Dennis Prager and Julie Hartman discuss why outward traits like musical taste or tattoos don't reveal character. Prager's friend Joseph feels nothing for classical music despite Prager's passion for it, and Prager has shifted from dismissing all tattoos to accepting most as neutral, judging only extreme placements like neck or face.
One of the things people have to understand is how unique every human being is. The big, the big macro— I always look for a big macro lesson. The big— I'll give you a serious, interesting, serious example. Okay, so I've loved classical music since high school. I mean love, I'm talking about if there's such a thing as love. I love classical music. It frequently tears me up. I love it. And I remember my, my dear, dear friend Joseph, since high school to this day. It was extremely bright man. I co-authored two books with him. My first two books are co-authored with him. And when I would put on classical music, when he would visit my apartment in Manhattan— we both lived in New York at the time— and, well, he still lives in New York, but he came out to LA for years. And I would play classical music and I would look at him and I'd realize he wasn't hearing a thing. It registered zero on his 1 to 100 passion scale. It had no effect. So I had to, I had to draw one of two conclusions. Either he's not as deep as I think he is, because if he's really deep, he would at least respond, or it has nothing to do with it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's its own world, any more than everyone who does respond to classical music is deep, which is not true either. So that was— see, by the way, this is just an insight into my own life. From the— my instinct has always been draw a conclusion from what just happened. And so watching Joseph not have any reaction as I am sitting there almost shaking from passion made me realize, well, this is not an indicator of person— of a person's depth. And then I realized, and of course a lot of, a lot of quite superficial people love classical music. By the way, it's depressing to me. I, I wish there was a one-to-one Correlation. You're deep. You are really deep, and you know I know that. It's why we do a podcast together. But, you know, classical music's not a passion of yours. And now it might be, I don't know, maybe I could develop it in you, but I don't even care. It doesn't— it's not on my agenda vis-à-vis you. But that's a great example. Whereas, you know, it was very— you know what depressed me? I mean, boy, did Talk about serious, here's a super serious— you know, that leading Nazis loved classical music. And I thought, oh, it was like, you know, when you're a kid you have idealistic visions of life and then one after another sort of shatter with reality.
Yes.
I really believed for some period that Schubert and Mozart and Bach and Beethoven ultimately made you a better person. And then I realized it doesn't really work that way. It's like tattoos. Wow. It's sort of like tattoos.
That's a great example.
It is because I've always associated it with, I don't know, loser may be too strong a term, but you know, impulsive perhaps. Well, that's, that's a sweet way. Somewhere between loser and impulsive. And then over time— well, not just because of Aaron. I've always—
I'm objective.
Yes, I'm, I'm not a fan of tattoos, but I no longer associate it with any other trait in the person. I do if it's on the neck or face.
I do.
Yes, but, but, but otherwise— and, and I'll tell you, one of the— forgetting my son, who was remarkably wonderful, as you know, and I don't say this because he's my son, It's true, and everybody knows that I don't look big on that. But my point is about tattoos, not about him specifically as my son. But forgetting him, the number of people who walk over to me for a selfie at airports who have tattoos and who, you know, I love your work, we have, you know, I watch your, you know, I watched you and Jordan Peterson on Exodus, or I watch your fireside chat and, you know, we got to save this country. I, looking at a person with some obvious exceptions like neck tattoos or face tattoos or, or, uh, or their, you know, gangbanger garb, I now assume nothing. And so all of this comes from your idiosyncratic behavior with pistachio nuts, but it, it really is worth One of the nice things to do in life is ask yourself, what can I learn from what I just observed?
Yes.
And, and so that is an example.
It makes life so interesting too.
Oh yes. And don't you want to— don't you want to understand it?
Totally. Oh gosh. Okay, so you know what's so funny about Dennis and Julie? We never rehearse. We never even talk about what we're going to bring up on the air. At most, what we'll say is what happened today. You said I don't have an idea. And I said, okay, well, I do. Or, you know, the opposite, you'll go, I have something I want to bring up. But what's so funny is, this could not have been a more perfect segue into what I wanted to talk about. How interesting, where I feel like I am in a just thrilling part of my life right now.
I'm happy to hear that.
And it's really big. And of course, it's and in large part because I love this show, I love my show. There are parts of it that are really challenging, being a single, trying to make it in media woman in Los Angeles with not that many friends. A lot of my friends are in New York. It's not easy all the time. And I talk about that with you a lot. But the word is thrilling. I feel like my life is thrilling. And it's not even so much because of my job. It's because of all of the interests and hobbies that I've accumulated outside of my job, but of course are also related to this job because I'm lucky enough to talk them through with you, to talk about them on the show. But I just feel like what you just said about wanting to understand life, it is so thrilling to, to go out and understand and talk to people. Talking with your son the other day about addiction was, was eye-opening. I was on a plane recently flying back from Tahoe and there was someone next to me with a tattoo. This is why I said you could not have teed it up better. And they were talking to me all about why they got their tattoos and I was developing these kinds of theories. And I just want to scream out to people like, life has endless opportunities for it to be interesting if you just open your eyes and see it. And I used to think life was boring. I used to think that the kind of range of things that you could explore were narrow, or I thought, oh, I, you know, I would never be the type of person who would listen to classical music, or I'd never, I'm just not interested in that. And I hope I'm making sense, but I've kind of pushed myself to become interested in these things or to try them out. And now my life is so much more thrilling and vast for it.
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