9: Bryan Callen - Cracking Wise 02:15:05

Hi, this is Eric Weinstein, and you found The Portal. Today, I am joined by none other than my friend, Brian Callen. Brian, welcome. It's good to be in The Portal, my friend. I'm not worthy, first of all. Let me say that I'm... Let me apologize to your guests. I'm not worthy. I'm nothing but a lowly comic. Athletic, yes, but that's about all. Supple, dangerous at times, giving always. Well, I think this is the first time we've started with that level of insincere groveling, but thank you, Brian, for breaking new territory. Thank you.

It's good. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. And I yours, sir. Stop. Okay. Now here's the thing. First of all, uh, I want to say that I so love your conversational style that at any time that you want to start hosting this, feel free. But, uh, we're just, we're just beginning the portal and what we're trying to do with, with the show and the series is two separate things. One, I think we're going to have a great time, uh, being here and interviewing lots of, uh, interesting people. Uh,

But there's a sort of a theme running through it, which is that I think a lot of people have realized that we've been in some kind of a stasis and that some of us may have found ways to break out of whatever this kind of malaise or miasma that settled over the country is. And we're trying to find the people.

and the concepts that might give people some new options to think about how to break free of whatever might be holding them in place or their communities or the country even, so at all different levels and scales. One of the things that has been most impressive to me about you is the way you use certain techniques for breaking new ground socially. And I was just thinking recently, I happened to

be invited over to your place. And you had a group of very talented combat sports guys. Just an eclectic group. It was an eclectic group, but it was, but there was a common theme and the common theme seemed to be people who are very skilled in a ring or in combat like situations. And it struck me that it was also incredibly diverse that in terms of a diversity standard, uh,

Other than the gendered issue, it was people of different hues, different religions, different cultural backgrounds, different age groups.

And it was one of the greatest salons and dinners I've been to in a long time. And it consisted largely of, as the British say, people taking the piss out of each other. Yeah. Yeah. And as a result, the intimacy in the room was off the charts. People were really opening up. People were being vulnerable. People were actually building each other up. And somehow there is no explanation for this behavior in the current cultural moment. It's like we've forgotten that.

what this is. Can you say a little bit about what you think is going on? Well, first of all, I think that it's, unfortunately, most people don't think they can make a difference with their ideas, with their conversation, with their point of view, with their actions. That's a cynicism. It's a deep cynicism that seems to, and I've always been an optimist, and I've always thought, if you look at history, it's usually a small group of people with

with a passionate set of ideas that get things moving. I mean, sometimes it's not for the good, in my opinion. For example, Russia in 1914, I mean, you had a very small group of intellectuals who got the communist revolution started. I might have been part of that back then if you looked at the way, you know, Russia was.

But these are people that had the gumption. I mean, if you look at the abolitionist movement, it was really started in England, I think in the 1840s. It was about these sort of like evangelical Christians who said, look, you know, no matter what, we can do this. If you look even in this country, John Brown, these were fanatics, but they were a small, energized group of people, the Quakers, Republicans.

They set these examples. You can even go into, you know, if you look, think about the ramifications of the marriage between, I think it was Ibn Saud and Wahab. The marriage of those kids and they made a deal. And he said, let me preach. Let me preach my puritanical message.

Salafi Islam, my puritanical version of Wahabi Islam. - This is back in the 1700s? - This was in, well, they met I think in 1744, but you know, subsequently, so this was a small group of very energetic people. Now I don't think a lot of times the outcome is so positive in those instances, but I, for better or for worse, I think the way you beat a bad idea is with a better idea. I'm quoting Amos Oz, who's the Israeli writer.

I never forgot him when he said that. And the way to come up with better ideas is not to purify your echo chamber. It's not to get, it's very tempting for guys like you and I, you know, it's very exciting for me to be able to even be around guys like you. I love Sam Harrison. You know, I love Jordan Peterson and you, you're very, you, you guys are very intelligent. You're highly educated guys.

And aside from the fact that personally I like you, but it would be very easy for all, when you have a dinner, typically what you see is people who've read the same books, listened to the same TED Talks, watched the same programs and have a similar background, educational background. I think that's boring.

I think I just do, man. I just love getting a Navy SEAL, a pro boxer who's never read a book. And then I put him with a D1 basketball player. Then I get a mathematician over there. And then I get an economist over here. And then I'll throw in a 90-year-old sometimes. I like to do that. A guy who's lived forever who's an actor, like my friend Jack Betts.

And then I'll throw in just two. Usually I'll get two people who I know aren't going to say much, but they want to listen. You need an audience.

And what you get is idea sex. You get an idea orgy. We had an idea orgy. And nobody looks at their phones, man. And it's 1.30 in the morning. And guess what? Everybody's learning from Eric Weinstein. And I knew that was going to happen. Because you come in and everybody there is heavy armed and tight in the belly. And everybody can talk about Manny Pacquiao. But all of these controlled savages are quoting poetry or they're talking about history. Yes.

To me, and it's just funny to hear you say it, you say guys like you, and I always felt the comedians and the musicians and the people who even study chess or jujitsu, this is all one thing.

family of people who have, you know, as I've called it before, a relationship with the unforgiving, like in chess, you make a move, you take the consequences of the move with rock climbing, you make a reach for a bad handhold. You have to deal with whatever comes next comedy, same thing, mathematics, et cetera. And so to me, there is a commonality, which is, are you engaged in some activity that is not that the, where the feedback is not mediated by, uh,

somebody's choice. Like there's no judge when you're a rock climber who says, well, I think that was an 8.3. Yeah. It's the rock. Yeah. It's the rock. Yeah. Well, I don't, I think sometimes, uh,

Anytime you have a group of people that are all in the same discipline, you know, the one great thing. So, so, you know, we talk about fighting. I love to box. And one of the guys there, Malik, I don't know if you remember Malik tall, tall, thin, tall, thin black guy, about six, 154 pounds. Malik's been boxing since he was seven.

Now, Malik was going to be on his way to be a world champion. He gets world champions ready. I know from other people that Malik gives world champions or did give world champions fits in the gym, as in he'd light them up, as in he's something special. And what's fun for me is trying to box with him. And I talk trash and I put in my mouthpiece and my headgear and I and I try to I cheat and I step on his foot. I kick him sometimes. I do everything I can.

Anytime he wants, he can put me to sleep. Anytime. And he's nice enough just to pat me around. And I'm the old man, I'm swinging. I try to hit him. I do everything I can to try to hit him. When we're done, he's taught me a couple things. I'm building my tree of knowledge when it comes to boxing. I love doing anything I'm bad at because it's humbling. And somehow I think it opens other portals. It kind of somehow stimulates. I become better at comedy. I become better at things. I don't know why.

Um, and then what happens is we sit down and he asks me cause he's on this education kick cause he didn't have the benefit of an education because he was always boxing. And so then it's time for me to sort of tutor him as we're warming down and we just talk over a meal. So it's a beautiful kind of symbiotic relationship where I get so much from him and so much wisdom and he gets so much from me. Now I'm also 20 years older, which is the only reason he can beat me.

All right. But the point is that they're there. So, so I don't know if I'm answering your question. Well, no, you're actually getting to another topic, which I'm fascinated by. You can continue the riff or I can jump. No, please. So there's a, there's a, I don't know how to say it exactly, but kind of a, a pattern that I've noticed. I haven't heard much commented upon, which is that social interactions get really rich when people can pass power back and forth. In other words,

if you have some kind of power and you, and you sit on it, it's not nearly as powerful as if I somehow give it away to you and you give it back to me. So for example, if you look at a happy couple, um, maybe the man praises his wife to the hill talks about how he married up, et cetera, et cetera. And,

In return, you know, she talks about how, you know, what an honor it is being with a man she can look up to. And the idea is that they've both exchanged power and built something in the diet. But, okay, that's a very important, and that's a very important idea and at the crux of why I put all these people from different ilks together, right? Great, say more. So one person has $100 million, the other person is having trouble making rent.

What I like about putting all those people together that are so different is that yes, yes, Eric, you might be smarter at theoretical math, but you have deficits too. We all do. We all do. So you're, you may be a superstar over here. Yes. Malik can knock me out with a right hand, but,

that is relevant only when we're in the ring, right? It's a little bit like, so all of us have these deficits. All of us have these weaknesses. Where are you smart? Where are you brave? Where are you strong? Well, it depends, but we are all dumb, weak cowards depending. - Somewhere. - Yes. And so when you try to get good at something,

You learn very quickly what your limitations are, what your strengths are. You learn a lot about yourself. And one of the cool things about people who've been in a ring or in a cage or on a mat is they are very aware of how tough they're not. There is no one who you know who fights who hasn't been...

Surprise. Surprise, knocked out, humbled. You're not getting good at combat, which I'm not, but you're not getting good at combat with a big ego. Enjoy that because what's going to happen is they're going to figure you out. You've got to constantly stay humble. The best fighters are the ones...

The ones that I know are the ones who are always going back to class, always learning. So of course they're going to be humble. Of course they're going to give back. Of course they're going to... It's like my buddy Amir Peretz, who is this Israeli badass soldier, but now teaches self-defense. He's the most humble, loving, giving person in the world because he has a very, very...

intimate understanding of what real violence is about and how easy it is, how easy it is to take a life. I mean, we're just flesh and bone. So there's no such thing as tough. There just isn't. There just isn't. I don't like those words. There's no such thing probably as strong. We are all terribly vulnerable.

- You know, I always talk about having children and I hate loving something that much because it's like watching a balloon float around a hot lamp. Well, we're all that way. - Well, you're the first person actually who's said this. This is what I always tell people about having kids. The main problem is that you don't want to love anything as much as you end up loving your child. - I mean, you know, thanks for giving me something I can't bear to lose. - Right. - You know, Jesus.

So did you get emotional just now? Well, yeah. I mean, because I actually lived it, you know, I thought about a relative who lost a son and you know, we've had two losses from auto accidents and you, you see people just trans just transformed by a loss that they couldn't control. There's no way to protect against it. And what it left me with was this idea that,

nobody, the most enviable person in the world is one knock on the door away from being somebody that you would pity. You know, you would just think. - That's so true. - And so that's what, that's the weird thing for me about envy, which is,

I've never had a billion dollars, but I have a good friend with a billion dollars and he's let me borrow his lifestyle for short periods of time. I had another friend who owned an island and so he let me borrow his island. And so I've at least seen and felt a little bit through pretend and play what it would be like to have a fantastic amount of money.

And I wish I could give this as a present to everybody to just try out the lifestyle for a day or two and figure out what it would do for you and what it doesn't do for you. And one thing it doesn't do for you is that there's no way to keep your children safe.

You can just do the best. There's no way that that's, that's for sure that we are always, I think Jordan Peterson was talking about, you know, in the Bible, the garden of Eden still as great as it was a snake still got in. Yeah. I mean, as, as even God couldn't keep a snake out of the garden of Eden. I mean, there is always danger lurking and you have to come to terms with that. And one of the things that I think, um,

I like about understanding violence at least shooting a gun right getting knocked out getting tapped out getting close to that a little bit I went to a war zone you know did stand up in Afghanistan in 2007 you at least you something about it makes you feel way more alive man you feel a lot more alive

And maybe the closer to death you are, the more alive you feel. And I got to tell you, after I came back, I was talking to my buddy, Dov Davidoff. We were terrified all the time because the suicide bombings were at a high and he'd be in these Humvees and stuff. I started getting addicted to that fear. I mean, I got, I don't want to be disrespectful to anybody who's been in a combat zone, but just my, the little bit I was there, I think 11 or 12 days, I got, and then we did a simulation firefight with, you know, lasers and stuff. And I, I,

I could feel that adrenaline. I was jonesing for it.

For a long time afterwards. And so was my friend. We talked about it. I can't imagine going through a real firefight. Do you know PGA work that the author, so he, I wish, I think it may have been Tennyson that he was actually referencing, but he, he said, um, we used to discuss the drunk delight of battle before we decided that war was a bad thing. And, you know, I'm on record of saying that I like everything about war except for the death and destruction. Then in some sense you need life and death, uh,

risk at least to catalyze certain things and then there's a question about does the life and death risk need to involve conflict between people and one of the things I'm curious about is the structure of the buddy picture which is a Hollywood staple and in the buddy picture you have to establish the two people really detest each other

And then they have to go through some sort of transformational conflict. And only then do they realize that they both have sort of a complementarity that allows them to be truly close. - That's right. Look at what happens to guys who hate each other before a fight in the UFC, beat the crap out of each other. I mean, they're full of blood. What do they do? They hug. - Yeah. - They hug. - Well, sometimes. - They hug again. Most of the time. There are times when no, but most of the time,

They hug and we want them to hug, you know? No, no. Well, I mean, boy, there's so much to do right here. You saw this weird briefest fight in the UFC, this Askeran. Right. Yeah.

That was different. It wasn't even a fight. It was a surprise attack. Yeah. That's Jorge Masvidal. You can't talk trash to Jorge Masvidal for three weeks before the fight the way Askren does and then expect him not to showboat a little bit. You can't do that to Jorge. For Jorge Masvidal, that's a real fight. And he still doesn't like it. Like he said, he goes, if I see him in a supermarket, he might get slapped up because I don't like him. Yeah. So this is the issue that some fights,

are transformational and they produce a closeness and some fights don't resolve whatever the tension is. And so one of the things I'm super curious about is, is it your experience? Like if I think about the fist fights I got in growing up,

I would say that I ended up closer to about half of the people that I fought and it had to do with some, I don't know, intangible ineffable quality. I can't quite put my finger on. Can you say when it is that you find that a fight can be transformational in male intimacy? I don't know. I think, I think it, I think, look, I mean,

We are, fighting is the purest of sport in a way. I mean, what is football? It's a game of inches, yes, but it's simulated war. Well, it's like multiple layers of indirection from war. That's right. Basketball, baseball, these are- Even more. These are very, I mean, the competition is very heated. These guys are giving it their all. There's something about fighting that,

where especially when it's MMA or something, but for that matter, really boxing, I think where you, where you're coming as close as you can get almost to what it's like to see a man kill another man or a woman nowadays, kill another woman with their bare hands.

There's something primordial to that that brings us back to when we were, you know, when we first evolved, you know. Well, so we talked sometimes about the Chomskyan pregrammar of language. And I've, in other places, talked about the, is there a Chomskyan pregrammar of religion? And is there a Chomskyan pregrammar of violence? Well, I think we were probably communicating words

way before we developed language. I mean, I can, there are parts of the world I know I can get in a fight right away just by holding a stare.

and the way I'm standing. I promise I can get a guy to go, you got a problem? You want to get in a fight really very quickly? I'll take you down. I'll take you to Brooklyn. I'll take you to Long Island. I'll take you to, I'll take you to anywhere in Boston or Philly. I promise for that matter, Jersey. And by the way, not necessarily in LA, but let me take you to the Inland Empire. Yeah. Just stand and stare for a little bit. Right. Just posture up. Something's going to happen, you know? So we are very aware of,

I think we have antenna that have been developed over millennia for when somebody's trying to take what's ours. And I always say this about, I'm writing about vulnerability now. I'm writing about what, you know, men are supposed to be vulnerable and we're supposed to sit with our sad and cry and get in touch with all. Okay, all right, man, but I'm dealing- - To a point. - I'm dealing with a lot of genetic residue. For a long time,

you know, I had to hunt, you know, with, with a spear or whatever. And I had to, you know, I, I have to believe that a lot of this is wired. And, and if you think of what it was to be a human, a human being in most cases throughout our history, whether we were in a small village or whatever, if you were in a vulnerable, if you were in a

For that matter, you could have been in Baghdad in 1258 and the Mongols or Constantinople in, what was it? 14 something, when the Ottomans broke down the wall. Our history has been, here they come over the hill, they're gonna break down our walls and kill us and take our women and children as slaves. That's the story of history. So you'll forgive me if I'm not a little bit ready all the time to fight for my life. - So this is, boy, am I glad we're here.

Sometimes I think about the idea that vulnerability has to be earned through strength. So, for example, if you look at Vin Diesel, if he's wearing a feather boa, it's only because he's Vin Diesel. He can't wear a feather boa if you're not really deadly. You got to have another man's blood on the feathers. Well, you know, or I don't know if you ever saw, what was it? Yeah.

with Tim Roth is the swordsman and there's a great duel in the end. Is it Rob Roy? I love Tim Roth. And he's like, he's, he's there with his like frilly cuffs and thing, but he's got better swords sort ability than anybody. And he's just completely deadly. And so in some weird way, in order to be comfortable with that vulnerability, you actually, it's almost like the dessert that comes from having a

proven yourself as somebody to be not to be trifled well i think that um it's an interesting thing because when you really study the language of vulnerability the again the fighters that did i you know i know enough combat navy seals and these guys uh i think they have a real sense of their own mortality i mean because they've either had to take lives or they've seen their friend i mean it's so it happens so quickly so it's a combination of

They become vulnerable, but they don't sweat the small stuff. I think a lot of this politically correct insanity about you said this word and that makes you a racist or whatever it is. We're just we're so offended all the time.

most of those people it it goes back to what you were saying we don't have an existential threat anymore and so most of those people don't really know and haven't really suffered because they're mostly white they haven't really suffered this this egregious racism slash ezra klein god bless him but ezra you know he he i listened to his his him talk and stuff and

And I mean, Ezra is so painfully educated and I can tell he's read every book in the world and he lives in Washington, D.C. and he probably has great dinner parties and he's friends with all kinds of intelligent intelligentsia. And he can talk about how vicious a slaveholder Thomas Jefferson was and would beat me at any debate. But I don't think Ezra necessarily really is friends with anybody who works with their hands or.

who smokes or who has punched people in the face for a living. And it's not a knock on him. And I might be wrong about him. I just, I think that his, I think if we were under, in different circumstances, we wouldn't have time for this shit. We wouldn't have time for this shit. Let me make another point. This is a better way to say it.

I watch when I'm in a restaurant and it's a busy restaurant and I see a woman from Malaysia, another one from the Philippines, another guy's black, another guy's Chinese, another guy's... I don't know what they look like. There's a wonderful composite. Then there's a couple of white people and they're all trying to get food to the customers. I promise you no one there is thinking about what your sexual orientation is, what your color scheme...

fuck off. I'm trying to get food on the table, bro. Right. And this noise, this noise over here, you people are making that, well, that this is not fair. We're like, dude, okay, good. I got work to do, man. I got work to do. I'm making a living here. Can you get the fuck away from me and let, let the economy do what it's supposed to do. Right. That's why ultimately I'm a free market guy. Get out of my way with your, I don't think we're free anymore. I think we're taking our freedoms away from it. You can't say anything.

You can't express an unpopular point of view. So this would be a portal point and something I'd be super interested in developing. Um,

for a while we started hearing comedians saying, I won't play colleges anymore. That colleges have become unfun, it throws me off my comedy game, it's not something I wanna be doing because people are so easily offended and part of the function of comedy was to explore that which is offensive and to give people access where normally they would sort of block it off and not be able to do it.

And then Joe Rogan, our mutual friend said something interesting to me. He said, it is now the golden age of comedy. I said, what? And he said, well, we've started figuring out how to tell these jokes after a period where we couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. And the best people,

are now able to explore these things because some new skill level had been unlocked. Does that resonate with you as a, as a standup? I don't know. As you saying it, I was thinking, Hmm, that's an interesting thing. Um, it's certainly way more lucrative now and it's easier to reach a wider audience and also your own audience. So, you know, you can niche. So you and Joe might have different audiences. Well, well, we may have the same, I don't know, but we probably have a similar audience, but I,

I think it's much easier to find your niche. And so that can be a little bit deceptive. Okay. Right? So I don't know the answer. He might be right about that. I do think there's some great comedy out there and I think it's needed. I think people like Bill Burr and Jim Jefferies and Rogan are needed because they're satirists and it's probably the last place on earth where you can really speak your mind and

and express unpopular points of view without suffering the kinds of ramifications you would if you worked at Google, Facebook, or the People's Republic of Apple, wherever it might be. These places are pretty tyrannical, it seems. I don't know. I haven't worked there. Well, you mentioned Bill Byrd. So again, I...

I don't know if you know this, but I did 10 to 15 minutes of standup. That's all I've ever done. I didn't know that. It was, you're very funny. It's very, it was very terrifying and very, and very fun. Um, but it was more or less impromptu. Uh, one of the things that I felt, um, as an outsider though, other than that, I have no experience is that when I saw Bill Burr talking about particularly gendered issues, uh,

I felt like I was watching Alex Honnold, the rock climber go up El Capitan. It was so, it was so fraught. It was so dangerous. Of course it was. Can we, can we geek out for a second? Who is, who is innovating really new stuff and not from the perspective of being in the audience, but you know, like there, there's a secret bar behind the comedy club we were just discussing and I was invited back there. I got a chance to listen to what are comedians talking about in terms of craftsmanship

of craft can you take us in to this world what is going on in chappelle and rock are still doing it they're still they're still taking on whatever whatever is sacred territory um i don't know that there are i don't know that there are any innovations i think i think the the only the only thing you can do with stand-up is to

I always say, write about what you're ashamed of, what you're afraid of, who you're pretending to be versus who you really are. These deeper questions. How do you want to die? What do you want to say when you die? What don't you want to say when you die? These are the kinds of things. What do you want God to say to you when you die if there is such a thing? What if there is God and you don't believe him? These are the questions that I like to play on fears and ask questions. I think that's where you get...

And it goes back to the salon thing. That's where I think you start sort of striking common ground with your audience, right?

One of the things I truly believe, and it comes from the fact that I lived in seven different countries until I was 14 years old. Really, yeah. I was born in the Philippines. I then moved to Calcutta, then Bombay or Mumbai. And then- Same Mumbai. I know, right? So it's Bombay. Well, our family, so you know my wife. And my wife's from Bombay. She's the one who told me. Right. So she's the one who corrected me.

That's why now I say Bombay. So the weird thing is that it's one of these things where educated people think that Mumbai is the hot happening. That's what I say. Sophisticated way. And I think her perspective is that that was actually the result of the Shiv Sena who had a Maharashtra for Maharashtra's campaign. So Bombay. Sorry. He didn't mean that, people. I don't know. Yeah.

I don't even know what that is. I'm trying to be popular. What's your point of view? I'm trying to jump on your bandwagon. Well, just that it's like New York State realizing that New York City is captured and deciding it's going to enforce New York State culture on New York City, which is much more cosmopolitan. So Bombay.

All right. But you've lived in. So Bombay, then Lebanon, then Pakistan, then Lebanon again. The war broke out. Stuck there for six months. Evacuated to Greece. Then Saudi Arabia. Then I'm 14 years old. I go to boarding school in Massachusetts. Then college down in Washington, D.C. And then, of course, L.A., New York, New York, L.A., back and forth. And finally, I'm the international movie star that I am now. Well, TV. TV.

But, but so, so, so my experience, my experience being around all those people, all those Muslims and all those Hindus and all those Christians and all those, um,

all those Arabs and all those Pakistanis and all those Indians and all those Filipinos and all those Afghanis and all those Ethiopians and Eritreans and Somalis. This is like the 12 days. And by the way, in, in that I traveled to communist Russia, communist China, when it really was communist Russia and communist China, Yemen, Syria. I was everywhere. I mean, you can Jordan, you name it. Yeah.

Seeing things like leprosy, advanced stages of leprosy in the marketplaces of Yemen. I mean, terrifying things. And feeling so lucky to be an American and not knowing why I was never hungry, but seeing real starvation in Kenya and Tanzania and the outskirts.

And the guilt, the fucking guilt of going, why am I so protected? Why do I feel safe and so full of food? And I'm watching, you know, I'm a pretty compassionate, imaginative person, I hope, enough to feel guilty, right? But the one thing I got from that experience was that essentially...

I don't give a shit what your religion, what your culture is. Essentially, we're all very much the same. We all enjoy humorous insults. We all, which is goes back to, you know, and we all want a better life for our kids and we all love to laugh and we all want to feel safe. And all you have to do with anybody from a different culture, and I don't care where they're from, is see them,

acknowledge that they are like you, compliment them a little bit maybe, know a little bit about where they're from or ask them some questions about what it's like to be who they are. And man, oh man, will all the doors open. And so that's why in my salons, as it were, I love proving that over and over again by taking the most eclectic group I can and throwing them all together and watching all those ideas unfold

find, um, you know, I guess life and that that's the secret. Well, so one of the things that I think about in this area is how much, um, to get this formula to work, it really requires skill. And there's an old definition of a gentleman that I'm very partial to, which is a gentleman is someone is a man who has never rude by accident. And, um,

I think one of the problems we're having is, is that there are people at very different skill levels. And so if you think about, you know, the terrifying words that one must not say, that really is sort of an admonition when everyone is now broadcasting via social media or their, you know, podcasting or Twitter feed, whatever it is that we're now frightened that people have very low skill and low experience are going to start opining to

at scale about things in ways that are really destructive. So for example, if you think about how far we've come from George Carlin's observations, Carlin died right before the financial crisis. And his perspective was that there wasn't a word you can't say. There are no bad words. There are bad contexts. There are bad people. There may be bad intentions. We're now in a world where Bill Maher is lectured

by a guy who founds NWA as to what words he can't say. How does, how does that shake out?

I think that's just a bad idea that will be scrapped eventually. I don't know how much damage it will do. It's a fad. A lot of these bad ideas are repackaged and they will cause their damage. But hopefully, because we have enough history to draw from, hopefully they will lose their relevance. I worry that there's this...

there's this strange movement to go back to old fashioned collectivism. I mean, this old fashioned idea of socialism and even communism and Marxism. And, and I, uh,

I don't know what this is. These are young people who don't, as I really, I really pay attention to it. They don't have a command of history. They don't know a lot. They just don't. Maybe I'm just older and I've done more reading and living, but I lived in those socialist utopias. And, and, and I went to those countries when they were very earnestly socialist and communist. And, and,

I'm always amazed at these ideas and they come out of academia. They come out of these professors and I know a lot of them and I have arguments with them on my other podcast. They are people who just don't have a lot of it. I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how many books you've read. You, my friend, don't make the trains run on time. You, my friend, have never had to make, turn a profit with a real business. You live behind walls in a university. You, my friend,

And those people are important, but they can also be just as dangerous as somebody with no ideas. What you point out, just to riff off of that, is that what if you have a system which effectively functions in a cult-like way, which is very few people who are academicians have ever left school.

In other words, they start at kindergarten or pre-K. - That's what's going on. - And if you leave, it's very suspicious if you return. You can't take five years off for most people. Now occasionally there are exceptions, but the system as a system of selective pressures is selecting specifically for people who never venture outside their initial environment. - I have talked to very smart academic all-stars. People talk about them all the time without going into names.

And one didn't really realize that they were trying to raise some money for something they wanted me to host. And he didn't really understand that there were agents out there that could raise sponsorship. He just didn't live in an economic world. But he's very happy to, and we had a big argument about it, he's very happy to advocate for an 80% tax rate for anybody making over a million dollars because he wants to go back to

what he thinks is Scandinavian like socialism, which is wrong. Scandinavia doesn't have that kind of a tax rate. And so you're wrong, but also this hunter gatherer ideal. Okay. All right. You know, good luck with that, but you shouldn't be making economic policy. You're not. Well, so you're bringing up something, which I think is terrifying. What happens when,

The sense making professions, that is the people that we deputize as our experts for taking in raw data and saying, okay, tell us what this means and tell us what we should do next. And you find this in education, you find this in, let's say journalism and the sort of talking head class.

all of these sort of institutional sense makers are caught up in business models, which are now selecting for people who have very little experience outside of this world. And I feel like if we don't come up with jobs for that class that pay very well, what you're going to get is you're going to get very ideological people with very little outside experience who are

are imagining a collectivist world that functions beautifully but not thinking about the amount of coercion and violence that it would take to accomplish that and whether or not it's something you want to even do it to begin with there's that idea there's that saying i love which is um an idea is a very dangerous thing to have if it's the only one you have it's a very dangerous thing if it's the only one you have i see and i think that there there is this orthodoxy this

homogenous, you know, kind of collective mind that comes out of a lot of these places. And you're right. I mean, there's no room. But I have two things to say. One, I think I worry that a lot of these big companies, I mean, to express even a different point of view, even to cite

the science behind the difference between men and women will get you fired. It gets you fired. I mean, it really can affect your bottom line. So it is a form of violence or certainly, what is the word? Coercion in a real sense, conformity mostly. But you know what? Americans are hard to fool and Americans don't like extremes. And there is a shitload of pushback

not just in this sort of this hard left kind of like mentality, but it's a big pushback and a lot of intellectual pushback as well, in my opinion. And it's only getting stronger. I mean, there's a reason that reasonable people who are responsive to evidence like yourself, like Jordan Peterson, whoever it might be, there's a reason these people really hit a chord. People like to listen to them because they're like, I knew this other stuff wasn't making that much sense.

you know, I, I feel like I'm stuck in this ideological world and I don't, I don't, you guys are calling me racist or you're calling me, you're telling me I'm not into equality. I'm not even thinking about that. I'm a fair minded person, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of pushback. Well, I, I mentioned this to Sam Harris and I think I'm going to maybe do a show on this podcast. Um,

Called the Hilbert problems. The topic would be the Hilbert problems of social justice. And so maybe the easiest one is you can't possibly understand my experience because you don't share it and you must understand my experience because it's so important. And so you just take these two things and then you say, look, I want to discuss those. That is a couplet.

I must understand. And I cannot understand because that's your problem after all. And what if I can actually write a screenplay, let's say, or do an impression on a stage where you say that was so good that there's no way you could have inhabited that character without understanding me. I felt that way. For example, if you remember, uh, Eddie Murphy is the old Jewish guy. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, he does a better Jew than any Jew I know. - Of course he does. He's an actor and he was around them. And you know, exactly. Exactly. - And so this idea that- - Again, it goes back to what? It goes back to the fact that we have a lot more in common with each other than we- - Well, in order to unlock that, don't we have to have enough safety to, and this is kind of this puzzle for me about the weird social justice movement.

If you create cancel culture, you're telling me that it is not safe to open my mouth and say something. That's right. Your ideas are harmful. Therefore, I'm not going to even bring them up to a conscious level because they're far too dangerous. What if one of them came out of my mouth inadvertently or in a joke that went south? Now you've got a really serious problem, which is what if some kind of bigotry and some kind of prejudice is just happening

It's garden variety. It's not very interesting. It's universally distributed. Everybody has it. That's probably, I mean, I have multiple feelings about how I feel about different people in different circumstances. If you don't allow some of this stuff to bubble up and come out your mouth and, and look at it for the brain fart that it really is, then you're, you're going to sit there weirdly guilty about,

- Either angry that you can't say that you wanna be able to say it, or you're gonna say, wow, I really am ashamed that I actually think that. - Well, I always say, all of us in my, I think I have a joke, all of us have at least 10 thoughts an hour, maybe a minute that would get us fired. I mean, and thank God, by the way. You know, Jonathan Haidt, I don't know if you've heard him talk on this subject, but he wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" and "The Righteous Mind." He's just, I love him. But he said that there is this,

He compares it to the, I think the Corazon of the Philippines. I think that's who they were called, who would gain status by killing

uh the most people you know essentially your enemy and you take their heads or you take a trophy maybe a piece of their hair and you gain status that way you got more women that way and this is an example of a sick culture i don't give a shit how how pure it is it's a sick culture right and there are a lot of examples of that and we seem to be in some pockets of this country there is this this uh

You gain status by finding the racist, by finding the bad guy, according to your orthodoxy, according to your puritanical, your puritanical idea of what a human being should be. It's a scavenger hunt that's gone out of control, like Pokemon for bigots and there aren't enough bigots to play it. It's not new, though. It's a form of the Inquisition. It's not new. Again, human beings love purity. They love the idea. You get these people who love the idea of trying to purify humanity.

and create their own utopia, which a lot of historians have written about. The most dangerous thing a human being can do... The most dangerous thing a movement can endeavor to do is to purify or create a utopia. Because what you'll do...

And if you have any questions, see Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Stalin's Russia. I mean, Stalin would have people killed because they had the wrong idea of what communism. And then you take whole groups because they've already been corrupted. Their brains, you can't really reeducate them. They're too old. So they're all wearing glasses. Anybody who's wearing glasses is an intellectual. They read a lot. They have a lot of this poisonous capitalist stuff in their head. Let's just bring them out to the killing fields and let's get rid of them. That's what happened throughout history.

That's what happens when you have ideologues running things because they're not smart. They're fanatics. They don't open themselves up to other points of view. I don't know why nobody ever talks about this. It's exactly what you're saying. This issue that purity is weirdly the most dangerous concept we have when people try to purify their

terrible things happen. And we have a ritual on Friday nights. We have a weekly Shabbat dinner. And in our family, we take the Shabbat cup of wine and we put two drops in it. And there's always this question. Why do you put two drops of water in the wine beforehand? My interpretation is,

is that it is us learning to live with impurity, that these two drops of water can bother your mind. Well, now the wine isn't pure. It's been watered down. It's adulterate. It makes no effing difference to the wine. And it's teaching my, the way I view it is it's teaching my children to avoid becoming fanatics about purity. When I think about the off-ramp, I don't know if you've ever seen this in Saudi Arabia, on the road to Mecca,

there's this wonderful off ramp that says, uh, Muslims only Mecca this way, all others, this is your off ramp. And I think about that and I think, wow, I wonder how much of the, the, the division in Islam between the things that go towards this jihadist craziness and the things that make for this wonderfully rich, uh, welcoming culture,

Some in some ways they're inextricable, but I wonder how much of it has to do with which portions of the culture have learned to live with impurity Well, I look at our culture Thomas Jefferson owned 600 human beings when he wrote all men are created equal that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed to their creator certain inalienable rights among which are life liberty in the pursuit of happiness he owned 600 human beings when he wrote that

I mean we we our peculiar institution I mean slavery we've been a country with slavery longer than we've been a country without slavery but you'd be hard-pressed to find a freer longer-standing democracy throughout history we are a modern country precisely because we continue to wrestle with that inconsistency so this is something I'd love to dig into

- One of the weird things about hearing the patriarchy, the patriarchy, the patriarchy, is the one place that was an actual patriarchy was the founding of our country. And what's hysterically funny and just sort of beautiful about it is that these guys wrote with enough generality

That they didn't make the mistake of saying all men other than Africans are created equal or all men are created equal and not you women. They spoke with a level of generality where. Think about how general life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is. Think about that. Right. You have the right to life.

You have the right to liberty and you have the right to pursue happiness, not happiness, but to pursue happiness. Meaning if pursuing happiness is, is, I don't know, living in water in a pond, whatever it is, then that's, you have that right. Right. And that is, that's our real religion. That's, that's what we come to defend. You know, that's his right. You hear it. But the,

the theory in some sense was so much more advanced than the instantiation at the founding of the country. One of the things that I find hysterically funny and also hopeful is that we, we have the opportunity in this country and we don't do it much to teach both every lousy, stupid, hypocritical thing we've done as a nation, many of them violent, many of them deadly, uh,

And to teach patriotism on top of that, because if you think about this in terms of all countries have histories, which contain things that they'd rather sweep under a rug. And somehow patriotism has been sort of people on the right really try to take it over. And as somebody who comes from a very progressive family, which suffered because of, let's say, the McCarthy era. Yeah.

I love this country and I know every lousy thing it's ever done. Do we have an opportunity to sort of reboot patriotism at a more mature level where the love of one country is an adult love rather than a childlike love? I think that most people, I happen to believe that most people are patriotic for the right reasons. I think America is an idea. I mean, the founding fathers solved the political problem.

Problem. The Greeks couldn't do it and no one else could do it. The Ottomans couldn't do it. The Romans sure as hell couldn't do it. This was, this is, I mean, these are a bunch of men in their thirties with the exception of Benjamin Franklin got together. What was in a hot July in Philadelphia and came up with this thing called the constitution and the bill of rights. Are you fucking kidding me?

I mean, think about it for a second. It's insane. It's astonishing. Checks and balances. You've got a Supreme Court. And I mean, and it was what was the legend goes, you know, when...

ben franklin came out and she's the woman said what have you created and he said a republic matter if you can keep it yeah it's great but this is this is an experiment this is a verb uh it has to be constantly defended george washington said careful or human beings will invent ways to take their own freedom away from themselves in the name of virtue and everything else so um

I think that for the most part, what I appreciate about patriotism in this country and, you know, is, is the, that at least people truly believe that we, that democracy having a say in who governs you.

And, and, and the big question in political philosophy, who governs the governor? Well, in our case, it's the people. Now, I know we can get into, you know, lobbying and how we're losing that ability and special interests, of course. But for the most part, that is always what's fiercely debated. You know, we are worried always that Washington is becoming an economy of influence, right?

that we are losing our meritocracy, but it's still the fact that, look at how vicious the press is to Donald Trump. And amen to that, whether you like him or not, you never want to lose the ability to this constant nasty battle. Oh, I want to take issue with this. Actually, this is the first place where I might have a disagreement with you. Okay, but this nasty battle, this nasty battle between, that's fake news, you're full of shit, he's a scumbag, he's a sex addict, all these things, he's a rapist. Yeah.

I don't think actually it's ever been any different in American politics. American politics has always been... They used to compare Abe Lincoln to an ape and all kinds of things. And they tried to start all these sexual rumors about different candidates. This has always been a dirty place. But...

I think that's probably what you get in a vibrant democracy. The big difference, the big difference between our democracy and someone else's, let's just take Iran, is if the hardliners lose, they die. They don't live to fight another day.

When we lose... A peaceful transition. It's a peaceful transition. So far. It's incredible. And the big thing was, I think, between Jefferson and John Adams. I think John Adams wanted a standing army, and Jefferson was against that because...

And but it was, look, they were very worried that they called him these wild eyed Jeffersonians. I mean, they were very worried that Jefferson was going back to this agrarian utopia. And I mean, he was a kind of a, there was a lot of talk about we got to get rid of these. This is, this could be a civil war. I mean, anytime you have a revolutionary war, anytime you have a

a country that wins their independence. Almost always they break into a civil war. Somebody's got to fight for power. This is the only country I can think of that didn't have that happen. And so I don't know how we got along on this, but it's- You mean so like India and Pakistan during partition after liberation? Oh my God, a horrible, a horrible civil war. Right. And in fact, it created the formation of Pakistan. Right. But so there's something very special about

about our patriotism, about our democracy as messy and as nasty and as quote unquote partisan as it is. Maybe it's supposed to be that way. Maybe, maybe government is supposed to move at a snail's pace. Well, I think when you have some, I think we're in a very dysfunctional period where the amount of nonsense, you know, I refer to K fabrication from the word kayfabe,

uh, which is the system of lies that professional wrestling uses to tell its stories. Right. So you've, I never heard that, but I like it. Yeah. So I do, I do have to say before you go into your thing, I love when you come up with these things, because when you left the dinner, uh, Malik, a professional boxer from, you know, Louisiana and Vegas and my buddy Herman who played D one ball and he's from Philly and,

both of them both of them were like man i fuck with eric i fuck with that dude he's so fucking smart he was saying shit i wanted to oh we what when can we have another dinner with that dude like everybody everybody wanted more weinstein so congratulations and your wife by the way she's a superstar she's she's great she's she's fantastic but keep going try to get around the show the uh when it comes to kevin

To K fabrication. I think that we're in a period of nonsense where we're talking about all sorts of things. And the best that can be said of us is that we are inefficient in unraveling ourselves. What I worry about is that we actually need something like an enemy in order to remind ourselves of how to get along despite our differences.

And I don't know whether part of the problem is that this unprecedented level of peace, even with foreign entanglements since World War II, is in fact deranging us. Is that possible? I do. I've heard that theory. Right. I've heard that sort of without...

War, I think it was the British general, I can't remember his name, said without war, you know, the population becomes very materialistic and petty. And until you have a common enemy, that's what unifies the country and gets people back down to what's actually important, values, duty, honor, things like this.

I don't know. I think time will tell. I think there are a lot of challenges. You were talking about combat athletes and all these guys. I think you said something so funny. I feel like I was on the Serengeti with a bunch of thoughtful cheetahs.

over a kill it was the fucking greatest metaphor i've ever heard it was so great but what you forget is that all of us think of you as the alpha male no because but it's true because you come in there and you're not physical but you're funny as everybody you're just cracking everybody up but then at the same time everybody knows everybody knows you got the biggest brain in the room so we start asking you you're i asked you about string theory it was so fucking hilarious because you started talking

And all of us were like, I don't know what he's, what's he talking about? Well, you know, well, the loops, if you look at the loops in the cones of the sphere, we have a predator. I'm like, what the fuck? Hey, bro, in English, stop with the Greek. You're speaking already. Well, there was, there was a fair amount of wine. There was a fair amount. There was indeed. But the point is, is that you had your own alpha status there. So there was a, there was a very, you know, well, do you want to get into what I'm sorry to tie that back in? It's hard.

It's hard enough. I don't know that we necessarily need an existential threat. Trying to make it in this economy and trying to put food on the table and gain some leisure time is still as hard as it ever has been. So maybe that's, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer either. But I do think that

one of the things we need to get back towards and just riffing again from the ways in which, um, I was observing your crowd deal with stuff is twice. I've been in a social gathering with you where there's been one female and a bunch of these guys, and I've watched how careful all the men are to elevate, um, not only the female, but whoever is there with them,

the lone female in the group. And the idea being that when it, when it, when it was my wife, the idea was people were, were holding me up and being a little kinder and a little nicer because you want to make that person look good in the eyes of, of the woman at the table. And the woman. It's a really astute observation. I agree with you. That's exactly what was happening. Well, because, because,

in my mind we've gotten, we've broken something a little bit in terms of male female relations and we are going to be in a process of either rediscovering what was lost or re reinstantiating whatever the abstraction was that was chivalry. Do you have any thoughts on, on where that goes? Like for instance, look, my, my experience, um,

with the men I know that I'm friends with and the hardest, toughest guys that I know and stuff like that, they're all gentlemen.

You know, if you have a guy who's not being a gentleman, who's rude to the woman at the table, or who is making her feel embarrassed, that guy's not in our fucking group. Well, you're first going to correct, like, give a few corrective signals. Oh, and all of my friends will. I don't know a friend. I don't have a friend who wouldn't be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What I think...

is super important and attractive about chivalry is the idea of protector. Well, of protector that, that there is a functionally important role. I'm going to try to figure out how to get at this thought to the violence. That is, you know, if there's a knock on the door, for example, at three in the morning, um,

my model is, is that mom goes to the nursery and dad goes to the front door to handle it. Correct, sir. And there is an expendability of us males that we accept as part of this bargain. That is, that is children. And that's in our DNA. It's in our DNA. That's in our DNA. Right. You're the first line of defense. You're the first and last line of defense. That's 100% the case. And, uh, I, I don't apologize for that. And I don't have a friend that's not that way. Um,

That's, that's, uh, we want to be the, of course we do. And that's attractive and that's noble and that's beautiful. And that's men at their best, by the way. Yeah. Uh, that's what people don't realize when you talk about, I always say this, man, I'm, I,

You know, when we talk about gun control. Right. I don't like guns, dude. I don't like them. And I don't want spree shooters out there. And I think I listen hard to people who are pro-gun control because I want to find a solution to this insanity. Okay. But...

people have to understand that men like myself who own guns and have them in the house. Right. I don't own guns because they're shiny and they go pow. Right. I own guns because they make me feel like at least if the shit hits the fan, worst case scenario, you have recourse. I can protect the people I love. Yeah. That is so deep in me, man. And, and that's what it's about. So, so give me a little credit. I may be a caveman. Yeah. But, um,

I'm trying to be the best caveman I can be, man. You know, it's also like the other thing is like, you can be a dirtbag, but don't be a dirtbag. You can be a dirtbag. Yeah, you got a lot of girls, you know. But if you are...

If you are hurting people's feelings, humiliating people, I tell you, man, I had a good friend and he got gonorrhea. And I said to him, he goes, hey, do you have a doctor, dude? I need these pills. I go, okay, good. I go, make sure you got to tell the girls because the girls you were with, and he was with like five girls, they can get it and they can go barren. And he said, I'm not doing that.

And when he said that, I call it the click. I call it the click. I go, you can have sex with all of them. Right. But now you're risking someone's ability to have children, dude. Right. And it's embarrassing. You got to make the call. And when I realized he wasn't going to make the call, I couldn't do it. I couldn't. I never spoke. That was it. That's it. You're out. So-

That's, that to me is chivalry. You don't have to be perfect, but just take care of your weight, bro. Right. So one way of looking at that is that let's imagine that there are a group of men and a group of women who both sort of sign up for this kind of an agreement. Like in the story that I was saying about the knock on the door, I perfectly believe that

mommy should go to the nursery with a shotgun. If she's worried that somebody is going to come barging in, you know, it's not a question of women should be defenseless. It's a question of the first line of defense and who's expendable. And this is just part of the deal. And I understand if some people don't like that, they don't believe in it. But those of us who do believe in that model should be able to locate each other as a culture and say, Hey, this is the compact that we're interested in perpetuating. Well,

By the way, you know, I talk and I'm sorry to bring up my special again, but in Complicated Apes, this last thing I talk about how I'm always amazed that the women's movement hasn't spoken more about the women of the UFC. And I do this whole bit about the idea that I did not expect women are moving into this space and they're doing it very effectively.

If you had told me eight years ago that I'd watch women throw hands and feet and elbows and grapple with the same skill and ferocity as men, I would have told you you're crazy. I would have said they're not biologically capable. Or that interested. Or that interested. And then you watch Rose Namajunas, Joanna Jenczak, Valentina Shevchenko, Amanda Nunez, Holly Holmes. I can keep going down the list. Misha Tate's no longer working. Ronda Rousey.

And Ronda Rousey, you know, she might have gotten knocked out by Holly Holm. She will go down in history as a very significant woman who was beautiful and also fierce. She kind of redefined what she said. The greatest thing I ever heard, she goes, my body's not designed to fuck millionaires. It's designed to beat the shit out of people.

And it was like, amen, sister. She's one of the first people I've ever been starstruck in front of. I was just, you know, she was in my audience one time and I didn't perform well. I've never done that. I was nervous. I was so fanboyed out. But these women are amazing.

as far as women that are changing hearts and minds, the ones that need to be changed, like a bunch of bros like myself, et cetera, the guys out there who thought that this arena belonged only to men, they have changed our minds.

And let's talk about LGBTQ or whatever. Let's talk about Amanda Nunez, whose girlfriend is in her corner. She kisses her girlfriend. Her girlfriend's hot and she's a fighter too. You got a couple of lovers kicking ass and changing the world. I mean, this is, why are we not talking about violence against women when it's done by another woman in a cage?

goes a long way in changing the heart and mind of a chauvinist like myself. We should be talking about, nobody's talking about that because of course they don't watch the UFC. Well, but it's also, you know, just there's a confusing aspect, which I think is good confusion. How many of these gals, when you see them doing, you know, their, what do I call the pre-fight thing? The weigh-in, the stare-down. Okay, the stare-down. The weigh-in is the other thing. So you weigh in, then you do the stare-down. Then you do the stare-down.

How many times have I looked at these gals in the stare dance? Those are two really super attractive, super feminine women. Super attractive and super feminine. And both of them could rip my head off. Oh my God. Valentina Shevchenko is so hot to me. Misha Tate's so hot to me. They're all so hot. The majority of them are physically beautiful. They're so attractive to me.

Right. I mean, it's, it's, it's like, you're just like, are you kidding? You, you have this skillset and you look like that. I've seen them. I've, I've seen, you know, Kat Zingano. I've, I know some of them. I've actually gotten to move around a little bit and train with some of them. And, and it's just like, they're, they're beautiful. Well, it also, it, you know, it calls men to higher purposes. If, if,

One of the great things that could come out of this is that if men want to retain some sense of, you know, being the protector that they're going to have to up their game and that people are going to have to, you know, raise better boys, right?

Well, that's going to be inevitable. I think you have, I will say I have this sort of visceral reaction to the feminist movement because I'm a guy and it's not my generation and I, it makes me feel insecure and stuff, but there is something really cool about women stepping into these spaces and maybe men can take a breather. Sometimes it's like I do this thing where I, you know,

I could never burst into tears. I'm not really allowed to do that. You know, Esther Perel at all. No, the name she's a sort of a next level, um, relationship. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I was hanging with her and she was trying out an idea, which I thought was, was pretty good, which she said, um,

I was trying to, she said, I asked her, I was trying to figure out masculinity. What I realized is that masculinity is both incredibly powerful and incredibly fragile. Yeah. And that. Comes with a lot of fear. Men are very terrified, terrified. They'll be revealed to be a coward. Yeah.

We're terrified of every aspect. I mean... Well, we don't sit in sad. We're not allowed to sit in sad, right? So women, I think, have more license or they're allowed culturally to sit in sad, to cry, to feel, and to eat ice cream or whatever it might be. Men are...

we can be sad for a couple minutes then we have to convert that sad to action rage or target it toward the person or thing making us sad and attack and kill it and i i i think i feel that very very deeply and and directly i think that's been that has been the the what i've had to deal with my whole life i hate to say it but that's that's been handed down to me do you accept

As I get older, I'm trying to wrestle with having a relationship with that side of me. My father was a Marine. My father, he told me a story recently about when you say visiting war memorials. He went to Iwo Jima. And I think only if you're a Marine, you're allowed to and you can go. There's one day a year, I think, when people are allowed to walk the island. And he was there.

or a family of a Marine or something. And he was there and an old woman, she was about 90. She was walking on the beach and she was having trouble because the sand is very deep and it's volcanic. And he said, "Can I help you? What brings you to the island?" And she said, "My husband was here." And he was 19, he was killed.

And she said, I always wanted to walk where he died. I always wanted to walk and I'm walking this whole perimeter so that I can feel like I stepped where he was. I don't know where it was, but at least I'm there. See how you get emotional? That's what happened to me. Yeah.

When my father told me that story, I started to get emotional. Yeah. But I couldn't do it in front of him. I couldn't cry. But just telling you that story makes me want to cry. Yeah. Because it was such a beautiful thing. And my father walked her all the way across the island or wherever that was, man. And there are some things worth crying about. And this is one of them. This is one of them. Some things are just too much to bear. And some things are too beautiful. And some things are too...

They just remind you of how awesome and awe-inspiring humanity can be and what happens in the face of terrible tragedy that's sort of bonding the beautiful stories, the beautiful stories of... That's why I studied Nazi Germany. That was my area of focus. I didn't know that. Yeah, and so when you hear...

about the girl whose sister, it was her birthday, and she found a blueberry in the fields they were having to work, and she wrapped it in a goddamn leaf and gave it to her sister for her birthday. Those little things, man, those little things are what we stay alive for. And those stories about those little things are probably why a lot of us are artists, you know, trying to figure out a way to get people to laugh and cry. That's the whole deal. That is our respite from this constant

this drudgery, this tragedy, this uncertainty, this fear. It's what, it's what Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche talked about is that yes, there's the will. We've got to sleep, eat, fuck, and then we die. But there are, there isn't, there is a way out there. There are portals, if I may, uh,

And those are artistic inspiration and conversations like this and great meals with friends. We have salons and that's what we stay alive for. And you can turn your life into a circus. Now you may die young and leave a good looking corpse, but I'd rather that. I'd rather live dangerously. - Than not have enough transcendence in existence. Fuck yeah. - Yeah, and you can't do that. You can't do that living in this purified echo chamber in a world where you're terrified to insult

offend everybody under the sun you won't have the kind of sex you want you sure as hell won't have the kind of laughs that you need and that you deserve you'll live in a sexless barren place where you're constantly trying to be right and not offend anybody you won't even be able to raise your fucking voice and i think that's bad for us well i think it's bad for our culture

you know, somebody put that to music, please. They will trust me. I can't believe you didn't start playing the harmonica. Something's right here. I know. Um, you know, I was going to potentially open the series with my cousin who, uh, her name was Eva core. And I spoke to her right before we launched, I guess the, the portal. And she said, look, I'm going on my annual pilgrimage. Um,

And when I get back, I'd love to. And she's from Indiana. I'd never met her. I've spoken to her a bunch on the phone. And she was a Mengele twin. And her sister, Miriam, was in the camp with her. And she was telling me on this phone call right before I left, she was saying that

she looked forward to an annual pilgrimage to Auschwitz where she was and that Miriam, her sister had stopped thriving in the medical experiments. And the only way to save her was to steal food to, to the point about the, the blueberry, the sister. So she stole potatoes and she was telling the story about stealing potatoes and that the penalty for stealing potatoes was death. Yeah. And so she stole these potatoes and got caught.

So she was clearly going to die. And then she was scolded and let go. Now she was just a little kid. And she said, ah, being part of the medical experiment means I'm protected by Dr. Mengele. And so nobody can touch me. So she continued to steal potatoes in order to save her sister. And she's telling me this crazy story. And I think I'm going to do an episode because she went to the extraordinary length of forgiving Mengele.

And this caused a huge human cry. Her name was Eva core. And I was dying to start the podcast. And then I get this phone call from her son and I find out that she's died in Poland on this last trip. So I don't get to bring the story the way I wanted to, man, was this chick tough? Like, you know, the whole idea. And when, when, when I tell the story, I think I'll do it on a separate episode of, uh,

the importance of forgiveness and as a, almost like a weapon and as a, a structural transformative ritualistic option. If you've been victimized, this woman gave nothing up in terms of toughness and then went to these extraordinary counterintuitive links. One of our last posts I think is her eating,

maybe a McDonald's meal in Auschwitz and sort of laughing about how, how amazing that there's a McDonald's near where we had automated human ritualistic kill. And Frank, you know, and Frank, uh, uh, I think she wrote, I still believe in my heart. Human beings are all good at the core, you know? And her father said, she shames me with her positive, positive, you know, outlook. Uh, but I, I think that's the, that's probably one of the reasons Christianity seems to endure, uh,

The idea that Christ preached forgiveness, that's a powerful thing. What you're really saying, I mean, I know as an actor, for example, you know, I had an acting teacher, as an actor, if you're playing Mengele, if you're playing Pol Pot, Stalin, or Hitler, you can't play him like a monster. Now you play him, you play him as a man trying to solve a problem for humanity's sake. That's a powerful thing.

That's way more interesting. And that very well may be what was going on in their twisted hearts. Even the Nazis had a sense that they were doing God's work, that they were being somewhat moral, getting rid of this problem called the Jews, etc. And this is why ideas...

And if you just rely on logic and rationality, you better be careful, man, because human beings come up with very, very logical and rational reasons to get rid of those people over there. It's one of the things I love about the thing that religion has to offer, which is that all life is sacred.

The Buddhists talk about sentient beings. The Christians talk about, you know, whether or not you're in a coma, even if you're unborn. Listen, you know, these things, and they're unwavering about those things. Sometimes that is the vanguard.

Sometimes that is the reason you have to be stalwart in those kinds of ideas. They're not convenient a lot of times. I'm a pro-choice guy, but I understand the value of these kinds of things because they do protect you against things

you know, the rationalists that come in, the scientists, the engineers who come in and start trying to run the world. Well, don't trust your own brain. I think it was Paul, Paul who said, don't trust your own heart. Yeah. I'm not a Christian by the way. You're not. No, I'm not. I haven't been to church. I don't go to church. I've been to church twice in my life. I, I, but I, I respect and understand the,

what these fixed truths have to offer. It's my only contention with Sam Harris, who I really like and I admire, but...

I'm going to give Sam just a quick lesson if I ever meet him on how not to start a conversation. Sam, don't say, listen, we need a war on Islam. Don't say that. You can't do that because you lose everybody. We got to be a little bit more. He's so painfully honest. You know I went on his show about this point. No, I didn't. Okay, so I did it. But I'm a fan. I'm a fan of Sam's too. I mean, we're great friends. I tried to...

indicate to him that there was something counterproductive, not about his line of thinking, but about his chosen mode of expression. - He gets emotional. Honestly, Sam gets emotional. I think that's what it is. - Well, but any sublimates it, right? So, you know, you almost never see him. - No, he's gonna find his way through. - I took a video of him playing Centipede on an old arcade machine.

And people loved it because they said, Oh my God, he's human. He's very, he's very Zen. He's very human. Yes. The issue that I had was that I didn't think that Sam understood what he was projecting. And that I said, you know, you need to say some things about the positive aspects of this culture. Well, it was like you open up this box and he's like, I love the call to prayer. I said, well,

He's like, I love the poetry of Rumi. And so he starts extolling some of the advantages. He's an incredibly religious guy for an atheist. I mean, I do his app, Waking Up. I love this book, Spirituality Without Religion. And I love his podcast. And I think that he's genuinely sincere about trying to get an honest conversation going. I fall in line with so much of his thinking, but I do think that he...

I do think he could, he could, uh, he, I think he does. I think he gets emotional. Yeah. I think that he goes on the offensive and that's, he's very upset about people not understanding his central message. And I think it few, few people understand what it is. He is not claiming that Israel, that, um,

Islam is a terrible thing that it has nothing to offer. He's not claiming that religion is bereft of good ideas or important ritual. What he's weirdly saying doesn't get picked up is I, Sam Harris believe that there is nothing that can be done irrationally through a crazy belief system that couldn't be done better at scale than

using reason as the substrate. But that's why I disagree. Well, I agree. I disagree too. I think Yuval Harari would disagree. You need myth. You need story. And we

So the value therein, let's just take Christ as an example in the Bible, or any story, or even Plato's forms were about the idea that you may not be able to touch perfection, but my God, you can imagine it. Perfection may very well not exist, but you can not only imagine it, but you should reach for it. You're going to miss, but the reach is what matters.

So doing the right thing a lot of times might be very much against, not in your own interests. I mean, think of the play The Crucible.

I mean, he's going to die for Christ's sake, but he's not going to give up his, you know, he's more than his appetite. He's more than the man for all seasons. These are these stories that we think about. The Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jesus Christ. These people endure and we speak of them and sort of with heads bowed because they put their own interests

There was nothing rational about what they did in a lot of ways. I mean, you could say, I suppose... Well, I mean, they knew that they were putting themselves... Well, so somatically, they were definitely putting themselves in huge rifts. They exterminated, they erased themselves physically. But there's something about... Have you ever read Gandhi on violence? Yes, a long time ago, yeah. You ever seen this riff that he did where he said that...

There are three things I want to talk about. I want to talk about pacifism. I want to talk about violence and I want to talk about nonviolence. And he says, I believe that my philosophy of nonviolence is superior to the other two, but given a choice between violence and pacifism, I would always choose violence. I don't remember that. I know Thoreau was his, a huge influence on him. So Gandhi, the Gandhi that we think of as this simple, kindly, saintly figure, but

is not actual Gandhi and Gandhi. He was an Anglophile. I know he's a lawyer in South Africa who, yeah. Well, there's that. Yeah. But he actually believed, he said, look, don't mistake nonviolence for pacifism. Nonviolence requires the most courage because you're going to put yourself in harm's way with a pre commitment not to defend yourself. And if you can't get to that level of badassery, choose violence. Yeah. And,

Why? Because the worst thing you can do is to be passive and to let your nation, you know, be raped as India was by the Brits. So this is like... Well, it may have been a strategic... I don't think that policy of nonviolence would have worked against the Nazis. The Germans would have just shot them and they would have just opened up on anybody. It worked with the British Empire because the British Empire had elections, they had parliament. Well, there's a question of who does the nonviolence and...

I don't know if you know about the Rosenstrasse protest in terms of you want to talk about weird portal effects. I think it was 1943 in Berlin, a bunch of women who were married to Jewish men or partially Jewish men, but who were not Jewish themselves decided that they would show Nazi Germany what's what and get their husbands back. And they organized a protest. I don't know why this isn't famous. It makes me feel like I'm crazy for bringing it up.

They organized a protest in Rosenstrasse, the street, and they made such an embarrassing show in front of the Nazis that the Nazis, I believe, acquiesced and got these men out of the camps and returned to the women. So it was like a... Well, this is the thing about the power of wives and mothers and beautiful young women who are...

you know, new bile just means marriageable. Um, we are so when women organize themselves effectively,

they can bring male systems, you know, really to their knees because there's no good way of saying we're against motherhood. We're against love. We're against anything that is aspirationally kind of pure. Yeah. Somebody has dropped, people have drawn correlations between women's rights and healthcare and the advent of healthcare and things. And which is why the women's March was so confusing to me because that was a tremendous amount of power to mobilize and

but without a very clear follow through and with some very dubious, you know, I think that a lot of us fear that there was some kind of antisemitism that was behind some of the organization of that. But just in terms of what could you get the Nazis to take note of? I've always been fascinated by who protested the Nazis effectively. There was another case, which you might know through, through boxing. I think the guy's name was Johannes Trollman.

who was a Sinti, like a Roma. And he was incredibly good looking and he was doing the Muhammad Ali thing years before Muhammad Ali of being very athletic as a boxer. So he was kind of a matinee idol of his time. And Germans were fantastic audiences for boxing. They were very well informed about the sort of science of the sport. And

obviously this guy had to go down because he wasn't pure and Aryan and German, but the crowd, the Germans loved him. And when he was, I guess the, you know, the refs gave the fight to the other guy, there was an outcry in Germany. So they changed the rules about how you could fight. And it was to make this guy's fighting style not work. So as a protest, I mean, it just, this is such a great story.

he divorced his wife because he thought it was a danger to her. He coded himself in flower to mock the purity of this, you know, racially pure German. Right. And he got into the ring with the crowd behind him and he took the effing loss. Right. And he gets sent to a camp.

And everybody reveres them. It's like, you know, the South Africans respected Nelson Mandela. Well, the Nazis fucking respected this guy. And they Germans at least. Yeah. Even the Nazis. Yeah. You know, because in some sense they know that they're doing the wrong thing. He can kick their ass with it. Well, but you know, it's, it's what you just said about fragility. Like here's this guy who's a genius with his fists, who's this unbelievable figure in his heart. And what is he doing? And,

you know, he's mocking them and he's sacrificing his own life. So he ends up in the camps. He's, he's, he's holding fighting clinics. And I think somebody, I don't know if kills him with a shovel or a pistol or something. So it's a terrible story. And there's a ring in a park in Germany on a slant. And it's just, the slant is the unfairness of the situation.

Right? Wow. And he was reinstated. His title had been taken away and it's been reinstated all these years later. Somebody needs to make a major motion picture. You know what amazes me is how you're this theoretical mathematician with such a poet's heart. Well, it's amazing, dude. But that's, but isn't, so now who's getting emotional? Well, I love it.

I love it too. And it's, you know, it's about heroism. It's about violence. It's about even in a tragedy celebrating, you know, these are the, these are the guys whose lives you want to see. At a slant. Right. And like, what a subtle, beautiful nod to a great life. Cause he's not even depicted. That's, you know, I was going to, I think what I'm going to do with the show, not every, not every episode is going to be transformative and transcendent. But I think one of the things I want to do is to organize the,

the world and its sites for transcendence. Like this monument, this, this broken ring needs to be on the map. People need to know there and they need to go on pilgrimages. Yeah. I feel those stories need to be right. I agree with you, man. And you're, you're in such a unique place to do this. I think this is going to be a great podcast. I think, I think you're going to love, well, you've got so many, you know, you're, you're so interested in so many different things. And I think you're look, the idea is to get,

The ideas, the good ideas that are stuck in books and stuck in people's brains who usually don't have an ability to talk to a lot of people, get them out and into the ears and into the brains of the people out there. Well, and I also want to make sure that, I mean, I don't want to hide the fact that, you know, I'm stuck.

I'm hypocritical. I don't exactly know what we're supposed to do next either. It's the struggle. It's the discovery. Right. You're trying to look for the portals. You don't know where they all are. Some of them are going to be false leads. But transcendent is what you were saying before. Right.

transcendence is available to everyone who's willing to look for it. It's not available every hour of every day. Well, that's my problem with cancel culture. Because what you're saying is, you know, we are who we were, we are who we are, and we are who we could be. And all of us are trying to be who we could be, or at least most of us. And I'm certainly very different. I don't know the guy, I don't know Brian Callen, 20-year-old Brian Callen, 25-year-old Brian Callen.

What an asshole. I mean, or at least what a dumb dumb, or at least what a, what a naive, ignorant, arrogant little shithead. I mean, I'm, I'm just a different person now because I'm 52. I mean, it took me a long time to become the human being that I am. And that's pretty flawed person, but at least I'm a little less flawed, made more mistakes. I have better pattern recognition, um,

I'm a little bit more compassionate, I hope. But we are verbs. We're verbs, man. - Say more. - We're not nouns. - I like this, okay. - When you cancel me out for something I did or said, my God, you're suggesting I'm that way all the time. No, I'm not. I might've been having a moment. I might've been confused. I might've been angry and outside of myself. - Or there might be a part of your personality. - I'm sorry? - If you think about yourself as a conference of different modules,

Like there are modules of all of us that we don't like. Some, some instruments sometimes are playing louder than the other instruments. Right. Or that piccolo is flat. A hundred percent. Right. And the idea is that because of the piccolo player, the entire symphony is canceled. I mean, you know, and who's doing this canceling. Show me one person who doesn't have these sets of issues. Right. I know. I know exactly. And who is behind all these? Like, it's just the Twitter sphere, right? I keep hearing it's not the real world, but my problem is it is the real

world. My problem is that you can lose your ability to earn a living when you're canceled. Well, so this is your career. My theory here is that we've moved from physical violence to reputational and economic violence. And so the idea being that the one thing, I mean, I don't know that I've fully done this theory anywhere, so it'd be great to do it here with you. The institutions have these rules on them.

And these rules are causing every institution that gets formed, whether it's a for-profit or a nonprofit or different sectors of the economy, to take on certain characteristics. The one thing that doesn't have this feel to it

is the individual. The individual cannot be legislated. Now, the individual may be dependent on the ability to access the banking system. I mean, one show that we have talked about is an erotic actress who has not been able to easily maintain merchant accounts or to gain credit. And there's a question about should we be harassing

people who are legally employed in jobs that somebody doesn't care for, which scares that everybody, everybody watches when nobody else is watching, you know, porn stars. I mean, you know, if you're going to criticize porn stars, please never watch porn. Well, this is the thing. When I, when I was doing these shows with Sam Harris, I would talk about,

how we lie. And I would say, who here, who here watches Pornhub? And like the audience is silent. I'd be like this, bro, me right here. I can tell you my favorite porn stars too. I can tell you everything about it. Not, I can even go through why I don't watch it anymore because it doesn't get me off because I don't believe the girls. But that's,

But then I got the girls. I do believe any other questions. Well, this is the thing. This is what I mean. Because you're in it at my salon, everybody will raise their hand. Well, this is the thing, but because you're an individual, but then when it comes to how you're employed, yes. Depends upon, are you on network TV? What are you on cable? You know, what is it that we can and can't say? What I believe is because the individual is the thing that is still free of this kind of, um,

Legislated goodness. In other words, there is goodness that actually occurs and there's goodness that is only there because we legislated the people who don't do not like things that are outside of their control are going to reputational attacks and

because that's the only way of shutting down the individual. That's right. And so that, that reputational violence has gotten far more extreme for people who speak out. That's right. And I think that that's really part of the story behind you brought up Jordan Peterson before. It's not so much in my opinion than any one of these people is saying something brilliant. All those brilliant things are said by some of these people.

It's more that people say, is there anyone willing to stand up for central values? Like core. But 60 minutes, 60 minutes had him on.

And there was the caption, I think it was 60 Minutes. There was this caption, and then they did a recap of it, maybe at CNN. And under it said, alt-right professor. How fucking dare you? Well, where does this come from? How dare you? Some asshole in the control room. No, but Brian, it's universal. Because they want to get views. It's universal. There is some story here, and I don't claim to have it, which has to do with how institutional media works.

finds a completely fake narrative and then just through perseveration repeats it so often that people think it's true well this is why this is why fake news quote-unquote has caught on I I'm not a Trump Defender let me tell you yeah but uh oh when I watch CNN and how slanted they are right and and and watch these lightweight journalists who just have not done their homework

And they've got three minutes or whatever it is, their opinion pieces and stuff. And I could say the same about Fox News, by the way, in a lot of cases. Because Tucker Carlson drives me fucking crazy because he doesn't really listen to any of his guests. He won't even let his guests talk. But, you know, it's like, it's...

It's just not true. You're not being truthful here. You are... And people know that. People get it. People go, hold on. Like, when Ocasio-Cortez calls enough Americans racist... Right. Well, we all go... Very white states, the majority of these...

Very white states voted a black president twice. You're being a little insulting here to all of us. That's a terrible thing to call a lot of Americans. I travel this country more than she does. And I travel country and I perform for and talk to and I'm around real people, not the elite. I'm around people that work for a living with their hands, etc.,

I can promise you, and a lot of them are white, I can promise you, I promise you, if you called any of them a racist, and I'm talking about people in the town, so they'd look at you and go, no, I'm not. No, I'm not. Well, but you can't get out of it. Oh, so you deny it? That just proves that you are. Well, you don't know because you don't know where you're at. Jesus, well, now what do I do? Well, what I really dislike about this is that the language is so impoverished. Like the issue of... Binary, good guy, bad guy. Well...

Exactly. I mean, if I'm in a situation where I have a lot of information about a different community, I'm going to form positive and negative impressions of every single possible community. But you're not, but see, ideologues don't like nuance. Well, so this is the war on nuance. Well, because nuance, you know, the way, the way I keep encountering this, I've made a big point of this. They view ideas.

like the Israelis view an olive grove. It's a place for snipers to hide. So we have to take down the olive trees so there won't be any snipers. I have to pee so badly and that metaphor just made me forget about my pee. Which is why we're taking a break with Brian Callen. Taking a break. When we return, Brian Callen on the portal. I've always wanted to say this. And we're back with Brian Callen.

Brian, if we could, I would love to switch into another area that I don't think we've really touched on much, which is your fascination with pretty deep science and the way in which it even works its way into your comedy routines and into your thinking. How is it that, first of all, I have this impression that

I grew up in LA and I used to come to some of the comedy clubs. I'd go to the improv probably more than anything else. And I'd see comedians and they'd suddenly switch into other languages. They'd switch into discussions of science or really abstract discussions of history for the material. And I came to think of comedians very often as being comedians.

kind of unregulated super minds is that something that you think is i mean is that i don't think so do you know where it comes from and i've been i've been in the business too long to think that most most comedians aren't interested in anything but i mean no steve martin yes banjo and the robin williams who switch into a million different head spaces in the space well i mean look the the

I always say that I'm in the business, the one thing that drives me is original self-expression. That's what I'm interested in. I'm interested in expressing myself fully and originally. And that responsibility is always pretty daunting. And so whatever it takes, you get to a point as a comic where you know how to make people laugh. I can write stuff and that's a bag of tricks. Then can you be thematic? Can you be original? Can you be saying something?

And that's where the real challenge is. You get older, you're writing an hour of comedy. Well, you know, okay, let's see what happens now. What are you trying to talk about? I mean, I spent all this time boxing and trying to stay in shape and

going beyond my biology and being ready and you know and keeping my home safe and whatever it might be but there are too many flanks to cover well where's the funny in that you know i'm gonna die i'm getting older and i'm way more vulnerable than i i can even imagine so um

again like let's see if i can be original about that and let's see if i can discover something and shock myself and surprise myself with with my next uh 60 minutes of comedy that that i guess so so unregulated super minds i don't think of it that way i just think about um probably meant to say dysregulated oh dysregulated okay yeah dysregulated yeah i i just uh

it's a huge privilege to belong to this very small fraternity, this small group of people that can get up in front of anybody in the world and make them laugh. I, that's never lost on me. Right. So I, I,

I feel very lucky that I can do that and that I'm part of this small group of people that does that over and over again. So you have shown essentially no interest in promoting your own stuff. I wonder if I could just ask you to take a couple of younger colleagues and maybe lift them up

for our audience? Who should we be watching? Who's coming up? Who you think is really deep in terms of observation and saying, use it, use it. Carmichael was doing standup for a long time. And I think he said he wanted to quit, which is a tragedy because he was so unique. Uh, and his success is not an accident. I, he was opening for myself and a guy named Dove David off one of my favorite comics and favorite people. And,

And I just immediately was shocked at how smart this kid was. No money. I think he comes from North Carolina. And he was – Spike Lee found him, and he did some specials. But they don't do it justice. He's just a very special guy. But in terms of sort of the younger up-and-coming folk, I –

I think Allie McCoskey is really funny. I think a guy named Chappelle Lacey is really funny. I think, um, I think Fahim Anwar is really funny. Uh, there are some really, these are people at the comedy store, go to the comedy store. Okay. And on a Tuesday night, on a Wednesday night, on a Thursday night and sit in the original room. And, uh,

I promise you, you'll see some people you've never heard of that'll crack your ribs. And those names come to mind immediately.

Just funny. I mean, funny. And then you've got the people like Sebastian and all these other people that are working and have already arrived. But yeah, there are a lot of young people who are, again, responding to a confusing time. They're responding to this confusion. It's coming into the comedy world. I mean, you know, there's old things you say, things you can't say. I mean, geez, all right. Well, you know. I mean, I don't think there should be any rules. Well, I think that

the rule that I like is that the more skilled you are and the more your comedy ultimately uplifts people, the more, not only you should you be allowed to say, but the more you're obligated for the rest of us to show us how to find the humor, the absurdity. And I was talking to humor for Christ's sake. When you hear stories about people who are in hijack situation, hostage situations, um,

Even in Prisoners of War, they tell fucking jokes. It's all you've got, man, sometimes. Well, you know, have you ever read this short piece again by P.J. O'Rourke, which I think is titled Is It Serious? No. And his point is...

lies are said with incredible earnestness, but it is truth that is uttered with a dismissive giggle. And I just loved this. It was really good. He talks about, um, this was Thomas Moore, you know, being executed or forget who. And he says, um, you know what, his last, his last utterances were, were jokes about make sure not to miss your mark because I wouldn't want to create a mess or something like that. And, you know, I think about that as, um,

I tend to believe people who are kind of smirking and giggling without being mean about it, just as a sign of like, well, hey, I'm actually plugged into the madness of all of the tensions in the world rather than just ideologically saying, I know which way to go. Do you... Tell me about your fascination with science, which you're trying to hide and cover up. Well, I just think that it's...

Maybe like mathematics. First of all, there's a lot of people who claim that this is scientific and things like that. But I like science because at the heart of science, it seems that you start with doubt and you continue with doubt. And usually, I guess I would define science or the scientific method as that which you can measure and that which you can replicate.

under the same circumstances. I think I'm right about that. I mean, to an extent, at least. There's a truth to that that you can't deny. Well, you know, if you're anti-vaccine, please pick up a history book or just a piece of literature to see what smallpox, diphtheria, measles, mumps, and all these other terrible diseases are.

did to people. I mean, if you really are anti-antibiotics, if you don't like antibiotics, well, I don't know if you know what consumption is, but it's tuberculosis and it killed a lot of people, including Chopin and some of the greatest minds. So we've pushed way beyond our biology and those scientists like Fleming, et cetera, those scientists, those physicists,

uh we owe them a great debt of gratitude the people that invented things like the geiger counter and x-rays and you know these these and and and who experimented on their own family i mean i was just thinking about it i think it's ronkin's um wife's hand is being x-rayed there's a giant ring on it yeah um yeah you know and then got you know leukemia or something well you know yeah i was about to say another one of these you know i don't know if you know benjamin jesti

So this was like a gentleman farmer who was a physician and he noticed that the milkmaids never got smallpox. That's right. That's right. And so he injected his own family with the pus from cows to give them all cowpox, reasoning the cowpox protected you against deadly smallpox. How crazy is it that you're willing to experiment on your family or this guy who did...

- Ulcers are not actually caused by stress. - By a bacteria, pylori or something. - Exactly. The badass school of science where you actually put yourself-- - We're curing, we have cured hepatitis C, which killed my cousin. - Is that right? - Yes, we've cured hepatitis C. Hep C is, at least in Northern Europeans, I don't know if it's still, 'cause I know interferon didn't work at all with African Americans, but it worked with

to an extent, if you have any other different things, different biologies. But I mean, we have, I think it's a nine month regimen where we cure it, ladies and gentlemen, cure it.

So I remember the AIDS epidemic. I watched my neighbors die slowly and without dignity. I watched how horrible that disease was. I was in New York City. I was in a theater scene. I was in acting class. I watched young, beautiful men die horribly. They had carposi sarcoma. They had lesions all over their faces. They had one thing after another. I had another friend who wouldn't let us see him in the hospital because I went to college with him and he just...

He just looked like he looked, it would give you trauma to look at him. I watched it. I saw them die. And then I saw something called protease inhibitors come along. And these motherfuckers had to rebuy their property because they all sold it and they had to rebuy it. And now they all live normal lives. And in fact, the AIDS virus has been compromised so often that

because of these different kinds of cocktail drugs that are becoming less and less toxic. It's had to compromise itself so often that it is now something you probably can live with. Like diabetes, only the difference is you don't have to take drugs because it's become such a weakened virus. That's what happens.

Yay. Yay to Western science. Yay to science. Forget Western science. Yay to science. It doesn't belong to anybody. It doesn't belong to the West or the East. Yay to experimentation. Yay to doubt. Yay to- To reason and compassion, where reason serves compassion. I mean, this is the thing that makes me bananas. If we had started to tell ourselves, I mean, I don't know if you remember this. One of the lies about AIDS

was that it just began in the homosexual community and that

there was no difference between heterosexual and homosexual transmission. And that was a, an attempt at a compassionate lie, but it was not actually, but it was also not compassionate because the more that you told these sort of superficial lies, the less you could actually get at who was at risk. Why? Well, news organizations. And I read a book about it. I think it was called the news about the news. I'm not sure. It was, he worked at CBS or, and, and,

There was a lot of pressure on news organizations to go out and find heterosexuals with AIDS. Right. And they combed the landscape for it and found a couple of women who were straight who had AIDS just to make sure that it wasn't just a gay disease. Right.

Which it wasn't. So they couldn't figure out why it was a heterosexual disease in Southeast Asia and Africa, but it wasn't in European populations in the Middle East. Well, why? Why was it also a certain... And gay men got it. But in fact, the gay men that did get it were the ones taking...

you know, the bottoms, if you will, right. Tops a lot of times survived the epidemic. And I know a number of them who did it through my theater days. We couldn't figure it out.

Was it a secondary infection? Was it healthcare in Africa? No. What happened was the bubonic plague. I think you and I talked about that. If you survive the bubonic plague, you have some gene variation where you have a resistance to the actual disease unless it's pushed into your body with a hypodermic needle or somebody's dick, if you will. But otherwise, it's going to be hard to contract it.

That's why the army couldn't figure out, they would test everybody for AIDS. And it was the cases were slim to vanishing in at least people that were admittedly heterosexual. Right. And then we started to see that there was something going on here, that it was, it did discriminate. The disease did discriminate, not because God said it so, but because there was a genetic mutation thanks to the bubonic plague.

Anyway, so why do I like science? I guess it gives me some answers. No, but it's more than you like science. I mean, you're pretty, you incorporate science into your comedy. Yeah. And I was curious as to whether those two parts of your brain work.

harmoniously. And I, I would be so lucky you have, I mean, I'm nowhere. I'm not even your area code in terms of your ability to jump between the romantics and I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen how many topics have you jumped between this? I mean, you're all over the place. I don't know, man, you have a deeper, I mean, your ability to movies and literature and poetry and music. And so I actually never met anybody like that. I remember.

I'm very flattered. You're a polymath. That's how I feel about you. The thing I was trying to figure out, though, and it's something I haven't cracked, would be can we use comedy as a means of delivering deeper analytic truths? Is there a natural fit? So, for example, if I make something rhyme,

the brain remembers it more easily. I upset people by saying things that rhyme are more likely to be true. And what I really mean is that when people work out a very pithy aphorism or, or a rhyme to remember something, it meant somebody said this was important enough to construct something that the brain will find sticky. And a joke,

Like almost every joke contains an element of surprise. If you saw it coming, it wouldn't be fun. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yes. And the answer is of course, comedy is the lubrication. Comedy is lubricant. Of course. Look, if you want to change somebody's mind, as Jonathan Haidt said, you've got to, you've got to make them feel safe.

You know, this is where I'd have Sam Harris, and he does a good job for the most part, but I'd have him read The Righteous Mind again if he hasn't. I mean, you know, Jonathan Haidt's damn right about the fact that if you want to change somebody's mind, strike some common ground first. You can't tell somebody who's religious...

who, because their religion gives them meaning and it gives them a feeling of safety. Right. You cannot tell them, you cannot tell them that they are like, like Lawrence Krauss and people like that. You know, you can't say you believe in a fairy tale and it was a book written by peasants 2000 years ago. That makes me really angry when people, well, that's what Lawrence Krauss did on my podcast. And I said, Lawrence, you're, you are not building a fucking bridge here, dude. I mean, you are, you can sit there and be right as a physicist all day long, but

I mean, okay, cool, dude. I mean, you're doing zero. You're doing a great job of destroying. You're doing nothing to persuade. And destruction is way easier than persuasion. It really is. It's my problem with cancel culture, et cetera. So this is interesting. I hadn't heard this before. In some weird way, and correct me if I'm wrong,

There is something about the rationality movement, the skeptical movement that is interested in cancellation of its own, but it's canceling religious culture.

I think so. I get very worried when somebody uses the word rational over and over again because they are religious in their own way. They're praying to the god of rationality. I don't think that all the answers lie there. Yes, if you want to figure out a way to have fresh fruit and vegetables in the wintertime, rationality, math, science. Yes, if you want to push ourselves beyond our biology with vaccines and antibiotics, of course.

But man, listen, listen, listen, don't take my mythology away from me. Do not try to take my romance. I like not knowing. I love, I love not knowing what's not being able to explain certain things. Look, it's like this. If I take a piano and smash it into a thousand pieces and, and put it in a big sack, I can say, this is a piano. But it's not a piano. It's not even a piano when it's sitting in a, in a,

corner. It's a piano only when somebody gets sits down and learns how to touch it just so it's exactly like it was I think it was Aldous Huxley who was Darwin's Bulldog you know and and they had this good natured debate at this this college that and and Matthew Arnold the American you know poet slash writer slash philosopher and

And there was this great debate where Aldous Huxley said, you know, man started as protozoa and became this pointy-eared, long-tailed hominid, and then we became man. And I have that proof because it's called the origin of the species. Yes, absolutely. There's no question that evolution is true. I believe in evolution. But...

as Matthew Arnold said, maybe it is true. We started, we started as pros or became monkeys, but there was something about that monkey that inspired it to Greek.

There was something about that monkey that created the deep and dark writings of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare, the Parthenon, Beethoven, Mozart, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and the list fucking goes on. Eric Weinstein, and it goes on and on. There was something about that that created beauty for its own sake. You know, it's that beautiful Schiller line, man, is it...

Man is truly, is never more himself than when at play and play being defined as that thing which you do for its own sake. Don't take that shit away from me. I don't want to explain anything, bro. Look, it's worse than this. We are driving mysticism, narrative fiction out of science when the really amazing science, the stuff that is, you know, that is like going to church,

is increasingly put under pressure from the sort of skeptic rationality community. And I skepticism and rationality are super important to both of us, but there's this other impulse, which is the imaginative impulse. And when you sick rationality and skepticism on the imaginative impulse at an early stage, you are killing the thing that built all of the rationality to begin with inspiration. Do you know what this is? This is a Klein bottle.

And the weird thing about it is, is that it only really exists in four dimensions. So this is a model of Klein bottle. Technically we would say it is immersed in R3 because this handle should not be going through this part of the bottle. And so there's no inside and no outside. It's like two Mobius bands sewn together. The only reason I learned about the Klein bottle was that I was given my, my father's Xerox something at his office when I was growing up for the national lampoon.

It was a fundraiser for terminal flatulence that looked really official, right? It showed a toilet blown apart and people suffer from terminal flatulence, but it is potentially curable. So at the end of this crazy foundation promotion fundraiser, on the back page of this thing was a short story about a Klein bottle that was used as a contraceptive device.

And the idea is that it would take the sperm and send it to the fourth dimension so no one would get pregnant. But this guy gets stuck in the Klein bottle. Now, this is a completely crazy, insane thing, but I had never heard of a Klein bottle. And I remember reading the story and saying, I've got to find out what that is. Is that a real thing? Sure enough, there was an entire topological theory of non-orientable manifolds. And the only way that I got to it

was from a humor magazine, right? - Yeah, that's great. Well, what about the idea that you're a mathematician, so I heard,

There's a great course called The Great Ideas of Philosophy. It's from the teaching company. And I just quoted a little bit of David Robinson, Dan Robinson, who has written more about philosophy than anybody in the past 30 years. He said something interesting. He was talking about how a theoretical mathematician spends their whole life

you know, they had a dream about some of this possibility, this mathematical possibility, and they spend their whole life coming up with this equation that they solve. And it bears no real relevance to the material world.

But then they die and okay, and thanks a lot. And we have this theorem that I guess you came up with, it was probably 300 pages long or something like that. And then about 100 years later, or 20 years later, whenever it it's used to put a rover on Mars or something, and it does bear direct relevance to the material world.

So, you know, again, it's what we talked about before. It was like there are certain mythologies. You can disprove that all men are created equal with biology and math. You can actually disprove it very easily. You can take LeBron James and send us through a whole bunch of tests.

But there's a deeper truth to it. When we collectively embrace this mythology, this myth that we are all created equal, it provides a better fucking world. It provides a better country, more food on the table, more equality, more diverse, more interesting culture, and ultimately a stronger culture because we're more creative. So that's a truth. So even though I can disprove it mathematically or biologically, for whatever reason...

It's a different kind of truth. It bears sweeter fruit. So what of that? What of that crazy idea? Thank you, Yuval Harari, by the way, for bringing that to my attention with Sapiens. Did you see the first, or did you hear the first terrible interaction between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris? Sure did. Sure did. Okay. When they're fighting. And that's what that was. I was like, Sam, you know, the, the, the,

Yeah. You backed Jordan in that? I thought they both got mired down and I liked them both very much. But I do think that Sam kept putting this flag there and couldn't move on. I understood what Jordan was saying, though. So let's just recapitulate for the folks at home. So my recollection, correct me if this isn't yours, is that Sam was trying to say that

truth was very important and Jordan was trying to say if something doesn't contribute to human fitness then in some sense it wasn't true a little bit different so I think what Jordan was saying was there are truths that would that there are say scientific truths that if

if followed through with might be self-extinguished yes we would we would extinguish the world right and that's not a that's that's so that that's not a truth that that so so he was trying to marry truth with fitness is it fitness or with with with um well if i guess positivity uh something so yeah i don't want to be unfair to jordan because i don't want to be unfair to either one of them but what i was looking to get was your actual insight in something that i've struggled with

On Sam's show, I said, I can reduce most of what I care about, or perhaps all of it, to four different values that compete with each other. And I said, it's truth, meaning, fitness, and grace.

So there are things that are true that rob my life of meaning. And so I have to trade off between them. There are things that are true that might be less fit. Like you discover some way of blowing the world up. That's very cheap in any high school student could do it. That would decrease human fitness. And then there are things that are true that are not graceful, that are not beautiful, that, that I'd wish were not true. And. Well, you know, but you don't need to talk about this. No,

Nisha talked about the idea of plural truths. I mean, when a chemist looks at a painting, when you look at a beautiful painting, like the Sistine Chapel or something, it brings you to your knees. A chemist could also say, well, what you see, what you think is blue is actually not blue. Your eyes are, that's a trick that your eye is playing. And there'd be truth to that as well, which is you're not actually- Take the David with its famous distortions of form.

Michelangelo's David only works because it is in fact not truly a human form. It's a distorted form that is reprocessed to be perfect. Right. Right.

That's right. Another way to look at it, let's just take dogs, for example. It's true that dogs are scavengers, pack animals, and hunters. And it's also true that they've probably evolved to manipulate you with their little wags and their ears down. Infant schema with big eyes. And so they're scheming you. They're fucking manipulating you, right? Okay, great.

it's also true that dogs are awesome yeah it's true that i kiss them and i love the fuck out of them and then when they die i cry so hard i can't okay but it's not the same that's true too there's room for all the well see but i don't i don't like this i love the idea that there are things that actually i'm willing to sacrifice truth for so you're saying it one way jordan's saying when you say i'm saying one way what i'm trying that they could have let go of that

Because they would have got, they got mired down. They did. And then they had that, you know, I remember Sam's agonizing. Should I do a redo? Yeah. What I get out of it. And this is an uncomfortable place to be, but it's interesting because it's uncomfortable to your point about what to mine in order to get to comedy. So maybe I'm just trying to get to a podcast is why did you imagine that truth was going to be a great guide to everything else? In other words, why would you imagine that truth wouldn't be something that you might have to give up a little bit to get a better outcome? Yeah.

I don't believe that the Supreme court is the nine wisest Druids just because they wear black robes. But on the other hand, maybe I get a really better outcome. If I learn how to suspend disbelief, when I go to the Supreme court, which I've attended once, just the way when I go to a movie, you know, transport me, take me away, make me believe that this is in fact true. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's true. I mean, that's, that's very true. There's there again, it goes back to these plural truths. It depends on where you're standing and the question you're asking maybe, you

you know, there are all these sort of different variations on it, but sometimes something can be true, very true for you right then and there. I mean, it may make no sense, but, Ooh, I'm just having a great time or fuck. I love you. And then you get, then you, then you have time to think about it. I was like, I was going to buy that car. I asked that person to marry me, but I, well, I really felt it in the moment. Maybe that's just my biology talking, but, um,

uh yeah i i think there are different levels there they're truths with a capital t and then there's smaller truths maybe they're illusions but i like the illusion well i mean i think that one of the things that you can point to just the way the way you talked about why do people get carried away and end up in vegas marrying each other is that in some sense maybe our biology knows that we can't trust our rational mind and that if we don't feel swept away that

One of the reasons that these impulses are so hard to explain is, is that biology has designed this drive to reproduce, to be almost suicidal, that you're willing to sacrifice your,

You know, if you think about it in terms of biology, you have soma, which doesn't reproduce and you have germ lines like what's between your legs that has a hope of immortality. And you have to make sure that the soma is overwhelmed by the need to perpetuate the germ. And so, in fact, we're born to be self-destructive and irrational in our somatic selves because it is our line.

that in some sense has to live forever. Yeah. You're a series of sensations, you know, and you chase some sensations and run away from the others. A lot of times. Um, I think that that's where, um, meditation and, uh, certainly something that's, I do because of that book that I've always been fascinated with. I read a lot of, when I was a young man, I read everything about Zen and, you know, I was very into, I was martial arts guy and I read a lot about, you know,

the Japanese tradition of Zen and Zen and the art of archery and motorcycle maintenance and all that stuff. And, and I even was, it went through my period. It was like the Greeks know nothing. And you know, I'm going to meditate, you know, and all that stuff. But, um,

But Sam Harris's book, Spirituality Without Religion, I really, really liked because, and I really like his app. I'm not a, but I do it every day and I've been doing it for almost a year now. Sam, if you're out there, you're welcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, he's, you know. But you guys haven't hung out. I've never met him. Well, let's, let's, let's rectify that because I think you guys would be fast friends. I think he's great. And I, you know, to be honest, I would love to potentially explore with you some of the

issues about how to bring truly high level math, physics, biology to a wider audience. I haven't really figured out exactly. I don't think you will, Eric. I think that you, well, you know, they say that Einstein was really good. And actually, I take that back. Einstein, they say, was really good at explaining the theory of relativity and gravity and things to a kindergartner. He could use diagrams.

And I think if anybody is qualified to do that, it's you because you're, you, you just are a romantic dude. No, I'm just being, but I'm kidding. But, but I mean, but, but yeah, yeah. And there's such an emotional core to this stuff, Brian. I know there is. And, and, and, you know, when you were talking on Rogan about, um, how you like leaving this world and you like, you're in a world of ideas. I, I just, I haven't stopped thinking about it. I have not stopped thinking about what you said. And, and, um,

And so you are eminently qualified to simplify these ideas and turn them into something beautiful. If that's true. And I don't know that it is. Maybe it's, look, it's a challenge. I know it's a challenge. But if it's true, it has to do with a very weird thing, I think, which is that

symbols were not really available to me as a language because of my learning issues. They sort of, they, they play around and they jump here and there and I can't really read equations just the way I can't read music. And so for me, what happened was I had to find some other route up the mountain because the symbolic route was blocked off to me. You got to make it relevant. So, so

I always say to people who are not, who haven't gone down the education road, I always say, I use these little things to young men. I know how to talk to them. I go, education's good. You know why? And they say, why? I go, because it teaches you the difference between a good idea and a bad idea. And

And they, oh, fucking, I like that. And then I say, you should study some math. What the fuck, math? And he goes, no, no, no, listen, study some geometry and algebra. Why, why? Well, because it teaches you how to think. And they go, well, what does that mean? I go, it teaches you how to formulate an argument. It teaches you how to debate and beat somebody, crush somebody, you know.

That's how my father did it to me. He goes, it gives you ammo. It'll teach you not to be a fuzzy thinker. And he masculine, he created a masculine energy around math. Guess who got an A in math? This guy. And I wasn't, and I was always thought I didn't have a math brain. But as soon as he did that, I was like, I got to fight the communists. I got to have a brain that's, I got to have a rational mind. And I got to learn how to, how to, you know, formulate an argument to beat that guy in the argument. I never, I didn't understand that. He had to, I didn't, I hadn't read Jonathan Haidt yet.

Well, it was very interesting. I don't know if you've ever read Einstein's, I guess it's a, it's not a eulogy. It's his celebration of Planck for his 60th birthday. No. So he, well, just, you seem to have read everything. Of course, I have Max Planck. At least I know Max's first name, Planck's first name. So, ah, yes, of course, Planck. It's pronounced Planck. So he, um, Einstein said, look in the, in the mansion of science, um,

you find three groups of people. He says, the first is the craftsman and the craftsmen are largely there, uh, because they enjoy the beauty of the construction and the purity of it. He says, then you find the competitors and they're there because science makes for a great game with which to beat each other in contest. And he says, there's a third group, which is the smallest of the three. And he said that group,

is the searchers and they don't do most of the work. He says, the only thing about the searchers is that the mansion wouldn't be there if not for them. And it's just this, it's like a gambit gives you, but like these guys, this is all that matters to me. Like when I hear that, when you just use that metaphor, but this is, oh fuck, how can you not be a searcher?

The problem is that I'll never be happy because I'm not enough of a searcher. It's like the great jazz musicians. I think it was Albert Murray who spoke about the difference. And you hear this from him. Yeah, but that was a dog whistle that you just pulled. Like the fact that you brought up Louis Armstrong. Yeah. Louis Armstrong is captured in our public imagination as a novelty singer as opposed to the greatest genius that jazz ever produced. Swing, like.

He invented real modern jazz almost single-handedly. He could get, again, the great ones like this, like Charlie Parker and like- Parker would be number two, maybe. They knew their notes, there was the song, and then they would go off. They would improv over here thematically and come back-

To the theme, they'd find their way back. I mean, that's the whole point of stand up the whole point of any kind of self expression, living in that danger zone, inspiration, doing something you didn't think you could do. You know, that was that great thing in the Karate Kid. I remember when he he breaks all the bottles and he cuts off and they go, How'd you do that? He goes, I don't know. It's first time I've ever tried it. Holy fuck.

we all went, yay. You know, I mean, we all want to live in that danger zone. I mean, you know, but gee, be a good boy, play your horn, put it back and go home. Don't be crazy. You might not find your way back. Um, you know, but it, it's, this is what this podcast, hopefully, you know, it's so fun to talk this way. Well, the thing is, um,

I want to make sure that you can escape this, this episode. So I don't go on forever, but I would love to have you back. And the thing that would be most meaningful to me would be to find some way for you, for you and me to explore some relatively difficult scientific ideas together to see whether or not we could make great audio and video out of, out of it. Because the thing that will be most meaningful for me is,

is if some of the really gorgeous stuff and you know we both are talking about the the craft and the emotion and the thing is is that if this doesn't end up producing some amount of transcendence and let's be honest most of these episodes that i'm going to do are not going to get to the level of transcendence that i'm looking for but

If we can do something to push out the best stuff that people don't know is there, the symphonies that are sitting there. And I always make this analogy as sheet music that has never performed. Like that's how I view academic papers. So many of these things are, are symphonic and they, there's no public performance that allows you to say, Oh, that's what those people were dealing with. Oh my God. Is that really part of our world? Is that really known and settled? That's amazing. Yeah.

I would be very moved because I think you've got a mind like almost nobody I've ever met in terms of range, conversational ability and the ability to also just emotionally and analytically communicate.

touch a subject simultaneously without one displacing the other. It'd be great. Geez. Coming from Eric Weinstein, that's a huge compliment. Um, but, uh, uh, you know, I don't know, but I'd love to, I, I, I would enjoy it. And especially trying to come up with, as you were talking about coming up with a, a complicated, we'll end with this, but coming up with a complicated mathematical, you know, or, you know, discussing, uh, or trying to discover or talk about, uh,

you know, a complicated scientific idea. I was thinking about when Socrates was trying to prove the, the existence of the soul and the notion that we are all immortal and have been here forever. He took the two slave boys and asked them a complicated mathematical question. And one kid, he asked a series of questions and couldn't get the answer. And another kid, they were both 11 or something and asked him the questions and, and got the answer after it led him to the answer to a series of questions. And he said, I think it was to Minos, the great mathematician,

mathematician in Athens. He said, now, do you see that this boy's soul's not been here long enough? So he didn't have the answer in his soul, but this boy had the answer and I just had to ask it out of him. Therefore, his soul has been around longer. I was like, so the point is, we're going to see if I'm an old soul or a young soul. And my guess is I'm going to be a young soul. Well, my guess is that you are a superposition of all. So thank you, my friend.

What a great time. Guys, you've been through the portal with our friend Brian Callen. Look for his special Complicated Apes. And if you happen to be in the Los Angeles area or any city Brian is visiting, his comedy show is astounding. I think you will really enjoy it. Brian, thanks for coming on the show. What a blast. What a blast.