Gad Saad and Joe Rogan dissect woke ideology’s absurdity—from "men can get pregnant" claims to the 2002 Stanford dinner where a postmodernist denied biological universals—calling it intellectual terrorism. Saad’s 86-pound weight loss via low-carb discipline contrasts with his critique of health anxiety, while Rogan links systemic corruption (like 4% wrongful death row convictions) to parenting risks, warning against indoctrinating kids before age 25. Both reject consequentialist lies and praise epistemic humility, framing modern ideological battles as parasitic on truth, echoing Aristotle’s principles of responsibility and hard work. [Automatically generated summary]
And so I was just saying, if you really are saying that you want to get healthy and you really are saying that you want to play soccer and do all these things again...
That's a hard one because nobody wants to hear they're gaining weight or they've gained weight or that they have to make radical changes to their life.
So at the end of the day, she says, don't have any snacks.
You're at $1,727 and you were supposed to get under $1,700.
So by having that feedback loop that's always keeping you in check.
So the third thing...
I weigh myself once a week so that the autocorrective mechanism comes in not when I'm now 227 in terms of weight, but if I've come to Texas and then I go on the scale and I've gained three pounds, well, now I know that I need to correct the following week.
So these little changes, I mean, there's nothing magical.
Just doing that I guess if I can add a fourth thing, I removed the all or nothing mindset.
In the past, I mean, the highest weight I reached, Joe, can you, and you won't offend me, can you, from knowing me for many years, do you know how heavy I got?
That's the heaviest that maybe I could have been more, that I'm aware of, that I've actually seen it on the scale, was 256. I had gone for my yearly physical, and I got on the scale, and I was 256, which is the average weight for a 6'4 middle linebacker who's, you know, 8 inches tall, you know, Right, that's scary.
And so I removed the all-or-nothing mindset in that I need to lose all the weight by next Tuesday.
My mindset was, as long as every day I'm a bit better, eventually, you know, the old baby steps thing.
And so I get on, I'm now 10 pounds less, 20 pounds.
Lunch might be my wife and I go to the Peruvian rotisserie place that we probably go to four times in a week, which I'll get a quarter of a chicken with a bit of coleslaw, vinegary coleslaw, not creamy coleslaw.
I might have one or two snacks around mid-afternoon, which might be things like 100 grams of frozen raspberries, a little yogurt of 70 calories, and then dinner will be a fantastic salad that if you looked at the volume, you'd think, my God, how are you losing so much weight?
But it only has five, six ounces of protein, but it's voluminous so that I feel full.
I may have another little snack at 8 o'clock, 70, 80 calories, and I've reached my 15, 16, 1700 calories, and I'm Mr. Slim Man.
I just want to see a 1 and a 6. I haven't reached it.
I've gotten to 170.4.
Last time I checked, I was 171. I just need to see a steady state of 165, 167. Now, the actuarial tables, by the way, for a guy my height, they put me at 155, which strikes me as a bit...
Yeah, those tables, the BMI tables, they don't account for mass and weightlifting, and also you did soccer for many, many years, so you have strong legs.
Yeah, I do 16. I mean, I occasionally violate it if I feel like it, but it's only because I know I can get away with violating it because I'm so consistent.
Yeah, Pressfield talks about that very same approach and he describes the muse as like a thing that will show up when you show up, that if you show up every day with respect to the muse.
He even says a prayer to the muse.
I don't remember if he gives you the prayer, tells you what the prayer is, but he'll sit down and say a thing like out loud to like, you know, to his laptop before he sits down and starts to write.
And then he'll write and he will write for three hours, no matter what.
And he feels like that three hours he starts to fade off and his creativity and his his energy for just the whole process sort of wanes to the point where it's not valuable to keep going.
You know, there is nothing more orgasmic to me, I mean, other than sex, literally, but then then the the process of creation.
There is a day when I open the laptop where that Word document has zero syllables struck.
And 12 months later, 16 months later, there is an entire book that's written that hopefully is going to be consumed by many thousands of people, many of whom are going to send selfies.
And that process is addictive.
And so a lot of academics don't write books.
They tend to focus on the peer-reviewed scientific papers.
You were one of the first people to sound the alarm many years ago.
There's a real problem both in academia and the way students are interacting with ideas and the way people online were interacting with ideas and you were a long time ago saying that there was something going on with people where these these essentially mind parasites It really is what it's like.
And it becomes very hard to debate ideas, and it becomes very hard to talk about subjects objectively and honestly, because some things are triggering, and some things are offensive, and some things are...
It's just like they can just decide.
Like, what cannot be discussed?
Because these things are offensive.
Just like the whole idea of fatphobia.
Like, I was watching this video today, and this woman was talking about how people going on a diet, and she was saying, you don't even know yourself, but going on a diet, you're being fatphobic.
And let me break this down.
And she breaks this down with this pseudo-intellectual nonsense, because I guess she was an educator.
And so here you got this sloppy, overweight, lazy educator telling people that it's good to be lazy because if you're not lazy and if you try to become healthy, then you're a bigot.
We are the only time, this is the only time in this world we're living in in 2022, this era from like whatever it was, maybe 1970, 1980 on, where poor people are fat.
But, you know, so earlier you asked me about how did I lose all the weight.
Well, it's a daily grind to be able to lose it.
It takes a lot of discipline.
Isn't it easier for me to construct an alternate universe that basically says...
That Joe Rogan and my physician saying that I'm overweight is going to reduce my longevity.
They're just part of the fat complex that is trying to marginalize differently-weighted people.
Yeah, differently-weighted.
You like that, huh?
I coined that trademark.
But really, from an ego-defensive perspective, it's a lot easier for me to adopt that ideology than to do the daily grind that's going to require for me to autocorrect, and therefore I buy into fat phobia and I buy into body positivity.
Yeah, the daily grind is legitimately hard, but there's support out there.
The thing that I would say to people that are on the fence, and it's easy to just decide to be body positive, and it's easy to decide to tell everyone you're beautiful no matter what, and to look at someone who's morbidly obese and say, you're amazing.
She was duped into tweeting a made-up quote of an image of an American adult film star dressed up as a doctor.
Most recently, she tweeted that the urine and feces of people who had received the jab needed to be separated from general sewage supplies while tests were done to measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water.
We'll talk about the idea of Ministry of Truth if you want in a second.
But just to finish the point about the beauty myth, she had written a book in the early 1990s where she argued that women are now winning in all facets of life.
And the only place where men can still exert control over women is by promulgating the idea of a beauty myth whereby there are universal standards of beauty And so now women, even though they're not literally chained by the patriarchy, they're chained by those expectations.
And so I had tackled that book in my first book in 2007 as a bunch of gibberish that was part of sort of the victimhood narrative.
When you're around a truly gorgeous woman, it's stunning how people fall in line and they don't know what to do and they stumble over their words and men insult each other in sort of a joking way to try to get a one-up socially over each other in front of the woman.
So you're right that physical beauty, well, we talked earlier about being 500 pounds and somebody telling you, but people should love you the way you are.
All other things equal, any person who doesn't weigh 500 pounds and instead weighs within the normal range is going to improve their looks.
You're not going to turn into Beyonce if you don't have the facial morphology to be gorgeous.
But we can all improve even on things that seem to be immutable, no?
First of all, you've got to think that the reason why someone wants to do that in the first place, the reason why someone wants that exorbitant amount of attention was they didn't get enough when they were young, almost always.
Or they obviously couldn't possibly realize the perks, and maybe that's why they do it.
But for the most part, it's someone that's making up for something that was missing in their childhood.
Then you get them in this bizarre system where you have to audition for everything.
So you have to be chosen.
So you have to bend your personality to whatever you think.
If you went into the average casting agent, if you were the best, if you were Daniel Day-Lewis, and he walked in with a MAGA hat on, they always thought, get the fuck out of here.
They don't want you, because there's a gatekeeper role that's a function of the casting directors and the producers and executives.
It's part of the weirdness of Hollywood.
So that accentuates the crazy in these people.
So you have crazy people, and then they're massively insecure already, and then you have them be chosen.
So then they bend their personality around.
It's like, you know, water finds its way.
You know?
You gotta figure out what do I have to do to get in?
And then, you know...
Look, I've been exposed to that.
I've been around that for decades because I've lived in Hollywood for a long time.
But now that I'm out here, I realize how much better it is to not be around that kind of a community because it shapes...
Everything around it, because you don't realize it, whether you realize it or not.
A lot of the people that are executives in these entertainment companies wanted to be actors, but they just didn't have the talent.
A lot of people were waiters.
They want to be actors.
A lot of people who have zero talent and recognize it, they want to be reality stars.
So they try to be influencers online.
So they try to do...
Like you find out one of your kid's moms is a TikTok lady.
And you're like, oh, Jesus Christ.
And she's doing TikToks and asking to take selfies with you.
Burt Bacharach is arguably the biggest music composer, song composer of the 20th century.
Pop songs that were big hits in the 60s and 70s from the Carpenters, from Diane Warwick, is this, I think he's Jewish, this Jewish guy who you would never imagine could produce this kind of soul if you're going to be stereotypical.
He's now into his 90s.
Check him out.
He even sang himself with Barbra Streisand.
He just seems like one of those old school guys who you could sit with and he's going to tell you stories that are going to blow your mind.
I'm not really too much into celebrities, but if I had to pick two guys I'd like to sit down with, Clint Eastwood, Burt Bacharach.
Well, you have a great podcast, and when you move out of that communist country you're stuck in, maybe you will be able to get those people on your show.
I remember I was actually telling someone earlier this morning, I was meeting with some people from UT Austin and the president of University of Austin earlier today, and I was basically saying that Joe told me long ago when I used to do your show in California, he used to say, Why don't you just move to California and do your podcast?
And I think I told you at the time, well, it's not quite as easy for me.
I'd have to give up my tenure.
But I think at some point, you just have to take the risk and get out of the golden cage that tenure is.
But you're popular online to a point where you have this literature career.
You write.
You do your podcast.
You're...
You comment on things, and you have a very valuable perspective to a lot of people.
At some time, sometimes being connected to an institution, even though it provides you with security, and it's wonderful in terms of the benefits and guaranteed money, That can sort of hold you back.
And I don't know exactly if it is holding you back.
A week ago, I went through a momentary depressive existential crisis on May 2nd, Monday, May 2nd, when it was the deadline to do your taxes.
So I have basically two main sources of income.
One is my professor's salary, and then the other is anything else.
Much of the anything else this past year was the parasitic mind.
The book royalties came in.
And so, you know, I don't make...
$100 million Spotify money.
So the royalties of that book are enough that, oh, now I can buy a home and retire if I wanted in Austin or Florida.
If you take that money from me, now I've got no money.
It's really that different.
So...
How impersonal the exchange was is kind of what hit me as an existential crisis.
I quietly, like a good little boy, entered my password into my bank account.
The box for Quebec government and Canadian government are ticked.
I put in a very large number in each of those two boxes that corresponds to a large majority of the book royalties that are coming from my neuronal firings.
You're not taxing me because I sell cups, which I understand that everybody doesn't want to be taxed.
But this is the most personal form of taxation.
It's a taxation of my personhood.
I'm telling you my story growing up in Lebanon, what happened to us.
I'm sharing with you my experiences as 30 years of a professor.
And the Quebec and Canadian governments say, hey, great job, Dr. Saad.
Yeah, it ends up being about 55. So there's a progressive taxation system.
And at the highest end, it gets about 53, 54. The highest rate for the federal government is 33. The highest rate at the provincial is 25. So I end up with about 58% just on the income that I made.
We didn't get into the sales tax, which is both at the provincial and federal level.
And then all the other, the property tax...
So I'm left with roughly about a third.
Now, it's not as though I discovered taxes yesterday.
I knew about taxes and I've always accepted it.
It's part of the institutionalized scam.
But when it's the money that you had taken ownership over it, because it hadn't been taxed at the source, right?
So that money had gone into my bank account.
It's there.
I'm now feeling as though I've built a little nest egg that can allow me to retire early from Concordia, to move to Austin and hang out with Joe and have my podcast here.
And then very, very coldly, in a dispassionate way, just like a Nigerian prince were speaking to me, I press two buttons and it all goes into a magic cloud.
Really hit me hard.
And I've never been someone who's interested in pecuniary things like money.
I've never cared about it.
But now I do because I do want an exit strategy.
I want to move on to the next stage of my life.
So money does matter.
So when you tax, though, my thoughts, my neuronal firings, my personal history, I can't imagine a higher form of existential rape.
I mean, let me just analogize one more thing.
When you torture someone, say, in a political prison, you will often hear the victim saying, they could torture my body as much as they want, but they could never get my mind.
Well, the Quebec and Canadian government Got my mind.
They said that the proceeds of my writing belongs to them, certainly more than it does to me.
That's an incredible rate of taxation, but I always knew that Canada was really high.
It used to be that Canada was high, but crime was lower.
The United States people were friendlier.
It seems like a great system because you have socialized medicine, you have some sort of a healthcare system up there, although there's a lot of complaints about that as well.
Your education system, it seems like it's more accessible to people to go to college and things like that, so you're contributing into this pile, which is fine.
But then, when you have what's a creepy fucking dictator for a prime minister, and that's what he is, the way he behaves, the way he behaved during this thing, and just the disingenuous way that he communicated, it freaked me out, because I never thought that guy was like that.
But the way he did it was just like, he just cast a pejorative label on them with no evidence.
With no provocation.
It was just like, I'm going to label them this so that I can impose laws to stop them from doing what is essentially a peaceful protest against something that- So let me tell you about the draconian measures we've had in Quebec.
So the first time that I came to the US after COVID was to Texas in December, to San Antonio.
I was at a speaking engagement.
The second one was in Naples, Florida.
And having now habituated so much to being masked under the dictatorship in Quebec and in Canada, it took us a day or two for us to kind of fall into step with everybody in Florida, where I had gone to an event that Dave Rubin had invited me to the first day that I was there, and everybody was unmasked, and yet here were the Canadians who were still masked because we had a difficult time letting it go.
Now, I don't see anybody masked here almost.
But till today, you can't go into a cafe in Montreal and not be masked.
A few months ago, we had a nighttime curfew where after 10 o'clock, you weren't allowed to walk your dog.
Yeah, I mean, this kind of points back to what we were talking about earlier with getting Naomi Wolf off Twitter, this idea of a ministry of truth.
Look, science, as I think you well know and your listeners know, the beauty of science is that it truly is epistemologically humble and that anything that is settled in science is settled with an asterisk.
It is provisionally true.
If in a hundred years someone comes up with compelling evidence that suggests that the theory of evolution is false...
Then, with complete humility, we will go back to the drawing board, right?
So to speak of settled science is literally an epistemological attack on the scientific method.
Nothing is ever settled, even though we now have an overwhelming evidence.
I mean, short of gravity, there's no theory that is as supported as the theory of evolution.
But I always keep in mind open that if tomorrow somebody were to bring down the whole edifice of Darwin, then that's what it is.
So this idea that there is someone, let alone this woman from Joe Biden who was doing the singing.
In a free society, there is always room for racists, imbeciles, idiots, false spreaders to exist.
That's what it means to be true.
And I've said this a million times and I'll say it again on your show.
I'm Jewish, as you know.
There is no greater, more offensive lie that you can say than to deny the Holocaust.
There's nothing more offensive, right?
The most documented historical event that has led to the systematic eradication of a people in the most industry-level way So there's nothing more offensive than to deny it, yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to exist.
I may not invite them on my show because I think that it is fruitless, pointless for us to debate what is in it, but they have a right to exist.
So what does it mean that someone is going to adjudicate misinformation, disinformation?
No, let the autocorrective process of debate and the scientific method decide that.
And I do also agree with you more about Holocaust deniers.
And there's a lot of people that say really ridiculous shit online.
And what we need is people that correct them and do it with a sounder argument and a more convincing argument.
And then you allow people to debate.
What people are concerned with, and I think people have this...
Naive perception about disinformation that there are people out there that are dumber than them and they'll get talked into things that aren't true.
That's what it is.
It's protecting people that are dumber than them because they're not getting sucked into it.
Say if you have a bunch of people that believe the earth is flat.
You know, who are we protecting by not allowing people to make videos about the Earth being flat?
We're protecting morons.
That's it.
Because it's not going to trick you, and it's not going to trick me, and it's not going to trick most people.
And the beautiful thing about someone coming out and saying the world is flat is that other people would say, Actually, they proved the world was around a long time ago and this is how they did it.
Not only that, we have satellites that fucking rotate around the earth and they go very specific miles per hour.
You can actually time them.
You know when they're gonna pass by.
Not only that, We've had satellites that are in space that look back and take photos of Earth.
Not only that, every fucking planet is round.
So the likelihood that Earth is this weird flat thing that's shaped like a Frisbee, while everything is round like a ball, doesn't make any sense, does it?
No.
Well, that's what the process of spreading correct information to counteract this information looks like.
The problem is we have these Election terms and there are like four years right and then every four years a new president gets elected Well, if you could just trick people enough to get someone into office that person could do a lot of damage Yeah, and that's what they're worried about so unfortunately that's
That this thing, this machine of spreading information and also this process of picking a new person every four years, it gives people this sense of urgency, that they have to stop information immediately, right now, which is what led people to make sure that the Hunter Biden story, the laptop story, was removed from Twitter, which is pure insanity.
Pure insanity, because it's a 100% legitimate story.
It's now been substantiated.
It's now being openly discussed in the New York Times and the Washington Post and all these other liberal newspapers.
They wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole before the election for fear that Donald Trump was going to get elected again.
So, through their own fear of this process of truth, that their truth wasn't going to be convincing enough, they decided to censor fact and news and real information.
And they did it for the good of the people that were too dumb.
Look, those people are not going to vote for Donald Trump.
If you look at the hardcore left people in this country, they're not going to vote for Donald Trump just because Hunter Biden is corrupt, and just because it appears that Joe Biden is corrupt as well, and that they were getting bribes from Ukraine, and he did have a job that he was completely unqualified for, and it was paying an exorbitant amount of money, and he was smoking crack.
But the point is, this is all real information that was pertinent to our understanding of who Joe Biden is and who his son is and what kind of business dealings were they involved in.
And shouldn't this demand an examination?
But they wanted Trump out so bad, they decided to censor.
So let me give you the academic analysis of what you just said.
So in ethical systems, there are two systems of ethics.
There's what's called consequentialism, right?
So is it okay for me to lie?
Well, it depends if the consequences of that lie protect someone's feelings.
So for example, if my spouse says, do I look fat in those jeans?
Then I better put on my consequentialist hat really quickly and say, my God, you've never looked better, sweetie, right?
Therefore, in this case, the consequences of the lie are noble, and therefore it's okay to do it.
Deontological ethics operates in the absolute realm.
It is never okay to lie.
Now, the reality is, for most things in life, we typically are consequentialists, and that's fine.
But when it comes to the truth or foundational principles, Then you should be completely deontological.
So let me give you an example.
We both know someone who's been on this show, who maybe remains a friend of yours, less so of mine for reasons that are unrelated to me, who violated deontological ethics when he went on Twitter and...
He celebrated the fact that Jack Dorsey had taken out Donald Trump's Twitter account.
Not that it's literally Jack Dorsey, but he had kind of tagged him.
Thank you, Jack, for doing this.
So what did he do there?
He was a consequentialist.
He violated a deontological principle which says that you never violate a freedom of speech thing.
But in his case, Orange Himmler is so dangerous That if I have to violate this deontological principle only for this one time, then it is worth doing it.
It's not unlike Brett Kavanaugh, right?
What people said, well, sure, he may technically not be a gang rapist when he was 16 going up and down the East Board, raping every single woman in sight.
But the presumption of innocence here doesn't apply because this isn't a court case.
It's only a job interview.
So let's not grant him that courtesy of presumption of innocence because it's too dangerous to have a guy.
So that's where all of those cases come from.
When it comes to truth, when it comes to foundational principles, be deontological.
Yes, and it's so important for the dissemination of information.
It's so important for our collective understanding of what's true and what's not true.
And when you violate that, and as soon as you make these decisions based on ideological principles rather than based on the true desire to understand objectively the facts,
And that's where we find ourselves today, which is grossly highlighted and exaggerated by social media because these echo chambers that people get in and then they seek approval and they seek validity from all these other people that share the same ideology and then they all support each other and they virtual signal to each other and then you develop these bizarre Like,
groups of humans, like, I love following certain people just because I know they're going to tweet ridiculous shit, and then I can go into their little hive mind and look at all these people in their echo chamber agreeing with them.
And some of it is things like men can get pregnant, like that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
It's like, it's crazy.
Like, if you had told me that there was going to be a pregnant man emoji on my iPhone just five years ago, I would have told you to get the fuck Do you remember, I don't know if I've ever said this story on this show, but I think even if I have, it's worth repeating.
So this, of all idea pathogens that I discuss in the book, the granddaddy So social constructivism is an idea pathogen.
Biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs, is a pathogen.
Cultural relativism is a pathogen.
Identity politics, right?
So postmodernism is the granddaddy of all idea pathogens because it removes the most fundamental epistemological premise of reality, which is that there are universal truths that we can regularly count on.
That's the whole premise of science.
There are natural laws that we're trying to discover.
Postmodernism says there is no absolute truth.
Everything is shackled by subjectivity, by personal biases, by relativism.
So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his PhD.
So he calls me and says, you know, or maybe I've called him, whatever, let's go out to dinner to celebrate.
So it was myself, my wife, we didn't have kids then, 2002, 20 years ago.
This is going to speak about your emoji with the pregnant man.
So it's myself, my wife, him, and he's bringing along a date, a female date.
He calls me up to say, I just want to give you a heads up that my date for the evening is a graduate student in postmodernism, women's studies, and cultural anthropology, to which I answered, ah, the holy trinity of bullshit.
LAUGHTER And then I said, okay, I get what you're saying.
You want me to be on my best behavior.
This is about you.
We're celebrating you.
So mom's the word.
You can count on me.
I'm going to be good.
Of course, it was a complete lie.
About halfway through the evening, I turned to the lady in question and I said, you're a postmodernist graduate student.
Yes?
Yes.
Do you mind?
I mean, I'm an evolutionist, evolutionist psychologist, so I do think there are, for example, human universals that we can rely on.
Do you mind if I propose a universal and then you can tell me how I'm an imbecile?
She said, go for it.
I said, is it not true that within Homo sapiens only women bear children?
Is that not a universal?
So she looked at me kind of baffled by my stupidity and said, absolutely not.
I said, no, how is that?
So she said, well, there is some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island whereby within their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear children.
And so by you restricting it to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant.
Having been exposed to her imbecility, I said, okay, well, let me take an example that's perhaps not quite as corrosive and as contentious as only women bear children.
I realized that was too dangerous ground.
Is it not true that since time immemorial, sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
Is that not true?
So there she used a variant strain of postmodernism called deconstructionism.
And the founder is Jacques Derrida, who basically says that there is no reality outside of language.
Language creates reality.
So there she deconstructed She said, what do you mean by east and west?
And what do you mean by the sun?
That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena.
I said, well, fine.
The dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.
And then I see your perplexed face, but that's postmodernism.
Listen, I come from a background in mathematics before I got into the behavioral sciences.
There is no field that is as axiomatically free of your identity bullshit than mathematics.
The distribution of prime numbers is the distribution of prime numbers whether you're Latinx or transgender or two-spirited, right?
Now, about five, six years ago, on my show, I did one of my satirical pieces where I donned a social justice warrior wig with red coloring because, of course, it shows that I'm ideologically fierce if I have blue-haired color or red-haired color.
And I facetiously stated that I was introducing, coining a new field called social justice mathematics.
We don't say the word irrational numbers because that marginalizes mental illness.
I just went through the whole litany of mathematics.
Five, six years later, my prophetic satire catches up.
I mean, reality catches up.
So now we have math is white supremacy.
So why is it that I'm able...
It's not because I'm a prophet.
It's because I have the ability To look for the stupidity where it is and then extrapolate how far you can take that stupidity.
That's what I satirize and then I wait with my arms folded until reality catches up to my satire.
I remember once you very kindly said that you really appreciated that the professor of my standing could be such a regular guy and joke around and so on.
So what I do is I mock the hysteria of the woke people by releasing clips where I'm hiding under the desk because I'm so fearful.
So for example, Donald Trump is inaugurated.
I hide and I literally do it I don't know if my acting is very good, but I pretend that I'm so fearful because I'm satirizing the insane hysteria.
So for example, when he was inaugurated, on my personal Facebook page, you'd have endless professors saying, well, I'm a woman of color.
Will I be able to still go safely on campus now that he's been elected?
Well, what do you think?
There's going to be militia roadblocks where they veer the women of color to gang rape centers?
Like, what kind of hysterical response is that?
I mean, you don't like Donald Trump?
Fine.
But it's not going to lead to the eradication of professors of color.
And so I have a whole series of clips where I feign hysterical fear hiding under the desk.
The most recent one might have been, or one of the recent ones, I think you'll enjoy the story, So my wife and I go to a cafe every morning after a one-hour walk.
The barista that was serving her looked like a transgender person.
So she came to me as we were waiting for our order to be delivered to us.
And she said, you know, I felt quite...
I didn't want to make an error in how I was addressing the person because, you know, I didn't know should I... And so I put out a tweet that was meant to be a testimony to how sensitive and kind and empathetic my wife is, that she was very, very concerned to not get the address wrong.
It was meant to be something aligned with the pronoun Taliban, right?
But it turns out, about 28 million tweet impressions later over two days, All egged by Valerie Bertinelli, because somehow she's an ally to the LGBT community, so she came after me.
And so I tweeted about it as a measure of how lovely my wife is, that she was so concerned.
So, I mean, literally millions of tweets of hate.
Now, of course, if I were Drew Brees, I would have gone on the record apologizing for having exhibited patriotism towards the flag, and I didn't know that the U.S. flag hurt some of my colleagues.
I'm a honey badger.
I don't apologize to anybody.
But what I did is I released a satirical under the desk clip where I said that all of the stuff that I faced in the Lebanese civil war from Islamic extremists is nothing as scary as the pronoun Taliban.
That got them more angry.
And I just kept egging them on and on till they went away.
Look, I don't have any problem with someone who has gender dysphoria.
I wish that everyone was happy.
I wish everyone, whatever clothes you wear, whatever name you like, whatever...
Identity you choose, it doesn't bother me.
What bothers me is when you enforce it on other people and then you promote it.
And then you make it seem as if it's more...
For young kids, I've had conversations with kids that are in high school, and one kid was like, it's not just tolerated, it's preferred and rewarded and you're looked down on if you're heterosexual.
Like, he has friends that are queer, and he has friends that are...
This is...
One of the things we were talking about, he was saying that there's people that just claim non-binary.
And you can get away with non-binary and still have sex with girls and date girls, but you just call yourself non-binary, and you can say, I'm a they-them.
And as long as you don't dress with, like, tank tops and, you know, fucking yoga shorts...
And so where it's really obvious you're male, you can get away with it.
It was the weirdest conversation because I was like, what is it like in school these days?
And he was like, man, I know so many trans people.
And I go, are they really trans?
He goes, I don't know.
He goes, some of them are being trendy for sure.
And a lot of them, it's girls that they didn't fit in before.
Perhaps they have...
They're awkward socially or whatever, and then they decide to be either non-binary or trans, or they don't want to specify, or they come up with some other gender, or they're pansexual is another one, which is like, I guess you're attracted to everybody.
So that speaks, by the way, to the earlier point where we talked about deontological ethics versus consequentialism.
Look, both you and I, I think, are very socially liberal.
So I support transgender rights in the strongest of ways.
everybody should live free of bigotry and so on.
In the pursuit and defense of that noble goal, I don't have to murder truth as a consequence of that.
So it's the same thing, for example, with equity feminism versus radical feminism.
Equity feminism is the idea that both sexes should be equal under the law.
By that standard, both you and I are strong equity feminists. - Absolutely. - On the other hand, When it becomes a problem is that in the service of that goal, we end up creating the premise that men and women are interchangeable, indistinguishable, that all differences between men and women must be due to social construction and other idea pathogen.
So we're murdering truth for a higher noble goal.
No, I never cede one millimeter of truth for any goal.
I have to be deontological in the defense of truth.
When we choose Navy SEALs, we're choosing them based on certain traits.
They have to be courageous.
They have to be physically fit.
They have to have bravery.
So imagine if we were to choose our professors in a way that we're not only choosing them based on their IQ, but on intellectual Navy SEAL-ness, if you'd like.
I mean, on Navy SEAL-ness and their intellectual courage, right?
As a matter of fact, most professors are invertebrate castrated individuals.
So they don't have a spine, nor do they have testicles.
Irrespective of whether they're male or female.
So they may have all the intelligence in the world.
As a matter of fact, all of these parasitic ideas originally were spawned by professors.
So being intelligent and educated does not inoculate you against stupidity, since many of the ones who originated those ideas are the anointed professors.
What they don't have is intellectual courage.
And so actually on this trip that I'm meeting you here, I've met some folks that are associated with University of Texas, Austin, and now the new University of Austin, that not only do we share intellectual affinity, but more importantly, we share intellectual courage metrics.
That's what is required to change the system.
You know, history is not shaped by fence-sitters.
It takes bold people, intellectually bold people, and we certainly don't choose our professors based on that trait.
No, I think that's a great point, that intellectual courage should be a requirement, and that it should be something that we celebrate and cherish and reward people for, based on an objective analysis of truth.
Exactly.
Because there are facts.
There are some things.
And like you said, saying that someone who's a biological male cannot bear children is just a fact.
It's just a fact.
And if you deny that, that's cowardice.
You're just scared of the crowd.
You're not denying that it takes a double X chromosome and a womb and eggs, and eggs fertilized by sperm inside this viable womb in order for you to conceive and ultimately give birth to a child out of your vagina.
But no, they're teaching people...
There was a story about a university that is...
Facetiously teaching people how a biological man would give birth out of his penis.
This is the ultimate cowardice, the ultimate intellectual cowardice.
Because they're so terrified of the madness of the crowds, as Douglas Murray would put it, that they're literally saying, well, when a man gets pregnant, the baby must come out of his penis.
Are you teaching people this?
Like, you're out of your mind!
It's unbelievable.
But this weird place that we find ourselves in where truth is not as important as adhering to these ideological principles that are clearly inaccurate.
But the reason why they're parasitized in this way is because they're trying to adhere to a higher noble goal, which is Don't hurt someone's feeling.
Don't attack their personhood.
Celebrate their personhood.
So again, we go back to consequentialism.
If I have to murder truth so that I appear empathetic and loving and accepting of all people, goodbye truth, it was nice knowing you.
That's wrong.
I can chew gum and walk at the same time.
I could be very socially conscious, as I think I can speak for both of us, but I am a dogged defender of the truth, and I will never concede an inch of the truth in the pursuit of not hurting your feelings.
I remember one time on a previous show, and I actually took that quote in this book, where you said, but if you pursue forbidden knowledge in your research and it hurts someone's feelings, what then?
There's a lot of people that get offended by things very easily, and if we start catering to them, we're not going to get anything done.
There's people that get offended by alarm clocks.
They don't want to have to be somewhere on time, because they're offended by the idea that they don't need as much rest as you do, or you need less rest than that, whatever the fuck it is.
The point is that anything can fall into that category as something that hurts your feelings.
If you have more money than the next person, that could hurt their feelings.
You should have less money, and we should have even distribution of income.
It's called Quebec.
Yeah, well, yeah.
Well, that's the dangers of quality of outcome, right?
So let me apply what you just said in the context of, you know, when you do research in a university, you first have to send it to an institutional review board or an ethics board, right?
That ensures that the research that you will do adheres to certain ethical principles, right?
So now let me give you the historical background to this and then tell you how insane it has become.
So in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which has been referred to as sort of the golden era of social psychology, you could damage a person's sense of self in the pursuit of science, but there was no ethical oversight over that because it was for the betterment of science.
So let me give you an example of that.
Suppose I bring you into the lab.
This is, let's say, in the 1960s.
I'm going to do what's called a false feedback paradigm.
I'm going to ask you to do an IQ test, and I'm going to falsely give you one of two experimental conditions.
I'm going to say, hey, Joe, you scored in the 99th percentile of the most intelligent people, and then I'm going to see how you solve a math problem based on this glowing feedback.
Or I'm going to say, oh, Joe, based on this IQ test, you basically score lower than a newborn pigeon.
Oh, okay, never mind.
Let's move on to the math test, right?
So I'm giving you false feedback, either glowing or not, and then I'm seeing how it affects your performance on some subsequent task.
Well, now, after you finish the experiment, I debrief you, right?
I say, actually, it was wrong.
It was false.
I just randomly put you in this condition.
We didn't even do an IQ test.
Now, this, by the more recent standards of ethics, which is still fine, would be considered unethical because even if I now tell you I was not truly giving you an IQ test, You'll walk away not knowing for sure whether what I just said is untrue, right?
So did he now tell me that I'm not a newborn pigeon because he's just trying to assuage my feelings, but I truly am dumb as a doorknob?
So it made sense that at some point we erected some ethical mechanisms to make sure that people were not damaged.
But now we've taken that to your earlier point.
To such an extreme whereby I can't ask you, are you male or female?
I have to have a 740 page list of all the different possibilities.
I can't ask you about your cultural background because I'm going to offend you.
I can't ask you about your income because that marginalizes maybe some people who don't have good income.
So basically, I can't ask you anything on an experimental study or a survey because there is no way by which there isn't going to be some road by which some participant may or may not be offended.
So now when I go through these ethical review processes, that's probably the thing that causes me more stress than actually conducting the study because I know I have to jump through 900 hoops before some moron says, okay, you're now cleared to do your studies.
And it seems like the academic world rewards this sort of intellectual cowardice.
Like, if you comply, then you're a part of this group, you're a part of this system, and you're allowed to continue spreading bullshit and getting a check for it.
And then your new coming group, your incoming students from the 2023 year and 2024 year of the freshman class, they're going to be more extreme.
With each year, they're going to get more things are going to be on the list of offensive topics, offensive answers, offensive reactions.
And it makes me wonder where this is going because this is accelerating.
This is not slowing down.
And even though there's a lot of people like yourself and myself who are older who realize how preposterous this is, the young people don't.
And they seem to think that not only is this better, that it's required in order to make the world a better place.
I'm hearing from a lot of teachers, meaning teachers at the high school level and so on, who write to me and say, my latest batch of students strike me as being less woke than previous generations, as if now the fulcrum is starting to shift.
So I don't have incontestable empirical evidence, but I'm increasingly hearing that we've kind of reached the singularity, peak wokeness.
So Christopher Ruffo is a guy who came out of nowhere, was a journalist, who became the kind of central repository of all things anti-critical race theory.
He's a journalist.
And now he has spearheaded.
It was a serendipitous thing.
He had never planned on being an anti-CRT activist, but through the serendipity of life, he has become sort of the honey badger of anti-CRT. And now there's all kinds of battles that are being won by parents who are finding their spine, who are going to these school board meetings, who are saying, I'm tired of this bullshit, right?
And so it doesn't take much for people to be ignited and find their courage.
And so I'm getting the sense, again, this is just from the trench that I'm, you know, the reports that I'm getting, that more and more people are now willing to speak out.
It's a domino effect, right?
This one speaks out, so I speak out.
And so my feeling is that if we're able to ignite the silent majority into speaking, as you know, The blue-haired Taliban are a minority.
It's not as though there is millions of them on every campus.
They're just very vocal, very committed.
They have the ear of the administration.
So very few committed people can keep the rest of us in check.
Most people are not on board with all that nonsense.
And I receive millions of emails that attest to that.
So there's all kinds of little evidence that's coming out to suggest that we might have reached peak wokeness and we're going to, you know, there are now a lot of institutions that are trying to position themselves as a bit less woke.
And, you know, the University of Chicago Declaration, the Princeton...
So my feeling is maybe I'm being too optimistic.
I think we've reached the maximum of the parasitic infestation and may reason rain again.
Yeah, he is now, and he was the first openly gay, but at the time he was not open.
So anyway, Barney Frank, who's this brilliant man in my high school, is debating this guy, and I found it fascinating because I got a chance to see two different perspectives, and Barney Frank was just much better.
He was just more rational, more well-read, and the other guy was sort of this cookie-cutter, rah-rah, conservative, God, liberty, justice for all, that kind of shit.
He was reading off of a playbook, whereas Barney Frank had a much more nuanced and much more convincing perspective, and it was great.
It was great because me and all these other kids that were 14, 15 years old got to sit in this class and watch these two people debate.
Now today you can't have that.
You can't have that.
The other guy who thinks that abortion is against God and that homosexuality should be outlawed, and that was like one of his perspectives, his anti-homosexual perspective, which was ironic because Barney Frank is gay, but nobody knew that.
But when that all took place, it was very beneficial.
And beyond the philosophical arguments for why we should have open debate, let's link it to your personal reality.
The Joe Rogan show is in large part popular, other than your infinite charisma and so on, is because of...
I'm undoubtedly sure that you score very high on the open-mindedness trait, right?
And it is that open-mindedness that created this, quote, safe space of deferring ideas.
That's what resonates with people.
Today you can bring Gad Saad, and tomorrow you can bring someone who is completely anti-Gad Saad, and you'd have a great conversation with both, and people reward you for that with a big Spotify deal.
So there are even very concrete, earthly, non-philosophical reasons to be Open-minded.
Now, when I have someone from the right on, whether it's Dan Crenshaw or Ben Shapiro, I get accused of being a fake left-wing person, a fake progressive.
I get all this hate and you moved to Texas and you became a fucking, you're red state and all.
It's only he's captured by the right.
He doesn't even realize it.
It's hilarious.
The mental gymnastics people will go through, even if I argue with them, even if I have them on and I don't agree with what they're saying about many things.
It's actually in my, forgive the shameless plug, my next, my next, this is not this book.
This is the next book.
The next book which I'm just finishing wrapping up.
It's tentatively titled A Recipe for the Good Life.
And so I look at all different metrics that have been studied relating to well-being and happiness and I infuse it with personal anecdotes.
So at one point I talk about, does political ideology affect your well-being and your happiness?
And so I look at the literature and a lot of the literature finds that conservatives score higher on happiness, to your point, score higher on happiness and well-being as compared to the liberals.
And they really are conservationists because they actually contribute financially.
The vast majority of the money that goes to wildlife habitat conservation, that goes to wildlife biologists, it goes to making sure the populations of wild animals are healthy, vast majority comes from hunters.
So people who buy ammunition, firearms, people who are just gun enthusiasts who never hunt, they contribute...
Find out what the exact amount is.
I believe it's 10%.
So 10% of this act goes to conservation of wildlife habitat.
It goes to setting up these structures to make sure that these wetlands are preserved for migrating birds and all these animals that require certain populations in order to be healthy.
They'll either import new animals into these areas.
Or they will cull some of them so they'll increase the amount of tags that are available.
All that is paid for by hunters.
By hunters.
By people that are trying to shoot the animals and eat them.
There's a few that are liberal that become concerned with regenerative farming, and then some of them become vegetarians, but their body doesn't go well with it.
It's like they have problems with their health.
And so then they reluctantly start reintroducing meat, but they want to do it in an ethical manner.
So then they start hunting.
That's happened to quite a few friends that I have that are liberal, but that do hunt.
So the most balanced in this particular study I have in mind, which is probably the most exhaustive one that's been done, engineering was 1.6 to 1. Now, 1.6 to 1 is actually very lopsided according to the metrics of stats.
You know, I mean, there's something called the odds ratio when you're calculating the efficacy of a drug.
If you get 1.2 to 1, that means the drug is effective.
It's 20% more effective.
So 1.6 to 1 is already quite lopsided.
That's the least.
You start getting into 5 to 1, 10 to 1, 15 to 1, 30 to 1. And then as you get into the more activist fields, it turns into 60 to 1, 120 to 0. So again, it's not that there is anything inherently less scientific about sociology.
Sociology could be as scientific as physics.
The problem is that sociology is more prone to be parasitized by ideology, whereas physics is less prone.
So the pursuit of these disciplines either makes them more amenable to adhere to the scientific method or less.
So oftentimes people, again, to go to an earlier point, people think that I am denigrating sociology as a lesser than.
No.
As a matter of fact, it's probably harder to study social systems involving human beings than to study the chemical structure of a particular compound in chemistry that is a lot more deterministic.
So there is nothing unscientific about the endeavor of sociology.
What makes it unscientific is that it doesn't adhere to the scientific method.
It becomes an activist field rather than a scientific field.
So if we can get rid of the activism and leave it out of the university, we'll get rid of a lot of this bullshit.
It's just stunning for a person who's not an academic to see so much intellectual, ideological capture that's involved in so many of these disciplines.
In the 76 years since its inception, over $7 billion has been collected from manufacturers and has been made available to states, including over $106 million in Mississippi, this partnership of hunters and sport shooters with firearms and ammunition.
By far, America's largest contributor to wildlife conservation and public access to our natural resources.
So if you were to ask people their perceptions of which of the two parties is more committed to environmentalists, I'm willing to bet that almost everybody would say it's the Democrats, right?
Well, the thing about hunting in particular that I think leads it to be very high, it's not just the use of guns, which is of course that alone, just firearm laws and regulations, like the people on the left overwhelmingly want to restrict those because it's part of the ideology.
But it's also the hard work.
Hunting is very difficult, especially mountain hunting.
I would imagine that the people that do elk hunting and the people that do the real high mountain stuff, it's overwhelmingly conservative people.
It's fucking hard, man.
There's no equity in hunting.
You have to fucking put in the work.
And if you're a part of a hunting party and everybody only eats if you do your work, you know, you can't say, you know, you're being fat phobic.
Like, no, you have to get up and fucking go.
And if you're 100 pounds overweight, people are going to look at you like you're a problem for the rest of the tribe.
The fact that we have gotten to a place where there's so much comfort and so much leisure time and people are so protected and insulated by the overwhelming amount of resources that we have that you can make that argument that it's okay to be fat and it's okay to be body positivity.
Well, clearly when you get healthier, you're enjoying it even more because you're seeing the fruits of your labor.
But also, once you get going, once your body starts sweating, effort feels good.
Especially when you do it and then you have those breaks in between sets where you get to take some deep breaths.
And you realize, all right, I did these things that I thought were really difficult to do.
Like if I said, I'm going to do 50 burpees, and I do 50 burpees.
Like, you did it!
And that little reward for hard work and for effort, that's very important for people.
And especially in this world that we live in, where we have these bodies that were designed to run away from predators and fend off invaders, and they don't get any fucking use at all.
You just sit down at a chair.
And when you do that, you get depressed and you feel that anxiety, like, gee, I wonder why.
When people tell me they're anxious, oh, I have anxiety, I have anxiety, okay, do you also have exercise?
You don't have exercise.
Well, what a coincidence.
You don't have exercise.
And then the thing that you get when you don't exercise is prevalent, which is anxiety.
Exercise.
Rigorous, hardcore exercise is clinically proven to be better than SSRIs for dealing with depression.
They've shown better results for anxiety for people who exercise vigorously than almost anything.
Other than like just fucking hardcore benzodiazepines, which are very difficult to kick.
Now, what I'm about to say next is completely speculative because I've often tried to introspect as to, you know, what caused that particular episode.
And it kind of relates back to our earlier comment about, you know, how I lost weight.
So something that I suffered from, not in a clinical sense, but I'm very health anxious in that, you know, because I'm punctilious, because I'm perfectionist, I always worried is something looming in the background.
And of course, once I'm overweight...
It's a lot more looming in the back, and it could be around the corner, right?
And so, as I was losing weight, but I had never gone to see a physician for several years, I was always ruminating about the possibility that once I see my physician for the first time in three years since I last got my checkup, could there be something that ends the party that I'm on?
Could there be a result, right?
And as we were driving to go to get the chicken, And again, I'm speculating, but it makes sense.
I saw a bus sign ad in the back of the bus, like city bus, that said, you know, could you recognize the signs of a stroke if it's happening?
And so I think I literally internalized it, got the panic attack.
By putting it to myself, developed the symptoms of a panic attack that mimic these kinds of things.
And I said, that's it.
I'm about to die in front of my chill.
And it just gets worse and worse and worse, right?
So for anybody who's listening out there, there is hope that you could never have it again.
Well, I will speculate as well, and I think that completely makes sense, and also I think it makes sense that you finally doing something about your health and losing weight makes you also anxious about the fact that it took you so long to do it, and what kind of damage have you done in the process?
Because when you were 86 pounds heavier, which is so crazy for me to say, I can't believe you were actually 86 pounds heavier, but that's how you were when I met you.
It's very hard to change habits because we get ingrained in these patterns in our head, whether they're good or bad.
And one of the things that I could say, like people say, oh, it must be hard for you to exercise every day.
I'd be like, I don't think it's not.
Nah, it's not really.
No, it's hard when you haven't been exercising to start.
Once you have momentum, it's not that hard.
It's like when people say, Joey Diaz said this, Joey's a very wise man, and one of the things he said about stand-up comedy, he said, it's the hardest, easiest thing you'll ever do.
Because when he's on, when that guy's on, he, in my opinion, is the funniest guy that's ever lived.
And when he's on, I've seen a lot of great comedians, and like, you know, there's great, great comedians that are live today, but no one makes me laugh like that guy.
And when he's on, it's effortless.
It's effortless.
He's just in the groove.
But getting there required decades and hard work and writing and performing and constantly experimenting with how to deliver material and how to do it correctly.
Once you've got it though, then it's just about maintaining it.
That's why you see the great ones like Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle.
They're constantly working.
They're constantly going at it.
If they had to start over from scratch as a beginner, as an open-miker, that's hard.
That's why I'm very encouraging of young, up-and-coming comedians, or even old.
I don't give a fuck what age you start.
People who are just starting out in comedy.
I'm very encouraging of them because I want them to know, like, hey, man, we all suck in the beginning.
It is a hard grind, but it is a beautiful fraternity of people.
And if you can make it in this community, if you can get to a point where you're funny, you will have a really enjoyable life.
I've done a few of them, and I haven't done one in a while, but everyone does it differently.
Some people write everything in joke form, and they think in joke form.
Tony Hinchcliffe is one of my favorite comedians, a good friend of mine.
He writes in joke form, and he thinks in joke form.
He's the guy, if something happens, if Jamie says something, and Tony has this sly look on his face, I always look at him, and he'll have the perfect line.
He's like the best off-the-cuff guy I've ever met.
And he hosts this show called Kill Tony that's on Monday nights on YouTube.
and the beautiful thing about that show is complete amateurs and Professionals and you know they all throw their name into a hat and he reaches in and pulls a name out and that person will go on stage Live on YouTube and in front of hundreds of thousands of people that are gonna watch
watch it and they'll do one minute of stand-up comedy and then Tony will either encourage them or mock them or they try to find humor in it but it's all in good spirits and it's all in good in good fun and in that takes courage Yeah, it does take courage.
But my point was that his specific style of writing is very different than mine, which is I either get an idea and I write it down or put it in my phone or I write in essays.
So I write essays where I just like a subject, like...
Yeah, if you looked at my notes, you'd be like, this guy's fucking terrible.
But the thing is, I'm not writing down the things that I think are good.
I'm just writing.
So I'm trying to let my mind find the things that are good.
So as I'm talking about a subject, I'm just...
So, if that's true, then why is this?
And then like, aha, I got something.
And then I'll pull that aside, and then I'll try to figure out a clever intro to that, and then maybe I'll try it the other way, and maybe I'll start with the premise first, or maybe I'll start with the pun.
I mix it up.
But I find that my best writing is when I write in just an essay form, and then extract And are you trying to write every day?
Yeah, I write basically every day.
I do something every day.
Every day.
I mean, I'll take a day off, but I feel like if I don't sit down every day and review my notes and go over my material, I feel like I'm doing it myself a disservice because there's so many bits that I have that are in my act that have been on comedy specials that I've done that just came from sitting down and writing.
Some of them came from nowhere.
Like, some of them came from nowhere.
You know, like I was with a friend of mine once.
And we were talking, and she was laughing about this overweight woman who had all this makeup on and this short dress, and she was looking at this crazy image of this woman, and she goes, what is she thinking?
I go, I'll tell you exactly what she's thinking.
She's just letting everybody know, it's not the best ride.
Sometimes I'll run it by Tony or one of my friends and I'll have an idea.
But most of the time I run it on the stage.
So most of the time, like I've been doing this Johnny Depp Amber Heard chunk.
And I've got two different versions.
So Friday night I did two sets in Phoenix.
I did one version of it the first set and a different version of it the second set.
Just trying to figure out.
And so it's baby legs, obviously, because the trial just started.
I need to figure out if it's even going to work.
It gets laughs, but I'm like, you always have to realize that if something gets laughs and it's in the news right now, it doesn't mean it's really good.
It could be that they're just reacting to it because they want to laugh at this crazy fucking trial.
It doesn't necessarily mean the material's good.
So you can't rely on the moment being novel, right?
Like there's this moment and everybody's excited about this moment and they're all aware of it so they're tuned into it.
It's got to be good a year from now, right?
Where it's like, if you had to do a joke tomorrow about someone like Brett Kavanaugh being inducted into the Supreme Court, it's got to be good a year from now.
The combination of these two results in what's called an inverted U-shape, okay?
So I'm wondering how we would apply that principle, let's say, to the feeling of novelty that you as the comedian experience when you deliver that joke, right?
The first time you say it, it's exciting.
The 73rd time that you say it during your tour...
Are you able to deliver it with as much spice and spunk, or are you entering as the deliverer of the message the negative tedium of the curve?
So of all the, I don't think I've ever asked you this, so you've got many hats, you've got this show, you've got the MMA, you do other things, you do stand-up.
If there is one that I told you you must choose as the one, is it a fair question to ask you that?
I definitely wouldn't want to choose because I think one of the things that I really like is that they all complement each other.
They complement each other as well.
Like doing MMA for instance.
One of the things about it, first of all, I love the sport and it's a great honor for me to be able to do commentary for the UFC and it means a lot to me and it always means a lot to me.
I never take it casually.
I always take it very seriously.
I'm never funny.
Like I'm not cracking jokes.
I'm not trying to be funny.
I mean, if something funny comes up, that's fine, but my job is to explain what's happening and to put color to...
I'm literally a color commentary guy.
That's helped by comedy, because I talk live all the time.
So when I'm at the UFC, and millions of people are watching, and the light goes on, and the camera's pointed at me, and I have to explain what's going on, I have zero feeling of, oh my god, oh, these people are watching, because people are always watching me.
They're watching me when I do this, they're watching me when I do stand-up, and I'm well aware when I stumble my words, I'm well aware when things don't come out the way I wanted it to, where I'm searching for the correct sentence and it doesn't really fit right, whether I'm not warmed up enough.
Because there is an intellectual warm-up process, and I'm sure you're aware of that too, that feeling.
So they complement each other.
All three things complement each other.
Podcasting is complemented by stand-up, because stand-up is the most difficult of the three.
Stand-up is you don't get a chance to redo it.
You can't say, actually what I meant to say is this.
There's so much wiggle room in podcasting, which is probably the easiest.
Podcast is probably the easiest.
And then stand-up is the hardest.
And MMA, it's easy with a caveat.
It's easy for me because I'm a massive fan and I watch fights constantly.
I'm always watching them on YouTube.
And this is something that's been a passion of mine my entire life.
So from the time I was a boy up until now, I've never not followed combat sports.
I've never not watched all the big fights.
I've never not paid attention.
I've never not trained.
I've never not...
So it's easy for me to plug into it because it means a lot to me.
But if someone was just applying it as a job, Say if you didn't give a shit about MMA, but you're like, you know what would be good?
If I was an MMA commentator.
MMA's really popular.
Maybe I should become one of those.
I'm not into training.
It's not a part of my life, but I'm just going to learn a lot about it.
Good luck.
That shit would take decades.
And you're gonna get things wrong.
People are gonna get so mad at you.
You're gonna say the wrong name for a kick.
Or you're gonna give the wrong advice about the way they need to position their feet or the way they need to move.
You're gonna fuck it up.
And then the people that know are gonna be so mad.
One of the things that I'm very fortunate that I have that job.
There's not a moment when I'm watching a great fight where I'm pretending.
I am fucking 100% tuned into that.
They know I'm one of them.
So when I'm talking about technique or I'm talking about style matchups and what's fascinating about it, they know I'm 100% genuine.
If you're just a sports guy and you're bullshitting, we've had a few of those, sports guys who come in and try to add sports guy terminology that they might use for baseball or for football or what have you, and they try to apply that to MMA, MMA people get mad.
They get mad.
Because it's a more personal form of competition.
It's more personal, more intense.
It's like you're literally putting your health on the line.
If you're like you are, where you know so much about psychology, you know so much about the mind, you know so much about the way people think and why they think and what the evolutionary basis for those things are, you can enlighten people in a way that they can just accept your knowledge because they know that you're being honest.
So in the next book that I'm doing, The Recipe for a Good Life, of course I get into the history of all sorts of cultures that have explored the good life.
It's not as though I'm the first guy to write about this.
Probably one of the topics that's been most written about.
None have been as prolific as the ancient Greeks.
And so when I saw your thing about Marcus Aurelius, I was about to write you to say, well, I've come to that same realization.
So as I was doing my research for the book...
Every time I would get an insight that I thought was original to me, I'd say, that fucker Epictetus has already said it 2,000 years ago.
Because he was so wise and his decisions for what he would concentrate on and not concentrate on and how he would accept people's flaws and mistakes that they'd made as if they had never made them and this just approach to stoicism and his philosophy on life.
The Greeks and the Romans, and if you look at the history of these ancient civilizations that dominated the world at that period of time, we can get a kind of an understanding of how they thought about things.
It's, to me, one of the more amazing things about history is to peer It's almost like we have a little bit of a time machine to peer into the mindset of these people that were so wise thousands and thousands of years ago and that their words are applicable today.
Well, I mean, that speaks to the universality of the human condition, right?
So I always tell my students when I'm teaching about evolutionary theory, I say, look, you can use cultural products as fossils of the human mind, right?
The human mind doesn't fossilize.
But the products that is left from human minds, we can study its contents in the same way that paleontologists study fossil remains.
So I can connect to the mind of an ancient Greek poet and understand what he's talking about as though he's speaking today.
Because the software that's running his mind and mine is identical.
He doesn't know what an iPhone is.
He doesn't know what a podcast is.
But he knows about sexual longing.
He knows about paternity uncertainty.
He knows about sibling rivalry.
Those are the universal themes that are invariant across time and place.
And so one of the things that I love about being an author is that I get to be connected through ideas with all of these immortal souls, you know?
And so it's really a beautiful thing to write and to create and that...
The fact that I independently thought of something that Epictetus thought 2,000 years ago connects me with him.
It's just you developed an understanding of human beings and of human nature and you have deciphered from this and extracted some truth and it turns out other people have done the same thing.
You know, there's a great book called The Immortality Code.
And it's Brian Mororescu who has gone through ancient Greek culture and all of the Ulyssidian mysteries and looked into all of their rituals and tried to figure out what was going on.
And one of the things that they've done is going over pottery.
And finding that there's remnants of psychedelic substances in these pottery jars.
And so these wine jars, these jugs as pottery, they found that they were imbibing in wine that was dosed with lysergic acid.
So they had different kinds of ergot and different kinds of things that would produce psychedelic states.
So all of these, you know, when people would go there to learn and when people would go to have these ritualistic experiences, they were tripping.
And this is the birthplace of democracy.
This is the birthplace of a lot of these thinkers, these great thinkers of, you know, that age.
And of course, Roman emperors forbade it, and they outlawed it, and in the book they sort of detail how it migrated to other countries, and you can find the same remnants in the pottery in these other countries, and you can literally track the path of their escape from these areas where they were more restrictive and trying these ritualistic experiences in other places.
So earlier you said that everything that I do, I do it out of love.
If I stop enjoying it, I won't do it.
So in The Recipe for the Good Life, I talk about the two decisions that you'll make in your life that are most likely to either impart great happiness or great misery on you.
Number one, choosing the right spouse.
Number two, choosing the right job or profession.
Because most of your waking time is going to be spent either with your family or at your job.
And if either or both of those impart you great happiness, you're well on your way to living a happy life.
And so in your case, you've ticked off the...
I mean, you probably live the most desired life in terms of a pursuit that most people desire to be in your, right?
Because you're completely free.
You're not bound to anyone.
You do exactly what you want, when you want, right?
So what would be, if it came to choosing the right spouse, you've been married for a long time so that Have you met my wife before?
You have to be someone who a good person would want to be with.
That's a big one.
There's a lot of people that want this amazing spouse, they want an amazing husband, they want an amazing wife, but they're not amazing.
Who the fuck are you to get that person?
I don't mean worthy as in a human being.
I mean worthy in your behavior, your tenacity, your discipline, your passion.
You have to be fun to be around.
You have to be a giver.
You have to be someone who enjoys being around you.
So when you're on a date with that person, when you first meet them, they like you.
They have fun.
You like them.
It's mutually beneficial.
Everybody wants to be desired, but nobody wants to be compatible.
Nobody wants to be generous.
Those are not things that people aspire to.
People don't aspire to being cordial.
They don't aspire to being warm and friendly and loving and humorous.
But that's what people like.
Everybody wants to be the baller at the club with the champagne, the big gold chains.
But that's just fucking bullshit.
That's what you see from the outside.
You want to be the person who's on stage where everybody cheers and they see your face.
That's on the outside.
What you want to be is someone who people like genuinely.
Like as a person.
Not the image of you, but who you fucking really are.
They have to know you.
So if you don't know yourself, and if you're not honest with yourself in terms of your discipline, your work ethic, the way you treat your friends, the way you treat strangers, the way you are, your personality.
If you're not working on that, you're never going to attract a valuable mate.
You're never going to attract someone who is...
Someone who's desirable, someone who you want to be around.
Why would they want to be around with you?
There's people out there that are working harder than you.
There's people out there that are nicer than you.
There's people that are there that are more friendly than you.
That's attractive.
If a woman's on a date with a man and the man's rude to the waitress...
So I told you I always go for long walks with my wife to get to the cafe in the morning.
And so one day we were stopped by one of my daughter's friend's father who came up to us.
He's a photographer.
And we stopped by to say hello.
And he said, do you mind if I ask you a question, Gad?
I said, sure.
He goes, how do you do it?
I said, do what?
What are you asking?
He goes...
Every single day I see you walking on this thing, you're arm in arm with your wife, and you're kind of lost in conversation.
You're both very serene and happy.
I said, well, I don't have a recipe.
I really just enjoy her company.
She's my best friend.
It sounds cliche-ish, but that's really what it is.
I'd rather be with my wife more than anyone else on most days that I exist than Now, I don't know if there is a recipe to find that person, but if you do find that person, hang on tight.
The second thing, if I'm going to get more scientific, it turns out that for long-term marital success, there are two competing maxims, birds of a feather flock together or opposites attract.
Opposites attract is great for short-term mating, right?
I tend to be extroverted.
You are introverted.
Maybe that complements each other for a little sexual dalliance behind the bushes.
But on the other hand, for long-term marital success, you want assortative mating, birds of a feather flock together on which traits, on shared values.
Do you, because of your fame and so on, are you...
Not defensive, but are you guarded in bringing new people into your inner circle, always wondering if there is an ulterior motive to why this person...
Do you have the mechanism to be able to adjudicate that?
Because a lot of people are trying to be friends with Joe Rogan, and I need to make sure that you're not a pretender, a user, and someone who's being instrumental in your...
I mean, there's some genuine sociopaths that wind up being cult leaders and shit like that, but eventually you see it.
Eventually you see it.
Just don't let them all the way in.
But you get it by just the way they talk.
When you're full of shit, one of the things about being a liar or being someone who is dishonest or is acting, you're acting like you're someone who you're not, is you're not good at recognizing that in other people.
Well, they either can't read people or they are so biased that they're looking for, like when people were talking about Joe Biden, like Joe Biden's State of the Union.
Defense lawyers are ethically bound to zealously represent all clients, including those they believe will justly be found guilty, as well as those they believe are factually innocent.
A strenuous defense is necessary to protect the innocent and to ensure that judges and citizens have the ultimate power to decide who is guilty of a crime.
So the problem with that is then it becomes like an intellectual exercise for the person who's the lawyer to defend someone who they know is guilty against an inferior...
Right.
Prosecuting attorney that they know is kind of a schlub and that they can sneak by and they've done that in the past with expensive suits and big words and convincing arguments.
Not only do they not think it, do you remember when John Gotti was on trial and he had that mob attorney who was fucking excellent, who was built like a brick shithouse?
By the way, you mentioned earlier how horrific it is when you prosecute someone that you know is innocent.
Of all the guests I've had on my show, probably the one that on a personal level affected me the most is I had a guy who spent 29 years in prison for a murder which he was eventually exonerated of.
And I've included him in my latest book because I'm talking again about the recipe for the good life.
And what amazed me about this guy is how non-filled with anger and hatred and a sense of retribution he had.
And so I basically coined him, you know, the new Buddha because I was trying to put myself in his position.
If you stole from me 29 years of my existence, he was so poised and so truly like as if he's a saint.
And I thought, you're a much better man than I am because if I got out after you've stolen 29 years from me, I think I would want to burn the world down because I would be so...
He's an ambassador for the Innocence Project and he's a good friend of mine.
I've had him on multiple times and through this podcast several people have actually been let out of jail because of the arguments that he made in this podcast and cases reopened and people examining things.
I mean, I'm giving him the portal, but he's so selfless in his work and what he does to try to exonerate innocent people.
And, you know, we've had fucking tear-filled conversations about this because he's gotten people out that, you know, were immigrants, couldn't speak English well, were unfairly accused, and the prosecutors knew that this person was innocent, and they don't give a fuck.
Once they have someone in the game, they're trying to win.
Once the game is going on, they don't say, hey, Your Honor, I think we're wrong.
I think this guy's innocent, and I'm going to not try to prosecute him.
Even though we're in court right now, I want to say that I'm on his side.
If people were honest, 100% of the time, I would be for the death penalty.
People are not honest.
And if you know what I know about the whole process of trying someone and convicting someone unfairly about the way they withhold evidence, like we were talking about with Kamala Harris, including genetic evidence, they try to withhold evidence that would exonerate innocent people.
If I didn't know that, I'd be for the death penalty.
I'm for killing people who murder your family, killing people who do horrible things.
I'm all for removing dangerous people that are detrimental to society.
The problem is you don't know.
You don't know because we have a corrupt system.
And not only do we have a corrupt system, but we have people that have existed inside this corrupt system for decades, and they're really fucking good at it.
So then practically speaking, since there is no way to render that probability of malfeasance to zero, then practically you would never be for the death penalty.
I think it's so hard to know whether or not someone who is saying they're innocent, unless there's overwhelming evidence, unless you have their family members and all these people saying, like Jeffrey Dahmer is a good example.
Fucking monster.
The guy was a monster, clearly.
There's a lot of cases of those.
Ted Bundy.
There's a lot of cases of those where people were fucking monsters.
That makes sense.
Like, remove them from society.
But what about people that are unfairly executed?
Unfairly convicted and then executed for crimes they didn't commit?
So I think we can set the set of criteria that you must reach so that you would feel sufficiently convinced that it has assuaged the possibility that someone is planting.
There's so many people that are good people that get fucking railroaded and they wind up in jail and they have poor representation and maybe they can't read and maybe they're just...
They get fucked and then they wind up getting executed and the killer is loose and free.
And that happens.
That happens all the time.
I don't know what percentage.
Let's ask this.
What do you think, I don't even know the statistics, what percentage of people who are executed turn up to actually be innocent?
It says the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science determined that at least 4% of people on the death penalty, death row, were and are likely innocent.
So you and I can set up the framework so that our exacting standards, so that nobody falls under 4%, could be met.
What I don't like is when you have people who say, under no conditions and no possible states of the world is it ever appropriate nor moral to kill someone.
And I simply don't agree that that's part of our...
There's a UFC fighter who's one of the all-time greats, Cain Velasquez, and he's in jail now because there was a man who was working at the preschool who molested his four-year-old A hundred times or more.
Like, they don't know how many times this person did this.
By the way, that number, before you go on, that number is an actual stat, which I may have mentioned on the show before, that the average pedophile, when they're caught, has up to 100 prior molestation encounters.
Well, this guy got out on bail and was under house arrest and Cain Velasquez found out and chased him down in his car, shot at him in the car, wound up shooting his father who was driving the car.
His father, who by the way, was running the nursing home.
So his father likely knew that his son was a monster.
Shot him in the abdomen and in the arm.
I think he shot him through the door.
The car was shooting out the door of the car.
Kane's in jail with no bail, no possibility of bail, and he's being tried for murder, or tried for attempted murder, excuse me.
And, you know, that's a situation where that guy seems to be guilty.
I would have no problem with that guy getting the death penalty.
So I've had not heated exchanges with my wife, but I always come with the following approach in parenting.
I don't put my children, who are now a bit older, they're 13 and 10, but growing up, I never put my children in any situation where they could ever be molested.
Meaning, if there is a man in any situation, my children are never going to be alone with them.
Now, my wife would argue, aren't you being a bit too punitive in presuming that there's a pedophile hanging around every corner?
I say, well, I'm not willing to take...
So the precautionary principle, I'm not willing to take the chance that that person who really seems nice, that neighbor, or the teenage son of their friend...
Anybody could be that guy.
He doesn't have horns.
I can't tell what he looks like.
Therefore, there was never any sleepovers.
There was never sleepaway camp.
So I can't understand.
Not that I'm blaming this gentleman who sought revenge.
But why is it that he was in a nursery that was run by a father and there was a male present?
I mean, that's the only way we're ever going to really know.
And until then, there's unfortunately a lot of people that are in bad circumstances, they have poor representation, they get framed, something happens, and then they wind up on death row.
So until then, it's very hard to support the death sentence.
I mean, I don't not support it in cases of pure guilt, like we know.
It's undeniable.
But there's a lot of places where people thought someone was absolutely guilty and it turned out not to be the case.
And then, you know, imagine living with that.
Imagine being a prosecuting attorney and you railroaded someone and sent them down the river, put them on death row, and then had them killed, and then it turns out they were innocent.
Like, man, good luck in hell.
Good luck in hell.
There's a special place in hell for people like that.
Prior to eventually settling on consumer psychology and evolutionary psychology, I had toyed with the idea of going into criminal psychology.
I had always been fascinated with the serial killers and so on.
And I decided, I think, rightly against it because I thought that I might have had the intellectual interest, but my personality would have been severely damaged by being exposed to darkness and evil.
That's actually one of the reasons why I didn't go into clinical psychology, unlike, say, Jordan Peterson, a friend of both of us.
I'm empathetic that I think I could have been an effective therapist, but I think it would have been very detrimental to my personhood because I wouldn't have been able to create the demarcation between listening to what was done to you when you were a child And then, oh, now it's five o'clock.
Let me go and party with my family because all is good.
And so I think I would have probably blown my brains.
And so I think in retrospect, even though I've always been interested in forensic psychiatry and clinical psychology and criminal, I picked more uplifting fields of human behavior to study.
I mean, I have many friends that are either former or current police officers, and they tell me the horrific things that they've seen, you know, where they've had to go to a home where a father just murdered the wife in front of the children and that kind of shit, or murdered a child.
They've seen so many horrific, horrific things, and then they come home to their own children, and there's a high rate of suicide among police officers, and I think they're correlated.
Well, it falls in line with these people that live in this delusional world where you don't need law enforcement, you don't need laws, and they're just going to be good people.
And then you get LA, where you get rampant, out-of-control crime, and people just get released on bail for murder.
But again, that shows you that having a poor understanding of human nature has downstream bad effects, right?
So if you think that by definition if you're a criminal, It is never due to your own personal agency, but the culprit is really the society that caused you to become a victim.
Then why should I be punitive, right?
And therefore I shouldn't incarcerate you.
It's wrong.
I am double penalizing you.
First, the world made you into the rapist.
Otherwise you're a beautiful, lovely human being.
And now I'm going to put you in prison.
Why don't I instead find a way to help you out of this thing?
So it's a wrong understanding of human nature that causes all of these insane woke policies.
It is a wrong understanding of human nature, but there is a reality to people that are fucked by the world.
There are certain people that through no fault of their own, they were born into a horrible circumstance.
They have terrible parents.
They live in a terrible neighborhood.
There's crime and drugs.
And that's all they know.
And that's all they've ever known.
And they grew up that way.
And they're probably the victim of abuse, whether it's physical abuse or sexual abuse and violence.
They've had this their whole life.
They've been in and out of penal institutions.
These people are fucked.
And the problem is there's no rehabilitation mechanism that's involved.
The friends that I've had that have gone to jail and come out of jail, they're like, you're not getting rehabilitated in there.
If anything, you get turned into a harder criminal.
You get taught how to do crimes better and you get to talk to people about how they get caught and how they're going to not get caught the second time when they get out.
I don't know what the solution is.
I would imagine that we're going to have to have a much more comprehensive understanding of what it takes to program a mind and what it takes to deprogram a mind and what techniques, what substances are involved in that that can be Effectively given to people?
Because we know that there's some substances that aid tremendously in alleviating people from whether it's alcoholism or any kind of addiction issues like this Ibogaine.
There's a bunch of different things that people can do.
A lot of people that have done psilocybin, John Hopkins studies have shown tremendous benefits in quitting detrimental behavior, whether it's cigarettes or things like that, gambling, drug addiction.
While women are pregnant, that if that woman is exposed to violence, that her higher cortisol rates in her body and the stress in her body, the adrenaline, all these effects will actually make the child more inclined towards violent activity.
Because the kid is thinking he's going to be born into a world that's crazy and he's got to protect himself.
But I think we need to find some way to reach people and let them know this in a way that there's a lot of people that don't have any role models of people that are striving through all this chaos and doing the right thing.
All the people that they're around, you know, people imitate their atmosphere.
If everyone in your atmosphere is committing crimes, and there are places in this country and certainly places in the world where that's the case, where you just live in a horrific environment and everyone around you is involved in terrible activities.
I can't cite it off the top of my head, but that the number one predictors in a home that can serve as a predictor of how well your children will do is how many books are in the home.
The other thing that I think in terms of parenting that is fantastic is if you treat your children with the dignity that they are deserving of.
Now, what do I mean by that?
I don't baby my children.
Even when they were five or six or seven, I speak to them as though they have a personhood.
I listen to them.
I explain the concept of libertarianism to my son who was nine last year.
We were walking and I was explaining.
You know why?
Because I was pissed off that a cop was standing giving out jaywalking tickets to people who were crossing the street when I'm perfectly capable as a 57-year-old man to know if there's an incoming car for me to make...
But apparently, no, the nanny state has to say when I should cross.
And so that led to a discussion of libertarianism.
Well, my giving him the dignity of me speaking to him in a way that I explained this to him, that's what good parenting is, right?
I don't mean to be tooting my own horn, but it's that you treat your children with the respect that they have a functioning brain.
Treat them with dignity.
And I think that could hopefully go a long way towards solving some of this criminality, maybe.
I had that, but I also had no one's coming to help me.
There's no dad that's going to clean up my mess.
There's no dad that's going to be there to hold my hand and comfort me.
I had to do it all myself in a lot of ways.
My stepdad's a very good guy and my mom's a wonderful lady.
They didn't do bad, but there's something about not having your biological father in your life and knowing that he's out there and that he's not even reaching out to you.
And yesterday I was asked, I was speaking at UT Austin, I was asked by a young man, how do you deal with adversity?
I said, well, for better or worse, I have the temperament that if you try to hurt me or if I face stressors in life, I want to then shove it up your ass and succeed even more.
So the more you throw at me, not unlike what happened with you, The more I'm irreverent to that stressor and I want to defeat it.
It's taken me a while to calm myself, though, because of it.
It took into my, you know, probably into my late 20s to really calm myself.
Because there was part of me that also felt angry that he wasn't around and also part of me that didn't feel in any way like I was safe.
When you're a child, you don't feel like anybody's looking out for you.
It's like a weird way to grow up.
You grow up in this way where you feel like...
Plus, I was a latchkey kid.
They just let me out of the house when I was little.
And you grow up that way, you recognize a lot more danger than other people do, which is also why I moved here so quickly.
Like, I moved to Texas in May of 2020, I started looking for houses.
I was like, fuck you.
When they said two weeks to flatten the curve, I go, okay, flattening the curve.
And then I started looking at statistics, then a few of mine got COVID and got over it really easily, and I'm like, what is going on?
And then it was months later.
I was like, what happened in a few weeks?
And then it was like more restrictions.
And I was like, what's going on?
And then I came out here to Texas and everybody's no masks and just hanging out.
I was like, what the fuck is going on?
Yeah, you should take care of yourself.
Yeah, you should be healthy.
Yeah, you shouldn't do anything unwise.
Yeah, it's not good to get COVID, but it seems like it's a respiratory disease and we've never been able to stop a respiratory disease from spreading ever in human history, ever.
And I know that.
And I'm not a fucking epidemiologist.
How do you not know that?
How do they not know that?
They do know that.
And masks don't work.
Fucking Fauci said masks don't work.
Unless you have a fitted N95 or KN95 mask.
Like, they're not working.
These fucking bandanas that people are wearing, this is nonsense.
Like, what are we playing games?
And the thing about Texas is like, you know, I met with the governor when I first came out here.
And one of the things that he said, he said, we want to make sure that we preserve people's freedoms.
I mean, constantly, teachers are getting arrested for exposing themselves to children, For masturbating in front of children, for sending nude pictures in front of children.
Every couple days there's a new one that pops up in the news.
And how many of those people haven't been caught yet?
And how many of those people are out there?
And how many of those people are doing it under the guise of I'm an LBGTQ educator?
Well, I think it's important, and I think everyone should know it.
I think that's why that whole, what they were calling the don't say gay bill in Florida was so infuriating.
Like, when you're saying that you oppose any sort of legislation that prevents people from talking about Sex and gender identity and sexual orientation with people that are first grade through third grade.
You oppose anything that restricts that.
I go, okay.
Who are you talking about?
Because if this is open-ended, I've had some fucking idiots for teachers when I grew up.
Can you imagine if those fucking idiots were trying to convince your child that they should be homosexual or that they should even be straight?
My point is, imagine if you have a gay child and you have a fucking teacher that's trying to indoctrinate your child into the world of heterosexuality and convince your child that they're going to burn in hell if that child is gay.
Imagine how furious you would be.
Well, it works the other way too, right?
It does.
It works the other way.
You should be really good at what you do if you want to talk to a fucking seven-year-old about gender identity and sex.
I've seen some of these people with lip rings and fucking blue hair.
They clearly are ideologically bound.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the way they live their life.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them pursuing whatever sexual identity they have and living their life.
But I'm saying you should not be the person that talks to children about this, especially if you're a fucking history teacher.
unidentified
You're supposed to be teaching them about fucking Native Americans.
So when I have students in my consumer behavior class, I tell them what age is it moral, ethical, if not legal, to target children through advertising?
And the typical answer that we get from academic research is that you should only target children with advertising when they know that the intent of the advertisement is to persuade them of something.
We tell companies, you can't sell cereals to an 11-year-old child because they're too young to protect themselves against the persuasive intent.
But from this side of the mouth, we tell people, teachers, that it is when they're 7 years old or 6 years old that we should tell them about LGBTQ stuff.
Those two things are inconsistent.
If I can't target your child to sell them chewing gum, then I shouldn't be targeting your child with gender identity stuff.
Well, the other thing is children want the praise and acceptance from adults.
They do.
That's part of being a child, especially adult they admire, like a teacher.
Especially adult that has a position of power, a position of influence.
They're standing in front of a class, and they're 37 years old, and these kids are 8, and they're telling them about how the world works.
And maybe they're doing it in a better, more attentive way than the parents do.
Maybe the parents aren't doing such a good job, because maybe the parents are fucking tired and they work all day.
I don't know.
But what I do know is your cerebral cortex doesn't even fully form until you're 25 years old.
Your frontal lobe, your ability to be a fully, like, realistically, you shouldn't be able to make any decisions until you're 25. Like, realistically.
Right?
But obviously you can't do that.
It is.
It's a high standard.
But there's so much that you can convince a child of.
There's so much.
You can convince them to join cults.
You can convince them to be a suicide bomber.
Why do you think they get children to wear those vests?
Because you can convince a child that you're going to go to heaven and you're going to be with Allah if you put on a suicide bombing vest when you're fucking ten years old.
There's a reason why they do that, and they don't go to 50-year-old guys with PhDs, right?
Because that guy would be like, wait, how many virgins do I get?
We're at a very strange place in this country where we're so ideologically bound and we're so connected to our tribe that we ignore all the signs that both sides are doing something wrong.
Both sides.
You were speaking about Dave Rubin, and there's one thing that I noticed recently that was kind of very disturbing.
Dave is now, he's essentially a right-wing guy, right?
So they used their sperm and they created children, right?
And then I was watching all of these fucking vicious...
Right-wing, ideologically captured people who were talking about how horrible they were and about this is rent-a-womb and they were talking about how it's satanic and all this sick shit and just shitting all over him and his husband.
And that basically speaks to a point that I make in Chapter 1 of The Peristic Mind where I say, while I will be focusing on idea pathogens of the left, because the ecosystem that I inhabit is academia, so therefore all the bad ideas stem from leftist professors, This doesn't mean that I'm implying that the right cannot be parasitized by bad ideas as well.
So the fact that I don't focus on the right doesn't mean that I am implicitly saying I support the right and not the left.
Academia is run by leftists, therefore they're the ones who originate and spawn all those bullshit ideas that I discuss in the book.
So you're exactly right.
The political aisle that you lay on It's not going to predict whether you can be parasitized.
This is, by the way, why people think that I'm being coy when they ask me, so what do you identify in terms of your politics?
And I say exactly what you just said.
I'm an ideas guy.
If you ask me what's your view on immigration or on the death penalty, you'd think I'm an ultra-conservative.
If you ask me about gay rights and transgender rights, you'd think that I am a Portland, Oregon inhabitant.
So depending on the issue you ask me, I move around to different parts because I'm an ideas guy.
I think if more people had that commitment, then we wouldn't be quite as tribalized, if I can put it that I'm with you, and I think that's the only way we get out of this.
By the way, I see it in my own environment with the number of students who now file for special services through the Office of Disability or whatever it's called.
So for the first 20 plus years as a professor, I almost had no one.
Because when you file with them, for example, you'll get 50% more time on your exam.
But you never find out because it's confidential.
So I never find out this person suffers from this issue.
So all I get is an instruction that person X needs 50% more time on the exam, right?
Well, I used to never have any of these filings.
And now, in any given semester, I may have, you know, quite a large percentage.
10% of the students are somehow in there.
So what happened?
There's been a growth in the incidence of, you know, whatever disability you had to follow.
But no, it's part of the grievance infrastructure, right?
Yeah, and look, you can always find reasons why you can't get out of bed.
I could find reasons every day.
We could always.
And by the way, those things, thinking in negative ways like that, it becomes a pattern.
It becomes a part of the way your mind interfaces with the world.
And it just creates more and more incentive for you to continue those patterns, and those patterns become comfortable.
Just like becoming a loser, failing, falling apart, not following through with things, fucking up jobs, getting divorced all the time, gambling away all your money, going in, like, all those things are patterns.
I don't have to tell you, you're literally a psychologist.
But all those patterns, they're so easy for people to fall into and you can't accept that.
You cannot accept that because there's been plenty of people out there that have had those patterns to turn their life around and that's what I encourage people to do.
I don't say the things that I say because I'm a mean person and I want to shit on people that are weak.
I want people to be strong.
I want people to be strong with themselves and I want people to recognize that there's value in being disciplined.
There's value in getting your life together.
There's value in truth.
There's value in honesty.
There's value in hard work.
There's value in camaraderie and friendship and love and being a good person.