The Joe Rogan Experience - #2012 - Gad Saad

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

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 "The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life." www.gadsaad.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. How are you, sir? Oh my God, I'm excited to see you. Good to see you. It's always great to see you. I think this is the ninth time I appear. So am I entering kind of Hall of Fame status? Yeah, there's like after five, anybody with more than five.

That should be like the top line on my CV. Forget about all the other bullshit. Nine times on Joe Rogan. We've had some fun conversations. Yeah, before we start, today, July 25th, is the release of my latest book. Here's a copy for you, sir. Thank you very much. The Sad Truths About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. Boom. All right. Please read it. I will. You'll enjoy it. you sir thank you very much the sad truth about happiness eight secrets for leading the good life

boom all right please read it i will enjoy it a lot of you do the audiobook oh yeah i swear to god the number one thing i was worried that you were going to ask me was that and you lead off with that uh so here's what happened an actor does. So he has a beautiful voice. I insisted. I said, Joe Rogan berated me on his show for maybe 15 minutes. Listen to him. They pitched it to the audio publisher. The audio publisher said, sorry, we do in-house narration. So I think for the next book, I'll put it as part of the contract.

Yeah, it has to be. They're silly. They're silly, especially when you're a public figure. Like there's hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of you talking. Indeed. Now, when people want to hear your words, they want to hear them through your mouth. And it's personal stories. Yes.

It makes no sense. I'm sold. Believe me, I fought the fight. That's so crazy. I know. But it's such a silly fight to have when someone's a professional public speaker. Yeah. Like yourself.

It doesn't make any sense. With a very velvety voice. Velvety. Smooth. And, you know, who's closer to the subject matter, right? Indeed. Come on. You know the truth behind the words.

Like, you're going to say these things. If you're talking about especially like real-life experiences you're saying them as you I lead off by the way and in First chapter to talk about sort of existential happiness about how I came very close to being aborted in Lebanon I don't want somebody else to be telling that's right, right, right, right, right, of course your story is wild Yeah, you know um what i find about people like yourself that have been through um like like a really scary thing really scary like genuinely scary like scary threats for threats for your life war zone stuff Folks like yourself have so much less patience for nonsense.

Exactly. And that's why I sometimes can appear irascible when I go after. Because sometimes people will say, you know, when I meet you, you seem so much nicer and warmer than how you are on social media. But I'm not trying to be mean on social media. It's that I'm pissed off at the bullshit. And so it comes across as though, you know, I'm cantankerous and combative, but I'm just really fighting, hopefully the good fight. The real problem with social media is the problem with human beings. It's tribal group think, and it overwhelms these groups of people that you associate with.

And then narratives get formed and you can't stray outside those narratives. You can't even look at objective reality. You can't look at data. You can't look at it. It just becomes so crazy. The ideology and the adherence to that ideology trumps everything. It trumps the truth. It trumps you're willing, as long as the politicians on your side, to ignore craziness, corruption, your side to ignore craziness, corruption, horrible shit. You ignore all of it. Perfect example of that. I hate to say that I've seen his feed meathead from all in the family. Rob Reiner.

Have you ever gone to his? I've read a couple of tweets and I'm like, I'm out. I love his work too much. I know. I know. It's hard to then like his work. He is so overwhelmingly obsessed with Trump. Stephen King is another guy who fits that description. Something happens to old liberals with a ton of money.

It's like something happens to those old creative types. It just, you know, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that you're arguing with people online about it all day long, if you're Rob Reiner or if you're Stephen King, like putting, you know, nasty tweets out. It's like, come on. So I actually, I wrote, maybe it was shameless plugging of my book, but I responded to Rob Reiner. I said, let me send you shameless plugging of my book, but I responded to Rob Ryan. I said, let me send you a copy of my book.

Man, there's so much that you have to be happy about. Stop being mired endlessly in vitriol. I mean, that's all he does. I mean, imagine this guy, how many things he's got to be grateful about. He's a creative guy, a talented guy, and he spends all day obsessing on issues that ultimately he's got no control over. Well, people viewed Trump as an existential threat to the very fundamentals of the country. They thought that he was going to come in and he was going to represent corruption on

a level that we've never seen before. But the problem with doing that and saying that is that it opens the door to examining all the other corruption. Like, how much corruption is there? Like, how much money are you guys making? Where's this money coming from? There's so much corruption that's readily available that once you start opening the door to calling someone a monster,

then everyone gets to look at you and go, hey, but what about you guys? Like, what are you doing? What about drone bombings? Let's talk about some real problems. What about the fentanyl crisis? Like, what about the borders where, like, criminals are coming through? Like, how many are being sent back?

What's the numbers? What's the numbers? I mean, a lot of them are good people that just want to find a better way to live and good for them and i would do it i would do it too if i could sneak across into america and be assimilated i would fucking do it yeah why wouldn't you if you if you got a bad roll of the dice and you're living in somewhere that's less favorable and you get the opportunity to just all you have to do is get across the river and they let you in but how many of those people shouldn't be here? How many of those people are dangerous? How many? What's the number? It's not zero. What's the number? Well, I could tell you that we've talked about this in the past when we talked about people

who come from certain cultures where there's rampant antisemitism. And so if you let people that are coming from cultures where when they're pulled somewhere between 90 to 99% of them will exhibit rampant Jew hatred. It doesn't take much of a sociologist or, you know, survey analyst to recognize that out of all those people that are coming in, you're going to have an increase of Jew hatred. Yesterday, I was out with some friends here in Austin. And so one of them asked me, have you seen an uptake on Jew hatred? Are you exposed to more? I say, it's endless. I mean, it's usually on social media. Do you think it's ramped up? Or do you think now that Elon has taken over Twitter and allowed

much more free speech? Hard for me to tell. I really don't know. But there is kind of a normalized... Now, many of them are behind anonymous accounts. Of course. But there is kind of a cavalier normalization of just saying, so for example, I think someone had retweeted, you know, a promotional thing about my book. And someone said, you know, why are you promoting the Jew? You're like, my God, this guy could be your son's teacher. He could be the grocer at the store.

You know what? I have a real concern with that. And I also have a real concern with vested entities, like organizations that would want people to be at each other's throats, stirring up things with fake social media posts. Because this is a real problem that's happening in the world right now right you know um someone um tweeted a bunch of different examples uh of where dozens and dozens of accounts are saying the same inflammatory things with the exact same wordage

exact and they're all like you know they have numbers and letters in their accounts like just random accounts and you know you go to their page it looks kind of real they have a photo there's like them with a flag it's like and you go through it you but you get this sense like oh you're you're a bot like you're not even a real person like so you you're an agent of you're stirring up bullshit so there's a certain aspect of our culture I don't know what the percentage is, but there's a certain aspect of the conversations online that are being Flavored by fake accounts that are designed to get people upset with each other. Yeah, it's like psychological warfare on a level that no one anticipated and no one's prepared for. Because when you have the

two things we already discussed, like this adherence to the ideology, no matter what, no matter what, like there's no, you can't objectively, logically defend any of the things that are in opposition of it. And then you have this. So are you, I noticed, I mean, obviously we follow each other on Twitter. You almost never, I mean, short of the recent thing you did with Peter Hotez, you almost never weigh in on anything. Was that sort of a conscious thing

for you to step back? Yeah, well, with that one, it was like, okay, this is crazy. You're saying that he made some crazy tweet about neo-fascist leanings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that. Like, what are you talking about? Like, with Robert Kennedy Jr. with me, I'm like, this is dangerous. Like, what you're saying is totally untrue.

You know it's untrue. And you're willing to just say it because, like, the more you can discredit someone who's in opposition to some of your ideas, the more you can somehow or another in your weird game of checkers you're playing, like elevate yourself. But you don't think people know what you're doing? Like that's like the most clear – neo-fascist? Like what the fuck are you saying? Did you feel more angry at the fact that you had already had a conversation with him and so there was some kind of personal connection between you two. I mean, I understand he's not your best friend. For sure.

I've had him on at least, was he on twice? Twice. Twice. I've had him on twice. I was very nice to him. Yeah. Even in disagreement with him, like in issues of health. I was very nice to him.

Yeah. But you can't just say stuff like that. And, you know, it's like I just wanted to say, like, have a debate with the guy. Yeah. Like, have a debate with the guy. So what ended up happening? I think it got up to like $2 million. He's not going to do it.

He won't do it. You know, I don't think he wants to do it. You know, and there's the idea that, like, Robert Kennedy would be too silver-tongued. Like, stop. Come on. Because he's a lawyer. You know, he's really good at arguing stuff. Like, if you either have

facts or you don't have facts. Right. And if you're scared to debate the facts, I have to go, what are these facts? What's bothering you? Like, what are you worried that he might bring up? I mean, what are we saying? It could be the case. So for example, I've been often asked, why don't you debate creationists or evolution? And I take the position there of Richard Dawkins, which is, it's not that I'm too haughty to debate anyone, is that there's almost no chance that I could present any evidence that would cause you to alter your position. So it's really a losing proposition. So could it be that Peter Hotez is coming from that perspective?

It could, but you know what I would say to that? Even in your case, it is preposterous for someone to not believe that at least there's a process of evolution at this stage. Right. It's kind of crazy because there's evidence of things that are happening where things are adapting to their environment right now that we've tracked. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, there's a little antelope in the Congo that swims underwater and eats fish. Is that right? Yeah, it's called a Diker. I think it's called a Diker di KER. I think that's how you say it But this little animal evolved Lived on grasslands and the grasslands became rainforest and when the grasslands are these little like prairie animals were trapped inside the Congo

There's an amazing BBC documentary about it. But they've got like these things are evolving. Yeah. Like they're figuring out how to swim. But believe me, having spent 30 years trying to convince some of my academic colleagues about the value of evolution and studying human behavior, they'll go la, la, la. I don't want to hear it. With human behavior. Yeah.

And especially with, you know, certain narratives. So this one is just swimming in the water. But these motherfuckers can go underwater. The duikers that they were talking about in the Congo, they can swim underwater for like 100 yards. Why do I feel that the crocodile is about to hit it any second now? Because we've seen too many of those videos. That is arguably one of the scariest.

Scenarios? Yes. The scariest. scariest the fucking scariest i have to pause something happened with my video oh right now oh it's something doing since mixing your two things really strangely i need it do we got a reboot not a reboot i just gotta figure out what happened oh okay but we got everything else no yeah it's so it's just yeah when i cut to your camera it's blending them together so if people are only listening to audio this is a special segment of the podcast it's only just for you there you go because the videos fucked should we stop talking I mean you can keep talking it's just a video looks weird so I don't want to be a distraction all right well let's fix

it we'll pause we'll be right back all right technical difficulties I just want to close the parenthesis on something that happened from last show oh incredible story you ready yeah that's actually speaks about connecting with people so last show you had asked me or not you had asked me we were talking about who would be some guests that we'd really want to have on our respective shows and you probably don't remember what my two celebrities were do you you? I don't remember. Clint Eastwood. And first, I appreciate his politics. I've been watching him since I was a kid in Lebanon.

Number two was Burt Bacharach. Do you remember who that is? I remember the name. Burt Bacharach is the music composer who's basically written songs for everybody. music composer who's basically written songs for everybody. He was featured in one of the Austin Powers movie where the guy says, ladies and gentlemen, Burt Bacharach. You know, anyways.

After our chat aired, I go on my Instagram. I have a personal DM, private DM, from what looks like the account of Bert Bacharach, who's arguably the biggest musical composer in the United States. So I'm extremely

excited. It turns out it was his son who said, oh, your clip with Joe Rogan was passed on to me, and I think it would be great for, I'd love for my dad to come on your show. Now, cut to the punchline.

It never ended up happening. He recently passed away. So perhaps he wasn't, I mean, he was like 94, 95. But just the fact that you and I are having a conversation, someone else picks it up, and then my world can intersect with Burt Bacharach, whom there is no conceivable place where his world and mine would ever connect.

That's the beauty of life. Wow, that is the beauty of life. That's awesome. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. You are a connector, sir. I try to be. Clint Eastwood would be an interesting guy to talk to.

The guy still works. He's like 93 years old. He's still out there making movies. Still enjoys it. I remember in Lebanon, I only learned English when I moved to Canada when I was 11. And I got all the communication I needed to get. Even though there wasn't much dialogue in the Spaghetti Westerns, I would look at him and I would say, that's the man, you know?

Remember Every Which Way But Loose? Of course. He hung around with an orangutan. So that's a bit later, right? That's a fucking movie. That's in the 70s, right? I believe so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I believe it was the 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He played a bare knuckle boxer. That's right. Who traveled around with an orangutan. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He played a bare-knuckle boxer. That's right. Who traveled around with an orangutan. That's right. Yeah, I think that sounds like 77. But I'm talking in the 60s.

I'm talking, you know, 65, 67, 68 when I'm, you know, 4 or 5 years old. And I'm watching this guy in Lebanon. Wow. That's the power of, you know, the male archetype. That is still Every Which Way Believes, right? I'm not conflating two movies, right? That's the movie where he was the bare-knuckle boxer, isn't it? I think that sounds right.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think at the time, his love interest in that movie... What the hell was that, Jamie? What was that? Jesus, Jamie. You got the wrong tab. Open up, son.

I started the trailer. How dare you? How about taking in a new movie? Okay. Which I might. I guess that's what this trailer is, and I don't know why there's nothing on it. You got a wrong tab open up What is happening, okay But it's weird others Yeah, it seems like someone was I Oh, I said 77. It's 78. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. It was just a dumbass movie.

Those movies are great, though. I love movies from that era. Like, ridiculous. Like, Smokey and the Bandit. Yeah. I mean, come on, man. Jackie Gleason. You got Burt Reynolds.

Sally Field. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, man. That's a fun movie. Yeah, yeah. Jackie Gleason plays a you got Burt Reynolds, Sally Field. Come on, man. That's a fun movie. Jack Gleeson plays a cop. It's hilarious. Yeah, yeah. What's your favorite movie of all time if you had to pick one?

I really don't think I have one. But you know what I watched recently, I rewatched, is 2001, Space Odyssey. I forgot how good that was. That movie is amazing. It's not just amazing, it's amazing visually. And it's from 1968. Yeah, it's amazing. The special effects are so good, all through it.

Like, even the apes in the beginning, you know, the scene where they're evolving. Yeah. When they encounter the monolith. The fucking special effects on the apes is pretty goddamn good for 1968. My all-time favorite, the original 12 Angry Men. I first saw, and actually it speaks to what we talked about earlier about how you can't get someone to change their mind when they're in a tribal mindset. Because I watched the movie for the first time in a first semester. I watched the movie for the first time in a first semester.

I was an MBA student, and I was taking an organizational behavior class where the professor assigned us that movie to watch it to demonstrate group dynamics. Because for those of you who don't know, have you seen it, Joe? I don't think I have. Oh, you need to. Rent it tonight. Who's in it? It's Henry Fonda. That's it. That's the one. Okay, I think I have, but it was a long,

long time ago. So, let me tell you the premise. Twelve guys get together in a room. They're trying to discuss whether a guy should be put to death, you know, found guilty. They take a poll. Eleven say he's absolutely guilty. Let's go home. One guy,

Henry Fonda, says, hey, let's sit and talk about it. The rest of the movie is how he gets each of the 11 other guys to flip their positions. And so that's why I had watched it in that MBA course because it demonstrates how, you know, there are techniques you can use to try to persuade people. Of course, today you could almost never do it. I can never convince Rob Reiner of anything. But, you know. I mean mean i wouldn't necessarily say that i think some people are just like really deeply cemented in their belief systems and i mean maybe they can relax it's still it's still you're a human being if you're a human being and you're willing to look at objective truth you can realize that like there's some other things afoot. There's like there's a tribal aspect to all of our ideological problems that makes objective

reasoning a giant problem. It's like it gets in the way of everything because people are so tribally committed right now and that they're tribally committed to this idea that the other side is the end of the world if they take power Yeah, and there's all these different things that are bounced back around these Societal issues that keep getting bounced back around Where you like what what why aren't these resolved like the Roe v. Wade one and now they're talking about? Gay marriage like doing the same thing with gay marriage like

Why do you want to do this? Are you doing this because you just want people to squabble about shit? Because that's what it seems like. Because that's the only reason why you would have, have like Supreme Court conversations about gay marriage in 2023. Like, why would you, what the fuck?

Why, what? Like, what are you? We've already had that debate. We're gone. We passed that. We passed that. so if that's still and if people even want to bring it up for debate like is that real

or is this one of those things that keeps us culturally squabbling and it keeps people like ideologically connected to one group and opposed with all their vitriol the other group the other of the group they're. They're evil the ruin of society Yeah, and this this fucking bipolar aspect to our

Society's just it's it's fed by social media. It's fed by these fake accounts. It's fed by You know soulless commentators that The saddest part is when that tribalism comes into your own family. So here's an incredible story. I've appeared on Tucker Carlson's show, I mean, his old show, several times on television, but his long form podcast that he used to do,

he had invited us to, us meaning my family and I, to Florida to do his show. He was super gracious, super warm with everybody, with my kids and so on. And so I put out a tweet just thanking him for his hospitality. Hey, Tucker, it was so nice to meet you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to chat, blah, blah, blah. A cousin of mine, Joe, who went through the Lebanese Civil War with me

and who was my best friend growing up in Lebanon. So you would think that if there's ever a relationship that's cemented in the trials and tribulations of our childhood, it would be that relationship. So he puts out a tweet and he says something. I mean, I don't remember exactly, although I quoted in the book on happiness, because I'm basically arguing don't live your life like my cousin. He puts out a tweet saying something like, have you no shame, right? So he decides to publicly shame me for being associated or agreeing to go on Tucker Carlson's show. That shows you what tribalism can do to the human mind.

It takes something as difficult as what we went through through the Lebanese Civil War and erases it because he can't believe that I could do something as grotesque as to talk to Tucker Carlson. Yeah. And if you asked him for examples, specific examples of why Tucker Carlson is so horrible, that's where it would get interesting. Yeah. Because some people might be able to say some things they found disagreeable, but most people are just sticking to a narrative. There's just this narrative that he is evil incarnate. He is a transphobe or whatever it is. He's a Putin stooge. Yeah, he's a Putin stooge.

There's all these different things. They want to ignore all evidence that he's a lovely guy. And he really is. By all accounts. by all accounts by all accounts all the people that i know that have had interactions with him say he's a very lovely guy including my friend steve ranella he had him on a podcast and these people that you know they had these ideas of who he was before he came on his podcast and he's like they all came away like i really like him he's a really nice guy yeah even if you don't agree with his politics he seems like a really nice guy gracious down to earth uh what what i love you know how you you often say

if you want to know whether the date that you're out with is a good person see how she he or she treats the server at the restaurant sure so the way he interacted with my children right he he was focused on them he was at the so how are you doing? How are you enjoying? Right? So he's taking his time. He's not acting haughty and I'm this big star. He is focused on my children. I thought that was really lovely. That's what I was trying to convey in that tweet. But to my cousin, that was beyond the pale. Yeah, it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate that someone would turn on you like that. Yeah. It's just so foolish. It's so foolish because it's, that someone would turn on you like that yeah it's just so foolish it's so foolish because it's first of all that should be something that you would have a conversation with somebody

about like if i care about someone they're they're talking to someone that i find egregious you know i think you would have a conversation with you call them up you know hey man just this is what i think like you tell me what you think. I want to know what you think. There's certain narratives that you can't – like anything on Fox News is the Hitler. It's the Hitler. It's the evil.

Well, I'll be on the Hitler channel tomorrow when I go to Greg Gutfeld. Yeah, it's like – I mean I think they're trying to reform that in some sort of a way. And I think Fox News is getting a lot of pushback from people on the right that are very concerned with, you know, some of the decisions they're making. They're kind of going down the same path that a lot of these other corporations have gone down. Do you have a sense of what happened? Do you have any? I don't know. So I don sense of what happened with the do you have any i don't know so i don't know what happened with tucker carlson i don't know why he got fired i know as much as the average person who reads reddit i know some conspiracies i know i know he

was uh he was like he's kind of wild fella when you think think about what he was doing on a major television show implicating the CIA and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He's saying it with utmost certainty. So you think that the reason of firing him was that they thought that he didn't adhere to some journalistic ethic or rigor or something like that? I don't know. That could be the case? I don't know. That could be the case. I don't know. I would think that when you have a network that's run by advertising, it's what you do for income.

I would imagine there's a lot of pressure by those people, those advertisers, to eliminate threats to their business. Right. So if you've got some wild dude on Fox News who's saying a bunch of shit about whatever it is, whether it's why are we in Ukraine, whether it's why are you mandating vaccines, whether it's having that kind of stuff on regular television. It's a big problem to anybody that's selling advertisement that's in those businesses. Apparently Budweiser didn't learn that lesson.

Well, see, the difference between Budweiser and pharmaceutical drug companies is that Budweiser is not prescribed. Right. It's not recommended by your doctor. Right. You don't go to CVS to pick it up. It's different. And so this is, like, something that you can't really criticize a brand and, like, say, yeah, we don't buy Pfizer around these parts anymore. Like, that doesn't work.

It's not going to work. You can do that with Budweiser, though. around these parts anymore. That doesn't work. It's not gonna work. You can do that with Budweiser though. And you can do that with, that's probably gonna happen with some other stuff too. People are upset at the Country Music Channel. Oh, yeah, yeah. The Jason Aldean song,

try that in a small town. The level of outrage, now I'm not saying that that's the greatest song the world's ever known you know but the level of outrage coming from people that are upset about that song is so strange when there are hundreds of rap songs out there yeah that are infinitely worse and also enjoyable misogynistic qualifying violence oh the whole thing. And no complaints at all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're not even talking about old stuff. There's new stuff too. There's hip hop, there's wild rock songs, there's a lot of wild shit. And to be focusing on that one

and it's the racial aspect of it was crazy because the real Antifa problems that were happening during the BLM I think it was a lot of white people doing that wasn't it? It was a lot of like Lost liberal whites who are very angry who decided to take up this movement and smash things So like the racial aspect of it. There's nothing racial about the lyrics or Or how about the Tracy, did you see the Tracy Allman controversy? No, I did not.

So she wrote in the, I don't know if you remember, I think it was 1988, she had this iconic song, Fast Car. Yes. Oh, right, right, right. And then this,

I guess he's a country music singer. Tracy Chapman. Chapman. That's the Allman, oh, she's an actress, right? She's a comedian. Yes. Tracy Chapman. Thank you.

Yeah. And then this singer asked for her permission, I guess, to do a cover and so on. It's amazing. And then people came out that, you know, the white guy is usurping. Yeah. Well, but that's always going to happen. You're always going to have a certain amount of people that say that. Yeah.

It doesn't mean it's real. It's also, and apparently she's happy that he's doing it. Well, no kidding. Everybody's good. And it's a great song. I mean, it's really good. He didn't even change the gender. Like when he sang it.

Yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah. I can become a checkout girl. He says checkout girl. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what else is up? I think we were going to talk about my impression of some of the prices in Austin. Oh, yeah. You were telling me that an espresso was $8. So, yeah. So yesterday I went out with – actually, I was at the hotel. And two friends came by, one of whom I think has been on your show, Michael Malice. Yeah, I love that dude.

Yeah, he's lovely. And the other guy is a professor at UT Austin, who's really Richard Lowry, who's really fighting. He's very much of a academic honey badger, fighting against all the woke stuff. And so we were just hanging out. One of the guys ordered a Diet Coke and two of us ordered two espressos.

The bill came. It was, with the tip, $28. And I'm thinking, this is like Oprah money. Like who can afford these prices? You tell me what's going on in Austin. I have no idea. I didn't go to that place. But I mean, in general, the real estate, everything is completely doubled, tripled. It's going, I mean, I understand that it's because it's a hot place. Yeah, but espresso shouldn't be $8, right?

What should espresso cost? Well, in Montreal, it'll be. Four or five is normal. Montreal would be maybe for an espresso. So it's a short espresso, single espresso, $3.50. It's hard for people to believe. But when I was growing up, there was no Starbucks. Right. People did not,

they did not like coffee like they like coffee now. They are the greatest drug dealers the world's ever known. They're slinging that sweet caffeine all over this country. And that's what it is. It's the best drug dealing operation the world's ever known because it's a super mild, productive drug that everybody enjoys. yes feels like a warm hug oh i feel i feel the the the requisite drug conversations coming up here we go on a 30 minute conversation but this is like a good drug like caffeine is it like there's whatever bad effects you get from coffee they're so minimal there's even like links to like good health benefits from it. I think there's worry. People used to worry about dehydration, but I don't think they worry about that as much anymore

when it comes to drinking coffee. They used to think that if you drank a lot of coffee, you would get dehydrated, but there's a certain amount of hydration you're actually getting from drinking coffee too. So it's like kind of complicated because it is kind of a diuretic, but it also like you're also drinking it. So that perfect segue into one of the chapters of the book, I talk about everything in moderation, which, of course, Aristotle already talked about the golden mean. You know, if a soldier is too cowardly, it's not good. If he's too reckless, he's going to die. And so, like most things, the sweet spot is in the middle. Like most things, the sweet spot is in the middle.

And so in that chapter, I go through a bewildering number of phenomena, all of which adhere to that inverted U. Too little, not good. Too much is not good. And the ideal point is in the middle. Exercise intensity, inverted U. Alcohol consumption, inverted U. Coffee consumption, inverted U. Fish consumption, Inverted you. And so I thought that was a really cool chapter to cover because it's arguably the most universal law that we can find.

So many things adhere to that inverted you. And I think we had discussed this last time that I was on the show. The ancient Greeks were already aware of it. I mean, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics talks exactly. I mean, he doesn't call it the inverted U. He calls it the golden mean. And so to our earlier conversation, the last time I was here

and going through the research for this book, the amount of insights I've found from Seneca, Epictetus, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius was just breathtaking. It was unbelievable. Yeah, I just got back from Greece. Was that right yeah i was in greece for two weeks and uh i saw the parthenon and we went to elisis uh went to

dalos went to a bunch of different islands it was really interesting man yeah we we checked out a bunch of ruins and uh it's just so it's so hard to even wrap your head around what was going on there two thousand plus years ago yeah indeed i i did five islands so maybe we can compare notes i did corfu crete naxos santorini and the fifth one i'm leaving to the end i asked the captain take us at the time i was traveling with a buddy of mine after school. This is like 1990. I said, take us to an island that's completely void of tourists. And so he dropped us off on an island, volcanic island called Fogligandros.

And we spent, I think, maybe two days there, not a single tourist, just hanging out with the locals. They didn't speak a word of French or English, and it was just magical. Wow. Where did you go? Which islands did you go to? didn't speak a word of French or English, and it was just magical. Wow. Where did you go? Which islands did you go to? We went to a bunch of them. I can't remember all the names. Mykonos.

Oh, right. But that is... It was on an island? That's tons of tourists, right? Yeah, there was a lot of people there. We went to... Oh, my God. I'm not going to remember.

A bunch of weird ones. But it was really fun yeah and it was relaxing but the most mind-blowing thing was seeing the parthenon and seeing uh elisis and walking around there yeah we just came back from portugal we did 16 days in portugal first time ever uh and i think it's elisis i'm saying elisis it's el's elusus. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, really enjoyed Portugal, with the exception, apologies to all of my Portuguese listeners and fans, not a very attractive language. You don't like that language? I don't like that.

But you hear it coming out of Brazil? It sounds amazing. Brazilian Portuguese is nicer than Portuguese Portuguese. Oh, no. I'm stealing here some, I think it was a comedian who said this, but who said something that like Portuguese is akin to someone having a perpetual stroke in the way that, you know, there's kind of a twisting of the mouth that appears unnatural. And I can see that because I found that it wasn't the most pleasant. So now I'm going to get hate mail from Portuguese people.

Yeah, they're going to be very mad at you. Because Brazilian Portuguese is beautiful. It's got a flow. It's got a flow, yeah. It's like a... But I mean, Italian, you know, it's a universally loved language. French is spoken in France. Now, I'm going to upset the next group of people.

Quebec French is an affront to human dignity. What? Yes, sir. I said it. What? Yes. It's horrifying. I can't believe what you're saying.

Now listen to this. My wife is able to switch her French depending on whom she's speaking with. So if she's speaking with someone who speaks international French, she'll speak in a regular manner. Not Parisian French, but like an international French. I speak in international French because we're from Lebanon.

When she speaks to a Quebecer, she turns into a complete Quebecer. And oftentimes I say, how did you just do that? That sounds so inauthentic. She goes, well, no, because if I speak in the regular French, then it'll come across as haughty. But that to me is so strange because that would be like I speak with an Oxford accent with one person

and then I turn into the southern drawl with the other person depending on who... That doesn't sound... There's a falsity to that. There's a good argument. There's a good argument that there's a falsity to that. But there's also a good argument that there's

a cultural agreed upon way of communicating. If you started talking like, therefore thou. If you started talking like that today, people would go, what are you doing, man? We don't talk like that anymore. Do you think I have an accent in English? You don't have an accent. You have a very distinct way of talking okay so you couldn't say oh you're American or Canadian it's you well you have this is there's that like

your your words are very clear but there's like there's something going on right yeah it's clear there's something going on there right but that's an fascinating thing about a person that's able to speak multiple languages it's like you're speaking English but you're speaking English perfectly with like a little bit of a twist to it. Right. Which is, I guess, an accent. So I guess the answer is yes. Arguably my only regret as a parent so far, may it be the only one that I ever experienced,

has been that we haven't passed on our linguistic heritage, we meaning my wife and I, to our children. So I speak, you know, Arabic is my mother tongue, French, English, and Hebrew. My wife speaks Armenian. And so between the two of us, we've got five languages and yet our children only speak French and English. And the reason for that is because if I were to speak to them in Arabic or Hebrew, my wife would be locked out. And if she speaks to them in Armenian, I would be locked out. And so we ended up just agreeing on the two languages that we both speak. But now both our children are telling us that they regret, because when they see me meeting someone who's Arabic and we break out the beautiful Arabic, at least my son has been saying, you know, daddy, you should only speak to me in Arabic.

But now it feels as if it's a vocabulary lesson, right? So I'm telling him, here is how you say, he goes, no, but just speak to me. Right. But that's easy to do when you're, you know, one year old, when you're 11, 12, 13, it feels false to start speaking to you in Arabic when you don't speak a word of Arabic. Yeah, but that's a great way for him to learn. Yeah, indeed. Wouldn't it be? Yeah, of course. Because he'd have to keep up.

He'd have to keep up. Yeah. That's what they say. If you really want to learn a language, really want to learn it, move to a place. Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I regret the most is that I haven't been able to return ever to Lebanon because if I were to go on a visiting professorship to, say, American University of Beirut for a year, they're going to come back flawless Arabic speakers. And especially, I mean, now my daughter's 14. He's 11. So they're sort of entering that period where they're pretty much soon not going to be able to ever speak it like a native speaker. There's something magical that happens around puberty where if you learn a language after that period, you could never speak it without an accent. Really? Yeah. And it really is. And no one exactly knows what causes that mechanism. So for example, I learned English at, and that was the genesis for why I asked you, do I have an accent?

Because I would expect that the time at which I learned it, I snuck in just before that period. Had I learned it when I was 13, 14, 15, I could have spoken it perfectly, but you would have detected a much stronger accent. That's interesting. it a much stronger accent. That's interesting. Yeah. That's a strange thing about human development and just the sounds that we all agree upon that equal the words. Well, there are tons of sounds in Arabic.

Let's see if you can do them. You ready? First time ever on the Joe Rogan experience. Give me a try. Okay. So, for example, my last name, everybody, all Americans will say sad. You just extend the A. But the proper way to say it, it's God sad.

Sad. Right. It's sad. Like Arnold. Like if Arnold was going to say it. Sort of like, exactly. Or, for example, h. Can you say h?

H. Not h. There's h, h, and h. They're coming from different parts from my throat. What? Those are all the same. So if I say, the Arabic people are going to laugh at this. Okay.

That means you're shit. Okay? Okay. It's a kh. Okay. That means you're an ass. Okay? You're an idiot.

Say it again. The second one? Yeah, the second one. But see, you're saying kh. It's kh. Okay. First time ever? Are we breaking new ground?

Oh, yeah, for sure. I've never even tried to say these words. Yeah, yeah. You know, Arabic, earlier I said some derogatory things about Portuguese and about French-Canadian, derogatory things about Portuguese and about French-Canadian. So let me be fair and say, not Arabic. Hebrew, which is also, you know, one of, from my heritage, is a violently ugly language.

On the other hand, Arabic, as spoken by the Lebanese, and I'm not saying this because I'm Lebanese, because, you know, Arabic comes in many different dialects, right? There's Iraqi Arabic, There is North African Arabic. There's Egyptian Arabic. The Lebanese Arabic is really the Italian of Arabic dialects. Get ready for some comments now coming your way. Isn't it weird how when they have horror movies, whenever someone's calling a demon, they always have to do it in an old language?

Meaning? It's always in Latin or something. Oh, oh right they're always reading from some book they're not supposed to be reading from what does it say muhammad is fun and they're like and then the demons come like you have to say the magic old words that people don't understand there's probably some weird you're a psychologist you understand that shit that's interesting what's going on there yeah you're putting me on the well it's just it's always right it's always like a dead language well or an old language because of that there so because it's an extinct language it's somehow calling demons it's calling demons that exist in another world i i think it's as simple as that what a dumb concept that the way to call demons is like by saying a word like making a

noise with your mouth it's the perfect frequency say candy man in front of the in front of the mirror three times scariest movie of all time since we were talking earlier about our favorite movie halloween first one jamie lee curtis is it really till today i would probably have a heart see what scares me about horror movies is not the supernatural stuff. It's the being startled. You see what I mean? Yeah. So oftentimes when I'm watching a horror movie, I will block my ears because it's that sudden sound that really scares me.

I think if I had to pick an all-time scariest movie I think I would see the first alien love them the first alien movie that is a scary movie it's very different than all the other alien movies because in all the other alien movies the aliens are kind of out in the open and you shoot a bunch of them they're coming from all over the place it's way unrealistic by the way yeah wait we can get into that. Have you seen the documentary of the making of Alien? I have, yeah.

Isn't that amazing? It's amazing, yeah. That HR, how do you say his name? Geiger? HR Geiger? That sounds right. The artist that designed it? Oh, my God.

Unbelievable. What a unique vision. Unreal. His art was so strange. That creature that he created was fucking amazing it was literally like the ultimate terrifying alien predator and a feminist empowerment because the alien is a female oh the big one the mother the mother is a girl yeah but this movie is so fucking good it's so good and it's so scary It's a great sci-fi movie, but it's also fucking scary like like you're talking about being startled

Yeah, yeah like and that that alien in this movie is elusive and intelligent and traps people Yeah, and and and you you get to see it in brief glances And then in the new movies after that, like Aliens, it's kind of a different things going on. Because you can kill them easy. You're just blasting a bunch of them. And then the mother's at you, but you got a robot body, so you're all good. Like, it's just so much ridiculousness that it just hurts my feelings. Have you ever seen 1980 Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill?

Which is kind of a precursor to all the transgender stuff that we hear today have you seen that movie no oh it's fantastic michael cain angie dickinson look you're amazing jamie it comes out i mean you're a wizard you have to see this movie joe she supposedly transgender in this no so what happens is can I give away some stuff well but if somebody wants to see it so she is sexually frustrated with her in her marriage so she goes to see a psychiatrist played by Michael Caine who as she's telling him her store her sexual stories is becoming aroused. But he turns out to be a guy who wants to become a transsexual, him the psychiatrist.

And so he doesn't like the idea of being aroused as a male because it is then, you know, attacking his desire to make the transition into being a female. And so Dressed to Kill, the movie is him dressing up as a, there you go. That's Michael Caine. Oh my God. It's phenomenal. I saw it as a 15 year old. I think that was my first exposure to transsexual operations.

Oh my God. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an amazing movie. I highly, highly recommend it. 1980? 1980, 15 years old. Wow. This was the year movie. I highly, highly recommend it. 1980? 1980, 15 years old.

Wow. This was the year, by the way, that year when my, not this is a weird segue, but when my parents were freed in Lebanon after having been kidnapped by Fatah in 1980. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I remember I was 15 years old. Another thing that happened to me when I was 15 years old, I broke my nose in soccer and then had to have it reset by the surgeon.

And so for about a week I wore a face cast. Did you get it fixed where you can breathe out of both nostrils? I think I can, yeah. But, yeah, it was that. That is so important. If anybody out here is listening and you have a deviated septum, get that fixed. If you can. If it's safe to do.

Because it's like the benefits of being able to breathe out of your nose. Right. Speaking of athletics, I remember many years ago I had come on the show where I was singing the glory of yeah Lionel Messi and you were like who right who's Lionel Messi and then you mentioned some MMA fighter that I'd never heard of and I remember your exact response you said you looked at me and said how dare you sir let me flip it back to you how dare you so are you now you are a Messi fan finally you've come around to the to the truth well he's an amazing soccer player. Oh, that goal.

There's no denying. Okay, well, let me since I'm on the number one show in the world. He's a wizard. Didn't they offer him some fucking insane amount of money and he just said no? Saudi Arabia. How much did they offer him? A different guy just got offered a billion dollars for one year. Yeah, Mbappe. What? Mbappe, Mbappe. What?

A billion for a year? Well, 330 of that is so that he can transfer to the team and then 771 is for his services yeah soccer for you they're buying everybody the Saudis said if they offered him each like take off they have so much money but let me tell you something LeBron will become Saudi Arabian king. He'll be the king of basketball over there. That's right. What? That is so crazy. Yep, yep.

December 18th, 2022 World Cup final. You talk about the power, the emotional power of sports, right? My family and I were sitting and watching the World Cup final. And we had the extent to which we were emotionally vested in Messi winning the World Cup final. And we had, the extent to which we were emotionally vested in Messi winning the World Cup can only demonstrate the beauty of sports, right? Because here's a guy that, we've never met him.

We're not Argentinian, right? He doesn't know that we're alive. And yet it's life and death for us that he should, I mean, it was so harrowing i don't know if you watched the game that at one point my son who's 11 years old said i i can't watch this anymore i'm going to have a heart attack uh that's the the power of sports that it can pull us in and it can make us truly tribal and on my case before you before you interject it was kind of driven my desire for him to win

was driven by really a purity strand. It was that it seemed cosmically unjust for the greatest soccer player of all time to not have won the World Cup. So when he won it, to me it seemed like the world is right. Beauty has won. I get it.

That's awesome. And I should add, what a guy, right? Humble, sweet, family man. What's fascinating to me is as happy as they are, the people on the other team that were rooting for them, they're devastated right now. That's the weird thing about sports. You can get so attached to what's happening

that a loss is like really a loss yeah can't believe we fucking lost to kansas city well in in my first book ever 2007 evolutionary basic consumption i talk about studies not my studies i'm i was citing other works that looked at what happens to the testosterone levels of fans as a function of whether their team wins or loses? How do you test that? Well, it's been tested. You just take salivary assays of fans as their team is winning or losing. You can get testosterone levels from that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. And so now what? It's not surprising, as you would know as a fighter, that if you and I fight and you defeat me, your testosterone level goes up, my testosterone level goes down. Like a video game.

Like a video game. Except what's happening here is that there is a vicarious endocrinological response. The fans are having the same increases in their testosterone levels or decreases as a function of their team winning or not. That's quite extraordinary. And that shows you why we become so bonded to our favorite players and so on.

We are really going through this battle with them. Yeah, it's really the case with fighters. When people have a fighter that they're really a giant fan of and that person gets beaten in a devastating manner, it's heartbreaking. There's even studies, by the way, that have looked at what happens to sexual behavior of fans after their team wins or loses. So let's say if your wife is upset

that you haven't been producing in the bedroom, she should pray that the husband's favorite team wins. Because if he wins, he has an increase in testosterone level, increases their libidinal drive. And so we're animals. It's just attaching so much of your own emotions to something completely out of control and just rooting on it. Exactly. Do you have a fan in any sport where you've ever been that vested in? Well, there was one time I remember when I was a kid, I was a giant fan of Donald Curry.

Donald Curry was the welterweight boxing champion at the time. And he had a rivalry with this other guy, Milt McCrory. And Donald Curry knocked him out. he became like my favorite boxer and then donald curry he got beat by this guy lloyd hunnigan it was a devastating loss like people couldn't believe lloyd hunnigan beat donald curry and it was like donald curry might be on the downslide but i was still like a giant fan of his and then donald curry fought mike mccallum and And Mike McCallum hit him with a left hook to the body and a left hook to the chin and put him out. Like out cold, and I couldn't believe it.

And I ran. Here it is right here. I ran out of the house. Watch this. Boom. Out cold. The one with the black shorts is your guy, right? The guy down is my guy.

Okay. So I misremembered it. It wasn't a left hook to the body. It was like he goes with a right hand and then a left hook behind it. But he just KO'd, KO'd Donald Curry, and I couldn't believe it. And so I put on my running shoes. I couldn't stay home. I just couldn't deal with it. I couldn't believe it. And so I put on my running shoes. I couldn't stay home. I just couldn't deal with it.

I couldn't deal with it. And I went running in the snow. And I ran. No, when was I in the snow? I'm thinking of another story. There was another time when someone lost and I went running in the snow. I don't think it was in the snow. I think it was warm.

I don't remember, but I remember I went running. And as I'm running, and I'm running down the road, I'm thinking to myself, I am never going to be this invested in someone else winning or losing ever again. I was so devastated that he lost. What was the bond? His technique. His technique was perfect. He was crisp.

Like he was coiled. They called him, what was his nickname? Something Cobra. Here comes Jamie. I forget what his nickname was. But his technique was so crisp. Lone Star Cobra. Lone Star Cobra.

There you go. He was out of Fort Worth. And his technique was so sharp. of Fort Worth and his technique was so sharp I just really I always admired guys who were able to find like the shortest path to connecting with a shot it's just like the technique is so dialed in yeah there's guys that like Gervonta Davis is like that their technique so dialed in that when you watch them uncork it's like oh my oh my God, the efficiency of it. And so I was just a giant fan of the guy. I just loved as a person who like really enjoyed technique. I like watching

someone who's exceptional at it. I recently put, I don't know, maybe a few months ago, I put out a sort of a hypothetical what if scenario where I, I think this was on Twitter, where I asked, where I, I think this was on Twitter, where I asked, you know, people who follow me, would I be able to step on an NFL field and under any circumstance, simply get a single yard as a running back? Right. So in other words, right. Right. So now, for example, if I go into a boxing ring with someone, the only way I'm going to survive is if I keep running around long enough because the singular time that they hit me, I'm unlikely to be able to withstand that. Right. So I'm gone, right? If I play basketball, I think I have enough skills that I can receive the ball and pass it off to someone, right?

And so then I started thinking, what about other sports? ball and pass it off to someone, right? And so then I started thinking, what about other sports? Could the average person who doesn't play that sport survive long enough to do something? I'm obviously not going to get a hundred yards, but a single yard. What are your thoughts? I thought maybe I was being presumptuous. Maybe now I'm an old guy, but I thought that it could be possible for the front line to make enough of a hole for me to run through for one year and i would just draw i just need to get a single yard yeah it's possible and but a lot of people thought there's no chance that that would happen because they would catch you in there in the backfield they would tackle you and then you would die well they probably could do that too that could happen as well but if the defense is so strong that they can just create a small enough

opening for you to go one yard, I think that's reasonable. Yeah. It would suck for you, though, dude. They're going to pile on top of you. You're never going to be the same again. And especially since I've lost so much weight, at least before I looked like a linebacker, a fat linebacker. Yeah, that was – you don't want that happening to you. What was that?

What just happened there? Watch again. Watch this guy. This is the running back trying to get the ball to get one yard. Watch this. Bam! His helmet's off, and he's hurt. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my God. He got tacked. And that's one of five guys that are going to try to stop you from doing that. Tacked. Old. These guys are so powerful. So Jamie is in the camp of I'm not getting a single yard. There's a lot of other variables.

But it is possible that the defense could have prevented that if the defense is extraordinary and the guys are on point. And there's, you know, games, things happen, right? People are trying to control things and people are charging forward. It's possible that there's an opening just big enough for anyone to get three yards. Right. Or one yard, rather. Three feet. Do you think you could step on a soccer field and look anything short of a complete moron?

No. No, impossible. I actually saw you recently, and I was really delighted to hear that, where you were singing the praises of how fit soccer players are. Oh, my God. We went to see the games here in Austin. And when you watch professionals, first of all, here's one reason why soccer is problematic for television. They don't get breaks. So there's no breaks like, you know, we'll be right back with another word from Nabisco.

There's none of that. So if you have commercials, like you have to interrupt the play of the game. And then people have to catch up. And then it's not, is it not live now? Or are you going to like have half of a commercial and half of the game? Like, what are you going to do? How are you going to do that? Cause they don't stop. They just keep going and you have to be insanely fit. Those guys look like thoroughbreds. Like their legs were just fucking shredded. So there was a study a few years ago. I can't cite what it was, but that looked at who were

the fittest athletes. Number one was soccer. It has to be. Do you know what number two was? No. Squash players. Why? I'm guessing because there are a lot of those very, very quick accelerations that you have to engage in to be able to get. The ball is very dead, right?

And so you really have to have this incredible quickness to be able to. What a weird thing for an elite athlete to choose. Jamie, can we check the rankings? I could describe squash. You know, I tried to play it. I got very claustrophobic. Really? I'm being serious.

Let me see what it looks like. Show me a squash game. It's like a racquetball, right? No, but with a ball that's more dead racquetball the ball has a lot more give um it bounces more i was just trying to look i found other sports that sound like they would be more but i didn't find it on a scientific study my wife has been trying to get me into pickleball what are what are our thoughts about that uh i hear people like it have i just lost the no testosterone points that? I hear people like it. Have I just lost a few testosterone points?

No. Come on, man. People like pickleball. Well, apparently there's a whole craze of pickleball now because it's not quite as difficult as tennis. You don't have to cover as much ground. It's still a racket game. It looks like a lot of damage to the knees, son. That's what I'm looking at right there.

In terms of squash we're talking? You're running around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of fucking explosive movements for old guys like us yeah yeah best stick to yoga pickleball you can play with the beer in your hand so you'd be all right yeah pickleball pickleball is the way to go son but by the way and i'm not gonna call it ping pong table tennis oh my god insane i i watch a lot a lot of it. When I was a graduate student, there was a fellow student. We're roughly the same level, so we can have these long rallies. We'd play for two, three hours.

We'd be drenched. Oh, it's very, very, very athletic. It's also amazing to watch. Like, their reads. Like, knowing where the ball's coming and to be able to get to the side of the table. And they're whacking over there. And then it steps sideways. and dudes are hitting them behind their backs.

It's beautiful. Wild. It's wild. It's beautiful. Those exchanges are so fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great, and you're just this little ball, just tracking this little ball, whacking it with your thing.

Now I just, now that you said that you went to the soccer match here, that's because Austin has a team, right? Oh yeah. They have a, it's because Austin has a team, right? Oh, yeah. It's the only real professional team in town. So are you willing on your show to commit to inviting Dr. Gad Saad to a game when Inter Miami comes over? Because Gad should see Lionel Messi in person? I would be happy to do that if I am going to be here while that is happening. So I have a lot of commitments.

I don't necessarily know when that is. But would you want to go? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. If I was free, I 100% want to go with you. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. That's amazing. You just made my day. You made me happy. Matthew McConaughey, who's the coolest. Such a good guy.

He's one of the owners, too. so he's the of Austin yeah, oh I'm not miss saying that right They just actually played here before right before messy join the team. I don't want to like miss state his position He's something I think he's one of the owners. I don't pay I unfortunately don't pay attention that but I do pay attention to him He's a super cool guy. Yeah, And he was with us explaining it to us. He loves it. He fucking loves it. You know who else is surprisingly into soccer?

Do you know the Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds? Oh, no shit. Is he really? He is the part owner of Wrexham. He's co-owner. Okay. I knew it. I knew he was.

I just wanted to be sure. Let's do Ryan. Wre Rexham. He's co-owner. Okay. I knew it. I knew he was. I just wanted to be sure. Let's do Ryan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rexham. W-R-E-X. Yeah, Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, they purchased a team, right? Yeah.

What a wild baller move. I'm going to purchase a sports team. They got good. They got good after they purchased them? Yeah. He's got the magic touch. Speaking of Blake Lively, I actually have her in the current book that came out today as a manifestation of a truly beautiful woman. Do we agree on that?

Oh, she's gorgeous. She's phenomenal. Yeah, truly beautiful. And exudes. That's like a duh. Yeah. Depends if you like that type. There's like a level of beauty.

And then everything else is just different versions of that that's what I think I think people are too picky first of all and I also think that it's like a level of beauty that's like you hit a level of like beauty and it's like everything else is just different so for on a man who would be a guy

that you would think is kind of the epitome of gorgeous? Jason Momoa Jason Momoa. Jason Momoa. Is that right? He's perfect. He's beautiful. He's tall. Tall, big.

He's from an island. He's got tan skin. He's always smiling. He's like a man's man. This is not the scientific study, but I was just trying to find where soccer lists on this rank. This is the most overall fitness rating, but this is based off of physical demands.

It has soccer. Number one is water polo. 25. 26. Oh, come on. You know, you never wrestled, did you? That's the other thing I had. I had wrestling as number one.

Okay, first of all, let me hit the brakes. Martial arts being number five and then boxing being number six, that is way too general. You can't say martial arts because martial arts is jiu-jitsu and it's also like fucking karate at the mall and then if you go down go go down i don't i can't speak to rugby league but you know i talked to guys like volkanovski used to play it's fucking hardcore shit that's all believable but why is wrestling keep going down keep going down why is wrestling way down below basketball? Oh, they're squashed.

They're tied, actually. Whatever it is, shut the fuck up. This is a bullshit study. Shut the fuck up. Let me tell you something. What's the reference there? Number one is wrestling. Number one.

Is that right? A hundred percent. You mean Greco-Roman wrestling, you mean? Whether it's Greco-Roman or whether it's freestyle or whatever it is. Folk style, whatever wrestling. That is the most physically demanding sport. For sure. It's so hard to do. It's

so hard. And to be at an elite level, like a Daniel Cormier level, like... I'm going to pretend I know who that is. He's two division UFC world champion. Oh, okay. He was also Olympic wrestler.

Nice. There's levels that these guys are at that is their fucking fitness is off the charts. Their athleticism is off the charts. Well, you know, I think we probably discussed this before. This is not wrestling, but my brother was an Olympic judoka. Oh, well, that's another one, man. Judo is hardcore. I've well, that's another one man. Judo is hard core I've I've trained a bunch with judo guys

They're ridiculously strong because they're throwing bodies around all the time and that throwing bodies around when they grab ahold of you It's a totally different feeling. So I'm sure I've said this story What's that boxing and wrestling number one boxing two? two. Yeah, that's how it should be. Soccer nine. That's, what is this website? This website's a good website. Athletic Bill,

yes, I don't know. Yeah, that website makes sense. If it agrees with my thinking, it's a good website. If it doesn't, it's a bullshit website.

Okay, where's soccer there, Jimmy? This was number nine on this list. Yeah, wrestling MMA, that's accurate. That's accurate.

Because if you look at guys like, uh, Carellon, Alexander Carellon, who's the scariest fucking wrestler of all time. Like, if anybody says, like, who's the scariest wrestler of all time? It's Carellon. They used to call him the experiment. Because his parents were, like, normal size. Like, kind of tiny. Like 5'7". And he's a fucking panther.

Like a human panther. foot two 300 pounds and you know what his move is he throws people around he picks them up and beats them with the earth he's the most terrifying wrestler ever because he would just hoist them up in the air and look at that picture see that picture i have that picture framed in on metal printed on metal in the gym just to remind me of what a pussy I am You should always know that dudes like that have existed and probably still exist today. Okay, so that was fucking terrifying Let's play the the football game of can I get a yard you go in with this zero chance? No, that's winning. How long can you last? I'd have to run away It would just be as long until

he catches me okay i would have to run away and i probably wouldn't be able to run away he's faster than me he's big and fast right the thing about corellon was he was 300 pounds but he moved like a cat he had crazy flexibility like ridiculous flexibility and mobility he did all these mobility drills if you watch his workouts, they were extraordinary. Because like, he's doing a lot of things like shield casts with giant steel plates. So he's doing a lot of this shit.

So it's like rotational muscles. His ability to manipulate things in awkward positions was off the charts. It was all like heavy kettlebell work. That guy was a freak. And his his mobility he would show all these mobility drills and different things like look what he's doing oh my goodness look at this i mean this is a fucking olympic gold medalist wrestler what era is this 80s i think his last

wrestling matches were around i want to say before 2000, because he did have offers. He had like one Fugazi MMA fight. It was like a fake MMA fight. Because they did a few of those in Japan. They had a weird sort of symbiosis with pro wrestling and MMA. And so there was MMA fights in Japan that are allegedly fixed. And they look fixed. You're watching me going, get the fuck out of here.

It's like you see a fake tap. You see someone giving their arm up or something. There was some of that going on. And so it seems like he got involved in one of those, where they gave him a shit ton of money, and they said, come over here. It's kind of pro wrestling, but kind of not. We'll say it's an MMA fight. It's one of those deals.

But if he did fight MMA, everyone would be fucked. Everyone. Everyone would be fucked. And if he figured out how to strike, oh, my Jesus. You know, I'm not sure if we've talked about this before, but the precursor of MMA, I had had that conversation with my brother, the judo guy, because we would go out to night clubs and he would, he's very, very small guy, probably five foot three, but built like a pit bull. And he'd kind of interact with the world as though he's six foot eight, the bouncers and so on. And I once asked him, do you think you can take these guys? And he said, if I can get them,

like if they knock me out before i get to them then they knock me out but if i get them and i can bring them down then they're dead and i think from my very very limited knowledge of mma the guys who usually win are precisely those guys who can do exactly what he said right yeah sort of but kind of everybody knows how to defend that now. It's just how well can you defend and how good of a striker is that wrestler? Because there's this gentleman who's coming up on the scene right now. His name is Bo Nickel, and he's an elite, like, blue chip wrestler. Like, elite wrestler. Like, Olympic caliber wrestler.

And now he's competing in MMA, and his last fight was a first round knockout with his hands and he showed he's got sick boxing skills too which is the most terrifying thing when you got a guy who's above and beyond you in grappling like once he gets a hold of you you're fucksville there's no way you have one way taken to fucksville he's gonna slam you to the ground he's gonna control he going to beat your ass. They're just too good at wrestling. Right. And then also he can fuck you up standing.

That's where it gets really dangerous. So if a guy like Carellon learned how to stand up, that would have been the end. Because there's certain freaks that like you just like athletic freaks. You're just like, what are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with that? So in the MMA, in the history of the MMA, is there someone that is akin to Messi in terms of like a Michael Jordan or a Messi in the MMA? There's a few. There's a few that are in that conversation. I think the number one consensus greatest of all time is Jon Jones.

Because Jon Jones just went up and easily won the heavyweight title with a first round submission. Easily. Just took the guy down, strangled him quick. And the way he did it was like so extraordinary. His control of distance, his strangled him quick. And the way he did it was so extraordinary. His control of distance, his management of the space, the way he set it up. It's really tough to argue that he's not the greatest of all time. Undefeated as a light heavyweight,

had one defeat that was a disqualification that's 100% bullshit. He was on top of this guy, smashing him, beating the fuck out of him. But they said that he did 12 to 6 elbows, which are the dumbest fucking ever rule in MMA. Because what if it's 12.05? What if it's 12.05? Sorry, what does that mean? I don't see it. Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah. From the position on the clock. Okay. An elbow straight down is illegal. Oh, I see. Doesn't make any sense. You have to do it sideways? How do you do it?

You do it at an angle. Okay. But it's literally because the athletic commissions that were sanctioning MMA initially, they said, you know, we've seen those things on ESPN where people break bricks with their elbows. You can't do that. It's too dangerous.

So you can't do that on the ground. You can't even do it standing up, I don't believe. I think if someone comes straight at you and tomahawk elbows you, I believe that's illegal. I'm not sure about that. But on the ground, it's most certainly illegal. And it's the dumbest rule. It doesn't make any sense.

A regular elbow is just as hard. An elbow like this is just as hard. It might be more hard because you can kind of get more of your shoulder into it. Or this might be a more awkward move. I mean, I'm not the best at this, but I would think that this is not as good as this. This seems like I'm getting a lot of weight into that. I'm getting the torque off my hips. This, I'm kind of coming up and down. I feel like I have more ability to generate force going sideways, going into it like that. So I don't, I think if you measured it, I bet it would be,

I bet this elbow is stronger for like the elite fighters. So it's not a matter of like whether or not it makes sense. It's a dumb rule. And that's the only time he ever lost. He got disqualified. Yeah, he got disqualified. It's the only time he ever lost. Other than that, like he's like at certain point in time in his career, he was like playing with his food.

Like he let fights go on too long where he's like almost disinterested. Like he wanted to try standing up with guys who were supposedly great strikers. He just decided not to try to take people down. Just try to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. Because he's so much better than everybody, he was getting bored. And then when he has big challenges like this second Daniel Cormier fight, he stopped Cormier with a head kick. He's so fucking good.

I mean, he's beaten so many people. And the way he beat them, he fought Lyoto Machida. And it's one of the most cold-blooded finishes in the history of the sport. He has Machida, and he grabs him at the cage, presses him against the cage, and gets him in this perfect power guillotine, puts him to sleep, and then drops him and walks away. Watch this. Watch this. So he grabs a hold of him.

They get this exchange. And John catches this. He gets him in this knee to the body and then he catches him in this standing crank. So see how he's doing that? He's compressing Machida's head to his chest. Completely putting him out. There's nowhere to go. He's 100% out cold. and so look at

that it just drops oh my goodness and walks away cold blooded cold blooded that's the goat that's the greatest of all time and when he's challenged that's when like i said the second daniel cormier fight there was so much bad blood between them when he's challenged really challenged that's when you see how good he really is the problem is he's so much bad blood between them. When he's challenged, really challenged, that's when you see how good he really is. The problem is he's so much better than almost everybody that ever has done the sport that he, at certain times, just got too distracted, partying a lot, fucking off a lot. Do you think there are any personality traits that predict people who are likely to be interested in MMA fighting versus other sports? There's so many personalities.

It's really interesting. The diversity in personalities in MMA is really fascinating to me as a person who's an analyst. Like there are people that are very calm and disciplined and religious, like people like the greatest, like Khabib Nurmagomedov, who's also in the conversation of who's the greatest of all time he's also in that conversation he's in Azerbaijan or where is he? Dagestan he's in the conversation of the greatest of all time

because it's not even a matter of whether he lost because he never lost he was 29 and 0 it's a matter of did he ever lose a round and he lost maybe one round in the Conor McGregor fight because in the Conor McGregor fight he was in one round it the Conor McGregor fight. Because in the Conor McGregor fight, he was in one round. It looked like he was kind of taking a round off to really put the heat on him.

He was slowing Conor down. And then he just, he was just taking him down and beating the shit out of him. Beating the shit out of him, yelling at him. Let's talk now. Let's talk. Because it was so much like trash talk. And, you know, it was a very emotionally charged fight. And I think he might have lost one round in that fight where Conor got the best of him standing.

Because Conor's still an elite motherfucker. But other than that, his whole career is just domination. There's one fight that he had with Gleason Tebow that was a controversial fight. It was a close fight. But that's very early in his career. When you look at him against guys like world-class competition, you guys like Edson Barboza guys like Michael Johnson like the domination that he Showed on these guys was just fucking off the charts who just take him down mount them Tie their legs up with his legs and beat the fuck out of him and he did it to everybody he did it to everybody

What's your? Preference in terms of do you like the showy trash talkers or do you have no preference i love them all i love it all i love the guys who talk a lot of shit and i love the guys that are like khabib that are stoic and just get the job done see because in soccer of course you've had this perennial discussion about you know messi versus ronaldo i don't really think there is a debate. Messi is much better. But I also admire his humility, right? Because if there ever was someone who should have a chip on his shoulder,

it should be Messi, probably the most famous person in the world who's done it all. And yet he really walks around as though he's nobody. On the other hand, Ronaldo is a big showboat. If you ask Ronaldo who's the greatest player ever, he'll say, it's me. Whereas if you ask Messi, he'll list 10 people and he won't put himself on that list and so there there is there is a way by which he engages in his personal conduct that i think is

really admirable that you know he truly is a role model right yeah that's beautiful so so i'm wondering so from the perspective of because there's a lot of showboating in fighters, right? I'm the greatest ever and I'm going to knock you out. I would have thought that you'd probably be more into the understated guys. No, no, I'm all into whatever the fuck you're into. Like I like that Conor McGregor wears diamond encrusted watches and drives around a Lamborghini yacht. I fucking love it. I know that dude grew up poor.

That dude was struggling early in his MMA career and wasn't even sure if he was going to continue fighting. Right. You know, I became a fan of his watching him fight in the UK. I watched him fight on YouTube and I reached out to him like 2013. I sent him a message saying, I hope one day you come over to the UFC. I'd love to love to see your fights might have been earlier than 2013 but I was like I think he's I knew he was legit like back then there's something special He's been on this show many times. No he hasn't been on the show ever. No kidding. No, I definitely have mom though

I love the guy. I love that. He's wild. I love it I like wild guys. I like John Jones and he was wild. I think he did some questionable shit That's no doubt some things that he shouldn't have done. Do you are are many of your clothes? But he would tell you that fighters I have a lot of friends that are in all walks of life But most of my friends was most my close friends do risky shit Either they they do martial arts or they do stand-up comedy or they do something. How about intellectual risk-taking? Yeah.

Well, you do those. You do those things for sure. What year was that? 2013. Yeah. So I tweeted to him. He was amazing. But I knew that back then.

But I like that he's a wild fella. I like that he's fucking wearing ridiculous expensive suits and fucking giant watches and crocodile skin shoes. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. I like it. I like when people go hard. That's good. Good. Enjoy it.

Enjoy it. Enjoy the shit out of it. I like when Floyd Mayweather does it. Enjoy it. You earned it. You deserve it. Enjoy it. Enjoy it.

Did you see there's a, i think it's an hbo documentary coming out of the mexican boxer i can't remember his name which one uh i guess yeah exactly oh have you have you have you heard that there is a no i have not heard that i think it's coming in august and i seem to be i mean from the little trailer that i saw i think there is quite a bit of personal demons that he's had to face in his life. And so it seems like a gripping story. Apparently he likes to party. Oh, is that right?

Yeah. You mean with the ladies or with the people? Oh, I was meeting with, I don't know. These are just rumors. You know, some controlled substances. He's had some issues. Yes. Public issues.

Oh, there you go. Yeah. Some issues with yeah rehab drinking drugs and women holla this might be the most interventions by Jamie on any show that I've been on nah he always does it yeah Jamie knows how to fucking slow him up he's the all-time greatest truth checker well he's the goat of podcast producers for sure everybody else he's the messy of podcast 100% but there's no Ronaldo out there so what am I the goat of podcasts. Everybody else is bowed out. He's the Messi of podcast producers. A hundred percent. But there's no Rinaldo out there.

So he's even better than that. What am I the Messi of? Or what is Messi the Gatow? Why does it have to always be about you? Why do we keep turning it around to you? About me? Come on, man. You know I love you.

I've said two words in this podcast. That's not true at all. Literally, if someone does a content analysis of our conversation so far, they wouldn't know that I'm here. I've just sat and smiled at your beautiful face. Aw, sweetie. That can't be true.

I can just look at the words I'm saying on my recording. It's like 50-50 in the last 10 minutes. No, it is not 50-50. How dare you? You got a little testy there. I gotcha. Not at all. I'm just having fun. So what else is up? What's going on?

I don't know, man. I'm more worried. What's upsetting you? What's making you happy? I'm more worried than ever about the cultural narratives. I'm more worried than ever about the fucking divide in this country. Yeah. It seems so accelerated, whether it's climate change or

Ukraine or whatever the subject du jour is. Yeah. It's everyone's so stereotypically on one side or the other. Have you lost any personal friendships because of ideological issues? No, not real friendships. Okay, good. Maybe acquaintances. Okay. But that was okay. Those are good. If you can clean those up. Exactly. Yeah. You find out who you really, who's really your friend. You know, even people that I like vehemently disagreed with about certain policies that were in place during the pandemic. Yeah. They're still my friends. Right. We can have disagreements. I know who the core of you is.

And people think about things differently. We're free to think about things differently. Some people are free to have a perspective that I don't agree with. It's like, and you might be able to back it up with some facts. Yeah. You might be able to, or you might be intolerant to the other opposition views because some of them are full shit. Maybe that's true, too. There's a lot going on, but it's very hard for people to when especially in times of crisis, like when during the pandemic, you kind of found out how human beings are very malleable and very quick to pick a narrative that they support. And especially if that narrative offers a promise of going back to normal, you know, and that was what was weird about that is like, this is a psychological, like test study.

If you wanted to do a test study of how a population, a free supposedly free population free thinking free freedom of expression freedom of speech is literally in the the doctrine that we run the law by and to have people willing to throw that away quickly under something that wasn't even it's not we're not talking about a nuclear war but we're talking about something that's like relatively in terms of the amount of people that die every year it's not good're not talking about a nuclear war, but we're talking about something that's like relatively in terms of the amount of people that die Every year it's not good. It certainly wasn't a good thing to have anybody 99.7% survival yeah, and Yeah, I mean again. It's not a good thing right. It's not good to get any kind of cold any kind of disease any kind of

Like illness it's not good but there's a lot of shit that's killing people also and there's almost no effort to stop that like there's no effort to stop the comorbidities that caused a lot of the problems that a lot of those people that didn't survive had there's no effort to stop that in terms of like what we understand about health and wellness and promoting that you're referring to obesity largely. Not just obesity, but malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies. So many people are eating, but they're malnourished.

It's a giant portion of our population that is not getting the proper nutrients every day. And there's a host of diseases that come along with that. And it's just not being discussed. I mean, it's not like the epidemic that it really is. It's not being discussed like the epidemic that it really is. Do you think that a lot of the governmental policies that were instituted stem from the fog of war during the pandemic, and so it was driven by ignorance? Or are you of the view that

there is kind of a Dr. Evil, you know, nefarious thing behind this whole thing? I am very reluctant to go with the Dr. Evil narrative. I think there's certainly people that you would consider evil that will take advantage when things happen. But do I think that like they released the pandemic on purpose? No, no. There's like pretty clear evidence that people working in the lab got sick and that those people spread it. No, but let's say the ad hoc policies that they would come up with.

You could only be four people on a boat. You can do this. You can't do that. My feeling is, I don't have any proof of it. It's just I'm speculating, is that a lot of it really came from the fog of war. People were, and I'm not trying to be charitable, but I think that most people were well-meaning. They didn't know what the hell they're talking about. They didn't

exhibit any epistemic humility, right? They made it seem as though they knew what they're talking about, but they were trying their best. I don't think there was kind of this grand conspiracy where this is our chance to take over the freedoms that people still adhere to. I would be more inclined to believe what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. I think it's many factors. And I think when we want to look at why people did what they did, we try to look at it one way or another. But I think there's many, many things going on. And also, for sure, governments that are really good at crafting laws that allow them to gain power and they've done that with the the the all the the bills that they passed after 9-11

you know the patriot act the patriot act 2 the ndaa all that crazy shit they whenever something happens they find new ways to control and they do it because it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to pass laws that people were reluctant to pass before. It happens. Yeah. Happens all the time. It's normal.

That's their job. That's what they do. What they do is they're in control. They're in power. That's the game that they're playing. The game that you're playing is, I want to keep my freedom. And we have to figure out a way to establish establish like real clear rules to how this game works Yeah

because if you could just cheat and lie and then delete things off social media and Have a bunch of bots saying a bunch of shit to stir people up and you're literally funding this Yeah Like who's doing that is how many of that how many of them are coming from America itself and How many of them are coming from America itself? And how many of them are coming from foreign agents who are trying to disrupt American politics and trying to disrupt American narratives? I wonder. I wonder like what is the ratio of shit posting? Like people that are like, what would you call it? Bot posting.

What's the level of disingenuous, non-human, non-real person posting? As relating to COVID or anything? Anything. I think it's all the social things that are coming up right now. Anything. You see a lot of these wacky fake accounts. I wonder how many of them are. There was an FBI analyst that said that he believed there's somewhere around 80% of Twitter's users are bots. It could be as high as 80%. Wow. That's crazy. What?

Can you imagine Twitter just becomes bots arguing with bots and they finally realize no one's on it? And they finally realized like no one's on it. But have you felt that your, I mean, your experience with Twitter has radically changed as a function of the pre and post Elon Musk coming in or hasn't changed much? You feel more free. Yeah. Like you can post things that are controversial and not worry about, you know, having your account limited. Yeah. Because if you were posting things about, like, first of all, there's things you couldn't post.

Like, you would not post a story about the Hunter Biden laptop. You couldn't even send it to me in a DM. Yeah. There were certain things I tried to send people in DMs, and they wouldn't allow me to send them. That's amazing. I'm like, this is wild. This is weird.

It's just confusing. It's like, why would you think this is a good idea? Well, I remember I had been contacted by, I don't know if you've had him on the show. Do you know who Matt Ridley is? Matt Ridley. Why do I know that? He's a, he's an evolutionary biologist. He was in the house of Lords in Britain. He's been on my show a few times. He wrote a book a few years ago with a coauthor. I can't remember her name, where they were arguing for the lab leak theory. And, and when he had, when his people had reached out to me

to come on the show, I very frankly said, look, I'm someone who very much speaks my mind. I don't care, but let's be pragmatic about this. If you come on my show and we spend an hour and a half chatting, it's going to be taken down.

This was at the time when YouTube did not allow that. And I've always kind of struggled with that decision because I was being pragmatic and saying, look, we're just going to waste our time. First of all, it's not going to appear. They're going to take it down.

They're probably going to put a strike on my channel, if not remove my channel. And there is a real problem with that. And so we ended up never doing the show. But just the fact that they can get to me, someone who really defines his identity as being irreverent and I just do whatever I want, yet they still found a way to get me to modulate my behavior, to think about it. Therefore they won against me. Yeah. It's, it's self-censorship

that people do out of survival. Yeah. And it, it, it always sat badly with me because, you know, I always thought no matter what, I'm always going to speak my mind. But here was a case where I actually fell prey to that. What's crazy is also the goals shift, the goalpost shifts. So I think you could talk about a lab leak theory now because it's kind of established science and there's more evidence that points to the fact that it leaked from a lab than there's, there's almost no evidence of natural spillover. There's also evidence of manipulation of the virus itself to make it more contagious to human beings. It's some real wackiness, man.

Yeah. It's really, it's crazy how, but it took so long for people to think that that could even be a possibility. Like, remember when Jon Stewart was on The Colbert Show and Colbert kept trying to block him from joking around about it no I don't I never saw that no I didn't oh my god you never see you have to see this it's kind of amazing because Jon Stewart bless his heart he sticks to the bit yeah and Colbert likes trying to cock block the joke he's not he's trying to stop him

from ranting so you can clearly see Jon Stewart is in the middle of a bit he's like literally doing it to the audience. He's doing a bit. Watch this. It's pretty fun. I guess this is it. This is a delight to have you here, my friend. Oh, my God.

There's nothing I wanted to do more than breathe everyone's air. Well, here FRIEND. OH, MY GOD, THERE'S NOTHING I WANTED TO DO MORE THAN BREATHE EVERYONE'S AIR. WELL, HERE'S THE THING. HERE'S THE THING. THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT YOU. THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT YOU. WE ARE TRULY DEAR FRIENDS, AND YET THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I'VE SEEN YOU IN THE FLESH IN 15 MONTHS.

THAT IS CORRECT. RIGHT. AND I AM SO REALLY HAPPY. AND I KNOW WE'RE ALL VACCINATED, AND I'M NOT GOING TO GET COVID, BUT I'M GOING TO GET SOMETHING. really happy. And I know we're all vaccinated, and I'm not going to get COVID, but I'm going to get something. Honestly, these people did not take good care of themselves during the pandemic.

Last time, well, actually, the first time we talked during COVID, I was still in South Carolina. That's right. You were locked down. I was locked down there, and the family, Evie and the kids, were the actual Carolina. That's right. You were locked down. I was locked down there. And the family, Evie and the kids, were the actual crew. That's right. That's how we were doing it.

We were doing it in a little unused little bedroom with cables through the window and a satellite truck on our lawn. And I mean, the room was twice the size of this desk, I think. I'm not joking. Chris could tell you. It's really, really tiny. But the whole point was just just get it done to get Something out there. We really wanted to do the show and when I interviewed you for it You were talking about how little progress we've made in science in

Combating pandemics because in 1918 the advice was wear a mask wash your hands That's right, and a hundred years late 103 years later Wear a mask wash your hands. It was soul-crushing to find that out. I was really hoping that, like, in 1918, they'd be like, drink a tincture of mercury and butterfly juice. Like, I was hoping it'd be, like, some bizarre thing, and I'm like, we've come a long way, baby.

It's the exact same... How do you feel about the science now, though? So I will say this. I, and I honestly mean this. I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science. Uh-oh.

Look at Gilbert. And that's kind of... Hold on one second. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not... Listen. Spit take. Listen. It's coffee. I wouldn't do that to you.

I wouldn't do that to you. I'm all for spit takes, but... But what do you mean by that? Do you mean like perhaps there's a chance that this was created in a lab, there's an investigation? A-takes, but... What do you mean by that? Do you mean, like, perhaps there's a chance that this was created in a lab? There's an investigation. A chance? Well, I...

Oh, my God. If there's evidence, I'd love to hear it. I just don't know. There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.

The disease is the same name as the lab. That's just a little too weird, don't you think? And then they ask those scientists, they're like, how did this... So wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab. How did this happen? And they're like,

a pangolin kissed a turtle. And you're like, no. The name of your lab. If you look at the name. Look at the name. Let me see your business card. Show me your business card. So when is this?

Look at Colbert, though. Look at Colbert. Colbert keeps opening his mouth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Wuhan. Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that happen? Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan.

How did that happen? Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus. Okay, okay. What about this? What about this? Listen to this. Wait a second.

All right. Oh, my God. He has to stand up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at Jon Stewart. But you see how many times Colbert tried to cock block his bit? But so this happened when? This was.

Look, they have the COVID-19 vaccine link there. Two years ago. So this is in the heart of everything. Yeah. And the chaos of it all. Yeah. Well, you know, in Montreal, you probably know that we had some of the most authoritarian stuff on COVID. Late into the pandemic, there was a curfew that you weren't allowed to walk your dog in your neighborhood after, you know, 8 p.m. or 10 p.m. or whatever it was.

Now, people really, there was an outcry, so they rescinded it. But just the fact that they did that, I mean, what would be the scientific evidence that suggests that walking your dog outside in the middle of the night- Super spreader event. No, but I genuinely think though, and I'm not someone who just gives people a pass to be charitable. I genuinely don't think it was something nefarious. I think that it was just the fog of war. People are acting like idiots, thinking like they know what they're doing. And they made, I'm sure there's going to be a thousand doctoral dissertations written about the

failure of public policy without it necessarily being a whole evil orchestrated thing. That's my sense. I think there's certainly a lot of that. And then there's certainly a lot of that and then there's certainly a lot of people that Never really had the power to dictate what people can and can't do before like mayors and governors They really didn't have the ability to shut down businesses. Yeah, and I think something there's something creepy and weird about having that ability Yeah, and that people especially if their income doesn't change at all. they did not seem to have a problem doing unscientific things that stop people from making money like shutting down outdoor dining that didn't make any sense and they did it and they did it for optics yeah and the fact that that that kind of stuff can happen like it's when you when you get it gets real

strange when people have power to do things because some people are just gonna start doing those things You know, there's a there's an interesting conversation to be had about what's going on in Canada right now with assisted suicide, yeah Because all you have to do is go to a doctor I believe the doctor recommends and then one other doctor has to recommend it so I don't know the the specific let's find out what the specific mechanisms are but you know people that are depressed are getting this as an option in 2021 the law was changed to include that those are serious and chronic physical conditions even if that condition was non life-threatening it's been available for adults since 2016 okay so and since 2016 Canada's medical

assistance in dying program known by the acronym made has been available for adults with terminal illness okay and in 2021 the law was changed to include those with serious and chronic physical conditions even if that condition was non life-threatening what would constitute that if I have severe back pain? Does that fit under that? Yeah, you could. Well, I think even depression, I think, is an illness. It's considered an illness, right?

Yeah. So if someone could, like, instead of discouraging people, instead of saying, you know, having a suicide hotline, instead of, like, having people that have nowhere to go, somewhere they can reach out and find help. Instead of that, you're saying, okay, we'll help you kill yourself. Like that is, that's a weird one, man. That's a weird one to get behind

because I'm all for people that have terminal illnesses and don't want to, I mean, we do it to our dogs, right? If our dog is dying, we have the dog put down. It's a humane way to take care of something that you love and care for. We do it to our dogs, right? If our dog is dying, we have the dog put down. It's a humane way to take care of something that you love and care for. You don't want them to— I went through that five years ago. It was like the worst thing that I've ever gone through. It's horrible.

It's devastating. How's your—I see some of those photos. He's doing well? He's the sweetest. He's the best. Well, you know, in Canada, there are all sorts of problems we're facing. I don't know if you heard about the story of the guy who just committed suicide because he was being bullied by the diversity, inclusion, equity. Have you heard about this? No, I didn't hear about this one.

A 60-year-old man who, from everything that I've heard, was an exemplary principal. He had been told that he has to take some, you know, diversity, inclusion, equity stuff. And in one of those meetings, I don't know the exact details, but he had sort of raised some concerns. Shouldn't we be judging people based on, you know, a meritocratic ethos and so on? Because he said that, right? He's actually quite a liberal person from what I have heard.

But just the fact that he questioned the DAI cult, the diversity, inclusion, equity, they started hounding him, harassing him. He's a racist. He's got to take remedial courses, sensitivity. He ended up committing suicide. I'm sure, Jamie, you can pull it up. Just recently, in the last week or two. Jordan Peterson wrote something about cancellation.

It's akin to being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yeah. Yeah, well. Or a horrible illness. I forget what he said. But you know what? A lot of people have tried to cancel me. Now, sometimes people say, oh, it's because you're tenured that you can be courageous because otherwise you wouldn't be courageous.

The reality is I get tons of death threats. I mean, last year I received for the first time ever an in-person death threat while walking with my son, necessitating that the Montreal police get involved. So there are many ways by which people can try to get you to modulate what you say and so on. It's a real problem. What is the number one thing that people are upset at you about? Probably, and I haven't done it in a while just because I kind of lost interest, the most violent would be any criticism of Islam. And in this case, it was, I think,

someone who was of that faith because he looked like he came from that background. And so people will get upset at me for all sorts of things. Valerie Bertinelli got upset at me once because I tweeted something about my wife having an uncomfortable interaction with someone, a barista who was transgender. And she got super upset. And two days later, 26 million tweets later, all the, as Dave Chappelle calls them, the alphabet people were really coming after me. But that doesn't have the timber of, you know, we want to kill you. When you start criticizing some Islamic stuff,

then it can get pretty hairy. And I think that's one of the things that's maybe different about, say, Jordan and me. I think he receives a lot more hate than I do. But some of the hate that I receive is really unique in that it's both Jew-related. And he actually mentioned this recently, that I'm in a unique position in that I receive a lot of hate that's related to my being Jewish. So cover being Jewish and then criticizing some Islamic tenets. So, for example, I've seen at times when I've come on the show, and we've talked about,

I remember one time I talked to you about the hatred of black dogs as sanctioned by Muhammad himself. And then all sorts of people started saying, he's making this stuff up, it's bullshit, why don't you bring a real Islamic person on the show? You can just look it up. I mean, Jamie can now check it, that there is within Islam a hatred for black dogs.

So even the most, you know. Is that a translation issue? Does that mean the color black for sure? It's black dogs, yes, specifically black dogs. Now, I think it comes from the fact, I don't know the exact theological reason, but I think that Muhammad himself had had a fear of black dogs. And so he sanctioned it as a kind of divine prescription. It couldn't possibly mean something else? Meaning what?

You mean the color black means something else? The alleged Hadith, which regards black dogs as evil, has been rejected by the majority of Islamic scholars as fabricated. black dogs as evil has been rejected by the majority of Islamic scholars as fabricated. Nevertheless, Islamic scholars have tended to regard dog saliva as impure. Yeah. So that comes by the way. So they're saying it's fabricated? Well, but pretty much anything that you say, someone will say, oh, it's fabricated. So in Islam, there's a thing called nejes, which is like impure things, right?

So for example, the kuffar, the non-Muslim is himself impure, while urine is impure. The dog saliva is impure. So if you were to be licked by a dog or something, then you'd have to redo your purity ritual before you pray because you've been touched by nejes, by something that is impure. So there are many debates depending depending on the hadith, as to whether something is authentic or not. But there is certainly, as Jamie just pulled out, the fact that there is,

within certain Islamic thought, that black dogs are uniquely bad. And so just if I say that on your show, there'll be some Islamic guy who says, you know, the Jew is making this stuff up and so on. And so it's now I've stayed away from it recently, not because I'm trying to shy away from it, just because I've said all that I have to say about the matter and I've moved on. But the hatred comes from all forms.

I can criticize feminism. I'll get women's group attacking me. If I attack something about transgender issues, I'll get criticized. And so the hate is endless. That's a horrible thing to experience. It's a horrible thing to experience, especially from a guy like you that literally fled it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, and when I would first, I think in our earlier chats many years ago, we've talked about, you know, Islamic immigration and so on. And I hold zero hatred. I think you know me enough to know that.

I mean, I have tons of Muslim friends. I probably know more Muslim guys than most people will ever meet. I never criticize individuals. I criticize ideologies, right? So, you know, does Islam codify the right of people to criticize Islam or not, if you're in an Islamic country? Well, the answer to that is very clear, and the answer is not one that promotes freedom of speech. Me saying that doesn't imply that I'm being hateful towards Muslims. I'm just literally talking about the Islamic doctrines,

just like there are doctrines in Deuteronomy that you and I can decide to criticize, right? And I think most Muslims, even some of whom are students in my class who've heard me talk about these things, not in a classroom setting, but in public, are very fair. And they'll say, you know, you're a very fair guy.

But other ones will send me emails and stuff that are just brutal that are really and i have to say i'm someone who's if i can speak of myself quite courageous but that in-person uh threat that i received when i was walking with my son was really truly harrowing because I could never rise to that threat, right? Because the way that guy was speaking to me, he always had more, you know, I had more to lose than him. And so there was never going to be a situation where if he decided to act on his hatred, I could have ever lived up to that challenge. And so for several weeks, I was really being careful going around, you know, trying to avoid that street. And it doesn't make sense that in the 21st century,

a professor in Canada should have to worry about which street he walks on because some idiot is threatening him in front of his 10-year-old son. It's incredible. Yeah, it's very terrifying. When you think about rigid things that are in certain religious doctrines, what do you think the roots of some, like the forbidden foods, do you think the roots were initially that those foods got people sick? Oh, yes.

That there was pandemics attached to them? Oh, what a great question. Thank you. In The Consuming Instinct, one of my earlier books, 2011, I have a whole analysis of certain kosher laws from an evolutionary biological perspective. And it's exactly what you just intimated. So pork.

So pork, right? So imagine ancient Jews walking around in an environment where there's no refrigeration, where the shellfish that might be tainted with a particular pathogen or not. You can't smell it. You can't see it. All that you know is that some people ingested and dropped dead and others don't. There is no mechanism by which I can learn the statistical regularities between A and B. Therefore, the only possible conclusion that I can come to is that it's a divine prohibition. There must be some divine reason. So even that theological prescription, I can analyze it from an evolutionary perspective. Now, when I did that, let's say for kosher laws, I didn't get rabbis writing to me

saying, how dare you? We're going to kill you for arguing that it's not divine. If I do the exact same thing with some Islamic doctrine, you know, very respectfully, very properly, most Muslims will hear it and say, yeah, fair enough, Professor Saad. But a few will say, how dare you? You should be killed. Right. And that makes no sense in a free society. No, it doesn't. And it doesn't mean that the root of any of these religious doctrines weren't from God himself. Like, who knows?

Who knows what the root of this stuff is? But the root of most of them, for sure, has gone through people. And the conversations have gone through people. It's, like, real clear in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. We know the people that. But the origins of it is what's the most fascinating to me. It's like, where did it start from? Like, what were the, when the first guy wrote it down?

Like, especially when you're talking about ancient Christianity or whatever it was before it was even called Christianity. Yeah. ancient Christianity or whatever it was before it was even called Christianity. You know, when I was in Greece, I was with Brian Murarescu. And he wrote this book about the Eleusinian mysteries called The Immortality Key. It's an amazing book. And in this book, it all details these rituals that they used to do. And, you know, thousands of years ago where they were drinking wine that were laced with psychedelics and coming up with democracy and like the the the root when

you're in those kind of environments when you're in a place that like used to be this like amazing utopian society or at least transformative society that never existed before and then you're walking around the ruins like, I wonder if they saw it coming. I wonder if they saw the end coming. Are we seeing the end coming? I hope not. Do you know?

When you see and you realize they built the Parthenon, when you're there looking at that thing, you're like, what did you do? How did you do this? what did you do yeah how did you do this how did you do this 2 000 plus years ago and it's all designed with the golden ratio in mind yeah it's wild craftsmanship i actually talk about in in my current happiness book i talk about different correlates with happiness how does personality correlate with happiness how does culture correlate with happiness marriage and does culture correlate with happiness, marriage, and so on? One of the sections I talk about religiosity and happiness,

are religious people on average happier? And the answer turns out that there is a moderate positive correlation between religiosity and happiness. Now that makes perfect sense in that religion provides me with structure. It provides me with greater commonality. It creates a nice demarcation between in-group and out-group. Therefore, people in my in-group I can cooperate with. I have greater cohesion. So there are very functional earthly reasons for why if I am religious, it's going to lead to greater happiness. But what I try to also argue in the book is that that shouldn't cause people who are not religious to despair that they're not going to be as happy. Because I, and I'm not sure what your religious views are, but I'm very much rooted in my Jewish identity. But in a cultural sense, I'm not very much of a believer.

But I am very much someone who sees the divine in things, right? My having a friendship with you, being able to text you for me to come on this show is a divine thing. My being able to bond with my Belgian shepherds in the way in this pure love is a divine thing. Meeting a random stranger with whom I have this fantastic conversation for 30 minutes is a manifestation of the divine. So I think we can be quite spiritual in our day to day without necessarily couching it in some supernatural, you know, religious narrative. What are your thoughts? I would agree with that. But I would also say that for a lot of people, those religious narratives are like a scaffolding for which they can establish a better life.

And I meet a lot of people that are devoutly religious, particularly devoutly Christian or devoutly Muslim, that are very disciplined and live their life because of this extreme belief, live their life in an often very successful way. And I think there's a piece that they have in a true belief. There's a piece that you have that there's a God that's got a plan for this whole thing. And just worship that God and do the right thing and you're going to be okay. perspective, I think it's less impressive for me to do the right thing because otherwise there is a big guy who is judging me than to do the right thing for no other reason than it being the right thing to do. I think the latter is a lot more impressive, right? Do you agree? Sure. But the big guy is a part of you and you're judging you. So you're not just doing something so that he doesn't judge you. You're doing something so that you don't judge you. Fair enough. So you are also God because you are also watching you do this thing. Well, I've evolved a moral compass

to use an evolutionary thing for social species. It makes perfect sense for us to have evolved a distinction between right and wrong. If you wrong me, there's going to be retribution. So we evolve that emotion. So I often get frustrated when religious people say, sure, evolution explains a lot of things, but it can't explain morality. That's simply not true. There's a lot of very clear evolutionary reasons for why a social species would have evolved a moral compass.

That makes sense. Yeah, it's not something that exists outside of the purview of science. And I think, I mean, there are several people, I think, that have been on this show that have, you know, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, that have written about the fact that, you know, the moral compass is totally within the purview of science. It completely makes sense that there's a moral compass. And it also makes sense you're talking about these divine moments.

I think it's all these things and then some. I think it's all survival instincts and and you know sort of having that dismissive reductionist view of what it means to be a person and have these experiences in life and what life is and i think we're trying to label something that is almost impossible to believe is true that i'm saying sounds with my mouth and you know what i'm thinking we're like sharing a context and language and we we have all these words that are connected to very specific things that we're very aware of meanwhile we're hurling through infinity on an organic spaceship that's spinning a thousand miles an hour in a shooting gallery of asteroids and comets and this is all

these things are true. And we're finite life forms that are constantly innovating and trying to escape the boundaries of our eventual demise physically, psychologically. We're trying to connect each other on the internet and put chips in our brains. And it's wild what's happening. And in the middle of all this, there's a battle, a true battle in 2023 over censorship, a real battle, in the middle of all this there's a battle a true battle in 2023 over censorship a real battle like the likes of which I've never seen because as a kid growing up there was no arguments against freedom of speech in America Right. I do not remember ever seeing someone argue against freedom of speech. It certainly wouldn't have been someone on the left

Yeah, so good. Sorry. No, I'm saying just that that alone someone argue against freedom of speech, it certainly wouldn't have been someone on the left. Yeah. Sorry. No, I'm saying just that that alone is, it's a terrifying thing. It's like people are literally crafting the shackles that are going to eventually contain them. And they're doing so greedily and enthusiastically. So can I offer a philosophical explanation for why I think this is happening? Sure.

Some of your viewers may have heard me mention this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating. So in my last book, In the Parasitic Mind, I talk about two ethical systems, deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics is an absolute statement. For example, if I say it is never okay to lie, that is a deontological ethics is an absolute statement. For example, if I say it is never okay to lie, that is a deontological statement.

If I say it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings. So the example that I often give is if your spouse asks you, do I look fat in those jeans? Then put on your consequentialist hat really quickly. So for most things, most of us are going to be consequentialists. But when it comes to certain fundamental principles that define, say, Western values, those have to be deontological. Yeah. Right? And so as to your point, until very recently, we all agreed that presumption of innocence was a deontological statement that can't have a but associated to it. You can't say, I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh. I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump. And so one of the reasons why I've gotten into a beef with someone

that we both know well is because that person has repeatedly violated what he should know better, which is that deontological principles by definition should never have the but qualifier. But now it has become perfectly okay when talking about freedom of speech to tackle it from a consequentialist perspective. Don't criticize Islam because that means you're hurting people's feelings.

Therefore, shut your mouth, right? No, you can criticize Islam. You can criticize Judaism, you can criticize evolution, you could do whatever. There is no but, right? And I think if we can ever return to understanding the distinction between deontological and consequentialist, I think we'll be back on the right track. What do you think got us on the wrong track in the first place? So I think it's the distinction between reason and feelings. We're both a reasoning animal and a thinking animal, but there's been now too much emphasis placed on feelings, right? So if I tell a truth that is hurtful to someone, then I should not tell the truth. So I've often, when I went in front of the Canadian Senate as the Jordan, for Bill C-16, the transgender bill, neither of us

was arguing that transgender people shouldn't live with full dignity and so on. But what we were arguing is that in the pursuit of that noble goal, you don't murder truth, right? So if I were to say it's insane for six foot four biological males to walk into female spaces, that makes no sense. I'm not erasing transgender people, right? But if the optimization metric is make sure to not hurt people's feelings, you start conflating these things yeah does that make sense yeah but it's also there's no way to stop someone from like if someone is a legitimate pervert and all they have to do is say they're a woman and now they can go to the woman's bathroom there's no way to stop that i'm not saying that that's the majority of people. I'm not, I'm saying there are human beings that are like that. And this does not in any way discount trans people. This just says there's people that will game the system and there's no

safeguards in place. So if you want to protect people from that, I don't know how you would do it other than having some sort of security in each women's bathroom to make sure that no one's creeping on people, which is outside impossible. You cannot have that. Well, I mean, think about, again, deontological principles. Until three minutes ago, 117 billion people had existed. That's roughly the estimate of how many people have ever existed, who fully understood that there were two phenotypes in the human species called male and female, and nobody disagreed as to what that was. But suddenly now, it is really controversial to argue that, and that's why I do some of the satire and sarcasm on social media. It's not to be mean or

flippant. It's because the only way you can handle some of the lunacy we're saying is through derision, through mockery, because it's insane. I mean, we are the product of 117 billion people who exactly knew how coupling works, but now we can no longer say it. When we refer to Leah Thomas, the six foot four swimmer,

we can't say that that's a male because that's a female because she said so. It's insane. It is insane. And it's wild to watch. It's wild to watch young people just adopt it wholesale. Because if you're a female athlete, it's not good. It's not good. It's unfair.

And I mean, that's the exact idea, right? Because people talk about it's unfair to this transgender athlete. What about the unfairness to all of the biological females who are being screwed by this, right? Yeah, there was a woman who came on Trigonometry recently, and she had a very detailed depiction of all the different advantages that, all the different advantages that even with a reduction of testosterone that the male frame has, particularly in developing power, power-related things, the shape of the hips, the angle from the hips down to the knees. Joe, I've had conversations with physicians, not that you need a physician to confirm that there's male or female. But how could you be a medical doctor and actually espouse some of the nonsense

such as there are no sex differences between men and women? I've had anesthesiologists. I've had gynecologists who argued that transgender medicine recognizes that the antiquated binary is no longer valid. That's insane. How could you be a gynecologist

and practice gynecology not knowing that? Maybe you're on ketamine. I don't know. I don't know how things got this bonkers. But I think that if you have a group where you can't question anything about it, you're going to have problems because then you have a protected group and crazy people can join that group. And that is a real factor. We've seen it. It's a thing.

You see it with these cases where these males with fully intact penises are wandering around women's locker rooms and women are freaking out. And they're like, no, I'm a woman. And they're like, what can you say? There's this thing that Matt Walsh did an interview with this guy. He's a politician. Let me find this because it's so crazy. So this guy who is a Biological male here. I'll send you this Jimmy. I'll send you this this story behind it, but there's a video of him talking to Matt Walsh and On the documentary. No, it's not a documentary here so this guy will pull up the story so he is

a biological male who has come out as a woman of color who's a lesbian and he does it with all the it facetiously but he's doing it with a full, straight face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful. And the way, when you hear them talk, it's amazing. Yes, I've seen this guy. Because it's checkmate. And they're saying, if this was true, we would be clapping and applauding him. But we don't think it's true. Yeah. But this, like, throws the whole thing.

Find the actual interview, if you could, online. Because it's amazing. The way this guy does, this guy deserves he should be in the next Tarantino movie. He's an amazing actor. But the way he lays it down is so perfect.

And he does it fully straight-faced. And now they're saying, if this was true, we would be applauding him. But it's not true. But that's the problem with the whole thing. So you think in the deep recesses of all those folks' minds who come out in support of men who have penises or women, do you think they know that it's bullshit? Or have they been so parasitized that they actually believe their nonsense?

I think a lot of them believe it. And I think a lot of them, that belief is confirmed by their social groups or who also not just believe it, but enforce belief in it. There's a social pressure to enforce belief in it. And I've seen it. I've seen it in action. I've seen women have arguments with people that are, you know, pro trans rights are pro-trans rights, and these women are arguing that there's pro-trans rights and then there's erasing women's rights, including the athletic argument, including the female spaces like intimate spaces, locker rooms, bathrooms. it's a very controversial subject in this strange culture we live in. And it's one thing that people can subscribe to one side or the other and find a group willingly, vehemently opposed to their position. So they engage in instantaneous conflict. So they're involved in this psychic war with competing ideologies.

And it gives them meaning. That's a real problem with human beings. That we do attach ourselves to things. Even if those things don't involve you or your life you decide like this is the movement that I'm gonna get behind stand behind and I'm gonna tell people and it gives you meaning Yeah, like you're you're a social justice warrior for the rights of the disenfranchised You know and there's something to be said for actually doing that of course There's something to be said for actually standing up for people who don't have a voice and doing the right thing there is something to be said for that but there's also something to be said for to

be able to look at this from both sides and if you're an 11 year old girl and there's some guy's dick in your face in the girls bathroom like what this guy's walking around naked in the locker room and you're a kid like is that okay yeah I mean how do you know what's happening here like what would you know are you sure yeah like and in some cases when someone's like so feminine and so so like seems like a woman you don't have any problem with it right well i mean there is a normal distribution for example when it comes to you know women who are very masculine men are very feminine we've

always recognized that right but we've never taken the step into the abyss of infinite lunacy where we say sometimes women can have penises I mean that's I mean and that's why I wrote the parasitic mind, the last book, right? Because I am, I was really literally arguing that human minds can be parasitized by ideological worms in the way that you can be parasitized by actual brain worms, right? Because there is no rational mechanism by which you can take a sexually reproducing species involving two phenotypes. There aren't any more than two. There's male and there's female, nothing else. And then argue that that's simply not true. It's antiquated to argue that boys have penises and girls have vagina. I actually satirically put out a tweet where I argued for

finger fluidity and finger diversity. I argued that if you're born congenitally with nine fingers or nine toes, then we should no longer be teaching in biology class that boys and girls are born with ten fingers. I was being facetious, but that's exactly the logic that they're using, right? Of course, there are some people who are born intersex, and of course, they have the right to live a dignified life free of bigotry. That doesn't mean, though, that we have to go back and rewrite the anatomy and biology books. And that's why I fight all these battles online and so on, because I truly am allergic to bullshit. I am very deontological when it comes to truth. And I get personally offended when I see people espousing all that nonsense. What is it that Dennis Prager was just talking about? It was just, there was some video

that came across my Instagram feed that was him saying that whatever medical organization is recommending that children not be labeled male or female because they don't have the ability to choose. Right. They can't tell you how they identify. Let's find out because it's something crazy. Yeah, yeah.

I remember reading it going, I'm not ready for this. I have shit to do. Or watching it. Now children are being taught that medical professionals, to the best of their ability, take an educated guess as to the sex of a child. Really? So until three minutes ago, 117 billion people knew exactly how to assort into male and female. But now we no longer abide by those antiquated binaries. I mean, it's insane.

It's terrifying. So why can't we chew gum and walk at the same time? I think both you and I are very socially liberal. I don't care one way or the other about what transgender people do. That doesn't mean that I have to accept the fact that a guy with a penis can call themselves a girl and I have to just say amen. Yeah, it seems crazy to have to just say amen. Yeah, it seems crazy to have to agree to that.

And it's not, that's not discounting the idea of trans people. It's real. But it seems crazy to force everyone to go along with what was called gender dysphoria up until very recently.

And there was a psychological condition that they would talk about, an issue that people had. Well, and to the point, remember earlier I put up the dress, or Jamie put up the Dress to Kill movie? In the past, when you wanted to have a sex change operation, the number of steps that you had to go through before you were accepted for sex change reassignment was quite assiduous and it made perfect sense because it's a really you know it's something that you can't undo and so it made perfect sense that you'd have to go through and now a five-year-old can say that they are of and you you're not allowed to question it it's really it's just it's insane you can put them on hormone blockers. And you can put them on hormone, exactly.

And there's so many problems that they're finding now, the people that have hormone blockers. Charles Theron adopts two kids from Africa, two boys, and it turns out statistically that it's perfectly reasonable that both of them are now girls. Have you seen that? I saw some meme. I wasn't sure that it was true.

If that is true, that seems very unlikely statistically, doesn't it? No, of course. I mean, already. What are the odds? So I think it's one in something like 10,000 that you have like full-blown gender dysphoria in the order of that magnitude. So if you have two, so it's two independent events. So it's one out of 10,000 times one out of 10,000. That's a very small number.

Let's steel man this. Okay. What's the most charitable explanation for this? That she, why she's doing this? Why this is the case? Why this is the case that she adopts two kids and that they're, they turn out to be girls. So I don't think it's a charitable explanation, but I think it's the correct one. And I talk about it in the last book. So I talk about Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. So Munchhausen syndrome is when I fake

an illness myself to garner sympathy and empathy. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when I harm someone under my care to garner the empathy by proxy. So it could be my child. It could be my dog. It could be my elderly parent. And so I've argued that transgenderism, as exhibited by many of these progressive, is a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Look at me the

super progressive woman who's got two transgender kids so it's a very very diabolically narcissistic i don't pretend to be psychoanalyzing her but you asked me for my prediction or opinion i think that's what it is yeah i was trying to find uh is there an explanation that would make, like, I would like to know, like, what is someone who truly believes that that's normal? What do they think? Who believes that what is normal? That it's just normal that those two boys turned out to be girls. It's people who live in La La Land because we know that statistically it's just impossible. It's like winning the lottery.

Right, but people do win the lottery, right? Yeah. So what would be your most charitable explanation? That would be the most charitable. It's just it just turned out that these two boys, but there's still a lot of evidence that if you, like especially with boys that exhibit that, they turn out to be gay and feminine gay men,

which used to be fine. Yeah now it's like you know like tim dillon has an argument about it that a lot of this is really homophobic you know exactly you know yeah i got that argument yeah it's an interesting argument because the the the guy the progenitor of this kind of stuff is i don't know if you know him john money do you know who that is no john Money was a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, who's really the father of social constructivism, who argued basically that, you know, you could take any boy and any girl, raise them in the opposite, you know, gender role, and then they would be that. And the classic example, which you may have heard of, was David Reimer,

whose penis was botched during a circumcision. They put a dress on him, said, call him whatever, Linda. And then he ended up committing suicide. Well, the guy who started all that was John Money at Johns Hopkins. And so we can really lay him

as the original culprit because a lot of surgeons will go to John Money for his expert advice. Question about this story. Sorry? I saw this meme go around too. This is where it came from, right?

This picture? Yeah. When I'm looking up the story about her adopting kids, all I'm seeing is that she had adopted one daughter and that in 2019, the other one said

that she was not a boy and that she is a daughter also. And so that they're both daughters. So one of them is a biological girl. One is a real daughter. And that's why I was trying to find out the actual, I don't know, I'm like digging through the stories. Nothing actually says biological anything. Well, then I really appreciate, Jules, your careful, you know, at the start you said, I don't know if that's true or not. Yeah.

So that – So it turned out it's not true. That's one of the reasons why I think a lot of people listen to you because exactly of that careful thing. I mean you can get upset at it and you could also – there's a lot of people that I know that will say their child is LBGTQ because their child is, they call themselves non-binary. I've seen this happen before. Like people, they wave it like a flag that it's like this amazing thing that they have a queer child.

Yeah. And the kid is just like, no, I'm just non-binary. I don't fucking nothing. I don't want to be this. You know what I mean? Whatever. Or they're just identifying as it

because the identity thing is very new. And when you give kids an opportunity to distinguish themselves from other people whether it's there's a lot of things that people do that with they they get into certain things they get into certain social groups getting a certain like hobbies and sports together but there was a thing that's that happened recently in where they did a study in new jersey they found out that there's a 4,000% increase in kids calling themselves non-binary. It's just like, I mean, at what point in time do we examine whether or not social pressures are playing a part in this?

Well, that's the Lisa, is it Lisa Littman or Lisa Littman? She was a researcher at Brown University who argued for the rapid onset of transgender thing as a social contagion. And I don't know if you remember, I talked about this in my last book. At first, Brown University had put out all these promotional alerts about, here's one of our researchers publishing this great paper in a top journal and so on. And then the transgender activists came after her, because how dare you be arguing that it's a social contagion, that it's not a real thing. And I'm not sure if they pulled the paper.

Maybe Jamie can tell us. But she really – I even invited her on my show to offer her a platform to support her. And she had laid low because of the blowback she was getting. Well, Abigail Schreier has experienced a tremendous amount of that, and she was one of the first people to talk about it. And when she talked about it on the podcast, I wasn't aware that it was that big of an issue and that there's so many particularly young autistic girls

that dive into this and that also there's a certain thing that happens when they start injecting testosterone that it gives them this like feeling of euphoria you know and that it does alleviate some anxiety because it has an effect yeah there's a physiological effect on and so they think this is what i've been missing my whole life exactly which is really kind of crazy to think that i mean it's it's a It's like this, especially when it comes to encouraging surgery and encouraging it for really young people. When did we stop believing that young people are impressionable?

Right. When did we stop believing that young people should not make life-changing choices when they're really young because they don't know what the fuck is going on. We've always said that with tattoos. We've always said that with body modifications. 17 years old, 364 days, so in one day he's going to be 18, who lies in wait, kills his parents to pick up the insurance, the progressive will argue, well, you can't put him in prison for life. He's just a child. His brain is still going to develop until he's 25. So for that issue, from this side of my mouth, I say that he's too young. But from this side of my mouth, I that he's too young but from this side of my mouth I'll say that a four-year-old is perfectly capable of saying I am on the

opposite body and shut up don't question it those two things can't coexist someone has to be a horrible monster for people to agree that this person needs to be tried as an adult right you know like some boy who stabs his whole family to death like crazy shit like that right and which does happen I think there was a case of something like that recently where kidss his whole family to death, like crazy shit like that. Right. And which does happen. I think there was a case of something like that recently where a kid stabbed his mother to death. They tried him as an adult. I think he stabbed a girl to death. Now I'm screwing it up.

I think he stabbed a girl that he went to high school with to death and left her in the woods. That's what it is, I think. There's been a bunch of those. Guys stab their parents. I just watched a documentary on the dating show Serial Killer. Have you seen this guy? Do you know this story? No. The dating show

Serial... Jamie, I'm sure, is going to pull it out. It's a guy who was really diabolical. I mean, he was attacking eight-year-old girls. He was attacking 25-year-old... What year was this? This would be... 70s. Oh, yeah yeah we did talk about this once yeah

then he appeared on the famous dating show where you know a woman is interviewing three guys that guy that's the guy yes

I remember that I do remember that yeah and it's funny because he won that show and then the woman decided

not to go out with him because she found him creepy. So she had the right antenna to pick up his creepiness, whereas other people didn't and paid. So he was a serial killer. He was a, but, but not just a serial killer, Joe, because he, he did not have a, you know, a unique demographic group, right? Typically serial killers will focus. I only go after boys. I only go after... This guy was caught in the act of suffocating an eight-year-old girl. And she didn't pass away. And he was, I think, sexually assaulting her, but he's also done it to 25-year-olds. So this guy was... Now, a progressive will tell you that this guy is like that because something happened in his background that made him that way. He couldn't have been born damaged, right?

It's the social constructivist argument. We're all born empty slate, and it's only society that either makes us good or bad. And therefore, they would want to rehabilitate. And by the way, the justice system released him several times when in a real deontological world, that guy would have been executed. By the way, I support the death penalty for guys like that. I support it if the legal system was clear. There's just too many people that get accused, and we've had a bunch of them on. They get accused of crimes that they didn't commit and spend decades in prison for murders they didn't commit.

decades in prison for murders and didn't commit. I've actually had a guy on my show, arguably the most remarkable story I've ever heard on my show. And I discuss it actually in my current book on happiness, talking about gratitude. He spent 29 years in prison for a murder that he was eventually exonerated of. On the show, I asked him, how is it that you go about your life? You're so put together. You're not full of vengefulness. You don't want to destroy the world. You must be Buddha. You're a much better man than I am. And his answer really speaks to the mindset of being a happy person and having gratitude. He said, well, I have a sister who's been bedridden with cerebral palsy for much of her life. And yet she manages to smile and be happy. So I don't really have much to complain about. So here's a guy who, who has had three decades

stolen from him and yet he still had the grace and dignity. I think we can all learn a lot from that lesson. Yeah. So that's why I have a hard time supporting the death penalty. Yeah. Because I think there's a lot of very corrupt prosecutors and a lot of very corrupt lawyers. And the whole thing is, it's human. But couldn't we just restrict it to the most? So if I find your DNA in the body of five dead children, that's the only time I will use the death penalty. Why not make it so extreme that your concern doesn't apply? I could agree with that. I see it at least on paper that I could agree with that. But the problem is people plan evidence and you could see like if there's a video of someone in the act of doing

something especially now with deep fakes that's a problem again right but yeah if someone was especially if they're saying they're guilty they show no remorse yeah like why should they be alive but i just wish that we knew for sure that everybody who's locked up in jail for a crime was actually guilty of that crime and that's not the case so that's not so there would be no context where you would ever sign up for the death penalty as it stands i just think you're giving people the kind of power for sure if someone does something we know they did it you want that yeah but But it's sort of akin to maybe the principles of free speech. Free speech applies even to people that you disagree with. The Holocaust deniers.

Right. Yeah. The insane people, Nazis. Like that was what the ADL used to support, right? I think that if we were living in a world where there was no lies and there were all the prosecutors and all the judges were all above board and just impeccable sense of ethics and morals and you could trust them to know the truth, then yeah. But that's not the case. Yeah. So in a flawed society like the one that we live in i can't support something that's killing innocent people right even if it's killing guilty people too yeah it's like if it

kills 10 guilty guys and one innocent guy we fucked up yeah and i think that i don't know what the number is of people that are unjustly accused but it's got to be high yeah you know and then there's people that are in jail for things that are very minor. And then while in jail, wind up killing somebody. Well, I mean, to your point, I think the Innocence Project has demonstrated that there have been men who were on death row who were exonerated. Many cases. So that speaks to your point. Many cases.

And my good friend Josh Dubin has worked with a lot of these different people. And through the show, a few of them have actually wind up being exonerated. Wow. Yeah. Now, he's a fascinating guy. And he's dedicated himself to finding these cases and helping these people. And he's gotten a bunch of them out. And their stories are insane.

And because of that, because knowing that those exist, i can't support something that's going to possibly kill those people just doesn't there's just too much corruption there's too much you can demonstrate the you could see it there's cases after case after case a prosecutor's getting arrested da's getting arrested and lawyers and it's too there's too much fuckery yeah it's a human issue you know and unless we knew that humans were telling the truth we you know you can't it's just too it's too much of a and to do it imagine if you're the person who executes this person then you find out that person was innocent like oh my god you got to live with that that person not only did you steal three decades of your life but then you took their life for something they didn't even do.

That's the reason why, isn't it, in firing squads, when you have a whole bunch of people and they're all, exactly. Yeah, but what about lethal injection? Yeah, there is someone who's literally doing it. Who knows what's going on there. Oh, we do it with a computer. Okay, whatever. You know what you're doing.

You know what you're doing. I what you're doing i mean you can find all sorts of ways to rationalize it yeah but morally of course you'd want that person removed from society if you found you found out that someone in your community back in the day in the tribal days was raping children you'd want to kill them exactly and justly so yeah we actually i was i can't remember who actually yesterday i did uh the guys that came over at the hotel, we were talking about, you know, parenting with the threat of,'t trust anyone with my children, precisely because the one who is going to commit those infractions is not someone that has, you know, hidden horns that you can see. It is your uncle. It is grandpa. It is the really sweet neighbor. It is the person. And so, and I've actually had, uh, not heated, but you know, disagreements with my wife where she thought I was being too paranoid about

this. And my answer is my job is to always err on the side of safety. So there's no sleepovers, there's no sleepaway camp, because there is going to be the counselor there who is a pig, and then I would have miserably failed in my job. And so my job, while you are under my protection, is to make sure that I never put you in a position where this could happen. What happens after when you're an adult, that's your business. What are your thoughts? Am I being- I think, no, I think, I feel what you're saying. I think you also have to let your children expose, they have to like, they have to be in the real world. They have to experience different kinds of people.

And to protect them too much is actually damaging to their development. So there's a fine dance that you do. So that's the anti-fragility stuff. Yeah, there's a fine dance. And, you know, you think about just your experience. I mean, it's horrible to say that any bad experiences were good for you, but oftentimes you develop character through a lot of adversity in your life. Oh, I completely agree with that. It's like how much adversity do you want to expose your children to? And then there's the question of things like predators.

I've actually argued in the happiness book. I argued that what I went through in the Lebanese civil war, paradoxically, makes me a happier person. Because anytime that I start whining about something that's pissing me off, I can always pull back from my memory, I had the miracle of escaping the Middle East intact. So what am I whining about? So you're exactly on point that the fact that I've gone through those horrors makes me the happier person I am today. Yeah. I think perspective, you know, that's the thing about anyone that I've met that's come from some war torn part of the world when they make it to America, especially if they're in a place that's safe and nice, they just have an immense appreciation and their perspective is very different.

They're also like people that come from communist countries in particular. They are just so allergic to that horse shit. Yeah. When they see it coming, any Marxist ideology, they see it coming. They're like, fuck you. Yeah. Fuck you. We know where this goes. This goes to you have to give up all your possessions and everything goes to the state and everything gets distributed evenly.

Like, how do you enforce that? Like, who gets to choose? Like, what the fuck are you signing up for? But these idealistic kids that think that the world could be a better place with socialism, if that we all just like, no one should, I saw this thing argued, this guy argued online, no one should ever be able to make a million dollars and that you should be restricted to a certain amount of income that allows you to have a certain – like he specified the certain size apartment that you should be allowed and anything else is in excess. Amazing. That it's an attack on the freedoms of others. an attack on the freedoms of others. It's like there's this fascinating takedown by this like, you know, super progressive, probably college kid.

Well, I have these ideas. I've seen it. So I think last year when I came on the show, I might have been right in the throes of having all my book royalties stolen from my last book from the tax authorities. Right. And so I was really pissed about it. And whenever I would post a tweet sort of condemning the parasitic taxation system, there would be people who would write to me with complete entitlement, Canadians, and saying,

well, why should you get to keep the money instead of you not being a selfish pig and sharing it with others? So my book royalties, my thoughts, my ideas, my humor is not mine. As a matter of fact, according to the Canadian government, about 58% is owned by them. But it really comes from having this idea inculcated in you, which is that we should all have equality of outcomes. It is a cancer and it is an affront to human meritocracy. It's unbelievable. The argument against that would be that there's a certain reality

to the way you're living in this life and that you have resources available and you have things available that other people don't have. And it would be better if you had less and then it bounced out. So if you give a little bit more and then eventually bounce out. The problem is it's not bouncing out. The problem is like, where's the money going? Well, the money is going to the government and they get to decide how it's spent.

And they get to pass laws and dictate and send a little here and well there's a war so we're going to need more and then there's inflation that comes with the war it's the price of gas and food and everything goes up and all this is happening and you can't say shit about it yeah and you're in this position where you're like well if you complain well you're a man of privilege. You're privileged and you should be giving that up. And if you gave it up, the world would be a better place. I don't have any faith in their ability to use my taxes to make the world a better place. I have zero faith. I willingly and happily pay my taxes because I think it's part of being an American. You contribute, even

if the system is flawed, you contribute to at least some of it is going to fixing roads and some of it is going to education and health care or whatever it is. Some of it's got to be going to people that care and are really trying to make the world a better place. Some of it has got to be going to whatever organizations that are doing a good job. But the idea that if you just keep... Some people think they should have a 90% tax bracket. It's like if you're a billionaire, you don't deserve to have a billion. You should just give up... Well, guess what?

They're not going to work. Yeah, exactly. People are going to get upset. They're not going to innovate. You don't have a quality of effort. There's a lot of equality. People talk about equality. There's not an equality of effort. There's a lot of equality. People talk about equality. There's not an equality of effort. There's not a quality of intelligence. There's

not a quality of skill, of talent. And it's genuinely anti-human nature. And I'm not sure if I've said this before on this show, but E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard biologist, who he's passed away now last year, I think, he studied social ants. And in social ants, everybody is equal other than the reproductive queen. So when he was asked about socialism slash communism, his answer, which I love to always quote, was great idea, wrong species, right? Which perfectly captures, right? We're not all equal. Some of us are taller, shorter, harder working, less harder working. So there's no reason why we should all have equality of outcomes. It is anti-human nature. It's not realistic. It's not realistic to expect people to work as hard as some people.

They don't have to. You don't want to be Michael Jordan. Well, don't fucking practice 12 hours a day. You don't have to be Michael Jordan. If you're happy as being a guy who works a job and likes to go hiking and likes to go fishing or something, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's all kinds of people. And some people are going to be that guy. And when they are that guy, like you can't say you have to give up all your money. It's hard to be that.

It's hard to be Michael Jordan. He deserves all that money. It's fucking impossible to be. Only one guy pulled it off. And you deserve all the money you make, my friend. No, let's not. Let's leave me out of this. Try to skirt around that.

But if you want it to be fair and send some to the Godside Trust Fund. What do you use your trust fund money for? I would use it to be able to use as escape velocity so that I don't have to answer to anybody. Have you, because of the oppressive nature of the Canadian government, have you ever thought about jumping ship? Oh, my God. I think we've discussed in the past. I think about it probably 30 times a day. Wow.

I haven't been able to for two main reasons, Joe. Number one, both my family and my wife's family are in Montreal. So that's number one. That keeps us there. Number two, it's very, very hard to walk away from a tenured professorship. That's the truth. Montreal is a great city too. It's a beautiful place to live.

It is. It's a perfect amount of cold weather that develops adversity and character. I've heard you say that before, but that's spoken from a guy who's lived in Southern California and then Austin for too many years. I think you forgot that how bad the winter's going to be. Oh, I remember. I lived in Boston. I remember. It sucks.

It sucks hard. It sucks. But I'm not saying that it's good. I think it's good for you. Yeah. Like, cold plunges are good for you. You're right. You know, they don't, it's not good while you're doing it.

It sucks. Right. But I think it's good for you. Yeah. And I think there's something about being at the, you're at the mercy of nature for many months at a time. There's many months from November until Wednesday start warming up around April. Yeah, mid to April. Yeah, it can get cold as fuck in March.

Cold as fuck in March. You got a full snowstorm. Yeah, so there's so many months where it's so goddamn cold that I think there's a certain humility that comes with that. Yeah. There's a certain of appreciations of the summer days because the summer days are enormously novel. Yeah. It's like what a beautiful thing. Like we just six months ago, we're just digging ourselves out to try to drive to the grocery store.

You got to dig yourself out of three feet of fucking snow. That's true. Everybody remembers that well and that's why montreal it's there's kind of an orgiastic party feel during the summer yes because we're making up for cocooning yes i used to love doing comedy up there we used to do the montreal comedy festival and it was in the summer and everybody was so happy that's right and i i really clearly remember thinking that that there's something to the kind of character that comes out of people that live in that place. It's not all of them, of course.

There's fuckheads at every corner of the world. But I just think there's something cool about that city. And it's also like it's very European, even though it's Canadian. There's a lot. Well, thank you. You're making me feel good that I'm still there. I love it up there. It's a great place.

It's great i just don't love the kind of direction that the government is trying to take control of the country that's what freaks me out taking control of narratives and taking control of what people say on social media and stopping protests and what they did with the canadian truckers yeah well i think and again to not to blow smoke up your behind, but one of the things that I think people appreciate about you is that you do change your opinion in light of new evidence. And I remember very vividly the first time that you and I spoke about Justin Trudeau,

you were quite a fan, and then you revised your opinion. Well, I felt he's a very handsome man, very good speaker, but he's not really a good speaker on the cuff, off the cuff. It's really like when he has like a speech. There's a template. Yeah. And, you know, he's a good looking guy. It's like when you see like a handsome fellow with nice hair, it's like, oh, I want him to be good.

But, you know, it's funny that you say he's good looking because Megyn Kelly came on my show and her view, and we would think that she would know how to judge the masculinity of someone. She said, I would never want that guy on top of me.

He doesn't exude any masculinity. Whoa, Jesus. I mean, literally, almost exactly that to the word. I'm sure that Jamie's going to pull it up any second now. But that's also him now, right?

Where you know who he really is. I think... He's a girly girl. You think so? We had a boxing match. We had a boxing match with some other politician did you ever see it i did not terrible yeah not terrible i mean i'll defer to

your boxing expertise through some hands you know is that right he's going after it yeah um but what disturbs me is the the way he's willing to discredit people that disagree with him, like the Canadian truckers. Yeah. He's saying that they're often misogynistic and racist. Like, what are you talking about, man? The fact that they froze the bank accounts of people who donated money. That's insane.

Insane. That's like Banana Republic shit. Yeah. That's scary. That's scary totalitarian shit. I had the spokesperson of the trucker convoy on my show. Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's a test case.

It really is. Yeah, for totalitarian government tactics. And they did not fail. They did not pass that test. They failed that test. And to the great discredit of my fellow Canadians, we've now three times. I mean, you don't vote for him. You vote for the party in a parliamentary system. But it's three times now that mean, you don't vote for him, you vote for the party in a parliamentary system,

but it's three times now that he's in. And each time he's gotten, I think, no more than about 30 something percent of the vote. So that's one of the dangers of a parliamentary system. Even though two thirds of the people don't want you there, he's now been prime minister since 2015. How does that work? Well, you're basically voting for the party, and then depending on how many seats are taken in the parliament, that's who becomes the majority. So it's not like the American system where I am voting for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. You're voting for a platform in your riding, right? So if I'm voting for the liberal party, I'm voting for the liberal candidate

in my riding. And now that is tallied up. And since he's the prime minister, the leader of that party, he then becomes the prime minister. And does anyone primary him? Do they have that sort of a situation where someone tries to challenge him from the same party? Only when you're deciding who's going to be the leader of the party. So once someone's leader of the party, they no longer challenge that person. That's right. So I don't know the exact details. So as long as that party is in power, he's in power.

He's in power. For how long? There is no, I don't think there's a statute, not statute, what is it called? Term limitations. Term limitations, thank you. I don't think there is. So he could be dictator forever. For like the next 4,000 years.

It's unbelievable. Great. One of the other reasons why I'd like to leave Canada and move to greener pastures. Yeah, it's just not good for people to have that kind of power. It's almost never good. And especially when they start using it in that way. They start using it the way they're using it up there. It's like the clamping down of free speech is never done by the good guys.

It's not. It's not what it is. And when you're being fed propaganda and you know you're being fed propaganda and now you're expected to not say it and not talk about it and just accept it, that's not good for anybody. That's not good for anybody. And it's only good for the people that are in power, and it's only good for as long as they're alive, because what they're going to leave behind is going to be a disaster. And if new people that are from the opposing party

get into control, they're going to expand their control even further. And this is a terrible cycle, that if you don't have very rigid rules on what can and can't be done, you open the door for tyranny. And that's what they're doing. And the worst part is that it's cloaked under the robe of progressivism. It says he'll be prime minister until 2025.

They brokered a deal. What does it say at the top? It says they brokered a deal that will keep minority government in power until the next election. Why do they say minority government? What does that mean? Minority liberal government. That's the minority of? What does that mean? So that means— Minority liberal government. That's the minority of the people in the country?

No, it's in terms of the number of seats in the parliament. I don't know the exact number, but you could either be a majority government or a minority government. Usually when you're a minority government, it's because you've set up an agreement with another party allowing you to— So in this case, it's the NDP. So the whole party is behind him, which is a problem. Yeah. And that's, what would it take for someone from another party to win? Get enough seats in the ridings to overturn this asshole.

Right now, the top guy in the conservative party is Pierre Polievre. I don't know if you've heard of him. I have. I think Jordan Peterson had him on his show. I'm not a huge fan. I don't know enough about his policy, so I don't want to misspeak. But traditionally, I don't like someone who spent their entire career in politics and nothing else. I like the guys who, you know, they were surgeons or they were lawyers or they were businessmen, and then they come into politics as a second act to their lives. Whereas this guy, meaning the Pierre guy, has always been in politics. And so for that reason alone, I would prefer someone to be coming in from the outside. But short of that, I don't

know anything about him. It just doesn't seem like it's moving in a good direction in terms of people's ability to express themselves indeed yeah it seems uh very very uh very much a thing that's in danger up there yeah it's weird yeah well have you what what has has jordan been a support i think he's a supporter of his right have you yeah jordan is supportive of this yeah i've watched some interviews with him well there is another guy who What has Jordan been a support? I think he's a supporter of his, right? Yeah, Jordan is a supporter of his, yeah. I've watched some interviews with him. Well, there is another guy who broke from the Conservative Party named Maxime Bernier who started a new party called the, I don't know what, the PPC or something.

I can't remember what it is. But it's very, very hard to get it off the ground. So I don't even think they got one person to sit in uh the parliament despite the fact that many of his positions would both probably you and i would agree with but it's just very hard to introduce a new party yeah so it's kind of it's kind of how it is in america as well yeah exactly like cornell west just branched off and he's in another party right now, right? Oh, is that right? What party is he in?

Cornel West left the Democrats to run for president under another party. Oh. Yeah. As an independent, or? What is it, the Green Party? Green Party. The Green Party. Oh, Green Party, okay.

Yeah, so that's interesting because there's a lot of people that are Cornel West supporters that they're thinking would ordinarily vote for the Democrat, whoever the Democrat is. Like there's blue no matter who people. Of course. There's a certain percentage in this country. And there's many of those who might look at Cornel West and go, you know what? I'm more aligned with what he's saying. Right.

And they might vote for him and it might sway votes in one way or another. They were very worried about that. Sort of like what Ross Perot did. I was just going to say exactly that. Ross Perot was like conservative. This was 92? Is that right? Yeah, it was when Clinton got

in office because they thought Ross Perot was like he was saying, he took out ads. So this is what people don't understand. There was no way to get your word out back then. It's hard to imagine in this day of YouTube and the web.

If you grew up with it, this is going to sound so alien to you. But no one really understood how the IRS system worked or the Federal Reserve worked or any of these things work. And Ross Perot Was so wealthy that he bought an hour of TV time. Yeah So instead of like whatever would normally be on whatever channel he did it he he literally bought you how much the cost How about a whole fucking thing? He was a Texas crazy billionaire dude and little dude Fuck you up and he just didn't tolerate anybody's bullshit. And this guy laid out, I forget what exactly he talked about, but he laid it out away with charts and explaining to people, like, how are you getting fucked?

Yeah. And I remember the conversations that I would have, the people I was working with back then, we would all sit around and talk, did you fucking watch that shit? Like, what is this? Like, is that all true? And people start researching it and buying books. You got to read this book. And like, what is this? And a lot of people wanted him to win.

And they thought like, yeah, let's have something different. Like someone who understands how to run a fucking business. Right. Someone who understands all the waste and corruption and all the evil bullshit that's going on behind the scenes. Come on, get in there, Ross. And that's probably how Bill Clinton got elected. That's right. Because he split the Republicans. Yeah, they split the Republicans. Because most of the people that were for Ross Perot were like, you know, fairly conservative minded people who wanted no nonsense. It's no nonsense. Texas billionaire comes along, explains everything. He's been very financially, you financially you know successful are you ready to make a prediction of for the 2024 election i don't here's my prediction i don't think biden runs okay i think i don't know what's going on with all this stuff with his son and with the with the yeah the the evidence of corruption how valid it is i i see all these articles about all these conversations that they had and the money that was being transferred back and

forth. I'm thinking it's pretty valid. It seems real valid. But it also seems like if this is all coming out like that, what a good way to remove a president that seems mentally compromised. Yeah. Because it seems like if you were in the Democratic Party and you thought like listen

There's a certain amount of people they're gonna vote blue no matter who all right. We just need a better Representation because you you could not have Kamala Harris She would not win people would be very very reluctant to vote for her for president I think after just listening to her talk for the last three years. Like, what? And so who else? And there would have to be a reason for that who else. So she would have to step down. It's Californian Justin Trudeau.

It's Gavin Newsom. The problem is he did such a bad job with California. They're so vulnerable. He does spit out some good propaganda. He just starts talking about them very high on California and all the fucking companies that have come from this and all the money that's generated and all the intellectuals and all that. Yeah, but you got to know the real stats of how many of them feel stuck. Because if you ask people on the street in California, I think the number was four out of ten people they surveyed are thinking about moving out of California, which is most people don't have the ability to up and move.

I was very fortunate when all the shit was going down in California in whatever it was, May of 2020 when I first started thinking about moving. I was like, this ain't going in a good direction. And I fucking smell chaos. And I got out early. But if you don't get out early and you don't have the ability to get out early, like you don't have the financial ability, maybe your parents live there, maybe you're taking care of someone,

maybe your job depends on you staying there and it's a good job, you're fucked. Yeah. And that's a lot of people. I wasn't fucked, so I got out. And I don't like where it's going. Because I don't, with letting people out of jail and all this craziness about no bail. Like letting people out.

They arrest them when they commit a crime and put them right back on the street. No bail. No cash bail. It's not a felony if it's under $950. All that stuff is crazy. When you go to CVS, you see like what it looks like in these stores in San Francisco. It's mad max. It's fucking madness.

There's so many businesses that are closing down. They don't want to be a part of it anymore. They're getting out of these states. They're getting out of Portland. They're getting out of Seattle. They're getting out of these places because they're like, this is fucked, and it ain't getting better. And that's what I don't like. I don't like when I don't see any course correction.

I don't see any readjustment. I don't see anything like, hey, we need to take care of disenfranchised people. But we also need to make our streets safe and we have to stop crime. OK, so we need to figure out a way to, you know, have these things, you know, mutually beneficial to everybody. Sure. And there's no none of that. There's like more ridiculous laws, more lacks on crime. More money for the homeless people. Give them free drug.

Give them needles. They need clean needles. Like, what? Let them camp out anywhere. I was asking you offline when we weren't on the show if you regret moving here. And what you said was you even love it more here than you did last year when we spoke. I love it. Yeah.

That's great, man. Texas is great. And Austin is particularly great. Because it's a progressive-minded city that's surrounded by red states. Right. Like there's a T-shirt that says, keep Austin weird and surrounded. There's something about being surrounded by the rest of like the real fucking Texas, Texas people. Like even the progressives here are more reasonable.

Right. So it's like whatever the chart chart is, where the middle is, there's so many people that you would even think of as conservative or you'd think of as progressive because they're socially progressive or conservative. But they're kind of more in the middle in terms of the way California was.

California was like radical leftism and then if you were a conservative, you had to hide it. Or you're a Nazi, or you live in Orange County. You know, there's, like, certain places where the conservatives thrived. Yeah, yeah. And that was fine. Yeah.

But the overwhelming amount of people who are in the big urban areas, like, specifically San Francisco and Los Angeles, they're in the fucking fog of it. They're in the fog of it. They believe all sorts of wacky shit. And they were the first persons that were happy that we were locking down. The first persons happy there was a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate. They were happy to go along with it all. I'm going to, I don't know if you've heard of the Commonwealth Club, which is this big event to talk about this book. It's in San Francisco. Oh, boy.

So maybe I need to be wearing a hazmat suit or something. Yeah, you need to wear something like N95 type deal. That's right. Just the poop smell in the air. Exactly, yeah. It's, I don't know how you fix that. That's the thing. I don't think we've ever seen a city fall apart like we've seen Los Angeles and San Francisco

fall apart and then have it be brought back. I mean, it can be done clearly, but how and how much time? Isn't it way easier to just... You think it's a death spiral? I'm worried that it's a death spiral. I'm worried that it's going to turn worse. You could have never imagined when I used to go to San Francisco in the 90s

to do stand-up all the time at the original Cap City, which was this cool little club that seated like 150 people, it was great. You could walk around the city and cool places to eat and cool bars to go to. It was a fucking lovely city filled with culture and artists and interesting people and smart people. It's like where the smart people were. Like not the people that were interested in show business and the vapid pursuit of stardom.

Those are the people up there. There were the tech people and the artists and the musicians. And so much cool shit came from San Francisco. Amazing food, the restaurants. Just like, just the walking around the streets. People were cool. And now it's a hellhole. It's the same place, just 30 years later And now it's a hellhole. Yeah. It's the same place.

Just 30 years later. It's a fucking hellhole. How? Ideologies have consequences. Well, San Francisco is a really good documenting of that. Michael Schellenberger's book. Oh, I've had him on the show. He's amazing.

He's amazing. And Michael Schellenberger, who used to be a hardcore progressive. So he understands the mentality behind it and the sentiment behind it. He's like a super sweet, kind guy. He's a lovely guy. And his book is amazing because it really documents and it's about how progressives ruin cities. And it uses San Francisco as an amazing example of it. And it's unfortunate because I think these people all have the right intentions.

A lot of them at least do. They have good intentions. They think this ideology is a kinder, more inclusive, more gentle, but the consequences of the way they're enacting laws and allowing people to ruin everything around them, that is real financial consequences. Yeah. And in the parasitic mind, I actually talk about the fact that all of those parasitic ideas start with a noble goal. And then in the pursuit of that noble goal, things go awry. So awry. I mean, how do you turn that around? Like who could be elected to mayor of San Francisco that could turn that around? And how would it even be tolerated? And do you even have the resources? Well, it's hard when you have a super majority like you do in

California. It's also hard when you have like, it's very like, it takes a long time to build a building. Yeah. It's really easy to light it on fire. Yeah. It takes just a few minutes. Yeah. Just throw gasoline on, throw a flag, step away away that fucking building's gone and to rebuild is quite difficult and when you have a city that's just overwhelmed with homelessness and crime and chaos did you see that video of these kids that stole a car and drove it off a cliff no in san francisco no you didn't see it no yeah i don't know the story behind this other than the fact that it was a stolen car. But it is wild footage of this car going off the side of like a very steep hill in San Francisco. Watch this.

So here comes the car. Stolen car. Watch this. This is wild. So look to the upper left-hand side. Stolen car. Watch this. This is wild. So look to the upper left-hand side. That's where it's going to come from. Yeah. Oh, this isn't the video.

This is a long-ass video. Yeah, this is like unedited. Okay. They're joyriding? What are they doing? Seems like it. Here it is. Oh!

Bro. Sorry, they jumped out of the car before this happened, or they're in the car? As the video continues, people try to help them get out of the car, and they sort of all get out of the car, and then at least two of them run away. Oh, my God. I'll sort of skip ahead. So a few people are now out of the car. They're climbing out here. Oh my goodness.

And then you can see them climbing the stairs. Does that lady say, I love you? Well, yeah, there's something going on. It's very confusing. I saw it on Twitter last night. Wow. Wow. Is that a person that was in the car?

I believe so. So she's saying, I love you? I don't know who's talking. I love you, but I'm getting the fuck out of Dodge. Is that what she's saying? Could be. Is she one of the people that opened the door? Again, it's hard to say who's...

Here, back it up a little so we can see. Where were you, investigative journalist? I don't know who's talking. I'm sorry. I love you. So someone's hurt bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yikes.

Oh, so that's the person driving the car. You see the position that she's in? That's the front of the car. Yeah. So that's the driver. No, that's not the case, because then the... Oh the driver. No, that's not the case because then the – oh, yeah. No, that's the back seat. Right?

Wow. I don't know. Is that the front seat? I'm just going to – Which way is the car holding on? The front's up here. That's the front. No.

So that's the back? The front's in the – It does – the front is like nose So that's the back? The front's in the... The front is like... Oh my god, this is so crazy. Look at how it goes down. Boom. I'm looking forward to my... Yeah, so that was someone in the back seat.

That was in the back passenger seat. Of course, look how the doors open. Duh. But whatever the fuck happened, that lady's like, I'm out, bitch. Love you, man. I got to go. You got fucked up. Yikes.

We've covered a lot of ground. San Francisco. Carjacking. Wish me luck. They carjacked that car and drove it over a cliff. There's a video of it going over the cliff, too. There's a video of it going straight down the street and going through a fence and just launching. It's happened to somebody I know.

Really? Yeah. He stopped them from actually stealing it, and the car flipped over. They got out and shot at him. Oh, my God. It's not in San Francisco, though. Where was that? Ohio.

Columbus? Yeah. Goddamn, Ohio. It's a wild area, too. That's a gritty town, right? I love Columbus. Is that right? Yeah, it's fun.

Never been. Fun places to do stand-up. Fun people yeah yeah yeah fun fun people but you know like all places took a hit during the pandemic yeah all places took a hit economically they took a hit with violence and crime and you know and the uh mostly peaceful. That's right. Mostly peaceful protests is a great meme. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was on CNN, right? I think it was on a lot of places.

I think a lot of places used that narrative. No, but the original one was he's saying that and there's stuff flying off. Mostly peaceful protests. Yeah. That's the thing. That is the truth, though. But if you do light some buildings on fire, and most of the people are not lighting buildings on fire, it's the thing. That is the truth, though. But if you do light some buildings on fire, and most of the people are not lighting buildings on fire,

it's mostly peaceful. Well, that's one of the things, by the way, that I think Canada, we have better than you guys in that we are less violent, right? Except with hockey. You guys fuck people up in hockey. There is no place in Montreal that you truly would be afraid to take a wrong turn.

Oh, well, that's nice. That's because the cold weeds out the weak. The cold weeds out the weak up there. I remember coming from Boston thinking how fucking cold it is up there. Like, whoa, this is another level. Another level. Like walking from my hotel to get something to eat I remember we walked a couple blocks more like this is an adventure

Yeah, an adventure and not dying when you're walking to a restaurant like holy shit minus 40 Yeah, and then when you get inside everybody's like holy shit. Holy shit, but there's a warmth and Hospitality to like going to a place when it's warm inside and it's cold outside and everyone's very appreciative of the warmth yeah it's very different than going into a cool place when it's hot out right going to a cool place when it's hot out it's nice it's nice but it doesn't feel the same nice as like you could fucking die out there that's right i've by the way when i was 13 they had stopped school,

I think the only time ever because it was too cold. Usually it's because it's too snowy. And it was, I think, minus 70 with wind chill. And I decided to walk out just to say, as I am now,

that I did it. And I lasted maybe 10 meters. It was your, my face was burning. So basically, it was like playing football in the nfl you lasted about what a nice way to bring it the same way you would walk out with a football god it gets so cold but i i mean i don't think it's necessary to develop character but i certainly think it helps yeah i felt that about boston like i love the people that live there

because there's a certain like fucking roughness to those people. They've dealt with some shit. They know how to deal with some shit. When is your next visit to Montreal? I don't know. I've been to Canada since all this shit went down until I couldn't cross the border if I was unvaccinated. Oh, right. That's true.

I'm like, you guys are out of your fucking mind. I mean, it still wasn't America until May. You couldn't come here. That's true. If you were unvaccinated. We were like the last country to hang in there with that. Yeah. Ugh.

Weird. Just weird to be going through this. Well, I remember the last time that, at least that I knew that you came, you kindly invited me to one of your stand-up at the corona theater across from joe beef we're giving a lot of plugs i think he's your friend yeah yeah well the the yeah both of those guys they're that's an incredible restaurant it is yeah i think it was voted in the top restaurants in canada yeah it should be yeah montreal is just an amazing place for culture in general. It's just a beautiful city.

It's got great old architecture. It's a lovely city. I'm feeling better by the second about being there. If you're going to live in Canada, it's a great spot. It is. It's a great spot.

Much less antiseptic than Toronto, that's for sure. Yeah, it's just, you know, those kind of policies that are in place that stop the freedom of expression, they're troubling. Because I always thought of Canada as being like this really open-minded, liberal place. And incidentally, there's a unique dynamic in Quebec that's different from Canada, which is the protection of the French language. And in doing that, you do end up also infringing on people's intrinsic rights, right? So I'm fully Francophone, so it's not as though I've got a, I mean, I'm

perfectly happy to speak French, but you shouldn't have to mandate that by instituting draconian laws. So you get all sorts of immigrants that come to Quebec that you otherwise should want to have in Quebec, but because they can't pass some French test, they end up leaving. Is that really good for society? That's a good question. According to the Quebec government, it is because Quebec is a distinct society that's surrounded by evil English language,

and we need to do whatever we can to protect it. In my view, you shouldn't. It is fascinating that there's a segment of your country that speaks primarily French. Amazing, isn't it's it is fascinating that there's a segment of your country that speaks primarily French amazing is that and by the way as as you leave Montreal it becomes almost exclusively French really and in Montreal historically the more you went west it was more English the more you went east the more French it was mmm but outside of Montreal, 20, 25, 30, 40 minutes, you could pretty much only speak French. Wow. Yeah. So. Kind of cool. Cool to visit. Kind of cool. Come and see us. We miss you up

there. Well, you know, you got to stay there and keep it down. Hold it down. You're one of the few reasonable voices from up there it's like yelling from the rooftops well thank you and you've been at the front lines for a long time my friend you you were sounding out about the dangers of all this stuff before anybody really recognized yeah where it could go oh thank you you and jordan yeah you know i mean you were even before him some of the the criticisms that you experienced back then, I thought like, wow, this is weird that people have this perspective.

Like, don't they see that he's making so much sense? Yeah. He's so right. I mean, everything you're saying is so rational and reasonable and well thought out. Like, Oh,

he's a Nazi. Wait a minute. He's a Jewish Nazi who escaped Lebanon. What are you talking about? Right. Right. It's, it's weird where people try to categorize people and say and you

in a lot of the ways because of who you are and because of your academic background because you're so articulate and the books you've written you've managed to like avoid a lot of the pitfalls that some other people have fallen into because you're so undeniably respected as an intellectual and when you're talking about these things you're talking about it from a place of like you have a deep understanding of the literature. You have deep understanding of like where these problems come from. What's the source of them? How do they arise and how do they permeate through society in this sort of, as you say, parasitic way? Thank you.

Those are very sweet words. I really appreciate them. Yeah. Well, you're a very important voice, my friend. You really are. And I think that your work has been instrumental for helping other people form arguments against some of this nonsense, too, because you've sort of laid it out where it could repeat what you've said. Like, you know, wait a minute. You know, the Godfather's got some points here. Thank you.

My pleasure, brother. And your new book is available right now as of today unfortunately these fucking knuckleheads didn't allow you to do the audio but you can read the book

and hear it in your sweet and sultry voice the sad truth about happiness eight secrets to leading the good life available now thank you so much

Joe thank you let's do it again anytime anytime let's do it again alright love you thank you

bye Thank you. Let's do it again. Anytime. Anytime. Let's do it again. All right. Love you. Thank you. Bye. Cheers.