Dr. Debra Soh, a former sex researcher turned science journalist, critiques how progressive ideologies—like dismissing biological sex differences or suppressing James Damore’s Google memo—stifle open debate, citing backlash against dissenters and selective rejection of science. She highlights rapid-onset gender dysphoria in teens, often tied to peer influence rather than intrinsic identity, while Rogan questions the fairness of trans women competing in combat sports due to lingering physiological advantages like bone density. Both condemn platform censorship, including YouTube demonetizing factual discussions, and celebrate podcasting’s unfiltered, long-form format for deeper intellectual exchange, contrasting it with shallow mainstream media. Their conversation underscores how ideological tribalism distorts nuanced discourse, leaving critical thinking in peril. [Automatically generated summary]
I think it's particular ideologies coming in and taking over.
But they've been there for a while.
But I think it's that they've reached the mainstream.
I see it as political correctness running amok.
And I see it as legitimate researchers not being able to speak out because they've got enough on their plate with their research, their teaching, they've got their students, you know, they're super busy.
And then on top of it, they don't want to deal with the mobbing that will inevitably happen if they do speak out.
So things are kind of in favor right now of the craziness.
And this is clear when you study us as an organism.
You know, I had a really bizarre conversation once with a guy who's a professor or a former professor, and he was trying to deny that there's a difference between men and women.
You have people that are maybe more typically masculine or more typically feminine, but even still, I don't think there are many people that are 100% one way or the other.
I almost feel like that way of thinking is more old-fashioned because this is all about being progressive and open-minded.
But I think if someone is a man but is maybe more female-typical, to say that this person is a different category of gender or that they're, I don't know, not male, to me that's more stereotypical.
You know what I mean?
I think it's not progressive to say if you're a mix of both, you must be something different.
Well, you're not necessarily a mix of both, right?
You just have a different hormonal profile and a different...
Different body type, different...
I mean, people vary so much that, I mean, I think having some sort of categories to say, oh, this is a male and this is a female, it seems like it's pretty beneficial.
You see these companies going and they're trying to be more with the times, I guess.
Everything is gender neutral now and I'm thinking, all of that money and time is being wasted when I don't think that does anything for women or sexism.
Instead of addressing someone by ladies and gentlemen, you say, people, is that really going to stop sexism?
It just makes people mad because then they have to change the way they talk.
I think it's coming from, for some parents, it's coming from a good place.
Like, they obviously want the best for their kids, and they don't want to limit the kid in terms of what they might be interested in.
And I think because the media is telling them, if you let girls play with dolls, that's terrible, and they're going to end up, you know, not having any sort of prospects when they grow up in terms of their jobs, or, I don't know, it's such a terrible thing to be female-typical nowadays.
But, I mean, like you mentioned, it's biology that's going to dictate what your kids play with.
And then in other cases, I think it's parents that want to be special.
Well, it's also weird because if your son is trans, it's totally fine for him to be female typical.
It's celebrated.
If you have a trans son and he likes wearing lipstick and short skirts and prancing around, then he's fabulous.
There was a boy in New York and there was this whole thing about he's the youngest ever drag queen and everybody's going crazy and people were angry about it.
If it was a little girl, people would be up in arms saying that it's sexist and that it's the patriarchy.
But that little boy, so I don't know that he's trans.
I believe that he just likes to, like a man who's a drag queen is just a man.
It's usually a gay man who likes to dress, you know, like an extreme form of femininity.
I love drag queens.
But I think that little boy is likely going to grow up to be a gay boy.
If you have a little boy who says he's a girl, and you see a lot of these trans girls, if they were left alone and they didn't transition, they would likely...
I absolutely believe that there are women that really are wired the wrong way and they should be men.
And there's men that are wired the wrong way.
It only makes sense.
It only makes sense.
But I do also think there's people that are crazy.
There's people that have legit mental illness.
They're delusional and they're also very susceptible to influence and very susceptible to, you know, someone persuading them that they are one thing or another thing.
Look, it's Those, like, Heaven's Gate cult people who cut their balls off and wore the Nikes and decided to kill themselves when the comet was near.
Remember that?
Yeah.
That's not normal, right?
It's not normal for someone to be able to talk you into cutting your balls off or putting on the purple sneakers or killing yourself when the comet's closed.
I do think that gender dysphoria is a legitimate phenomenon, and I do have a lot of empathy for people who are suffering.
And I think for adults, they should be allowed to transition if that's what they decide to do, if that's something that will help them feel better.
My issues with the kids, I don't think it's appropriate for children to be transitioning, and I can talk a bit more about why.
But I think in terms of the pathology aspect, I think for...
Because gender is so trendy right now.
And in the past, you might have seen this kind of pathology manifest in a different way.
But now because everyone is saying gender is the way to express, you know, I think people also see if you have a problem in your life, they think it's gender related.
So say with someone with a personality disorder, and people like a lot of attention, they like to...
It's always about them and their identity, and their identity shifts a lot.
So this could very well be what it is, and now they're being basically rewarded for that.
I see some women, which I find interesting because I think it's confusing for young women now who are starting to date and they think, I don't really want to have casual sex, but I'm being told that's what I should do.
Yeah, but the dynamics shift according to what is available and who's there and what kind of a culture you live in.
People adapt or very malleable to different climates and different cultures and the way people treat sex and don't treat sex.
I think what happens is people tend to react very aggressively or very strongly when someone is Doing something that is different than the way they're doing things.
Because this would possibly indicate that there's another way, or maybe their way is wrong.
Especially when it comes to sex, people get very strange.
Yeah, I mean, open relationships are actually pretty common.
Consensual non-monogamy, there's one study that showed one in five Americans have actually tried it, so it's pretty common.
Me personally, I'm monogamous, but I think, you know, people should do what they want to do if it's consensual.
I think, you know, obviously, having been a sex researcher and now someone who writes about sex research for a living, I'm very sex positive, and I think a lot of the problems that we see and a lot of the suffering and distress and issues that people have In their lives could be solved if our world was more sex-positive.
And this is what I'm saying, that people, when you're living a life that's different than the way they're living their life, people get very aggressive about it.
Same way, I mean, sober people tend to get aggressive about people who enjoy drinking or people who enjoy smoking pot or taking mushrooms or something.
They get very shitty about it sometimes.
And it's because it's very polar, very opposite of the way they're living their life.
And they don't want to see anybody living their life in a very different way but also being happy.
But it's this thing that people living a different way is somehow or another unacceptable and threatening to their perceptions of what you should be doing with your life.
I guess the idea is that women should be equal, and obviously as a woman I believe that.
And so any sort of subjugation of women must somehow be imposed by society.
Because if we acknowledge that women are different biologically in any way, that's going to be used as justification why they don't deserve to be treated the same as men, or they're not as capable as men.
I guess because there has been a history of there being sexism.
And say, so with the whole Google memo thing...
And this idea that women are biologically, we are different, not to say we're not as capable, but if there are any sort of biological correlates to what women find interesting, could that be extrapolated to capability, extrapolated to women should go back to the kitchen, women aren't good at math, things like that.
I mean, I get why people don't like biological explanations for things.
Like you said, I think it's just a lot easier.
It's a lazy way to just dismiss the whole thing and say, you know, we don't need to think about it.
But it's just – it's clearly not true in terms of the scientific research.
So there has to be some cognitive dissonance in order to accept that and to preach it and to say it, and everybody has to agree upon it, which is one of the reasons why I think – Any statements contrary to that get aggressively attacked.
And this is part of the reason why these ideas are so supercharged.
It's that there's an understanding that it's horseshit.
And so when someone challenges it and says it's horseshit, you've been living your whole life with this horseshit.
Well, I think there's definitely something to that, and I think there's something to this problem that human beings have, where they have an idea, and that idea becomes part of their identity.
And then they start arguing for that idea, and any argument against that idea is an argument against them as a person, because they're trying to win.
They're not necessarily looking at things in an objective way where they're detached from the idea and studying it as a thing.
And it becomes even more of a problem when it gets tribal, when these ideas are attached, like climate change, clearly attached in denial to the right in support to the left.
It's this very strange tribal thing.
And that also happens with gender.
If you are in support of women's rights and you are in support of trans rights and LBGTQ and all that jazz, you're almost 100% going to be on the left.
It's just one of those tribal things.
If you're pro-choice, you're almost always going to be on the left.
If you're not, you find yourself in that...
Which one was it?
Was it Tammy Lauren?
I get her confused with that Lauren Southern girl.
What's interesting is if you follow boxing history, and I know you're a martial artist, if you follow boxing history, the oppressed early immigrants are almost always the best boxers at the time.
And for a while, there was a lot of Jewish boxers.
A lot of Italian boxers, of course, you know, Rocky Graziano and Rocky Marciano and all these Italian.
And then it became Cubans and Puerto Ricans.
And then it became, well, there was always blacks as well.
But this like the immigrants in particular, Irish, like a lot of Irish immigrants that early on, they were thought of as like being some of the lowliest of the low.
What is it about not trying to kick you guys out, but that is one of the weirder discriminations that is somehow or another slipped under the radar, that they're making it more difficult for Asians to get into Ivy League universities because you guys do so well.
One of the problems with that book is people were showing the differences in IQ by, you know, as it varies across different geographical segments and across races.
And if anything, that book is really like a testament to the master race of Asians.
But for real, right?
We do okay.
But genetically, Asian people seem to be superior when it comes to IQ, according to that book.
But one of the things about it is it sort of dismisses the idea of talent.
And it shows, it goes into depth about all the, not dismisses it, but shows that it's not some magic gift that's bestowed upon people.
But what it is, is it shows all the pathways that lead to the skill developments that we consider talent.
And discipline and hard work, in particular, discipline being a culturally enforced thing, which it is with many Asians.
I often talk about my friend Junkzik, who when I was doing Taekwondo, he was on the US team while he was also in his residency in medical school.
This guy was a fucking animal.
I never met anybody in my life who worked as hard as him.
He always looked exhausted.
This is his face.
He just was always tired, but then would go to work like a fucking savage.
Was in between studying for his, you know, in the middle of medical school, and he would put his backpack on, filled with books, and run the stairs at the university.
He's fucking crazy.
And I would talk to him about it, you know, because my parents were not like that.
And his parents were like...
My parents were hippies and they were like, do whatever the fuck you want.
We don't care.
And his parents are like, you must be a doctor!
And he was like telling me about the kind of discipline that he grew up with.
And that culturally enforced discipline leads many, many, many, many, many people to succeed.
Whereas the sort of latchkey kids that I grew up with, there was no culturally enforced discipline.
You either developed it on your own, you pursued something that you enjoyed and figured out how to become disciplined, or you just weren't.
But this thing that's in Asian cultures is what's propelling them forward.
Okay, so it turns out that for decades now, Harvard has been discriminating against Asians and requiring them to have higher SAT scores than people of other ethnic backgrounds in order to get the same chance of admission.
And then more recently, it's been shown that, okay, so Asians do well with SAT scores.
They do well with extracurricular activities.
So the only way that admissions committees can actually penalize them is through rating their personality.
So seeing them as, you know, less likable, things like that, because they're subjective.
And, you know, I find it amazing that very few liberal outlets have covered this.
The New York Times has been one.
But outside of that, it's been very few.
And it's really disappointing.
I mean, I wrote about this for the Globe and Mail, and I was amazed no one had heard about this story at all.
I've been obsessed with this company Huawei recently.
And I got obsessed with them for two reasons.
One, because I read an article about the superiority of the cell phones that they're producing that are not being accepted in America.
And so then I started doing...
I'm kind of a dork when it comes to cell phones and technology.
I'm very fascinated by them.
So I read a lot of articles about Huawei phones.
And they have these fucking insane Leica cameras with 40 megapixel lenses.
Three lenses on the front and 20-plus megapixel selfie cameras and really intense technology.
Much higher gigabytes.
I think they have 500-gigabyte storage capacity.
4,000 milliamp batteries.
They're a superior battery.
It's a superior phone.
And I'm looking, I'm like, wow, this is kind of crazy.
And then it turns out you can't sell them in the United States.
And the federal government's blocked these carriers from having them.
And they're saying it's because the Chinese government is involved in stealing information and hacking and all this different stuff.
I'm like, okay.
Alright, maybe, but it's kind of fucking weird that you can't figure out whether or not a phone is being used to, like, how are these hackers, how are these, like, super genius people who program phones, you can't, like, look at one of those phones and figure out what it's doing?
Is it, like, doing some magic, or somehow or another it's stealing people's information and there's no mechanism that you can detect?
What I'm worried about is that they're scared that these companies, which are fanatical, maniacal in their aggressive pursuit of dominance in the cell phone markets and technology in general, are going to take over.
They're going to squash all these American companies.
This is my own personal speculation, but I'm looking at this, I'm like, how much legitimacy is in that?
Because they're right now, worldwide, I believe they're the number three cell phone manufacturer.
Right, so whatever that is would be a local thing.
But you'd have to be right next to your fucking car to use your phone.
That's stupid.
What I'm saying is the problem with the...
This is an article that I read that's explaining the problem.
I think it was one of those tech sites.
But it was saying that in certain places with limited coverage, you probably would have no coverage with one of these phones.
Whereas it would work okay if you were in New York or in Los Angeles or Chicago or something like that.
But if you went to the boonies, if you have Verizon, you probably could be able to text your friends or get a phone call out, but you wouldn't be able to do it.
So, the Equality of Outcome people, the reason why they're trying to keep Asians or at least limit the number of Asians, but doesn't that have the opposite effect?
If you're asking me in terms of what people see as a problem, I think because it looks as though other groups are not getting a fair chance.
It doesn't make people feel good.
Because it means that you're acknowledging at some level that some people are doing better than other people, and that makes some people uncomfortable.
But it's gone to a place where it becomes indefensible.
So instead of trying to raise up people whose scores are lower and give them an equal opportunity or take people from impoverished areas with poor education and give them more of a chance, which is what Affirmative action was supposed to be about.
Instead of that, you're doing it from the top down.
You're going, oh, no, no, no.
There's too many of these people that are doing good.
We're going to squash it.
We're going to limit their ability.
But how could they do that in good conscience?
That's what's crazy.
But doing it from that perspective, doing it like looking at a race that's super successful that is also a minority and saying too many of them.
What I find the most sad is there are Asians who are totally fine and they say, I'm willing to give up my spot for someone else because I think diversity is important.
They could actually think that way, but the people who cut their balls off and killed themselves because they thought the comet was coming and the spaceship was behind it, they thought that too.
So I actually got a chance to talk to James as part of, so there's a podcast, Wrong Speak, that I host with Jonathan Kay.
And our first episode was actually about James Damore and his saga and basically how, what I took away from that whole thing, I mean, it's been almost a year now.
It's amazing how the media could not get it right, and I feel that they intentionally smeared him.
It wasn't that people didn't understand the science, that they very intentionally said, we don't like this, we want to get clicks, or we want to basically sacrifice this man for our agenda.
Well, the problem is he actually cited the studies that showed why people choose different professions, why people gravitate towards different activities and different professions based on gender.
And these are actual studies.
So in citing those studies, he cited something that's contrary to this promoted narrative.
I don't know why The problem with denial of any facts is that the people that are opposing you now have evidence that you're a loon, right?
Like, one of the problems with the left and this really radical, progressive behavior that's in denial of science is now the right gets to look at the left and go, look, these people are out of their fucking mind.
And the only way it moves around is if everybody's different.
If everybody's just a block, the same shape, the same density, the same size, like what is that?
It's boring.
Well, it's not just boring.
You're not going to have a competent society.
It's not going to work.
Like you need soft and hard.
You need both.
You need something in between.
You need far extreme right to polarize and activate the far extreme left.
I mean, I really think you need a guy like Trump.
To get people to be more politically active and more socially active.
I think, in many ways, he does the left a service by providing this, like, ridiculous figurehead of what's possible with ego and greed and right-wing gone amok.
You know, the Steve Bannons and the Breitbarts and all that stuff.
Like, that stuff empowers the other side, and the good thing about it is somewhere in the middle is like a balanced, healthy society, and hopefully we'll be able to achieve that someday.
I mean, this is the argument always, is that you cannot have light without dark.
I just would hope that with the amount of information that's available today, that we can look at the actual studies that are being done on gender, on sex, on biology, and don't look at it in terms of, you know, don't quantify it in terms of this side's better or that side's better.
Just look at what fascinating difference is.
This is amazing and it's interesting.
And there's a lot of dummies that are men.
And there's a lot of dummies that are women.
There's just dummies.
And it doesn't have anything to do with one gender being superior or one gender being inferior.
It's just human beings have a lot of variability.
And there's a lot of different things that...
A lot of inputs in you developing and becoming a thirty-year-old person that happens to be talking to this other thirty-year-old person.
Your path to get to wherever you are.
There's so much going on.
There's influences in terms of your environment, your education, your life experiences, your family, your loved ones, your There's so much that leads to you being who you are today.
If you're just going to keep pumping out, like from a research perspective, if you go in, the only scientists who are going to look at this stuff now are the people who know what they're going to find in advance.
They're not going to publish anything that's going to upset the public.
So in my mind, there's no point to even do that kind of research because that's not actually science, what you're doing.
I mean, it's a throwback to Orwell, obviously, in 1984 and this idea that by controlling language, we can control, the government can control how people think and what reality is.
And what I find interesting is with the topics we covered.
So first episode, we talked to James Damore.
Second episode, we talked to Lindsay Shepard and looked at the whole what happened at Wilfrid Laurier University.
And then the third one is rapid onset gender dysphoria.
So looking at this trend in adolescent girls who come out as transgender, even though they've had no previous signs of gender dysphoria.
And so with all of them, these issues are all super taboo and all these people have been mobbed.
And in the case of rapid onset gender dysphoria, you see the parents who are being called transphobic for questioning, is my daughter really trans?
You know, we're just trying to get at the truth, really.
We're trying to understand, you know, why is it we can't talk about these things?
Why is it we're in such a situation now that the response to any sort of unpopular idea is to be mobbed and to attack people and intimidate them and shut the conversation down.
Well, there's only been one study so far that's been published because it is such a new phenomenon and because it is so hard to do this work because, I mean, people call it a myth.
Pretty much anything that counters the transgender narrative is considered hate speech.
So as a researcher, if you try to do any research on this issue that goes against what trans activists say is acceptable, you know you're going to get into trouble.
So no one wants to touch it.
So there's been one study that did show, you know, with girls especially, it's very much about Being influenced by friends within a peer group.
I think there's some crazy high number in terms of the number of girls that will come out as transgender one after the other.
So it's real.
But I mean, I get why people find it.
Some people find it threatening because it suggests that maybe trans people aren't really transgender.
You know, maybe the way they feel isn't legitimate.
But in terms of the way to treat it, these parents are at a loss.
I mean, these girls are not getting treated for the underlying condition.
There was one parent we spoke to, he saw nine mental health professionals.
Every single one said that your daughter's not transgender, but they couldn't go on the record as saying so.
I think only one went on the record as saying so, because they're terrified.
It's so interesting when you watch the similarities between any group that feels that they're being maligned or that are being very defensive about their position and trying to hold strong and aggressively attacking people that are against it.
In many ways, this sort of behavior is mirrored in the Second Amendment people, like the people that are pro-gun.
Like, if you tried any gun restrictions or any gun legislation or any changes in the laws of gun control, they aggressively go after it.
They do whatever they can to keep things the way they are now and show how much positive benefits guns have and how many people are saved by guns.
But it's this thing, besides the gun, take the gun out of it.
It's the defense of the idea.
It's like they're committed.
They identify with being a person who's a gun nut or a gun supporter or Second Amendment.
Freedom-loving, I got a fucking eagle on my back, you know, that kind of shit.
It's like, and it's the same thing with trans people.
Like, anything against anything, what you're saying, this is impossible.
This thing that you're talking about, this rapid-downset gender dysphoria, being autistic people, that is transphobic.
And they get super hyper-aggressive about it.
Instead of saying, oh, well...
Whoever this person is, if they're a trans person, instead of saying, well, I am legitimately trans, but it's entirely possible that there's a broad spectrum of human behavior and human thought, and that some of these people have a real issue.
And I could see the reward, especially in today's climate.
When you look at today's climate, that would be an interesting study, right?
If you look at the climate of today and the support of trans people and the attacking of people that are transphobic and the overwhelming social benefit of supporting trans people, and then you look at the rapid onset gender dysphoria and see if they match up.
What you were saying, actually, I think the majority of trans people are not on board with this whole, across the board, everyone should just transition.
But I think it's another case of the vocal minority shutting down anyone who dares to disagree.
A trans man in a movie and people freaked out that she is not trans and she has this part.
You know, that was the same thing that happened with Jeffrey Tambor.
Jeffrey Tambor was accused of sexual harassment by people on the set who were trans, who were also very upset that he was the star of a television show that was about trans people, and he's not trans.
Yeah, but you're also looking at an A-list actress who would bring an incredible amount of attention to your progressive project.
And, you know, it may very well change the tone of the way people accept trans people.
Like, if it's portrayed in a positive light, it's entirely possible that it would open up, like, especially if people that are on the fence, it might open up their heart and make them look at things differently and say, oh, okay, I see where this...
Woman wanted, you know, she wanted to transition to be a man because she was wired incorrectly or wired to be a man.
I shouldn't even say incorrectly.
Like, maybe you could see her as a person now instead of just as a subject for debate or as a...
Well, the only fear I would have is, not with your point, but with my point, with the tokenization of people.
So to say, okay, if this is a trans role, we need to find a trans person.
Same as with racial tokenization.
We need to have a certain quota, so we need to have this number of people that fit this.
That's my only issue, because then people look at it and say, you only picked this person because of their identity, not because of what they brought to the table.
Well, they're looking for people to back down, and they're looking for people to get scared.
It's fun.
It's fun to find a target.
Let's get them fired!
Get her fired!
Take her off that movie!
It's fun for them.
Because as a, you know, hashtag, air quotes, activist, what they're doing is they're just attacking.
And there's probably some good out of it.
But look, there's got to be some good...
For sure, out of real monsters getting arrested, right?
There's some good out of the Harvey Weinsteins and the Bill Cosbys of the world getting arrested and getting busted and shutting down.
And we would hope that...
Other monsters in waiting would not act out on their instincts because of the fact they're worried about the repercussions that you're clearly seeing.
And that we would hope that people, that our behavior as a culture shifts one way or another.
And then it's going to move as far away from misogyny as possible.
And whether it's through the threat of incarceration or shame or whatever it is that causes it to go the other way.
It's probably for the best, as long as it doesn't go as far as all men are pigs, all men are creeps, all men are trash, and that's what we were talking about earlier.
Like, when it gets to that place, you gotta go, well, this is not a good place to be.
Well, also, if there is an allegation that that's taken at face value right away, because we do see, unfortunately, that some of these allegations are false.
So if we're going to – I mean, it's what we were talking about earlier, like white power, black power, brown power.
Fucking human beings.
And as soon as we stop looking at human beings as individuals and we just agree that one group is good and one group is bad, you've got some real discrimination problems there.
Or if you say you want due process and women lie and that side of the equation, I think both sides are equally bad because you're not getting at the truth.
Well, we're also in this weird, slippery thing when it comes to human beings and truth because it's so hard to tell who's telling the truth.
If two people see something, like see a car accident, and one person says, well, this lady ran the red light and slammed into the car, and then the person right next to her says, no, she didn't.
This other guy ran the red light, and she hit him.
Well, she clearly didn't tell the truth about some aspects of their relationship.
She cheated on him, and that's why he got rid of her, or broke up with her.
And then she also said he was this terrible boyfriend, but then there's videos of her talking about what an amazing boyfriend he was.
While they were together about how we stayed with her in the hospital and slept by her bed and it's like and she's also she had a bunch a host of mental illnesses that she described in their video about like not being able to drive down the street with the windows open because she's worried that germs gonna get in her car and some of those she recovered from and some of them she didn't like it's and there's another problem with people when it comes to when they're talking about things they might not even be lying Yeah, that's the thing.
They just might have a distorted perception of reality.
That is another problem with human beings when it comes to any sort of interaction between two people.
Especially after a breakup, I think the way that a person can view the time they spent with someone can very much change based on their current situation or how that breakup happened.
Yeah, I mean my rule of thumb what I would say to people is unless you know the two people I don't think you can ever really know what happened So in that case of say you leave and Jamie tells you I said something about you're probably gonna go with Jamie right cuz you know him so I would say this Jamie's a little crazy.
I might go Yeah, I mean it's for sure if I didn't know you and in Jamie told me you did something fucked up I would side with Jamie but Even that's weird.
If I'm not there, if I don't know.
If you say, I didn't do anything.
I'm like, maybe one day you'll be my best friend.
And maybe one day Jamie will turn out to be a fucking psycho.
I was like, remember when we used to think Jamie was okay?
And I'll leave it at that because no spoiler alerts here.
But until...
It is awful.
Fucking dark episode stays with you after this one does this one's dark I mean this I mean I can't I can't I will give too much away if I talk about it but the concept is that you can they have a machine and they set this machine up and through this machine they can literally read your memories Okay.
Until that happens, we really don't know.
And, you know, there's been things in my life where I looked back on it and I had a perception and then I went to the place where I grew up and I was like, I don't remember it looking like this.
I don't remember this being so close.
Oh, the street's right here?
This is where the house is?
Oh.
And then you have to kind of like remap your memories.
Like, okay, we got to clean these memories up and try to figure out what's accurate and what's not.
But then, I'm just talking about like the neighborhood where I grew up in.
But what about you're adding in emotions?
Then you're adding in painful emotions because of breakups and perhaps suicidal thoughts and...
I mean, it's been absolutely proven that eyewitness testimony is the least accurate piece of evidence that any investigator can ever use in terms of like trying to figure out what happened at the scene of a crime or anything involving any sort of trauma.
And I mean, when we look at, say, the issue with Me Too and the sexual assault and sexual harassment, I think also some people see this and they think, I want to help this person.
So they might reinterpret their situation in a way to say, I also want to help this person.
Well, I think there's clearly, without doubt, been a lot of unchecked sexual harassment in the workplace.
Yeah.
I've always said this, and this is not to say that men and women shouldn't work together.
I'm not saying that in any stretch.
I just want to get that out of the way really quick.
But when men and women do work together, they're around each other all day.
And people are sexually attracted to each other.
And men are gross.
And it's just...
This guy that I was having this conversation with today, we were talking about that.
I was like, could you imagine being a girl and working in an office and guys trying to fuck you all the time?
And they're always saying stupid shit to you when you're trying to get coffee.
We were talking about gay guys.
And he was saying, when he was in the military, would you have a problem with gay people?
And it was really funny.
He goes, if I was working with a gay guy, I'd want him to like me.
That way he'd try to impress me and he'd do his job better and he'd be real nice to me.
We were laughing about it.
But I was like, okay, that's true.
But if you were around a gay guy that was always trying to fuck you and maybe touched your ass when you bent over to pick up some paper or something like that, that would get real annoying.
And if your job relied on this guy liking you and approving you, which a lot of women's jobs rely on creeps liking them and approving you, it gets fucking disgusting.
That's the reality that many women have lived with for decades.
But then I see, okay, now imagine being a woman who works in the office with this guy who's in love with this woman, and then they have a relationship, and then all of a sudden her career starts doing a little bit better.
There's a lot of women who I know who are actresses who were approached by certain types of men who are producers or executives in certain ways, and they said no.
And then girls that they know said yes, and their careers advanced.
And this was a thing where people were aware of it.
There's a power dynamic that exists when there's a boss and then there's an underling.
There's a person who's working for that boss.
And whether it's a producer and an actress or whether it's a CEO and an employee, when they engage in some sort of a transactional sexual relationship, that makes everyone fucking uncomfortable.
I think corporations pretty much across the board now just fire people when they do that.
There was a recent CEO of some large, high-profile company who had to step down because he was involved in a consensual sexual relationship with somebody.
Do you remember who that was?
It was real big.
Something...
Super recent, but it was it was no crime, but it was consensual sexual relationship with someone who worked for him.
Was it?
Intel.
Yeah.
People, they're around each other all day long.
Think about it.
If you go home, say if you work eight hours a day, and it takes you an hour to drive to work, takes you an hour to drive home, that's fucking ten hours, and nobody works eight hours a day if you really want to make it, right?
You work nine and ten, so it's like half the day is gone.
You get home, you're exhausted, You know, your husband's exhausted.
You're staring at each other.
You're together like three or four hours.
You have a meal.
You go to sleep.
You get up in the morning.
You go do it again.
You're with those people at work more than you're even with the people that you live with.
You know, that's really...
And that's your waking hours.
By the time you get home, you're fucking tired.
And if you go to the gym afterwards, well, there's an hour and a half gone there.
But then, imagine, say, if you and Jamie worked together, okay?
And you guys had a consensual sexual relationship, and you both were on the same level, you both, and there's not, it's not like anybody has any power, but then you break up.
You know?
And then Jamie comes over to me and he's like, you know, I gotta tell you, that doctor's a fucking asshole.
He's a bitch.
And then you come to me, and you're like, you know, Jamie, you know, he looks like a good guy, but when you start dating him, he's a fucking selfish prick.
They're posturing as an alternative to these men who don't want monogamous relationships or would break the woman's heart or are not willing to compromise and bend the will of the woman.
And they put these women on a platform and worship these women and I am the alternative.
And I'm the powerful alternative.
And these men are assholes.
And then they try to shit on those men and take those...
But all it does is make those men appear even more attractive to these women secretly.
These men, these feminist men and these women have these weird relationships where it doesn't work and they're never sexual.
Or if they are sexual, the women aren't really sexually attracted to them.
So they withhold sex.
It gets super weird.
Obviously, I just generalize a lot about a giant group of people's relationships.
But what I've seen, it's just they don't run fast.
I mean, I think not all men who call themselves feminists are male feminists.
So in that, I think men who ascribe to women being equal, that's a good thing.
And I think a lot of guys will say, yeah, I'm feminist, because they think that's the right thing to do.
That's the socially acceptable thing, and that's the way we should be.
But then the ones who run around and say, you know, really, really push it and make that their identity and really sell themselves as male feminists, those are the guys I have an issue with.
The crazy thing is with these guys, though, you see there's been a trend where they actually have a lot to hide, and they usually are misogynistic, and they usually do abuse women, which is the scary thing.
I think what happens is there's a certain amount of resentment from living this sort of fake life and having these fake beliefs and doing so just to get to the approval of women.
And then when it doesn't work out, there's anger and resentment and this just...
Like, I'm sure there's a bunch of them out there that are really good guys and maybe through the influence of the people that have been around, they've chosen to identify as a male feminist and this seems to be a good way to show that they support women.
And even if they have to support women over men, look, women have been fucked over for so long.
I'm more than willing to do that.
And they do it with good intentions.
That's entirely possible.
But a lot of it are creepy little dudes that are trying to get laid, and they're not attractive to women.
So they're trying to figure out a way to become attractive to women.
And they don't have the confidence to just go, well, aren't we all equal?
One of my all-time favorite tweets that I read was a guy saying, I'm not going to describe myself as a feminist until women tell me that I'm doing feminism correctly.
It's fairly unrelated, but not necessarily to what we were talking about about Gender dysphoria about some people choosing that as a path to get a lot of attention.
I mean, I think there's many things that people do to get a lot of attention.
There's things that people do to stand out as typically unique, right?
Dye their hair pink or purple or blue or wear certain things or do certain piercings.
There's things that people do to like get attention and fit in and find their niche and just do something where it makes them feel like they have some clout in this community of humans.
Yeah, when it's not just a bunch of people finding each other, but a bunch of people looking at the other people and attacking them for not being similar.
Yeah.
But that's one of the things people do to sort of affirm their identity, right?
You attack the people that oppose that identity or attack the people that are different.
You've got to wonder, like, objectively, if you were from another planet and you were watching these patterns take place, you go, wow, look at this creepy little organism.
Going back to the transgender bullying, I guess, my issue with all of that intimidation is the fact that these kids are not getting the help that they need.
And so if we look at something like I was saying earlier about if it's a little boy who says he's a girl, he's likely going to grow up to be a gay man.
You can't say that now.
And so all of the scientific research suggests that, all the studies ever done suggest that, but you can't say that because it really upsets transgender activists.
And so you have all these children now who are transitioning who I think in five, ten years are going to regret it.
Isn't this sort of similar to what we were talking about earlier is that historically Trans people have been so discriminated against that it shifted so hard the other way.
Like just what we were talking about in terms of sexism and then harassment in the workplace and sexual harassment and rape was so one-sided that now it's pushing the opposite way.
I read a tweet once by this woman that said, here's an unpopular opinion.
And she was an editor of a magazine.
Here's an unpopular opinion.
I'm not even remotely concerned with men being falsely accused of sexual harassment or assault.
And she was attacked.
Yeah.
Brett Weinstein retweeted it and pointed out how wrong this idea was and how crazy this is to take allies who are falsely accused of sexual harassment or assault and not being concerned about that.
You're only concerned with your own gender.
This is a perfect example of an intelligent person that's thinking in this really crazy discriminatory way because in her mind, her team had been fucked over so many times that it's time to fuck over that other team.
If we lose a couple of people, hey, we shoot some drones into some apartment buildings and a few civilians die, at least we got the terrorists.
And I mean, I understand that, like the anger that comes with that.
I think for the people who are the most militant, so not to say that of this particular person, but I think of women in particular who are the most militant about this movement, I think they really just have been hurt badly by men.
If you say that these women that are angry about men, that they've been hurt by men, so now they discriminate against large groups of men because of that pain.
Does it balance out to a point in our children's future, our children's children's future, where this is no longer a concern, like cannibalism is no longer a concern, or a very, very slight concern?
You know, where it's an aberration, where it's a very, very rare thing.
I mean, that's the ultimate goal, right?
Is that we reach a point in our society where we do not care if someone's gay.
We do not care if you're a girl.
We do not care if you're a boy.
And we're not mad if you're not attracted to us.
I mean, that would be a wonderful thing, right?
If we get to a point where people are just comfortable in their own skin.
Yeah, I mean, culturally, across the board, whether it's male versus female, whether it's trans versus straight, all of this, gay versus straight, whether, you know, progressive versus conservative, I would love it if we got to this point with all this chaos and calamity and arguing back and forth.
It would be fantastic if we can get to a balance point.
And I hope that we understand why things get extreme.
And that as human beings, we can look at it with compassion and say, like you were saying, like women that are so angry against men.
It's not just because for no reason.
Something had to happen to them.
Like I had a friend.
And he was not an attractive man.
And over the time that I knew him, he became more and more resentful to women to the point where he would just openly say fucked up, misogynistic things about women.
And it was weird to watch, but it was one of those things where I was like, oh, I see.
But when we look at it with compassion, I mean, hopefully the healthy people, the people that aren't in that state of anger and resentment, that they look at it with compassion, they go, oh, okay, I see why this woman would write that tweet.
She's met a bunch of fucked up, shitty dudes, probably male feminists.
As a comic, 140 was great because it made you really...
It made you really invest in the economy of words.
You really had to make sure that you got your point out as quickly as possible.
It's great for joke writing.
It's a good way to really trim down the fat in your jokes.
But it's not a good way to express ideas.
One of the good things about Twitter is they have this thing where you can reply to your tweet and then reply to that, reply to that, and they all fit in together.
I like that.
But I don't like it sometimes, because sometimes people just fucking drone on and on and on.
Because I'm like, you guys can kiss my fucking ass.
You're out of your mind.
You guys are out of your mind if you think that a man who has been a man for 30 years And has taken female hormones for two is the same.
You put Brock Lesnar, chop his dick off and put him in a dress, that guy's gonna maul through the women's heavyweight division like nothing you've ever seen in your life.
Because we're built different.
And it's just a fact.
And anyone who tries to argue that is crazy.
And there are certainly standouts in terms of women who are much more muscular, higher bone density, particularly African-American women have very high bone density.
But there's a different shape to their hips.
There's the size of the hands, the size of the shoulders.
Things are different.
Also, the imprinting of years and years of testosterone.
There was a great article by this board certified endocrinologist who went over all of the things that separate men from women, which should exclude them from competing in combat sports against women.
And this woman was called a transphobe.
She's talking endocrinologist, you idiot.
She's talking about the science.
And she's also talking about the science of one of the things they talk about is how women, you know, or trans women, once they transition to being a woman, they're basically biologically almost exactly the same as women.
She was like, no, not only that, but the bone density is retained by taking estrogen, which is what the problem with women when they have osteoporosis is They're losing estrogen.
They lose bone mass.
Well, the estrogen actually helps you retain bone mass.
So when a man transitions to a woman and then starts taking estrogen, it's actually helping retain the bone mass that he would have lost by not having testosterone.
And then on top of that, reaction times.
The reaction times are several tenths of a second faster in general for women than they are for men rather than they are for even professional athlete women.
So all these...
All these variables that need to be taken into consideration when you're allowing someone to do a sport.
And we're not just talking about bike racing.
We're not talking about, you know, something where someone...
I don't know, but I was fascinated by watching the mob come after me for that one.
I was like, this is adorable.
What was fascinating about it was, here's something that I... I mean, I'm not a real expert in physiology or endocrinology, but I'm a martial arts expert.
I've been doing it my whole life.
I know the difference.
I've trained with women world champions and watched them get mauled by men who are not very good.
It's just a fact.
Especially when it comes to striking.
You know, there's more of a gap in jujitsu or the gap rather closes in jujitsu because skill and technique Take precedent over physical strength.
But goddammit, when it comes to striking, you could get a man who's been doing it for six months but just happens to have a lot of fast twitch muscle fiber and just knows how to hit things hard.
And he'll fuck a woman up.
It's not good.
Especially when it comes to kickboxing and kicking and punching.
There's so many advantages.
And to say that those advantages are immediately cut out of the picture as soon as you transition to being a woman and within two years you should be able to fight women in a cage and not tell them that you're a woman.
I think it's interesting that in this, because it is pitting people who would call themselves feminists against transgender activists, and it's basically women are being lost in the mix, so you can't say certain things like, on what planet would it be okay for someone who is born male to fight a woman?
But in this case, because this person who's born male identifies as female, you can't call that into question.
And also, there was a real problem in Texas, the other way, where they're What they were doing is being prejudiced against trans people to the point where they wouldn't let a girl transitioning to being a boy wrestle with boys.
They made her wrestle with girls while she was taking testosterone.
It's like, you guys are out of your fucking mind.
You're not even recognizing that she wants to compete with boys, which is a disadvantage for her or him now.
Let him compete with boys because this is a different thing.
But then even then, a lot of boys are saying, well, look, I'm not taking testosterone.
I just have testosterone.
What if her testosterone is higher than my testosterone because she's taking exogenous testosterone?
This is kind of crazy.
Yeah.
There's a lot of new ground that's going on here.
My concern as a martial arts expert is when you are using ideology to push this progressive notion that a trans woman is exactly the same as a woman, and you're getting women beat the fuck up because of it.
And this is what I felt, this is what I saw.
And they wouldn't have to be hard for like a year or two, but then it all went away.
So you would kind of be a turf in this situation because you're advocating for women and the safety of women and saying that people who are born male but identify as female are not the same as people who are born female.
Look, if you have a thousand people and a hundred of those people are a fucking asshole to you, it's going to feel like a lot of people, right?
So if you're a trans person and you're...
I mean, I've seen horrific things written to trans people online.
I've seen it.
I've seen it.
I understand there's real discrimination.
But I understand that you have to understand...
You have to appreciate who your actual allies and people who are rational people who actually care about you and who disagree with you on one very particular thing.
And this is the only place where I disagree.
It's combat sports.
And it's because it's my area of expertise.
I've been doing it since I was a kid.
Like you can't tell me that there's not differences.
I've watched men and women fight my whole life.
I know there's a difference.
And I know from talking to endocrinologists and people who are experts in the human anatomy that there's just physiological differences that are insurmountable.
I mean, I get where people are coming from, the people who are upset by this, because I think by acknowledging that someone was not born the sex that they identify as, it's almost like pointing out to them that they're different.
For men who will date trans women who are retaining their penis, that's what it's called in the literature, if they decide not to get surgery, it's actually a particular sexual preference.
But this is the thing, the difference between a man and a woman, a trans man, a trans woman, and then someone who could actually be a woman.
I think we're going to get to a point within, you know, whether it's 100 years or 500 years, where we can use things like the future version of CRISPR or whatever comes down the line next, some scientific innovation that's going to allow people to literally transition.
The benefit that I get out of it is a benefit that is not often...
It's not...
It's not often promoted and that benefit is there's something good about being nervous.
There's something good about what people call paranoia.
There's something good about heightened perspective that is brought upon by psychedelics or by marijuana where you are forced to re-examine what you've taken for granted.
And that's what I like about it.
And so what I like about...
One of the things that I like about Smoke and Pot, besides the fact that I believe it makes me more compassionate, it instills a better sense of community, it makes me more friendly and more loving, and it definitely does that.
But it also makes me look at things with fresh eyes and appreciate the weirdness.
And I like the fact that it makes certain people happy.
If it makes them happy or people that are attracted to them happy, I really do like it.
I don't like definitions.
I don't like...
Restrictions, you know?
So where people would get an incorrect assumption is my radical stance against this trans woman fighting other women because I recognize it as being unfair.
It's interesting because I heard you talk about this.
I don't know if it was your interview with Josh Barnett, but when you first get into the cage, you don't know what the other person is going to be like until you start fighting.
And I just imagine if you go in and you don't know that someone was born male, how that's a very big disadvantage.
I think there's a propensity for violence that exists in the mind of a man that I just don't know if it's the same in most women.
I just think...
I don't know how much of that...
I don't know if you turn me into a woman, how much of that you would squeeze out.
I don't know.
But I know there's a switch that men have because I've seen it go off.
I've seen...
I've probably seen more people get fucked up in real life than 99.9% of people that have ever lived.
Other than like...
You know, people lived in Roman times and shit, watched people get chopped up by swords.
But people in modern time, like in terms of like fisticuffs, people getting head kicked and beaten down with elbows, I've probably seen more of that than almost anyone that's ever lived.
There's probably a small group of people, like a thousand people on the planet that have seen as many people get fucked up personally as I have.
So you date a chunk.
You get a sense of what you're seeing.
You get a sense of...
And you understand there's a...
There's a technical violence that women are capable of, for sure.
I mean, especially extreme examples like Chris Cyborg, who's super violent.
Or when Holly Holm head-kicked Ronda Rousey and then hammer-fisted her while she was unconscious.
Super violent, but also very technical violence.
And then there's...
An extreme over-the-top masculine violence that I've seen that's that's even more ferocious There's there's something to it that is it's another level this and and this is not saying that men are better than women This is not this is just I'm saying there's a thing that men do there's a reason why men cause all wars Men cause all wars.
Women aren't fucking suiting up and going into battle and trying to conquer as a giant, you know, million-strong group of women soldiers invading a foreign army.
And it's also, there's something about males, this switch, this violence switch that exists, and it exists in a very dark way.
Women are capable of shooting people and stabbing people and doing all these things.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying that.
But it does not happen in the same numbers that it happens with men.
It just doesn't.
And I think that this is something that also has to be taken into consideration when you're talking about men versus women.
Like, it's a different thing.
And people who don't think it's a different thing have probably never been punched in the face by a guy, you know, or seen guys punch guys in the face or been around it enough where you realize, like, it's a different thing.
You look at the data in terms of what men have lifted, what they can do.
Like, this is this guy, this woman who used to be a man who's now competing in weightlifting in Australia.
Like, everybody's going crazy over this one.
It's fucking crazy.
It doesn't make any sense that they're allowing this.
This is so nonsensical.
If you want to have trans, the transgender Olympics, go for it.
Do that.
But to try to pretend.
Until we come up with some sort of a way, like with CRISPR or whatever we talked about before, where you can actually turn a man into a woman.
Turn a woman into a man.
Until it's like real clean, we look at it, we go, yep, we just did the chromosome test, you've got a Y chromosome now, and you've erased 30 years of testosterone, and you know, a man now is built like you.
And what she was, I mean, if you look at like the caliber of competition that she's fought, guys like Raquel Pennington, or girls, excuse me, like Raquel Pennington, Sorry, Raquel.
And look at who Fallon Fox was fighting when she was fighting, you know, lower-level competition.
That's a giant leap between Raquel Pennington and someone who is on these amateur circuits.
And Raquel Pennington beat Ashley Evans-Smith.
Crazy fight.
Submitted her with a bulldog choke with like one second to go.
We're screaming.
It was nuts.
Covered in blood.
It was fucking chaos, right?
But this is like super elite world championship level fighting.
Imagine if you were a woman and all your life you've been fucking power cleaning.
Through the force of will and determination and your focus and discipline and then some trans woman comes in and just, this bitch is lifting a hundred pounds more than you're ever gonna lift.
You know, like those poor girls in Texas that had to wrestle that girl because they're discriminatory in the opposite way and they won't recognize that this trans girl is a boy or this trans boy is a boy.
So I guess it isn't impossible to get pregnant, but if you're straight from pubertal blockers straight onto cross-sex hormones, your body hasn't even really developed.
I think it depends on how, I'm not an endocrinologist, but I think it has to do with how long you've been on the hormones and probably how old you were when you started.
But in this case, I mean, I've seen cases too where trans women will breastfeed, but they're, and the doctors say this is an amazing thing, but they're taking hormones.
So basically those hormones are going to the baby when they're breastfeeding.
Well, the one side being that is progressive and if you identify as a woman and you have a child, then you should, you know, raise that child as if no different from any other woman.
Well, this is one of the weirder things, the argument that I had.
about with one person online where they said about Fallon Fox they said she's always been a woman and I said even when she was having sex with a woman and got her pregnant and she said yes even then I'm like we're done we're done here we can't we're in make-believe land now yeah well what does that mean you wrote you were a woman when you were having sex with a woman so why not just stay that woman who has sex with women I think it's because people want to have sympathy, right?
Well, that's the only way they can win, too, though.
Because if you actually enter into a conversation, you have to actually think about your position and actually think of ways to argue with the other person.
But it's hard for people to know that your heart is in a good place.
It's just part of the problem.
When you don't fall in line with the accepted narrative, people think, well, oh, it must be because you're conservative or you're transphobic or homophobic or something wrong, where you're not on board with the way people are thinking today.
In the last two years, I realized that academia changed a lot.
In two years?
And I would say in the four years I did my PhD, it changed a lot.
So when I started, there were certain topics that were a little taboo, but you could still ask questions.
And I had planned to stay in academia and continue being a sex researcher.
I love sex research.
But I realized as time went on that you couldn't ask important questions anymore.
And especially when it comes to gender, sex differences, and gender dysphoria.
So at the time, with regards to the debate on kids with gender dysphoria, every single mainstream news piece in left-leaning outlets was saying, young kids should transition.
That's the best thing for them.
And so you'd see all this coverage of young kids who had transitioned to the opposite sex, and their parents were, you know, elated, the kids were, you know, doing so well, apparently...
But from a scientific perspective, that's not what the research shows.
As I said, most kids will grow their feelings, so it's best to just wait and see.
And so I wrote an op-ed about that.
And at the time, I wrote it and I sat on it for probably about six months trying to decide whether I should really try and get it published because I knew that people were going to be really upset, even though I was just talking about the scientific literature.
And I asked my colleagues, what do you think?
And they said to me, I said, should I wait until I have tenure to publish this?
And they said, even if you have tenure, it's not going to protect you nowadays.
So, you know, I was lucky.
My mentors have always been very supportive of looking at facts and looking at the truth.
And don't worry about whether it's politically incorrect or not.
Just say, when you do a study, just present what you found.
Don't worry about how people are going to take it.
But not everyone is like that, especially even in the hard sciences now.
If you publish, I mean, it won't even get published now if you find things that are controversial because journals don't want to have to deal with that.
The institutions don't want to have to deal with that.
So I made the decision to publish that op-ed and then from there I said, well, I'm going to see where this journalism thing can take me.
Well, that sort of behavior and that thought process on their side is such a weakening of the foundation of critical thinking.
And it also comes at the same time as these platforms like podcasting and YouTube that allows a person like you or like Jordan Peterson to now disconnect and have a far larger audience.
But the demonetization, especially since you criticize YouTube, as soon as you criticize YouTube, that's like one of the best ways to get demonetized from one of their videos is to criticize them.
But I have friends who are, their main source of income was YouTube and videos and advertisement.
And for them, it was a disaster.
Like people that were making a lot of money and then all of a sudden that money was cut down to 30% of what it used to be.
And with no clear guidelines.
The problem with the guidelines is even if you, like, say if we have a video and they just decide that they don't like the video, You can't really protest it.
You can protest it, but then they review it and then they uphold their initial ruling and they don't tell you why.
They don't say, well, hey, you called someone a queer or you did this.
I know a bunch of people thought about building one, and I've been contacted by people that are starting up a new one.
They want me to join that.
Good luck.
Good luck.
YouTube's so far ahead.
It's like, how do you catch up to them?
And I don't think they're evil by any stretch of the imagination.
And I had a conversation with someone about it pretty recently where she was describing that they're using crude tools.
And this is part of the problem with...
What is being deemed as censorship is really—they're trying to root out hate speech, and they're doing so with crude tools that will eventually, through AI, get better.
what they're doing is they're trying to make subjects much less attractive to discuss mm-hmm and who's doing it I mean is it doing it through crude tools or someone looking at it and flagging it and deciding that this is not something they want to be involved with advertising and in their defense a lot of this got started off by people that were really doing fucked up things on YouTube and And they had to respond.
And they had to figure out a way to eliminate that stuff from their platform.
And I think once you start censoring, the tendency is to continue and to expand.
The tendency is not to back off of that censorship.
You're like, you know what?
We're just going to allow Holocaust deniers and racists and make your videos.
Hey, this is YouTube.
This is the Wild West, baby.
They're not going to do that because they have advertisers and there's a significant amount of revenue that they get from that.
Well, I think the question is, do you want to solve the problem, or are you trying to just be successful as a business?
If you want to solve the problem, I don't think.
Suppressing speech and shutting down people who are genuinely just trying to ask questions and have conversations, I don't think that's going to solve things.
I don't think they're trying to solve any problems.
I think they're trying to make a ton of money, and they're also very liberal, and they think the right thing to do is to suppress certain ideologies they deem harmful or hate speech.
You know, I had a conversation with a woman who's a YouTube exec.
She was telling me that Douglas Murray and Sam Harris, they had this podcast that they did online, and Some guy put it up in his playlist, and he got a community guideline strike for having it in his playlist.
I'm the least mentioned, happily the least mentioned person in that group.
I'm very happy about that.
I don't like being in any groups.
Groucho Marx once said, I don't want to be a part of any club that would have me.
It's just...
Look, I'm very happy to be able to have a platform where I can have people like you on or any of those people, whether it's Brett Weinstein or Eric Weinstein.
But the label of it all, I mean, what's interesting is it starts this conversation, right?
As to why is it even necessary to have this dark web, and what's the function of this dark web, and what is the dark web doing really?
Like, what is, you know...
And there was an article today where someone was calling it problematic and saying that it's mostly right leaning people, which is absolutely not true.
Sam Harris, very left.
Brett Weinstein, fiercely progressive.
Eric, very left.
I'm way more left than I am right.
The very few right-wing ideas that I hold on to, they're very small.
The vast majority of my positions on things side with people on the left.
Vast majority.
Ben Shapiro's very right.
But he's reasonable, you know, and he's also a young guy, you know, conservative, religious.
But he's also extremely intelligent and reasonable.
We've talked to him.
And he has himself disavowed some of the things that he said.
And he's himself criticized his own words.
And he wrote a whole column.
Here's a list of all the stupid things I've ever said online.
Because he's a very aware guy.
Very self-aware.
I think...
I think it's important to have discussions.
And I think it's important that when people feel like those discussions are being suppressed, that they talk about that.
I felt, I mean, the fact that the New York Times covered it gave me a sense of relief because sometimes the things I write, I don't feel like the things I write are that controversial or that offensive, but the response I get sometimes I'm surprised.
But I feel a little bit more optimistic because it tells me that people get it, that we have conversations like this and people don't think that we're bigoted or that we're coming from, we have a nefarious agenda.
Yeah, that's where censorship becomes very dangerous if you do silence a lot of these conversations.
and right now they're not being silenced even though they're they're being demonetized and to a certain extent that is a problem but the conversation still exists and as long as they do still exist and the the vast majority exist in the audio form anyway and podcasting is the vast majority of the the volume of people that are downloading these kind of conversations I think it's an incredibly unique time for the distribution of ideas.
I don't think there's ever been anything remotely like this in human history.
There's never been a time where someone like me can just do something just on a laptop with a webcam and then nine years later, it's this.
It's wild.
Fucking nuts.
And I don't even...
I'm aware of it, but I don't even think about it that much, honestly.
Well, I definitely wouldn't say half the shit I've already said today, right?
That's the appeal, though.
The appeal is that you and I, I really believe this, if there was no microphone, we probably would never have this conversation because it's too difficult.
It would be too weird.
Like, you and I are just going to sit down and just talk to each other.
Well, I used to like doing radio when I was a guest.
You know, on certain radio shows, you know, like you do, like, if I was going to go to, you know, Phoenix or something like that, and I would go do stand-up there, I would have to promote it on the radio in the old days.
And I would get there, and I would get there early and, you know, smoke a joint beforehand, drink a cup of coffee, get in and start talking shit and having a good time and laughing.
I'd be like, that'd be fun to have a radio show, man.
You know, just go in there and just talk and have fun.
But the problem was, to me, it was like always the censorship.
I was like, oh, you gotta censor yourself.
Then I started doing the Opie and Anthony show.
And Opie and Anthony had a show on, you know, first it was XM, then it became Sirius, and And then they split up.
But when I would do that, it was Opie and Anthony and Jim Norton.
I was like, this is the best!
This is so fun!
And the way they did it, credit to them, the way they did it was different than any radio show I'd ever been a part of.
Because there was no structure.
At all.
They would just bring comics in.
It would just be me and Ari Shafir and Bill Burr and Joey Diaz and all these guys.
They would just come in and hang out and talk shit.
There was no structure at all.
It was just Anthony is such a smart and funny guy and Opie would sort of run the thing and Jim was there and they would just let everybody talk and I'd be like this would be amazing.
You could just come in and hang out and have fun.
And then Then I started doing a podcast after that.
But it was because of that.
And then Anthony did a thing called Live from the Compound.
He calls his house The Compound.
And he did this thing in his basement where he had a green screen.
And he did his own show.
And he did karaoke while he was holding a machine gun.
He's fucking crazy.
Anthony's like a legit gun nut.
But he had a studio that he built in his basement with legitimate equipment.
And I went, oh.
And that inspired me.
And that is literally what started me off to do a podcast, is seeing that he had set this up in his basement.
And I was like, well, just fucking start doing it.
I was gonna say the same thing I feel the wrong speak the fact that I can see people being mobbed and I can think okay I wonder what they're like and I can just ask them yeah yeah like is that what it's like for you see someone you think I just want to talk to them oh yeah Yeah, especially someone in a controversial position like Jordan.
It's amazing to see intelligent, articulate people clearly lying about his positions and not even understanding that by doing that they're strengthening him.
You're not going to lie to the point where people are going to really think that your position is correct and all these things that Jordan has said.
That somehow or another you misheard them or the whole world misheard them.
You're misrepresenting his positions and that just makes all the people that are siding with him realize he's right.
It strengthens him.
They literally don't understand that they are his publicists.
They are helping.
They are proving his point and to the point where he's selling out.
And I think also with issues that are more complex, you can talk about all the different nuances to that issue.
Because if you just simply have your talking points, if you do a standard interview that's, say, seven minutes long, it's going to be very, very sparse in terms of what you're saying.
But I think that's one of the rarest qualities when it comes to discourse, is the ability that people have to abandon ideas that they've supported in the past.
They've gotten these things and they've decided this is what my side supports, so I'm going to just spout this out and this makes me seem like I'm a good team player.
And then the thing about podcasts though, when you're sitting down for three hours, you go, why do you think that?
Like, what's going on there?
And then they start talking about why they think that, and then it all falls apart.
And then you realize that they don't even know why they think that.
The problem with that version of idea sport is lobbyists and special interest groups and different people that are pushing you to get in the office because you're going to change laws and force things through.
That's the trickiest of all idea sports and also the most shallow.
I mean just think about presidential debates and speeches and those are the most shallow discussions in terms of the actual reality of who that person is.
Who is that person?
Imagine if you were dating someone and every time you went on a date with them it was like a presidential speech.
It was probably the Google memo, I think, when I wrote that column defending James Damore's memo, because I think that's when we first started being in contact.
So I have a weekly column for Playboy.com, monthly column for The Globe and Mail, which is Canada's national newspaper, co-host on Wrong Speak, the podcast, and I'll be doing hopefully lots and lots more stuff going forward.