Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan critique media distortions of Jordan Peterson’s message, dismissing boycott calls like Chick-fil-A’s "homophobia" claims despite its post-Pulse generosity. They debate race-based admissions policies, artistic freedom in the wedding cake case, and estate taxes, with Rogan calling wealth confiscation "creepy." Rubin shares his alopecia struggles amid fame, while Rogan defends Peterson’s incel insights, arguing self-improvement—not societal rules—builds confidence. Both highlight how ideological rigidity stifles honest debate, warning that hyperbolic attacks risk desensitizing future threats. [Automatically generated summary]
And it's like there is, without being hyperbolic, there is some kind of awakening happening right now.
People are kind of getting their shit together.
They're kind of sorting out things.
They're through long-form conversations like we're all having and all these people that we're now connected with.
There's something happening where people are going, there's another way to make sense, and let me figure out what that is.
Doesn't mean we have all the answers, and I'm sure as hell no I don't, and I don't think you think you do either, but we're at least giving them a little room to figure it out, and it's pretty cool.
It's been fascinating is how many people misrepresent what he says to try to frame him in a way that makes him evil and makes their position seem more ethical or more moral or better or more intellectual.
There's so many articles being written about him almost on a daily basis that misrepresent what he's saying.
We've done about 20 shows in the last six weeks or so, bounced around from Nashville and Houston and Atlanta and Chicago and everywhere else.
The crowds have been incredible.
It's probably split.
First off, they always go, well, it's angry white men.
That's the main thing.
It's all angry white men.
Let's say it was all angry white men there.
That in and of itself doesn't mean it's bad.
Let's say there was like a really disaffected group of angry white men that really felt like either masculinity had been compromised or they couldn't get jobs or they didn't feel good about their lives.
Like if there was someone talking to them that was helping them, that would actually be good.
But let's just put that aside, right?
Because they don't mean it in a positive way.
So they say it's all angry women.
Now, I can tell you it's about 60-40 male to female, roughly.
Well, it's actually usually girls will come up to me after and they'll go, you know, he's a big fan of you guys or he loves Jordan or he loves you or blah, blah, blah.
And I'm just here.
But then they all have a great time.
I mean, I'm telling you, this thing has been an insane love fest.
I know you saw the video that Jordan posted last night.
It was his birthday last night.
We were at, where the hell was I? Atlanta, the tabernacle in Atlanta.
You know, almost 3,000 people singing happy birthday to him.
We brought out this freaking stuffed lobster and a piece of meat because he's on this crazy meat diet now.
And it's like it's an endless love fest.
Every street we walk down, people high-fiving us, saying hi.
We did a little meet-and-greet impromptu thing at the Lincoln Memorial, and about 100 people showed up just out of nowhere.
And it's like these people are just trying to figure shit out.
They're not white supremacists.
They're not alt-right.
They don't hate women.
It is literally nothing.
That they say.
Because they want clicks, and the way they get clicks, I mean, you know, the way they get clicks is they say the absolute reverse from the truth.
It's not that they lie a little bit.
Like, a little lie, I think nobody would even pick up on it.
So I basically do like 15 minutes of stand-up up top.
He does an hour and a half.
And then we do a Q&A together.
And we bring out all of these things.
And every night to clear it up.
And sometimes I'll have people bust out their phones.
And I'll be like, why don't you guys record this tonight?
And let's get it out on Twitter.
Where he takes down the alt-right because he hates the identity politics of the right as much as the identity politics of the left.
I mean, I think...
I think the reason we all focus on the thing of the left is because it has encompassed culture and media and politics and what you're allowed to say and universities and all that.
So it makes more sense to focus on that.
The little sliver of it that's on the right Yeah, it's shitty.
It's horrible.
You should not look at your skin color as some great thing that makes you better.
I know nothing about you by the color of your skin.
I know about Joe Rogan because I watch the show.
I listen to the show.
We've done this several times.
And for the hours that we're going to sit here now, we can dive as deep into any issue.
And that's the only way that I can sensibly judge you.
But the idea that you will look at people, that you would look at a black person, a black person would be sitting there, or a Muslim person would be sitting there, or a trans person sitting there, and you'd go, I have even the inkling of what you think Because of that immutable characteristic, that is actual racism.
That is prejudging, right?
Judging first before you know somebody.
So I have a much bigger issue with that because that has infected everything in American society right now.
The identity politics of the right that this should be a white ethno state or something like that.
I talk about things usually from a little more of a political lens than I think you do.
So yes, of course, ultimately it is tribalism, however you want to parse that tribalism, right?
So yes, and I say this all the time, but the left-right thing doesn't make that much sense anymore.
You're either basically for freedom.
You're for the individual.
To live freely, however they see fit, or you believe that the government should engineer things and that there should be central planning so that people...
They're just trying to say whatever they can say that's going to appease both the special interest groups and the lobbyists and the people that are helping them get into place, the people that are going to vote for them, and then just sort of skirt around all the other issues that are controversial to the point where they can get into office.
You could do two hours with him and he'd be a lot better in a lot of ways.
But he should be the guy.
But he doesn't have the balls to do it because he wants to maintain being a Republican senator in Kentucky and he's not going to do it if he has to leave the party.
But I've seen a major shift, I think, in Republicans or at least conservatives or generally people on the right, whatever you want to call that thing.
I think I'm a classical liberal.
You believe in the individual.
The sovereignty of the individual is the simple, most important thing.
It is your life.
It is your duty to do what you see fit.
The government is supposed to do pretty much nothing other than protect your life.
So it's supposed to have an army and police and stuff like that.
And then really just laissez-faire economics.
The difference between classical liberal and libertarian is how far do you want to go with the government?
So I think there is some utility for the state.
But the more I do this, the more I have these conversations and I talk to ANCAPs and real libertarians and all that.
I find it hard to defend the state at almost any level at this point.
But I do think that because I don't want to live in Mad Max Fury Road just yet, although we may be heading there, I still will defend the state at some level.
But I would say everything should be local.
We have an incredible experiment here with 50 states.
Move, go somewhere else.
If your state doesn't have good education, you can go somewhere else.
If you don't like the weather, somewhere.
But the second we make everything federal—and this is what—it's not just the left.
This is what people who were using lazy thinking that you referred to—they think we should just have one law, that we should all live exactly the same no matter where we are geographically, no matter what our religion or however we set our set of views is.
That is a nightmare.
That is a nightmare for a totalitarian state because if the federal government, if one government controls everything, guess what?
If you don't like it, you got to leave the country.
Now, I could move to Texas, and the property taxes would be way low, and maybe because they don't tax as much, the schools aren't as good, or a series of other things.
anyone that wants to keep giving more power to the federal government which is pretty much everybody these days pretty much everybody in mainstream certainly all of the Democrats All of, you know, the mainstream set of Democrats and the Bernie and the progressive crew, they would love for the federal government to control everything.
No, I'm hearing what you're saying, but I'm just not hearing this...
This clamoring for the government to take care of everything.
I mean, you heard a little bit from Bernie, you know, but I just think, again, a lot of that is like, it's not doing it now.
So the idea is that the solution would be if the government takes over and we take more rich people's taxes, you know, and he'll spout off about income inequality and take that money and redistribute it.
And then somehow or another, that's going to fix everything.
So they should at least be honest and say that because a certain amount of people just hear free and you just think it's free, but it's not free.
You obviously have to pay for it.
But also we're moving into an economy where robots are taking over.
Automation is taking over.
Go to what I think McDonald's said within five years, it's all going to be iPads.
Go to half the McDonald's and fast food places in airports now.
It's all iPads.
So the more you're going to...
I mean, that's ingenuity, right?
We're going to be subsidizing all these people to go to college, where often in college they're learning nothing in gender studies and all of these other crazy classes.
And we're just going to have this set of people who have no real skills, and we're going to set up businesses that will never want to hire them because the government is going to tell them how much to pay.
I mean, you have employees here.
You pay them what you think is fair.
And if they don't want to do it, they don't have to.
But imagine if the government came in and was like, Joe, you're going to have to pay your guys this amount.
It's a small percentage, but they have way over...
Influence on the amount of people they have scared the majority into silence I mean, I don't know how often you're doing colleges these days, but I don't know Yeah, I'm doing them all the time and what I find so I did this thing at University of New Hampshire We posted saw it so look they first off what they did was they were supposed to be about 300 people there So they at first because of the protesters the school said we can't secure a room So think what are they protesting you about?
Well, technically I was supposed to be there that day with Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk from Turning Point.
And we were going to talk about cultural appropriation and some of the hot button stuff.
So I don't even know that they all were there to protest me specifically.
But anyway, that day was the day that Candace and Charlie ended up on TMZ with Kanye.
So they bailed on me and just left me for the wolves.
They would scream or they'd start robotically, you know, they set timers and then they robotically chant, we're not the problem or just some other nonsense.
So she's literally trying – you have a professor that is part of the protesters and she's live tweeting the thing about alt-right Dave Rubin.
I mean so that's where – when people think it's this little thing, it's – yeah, it's this little thing that's metastasizing and spreading like a cancer.
And I truly believe that identity politics, that this thing I think is the biggest threat to the West and to freedom that exists.
And by the way, for the record, the authorities or the police or the campus safety, whatever it was, did at one point try to have some people sit down and be quiet.
And I was like, guys, don't worry about it.
Because it's like, yeah, I guess we could escalate it to that point.
Oh, and by the way, I didn't even want this video to be released.
When they videotaped this, I did not want it to be released because I don't want to add fuel to the fire.
That's part of the problem, right, is that this becomes something that they know that they can get a video of if they go to your next performance and interrupt you.
Well, that's why we ended up putting the video up because a couple of them would put up these little clips very selectively edited that made it seem like I was doing things that I wasn't, like I was silencing them or just some other nonsense.
So then finally I was like, all right, if this is the way the internet is and it just is, then we'll just put up the whole thing unedited, even though I had...
Ten minutes before, I said, guys, don't even record this.
I said, don't even record this because Charlie and Candace hadn't showed up.
And I was like, it's ridiculous.
I got 7,000 empty seats behind me.
But then once people start playing that game, you can either just be the bitch, which I refuse to be, or you can fight back.
Yeah, it's a weird place to be, because you know what they're doing, and they're essentially just trying to rile you up, and if they're not willing to have a real dialogue with you, they're just yelling, fuck Dave Rubin.
That really should disqualify you from being a teacher.
I mean, that's the worst way to communicate.
You're demonstrating that your thinking sucks, and that you want to teach about gender studies, but yet, you know, you're...
You're interrupting, and you're trying to claim transphobia, or whatever the fuck he's, she, is trying to claim.
Yeah, and by the way, I treated her with complete respect.
Like, That's the thing.
They truly, they want you, they want to put their foot on your neck and have you stay there forever.
And that's why every time now that somebody mainstream writes something about you, half the time they're calling you a conservative because they don't know what the fuck to do with this guy who's talking about drugs and all the crazy shit you're talking about all the time, but also you're woke enough to actually identify there is a problem here.
With what's happening in the mainstream.
So they can't categorize us in any sensible way.
So in a weird way, especially because me and you also, because of the nature of what we do, we sit from people that are a little scary.
You know what I mean?
Like, you've had Jones on.
I've had Molyneux on.
You know, I had Cernovich on at the beginning.
And I'm sure you've had plenty of other controversial people.
And it's like, so there's an odd way that they want to look at the two of us more than other people because by the nature of our jobs, by the nature of how we exist...
That's a threat if you want to control the way everybody thinks.
Yeah, I would have been mad at them and I would have talked about it right away.
I would have been like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Those kids are dead.
Like there's a guy that was a terrible story about a guy who was a conspiracy theorist before Sandy Hook and then his kid died at Sandy Hook and a bunch of people were threatening him and calling him a crisis actor and saying his kid never died and then he realized how insane it really is.
Without going down fully on that road, there is one odd thing about the Bourdain thing, which is just a few weeks ago, didn't he tweet some odd thing about having the...
He's met the Hillary Clinton machine or something?
If I had him on again, that would be the first thing I would talk about.
I've been friends with Alex since 1998. I've known him for a long time.
I don't think he's a bad guy, but I think he's very wrong about a lot of things.
He's very misguided about a lot of things, and I think he loves conspiracies.
There is a bunch of people in this country that love to connect the dots and find conspiracies in fucking everything.
Everything that there is.
And sometimes they're right.
And Alex has been right.
Definitely.
He's been right about a bunch of things.
He was right about the World Trade Organization in particular.
About when they were using...
Agent provocateurs to disrupt protests and make them violent protests by smashing windows.
He documented all of it.
None of them were arrested.
They all went to one safe house and then negotiated with the police.
Then they were released.
They all had military issue footwear.
He's got all these documents from people that worked inside either police or law enforcement that say that there is a standard practice, and this has existed for a long time.
And when you have peaceful protests, and you can't do anything about it, the best way to do something about it is to take that peaceful protest- We're good to
So I'm not actually, in case you think I am, I'm not giving you shit for doing it.
I'm just curious.
I'm just curious because I think part of the article that Barry Weiss wrote in The Times about us, she was talking about that.
And there's a line in there where she said, you know, if you talk to these people, meaning Jones and Cernovich and all of you, that you're either cynical or stupid.
And in effect, that was a shot at me and you.
It wasn't a shot at anybody else because they don't have to talk to other people.
It says, it seems to me that if you're willing to sit across from an Alex Jones or Mike Cernovich and take them seriously, there's a high probability that you're either cynical or stupid.
If there's a reason for shorting the IDW, it's the inability of certain members to see this as a fatal error.
Well, anyway, this gatekeeping thing, I just think it's interesting because if we're going to do what we do well at whatever level we do it, it's like we're going to have to talk to people that people don't like.
j simpson lawyers on on monday he could have the cast of seinfeld on tuesday he could have a magician on wednesday he could have lucille ball if she was still alive on thursday and then you know george the secretary of state or something so no one thought he endorsed all of those ideas or was friends with all those people but i think somehow now because because this feels like your home mine is actually in my home the way we are we're different we're friendlier
we're not sitting here with note cards and with ifbs and it doesn't feel all produced and planned and all that even though i think we both do a hell of a fucking professional show that i think we're both really proud of um I think because of that, they think...
Now you're seeing the real them or something like that.
One of the reasons why I decided to do a podcast in the first place is because I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted.
I wanted to be able to talk to my friends, have a good time, fuck around.
Along the line, it became something different.
And along the line, it became not just talking to my friends, it became talking to people that are famous or interesting people or professors or writers or whoever it is.
How aware are you of the thing that you just said there, that you did exactly what you set out to do?
I don't know that you fully set out to do it this way, but you did it.
This thing that you have created is so it.
It is so what you wanted to do, whether you fully got it or not, but you created it.
It's awesome like I'm I'm doing it at a I think a lower level than you are but I'm very aware of that that like I somehow I Hated what the system was offering and I was like I gotta do something that feels right for me And I came at it from a different place did it cuz I didn't come out from a place like I need a gig I came at it from a place like it'll be fun.
I'm always like, if you're spending all day long hating on me, if you think what I'm doing is the real problem here, you know what I mean?
Let's say I'm wrong on everything.
Let's say everything I said for the first 10 minutes about politics is wrong and we should have strong federal government and identity politics.
Even if that's how it really is, am I really the biggest problem here that people are all day long devoting Twitter accounts, people that make accounts all day wrong?
I mean, I don't want to go too far in it, but in effect, it's when I did that PragerU video about why I left the left, that's sort of the genesis of it, of sort of giving people a little bit of a road map.
So he does – he has this online university where they do these five-minute cartoon videos on different ideas.
So they'll do on economics and foreign policy and race and religion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I did one.
It was about a year and a half ago, February of last year.
Well, I had actually never said the phrase why I left the left, but I just talked about my frustrations with the left and why I believe in freedom and in liberty.
They titled it, Why I Left the Left.
And actually, the first half hour when it dropped, I was pissed because I was like, man, did they just blow my gig?
I really felt at that time, I feel a little differently now, that I was trying to fix the left from within or at least have conversations as someone that was one of these people.
That's why I was focusing on the left.
All these liberals were my people.
This is the thing that I grew up in that I always believed in.
So the fact that they did that, the first half hour, I was like, fuck.
Did I just get booted out?
And then quickly I realized that video went so viral.
It's their number one viewed video on YouTube that I was like, you know what?
I have to just kind of embrace this.
And again, it goes back to the labels thing.
It doesn't really matter whether you left the left or whether you're a libertarian or a classical liberal, the rest of it.
But anyway, that's the genesis of the book of like, just how do you escape this sort of monolithic...
Totalitarian thinking and how do you just be whoever you are and how does being an individual basically lead you to being happy?
Because I think that's actually the only way that you can be happy.
I think that that's it.
It's the most cliche thing ever.
It's what Peterson's telling these people every night that thousands and thousands and thousands of people are showing up every night and he talks about the individual.
He talks about stand up straight, clean your room.
These things all sound silly, At some level.
And the more that I'm with the guy, it's like he is giving these people something that has just been so lost.
Like so absolutely lost.
People think you can just be pathetic.
Blame the system.
Everything else is somebody else's fault.
You should be given shit.
All of this stuff.
And it's like, think about every movie, any movie, whatever your 10 favorite movies are.
Is it about a guy who just was like, oh, the world sucks and what the fuck am I going to do?
And it's somebody else's fault.
No!
Every great movie.
Whatever, you guys got a problem and guess what he does?
All we can do is judge people as individuals and you have to just figure out what is right for you.
So for all the people that I disagree with that are sort of like big government lefties and blah, blah, blah.
And I get why that you maybe need a little more of that if you live in a big city where you might need more noise regulations than if you lived in the freaking – if you live in the middle of Idaho on a farm or whatever.
It's like if that's the life that you want to live, then fight for that.
But what we're doing now is this collectivist craziness is causing people to be unable to think clearly.
So like Huffington Post yesterday wrote a thing about how you have to choose between being for gay people or said – I think it was for For queer people or for Chick-fil-A? Oh, is this because of Jack?
Yeah, because Jack retracted his tweet about Chick-fil-A. Did he have a tweet about Chick-fil-A? Yeah, he tweeted that he showed a digital receipt that he bought Chick-fil-A and then Soledad O'Brien was like, you tweeted that on Gay Pride Month.
He wrote, boost, and then he tagged Chick-fil-A. And Soledad O'Brien showed him who's boss.
But that's what I'm saying, that that sort of, this endless guilting and, you know, you do this so you're evil...
It's ruining the fabric of society.
It really is.
Eat chicken if you like chicken.
Don't eat it if you don't like it.
But that's what individualism is about.
If you want to make the choice, if you think that whatever Chick-fil-A is doing to gay people, whatever they're secretly doing to gay people, if you think that's so evil, even though, by the way, During the Pulse nightclub shooting at the gay club in Florida when 51 people were killed, they gave free food to everybody.
But if you think they hate gay people that much, then don't shop there.
But you don't have to harangue everybody else into doing everything that you want them to do.
I could see people, if they're saying that Chick-fil-A is a homophobic institution, that you shouldn't endorse Chick-fil-A, particularly if you're a gay man.
But he clearly is an influencer, and I think that the Cash App, if I had to guess, because they sponsor this podcast, they're very active in sponsoring podcasts, they probably have some sort of an endorsement deal with him, which is why he did that.
So it was a financial thing for the Cash App, if I had to guess.
But it goes exactly to where we started with this whole thing.
There is this loud group of people and most of them have some sort of odd influence in media.
They're all of these Blue Check, BuzzFeed, 4,000 Twitter follower people that retweet all of the articles of the people like them at Salon and Vox and BuzzFeed.
And they make it seem like we're all hysterical, crazy people.
And I simply don't believe that.
I believe that most people, I would say the vast majority of people probably...
I mean, I think it's something crazy.
Like 80% of people I think are good, decent people who just want people to live.
They want, you can fuck who you want to fuck.
You can smoke what you want to smoke.
You can't do it on my property.
You can't take what's mine.
You can't force me to bake a cake or do any of those things.
But you can allow people to live as they see fit.
I think that's what most people are.
And that's why there's such a pushback.
That's the answer to the Peterson thing.
Peterson said, I'm not going to use pronouns that the government forces me to use.
And there's certainly a business in a lot of people that write these articles.
The Jordan Peterson thing has been very illuminating to me because I've watched them misrepresent his positions on so many different things and call him so many horrible names, transphobic, racist, alt-right, all these different things, and do so with You know, with no justification or rationalization.
Like, you look at the actual article, and they don't post to what he actually said.
Like to deny these realities all the time and to think that that's because of your toxic masculinity and all of this nonsense.
I agree that it is a loud minority.
But what I... I think maybe where we're having a little difference is that I think this thing has spread in a way.
It is so easy to believe this nonsense, this abject drivel, that it is infecting young people at an alarming rate.
But by the way, there's a lot of hopeful signs on this because now they're doing all these studies that the generation right after millennials, so the kids that are like...
You know, like 15 now, that they're actually more conservative now because they see all this as absolute hysteria.
So I think there is, we are getting like a little bit of a rubber band effect on this thing.
And I think things are shifting into normalcy.
And that's why people are listening to your show and listening to Sam's podcast and everything else.
I think there's an issue with people commenting on things that other people were saying and just sort of jumping in and not having the other person there to Discuss these subjects with it particularly like why do women wear makeup at work?
Why do women dress the way they dress?
I think if you sat if you were sitting down with Jordan talking about it He's willing to engage in these subjects with a very very Broad canvas.
I mean, he's willing to look at all the various aspects of them because as a legitimate intellectual, that's what he's doing.
It's an intellectual exercise in discussion of cultural norms.
Like, why do women wear these shoes where you can see their toes in the workplace?
Whereas if a guy showed up with flip flops on, he'd be like, Mike, the fuck?
We're at work here.
Get out of here with this bullshit outfit.
Go put on some goddamn dress shoes.
We're in the office.
It is strange that women wear very little clothes in comparison to the way men do on these shows.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with the discussion.
The problem is framing it as if he's saying, you shouldn't be able to.
If someone got on TV and said, you shouldn't be able to wear makeup at work, you shouldn't be able to dress like that, that would be a problem.
So think about what these guys are doing in effect.
So you're saying that Jordan's taking basically a decent but potentially confusing position, but it's basically a right decision of let's have a conversation.
So when they write all these hit pieces – and why do they do it?
Because they can't get anyone – they just did release this study about journalists and they're basically all paid like 45 grand a year and they're alcoholics, just – Mm-hmm.
Oh, there's a guy out here who's sold over a million copies of his book, who's on tour selling out Beacon Theater and blah, blah, blah all over the world.
I'm going to write a hit piece on him because guess what?
That's going to drive a hell of a lot more traffic than writing something honest.
So that's part of the game.
And, you know, he – I've discussed this many times including on stage with him.
But I'm telling you, man, this tour, it has been a freaking love fest.
Every night when I go up there and I'm warming up the crowd and I'm doing silly lobster jokes and, you know, some of his other buzzwords and I'll talk about make a couple jokes about Kathy Newman or like some other silly things.
But I'll go up there and I usually make some reference to the intellectual dark web.
And if I say your name or I say Shapiro or Sam or whatever, people go crazy.
And what I'm realizing about it is all of these people, think about all the people, however many hundreds of thousands of people are watching this or listening to this right now, and then how many millions will, you know, in the next two weeks or whatever.
Most of them are doing it alone, right?
They're watching on their phone or they're listening on their iPad, whatever it is, or you're maybe watching with your boyfriend or girlfriend.
But most people, it's a pretty solitary experience in the world of what we do.
Now imagine, and it's like when you do stand-up.
Now 3,000 people piled into this place.
And you can look around and go, whoa, there's some other people like me.
And they're not bad people.
And actually what I've found is that these people look good.
They dress right.
Not to make it all about material stuff, but they look like people who are trying to get their shit together.
And I think I said it to you right before we sat down, but me at this moment, I truly feel like the best that I've ever been.
I really do.
And it's partly because of that, because you cannot be around that constantly.
I'm not saying everything he says is right, and I'm still not with him on some of the religious stuff.
And I'm doing my show when I leave here to go with Sam Harris, and they're really...
Well, there's a real problem with mainstream news.
And first of all, there's a problem in that it's a ratings-driven thing.
It's like everything they're doing, they're trying to get ratings.
Anytime there's a big story in the news, it's just like, what are people going to pay attention to?
That's what we're going to put on.
There's no consideration like, is this interesting to us?
Is this what we want to discuss?
It's a news program, but it's not a news program because it's also an entertainment program.
And then they have commercials every 15 minutes.
Did you see the Jim Acosta thing, what he did during the Korea thing?
That is crazy.
That's crazy that a journalist would insert himself into that sort of a situation and interrupt and yell things out, and people don't have a problem with that.
It's like if they would just lie a little bit, just lie a little bit on the margins, as they probably always have done.
I don't think we'd be in this position because people wouldn't be able to so clearly see how messed up the whole thing is.
But because they've become so hysterical, writing articles that are completely the reverse of the truth, because they're acting like petulant children all the time.
And because they half the time, it's like they pretend they're nonpartisan.
But if you just look at any of these journalists Twitter feeds, it's like pretty obvious what you all are, all of you in the mainstream media.
They've created an opening so that now, if people want some sense of truth, you turn into...
Joe Rogan and you're turning to all of these other shows.
And I've seen this because it's this weird environment where You want these people to like you so you're terrified of saying anything, even remotely controversial, that doesn't stick to the script of this left-wing discourse.
So there's all these people that are just faking it.
They're bullshitting.
They might not even have real opinions, but they've adopted this predetermined pattern of opinions that they think that is going to help them get through the door with these producers and these studio executives.
That's Hollywood.
And then when someone breaks free, occasionally someone becomes right-wing, whoever the fuck they are, whether it's Chuck Woolery or Dennis Miller, or they're like, look at that fucking crazy man broke from the pack!
Yeah, he's dealt himself in he's all in he's all in and he's like sort of like resigned himself to never work again Yeah, I mean means but he's probably like 75 years old or whatever he is.
And that's what I mean by I think we're starting to win.
And I don't mean it win like we're going to destroy these people.
I mean I think the narrative has started to shift a little bit where the enthusiasm behind the conversations that we're all having, whoever it is in this thing, the enthusiasm is so great and there is no counter-enthusiast.
Like where are all the – Versions of us on the other side of this.
The people that really are selling identity politics at a really great way, at a comedy level, who have a huge podcast.
Where is that intellectual set of people?
Where's the Sam Harris of the other side of this that have real followings?
They don't exist and that's partly why the hysteria has been ramped up.
They can't believe That out of nowhere, just because of all of our just wherewithal and desire to do what we think is right or what makes us happy or whatever the hell you want to call it, they can't believe we all freaking created something.
And I think that's where a guy like me and Shapiro, although we have very different opinions on many different things, I think we both are intellectually curious.
Well, now he takes the libertarian position, which is the government shouldn't be involved.
But I don't know – but I see a lot of conservatives doing that where they should have all – like this is where Rand Paul, who I mentioned before, he should have been years ago screaming that he's for gay marriage because if you're truly a libertarian – If the government doesn't tell me what to smoke, what to sleep with, then the libertarians could have taken a really awesome, powerful, principled position and said, this isn't about religion.
Look, Barack Obama was not for gay marriage at the beginning.
He got pinned into it because Biden made that stupid comment on Meet the Press where he was basically like, everyone's for it, and then Obama had to come out for it.
But think about it.
If all of this stuff that we're talking about keeps winning, if it all keeps winning, what will happen in 50 years?
They will literally look back at video of Barack Obama campaigning the first time around saying that he's for traditional marriage and they will call Barack Obama a homophobe.
And they will eventually want the Barack Obama library that's being built now in Chicago, they will want that being taken down because that will be the statues of our day.
So that's why I don't know where you're at on the monument stuff, but I would not take any of them down.
You can put up a counter plaque or something right next to it to say Robert E. Lee did this or that.
But the idea that they're removing this shit, I think, is absolutely terrible.
There's a problem with having them in town squares and celebrating them.
But there's also a problem in that they were all most of them.
The ones that they're talking about in the South, they were resurrected during the Civil Rights Movement to sort of counteract the Civil Rights Movement.
So, like, these are really...
This is not like a celebration of these people back in the day when they were viable.
This is during the Civil Rights Movement.
They erected these fairly cheap, and they put them up quickly.
And they did it in response to black people wanting more rights.
I was in Old Town Alexandria where George Washington's church was and it's actually the same church that Robert E. Lee went to so they had a plaque for both of them and because they took down the Robert E. Lee one they also took down the George Washington one at the church that George Washington went to.
I mean, if you follow that logic, and this is what you have to do when you're doing these sort of historical trackings, they will come for everything.
So think about it.
Thomas Jefferson is my favorite founder.
Thomas Jefferson, you can go to his house in Monticello, and they do – if you go on the tour, it's incredible.
They are incredibly honest about his relationship to slavery, that he owned slaves his whole life.
He was having an affair with at least one slave and most likely had children with that slave.
At the same time, he was writing the laws that freed the slaves.
So without this man, these things don't move forward.
So we all live with these odd inconsistencies.
George Washington.
George Washington, who gave up power after the revolution.
Like, he did the most incredible thing.
You know, he gave up power as the commander of the army after the revolution.
The most incredible thing that a leader of a country could do, he owned slaves his entire life.
When he died, and they do this at his house in...
It's outside D.C. I'm blanking on it for a second.
She had inherited them I think from her parents or something like that.
Like it's all – it's deeply twisted and warped and of course it was – now of course we can objectively look at it and go slavery was wrong and you shouldn't – of course.
But they all were doing things in their time that the world doesn't magically become what you want it to be just because you exist and think something.
And the more that we start thinking that, the more we'll eventually come after Obama for running against gay marriage the first time and all of these things.
There is something that we think – you love meat, right?
You love elk and all this other stuff.
Guess what?
One day if this craziness keeps going, they will look back when you're a grandfather and they'll be like, they ate meat because at that point we'll be eating artificially produced whatever.
And they'll literally watch videos of you chomping on some ribs and go see what a savage he was.
So that's why you have to just be aware of what your time is, your time in this world.
We are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law.
unidentified
And they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.
So that's why we need to start by giving agencies charged with border security new technology, new facilities, and more people to stop, process, and deport illegal immigrants.
Having said that, securing the borders alone does not solve immigration management.
We're going to have to better manage legal immigration in order to end illegal immigration.
Senators McCain and Kennedy point us in the right direction on that point.
Right now we've got millions of illegal immigrants who live and work here without knowing their identity or background.
That's part of the reason that we need a guest worker program to replace the flood of illegals with a regulated stream of legals who enter the United States after checks and with access to labor rights.
Part of the reason that illegal immigration is so damaging is that it ends up Creating a pool of workers with depressed wages and no rights.
If you enter illegally, you're showing disregard for our laws.
We cannot allow illegals to pour in.
We can't let them go ahead of lawful people who are trying to enter the country.
We need better border security, more process and deportations.
We have to better manage legal immigration.
And then he talked about the millions that are here now, which in effect is a pathway to citizenship, which by the way, Trump is basically for at some level.
So what are we really talking about every time we scream that everybody is racist?
What does that actually say about the way things have changed or the cult of personality around Trump or just sort of the general derangement of the media that they can't view these things?
I think it's also people's access to communication.
The fact that anyone can voice their opinion, whether it's on Facebook or YouTube or what have you.
It's a different world.
Twitter.
You just tweet instantaneously.
This is fucking bullshit.
People should be able to do whatever they want or whatever you want to say.
And then a bunch of people can agree or disagree or retweet it or screen grab it because they think that it's damaging to you and they put, I can't believe you support this piece of shit.
You can wake up on any given morning, find someone you've never heard of who said something you slightly disagree with, and you can help get them fired.
So, like, they'll say, okay, you know, just in the last couple days with North Korea, that Trump said...
I've been traveling a lot, so, like, getting the exact quote will be tough, but it'll be something like...
You know, Trump said to the North Korean dictator that they're good friends now or something like that.
Like he's already giving him respect.
Well, it's like if Obama, when Obama ran, he said he would sit down with Ahmadinejad and he would sit down with the leaders of North Korea and the rest of those things.
Now Trump is doing it.
So it's like, do you want him to sit down with them and tell him to go fuck himself at the same time?
Like, I'm not even saying this thing's good or bad.
I hope Trump does amazingly well and turns the country around.
I hope he evolves his ideas as a human being.
I hope he does mushrooms.
I hope he grows to love people.
Why would you hope for failure, especially failure for the whole country and sending people into a recession, which is undoubtedly going to cause suicides and turmoil and crisis and people going to go into panic thinking and panic voting, which is not what you want.
I mean, literally, that's what started Hitler.
I mean, that's what started Nazi Germany, right?
They were in the middle of a horrible recession, and this guy came along that proposed a solution.
You're not going to get a better version of the future by people living in fear and poverty and sadness.
I don't think anybody else would have done what he did with North Korea.
Talked a bunch of shit to that guy.
Call him fat and short and you know like it was very funny like what he does is kind of funny and then he gets to have a meeting with the guy and the guy agrees to a meeting with it.
I think they're baffled by him.
They don't know what to do with him because North Korea and South Korea when the presidents of the two countries met at the DMZ and shook hands like that was an historic moment.
Yeah Maybe they can get past all this fucking bullshit that's been going on forever.
And if part of that was helped in some way by Trump being crazy, like maybe it's good to have someone that fucks things up a little bit and mixes it up.
So he brings in John Bolton, who's thought of as a neocon, like a warmonger neocon.
And then he has Mattis as the Secretary of Defense, warmonger neocon.
Maybe what he was doing is that he was scaring people from the...
Going, I'm going to bring in all these people who are really scary, who don't talk about peace that often, who talk about exercising our power and all of that stuff, so that Kim Jong-un is going to go...
Like, if you remove the Twitter hysteria, like, remove just, like, hysteria stuff, like this he said, she said.
Like, in terms of what's happening in the country right now, black and Latino unemployment all-time low, economies chugging along, like, the basic things that matter for a society are working.
I don't know enough about this, but what's been explained to me is that a lot of this is the momentum of what Obama did when he was in office and that the economy, he's riding the work of Obama.
He's riding the wave of the previous administration's policies.
But let's even say that's completely true, what you just said there, that this is all just because of Obama stuff.
Well, it's working.
Like we've got a guy that maybe has just picked up the ball and he's the lucky guy and maybe he's going to get it to the next thing.
But what I'm actually more enthused by is that I think after all this craziness that we're in right now, I actually think people are so starved for sanity and like a reset to decency.
I actually think things are going to get much better.
I think, again, this is where I think the conversations that we're all having are affecting things in a big way.
And I think that even politically, it's going to start bubbling up.
When I was in DC the other day, I was at a small dinner with a pretty – Influential senator who probably doesn't want me to say his name at the moment.
I'm not gonna say it, but I'll tell it to you later.
But it was somebody.
It was somebody big.
And he got it.
He really got it.
Like he knew about us, like this whole thing.
And that's what I'm saying.
Like, I'm not sitting here like, oh my God, it's so amazing what we're doing.
But there is something happening.
And I think it will reach the political level too, that people will not want the hysteria anymore.
And that eventually Trump will, because of his own craziness, become unnecessary.
You won't always need the icebreaker.
We needed the icebreaker to get all this shit out.
Now it's all out.
Everyone's reevaluating everything.
And then out of that is going to grow.
I mean, look, maybe it grows something horrible, right?
Like maybe the Hitler comes.
I obviously hope it doesn't happen.
But what I think is that something decent is going to come.
There's people that are just ideologically driven and they can't be shook from that position.
They're hard left or they're hard right or whatever they are.
They have this rigid idea in their head of what reality is and anything that's contrary to that, they're going to oppose.
And I think...
Jordan has been one of my favorite lightning rods for observation for watching this because all the disingenuous articles about him deceptive Talking about his positions and in extremely inaccurate ways and labeling him as some sort of a prejudiced terrible person What those have done is solidified This idea that there is a campaign of people that just are completely ideologically driven and they don't mind being deceptive
and that strengthens the position.
It helps people like us to just talk about stuff and don't mind talking about being incorrect or ignorant or not worried.
We're not worried about our stance.
We're going about most conversations from a place of objectivity as much as we possibly can.
Most people are subjective, at least to a certain extent.
As much objectivity as we can, as much honesty as we can, and just talking about things.
And this is something that's not happening in these little click-baity articles or in...
People that interrupt your shows and shake fucking jars of nickels or whatever they're doing.
All that stuff strengthens this position that we're in, that we're in this weird time of intellectual dishonesty and turmoil.
And I think a lot of it is because there's a lot of people that were just extremely upset that Trump got into office and anything that seems to represent that position or that side must be opposed violently.
So I think underneath everything you're saying right there, you're very hopeful right now.
I actually sense that you're really hopeful, and I am too.
And it's like, how could we ever do this if we weren't, right?
I would say that if I had to sort of whittle it down what I am at the core, I basically am a world-weary optimist.
I'm an optimist by nature, but I believe that the world is rough and tumble and all the things that Jordan would say about existence, I believe.
But I'm still an optimist despite that.
And what you just said right there basically is showing that the Trump thing was necessary because imagine if Hillary was president right now and the same machine and bullshit nonsense and media and all of that stuff kept churning along.
Think how much worse it would be for these conversations right now.
We would so be on the wrong side of things so to speak.
And the forces that don't want us to do anything good and have conversations would have been so emboldened.
Trump just came and took a freaking bat to the whole thing.
Now, as I discussed with Eric Weinstein, it's like Trump was the bull in the China shop.
I think most of us would have preferred a panther.
We kind of wanted something to walk through, knock a few things off.
Trump just blew up the whole thing.
The phrase is bull in a China shop, not a panther in a China shop.
So that's what you get.
But after this, for every reason you just said, there is going to be a return to sanity.
It goes one of two ways, but I just am a firm believer that it will go that way, that there is enough of us out there now trying to reset things, and because I don't think people are evil, I don't think people want to be talked down to, I don't think people are dumb, and even the people who are dumb, I don't think they want to be dumb.
And because of all of that, I think this was the necessary thing to happen right now.
I'm with you that I think I hope that he continues to do basically good things.
And that if that means that he gets in for another four years and continues to do good things, then so be it.
But yes, what I prefer that it's sort of more of a small government, calm person who could tell you how many branches of government there are.
And like all of that shit and all of the stuff from that flag that's right behind you.
Yeah, I've got a freaking Declaration of Independence in our control room and a constitution and a big American flag.
Like, would I rather someone who knew what the Federalist Papers are and all of those things be in the Oval Office?
Yes.
You don't get everything you want in life.
So you just kind of work with what comes.
And I think we have a little room to work right now.
I think also as more people open themselves up to the ideas that Jordan is espousing, or you are, I am, or more people are genuinely objective about these ideas and start discussing them, the more frantic The people on the radical left, what they call the regressive left, the more ridiculous they're going to get and the more obvious it's going to get that they're out of control.
It's just what happens.
People start ranting and screaming louder because their initial message doesn't work.
It's not like they're going to go back and revamp the message and make it more logical.
So when that's exactly what they're doing with Trump, too, you keep screaming Trump's Hitler, right?
You keep screaming Trump's Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
Now, Hitler killed millions and millions of people, and many more millions were killed because of Hitler that he didn't directly kill.
Now, if you keep doing that with Trump, and then someone plays that Barack Obama clip, and you go, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're calling Trump Hitler.
Here's Obama saying something that actually sounds possibly even more extreme if you believe this is an extreme position to take.
So now, is Obama Hitler?
And what they're doing is they're creating a situation where they're going to cause a rebound so that people will be like, oh, these guys aren't all nuts.
But if they destroy all of our ability to have this conversation, Then when the real Hitler comes in, we won't even be able to recognize it because they will have cried wolf to the point that someone's going to come in and they're going to have a big smile.
It won't be a Trump.
When Hitler, the Hitler type, and I hate using Hitler as the metaphor because it's so overplayed, but when the Hitler type comes...
It ain't coming as the angry guy like Trump is.
It's going to come with the smile on its face, right?
That's that socialist t-shirt, like, you know, socialism smiley face.
That's how it will come because it will be masked in identity politics.
It will be masked in all of this nonsense that will rip us apart, that will literally have us killing each other on the streets.
If the ideas of what I consider the fringe left, which are pretty much mainstream Democrat ideas already, if the Democrats keep going more towards the Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Keith Ellison, real hard left progressive stuff, it is rooted in identity politics, which we've done already.
But it is rooted in something that separates us.
It is rooted that you should...
That even today, did you see this at Harvard?
I just tweeted out when I was on the way here.
Harvard released this statement defending the fact that they're okay with basically having quotas that work against Asian students because they want to have more other minorities, basically meaning black or Hispanic minorities.
So think about it.
Why would you discriminate?
If you were hiring right now, let's say you're hiring today, right?
You're hiring for your studio.
Who's going to hire?
You're going to hire the most qualified person or are you going to try to figure out every little identity thing to figure out who you should hire?
You will not be, if you're Asian and you, and why did they, why did Asian Americans or Indian Americans are a great example that they have succeeded at every level that we measure success.
I think the highest socioeconomic average salary over a hundred grand, you know, education, et cetera, et cetera.
If you now say, well, wait a minute, these people played by the rules they They came here as in most, you know, like all of our ancestors virtually came here pretty much with nothing.
People owned small businesses, busted their ass, worked in coal mines, etc., wherever you had to do it.
If you do all of those things and then you focus on education and on family and all of those things, and now the system is going to say, well...
Worked for a while, but we're going to have to put you at the bottom of the thing now.
And guess what?
You're not going to get into Harvard because you're Asian.
That is racism.
So I've been calling this out for at least two years.
That the next move by this identity politics, this evil oppression Olympics machine, is that they will come after Asian people.
And it's starting to happen now.
So I see all these minorities, by the way.
So Candace...
I watch the show, and I know you guys definitely have disagreements on stuff, as do I do when it comes not only to politics, but tactics sometimes and stuff, but I really do like her.
You know, look, she's causing a massive rift in the black community, and you can see it in the numbers.
Black male support for Trump doubled.
It was at 11%.
It's now at 22%.
Well, it's Kanye.
Kanye was the wrecking machine, but I actually think in the grand scheme of things, Candace is much bigger.
I really believe that.
Why?
Because I think she could be a direct line to all of the political parts of this if she decides to go that route.
I mean, I think the black community is starting to split.
I think the gay community is starting to split because the left has sort of had this odd embracement of Islam, which is bad for gays.
So I think the gays are starting to split.
I think...
That Latinos are even starting to split a little bit differently because I think for all the people that came here legally, they're actually not as thrilled with illegal immigration as the media may imply that they are.
So I think there's just massive shifts happening all over the place.
And the way we look at voting where every election, you know, what's his name?
John King goes on CNN and shows you the map and he goes, well, the white working class people here voted this way and the black inner city people.
I think all of that is about to explode.
And they won't know what to do because they haven't been listening, but I think some others have been listening.
Do you think there's real room in this country for a third party?
I mean, I think for sure someone could take a position that's outside those two boxes and make some real valid points and have a little bit of ideas from each side.
But the real concern in this country seems to be throwing your vote away, right?
That's the thing that people are always worried about.
Well, if you go that way, you're throwing your vote away and you're essentially...
Giving it to the person that is on the other side.
One issue is that they apparently went to places they thought would deny them so that they could make a story out of it.
It wasn't as simple as a loving couple went to some place, they wanted to get a cake made, and the people said no, and they're like, what the fuck?
No, they wanted a story.
So they sought out places that they thought were going to deny them, and then they made a giant national event out of it.
I don't think...
People should discriminate to the point where they're not gonna make someone a cake.
But do you think the government shouldn't step in?
No.
I think you should let people know publicly that these are people that they discriminate against gay people.
And so if you want your dollars to represent your opinions and your feelings on things, maybe you shouldn't buy a cake from these folks that don't want to make a cake for gay people.
But the idea that government's going to step in?
It seems crazy to me.
But then, as soon as I say that, I go, okay, well, what if they wouldn't make a cake for black people?
So it's – look, we have the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You have to serve people based on race and all of the minority statuses that there are.
I'm not for relitigating that.
But there are – there is a libertarian argument that basically would say – We don't need those laws anymore because the Civil Rights Act was in response to Jim Crow laws where states in the South had discriminatory laws.
So we had the federal government come in and clean that up for everybody.
So you have to serve everyone equally.
You can't deny a black couple to come into your restaurant or you have to serve them.
If there was a Jewish artist who took commissions for paintings, would you force that person to paint neo-Nazi signs?
Of course not.
You would never have the government come in and say that they are...
Forced to paint something that's against their conscience.
So I would say that your original position is the right one, which is it kind of sucks, right?
It kind of sucks.
Like I wish in my heart of hearts, I'm gay again.
Like I wish that every baker would treat everyone equally and every person would treat everyone equally.
They're not allowed – he wasn't allowed to deny them something that was in the store already because you can't deny based on those protected categories.
So he wouldn't – by the Civil Rights Act, he wouldn't have been allowed to deny interracial couple a cake that existed there already.
Could he have denied them one that he would have had to draw a black woman and a white woman if he was a real racist?
We would all love there to be, not all of us, but most sane people don't want racism to exist.
But should we not let people meet?
Should we be bugging people?
Should we force people to do something they don't want to do?
I mean, I just fundamentally do not believe in that.
I don't want people to be racist.
I don't want people to be homophobic or transphobic.
But the idea that the government can use its authority to make people do all of these things I just think is absolutely crazy.
So whether they decided to intentionally inflame this or not by finding people that weren't going to do it, if you're listening to this right now and you're getting gay married or untraditionally married, as they call it, if you're doing that and you live in Alabama and there's only one baker there and he doesn't want to bake a gay cake, It sucks.
It does suck.
But what you might want to do is what I said about an hour ago, which is maybe leave that town.
Like, maybe take your skills, whatever worth you bring to a community, and move to a bigger town where there probably is someone that'll do it.
Or order a cake online.
I mean, the technological part that you just mentioned, that you can now tweet about stuff and go, don't...
We have power as people.
And the idea that we outsource all the decision-making to the government is extremely dangerous.
I mean, every horror in human history is a government doing things, basically, as long as governments have pretty much existed.
It's not bands of nice individual people that disagree on some stuff, murdering people.
You'd have to give me an example of what they were actually doing.
Like, you're allowed to hate gay people.
You are.
I hope that you do not.
And I actually think this is somewhere where the conservatives have moved.
I really do think they have moved.
There's virtually no mainstream conservative that's screaming about gay marriage anymore.
Even Mike Huckabee, who's sort of irrelevant, or like the Christian conservative side of that.
They pretty much have...
Ted Cruz, what does he say about gay marriage anymore?
But that's again why Rand Paul should have led or the real, the true conservatives that believe in limited government should have led the charge on this.
So this is where the progressives did do something right years ago because they were fighting for real equality.
Because real equality means you should be able to marry whoever you want.
They weren't going for extra rights for anyone.
Now they're going for extra rights because we all have equality.
It doesn't mean we all have equality.
Equal everything.
But we have to have equality under the law.
That's all the government can provide you.
And then once you have that, some of us are going to be born into more money, right?
Like your kids are going to have more money than you did, right?
If the government was slim and trim and effective and, you know, we were all taxed right and it was transparent and effective and functional, there would be no reason to be a libertarian.
I'd be sitting here going, I'm for government.
You know what I mean?
Like if it really operated in a slim way.
But what?
The government doesn't do anything good.
Name one problem you could possibly have in your life, Joe Rogan, that you'd be like, let me get the government to solve this.
And between UPS and FedEx and Amazon and drones and blah, blah, blah and DHL, they'd all start – it would probably drop prices because right now we've just got this artificial thing that sits there that then allows them to price according to that.
But if you drop that, why is the government in that business anymore?
I have three chickens.
I've really done the Joe Rogan lifestyle here.
Over the last couple of years.
So I have three chickens right now.
I'm going to give you a good UPS story.
We ordered them.
They were born in August on a Monday in Cleveland.
They hatched that day.
They threw them in a box with a little hole, USPS, and they showed up at my door in LA on a Tuesday.
Well, I'm not telling you that I'm against all regulation, period.
But that's where I said intellectually I like that argument because I think you can make a very sound argument that competition would force people to do better work.
Like if you're a plumber, you have a vested interest In doing the best plumbing job you can so that people will rate you on Yelp so that you will get more work.
You don't have a vested interest in cutting corners.
Now, you might, right?
You're going to push it as much as you can to save as much time and energy and money as you can.
But once you go over that edge, yeah, you don't want to be known as the guy that you tighten something too much so that you flooded the house.
If they knew there were no inspectors, no one was going to check their stuff and make sure that their stuff was up to code.
Listen, man, I was in construction my whole life.
My dad was an architect.
I've been in construction since I was a little kid.
You fucking need regulations.
These guys, a lot of people that are in construction...
They'll do whatever the fuck they can to make money and it's not good for the people that have the house because they might have that house for five, ten years before that problem manifests itself.
The people who are establishing these codes are licensed builders or people that have been involved in construction for a long fucking time and they know what's safe and what's not safe.
That's why those codes exist.
They exist to protect the consumers.
You can't just protect the consumers through the marketplace because Because it takes a long time for these problems to become a real issue.
And these problems could potentially damage everybody in the neighborhood.
It's not just going to affect the person on this one lot.
Like if a fire starts, it burns all the houses in the neighborhood.
Or if a flood happens and it floods everyone downhill, it's a real problem.
And, you know, my dad wasn't in construction, so I'm not privy to like all of that, the little stuff.
But I genuinely believe that as a general level, People have a vested interest in, especially now because of phones and apps and Yelp and all the things, doing good work because that's how you will get more work.
And make sure that someone doesn't do something stupid with a power line or someone do something stupid with the way they constructed main beams where they're subject to collapse.
Because most people buying a house don't know what the fuck they're looking for.
Most people getting a house built, they have no idea about construction methods and they need someone to inspect things and make sure that it's up to code.
It's a dangerous thing, too, because it's where you sleep.
It's where your kids sleep.
It's...
I think there's a lot of idealistic notions about deregulation and I think there's some consumer protection has to be put in place because people don't have the time to spend all this time researching construction methods and making sure everything's done correctly and be there and make sure that the joists are a certain width and they have a certain amount of support.
All that stuff has to be done by people who understand code.
Assuming that the government regulators understand code correctly and aren't just on the take or just basically just taking money and signing off on things.
There's a big difference between an insurance inspector and a code inspector.
Code inspectors are very different.
When you're having a house built, and I've had construction projects where I had to explain to people and go through it with builders, they're making sure that the house doesn't fucking fall on you, that the power lines are done correctly, that all the electricity is done correctly, the pipes are laid in correctly, your septic system or your sewage system is done correctly.
So without whittling it to the definition of greed versus ambition, it's like you do what's good for you, but it doesn't mean you're just running this rampaging program to destroy the world in the name of Joe Rogan.
You're doing what's good for you because you actually like your audience and you want them to learn.
You want to have money so that your family can live in a house that you can afford and that you can send your kids to good schools and all of those things.
That's all rational self-interest.
If at the same time you were running a nuclear power plant and you were Mr. Burns and you were dumping in the river, well, no, that's actually no longer rational self-interest because now you're polluting the very environment that you live in.
Yeah, that I would say there has to be some, but I've had some interesting people on conservatives who are doing environmental stuff from a conservative perspective, that there's ways to make money actually in green stuff, in green products.
So what those guys would argue is what I said before, which is that ultimately, especially now because of technology, like in the old days...
So every time someone cuts regulation, I've heard Bill Maher say this a lot, they're going to start...
Polluting the river immediately.
That implies that these businessmen, whatever industry that they're in, that they're immediately going to be like, ha, the regulation's gone, start polluting the water.
We live in a time now where everyone's walking around with an iPhone, where maybe 50 years ago you could have got away with a lot of bad shit, right?
coal miners that were breathing all kinds of horrible shit that nobody was ever going to find out about, where now everybody is walking around with Snapchat and Instagram and blah, blah, blah.
So a lot of the stuff would be exposed more so that all of the things that we've been talking about for the last couple hours about people getting involved, a lot of the things I think would start self-regulating.
But again, and then I won't say it again, I'm not for just deregulating everything.
I just think there's probably better ways to do it than just having the government come in and say, this is what you got to do and now figure it out.
Because the government isn't that good at most things.
Yeah, I know what you're saying there, but I do think that obviously there has to be laws in place, specifically laws in place that protect people from someone doing something that's going to damage all the other people in the community.
Right, but I don't think it's just like specifically in terms of like someone polluting rivers.
I don't think it's good enough to snapchat about it.
I think people should be locked up and go to jail if they find out that someone's dumping toxic waste into the river because it's too expensive to process it and get it removed and put in some place where it's, you know, safe.
Sentence commuted that's kind of crazy like she showed up and she presented this case about some woman who's a Been in jail for she's essentially jail for life for nonviolent drug offense, right?
Well, that's where we're in a full and total agreement.
I just think that this idea that the pharmaceutical companies can sell drugs, but people can't sell drugs, that they're responsible for the unimaginable number of people that have died from opiate overdoses, fentanyl.
I mean, fentanyl, just last year, we lost Tom Petty, we lost Prince.
A couple other people too.
I can't remember.
There's some other famous people that died from fentanyl.
Patton Oswalt's wife, she was another fentanyl.
It's a horrible, horrible, horrible drug.
And no one's clamoring for these people to go to jail.
Prescription drugs with a zillion side effects that are seemingly far worse, including thoughts of suicide and depression and blah, blah, blah, than the original thing they're trying to treat.
And then you think about how many people that are in jail right now for marijuana, how many people that are in jail for cocaine, how many people are in jail for psychedelics, MDMA. I mean, there's no comparison in terms of the amount of damage done per capita.
You know, sleepwalking, saying crazy things, eating it, you know, literally just being unable to control what you're doing while you're on Ambien, being in this zombie-like state.
So is it possible that even though she has also said that she didn't realize that Valerie Jarrett was black, which I actually kind of do believe – I don't know.
Whether or not they're responsible for those side effects is where it gets into the realm of personal responsibility.
Like, if you take Ambien and you do something, are you responsible for it?
No?
Yes?
What are we going to say?
If you drink and you go commit a violent crime, are you responsible for it?
We all agree, yes.
So it gets real strange.
It gets real strange.
I mean, that's one of the weird things when it comes to gender and responsibility, because there's been so many issues of men and women in particular.
It's almost always men and women.
You never hear about these from gay couples, but men and women, or I haven't heard about it at least, men and women getting drunk and having sex, and then the man gets accused of sexual assault.
And this has gotten so weird that a guy, preemptively, a guy and a girl had sex, and the guy called the police and wanted her charged with sexual assault because he was drunk.
And he did it as a preemptive measure because he was worried that she was going to come after him.
And so the university took action against the girl.
And I'm like, Jesus Christ, are we playing little stupid games and pretending that girls rape guys when they're drunk?
It's a gray area because we know that some people do take advantage of people that are drunk.
For sure.
If someone was like pouring drunk drinks down someone's face and they were sober and they were doing it with the intention of raping them once they were intoxicated and they couldn't consent anymore, that's one thing.
But if two people are getting together and drinking and then having sex and then the woman has regret in the morning when she sobers up so she decides that it was rape because she and he were both drunk, that's preposterous.
But we don't have this ability to rationally process each individual case.
But by the way, here's something that Trump did that was really good.
He got rid of those ridiculous Title IX laws that Obama instated where they were basically having these clown courts in colleges that you could go to them.
And instead of having due process, which is perhaps the most important piece of a functioning Western free society where you are innocent until proven guilty...
They were suspending male students just by accusations.
And then it was leaking.
I had Laura Kipnis on, who's a professor, that she was fighting against Title IX. So then they brought up Title IX charges against her.
And there's many, many other stories on this.
That's something that Obama brought in that Trump actually got rid of.
That evil, what's her name?
Evil Betsy DeVos got rid of.
So it's like...
We've just gotten to the point where we've politicized everything.
We've politicized our own capacity to be free and make decisions for ourselves.
If you get drunk and are fooling around with somebody, some of that's on you.
You might regret it in the next...
Every single one of us listening to this has had sex with someone or done drugs with someone or something, woke up the next morning and been like, fuck, I shouldn't have done that.
Yeah, but again, this is where the identity politics of all this ruins everything, because you're not saying that anyone that gets drunk, you're saying if a girl, really, although that one example that you gave is true.
Oh, you were drunk and a girl took advantage of your penis?
Oh, did you orgasm?
You did.
Shut the fuck up, then.
Get out of here.
What are you doing?
It's ridiculous across the board.
It's far more ridiculous, though, when a guy is accusing...
Let's just be honest about this.
It's far more ridiculous when a guy is accusing a girl of rape in those circumstances.
And I don't want to hear all your progressive nonsense screaming and yelling and, no, it's not.
We're all equal.
Fuck you.
It's not the same.
If a guy does that to a girl, if a guy purposely gets a girl drunk and does it because he knows that she wouldn't consent any other way, and then gets her to the point where she's like, and she's barely conscious and fucks her, in my opinion, that's rape.
But if a couple gets together and they have a few drinks, and they're laughing, they're flirting, and they make out, and then they go back to her place or his place and they have sex, it's not rape.
It's definitely not good for anybody to take advantage of someone's body and in particular give them a drug where they have no control and then rape them.
Yeah, it's the same thing.
If a girl does it to a guy, it is the same thing.
If she roofies the guy and has sex, and especially, what if the guy has a girlfriend and he doesn't want to have sex with her, or, you know, fill in the blank, he's not attracted to her, or he's gay, and you do that to him and he's repulsed by it, yeah, it's rape.
The idea that this guy, who was America's sweetheart, America's dad, was possibly the greatest serial, not the greatest, but one of the worst serial rapists of all time, if not the worst.
I used to have Cosby records hanging up in my house even to three years ago and eventually as the story started leaking out, I had one of his great records.
And at first I was like, I'm just going to leave it up.
Like it doesn't change my feelings about him as a comic.
And then I remember people would be coming into my house.
I mean, I think Jordan would have a lot to say on this.
These inconsistencies that we live with that often drive us and that, you know, why did we find out that...
You know, these people preaching about morals all the time are the same people that are doing all this weird shit, or that we've all done things that we're not proud of, or whatever it is, and it's like...
I guess it becomes an addiction like anything else.
I'm sure people do studies on this about what happens to the actual brain chemistry when you're doing these things.
And I would guess it has something to do with the dopamine levels that are released at the same time when somebody's snorting coke and doing whatever they're doing.
Everything has become so public, and I think that that's part of the problem all the time.
Who banged who in college?
The idea that that now is like this thing that gets written about and people get interviewed on all these things.
Again, all of that is kind of dangerous.
And that's why I try all the time.
And I think what you usually do is you usually talk about ideas, not people, because it's the underlying philosophical ideas that matter, not the specifics of this kid.
I mean, you didn't pull up the picture of the kid and Mention the girl's name and hers are Twitter and all that.
But that it's the underlying philosophical issues of why are we doing this?
Why are we exposing everybody?
Why are we attacking and destroying everybody and all that?
That that's much more interesting to me than just the specifics of the people or, you know, all the people that I'm so sick of, all these blue check writers and BuzzFeed people.
Well, they're just—they're in the business of writing.
You know, I think a lot of it is—I mean, we can decide that these people are our enemy, but, like, we're in some ways foes on the battlefield.
You know, I just— In a very perverse way.
In a very perverse way.
And I don't—I just think it's just like— Their job is to write about things, and when we're involved in a story, they find an angle and they go after it, just like I do with jokes.
If I crack a joke about somebody, I do a bit about somebody.
I don't hate them.
I had this whole bit about Bruce Jenner and the Kardashians, what led Bruce to become a woman.
It's not because I hated them.
It's because I thought it was funny.
I thought there's an angle there.
It's a story.
It's a big thing that's on people's minds.
And so it became a target for me.
The same way it is when a lot of these folks write articles.
And, you know, a lot of them are in their 20s.
And, you know, they're idealistic or they're young and evolving their thoughts.
And maybe they wouldn't write that article five years from now or 10 years from now or whatever.
I think we have to take that into consideration as well.
These people are embarking on a career in journalism and, you know, for a lot of them shitting on Jordan Peterson gets them social brownie points.
So I was talking to Jordan about something that I think is kind of interesting that I haven't talked about publicly before, and I thought if I'm going to come on Joe Rogan, let me see if I can bust out something kind of personal.
So, you know, Jordan was having all these autoimmune problems, and that's kind of what led him to...
He's definitely lost some weight, slimmed down a little bit, but in a good way.
His energy is back.
His hair looks better.
He just looks better.
I don't know...
All the science behind the carnivore diet of whether you can do it forever and not eat vegetables and truly survive.
I don't know where you're getting the rest of the nutrition that you need and the rest of the vitamins and all that.
But when I've gone out to dinner with him over these things, the biggest steak you can imagine at every place, chops it up, eats meat.
That's it.
So anyway, we were talking the other day in the green room before the show that it's interesting that He had this health problem as his success was growing.
And it's like you don't really think about that in life because we all like to think like as we're growing and getting better and doing what we're supposed to do, that our health is kind of in line with that.
So I've actually never talked about this before, but about two and a half years ago, right when my show was really taking off, I think probably about the first time we did our first sit down, so not the one last year, but about two and a half years ago.
As I was also first getting hate online at the same time, I started losing tons of chunks of hair.
Tons.
Like I'd be in the shower.
Yeah.
And tons of hair would be everywhere after.
You know, I'd shower hair in my towels and everything and lost like huge patches back of my head, up top, like all over the place.
So I had, or I have, I guess I technically still have it, alopecia areata, where it's an autoimmune thing.
They don't know why your white blood cells start attacking your hair follicles.
So I went about two years ago.
And again, this is just as I'm starting to really succeed.
I'm really just breaking through for the first time.
And I went on this crazy experimental drug.
So usually when you have this, they just shoot corticosteroids into your head, and they hope that that Basically reverses it or stops it or whatever.
But my case was so severe that I went – I found this doctor who's doing this really experimental thing where in effect they're putting something like poison ivy on your head so that your white blood cells will attack that instead of attacking your hair follicles.
And the hope is if you do just the slight amount that's necessary that you won't have like crazy reactions and you'll be – and your hair eventually will grow back.
Anyway, I did it for about a year.
First off, when I was on camera – I mean there were points where like I was like, oh my god, like I can't be on camera anymore.
I was doing, not spray hair, but powdered shit and grew out my hair to hide.
Later I can show you.
I still actually do have some spots here.
But anyway, I went under this experimental stuff.
And literally for two years, virtually my entire body was broken out.
Like red, itchy, gross, disgusting.
My head was like dripping.
For two years?
Yeah.
For like a year, bad.
And then a year, not as bad.
But like oozing my head, like as if you had poison ivy.
I was literally basically putting poison ivy on my head.
And like...
I was extremely sensitive to heat and light, and it was a truly miserable...
I had a real...
Oh, I gained weight because of it, because it screws up your...
My neck actually looked thicker.
I look at videos where I did not look good for a year.
I look kind of bloated, because my body was basically having an allergic reaction at all times.
I was putting something on my head to cause my body...
To have an allergic reaction.
Like, for whatever reason, I was just very sensitive to it.
But anyway, I bring this all up.
A, because I've never talked about it and I thought it might just be something to, like, throw out there.
But B, what I've discussed with Jordan is just this interesting idea of sort of as you're succeeding and as you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, that life just throws you weird things.
And I'm pretty much over it now.
I'll show you later.
Like, I definitely have some stuff still that now I'm just taking the injections and we'll see what happens.
What's good about is the same thing that I try to do with all my material.
I look at and I learned this from Doug Stanhope.
Doug Stanhope actually said it to me and I realized I kind of do it, but from him saying it, I did it more.
He said, you should write your bits as if you're a defense attorney.
Like, you're defending your bit.
Like, write your bit, like, as if you...
And so I think that one of the things about having haters out there or critics out there is that they're examining your material and finding holes in it.
And I think if you go over all of your material and all of your ideas from the perspective of someone is watching them right now trying to find fault in everything that you do...
Find those holes, patch them up, and there's going to be disagreements.
It's not like you're always going to be able to state your point and it's going to be undeniable to someone who completely disagrees.
Ideologically with your stance on whatever the fuck it is.
But no, as long as you...
It's undeniable to you.
You've rationally made your case.
You've objectively stated the facts.
This is your position.
This is why.
And you can back it up.
There's too much sloppy work going on where people think they can...
And you see this a lot.
There's a lot on the progressive left, or the regressive left, or what do you want to call it, where they just expect that other people are just going to agree with their stance on things so they have this sort of This very rigid ideology that they're trying to put out there.
So then you don't have to do the legwork of the argument.
It's a lot harder to take a position that says you should be who you are and you have to fit that into society rather than saying, this is what the moral imperative is.
This is why we need those laws.
And if you deviate from that, you're the bad guy.
So unfortunately, they've just embraced that, I think, too much.
So it's like one of those things, like when I go to these colleges and I'm usually invited by libertarians, and it's like, libertarians want low taxes and limited government and live how you want to live, right?
Like that's the basics of it.
But they'll often say, you know, I talk about low taxes in a college class and people say I'm racist.
And it's like, well, how does race get into that?
But what they will say is that what they'll say is, well, wait a minute.
If you want low taxes, that means you don't want money going to people who need it more.
And often it is people of color who need it more.
So you inherently are racist.
You have to think on how to make the counterargument to that.
I think there's a very valid counterargument that I buy into.
But you have to think.
It's very easy to just take somebody who thinks the reverse of you and go, you're racist.
So he, I think he would say this, but I'm not his lawyer, but I think he used the phrase, all he meant was marriage, that generally societies that more people are married and people remain married.
They have to build confidence, get your shit together.
And martial arts, I think, is one of the best ways to do that.
I've seen so many men that were insecure and dorky.
They become fucking nerd assassins through martial arts.
I think it's a great way to build confidence, and I think there's an extreme lack of adversity, like physical adversity in a lot of people's lives.
And overcoming physical adversity is what leads to a lot of confidence in men.
I just think that there's a lot of men that just have no idea whether they can or can't do anything difficult, and they have massive insecurity because of it.
I think he would say that once you accomplish that, that that's when you will find more women and that the next step, the next natural progression in life is that you will find someone that you want to be partnered with and that that then has the best value for a society.
The only way I could ever do as many different things as I do is if I just get after it.
I get after it pretty fucking good.
I'm not insecure in that.
I mean, whether it's through martial arts or any kind of exercise or work, I take pride in getting things done.
I take pride in working, especially working towards things that are important to me, whether it's working on my set, working on my stand-up, whether it's working on a podcast, whether it's working on my martial arts or my fitness or yoga or whatever.
I get after it, man.
Just got to.
And for me, it's not a matter of whether or not it's an option.
It's like brushing my teeth.
I don't decide one day, I don't want to brush my teeth today.
I just fucking brush my teeth.
And when there's days where I'm doing fasted cardio, when that alarm goes off, it's not a matter of whether or not I shut the alarm off.
She drinks water before and she drinks it after, but when she's in that class, she's just tough.
It's just, you know, it's never easy to do.
You know, it gets a little bit easier when you get better at it, but then you just try harder and it makes it more difficult.
If you're always giving 100% effort, it's always going to be hard.
You know, you take some pride in the fact that now I can go two miles through the hills and, you know, and reach the point of exhaustion where before it was one or whatever.
Whatever your little progress markers are, you get some satisfaction in that.
But it's always difficult to get going.
The hardest step is the first step.
It's not the 30th step or the 100th step.
It's the fucking first one.
It's getting on the trail, getting going.
It's the hardest thing.
The hardest weight to lift is the first one because once you get going, Like, okay, I'm a half hour into my workout.
I'm writing things down that I'm supposed to be doing.
Now I got, you know, 20 chin-ups and then burpees and then all these...
If you would have ever thought when you started stand-up that you'd be sort of like a...
Because you're kind of like a lifestyle guru in a way.
You know what I mean?
Like every time I've done the sensory deprivation stuff or the float stuff, every time I've gone into the place, when I just talk to the girl when she's like setting it up or something, I'll be like, oh, Joe Rogan got me into this.
And they're always like, oh, Joe Rogan!
Joe Rogan, he got everybody into this.
You literally created float places.
I went to one in Nashville.
The woman was like, oh, Joe Rogan, I love Joe Rogan.
But that and the MMA stuff and all that, what a bizarre adventure.
I mean, what does that say about saying what you think and explaining what your life is to people?
That's what they want.
I mean, I think when I'm with Jordan, the thing I realize more than anything else is he's giving them a little room to be who they are.
He's taken some of the bullets, the hit pieces and all that stuff that we've talked about.
He takes a little bit of that to take these positions that are not wrong, but are just...
Politically incorrect or somewhat unpopular or controversial.
And by taking those positions, he gives other people just a little bit of a force field to think a little bit.
So for you in this, it's like you started doing something that gave you a little peace of mind, a little something that made you feel good and feel healthy and clean and mentally sound and all that.
And then you started talking about it.
And then, holy shit, somebody in Nebraska was like, I'm going to try that.
And the next thing you know, she opened a clinic for it and is doing it.
You know what I mean?
And then that spurs.
And so that's the beauty of saying what you think.
How quick can you snap into the zone that you want to get into when you're in there?
Because when I just did it a couple days ago, I've done it a couple times now and I've usually been...
to kind of clear the clutter.
But, you know, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less.
This last time, just because I think we've been traveling so much up in planes every day and everything else, it wasn't until the last, you know, that's what happens.
Like the last five minutes, I finally got to that place where I was kind of disconnected.
But do you have a trick for that when you get in there?
You got a good strain of indica that's not going to completely destroy me.
Like, my weed situation at this point, and I used to be a big pothead, my weed thing is like, end of the night, puff from my vape pen, like, watch the same Simpsons episode that I loved in 1989. Like, that's good enough for me.
Like, I don't need, like, I know a lot of my comic friends, like, they want to smoke a sativa, and right, right, right.
And I'm like, I've opened up enough doors in my brain, if anything, I'd tighten a couple hinges, you know what I mean?
So, back in the day, like college and a little bit after college, I had Did mushrooms, I don't know, maybe 20 times in my life, something around there.
And then I haven't done it in about 15 years.
And then about six months ago, some mushrooms appeared, doesn't matter how.
They were in my house, and I was like, all right, here's what we're going to do.
I had some friends over, and David was there.
And we were like, all right, we're all going to take one cap.
We're not going to have a full- Oh, you fucking pussies.
Wait, wait.
It's been a while, man.
Come on.
So I was like, you know, we're just going to take one cap.
No, my drive is for the people that enjoy my work.
When I'm doing stand-up, my drive is because I know there's a bunch of people that are getting babysitters, and they bought tickets in advance, and then, like, next Friday, Joe's coming to town, and I'm...
I'm working hard for that.
I don't want them to have a bad experience.
I want to do the best fucking show I can do.
I'm dead serious about that.
That's very important to me.
I understand there's a massive responsibility.
And I'm doing the Chicago Theater like I did last weekend.
Two shows, 3,700 people a show.
That's a lot of fucking people.
I don't want...
I want anybody to be disappointed.
I want to do my best job.
The best I can do.
And that's where my drive is.
My drive is to...
I'm dissecting material.
I'm rewriting it.
I'm practicing.
I went up three times last night.
I'll probably go up...
I'm going up at least two times tonight.
I'm doing the improv and I'm doing the comedy store.
I do that all the time, man.
I do that all the time.
And my drive is to...
There's a great reward in making people laugh.
And there's a great reward in...
We made an exchange.
They came to see me.
I made them laugh.
Everybody's happy.
We had a deal.
That's the deal.
It's not an easy deal.
It's like you've got to work hard to fill your end of the bargain.
But if you do work hard and you do work at it and you do examine it and you do put in the hours on stage and you do go over the rewrites and listen to the recordings and do your best, it's rewarding.
The reward is that I... I can say that those people have a good time.
Like when I put a video up on Instagram of a bunch of people cheering after the show, my feeling, this is like we shared this time.
I mean, it's like I'm getting back to this thing that people don't know me from.
And it's like, I'm good.
I sent you...
The hour.
I haven't sent it to anybody.
I'm not putting up publicly, but I wanted you to see it because even if you could only watch a minute, because I wanted you to know that I'm a real comic.
You know what I mean?
Because otherwise, it's like we can all sit here and be like, yeah, I'm a comic, blah, blah, blah.
But it's incredibly powerful when you're in that room with those people and you make it real for that.
And I know my style.
I'm never going to be the best joke writer on the planet.
It's not where my passions lie.
But I like being in that room with these people Doing what we did here and getting everybody playing and being in the moment.
And I get people kind of yelling at each other and screaming and announcing their political differences and like all this crazy shit.
And I don't know anyone that's doing it the way that I'm doing it.
And it's not like I'm doing a set the way Seinfeld would lay out, you know, every word, you know, for the hour.