July 11, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:53:58
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| Abandon. | ||
| Three. | ||
| Two. | ||
| And we're live. | ||
| What's up, buddy? | ||
| Hey, how are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you? | |
| I'm very sorry about that sound of the thing in the background, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You hear that? | |
| Listen. | ||
| That's annoying. | ||
| We'll shut that off. | ||
| Can we shut that off? | ||
| Sure, go ahead. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can you shut it off, Jamie? | ||
| That is because there was smoke in this room. | ||
| And the Godfather has an issue with the smoke. | ||
| How did you get over your asthma? | ||
| Around puberty, it often subsides, especially if you're quite athletic, which I was. | ||
| And then it completely went away by about 13 and only came back by about 25. But now I'm not full-blown asthmatic. | ||
| Only when I get sick, if I, let's say, get a cold, it will migrate to my chest, turn into bronchitis, and what will take you four days to fight might take me a month of whooping cough. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| That's why I'm really careful about not getting a cold, you know? | ||
| You must be a hand washer. | ||
| Well, that's why when I came out of the bathroom, my instinct was to tell Jamie as I was shaking his hand, I washed my hands, because I'm always careful about shaking other people's hands, so I'd like to extend them the same courtesy. | ||
| Yeah, man, I shake some people's hands, and it's like they just dunked it in the pool. | ||
| Some people, like, they get so sweaty, and you shake their hand, you go, whoa, okay, but what's going on with this hand? | ||
| Like, what kind of weird bacteria? | ||
| I read this article that was saying that water bottles, when you reuse a water bottle, they've tested them, and they say that there's less bacteria on dog toys. | ||
| It's pretty bad. | ||
| Well, that's why, by the way, I've resorted to fist bumping. | ||
| Not because I'm cool, but it just reduces the amount of germ transfer from one person to the other by just going like this. | ||
| But don't you think that that compromises your immune system by not exposing it to a lot of different things? | ||
| I mean, there is actually research on this, right? | ||
| From evolutionary medicine, kids who grow up in very sterile environments end up suffering from greater respiratory ailments precisely because their system hasn't been kicked up. | ||
| Yeah, I believe that. | ||
| I rarely get sick, and I shake a lot of hands, but I know a lot of people that don't, and they're kind of sick all the time. | ||
| Like, I don't want to get sick. | ||
| I'm like, but maybe that's what's going on. | ||
| Maybe we'll French kiss later after. | ||
| Ooh, exciting. | ||
| Don't you threaten me with a good time. | ||
| I think it's also really important, I don't know how much you partake of this, but to consume probiotics, do you eat acidophilus or yogurt or... | ||
| I do like yogurt. | ||
| I do like kimchi. | ||
| I don't do it by design. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think maybe just those preferences are healthy and so I'm happy to hear that they are good probiotics and for grapplers in particular. | |
| Grapplers are very particular about the consumption of probiotics because we get a lot of ringworm. | ||
| And also staph infections, too. | ||
| There's a lot of different infections that people can get from, especially ringworm, though. | ||
| Staph infections is really more from an open cut. | ||
| But having healthy skin flora is very important. | ||
| That's why, all you kids listening, don't use antibiotic soap. | ||
| It's not the right way to go. | ||
| There's a lot of healthy soaps that use like tea tree oil and eucalyptus that are really good for you that are probiotic. | ||
| Keep the idea of worm in mind because later I'd like to talk about brain worms and how it relates to a condition that is affecting the West. | ||
| We can get into it now. | ||
| Brain worms? | ||
| You mean like toxoplasma? | ||
| That would be one. | ||
| Yeah, there's other ones? | ||
| There are many others. | ||
| Do you want to get into that now? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I had Sapolsky. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And I should write to him. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| He is amazing. | ||
| I wrote to him a while ago, maybe a year and a half or two years ago, but at the time to come on my show. | ||
| But he was, I think, very busy writing a few books, which I'm guessing he's probably done with now. | ||
| Well, he was busy then. | ||
| We had to meet him in L.A. in his hotel room. | ||
| To be able to. | ||
| We only had an hour. | ||
| He literally landed, got into his hotel room. | ||
| We went with him as he opened up the door to his hotel. | ||
| We sat down with him. | ||
| There was just a little table and chair there. | ||
| Yeah, he's fantastic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so basically I argue that in the same way that there are all sorts of animals that once they are infected with this brain worm, and there are different instantiations of it, They become zombified, right? | ||
| Just to give you another example, the spider wasp will sting the spider, which is much bigger than it, rendering it zombified. | ||
| It then carries it into its burrow, lays its eggs. | ||
| On the in vivo spider. | ||
| And then when the eggs hatch, they eat it in vivo. | ||
| And I argue that the political correctness is akin to the spider wasp's sting because it zombifies us into walking quietly to the abyss of infinite darkness while horrible things are happening around us. | ||
| But while we think that we're doing the right thing. | ||
| While we think that, yeah, we're being not racist and good and progressive. | ||
| But to go back to the brain worm idea, so... | ||
| I coined the term, not to be cute, but to actually name this collective condition. | ||
| I call it Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome. | ||
| Yeah, we've talked about this before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did we talk about it? | |
| Do you know that that's a myth? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's become just a metaphor for, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| The myth being folks that ostriches don't really stick their head in the ground. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it's really taken on a life of its own at this point. | ||
| I'm actually thinking of studying this scientifically, not just as something that I talk about in my public engagement. | ||
| What is it that causes some people to be more likely to be parasitized by the types of mindsets that would cause you to suffer from Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome? | ||
| So a classic example would be, which I guess we'll get into... | ||
| How much evidence do you need to see around the world that there might be some religious ideology that is somewhat problematic and antithetical to secular, liberal, modern values? | ||
| How much information or what is the type of information that you would need to see before you're able to arrive to such a conclusion? | ||
| And so one of the things I'm thinking of doing is to formally Quantify a score of OPS, how much somebody suffers from OPS, as a type of mindset, and what are some predictors that could help us understand who is more or less likely to be afflicted by this mindset? | ||
| Well, there's certain people that just never want to hurt anyone's feelings, except when they think that it is within their rights to attack that person, because that person is somehow or another victimizing someone else, and then they'll be far more egregious than the original offense. | ||
| Did you know about that guy in Canada that's getting sued? | ||
| Well, the Human Rights Council fined him $12,000 because he walked into an apartment that he owned with shoes on because there was a Muslim family living there. | ||
| Their lease was up, and he was looking to rent the apartment. | ||
| They stopped responding to his texts. | ||
| And so he opened up the apartment to show this apartment that he owns, and because he walked into a building that he owns with his shoes on, he has to pay them $12,000 for failing to accommodate their religious practices while showing their apartment to prospective tenants. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Welcome to Canada. | ||
| We just had a thing called Motion M103. Are you familiar with this? | ||
| Look at this statement, though. | ||
| I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the Human Rights Count Tribunal of Ontario also found that he harassed them and created a poisoned housing environment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| There you go. | ||
| Because he refused to remove his shoes. | ||
| Some sensibilities are more equal than others. | ||
| But that is just... | ||
| Why is it that people are so... | ||
| Especially and particularly with Muslims. | ||
| You'll notice that there's a lot of people that are... | ||
| They will accuse everyone of Islamophobia, yet they'll shit on Christians. | ||
| It's really common. | ||
| It's not that they believe in religious freedom. | ||
| It's that they have a pet cause. | ||
| And the pet cause is almost like being a contrarian to a lot of far-right people who are... | ||
| Really terrified of Muslims like they're trying to like figure out How to balance that out with their own ridiculous left-wing version of it? | ||
| Well, I think there are two elements to it. | ||
| One is that they're just afraid to criticize Muslims because there are greater repercussions to do so than to criticize Seventh-day Adventists. | ||
| So just from a very basic sort of survival instinct. | ||
| But I think secondly, which is kind of part of the ostrich parasitic syndrome I'm speaking of, there are all sort of erroneous ideas that people have been infected with. | ||
| You know, the The Muslim religion is a religion for the downtrodden, the brown people, the exotic others. | ||
| And so to criticize them when they are a hapless, exotic minority is simply racist and sexist. | ||
| And people believe that. | ||
| Even though most of the countries that these people are coming from, when they come to the West, not only are they the majority, they're almost the exclusive majority. | ||
| So they are out of, I think, 56 countries that constitute the... | ||
| OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, something like 29 or 30 countries, they're exclusively Islamic. | ||
| There are no longer any religious minorities. | ||
| It's in the order of 99.9 something. | ||
| So to argue that people who come from these countries are, you know, religious minorities. | ||
| Well, I mean, they're religious minorities when they come to the West, but they're all coming from countries where, never mind that they're the majority, they've never interacted with someone who did not share their faith. | ||
| I don't think people understand that if that happens here, like, you can't turn back from that without violence. | ||
| I mean, I'm not saying that it would happen in the United States, but the fact that it can happen anywhere means it can happen everywhere. | ||
| I mean, it really can. | ||
| I mean, it's a big reach on my part to say that, because there's no evidence whatsoever that it's going to happen here. | ||
| But if you really look at some of the countries that are suffering under There's these really oppressive religious ideologies where women aren't allowed to drive where they have to wear Covering all over their body that signifies that they're a part of this religious sect Like if that if someone tried to do that today Like if you had some blonde haired blue-eyed guy that made all women wear a certain outfit and they weren't allowed to drive and they weren't allowed to have the same rights How many people would be standing up for them? | ||
| It's incredible Especially if it was a new thing there's something about old things like old ideology is them legitimacy So strange. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, it's exactly what you said. | ||
| You take an idea that someone holds. | ||
| If he doesn't cloak it under the robe of religion, you commit him to a psychiatric institution. | ||
| If he says, no, no, no, but this belief... | ||
| As part of my religion, suddenly you get a free pass. | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| But to speak to your point about, well, that you were stretching about it happening in the United States, you're not stretching it at all. | ||
| all. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I've argued, for example, when Trump won, that if you look at a long-term view of the issue of Islamic immigration, if what you focus on is, do we have the proper vetting processes to stop ISIS terrorists from coming in? | ||
| That's a very short-term view of the problem. | ||
| But if you recognize that societies will take often very, very long time before they become Islamized, it's not as though every single country that today is Islamic became instantaneously overnight Islamic. | ||
| In some cases, it was a very, very quick invasion. | ||
| In other cases, it took 500 years before the demographic reality shifted. | ||
| And so, yes, if you look at it from the perspective of 10, 20, 50, 100 years, the U.S. stands no threat. | ||
| But take a long-term view. | ||
| I love this quote from, I think it was the Taliban who said it, that the United States have all the clocks and watches. | ||
| We have all the time in the world. | ||
| In other words, inshallah, eventually, God willing, we will conquer you. | ||
| So this is the right way to look at this issue. | ||
| Do you wish to have a society become more Islamized or less? | ||
| Let me draw another analogy. | ||
| At the end of every day, you can weigh yourself and one of three things is going to happen. | ||
| You've either lost weight that day, your weight did not change a single ounce, or you've put on weight. | ||
| So let's analogize this with Islam. | ||
| When Islam comes into a place, either the society gets better, nothing changes, or it gets worse. | ||
| Do we have enough data at this point after 1400 years to suggest that we can try to bet what will happen to a society? | ||
| The answer, regrettably, is yes. | ||
| Again, I hate to have to preface, of course, most Muslims are lovely and peaceful and wish to simply raise their children. | ||
| But Islam as an ideology when it comes into a new society, is it a good thing? | ||
| If yes, let's all turn Islamic. | ||
| If no, then maybe we should have an honest conversation about this. | ||
| An honest conversation is what's really important because these things get so emotionally charged, like the infamous Ben Affleck-Sam Harris debacle on Bill Maher's show. | ||
| But that to me is a perfect example because Sam speaks in such a measured way. | ||
| Tone and he's so educated about it. | ||
| He's not making these big gigantic leaps, but people love to jump on him and call racism. | ||
| He sent me some video that I just watched the other day where a bunch of people are just Taking complete out-of-context statements Attributing him to him as being like this is what he believes on things when if you listen to the full Extent of the conversation. | ||
| He's literally saying like that. | ||
| I'm gonna say something here that could be taken out of context But what I'm saying is like imagine if someone was saying this, right? | ||
| How do you respond to that and they use that as a statement? | ||
| I mean, there's there's so much of that going on There's so much so dishonest Well, there's this weird not-me thing that they're doing. | ||
| It's like, I'm not the racist. | ||
| He's the racist. | ||
| And they get very, you're racist! | ||
| Like, the Ben Affleck thing. | ||
| Like, he was like, that is so gross. | ||
| That is so racist. | ||
| Like, instead of just... | ||
| I'm discussing this conversation. | ||
| I'm discussing this, especially on the Bill Maher show, because that shows all those shows. | ||
| It's not to criticize that show, but all those shows, we have a panel of six people. | ||
| What you see is a bunch of people waiting to say something and they have to jump in. | ||
| And it's almost like they have to be salacious or they have to be outrageous just to get heard. | ||
| You know, like everyone, it's, it's, it, those kind of shows promote this sort of disingenuous communication. | ||
| Because you have to, you can't be polite. | ||
| Like, you and I can be polite. | ||
| It's just you and I. We can talk and we can have these long-form conversations. | ||
| But on that show, you don't have the time to unpack what's wrong with anything. | ||
| All ideologies, all things that tell you how to think. | ||
| Forget about whether or not you think it came from Jesus or the prophet Muhammad or Joseph Smith. | ||
| Anytime there's a doctrine that tells you how to think because of some mystical presence, some god or deity or prophet who has gotten the wisdom of the universe, and you must not question it, and women have to wear veils and dress up like beekeepers. | ||
| I mean, all that stuff is very, very problematic because people are prone For whatever reason, I mean, I guess it's something that goes back to tribalism and alpha male chimpanzee behavior. | ||
| We're prone to follow. | ||
| We're prone to follow leaders. | ||
| I mean, it makes it easier. | ||
| And that's one of the things you're seeing here. | ||
| Well, what's amazing is that it's one thing to attack Sam because in the game of identity politics, he scores really poorly, right? | ||
| He's a Southern Californian white male who doesn't speak any of the languages that matter, Arabic or so on. | ||
| And his parents had money. | ||
| And his parents had money. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Oh, your parents had money, you sinner. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I only recently found out, maybe a year and a half ago, when I met him last, that his mother is the creator of Golden Girls. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| No, I didn't even know that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And actually, I just looked at one of the Golden Girls that was rerunning. | ||
| And you see, I think it's Susan Harris or something. | ||
| But anyways, someone like me who comes from the Middle East who escaped that reality, someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| I've had many people on my show. | ||
| I don't know how much you followed, but a lot of people who've all escaped from this world, either they still consider themselves Muslim, but not Muslim-lite, or ex-Muslims in many cases. | ||
| They will be attacked. | ||
| So imagine, you know, so there is some woman who went to Wellesley College who doesn't know anything about Islam short of whatever she learned in her bullshit progressive course. | ||
| She will lecture to us what true Islam is. | ||
| Not the people who lived under it. | ||
| Not the people who ran away from it. | ||
| She knows better because... | ||
| So it's really... | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| It's infuriating. | ||
| It's stunning. | ||
| And it's also confusing. | ||
| Because, like, when you see them do it, like... | ||
| I mean, anytime someone goes so far overboard that objective reasoning is out the window and you're... | ||
| You know, you're so committed to whatever position that you're in that you can't look at both sides of it. | ||
| I mean, I could see why a lot of religious traditions would be comforting to people, remind them of where they came from, give them pride of their homeland, give them a personal good feeling that they're connected to some sort of an ancient tradition, as long as it's not oppressing other human beings. | ||
| And there's got to be some, I mean, actually cultural patterns of behavior that people do, like celebrations, like Oktoberfest or something like that. | ||
| Those things, you know, promote some sort of a pride, like I guess a pride in Germany and their beer making and all that stuff, without oppressing people, you know? | ||
| But by the way, this is... | ||
| A good segue to what you're talking about is something that is upsetting me these days, increasingly so. | ||
| So some people are now trying to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism. | ||
| The reason why I mention this is because Islam has two elements. | ||
| There's the spiritual part, which is kind of like your Oktoberfest, pray this way, believe in a monotheistic God and so on. | ||
| But then within Islam is a much larger component of politics, political Islam. | ||
| So when you say something like, well, you know, we should be attacking Islamism, as if it's something that is outside of Islam. | ||
| That's simply false. | ||
| Islamism is Islam, right? | ||
| Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and I can quote many other Islamic experts, said, Islam is Islam. | ||
| The term moderate Islam, Islamism, and all these other qualifiers are nonsensical. | ||
| Now, the reason why that upsets me is because it grants people a false sense of security and hope. | ||
| You know, Islam is wonderful, but we need to attack this separate thing called Islamism. | ||
| Well, from day one, 1400 years ago, Islam was Islamism. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a spiritual element. | ||
| That doesn't mean that most Muslims just want to practice the spiritual part. | ||
| But there is no set of doctrines in a separate book called Radicalized Islamism. | ||
| It all comes from the same text. | ||
| It comes from the Quran, it comes from the Hadith, and it comes from the Sirah, the biography of Muhammad. | ||
| So this kind of false narrative that people are promulgating so that they seem as though they're not frontally attacking a religion, while laudable, while nice, I get that reflex, it's false. | ||
| And so again, to go back to our point of talking honestly, We need to talk honestly. | ||
| There is only Islam. | ||
| Some people choose to practice it fully. | ||
| Some people choose to ignore the ugly part. | ||
| But there is no such thing as Islamism. | ||
| Islamism is part of Islam. | ||
| Now, you're a person that goes out of your way to say, we're not talking about the kind, sweet Islamic people that just want to raise their children. | ||
| So how do you sort of manage those two ideas, that they're the same? | ||
| Like when the term radical Islam gets thrown around. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, radical Islam simply means I really take my Islam seriously, right? | ||
| Let's draw a silly analogy. | ||
| If I don't eat pork, am I a radical Jew or am I a Jew, right? | ||
| Now, I happen to be Jewish. | ||
| I simply ignore the kosher edict that says don't eat pork. | ||
| Why do you do that, though? | ||
| Because in my case, I simply identify as Jewish in the sense that Judaism is a multi-attribute identity. | ||
| It includes a shared history, shared lineage. | ||
| It's kind of a race. | ||
| Some could argue it's a race. | ||
| It's considered in a lot of people's ideas. | ||
| So I could still... | ||
| In the same way that you might identify as coming from Boston, and there's a shared history from all people who grew up around the time that you grew up in Boston... | ||
| And there is a sense of affiliation and tribalism with that reality. | ||
| Being Jewish, as far as I'm concerned, and for most Jews, is exactly that. | ||
| We don't necessarily take the religious elements very seriously. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that we are practicing a light Judaism or non-radical Judaism. | ||
| We're simply ignoring those parts of Judaism that we choose to ignore. | ||
| So there is no such thing as radical Islam. | ||
| There are no books called radical Islam. | ||
| There is a set of doctrines called Islam, and then I could do what's called cafeteria Islam, which is I pick and choose the parts that I wish to adhere to. | ||
| So again, the discourse is a false narrative. | ||
| I understand the reason for it, because people find it rather gauche to attack frontally a religion, or at least to attack Islam. | ||
| So they have to, I call this the ism magic heuristic, right? | ||
| You add ism to something, it makes it bad. | ||
| Islam is good. | ||
| Islamism is bad. | ||
| Believe me. | ||
| For you, I would like to defend you, if there's a lot of people that are listening right now, or offer up some, not even defend you, but offer up some information. | ||
| You grew up in a place where being Jewish was lethal. | ||
| I mean, your life was threatened. | ||
| Certainly when the Civil War broke out. | ||
| Prior to that, you could live in Lebanon as a Jew. | ||
| People knew that we were Jewish, but know your place, Jew. | ||
| That, by the way, is something that I explain when discussing... | ||
| I'm not sure if we've discussed this on this show, but it might be worth repeating. | ||
| I believe we discussed your past in Lebanon. | ||
| Okay, so do you know what a dimmi is? | ||
| Have you heard that term? | ||
| Dimmi? | ||
| Yeah, you explain it, but please do again. | ||
| So a dimmi is a third-class citizen, comes out of Quranic edicts that basically said that when Islam comes into a society, you basically have three choices if you're not a Muslim. | ||
| You could either convert, you could either get killed, or if you are people of the book, meaning Christians and Jews, meaning people of the book that you're also monotheistic, you're also from an Abrahamic faith, Then you could live as a dimmi. | ||
| A dimmi is a protected class, protected in quotes. | ||
| We tolerate you. | ||
| And in order to tolerate you, we're going to remind you repeatedly of your subservient position. | ||
| Now, at different points across the last 1400 years, that mechanism was either instituted very forcefully or more lightly. | ||
| So in the context of Lebanon, which was a very progressive and modern country in the Middle Eastern context, There wasn't somebody knocking on our door and levying the jizya. | ||
| Pay us or else we're going to rape your daughters. | ||
| But you didn't wear a big star of David because that might be construed as inflammatory, just like the example that you started off the show. | ||
| You're hurting our sensibilities by pushing your Judaism on us, right? | ||
| So your status did not always have been threatened in that my head is going to come off at any minute, right? | ||
| My parents grew up and lived there. | ||
| They didn't die. | ||
| But once the Civil War broke out, then it became lethally dangerous to be Jewish. | ||
| I mean, we're going to be executed. | ||
| We left. | ||
| So you never know when we're going to go from tolerating you to off with the heads. | ||
| And that's been the history for the past 1400 years. | ||
| And so, again, when people think, but Islam is not that bad. | ||
| Look, in Andalusia, Jews and Christians and Muslims used to walk around hand in hand in Spain around the 15th, 16th century. | ||
| Baloney. | ||
| Yes, people were not being beheaded every day, but you knew your place. | ||
| That's not equality. | ||
| And it's kind of interesting when you talk about this idea about how people are reluctant to criticize Islam because they're worried about the repercussions of this. | ||
| It kind of speaks to how rare it is that people do violate those principles in those countries. | ||
| Because if you do have a culture that's 99% Islamic, Especially if they go by the book, like, every step of the way. | ||
| Like, there's not going to be a lot of people that are stepping on the line for fear of the horrific repercussions. | ||
| Now, psychologically in this country, you're seeing that for some strange reason emerging from the left and emerging from a lot of like really progressive colleges and universities where they want to be almost the first ones to step up and say, don't criticize this you're seeing that for some strange reason emerging from the left and emerging from a lot of like really progressive colleges and universities It's unbelievable. | ||
| It's a really strange position to be a progressive who's reinforcing the ideologies of a regressive culture that's very ancient. | ||
| But what's incredible is that they'll come up with ways to defend this cognitive inconsistency. | ||
| And hence, that's part of the ostrich parasitic syndrome that I was mentioning earlier. | ||
| What are some ways that they defend it? | ||
| Let me just give you a few manifestations of ostrich logic. | ||
| My friend Mohammed is a very nice guy and he drinks and he fornicates and he's very liberal. | ||
| So the idea then becomes that as long as I can identify a single exemplar of an Islamic person who does not otherwise adhere to what Islam dictates, then it's not true that Islam is bad. | ||
| Now, this is a manifestation of a more general cognitive bias, which goes like this. | ||
| If I walk into class and I say, look, homo sapiens are sexually dimorphic. | ||
| There are innate sex differences between the two sexes. | ||
| Men are bigger than women. | ||
| Someone will put up their hand and say, but my Aunt Linda is taller than my Uncle Joe. | ||
| Oh, gee, Darwin is dead, right? | ||
| So they identify a singular exemplar that is supposed to falsify a statement that is only true at the population level. | ||
| So that's one example. | ||
| Muhammad is nice, therefore Islam is nice. | ||
| Here's a second example. | ||
| They point to a particular historical context where Jews lived in Islamic countries and weren't killed. | ||
| Hey, but God said, you lived in Lebanon and you still have your head. | ||
| And the retort that I usually give is, well, until they were going to cut off my head. | ||
| But secondly, Jeffrey Dahmer, if you take, I think he was guilty of 17 murders. | ||
| If you take the number of days that he lived as an adult, So, what you have to basically do is take each of these ostrich logic arguments and analogize how idiotic they are. | ||
| But it's very exhausting because the bent, as you said, of all these progressives is to do whatever they can to protect the ideology. | ||
| It's exhausting to consistently have to try to fight through all their clutter. | ||
| And it's not a thought that... | ||
| It's not something that is structured with objective reasoning. | ||
| It's something that's structured with their own particular ideology that does not want to criticize this one segment of the human population that they think is being persecuted. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And meanwhile, if you think about throughout currently in the world, which ideology persecutes the most number of other people? | ||
| So if you talk about bloody borders, right? | ||
| Islam has fought with Buddhists. | ||
| Islam fights with animists. | ||
| Islam fights with Jews. | ||
| Islam fights with Christians. | ||
| Islam fights with Tibetan monks, right? | ||
| So in other words, Islam doesn't necessarily make for very good neighbors. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because, again, notwithstanding the fact that most Muslims are lovely and just want to raise their kids, Islam is a supremacist ideology. | ||
| It basically says that the world is meant to all be united under the flag of Allah. | ||
| Now, some people take that seriously. | ||
| Others don't. | ||
| But the doctrines of Islam are very clear. | ||
| We should all submit to Islam. | ||
| So even if 95% of Muslims don't adhere to that tenet, if only 5% do, that means we're always going to have friction. | ||
| In some cases, it'll be like Lebanon. | ||
| By the way, I've predicted that in Europe... | ||
| This is on record, we can probably find it, that in Europe, within 15, 20, 25, 50 years, we're going to have Lebanon all over the place. | ||
| And now it's starting to happen, right? | ||
| At one point, we were having daily attacks all over Europe. | ||
| So again, if you're going to increase Islamic immigration to the West, Of course, most people are nice and just want to escape to a better world. | ||
| But are you willing to take the risks for what's about to happen? | ||
| Are you willing to accept people whose cultural and religious values are perfectly antithetical to yours? | ||
| If you do Pew surveys from around the Middle East or Islamic countries about your views on Jews, well, you'll get things like 95 to 99 percent Jew hatred. | ||
| So if I am a Canadian Jew, right, and I see that 50,000 Syrians are going to come in, Is it that I'm filled with hatred towards Syrians or am I simply someone who calculates statistical regularities and basically says that out of 50,000 people, if 95% have endemic Jew hatred as part of their identity, do I have a right to be concerned about this? | ||
| I'm not worried about Haitians. | ||
| They're black people. | ||
| I'm not racist. | ||
| I'm not worried about the Vietnamese. | ||
| I'm worried about the cultural and religious baggage that you bring in. | ||
| What about your views towards clitorises or homosexuality or religious minorities or black dogs? | ||
| Darwin forbid if you're a black dog. | ||
| A black dog? | ||
| I mean, Muhammad hated dogs, but he particularly hated black dogs. | ||
| So what do they do with blocked dogs? | ||
| Go online and you'll see some pretty ugly animal cruelty. | ||
| They're not very tolerant towards dogs. | ||
| If you touch a dog before you're heading to prayer, this is called nejus. | ||
| It's impure. | ||
| By the way, the kuffar, the non-Muslims, are also nejus. | ||
| They're as impure as urine and blood and sperm and feces. | ||
| Should I feel bad that there is an ideology that considers me an impure quality? | ||
| Now, does that mean that all Muslims are like that? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| 99% of the Muslims I've met have been lovely, and many of them are my friends. | ||
| But we should be able to talk about what's inside those books. | ||
| And those books are not radical Islam. | ||
| They're Islam. | ||
| Well, let me ask you this. | ||
| What's the alternative? | ||
| Like, say, for Syrian refugees? | ||
| I mean, any kind, caring person who... | ||
| Has concern for our fellow human beings sees these people fleeing and sees the horrific conditions that they're confronted with in their own country and they really don't have a lot of options and they're trying to escape to the West. | ||
| What are the options? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| There are no clear answers. | ||
| I would certainly say you first place the people who are most at risk in those societies in the front of the queue. | ||
| So you bring the Yazidi women, you bring the Christians who are being persecuted. | ||
| The women, but what about the father? | ||
| If the dad is with the wife and the children, you can't just have the father stay back behind the tent and you let the mom go to Toronto with the kids. | ||
| No, fair enough. | ||
| What I was saying, though, is that let people who are non-Islamic, who are fleeing those areas, at the front of the queue first. | ||
| But isn't that religious persecution? | ||
| I mean, or at the very least, it's prejudiced, right? | ||
| I mean, you're singling people out because of their ideology or because of what religion they're from, not because of their past behavior or any predictors whatsoever about their future behavior. | ||
| But we do have some statistical regularity about... | ||
| What types of values those guys are going to come with. | ||
| So I'm not suggesting we close the door. | ||
| Right, but wouldn't that, in a way, I mean, just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't that, in a way, kind of put the Muslims in Toronto, who do immigrate, whatever, pick that city, who try to immigrate to Canada, in the same sort of a position that your family was in, in Lebanon, where you were hiding the fact that you were Jews? | ||
| No one has an inalienable right to immigrate anywhere, correct? | ||
| So if you wish to immigrate to the West, then leave every single syllable that constitutes a belief, attitude, position, value that is contrary to ours at the door and then welcome in my brother. | ||
| Man, isn't that a crazy thing to say to someone whose entire life and their ideology is a big part of their identity and who they are, like how they view the world. | ||
| That's the structure for which they interface with other human beings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with you in a way. | |
| I agree with you overall when I talk about the entire human population that it would be wonderful if we did that. | ||
| But from individual to individual, we know about the trials and tribulations that people go through in a day-to-day life and religious freedom and a religious ideology in many cases helps people get through the pains of life. | ||
| It helps them get through the struggles. | ||
| I'm not saying that it's rational, but I am saying that in many ways it's a scaffolding for their own personal behavior. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| You would have to then ensure that your religious practice is exclusively practiced privately. | ||
| Never should there ever be an intrusion into the public sphere. | ||
| No asking for prayer rooms at the university. | ||
| The example that you gave is the slight creeping jihad, right? | ||
| So my next book is called, tentatively, it might change, Death of the West by a Thousand Cuts, right? | ||
| It's the idea that when you take, again, a parable of the frog, when you put it in boiling water and you do it very slowly, the frog, if you do it very, very slowly, if it falls below a just noticeable difference, it doesn't notice that the temperature is rising until it's too late and it boils to death, right? | ||
| So this idea of just noticeable difference is something that's very important in this conversation. | ||
| We're not going to get Islamized overnight, but Egypt, before it became Islamic, used to be non-Islamic once upon a time. | ||
| Today it's about 10% Coptic Christians. | ||
| Turkey is now 99% Islamic. | ||
| One day it wasn't. | ||
| Iran, the great Persian empires were non-Islamic. | ||
| Today it's almost exclusively Islamic. | ||
| So the United States and Canada are not going to become Islamic in the next 10 years. | ||
| But give it enough time, have a long enough view of history, and I worry about your grandchildren and mine. | ||
| And so that's how you have an honest conversation. | ||
| And I'm not sure what the answer is. | ||
| One possibility, which I've discussed with folks on my show who are trained lawyers, is that There are provisions in the law, at least in the United States, to declare an ideology as being seditious, right? | ||
| So in the same way that you could say that Nazism is seditious to our values or communism, there are elements of Islam, the non-spiritual parts, that it doesn't take Einstein to recognize that they are perfectly antithetical to every single value that you and I would hold dear as Westerners. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| What would be some of those values? | ||
| So take, for example, Sharia law, which is the Islamic law by which you organize society. | ||
| The first premise of Islamic law is that the crime, its severity, and its punishment depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the victim. | ||
| So imagine the idea in the American Constitution that justice is blind. | ||
| Well, that is already violated as the most fundamental tenet of Sharia law. | ||
| If a Muslim kills a Jew, it's a very, very different crime than if a Jew kills a Muslim. | ||
| You can just go look up Reliance of the Traveler, which is the English translation of Sharia law, and you'll see all these things. | ||
| So why should we tolerate this kind of stuff, right? | ||
| Come in, my Muslim brothers, but keep the stuff that you yourself escaped from out of our country. | ||
| We don't want it. | ||
| And if you keep it out, come in and let's grow together and hug it out. | ||
| But why should I be tolerant towards the intolerable? | ||
| I agree with you in theory, but I think the problem is as soon as you tell someone to not follow certain aspects of their ideology, those aspects become even more attractive. | ||
| And especially if they consider the West to be decadent and filled with sin and fornicating and drinking and all the things that they think are disgusting. | ||
| And then these people... | ||
| Other ones are telling you that you can't follow the word of God as brought down by the prophet from up on high. | ||
| It becomes even more attractive to them. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| Drugs. | ||
| Psychedelic drugs. | ||
| Everyone gets on mushrooms. | ||
| And I'm not kidding. | ||
| I really think you need transcendent experiences to escape from the day-to-day vibration of normal life. | ||
| How about just the commitment to reason and science? | ||
| It would be wonderful if we could do that, but people are so terrified of death, and they're so terrified of the unknown, and they're so terrified of not having structure. | ||
| People love having ideological structure that they can govern their life by. | ||
| Real, clear, established rules. | ||
| Man, people get mad at me when I wear a fanny pack. | ||
| And I'm not joking. | ||
| One of the reasons why I wear it is because people think it's disgusting. | ||
| Like, you think it's disgusting that I have a bag around my waist that I can keep my keys and phone in. | ||
| But we have structure, you know? | ||
| Men aren't supposed to wear sandals. | ||
| You know, if you're a man and you're wearing high-heeled, open-toed shoes, you will get ridiculed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because we have a structure. | ||
| And this structure, I mean, that's a bad example. | ||
| But it's not really, because it's along the same lines of thinking. | ||
| We would expect you to behave like we do so that we don't have to worry about your behavior. | ||
| I like gentlemen. | ||
| I like a man with a tie and a suit because I'm pretty sure that guy's not going to spit at me and stab me and rob me. | ||
| We have these ideas about people that dress and behave a certain way. | ||
| If you're in a business meeting and a guy starts swearing, you're like, whoa, all bets are off. | ||
| This man's not establishing the gentleman's protocol. | ||
| He's not following the standard business. | ||
| A business-oriented, you know, I would just like to exchange numbers and funds with you protocol. | ||
| And so I don't understand what his behavior is going to be. | ||
| He's unpredictable. | ||
| He could be a random street thug with a hoodie. | ||
| You know, that was a thing for a while. | ||
| People were scared of young black men with hoodies on because a gentleman would not wear a hoodie on the street. | ||
| That's a dangerous person. | ||
| But by the way, our brains have evolved to think this way, right? | ||
| And so this idea, you were asking me earlier, give me some examples of ostrich logic. | ||
| So this kind of hashtag. | ||
| Not all, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| Now, that, again, is idiotic. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because when we think about it, let's not talk about Islam for a second. | ||
| If you're going down a dark alley and you see four young men, forget about hoodies and pants down, just four young men. | ||
| So all you've described is the fact that they're young and they're men. | ||
| If you see four young men versus four elderly women, just because of your statistical regularity that you'd calculate which group is more likely to impart violence on you, then you might avoid the alley with the four young men, even though not all young men. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even though the probability that a young man is going to jump you and gang rape you and mug you and stab you is a small one. | ||
| But your brain has evolved to calculate those statistical regularities and to then... | ||
| Be very careful, be very risk aversive in putting yourself in harm's way. | ||
| So again, even though most Muslims are very nice and very lovely, I think we have enough data right now if we look at the last, since 2011. In 2001, 9-11, there's been over 30,000 terror attacks committed in the name of Islam, right? | ||
| I challenge anybody in your comments section to list me another ideology that comes remotely close. | ||
| If you added up every single other ideology since 2001, you wouldn't come up to 100. So what is the statistical numbers that you need to see before you're able to simply say, look, let's have an honest conversation, notwithstanding that not all Muslims and most are nice. | ||
| Is there a problem with Islam? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not radical Islam. | ||
| It's not Islamism. | ||
| It's not militant, violent extremism. | ||
| Let's stop with the bullshit euphobisms. | ||
| There are inherent elements, contents within Islam that are problematic. | ||
| It's not my job to find a way to get rid of them. | ||
| But if you wish to be part of our Western societies, then you need to find a way to expunge that stuff. | ||
| If you do it, welcome my brother, we're all brothers. | ||
| If you don't, then I should show preference to people who share similar cultural values to me. | ||
| That's called Now, what about people that would say that there's inherent problems with the Jewish religion? | ||
| There's inherent problems with subscribing to that ideology, that they have been persecuting Islamic people in Palestine, that they've been prosecuting and treating Islamic people as inferior to Jewish people? | ||
| That's, I mean, I know you're not necessarily saying it, but that's part of ostrich logic. | ||
| That's what I call, but muh, the Crusades, right? | ||
| And it's not me who actually came up with the but muh, right? | ||
| So every time... | ||
| What is but muh? | ||
| Muh, like, it's a way of saying, like, but bro, what about the Crusades? | ||
| Muh, M-U-H. Where's that from? | ||
| I think I first saw it in, he'll be happy that I'm giving a shout out, I think a guy on YouTube who goes by the name of T and Kraut, or Kraut and T, he's a German YouTuber. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| I meant like that's not from a language or anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no, no, no. | |
| It's like saying bro. | ||
| Like duh? | ||
| Duh, exactly. | ||
| Wait a minute, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| But muh, the crusade. | ||
| So as soon as you point to some Islamic ugly reality, then someone points, but bro, what about Israel? | ||
| But isn't it a valid comparison? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| But you're kind of claiming an ideology, right? | ||
| But when you're saying you're Jewish, and I support you saying this 100%, especially considering of all people, you should be in some ways proud of who you are, considering that you come from a line of oppressed people that escaped a horrible situation. | ||
| No one is arguing that there is a monopoly of ugliness that only stems from Islam. | ||
| Jews can engage in ugliness, Christians, atheists. | ||
| Why subscribe to any ideology then? | ||
| Because in the case of, you're talking about specifically Israel? | ||
| Any ideology. | ||
| Not necessarily Israel, which is a land. | ||
| I reject all the religious elements of Judaism. | ||
| So why are you a Jew? | ||
| Because I am part of a people. | ||
| I'm part of a shared history. | ||
| So it's like I'm Italian. | ||
| You're Italian. | ||
| You're Italian, right? | ||
| I belong to the lineage. | ||
| In the same way, by the way, I recently put up a clip on my channel where I talked about academic lineage. | ||
| So in the same way that you could build a genealogy of your family tree or of a people's, you could do what's called an academic genealogy. | ||
| So for example, my doctoral supervisor is my academic father, and then I could look to see who was his academic supervisor and who was his academic supervisor. | ||
| We do that in martial arts. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, there's a direct lineage like that. | ||
| So I could literally go back to some of the founders. | ||
| In only three or four generations, I'm with some of the pioneers of psychology. | ||
| And so I belong to that particular tribe when it comes to academia. | ||
| When it comes to my ethnicity, to my religious heritage, I belong to a group called Jews. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that all the booga-booga bullshit in Judaism I buy into. | ||
| I reject it. | ||
| So it makes me already somewhat less dangerous in that if there are any... | ||
| Ugly elements within Judaism, they're simply not going to be instantiated because I'm openly rejecting all that shit. | ||
| Right, I understand. | ||
| You as an individual. | ||
| Me as an individual. | ||
| And most Jews in the West, I think, would fit into my category. | ||
| By the way, later we should talk about a four and a half hour talk I had with the Hasid, a very religious Jew. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Flying to California. | ||
| I'll do so in a second. | ||
| Now, if most Muslims... | ||
| I said, look, there's tons of historical elements in Islamic societies. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| Islamic architecture, Islamic science, some Islamic philosophy. | ||
| They were one of the first intellectuals in modern history. | ||
| So I could be Muslim in that I come from a shared lineage of people, and I could be very proud of that. | ||
| But I can also have the moral compass and the moral fortitude to say, but there is stuff in my book that is truly grotesque. | ||
| And no amount of obfuscation and reinterpretive dancing could alter that ugliness, right? | ||
| There's no way to take kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, take an espresso break, resume killing. | ||
| There's no way to take that and reinterpret it using modern sensibilities to mean killing with caresses, right? | ||
| Let's not play this reform game. | ||
| So be proud of your cultural identity, and if that incorporates an Islamic identity, great, but reject all the bullshit, right? | ||
| And so I think that's where Judaism and Christianity at this point is somewhat different from Islam. | ||
| For most people who are Islamic, even if they don't necessarily believe it, They'll feel very reticent to openly admit it, that they despise a lot of the ugliness. | ||
| They'll say it's not true, it doesn't exist, you didn't understand it, you misinterpreted it. | ||
| The Reza Aslan bullshit, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, be honest about it. | ||
| Say it exists, say you reject it, and let's move forward, but stop obfuscating. | ||
| Well, then there's people like Majid Nawaz, who he identifies as being a Muslim, but he does reject those things. | ||
| But he says that you could reform them. | ||
| And Majid and I have had, in case some of your viewers don't know this, I invited at one point Majid to chat and... | ||
| He refused because I think he refused, and I can't put intent into his mind, but I'm analyzing his rejection to chat with me. | ||
| I think it's because he sees that I'm going to call him out on a lot of his narrative. | ||
| Well, no one knows why someone rejects something. | ||
| Did he openly reject it like he has no room for it in the future ever? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, at this point, I retract that invitation. | ||
| So even if you wanted to... | ||
| There's an expression in Arabic. | ||
| I'm going to use this for a second. | ||
| Imagine this is... | ||
| A pen? | ||
| He's holding a pen? | ||
| Oh, I'm holding a pen. | ||
| Yeah, for the people at home listening. | ||
| The vast majority are just listening. | ||
| Imagine that this pen were a cork, the cork of a wine bottle. | ||
| There's an expression in Arabic, which I'll say in Arabic, some people have heard me mention it before. | ||
| The expression is, is to get drunk simply by smelling the cork, right? | ||
| So, look, I'm smelling it, I'm already getting drunk. | ||
| That's what Majid Nawaz is. | ||
| He gets people drunk with his hopeful reform message. | ||
| It sounds so liberal. | ||
| It sounds so hopeful. | ||
| Say the word again? | ||
| Say the expression again? | ||
| I can't even make that noise in my face. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| I just said, do you want me to have the rest of this conversation in Arabic? | ||
| It'd be fascinating. | ||
| I wish I could speak it. | ||
| Sounds cool. | ||
| Actually, what happens with a lot of the guests that I bring in on my show who are Arabic, we always start off the start of our show speaking only in Arabic. | ||
| Because for most Westerners, it's fetishized. | ||
| It's so exotic. | ||
| My goodness. | ||
| Well, it's so alien to the way English sounds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But so going back to Majid, I think what... | ||
| Maybe his heart is in the right place. | ||
| I'm not trying to infer or imply that he's diabolical or duplicitous. | ||
| I think he probably truly believes that he's doing something worthwhile. | ||
| The problem is that it's not as though until Majid Nawaz came along... | ||
| No one had ever thought about this idea of reforming Islam. | ||
| Geez, really? | ||
| We never thought of that in the last 1400 years. | ||
| But the reality is that there are elements within the doctrines of Islam that simply don't permit for this reformation to take place. | ||
| And even if it could take place, we don't necessarily have the time to wait another 400 years while we deliberate how each syllable in each of the problematic passages should be reinterpreted while people's bodies are being stacked up all over the world. | ||
| And so therefore, I think that there needs to be a much more direct intervention. | ||
| And what I mean by direct intervention, no, there doesn't need to be reformed, doesn't need to be interpreted, it needs to be expunged. | ||
| These types of ideas, if Judaism has certain ideas that are belligerent to women's clitorises, then I want those ideas in Judaism out. | ||
| They don't belong in the public arena of ideas. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Now, how did Christianity reform and Islam did not? | ||
| How did that go about happening? | ||
| Because at one point in time, Christianity was a very repressive religion, and the apostasy, the idea of it was much more oppressed than today. | ||
| Right now, like, Islam is the only religion that I'm aware of. | ||
| I mean, maybe there's more that I'm just ignorant to, where if you leave the religion, They can kill you. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, that's what God wants. | ||
| God wants you to die because you don't believe in Him anymore. | ||
| Well, I've always said that Islam is the perfect memoplex. | ||
| So are you familiar with that term, memoplex? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So a meme is a term that Richard Dawkins coined in his book in 1976. Selfish Gene. | ||
| Selfish Gene, thank you. | ||
| Where he was analogizing the idea of a gene Genes propagate, correct? | ||
| Well, memes are packets of information that spread from one brain to another. | ||
| And so memes also spread. | ||
| We are both a biological and a cultural animal, right? | ||
| Both our genes spread and our ideas spread. | ||
| So a meme is something that can go... | ||
| So if you read my books, I am infecting your brain with my memes, with my ideas, correct? | ||
| A library is a collection of memes. | ||
| So a memoplex is a collection of memes that in this case falls under a religious ideology. | ||
| Well, Islam is the perfect memoplex in what sense? | ||
| In that its contents are made to spread. | ||
| For example, Judaism. | ||
| You mentioned earlier Judaism. | ||
| Do you know how many Jews there are in the world? | ||
| Twelve. | ||
| Twelve what? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| Just taking a guess. | ||
| Not to put you on the spot. | ||
| Okay, let me think. | ||
| There's seven billion people in the world. | ||
| I would guess there would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion Jews. | ||
| A billion. | ||
| Jamie, you want to take a guess? | ||
| Maybe 500 million. | ||
| I'm going to take a very conservative guess. | ||
| I'm going to change it to 500 million. | ||
| I'm so glad that we did this. | ||
| You're going to be shocked. | ||
| How many? | ||
| There's somewhere between 13 to 15 million Jews. | ||
| That is more than that in New York. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You're out of your fucking mind. | ||
| No, just look it up. | ||
| Shut the mic off. | ||
| This guy's talking crazy. | ||
| He's an agent. | ||
| I'm a Zionist shill. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Let Jamie now do his little Google magic. | ||
| 13 to 15 million? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 13 to 15 million. | ||
| There's more idiots in America than there are Jews. | ||
| And that's only in Arkansas. | ||
| No, I'm just kidding. | ||
| Sorry, guys. | ||
| I'm just joking. | ||
| Is that really it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, think about how many Nobel Prize winners are Jews. | ||
| I think 25 to 30 percent. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that, by the way, some people will say there's a genetic element, but even if Here we go. | ||
| What do we got? | ||
| 14,200,000 Jewish people in the world. | ||
| Did I just say between 13 and 15 million? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Always perfectly accurate. | ||
| What is the enlarged? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| The largest number possible is 20 million. | ||
| I've never seen 20 million. | ||
| It's usually the highest I've seen is 16 million. | ||
| It says core Jewish and enlarged Jewish. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Like dudes who get converted because their wife makes them? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My uncle did that. | ||
| But by strict conversion laws, that would not be allowed. | ||
| You're not allowed to convert for ulterior motives. | ||
| What ulterior motives? | ||
| He wanted to become a Jew. | ||
| No, it has to be spiritual. | ||
| It's a spiritual awakening. | ||
| Well, he went through the whole process. | ||
| He went to Hebrew school. | ||
| But that process has to be for no ulterior motive. | ||
| It can't be because my wife would not marry me otherwise. | ||
| Well, I think he did it because she wanted him to do it, and then he decided to do it because it was what, you know, I mean... | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But anyways, let's go by. | ||
| So there are about 13 to 15 million Jews. | ||
| There are 1.6 billion Muslims. | ||
| One-fifth of humanity. | ||
| To every one Jew, there's a hundred Muslims. | ||
| Which ideology is more successful based on propagation? | ||
| Islam or Judaism? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, why is that? | ||
| Well, take, for example, conversion laws. | ||
| As you said about... | ||
| Was it your cousin? | ||
| No, my uncle. | ||
| Your uncle. | ||
| In the way that he did it, as you said, it's a very assiduous process. | ||
| It takes a long time before, and as a matter of fact, the rabbis are supposed to try to dissuade you from converting to Judaism because that, in a sense, tests your faith, your desire to change. | ||
| In Islam, do you know what you have to do to convert? | ||
| What? | ||
| I won't say it, because if I actually say it in Arabic, that could be taken. | ||
| Then you mean to convert it? | ||
| I've converted, and therefore if I leave it, but basically you just have to say the shahada, which it's like the, I testify. | ||
| Wow, that's it? | ||
| It's one sentence. | ||
| And then that's it, bam. | ||
| Boom, you're in. | ||
| And then if you leave, they can kill you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're dead. | |
| In Judaism, there isn't that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| How about laws for marriage? | ||
| A Muslim man can marry up to four women, including non-Muslim women, and convert them. | ||
| But a Muslim woman cannot do the other way around. | ||
| So the whole structure of Islam is built on the propagation of the belief system. | ||
| So just by that, which one is going to be more dangerous? | ||
| One is a proselytizing religion. | ||
| The other one, you're not allowed to, in Judaism, to proselytize. | ||
| You're not supposed to try to convert others. | ||
| In Islam, da'wah is to proselytize. | ||
| Now, in different countries, they'll do it in different ways. | ||
| In the West, where they are in the minority, they'll do it through interfaith exchanges. | ||
| But the interfaith exchanges are always the Muslim telling the non-Muslim how great our religion is and why you should convert. | ||
| It's never give and take. | ||
| So just going back to your early point about Israel and so on. | ||
| Yes, of course, undoubtedly, there are some Israelis that do very bad things to their non-Jewish brothers. | ||
| No question. | ||
| But when we're talking about existential threats to our Western ways, you and I probably don't stay up worrying about radical Jews. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I wonder what it is about people that makes us so susceptible to ideological thinking. | ||
| And still. | ||
| And whether or not it's ever expungible. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Whether or not it's ever something that we can eradicate from the thought process. | ||
| It just seems inherent to being a person. | ||
| So much so that I recognize it in myself. | ||
| Like, here's a perfect example. | ||
| I ran into a guy just a few days ago, and he said hello to me, and then he explained to me that he trains jujitsu with the Machados, and immediately we were like brothers, because that's my lineage. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So it's like, oh, what's up, man? | ||
| Like, immediately. | ||
| And I'm like, that is so weird. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| You know, like, I understand. | ||
| Like, when I talk to someone, like, oh, how long you train? | ||
| 12 years. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So you understand me, and I understand you. | ||
| Where do you train Machado's? | ||
| Oh, we come from the same thing. | ||
| Oh, we're like brothers. | ||
| There's a weird thing. | ||
| Like, I'd give that guy a ride. | ||
| I don't even know him. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But that's the case with religion. | ||
| That's the case with many things. | ||
| It's the case with ethnicities, oftentimes even with state pride. | ||
| Like, we branch off into groups. | ||
| And we have microgroups and macrogroups. | ||
| And it gets real weird when we do this, but we all do it. | ||
| So... | ||
| To speak exactly about this ever-granular way to compartmentalize us versus them, let me mention the Hasidic story. | ||
| Oh yeah, please do. | ||
| Because the reason that's a good segue is because I actually raised it with him on the plane. | ||
| I used to live in an area in Montreal called Outremont, for the Montrealists out there who don't know where it is, where there are a lot of Hasidic Jews. | ||
| So now you would think that Within this very small group of people called Jews, within an even smaller group of people called Hasidic Orthodox Jews, once you're an Orthodox Jew, you're an Orthodox Jew. | ||
| No. | ||
| On this side of the street are the Polish Orthodox Jews. | ||
| On this side of the street are the Hungarian Orthodox Jews. | ||
| And I wouldn't be caught dead marrying my daughter to those heathen pigs from the other side of the street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So in other words, our ability to create us versus them distinctions, as you said, is infinite. | ||
| That's what, by the way, I hate most about religion. | ||
| And not only Islam, right? | ||
| Certainly every Abrahamic religion has a very clear delineation between us and them. | ||
| If we are Christians, we're going to heaven. | ||
| The rest of you who haven't accepted Jesus are going to hell. | ||
| If you are Jewish, there are the Jews and there are the Goys, the Gentiles. | ||
| If you are Muslim, of course, there are us Muslim believers and all of you Kuffar. | ||
| And so it's an inherent part of Abrahamic faith to play on this very innate mechanism of tribalism, us versus them. | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| And it's also what happened in Iraq when we got rid of Saddam Hussein. | ||
| It created a civil war between two rival factions of Islam. | ||
| Shia and the Sunni. | ||
| Yeah, and most people had no idea that was even a situation over there. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| But do you want to talk more about this? | ||
| So I was very interested in asking him things that I actually thought about studying scientifically as part of my research. | ||
| So one of the things that I study, as you know, is, well, I apply evolutionary psychology to all sorts of things, one of which is mating preferences. | ||
| You know, are there certain mating preferences that are universally true, irrespective of culture, right? | ||
| And the answer, of course, is yes. | ||
| So whether you go to the Yanomomo tribe in Brazil, a closed society, or you go walk around in LA, there are certain things that men will look for in women and other things that women will look for in men that tend to be universal for clear evolutionary reasons. | ||
| So I was interested at one point in studying the mating preferences of the Hasidic community. | ||
| Again, the idea being that here you're taking a community that culturally and religiously is very close, where the cultural and religious brainwashing is very, very strong. | ||
| And this movement that you're making with your hands, does that represent the sheet with the hole in it? | ||
| Because you're doing this thing. | ||
| You keep doing this thing with your hands like a hole. | ||
| It must be a subconscious thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is that a real practice? | ||
| I don't know if it's real. | ||
| I think it might be the ostrich thing. | ||
| It must be. | ||
| Maybe it's a... | ||
| Find out what we're talking about. | ||
| Explain what we're talking about. | ||
| The idea is that when a Hasidic couple has sex, they have a sheet between them where they make a hole where the genitalia goes, and that's how you get it on. | ||
| That's what I thought while you kept doing that. | ||
| You're making a circle. | ||
| No, it was subconscious. | ||
| Maybe it was a Freudian thing. | ||
| And so my idea was, at one point, is to see if I can get access to the Hasidic community, which would probably not be easy to get into the Hasidic community and ask them about their mating preferences. | ||
| And so it was a small idea I had over, you know, an afternoon and then kind of dropped it and moved on to other things. | ||
| But here I was sitting with a couple, a Hasidic couple, and I thought, okay, I can't do a scientific study, but at least I could come up with some anecdotes to discuss. | ||
| And so I actually asked them things like, you know, can we talk about some mating preferences that take place within the Hasidic community? | ||
| And there were some really incredible insights that came out. | ||
| So for example, the wife said that one of the attributes that she absolutely was looking for in a prospective mate was that he be taller than her. | ||
| And it turns out that this is called assortative mating, birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| So if you look at naturally occurring couples, it is almost never the case that the woman is taller than the man. | ||
| There was actually a study done with 720 couples. | ||
| A single couple, the woman was taller than the man. | ||
| Physical desire, in this case, I just need the man, not to be tall, just taller than me, right? | ||
| That was replicating in a completely different context in the Hasidic community. | ||
| I even asked them about things like, well, will a Hasidic woman ever look at a non-Hasidic guy that's walking down the street, a bad boy, that has tattoos and greased back hair? | ||
| and you know the swimmer's body and desire him or has the cultural and religious brainwashing been so great that her eyes are shut off to these possibilities and she actually said that no I mean bottom line As E.O. Wilson said, the genes hold culture on a leash. | ||
| In other words, no matter how much cultural and religious brainwashing you have, if you scratch far enough, you'll get the same human nature. | ||
| And that's what I basically got from my conversation with them. | ||
| That's a fascinating way of describing it. | ||
| The genes hold culture on a leash. | ||
| That's not my quote. | ||
| That's E.O. Wilson. | ||
| That's a really perfect way of saying it. | ||
| Every now and then you hear a phrase where you're like, ah. | ||
| I wish you could get him on your show. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| He's now probably 85. Do you know who E.O. Wilson is? | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| So E.O. Wilson is a very famous scientist at Harvard. | ||
| I've heard the name. | ||
| I just don't know who he is. | ||
| Yeah, he's amazing. | ||
| By training, he's an entomologist, an insect scientist. | ||
| He specifically studies the social ants, basically. | ||
| And so he looks at things like reciprocal altruism, kin selection, all of these mechanisms of altruism in the context of... | ||
| Here's another quote that he has that I love. | ||
| Communism slash socialism. | ||
| Great system, wrong species. | ||
| What he's basically saying is that that political system of we're all equal under communism is a great idea, but it applies to social ants. | ||
| It doesn't apply to humans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he's got these wonderful, pithy quotes. | ||
| I know that Robert Sapolsky is great, but if Robert Sapolsky is great, you need to get E.O. Wilson on this podcast. | ||
| Well, if it's possible, I'll look into it. | ||
| Where did you say he is? | ||
| He's at Harvard. | ||
| Harvard. | ||
| So I'd probably have to come to him. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I doubt he travels a lot at this stage of his life. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Well, I'd be willing. | ||
| I'm going to be back there eventually, I'm sure. | ||
| So how often do you go back to Boston? | ||
| Well, I haven't been in a while. | ||
| I'm going to try to get there in the spring. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm thinking about filming my next Netflix special there. | ||
| Why there? | ||
| That's where I started. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| Trying to figure it out. | ||
| It's either going to be there or here, I think. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| Those are my two options, Boston or California. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| Just having to figure it out. | ||
| Either my current or my former home. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So, when you talk to this guy for four-plus hours... | ||
| My wife was pissed, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because you didn't talk to her? | ||
| Because she felt ignored. | ||
| She felt like she was getting bored and she had to take care of the kids while I was having this... | ||
| As a matter of fact, I thought later, wouldn't it have been wonderful if we could have taped it and I could have released this conversation on my show? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because it was so honest, right? | ||
| Did you keep in touch with this guy? | ||
| So we exchanged, and I actually asked him permission. | ||
| I didn't mention it. | ||
| I said, would you mind? | ||
| I'm going on this very popular show. | ||
| He goes, no, no, go ahead. | ||
| Feel free. | ||
| Wow, man. | ||
| It would be cool to get you guys together and I could moderate. | ||
| Yeah, that would be cool. | ||
| Well now, it was an amicable conversation. | ||
| Very. | ||
| And I really pushed him, very politely. | ||
| So at one point I said to him, you know, what would be the evidence that you would need to see to have any questioning of your faith? | ||
| And his answer, which is a classic argument from, I don't know if you know the term, God of the gaps. | ||
| Are you familiar with that term? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So God of the gaps is basically, at one point when we didn't know much in science, God could be found explaining everything, right? | ||
| Why does thunder happen? | ||
| Well, God does it, right? | ||
| Now we find out that there is a very clear material explanation for lightning. | ||
| So now that's off. | ||
| So now God goes and hides somewhere else. | ||
| And now he constantly finds the small gaps where science hasn't yet been able to uncover an explanation and he hides there. | ||
| That's called the God of the Gaps argument. | ||
| And so he used the granddaddy of God of the Gaps. | ||
| He goes, if you take me back to the Big Bang and you show me that there was no God at that point, Then I'm willing to renounce my faith. | ||
| To which I answered, even if I were able to do that, you would still find a way to finagle your way into justifying your belief. | ||
| In other words, there is no amount of evidence that I could ever provide you. | ||
| That would shake your foundation. | ||
| So we really got into some heavy stuff. | ||
| By the way, that's one of the differences between, I think, in his case, he's an extremist Jew in the sense that he is the most practicing of Jews. | ||
| Well, how come we could have this very, very difficult conversation and leave at the end shaking hands, both richer for it, and no one's heads come off? | ||
| Well, you were also a Jew, though. | ||
| I mean, didn't it help? | ||
| I mean, what if he had that conversation with a Muslim? | ||
| Don't you think that maybe... | ||
| Maybe there'd be more contention, but nobody's head would be locked. | ||
| At least the Jew... | ||
| Not on United Airlines. | ||
| Right. | ||
| My point is that I think part of Jewish tradition, even when you, for example, go to the yeshiva to study, say, the Talmud, is that there is this mechanism of we constantly argue about everything. | ||
| Nothing is settled. | ||
| We have to debate over everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you have to have that openness of spirit to have your ideas questioned. | ||
| And I think that if already Islam were open to that a bit more, then maybe we'd be in a better place. | ||
| I've heard some of the most compelling arguments against the Big Bang from religious people. | ||
| Give me some of those. | ||
| Well, the argument against it is you're not willing to believe that there's a creator. | ||
| That there's some sort of a system that was put in place by a much higher power beyond what we can describe. | ||
| But you're willing to believe that everything came out of nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Something smaller than the head of a pin for some reason that no one's ever figured out. | ||
| And the only evidence that we have is the radio wave echoes of this event. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| I mean, I've heard similar arguments. | ||
| I mean, Thomas Aquinas is the guy who always argued, I think, in the 12th century about the first mover, that you could always go back and say, at time zero, what started that? | ||
| What started that? | ||
| I don't think you could ever really ultimately shake somebody's foundations, right? | ||
| There's no amount of that. | ||
| It is odd that we're all willing to believe the most insane version of the creation of the universe ever, without a doubt. | ||
| Like every person of science, people that believe in genes and atoms and subatomic particles and quarks and gluons, they believe that at one point in time there was something that was smaller than the head of a pen that became The infinite space that we see in front of us that's constantly expanding. | ||
| And so infinite that one of the things that Lawrence Krauss really, really fucked my mind up when he was here. | ||
| He was explaining to me that when we're seeing the universe, we're talking about 13.7 billion years or whatever it is. | ||
| You're seeing as it was. | ||
| Well, yes, not just seeing as it was, but he said you're only seeing the observable universe because the universe itself is moving faster than the light that you see from it. | ||
| So it's entirely possible that it goes back far further than that. | ||
| You just can't see it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Richard Dawkins, the guy that we talked about earlier about selfish gene, has a wonderful concept. | ||
| It's called middle world. | ||
| Have you heard this before? | ||
| No, but I read J.R.R. Tolkien's. | ||
| Is that Middle Earth? | ||
| Oh, that's Lord of the Rings? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay, I'm not too familiar with that stuff. | ||
| But he talks about middle world, the idea being that our brains evolved to understand phenomena at a level that our brain interacts with, right? | ||
| He calls that middle world. | ||
| So that which is at the cosmological level, right, at the Lawrence Krauss level of cosmology, or at the nano level... | ||
| Quantum physics. | ||
| It's so esoteric that our brains haven't evolved to understand phenomena at that level, right? | ||
| So in a sense, it's counterintuitive for us to even do science. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| When you and I, or actually most physicists, when they study things at those levels, they will tell you that the stuff is so esoteric, right? | ||
| Richard Feynman, the very famous physicist, right? | ||
| Said, you know, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics or something to that effect, right? | ||
| That it is so esoteric and difficult for human brains to understand things at that level, small or very big. | ||
| But that notwithstanding, that doesn't mean that scientists succumb to belief just like religious people do. | ||
| Because scientists have epistemic humility, which basically means what? | ||
| I'm always willing to see data. | ||
| if Joe Rogan tomorrow comes to me with data showing that the mechanisms of evolution as enunciated starting with Darwin are wrong then I would be a dishonest scientist to not revise my beliefs in light of Joe Rogan's evidence so in other words scientists are always open It's always provisional knowledge. | ||
| It's only the best that we have now. | ||
| Whereas in religion, it's revealed truth. | ||
| It is true because it is true, because it's in my book, because it's true. | ||
| So in a sense, religious people are epistemologically haughty. | ||
| They're arrogant because nothing could change their opinions, whereas scientists change their opinions every day. | ||
| So in that sense, I don't think we're both succumbing to belief systems. | ||
| No, I'm not necessarily saying that. | ||
| And I'm not equating them. | ||
| I'm not saying they're equal. | ||
| But it is an odd belief. | ||
| And not necessarily even a belief, for lack of a better word. | ||
| But it's an odd concept. | ||
| That because we know that this exists, and because we have some sort of residual trace of an explosion a long time ago, you can... | ||
| I know, it's mind-blowing. | ||
| I mean, I probably, just as a layperson in physics, probably 1% of what I see in a National Geographic on physics, I can even remotely understand, right? | ||
| Because it just seems so... | ||
| And it's not as though I'm not capable of complex thought, but it's just so difficult for human minds... | ||
| What does it mean 16 billion light years away? | ||
| For the light to travel for 16 billion light years, that's the envelope? | ||
| How do you understand these kinds of... | ||
| It's too big. | ||
| And then the concept of life and death is also like our physical limitations. | ||
| Because we know that we live and die and we know that the Sun is going to burn out and we know that life on Earth lives and dies and things change. | ||
| So we impose these physical restrictions on the very universe itself when in fact it might be some constant process of expanding and contracting. | ||
| That's one of the most disturbing ideas is that the universe is going to expand infinitely and then contract infinitely and then do it all over again. | ||
| So that, I mean, I don't know if this is even a correct theory. | ||
| I don't know if maybe it's been disputed, but I had read once that there is a theory that the universe contracts to some insanely infinite position and then retracts down to the head of a pin again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then the whole Big Bang is this continual process that might take, you know, 100 trillion years or something insane. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| If you understand 1%, I understand 000.1. | ||
| I actually had this physicist on my show. | ||
| He might be a fun guy to have on your show. | ||
| His name is Lee Smolin. | ||
| He's a guy who produced... | ||
| The way that I discovered his work... | ||
| Is that I was looking for every possible field that I could think of where evolutionary theory has been infused into that field, right? | ||
| So for example, in my case, I apply evolutionary psychology in consumer behavior. | ||
| You could study criminality from an evolutionary perspective. | ||
| You could study medicine. | ||
| And so I was trying to come up with a table that listed all of the various scientific disciplines where evolutionary principles have made headway. | ||
| The field at the highest level, remember we were talking about middle world and cosmic... | ||
| He argued that the process of natural selection operates at the cosmological level, where this grand set of universes are being selected. | ||
| In other words, in the same way that we select genes, right? | ||
| Some genes get selected and others die out. | ||
| That that mechanism, sort of a cosmological natural selection at the cosmological level. | ||
| And so that's how I first... | ||
| It is so mind-blowing. | ||
| It is so esoteric. | ||
| It's so difficult to... | ||
| So non-palpable that it borders on taking mushrooms or psychedelics. | ||
| That's how mind-blowing. | ||
| So maybe you should check out our chat on my show. | ||
| He's a really cool guy. | ||
| You might enjoy him. | ||
| Well, it is fascinating to think of how much the universe, how many possibilities exist in the universe, right? | ||
| I mean, how many different solar systems exist? | ||
| Hundreds of billions just in this galaxy, one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. | ||
| It's almost like for our little tiny worlds, like when we try to look at it in terms of the big picture, we're not capable. | ||
| We don't have enough processing power. | ||
| We don't have enough hard drive space. | ||
| We can't Take all of these points of data and bring them into our head and consider them. | ||
| But it's entirely possible that everything you see in the ant world in terms of competition, everything you see in the human world in terms of competition, natural selection, and the constant and never-ending desire for innovation. | ||
| For novelty, for new things. | ||
| We have this constant desire to improve upon every single thing that we've ever done. | ||
| No one ever looks at a car and says, this is the best car ever. | ||
| It will not be improved upon. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| We don't need to make cars anymore. | ||
| They always want to come up with something that has better airbags, faster zero to 60, more protection for the passenger, automated controls. | ||
| You can sit back and sleep while your car drives you to work. | ||
| There's all these things that we just take for granted, but they're always moving in the direction of improvement. | ||
| And you could do that with life on Earth. | ||
| You go back to single-celled organisms, which become multi-celled organisms, and we always look at it like, oh, that's just a coincidence. | ||
| And it's dinosaurs, and then it becomes mammals, and then it becomes humans, and then it becomes animals. | ||
| Airplane riding, cell phone using, video having, you know, I mean, it just gets more and more complex, but we just, oh, that's just coincidence. | ||
| But is it? | ||
| Or is it moving in this constant state of improvement until we create an artificial being that can accelerate things far faster than our biological limitations are capable of doing? | ||
| So I'm not sure if this is where you want to go, but as you were describing this sort of quest for improvement, one of the threats of that reflex, or one of the dangers of that reflex, is precisely how totalitarian ideologies develop, where they argue that our current state of the world is faulty. | ||
| And if only you implement our ideology de jour, it could be communism, it could be Islam. | ||
| Right, it could be perfect. | ||
| Then it could be perfect. | ||
| Socialism in fact. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there is a way by which we could reach that utopia if only you adhere to our ideology. | ||
| So there's a real danger in sort of succumbing to that. | ||
| And by the way, I'm reading right now a book by William Gairdner, who might come on my show. | ||
| He's, I think, a political scientist. | ||
| His book is called The Great Divide, where he actually lays out some of the sort of fundamental foundational differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of their worldviews and how because of these starting positions being so different, having no overlap between them, the Venn diagrams don't where he actually lays out some of the sort of fundamental That's why you end up speaking over each other without being able to find common grounds. | ||
| So one of these differences is that and I describe something similar using different terms. | ||
| A lot of the quote liberals and progressives view our brain as being blank slate, right? | ||
| It's infinitely malleable. | ||
| And so if you see differences between people, it can't be because there was a starting point difference. | ||
| Michael Jordan was not innately different. | ||
| There were some environmental conditions that led Michael Jordan to become who he is and not Gat Saad to be the best NBA player ever. | ||
| And if only we can find the appropriate social intervention strategies, then we could all have equality of outcomes. | ||
| And so that is a faulty understanding of human nature, because human nature, as of course you know, is really an interaction of our biology and our society. | ||
| But so much of the welfare state is based on this idea that, no, we need more of your tax money so that we could implement a social engineering program so that we could reach that utopia where we are all equal outcome. | ||
| And frankly, I think that that's complete nonsense. | ||
| It is fascinating that people seek comfort in communism and socialism for that very reason, like they almost are trying to slow down the competition that they can't win. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I see it, by the way, at my university. | ||
| So Canada is a very sort of social welfare state, and Quebec, the province where I live, is sort of socialist on steroids. | ||
| And so in the context of the universities, all of the metrics of reward are removed so that we can have equality of outcomes. | ||
| And the way that you instantiate that is through The unions, right? | ||
| So there's a very powerful union that ensures that all professors are roughly treated equally because we're all social ants. | ||
| There's a queen bee, and then the rest of us are all equal. | ||
| But of course, humans are not equal. | ||
| Some are smarter. | ||
| Some work harder. | ||
| Some are more apathetic. | ||
| Some are honest. | ||
| Some are cheaters. | ||
| And so this idea of constantly having to have some external agent manage the process so that we could all be equal, to me, is grotesque. | ||
| And it goes back to, I think... | ||
| Probably our first conversation you and I had when I was saying that, you know, I would love to eventually come to Southern California, because at least in the United States, the society has been less parasitized by the social welfare idea. | ||
| Of course, the Democrats are more so than the Republicans, but as a general rule... | ||
| Canada is basically pure social welfare. | ||
| We're all equal. | ||
| And of course, Justin Trudeau is certainly trying to push that idea even more. | ||
| He's too handsome. | ||
| That's that guy's problem. | ||
| He's trying to make up for the fact that he's beautiful. | ||
| He's trying to be super sweet to everybody. | ||
| That's what's going on up there. | ||
| Did you hear about the... | ||
| I just put up a clip a few days ago about the Omar Khader case. | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Actually, a few people tweeted, oh, please talk to Joe Rogan about this. | ||
| So Omar Khadr is a Muslim guy whose family had become Canadian citizens, but the father had taken them away, I think, to Pakistan at one point and to Afghanistan at another. | ||
| And at one point they were living in Taliban territory. | ||
| This is 2002, I think. | ||
| And the U.S. military had engaged in some firefight. | ||
| At one point, they even lived in the compound of Bin Laden. | ||
| So these were really real apple pie Canadian folks. | ||
| And Omar Khader, who was 15 years old, apparently threw a grenade, engaged in a firefight, killed one U.S. soldier, and I think blinded a second one. | ||
| He was taken to Guantanamo Bay as a 15-year-old, spent many years there. | ||
| He was a military tribunal, U.S. Guantanamo Tribunal, gave him a symbolic sentence of 40 years, but it was symbolic in that I think it was only going to be eight years. | ||
| They agreed on a plea deal of eight years. | ||
| Then he was extradited to Canada. | ||
| Very quickly after that, he was released because he already served quite a few years in Guantanamo. | ||
| And then he filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government for not having protected his Canadian charter rights because he was a child soldier and so on. | ||
| And he just settled on a $10.5 million settlement and an official apology by the Canadian government. | ||
| Most people were outraged. | ||
| Most Canadians are outraged. | ||
| But then you should see the comments on my YouTube channel. | ||
| You know, what kind of pig are you talking to me that I would not understand that this was an innocent child soldier who... | ||
| Yeah, because most of us are usually hanging around when we're 15 in the compound of bin Laden and lobbing bombs at incoming Marines. | ||
| You know, that's a very Canadian apple pie thing to do. | ||
| So again, the reflex is not to be outraged that my taxpayers are funding this guy now in a $10.5 million settlement. | ||
| I'm a pig. | ||
| I'm a racist pig for not understanding this was just an innocent... | ||
| Child soldier at the wrong place at the wrong time. | ||
| Okay, let's look at two different things. | ||
| One, the amount of money they gave him, yeah, it's kind of crazy that your tax dollars go to that, but let's look at the 15-year-old kid. | ||
| What do you expect and what could possibly be done to dissuade him from following this path? | ||
| I mean, he's living in Bin Laden's compound. | ||
| You're talking about someone who's vulnerable to ideology. | ||
| 50-year-old men are vulnerable to ideology. | ||
| What about a 15-year-old child? | ||
| I don't know how much blame you can put on a kid now when it comes to throwing a bomb at someone and taking the life of another human being Well, there's got to be a lot of circumstances involved in that, and I would like to know what they are before I think about any judgment whatsoever, because I don't know, were they shooting at him? | ||
| Were they shooting at someone he knew? | ||
| Did someone he knew get murdered by a U.S. soldier? | ||
| Was he actively engaged in some sort of military training and considering becoming a militant? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But 15 is a baby. | ||
| I mean, yes or no, right? | ||
| I mean, you can drive a car at... | ||
| 16. In Quebec, yeah, you can start a driver's permit at 15. Is that what it is? | ||
| 15? | ||
| Yeah, my mother and father... | ||
| My father was 19. My mother was almost 16 when they got married. | ||
| So you can procreate and have a child, but you don't understand the... | ||
| Yeah, but let's be real about physiologically. | ||
| Your frontal cortex isn't even formed until you're 25. When you're 15 years old, you're not capable of making, especially living in a war zone, you're not capable of making moral and ethical judgments above and beyond the ideology that you're being raised in. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I agree that most of us in that situation may not have been able to extricate ourselves from that. | ||
| And what I'm going to say next doesn't necessarily support the outrage, but it gives it greater context. | ||
| He does come from a family. | ||
| Later, if you check when we get off the air, sort of the cues of this family, they don't seem as though they are assimilating very nicely within Canadian value system. | ||
| In other words... | ||
| For most Canadians, the reflex of taking this guy who seems to be quite resistant to liberty and modernity and freedoms and rewarding him with $10.5 million. | ||
| By the way, this is $10.5 Canadian, so it's probably $30 American. | ||
| At this point. | ||
| I thought you guys were real similar to us now. | ||
| We were till a few years ago. | ||
| We were at par and I think now we're at 1.3. | ||
| So we're about 25-30% less than you. | ||
| That's how it was when I first used to go up to Montreal, like in the 90s. | ||
| You mean at par or different? | ||
| Different the way it is you're saying now. | ||
| The American dollar went far longer up there. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, it's heading back towards that now. | ||
| Not to the worst. | ||
| The worst that I've ever seen it was when we lived in California in 2001 to 2003. At one point it was 0.64 or 65. Now it's at about 0.75. | ||
| So it's not the worst that it's ever been, but we're heading in that direction. | ||
| But since we're talking about Canada, maybe you'd like to talk about, and I know that you've had Jordan Peterson on, did you follow both of our respective testimonies in front of the Canadian Senate regarding Bill C-16? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| You know, I've read a lot of Jordan's stuff on that. | ||
| I've seen him speak a lot, and I saw that one conversation that he had on television in Canada with some person who is a professor in gender studies. | ||
| Who is ambiguously sexual. | ||
| I don't know what they were. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whether it's a guy or a girl or a transgender woman to man. | ||
| This is what it seemed to be, right? | ||
| Right, yes. | ||
| And the one who was saying that there's no, that gender, there was no biological difference between men and women. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which is just fucking horseshit. | ||
| I mean, that is just like, one plus one is not two. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's obviously a broad spectrum of variation in both sexes and they kind of coalesce in the middle somewhere with some. | ||
| Well, what's amazing is that I've been fighting this battle in academia precisely because of what I do, which is introduce evolutionary psychology in the social sciences. | ||
| So these types of conversations, these ludicrous conversations, I've been experiencing them for much of my scientific career. | ||
| What's extraordinary at this point is that some of this nonsense is now becoming law in Canada. | ||
| So to kind of give you the background to what happened, so I was invited both to speak in front of the Canadian Senate and also to give a talk on Parliament Hill. | ||
| The Canadian Senate part was Bill C-16, which is a bill that seeks to incorporate gender identity and gender expression under the rubric of hate crimes. | ||
| So in the same way that I can't discriminate against you for your religion or your race or your ethnicity, I can't discriminate against you because of your gender identity or gender expression because then that would be a hate crime. | ||
| And so I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate to simply say that, while of course everybody's personhood should be respected and we're all equal under the law, the manner by which the bill was tabled, the way it was written, it was so vague as for it to be dangerous. | ||
| And so I gave examples. | ||
| So let me just mention a few here for your viewers. | ||
| So I said, look... | ||
| Harvard University, their LGBTQ office, came out with a pamphlet that said that the idea of promulgating, and I'm going to quote, fixed binaries and biological essentialism, close quote. | ||
| Fixed binaries means male-female. | ||
| Biological essentialism is to argue that anything is biological. | ||
| So the idea of promulgating fixed binaries and biological essentialism is a form of transphobic, systemic violence. | ||
| This is not... | ||
| Violence. | ||
| Violence. | ||
| And it's not metaphorical. | ||
| It's not allegorical. | ||
| It's not that they mean violence in quotes. | ||
| It is a form of transphobia, but specifically systemic, violent transphobia. | ||
| Now, how do they define violence? | ||
| Because there's a very specific definition of violence. | ||
| Well, I don't know how they define it. | ||
| How do they use that? | ||
| In the general sense, I think it's the desire to come up with ever-broadening definitions of violence so that any transgression that you commit could fit under that rubric. | ||
| Even microaggressions. | ||
| Microaggression is a form of violence, right? | ||
| So then I went in front of the Canadian Senate. | ||
| Now, you could watch this later. | ||
| It's on my channel. | ||
| I said, look, Every single thing that I teach in my courses would constitute transphobic systemic violence based on that sort of standard, right? | ||
| Based on scientific data. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So if I get up and say, here's how sexual selection works, right? | ||
| Sexual selection is the mechanism that explains how sex specific traits evolve. | ||
| Well, sex specific traits evolve You recognize that there is male and there is female. | ||
| Here is why human males are likely to have been sexually selected to be more risk-takers, right? | ||
| Well, by engaging in that conversation, I would be promulgating fixed binaries and biological essentialism. | ||
| And transforming. | ||
| And transphobic violence. | ||
| And transphobic violence. | ||
| Because a transgendered student can come up to me and say, look, professor, you've taught your course. | ||
| I've listened to your course for 13 weeks. | ||
| You talked about evolved mating preferences and so on. | ||
| Not once did you talk about the non-gender, the non-binary, the gender fluid, the other kin and so on. | ||
| That's marginalized me. | ||
| That's excluded me. | ||
| You're being biased. | ||
| You're being prejudicial. | ||
| So I try to argue that. | ||
| Most of the liberal senators either laughed and scoffed. | ||
| One of them accused me of being pro-genocide. | ||
| This is on record in the Canadian Senate. | ||
| So a scientist... | ||
| What's this person's name? | ||
| I think Joal. | ||
| Senator Joal. | ||
| But I started pushing the... | ||
| which has now become maybe an internet meme. | ||
| Did you have a conversation with him? | ||
| Did it end there? | ||
| So, the conversation we had was... | ||
| Promoting genocide? | ||
| How do you respond to that when someone says that? | ||
| So then my response, which you could see, I'm paraphrasing, he said, well, I'm not sure that given the fact that I escaped execution in Lebanon because of my Jewish heritage, that I need to be lectured about genocide. | ||
| And that sort of took him aback. | ||
| Now, apparently later, and I didn't see this, apparently later he wanted to retract some of these comments and apologize for them. | ||
| I don't know if he did or not. | ||
| How did he justify genocide? | ||
| Like, what... | ||
| That's what happens when you have your brain parasitized by Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome. | ||
| How is it okay to study all of these behavior patterns in ants and monkeys and dogs and what have you, but you can't with human beings? | ||
| Because if you do with human beings somehow or another... | ||
| Anything that you find about generalized behavior patterns or specific sexual preferences that somehow or another marginalizes or in some way diminishes how another person is living their life to the point where it becomes violence. | ||
| So there's actually a term for what you just asked. | ||
| It's called the human reticence effect. | ||
| And simply put, A lot of people are perfectly happy to use evolutionary arguments to explain the behavior of the salamander, the hyena, the mosquito, the dog. | ||
| But if you use the exact same evolutionary principle to explain human phenomena, then suddenly it's no-go. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Do you think it's because we're aspiring to something better? | ||
| I think it's because people succumb to, wrongly so, to the idea of biological determinism. | ||
| They think that if you call up in explaining a phenomenon a biological principle, that means you're doomed to your biology. | ||
| It's a fatalistic thing, which of course is nonsense because there's no such thing as biological determinism because most of the things So, the idea of biological determinism is a false worry. | ||
| Much of what we do, it's called the interactionist viewpoint, much of who we are is an interaction of our genes and our environments. | ||
| But for most people, there is something vulgar about reducing the richness of the human condition to our biology. | ||
| It just feels wrong. | ||
| This explains the behavior of the hyena. | ||
| But we are above that. | ||
| We are cultural animals. | ||
| We are prone to conditioning and socialization and higher-order cognition. | ||
| So you could even take evolutionary biologists. | ||
| So these are people who are trained in evolutionary biology. | ||
| They will commit this error. | ||
| I mean, that's breathtaking, right? | ||
| The classic example is a guy who is otherwise an utter buffoon. | ||
| His name is P.Z. Myers, a fifth-rate academic. | ||
| And I say this because... | ||
| Not to denigrate him, but because... | ||
|
unidentified
|
And by Z, that's the letter Z. Z, Z, yes. | |
| Yes, Canadian. | ||
| So P.Z. Myers. | ||
| His claim to fame is he's got a very, and hats off to him, he's got an incredibly popular scientific blog called Faringula, which gets 100 million views or something. | ||
| So he's done very well for himself. | ||
| But he's the guy who is perfectly happy to use evolutionary principles to explain the mating behavior of the salamander. | ||
| But if I come along as an evolutionary psychologist and use the exact same principle, the exact same logical structure to explain human behavior, well, what's this Gatsad doing with this bullshit evolutionary psychology stuff? | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| That's pseudoscience, right? | ||
| And the reflex he has that is because... | ||
| To somehow explain it for the salamander makes sense. | ||
| It's National Geographic. | ||
| But humans, they're not prone to biology. | ||
| And I'll just give you two other examples. | ||
| Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewington, who were very, very famous Harvard evolutionists, also despised evolutionary psychology, but for other reasons. | ||
| They were avowed Marxists. | ||
| They came sort of from the hippie generations of the Marxists. | ||
| They're probably about 20 years older than me. | ||
| Well, one of them now has passed away. | ||
| Stephen Jay Gould is dead. | ||
| But they were guys who thought that if evolutionary psychology is right, then their Marxist bullshit ideologies would be wrong. | ||
| So they were strong anti-evolutionary psychology folks, even though all of their training suggested that they should be for it. | ||
| So they are the guys, by the way, who used to... | ||
| E.O. Wilson, I mentioned earlier... | ||
| So E.O. Wilson, the social ants guy, wrote a book called Sociobiology in 1975, where he explained how evolutionary theory could explain behavior across all sorts of animals. | ||
| Everybody was happy with the book. | ||
| In one of the last chapters, he applies all these principles to the human condition, He became persona non grata. | ||
| He became a Nazi. | ||
| He couldn't go anywhere to give a talk without being shouted down. | ||
| Not unlike how you're seeing Milo today being shouted down. | ||
| Well, E.O. Wilson went through those culture wars 30 years ago because evolutionary psychology was attacking the pet political ideologies of his colleagues at Harvard. | ||
| I don't know if Milo is a valid comparison. | ||
| I think Jordan Peterson would probably be a better comparison. | ||
| Because Milo is obviously a provocateur and he did it on purpose. | ||
| But instead of pointing the finger at individuals, I would like to try to figure out, obviously we're not going to, but let's discuss it. | ||
| What is the motivation? | ||
| Why do people resist these ideas of looking at the data of human interaction and genetics and sexual preference? | ||
| Why do they resist Examining these factors like what is it about and what is it about people that like that guy that you're talking about that wants to point at you for examining these factors and call you horrific names and just for looking at Actual provable data data that you can mean you could show it you could do a minutes reviewed you can What's the motivation? | ||
| I think it's ultimately ego-driven. | ||
| So in the case of those Harvard folks, they are committed Marxists. | ||
| And if evolutionary psychology is right, therefore my pet political ideology is wrong, therefore I have to shoot it. | ||
| That's one example. | ||
| Let's do a few more. | ||
| Suppose I am an overweight woman. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And I don't get much action on the mating market. | ||
| One of two things can happen. | ||
| I could either believe that there is an evolved preference that men have for certain universal standards of beauty, or... | ||
| I could go for the much more comforting message, which is that these beauty standards are arbitrary sexist patriarchal standards. | ||
| And if only men would stop being shallow and buying into these Hollywood images, then... | ||
| Myself, this beautiful 800-pound woman, would be getting all the action in the world. | ||
| So it's nothing wrong with me. | ||
| It's that there are outside forces that are causing these arbitrary preferences to arise, right? | ||
| Naomi Wolf wrote a book in the early 90s, The Beauty Myth, that sold millions of copies, where she argued that there is no such thing as universal standards of beauty. | ||
| It's all a beauty myth. | ||
| It's the patriarchy that imposes these beauty myths on women to attack their sense of self. | ||
| Well, if I'm a woman who doesn't score well, even if I'm a man, for example, and we know that women prefer men of high status, well, I could do one of two things. | ||
| I could get out there and shake my butt and get the status, right? | ||
| Joe Rogan, nobody gave him all the stuff that you have. | ||
| You had to work hard for all your success so that you could then hopefully do well on the mating market. | ||
| Or I could say, you know what, these are all arbitrary standards. | ||
| I mean, in a just world, my being a lazy, apathetic beta male would just be as worthy of love. | ||
| And so I think ultimately there is an element to biological-based explanations Unhopeful to most people, right? | ||
| The idea that we could all be anything is a lot more hopeful. | ||
| And the idea that we could all be anything unconstrained by biology only exists in the recesses of ideologues. | ||
| The world is not made up like that. | ||
| Beautiful people are more symmetric. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that if you're not symmetric, you're doomed to a life of celibacy. | ||
| But know the fact that Brad Pitt is considered handsome because he exhibits certain cues that women all around the world agree are beautiful. | ||
| So to answer your question, there is something very non-hopeful about blackness. | ||
| Buying the idea that we are biological beings. | ||
| It's a lot more comforting to know we are infinitely malleable, infinitely socializable, because then any of us could be anything. | ||
| Given the right conditions, I could be the next Lionel Messi. | ||
| That's hopeful, and therefore I'd like to subscribe to that. | ||
| I think there's absolutely something to what you're saying, but I think there is also this very strange and vague possibility that we are aspiring to a higher standard because we recognize that human beings are evolving and that we're moving into some strange place where we're no longer just creatures of the flesh. | ||
| And that this need to put people on this even playing field is a part of this aspiration. | ||
| I definitely think there's these influences and I definitely think there are these... | ||
| There's a lot of people that look at beautiful people and they get upset. | ||
| I mean, there's a way that they do it where they feel that they're justified in being prejudiced. | ||
| Like, they can see a guy like The Rock, for example, who's a... | ||
| Big, handsome man. | ||
| Big, burly man. | ||
| And they think, that guy's a fucking idiot. | ||
| Immediately. | ||
| Meanwhile, that guy probably reads a lot. | ||
| He's probably smart as hell, right? | ||
| He's obviously very ambitious, so he can control his mind. | ||
| Charismatic. | ||
| He's very disciplined. | ||
| He controls his mind far better than a lot of overweight people that would criticize him and call him a fool. | ||
| But meanwhile, they let their body rot to this state of decay, which is not an intellectual thing to do. | ||
| If you're looking at your body in a Like, as a finite resource, and how do you manage that resource? | ||
| Well, very poorly if you're eating ringdings, drinking fucking soda, and smoking cigarettes, and then talking about The Rock being an idiot, right? | ||
| I mean, these are obviously straw man examples. | ||
| But I wonder if... | ||
| What we're doing with what's going on in Canada and this liberal social justice warrior approach to everybody being equal and if they're not, let's try to make them equal and if there's anybody that's superior, let's try to push them down and bring the brown people up and I wonder if we're trying to achieve some sort of equilibrium, some sort of balance, some sort of Some sort of state where we're no longer just monkeys. | ||
| We're no longer just creatures of, you know, I want to fuck her because she's got big tits. | ||
| You know, these are base ideas. | ||
| These are base instincts that it's fine if we observe them in bonobos, but we don't want to see them in Harvard-educated kids, right? | ||
| So the male gaze becomes problematic, right? | ||
| A man staring at a woman becomes a microaggression. | ||
| Meanwhile, she's wearing almost nothing. | ||
| She's got a short skirt on and painted toes, and you want to... | ||
| You can't help yourself. | ||
| The genes come firing up. | ||
| You must suppress those, because we're eventually moving past the flesh. | ||
| And you are of the new generation, the new generation that will someday be neutered, and there will be some non-binary expression of your humanity that, you know, exists as an avatar in some virtual reality world that you'll be forced to subscribe to when you join Yale. | ||
| But by the way, when you talked about the male gaze, I'm not sure if we've discussed this on this show before, but it's precisely this type of thinking that causes the Western feminists to view the burqa as liberating and the bikini as patriarchal oppression. | ||
| It's exactly that, right? | ||
| To the extent that the male gaze is a form of visual rape, right? | ||
| And that should be condemned, that should be stopped because it is a type of assault, in quotes, right? | ||
| The burqa, by removing that male gaze, becomes liberating. | ||
| Now, this is not an argument that I'm making up. | ||
| I've heard this argument. | ||
| On the other hand, when a woman wears the Brazilian thong and you and I look at her and have the exact same predictable response that most men would have because it's an evolved response, well, that's bad because we are part of the patriarchy and we are succumbing to this rape urge, that's bad because we are part of the patriarchy and we So when I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome, I don't just use it as a metaphor. | ||
| It's genuinely the case that people's minds are becoming infected with such garbage that they're incapable to rationalize, to think with reason. | ||
| And that's what I end up doing most of the time. | ||
| That's what Jordan Peterson ends up doing most of the time, which is we are committed to truth, unencumbered by political correctness. | ||
| Earlier you were saying, what would be some, you know, how can we get ourselves out of You know, succumbing to this tribalism and so on. | ||
| I think the only way you could do it, and I'm not saying that anybody can reach that level, is to simply be dedicated to the pursuit of truth. | ||
| When I was on Sam Harris' show, you know, earlier this year, about six, seven months ago, he asked me, is there any research question that you would not tackle in your scientific career that is too taboo? | ||
| And my answer is no, right? | ||
| As long as you address the question honestly and objectively, there is nothing that should be off limits, right? | ||
| Because then it becomes very easy to say, well, sex differences, we shouldn't study that because then it will marginalize one sex or the other. | ||
| Race differences, we shouldn't study them for the same reason and so on. | ||
| That becomes forbidden knowledge. | ||
| No. | ||
| The highest ideal that any honest person should pursue is the pursuit of truth, and certainly an intellectual. | ||
| So don't be encumbered by political correctness. | ||
| Just pursue the truth. | ||
| And I think one of the reasons that Jordan Peterson's message and my message has resonated now with a lot of people is because at least they see that we are ascribing to that ideal to the best of our abilities. | ||
| What if that truth hurts your feelings? | ||
| Fuck your feelings. | ||
| Oh, how dare you? | ||
| I'm triggered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't believe I used the F word. | |
| Well, this podcast has an effect on people. | ||
| I think it's a bunch of different things going on all at once. | ||
| And there's obviously some tribalism going on even amongst these Social justice warriors he's a virtue signaling people who are trying to Get as much credit much, you know social justice warrior street cred as they can like what? | ||
| Happened with Brett Weinstein up in evergreen college and when I had him on I just read some recent thing where they're doubling down on their hate of him and you know me they They're accusing him of all of this by simply going on the Tucker Carlson show. | ||
| Now, here's what's fascinating. | ||
| Huffington Post, which is a really left-leaning establishment, right? | ||
| I mean, if any website is left-leaning, it's Huffington Post. | ||
| I think they have some great articles. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| I'm not critical of all their stuff, but it's very left-leaning, like openly regarded. | ||
| They had a piece breaking down how preposterous these students are, and the faculty, and the president, and what they have done to Brett Weinstein, and criticized each step of it by showing a transcription of his conversation on the Tucker Carlson show, which lasted like five minutes, I think. | ||
| And, you know, they called Tucker Carlson alt-right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, I don't know. | ||
| You're redefining alt-right now. | ||
| By the way, I've been called alt-right. | ||
| Dave Rubin and I are leaders of the alt-right. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| We're leaders. | ||
| We're the actual leaders of the alt-right. | ||
| I wrote a tweet about this. | ||
| Like, the fact that they can call Dave Rubin, who is a gay man, Who's married to a man who used to be on the Young Turks. | ||
| Who's Jewish? | ||
| Who's Jewish. | ||
| And, I mean, I guess I call them a progressive, but a progressive in the idea that he wants progress. | ||
| I mean, the real broad term of progressive. | ||
| Progress meaning equality for all, but honest. | ||
| Honest about the approach. | ||
| But I would consider him probably more in a libertarian bent, if you wanted to get, like, political. | ||
| I guess I'm sort of in this sort of progressive slash libertarian left-leaning thing, but I also believe in a lot of right things as well. | ||
| I think that competition is probably ultimately good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Blaming other people for your lack of success is really easy and it's something that people do all the time but when you do that if you look at things in that way then you're diminishing the struggles that downtrodden people and minorities and the oppressed and all these different you know Small groups that have been somehow or another marginalized. | ||
| You're diminishing their struggle, which is absolutely not the case. | ||
| But there have been people that have emerged from those groups and done amazing things. | ||
| But, oh, those are outliers, and you can't hold people up to the standards of those outliers. | ||
| And, you know, the real problem is that the competition is stacked in the favor of these white men who experience white privilege. | ||
| And what we really need to do is squash white men. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| By the way, I have a theory about all this stuff. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I call it Collective Munchhausen. | ||
| Oh, you've said this before. | ||
| Please go again, though. | ||
| I'd like this to stand alone. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, remember how earlier I said that the highest ideal should be the pursuit of the truth? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, the currency that I operate in is pursuing truth, wherever that leads me. | ||
| A banker cares about the bottom line, how many zeros there are in his bank, right? | ||
| In my case, it's truth. | ||
| Now, in the social justice warrior's currency, it's how much ego strokes he or she gets by proclaiming unique victimhood status. | ||
| Now, why do I call this collective Munchausen? | ||
| So in 2010, I had published a paper in a medical journal where I was looking at a specific form of Munchausen. | ||
| So Munchausen syndrome is a psychiatric condition where someone feigns illness to get attention, to get empathy, to get sympathy. | ||
| It's a real psychiatric condition. | ||
| I know a lady who's got it. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Oh yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'll tell you later. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a different situation where... | ||
| You try to get your ego strokes by harming someone else and then getting the reward. | ||
| So what does that mean? | ||
| You're, for example, a biological mother who has this condition. | ||
| You will harm your child, your biological child. | ||
| So that then you could take him to the hospital and people say, oh, poor you. | ||
| You've got a sick, ailing child and so on. | ||
| And then you get your orgiastic, orgasmic strokes by getting that attention and that empathy, right? | ||
| Or you could do it if you have a pet or sometimes with elderly parents. | ||
| But usually it's your biological child. | ||
| So I was writing a paper trying to explain this from an evolutionary perspective, how this pathology could arise. | ||
| And so that's how... | ||
| The psychiatric syndrome wasn't my radar. | ||
| And then as I started seeing all these social justice warriors Navigating the world through a game of Oppression Olympics, where the highest goal you could achieve is to be declared the winner of the Oppression Olympics game, right? | ||
| It's not the pursuit of truth. | ||
| It's not making the most money. | ||
| It's, can I be anointed as the guy with the greatest? | ||
| And I call this collective Munchhausen because it becomes a form of Munchhausen, but at the collective level, right? | ||
| Let me give you another example as relating to Donald Trump. | ||
| When Donald Trump won the election, just on my Facebook page, private personal Facebook page, I would see people outdoing each other almost as if it were satirical in terms of their collective munchausen. | ||
| I am a brown woman who's attending this university. | ||
| Now that Donald Trump has won, I'm afraid to go to classes. | ||
| Just think about how outrageous that sounds. | ||
| You may like or dislike Donald Trump. | ||
| Do you genuinely believe that your ability to take classes in your bullshit college in Maine is going to be affected? | ||
| You're going to experience personal safety because Donald Trump is setting up Roadblocks so that he could create internment camps for all women of color so that they get gang raped. | ||
| What is the fear that you have that you're literally right? | ||
| But they're testifying, right? | ||
| They're testifying. | ||
| And so it becomes this collective psychosis where the way that I win is by demonstrating that I am the biggest victim. | ||
| And so that's what social justice warriors do, is that they have to win that game. | ||
| And so the Brett Weinstein example is those guys seeking to win those Olympics. | ||
| How dare you say that you could come on campus? | ||
| Don't you know what kind of victims we are and so on? | ||
| It's a complete departure from reason. | ||
| It's grotesque. | ||
| It's a psychiatric condition. | ||
| It's weird how prevalent it is, though, and how it's almost one of those things that you, as a professor, are not really allowed to discuss with the people that are exhibiting that behavior because then you're diminishing their fear. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're diminishing or marginalizing their own personal issues that they feel that they have. | ||
| Accept? | ||
| Accept. | ||
| Because I always can pull out my victimology card, which usually outranks all of them because they're screaming while sitting at Wellesley paying $60,000 that they are marginalized. | ||
| Whereas I say, I'm not sure if I could be sympathetic because let me tell you my personal history. | ||
| Well, that's what you did with that guy in the meeting when he accused you of genocide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You've hit him with four aces. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, suck it, stupid. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so now, by the way, the only way I can improve my score, as I have jokingly said, is if I self-identify as a woman, hence I'm transgendered, Would you shave, though? | ||
| If you self-identified as a woman, why do you have to assume the appearance of a woman? | ||
| I mean, if really appearances don't matter. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, if that's what we're saying. | ||
| I'm a woman with a penis. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, this whole idea that beauty standards are bullshit and that are constructed by the patriarchy. | ||
| Why can't you grow a big old Santa Claus beard and still identify with a woman? | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Why can't you? | ||
| Well, let's set the trend. | ||
| But where do we draw the line though? | ||
| Because I have no problem with someone identifying as a woman. | ||
| If you want to be a woman, that's fine. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But, well, where do we draw the line though? | ||
| Where are you allowed... | ||
| Where are you... | ||
| How out there can you get before I'm allowed to go, well, that guy might be fucking crazy. | ||
| Well, have you heard about this new... | ||
| There's this new thing called, I think, cis-sexism. | ||
| Have you heard this? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think I covered it in one of my Sad Truths clips. | ||
| It's basically the idea that... | ||
| So, you're a heterosexual male who... | ||
| I'm cisgendered. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is not real. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not a real expression. | ||
| But it is real. | ||
| All expressions are created by humans, right? | ||
| Very true. | ||
| Some humans accept it. | ||
| So, you and I wish to mate with women. | ||
| Hence, we are heterosexual males. | ||
| Boy, do we. | ||
| Okay, right. | ||
| Now... | ||
| Stay with me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Now, by you restricting your preference to this old antiquated term of women, meaning that they have vaginas, you're actually engaging in a form of cis-sexism because there are women who have nine-inch penises who should also be privy to your attention. | ||
| So by you saying, yes, I'm attracted to women, But only the women that are cisgendered that have female genitalia, that's a form of cis-sexism. | ||
| This idea is not being promulgated. | ||
| So you even saying that you have a heterosexual orientation towards biological women is a form of transphobia. | ||
| Not unlike, by the way, here's another example, transracialism. | ||
| Have you heard of this idea? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I love this idea. | ||
| Isn't it fantastic? | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| So... | ||
| How far can we take this? | ||
| We can go pretty far. | ||
| So you think the fulcrum is not going to start swinging the other way at some point? | ||
| For sure it will, and it has. | ||
| And I think that's one of the reasons why Donald Trump got into office, is people were so upset with political correctness, they went with the exact opposite, which is buffoonery. | ||
| Outrageous, braggadocious male buffoonery. | ||
| I mean, that's really what it is. | ||
| I mean, he's a braggadocious buffoon in a lot of respects, especially the way he talks about his ratings and, you know, talks about himself in the third person, you know, like he was describing Kanye West, that Kanye loves Trump. | ||
| I mean, could you imagine saying that about yourself, like describing yourself in the third person, but a famous person loving you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| Well, you know, a lot of people who follow me think that, I joke that, That, you know, they think that I have these Trump posters in my room and, you know, he's my big hero, which of course he's not. | ||
| And by the way, I'm Canadian, so I truly don't have a dog in this fight. | ||
| The reason why they think that is because I offered, prior to the election... | ||
| Being done, I offered some compelling reasons, psychological reasons, why people might vote for Donald Trump. | ||
| So most famously, perhaps, in my chat with Sam Harris, I explained the psychological mechanisms that could lead to otherwise perfectly reasonable people to vote for Trump. | ||
| Simply proposing these was complete I'm sure you're aware of what's going on with Scott Adams. | ||
| I mean, Scott Adams has lost millions of dollars for simply stating that he believes that Donald Trump is a very persuasive person and correctly predicting that that power of persuasion would allow him to win the presidency. | ||
| Is that incredible? | ||
| He doesn't even vote. | ||
| Scott Adams says because he talks so much about politics, he does not want to have a dog in the fight, so he doesn't vote. | ||
| He told me that on the podcast. | ||
| And so people think that he's a Trump supporter. | ||
| He's like, I'm absolutely not a Trump supporter. | ||
| He goes, I'm analyzing the human behavior. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So just to kind of repeat what I had told Sam, so there are different decision rules that one can use when they're making a choice between competing alternatives. | ||
| So, for example, if you're choosing between cars, each car is defined by many attributes, right? | ||
| It's gas efficiency, it's the power of its engine, its price, and so on. | ||
| And so there are different ways that I could apply a decision rule in choosing between car A and car B. So here's one rule. | ||
| I could take all the attributes, put them together, multiply them by the importance rate of each attribute, and pick the best product. | ||
| So using that decision rule, maybe Hillary Clinton would have won. | ||
| Because maybe if you put all the attributes together, she ends up scoring higher than Donald Trump. | ||
| But here's another decision rule. | ||
| It's called the lexicographic rule. | ||
| The lexicographic rule basically says, I simply look at my most important What's the attribute that I care most when I'm making the choice within this category? | ||
| And I simply choose the alternative that scores higher on that most important attribute. | ||
| So for example, if it were cars, I only care about the power of the engine, so I choose car A because it has a stronger power engine, right? | ||
| In the case of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, suppose that my lexicographic rule is, I care only about the position on immigration. | ||
| That's my decision. | ||
| That's the only thing I look at. | ||
| Well, it's very reasonable for people to think that Donald Trump had a more conservative, tough view on immigration than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| So if I use that decision rule, that psychological rule, I would choose Donald Trump. | ||
| It wouldn't make me a guy who is sleeping with my sister and I'm a toothless guy in Arkansas and a hick. | ||
| It simply means that I'm using a particular decision rule that causes me to choose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. | ||
| So again, all I did, not unlike what Scott Adams did in his own way, is offer the different psychological processes by which a very reasonable person can end up choosing Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And it's unbelievable the kind of flack I got. | ||
| Well, it's crazy because it's your absolute area of expertise. | ||
| I mean, it's what your education is in. | ||
| It's what you teach. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's so strange that if it doesn't jive with people's belief systems, they get upset at you for teaching something that's science. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, I call this, by the way, the I used to love you got sad, but rule. | ||
| So I used to love you got sad, but Trump, I hate you. | ||
| People just love saying that, though. | ||
| They love saying that. | ||
| They love to try to instill a seed of regret. | ||
| Not just criticism, but regret. | ||
| Because it's even more painful. | ||
| Like, to say, I just think you're a fool. | ||
| It's like, all right, well, fuck you. | ||
| You're not my fan. | ||
| I'm not into you. | ||
| What's the number one source of flack that you receive from your gigantic fan base? - Oh. | ||
| The one issue that triggers the most animus to you. | ||
| Boy, I don't know. | ||
| To me? | ||
| Like, personally? | ||
| Like, you know, Joe, I think you're a great guy, but my God, you're such an idiot because of X. What's X? There's so many things. | ||
| We need a three-hour podcast just to name them all. | ||
| I get a lot of facts wrong. | ||
| A lot of things I remember incorrectly. | ||
| Because a lot of, like, these free-form conversations like we're having, it's not planned out. | ||
| The subjects aren't planned out. | ||
| In particular, like... | ||
| The divergent paths that we take, sometimes we'll go down a path and I'll go, what was that story about that thing? | ||
| And I'll get that shit wrong all the time. | ||
| Because as good as my memory is, and it's pretty good, there's just a certain amount of data that you could... | ||
| Instantaneously call up to the... | ||
| I mean, if you ask me questions about certain things that are in my constant day-to-day existence, like maybe perhaps stand-up comedy or martial arts, I can give you a staggering amount of information off the top of my head. | ||
| But there's a lot of stuff that we talk about in these podcasts. | ||
| It's just people say, well, you should have prepared for it. | ||
| Well, I didn't know we were going to talk about it. | ||
| It's one of the things that makes the conversation so interesting. | ||
| So in that sense, I'm giving myself a get-out-of-jail-free pass. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, getting things wrong is probably the big one. | ||
| Talking over people, being a meathead, all those things I'm guilty of. | ||
| I think probably the number one thing for me over the past few months has been this Trump thing. | ||
| Where people simply can't, they think I'm his water boy, which of course I'm not. | ||
| But I'm simply saying, look, very reasonable people could have converged to a Trump decision, a vote. | ||
| But don't you think that's like one of those 140 character criticisms? | ||
| Like it's really, like I've been called a Trump supporter, I'm 100% not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But because of the fact that it's a cruel thing to say to someone, yeah, still loving Trump now, you fucking idiot? | ||
| Like, loving Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| What am I, like I have a seven minute long bit about him on my act. | ||
| Like how am I loving him? | ||
| Like what are you talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| But it doesn't matter, because by saying that, they could diminish you. | ||
| Oh, you're a racist. | ||
| Oh, you're a sexist. | ||
| One of the craziest ones is if someone gets unfairly or unjustly or inaccurately accused of rape, immediately that person's a rapist, and they did it. | ||
| And it is incredibly difficult to exonerate yourself from that. | ||
| And people that have been accused of rape, I mean, not people like Bill Cosby when he gets accused of it 50 fucking times or something crazy, but I've known people that were accused of rape and it was all a lie. | ||
| And it was done by an ex and it was just someone who was a scorned lover and was angry and they wanted to cast the worst possible light on this person in order to give them some taste of the pain that they feel from rejection or from whatever reason. | ||
| And this is not uncommon. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what the statistics are as far as false rape accusations versus actual rape versus people who are raped who don't talk about it. | ||
| But either one does not invalidate the other. | ||
| By saying that a lot of women actually have been raped, which neither you nor I would ever argue with, of course. | ||
| And it's a horrible crime, and it's a terrible fucking thing to do to a person to take away their humanity in that way. | ||
| That does not... | ||
| That does not somehow or another make it okay that people have false rape accusations. | ||
| No, that's a horrific thing, too. | ||
| I mean, we can quantify what's worse or what's better, you know, and I think we would all agree that it's probably worse to be physically raped than it is to be accused of rape when you didn't do it. | ||
| But they're both gross. | ||
| But do you think that, and I've actually written about this, do you think that the punishments for false accusations of rape are too lax? | ||
| Because I do. | ||
| I don't know what they are, but I would say that they should be pretty horrific. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Almost to the same amount of what he would have spent in prison. | ||
| Yeah, I think maybe like 70%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think false rape accusations, especially if you like really chase it down and try to get this person locked up, I mean there's so much wrong with that. | ||
| It might be like 70% of rape. | ||
| I mean 70% meaning like 70% is bad. | ||
| I shouldn't say a number. | ||
| I don't think it's as bad as physically raping someone. | ||
| But it's in the neighborhood. | ||
| But I mean, think of it this way, not to get too philosophical. | ||
| Every day that a guy spends in prison as a falsely accused rapist, while you, the woman who falsely accused him, is sitting in your house, I mean, you are, quote, Committing the crime every day of his life, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every day that you don't step forward, you're punishing, right? | |
| I mean, again, not to diminish that one act of rape, but you are raping this guy, metaphorically, if not literally, because he probably is going to be raped in prison for having... | ||
| That accusation on top of his head, right? | ||
| Right, because that's a targeted person. | ||
| That's a targeted person. | ||
| So, in a sense, you're almost as diabolical as a true rapist because you are living with that false information and every day you're going to buy your tomatoes and groceries unencumbered by the fact that there is a guy sitting in prison who's probably passing some very ugly moments because you're unwilling to correct the wrong that you've done. | ||
| So, I think it's a pretty diabolical person who does that. | ||
| It's definitely a diabolical person. | ||
| The problem is whenever you bring up this diabolical person, you automatically get lumped in with someone who is some sort of an enabler, some cisgendered, white male, privileged piece of shit who doesn't care about actual rape victims because you're more concerned with men who get falsely accused of rape. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's just another thing. | ||
| It's not diminishing the actual crime of rape, which is one of the worst things in the world next to murder. | ||
| It's just a horrific, terrifying aspect of human beings that we're even capable of doing that. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that false rape accusations aren't also a horrific aspect of being a person. | ||
| There's just a lot of shitty behavior that people exhibit. | ||
| And as soon as we lock ourselves into these These little groups that will always blindly support. | ||
| Like, I have this bit I've been doing lately about a bumper sticker I saw on a girl's car that said, Girls Kick Ass. | ||
| I'm like, can you imagine if a guy had a bumper sticker that said, Boys Kick Ass? | ||
| You're signing off on 160 million people? | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| But it's one of those things where we'll allow that because we All agree that women have a harder go of it in this country in particular and other countries far more so, right? | ||
| And we could go back to ideology for the reason for that, what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| By the way, speaking of rape, I don't think we've mentioned this ever on this show. | ||
| Two of my colleagues, one of whom I know well, the other one not so much, if at all, wrote a book around 2000 or 2002 offering an adaptive evolutionary explanation for rape. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| You don't need to hear anything more, right? | ||
| How's that guy doing? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So actually, I'll tell you their names. | ||
| So Randy Thornhill, who's a very, very serious scientist, and Craig Palmer, they wrote a book, I think it was in 2000. Now, they weren't, of course, justifying rape. | ||
| They weren't condoning it. | ||
| They were saying, look, if you wish to understand rape, Then you better have a good scientific basis for why it happens. | ||
| And therefore, they offered an adaptive argument. | ||
| Which, by the way, that's one of the main things that people who hate evolutionary psychology commit as a fallacy. | ||
| They think that when you explain a phenomenon, you are justifying it. | ||
| So if you explain why men and women might cheat on one another in monogamous unions, or you're offering a scientific justification for cheating, of course you're not. | ||
| Usually my rebuttal is... | ||
| The guy who studies cancer, an oncologist, does that mean he is for pancreatic cancer? | ||
| He's justifying? | ||
| No, he's just trying to explain why pancreatic cancer happens. | ||
| Is that across the board, though? | ||
| I mean, what if you try to explain why people commit violent crimes or explain why people steal things from stores? | ||
| Yeah, that's a great question. | ||
| I think there are certain phenomena that trigger that response more than others. | ||
| And it's an open, empirical question. | ||
| What's the quality of the phenomenon that causes you to react that way or not? | ||
| Well, I would say that it's most likely the stronger person who seems to have the privilege victimizing the weaker person. | ||
| Like males versus females. | ||
| Or child abuse. | ||
| That's another one. | ||
| So the book that got me into evolutionary psychology, I've mentioned this story before, maybe not on the show. | ||
| It was my first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell. | ||
| And the professor, this was an advanced social psychology course, and the professor assigned a book called Homicide. | ||
| By two pioneers of evolutionary psychology, husband and wife team, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, where the book is about understanding patterns of criminality via an evolutionary lens. | ||
| And one of the things in the book that had struck me as so powerful was looking at child abuse in a home and then Demonstrating that there's a very clear evolutionary reason why that happens. | ||
| So let me ask you this. | ||
| Have we discussed this before in this show? | ||
| I don't think so, right? | ||
| No, I don't recall. | ||
| Can you guess at all what is the number one greatest predictor of there being a child abuse in a home? | ||
| So for example, you might say, oh, it's poverty. | ||
| I would say it's probably parents that were abused as children. | ||
| No, bigger than that. | ||
| Bigger than that. | ||
| Much bigger. | ||
| As a matter of fact, that one factor is a hundredfold greater than that. | ||
| So in other words, typically when you say what's called an odds likelihood ratio, 1.2, so you have a 20% greater chance of getting cancer if you smoke. | ||
| So just having 1.2 greater odds is considered a big number. | ||
| Here I'm telling you a hundredfold greater. | ||
| So it's something that's almost never seen in science. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Having a step-parent in the home. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Okay? | ||
| Now, think again here of another animal. | ||
| And again, the people who don't like us... | ||
| A hundred times greater? | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| And actually, it's now been called the Cinderella effect. | ||
| Because in Cinderella, she shows the evil stepmother loves her two biological daughters, but hates the stepdaughter, Cinderella. | ||
| Now, think about with lions, right? | ||
| In a lion pride, you have a... | ||
| One or two dominant males who control and protect the pride and who control sexual access to the females. | ||
| There's constant testing of these males by bands of young males who are looking to take over. | ||
| And for a while, the resident males win out, and then eventually, they lose. | ||
| When they lose, and they're either killed or banished from the pride, what's the first thing that the new incoming bosses do? | ||
| They kill the babies. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| They kill the babies. | ||
| What happens to the females, the lionesses, When they kill them, they go into an estrus. | ||
| So I mean, instead of playing Barry White music and the violin to get them in the mood, kill their children and they get in the mood, right? | ||
| Nature is brutal, right? | ||
| Well, in the context of humans, when you have a step-parent who... | ||
| Is not biologically linked to the child, it simply increases the likelihood of there being abuse, right? | ||
| Now, usually when you explain this, what is the first thing that people say? | ||
| Oh, well, I grew up with a stepfather and he didn't do this to me. | ||
| You're an asshole. | ||
| Or, but what are you saying? | ||
| That means it's okay to do it because you're explaining it? | ||
| So look how they conflate explaining a phenomenon with justifying the phenomenon. | ||
| So I think rape, child abuse, and probably marital infidelity are the three evolutionary phenomena that when you explain using an evolutionary lens, people go completely wacko. | ||
| Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| I mean, it's something that you almost can't look at it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Forbidden knowledge, as per my conversation with Sam Harris, avoid that topic because you'll get too much flack. | ||
| And that's dangerous. | ||
| Nothing should be forbidden. | ||
| So these scientists that wrote this book where they were examining rape and the causes of rape, what was the repercussions? | ||
| So I was invited. | ||
| So Randy Thornhill is at the University of New Mexico, and he's still there. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| When his group invited me to give a talk at the university, him and I went out for a while, and I asked him that question. | ||
| He said, at one point, there had to be constant police patrols because of all the death threats and so on that he was getting. | ||
| Now, I suspect that at this point it has subsided. | ||
| This is 15, 16 years ago. | ||
| But when the book first came out, it was dangerous to beat Randy Thornhill. | ||
| Well, isn't it so bizarre where people that... | ||
| You would think of the left, right? | ||
| And as soon as you think of people that are liberal and progressive, you think these are nonviolent folks that just want peace and happiness and love. | ||
| But look what happened in Evergreen. | ||
| I mean, this is what Brett Weinstein talked about. | ||
| The threats, and then all of a sudden you've got vigilante patrols with tasers and baseball bats, and these are kids. | ||
| because someone doesn't agree with their thoughts. | ||
| The whole idea of it was a day of absence, a day of inclusion, a day of presence, right? | ||
| That was the idea, was that white people should stay home. | ||
| And Brett Weinstein was like, that's fucking racist. | ||
| Like, you can't do that. | ||
| And he, as he self-describes, is a deeply progressive person. | ||
| And all my conversations with him indicate that in a huge way. | ||
| I mean, he's just a really open-minded, progressive guy who, he doesn't, but he doesn't want racism against white people to exist any more than he wants it against black people. | ||
| But by the way, I was, so he came on my show too. | ||
| We had a great chat. | ||
| He's sick and hiding now. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt you. | ||
| No, no problem. | ||
| Isn't he? | ||
| I don't know if full hiding, but he's certainly not on campus. | ||
| I believe he said he had to move his family. | ||
| Yeah, I even know where, but maybe I shouldn't say where. | ||
| Well, if you look at the comments section, I wonder if the same thing happened when he came on your show. | ||
| I was amazed at the animus that was being levied at him from people who were saying, hey, the guy is part of the problem. | ||
| He's a progressive who created the monster that is now biting his ass. | ||
| And so let the snake... | ||
| And I thought that was so uncharitable. | ||
| No, I didn't get that. | ||
| But I do understand why fools would think that. | ||
| Because he's not. | ||
| The real true progressives, like non-ideologically based progressive, that's a good thing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's a good thing. | ||
| I mean, to think that, hey, man, we should all be the same, regardless if you have dreadlocks or a shaved head or if you're white or black. | ||
| It's a weird thing. | ||
| Like, sexual preference, we were talking about this before, like, if a man is only sexually attracted, if he says, I am sexually attractive, I prefer white women, you are a fucking racist. | ||
| But if you say, I prefer black women, like, ooh, spicy. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| By the way, this cuts both ways, and I've actually commented on this. | ||
| If you say, I'm attracted to overweight women, you are objectifying and fetishizing our corpulent bodies. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| No, no, that's what they'll say. | ||
| That's what Dale's saying. | ||
| Those are the complainers. | ||
| I should be happy if somebody likes them. | ||
| If you say, I don't like fat women, because I'm not... | ||
| Then, of course, you're... | ||
| So, same thing with black women, right? | ||
| If you say, look, I just have a preference for black women. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it's the old stereotype of the sexual black woman with the beautiful behind. | ||
| You're objectifying us. | ||
| You're racist. | ||
| If you say, you know, I really don't like the body types of black women. | ||
| I prefer Asian women. | ||
| Well, you're racist. | ||
| So, all roads... | ||
| Lead to you being an asshole. | ||
| If you like them it's bad, if you don't like them it's bad. | ||
| What if you just say you just enjoy dating black women because of the way they communicate? | ||
| Someone will probably accuse you. | ||
| Listen, correcting somebody for their grammar, if it's part of their dialect, is racist, right? | ||
| So, Ebonics. | ||
| Actually, I was coming, when we were coming here, I was listening to a song by, I can't remember, Sierra? | ||
| Sierra. | ||
| Do you know who that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| She's a hip-hop singer. | ||
| And at one point, in one of the songs, she goes, There You Is. | ||
| There You Is. | ||
| So I told my wife, I said, You know, it really pisses me off when they commit these grammatical errors. | ||
| Yeah, but isn't that an art thing? | ||
| I mean, like, I might say something grammatically incorrect on stage if I think it's funnier than saying it correctly. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| If you're doing it because it is part of the sort of the contextualized shtick. | ||
| But isn't that what she's kind of doing in a rap song? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's an open question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Maybe it just rhymes better. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| Don't say there you is. | ||
| There you is? | ||
| But what if she's trying to rhyme? | ||
| What rhymes with is? | ||
| Fizz? | ||
| Fizz. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sitting champagne, getting my fizz, look over there, there you is. | ||
| I should have been a rapper, dude. | ||
| By the way, you said that saying that you're attracted to black women might be racist or not. | ||
| Did you hear the latest with the new letter that was uncovered from Tupac Shakur to Madonna? | ||
| Healing like white chicks? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No, that he broke up with her because she was a white woman. | ||
| He broke up with Madonna? | ||
| Madonna, yeah. | ||
| She was annoying. | ||
| He was just trying to find an excuse. | ||
| That's a good way that you can't ever change, right? | ||
| You can't change the fact that you're white. | ||
| That's a good move. | ||
| But imagine if it were the other way around, right? | ||
| If she had written him a letter saying, hey, dear Tupac, I would have loved to continue this relationship, but given that you're a black guy, her career would be over. | ||
| But him saying it to her... | ||
| He actually said, he said, if you date me, it appears as though you're an exciting, cool woman. | ||
| But if I continue to date you, a lot of the people that made me who I am, I would lose credit with them. | ||
| I'll tell you what, if she was throwing that pussy correctly, probably still would have stuck around. | ||
| She's probably annoying. | ||
| She probably talks too much. | ||
| She probably talks about herself in the third person like Trump. | ||
| Probably true. | ||
| Madonna likes you. | ||
| I'm going to admit something now that's going to come back to haunt me. | ||
| What? | ||
| 1985, my cousin and I, I shouldn't be saying this. | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| Drove to Toronto to see Madonna. | ||
| I would have done that in 1985. She was a fantastic performer. | ||
| She was a huge superstar and still kind of is. | ||
| I'm just joking around about her being annoying. | ||
| It's just a funny thing to say. | ||
| I was always a big Madonna fan when I was younger. | ||
| I think, you know... | ||
| Two's beautiful and interesting and bold. | ||
| I mean, you don't get that without a certain amount of ego. | ||
| So to mock that ego is like, well, of course, you know, it's like that's who she was. | ||
| Yeah, true. | ||
| You know, and then what Tupac is doing is, I mean, he's kind of like locked into the identity politics of the 1990s. | ||
| I mean, that's where he was, you know. | ||
| Is there a person that you would love to have on your show who is an artist that you really love? | ||
| There's a lot of them. | ||
| There's not one. | ||
| There's one that's coming on my show. | ||
| Can I tell you who it is? | ||
| Yeah, who? | ||
| I hadn't announced it, so I hope that he doesn't somehow back out, but I'll mention it doesn't matter if he doesn't end up coming. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Wayne Newton? | ||
| No, it's Ricky Martin. | ||
| No, I'm kidding. | ||
| He's living in La Vida Loca. | ||
| Do you know the group Stylistics? | ||
| No. | ||
| The stylistics were an old soul group that's part of a genre called the Philly sound. | ||
| So there's a type of black music in the late 60s, early 70s that's this very soulful, sexy soul type of music. | ||
| Stylistics were probably the epitome of that genre. | ||
| Now this is a group that I grew up listening to all the way back in Lebanon when I was a kid. | ||
| And I've made contact with the representatives of the lead singer, and he said that he will come on my show at some point. | ||
| Oh, exciting times! | ||
| So all the people that I've had on my show, all of whom have been lovely and accomplished people, I think, and I hope I'm not... | ||
| Being insulting to anybody. | ||
| I don't think I'm as excited to be speaking to anyone. | ||
| Which shows, by the way, the power of music, right? | ||
| As much as I am in speaking to this gentleman, you know, who... | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| Look at that. | ||
| That's actually not the singer. | ||
| Is that a bare chest under a suit coat? | ||
| That's the guy. | ||
| That's Russell Tompkins Jr. Wow. | ||
| Look at that fro. | ||
| Strong fro. | ||
| He's got what's called the falsetto voice. | ||
| He goes very, very high with his voice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| You are everything. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| I've heard that song. | ||
| Isn't it funny how, like, people used to dance and move back then? | ||
| Like, look, everyone was, like, synchronized, and there was, like, a thing they used to do together. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That doesn't really happen anymore. | ||
| I wonder what happened where people decided that synchronized singing, like, five men together on stage is not cool anymore. | ||
| Well, you do have boy bands. | ||
| You have Backstreet Boys. | ||
| Yeah, but these are men. | ||
| These are men, yes. | ||
| These are men. | ||
| This is five men moving their arms and singing in synchronicity while people dance slowly, which no one does anymore. | ||
| No one dances like that anymore. | ||
| Who fuck sings like that anymore? | ||
| Who fuck dances like that anymore? | ||
| It's weird, right? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Somebody needs to bring back the soul train. | ||
| In 2001, when we lived in Southern California... | ||
| I had the crazy idea of calling the representatives of the stylistics to see how much it would cost to hire them for a private concert. | ||
| Somehow I thought that a professor had enough of a salary to hire the stylistics. | ||
| For a private concert? | ||
| How many people? | ||
| Apparently, you know, I just had this fantasy that, you know, wouldn't it be amazing to invite people to you? | ||
| Apparently, I'm much poorer than I think I am. | ||
| I think it's five dudes. | ||
| It was actually, I can't remember the exact number, but it was something in the order. | ||
| This is 15, 16 years ago. | ||
| I can't remember, maybe half a million dollars, the whole cost of flying them and their fee. | ||
| What? | ||
| UC Irvine was not paying me enough. | ||
| I can't remember the exact number, but it was much more than I could afford. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What were you hoping for? | ||
| Like 10 grand? | ||
| 50,000? | ||
| 50,000 you were hoping for? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would seem like reasonable. | ||
| That's like, you know... | ||
| I thought I had Joe Rogan money, but I only have mere professor money. | ||
| That's a... | ||
| Even 50,000, it's like, I wouldn't spend that much money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| No! | ||
| If you could... | ||
| What's your favorite group? | ||
| It's probably Metallica, am I right? | ||
| I love Metallica. | ||
| I love me some Metallica, especially when I'm working out. | ||
| And Cher. | ||
| I mean, you did tell me prior to starting how much you love Cher. | ||
| You did say that. | ||
| Chipsies, tramps, and thieves. | ||
| That's what the people are down there. | ||
| So, who's your favorite? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you could have... | |
| I do not have a favorite. | ||
| Give me one. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| Led Zeppelin. | ||
| Okay, Led Zeppelin. | ||
| But I found out they steal music. | ||
| Oh, the Stairway to Heaven story? | ||
| Yeah, that hurts me. | ||
| That hurts me bad. | ||
| No, but didn't they get... | ||
| Allman Brothers? | ||
| What, they got exonerated because they paid off some fucking people. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Do you know how much money they would have to give back? | ||
| How much the record companies would have to give back? | ||
| But it was established that it was stolen? | ||
| Like, in terms of the... | ||
| You want to play it? | ||
| You want to play it so we can hear it? | ||
| Here, let's play it. | ||
| So we could just... | ||
| Can we do it? | ||
| Or would they fuck us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
YouTube would. | |
| YouTube will fuck us. | ||
| Alright, so we'll do this, and it won't be on YouTube, so the people listening right now on YouTube are not going to hear shit, but this is what we'll do. | ||
| We will synchronize. | ||
| Jamie will tell you what this is, and you can synchronize it. | ||
| Does that even work like that? | ||
| Can you open up two YouTube windows? | ||
| I can put the video in the corner so you can see. | ||
| It's a 56-second video called Led Zeppelin vs. | ||
| Spirit, Stairway to Heaven Comparison. | ||
| Yeah, so we'll have to kind of talk a little bit of it. | ||
| Otherwise, the people that are listening to this live streaming are going to get this. | ||
| It's just going to be like dead air. | ||
| So this is the original song. | ||
| This is not the Led Zeppelin version. | ||
| This is the song that Led Zeppelin... | ||
| Fucking ripped off. | ||
| Yeah, this sounds exactly like... | ||
| Dude, it's 100%. | ||
| It's not like 80% or 70%. | ||
| It's 100%. | ||
| They stole this. | ||
| This band opened for them. | ||
| Oh, it's only one of many. | ||
| That hurts me. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of influences that they had from old blues songs that they added to some of their songs, which is more forgivable, almost akin to what they do today with rap music, with sampling. | ||
| Sampling, yeah. | ||
| Which I don't have any problem with at all. | ||
| I mean, I think it kind of enhances it and makes you think about the old song. | ||
| But this is egregious. | ||
| So what was their position? | ||
| It just happened by fluke that we came up with the same notes? | ||
| Just hired the best lawyers. | ||
| They got themselves some Jews. | ||
| Is that anti-Semitic to say Jews are awesome at being lawyers? | ||
| So here, did you play the... | ||
| Okay, it's both of them. | ||
| Okay, well, play the second part of the first one. | ||
| Oh, so the first one is Stairway to Heaven. | ||
| Where does it go? | ||
| There's a better version of it. | ||
| Oh, that's the comparison. | ||
| Okay, let's go back to it, see if you can... | ||
| We'll see which one is... | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| This is the California band, psychedelic band, Spirit. | ||
| This is Taurus. | ||
| This is not sounding like... | ||
| No, this is different. | ||
| That's not it. | ||
| The Taurus is a sound you're listening to right now. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| It changes. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Oh, here. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You hear this part? | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| The chords sound... | ||
| That's not even a good version. | ||
| There's a better... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just that riff is the part that's in question. | |
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it was one of the other songs. | ||
| Okay, so not withstanding the potential for them having done some unsavory things. | ||
| They're pretty badass. | ||
| You wouldn't spend $50,000 to... | ||
| You have as your guest of honor the Godfather at your house, and then you say, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, Led Zeppelin. | ||
| I'm going to do it for you. | ||
| He's a closet Led Zeppelin fan. | ||
| I get what he's trying to do. | ||
| You know how much money you'd have to pay? | ||
| You always hear about these guys in the Middle East, some sheiks that hire Rihanna to go over there and perform. | ||
| I think a million is like a bargain. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Didn't Beyonce go and do some crazy concert for New Year's in Dubai for somebody for like five million bucks or something? | ||
| Yeah, it pays to be super famous, I guess. | ||
| What do you think of Janet Jackson marrying some oil chef? | ||
| Yeah, she's like full-on burka now, right? | ||
| She's full-on burka. | ||
| Yeah, well... | ||
| Some of those videos need to be expunged from our collective memory now. | ||
| How about when she pulled a tit out at the Super Bowl? | ||
| Jay-Z and Kanye paid $6 million to perform in Dubai. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ew! | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Is there a place that you would be invited for a very large sum of money that you would refuse because you disagree politically or ideologically with whatever that person who's inviting you stands for? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But certainly they didn't think they were bought for some price. | ||
| Well, it's a little bit different what they do because they would go over there and I guess they would know what their material would be. | ||
| If they went over there to perform 99 Problems, Jay-Z's lyrics are out there. | ||
| They say, hey, we would like you, we're going to give you six million bucks, we want you to sing 99 Problems and all these different songs. | ||
| The lyrics are clearly established. | ||
| But if someone like me went over there and did comedy, who was it? | ||
| One of the guests I had in the past, Hal Sparks, I think it was Hal Sparks, that went over to Dubai, and he did a bit, and he was told by one of the people in the audience that he was going to be arrested, because he referred to one of the royal family by the wrong name. | ||
| He called him Sir instead of Your Highness. | ||
| And so they were going to arrest him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| But then some other member of the royal family stepped in and stopped it because they said, no, he was respectful and he just didn't understand the tradition. | ||
| The protocol, yeah. | ||
| But they were ready to lock him up in a fucking cage because he used the wrong term. | ||
| Not even in a disrespectful manner. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, they just called him sir, you know? | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, like, that's not the place that I'm going. | ||
| I'm not interested in any place. | ||
| Look, man, there's a real problem with Canada right now. | ||
| I know you know what happened in Vancouver, where a comic was heckled by these lesbians, and he shit all over them, and then they sued him and won, because he had done something to violate their human rights, because they were heckling not just him, but people before him. | ||
| They were disrupting a live performance. | ||
| So do you think that this trend of famous comics refusing to perform at universities is only going to continue to increase? | ||
| Or again, have we reached the maximum and now there's going to be blowback? | ||
| Because I know Jerry Seinfeld doesn't do it. | ||
| Chris Rock doesn't do it, right? | ||
| I haven't done it since 2003, maybe was the last time I did a show at a university. | ||
| As a conscious church? | ||
| 100%, yeah. | ||
| I don't think they have enough life experience. | ||
| I like to talk to people that have lived. | ||
| When I talk to people, I want to talk to someone who has had affairs, love affairs, and has had jobs and been fired, has had education. | ||
| I want someone with life experience. | ||
| Not that there's anything wrong with being 18. Or whatever, 19. But I want someone who's got some living under their belt so they know what the fuck I'm talking about. | ||
| I don't want to have to explain everything. | ||
| I did a concert once. | ||
| Not concert. | ||
| I did a show once at a university and I was talking about something sexual. | ||
| And I saw this bewildered looks in the audience. | ||
| I go, how many of you people are virgins? | ||
| I go, don't even raise your hand because I don't incriminate you. | ||
| I go, just blink real fast. | ||
| And they started laughing, but it got real uncomfortable. | ||
| I go, would you again? | ||
| I go, I'm not going to even look at you. | ||
| I go, I'm going to look at the sky. | ||
| Would you say that I would be out of line if I said 10% of you were virgins? | ||
| And the place went, they went, no, no, that's probably about right. | ||
| People are like yelling. | ||
| I'm like, that's crazy! | ||
| 10% of you are virgins? | ||
| That's like, if there's 200 people, 20 of you are fucking virgins? | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's a lot of people! | ||
| And it's probably more than that. | ||
| They're probably being modest or not being honest about it. | ||
| I just... | ||
| It's nothing wrong with being in college, obviously. | ||
| But as far as like where I want to perform, I don't have a lot of... | ||
| If I have a day, there's 24 hours in that day. | ||
| I don't have a lot of hours to perform at night. | ||
| If I'm performing at night, I get a couple hours. | ||
| I like doing actual comedy. | ||
| I like doing what I do. | ||
| And then one of the things about comedy is... | ||
| It's different than any other art form in that, like, say if you go to see music, like, you know what you're going to go see. | ||
| You don't usually just say, oh, live music. | ||
| Like, oh, let's hope that it's something I'm interested in. | ||
| You know, we're going to see Jay-Z, followed by Johnny Cash, followed by Loretta Lynn. | ||
| No, it's not going to be that way. | ||
| You're going to go to a rock and roll club. | ||
| You go to the Viper Room, most likely you're going to hear some rock and roll. | ||
| You go to a country western bar, you know, you're going to see that. | ||
| I think with stand-up comedy, people get upset if you're not doing, like, what Appeals to them and their sensibilities. | ||
| I like to go to nightclubs. | ||
| That's why I don't even do corporate gigs I get a lot of offers to do these corporate gigs and they'll they'll pay you a lot of money because they'll be to tame the audience they won't know it's just like it's not a it's not a real comedy show It's like you guys are paid. | ||
| It's like you're Gadsad paying 50 grand to have these guys sing in your backyard some weird ego thing right I saw my friend Dana White who was the He's the head of the UFC. He had a birthday party years back, and Stone Temple Pilots played before that dude died of an overdose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And, man, nobody was fucking paying attention. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Stone Temple Pilots. | ||
| I mean, they kind of got everybody to pay attention, got everybody to move towards the stage. | ||
| But people, A, didn't know to expect Stone Temple Pilots. | ||
| It was a big surprise. | ||
| And when I even introduced them, when I introduced Stone Temple Pilots, people didn't even think that it was really going to be Stone Temple Pilots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I said, happy birthday to Dana. | ||
| I thanked him for everything. | ||
| And then I said, and I'm going to blow your mind right now, ladies and gentlemen, Stone Temple Pilots. | ||
| And they came out, and it was really Stone Temple Pilots. | ||
| They went hard. | ||
| It was really, really impressive stuff, because they did their full-on concert, like 100% all out. | ||
| It was intense. | ||
| It was really amazing. | ||
| But there wasn't a lot of people paying attention. | ||
| And while I was sitting there watching it, I was like, you know what? | ||
| Yeah, never again. | ||
| I'm never doing... | ||
| I mean, I'd already decided I wasn't going to do it. | ||
| I wasn't going to do that anyway. | ||
| I remember something that you said, I think, in our first chat several years ago, which has resonated and stuck with me. | ||
| You were... | ||
| Comparing your career as a stand-up comic or in fighting to the truth that comes in science, and you were comparing that to acting, which is very ephemeral and fuzzy, and you were saying basically, look, when you're a scientist, you have to present stuff, and it's either right or wrong, and people are going to judge you, and you analogized it to comedy. | ||
| You get up in front of a crowd. | ||
| You either know you're, I mean, you're either funny or you're going to bomb. | ||
| You get up to fight. | ||
| You either are ready or you're going to get pummeled. | ||
| And I thought that was a really good analogy because there's truth and honesty in that, right? | ||
| There's no way to wing it as a comic. | ||
| You get up and you better be funny, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it's very subjective. | ||
| Like one thing that might make you laugh, someone might think is terrible. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of people that are fans of certain comedians that other people think are awful. | ||
| It's just like music. | ||
| You know, there's certain types of... | ||
| It's all subjective. | ||
| It's like when you consider art, what's really like fighting even, it's like... | ||
| It's not necessarily even who's necessarily better. | ||
| Sometimes it's like what happened in the moment. | ||
| Sometimes dudes collide heads and it changes the course of a fight and it's not because of a skill. | ||
| It's because in the moment something happened chaotic or someone got poked in the eye and they couldn't see well and then they got knocked out. | ||
| Are they the worst fighter? | ||
| Not necessarily. | ||
| It's like sometimes there's all sorts of Unpredictable variables that come into place. | ||
| There's a guy that I recently, quote, discovered. | ||
| He's an Italian comedian who had an HBO special. | ||
| I thought the guy... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sebastian? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Sebastian Manasacco? | ||
| He's a buddy of mine. | ||
| He's been on the podcast. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| Hilarious guy. | ||
| Usually when I watch stand-up comics, I mean, I'll laugh a bit. | ||
| I think this is funny. | ||
| But that guy in that show, I've probably watched... | ||
| It was on Showtime. | ||
| It was on Showtime. | ||
| I literally could not stop laughing because somehow his humor very much resonated with some of our sort of Middle Eastern... | ||
| Italian. | ||
| And I just could so gravitate towards him. | ||
| This guy is fantastic. | ||
| He really is. | ||
| He's a great guy, too. | ||
| Nobody hates that guy. | ||
| That guy is loved in the comedy community. | ||
| But is he in recent? | ||
| Or has he been known for a long time? | ||
| He's been doing it for a long time. | ||
| And he's an interesting case because when he first started out, he wasn't doing that good. | ||
| He had to really work hard at it to become who he is. | ||
| But he stuck with it and chipped away at it and got better and better and better. | ||
| And I didn't see him for a long time because I had taken my hiatus from the comedy store. | ||
| And I saw him on Showtime. | ||
| When I wasn't at the Comedy Store anymore, and I thought it was so fucking funny. | ||
| I remember tweeting at him, and I got a hold of him. | ||
| I said, dude, that was amazing. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| And I had heard that he was doing really well, but I hadn't seen him perform. | ||
| It was probably like six years, five or six years at least. | ||
| He just had gotten so much better. | ||
| That's innate, right? | ||
| You agree that much of our humor... | ||
| I mean, it's not something that you could teach in a workshop, right? | ||
| How to be funny 101, right? | ||
| It's just you either have that delivery, you know how to... | ||
| I would say you have an ember. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| As long as you have an ember, you can become really funny. | ||
| But I've met a lot of people that sucked in the beginning and they just got really good because they really worked hard at it. | ||
| And here's the most important thing, and this relates to what we've been talking about. | ||
| Being objective about the actual root cause of why people like you or don't like you. | ||
| Try to figure out what it is about what you're doing that people don't like and correct it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Get better. | ||
| Improve. | ||
| And the only way to improve is not blame the audience. | ||
| Oh, you're a bunch of cisgender. | ||
| You're stupid. | ||
| You don't understand my jokes. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but people do do that and the people that do make those excuses and don't Instead, look internally. | ||
| You know, like sometimes you can have a bad set and you gotta say, you know what, man? | ||
| I fucked that up. | ||
| I just wasn't tuned in. | ||
| I gotta readjust. | ||
| I gotta, you know, maybe I was sick that day. | ||
| You know, there's always like reasons necessarily. | ||
| Not necessarily excuses, rather. | ||
| But you've got to examine those uncomfortable moments. | ||
| And some people excuse themselves by that, by saying, that audience sucked, or these people are assholes, or these people are stupid. | ||
| There's a bunch of excuses that people make. | ||
| And it's super critical that you don't do that. | ||
| You've got to look at the whole thing. | ||
| Do you... | ||
| In terms of actionable feedback, do you look for it from other professional comics because you trust their opinions more, or are you looking for the civilians in the audience to give you that feedback? | ||
| Which one is more actionable from your perspective as you're trying to improve your craft? | ||
| It's very problematic to play for the comedians, because comedians like weird shit. | ||
| Like, we might like something completely obscure that we don't see coming, you know, but an audience might not be laughing, and you might hear one comic in the back of the room going, BAH! That's fucking ridiculous! | ||
| And the audience doesn't think it's funny. | ||
| And then there's a trap that the comedians will fall into where they start playing for their peers specifically. | ||
| There's a bunch of guys that have... | ||
| I don't want to call anybody out, but there's people that have ruined their career because they essentially became the comical place at the back of the room. | ||
| And the audience didn't think they were funny. | ||
| And essentially they're making fun of people who try to be funny. | ||
| And instead, exonerating themselves from any real pressure to be funny. | ||
| Because, hey, I'm here to make the comics laugh. | ||
| I'm a comics comic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, the real comics are comics comics. | ||
| Dave Chappelle's a comics comic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But he kills the audience, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because he's real. | ||
| He's got the full package where there's a lot of comics that bomb in front of the audience, but you'll have like 20 guys in the back of the room that think it's cool to chuckle at obscure references and very bizarre words that get used in some sort of strange way. | ||
| Dennis Miller would be sort of like that, right? | ||
| Because just to follow his references takes you like a flowchart of 20 pages long, right? | ||
| I talked to Norm Macdonald about him once. | ||
| It was really funny. | ||
| He goes, yeah, you know, he's not really that smart. | ||
| He doesn't really know those words. | ||
| I go, what? | ||
| He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He just finds out words that people don't know and he uses them. | |
| And people laugh even though they don't know what he's talking about. | ||
| So someone played a joke on him once where they used some reference. | ||
| They used some reference on Dennis Miller that they made up. | ||
| Oh, it was Dom Irera. | ||
| Used a reference on Dennis Miller that he's made up. | ||
| And Dennis started laughing at it, even though it wasn't real. | ||
| Because it was like something that you had to be like cool to know. | ||
| I'll have a good Dom to remember the story. | ||
| But he was like, he goes, I fucked him with his own thing. | ||
| I tricked him with his own trick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, he just used a reference that isn't real. | |
| And he just, yeah, you're right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because people don't like to be on the outside. | ||
| People don't like to say, what the fuck does that mean? | ||
| I'm a big fan of saying, what does that mean? | ||
| Look, I've had 900 plus podcasts with 700 people way fucking smarter than me. | ||
| So I have to say, I don't know what that means. | ||
| You've got to be... | ||
| But there's a weird thing where people don't like to... | ||
| They equate not having information with somehow or another being less intelligent, which is a really bizarre thing. | ||
| Because, like, it's okay if you're talking to someone about something that you couldn't possibly have data on, like, you know... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| A video game, right? | ||
| That you don't play. | ||
| Like, what's it about? | ||
| Like, how's it go? | ||
| Like, that's okay. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But as soon as it's something about, like, some sort of cultural reference or perhaps a book that maybe you should have in your... | ||
| It diminishes you to admit that you don't know it. | ||
| That's a weird thing. | ||
| You know, it's a weird thing to be somehow or another to feel diminished by information or a lack of information. | ||
| But it's so funny that you say this because... | ||
| In my classes, students will oftentimes ask me a question that has me stumped, and I will usually answer, you know what, I actually don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Could you send me an email so I could look it up? | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| And they are really impressed by that honesty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It is impressive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I hear you, yeah. | ||
| Well, it takes humility, I guess. | ||
| But on the other hand, when I know something, I come out with the bravado of, I know my shit, right? | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| So have the humility to know what you know and what you don't know, as the old saying says. | ||
| Well, you have that what you would say bravado. | ||
| It's like a pride of hard work. | ||
| I mean, you've accumulated a massive amount of knowledge from seeking this knowledge and studying very hard. | ||
| So it's something that you should be proud of. | ||
| But it's not something that you look at, like, when you're proud of it, you're not diminishing other people that don't have that information. | ||
| You're saying, like, this is what I know to be true, and this is a fact. | ||
| This is undeniable. | ||
| But that's a beautiful thing that you could also say, I don't know about something that you don't know. | ||
| That will give the people that are listening, that will give them so much more of a sense of respect for you than horse shitting around and pretending. | ||
| That's such a weird thing that people do. | ||
| And by the way, in the media, oftentimes they want you to weigh in on things as a scientist which you don't feel that your area of expertise would allow you to. | ||
| And they get frustrated because then they feel as though you're equivocating. | ||
| Look, I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to make that statement with that level of certainty. | ||
| But they want it because that's what the headline has to say. | ||
| And then they get frustrated that you're tippy-toeing. | ||
| But I'm just being humble about what is true and what I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough to say is true. | ||
| Yeah, I've had people get upset at me about talking about upcoming martial arts fights because I don't give predictions. | ||
| I very, very, very rarely give predictions unless there's some gross mismatch that really shouldn't be happening in the first place. | ||
| Because you really have no idea what's going to happen. | ||
| There's a high likelihood that something might happen. | ||
| If I look at the way one guy moves versus another guy moves and I go into my database of experiences of seeing a lot of live competition and knowing what one person is capable of, I can make I can make a statement with reasonable certainty, but I don't know if they were injured in training. | ||
| I don't know if they come into the fight sick. | ||
| I don't know if they're breaking up with their girlfriend. | ||
| I don't know if they got staph infection two weeks before the fight and they're on antibiotics. | ||
| There's so many variables. | ||
| I don't know if they might get headbutted, like we talked about earlier, or they might have an injury, like in the middle of the fight, like something goes wrong and their knee blows out. | ||
| There's so many variables. | ||
| Has the thing between the boxer and the MMA guy happened yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The thing? | |
| See, this is, I love when someone is so far. | ||
| I'm trying to connect with you. | ||
| I know, I love that though. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| No, I'm not criticizing you, but I love when someone is so far removed, but they're still aware of something that's like a big cultural event. | ||
| No, it takes place August 26th. | ||
| I think even, I'm an unbelievable novice when it comes to this stuff. | ||
| I think I could make a prediction here in front of your huge podcast. | ||
| That the MMA guy is going to get trashed, correct? | ||
| I would imagine that most likely he is going to lose a boxing match to the best boxer that has ever lived. | ||
| So what's the point of this fight? | ||
| Just for money? | ||
| The same thing if you wanted to see a figure skater play hockey against Wayne Gretzky. | ||
| Okay, so why would the MMA guy put himself up for that potential humiliation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Money? | |
| Get that cheddar! | ||
| Dollar-dollar bills, y'all! | ||
| Has he been on your show? | ||
| No, he has not. | ||
| I fucked up. | ||
| I should have had him on back before he blew up. | ||
| He's too big now. | ||
| I referred to him as Conrad last time or something, right? | ||
| Yes, I think you did. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| His name's Connor. | ||
| Connor McGregor. | ||
| Yeah, he's a real meteoric entity and like the most meteoric in all of combat sports. | ||
| He became so famous so quick. | ||
| Because he's a real unicorn in a lot of ways. | ||
| He's got so many different things going for him. | ||
| Handsome guy, brutal knockout artist, predicts outcomes and pulls them off and has been incredibly successful in a short period of time. | ||
| Won two world titles in two different weight classes and is arguably the greatest trash talker ever. | ||
| He trash talks better than anybody. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, there's actually a big thing that's going on today, right? | ||
| The press conference? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, I'm reading the thing. | |
| They're scalping tickets outside of it for $40 right now, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it? | |
| Just $40? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was free. | |
| Oh. | ||
| My nephew is probably all over that stuff, right? | ||
| Probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The press conference itself will be a show. | ||
| Because this guy is so good at getting people riled up and talking shit. | ||
| That's half the fun. | ||
| I was too young to appreciate the Muhammad Ali days, but I would imagine that when Muhammad Ali was challenging Sonny Liston, half of the fun was Muhammad Ali talking shit. | ||
| Like, this guy's crazy! | ||
| By the way, that's exactly the mechanism. | ||
| When I take on some random person online and I just have fun with it, sometimes people misunderstand this to be, I'm getting pissed. | ||
| I'm just doing bantering. | ||
| I'm usually doing this with a smile on my face, but they think of it as though I'm just trash-talking them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing, man. | ||
| It's like engaging with people you don't know. | ||
| Sometimes that person's insane, and then they'll make it a career to go after Gadsad all day long. | ||
| Interacting with people in text form is very problematic, right? | ||
| It's like a lot of issues. | ||
| You don't get social cues. | ||
| You can't adjust. | ||
| In our conversation, we're kind of going back and forth, and you say something, and I react to it, and we laugh, and we see each other. | ||
| All that's missing when you're writing things. | ||
| Yeah, very true. | ||
| Especially if someone, like, writes a blog about you. | ||
| If somebody listens to what you've said on this podcast and they write a blog about you defining you, he is a man that does this. | ||
| His whole career is this. | ||
| And you read it, like, Sam Harris was just explaining something to me that someone did about him. | ||
| And I read it and I was like, wow, this is such a weird way to describe and interact with a person you've never even met. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Incredible. | |
| To write a one-sided thing where you don't even know the guy. | ||
| You don't really know them, like really know them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've seen some videos, maybe you've read some things. | |
| And that you would muster such animus towards a person that you haven't met, right? | ||
| I mean, I'm fortunate enough to not have too many of these haters and trolls, but there is one or two guys that have come to my attention that it seems as though they spend 90% of their day Doing trash stuff about me. | ||
| And you think, what could it be that I could so trigger in them that they would construe it as a valuable use of their time to take on someone whom they've never even met, but somehow they're pissed at you and they think it's a worthwhile cause to trash talk you all day. | ||
| Well, it's a weird thing. | ||
| Like, even if they have a valid point, there becomes some sort of weird symbiotic slash parasitic relationship with the person that you're criticizing. | ||
| Like, you are inexorably connected to them. | ||
| They are your enemy. | ||
| You think about them all the time, and by virtue of that, you become part of them. | ||
| Or they become part of you. | ||
| Like, that's the weird thing about thinking, right? | ||
| Like, when you're on stage and you are giving a lecture... | ||
| One of the more amazing things that happens when someone is on stage talking about something is you allow them to kind of think for you in the sense that when you are and it's one of the reasons why it's so important to be articulate and so important to be very aware of What you're going to say in advance, the point where it comes out smoothly and there's good entertainment value to it, is that it's pleasing to listen to. | ||
| You're aware of how annoying certain speech patterns can be and you avoid those. | ||
| You're aware of how compelling other speech patterns can be and you embrace those. | ||
| And so it makes it pleasing for the person to listen to. | ||
| So they can just sit back and listen to you talk about evolutionary psychology. | ||
| Whereas when a person sucks at it, it's like grading, it's Painful it gets in your head. | ||
| You're not connected with them. | ||
| You're not allowing them to think about for you, right? | ||
| There's there's that happens with comedy to like when someone's really good like you see like a great comic like a Louis CK or someone like that when he's on stage and he's he's really in the groove You're kind of allowing him to think for you, right? | ||
| You're like letting him take the reins of your imagination and your mind and your visualization and But boy, it must be a tough job because I always think, what if you just had a fight with your wife? | ||
| Oh, I've had that before. | ||
| And you're pissed, right? | ||
| But in 10 minutes, I don't give a shit about your fight. | ||
| You have to perform, right? | ||
| It depends on what kind of comedy you have. | ||
| Like if you're Sam Kinison, it's probably better. | ||
| Because you're angry. | ||
| You go on stage, you fucking are! | ||
| He would go on stage probably angry, pumped. | ||
| I mean, it really depends on what you're trying to do. | ||
| It also depends on what the fight was about, whether or not you were wrong or she was wrong. | ||
| I would be way better off going on stage if someone wronged me versus if I wronged them. | ||
| Like, if I wronged someone, I would feel terrible. | ||
| Yeah, that's the worst. | ||
| Intrusive thoughts in your head. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Remorse. | ||
| Yeah, and reexamining your own behavior patterns and finding fault in them. | ||
| That's the last thing I ever want to do, is treat someone wrong and then go on stage. | ||
| But if someone treated me like shit and then went on stage, I'd probably feel exonerated. | ||
| I'd probably be energized, you know? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| I'm not sure how much time we have left. | ||
| I think we're done. | ||
| It's two. | ||
| We did three hours. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Next time we'll talk about, because you mentioned, I guess it's related to regret. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We'll talk about the psychology of regret. | ||
| The psychology of regret. | ||
| Oops, mark it down. | ||
| Always a pleasure, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, buddy. | |
| I really, really enjoy these conversations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Likewise. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And tell everybody how to get a hold of your podcast, get a hold of your YouTube videos, rather. | ||
| Right, so if you want to follow me on Twitter, at GAD, G-A-D, S-A-A-D. If you want to follow me on my YouTube channel, just enter GADSAD or the SAD S-A-A-D truth. | ||
| See you soon, folks. | ||
| Oh, we're back tomorrow with Maynard Keenan from Tool and Pussifer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| It's amazing how the food is going. |
Export Selection