The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 304. Infamous： When Comedy Exists Outside of Agenda

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

00:00:05.560 important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those

00:00:10.560 battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can

00:00:15.700 be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you

00:00:25.520 might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that

00:00:30.420 while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're

00:00:35.700 suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to

00:00:42.100 Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be

00:00:48.080 the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:55.520 Hello to everyone who's watching and listening on YouTube and on the podcast platforms. I'm

00:01:12.880 speaking today with comedian Andrew Schultz, who's also an actor, producer, and podcaster. One of the

00:01:21.080 biggest and most influential names in comedy today, the business savvy Schultz has been credited with

00:01:27.000 helping to spur democratization in comedy. He has proven that comics looking to retain ownership of

00:01:33.380 their material by self-releasing on platforms like YouTube can achieve equal or greater success,

00:01:39.480 both financially and in terms of the building of an audience in comparison to those who strike deals

00:01:44.680 with streamers or networks. Schultz recently sold more than 150,000 tickets as part of his 10-month

00:01:51.900 sold-out Infamous tour, which he capped off by selling out the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall in New York

00:01:59.280 twice. He premiered his subsequent special, Infamous, exclusively via the live streaming social media

00:02:08.100 platform Moment House in July, before releasing it for free on YouTube, where you can watch it as I did

00:02:15.060 this morning. While Schultz has self-released multiple specials, including his first titled

00:02:19.760 4-4-1 in 2017, he's also managed to find success through more conventional channels, having created,

00:02:27.740 written, performed, and executive produced the four-part comedy special,

00:02:31.620 The next project he's involved in as an actor is Kenya Barris' remake of the classic streetball

00:02:42.300 comedy White Men Can't Jump for 20th Century Studios, which has him sharing the screen with

00:02:48.260 Laura Harrier. He will also appear in Netflix romantic comedy You People, top-lined by Eddie Murphy,

00:02:56.260 that must be a thrill for him, Jonah Hill and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, which Barris will direct from his

00:03:02.980 and Hill's script. Schultz will then rejoin Barris for MGM's sports comedy Underdogs alongside Snoop Dogg,

00:03:11.160 so there'll be a lot of marijuana involved in that. Past credits on the TV side include HBO's Crashing,

00:03:17.340 Prime Video's Sneaky Pete, and IFC's Benders. Schultz's podcast, Flagrant, is listened to by

00:03:25.460 2 Million Devout Fans Weekly. He also co-hosts Brilliant Idiots with Charlemagne the God.

00:03:33.040 Looking forward to talking to you, Andrew. I'm ready. I'm ready. Let's do it, man.

00:03:37.260 Also, my mom discovered you this week, so she's an absolutely huge fan, and she says hello,

00:03:43.340 and she would be furious if I didn't say hello for her. What's your mom's name?

00:03:47.180 Sandra Cameron. Sandra Cameron Schultz.

00:03:49.500 Aha. Well, say hello to her for me, and I'm really impressed that it only took her a week to become

00:03:54.120 a huge fan. It's always good to know that someone's mom likes me.

00:03:59.460 Yeah.

00:04:01.280 So tell me, hey, tell me about your YouTube special and how that came about. You decided not to stream it.

00:04:09.800 You put it on YouTube instead. So I want to know the whole story. How'd that come about?

00:04:14.800 Okay. So short version of the story is I was originally going to do it with a streamer,

00:04:21.820 right? And then they were unhappy with some jokes. I think the climate changed a little bit,

00:04:27.740 and they were quite concerned how the jokes could reflect on the brand, which is reasonable. I think

00:04:34.220 that a private corporation has the right to make those decisions for themselves and then see how

00:04:39.520 things go for them after that. Now, sometimes those decisions could be the wrong ones. You know,

00:04:43.840 you could maybe become too woke in your content and then end up losing money, but...

00:04:50.180 No, that could never happen. Too woke? How could that possibly be? Too woke for comedy?

00:04:56.000 Yeah.

00:04:56.240 I can't even imagine that's a thing.

00:04:58.200 No, but... Okay, side note. I mean, I want to get back to the special, but there is something

00:05:01.740 interesting that I've learned from like being in Hollywood a little bit more now,

00:05:06.220 is that like, I used to have the perception, you know, I think we all create these perceptions

00:05:11.340 where it's like, there's this like group of organized individuals that are like coming together

00:05:16.760 and making decisions on like what is palatable and what isn't palatable, and then inserting those

00:05:22.820 into culture in their like different fields, like Hollywood, one of them. Okay, all the movies this

00:05:27.280 year are going to be about non-binary or whatever it is. And after being in it a little bit more,

00:05:34.140 I think that it's way less organized and more about self-preservation. So it's like,

00:05:42.760 how do I not lose my job?

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00:07:21.940 Well, I worked with middle managers for a long time when I was selling

00:07:28.700 personnel evaluation technology to corporations. And I did that for about 10 years, rather

00:07:37.400 unsuccessfully. We found one company that used them extensively. But I learned very rapidly there that

00:07:42.960 the fundamental motivation of virtually every middle manager in a corporation is,

00:07:48.020 how can I not get blamed if something goes wrong? Yes. That's it, man. There's no ambition.

00:07:54.780 There's no desire to grow the company. There's nothing. But I don't want to stick out. If there's

00:07:59.640 a mistake, I don't want it to be on me. I hope I don't get blamed for anything. I'm not going to do

00:08:04.240 anything dangerous ever. And yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the idea that people are organized enough to

00:08:09.880 have a conspiracy is that that's just so rarely the case. But I was part of that belief a little

00:08:15.700 bit because you see it and it looks so obvious. You're like, why is every single movie the same,

00:08:19.240 every single TV show the same, but they're having the same values. But then after, like I had a moment

00:08:23.920 on a show a while ago where a guy got fired, a white older man got fired because he read the N-word.

00:08:30.720 Like he read the script and it had the N-word in it. And like the whole cast was kind of like,

00:08:38.320 well, the people I spoke to on the cast, even the black people in the cast were like, yeah,

00:08:41.020 I don't, I don't think it's that offensive. But the companies involved were thinking what the

00:08:45.800 middleman was thinking, what you just said, which was, okay, I don't want to be responsible for this.

00:08:50.060 How do we, how do I get this blame off of me? Okay. Maybe if we just remove this person,

00:08:54.640 it'll be a sign that we are, we care about the people that are here and we don't want them to be

00:08:58.440 offended, et cetera. Now, I don't think, I don't know. I don't believe that the guy did it out of

00:09:02.520 malice. And the black people I spoke to on the cast were like, yeah, I don't think he was being

00:09:05.680 malicious at all. But it was one of those things where everybody was fighting for the ability to

00:09:13.600 continue working and they didn't want to take that responsibility. And because of that, they made a

00:09:18.440 very woke decision. So now it may, you know what I'm saying? It made me look at the industry a little

00:09:23.820 differently. Like everybody, it's like maybe the more desired the job is, the more willing the

00:09:30.280 middle managers will be to, to, to be extremely liberal in their values. So they don't lose that

00:09:36.920 opportunity. I don't think that exists on a construction site because the guys there are

00:09:40.540 like, look, I can get a job doing drywall somewhere else. So I'm going to say whatever the fuck jokes I

00:09:44.580 want to say on this construction site. So I think too, though, there's, there's a complicating factor

00:09:51.740 there, which is, it's something like this. So, you know, each of us carries a representation

00:09:57.620 of systems of ideas in our, in our imagination, in our mind. And those ideas are active within us.

00:10:06.360 That's one way of thinking about it. And nobody is a 100% repository of all woke ideas.

00:10:15.360 But so there's fragments of the woke net of ideas in any given individual. But if you get

00:10:21.500 20 people who have fragments of those ideas in their head all together in a room, then you have

00:10:27.600 the whole goddamn woke catastrophe operating. And then it'll look like a conspiracy. And then you

00:10:35.100 can take 20 different people, each of whom have fragments of the woke nonsense in their head and

00:10:39.540 put them in a different room. They'll come up with the same decisions. There are these webs of ideas

00:10:44.380 that, in some sense, each of us acts as a neuron in a, in a, in a neuronal web when we're together

00:10:52.060 in a group. And so then things look conspiratorial, but it's a consequence of the working out of the

00:10:58.000 internal logic of systems of ideas. And so, and then it might be that each individual actor is

00:11:04.420 fundamentally only concerned with not being held accountable for ever making any kind of mistake,

00:11:09.560 which is a hell of a way to live your life. Certainly no way to live your life. If you're

00:11:13.640 a comedian or a man for that matter, maybe not even a woman, you know, not even. Yeah. Yeah.

00:11:21.140 That should make me popular. Yeah. Yeah. It was just, it was an interesting thing for me to see

00:11:26.500 how it kind of manifested. And I think that there is like an opposite version of that. Cause now I've

00:11:32.220 seen like the, the conservative woke pop up. Have you been, are you familiar with this? Or what are

00:11:40.040 you referring to? I don't even know if I call it the conservative. It's a really interesting thing.

00:11:44.800 It's, I would almost call it like the counterculture brigade, which is like people who I think have

00:11:50.680 been, I think they were called conspiracy theorists and now they're kind of like searching for a home.

00:11:56.720 I think a lot of the, the support for Kanye even right now is he's just tapping into very niche

00:12:04.440 beliefs and a bunch of them at the same time that people have no representation for. And now he's

00:12:10.980 the most famous person tapping into those, those groups. Right. So he's like Jordan. He's like

00:12:17.540 George Floyd really died of fentanyl. And now all the people that are anti black matter,

00:12:23.520 a black lives matter. They just hate the idea that there's anything else that killed him,

00:12:27.900 but his own choice to do fentanyl are like, okay, Kanye's got it. And he also did a thing.

00:12:35.500 He's all, you know, the Jews run the banks, the Jews run all these things. So he's tapped into all

00:12:38.920 these niche groups and now he's become like their representative. But what I've noticed about

00:12:43.480 these groups is that like, they're so scorned by maybe being lied to by the mainstream media or

00:12:51.580 whatever it is that their personality or identity has almost become the rejection thereof.

00:12:58.420 Yeah. Well, that's, that's always a threat that exists on the conservative side. You know, the,

00:13:03.580 the left wingers always accuse the conservatives of being reactionary and they're reactionary

00:13:09.520 because they keep saying things like you guys on the left, you're going too far. You got to slow

00:13:14.480 down. You got to stop doing this. You're going too far. And that is reactionary in some sense,

00:13:19.720 because they're always reacting to the excesses of the left. The conservative types tend not to want

00:13:25.860 to change things. And, you know, that can be their downfall too, because sometimes things have to

00:13:30.380 change. Although intelligent conservatives sure know that, but it's hard for the conservatives to

00:13:37.440 come up with a vision and to unite themselves because, well, first of all, they tend to stand for

00:13:43.000 tradition and it's not that easy to articulate traditional norms. And second, they do get reactionary.

00:13:48.740 And, you know, that can turn into kind of a demented populism too, because the reactionary

00:13:54.160 conservatives can go out and find the disaffected people on the right. And there's plenty of them

00:13:58.760 now, and then capitalize on their resentment. I mean, Trump was pretty good at that in many ways

00:14:04.460 and continues to be so, you know?

00:14:07.820 Yeah.

00:14:08.160 And that's, I haven't been targeted particularly by the right, although I have to some degree

00:14:13.640 years ago. You know, when I first rose to whatever degree of notoriety I have now,

00:14:21.040 a lot of the disaffected types on the right were also hoping that I'd be their guy. And

00:14:25.880 same thing happened to Dan Crenshaw, the congressman, because he kind of looks,

00:14:29.780 he's got that evil right-wing super villain appearance, if you, you know, in some sense.

00:14:35.260 And they were kind of hoping he'd be their man. And he wasn't. And he actually gets targeted more

00:14:41.040 by the, by the conspiratorial right than he gets harassed by the left, which is quite the

00:14:46.460 accomplishment on Crenshaw's part.

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00:15:55.300 And he's a perfect example because it's almost like this group of people who have felt so rejected

00:16:04.460 by everything. I'm talking about the extreme conservative. We need another term for it.

00:16:10.180 Like, I don't like how liberal and conservative, it's too binary because I don't even see like

00:16:15.680 the extreme woke thing to say. Yeah, right? Now we're talking. Yeah, good work. Good work,

00:16:20.440 Andrew. Yeah, you see, you fell right into the clutches of that system of ideas. I know, I know,

00:16:24.780 I know. It's too non-binary. They get me, they get me. But it's like, because I've seen the way

00:16:32.080 that they went after Crenshaw when he disagreed, I think about like gun rights or something like

00:16:35.380 that. He was their champion as long as he said everything that they agree with. And the second

00:16:40.740 he diverted from their beliefs, he no longer was useful. And this happened to me. I didn't even know

00:16:47.440 that this like cluster of people existed in this like organized way. But like I did a rant where I

00:16:52.200 went after Kanye. And I thought it was kind of a pretty easy thing to do. Here's a billionaire

00:16:57.480 that said some awful things. I'm going to roast them with jokes. This is what I do. I think we

00:17:04.260 can make fun of billionaires. I think they're okay to make fun of. And there was this like onslaught

00:17:09.260 of comments about people saying, you got it wrong. It was fentanyl that killed George Floyd. You got

00:17:14.200 it wrong. The Jews do run the banks. They do these things. And I'm like, who, what is this group of

00:17:18.500 people? And why are they so organized and hateful? And why is Kanye their new guy? And I started DMing

00:17:23.540 some people that were like trashing me. And I was just like, explain like what you're upset

00:17:27.080 about to me. I don't understand. Like we're just making fun of like a really rich guy that said some

00:17:31.280 awful things. And the reaction that every single one of them said was so funny. They're like, look,

00:17:37.860 Kanye is an idiot, but he's right about these things. And they're basically saying anybody who agrees

00:17:43.160 with me and is famous, I'm going to ride for as long as they agree with me. And the second they

00:17:48.360 divert. The problem with social media is that you have to hear from people like that. You know,

00:17:53.560 let me tell you a story. I was talking to Andy Ngo, the journalist who covers Antifa.

00:18:00.140 Yeah. And I had been talking to some prominent Democrats about Antifa and they said it doesn't

00:18:08.640 exist. And I said, well, what do you mean it doesn't exist? It promoted riots in multiple

00:18:15.680 American cities. There's people in black masks and uniforms that call themselves Antifa.

00:18:21.320 How do you mean it doesn't exist? Say, well, there's hardly any of them. They're not really

00:18:24.860 organized. They're not an official group. And they're a tiny, tiny, they're such a tiny minority

00:18:31.060 that they're negligible. And it didn't really appear to me that they were negligible, but these were

00:18:36.740 respectable people and they weren't stupid. And I thought, okay, they probably have a reason for

00:18:40.720 thinking this. So I asked Andy Ngo about this because he knows more about Antifa than anyone

00:18:45.860 else in the world. And I said, how many Antifa cells do you think there are cells, so to speak,

00:18:51.820 in the United States? And he thought, well, maybe 40. And I said, well, how many full-time equivalent

00:18:58.120 employees do each of these cells have, so to speak, right? How many people in each city are devoting

00:19:03.740 their lives to being Antifa, whatever that means? And he figured 20. And so that's 800

00:19:10.420 out of 300 million. It's one in 400,000. And so like, that's none, right? In a city the size of

00:19:19.060 Halifax, city many Americans probably don't know about, but it's a city of about 400,000 in Canada,

00:19:25.080 you'd have one person. And like, in some ways, that's zero people, right? It's just no one.

00:19:31.340 But the problem is, is that a very tiny number of people can cause a tremendous amount of problems,

00:19:37.160 a tremendous amount of trouble. And maybe enough trouble to bring down a whole civilization.

00:19:42.180 Maybe it only takes one in 100,000 to do that, especially if they're organized. And now with

00:19:47.460 social media, well, they're always organized because no matter how peculiar you are, you can

00:19:53.780 find another 100 dimwits exactly like you on the net. And then you start to think that, well,

00:19:59.060 you've got something there. And, you know, in some ways that's a plus because disaffected people

00:20:03.720 can find a community, but man, it depends on who the disaffected people are and exactly what the

00:20:09.180 community is up to. So, and then, you know, you're in a situation where you're putting out content to

00:20:16.320 hundreds of thousands or millions of people. And you also, you get feedback, but it's demented and

00:20:22.860 strange feedback because it's not representative of the normal population. It's, it might be that

00:20:30.040 subset of people who had a really bad day for reasons you don't even understand and that are

00:20:34.720 deciding to take it out on you behind a mask of anonymity. There's something very pathological

00:20:40.520 about the democratization of public discourse on social media. It's really warped and demented.

00:20:46.740 Now, my, my question to you is why do you think that those democrat leaders didn't acknowledge

00:20:52.160 that this was a problem? Do you think they truly didn't think it was a problem based on the data,

00:20:56.400 or do you think that they were also acting in terms of self-preservation?

00:21:02.440 Well, I think they were much more concerned with 4chan and the conspiratorial right,

00:21:08.260 which they regard as truly real.

00:21:10.520 But that's self-preservation, right? You can criticize the opposition and not lose votes.

00:21:16.260 It's also justification for their own beliefs.

00:21:19.860 Of course, of course. But like, I actually admire what Crenshaw did is he knew by taking

00:21:25.140 that stand that he was going to reject some of his base. I admire that. That's a ballsy,

00:21:30.000 brave move. Stand up for something you believe in, despite pissing off people who may follow you

00:21:35.460 and support you. He's not acting in terms of self-preservation. He's doing what he

00:21:40.400 genuinely thinks the right thing to do is. Now, in politics, this is middle management, right?

00:21:45.160 You have to support your constituents if you want to stay in office. If you truly care about

00:21:49.900 holding on to power, if you truly care about making change, you're going to piss off your

00:21:54.080 constituents by rejecting Antifa because the opposition is going to, or your, your maybe

00:22:00.140 democratic opposition is going to position you as someone who is not empathetic to the liberal

00:22:04.800 plight. Yeah. Well, you know, the, the easy way out of this, as far as I can tell,

00:22:09.520 well, easy, the only real way out of this conundrum is just to say what you think. Like,

00:22:15.320 you don't have to say everything you think all the time, but you have to, you have to decide at

00:22:19.840 some point whether you're going to pander to the short-term demands of your hypothetical constituents

00:22:24.820 or whether you're just going to say what you believe to be true. And the thing is, is that I

00:22:31.160 watch politicians, and this is, this is a particular terrible thing that's happening in the political

00:22:36.000 arena right now, is they use opinion polls to sample the consequences of their actions.

00:22:43.260 But most of that's just rubbish. And the reason I'm saying that there's technical reasons for that

00:22:48.360 is that if you want to find out what people think, say even one person, it's extremely difficult because

00:22:55.420 first of all, people don't know exactly what they think and they can't articulate it that well.

00:23:00.660 And it's a mystery even to them. And so you have to spend a lot of time listening to find out what

00:23:05.600 anybody thinks about anything, especially if you're not just going to go for their immediate

00:23:09.760 cliches. And then if you're going to sample a whole population and try to get their opinion about some

00:23:15.680 political issue, then you have to formulate the questions with unbelievable care.

00:23:21.820 It really takes, to find out what people think about any given complex issue would probably take a team

00:23:27.880 of reasonable researchers two or three months to formulate the questions accurately enough to get

00:23:34.100 a reasonable response. And yet opinion pollsters claim that they can just tell you what people

00:23:39.140 think by coming up with some questions. And so then the politicians judge the results of their

00:23:46.040 actions by the opinion polls, which don't really represent people's views at all. And then we're led by

00:23:51.860 this idiot whim of the mob. And the real leaders go out and listen to people and then aggregate their

00:24:00.860 concerns and then act on principle. And that's essentially what Crenshaw did. And to tell the

00:24:06.400 truth is to act on principle. And I think with regard to the medium to long-term rather than the short-term

00:24:12.520 immediate popularity payoff, which is a bad way to, it's a very bad way to conduct your affairs. I don't

00:24:18.980 think it's a good long-term strategy. And imagine if you were a comedian and your, your, your rule

00:24:24.820 was, I'll never make a joke that offends anyone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be, I'd be a very

00:24:33.680 different comedian. I'll tell you that. Yeah. I think pretty much every joke in your last special

00:24:37.980 would have been cut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so back to that, you said the streaming service that you

00:24:45.080 were working with wanted to, they wanted to edit your show and how in the hell did they decide

00:24:50.600 what was the hierarchy of offense? Because I, I watched your special this morning and I thought

00:24:56.000 every goddamn thing you said was offensive. So how did they decide what to cut, what to keep?

00:25:01.800 That's a great question. You know, I'm sure that they have their, everybody has their like list,

00:25:06.620 list of what is right and wrong. And I think that list is so malleable. And I think that's,

00:25:11.380 for me, that's the most fun part of standup is I like finding the divisive topic and then

00:25:18.000 seeing if there's like one kernel that we can all agree on. And sometimes that thing that we all agree

00:25:24.280 on is the opposite of what everybody would like to present themselves as. So like, like I, like I'm

00:25:32.940 trying to think of even, I know I had a bit about abortion in, in the special, but I'm even thinking

00:25:37.160 about like abortion right now, which is a very divisive topic, right? I don't know how you feel

00:25:41.880 about it, but I've been like really thinking, I'm like, what is like the, the truth on how people

00:25:47.560 feel about abortion? And I think I've gotten to it, which is, uh, okay. Everybody has a number of

00:25:56.700 abortions where if you go past that, it's too many. So it's not really, even if you're liberal,

00:26:04.840 it's not really your body, your choice. It's like your body, your choice up to like three.

00:26:12.900 And then all of a sudden people are like, what's, what's going on over here? You know, nine,

00:26:18.600 nine is a softball team. Like that's, that's a lot, right? Like that usually people, even the most

00:26:24.420 liberal person will be like, all right, well, teach her how to put on a condom or something. Like what

00:26:27.920 the fuck is going on over here? And then the most conservative person, their number is one.

00:26:34.300 They're like, one is too many, but we all agree that there's a spectrum of when it's too much.

00:26:40.400 And I think like, for me, that's where a joke begins, right? I go, Ooh, okay. There's the, I can,

00:26:46.520 there's a whole group of people in like this liberal San Francisco audience where I may perform at or a

00:26:51.360 super liberal New York audience. What if I can get every person that, even the women that are super

00:26:55.780 pro-choice to be like, yeah, nine is a lot. I, you know, nine, I think it might be the government's

00:27:02.360 choice at nine. You know, like, how can I get you to see the other side without being a politician

00:27:08.660 about it going, this is how you must live your life. How can I do it? We all laugh. You know,

00:27:13.480 I think it was like Oscar Wilde was like, uh, said, like, uh, if you want to tell someone the truth,

00:27:18.420 make them laugh. Uh, if not, they'll kill you. And I don't think all comedy has to be truthful and all

00:27:23.060 that kind of stuff. I think comedy speaks to feeling. It doesn't speak to what is right or

00:27:26.560 wrong. It speaks to genuinely how you feel. And, um, yeah, well, it does tend to speak to truth in

00:27:33.980 some real sense because when you laugh, when an audience laughs, they laugh spontaneously,

00:27:40.700 right? The laughter is truthful, but the laughter is truthful because it taps into a feeling.

00:27:47.820 But just because you feel a thing doesn't mean that that is right or wrong. And I think that's

00:27:53.740 where a lot of times comedians get in trouble when they start going, I'm speaking truth to power. I'm

00:27:58.220 telling you what's right or wrong. And it's like, buddy, don't put the cape on. Yeah. Just, if you

00:28:03.760 tell people you're just out here telling jokes, you're just having fun. Now you're not going to be

00:28:08.680 positioned with the responsibility to tell the truth every time I want to tell up jokes. I want to say

00:28:14.400 messed up things. And in order for me to do that and have the freedom to create in that space,

00:28:18.820 I can't be Superman. You know what I mean? I can't say that I'm the arbiter of truth. I'm going to get

00:28:24.840 it right every single time. What I'm going to do every single time is make you laugh.

00:28:28.760 I think also that that actually, um, what would you say? It subordinates comedy to something lower.

00:28:35.880 You know, when I, you see this happening with entertainers very frequently, probably most

00:28:41.580 often with actors is, but sometimes with musicians, sometimes with other, let's call them

00:28:48.440 entertainers. It's a bad term. Creative artists is they, they get possessed of the idea at some

00:28:55.360 point that what they're doing isn't good enough. And that because it isn't good enough, they have to

00:29:00.220 do something truly good. And that's usually something in the political arena. And what they don't

00:29:05.180 understand is that there is almost nothing in the political arena that's anywhere near as good as

00:29:09.640 what works in the creative arena. So you're immediately subordinating what's best to what's

00:29:15.160 lowest. And so when you see a Hollywood actor go on a political rampage, you think, well,

00:29:20.820 you're already doing a lot of good for the world with your creative actions. And now you're,

00:29:25.900 now you're a second rate politician, even though you were a first rate actor or comedian or musician.

00:29:31.300 And, you know, I've gone to a lot of artistic shows in recent years and had them polluted by

00:29:38.000 political discussion and you get pulled into the performance and then halfway through there's

00:29:45.160 something politically correct often because that's generally the case now. And you think,

00:29:49.040 oh my God, I got suckered here. You know, I was coming to hear someone great, do something great.

00:29:53.260 Now I have to listen to the same halfwit political opinion that I could have not paid for and listen to

00:29:59.140 any undergraduate spout. It's like, well, thanks a lot for that. You know, you think black lives

00:30:04.300 matter. Well, you know, that doesn't make you special. Yeah. You know, anyone who's not an

00:30:09.820 outright bloody Nazi thinks that. And so it's just not, it's just not elevating. And it's, it's very sad

00:30:17.100 thing to see that creative artists are buying the idea, part of this rat's nest of ideas we were

00:30:24.380 talking about earlier that, that politics is somehow morally superior. Political opinions

00:30:30.600 are somehow morally superior to creative endeavor. That's definitely the case on the comedy front.

00:30:37.360 Yeah. It's, it's, I wonder if it, hmm. Yeah. I think it's hard. I think like with success and

00:30:43.540 notoriety, well, it's twofold. It's like with extreme criticism, for example, you went through

00:30:48.400 extreme, extreme, extreme criticism. It's hard. I would imagine to stick to your guns when you know

00:30:57.340 that you could easily back into the comforts of the people supporting you, right? It's the brave

00:31:03.580 move is despite the criticism, continue saying and feeling, uh, the things that you feel for lack of a

00:31:11.700 better way to describe it, but like to continue being consistent on how you feel and expressing that

00:31:17.040 it's very easily to get like this onslaught of criticism from the left and then just go,

00:31:21.260 all right, the right likes me. I'm going to go right wing. All my opinions are conservative,

00:31:25.500 et cetera. It's much harder to piss off the left one day, piss off the right the other day,

00:31:30.580 because that's who you are as a real person. Nobody is 100% in that way and feeling that thought

00:31:37.760 every single time. Like what I, what I tried to, I guess, express in a lot of comedy, like I have an

00:31:43.240 abortion bit in the special to this day, nobody knows which side I am on the abortion issue,

00:31:48.660 right? And both sides think that joke represents them. That's designed on purpose to do that.

00:31:55.480 Like if you even look at the comments, both of them are recognizing like the faults in their side

00:32:00.220 and also the support of their side. And to me, it was really cool to put out a piece like that,

00:32:05.080 that wasn't going, you're an idiot for not believing exactly what I believe, especially a divisive

00:32:10.760 topic like that. I just think it's, I don't know, like, did you have that moment where you were

00:32:14.820 getting this onslaught of criticism and people were calling you the next fucking Nazi this,

00:32:18.940 and then you're the, the muse for like movie villains. Was there ever a moment where you were

00:32:23.200 like, this, I don't need to stay true to myself. Let me back into the comfort of the people who love

00:32:28.720 me. Yeah. Well, it's hard to say, you know, because a lot of that's pretty subtle. If all the attacks

00:32:35.600 or almost all the attacks are coming from one side and almost all the support is coming from the

00:32:40.500 other side, it also puts you in a position of having to wonder just exactly who your friends

00:32:45.920 are, you know? And one of the things I have found is that for me, for whatever reason, and I don't

00:32:52.580 think that this is unique to me, it's a lot harder for me to talk to people on the left. And the reason

00:32:57.840 for that, and it didn't used to be like that, not, not 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Yeah. In fact,

00:33:05.820 if you'd talked to me 15 years ago, I probably would have thought that I was at least moderately on the

00:33:10.140 left. And so, but in any case, I always feel like I have to walk on eggshells. I feel like I have to

00:33:16.440 watch what I'm saying. And I don't really like talking to people around whom I have to watch

00:33:21.900 what I'm saying. I actually like to talk to people and I can just say what I have to say, especially if

00:33:26.860 it happens to be funny, which now and then is the case. And so, and then it is difficult not to

00:33:34.140 identify with people who support you, especially if that goes on for years. And so, who knows how

00:33:39.980 that changes you? You know, I definitely have become more conservative in my thinking. And I

00:33:46.200 would say, I think there are intellectual reasons for that primarily though, you know, because one

00:33:51.560 of the things I've understood more deeply recently, more explicitly, you know, I've been putting this

00:33:58.900 together is that the definition of sanity that's generally implicitly held among the psychological

00:34:08.560 community is probably too individualistic. And what I mean by that is that I don't think that sanity is

00:34:17.160 something that you have in your head. It's not part of your psyche. It's not part of you exactly.

00:34:22.920 It's more like harmonious interaction with the hierarchy of social arrangements that you have

00:34:33.700 with other people. So, well, imagine this, for example, a neighbor I knew on my street said to

00:34:39.960 me once, you're never any happier than your most unhappy child. Right? So that's a good one. But so

00:34:48.960 you imagine, well, you're a pretty sane person and you're married and your marriage is terrible.

00:34:52.620 It's like, well, then you're not that sane, are you? And if you have a terrible marriage and you're

00:34:57.140 not getting along with your kids, then you're also not very sane. And if you're in a terrible

00:35:03.320 marriage and you don't get along with your kids and you're fighting with your siblings and your

00:35:06.820 parents, then you're even less sane. And so you imagine that sanity, you're sane if you have a

00:35:12.760 relationship that's working, if you have a relationship with your family that's working, if that family

00:35:18.400 is nested inside a community that isn't too fractious, you know, and there's something

00:35:22.300 musical about it. It's like every note has its place. And so I think, yeah, you see what I mean?

00:35:28.880 And it's also, I see what you mean, but if I can give some pushback, I would say that like the person

00:35:34.840 that has the miserable marriage and unhappy kids, but is still seemingly happy. That person is insane to

00:35:41.800 me. The person that has unhappy kids in an unhappy marriage and is unhappy is sane.

00:35:50.120 Yes, that's exactly my, well, that's exactly the point I'm making is that, okay. Yes. Because the thing

00:35:55.460 is, is that if you aren't reflecting the structure of the social communities around you, then you're

00:36:01.740 off calibration. Well, here I was talking to a woman named Jean Twenge yesterday, and she's a research

00:36:07.500 psychologist. We were talking about self-esteem and one of the, the self-esteem movement in the

00:36:13.440 school system in California was absolutely dreadfully devastating and appalling. It basically

00:36:19.820 posited that you could teach kids how to be narcissistic to overcome their negative emotion

00:36:26.120 and neuroticism. And that's so preposterously appalling that you couldn't invent something

00:36:30.880 stupider. So we were talking about self-esteem, whatever the hell that means, because it's a very badly

00:36:35.940 defined term, but here's one way of determining whether you have the appropriate amount of

00:36:42.560 self-esteem. You might say, well, everyone should feel good about themselves. It's like, well, if you're

00:36:46.960 a miserable, ratty, lying, deceptive, narcissistic prick, then probably you shouldn't feel that good about

00:36:55.000 yourself. And how do you know that? Because you should feel about as good about yourself as people on

00:37:00.840 average do around you, right? So you're, and we even know this technically because you have a little

00:37:08.980 counter, so to speak, in your psyche that ranks you in terms of your social standing. And the higher

00:37:18.760 you're ranked, the less negative emotion you feel and the more positive emotion you feel. And that's

00:37:25.560 because your brain is indicating to you that you're well situated in a social community and you're

00:37:31.140 secure with opportunity. And so your self-esteem should, that's exactly how it works. It's a very,

00:37:36.980 so what happens to people who get depressed, technically depressed, is that that counter goes

00:37:44.540 astray and they start thinking less of themselves than their situation would indicate.

00:37:51.000 Yeah.

00:37:52.260 And so then everything around them falls apart. They feel that their past was a catastrophe.

00:37:56.460 They feel that their present is hopeless and that the future isn't going anywhere. But it's because

00:38:00.720 this really, really low level counter that utilizes serotonin has gone astray. And sometimes

00:38:08.160 antidepressants can help deal with that. Now that's not someone, that isn't someone who has a terrible

00:38:13.960 life. That's someone who has a good life, but something's gone wrong with them psychophysiologically

00:38:19.780 often. So the counter is out of whack. In any case, you should have about as much self-esteem as other

00:38:25.260 people are willing to grant you. And that's kind of a conservative idea as well, in some real sense.

00:38:31.780 Enough self-esteem as others are willing to grant you.

00:38:34.820 Yeah. It's like, well, imagine, you know, if everybody in the company assumes that you're an

00:38:39.780 average performer, you should probably assume that you're an average performer. You shouldn't be

00:38:45.100 running around feeling good about yourself in excess of that because your attitude towards

00:38:50.540 yourself should be a reflection of your actual situation in the social environment.

00:38:57.080 So my pushback on that would be, um, if your self-esteem is defined by how the people around

00:39:04.280 you treat you, how can you break out when you're in an industry of, of narcissists that are really

00:39:13.620 only concerned with how they're doing, what they want. Like how, how do you separate yourself?

00:39:19.260 That's a great question, man. And that's, that's the, that's the trick that, that presents itself to

00:39:25.900 everyone creative. But the answer maybe is, and this is, I don't, I don't know if we support this,

00:39:33.580 but this might be the truth. There is a reason why narcissists tend to break out because their

00:39:38.640 self-esteem is not limited by the views of others. That is, that is true. That is exactly true. Well,

00:39:45.320 in fact, in that regard, so you put your finger on something that's cardinally important because

00:39:50.160 it is generally the case that your view of yourself should reflect the views of those around you.

00:39:56.200 But the problem with that is now and then the social situation gets so pathological that that's

00:40:02.960 no longer reliable. Now, when that happens, you're really in trouble. That's the first thing we should

00:40:08.300 point out because if society has got so demented that its feedback can no longer be trusted, then

00:40:14.860 everything's, everything's going to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. But that is when you get the

00:40:20.100 necessity for people to call on whatever it is within them that makes them true

00:40:25.820 moral agents to, let's say, say what they believe to be true with great caution. But I would say even

00:40:32.880 in those circumstances, like I've been fortunate when I've been doing that to the degree I've been

00:40:38.300 able to do that because I have friends around me who are giving me accurate feedback, I would say,

00:40:45.360 and careful feedback despite the mob pressure. I don't know if anybody could really do that alone.

00:40:51.820 You know, you know what I mean? Maybe you could.

00:40:54.200 Yeah, 100%. And 100%, I just know, and I'm sure you felt this as well, is that like,

00:40:58.580 at least when I'm running my business and I have my friends and the guys that I work with and build

00:41:05.020 with, I personally feel most creative when I have support, right? So when there is a momentum,

00:41:13.420 when the ball is moving, when there's an avalanche, that's when these explosions of creativity happen to me

00:41:18.500 in a conversation, when I'm talking to someone or other people who value what I have to say,

00:41:23.620 all of a sudden, I have tons to say. I'm excited to share. When I'm talking to someone who thinks

00:41:28.840 that I'm an idiot, I'm questioning the things that I have to say. So in my mind, I'm trying to

00:41:34.120 foster an environment where everybody here feels the confidence to access their genius, right? Now,

00:41:41.040 if their genius in one zone is a six, that's fine. If their genius in another zone is a 10,

00:41:48.240 that's fine. But let me get the best version of you. Now, that's not saying we're buttering people

00:41:52.860 up, but at the same time, we're not treating it like, I don't know. I think like creativity is not

00:41:58.660 a football field, right? Where it's like, you can only run as fast as you can run. I can yell at a

00:42:04.280 player. He's still going to run a 40 in five seconds. I can say he sucks. He's going to run a 40 in five

00:42:09.220 seconds. I can say he's great. He's going to run at 40 in five seconds. But with somebody who's

00:42:12.740 coming up with like a creative idea, a funny idea, the more I build his confidence up, the more willing

00:42:18.620 he is to go into those deep, weird concepts that might produce something incredibly creative.

00:42:23.500 Yeah. Well, you do a lot of that by listening and attending, right?

00:42:27.460 Yes.

00:42:27.960 Yeah. Because people will manifest themselves more fully in precise proportion to the degree that

00:42:36.920 they're being attended to and listening to. I was thinking too about the calibration issue. You

00:42:42.000 know, one of the values of a real education is that you start to spread the community that you

00:42:52.040 identify with over vast spans of time. So, you know, in the humanities in particular, at least in

00:43:00.140 principle, there was a golden thread of conversation that's been going on at least from the time of

00:43:05.780 Socrates between great minds moving forward that have been adjudicated as great by the consensus of

00:43:12.680 the entire educated community, let's say. And now that's all, of course, parodied as a patriarchal

00:43:20.060 oppression. But we'll leave that aside for the moment. And then maybe when you're called upon

00:43:27.460 to speak carefully and truthfully, despite mob pressure and despite your otherwise laudable

00:43:36.380 willingness to abide by the judgment of the group, the group starts to expand across time.

00:43:44.540 And so the pathologies of the moment can be ignored in favor of the, what would you call it? The

00:43:51.420 wisdom of the group stretching across thousands and thousands of years. And you see, that's also

00:43:56.260 in some sense a conservative idea in the deepest sense, because the idea would be that there is a

00:44:02.740 fundamental spiritual tradition that manifests itself philosophically and theologically that

00:44:09.620 has to be attended to despite the vagaries of the moment. And so, and that seems to be right. You

00:44:16.940 know, I mean, I think what you do when, if you go to university and you get a real education,

00:44:21.500 you find a peer group, the peer group of creative and truthful thinkers, and their thought in some

00:44:30.380 sense exists outside of time, right? It's eternally valuable. And it doesn't matter what the situation

00:44:37.220 is. And then you can judge your actions in the moment against those standards.

00:44:41.100 Hmm. Yeah. But you're still picking the people whose standards most resemble yours.

00:44:49.020 Well, not necessarily, not if you're really getting educated, you know, because then you

00:44:52.980 get exposed to a lot of people who didn't necessarily think the way you thought.

00:44:57.940 Well, this is, this is why it's so important. It's like,

00:45:01.580 and this is why the internet is amazing, but also dangerous. It's just like university in this way.

00:45:06.920 Okay. Before the internet, there was college and that's how I described it. In high school,

00:45:11.980 you talk to some people that had rough experiences in high school, especially people who are younger

00:45:16.140 than me. And I said, Hey, just wait till you go to college. You're going to be dealing with way

00:45:19.240 more people and you'll be able to be yourself because there's some other people that actually

00:45:23.100 feel just like you. Right. And you're going to really like this college experience because

00:45:27.220 you're going to find a friend group that just didn't exist in your small hundred kid per grade

00:45:31.560 high school. Right. The internet is that on steroids, right? Now that little four person

00:45:38.140 group that really likes gaming and wearing masks and doing all this other shit is 4 million globally.

00:45:43.980 You get to feel part of a big group and you have all these people that like what you have to say.

00:45:48.860 But what I think that the internet can often do, and it's something that like,

00:45:52.900 I try my hardest to not let it do is it dulls our sword. You know what? We don't have to communicate

00:46:01.480 outside of the echo chamber, right? We know if we want, we can say the things we believe to the

00:46:08.280 people who also believe them. And now there's no more nuance. One of the great things about getting

00:46:13.380 on stage and doing standup comedy show when people don't know I'm going to be there, right?

00:46:18.000 I've been very fortunate to go and sell out in the biggest theaters in the country, right? This has

00:46:23.380 been awesome. But one of the really cool things about going up to a show where people don't know

00:46:27.340 I'm going to be there is there are people who may disagree with me, hate me, not know me, and also

00:46:33.000 love me all in the same room. And it keeps my tongue sharp. I have to communicate to those people

00:46:40.900 ideas that they might disagree with in a way that's funny enough for them to listen and then

00:46:47.180 project laughter. I fear and I sometimes fear that like you've experienced so much

00:46:55.600 undeserved hate from the left that it's positioned you as with some resentment, which is reasonable.

00:47:04.140 I don't know how you're even still having like the common debate and discourse. Like if most people

00:47:09.880 in your situation, they would just say them, screw them, whatever. But your information

00:47:15.680 is more important to the people who don't agree with you than the ones who already agree.

00:47:21.980 You know what I'm saying? Like explaining the value of, let's say God, I'm not someone who was

00:47:27.580 raised with religion, but I believe in the power of it. And so explaining the power of God to someone

00:47:33.060 who is not religious is more important to the, than to the believer. Cause if that person can get

00:47:39.020 something from it, it's so powerful. But if you've only ever explained it to your congregation,

00:47:43.840 you're not going to be able to communicate it to me or another person or a person who is a,

00:47:49.040 maybe there's even an atheist. There's no way they're going to be able to digest it.

00:47:52.420 Yeah. Well, that was, that was part of the potential danger of joining forces with the daily

00:47:56.860 wire, you know, cause they're obviously a conservative enterprise and my family and I thought long and

00:48:02.680 hard about that. I mean, first of all, um, I like working with the daily wire. They've been extremely

00:48:08.880 good to work with. They've left me alone. Not only have they left me alone to do whatever it is that

00:48:16.120 I want to do, they've helped me do things I wanted to do that I wouldn't have been able to do

00:48:20.740 otherwise. And I also felt that it was appropriate and wise to find some, um, allies on the social media

00:48:31.560 front because while I'd got banned off Twitter and you know, YouTube hasn't harassed me much,

00:48:36.260 although they've demonetized my daughter several times for reasons that are completely opaque and

00:48:41.400 God only knows, you know, what might happen on the YouTube front. I know they've demonetized

00:48:46.400 Yanmi Park many times, the North Korean dissident. And that's because Yanmi Park objects to North

00:48:53.000 Korea, you know, and you'd think you'd be able to get away with that given that it's after all,

00:48:58.860 North Korea, which is like the worst dictatorship anyone's ever managed to produce, which is really

00:49:04.040 saying something right because there's been some pretty bad dictatorships. And so, and obviously

00:49:11.260 the daily wire is a conservative enterprise. And I was worried that that would compromise my ability

00:49:16.600 to communicate with the very people that you were just discussing, especially about the things that

00:49:21.220 I want to talk about. But, um, you know, also I would say, I don't exactly know what to make of this.

00:49:29.460 You also find your friends where they're willing to have you, you know, and I get pilloried quite

00:49:37.340 often for not talking to enough people on the left. And a huge part of the reason for that is that

00:49:41.920 most of the time they won't talk to me. I, I spent years trying to find Democrats who would speak to me,

00:49:48.440 you know, actual politicians who would speak to me on my YouTube channel. And although I have a couple

00:49:53.040 identified now and potentially lined up for years, the answer to that request was, there's no way we're

00:50:00.840 going on your channel. And so, you know, how the hell can you talk to people if they just say no?

00:50:06.240 Why should they? Why should they go on their channel? You're going to lobotomize them. Like,

00:50:10.600 I don't think the answer is speaking to politicians. Like I remember, I remember first engaging,

00:50:17.420 like with your content. And what I think is so powerful about you is that you're such a thoughtful

00:50:24.260 thinker that you can really almost, I don't want to use the word weaponize, but like you can weaponize

00:50:30.940 arguments for the average person that has feelings they can't articulate. And I think what's, what's so

00:50:38.080 powerful about that is that you're giving a voice to someone that doesn't feel confident enough to

00:50:43.780 express themselves. Right. And it's a really, but what's really great about it is that it's

00:50:49.160 articulated in a way in which the other side understands and accepts. And I think it's one

00:50:55.480 of the reasons I was probably drawn to you is because I like doing this with comedy, regardless

00:50:59.160 from which side I'm fighting for. I would never take a political side because that's, that's my

00:51:03.620 ability to dance. I can't dance once I say I'm on one. I don't want you to know where the joke is

00:51:08.020 going. But what I loved is you, you deliver this information and it was so hard to refute it.

00:51:16.400 And I don't care whether you're on the daily wire or whether you're on CNN plus or whatever that

00:51:20.740 shit is. It doesn't matter to me because as long as your thoughts stay true to you, then that will

00:51:26.160 be communicated. Maybe less people on the left will digest them because you're on the daily wire and

00:51:32.220 that's their bias, which is stupid. But I do want your ideas to get to them. And I want them to get

00:51:39.840 to them in a way where it's, it's not coming with resentment because nobody listens once they're told

00:51:47.140 they're an idiot first. You know what I mean? Like if you're going to listen, you an idiot, here's why

00:51:51.740 you're an idiot. I already shut down. You know what I'm saying? Like, cause you said you want to fight

00:51:56.920 me. You didn't say you want to teach me something. And I wonder if when you were teaching in the

00:52:01.620 university level, you were almost, you were almost, it was like the comedy club with the

00:52:06.900 strangers. You don't know who these kids are, where they're from.

00:52:09.760 Well, it was also never, it was never political. You know, I mean, none of the things I did at the

00:52:16.200 university until I objected to some Canadian legislation were ever political. And I didn't

00:52:24.300 really expect things to turn off the way they did.

00:52:26.300 I wish we could just talk about it culturally. Like, I don't know, politics creates this divide

00:52:31.020 and there are these people that it's just like we were talking about before where they're

00:52:34.320 just trying to preserve themselves. They just want to keep their job. They want to win their

00:52:37.660 next reelection and they're using you in some gotcha strategy. And I hated seeing it happen,

00:52:42.420 but there's certain realms that once you enter, you deal with the onslaught. There's like institutions

00:52:47.160 like you with banking, you banking, people are going to take you out. You politics, people are

00:52:52.680 going to take you out. And there's probably like another one as well. And, but for me, it's

00:52:57.100 like, what are these cultural conversations? Like it's important, the messaging that you

00:53:02.080 get across and I know it and you do something and I'm not trying to compliment myself here.

00:53:07.900 I'm just complimenting you. But like for me, when you express a viewpoint or a feeling and

00:53:13.460 my 75 year old mother likes it and a 19 year old kid likes it, you're speaking to core primal

00:53:22.700 human instinct. Okay. That is what jokes do. If I see, when I see generations of people at one of

00:53:31.200 my shows, when I see a father and his son, both laughing together, like one, I get emotional

00:53:35.600 almost. Cause I'm like, Oh, I love those moments with my dad. Yeah. But two, I'm like, I'm hitting

00:53:39.880 in core. I'm hitting who you are. I'm not tapping into this like community you're supposed to be a part

00:53:46.080 of. I'm tapping into something primal. Yeah. Well, so, you know, you talked about people's ability to

00:53:51.480 find community on online and, and the analogy between that and the colleges. I think the

00:53:57.920 difference is, is that when you go to college and you find people who have your intellectual

00:54:04.600 and creative interests, let's say, you also do that under the tutelage of older people. So there's

00:54:10.880 an apprenticeship element and you do it while you're being introduced to the great thinkers of the past.

00:54:15.960 And so there's a, again, that's a conservative idea in some sense. It's like you get this new

00:54:21.360 freedom and you get to, you get to expose yourself, so to speak, to new people. And, but you do that

00:54:28.600 within the confines of an intellectual tradition. And so that stops it from going seriously sideways,

00:54:34.200 let's say into the realm of ideology or propaganda or conspiratorial thinking, which are,

00:54:39.620 which are pathologies that you might associate with that emergent group identity. And a lot of

00:54:45.960 that's lacking online, obviously, obviously. Yeah. I hate how, I'll be honest, like, I hate how

00:54:52.640 the right has been bastardized. I hate how the left has been turned into like a bunch of like pussy

00:54:58.420 little cucks. Like, I think that there's these extreme versions, right? Like the extreme right is not

00:55:06.420 like a Romney conservative. You know what I mean? Like the extreme left is not like a, I mean,

00:55:13.160 Clinton is, you know, embroiled in controversy, obviously. But like when my parents were growing

00:55:17.920 up and they were like Clinton Democrats, you know, or even Obama, if you want to say it, like these

00:55:22.060 things are so close yet the parties are defined by their extremes. It's almost like soccer clubs.

00:55:28.680 You know, when you look at like these soccer teams, they're like defined by their hooligans.

00:55:32.000 A lot of times it's like the hooligans are five, not even 5% of the people even go to the games.

00:55:37.740 Right. So what I would love is the discourse to come back here.

00:55:41.400 Yeah. Well, and part of that, part of that, I really think I was talking again to this Gene

00:55:46.460 Twenge the other day about what's happening online to facilitate that. And this tiny percentage of,

00:55:52.740 of, of bad actors goes without punishment online. And that's a huge problem. You know,

00:56:00.100 if you're a real troublemaking prick in person, someone's going to give you a swat and that's

00:56:06.640 going to keep you down, you know, and sometimes that doesn't happen appropriately. And sometimes

00:56:11.220 it does, but generally speaking, people watch their tongues pretty carefully when they're talking

00:56:15.940 face to face with actual others and the narcissists and the Machiavellians and the psychopaths

00:56:21.880 keep themselves pretty well in check because of that pressure. But online, none of those

00:56:28.060 sanctions exist. Plus the social media companies capitalize on the agitation they produce and

00:56:35.100 they literally capitalize on it because their algorithms drive people's attention towards the

00:56:40.460 polarizing influences. And so we're in a situation now where that 3%, because it's probably no more

00:56:46.660 than that, holds disproportionate influence over, over political discourse online. And I have this

00:56:53.740 suspicion that that's tearing us, that's really tearing us apart because it's, it's obliviating

00:56:59.040 the middle, right? The reasonable middle. It's also the case, I think that the people in the reasonable

00:57:03.860 middle, because they're reasonable and because they're just going about their lives, aren't that

00:57:09.460 good at articulating the values of the middle, right? Yes. Because I always think about this in

00:57:15.480 relationship to marriage. It's like, you know, some radical can come up to you and poke you and say,

00:57:20.280 justify marriage. And the typical person is just going to be set back on their heels. It's like,

00:57:26.960 well, I don't know how to do that. We agreed 50,000 years ago that marriage was a good thing.

00:57:32.160 I can't come up with a philosophical justification for it. It's like, why do you love your children?

00:57:38.000 Yeah. Well, I don't know. I just, yeah, well, it's, it's the, the, you know, the, the, the ideas that

00:57:50.100 bind us, that are deep, they don't, they're not generally, they're not generally articulated.

00:57:58.620 And so when they're challenged, those who hold them have no idea what to say. And like, here's another,

00:58:04.920 here's another example. I like to use this on people who are radically left. It's like,

00:58:10.060 why is slavery wrong? I think, well, God, it's obvious that slavery is wrong. Slavery is just

00:58:16.720 wrong. It's like, okay, fair enough. Why? Yeah. Well, as far as I can tell, it has to do something.

00:58:23.700 It has to do with the fundamental sanctity of the individual. It's basically a religious claim.

00:58:30.240 Yeah. You're removing their freedom. Yeah. And their freedom is, their freedom is an appropriate

00:58:35.840 part of them because they're a part of divine providence. It's something like that. That's

00:58:40.140 the axiomatic claim. Well, if you dispense with the entire religious underlay, which is certainly

00:58:45.880 what you do if you're, if you're on the radical left, it's like, well, then why not, why not just

00:58:51.940 use power? If I can make you do what I want you to do, why the hell not do it?

00:58:57.080 But this is how jokes work. It's like, yeah, but why is it wrong?

00:59:02.100 But this is how jokes work. Isn't this beautiful? It's like you find a way to get a person who is

00:59:07.920 an atheist, doesn't believe in religion, thinks the religion is the worst thing in the world

00:59:11.300 to agree that religion has immense value by getting them, by getting them to agree that a thing they

00:59:18.100 hate, slavery is wrong. And then you attach why slavery is wrong to the thing that they also think

00:59:24.500 is wrong. And now they have to choose one or the other. And that's not a hard choice,

00:59:28.760 religion or slavery. That's great.

00:59:30.980 Why did you just compare that to a joke? I think you're right. But why, why did that connection

00:59:35.340 occur for you?

00:59:36.840 Because you're making people choose what will, for me, that's how I would enter anything. I would go,

00:59:42.360 okay, how there's a person who is not religious, or we can even use like, wait, wait, let's person

00:59:48.920 who's not religious. I would like to convince that person that religion is valuable, right?

00:59:54.580 So, and I have bits that I've done about this, right? So what do they hold true? What are their

00:59:59.000 other values? Maybe they're very liberal. Maybe they don't believe in, I mean, I don't think you

01:00:03.160 have to be liberal to not believe in slavery. We should all not believe in slavery. But here's

01:00:06.300 another thing that they would hold true. They disagree with slavery. Okay. Now, if I believe that

01:00:10.180 the reason why man has the right to their, their, I guess, independence and their freedom

01:00:15.920 is because I'm a God made individual and God would never make somebody chained, uh, then

01:00:22.180 that person has to accept that God is the reason why slavery is wrong and therefore has to

01:00:28.920 right. So, right. Okay. So there is some, okay. There is something, there's something definitely

01:00:33.840 there because a punchline. So there's a, there's a whole line of psychological. We need a punchline

01:00:39.920 still. Yeah. We need a punchline still, but that's a premise. Right. Yeah. Right. You need to put

01:00:44.400 the punchline is what drives it home. You know, and one of the things that I have found, I think

01:00:49.380 that what I do on stage is most analogous to what standup comedians do. And the reason for that is

01:00:56.860 that when I do a lecture, for example, or try to answer a question, there's usually an investigation,

01:01:03.380 but it has to build up to a punchline. There has to be a culminating moment where it's driven home and

01:01:10.460 that's a moment of insight. And what it does is it takes a bunch of information that's sort of

01:01:14.420 being scattered around and brings it together. And everybody goes, aha. And that's very much like

01:01:20.860 the, the, the, the climax of a joke. And it's, it's part of insight. And so there's a psychological

01:01:28.120 literature on insight and insight seems to develop when a number of things that weren't linked together

01:01:34.480 are suddenly linked together and you go, aha, that's how all that fits together. And I mean,

01:01:40.400 comedians are doing that all the time because they, they. We're explaining the world. And

01:01:44.760 sometimes we're explaining the world in ways that don't really make sense, but they're funny

01:01:48.300 connections. You know, I had a, one of the earlier jokes in my career that worked was, you know,

01:01:53.380 we were talking a lot about like the oppression of women and I'm like, okay, maybe it'd be funny

01:01:57.080 if I could find a justification for the oppression of women. So I said, you know, the oppression of

01:02:01.220 women is horrible. You know, countries that treat women horrible. I mean, that's just awful,

01:02:05.280 but they have the best food. So my just like, you know, nobody's ever said, you know, let's go out

01:02:11.380 for a Canadian tonight. Right. So to me, that's, that's like the more equal a country, the worse

01:02:16.600 the food is. And then the more oppressive the country, the better, like, I think one of the

01:02:20.600 lines was, uh, the more countries like stay in the kitchen, the better the food comes out of the

01:02:25.420 kitchen. You know, now these are absurd concepts, but a really funny connectivity, right?

01:02:30.800 Right. Right. I'm justifying something awful, but now all of a sudden everybody in the room

01:02:35.260 is kind of agreeing like, Holy like, yeah, I'm not a fan of Swedish food. I'm not a fan

01:02:40.060 of, you know, I'm, I'm, I've really, I really love hummus. You know what I'm saying?

01:02:46.060 I mean, Norwegians, Norwegians eat fermented shark. Jesus. That's an argument against the equality

01:02:53.200 of women right there. Fermented sharks. That's just not a good idea. So this is the cans

01:02:59.780 of that stuff. I think it's called surstrumming. You can't fly on airplanes with cans of that

01:03:05.920 because they explode. So that is not a food you should eat.

01:03:11.660 So to me now I don't have the responsibility you have, which is to be truthful and right.

01:03:16.480 So I can dabble in the wrong and the wrong is so funny, but for me, like, I don't know.

01:03:21.900 I just love this. I love the wrong. The wrong is great. And we allow, it allows us to explore

01:03:25.720 ideas. Like I got a boxing coach, right? And, uh, not, not for anything else other than

01:03:29.980 exercise. I just love to do this part. Right. But, um, and he's from Egypt and he was speaking

01:03:35.040 to me in Egyptian Arabic. And I thought they're like curse words are a great way of organizing

01:03:41.480 a society's hierarchy in values, like the different curse words that they use. Right. And he was

01:03:47.680 telling me, he'll call me different curse words. He called me a mitnaka, right? Which means

01:03:52.800 prostitute. Sorry, sorry. Mitnaka means, um, a slut actually for lack of a better word.

01:03:59.760 Uh, and then he goes, uh, sharmuta, he calls me, which means prostitute. He goes, now listen,

01:04:05.540 outside of here, don't say mitnaka to anybody. That is a horrible word. Okay. You cannot say that.

01:04:12.080 Do not, he's basically, don't call anybody a slut. He goes, you can call people sharmuta. That's not

01:04:16.280 that bad. I go, wait a minute. You're saying slut is worse than prostitute. And he goes, well,

01:04:22.680 sometimes you have to for money. That makes sense. But just for pleasure. What is wrong

01:04:27.960 with you? Go your boyfriend or something. And I thought it was like such a beautiful look

01:04:32.680 into culture. You know what I'm saying? Like, like there are dire circumstances that made

01:04:40.700 it more reasonable to have sex for money because you needed money to survive. Maybe you need to

01:04:44.940 help your family. And that was forgiven culturally in this. It was, it was like understood. It was

01:04:50.960 like, you don't want to do that, but at least you're doing it to support your family.

01:04:53.960 Yeah. Well, the curse, the curse words always touch on taboos, right? And so taboos would

01:04:59.140 be the worst thing in a society. Um, the, in, in, in Quebec, all the curse words are church

01:05:06.600 related. Tabernak. Yeah, exactly. How do you know that? Why do you know that?

01:05:11.560 It's my job to know these things.

01:05:13.100 So let me ask you again about your special. So it was going to be edited. Did you know how heavily

01:05:20.140 it was going to be edited? Yeah. They told me certain jokes that they, that they didn't like.

01:05:24.420 And again, I don't necessarily have resentment for companies that are trying to protect themselves.

01:05:29.900 You have that right as a company. I disagree because I don't think it is the protection that

01:05:36.340 you want. I think the ultimate protection is putting out great content that people love.

01:05:40.660 Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's how you develop the moat. But I think it's very easy to just

01:05:45.200 go like, you guys, you guys want to censor blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, I get it. You have

01:05:49.380 a family, you have kids in private school. You don't want that maybe responsibility of putting

01:05:53.300 out the thing that got your company in trouble, yada, yada, yada. So I don't have personal

01:05:57.280 resentment. It was frustrating. So basically long story short, what I did is, uh, I bought the

01:06:02.780 special back and I, and I, they could have said no to this, but I was able to buy the special

01:06:07.080 back, which is, I'm very grateful for. And I put it up on, uh, my own, uh, put it up

01:06:13.660 on moment. Moment is this platform where you can stream content. So basically pay for people

01:06:19.940 to buy a ticket to watch the show and then own it in perpetuity. So I first did a window

01:06:24.860 there, kind of like a movie, right? Like you go see Batman in the movie theater. That's

01:06:28.660 how I was thinking about it. You go see Batman in movie theater. It's there in a movie theater

01:06:31.900 for a couple of months. And then a few months after that it's on cable. So I was like, let

01:06:35.960 me try this for comedy. I put it up here and you know, fingers crossed and it does unbelievably

01:06:41.860 well. And I made way more than I would ever make on the special itself. It was the most

01:06:47.580 money I've ever made in my life to be honest with you. And that was moment. It was on with

01:06:52.180 moment. Yeah. So like moment, uh, yeah, moment world is now, but it was moment house when

01:06:56.960 I did it, but moment, it's just a great company. They've been doing these live stream

01:06:59.240 events. They do it for bands. They do it for comedians. And I'm hoping that this is another

01:07:03.380 pathway for comics to put their content out and have a window where they can monetize

01:07:08.460 it. I mean, the beautiful thing about putting your stuff out on YouTube is it goes to the

01:07:11.940 world, but you're not able to monetize it in the same way. And in order to create a special

01:07:18.180 like the one that we created, I mean, it costs $400,000 to shoot the special. So you have

01:07:23.380 to be able to generate money to do something that can compete with a Netflix, compete with any

01:07:29.160 of these other, an HBO, any of these platforms. I want to be able to create that content and put

01:07:33.620 it out there. So we put it behind this window and people came out, they supported it. It was

01:07:36.920 amazing. And then a few months later, I put it out on YouTube. Yeah. And that I think we're at

01:07:43.420 8 million views in a month or something like that. So now I get all the new people, all the people who

01:07:48.780 weren't familiar with me, all the people that didn't know who I existed and their friends can share

01:07:53.460 it. But I was also able to give it to the, to the, the, the fans who really have rode for me

01:07:59.120 from the beginning and give them this experience. Also the YouTube version, I put, uh, some ads in.

01:08:04.780 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I watched it. I watched it this morning. Well, how, what did you charge for the

01:08:09.060 special on moment? Uh, 15 bucks. And how long did you have it up there before you switched it to

01:08:14.520 YouTube? I did two, two week windows. So I just did two weeks and then so many people are asking

01:08:21.580 for it that I put it back up for another two weeks, a week later. And why did you decide on

01:08:25.780 those time periods? I wanted to create urgency. I think, I think one of the issues with just having,

01:08:31.720 you know, like it up is I'll get to it. I think that's one of the problems with content in general.

01:08:36.640 Like I think, yeah, I think, I think, uh, you know, there, there's this idea with it streaming,

01:08:42.300 and you're, Oh, I'll get to it. I'll get to it. And then you never get to it. And there's just so

01:08:47.100 much that you have to get to. And I think that if you create urgency, like a boxing match is we have

01:08:54.180 to watch this tonight. An MMA fight. We have to watch as a sporting event. We have to. So knowing

01:08:58.680 that there's this two week window where you could watch it with no ads, and this was the way it was

01:09:02.500 going to be, you know, also there was no telling when I put it on YouTube, if they weren't going to

01:09:05.980 take it down. So like, this was the only time that you were 100% sure that you could watch it in

01:09:12.140 its entirety. And, um, it also created this time where like everybody, well, not everybody, but a

01:09:17.600 lot of people watched it at the same time. So we had a live viewing and it created this communal

01:09:23.100 feeling, which we want. Like I love watching house of dragons, you know, the game of thrones,

01:09:28.280 uh, reboot. Uh, I love watching it on Sunday with everybody else and then going on Twitter and seeing

01:09:33.860 how people are reacting to it and taking part in this massive group experiment and hearing their live

01:09:40.360 real-time reactions. To me, this is awesome. So I wanted to create that for a comedy special and, um,

01:09:46.100 it was awesome. We were able to do it, man. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'll have to look into

01:09:50.000 moment. That sounds extremely interesting. And then you said, I'll connect you with them. Okay. Okay.

01:09:54.600 Good. You doing, you doing one of your lectures, for example, on moment, like creating this moment,

01:10:00.880 having this moment for all these people to all check in at the exact same time. And they've got some

01:10:05.720 other really cool features too. Like you can sell merch while you're watching it. Like there are all

01:10:09.740 these different things that are like easy to, to access. People can comment real time on it,

01:10:14.140 which is also cool. But like having this place where all these people who want to experience this

01:10:18.860 thing with you, be it live or pre-recorded, but before it goes out to the world and, um, people want

01:10:25.300 to support. That's another thing I learned. Like I've given out so many hours of comedy. I've given,

01:10:29.020 there's so many people that hit me up and they're like, listen, like you've made me laugh

01:10:31.600 with really, through really dark times for years. Like there are people, when I put it up on YouTube,

01:10:36.880 started donating money. I didn't even know that that was a thing that you could do,

01:10:40.920 but they felt guilty that they didn't buy it in the first window.

01:10:44.940 People don't, people don't really want something valuable for nothing. They want to contribute their

01:10:51.220 part. Generally speaking, that's, that's why giving away things for free in some real sense is a bad

01:10:57.260 pricing decision. And so, because it does, it does deprive people of the opportunity to reciprocate

01:11:04.300 and they want to be able to reciprocate. Yeah. So now you're having, I think, more success on the

01:11:11.080 movie front. That's correct. Yeah. I've been able to do, uh, some small roles in some films and, um,

01:11:17.880 I guess those are all going to come out. I don't even know when they're going to come out, but, uh,

01:11:21.580 I want to make a film. So to be honest, it's, yeah, well, I guess, I don't know here, here's,

01:11:29.140 I want to make a film. I'm really excited, but I'm really getting into story now and the power of

01:11:33.140 story. And I know I have this theory that like, I think stories, I think we have a biological reaction

01:11:42.000 to stories in the same way that we have to music. You know, like, like I noticed when I'm hanging out

01:11:49.220 with my friends that I've known for decades, we will retell the same stories that we were all a

01:11:53.520 part of. And every single time our, our eyes light up and we get goosebumps and we laugh and we get

01:11:59.280 excited and the stories morph and change. And we get to like relive them in the same way. When a song

01:12:04.440 comes on, that was a song you absolutely loved, or we were going through something, you get to feel

01:12:09.520 all those like emotions again, like you tap towards them. And like, even when somebody tells a story in

01:12:15.340 a group, it's different than when someone has like a hot take or a premise. It's like, Hey,

01:12:20.040 this thing happened. Everybody shuts up. And all of a sudden we're like around the campfire for some

01:12:25.740 reason. Yeah. So I'm, I'm one, I'm curious your take on what that is about us and story. Is it like

01:12:31.120 our earliest version of digesting information? Well, I think, I think we, this, I'm writing a new book

01:12:37.700 called we who wrestle with God and that's really what it's about. It looks to me like, I think it's

01:12:45.520 incontrovertible in some sense that we see the world through a story. And so if you're out with

01:12:52.660 your friends and you're telling a shared story, then you're, you're literally building the, you're

01:12:57.740 literally building the shared set of assumptions that constitutes the friendships. And so, so think

01:13:04.700 about the, think about the leftist take on the world. So the leftist take is something like

01:13:09.020 the fundamental story is one of power and the relationships between people are structured as

01:13:14.760 a consequence of power. That's true for marriages. It's true for history. It's true for the Western

01:13:20.900 canon. It's true for economic interactions. It's all about power. Well, that's a story and it's not a

01:13:27.140 very good story by the way. And it's also not a story that unites or reflects reality in an accurate

01:13:34.180 manner because social relationships are only predicated on power when they become corrupt.

01:13:42.360 So, well, if you have to force someone to be your friend, that's just not working very well. If you

01:13:48.880 have to force your wife to pay attention to you, then the bloody situation is degenerated. If you have

01:13:55.420 to force your children to listen all the time, then you're not mutually acting out a very good story.

01:14:02.580 And so the question is, what's the story that's the antithesis of power? And I think the antithesis

01:14:11.000 of power is play. If you're ensconced in a good story, then what you're doing is play. This is one

01:14:20.540 of the reasons it's, I really like watching comedians because they're playing all the time.

01:14:24.400 And I think you, I think that play, the spirit of play is actually the antithesis of the spirit

01:14:30.360 of power. Let me tell you something that will prove your theory. And I have to give credit to

01:14:35.520 my podcast co-host and just creative partner and so many things, Mark Gagnon. But we, I took him to

01:14:42.620 this thing called Burning Man this past year. And his reflection on Burning Man was, he goes,

01:14:47.940 it's just adult play. I go, what do you mean? He goes, think about it. The whole thing is adult

01:14:52.540 play. Now to tap into the power thing, Burning Man is what happens when you remove power. There's

01:14:59.280 no currency. You cannot buy anything. And there's no restriction in terms of your ability to enter

01:15:04.180 once you're there. Every party is welcome to everybody. Every place is welcome to everybody.

01:15:08.900 You can't even buy things. You just give. So you remove traditional power structure and hierarchy.

01:15:13.920 What is left for humans? Play. Dress how you want to dress. Dance how you want to dance. Party how

01:15:20.800 you want to party. Be silly. Prank one another. But play is the absence of power. Wow. That's kind

01:15:27.080 of cool. Well, look, look at what happened. I used to go work out with a couple of my friends in

01:15:31.960 Boston. And we used to try to make each other laugh when we were bench pressing. Because as soon as

01:15:39.160 you laugh, you lose all your muscular control. And so it's obvious that play and humor are

01:15:45.360 antithetical to power. Because as soon as you laugh, you're powerless. I think I talked to Theo Vaughn

01:15:53.520 about this, the comedian. His mother had a very strange condition. If he made her laugh,

01:15:59.820 she would actually fall asleep. Yeah, she'd lose so much muscular control that she would fall asleep.

01:16:06.240 He said he used to try making her laugh when she was driving. Yeah. Yeah. Which seems like,

01:16:11.840 you know, not the wisest thing to do. But he apparently wasn't the wisest child, at least

01:16:17.240 by his own admission. Well, he was curious. He was playing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a very

01:16:22.700 lovely thing to know, I think, is that, and then the right story to tell is one that enables people

01:16:27.700 to play along. But that's, and that's the beautiful thing. It's like when I hang out with my friends,

01:16:33.440 like when we have those moments together, that is what we're engaging in. We're engaging with this

01:16:38.440 ball busting. We're engaging with this play. And we're engaging with these storytelling that

01:16:43.160 these stories always share something about who one of us is or who we all are. You know, oh,

01:16:50.360 blah, blah, blah. Loves big girls. Remember when we were doing this and he had that girl, man,

01:16:55.780 she wasn't that big, blah, blah, blah. And now it's like, I'm not going to make a parallel to the Bible,

01:17:01.960 but like, there's a reason why the Bible didn't just say, just do these things. There's a reason

01:17:05.780 why they put them in story, right? Because it's far more impactful to listen to this story.

01:17:11.940 And I wonder if like through osmosis, the behavior in the stories kind of get locked into our long-term

01:17:19.280 memory, where if you just tell someone a rule, it's short-term and that might be fleeting.

01:17:23.680 Well, the thing about having the rule embodied in the story is you see how it's acted out.

01:17:29.580 Eh. So, and then that's much more convincing to watch how something's acted out, partly because

01:17:36.460 then you also know how to act it out, right? If it's just a rule, you have to translate the rule

01:17:42.040 into action. But if it's a story, then the actions are laid out for you. You know, and they say that

01:17:48.180 every story has a moral. And in some sense, that would be the rule of the story. But it's not

01:17:54.180 necessarily always that easy to extract out the rule, but you can still understand the story.

01:18:00.600 Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, I want to do a deep dive. And like, I just think, I think one of the issues

01:18:06.760 with Hollywood right now, to be honest, and like why some of these films just don't make sense or so

01:18:10.880 many of them don't is because the creator of the idea is so far removed from the executor of the

01:18:20.120 project. Yeah. So like, Hey, here's a great idea for a movie, blah, blah, blah. And then someone

01:18:25.200 goes, I'm going to buy that from you. That's great. Thank you so much. And then we're going

01:18:28.600 to go make it. And they're making it with all these people that are also kind of detached from

01:18:32.420 the project. If you look at the writer directors, their movies hit at a much higher rate. Yeah.

01:18:40.460 And it's not only because maybe they're more talented, but it's because they're invested

01:18:44.300 in the project all the way through. It means something if that project fails because their

01:18:49.980 identity is wrapped into it. A random person that gets thrown on a project, a random writer

01:18:55.680 that does punch up, that's not even credited. They also, they also benefit from the success

01:19:00.660 disproportionately. So, you know, you were talking about these censorship proclivities. So one of

01:19:05.480 the things I observed in, uh, in court, in the corporate world, when I was attempting to sell

01:19:10.860 to middle managers was that if they bought something from me and it failed, they would

01:19:16.980 get blamed. That would happen. But if they bought something from me and it was very successful

01:19:23.760 for the company, they wouldn't get credited. Oh, they wouldn't? No, because of this, because,

01:19:30.900 so I'll give you an example. We were selling these tests, psychological tests, and, uh, to,

01:19:37.060 to, to a group of people who were doing the hiring. And they said, well, they got budgeted on the cost

01:19:42.040 side. So every cent they spend on hiring would be, um, would be credited to them, right? As an expense.

01:19:51.800 But if they hired much better people and the company did well, that wouldn't be credited to them as a,

01:19:57.460 as a, uh, uh, accomplishment because the, the, the value would go to someone else.

01:20:04.580 It wouldn't be directly attributed to them. And so what happened to them was that there was an

01:20:08.840 outside risk to each of them for acting in an entrepreneurial manner and very little upside if

01:20:15.200 it was successful. And you can imagine in a Hollywood production, for example, that isn't

01:20:20.040 spearheaded by a writer director, if it's successful, he's going to be wildly successful.

01:20:25.180 Now he has to shoulder the blame too, but if it's distributed among a bunch of people,

01:20:29.640 then they're going to get blamed if something goes wrong. But if it goes real well,

01:20:33.480 they're not going to get credited. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how you

01:20:37.700 have a shitty project. Maybe you get lucky and it ends up working out, but, but yeah,

01:20:42.040 I think that I like shouldering that blame. I'll take the risk on myself with these projects like

01:20:47.180 that I, that I want to do. Like, I don't mind that if it fails, it's on me. I can take that.

01:20:51.220 That that's motivating. That's exciting. You know? And I also believe in myself and the people

01:20:57.180 that I work with that we can execute these things. So, but it's, it's, what happens is if

01:21:03.400 you do the, if you run a business like that, you create a bottleneck. You know, like I, I even went

01:21:09.340 through this when I was editing the special and we were editing the special, you know, I edited it

01:21:12.660 with Mark and Shifty who are absolutely brilliant. And we sat in there and we edited, it took us one

01:21:20.000 day for each minute of the special. So for one 60 seconds, it took us a day of editing. And we did

01:21:28.520 that for until it was done. Now, nobody's edited a comedy special like this because usually the

01:21:33.680 editors so far move from the comic or it's already with another production company or it's already at

01:21:38.500 one of these streaming things. But for me, in order for it to be as good and as nuanced and as beautiful

01:21:43.620 as it is, in order for me to take you into the room, we needed to edit it that way. Like we were

01:21:49.560 watching horror movies to see how they built tension and then released it because that's

01:21:55.600 comedy. It's tension and release. So if you have slow pushes while you're building the tension

01:22:00.540 and then removal when it's released, or like you zoom out when it's released, it's like,

01:22:05.340 okay, let's use that. Let's apply that. How can we make you feel the tension that you won't feel

01:22:10.420 because you're watching it through a screen? How can we bring you into the room? You know?

01:22:14.540 So that's something you do.

01:22:15.620 So that's interesting. So did you focus in while you were building the tension

01:22:19.440 and then snap out? Sometimes.

01:22:22.260 Yeah. Well, why did you decide? That's very interesting because that actually corresponds

01:22:26.980 to different hemispheric function. So the left hemisphere zooms in and the right hemisphere

01:22:34.340 zooms out and that the right hemisphere is responsible for insight and the left hemisphere

01:22:39.540 for detailed processing. And so you seem to have, you seem to have intuited something like that

01:22:45.880 in that editing process. That's very cool. So you zoom in and then when the punchline hits,

01:22:50.800 you can, you can snap to a broader perspective.

01:22:53.780 We'll often hit a punchline on a zoom in, but sometimes a punchline is a misdirection.

01:23:00.320 And by zooming in, immediately we would be telegraphing it. So what we would do is leave it

01:23:07.020 in let's say a cowboy shot or something like this. So we could catch you off guard because catching you

01:23:11.780 off guard is very important. Right? But maybe on a big laugh, we let the room breathe.

01:23:17.660 We were able to show the audience laughing as well. I think there's a communal aspect when you're at a

01:23:22.160 comedy club, you see other people laughing and that's beautiful. It's cathartic. You're like,

01:23:25.940 okay, I'm free. I can let loose here. So we want to, we want to show shots where other people were

01:23:31.120 laughing. So you felt comfortable. You could get caught up in that momentum. So it's like approaching

01:23:36.300 the editing process with the same passion, love, and creativity that we approach writing the jokes

01:23:41.640 and creating the show. Yeah. Well, that definitely, definitely one of the things that standup

01:23:46.260 comedians are doing is providing a communal theater for free play. And it's definitely free because

01:23:52.640 you can't compel someone to laugh. You can't even compel yourself to laugh. Not genuinely. It has to be,

01:23:59.520 it has to come from the source, right? It either strikes you as funny before you think,

01:24:04.820 or it's not funny at all. And there is something I think extremely stress relieving to be among a lot

01:24:13.820 of other people who are laughing at the same thing, because it means you're all being, you're all

01:24:18.760 playing spontaneously together without fear. And that's, that's almost like the definition of no

01:24:23.980 stress. Exactly. And one of the things that we like specifically did, like, like I would say that my

01:24:30.420 audience is by far the most diverse audience in, in standup. Now the advantage of that is,

01:24:36.500 and one of the things that I learned is I was going through standup and I like to make fun of

01:24:40.640 everybody because I'm curious about everybody. And I learned these things about people that I think

01:24:45.280 are like really funny. So when I organize them into jokes, I also like to talk about, it doesn't only

01:24:49.940 have to be like me. I'm not very self-centered with my comedy, which is not necessarily a bad thing,

01:24:54.420 but I'd like talking about topics, other people, cultures, et cetera. These things are all

01:24:58.280 interesting to me. But what I realized is we're going through this very like woke time where a

01:25:05.340 white dude, a straight white dude, like me making fun of, you know, somebody from Ethiopia might be

01:25:10.080 crazy. Right. But what I realized is if that Ethiopian person was there and I'm talking to them

01:25:16.800 and doing the joke to them and they're laughing, nobody can be offended.

01:25:20.860 Yeah. Yeah. Russell Peters does that very well. I mean, he's great at it, man. Cause he,

01:25:27.020 he's an equal opportunity offender and his audiences are, and it's so interesting to watch

01:25:32.320 his audiences because you can just, you can almost feel the tension in the different ethnic groups in

01:25:39.420 the audience waiting for their chance to be made fun of. And it's, they want it. Well, yeah,

01:25:44.920 it's because I think at a deep level, they want to show that they can play along with the joke,

01:25:49.060 you know, that they can. Two things. They want to play along and they want to show they can,

01:25:53.260 but they also like representation in a creative, clever way. Yeah. So like, this is something I

01:25:58.680 learned without realizing, but like, I would do these jokes about random, random groups, right?

01:26:03.300 Just, you know, knowledge that I picked up over the years. And then because the internet exists in

01:26:08.060 these echo chambers, those jokes will go viral in those communities. Right. Right. Right. So the

01:26:13.900 Bosnian community would hear about a joke I did about some Bosnians in St. Louis. There's a big

01:26:17.840 Bosnia community there, but it would go crazy viral, not only here, but in the Bosnian communities,

01:26:22.480 but in like Bosnia. And the beauty of this is they felt represented, not in a hacky way.

01:26:29.520 They felt represented in a cool way. They didn't know that people knew this about them. They thought

01:26:34.540 it was just their community. And then they're seeing it on a YouTube page with millions of views and

01:26:38.740 the world is laughing at it as well. Laughing at something they might be proud of. And they're cool

01:26:43.540 with being represented in that way. Yeah. When you do that, the community wants to share

01:26:48.300 it. They want to be part of it. Yeah. They feel like you cared about them enough.

01:26:51.640 It's an invitation to the universal table in some sense. Right. It's, it's, it's a place

01:26:56.500 where everybody, and that's what is so wonderful about standup comedy. It's like a, it's like

01:27:00.840 a, it's like a music concert, right? It's the same sort of thing is that people can go there

01:27:05.440 and, and enjoy something spontaneously communally and play together. And I'm really happy by the

01:27:14.140 way about this insight about play. You know, I think if you, if you had to set the world

01:27:19.080 up and you wanted to figure out what the best story you could possibly tell is, that would

01:27:24.360 be an antidote to the depredations of power. It does seem to me that a story about play

01:27:29.340 is the right one because there's nothing more fun than that.

01:27:32.420 What are we going to do this weekend? What are we going to do this weekend? What are people

01:27:35.200 around the world going to do this weekend?

01:27:38.760 Exactly. They're going to play with death.

01:27:40.760 They're going to play with the most terrifying thing in the world, right? The most offensive

01:27:47.040 costumes, but also the idea of death is what spawned it. We need it. It's, and I got to

01:27:51.800 give Louis CK credit on this, but like Louis had a, he was talking about comedy and it's

01:27:56.120 like making offensive jokes has existed for centuries. It would have been weeded out if there wasn't

01:28:02.740 something that we needed, if there wasn't some catharsis in it. The idea of Halloween, like

01:28:07.920 playing with death is crazy. If you really think about it, especially for earlier societies,

01:28:13.160 the most terrifying thing in the world to just dabble with it and joke with it and scare

01:28:19.020 people. We need it. We want that release. We want that play.

01:28:22.320 Well, the alternative, the alternative is to run in terror from it and hide. And all that

01:28:28.200 does, the thing about that is all it does is make it worse.

01:28:30.800 Yeah. And so I think, you know, here's another way of thinking about it. So when I was training

01:28:39.880 people who were agoraphobic to get back on elevators, let's say, we basically did that

01:28:47.920 by playing. And so the way it would work was, all right, I'm afraid of this elevator. I can't

01:28:55.240 get on this elevator. I'll have a panic attack. My heart rate will go up to 150 beats per minute.

01:28:59.860 I think I'm going to die. I'm going to make a fool of myself. It's just, I'm going to want

01:29:04.060 to go to the emergency room. It's going to be humiliating and dangerous. It's just a catastrophe.

01:29:08.700 It's death. I had a client who actually said when the elevator's doors opened, she said,

01:29:13.600 that's a tomb. And so she was, she was afraid of dying in there. And so in a sense, what we would

01:29:20.120 do is play because I would say, well, you can't get on the elevator. She said, that's right. And I said,

01:29:24.860 well, you know, can you look at a picture of an elevator in a magazine? It's like, well,

01:29:30.000 I think I could do that. And so that's on the edge of play, right? It's like, well,

01:29:34.100 it's a bit challenging and it's a bit threatening, but I could do it. And then maybe you have the

01:29:38.480 person go out in the hallway and, you know, they can walk within 40 feet of the elevator.

01:29:43.360 And so you find that line, it's a line, right? Where the person is willing to walk up to that line

01:29:50.660 and then one step farther. And that's really, again, what you're doing when you're telling a

01:29:54.960 joke. It's, you're finding that line and then you're walking one step farther and, and, and

01:30:00.800 you manifest that spirit of play. And it helps expose people to the things they don't want to think

01:30:05.360 about. In a safe environment. It exposes them in a safe way, right? Because we all know that we're

01:30:11.720 playing. It's just like, it's honestly, it's like flirting. You flirting with a girl or you flirting with a

01:30:16.300 guy. Flirting is finding that line of what is polite and then being funny enough to go a little

01:30:24.560 bit past it. And now everybody's in that little naughty territory. It's still safe because we're

01:30:29.780 playing. It's not like you're coming on too strong or like grabbing people or anything like that.

01:30:35.080 You're being naughty. You're flirting. You're like, yeah, what if we were, what if we were married?

01:30:39.300 Where would we go on vacation? And the girl's like, what are you talking about? I just met you. What do you

01:30:42.480 mean? We're married and now we're creating this hypothetical scenario where we're both

01:30:46.980 dancing the dance and it's safe because it's play, but we're able to access.

01:30:51.680 Well, you know, that's, I think that's also how women evaluate men while they're dancing

01:30:57.040 is like, well, can you play, right? Are you all hands? Are you, are you too, you know, dead set on

01:31:04.260 your instrumental goal or can you control yourself well enough to play? And it's got to be to dance

01:31:10.420 properly is to be in that flirtatious zone. Exactly. And that also indicates that you're

01:31:16.060 responding to the cues that the other person is putting out there in the most accurate possible

01:31:21.340 way. Right now you're going to be pushing slightly because you want to find out where the boundary is.

01:31:27.180 And that's probably what makes it exciting. But if you're just rampaging in past all the boundaries,

01:31:31.800 then you're just a dimwit and maybe a dangerous one. So. And that's, yeah. And that's the problem

01:31:38.140 with politics is there's no play. It's boring. It's binary. It's, there's no fun whatsoever.

01:31:45.160 Everything that you say can get you canceled for this or canceled that nobody's just allowing it to,

01:31:50.140 to just play. And I will give Trump credit in this regard. Yeah. He was just up there playing

01:31:55.240 like he didn't give a, he's like, I'm going to make fun of this guy for being short. I'm going to

01:31:59.300 make fun of this person for killing everybody. I'm going to make fun of everybody on the stage.

01:32:03.680 And people reacted to play. They also reacted to like, you know, him speaking on things that

01:32:08.620 their fringe groups cared about, but there was an element of play. Yeah. You know, I was given a

01:32:13.980 book and unfortunately I didn't keep it, which was a big mistake, which was someone had published

01:32:18.620 quite a beautiful book. It looked like a kind of a leather bound library copy, you know, a classic book.

01:32:24.500 It was the collected poetry of Donald Trump. And then what they had done was taken his tweets

01:32:30.060 and turned them into poems page on page after page. And I got to tell you, man,

01:32:35.200 they were hilariously funny. It's funny. It was unbelievably funny. He's unbelievably

01:32:40.400 caustically witty. Yeah. And, and yeah, yeah. Well, and that was certainly one of,

01:32:45.960 one of his charming features that, that. I remember they're like Megan, Megan Kelly and shout out

01:32:51.800 Megan. I love Megan, but Megan Kelly goes, you've called women pigs and you've called women

01:32:55.820 ogres or something like that. And he was like, just Rosie O'Donnell. That's a funny,

01:33:00.740 playful thing to say on the world stage, you know, calling a what's their face. Pocahontas

01:33:09.200 is funny. Like it exposed politics in a lot of way, because if somebody is having fun,

01:33:16.320 that's infectious, especially if they're having fun around everyone else who is not,

01:33:20.600 you've been at these stuffy dinners. I'm sure they invite you all the time. And there is a table

01:33:25.240 that's laughing and goofing around and having, it is impossible not to look over at it. It's

01:33:29.640 impossible not to see what's happening or where is this fun? And why are you guys having so much

01:33:33.940 fun? You enjoying yourselves. So, so I have a theory of leadership and you tell me what you think

01:33:39.560 about this. So imagine that all leaders are confronting dragons of one sort or another.

01:33:47.200 Okay. Now the question is, are you the man for that dragon? Cause some of them are large enough

01:33:52.780 to burn you very rapidly to a crisp. And so you might say, well, how do we judge that? How do we

01:33:58.940 know if you're the, if you're the night for that particular dragon? And here's a good rule. If

01:34:04.500 you're frightened into paralysis or tempted towards tyranny in your attempts to deal with the dragon,

01:34:12.440 which is, this is so catastrophic that I have to panic and everyone has to listen to exactly what I

01:34:17.840 say, then you're too small for the dragon and you're not the right leader. And so I was thinking

01:34:24.360 about this in relationship to the climate crisis. It's like if the, if carbon dioxide transforms you

01:34:31.160 into a paralyzed tyrant, you're not the right man for the environmental job. And then you might say,

01:34:37.280 well, who would the right man be? And that might be someone who can approach that particular dragon

01:34:42.920 with a certain degree of play. And, and what would that be? So give me, give me what, what is the

01:34:49.540 play? How do we play with the environment? Well, I would say we at least agree not to put in rules

01:34:55.700 by compulsion. Yes. Right. So here's a rule, no rules instituted by compulsion because it's bad play.

01:35:04.700 It's like, you have to do this. It's like, that's because that's a bad policy. If you can't get me to go

01:35:10.420 along with it willingly, then you're a tyrant and you think the crisis is so important that you get

01:35:16.580 to be a tyrant, but that just shows that you're not a very good leader. Yeah. Yeah. Don't you think?

01:35:23.120 I mean, so you don't get to say you have to do this. Not if you're, not if you're a good leader,

01:35:29.220 you have to say, here's a bunch of reasons. You have to tell a story back to what we were talking

01:35:33.200 about earlier. I have to tell you a story and you think, yeah, man, I could get on board with that.

01:35:37.800 I'm all in on that. And that's a much better arrangement anyways, because then I don't have

01:35:42.240 to enforce your compliance. You know, you talked about these projects that you were engaged in

01:35:47.660 creatively. If you want them to work, everybody's got to be on board, right? If you're going around

01:35:52.680 hitting people to make them listen to you, then you're almost inevitably dooming the project to

01:35:57.820 failure. Because first of all, they're not going to be all in. And second, they're going to take their

01:36:02.020 revenge where they can get it. Yes. They have to believe in the project as well.

01:36:07.800 They have to be pot committed as well. They have to believe in you, especially if you're their leader.

01:36:12.380 Yeah. I mean, the dragon, the dragon metaphor, you can almost see day to day with like bullfighting.

01:36:18.120 I know it's unfair because they stab and wound the bull, et cetera. But like,

01:36:21.460 he's not terrified of the bull running away. He's staring at the bull. He's dancing with the dragon.

01:36:26.980 Yeah. No kidding. That's for sure. That's what bullfighting is. Exactly. It's playing with death.

01:36:31.500 It's the same as Halloween, man. It's the same thing to play with death.

01:36:34.700 So why do we need that? Maybe that's how we understand comedy. Maybe that's how we understand

01:36:39.700 Halloween. Maybe that's how we understand like the darker sides of our nature. And people probably

01:36:43.580 just want to ignore them. Well, I can give you an example of that. So I was just on the Via Dolorosa

01:36:50.620 with Jonathan Pazio, who's a Greek Orthodox Christian thinker, who's also an expert on

01:36:56.180 postmodern theory. And we went to Jerusalem. We did a documentary there, which will be released

01:37:01.960 sometime in the next six months. And we walked the 12 stations of the cross in Jerusalem. And then we

01:37:07.980 went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is founded on the crucifixion spot. And you might say,

01:37:13.380 well, what were we doing? And what is everybody doing who's walking that road? And the answer is

01:37:18.180 they're playing with tragedy and death. Interesting.

01:37:22.240 Well, that is what's happening. So you imagine that the crucifix itself is a symbol of

01:37:27.620 torturous death. Well, why would people be gazing at it? And the answer is, well, because you have

01:37:34.640 to gaze upon that which frightens and terrifies you because otherwise you can't master it. And so each

01:37:41.700 of those stations of the cross, you know, which are marked out both mythologically and geographically,

01:37:47.120 because it isn't certain where each of those events occurred, let's say, it's a play. It's a passion

01:37:54.200 play. And the passion is, look, man, sometime you're going to have to die. And sometime you're

01:38:00.040 going to be exposed to betrayal. And sometimes you're going to be under the thumb of a tyrant.

01:38:05.680 And sometime you're going to be questioned about truth by a moral relativist. And sometimes

01:38:11.600 criminals are going to be preferred to you. That's all going to happen to you in your life. And you

01:38:16.300 bloody well better get ready for it. And the way you get ready for it is by playing with it.

01:38:20.900 By playing with it.

01:38:21.880 You bet. And that's, that's exactly what's happening in those, in those religious rituals

01:38:26.780 is it's play with death.

01:38:28.700 Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, I was there as well. I, you know, you got to touch the stone

01:38:33.300 and while I was, you know, the, uh, what is it? The, uh, not anointing stone. What is the stone

01:38:38.300 where, where he, where Jesus' body was wrapped up?

01:38:40.500 Yeah. You mean in the, in the whole, in the church of the Holy Sepulcher?

01:38:43.460 Yeah.

01:38:43.880 Yeah. Right. That's where, that's where he was wrapped after, after the crucifix. Yeah.

01:38:48.500 And it was a beautiful moment. And I saw people, you know, touching it and I wanted to touch it,

01:38:53.480 but I also was feeling naughty. I was like, this is such, this is such an important place

01:39:00.120 in history. And I was wowed by the fact that I could actually touch this thing where like Jesus'

01:39:04.380 body was also there. But because of those high stakes, I was like, Ooh, what's the naughty

01:39:09.840 thing that we could do over here? Like what's, you know? And I think that that dance we have

01:39:15.240 is why theme parks exist. Like, why are we on roller coasters? You know, we want to face it.

01:39:20.480 Yeah. Well, that's why we go to horror movies too, which is really a very difficult thing to

01:39:24.720 understand. And it is, it is, you know, this, the, the fundamental spirit of religious affirmation,

01:39:31.840 I would say is to, is to play with catastrophe fundamentally. Right. And so, and the reason we have

01:39:39.740 to play with catastrophe is because we have to face catastrophe. And so there's all sorts of

01:39:44.320 things we do that appear very strange. Like, like you said, amusement parks are a good example of that

01:39:48.700 because they, they push you to the limits of your physical tolerance and they do it in a way that

01:39:54.220 is constrained danger. And horror movies obviously do that psychologically.

01:40:00.420 Yeah. It's like sparring. Yeah. You know, like sparring prepares you for fighting in life,

01:40:05.380 but you do it in a more safe environment. It allows you to be more calm and comfortable

01:40:10.040 in those circumstances that happen in life that are not going to be calm and comfortable

01:40:14.200 otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, even you look at like.

01:40:18.160 That's all part of that dragon confrontation process is that, you know, you want to find a

01:40:23.500 dragon that's large enough to pose some threat, but that you have a reasonable chance of overcoming.

01:40:27.880 And then what you have is an optimal challenge instead of something that terrifies you.

01:40:31.660 And then you build the challenges across time, you know, and that's what you do as you become

01:40:35.820 competent. Think, think about, you've seen the rise in popularity of jujitsu, right?

01:40:41.820 Yeah. Um, and obviously we got to give our good friend Joe Rogan credit for this MMA credit for

01:40:46.760 this Dana White, but jujitsu is the closest you can come to death while training. Because if somebody

01:40:54.860 chokes you and you don't tap, you just die, right? Like in boxing, you know, you get knocked out,

01:41:03.840 you get back up. Like it takes a lot of brain trauma with like really small gloves to be killed

01:41:09.440 while you're sparring. I don't think you're getting killed while you're sparring and boxing. You got the

01:41:13.240 headgear, the gloves are much bigger, but in jujitsu, if someone just keeps choking you and there

01:41:19.280 isn't enough oxygen that gets to your brain, you could potentially die. I could see why people like

01:41:24.780 playing with that. Yeah. I could see it. It's, well, you know what you'll find, what you find in

01:41:29.780 therapy. It's very, very interesting. There's a large body of research supporting this. So the idea,

01:41:35.500 first of all, was that if you expose people to things they were afraid of, and you paired that

01:41:41.300 with a relaxation response, they would learn to relax instead of being afraid. But then it was

01:41:48.300 rapidly discovered that you didn't have to teach them to relax. And that kind of blew the whole

01:41:53.780 theory because the theory was they had learned to be afraid and now you were teaching them to relax.

01:41:58.160 It's like, nope, all you have to do is expose them voluntarily and they get better. And then the

01:42:03.180 theory was, well, they'll get better in relationship to the specific thing you're exposing them to,

01:42:09.800 but the symptoms will just crop up somewhere else. And that also proved to be wrong.

01:42:17.840 And it was because, you know, when my client said, this is a tomb when the elevator doors opened,

01:42:22.680 what it showed was she wasn't confronting the elevator. She was confronting her fear of death.

01:42:29.100 And she really was doing that. And what she was learning was that by putting herself in a position

01:42:34.640 where she was confronting the threat of death, she could observe that she could actually

01:42:39.620 handle it. And then she got braver. And that's what happens to people in psychotherapy when you

01:42:45.260 use exposure therapy is they don't become less afraid. They become braver. And that generalizes.

01:42:52.560 And so what they see is that there's something within them that can overcome even the things

01:42:56.580 they're most afraid of. And that's, well, that's a good thing to talk about in relationship to

01:43:00.440 Halloween. Because, I mean, Halloween plays with death and decay and predation and monstrosity and

01:43:07.840 everything that's dark. And it's become an immense holiday. And I think it is because our culture is so

01:43:14.700 sanitized that we take everything that smacks of death away and hide it. And, you know, to some degree,

01:43:20.660 thank God for that. But it still presents us with this conundrum, which is, well, we have to face

01:43:26.600 our finitude and our mortality and how best to do that. And the answer has to be something like

01:43:33.080 in a spirit of play. God, it's a hell of a thing to think about when you're thinking about death

01:43:39.020 itself. But how brave of us to take on the challenge. Well, that's exactly right, man. And I

01:43:45.820 think that's actually a good question, right? How brave of us? Question mark. And the answer to that

01:43:51.420 might be, well, how brave can you be? And God only knows how brave you can be. Maybe you can be brave

01:43:56.500 enough to play with death. And this is why discourse has completely fallen apart because

01:44:03.320 there's no room to play. There's no room to say the wrong thing. There's no sparring session. There's

01:44:08.840 no Halloween. There's no trying out the jokes, trying out the ideas. It is death. It's not play.

01:44:17.080 Yeah. It's not even a practice. Yeah. Well, that's the problem with cancel culture, you know? Well,

01:44:21.540 you know, I learned years ago when I was lecturing at Harvard, I was talking about very serious

01:44:26.160 things about the Holocaust and about the catastrophes in the Soviet Union and all of that

01:44:30.800 absolute abysmal hellish mess. And there was a little voice in the back of my head that said,

01:44:36.480 you know, you're too serious about this. If you really mastered it, you could do it in a spirit

01:44:40.540 of play. And I thought, oh my God, you know, really? How can that possibly be when discussing

01:44:46.320 things that seriously? How could you possibly do that in a spirit of play? And the answer would be

01:44:51.340 something like, well, if you really mastered it, you could. And that the mastery would be evident

01:44:57.820 in the fact that you were playing. Now that didn't really tell me how, right? Because it's still a big

01:45:03.140 problem of how you do that. But I do believe it's true. I believe it's fundamentally true is that

01:45:10.480 the mastery that someone demonstrates over a given subject domain is precisely proportionate to the

01:45:17.760 degree that they can do it in the spirit of play. Yes. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. How do you play with these

01:45:24.920 like dark, these dark, tricky topics? I think that was even with the Kanye thing. I think that was,

01:45:30.240 was so tricky is like, especially with the antisemitism that was bubbling out. Yeah. I think

01:45:34.720 antisemitism is this like, it's such a unique form of hate because one, most people are not familiar

01:45:40.980 with Jews. Most people. So if you're not familiar with them, you haven't spoken to them and, and talk

01:45:48.360 to them about how they react to this. And two, the way that we get taught like world history, at least

01:45:54.060 in America, is that like Germany was regular. And then all of a sudden one day they just started

01:45:59.540 hating Jews and then they were putting them in concentration camps. We don't get taught what,

01:46:04.140 what Hitler used and Goebbels used to build up the resentment for the Jews. That's not really

01:46:10.180 spoken about to us. So I think a lot of, when the Jews hear these things, like they run the media,

01:46:14.620 they run the banks, it's red flag. It goes, Oh, this is how it starts. It's happening. And then

01:46:20.240 when non-Jews hear it, they go, well, those sound like some pretty cool stereotypes. I mean, imagine,

01:46:26.400 imagine someone like a black friend of mine who wears glasses, even though he doesn't have a

01:46:30.480 prescription. So people think he's less threatening when he's walking down the street. Imagine his reaction

01:46:35.460 to hearing the stereotype, own the banks, run the media, own sports teams. He's going, give me those

01:46:42.400 stereotypes right now because he's unfamiliar with what those stereotypes lead to. So there's this huge

01:46:49.920 chasm with understanding the hate of a group of people and how those things, which seem complimentary,

01:46:56.120 they seem aspirational. Like you want to be able to be in power positions, but we, because we haven't been

01:47:03.060 taught that those are the things that first are said before you dehumanize a group of people and

01:47:08.340 then kill 6 million of them. Yeah. Well, part of the problem with the, with the, with the discourse

01:47:15.940 about, about the Jewish minority is that Jews are disproportionately successful for all sorts of

01:47:21.800 reasons. And so that, that fact easily feeds into conspiratorial thinking, right? Partly because

01:47:29.500 minorities are annoying, you know, but they're not nearly as annoying when they're unsuccessful

01:47:34.960 because at least they can, what would you call a tone for the sin of being a minority by being

01:47:40.800 oppressed and miserable. And so that's a positive thing, but if they're, you're saying, if they're

01:47:46.420 successful, then they're really annoying because not only are they a minority, but you know, it's easy to

01:47:52.700 become envious. And then it's also easy to presume that it's some sort of conspiratorial

01:47:57.380 practice on the part of that minority. That's giving them an advantage over, you know, you who's

01:48:03.520 striving ahead so nobly. You're giving a hypothetical to how the majority sees minorities, not how you

01:48:11.620 see minorities. Yes. I'm glad you picked that up. Yes. Hopefully the listeners and watchers will have

01:48:18.300 done the same thing. I can see a clip. Look, minorities are annoying, but especially the rich ones.

01:48:24.860 Yeah. I mean, yeah. Like, yeah, yeah. You can be sure the young Turks are going to clip that out.

01:48:34.000 But yes. Yeah. I see. Yeah. I don't know. I just see it. I saw it kind of happening in real time.

01:48:40.920 And I'm planning to talk to him soon. I think. Say again, I'm planning to talk to Kanye soon,

01:48:47.880 I think. And what are your thoughts about that? Have you had, yeah, what is your thinking with that?

01:48:55.240 Well, I'd like to find out what's going on. I mean, he's a stunningly creative person and he seems like

01:49:00.300 a bit too much of a treasure just to throw in the dustbin. You know, obviously he's got his problems

01:49:06.760 like most people do. And the thing about geniuses is they have lots of problems, just like ordinary

01:49:11.700 people, but they're also geniuses. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's a good thing to keep in mind.

01:49:19.040 I think that Kanye's genius outside of music, I think he's an incredibly gifted producer,

01:49:24.980 but I think Kanye's genius is his ability to influence. And then the ability of, then the

01:49:31.180 genius of influence seeps into industries that are completely subjective. Fashion is nothing.

01:49:39.960 Fashion is, if you can get the most influential people to wear a garbage bag, that is cool. Now

01:49:46.260 things go in and out of style. Skinny jeans are cool. Then baggy jeans become cool. There's not a

01:49:53.880 specific cut that makes them good or bad. There's an edge, you know, just, just like the edge we were

01:49:58.920 talking about in comedy and fashion comes, imagine there's a social hierarchy. Yep. Fashion goes from

01:50:05.700 the top down. It even happens with names. And so there's, there's a, there's a standard trajectory

01:50:11.340 of names. The aristocracy picks names, whatever the aristocracy happens to be. Then those names

01:50:17.220 become popularized till everyone has them. Then they go out of fashion and then they disappear for

01:50:22.640 a number of generations. And then the aristocracy rediscovers them and the names cascade down the

01:50:28.220 hierarchy again. Fashion is all about being on the edge, just like comedy, right? It's like,

01:50:33.280 are you with it? Are you awake? Are you on the cutting edge? And that changes where the edge is.

01:50:39.200 Exactly. Because, and I would say it doesn't start at the top of the aristocracy, but I'm just,

01:50:44.000 you know, we're just pulling, what is it? I'm nitpicking or whatever, but essentially fashion,

01:50:48.460 what is cool is a rejection of what is popular. Cool will always be the rejection of popular.

01:50:53.160 Right, right. So what happens is the skinny jeans become ubiquitous and then you start seeing them

01:50:58.380 in the mall stores. Yes, exactly. Target. There's like, exactly. Target has them. And then there's

01:51:04.420 a small group of like cool kids that exists in a few different areas that start rejecting the norm

01:51:09.700 even before they're in Target. Yeah. Those kids, once the thing is in Target, because they're such,

01:51:16.040 I don't want to say devil's advocates or counterculture, whatever it is, those kids are

01:51:20.700 the real influencers. They get copied by a guy like Kanye. And then Kanye's influence puts his clothing

01:51:27.600 on a bunch of other famous people who have influence. And then it trickles down to me,

01:51:33.280 other people, et cetera. And now all of a sudden we're changing out our skinny jeans.

01:51:37.020 Those kids, those kids, the influencers that you're talking about, those are the aristocracy

01:51:41.240 among their age group. They're the creative kids that are on the edge.

01:51:46.040 No, that's fair. That's fair. Within their peer group, they're the coolest or they're the outsiders

01:51:52.260 that nobody thinks is, no, they're probably the coolest. Let's say they're the coolest.

01:51:55.420 Yeah. Well, if you've got it exactly right, you can be cool and an outsider at the same time.

01:52:01.520 And that's a real artist, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right. We should stop because

01:52:06.860 we've been going for, well, quite a long time. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. I should

01:52:11.880 let everybody watching and listening know that I'm going to talk to Andrew for another half an hour

01:52:15.720 behind the Daily Wire Plus platform. We're going to talk more biographically. I want to find out

01:52:20.540 exactly how he shaped his career. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue

01:52:25.620 listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 10, 2022

304. Infamous： When Comedy Exists Outside of Agenda ｜ Andrew Schulz

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