Jordan Peterson | Club Random with Bill Maher
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LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. That is a nice looking suit. Thank you, sir. Were you someplace before this? Well, I like to think so. No, I mean like someplace important. No, this is all for you. Really? Thank you. I feel even better. Three-piece suits in LA, you know, they go together like this. Well, I just got to tell you, you look amazing. Well, thank you, sir. Because I know you're at death's door. Yeah. Yeah.

For a long time. I've said this before. I said it to Matthew Perry because he was at Desdore when he was on my show, the other one. And I said, you know, it's amazing that life, it's so fragile. It's so easy to die. And it's also kind of hard. This is true. It's also kind of hard to get you. And you were close, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So what, why? What was, I forgot what it was. I don't know, really. You don't know? Really? Not really. It was a bunch of things, I think, all at the same time. I don't really know. But what was the symptoms? I was in worse pain every moment during the morning and afternoons for two and a half years than I'd ever been for any moment in my whole life. What kind of pain?

I don't know how would I describe it. Like all over? Yeah. Yeah, well, it was also like cattle prod pain, so I couldn't sit down. There were months where I was walking 9 to 12 miles a day. And what is the provenance of this pain? We don't know. Well, some of it had to do with...

Some of it had to do with benzodiazepine withdrawal. Valium, essentially. Oh, you were taking Valium? Yeah, although not very much. Oh, no? Well, I got really sick. I got really sick in 2017.

In 2016. And I couldn't sleep at all. People partied on that shit. I know. In this town. Yeah, well, you know, if you do it now and then, it's not so bad. No. I always had a low keel, so like any downer I took... Just pass out? I literally... Listen to this. When I was living in New York when I was a young comic, we took a Quaaludes. Quaaludes. Remember Quaaludes? Yeah.

And I passed out. We got about two blocks from my apartment. I passed out. I remember it being over the hood of a camp. Part E. And they just dragged me, my friend dragged me right back to the apartment and threw me on the bed. And I woke up 14 hours later with the door open. That's how bad my apartment was. The door was open for 14 hours and no one wanted to rob it. That's sad. That's sad. You know, that's embarrassing in New York. So you were on. Okay. But then, okay, but, and...

I mean, you just look great. Thank you, sir. You look better than ever. Yeah, probably I'm better than ever. You look like the fucking Marlboro Man. I mean, you're like dead, rested, and ready. Ready to go, man. Yeah, but that suit, I mean, Jesus Christ, you must feel like a million bucks to come back from that. I'm pretty happy, but, well, my wife almost died, too, at the same time, so... Well, maybe that's what caused your sickness. It didn't help. Right. And my daughter was also very sick at the same time, so...

I believe rather deeply in the mind-body connection. I believe that among the parts of Western medicine that annoy me and that I believe in the future will look stupid is not countenancing, not taking into account rather that element. Like if they can't read it on a blood sheet, you know, a

your blood panel and quantify it with a number, it doesn't really exist in Western medicine. And I don't think that's how we are. You agree with that? Well, there's a lot more to health than what can be reduced to, let's say, the merely physical. I mean, it's complicated. I have a very stringent diet. That seems to help me a lot.

And it helps me on the psychological front. So, you know, unfortunately, soul and body seem to be tied quite tightly together. They are. Well, soul, I'm at the soul. I don't even know what the soul is, but the body and the mind. That's what's born in the wrong body, Bill.

Everyone knows that. I love it when your Canadian accent comes through. It makes it a little funnier. Like I'm watching, you know, Mackenzie. Remember the... Bob and Doug? Bob and Doug. Oh, yeah. We were pretty fond of them. Those two could be from my hometown. Wasn't that a great... Wasn't SCTV the best? It was quite something, yes. Do you ever watch the Trailer Park Boys? The what? The Trailer Park Boys? No, what's that? Oh, it's like SCTV on steroids. Really? Yeah, it's like... What's it on?

Who did it now? Showcase did it for a while. But is it on now? The government was subsidizing it, which is like the funniest thing in the world. It's about these like three reprehensible, low-time, low-key crooks who live in a trailer park in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Oh. Yeah, they're ridiculously funny.

Well, that was the funny part about Bob and Doug is that it was mandated by the Canadian government. We like to subsidize everything. A certain percentage of the programming had to have Canadian content. So they were really sending that up. They certainly were. Well, it was prime Canadian content. Yeah. I think it's awesome that...

the person that you are, I mean, aside from who you actually are, but a Canadian professor, became this great gadfly of the left, of what I would call the stupid left, not the real left, which I hope there's some left, or rather remaining. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But of all the people

Canadian, you know, and I always think of Canadians as people who, they're so good at, they're part of America, but they're also not. You know, they can be it, but also look, I feel like they look at us from a distance, and that's why their satire is so great. Yeah. And they're... Well, and there's plenty to make fun about Canada, too. So, you know, we like to do that.

But it is, it's a terrible thing when Canada has become politically interesting. You know the world is close to ending when that's the case. And sometimes politically stupid. Well, yeah, often. I mean, I read a quote from Justin Trudeau, which was so dumb. Which one? Is he always dumb? He always lies.

As far as I can tell, all the time. Right. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard him say a word that I thought was true. Really? Mm-hmm. Okay. See, we don't really follow it. I mean, I just thought, oh, here's this, you know, great-looking guy, Ivanka seems to want to fuck him. And, you know, Canada, I mean, it's hard to fuck up Canada. But...

Yeah, the quote I read was, they asked him something about the protest because you had a big controversy about protests, right, with the truckers. Truckers, yeah. Right. And I think he was referring to them, but the quote was about protests in general. It was something like, we have a vibrant democracy here in Canada and we value protests. But it was something like, but when you use protest to protest or to object to the policies of the government, I think you're going too far. Right.

Well, what the fuck is protest for? Except to object to the policies of the government. It was quite shocking, everything that happened in that protest, because they seized the bank accounts of 200 Canadians. And that was not amusing. And Trudeau has no idea what that did to Canada's international reputation. That was not a good precedent. Okay, wait. Go back. They seized the bank accounts of people who were in the...

They seized some bank accounts of some people who only sent money to the protest, like through Give, Send, Go and GoFundMe and so forth.

Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. So you didn't even have to be at the protest. When you say seized, they froze it? They didn't take their money, they just froze it. They froze their credit cards, they froze their mortgage payments, they locked them out of the financial system entirely. That is creepy. It's really bad. In fact, one of the banks actually apologized. There's five big banks in Canada, and one of them actually apologized for doing it eventually. They all should have apologized, but...

but one did yeah it was really bad which was shocking i don't i don't canadians aren't sufficiently shocked about it partly because they don't really understand what that did to canada's international reputation but it was absolutely absolutely i can't imagine a politician doing anything more inappropriate than that right no trial no real investigation plus trudeau claimed that um

The trucker convoy was financed by mega, you know, Republican Americans, which is completely preposterous because, first of all, why would mega Republican Americans foment dissent in Ottawa? Like, even if they knew where it was, which they don't, and they don't care, and why would they? And so, first of all, it was the Russians. You know, it's like, oh, yes, that's the Russians' primary concern. And then it was like literally mega Republican Americans funding the trucker protests in Ottawa.

You know, it was so, it was so. And they were protesting vaccine mandates. Yeah, essentially. But they were protesting the lockdowns more broadly, I would say. Yeah. And because it was really hard on them. It was hard. Well, obviously, you were locked down. You know how fun that was.

We did real-time right from this room for about six months. I did the monologue standing over there. I mean, I did the editorials on the lawn. I mean, it was so silly. I still think it's silly. I look back, and I think it's even more ridiculous as I learn that so many of the things that I was saying that people were kind of like scoffing at...

Well, now I read a report like, yes, using hand sanitizer all the time on your hand is very bad for you because you're bathing yourself in antibiotics, which does seep into your skin. You wouldn't live, you wouldn't want, you would never choose to live on antibiotics, right? Things like that. Keeping children masked. That was really bad. I mean, what it's done to both families.

mentally and physically. Yes, and that sort of thing always hurts the poor kids worse, right? Because anytime you intervene in a manner that's going to interfere with educational attainment, it's the people who are barely skating by to begin with who are going to get walloped from it. And that's certainly, the data certainly revealed that that's been the case. I remember being in Chicago, I believe it was, during the, maybe it was 21. Yeah, we weren't working at all in 20. Okay, so...

And I remember the, I was talking to the driver taking me in from the airport and he was, he had a mask on and my friend who travels with me and we always would tell drivers everywhere or anybody, you don't have to have the mask on for me. You know, if you want a break in the day where you don't have to be breathing your own stale, shitty air for no reason, we'll open the windows to the car, whatever we're,

And this guy said, he said, I know, I'd like to. He said, but my four-year-old daughter, I came in last night and I didn't have the mask on and she freaked out. So they hit, it always stuck with me. They'd gotten a four-year-old to be panicked when she saw her father without a mask. Yeah, right. I mean, where does that fall in your mind?

psychology professor world. I mean, what does that do to a person? What's that person going to be like when they're 20? Well, I think it was also what it did to everyone and what it revealed about everyone. Like my sense in Canada, Toronto was locked down very badly and people were pretty much on board with it. And

My sense in Toronto was that 70% of Torontonians would have worn a mask for the rest of their life without making a peep about it. And 30% of them would have been happy about it because it gave them an opportunity to inform on their neighbors. And that wasn't cute. Oh. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, in East Germany, like one-third of people were government informants. Absolutely. And you think, well, that couldn't happen here. It's like, yeah, it could in about 15 minutes. Yes, the Stasi payroll. Did you ever see the movie The Lives of Others? Mm-hmm.

The German, it won the best Oscar for best foreign language. Yeah, there's a fun society to live in. One of the best movies. I mean, if you're looking for something with subtitles, I would recommend that one highly, people, The Lives of Others. And it was about, yes, what went on under communist East Germany. Yeah. And somebody, he was a playwright and he was...

Playing ball with the regime, he was kind of on the line. He was able to be an artist, but obviously he wasn't. What they did with the bugging and the, oh my God, it was how humans can get themselves into those kind of societies. And I suppose we could. You do it by lying.

You know, I mean, people think that tyranny is a top-down, is the top-down imposition of force on people who would otherwise want to be free. And that's just not true. That isn't how it works at all. A totalitarian state occurs when everyone lies about absolutely everything all the time. And the totalitarian state is the grip of the lie. Now, the politicians and the people who have power in those situations, they lie too, but so does everyone else.

Now there's a story, it's interesting, I've been writing a new book, it's coming out in February, it's called We Who Wrestle With God, and I've been writing about Sodom and Gomorrah and the threat of the destruction of the city. And so the idea is that if a city deviates from the appropriate moral path too blatantly, then all hell will break loose. Of course, that begs the question of what constitutes the appropriate moral pathway, but

Abraham intercedes with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah. And he says, first of all, that if there are 40 people, he says, well, you can't destroy the city when he's talking to God. You can't destroy the city. There's some good people there. And God says, yeah, well, I don't think there's very many.

And Abraham says, well, what if there's 40? And God says, well, if you can find 40 decent people, then we'll leave the city alone. And Abraham bargains and bargains. And I think he bargains them down to 10. Which is quite good, you know, because God's willing to give in. But it means something very specific as far as I'm concerned. It means something like...

If in a political unit, there's still 10 people who are willing to tell the truth, then all hell will not break loose. That's enough. 10 people who actually tell the truth is enough to stave off the descent into totalitarian chaos. That's why comedians are so bloody important, right? Because they...

They can, they do say what's true and you can tell it's true and you can tell that people believe it's true because people laugh and you can't, you can't really fake that. It's genuine. Well, then you are an honorary comedian because you do it. Yeah, but people just laugh at me, not with me. No, no, no. Well, yes, you're not a comedian, but you are Canadian, so you're halfway there. Well, right. Yes, yes. But you are, no, you don't, you do not give.

And again, this is what I was trying to say before about you being a Canadian professor. It's like so delicious that you're the thumb in their eye because it's so much harder to argue with somebody like that because it's the person that they think, they should be on our side, Canadian academic. I know. How much more milquetoast can you possibly get than a Canadian professor? Not milquetoast, but liberal and erudite and sophisticated and all the things we want to think we are. And yet he's not...

getting on the crazy train with us. And come on, the crazy train is leaving the station. Hey, so I could ask you a question that I've asked like 40 Democrats, Senators and Congressmen and Robert F. Kennedy, by the way, recently, this question. It's a very hard question and I don't ask it just, you know, to cause trouble. I'm actually curious. I am ready. When do you think the left goes too far? May I use my lifeline?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Call the people who know. Okay. I mean, you mean they have it already? Well, but how do you know? When Trump gets reelected, that's when you know. What would you regard as behavior on the left that's unacceptable from the perspective of someone who's essentially liberal? How long have you got?

I mean, the theme I've been trying to promulgate as much as I can the last five years, partly just in self-defense of people who say, I've changed, I have not, is that wokeness

is not something that expands on liberalism. It's something that undoes it. And I think you are on the same page, generally. I mean, to give a few examples, colorblindness, wanting to have a colorblind society where we don't see race, is classic liberalism. Certainly what Obama was going for. That's not wokeism. Wokeism is race is front and center to everything.

Yeah, so that's part of that. So to me, that's an extension of the insistence that someone's primary identity is signified by their group. Right, which again, this is exactly what...

old school liberals were fighting against. Don't characterize somebody by that. Okay, so they completely invert it and then they get mad at us for somehow we're conservatives. No, no, we're not conservatives. You're just not what liberals are. You're doing a different thing, which is fine. We're all allowed to do our thing, but you can't do this whole different thing and then take the term that used to apply but doesn't apply anymore. I mean, there's many colleges that have segregated dorms. Okay,

Again, you do you. And graduation ceremonies. Yes, you do you. But this is not liberalism. And certainly in the realm of gender. I mean, liberalism is always about tolerance for what's...

celebrate and allow everyone to be protected and respected for who they are. That includes homosexuality, that includes trans, which of course is a real thing that happens. That's different than rewriting the anatomy book from page one so that every kid who comes out, it's a jump ball and there's no such thing as sex, it's only gender. And

Again, this is something different. It's not liberalism. So you can't say, oh, you don't believe in that. You're not a liberal. Freedom of speech used to be a whole liberal thing. We used to own the First Amendment like the conservatives owned the second. That's reversed. I mean, something like the homeless movement.

It was liberals who I used to do the show on HBO Comic relief we're gonna help get the homeless off the street now It's how dare you ask them to get off the street so you can keep the homeless on the street and you can have You know segregated dorms and all that But that's liberalism. It's not it's something different so

So there's a line of research that's been developing, I guess, over the last six or seven years that I think is very relevant to this. Because I've been thinking more and more thoroughly that the culture war is actually not a political battle at all. That the political battle is a facade for the actual battle. Which is? Well, there's a group of researchers, most of them centered originally at the University of British Columbia, who started studying culture.

the subclinical manifestations of psychopathy. So there's a guy there named Robert Hare, and Robert Hare was the first psychologist who really studied psychopaths. And he developed a checklist for psychopathic behavior and the diagnostic criteria. It never became a formal diagnostic criteria, but criminologists have used it a lot. And if you're psychopathic, you're much more likely, for example, to be a repeat offender. And so he delineated

the core psychopathic traits. And there's two sets of core psychopathic traits. So the first core dimension is something like predation. It's like, if I'm a psychopath, whatever's yours is rightfully mine. And if you can't defend yourself against me taking it, that's just an indication of the kind of weakness that makes you a viable moral target, right? You're too weak to resist. You're too, what would you call it?

you're too contemptible to even bother with. So not only can I take your stuff, but morally I'm obligated to. You say this very convincingly. I know you're adopting the voice of them, but I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could play this part beautifully. Yeah, well, yeah. Well, I've watched people like that a fair bit. And the second dimension is parasitism.

And so that's a more subtle form of predation. And someone with a parasitical lifestyle will adjust their attitude towards you so that they can, so that you'll do the work and support them. And they'll do that however they can get you to do it. They'll use the sense of,

Proclamation of victimization, for example, is one of the strategies that the parasitical psychopaths use. Like the stripper's boyfriend who doesn't have a job. Yeah, right, right, right. We come from different schools of thought. Okay, let me ask a dumb layman question before we finish this. I would love to know, and I'm sure I was told, the difference between sociopath and psychopath. It's not really a relevant distinction.

Really? Yeah, yeah. It's not really a relevant distinction. Okay, so predation and parasite. Right, right. So a psychopath is a predatory parasite. And that means they're very, very low in agreeableness, no empathy, tend to be callous. That's the personality manifestation. They're very unconscientious. They will not formulate or keep verbal contracts. Like who are some people who fit this description? Ted Bundy.

Oh, I was hoping for more. Well, let me put it another way. Who are some people running for president now? Well, that's an open question, right? So that brings us to the next part of this. So Robert Hare's students, a variety of them, started to study psychopathy in its more normal forms, right? Because you can imagine you're so psychopathic that you end up fully criminal and then you're in prison. But not everybody who has psychopathic proclivities is going to

be foolish enough to be criminal enough to be caught, let's say. So there's other things that make you get caught if you're a criminal. So they started to study subclinical psychopathy and built a personality inventory to measure subclinical psychopathic traits. And so the traits are psychopathic, so predatory parasite, Machiavellian. So like a Machiavellian individual is

In preparing for an interview like this would be thinking, OK, well, now I'm going to go on Bill's show. What can I get out of it? You know, how can I elevate my status? What could I use to sell? Like and then every word would be crafted to extract. Well, every word would be used to extract out something that was only self-serving.

You know that if your dialogue with someone goes well, what happens is you fall into an honest conversation. No, it's just because I have no agenda and I have no idea where we're going to go. My agenda is to have as close to what this would be if we were not making this into a podcast. And it would be no different. I can honestly say I don't think there's one thing I would have done differently.

And it should feel that way. And I want it to feel that way. And that really works well on YouTube. It's what people want. Because they're actually tired of overproduced instrumental conversations. But a Machiavellian would be manipulating the conversation constantly to get an edge, to get an angle. And so a Machiavellian doesn't use their words to represent what they believe to be true.

They use their words to obtain whatever they're angling for from the person they're talking to. And so that happens on the sexual front, for example, very often. So people who are hyper committed to short term mating strategies tend to use instrumental language, right? They're manipulative. So psychopathic Machiavellian

Narcissistic. So someone who's narcissistic wants unearned social status. And the last one, they had to add this. This triad was first called the dark triad, and then they had to add sadism. Because it turns out if you're all three of those things, you also take positive delight in the suffering of other people. And there's a very high correlation between the dark tetrad personality traits and left-wing authoritarianism.

So that's why I think it's not fundamentally political, is that what's happening is that there's a small minority of people who are very manipulative, who use compassion as a camouflage, and then people who are generally and genuinely compassionate

they can be manipulated easily. And so, and that's not, that's why you're seeing, that's part of the reason you're seeing this deviation, deviation from more classical liberalism. There's no better camouflage for someone who's truly dark than compassion. Right. Right. Right. Wow. That is some interesting shit. Yeah. It's, it's very, it's brutal. And the data is accumulating. Well, it's worse than that too. It's actually really quite, it's really quite frightens me because I,

3% of the population has these traits, basically, and that's stable cross-culturally. And what seems to happen is if it falls to 1%, everybody forgets that people like that exist. And so then when they pop up, they can be successful. But if it gets up to about 5%, then everybody thinks, oh, the psychopaths are here, and they start beating them back. And so they stabilize around 3%. Any more than that presents a positive danger to the integrity of the state itself.

Now, I think we enable the psychopaths online because I think that online communication circumvents all our defenses. Yeah, well, there's accruing literature on that front too because the online troll types who do nothing but cause trouble online have these personality traits. And what's going to happen if it tips past the 3% to 5% or 10%? Well, that's what happened in the Russian Revolution.

What happens if those people get the upper hand? They like to dance in the ruins, man. You bet. And they're out for mayhem. And they're drunk on the elixir of revolution. Well, they're not going to be successful pursuing their manipulations

in a society that's actually predicated on work so they want to flip things upside down because they can rape the runes that's a good way of thinking about it right yeah you yeah yeah it's very it's very bad and i really am concerned though see because we virtualize communication right and that means that there's certain defenses that we have

against being exploited that are no longer making themselves manifest. So you can say anything you want online, especially if you're anonymous, and nothing will happen to you. And you can bring any kind of accusation against anyone at zero cost to yourself. And that's not good. It might be fatally not good because something is driving polarization. 80% of

Americans agree on most political issues with about an 80% overlap, right? But we're getting polarized. It's like, well, what the hell changed? Well, how about the entire mode? How about all of our modes of communication?

Right? They've radically changed, and they certainly enable reputation savaging, gossip-mongering, cancellation, all of that. It's way easier online. Not just a difference in degree, a difference in kind. Yeah, yeah, different. Absolutely. I've had this argument with people on my show say, oh, you know, that's what they said when radio came in and TV. It's like, and computers. No, it's different. It really is different because there isn't this addictive quality to it.

It's a difference in kind. The cell phone is more like a pacemaker than a television set. I was able to turn off the television set, even though I liked I Dream of Jeannie and Bonanza and whatever. I could have watched it. But I wasn't addicted to it. And they're addicted to it. And you're right. It has changed the wiring, as someone said about another thing. We're building the plane as we're flying it, especially with kids. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and we're doing very strange things on the sexual front too. Oh, very. Just in this room. Exactly, exactly. And in Hollywood in general. 35% of internet traffic is pornographic. That's a lot. It's about 42% in my house, but I take your point. Well, according to what you would expect...

It's so funny. Women like to say that they're morally superior to men, and in many ways they are. But I never understood why...

being more interested in shopping than pornography made you morally superior? Because if you look at what most women go to on the internet, it's shopping sites. Women like verbal pornography. It's true. It's true. Meaning dirty stuff? There's a typical, no, no, pornographic stories, but not visual. Like men are pornographic visually. Women are pornographic semantically.

There's a big literature on this. But what is it? Well, there's a classic story. It's the story of every Harlequin romance. Oh, I see. There are pornographic Harlequin romances. You're saved by a handsome... Yeah, well, that's part of it. It's Fifty Shades of Grey. Oh, yeah. Biggest selling novel ever. Ever. Right. And I believe directed by a woman, written by a woman, and certainly enjoyed by women. Yes. Right at the height of Me Too, by the way.

Yes, well, the first one may be. Oh, me too. Yes, correct. Yeah, so that was very interesting. Okay, so here's the plot. It's Beauty and the Beast. So the Google engineers figured this out because they looked at billions of internet searches for pornographic material from women and they analyzed the narrative. Really? Yeah, yeah. How do you know that? There's a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts that the Google engineers wrote.

Oh. Yeah, and Google engineers make great psychologists because they're too stupid to be politically correct. So they just tell you what's actually true, and they don't even know that there's something wrong with it. It's like, this is just what happened because they're engineers. They're nerds. Yeah, yeah. So they just think, oh, this is what the data shows. You've got a problem with that? How would anyone have a problem with that? Because they're engineers, right? I love that. Okay, so there's five.

male categories that are hyper attractive on the pornographic front to women. Vampires, werewolves, pirates, surgeons, and billionaires.

Hey, that's right. That's right, man. So, you know, I can't help this. This is just how it is. So if you were a billionaire pirate with a medical degree, you could fucking kill it out there. You'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You'd be slaying it. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so now the next part of it is a lot of the buildup is foreplay.

So what happens is that the billionaire pirate werewolf vampire finds this girl who has kind of a secret beauty, right? And they have a very fractious...

A secret beauty, yes. Yeah, well, you know, it's like a Hollywood librarian. Well, I mean, I love that. She's not beautiful with her glasses on. Right, because that covers anybody who's reading it to thinking who's not very attractive. They can think, oh, well, I have a secret beauty. Exactly, exactly. It weighs a ton, but it's secret. Okay, now they have a fractious relationship, right?

because he's attractive to all sorts of other women and there's quite a bit of tension and fighting, but eventually she tames him with her secret beauty. And then that's when the wild sex starts. Not just her secret beauty, but her awesome personality.

So that's the female pornographic pattern, by the way. And it's verbal. Come on. Not as many women read Harlequin romances as men view pornography. All men look at pornography. I don't think all women do that. I think women are a little more...

I don't know. I wouldn't know how to quantify the comparison exactly, but believe me, there's, well, Fifty Shades of Grey is a great example. Yes. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, look, women are in a bind now because the politics tells them to say one thing, especially about sex.

We're definitely going to get in trouble here. I don't care. Trouble's coming for sure. If either one of us cared, would we be this far along? All you got to do, what you have to do is lean in. I mean, that's what we both do. It's like, no, I'm going to trust that there are this certain percentage, hopefully more than 3% psychos. Yeah, hopefully. Who are sane people who are, you know, again, the idea that the people...

who they say are these arch conservative bad guys now, the Canadian professor or Barry Weiss, you know, a lesbian. Joe Rogan, gateway to the alt-right. Yeah. I know Joe, he's conservative, man. He's never met anybody more conservative than Joe Rogan. Sam Harris, you know, these people who were like, it wasn't that long ago when we were just regular liberal folks.

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We were talking about female pornography. Oh, yes. Yeah? Yes, that's very important. We're having someone on the show. Rachel Bilson is an actress coming on. I can't wait to talk to her because she made a statement about how she basically likes sex. And it was like she likes the guy. She just basically described...

The entire experience of my whole life. Like, women, do they want to be raped? Of course not. Should you be rough? No. Blah, blah, blah. But they want a man.

If they wanted to be with a woman, they could do that. I don't know what her exact words were, but it was something like, it's this old shit about the, that's why the fantasy is this. They want a guy, there's a fine line that a gentleman knows how to pull off between not being scary or rapey or over the line, but having a pair of balls and just not being a woman at all. Being, yes, is it domination? And also not being a narcissistic psychopath.

Right. So you see that really well laid out in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Yes. Because there's Gaston. He's like Trudeau. He's like Justin Trudeau, except more muscular. No, definitely. And, you know, Beauty is relatively what she's clued in. She's intelligent. And she prefers the guy who's like the actual beast because he's honest and tameable. And that, like the female pornographic...

literary structure is identical to Beauty and the Beast. It's the same story. Wait, so in the Beauty and the Beast, she has another choice for a lover? Yeah, the Beast. No, but another... Gaston. Oh yeah, he's... No, was there another guy who was a more... Gaston is not the Beast. No, Gaston is the guy who is trying to entice Beauty, who ends up trying to kill the Beast. But

the beast kills him. And Gaston is a regular looking guy? He's, no, he's extremely handsome and like the dopey girls in the village really love him. He's very narcissistic. Yeah. So he's the fake. He's a fake.

Yeah, but he's like, you know, Niedermeyer in Animal House, right? I mean, there always has to be that stiff, good-looking guy in the college movie who the girl, you know, he thinks he can easily get the girl because he's the good-looking captain of the football team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Gaston. Yeah.

Okay, and then the subversive dude winds up getting her in the end because that's our fantasy. Right, right, right. In real life. That's the fantasy of creative people. In real life, Gaston gets the girl nine out of ten times. I mean, come on. She's a beauty. We're comedians and professors. We're not in that league, bro. Yeah, well, at least we do better than engineers. No. Exactly. Those fucking nerds.

Now, listen, not that this stuff isn't important and it's certainly not all about me, but I got one really important question I got to ask you from about 10 minutes ago. You mentioned these five areas, and I feel like I'm clear on four of the five. I am not a parasite. I'm not a predator. Mm-hmm.

I'm not a... Machiavellian? That's the one I'm a little iffy on. Let's go back. What are the other two? A narcissist? I'm not that. Sadist? No. Okay, well, good. The sadist part, that's very good. So, my question, you're the doc. I mean, can I, I do have Machiavellian qualities. Here, I'll put it this way. The difference between me and my father

My father would always just do the right thing. Yeah. Me, I think about doing the wrong thing. Yeah. But then I don't because I was raised by my father. Right, right, right. But I felt like with him, it's the natural thing. And me, I will always go, you know, and I don't. But it's a little Machiavellian. Well, yeah, look.

First of all, I'm not sorry about people who are in media and and any branch of entertainment, any branch of public life, journalism, politicians, the the sin, so to speak, that they're going to be more tempted towards are the sins on the narcissistic side of the equation. Right. Right. Because and there's a reason for that. And the reason is they're going to be extroverted. So they want they want they're talkative. They're assertive. They want they want to be in the limelight.

And the comedians also have to be... And it's all around them. They have to be disagreeable because if you're not disagreeable, you can't be a comedian. I mean, look at Bill Burr. I mean, everything he says is like ornery as hell, right? And it's funny. Right.

Almost all comedy is transgressive and you have to be kind of rude to be transgressive. And so you're low in agreeableness and then you're very high in openness, which is the creativity dimension. So, of course, all manner of crazy ideas are going to enter your head. Right. Because that's part of the issue of being creative. You don't know the half of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I might not.

You might. Yes. I can't tell you how great it is to have you back. Well, thank you, sir. Honestly, there was a lot of people who, when you were down and out, were very sad. Like, oh man, that is one guy on the team. And our team is not that big. That we cannot afford to lose.

So to have you come back and be so on it and looking good and funny and brave as always, man, that is... And you got lots of shit coming up, right? Don't you have a... You bet. What do you have? Let's do our plugs. Okay. I will be... We're not done by even a little. This is... But...

that I always forget. August 19th, Ovens Auditorium, Charlotte, North Carolina. August 20th at the Township in Columbia, South Carolina. September 1st at the Moody Theater in Austin, Texas. September 2nd, Texas Trust CU Theater in Grand Prairie, Texas. There's nothing wrong with making a little money and having people laugh. I mean, you know, Marianne Williamson was just here and I love her. But, you know, we definitely have

I actually think that's from last year. No, I'm dead serious. I'm dead serious. Yeah, yeah. No, no. I've been reading this all week. No, I might not even know my own schedule. It's possible. No, that's me. That's okay. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I thought you were plugging me. I'm so sorry. Jesus Christ. This is about you? That's his dad. Yeah, you're right about the Machiavellian thing then, for sure. Now, let's do...

That's hysterical. You thought they were yours? Yeah, I know. Jesus. That's what happens when two nurses talk. It's like, who's plugging who here? How disappointed people would be if I showed up and they thought it was you. They would be like, oh, my God. Okay, so what are your dates? All right, well, what have I got coming up? I'm doing a European tour at the European, Europe and the Middle East.

In early October. Middle East. Yeah, I'm going to the United Arab Emirates. UAE. You bet, you bet. Turns out I have a lot of Muslim followers. Great. Followers isn't the right word. No. Viewers, listeners, and readers. That's right. Not followers. That's fantastic. I'm very much looking forward to it. Yes, I haven't been, I haven't been, I've been to Israel. That's the only part of the Middle East I've been to so far. Yeah. And so, yes, I'm very excited about that. Wow.

I've actually done a number of podcasts with Muslim thinkers of various stripes ranging from, you know, real apostate types like Ayaan Hirsi Ali to people who are, you know, Muslim traditionalists. And that's been extremely interesting. And one of the things that's really been positive about that, I got to tell you that even talking to the

the more traditionalist Muslim types is, first of all, those podcasts attracted very large audiences, like multiple millions of people. And the fundamental comment, because I read a lot of comments about my YouTube podcasts,

the most common podcast by far were expressions of relief on the part of Muslims that they were part of the conversation. So that was really, really heartening to see. There must be such a hunger and an earthquake waiting to happen in the Islamic world for Muslims.

You know, I mean, look, I've taken my lumps, especially after 9-11, talking, I think, honestly about the problem. The same thing Sam Harris has identified so beautifully, that there is a unique problem with the religion, whatever religion it is at any time in history, that is the most fundamentalist. And at this time in our history, that is Islam. Well, might be, might be woke liberalism.

Hey, man, it's a toss-up. No, well, that is a religion, too. But it also might be which religion is being gamed most effectively at any given moment by the psychopaths. Right. But if I draw a mean cartoon of AOC, I'm not going to get killed. But if I draw the wrong cartoon in the other religion, I will. Yes, that's not a good thing, generally speaking. So I'm going to make that important to me, like which one could really kill me.

But things, I really feel like things have changed a lot. I haven't talked about this issue in a long time. They have changed. Because, you know, terrorism hasn't really been in the headlines. Yeah, well, the Abraham Accords were a big step forward too, man. They were a big step forward. And things change, you know, I thought it was, this amused me, there was a, I think, must be in Minnesota, I think, where there's a large Muslim population. I forget the city, but they

the liberals, they were very proud of themselves that they elected a majority Muslim school board, which then during Pride Month refused to do the Pride flag thing. They were like, oh, and that's always the conundrum liberals have found themselves in, which I always ridiculed, and of course they hated me for it, that how can you be liberal? And because they're a minority or a different religion or their skin is browned,

support them in the most illiberal actions, you know, just the way the women with the really we're putting a fucking tarp over a woman's head. And this is not like job one on your woke agenda would be to get the fucking it's like what they put on a prisoner, you know, when we're kidnapping you. That's not job one to get that off every woman's head in the world.

That would be mine. If I was like, okay, welcome to the meeting of liberals and wokesters, and we are the social justice warriors, and we must establish social justice wherever it's being violated, that would be very high on my meeting agenda. Right. You'd go for the countries where there's real oppression. I would go for that specific act. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I mean, if there was a country where, say, it was black and white people and they were making the black people wear the shroud on the head, would we just be like, uh-huh, I see. That's how you do things? Okay, great. You do you. That's what liberalism is. Cultures are different. Yeah, well, it's very, very hard to get the balance between liberalism

discrimination in the positive sense, right? Discriminating between what isn't appropriate and what is. And, uh,

It's what is it's justice and mercy. It's the balance between justice and mercy, between discrimination and tolerance. And I mean, it's hard with your kids, right? Because obviously you love your kids, but it's like, no, not everything you do is okay. Right. Right. And so, right. Because that's not good. Right. That turns you into a real monster as a parent. Everything you do is okay, dear. It's like really everything, mom, you mean everything. If you ask me what the absolute source of,

the mess we're in is now I would say it is that kind of parenting seriously because I think what happened was parents told their kids a in this century I guess starting in the nineties I guess it got worse every decade they said my generation was a little too self-involved and it just got worse but they indulge the kids so much and blue smoke up their ass and told them that they were little geniuses and didn't challenge them on anything and treated them like peers even though they were

two feet tall when they walked in the room. Like when I walked in the room when I was a kid, like you couldn't just invite yourself into the adult conversation as you should not have been able to. You were a child. That's not how they do it today. So the kid grows up thinking that even though he's a child with the kind of stupid thoughts that are in a child's head, that they're valid. And then those thoughts become like

what that generation that then starts running the media outlets and so forth puts out there. So I read headlines in actual esteemed magazines and newspapers like the one I read about women. It was in The Atlantic. I think the name of the article was Separating Sports by Sex Doesn't Make Sense. It does, of course, matter.

They actually wrote the line. It was something like, keeping the binary in sports reinforces the idea that men are bigger and stronger and faster than women. That's not an idea. You see what I mean about like, this is insanity.

But it was said by some kid who's young enough to think it's true or just want it to be true, and no adult ever said, no, that's just crazy. So I've been trying to figure out why this has happened, you know, and you can generically attribute it to a kind of moral decay, but that's not very precise. And so there's a bunch of things that have happened in the last 60 years that I think have contributed to this. And some of them are very complex. So one of them is...

Parents are a lot older than they used to be, right? They have many, many fewer children. Yes. Right? And so that's a really interesting one because that means that comparatively speaking, each child is hypervalued. And obviously there's some utility in that, but there's some real danger in it too. Yes.

children don't have a lot of siblings. And the thing about siblings is they take the narcissism out of you because your siblings compete like mad for attention. And if you're, if you're like center of the universe among your brothers and sisters, they're not going to be very happy about that. Right. Right. So like in parents now are as old as grandparents were historically. Right. So, so those are radical shifts. And there's another thing that I've noticed too, is that

There's, because the separation between the generations now is longer in terms of years by double, there's also a real, there's real impediments to the intergenerational transmission of knowledge about parenting. Like I was just working with my son the other day with a little bit of a discipline problem he was having with his 14-month-old who was getting pretty bossy. And

My son doesn't take a lot of nonsense. He's not a pushover, but he didn't know what to do. And I suggested to him what to do. I told him what to do, but he couldn't do it. I went there with him and showed him how to do it, and then he could do it. But he couldn't do it by being told. What were you doing with the kid?

Well, when she got squawky and demanding, I just put her in the crib. Oh, I see. Just squawk until you're done, and then you can come out again. And as soon as you're peaceful, you can come out. I see. You know, because... And even at that age, they can get that? Oh, absolutely. Nine months. Really? Nine months. Oh, yes, absolutely. Now, it depends on the kid. Like, not all kids are going to be like that. But the kids that are more extroverted and disagreeable are going to be like that. But even before they can talk, they can think? Oh, absolutely.

Well, obviously they're... Yes, yes. They don't, first of all... They're understanding that you're making a demand of them. Oh, well, and kids are going to use whatever tools they have at hand to get attention. They're so Machiavellian. Yes, they're Machiavellian kids. Yes, they are. They are. And some kids are more Machiavellian than others. And there can be real advantages in that too. Right. Right.

Like a kid who isn't a pushover can be socialized with extreme precision, right? Because they're pushing, they're checking out to see where the boundaries are. And so they can really learn to be socially sophisticated, but they're also a handful. So, you know, you don't get a benefit without a cost. Anyways, it was interesting to watch because even though he's not a pushover,

He couldn't figure out exactly what to do without having it acted out. And so now we're extending the gap between generations. And so I think we've interfered with the intergenerational transmission of parenting knowledge. It's not that easy to know when to put a disciplinary boundary on a child. You know, it's a very complicated thing to do. And it's hard on mothers in particular, because up till the age of about nine months,

Whenever your child manifests any sign of distress, your job as a mother is to assume the child is 100% correct and fix the distress. But at some point, there's a transition because a lot of the distress now becomes anger and it can become manipulative anger. And so now you have to step back and you have to think, well, now kid, everything that you're bitching about, you can't get. But it's really hard for mothers to make that transition because

And they've had to care for this creature for like nine months and do exactly what they were bidden to do immediately. And all of that was appropriate. And so there's a complex shift that has to take place. And it isn't obvious to me that people can do that alone. So there's lots of factors that have led to this change.

Then there's another one. You tell me what you think about this. This is actually one of the flaws, I think, of liberalism per se. So, like, I've thought of myself, I think, for my whole life as a classic liberal, but I've started to understand the limitations of the liberal philosophy on a broader scale. You tell me what you think about this. So, and it centers on issues of identity.

And I think clinical psychologists and psychiatrists have also been part and parcel of this relatively pathological transformation. It's like everyone should be free, as free as they can possibly be. It's like, yes, but that only works, that set of principles only works in a society that's bounded by nested relationships. So let's think about what...

how you might be if you were functioning optimally. I'd say, well, my psyche would be arranged properly. It's all subjective, right? My mental health, my subjective mental health is tip top and paramount. And that's within me. What's nested?

Well, okay. Here's what you have to have to be sane as far as I can tell. Like, it's pretty hard to be sane unless you have some continuous, direct, relatively intimate relationships. Because you're going to have parts of you that are going to go astray. And unless you have someone around to whack you on a regular basis, you're going to degenerate there. All right. So you need, let's say you need an intimate relationship to keep you bounded. Both of you, right? Because I think you take the typical man and woman and you put them together and you're

they sort of approximate one sane person. Really? Yeah, yeah. And it's in that interaction that the sanity emerges. It's not inside. It's in the interaction. And then your friends bind you, right? Because if you're boring, they don't listen to you. And if you're annoying, they turn away from you. And like you're getting social cues all the time about where you're drifting.

Right? And so you have your friends that keep you in line. You have your extended family. And not to interrupt, but that's why stars become self-destructive. Because the friends are really all become hangers-on who want to curry favor and never tell them the truth. Right. Well, then what happens? Then whatever insanity is there multiplies. You die straining on the toilet. Yeah, right. Right, right.

Right. Okay, so you see, that isn't really how we conceptualize mental health. Now, we think of it as something that's within, but... Wait, you said relationship, friends... Friends, family, extended family. Yeah, but then there's more. There's community, there's the political organizations around you, there's your business relationships. Like, you're nested in a hierarchy of social relationships.

And if you can take those for granted, then you can say, like the English liberals did when they established liberalism, then you can be free. Yeah, but you have to be nested in all those relationships before that freedom doesn't just make you drift into some insane direction. And now we've got this situation where we tell young people, well, you can be whatever you want to be. It's like,

You mean whatever? Well, no, but seriously, right? Because if you're a girl and you can be a boy, you can be whatever you want to be. No, when I was a kid and we said to a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? We meant like fireman. Right. We didn't mean like girl. We also didn't mean drag queen. No.

There's something wrong with a drag queen. In a club at night in New York, in Soho. Exactly. Why that's a hill the Democrats want to die on, I have no idea. All I can say is that's what happens when there's this institutional capture

I don't think most Democrats, most liberals are in league with what the far left is saying. They just are afraid of them. Yeah, right. They're just afraid of them. There's good reason to be afraid of psychopaths. Of course. Look, I've known at least 200 people who've been canceled.

Like, I have a very wide network of cancelled people. And virtually every single one of them, when they got cancelled, responded to it about the same way you would respond to either a very, very bad court battle or a very, very bad illness. Like, it really wipes people out. Now, you get the odd person. Douglas Murray is like this, by the way. He's up for the fight, right? He's a hard guy to cancel and put in a corner. But most people who are cancelled, man, it just devastates them. No, that's why I said, when you got sick,

I feel like there's a little team. We don't all agree on everything, but we all kind of agree that there's a thing called sanity, and there's a certain amount of stuff that

lands in it and certain stuff that lands out and we don't have to agree on we kind of like the fact that we don't have to agree on everything but we're well you don't learn otherwise do you don't learn but you know and in general we're we don't have that many things to disagree on so yeah i agree the idea that we would lose any member of the team uh this little avengers squad that we have

I feel like is, yeah, it's very threatening because I feel like

There are people who only think all day long about how to cancel people, how to get rid of people. That is their raison d'etre. And they would like to think of themselves as social justice warriors. And they're just fucking mean girls. It's not about the worrying. And it's not about the social. And it's not about the justice nearly as much as it is about, I got this scalp on my wall.

That's the sadism part. That's right. I found somebody who's less morally aware than me and my friends because they didn't get the memo about Latinx. We say Latinx now. Oh, shut up, fetch girl. Yeah. You know? Well, and it's interesting, too, that you bring up the issue of mean girls because there are male patterns of antisocial behavior and there are female patterns and

and the male pattern tends to tilt towards physical violence which is partly why almost everyone who's in prison is male as we really put clamps down on physical violence right but the female anti-social pattern which is well established by the way in the clinical literature is reputation savaging gossip mongering and exclusion and its scales online oh wait say that again reputation savaging right so this is what chicks do as opposed to us you're so right when

Men are like, I'll kill you. Yeah. And women are like, I'll make you kill yourself. Right, right, right, right, right, right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'll make you wish you were dead. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I'll actually make you kill yourself because that happens a lot. That's online bullying, right? You bet. They get some 14-year-old and they just... And look, I so understand this, even though I'm just...

oceans away from the era where cell phones were part of your teenhood. But I sure do remember the feeling of having a knot in my stomach. Most days, I would say that I went to school for many, many years because there was so much

bullying, embarrassment potential, ostracism. Yeah. You imagine what that would be like with cell phones, where every bloody thing, stupid thing you did at a party was recorded? And it never leaves. At least you could go home after school and the cell phone didn't follow you, but it follows you into your bedroom. Yeah, and it might follow you for the rest of your life. And it might follow... You know, I'm so...

Not being able to forget is a terrible thing, right? Correct. And, you know, if you can record everything... That's why I smoked this. Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly. Who are you? No, it's absolutely true. Eugene O'Neill said, a life without illusions is unpardonable and a life with illusions is unbearable.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you need to be able to forget and you need to be able to forgive. And it's also the case that it isn't obvious at all that virtual communication facilitates forgiveness, right? It's really good at facilitating the vengeful mob. What is?

Online communication. Oh, online communication. Because you don't have mobs of people who are going out together to forgive. No. Like, no, that's not happening. In the Bible, it does. Yeah, yeah, but it doesn't make itself, and even if it does happen online, it doesn't attract attention. You were talking about Sodom and Gomorrah earlier. That was you, right? It was. It was me. It was Marianne Williamson.

Okay, so I was there when we were making Religious. That was one of the places. And this is the one with Lot's wife. So I feel like I studied this and I didn't remember these intricate permutations. God was bargained down to ten people. That's actually why they go to Sardinia, to look for the ten people.

But it started at 40? Started at 40. I just love the way they love the Bible, and it's the greatest book, and they swear on it. But it has these things that are comically stupid and corrupt. I mean, God is so corrupt in the Bible. I mean, you can bargain with humans. He does things that are so capricious and cruel and petty. I mean, he's very Trumpian.

Well, I've been walking. I released a series on, started to release it yesterday on YouTube on the story of Exodus. And it's a 16-part series, 32 hours of Exodus. Yeah, I had nine people come down. And I've been walking through the biblical corpus. That was actually something I wanted to talk to you today about. I love it. I love it that you're a real professor.

You're like a personality and a TV guy and like a great voice, but you're the real deal. You're an academic. So there's a very interesting idea that lurks behind the notion that you can establish a covenant with God. And you can tell me what you make of this. It's like...

It's a reflection of the fact that human beings bargain with fate all the time. We bargain with the future all the time. So, and here's how we do it. So, and this is what you teach your kids. You teach your kids that if you forego immediate gratification, so you give it up, sacrifice it, because that's a sacrifice.

That the future will be better as a consequence. Well, that's okay. It's a contractual relationship. Well, that's what's trying... Right. That's the thing that's so interesting is that it actually will. If you don't have that piece of cake tonight, you'll be healthier tomorrow. Right, right. And if you don't go off and play with your friends immediately after school, but, you know, play the piano for 20 minutes, then in 10 years when you're actually a musician, all sorts of... Okay, so...

But see, this is something that's very uniquely human because human beings have learned that if we give up, there are certain forms of immediate gratification. If we give them up, which means we offer them up, it's a sacrificial offering. Then we can make a covenant, a bargain with the future. Right. That's what's being reflected in those stories where the notion is that you can bargain with God. I love all that shit. I went to...

Cornell, I took a Bible course. But all the stuff I took, I knew I was going to be a comedian. So I didn't take any courses for any other reason than, oh, this looks interesting. And I'm a liberal arts major. And so all those courses where they go into such detail and they really delve into going over the text in a way that they try to understand how those people were thinking. And that, to me, is just...

delicious academia. I remember I did not have any sort of social life at Cornell, but I did have all these intellectual epiphanies from all these professors who you remind me of, who like to introduce these ideas and these, and oh, okay. So I knew that story all these years and now I'm really understanding it. It's, I kind of miss that. We released the series on the Daily Wire first and it was,

was the most popular thing they ever made, apart from Matt Walsh's documentary on what is a woman. Is that right? Yeah, it's very strange. It's very strange because it's very academic. It's a very academic seminar series. Well, I mean, the Bible is so well known, even by people who haven't read it. And by the way, a lot of the people who put their hand on it and love it so much have never read it, certainly not all the way through. It's a big, long book. Yes, it is. And it's, you know, full of mostly nonsense. Once in a while, it stumbles upon wisdom, you know.

I mean, it's, but come on, you got to give these people their due. I mean, it was written, first of all, it's an anthology. I'm going to tell you a story. Okay. A Bible story? Tell me what you think about a Bible story. This is Jordan Peterson's Bible story. I love your Bible stories. Okay, this is a Bible story. So I've been looking at the story of Jonah. Yeah. And this is a story that you'll appreciate. So here's what happens to Jonah. He's just minding his own business.

And then the voice of God comes to him and the voice says, you have to go to this city, Nineveh, because everybody in Nineveh is like, they've strayed off the path. And I'm thinking about wiping them out, but you could maybe go there and tell them like how foolish they are and they'll straighten up and then I won't have to destroy the city. And Jonah thinks, there's no goddamn way I'm going to do that. First of all,

Nineveh is a city of his enemies. Babylonia. It's a city that he's not allied with. And so he thinks, well, you guys can go to hell in a handbasket, and if God wipes you out, that's perfectly fine with me. Right. And then he also thinks, like any wise man would, it's like, I see, this is the task you have for me. It's like, there's 150,000 people there. I

I'm a foreigner. I'm going to go there and tell them how they're misbehaving, and that's going to work out well for me. So he thinks to hell with that, like any sensible person would. And he doesn't say what he has to say, right? So then he hops on a boat and he gets the hell out of there. Well...

It turns out that God's not very happy if you're informed that you have something to say and then you don't say it. So the storms come and the waves rise and now the ship's in danger. Okay, so what does that mean? Yes, that's right. It means that if you don't say what you have to say when you're called upon to say it, you'll put the whole damn ship at risk.

Now the soldiers figure this out, or the sailors, they figure out there must be someone on the boat that isn't right with God, and that's why we're in danger of being swamped. So they will go and ask everybody, and Jonah, to his credit, says,

Yeah, it's me. You know, I had the voice of conscience made itself manifest to me. I had a task to do. I refused it. I'm screwing things up. And the sailors actually try to save him, but it doesn't work. So they throw him overboard. Now you think, okay, Jonah's got what he deserves because he shut the hell up when he had something to say. And now he's going to die. And you think that's pretty damn rough. And partly what that means is if you hold your tongue when you have something to say,

then you're going to put the ship at risk and you'll be lucky if you don't die. All right, but that's not enough. That's not nearly enough because that isn't all that happens if you don't say what you're called upon to say.

So the next thing that happens is Jonah's drowning away. That's about as bad as it gets. And then this creature from hell itself comes up from the bottom of the abyss and takes him down. And so now he's in hell for three days. And so that's the next part of the story, which is that if you're called upon to say what you have to say and you refuse it, like you'll end up in a place where you wish you were dead. Wait, not the whale? It's the whale. Oh, okay.

But it's the same thing. In the story, the whale is described as hell. It's exactly the same idea. In Religious, the guy who was arguing with me

And he said, this point was very important to him. He said, the Bible does not say whale. It says big fish. Okay, well now it makes perfect sense. Yeah, well, it's the thing, what it is. It's a representation of the thing that dwells in the dark. It's so interesting that you see the lessons in these. And I just always...

read these things as like super fucking stupid from the Bronze Age, you know. And obviously they were telling people something. I mean, whoever wrote this had a message in mind. Well, they were trying to figure out by telling stories how the state itself got corrupted. And this is one of those stories. So the story is, here's how the state gets corrupted.

You're called upon to tell your fellow man, enemy or not, when they're not behaving properly. When your conscience tells you to do that, you're called upon to do that. If you don't do that, the whole ship will start to rock. But do you think the ancients who were reading this at the time, and they read the story about he gets swallowed by the big fish or the whale, etc.

You think they got this message? They were like, yeah, but what this really means is when you're called upon, excuse me, I'm talking, when you're called upon, then you step up and do it. No, I would say it's a step and it's a dreamlike step in the developing of understanding. So before you fully understand something, you can represent it in a story, right? It's kind of halfway. A kid will start to understand something by acting it out. They may. I mean, they may have gotten it or they may have gotten it on an unconscious level.

Right. They got it at an implicit level, which is what you get when you watch a story is you get it at an implicit level. And it's actually very powerful. Right. I mean, when people go to movies, most of the time, most people, when they go to movies, don't sit around afterwards and discuss what the movie meant. They just enjoy the they just enjoy the story. But that doesn't mean they didn't learn anything.

It just means they don't reflect on what they learned. Now, the people who came up with these stories, they were telling the stories because the stories were really interesting. But the question, there's a deeper question is, well, why the hell was that story interesting? And why was it remembered? And so what happens to Jonah is that he's in the whale for three days. And then he thinks...

Now I'm in hell. Okay, I'm going to repent of my inadequacy. I'm willing to say what I have to say. So the whale spits him up on the beach. Then he goes to Nineveh and he tells everybody what the hell they're doing wrong and God decides to spare the city. And so for me, this story encapsulates... To win-win. It's...

well it's a little hard on jonah you know well he's the whole hell thing he does he he lives that's right did he relocate to nineveh no it's just a pilgrimage to nineveh okay so he did okay but he goes there and then then the city is in fact saved but but it's perfect bill because what it shows and and i know you know this because you wouldn't speak the way you speak and this is true of comedians in general you know

that you have a moral obligation, like a deep and profound moral obligation. I do. To say what you have to say. You're right. Well, then you might say, well, what would happen if people didn't say that? Well, that's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. If everyone, if there isn't anyone...

who's left, who is good and will tell the truth, then the whole city disappears. And the same thing happens in the story of Jonah. It turns to hell. Everything turns to hell if you don't say what you have to say. So where is North America now on this scale of like how many...

Well, you tell me. You tell me. What do you see in Hollywood? How terrified are people of telling their truthful stories now? Oh, everybody. Okay. No, it's... I mean, we're... No, we're in a terrible place and they're... Yeah. I mean, look, I'm not going to get into the strike stuff, but it's...

It's rough not being able to put a voice out there. And I'm not just talking about mine, but our show is one of the few places where you would see people of differing viewpoints. Instead of you watch Fox News, you watch MSNBC, you know exactly what they're going to say. You know what the question is. The answer always begins with, you're so right, Chris. Right, right, right. Okay, that's not what we do. And, you know, I feel like...

there should be more of that and with a strike on there's none of that. So it's a little scary when you only hear the one side or the side of the bubble you're in. Or if you're only allowed to say what the narcissistic Machiavellians want you to say for their own nefarious purposes. I mean, I've talked to lots of people in the entertainment industry who tell me flat out that they're even starting to censor themselves.

No, they can't sit alone in a room now and write down what they actually think or even tell the story they want to tell without having that voice in the back of their head going, you know, if you you probably shouldn't go there because, you know, the mob's going to come for you and for creative people.

As soon as the, what, the angry mob, the angry mob is the tyrant who can't stand the jester. It's like, as soon as you have the angry mob in your head, you're done as a creative person. You're right. Especially if you're a comedian, because you have to be transgressive. It's led to a lot of stress in my life. I would say more than anything else, except relationships. You know, it took me a long time to learn that I'm not really built for like

the kind of standard i mean you when you were ticking off like those five things you need to be happy or whatever yeah like i must say that's the one time my my bristles sort of went up because i've i don't know if you're saying this exactly but i've read it in other places i mean there's a i forget the guy's name but he's a famous doctor and he wrote a book on how to like be you know there's a lot of books like that how to live to be a million years old or you know how to

don't die if you don't have to. Right, right, right, right, right. It's a good title. Yeah. You know what? It really is. And one of his things was, you know, he had like 40 things you're supposed to do and I agreed with most of them. You know, obviously stay in shape and, you know, don't eat sugar and,

And one of them was, be married. And I was like, you know, for you. It bothers the unmarried. And there's actually, I think, probably now more of us than married now in America. I think that we tipped over that point a few years ago. I think singles are the majority. It's just that idea that, you know...

well, you're this doctor, you're supposed to be really smart. A lot of what you say is smart, but you don't get that that's like a personal thing. And, you know, I hate to put it this way, but sometimes when somebody gets cancer and they go like, I couldn't have gotten through it without my wife, or I couldn't have gotten through without my husband. And I always want to say, yeah, and maybe they gave it to you.

Yeah, well, you know, relationships can be definitely... Yes, the stress of one I'm talking about, of course. It's funny, though, you know, because is it... How much of it do you think is the stress of relationship? And how much do you think of it... How much of it do you think is the difficulty of maintaining a relationship through the stresses of life? Right? Because the... A, not B. Not B. Not life. Life is not the problem. It's the relationship itself. It's the monotony itself.

I mean, again, people are different. Some people, they love that. I know guys who are like, they cannot wake up alone. And that's not me.

People are different. And I don't think we give that enough respect, that idea. I think there's a lot of this assuming. If you want to be happy, be married. Just get in line, buddy. Come on. This is what we're doing here. We're doing the marriage thing to be happy. You do you. You know?

So, well, we talked about this a little bit earlier in terms of the utility of sustaining relationships to sort of keep you tapped into shape. Yes. Okay, so if you don't have a long... I've got dozens of them. Yeah. And have they tapped you into shape? I've got bitches tapping me into shape all across this country. Are you kidding? I'm all about the tapped into shape. Well, so what keeps you as sane as you are? You know what?

my parents yeah okay so a lot of it is you were brought up i i'm very grateful that i was brought up in the era i was brought up in and not the one we have alluded to tonight where people are spoiled and where you were over protected i was not over protected i'm so much first of all adulthood just seems like all gravy compared to how much anxiety and fear i had in my childhood

And many people will say the opposite, but to me, childhood was, even when it was not bad, and I didn't have a bad, nothing bad happened to me. I had wonderful parents, you know, grew up in a placid New Jersey setting in the 60s. It was very, very leave it to beaver.

But I still was like a nervous mess going to school because there was no such thing as like protecting you from bullying. There was one kid who was bullied so unmercifully. I can't believe he didn't kill himself, but we were made of sterner stuff. So, I mean, the fact that I had that kind of

upbringing where I wasn't overprotected, where I got understood very early, certainly before I went off to college, what real sorrow was. Not that I like went to war or anything, that would be the ultimate, but like, you know, getting dumped the first time when you're 17 and, you know, just the bullying stuff in the schools and all that kind of stuff. You're going off to college and then college, there was no social life at Cornell. It really sucked.

I mean, by the time I got into adulthood, I was like, what happens to me? It's just not worse than Cornell. And so it's all been gravy. And I was always meant to be an adult. I like adult things. I didn't even like children when I was a child. I thought they were very childish. I went to Cornell the first year.

Semester, I alienated the entire dorm because they were like having shaving cream fights every night. Okay, it's funny for a week.

And then it was like, and I like said something and then I was like the asshole Niedermeyer and had to like lock myself in the room while they banged on the door and, you know, wrote bad things. It's like that was my experience up until like almost till I got out here. One of the things I have been trying to communicate to my, to the audiences that come and listen to me is that, you know, all things prefer, all things concerned, it's better to be an adult.

Like, it's better. And people do look back and they romanticize. So much better. They romanticize. Like, I went to my high school reunion. Just a pussy. I went back to my high school reunion after like 25 years. And it had many of the stereotyped features of such events. And one of them was this nostalgia for, let's say, junior high. And I swore to myself in junior high, I looked around at my friends and I thought,

People keep telling us these are the best years of my life, our lives. And all of my friends are miserable. They're miserable being 13, 14. They're like completely miserable. I'm never, never going to forget this. I'm not going to fall prey to the delusion that these were the grandest years of our life. And I don't think they are. They were terrible. You had acne. And you were, I mean, you were so horny. I mean, I was like beyond horny from, I would say, 11 years.

to 16 without any relief of that except myself. So you're at the horniest and, you know, you're... And least desirable. Well, least desirable. Hell of a combination. Exactly. You did it again, God. Genius. Yeah. Um...

No, I was shy. Super shy. Why did things improve for you when you became an adult? What happened that was different? Well, I don't want to get cosmic on you. I just was always meant to be this way. I was always meant to play this part. Like, are you aware of the show Camelot? Yes. Okay, it was one of my parents' favorites when I was a little kid. It was playing in the house, the show recording of it.

And it's about a king. They remade it. They made a movie with Sean Connery when he was older as the king. King's older. I guess it's King Arthur. And certainly on Broadway, it was Robert Goulet. Canadian Robert Goulet. We have all the heartthrobs, man. I was going to say, I will forgive you if you want to sing praises to Robert Goulet because he is a hometown hero. Come on. He was awesome. I knew him. Awesome dude.

Okay, great Canadian, forgot the words to the National Anthem once. We don't know the words to the National Anthem. We keep changing them for politically correct reasons. You should hear a group of Canadians get up and try to sing the National Anthem. It is really quite comical. We mumble through at least two-thirds of it. Is it sons or daughters or them or they? We have no idea. Play in your greatest hits.

Okay, so Robert Goulet, this is what made him a star on Broadway in 1960. He played Sir Lancelot. And it's a love triangle. Guinevere, she's married to the king, who's an awesome king. He's a great king. He's not like he's a schmuck or anything. And he's still very hot.

Sean Connery, even at 60. Okay. But she, of course, falls for the handsome young Lancelot, Robert Goulet. That's when he sings, If ever I would leave you, it wouldn't be in summer.

Okay, so I hope we don't have to pay royalties for that. So like I was never meant to be Lancelot. I'm not the boyfriend. I wasn't good at that. I'm the king, okay? You know, it's great. You can have your boyfriend or Lancelot, but it was just never the role that I was meant to play. So I just got more comfortable the older I got to this day.

you know, and of course, at some point that will end because, you know, we are pushing, you know, the age where I guess that is around the corner. But, you know, until they stop me, I'll continue to live young. So, you know, to answer your question, what keeps me going? I think a lot of it is that I like the fact that I didn't have kids because then I didn't like

pass on, I didn't trade my life for someone else's life, which is what you sort of have to do when you have kids. It's noble and it's, I get the sacrifice, but like I'm, I may be. What really, what has sustained you? I mean, you talked about your parents and you're grateful to that relationship. Yeah. So. My sister is still in the world and we're close and we talk on the phone and stuff. That's nice. Friends? The best.

And the greatest thing about being this age is that, you know, friends are something you collect over a lifetime. And I don't mean that in a cynical way. It's a good thing. I remember, like, at Cornell, having no friends. No friends. Zero. How old were you when you went to Cornell? Everybody, 18. And when was that? 74. 74.

Okay, okay. Okay, so like forget girlfriends. No girl girls forget that was not gonna happen at Cornell, but Not even friends. I mean that's lonely Yeah to go from that to like when you're this age and you have friends who like I have three friends from childhood You know a couple from college and then friends from early stand-up who are still my friends and

from when I was like an actor in the 80s, you know, a couple of people like that. And then from the people on...

politically incorrect and then real-time over the last 30 years friendships that just happened organically I mean I never push it on anybody but a lot of those are long-term friendships long-term so why do you think so you don't have to have so many wonderful friends what why do you think you were so successful in terms of maintaining long-term friendships but not successful in terms of because I don't see it as a success

Right, but you do see having the friends as a... Just the way the question is phrased, you are not successful at keeping long-term relationships. Yeah, I threw the game, okay, Doc? I didn't want to be successful. I took a dive in the third round. Right, but it's curious to me that you... But that isn't the case on the friendship front.

But it's so different. Friendships, you don't get tired of the sex. I still love hanging out with Jim Vallely and we never, ever expect sex. Ever. Not once in 45 years.

And so there's just not that dimension to it that is always hanging over the head like the sword of Damocles over relationships. The clock's always ticking on them for when the passion runs out. And that's the dilemma everybody finds themselves in. Everybody finds themselves in it. It's just how people handle it. Some people cheat. Some people leave. Some people don't care.

Some people just suck it up. You know, everybody has their way of dealing with it, but it's going to happen. No one, I mean, and no one who's in a long-term relationship is going to say, oh yeah, 20 years on and we still like attack each other when we walk in the door. It's just, come on. That's true in my case. You still attack each other? Yeah.

I know it makes an ugly picture. We just played Stump the Band. Sorry, man. You got me. You win. Dinner at Pepe's. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Wow, that's very impressive. It's really... You're a better man than I. Let me tell you the story. Because it...

So both my wife and I were very sick for a couple of years. Right. And she just about died every day for about eight months. It was really not good. And she handled it with amazing grace, by the way. And at the same time, I was very ill and we were actually separated like for about two years because I was in hospitals here and there. Sure. And so...

I was there with her for the bulk of her illness. And then when she recovered very suddenly and somewhat miraculously on our 30th wedding anniversary day, by the way, which she told me she was going to do like three months previously, which was like, I have no idea what to make of any of that. I got very ill after that. And so we were apart more or less for about two years. And we grew apart quite a lot.

And when we got back together, when I moved back into the house, it wasn't, we didn't really know what to do with each other because it had been so long and she had kind of gone her way and I was still very ill.

But we had made a habit of dating two or three times a week. Like, we really set aside time to do that. Each other? Yes, yes, each other, yes. An important point, Bill. Yeah, yeah. And so we had practiced that continually. Wow. And we really set aside time to do that. And so when we got back together and we didn't really know what to do, we thought, well, we...

we had this dating routine, like maybe we could start that up again. And I tell you, man, that brought us back together right away. And it was better than it was before. And that has continued. And when you say dating, describe a date. Like it sounds like something where it's planned and...

You're at your best. That's what you got to do. Well, okay, I can tell you. So we have this third floor. You go out to dinner. We generally don't because I can't go out in public that much. Look at you. Fucking A. Cannot go out in public. I love it. Well, not be private, right?

So you, well, you, you, I'm sure you know exactly what that's like. Hockey, you do something that involves hockey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I wear a mask, if I wear a goalie mask. There you go. Solves two problems at once. And COVID. Yeah. We have this third floor on our house. We built, we built a log cabin essentially on the third floor of our house in Toronto. It's this little narrow house. Yes. We had this weird idea that we would build a log cabin on the roof of our house, which we eventually did. On the roof? Yeah.

Yes, we tore off the roof and we put a third floor on that's basically a log cabin. Except we had an Indian guy, Native American, Native Canadian actually, come and help us design it. And it's full of totem poles and beautiful Native art. It's a crazy place. It's all wood. It has great acoustics. It's a small, it's not much bigger than this place. About the same size as the place that we're in right now. Do you let Elizabeth Warren stay there for free? I would if she asked, you know.

It's only polite. And it has great acoustics. It has a great sound system. We go up there and dance, and it's beautiful. Dance? Yeah, we go up there and dance, and I have laser lights show up there, which is real fun. Do you know how many women just came right now? The idea that this erudite...

Good-looking Guy you got the George Hamilton tan. I don't know how a fucking Canadian gets a tan like that Oh, I guess you're here in California. Hey, man, okay instant. Wow Like to know that there's a guy in the world who is like that with somebody's been with for 30 years That is the ultimate pussy boner for women. I mean seriously, I

that wetness panties from here to Koala Lumpur. I'm telling you. Well, so that's a good move. But it's true. There's a place in L.A. called Trashy.com. Trashy.com. Trashy Lingerie. Yeah, yeah, that's it. I had a membership card in 1988. Okay, so you know the place well. So about 20 years ago, something like that, I bought like 100 pieces of lingerie for my wife. Whoa, 100? Yeah, a whole bunch, like a boatload.

What a baller. Yeah, yeah. And then she wore them. And that took care of the novelty problem, by the way. The novelty? Oh, really? It helped a lot, yes. Well, I mean, it's the same. It was a form of play, you know? Oh, of course. I mean, let me tell you, you're low maintenance because, I mean, the idea that just different lingerie could, because it's still the same person in there. I mean, that's my problem.

You know that people can be very complicated, right? And they can show you different sides of themselves. Also lingerie. If you can play well. It can be very complicated. Yeah, yeah. Well, fair enough. Fair enough. But she played long, you know? And that made a big difference. Look, I envy you. That is just, that is a rare, but you do realize how rare you are among men, though, right? I'll tell you something else that's strange. So I've known my wife since she was eight.

So we've known each other for 52 years. And we were childhood friends. And I really liked her when we were kids. Like, I was probably in love with her. Before you were even pubic? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She lived across the street. She was one of my friends. And we kind of separated because I was young. I was a young kid in my class because I skipped a grade. And so she, you know, she physically matured like two years before me. And then she was gone for like four years, essentially. But

We were very close friends when we were kids, and there was romantic attraction there at that age. And now when I see her, I swear this is true. When I see her, I can see her at every single age of her life at the same time. It's really magical. Okay, they all just came again.

I was rehearsing all of this before the show, Bill. I mean, if you weren't sincere about it, they wouldn't come. But they're coming. I mean, because you are obviously sincere. You can't make this shit up. No? No, you cannot make this shit up. No, it's also hard to read. Not even Tom Hanks can make this shit up.

No, but he's like the other guy who, you know, when he, there was a run of movies there he did, and I guess it was kind of in vogue at the time. And like the best thing you could be was the widower because it showed that you can commit, you're single, right?

You're a total committer, but you're also single, but it's not your fault. Right, right, right. The one way you could be both the guy who commits crazy commits and they're sorry for you because the wife and now, you know, so that was always, and I know a guy and a friend of mine in real life who is that, I mean, he sadly and unfortunately lost his wife at like, I don't know, 35 or 40 or something. And, uh,

Yeah, I mean, it's way better than saying I'm divorced. Well, you said, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but from what I understood from what you told me was that

The integration of sex into a relationship was what fragmented your intimate relationships. It was hard to manage that. You have these long-term friendships, but the sexual element was something that didn't integrate well. Let's not talk about it like I'm some weird science project. Yes, I was experiencing what 98% of the world goes through, which is they get fucking bored of each other because no matter how interesting a person is,

If you live with them every fucking day, no one is that interesting. You're not. I'm not. We're good now because we're like getting drunk, forcing it all together. But like it can't always be that way. It's very difficult. It's very difficult. Well, I'll tell you something else that happened. This was interesting. You know, I was out on tour with my wife.

And we've toured a lot. We've been in like 500 cities in three years. Like it's four years, something like that. It's crazy. We're on the road all the time. And one time...

last March when we were touring, Tammy had enough for a variety of reasons. I wasn't feeling very well again and she just had enough of touring. So she went home for a while and she liked to be on tour. And so she went home and she sat down and she thought like, well, what the hell do I have to do to want to continue being on tour? And a little voice came to her and said, you have to get your own room.

And so she was worried about that because she thought, she thought, she went and talked to a friend of hers and she said, well, you know, I was trying to think about what I needed if I was going to be on the road. And I think I need my own room. And her friend said, get your own damn room. And Tammy said, well, I'm kind of worried about bringing this up with my husband because I don't know what he's going to think. And so she came and told me this. And she said, I went home and I thought about what I need to go on tour. I need my own room. And I thought, well, what the hell are you trying to tell me here exactly? You know, right, right. But then I thought,

Because I trusted her, right? And she's an honest person. We swore when we got married that we wouldn't lie to each other. And she really took that even more serious than me. And I took it seriously. So she doesn't lie to me. And so if she tells me that she thought through something in a particular way, I can believe it. Thank God. It's not a rejection. It's just a smart move. Well, that's why I realized that quite quickly. How can... Look...

10% of life is completely disgusting. Everything that happens in the bathroom, including brushing your teeth. Like I don't want to watch someone brush their teeth and that's hardly the grossest thing that happens in the bathroom. I just think it's gross.

These things need to happen alone. Well, we also realized it's like if you live in a house with someone, you don't live in the same room. And we're not on the road. We live on the road. I know, but you kind of do. And you certainly sleep together, right? You're in the same room about probably...

at least 40%. Right. You know, that's a lot of time. It is a lot of time. With another human being. It just is. Well, we don't know, we don't know exactly how much time you have to spend together in a part to maintain that novelty. Like, and it's a real complicated thing. I know. Well, well. Wait, I got, finally I got an answer to one, Doc.

No. Well, you said, you know, you said quite straightforwardly that there's a privacy boundary that you want to maintain. Right, right. I mean... But that's not unreasonable. Again, I'm not the only one who's told these kind of stories, but I've heard it many times. Like, a woman will say, you know, I was totally into this guy, and then we decided to kind of, like, get closer, and, you know, one night he just burped in front of me, and I was like, oh...

we're not burping now, are we? Yeah. And he goes, oh, I'm feeling gassy. I was like, okay. You know, like there is a moment when it just,

The part that makes it tingly gets killed. I remember somebody else's friend of mine's wife told me, you know, we were talking about, I don't know what, but she was telling me about like marriage. And I said, she was being very pessimistic about it. And I said, when did it all go south like that? And she said, the first time I had to wash his underwear. Mm-hmm.

We don't have to get graphic about it, but I know exactly what that means. And it's like, you can't unsee that. And you can, like, maybe you're made of sterner stuff. I think you are, definitely. But some of us just, like, we can't manage those two things. There's a singer, I think it's Meghan Trainor, who has a love toilet seat with her husband. Like, they shit next to each other. To me, this is like the opposite end of the spectrum I'm on.

Like if that's maybe I'm anal ironically, cause they're actually shitting together. But yes, I guess that makes me anal and that's whatever that is, which I think is nuts. But I think that has a lot to do. I mean, was it Freud or Erickson? One of those dudes who said like, everything is Mike in our personality packed in, in the first couple of years. So that kind of thing with me,

probably dictated a lot about this, right? I don't want to wake up with somebody necessarily. I can and it's going to be great, but like I don't need that. But I do need like my own bathroom. Well, one of the things that has happened since, so we talked this through and I said, look, if you think you need your own room and that's going to make the tours work better, like

Partly because our schedules weren't aligned exactly. I would be up later at night than her. Of course. How can they be? Just the temperature. I remember having a girlfriend. We used to fight. We'd have thermometer wars. Like I'd wake up because she wanted it hot and I wanted it cold, sleeping. I'd wake up, it would be 80 degrees.

She did. And then I'd move it to 62 because like, OK, we got it. I know you're going to fuck with this at some point. So what sort of way? What wouldn't it be just easier to get separate rooms? So you did, I'm hoping, get separate rooms. Absolutely. And it worked, right? It really it worked amazingly well. I think it was partly, too, because she got away from me enough to miss me.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the problem with that continual take-it-for-granted intimacy means that there's no deprivation, right? And you have to be deprived of someone to some degree before you get interested in them. And so you can get satiated with... You know what the number one mistake, I'm getting this from women, that young guys make with girls is like, they meet, okay, the girl likes him, okay, he's cute, he doesn't seem like a psycho.

give their number and then instead of just like being cool about it and like hitting them up the next day, hey, great to meet you. Let's talk soon. They like bombard them. And the girl is like, could you give me just a minute to try to miss you? Right. Before we start, you know? Yeah, yeah. And it's like they just tip their hand of their insecurity and their desperation. They think it's probably even more important to give women space to miss you because it's

Women prefer sex at less frequency than men.

And so if you don't give your woman space, more space than you might even want to give her, given your likely difference in sexual temperament, then she isn't going to get a chance to miss you. I mean, that's not always true. No, it's not. No, no, it's not always true. It's not always true. But it's reliably true. But it's great that after you went through everything you went through health-wise, that the old skin bus still...

It can drive into Tonantown. Yes. Yeah, well, you know, you want to know what you should be pleased about in life. Right, right. And that's the thing about, that's one of the things about getting older. It's like, well, what are you pleased about? Well, things still work. Yeah. It's like, it's a lower threshold. Well, Fran Lebowitz has the great observation that she says, you know, when people

people go, you look great. She said, yeah, remember, nobody really says it to you when you're young. Right. They only say that when it's a surprise. You look great. It's like you're decrepit. You look way better than you should. That's really the chyron underneath your head. Yeah, definitely. It's like, you know, for your age or... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you do. For your advanced state of basic repulsiveness. Don't look nearly as awful as you could.

So glad you're killing it. I could talk to you all night, but I'm not going to take advantage. So anytime I can do anything for you, I'm your biggest fan and I don't care who knows it. And I hope we see each other often. You can come to this conference that I'm hosting in London in October. Okay, that's not going to happen. No? No, I don't travel overseas anymore.

Oh, how come? You know, I'm just not a great traveler. Never was. I'm a nervous traveler. The last two times I went to Europe, I never got over the jet lag. Never slept, right? Like, never slept more than four hours. And so that affects, like... Yeah, that's not fun. This is too much information. It just... Some people travel easily and well and...

I increasingly, as I got older especially, I think, you know, I backpacked across Europe with zero money when I was 21. So, you know, but it's different. And I'm just, you know, I mean, a lot of traveling is just, oh my gosh, wondrous and delightful. And some of it is trying to cut open an orange at two in the morning with a can opener because there's no knife in the room. And it's, you know, it's just, when I get home, it's like,

such a relief from a trip so you said though that you were doing some touring or some appearances in america yeah okay and you know quick i do weekends you know i do friday saturday and i come home after the second show saturday so i'm not gone that long and uh and are these basically stand-up comedy absolutely uh-huh yeah yeah that's fun very stand-up yeah that's when i'm on the road with tammy one of the things we often do is go to stand-up comedy shows

But someday we should do this live. Yeah, that'd be fun. That would be fun and get a good crowd. Yeah, that'd be fun. We should do that at the sphere in Las Vegas. There is still such a thing as the public intellectual. Yeah, yeah. The audience is not as big as I'm sure it was, perhaps at different eras in our history.

but it still exists and it's large enough to have got you this nice suit. - It did, it did.