Hurt Them if they Dare to Laugh | Andrew Schulz | EP 304

I have this theory that, like, I think stories, I think we have a biological reaction to stories in the same way that we have to music. There's a reason why the Bible didn't just say, "Just do these things." There's a reason why they put them in a story, right? Because it's far more impactful to listen to this story. I wonder if, like through osmosis, the behavior in the stories kind of gets locked into our long-term memory, where if you just tell someone a rule, it's short term, and it might be fleeting. Well, the thing about having the rule embodied in the story is you see how it's acted out. That's much more convincing to watch how something's acted out, partly because then you also know how to act it out.

[Music]

Thank you. Hello to everyone who's watching and listening on YouTube and on the podcast platforms. I'm speaking today with comedian Andrew Schultz, who's also an actor, producer, and podcaster—one of the biggest and most influential names in comedy today. The business-savvy Schultz has been credited with helping to spur democratization in comedy. He has proven that comics looking to retain ownership of their material by self-releasing on platforms like YouTube can achieve equal or greater success, both financially and in terms of building an audience, in comparison to those who strike deals with streamers or networks.

Schultz recently sold more than 150,000 tickets as part of his 10-month, sold-out "Infamous" tour, which he capped off by selling out the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall in New York twice. He premiered his subsequent special, "Infamous," exclusively via the live streaming social media platform Moment House in July, before releasing it for free on YouTube, where you can watch it, as I did this morning. While Schultz has self-released multiple specials, including his first titled "441" in 2017, he's also managed to find success through more conventional channels, having created, written, performed, and executive produced the four-part comedy special "Schultz Saves America" for Netflix in 2020.

The next project he's involved in as an actor is Kenya Barris's remake of the classic streetball comedy "White Men Can't Jump" for 20th Century Studios, which has him sharing the screen with Laura Harrier. He will also appear in Netflix's romantic comedy "You People," toplined by Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, which Barris will direct from his and Hill's script. Schultz will then rejoin Barris for MGM's sports comedy "Underdogs," alongside Snoop Dogg, so there'll be a lot of marijuana involved in that. Past credits on the TV side include HBO's "Crashing," Prime Video's "Sneaky Pete," and IFC's "Benders." Schultz's podcast "Flagrant" is listened to by 2 million devout fans weekly. He also co-hosts "Brilliant Idiots" with Charlemagne the God.

Looking forward to talking to Andrew. I'm ready. I'm ready. Let's do it, man.

All right, so my mom discovered you this week—she's an absolutely huge fan—and she says hello and she would be furious if I didn't say hello for her.

What's your mom's name?

Cameron.

Sandra?

Cameron Schultz.

Aha! Well, say hello to her for me. I'm really impressed that it only took her a week to become a huge fan. That's, yeah, it's always good to know that someone's mom likes me.

Yeah, yeah. So, so, tell me, hey, tell me about your YouTube special and how that came about. You decided not to stream it; you put it on YouTube instead.

So, yeah, I want to know the whole story. How’d that come about?

Okay, so, short, short version of the story is I was originally gonna do it with a streamer, right? And then they were unhappy with some jokes. I think the climate changed a little bit and they were quite concerned how the jokes could reflect on the brand, which is reasonable. I think that, like, a private corporation has the right to make those decisions for themselves and then see how things go for them after that. Now, sometimes those decisions could be the wrong ones, you know? You could maybe become too woke in your content and then end up losing money, but—

[Applause]

To woke? How could that possibly be too woke for comedy? I can't even imagine that's a thing.

No, but okay, side note, I mean I want to get back to the special, but there is something interesting that I've learned from, like, being in Hollywood a little bit more now, is that, like, I used to have the perception, you know, I think we all create these perceptions where it's like there's this group of organized individuals that are, like, coming together and making decisions on, like, what is palatable and what isn't palatable and then inserting those into culture in their, like, different fields, like Hollywood, one of them. Okay, all the movies this year are going to be about non-binary or whatever it is, and after being in it a little bit more, I think that it's way less organized and more about self-preservation.

So, it's like, how do I not get blamed if something goes wrong?

Yes, that's it, man. There's no ambition; there's no desire to grow the company. There's nothing but, I don't want to stick out. If there's a mistake, I don't want it to be on me. I hope I don't get blamed for anything. I'm not going to do anything dangerous ever.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the idea that people are organized enough to have a conspiracy is that that's just so rarely the case. But I was part of that belief a little bit because you see it; it looks so obvious. You're like, why is every single movie the same, every single TV show the same? Are they having the same values?

But then after, like, I had a moment on a show a while ago where a guy got fired— a white older man got fired because he read the N-word. He read the script, and it had the N-word in it. And, like, the whole cast was kind of like—the people I spoke to on the cast, even the black people in the cast were like, "Yeah, I don't think it's that offensive." But the companies involved were thinking what the middlemen were thinking, what you just said, which was, "Okay, I don't want to be responsible for this. How do I, uh, how do I get this blame off of me? Okay, maybe if we just remove this person, it'll be a sign that we care about the people that are here. We don't want them to be offended," etc.

Now, I don't think—I don't know; I don't believe that the guy did it out of malice, and the black people I spoke to on the cast were like, "Yeah, I don't think he was being malicious at all."

But it was one of those things where everybody was fighting for the ability to continue working, and they didn't want to take that responsibility, and because of that, they made a very woke decision.

Yeah, so now it made, you know what I’m saying? It made me look at the industry a little differently. Everybody, it's like, maybe the more desired the job is, the more willing the middle managers will be to be extremely liberal in their values so they don't lose that opportunity. I don’t think that exists on a construction site because the guy's there like, "Look, I can get a job doing drywall somewhere else, so I'm gonna say whatever the jokes I want to say on this construction site."

So I think, too, though, there's a complicating factor there, which is something like this: so you know, each of us carries a representation of systems of ideas in our imagination, in our mind, and those ideas are active within us—that's one way of thinking about it. And nobody is a 100 percent repository of all woke ideas, yeah, but so there's fragments of the woke net of ideas in any given individual. But if you get 20 people who have fragments of those ideas in their head all together in a room, then you have the whole goddamn woke catastrophe operating, right?

And then it'll look like a conspiracy, and then you can take 20 different people, each of whom have fragments of the woke nonsense in their head, and put them in a different room; they'll come up with the same decisions. There are webs of ideas that, in some sense, each of us acts as a neuron in a neural web when we're together in a group. And so then things look conspiratorial, but it's a consequence of the working out of the internal logic of systems of ideas.

And, so yeah, and then it might be that each individual actor is fundamentally only concerned with not being held accountable for ever making any kind of mistake, which is a hell of a way to live your life—certainly no way to live your life if you're a comedian or a man for that matter. Maybe not even a woman, you know? Not even.

Yeah, yeah. It was just—it was an interesting thing for me to see how it kind of manifested, and I think that there is, like, an opposite version of that because now I've seen, like, the conservative woke pop-up. Have you been—are you familiar with this, or what are you referring to?

I don't even know if I'd called it conservative; it's a really interesting thing. It's—I would almost call it, like, The Counter Culture Brigade, which is, like, people who, I think, have been— I think they were called conspiracy theorists, and now they're kind of like searching for a home. I think a lot of the support for Kanye even right now is him just tapping into very niche beliefs and a bunch of them at the same time that people have no representation for. And now he's the most famous person tapping into those groups, right?

So he's like Jordan, he's like, um, George Floyd really died of fentanyl, and now all the people that are anti-black matter—Black Lives Matter—they just hate the idea that there's anything else that killed him but his own choice to do fentanyl, right? So they're like, "Okay, Kanye's got it."

And he also did a thing—I saw, you know, the Jews run the banks, the Jews run all these things—so he's tapped into all these niche groups, and now he's become like their representative. But what I've noticed about these groups is that, like, they're so scorned by maybe being lied to by the mainstream media or whatever it is that their personality or identity has almost become the rejection thereof.

Yeah, well, that's always a threat that exists on the conservative side, you know. The left-wingers always accuse the conservatives of being reactionary. And they're reactionary because they keep saying things like, "You guys on the left, you're going too far; you've got to slow down; you've got to stop doing this; you're going too far." And that is reactionary in some sense because they're always reacting to the excesses of the left. The conservative types tend not to want to change things, and you know that can be their downfall too because sometimes things have to change, although intelligent conservatives sure know that. But, um, it's hard for the conservatives to come up with a vision and to unite themselves because, well, first of all, they tend to stand for tradition. It's not that easy to articulate traditional norms.

And second, they do get reactionary, and you know that can turn into kind of a demented populism too because the reactionary conservatives can go out and find the disaffected people on the right, and there are plenty of them now, and then capitalize on their resentment. I mean, Trump was pretty good at that in many ways.

Um, yeah, and that's—I haven't been targeted particularly by the right, although I have to some degree. Years ago, you know, and when I first rose to whatever degree of notoriety I have now, a lot of the disaffected types on the right were also hoping that I’d be their guy, and the same thing happened to Dan Crenshaw, the congressman, because he kind of looks—he's got that evil right-wing super-villain appearance, if you know what I mean.

And they were kind of hoping he'd be their man, and he wasn't, and he actually gets targeted more by the conspiratorial right than he gets harassed by the left, which is quite the accomplishment on Crenshaw's part.

While today's cups of coffee often come with hints of soy and social justice, our new coffee sponsor delivers an entirely different experience. It's bold, strong, delicious, and overall as good as the causes it supports. I'm speaking, of course, about Black Rifle Coffee. Many of you know about Black Rifle already; it's a veteran-founded and operated coffee company who have made it their mission to hire 10,000 veterans, and they're well on their way. By purchasing for Black Rifle Coffee Company, you're directly supporting the military service community.

But what about the coffee itself? Well, it's bold, strong, and really good. Go to blackriflecoffee.com and use promo code Jordan for 10 percent off your first order or when you sign up for a new coffee Club subscription. The subscription gives you free shipping on all coffee club orders, early access to club deals and promotions, and special discounts from their partner brands. That's blackriflecoffee.com with promo code Jordan for 10 percent off your first order or when you sign up to become a coffee Club member. Black Rifle Coffee—supporting veterans and America's coffee.

[Music]

And he's a perfect example because it’s almost like this group of people who have felt so rejected by everything. I'm talking about the extreme conservatives. We need another term for it; like, I don't like how liberal and conservative—it’s too, um, binary because I don't even see, like the—

Yeah, right now. Good work, good work, Andrew. Yeah, you see, you fell right into the clutches of that system.

They get me!

Yeah, but it's like, because I've seen the way that they went after Crenshaw when he disagreed, I think about like gun rights or something like that. He was their champion as long as he said everything that they agree with, and the second he diverted from their beliefs, he no longer was useful.

And this should happen—this happened to me! I didn't even know that this, like, cluster of people existed in this organized way, but, like, I did a rant where I went after Kanye, and I thought it was kind of a pretty easy thing to do—here's a billionaire that said some awful things, I'm going to roast him with jokes. This is what I do; I think we can make fun of billionaires; I think they're okay to make fun of—and there was this onslaught of comments about people saying, "You've got it wrong! You know it's fentanyl that killed Jordan Floyd! You got it wrong! The Jews do run the banks! They do these things!"

And I'm like, "Who? What is this group of people and why are they so organized and hateful? Why is Kanye their new guy?" And I started DMing some people that were, like, trashing me, and I was just explaining, like, "What are you upset about?" to me. I don't understand. Like, we're just making fun of, like, a really rich guy that said some awful things—and the reaction that every single one of them said was so funny; they're like, "Look, Kanye is an idiot, but he's right about these things," and they're basically saying anybody who agrees with me and is famous, I'm going to ride for as long as they agree with me!

And the second they divert—the problem with social media is that you have to hear from people like that. You know, let me tell you a story. I was talking to, uh, Andy No, the journalist who covers Antifa, and, uh, I had been talking to some prominent Democrats about Antifa, and they said it doesn't exist.

And I said, "Well, what do you mean it doesn't exist? It promoted riots in multiple American cities. There are people in black masks and uniforms that call themselves Antifa. How do you mean it doesn't exist?" They said, "Well, there's hardly any of them. They're not really organized; they're not an official group."

And they're a tiny, tiny—they're such a tiny minority that they're negligible. And I didn't really— it didn't really appear to me that they were negligible, but these were respectable people and they weren't stupid, and I thought, okay, they probably have a reason for thinking this. So I asked Andy No about this because he knows more about Antifa than anyone else in the world.

And I said, "How many Antifa cells do you think there are?" Cells, so to speak, in the United States. And he thought, "Well, maybe 40." And I said, "Well, how many full-time equivalent employees do each of these cells have, so to speak, right? How many people in each city are devoting their lives to being Antifa, whatever that means?" And he figured 20.

And so that's 800 out of 300 million; it's one in 400,000, and so, like, that's none, right? In a city the size of Halifax—a city many Americans probably don't know about, but it's a city of about 400,000 in Canada—you'd have one person there. Like, in some ways that's zero people, right? It's just no one, right? But the problem is, is that a very tiny number of people can cause a tremendous amount of problems—a tremendous amount of trouble and maybe enough trouble to bring down a whole civilization.

Maybe it only takes one in a hundred thousand to do that, especially if they're organized. And now with social media, well they're always organized because no matter how peculiar you are, you can find another hundred dimwits exactly like you on the net. And then you start to think that, well, you've got something there.

And you know, in some ways that's a plus because disaffected people can find a community, but man, it depends on who the disaffected people are and exactly what the community is up to. Yes.

So and then, you know, you're in a situation where you're putting out content to hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and you also—you get feedback, but it's demented and strange feedback because it's not representative of the normal population.

It's, yeah, it might be that subset of people who had a really bad day for reasons you don't even understand and that are deciding to take it out on you behind a mask of anonymity. There's something very pathological about the democratization of public discourse on social media; it's really warped and demented. Now, my question to you is, why do you think that those Democrat leaders didn't acknowledge that this was a problem? Do you think they truly didn't think it was a problem based on the data, or do you think that they were also acting in terms of self-preservation?

Well, I think for Chan and and inspiratorial truly real, but that's self-preservation!

Yeah, I know. Criticize the opposition; it's not those votes. It's also justification for their own beliefs.

Of course, of course. But, like, I actually admire what Crenshaw did is he knew that by taking that stand, that he was going to reject some of his base. I admire that; that's a ballsy, brave move. Stand up for something you believe in despite pissing off people who may follow you and support you.

He's not acting in terms of self-preservation. He's doing what he genuinely thinks is the right thing to do.

Now in politics, this is middle management, right? You have to support your constituents if you want to stay in office. If you truly care about holding on to power, if you truly care about making change, you're going to piss off your constituents by rejecting Antifa because the opposition is going to—or your maybe Democratic opposition is going to position you as someone who is not empathetic to the liberal plate.

Yeah, well, you know, the easy way out of this, as far as I can tell—well, easy—the only real way out of this conundrum is just to say what you think. Like, you don't have to say everything you think all the time, but you have to decide at some point whether you're going to pander to the short-term demands of your hypothetical constituents or whether you're just going to say what you believe to be true.

The thing is, I watch politicians, and this is a particularly terrible thing that's happening in the political arena right now, is they use opinion polls to sample the consequences of their actions. But most of that's just rubbish, and the reason I'm saying that is there's technical reasons for that.

If you want to find out what people think, say even one person, it's extremely difficult because, first of all, people don't know exactly what they think, and they can't articulate it that well. And it's a mystery even to them. And so you have to spend a lot of time listening to find out what anybody thinks about anything, especially if you're not just going to go for their immediate cliches.

And then if you're going to sample a whole population and try to get their opinion about some political issue, then you have to formulate the questions with unbelievable care. It really takes—to find out what people think about any given complex issue would probably take a team of reasonable researchers two or three months to formulate the questions accurately enough to get a reasonable response.

And yet opinion pollsters claim that they can just tell you what people think by coming up with some questions, and so then the politicians judge the results of their actions by the opinion polls, which don't really represent people's views at all, and then we're led by this idiot whim of the mob. And you know, the real leaders go out and listen to people, right?

And then aggregate their concerns and then act on principle. And that's essentially what Crenshaw did. And to tell the truth is to act on principle. And I think with regard to the medium to long term rather than the short-term, immediate, you know, popularity payoff, which is a bad way to—it's a very bad way to conduct your affairs.

I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy. Imagine if you were a comedian and your rule was, "I’ll never make a joke that offends anyone."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

I’d be a very different comedian—I’ll tell you that!

Yeah, I think pretty much every joke in your last special would have been cut!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So back to that: you said the streaming service that you were working with wanted to—

Yeah, they wanted to edit your show, and how in the hell did they decide what was the hierarchy of offense? Because I watched your special this morning, and I thought every goddamn thing you said was offensive!

So how do they decide what to cut, what to keep?

That's a great question! You know, I'm sure they have their—everybody has their list of what is right and wrong, and I think that list is so malleable. And I think that for me, that's the most fun part of stand-up is I like finding the divisive topic and then seeing if there's, like, one kernel that we can all agree on.

And sometimes that thing that we all agree on is the opposite of what everybody would like to present themselves as. So, like, I'm trying to think of even—I know I had a bit about abortion in the special, but I'm even thinking about, like, abortion right now, which is a very divisive topic, right? I don't know how you feel about it, but I've been, like, really thinking, I'm like, what is, like, the truth on how people feel about abortion? And I think I've gotten to it, which is everybody has a number of abortions where if you go past that, it's too many. So it’s not really even if you’re liberal, it’s not really your body, your choice. It’s like your body, your choice up to like three, and then all of a sudden people are like, "What’s going on over here? Nine? Nine is a softball team! That’s a lot!"

Right? Like that usually even the most liberal person will be like, "Alright, we'll teach her how to put on a condom or something. Like, what the f**k is going on over here?" And then the most conservative person, their number is one. They're like, "One is too many!" But we all agree that there’s a spectrum of when it’s too much. And I think, like, for me, that’s where a joke begins, right?

I go, "Okay, there's—I can—there's a whole group of people in like this liberal San Francisco audience where I may perform at or a super liberal New York audience. What if I can get every person out, even the women that are super pro-choice to be like, 'Yeah, nine is a lot!' You know, like, I think it might be the government's choice at nine!' You know, like, how can I get you to see the other side without being a politician about it, going, 'This is how you must live your life?'

How can I do it, we all laugh? You know? I think it was like Oscar Wilde who said, "If you want to tell some of the truth, make them laugh; if not, they'll kill you."

And I don't think all comedy has to be truthful and all that kind of—I think comedy speaks to feeling; it doesn't speak to what is right or wrong. It speaks to genuinely how you feel. And, um, it does tend to speak to truth in some real sense because, yeah, when you laugh, when an audience laughs, they laugh spontaneously, right?

But the laughter is truthful because it taps into a feeling, but just because you feel a thing doesn't mean that that is right or wrong. And I think that's where a lot of times comedians get in trouble when they start going, "I'm speaking truth to power; I'm telling you what's right or wrong." And it's like, "Buddy, don't put the cape on. Yeah, just if you tell people you're just out here telling jokes, you're just having fun," now you're not going to be positioned with the responsibility to tell the truth every time.

I want to tell jokes; I want to say messed up things. In order for me to do that and have the freedom to create in that space, I can't be Superman, you know? I mean, I can't say that I'm the arbiter of truth and I'm going to get it right every single time.

What I'm going to do every single time is make you laugh.

I think also that that actually, um, what would you say, it subordinates comedy to something lower. You know when you see this happening with entertainers very frequently, probably most often with actors, but sometimes with musicians, sometimes with other—let’s call them entertainers—it's a bad term, creative artists.

They get possessed of the idea at some point that what they're doing isn't good enough, and that because it isn't good enough, they have to do something truly good, and that's usually something in the political arena. And what they don't understand is that there is almost nothing in the political arena that's anywhere near as good as what works in the creative arena. So you're immediately subordinating what's best to what's lowest.

And so when you see a Hollywood actor go on a political rampage, you think, "Well, you're already doing a lot of good for the world with your creative actions, and now you're a second-rate politician even though you were a first-rate actor or comedian or musician."

And, you know, I've gone to a lot of artistic shows in recent years and had them polluted by political discussion, and you get pulled into the performance, and then halfway through, there's something politically correct, often because that's generally the case now, and you think, "Oh my God, I got suckered here. You know, I was coming to hear someone great do something great; now I have to listen to the same half-wit political opinion that I could have not paid for and listened to any undergraduate spout. It's like, well, thanks a lot for that."

You think Black Lives Matter, well, you know, that doesn't make you special.

Yeah, you know, anyone who's not an outright bloody Nazi thinks that, and so it's just not—it's just not elevating and it's a very sad thing to see that creative artists are buying the idea, part of this rat's nest of ideas we were talking about earlier, that politics is somehow morally superior, political opinions are somehow morally superior to creative endeavor.

That's definitely the case on the comedy front, yeah.

I wonder if it—hmm, yeah, I think it’s hard. I think, like, with success and notoriety, well, it’s twofold. It’s like with extreme criticism, for example. You went through extreme, extreme criticism—it’s hard, I would imagine, to stick to your guns when you know that you could easily back into the comfort of the people supporting you, right?

It's the brave move is, despite the criticism, continuing saying and feeling what the things that you feel—for lack of a better way to describe it. But to continue being consistent on how you feel and expressing that, it’s very easy to get, like, this onslaught of criticism from the left and then just go, “Alright, the right likes me. I’m gonna go right-wing. All my opinions are conservative,” etc.

It's much harder to piss off the left one day, piss off the right the other day because that's who you are as a real person. Nobody is 100 in that way, and feeling that thought every single time.

What I try to, I guess, express in a lot of comedy, like I have an abortion bit in the special, to this day nobody knows which side I’m on the abortion issue, right? And both sides think that joke represents them. That’s designed on purpose to do that.

If you even look at the comments, both of them are recognizing the faults in their side and also the support of their side. And to me, it was really cool to put out a piece like that that wasn't going, "You're an idiot for not believing exactly what I believe," especially a divisive topic like that. I just think it’s—I don't know, like, did you have that moment where you were getting this onslaught of criticism? People are calling you the next Nazi diss, and then you're the muse for, like, movie villains. Was there ever a moment where you were like, “This—I don’t need to stay true to myself! Let me back into the comfort of the people who love me!”

Post-modernism is tearing our world apart. The one thing that may be able to unite us is a mass return to our Judeo-Christian roots. At the individual level, that means developing our prayer life. There’s a ton of literature out there on the benefits of secular New Age mindfulness meditation, but what isn’t talked about nearly enough is the power of a consistent prayer life.

That’s where Hallow comes into play. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the U.S. and the number one Catholic app in the world. Hallow features over 5,000 prayers and meditations, including daily prayers to help you build a habit of prayer and gratitude, Bible reflections with Jeff Cavins and Father Mike Schmitz to help you grow in knowledge and understanding, meditations to help you prepare for sleep and rest each day, reflections with Bishop Barron, and much more.

Use Hallow as a foundational tool to grow in gratitude and character each and every day. Try it free for three months by going to hallow.com/jordan—that’s hallow.com/jordan. Ground yourself in fundamental truths with Hallow today.

Yeah, while it’s hard to say, you know, because a lot of that’s pretty subtle. If all the attacks are—almost all the attacks are coming from one side and almost all the support is coming from the other side, it also puts you in a position of having to wonder just exactly who your friends are, you know?

And one of the things I have found is that for me, for whatever reason—and I don’t think that this is unique to me, it’s a lot harder for me to talk to people on the left.

And the reason for that—and it didn't used to be like that—not 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

Yeah, in fact, if you talked to me 15 years ago, I probably would have thought that I was at least moderately on the left. And so, but in any case, I always feel like I have to walk on eggshells. I feel like I have to watch what I'm saying, and I don't really like talking to people around whom I have to watch what I'm saying. I actually like dark people, and I can just say what I have to say, especially if it happens to be funny—which now and then is the case.

And so, and then it is difficult not to identify with people who support you, especially if that goes on for years. And so who knows how that changes, you know? I definitely have become more conservative in my thinking, and I would say I think there are intellectual reasons for that.

Primarily, though, you know, because one of the things I've understood more deeply recently, more explicitly—you know, I’ve been putting this together—is that the definition of sanity that's generally implicitly held among the psychological community is probably too individualistic.

And what I mean by that is that I don’t think that sanity is something that you have in your head; it’s not part of your psyche; it’s not part of you exactly. It's more like harmonious interaction with the hierarchy of social arrangements that you have with other people.

So, well, imagine this, for example: I—a neighbor I knew on my street said to me once, "You're never any happier than your most unhappy child."

Right? So that's a good one. But so you imagine, well, you're a pretty sane person and you're married, and your marriage is terrible. It’s like, well, then you're not that sane, are you?

And if you have a terrible marriage and you're not getting along with your kids, then you're also not very sane. And if you're in a terrible marriage and you don't get along with your kids and you're fighting with your siblings and your parents, then you're even less sane.

And so imagine that sanity, you’re saying, if you have a relationship that's working, if you have a relationship with your family that's working, if that family is nested inside a community that isn't too fractious—there’s something musical about it. It's like every note has its place.

And so, I think, yeah, you see what I mean? And it's also, I see what you mean. But if I can give some pushback, I would say that, like, the person that has the miserable marriage and unhappy kids but is still seemingly happy—that person is insane to me.

The person that has unhappy kids in an unhappy marriage and is unhappy is sane.

Yes, that's exactly the point I'm making is that—Okay, yes! Because the thing is that if you aren't reflecting the structure of the social communities around you, then you're off calibration.

Well, here I was talking to a woman named Jean Twenge yesterday, and she's a research psychologist. We were talking about self-esteem, and one of the—the self-esteem movement in this school system in California was absolutely dreadfully devastating and appalling. It basically posited that you could teach kids how to be narcissistic to overcome their negative emotion and neuroticism, and that’s so preposterously appalling that you couldn’t invent something stupider.

So we were talking about self-esteem, whatever the hell that means, because it’s a very badly defined term. But here’s one way of determining whether you have the appropriate amount of self-esteem: you might say, “Well, everyone should feel good about themselves.” It’s like, “Well, if you’re a miserable, ratty, lying, deceptive, narcissistic prick, then probably you shouldn’t feel that good about yourself.”

And how do you know that? Because you should feel about as good about yourself as people on average do around you about you, right? So your—and we even know this technically because you have a little counter, so to speak, yes, in your psyche that ranks you in terms of your social standing.

And the higher you’re ranked, the less negative emotion you feel, and the more positive emotion you feel.

Yeah, yeah! And that's because your brain is indicating to you that you’re well situated in a social community, and you’re secure with opportunity, and so your self-esteem should—that's exactly how it works! It's very—yeah!

So what happens to people who get depressed, technically depressed, is that that counter goes astray, and they start thinking less of themselves than their situation would indicate.

Yeah, yeah! And so then everything around them falls apart. They feel that their past was a catastrophe; they feel that their present is hopeless and that the future isn’t going anywhere. But it's because this really, really low-level counter that utilizes serotonin has gone astray.

And sometimes antidepressants can help deal with that. Now, that’s not someone that isn’t someone who has a terrible life; that’s someone who has a good life, but something’s gone wrong with them psychophysiologically often. So the counter is out of whack.

In any case, you should have about as much self-esteem as other people are willing to grant you, and that's kind of a conservative idea as well in some real sense—enough self-esteem as others are willing to grant you.

Yeah, it’s like, "Well, imagine," you know, assume that you're an average performer. You shouldn't be running around feeling good about yourself in excess of that because your attitude towards yourself should be a reflection of your actual situation in the social environment.

So my pushback on that would be, if your self-esteem is defined by how the people around you treat you, how can you break out?

Yeah, when you're in an industry of narcissists that are really only concerned with how they're doing, what they want—like, how do you separate yourself?

That's a great question, man. And that's the trick that, well, presents itself to everyone creative. But the answer maybe is—and I don’t know if we support this, but this might be the truth—there is a reason why narcissists tend to break out, because their self-esteem is not limited by the views of others.

That is true; that is exactly true. Well, in fact, in that regard, so you put your finger on something that’s cardinally important because it is generally the case that your view of yourself should reflect the views of those around you, but the problem with that is now and then the social situation gets so pathological that that’s no longer reliable.

Now, when that happens, you’re really in trouble—that’s the first thing we should point out, because if society has got so demanded that its feedback can no longer be trusted, then everything's going to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly.

But that is when you get the necessity for people to call on whatever it is within them that makes them true moral agents to, let’s say, say what they believe to be true with great caution. But I would say even in those circumstances, like I've been fortunate when I've been doing that to the degree I've been able to do that, because I have friends around me who are giving me accurate feedback, I would say, and careful feedback, despite the mob pressure.

I don't know if anybody could really do that alone, you know? You know what I mean? Maybe you've got—

And I'm sure you felt this as well—that it's like, at least when I'm running my business and I have my friends and the guys that I work with and build with, I personally feel most creative when I have support, right?

So when there is a momentum, when the ball is moving, when there’s an avalanche, that’s when these explosions of creativity happen to me—in conversation, when I’m talking to someone or other people who value what I have to say.

All of a sudden, I have tons to say, and I'm excited to share—when I'm talking to someone who thinks that I’m an idiot, I'm questioning the things that I have to say.

So in my mind, I'm trying to foster an environment where everybody here feels the confidence to access their genius right now. If their genius in one zone is a six, that's fine; if their genius in another zone is a ten, that's fine. But let me get the best version of you.

Now, that’s not saying we’re buttering people up, but at the same time, we’re not treating it like—I don’t know, I think like creativity is not a football field, right, where it’s like you can only run as fast as you can run. I can yell at a player; he's still going to run a 40 in five seconds.

I can say he sucks; he’s gonna run a 40 in five seconds. I can say he’s great; he’s gonna run 45 seconds. But with somebody who’s coming up with a creative idea, a funny idea, the more I build his confidence up, the more willing he is to go into those deep, weird concepts that might produce something incredibly creative.

Yeah, well, you do a lot about by listening and attending, right? And, yeah, because people will manifest themselves more fully in precise proportion to the degree that they’re being attended to and listened to. I was thinking too about the calibration issue.

You know, one of the values of a real education is that you start to spread the community that you identify with over vast spans of time. So, you know, in the humanities in particular, at least in principle, there was a golden thread of conversation that’s been going on at least from the time of Socrates between great minds moving forward that have been adjudicated as great by the consensus of the entire educated community, let’s say.

And now that’s all, of course, parody—it’s, uh, patriarchal oppression, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. And then maybe when you’re called upon to speak carefully and truthfully despite mob pressure and despite your otherwise laudable willingness to abide by the judgment of the group, the group starts to expand across time.

And so the pathologies of the moment can be ignored in favor of the, what would you call it, the wisdom of the group stretching across thousands and thousands of years. And you see that’s also, in some sense, a conservative idea in the deepest sense because the idea would be that there is a fundamental spiritual tradition that manifests itself philosophically and theologically that has to be attended to despite the vagaries of the moment.

And so, yeah, that seems to be right, you know? I mean, I think what you do when—if you go to university and you get a real education, you find a peer group—the peer group of creative and truthful thinkers and their thought in some sense exists outside of time, right?

It’s eternally valuable, and it doesn’t matter what the situation is. And then you can judge your actions in the moment against those standards. Hmm, yeah.

But you’re still picking the people whose standards most resemble yours.

Well, not necessarily, not if you’re really getting educated, you know? Because then you get exposed to a lot of people who didn’t necessarily think the way you thought.

Well, this is why it’s so important; it’s like— and this is why the internet is amazing but also dangerous. It’s just like university in this way.

Okay, before the internet, there was college, and that's how I described it in high school. You talked to some people that had rough experiences in high school, especially people are younger than me.

And I said, "Hey, just wait to go to college. You’re going to be dealing with way more people, and you’ll be able to be yourself because there are some other people that actually feel just like you."

Yeah, right? And you’re gonna really like this college experience because you’re going to find a friend group that just didn’t exist in your small 100-kid-per-grade high school, right?

The internet is that on steroids right now. That little four-person group that really likes gaming and wearing masks and doing all this other stuff is four million globally. You get to feel part of a big group, and you have all these people that like what you have to say.

But what I think that the internet can often do—and it’s something that, like, I try my hardest to not let it do—is it dulls our sword, you know? We don't have to communicate outside of the echo chamber, right?

We know if we want, we can say the things we believe to the people who also believe them, and now there’s no more nuance. One of the great things about getting on stage and doing stand-up comedy show when people don’t know I’m going to be there, right?

I’ve been very fortunate to go and sell out from the biggest theaters in the country, right? This has been awesome.

But one of the really cool things about going up to a show where people don't know I'm going to be there is there are people who may disagree with me, hate me, not know me, and also love me—all in the same room!

And it keeps my tongue sharp! I have to communicate to those people ideas that they might disagree with in a way that’s funny enough for them to listen and then project laughter.

I fear—and I sometimes fear that, like, you've experienced so much undeserved hate from the left that it’s positioned you as, with some resentment, which is reasonable!

I don’t know how you’re even still having, like, the common debate and discourse—like if most people in your situation they would just say damn screw them whatever. But your information is more important to the people who don't agree with you than the ones who already agree.

You know what I'm saying? Like, explaining the value of, let’s say, God, I'm not someone who was raised with religion, but I believe in the power of it.

And so explaining the power of God to someone who is not religious is more important to the than to the believer, because if that person can get something from it, it’s so powerful.

But if you've only ever explained it to your congregation, you're not going to be able to communicate it to me or another person or a person who is maybe there's even an atheist—there's no way they're going to be able to digest it!

Yeah, well that was part of the potential danger of joining forces with the Daily Wire, you know, because they’re obviously a conservative enterprise, and my family and I thought long and hard about that.

I mean, first of all, I like working with the Daily Wire; they've been extremely good to work with. They've left me alone—not only have they left me alone to do whatever it is that I want to do, they've helped me do things I wanted to do that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.

And I also felt that it was appropriate and wise to find some allies on the social media front because, well, I got banned off Twitter, and, you know, YouTube hasn't harassed me much, although they've demonetized my daughter several times for reasons that are completely opaque, and God only knows, you know, what might happen on the YouTube front.

I know they've demonetized you on Me Park many times, the North Korean dissident, and that's because Me Park objects to North Korea. You know, when you think you’d be able to get away with that given that it’s right after all North Korea, which is like the worst dictatorship anyone's ever managed to produce, which is really saying something, right? Because there’s been some pretty bad dictatorships.

And so—and obviously, the Daily Wire is a conservative enterprise. And I was worried that that would compromise my ability to communicate with the very people that you were just discussing, especially about the things that I want to talk about.

But, um, you know, also, I would say, I don’t exactly know what to make of this. You also find your friends where they're willing to have you, you know?

And I get pilloried quite often for not talking to enough people on the left, and a huge part of the reason for that is that most of the time they won't talk to me.

I’ve spent years trying to find Democrats who would speak to me, you know, actual politicians who would speak to me on my YouTube channel, and although I have a couple identified now and potentially lined up for years, the answer to that request was, “There’s no way we’re going on your channel.”

And so you know, how the hell can you talk to people if they just say no?

Why should they—why should they go on their channel? You’re going to lobotomize them?

Like, I don't think the answer is speaking to politicians. Like, I remember I remember first engaging, like, with your content, and what I think is so powerful about you is that you're such a thoughtful thinker that you can really almost have—I don’t want to use the word weaponized—but like you can weaponize arguments for the average person that has feelings they can't articulate.

And I think what’s really great about it is that it’s articulated in a way in which the other side understands and accepts. I think it's one of the reasons I was probably drawn to you is because I like doing this with comedy. Regardless of which side I'm fighting for, I would never take a political side because that’s—that’s my ability to dance.

Yeah. I can't dance once I say I'm on one. I don't want you to know where the joke is going.

But what I loved is you deliver this information, and it was so hard to refute it.

And I don't care whether you're on the Daily Wire or whether you're on CNN Plus, or whatever that is—it doesn't matter to me. Because as long as your thoughts stay true to you, then that will be communicated.

Maybe less people on the left will digest them because you're on the Daily Wire, and that's their bias, which is stupid, but I do want your ideas to get to them. And I want them to get to them in a way where it’s—it’s not coming with resentment because nobody listens once they’re told they’re an idiot, first. You know what I mean?

Like, if you're going to listen, “You’re an idiot, here’s why you’re an idiot!” I already shut down, you know what I’m saying?

Like, because you said you want to fight me; you didn’t want to teach me something.

And I wonder if when you were teaching in the university level, you were almost—it was like the comedy club with the strangers. You don't know who these kids are, where they're from.

Well, it was awesome; it was never political, you know? I mean, none of the things I did at the university until I objected to some Canadian legislation were political.

And, um, I didn’t really expect—politics ruins everything. I wish we could just talk about it culturally, like, I don’t know.

Politics creates this divide, and there are these people that are just, like we were talking about before, they're just trying to preserve themselves. They just want to keep their job; they want to win their next re-election, and they're using you in some gotcha strategy.

And I hated seeing it happen, but there's certain realms that once you enter, you deal with the onslaught. There's, like, institutions, like you with banking; banking people are going to take you out. Politics, people are going to take you out; and there's probably another one as well.

But for me, it's like—what are these cultural conversations? Like, it’s important, the messaging that you get across.

And I know it, and you do something—and I'm not trying to compliment myself here, I'm just complimenting you—but like, for me when you express a viewpoint or a feeling, and my 75-year-old mother likes it and a 19-year-old kid likes it, you're speaking to core, primal human instinct, okay?

That is what jokes do. If I see, yeah, when I see generations of people at one of my shows, when I see a father and his son both laughing together, like, one, I get emotional almost because I'm like, "Oh, I love those moments with my dad."

Yeah.

But two, I'm like, I'm hitting core; I'm hitting who you are! I’m not tapping into this, like, community you’re supposed to be a part of; I'm tapping into something primal.

Yeah, well, so you know you talked about people’s ability to find community online and the analogy between that and the colleges.

I think the difference is that when you go to college and you find people who have your intellectual and creative interests, let’s say, you also do that under the tutelage of older people, so there's an apprenticeship element.

And you do it while you're being introduced to the great thinkers of the past. And so there’s—again, that’s a conservative idea in some sense; it’s like you get this new freedom and you get to expose yourself, so to speak, to new people, but you do that within the confines of an intellectual tradition.

And so that stops it from going seriously sideways, let’s say, into the realm of ideology or propaganda or conspiratorial thinking, which are—yeah, which are pathologies that you might associate with that emergent group identity.

And a lot of that’s lacking online, obviously.

Absolutely! I hate how—I’ll be honest, like, I hate how the right has been bastardized. I hate how the left has been turned into, like, a bunch of, like little—I think that there are these extreme versions, right?

Like, the extreme right is not like a Romney conservative, you know what I mean? Like, the extreme left is not like—

I mean, Clinton is, you know, embroiled in controversy, obviously—but like when my parents were growing up and they were, like, Clinton Democrats, you know, or even Obama, if you want to say it—like these things are so close!

Yet the parties are are defined by their extremes. It’s almost like soccer clubs! You know, when you look at, like, these soccer teams, they're, like, defined by their hooligans a lot of times, and it's like the hooligans are five—not even 5 percent of the people who even go to the games, right?

So what I would love is the discourse to come back here.

Well, and part of that, part of that I really think—I was talking again to this Jean Twenge the other day about what's happening online to facilitate that.

And this tiny percentage of bad actors goes without punishment online, and that's a huge problem! You know, if you’re a real troublemaking prick in person, someone's going to give you a SWAT, and that’s going to keep you down.

You know, and sometimes that doesn't happen appropriately, and sometimes it does, but generally speaking, people watch their tongues pretty carefully when they're talking face to face with actual others.

And the narcissists and the Machiavellians and the psychopaths keep themselves pretty well in check because of that pressure. But online, none of those sanctions exist.

Plus, the social media companies capitalize on the agitation they produce, and they literally capitalize on it because their algorithms drive people's attention towards the polarizing influences.

And so, yeah, we’re in a situation now where that 3 percent—because it’s probably no more than that—holds disproportionate influence over political discourse online. And I have the suspicion that that's really tearing us apart because it's—

Yeah, it’s obliviating the middle, right? The reasonable middle.

Yeah, it's also the case, I think that the people in the reasonable middle, because they’re reasonable and because they're just going about their lives, aren't that good at articulating the values of the middle, right?

Yes, because I always think about this in relationship to marriage. It's like, you know, some radical can come up to you and poke you and say, “Justify marriage!”

And the typical person is just going to be set back on their heels. It's like, “Well, I don't know how to do that. We agreed 50,000 years ago that marriage was a good thing!”

I can't come up with a philosophical justification for it!

Why do you love your children?

Yeah, well, I don’t know; I just, yeah!

Well, it’s the—you know, the ideas that bind us that are deep—they’re not generally articulated.

And so when they're challenged, those who hold them have no idea what to say. And like, here's another example I like to use this on people who are radically left—it's like, “Why is slavery wrong?”

How do you think?

Well, God, it's obvious that slavery is wrong! Slavery's just wrong!

It's like, "Okay, fair enough. Why?"

Yeah, well, as far as I can tell, it has to do something with the fundamental sanctity of the individual. It’s basically a religious claim, yeah?

You’re removing their freedom!

Yeah! And their freedom is an appropriate part of them because they're a part of divine providence. It's something like that. That's the axiomatic claim!

Well, if you dispense with the entire religious underlay, which is really what you do if you're on the radical left, it's like—then why not just use power?

If I can make you do what I want you to do, why the hell not?

Let’s do it! This is how jokes work!

Like, yeah, but—why is it wrong?

Because this is how jokes work!

Isn't this beautiful?

It's like—you find a way to get a person who is an atheist, doesn’t believe in religion, thinks religion is the worst thing in the world—to agree that religion has immense value by getting them to agree that a thing they hate, slavery, is wrong.

And then you attach why slavery is wrong to the thing that they also think is wrong, and now they have to choose one or the other.

And that’s not a hard choice!

Religion—why did you just compare that to a joke?

I think you’re right, but why? Why did that connection occur for you?

Because you're making people choose what—

Well, for me, that's how I would enter anything. I would go, "Okay, how can—there's a person who is not religious; I would like to convince that person that religion is valuable, right?"

So—and I have bits that I've done about this, right? So what do they hold true? What are their other values? Maybe they're very liberal; maybe they don't believe in— I mean, I don't think you have to be liberal to not believe in slavery!

We should all not believe in slavery!

But here's another thing that they would hold true: they disagree with slavery, okay?

Now, if I believe that the reason why man has the right to their, I guess, independence and their freedom is because I'm a God-made individual and God would never make somebody chained, uh, then that person has to accept that God is the reason why slavery is wrong.

And therefore, they have to, right?

Right, okay, so there is something—there's something definitely there because a punchline—so there's a—there's a whole line of psychological—

We need a punchline still!

Yeah, we need a punchline still!

But that's a premise! Right?

Right, right.

But the punchline is what drives it home, you know?

And one of the things that I have found, I think that what I do on stage is most analogous to what stand-up comedians do. And the reason for that is that when I do a lecture, for example or try to answer a question, there's usually an investigation but it has to build up to a punchline.

There has to be, yes, a culminating moment where it’s driven home, and that’s a moment of insight.

And what it does is it takes a bunch of information that’s sort of being scattered around and brings it together, and everybody goes, “Aha!"

And that’s very much like the climax of a joke, and it’s part of insight. And so there’s a psychological literature on insight, and insight seems to develop when a number of things that weren’t linked together are suddenly linked together and you go, "Aha! That’s how all that fits together."

And I mean, comedians are doing that all the time because they're explaining the world—and sometimes we're explaining the world in ways that don't really make sense, but they're funny connections.

You know I had a—one of the earlier jokes in my career that worked was, uh, you know, we were talking a lot about the oppression of women and I'm like, "Okay, maybe it'd be funny if I could find a justification for the oppression of women."

So I said, "You know, the oppression of women is horrible. You know, countries that treat women horrible—I mean that's just awful. But they have the best food!"

So my justification is, like, you know, nobody's ever said, "Let's go out for a Canadian tonight."

Right?

So, to me, that's like the more equal country the worst the food is, and then the more oppressed the country, the better—like, I think one of the lines was, "The more countries, like, stay in the kitchen, the better the food comes out of the kitchen!"

You know, and now these are absurd concepts, but a really funny connectivity, right?

Right, right!

I'm justifying something awful, but now all of a sudden everybody in the room is kind of agreeing, like, "Holy sh*t!"

Like, "Yeah, I'm not a fan of Swedish food! I'm not a fan of—you know, I’ve really, I really love hummus!"

Norwegians eat fermented shark!

Jesus! That’s an argument against the equality of women right there—fermented sharks—isn't that just not a good idea?

So, yeah, so this is the cans of that stuff!

I think it’s called surströmming—you can’t fly on airplanes with cans of that because they explode! So that is not a food you should eat!

So to me, now, I don’t have the responsibility you have, which is to be truthful and right, so I can dabble in the wrong, and the wrong is so funny.

But for me, like, I don’t know, I just love this—I love the wrong! The wrong is great!

And we allow it—it allows us to explore ideas! Like I got a boxing coach, right? Not for anything else other than exercise; I just love to do the sport, right?

But, and he's from Egypt, and he was speaking to me in Egyptian Arabic, and I thought that like curse words are a great way of organizing a society's hierarchy in values—like the different curse words that they use, right?

And he was telling me, he’d call me different curse words. He called me mitnaka, right? Which means prostitute—sorry, sorry, Naka means, um—a—a, actually for lack of a better word—and then he goes, "Charmuta," he calls me, which means prostitute.

He goes, "Now listen, outside of here, don't say mitnaka to anybody; that is a horrible word, okay? You cannot say that!”

He’s basically, “Don't call anybody a—he goes, ‘You can call people sharmuta; that's not that bad.’"

And I go, “Wait, wait, you’re saying sharmuta is worse than prostitute?”

And he goes, “Well, sometimes you have to for money; that makes sense. But just for pleasure? What is wrong with you? Go your boyfriend or something!”

And I thought it was, like, such a beautiful look into culture, you know what I’m saying? Like, there are dire circumstances that made it more reasonable to have sex for money because you needed money to survive. Maybe you need to help your family, and that was forgiven culturally; it was understood.

It was like, “You don’t want to do that, but at least you’re doing it to support your family!”

Yeah, well, just circling around, the curse words always touch on taboos, right? And so taboos would be the worst thing in a society. In Quebec, all the curse words are church-related.

Yeah, exactly! How do you know that?

Why do you know that? It’s my job to know these things!

So let me ask you again about your special. So it was going to be edited—did you know how heavily it was going to be edited?

Yeah, they told me certain jokes that they didn't like. And again, I don't necessarily have resentment for companies that are trying to protect themselves. I—you have that right as a company. I disagree because I don't think it is the protection that you want. I think the ultimate protection is putting out great content.

Well, I love—right, exactly! Yeah, that’s how you develop the moat!

But I think it’s very easy to just go like, “You guys—you guys want to censor blah, blah.” It’s like, “Yeah, I get it. You have a family, you have kids in private school; you don't want that maybe responsibility of putting out the thing that got your company in trouble." Yada, yada.

So I don't have personal resentment; it was frustrating.

So basically, long story short, what I did is I bought the special back. And they could have said no to this, but I was able to buy the special back, which I'm very grateful for, and I put it up on my own—I put it up on Moment. Moment is this platform where you can, you know, stream content, so basically pay for people to buy a ticket to watch the show and then own it in perpetuity.

So I first did a window there, kind of like a movie, right? Like you go see Batman in the movie theater. That’s how I was thinking about it. You go see Batman and movie theater; it’s there in that movie theater for a couple months, and then a few months after that, it’s on cable.

So I was like, let me try this for comedy. I put it up here and, you know, fingers crossed—and it does unbelievably well! And I made way more than I would ever make on the special itself.

It was the most money I've ever made in my life, to be honest with you.

And that was Moment—it was on with Moment?

Yeah, so Moment, uh—yeah, Moment World is now, but it was Moment House when I did it. But it's this great company. They've been doing these live stream events; they do it for bands, they do it for comedians, and I'm hoping that this is another pathway for comics to put their content out and have a window where they can monetize it.

I mean, the beautiful thing about putting your stuff out on YouTube is it goes to the world, but you're not able to monetize it in the same way. And in order to create a special like the one that we created, I mean it costs $400,000 to shoot the specials!

So, right? You have to be able to generate money to do something that can compete with a Netflix, compete with any of these other—HBO—any of these platforms.

I want to be able to create that content and put it out there. So we put it behind this window, and people came out; they supported; it was amazing. And then a few months later, I put it out on YouTube.

Yeah, and that—I think we’re at eight million views in a month or something like that. So now I get all the new people—all the people who aren’t familiar with me, all the people that didn’t know who I existed—and the friends can share it.

But I was also able to give it to the fans who really have rode for me from the beginning and give them this experience.

Also, the YouTube version, I put, uh, some ads in.

Yeah, yeah! I watched it this morning!

Well, what did you charge for the special on Moment?

Uh, 15 bucks.

And how long did you have it up there before you switched it to YouTube?

I did two, two-week windows. So I just did two weeks, and then so many people are asking for it that I put it back up for another two weeks a week later.

And why did you decide?

I don’t know, in periods I wanted to create urgency. I think one of the issues with just having—you know, like just having it up is, "I'll get to it."

I think that’s one of the problems with content in general, like I think, I think, uh, you know, there’s this idea with its streaming, you’re, "Oh, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it,” and then you never get to it, and there's just so much that you have to get to.

And I think that if you create urgency, like a boxing match is— we have to watch this tonight; an MMA fight we have to watch as a sporting event; we have to.

So knowing that there's this two-week window where you could watch it with no ads, and this was the way it was going to be—you know, also there was no telling when I put it on YouTube if they weren't going to take it down.

So like this was the only time that you were 100 percent sure that you could watch it in its entirety. And, um, it also created this time where, like, everybody—well, not everybody, but a lot of people watched it at the same time, right?

Right.

So we had a live viewing, and it created this communal feeling which we wanted. Like, I love watching House of Dragons, you know, the Game of Thrones reboot.

I love watching on Sunday with everybody else and then going on Twitter and seeing how people are reacting to it and taking part in this massive group experiment and hearing their live, real-time reactions. To me, this is awesome.

So I wanted to create that for a comedy special, and it was awesome. We were able to do it, man!

Yeah, well, I'll have to look into Moment; that sounds extremely interesting.

And then you connect too with them?

Okay! You doing one of your lectures, for example, on Moment, like creating this moment, having this moment for all these people to all check in at the exact same time.

And they’ve got some other really cool features too, like you can sell merch while you're watching it. Like there are all these different things that are, like easy to access, people can comment real-time on it which is also so cool.

But like having this place where all these people who want to experience this thing with you, be it live or pre-recorded, but before it goes out to the world and people want to support—that’s another thing I learned.

Like I’ve given out so many hours of comedy; I’ve given—there are so many people that hit me up, and they're like, "Listen! You've made me laugh through really dark times for years." Like there are people, when I put it up on YouTube, started donating money.

I didn't even know that that was a thing that you could do! But they felt guilty that they didn't buy it. People don’t—people don’t really want something valuable for nothing. They want to contribute their part. Generally speaking, that's—I think that’s why giving away things for free in some real sense is a bad pricing decision.

And so, because it does—it does deprive people of the opportunity to reciprocate, and they want to be able to reciprocate.

Yeah! So now you're having, I think, more success on the movie front—that’s correct?

Yeah, I’ve been able to do some small roles in some films, and I guess those are all going to come out. I don’t even know when they're going to come out, but I want to make a film.

So, yeah, to be honest, it's—yeah, well, I guess I don’t know. Here’s—I want to make a film; I’m really excited! But I’m really getting into story now and the power of story.

And I know I have this theory that, like, I think stories—I think we have a biological reaction to stories in the same way that we have to music. You know, like, yeah!

Like I notice when I'm hanging out with my friends that I've known for decades, we will retell the same stories that we were all a part of, and every single time our eyes light up and we get goosebumps and we laugh, and we get excited, and the story’s morph and change, and we get to, like, relive them.

In the same way, when a song comes on that was a song you absolutely loved or you were going through something, you get to feel all those, like, emotions again, like you tap two towards them.

And even when somebody tells a story in a group, it's different than when someone has like a hot take or a premise.

It's like, "Hey, this thing happened!" Everybody shuts up, and all of a sudden we’re like around the campfire for some reason!

Yeah!

So I'm curious your take on what that is about us and story: is it like our earliest version of digesting information?

Well, I think it's incontrovertible in some sense that we see the world through a story. So if you’re out with your friends and you're telling a shared story, then you’re literally building the—you're literally building the shared set of assumptions that constitute the friendships.

And so, think about the leftist take on the world. So the leftist take is something like the fundamental story is one of power, and the relationships between people are structured as a consequence of power.

That's true for marriages; it's true for history; it's true for the Western canon; it's true for economic interactions; it’s all about power.

Well, that’s a story, and it’s not a very good story, by the way. And it's also not a story that unites or reflects reality in an accurate manner because social relationships are only predicated on power when they become corrupt.

So, well, if you have to force someone to be your friend, that’s just not working very well. If you have to force your wife to pay attention to you, then the bloody situation is degenerated.

If you have to force your children to listen all the time, then you're not mutually acting out a very good story.

And so the question is, what’s the story that’s the antithesis of power? And I think the antithesis of power is play.

Hmm.

If you’re ensconced in a good story, then what you’re doing is playing. This is one of the reasons it’s—I really like watching comedians because they’re playing all the time.

And I think that play—the spirit of play—is actually the antithesis of the spirit of power!

Let me tell you something that will prove your theory, and I have to give credit to my podcast co-host and just creative partner in so many things about Mark Gagnon.

But I took him to this thing called Burning Man this past year, and his reflection on Burning Man was he goes, “It’s just adult play.”

I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Think about the whole thing—it's adult play!”

Now, to tap into the power thing, Burning Man is what happens when you remove power. There’s no currency; you cannot buy anything.

And there’s no restriction in terms of your ability to enter; once you're there, every party is welcome to everybody, every place is welcome to everybody. You can’t even buy things; you just give.

So you remove traditional power structure and hierarchy, what is left for humans? Play! Dress how you want to dress, dance how you want to dance, party how you want to party, be silly, prank one another, but play is the absence of power.

Wow! That’s kind of cool!

Well, look at—well, look at what happened—I used to go work out with a couple of my friends in Boston. And we used to try to make each other laugh when we were bench pressing because as soon as you laugh, you lose all your muscular control.

And so it’s obvious