#2012 - Gad Saad

The sad truth about happiness. Eight secrets for leading the good life. Boom. All right. Please read it. I will. You'll enjoy it. Did you do the audio book? 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. So here's what happened. An actor does it. 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 in you're a public figure. Like there's 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. I believe me, I fought the fight. I know. But it's such a silly fight to have when someone's a professional public speaker, like yourself, like doesn't make any sense. With a very velvety voice. Velvety. Smooth. And you know, who's closer to the subject matter, right? Indeed. I 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, 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 story. Right, right, right, right. Of course. Your story is wild. You know, when I find about people like yourself that have been through like a really scary thing, really scary, like genuinely scary, like scary 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. Yeah. 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. Trumps the truth. It trumps your willing as long as the politicians on 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 when 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 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, putting nasty tweets out. It's like, come on. I actually wrote, maybe it was shameless plugging with my book, but I responded to Rob Reiner. 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? How much money you guys make? Where's this money coming from? There's so much corruption that's readily available that once you start opening the door to calling someone a monster, then everyone gets to look at you and go, hey, but what about you guys? What are you doing? What about drone bombings? Let's talk about some real problems. What about the fentanyl crisis? What about the borders where criminals are coming through? How many are being sent back? What's the numbers? What's the numbers? A lot of them are good people that just want to find a better way to live and good for them. I would do it too. If I could sneak across into America and be assimilated, I would fucking do it. Why wouldn't you? If you got a bad roll of the dice and you're living in somewhere that's less favorable and you get the opportunity to just, all you have to do is get across the river and they let you in. 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 I've talked about this in the past when we talked about people who come from certain cultures where there is rampant anti-Semitism. And so if you let people that are coming from cultures where when they're pulled somewhere between 90 to 99 percent of them will exhibit rampant Jew hatred, it doesn't take much of a sociologist or 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 a promotional thing about my book and someone said, 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, 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. Someone tweeted a bunch of different examples of where dozens and dozens of accounts are saying the same inflammatory things with the exact same wordage. Exact. And they're all like, they have numbers and letters in their accounts, just random accounts. And you go to their page, it looks kind of real. They have a photo. There's them with a flag. And you go through it. But you get this sense like, oh, you're a bot. You're not even a real person. So you're an agent of your stirring up bullshit. So there's a certain aspect of our culture. I don't know what the percentage is. But there's a certain aspect of the conversations online that are being flavored by fake accounts that are designed to get people upset with each other. It's like psychological warfare on a level that no one anticipated and no one's prepared for. Because when you have the two things we already discussed, like this adherence to the ideology, no matter what, no matter what, 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 the 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, 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 the more you can discredit someone who's in opposition to some of your ideas, the more you can somehow 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, uh, 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 you, there was some kind of personal connection between you two. I mean, Einstein is not your best friend. For sure. I've had him on at least, was he on twice? Twice. I've had him on twice. I was very nice to him. 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 two million dollars. 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 tongue. Like, come on. Cause he's a lawyer, you know, and he's really good arguing stuff. Like, look, if you either you 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? Well, what's bothering you? 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 creationist 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. Yeah. 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. It's kind of crazy too. Cause there's like, 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. D-I-K-E-R. I think that's how you say it. But this little animal evolved, uh, lived on grasslands and the grasslands became rainforest. And when the grasslands, 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. 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 in studying human behavior, they'll go la, la, la. Right, with human behavior. And especially with, you know, certain narratives. So this one is just swimming in the water, but these motherfuckers can go underwater. They can, the, the Dikers that they were talking about in the Congo, they can swim underwater for 100 yards. Why do I feel that the crocodile is about to hit at any second now? Because we've seen too many of those videos. That is arguably one of the scariest scenarios. The scariest, the fucking scariest. Sorry, I have to pause. Something happened with my video right now. Oh, it's some doing some mixing your two things really strangely. I need to, do we got a reboot? Not a reboot. I just got to figure out what happened. 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 there's people only listening to audio. This is a special segment of the podcast. It's only just for you. There you go. Because the video's fucked. Should we stop talking? I mean, you can keep talking. It's just that the 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. We're back. All right. Can I, technical difficulties. I just want to close the parentheses 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 yet asked me, we were talking about who would be some guests that we'd really want to have on our respective shows. And you probably don't remember what my two celebrities were. Do you? I buy a chance. 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, who's, I don't, do you remember who that is? Burt Bacharach is the music composer who's basically written songs for everybody. He was featured in one of the Austin Powers movie where he, 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 Burt 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 punch line, 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 a beauty of life. That's awesome. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. You're a connector, sir. I try to be. Clint Eastwood would be an interesting guy to talk to. Like the guy still works. He's like 93 years old, still out there making movies. Yeah. Well, I don't enjoy it. I remember in Lebanon, when I, you know, I only learned English and 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 his spaghetti westerns, I would look at him and I would say, that's the man, you know? And so he's... 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. 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, four or five 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 But Loose, 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 a wrong tab. Open up, son. I started the trailer and that's what it is. How dare you. How about taking in a new movie? Okay. I guess that's what this trailer is and I don't know why there's nothing on it. Oh, you can't see the video? I don't know yet. Oh, what is happening? Okay. Yeah. But it's weird. Oh, there's the video. That's the one. I don't know what that place is over it. It seems like someone was... Oh, I said 77. It's 78. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. This is a dumb ass movie. Those movies are great though. I love movies from that era. They're like ridiculous, like Smokey and the Bandit. Yeah. I mean, come on, man. Jackie Gleason. You got Burt Reynolds. Sally Fields. Yeah. Come on, man. That's a fun movie. Yeah. Jackie Gleason 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, A 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. That's amazing. The special effects are so good, like all through it. Like even the apes in the beginning, you know, the scene where they're evolving. 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 was an MBA student and I was taking a organizational behavior class where the professor assigned us that movie to watch it to demonstrate group dynamics. Because for those of you who don't have, have you seen a joke? I don't think I have. Or you need to rent it tonight. So basically 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. 12 guys get together in a room. They're trying to discuss whether a guy should be put to, you know, found guilty. They take us a poll. 11 say he's absolutely guilty. Let's go home. One guy, Henry Fonda says, Hey, let's, 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, 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 part of your 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're 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 like, Supreme Court conversations about gay marriage in 2023. Like why would you fuck? Why? What? We've already had that debate. We're gone. We passed that. We passed that. So if that's still in it, if people even want to bring enough 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 victory, all the other group. The other group, they're monsters. They're evil. The ruin of society. And this fucking bipolar aspect to our society is just, it's fed by social media. It's fed by these fake accounts. It's fed by soulless commentators. 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 our kit, 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? 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 to the Lebanese civil war, and it erases it because he can't believe that I could do something as grotesque as to talk to Tucker Carlson. 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, but they want to ignore all evidence that he's a lovely guy. And he really is. 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 they had these ideas of who he was before he came on his podcast. And he's like, they all came away from like, I really like him. He's a really nice guy. Even if you don't agree with his politics, he seems like a really nice guy. Gracious, down to earth. You know how you often say, if you want to know whether the date that you're out with is a good person, see how he or she treats the server at the restaurant. Sure. So the way he interacted with my children, right? He was focused on them. He was at the moment. So how are you doing? How are you enjoying? Right. So he's taking his time. He's not acting hottie 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, first of all, that should be something that you would have a conversation with somebody about. Like if I care about someone, they're talking to someone that I find egregious. You know, I think you would have a conversation with you. You call them up and you go, Hey man, just this is what I think. Like you tell me what you think. Yeah. 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 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, he was like kind of wild fellow. When you think about like what he was doing on a major television show, implicating the CIA and the assassination assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yeah. He's saying it was like utmost certainty. Yeah. Right. 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. Yeah. That could be the case. I don't know. Yeah. I would think that when you have a network that's run by advertising, you know, I mean, it's what you do for income. Yeah. You know, I would imagine there's a lot of pressure by those people, those advertisers to eliminate threats to their, their business. Right. So if you got some wild dude on Fox News, who's saying a bunch of shit about whatever it is, whether it's why we in Ukraine, whether it's why you mandating vaccines, whether it's what, this 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. You don't get, you don't go to CVS to pick it up. It's a, that's different. And so this is like something that you can't really, you can't really criticize a brand and like say, yeah, we don't, we don't buy Pfizer around these parts anymore. Like it doesn't, that doesn't work. It's not going to work. You can do that with Budweiser though. And you can do that with like, that's probably going to happen with some other stuff too. Like people are upset at the country music channel. Oh yeah. Jason L. D. try that in a small town. Yeah. The level of outrage, like, 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 that are infinitely worse and also enjoyable. Misogynistic, qualifying violence. Oh yeah. And no, no complaints at all. And we're not even talking about old stuff. There's new stuff too. There's, there's, 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 it's the racial aspect of it was crazy because like the real Antifa problems that were happening during the BLM. I think it was a lot of white people doing that. Right. 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 how about the Tracy Al, did you see the Tracy Alman controversy? No, I did not. So she, 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. And then this, I guess he's a country music. Tracy Chapman. Chapman. That's the Alman. Oh, that's, she's an actress, right? She's a comedian. Yes. Tracy Chapman. Thank you. And then this, this singer asked for her permission, I guess, to, to do a cover and so on. It's amazing. And then people came out that, you know, the white guy is usurping the, yeah. Well, but that's always going to happen. You're always going to have a certain amount of people to 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, I can become a checkout girl. He says checkout girl. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what else is up? What's, I think we were going to talk about what 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 to one of whom I think has been on your show, Michael Malice. Yeah. I love that dude. Yeah. He's lovely. And the other, the other guy is a professor at UT Austin was really Richard Lowry, who was really fighting. He's very much of a academic honey badger fighting against all the work 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? Which is 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. It feels like a warm hug. Oh, I feel the requisite drug conversations coming up. Here we go on a 30 minute conversation. But this is like a good drug. Like caffeine is, whatever bad effects you get from coffee, they're so minimal. There's even like links to like good health benefits from it. Yeah. 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. 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 U. And so I thought that was a really cool chapter to cover because it's arguably the most universal law that we can find. So many things adhere to that inverted U. And I think we had discussed this last time that I was on the show, the ancient Greeks were already aware of it. I mean, Aristotle and his Michael Macchian ethics talks exactly, I mean, he doesn't call it the inverted U, he calls it the golden mean. And so to our earlier conversation, the last time I was here in going through the research for this book, the amount of insights I've found from Seneca, Epictetus, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius was just breathtaking. It was unbelievable. Yeah, I just got back from Greece. Was that right? Yeah, I was in Greece for two weeks. And I saw the Parthenon and we went to Ulysses, went to Dallos, went to a bunch of different islands. It was really interesting, man. Yeah. We checked out a bunch of ruins. And it's just so, it's so hard to even wrap your head around what was going on there 2000 plus years ago. Yeah, indeed. 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 Foligandros. 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 to go to? We went to a bunch of them. I can't remember all the names. Mykonos. All right. But that's tons of tourists, right? 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. And it was relaxing. But the most mind blowing thing was seeing the Parthenon and seeing Elysses and walking around there. Yeah, we just came back from Portugal. We did 16 days in Portugal. First time ever. I think it's a elusive. I'm saying Elysses. It's a lusus. 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. Did 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. 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. It's like there's like a but I mean, it's Italian, you know, it's a universally loved language. French has 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 this is the case. 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 an international French because we're from Lebanon. When she speaks to a Quebecer, she turns into a complete Quebecer and oftentimes they 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. Right. 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. There's a falsity to that. Yeah. But there's also a good argument that like, there's like a cultural agreed upon way of communicating. You know, like if you started talking like there for all thou, like you started talking like that today, people go, what are you doing, man? Right. 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. Well, you have this, 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 a fascinating thing about a person that's able to speak multiple languages. It's like you're, 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 yeah. My, 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 mother, 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, the two languages that we both speak. But now both, both our children are telling us that they regroup because when they see me meeting someone who's Arabic and we, we break out the beautiful Arabic, at least my son has been saying, you know, daddy, you should only speak to me in, in Arabic. But now it feels as if it's a vocabulary lesson, right? So I'm telling him, here's 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, you know? 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. Like, 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 to 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. But so, for example, I learned English at 11. And that's 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 that when I was 13, 14, 15, I could have spoken it, you know, perfectly, but you would have detected a much stronger accent. That's interesting. 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. 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 side. Side. Right. It's the high name. Like Arnold, like if Arnold was going to say it. Sort of like exactly. Or for example, can you say, not there's and they're coming from different parts from my throat. What? Those are all. So if I say, if I say the Arabic people are going to laugh at this. That means your shit. Okay. Okay. Okay. And that means you're, you're an ass. Okay. You're an idiot. Say it again. The second one. Yeah. But see, you're saying it's Oh, okay. First time ever. Are we breaking new ground? Yeah, for sure. I've never even tried to say these words. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it's Arabic. Earlier I, I, I said some derogatory things about Portuguese and about French Canadians. So let me be fair and say, not Arabic, Hebrew, which is also, you know, one of them 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 Lebanon, 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, the Italian of Arabic dialects. Get ready for some comments and I'll come in your way. Isn't it weird how when they have horror movies, whenever someone's like calling a demon, they always have to do it in an old language. Meaning like, it's always in Latin or something. Oh, right. Okay. They're always reading from some book. They're not supposed to be reading from, what does it say? 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 always, right? It's always like a dead language or an old language. I think it's because of that. So because it's an extinct language, it's somehow calling demons. It's calling demons that exist in another world. 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. Or say Candyman in front of the mirror three times. Scariest movie of all times, as 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? When he comes and you write, 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 say the first Alien. Love that movie. 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. Wait, we can get into that. Have you seen the documentary of the making of Alien? I have. Is that amazing? It's amazing. Yeah. That HR, how do you say his name? Geiger? The artist that designed it? Oh my God. What a unique vision. Unreal. His art was so strange. That creature that he created was fucking amazing. It was literally 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. 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 you're talking about being startled. And that alien in this movie is elusive and intelligent and traps people. And you get to see it in brief glances. And then in the new movies after that, like aliens, it's kind of a different thing going on because you can kill them easy. You're just blasting a bunch of them and then the mother is at you, but you got a robot body, so you're all good. 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 Caine, Angie Dickinson. You're amazing, Jamie. It comes out when you're a wizard. You have to see this movie, Joe. Is she supposedly transgender in this movie? No. So what happens is, can I give away some stuff? Yeah, it's a spoiler. It's a spoiler. 43 years old. You got it. Well, but if somebody wants to see it. So she is sexually frustrated with her and her marriage. So she goes to see a psychiatrist played by Michael Caine, who as she's telling him 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 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, 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 Fata 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 a fix where you can breathe out of both the nostrils? I think I can. Yeah. But yeah, it was. That is so important. If anybody out here is listening and you have a deviated septum, get that fixed. If you can, if you're, it's safe to do because it's like the benefits of being able to breathe out of your nose. 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? Who's Lionel Messi? And then you mentioned some MMA fighter that I'd never heard of. And I remember your exact response. 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 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, Wizard, didn't they offer him like some fucking insane amount of money? And he just said no. Saudi Arabia. How much they are different guys just got offered a billion dollars for one year. Yeah. And bopping and bopping and bopping. What a billion for a year. 330 of that is so that he can transfer to the team and then 771 is for his services to soccer for a year. They're buying everybody. The Saudis. LeBron said if they offered him, he'd fucking 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 is so crazy. December 18th, 2022, World Cup Final. You talk about the power, the emotional power of sports, my family and I were sitting and watching the World Cup Final and we had the extent to which we were emotionally vested in Messi winning the World Cup can only demonstrate the beauty of sports. Because here's a guy that we've never met him. We're not Argentinian. 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 watch the game that at one point my son, who's 11 years old, said, I can't watch this anymore. I'm going to have a heart attack. That's the power of sports that it can pull us in and it can make us truly tribe. And on my case, before you interject, it was kind of driven. My desire for him to win was driven by really a purity strand. It was that it seemed cosmically unjust for the greatest soccer player of all time to not have won the World Cup. So when he won it to me, it seemed like the world is right. Beauty has won. I get it. Look at that. 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 the attempt, they're devastated right now. Yeah. That's the weird thing about sports. You can get so attached to what's happening that a loss is like really a loss. Can't believe we fucking lost to Kansas City. Well, in my first book ever, 2007, Evolution of Basic Consumption, I talk about studies, not my studies. I was citing other works that looked at what happens to the testosterone levels of fans as a function of whether their team wins or loses. Of course, 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. 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 and the chronological 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. That's 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 if, let's say, if your wife is upset that you're not, 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, it's just attaching so much of your own emotions to something completely out of control. There's a rooting on it. Exactly. But 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 Hunnegan. It was a devastating loss. Like people couldn't believe Lloyd Hunnegan beat Donald Curry. And it was like Donald Curry might be on the downslide, but I'm still like a giant fan of his. And then Donald Curry fought Mike McCallum. 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. I couldn't believe it. And I ran. Here it is right here. I ran out of the house. Watch this. Boom. So the, the cold, the one with the black shorts is your guy, right? The guy down. It's my guy. So I, I, 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, he KO'd, KO'd Donald Curry. And I couldn't believe it. And so I put up my running shoes. I couldn't stay home. I could, I just couldn't deal with it. I couldn't deal with it. And I went running in the snow and I ran. I know. I went in the snow. I'm thinking of another story. It was another time when someone lost. I went running in the snow. I don't think it was in the snow. I think it was warm. I don't, 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. Well, what was the bond? What, what, why, why? His technique, his technique was perfect. He was crisp. Like he was coiled. They called him, his, his, what was his nickname? Something Cobra. Here comes Jamie. I forget what his nickname was, but his, his technique was so crisp. It's a Lone Star Cobra. Lone Star Cobra. There you go. He was out 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 where it's just like the technique is so dialed in. Yeah. There's guys that like Gervonta Davis is like that. Their technique's so dialed in that when you watch them uncork, it's like, 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, 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 that's, 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? 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 I'm an old guy, but I thought that it could be possible for the front line to make enough of a hole for me to run through for one yard 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 is no chance that that would happen because they would catch you in the back field. 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. 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 this guy. This is the running back trying to get the ball to get one yard. Watch this. No. His helmet's off and he's hurt. Oh my God. Oh my God. He got attacked. And that's one of the five guys that are going to try to stop you from doing that. Attack old. This guy's just so powerful. So Jamie is in the camp of I'm not getting a single yard. There's a lot of, 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, 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. No, impossible. Now 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. Yeah. So there's no breaks. Like, you know, we'll be right back with another word from the Misko. You know, 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, 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. So I, I, I, a weird thing for an elite athlete to choose. Jamie, can we check in the rankings? I could describe squash. You know, I tried to play it. I got very claustrophobic. I'm not being serious because let me see what it looks like. Show me a squash game. It's like a, in a racquetball, right? No, but with a, 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 in a scientific study. My wife has been trying to get me into pickleball. What are our, what are our thoughts about that? I hear people like it. Have I, have I just lost the, 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. A lot of fucking explosive movements for old guys like us. Yeah. Best stick to yoga. Pickleball, you can play with the beer in your hand. So you should be all right. Yeah. Pickleball, pickleball's the way to go, son. By the way, and I'm not going to call it ping pong, table tennis. Oh my God. Insane. I, I watched a lot of it. When I was, when I was a graduate student, there was a fellow student who were roughly the same level. So we could have these wrong, 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 balls come in and to be able to get to the side of the table and they'll back it over there. And then it steps sideways and dudes are hitting them behind their backs. Like it's wild. It's wild. It's beautiful. Those exchanges are so fast. 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 the only real professional team. So are you willing on your show to commit to inviting Dr. Gatsat to a game when Enter Miami comes over because Gats 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, you know, I don't necessarily know that I'll, I don't know when that is, you know. But would you, would you want to go? But if, yes, yes, yes, yes. If I was free, I 100% want to go with you. Oh. 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 there. Of Austin. Yeah. Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't, I'm not missaying that, right? I don't think so, but yet they just actually played here before, right before Messi joined the team. I don't want to like misstate his position. He's something, I think he's one of the owners. I don't pay, unfortunately don't pay attention to that, but I do pay attention to him. He's a super cool guy. And he, you know, was with us explaining it to us. Like he had, 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. Have you heard? He is the part owner of Rexxum. He's co-owner. Okay. Can you, Jamie? I knew he was. I just wanted to be sure. Let's do Ryan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rexxum. W-R-E-X. Yeah, Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, they purchased a team, right? What a wild baller move. I'm going to purchase a sports team. They got good. They got good. They purchased them. Speaking of 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, do we agree on that? Oh, she's gorgeous. She's phenomenal. Yeah. Truly beautiful. And exudes. That's like a duh. Yeah. Well, it's depending if you like that type. Ah, there's, there's like a level of beauty, beauty, and then everything else is just different versions of that. Yeah. That's what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we both do picky, first of all. Then 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. Is that right? He's perfect. He's beautifully tall. Big, 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 lifts 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 wrestling. Boxing. Okay, first of all, let me hit the brakes. Um, 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 jujitsu 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 is 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, there are squash or tied actually, but whatever it is, shut the fuck up. This is a bullshit study. Shut the fuck up. Let me tell you something. Number one is wrestling. Number one, a hundred percent. You mean number one? You mean Greek or 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, like a, like a Daniel Cormier level, like, I'm going to pretend I know who that is, two division UFC world champion. Oh, okay. It was also Olympic wrestler. Nice. There's, 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, my, 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, 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 the story. What's that? Boxing and wrestling number one boxing too. Yeah, that's, that's how it should be. Soccer. That's what is this website? This website's a good website. Athletic bill. Yes, I don't know. Yeah. That's that website. If it agrees with my thinking, it's a good website. If it doesn't, it's a bullshit website. Okay. What, where's soccer there, Jimmy? This was number nine on this list. Yeah. Wrestling MMA. That's, that's accurate. That's accurate. Because if you look at guys like Corellin, Alexander Corellin, who's the scariest fucking wrestler of all time. Like if anybody says like, who's the scariest wrestler of all time, it's Corellin. He, they used to call him the experiment because his, his parents or his parents were like normal size, like kind of tiny, like five, seven. And he's a fucking panther, like a human panther, six 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. Cause 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's fucking terrifying. Let's play the football game of can I get a yard? You go in with this zero chance. No, not winning. How long can you last? I'd have to run away. It would just be as 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 Corellin 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. And you watch his workouts, they were extraordinary. Cause 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 was 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 mobility, he would show all these mobility drills and different things. Look at what he's doing. Oh my goodness. Look at this. I mean, this is the fucking Olympic gold medalist wrestler. What year 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 Fagezi MMA fight. It was like a fake MMA fight. Cause 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. Like it's like you see like a fake tap. You see like 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 you figured out how to strike, oh my Jesus. I'm not sure if we've talked about this before, but the precursor of MMA, I had had that conversation with my brother, the judo guy, because we would go out to nightclubs and he would, he's very, very small guy, probably five foot three, but built like a pit bull. And he, he 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's 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 just slam you to the ground, he's going to control, he's going to beat your ass. They're just too good at wrestling. And then also he can fuck you upstanding. That's where it gets really dangerous. So if a guy like Corellin learned how to stand up, that would have been the end. Because there's certain freaks that like you just like athletic freaks. You just like, what are you going to do with that? What are you going to do? 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, the 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 management of the space, like 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 them. But they said that he did 12 to six elbows, which are the dumbest fucking ever rule in MMA. Because what if it's 1205? What if it's 1205? What does that mean? I don't know. I'm sorry. Yeah. From the position of the clock. Okay. An elbow straight down is illegal. Oh, I see. Doesn't make any sense. Yeah. 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, I believe that's illegal. I'm not sure about that. But on the ground, it's most certainly illegal. And it's the dumbest rule. It doesn't make any sense. A regular elbow is just as hard. An elbow like this is just as hard. It might be more hard because you can kind of get more of your shoulder into it, or this might be a more awkward move that I mean, I'm not the best at this, but I would think that this is not as good as this. This seems like I'm getting a lot of weight into that. I'm getting the torque off my hips. This I'm kind of coming up and down. I feel like I have more ability to generate force going sideways, going into it like that. So I don't, I think if you measured it, I bet it would be, I bet this elbow is stronger for like the elite fighters. So it's not a matter of like whether or not it makes sense. It's a dumb rule. And that's the only time he ever lost. He got disqualified. It's the only time he ever lost. Other than that, like he's like at certain point in time, his career, he was like playing with his food. Like he let fights go on too long where he's like almost disinterested and he wanted to try standing up with guys who were supposedly great strikers, just decided not to try to take people down. Just try to do whatever the fuck you wanted to do. Because he's so much better than everybody. He was getting bored. And then when he has like big challenges like this second Daniel Cormier fight stop Cormier with a head kick. Like, he's so fucking good. I mean, he's beaten so many people and the way he beat them, he fought Leota 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. Like there's nowhere to go. He's 100% out cold. And so look at that. Just drops him 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 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. That's really interesting. The diversity in personalities in MMA is really fascinating to me as a person who's an analyst. There are people that are very calm and disciplined and religious, people like the greatest, like Khabib Nirmar Gomirov, who's also in the conversation of who's the greatest of all time. He's also in that conversation. He's Ajay Bajan or what is he? Dagestan. Dagestan, okay. He's in the conversation of the greatest of all time because it's not even a matter of whether he lost because he never lost, who's 29 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 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. I'm beating the shit out of him, yelling at him, let's talk now. Let's talk because he was so much like trash talk during, 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 Glace and T-Bao that was a controversial fight, it was a close fight. But that's very early in his career. When you look at him against guys like world-class competition, you know, guys like Edson Barbosa, guys like Michael Johnson, like the domination that he showed on these guys was just fucking off the charts. He'd just take them 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? I have no preference. I love them all. I love it all. I love the guys that talk a lot of shit. And I love the guys that are like, could be 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 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 I'm wondering. So from the perspective of, because there's a lot of showboating and fighters, right? I'm the greatest ever. And, you know, 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 the Conor McGregor, where his diamond encrusted watches and drives around a Lamborghini yacht. I fucking love it. I know, I know that dude grew up poor. That dude was, 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, I reached out to him like 2013, I sent him a message saying, I hope one day you come over to the UFC. Love to love to see your fights. Might've 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. Oh, 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. Are many of your closest friends fighters? I have a lot of friends that are in all walks of life, but most of my friends, most of my close friends do risky shit. Either they do martial arts, or they do standup 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. Yeah, he's amazing. 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 the, there's a, I think it's an HBO documentary coming out of the Mexican boxer. I can't remember his name. Which one? I guess they are. Oscar de la Hoya. Yeah, exactly. 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. With the ladies or with the, I was meeting with, I don't know. These are just rumors, you know, some controlled substances. He's had some issues. 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. No, he always does it. Yeah. Jamie knows how to fucking load 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. A hundred percent, but there's no Ronaldo out there. So he's, what, what am I the messy of or what is messy? Why would you keep turning around to you? About me, I've said two words in this podcast. That's not true at all. Literally, if someone does a content analysis of art conversation so far, they wouldn't know that I'm here. I've just sat and smiled at your beautiful face. Oh, sweetie. That can't be true. I can just look at the words I'm seeing on my recording. It's like 50, 50 in the last 10 minutes. It is not 50, 50. How dare you, sir? You got a little testy there. I got you. Not at all. I'm just having fun. So what else is up? What's going on in the, what's going on? I don't know, man. I'm more worried. What's upsetting you? What's making you happy? What's... I'm more worried than ever about the cultural narratives. I'm more worried than ever about like the fucking divide in this country. It seems so accelerated, whether it's climate change or Ukraine or whatever the subject du jour is. 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, 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. We can have disagreements. I know who the core view 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, 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. It was like, this is a psychological test study. If you wanted to do a test study of how a population, even a supposedly free population, free thinking, freedom of expression, freedom of speech is literally in the doctrine that we run the law by. And to have people willing to throw that away quickly under something that wasn't even, 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. It certainly wasn't a good thing to have anybody 99.7% survival rate. 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 what we understand about health and wellness and promoting that. You're referring to obesity. Yeah, not just obesity, but like 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, 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 they released the pandemic on purpose? No, no, there's 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. 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. I think when we want to look at why people did what they did, we try to look at it one way or another. I think there's many, many things going on. Also, for sure, governments that are really good at crafting laws that allow them to gain power. They've done that with all the bills that they passed after 9-11, the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II, the NDAA, all that crazy shit. 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 will be reluctant to pass before. It happens. It happens all the time. It's normal. That's their job. That's what they do. What they do is they're in control. They're in power. That's the game that they're playing. The game that you're playing is, I want to keep my freedom. Right. We have to figure out a way to establish real clear rules to how this game works. 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, who's doing that? How many of them are coming from America itself, and how many of them are coming from foreign agents who are trying to disrupt American politics and trying to disrupt American narratives? I wonder. I wonder what is the ratio of shit posting? 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%. That's crazy. Do you imagine Twitter just becomes bots arguing with bots, and they finally realize no one's on it? But have you felt that your experience with Twitter has radically changed as a function of the pre- and post-Elon Musk coming in, or has it changed much? You feel more free. You can post things that are controversial and not worry about having your account limited. Because if you were posting things about... First of all, there's things you couldn't post. You would not post a story about the Hunter Biden laptop. You couldn't even send it to me in a DM. There were certain things I tried to send people in DMs, and they wouldn't allow me to send them. That's amazing. 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 them on the show. Do you know who Matt Ridley is? Matt Ridley. Why do I know that? 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 co-author. I can't remember her name, where they were arguing for the lab leak theory. And 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 taking town. This was 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 self-censorship that people do out of survival. Yeah. And it always sat badly with me because 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 mechanism. What's crazy is also the goals shift, the goalposts shift. 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 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 crazy how, but it took so long for people to think that that could even be a possibility. 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 don't know that. You never saw that? No, I didn't see that. Oh my God. You have to see this. It's kind of amazing. Because Jon Stewart, bless his heart, he sticks to the bit. And Colbert is trying to cock block the joke. He's trying to stop him from ranting. So you can clearly see Jon Stewart is in the middle of a bit. He's 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's the thing. 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. 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. 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. And that's right. You were locked down. I was locked down down there. And the family, Evie and the kids were the actual crew. That's right. That's how we were doing it. We're doing it in a little unused little bedroom with cables through the window and that's right. A satellite truck on our lawn. And I mean, like the room was twice the size of the desk, I think. I'm not joking. Chris could tell you it's really, really tiny, but the whole, the point was like, 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 so crushing to find that. 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? 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. Oh, you'll bear. And that's kind of, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not take, listen, coffee. I would do that. I wouldn't do that to you. What do you, what do you, what do you mean by that? Do you mean like there's a chance that this was created in a lab? There's an investigation. A chance? Well, I, I, I, I, I, there's evidence I'd love to hear. 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, 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, pangolin kiss the turtle. And you're like, no, if you look at the name, look at the name, can I, let me see your business card. Show me your business card. So when is this? So look at Colbert though. Look at Colbert. Colbert keeps opening his mouth. Yeah. In Wuhan. Oh, cause 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 Corona. Okay. Okay. What about this? What about this? See, see, all right. Oh my God. He has to stand up. Yeah. Yeah. There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Like, Oh, I don't know. Maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean or it's the chocolate factory. Maybe that's it. That could be. Look at John Stewart, but you see how many times Colbert trying to knock back his bit. But so this happened when this was. Look, they have the COVID-19 vaccine rink there two years ago. So this is in the heart of everything 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. We, late into the pandemic, we, there was a curfew that you weren't allowed to walk your dog in your neighborhood after, you know, 8 PM or 10 PM 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, 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 it's not, 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 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 before. And I think there's something creepy and weird about having that ability 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 for optics. And the fact that that kind of stuff can happen. It gets real strange when people have power to do things, because some people are just going to start doing those things. There's an interesting conversation to be had about what's going on in Canada right now with assisted suicide. Because all you have to do is go to a doctor, I believe. The doctor recommends it, and then one other doctor has to recommend it. So I don't know the specific mechanism. Let's find out what the specific mechanisms are. But 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 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? Yeah. Does that fit under that? Yeah, you could, well, I think even depression, I think, is an illness. Yeah. 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 to 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? Exactly. Because 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 sometimes photos. He's doing well. He's the sweetest. Yeah, he's the best. Well, you know, in Canada, there are all sorts of problems we're facing. And 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 the story? No, I didn't hear about this one. A 60 year old man who from everything that I've heard was an exemplary principle. He had been told that he has to take some diversity, inclusion, equity stuff. And in one of those meetings, I don't know the exact details, but he had sort of raised some concerns. Shouldn't we be judging people based on, you know, a meritocratic ethos and so on? Because he said that, but he's actually quite a liberal person from what I've heard. But just the fact that he questioned the die cult, the diversity, inclusion, equity, they started hounding him, harassing him. He's a racist. He's got to take you know, remedial courses, sensitivity. He ended up committing suicide. I'm sure as a Jamie, you can pull it up just recently in the last week or two. And Jordan Peterson wrote something about cancellation. It's kind of being diagnosed with like a terminal illness. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, horrible illness. I forget what he said. But you know what, what a, what a lot of people have tried to cancel me now. Sometimes people say, Oh, it's because your tenure that, you know, 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 a 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 him, the alphabet people were really coming after me. But that doesn't have the timber of, we want to kill you. When you start criticizing some Islamic stuff, then it can get pretty heavy. 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 tenants. 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. He'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. And 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 sank, you know, he sanctioned it as a kind of divine prescription. It's not, it couldn't possibly mean something else. Meaning what? I mean, the color black means the alleged Hadith, which regards black dogs as evil has been rejected by the majority of Islamic scholars as fabricated. Nevertheless, Islamic scholars have tended to regard dogs, saliva as impure. Yeah. So that, that comes by the way. So just fabricated? Just, well, but pretty much anything that you say, someone will say, Oh, it's fabricated. So in, in Islam, there's a thing called najas, which is like impure things, right? So for example, the Kufar, the non Muslim is himself impure. Well, 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, your purity ritual before you pray, because you've been touched by najas, by something that is impure. So there are many debates depending on the Hadith as to whether something is authentic or not. But there is certainly, as Jamie just pulled out, the fact that there is within certain Islamic thought that black dogs are uniquely bad. And so just if I say that on your show, there'll be some Islamic guy who says, you know, the Jew is making this stuff up and so on. And so 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 for a guy like you that literally fled it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, and, and when I would, 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 we can, 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 public, are very fair. And they'll say, you know, you're a very fair guy, you never, but other ones will send me emails and stuff that are just brutal, that are really, really, and I have to say, I'm someone who's, if I can speak of myself, quite courageous, but that in-person threat that I received when I was walking with my son was really, truly harrowing because I could never rise to that threat, right? Because the way that guy was speaking to me, he always had more, you know, I had more to lose than him. And so there was never going to be a situation where if he decided to act on his hatred, I could have ever lived up to that challenge. And so for several weeks, I was really being careful 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, you know, 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 a pandemic 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 the idea, so imagine ancient Jews walking around in an environment where there is 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 drop 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 Saq, 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 it doesn't, 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 really 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, you know, when I was in Greece, I was with Brian Murarescu and he wrote this book about the illucinian mysteries called the immortality case, an amazing book. And in this book, it all details these, 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 root, when you're in those kinds 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 or if they saw the end coming. Yeah. Because are we seeing the end coming? Because it doesn't seem like... I hope not. I hope not. Do you know? I mean, when you see like, and you realize they built, they built the Parthenon. When you're there looking at that thing, you're like, yeah, that's amazing. What did you do? How did you do this? How did you do this 2000 plus years ago? And it's all designed with a golden ratio in mind. Yeah. It's wild craftsmanship. I actually talk about in my current happiness book, I talk about different correlates with happiness. How does personality correlate with happiness? How does culture correlate with happiness? Marriage and so on. One of the sections I talk about religiosity and happiness. Are religious people on average happier? And the answer turns out that there is a moderate positive correlation between religiosity and happiness. Now that makes perfect sense in that religion provides me with structure. It provides me with greater commonality. It creates a nice demarcation between in-group and out-group. Therefore, people in my in-group, I can cooperate with. I have greater cohesion. So there are very functional earthly reasons for why if I am religious, it's going to lead to greater happiness. But what I try to also argue in the book is that that shouldn't cause people who are not religious to despair, that they're not going to be as happy 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 a very, and often very successful way. And I think there's a peace that they have in a true belief. There's a peace that you have that there's a God that's got a plan for this whole thing and just worship that God and do the right thing and you're going to be okay. But do you, I mean, so for again, from a purist perspective, I think it's less impressive for me to do the right thing because otherwise there is a big guy who's 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 evolution thing for social species that 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 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 the 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 these things and then some. I think to just sort of rationalize it down to 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 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 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, 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, 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 they're doing so greedily and enthusiastically. So can I offer a philosophical explanation for why I think that's happening? Sure. Some of your viewers may have heard me mention this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating. So in my last book, In the Parasitic Mind, I talk about two ethical systems, deontological ethics, and consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics is an absolute statement. For example, if I say it is never okay to lie, that is a deontological statement. If I say it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings. So the example that I often give is if your spouse asks you, do I look fat in those genes, then put on your consequentialist hat really quickly. So for most things, most of us are going to be consequentialist. 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 butt associated. Right. You can't say, I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh. Right. I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump. And so one of the reasons why I've gotten into a beef with someone that we both know well is because that person has repeatedly violated what he should know better, which is that deontological principles by definition should never have the butt qualifier. But now it has become perfectly okay when talking about freedom of speech to tackle it from a consequentialist perspective. Don't criticize Islam because that means you're hurting people's feelings. Therefore, shut your mouth. 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 feeling 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 woman'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, the anthological 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. Well, 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 with 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 argue 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 Ron 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 like, what can you say? Have you seen, 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, Jamie, 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 on 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 facetiously. But he's doing it with a full straight face. And the way when you hear them talk, it's yes, it's amazing. 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 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 he's it's not true. And so that's the problem with the whole thing. So you think in the deep recesses of all those folks, his minds will come out as in support of men who have penises or women. Do you think in the deep, they know that it's bullshit? Or have they been so parasitized that they actually believe their nonsense? I think a lot of them believe it. And I think a lot of them that belief is confirmed by their social groups, or who also not just believe it, but enforce belief in it. There's a social pressure to enforce belief in it. And I've seen it. I've seen it in action. I've seen women have arguments with people that are, you know, pro trans rights. And, you know, and these women are arguing that there's, there's pro trans rights, and then there's a racing women's rights, including like the athletic argument, including the the female spaces, like intimate spaces, locker rooms, bathrooms. It's, 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 get engaged in instantaneous conflict. So they're involved in this psychic war with competing ideologies, and it gives a meaning. That's a real problem with human beings, yeah, that we do attach ourselves to things, even if those things don't involve you or your life, you decide like, this is the movement that I'm going to get behind, stand behind, and I'm going to tell people. And it gives you meaning. Yeah. Like 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 girl's 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, but, you know, are you sure? Yeah. And in some cases, when someone's like so feminine, and so, so like seems like a woman, you do, 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 who are very feminine, we've always recognized that. But we've never taken the step into the abyss of infinite lunacy, where we say, sometimes women can have penises. I mean, that's, I mean, and that's why I wrote The Parasitic Mind, the last book, right? Because I was really literally arguing that human minds can be parasitized by ideological worms in the way that you can be parasitized by actual brainworms, 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 women, girls have vagina. I actually satirically put out a tweet where I argued for finger fluidity and finger diversity. I argued that if you're born congenitally with nine fingers or nine toes, then we should no longer be teaching in biology class that boys and girls are born with 10 fingers. I was being facetious, but that's exactly the logic that they're using, right? Of course, there are some people who are born intersex, and of course they have the right to live a dignified life free of bigotry. That doesn't mean though that we have to go back and rewrite the anatomy and biology books. And I mean, and that's why I fight all these battles online and so on, because I truly am allergic to bullshit. I am very deontological when it comes to truth. And I get personally offended when I see people espousing all that nonsense. What is it that Dennis Prager was just talking about? There was some video that came across my Instagram feed that was him saying that whatever medical organization is recommending that children not be labeled male or female, because they don't have the ability to choose. They can't tell you how they identify. What's fine with that? It's something crazy. 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, a hundred and 17 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. So why can't we chew gum and walk at the same time? I could be all, 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 agree to that. And 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. Exactly. 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 gail movie in the past, when you wanted to have a sex change operation, the number of steps that you had to go through before you were accepted for sex change reassignment 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, and you're not allowed to question it. It's really, it's just insane. You can put them on hormone blockers and you can put them on hormone. And there's so many problems that they're finding now that people that are, have hormone blockers. Charlreese 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, 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. Well, what's the most charitable explanation for this? That she, why she's doing this? Why is this is the case? Why is this 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 talked about it in the last book. So I talk about munchausen syndrome by proxy. So munchausen 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 by, 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, what is someone who truly believes that that's normal? What do they think? Who believes that what is that? It's just normal that those two boys turned out to be girls. It's people who live in Lalala because we know that statistically it's, it's just impossible. It's like winning the lottery. Right. But people do win the lottery, right? Yeah. So what, what would be your most charitable explanation? That would be the most charitable. It's just, it just turned out that these two, 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, yeah. Feminine gay men. Yeah. Which used to be fine. Yeah. And now it's like, you know, like Tim Dillon has an argument about it that a lot of this is really homophobic. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah, I got that argument. Yeah. It's an interesting argument. 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, the, 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 the, 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. Yeah. All I'm seeing is that she had a 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, so one of them is biological. One is a real daughter. I was trying to find out the actual, I don't know, I come like digging through the stories. Nothing actually says biological anything. Well, then I really appreciate Jill's, your, your careful when you, you know, at the start you said, I don't know if that's true or not. Yeah. So that, I think 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 not, but I don't fucking nothing. I don't want to be this whatever. Or they 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, 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. Yeah. It's just like, I mean, at what point in time do we examine whether or not social pressures are playing a part of this? Well, that's the Lisa, is that 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, you know, had put out all these, you know, promotional alerts about, you know, 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 had, I'd even invited her on my show to, to offer her a platform to, you know, to support her. And she had laid low because of the blowback she was getting. Well, Abigail Schreier is experiencing 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 was, I wasn't aware that it was that big of an issue. Yeah. And that there's so many, particularly like 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 things, because it has an effect, there's a physiological effect on, and so they think this is what I've been missing my whole life, which is really kind of crazy to think that, I mean, it's, it's a weird things like this, either, especially when it comes to like encouraging surgery, as encouraging it for really young people, are we when, when did we stop believing that young people are impressionable? 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? Well, we've always said that with tattoos. We've always said that with, you know, body modifications, and look at the cognitive inconsistency when it comes to age, because if a progressive will say that a 17 year old who's 17 years old 364 days, so in one day, he's going to be 18, who lies in weight, kills his parents to pick up the insurance, the progressive will argue, well, you can't put him in prison for life, he's just a child, his brain is still going to develop until he's 25. So for that issue, from this side of my mouth, I say that he's too young. But from this side of my mouth, I'll say that a four year old is perfectly capable of saying I am in the opposite body, and shut up, don't question it. Those two things can't go. Yeah, 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 kids stabbed his mother to death, and 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 this is a bunch of those guys to have their parents just watched a documentary on the dating show Serial Killer. Have you seen this guy? Do you know this story? No. The dating show, 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, we did talk about this once. Yeah. Then he appeared on it on the famous dating show where you know, a woman is interviewing three guys. That's guy. That's the guy. Yeah. So 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, but not just a serial killer Joe because 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 had, 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 this is not the time. Now 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 either makes us good or bad. Yeah. And therefore they would want to rebuild. 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 supported if the legal system was clear. Yeah. 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 that didn't commit. I've actually had a guy on my show, arguably the, the most remarkable story I've ever heard on my show. And I discussed 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 like very corrupt prosecutors and a lot of very corrupt lawyers. And the whole thing is it's, 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 know, it's, you could see like if there's a video of someone in the act of doing something, especially now with deepfakes, that's a problem again, right? But yeah, if someone was, especially if they're saying they're guilty, they show no remorse. Yeah. Like why should they be alive? But I just wish that we knew for sure that everybody who's locked up in jail for a crime was actually guilty of that crime. And that's not the case. So that's not the case. 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 it's a sort of akin to maybe the principles of free speech. Free speech applies even to people that you disagree with the Holocaust. Right. The insane people, Nazis, like that was what the, the ADL used to support, right? I think that if we were living in a world where there was no lies and all the prosecutors and all the judges were all above board and just impeccable sense of ethics and morals, and you could trust them to know the truth, then yeah. But that's not the case. Yeah. So in a flawed society like the one that we live in, I can't support something that's killing innocent people, even if it's killing guilty people too. 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. 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. 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. There's just too much corruption. There's too much, you can demonstrate, you could see it. There's cases after case after case, a prosecutor is getting arrested, DA is getting arrested and lawyers. 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, 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 or something that didn't even do. That's the reason why, and isn't it in firing squads when you have a whole bunch of people and they're, exactly. Yeah. But what about lethal injection? Yeah. There is someone who's literally doing it. Knows what's going on there. You know, do it with a computer. Okay, whatever. You know what you're doing. You know 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, the guys that came over at the hotel, we were talking about, you know, parenting with the, with the threat of, you know, protecting your children from a pedophile. And I've argued that my approach to parenting has been, I don't trust anyone with my children. Precisely because the one who is going to commit those infractions is not someone that has, 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, 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 sleep away camp because there is going to be this, this counselor there who is a pig. And then I would have miserably failed in my job. And so, my job while you are under my protection is to make sure that I never put you in a position where this could happen. What happens after when you're an adult, that's your business. What are your thoughts? Am I being? No, I think I feel what you're saying. I think you also have to let your children expose them. 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 antifragility 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 they, 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. In the Happiness Book, I argued that what I went through in the Lebanese Civil War paradoxically makes me a happier person because any time that I start whining about something that's pissing me off, I can always pull back from my memory. I had the miracle of escaping the Middle East intact. So what am I whining about? So you're exactly on point that the fact that I've gone through those horrors makes me the happier person I am to them. 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 horseshit. When they see it coming, any Marxist ideology, they see it coming, they're like, fuck you. Fuck you. We know where this goes. This goes to, you have to give up all your possessions and everything goes to the state and everything gets distributed evenly. How do you enforce that? 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 you specify 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. It's like there's this fascinating takedown by this like super progressive, probably college kid. Well, 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 were the way you're living in this life, and that you have resources available and you have things available that other people don't have. And it would be better if you had less and then it bounced out. So if you give a little bit more and then eventually bounce out, the problem is it's not bouncing out. The problem is like, where's the money going? Well, the money is going to the government and they get to decide how it's spent and they get to pass laws and dictate and send a little here. Well, there's a war, so we're going to need more. And then there's inflation that comes with the war. There's the price of gas and food and everything goes up and all this is happening and you can't say shit about it. And you're in this position where you're like, well, if you complain, well, you're a man of privilege. You're privileged and you should be giving that up. And if you gave it up, the world would be a better place. I don't have any faith in their ability to use my taxes to make the world a better place. I have zero faith. I willingly and happily pay my taxes because I think it's part of being an American. 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 healthcare or whatever, 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, like 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 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 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 the quality 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 because, well, don't fucking practice 12 hours a day. You don't have to be Michael Jordan. Like 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. 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 Gatsa, the 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. 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 there. 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 like 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 hard. It sucks. But I'm not saying that it's good. I think it's good for you. Yeah. Like coal blunge is a good for you. You know, they don't, it's not good why you're doing it. It sucks, but I think it's good for you. 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. May the April. Yeah. It can get cold as fuck in March. Cold as fuck in March. You got full snow storm. 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, they're enormously novel. Yeah. It's like, what a beautiful thing. Like we, we just six months ago, we're just digging ourselves out to try to drive to the grocery store and 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 field during the summer months 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 fuck heads at every corner of the world, but I just think there's something cool about that. 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, 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, 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. It is 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 Megan Kelly came on my show and her view. And you would, 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 messages. 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. He thinks we had a boxing match. He 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. Yeah, not terrible. Like threw some bands, you know, is that right? Welcome's going after it. Yeah. But what disturbs me is the way he's willing to discredit people that disagree with him, like the Canadian truckers. Yeah. We're saying that they're often misogynistic and racist. Like, 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 for- 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 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 writing. So if I'm voting for the liberal party, I'm voting for the liberal candidate in my writing. 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? I don't think there's a statute, not statute, what is it called? The term limitations. Thank you. I don't think there is. So he could be dictator forever. For like the next 4,000 years. Yeah. 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. Yeah. It's almost never good. And especially when they start using it in that way, they start, you know, 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. Yeah. It's not, it's not what it is. And when you're, you're being fed propaganda, and you know, you're being fed propaganda, and now you're expected to not say it, not talk about it, and just accept it. That's not good for anybody. That's not a good friend. 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, that's what they're doing. And the worst part is that it's cloaked under the robe of progressivism, right? It says he will 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. Yeah. Why they say minority government? 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, right? So in this case, it's the NDP. So the whole party is behind them, 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 Poly\u00e8vre. 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 policies, 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. 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 very, very, very much a thing that's in danger up there. It's weird. Yeah. Well, have you, what has Jordan been a support? I think he's a supporter of his, right? Have you? 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 the parliament. Despite the fact that many of his positions, we 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 Cornel 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. Yeah. As an independent or what did the green party, the green party, the 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, 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. Yeah. Ross Perot was like conservative. Yeah. But also. This was in 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 so 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 literally bought, he goes, how much is it cost? How about a whole fucking thing? He was a Texas crazy billionaire dude and. Little dude, right? Little dude. Little dude. I got a big card and I'll 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 of the way with charts and explaining to people, like, how are you getting fucked? And I remember the conversations that I would have that people I was working with back then, we would all sit around and go, did you fucking watch that shit? Like, what is this? Like, is that all true? And people start researching it and buying books and you got to read this book and like, what is, 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 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. No nonsense. Texas billionaire comes along, explains everything. He's been very 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, the evidence of corruption, how valid it is. 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 that are going to vote blue, no matter who, right? We 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? It's, she would have to step down. It's California and Justin Trudeau. It's Gavin Newsom. The problem is, uh, he did such a bad job with California. It's so, they're so vulnerable. Like, he does spit out some good propaganda. He just starts talking about, I'm very high on California and all the fucking companies that are coming from this and all the money is generated and all the intellectuals and all the, yeah, but you got to know the real stats of like how many of them feel stuck. Because if you ask people on the street in California, the, I think the number was four out of 10 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. Yeah. 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, 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. 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. Cause I don't with, with letting people out of jail and all this, 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 at these stores in San Francisco. 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 are 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, uh, take care of disenfranchised people, but we also need to make our streets safe and we have to stop crime. Okay. So we need to figure out a way to, you know, have these things, you know, mutually beneficial to everybody. 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? I was asking you offline when we weren't on the show, if you regret moving here and you, what you said was you even love it more here than you did last year. I love it. Yeah. 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, 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. So it's the, the, the, the, like whatever the chart is, like where the middle is, there's so many people that you would even think of as conservative or you 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 like, 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 and that was fine. But the overwhelming amount of people who are in the, the, 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, they, they believe all sorts of wacky shit and they were the first persons that were like happy that we were locking down. The first person's happy. There was a mass mandate and a vaccine mandate and they were, 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 she event to talk about this book. It's in San Francisco. So maybe I need to be wearing a hazmat suit. Yeah. You need to wear something like N95 type deal. Just the poop smell. 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? So you think it's way easier to just death spiral. I'm worried that it's a death spot. I'm worried that it's going to turn worse. Like you could have never imagined when I used to go to San Francisco in the nineties and to do standup all the time. I would at the original cap city, which is this cool little club that seated like 150 people. It was great. You could walk around the city and cool places to eat and cool bars to go to. It was a fucking lovely city filled with culture and artists and interesting people and smart people. It's like where the smart people were, 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, the artists and the musicians and so much cool shit came from San Francisco. Amazing food, the restaurants, just like the, just to walking around the streets. People were cool. 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, uh, documenting. Yeah. Michael Schellenberg. Oh, I've had him on the show. He's amazing. He's amazing. And Michael Schellenberg, who used to, you know, used to be like 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 have this, 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. Like 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 flake step 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, 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. That's where it's going to come from. Oh, this isn't the video. This is a long ass video. This is like a unedited. Okay. They're joyriding. What are they doing? It seems like it. 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. So let's skip ahead. So a few people are not out of the car. They're climbing out here. Oh my goodness. Then you can see them climbing the stairs. Does that lady say I love you? Well, yeah, there's something going on. I, it's very confusing. I saw 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. It's, 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 could see where we're reinvesting. I don't know. 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. Cause then the, Oh yeah. No, that's the back seat. Right. Wow. I don't know. Is that the front seat? Which one? The front. That's the front. No. So that's the back. The front's in the, it does. The front is like, Oh my God. This is so crazy. Look at how it goes down. Boom. I'm looking forward to my, uh, yeah. So that was someone in the back seat. That was in the back passenger seat. Of course. Look how the doors open. Um, but whatever the fuck happened, that lady's like, I'm out bitch. Love you man. I gotta go. You got fucked up. Yikes. We've covered a lot of ground. San Francisco. Card Jack. Wish me luck. They, they check, card Jack that car and drove it over the 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. I'm just launching somebody. I know. Really? Yeah. They got, he stopped them from actually stealing it and it like the car flipped over. They got out and shot at him. Oh my God. It's not in San Francisco though. Where was that? Columbus. Yeah. God damn high. That's a gritty, gritty, gritty town, right? I love Columbus. Is that right? Yeah. It's fun. Fun plays do stand up. Fun people. Blue collar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fun, fun people. But you know, like all places took a hit during the pandemic. All places took a hit economically. They took a hit with violence and crime and, you know, and the, uh, mostly peaceful protests. That's right. Mostly peaceful protests is a great meme. Yeah. Yeah. That's that was on CNN, right? I think it was on a lot of places. I think a lot of places. The original one was, he's saying that and the fire behind that mostly peaceful protest. 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 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 with hockey. There is no place in Montreal that you truly would be afraid to take a wrong turn. Oh, well, that's nice. It'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 of blocks and we're like, this is an adventure. Yeah. An adventure in not dying when you're walking to a restaurant, like holy shit. Mine is 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. 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, to say as I am now that I did it and I lasted maybe 10 meters. It was your, my face was burning. Basically it was like playing football in the NFL. You lasted about, what a nice way to bring it back. The same way you would walk out with a football. God, it gets so cold. But 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. What is your next visit to Montreal? I don't know. I've been a Canada since all this shit went down till I couldn't cross the border. If I was unvaccinated. Yeah. That's true. And I'm like, you guys are out of your fucking mind. I mean, it still was in America until May. You couldn't come here. That's true. If you were, if you were like the last country to hang in there with that. 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, yeah, both of those guys, that's an incredible restaurant. It is. Yeah. I think it was voted in the top restaurants in Canada. Yeah. Well, should be. Montreal is just an amazing place for culture in general. It's just a beautiful city. It's great, great old architecture. It's just, 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 kinds 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? But according to the Quebec government, it is because Quebec is a distinct society that's surrounded by evil, you know, 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? And by the way, 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. But outside of Montreal, 20, 25, 30, 40 minutes, you could pretty much only speak French. And, you know, 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 gotta 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. And you've been at the front lines for a long time, my friend. You were sounding out about the dangers of all this stuff before anybody really recognized where it could go. Thank you for saying that. You and Jordan. Yeah. You know, I mean, you were even before him. Some of 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, 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 weird where people try to categorize people 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, like what's the source of them? How do they arise and how do they permeate through society in a 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 and like, you know, wait a minute, you know, the godfather's got some points here. Thank you, Joe. I really appreciate it. 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. Do it again. All right. Love you. Bye.