Stefan Molyneux and Joe Rogan dissect the Trayvon Martin case, exposing media manipulation—retouched photos and edited 911 calls—to distort racial bias claims. They link societal violence to child maltreatment, ADHD misdiagnosis in boys due to gendered curricula, and rising sociopathy (now 1 in 20–25), citing Sweden’s 1973 spanking ban as a model. Molyneux predicts a global financial reset post-1913 fiat currency collapse, while Rogan critiques drone strikes’ civilian toll (98% innocents) and circumcision’s cultural trauma. Both reject rigid ideologies—like feminism’s grievance-driven funding (e.g., Canada’s $300M over 15 years)—and argue progress hinges on disciplined individuals leveraging influence, not political movements. Molyneux’s Truth documentary and Rogan’s stand-up vulnerability highlight their shared belief in personal responsibility over systemic blame. [Automatically generated summary]
For folks listening to this, we're in Toronto right now.
This is the first time I've met Stefan.
I met him just a few moments ago down in the lobby, but I've seen a lot of your internet videos.
And I was particularly impressed with several of them, but really the Trayvon Martin one.
I think you covered that better than anyone I saw online, on TV, in the media.
You gave a real, you know, the quote, the Fox fair and balanced, you gave a real fair and balanced approach to that subject.
And to me personally as a human being, that was one of the most frustrating events of our day.
Not just because a young man lost his life, not just because Of the race-baiting that went on with it, but the cloudy, muddy thinking that I felt was perpetrated by the media and by politicians and by all these people that were looking to capitalize on that event.
The thinking was so disingenuous and they were showing these photos of him when he was like a fucking baby.
I wonder, there's no proof of this yet, it's all bullshit hypotheticals, but I wonder if this guy was a black guy and apparently he had a real chip on his shoulder about, you know, I'm not going to get ahead because they hate me, the whitey hates me and all that.
He had a real chip on his shoulder about being black and trying to get ahead in a white world or whatever.
I wonder if the degree to which they did not intervene in his obviously escalating mental health problems was because they were afraid that he was going to launch some complaint about racism or something like that.
I wonder if that actually scares people off from dealing with people just like they're human beings because they're afraid of that card getting pulled and then getting dragged into something god-awful.
Yeah, well, it's almost like we're still responding to the echoes of the imbalance of the past, you know, the slavery era echoes and the civil rights era echoes of the 50s and 60s.
It's almost like we're still not even, the ship hasn't, We haven't made it level yet.
It's almost like that's why this stuff is still tolerated.
It's very confusing to me though when it's so obvious and so blatant like it was in this case.
It's also very frustrating to me because as a person who deals With a lot of martial artists and a lot of people with anger issues who have become really incredible members of society and really admirable human beings,
people who have learned to harness this Frustrated energy that a lot of young men have if they grow up in confused households or whether they're absentee parents or bad neighborhoods or whatever the factors are that lead them to be these angry people, that can be channeled and it can be channeled into a way that develops character and it doesn't happen.
So when I see a guy like Trayvon Martin do what he does and get shot and die and all this, I see a massive loss of potential just as a human being, a young human being.
You know, a young human being that commits crimes or does bad things when they're 18 is not even necessarily a bad person.
What they are more than anything is just misused potential and misguided.
A human being is so incredibly complex.
There's so many facets and aspects to being a person and developing as a productive member of society that it needs guidance.
I mean, you see an unbelievable tragedy like that.
I always think of like all the The turns and the steps and the other possibilities that might have happened.
Early intervention, some teacher somewhere, some relative or someone who would have just seen something going off the rails and really stepped in and made a difference.
I think that tidal wave can be stopped early.
I think once it gains real momentum, it's tough later on.
It's very tough.
But early intervention, really seeing people who are going off the rails and then really working to intervene.
If we could get that down as a society, Oh man, I think we'd live in a different world.
We would live in a different world, but it is very, very, very difficult to do.
Incredibly difficult to pull someone out of that momentum, the momentum of being a bad person and almost reveling in it, which is a big aspect of gangster rap and art culture.
Well, you know, they've done some really interesting studies, because just over the last 10 or 15 years, they really see inside the brain For the first time ever, these fMRIs, they can really see inside the brain.
And they've found people who've been identified as sadists, and they show them pictures of people being hurt intentionally, and their happy joy centers light up.
Everyone has a soul and we're all kind of equal, all made in the image of God and this and that and the other.
According to the people I've talked to and the research that I've done, there are some real predators among us who really are not kind of like us at all.
It's somebody who sees some cat being driven over and he giggles and finds that really quite thrilling.
I mean, I don't even know what species that is, but I think there are enough people out there that they make life kind of difficult for the rest of us.
Yeah, well, so, I mean, this is the fascinating thing about epigenetics, right?
So, I mean, when I was a kid growing up, there was this nature versus nurture.
Like, you got your genes, that's what you're born with, right?
And then maybe you can influence it a bit with nature.
But what they're finding out now is that genes turn on and off depending on experience.
So they found that if you have a particular gene and you're a boy and you are physically abused as a child, almost for certain you're going to end up on the bad side of things.
Like you're going to end up violent, aggressive, criminal, jail, whatever, right?
Now, if you don't have that gene you're abused, likelihood, but it's less.
And so certain genes for aggression get turned on and strengthened based upon your experiences.
You can end up, like twins who grew up in different households can end up with different genetics based on their environment.
That's what's so important about, you know, something I focus a lot on is the parenting, parenting, parenting.
It seems to me so many people are out there and they're just so messed up.
Like you just, you can't rewind and you can't send them down a different path.
But if you kind of look at the next generation, the next generation, what if we could get the percentage of people spanking their children down from 90%?
I mean, it seems so weird in the 21st century that that's how parents are really focused.
In Sweden, I think it's been banned since 1973. You all know what a hellhole Sweden is.
They're doing fine.
It's still 80% to 90%.
It's legal here.
It's legal in America.
From 2 to 12, you can hit a child in Canada legally, just not in the face and not with an implement.
Of course, these are the most vulnerable, tender, helpless, dependent, lack of freedom members of society.
But it's hard to see how weird society that we have.
You had this great bit last night, go see the show, anyone who's listened to this is my show.
We did this great bit like, what if space aliens come down and try and understand?
You had Kim Kardashian, which of course is tough enough.
What if they tried to understand our culture?
It wouldn't make much sense.
But you realize that the hierarchies and everything that we have, the wars, the prisons, for prisons you need prison guards, for wars you need soldiers.
You can't get healthy, happy, well-adjusted people to go out and do that kind of stuff.
So I think our whole society relies upon the maltreatment of children and if we didn't have that, a lot of people who got a lot of money and power right now would kind of find themselves out in the cold.
That's why there's such little funding for schools, and they're trying to keep people poor, because poor people don't raise their kids correctly, and so on and so forth, and then it continues.
I think we have an instinct for domination as human beings.
Animals do too, and they don't have secret cabals of Rockefellers in smokey rooms organizing everything.
I think we just have an instinct for domination, and it plays itself out, but I don't think it's something written down and handed out in secret braille scrolls or something like that.
If we control the Middle East, we want to control Africa.
It's a natural thing that if we do a certain thing, we will continue to do it and try to push the envelope further and further until we hit some sort of a wall or resistance.
I think in America, we are starting to see that wall build up and gain momentum.
The wall of resistance against the Syria invasion was bigger than anything that I'd ever seen in my entire life.
I'd never seen, universally across the board, the entire country go, fuck this.
This is crazy.
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This might be the first war that's actually stopped.
In history, this would be the first war that popular resentment and resistance has actually stopped.
Against all the financial military industrial complex momentum that is in the States, which is huge.
I don't know if you know the fact that the people who voted yes for the war in Syria get 86% more funding for the military industrial complex than the people who voted no.
They're just voting to send money and blood to the donors.
It's horrible.
But the fact that it might actually be pushed back and the fact that the Russian guy Putin is telling the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to not have a war.
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I mean, what kind of upside-down universe should we be living in, you know?
Not only that, but Putin said a really interesting thing about claiming that citizens of the United States are exceptional, and how dangerous that is, and about how we are all just human beings, and to have anybody Established as being the exceptional people is a very dangerous idea.
For the United States to promote this idea that we as Americans are different, he's absolutely right.
If an individual displays that characteristic, they're called entitled or narcissistic, which means that just good things should come to me no matter what.
If they're not brought to me, I'm just going to go take them.
That's a really dangerous personality trait, but somehow it's elevated through the magic of patriotism into wonderful stuff.
And as I get older, I find it even more fascinating because a guy like Obama, I'm 46, a guy like Obama is just a couple of years older than me.
So it's not like this thing where when I was a boy and I would look at the president, yeah, they were way up there, they were different.
They were always a part of this system already, political system, educational system, skull and bones.
But this Obama guy was the first guy that doesn't fit that mold to me.
And it's close to my age.
And the concept of me being a president is just the most ridiculous thing of all time to me.
But this guy is essentially my, obviously more educated than me, but essentially my age.
And I find it amazing how he has gone from being this This political outsider, this rebel, this guy who's going to change this and close Guantanamo Bay, and then all of a sudden he gets in and he's exactly the same thing that we've seen time and time again over the last eight years.
More drones, more detainees, and the only reason he ended the war in Iraq was quite fascinating and tragic, you know, if you have hope for the guy, right?
The reason that they had to pull their troops out of Iraq was that Iraq was going to start holding the troops criminally responsible for what they were doing because they were facing such resistance from the population for the occupation.
They finally said, okay, you guys don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card anymore.
We're going to start applying international military law to your troops.
And Obama's like, okay, fire up the airplanes.
We're going to pull those buggers out because they're going to be subject to the rule of law, and they had to get them out that way.
I think what we're in right now as far as the whole privacy thing is this strange transitionary period to a point where I think ultimately there will be no privacy.
I don't think that's bad because if we were all really cool and everyone was really nice to each other, privacy wouldn't be as important.
It becomes important when people violate privacy and there's stalkers and there's people that fuck with people and people that have agendas.
Mess with people's lives.
But ultimately, privacy, we're dealing with information.
And the trend in society and technology seems to be the dissolving of boundaries between people and information.
And I think it's been amazing as far as education.
When you look at your phone, you can Google something, you get answers to any question.
I mean, we live in an amazing time when it comes to that.
That trend, you know, we talked about escalation.
It's just what we do.
That trend will escalate further and further, and I think ultimately it'll escalate to the point where there'll be no more secrets.
Yeah, I mean, the technology that we're having this conversation, we can broadcast it to like millions of people.
I got like 50 million downloads of my show, which for a philosophy show is crazy, right?
But there's this huge race.
It's like these two bullet trains going across the landscape, right?
And the technology of control versus the technology of illumination, I think, are really, really battling.
And we've got to keep pushing the gas to stay ahead because we've got this incredible thing.
You mentioned it in a show recently, like the gatekeepers are down, right?
And we can have this conversation, broadcast it directly to people.
Nobody has to tell us what we can talk about.
Nobody tells us what words we can use or what concepts we can explore, anything like that.
Which is unprecedented, except maybe for the Gutenberg press in like the 15th century when they printed the Bible and started handing it out to peasants in a language they could actually understand, because before that you had to know Latin and all that kind of crap.
So they got to read the Bible for the first time and were like, holy shit, are you kidding me?
This is in here, this is in here.
They started to develop their own thoughts about it, and that broke down the monopoly of the Catholic Christendom, which had been around since the Dark Ages.
So when you get information to people, you fragment the central narrative.
Of a society, which is great.
That's what you want.
Central narratives are incredibly dangerous.
You know who had a great central narrative?
The Nazis.
They had wonderful central narratives about the role of the white race to dominate all the other races and Germany's manifest destiny in Europe.
Communists had a great story about the rise of the proletariat, destruction of the middle classes and the end of the bourgeoisie.
Narratives that are really well-inflicted and universal and incredibly dangerous.
All the lemmings run the same way.
So we've got this massive air strike on a central narrative which comes directly out of this technology, which is where you can get exposed to viewpoints that you never would have been exposed to before.
Do you think before the internet, American media would be playing anything that Vladimir Putin said about Syria?
You'd never even know the guy said anything about it.
Now you can get it all and you can connect with people.
I want to talk about the comedy stuff where I think the connection stuff was really a good theme in the show last night.
But there's a race because the degree to which we can shatter the central narrative and individuate what we're doing in the world is, you know, they're racing with us to try and control and make us afraid to communicate with each other and afraid to get to the truth.
And I really view that as a pretty important race over like the next 10 years.
I think the real issue in this world is information and then, of course, the big one is the monopolization of resources.
And the monopolization of resources, which are, I believe, I think resources should be a global asset for human beings.
I don't think anybody should be able to control the amount of oil.
I don't think people should be able to control water.
I think it's ridiculous.
The idea that a group of human beings decide to control water, I feel like that's an act almost of terrorism, of social terrorism.
The idea of keeping water from people that need water, the idea of keeping oil from people.
If we all agree that we're going to use oil, the idea that one person can decide who owns this shit that has been in the ground for millions and millions of years just because you planted a flag on a patch of dirt, it's fucking craziness.
But that's where all the influence comes from.
The influence comes from this massive amount of money that you can gain by controlling, monopolizing natural resources.
And it's just like when they used to be able to monopolize the information that was received.
Just like when William Randolph Hearst basically controlled most of what information got out to people when he ran newspapers.
That's a dangerous aspect of our world that is eventually, I think, going to crumble under the weight of its own bullshit.
I just don't see how it can continue.
I don't see how people can continue to live the way we're living right now in the face of the information that we're being presented with.
Well, you know, the great thing is once you go outside and narrate it, For me, I feel pretty retarded most of the time.
I'm not a dumb guy, but I see so much information out there.
So many things, so many stories.
I could do all this research for my shows and stuff like that.
I feel like I barely scratched the surface.
There's so much information out there.
With a central narrative, you feel like, well, we're Catholics or we're Jews or we're Jesuits, so we got it down.
We got the whole thing down, right?
But the great thing is once you shatter that central narrative, you realize there's such a vast amount of conflicting information and opinions and perspectives, and I don't know what the hell is true half the time.
I'm lucky to get 10% of it.
So I think that it breeds a kind of humility.
That is the opposite of the desire to dominate.
The desire to dominate is, well, I know what the hell people should do, and by God, I'm going to make them do it.
I know they shouldn't smoke marijuana, and if they fucking smoke marijuana, I'm going to round them up with cats in blue uniforms and throw them in a prison cell, you know, where 200,000 times a year they get raped.
In America, more men get raped than women.
It's all prison stuff, right?
So when you feel like you just know how the hell everyone else should live.
The way we should help the poor is take money from these guys by force, give it to a giant bureaucracy and have little drops of it drip down to the poor to keep them in a dependent state so they keep voting for more and more government.
If you really feel like you know exactly how people should live and what they should do, then you've no problem bringing out the airstrikes of the military and the police and the prison system.
But if you're humble and you realize that we're pretty much retarded about everything, there's a few things that I'm good at, but most of it, you know, I'm not going to drill my own teeth, I'm not going to do my own appendix, I barely even clean my own house, right?
But once you get exposed to a vast amount of contradictory information, you realize just, Like, we're all kind of stupid, and that's why we should be humble and not order each other around at the point of a gun, which we're so addicted to doing these days.
Chance would kind of add a great quote about that, about the bonfire of enlightenment.
As the bonfire of enlightenment grows brighter, the surface area of ignorance becomes more illuminated, and you realize the more you learn, the more there is to learn, and then it becomes impossible.
I think that's great, because I think there's a real danger in claiming the kind of arrogance that comes from especially very highly educated people in specific areas.
If you're very highly educated in a specific area, they oftentimes are arrogant about things that they're ignorant about.
And it's interesting to watch that become an impossibility.
You're faced with such a massive amount of data that's just online, on my Twitter every day, I'm exposed to dozens and dozens of fascinating stories about science.
It's so strange, but that is the accepted smallest measurable part of the universe.
It's amazing when you really start to think about what we know about nature, nature being fractal in so many different ways, the universe itself being fractal, and then when you get down to the smallest measurable The components of reality itself being this strange fiction almost world.
It's so bizarre.
It's impossible to know everything.
So I think this age of enlightenment that we're in right now is really unprecedented.
I think we're kind of getting there in a really painful, difficult way.
I think we're kind of getting there because we've got this narrative And in the future, I guarantee you, it's going to be completely insane to look back and say, if people ever believe this shit, I mean, you know, the guys who cut their own balls off to go join that comet, you know, you look back and you say, wasn't there someone who said, you know, when you're bringing out the pinkish years and taking off your tighty-whities, there's got to be someone who's saying, We're kind of going in the wrong direction here, but I think in the future they can look back at us like that and say, what were they thinking?
Like, we have these geographical areas called countries, and in those countries we have a tiny group of people with all the guns in the world, and they tell everyone else what to do, and somehow we think this is going to work out fine.
I think the enormity of the times we live in, it's really easy for us to not notice it.
It's so normal to just be able to call someone on your cell phone.
It's so normal to be able to get on the internet and just get information.
I think the enormity of this as far as what that's like in comparison to having to go to the library and to getting your education from a school, which you're getting...
If you're taking science, you're getting it from this professor, and this professor is going to recommend these books, and there may be a completely opposing point of view that you're never going to be exposed to.
Whereas if you Google something, and then Google that phrase, and then debunked, man, I can't tell you how many fucking times I've had someone send me something, and then I'll say, Google what you just sent me, and then debunked, and then let's talk.
You're getting this weird sort of confirmation bias-y thing that exists.
I've heard that argument as to why the internet is bad.
One of the bad things about the internet is you seek out like-minded people and you sort of confirm each other's biases and get together and pat each other on the back.
Sort of, yes, but I feel like those are just little camps outside of the wilderness of information, which is New York City.
You might have a tent where all you assholes get together and say that the Earth is 6,000 years old, but you're an hour's walk from Manhattan.
Well, I don't remember all those people talking about a unity of narrative and seeking out like-minded people really complaining about, say, the church that I grew up in, or the public school that I grew up in, where I was taught that, you know, governments are necessary, beneficial, wonderful, and, you know, we fought the Second World War to defend against national socialism, and we won.
Like, we had, we already had that narrative.
Now people are fragmenting into their own narratives, but that's still way better than one monolithic nonsense pile that we're all supposed to imbibe, right?
It's also like, as a human being, what we have been given is this insane amount of potential in the mind and in the body's ability to manipulate matter and nature, but yet we don't have a real direction book.
And we're sort of figuring out the abilities of this mind and the possibilities of society and our interactions with each other and the accumulation of information that we can all rely on each different aspect of our culture to contribute, whether it's history or science or mathematics and all this stuff comes together and the potential of it is almost unfathomable.
It's almost impossible to really truly wrap our heads around.
And we only figure out how to do things right by trial and error.
We have to fuck up and then go, well, we can't do that again.
And we have to drop a nuclear bomb and go, well, that's a disaster.
And we have to, you know, We have this incredible device, the human mind, and we have very little idea of how to utilize it properly or even less control or engineer thought into how to develop people properly and to try to I mean, when you see the president on television, what do they always deal with, the leader of the free world?
Well, they deal with conflict.
They're constantly dealing with conflict and loss and finances, and they're dealing with all these things that are important to people that are developed.
But how much thought is actually given to developing people?
When was the last time you heard the President of the United States talk about what we really need to do is focus on the lowest rung of our ladder, the weakest link in our chain of human beings, and strengthen that.
Wouldn't we be a better country if we had less losers?
Isn't that something we should concentrate on?
But it never gets brought up.
There's never talk about enriching poor neighborhoods or setting up community centers, finding ways to help young children that don't have guidance.
Bring in people.
And have fucking companies like Halliburton fund it.
You want to make a lot of money?
Rebuild Detroit.
You know?
Fuck Iraq.
Rebuild Detroit.
Fuck going to countries and blowing them up and rebuilding them.
Concentrate on what's already fucked up right here.
And it's never done.
And we look at it in terms of, you know, it's almost like going from Presidential run to presidential runs, like these four-year terms that they do.
In a way, it's almost like the idea of having a president and having these small four-year terms.
It's like you're always going to concentrate on just problems as far as conflict and money.
You're always going to concentrate on what's on the tip of people's tongues all the time, but not on the engineering of society.
It's all just playing whack-a-mole with whatever fucking crisis is coming up at the moment.
And it's not, how are we going to make it so the society can be sane in 40 years?
We don't care about any of that stuff.
I mean, that's why there's a national debt.
That's why there's war, because it's just about getting elected.
Like the Federal Reserve just said, well, we're going to keep Buying $85 billion worth of US Treasuries, even though we said we were going to stop, because there's going to be an election coming up.
And what do they care if they pass the bill to the unborn?
I mean, they're going to be long gone.
So we have this weird society that does these really narrow time slices, which is just all about whack-a-mole and satisfying the noisiest people and keeping those people.
But the actual work of preventing in the long run, which is so easy.
The science is so easy.
It's so simple.
Reason with your children.
Don't hit your children.
Treat them like they're reasonable human beings.
I mean, I'm a dad of them.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for like four and a half years.
Never had to raise my voice at my daughter.
Never had to yell at her.
Never had to hit her.
Never had to have a time out.
We just reason things through.
They can start doing that at about 18 months of age, the studies show.
They can start to reason.
They can start to negotiate.
And if we had that, if we had that as a society, I can virtually guarantee you there would be almost no criminality.
I agree, but don't you think that there's an economic aspect to that that really can't be ignored?
You have the ability to do that, and very few people do.
That's the real issue, is that so many people, you have a working mom and a working dad, and the kids, by the time they see their parents I mean, they're ready to go to bed.
I mean, it's four or five o'clock at night if they're lucky.
Most of the time, they see their parents afterwards, so it's six, seven, you know?
And this idea of the daycare, just kind of, you put them in daycare and that's fine.
It's just not true.
Statistically, factually, scientifically, kids who are in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience exactly the same symptoms as those who've been abandoned by their mothers.
They experience maternal abandonment at a very fundamental level.
It changes their neurological system.
It changes their stress responses.
It changes their cortisol levels permanently.
You measure it 10, 20 years later.
It's still the same.
So this idea that you can just march people off to work, hey, it's great for the government.
I mean, the government loves it when both parents work because then they've got two taxes, two tax bases, two tax cattle out there spitting money into the treasury, plus then they've got to put the kid in daycare so then there's somebody else who they can tax who's taking care of the kids.
So the government loves it.
It really ups the GDP because everyone's working.
They get much more taxes.
And the problems of having kids in daycare, well, they get shuffled down to the next generation and who the hell cares about that?
It's so easy for us to say, you know, my wife is a stay-at-home wife, a stay-at-home mom, and, you know, we have three children, and, you know, we're very fortunate, and everything works out great.
But in a unique financial situation, that can happen, whereas I have a lot of friends that are not in that situation.
They're trying to raise children, and they're also trying to put them in daycare during the day, and, you know, the wife just went back to work because we have bills, and this and that.
And you see it, and it's not the way a child wants to develop.
Do you think that's just a desire for materialism and some sort of a rationalization that you can...
You can go after both, that you can acquire all these things and keep up with the Joneses and just have someone else take care of the busy work of taking care of your child while you do that?
I think what happened was, and this sort of happened in the 60s and 70s, right?
So in the 50s, this whole amazing series of labor-saving devices came out, which freed women from the endless drudgery of, you know, your dishwashers came out and laundry machines and vacuum cleaners and all that kind of stuff, right?
So basically, a huge amount of work was done by machines now, which freed up women.
And of course, a lot of them were like, oh, okay, great, I'm going to go workforce whatever, right?
But I think what's really been downgraded is the skills required to be a good parent.
I mean, I've done some tough stuff in my life.
I've built businesses.
I started this crazy show and all that kind of stuff.
Nothing to me is more exciting and challenging than being a dad.
I mean, I know it's a cliche and everyone's always the most wonderful thing, but it really is an incredible thing to do, especially if you don't do any of the aggression stuff, because then you've got to come up with other stuff, right?
Other ways of dealing with conflicts, other ways of dealing with, quote, bad behavior.
It's really challenging.
Now, if you're just spanking your kids and yelling at them, I guess it's not that challenging and hell It's a hell of a lot not fun, right?
Because all you're doing is spending your whole day trying to control someone who doesn't want to be controlled.
That's no fun.
So I think that because we've got this hit them and put them in timeouts and send them to bed without dinner and yell at them or whatever, I mean, that's retarded.
Anyone could do that.
You can get an angry robot to do that, right?
But if you don't do that stuff, Then you have a really unique challenge of negotiating with someone who's three.
I mean, how exciting is that?
What an incredible challenge that is.
But because we've still got the hitting and the yelling and all of that, it's retarded.
And so people say, well, this is stupid and not fun, so I'm going to go to work.
But it's only stupid and not fun because you're yelling and hitting.
If you didn't do that, it would be really engaging.
And it's the most important aspect of our society, the most important aspect of our families, the most important aspect of our communities is developing good human beings.
And it's one that we leave to everybody.
We just go, look, I know you fucked your whole life up, but take care of this person.
And that person will in turn transfer everything that you've taught them and any way that you've fucked them up or made them better.
And they're going to Go out into the world and spread that energy, and it literally changes the tone of our entire society and culture.
And it's fascinating when you see different cultures all throughout the world, if you study the different ways they interact with their children, How vastly different the culture itself becomes because of these styles of interaction.
And our culture, which is thought to be universally one of the most materialistic, selfish, childlike cultures, is one of the cultures that embraces this idea of the two parents working, the childcare, this idea of how we've decided to Promote becoming a human being.
It's one of the most awkward, weird examples of it on Earth.
Could you imagine, Joe, could you imagine it's your anniversary?
I know you got married a couple of years ago.
You've been with your wife a long time, right?
Imagine it's your anniversary, right?
And she calls you up and she says, Joe, you know, it's our anniversary.
I go out for a nice dinner.
I got a babysitter.
And you say, oh man, I can't believe what a cliche.
I completely forgot.
I'm so sorry.
Oh my God, that's so embarrassing.
But I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll call up someone we don't know, and I'm going to pay the minimum wage to go out for dinner with you.
Now, they may not speak great English.
I mean, they've never met you before, but I'm sure it's going to be pretty much the same as going out for dinner with me, your ever-loving husband.
So, let me just make that call to the agency to send out some half-broken English-speaking guy to go out for dinner with you, and it's going to be exactly the same.
She'd be like, no, it's not the same, because you're my husband.
He's the same guy I don't even know.
But why the hell would we think parenting is any different?
I mean, how the hell do you replace the bond of you grew the child in your belly and you breastfeed the child and you know that child?
But I'm sure some minimum wage stranger who's rotating in and out of that job every four months is going to be exactly the same as a parent.
And it's very frustrating to me when I communicate with people that are, especially women, that are single, that are thinking about having a child on their own.
I've had so many.
And I get it.
I get that they want a child.
And I get that they want a child and that they can't find a man.
I understand it.
It's hard to find someone that you're compatible with.
But god damn, is that a terrible idea.
It works sometimes.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes you get lucky and you meet someone and somewhere along the line...
Statistically and factually, there's no single worst predictor for a kid's outcome than being from a single mom household.
I hate to say it because, again, there are lots of single moms out there really trying to do the right thing.
Some single moms, like, husband got hit by a truck.
Terrible.
All the support.
The vast majority of it is didn't find the man or just ditched the man or whatever.
It is catastrophic for kids.
The statistics are horrendous.
80% of rapists come from a single-parent household.
85% of murderers.
Again, not that they all turn out that way, but when you see these significantly negative elements, a lot of it gets traced back.
There's this theory that says, economists are working this out fairly well, they say that if marriage rates had stayed at the 1970 levels, because marriage rates are really low these days, and marriage is not necessarily the same as two people committing to stay together while they raise a kid, but we would have almost no deficit in government spending if marriage rates had stayed As they did in 1970. You know, when majority, fast majority, got married, stay married, and so on.
Because marital disintegration, I mean, huge rise in welfare state, huge rise in criminality costs, huge rise in everything you can think of in society.
If you trace back the deficit, a lot of it has to do with this breakdown of the family, which is I mean, some people say it's all engineer and I don't credit the ruling class with that much deviousness.
Like, you can grow your own tomatoes, but when you deal with anything that affects your consciousness, you have to have The government has to step in and allow you to do so.
Well, I think as long as you don't sell it, I mean, I think you can make your own stuff at home or whatever.
But I think with tobacco, you need like a big, you know, in certain places and a big crop and stuff like that, and processing it is really hard.
Whereas pot, you just grow it and smoke it.
So I think it would be really tough, you know, because we measure economic productivity in this weird way.
You know, like if someone gets sick, the GDP goes up.
Like, how is that sane?
I mean, surely sickness is a bad thing and the GDP should reflect a negative result.
But, you know, they go spend a lot of money on treatments and suddenly it's like, woo, we're richer.
Same thing, if you then have people smoking pot that they've grown themselves, your GDP is going to take a huge crater and then all these people are going to be out of work who supply all this horrible stuff to people and so on.
The way we measure stuff now, it's just completely insane.
It forces everyone into these really, really bad decisions.
Yeah, one of the things you said that I really agree with about how boys are so much different than girls when it comes to learning.
I just recently started volunteering at my daughter's school, and she's in kindergarten, and I watch boys do, you know, you volunteer, like you have these tables set up, and you have to, everyone has to put together this little book and cut these pieces out and put it in order, and You watch boys do it as opposed to girls, and they're a different animal.
I mean, it's a completely different thing.
They're almost like...
They're so challenged.
Like, the girls can just...
unidentified
And they're doing it nicely and humming to themselves.
Boys aren't cutting in the lines, and they're barely paying attention to what's going on.
They want to run.
They want to go do something.
That's how I felt growing up.
I always felt like, I can't wait for this fucking bell to ring so I can run out of here.
I thought at the time, well, obviously, I'm not very smart and I'm not going to be good at school.
It wasn't that at all, but what it was was, I'm not designed for this.
There is a society, and this society has a broad spectrum of human beings, and we have various tasks that we will do and we will be really good at, and we'll have Different occupations that we can choose, and different ones suit different personalities, but this fucking cookie-cutter shit that they do in school, they want everyone to be the same way, because that's all they have money for.
That's all we have resources for.
We have the ability to stick you in this class from 9 a.m.
to whatever, 2 p.m., and do this stuff, and then we need you to listen, and then you go, and then you leave, and we give you a grade on it.
Madness!
The idea of that as an educational backbone, as an educational foundation for a human being.
You know, there's two things that are the best predictors of empathy.
Right?
Empathy is what we really, really need as a species.
Like, we're fucked with that empathy, because we've got these weapons of mass destruction, we've got nuclear weapons, we've got...
Like, if we don't really work on empathy, it's the most important resource.
So the question is, how do you grow it?
Two things seem to come up on the top of the list for how to grow empathy.
I would never have guessed them, so I'm going to ask you to try.
The two things that rise at the top when it comes to developing empathy.
Number one, the presence of a father.
Isn't that interesting?
Because men are considered to be less empathetic and women more empathetic.
Presence of the father is the number one predictor for the development of empathy.
Number two is free play in nature.
Hmm, free play in nature.
My daughter's really into this right now.
Like, we have toads that live by our house, and we have a froggy pond not far away, and she's learning a lot about how to handle things delicately, how to play with them and all of that.
She's great, great with animals.
And free play in nature in the presence of a father.
Now, what's happened over the past 40 years in our society?
Kids don't get free play in nature anymore.
Most of it's scheduled shit in the gym, you know, with the dance classes and all that.
There's nothing wrong with those, but give them free play in nature.
The glorious anarchy of childhood where it's just like, here's an afternoon, go do something, right?
That's number one.
And number two, of course, is that dads have vanished from so many households.
And this is why, in the last 15 years, sociopathy, one of the most malignant forms of destructive personality traits, sociopathy has doubled in the last 15 years.
That she had functional knowledge of a murder scene.
And the woman who was a neurologist felt that it was very dangerous because she said, there can be functional knowledge of something based on how much have they talked to you about this crime scene?
Have you formulated imageries in your head?
Have they shown you photographs of this scene?
Have they, like, what places, and how do we know, what aspect of it relies on personal creativity?
Or the imagination to sort of conceive and play it out in your head and then that this is registered on the fMRI.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff where we're getting to really understand the various components of what makes us a human being.
I have stories about my childhood and I swear to God, I could not tell you if they're true or not.
I don't know if I heard that story so many times.
I told it so many times.
I don't know if I am, in fact, a lizard reptile from the planet Aldebaran.
I mean, I'm not sure.
I don't know.
The story is like, oh, I remember when you did this.
I don't know if it got extrapolated.
Honestly, no.
Pictures of it didn't happen.
I don't know.
I think that's true for a lot of people.
You talk yourself in and out of stuff.
They did a study recently that blew my mind about people's ethical integrity.
So they did a study where they got people to agree with a particular ethical statement.
I agree with this ethical statement.
Abortion is bad or whatever.
They get an ethical statement.
And then they had them close the book and then the book stuck a new word that made it exactly the opposite statement.
I now agree with this thing that I formally condemned as evil.
They opened it up and they asked them, can you just read that again and tell us what you think?
About 70-80% of the people would read it again and completely agree with the exact opposite statement that they've made, not three minutes before, and had great reasons for it.
Well, I've had real issues with people when you talk to them about past events and they start giving an incredibly distorted, self-serving version of it, and I wonder whether or not they really believe this or not.
I'm a big proponent of if I criticize something, I criticize myself first.
Because I think that if I criticize a various aspect of human nature, like memory, my memory is fantastic and yet fucking terrible.
When I do the Ultimate Fighting Championship, when I do the broadcast for the fights, I can rattle off statistics.
But it's a huge event for me, an important once-a-year thing when I come to Toronto.
And yet, my memory of it is this incredibly cloudy thing.
And it's like, that is the case, I think, with most human beings when it comes to memory.
And we look at memory and we try to pretend as if my memory is locked solid.
You know, it's in there.
Bolted in, it's screwed in place, it's not going anywhere.
That's nonsense.
The mind doesn't work that way.
There's various things you can remember.
I remember how to use this espresso machine because I've done it.
I know I push the little carton in there and I press that button and the junk comes out.
But, you know, the reality of my day, like what went on today, is just snapshots, like weird flashbacks of food I ate and the jokes that we'd tell.
It's very strange, the human mind.
I think one of the emerging aspects of technology that I'm incredibly fascinated with is the symbiotic relationship that we're starting to have with computers, machines, Google Glass.
I think we're going to develop an artificial way of recording things, an artificial way of recording life that's going to be like, I'm going to be able to, you know, Stefan, please check out my day.
I'm going to drop off my day and you're going to roll with like, holy shit, weren't you fucking terrified in this?
Well, this is a crazy moment.
We'll be able to call each other up.
We'll be able to fast forward each other's lives and share.
Well, do you know that a whole bunch of lawyers are trying to get in touch with the NSA these days?
Because the NSA records everything.
And so they're saying, look, I mean, for my court case, you guys know his cell phone was here when he was talking on it, and they say he was here, but the cell company doesn't have records.
Go back two years.
You guys can get this guy out of jail, and the Freedom of Information Act, they're just hammering these guys, trying to get facts out to get people out of jail or put people in jail.
If you send something, if you transmit something, someone can receive it.
Someone can pick it up.
Someone can intercept it.
It's a very strange aspect, but again, as we were talking about before, I think we are in an adolescent stage of this relationship that we have to technology and this relationship that we have to information.
I think, ultimately, it's going to get to a point where there is no boundary between your information or my information.
I think where that really gets weird is with money.
Because money essentially right now is just ones and zeros.
And when you get down to this finite point of this finite barrier and that barrier breaks and there is no boundary between anyone and information, money is just information.
We live in the weirdest time when it comes to money as well because of the whole collapsing of the banks and the bailouts and the president getting on television and saying that he's going to limit the guys who we bailed out.
He's going to limit their fucking bonuses to half a million dollars.
Well, Obama, of course, you know, there's some theories that one of the main reasons he got elected was he took the most money of all the candidates from Wall Street, from the financial companies.
And, I mean, what's he going to do?
Throw them in jail?
Like, they just did this fine.
I think it was yesterday.
J.P. Morgan got hit with a fine of $920 million.
First of all, that's just bailout money they're handing back.
It's like phoning the cops and saying, somebody stole my car.
The cops said, oh, we found it.
Well, we're going to keep it, but we found it.
I mean, why would the government get the money for what J.P. Morgan did to rip off its customers?
Plus, the J.P. Morgan employees aren't going to get raises because, I mean, but the J.P. Morgan executives, they don't pay anything.
It's a corporation.
I mean, they can't pay.
I mean, the corporation is just this abstract fiction that people make up to shield themselves from legal consequences.
So, everyone's like, oh, well, they got fined, so they're, you know, somehow the J.P. Morgan executives are out that money, and it's like, no, they're not.
I mean, they're never going to get thrown in jail for anything.
Never going to get thrown in jail for things that the average person would be locked up for the rest of their life if they were involved in fraud at that level.
If they were involved, I mean, just think about Just think about when people go to jail for what they do with the stock market, for manipulation of the stock market.
How much different is that, really, than what goes on with the banking crisis?
You're talking about moving money around.
You're talking about manipulating things and figuring out a way to profit from these manipulations.
How is insider trading any different from what these guys have done?
If you want to talk about manipulating the stock market, the Federal Reserve buying The treasury bonds is because nobody else wants those pieces of shit, frankly, right?
I mean, the Chinese are sick of them, the Indians are sick of them, the Japanese are sick of them, because they know that they can't possibly be redeemed without hyperinflation or some other default, right?
That's either a soft or a hard default.
They know that that stuff is junk, so the Fed is buying them just to prop up the prices, and they're doing that so all the other governments don't have to admit that they're basically toilet paper, Zimbabwe.
And it's all just this crazy thing that they can't possibly sustain.
You know, I did this show once.
There have been about 240 Just paper-only, quote-fiat currency, paper-only money in the history of the world.
240 different ones.
Some government gets in power, they issue some bullshit currency, and then it blows up, and then they issue some new currency or whatever.
There's only one of them that's still in circulation from a couple of hundred years ago.
It's the British pound, though it's lost like 97% of its value.
The dollar's lost like 98% of its value since the Fed came in in 1913. People say, yes, it's expensive.
It's not.
Gas is cheaper now than it was in 1960 if you pay for it in silver.
If you pay for it in this paper shit that they hand around pretending it's money, it's really expensive because it's been devalued so much.
When I first came to Canada in 1977, I was like 11 years old.
I could get a candy bar for a dime.
You know, now and within like 10 years it was like a buck because they're just printing all this crazy money.
Printing money is a great gig because you get to hand it out to all the people who are voting for you and then the inflation hits like two years later and nobody can connect the dots.
It's beautiful.
And plus, everyone blames the local supermarket for raising the prices as if they want to, right?
But all this central printing money stuff is just really, really dangerous and it brought down the Roman Empire in exactly the same way.
They just kept putting more and more crap into their money until what was silver denarius, which was originally 100% silver, it ended up being like 1.5% silver with basically zombie teeth and hair and shit thrown into it, right?
And it just destroys the entire economy and there's going to have to be this huge reset in the global economy soon.
What's fascinating is that now that we have this incredible access to information and now that people like you are putting this stuff out there, it's become part of the narrative.
People understand what's wrong.
It's not just a matter of it goes wrong and it takes years for people to put the pieces together and then you have to go to school and learn what's wrong.
It's really right in front of your face what's wrong.
What happens now?
Do you think that there's an adjustment period?
Do you think that because of this incredible groundswell of information, do you think that it can be re-engineered?
Can it be redesigned?
Can we somehow or another Bitcoin our way out of this?
Well, there's a long-term solution, which I think is multi-generational, which has to do with treating kids better and raising them rationally and not using aggression on them and all that.
There's a long-term solution.
The short-term solution, I think, is just trying to invest in human capital, trying to convert paper currency into something tangible like real estate or gold or something like that.
I think those are sensible strategies that lots of people who've been on my show and all these economists all talk about.
I think that's all good stuff.
I think what's going to happen in the short run is obviously the government's going to run out of money.
No matter how much they print, they're just going to run out of money.
Then what happens is there's going to be talk of sacrifice.
Now, not the kind of sacrifice like, forget the second car, stay home with your kids that we've been talking about before, but like real hard-nosed sacrifice.
And they're going to say, well, we've spent beyond our means for so long, you've seen this happen before in history, and they just basically turn on the dependent classes.
They expect the welfare recipients to live on less, social security recipients to live on less, and they'll just start squeezing the dependent classes because that's the biggest single bill.
And also, you will see, which of course is the goal of a lot of overseas terrorists, you will We'll see the US begin to withdraw the imperial presence in the world.
They've got over 700 military bases all over the world.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship is, to me, literally the ultimate in competition for a human being.
I don't think it's for everybody.
It's certainly not, but I think as far as the amount of time and energy and focus and then the maintenance and the control of your emotions during a contest, because you're literally putting your health on the line and your consciousness, you can get incredibly badly hurt.
I think it's one of the reasons why it's so incredibly exciting.
And the discipline, I can't remember the name of the fighter, but you're saying it's one guy who keeps a list of everything he wants to accomplish by his bed and reads it.
First thing that he gets up in the morning and just really focuses on that stuff.
Let me spin you a theory because we're talking about the fighting stuff.
I was watching the show last night and I was thinking about why is this occurring?
People could be doing anything with their time and money and they're coming here to see some really funny stuff.
And I was thinking about a lot of the stuff that you and the other two comics talked about is pretty visceral, right?
I mean, you've got this great phrase that you use, the monkey energy.
You know, like you've got this crazy monkey energy when you can't pay your mortgage and, you know, but you've got to go out and do something physical because your body thinks there's like a tiger jumping at you and stuff like that.
And I was really struck by, you know, Dick Farr jokes and stuff like that.
I mean, cum jokes and stuff like that.
They're funny.
But I think it's really interesting the degree to which people respond to that, because it's not polite conversation.
I've never seen a sign outside the box office relative to yours that says, the most extreme possible language will be used.
If you like Jane Austen, your head is going to explode in here.
It was actually that sign I put up It's on my first CD, which is called I'm Gonna Be Dead Someday, which I released in 1999. And that sign was something that I started putting up in comedy clubs because I got tired of people complaining.
And they said, this show will contain the most extreme content imaginable.
And these are all sorts of really common experiences that we really can't talk about because we live in these refined abstracts of countries and religions and clubs and all that.
But here, at this level, we really do, I think, connect in a very visceral way.
And there was so much talked about in terms of connection.
And I think the audience is laughing because we never get to talk about how we connect.
At an animal level.
And I was thinking about the UFC as well.
That a lot of your life, I think, is around getting people to connect at a very visceral animal level.
And animal level sounds bad.
I don't mean it that way at all.
I think it's really, this is where we do connect at the beginning.
You know, we connect in sex, we connect in fighting, we connect in...
It was entertaining and I know people enjoyed it, but what was fascinating to me was I have a background in martial arts and in competition, more importantly.
I fought most of my life from age 15 to age 22. It's basically all I did with my time.
And so I understand what it's like to be confronted with a daunting task.
I understand what it's like to be standing there when the referee looks at you and goes, You know, and then looks at the other guy and goes, are you ready?
It's a very strange thing for us to just say, ready, go, and then go do something.
It's really hard to do, to anticipate.
And also, as human beings, we can calculate all these different variables.
And one of the things about being an intelligent person and facing a difficult competition, whether it's fighting or anything incredibly hard, is like, You are aware of the variables.
You're aware of the failure.
You're aware of the humiliation.
You're aware of the embarrassment of failure.
You're aware of the personal dissatisfaction with your own performance and the pressure that's going to come with that.
All those variables, they can combine to create a constriction effect.
Where you just almost can't perform.
You're overwhelmed by the possibilities.
And you just freak the fuck out.
It's called being dwarfed by the moment.
The moment comes and it's...
And one of the things that I was good at on Fear Factor is to talk people through that.
And just to let them know, like, look, you can fucking do this.
You just go out and don't think about anything else but doing it.
All those other things are a trap.
All those other things are demons.
You've got to keep those demons at bay.
Don't entertain them.
Don't feed them.
Don't give them water.
Push them away.
They don't exist.
What you're going to concentrate on is repeating the mantra that you can do this and this is how you're going to do it.
Be in the moment and go do this.
And I helped a lot of people get through that show because of that.
And that is a primal thing.
That's the difference between someone who survives an encounter with a jaguar and someone who doesn't.
You know, someone who panics and freezes up and gets killed and someone who runs away.
Someone who figures out how to climb a tree.
Someone who figures out how to pick a rock and smash it in the head.
The difference between someone who encounters an incredibly difficult situation and learns from it or dies because of it.
That's a primal thing, man.
I mean, that is one of the reasons why we're here, is because people did confront predators.
And the reason why children are afraid at night of monsters is because we have genetics that were never above jaguars.
A person has been, they've prepared their entire life for this moment.
And it's not just the no way that you get when you're getting bit by a shark, but it's also knowing that that no way is coming every fucking day, getting up at 5 a.m.
when the alarm clock goes off and eating healthy and running and making sure you get the right amount of rest and take the right amount of vitamins and all that knowing that you have that instinct to say no way, but so does he.
You're going to have to control your body, control your mind, develop your skills, and have an intelligent approach to this very difficult task in front of you.
Like, who's going to be the one that controls the situation?
Who's going to get the first pick of the girls?
Who's going to get, you know...
Who gets to pick on people and get away with it?
That is a part of being a human being.
And it's also a part of being a human being that, as you said, is developing in a society where children are not being raised correctly.
If a child grows up with martial arts, As a young boy, you'd be incredibly embarrassed to be a bully because that is the worst thing you could ever be in a martial arts class.
I am a black belt in jiu-jitsu and I roll on a regular basis, roll meaning spar, with people who are complete novices.
But the point is, if I humiliated them or beat them up or something like that, It would be a massive embarrassment for my school, a massive embarrassment for me as a martial artist.
Everyone in class would hate me because of it.
There are people like that that do bully and try to hurt lesser ranks or novices.
Those people are kicked out of class.
There's no place for them in martial arts.
It's about developing character and then about representing that development of character, like having honor and having respect.
And if kids learned that at an early age, there'd be no bullying in class.
There would be none of that.
There's always going to be people picking on people and people making fun of people, but bullying is specific, like ganging up on people and tinninating them.
That is one of the scariest aspects of growing up.
And it motivates a lot of martial artists to learn.
And that's what motivated me.
So ultimately it's like this terribly negative force channels itself into an incredibly positive thing that really became a developing factor for every aspect of my life.
It became a real vehicle, I love to use the phrase, a vehicle for developing human potential.
You find out, because it's so difficult, you find out what you can do, and then other things become easier.
There was a famous karate master who once said that the karatikas are not nicer.
They're just tired from training.
They avoid these things because it's too hard to just get up for it.
But I think that human beings have a massive amount of what I call chimp DNA, the monkey instincts.
There's a massive amount of those that are not being represented by the way we live our lives.
The bodies that we have are essentially the same bodies as the humanoids that lived 100,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago.
There's very little variation.
And the need for physical movement and the need for just activity and all these different hormones and chemicals that your body just naturally produces, they have to be satisfied.
They have to be moved around.
And I think it's a huge part of balancing your perspective in life, balancing your view of the world, just to exercise these things out of your system.
And for boys especially, a huge, huge part of being sane.
Yeah, certainly learning how to manage aggression is really important.
I think one of the, yeah, I'm a strong atheist, and I think one of the things that was really harmful about religion was this idea that we are antibody, that we are souls trapped in this prison of the flesh, and we're, you know, aimed to be these rockets that rise up to meet the glory above and so on, because I think that gave us this...
Feeling that the body is somehow, and it's very explicit in some forms of Christianity and other religions too, that the body is Satan's device to draw you away from God, the lusts and all that, all the stuff that the comedians make fun of and celebrate, I think.
It's very pro-body, right?
Because it's funny and it's an enjoyable place to be.
And I think that this hostility towards, it's called in philosophy the mind-body dichotomy, that we're this glorious mind tracked to this horrible fleshly corpse kind of thing.
I think it's really, really unhealthy.
And I didn't really get that when I was young.
When I was 20, I went to the National Theatre School.
I was going to be an actor and a playwright.
I did some of that for a bit, but what they did there, which I thought was amazing, was real body work, which I'd never been exposed to before.
I grew up in England.
England's relationship to the body is crazy.
I haven't even cleaned their teeth with that.
I love the taste of gingivitis in the morning.
It smells like empire.
When I did this bodywork, which was like the Alexandra Technique, which is a body repositioning technique, we did gymnastics, we did sword fighting, we did stage fighting and all that kind of stuff, which is in some ways more challenging.
We did stretching and I got into yoga and stuff like that.
And I'm always encouraging this in my show, because I deal with a pretty hyper-intellectual audience, and I keep trying to remind people, you know, drive your brain back into the body.
Drive your brain back into the body.
That is a seat of everything that you are.
And, you know, if that doesn't do well, you're not going to do well in the long run.
And don't split yourself off from the body, but there's this weird thing in society where we are somehow not our bodies.
And it has to do with the soul idea we're going to continue afterwards.
And I don't think I'm going to have any more reality after I'm dead than I did before I was born, which is to say not at all.
And this is where we are.
And I really try to encourage people to really root themselves in that.
You know, we have a second brain called the gut, which is almost as complex as the one we've got up here.
People say, I've got a gut instinct.
That's real.
That's not an imaginary thing.
There's this great book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink.
You should pick it up if you haven't read it.
Yeah, okay, so when he says, you know, people get stuff, like, so incredibly quickly.
And that's not an intellectual process.
That is a full-body process.
And I think the people, you know, in terms of you saying, how do we heal the world?
I think our bodies detect immorality a lot quicker than our brains do.
Like, yeah, I have those people, they come around, you're like, Oh man, there's something not right about this guy.
I don't know if body language, they may look perfectly normal or whatever, but there's a slight vacancy in the eyes or something like that or an overly stiff body posture or something like that.
I think that if we could see I think we can see those people, but I think we can mostly see them with the body, not with the brain.
Because the brain, we can talk ourselves in and out of stuff.
But the body, I think, really connects at a very visceral level with The people around us.
And I think if we could train people to be more in the body, I think they'd be better at detecting bullshit and better at detecting bad people and shunning them.
And then we'd kind of isolate them and quarantine them, not breathe with them, not have them over fucking up our kids.
And I think then we'd be able to pass that gene out of the pool, so to speak.
There's this great therapy called internal family systems therapy, which basically says that we don't have a single self.
We are a competing ecosystem of our parents and those who want stuff from us and some of our own needs, which is also to please those who want stuff from us.
It's all competing.
If you think that you've got one ego, you end up being a kind of tyrant.
Because all these other voices in your head that are telling you to do stuff or encouraging you to do stuff, kind of clamp them down because we need unity.
But I think the idea that we are always in a state of negotiation with ourselves is really positive.
I spent years in therapy and I think it's just fantastic to work for that kind of approach that we have.
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I call it the Mico system, like me is an ecosystem.
And of course, if you can negotiate with yourself, I think you'll end up with a society where people negotiate with each other.
I think that the people who are tyrannical with their own identity end up being tyrannical with others.
I think that the way the world is out there is very much a mirror of the way we live internally.
And if we can be more at peace in negotiating with ourselves and recognize that we should not have a single dominant authority within ourselves, but everything is a negotiation, you know, do I want to work out or do I want to have a nap?
I mean, I have those negotiations with myself all the time.
And that way I can negotiate with my wife and my daughter and my listeners and all that.
And I don't have a tyrannical part of myself that says, well, you've just got to do this, goddammit, no matter what.
Because I'm always afraid that if that's the way it is for me in here, that's how it's going to translate to the world out there.
I always feel that the The most massive structures in the world are the governments, states, armies, and all that.
Just a reflection of how we deal with ourselves internally.
And I think trying to get people to relax about how they deal with themselves internally and negotiate more than dictate, I think is really important.
I'm completely rambling, but I hope that makes sense to you.
Being rigid and not being able to be flexible about things is also a huge issue.
The ability to alter your ideas about things and not feel like you're a loser because you changed your mind.
The ability to admit mistakes and to be able to express where the mistake went wrong and what you believe now.
I think that's very important.
One of the things that I see in people that I admire is the ability to admit you're wrong, the ability to admit mistakes, the ability to admit personal failures, and then the ability to grow from learning about that mistake.
One of the things that I find to be one of the most incredibly weak and Intolerable things is someone who cannot admit they're wrong.
One of my favorite writers is Charles Dickens, or you take Shakespeare.
Charles Dickens wrote like 35 novels, of which like four or five are famous.
So he's the best novelist that we've ever produced as a species, and he's got a success rate of 20%.
You know, Shakespeare wrote like 54 plays, hundreds of sonnets, and of his plays, maybe 10 are like regularly produced, you know, the Hamlets, Othellos, Motion to Venice and all that.
So he had a success rate of about 20%.
So the greatest conceivable geniuses in human history have a success rate of about 20%.
I've had some of my biggest breakthroughs from failures.
From my disgust in the failure or my discontent and my recognizing where I went wrong and then my re-energizing and refocusing.
Like my stand-up comedy failures.
I can literally point to the moments on stage like the worst bombings in the history of my career and then the giant leaps that I made in progress after that.
It's always been the case.
And now, to this day, if I have a set that's not so good, I recognize that I hate that, so I will now refocus, and that this is a good thing.
Because this taught me, well, you got a little sloppy there, or you got overwhelmed by responsibilities, or you didn't put enough focus in it, whatever it was.
Now is the time to recognize that just like every other time in the past, you are now going to grow, and you'll be better than you ever were before.
I did one show, and I thought I did the right research, but I didn't at all.
I did a show on healthcare, and then this woman who was a doctor, who was pretty high up in the profession, she wrote me this long email detailing every single thing that I got wrong in my show.
And so what I did was, you know what, I'll just read this whole email.
I correct myself all the time on the podcast because a lot of times during the podcast, We're completely talking out of our ass.
I remember something.
And now I go, hold on, let me Google that.
I'll constantly Google things.
When in the middle I go, okay, I'm full of shit.
Because actually they proved it in 1972 that this is, you know, and I think that's really, really, really important.
Especially when you have this weird responsibility, like, as I know that you do, you have a massive following online and a lot of people very much respect your opinions and your thoughts on things and consider them very highly.
So when you say something or you go over something and then it turns out that it was incorrect or your original assumption was based on some bad information, it's so important to be flexible like that.
It's so important to be honest like that.
And so that people recognize that you're a human being and everyone who's listening is a human being and we're all essentially in the same boat together.
One of us may have focused more on a particular topic or one of us may have more talent in a particular area.
Especially when you put out a lot of shows, you're just going to get stuff wrong, and you can't be an expert in everything, and that's no question that you have to read.
And you also want to model that behavior for people, right?
Because if you're the defensive guy who can't admit that he's wrong, The kind of people who are going to end up being comfortable with you are not the kind of people you want to have around.
Oh, this guy never admits he's wrong.
He's an okay guy for me.
You want to have that force field that repels the people who want that because that's not a good place to be.
I have a very critical forum and sometimes critical in a bad way.
There's a lot of cunty behavior, a lot of people are just really negative people, but a lot of really intelligent people too that I really rely on.
Sometimes if I have a show that doesn't go well or if I Something happens or there's a dispute about something.
I like the criticism.
I think it's hugely important, especially if it's honest and it's intelligent, because that wasn't available before.
And one of the resources of the internet that's so fantastic to me is that you can get opinions and you can get intelligent ideas from people that you would never be able to contact with 10, 20, 30 years ago.
You just wouldn't be able to.
And now you can get them and you can interact with them in real time and it's a beautiful thing and it's so enriching and it's so important for your personal growth and for the growth of anything you're trying to do to have these intelligent people giving their point of view.
You may or may not agree and that's one of the things I find along the way.
I'll read a really intelligent review of why something that I did was not right and I'm like, I see where you're coming from but I disagree entirely.
I can respect that, but I don't like that.
I don't like this that you're saying is good.
I don't like Smashing Pumpkins.
I don't like Grateful Dead.
There's a lot of things that a lot of people like that I don't like.
My temptation, though, I've got to tell you, my weakness is, oh, Joe, you've got to stop me if I do this.
I want to nitpick back, nitpick back.
So I talk to a lot of libertarians, and libertarians, God love them.
Greatest people in the world, but if you make one factual slip, like six million guys are going to come down with you, like wiki references coming out their eyeballs.
So the other day, I was like, I said something about tigers in Africa, right?
You know, and like six million people emailed me, Dear God, how can you believe that there are tigers in Africa?
I really felt that this was essential to add to you.
And I don't know if you ever figured this one out, but I watched the stuff you did on circumcision.
Because we did, it was Mike's idea actually, we did a video on circumcision as well, which started off with a video of someone getting circumcised, a baby.
And it's like, if you can watch that and still go ahead with it, I mean, Lordy, check yourself in and get some meds, right?
But you had a question about, because I think in the show, We got the opinion that women said that sex with uncircumcised penises was better.
I think you were looking that up in the show, and I don't know if you ever got the answer, but I think we found the answer through various experimentation with fruits and vegetables.
I'm kidding.
But what it is is because the foreskin makes less friction for the woman.
Because when you thrust, the foreskin has some give.
So it's less friction-y for the woman, and because it's less friction-y, it's more comfortable.
Because, you know, it's just kind of rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, right?
So you thrust, and the foreskin has give back and forth, and so it doesn't stress the woman's vagina as much through that friction.
That's apparently...
Which is why I think guys who are circumcised need more lubricants and stuff like that.
You know, like a good spray of WD-40 before you go in or whatever it is, but...
The penile cancer thing, even the American Society of Pediatrics, because they say, you put penile and cancer together, you usually will get a man's attention.
I mean, sorry to put it bluntly, and you have to put shit in to wedge it, because the baby's born with the force being adhered, physically adhered to the penis.
But she realized at that moment, like this is not happening.
And she packed up our stuff and we were gone.
But I'll never forget the feeling of disappointment.
When you're a child you hope that your father is a hero and to know that he's not.
So I think for me it was this very young introduction to close violence.
Violence within the household was sort of a defining factor why I was terrified of violence and why I wanted to learn to defend myself really early on.
The idea that someone could just do that to you or that someone could do that to their wife or someone could do that to my mother.
And do you as a dad, I mean, I know me as a dad, I mean, the idea that I would ever see that look on my daughter's face where I would fall from grace, doesn't that terrify you?
It terrifies me.
I mean, I'm not like...
You know, constantly trying to be like some statue of perfect fatherhood or whatever, but the idea that I would disappoint my daughter in that fundamental way where she'd have that crossroads with me and no longer look at me in that same, you know, look up to kind of way.
You know, I couldn't imagine, you know, I mean, If I even raised my voice to my daughter, it's like, come on, seriously, you can't do that.
You can't hit each other.
You can't throw things through a window.
The idea of hitting my daughter is insane.
It's alien.
It's impossible.
And the idea of hitting my wife is so completely out of the idea of what's possible.
I wonder what my feelings would be if I didn't grow up in a house of violence.
I wonder if it wouldn't be so repulsive to me, having actually physically experienced it in person up close.
But I did.
So I was inexorably...
That's a part of my psyche.
That being a negative thing, that being a horrific crime, And there's also just a weakness.
Like, I'll never forgive a man that's willing to do that, to hit a woman like that.
It's just so weak.
It's so incredibly weak.
It's just such a failure of character and such a negative, selfish impulse to hit someone like that.
One of the major things that's wrong in human interaction is the ability to hurt each other, to wantonly reach out and injure each other and hate and express our ignorance in such a violent and selfish way.
I'm sure you do too, but I feel that even more strongly with parents to kids.
We're so much bigger.
My wife can leave me.
Your wife can leave you anytime if you're a jerk, right?
Your kids can't.
They got nowhere to go.
They can't just say, well, that's it.
I'm getting a divorce from you, Dad, and I'm going to go find a better dad.
But they have nowhere to go.
They have no choice.
They're so tiny.
And I think violence always makes you smaller than your victim.
And I calculate I'm going to hit a four-year-old.
I mean, are you really so far out of options as an adult with all the choice in the world that you actually have to end up hitting someone so tiny and dependent?
I was reading some account of a guy who was losing custody of his child.
Him and the wife had gotten divorced.
And I was reading this articulate, well-written account of the horrors of the legal system until I came upon this thing where he said that his daughter went back, the daughter was three, went back to the wife and told of a mild spanking that he gave her.
You're a douchebag.
You're a lying douchebag.
You're a piece of shit.
You spank your baby.
And what you're doing here is manipulating reality with your blog to try to paint yourself out to be a victim.
You're a fucking kid, man.
I don't care if it's a mild spanking.
You don't mildly spank a fucking three-year-old when you're a grown man.
It's nonsense.
It's crazy.
You don't have to do that.
They throw a temper tantrum, hover over them, communicate with them until it's over, and then give them a hug and say, I love you no matter what.
I know it gets frustrating.
I've had frustrations.
That's the number one thing that I always do when I communicate with my kids.
I always tell them, when I was your age, I was even worse at that.
When I was your age, I used to lie all the time.
When I was your age, I used to do this all the time.
I always wanted to be first.
I always was selfish.
I wanted to have all the toys.
But then I realized that when you share toys, it makes it better.
It's hard to realize that as a four-year-old, but one day you're going to figure it out.
The categorization and this thing that we do where we make one thing better than another thing, even though it's exactly the same, like spanking is better than beating, you know, but they're the same goddamn thing, you know?
Like, how about this, I mean, it's sort of unrelated, but not really, this thing that's going on with With this deploring of chemical weapons, that somehow or another murdering people with chemicals in that fashion is way worse than using drones.
These robots that shoot Hellfire missiles into buildings and kill 98% innocent.
I mean, it's fucking terrifying shit, but yet Obama will be on TV talking about how these chemical weapons, we have to deplore the actions of a father holding his children, begging for them to get up.
What about the fucking kids you blew up from the sky?
What about rockets launched from robots like some Orwellian nightmare flying around cities with night vision where someone's got a remote controller in Nevada and they're pressing the fire button and launching these missiles?
This idea that we need to take military action.
We need to kill because people have killed.
We need to go murder innocents because innocents have been murdered.
And you know, I mean, the terrifying thing about, it's not just American weapons, it's modern weapons in general, is the fact that they will fuck with entire populations' genetics.
Like, this is something, I just did this study, this sort of Review of the Syrian stuff and America's outrage at chemical weapons.
Without even getting into Vietnam, where millions of people were destroyed by these unbelievably horrendous weapons.
The only thing America didn't use was mustard gas and nuclear weapons.
Everything else, they just threw from bombers down on this population.
In Fallujah, in 2007, they used this white phosphorus, which is basically just exploding glue that melts human beings.
And they just fired it indiscriminately into the city.
And they use these depleted uranium shells, because they're good at piercing armor, of which there really wasn't much of in Iraq anyway.
But this stuff has a half-life longer than the planet itself.
And it so screws with the genetics of the population, because it goes into the dust, it goes into the lungs.
There's been a 600% increase in leukemia.
And in the years after this Fallujah attack, run by America, by the special forces, by the army, 50% of the children were born with birth defects.
And a guy, a geneticist who's gone to study the city, says that he's never seen a more compromised, is a nice way of putting it, basically a more fucked up genetic population.
This is going to go on for generations.
These genes have been completely destroyed by these weapons.
And then they're saying, well, you know, this guy in Syria, he used these chemical weapons and so on.
It's like, but at least that stuff is not going to completely rewrite the genetic code of the population for generations to come.
And I had to apologize to people because I was talking about where they used all these depleted uranium and all these guys from Serbia, right, and say, well, we don't count?
I mean, come on.
I mean, they used it with us, too, with the same effects.
And then that's also the cause of this gulf war syndrome that all these people have come back with horrible illnesses that mirror radiation sickness and then the government has denied them medical treatment and said there's nothing wrong here, there's nothing going on here.
Yeah, you know, that old joke about BMWs, what's the difference between I'm going to tell a joke to a comedian, so I'm going to talk to a porcupine and a BMW and then a porcupine and the pricks are on the outside.
Other than the BMW factor, very, very nice people.
That's also always going to be the case when people are privileged or when they have more money or when they feel like they've worked harder and the other people are weak and lazy.
Not only that, it's one of those things that when you see someone on a camera, you see them on a screen, you see them and this weird alpha male primate thing that we have where we think that the person who gets to talk is special.
The person that's on camera is special because that would be like the leader of the tribe or something.
There's this weird They've sort of hijacked our human reward system with media.
And so because of that, when you see someone who's on film and someone's crying, you give them incredible accolades.
Because he was such a brilliant guy and so good at ad-libbing.
That what he would do is we had an amazing executive producer, Paul Simms, brilliant, brilliant guy who created the show, the head writer and executive producer, and a great writing staff as well.
But Paul was really open to us experimenting.
So they would give us a framework, they would give us a script, but Dave would rewrite entire scenes.
And so, so much of what we did on that show was ad-lib, almost maybe 50%.
So it wasn't just about reading people's lines being easier.
It's just an easier gig.
It's easy.
So my stumbling into a sitcom, it was because of a bunch of lucky factors.
Luck number one, that they saw me on MTV. They got to saw my comedy special, or MTV, Half Hour Comedy Hour, when I was on This television show where I did like 10 minutes.
They saw that and it went well.
And then I got these opportunities that just opened up from that.
And then this show came about and then I got on it.
It was a show that was already created.
So it was all luck.
That was all luck.
And the idea that you get that successful after five years of doing stand-up is really, really rare.
Maybe you'll have a couple of good lines that you've accumulated or you've developed over the course of your life some observations that you think are really funny.
You wrote them down.
They might be valid.
They might be good.
And they might work a couple of times.
But not when people are paying.
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Not when people pay 30 bucks for a ticket and then they say, wait.
I mean, I was just amazed, because the hour and twenty that you were on stage last night, it flew by for me.
You know, and I mean, are you saying, according to your memory, it kind of flew by to you.
But I'm thinking, the amount of work, I mean, the amount of material that's written and discarded and tested and discarded, the amount of concentrated work that does an hour and twenty of making people laugh.
I mean, man, tip of the iceberg last night, huge amount of work underneath.
When I'm not working on other things, if I'm not doing the UFC or if I'm not working on my podcast, I am always thinking of stuff.
Like, is this funny?
Is this interesting?
But it's also, I've kind of designed my life In that the creation of material outside of the actual sitting down in front of the computer and writing, which is critical.
That has to be done.
That's one of the things that a lot of lazy comedians don't do.
You have to do the writing down notes and stuff is important too, but the actual sitting down and crafting the bits and putting them in order and figuring out a way.
You free ball when you're on stage and let it come when it's on stage because when you're on stage you never know what the hell can happen.
You have to be in the moment.
Like when the guy came up to me at the beginning of the show and handed me the hockey puck.
What the fuck are you doing?
And then it became like five minutes of me goofing on this guy.
Well, last night's set was particularly rich in ideas because some of the new things that I've been working on are...
There's a lot of stuff that I'm working on about this sort of weirdness of progressive thought lately, like this really aggressive progressiveness that's going on where people are denying reality and they're doing it so because they feel like people have been marginalized in the past, which is true, but it doesn't mean you spring it back the other way.
You say a bunch of stupid shit that doesn't make any sense.
These feminists are protesting These students, and screaming in their face, these students that want to go see this man talk about men's rights and about that you hate women and all this, and they're incredibly aggressive.
I think that absolutely if a man and woman get divorced, the man should pay child support.
Absolutely.
And if the woman was not working during the time of the marriage, I think there should be some sort of compensation, something fair and something reasonable.
And it's very true because, I mean, and then people call, oh my god, that's so terrible.
I just went through all the founding Matriarchs of the feminist system.
They're all Marxists, all leftists, and so on.
And also, if feminists are so pro-woman, then where are they with Margaret Thatcher?
Margaret Thatcher was like the first leader of a Western country.
She struggled up from nothing.
I mean, an incredibly powerful woman.
But she was on the right, you see, so they hate her.
What about Ayn Rand?
Ayn Rand wrote the most influential book outside the Bible and the second most Influential book, according to the New York Times Review, of books after the Bible, you know, reshaped Western philosophy in many ways and Western politics.
So, I mean, I have these sort of suspicions when they're sort of, is it the leftist ideology or the pro-woman?
Now, if it's the pro-woman, then they should be incredibly positive.
Where are the feminists when people insult people like Ann Coulter?
Where are the feminists when people insult Sarah Palin?
You know, like Bill Marver called her a cunt.
I mean, that's really pretty vicious, like publicly, openly, right?
I mean, because they're on the right, and they're considered to be on the right, so they get a pass when people go, you know, but you then say something bad about a woman on the left.
So I think that it is more left than it is pro-woman, because when they choose between their politics and the gender, they always seem to choose the politics over the gender, and that's why I say it's leftist rather than pro-woman.
I agree, and I think there's a lot of really emotional and non-objective thinking attached to feminism, and there's a lot of really strange...
One of the more recent ones that I find incredibly strange is there's this new trend of accusing men of rape if they have sex with a woman who has had something to drink.
This is a broad, sweeping thing that's going through the internet in a lot of these It's really weird because there's a lot of it in what they call a skeptical community.
The skeptical community seems to be integrated with a lot of male feminists and feminists, and this is something that they've adopted, this idea that somehow or another skepticism and this idea that they combine.
I don't know if you're aware of the case, the Michael Shermer thing?
But it's the idea of that being the skeptic community.
I mean, one of the things you learn as a skeptic when you're breaking down any idea Whether it's a religious idea or whether it's an idea about an event that took place is that a person's eyewitness account of any individual event is suspect and that it's one of the worst forms of evidence.
And it doesn't mean that a terrible thing didn't happen to this person.
But it does mean that if you look in the context of the way it was explained in this guy's blog is that she was put in a position where she couldn't consent.
What kind of weirdo language is that?
And then the corroborating evidence that he uses in this blog is that a woman went to a party with this guy and he kept getting her drinks and he was flirty and she got drunker than she usually does and that's it.
That's the corroborating piece of evidence that the man and a woman who are both adults were drinking together and she got drunk.
You talk about removing yourself from personal responsibility.
How is it possible that a person who believes in the power of being a woman could think that a woman is so much weaker than a man that she can't control how much liquor she consumes when she's around a man?
That the man somehow or another, by being with her and drinking with her, forces her to consume more than she normally would?
But that has taken, and this is a long dark road that as a man, and you know, I'm sorry that if you're a woman, it's really hard to get this.
We have had so much negativity over the past 40 or so years hurled at masculinity that, I mean, we were like half criminals just for breathing.
I mean, if you look at the role models on TV, how men are portrayed, you know, the Homer Simpsons and the American Dads.
Yeah, the Bundy.
We're all just idiots and sex-crazed and irresponsible and stupid.
And the amazing thing is that it's true that if you look at the bell curve of intelligence, for women, it kind of spikes in the middle.
So many more women are of average intelligence than men.
Now, you still have your brilliant women, you still have your dumb women.
But if you look at the bell curve of male intelligence, much flatter, which means that we have a lot more geniuses and a lot more complete idiots.
And what's happened is everybody's focused on the idiots among men and have completely begun to ignore all the brilliance that men bring to the world, all of the amazing, incredible inventions that men bring to the world.
And it's just we're focusing on this low cluster, which is incredibly biased.
It's like saying, okay, well, blacks in America, they commit a lot more crimes.
And we're just going to focus on that and say, that's all the blacks are.
That's all we're going to portray as blacks as criminals and blah, blah, blah.
That would be incredibly racist.
But the sexism of portraying men as idiots, because we happen to have more cluster as a gender on that side, and completely ignoring all of the incredible stuff that brilliant men bring to the world, is incredibly sexist, and it's really hard for people to see.
I mean, like, the idea that, you were talking earlier, the idea that a woman can competently raise children without a man around is just taken for granted now.
It's absolutely not true.
Men are essential to the healthy raising of children, but the idea that we would recognize that as a society is just, we're just, they're disposable.
It's also a very unfortunate situation in regards to feminism that a lot of people are dealing with their own personal experiences that they've had with a few asshole men in their lives in regards to them not being sexually attractive or not fitting into a certain social group or not.
And then they have somehow or another extrapolated that, that all men are pieces of shit and rapists or a massive amount of them need to be curbed and laws need to be changed and if you get drunk with a girl and you have sex with her, you're a rapist.
I mean, and a lot of this is based on their own negative interactions with men and the stereotype of feminism, unfortunately, There's a meme online, this is feminism.
And it's a woman holding up a sign saying, I'm a feminist.
And she's fucking 300 pounds.
And everyone's like, yeah, that's feminism.
Yeah, you're right.
It's a big fat ugly girl that no one's a fuck.
That's really unfortunate.
But the type of person that is a large, unattractive woman is going to deal with, immeasurably, it's going to be so much harder for her to find people who are sexually attracted to her, for her to find healthy relationships.
It's an unfortunate reality in this world that if you are not sexually attractive, you are not going to have as easy a ride when it comes to the opposite sex.
Well, I mean, but sexually attractive and 300 pounds, I mean, somebody who's 300 pounds is, for most people, going to be sexually unattractive.
But if they sort of lose weight and exercise, that's sort of a different matter.
That just comes down to a basic human competence.
But one of the things that I've thought of, like I grew up with a single mom, and we lived, because single moms are usually broke, right?
I mean, because it's a tough life.
And so when I grew up with a single mom, everyone around me has single moms as well.
You know what's interesting is that the kind of men who float through the single mom world, they're not always the best kind of men, right?
They're kind of trashy, right?
Because the really competent and successful and intelligent men aren't trolling the girlfriend farms at the single mom, you know, low rent housing ghettos, right?
And so I think what happens is a lot of these women have grown up In single mom households or in this sort of environment.
And so who are the men who are floating through that?
They tend to kind of be losers.
They tend to be pretty unstable.
They tend to be kind of parasitical.
They don't tend to be the very best specimens of masculinity.
And so I think the breakdown of the family has created an environment where a lot of girls growing up don't have a positive male role model in their life.
And the kind of men that they see floating through their mom's beds tend to be kind of trashy.
It's also very unfortunate that in the criticism of masculinity, you've removed a lot of allies by blanket generalizations of men.
You removed a lot of people like myself, who I can't support you on that, even though I'm an entirely pro-human being and pro-equality.
But when you make these mass generalizations and call someone a men's right advocate asshole, These are nonsense statements, and it's unfortunate that I guarantee you, and it's not saying that all feminists Feminists are unattractive, or all feminists are not sexually viable, but I guarantee you almost all of them have had a lot of negative experiences with men.
Yeah, but the problem is, you know, in Canada here, I had a guy on my show, a great guy, Bill Gairdner, who wrote The End of the Family, and he pointed out that There's a revolution that occurs, I think, that initially is necessary, and I think this is also with blacks in America, too.
There's a revolution that occurs that is initially necessary, but the whole point of a revolution is to defund itself, to end, right?
So, yeah, I mean, there was stuff that needed to be done.
Obviously, we talked about this earlier with blacks in the 60s and some stuff with...
Women is kind of different, right?
Because there's always been this women and children first, right?
The vast majority of the people who died on the Titanic were men, offering up their lifeboats to women, right?
Because there has been a sort of women and children first, and women have been kind of elevated.
There was no black people first in the South, right?
So it's a little bit different.
But there was, I think, some push for equality that needed to happen.
But then what happens is you get a lot of people who get heavily invested in this cause, and it becomes their ego, their identity, right?
Like, I fight for black rights, I fight for women's rights, and so on.
But then what happens is society will often listen and respond in a positive way.
And then what happens is that cause begins to diminish.
And people are like, you know, supporting, like, I'm not going to support the abolitionist cause cause slavery's ended.
Like, I'm just not going to do it.
It's over, right?
I mean, there may be other problems, but that's not the problem, right?
Like, I don't support a lot of, you know, let's deal with polio victims because we got this vaccine and we don't really have polio victims anymore, right?
So the whole point of a revolution is to defund itself, to end, for people to move on with their lives.
But what happens is when you have a government, you get these voting blocs and you get, like in Canada, over the last 10 or 15 years, the Canadian government's given $300 million to feminist groups.
That's not coming from Canadian women or Canadian men, for that matter, because, you know, a lot of it's kind of been dealt with.
But these groups continue by poking these scabs and by continuing these grievances and by finding the Trayvon Martin situation, blowing it up into a race war and all this kind of stuff.
A lot of the stuff has been dealt with, but because the government's still giving the money, they still need to whip up these kinds of hysterias just to justify their own existence.
I mean, the whole point of revolution is to end.
The whole point of, I want to deal with measles is get a vaccine and end measles.
You don't keep taking the same amount of money year after year, but if you have a government funding it, then you have to manufacture these grievances, which just keeps things going and getting worse.
They don't pretend to like a man because he's wealthy and hope to get pregnant with him either.
I mean, I don't see any feminists that are decrying that, and that's a horrible affront to womanhood to think that the only way that you can make a living is to lie to a man and make him Get you pregnant so that you can get money from them from then on.
I mean, feminists, true feminists should be horrified by that.
The false rape accusations, which in some studies are 20, 30 or 40 percent.
There's a study in the Air Force where they actually, even women who've withdrawn their accusations, 20, 30 or 40 percent of rape accusations, in some studies, who knows what it is universally, Are false.
I mean, how horrendous is that?
And women should be coming down so hard on women who make false rape accusations because they make it so much harder for the women who actually have been raped because then there's that problem or false paternity.
This football player who's recently been released, he got on tape, this girl admitting that she lied about him raping her, and her family received a million dollars, or $850,000, and now they have to pay the money back.
Yes, and this idea of withdrawing consent and that somehow or another you can do that and turn a guy into a rapist, that's a hating thing.
What you're doing is you're hating someone who's manipulative.
You're hating someone who can con you into bed.
But that's been what men have been trying to do since the beginning of time.
Like, you're hating the game of courting a woman.
And there have been men that wear shoes that they would never wear, and watches they would never buy, and cars they don't give a shit about, and apartment that they decorate just to get the woman to believe that they're like this.
It's all a lie.
My friend Brian, who you saw earlier tonight, last night, first show.
Brian Callen is a hilarious guy.
The first time I came over his house back when he was single, he had Jack Kerouac on the road, sitting on his night table, opened up with like...
You know, I've always, I have this thing when I say to people, and I think a lot of times we lie and pretend, a big part of us, because we're not happy with who we are.
We're not really, and we like to be, we like to wish that we were someone better.
I always tell people, be the person that you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid.
You want to really live your life optimally, you want to really be an admirable person, be the hero of your own story, and be the guy that you pretend to be when you try to get laid.
And you have to love yourself in order to be loved.
If you have all sorts of flaws that you don't fix and you don't like various aspects of yourself that you don't correct, What normal person in their sensible mind would want to engage in a long-term relationship with someone that's incredibly flawed, knows it, and does nothing about it?
Like, that sounds like a nightmare.
That sounds like taking on a dog that shits all over the house.
You know, you're just taking on a giant problem.
You gotta fix this person?
And some people do do that.
They take on projects.
You know, I mean, I have a friend who every fucking girlfriend he dates is always broken.
And you can never see that.
Your problem is, your own life is a mess.
And you don't want to deal with that.
So you bring people into your life that are more fucked up and you can fix that.
I mean, I think that is a huge part of what's wrong with people in relationships.
What's wrong with a lot of people in relationships is internal.
It's what's wrong with you.
What are you bringing into a relationship?
Until you're happy with who you are, until you're just a reasonable person who's objective about your own actions, And objective about your own path in life and enjoying your own path in life, you're not worthy of a healthy, happy relationship.
Well, and this is terrible, I think, dichotomy where, you know, women get married to guys hoping that they'll change and guys get married to women hoping that they won't.
You're not going to cut that long hair when you have kids, right?
You're going to keep exercising, right?
You're still going to look great and all that.
The idea that you're with someone in the hopes that they'll change is just completely insane.
It's like buying a Buick and hoping it's going to be a boat.
I have a friend and his girlfriend, he went to the bathroom and his girlfriend was confronted by my other friend's girlfriend about the kind of car he drives.
Because he drove a sports car, he had a Ferrari, he's a wealthy guy.
And the girlfriend was like, why do you let him drive that car?
He let him drive that car?
Yes, that was her words.
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Like, a guy driving a car like that is like, you know, he's like, he's a player.
Those people are not in my life anymore, but this woman was incredibly manipulative.
The guy was a wealthy, strong guy, but for whatever reason, this attractive woman came into his life and just started dominating him.
She didn't work.
He paid for everything.
And she wouldn't let him do shit.
She chose everything that he did.
She dressed him.
She bought clothes for him.
And he was not allowed to buy a sports car.
Not to say anything great about having a sports car, but I don't understand.
If you're going to be a capitalist, if you're going to be a materialist, which they clearly were in this big, giant house, you should be able to buy whatever fucking car you want.
If you're really going to bust your ass and work 12 hours a day, I'm not saying there's any great honor or nobility in buying a Ferrari, but if you really want a Ferrari and you've got a lot of money, buy a fucking Ferrari.
That reminds me, best moment in your Peter Joseph interview, because I'm doing a debate with him on Monday, because we have some slightly different ideas about how the future should go.
And we have a debate, and so I listened to your show with it, which is really enjoyable, and I love the bit.
He said, you know, they could make better cars.
The Ferrari, they could make that better.
And you're like, no.
They absolutely could not make that car any better than it is.
I think we all together can work things out by talking and exchanging ideas and exchanging opinions and agreeing and seeing each other's points of view.
I think we can help that way.
We can all help each other, but the idea that one person is going to be the moral authority or the voice of wisdom, it's a very dangerous position.
I mean, there's a few things that I'm comfortable saying people shouldn't do, but outside of that, I have no I have no idea what is going to make you the happiest in life.
I mean, yeah, don't steal, don't kill, don't rape.
Yeah, fine, fine, fine.
But even how many people really do that?
Not many, right?
But actually how people should live?
I mean, man, if we can start pointing guns at each other, if we can start having these crazy laws, stop throwing people in jail for the wrong bits of vegetation, I think that would be a great step forward.
Let's just start pointing guns at each other to get stuff done.
Outside of that, I have no idea what people should do to make themselves happy.
You sit there and say, what should I do with my day that's going to make me the happiest?
It's nice to have the choice or whatever, but as to what other people should do, who they should be with, and what careers they should follow, that's really impossible.
And one of the reasons is that they've conquered their ego to a certain extent and that they have a much better control over it because they're being checked over and over again on a daily basis in the gym.
And you'll sleep better that night because you didn't have a nap and scrub your cycle.
So just that kind of discipline is really lacking.
I think we used to have a lot more of it when we were really confronted with nature a lot more.
And now we live in this fuzzy city where you can get everything 24-7 and it's all easy to come by and so on.
And the materialism to me comes with the laziness and the laziness comes with the depth.
Because we talk about national debts and so on.
In America, and to some degree, it's almost as bad in Canada too.
People have debts way bigger than their income.
That's a laziness too.
Why not defer some gratification?
They've done a study on kids.
It's called the marshmallow study.
They take four-year-olds and they sit them down and they say, you can have two marshmallows now, or you can have four marshmallows if you have one now and wait.
Just have the discipline to do it when you don't feel like doing it.
The deferral of gratification, I'm sure with the training, there's times when you get your ass kicked or you pull the muscle and you're just like, well, I've got to go back and do it.
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Or there's times where like that cheesecake looks like I'm drooling like a tsunami here.
So you say that the fighters are like really great guys.
I think it's because they probably really work that muscle of discipline to the point where they have a coach, they have a set of personal responsibilities, and they don't let themselves step outside of that.
And so there's a kind of security in people who have a lot of discipline in whatever field it is that they're working in.
I really like being around people who've got a lot of discipline because you know they're not just going to do some random shit.
I know you said yours is a little bit, you know, grab what you can as far as your career goes and a little bit on the less than planned side, but do you have sort of an idea of where you want to go?
There's no, there's no, like, you're never a total master.
It's not possible.
I mean, you, you can teach and you, you have a certain amount of, like, there's certain moves that I can, uh, teach someone in Jiu Jitsu, but could I teach you Jiu Jitsu mastery?
Something you have to pursue on your own and most likely you'll never achieve.
You might be masterful over one particular skill level, but then someone else come along that is much more skillful than you and master you.
It's a constant series of levels and it's fairly infinite.
And then there's also the physical challenges and athletic ability and all sorts of intangibles that different people bring to the equation.
But I think that in pursuit of those things is where you find yourself.
And that the really interesting aspects of it is the growth that you achieve in those things, whether it's through the growth in writing or comedy or anything difficult, those things manifest themselves in the rest of your life as well.
I think it's broadened my perspective immensely to be able to have these kind of conversations like you and I sitting down here for hours just chatting.
I think it's really difficult to pull off in the real world.
Unless we're agreeing to have a podcast, it's really hard to just set aside three hours where we're just going to talk.
It wasn't really my thing, but it was fun to go up and try.
I always like doing that sort of stand on the cliff edge thing.
But I love stand-up.
I think what you guys do is like fantastic.
I think it's just a real ray of sunshine in human life.
And what you give is you give permission for people to be funny themselves, to have fun, and the joy that you guys have.
The one of the things I love most about stand-up, you know the breaking bit, and you did it a couple of times last night, where you You did something that's so funny that you yourself found it funny because maybe it was unrehearsed or something spontaneous or you had a thought because that seeing somebody have joy in the moment is really, really enjoyable.
There's some people that do like fake breaks and they'll laugh at their jokes a fucking billion times in a row and every time you'll see them they'll laugh at it the same way.
It's kind of gross.
But last night I was working on a bunch of new stuff, so that was one of the reasons why I thought it was so funny.
Yeah, and going back and forth with the crowd, it's really amazing to see the energy that you have.
I think people don't see the kind of energy that a really energized stand-up comedian has.
They may see it at a rock show, whether it's the lead singer or some Freddie Mercury stuff or whatever, right?
But when you go to see stand-up, you see somebody who's really putting out a lot of energy.
And I think it reminds people that they can be incandescent.
They don't have to be like these dull embers, which most people trudge through their vase and their cubicles and whatever, right?
Just dragging themselves around.
But I think seeing people really energized, it reminds you that it's inspiring.
It reminds you that you can be.
That you can be powerful, that you can be commanding, that you can be generous.
Because stand-up comedy is very generous, in my opinion, because it's so vulnerable.
I mean, you're out there, like, I'm either going to get a laugh or not.
You know, like I did the acting, and I didn't do much comedy.
I did some, but I mostly did, like, the serious stuff.
And if the theater's quiet, you can just pretend that they're really moved and, you know, crying and all this sort of stuff.
But if you're going for laughter, I mean, it's there or it's not.
It's hanging out there, right?
I'm not going to tell you your job because of course you know it a million times better than I do, but what I really love about the stand-up is just that openness, the honesty, the vulnerability, and the energy.
It's funny that you just call it generous because a lot of people think of it as selfish because the only reason why you're being vulnerable is because you're hoping that you're going to get a laugh.
I'd forgotten about him because, you know, I try to blank out on politics as much as possible because I know it's like dandelion fluff in the wind that'll sting your eyes.
I wanted to ask you, because I... This is something that I ask of pretty much anybody who I think is a thinker, looking at this crazy life that we live.
Do you have a positive outlook for humans, for culture?
Do you think that we're going to work this out?
Are you a Voice of Doom guy?
Or do you think like, you know what, I think this is actually moving in the right direction, ultimately.
After so many words, in the most important question, I give you one word.
I think that the world will go how the most important and energetic people will make it go.
Right?
So, I don't believe that I'm along for the ride.
I am not a big movement in history kind of guy, you know, like Hegelians or Marxists, sort of, you know, bullshit and technical, but they all believe that these big historical movements and, you know, the zeitgeists I don't believe that.
I believe in the single great willpower individual theory of history.
That when people who have ability and intelligence and passion and commitment, they're the ones who make the world go in a particular direction, right?
Founding Fathers did it one way, and it went, I think, in a pretty positive direction.
You know, once the slaves and women got caught up with the all men are equal kind of thing, it went in a pretty positive direction.
If you look at Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, it went in a very bad direction.
If you look at the Soviets, the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin and company, it went in a seriously bad direction.
It killed like 70 million people in the Soviet Empire, right?
But these are all individuals.
They're all individuals with particular abilities making choices.
So I don't believe that the world is going to get better unless people who can make it get better.
I think in entropy as things get worse, right?
I mean, the lowest common denominator and the worst demagogues tend to take over, but you can really fight against that.
I'm a single hero of history.
You take a stand as best you can and you shine that light as bright as possible.
And then most people will simply go one way or another based upon the willpower of the individuals that they listen to and the clarity and the focus and humility of the people they listen to.
So I think that it goes the way we want it to go, but it's not going to go there unless we make it go to a better place.
If you choose a contract, then you're bound by that contract.
I don't think you have to, but you're kind of a dick if you don't.
If you're like, oh, I don't want to give that guy tracheotomy because this ravioli is really good, even though you could and saved the guy's life, it's not like you should be thrown in jail for that, but it's really douchey.
And I think if you have verbal abilities and you have skills and you have energy and you have education and you have some capacity, given now how easy it is to broadcast to the world, By God, you kind of owe it to the future.
You know, because all the great stuff that we have was people putting themselves on the line in the past.
You know, all the great, like the freedoms we have, the political freedoms, all people fighting hard, and a hell of a lot harder than we have to fight.
You know, the guys, the founding fathers, they faced down the British Army, for God's sakes.
They could have gotten muskets through the head, right?
Musket balls through the head.
What have we got?
Oh, maybe some people might say bad things about me online.
It's not exactly Joan of Arc stuff, right?
So we have an incredible platform.
We have so little downside.
To bringing light to the world.
That's what drives me every day.
Especially when you become a dad.
Your whole time frame extends.
It's not about your life.
It's about, my daughter's going to outlive me for 40 years, I hope.
50 years.
It really is about I just can't let the assholes take over.
Because assholes love to be in charge.
And the problem is good people aren't that bossy.
Because good people live and let live and I don't want to be in your face and in your business and all that kind of stuff.
And so the problem is that bad people are just anal and motivated and douchey and power hungry and they just work like assholes to get power over others.
And good people are like, well, I really want that power because I'm happy and I'm in love and, you know, I've got a great life and so I really don't want to boss everyone else around.
But we have, through this technology, we don't have to have political power to have an effect.
And we don't have to be a professor and teach maybe 5,000 people in our whole career or write some book that maybe 10,000 people read.