:41:10.000 And maybe I'll write my next book on this topic.

01:41:13.000 And I always tell people that, you know, don't rely really on money.

01:41:16.000 I mean, money in a sense, it's an inverted U. Up to a certain point, having more money makes you happier.

01:41:23.000 But beyond that point, it's diminishing returns.

01:41:25.000 There's an inflection point where it doesn't really alter your level of happiness in any way.

01:41:30.000 Would that be correct of you in that the fact that you've got this huge deal doesn't really alter your, you know, global holistic level of happiness?

01:41:39.000 No, it doesn't make me any happier.

01:41:41.000 No.

01:41:42.000 I'm happy when I can do stand-up, and I can't really do stand-up right now.

01:41:45.000 I'm happy when I can do podcasts.

01:41:47.000 I'm very fortunate I can do that.

01:41:48.000 I'm happy my family's healthy.

01:41:50.000 I'm happy I have good friends.

01:41:51.000 Those things are still there.

01:41:53.000 Those are the things that make me happy.

01:41:55.000 I'm happy to be able to talk to someone like you.

01:41:56.000 I'm happy to be able to express myself.

01:42:00.000 I'm not a guy who needs a lot of money for stuff.

01:42:03.000 I don't live the most extravagant life. 0.71

01:42:06.000 I dress like a bum.

01:42:09.000 I haven't really changed much about that kind of stuff.

01:42:13.000 I think that, if anything, it brings more pressure because once people realize you're making a lot of money and they put you in a different category, then they start criticizing you more.

01:42:22.000 Yeah.

01:42:43.000 That person's opinions and perspectives because it fits your narrative and it helps you criticize them easier.

01:42:50.000 No, it definitely hasn't.

01:42:52.000 But also, I didn't trust...

01:42:54.000 I think it's good to be with a company that...

01:43:00.000 Has an interest in your show being successful.

01:43:04.000 Right.

01:43:16.000 They want the show to be successful.

01:43:18.000 They have an interest in it being successful.

01:43:20.000 Financial interest in it being successful.

01:43:22.000 And also, the head of Spotify was a fan.

01:43:24.000 He likes listening to it.

01:43:26.000 He didn't want it to change.

01:43:27.000 And we've gotten insurance that it wasn't going to change.

01:43:31.000 And a lot of people were really concerned.

01:43:32.000 Like, now you're going to have a different kind of a show.

01:43:35.000 No, I'm just going to do the exact same show.

01:43:36.000 There's been zero input in terms of someone telling me, hey, don't talk like that.

01:43:42.000 Don't say this.

01:43:43.000 Don't bring these subjects.

01:43:44.000 There's been none of that.

01:43:45.000 As much as people speculate there has, there's been none of it.

01:43:49.000 But it doesn't make you happier.

01:43:51.000 Yeah.

01:43:52.000 You're happy when you don't have to worry.

01:43:55.000 When you don't have to worry about your bills.

01:43:56.000 That's when money makes you the happiest.

01:43:59.000 That's the big leap.

01:44:00.000 Because I remember when I first got my first development deal and I went from being really poor and not having any idea how I was going to pay my rent...

01:44:09.000 To having a lot of money in the bank, having like six figures in the bank, and then this huge weight lift off my shoulders.

01:44:17.000 I remember that feeling.

01:44:18.000 I remember the feeling like once I looked at my bank account like, whew, I don't have to worry about my bills for the first time in my life.

01:44:26.000 There you were on the increasing part of the curve, right?

01:44:29.000 You were, in other words, more money led to greater happiness.

01:44:32.000 But then you get to a point where there's diminishing return, whether you have 10 million or 30 million or 100 million, doesn't add one millimeter of happiness to your global life.

01:44:43.000 No, it doesn't.

01:44:43.000 But what it can do is add more pressure.

01:44:47.000 And that can actually make you less happy.

01:44:49.000 And then you also, like I said, you're the target of more criticism.

01:44:53.000 That can make you less happy if you pay attention to it.

01:44:55.000 But what I've done is ramp up my physical exercise, my meditation, and my, as in California at least, my yoga.

01:45:04.000 I haven't really been pursuing that out here, but I've been doing a lot of exercise.

01:45:07.000 And as long as I have physical struggle, like a tremendous amount of physical struggle, I'm really good at letting the rest of it just wash off my back because I give myself so much physical struggle.

01:45:24.000 My workouts are so intense that whatever the pain or the frustration or the difficulty of criticism, it pales in comparison to what I do to myself.

01:45:38.000 And it sounds like a crazy person's approach to things, but I've really got a method to my madness.

01:45:44.000 In terms of the way my mind works, I work out like I'm training for something, like I have some insanely difficult physical task ahead of me that I have to prepare my body for.

01:45:55.000 But I really do.

01:45:56.000 That task is maintaining sanity.

01:46:00.000 My body has a lot of requirements.

01:46:03.000 And because I am in this high-pressure, sort of stressful situation with this place that I find myself in where there's a skeleton crew of people, me and Jamie mostly,

01:46:19.000 that reach...

01:46:21.000 Millions of people all over the world.

01:46:23.000 How did this ever happen? 0.99

01:46:24.000 If I just sat around and thought about all those people listening and all the people that are mad at me and all the people that love me and the expectations and the criticisms, I'd lose my fucking mind. 0.99

01:46:34.000 I really would. 0.99

01:46:35.000 And if I got into it...

01:46:37.000 And I start engaging with those people and arguing with those people all day.

01:46:40.000 I would have no time for my family.

01:46:41.000 I have no time for anything.

01:46:43.000 So I consult with myself.

01:46:45.000 I think about it myself.

01:46:47.000 I spend time meditating.

01:46:49.000 I do deep breathing exercises in the sauna. 1.00

01:46:51.000 And I work out like a fucking terrorist. 1.00

01:46:53.000 And then at the end of the day, I'm okay. 1.00

01:46:56.000 And I can keep doing that.

01:46:58.000 Do you ever have the noisy brain where you're trying to sleep but you're thinking about 33,000 things?

01:47:06.000 Because I'm thinking of someone like you who has multiple careers so that the stressors could become...

01:47:12.000 It's not as though you're only a podcast host or only an MMA guy.

01:47:17.000 So is there a particular area where it's difficult to shut off your brain because you're uniquely worried about those particular stressors?

01:47:26.000 The biggest stressor are my own failings.

01:47:29.000 The biggest stressor are my own errors and the things that I've done wrong.

01:47:33.000 Those are the things that bother me.

01:47:35.000 When I've had a show where I wasn't at my best, or I said something that wasn't accurate, or I said it in a way where I could have done a better job of expressing myself, those are the things that bother me.

01:47:48.000 I am my biggest self-critic.

01:47:50.000 You know, it's so funny you say this because I'm going to relate what you just said to something that drives my behavior.

01:47:57.000 So when people tell me, why do you take on all these fights to fight against these bad ideas and it adds so much stress to your life?

01:48:06.000 I always tell them that I have, and it's going to speak exactly to what you said about yourself, I have a very exacting code of personal conduct So that I am truly my, you know, my most severe critic because I set the bar very high so that at the end of the night when I put my head on the pillow,

01:48:24.000 in order for me to not suffer from insomnia and to not feel like a fraud, I need to know that I've done Whatever I could to contribute to the battle of ideas.

01:48:34.000 Now, however big or however small, I don't have Joe Rogan's influence, but I certainly have some influence.

01:48:40.000 And so for me to be able to go to bed with my whole personhood intact, I need to feel as though I've done all that I can.

01:48:49.000 And that's what compels me to engage in the way that I do.

01:48:53.000 And so I really do appreciate what you said about sort of having this Now, it can be exhausting, right?

01:49:01.000 Because you become your worst critic.

01:49:03.000 Did I say the perfect thing?

01:49:05.000 Did I say the right thing?

01:49:06.000 Was I at my best?

01:49:07.000 But in a sense, maybe it's best for you to be your own critic rather than others to be your critics, right?

01:49:13.000 Yeah, I always tell people I'm not a fan of my work.

01:49:18.000 If anybody has criticisms, believe me, I have worse criticisms.

01:49:21.000 But I think that's a great regulatory mechanism.

01:49:24.000 And some people say, oh, I should take time to smell the roses.

01:49:26.000 I do outside of my work.

01:49:29.000 I do.

01:49:30.000 I love...

01:49:32.000 Friendships, and I love life, and I love my family, and I love a lot of things.

01:49:37.000 I love a lot of things.

01:49:38.000 But when it comes to my work, I'm pretty ruthless on myself.

01:49:42.000 But that's a great regulatory mechanism for keeping sanity with something that's public.

01:49:49.000 Because you're doing it publicly, so you are exposed to all these people's perspectives and views and criticisms and praise, and both of them are equally toxic, right?

01:49:58.000 The criticisms can change the way you feel about yourself to the point where you could lose all self-respect and hate yourself and just want to argue with everyone who doesn't like you, but also the praise.

01:50:09.000 You can get delusional and you can start to think that you are someone special, you are different than the rest, and you don't have to try as hard, and everything you do is amazing.

01:50:18.000 And that's probably worse.

01:50:20.000 I think it's probably better to be ruthlessly self-critical than ruthlessly self-congratulatory.

01:50:27.000 I think that's actually probably more toxic.

01:50:29.000 Not actually.

01:50:30.000 I definitely think it's more toxic. 1.00

01:50:32.000 And the people that I know that lean in that direction, they all turn to shit. 1.00

01:50:36.000 Like, their work suffers. 1.00

01:50:38.000 They lose their ability to understand whether or not they're doing something good or bad.

01:50:44.000 And one of the things that people always say when someone becomes successful is like, how do you remain relatable?

01:50:49.000 Like, how do you maintain clarity?

01:50:53.000 But that's the introspective part.

01:50:56.000 That's the ruthlessly introspective part.

01:50:59.000 I don't think I'm any different than anybody else.

01:51:01.000 And I'm constantly telling people, all I've ever done is just keep working and grinding.

01:51:08.000 And so if you're on a path and you're running...

01:51:12.000 Yeah.

01:51:34.000 10 years into the run and you go, look how far I've gone.

01:51:37.000 I am amazing.

01:51:38.000 I am the best.

01:51:39.000 I am above...

01:51:40.000 No, no, [...

01:51:41.000 You just kept going.

01:51:43.000 That's all you've done.

01:51:44.000 Anybody could keep going.

01:51:45.000 And you get better if you pay attention.

01:51:47.000 If you pay attention to what you're doing and you are ruthlessly critical and you do have those days where you do something that you don't like, well, then you don't do it that way anymore. 0.98

01:51:55.000 And then you think about what you did wrong, you think about what you could do better, and you apply that information, and you apply some hard work and some discipline, and you keep fucking going. 0.91

01:52:04.000 And as long as you do that, you're going to get better. 0.85

01:52:06.000 Even in something that doesn't seem like you get better at it, like with conversations.

01:52:10.000 But you do.

01:52:11.000 You do get better at it.

01:52:13.000 There's an art form to conversations where you can make it in a way where the people that are listening, it resonates.

01:52:21.000 It's nice to hear.

01:52:22.000 They like it.

01:52:24.000 Yeah, I think more than anything, there's an intimacy in these conversations, right?

01:52:29.000 I mean, right now, I could completely presume that there's nobody listening to us, and it's just two guys talking to each other in a very familiar, intimate way.

01:52:39.000 And I think people pick that up.

01:52:42.000 And even on my own show, I think that's exactly what happens.

01:52:45.000 I often notice when people come on the show before I turn on the camera, They're nervous.

01:52:49.000 But then I set them at ease and I say, look, forget about the fact that there's going to be some people watching.

01:52:54.000 Just have a normal conversation with me.

01:52:56.000 And then within five minutes, you see the morphology of their face change because they really just get into it.

01:53:02.000 And I think it really speaks to You know, there's this old kind of adage that, you know, people have short attention spans.

01:53:11.000 They want, you know, clips to be three minutes long.

01:53:14.000 And my goodness, has your show proven that to be, you know, about as incorrect as you can get?

01:53:19.000 Because again, people are, you're speaking in people's brains, right?

01:53:24.000 By the way, people were so upset when my latest book, I didn't do the narration because they had so gotten used to my voice I don't want to say hate mail because they were very polite.

01:53:36.000 They were fans.

01:53:37.000 But they said, we are so disappointed that you didn't narrate your own book.

01:53:42.000 Why didn't you?

01:53:44.000 Thank you for asking.

01:53:46.000 I asked the publisher.

01:53:48.000 The publisher sells the rights of the book to an audio publisher.

01:53:53.000 And I proposed to the audio publisher, look, I can narrate it myself.

01:53:57.000 And they said, no, we have in-house narrators.

01:54:01.000 And we're just going to go with that.

01:54:02.000 So I don't know if it's because they didn't want to set up the system for me to do it, or maybe they thought it wouldn't alter the bottom line sales.

01:54:10.000 But I proposed it, they said no, and I said fine.

01:54:13.000 That's a huge error on their part.

01:54:15.000 You think so?

01:54:16.000 Yes!

01:54:17.000 And I wish I had talked to you before and I would have had you insist that you narrate it.

01:54:21.000 Yeah, I agree with your fans. 1.00

01:54:23.000 Fuck that next book. 1.00

01:54:24.000 Redo this one, man. 1.00

01:54:26.000 Redo it.

01:54:27.000 I always tell people when you have as deep and as silky a voice as mine, if I were to narrate my own voice and my own book, it would be distracting.

01:54:37.000 So maybe I'm doing them a service by having a nasal guy read the book. 0.97

01:54:41.000 No, no.

01:54:42.000 Is there a way to fix this?

01:54:43.000 Can you contact them and redo it?

01:54:45.000 Maybe round two.

01:54:47.000 Oh man, they should do it right now.

01:54:49.000 They should do it right now.

01:54:50.000 Yes, 100%.

01:54:51.000 You should be narrating your own book, for sure.

01:54:54.000 First of all, they're your thoughts and your words and your writing.

01:54:57.000 Who better to read your writing than you?

01:55:00.000 It should only be you.

01:55:01.000 There should never have been a consideration that anybody else would do it.

01:55:04.000 I mean, my only concern, to be honest with you, was...

01:55:07.000 I mean, yes, you're right that the whole book should be narrated by me.

01:55:10.000 But because I use a lot of sarcasm and humor and satire and the book has a lot of personal anecdotes...

01:55:18.000 I was worried that the narrator might not be able to pick those.

01:55:22.000 Now, based on what Michael Shermer listened to the audiobook early, before it was released, and he said that the guy did a reasonably good job.

01:55:30.000 So I'm going on his opinion, but maybe you're right.

01:55:34.000 Maybe I should have done it otherwise.

01:55:35.000 Well, Shermer's being very charitable.

01:55:37.000 As good a job as that guy could be, it's like, listen, if you wanted to have someone read George Carlin's act, wouldn't that be offensive?

01:55:46.000 Wouldn't you want to hear those words from George Carlin's voice?

01:55:50.000 You would.

01:55:51.000 True.

01:55:52.000 That's the same way with your work, man.

01:55:54.000 There should have been no consideration whatsoever to anyone else doing it.

01:55:58.000 I'm going to take that small clip that we just had and I'm going to send it and shove it up the behinds of my publisher. 1.00

01:56:04.000 They're foolish. 0.99

01:56:04.000 They do that all the time. 0.99

01:56:05.000 They did it with my friend Steven Rinella.

01:56:07.000 And then as the rights ran out, he eventually got the rights and he has a book on the American Buffalo.

01:56:13.000 It's a fantastic book.

01:56:14.000 And it's a really brilliant book about his own journey to understand Native American Buffalo.

01:56:21.000 And it's a great book, but it's greater with his voice narrating it.

01:56:26.000 And he was upset because the publisher did not want him to narrate it initially, just like they did with you.

01:56:32.000 They had someone else do it.

01:56:34.000 They had no attachment to the words.

01:56:36.000 It didn't resonate.

01:56:37.000 It didn't mean anything to the guy.

01:56:39.000 He was just an actor reading. 0.99

01:56:40.000 And I'm sure the guy reading your shit is just an actor, too. 1.00

01:56:43.000 That's crazy. 1.00

01:56:45.000 Have you thought about maybe dipping your polymath toes into writing a book?

01:56:52.000 Yeah, I have.

01:56:53.000 I actually write a lot, and I've been writing a lot lately, especially during the pandemic.

01:56:57.000 I spent quite a few hours sitting down and thinking about that very thing.

01:57:03.000 I had a book deal in the past, but the...

01:57:08.000 The interaction that I have with the publishers and with an editor was so frustrating that I gave them their money back.

01:57:16.000 What was the problem?

01:57:18.000 They just wanted it to be like stand-up.

01:57:20.000 They wanted me to write stand-up, essentially.

01:57:22.000 And they even offered to pay me to just take my act and just transcribe it. 0.94

01:57:29.000 And I said, that's ridiculous. 0.54

01:57:30.000 That wouldn't work. 0.98

01:57:31.000 Don't do that.

01:57:33.000 That's crazy.

01:57:33.000 So then what's the audiobook going to be?

01:57:35.000 Me doing stand-up with no audience? 1.00

01:57:37.000 That's so dumb. 1.00

01:57:38.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

01:57:39.000 I'm not doing that.

01:57:41.000 And then I wrote some things and I wrote some weird things like my thoughts about sometimes I act as if life is a simulation.

01:57:52.000 I act with the knowledge that life is a simulation.

01:57:56.000 I literally go and I approach every interaction of my day occasionally with the idea that life is a simulation.

01:58:04.000 I did it in a humorous way but in a way that The concept is, of course you know this, if there is a simulation that's so good, you cannot discern whether or not it's a simulation.

01:58:17.000 How do we know whether or not we're in it right now?

01:58:19.000 And when you talk to really intelligent people that have studied this over and over again, they say it's highly likely that that is the case.

01:58:26.000 We will one day reach the point where simulations won't be discernible.

01:58:32.000 How do we know if we're in one right now?

01:58:35.000 And I was saying that I spend some of my time behaving as if I'm in a simulation.

01:58:43.000 And these are the benefits for that.

01:58:45.000 They're like, this is too weird.

01:58:46.000 And I'm like, yeah, I think weird.

01:58:48.000 Sometimes I think weird.

01:58:51.000 And they were like, we wanted to have punchlines in each sentence.

01:58:57.000 I'm like, stop.

01:58:58.000 I'm going to give you your money back.

01:58:59.000 You know, I gotta tell you, I mean, so this is for aspiring authors who are listening to this show.

01:59:06.000 You touch on a very important point.

01:59:08.000 The relationship between the author, well, and the publishing house in general, but the editor who's handling your book is really akin to a marriage because you are ultimately sharing with that person the first draft Of your intimate thoughts,

01:59:24.000 right?

01:59:24.000 Your book is your baby.

01:59:25.000 And so in my case, my editor for The Parasitic Mind was just the perfect guy because You know, when you send off the first draft, I mean, you're scared, right?

01:59:37.000 Because you think it's a great book.

01:59:39.000 You think you've done a great job, but you don't know.

01:59:42.000 Nobody's looked at it yet.

01:59:43.000 This is going to be the first guy who's going to actually look at it.

01:59:46.000 Is he going to say, what the hell are you talking about?

01:59:48.000 Or is he going to be?

01:59:49.000 And so the feedback that I got from him was really just one main thing.

01:59:53.000 There was very little.

01:59:54.000 He said, look, your book is too long.

01:59:57.000 We need to make sure that when people are reading this book, they can't put it down.

02:00:02.000 You currently are at, I think it was my first draft I gave to him was 93,000 words.

02:00:07.000 He said we need to scale it back to about 70,000 words.

02:00:11.000 But he was very polite in sharing that feedback because he knew that it's tough to tell an author who spent time agonizing over every syllable, hey, cut off 23,000 words from your baby.

02:00:26.000 But I think you have to come with the humility. 0.96

02:00:28.000 You can't be the type of guy who says, I am not going to change a goddamn syllable in my book. 0.95

02:00:34.000 And so I actually took his feedback to heart. 0.94

02:00:37.000 I did make the cuts and I think the book is much stronger for it.

02:00:41.000 So I really think there's got to be this unbelievable trust and intimacy between the editor who's handling your book and yourself.

02:00:48.000 If that relationship doesn't work well, I think the book will suffer.

02:00:53.000 I don't blame the publisher or even the editor.

02:00:57.000 I got the book deal before I had a podcast. 0.99

02:01:00.000 I don't think they understood that I just like to talk about shit sometimes. 0.73

02:01:05.000 They wanted me to approach it like a stand-up comic writing a book. 0.98

02:01:08.000 Like a book with a lot of comedy in it.

02:01:12.000 If anybody goes back and reads my old blog entries, they weren't like that.

02:01:17.000 Some of them were humorous and some of them were just weird.

02:01:19.000 Some of them were just strange thoughts that I have about life.

02:01:23.000 And oftentimes, that's how I would write stand-up in general.

02:01:27.000 I would write essays, long essays.

02:01:29.000 And out of those essays, I would extract a few sentences.

02:01:32.000 Those sentences would become bits.

02:01:35.000 And that's how I would come up with comedy.

02:01:36.000 I would do it like I was mining.

02:01:39.000 Like when you're mining, you're not getting all gold.

02:01:42.000 You're getting a lot of dirt.

02:01:43.000 And you got to like shift through that dirt.

02:01:45.000 And then I'd find the nuggets.

02:01:46.000 And I'd set those nuggets aside.

02:01:48.000 And then that was my process.

02:01:51.000 But in the process of doing that, I would write a lot of things where I was expressing myself on unusual and bizarre topics.

02:02:00.000 And they weren't into it.

02:02:03.000 Does the first time that you introduce new material to someone, for example, will you do the bit in front of your wife before it goes out on the road or the first time is in front of an audience?

02:02:17.000 Always.

02:02:18.000 Yeah, always.

02:02:18.000 Always first time in front of an audience.

02:02:20.000 Always.

02:02:21.000 Occasionally I'll say something on a podcast and it's funny and then that becomes a bit... 0.87

02:02:24.000 But most of the time, I have an idea, and the first time I say it, what I'll do is I'll make a shit sandwich, meaning I'll do a bit that I know works, and then in between that bit, I'll sandwich in this new stuff, and then if it sucks, then I'll go on with a proven bit afterwards.

02:02:42.000 So it's beautiful if you have material already, because you have a little scaffolding.

02:02:47.000 And so one of the things that I do every time I release a Netflix special, You have a special, and then you have all this time off after the special where you have to write a new special.

02:02:57.000 So I have usually about three to six months between the filming of a special to when it airs. 0.99

02:03:05.000 So during that time, I make a lot of shit sandwiches. 0.97

02:03:08.000 So I have those bits that I know work and then I sandwich in this new stuff. 0.99

02:03:12.000 And then some of the new stuff is great right off the bat.

02:03:15.000 It's rare, but occasionally you have a finished product from the paper to the audience and it works right away.

02:03:21.000 And you've nailed it.

02:03:22.000 It resonates.

02:03:23.000 But a lot of times it's not.

02:03:25.000 Some bits, they take forever to figure out.

02:03:28.000 And you've got to attack it from all these different angles and it could drive you crazy.

02:03:34.000 I saw a recent show that you were on or whatever, a documentary.

02:03:39.000 I think it's called The Comedy Store.

02:03:41.000 I'm really enjoying it.

02:03:42.000 Actually, my wife got into it too.

02:03:44.000 And the last one that aired last week, it featured you heavily where you were talking about The Comedy Store.

02:03:51.000 What is the name of the woman that ran it?

02:03:53.000 Mitzi Shore.

02:03:55.000 And I remember, I mean, I'm going to link what I'm about to say to what we talked about earlier in terms of Trump getting the approval that he wants.

02:04:04.000 And I was moved by how you were moved when you first...

02:04:10.000 Had Mitzi say to you, hey, you're funny.

02:04:13.000 I mean, that in a sense demonstrates that we're all looking for that ego stroke from the person that we care about.

02:04:20.000 In this particular case, for you, the holy grail was for Mitzi to give you her imprimatur.

02:04:26.000 And once you got it, it was like you had won the Nobel Prize, right?

02:04:30.000 Yeah, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

02:04:34.000 Because it was like, that was Mecca.

02:04:35.000 Comedy store.

02:04:36.000 When I started out doing stand-up in 1988 in Boston, I had heard about the Comedy Store from everyone.

02:04:44.000 Everyone talked about that is where Sam Kinison started.

02:04:47.000 That is where Richard Pryor used to perform.

02:04:49.000 And you would hear about all the greats, Robin Williams, all these different people who worked out at the Comedy Store in LA. And you would see video of it on television, and you would see these comedians that you knew were the greatest of all time, and they all came out of this one place.

02:05:06.000 And there was this one woman, it was her vision.

02:05:09.000 And she's, without a doubt, the most important person in the history of comedy outside of comedians.

02:05:14.000 It's Mitzi Shore.

02:05:16.000 She's the number one. 0.99

02:05:17.000 She allowed the lunatics to run the asylum. 0.98

02:05:20.000 And it's a bizarre family there where the only currency was, are you funny? 1.00

02:05:27.000 It didn't matter if you're a woman or a man or gay or straight or black or white or Asian or East Indian or whatever the fuck you were. 0.99

02:05:36.000 Are you funny? 1.00

02:05:38.000 And if you're not, fuck you. 1.00

02:05:41.000 That place was ruthless. 1.00

02:05:43.000 But if you were funny...

02:05:45.000 And you made it and you became a paid regular.

02:05:47.000 You were in this very small group of human beings.

02:05:52.000 There's probably, I would say, a thousand legitimate professional comedians on the planet Earth.

02:06:01.000 Out of those 1,000, there's maybe 500 that are really good that can headline in a theater or an arena or a sellout, a comedy club.

02:06:14.000 They have a following.

02:06:15.000 People come to see them.

02:06:16.000 It might be less than that.

02:06:17.000 It might be being charitable.

02:06:18.000 It's a small group of people because it's...

02:06:21.000 Such a brutal business on your self-esteem.

02:06:24.000 It's such a brutal business on your emotions, and it's so hard to get good.

02:06:29.000 You know, you could start off kind of good, but to be consistently good over and over and over again, to put out consistent specials, to consistently improve, it's so much work. 0.97

02:06:39.000 And most comedians, and this is a terrible thing to say, but it's true, they become good and then they start to suck.

02:06:47.000 They get to a point where they get that adulation, like we were talking about, and they embrace it.

02:06:51.000 And that's all they want.

02:06:52.000 They don't want to grind anymore.

02:06:54.000 The Comedy Store forced you to grind because you weren't just performing for your audience.

02:06:59.000 If I was going up on any given night, I'm not just performing for my audience.

02:07:03.000 There's people there that are there to see Whitney Cummings, they're there to see Eliza Schlesinger, they're there to see Joey Diaz, they're there to see Anthony Jeselnik.

02:07:10.000 I'm just one. 0.87

02:07:11.000 Of many, many, many people that are on the lineup, and they're all killers.

02:07:15.000 All these comedians would just be, you know, Ali Wong, they'd just be smashing, smashing, smashing, and you go on after them, and you gotta bring the heat.

02:07:23.000 And you're also trying to work out new material, and it's a gem, and it's like, it's also, there's like a family aspect to it.

02:07:30.000 Everybody's like, especially over the last decade in particular, because Comedy over the last decade, we realized that we don't have to have a famine mentality anymore, because everybody in the past was all competing for a limited amount of slots on television.

02:07:45.000 Everybody was competing for parts in a movie or parts on television shows or the host of The Tonight Show, and it was like a very dog-eat-dog sort of environment.

02:07:55.000 With podcasts, the atmosphere changed.

02:07:58.000 And then it became, no, we help each other.

02:08:00.000 You get on my podcast.

02:08:01.000 We have fun.

02:08:02.000 I tell people to watch your show.

02:08:04.000 I tell people you're going to be at the Chicago Improv.

02:08:06.000 And then everybody realized, oh, no, we're in this together.

02:08:09.000 And then it became like a brotherhood and a sisterhood.

02:08:12.000 It became a family thing.

02:08:13.000 And now it's much, much, much more supportive than it's ever been in the past.

02:08:16.000 So then the Comedy Store became, instead of this antagonistic sort of battleground, then it became this place where people...

02:08:24.000 Go to, like, refresh and see their peers.

02:08:28.000 So everybody would go on the road.

02:08:29.000 One of the best nights at the Comedy Store was Tuesday night because no one was on the road on Tuesday night.

02:08:34.000 Because the Tuesday night, everybody would come into town.

02:08:36.000 And so the people like Sebastian Maniscalco or all these people that would do Madison Square Garden on the weekend, they would come to the Comedy Store on a Tuesday night to work out new material.

02:08:45.000 And we'd all see each other.

02:08:46.000 So you'd go there on a Tuesday night and there'd be three sold-out shows on a Tuesday night.

02:08:50.000 It was madness.

02:08:51.000 And the lineups were just insane.

02:08:53.000 You'd look at the lineups.

02:08:54.000 And you go, look at this lineup!

02:08:56.000 This is crazy!

02:08:57.000 Anywhere in the world, you'd have to pay so much money to see this lineup.

02:09:00.000 Dave Chappelle would stop in.

02:09:02.000 Chris Rock was there.

02:09:03.000 And you would pay $20.

02:09:05.000 $20.

02:09:06.000 And you'd get to see the greatest comedy you've ever seen in your life.

02:09:08.000 And the word got out.

02:09:10.000 And it became this place where consistently it was sold out seven nights a week.

02:09:14.000 And that all happened within the last ten years.

02:09:17.000 And specifically...

02:09:19.000 From 2014 on when I returned because we had been talking about it and that was what that episode of the Comedy Store was all about.

02:09:25.000 We talked about it so much on the podcast and we talked about me and I would advertise so often about what a great place it is and I'd have guys like Tom Segura and Burt Kreischer and Ari Shafir on my show and we talk about the fun times we'd have and people were traveling from all over the world to come to this place and We were there because of the vision of Mitzi Shore.

02:09:46.000 We were there because of one woman. 0.98

02:09:48.000 Because she, in the 1970s, said, the only way this is gonna work is you let these fucking crazy people do whatever they want and find themselves on that stage. 0.99

02:09:57.000 And all that matters is that you're good. 0.99

02:09:59.000 That's all that matters.

02:10:00.000 Are you funny?

02:10:02.000 Is the audience laughing?

02:10:03.000 Well, then you're doing your job. 0.99

02:10:05.000 Everything else, I don't give a fuck about. 0.94

02:10:07.000 I don't care about the industry. 0.99

02:10:08.000 I don't care about agents.

02:10:09.000 She wouldn't give free passes to anybody.

02:10:12.000 And all the other clubs, like the industry and the agents, they would all hobnob and come to these clubs because it was their social place.

02:10:18.000 They would get free tickets and free drinks, and usually they would become a problem.

02:10:22.000 They would talk too much, and they'd get loud, and they weren't listening to the comedy, and they were drinking too much.

02:10:27.000 But not at the comedy store. 1.00

02:10:29.000 The comedy store, fuck you. 1.00

02:10:30.000 Pay the money. 1.00

02:10:31.000 It's 20 bucks.

02:10:32.000 Like, you know, oh, this is someone from ICM. Fuck ham, she would say. 1.00

02:10:35.000 I don't care about agents. 1.00

02:10:37.000 She didn't care about anything but comedy.

02:10:38.000 Are you funny?

02:10:40.000 And so...

02:10:42.000 I was going to say, I think that you mentioned earlier that You know, it's a very tough business to be in because of the rejection and so on.

02:10:50.000 I think rejection is such a fundamental part of life, right?

02:10:54.000 So, for example, when I send a paper to a journal for it to be peer-reviewed, I mean, the rate of rejections in top journals is in the order of 90-95%.

02:11:05.000 I mean, so stop for a second and think what that means, right?

02:11:07.000 You've just spent two, three, four years working on a scientific project.

02:11:11.000 It took you another six months, eight months to write it up.

02:11:14.000 You send it to a journal and you have a 90-95% chance of it being rejected.

02:11:20.000 And so I always tell my students that, you know, rejection is really part of being anti-fragile, right?

02:11:27.000 I don't know, are you familiar with the concept?

02:11:28.000 Nassim Taleb, yeah.

02:11:29.000 Yeah, exactly, very good, right?

02:11:30.000 Who's a very good friend of mine, also a fellow Lebanese, right?

02:11:33.000 So anti-fragility is something that, I mean, as long as something doesn't kill you, right?

02:11:38.000 The old adage is, squeaky doors don't break, which is basically rewording the concept of anti-fragility.

02:11:44.000 You know, you and I grow because of the rejections, right?

02:11:48.000 And I think a lot of my graduate students oftentimes are disheartened by the odds of a paper being accepted because they say, my God, I'm going to spend the next 30, 40, 50 years operating within a domain of interest where the likelihood of my work being rejected consistently is in the order of 80,

02:12:07.000 90, 95%.

02:12:09.000 It's a tough pill to swallow, but ultimately the process ensures that that which does get published is top quality.

02:12:17.000 And I guess in a similar sense, it's the same for you guys, that the person who ends up making it is hopefully funny.

02:12:24.000 I think you told me on the first show that I ever came on your podcast, You had compared what I do to yours.

02:12:32.000 And probably of all the things you've said to me, that's the one that I remember the most.

02:12:36.000 You said, you know, there's something very similar in what you do and what I do in that it's impossible to hide.

02:12:42.000 The audience will find you out, right?

02:12:44.000 If you get into a ring as an MMA fighter, you can't fake it.

02:12:48.000 If you get into in front of a stage and you're not funny, you can't fake it. 0.97

02:12:52.000 If I get up in front of people and I start espousing stuff that's garbage, I'm going to get...

02:12:58.000 I really appreciate that because it shows that, yes, what we do is risky, but it's honest.

02:13:05.000 If you're good, the crowd will tell you that you're doing a good job.

02:13:08.000 And the way to get better is through struggle.

02:13:11.000 The best moments of my career have come after the biggest bombings.

02:13:16.000 There's something about bombing that wakes you the fuck up.

02:13:20.000 It's such an awful feeling. 0.64

02:13:21.000 It's like, you got to get better. 0.99

02:13:23.000 So if I look back on the beginning of my career, there was moments where I had horrible shows where I just ate shit on stage. 0.90

02:13:33.000 But after that, I had a big growth spurt because I realized what went wrong. 0.90

02:13:38.000 I never wanted it to happen again.

02:13:40.000 And I restructured and I got better and I worked harder.

02:13:44.000 What is it that goes wrong usually?

02:13:46.000 Is it that literally the joke or the anecdote that you're telling is you've overestimated how funny it is?

02:13:54.000 Or is it that the delivery, the timing?

02:13:56.000 What is it that's not working that you say this bit is going into the dustbin?

02:14:01.000 It could be any factor.

02:14:02.000 There's a number of factors.

02:14:04.000 It could be your attitude that you carry with you on stage.

02:14:07.000 You could be too cocky or too confident and not engaging enough.

02:14:17.000 It's not humble, but connected to the idea of expressing the bit rather than you killing on stage.

02:14:25.000 Some people just want to go up there and be great.

02:14:28.000 But what you really have to do is don't think I want to be great.

02:14:34.000 What is the best way to get this into people's minds?

02:14:37.000 And one of the best ways is to be completely tuned in to what you're thinking and what you're saying, to be locked in, focused, and also it's got to resonate with you.

02:14:48.000 You have to really think this is funny.

02:14:50.000 And it takes a while to figure out what about it is funny to you because you're so close to it.

02:14:55.000 You wrote it.

02:14:55.000 You're sitting there with it.

02:14:57.000 After you've written it and rewritten it three or four or five times, maybe it's not even that humorous to you anymore.

02:15:04.000 You have to figure out how to make it humorous.

02:15:05.000 And the way you've got to do that, it's one of the rare art forms where you need an audience to really put it together, to create it.

02:15:13.000 And you might get a bad crowd.

02:15:16.000 You might get a crowd that's drunk.

02:15:17.000 You might get a crowd that just had a heckler thrown out five seconds ago and people are upset.

02:15:21.000 You might get a crowd where the person before you had a terrible set and the audience is like, why are we even here? 0.99

02:15:27.000 This show sucks.

02:15:28.000 You got to kind of re-energize them and re-engage them. 0.99

02:15:31.000 They might have a preconceived notion of who you are when they look at you.

02:15:35.000 Women have a problem with that. 1.00

02:15:36.000 There's a lot of women that go on stage and men are like, ah, girl, she's not funny.

02:15:40.000 So women have like a bigger hurt. 1.00

02:15:42.000 I think comedy for women is probably at least 50% harder than it is for men.

02:15:47.000 I really believe that.

02:15:48.000 It's like the perceptions that a lot of men have are very prejudiced towards whether women are funny or not.

02:15:55.000 There's so many different factors.

02:15:57.000 I think I might have discussed this on a previous show, but one of my former postdocs, his doctoral dissertation was on an evolutionary study of humor.

02:16:09.000 And the argument was that humor is a sexually selected trait, meaning that humor serves as a proxy for intelligence, right?

02:16:19.000 And so to the extent that there are sex differences in the frequency of top comedians, An evolutionary perspective would argue that there are stronger selection pressures, evolutionary pressures for men to be funny as part of their elaborate courtship rituals than there are for women to be funny. 0.99

02:16:37.000 So, for example, you know, never have the following words been uttered Sure, Linda, you have a gorgeous ass, but you're not funny enough. 1.00

02:16:46.000 We're not gonna have sex, right? 0.99

02:16:48.000 But the other way, it certainly has happened, where a woman sees a gorgeous guy, but he's a dud, he's not funny, he's not engaging, and she decides that he's not the right partner for her, right?

02:16:58.000 That's why women can consistently say, I want a funny guy, because they're effectively saying, I want a smart guy. 1.00

02:17:04.000 I mean, it's hard to be funny and witty and be a dumb guy, correct?

02:17:09.000 You're right that it's much harder for women to be comedians, but in part, evolution explains why there are sex differences in terms of the frequency of comedians. 0.94

02:17:19.000 Does that make sense?

02:17:20.000 Yeah, it does.

02:17:21.000 Going back to Christopher Hitchens, he wrote a bit about it.

02:17:24.000 Exactly.

02:17:24.000 He wrote a piece in the Vanity Fair, right?

02:17:27.000 Exactly.

02:17:27.000 About women not being funny and people got so mad at him.

02:17:30.000 Had he explained it using an evolutionary perspective?

02:17:33.000 I don't think so, right?

02:17:34.000 His perspective was that women who are funny take on male characteristics. 0.97

02:17:39.000 They're usually very butch.

02:17:43.000 I think you used Roseanne Barr as an example and some other women who have a brash, almost masculine perspective on comedy. 0.97

02:17:55.000 But to get back to the point, There's a lot of factors when you bomb.

02:18:01.000 And I do believe that the bar is higher for women. 1.00

02:18:05.000 I think it's more difficult because of perceptions.

02:18:07.000 But I just think for everybody, it's about how much fun you're having up there.

02:18:13.000 It's about how much focus and time you put into the material.

02:18:16.000 How much time you've spent doing it, too.

02:18:20.000 Comedy is, in a sense, it's a form of hypnosis.

02:18:23.000 Yeah.

02:18:26.000 Yeah.

02:18:27.000 Yeah.

02:18:29.000 Yeah.

02:18:39.000 Preconceived notions.

02:18:40.000 I just allow them to take me on a journey with their words.

02:18:44.000 And they're acting it out.

02:18:46.000 And it's fun.

02:18:47.000 I love it.

02:18:48.000 And it's one of the things that really has helped me throughout my career is that I'm still a fan of stand-up comedy.

02:18:54.000 And some comedians lose that.

02:18:56.000 They lose the love of watching it as an art form, unfortunately.

02:19:01.000 Have you ever met a comedian who, when you saw their act...

02:19:06.000 You thought they were very funny, but when you got to know them personally, they were duds in their interactions with you.

02:19:13.000 Because you would think that someone you have.

02:19:15.000 Oh yeah, there's a lot of them.

02:19:17.000 How do you explain that disconnect?

02:19:18.000 Why wouldn't you be funny in your personal life, but funny on stage?

02:19:23.000 Shouldn't they translate from one to the other?

02:19:25.000 No, not necessarily, because it's like a musician.

02:19:28.000 When you meet someone, they're a great singer, should you be enthralled by their speaking voice?

02:19:36.000 There's a lot of comics that are very introspective and they're almost shut-ins.

02:19:48.000 And they only come alive on stage. 0.94

02:19:50.000 Some of them are miserable.

02:19:51.000 And they only become really funny when they're in front of a crowd and they get to do their thing. 0.89

02:20:00.000 Richard Jenny was apparently...

02:20:01.000 I didn't know him too well when he was alive.

02:20:03.000 I met him a couple of times.

02:20:05.000 This is the one who committed suicide?

02:20:06.000 Yeah, he was one of my favorites.

02:20:08.000 He was brilliant, but...

02:20:10.000 Yeah.

02:20:32.000 Who's the worst person you had to bring to radio?

02:20:34.000 And a lot of them would say Richard Jenney, that he just didn't want to be there.

02:20:37.000 He wanted to be a TV star, a movie star, and it never really worked out.

02:20:41.000 But what he was was one of the most brilliant comedians ever.

02:20:44.000 But even though I love to go see him do stand-up, that's not what he wanted.

02:20:48.000 You know, it's like that Billy Joel song, The Piano Man.

02:20:52.000 I'm sure I could be a movie star if I could get out of this place.

02:20:56.000 That was him.

02:20:57.000 He wanted to be something that he wasn't.

02:21:01.000 He didn't want to be on the road all the time just working in the clubs.

02:21:05.000 But what he was for us, for other comedians, was one of the best examples of what a stand-up comic could be. 0.98

02:21:13.000 He was so fucking good. 0.81

02:21:15.000 You know, it's so hard to see his specials and to really appreciate how good he was live. 0.98

02:21:21.000 I mean, you get a lot off of his specials.

02:21:23.000 He was obviously really funny and brilliant and his writing was great. 0.99

02:21:25.000 But you would see him live and you would go, God damn. 0.93

02:21:29.000 You would have comics leaving his show shaking their head like, I will never be that good. 0.99

02:21:33.000 He's so good.

02:21:34.000 But miserable in real life.

02:21:36.000 Just not happy and not necessarily a funny guy off stage.

02:21:41.000 But on stage, he was one of the greats.

02:21:43.000 But, you know, it's funny because when you said that he was miserable in the fact that he was a comedian rather than a movie star, it kind of, if we circle back to one of the first points that we talked about when we started today's conversation where you said, you know, you're a happy guy and so on, it speaks to the importance of really pursuing something that on a daily basis makes you happy.

02:22:05.000 I mean, I get tons of emails from people who say, hey, professor, I finished my bachelor's in this.

02:22:11.000 What should I study for my master's?

02:22:13.000 What is the market suggesting?

02:22:16.000 And I always tell them, no, please don't look at it that way, because you're going to have to wake up every day.

02:22:20.000 I mean, the place where you spend most of your waking time is at your job, right?

02:22:26.000 And the fact that I am happy, sure, I'm dispositionally happy.

02:22:29.000 It's just my innate personality.

02:22:31.000 But I'm also happy because I have a job that I love to do, whether I'm writing a book or speaking to Joe Rogan or giving a lecture.

02:22:38.000 I'm always excited by what I'm doing.

02:22:40.000 Therefore, it's hard for me not to be happy.

02:22:43.000 So someone like this comedian, this regrettable thing where he committed suicide, That mismatch between where he wants to be and where he is every day is a terrible...

02:22:53.000 Now, for most people, they don't commit suicide, but they do wake up at 57 saying, you know what?

02:22:57.000 I never wanted to be an accountant.

02:22:59.000 I became an accountant because my dad told me it's a safe job or a dentist or a doctor or whatever.

02:23:05.000 And I always tell people, I mean, I know it sounds cliche-ish, you have to find what makes you passionate.

02:23:11.000 And if you can do that, I think it's one way by which you can guarantee happiness.

02:23:16.000 It's one of the only ways.

02:23:18.000 I always speak of this quote because it's one of my favorite quotes ever by Thoreau.

02:23:23.000 Most men live lives of quiet desperation. 0.97

02:23:26.000 Right, yes.

02:23:27.000 That is not where you want to be.

02:23:29.000 And everyone's different.

02:23:31.000 You know, some people love to do stand-up comedy.

02:23:34.000 Some people loathe it.

02:23:35.000 Some people want to be a musician and unfortunately they make furniture.

02:23:40.000 There's a lot of that out there.

02:23:42.000 And not everybody can be a rock star, right?

02:23:45.000 Not everybody can be a famous painter.

02:23:49.000 And I don't know, other than what I do and what I've done, my path, I don't know what it would take for someone to be successful in their chosen field.

02:23:59.000 It's not mine.

02:24:00.000 I don't know.

02:24:01.000 But for Jenny, he was of an era where if you really wanted to make it, you had to be a movie star.

02:24:09.000 He looked at guys like Jim Carrey and all these people like Jerry Seinfeld to become a television star.

02:24:17.000 That was what everybody wanted.

02:24:18.000 They wanted a thing.

02:24:20.000 They wanted stand-up to be the thing that got you to the ultimate goal.

02:24:24.000 And now comedy is the ultimate goal for this generation of comics.

02:24:30.000 So it's become a different thing, fortunately.

02:24:33.000 Is there something...

02:24:36.000 I hope it's not too personal a question, but that's what your podcast is all about.

02:24:40.000 So there's a theory in psychology that looks at the psychology of regret.

02:24:44.000 So when you ask people, what do you regret most?

02:24:48.000 And there are two possible sources of regret.

02:24:50.000 Regret of action or regret of inaction.

02:24:53.000 So regret of action would be, I really regret that I did this in my life.

02:24:58.000 Regret of inaction is, I really regret that I never pursued that in my life.

02:25:01.000 And it turns out, Joe, that for most people, the greatest source of regret for them stem from inactions, right?

02:25:10.000 I regret that I didn't do this.

02:25:12.000 So if I were to put you on the spot and say, right now, today, what is the thing you regret most in life, what would it be?

02:25:19.000 Yeah.

02:25:25.000 Yeah.

02:25:42.000 Failure is a part of that.

02:25:44.000 Mistakes are a part of that.

02:25:46.000 And when it comes to the regret of inaction, I don't have any.

02:25:49.000 I have zero regret of inaction. 0.99

02:25:52.000 Not a fucking thing. 1.00

02:25:53.000 You are a dream of clinical psychology. 1.00

02:25:56.000 Clinical psychologists would be out of business as everybody was made up of Joe Rogan's.

02:26:00.000 Well, I've been insanely fortunate.

02:26:02.000 I have three dream jobs.

02:26:05.000 I'm a color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

02:26:08.000 I'm a lifelong martial artist.

02:26:10.000 That's a dream job.

02:26:11.000 I'm a professional stand-up comedian.

02:26:13.000 I work the biggest venues.

02:26:15.000 I have the most fun.

02:26:17.000 I have great friends.

02:26:18.000 Dream job.

02:26:20.000 Podcasting, which I never even thought was a job, has become this amazing job.

02:26:24.000 And I love doing it.

02:26:26.000 I love it.

02:26:26.000 When I was leaving my house today, knowing I was going to get to talk to you online, nothing but happiness.

02:26:32.000 I was looking forward to it.

02:26:35.000 Nothing regretful about it at all.

02:26:37.000 I'd have zero regrets in terms of inaction.

02:26:40.000 Any regret that I have of action, the things that I've done wrong or people I've wronged or things I've said that I shouldn't have said has made me a wiser person.

02:26:52.000 So I don't even have regret in that.

02:26:55.000 Sorry to interrupt you.

02:26:56.000 I would also say that Having a family home that's a true solace is really an important part.

02:27:06.000 So for me, when people ask me, how do you handle the stressors of your life?

02:27:11.000 Well, I know that when I come home, I have my children whom you've met, I have my wife, and they really are my soulless.

02:27:17.000 In other words, there is nothing I'd rather do when I have some free time than to be with my family, than to be with my wife.

02:27:25.000 She really is my best friend.

02:27:27.000 And of course, there is no prescription for how you can guarantee that you can pick the right life partner.

02:27:32.000 But really, try to make that decision as carefully as you can, because that itself can be either a source of great happiness or terrible misery.

02:28:01.000 Oh, terrible misery.

02:28:02.000 If you don't have anything to bring to the table, if you're filled with self-hate and loathing and anger and all the jealousy and pettiness, you're not going to get a person who is a good person.

02:28:19.000 It's not going to happen.

02:28:20.000 You've got to fix yourself.

02:28:21.000 Like, so many people think they're going to find a person.

02:28:23.000 That person's going to make them happy.

02:28:25.000 Now, I think people enhance your happiness.

02:28:28.000 It certainly makes you happier. 1.00

02:28:30.000 But you have to figure out who the fuck you are. 1.00

02:28:32.000 You have to work out your own bullshit if you want to have a good person in your life. 1.00

02:28:36.000 Because a good person's not going to be attracted to someone who's all fucked up. 1.00

02:28:40.000 They're not going to want to be around you. 0.99

02:28:41.000 You're going to be a problem for them.

02:28:42.000 And you should, in a non-selfish way, you shouldn't want to have a good person in your life if you're a mess. 0.98

02:28:48.000 Because you're going to fuck up their life. 0.95

02:28:51.000 But I agree with you. 0.93

02:28:53.000 Having a family and having people that you love and loved ones, if without that you don't feel complete.

02:28:59.000 People need love.

02:29:01.000 And it's such a...

02:29:02.000 You know, it's such a cliche thing to say, you know, all you need is love.

02:29:06.000 It's not all you need.

02:29:07.000 You need food and shelter. 0.99

02:29:08.000 But if you have everything but you don't have love, you will be fucking miserable. 0.99

02:29:13.000 There's so many people that are successful, but they don't have love. 0.97

02:29:18.000 And those people, it's an imbalance, right?

02:29:22.000 I mean, the standard cliche of the...

02:29:26.000 The billionaire CEO who works 16 hours a day and is on his fourth marriage and has a bunch of kids that are drug addicts because he was never there.

02:29:37.000 On paper, he's successful.

02:29:39.000 But his real life is a shambles because he spent all of his time concentrating on accumulating wealth.

02:29:46.000 And accumulating power and none of his time on himself and how he interacts with other people and being a good father and being a good husband and being a good friend and being a decent human being.

02:30:03.000 And sometimes those are the hardest things to do.

02:30:06.000 It's easy to concentrate on a task at hand.

02:30:09.000 If you could just distract yourself from your own barbaric humanity and just think only about accumulating numbers in a bank account.

02:30:17.000 I mean, that's Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, right?

02:30:21.000 Just greed is good.

02:30:22.000 Without giving any names, I have family members who have been of that type, who really have never fostered long-term friendships.

02:30:32.000 When I say family members, I don't mean my own family.

02:30:35.000 I mean, my family of birth, where they became very wealthy, where they collected Ferraris and Aston Martins.

02:30:45.000 And I've warned these family members that life is long and if one day you were to lose your money, and I hope that you don't, the trajectory is not a good one.

02:30:57.000 And I hate to say it, but it's turned out that way.

02:31:01.000 Love is a protective belt.

02:31:03.000 We get older, right?

02:31:06.000 You should always be accompanied by great quality people around you, but you should certainly have those great quality people as you enter the golden years of your life.

02:31:17.000 And I think, regrettably, for some of these high-flying players, They think that the party is going to go on forever and it isn't.

02:31:25.000 And so, yeah, you know, choose carefully who you're going to go to bed at at night because that's one of the sources of happiness.

02:31:34.000 Yeah.

02:31:34.000 And also, if you get if you're concentrating only on success in terms of financial success, and that's what a lot of people do that are in business, right?

02:31:42.000 You're really your your life is fixated on numbers.

02:31:46.000 Your life is fixated on accumulating numbers.

02:31:49.000 It's an empty pursuit, but it's also a pursuit that becomes insanely addictive, because you compare yourself to the people around you.

02:31:57.000 Mike's house is 4,000 square feet, but my house is 5,000 square feet. 1.00

02:32:02.000 And then you're happy with it until you realize that Steve's house is 7,000 square feet, and you're like, fuck! 0.99

02:32:06.000 And he lives in the best neighborhood. 0.99

02:32:12.000 And I live in a not so desirable neighborhood.

02:32:14.000 It's not as desirable as his.

02:32:15.000 And I have a Porsche, but he has a Ferrari. 1.00

02:32:18.000 Like, oh my god, you're losing your fucking mind. 1.00

02:32:20.000 Keeping up with the Joneses, right? 0.99

02:32:22.000 I mean, the positional economy is a real term that captures exactly what you just said, which is, by the way, it's not so much for many things.

02:32:31.000 What makes us happy is not so much some absolute level of whatever the currency is, but that we have more of it than someone else.

02:32:41.000 I think I might have even mentioned this on a previous show on your podcast.

02:32:45.000 For example, if you ask people, are you happy with your sex life?

02:32:50.000 The amount of sex you have is less important than the fact of you having more sex than your close friends, right?

02:32:59.000 Which shows you again how much of a hierarchical species we are.

02:33:03.000 We use social comparison to decide whether we're happy or not, right?

02:33:08.000 Yeah, it's weird.

02:33:11.000 I think that for a lot of people, goals make them happy.

02:33:16.000 Achieving goals.

02:33:18.000 Like having something that you're working towards.

02:33:21.000 And I don't necessarily just mean financial goals.

02:33:23.000 I think that's where people get tripped up, is just thinking about financial goals.

02:33:26.000 But...

02:33:28.000 Accumulating skills.

02:33:29.000 Getting better at things.

02:33:31.000 To me, that makes me happy.

02:33:33.000 Or at least keeps me engaged and satisfied.

02:33:36.000 There's something about learning new things that's very rewarding.

02:33:40.000 Getting better at things.

02:33:41.000 Very rewarding.

02:33:43.000 But not if all you're concerned about is numbers.

02:33:48.000 Not if you're just doing it to try to achieve bigger and greater.

02:33:52.000 Like you were talking about the point of diminishing returns when it comes to financial wealth.

02:33:55.000 I think challenges are important, like having things that you're working towards, because they give you this sense that in doing these things and getting better, whether it's getting better at playing chess or getting better at tennis or whatever, pick a thing.

02:34:11.000 There's something about it that develops your overall human potential.

02:34:15.000 When you get better at something, you flex the muscles and exercise the muscles of getting better, of figuring out problems, of being engaged.

02:34:25.000 When you're stagnant and just doing the same thing over and over and over again with no change, your mind atrophies.

02:34:33.000 It speaks to what you said earlier when you said using the COVID lockdown for self-improvement.

02:34:40.000 So, for example, one of the things that I did during the COVID lockdown is I said, because I am now addicted to this step counting thing that's on my iPhone, I said I wanted to always maintain at least 14,000 steps per day.

02:34:57.000 So it was a very concrete goal.

02:34:59.000 I knew that I had to reach that benchmark.

02:35:02.000 And it didn't matter if at, you know, 10 o'clock at night, I have to go walking around the block eight times so that I could hit that mark.

02:35:09.000 I was going to do it.

02:35:11.000 And so by doing that, it gave me great satisfaction because I could look now at the last seven, eight, nine months and see that my pedometer is showing that I've maintained this very specific objective.

02:35:24.000 And so that feels good.

02:35:25.000 It's funny because there's a book that I read recently by Adam Alter.

02:35:30.000 It's called Irresistible, and it's about addiction to technology.

02:35:33.000 And one of the things that he talks about that's one of the most addictive things for people is these fitness trackers.

02:35:39.000 Yes.

02:35:40.000 People get addicted to step counts and how much exercise and exertion they put forth in a day.

02:35:45.000 And even though it can masquerade as a positive for some people, particularly people with addictive personalities, it can become a real problem.

02:35:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:35:55.000 In my case, it's been good.

02:35:57.000 By the way, I was recently on, I don't know what you think of her, but I was on the podcast of Jillian Michaels.

02:36:04.000 That was super fun.

02:36:05.000 Which, by the way, again, shows you all of these incredible connections that today we have.

02:36:10.000 In what world would I, a professor of evolutionary psychology and so on, have connected with Jillian Michaels, but apparently she was a fan of my show and invited me on.

02:36:21.000 So, again, the social network stuff allows You know, meetings of worlds that you would have never thought possible 10, 15 years ago.

02:36:29.000 Yeah, it really does.

02:36:30.000 I don't know much about her.

02:36:31.000 I know she's like a weight loss lady. 1.00

02:36:32.000 She makes people lose weight, right? 1.00

02:36:34.000 She gets people fit.

02:36:35.000 I think that's her original claim to fame.

02:36:37.000 She was on the Big Loser show.

02:36:40.000 What she does after, I don't know, but I joked with her at the start of the show.

02:36:43.000 I told her that, you know, when I invite people on my show, I have all sorts of illustrious people, most of whom my wife never batted an eye, but when she found out that I was appearing on Jillian Michaels, She said, oh, tell her I'm a fan.

02:36:55.000 Tell her I'm a fan.

02:36:56.000 So apparently I finally got street cred by appearing on Jillian Michaels' show. 0.99

02:37:01.000 Yeah, she's supposedly like a hard ass, right? 1.00

02:37:05.000 She's a tough lady. 1.00

02:37:06.000 She's a tough lady. 1.00

02:37:07.000 She makes you get after it.

02:37:09.000 Yeah.

02:37:09.000 Well, I'm a fan of people that motivate people.

02:37:11.000 I feel as though you've been remiss in pointing to the fact that I'm about 20 pounds lighter than the last time that you saw me when I was on your show.

02:37:22.000 I think a little shout-out from Joe Rogan saying, well done, would have been the appropriate thing for you to do, but I'll forgive you.

02:37:29.000 How can I know?

02:37:29.000 All I see is your shoulders and your head.

02:37:31.000 You don't see a bit.

02:37:32.000 The face is thinner a bit.

02:37:34.000 Nothing.

02:37:34.000 You look good.

02:37:35.000 I'll tell you that.

02:37:36.000 I don't know.

02:37:37.000 You lost 20 pounds, though.

02:37:38.000 That's great.

02:37:39.000 Yeah.

02:37:41.000 I still have a lot more to lose, but certainly from my maximum point, I'm about actually a bit more, maybe about 25 pounds down.

02:37:48.000 That's great.

02:37:49.000 What did you do to do that?

02:37:51.000 You know, for me, it really has to be about almost turning into a Gestapo concentration camp.

02:37:57.000 My wife keeps track of my calories. 1.00

02:37:59.000 She turns into Dr. Mengele.

02:38:01.000 She makes sure that, you know, I'm getting this.

02:38:04.000 Once I deviate from that sort of narrow path, then I become a sumo wrestler very quickly.

02:38:12.000 Yeah, for me, it's pasta.

02:38:15.000 Oh, is that your weakness?

02:38:17.000 Yeah, and it goes right to my gut.

02:38:19.000 There's something about pasta and bread.

02:38:21.000 I can just swell up on pasta and bread.

02:38:24.000 When I cut all that stuff out and I just eat vegetables and meat, I just slim right down.

02:38:30.000 My weakness, I guess it's the Italian in me, my weakness is pasta.

02:38:35.000 And I don't eat a small amount of it either.

02:38:37.000 I eat preposterous amounts of food.

02:38:40.000 You're playing like a monster, so it doesn't matter, right? 0.95

02:38:42.000 I've always eaten ridiculous amounts of food. 0.80

02:38:45.000 But when I eat meat, I'm pretty easily satisfied.

02:38:49.000 But there's something about carbohydrates, especially pasta, that I can just keep funneling that stuff in my face.

02:38:56.000 Even after I'm like, I'm already full.

02:38:58.000 I know I'm full.

02:38:59.000 I shouldn't be eating more.

02:39:00.000 I'm like, one more.

02:39:01.000 And then after that, sugar.

02:39:04.000 Eating cake and pie and whipped cream on it.

02:39:09.000 I get gluttonous.

02:39:10.000 I'm a gluttonous person.

02:39:12.000 There's an ongoing joke now, and I'm sure you probably don't check it because you probably get tagged a million times on Twitter, but oftentimes I will post something decadent I'm eating and then I will write, please forgive me,

02:39:28.000 Joe Rogan, hashtag Joe Rogan.

02:39:30.000 So somehow you've managed to incorporate yourself in my culinary conscience So that every time I eat something bad, Joe Rogan is on my right shoulder, you know, insulting me.

02:39:42.000 Well, I'm sorry about that.

02:39:44.000 Or maybe I'm not sorry.

02:39:46.000 Maybe it's helping you.

02:39:47.000 I mean, sometimes, like, that's the thing.

02:39:49.000 People love that term, fat shaming, to use it as a pejorative.

02:39:52.000 But there's something about fat shaming that can motivate you.

02:39:56.000 If someone says, it's like we were talking about earlier, things that feel bad.

02:40:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:40:00.000 Like, oftentimes they'll force you into action, you know, and I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but sometimes their feelings need to be hurt a little in order to prod them into action, and you can do that with people.

02:40:13.000 It's just like, who do you do it to?

02:40:15.000 Who needs it? 0.71

02:40:16.000 Who would be thankful?

02:40:17.000 And who gets really badly hurt by it?

02:40:20.000 Actually, I had written an article on my Psychology Today column defending Jillian Michaels, whom we just talked about a second ago, because she had gone after, but in a very polite way, she had gone after Lizzo saying, well, sorry,

02:40:36.000 but I'm not going to celebrate her body because it's not good for her to be this overweight. 1.00

02:40:40.000 And suddenly she was this monster Nazi because how dare you not celebrate Lizzo's body and so on. 0.99

02:40:46.000 And I said, I mean, are you insane? 0.99

02:40:49.000 Why should she be celebrating? 0.94

02:40:51.000 She's a fitness expert, a health expert. 0.99

02:40:53.000 Why should she be celebrating someone being 300 pounds overweight or whatever she was? 0.97

02:40:58.000 And so I had actually defended her.

02:40:59.000 So you're exactly right.

02:41:01.000 The truth sometimes hurts, but we need to say it.

02:41:04.000 Well, someone especially like Jillian Michaels, I mean, that's her expertise.

02:41:07.000 She's a fitness trainer. 1.00

02:41:08.000 You know, for her, the idea of getting that big is preposterous.

02:41:12.000 And the idea of celebrating it and saying, everybody's beautiful. 0.99

02:41:15.000 Well, that's ridiculous.

02:41:17.000 That's not the case.

02:41:18.000 You know, beauty is rare.

02:41:19.000 That's why it's so celebrated.

02:41:21.000 Because when someone does achieve an amazing body, we know how hard it is to do, especially how hard it is to maintain.

02:41:28.000 I mean, Jillian Michaels has had a beautiful body for a long time. 0.76

02:41:33.000 I mean, that means she's incredibly disciplined. 0.94

02:41:35.000 Of course, a person like that is going to look at someone who's not disciplined at all being celebrated for her body and go, that's ridiculous.

02:41:42.000 And she's right, because there's health consequences to being that big. 0.69

02:41:46.000 And to ignore those health consequences just to make yourself feel good that you're making someone else feel good about being morbidly obese...

02:41:56.000 It's not right.

02:41:57.000 It's not smart.

02:41:59.000 It's not good for anybody. 0.99

02:42:00.000 I mean it's not nice to just make fun of her and shit on her and say terrible things about her. 0.94

02:42:05.000 That's not nice either. 0.98

02:42:06.000 But it's not nice to say you look great no matter what.

02:42:10.000 That's not really the case.

02:42:11.000 It's not true.

02:42:12.000 And of course, by the way, there are marketing campaigns that have become famous in selling that BS, right?

02:42:18.000 So Dove does exactly that.

02:42:20.000 It doesn't matter how overweight you are.

02:42:23.000 We're all equally beautiful.

02:42:25.000 So when I teach, let's say, marketing in the business school, I say, yes, it's a very effective advertising campaign because it empowers women. 0.94

02:42:34.000 But if you are a truth purist, you're really peddling BS because we're not equally beautiful.

02:42:41.000 Beyonce It's not as desired as Lizzo.

02:42:45.000 You mean Beyonce's more desired?

02:42:48.000 Absolutely.

02:42:49.000 I mean, it's not as desired, meaning more desired.

02:42:51.000 More desired than Lizzo, clearly.

02:42:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:42:53.000 She has a perfect body.

02:42:54.000 Yeah.

02:42:55.000 Well, the weird thing is that that doesn't apply to men.

02:42:58.000 Like, nobody looks at a man with a fat gut and goes, you're beautiful no matter what.

02:43:03.000 Nobody says that.

02:43:04.000 Like, men get mocked.

02:43:06.000 Well, because, I mean, of course, women do look at men's physical markers, but not to the same extent, because in a sense, men can compensate for some of their physical shortcomings by doing well in other metrics, right?

02:43:21.000 So you could have a guy who's very funny, who's Maybe not the tallest, but he has great personality or a dominant personality.

02:43:27.000 But when it comes to physicality, it's difficult to compensate for that.

02:43:32.000 You either are facially symmetric or you're not, right?

02:43:36.000 So on some traits, we can compensate for them.

02:43:38.000 On others, they're sort of deal breakers, right?

02:43:41.000 Yeah, I guess.

02:43:42.000 But in a way, it's really sexist to women, right?

02:43:45.000 Because we're saying you're only valuable if your body looks good and will lie to you and say, your body looks good no matter what girl.

02:43:53.000 You look beautiful.

02:43:54.000 It's like you're treating them like they're children. 1.00

02:43:56.000 Whereas with men, you see a guy who's fat, and you're like, look at that slob. 1.00

02:44:01.000 And you're allowed to, and no one will say you're fat-shaming. 0.87

02:44:04.000 No one says you're fat-shaming men.

02:44:06.000 Fat-shaming is always in response to someone saying something about a woman's body.

02:44:14.000 Men who are fat are funny. 0.68

02:44:15.000 It's humorous.

02:44:17.000 My friend Bert Kreischer, when he goes on stage, he takes his shirt off so he can see his gut.

02:44:22.000 And he does stand-up.

02:44:24.000 I mean, he was in Chicago recently.

02:44:25.000 He did an outdoor show.

02:44:26.000 It was 30 degrees outside.

02:44:27.000 He said he did it with no shirt on.

02:44:28.000 I'm like, that is hilarious.

02:44:30.000 So committed to showing everyone his gut that he did it.

02:44:35.000 Chris Farley.

02:44:37.000 Chris Farley.

02:44:38.000 Perfect example.

02:44:39.000 John Candy was another great example.

02:44:41.000 But...

02:44:43.000 For a guy like that, there's no fat shaming.

02:44:46.000 It's not like you say to Chris Farley, you're beautiful no matter what.

02:44:50.000 Because that's not true.

02:44:51.000 You know it's not true.

02:44:52.000 But it's okay that you say to a man that it's not true.

02:44:55.000 It's okay that you tell him he's fat.

02:44:57.000 But again, that's just because the personhood of a man is not as clearly tied to his physicality.

02:45:03.000 I don't think that that's sexism.

02:45:05.000 It's called evolution, right?

02:45:07.000 For example, the trajectory of the mating value of men and women changes throughout their life history, right?

02:45:14.000 A woman is more desired, all things considered, when she's 20 than when she's 80. That's not because life is ageist. 0.53

02:45:22.000 That's because it's called biology.

02:45:24.000 Whereas a man's mating value increases, Right? 0.56

02:45:27.000 You and I were more likely to be rejected when we were 20 than we are today because we have more status today.

02:45:35.000 So I don't think that life is sexist or ageist.

02:45:38.000 There are certain incontrovertible truths about our reality and we just have to deal with them.

02:45:43.000 Isn't it funny though that people want to deny those incontrovertible truths about reality if they don't make them feel good?

02:45:50.000 Exactly.

02:45:51.000 Exactly.

02:45:53.000 Yeah, it's really unfortunate.

02:45:55.000 But it's really funny that some of the people that also say that you shouldn't body shame, they're the same type of people that make fun of Donald Trump for having small hands.

02:46:05.000 It's like whenever it's convenient, you will forego those rules.

02:46:11.000 Well, that's hypocrisy, one of the curses of the human condition.

02:46:16.000 Yeah, there's so many curses of the human condition, aren't there?

02:46:19.000 It's funny.

02:46:20.000 Even if we're aware of them, we still can't help fall into those pitfalls.

02:46:24.000 That's why there is something called the seven deadly sins, right?

02:46:27.000 It's because moral philosophers and theologians were well aware of many of the quicksand traps that we could fall into and they've put them into a easily digestible list for us, right?

02:46:38.000 Well, that's why it's important to have psychologists like yourself who can explain exactly what's going on in the mind that's forcing you into these weird little traps and holes.

02:46:48.000 Thank you, sir.

02:46:50.000 So your book that you put out, The Parasitic Mind, we've barely talked about it.

02:46:55.000 Is it out right now?

02:46:58.000 It came out on October 6. So far, it's doing really well.

02:47:02.000 Very excited by it. 0.89

02:47:03.000 It basically is the story of many of the things that we've been talking about all the years that I've been coming on your show, which is there are a bunch of these terrible ideas, these idea pathogens that were spawned on university campuses because it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas.

02:47:20.000 And so I trace What these bad ideas are, how they originated, and then I offer solutions for how we can protect ourselves against these bad ideas, how we could vaccinate ourselves against disordered thinking.

02:47:34.000 Now, I'm sure these ideas and the way you're describing them make some people uncomfortable, like they upset people.

02:47:42.000 Have you had a lot of criticism about this book?

02:47:46.000 So far, not too much criticism because I'd like to think that I've done a pretty good and tempered job in presenting the evidence.

02:47:55.000 So one of the things that I try to explain in the book is that each of these bad ideas start off with a kernel of truth and some noble cause, but then in the pursuit of that noble cause, the idea gets distorted and it becomes parasitic.

02:48:13.000 So for example, When it comes to feminism, equity feminism is a great idea because it basically says that men and women should be equal under the law.

02:48:21.000 There should be no institutional sexism.

02:48:23.000 We can all agree to that.

02:48:25.000 But in the pursuit of that original noble goal, we shouldn't then say As do militant feminists say, that there are no innate biological differences. 1.00

02:48:35.000 Everything is due to a social construction.

02:48:37.000 We need to make men and women indistinguishable in the pursuit of the original goal. 0.99

02:48:41.000 When it comes to transgender activism, it's the same story.

02:48:44.000 You and I can both be fully in favor of transgender rights, As I think we both are.

02:48:49.000 But that doesn't mean that we reject biology, what I call biophobia, in arguing that a 275-pound guy who's 6'7", who decides to call himself Linda tomorrow, he can fight the MMA against women who are one-third his size.

02:49:06.000 And if you say otherwise, you're a transphobe.

02:49:08.000 And so what I basically argue in the book is that each of these terrible ideas Started off from a good place, but then it metamorphosized into a complete departure from reason.

02:49:20.000 And then I offer ways by which we can sort of retake reason and logic and science from these parasitic ideas.

02:49:27.000 Now, when you construct a book like this, do you look at it in terms of how people could potentially criticize these ideas and what arguments they would have against what you've proclaimed?

02:49:41.000 Well, what I try to do is offer a way by which it becomes difficult to argue against me because the evidence is too great in my favor.

02:49:52.000 I always tell people that when I walk into a room, if I walk with the requisite squagger, it's because I know what I know.

02:50:01.000 But I also have epistemic humility, meaning that if you were to today ask me, Joe, give me your position, Gad, on the legalization of marijuana, I would tell you, you know what?

02:50:10.000 I simply don't know enough about the story.

02:50:12.000 I haven't done my homework.

02:50:14.000 I haven't built, to use a term from my book, I haven't built the nomological network of cumulative evidence that would allow me to pronounce a definitive position.

02:50:23.000 And so I think if I've done a good job in the book, I will have communicated to people a way by which when they are constructing arguments, they can do it void of hysteria.

02:50:34.000 If I want to prove to you, Joe, that toy preferences are not socially constructed, I can prove it to you by bringing data from across cultures, from across time periods, From across disciplines, showing to you that toy preferences have a biological signature.

02:50:51.000 I don't need to get hysterical.

02:50:53.000 I don't need to get emotional.

02:50:54.000 And so I'm offering people an epistemological truth in establishing when to know that something is truthful or not.

02:51:01.000 Does that make sense?

02:51:02.000 Yeah.

02:51:03.000 Have you ever debated someone who disagrees with your positions on these things?

02:51:09.000 Someone who has maybe a social justice warrior's perspective on these ideas?

02:51:13.000 Yeah, it's called Tuesday.

02:51:16.000 I spent 99% of my waking life doing nothing but that.

02:51:21.000 Are you kidding?

02:51:22.000 My blood pressure is higher because of that, right?

02:51:25.000 So yes, but in all seriousness, I face it both in my public engagement.

02:51:31.000 Meaning, let's say, on social media or whatever, but also in my scientific career, as I think you and I might have spoken in the past, I've always faced that consistent debate because many of my colleagues in the social sciences, even till today, are very,

02:51:47.000 very resistant to accepting the idea that biology matters when it comes to human affairs, as I think we've discussed in the past.

02:51:54.000 And so it's really, in a sense, this book I've been writing it for 25 years because I have seen, you know, I tell in chapter one of the book, I basically say that I faced two great wars in my life.

02:52:07.000 The first war was the Lebanese Civil War when I was a child, and the second war has been the war on reason, logic, and science that I have experienced as a professor of 26 years.

02:52:17.000 Some of the stuff that is being taught and promulgated at the universities is absolutely insane.

02:52:22.000 I mean, people think that I'm making it up, that I'm being satirical when I say these things, but you now see the downstream effect of all those bad ideas, right?

02:52:30.000 You're seeing it in HR departments.

02:52:32.000 You're seeing it in the training in the military.

02:52:35.000 You're seeing it in political parties.

02:52:37.000 So these ideas start off in the universities as some esoteric nonsense, but with enough force, they become mainstream stuff.

02:52:47.000 Yeah, well these people graduate from those universities and they go on to enter the workforce with these notions that they have.

02:52:53.000 And these notions are reinforced by the other people that are their age that graduated along with them and they want to reshape society and these ideals. 0.98

02:53:03.000 And then one day they get older and then they get a mortgage and then they get a job and they get a family and they go, what the fuck was I doing? 0.98

02:53:11.000 Exactly. 0.98

02:53:11.000 But they've already started this process. 0.98

02:53:14.000 It's interesting that you say this denying of biology and its effect on human affairs is such a strange thing because it's clearly a factor.

02:53:25.000 It's clearly a significant thing.

02:53:30.000 We know it's a real thing, but the denying of this particular factor is very strange.

02:53:41.000 It comes from a hopeful place, right?

02:53:43.000 Because imagine if we can argue that your child and mine has equal probability to become the next Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan as Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan.

02:53:56.000 We're all born with equal potentiality.

02:53:59.000 We're all born on equal footing.

02:54:02.000 We're all born tabula rasa.

02:54:04.000 So again, that speaks to my point earlier, right?

02:54:06.000 These idea pathogens free us from reality, but they do so in the service of kind of a feel-good, noble cause, but it is perfectly detached from reality.

02:54:18.000 Men and women are not biologically the same.

02:54:20.000 We're not all likely to become Michael Jordan.

02:54:24.000 Transgender people have every right to live free of bigotry, but they shouldn't compete with biological females if they're trans women.

02:54:32.000 And so again, I think the difficulty is that for most people who are social justice warriors, they think that we can't chew gum and walk at the same time.

02:54:40.000 I could be for all of these noble causes without ever murdering a millimeter of truth.

02:54:46.000 Yeah, and the physical issue is very strange, too, because physical variables, they're so real.

02:54:54.000 And to deny that as a factor, as a real factor in who you are and what your potential is, that's one of the reasons why sports are so interesting, right?

02:55:03.000 Like, a person like me really doesn't have a chance to compete against LeBron James.

02:55:09.000 It's not going to happen.

02:55:12.000 It's not on the table. 0.98

02:55:13.000 And to deny that, it seems foolish. 0.53

02:55:17.000 To deny physical differences.

02:55:20.000 It's one of the reasons why sports are so interesting.

02:55:23.000 You get to see these freaks.

02:55:26.000 You get to see these rare people that can do things that you know for a fact if you had a million years to practice, you could never achieve the things that they're doing.

02:55:34.000 And it's But by the way, John Watson, one of the founders of behaviorism, argued basically, and I have the exact quote in the book, that, you know, give me any 12 infants,

02:55:49.000 I could turn any one of them into the next beggar, the next surgeon, the next athlete. 0.88

02:55:54.000 So he was basically arguing for exactly the position that you are so rejecting.

02:55:59.000 Hey, I could turn you into the next LeBron James If you give me the right opportunity to properly condition you and socialize you, it's insane.

02:56:09.000 By the way, even, for example, in psychiatry, until very recently, something as clearly organic as schizophrenia was blamed on the environment.

02:56:20.000 You had a schizophrenic mother who hugged you too much or didn't hug you enough. 0.99

02:56:25.000 Of course, today we look back at that and say, who believed this nonsense? 0.66

02:56:31.000 Well, Freudians did, right?

02:56:33.000 So again, it's not as though these ideas are not espoused by otherwise very smart people.

02:56:39.000 John Money of Johns Hopkins University Who was one of the original sort of gender is a social construction, used to advise surgeons, well, don't worry about it. 0.92

02:56:50.000 Do the surgery on this boy and put him in a dress, call him Linda, and he will be a girl. 0.98

02:56:56.000 Because it was thought that gender is completely due to social construction. 0.93

02:57:00.000 It has nothing to do with biology.

02:57:02.000 So these ideas have real consequences.

02:57:05.000 They're not just some esoteric thing that we talk about in the humanities department.

02:57:09.000 Well, at one point in time, you were one of the first people that was arguing the dangers of this stuff leaking out of the universities. 0.73

02:57:17.000 And people thought it was foolish.

02:57:18.000 Like, you're concentrating on something that's a small faction of people that are in the universities and it has no bearing on the real life.

02:57:24.000 But then we've seen, like, particularly the protests in Portland, where they went on for like, I mean, I think they're still going on.

02:57:29.000 It's over 100 days.

02:57:31.000 Of them trying to light federal buildings on fire and rioting in the streets.

02:57:35.000 It's still happening.

02:57:37.000 That is literally those chickens coming home to roost.

02:57:41.000 No kidding.

02:57:42.000 Exactly right.

02:57:43.000 Look, I know we've talked about Justin Trudeau previously on your show. 0.91

02:57:47.000 Justin Trudeau is a walking manifestation of almost every single one of the bad ideas that I discuss in the parasitic mind.

02:57:56.000 He's into postmodernism.

02:57:58.000 He's into diversity, inclusion and equity.

02:58:01.000 He's into cultural relativism.

02:58:03.000 You know, every single one of the dreadful things that I talk about in the book, he exemplifies it.

02:58:08.000 Why?

02:58:08.000 Because he is a product of that Educational process.

02:58:12.000 That's what you're supposed to think as a progressive.

02:58:15.000 And now that he is prime minister, he institutes each of these ideas.

02:58:20.000 They have real consequences.

02:58:21.000 I'll tell you a quick story that just happened to me recently.

02:58:26.000 My daughter came to me and told me that her science teacher had an avatar of BLM in their dialogue, in their whatever, Zoom or whatever it was called.

02:58:35.000 And I thought that was very objectionable.

02:58:37.000 And so I wrote a very polite but firm letter To the principal saying that I didn't think that it was appropriate in the pursuit of her pedagogic responsibilities that a teacher would signal her political affiliations to young children.

02:58:53.000 And secondly, I then said, but never mind that, If you look at some of the positions that are espoused by BLM, they're truly grotesque, whether it be the Marxist stuff, whether it be the black supremacism, whether it be the clear anti-white propaganda.

02:59:08.000 And so I thought, is this something that's appropriate for a teacher to be doing?

02:59:12.000 Well, within a few hours, It was taken away.

02:59:15.000 It was taken off, right?

02:59:16.000 So that was, in a sense, me activating my inner honey badger, right?

02:59:20.000 It's not that I just got on a Joe Rogan show to talk about these ideas.

02:59:24.000 In my own personal life, I got engaged, and I think that's what everybody needs to do.

02:59:30.000 You need to be engaged in the battle of ideas because they have truly severe consequences on our children and their children.

02:59:37.000 But there's a lot of people that are afraid.

02:59:39.000 They're afraid to engage in the battle of ideas because they don't want to be labeled a bigot and they don't want to cause people to attack them and they'd rather just keep their mouth shut and complain quietly to their friends.

02:59:52.000 But earlier we were talking about all of the different frailties that the human condition suffers from.

02:59:59.000 I think cowardice is something that I've always said should be added to the long-standing list of seven deadly sins.

03:00:05.000 We should have an eighth sin called cowardice.

03:00:09.000 Look, I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but the young folks who landed on Normandy weren't given a guarantee of safe passage.

03:00:20.000 They knew that most of them were going to be mowed down like little mosquitoes by the machine guns of the Nazis, and yet they said, hey, I'll go, I'll do it. 0.69

03:00:28.000 And they did that.

03:00:29.000 They made that sacrifice so that Joe Rogan and Gad Saad can today sit in a free society And have this great conversation.

03:00:35.000 So I understand that people are afraid of real repercussions.

03:00:39.000 And I'm not suggesting that people should be reckless martyrs.

03:00:42.000 But what I am saying is that you can't simply say, I'm too afraid and I've got too much to lose.

03:00:49.000 Let Gad Saad, let Jordan Peterson, let Joe Rogan put their neck on the They've got this.

03:00:55.000 They can handle it.

03:00:56.000 No, we each have a small part to play.

03:00:58.000 If we all grow a pair and speak out in unison, we'll get rid of these ideas by next Wednesday.

03:01:05.000 If we don't, it'll be a long ride to hell.

03:01:09.000 Hear, hear.

03:01:09.000 I think that's a great way to end this.

03:01:11.000 We just got through three hours, believe it or not.

03:01:13.000 Isn't that nuts?

03:01:14.000 Just flew by.

03:01:15.000 Man, I could sit with you and talk.

03:01:16.000 I felt like it was three minutes.

03:01:18.000 You're just the best, man.

03:01:19.000 You're unbelievable.

03:01:20.000 Listen, I feel the same way about you.

03:01:21.000 I appreciate you very much.

03:01:22.000 Your book, The Parasitic Mind, needs to be read by you in the audiobook.

03:01:27.000 Please, whoever's listening, audio people, the people that are responsible, the publishers, please!

03:01:33.000 Let Gad read it, please.

03:01:35.000 Thank you.

03:01:36.000 Thank you, brother.

03:01:37.000 It was an honor, as always.

03:01:38.000 Take care, my friend.

03:01:40.000 Bye-bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 29, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1557 - Gad Saad

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