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June 16, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:39:27

Podcast: Who is Joe Rogan? With Jordan Peterson

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	I guess the first thing I'd like to just ask you is how you doing?
	I'm doing great.
	So what's great about what you're doing?
	What's so good about your life?
	Well, right now I'm in the process of putting together my next stand-up comedy special.
	So I'm at the process now where I've actually put together a full new hour of material since my Netflix special, which came out in October.
	So that's great for me.
	That's always a relaxing moment because it's very difficult to put that hour together.
	And so how do you go about doing that?
	A lot of writing, a lot of performing, a lot of reading, a lot of going over notes, a lot of examining material, a lot of reviewing things.
	Sets and trying to find out what I like and what I don't like.
	It's a long and brutal process.
	It's the most fun, but also the most difficult part of stand-up is the creation of new material.
	So how many hours do you think you put in of work to do an hour's worth of stand-up?
	Any idea?
	That's a really good question.
	It's usually about, I can create a solid 10 minutes a month.
	That's usually what it is.
	So it takes me six months to do an hour.
	And in that six months, on an average week, I'll do eight or nine sets.
	So that's eight or nine, either half hour or hours of material, sometimes 15 minutes, usually an hour, depending upon where I'm working and how many other people are on the show.
	And then a lot of time writing.
	So you're doing those sets in front of live audiences all the time?
	Yes.
	Yeah, you have to.
	That's the weird thing about stand-up comedy.
	It seems to be that it's not something that you can do in a vacuum.
	It has to actually be done.
	It has to come alive in front of the audience.
	Like, I can write in a vacuum.
	I can write alone.
	I can contemplate, go over my material, review, edit.
	I can do all sorts of things by myself, but it really doesn't come alive until it's in front of an audience.
	Yeah, well, I guess it's not so easy to figure out what's funny.
	You kind of hope that people will laugh.
	Yeah, it's that, but it's also there's a state of mind that you only really achieve when you're performing in front of an audience.
	And you can try to recreate it, but it'll be fake.
	If you try to do it on your own, like, I don't write I don't write in joke form.
	I don't write the way I say it on stage.
	I write in sort of a conceptual form.
	I write in an essay form.
	Then I extract things that I think are funny out of that, but they really only find the true way I'm going to do them.
	I only find that in front of an audience.
	When I'm in front of an audience, then it becomes clear to me how I should and shouldn't say things based in part on how they're reacting and based in part on how I feel.
	When I'm performing the idea, I find where the fat of the bit is.
	And that's where you kind of appreciate economy of words and you know what to edit out and what to elaborate on, what people aren't totally understanding, and what maybe is over-explained.
	And all that stuff kind of comes together in front of an audience.
	So the essays that you're writing or the writing that you're doing, like, are they on serious topics?
	Are they on things you're thinking about philosophically?
	Or are you trying specifically to be funny?
	Or are you just trying to get some thoughts down, you know, about the way you're thinking about the world?
	Both.
	You know, it's like the ideas...
	I always say the stand-up comedy, at least the way I do it, it comes in three forms.
	Like, there's three steps.
	In the beginning, you're really just trying to get laughs.
	You're fighting for survival out there.
	You're scared.
	That's in the early days of your career.
	Then you start doing what you think is funny, like things that would make you laugh.
	But then, in stage three, you start...
	Trying to make ideas funny.
	And you try to cleverly introduce ideas into people's heads that maybe they wouldn't entertain without the humor aspect of it.
	And so when I write, if I write on a subject, whatever the subject might be, I write Without thinking, oh, I have to make each word funny, or I have to make each sentence funny.
	I write just, what are my thoughts on this subject?
	And then along the way, I find irony, and I find ridiculous perceptions, and all the things that lead to stand-up comedy material.
	And I extract those.
	Right, and how much of the humor and the whip just occurs to you spontaneously on the stage?
	Sometimes a lot.
	It depends on the subject, but it's always a possibility.
	Some of the best lines that I've ever come up with in my act, I come up with on the spot while I'm just talking about things.
	Right.
	Well, that should be when you're into the subject and things are going well with the audience.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's basically how it goes.
	It's a tricky business.
	It sounds like an extremely tricky business and one where the cost of failure is humiliation and emotional pain.
	Yeah, it's the worst.
	There's not that many things that are more embarrassing than trying to be funny, especially if you've put, say, 100 hours into one hour of preparation, which is less than you're doing.
	And then finding out that you're just not that amusing.
	More common than not.
	So how many Netflix specials have you done now?
	I've done three, and I'm working on my fourth one right now.
	But overall, I've done nine different hours of comedy, either a comedy album or a video special.
	What's it been like working for Netflix?
	It's great.
	They're very easy.
	They really don't have any notes.
	Fortunately, I got to them at a stage in my career where I was already advanced and I was already a headliner and I'd already been doing stand-up comedy for decades.
	So it was good in that sense that I was well prepared.
	But when we first signed this initial deal, they were really just wanting me to do what I do best.
	So they liked it and it's easy.
	There's really relatively little input.
	Almost none.
	Right, so they're not willing to mess with success fundamentally.
	Yeah, they like what I do.
	So they're just like, go ahead.
	And they know that my goal is to do my best.
	I'm not trying to...
	I mean, there are comedians that will release material just for the money.
	They'll try to capitalize on their fame and put something out that's sloppy.
	And I feel like, for me at least, that's not an option.
	And that would taint my legacy and taint my body of work.
	I'm not interested in doing that.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, well, I've seen your Netflix specials, and they're pretty damn funny.
	Thank you.
	That little skit you did on the Kardashians, that was a killer, man.
	Thank you.
	That took forever to work out.
	I had to figure out a way to make fun of that guy.
	God, it was ridiculous.
	You make an extremely intense, demonic gargoyle.
	A very good sense of humor.
	Yeah, so that was killing me.
	I thought, Jesus, he's not going to go there, is he?
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Oh, he's going to go farther.
	Yeah.
	It's good to see that kind of horrific courage manifest itself on stage.
	You really like that in a comedian, you know, when you see them get going.
	I used to see this with Sarah Silverman.
	You could see her eyes sort of flash, and she'd think, I shouldn't say that.
	There's no way anyone would say that.
	Then she'd say it.
	You'd think, oh, no one should have said that, but man, it was deadly.
	Yeah, I think out of all the women doing comedy right now, she's probably the best at that.
	She's the best at pushing that envelope.
	Yeah, that's for sure.
	There's some very dark recesses in that woman's mind.
	Yeah.
	Okay, so the Netflix thing is going well.
	Do you enjoy doing that?
	Yes.
	Yeah, I enjoy it.
	What do you like about it?
	The danger of it, the difficulty, the challenge, that one, it's done and people enjoy it, that I'm legitimately affecting people.
	I love that when people get a chance to sit down and watch it for an hour and it'll make them feel better.
	They'll laugh.
	It takes them out of the dreary The dullness of their day or the agony of whatever they're going through in their life, and they can escape that for an hour.
	Yeah, thank God for comedy, man.
	It's just in the same domain as music for necessity.
	Yeah, I agree.
	You know, there are campuses now where there's no sarcasm rules, eh?
	Oh, that's hilarious.
	God, can you imagine?
	I'd last about 15 seconds.
	I can't.
	Yeah, is sarcasm considered a microaggression?
	Yes, definitely.
	Unless it's real sarcasm, in which case it's a macroaggression.
	I just keep thinking that in time, this is going to be one of the most hysterical periods of time that people look back on, periods of history.
	Like, you know, when we look at guys with powdered wigs and, you know, preposterous behavior from the past, and we go, God, what were they thinking?
	I really think we're going to do the same thing about today.
	Well, I hope so.
	I think for sure.
	I hope so.
	That means that we'll be more sane when we're looking back.
	Or at least we'll be sane in a different way.
	I'm pretty much ready for a different form of insane, personally.
	Well, I think the insane that you're getting is so pronounced and it's so much more intense That it's less effective.
	And then the reaction to it is more popular.
	The negative reaction to a lot of this insane rhetoric and this insane behavior.
	It's more popular now to understand how ridiculous some of these people are.
	You know, when you see, like, what Antifa's doing in Portland, blocking traffic and, you know, telling people where to go and what to do.
	Beating people up that don't comply and saying that you're a white supremacist if you don't listen to them.
	All this stuff is so ridiculous.
	It's so over the top.
	And they keep feeding on themselves.
	They keep attacking people that are not progressive enough.
	They keep literally eating their own.
	And from the outside, from the perspective of people that don't share their ideology, it looks more and more ridiculous, and that makes them more and more frenzied, and it ramps it all up.
	And I think it's ultimately going to crash.
	It's just like, what kind of damage is it going to do to the landscape as it's crashing?
	Right, right.
	Well, that's the thing that, you know, hopefully can be mitigated so that the landing isn't too hard.
	So I thought, look, every time we've talked, we've talked a lot about me.
	And like, I'm quite sick of talking about me, actually, and probably have been for like a year.
	Or maybe even longer.
	So I thought that it would be really good to talk about you.
	And I'm curious about you because you're such a strange character.
	And so, you know, in the most interesting of ways.
	And so I thought I'd start at the beginning.
	So I don't know that much about you.
	So where'd you grow up?
	Well, I grew up in a lot of places.
	I was born in New Jersey.
	I lived there until I was seven.
	My mother split up from my dad and married my stepdad.
	We moved to California.
	We lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11.
	Then I lived in Florida.
	He was going to the University of Florida at Gainesville.
	Lived there from age 11 to right around 13.
	Then we moved to Boston and I lived in Boston for And the next, I guess the next 10 years.
	And that's really where I grew up.
	I grew up basically, when I think of where I come from, I think of Boston.
	It's also the place where I started doing stand-up comedy, which means a lot to me.
	And it's also where I started fighting.
	It's where I started doing martial arts.
	All the significant things that happened in my life happened in Boston, in my developmental period.
	And so you moved to Boston when you were how old?
	Thirteen?
	Thirteen.
	I see.
	Yeah.
	Right, right.
	And then you were there for how many years?
	Eleven.
	Eleven years.
	Oh yeah, so that's a long time.
	Yeah.
	Where do you live in Boston?
	Newton.
	Newton, Upper Falls.
	It's a suburb of Boston.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Nice and New England, eh?
	Yeah, I love it out there.
	Yeah, me too.
	The people have a great sense of humor.
	It's like Toronto in a way that you have to deal with that wicked winter, and I think that develops character in people.
	It was funny, when I moved to Boston, because I lived in Alberta and then Montreal, and Montreal is bloody horrible in the winter, and Alberta is even worse.
	So I'd go down to Boston and I went down there to interview first, and it was February, and it was spring as far as I was concerned.
	I didn't even have a coat on.
	And then when we lived there for years, it was so funny.
	We lived in this old house by a park, and we'd get those nor'easters blowing with hurricane-level winds, and it bloody well snowed three and a half feet.
	And I'd be thinking in my Canadian way that, Jesus, I better not go outside because I'll just freeze to death the second I step outside.
	But I'd go outside, and it was like, well, it was 34 degrees or some damn thing.
	It's like I was expecting minus 40, you know, just horrible.
	So Boston winter is never...
	I mean, apart from the snow, which was, you know, deadly significant, they never really struck me as winter.
	They sort of struck me as, well, this is the sort of winter that you'd like to have if you wanted a showy winter that people could be pleased with, rather than one that just sort of killed you.
	Yeah, Canadians are on another level when it comes to winter.
	I have some pretty good friends that live in Alberta.
	And whenever I go up there, it's like, whoa!
	Where do you go?
	They're outside of Edmonton.
	They're about two and a half hours north of Edmonton.
	Where?
	I don't know the name of their town.
	It's where I go bear hunting.
	One thing you notice about bear is they have fur.
	They don't have fur.
	They actually can't live there.
	Two and a half hours north of Edmonton in the winter.
	You go outside in the wrong day and you're out there too long, then you die.
	Yeah, or you run into a grizzly.
	Yes, there's also that.
	Those are nothing to take lightly, man.
	When we used to go camping, especially in British Columbia, grizzly bears were always a concern.
	Like a black bear, if it chases you, and first of all, it's only about a third the size of a grizzly bear, and it's still pretty big, like it's a black bear, you know, it's not like a house cat.
	And if those things chase you and you play dead, they'll usually leave you alone.
	But if a grizzly chases you and you play dead, then it eats you.
	And then, of course, if you fight back, well, it also eats you.
	Maybe you get a blow or two in, and probably not.
	So, yeah, that was one of the terrors of camping there.
	More people are preyed upon by black bears.
	When a black bear attacks you, it's usually because it's trying to eat you.
	When a grizzly bear attacks people, it's usually either mistake or it was scared, or it's really hungry.
	Yeah, the black bears tend to be like that, too.
	A lot of them are old if they attack you, you know?
	They're getting so they can't catch a real animal, so they'll settle for like an Arctic monkey with no fat.
	Yeah, they get desperate.
	Okay, so New Jersey.
	What do you remember about New Jersey?
	Boy, that's where I went to Catholic school, which was a horror in and of itself.
	And it's, you know, where my relatives lived.
	And I just remember the ethnic Italian environment and what that was like, you know, what it was like being around my relatives around there.
	Very Sopranos-like.
	If you ever watch the TV show, that's really representative of a lot of New Jersey.
	You know, I don't remember too much other than that, though.
	You know, I was pretty little when we left.
	Do you still have relatives out there?
	I have one uncle.
	Well, two uncles that still live there.
	Have you ever seen them?
	I haven't seen them in years.
	Okay, so New Jersey, mostly positive memories, do you think?
	I mean, seven and below, that's pretty young.
	Well, it was a tumultuous time period for me.
	My parents...
	We're always fighting, and it just wasn't a good time.
	So when we escaped New Jersey, it was a relief.
	And that was also when your mom split up from your dad?
	Yeah.
	Are you in contact with your dad?
	No.
	I haven't spoken to him since I was seven years old.
	Is he still alive?
	He's still alive.
	And his name's Joe Rogan, which is even crazier.
	Huh.
	So you ever think about him?
	No.
	No, not really.
	No, no, it's a long time ago.
	Well, that's...
	Huh.
	And do you remember what he was like to you?
	He was nice to me.
	He just wasn't very nice to my mother.
	They had a very bad relationship.
	Right.
	Right.
	Okay, so you leave New Jersey and you go to California.
	Yeah.
	Where'd you live there?
	We lived in San Francisco.
	And that was an interesting time for me because it was during the Vietnam War.
	And it was sort of the height of the hippie movement.
	Right.
	My stepdad was a hippie.
	My father was a police officer in New Jersey.
	Oh yeah.
	So I went from being around a cop who was a pretty brutal guy to being around a long-haired hippie who was all about peace and love and was an architecture student.
	You know, it was a completely different sort of vibe.
	Yeah, sounds like a completely different sort of vibe.
	Yeah, it was around a lot of gay folks, it was around a lot of hippies, a lot of pot smokers, a lot of real open-minded thinkers and weirdos around Haight-Ashbury and that sort of area.
	We lived near Lombard Street.
	It was real classic San Francisco in the 70s.
	70.
	So, yeah.
	So, let's see.
	So, you would have been, you said, 7.
	How?
	I guess I was like 74.
	Probably 74 because I was 7 years old.
	Right.
	I was born in 67.
	Yeah, so you're 5 years.
	I see.
	You're 5 years younger than me.
	So, that places you there.
	So, yeah, it was still pretty hippie central.
	Yeah, it was pretty interesting.
	And then I went from there to Florida, which was like a total polar opposite.
	You know, that was the first time I'd ever heard anybody say the N-word was in Florida.
	And I didn't know what it meant.
	I had to ask my mother.
	My mother got upset at me.
	She thought I knew what it meant.
	I was just playing games.
	I was like, I don't know what it means.
	I'm like, tell me what it means.
	She said it's a bad word for black people.
	And I was like, wow, really?
	I go, okay.
	Because I was hearing it all the time.
	I never heard it in San Francisco.
	I literally didn't hear it until I was 13 years old.
	Or, excuse me, 11 years old.
	And so, yeah, so where did you move to in Florida?
	We moved to Gainesville, which is where the University of Florida was, where my stepdad was going to get a, he was, he's studying architecture, and then we eventually moved to Boston so he could go to the Boston Architectural Center.
	That's why we wound up moving there.
	And is your mom and your stepdad still together?
	Yep, still together.
	And do you see them?
	All the time.
	Yeah, they have a great relationship.
	It's really completely different.
	They've been together forever.
	They get along fantastic.
	And in many ways, that sort of modeled my expectations for a real relationship.
	You know, I saw the worst and then I saw a really great one.
	And I'm like, okay, I want that, you know.
	Yeah, that's a good choice.
	That shows some wisdom on your part, picking the second one rather than the first one, let's say.
	Yeah.
	Has that worked out?
	Have you had good relationships?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, my wife's awesome.
	You've been married for how long?
	Almost 10 years.
	10 years.
	And you have two girls or three?
	I have three girls.
	Three girls, right.
	Two young ones and one adult one.
	Right.
	I remember on the special that I was referring to that you were bemoaning the fact that you were absolutely saturated in a feminine environment.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's interesting, man.
	It's interesting.
	But I think it balances me out.
	I think ultimately it's probably good for me.
	Yeah.
	You think it's interesting.
	Now you wait till they hit teenagehood.
	Yeah.
	Then it'll be interesting.
	All right.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Yeah.
	I actually enjoyed having teenagers, you know, weirdly enough.
	I mean, we had a good rule in our house.
	Our kids brought their friends over to our house a lot.
	And it was funny because when they first came over, when my teenagers' friends came over, they were always afraid of me.
	But after about a month of being there, you know, like getting to know the place a bit, not staying there all the time, obviously, but getting a bit familiar with it, they ended up being a lot more afraid of my wife.
	That was quite funny.
	She doesn't look that dangerous on first impressions.
	And she's kind of soft-spoken, but she's very unforgiving.
	That might be one way of putting it.
	We had a pretty good rule in our house with the teenage kids, which was, it's a good one to know, which was, look, we're really happy you're here, you know?
	But if you do something really stupid and we never ever have to see you again, that would actually be okay with us.
	That's a good rule.
	It's a good rule.
	They also knew we meant it.
	And so the kids could have their friends over, you know, and they could have a reasonable amount of fun or maybe even a slightly unreasonable amount of fun, but they couldn't have an overwhelmingly unreasonable amount of fun.
	That's a great way to put it.
	Overwhelmingly unreasonable amount of fun is a great way to put it.
	Yeah, that was too much.
	We had a good drug policy too, I think.
	How'd that go?
	I think it went well.
	The rule was...
	Look, I know perfectly well you're going to experiment.
	They were going to an art school.
	You know, it's like, I think one of the majors was pot smoking and another was experimentation.
	Like, there was just no way they weren't going to experiment.
	And my rule was, I better not be able to tell because you're being too much of a fool.
	So if you're going to experiment, you better handle it because otherwise you're pathetic.
	That seemed to be pretty good.
	Well, that's, you know, because I thought, I already thought it through, you know, because there's a literature on experimentation among adolescents, both criminal experimentation and You know delinquency minor delinquency and that sort of thing and drug use and you get Pathology at both ends the ones who are you know smoking pot every day and taking drugs on a regular basis Their outcomes not so good,
	but the ones who abstain completely and never experiment their outcome is also not so good They tend to be on the dependent anxious end of the distribution and so you know you want your kids to well Play with the rules a little bit.
	But then I thought, well, what...
	So, okay, you've got to play with the rules a little bit.
	What are the rules about playing with the rules?
	And one should be, try not to be a bigger fool than necessary.
	That's a good one.
	So you're not compromising yourself in the present.
	But the biggest issue, I think, really, and I think this is the fundamental rule for experimentation with adolescence, is you don't get to screw up your future.
	Right?
	Because that's the killer.
	Well, what I worry about more than anything is opioids.
	I worry about those because people are dying from them.
	No one's dying from pot.
	It's very rare that anybody is doing something so stupid that they put their life in danger from pot or mushrooms.
	I'm worried about the ones that kill you.
	I worry about pills more than anything that my children might possibly face, especially when I consider the fact that these Opiate manufacturers, these opioid manufacturers, they keep making these damn things stronger.
	And I don't understand.
	I mean, it's not like OxyContin wasn't strong enough as it is, but now they have fentanyl.
	And now they're coming up with things that are stronger than fentanyl.
	It's disgusting.
	Yeah, well, it's a weird arms race, eh?
	Because, I mean, this is something that's really an unexpected consequence of the illegalization of drugs, is that now we've generated all these chemists who are really good at making tiny variations on every psychoactive substance known, and now instead of like 10 addictive substances you can get yourself into serious trouble with, there's 300.
	Yeah.
	That doesn't seem to be a big plus.
	No, it doesn't.
	It's disturbing and it's disgusting.
	They're finally starting to bring some of these guys to justice and they're arresting some of these people and bringing them to court.
	Some of these manufacturers, they've been pushing this stuff down people's throats for years and incentivizing doctors to subscribe them.
	It's a tough one, man.
	When my daughter was sick, when she was a kid, She was in extreme, it's gotta be, agony is the right word, you know, for like two years, about that, because she was walking around on two broken legs.
	You know her story a little bit.
	The physician at SickKids, which was the person who was dealing with her arthritis, would only prescribe her basically, you know, anicin, you know, minor league over-the-counter painkillers, which was like trying to kill a grizzly bear with a fly swatter.
	It really wasn't the right tool for the job.
	And we found a family doctor who had enough courage to prescribe her OxyContin.
	That was no joke, you know, because the first couple of weeks she was on OxyContin.
	It was really odd and rough because it was like she was drunk.
	And so that was, well, that was weird socially, to say the least, and also rather frightening, but it did control her pain.
	And we actually had to mix OxyContin with Ritalin.
	Which is a strange combination, but a good one to know about because Oxycontin sedates and Ritalin stimulates, but the combination of the two are synergistic, so they can really control pain.
	And so her pain was controlled enough so that it didn't drive her insane over about a two-year period.
	And then once she got her operations and had her legs fixed, she went off the opiates and she went through the whole withdrawal shtick.
	You know, she had like night sweats and she had Ants crawling under her skin and like it was pretty brutal.
	Although she she stopped cold turkey and never tried them again.
	She hated them.
	She said they just made her feel dead and it's funny a lot of people you know a lot you hear their horror stories that you know if you try opiates once you're pretty much screwed because they're so wonderful but lots of people don't like them but there is a sizeable minority of people you know who really like them and and then there is the danger that you described of overdose and that's You know, that's a frightening thing.
	Hopefully your kids are smart enough to stay mostly away from pills.
	Yeah, hopefully.
	You know, you've got to worry about the influence of their friends and peer pressure.
	Yeah, yeah, definitely.
	Well, the terrible thing about teenagers, you know, is that everybody always says, well, why do you succumb to peer pressure when you're a teenager?
	And the answer is, well, that's why you're a teenager.
	You know, you're getting away from your family, and you're even getting away from your, like, elementary school best friend, and you're starting to join the broader social group.
	And your job is to fit in.
	Like, not to fit in so much that there's nothing left of you, you know, but your job is to fit in to the tribe, to the group, and to learn how to do that.
	And, of course, the downside is, well, you're susceptible to peer pressure, but it's hard to distinguish that from actually being properly socialized, you know?
	The two things are very tightly aligned.
	All right, so you were in Florida, and you learned some words that...
	That you didn't know.
	What was Florida like for you?
	You were there only for a couple of years.
	Yeah, Florida is a strange place.
	I still have a love-hate relationship with Florida.
	It's the land of the lost.
	It's where people go to escape wherever they're from.
	Billy Corbin, who's a documentary director.
	He directed Cocaine Cowboys and a bunch of other great documentaries.
	He lives down in Florida, and every time he and I talk, we just talk about how ridiculous Florida is.
	And it's this place where people go to escape.
	They go to escape from the brutal cold of the Northeast winter, or they go, oh, Jesus.
	My phone is telling me that I'm running out of batteries.
	I'm going to have to switch headsets and plug this in, but it'll only take a second.
	That should be fine.
	But I just think that Florida is just like a uniquely stupid place.
	It's a weird place, you know.
	One of the things that's really struck me about the United States that's really different than Canada, for what that's worth.
	It's not like Americans really care why the United States is different than Canada, apart from the fact that it isn't like freezing cold six months of the year.
	There's a lot of...
	The U.S., it's like a movie set.
	You know, so much of it is like it's manufactured to look like something else.
	And Florida is really like that.
	Yeah.
	And it's a very strange place to visit.
	Because everything is, not in the old towns, but the beach towns are like that a lot.
	There's some genuine old Florida, but most of it is.
	It's manufactured fake utopia for exactly the sort of people that you're describing.
	You know, that doesn't seem unbearable or anything.
	I mean, the weather's nice and the beach is nice and, you know, there's worse places to live, but there's something about it that's like a...
	It's like a...
	Well, obviously, it's like a resort, but resorts have that sort of fake utopian element to them that is...
	I don't know what it's like exactly.
	It's kind of like a child fantasy or an adolescent fantasy, something like that.
	You know?
	It's what you think you want.
	If you don't think it's hard.
	I always say that if you want to starve to death, open up a bookstore in Miami.
	Aha!
	Right.
	Like legitimately.
	There's no reading going on down there.
	It's just a strange place where people go to party and It's weird.
	Right now, I have to warn you that there is a beam of light shooting directly out of your head.
	Oh, right here?
	Yeah, it's very impressive.
	I'll move this around.
	There we go.
	Yeah, that's probably better.
	I had to plug in because the power was dying on my phone.
	I guess this video stuff.
	Sucks a lot of power out of your phone.
	I guess so.
	I guess so.
	I mean, I didn't like the whole thing shooting out of your head, but you never know.
	You don't want to get any rumors on the internet.
	You know how easy that is.
	Well, yeah, you, amongst all people, know how easy that is.
	Hey, I haven't been in this scandal for a whole week.
	Well, this podcast is still young.
	Yeah, fair enough.
	We might be able to cover something that'll cause trouble.
	You are, out of all the people that I'm friends with, you are probably the most misrepresented friend that I have.
	And I defend you quite often, and I... Don't get where people are coming from with you.
	I don't understand their inability to listen to your words.
	And instead, they try to generalize and formulate these distorted descriptions of who you are and what you stand for.
	And it's very strange to me.
	I kind of do know that you're challenging a lot of people's beliefs and the way they...
	You know, they've structured these beliefs, but it's very frustrating to me.
	And I'm sure it must be way more frustrating for you.
	Well, it's kind of surreal to me because I was talking with my kids about this the other day.
	You know, the way people think I am, especially if they read You know the hit pieces that the journalists have written and maybe even watch me in those interactions You know they think I'm provocative and they think I like combat and conflict and you know and I don't I'm not combat actually and I really don't like conflict that much I go out of my way quite a bit to avoid it and you know I'm misogynist except that almost be all the people I've ever
	worked with in my whole life have been women and I've been in a women-dominated field and And I never thought of myself as right-wing, that's for sure.
	I mean, maybe now that the far left has gone completely off the deep end, it's like, well, maybe I'd be classified as a conservative.
	But that's mostly because, as a social scientist, I learned that you shouldn't conduct large-scale experiments on huge swaths of the population and assume that your stupid idea is going to work out correctly, because it won't.
	You can't even get people to behave properly in a lab for like half an hour.
	So how you think you're going to get a whole society to do what you want, you know, as a consequence of passing a piece of legislation is beyond me.
	But yeah, and here's something else that's weird, you know, like if you read the newspapers, You knew I got disinvited from Cambridge, Cambridge Divinity School.
	I mean, what a thing to be disinvited from, a divinity school.
	Christ, you have to be Satan himself to get disinvited from a divinity school.
	And, you know, well, it's so crazy.
	You know, and I just wanted to go down there and learn some more about the biblical stories, the Exodus stories.
	That was the idea.
	And...
	Then to get disinvited to have that be a whole big scandal.
	It was just like What the hell man, it's it's It's quite the crazy situation and then so you read about all this and and you see this online and you think God his life must just be hell Because of all the controversy, but then when I go out in the streets Or to my lectures, or anywhere, it's completely different.
	It's unbelievably different.
	Like, so now if I walk down the street, I mean, when you walk down the street, you must just get identified all the time.
	Like, if you go out in an hour, how many people will come up to you?
	Depends where I go.
	But if I'm in Hollywood, it's pretty crazy.
	If I go around young people, if you see men and they have shaved heads and tattoos, it gets nuts.
	Those are my people.
	Muscular men.
	Yeah.
	So if I go out, you know, and I'm walking down the street, and it doesn't really matter where, usually I get approached five or six times in an hour by people, and you know, they're always very polite, and they're very apologetic, and they are happy about something they've read or listened to or whatever, or often they talk about our podcast.
	That's pretty damn common.
	That was common throughout Europe.
	As well and you know they tell me about some dark part of their life and how they're doing much better and You know how their friends have been watching my videos and are feeling better about it.
	So it's just Ridiculously positive just all the time and then when I go to my lectures It's the same thing.
	It's like yeah crazily positive.
	So, you know, we've had 350,000 people at the lectures so far and And there hasn't been one negative occurrence.
	We had one heckler once who was rapidly escorted from the building, and he knew he was going to get escorted, so he was kind of a cooperative heckler.
	But, like, no one's coming there With anything negative on their mind they're there to listen to a psychological lecture to have a deep discussion and to try to get their act together and the goddamn journalists They just don't seem to be able to fathom that like they've got this false Cynicism or maybe real cynicism that makes it absolutely impossible for them to believe that you know tens of thousands of people could actually be serious about improving their life and that I could be having events that were
	Basically 100% positive and so online I'm a bloody monster.
	You know, I'm a misogynist and a racist and a transphobe and uh, what else am I? I'm a homophobe and uh, oh a Nazi lots of times and sometimes a Jewish shill and um Well, there's a bunch of other things too.
	What disturbed me Excuse me.
	What disturbed me about you is when they pulled your books out of New Zealand When a New Zealand bookstore decided to pull your books because of the Christchurch massacre, like what does a book on self-improvement and taking responsibility, what does that have to do with a horrific mass murder?
	I mean, the idea that they connected those two together and that they decided that in some way or shape, Your words of encouragement and recognizing the importance of discipline and of taking responsibility and self-reliance, that those things, your book somehow or another had something to do with someone doing something as awful as what happened at Christchurch.
	It's so distorted.
	And that's the perfect example that I cite when I say, think about the fact that this guy's book was removed.
	Right after something had taken place that had literally nothing to do with anything you've ever said, ever.
	Yeah, well, they kind of got their comeuppance in some ways because people started to point out that they were still carrying Mein Kampf, and so that turned out to be a problem.
	And then they were also carrying a book that showed you how to turn a semi-automatic into a fully automatic.
	And so, you know, you've got to be careful when you go after someone for their sins that you don't have a few sins in your own, like, lying around where people can, you know, sort of observe them.
	Anyways, they did reverse that decision, but...
	That's good.
	Yeah, yeah, that was good, but it is.
	It's very weird.
	I'm going to the UK here right away.
	Now we're talking about me, and we weren't supposed to be, but I'm going to the UK right away because the paperback is launching there, and so I'm going to be talking to journalists and Talking to UK journalists, man, that's like jumping into a tub of, well, not full-grown crocodiles, but, you know, like five-footers anyways.
	So what you're trying to say is...
	Yeah, they're pretty snappy.
	So I've got some trepidation about that.
	So it's a funny life.
	It's a very peculiar life to be involved in, and I'm not exactly ever sure what to make of it on a day-to-day basis.
	But it does give me a chance to talk to you.
	What's most peculiar for you is that you were not famous for most of your adult life.
	And then over the last four years, you've been catapulted and become one of the most famous, if not the most famous, psychologists on the planet Earth.
	Yes, it's very disconcerting.
	It's hard to get it.
	It's actually rather hard to adjust to that.
	I mean, maybe it's a function of age.
	I found, you know, when I was younger and I used to move from place to place, take me about a year to adapt.
	But I also noticed that as I got older, every time I moved, it took me longer to adapt.
	By the time you're 56, you know, if you know someone for 10 years, it's like you feel like you're just starting to get to know them a bit.
	You know, when you're 17, you have a roommate for six months, and it's like your best friends for the rest of your life.
	So it is a very difficult thing to adapt to.
	I can't really wrap my mind around it.
	And I guess it's also partly because it's true no matter where I go.
	Like, I went to Slovenia, you know, and it's...
	Everybody speaks English in Slovenia, by the way, and you are a big hit in Slovenia.
	I don't know if you know this, but it looks to me like the podcast YouTube world has even more impact in places where the press is not very reliable.
	Like everybody knew about our everybody knew about our interviews and our podcasts and so I was stopped in Slovenia constantly, which is that was a real shock, too So but again, so the shock is and this is the weird thing about YouTube and about podcasts is that it's not It's just not one country or two countries.
	It's like every damn country and so It's but I'm really fortunate really fortunate because like I said all the public encounters I have are Are extremely positive they're hard to cope with though, you know in some sense because people are always they always tell me a serious story you know,
	they say I was in some sort of hell of some sort six months ago too much drugs or alcohol or bad relationship or not get along with my family or underemployed or nihilistic or depressed whatever you know like Whatever little corner of hell they have to occupy and they've been practicing something like maybe developing a vision for their life or trying to live a more meaningful life or taking more responsibility or like really making an effort to pull their families together and to advance
	at work regardless of what their job is and it's working and so they're always like shell-shocked that it's working and thrilled to death but it's so strange to have these intense 20-second, 30-second conversations with people about really deep elements of their life, and then, you know, it's a shock, and then you walk along the street, and it's a normal day, and then someone else comes up and does the same thing.
	It's like, I don't know what to do with it emotionally.
	It's...
	Because maybe, you know, someone might tell you that, I don't know, maybe they tell you that something, if you've been helping them, maybe they tell you that once a year, once every five years or something, but...
	To have it happen all the time is, I don't know, I think it fills me with a kind of sorrow.
	Like, I'm really happy that it's happening and everything, but there's still something about it that's deeply and deeply moving and difficult to adjust to.
	And the sorrow because so many people are struggling out there and that you're encountering all these folks?
	Well, the sorrow is that there's so many people struggling out there and They have so little support that my lectures and podcasts and the book were what was necessary to help them straighten themselves out.
	You just can't imagine how many people out there haven't heard an encouraging word.
	What's the old song?
	Home on the Range?
	Except that's where you don't hear a discouraging word.
	Well, these people have never heard an encouraging word.
	It's sad to see how common that is and how little It takes to turn that around and it's so fun out in the lectures because you know a lot of the people in my lectures are Crack, they're the same people you were talking about that stop you in Hollywood You know, they're kind of rough working-class guys.
	That'd be about 30% of my audience I would think you know and they're not the sort of people that you would Stereotypically presume would come to an hour and a half lecture on you know Philosophy and psychology, but man, they're listening.
	They're listening like mad and it's so Fun and interesting to watch them think it through and to and to take this seriously and you know and they come up afterwards and they say you know I've been watching your lectures and I'm a much better husband or I'm a much better father and Sometimes they have their girlfriend or wife with them and she says the same thing and you know It's really nice man It's really something.
	Well, you really are making a giant impact and it's only understandable that it would be difficult for you to wrap your head around what this is.
	It's not something that very few human beings ever get to experience.
	A very, very, very tiny percentage of our population worldwide is ever put in a position like you're put into.
	Let's look at your position.
	I asked you this at one time.
	Last time we talked, I think you were getting something about 100 million downloads a month on your podcast.
	What are your figures?
	If you don't mind, what are your figures?
	Probably double that.
	Double that.
	Jesus Christ, that's just unbelievable.
	Especially with YouTube.
	With YouTube and all the YouTube clips, it's actually probably more than that.
	It's nuts.
	It's gotten to the point where I try to pay as little attention to the numbers as possible and just concentrate on doing the show.
	Because I think if I pay attention to it too much, I might lose my mind.
	It's untenable, the sheer volume of human beings.
	If you were ever on a stage and you were looking out at 300 million people, what would that look like?
	I mean, it's not 300 million people because it's 300 million downloads in a month, but the real number of human beings you're interacting with, I mean, I don't know what that is.
	Is it 50 million people?
	I don't know how many actual million people are listening to the show or watching the show on a regular basis, but it's an unmanageable number in terms of like reading comments or trying to pay attention to what they want or what they don't want.
	It's very strange.
	Yes, it's a very weird position to be in, there's no doubt.
	And the strange thing is, too, is that, well, we've talked about this before, too.
	Like, this is early days, right?
	I mean, this has only been happening for about...
	How long have you been doing your YouTube videos?
	The YouTube videos are only a few years.
	I think it's only three or four years.
	The podcast will be ten years in December.
	Right, okay, so 10 years, that's starting to become a decent chunk of life, but three or four years, that's still new.
	And I mean, the podcast market and the YouTube market are still, they're brand new technologies, fundamentally.
	Yeah, fundamentally.
	And now you're seeing corporations trying to capitalize on it.
	And I've started to get these very bizarre offers to make my podcast exclusive on this platform or that platform.
	And these companies, they're throwing crazy amounts of money around at podcast networks.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars to buy podcast networks.
	So it's becoming very, very strange because what was a joke five or six years ago?
	Literally, like, why are you wasting your time doing a podcast?
	I used to hear that all the time.
	Now it's, how did you do this?
	How did you make this podcast so popular?
	That's a totally different question.
	Yeah, well, it's so strange because...
	So many people, nobody realized that there was an audience for on-demand audio.
	And you see the same thing in the book world.
	Not only that, but not just on-demand audio, but long-form conversation.
	Yeah.
	One of the, I mean, even my friend Ari, who's one of my best friends, would always tell me, you got to edit your shows.
	Nobody wants to listen to anything that's three hours long.
	So I'd say, well, then they don't have to listen.
	And he's like, you're doing yourself a disservice.
	And I'm like, I don't think I am.
	If someone only has an hour, then listen to it for an hour.
	You might miss out some information, but it's not going to change your life.
	Do whatever you want to do.
	But I like talking to people for long periods of time because I think you really only get cooking After like the first half hour, 40 minutes, that's when you get comfortable.
	You sort of get into a groove of communication, you know, figuring out this person's rhythm and thought processes.
	And then as you expand on these ideas and you share information back and forth with each other, after an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, that's when things really start getting deep.
	And oftentimes the last hour of a three-hour podcast is the best hour.
	Yeah, well that intuition was certainly right and revolutionary.
	You never know when you come up with a revolutionary idea.
	Yeah, I mean, part of my revolutionary idea is just me being stubborn.
	Just like I didn't care.
	I wasn't doing it for money.
	So the only reason why I was doing it was because I enjoyed talking to people like you or many of my other guests.
	I want to talk to...
	It's a very rare opportunity where I would get a chance to sit down with someone like you with no distractions, no other people in the room, no cell phones, and just talk for three hours.
	That's so unusual in our world.
	And our constantly distracted world.
	And I think I've gotten a fantastic education because of that.
	I mean, it's really enlightened me on so many different subjects and expanded my understanding of people in general.
	And conspiracy theories.
	I mean, man, you're up on those.
	I've got some of those too.
	Yeah, so that's important to be up on the conspiracy theories just to keep track of the damn things.
	Well, you got to know what people think of you.
	Lately, I'm a Zionist shill.
	This is the most recent one.
	I didn't know it was a Zionist shill.
	Oh, yeah.
	You're a Zionist shill.
	Yeah.
	I'm a white supremacist, too, depending on who you ask.
	Yeah, well, I've got those two things as well.
	It's real interesting to be able to juggle both of those identities.
	It's like, scientists go one day, white supremacists the next.
	It's sort of like being gender fluid, except on the political spectrum.
	Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
	Why do you have to be conservative or Democrat?
	Sometimes you're one and sometimes you're the other.
	It depends on the day.
	There's no reason to extend that all the way out to the edges.
	Yeah, gender fluid is my favorite.
	That's my favorite thing that's going on right now.
	Where someone could be like a woman for a few hours and then be a man for the next six.
	You know, I read, although I don't know if this is true, but I read it several places and I actually looked.
	I read that the Olympic Committee is going to let trans people compete in the Olympics in the next competition.
	I'm not surprised because the IOC, the Olympic Committee, is incredibly corrupt.
	And I think what they do, first of all, is disgraceful.
	They make billions of dollars.
	The athletes make zero.
	I think it's disgusting.
	I think everything about what they do is corrupt.
	and the idea that they're there for fair and pure competition is nonsense.
	They're there to make shitloads of money, and that's what they're good at.
	And what they're good at doing is putting on these gigantic events where they profit in spectacular and staggering ways, and the athletes dedicate their entire life to these moments, and they literally make nothing.
	And then after that, if they're lucky, if they're very famous and popular, they can eke out a living with endorsements.
	Or, you know, for the rare person like Michael Phelps or someone like that who's just a true outlier, they can actually get wealthy from it.
	But it's very, very rare.
	Most of those athletes will be in severe debt.
	Most of those athletes either have to get sponsored or they have to find someone who is willing to share the burden and help them achieve their goals.
	But Without some sort of altruistic benefactor who's got millions of dollars to pour into their camp.
	I mean, it's just...
	It's disgusting.
	They're professional athletes.
	I mean, that's what they do with their entire life.
	If you want to win a gold medal in the Olympics in gymnastics, you can't have a side job.
	You can't be working eight hours a day.
	No, you have to be a professional athlete.
	And the Olympic Committee knows this.
	And if you've ever paid attention to how they've let people get away with cheating.
	I mean, there's a fantastic documentary out right now by Brian Fogle called Icarus.
	And it's all about the Sochi Olympics and how Russia cheated in the Sochi Olympics.
	And the IOC barely punished them.
	They punished a few people.
	And how the IOC and the World Anti-Doping Agency, they have people from each organization.
	They share.
	They go back and forth.
	They work for one, and they work for the other.
	And they're totally in conflict.
	It's a total conflict of interest.
	And it's a dirty business.
	So if the tide of political...
	My perception is that it's a good progressive thing to have trans women competing in the UFC. I shouldn't say the UFC. That'll never happen.
	But trans women competing in the Olympics and that this was what everybody wanted.
	They would just do it.
	They would do it regardless of whether or not it's fair.
	Regardless of whether or not it made sense.
	And they would do it just to get more eyes on the show.
	Just to get more money.
	And that's what they're there for.
	That's what they're good at.
	It would be fascinating to see how all That plays out because it's so absurd.
	I looked up some stats the other day because I was curious, you know?
	It's like, okay.
	I know that all the differences between men and women are socially constructed, but nonetheless, I went and looked up the biological comparison of strength.
	You know, and the typical woman has 30% of the upper body strength of the typical man, and about 55% of the lower body strength.
	Now that's like, that's a big difference, man.
	That makes the average man three times as strong in the upper body.
	Jesus, that gives you an advantage that's just, well, it's criminal.
	Well, it is, but the question is, how much do you lose from the conversion?
	How much do you lose from estrogen?
	You lose some.
	But if a woman, say, look, if you have an athlete who's a woman who's 32 years old, and it turns out that she's been taking steroids her entire adult life.
	So she's been taking steroids for 12 years every day, and then decides to stop taking them right before the Olympics.
	Wouldn't everybody agree that she has a massive advantage?
	Wouldn't everybody agree that most likely her tendon strength her muscle strength her bone structure all of that has been Completely altered by taking performance-enhancing drugs.
	We would all agree to that.
	Well, guess what?
	That's what you're doing if you're a man for 30 years, and then you decide to transition and become a woman for two, even if you're taking estrogen.
	One thing I don't understand is, apart from the obvious unfairness of that, What what I struggle with understanding is the triumphalism of the victors It's like they enter these contests and then they win and then they celebrate their victory as if it's a genuine victory despite the fact right wiped out these women who've been working mostly within the rules for like you
	know Maybe not decades, but certainly many many years in succession.
	And they just blow them away, especially in like strength contests.
	And then they actually treat that like they won, and then they also claim it as a moral victory.
	You know, and for me, that's just...
	The only thing I see in that is a narcissism that's so deep that it's almost unfathomable.
	It's like, how can you take pride in that sort of victory unless you don't see who it is that you're defeating?
	I don't get it.
	Well, it shows how pathological this whole thing really is when you're dealing with the idea that you can turn A person into someone of the opposite gender.
	Not just recognize them as being a woman and treat them as a woman and allow them to use whatever name they would like.
	I'm all for that.
	But it's that you are going to say, no, this is a woman and she should be able to compete with women, including in combat sports, rugby.
	There's a male to female trans athlete that plays rugby in Australia that's 240 pounds.
	And just smashing women.
	And I don't think there's any real standards that are universal in terms of like, what do you have to go through in terms of your conversion therapy?
	And like, what about size differences when you're dealing with high impact sports?
	No, because that's a political minefield.
	Like the radical end of it is, well, you're the gender that you say you are.
	And The medical conversion is irrelevant, and I don't know how that translates into the sports world, but my sense is that if the same thing happens in the sports world that's happened in the political world, that it will be basically indistinguishable from whim.
	It's like, well, now I'm a woman.
	I had a guy on my podcast recently, and this came up, and it was a big argument.
	And essentially his stance was, he is all for inclusiveness, and he would like to move towards a world where trans athletes can compete, and they're included, and they can compete as women.
	And I was trying to explain the benefits of being a male, the physical benefits of being a male and competing against women.
	And he just didn't want to hear it.
	It was just in denial of it.
	It was...
	It was going against these preconceived notions that he had, and the ideology.
	There's a part of progressive ideology that is, you're supposed to look at a trans woman as every bit a woman.
	Yeah, that's because you're supposed to accept the doctrine that all differences between men and women are socially constructed, which is, of course, a doctrine that's Nonsense.
	It's delusional.
	It's nonsense.
	And it's delusional for some even deeper reason that's even harder to fathom.
	I don't know what it is.
	Yeah, it is hard to fathom.
	I don't understand the root of it.
	I really don't.
	Even when I talk to people who subscribe to these notions, I don't understand the logic.
	I don't understand where's the breakdown in their perception of the world where they don't see.
	And there's another thing that we got into.
	Go ahead.
	Another thing that we got into was children, transition.
	I keep hearing this.
	This is something that I keep hearing that's driving me mad.
	That hormone blockers, that these puberty blockers are reversible.
	They keep saying that they're harmless.
	They're reversible.
	If the child changes their mind, they could always just get off the bar and the results are reversible.
	That's not true.
	You're affecting the development of a child.
	If you're using these hormone blockers, you are changing the way the child is going to develop because they're not going to have testosterone the way a normal boy would if they're transitioning from male to female.
	If you're doing this to a six-year-old kid, the notion that this is completely reversible is completely disingenuous because that child is not going to go through the same developmental period physically as they would if they had access to testosterone.
	They're just not.
	It's just not true.
	It's not true if you talk to medical doctors.
	It's not true if you talk to a biologist.
	It's just not true.
	And it's something that they use to try to justify the, in air quotes, harmlessness of this particular type of therapy that they're encouraging.
	And it's just to say that there's nothing wrong with being trans.
	And I don't think there is anything wrong with being trans.
	But I think there is something wrong with making decisions for a child or allowing a child to make decisions that will massively impact them for the rest of their life and to make that decision when you're six.
	Like, I could only imagine if I was a person who had gone through that and then having this conversation with my parents going, why the fuck did you let me make that decision?
	It's going to be really interesting to see that play itself out in the courts in about 12 years.
	Oh, it's going to be ugly.
	It's going to be ugly, man.
	You don't let your damn six-year-old get a tattoo.
	Right, exactly.
	I mean, a tattoo is fairly reversible.
	The whole thing about it is nonsense.
	And it's this whole progressive ideology that they're subscribing to.
	There's a doctrine.
	There's all these different things that you have to subscribe to if you want to accept that ideology.
	And this is one of them.
	This is one of them.
	Trans children.
	You can't say, yeah, that is problematic.
	You're not allowed to say that.
	You can't even entertain the notion that this could be a particularly egregious offense Well, I guess, you know, if the primary idea is that our society is an oppressive patriarchy, and I think that's like number one idea, then anything that touches on that in any way immediately becomes untouchable.
	the adults to make the decision, then you have to believe in authority because the adults have the authority.
	And if you're going to believe that the adults have the authority, then you have to believe that hierarchy has some value.
	And then that tangles you up with your insistence that, you know, hierarchy is definitely oppressive and especially the Western form of hierarchy.
	And so I think that central axiom is so vital that anything that gets near it gets twisted and bent like it's too close to a gravitational field and the logic is irrelevant because that fundamental central issue has to be supported at all cost.
	Well, this is one of the conundrums of our conversation.
	We came to this one point where I said, now, if a child identifies as a girl, I said, why not just let them be a girl?
	Why do you have to fuck with their hormones?
	Why do you have to chemically engage with their body?
	Yeah, if it's all nonsense.
	This is my take on all of this.
	Just be a girl.
	Anything where you need medical science to consistently inject chemicals into your body that can alter your hormones irreversibly at a very young age.
	Why is that natural?
	Why are you saying this is what this person biologically or psychologically needs?
	Are you sure?
	This seems like something that human beings have constructed.
	Well, it's particularly damn weird if you insist that gender is a social construct.
	Yes.
	Like if it's a social construct, then what the hell are the hormones for?
	Exactly.
	That was my point.
	He didn't have an answer to that.
	No, no, that's a rough one, man.
	Okay, so we're going to go back to Boston.
	Okay.
	Okay, so you said that's really where things started for you.
	So you moved there when you were 13.
	And so what did you get involved in?
	First of all, like what kind of kid were you in school?
	I barely paid attention.
	If ADD is real, I certainly had it.
	And I was very, very interested in what I was interested in.
	I was very uninterested in people telling me what to do.
	And I essentially couldn't wait to get out of school.
	But I would excel at things that I had interest in.
	And initially it was art.
	I wanted to be a comic book illustrator until I really got into martial arts.
	Around 14, 15 years old, that's when I really became massively obsessed.
	And that was really the first thing that I ever did where I really didn't feel like a loser.
	I really felt like, oh, I actually have some talent.
	I actually can be exceptional.
	I grew up constantly moving, didn't really have a lot of friends.
	I would be new in this town.
	I'd get picked on.
	I wasn't a big kid.
	And there was a lot of issues with that psychologically.
	And I didn't like being afraid of other kids.
	I didn't like not knowing what to do.
	If I ran into kids, they were going to bully me and pick on me.
	Yeah, well that's an annoying thing not to know what to do about.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And, you know, martial arts changed that 180 degrees.
	And then I became someone who I would be afraid of.
	You know, I became the opposite of what I was.
	So what I was was someone who was terrified of conflict, didn't know what to do.
	And what I became was, you know, a Taekwondo champion.
	I became a martial arts champion.
	I knew how to fight.
	I've done it so many times.
	So what did you do?
	You just walked into a joint one day and decided that that's what you were going to do?
	How did it come about?
	It was very fortunate.
	Well, I'd done a little bit of martial arts training at a different place.
	And then one day I was in Boston for a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.
	And as I was walking home to the train station with a friend of mine, there was a lot of people that were leaving the baseball game.
	So the lines from the train for the T, which in Boston, public transportation was very long.
	So we decided to go check out the Jae Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute.
	It was right there.
	And I had been really into martial arts because of what I said.
	You know, the aforementioned insecurities.
	So I went up the stairs, and as I was walking up the stairs, just fortuitously, a guy named John Lee was training.
	And John was a national taekwondo champion who was in preparation for the World Cup.
	Which was this huge event that he was taking, the international event that he was about to travel to go to.
	And he was in the peak of his training.
	And so I walked up to the top of the stairs and I heard this crazy sound of what it turned out to be this man kicking this bag and slamming his heel into this bag and having the chain snap and And rattle and the thud of his heel slamming into this leather bag.
	And I got up there and I watched this guy work out.
	I couldn't believe a person could do that.
	I'd never seen anybody kick something so hard in real life.
	Anybody that had such incredible martial arts skill like this guy did, John Lee, who became a mentor of mine and taught me quite a bit.
	But that changed everything.
	I was there the next day.
	I talked to them.
	They gave me a brochure and a pamphlet.
	And I was there the next day, and I was probably there every day of my life, give or take a few days here or there if I was injured or something came up, until I was 22 years old.
	So how many hours a day were you spending there?
	All day.
	I had keys pretty quickly.
	They gave me keys.
	Right away, my instructor recognized that I was pretty obsessed, and I was physically pretty talented.
	So he had me teaching classes instead of paying.
	He was like, if it's difficult for you to pay, I'd like to have you teach.
	And there was some wisdom to that too because one of the best ways for someone to get good at martial arts is actually to teach.
	It actually refines your technique.
	You think about it more.
	You're explaining it to people that don't necessarily understand all the mechanics of it.
	So I started teaching.
	I would teach private lessons to beginners.
	I would teach group classes.
	And then eventually I went on to teach at Boston University.
	I taught at Boston University when I was 19.
	I was teaching an accredited class there.
	It actually counted towards your GPA. And so I did that.
	I was already US Open champion by then.
	How long did it take?
	So you went in there when you were 13 and you were a kid that had moved around a bunch and got pushed.
	I was 14 or 15 by the time I got to that school.
	And then I had my black belt by the time I was 17.
	And I was competing in the adult division by then.
	Before I was ever 18, I was competing as an adult.
	He might have even put me in when I was 16, if I remember correctly.
	And then I won the state championship when I was 18, and I won it every year from then until I stopped.
	Right, so you had a pretty successful run at it there.
	How long did it take before, like were you still, were you a thin, like were you a skinny kid when you started?
	When did you start to bulk up and get big?
	When did you start to get tough enough so that, you know, the problems with aggression stop, you know, with other people's aggression stop being a trouble for you?
	Well, luckily with high school, kids heard about it right away.
	It was one of those things where you find out that one of the kids you go to school with is flying all over the country, kicking people in the head.
	They just avoided me.
	I certainly never sought out trouble, but people avoided me.
	Junior and senior year, I'd already become this weird kid.
	That was obsessed with martial arts.
	And I spent most of my life, from the time I was 15 until I was 21, training and competing.
	I probably fought over a hundred times.
	I traveled all over the country.
	I fought in California.
	I fought in Ohio.
	I fought all over the place.
	A lot of local tournaments in Connecticut and Massachusetts and New Hampshire is where I won the US Open.
	I just fought everywhere and that was most of my life.
	Yeah, it was most of my life until I got into stand-up comedy.
	Right, so you had a very singular life.
	Yeah, 100% singular.
	Uniquely singular.
	But I avoided most of the pitfalls of high school partying and all that stuff.
	I didn't do that because I was scared of getting hurt.
	I was scared that if I showed up for training hungover that I'd get beat up.
	I was scared of anything that would take even a tiny bit away from my performance as a fighter.
	Because I was obsessed with it.
	Was that actually fear of being hurt because you made a mistake?
	Or fear of losing the competition?
	Fear of being hurt.
	Fear of losing the competition.
	Fear of being hurt in training.
	Training alone was as scary as any competition.
	I just completely by luck wandered into one of the best schools in the world for Taekwondo.
	It hit...
	They had produced multiple national champions and, you know, real top of the food chain athletes in terms of Taekwondo.
	And it was just dumb luck that I walked into that school.
	And, you know, I could have walked into another school that was a few blocks away that was terrible.
	I just got lucky.
	I got really, really, really lucky.
	So how useful are the technical martial arts like Taekwondo and like in an actual street fight?
	Not that useful.
	I mean, more useful than knowing nothing, but not as useful as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
	Or now, a lot of people now are just learning mixed martial arts, which is essentially what you see in the UFC, where they're a jack of all trades, master of none.
	And the argument, there's two arguments.
	There's an argument that that is a good thing to learn.
	And then there's other arguments that being a specialist first is the best thing and then learning the other things later in life is the best way to go about it.
	Like a specialist, particularly a striker or a grappler, like being an elite wrestler or an elite jujitsu artist and then learning all the other stuff later in life because you have such a significant advantage if you can bring the fight into your realm of expertise.
	So if you are a striker, every fight starts standing up.
	And if you're an elite striker and you know how to avoid takedowns and you know how to wrestle enough to keep a guy off you, you'll have such a significant advantage striking that you can dominate the competition.
	And we've seen that in the UFC. We've seen that with both grappling and with striking.
	That it seems that if you become a specialist in one particular area and then learn Those other things, you'll be better off.
	But you can't really just be a specialist, whether it's in Muay Thai or Taekwondo or Jiu-Jitsu.
	You really kind of have to understand if you're a grappler, you really kind of have to understand striking.
	And if you're a striker, you really kind of have to understand grappling in order to at least avoid it.
	Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	So, during this time, too, you got to be a pretty big guy.
	So, when did that start happening?
	Were you working out like mad while you were training as well?
	Yeah, but I was much thinner.
	I was much thinner back then.
	I didn't do much weightlifting because I was trying to compete in certain weight classes.
	Like when I was 17, I was cutting weight when I was 17 and 18.
	I was trying to make the 140-pound weight class, but I was really probably about 10 pounds plus heavier than that.
	And I would dehydrate myself, and it was really affecting my performance.
	And then when I was 18, I moved up to the next weight class.
	That was 154, I believe it was.
	And when I moved up to that weight class, I got way better.
	That was when I really excelled.
	That's when I became...
	Like a real national class athlete was when I moved up.
	But I still wasn't lifting weights much.
	I was just doing Taekwondo training.
	It was just a lot of heavy bag work, some calisthenics, but mostly it was martial arts work.
	Then when I started getting into Jiu Jitsu, it was long after I stopped competing.
	That's when I started really getting into weightlifting because Jiu Jitsu involves Grappling.
	And I think the advantage to being strong and grappling is pretty significant.
	It's gigantic.
	And so that's when, you know, I was like 29 or so like that.
	That's when I really started heavily weightlifting and getting into that.
	How long did your initial martial arts career last?
	I fought from the time I was 15, and I think I had my last fight.
	It was either I was 21 or 22.
	I don't really remember.
	The last three fights were kickboxing fights, and I had those while I was doing stand-up comedy.
	So I was spreading myself too thin.
	I was working a bunch of different jobs.
	I was working delivering newspapers.
	I was working as a private investigator's assistant.
	I did some construction.
	I did a bunch of different odd jobs to make a living.
	And I decided somewhere along...
	Newspaper, delivery boy construction agent, jujitsu fighter, stand-up comedian.
	You know, that's kind of your typical 19-year-old situation.
	Yeah, well, jiu-jitsu came later.
	Jiu-jitsu didn't come until I was, I think I was 28 or 29 when I first started training jiu-jitsu.
	That was mostly just taekwondo and kickboxing.
	I really got into kickboxing.
	And I had three kickboxing fights, and I was entertaining the idea of fighting professionally.
	But I was also starting to get really worried about brain damage.
	I started to see some signs.
	From kickboxing specifically?
	Yeah, specifically because I was getting hit a lot more.
	Oh yeah?
	The kickboxing sparring that I did, I did that over the course of about two years where I really got heavily into kickboxing.
	I did a lot of boxing sparring and a lot of what you would call gym wars where guys would just, we would beat the shit out of each other and you'd get hurt and you'd come home with headaches and Basically, we're fighting in the gym.
	I mean, it's not a wise way to do it.
	The smart gyms now and the best martial artists, they very rarely spar hard.
	Most of the time, they spar technically.
	So they're hitting each other, but they hit each other like this.
	They don't blast each other full blast.
	They sort of touch each other.
	They're working on timing, and occasionally you go hard just to make sure that you can survive With these techniques in a firefight that you know how to deal with it once you get hit.
	Is the lower combat intensity still useful for training, for the real thing?
	Yes.
	But you have to have some high intensity.
	And some people, that high intensity, they actually have drills that they use to sort of...
	To simulate actual exchanges that you would have.
	There's a lot of science to it now that didn't exist back then.
	the the gyms that I came up in were real hard nose really you know tough gyms and if you if you weren't tough you did not survive and they weren't interested in anybody that couldn't take a shot or anybody that wasn't willing to go to war so you would put on a mouthpiece you put on a cup you put your shin pads on and you beat the fuck out of each other and that was a big part of learning how to It was these sparring sessions were brutal.
	They were nerve-wracking.
	You'd be scared.
	You'd be scared going into them.
	They'd be, you know, I'd be anxious the night before if I knew how to spar a particular guy the next day because I knew it was dangerous.
	You basically were having fights all the time.
	So I'd have fights several days a week.
	You would fight.
	You know, it wasn't really sparring.
	I'd hit guys as hard as I could.
	You're covering a lot too, man, all the time, I think, from that.
	So, okay, there's a big hole in this story, too.
	So, like, you're doing great at taekwondo, you're a national-level athlete, and you switch to kickboxing, you're worried about getting hurt, and that seems reasonable, because, like, how about not being brain damaged by the time you're 30?
	But then, you know, I guess kind of what I'm wondering was, like, how many shots in the head did you have to take before you thought being a stand-up comedian was a good idea?
	Well...
	One of my dear friends to this day is a guy named Steve Graham and Steve was when I met him I was 15 and he was probably 30 and he was going through his residency as an ophthalmologist and He had been a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force.
	He had been on the U.S. ski team.
	He was a national skiing champion.
	Just a wild man.
	Just a guy who took chances and lived life to the fullest and was just one of the most hard-working people I ever met in my life.
	And...
	I would make him laugh.
	And I would make some of the people laugh in training because we were always nervous.
	When we would go to tournaments, we were nervous.
	Because, you know, I'd seen many of my friends get knocked unconscious at these tournaments, get kicked in the head, taken to hospitals.
	And, you know, I'd seen it in the gym, too.
	A lot of guys getting beat up and knocked down in the gym.
	It was constant.
	And it happened to me a couple of times.
	I'd been hurt.
	So we had this gallows humor where we would go to these events We'd travel to these tournaments and the tension would be so thick.
	Everybody would just be taking deep breaths and trying to relax and just stay loose before you fight.
	And I would be the class clown in that environment.
	Had you ever seen any of that when you were in high school or junior high?
	No, I didn't have that.
	So it took those circumstances.
	Yes.
	I did have a sense of humor, but it would manifest itself in cartoons.
	I would draw cartoons of the teacher.
	I would draw cartoons of certain kids that would kiss the teacher's ass.
	I would draw them kissing the teacher's ass and saying ridiculous things.
	And if the teacher was late to a class and I knew I had enough time, I would put something on the chalkboard and then pull down the screen so that when they would go to use the chalkboard, they would pull the screen back up and see this Ridiculous cartoon that I had drawn.
	The whole class would laugh.
	And then the teacher would ask, who did this?
	And luckily nobody ratted me out.
	So I enjoyed making people laugh.
	But that was...
	It mostly wasn't things I said.
	It was mostly cartoons.
	Right, right.
	That's very different, yeah.
	Yeah, but with comedy...
	The fighting, when we were getting ready to compete, I was just trying to add some levity.
	I was just trying to lighten up the mood because everybody was...
	And it was also...
	It was a charged environment.
	So anything that I said that was actually funny would get a giant reaction.
	And that became addictive.
	And I was pretty good at doing impressions.
	So I do impressions of our friends, do impressions of our instructor, all these ridiculous situations.
	And my friend, Steve Graham, and my other friend, Ed Shorter, who's another one who encouraged me, who I lost touch with, unfortunately.
	He said, you should be a comedian.
	And my take on it was, you think I'm funny because you're my friend.
	But other people are gonna think I'm an asshole.
	The things that I think are funny are fucked up.
	I have a fucked up sense of humor.
	I mean here I am devoting most of my time to trying to get really good at knocking people unconscious.
	That's what I was trying to do.
	I was trying to separate people from their consciousness.
	I was doing my best every day to get good at that.
	It's like a really perverse psychedelic drug.
	Yeah, it was the worst.
	Yeah.
	But I was trying to hurt people.
	That's what I was trying to get good at.
	I was trying to get good at hurting human bodies.
	And I just didn't think...
	I thought that I was such a weirdo and such an outlier in terms of how society viewed combat, physical hand-to-hand combat and interactions with each other that no one would think that the things that I was making fun of were funny.
	And this guy convinced me to go to an open mic night.
	He's like, you should go to an open mic night.
	Just go.
	There's a lot of comedy clubs in Boston.
	Go and watch.
	And I went and watched and I realized, wow, one of the things about going to open mic night is most open mic comedians are so terrible that it encourages you to try it.
	Because you're like, well, I can't be that bad.
	Like, I might have something that's better than some of these people.
	And then, you know, you'd see a real professional go up and it would be so discouraging because you'd say, like, God, my God, I'll never be that funny.
	That guy's impossibly funny.
	But I knew from martial arts that if I worked really hard at something, I could get good at it.
	And I had this thought that maybe I could do that with comedy because I didn't want to fight anymore.
	I was already on my way kind of out the door.
	I was really worried about the brain damage.
	I was on my way out the door from the time I was like 19.
	From the time I was 19 I was starting to worry about brain damage.
	So you're 53?
	I'm 51.
	51, 51.
	And so much, how much damage did you actually sustain?
	You know, like lots of people.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I seem to be okay.
	How about physically, muscularly, and that sort of thing?
	Oh, no, I'm fine.
	I had a bunch of surgeries.
	I've had my nose repaired.
	My nose was destroyed.
	I had no nose.
	The inside of my nose just didn't work until I was 40.
	And then I had a deviated septum operation.
	They had to cut out giant calcified chunks of scar tissue and all sorts of...
	Literally, my nose was useless until I was 40 years old.
	So that must be kind of a relief to have your nose.
	Oh my god.
	I tell everybody, get it done.
	If you have a deviated septum and you can't breathe out of your nose, my god, this...
	I couldn't do that until I was 40.
	Yeah.
	It was just all broke.
	I broke my nose who knows how many times.
	At least a dozen.
	And it just was always bloody.
	I was always getting punched or kicked in the nose.
	Yeah, it doesn't seem designed as a sense organ to be in the middle of your face where you get punched.
	Well, it has this little tiny piece of cartilage too.
	It should be on the top of your head, you know.
	It would be a lot safer out there.
	Yeah.
	Like a whale.
	It also makes your eyes swell shut.
	It makes your eyes water.
	It makes it difficult to see when you get hit in the nose.
	The hit in the nose is really annoying.
	But other than that, I had both my knees reconstructed.
	I had ACL tears in both knees.
	I had to get them reconstructed and a bunch of other stuff.
	A bunch of other broken things.
	You broke yourself up pretty good.
	Yeah, broken knuckles.
	I broke a lot of stuff.
	But everything works great now.
	I mean, after surgery.
	I mean, for a person who's been through what I do, what I've done with my body, my body works remarkably well.
	Yeah, it's amazing, actually.
	You know, that's a lot.
	You think you'd be arthritic, at least, in some of your joints and that sort of thing.
	No, I'm pretty good.
	I mean, I also am very proactive.
	I do a lot of yoga.
	I've had a bunch of stem cell therapies to deal with some significant tears and injuries that I've had.
	But all that, you know, knock on wood, everything works pretty good.
	But the brain damage thing is, I don't know.
	I really don't know.
	I really sit back and think about some of those wars that I was in.
	Yeah.
	Gym wars in particular and some fights and my last fight I got TKO'd.
	I got stopped.
	I got hit with a left hook and dropped and my legs went out from under me and then I got up and I get hit again fell down again they stopped the fight and that was when I decided I'm going to stop.
	I was like, I'm not giving this the same amount of dedication I gave when I was at my best.
	I was spreading myself way too thin with comedy.
	And I just didn't have this same hunger for it that I had when I was young or younger.
	And I was also very aware of the consequences at that point in my life.
	I was like, I know where this is going.
	I saw guys at the gym that were punch trunks.
	You know, that were slurring their words and they would forget things.
	And I had seen some people progress towards that.
	And it was very, very disturbing to me.
	You know, I'd be lying in bed at night after a hard sparring session and my head would be pounding.
	And I would think, what am I doing to my fucking brain?
	Like, what am I doing to myself?
	And...
	I got real lucky that I found stand-up comedy.
	I mean, if the UFC was around back then, I most certainly would have started fighting.
	And, you know, to not be training intelligently, because I wasn't training intelligently, I was training like a meathead, and that was just all we knew back then.
	I probably would have sustained some pretty significant damage before I ever even got into the octagon.
	I probably would have already had massive brain damage before I ever had a fight.
	Right, right.
	So that's good.
	So you stepped out at an intelligent time.
	And so then you started your comedy career.
	And you started at Open Mics.
	And so tell me about how that developed.
	Well, open mic nights are very interesting.
	You sign up on a list and you may or may not get on.
	They pick people out of a hat.
	Like, say if there's 50 people signing up, 30 people get on.
	And, you know, you each do five minutes.
	And, you know, the host is generally a professional comedian that brings people up.
	And, you know, you have this weird culture of people that are struggling to try to figure out how to make a living in this sort of undefined art form.
	There's no classes you can take in it that are really worth anything.
	There's no books that you can buy that are going to teach you anything.
	It's something that you kind of have to...
	The only thing that I liken to is rap music.
	Because rap music seems to be very similar in the fact that you have to learn from other practitioners.
	You don't really learn from books.
	Maybe there is now.
	I don't know of any real legitimate university courses on stand-up comedy.
	I don't think they could teach it to you anyway because everyone does it differently.
	But I think that's the case with rap music as well.
	I think you kind of have to learn from the people that are already doing it.
	And one good thing about stand-up comedy, particularly today, today it's much more open and inviting and Comedians have a lot more camaraderie than they did in the beginning because they're not fighting over scraps anymore.
	Now there's so many venues, so many different places to work and then there's YouTube.
	And the internet and comedians, there's much more of a supportive community of people trying to help people.
	And I try to really concentrate on that.
	I spend a lot of time trying to help young comics.
	I put a lot of young comics on my shows.
	I have them host.
	You know, I've got a show tonight and a young comic has only been doing it for a few years.
	Her name is Ally Makovsky.
	She's the host of it.
	She's really funny.
	And I try to encourage them.
	I try to help them.
	I try to give them advice.
	I try to give them pointers.
	I try to, when they have great sets, I try to really thank them and say that was excellent and you got this.
	Just keep doing what you're doing and you can really make a career doing this because it's such an insecure business.
	It's such a weird, undefined path that you have to take.
	And I love the art form.
	I love it as a consumer.
	I love it as a person who's an audience member.
	I really still to this day enjoy watching stand-up.
	But back then, It wasn't that supportive.
	We would just support each other, but the professionals weren't that supportive.
	Not like they are today.
	A few people, there's a guy named Lenny Clark that I'm still good friends with to this day.
	And I opened up for him.
	He was a Boston legend.
	And I was super fortunate to open up for him when I had been doing comedy for about a year.
	And he gave me some great advice.
	And that meant the world to me.
	And he was actually on my podcast just last month.
	I love that guy.
	And, you know, he helped me out when I was really, really, I was 21.
	I was really, really young in my comedy career.
	And so you started putting the same amount of dedication into that that you had been putting into the martial arts?
	Exactly.
	Yeah, I just became obsessed with it.
	And I just traveled all over the place doing open mic nights.
	I mean, me and my good friend, Greg Fitzsimmons, we started out together.
	We're good friends to this day.
	We started out within a week of each other.
	And we used to travel all the way to Rhode Island.
	We would drive, you know, an hour plus drive to go down there just to do five minutes.
	And then we were at an open mic night for free.
	And they would drive all the way home and just dream about one day being a professional.
	That was the dream.
	The dream was to pay your bills by doing comedy.
	Imagine if you could do comedy for a living.
	That was the dream.
	I would never imagine that I'm doing what I'm doing now or I'm doing these sold-out arenas.
	That wasn't even a hope.
	It wasn't even like, maybe if it goes well, I could do this.
	Maybe I could do that.
	That was never on the menu.
	And it's gotten to this really crazy astronomical place now that it's very hard for me to even imagine that that came out of those strange days in Boston, just traveling around all these different weird comedy clubs and writing constantly, not knowing how to write, not knowing how to formulate a joke, having many more misses than hits.
	You know, a lot of bombing.
	I bombed all the time.
	You know, you've got to have that ability to bomb and come back from it.
	I mean, because you're going to have a lot more Misses than hits, that's for sure.
	A lot more.
	Yeah, especially in the early days.
	What do you think accounts for that obsessiveness that you described?
	And that's a negative way of putting it.
	I mean, obviously, you said that, you know, when you were in school, if you weren't interested, you weren't listening at all.
	But if you were interested in something, you were like laser focused.
	And that really came up in the martial arts.
	But it obviously manifested itself in the stand-up comedy, too.
	So...
	What is it about you that enables you?
	What do you think it is about you that enables you to zero in on something like that to the exclusion of everything else?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I think some of it has to be attributed to the unhappiness in my childhood.
	That when I would find something that I did get some joy out of, I would just concentrate all in on that.
	I think some of it also was like, I wasn't really raised with a lot of discipline.
	And I wasn't really raised with a...
	My parents were both...
	My stepdad and my mom were both working all the time.
	So they weren't really around to sort of tell me what to do or how to live.
	And they weren't really around to let me know that everything was going to be okay.
	They were always working.
	So they would come home from work at like six o'clock or something like that and I'd been on my own all day.
	Me and my sister had been on our own all day.
	We'd come home.
	We had a key.
	We got into the house.
	There was a lot of real bad feelings.
	When I found something that made me feel good, I just did that exclusively.
	That's all I did.
	I still have that problem to this day.
	When I get obsessed with something, if I find something that means something to me, I think of it all day long.
	If I get obsessed with something, it becomes like a mantra that's in the back of my head.
	I have to shut it off.
	I have to do my best to shut it off.
	Otherwise, I can't listen to people.
	When people are talking to me, I don't want to talk to them.
	I want to go do that thing that I want to do.
	It becomes like a compulsion.
	And it could be socially negative.
	It could be detrimental to relationships and friendships.
	Yeah, but it seems like that sort of thing is also absolutely necessary if you're going to develop high-level skill at something difficult and unlikely.
	Because unless you're obsessive about it and practice it all the time, the people you're competing with are going to take you out.
	Well, I would always be terrified that I would run into someone like me.
	Well, I can understand that.
	That's what I was terrified of.
	But that was the fear that I would run into someone who is 100% all in.
	And when I was fighting and when I lost my last kickboxing fight, I wasn't all in.
	And I knew I wasn't the same person I was when I was like 18, 19.
	I was a psychopath.
	I mean, I was 100% committed to doing nothing but that.
	And then as I was examining my future prospects in my life and I started to become more aware of the problems of what I was doing, I became less and less.
	I had one fight that I had in California, in Anaheim, in the U.S. Nationals in 1980.
	It must have been my...
	It seems like it had to have been 86.
	86 or 87.
	Somewhere around there.
	87?
	Somewhere around 87.
	I knocked this guy out with a head kick in front of his pants.
	And it was...
	People were crying and he was unconscious for a long time.
	He was unconscious for a solid half hour.
	And they dragged him off of the mat.
	They put him in a stretcher.
	They took him to the hospital.
	I never saw him regain consciousness.
	And I remember thinking that could have easily been me.
	I didn't have any illusions of me being some impervious, invulnerable person.
	And I was really thinking about how I hit him so hard my heel was hurting the next day.
	I was walking with a limp from his head because I wheel kicked him in the head.
	It's a particularly brutal move where you spin and your whole leg comes around.
	You're hitting someone in the head with your heel and he felt like he had gotten shot.
	Just fell face first, out cold, snoring.
	It wasn't the first time that I'd done that to someone, but it was one of the most brutal because he kind of ran into it too.
	He was trying to kick me as I was kicking him.
	So it was the force of his body coming towards me and me hitting him.
	And I was thinking, that guy's probably never going to be the same again.
	Like, he's never going to get over it psychologically.
	Or if he does, it's going to be very hard for him.
	But he might...
	He might be damaged for the rest of his life.
	That's a real possibility.
	And then I started thinking, am I willing to have that happen to me at 19?
	I was 19 years old.
	I was like, is this what you want to do?
	Do you want to get hit in the head like that and never be the same again at 19?
	Because it easily can happen.
	Yeah, that's about 60 years to live like that.
	Yeah, this was a national championship tournament.
	So he was a state championship, I think from Illinois, and I was a state champion from Massachusetts.
	He was a black belt.
	It wasn't like he was an unskilled guy.
	So the fact that I was able to do that to him, and I was able to do that to a bunch of other guys, I knew that someone out there could do that to me.
	I knew that I wasn't the best in the world, and I knew that even though I was a real national-level competitor, I wasn't world-class.
	I wasn't the best, especially at 19.
	And so that doubt...
	That doubt stuck with me for the next couple of years.
	And it was probably the first seed of my new future was me hurting that guy and thinking about what that was going to be like if that happened to me.
	Yeah, well, that's a hell of a right turn you took there to go into comedy.
	So, okay, so how...
	Now, you became successful as a comedian.
	So...
	You started playing in little clubs like stand-up comedians did.
	How did you get your breaks?
	How did your career develop?
	It took a few years for me to get competent.
	It took two or three years for me to get competent.
	Three years in, I got extremely fortunate again where I met my manager, my manager who's my manager to this day.
	He basically picked me up when I was an open mic comedian.
	I mean, I was getting a few paid gigs here and there, but I was really an amateur.
	And he found me.
	He was looking for new talent.
	He came up from New York.
	He was a really well-respected and well-recognized manager, still is.
	Of course, his name is Jeff Sussman.
	And we've been together for, shit now, it must be 28 years.
	Yeah, we've been together since I was an amateur.
	That's a successful collaboration to span that amount of time.
	Not many changes.
	Yeah, we've been together forever.
	We've been together forever.
	We don't even have a contract anymore.
	We haven't had a contract I think for like 10 years.
	So during all this time, this is just like a bit of a side question here, but do you ever have any time at all to pursue relationships with women?
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, you do comedy.
	You're in clubs at night.
	You have most of your day to do whatever you want.
	When I was just a stand-up comedian, I had a lot of free time.
	You know, I mean, you're writing jokes, but you can only do that a couple hours a day or you get bored and then it's not effective.
	And then you're just kind of living your life and hanging out.
	And sometimes the best way to develop your comedy is to have good social interactions.
	It's actually kind of important when you're an aspiring comedian to be in a lot of social situations.
	Because you're around people, you hear people say things, and then you think what they say is silly, or what they say is, you know, you disagree or you agree.
	You see perspectives and points of view, and you kind of, you develop, you know, an understanding of how human beings behave.
	It's kind of very important.
	So, Yeah, I was around a lot of different girls and a lot of guys and just being out.
	And you're always at comedy clubs and nightclubs, but I didn't go out other than that.
	If I wasn't at a comedy club at night, I probably wasn't out.
	It was always the same thing with...
	My obsession with fighting.
	And fighting came way easier for me than stand-up did.
	Stand-up was way harder for me.
	It was way harder.
	It was way harder to achieve confidence.
	What was harder about it?
	Well, you said it took you two or three years to get competent.
	So that was a lot of falling flat on your face, I presume.
	Yeah.
	And even then, even like three years in, I still could bomb at any moment.
	I mean, I could have a bad set.
	I didn't know how to do it.
	But also, I was socially awkward.
	I think it took me a while to not be so socially awkward.
	That was an issue.
	A lot of it was from my upbringing, but a lot of it was also, I kind of cultivated that when I was fighting.
	I didn't want people to like me.
	I didn't care.
	I didn't need them to like me.
	All I needed them to do...
	I kind of wanted them to be scared of me.
	So when I was fighting, I wasn't trying to make friends out there at all.
	I was just trying to fuck people up.
	When you were fighting, did you have any relationships with women?
	Not good ones.
	No.
	I wouldn't allow them to have much of my time.
	I didn't I think to have a successful relationship, you have to spend a lot of time together.
	You have to communicate.
	The person has to almost be first place in your life.
	That was never happening.
	That would come up very often.
	I was a girl that I was dating in high school.
	I used to teach at the school, so I had keys to the school.
	One time, I took her up there because I needed to get a workout in.
	She wanted to have sex.
	At the gym.
	And I was like, there's no way.
	I wouldn't do it.
	I was like, this place is sacred.
	Like, there's no chance.
	She was trying to fool around.
	And I was adamant.
	I was like, this is never happening.
	Like, this might as well be a church to me.
	I was like, it's not happening.
	And you know, I was so horny when I was 17 years old.
	To me, at 17 or 18, to say no to sex was crazy.
	Right, right.
	That's a crazy story.
	I think we're going to clip that.
	Put it in a little clip that says, Joe Rogan tells a story that no sane man would believe.
	Well, you know, that was the first refuge that I had from my life of despair.
	So for me, I wasn't going to screw that up.
	Right, right, right.
	And I felt like disrespecting the academy like that.
	Yeah, well, you'd be treated like an adult.
	That's something when you're a teenager, you know, like to actually be treated that way.
	It's a good thing not to mess with if you're fortunate enough to have it.
	Well, I wouldn't even walk onto the training floor by myself with no one around without bowing.
	Uh-huh.
	I mean, there was no one there, but I would never leave the common area and step onto the training floor without bowing first.
	Right.
	Never.
	Okay, so when you were in comedy now, you said you were all in as a fighter, and you figure you went all in as a comedian, too.
	And did you do that right from the beginning?
	Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
	Yeah, right away, as soon as I realized that I could actually do this.
	And as soon as I realized, I decided, I mean, my first set that I ever did, I had a bunch of my friends come down and watch me and I wasn't good.
	The first time I ever got on stage, but I got a couple of little chuckles and laughs.
	And then I realized this might be possible.
	I might be able to do this.
	And then I became obsessed with figuring out how to do it.
	Because it was, I saw it as a path.
	Like, okay, this is a thing.
	Like, this is a thing you could do that you actually love.
	Like, I was a huge fan of the art form.
	I loved watching it.
	My parents took me to the movies when I was like 14 or 15.
	We saw Live on the Sunset Strip.
	It was a Richard Pryor movie in the theater where he did stand-up.
	And I had never seen that before.
	And I remember thinking, how crazy is it that this guy can just talk?
	And it's so funny.
	I was falling out of my chair laughing and I was looking around.
	I remember looking around while the movie was playing at all these people in their chairs just rocking back and forth and laughing so hard.
	That's really something to say.
	Especially when you're a young teenager.
	Like 16?
	I know you shouldn't talk about Bill Cosby, but I saw him live.
	I saw him live too when I was a security guard.
	Oh yeah?
	Yeah, I was a security guard at Great Woods.
	I saw Kinnison there when I was a security guard.
	I saw Rodney Dangerfield there.
	Yeah, I saw quite a few people there.
	Yeah, well it was something to see him sit on his stool with his cigar and get the whole audience like literally hysterical.
	I mean the guy in front of me was rocking back and forth so hard he could hardly breathe.
	His wife kept elbowing him to get him to kind of...
	Turned back into something vaguely resembling a human being.
	It's really amazing to see someone with that much command of the audience and so consistently, unbelievably funny.
	He's the most tragic story in all of show business.
	Man, it's a catastrophe.
	Next to Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson.
	I mean, those are the three most tragic stories in show business, in my mind.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, he's a monster.
	It's crazy.
	This brilliant comedian is a monster.
	What the hell?
	You know, the thing that's so strange about Cosby, you'd think, well, like...
	Was this really necessary?
	Like, man, the guy was famous in 15 different directions and really well respected.
	You wouldn't have think he would have had to date rape his women.
	You know, it's just...
	Well, yeah, I mean, he could have just had prostitutes.
	I mean, if he really just needed sex.
	I don't think that's what it was.
	I think there was a sick perversion...
	And I think he liked to do that to people.
	He liked to trick them.
	I mean, I'm just guessing, right?
	Well, it has to be something like that because it's so counterproductive and so...
	Psychotic.
	It's psychotic.
	I mean, I don't understand it.
	You know, I've tried to...
	I've tried to sort of imagine what it must have been like to be around in the 50s and the 60s.
	I think people did that to each other way more often than we'd like to admit.
	And I think that it was more casual than we would think of today, where people would slip someone a mickey.
	He even had a bit that he did Way back in the day about giving someone Spanish fly, that you'd give someone something that would make them horny.
	I think he was probably a guy that had an incredibly inflated opinion of himself, didn't want anybody to ever reject him, experienced that a few times.
	Again, this is pure speculation.
	And just decided that he was better than people, that he could just drug them.
	It's so strange though, because his comedy was basically so, like it was generally family oriented.
	It was, you know, and he put himself forward as a role model and he was credible.
	Like he was credible as an actor, as a role model, and he seemed credible as a spokesperson.
	It kind of makes me think, you know, there's this...
	idea that the psychoanalysts have this guy named Eric Neumann who is a student of Carl Jung's and one of the things that Neumann said it wrote a book called depth psychology and the new ethic right after World War two and it's a it's a great book a little thin book, but it's a great book one of the things he says in that book is don't be better than you are and What he meant was he didn't mean don't improve like that would be foolish.
	He meant Beware of adopting a persona that makes you a far better person than you actually are, because all of that part of you that you're not admitting to, that's going to go off and have its own life.
	Because you're not integrating it, you know?
	You're suppressing it in some way, and you're not...
	And and so it's a living thing, you know that well like the aggression you had when you were a fighter That's a big deep part of you, you know You can't just push something like that aside and pretend that it's not there and think that it's not gonna go off and have some fun when you're not paying attention Yeah,
	I mean like something like that must have got him is that he was he was split between this really good guy that he was trying to be which was like too good and And this more monstrous side of his personality that he obviously never integrated or perhaps never even admitted to.
	It's really a hell of a story, man.
	And it really is a catastrophe, I think.
	It was an absolute bloody catastrophe for his victims, obviously.
	But just as a general cultural phenomenon is so awful.
	Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
	They say you should separate the man from the art.
	But in his case, it's almost impossible to do because his art was his perception of life.
	So when you're watching him, it's not like a painter or even someone who makes a movie.
	It's like when you're watching him, you're watching him now and all you can think of as he's talking about these different things and about, I told my children.
	He's doing this lovable dad voice.
	All you can think of is that guy rapes people.
	He drugs them and rapes them.
	Yeah, yeah, right.
	I can't enjoy it anymore.
	And he's, unquestionably, as far as his skill, he was one of the greatest of all time.
	Yeah, yeah.
	All right, so you got a manager, and you got a good one.
	And what happened?
	Yeah.
	I moved to New York, and then once I moved to New York, I started doing a ton of stand-up comedy.
	I was traveling all over the place, and I got better and better, and I kept working on it, working on it, and just doing a lot of gigs, and just going all over the place.
	And then a few years later...
	How old were you by the time you were paying your bills?
	Because that was your first marker for success.
	Probably like 26.
	25, 26 was when it all started coming together.
	Oh yeah, so that's not too bad.
	Yeah, I mean I wasn't making a lot of money.
	I was making enough money to eat and pay my rent.
	And then somewhere around then, I did a thing called the MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour.
	It was a television show they had on MTV. And each comedian, I mean, I don't know how much time I did on the show.
	I think you do like seven to ten minutes or something like that.
	It wasn't a lot of time.
	And I had a set and I did it on television.
	It went really well.
	And then next thing you know, I got all these offers to do television shows.
	I got development deal offers.
	And then before you know it, I'm living in California.
	It was like that.
	I mean, within a year, I was living in California and I was on a sitcom.
	And then that sitcom got canceled.
	And I thought I was going to move back to New York.
	It was called Hardball.
	It was a baseball show on Fox.
	It was a sitcom about a baseball team.
	That show got canceled.
	And then I got a development deal with NBC. I was going to move back to New York, but I had signed a lease for my apartment.
	I hated LA. I hated actors.
	I didn't like it.
	It was so disingenuous.
	The worlds that I had come from were the worlds of stand-up comedy, which is about as real as you can get.
	Either you're funny or you're not.
	And then the world of fighting, which was even more real than that.
	And then all of a sudden I was around all these people.
	That were just full of shit and weird.
	They were put on these personas and they wanted the casting agents to like them and the producers to like them.
	And everything was fake.
	And everybody knew it was fake, but they all accepted it.
	And they talked fake.
	And it was very, very strange.
	Very hard for me to deal with.
	I really didn't like actors.
	I didn't like Bean.
	And the only place that I sought refuge...
	It's a funny thing that there'd be an automatic assumption that because you were a good stand-up comedian that somehow you'd be an actor.
	Yeah.
	It seemed to be the same thing.
	No, they're not.
	But the thing is that a lot of comedians had gone on to be super successful in the world of sitcoms.
	Like Roseanne Barr, Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen, those type of people.
	They had these huge careers.
	Brett Butler.
	So because of that, all that was happening at the same time.
	This was like in 94-ish when I got on TV for the first time.
	And that was what they were pushing.
	And then agents and managers would push that too because obviously you can make a tremendous amount of money.
	So that show got canceled, but I had a lease for this apartment.
	So I was kind of stuck in LA. So I was like, all right, let me just stay out here and see what happens for a year.
	That was my thought.
	And then I got a development deal with NBC. They wanted to do a sitcom with me.
	And then I wound up auditioning for a show that they had already had called News Radio.
	And that was with Dave Foley and Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney and Candy Alexander and Steven Root and Andy Dick and Vicki Lewis.
	And we did that show for five years.
	And then, you know, by that time, I had done a lot of stand-up at the Comedy Store.
	When that show was canceled, Fear Factor came along and I was touring as a comedian.
	Now that's a whole switch there.
	Okay, so now you go from sitcoms to Fear Factor.
	So how the hell did that happen?
	Well, it happened to...
	NBC came up to me with the idea, because I was on NBC previously, and they liked me.
	And then part of the thing was that I didn't want to work with actors anymore.
	I was happy that Fear Factor was no actors.
	And I was like, oh, good.
	This is easier to do.
	It's just me talking to people.
	Since I had a background in coaching, because I had coached a lot of people at tournaments, in competition, and I taught a lot at Boston University, I taught at my own school, you know, with Taekwondo, I was used to teaching people and I was used to encouraging people and getting people motivated.
	And I knew how to get fired up for competition.
	So you were actually one of the rare people in the world who was actually trained To be the right host for Fear Factor.
	Yeah, in a lot of ways.
	Luckily, fortuitously, because when someone was nervous and they're about to do something, I could grab them and go, look at me, you could do this.
	This is going to define you.
	If you back off right now and you get scared and you give in to your fears and your anxieties, this is going to define you.
	Or if you just press forward and realize you can do this and succeed, it will define you in a positive way and you'll build momentum in that direction.
	You can do this.
	And I was really good at giving people pep talks.
	I was really good at firing people up.
	And it was part of the gig that it was completely unexpected.
	Because I thought the gig was just going to be, these people do these crazy things, and I make fun of it, which is part of my job, and we all cheer, and it would all play itself out because it was a reality show.
	It was sort of a game show slash reality show.
	It was like a hybrid.
	But somewhere along the line, especially when they became really nervous, it was very intense.
	And there was moments where I really...
	I wanted these people to win.
	I wanted these people to do their best.
	I wanted these people to succeed.
	And to be able to encourage someone.
	That's the basis of psychotherapy.
	It's really something to get people to face their fears.
	You were doing it in a very In an idiosyncratic way, a very unique way, but imagine it was psychologically compelling very often.
	Got any particular stories from that time?
	You got a good story from Fear Factor?
	There was one time where there was this couple, not couple, a family.
	It was a father and a son competing against a mother and the daughter.
	And the father and the son were kind of jerks, which was part of the competition.
	There was a lot of trash talking, but they were really cocky.
	And they thought that they were going to win, you know?
	And it was, you know, they had The parent and child teams had gotten down to two.
	And it was the man and his son versus the woman and her daughter.
	And everybody thought these jerks were going to win and we were kind of bummed out about it.
	But the woman and her child...
	They just rose to the occasion.
	I remember talking to them and firing them up, but I still didn't know if they could do it.
	What was the challenge?
	It was some crazy thing that they had to climb and do this thing.
	I don't really remember all of it.
	They had to gather flags.
	It was all for time.
	But the son, the jerky son, the jerky dad, they kept screwing up.
	And they fucked up because, you know, they'd kind of taken it for granted that they were going to win.
	And when the pressure hit them and they knew it was all on the line, a lot of times jerks are just insecure.
	And when they're under pressure, when they're really faced with real pressure, like this is the real moment.
	Who are you really?
	Fuck all that talk.
	Who are you really?
	They fall apart.
	And...
	The mother and the daughter won.
	And you're talking about a hardened crew of people that had watched people eat animal dicks and jump out of helicopters for season after season, episode after episode.
	You know, we did a hundred and something shows.
	A hundred and...
	I don't even remember how many shows.
	Probably 140 episodes of that show.
	Everybody cried.
	Hmm.
	The camera people.
	Like, I'll cry now if I'm thinking about it.
	When the mother and the daughter won.
	I mean, there's a justice component to it, right?
	There's a comeuppance.
	It was a comeuppance.
	It was an underdog.
	It was just seeing their spirit.
	You know, when they were figuring out a way to win, watching them win, to this day, I'll tell you, one of the things that makes me really happy about this interview, Joe, so far, is that I have a tendency to tear up in interviews, as you may have noticed, but this time it was you, so I'm quite pleased about that.
	It's a very touching story, though, man.
	You do, eh?
	Yeah, yeah, but particularly like that, I don't tear up for sad things.
	I tear up for happy things.
	Yeah, that's an interesting thing to think about too, because it's not exactly happy, right?
	You know, when these people come up to me and they tell me their stories, That often makes me tear up because it's like this blast of dead, bloody seriousness with a happy ending.
	So it's a comedy because it's a happy ending, but it's rough and affecting and that makes me tear up.
	And I think my proclivity, I've always kind of had that ever since I was a kid, but it seems to have come back.
	Me too.
	Well, you too, eh?
	Yeah, yeah, always.
	But it's always been happy things.
	It's never been sad things.
	It's very hard to get me to cry with sad things.
	Triumph.
	Yeah, triumph.
	Success.
	People pulling through.
	Post-fight interviews, when I work for the UFC, when someone has a particularly incredible performance, I have to fight off tearing up.
	I feel so happy for them.
	Isn't it strange that it's that same response to sorrow?
	It's the same response to sorrow and triumph.
	Yeah, it is.
	You know, like, what the hell's up with that?
	I don't understand that at all.
	I mean, I guess it's kind of a sign of empathy.
	Yes, it is definitely a sign of empathy.
	But what's also odd is that with sad things, I can...
	I can objectively analyze them, and I cannot get sad.
	I can understand that this is just life, and it is what it is.
	I mean, I won't feel good, but I won't start weeping.
	I don't weep for sad things the way I weep for happy things.
	So that's interesting.
	So in some sense, you've trained yourself to detach yourself from that kind of sorrow, but not to detach yourself from triumph.
	I can rationalize and understand sorrow.
	I can internalize it.
	I get it.
	I know what it is.
	And, you know, I just get so happy for people sometimes when things go well.
	Yeah, one of my guilty pleasures is I really like America's Got Talent and the BBC equivalent.
	What the hell is the BBC equivalent?
	Is it the X Factor?
	Something like that.
	Yeah.
	And it does the same thing to me.
	I'd see somebody schlub themselves out there on the stage looking pretty damn dreadful in about four different dimensions and then knock it out of the park.
	It's really something to...
	Yeah, it's something amazing.
	Well, because I think as a human being, you realize how hard it is to overcome competition or these difficult moments or these moments when you're tested and you know there's fears and insecurities that these people have to battle as well as the actual physical task in front of them.
	There's so much going on and there's so much anticipation and nerves and anxiety involved in that, that to see someone triumph I mean, I am a student of human will.
	I love stories of discipline and success.
	I don't like bad stories.
	I don't even like going to movies where they're sad.
	When people tell me about sad movies, I'm like, stop.
	I'm not going to that movie.
	I don't like it.
	I don't want to see it.
	I'm not interested.
	I know what sadness is.
	I've been sad.
	I get it.
	I'm not interested in getting that in a form of entertainment.
	I like success.
	I like seeing people triumph.
	I like seeing the human spirit manifest itself in spectacular ways.
	Yeah, that's why I like my lectures.
	That's why it's so fun to do them, you know, because I'm out there trying to tell people that they have the opportunity to do that and to point out to them too that if they watch themselves, they notice they love that.
	Because, you know, that's one of the things.
	You go to a basketball game or a hockey game or something like that, and somebody makes a spectacular play, and it's a little celebration of the human spirit.
	Ability to do something impossible in the moment, and everybody's up on their feet, like, in one second.
	Go, man, go!
	And that's...
	The more of that, the better as far as I'm concerned.
	There's so much concentration on the destruction we wreak on the planet and our original sin and our weakness and the terrible things we do to each other.
	It's really nice to see those situations where People are celebrating the triumph of an individual in a group like that and really says something wonderful about human beings deep in their core for all of our problems.
	It's really something to be part of that.
	Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I think we concentrate way too often and way too much on the negative aspects of people.
	It's almost like sports is about the only place that doesn't happen, you know?
	It's kind of strange because you do concentrate on the positive in sports.
	You celebrate the winners, you know?
	The cameramen don't go over and interview the losers.
	I don't know why it is that in sports it's okay to celebrate the triumphant and the victorious, but it is okay and no one questions it.
	Well, that's not true because now they have non-competitive games for kids and that's part of the politically correct curriculum, but most of the time, most sane people will celebrate along with a victorious athlete and that's really something.
	Alright, so fear factor.
	How many years did that last?
	Six years.
	Were they good years?
	It was good financially.
	Yeah, well that's something.
	I made a ton of money and it alleviated financial pressure.
	But I enjoyed doing it somewhat, but it was not like the way I enjoy the other things that I do.
	It's not like I enjoy stand-up comedy.
	It's not like I enjoy working for the UFC. It's not like I enjoy doing podcasts.
	All those things that I just talked about, those three things, those things are labors of love.
	They're passions.
	They're things that I'm really...
	I'm genuinely fascinated by and interested in.
	Like this conversation, I would have this conversation with you if it was just you and me, and there was no cameras.
	I would love to have this conversation.
	I love having conversations with interesting people.
	I love stand-up comedy.
	I love all those things.
	I didn't love being there for Fear Factor, but it was a great job, and I knew it was a great job, and I knew I was really lucky to have it.
	So it was great in that respect, but when it was over, I'd kind of decided I was done with television.
	When it was over, I was like, okay, I think I'm done with this.
	No more of this.
	From here on out, I'm just going to concentrate on my own stuff.
	And so from then on out, I just really focused on stand-up comedy.
	And that's when my comedy career really took off, was post Fear Factor.
	I mean, I had a comedy career during Fear Factor, but it really took off post Fear Factor because I really gave it all of my attention.
	And so what happened after Fear Factor that boosted you on the comedy circuit?
	Well, I did a special for Comedy Central and Spike TV called Talking Monkeys in Space in 2009.
	That was probably my best work up until then.
	From then, I've been on a pretty steady pace of doing specials every two years or so ever since then.
	Right, right, right.
	And that's being successful non-stop.
	Are you getting better?
	Yeah, I think I am.
	I think I'm getting better.
	I think it's one of those things, as long as you keep concentrating on it, and as long as you keep focusing on it, you're getting better.
	I think my hour that I'm doing now is as good as anything I've ever done, and it's not even done yet.
	It's only, you know, six months into this hour, but I think it's some of my best work ever, and I'm really excited to see where it comes.
	Well, I mean, there's no rush because it's only six months since my last one.
	I probably will work on this for another year before I even think about recording it.
	Oh yeah, so if it's good now, it should be really good by then.
	Yeah, it's like a samurai sword.
	You're folding the metal and hammering the blade, folding the metal and hammering the blade, and you got to know when it's ready.
	And I'll start to get a sense of where it's ready in about a year.
	In about one year, then I'll start going, all right, this seems pretty solid.
	Maybe it's time to rock and roll.
	And then I'll contact Netflix.
	And I'll say, hey, let's do it.
	Let's set it up in whatever city I decide.
	I'll pick a city.
	I'll just run it over in my head.
	I'll pick a name for it.
	Well, maybe I'll try to stay posted on what you're doing and come down and see it.
	That'd be fun.
	I missed you the last time you were here in Toronto, but I'd like to come and see one of your shows live.
	I think that'd be a blast.
	So the next was the UFC, eh?
	Yeah.
	That was TV too.
	The UFC happened while I was on news radio actually.
	While I was on news radio, I started working for the UFC way back in 1997.
	But the UFC was more of a sideshow back then.
	It was banned from cable.
	You could only get it on satellite TV. Right, right.
	And it was a freak show.
	People didn't know about it.
	I mean, I loved it because as a lifelong martial artist, to me, it was fascinating to watch all these different styles compete against each other.
	But it didn't pay much money.
	And even though it was enjoyable for me, it got in the way of other aspects of my life.
	And so I quit around 1998.
	And then...
	Somewhere along the line, in around 2001, the UFC was purchased by this new company.
	And when they purchased...
	My earphones are dying.
	I'm going to have to take these off and unplug this here.
	Can you hear me still?
	Is that good?
	Yeah.
	It's good?
	Okay.
	Once it started...
	Once the new company took over, they were trying to get people to go to their events, and they asked me to go to the event.
	It was when I was doing Fear Factor.
	And so I went and watched it live, and when I was watching it live, I was talking to Dana White, who's the president of the UFC, and just talking to him about the sport and all these different things I think about.
	Are you interested in this guy?
	I was asking about various obscure fighters who were competing in Japan.
	Maybe he didn't know about it.
	You should try to get these guys.
	And then somewhere along the line, he said, Hey, you want to do commentary?
	And I was like, I don't want to work, man.
	I'm just here.
	I just want to enjoy this.
	So he and I became friends and he talked me into doing it.
	And I first did it for free.
	I did like 12 events or so for free, just for fun.
	I was like, just get tickets for my friends and I'll go and I'll do commentary for you.
	But I didn't take it that seriously.
	I didn't ever think it was going to be, you know, a career.
	Right, right.
	Well-known commentator in mixed martial arts.
	I just thought I was doing it as a favor for them and for fun for me.
	And, you know, lo and behold, here we are, 18 years later.
	I'm still doing it.
	I presume they're paying you now.
	What's that?
	I presume they're paying you now.
	Oh, yeah, they pay me a lot.
	That's good.
	That's good.
	That's better bargaining position, I would say.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, they're very generous.
	Okay, so that's kind of an understandable transition in some sense because, you know, you got your social skills highly developed and you got your ability to be witty on demand highly developed and to pay attention to an audience and you had the martial arts background and so UFC commentator, that makes sense.
	It's that, alright, so now where does the podcast come in?
	How the hell does that happen next?
	I guess it's next, isn't it?
	Yeah, the podcast was 2009, I guess, when it first started.
	And the podcast was basically, it was just for fun.
	It was like something to do with my friends, me and my friend Brian.
	We just decided to set up a laptop and people would ask questions and we would just start Just talking about things.
	And then it became a weekly thing.
	And then we started uploading it to iTunes.
	And then, you know, I started getting guests.
	I mean, it took years before it was profitable.
	I mean, it was just for fun.
	Forever.
	Like a lot of things that I've done.
	It was originally just for fun.
	Well, that's pretty early podcast, too, though, eh?
	2009.
	Very early, yeah.
	I mean, podcasts were...
	I mean for lots of people, they're still not a thing, although that's really changed in the last three or four years.
	I mean, you know, they're definitely a mainstream media phenomenon now.
	But 2009, I mean, that was fringe stuff fundamentally.
	Yes, yeah, it was very fringe.
	There was just a few of them.
	So there wouldn't be an advertising market at that point, I wouldn't have thought.
	Not much of one.
	No, there was no ads.
	We didn't have ads for years.
	And then slowly, ads started trickling in.
	The first ad was the Fleshlight, which is a masturbation device.
	It was a funny story about Sam Harris.
	Sam Harris, who was a guest really early on, when the Fleshlight was the only sponsor, requested that we not have the Fleshlight as a sponsor on the episode that he was on.
	And so I was like, okay.
	So I took that week off.
	I just decided no sponsor that week.
	That's funny.
	For very many reasons.
	It's funny that that was your first...
	Well, you know, pornography leads the way, right?
	Yeah, well...
	Get on the internet.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It is kind of funny.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, what's even also funnier is that the guy who was...
	I guess he was the CEO of The Fleshlight or marketing something or another of The Fleshlight.
	He went on to form Onnit with me.
	So Onnit, which is my fitness and supplement company, he and I are partners in this and it came out of our The thing with the Fleshlight, our business agreement, because it was really profitable for the Fleshlight.
	And he realized early on, like, wow, having a podcast sponsor something can be incredibly lucrative if the podcast is well-respected and well-received.
	This is sort of an untapped advertising market.
	Hey, let's start a business and just use the podcast as a method of launching this business.
	Let's see how it goes.
	Right.
	And that became very successful, too.
	But the podcast sort of took on a life of its own.
	It went from being just me hanging out with comedians, talking to me, interviewing people like you, having conversations, I should say, more than interviewing people like you and, you know, scientists and archaeologists and doctors and, I mean, everyone.
	Yeah, well, right.
	You started talking to everyone.
	Yeah, everyone.
	Really everyone.
	And it was mostly comedians to begin with?
	Yes.
	It was almost all comedians in the beginning.
	And the everyone part is interesting because that's something that people resist or resent more than anything now.
	The thing about this that you see now, you see this expression, giving someone a platform.
	Why would you give someone a platform with those ideas?
	And it really comes down to this concept of Silencing opinions that you don't agree with.
	And my thought on it has always been, I want to talk to all kinds of different people.
	And even if I don't agree with them, I want to find out why they think the way they think.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, there's also an element of useful disagreeableness there.
	It's like, I'm going to talk to whoever the hell I want to.
	Yeah.
	I don't care what you think about it.
	I interviewed Milo, speaking of people that you're not supposed to be talking to.
	Recently?
	Yeah, like a week ago.
	Yeah.
	Did you take a lot of heat from that?
	It hasn't been broadcast yet.
	I don't think I'm going to take a lot of heat for it, you know, because we didn't have a political discussion.
	We had a psychological discussion.
	Well, I was really curious about how he got taken down, you know, when he was talking about his sexual abuse when he was a kid, and defending it in some sense.
	Like, I watched that interview, and I knew he was in trouble as soon as he completed it.
	I figured, no, you said things that you're not allowed to say.
	And I think a part of it was that See, I was split in two parts watching it, partly because I was also watching it as a clinician.
	I thought That it was admirable of Milo to refuse to take the victim stance because he had been such an anti-victim, what would you call it, agitator or advocate, right?
	And so he said, well, I was a full participant in this.
	But then the clinical side of me thought, no, man, you haven't updated your memory since you were 14.
	Like, you're still thinking of adult Milo as 14-year-old Milo, and you're not thinking about 14-year-old Milo as a kid.
	And so that was sad for me to see that, because often when people are traumatized, in some sense, around the area of trauma, they don't mature.
	It's like they get stuck.
	Well, look, imagine that you're on a path and you come towards an obstacle that's impenetrable.
	But you really need to get through it, to fully develop.
	Like, it's part of what you need to grow up, but you can't.
	So you walk around it, you know, but you leave the part of yourself that could have matured behind there.
	And because it didn't deal with the challenge, like this is sort of what you were experiencing maybe on Fear Factor, maybe why you're such a...
	What you're so emotionally affected by triumph.
	It's like you get defeated by something like that.
	You can't overcome it.
	There's part of you that gets stuck there in a sense and something Freud observed like a hundred and My damn near must be 120 years ago that people would fixate at a certain age because something had happened to them Or at least part of their personality would I could see that happening with Milo And I thought that he was in a really tough spot because he'd been molested He didn't want to play the victim He yet.
	He actually was a victim which was the perverse damn thing and that you know the way he spoke about it could easily have been twisted, Twisted, misinterpreted, partly because of his own doing, into a quasi-justification for pedophilia.
	And then he also said, well, you know, this was relatively common practice in the gay community, and I figured he'd be cut to ribbons for bringing that up.
	But he said, in the interview, it was really weird, you know?
	He said that it wasn't the left-wingers that took him out.
	It was the Conservatives.
	Really?
	Because he was slated to speak at CPAC. And the straight Republican types, not the Trump types, you know, but the more classically conservative Republicans, didn't think that Milo Yiannopoulos was the right kind of guy to have speaking at CPAC. And so his sense is that it was actually the moderate right that wiped him out.
	And so that was interesting, and I didn't expect that.
	And we also talked a fair bit about...
	I can't tell you all of it because then nobody has to watch the damn podcast or listen to it.
	But, you know, he's also shifted his viewpoint quite substantially on what happened to him when he was 14.
	And he describes the process he went through to kind of rethink that, not least because of all the controversy it caused.
	So, you know, I think, well, that was our conversation.
	It lasted a couple hours.
	It was...
	You know, I asked him how he was doing and what he was planning on doing and and that and so that was kind of interesting to find out too, but We never got into anything that was remotely political and so I was happy to have had the conversation You know the thing about people like Milo is I don't give a damn what you say about Mel's Jones is the same sort of person I think the same thing about Tommy Robinson for that matter.
	It's like These people are interesting They're strange people and they have an effect on the world.
	What are you supposed to do?
	Are you not supposed to be curious about that?
	It's the deplatforming thing.
	They have this idea that you should not have a differing opinion.
	If you have a differing opinion, it should never get a platform.
	Yeah, well, it's also more perverse than that, even.
	It's the idea that if you give someone like that, quote, a platform, so now you're willing to talk to them, that you must agree with them, merely because you're conversing with them.
	And it's like, well, that guilt by association assumption is...
	It's a terrible assumption.
	What does it mean?
	You're only going to talk to people who hold exactly the same ethical views that you hold on anything, on everything.
	Yeah, it's nonsense.
	It's like that data in society thing that came out connecting everybody as alt-right gateways because they've talked to people that are on the right.
	You know, I tweeted that lady when she wrote that.
	I said that Barbara Walters interviewed Castro.
	Does that make her a communist?
	And basically how my take on all this stuff is.
	There's nothing wrong with talking to people.
	And I feel like Milo...
	Well, Milo, you know, almost has been his own worst enemy because he's such a provocateur.
	And now they've turned a lot of that stuff that he was saying as a provocateur and they've turned it against him.
	But I think that...
	You and him have this one thing in common in that you get categorized by lazy people who are not good at nuance.
	And they put you in this box that other people have created.
	And this box is, oh, this is an alt-right this.
	This is a conservative that.
	This guy's a Nazi.
	This guy's a white supremacist.
	This guy's a that.
	Whatever it is, they put you in that box.
	And then, socially, You have to, in order to fit into the ideology, in order to fit into this groupthink, you have to sort of Accept these definitions.
	That this person's bad.
	You know, that that person, Gavin McGinnis is a Nazi.
	Milo Yiannopoulos is a Nazi.
	That these people are this.
	These are the problem.
	Without any real understanding of who those people really are.
	Without any real grasp.
	Yeah, well that happened to Sargon of the CAD, right?
	Yeah.
	Hey, by the way, we're launching our alternative social media platform soon.
	We've got it going, yeah, it's going to be...
	Well, we tried out the first of the technology.
	I just debated Slavoj Žižek on Friday, last Friday, and he was hypothetically the world's foremost Marxist philosopher, although it turned out that he wasn't really a Marxist at all.
	He called himself a Hegelian, which is actually way different than being a Marxist, and so it wasn't really much of a debate.
	It was more me attacking the Communist Manifesto for half an hour, which I found rather...
	It's a rather straightforward thing to do, and then us having a rather peculiar and productive discussion for about an hour and a half.
	But anyways, ThinkSpot tested their technology, so livestream technology, and we've got some cool features that no other platform has.
	So it'll be a subscription service, and so that's partly what makes it a replacement for Patreon to some degree, you know, because we want to be able to monetize creators.
	But we've got new different terms of service and so the essential issue with the terms of service will be that once you're on our platform We won't take you down unless we're ordered to by a US court of law That's basically the idea so we're trying to make an anti-censorship platform and then we've got there's other features too that are quite cool and unique so for example You might be interested in this with regards to your podcast.
	So if you listen to your podcast on our platform, people will be able to pick a time in the podcast, like maybe a 30-second clip, and just mark it out.
	And then they'll be able to either make a written comment about it or an auditory comment and then send that to a friend or post it.
	So that they're running, continual running conversations in audio and written form on podcast content constantly.
	We want to do the same thing for YouTube videos so that people can append their own video to any part of a video and then distribute that to their network or also post it so that people can watch, you know, so that We're hoping we can get a real dialogue.
	We can really add dialogue to the podcast and YouTube world.
	We're also going to do the same thing with books.
	So if you buy an e-book on the platform, you'll be able to annotate publicly.
	And so what that should mean is that every book that's Sold on our platform that many people purchase will become the center of multiple conversations and we can do that with books that are in the public domain So, for example, one of the books we're going to post right away is Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche.
	And I'm going to start annotating it.
	You know, and so what that should mean...
	You know, if you look at the Bible, it's a good example.
	People have been annotating it for like 5,000 years, right?
	Every verse has God books written on it.
	So it's just this incredibly expanded document that's pulled in thousands and thousands of people to this collective conversation.
	And this platform should be able to...
	Allow people to do that with with great works of art and well and then with also with current current affairs and events and Such as well YouTube videos and podcasts and so it's nice looking to it It's got a fairly professional feel.
	We're hoping that we'll build a poll People who are interested in intelligent conversation Specifically into this platform, you know and maybe start to pull them away from YouTube and some of the less specialized Channels hoping it's a that that plus you know our anti-censorship stance and the be invitation only to begin with so that we can Well, so that we can beta test it, make sure the damn thing works, and that we're not fooling ourselves about its appeal.
	So that's come a long ways, and hopefully, I think we've got four, five, six people who are interested, who are lined up.
	Ruben is going to use it.
	I'm going to use it.
	James Altucher, Jocko Willink, Michael Shermer.
	I think those are...
	Oh, and...
	Carl Benjamin, Sargon of the CAD. They'll be our first beta testers, fundamentally.
	That sounds awesome.
	Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, man.
	If the bloody thing works, I'd like to have a conversation with you about it at some point.
	Oh, for sure.
	I'd love to try it.
	Okay, okay, okay.
	Well, I'll let the developer know.
	But I think the annotation feature could be really cool.
	And we're also setting it up so that if you do comment, All the comments will be up and down voted.
	And if your ratio of down votes to up votes falls below 50-50, then your comments will be hidden.
	People will still be able to see them if they click, but you'll disappear, you know, from the mainstream.
	We don't know if 50-50 is right.
	We're gonna have to play with that because we're also trying to control stupid trolling.
	And I think we're going to put a minimum length requirement on for written comments so that you can't just say four words like, this guy's a fucking idiot.
	You know, like, no.
	You don't need that.
	So that, you know, minimum comment length is 50 words.
	You're going to have to put a little thought into it.
	Even if you're being a troll, hopefully you'll be a quasi-witty troll.
	Yeah, that's the ultimate battle, right?
	It's trying to combat the trolls in some sort of a way or mitigate their impact.
	Yeah, well, the ultimate battle is to do that without being censorious, right?
	Because you want people to be able to express their opinion, but there's a difference between, it's subtle, but there's a difference between productive dialogue and provocation without wit for the purpose of causing trouble.
	There's so many people out there that are just bored and that's what they use the internet for.
	They're at work, they're in a cubicle all day and they get their jollies out of just fucking with people online.
	And my producer, Jamie, he has a friend who does that.
	I mean, this is what this friend does.
	He has a bunch of accounts and he just trolls people.
	He tries to troll celebrities and he tries to get them to respond to him.
	He says mean things to them and That's how he entertains himself while he's at work.
	See, that's that same dark side that was manifested to a much greater degree in Bill Cosby.
	Right.
	Well, the guy is also depressed.
	He's also a depressed guy.
	He's a failure in life, and he's everything you would expect as someone who uses that kind of time for recreation.
	Right.
	So the issue with him is he should take some of that.
	So if he would admit to himself his aggression, If he'd come to terms with it, he could take that damn aggression and he could integrate it into his personality.
	And that would make him able to focus on his life.
	You know, like you said, when you started your martial arts fighting, that you were obsessed.
	And you were also sick of being pushed around and all of that.
	And you were willing to do something about it.
	But obviously, and it's obvious just talking to you, that the aggressive part of your character is...
	Like, deeply integrated inside of you.
	It's not hiding out in some corner doing stupid things that, you know, you're not paying attention to.
	It's right there at hand.
	And you get a guy like the one you're talking about, he's split into meek and depressed and ineffectual on the one hand, and cruel and resentful and bitter on the other.
	If those two things would marry, you know, he'd get half his personality back and maybe some of his dynamism.
	So it's a real waste of time.
	I think a lot of people just feel just totally powerless and they feel like this is the only way they can affect others is by reaching out and trolling or saying mean things.
	I think that Many people take these terrible paths in their lives which are not productive and they don't feel good about it.
	They don't respond well to whatever they're doing with their life and they have this constant state of anxiety.
	It's like Thoreau's quote, Most men live lives of quiet desperation.
	Yes, except the trolls live lives of noisy desperation.
	Yeah, very similar.
	That's what the internet has allowed.
	Yes.
	Jordan, I've got to wrap this up.
	I've got to get out of here, unfortunately.
	This is a long and wonderful conversation, though, like we always have.
	Hey, while we damn near got caught up, do you got 30 seconds?
	Yes.
	Okay, well, let's end it off.
	I want to know what are you up to next, man?
	Like, what do you want to have happen?
	You've got this crazy reach.
	You've got this crazy platform.
	What's on your horizon?
	Anything about what you're doing?
	No.
	No, I just enjoy what I'm doing.
	I like to continue doing what I'm doing.
	I'm very happy that people enjoy the show.
	I'm very, very happy that it's affecting people in a positive way, that they're getting inspiration out of it, and they're getting information and entertainment and education.
	And it means the world to me.
	I love it.
	I love doing the podcast.
	I love doing stand-up.
	I love everything that I'm doing.
	I mean, I'm very, very happy with my career and family life.
	I couldn't be happier.
	So I just like to keep doing what I'm doing.
	I don't have any crazy aspirations other than continuing to get better at everything that I try to work at.
	Yeah, well, that's a crazy aspiration, man, because you've got a lot of things going for you that are very, very unlikely, you know, and to hope, I don't mean to hope that they'll get better, but to continue to work to get those better, that seems like sufficient aspiration from my perspective.
	I think if you work at anything, you're trying to improve.
	And there's always room.
	There's always room for improvement in everything.
	In your personality, in your work, in everything.
	And that's what I strive for.
	I strive for improvement.
	Yeah, well, that edge of improvement's a good place to be.
	Look, I wanted also to thank you.
	Just so you know it.
	Especially that first interview you did with me.
	That was really helpful to me.
	And I mean, I've enjoyed all the talks that we've had, and they've been really productive, and they've had a very big impact on my life, but lots of people have watched them.
	It seems to me that we've had a pretty productive series of interactions, but I do owe you some thanks.
	And also, thanks for coming on this podcast, man.
	It was really good.
	My pleasure.
	My pleasure.
	I will definitely talk to you about ThinkSpot once we get it going and see that it works.
	Because, look, I didn't have any hope for its success when it first was a little ugly baby thing.
	Because, you know, it's too impossible.
	But it's looking pretty damn good, and it's got some cool features.
	So it'd be nice to have a censorship-free platform if we could figure out how to do that.
	That sounds very exciting.
	I'm very interested.
	I can't wait to try it.
	All right, man.
	Thank you, Jordan.
	Hey, thanks a lot.
	My pleasure.
	Hey, good luck with your improvement, and I'm looking forward to the comedy special.
	Thank you, my brother.
	Take care.

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