Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "What's Wrong With Men?" with Michael Ian Black

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"What's Wrong With Men?" with Michael Ian Black · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  What an amazing time to be alive, what an amazing time to be watching the news and having
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  conversations about the news and consuming all kinds of bits and pieces and opinions from
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  Heather and Thither. Like a little bowler bird pecking around the internet and social media,
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  trying to figure out what's true and what's not. But also what an amazing time to be susceptible
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  and vulnerable to stridency, to misinformation, to what aboutism, to people trying to distract us
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  from what really matters, jangling keys in front of our face in order to get us to look over here
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  instead of remaining stable and calm and even keeled. The only way we can do that is by having
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  conversations that resonate with all of us, conversations that make sense to all of us,
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  conversations that are difficult, conversations that are important, conversations that are a little
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  bit uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show, what a wonderful man, what a funny man, what a warm-hearted man,
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  Michaelian Black is a comedian extraordinaire. He's got a new book about what it means to be a man.
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  It's basically a letter to his 19-year-old son who's going off to university. It's a meditation
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  on masculinity, essentially. I wanted to talk to him about that, about our political moment,
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  which I should just address before we move on. The current state of things in the United States
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  is that the president is refusing to concede even though he clearly lost the election in a number
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  of states. He is claiming that there was electoral fraud. There is no evidence of electoral fraud.
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  There are a lot of online rumours. I've seen people who I even respect, spreading either
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  uncoroperated or out of context misinformation about dead people voting, which when you actually
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  do the fact check and you go back to the sources and you look at CNN and the New York Times and
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  places which for all of their mistakes and for all of their ideological blindedness are not about
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  pumping out, outright lies. When they actually dig down and they ask the state election officials
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  what is going on, there is no evidence of widespread fraud. It's so patently obvious when you look
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  at the motives of the people who are spreading these rumours and the fact that they are not providing
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  any evidence which is standing up in any court or with anyone who knows what they're talking about
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  in terms of data science and election hearing. It's so patently obvious that they're doing this
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  for nefarious reasons that I hesitate to even give any credence to the claim of election fraud,
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  but there it is that you've got the leader of the most powerful country in the world and the
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  loser of a democratic election for the first time in US history refusing to accept the result and
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  don't go on about 2000 and gore and so on. There you had one state that was extremely tight,
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  extremely close. You were talking about merely hundreds of votes and of course you need to get
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  to the bottom of it and count them all until the Supreme Court stepped in and said no, stop counting.
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  That was a legitimate cause for delay. It's not a legitimate cause for delay if the margin is not
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  hundreds, but thousands and tens of thousands of votes well beyond the margin of error across a
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  number of different states. It's just dangerous, Tom foolery, but I'm not going to dwell on that.
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  I will dwell just for a moment about how I feel about the passing of Trump. I know I have some
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  Trump supporting listeners and friends. Some of my left wing friends think it's unconscionable
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  that Trump voters would listen to me. They say this about Sam Harris as well. I saw an article saying
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  Sam Harris was apparently surprised to find that I'm to a quarter or a third of his listeners are
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  Trump supporters and he feigned surprise, but this just goes to show that he is actually part of the
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  right wing. I'm like, hang on, since when is it a liability to speak in ways that other people find
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  interesting, even if they don't already agree with 100% of what you're talking about? Isn't
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  the point of having conversations to not just be in an echo chamber? That's certainly the point
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  of having conversations on this particular program. I can tell you that for nothing. So I
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  regarded as something of a badge of honor that we do have a pluralistic and diverse range of
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  listeners and hopefully I can speak to them all in ways that make sense. But let's just take stock
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  then of why I think it's a wonderful thing that Donald Trump will no longer be the president.
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  It's not because of his misogyny, although that's bad. The whole question of having a person with
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  enormous moral failings in the White House is discreet and distinct from the question of what
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  they're doing to the country. It's not because he has set outrageous things like that troops
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  are just suckers and that John McCain wasn't a war hero. I think you're allowed to be dismissive
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  of revered institutions in American public life. It's not even because of locking children in
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  cages. You hear this lot from the tearing families apart and locking children in cages. I mean,
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  that's horrible. That's the terrible policy. I think my own country of Australia's policy of
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  forcibly detaining people who arrive by boat in desert island prison camps for the rest of their
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  lives is horrendous as well. But there are rationales for it. The lion goes that if you do that,
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  then you deter people from making a dangerous trip to come here by boats and as long as you combine
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  that with a very generous policy of resettling refugees from refugee camps around the world,
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  then that's a better way to do the best thing from a humanitarian point of view. I don't quite
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  buy that because I think you have a duty of care to people who come into your country, who come
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  into your embrace to treat them as dignified human beings, not as chattel. But I can understand
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  that there's a difference of opinion on that. I don't think that's a reason that solely is a
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  reason for regarding Trump's presidency as an abomination. It's not even because I think he's
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  incredibly dangerous. I mean, in the early days of the Trump administration, a lot of people said,
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  I can't believe this man is going to have his finger on the nuclear trigger. I can't believe he's
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  going to, I mean, we are just one red button press away from global annihilation with North
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  Korea. It turns out that probably actually isn't quite as risky as we thought it is. The risk
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  of nuclear annihilation is a lot more risky than we think it is, but that's largely because there
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  are too many nukes and there aren't enough safeguards against their accidental deployment,
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  not because I think that Donald Trump is actually going to nuke Pyongyang.
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  It's not because he's anti-gay. A lot of my friends have said good riddance to the most anti-gay
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  present. There was a viral video going around of him saying that he doesn't support gay marriage.
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  Well, excuse me for spouting a Republican talking point, but he is the first president in history
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  to take office as a supporter of gay marriage, personally. Hillary Clinton wasn't a supporter
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  of gay marriage until about 2009 or something. President Obama wasn't when he took office. He changed
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  position during office. These are very new cultural things, and if you want to complain about
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  bigotry towards the LGBT community, that is a foundation of conservative Republican thinking.
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  This is not particular to Donald Trump. If anything, Trump is a much more cavalier cosmopolitan
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  grab him by the pussy non-judgy kind of hedonist than the base of his party is. So any generic
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  Republican, for example, Mike Pence, is likely to be more anti-gay than Donald Trump has been.
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  The problem I had with Trump, and the reason why I think we should all breathe huge
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  size of relief at this point in time, is, well, there are a few. The first is the idea that America
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  can go at alone without the assistance and cooperation and collaboration of the rest of the world.
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  The 21st century is going to stand or fall on the question of whether or not we can get out
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  together about some big transnational problems. The most urgent one, of course, is the pandemic,
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  but the biggest one, the one that's likely to make the pandemic look like a drop in the bucket,
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  and that's going to be, by far, the most disruptive, is the chaos to weather systems that the
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  change in climate is going to bring. You don't have to be a crazy-eyed Greta Tunberg loving,
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  tree-hugging believer in the most extreme predictions of the intergovernmental panel on climate change,
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  the world body, on this. To nonetheless realize what the Pentagon realises and what
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  insurance companies realize and what, indeed, oil companies realize as they look at investing in
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  drilling in parts of the world that had previously been covered in ice, which is that the world
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  is getting hotter and the climate systems are becoming more chaotic, and that's going to mean
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  more fires. It's going to mean more cyclones and hurricanes. It's going to mean more displaced
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  people, more droughts, more food crises. As you have what, a billion people on the Indian subcontinent
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  enduring changes to the rain systems, changes to the weather patterns, changes to when they can
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  plant and what they can plant and how they can plant and what's viable where. You're going to see
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  huge movements of people. I mean, prior to the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War,
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  we don't focus a lot on the massive spike in food prices that took place as a result of droughts
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  that had been occurring right across the Middle East. Unprecedented droughts. Now, of course,
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  there have always been droughts in the Middle East. It's a dry place. There have always been
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  changes to monsoon patterns in the Asian subcontinent. These are complicated things. We don't know
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  for sure exactly how it's going to pan out. But as I heard Elon Musk say recently, it's a game of
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  probabilities. It's not a game of certainties. The future never is. So we need to come together as a
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  globe and figure out how to just begin to get under control the soaring exponential increase
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  in carbon emissions. I mean, get this. Half of all carbon emissions have taken place
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  since the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was signed in I think was at 1990 and like the past 30
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  years. So the first half of all climate inducing climate chaos inducing carbon emissions came out
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  when we perhaps didn't know better just as a result of the industrial revolution over the course
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  of hundreds of years. And then the second half have come out when we did know better. And we should
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  have been doing something because my kids and their kids and your kids are going to be enduring
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  a world that is at a minimum. Let's not go for the dystopian questions at a minimum.
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  It extremely more politically unstable as large refugee flows go swarming around Asia and Africa
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  and the Middle East. Extremely disrupted financially as we have to amend our farming patterns
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  across North America and Europe and Australia. It's just going to be a much more expensive
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  destabilized probably authoritarian far right provoking social unrest inducing
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  time to be alive. So it's not just tree hugging environmentalism here. The idea that America
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  can put America first and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, withdraw from international
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  agreements and is going to find some sort of global leadership by being solo
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  is a misunderstanding of the nature of geopolitics in the 21st century. It might have worked in the
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  1800s. It can't work in the 2000s. So that's the first reason I'm happy to see the back of
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  President Trump. The second is more prosaic. It's his self-dealing. It's his corruption. His
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  flagrant corruption. The fact that he still has Trump hotels. I mean, when he came into power,
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  he said, I'm going to put all my assets into a trust. But it's not a blind trust. It's a trust
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  that his children control. Other presidents have put their own personal financial dealings into
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  a blind trust, meaning that someone who they don't know and they don't talk to manages it in the
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  complete absence of any of any information about what the president might be doing. That's the
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  correct and kosher way of doing things. If you are in a position to make decisions, they're going
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  to have huge financial and economic ramifications for all kinds of different stocks.
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  That's the correct thing to do to keep it at arms length. Instead, are we going to believe that
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  he doesn't talk to Eric Trump and to Donald Trump, Trump, Jr. and to Ivanka and to Jared?
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  These are the people who, they are literally privy to decisions that are going to have big
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  impacts on the assets that he owns. That's not okay. He literally owns hotels where the
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  implicit agreement is that foreign world leaders are going to stay and give him personally money
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  while they're there on government business to visit him as a government official.
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  This is just flagrant, open, unapologetic self-dealing to an extent that we haven't seen
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  in the White House, well, I don't know about ever, but certainly not within my living memory.
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  The third reason I'm happy to see the back of him is the abuse of power, the pressure that he
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  is putting on America's system of checks and balances, the extent to which he is trying to
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  smash through, not just norms, norms sounds a bit of feat like, oh, we've got these norms, you
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  shouldn't do this and he comes in saying, well, why shouldn't I do it? It's all very well to upset
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  a norm, but it's not all very well to take a system that was designed very carefully to have
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  different strands, an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch,
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  and just start muddying them together so that you use the Attorney General of the United States as
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  essentially your own personal lawyer to go through the Mueller report and tweak it and twist it
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  and manipulate it and redact it two weeks before you actually release the report
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  so that you can get the spin on it. It's not okay to fire the director of the FBI because he's
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  investigating you. It's not okay to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal behavior because
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  it was benefiting you personally politically in a partisan way. It's not okay to wield these tools
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  as tools to subvert justice rather than uphold it. Is there a bit of this all the time? Yes,
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  outgoing president's always pardon their mates. I don't believe in the pardon power at all,
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  I think the pardon power is absolutely bonkers. It's just crazy to me. It's so obviously something
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  from a dictatorship. I think of pardoning people and I think of a king. I don't think a president
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  should have the ability to reach into the justice system and overturn the rulings of the justice
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  system. I won't get into a whole conversation about that, but whatever problems there are with
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  the justice system, whatever injustices there are, they have to be dealt with inside that column of
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  power, meaning the justice system. I don't know why the executive gets to reach in and do it.
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  It's so obviously a way for personal school settling and personal payback and personal thanks
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  to people who've broken the law to do you a favor. Another reason I'm happy to see the back of him
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  is justices, not just justices on the Supreme Court, but on federal courts. It is gaulling to
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  a foreigner to see so much of American politics filtered through the justice system so that whether
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  it's the Affordable Care Act or whether it's campaign finance reform or whether it's gun law reform,
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  so much of this is contingent on courts, on judges deciding whether or not the laws that are
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  written by the duly elected representatives of the American people are constitutional.
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  And if you are stacking courts with people who are inimical to legislatures passing, for example,
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  I mean, I think the most important thing would be campaign finance reform, so it's just not quite
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  so expensive to get elected in America. So there isn't quite so much power from drug companies
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  and other oil companies to shape policy. If you've got courts that simply prevent any laws like
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  that from being passed, that's a real problem. And I come lastly to my biggest problem with Trump and
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  my biggest sense of relief to why he is no longer going to be with us, touch wood.
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  It's anti-expertise. It's this anti-elitism, well it catches itself as anti-elitism,
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  but what it actually is is a disdain and disrespect for people who know what they're doing.
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  There's a kind of a pandering to base mob mentality. A hollowing out of the institutions
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  and the systems from both the public health service, to environmental experts, to policy experts
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  that is fundamentally unserious. It is fundamentally just treats the whole edifice of Western
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  civilisation almost as a joke. An American democracy as a joke. Everything's a kind of alt-right
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  meme gag. Nothing's to be taken seriously, nothing's to be revered, nothing's to be regarded as wholly.
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  Might sound a bit funny to talk about the institutions of government and policy as being wholly.
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  But I think they are. I think there is close to wholly as anything ought to be the fact that we have
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  been able to establish the levels of prosperity, peace and comedy that we have in the past couple
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  of hundred years for all of their faults, for all of their racial injustices, for all of their
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  inequality, for all of their gender injustices. Compared to any other place or time in history,
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  where would you rather be? Then in the West, in the 21st century. And to come swaggering into that
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  system and piss all over it and burn it down because it's not functioning precisely the way that
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  you might like. To not listen to health experts, to not give a shit about defense experts,
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  to not give a shit about what your allies think or what international agreements your predecessor
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  made, to simply be about owning your opponents and blustering has been the most damaging aspect
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  of the Trump administration. I also want to be able to ignore national politics again.
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  It shouldn't be this important in our lives. It certainly shouldn't loom this large in the lives of
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  non-Americans. Politics should be a fairly boring thing that runs in the background,
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  that sustains the edifice of civilization that allows us to have some democratic say,
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  but not to get caught up in culture war, mob rule, hostilities and passions. We're way too
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  inflamed. The temperature is way too high. And I'm looking forward to that being called down.
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  Now some will say hang on. The temperature is not just high on the right. The temperatures
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  are very high on the left as well. If you talk about culture wars, what about cancel culture,
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  what about the hysteria of anti-racists, what about antifa, what about Black Lives Matter,
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  what about protesters burning down cities, what about people rioting? All of that's true.
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  And I half blame it on Trump. The idea that a Joe Biden administration is going to empower
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  the far left is utterly misguided. A second Trump term would have deranged the left.
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  It would have hollowed out any sense of sensible, centrist, left-wing agitation
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  that cares about bread and butter issues, like how people can afford their health care,
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  like inequality, like good wages, good schools. And it would have replaced those swamped
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  them almost entirely as it has for the past few years, really, with this kind of hysterically
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  angry performative social justice. That is not intrinsic to the left. That is a reaction
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  to Trump's provocation. Part of the insidious nihilism of that man is that he can not only
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  rally his base. He can rally his opponents. He's got you like a puppet on a string.
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  And everyone is just an actor in the Trump saga. None of that was a good look for the left.
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  I want my left back. I want people who care and reason, injustice,
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  and clear argumentation, in sound thought, in compassion, and most of all, in expertise.
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  Here's to the next four years. Michael Ian Black, if you are not one of the two million people
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  who follow him on Twitter, he is well known for his Royal and Wet Hot American Summer and then
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  the revival of Wet Hot American Summer, which was a Netflix redo recently called Wet Hot American Summer
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  Ten Years Later. He's got a bunch of stand-up specials. He's a wonderful thinker. I specifically
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  wanted to talk to him about what it means to be a real man. What it means to be a good man in this
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  age of a crisis of masculinity. But obviously, he needs to say we also joke around a bit and we
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  drift into areas about politics and Trump too. It's a meandering conversation. It's a wonderful one.
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  He's a bit of a national or international treasure. Enjoy this conversation with Michael and Black.
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  Because I'm in a studio, I don't have a video. You can turn yours off and then you can
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  do a who's the CNN guy from who was Jeffrey Watch's face? Oh, that's a great question. Who's
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  the CNN guy who was Jeffrey Watch's face? Is that what you just asked? That's what I just asked.
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  Jeffrey Lord. No, he's a legal analyst and he got caught on Zoom. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  Jeffrey, do you see what I mean? It wasn't that hard. No, it wasn't. Well, that's a good pun.
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  There you go. Oh, dear, oh dear, me. What times? What times do you live in? How are you doing?
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  Uh, you know, fine. How are you?
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  Uh, I'm pretty well at the moment. It's been ups and downs. Uh, I feel very, I feel bad about
• 23:48
  about ever complaining because things are going so much better here than they are elsewhere and
• 23:52
  things are basically back to normal. They really are. You can go to restaurants, restaurants, you can go
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  to bars, you can go to do whatever the hell you. I went to a movie, Michael. I don't even know what
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  that means. I went to several, not consecutively, but on subsequent weeks. And you were wearing
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  like a, like a, some sort of protective suit. No, no, no, I didn't need it. So you would
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  think you were in the theater by yourself. No, no, no, they leave an empty seat and, uh, yeah,
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  I wouldn't go to, I wouldn't go to one seat theater. God, it's a one seat theater. Well, that makes
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  I call it more of a theater ret in my basement. It's in my living room. No, it's, uh,
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  it's a real, real theater and, uh, it wasn't very busy. And there were a few people wearing masks.
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  Uh, and I got to stretch out. The only problem is that the, the big wigs in a Hollywood,
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  your fat cats, they're not releasing, uh, nothing. So everything, everything that's on the screens.
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  And, you know, you don't want to rely on the Australian film industry to keep you thoroughly
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  entertained. So, so yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like old bond movies. I saw that Spartacus was
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  airing. What about, what about strictly ballroom? That, that's probably playing, right? I don't,
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  I think we give our films about three years and then we try to forget about them. Unless they
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  are Priscilla or Mad Max. Right. That's it. Uh, you know, where I'm going in a week, uh, Michael,
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  I'm going to the part of Australia where Mad Max was shot on a family vacation to take the kids
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  to the outback for the first time. That's, that's just the interior. That's the interior of the,
• 25:33
  of the continent. Right. And there's a Mad Max museum, which I'm sure my three year olds will
• 25:38
  find either horrifying or amusing. Yeah, or, or, or just they'll have no interest in it at all.
• 25:46
  That's probably quite true. There'll be more interested in the, in the, the dust.
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  If they have, if they have like full cars from the movie, that would, that, that would probably
• 25:54
  excite you. Let's not get carried away. Right. I think they probably have some corrugated iron,
• 26:00
  and a boot that was worn by not Mel Gibson, but Mel Gibson standing. Right. It's that sort of place.
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  But it's been weird. It's been the funny, funny year because, you know, we had a lockdown. And
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  I can't imagine what it's like to still be essentially locked down. Well, we never had a lockdown.
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  We've just been going better. Right. It's affecting everybody we see. Right. But you, I mean,
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  you've had, yes, this is the irony by not having a lockdown. You have a de facto voluntary lockdown,
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  because nobody wants to go out to a packed restaurant when it might make them very, very sick.
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  You'd be surprised. Really? I mean, I mean, it is weird. I mean, where I am in Connecticut,
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  a mask compliance is very, very high, like a well over 90%. So you won't go anywhere where you're
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  not seeing masked people. This is because people in Connecticut communist authoritarians.
• 26:58
  That's right. And you'll go anywhere. But places are like, they feel normal in a way,
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  aside from the masks, like businesses being conducted. People are out in public. There's maybe fewer of
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  them. But if you didn't know there was a pandemic, you wouldn't think just by the population that
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  anything was particularly wrong. That's interesting. I just assume it's a wasteland. Like,
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  because New York is still a wasteland, right? And I think London's still a wasteland.
• 27:31
  I haven't been to New York in months and months and months. So I don't know, but I hear it's a wasteland.
• 27:36
  But New York's a different situation because it's so congested normally. People are just in such close
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  contact. Here in Connecticut, you know, you can, you got a little elbow room. Sure. You can ride a
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  moose down high street. And we normally do. That's how you get around it. So you've been going out
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  and socializing. You've been having your wild parties and going out raging at the Connecticut
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  saloons. But how has it been being around your family more? Well, you know, because I am an actor,
• 28:04
  I am therefore often unemployed. And so it's not that unusual for me to be around the house.
• 28:12
  Right. I was looking, I did look, I see here on your on your resume, Michael, that you're an actor
• 28:19
  and a comedian. And then I went to your website and went to the touring page with the upcoming
• 28:25
  touring dates. Yeah. And it's a blank page. And at the top of the page, it says there are no
• 28:30
  upcoming events at this time. That's exactly right. There are no upcoming events at this time.
• 28:36
  The comedy world here is non-existent. Show business is very slow, but percolating a tiny bit.
• 28:47
  I'm shooting something tomorrow, a little something. I shot something a few weeks ago and a
• 28:51
  couple weeks before that. All very low page. Josh, don't misunderstand. Right. But it's very,
• 28:57
  very low page. It's better than when you say shooting something. I mean, that could be, I'm just
• 29:02
  going to be shooting something on Instagram on my phone. And I'm not even getting any money,
• 29:05
  but you're getting people paying you in cash. Yes, an American dollar. Which is still the world's
• 29:12
  currency. It is the world's currency. It's even doing quite well in spite of all this.
• 29:17
  Yeah. And has been. I don't know why. I mean, I guess nobody else is kind of stepping up and say,
• 29:22
  we'll take over the world. Yeah. Well, you've got to watch those Chinese. I think they got their
• 29:26
  eyes on it. Well, clearly, they do. And honestly, like, it doesn't seem so bad.
• 29:33
  The Chinese ruling the world. Yeah. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a gentle totalitarianism
• 29:39
  if you're not a wigger. That was just going to say, have you spoken to many of the Muslim
• 29:44
  wiggers in the west of the country about this gentle authoritarianism of which you speak?
• 29:51
  No, but that's true. If you're a, if you're a hand person and you're in Beijing and you're making
• 29:56
  it rain money, you know, and you're doing the kind of rapid thing where you hold, hold bills in
• 30:00
  your hand and you fly them off. It's probably fine, right? It's probably fine.
• 30:05
  As long as you don't agitate or discuss politics or make a ruckus about anything.
• 30:10
  Hmm. Have an opinion of any. Yeah, just don't. And honestly, it would be a relief for me to not
• 30:17
  have opinions. I would. Now that that is interesting. And this is something we'll get into about
• 30:22
  having political opinions because I've got a bit of a bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug bear.
• 30:27
  Is that a thing? Sure. I got one of those at the moment. And in an earlier episode of this
• 30:31
  podcast, I was talking to Oliver Birkman. I don't know if you know, Oliver. No. He's a guardian
• 30:37
  journal who lives in New York, who's a, but he's a Brit. And his big thing is kind of that we
• 30:44
  paint too much attention to the news and that we're spending too much time like social media and kind
• 30:49
  of social media activism are deranging us all because we're spending way too much time focusing
• 30:55
  on rather abstract things like national politics and not enough time focusing on things that
• 31:00
  actually matter like trees and sunshine and outcat. Are those the examples that he gives?
• 31:08
  Those are my, that's me really taking what he's offered and then, and then raising that and improving on it.
• 31:16
  Well, I mean, it's hard to argue with him that we're spending too much time on social media,
• 31:20
  paying attention to things that maybe don't affect us directly on the other hand.
• 31:24
  If no, if we're not paying attention, then the people who are instituting these horrendous policies
• 31:31
  will just go about it without any pushback. So it's a kind of double-edged sword.
• 31:35
  By horrendous policies, I assume you mean, and this is how I know that the US dollar is doing
• 31:39
  quite well because I got in the mail a check from your president. Yes, it's still your president,
• 31:46
  Michael. For $3,400, he sent it all the way to Australia for me. This was for the family for
• 31:54
  pandemic relief. And I went and I cashed that check and it was, you know, it was like almost
• 31:59
  five grand Australians. So I'm glad to see that your country's being run so well.
• 32:04
  I so you're an American citizen? I'm a permanent resident. I have a green card and I'm married
• 32:08
  to a US citizen. So if you're a taxpayer, then even if you're living abroad, you still get a little
• 32:13
  bit of that sweet booty. So permanent resident does not at all mean permanent resident?
• 32:19
  It's supposed to, and if I stay outside of the country for long enough, they'll take my green
• 32:23
  card away. But I'm hoping that I can appeal on the basis of the pandemic that there are
• 32:28
  extenuating circumstances as to why I haven't been residing in the United States lately.
• 32:31
  Right. I mean, you might have to get back that money at some point.
• 32:34
  Well, I think if I keep paying taxes, shouldn't I get to keep the tax, tax booty? And I'll just
• 32:39
  keep calling it a booty. Yeah, as long as you're paying taxes, yeah, you can, you can work that booty
• 32:45
  all you want. And working that. Thank you, Michael. And I think I need, I think I do need to
• 32:49
  keep paying taxes because one of the weird things about the US, here's a little civics lesson for you,
• 32:54
  is that it's one of the only countries in the world, certainly the only developed country,
• 32:58
  where regardless of where you live in the world, or for how long you don't return, don't set foot
• 33:04
  on US soil, you have to keep paying US taxes and lodging your taxes in the States.
• 33:08
  Good. If you're a citizen. Good. Good. You say makes, makes perfect sense to me.
• 33:13
  Explain. Well, if you're, if you're a US citizen, then presumably you are the recipient of benefits
• 33:19
  of the American system. And you should pay into the American system. I mean, if you,
• 33:23
  if you're, if you're a citizen and you get in trouble, you go to the embassy, right? If you,
• 33:27
  if you, if you, that's an expensive embassy visit, if you're paying taxes your entire life and
• 33:30
  you're never using a road or a, so I'd rather just pay out of pocket. Is there a, can I do a
• 33:36
  copay for the embassy visit? Maybe there might, there might be a, an option where you just pay
• 33:44
  per service. That's possible. We're going to talk about, we're going to talk about your book in a
• 33:48
  moment. We're going to talk about, about things that don't relate to the news. But I, but, because
• 33:52
  of the, and I don't want this podcast is not about, is not reactive to the news, but because I'll
• 33:57
  be releasing this fairly soon, but it is reactionary, right? It is, it is a reactionary podcast in
• 34:02
  this strictly political sense. Yeah. And, but, but I think we have to talk about what's going on
• 34:08
  in the world. Specifically, what I had just had for breakfast, before we get to the political
• 34:14
  side of things, because I was, I went to get some, some milk at the supermarket across the road.
• 34:20
  And I was a bit package. And I saw that there were, there was a tub of New Zealand muscles.
• 34:28
  You know how they'll sometimes, they, they're shocked. And they're just in a little tub and they're
• 34:31
  in brine. And it was in chili, in a chili brine. And it was, this is, this is something you would never
• 34:39
  find in the States. You would never find shut muscles in a chili brine.
• 34:46
  Just chili meaning like hot hot sauce, right? You know, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I understand.
• 34:52
  You, and they're not even in the shell. They're shocked. They're shocked. Yeah, they're floating.
• 34:57
  The like little little pale, beige New Zealand turds in a, in a pinkish chili brine. And
• 35:04
  I'm just talking about a small supermarket. We're not, this isn't a big place. This is a little
• 35:07
  corner store. That's the kind of quality of, of produce that you can expect in Australia and
• 35:11
  New Zealand. I think like a different, different definitions of what produce is. Why is that,
• 35:18
  it's, what is produce? Fruits and vegetables. Oh, oh, maybe I lived in the States for 12 years
• 35:24
  and never understood that. I just thought people, that wouldn't include toilet paper.
• 35:29
  Uh, those would be, uh, uh, household goods or sundries.
• 35:36
  Wait, now I'm, now I'm building my own. I don't, I don't think, hang on, aren't sundries edible?
• 35:42
  I don't know. It's just a word that I've seen every now and again. And a sundry sounds like a
• 35:47
  sundry sounds like something that you could get on a plane. You could buy on a plane, uh, to, to
• 35:53
  keep your appetite at bay. Let me see sundries. I've got a dictionary. Various items,
• 35:58
  not important enough to be mentioned individually. A drug store selling magazines, newspapers and
• 36:04
  sundries. Huh. Uh, produce, uh, dictionary definition, things that have produced or grown
• 36:13
  especially by farming. Well, that would include a muscle, wouldn't it? No.
• 36:19
  It's not grown by farming. I mean, uh, I mean, no, no, no. I mean, maybe there's a muscle farm
• 36:29
  somewhere. Of course, there's a muscle farm somewhere, Michael. They don't, where do you think
• 36:33
  the muscles come from? They just walk along the shore and hope to find one? Yes. Yes. They come
• 36:39
  from the sea. Yes, they come from, they come from muscle farms in the sea. They come from the
• 36:44
  beach, scratching the definition of produce in, in an uncomfortable way. Okay. I don't want to
• 36:49
  make anybody uncomfortable. My point is simply that at 730 in the morning, I'm in a small mini
• 36:53
  mat, uh, and buying milk. And I saw I buy a pot of these muscles. And for some reason,
• 37:01
  thought that it would be a good idea before talking to you early in the morning, without
• 37:05
  on an empty stomach to, to eat a pot of chili, uh, muscles freshly shocked from New Zealand.
• 37:15
  And it sounds bomb-n-able. I mean, first thing in the morning, that just sounds bomb-n-able.
• 37:20
  No, I mean, I've got a coffee now to kind of get rid of the taste in my mouth, but I can still feel
• 37:24
  I'm buying the muscles, the chili muscles with coffee. Yeah. I know. Okay. As long as you're pairing
• 37:30
  chili muscles and coffee, I think that's fine because that's like classic.
• 37:33
  You know, it's a classic, but that's a breakfast of champions stretching back to the Roman times.
• 37:39
  But I've still got a little bit of that kind of furry, you know, muscle, you know, you have a little
• 37:42
  furry muscle taste. No, no, I don't know what that is. You don't know what that is. Okay.
• 37:48
  Well, you got to come down to Australia. No, I mean, no, if that's, if those are my breakfast
• 37:52
  options, no. That's the classic Australian breakfast option. No, I don't want to mislead you.
• 37:56
  I don't want to mislead you. The classic Australian breakfast option is kangaroo steak
• 38:01
  on a bed of wild koala. So I've done a boom. So I've done a boomerang, exactly.
• 38:07
  So we happened to be in a weird political moment. How are you feeling about that?
• 38:15
  You know, in general, fairly good, but of course, you know, it's going to have to be pretty good
• 38:23
  for the moment until there is an actual transition. Because at the moment, our
• 38:30
  beloved commander in chief is just refusing to acknowledge reality, which is troublesome.
• 38:37
  And to people who are listening to this after the fact, we are speaking on the 12th of November.
• 38:44
  So we're a week out from the election. Oh, basically, how long ago was the election?
• 38:50
  My brain's fried. So we can half, right? And the president still hasn't, has not only not
• 38:57
  conceded. What surprises me is that the rest of the Republican Party seems to somewhat be
• 39:02
  supporting him in these baseless allegations of widespread electoral fraud on the part of the
• 39:07
  Democrats. It's interesting, Michael, that the Democrats stole the White House, but they didn't
• 39:11
  go for the Senate. You think we would have, right? You should have. That's another set.
• 39:16
  It makes, it would have made our lives so much easier. Also, if we could have rid the election,
• 39:21
  we would have rid Florida, you know, just take Florida, erase all the data. Yeah.
• 39:28
  That's right. Why, why make it a, why make it a tiny margin? But maybe hang on, that's not,
• 39:33
  maybe it's easier to do tiny margins across a number of states. Maybe, but Georgia isn't one of
• 39:39
  the ones you'd pick. No. You'd, you'd, you'd do Florida. You would. And then, and then there
• 39:45
  just wouldn't be any issue at all. It's a very good point. Yeah, it's, look, it's a, it's a stupid system
• 39:54
  run by generally stupid people and presided over at the moment by a nightmarish president.
• 40:03
  So, you know, things are, things are looking better because
• 40:06
  come January, there will be a new president, but at the, you know, it could be a bumpy road before
• 40:11
  we could. I was a little worried on the election day when I started tuning in around lunchtime here
• 40:16
  and, and I started seeing red, red, red. Now my worry is less that he'll be able to stay in power.
• 40:21
  I don't think he will. But more that the, the bigger battle is to retain, to enable people to
• 40:28
  retain a faith in, in democracy and to come along for the ride regardless of who the president is.
• 40:34
  Like, I've always sort of admired our ability. I was going to say America's ability, but it's
• 40:38
  sort of widespread across the Western world to put aside our differences and once the government
• 40:43
  is formed, then that's the government and the government for everybody. And Trump was a bit of an
• 40:47
  anomaly there because he was so, so keen and enthusiastic about being a representative
• 40:53
  just of his side of politics and a very sort of thin wedge of his side of politics that was fairly
• 40:58
  nationalistic and identitarian. And, but I was sort of hoping that when he went away, we'd all be
• 41:04
  able to come behind the next government, the next administration. And my worry is that all this
• 41:09
  stuff, all this Huah, is that what he's basically doing is just trying to plant enough booby traps
• 41:14
  in the mind of a sufficiently large minority of Americans that they're never going to accept
• 41:18
  a Biden administration. Well, that is certainly true whether he's planting the booby traps or not.
• 41:25
  I mean, his his core supporters, which seem to number a lot more than I had hoped,
• 41:34
  will have a difficult time adjusting to reality. And I don't know what that means. I mean,
• 41:43
  I don't know what that looks like other than I think the Senate is going to continue to be
• 41:48
  as obstinate and difficult as they can be with the new administration. That's what they did under
• 41:57
  Obama and they will continue to do it under Biden. And it's just going to be ugly. I mean,
• 42:02
  it's just it's just going to continue to be ugly. And I don't I don't know if there's anything
• 42:06
  anybody can do about it right now. The fact that the president needs to win like, I heard
• 42:15
  and also was saying like if Biden was if it weren't for the electoral college and Biden was just
• 42:21
  ahead the way that Biden was ahead at like 8 p.m. on election night, then you'd just call it.
• 42:27
  Just like in all of the other races, all of the Senate races and the House races,
• 42:31
  once someone's ahead by not just one percent, but like, you know, they're sort of like a head by
• 42:36
  two, three, four percent, then once you've after you've adjusted for all of the stuff that you know
• 42:40
  is going on demographically in terms of the way votes come in, then you just call it. But he can
• 42:45
  the Biden can be ahead by three percent, four percent, five percent, six percent, like seven
• 42:49
  percent, and it's still like all too close to call because of this the the electoral college,
• 42:53
  but which we're not going to talk about because it is infuriating and boring.
• 42:57
  Yeah, but if we were to get rid of the electoral college, think about what it would do to
• 43:02
  southerners in the 1700s. Like, you have to be mindful of southerners in the 1700s.
• 43:10
  Well, what about southerners today? They would no longer be able to wield disproportionate.
• 43:16
  It would it would it would certainly benefit some of them, the electoral college, and it
• 43:22
  disenfranchises many others. Yes, that's true. And it's not all southerners. It's really the midwesterners
• 43:28
  who have us who have us over a barrel. I guess that's true if only because the southern states tend
• 43:35
  to vote in a block, despite their you know, lower population as a percentage of the entire country,
• 43:44
  they they can they they wield a lot of power as a block. That's true. And I should just clarify
• 43:50
  here that there's nothing necessary. Whenever I broach this, I get texts and tweets and your emails
• 43:56
  and so on from people saying, yeah, but America's not a direct democracy. America's not a it's
• 44:01
  not mob rule. It's a republic, which is very true and fine. And nobody wants just majoritarian rule
• 44:08
  regardless of the consequences. But you also don't want to implement a situation where there is
• 44:12
  entrenched minority rule that makes it almost impossible for the majority's wishes to get fulfilled
• 44:18
  because at every step of the way, whether it's the justice system through the Supreme Court,
• 44:23
  the Senate through the overrepresentation of smaller states, the electoral college electing
• 44:28
  the White House and Jerry Mandarin in the House. So you manage to get people who are representing
• 44:34
  minorities and the same minority of white conservatives ruling over everybody. That's that's not a
• 44:41
  republic. I mean, you know, a republic is supposed to be if it's a representative democracy,
• 44:45
  then you're supposed to vote for your representatives and then they all go to Washington and they
• 44:49
  hash things out and they pass some laws. But it's not even that.
• 44:55
  No, it's minority rule. I mean, it's bizarre. I mean, the closest thing is, I mean, I was going
• 45:03
  to say it's not quite this bad, but depending on your point of view, I mean, it's like an apartheid
• 45:07
  in South Africa. I mean, it's definitely not as bad. I'll roll with you on the qualification.
• 45:14
  But it is, well, it's becoming increasingly like that, not in terms of the obviously horrific
• 45:28
  conditions of South Africa, but in terms of an entrenched white angry minority
• 45:36
  going up everything else and controlling the nation where they don't have the numbers to do it.
• 45:44
  And that seems to be the entire republican strategy.
• 45:48
  I can see the bright butt hit line. Michaelian Black says,
• 45:52
  woke white liberals are as oppressed as Black South Africans in the 70s.
• 46:00
  Brooklyn is the new Johannesburg. That's right. Well, yeah, and I guess Queens would be Soweto.
• 46:11
  You just wanted to get Soweto in there. You're always doing this. Every time we speak,
• 46:16
  you're trying in front of way to get Soweto into the conversation. I've walked right into it.
• 46:22
  So let's talk about culture and about gender and about manhood, because this is the subject of
• 46:27
  your new book. I've got your last book. I read to my children a child's first book of Trump,
• 46:35
  which is a wonderful, a wonderful picture book for children. My partner even
• 46:42
  Instagrammed a footage of our daughter saying that Trump was a horrible man, and then apparently
• 46:48
  you retweeted or something. I can't even remember without, probably not even knowing.
• 46:52
  No, I didn't know that. I mean, I don't remember. We're treating it, but if I did,
• 46:56
  I would not have known that that was your problem. Well, anyway, thank you for getting him some more
• 47:00
  followers. Oh, yeah. And now the net, your latest book is about what it is to be a man. It's
• 47:07
  called a better man. And it's written it essentially as a letter to your son who is, how old now
• 47:13
  he's going off to college? Nineteen. Nineteen. Nineteen. What motivated this?
• 47:18
  Well, it was a number of things. The long answer in the short answer are somewhat different,
• 47:23
  but related. The long answer, well, I'll give you the short answer, and then if you want more,
• 47:29
  I'll give it to you. The short answer is my son was leaving for college, and I solved it. Is
• 47:35
  there a wolf in the background? Are you in any danger? If you're in any danger, feel free to move
• 47:40
  to a safe house. We maintain a few wolves because the wilds of Connecticut can be a little bit
• 47:49
  dicey. I thought that the dicingness of the wilds of Connecticut was in the fact that there are wolves
• 47:54
  and such. Yeah. Yeah, but what you want to do is you want to have house wolves to come back
• 48:00
  the wood wolves. Right. Right. Are there many battles between the two? It seems like it seems
• 48:08
  foolhardy to me. I would just eradicate the wolves altogether and leave the outside wolves
• 48:12
  outside and close my doors to any kind of wild dog. You'd think, but we just we just love our wolves
• 48:20
  here in Connecticut. Okay. Good for you. All right. As long as you're safe, you can continue with the
• 48:24
  short slash long answer. The short answer is that I sort of saw an opportunity to have this conversation
• 48:30
  with my son as he was getting ready to leave for college. And so I took that opportunity and
• 48:38
  wrote him a letter or a in the form of a book or a book in the form of a letter depending on how
• 48:45
  you want to look at it. What's the long answer? Because I pretty much already covered the I feel
• 48:50
  like I did as good a job as you did at the short answer, but it just did by introducing it and saying
• 48:54
  you've got a book. It's called Better Man. It's a letter to your son. He's 19. He's going off to
• 48:58
  college. And then you, as you just repeated back to me, the set up in a lengthy way, in a slightly
• 49:03
  longer and more roundabout way that added nothing. Right. Right. The long answer involves gun violence
• 49:10
  and being horrified at the shooting that took place at the in Parkland, Florida. When he was
• 49:20
  just entering his senior year of high school and being and I am I have long been an outspoken
• 49:30
  anti gun person. And I just fired off a series of tweets about it. And one of the tweets was
• 49:37
  I mean the the the the gist of the tweets was why is it always boys who are doing these things?
• 49:42
  You know, I I tend to blame guns and gun manufacturers and all the rest of it and conservative
• 49:49
  politicians who refused to pass any sort of legislation. And I still do blame all of those factors,
• 49:56
  but one of the factors that I felt like was never addressed was the fact that it was always
• 50:00
  boys and young men calling the trigger. And that Twitter thread got got picked up. So you know,
• 50:12
  people were seeing it and then the New York Times wanted me to write an op-ed about it. So I wrote
• 50:15
  an op-ed about it. And then a book publisher asked me if I wanted to expand it into a book.
• 50:20
  And I reluctantly said yes. Do you think there's there's something particular about our moment
• 50:26
  that is responsible for that behavior? Or do you think that that is intrinsic to young manhood?
• 50:39
  I think there is something I think intrinsic is a complicated word because I don't know if
• 50:43
  by intrinsic you mean biologically or socio well either I think I mean if something is so widespread
• 50:49
  as a sociological and environmental phenomenon then we might as well ignore the question
• 50:54
  of nature versus nurture and just treat it as what is common enough to be what is certainly
• 51:01
  intrinsic is that men and people of the male sex commit the overwhelming majority of violence
• 51:08
  in the world. And always have so that is intrinsic whether it is the factors that make that so
• 51:21
  I think our combination of things as far as like gun violence specifically I do think that there
• 51:28
  is something about this moment that makes it more likely a lot of things about this moment that
• 51:34
  make it more likely not the least of which is just the fact that other people have done it before
• 51:38
  and so something gets in just stupid head that they're going to do it too.
• 51:45
  But I like that I mean I think that explanation actually is under underappreciated in all of this
• 51:52
  and I take I obviously share all of your concerns about guns and I'm proud of Australia for having
• 51:57
  had the the gumption under a conservative leader in the 90s to do something about it which by the
• 52:02
  way to American listeners was not primarily about taking guns away from people it was primarily
• 52:07
  about about proper licensing and then tracking and responsibility and liability and rules such as
• 52:13
  if a gun that you have purchased is used in a crime or to kill somebody then you are responsible
• 52:18
  you know responsible for murder but you're responsible for you know you can't just say oh I lost it
• 52:22
  or it got stolen everything has to be reported and so there's a better better tracking system
• 52:26
  there are actually more guns in Australia now than there were before the massacre that triggered
• 52:33
  the the legal the changes to the legislative changes but I mean I think this idea of it being a
• 52:39
  kind of almost mimetic panic like a slow motion copycat wave that takes place over years and decades
• 52:48
  it's it's almost like a slow motion stampede I've heard it described as where if you are one of
• 52:55
  these borderline kids who are struggling with all of the frustrations and amasculations and violent
• 53:03
  ideations of of boyhood then there are multiple ways that could express itself and if you have an
• 53:09
  easy off the shelf template that you've seen glamorized in the past then that occurs to you in a
• 53:16
  way that it wouldn't if it hadn't been happening so it becomes a there's a snowballing effect
• 53:21
  yeah I do think it has a lot of resonance for young men the kind that you just described
• 53:29
  so that was the immediate impetus for the book but the book isn't about gun violence although I do
• 53:36
  talk I begin the book with remembering Sandy Hook which occurred very close to my home
• 53:45
  and that was that was the primary school where all the the small I mean they were like five or
• 53:50
  six or something when they the children who were massacred there oh no it was 20 no I mean like they
• 53:57
  were they were of oh they're young school age yeah yeah yeah we're around six six years old six
• 54:01
  seven years old and my kids were in elementary school at that time not very far from
• 54:10
  that event and and then they were in high school when this high school event happened and so
• 54:17
  you know it was a combination that that's that's the long answer it was gun violence that started me
• 54:23
  off and and as we just as you just learned it was a long answer yeah I that was a good one though
• 54:30
  I think if I had to choose between the the upside of the brevity of the first answer versus the
• 54:36
  upside of the substantive content of the second I'd go for the for the latter any day of the week
• 54:41
  I mean every day of the week I mean eventually I'd get bored of it if we were having this conversation
• 54:44
  every day and you just kept saying the long answer over and over but I could I'd get a good three or
• 54:48
  four days out of it before I was like Michael stop. Part of the reason I abridged the answer is
• 54:53
  because often when I'm asked that that question I'm under some time constraints to answer
• 54:58
  I know you're on your talk shows and so on where they give you eight minutes there's no eight
• 55:01
  minute clock ticking here right I would be surprised if you had an eight minute clock that would
• 55:06
  be a very unusual clock that would be wouldn't it would that be I guess it's a hard boiled egg
• 55:12
  time uh that sounds about right yeah maybe a semi semi hard boiled maybe one of those ones
• 55:17
  that you get in a Japanese ramen where it's kind of hard but there's still a little bit of softness
• 55:21
  to the yolk I'm just looking up how long to boil eggs and uh excellent podcasting three minutes
• 55:27
  for soft boiled six minutes for medium 12 minutes for hard there you go so it's right in between
• 55:32
  that it's it's per I was perfectly accurate in saying it's sort of halfway between a medium
• 55:38
  and the hard boiled egg uh when you think about the way that that masculinity gets expressed
• 55:45
  and in the past there was this rather like you know pre sort of 60s there's this rather uncomplicated
• 55:51
  idea of what a man's role is um how are we doing in terms of understanding where what the
• 56:00
  position of man is because I can't quite figure out whether obviously there have been so many
• 56:04
  advances for women and now for LGBT people and specifically now for trans people and there's a lot
• 56:11
  of question marks about what gender is you just alluded to the nature nurture thing like how much
• 56:16
  of it is innate I am increasingly as I get older and as I have kids increasingly sort of unpopular
• 56:25
  on the unpopular side of this sort of suspecting that there actually is something behaviorally innate
• 56:30
  about gender and that maybe in our zeal to quash the violent nasty toxic aspects of masculinity
• 56:40
  were also leaving young men somewhat adrift and emasculated and uncertain of what they are supposed
• 56:48
  to be doing yes so that was a question couched in an editorial and that's correct that's that's
• 56:56
  the way I conduct this podcast so to answer your question how we're doing not well and to respond
• 57:03
  to your editorial I actually agree with you and say so in the book that there is I think
• 57:10
  a significant biological component to it however um if we my concern about that is if we assign
• 57:24
  too much importance to the biological component which I agree with you there is some of maybe a
• 57:30
  significant amount of what ends up happening I think culturally is that we end up with the same
• 57:39
  traditional sort of dichotomy between male and female and the same gulf that separates us
• 57:45
  and I think what is true is there are certain behaviors that boys exhibit in girls exhibit on the
• 57:52
  average that we can say are more typically associated with boys and are more typically associated
• 57:58
  with girls and there probably is a kind of average behavior um god damn wolves and you hear how
• 58:06
  that's not a wolf what was it yes it's a it's a castrato wolf he has what kind of operation
• 58:14
  are you running them Michael well he if you're gonna have a wolf you want them to howl in the most
• 58:20
  beautiful it's angelic and shella timber yeah that sounds that does sound like a wolf puppy who
• 58:28
  you've stolen from its mother and have kept in the basement and have viciously ripped its
• 58:34
  testicles out and now it's just it's howling the moon yeah that just all of what you said is true
• 58:40
  but just gorgeous just a gorgeous howling voice um I think there is a kind of a bell curve of behavior
• 58:49
  where there is sort of typical male and female behavior and then there's a lot of you know there's
• 58:56
  less overlap but there is overlap um and my concern about assigning too much importance to the
• 59:01
  biological component is that you end up segregating the sexes in a way that I don't think is
• 59:05
  particularly helpful I do think that it's important to acknowledge that there are probably biological
• 59:11
  difference almost certainly biological differences um that explain some male behavior but not all in
• 59:17
  some female behavior but not all and that's some boys exhibit behavior that is more
• 59:22
  traditionally associated with girls and vice versa what do you make of the rise of sort of
• 59:28
  in cells and the alt right and the appeal of people like Jordan Peterson and the the the
• 59:35
  virality of that west point speech that that general gave a couple years ago where he was basically
• 59:40
  saying like you've got to clean up your room like the the thing to start doing is just to to start
• 59:44
  small and show discipline that there's a um I don't know almost like there's there's an
• 59:50
  untapped and kind of stultified uh passion for some form of greatness and manliness and heroes
• 59:59
  journey that is not being expressed and that's getting diverted into these perverted sort of
• 1:00:04
  corridors in our current culture and that maybe there should maybe the healthy way to react to
• 1:00:10
  what you're talking about that biological difference without having to segregate the sexism
• 1:00:14
  returns to the 1950s is to find fruitful ways for young men to be able to express their more caveman
• 1:00:24
  instincts without constantly being told that that's bad and that they have to feminize themselves
• 1:00:29
  yeah I do think that there's I do feel like I understand that in that appeal of somebody like
• 1:00:35
  Jordan Peterson for exactly the reason that you just described that he dealt I don't think
• 1:00:42
  he no longer deals in much um but he dealt what's happening with him by the way is he alive is he
• 1:00:47
  it very ill he was very ill he was addicted to something and then he went to a addiction treatment
• 1:00:54
  in some random Eastern European country in court COVID yes yes yeah he was in like Bulgaria or
• 1:01:02
  something why are you going to Bulgaria was in Russia was in Russia right so apparently what happened
• 1:01:07
  is his daughter got him into this all meat diet that's we had he had kidney failure he had all kinds
• 1:01:14
  of health problems he ended up in Russia he ended up addicted to painkillers like he's just a mess
• 1:01:19
  as far as I know he's alive um but I don't think he's doing very well and certainly whatever platform
• 1:01:27
  or whatever let's say whatever soap box he was standing on seems to have been kicked out from
• 1:01:31
  under him that being said I do think that there is something about this idea of the hero's journey
• 1:01:40
  that he tapped into really well um I don't like where he took it but I think one of the reasons
• 1:01:51
  that idea is so appealing to young men in particular is for the reason that you described that they
• 1:01:59
  are looking for something and when somebody comes along and says I I know what it is you want to be
• 1:02:06
  you want to be a hero and here's how you become a hero um I think that's probably very appealing
• 1:02:13
  and then if you stretch that out a little bit I think you very quickly get into
• 1:02:22
  um dangerous territory because what is a hero trying to do other than vanquish foes and
• 1:02:31
  inevitably if you're on a hero's journey you're going to need to find some foes and there are some
• 1:02:35
  people in the George Jordan Peters in world who are happy to supply you with those foes um and I
• 1:02:45
  think we all know what that looks like and and I think it's very easy for somebody who's
• 1:02:50
  disaffected and kind of a drift to to buy into that um and it's dangerous but I do think just
• 1:02:57
  that it's rude the idea the very simple idea of starting you know with the metaphorical cleaning up
• 1:03:04
  your room has some merit and it has some value the I and in fact I talk about it in my book the idea
• 1:03:10
  of being uh I I call it a habit of consideration which I think is maybe more namby pamby but maybe also
• 1:03:19
  a little bit um more useful the idea that not that you're being considerate although you can be
• 1:03:27
  that too but that you're considering what you're doing so if you're sitting if you're standing
• 1:03:32
  there washing dishes over this sink if you're in a habit of consideration and you're considering
• 1:03:37
  that activity and that task at hand and you're devoting yourself to it and a kind of quiet um
• 1:03:44
  uh qualitative way I think over time those small habits those small habits of consideration
• 1:03:51
  can actually be really beneficial for boys and for girls but I think I I think for boys in particular
• 1:03:58
  um it can be helpful because it directs an energy that I think is too often unfocused and even if
• 1:04:07
  if it's as something as stupid as doing the dishes or cleaning your room or doing your homework
• 1:04:13
  there is something about that there is um there is something about that the seeking out
• 1:04:21
  quality and a job well done that I think appeals to guys uh when you say that uh that
• 1:04:28
  you're framing it in a slightly more namby pamby way than the Jordan Peterson of the world I
• 1:04:32
  think uh this is uh you should really consider putting that on some kind of a business card that you
• 1:04:37
  take great ideas and you make them more namby pamby uh because that's a good thing to I think it's
• 1:04:42
  a good thing to do I write books that take there's such a hard edge there's such a hard unyielding
• 1:04:51
  edge to Jordan Peterson yeah uh I think it's so off-putting to so many people including myself
• 1:04:59
  yeah but there's also something isn't doesn't a secret little part of you could kind of love it
• 1:05:03
  as well like when he when he does an interview like the the classic interview that he did with
• 1:05:08
  channel four in the UK where the interviewer was a very was a woman who had come into the interview
• 1:05:15
  with a preconception about what he was and what he was saying and he just refused to
• 1:05:20
  to concede to her interpretation of where he fits into the culture so she'd have to keep saying
• 1:05:26
  so what your saying is and then rattles something off and he'd just laugh and say no that's not
• 1:05:30
  what I'm saying you're not listening you're you're you're treating me as if I'm a cardboard
• 1:05:34
  cut out of the person you think that I am what I'm actually saying is is X I take a point that
• 1:05:41
  that that stride and seek and get misinterpreted as a a need to vanquish foes and you're right that
• 1:05:50
  there's a there's a cohort of young men who are are a bit lost by the what they're supposed to be
• 1:05:56
  doing and find some sort of comfort in the uh Joe Rogan Jordan Peterson Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
• 1:06:03
  uh realm and that that can warp itself into hunting for foes and becoming an alt-right uh dick but
• 1:06:10
  isn't the isn't the challenge then for us to find ways to take that instinct not make it wrong
• 1:06:16
  not say that you're a terrible and you need to turn into a flower but that the alternative to
• 1:06:22
  to vanquishing foes is to simply be a stand for what is good and be uh you know you don't need
• 1:06:29
  to always be fighting things you sometimes it's good enough to just be master of the half and
• 1:06:35
  protector yeah yeah and I think that's I I think you are exactly right it was another editorial by the
• 1:06:44
  way it was not really a question but I agree with it um and one of the things I'm really careful
• 1:06:50
  about in my book is saying being very explicit about not wanting to reinvent
• 1:06:57
  masculinity not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with what I think of as traditional
• 1:07:04
  masculinity um and those attributes are strength I think and independence and fortitude primarily
• 1:07:13
  those three um which happened to coincide with the attributes of classic heroes you know they
• 1:07:21
  they have all those traits I think those traits are celebrated right now a lot in girls
• 1:07:30
  we really elevate and celebrate strong independent fierce girls who endure um
• 1:07:39
  um but at the same time we're we're we're trying to kind of poo poo those attributes in boys
• 1:07:46
  because we worry that they lead to abusive behaviors and in some cases they do but their suppression
• 1:07:53
  their suppression actually perverts them more than finding a fruitful way to express them would
• 1:07:59
  I think they can I think I think suppression can do that and I think it can be corrosive for young
• 1:08:07
  I mean just look at just look at Trump I mean that what's interesting to to me about
• 1:08:12
  this whole sort of crisis of masculinity is that the most disaffected young men are the ones
• 1:08:20
  who find appeal in really the girliest like I don't want to say girliest that's a that's sexist
• 1:08:27
  the the most sort of a feat and fragile uh and umbridge taking uh vision of masculinity blustering
• 1:08:37
  as strength in the form of people like Giuliani and and Trump and these hangers on I mean like
• 1:08:44
  Jared Kushner this is your idea about of masculinity these people are fragile genteel little flowers
• 1:08:51
  who get co-opted by people seeking uh some urzats form of kind of phony masculinity as if they were
• 1:08:58
  they were titans or gods well I I would hesitate to put Jared Kushner in the same
• 1:09:05
  silo as Trump and Giuliani in terms of like anybody's looking to him as a paradigm of masculinity
• 1:09:11
  that's true but he I just like shooting on Jared when I can just and you're correct to do that um but
• 1:09:18
  there that that buffoonish caricature of masculinity so beautifully exhibited by Trump is um it is
• 1:09:26
  but it is befuddling like what what is it about that that is so appealing to so many people
• 1:09:34
  I suspect it has something to do with um
• 1:09:38
  um that even though so many people like you and I feel like we're seeing through something we're
• 1:09:48
  seeing through bluster I think for a lot of guys seeing confident bluster and bullshit is a
• 1:09:56
  pretty good stand-in for what they envision masculinity to be I've never I'm never backing down
• 1:10:03
  um argumentative orish version uh warped version of what maybe they thought real men used to be
• 1:10:14
  like right but see my my suspicion is that that can only that illusion can only arise in a vacuum
• 1:10:20
  of real masculinity and that vacuum of real masculinity is in part caused by politically incorrect
• 1:10:26
  alerter here drum roll uh feminism and the crisis of the role of men
• 1:10:33
  vis-a-vis conventional gender roles you know what I mean like you you you you you classify all
• 1:10:38
  expressions of traditional masculinity as being toxic people get lost and then this weird phony
• 1:10:45
  uh girly form of masculinity can become ascendant which wouldn't be ascendant if you had a few more
• 1:10:52
  generals telling people to make their beds all along um I guess I disagree with you about
• 1:10:59
  feminism and political correctness I think feminism at its core and its central mission has done
• 1:11:11
  tremendous amount of good for women and for men um but I think it has been
• 1:11:21
  co-opted in caricatured by its opponents to be something that it isn't uh I also think political
• 1:11:28
  correctness as loaded as that term is has done far more good than harm in the culture at large
• 1:11:37
  and it too has been co-opted and corrupted by its opponents I think that um both of those
• 1:11:50
  movements feminism and political correctness arose from a need that people had who were feeling
• 1:11:58
  marginalized and oppressed and it would be hard to argue that they weren't
• 1:12:02
  felt the need to create space for themselves um so we've spent the last 60 years with women
• 1:12:13
  elbowing and muscling their way into the workforce uh elbowing and muscling their way into
• 1:12:20
  something approaching even though we're not there yet but at least trying to approach gender
• 1:12:25
  equality yeah just just so we're not we're not uh hashing over something that we already
• 1:12:30
  agree about I should clarify I shouldn't have said feminism because that's not you're right I mean
• 1:12:34
  I'm a huge fan and supporter and find enormous inspiration from the feminist for the second
• 1:12:40
  way feminist from the germane grays and the camellia paglias I still read them and I think that
• 1:12:45
  that was an unalloyed good and that we should be fighting for equality uh in terms of equality
• 1:12:52
  of opportunity for for all genders and and races I'm an egalitarian in that sense I guess what I'm
• 1:12:57
  talking about on the cultural level rather than the opportunity level is a certain sort of
• 1:13:04
  I guess political correctness is the old fashioned word for it but today it occurs as a kind of
• 1:13:08
  performative social activism which which gets its rocks off being extremely sensorious and
• 1:13:14
  hysterical and sort of schoolmarmish about things so when I when I said feminism earlier I didn't mean
• 1:13:20
  if fighting for equal pay for example or fighting for equal representation in politics and in
• 1:13:25
  boardrooms what I meant was uh you know a young person being told that if he wants to go hunting uh
• 1:13:32
  that's an expression of toxic masculinity or that if uh you know if he isn't aware of the
• 1:13:39
  catastrophic rates of domestic violence and isn't acting every single day to combat them then
• 1:13:43
  he's personally responsible because he's because he has a penis that like that kind of climate
• 1:13:47
  that I'm talking about yeah but I also think that that the extremes tend to get magnified when
• 1:13:53
  that's not where most people are living you know we tend to pay a lot of attention to the extremes
• 1:13:58
  but most people I don't think would make that argument most feminists people who describe this as
• 1:14:04
  feminist wouldn't get that argument so I worry that we end up get losing the forest for the trees
• 1:14:09
  when we isolate innumerable examples like you're describing and then end up throwing a blanket over
• 1:14:17
  the entire uh movement and yeah no we do do that but just in my defense I'm not doing that I
• 1:14:24
  am pointing to a phenomenon which I think social media is largely to blame for here which is
• 1:14:31
  which is that there is a there is a lost kind of um we don't have rock we don't have rolls
• 1:14:36
  anymore we don't have easy off the shelf rolls anymore and because social media magnifies all
• 1:14:41
  of those outlying examples we can feel besieged and agreed grieved and put upon because you know
• 1:14:49
  the most extreme examples of everything are constantly in our face on social media and that
• 1:14:53
  drives us into more extreme positions and uh you know perverted forms of masculinity than
• 1:15:00
  than we might have if we weren't constantly looking at our screens and if we just had
• 1:15:04
  traditional role models you are literally committing genocide right now I just want you
• 1:15:12
  I'm not the one with wolves it was castrated wolves in my basement my god
• 1:15:15
  haha yeah I mean this is it's all what you're describing is all nuanced and it is there's I
• 1:15:25
  agree with a lot of it I disagree obviously with some of it um I do think social media is
• 1:15:35
  corrosive and has probably maybe more negative than positive effects I don't know um and I also
• 1:15:44
  but I guess I disagree with the idea that there aren't men out there that we can look to and say well
• 1:15:51
  he's doing a good job of of being what a modern man should be I mean we had a president who was
• 1:15:58
  I think a perfect exemplar of it for eight years um you're talking about Bill Clinton uh
• 1:16:03
  he's blocked his way around Arkansas really raped his way around Arkansas like every good
• 1:16:10
  upstanding old-fashioned man should uh there were probably only a few rapes with Bill Clinton
• 1:16:17
  uh but Arkansas is not a very big popular state so it's a proportional
• 1:16:21
  it's a per capita he raped his way around Arkansas but I mean Barack Obama spent eight years
• 1:16:27
  being president and I don't recall any of the conservatives who would be arguing I think for
• 1:16:34
  traditional male uh roles pointing at him and saying that's who we should aspire to be
• 1:16:42
  um we can draw our own conclusions as to why but he's not unique there are a lot of good dudes
• 1:16:50
  out there um both in the culture and just in people's sort of general lines that I think you can
• 1:16:57
  look to I don't I don't think that idea has been utterly lost I do think the role of man in general
• 1:17:04
  the sort of societal role of men is under a question and that questioning I think is leading to a
• 1:17:11
  lot of problems I mean I hope that there are lots of examples of good men I'm frankly surprised
• 1:17:16
  and I wonder if you are by like when you lift up the when you turn on the light in the in the kitchen
• 1:17:21
  of masculinity the number of cockroaches that are scurrying around there there's just been a
• 1:17:26
  revelation here in Australia uh the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the the public broadcaster uh
• 1:17:31
  did a a bombshell documentary about some of the highest people in in government having affairs
• 1:17:37
  on the side in parliament house while they were married these are these are conservative family
• 1:17:42
  values politicians and it being this sort of widespread thing of even when it's not an affair just
• 1:17:47
  sort of you know getting drunk and and sexual harassment like this is a post me to era and this
• 1:17:53
  behavior is still going on you look at in the States as well I mean can you imagine how clean
• 1:18:00
  Obama had to be given the amount of people who want to bring him down like he you knew it and he knew
• 1:18:08
  I mean but he it can't even have just been calculating because he didn't it there was never
• 1:18:12
  any scandal even from his past that came up in terms of infidelity or mistreatment of women or
• 1:18:18
  being uh inappropriate or being sexist I mean he was like a a paragon of virtue in a in a
• 1:18:24
  climate where I'm always but mute like even when the grabbing by the pussy tape came out with
• 1:18:29
  Trump I was like I've I have never heard people talk that way like am I so sheltered I these are
• 1:18:34
  not I don't know these men and so I can't tell if I'm just one of the rare idiots who is like
• 1:18:42
  blundering around like Mr. McGoo unaware of all of the misogyny that's taking place around me or if
• 1:18:47
  if the if the system is selecting for for for creeps or if we're exaggerating the problem
• 1:18:56
  I think maybe all of the above I also think that um when I talk about good men
• 1:19:05
  I'm not talking about perfect men because I don't think there is such a thing I mean Obama's
• 1:19:09
  probably as close as you're gonna get to perfect at least what we know about him but I also don't
• 1:19:15
  think there's perfect women there aren't perfect people there's nobody that you can't point to
• 1:19:21
  and say this person engaged in bad behavior on such and such occasion we've all done it
• 1:19:27
  does it rise to the level of sexual assault I think in most cases absolutely not
• 1:19:36
  but have we all said inappropriate things done inappropriate things made mistakes hurt people's
• 1:19:40
  feelings been hypocrites uh done things we we knew we shouldn't be doing but did them anyway in
• 1:19:48
  the moment because they felt good like whatever it is we're all guilty of all of it when I talk
• 1:19:57
  about in this context I'm talking about a good man I guess I'm talking about somebody flawed who
• 1:20:03
  is working on themselves and is doing their best to sort of be better day to day to day and trying
• 1:20:09
  to set a good example knowing that we all fail at it we all fail um because we're all human and
• 1:20:17
  that's okay I don't think we need to be perfect as a as a gender to be um helpful and to be
• 1:20:27
  role models in that light given that you're putting emphasis on sort of self awareness and reform
• 1:20:33
  and forgiveness uh recently saw a video of Sarah Silverman talking about forgiveness and the and
• 1:20:42
  in this cancel culture and we all know what I'm talking about whether you think there is one or
• 1:20:48
  there isn't one or where you stand on it and there's a lot of gray matter there
• 1:20:54
  but without a path to redemption when you take someone you found a tweet they wrote seven years ago
• 1:21:00
  or a thing that they said and you expose it and you say this person should be no more
• 1:21:06
  banish them forever they're going to find some place where they are accepted
• 1:21:13
  and it's not going to be with progressives which ironically means to be changed progress
• 1:21:18
  does that factor into what you're talking about I guess so yeah I mean I I think they're
• 1:21:25
  we have to have some humility as people we have to
• 1:21:30
  you know what's what is that biblical expression and forgive me I am almost illiterate when it comes
• 1:21:36
  to the Bible but don't point to the something in my eye your eye I think it's I think I think I think
• 1:21:49
  I think it's fool me once shame on you fool me twice you're not going to fool me again as the
• 1:21:55
  George W. Bush said there's an old saying in Tennessee I know it's in Texas probably in Tennessee
• 1:22:00
  that says fool me once shame on shame on you it fool me we can't get fooled again
• 1:22:13
  it is so tempting particularly because of social media to direct our outrage outwards it is so
• 1:22:19
  tempting to look at anybody's behavior and say it is unforgivable and this person we should show
• 1:22:27
  no mercy towards and in some cases some rare cases I think that's probably true but in most cases
• 1:22:35
  you know I think we can get over stuff particularly because chance the odds are
• 1:22:41
  better than not that we're guilty of similar behavior in some aspect of our lives
• 1:22:46
  but but I agree with you that so much of that outrage is performative it feels good and it gets
• 1:22:52
  you attention but it's not particularly useful and it it causes I think some grave harm to people
• 1:23:01
  it also causes grave harm to the left which is part of my concern about it you know I'm less
• 1:23:05
  concerned about the individual people who get hunted well I suppose I am concerned about them
• 1:23:10
  because I might become one of them and have occasionally been one of them the people who get
• 1:23:15
  hunted and hounded in about of puritanical public shaming from the left but a bigger problem
• 1:23:22
  than that is just how off-putting that is to the rest of middle America and middle Australia and
• 1:23:28
  how I fear that it empowers people on the right to cast the entire left as being authoritarian
• 1:23:35
  and intolerant what do you tell your son about creativity and art versus work work that's the
• 1:23:42
  other thing that I think is interesting about about the sort of gender conversation what it means
• 1:23:46
  to be a man what it means to be a worker in the 21st century how do you think about that well I've
• 1:23:54
  never made a distinction I mean my own work is creative so I don't think in my household we've ever
• 1:24:00
  drawn any kind of distinction between doing creative work or work with the imagination or collaborative
• 1:24:06
  work as something separate and apart from the kind of job that you would go to every day
• 1:24:13
  do you ever read not having the stability or security of a profession
• 1:24:19
  I have I have a profession I mean I'm an entertainer I mean traditionally this is like the
• 1:24:26
  word produce I think I think I think profession generally is about vegetables and fruits but not
• 1:24:32
  muscles no I don't I don't I don't I don't have any second thoughts about what I've chosen to do
• 1:24:44
  for a career other than just you know sometimes I just worry about paying my mortgage but
• 1:24:50
  but that's not I've made a lot of decisions that were probably bad for me financially because
• 1:24:57
  they were better for me just in terms of my life like living in Connecticut yep that's one of them
• 1:25:06
  that is absolutely one of them I mean I you know I deliberately did not choose to live in Hollywood
• 1:25:13
  because I felt like in a way that would that would that would make me part of an industry that I
• 1:25:20
  didn't really want to be a part of I didn't want to be I didn't want to think of my career as an
• 1:25:24
  industry I wanted to think of it as something that I chose to pursue because I enjoyed doing it
• 1:25:30
  and I enjoyed the kind of work that I was doing and I've been fortunate that I've been able to do
• 1:25:36
  that low these many years but it definitely I there's no question that it has come at some cost
• 1:25:44
  I assume you did your time in L.I. at some point very briefly about a year and a half
• 1:25:50
  when was that 99 into 2000 when was wet hot American summer
• 1:25:59
  2000 I think we shot it in 2000 I think so would that have happened without L.I.
• 1:26:08
  oh yeah yeah that would have happened without L.I. because those relationships were formed
• 1:26:14
  well before I was living in L.I. what did you make of the city?
• 1:26:20
  I didn't like it so I left I didn't like how
• 1:26:25
  pervasive show business was you just you know it was just it just felt it in your pores and it felt
• 1:26:31
  oppressive I didn't like that thing of going into a restaurant and everybody looking up to see
• 1:26:38
  who's coming in and going out I didn't like the schmousiness I didn't like the way it corrupted
• 1:26:45
  or I felt like it was going to corrupt my thinking where you're like obsessing over box office
• 1:26:50
  returns like what like what do I give a shit about that um I didn't want us I didn't want to
• 1:26:56
  live in the trenches of like doing guest star spots on sitcoms and the hopes of maybe having
• 1:27:00
  my own sitcom one day like I just didn't I just didn't want to go down that path and I didn't
• 1:27:05
  know what it would mean to not go down that path but I thought let me try it's uh it's very
• 1:27:14
  reminiscent of my experience of Los Angeles as well where you know it's funny it's funny it's a
• 1:27:19
  funny thing about single industry towns it doesn't even have to be entertainment I remember I went
• 1:27:24
  to I spent some time in DC after having lived in L.A. for a year and it was a few years after I'd
• 1:27:30
  I'd fled L.A. and gone back to New York and one of the things that I loved about one of the things
• 1:27:34
  that made me fall in love with New York City when I was you know just in my in my teens when I
• 1:27:38
  first went there and vowed that I would come back and ended up living there for for more than 10
• 1:27:42
  years what was the the sheer diversity of people who are there I mean there it there is no other
• 1:27:46
  place I've ever been where there is a larger range of rich and poor and creative and uncreative
• 1:27:52
  and financially avaricious and yeah I mean just so many different people and so many different
• 1:27:57
  pursuits if you're at a if you're at a house party in Brooklyn there's going to be a lot of people
• 1:28:01
  you know that we have cliches about Brooklyn all being like Portlandia but there is a large
• 1:28:07
  a huge range of different interests and and careers and professions whereas DC I was like oh I've
• 1:28:14
  seen this before somewhere it's it's it's everybody's in on the same train everybody in DC is on
• 1:28:20
  a politics legal train and everyone in Los Angeles is judging each other for where they are on this
• 1:28:26
  single train and especially when you're young and you're trying to make it on that same train
• 1:28:32
  and you're trying to do it for reasons of of creativity and something deep within you that you
• 1:28:38
  you have to say and you're not quite sure how or what yet I found it so corrosive to be in an
• 1:28:44
  environment where everybody was judging you like the perfect the perfect example was I wanted to do a
• 1:28:50
  an improv night in New York when I first moved there because I was involved in a charity for
• 1:28:55
  Middle Eastern peace charity and I called around a few mates who I've made just at UCB and some
• 1:29:00
  other places and everybody the instant they heard the that there was an opportunity to perform
• 1:29:05
  said yes and it was like Paul Sheer and all these people who were sort of heroes of of mine
• 1:29:12
  came and did this night and we raised money for charity and that was it and then when I was in
• 1:29:16
  LA I was organizing a stand-up night it was further Haiti earthquake I think and every single person
• 1:29:23
  to a person who I invited found a way of sort of slightly embarrassly asking who would be there
• 1:29:30
  and whether or not there would be like like so where's it going to be like who's being invited
• 1:29:35
  like they're kind of angling to whether or not there's going to be an agent there or if they might
• 1:29:38
  might get a script deal out of or something I'm like do it for the fucking love you're a performer
• 1:29:42
  come on either do it or don't do it I don't care if you say no but like let's cut this bullshit it's
• 1:29:46
  not all about it's not about how this is going to get you up the ladder sometimes it's just for
• 1:29:51
  the love of the game and I felt like New York was about the love of so many different games and
• 1:29:55
  LA was about this yeah striving yeah I mean it's an industry town and it's unpleasant for that reason
• 1:30:04
  so I didn't want to be there you mentioned you nodded earlier in this conversation to doing
• 1:30:11
  the dishes and just focusing on doing the dishes and it made me it harkened to a kind of
• 1:30:16
  rhetoric that I'm hearing a bit more and more lately around mindfulness and stoicism and being
• 1:30:24
  present and and I love this counter movement I love it as a counter movement to our distractedness
• 1:30:30
  and to social media and I wonder whether that was accidental or if you're into that I'm not into it
• 1:30:38
  as a movement um not that I'm against it but it's it's not it's not a particular movement that
• 1:30:46
  I'm paying attention to but I do I guess my thoughts and and those thoughts overlap a great deal
• 1:30:56
  and by the way like I'm terrible at it like when I talk about the habit of consideration like
• 1:31:00
  I'm terrible at it um I really have to like bring myself into it it has to be a conscious effort
• 1:31:07
  on my part I'm not saying that I'm any better at it than anybody else I'm not but I'm encouraging
• 1:31:11
  myself and in the book my son to at least be aware that you're not in the habit so that
• 1:31:20
  when those moments present themselves you can take that little bit of effort um and apply yourself
• 1:31:28
  and and and and develop that consideration because it because when I do it it actually is really
• 1:31:33
  helpful and I guess that is probably very similar to meditative work or you know the idea of
• 1:31:41
  being present I think they're probably the same thing I like to I like to pretend that I'm doing it
• 1:31:48
  whilst actually listening to podcasts sure you know yeah and I and I seem very contemplative
• 1:31:54
  especially if I wear the small ear buds that are Bluetooth so people can't tell that I'm not
• 1:31:59
  that when I'm gazing at the dishes I'm not actually listening to a to a podcast because
• 1:32:06
  it is funny like you can you can consume a lot of Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra and you know
• 1:32:12
  even Sam Harris now and Ryan Holliday is another one of these guys who's obsessed with with
• 1:32:16
  with Stoicism and you can constantly be listening to them talk about the importance of not listening
• 1:32:21
  to things and you can go yeah that's very very profound I too I'm enlightened about emptying my mind
• 1:32:29
  of everything apart from the voice of someone telling me to empty my mind yeah I mean I think these
• 1:32:35
  things are ultimately uh you know we're not I don't know that I'm trying to achieve anything I
• 1:32:40
  don't think I'm I don't think I'm ever going to find Nirvana but I do think you can be pointed
• 1:32:47
  in that direction and have a sense that it's out there somewhere and just take little steps towards
• 1:32:52
  it if the Vikings were right and you die and you go to Nirvana you're gonna have a lot of egg on
• 1:32:57
  your face for saying that I will be mortified let's end with a few pandemic related questions if
• 1:33:05
  there was no pandemic all of a sudden there was no there was no coronavirus you and you have one day
• 1:33:10
  before it comes back what do you do probably what I'm doing now hang out with the wolves
• 1:33:17
  with the wolves howling at the moon maybe get a pizza like the pandemic for me in a lot of ways
• 1:33:23
  has been terrific because it gives me just the best excuse to hang out at home and do almost nothing
• 1:33:29
  which is which is my preferred way of being anyway you wouldn't go to a Broadway show you wouldn't
• 1:33:35
  go to the movies you wouldn't go to a restaurant you love or a back bar and not a bar but I might
• 1:33:40
  go to a restaurant probably go out for a nice meal but you know but but I think it's going to be
• 1:33:46
  very very hard for us as a people at least as an American people to forget about the pandemic so
• 1:33:56
  I am anticipating even when it's all behind us and I'm going to a restaurant and it's packed I'm
• 1:34:00
  going to be uncomfortable having been fully vaccinated and knowing everybody around these been
• 1:34:05
  fully vaccinated it's it's not going to be the same for a while I mean in some respects I think
• 1:34:09
  that'll be good I think we should all just agree to do away with handshaking and like hugging and
• 1:34:14
  kissing these are silly things we don't need to be doing them I'm well I'm advocating for when
• 1:34:19
  the pandemic is behind us doing far more open mouth kissing as just as just agreeing to replace
• 1:34:26
  hands and even with the elderly because now all of a sudden they can yeah I mean they've been at
• 1:34:31
  rig they've been so lonely that yeah particularly with the elderly they need it yeah I like that I
• 1:34:40
  don't want to I don't like the elbow thing do you greet anyone with I guess do you do that I don't
• 1:34:44
  like the elbow I don't like it either when people do it to me I return it but it's very it's very
• 1:34:51
  affected the other day someone came up to me and put her hands on her her heart and sort of did a
• 1:34:58
  little kind of almost a namaste bow yep which I thought was I thought was nice but maybe over
• 1:35:05
  doing it a little maybe laying on a little thick I mean I think the new I you know I think we're
• 1:35:10
  struggling with greetings pet post pandemic greetings the way we're struggling with pronouns it's
• 1:35:14
  like nothing quite feels right yeah I think we just do away with all of them with pronouns and
• 1:35:19
  greetings I don't you know hi I know you this is good yes of your friend of mine this is here we are
• 1:35:26
  we went together and now we're together and then when we part away when we part ways we won't
• 1:35:30
  be together and we don't we don't need to I don't have a sword I don't need to show you my hand
• 1:35:34
  yeah it's fine I got it when we can travel again where will you go um
• 1:35:42
  I my wife and I have been talking about going to Copenhagen
• 1:35:47
  and we just a city I've never been supposedly lovely I'd love to see it so I'm going to Copenhagen
• 1:35:53
  that's great I mean that is exactly what the what the conservatives would imagine and a
• 1:35:59
  feet liberal would Denmark Denmark yeah you know you want to turn America into Denmark and now
• 1:36:05
  you're going to go to Denmark well the problem is that the Danes seem to be the happiest people
• 1:36:11
  on earth according to innumerable super surveys they all and not to be politically incorrect again
• 1:36:17
  the sexiest are they can we just admit that I don't know I don't know I just admit it Michael
• 1:36:23
  I don't have an experience with deans to know the I went to I actually lived in Copenhagen for
• 1:36:29
  a semester uh and when I was of of university age because I went there one summer when a friend
• 1:36:35
  of mine was uh was studying there and I was I was so shocked by how pretty everyone is
• 1:36:42
  I thought clearly I have to spend some university time here and have as much sex as possible
• 1:36:48
  so I enrolled in Copenhagen Business School and did a semester
• 1:36:52
  for really for the purpose of having sex and adventure and it's a beautiful city as you say
• 1:36:57
  I mean it's cobblestones uh like ice cream and sex great perfect um what do you think is going to
• 1:37:05
  happen in the next four years of politics let's just wrap with no that's that's I've got that on
• 1:37:10
  my list but you know what that's a depressing I'm not going to ask you that I'm going to ask you
• 1:37:14
  a piece of advice about my own son who's now who's just turned three he's very into dinosaurs
• 1:37:20
  and animals of all kind if you had to give advice to my son what would it be um so this is advice
• 1:37:29
  to your son not advice to you you could you could do both and we could get a tofa uh my advice to
• 1:37:37
  your son I guess would be uh don't worry about the pants shitting your your your parents are
• 1:37:48
  going to want you to clean your ass don't worry about reveling it you know you've only got so many
• 1:37:54
  years of pants shitting just enjoy this special time um just really really take advantage of it
• 1:38:02
  let loose uh and just just just have fun with it right okay okay I'll um I'll consider
• 1:38:11
  passing that along and what about the advice for me is it going to be equally profound
• 1:38:17
  my advice to you would be uh don't worry about your son he's going to be fine you know
• 1:38:23
  benign approach his childhood with as much benign neglect as you possibly can
• 1:38:29
  he's going to be fine what if I see a dramatic uptick in pants shitting
• 1:38:35
  again it's fine like what's the worst that's going to happen he'll he'll he'll shoot his pants yeah
• 1:38:41
  that's the worst that happens it's fine it's fine wow I feel like I've been Eckhart Tollade and
• 1:38:47
  Deepak Trooper into wisdom and calm let me and if you want to join him there's going to be
• 1:38:53
  consequences like if you want to shoot your pants go ahead do it have a father son saying like
• 1:38:58
  there's really could be no consequences to it if you decide to join him in that activity I mean
• 1:39:02
  it just not so depends where we are if we're on a plane it'll be unpleasant for other people but
• 1:39:08
  really what are the consequences none none none none they might drag me off the plane like that
• 1:39:14
  Asian guy who they dragged off the plane is there and I don't know that story he bashed his head
• 1:39:19
  and they were screaming and everything don't you remember that a couple years ago he was like
• 1:39:24
  he's right I think so many people off planes these days it's hard to me to keep
• 1:39:29
  well it was one of those amazing stories where he'd literally done it nothing wrong whatsoever he'd
• 1:39:33
  flown in from Asia and he was only connecting flight and they'd just overbooked the flight and
• 1:39:37
  they didn't want to and they wanted some of the flight attendants the flight attendants had to go
• 1:39:41
  back to their hub and so they'd ever booked the flight and to get the flight attendants on the plane
• 1:39:44
  they had to bump a couple of people and because he didn't have status they told him to get off the
• 1:39:48
  plane and he's like I've been traveling for 18 hours or something I need to get to I need to be
• 1:39:53
  there in the morning I can't stay overnight in in whatever this this hub city is and so they were
• 1:39:58
  like if you don't remove yourself from the plane we're going to have to remove you and he was like
• 1:40:01
  well I'm not he I don't even think he understood exactly what was going on because he thought he
• 1:40:04
  I have a ticket on the plane so I'm here and they brought on these like not air marshals but like
• 1:40:10
  the security and they had to physically and he's screaming and kicking and they dragged him and he
• 1:40:15
  smashed his head and then dragging this limp kind of this limp got literally dragging him down the
• 1:40:20
  aisle smearing blood as he's kind of flailing about saying I want my seat I want to fly I'm on
• 1:40:27
  the plane and it was not good not good PR for you know and did he shoot his pants he didn't take
• 1:40:33
  advantage of that which in my opinion was a real mistake Michael in black a pleasure is always
• 1:40:40
  thank you for your time and take care of the wolves it's great to talk to you and you Josh
• 1:40:45
  thanks for having me back on