Jesse Singal and Joe Rogan dissect Twitter’s mental health toll, comparing it to a "sociopathic middle school cafeteria," while debating free speech risks—like platforming Alex Jones despite his Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Singal critiques fad psychology (e.g., 50% replication failure in social priming studies) and media bias, contrasting with Rogan’s hope for open debate. They explore gender dysphoria research, warning against irreversible treatments without long-term data, and question humanity’s future amid climate change and nuclear threats. Rogan defends psychedelics as tools for growth but acknowledges their potential misuse, while Singal critiques ideological cherry-picking in journalism. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how tribalism—online or religious—distorts truth, prioritizing validation over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I was going to say, I think it, I know people from real life who, I don't know for sure, but I think like being on Twitter is exacerbating their mental illness.
Here's what I don't get about your ability to stay off is I have, you know, one, a millionth the notoriety of you.
Some people hate me, but no, you know.
I have trouble not checking in on what people are saying about me.
And that's what fucks you up.
Because then you go down the spiral and you pretend that this angry 15-year-old in Ohio who's talking shit about you, that you can convince him you're a good guy.
And that's crazy because he's not trying to have a conversation.
But I find I can't stay away from those fights with the angry 15-year-old in Ohio.
And I think one of the things that happens on Twitter that's really kind of strange is that the bullied become the bullies.
It's like you get a lot of people that had a really rough time in high school and socially, and now they found this circle of people that agree with them, and they're all...
For lack of a better term, they have mental health problems because there's no doubt they're filled with anxiety and chaos and they're on there all day long and they're just arguing and attacking people.
There's some people that I follow and I don't follow them.
What I do is I bookmark their page and I go back to it because I just don't...
I don't want to get into it, but occasionally I'll go and see, like, okay, let's look at this science project.
And I'll just see, oh, look at this, we have 10 hours of tweeting today.
And it's 10 hours of slinging mud and being shitty and calling for people to be deplatformed.
And boy, when they came for her, it was wild watching her scramble and trying to placate.
Trying to calm them down and seeing that it didn't matter.
You could look at the bulk of her tweets and what she does as an academic.
She's not a bad person.
She's just loony.
She's just a loony progressive who thinks that the only way to make change in this world is to attack people.
And to, you know, vehemently dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as either a racist or a Nazi or alt-right or including people that are clearly none of those things.
What I'm fascinated by is these communities where You constantly have to look over your shoulders because if you say the wrong thing once, you're basically out of the community.
And this isn't just on the left.
This actually happened on the right with Trump, where people who didn't support Trump, it was like, bye.
It doesn't matter.
You've been a good conservative 20 years.
So there was a sort of socialist lefty writer in New York who had done a lot of good stuff.
She wrote a Times piece about how she met Barry Weiss.
And how they got along.
And she's like, I thought I would hate Barry Weiss.
I like Barry Weiss.
And she was basically ousted just for refusing to say Barry Weiss was like, you know, Hitler's daughter or something.
Well, the thing to keep in mind, I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying like, oh, it's just Twitter.
Why do you talk about it so much?
Why do you care?
But like every, basically every mainstream journalist and a significant proportion of like big name academics, they're on Twitter every day.
And they're looking around to see who responds to what.
Yeah.
Any journalist right now who says that Twitter is not setting the terms of the agenda and what we cover and how we cover it, I think is diluted or lying.
You were saying, we were talking about this before and we agreed to stop talking about it until we got on the podcast, that there was, I guess there's a clip going around from my podcast from years back where it was Charles Johnson on the podcast where he was saying something about a gene.
So people were recirculating a clip where Johnson was saying that...
People are going to take this clip out of context.
He was saying, I'm not saying, that there's a gene called MAOA associated with aggression and that black people have more of it.
And I saw this on my Twitter feed and I hit up a friend of mine, a buddy.
I met him once in real life in Helsinki.
His name is Amir Sariazlan.
He's like a genetics researcher.
Great follower on Twitter.
He studies genetics.
I was like, what's this deal?
They call it the warrior gene.
The idea is if you have this gene or some variant of it, you're more aggressive.
And he basically explained there's this interesting recent history of genetics where people thought there was like a gay gene and a liberal gene and a warrior gene.
These are called candidate gene studies.
Like what happens if you have this gene versus not have this gene?
At the time Johnson made this claim, there had been this like Pretty shitty media coverage about the idea of a warrior gene.
Do you know that guy John Horgan, the science writer?
He was one of those guys that I didn't know anything about until I had him on.
And then when I had him on, there was things like that where I was like, wait, what?
There was a whole group of people.
And also, I should just say, when I was doing the podcast back then, I didn't sort of understand the impact that it had.
I thought I was just having conversations with people, because it wasn't nearly as popular back then.
So if I had a podcast with someone whose opinions that I completely disagreed with, I'd have them on anyway.
I'd just like, see, let's see where this goes.
This just made me be interesting.
Maybe a weird conversation to have a conversation with someone who's got a polar opposite view of life than I do.
You know, it was a much smaller platform back then.
And so I didn't think of it as a responsibility or like I didn't think, you know, there's a thought now that you shouldn't put people on.
You're elevating their platform.
But I still kind of disagree with that because I think.
There's a real value in having people on that have different views than you.
Even if you don't agree with them, there's a value in figuring out where they're wrong.
There's a value in figuring out if maybe there's a hole in your logic, like whatever it is.
With him, there was a lot of those guys.
I don't even know if that was like, was that pre-Milo or post-Milo I had?
There was a bunch of these guys that had realized there was a movement online.
And in a lot of ways, what's really interesting is, I'm very anti-censorship.
However, there's no denying.
I shouldn't even say however.
I'm very anti-censorship.
I think it's a terrible way to behave.
I think it's a terrible way to sort out the truth, to just silence people and remove people from platforms.
And the idea that Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are just private companies and they can do whatever they want.
I think it's bigger than that now.
I really do.
I think this is a legitimate modern-day free speech issue to the point where there's a real argument to be made that if you're not on these platforms, you're not just diminished.
They've silenced you in a way that changes the narrative.
You don't get to see the other person's point of view.
Even people that are incredibly polarizing, like Trump, it's fucking amazing that they can just remove the 45th President of the United States from everything.
And he can't even communicate anymore.
You know?
I mean, you could say it's because of the Capitol attack, you could say it's because of a lot of things, and I get your perspective, but I do not agree with silencing him.
I just don't think...
You know, they just didn't want him to win again.
But my point was, Back then, all these alt-right guys were catching a lot of steam.
They had a lot of momentum on their side.
Milo, who is a very charismatic, very articulate, humorous guy.
So he would do these interviews.
The right loved him.
He would go on all these different talk shows, and he would make fun of everything.
Even Bill Maher loved him.
And it was interesting, right?
And then there was a lot of these guys that came along that would parrot alt-right talking points.
And it's like, if you pay attention to online forums, when they're left alone, like Reddit's a great example, they had to close down the Donald, right?
Reddit decided this is just too nuts.
It's too nuts.
It's too much.
They just...
I don't agree with that either.
But they stepped in because...
Shitposting is a real thing, right?
And people love saying things they're not supposed to say, and they love riling people up.
Now, when you're a person, whether it's Charles Johnson or someone else, that finds this avenue where you can get a lot of attention, By stirring shit and saying things and maybe you don't even agree with but saying things that are gonna rile up people on the left and get a bunch of shit posters and Hardcore right-wing people online to love you people lean in towards that and there was a lot of that going on I think that's where Gavin McGinnis went south.
That's where Milo went south a lot of these guys and then once the wave of Censorship came in and those guys started getting deplatformed.
You see, it really did have a massive impact on the culture.
Because there was a movement, man.
It was a big movement.
And they essentially threw water on that movement.
I actually want to press you on one thing because my impulse as a journalist is to ask you questions.
So most of your critics, the shit they say about who you platform, I find ridiculous because often you're platforming people who are already popular.
And I'm with you in that if someone is already a big figure, they're a big figure.
All the best we can do is interrogate their beliefs.
A couple times where I'm more sympathetic to your critics, one was like Johnson, although then I saw you go back and forth with him on Twitter about this black gene violence bullshit.
But to me, there's a big difference between like, you know, later on, we're surely going to talk about like rapid onset gender dysphoria.
And like Abigail Schreier wrote a big bestselling book.
You can't deny that's part of the conversation.
I think it's crazy people try whether you agree with her or not.
You can't shut that down.
To me, that's like one subset of conversation where I'm like, you have to have those conversations.
The one area where I sort of agree with your critics is I know you might not want to talk about this guy, but when you had Alex Jones on, and there's this conspiracy theory about the governor of Virginia harvesting organs from fetuses.
Well, the crazy sounding ones, the problem with some of the crazy sounding ones, they turned out to be true.
Because he was telling me about Epstein fucking a decade ago.
Well, let me tell you, this is nuts, man.
Like a decade ago, he's like, well, what they do is they compromise all these elites, they take them, they bring them to this island, they have them fuck these underage girls and they film it.
There's a lot of testimony from a lot of different people.
Whether or not they fucked them, they were there.
And whether or not they really have film of them fucking them, it is very bizarre that you have these high-level people in both science, celebrities, politicians, and they fly to this fucking island where this convicted pedophile has this weird spot where he takes people.
This is my point.
Like, Alex told me about this a long time ago.
And it sounded like Looney Tune talk.
You know, he was talking to me about human monkey chimeras that they were working on a long time ago.
Sounds like loony shit.
I saw it on the news.
I mean, there's a science paper published about human, see if you can find the chimeras, the human monkey chimeras.
Yeah, I think a lot of what he does is he takes some little sliver of truth and he, either because he may get up or has an overactive imagination, that becomes a grand conspiracy theory where the state of Virginia...
We shouldn't say this unless we know his actual words.
And maybe he misspoke, right?
I mean, a lot of these guys are old.
They misspeak a lot and they're under pressure.
You have to recognize that too.
Like, look at Biden.
I mean, we give Biden more free passes than any president in the history of presidents.
And he's only been a president for seven months.
We give him all these free passes because we know he misspeaks, because we know he's compromised.
So let's hear what it says.
unidentified
Other restrictions now in place.
And she was pressed by a Republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion, even as a woman is essentially dilating, ready to give birth.
And she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labor.
Do you support her measure and explain her answer?
Yeah, you know, I wasn't there, Julie, and I certainly can't speak for Delegate Tran, but I will tell you, one, first thing I would say, this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved.
There are, you know, when we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way.
And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities.
There may be a fetus that's non-viable.
So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.
The infant would be delivered.
The infant would be kept comfortable.
The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired.
And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
So I think this was really blown out of proportion.
But again, we want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions.
We want the decision to be made by the The mothers and their providers.
And this is why, Julie, that legislators, most of whom are men by the way, shouldn't be telling a woman what she should and shouldn't be doing with her body.
unidentified
And do you think multiple physicians should have to weigh in as is currently required?
Well, I think it's always good to get a second opinion and for at least two providers to be involved in that decision because these decisions shouldn't be taken lightly.
And so, you know, I would certainly support more than one provider.
No, because I think he phrased it poorly, but I think he's talking about you would only have an abortion that late in the case of the fetus not being viable in the first place.
And then he did not answer the question.
Well, he's talking about a weird situation where then the fetus was surviving outside the womb.
Think about Jones's idea that this is part of a conspiracy to harvest baby organs.
And I think abortion is, it's one of those conversations that are, it's an incredibly human conversation in that there's There's clearly, there's times when abortion disturbs almost everybody.
When you're talking about a bundle of cells in the very early stages, it seems like most people would support abortion.
But when you get to third trimester, you get to what they're talking about, what this is...
Basically, she's ready to give birth.
That's when people get super uncomfortable with it and that's when you run into people that take this whole discussion and turn it into what you're saying, which is like you're making this loony conspiracy about harvesting organs.
I did, but John Ronson said that he got all his teeth knocked out, and Alex is like, no, I'll show you an x-ray.
I never got my teeth knocked out.
They're all his teeth.
So there's some of that that's not true.
Also, Ronson was with him in Bohemian Grove.
Ronson, they set that up.
In the early, it was like...
Well, they were friends, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Look, Alex is a polarizing figure, but the people that know him, like how I know him, they think he's an entertaining, fun guy to be around who knows a lot of crazy shit.
The problem is he's so polarizing that saying that opens you up to so much criticism that everybody immediately wants to push back.
But he needs someone who's like, hold on, let's see if that's true.
And if you just leave him on his show and he's ranting and raving and he's there all day and he's drinking two bottles of tequila, it's going to be a wild-ass crazy show and he's not even going to remember half the shit he said.
But if you can rein him in, he has a lot of fucking information about false flag events, a lot of information about, like, people think he's a right-wing guy.
When I met him, he got arrested for going after George W. Bush and saying he was perpetrating crimes against humanity.
You know, people worry about people influencing folks.
And for most people that see Alex on, like, the Andrew Schultz show or Michael Malice's show, they just think he's a really entertaining, crazy guy to listen to, and they enjoy it.
They really enjoy listening to him.
For most intelligent people, he's not going to persuade them one way or the other, other than maybe get them to look into things.
I mean, that's something that Dr. Shanna Swan wrote about.
What was the name of that book again?
Sorry, we keep forgetting the name of the book, but it's a fantastic book about the way it's affecting human beings.
A radical drop in testosterone levels, a radical increase in miscarriages.
This is Countdown.
Dr. Shanna H. Swan, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Impairing the Future of the Human Race.
This is a terrifying conversation that I had with her.
I don't know if you listened to that one, but it's really good.
And it's just...
She's a scientist, and it's all just about phthalates and pesticides and the effect they have on human reproductive systems, but also on frogs.
Pesticides really do have a radical impact on frogs and amphibians.
That particular clip is a real problem because it's, you know, to draw the conclusion that he drew, my conclusion that I drew from that is like, Jesus Christ, that is such a weird area of discussion,
like whether or not you should revive a fetus once it's been born and to decide to revive or not revive based on whether or not it's Deformed or whatever the issue is that it has physically, whatever ailment or...
I think the real problem was him having that conversation on the radio and probably unprepared.
He probably didn't know that that was going to be one of the things he talked about.
And the way he discussed it I think an issue like that is something that you really should sit down and write out your actual thoughts and think about those, solidify them.
One of them, I didn't know about the widespread use of agent provocateurs throughout history.
I really wasn't aware of that.
I wasn't aware of that the government has an actual strategy that they use to break up peaceful protests by bringing in people who cause violence.
And it's happened forever.
And they used it for the World Trade Organization in, was it 99?
Whatever it was.
And Alex detailed that in depth.
And he showed through news reports.
He showed through stories in the news.
And he showed through video clips how these masked people came in and took this peaceful protest.
And they just started randomly breaking windows and tipping over mailboxes and doing all this crazy shit.
And how they were ultimately let go.
And how they were all wearing government-issued boots and...
The cops never arrested them or they allowed them to hide out in a building together and then they all made some sort of a negotiation and released them.
But I think that fuels conspiracy theorists is that the shit even just our government has done over the years has been so weird that I don't blame people.
Yeah, it's The Quick Fix, Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Social Lose.
That's a good sign that I had to look at the book to remember what it's called.
I was a science editor at New York Magazine.
I wrote about psychology, basically.
And every day we get press releases from Harvard, from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania that psychologists are figuring out amazing stuff about how to fix the world.
How to fix racism, how to fix the educational system.
And a lot of these, when I looked into them more, there's like nothing there.
There's no actual result there.
And people spend, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on these ideas that don't really do anything.
Have you ever taken the, you know, the implicit association test?
So anyone listening to this who's done a diversity training recently at work has probably heard of the implicit association test.
Since 1998, leading psychologists are like, this test will measure your unconscious racism, racism you're not even aware of.
And this leaks into the real world and makes you do racist stuff.
And we end up spending millions of dollars on it.
Every school embraces it.
Every company embraces it.
Except, whoops, there's nothing there.
It doesn't actually measure anything.
So I'm really interested in those instances where like the most, and maybe this is why I should drink with Alex Jones, where the most important experts in the world tell us shit and it's just, it's not true.
How much has to do, when the spreading of this kind of information, how much of it has to do with clickbait?
One of the things that's disturbed me over the last decade or so is that journalism, even journalism at its highest levels, without naming any names, but like fabled institutions, are resorting to clickbait.
You know, my friend Kurt Metzger said something about the New York Times once.
He said it's like a fat girl's Tumblr blog now.
And I'm like, that is such a fucked up thing to say.
But what he was saying was that there's stories that are written in there that are not what you associate with the New York Times of old.
This is where it gets complicated, but certain areas of research, so one of them is called social priming, and that's the idea that if I flash an American flag before your eyes for 300 milliseconds, you'll get way more patriotic.
It sounds like voodoo magic, but for a while people really believed these results, and the reason they believed them is because there's all these ways you can fuck up statistically, and you publish stuff that appears to be true but isn't false.
Let's say I asked you off the bat, take the top psychology journals around.
What percentage of the findings in them would you say could be replicated later on if you run it back?
One of my favorite stories was a guy who was involved in a test where they were doing a study where they gave one group an SSRI and the other group they gave a placebo.
This guy, for whatever reason, took a shitload of pills and ran to the hospital with an elevated pulse, high blood pressure, holding this pill bottle, freaking out, thinking he's dying, telling them that he fucked up and he took the whole bottle of pills and he's going to die.
They contact the physician.
The physician comes down and informs him that he was a part of the control group.
And he had taken a placebo.
Within minutes, his heart rate drops down to normal.
His blood pressure drops down to normal.
And he's fine.
So this guy who was convinced he was going to die had just completely done it to himself.
He had decided that he had taken some sort of fucking poison or something.
You know, some horrible medication.
And far exceeding the dose you're supposed to take.
Yeah, I mean, they were saying, this is amazing scholarship, this is incredible work.
But it just goes to show you...
Academia is in a weird place, man.
It's always been in a weird place, but it's in an exceptionally weird place today with the climate of our culture because these people, a lot of them that are teaching these courses, a lot of them that are professors, they went from being a student and living in this world to then getting a job at the university to becoming a professor.
So they've never been out there in the regular world outside of this insulated bubble of academia.
The same thing is happening in journalism because especially as like more and more of us come from upper middle class, like good college settings, we all have the same beliefs.
We're all not really tolerant of people with different beliefs and it's turning journalism into a shit show actually.
It's really depressing because like what's the point of being a journalist or an academic if you're not going to be open minded and actually interrogate the world a little bit?
It seems like we get along, but she's mean to me on the show a lot, so I should go after her comeuppance.
I noticed that because she worked at a place called The Stranger in Seattle.
I worked for New York Magazine.
I left under good terms just to write the book.
But once we got in our own bubble and we realized that no one who mattered could get pissed off at us and we didn't have to answer to editors, I don't know.
It just made the conversation much more free-flowing.
We could talk about what we want to talk about.
It's the biggest difference in the world when you're not...
Looking over your shoulder, or it's not just the bosses who are the problem.
It's like, is your 25-year-old colleague going to be very sensitive about what you said and report you to HR? And go to human resources.
Yeah, which is, I think, have you had Jonathan Haidt on before?
Well, it's also infiltrated corporations in a massively disingenuous way because they've recognized that the wind is blowing in that direction, so they'll put up a rainbow flag.
So I was the one who brought up the connection to mental health.
And I do think there's some mentally ill people who get, you know, Twitter makes it worse.
But I think that's like sort of, I'm worried that's like too easy now because I'm...
I don't know if you remember this.
You might have talked about this on the show.
There was a moment last year when all the public health researchers were like, those far-right protesters getting together to protest mass and lockdown, that's so dangerous.
You can't get together.
There's a pandemic.
Then the next week, George Floyd happened, and then there's BLM protests.
You can do BLM protests.
So it's like the same people flipping it.
That kind of behavior, that's not mental illness.
That's just like you want the positive approval.
You want to stay in the good graces of your tribe.
Well, again, we're going back to confirmation bias.
This was a conversation that I was having with a friend of mine who was pro the George Floyd protests, and I said, listen, I'm 100% pro people protesting.
I go, if they're just protesting, as soon as it gets violent and the chaos, that bothers me.
But it is kind of crazy that all of a sudden we're okay with people screaming shoulder to shoulder with each other.
The whole idea is that this stuff is airborne.
And, you know, his take on it was, like, there's no significant evidence that proves that it's spreading.
I go, that is horseshit, man.
I go, if you look at the fucking jumps, there's a big jump in infections post, like, there's like 10 days after these protests.
There's always a big jump.
I go, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to protest.
Well, it shifted our country in a very bad way, I think.
I really do think it did.
I think there's a lot of people that were already unbalanced and kind of mentally unwell, and that pushed them over the edge.
And we've got to figure out how to bring people back.
And I don't know how to do that.
I mean, I remember a time where it didn't seem like there was this gigantic gap.
Between people on the left and people on the right and even people in the center.
It's people that are angry if you're a centrist.
It's just a different state of mind.
It's like if you're not on my side, you're on the wrong side now.
I always thought that because of the internet, we're going to get more access to information, so we're going to have more access to the truth, and people are going to be able to debate things and find out exactly what's up.
There's a lot of shit that people have to deal with.
They don't have the time to develop a very nuanced, objective, purely...
It's a purely honest view of what they're looking at.
So they find these conglomerations of people that have adopted these predetermined patterns of behavior and these opinions, this conglomeration of opinions, and they just adopt those.
And then they repeat the things that they think they need to say in order to be in the good graces of that group.
I forget who – it's either this political scientist in Arizona or these polling guys.
People can Google it.
The idea is like 20 percent of us are screaming at one another on Twitter, Facebook, whatever.
Most of the country is just exhausted and hates talking about politics because things have gotten so heated that – They don't want to say the wrong thing on Facebook.
So it's sort of like the sort of controversial concept of like the silent majority.
But I think there is a silent majority of people who want nothing to do with the present political discourse.
And to me, that sort of explains how like...
People like me from Brooklyn were all Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders and I was sort of divided between the two and then Joe Biden just runs away with it because most people are not online.
It just says rights to results or strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual's pedigree, likely in the range of six to ten generations ago.
And my friend was talking to me about this and he was saying it's kind of crazy that this guy got his eyes done to look more Korean where Koreans get their eyes done to look more European at a really frightening rate.
Like it's one of the most popular plastic surgeries in all of Korea is to get your eyes done.
I was just thinking about what you said about everything being ultra-polarized, no one could get along.
The guy to me that did the best job of bridging that stuff, and I listened to your interview with him when I was prepping for this, was Anthony Bourdain.
He went to these cultures that really did have views that he would view as horrible, about women or gay people or whatever, and he intentionally didn't focus on that.
He focused on food and where you live.
I don't know.
I obviously didn't know him at all, but his death really hit me hard because I just think that's really hard to do and we need way more people like that and we don't have any.
I knew that he was a complicated guy, but I actually got a text message from my friend Maynard, the lead singer of Tool.
He's a jiu-jitsu practitioner, and Bourdain's a jiu-jitsu practitioner, too.
And the two of them, I thought it was really cool that they both got into jiu-jitsu and they're finding all this...
Benefit from it emotionally and physically.
Bourdain got into it in his late 50s, and all of a sudden he got ripped.
He had addictive personalities.
It was terrible when he was doing heroin, but amazing for jiu-jitsu.
Because all of a sudden, this guy is super dedicated.
He's training every day.
And so Maynard was like, I think I want to have a celebrity jiu-jitsu match with Anthony Bourdain.
Do you think he could hook that up?
I go, I'll ask him, man.
Just joking around.
And then I get this phone call or this text message when I was in Chicago from Maynard saying, I guess we won't be having that celebrity jiu-jitsu match.
Well, I mean, that's the thing a lot of people don't realize about suicide, because I've written a little bit about this, is it's a much more impulsive thing than people often realize.
And it is that question of like...
If someone can be...
That's why suicide hotlines are so important.
Can you talk someone off that emotional cliff in the moment?
I mean, I partied with him a few times, but the hardest I ever partied with him, we were in Montana, and we were, for his show, we went pheasant hunting.
But I did that my whole life, unfortunately or fortunately.
I think ultimately fortunately.
Because I moved from New Jersey to San Francisco when I was 7. We stayed in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. And then we moved to Florida from 11 to 13. 13 to 24, I lived in Boston, then New York, then LA. No, Texas.
And that's also how I got into martial arts because I was like, God damn, I'm so tired of people picking on me.
It was very scary to not have friends and to be in the school.
And also I was a short kid, so I was worried these guys were going to beat me up.
So I got involved in martial arts, which also tremendously helped my ability to see and think of things for myself because I had gone through some very...
You know, competitions are dangerous and scary, and the stress level's so high, and if you can get through them on the other end, you have this incredible feeling of accomplishment.
Win, lose, or draw.
At least I did it.
I faced it.
I went out there and I did this terrifying thing and competed, and that's all I did for six years of my life.
Now, if they fucking dox you, and they start harassing your kids, or harassing your wife, or harassing your boss, that's where it gets gross when people don't like someone's opinion, and then they contact someone's boss, and then they...
Katie had like, after she left the stranger, I mean she got laid off because they laid off everyone, but she had like co-workers just openly talking shit about her online just to raise their own social capital.
And also, even if they like it because they're worried about you coming after them or they want to make sure that they're on the right side of the mob, they're going to know that that's who you are.
You don't have to be like that.
If you disagree with someone, you could do so in a kind way.
We've got to emphasize that.
Moving forward as a culture, in order to figure out The right way to have discussions about things where they actually get productive, where you actually have real conversations where maybe you might learn something about the way other people view things.
I have a hesitancy to retweet something that's on CNN. No, it's the exact same thing with me where it's like five years ago, I would say controversy blows up.
Washington Post writes an article about it.
I'm like, I can trust the Washington Post to get the basic details right.
And I'm not saying like every journalist at the Washington Post is bad.
I still enjoy their coverage, but I need to now double check to make sure the Washington Post isn't passing along misinformation.
The response when Bernie came on here was like one of those moments where I... My gradual loss of faith in mainstream journalism, there's been a step process.
They took jokes out of context and they connected Bernie to being a person who supports someone who has abhorrent views.
That's what it is.
They did it because they didn't want Bernie to win.
If I had done the exact same conversation with the exact same endorsement of Biden or whoever they wanted at the time, they would have applauded it and they would have amplified it.
They didn't want Bernie to win.
It was really clear and simple.
Because you got people that are progressives that were the ones who were attacking that.
The way they wrote about you was just such horseshit.
It was just...
The way they distorted your views and distorted your positions on things, because I had to go back and read what you originally said, and then go back and read the article again, and it was...
But this is the thing.
I think part of this...
I think there's two things going on.
One, part of it is going back to what I said before, that a lot of these people were treated horribly.
They were bullied when they were younger.
And now they have a chance to be the bully and they're doing that.
You know, it's almost like they feel like they have to get back.
They have to get people back.
There's that.
But then there's also, there's a very real moment in society today where, and many parts of this are good, where trans people are accepted and not just accepted, they're applauded in a way that's never happened where trans people are accepted and not just accepted, they're applauded in a way that's never happened So anything that goes against that narrative is immediately attacked, even if you're talking about children making life-changing decisions.
You go on puberty blockers because that prevents your secondary sex characteristics from developing.
And for people with gender dysphoria, that can be painful.
If you feel like a girl and you develop an Adam's apple and facial hair...
It exacerbates your dysphoria.
And then after you've been on blockers, you can go on cross-sex hormones.
That means if you're a natal male, you'll develop some female features and vice versa, blah, blah, blah.
There's a Dutch clinic in Amsterdam that pioneered this idea of using puberty blockers for this.
We'd always had puberty blockers because if a girl goes through puberty at seven, That's not good.
We want to delay that at least a few years.
And they figured out a protocol and they did some research.
This is one of the only gender clinics in the world that does good, rich, long-term data.
And we desperately need long-term data.
They found that for kids who were gender dysphoric from a very young age, four or five, and Abigail Schreier has talked about some of this, Their view was that gender dysphoria usually goes away in time.
Usually, it often means you're going to be gay.
So if it's a boy who likes to wear girls' clothing and say I'm a girl, oftentimes it'll grow up to be a gay male, sometimes it'll grow up to be a trans woman.
In this clinic's view, if you get to the edge of puberty, puberty starts, and your gender dysphoria has not gone away, It's probably not going to go away ever.
And you should go on puberty blockers and you should go on hormones.
So this clinic, the Dutch clinic as it's called, they have a lot of research showing that among their kids, the kids who go through this protocol, they end up well.
They have good mental health.
They're doing well as young adults.
And that tells us something, which is that in some cases we might want kids to go through this.
This does not tell us that like any kid who feels gender dysphoric or says they want blockers and hormones should go on them.
And what's happening now is it—and this is not just something Abigail Schreier says.
This is something clinicians themselves say, is kids are coming out as trans at 13 or 14, much later than they used to.
And we don't know if the same logic applies or the same research applies to a kid who comes out at 12 and 13 versus a kid who comes out at 5 and has been gender dysphoric for 7 years.
So what I find incredibly disturbing right now is— These treatments, I'm really in favor of kids who need them getting them.
I'm opposed to all the Republican laws attempting to ban them.
I don't want a fucking Tennessee state legislator getting between a doctor and a patient.
I feel very strongly about that.
I'll defend that view.
But it's like a really big deal to put a kid on puberty blockers.
It's a really big deal.
You're interfering with the natural process.
It's a really big deal to put them on cross-sex hormones because those are even less reversible.
If you're going through a developmental process that depends upon your body having testosterone and you deny your body testosterone at a normal level for multiple years while you're in puberty and while you're growing, you're not getting that back.
When you are a natal male, and then you go on hormone blockers, and you go through puberty on hormone blockers, and then you decide that you're going to detransition, for sure your developmental cycle is going to be altered forever.
If you decide to go back to being a male, you're not going to be the same person who you would have been if you had testosterone through the whole process.
The theory is if the kids are well assessed and they go through the Dutch protocol where they felt that way since they were three, they're probably not going to change their mind.
We don't see the thing is like it's it's changing the mind is like what does that mean?
You know, it's it's like you can't have There's not a set.
It's not like you're on fire.
No, you're not on fire You know I'm saying like it's not a one or a zero.
It's not you you This is it's such a giant deal Like when you say that someone's changing their mind you have to say okay, what are the influences and Like, what is around this child that's making this child?
Is this just coming from the child's being?
And this is how they feel?
It's how they've always felt?
Do they have people around them that are telling them that this would be the right thing to do for them?
No, I think some people would, but I think other people would say that you're sort of, in an ableist way, destroying an element of humanity that would otherwise produce amazing things, even if they're neuroatypical.
So are you opposed to kids, and I ask this as someone who thinks this needs to be an open discussion, but do you basically think kids should never go on blockers?
Are there cases where you'd be comfortable with it?
And you would have to say, well, what are those cases?
And who are those people?
And how do you make that decision?
But how do you make that decision?
And who makes that decision?
Is it the parents?
Is it the child?
Because in some places, children as young as 10...
There was a ruling recently...
I think they were saying that as early as 10 years old, if the parents disagree with the child affirming its gender identity, that the parents will no longer have custody of the children.
BC father arrested held in jail for repeatedly violating court orders over child's gender transition therapy.
He's alleged to have revealed information about his child's mental health, medical status, and treatments and gave information that could reveal the family's identity.
But I'm not saying a two-year-old who says that once.
I'm saying a two-year-old who, from the time they could talk, has insisted this about themselves, and then you get to 10 or 11 in the onset of puberty, and they've consistently identified the other way that whole span.
Yeah, but I'm saying, so the research the Dutch clinic has and this Canadian clinic has, and this is all controversial, people will disagree with it, suggests that the longer a kid is dysphoric as a child.
I think guys like you and I having this discussion is insane.
The amount of data that there's available that people like you and I are trying to figure out whether it's right or wrong, whether you agree with this or not agree with this, there's not enough information.
This is the kind of thing we're talking about, like how journalism is dysfunctional right now.
If you even suggest this ever happen, I got put on a list of A sensible anti-LGBT bigots by GLAAD. I'm on a list, like an enemies list, because I've written about this in a way that doesn't entirely discount that possibility because I've talked to kids who've said it happened to them.
These guys ran this really bad article basically telling everyone.
And what pisses me off the most is parents reading this.
They're saying the evidence we have on blockers is good.
The evidence we have on hormones for kids is good.
We don't have good evidence on any of this.
And I feel badly for parents of kids trying to work through this issue in the absence of any good evidence because they are basically, in some cases, effectively being lied to.
If you're a journalist and you say, we have really solid evidence on this, that's not true.
And Multiple governments in Europe have looked into the evidence and they've all come away saying we don't have enough here.
So I just think we need to be pretty conservative about this issue until we know more, which we don't yet.
I'm not prepared to make the direct comparison to like the satanic sex abuse panic, but people want to protect kids.
And occasionally we have these like moral panics of like all these parents are hurting their kids.
All these day care providers are hurting their kids.
You know, for understandable reasons, humans go crazy about kids sometimes.
And I think there's a subset of kids who are really trans and need access to these hormones.
There's a subset of kids where there's other mental health stuff going on.
And I've quoted some of the top clinicians in the country, including the head of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, Erica Anderson.
She's trans herself.
She'd be a great guest.
I know people always tell you who you should have on.
Yeah.
She herself has seen situations that really worry her because the clinicians themselves are not following the rules they're supposed to follow before they give kids blockers or hormones.
Because this is essentially over the last couple decades, and more so over the last decade, this is coming to the forefront of the public consciousness.
This is a topic that is discussed constantly.
And now with the introduction of Olympic athletes, now we have the first female weightlifter from New Zealand who was on the team that was a male.
And we have all these questions about this kind of stuff.
I think the first thing to realize is that A, trans people have been treated horribly over the years, and B, in 99% of incidents, like, situations, there's not much to discuss.
People should be treated the way they want to be treated.
There's a small subset of issues that you've talked about on the show, and one of them is kids.
Things like this, if you're a generalist, like I'm not sure what the background of the people from science-based medicine is, but I would imagine that anything like this, that you're going to cover a complex, nuanced, multifaceted subject that has broad implications for our society, for children, for adults, for fucking corporations, for everybody.
You gotta know a lot.
This is not something you can have a cursory examination of, and I think that there's a real motivation that a lot of people online have, is to give in to the crowd.
Like, whatever the crowd wants, placate them, say what they want you to say, express yourself in a way that you think is going to be well received by the orthodoxy.
I think what makes it more complicated is that if a journalist came to me and was like, I want to write about youth transition, I could give them a list of sources to get quotes from.
Some of them would say there's no issues here, the data's great.
Some of them would say kids should never transition.
Some would be in the middle.
So you can cherry pick.
And these guys, in my view, cherry pick.
They only consulted sources that told them what they wanted to hear and that would shield them from a lot of criticism online.
I think that's a dangerous way to go approach a genuine scientific controversy.
Well, it's stupid because for some people it's not nuanced.
Here's the thing about nuance.
We're talking about millions of humans, right?
When you have millions of humans, you have a great variety of different circumstances.
Different personalities and different mindsets and different biology.
People vary.
We vary widely.
Now, if you could get one person and that one person, you could talk to that one person and get a real clear understanding of who they are, you'd have less nuance.
You'd have an understanding of who they are, and you have an understanding of why this is so important to them, and then you can make a clear-cut distinction.
But I think that has to be done in an objective way across the board.
I mean, with examining this kind of an issue, it's very complex.
It's very complex.
And if you're not a trans person and you're talking to someone or talking about things like trans people, I think we all have to recognize that we don't even understand what that feels like.
And that's why I think anyone who writes about this issue, like I've interviewed trans people, and if you do, you come away feeling like this wasn't a choice for them.
This wasn't some flippant thing like, oh, I'm going to try being a chick for a while.
It's like, to me, when it comes to adults, you'd sort of have to be an asshole to be like, I don't think this person should be able to transition.
I think it would be incredible just to be a woman for a couple days would be incredible just to get a perspective of what it feels like to have those hormones rushing through your body.
Just to feel like to want to wear those weird shoes and to be into purses and just to look at things, you know, like serious issues from a woman's perspective versus a male's perspective because...
You know, we try to be understanding and try to, like, have open communication, have conversations with each other and figure out how you feel, how I feel, but there is no way a man understands what it's like.
You had Carol Hoeven on, and she talked about hormones, and I think there's been really interesting stuff written about trans people who transition, who are like, I live my whole life as a man, here's what it's like to be a woman, here's what it's like to be a man.
That shit's fascinating.
If there was a totally reversible way to experience that, I would totally do it.
I have spoken to quite a few female to male trans people, and one of the things that you come out of that with is that there's an understanding of the impact of testosterone that they just really did not know.
They thought that men were just dicks because it's easy to be a dick, and then they go, oh, this is just- No, we're literally poisoned by a hormone in our brains.
That's forced people to go to war and forced people to try to conquer resources.
It's a wide range of humans because there's a wide range of guests.
So I think there's some people that, like, when I have on an MMA fighter, their eyes glaze over and they just fast forward through that one, skip it, and go to the next one.
I mean, I'll always be nerdy and awkward, but until age 10, I like...
Video games, really nerdy stuff.
And I... Yeah.
like cavemen and whoever's strongest wins I think actually especially in football because people associate that with just being strong but it's so um tactically rich and when you understand what makes you know New England so Tom Brady a brilliant quarterback yeah you have to think so quickly and and I when I was listening to talk about MMA it seemed like there's some similarity there of like having to assess the situation so quickly in a way no one else could yeah that's that there's a lot of that to it it's
It's also a way of living your life in this really exciting, dangerous way that's so appealing to some people.
And I don't know, I mean, we're talking about the warrior gene and all the various genes.
I don't know what it is about people that leads some people to want to take risks.
One of my daughters is a big risk taker.
She's always been like that.
She was little.
She wanted to go on the highest monkey bar.
She's just a risk-taking kid.
She has that thing that makes her want that thrill, and some people want to do rock climbing, and they want to do hang gliding, and they want to do all that kind of wild shit.
And I don't know what that is.
But I do know that we also need computer coders.
We also need people that are studying philosophy.
And sometimes they're the same people.
There's a lot of people that actually study philosophy that are also martial artists, which is kind of interesting.
And one of them is John Donaher.
One of the most brilliant people I've ever spoken to ever in my life who is the greatest jiu-jitsu coach alive who was a professor at Columbia.
It's just good for you because I think a lot of the anxiety that people have is...
There's tension and anxiety that exists in the human body that is a remnant of the past and it's a part of the fact that whenever you face stress thousands and thousands of years ago, that stress most likely came in the form of violence.
It came in the form of a predator trying to eat you or a neighboring tribe that was trying to attack your village and so our sense of stress Is directly connected to physical exercise and adrenaline and anxiety.
If you could just burn that off, you have a much healthier perspective on what the actual problem is, and it allows you to look at things with a clear view.
But what makes us such an interesting species is, like, we can accommodate both, like, the big burly guy who could, like, take down the mammoth, but then there's, like, the dealmaker who could, like, convincingly be like, oh, you should give me some of the meat, we'll give them some of the meat.
There's, like, these sort of schemers, and we have room for all these different types of people.
People creating things, it's really fascinating what the human animal is, right?
Because we are, we share the same space as all the other creatures, but we're the only ones that alter our environment in this radical, significant way.
And we can balance out any perceived or all differences in physical strength, in status, and we can do it with a tool, like a gun.
That's one of the scariest things about gun violence.
You could just, this person, I don't like them anymore, bang, now they go away.
I mean, you basically, with a finger, like the easiest thing, like I took my kids to the gun range, because we're in Texas.
Do you think if you had to gun to head and you had to choose either humans are going to destroy the planet or we're going to find some technological fix and clean up the mess, which do you think is more likely?
Because I think if you look at the trends over time, right, if you read any of Pinker's work or if you look at just the charts and statistics about violence and murder and rape and all the horrible things that people are capable of, it's way less prevalent now than it was thousands of years ago.
It's moving in that direction.
The problem, I was going to say, the problem is that we could literally annihilate the entire planet with one wrong event, right?
We have that ability that, because of Oppenheimer and everybody after him, that we can literally nuke the planet multiple times over.
That's what scares me, is a mistake.
Or what really scares me more than anything is natural disasters.
I was going to say, I think there's these runaway climate change scenarios where it's supposed to be 2 degrees, but our models aren't accurate, and then it's 7 degrees, and that just destroys everything.
I'm enamored with this idea that the kind of features a species needs to take over a whole planet and tame it the way we do...
You also, like, you have the seeds of your own destruction and that everyone wants to think that, like, species get to a certain point and they send spaceships out and they colonize other planets.
But, like, what if the entire universe is just littered with, like, dead civilizations that destroyed themselves?
Because I think I'm less optimistic than you and I sort of, I worry we're headed in that direction.
Well, one thing that we can look at, and there's nothing to do with self-destruction, we can look at the history of species on this planet, and 90-whatever percent of them that ever existed are gone.
Oh, well, never smoke a lot of it if you don't smoke a lot.
The thing about weed is you develop a tolerance, but if you don't develop a tolerance, if you don't have a tolerance and you try to smoke a half a joint with somebody, you're going to go into the grave.
I mean, figuratively.
It's not going to kill you, but you're going to feel like you're dead or you want to be dead or you want to stop existing.
I don't know if it's accurate, but John Marco Allegro was a biblical scholar and a linguist And he also was an ordained minister, and he was the only one on the Dead Sea Scrolls translation group.
There was a bunch of scholars that were translating the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he was the only one that was agnostic.
Because as a theologian, as he was studying religions and looking at the histories of these things, He started realizing that so many of these were connected by more and more ancient stories, and he started becoming very skeptical and became agnostic.
But all the other people in the group were very religious.
But he was still an ordained minister.
And he got to a point where he studied it for 14 years and he wrote a book.
And this book was The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
And I believe the book was bought up by the Catholic Church.
And then I bought some copies of it that were used online.
But then a guy named Jan Ervin released it.
He republished it and released it.
So you can get it now.
But it's a fascinating book.
And in this book, he said basically all of Christianity was most likely about psychedelic mushroom rituals and fertility rituals.
That fertility rituals were a gigantic part because, you know, infant mortality was very high.
I mean, you got an infection, you died, you broke your leg, you died, you're likely to die.
Most people didn't live very long, just because of injuries and sickness.
And he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom coated in God's semen.
So this is when they thought, we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, right?
So when it rained, these mushrooms would just appear out of the ground and then they would eat them and trip balls.
And they would think that God literally came out of the sky and that this is how you would get in touch with God by eating these things.
Imagine if you're a primitive person with no science, no written language, I mean, they told these stories just through oral tradition for over a thousand years before anybody wrote them down, right?
And you're eating these things and tripping balls.
It gets deep because there's so many things connected to this theory that John Marco Allegro had.
It's very bizarre when you follow it.
One of the things was Christmas.
The Christmas trees, pine trees, underneath these pine trees, you always have these shiny packages, right?
Well, there's a mycorrhizal relationship between coniferous trees and a mushroom called the Amanita muscaria.
This Amanita muscaria mushroom was worshipped all throughout human history.
In fact, it was very closely connected to Santa Claus and to elves.
But when you trip balls, you can see elves.
That's what's fucked up.
So this mushroom looks like Santa Claus.
It's red and white, and it grows underneath Christmas trees, underneath pine trees.
When you take the mushrooms, the way you dry them out is you hang them from the leaves of the tree so they dry in the sun, which is literally the decorations on Christmas trees.
There's many, many articles written about the connection between...
Also, Santa Claus came down the chimney.
Well, the shamans in Siberia, once they tried to outlaw these shamanic rituals and outlaw these psychedelic practices, the way they would come into people's houses, on snowdrifts, they would hop down through the chimney.
They would drop the mushrooms down and hop down through the chimney because they were trying to avoid the local law instead of going in through the door.
How about the, well, we could tell you more about that, but how about the reindeer, right?
Santa has these reindeer and they're flying, right?
Well, reindeer are incredibly attracted to the Amanita muscaria mushroom, so much so that shamans who have these psychedelic rituals have pointed out that when they go outside of their tent or outside of their hut to take a piss, That the reindeer will knock them over to get to the piss because the piss has the smell of these psychedelic mushrooms in them.
And the way people extra trip, one of the things they do is they piss into a glass while they're tripping because some of the psychedelics get filtered through the body and it winds up in the urine and then they drink the urine and blast off into orbit.
So this is like an ancient practice of drinking your own piss while you're tripping balls on mushrooms, and it's connected to these fucking reindeer, which are caribou.
And caribou are always eating these Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
Like, why are there elves associated with Christmas?
Well, elves are associated with mushroom use.
But the thing is, and this is me being honest, most people that have taken Amanita muscaria, the only person I know that's had a real legitimate trip in it was Paul Stamets.
But Paul, he's...
He's probably the most well-versed mycologist alive.
Well, the burning bush, you know, with Moses in the burning bush, they now think, scholars out of Israel think, thanks to University of Tel Aviv, I forget which school it was, there's a working hypothesis that this was a story about someone with the acacia bush.
The acacia tree is rich in dimethyltryptamine.
You smoke dimethyltryptamine, you experience some higher power.
Well, John Marco Allegro's belief was that all of the stories that were in the Bible were all designed to hide these rituals.
And that, you know, like even the apple in Adam and Eve, that the apple represented the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
And that God did not want Eve to eat the apple because if she did, she would have an understanding of him and of God.
There's so much wild shit to it.
And the idea was that they wrote all these things down in parables and in these stories with this cryptic meaning to it to hide it from the Romans when they were being conquered.
Well, so the thing I feel like I'm missing out on by being, I think, too neurotic and fucked up to do these drugs is like you achieve these states where you've done a lot of stuff.
You're like, okay, well how the fuck is this real?
You can just get there in 30 seconds?
So this just exists around us all the time?
What is this?
But what I mean by fades is sometimes you just get busy.
Life gets busy.
You have bills.
I basically have three jobs.
I'm a comedian.
I do the UFC commentary and I do this.
It's a lot of things.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
You get caught up in these things, and I'm trying to do my best at all these things, so it requires work.
I have to think, so I'm constantly involved in what I'm doing, and you can get caught up in stuff, you know, to the point where you forget that you are You literally are not even you.
There's more bacteria cells in your body than there are human cells.
You are a part of this gigantic super organism known as the human race, and each individual, it benefits them to think of themselves as being unique and alone, and looking out for themselves.
But in the reality, that couldn't be further from the truth.
So there's so many things that you just get lost with.
Where you just get caught up in the trappings of everyday life and what psychedelics do, it just resets that whole thing and you get a chance to see things from a completely different perspective.
Well, you also recognize that no matter what is happening in your life, no matter what good stuff, like with your career, if you don't have love And friendship.
If you don't have friendship and love and people around you aren't happy as well, then your life is not going to be good.
Yeah, but I think the positive qualities that you have and the positive aspects of who you are, I don't think they're going to be negatively affected by an alleviation of anxiety.
I think it's going to be an enhancement of your perspective.
Yeah, just working through that and looking and trying to shift your perspective on things.
Even if you never did with a psychedelic for the rest of your life, I think for you, really, what I would recommend to you, and I'm obviously not a doctor or a counselor, I would say exercise, like regular routine exercise.
I guess my worry is if I did that, I would just, instead of like having this luminous experience where I put all this shit in perspective and put the puzzle pieces together, it would just like be a meteor hitting the whole board and the pieces fly everywhere and it would get worse because I just don't trust my ability to like work through these issues maybe.
Most of the time what's going on, and this is obviously debatable and there's a lot of nuance involved in this as well, but what bad trips are for the most part, most people think is your ego trying to control the experience.
Because when you're on a psychedelic, it's like trying to grab the rail to stop the rollercoaster.
I think it's a very valuable tool, but I think we are left without an operating manual because of the prohibition, because of the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970. We could have had such good data on this if they hadn't passed those shitty fucking laws.
I mean, you've got to realize it's been 51 years since they've been illegal.
Yeah.
1970, everything became illegal, which is nuts.
I mean, they made illegal what Brian Murorescu, his work on this book, The Immortality Key, which I brought up with Michael Pollan and some other people.
It's this amazing book on ancient Greece and how these scholars...
That were responsible for the birth of democracy and the structure of modern society.
They were tripping balls.
They were all tripping.
They were all taking ergot.
They were all taking a form of LSD. And they were probably taking a bunch of other shit, too.
And they were mixing it in wine.
And people would travel from all over the world to attend these rituals and come back with these amazing stories of enlightenment and of the way they thought about everything adjusting and changing and the connection with the gods and the spirit world.
This is all a part of human history and these fucking stiff cunts wearing stupid shiny shoes and ties, they took it away from us in the Nixon administration.
Fucking Nixon.
You know, these people that wanted everything to be shut down.
Because with psychedelics, you do recognize that other people are...
Look, you are me.
You're just living a different life.
If you lived my life and you were in my body and you went through all the experiences that I had, you would be me.
We don't vary as much as we like to think each other do.
What we are is we are spirits that are going through these—we're consciousness.
Let's put it in a non-woo-woo way.
We're consciousness that's going through a different biological vehicle with different life experiences, and we are trying to navigate our way while trying to be happy and trying not to get hurt.
We're trying not to get hurt by life or get hurt by other people.
You stop worrying about money, but you still worry about life.
Like, life has other things.
Like, if you don't have to concentrate on money anymore, your bills are paid, you know, your rent is paid, you're okay, you don't have to think about that.
There's a really fucked up story basically about the army adopting this anti-PTSD program that didn't work, that they spent like half a billion dollars on.
There's stuff about grit, making kids more gritty.
That doesn't work.
It's a little bit of a bummer of a book, but it also will tell readers how to be better judges of scientific claims.
There are different interpretations as to why God chose a burning bush as a way to get Moses' attention.
One theory says that Moses was worried that Egypt was going to completely destroy the Jews.
God showed him the magical bush to say that just as the bush is burning but isn't consumed, Egypt may cause the Jews to suffer, but they won't be destroyed.
It says Sneh, S-N-E-H, is a Hebrew pun on Sinai, the place where the bush was burning.
Most commentators say that S-N-E-H, Sneh, is a very lowly thorn bush.
The Catholics in St. Catherine's Monaster at the base of Mount Sinai...
Claim to have the actual bush growing in their courtyard.
The bush is a bramble rubus sanctus.
Just as Moses had to remove his sandals in the presence of the bush, the monks at the monastery require visitors to remove their shoes before coming into the presence of the bush.
How weird.
Imagine if they really do have the actual bush that Moses saw.
Well, it's also you have to recognize that you're talking about something that was translated...
In multiple different languages, and you lose a lot of the meaning, right?
Like, one of the things about Marco Allegro's work was the Dead Sea Scrolls were the only version of the Bible that was in Aramaic, and it's so old that it's written on animal skins, and the way they did the deciphering, they had to use DNA tests to match up the animal skins to make sure that they had the skins from the same animal, so that they knew that the piece of skin was See all these broken pieces?
So in order to figure out which piece goes in which pile, you have to do DNA tests on the pieces.
I went through the same sort of angry atheist phase as a lot of people.
And it is true that the idea that we're supposed to extract moral meaning from these stories that are honestly mostly just about God smiting this or that tribe.
They're cool stories, but the idea that we're supposed to take them to inspire the way we live is a little bit silly.
Well, I mean, I think a lot of that stuff, including pork, like eating an animal that chews its cud that has a cloven hoof, you're not supposed to eat that, is, I think it had to do with diseases.
Yeah, and I bet a lot of the ancient laws of how to behave and what to do and rituals were related to, like, how about the ritual that a lot of the Muslim world has of, you know, you wash your hand, you wash your ass with your left hand.
This came out maybe around 2000. I think it was a book called The Bible Code.
And it claimed that if you use that thing where letters can be letters or numbers, it like foretold the future of predicted events.
And it was completely off because it was this thing where like, of course, if you can interpret letters as letters or numbers, you can construct some story.
But people were very convinced that the Torah, which had been, of course, translated Numerous times if I could tell the future.
It's so wild though that ancient Hebrew had that distinction where it was part numbers and part letters and that there was numerical value to the words.
Yeah, and I don't, I don't, I'm not religious, I don't really identify with being Jewish, but this idea that you're saying the same prayers that your family, your ancestors were saying 1,500 years ago is kind of amazing and not a lot of people can say that.
And I'm overgeneralizing a little bit, but it's just weird.
We have this secular Jews have a complicated relationship with them because we, frankly, we look down a little bit on how traditional they are and how insular.
I'm sure they look down on us because we're, you know, corrupted and fallen, but they're the ones sort of keeping the numbers up because a lot of us are intermarrying or not having a lot of kids.
It's just, it's weird being a member of a group that could literally go extinct.
And it was weird during the pandemic that they were getting attacked for having group gatherings and, you know, that they were trying to force them to comply with these pandemic rules.
And they're like, we're not even in your fucking world.
And it's kind of wild to think how long they can keep that up.
You know, I've been reading this book.
I started reading it again, Empire of the Summer Moon.
It's about the Comanche Indians and the settlers that tried to make it across the plains and that they encountered these Comanches and it was like a massive deterrent for so long.
But one of the things the book focuses on is how up until the 1600s, until the Europeans came here, they didn't even have horses.
And they lived this way.
The way they lived for who knows how many thousands of years had not varied.
But then so much of the European world and the Asian world had gone so far beyond that in terms of civilization and culture.
Yeah, but they had this very tight way of living that never varied.
But one of the fascinating things was oftentimes, whether it was prospectors or sometimes children were kidnapped and they became a part of the tribe, and then they would get re-kidnapped decades later, and they never wanted to go back to society.
They always wanted to go back to the tribe.
They never were like, thank you.
Oh my God, this is so much better.
They hated it.
They hated the modern way of life.
They were so in tuned with chasing the buffalo down on the plains and sleeping in tents.
Well, and it's that whole question of, so evolution carved us a certain way.
And, you know, we're very thankful we have antibiotics and phones to keep in touch with our loved ones.
But at a certain point, you get so far from our Ancestral past that it introduces, I mean, even just like the social media thing.
It used to be the feedback you got from your tribe mattered because they're your tribe.
If your tribe is fucking random people thousands of miles from you, it feels like it matters because of these deep-seated tendencies we have, but it doesn't, and it hurts you.
Or in someone like my case, my tribe, like on Twitter, I think I have 7 million people.
What the fuck is that?
How is that possible?
That doesn't make any sense.
And if you want the feedback of 7 million people, you're going to go mad, you know?
And I think there's also a thing that happens if you can spend some time alone in nature, where there's like, it's almost like a...
It's like there's a void that you didn't even know you had.
And then you're like, oh, this is so nice.
This feels so good.
It feels so normal.
Because your body wants to be around these bountiful, natural environments where you're around a lake and mountains and you see birds fly overhead and deer bouncing by.
Your body has a connection to that that's very, very primal.
When you get on the plane in JFK and you get off in like, well, LA's really urban, but LA or like Tucson or Phoenix, any place where it's just a totally different landscape and the fucking mountains ringing everything, it does something to you.
Like, we're supposed to be in these more wild places.
People are so much friendlier than in L.A. The thing that got me is there's a real tangible feeling of not being bothered by people.
In the sense that there's too many of them.
When you're on the 405 in LA and it's 3 in the afternoon and you just see a fucking sea of red brake lights in front of you that goes on for hours, you're like, shit.
I used to do gigs in San Diego and I would have to leave my house at noon.
It's a 90-minute ride, man.
I have an 8 p.m.
show.
I got to leave at noon because I might be in my car for five fucking hours.
I hate that thing of if you live in New York and you're like, I'm driving somewhere, you just have no idea if it's going to take you three hours or six hours.
Honestly, when I was like 26, I read the Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer because an ex had recommended it.
She was vegetarian.
I just found it compelling.
I think if I lived in a country with like, I'm going to sound very douchey in Brooklyn here, but if I lived in a country that had a different approach to eating meat, like the kill your own food type thing, I don't have an inherent moral problem with it, but I think the way we do it in the States is fairly fucked up.
But that's why, like, the whole, again, not to go back to the endless topic of cancel culture, but I do think liberals are becoming more liberal, but conservatives are always fucking trying to ban something, trying to ban filming the factory farm, trying to ban, you know, not standing for the place.
Well, we lost an opportunity to address, during the pandemic, there was this massive push to address the fact that businesses were losing money, and so the government had to stimulate these businesses to maintain the quality of life, right?
My position on that was, why didn't the government also address the fact that you have these disproportionately fucked up communities that have stayed this way for decades?
And this also radically affects the quality of life for the people that live there, like failing corporations.
Like the idea that Detroit and Baltimore and South Side of Chicago, all these places, that's just how they are.
That's just how they are.
It's unfixable.
Fucking nuts.
It's nuts.
And we went way out of our way to make sure the corporations stayed healthy, but we didn't ever address the fact that there's people in this life that, without a doubt, people in this country, there's certain people that are born into a situation that is not fair.
This is why, like, if you write about cancel culture, you've, like, been canceled, fucking big air quotes, people are like, no, you should be a conservative now.
Conservatives are against cancellation.
What motivates me more than anything is that we're the richest country on earth, but a huge number of people are just fucking, have no chance whatsoever.
They don't have a chance to go to, like, a Newton public school.
And, um...
I think that should be the story.
And that's why Bernie Sanders did well.
That was basically the only thing he talked about.
He did not get distracted by culture war bullshit.
That's where Elizabeth Warren went off the rails.
She's like suddenly trying to talk like a woke person, which she isn't.
If the conservative media has an opportunity with Biden to really take the high road and to show that what the liberal media did with Trump, they're not going to do with Biden, and just judge him on policy.