Gad Saad’s ninth appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience dissects happiness science, critiquing liberal tribalism (Rob Reiner, Stephen King) while linking his combative online persona to childhood trauma—war zones and near-abortion. They debate athlete endurance (soccer vs. wrestling), consequentialist ethics, and transgender policies, with Saad dismissing gender dysphoria claims as statistically implausible. Rogan’s skepticism about systemic trust extends to crime reforms and California’s decline, while Saad frames progressive policies as "parasitic ideas" spiraling into chaos. The episode underscores how personal experiences and evolutionary biology clash with modern ideological extremes, exposing fragility in both systems and narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Something happens to old liberals with a ton of money.
It's like something happens to those old creative types.
It just doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense that you're arguing with people online about it all day long, if you're Rob Reiner or if you're Stephen King, like putting nasty tweets out.
Well, people viewed Trump as an existential threat to the very fundamentals of the country.
They thought that he was gonna come in and he was gonna represent corruption on a level that we've never seen before.
But the problem with doing that and saying that is that it opens the door to examining all the other corruption.
Like, how much corruption is there?
How much money are you guys making?
Where's this money coming from?
There's so much corruption that's readily available that once you start opening the door to calling someone a monster, Then everyone gets to look at you and go, hey, but what about you guys?
What are you doing?
What about drone bombings?
Let's talk about some real problems.
What about the fentanyl crisis?
What about the borders where criminals are coming through?
How many are being sent back?
What's the numbers?
What's the numbers?
I mean, a lot of them are good people that just want to find a better way to live, and good for them.
And I would do it too.
If I could sneak across into America and be assimilated, I would fucking do it.
Why wouldn't you?
If you got a bad roll of the dice and you're living in somewhere that's less favorable, and you get the opportunity to just, all you have to do is get across the river and they let you in.
Well, I can tell you that we've talked about this in the past when we talked about people who come from certain cultures where there's rampant anti-Semitism.
And so if you let people that are coming from cultures where when they're polled, somewhere between 90 to 99% of them will exhibit rampant Jew hatred.
It doesn't take much of a sociologist or a survey analyst to recognize that out of all those people that are coming in, you're going to have an increase of Jew hatred.
Yesterday, I was out with some friends here in Austin, and so one of them asked me, have you seen an uptake on Jew hatred?
You know what I have a real concern with that and I also have a real concern with Vested entities like organizations that would want people to be at each other's throats Stirring up things with fake social media posts because this is a real problem that's happening in the world right now,
right, you know someone tweeted a bunch of different examples of where Dozens and dozens of accounts are saying the same inflammatory things with the exact same wordage, exact.
And they're all like, you know, they have numbers and letters in their accounts, like just random accounts.
And, you know, you go to their page, it looks kind of real.
They have a photo.
There's like them with a flag.
It's like, and you go through it, but you get this sense like, oh, you're a bot.
You're not even a real person.
So you're an agent of you're stirring up bullshit.
So there's a certain aspect of our culture.
I don't know what the percentage is, but there's a certain aspect of the conversations online that are being flavored by fake accounts that are designed to get people upset with each other.
It's like psychological warfare on a level that no one anticipated and no one's prepared for.
Because when you have the two things we already discussed, like this adherence to the ideology no matter what, no matter what, Like, there's no...
You can't objectively, logically defend any of the things that are in opposition of it.
Like, with Robert Kennedy Jr., with me, I'm like, this is dangerous.
Like, what you're saying is totally untrue.
You know it's untrue.
And you're willing to just say it because, like, the more you can discredit someone who's in opposition to some of your ideas, the more you can somehow or another in your weird game of checkers you're playing, like, elevate yourself.
But you don't think people know what you're doing?
Did you feel more angry at the fact that you had already had a conversation with him and so there was some kind of personal connection between you two?
You know, and there's the idea that, like, Robert Kennedy would be too silver-tongued, like, oh, come on, because he's a lawyer, you know, and he's really good at arguing stuff.
Like, if you either have facts or you don't have facts, and if you're scared to debate the facts, I have to go, well, what are these facts?
But believe me, having spent 30 years trying to convince some of my academic colleagues about the value of evolution in studying human behavior, they'll go, la la la, I don't want to hear it.
That actually speaks about connecting with people.
So last show, you had asked me, or not you had asked me, we were talking about who would be some guests that we'd really want to have on our respective shows, and You probably don't remember what my two celebrities were.
Do you?
I don't remember.
Clint Eastwood.
And first, I appreciate his politics.
I've been watching him since I was a kid in Lebanon.
Burt Bacharach is the music composer who's basically written songs for everybody.
He was featured in one of the Austin Powers movie where the guy says, ladies and gentlemen, Burt Bacharach.
Anyways.
After our chat aired, I go on my Instagram, I have a personal DM, private DM, from what looks like the account of Burt Bacharach, who's arguably the biggest musical composer ever.
In the United States.
So I'm extremely excited.
It turns out it was his son who said, oh, your clip with Joe Rogan was passed on to me.
And I think it would be great for, I'd love for my dad to come on your show.
Now, cut to the punchline.
It never ended up happening.
He recently passed away.
So perhaps he wasn't, I mean, he was like 94, 95. But just the fact that you and I are having a conversation, someone else picks it up, and then my world can intersect with Burt Bacharach, whom there is no conceivable place where his world and mine would ever connect, that's the beauty of life.
But you know what I watched recently, I rewatched, is 2001, Space Odyssey.
I forgot how good that was.
That movie is amazing.
It's not just amazing, it's amazing visually.
And it's from 1968. Yeah, it's amazing.
The special effects are so good, like, all through it.
Like, even the apes in the beginning, you know, the scene where they're evolving, when they encounter the monolith, the fucking special effects on the apes is pretty goddamn good for 1968. My all-time favorite, the original 12 Angry Men.
I first saw, and actually it speaks to what we talked about earlier about how you can get someone to change their mind when they're in a tribal mindset.
Because I watched the movie for the first time in a first semester.
I was an MBA student and I was taking an organizational behavior class where the professor assigned us that movie to watch it to demonstrate group dynamics.
Because for those of you who don't, have you seen it, Joe?
They're trying to discuss whether a guy should be found guilty.
They take a poll.
Eleven say he's absolutely guilty.
Let's go home.
One guy, Henry Fonda, says, hey, let's sit and talk about it.
The rest of the movie is how he gets each of the 11 other guys to flip their positions.
And so that's why I had watched it in that MBA course because it demonstrates how, you know, there are techniques you can use to try to persuade people.
I mean, I don't remember exactly, although I quote it in the book on happiness.
Because I'm basically arguing, don't live your life like my cousin.
He puts out a tweet saying something like, have you no shame?
So he decides to publicly shame me for being associated or agreeing to go on Tucker Carlson's show.
That shows you what tribalism can do to the human mind.
It takes something as difficult as what we went through through the Lebanese Civil War and it erases it because he can't believe that I could do something as grotesque as to talk to Tucker Carlson.
What I love, you know how you often say, if you want to know whether the date that you're out with is a good person, see how he or she treats the server at the restaurant?
And I think Fox News is getting a lot of pushback from people on the right that are very concerned with, you know, some of the decisions they're making.
They're kind of going down the same path that a lot of these other corporations have gone down.
I would think that When you have a network that's run by advertising, it's what you do for income.
I would imagine there's a lot of pressure by those people, those advertisers, to eliminate threats to their business.
So if you've got some wild dude on Fox News Who's saying a bunch of shit about whatever it is, whether it's why we in Ukraine, whether it's why you mandating vaccines, having that kind of stuff on regular television.
It's a big problem to anybody that's selling advertisement that's in those businesses.
There's hip-hop, there's wild rock songs, there's a lot of wild shit.
And to be focusing on that one And it's the racial aspect of it was crazy because like the real Antifa problems that were happening during the BLM, I think it was a lot of white people doing that, wasn't it?
It was a lot of like lost liberal whites who are very angry, who decided to take up this movement and smash things.
So like the racial aspect of it, there's nothing racial about the lyrics.
So yeah, so yesterday I went out with, actually I was at the hotel, and two friends came by, one of whom I think has been on your show, Michael Malice.
People used to worry about dehydration, but I don't think they worry about that as much anymore when it comes to drinking coffee.
They used to think that if you drank a lot of coffee, you would get dehydrated, but there's a certain amount of hydration you're actually getting from drinking coffee, too.
So it's kind of complicated, because it is kind of a diuretic, but you're also drinking it.
So that perfect segue into one of the chapters of the book, I talk about everything in moderation, which, of course, Aristotle already talked about the golden mean.
You know, if a soldier is too cowardly, it's not good.
If he's too reckless, he's going to die.
And so, like most things, the sweet spot is in the middle.
And so in that chapter, I go through a bewildering number of phenomena, all of which...
Adhere to that inverted you.
Too little, not good.
Too much is not good.
And the ideal point is in the middle.
Exercise intensity, inverted you.
Alcohol consumption, inverted you.
Coffee consumption, inverted you.
And so I thought that was a really...
Cool chapter to cover because it's arguably the most universal law that we can find.
So many things adhere to that inverted U. And I think we had discussed this last time that I was on the show.
The ancient Greeks were already aware of it.
I mean, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics talks exactly—I mean, he doesn't call it the inverted U. He calls it the golden mean.
And so to our earlier conversation, the last time I was here in going through the research for this book, the amount of insights I've found from Seneca, Epictetus, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius was just breathtaking.
I think there was a comedian who said this, but who said something that, like, Portuguese is akin to someone having a perpetual stroke in the way that, you know, fazão, wow, right?
There's kind of a twisting of the mouth that appears unnatural.
Arguably my only regret as a parent so far, may it be the only one that I ever experienced, has been that we haven't passed on our linguistic heritage, we meaning my wife and I, to our children.
So I speak Arabic as my mother tongue, French, English, and Hebrew.
My wife speaks Armenian.
And so between the two of us, we've got five languages.
And yet our children only speak French and English.
And the reason for that is because if I were to speak to them in Arabic or Hebrew, my wife would be locked out.
And if she speaks to them in Armenian, I would be locked out.
And so we ended up just agreeing on the two languages that we both speak.
But now both our children are telling us that they regret.
Because when they see me meeting someone who's Arabic and we break out the beautiful Arabic, at least my son has been saying, you know, Daddy, you should only speak to me in Arabic.
But now it feels as if it's a vocabulary lesson, right?
I mean, one of the things that I regret the most is that I haven't been able to return ever to Lebanon because if I were to go on a visiting professorship to, say, American University of Beirut for a year, they're going to come back flawless Arabic speakers.
And especially, I mean, now my daughter's 14, he's 11, so they're sort of entering that period where they're pretty much soon not going to be able to ever speak it like a native speaker.
There's something magical that happens around puberty, where if you learn a language after that period, you can never speak it without an accent.
Earlier I said some derogatory things about Portuguese and about French-Canadian, so let me be fair and say, not Arabic.
Hebrew, which is also from my heritage, is a violently ugly language.
On the other hand, Arabic, as spoken by the Lebanese, and I'm not saying this because I'm Lebanese, because Arabic comes in many different dialects, right?
There's Iraqi Arabic, there is North African Arabic, there's Egyptian Arabic.
The Lebanese Arabic is really the Italian of Arabic dialects.
Get ready for some comments and I'll come in your way.
This was the year, by the way, that year when my, not, this is a weird segue, but when my parents were freed in Lebanon after having been kidnapped by Fatah in 1980. Wow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I remember I was 15 years old.
Another thing that happened to me when I was 15 years old, I broke my nose in soccer and then had to have it reset by the surgeon.
You talk about the power, the emotional power of sports, right?
My family and I were sitting and watching the World Cup Final.
And we had...
The extent to which we were emotionally vested in Messi winning the World Cup can only demonstrate the beauty of sports, right?
Because here's a guy that...
We've never met him.
We're not Argentinian, right?
He doesn't know that we're alive, and yet it's life and death for us.
I mean, it was so harrowing, I don't know if you watched the game, that at one point my son, who's 11 years old, said, I can't watch this anymore, I'm going to have a heart attack.
That's the power of sports, that it can pull us in, and it can make us truly tribal.
And in my case, before you interject, It was kind of driven, my desire for him to win was driven by really a purity strand.
It was that it seemed cosmically unjust for the greatest soccer player of all time to not have won the World Cup.
So when he won it, to me it seemed like the world is right.
Well, in my first book ever, 2007, Evolutionary Basic Consumption, I talk about studies, not my studies, I was citing other works, that looked at what happens to the testosterone levels of fans as a function of whether their team wins or loses.
It's not surprising, as you would know as a fighter, that if you and I fight and you defeat me, your testosterone level goes up, my testosterone level goes down.
There's even studies, by the way, that have looked at what happens to sexual behavior of fans after their team wins or loses.
So if, let's say, if your wife is upset that you haven't been producing in the bedroom, she should pray that the husband's favorite team wins because if he wins, he has an increase.
It was like he goes with a right hand and then a left hook behind it.
But he just, he KO'd, KO'd Donald Curry.
And I couldn't believe it.
And so I put on my running shoes.
I couldn't stay home.
I just couldn't deal with it.
I couldn't deal with it.
And I went running in the snow.
And I ran.
No, I went in the snow.
I'm thinking of another story.
It was another time when someone lost and I went running in the snow.
I don't think it was in the snow.
I think it was warm.
I don't remember, but I remember I went running.
And as I'm running, and I'm running down the road, I'm thinking to myself, I am never going to be this invested in someone else winning or losing ever again.
I recently put, maybe a few months ago, I put out a sort of a hypothetical what-if scenario where I, I think this was on Twitter, where I asked people who follow me, would I be able to step on an NFL field and And under any circumstance, simply get a single yard as a running back.
If I play basketball, I think I have enough skills that I can receive the ball and pass it off to someone.
And so then I started thinking, what about other sports?
Could the average person who doesn't play that sport survive long enough to do something?
I'm obviously not going to get 100 yards, but a single yard.
What are your thoughts?
I thought, maybe I was being presumptuous, maybe now I'm an old guy, But I thought that it could be possible for the front line to make enough of a hole for me to run through for one yard.
But a lot of people thought there's no chance that that would happen because they would catch you in the backfield, they would tackle you, and then you would die.
It's also amazing to watch, like their reads, like knowing where the ball's coming, and to be able to get to the side of the table, and they'll whack it over there, and then it steps sideways, and dudes are hitting them behind their backs.
Whether it's Greco-Roman or whether it's freestyle or whatever it is, folk style, whatever wrestling, that is the most physically demanding sport, for sure.
It's so hard to do.
It's so hard.
And to be at an elite level, like a Daniel Cormier level, like...
You know, I'm not sure if we've talked about this before, but the precursor of MMA, I had had that conversation with my brother, the judo guy, because we would go out to nightclubs and he's a very, very small guy, probably 5'3", but built like a pit bull.
And he'd kind of interact with the world as though he's 6'8", the bouncers and so on.
And I once asked him, do you think you can take these guys?
And he said, if I can get them, if they knock me out before I get to them, then they knock me out.
But if I get them and I can bring them down, then they're dead.
And I think from my very, very limited knowledge of MMA, the guys who usually win are precisely those guys who can do exactly what he said, right?
But it's literally because the athletic commissions that were sanctioning MMA initially, they said, you know, we've seen those things on ESPN where people break bricks with their elbows.
You can't do that.
It's too dangerous.
So you can't do that on the ground.
You can't even do it standing up, I don't believe.
I think if someone comes straight at you and tomahawk elbows you, I believe that's illegal.
I'm not sure about that.
But on the ground, it's most certainly illegal.
And it's the dumbest rule.
It doesn't make any sense.
A regular elbow is just as hard.
An elbow like this is just as hard.
It might be more hard because you can kind of get more of your shoulder into it.
Or this might be a more awkward move that, I mean, I'm not the best at this, but I would think that this is not as good as This.
This seems like I'm getting a lot of weight into that.
I'm getting the torque off my hips.
This I'm kind of coming up and down.
I feel like I have more ability to generate force going sideways, going into it like that.
So I don't, I think if you measured it, I bet it would be, I bet this elbow is stronger for like the elite fighters.
So it's not a matter of like whether or not it makes sense.
And when he's challenged, that's when, like I said, the second Daniel Cormier fight, there was so much bad blood between them.
When he's challenged, really challenged, that's when you see how good he really is.
The problem is he's so much better than almost everybody that ever has done the sport that he, at certain times, just got too distracted, partying a lot, fucking off a lot.
The diversity in personalities in MMA is really fascinating to me as a person who's an analyst.
That are very calm and disciplined and religious, like people like the greatest, like Khabib Nurmagomedov, who's also in the conversation of who's the greatest of all time.
He's also in that conversation.
He's in the conversation of the greatest of all time.
Because it's not even a matter of whether he lost, because he never lost, who's 29-0.
It's a matter of, did he ever lose a round?
And he lost maybe one round in the Conor McGregor fight, because in the Conor McGregor fight, he was in one round, it looked like he was kind of taking a round off to really put the heat on him.
He was slowing Conor down, and then he just, he was just taking him down and beating the shit out of him, beating the shit out of him, yelling at him, let's talk now, let's talk, because there was so much trash talk.
It was a very emotionally charged fight.
And I think he might have lost one round in that fight where Conor got the best of him standing.
Connor's still an elite motherfucker.
But other than that, his whole career is just domination.
There's one fight that he had with Gleason Tebow that was a controversial fight.
It was a close fight.
But that's very early in his career.
When you look at him against guys like world-class competition, You know, guys like Edson Barboza, guys like Michael Johnson.
The domination that he showed on these guys was just fucking off the charts.
He would just take them down, mount them, tie their legs up with his legs, and beat the fuck out of them.
You know, I became a fan of his watching him fight in the UK. I watched him fight on YouTube, and I reached out to him like, 2013, I sent him a message saying, I hope one day you come over to the UFC. I'd love to see your fights.
It might have been earlier than 2013. But I was like, I knew he was legit back then.
Even people that I vehemently disagreed with about certain policies that were in place during the pandemic.
Yeah.
They're still my friends.
We can have disagreements.
I know who the core of you is.
And people think about things differently.
We're free to think about things differently.
Some people are free to have a perspective that I don't agree with.
And you might be able to back it up with some facts.
You might be able to.
Or you might be intolerant to the other opposition views because some of them are full of shit.
Maybe that's true too.
There's a lot going on, but it's very hard for people, especially in times of crisis.
During the pandemic, you kind of found out how human beings are very malleable and very quick to pick a narrative that they support, and especially if that narrative offers a promise of going back to normal.
And that was what was weird about that.
It was like, this is a psychological, like, test study.
If you wanted to do a test study of how a population, even a free, supposedly free population, free thinking, freedom of expression, freedom of speech is literally in the doctrine that we run the law by.
And to have people willing to throw that away quickly under something that wasn't even...
We're not talking about a nuclear war.
We're talking about something that's relatively...
In terms of the amount of people that die every year, it's not good.
It certainly wasn't a good thing to have at anybody.
Do you think that a lot of the governmental policies that were instituted stem from the fog of war during the pandemic, and so it was driven by ignorance?
Or are you of the view that There is kind of a Dr. Evil, nefarious thing behind this whole thing.
And I think when we want to look at why people did what they did, we try to look at it one way or another.
I think there's many, many things going on.
And also, for sure, Governments that are really good at crafting laws that allow them to gain power, and they've done that with all the bills that they passed after 9-11, you know, the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II, the NDAA, all that crazy shit.
Whenever something happens, they find new ways to control They do it because it's an opportunity.
It's an opportunity to pass laws that people are reluctant to pass before.
It happens.
It happens all the time.
It's normal.
That's their job.
That's what they do.
What they do is they're in control, they're in power.
That's the game that they're playing.
The game that you're playing is, I want to keep my freedom.
We have to figure out a way to establish real clear rules to how this game works.
Because if you could just cheat and lie and then delete things off social media.
Have a bunch of bots saying a bunch of shit to stir people up and you're literally funding this?
Like, who's doing that?
How many of them are coming from America itself?
And how many of them are coming from foreign agents who are trying to disrupt American politics and trying to disrupt American narratives?
I wonder.
I wonder, like, what is the ratio of shitposting?
Like, what would you call it?
Botposting.
What's the level of disingenuous, non-human, non-real-person posting?
Well, you know, in Montreal, you probably know that we had some of the most authoritarian stuff on COVID. Late into the pandemic, there was a curfew that you weren't allowed to walk your dog in your neighborhood after, you know, 8 p.m.
or 10 p.m.
or whatever it was.
Now, people really, there was an outcry, so they rescinded it.
But just the fact that they did that, I mean, what would be the scientific evidence that suggests that walking your dog outside in the middle of the night?
You know, people that are depressed are getting this as an option.
In 2021, the law was changed to include that those with serious and chronic physical conditions, even if that condition was non-life-threatening.
It's been available for adults since 2016. Okay, so, since 2016, Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying program, known by the acronym MAID, has been available for adults with terminal illness.
Okay.
conditions even if that condition was non life-threatening what would constitute that if I have severe back pain yeah that fit under that yeah you could well I think even depression I think is an illness yeah it's considered Yeah.
So, if someone could, like, instead of discouraging people, instead of saying, you know, having a suicide hotline, instead of, like, having people that have nowhere to go, somewhere they can reach out and find help, instead of that, you're saying, okay, we'll help you kill yourself.
Like, that is, that's a weird one, man.
That's a weird one to get behind because I'm all for people that have terminal illnesses and don't want to...
I mean, we do it to our dogs, right?
If our dog is dying, we have the dog put down.
It's a humane way to take care of something that you love and care for.
A 60-year-old man who, from everything that I've heard, was an exemplary principal He had been told that he has to take some diversity, inclusion, equity stuff.
And in one of those meetings, I don't know the exact details, but he had sort of raised some concerns.
Shouldn't we be judging people based on a meritocratic ethos and so on?
Because he said that, he's actually quite a liberal person from what I have heard.
But just the fact that he questioned the DI cult, the diversity, inclusion, equity, they started hounding him, harassing him.
Sometimes people say, oh, it's because you're tenured that you can be courageous because otherwise you wouldn't be courageous.
The reality is I get tons of death threats.
I mean, last year I received for the first time ever an in-person death threat while walking with my son, necessitating that the Montreal police get involved.
So there are many ways by which people can try to get you to modulate what you say and so on.
Probably, and I haven't done it in a while just because I kind of lost interest, the most violent would be any criticism of Islam.
And in this case, it was, I think, someone who was of that faith because he looked like he came from that background.
And so people will get upset at me for all sorts of things.
Valerie Bertinelli got upset at me once because I tweeted something about my wife having an uncomfortable interaction with someone, a barista, who was transgender.
And she got super upset.
And two days later, 26 million tweets later, all the, as Dave Chappelle calls them, the alphabet, people were really coming after me.
But that doesn't have the timber of we want to kill you.
When you start criticizing some Islamic stuff, then it can get pretty hairy.
And I think that's one of the things that's maybe different about, say, Jordan and me.
I think he receives a lot more hate than I do.
But some of the hate that I receive is really unique in that it's both Jew-related.
And he actually mentioned this recently, that I'm in a unique position in that I receive a lot of hate that's related to my being Jewish.
So cover being Jewish and then criticizing some Islamic tenets.
So for example, I've seen at times when I've come on the show, and I remember one time I talked to you about the hatred of black dogs as sanctioned by Muhammad himself.
And then all sorts of people started saying, he's making this stuff up.
It's bullshit.
Why don't you bring a real Islamic person on the show?
You can just look it up.
I mean, Jamie can now check it that there is within Islam a hatred for a black dog.
Now, I think it comes from the fact, I don't know the exact theological reason, but I think that Muhammad himself had had a fear of black dogs, and so he sanctioned it as a kind of divine prescription.
Pretty much anything that you say, someone will say, oh, it's fabricated.
So in Islam, there's a thing called nejis, which is like impure things, right?
So for example, the kuffar, the non-Muslim, is himself impure.
Well, urine is impure.
The dog's saliva is impure.
So if you were to be licked by a dog or something, then you'd have to redo your purity ritual before you pray because you've been touched by nejis, by something that is impure.
So there are many debates depending on the hadith as to whether something is authentic or not.
But there is certainly, as Jamie just pulled out, the fact that there is within certain Islamic thought that black dogs are uniquely bad.
And so just if I say that on your show, there'll be some Islamic guy who says, you know, the Jew is making this stuff up and so on.
And so...
Now, I've stayed away from it recently, not because I'm trying to shy away from it, just because I've said all that I have to say about the matter, and I've moved on.
But the hatred comes from all forms.
I can criticize feminism.
I'll get women's group attacking me.
If I attack something about transgender issues, I'll get criticized.
I think in our earlier chats many years ago, we've talked about Islamic immigration and so on.
And I hold zero hatred.
I think you know me enough to know that I have tons of Muslim friends.
I probably know more Muslim guys than most people will ever meet.
I never criticize individuals.
I criticize ideologies, right?
So, you know, does Islam codify the right of people to criticize Islam or not, if you're in an Islamic country?
Well, the answer to that is very clear, and the answer is not one that promotes freedom of speech.
Me saying that doesn't imply that I'm being hateful towards Muslims.
I'm just literally talking about the Islamic doctrines, just like there are doctrines in Deuteronomy that you and I can decide to criticize, right?
And I think most Muslims, even some of whom are students in my class who've heard me talk about these things, not in a classroom setting, but in public, are very fair.
And they'll say, you know, you're a very fair guy.
But other ones will send me emails and stuff that are just brutal, that are really...
And I have to say, I'm someone who's, if I can speak of myself, quite courageous, but that in-person threat that I received when I was walking with my son was really, truly harrowing because I could never rise to that threat, right?
Because the way that guy was speaking to me, he always had more, you know, I had more to lose than him.
And so there was never going to be a situation where if he decided to act on his hatred, I could have ever lived up to that challenge.
And so for several weeks, I was really being careful, trying to avoid that street.
And it doesn't make sense that in the 21st century, a professor in Canada should have to worry about which street he walks on because some idiot is threatening him in front of his 10-year-old son.
When you think about rigid things that are in certain religious doctrines, what do you think the roots of some, like the forbidden foods, do you think the roots were initially that those foods got people sick?
In The Consuming Instinct, one of my earlier books, 2011, I have a whole analysis of Of certain kosher laws from an evolutionary biological perspective.
So imagine ancient Jews walking around in an environment where there's no refrigeration, where the shellfish that might be tainted with a particular pathogen or not, you can't smell it.
You can't see it.
All that you know is that some people ingested and dropped dead and others don't.
There is no mechanism by which I can learn the statistical regularities between A and B.
Therefore, the only possible conclusion that I can come to is that it's a divine prohibition.
There must be some divine reason.
So even that theological prescription, I can analyze it from an evolutionary perspective.
Now, when I did that, let's say for kosher laws, I didn't get rabbis writing to me saying, how dare you?
We're going to kill you for arguing that it's not divine.
If I do the exact same thing with some Islamic doctrine, you know, very respectfully, very properly, most Muslims will hear it and say, yeah, fair enough, Professor Saad.
And it doesn't mean that the root of any of these religious doctrines weren't from God himself.
Like, who knows?
Who knows what the root of this stuff is?
But the root of most of them...
For sure has gone through people.
And the conversations have gone through people.
It's like real clear in the Bible, especially in the New Testament.
We know the people that...
But the origins of it is what's the most fascinating to me.
It's like, where did it start from?
When the first guy wrote it down, especially when you're talking about ancient Christianity or whatever it was before it was even called Christianity.
When I was in Greece, I was with Brian Mororescu.
And he wrote this book about the Eleusinian Mysteries called The Immortality Key.
It's an amazing book.
And in this book, it all details these rituals that they used to do.
And thousands of years ago, where they were drinking wine that were laced with psychedelics and coming up with democracy.
When you're in those kind of environments, when you're in a place that used to be this amazing utopian society, or at least transformative society that never existed before, and then you're walking around the ruins like, I wonder if they saw it coming.
I actually talk about, in my current happiness book, I talk about different correlates with happiness.
How does personality correlate with happiness?
How does culture correlate with happiness?
Marriage and so on.
One of the sections I talk about religiosity and happiness.
Are religious people on average happier?
And the answer turns out that there is a moderate positive correlation between religiosity and happiness.
Now that makes perfect sense in that religion provides me with structure, it provides me with greater commonality, it creates a nice demarcation between in-group and out-group, therefore people in my in-group I can cooperate with, I have greater cohesion.
So there are very functional earthly reasons for why If I am religious, it's going to lead to greater happiness.
But what I try to also argue in the book is that that shouldn't cause people who are not religious to despair, that they're not going to be as happy.
I'm not sure what your religious views are, but I'm very much rooted in my Jewish identity.
But in a cultural sense, I'm not very much of a believer, but I am very much someone who sees the divine in things, right?
My having a friendship with you, being able to text you for me to come on this show is a divine thing.
My being able to bond with my Belgian shepherds in the way in this pure love is a divine thing.
Meeting a random stranger with whom I have this fantastic conversation for 30 minutes is Is a manifestation of the divine.
So I think we can be quite spiritual in our day-to-day without necessarily couching it in some supernatural, you know, religious narrative.
I would agree with that, but I would also say that for a lot of people, those religious narratives are like a scaffolding for which they can establish a better life.
And I meet a lot of people that are devoutly religious, particularly devoutly Christian or devoutly Muslim, that are very disciplined and live their life because of this extreme belief, live their life in an often very successful way.
And I think there's a peace that they have in a true belief.
There's a peace that you have that there's a God that's got a plan for this whole thing.
And just worship that God and do the right thing and you're gonna be okay.
But do you, I mean, so for, again, from a purist perspective, I think it's less impressive for me to do the right thing because otherwise there is a big guy who is judging me than to do the right thing for no other reason than it being the right thing to do.
I think the latter is a lot more impressive, right?
Yeah, it's not something that exists outside of the purview of science.
And I think, I mean, there are several people, I think, that have been on this show that have, you know, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, that have written about the fact that, you know, the moral compass is totally within the purview of science.
It completely makes sense that there's a moral compass.
And it also makes sense that you're talking about these divine moments.
I think it's all these things and then some.
I think it's all these things and then some.
I think to just sort of… Rationalize it down to survival instincts and, you know, sort of have that dismissive reductionist view of what it means to be a person and have these experiences in life and what life is.
I think we're trying to label something that is almost impossible to believe is true.
That I'm saying sounds with my mouth and you know what I'm thinking.
We're like sharing a context and language and we have all these words that are connected to very specific things that we're very aware of.
Meanwhile, we're hurling through infinity on an organic spaceship that's spinning a thousand miles an hour in a shooting gallery of asteroids and comets.
All these things are true.
And we're finite life forms that are constantly innovating and trying to escape the boundaries of our eventual demise physically, psychologically.
We're trying to connect each other on the internet and put chips in our brains.
It's wild what's happening and in the middle of all this there's a battle a true battle in 2023 over censorship a real battle like the likes of which I've never seen because as a kid growing up there was no arguments against freedom of speech in America right I do not remember ever seeing someone argue against freedom of speech it certainly wouldn't have been someone on the Left Yeah.
So can I offer a philosophical explanation of why I think this is happening?
Sure.
Some of your viewers may have heard me mention this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating.
So in my last book, In the Parasitic Mind, I talk about two ethical systems, deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.
Deontological ethics is an absolute statement.
For example, if I say it is never okay to lie, that is a deontological statement.
If I say it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, so the example that I often give is if your spouse asks you, do I look fat in those jeans, then put on your consequentialist hat really quickly, and then lie, right?
Most of us are going to be consequentialists.
But when it comes to certain fundamental principles that define, say, Western values, those have to be deontological, right?
And so, as to your point, until very recently, we all agreed that presumption of innocence was a deontological statement that can't have a but associated to it.
You can't say, I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh.
I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump.
And so one of the reasons why I've gotten into a beef with someone that we both know well is because that person has repeatedly violated what he should know better, which is that deontological principles, by definition, should never have the butt qualifier.
But now it has become perfectly okay when talking about freedom of speech to tackle it from a consequentialist perspective.
Don't criticize Islam because that means you're hurting people's feelings.
Therefore, shut your mouth.
No.
You can criticize Islam.
You can criticize Judaism.
You can criticize evolution.
You could do whatever.
There is no but.
And I think if we can ever return to understanding the distinction between deontological and consequentialist, I think we'll be back on the right track.
Like, if someone is a legitimate pervert, and all they have to do is say they're a woman, and now they can go to the woman's bathroom, there's no way to stop that.
I'm not saying that that's the majority of people.
I'm saying...
There are human beings that are like that, and this does not in any way discount trans people.
This just says there's people that will game the system, and there's no safeguards in place.
So if you want to protect people from that, I don't know how you would do it other than having some sort of security in each women's bathroom to make sure that no one's creeping on people, which is outside impossible.
Until three minutes ago, 117 billion people had existed.
That's roughly the estimate of how many people have ever existed, who fully understood that there were two phenotypes in the human species called male and female.
And nobody disagreed as to what that was.
But suddenly now, it is really controversial to argue that, and that's why I do some of the satire and sarcasm on social media.
It's not to be mean or flippant.
It's because the only way you can handle some of the lunacy we're saying is through derision, through mockery, because it's insane.
I mean, we are the product of 117 billion people who exactly knew How coupling works.
But now we can no longer say it.
When we refer to Leah Thomas, the 6'4 swimmer, we can't say that that's a male because that's a female because she said so.
Yeah, there was a woman who came on trigonometry recently, and she had a very detailed depiction of all the different advantages that, even with a reduction of testosterone, that the male frame has.
Particularly in developing power, power-related things, the shape of the hips, the angle from the hips down to the knees.
Joe, I've had conversations with physicians, not that you need a physician to confirm that there is male or female, but how could you be a medical doctor and actually espouse some of the nonsense such as there are no sex differences between men and women?
I've had anesthesiologists.
I've had gynecologists who argued that transgender medicine recognizes that the antiquated binary is no longer valid.
That's insane.
How could you be a gynecologist and practice gynecology not knowing that?
But I think that if you have a group where you can't question anything about it, you're gonna have problems.
Because then you have a protected group and crazy people can join that group.
And that is a real factor.
We've seen it.
It's a thing.
You see it with these cases where these males with fully intact penises are wandering around women's locker rooms and women are freaking out and they're like, no, I'm a woman.
Like what can you say if you see there's this thing that Matt Walsh did an interview with this guy.
He's a politician Let me find this because it's so crazy.
So this guy who is a Biological male here.
I'll send you this Jimmy.
I'll send you this this story behind it, but there's a video of him talking to Matt Walsh and On the documentary.
No, it's not a documentary here So this guy...
We'll pull up the story.
So he is a biological male who has come out as a woman of color who's a lesbian.
So you think in the deep recesses of all those folks' minds who come out in support of men who have penises or women, do you think they know that it's bullshit?
Or have they been so parasitized that they actually believe their nonsense?
I think a lot of them believe it and I think a lot of them that belief is confirmed by their social groups or who also not just believe it but enforce belief in it.
There's a social pressure to enforce belief in it and I've seen it.
I've seen it in action.
I've seen women have arguments with people that are You know, pro-trans rights and, you know, and these women are arguing that there's pro-trans rights and then there's erasing women's rights, including, like, the athletic argument, including the female spaces, like intimate spaces, locker rooms, bathrooms.
It's a very controversial subject in this strange culture we live in, and it's one thing that people can subscribe to one side or the other and find a group willingly, vehemently opposed to their position.
So they engage in instantaneous conflict.
So they're involved in this psychic war.
With competing ideologies, and it gives them meaning.
That's a real problem with human beings, that we do attach ourselves to things.
Even if those things don't involve you or your life, you decide, like, this is the movement that I'm going to get behind, stand behind, and I'm going to tell people.
And it gives you meaning.
Like, you're a social justice warrior for the rights of the disenfranchised.
Well, I mean, there is a normal distribution, for example, when it comes to women who are very masculine, men who are very feminine.
We've always recognized that.
But we've never taken the step into the abyss of infinite lunacy where we say sometimes women can have penises.
I mean, that's why I wrote The Parasitic Mind, the last book, right?
Because I was literally arguing that human minds can be parasitized by By ideological worms in the way that you can be parasitized by actual brain worms, right?
Because there is no rational mechanism by which you can take a sexually reproducing species involving two phenotypes.
There aren't any more than two.
There's male and there's female.
nothing else, and then argue that that's simply not true.
It's antiquated to argue that boys have penises and girls have vagina.
I actually satirically put out a tweet where I argued for finger fluidity and finger diversity.
I argued that if you're born congenitally with nine fingers or nine toes, Then we should no longer be teaching in biology class that boys and girls are born with 10 fingers.
I was being facetious, but that's exactly the logic that they're using, right?
Of course, there are some people who are born intersex, and of course, they have the right to live a dignified life free of bigotry.
That doesn't mean, though, that we have to go back and rewrite the anatomy and biology books.
And that's why I fight all these battles online and so on, because I truly am allergic to bullshit.
I am very deontological when it comes to truth.
And I get personally offended when I see people espousing all that nonsense.
What is it that Dennis Prager was just talking about?
There was some video that came across my Instagram feed that was him saying that whatever medical organization is recommending that children not be labeled male or female because they don't have the ability to choose.
They can't tell you how they identify.
Let's find out, because it's something crazy.
I remember reading it going, I'm not ready for this.
Well, and to the point, remember earlier I put up the dress, or Jamie put up the dress to gail movie?
In the past, when you wanted to have a sex change operation, the number of steps that you had to go through before you were accepted for sex change reassignment...
It was quite assiduous, and it made perfect sense because it's something that you can't undo, and so it made perfect sense that you'd have to go through.
And now, a five-year-old can say that they are, and you're not allowed to question it.
Charles Rees Theron adopts two kids from Africa, two boys, and it turns out statistically that it's perfectly reasonable that both of them are now girls.
When I'm looking up the story about her adopting kids, all I'm seeing is that she had adopted one daughter and that in 2019, the other one said that she was not a boy and that she is a daughter also and so that they're both daughters.
And look at the cognitive inconsistency when it comes to age.
Because if a progressive will say that a 17-year-old who's 17 years old, 364 days, so in one day he's going to be 18, Who lies in wait, kills his parents to pick up the insurance, the progressive will argue, well, you can't put him in prison for life.
He's just a child.
His brain is still going to develop until he's 25. So for that issue, from this side of my mouth, I say that he's too young.
But from this side of my mouth, I'll say that a four-year-old is perfectly capable of saying, I am in the opposite body and shut up, don't question it.
There's just too many people that get accused, and we've had a bunch of them on, that get accused of crimes that they didn't commit and spend decades in prison for murders they didn't commit.
I've actually had a guy on my show, arguably the most remarkable story I've ever heard on my show, and I discuss it actually in my current book, Unhappiness, talking about gratitude.
He spent 29 years in prison for a murder that he was eventually exonerated of.
On the show, I asked him, how is it that you go about your life?
You're so put together.
You're not full of vengefulness.
You don't want to destroy the world.
You must be Buddha.
You're a much better man than I am.
And his answer really speaks to the mindset of being a happy person and having gratitude.
He said, well, I have a sister who's been bedridden with cerebral palsy for much of her life, and yet she manages to smile and be happy, so I don't really have much to complain about.
So here's a guy who has had three decades stolen from him, and yet he still had the grace and dignity.
I see it at least on paper that I could agree with that.
But the problem is people plant evidence and, you know, it's you could see like if there's a video of someone in the act of doing something, especially now with deepfakes, that's a problem again, right?
But yeah, if someone was especially if they're saying they're guilty, they show no remorse.
Yeah, like why should they be alive?
But I just wish that we knew for sure That everybody who's locked up in jail for a crime was actually guilty of that crime.
I think that if we were living in a world where there was no lies and all the prosecutors and all the judges were all above board and just impeccable sense of ethics and morals and you could trust them to know the truth, then yeah.
But that's not the case.
Yeah.
So, in a flawed society like the one that we live in, I can't support something that's killing innocent people.
Even if it's killing guilty people too.
It's like, if it kills ten guilty guys and one innocent guy, we fucked up.
And I think that, I don't know what the number is of people that are unjustly accused, but it's gotta be high.
And then there's people that are in jail for things that are very minor, and then while in jail, wind up killing somebody.
He's a fascinating guy, and he's dedicated himself to finding these cases and helping these people, and he's gotten a bunch of them out, and their stories are insane.
And because of that, because knowing that those exist, I can't support something that's going to possibly kill those people.
It just doesn't...
There's just too much corruption.
There's too much.
You can demonstrate.
You can see it.
There's cases after case after case of prosecutors getting arrested, DA's getting arrested, lawyers.
It's a human issue, you know, and unless we knew that humans were telling the truth, you know, you can't, it's just too, it's too much of a, and to do it, imagine if you're the person who executes this person, then you find out that person was innocent.
Like, oh my God, you got to live with that?
That person, not only did you steal three decades of your life, but then you took their life for something they didn't even do?
Actually, yesterday, the guys that came over at the hotel, we were talking about parenting with the threat of protecting your children from a pedophile.
And I've argued that my approach to parenting has been, I don't trust anyone with my children.
Precisely because the one who is going to commit those infractions is not someone that has hidden horns that you can see.
It is your uncle.
It is grandpa.
It is the really sweet neighbor.
It is the person.
And I've actually had, not heated, but disagreements with my wife where she thought I was being too paranoid about this.
And my answer is, my job is to always err on the side of safety.
So there's no sleepovers, there's no sleepaway camp, because there is going to be this counselor there who is a pig, and then I would have miserably failed in my job.
And so my job, while you are under my protection, is to make sure that I never put you in a position where this could happen.
What happens after when you're an adult, that's your business.
I've actually argued, in the happiness book, I argued that what I went through in the Lebanese Civil War, paradoxically, makes me a happier person.
Because any time that I start whining about something that's pissing me off, I can always pull back from my memory, I had the miracle of escaping the Middle East intact.
So what am I whining about?
So you're exactly on point, that the fact that I've gone through those horrors makes me the happier person I am today.
You know, that's the thing about anyone that I've met that's come from some war-torn part of the world.
When they make it to America, especially if they're in a place that's safe and nice, they just have an immense appreciation and their perspective is very different.
They're also, like, people that come from communist countries in particular, they are just so allergic to that horseshit.
When they see it coming, any Marxist ideology, they see it coming, they're like, fuck you.
Fuck you.
We know where this goes.
This goes to, you have to give up all your possessions and everything goes to the state and everything gets distributed evenly.
How do you enforce that?
Who gets to choose?
What the fuck are you signing up for?
But these idealistic kids that think that the world could be a better place with socialism if that we all just like no one should I saw this thing argued this guy argued online no one should ever be able to make a million dollars and That you should be restricted to a certain amount of income that allows you to have a certain like a Spit specified the certain size apartment that you should be allowed and anything else is in excess and Amazing.
That it's, you know, an attack on the freedoms of others.
It's like there's this fascinating takedown by this, like, you know, super progressive, probably college kid who had these ideas.
So I think last year when I came on the show, I might have been right in the throes of...
I'm having all my book royalties stolen from my last book from the tax authorities, right?
And so I was really pissed about it.
And whenever I would post a tweet sort of condemning the parasitic taxation system, there would be people who would write to me with complete entitlement, Canadians, and saying, well, why should you get to keep the money instead of you not being a selfish pig and sharing it with others?
So my book royalties, my thoughts, my ideas, my humor is not mine.
As a matter of fact, according to the Canadian government, about 58% is owned by them.
But it really comes from having this idea inculcated in you, which is that we should all have equality of outcomes.
It is a cancer and it is an affront to human meritocracy.
The argument against that would be that there's a certain reality to the way you're living in this life and that you have resources available and you have things available that other people don't have and it would be better if you had less and then it bounced out.
So if you give a little bit more and then eventually bounce out.
The problem is it's not bouncing out.
The problem is, like, where's the money going?
Well, the money is going to the government, and they get to decide how it's spent.
And they get to pass laws and dictate and send a little here.
Well, there's a war, so we're going to need more.
And then there's inflation.
This comes with the war.
The price of gas and food and everything goes up and all this is happening and you can't say shit about it.
And you're in this position where you're like, well, if you complain, well, you're a man of privilege.
You're privileged and you should be giving that up.
And if you gave it up, the world would be a better place.
I don't have any faith in their ability to use my taxes to make the world a better place.
I have zero faith.
I willingly and happily pay my taxes because I think it's part of being an American.
You contribute, even if the system is flawed, you contribute to at least some of it is going to fixing roads.
Some of it is going to education and health care or whatever it is.
Some of it's got to be going to people that care and are really trying to make the world a better place.
Some of it has got to be going to whatever organizations that are doing a good job.
The idea that if you just keep...
Some people think they should have a 90% tax bracket.
It's like if you're a billionaire, you don't deserve to have a billion.
And I'm not sure if I've said this before on this show, but E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard biologist, who passed away now last year, I think, he studied social ants.
And in social ants, everybody is equal other than the reproductive queen.
So when he was asked about socialism slash communism, his answer, which I love to always quote, was, great idea, wrong species.
Well, I think, and again, not to blow smoke up your behind, but one of the things that I think people appreciate about you is that you do change your opinion in light of new evidence.
And I remember very vividly the first time that you and I spoke about Justin Trudeau, you were quite a fan, and then you revised your opinion.
But you know, it's funny that you say he's good-looking because Megyn Kelly came on my show and her view, and we would think that she would know how to judge the masculinity of someone, she said, I would never want that guy on top of me.
And especially when they start using it in that way.
They start using it the way they're using it up there.
It's like the clamping down of free speech is never done by the good guys.
It's not.
It's not what it is.
And when you're being fed propaganda, and you know you're being fed propaganda, and now you're expected to...
Not say it, not talk about it, and just accept it.
That's not good for anybody.
And it's only good for the people that are in power, and it's only good for as long as they're alive.
Because what they're going to leave behind is going to be a disaster.
And if new people that are from the opposing party get into control, they're going to expand their control even further.
And this is a terrible cycle that if you don't have very rigid rules on what can and can't be done, You open the door for tyranny, and that's what they're doing.
Yeah, so that's interesting because there's a lot of people that are Cornel West supporters that they're thinking would ordinarily vote for the Democrat, whoever the Democrat is.
Laid out, I forget what exactly he talked about, but he laid it out of the way with charts and explaining to people, like, how are you getting fucked?
And I remember the conversations that I would have, the people I was working with back then, we would all sit around and go, did you fucking watch that shit?
Like, what is this?
Like, is that all true?
And people start researching it and buying books, and you gotta read this book, and like, what is this?
And a lot of people wanted him to win.
And they thought, like, yeah, let's have something different.
Like, someone who understands how to run a fucking business.
Someone who understands all the waste and corruption and all the evil bullshit that's going on behind the scenes.
It seems real valid, but it also seems like if this is all coming out, what a good way to remove a president that seems mentally compromised.
Because it seems like if you were in the Democratic Party and you thought, like, listen, there's a certain amount of people that are going to vote blue no matter who, right?
We just need a better representation.
Because you could not have Kamala Harris.
She would not win.
People would be very, very reluctant to vote for her for president, I think, after just listening to her talk for the last three years.
Like, what?
And so, who else?
And there would have to be a reason for that who else.
The problem is he did such a bad job with California.
They're so vulnerable.
He does spit out some good propaganda.
He just starts talking about them very high on California and all the fucking companies that have come from this and all the money is generated and all the intellectuals and all that.
Yeah, but you got to know the real stats of like how many of them feel stuck.
Because if you ask people on the street in California, I think the number was four out of ten people they surveyed are thinking about moving.
But if you don't get out early and you don't have the ability to get out early, you don't have the financial ability, maybe your parents live there, maybe you're taking care of someone, maybe your job depends on you staying there and it's a good job, you're fucked!
And that's a lot of people.
I wasn't fucked, so I got out.
And I don't like where it's going, because I don't, with letting people out of jail and all this craziness about no bail, like letting people, they arrest them when they commit a crime and put them right back on the street.
They're getting out of these places because they're like, this is fucked.
And it ain't getting better.
And that's what I don't like.
I don't like when I don't see any course correction.
I don't see any readjustment.
I don't see anything like, hey, we need to take care of disenfranchised people, but we also need to make our streets safe and we have to stop crime.
Okay, so we need to figure out a way to, you know, have these things...
You know mutually beneficial to everybody sure and there's no none of that there's like more ridiculous laws More lacks on crime more money for the homeless people give them free drug give needles they need clean needles like what?
I was asking you offline when we weren't on the show if you regret moving here and what you said was you even love it more here than you did last year when we sold.
Texas is great and Austin is particularly great because it's a progressive minded city that's surrounded by red states.
There's a t-shirt that says keep Austin weird and surrounded.
There's something about being surrounded by the rest of the real fucking Texas, Texas people.
Even the progressives here are more reasonable.
Whatever the chart is, where the middle is, there's so many people that you would even think of as conservative or you'd think of as progressive because they're socially progressive or conservative, but they're kind of more in the middle in terms of the way California was.
California was like radical leftism and then If you were a conservative, you had to hide it.
Or you're a Nazi, or you live in Orange County.
There's like certain places where the conservatives thrived.
And that was fine.
But the overwhelming amount of people who are in the big urban areas, like specifically San Francisco and Los Angeles, they're in the fucking fog of it.
They're in the fog of it.
They believe all sorts of wacky shit.
And they were the first persons that were, like, happy that we were locking down.
The first persons happy there was a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate.
When I used to go to San Francisco in the 90s to do stand-up all the time, I would at the original Cap City, which is this cool little club that seated like 150 people.
It was great.
You could walk around the city and cool places to eat and cool bars to go to.
It was a fucking lovely city filled with culture and artists and interesting people and smart people.
It's like where the smart people were.
Not the people that were interested in show business and the vapid pursuit of stardom.
Those are the people up there.
There were the tech people and the artists and the musicians and so much cool shit came from San Francisco.
Amazing food, the restaurants, just walking around the streets.
Well, I remember the last time, at least that I knew that you came, you kindly invited me to one of your stand-up at the Corona Theater across from Joe Beef.
And incidentally, there's a unique dynamic in Quebec that's different from Canada, which is the protection of the French language.
And in doing that, you do end up also infringing on people's intrinsic rights, right?
So I'm fully francophone, so it's not as though I've got a – I mean, I'm perfectly happy to speak French.
But you shouldn't have to mandate that by instituting draconian laws.
So you get all sorts of immigrants that come to Quebec that you otherwise should want to have in Quebec.
But because they can't pass some French test, they end up leaving.
Is that really good for society?
According to the Quebec government, it is, because Quebec is a distinct society that's surrounded by evil English language, and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.
And you, in a lot of the ways, because of who you are and because of your academic background, because you're so articulate and the books you've written, you've managed to, like, avoid a lot of the pitfalls that some other people have fallen into because you're so undeniably respected as an intellectual.
And when you're talking about these things, you're talking about it from a place of, like, you have a deep understanding of the literature, you have deep understanding of, like, Where these problems come from?
What's the source of them?
How do they arise?
And how do they permeate through society in this sort of, as you say, parasitic way?
Yeah, well, you're a very important voice, my friend.
You really are.
And I think that your work has been instrumental for helping other people form arguments against some of this nonsense, too, because you sort of laid it out where it could just repeat what you've said.
Like, you know, wait a minute, you know, the Godfather's got some points here.