The Joe Rogan Experience - #1816 - Gad Saad

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University, and an expert in the application of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. He is the host of "The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad" podcast, and the author of multiple books, the most recent of which is "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense." http://www.gadsaad.com/

the Joe Rogan experience you look like you've lost a large child from your body 86 pounds that's right that's a large child I know that you want to take credit for it because fat shaming works exactly but I can't give you all take credit for it because- Fat shaming works. Exactly. But I can't give you all the credit. No, you deserve all the credit. I didn't do anything. So because- I just was concerned for your well-being.

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- A friend has to be brutally honest with you. Well, that's a hard one. that you want to play soccer and do all these things again. A friend has to be brutally honest with you. Well, that's a hard one. 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. I'm actually at the lowest weight since, I think, 88. That's incredible.

On size, waist, 33. How much better do you feel? Phenomenal. Outrageous. Isn't it incredible? Like if they could give you that in a pill, just the feeling, how it feels to be 86 pounds lighter. Exactly. Oh, my God.

I mean, just to give you a sense so that we could put it into metrics, when I was overweight, our lovemaking session was only an hour and a half of vigorous sex, whereas now I've doubled it. Congratulations. Thank you. How do you have so much time? It's incredible. My wife is Lebanese. She's spicy.

She demands a lot of me. What did you do other than exercise? And how did you shift your diet? So two things. Number one, 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day no matter what. No matter what. So it's been almost now two and a half years that I haven't done a single day of less than 10,000 steps. Now, the steps could be treadmill.

It could be walking outside. It could be running vigorously on the, you know, whatever. It could be biking. But I always have with me this actually, well, I should. Is it one of those pedometers? It's one of those pedometer things. And I'm obsessive about maintaining. So just by having this clear objective that I have to reach makes it that no matter what, I've got to get off the proverbial couch and walk around. It's

minus 20 in Montreal. I'm walking outside until I reach that. But I was always quite physically active. Of course, much of your weight loss comes from keeping this guy closed. Yeah. That's the thing that people need to, it's very, very, very, very difficult to exercise your way to weight loss. Exactly. And so what I did, so my wife who's here, who you've known her for many years, she's an amazing woman, she turned into the diet Gestapo.

She's got this MyFitnessPal, they're getting, I guess, free publicity on the number one show in the world. So through MyFitnessPal. They're getting, I guess, free publicity on the number one show in the world. So through MyFitnessPal, she enters, still today, every single thing that goes into this gorgeous body. So at the end of the day, she says, don't have any snacks. You're at 1727, and you were supposed to get under 1700. So by having that feedback loop that's always keeping you in check,

plus, so the third thing is 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? I guess you can calculate. Well, if I look at you now, you look like you weigh about 165 pounds.

Am I right? I'm 170. Ah, see, I'm pretty close. Very good. I'm good at weight classes. A lot of years of calling fights. Exactly. And I would imagine the heaviest you got

was probably close to 300 pounds. 256. Yeah. Okay, so that's the 86 pounds. So 256 for a guy. That's the heaviest. That's the heaviest that I, maybe I could have been more, that I'm aware of that I've actually seen it on the scale was 256.

I've gone for my yearly physical and I got on the scale and I was 256, which is the average weight for a six foot four middle linebacker who's, you know, eight inches taller, 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, the old baby steps thing.

And so I get on, I'm now 10 pounds less, 20 pounds. Hey, let me try to get under 200. I am. And then bit by bit, magically, here I am. For a message, if you have a message to anybody out there that's trying to do it, what would it be? What's the most important thing? It's that there are 1,000 different temptations in a day for you to violate your goal. And you can almost never fail.

You don't have to be so punishing. your goal, and you can almost never fail. You don't have to be so punishing, but 997 out of the 1000 bifurcations in the road, you have to take the right road. And so do that enough days, enough times, get 997 out of a thousand, and suddenly you'll be 30, 40, 50 pounds lighter. Just trust the process. Trust the process. And that's what's hard for people to do because they really do want immediate results. And the way I always describe it, there's a gambling term that you have to get better the same way you get sick. It's like if you're gambling, say if you and I were playing pool and I was ahead 100 games and you said double or nothing, I would say, no, no, no.

You got to get better the same way you got sick. Right. Because I'm up 100 games. Why would I risk losing it all in one shot? No, no, no. And that's how it is with weight loss. You got to get better the same way you got sick, slowly over time. And it's been now, you know, the usual thing is that you put it back on. I've now had it off for quite a while. So I'd like to think that I'm in my steady state now. Well, you've become aware now of the value of being thin and healthy, and you've become aware of how good you feel. I don't think you're a smart man.

You're not going to go back. Exactly. Did you ever have any trouble with your weight? I mean, I've been like five pounds overweight before, ten pounds overweight before. That's it? Yeah, and then I always like, oh, you fat fuck, and then I lose the weight. Now, is that because of your background?

No, no, no, not putting on. Why didn't you ever put on more weight? It's not an option. I'm not getting fat. Is it literally a vanity issue? No, it's a health issue. It's a health issue. I work out.

I do martial arts. If I'm fat, I can't work out. If I can, I feel it. It's like I put sludge in my engine. The fattest I ever got, I think I got to 207 one time. For me, it goes right here. It goes on my sides and in my belly. It also was eating a lot of pasta, which is just not for me.

Whenever I do that, I always feel like shit. And I just overeat. But I work out a lot. So it keeps it in check for the most part. But it can get away from me if I'm stupid. Because I still eat like a teenager. I eat as much as I want. I eat large amounts of food.

But you do mainly the protein stuff, right? Yes. Mainly I eat as much as I want. I eat large amounts of food. But you do mainly the protein stuff, right? Yes. Mainly I eat meat. But I eat mostly meat and fish and fruit. That's mostly what I eat. So I guess the fifth element of when you asked me how to lose weight, I also removed all the carbs, almost all of it. Once in a while I have a bit of something. So what is a daily meal for you like?

So breakfast I may have one or two boiled eggs. 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 a hundred 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, you know, 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, 1,700 calories, and I'm Mr. Slim Man. Are you trying to lose more or are you going to maintain this? Because you look great. Thank you. That's very kind. I just want to see a 1 and a 6.

I haven't reached it. I've gotten to 170. 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… That's pretty thin. That's pretty thin. at 155, which strikes me as a bit... That's pretty thin.

That's pretty thin. Yeah, I don't... 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. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, I think that one thing that can help you, I don't know if you've done intermittent fasting. Have you tried that?

So what kind of window? 16, 8? I like 16. Yeah, I like 16. So I've done that for three days just because I'm trying to recover from having gone on a trip. But I'm guessing you're suggesting that I do it for a longer period, correct? Well, I just, that's what I do. Always?

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. Right. You know, but that's my move. Are you as disciplined in other aspects of your life as you are in your weight management? I mean, certainly in your work ethic you are, but other things or do your punctilious nature only manifest itself in a few domains and you're completely carefree in others? No. No, I can't.

This is me. This is me with everything. Your exact thing. Yeah. I mean, I take days off. I relax. I know how to relax. I'm good at that.

But I think discipline is a very important thing for a person. I think it's a very important thing to take care of the thing. It's like not taking care of the things causes you so much more pain and anxiety than taking care of the things. Right. So take care of the things, no matter what it is, whether it's your body or your work or whatever you got to do. Fucking off is not good for you. It's like you need, if you're a professional, just do your work. And you should be a professional

with your body, be a professional, there's a great book called, I think it's called Going Pro, it's Steven Pressfield, the same guy who wrote The War of Art. I'm in the middle

of his second book which I don't like as much as The War of Art but Turning Pro and the whole idea is about approaching your work, like, you know, decide that you're a professional.

Show up when you're supposed to show up. You put in the time. And this is in regards, he's a writer. But I think it's applicable to almost anything, whether you're a painter or, you know, like yourself, an intellectual. You could be whatever it is. Whether you're dealing with your physical body, whether you're dealing with hobbies, just do the work. Put in the discipline. So I can apply what you're saying to being an author.

When you try to write a book, look, I do two types of authoring. I write academic papers, but those papers have a very clear template, right? You start with an intro, then you've got the hypotheses, the literature review, the methodology, the results. So the content is not a priori determined, but the template is clear. When you write a book, you're going on an open-ended journey. I mean, you do have an outline. You have a book prospectus of the things you want to say, but how you fill these in, you have no idea.

And so one of the things that I tell people when they write to me and say, how did you become a successful author? Discipline. Every single day, rain or shine, I decide that I have to write no matter what, 300 words. They may be great words. They may be things that I edit, but there is no, I'm not feeling good today. There is no, my throat is itching. I feel a bit down. No matter what, I'm writing 300 words. And so if you have that grit, I think it's a path to success. 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 his laptop before know to his laptop before he sits down 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. Right. You know, there is nothing more orgasmic to me, I mean, other than sex, literally, but

than the process of creation, right? 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, you know, a lot of academics don't write books.

They tend to focus on the peer-reviewed, you know, scientific papers. Well, it doesn't have to be entertaining. That's the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and what you write. Which, by the way, I want to give you a copy of The Parasitic Mind with an autograph. Please don't sell it on eBay.

I will not sell it on eBay. Thank you very much. Cheers. Enjoy it. Please read it. I think a lot of the woke stuff that you talk about is all covered in this book. And you covered it years ago, too.

I covered it. You were one of the first people to sound the alarm many years ago that 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

It really is because they do and they're they're actually a contagion like they spread throughout communities and people accept them as standard exactly 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 and it's just like they can just decide like what cannot be discussed because these things are offensive just like the whole idea of fat phobia 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 fat phobic.

That's true. 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. You're a fat phobe. Body positivity, right? It's nonsense. Body positivity is stupid.

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. Right. This is crazy. Yeah. Where it's not just wealthy people who are just sitting there getting fed grapes while they're lounging. It's poor people. Everybody's eating bad food.

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 are trying to marginalize differently weighted people. Differ 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, it's 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.

You're so special. You're incredible. It doesn't matter. And fuck those people that say you need to lose weight. You just need to be you. And you're just, I love you. You're amazing. And any man who looks at you for your beauty rather than what's on the inside

is not a man that you want to be with. Yeah. Well, he doesn't want to be with you either. So I don't know what to tell you. So if you want to just like call it first and say say i don't want to be with him because he judges me do you remember the book the beauty myth by naomi wolf do you know that book i do remember about that book i did not read it so she she's kind of come around a bit because she's now been

uh more on the rational side of the whole covet thing. You know, more nuanced, more tempered. Isn't she recently suspended from Twitter? Was she? I didn't know that. See if Naomi Wolf was suspended from Twitter. I believe I might be right. Is Jamie part of the Ministry of Truth? Jamie's on the ball. Don't worry about Jamie.

The Ministry of Truth? Is that the Biden administration? Yeah, here it is. Oh, she was suspended. Look at this. Don't worry about Jamie. The Ministry of Truth? Is that the Biden administration's? Yeah, here it is. Oh, she was suspended. Look at this. Suspends Naomi Wolf after tweeting anti-vaccine misinformation. There you go. Yeah, but this is on the BBC.

What is the actual anti-vaccine misinformation? What did she say? Oh, the beauty myth. There it is. That's what I was going to talk about. Yeah, this is her. So what did she say? 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. What? She said that? Has she gone crazy? I don't know. How are they, like, she claimed that vaccines were a software platform that could receive

uploads. Oh, Jesus, Naomi. This is what happens when you don't lose weight quick enough. She also compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Satan to her more than 140,000 followers. But that's not misinformation. That's correct. Well, you could do that. You're allowed to say that someone's Satan,

but you can't say that they're separating the sewage. Like there's some sort of a program that like separates vaccinated from unvaccinated poop. Like, well, you got to fill this out so we can detail which pipe your poop should be sent through. 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. I don't know know apparently she hasn't done any better recently she blew a fuse she blew it seems like she if that's all true jamie see if

there's anything that's like more rat the bbc is very sketchy lately especially when it comes to covid stuff if maybe there's um something that like has a detailed depiction of why she was suspended like with the actual tweet itself. Because I remember people were outraged on Twitter because she posted some really rational things and somebody reposted it. She posted it somewhere else. And they were like, she needs to be brought back.

But I don't know what it was. The problem with beauty is that it's not fair. That's what the problem is. So when someone says, you know, the beauty myth and men who want you to be held to certain standards of beauty, those men are bad people. It's like, no. It's a tyranny. It's a short-lived tyranny. A tyranny of beauty.

And it is reality. And you know who doesn't talk like that? Really hot women. Exactly. It's fucked. And it is reality. And you know who doesn't talk like that? Really hot women. Exactly. It's fucked. It's just, they are a drug. 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 it's bizarre to watch it's bizarre here's the thing so to give some people who may not be gorgeous some some light at the end of the tunnel mating is a compensatory process what do i mean by that uh i'm not six foot four height is beautiful trait, but I can make up for my lack of height by being charming, by being funny, by being exceptionally good looking, which is just the genetic lottery, by having academic status

and being an accomplished person. So I can compensate for traits on which I'm lacking, in this case, physical height. And so there are ways by which you can improve your lot on the mating market. Men can. 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? Well, we certainly can. And, you know, men are certainly attracted to women's personalities and certainly attracted to their energy and, you know, how they approach life. personalities and certainly attracted to their energy and you know how they approach life but the the unfortunate truth about sexual attraction is it's largely a

body shape and you know the way the structure of the face the geometry of the face it's It's I mean clearly some people are repulsive because of their personality even though they're gorgeous right that's true, too But it's stunning. Like, I'm sure you're watching this Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. I watched a bit of it, yes. There's no way a fat woman could get away with what that lady did to him. Right? There's no way an unattractive woman who's overweight could ever talk to Johnny Depp the way she did.

She's genetically gifted, and she's got an amazing face structure. I think at one point in time she was voted the most beautiful woman alive. Right. You know, she has a perfect face. It's kind of fading a little now because of craziness and drugs. And she's toning down her beauty to appear as a victim. She's not showing up, you know. Well, yeah. She's not dolled up.

She's not dolled up. She's not. I mean, she's vain. She's not going to not wear makeup. She's wearing up. She's not. I mean, she's vain. She's not going to not wear makeup. She's wearing makeup. She's also been doing coke for decades. You know, it's like that shit wears on you. I think the mélange, the combination of their two personalities was the perfect combustible, you know, fire, right?

Yeah. You know, he's, I mean, I didn't follow it closely, but from what I gather, he was pathologically jealous because he's much older. She's the super hot girl who is not very homely in her interactions with other men. She probably can trigger jealousy in even the most secure guy. So you take a rather narcissistic girl with a guy who is maybe fading in terms of his qualities as a man. He's much older than her. And so they feed off each other. One of the things, for example, I love, and I've been married to my wife for 23 years. We've been together. I think, I hope you'd agree. She's a beautiful

woman. Thank you. Uh, I know it's weird that you would pick this guy, but that's maybe my biggest accomplishment. Thank you. Uh, but anyways, uh, she's never once that I can remember triggered a jealousy response from me. Not that I don't have the capacity to be jealous. I think even the most secure of people can be. But it's because she has those wonderful qualities whereby we both know the code. We never try to test each other's love by triggering each other's jealousy. That's dark shit when when you see that in a relationship that i mean i've been in relationships where that happens and it's not

fun but when you see that happen you just go this is not going to end well like there's no one's gonna they're not gonna learn that type of personality that does that like she like one of the things in the trial she called him him an old fat ass. There you go. And they insulted each other. And it's just like, they're actors. Look, they're crazy people. That's just what it is, man. That business.

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, is 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 and it's not on objective metrics, right? It's not there. There isn't a clear ABC that would result in me being picked It's the vagaries of the casting director There's also an ideology attached to it You must be progressive and liberal you must be progress if you walk in there with a fucking make America great again hat on It's not gonna wear an attorney point USA t-shirt They'll kick you right out of the fucking room like you you literally won't be allowed to speak right if you want if you went Into the average casting agents if you were the best if you were Daniel Day-Lewis And he walked in with a MAGA hat on there was time to get the fuck out of here They won't they don't want you because it's 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 got to 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 right 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 like one of your kids moms is a tiktok lady and you're like oh jesus Christ and she's doing tick-tocks and asking to take selfies with you like Have any celebrities from that world entered your innermost? Friendship circle in your life. Yeah, there's good ones. There's people in that world that are very good people

Yeah, that are that are not in any way like what you would expect from like a movie star. Like Chris Pratt is a great example. He is the most normal, down-to-earth, friendly guy you could ever meet. Oh, that's great. He's wonderful. He's a great guy. Like I've run into him multiple times. I've been in a hunting camp with him.

I ran into him in Lanai on the beach, just randomly ran into him. I didn't know he was going to be there. He didn't know I was going to be there. And he was there with his, at that time, I think newlywed. I think they had just gotten married and he was there on his honeymoon. He's the best. He's so nice. And I'm going to make a prediction as to the number one personality trait that assorts people into the Chris Pratt's and not. Ready? Yes. Authenticity. and not ready yes authenticity authenticity is certainly um a factor another factor is um he's very religious you know so he has like a core set of values and ethics and morals that he thinks are um above everything else so a guy like that is not going to get sucked into it yes very grounded but i've met some

other people that are really cool i met robert pattinson recently the batman the new batman guy he's great he's a great guy he was so normal he's fun to hang out with great sense of humor you know who's my fantasy interview on my show who clint eastwood he's's a fantastic character. Here's another one. His son. His son, Scott. Great guy. Great guy. But is he in the business? Yes. He's a famous actor.

He stars in a bunch of movies. Scott Eastwood. Yeah. Should I be ashamed that I've never heard of him? Nah, you're not young enough. He's in, like, God, he was in that recent Guy Ritchie movie. What was the recent movie? He was great.

He played a bad cop in recent Guy Ritchie movie. What was the recent movie? He was great. He played a bad cop in the Guy Ritchie movie. He's in a lot of shit, man. He's always in movies. You know what I love about Clint Eastwood? So my first exposure to him was as a young kid in Lebanon with the Spaghetti Westerns. So you're five, you're six, and there's this quiet guy who's ominous, who comes in, who saves the day. And it's playing on all of the evolutionary based archetypes that we're programmed to respond to, right? So I'm looking at this guy and say, I want to, I like this guy. I want to be this guy.

And then throughout his career, you know, as I got older and as he progressed in his career, you know, he's become a great filmmaker. And so he, and plus he's not woke. And so he just seems like the type of guy, obviously he's now quite elderly and so on. He'd be the kind of guy that I'm sure I'm unlikely to meet him and not say, my God, what a cool guy. He just exudes those qualities, right? He seems very fun. Yeah. Very interesting. I mean, He seems very fun, very interesting. I mean, look, his career has been incredible. He was, you know, he's doing those Westerns in the 1960s.

Kind of like maybe one of the last old school movie stars that is still around, right? Well, also old school movie stars who's still working on a regular basis in his 90s. Unbelievable. Yeah, and directing as well as acting. Here's another one I would love to have on my show. I don't quite have your reach, so I could only fantasize about some of these guys. Burt Bacharach. Do you know who that is? No, I don't. Burt Bacharach is arguably the biggest music composer, song composer of the 20th century of all many of the 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 there yeah you know he said he's even sang himself with barbara 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. So 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. Well, aren't you lovely? I remember I was actually telling someone earlier this morning,

I was meeting 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. Well, it is a great cage, you know, but you're popular online to a point where, you know, you have this literature career, you write, you do your podcast, 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 you know guaranteed money that can sort of hold you back and i don't know exactly if it is holding you back it is it is we can talk about that so first let me address the communist part five minute of venting and then we can please do so last week you know i'm i'm by temperament unbelievably jovial i wake up in the morning i'm happy i'm excited I'm going to do Joe Rogan. Then I'm doing, just life is beautiful. 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. 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. 55% of the proceeds of your book are mine. 55? 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, and 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 insane. That's an incredible rate of taxation, but I always knew that Canada was really high.

And, you know, it used to be that Canada was high, but crime was lower in the United States. People were friendlier. It seems like a great system because you have socialized medicine. You have, you know, 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.

We had a conversation a few years ago where you were sort of more positive about him. I thought he was a handsome fellow with a good vocabulary and seems like a nice guy. And, you know, before he really leaned into the woke stuff, I just thought he was a kind, sensitive guy. And I was like, that's probably a good disposition to be a leader. But just the way he labeled those truckers as racist for no reason. The people that were protesting against mandates, he decided they were misogynists and racists. Transphobic.

Yeah. Yeah. It was just, but the way he did it was just 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 then I can impose laws to stop them from doing what is essentially a peaceful protest against something. So let me tell you about the draconian measures we've had in Quebec for COVID. Oh, I know.

You know about it. Yeah, I have friends. I have friends that live in Quebec and they're fucking furious. So we still have, by the way, masks. I think they're removing them on May 14th, right? 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. There was a politician in Canada that just said the science is settled and he's going to mandate if he wins COVID vaccines for young children. And it's going to be a part of their normal vaccination process like measles, mumps, rubella, required vaccines. Well, that science is not settled. Not only is it not settled, there's clear evidence that it's more dangerous. And you're looking at children getting COVID,

it's not dangerous. If you really want the settled science, you're going to encourage people to lose weight because that's the settled science. The settled science is obesity is a massive factor, a massive factor, a risk factor in COVID outcomes. 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 100 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? But 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, you know, 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, do you know who I'm talking about? The minister of truth. Who's going to adjudicate what is true or not. 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 right. 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. Yeah. And people should know also that your life experience was far more extreme than the average person's. When you're saying this, you're coming from Lebanon where you literally fleed for your life. Your family fleed for their lives because you're Jewish. Exactly. It's not as simple as I'm Jewish and denying the Holocaust is offensive to me because I'm Jewish. No, you fleed for your life because you were Jewish. Bingo.

And yet I support the right of those. So what greater commitment to absolute freedom of speech can you exhibit? So I hate all this stuff. I hate this idea that there should be hate speech laws. You can get on the pedestal and say Jews suck. And you know what? You're an idiot, but that's cool. What you can do is say, let's go to the corner of 7th Street and 8th Street, whatever, 8th Avenue,

and kill every Jew that's at that synagogue. So short of incitement to violence, short of defamation, everything goes. Yes. No, I couldn't agree with you more. 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. You know, like 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 a very specific miles per hour. You can actually time

them. You know when they're going to 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 disinformation looks like. The problem is we have these election terms and they're 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. And that's what they're worried about. And 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. Right.

Which is pure insanity. Insane. Pure insanity, because it's 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. Because they're not going to, look, those people are not going to vote for Donald Trump. If you look at the hardcore left people in this country, Because they're not going to – 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. And was a sex addict.

Maybe. Maybe he just likes to party. I don't know, 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. Well, this is a fucking slippery slope, a terrible slippery slope. 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, right? 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 celebrated the fact that Jack Dorsey had taken out Donald Trump's Twitter account. I mean, not that it's literally Jack Dorsey, but he had kind of tagged him, thank you, Jack, for doing this, right? So what did he do there? He was a consequentialist. He violated a deontological principle, which says that you never violate, you know, a freedom of speech thing, right? 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. For all other things, be a consequentialist. 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. just, you develop these bizarre groups of humans. I love following certain people just because I know they're gonna 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 I'm like, this is crazy. But it's so fat and some of it is of things like fat phobia and some of it is things like men can get pregnant, like that kind of stuff. It's so fat, and some of it is of things like fat phobia, and some of it is things like men can get pregnant, like that kind of stuff. It's crazy. 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 out of here. 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. It's something that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind. Did I ever tell you the story with my interaction with a woman with whom I had a battle about men getting pregnant?

I don't believe so, no. So let me tell you this. So this, of all idea pathogens that I discuss in the book, the granddaddy of all. 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, 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. 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 barefoot and pregnant. So once I- Mythological. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Once I recovered from the mini stroke, 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. So she said, I don't play label games. And sets in the West. And then I see her perplexed face, but that's postmodernism. So she said, I don't play label games. And that ended the conversation. Oh my God, how is this guy dating her? Are they married with children now?

No, they're not. They're not. I don't think it lasted much longer. So- Too bad. Wouldn't you like to interview her again? I would. 20 years later.

And I wonder, by the way, because I've told this story on a few occasions. It's in the book. I've always fantasized about whether she read that story and says, what an idiot I was, or whether she reads that story and says, what an idiot he is. He's never come around to seeing the truth. Well, she was in her 20s, right? She must have been in her 20s.

And now she's in her 40s. Maybe she's a Republican. Maybe she got red billed. That happens a lot. Well, that was in Canada, by the way. Yes, but I mean, whatever you have, whatever your version of that is. Conservatives. What's your conservative?

So it would have been Harper, the last prime minister who was conservative. Right, but what is your party, the conservative party? The conservative party. Oh, it's just the conservative party. And then there's the liberal party and there's the NDP. Those are the three main ones. Well, at least you have three. Yeah, we don't have a two party system.

Well, we have a joke. But the point, I mean, just to wrap up that story, she wasn't an escapee from a mental institution. She was a graduate student in post-modernism. Maybe you can't tell the difference between these two. But she wasn't an outlier. She was just aping what you learn if you're a graduate student in postmodernism. So what's the goal?

It's staggering, right? People often think that when I attack some of those disciplines, it's because I'm placing a value judgment on sociology or on art history. I'm not. I think you can study all those things in a very rational, in a very enlightened way that can enrich the human spirit. What you can't do is to be so parasitized by idea pathogens that it becomes a form of intellectual terrorism. It becomes a form of nihilism. Up is down, left is right. So I could have predicted the whole men can get pregnant from that story from 20 years ago. It's pretty incredible that she was willing to deny East, West, North, and South. And the sun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, we have a fucking compass. Okay. As far as like, what is East and what is West? Like

it's, well, what is hot and what is cold? You deny those labels? Like, do you, you know, if you ask for tea and they give you an ice cube, are you cool with that? What the fuck are you talking about? 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? 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. You know, 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. It's insane. It is insane, and I don't know where it's going. Do you have any predictions about five years from now? Is there any satire that you have thought about releasing on the world?

Not that I could think off the top of my head, but, for example, I have another series of satirical clips where I do the hiding under the desk. Have you ever seen any of those? Hiding under the desk? Yeah. So I literally, so I remember once you very kindly said that you really appreciated that the professor of kind 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 to, I mean, you don't like Donald Trump, fine. Yeah. 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. 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 that, you know, because somehow she's an ally to the LGBT community, so she came after me. Anyways, it doesn't matter. Valerie Bertinelli, the lady that used to be married to Eddie Van

Halen? Exactly. Exactly. You can probably go find all the tweets. They're still up there. So then- So I'm a little lost here. What is she upset at? She couldn't have said, hello, may I have a coffee without using pronouns? Is she mentally ill that she doesn't know how to address someone without a pronoun use? But there was, I explained then what happened. There was a colleague of the barista who, who my wife turned to, to that colleague to say, because it was the first day that the transgender person was working and was having a hard time with the cash register. So she wanted to say, oh, it's only his first day, he'll get the hang of it. So there was a need to use a pronoun, right? It was her first,

but she didn't know. So she don't want to presume that this female presenting person was a her, maybe that will offend her. She didn't want to use the, and so it was a very inoffensive, innocent thing. 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 until they went away. So lesson is life lesson. Never apologize to the assholes. But that seems like you have a lot of free time. You're willing to engage with those people all day long like that. You know what it is?

It's a pressure valve release for me yeah it's i i always do these things with a sardonic smile and a twinkle in my eyes i just enjoy now sometimes i'm too busy and i don't do it plus i'm combative and in that you know if you attack me i'm gonna attack you and anybody who's gone who's ever known you right it's just part of my temperament. So it's not a question of I have free time or not. It's just, I can't walk away from a fight. Well, I don't know if that's healthy either. It's not. And I've tried to modulate that by being less on social media. But this pronoun thing is so strange. I never would have imagined that gender would be such a

hot topic. I mean, there's always been, you know, look, go back to Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yeah. It was transvestites back then, you know, and then transvestites somewhere along the line. You heard transsexual now and then transsexual became a new thing. And it's like, OK, now people are transsexual. now and then transsexual became a new thing and it's like okay now people are transsexual and then you had drag queens which were not necessarily transsexual sometimes it's people that just have like some erotic connection or you know some fantasy connection with dressing up like a woman sometimes they were heterosexual and they just like to dress occasionally like women and but then

somewhere along the line it became like a major fixation for culture. The pronoun thing, and putting your pronouns in your bio, like grown men with beards, say he, him. Like what the fuck do you think you are? Every single professor I know on LinkedIn has to put it.

That's insane. I've talked to a professor about that, and he said, I reluctantly put it in my bio because if I don't, I'll be to put it. That's insane. I've talked to a professor about that and he said, I reluctantly put it in my bio because if I don't, I'll be attacked for it. The day that you see me putting it on my thing, send out one of your security guys to put a bullet in my head. No, I'll send them back to kidnap you and take you to Texas. We don't have to do that here. But even places like Austin is very progressive. It's probably the most progressive place in Texas.

Where would you put it in the continuum of wokeness compared to say the Mecca of Portland, Oregon? Not close. Not close at all. So still way, way, way, way more normal. It's tolerant, which is beautiful. I like tolerance. 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.

Right. Like he has friends that are right 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 yeah 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 could say i'm a they them and as long as you don't dress with like tank tops and you know, fucking yoga shorts. Like, and so like where it's really obvious you're a male, you can get away with it.

Like 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'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. To everything, yeah. Yeah, which is... So that speaks, by the way, to the earlier point when 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. Well, that's very brave of you in your line of work because that's not something that is common in professors. No. Professors, they give in to, for the most part, they give in to the will of the crowd. And it's very strange. You know, I've made the following analogy. 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 SEALness, if you'd like. I mean, on Navy SEALness and their intellectual courage, right? Yes. But we don't pick people. 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. Right.

And based on an objective analysis of truth. Exactly. Because there are facts. There are some things. objective analysis of truth. 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.

I've heard about that. Yeah, this is fucking insanity. 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? You're out of your mind. It's unbelievable. But this is 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? Do you remember what I answered you? I don't remember. What did you say? I said, well, fuck your feelings. Right? Yeah, your feelings are, like, that's the problem.

It's like 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 right there's people that get offended by alarm clocks they don't want to have to be somewhere on time right because they're offended by the idea that they don't need as much rest as you do right or you need less rest than that whatever the fuck fuck it is. The point is that like 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. So you should have less money and we should have even distribution of income and the merits

of your heart. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, that's the dangers of quality of outcome, right? I mean, that's literally communism. That's how it gets going. 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 door, 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 of, 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. So here's some optimism along those lines. 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. What do you think is causing the shift back? It might be that there's been some people who've been fighting this and now they're getting bigger platforms. So things are changing. It might be that more, I mean, take for example, someone, and I'm happy to use this platform to give him a kudos, Christopher Rufo. Do you know who that is? I know his name. So Christopher Rufo is a guy who came

out of nowhere, you know, was a journalist who became the kind of central repository of all things anti-critical race theory. He's a journalist, right? And now he has spearheaded, it was a serendipitous thing. He had never planned on being a 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. 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. 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.

Well, we see that. I'm sorry, but we see that with Disney, the stock crushing. We see it with Netflix, the stock crushing. They say with Netflix, their stock crashing. 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 reign again. Well, may reason reign again and may debate take place again too.

Let opposing sides discuss things. Come up with a champion for your left-wing idea and allow that champion to debate someone from the right. And then if the person from the right wins, do better. Come back with a better argument. Let's do it again. And maybe you're wrong. Maybe it turns out that this guy's going to convince you of certain things. Or maybe he's wrong.

Maybe you're going to convince the audience of things. he's wrong. Maybe you're going to convince the audience of things. When I was a child, when I was in high school, Barney Frank, who is a liberal in Massachusetts, was debating someone from the moral majority. And I got to watch, and the moral majority was like this- He was the first openly gay congressman. He wasn't openly gay at the time. Oh, I see. 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 like kind of cookie cutter, rah rah, conservative, you know, God, liberty, justice for all, that kind of shit. It was just like he was doing, 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 like 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 he wasn't. Nobody knew that. which was ironic because Barney Frank is gay, but nobody knew then. But when that all took place, it was very beneficial to watch it play out.

And the crowd let it all play out. There was claps when people did well. But you're watching this intellectual discourse. You're watching a sparring match. Right. And Barney Frank was the more skilled at that. And that's how it's supposed to go. That's what's beneficial for everybody watching. 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-Gadsad 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. It results in – I guess so. You can't fake that though I don't think.

I think it would come out eventually. But you know what's interesting to me is that when I have progressive people on the podcast, I get no pushback at all. From them or from the audience, you mean? From the right. From the right. 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. 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 it, I don't agree with what they're saying about many things, which oftentimes is the case.

It does not matter. The tolerance level from the left has evaporated. So I've got a theory for this. It's actually in my, forgive the shameless, but 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 wellbeing as compared to the liberals. And so I was trying to- I'll tell you why. So you go ahead and then I'll tell you my reason. The liberals are unhappy that the conservatives exist. So how can they be happy?

Right. So I'm going to add to what you just said. The conservative at the root of the word conservative in the etymology is to conserve, right? So there's a set of beliefs, of values, of foundational principles that are worthy of conserving. So I wake up existentially if I am a conservative and I say, yeah, there might be at the margins bad things, but I'm happy because life is good. There are things worthy of conserving. life is good. There are things worthy of conserving. The liberal, on the other hand, is looking for the magical utopia, unicornia that's around the corner. The current world sucks. I need to burn it down so that I could start fresh. And so I think that's why you get the deferring venom from the two. The conservative is happy with the status quo. The blue haired

Taliban wants to burn it down. Which is interesting because conservationists, a lot of them, tend to be liberal. That's true. They're trying to conserve nature. Yeah. Well, cognitive consistency is not a hallmark of the left, unfortunately. But conservationists who also participate in outdoor activities like hunting and fishing tend to be more Republican. That's right.

It's interesting. 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 that populations of wild animals are healthy, vast majority comes from hunters. Is that true?

Billions of dollars. Anecdotally or the data? No, the real data. Yeah, the Pittman-Robertson Act. It's an act that was created that, so it's not just hunters, it's also gun owners. 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. Do we know what is the the rate the ratio of rip you know avowed Republicans to Democrats who are hunters rough it's staggering 90 10 it's it's probably somewhere in that range yeah I would like to know I wonder if anybody's ever done that study it has to be the ones that I meet are all all Republicans. They're like, it's like 80%.

Right. 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. But most of them are conservative. Very interesting. Yeah. I did in this book, I looked at the distribution of Republicans to Democrats, certainly within academia. And as you can imagine, it's overwhelmingly tilted to the left. Overwhelming. Depending on the discipline.

And some disciplines could be 120 to 0, the ratio. I mean, literally not a single Republican. What is the discipline where it's more balanced? What's the most balanced? 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's 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 early 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

the pitman robertson act do we did you google that like what the pretend it's 10 for handguns 11 for long guns and ammo yeah so that's a large amount of money and how much money does it generate per year uh in the 76 years since its inception over seven billion dollars 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, the firearms and ammunition industry, by far America's largest contributor to wildlife conservation and public access to our natural resources. Now, isn't that, 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? Occasional Cortex AOC is someone who, you know. Occasional Cortex.

And by the way, someone told me that Michael Savage uses it. And that pissed me off because they were saying, oh, you stole it from him. I only found out independently that he uses I wanted to I wanted to give him the kudos but I came up with that joke I studied the brain occasional cortex so occasional cortex I'll go to war with you on that one aren't you sweet so I'm I'm I'm maladaptively honest to a fault so yeah I would never do that. So, occasional cortex is the linchpin, right? She's the new Green Deal, right? So I'm willing to bet that even

Republicans would probably not know of this, don't you think? A lot know. The ones that hunt know. What percentage of hunters are Republican versus Democrat? I was trying to find that out. I couldn't get accurate data. I found a poll of a,000 hunters,

and they were giving other, and they were answering other questions that didn't say like, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat. I bet it's like sociologists, but the other way. So earlier I was saying about the distribution of Democrats to Republicans in academia,

but I found a study that was looking at within medicine. So you are an anesthesiologist. You are a surgeon. You are a psychiatrist. You are a dermatologist. Does the likelihood of you being Republican or Democrat change across disciplines of medicine? And there are profound differences.

I thought that was fascinating. This is not my study. It was someone else's study. So psychiatry, pediatrics scored very, very high on the left. Orthopedic surgeons, oh, and infectious disease also scored very high on the left, which we might presume from some of the COVID interventions. Orthopedic surgeons were a lot more right. Isn't that interesting? Well, it's a structure thing, right? Like there's

no room for funny business and shenanigans and mandates when it comes to fixing your knee. Fixing Achilles tendon. Exactly. Yeah. It's just like, this is what it is. And I bet military, very high on the right. On the right. Exactly. Very high on the right. Well, the thing about hunting in particular that I think leads it to be very high is 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 it's very difficult hunting is very difficult especially a mountain hunting i would imagine that the people that do like elk hunting and the people that do like the real high mountain stuff it's overwhelmingly

conservative people right it's fucking hard man like there's no equity in in in hunting like you don't you know 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 can't say you're being fat phobic. 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,

it's okay to be the body positivity. That only exists because of excess. I'm wondering, forgive me, I don't mean to be psycho you know, the body positivity that only exists because of excess. I'm wondering, forgive me, I don't mean to be psychoanalytic on you, but your disdain for obesity has come across in many of, at least our chats. Is it because you don't, you ascribe a particular trait to someone who is willing to let themselves go that is kind of a personal injury to your sense of i'm afraid of seeing it in myself i see yeah i mean when i when i mean one of the things that people people are upset at something they see in other people it's things that they would never

want to see in themselves right like i don't like liars because i'd never want to see myself alone i don't like people that are weak i don't like peoplears because I'd never want to see myself alone. I don't like people that are weak I don't like people that just give up drives me crazy, right? Cuz I I don't ever want to see that in myself. That's the thing I fear the most so what is obesity? It's like are you blind? Do you not recognize that you've done something horrible to your body? Of course, you know, right you've just chosen that it's too difficult to act and do something.

But I have a slow thyroid. Oh, me too. Really, I have hypothyroidism. Do you, okay, I was being facetious about that. No, I really do. Okay. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, when I found out about it, I had 8% body fat.

Yeah. Wow. I was fucking ripped and I was still, I was like, why am I getting headaches? And the doctor's like, you have a hard time losing weight? I'm'm like no and he was like you will you have hypothyroidism it's um what's it called Hashimoto's disease yeah and so they prescribe thyroid medication but it just stuck because at nighttime I would get these vicious headaches and I would go to sleep like I got shot with a tranquilizer dart I was was so tired. But my willpower and my discipline is what kept me working out. I don't know if I was 8% body fat.

I might have been 10. But I had a six pack. I was ripped. And so they're like, this is unusual. Usually people who have hypothyroidism, they gain weight. But I just worked out all the time. I just made sure I worked out, period. I didn't use it as an excuse like people that use that as an excuse like

I'm tired all the time and I exercise I still fucking do it I just make myself do it like that's up. That's a possibility. That's a choice, but you enjoy it though because I enjoy Exercising yes, it's not a chore for me to do it Well clearly when you get healthier you're enjoying even more because you've seen the fruits of your labor But also once you get going once 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. Yeah.

You know, especially like 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 that's, you did it. Like in 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? Right. You don't have exercise. Well, what a coincidence You don't have exercise and then you the thing that you get when you don't exercise is is prevalent which is anxiety. Yeah

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. I'm going to share this

probably for the first time ever publicly, and I'm doing it on the biggest forum in the world. Last year in July, I was driving to go get the Roti Street Peruvian chicken with my wife and kids. I had absolutely no sense of doom or anxiety or stress, and I got out of the blue and it turned out to be a panic attack. I'd never, ever had this. I've never, I'm, you know, I'm an intense person, but I'm very mellow. First time in your life. First time. So I had had a few times where I felt kind of an anxiety rush. I think it started when

I was getting in 2017, a lot of death threats that required for me to have security and so on. So that's the first time that I felt kind of this whoosh, but it was totally manageable. I've never experienced anything. And so we were driving and I told my wife, I feel like I have to stop. My heart is really beating fast. I started getting tingles in my fingers. I said, am I getting a stroke? Am I getting a heart attack? And so we went to the hospital, and very quickly they said, you know, it's a panic attack, which I haven't, I've never had a recurrence of it. I can't explain why I had it that time and I haven't had it other times. It turns out, by the way, that the attending physician, when we were, I were i said you know because i'm always worried i mean you you would feel it more than i do you're a public figure um i'm known and he goes i i know

who you are when i saw the name that i was right and then he kind of told me you know maybe you need to mellow out and not be so you know he gave me the usual stuff but i'm saying all this because as I felt other times this kind of rush coming that might lead to that, what would help me is to right away start exercising. And when I would exercise, it's as if like a gag reflex. You know, if sometimes you're nauseous, you're nervous, if you gag, it releases it. So exerting the physical pressure that's pent up in you, then my wife would say, how do you feel? I say, oh, I feel great. I'm fine. So exerting the physical pressure that's pent up in you, then my wife would say, how do you feel? I say, oh, I feel great. I'm fine. So I think I have anecdotal evidence to support what you're saying. Yeah. I think most people do that have experienced that, that have had these bad feelings, then exercise and felt good afterwards. It's the release of

endorphins. I mean, it's all science. They know what happens to the body when you exercise. Exertion feels good. There's something very valuable. And if someone's overweight and you're saying, well, I can't run. I can't exercise vigorously. You don't have to. You can just walk. Just go walk.

Especially if you're overweight, I would encourage you to just walk. You don't have to do something that hard. 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 you know, it's, 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, I saw, 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? Oh, Jesus. 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.

Yeah. And I said, that's it. I'm about to die in front of my children. 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. But when you do have it, it is a surreal feeling. 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. What kind of damage have you done in the process? Yeah. Because when you were 86 pounds heavy, which is so crazy for me to say, I can't believe you were actually 86 months ago but that's how you were when i met you that is terrible for your body it is your body carrying

around all that extra tissue is just it's the worst and you know it's like it's not my disdain for people that are overweight i have love for everybody and i certainly have love for people that are overweight i have a lot of friends that are morbidly obese i have friends that are comedians one of your comedians who always appears i don't know his name joey diaz yeah yeah joey's lost quite a bit of weight oh good yeah he lost quite a bit of weight during the pandemic he was really worried about it he's you're setting us straight one guest at a time less i try man it's just i try not to do i'm just i come off mean sometimes because i'm mean to me right you know so i mean if i'm mean to me. Right. So if I'm mean to me about stuff like that, I'm mean to my friends.

And sometimes they don't want to hear it. I'm like, okay. Okay, but I'm just telling you. You know, it's so funny you said this because not to be charitable, but a lot of people got upset when you had fat shamed me. And I think my wife and I were talking, and I said, you know what? How about I look at it this way? talking. And I said, you know what? How about I look at it this way?

If he didn't care, he wouldn't have said that stuff. No, I've had a lot of fat people and never said a fucking word to them. I love you. I want you to be healthy and wealthy. And I'm happy that you are now. I'm really happy. It's beautiful. And I've been following it very closely. I follow you on social media.

You sent me one. Such a nice message. I'm seeing you on those. That really made my day. That was so beautiful. Well, it made my day to see you thrive. It really makes me happy. It makes me happy because I know how hard it is.

It's very hard to change your lifestyle. 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'm like, I don't think it's not. No, 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 it's – 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, and I've seen a lot of great comedians, and there's great, great comedians that are alive 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 of 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. Like that's why I'm very encouraging of young up and coming comedians or even old, you know, I don't give a fuck what age you start, but 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. It's a great way to make a living.

I saw you on a documentary where I think you were – it was a documentary about stand-up. Do you know which one recently? I've done a couple of those. Okay. I don't know which one. Do you know which one recently? I've done a couple of those. Okay, I don't know which one.

I was fascinated by it because I think what was being discussed is the creative process in generating material. And I'm fascinated by that because I can explain my creative process of how I write a book, but I've never attempted to write a set of jokes. I could be naturally funny, but I don't know the mechanism. I don't know how a chef is creative. I don't know how a painter. don't know how a chef is creative. I don't know how to paint it, but the act of creation excites me. And so I remember I had watched that particular documentary and I thought it was so cool to see all these comedians. It was, I'm trying to think which one it was. It was maybe a two-part series. Is it ringing a bell?

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 like Tony Hinchcliffe is one of my favorite comedians a good friend of mine Right he he writes in joke form and he thinks in joke form like he's the guy like if something happened If Jamie something says something and Tony has this sly look in his face I always look at him and he'll have like the perfect line. Right. 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 going to watch it and they'll do one minute of standup 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 fun. And in that- 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, 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, um, sex differences. Yeah. Sex difference. And then just start. And then I just like, I'll just, I might type out a thousand words of nonsense for one sentence and that one sentence of like ah there's something there and i i'll pull that out and i'll put it aside i'll copy and paste that somewhere else and then i'll start over again with that one sentence that i know that's good i'll keep that above and then right below it i'll

give it a couple spaces and right below it i'll readdress the subject try to do it from new eyes so if if you have to come up with new material for a one hour special yeah how how many pages of content is going to correspond to the one hour nine out of ten pages suck really yeah if you looked at my notes you'd be like this guy's fucking terrible but the the thing is like i don't know i'm not writing down the things that I think are good. I'm just writing. Okay. Right?

So I'm trying to let my mind find the things that are good, right? So as I'm talking about a subject, I'm just da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da. So if that's true, then why is this? And then like, ha-ha, 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 or does it come?

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. 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 like looking at this like 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, but there's no line. And her and I were howling. We were laughing so hard. That came out of the ether, right?

That made it onto a comedy special. But that came out of nowhere. So sometimes it's like that. Sometimes they just come. Do you test the stuff on trusted audience of your friends before you do it the first time professionally sometimes i'll run it by a professional sometimes i'll run it by tony or one of my friends and i'll like 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 just I've got like two different versions so

Friday night I did two sets in Phoenix I did one version of it the first set and it's 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 is 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, you know, someone like Brett Kavanaugh being inducted into Supreme Court. Like, it's got to be good a year from now. It's got to be good. It's got to be a good chunk. It's got to have good material. It can't just be familiar. So I want to ask you, I want to tie what you just said to some scientific principles.

So there's something called two-factor theory in psychology of persuasion. The idea being that every time you are exposed to a stimulus, there is incremental learning. The first time that I hear a lecture, I pick up a lot of stuff, but the second time I pick up more, but it reaches this asymptote. After I've watched the same lecture 18 times, I can't extract anything from it. An opposing factor is what's called negative tedium, boredom. The first time I hear a funny ad that's surprising, it makes me crack up. But by the second time, it decays very quickly. 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? That's part of the art. The art is you have to be in the moment when you're discussing a subject, you have to care if you don't care the audience knows if you're phoning it in they know you can say the right words with the right amount of pause with the right timing and it doesn't matter they have to fucking know that you're tuned into it if you're not tuned they smell it they feel it it's like they're there's what's going on when you're doing stand-up is some kind of weird sort of mass hypnosis.

That's what's going on. And to think that it's just jokes is not totally understanding the art form completely. Because everyone knows, everyone that's done stand-up that's had a killer set, when you're killing, you have this feeling where you're just you're everyone's like synced right it's like there's energy in the room like you feel a wave that you're all riding and you're as much of a passenger as you are the driver right and you're all riding it together that's

the best time that's the best time for the audience it's the best time for the kids 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, you know, 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? What would it be? I definitely wouldn't want to choose. Cause 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 uh 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 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, it's just like, that's fine. But my job is to explain what's happening and to put color to it. I'm literally a color commentary guy. That's helped by comedy because I talk live all the time. so like 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 always people are watching because people are always watching me right like 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, and whether I'm not warmed up enough. Because there is like 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, so say if you didn't give a shit about MMA, but you were like, well you know what would be good? If I was an MMA commentator, MMA's really popular, maybe I should become one of those.

With no, I'm not into training, it's not a part of my life, but I'm just gonna learn a'm not it's not a part of my life but i'm just gonna learn a lot about it good luck right good luck good luck that shit would take decades and you're gonna get things wrong the people gonna get so mad at you you're gonna say the wrong name for a kick are you 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 to fuck it up. And then the people that know are going to be so mad. One of the things that I'm very fortunate that I have that job,

very, very fortunate, but I say I'm very fortunate, everyone knows I'm very fortunate. I know that they know. They know that I know, right? And they also know that I'm legit. Like I really care. Authenticity, you talked about earlier.

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 We talked about it earlier. There's not a moment when I'm watching a great fight where I'm pretending. Right. I am fucking 100% tuned into that. They know I'm one of them. Right. 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. Well, I remember maybe the first time that I came on your show, you said something that always stuck with me. You were drawing an analogy between the honesty that is required when you are a stand-up comic, when you're a fighter and you go into the ring, you can't hide anywhere. And then you analogized it to when I have to speak in front of an audience about academic stuff. And you said that all of these three pursuits, you can't bullshit because they're going to know. And I

love that because I am someone who is authentic to a fault. And so I love the idea that if you walk into the ring, you can't fake it. If you're not prepared, you're going to get pummeled. If you go up in front of an audience, you're not funny. Regrettably, people are going to respond accordingly. If I get up in front of an audience and I start espousing bullshit,

people are going to, I mean, I'm on this show. People are going to listen to every syllable that I utter. And so I think for me what protects me is that I'm very epistemically humble. In other words, when I know something, I walk with the swagger of someone who knows what he's talking about. But then if you ask me about, so what are the consequences of the legalization of marijuana in Canada? I'm going to say, you know what? I don't know enough about this topic. And so having that epistemic humility protects me against the prying eyes

because I am very modulated as to what I know and what I don't know. And of course, Confucius talked about this many centuries, many thousands of years ago. And so I think that honesty element is so beautiful. And so people ask me, do you get nervous before you get on Joe Rogan? And I say, no, he's a friend. I know I'm going to have a good time. I don't think just like you that there's anybody watching me.

The number one thing that makes me stressed about coming on the show is, am I going to have to go to the bathroom during the three hours? If you have to go, you let me know. I know you always say that. Just let me know. We'll pause it. That's literally the only thing that worries me But your honesty is very important

And you are obviously honest to a fault There's no fault to be honest That's a weird statement It's so that people know they can trust you If you're like you are Where you know so much about psychology You know so much about the, 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. Yeah, exactly. And that's so valuable.

That's so valuable. One of the biggest thrills I get is, as you might imagine, given your platform, I receive innumerable emails from people. Someone will say, I got into evolutionary psychology because I followed the stuff that you were talking about with Joe Rogan. And which leads me to another point, which again, not to blow complimentary smoke up your which, again, not to blow complimentary smoke up your beautiful behind, but in the parasitic mind, I tell the story in Chapter 1 of the haughtiness of academia. And the story that I tell is I was at Stanford speaking at the business school,

about as big of an academic mecca as you can get, and the gentleman who had hosted me the night before for dinner said, oh, you know Joe Rogan, you go on his show. I said, yeah. He said, yeah, well, you know, we don't condone that at Stanford. I said, well, what do you mean? What is it that you don't condone? He said, well, you know, we don't do sexy research so we can get on Joe Rogan. I said, well, I don't do research so I can get on Joe Rogan, but I can do research and get on Joe Rogan. I don't do research so I can get on Joe Rogan, but I can do research and get on Joe Rogan.

Surely you would think that popularizing your ideas to millions of people might be worthwhile in addition to publishing a peer-reviewed journal. And his answer was, yeah, well, we don't do it. He's just saying that because he hasn't been on. Exactly. I've had a lot of people from Stanford on. Well, but not this guy. But by the way, when I started coming on the show, I don't think you had yet many professors who had come on. I think now everybody wants to come on Joe Rogan because... Yeah, you were one of their...

What year did you first come on? The first time? 2014. I don't know if you were the first professor, but you were certainly one of them. I mean, that's eight years ago. Isn't that crazy? Time flies. It's unbelievable. Do you foresee doing this forever, or do you ever see it?

I enjoy it. I don't think about it. I don't think about whether or not I'll keep doing it. I thought about it when I was gonna build a giant building. When I came out here, I was gonna buy a piece of land and build, and I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute. How long am I gonna do this for? For what purpose?

To build a fucking crazy podcast empire. Is that right? Just to build a giant studio. I'll show you what we're doing here afterwards. Yeah. But I thought about it for a moment, and then I'm like, what are you thinking? Why are you thinking about that? I don't – I just do what I like to do.

And as long as I can do what I like to do, I just do what I like to do. If it becomes, like, pragmatic, if I have to sit down and go, well, this is not tenable anymore. This is, like, not manageable. This is too much of this and that. But it's not. So I don't have to think about it like that. So if you don't mind me asking, you've had recent stuff with Spotify and this thing being taken off and that. Would that be construed as something that affects your enjoyment of doing a podcast? What affects my enjoyment is whether I enjoy it while i'm doing it and i always enjoy it while i'm doing it because i always pick who's on right so like i don't have

uh there's not a managerial department or a you know there's no executives there's no one so if you see you know like yesterday i had the Black Keys on. I love that band. They're fucking awesome. They were great. And like, I'm friends with them and they contacted me and they said, hey, we got an album coming out. I'm like, fuck yeah, come on. Like that's the process. So there's no filter. So the audience knows there's no filter. They're aware of this. So they know that if I'm talking to you, it's because I enjoy enjoy conversations. So that's always going to be good. And when it's not, I'll just quit. When I'm just like, I don't want to do that anymore.

I'll just quit. So I recently saw you on Instagram posting about Marcus Aurelius. Yes. And so I want to, can we veer to that for a second? Sure, please. 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. Isn't that wild? Yeah. It's unbelievable. And so it reminds me, and I want to give him kudos on the show. So do you know who Nassim Taleb is?

Sure. Yeah, so Nassim is a good friend of mine. He's a fellow Lebanese. And so many years ago, he was kind of egging me, teasing me, saying, I don't really understand what you study in psychology, Gad. Everything that there is to know about psychology and human nature, the ancient Greeks have already covered it. And so I mean, he was just egging me on.

But then many years later, as I'm preparing for this book, I'm like, I think he might be right. You know, we might be empirically validating what they've already philosophized. But so your post about Marcus Aurelius really resonated with me at exactly that same moment it's quite fascinating when you read his his writing it's

unbelievable because he was so wise and his decisions for what he would concentrate on and not concentrate on and you know 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 were, the Greeks and the Romans. And, you know, if you look at the history of these ancient civilizations that dominated the world at that period of time, and 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 into the – 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. Yeah. 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 studies 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. 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 2000 years ago connects me with him. Yes, truth. 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. It is fantastic. You know, there's a great book, uh, called the, um, the, what is it? Immortality code. And it's, uh, Brian Murorescu who has, he's gone through, uh, ancient Greek culture and, uh, Greek culture and all of the Ulyssidian mysteries and looked into all of their rituals and tried to figure out like 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.

Wow. So they had different kinds of ergot and different kinds of things that would produce psychedelic states. So all of these, you know, like 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. thinkers of you know that age and of course Roman emperors forbade it and they outlawed it and they in 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 pack you could track the path of their escape from these areas where they were more restrictive and trying these ritualistic experiences in other places. But it's the immortality key or code? Key. The immortality key. It's an amazing book. Really, really. And Brian was on the podcast. And because of him being on the podcast, Harvard has opened up a field of study in that particular area where they're looking at psychedelic substance use in ancient Greece. Because it's irrefutable now.

Because of the residue, now they now have scientific evidence. They have residue that shows that they were most certainly flavoring their wine with this stuff. That's another thing that I didn't know. I always thought wine was wine. It was fermented fruit. It's not. Their wine, they would always add things to. They constantly added stuff to their wine. Their wine was never just wine. Their wine was most of the time wine with other things. And oftentimes, psychedelic substances like ergot mixed in with the wine. Fantastic. So earlier you said that, you know, 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 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 job. I mean, you probably lived 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?

I've never met her. Oh, she's here. She'll be here in a little bit. Oh, that'd be great. She'll be here. We have a gym next door. So what would be the things that you would advise people? I want to see if it jives with some of the things that I say in the book, the things that, you know, you should look for for the optimal mate. Of course, there is no guaranteed recipe, but do you have some life lessons as to how someone should choose their optimal wife or husband? You have to be someone who a good person would want to be with.

Yeah. That's a big one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 right like who the fuck are you to get that person like you have to be i mean i don't mean worthy as in a human being i mean worthy in your behavior your your tenacity your discipline your passion yeah 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 desired but nobody wants to be compatible right nobody wants to be generous nobody want I mean that 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 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 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 like 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 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 out 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.

I was going to say exactly that as a test. Oh, my God. Or the man talks badly about his ex-girlfriend or his ex-wife. She's going to go, what are you going to say about me? Yeah. You know, what are you going to, why are you not even treating me nice? I actually, so I agree with everything that you've said. So one time, so, you know, I told you I always go for long walks with my wife to get to the cafe in the morning.

So, you know, 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 he said, we stopped by to say hello. And he said, do you mind if I ask you a question, Gar? 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. Now, I don't know if there is a recipe to find that person, but if you do find that person, hang on tight. So that's one. Well, you have to know who you are. Very true. If you don't know who you are, you won't know who they are. And if you're full of shit. And by the way, the ancient Greeks already beat you to that. Know thyself, right? Yes. So the stuff you're saying, they already said it. Yeah, they knew it. To our point. Yeah.

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. I tend to be extroverted, you are introverted, maybe that compliments each other for a little sexual dalliance behind the bushes. But on the other hand, for long-term marital success,

you want assortative mating, a birds of a feather flock together, on which traits on shared values. Right, right. So if you don't have that in common the stats of you likely divorcing shoots through the like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard being Johnny's a sweetheart of a guy Joe but is that true is it really oh yeah he is yeah he's a sweetheart of a guy yeah yeah I've talked to him and he's very good friends with one of my very good friends

my friend Doug Stanhope he's a sweetheart of him, and he's very good friends with one of my very good friends, my friend Doug Stanhope. He's a sweetheart of a guy, and that's part of the problem. And he was in a loving relationship before her and had a child and the whole deal. But it's also it's the partying. That's probably what they shared in common. But what they didn't share in common was truth and honesty, and Johnny's pretty honest. I didn't know that he was so poetic and all that. See, people are going to get the chance to see him. He's an interesting guy, and she other lady. I didn't know that he was so poetic. Yes, see? People are going to get the chance to see him. He's an interesting guy, and she's not.

Well, she's interesting, like, if I was a psychologist and I was studying her. Like, for you, it must be interesting. Right, right, right, exactly. Because, I mean, she's so full of shit that she says things on the stand that are directly refuted by previous things that she said, including that she never hit him.

Like, she's fucking uncut. Not only that, the two of them are recording hit him. She's fucking untruthful. Not only that, the two of them are recording each other. Like how crazy the both of them. That's when they have in common. Neither one of them trusted each other, so they were fucking recording their conversations like insane people. You were mentioning earlier about the test with the,

if someone treats the waiter or waitress badly. Do you remember in Bronx Tale, the door test? Yes, yes, yes. Isn't that unbelievably wise? Yeah, it is wise. How crazy is it back then? Like there's no automatic doors. Exactly.

You had to use a key. By the way, one of my favorite movies of all time. It's a great movie. It's a great movie. Yeah, yeah. But that is a test. Like you want people that care. Like people that don't care about other people. But that is a test.

You want people that care. People that don't care about other people. That's only a virtue if no one cares about anyone and you're protecting yourself from pain. Right. Right? And so there are a lot of people out there that say that. I don't give a fuck about anybody else. I'm going to get my thing.

That's silly. Right. You're missing the objective point. The objective point is community. The objective point is camaraderie, love, friendship, relationships, whatever. It's like it's a mutually beneficial thing to be caring and to be kind. It feels good to be nice to people. It really genuinely does. It's actually selfish to be generous and kind and nice.

It really is because it feels good. Because you benefit. Yeah, you benefit, and people don't think about it that way. And it's not why you should do it. You should do it because it makes other people feel good, but that does make you feel good. It really does. It's like really,

like that's one of the secrets to my happiness. I have a lot of really good friends and I'm really close to them. And like I love them. And I tell them I love them. I tell my guy friends I love them all the time. And I have a lot of friends and uh these friends that i have a lot of them uh i've known for decades and we've

had a lot of fun together and we it's we have kindness and generosity but also we hold each other accountable and we're also very honest and when they they're not honest, I'm like, come on, fuckface. I don't give a full shit. 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 a 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, someone who's being instrumental in your- You can find out pretty easy. Okay. Bullshitters are not good at it. No one's good. I mean, there's some genuine sociopaths and wind up being cult leaders and shit like that, but eventually you see it eventually see just don't let them all the way but you 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. Right. And you're not reading how the other people are seeing you. So you think you're conning people when you're not. This is the Amber Heard thing. Yeah.

Like if she was an honest person, just the way she's talking and acting like the fake crying, it would be so brutal. But it's so funny because I listened to, think it was maybe megan kelly's podcast uh where it seemed as though everybody had bought into you know her act that you know no way even though she's an actress could she ever fake those emotions whereas i watched that little snippet and it struck me as inauthentic so what is it that was authentic i well i can't remember who her guest no no no the i think there was a guest on her show oh the guest must have been a hardcore woman feminist that like doesn't believe but do you think that's the only victim do you think that that's the only thing that can assort people into

seeing the inauthenticity versus not seeing it? Yeah, I think she has. If someone doesn't recognize the inauthenticity of that woman on trial, it's because they don't want to. They can't read people, yeah. Well, they either can't read people or they are so biased that they're looking for it. Like when people were talking about Joe Biden, like Joe Biden's State of the Union address was amazing. Or was it Mark Garagos?

What about Mark Garagos? Who's a friend. I think that was the guest on Megyn Kelly where he was saying, you can't fake those kinds of raw emotions. That's hilarious. Isn't he a lawyer, though? He is. Yeah. I don't know about that.

Yeah. Sorry, Mark. I didn't mean to call you out. Of course you can fake that. She's not even faking it well. Right. What a sucker he is. I'd like to find out how many times that guy's been divorced.

Okay. Mark, I'm really sorry because I got to tell you. Maybe he's just saying that to be a contrarian. So I know Mark well. He lives in Southern California. He's done a lot of high-profile cases. A couple of summers ago, I was in Southern California with my family. We were very keen to go to an LAFC game, Los Angeles Football Club.

I reach out to Mark. I say, Mark, you got to hook me up with tickets. Within two hours, he's wired me tickets to go. So he's a good guy. He is a very, very good guy. Sometimes good guys are suckers. Now, I might agree with you on one point. Doug Peterson, is that his name?

The guy who killed his wife? Or Dennis Peterson? The guy who killed his pregnant wife who was on death row in California. He represented him. Which one? I don't remember what that guy was. What were the circumstances of him killing? There was a guy who was dating, having an extramarital affair, so his pregnant-

Is that in Colorado? No, it was in Modesto, California. Because there's a few of those cases, aren't there? Can we get Jamie to pick? That's so fucking gross. Scott Peterson. Scott Peterson. Okay, I remember that one, yeah.

Well, I think Garagos represented him or maybe during the appeal process. And I've always wondered whether when lawyers do that, they have to know the truth. You have to know, but it's your job to defend the guy. That's what's the darkest thing about that job. Yeah. When you're a defense attorney in particular, where you have to defend someone who very well might have killed their pregnant wife. But technically speaking, if that client were to say to you, I admit to you in private that I've done it,

or do you have to go under the... I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know. I don't know how that works. I mean, I think you could probably recluse... Could you recuse yourself? What happens when someone knows that their client is guilty? That's a very good question. I mean, so my feeling is as long, and I don't know, I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think they can simply say, I did it and you're defending me.

So I just kind of put my hand and I go, la, la, la. Don't ever say it. And I'm presuming that we're going, everything you're telling me is truthful. Yeah. You know what's scary is the opposite of that. When prosecutors know that you're innocent and they're still trying to get you. That's real. I mean, that's Kamala Harris, by the way. I despise that woman and I'm Canadian.

By the way, her high school, I played soccer for my high school against her high school when she was at that school in Montreal. Because I don't know if you know, she was from Montreal. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. She grew up in Montreal. Wow. So we lived very close to one another. Did she cheat at soccer, too?

She probably—well, I didn't play against her. I didn't play—I played on—back then, we we used to have boys team that were made up of biological boys. Lawyers are supposed to represent someone even if they think they're guilty. Okay. Zealously. But if they think they're guilty or if they know. What if the. I believe it's the same thing.

Oh, it's the same thing. Is that right? Okay. 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. becomes like an intellectual exercise for the person who's the lawyer to defend someone who they know is guilty against an inferior prosecuting attorney that they know is kind of a schlub, and they can sneak by. And they've done that in the past with expensive suits and big words and convincing arguments. The mafia lawyers surely don't think that those guys are in construction,

really. 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? Bruce something. What was his name? Cutler? Bruce Cutler? Was that his name? That sounds right.

Cutler? Boy, we're going to Jamie today a lot. What was his name? But he was built like a fucking linebacker. He was a scary guy because, you know. He was a mob lawyer. He looked like a mob lawyer. Yeah, look at him.

What's his name? Bruce Cutler? Yeah. Look at the fucking, look at the size of that guy. I mean, he looks like the guy would break your fucking head with a bat. Look at him. Look at him. Big, bald, gorilla-looking dude like he'd smash your fucking face in.

That looks like a mob attorney. Like that's a guy that was under no illusion that John Gotti was innocent. And he was really good at getting him out. That's why they called him the Teflon Don. They kept getting him out. By the way, you mentioned earlier how horrific it is when you prosecute someone that you know is innocent. 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... That's a third of your life.

Right. If you're lucky. Yeah. So you might... I'll send you the link if you ever have time. You should watch it because this guy is the model by how we should live life without having rancor in our heart. I mean how forgiving he was is really incredible.

That's amazing. Yeah. It's a sneaky system. I've had Josh Dubin on. He's an ambassador for the Innocence Project and he's a good friend of mine. I've had Josh Dubin on. 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. Is there no end to your influence?

Well, it's his influence. I mean, I'm giving him the portal, but he's 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 We're immigrants couldn't speak English well or 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. No one does that. Ego and careerism over truth. So on the judicial point, are you for or against the death penalty? 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 right like they try to withhold evidence that would exonerate innocent people if you did if i didn't know that i'd be for the death penalty so philosophically you're not against it i am for killing people who rape children I'm for killing killing people who 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 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 how about we we do it very simply if i'm going to set the criterion if i find your dna in or on the bodies but you can't know because someone could plant that even then it becomes sketchy because like people have have planted DNA evidence on innocent people. They've taken someone's innocent DNA, an innocent person's DNA, and planted it on a body in order to make it look like they committed a crime.

That's impossible. speaking since there is no way to render that probability of malfeasance to zero then practically you would never be for the death penalty it 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 like their family members and all these people saying like like Jeffrey Dahmer is a good example. Like, 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? That happens all the time. 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. It has to be a Richard Ramirez type situation.

It has to be someone. The night stalker. Yeah. It has to be a Richard Ramirez type situation. It has to be someone. The night stalker. Yeah. 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,

you know, they're just, they get fucked and then they wind up getting executed and the killer is loose and free. And that, that's happens. That happens all the time. I don't know what percentage. Let's find, let's ask this. What do you think if, 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? I'm going to say no more than 5%, which is a pretty high number. It's a pretty high number. I would say you're probably right. It's probably less than that. I would say it's probably less than 5%. But that's enough, man. That's enough.

That's a lot. You've got 100 people, five of them you're going to murder. But that's because the criteria. 4%. See, we're close. Goddamn. Give me some knuckles, brother. Goddamn.

Nailed it. Can I see that statistic, the way they say it? 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. Have been executed. Oh, people have no doubt that some innocent people have been executed. That's a different sentence. Yeah, but it's okay. It's the same thing.

It says people on death row that have been convicted to the death penalty. Yeah, but look, there have been cases of death penalty where it's based on eyewitness testimony. We know how unreliable that is. 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, yeah. Like Hitler? You tell me you wouldn't want to execute Hitler? Exactly. It's crazy. There's people that are egregious, right? There's people that their cases are so horrific that there is a moral imperative to remove them from the population. Exactly right.

And I think the example that you gave with the children is that's where I would be. You know, there's a story. There's a UFC fighter who's one of the all-time greats, Cain Velasquez. 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 this 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. 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 uh 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

uh 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 um you know that's a situation where if that guy uh that guy seems to be guilty i would have no problem with that guy getting the death penalty that guy's ruining people's lives unbelievable ruining a small child if you found out your your boy had been sexually molested fucking a hundred times by some monster. It's the biggest nightmare in the world. It's the scariest thing ever. And what Cain Velasquez did is what every person says they would do if someone came after their child. He actually went out and did it.

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 or 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? That makes no sense to me. I don't know. I don't know how it worked. I don't know the story. I see your perspective. But, you know, there's a lot of people that have run nursing homes that are adult males that are great people.

It's just like it's not. I mean, it's a horrible, horrible situation. But I just think the problem is we can't read minds yeah until we can determine ultimate truth like pure like undeniable truth from a person like i sit you down and say uh mr sad would you please put your hands on this thing and uh tell us what you did and what you didn't do and then until we can do that and by the way people did here's the thing people say like oh just get it give them a polygraph test let me tell you something sociopath path they pass they pass polygraph tests all the fucking class real sociopaths can sit there and lie to your fucking face and it doesn't change their heart rate at all.

Liars, like real good liars. People have gotten real fucking good at lying. They've been lying their whole life. They've just been making up shit and lying about this and lying about that and covering their tracks. They don't even think they're lying. They're fucking crazy. And so there's, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on the show, there's a evolutionary biologist by the name of Robert Trivers, who's still alive. Some have said he's arguably the biggest evolutionary biologist since Darwin. He's now in his late seventies. So he

developed the theory of the evolution of self-deception. Why is it that we are so good at self-deceiving? And the argument is that if I'm trying to manipulate you, Joe, when I lie to you in a manipulative intent, I have micro cues that signal that I might be lying. But if I first lie to myself so that I can shut off those signals, it becomes impossible for you to read the manipulative intent in me. Well, what psychopaths have innately built within them is the natural ability to have those cues shut off. And so the polygraph test can't pick it up precisely because they're not emitting those signals. But if you and I tell a fib, it's going to create a physiological arousal state, and then you're going to pick it up in the machine. Yeah. Yeah. It's not effective. That's why it's not applicable in court. And

they need to come up with one. 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 mean, I think, I don't not support it in cases of pure guilt. Like, we know, it's undeniable. Right. But there's a lot of places where people thought someone was absolutely guilty and it turned out not to be the case.

Sure. 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.

Yeah. Imagine? Prior to eventually settling on consumer psychology and evolution 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 good 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 think you picked wisely and I think you're absolutely accurate. I think that same problem applies to police officers. Exactly.

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.

And imagine that we now make them turn out to be diabolical via the hashtag defund the police. So, of course, they are bad cops, but the reality is we should be treating them with the respect that they're deserving of, because most of us would not be lining up to do their job. They don't get paid enough for it. And yet we do hashtag defund the police. It's grotesque. Well, it falls in line with these people that live in this delusional world where you don't need law enforcement and you don't need laws and they're just going to be good people.

And then you get L.A., where you get rampant, out-of-control crime, and people just get released on bail for murder. They're just out roaming around the streets. And if you're still less than 950, it's not a felony. I mean, how many fucking Walmarts have to close down and Walgreens have to close down in San Francisco? Those drugstores where they just walk in and just start shoveling things into a bag and walk out.

No one does anything about it. 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. 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, been John Hopkins studies have shown tremendous benefits in quitting detrimental behavior, whether it's cigarettes or things like that, gambling, drug addiction. I think there's – Just aging reduces your criminality. Oh, sure. Just your drop in testosterone is a huge predictor. Especially violence, yeah. So just wait out the curve and you'll become less violent yeah but i mean it's like how do we let someone become more

wise while still protecting everyone else from that person's impulses and urges especially if that person did grow up in a violent household they were beaten and everyone in their neighborhood sucks and just there's a lot of people like that. It's not a, like, that's the real inequality. The real inequality is the way children are raised. The real inequality is what are you exposed to? Even in the womb, you know, they've done studies that show that people that are, that women that are pregnant while, and notice I said women that are pregnant, because guess what? men can't get pregnant Wow, that was a bold statement

I'm saying it while women are pregnant that if that woman is exposed to violence that their higher Cortisol rates in her body and their 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. He's got a shorter tension. But then this kind of causal argument could be applied ad infinitum, right? Yes. At some point, you have to stand up and say, I have personal agency.

Look, I grew up in the most violent environment possible. Right. It's called the Lebanese civil war. I did not rob anybody. I did not attack anybody. I did not rape anybody. But you also grew up with good parents. Fair enough. I get it. We do have, but there are many, many people who've grown up with very, very bad parents and they didn't end up killing. So I get the argument of the mitigating factors and I'm empathetic enough to understand it, but it never justifies you. At any moment in life, you have a

bifurcation in the road and you can go right or you can go left. If you make the wrong choice, you pay the price. I think that's true. I think you're right, but I think we need to find some way to reach people and let them know this in a way that, like, 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, where you live in a horrific environment and everyone around you is involved in terrible activities. Have you seen the study? 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. Really? So imagine if, and it'd be great if- Well, my kids are going to kill it because I got a lot of books.

They got a lot of books from guests that come on your show. People that send me books that I don't read. And then books you throw, exactly. I'm going to test you on this book next time. What did I say in chapter seven? No, but seriously, so you're exactly right. Having loving parents. You know, Larry Elder, whom I think you know, often talks about the number one predictor.

He's the black face for white supremacy. He is the black face for white supremacy. I saw that in LA Times. They wouldn't lie. Exactly. What does it say? A child growing up in a home with at least 80 books will have a greater literacy and numeracy in adulthood. A home library can promote reading.

There you go. So basically just, you know, 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, and we were walking, and I was explaining to him. 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. Well, your children are very lucky that they have you as a dad. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people that have shithead dads. And the other thing is exposure to drug addiction. And then losing that sort of the fear of that at a very early age. And everyone's doing drugs around you and it's a common thing.

It's like- You didn't have a dad growing up, right? No, no, no. My parents, I have a stepdad, but my parents divorced when I was five years old. Did you stay in touch later with your biological dad? No, I haven't talked to him since I was seven. Wow.

Yeah. Do you even know if he's alive? Yeah, he's alive. Wow, that's rough. Rough on him. Yeah. Has he ever tried to reach you? No.

No, that's what's even more crazy. His kids have. He has other kids. They tried years ago, but I'm like, let's not. Do you think they reached out, forgive me for asking, because you're the Joe Rogan guy? That's how they knew. We have the same name, he and my dad and I.

His name is Joe Rogan, too. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's his punishment. That's his punishment. He could have been with the son, Joe Rogan. Probably not, though.

Probably wouldn't have been me. I probably would have been a shithead if I kept him as a dad. It's one of those things where you always wonder. The curse of having that happen to me at an early age, it gave me an independence and a determination. I had determination that other kids didn't have. I had like a – I'm going to show the world.

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. And I had to do it all myself in a lot of ways. And, you know, you know, my stepdad's a very good guy and my mom's wonderful lady. It's not, 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. I can't imagine that. I mean, I love my children so much. I won't say much, but believe me, I share a similar reality. Yeah, I'm sure.

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 faced 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. So I hear you, brother. It's taken me a while to calm myself though because of it. It took 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 um like i was safe like you know you don't you don't have anybody like when you're a child you don't have anybody like, 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, and 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. I moved to Texas in May of 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 to 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, I belong here. What the fuck is going on? Like, 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. 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. That's the same thing Ron DeSantis said.

I met him recently too. He said, we preserve people's freedoms here. I spoke at a event by Hillsdale College. I don't know if you know the school. They're kind of a college that positions itself as kind of the premier anti-woke college. And they had invited me to speak in Florida at an event in Naples. And so I was the plenary speaker on whatever it was on Thursday. The Wednesday event, it was DeSantis. And so I didn't get to meet him personally, but I was at his thing. And he seems like pretty legit. What do you think?

I think he's legit. There's people that don't agree with some of the things that he says, because they're ideologically opposed to him because they're on the left. But if you don't have a left or a right, which would be way better for all people to just engage with individual ideas individually. Engage them independently. How do you feel about education? I think it's critical. It's very important. How do you feel about indoctrination by people that are educators?

I don't like that at all. There's just two very different things. And if you want to tell me that they're the same thing, I say fuck you. Because they're not. Because there's a lot of fucking crazy people that wind up being teachers. Someone said to me that, or read this, not all, that term groomer, a lot of people don't like that term online. They're very upset. But they're real.

There are groomers. You don't like it? Do you not like it because you don't want children to be groomed? Or do you not like it because it's a pejorative that's used against the left, which is I think more likely. Well, here's what's more important. Not have people groom your fucking kids. That's what's more important than you getting uncomfortable with this word because it's used by people on the right.

Like I saw someone as an argument, someone who I think is an intelligent person say that there should be a block against using the word groomer. Unbelievable. No. No, there should be no groomers. How about that? And this is what they wrote. They said, not all teachers are groomers, but a lot of groomers are teachers.

There you go. And that's real. That's a real fucking problem. I mean, constantly teachers are getting arrested for exposing themselves to children, for masturbating in front of children, for sending masturbating in front of children, for sending nude pictures in front of children. Every couple of 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? I'm keeping a tally of the amount of hate mail that you're going to be getting well good luck I don't read it it's the there's people that are good people in all walks of life trans people gay people straight people bisexual whatever the fuck you are there's good people in all walks of life there's also pieces of shit that will use those labels in order to get closer to groups of people and indoctrinate them and indoctrinate them for their own sexual pleasure. And that's real. So you don't like kindergarten teachers talking about gender identity?

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. 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? Imagine if you have a kid that's gay. Never mind convincing. How about just don't address, don't talk about this issue. That's my point.

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 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. Yes. Because once they know that, they can build the cognitive barriers against your persuasive intent. Yes. So from this side of our mouth, 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 like 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 eight, 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 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 10 years old. There's a reason why they do that, and they don't go to 50-year-old fucking ten years old, right? 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? Why do I even want a virgin? What the fuck are you saying? Can I shut you show me this? I feel as though you're preparing the next bit for your show No, it's just it's We're 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.

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? He used to be a left wing guy, he used to be with the Young Turks, now he's a right wing guy. Dave and his husband adopted children, or, or had a surrogacy. Surrogate, okay. So they used their sperm and they created children right yeah

um 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 this is they were talking about how it's satanic and all this like sick shit wow and just shitting all over him and his husband for their i guess there's two children there's there's two of them exactly and i'm watch this i'm like man imagine being that dude and you know you you go over to that side and you think you know well the right wing accepts me and loves me and it's kind of a cool thing because i'm a gay guy, but I'm also conservative now and I've been red pilled. And then you try to express a little bit about your own personal life and these hateful assholes are

coming at you. And he just wants to be a loving father, just wants to be a loving father with his husband. And that basically speaks to a point that I make in chapter one of the Parasitic 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 is not going to predict whether you can

be parasitized. Yeah, it's not. There's plenty of really shitty right-wing ideas too. And there's plenty of shitty libertarian ideas. There's shitty ideas in all sorts of ideologies. And again, I think you should engage with each idea individually. 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 way. I'm with you. And I think that's the only way we get out of this.

Look, I'm very much, I lean far more left than I do right because I grew up on welfare. I grew up in poverty. I grew up, we had food stamps when I was a kid. I remember those times. I remember being poor. And I will never say that I don't believe in social services or a social safety net. I think that's crazy. That saved my family. It saved me. And my parents worked their way out of it. My mom and my stepdad worked their way out of that and eventually got off of it and eventually did well. I saw it happen. So I saw the benefit of hard work, but I also saw the benefit of having

a social safety net. So I'm very progressive in that, but I value hard work and discipline more than fucking anything. And when someone says, oh, I can't, I can't this because i'm triggered by this shut the fuck up like i i know what that is i know weakness i know nonsense i know excuses i know slovenly behavior and it should never be it should never be praised ever right because it's not good for you either and that the feelings that you get when someone like leaves and pretends that everything you're doing is fine. And you need a mental health day. I get it. You need a mental health day.

Like a friend of mine who's an employer, she employs people. And she was saying that some of her employees are saying, I need a mental health day today. She's like, you're not sick. Get the fuck to work. What are you talking? You want to get paid for this mental health day? Show the fuck up. We're not talking about your parents just died in a car accident.

No, you have a high level of anxiety today. It's this Roe versus Wade thing. I saw it in the news. I need a mental health day. Fuck you. Show up at work. Show up at work and work harder. Get the fuck out of here with this.

You need to be a bit more animated, Joe. I get so crazy about it because i know what it is but i by the way i see it in 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 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, therefore that. 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 quite a large percentage. 10% of the students are somehow in it. So what happened? There's been a growth in the incidence of whatever disability you had to file, but no, it's part of the grievance infrastructure. There's been an infestation of indulgence. Exactly. Yeah, and look, you can always find reasons why you can't get out of bed i could find reasons every day right 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 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 are so 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 that 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 a 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. And it's hard

to be a good person. And Aristotle has already said all those things that you just said. Yes. But you go on thinking you those things that you just said. Yes. But you go on thinking you're the first one who said it. No, I'm not thinking. I definitely am not. I'm teasing you. By the way, we're three hours in.

How about that? Oh. Crazy. You know, I didn't even know if it was an hour or two or three. Crazy. It flies by. You are amazing.

The Parasitic Mind's available now. Did you do the audio book? Please tell me you did. No. It's from the time when you got angry at me. Nothing has changed. It's not me i know why don't they let you do it tell these fucks you're you're silky smooth voice i know

be so much better than some fucking actor reading your bullshit with the next book will you read it i am going to do everything in my power to adhere to your edict who is the the publisher the publisher of the book is regnery the audio audiobook I can't remember please get your shit together The Godfather should be reading his own book. I am the Lebanese Barry White. Yes. I mean the smooth voice I need it. I need it on the audiobook I don't need if I heard some other guy reading your words would be like well not just my words many cases It's my personal history at Lebanon, Right. Exactly. This is nonsense. I'm with you, brother. Let's

go. Come on. Delete that old one. Start fresh with a new one. But either way, the book is fantastic. Just read it. Don't even get the audio over it. Do whatever you want. But know that this man wrote it. It's available and it's awesome. I appreciate you, brother. Oh, thank you so much. And your podcast

is available. The Sad Truth on podcast YouTube it's on everything beautiful always a pleasure always a pleasure my friend cheers all right bye everybody