The Jordan Harbinger Show
1107: Ballet Date with a Geopolitical Incel Mate | Feedback Friday
Fri, 24 Jan 2025
Your fascist colleague thinks clubs turn people gay but loves male ballet dancers. Sometimes the closet has geopolitical dimensions. It's Feedback Friday! And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at [email protected]. Now let's dive in! On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss: You're a PhD student who befriended a peculiar new colleague with a penchant for authoritarianism, homophobia, and ballet. He's confiding increasingly concerning political views, showing up in clouds of cologne, and taking you on what might be accidental dates. Can you guide him toward compassionate self-acceptance, or is this a lost cause? Your neighbors are living like chaos incarnate — their yard's a tribute to entropy, their unmuffled car sounds like a dragon with indigestion, and there might be a whole rat civilization developing under their porch. The police can't help, and your three-year-old keeps getting woken up. What's your next move? 20 years ago, your alcoholic father's infidelity led to your mother's tragic end. Now he's remarried to someone younger than you, and you're caught in an exhausting cycle of guilt, obligation, and resentment. Is it time to break free from this emotional tornado? Recommendation of the Week: Mixbook You're a teenage tech prodigy who landed a dream gig with a Forbes 30-Under-30 founder and a popular YouTuber. But four months after delivering stellar work, they've gone radio silent. The prototype's gathering dust, meetings keep getting canceled, and your professional relationships are hanging in the balance. How do you light a fire under success? Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at [email protected]! Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger. Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1107 And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is Feedback Friday?
Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with Feedback Friday producer, the minute hand to my hour hand on this analog clock of life conundra, keeping us precise while I get us generally in the right ballpark, except during daylight savings time in certain U.S. states, only because not all of us observe it for some as yet understood reason, Gabriel Mizrahi.
That was ornate, my friend. Yeah. I owed you one after last week's sign-offs. Ornate is a good word. Over-engineered. Over-engineered. Yes.
Yes. And apparently it's a Swiss clock because that was way too complicated.
I thought you were going to say cuckoo. I was going to be down with that either way. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker.
During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from money laundering experts and undercover agents to astronauts and Emmy-nominated comedians. This week, we had Amanda Ripley on who survives disasters and why.
It's actually pretty damn fascinating how there's certain personality types, certain little habits that people have that allow them to survive better, and of course, the people around them to survive better in catastrophes, in disasters. Finally, we had Skeptical Sunday last Sunday on DNA.
On Fridays, though, we share stories, take listener letters, offer advice, play obnoxious soundbites, and come up with increasingly elaborate and verbose metaphors for me and Gabe's partnership. Whatever you want to call this. That just sounds weird to me. Collaboration, perhaps? Collaboration works. Yeah, that's a little less ambiguous.
As always, we've got some fun ones and some doozies, and I can't wait to dive in. Gabe, what is the first thing out of the mailbag?
Dear Jordan and Gabe, I'm a soon-to-graduate senior PhD student in a STEM field in the US, and recently my lab recruited a new graduate student. Imagine an Indian baby-faced Dwight Schrute, always sharply dressed and enveloped in a very thick cloud of cologne.
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Chapter 2: How to handle a colleague with concerning views?
And they're like, yeah, but he's also like, he was like the biggest loser in our school. He has no friends. He was always bullied. His parents are screwed up. His childhood was screwed up. He doesn't have a dad. And it was like, now it all makes sense. And you just...
pitied the guy even though he had these really disgusting views and it was all just like edgy bro to make up for the fact that his life was a total mess. So it's fascinating. I'm resisting the urge to engage too deeply with this guy's actual beliefs because they're so reckless and un-nuanced. And frankly, tangential to the real question here, which is how do you deal with problematic people?
But I find it fascinating that one of his beliefs is that people of different ethnicities will never be able to successfully live together. Meanwhile, he's inviting this white dude over to his apartment all the time for snacks and tea. Okay.
Right. What did he say? True assimilation is a myth. Right.
Which is one of the popular positions of right leaning people. And honestly, even a lot of moderate people, especially over the last 10 to 15 years with this huge wave of immigration all over the world, this idea that there might be a fundamental incompatibility between certain cultures, at least between people who are interested in assimilating and people who are not.
And you see this a lot throughout history. Once you start to study history, you realize how nonsensical this is. It's like the Mexicans that come here will never assimilate. But then you talk to somebody or you read something from 100 years ago and it's like the Italians and the Irish, they'll never get along.
And now it's I challenge you to distinguish an Italian from an Irishman in the East Coast. It's impossible unless you know their name or they start talking about it. There's no difference. Why? Everybody assimilated for crying out loud. The whole thing that this guy's arguing is impossible. Anyway, I am not interested in further unpacking that idea here. I'm not trying to get into that debate.
What is interesting to me is this guy saying all this, and then he's turning around like, also gay people are conspiring to destroy society. Liberalism is destroying women's desire to have a family. Gay men only adopt male children because they want to abuse them, which is obviously incorrect. Whatever. The CIA is trying to turn people gay.
It's uncomfortable to talk about, but by holding these views... This guy might be the reason that true assimilation, at least for him, is in fact a myth. Quite. He's right because he himself is the problem. Right. He's the one holding these rigid, regressive, hateful views that prove his point.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of living next to chaotic neighbors?
Prep a container of leftover fish or tuna fish in water. Let it sit unrefrigerated, of course, for a few days until it really stinks. Then pour the water into the grill under their windshield wipers. You know, that little spot where everything. When they turn on the car, it'll blow into the car. It will never go away.
They'll probably be forced to dump the car finally and get a new one because they don't care that they're inconveniencing anybody else with the loud ass noise. But they're going to care when their car smells like the inside of that sushi restaurant's dumpster from that other question.
And man, that is just a chef's kiss of sabotage, but that is so mean that I cannot in good conscience recommend you do this. So those are some options, dark and regular, like the different kinds of coffee at Starbucks, and I hope they help. And as fun as the dark Jordan, dark Reddit ideas are, I really, again, cannot advise you to pursue those.
Certainly not before trying all of the reasonable legal ways. You really got to try to resolve this diplomatically and legally before you resort to anything else. But it's nice to know you have options and it's nice to fantasize about pulling those off.
But on that note, I do want to talk about the other big thing she hasn't tried, apparently, which is just going over there and talking to them. She said that she knows in her bones she can't have a civil conversation with them. But the reason she doesn't think she can have a civil conversation is that What did she say? She vibrates with anger every time she hears them or talks about this.
She said they've had years to do the right thing, so I don't really care to chat with them. That's what she said.
But I don't know. I just got to point out that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't have a civil conversation. I understand that these people are probably mentally ill. They're Neanderthals. But it's actually our friend here's anger that's preventing her from at least trying to go over there and ask them politely to keep it down and clean up their trash.
So it sounds to me like her feelings about them are very intense, very chaotic, and she's not sure she can regulate herself enough to handle this conversation directly.
Yeah, it's a good point. She should at least try to resolve things that way before going through all this work. I know she's already said that she knows that these people are and she can't deal with them and that's probably the case.
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