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00:06:15.000Evolutionary psychology to understand our consumatory nature.
00:06:18.000What are the biological forces that compel us to be the consumers that we are?
00:06:22.000But I define consumption very broadly.
00:06:24.000It's not just consuming Coca-Cola, but we consume friendships, we consume religion, we consume marriages.
00:06:30.000So it's a consumption with a capital C. That's fascinating to me because, you know, we have these general definitions that we use in culture.
00:07:08.000You study these cultural products because they say something really about the evolution of the human mind.
00:07:13.000Do you study songs that are annoying as well?
00:07:16.000Because I've always wondered why some songs are super appealing to some, but then just infuriating to other people.
00:07:22.000Yeah, so that would probably be more a musicologist who would study the musical structure of songs to know what makes them appealing or not.
00:07:29.000I'm specifically looking at the lyrics.
00:07:32.000So, for example, if you look at hip-hop videos, they're a wonderful Darwinian laboratory because all the political correctness is cut out.
00:07:40.000And basically your real Darwinian being shines through, right?
00:07:43.000So men are going to signal, hey, I've got the Maserati, I've got the Porsche, get with me.
00:07:49.000Women are going to signal, you know, beauty markers.
00:07:51.000It's only women, for example, who denigrate men if they have low social status, right?
00:07:55.000It's never going to be a guy saying, hey, Linda, you...
00:07:58.000You don't work hard enough, so you're not ambitious enough.
00:09:13.000So your thing would be more along the lines of studying why people find it appealing, like the rap type song, why they find it appealing like the Taylor Swift song.
00:09:26.000So for example, if you take an ancient Greek poem, right?
00:09:32.000We still study it at university today, 3,000 years later, precisely because that poem is going to speak to certain Sibling rivalry, status competition, parental conflicts with their offspring, paternal uncertainty.
00:09:50.000All of these factors is what makes literature interesting.
00:10:36.000I am absolutely fascinated by what was going on thousands and thousands of years ago and, like, what was the mindset and communication with those people.
00:10:45.000And you can kind of pull a little bit of it out of their writing.
00:10:48.000But, man, if I could go back in time to some – I mean, it would have to be a culture, obviously, that speaks English where I could understand what they're saying.
00:10:56.000I think that would be incredibly fascinating to go back three or four thousand years ago and communicate with people and just try to figure out how they see the world.
00:11:04.000You know, a lot of people are very stuck on identifying cultural differences, right?
00:11:08.000So the French eat this type of food, the Malaysians do this type of dance.
00:11:12.000But what they miss is that underneath all of these important cross-cultural differences is this bedrock of human universals that make us a lot more similar than different from one another.
00:11:22.000And especially in the social sciences where people are really focused on just identifying differences, differences, differences.
00:11:30.000But of course, there are also things that are so common.
00:11:34.000There are certain beauty markers that if I went to the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon, they're going to find exactly the same things attractive in the beautiful girls in rap videos as you and I would.
00:11:46.000And that's because those beauty markers are evolutionary markers.
00:13:20.000So anyways, I gave a talk there on their...
00:13:22.000This thing called the Freedom Project, which tries to promote sort of iconoclastic ideas that kind of break the shackles of political correctness.
00:13:31.000And it was just amazing the kind of stuff that was happening there.
00:13:36.000I mean, I'll just give you one or two examples.
00:13:39.000Apparently, it was a form of oppression for a professor to assume that when he meets students, he right away categorizes them as either being male or female.
00:13:51.000So, for example, if I see you in my class and I say, hey, sir, blah, blah, blah, well, that would be a form of oppression because I'm assuming based on your Outer markers that you are male.
00:14:03.000Rather, what I should do is sort of do a quick polling of each person in terms of how they'd like to be addressed.
00:14:11.000So you may be biologically male, but you are transgender.
00:14:46.000And so now you have at universities a discussion as to whether you should have not male and female bathrooms, but you should have gender-neutral bathrooms, and so on and so forth.
00:14:57.000And so in academia and the world that I reside in, it's there.
00:15:30.000Like a parasite that enters you, right?
00:15:32.000So in the same way that viruses can enter your body, viruses of the mind can also take over your...
00:15:42.000I mean, religion is an example of a memoplex, a form of...
00:15:46.000I mean, some people would be upset by what I'm saying, but a form of parasite that kind of rewires your thinking.
00:15:51.000And so political correctness is an astonishing form of parasitic thinking, where everything is viewed through the lens of, I should not offend anyone.
00:16:02.000And so common sense and just reason goes out the window in the pursuit of non-offense.
00:16:17.000They offend anyone who does not agree with their notion that you should not offend.
00:16:21.000They will be violent and angry and fucking incredibly insulting to people who do not agree with their terms of what is offensive and what's not offensive.
00:16:32.000I have been Some of the meanest, nastiest things have been said to me by people who claim to be in this sort of ultra-sensitive, super open-minded category, which is quite fascinating to me.
00:16:51.000I think it's Thomas Sowell, an economist, who basically was criticizing so-called diversity.
00:16:58.000So at American universities or in Western universities, everybody talks about diversity, but the only form of diversity that's not allowed is intellectual and political diversity, right?
00:17:08.000So we want diversity in terms of skin color, we want diversity in terms of sexual orientation, we want diversity in terms of genders, right?
00:17:15.000So all forms of diversity are welcome, but don't you dare step out of line with the accepted politically correct positions.
00:17:22.000Now that's diversity that we don't want.
00:17:54.000The religious folks will hate my work because if Darwinian theory is correct, it is, then where is God in all this?
00:18:01.000So there's this long queue of people Who will come out of the woodworks to criticize you, not for any valid scientific reasons, but because it shakes their ideological beliefs.
00:18:10.000It's fascinating to me the parallels between religious nutters and politically correct nutters, because it's very similar in a lot of ways.
00:18:17.000Their ideology is just so cemented in their consciousness.
00:18:36.000If there are not differences, any differences in the sexes, what do they use, these radical feminists, what do they use to define the reason why humans have such varying behavior between the male and female genders?
00:18:52.000Everything short of genitalia is a social construction, right?
00:18:56.000So even, for example, the fact that Bubba grew up to be a block center for the University of Oklahoma and hence he could bunch print 500 pounds.
00:19:08.000That's not due to, for example, any physiological reasons that he is so strong.
00:19:12.000It's because what happened is his parents aggressively nurtured rough tumble play, whereas for girls, they told them, listen, Linda, you should not be playing so rough.
00:19:24.000And that then either gives the green light or the red light to express your physicality.
00:20:33.000Equality under the law as being indistinguishable beings, right?
00:20:37.000We could be different beings, yet we should be equal under the law.
00:20:40.000But they argue that if you admit to the fact that we are different, then that makes it easier for the status quo sexist patriarchy to maintain its privileged position.
00:20:51.000And so they create this edifice of the past 50 to 100 years of social science research that is completely laughable, but that they hang on to like religious belief.
00:21:03.000There was a woman that has a video online on YouTube where she claims that there is no difference in the physical strength of men and women, and it's just that men have been encouraged to engage in weightlifting and all these different things, and if women did the same thing, they'd be just as strong.
00:21:24.000Well, it's also insane because women who are athletes, women who are elite, world-class athletes, if they compare their hand strength to men who don't even exercise, men are stronger.
00:21:36.000Just the ability to grab things and grip things.
00:22:08.000And not only that, the fact that it takes 30 years, like your 30 years of being a man with full testosterone, and then it takes like 10 years before your bone density even starts decreasing.
00:22:18.000But they wanted to make it so it's completely indistinguishable.
00:22:22.000And they also have support from transgender surgeons, which is quite fascinating and completely biased.
00:22:29.000These transgender surgeons who want to, or reassignment doctors, and they want to pretend that they're exact equals physiologically.
00:22:39.000So in my first book, I talk about John Money, who was a very famous psychologist at Johns Hopkins, really around maybe the 50s to 70s.
00:22:49.000He was a big gender theorist who basically argued that everything is due to socialization so that when surgeons would go see him, Because they had to do gender reassignment, either, for example, let's say at a circumcision, in the rare case where you botch the circumcision,
00:23:05.000and now you have a problem in terms of having a functioning penis, or if you have, for example, a condition micro-penis, where you're unlikely to be a functioning male when you grow up, well, he would say, don't worry about it.
00:23:16.000Just have the surgery, put a dress on the kid, and raise them as a girl, and there'd be absolutely no problem.
00:23:23.000And, of course, the reality is that that's not how biological sex is determined.
00:23:28.000And the most famous case is David Reimer, who was one of his patients, who, after having gone through the treatment, committed suicide.
00:23:38.000The reality of What you said, one of the more fascinating aspects of it is the difference between us all being equal as human beings and being the same.
00:23:53.000But we all should be equal as far as our rights.
00:23:56.000You know, as far as, like, how we're treated by each other and the law and what a person can get away with, you know, what keeps our society civil and kind.
00:24:06.000Yeah, we should all have equality, including children and old people and everyone.
00:24:10.000Everyone should have equality in that aspect.
00:24:12.000That's what makes a civilized, caring society.
00:24:16.000The idea that there's no differences as far as the other...
00:24:20.000I mean, that we are equal as far as, like, physical strength or as equal as far as, like, our wants and desires and needs, that's denying hundreds of years of literature of the struggle, the struggle in all cultures between the male trying to understand the female,
00:24:37.000the female trying to understand the male.
00:25:04.000You can't just be what you want to be and do what you want to do because that's going to drive her fucking crazy because you want to have sex with 100 women, you want to drive 50,000 miles an hour, you want to...
00:25:20.000By the way, speaking of sexual variety, which is kind of a central issue in evolutionary psychology, you should see some of the hate mail I get when I state something as banal as, you know, men would have evolved a greater penchant for sexual variety for terribly trivial reasons to explain,
00:25:48.000Men, in one ejaculation, have 250 spermatozoa.
00:25:53.000So our gametes are very cheap and abundant.
00:25:57.000And then, of course, you add the cost of gestation, right?
00:26:02.000The likelihood of having mortality when you're giving birth.
00:26:05.000So for all these reasons, women have much greater minimal parental obligations.
00:26:10.000Therefore, evolutionary theory would predict that they would be much more judicious when they're making a mate choice.
00:26:15.000Because if they make a poor mate choice, it looms much larger for them.
00:26:19.000That, on the other hand, for men, the costs of making a poor maid choice are not as great, but the benefits of having multiple mating opportunities are quite beneficial.
00:26:28.000And therefore, that's why, on average, you expect men to have a much greater penchant for sexual variety.
00:26:34.000Now, that's been documented in 17 trillion different ways, and yet you still have people that will send you hate mail saying, my God, are you a sexist pig?
00:26:43.000How could you promulgate this garbage?
00:26:45.000Well, I think when you're looking at human beings and you're talking about these variables, you're looking at it as objectively and scientifically as possible.
00:26:55.000When people want that concrete world that we've discussed, this politically correct, they have this resistance To looking at it in any way other than the way that they have.
00:27:15.000And that's actually one of the criticisms that you often get about evolution psychology.
00:27:18.000People think that you are trying to justify behaviors.
00:27:21.000For example, if you explain why people are likely to cheat on their monogamous unions, then they say, oh, well, you're offering father why people should do it.
00:27:31.000And of course, my rebuttal is, I'm certainly doing no such thing similar to how an oncologist studies cancer.
00:27:55.000But again, the ideologues will say, no, but if this forbidden knowledge gets out, it makes it easier for people to justify this behavior or that behavior.
00:28:05.000It's absolutely fascinating to me how human beings react and act, and so this subject is quite near and dear to my heart.
00:28:34.000But I love the fact that they exist because I'm absolutely fascinated by their folly.
00:28:38.000I'm absolutely fascinated by this idea that they have in their head that's so concrete that they believe that soldiers are dying because men are being allowed to marry other men.
00:28:49.000It's unbelievably weird, but compelling to me.
00:28:53.000And in an equal way, the idea that you saying that there is some sort of an invested commitment that a woman has that a man does not have, objectively, just looking at us as a biological reproducing species, that you would experience hate because of that.
00:29:10.000As a scientist, as a person just analyzing data, I'm amazed and I'm fascinated and I'm just drawn into it.
00:29:33.000I believe in science and truth and reason.
00:29:35.000And so we escaped Lebanon actually during the civil war.
00:29:40.000My parents in 1980 were kidnapped by Fatah, the very peaceful of Fatah because, you know, it's all peaceful.
00:29:46.000And then after that, we've never gone back to Lebanon.
00:29:50.000And so I, from a very young age, I think I already had sort of the innate penchant to question religious belief, which certainly created friction within my family, because you should just believe and shut up.
00:30:03.000But then when I saw the hatred that religion engenders firsthand, I mean, facing execution as we're trying to escape Lebanon...
00:30:12.000And then coming to the West, I think I became that much more forceful in my convictions to try to combat religious dogma.
00:30:22.000And of course, some of the biggest hate mail that you get is when you do that.
00:30:26.000I've even had real professional situations where I've lost professionally because of my position.
00:30:33.000Actually, here in California, I've had several schools who otherwise were very, very interested in making me very, very lucrative offers who, after maybe doing a bit of due diligence on me and seeing that I'd written stuff that was critical of religion, suddenly I became persona non grata.
00:31:31.000There's another school three years ago who was going to make me a huge, huge offer in Orange County that didn't work out.
00:31:38.000Now, to the person who wanted me to appear in front of the God Squad, this was several years ago when I was at UC Irvine, I told him, you do realize that I am an atheist Lebanese Jew evolutionist, so it's going to be a while before I accept Jesus in my heart.
00:31:56.000And his answer was, well, no, no, but don't worry, we'll coach you as to what to say.
00:32:53.000There's the same ultra-progressives that, you know, would give you a million different ways to address someone based on whatever gender they identify with or, you know, whatever the fuck else weird, ultra-supersensitive thing.
00:33:06.000I find that completely fascinating, this Islamophobia thing.
00:33:09.000There's several websites that I frequent just to freak myself out.
00:33:14.000And the super sensitive ones on a regular basis will go over this Islamophobia.
00:33:20.000Well, because it's actually a very astute way to...
00:33:44.000You may or may not know, it started with the Muslim Brotherhood, a very smart strategy, where they knew that the West is very open to being tolerant and so on, and so they kind of piggybacked on that.
00:33:55.000And so in academia, you just never criticize that one idea.
00:33:58.000Now that's very dangerous, because in a sane world, All beliefs should be open to criticism.
00:34:37.000Obviously, I don't remember much of this, but I was very religious.
00:34:41.000And it was because my parents were divorcing...
00:34:44.000And there was a lot of violence in the household and I had this idea in my head that like somehow or another God was the right way and everybody else was wrong.
00:34:53.000Going to Catholic school cured me of that entirely.
00:34:56.000The nun that I had, Sister Mary Josephine, I don't remember much about being six years old, but I remember that bitch.
00:36:43.000But I don't understand how you can be a rational, intelligent, objective person who looks at some shit that people wrote thousands of years ago and say, no, this is- This is immobile.
00:37:05.000So I do, in one of my latest books, I have a chapter which I think got me in trouble with one of the Southern California schools that I was getting an offer from because I'd given them a signed copy of the book.
00:37:16.000And then they probably got to that chapter.
00:37:19.000That chapter is called Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.
00:37:21.000And so what I do in that chapter is I go through different hope peddlers, of which religion is the greatest, but others would be medical quackery, self-help gurus, and so on.
00:37:32.000So different agents that peddle hope, and I argue, again, from an evolutionary perspective, because they're very successful because they cater to these very basal Darwinian insecurities.
00:37:43.000None greater than the very obvious one of existential angst, right?
00:37:48.000We're the only animal that we're aware of that actually is aware that we are on a death sentence, right?
00:37:52.000I mean, I know that I've got another, luckily, maybe 40 years, right?
00:37:56.000Well, if I have high cholesterol, I go to my physician, he gives me Lipitor, boom, LDL goes down, everybody's happy.
00:38:02.000But what pill do I take to solve this really looming problem that's at the end of the road called my death?
00:38:08.000Well, different religions will give you different dances, but they all certainly promise you some form of eternity.
00:38:15.000It could be in the form of reincarnation.
00:38:47.000It's also, there's something about human beings where we realize somewhere along the line that there's no one alive that has any more answers about what lies beyond the great beyond, you know, after death,
00:39:17.000But I tell you, there are two ways of seeking to reach immortality.
00:39:22.000One, of course, is, it might seem a bit crass, but through just the genetic propagation, your children are, in a sense, your form of immortality.
00:39:45.000There's no immortality unless there's some sort of a fractal nature to the universe where life and death is this completely ongoing cycle where the deeper you go, it starts again.
00:40:12.000I remember very succinctly that I would like look at like Buck Rogers and all these different space.
00:40:19.000I'm like, oh, they're going to go over to this town and they're going to come back and this is our neighborhood.
00:40:24.000They're going to go to that neighborhood and come back.
00:40:26.000And then as I got older and I started studying astronomy and I started studying the, and as I got older, also the knowledge that they had about the amount of stars changed.
00:40:38.000And they started talking about how there's more stars in our galaxy than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
00:40:47.000And then I remember just thinking, well, this is a motherfucker of a neighborhood.
00:40:50.000This is starting to get really strange.
00:40:54.000As you get older still, you realize that there's no way they know how big it all is.
00:41:00.000They have a general sense of 14 plus billion light years.
00:41:03.000But then there's the fractal nature of black holes, the possibility that inside every galaxy is a black hole that contains an entirely new universe.
00:41:12.000And this is something that's being thrown about, not by freaks, but by real serious legitimate scientists.
00:41:28.000If a supernova can exist, you know, why is it so crazy that a person lives for eternity and just continues to reincarnate?
00:41:35.000Well, and in light of all that vastness that you said, isn't it incredible that all the monotheistic Abrahamic religions would argue that on some small speck of sand, in some Bronze Age point, God spoke to some prophet and told him, you really better not eat.
00:41:53.000So in this great universe, this cosmos, it's really important that you don't wear leather shoes at Yom Kippur or whatever the rule is.
00:42:02.000It's just astonishing to me that people actually buy this stuff.
00:42:06.000Well, I think that the reason for the pig stuff, and I've talked about this recently with my friend Ari, who was raised very religious in Judaism.
00:42:17.000And then as he got older, just decided to abandon it all.
00:44:30.000What makes us human is precisely that we're able to transcend these biological imperatives.
00:44:35.000And so the field of anthropology, not bio-anthropology, which is a subset of anthropology that recognizes biology, but for example cultural anthropology is all about going to all of these exotic cultures and demonstrating how each culture is unique and different and hence there are no such thing as human universals.
00:44:52.000Social psychology is pretty much operated without any understanding of biology.
00:44:56.000So what I did in my work I came along and I founded this field, which I coined evolutionary consumption, where I apply evolutionary theory and biology to study consumer behavior.
00:45:06.000But more generally, my real goal is to what I call, maybe it's a grand goal, to Darwinize the business school.
00:45:12.000The idea is that you can't study anything.
00:45:14.000You can't study investment psychology or personnel psychology or organizational behavior or consumer behavior.
00:45:21.000Without recognizing that all of these players are biological beings, right?
00:45:25.000The decision that you make if your blood sugar is low and you're hungry is very different than the decision you make if you're satiated, right?
00:45:32.000I mean, that's a trivial example, but a very obvious one.
00:45:34.000So the idea that economists have spent, you know, 100 years developing all these fanciful mathematical models without ever recognizing that there are these biological forces that compel us to be the...
00:45:49.000So the greatest blowback has been from social scientists who typically have been very reticent to accept what this biology boy is saying about consumer behavior and so on.
00:46:36.000Now, the reason why that quote captures, I mean, if I ever did an autobiography of my scientific career, that quote is basically my book, because I've seen people go through these four stages in their responses to my work.
00:46:49.000At first, I couldn't get an invitation to get 20 minutes at a conference to speak, because what does biology have to do with anything?
00:46:57.000And now, of course, science is an autocorrective process.
00:47:00.000The evidence is coming in my way, and I don't mean to gloat about it.
00:47:48.000And so in his quote, he basically says, you know, if God exists, he must have a particular penchant for beetles for having spent so much effort in coming up with all of these different species variations.
00:48:27.000On sort of the intrinsic level, I'm a dogged pursuer of the truth and so I almost get offended by these positions.
00:48:34.000And so in that sense, it's frustrating.
00:48:36.000But there's also an extrinsic, a real sort of tangible way that it's frustrating.
00:48:40.000A lot of these gatekeepers are the ones who decide whether I get a position in Southern California or not.
00:48:46.000And so if I play within the paradigm, if I do the research that is expected of me, that doesn't sort of bust any existing theories, then I'm good.
00:48:57.000But if I'm this guy from the outside who's trying to biologize the field, well, who does this guy think he is?
00:49:02.000So in that sense, I think it's also frustrating.
00:49:04.000I mean, my wife always tells me, well, don't worry.
00:49:56.000So that means basically when you send your paper to a scientific journal, usually the editor will look at your paper and say, okay, well, here are three reviewers that I think would be appropriate for this paper.
00:50:08.000And then he sends it off, and then the process starts, and it goes back and forth for probably several years.
00:50:14.000When he desk rejects this, he's basically saying that this paper is not worthy of even going out for review.
00:50:20.000And so, you know, I would send all of these papers to these top journals, and the editor would write back to me, sorry, I'm not even sending it through the review process.
00:50:29.000Do you remember what one of the original ones was, was the subject of?
00:50:34.000Well, probably the first one was one where I was introducing the theoretical framework of how to apply evolutionary psychology in understanding marketing.
00:50:44.000And usually the argument that I would receive, which is breathtakingly inane in its stupidity, is, well, evolutionary theory is just a bunch of just-so storytelling, right?
00:50:58.000You just come up with these fanciful post-hoc stories, since obviously you're not conducting...
00:51:05.000An experiment in a lab to demonstrate evolution.
00:51:08.000And of course, that is so laughable because if that were true, how is it that astrophysicists study the origin of the universe that's 14 billion years ago, right?
00:51:17.000They certainly don't conduct an experiment in the lab.
00:51:23.000But again, if you're very paradigmatically bound to manipulating something in the lab, Then somehow evolutionary theory seems epistemologically, in terms of the philosophy of science, it seems as though you're just waving your hand and telling stories,
00:51:54.000Yet people somehow can't get around to understanding how you could explain something that happened hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago.
00:52:03.000And so the original rejections were always, oh, but come on, we don't take things at faith here.
00:52:20.000No, because I, and that's a great question, because I think I was fortunate enough to have the personality for this endeavor.
00:52:29.000In other words, it's not just that you had to have the brains to do what I was doing.
00:52:33.000If I would suck my thumb, go into a fetal position and start crying every time somebody rejected me, rejected my work, then it wouldn't.
00:52:41.000But because I was a fighter, because I was a high testosterone guy, then that only compelled me to come back and say, I'm going to prove these guys wrong.
00:52:49.000But it delayed the process because I was kept out of many of the leading consumer behavior and marketing journals.
00:52:58.000I published books that became bestsellers.
00:53:00.000I published in medicine and economics and psychology.
00:53:03.000And only recently have I tried to come back to the folks that I'm most trying to convince, and those are the consumer psychologists.
00:53:10.000Now, luckily, I'm their friend, but for years I was really sort of at the periphery.
00:53:15.000It's fascinating as well that the attitudes about these subjects have evolved and changed within science and within modern academia.
00:53:24.000It's really interesting to see this sort of evolution of these ideas and this acceptance of ideas that didn't exist before, but along with The new craziness.
00:53:36.000The new fat acceptance and all this other nonsense.
00:53:40.000These new politically correct terms and this parasitic thinking that you so described so well.
00:53:47.000This is the new threat to unbiased objective thinking.
00:54:17.000As a matter of fact, in my Wellesley talk that I mentioned earlier, I put up a list of suggested topics that these trigger warning folks were saying require trigger warnings.
00:54:32.000The discussion of pregnancy, of sex, of disease, of war, of criminality, of mating, all of these things could potentially cause some distress to somebody And should therefore come with a trigger warning.
00:54:48.000Now, for somebody who escaped Lebanon under immediate threat of execution, I look at that and I say, this is a decadent society in that if that's the things that worry people, they should really go spend a day in the neighborhoods where I grew up,
00:55:07.000and then maybe they'd have a different perspective as to what they should be picketing against.
00:55:13.000My thought is that people are just so used to this soft life of everything being really easy to achieve that they have never developed this understanding of, first of all, how fortunate we are to be living in this time and age,
00:55:32.000to experience this easy life that we live in, but that we're really lucky.
00:55:39.000To focus on a bunch of nonsense and to get carried away thinking about all these ultra-supersensitive notions and to dwell on them as if in some way you're going to make the world a better place by doing that.
00:55:59.000It's a way to demonstrate that I care.
00:56:02.000But in doing it with very little cost to me, it takes a lot more guts to stand up against Islam than to stand up against some hick, evolution-denying senator who's Republican.
00:56:14.000So, for example, if I look at my Facebook friends, if I put up a post that is critical of the senator who is a redneck Republican...
00:56:25.000I'll get from my academic colleagues 80 likes.
00:56:43.000And so, for example, the Western feminists are very, very quick to chastise David Letterman if he makes a sexist joke or whatever it was to his intern.
00:56:55.000But to speak against genital mutilation in the Islamic world or other parts of the world or all kinds of other injustices that women face, well, we should be quiet about that.
00:57:11.000Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a woman who was born into Islam, who escaped an arranged marriage, moved to Netherlands, became a Dutch parliamentarian, and then was part of a documentary that was offensive to some Muslims,
00:57:28.000and then she had to have protection for the rest of her life, now has moved to the United States.
00:57:33.000And has spent pretty much her entire career fighting for the rights of women, not just Muslim women, women in general, but of course many Muslim women in those areas are mistreated.
00:57:43.000So Brandeis University decides to bestow her, this is very recently, a couple of months ago, bestow her a, I think, maybe honorary doctorate or speech convocation, to speak at the convocation.
00:58:15.000So, you know, I mean, we're pretty much lost as a society if we can't identify who the heroes are and who is on the right side of each issue.
00:58:25.000Not just that, but the educators are the ones that are having this issue.
00:58:28.000The educators are the ones that are having a hard time recognizing who's on the right side of things.
00:58:33.000I think there's one very important thing that you brought up, and that's the social aspect, the social gratification, the social reward aspect of supporting things that we all agree upon, like that these Hick senators are bad,
00:58:50.000and then the scariness of Islam, the scariness of criticizing the Muslim world, and then this concept of Islamophobia.
00:59:44.000So when I get this thing where people start identifying with one gender and one gender specifically, And there's another thing that men are doing where they're not only proclaiming themselves as a male feminist, but they're also saying that if they are unjustly accused of something,
01:00:04.000that they would happily be unjustly accused of something if it could somehow or another prevent women from being persecuted.
01:00:56.000At my university, right now in Montreal, at one point I sat, precisely because people had a sense of some of the positions I held, they asked me to come in and sit on a Religious Accommodation Committee.
01:01:09.000We're a secular university in a secular society, officially, as the official law.
01:01:15.000So what does it mean to say that we're going to now enact A religious accommodation policy.
01:01:20.000I mean, that's like saying, I am a virgin, but I'm pregnant.
01:01:23.000I mean, the term can't make sense, right?
01:01:26.000So my position was, I am equally non-pliant to anybody's religious beliefs.
01:01:33.000If Jews come to my class and say, we want to do Yom Kippur, blah, blah, blah, well, I'm Jewish, and I'm still going to come to the lecture.
01:01:41.000But now, if Muslims come and say, we want to take Hajj for three weeks at Mecca, so we won't be showing up to your class for three weeks, Well, I'm equally unreceptive to that idea.
01:01:51.000Well, it seemed like most people were pretty happy with my general position as long as it didn't apply to this one particular group.
01:03:05.000And by the way, Brandeis University, as you may know, was founded by a liberal, well, by Brandeis, who was trying to kind of found an institution that That would be open to all, that would be pluralistic precisely because of some of the anti-Semitism that Jewish students would have faced at some of the sort of Northeastern schools.
01:03:25.000And so the school is founded on these principles and then at first opportunity you violate everything that you stand for.
01:03:31.000Is there any movement to try to change this?
01:03:33.000Is there any discussion to try to illuminate this sort of real issue with academia?
01:03:40.000Well, if I can be modest, I think it's guys like me who are really in the wilderness who try to come out of the woodworks and have the courage and the big...
01:03:52.000I have testicles to try to do that, but I think most people have herd instincts.
01:03:56.000But even if you say that, you have the testicles to do this?
01:04:58.000If somebody would tackle me, say, stop whining, get up, white bitch.
01:05:04.000Usually the way I fought that is I'd say, I'm not going to...
01:05:10.000Get by this guy next time around, and I'm going to score a goal.
01:05:13.000I didn't kind of curl into a fetal position and start crying.
01:05:16.000Well, today, they are, I mean, facetiously, they are commissars standing around the field making sure that nobody utters any of these slur words because then you could be taken to a hate speech code tribunal, right?
01:05:29.000I mean, in Canada, we have hate speech laws.
01:05:58.000Well, freedom of speech is the right to be an asshole, but in other terms, freedom of speech, on the other hand, in response to your being an asshole, is the right to ostracize you.
01:06:08.000It's the right to just get you out of social groups, and that's how you recognize assholes.
01:06:14.000Sanitize the world and remove half the language and put trigger warnings out for everything that everybody says, it's very difficult to get to the heart of what someone's trying to communicate.
01:06:23.000When we're making mouth noises, trying to express our thoughts, and we're limited in such an amazing way by so many different forms of expression.
01:06:33.000Here's a great example that's happening all over the West and certainly in Canada and the US. Try to give a lecture or invite somebody either that has a pro-Israel position or an anti-Islam position and see what happens.
01:07:11.000At Concordia University in Montreal, the prime minister of a democratically elected government Our only supposed true ally in the Middle East was unable to speak because there was great threat of danger.
01:07:37.000I forget which one but there was a speech by a guy who was considered to be a men's rights advocate with the insult as they call them MRAs and he had written a book and he was giving the speech And these feminists were protesting.
01:09:36.000I wrote an article on my Psychology Today blog maybe about two years ago where this wasn't my study.
01:09:41.000I was simply summarizing somebody else's work.
01:09:45.000What he had basically done, or I think there were several researchers, they had looked at the political leanings of professors at American universities, whether they're Democrat or Republican, and they actually then broke it down by departments.
01:10:01.000So, for example, what would be the Democrat versus Republican ratio in sociology versus in physics?
01:10:07.000What they found is that I think if I'm going on memory, I think that the ratio is about 5 to 1 Democrat to Republican.
01:10:16.000And in some departments, most notably, for example, in the humanities and sociology and so on, it was 44 to 1. Now, I didn't present this as this is good or this is bad, but I certainly was trying to make the point that on some issues,
01:11:52.000Well, in their defense, though, the points that are taken by the Republicans so often are, they're really, if you had to choose, like, one side that's paying attention to science and one side that's paying attention to religion,
01:12:08.000Well, listen, and I'm an evolutionist, so obviously when it's going to come on that issue, I'm going to be a lot more with the Democrats than all the, but, for example, my position, you may disagree, I hope you don't kick me out of here.
01:12:23.000I think that if you are caught having raped and killed 10 children and we've got the DNA of you in the 10 children, it's incontrovertible that you are guilty.
01:12:34.000I don't see it as a terrible moral issue that we could potentially discuss the possibility of executing you.
01:12:43.000As a matter of fact, I think that in some cases, the amount of rights that we give to otherwise homeless Horrifying monsters, that itself is barbaric.
01:12:50.000So on that dimension, I'm likely to be much more, quote, And I am as well.
01:12:57.000So nuanced thinking is a mark of somebody who kind of has a sense of what the world looks like.
01:13:03.000Yeah, and I think that that's also a mark of someone who doesn't have a dog in the fight, as you said before.
01:13:08.000I think when you look at the world, there's a lot of variables that must be taken into consideration.
01:13:14.000As soon as you deny those variables because you have a specific stance, it's a predetermined...
01:13:19.000Pattern of thinking that you've aligned yourself with I'm on the left and as a Democrat like I was having a conversation with someone the other day and they were talking about Upcoming elections and they said if we lose the house if we lose like he's a fucking comedian He's a comedian that I'm talking to and he's talking about the Democrats and he's on team we and I'm like wow I'm a hundred percent for the death penalty in term in like a Ted Bundy type character some monster and But my problem with it,
01:13:48.000my number one problem with it, is that I don't believe that the system is a good system.
01:14:33.000I don't know what the circumstances were, but whatever I know is if that is the only way you can handle that woman, you shouldn't be a police officer.
01:15:33.000I said, give me an example of why would somebody like me?
01:15:35.000He goes, let's suppose you're a recidivist, drink-and-drive kind of guy, and the cops are pissed off at you.
01:15:42.000They'll take you to the jail, they'll throw you with all the gangbangers, and they'll simply scream out, fresh fish out of water.
01:15:48.000That's exactly the term that he used, which basically is the code word for, have at him, boys, and we won't hear his screams.
01:15:58.000And I remember, this was in the late 80s, And subsequently, I actually met the son of this guy, coincidentally, and later found out that that was his father.
01:16:11.000But anyway, so that's an example of misconduct where, you know, if you piss off these cops, they could do all sorts of things to you that can have some profound consequences on your body.
01:16:21.000Yeah, I just want to state for the record, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement.
01:16:39.000And he said he would overhear these doctors, very specifically remember, overhearing these doctors bragging about talking this guy into a surgery department.
01:16:47.000And about how he's going to buy a car now.
01:16:50.000You know, like, that's a new whatever it was, you know, Porsche, whatever.
01:16:54.000For me, you know, he was bragging about talking to this guy into surgery.
01:17:04.000There's bad people in all walks of life, and I think that is my number one, my only, really, resistance to something like the death penalty.
01:17:12.000But when you look at the recidivism rates for child rapists, it's just through the roof.
01:17:18.000I don't know if you've seen the stat, and I can't cite who came up with it, but apparently when you catch a pedophile, he's on average committed 100 transgressions prior to you catching him for the first time.
01:17:32.000So why does this guy benefit from all of our legals?
01:17:38.000I mean, if you've done this stuff so many times, why do we have to be so humane?
01:17:45.000I would actually argue it's inhumane to be so humane to this guy.
01:17:48.000And I wrote an article on Psychology Today where I was talking about...
01:17:52.000I don't know if you remember the case with these two guys in Connecticut who did a home invasion.
01:17:58.000And they raped the girls and the mother and set the house on fire, beat the father, but he survived and so on.
01:18:05.000And so it was coming up to their death penalty.
01:18:08.000And so as a tribute to that case, I wrote an article on my Psychology Today blog, which I think I titled, Is the Death Penalty Barbaric?
01:18:16.000And I was arguing that for these kinds of guys, no, it's not.
01:18:19.000Well, you should have seen my progressive, enlightened, cafe-sipping academic colleagues Scoff at my barbarism, right?
01:18:28.000I mean, what kind of hick must I be to actually even hold those sentiments?
01:18:33.000If it comes between putting me in jail for the rest of my life in some cage where I have to be constantly in fear of men raping me and stabbing me with toothbrushes that they've sharpened in knives, I'll take death.
01:18:45.000If there's no possible, reasonable hope for parole, the idea of keeping someone in a jail to rot for the rest of their life is probably more suffering.
01:19:28.000There's a guy, I don't remember his name, a Harvard professor who had studied, you know, what makes people healthy for something like 60 years.
01:19:37.000And I think the bottom line, if I'm paraphrasing him, is that people need social relationships to be healthy.
01:19:44.000That's sort of the number one thing that It maintains your health, psychological and physiological.
01:19:52.000I mean, everyone that I know that has these horrible relationships with either boyfriends and girlfriends or with their parents or with their job, they seem to carry those on all the time.
01:20:04.000It becomes almost a part of the norm of relationships.
01:20:07.000But the people that I know that have Healthy relationships with their boyfriends and girlfriends or wives and husbands.
01:20:13.000Healthy relationships with their children.
01:20:15.000Healthy relationships with their friends.
01:21:50.000Well, there's this thing, speaking of guys who are in the business of doing heroic acts, you've heard of the fireman fantasy.
01:21:57.000I mean, the fact that women find guys, well, firemen, to be very attractive.
01:22:02.000And it actually turns out that there was a study that was done that actually shows this to be the case.
01:22:06.000And I discussed this in one of my articles on Psychology Today.
01:22:09.000If you have a guy approach women either wearing a fireman's suit or not, his chances of getting her phone number increases quite substantially if he is wearing a fireman.
01:22:50.000My most read article ever, over maybe three, four hundred thousand readers, It's one of his studies where I was simply, because we're going to talk about the blowback issue now and here again.
01:23:03.000It was a study where he looked at the likelihood of women being picked up as hitchhikers as a function of their breast size.
01:23:12.000So he actually had the same woman And they, you know, artificially manipulated her breast size, and on different days she would stand there, and of course it turned out that men were much more likely to pick up the woman if she had, the same woman,
01:23:28.000So I just summarized that study, put it up, and then I remember I'd gone on vacation, came back from vacation, found out that it had completely gone viral, but I had a million hate mail Not just from readers, but from fellow Psychology Today bloggers who were arguing that I was peddling pornography.
01:23:48.000Because I had a picture as the teaser image for that article.
01:23:51.000I had a photo of a woman sitting in a passenger seat with large breasts.
01:23:56.000Well, it seemed appropriate for the topic given that that's what the topic of the study was.
01:24:00.000But by putting that image, I was objectifying women.
01:24:04.000I was treating them as mere sex objects.
01:24:07.000And so even though I had nothing to do with the study and I was simply summarizing somebody else's work, I was a horrifying pornographic peddler.
01:24:15.000Isn't it funny that just a photograph of a woman with large breasts is considered pornographic?
01:25:13.000But the idea that a woman with big breasts sitting there and passed her seat of a car could somehow or another be pornographic is ridiculous.
01:26:37.000To gravitate towards guys that you would think that already would sort of not be these little wimpy guys?
01:26:42.000Or, I mean, how come it turns out that they're all sharing...
01:26:46.000Because we're certainly in the minority in academia, so how...
01:26:48.000Those are the only ones I'm interested in talking to, I guess.
01:26:51.000I mean, I'm actually quite fascinated in talking...
01:26:53.000I would love to talk to some ardent male feminist who shares these Islamophobic, hating ideas, like hating Islamophobia and hating male patriarchy.
01:28:07.000You know, it's funny you talk about these Hollywood types.
01:28:09.000I wrote an article, which one of those really popular ones on Psychology Today, where I was talking about the narcissism and grandiosity of celebrities.
01:28:22.000Madonna, because of her Kabbalah juice...
01:28:25.000She says that the radiation problem in some lake in Ukraine could be resolved by putting some Kabbalah juice on it.
01:28:56.000Was shocked that the NIH, the National Institute of Health, was not taking her scientific research seriously, demonstrating that that's what...
01:29:09.000I think she must have played once at some point.
01:29:11.000No, but seriously, and what I argue there is that You know, if you're walking all day with yes-men catering to each of your whims, you actually live in a world where you truly start thinking that you're a deity.
01:29:27.000I mean, you really did save the world.
01:29:28.000I'm Tom Cruise and I saved the world in Mission Impossible, whatever.
01:29:32.000And therefore, it is perfectly reasonable that I have something profound to say about everything.
01:29:38.000Therefore, Tom Cruise says that there is no such thing as psychiatric illnesses.
01:29:43.000You just have to do exercise and vitamins.
01:29:46.000And that we don't take that seriously is really an affront to him.
01:29:50.000And so I had written an article where I was saying that it's really astounding the type of narcissism that these folks...
01:29:56.000And I argued that in part it comes from a form of guilt.
01:30:02.000That deep in the recesses of their bedrooms when they turn off the lights, many of them actually know that they are frauds that are not really deserving of all of the perks that they've received.
01:30:12.000And so one of the ways that maybe I could fix that is by demonstrating that I'm much more than a mere actor.
01:30:20.000I'm really helping solve the radiation problem in the Ukraine and so on and so forth.
01:30:25.000Because then I seem as though maybe I am more worthy of all the accolades that are being bestowed upon me.
01:30:31.000That's a very fascinating way of looking at it, and I think you probably are onto something there.
01:30:35.000I think the knowledge and the understanding that they're frauds, the deep-seated knowledge, whether they avoid it and deny it or not, there's a lot of people that are horrible people that are involved in charitable organizations.
01:30:50.000And one of the reasons being is to sort of show that they...
01:31:48.000Despite the fact that he'd sued people that had claimed that their lives had been affected by his drug use, that people that they love had been drug tested, and that they lost their entire career,
01:32:04.000and that they were aligned with Lance Armstrong, did drugs with Lance Armstrong.
01:32:08.000Lance Armstrong would sue these people.
01:32:10.000And then finally came out and told the truth and passed off his organization to other people.
01:33:30.000Why do the upper uppers don't drive Maseratis?
01:33:34.000Because everybody in their circle can also buy a Maserati.
01:33:37.000So they actually drive pretty, oftentimes pretty, you know, cheapish cars because that's not going to be a very honest signal of my true value because everybody in my social group can imitate it.
01:33:47.000But if I can give a hundred million dollars to the so-and-so cancer or buy a hundred million dollar painting that a two-year-old could have otherwise painted, boy, that's an honest signal of my quality, right?
01:33:58.000And so I actually talk about this exact idea of not advertising your generosity.
01:34:05.000Yeah, I call it happiness bombs when I leave a big tip at a restaurant and I get out of there before the waiter can see what the tip is.
01:34:59.000It's exactly what we're talking about, right?
01:35:01.000So that whole episode was a great episode because whoever wrote it actually understands our human nature.
01:35:08.000Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating aspect of human beings, this need to be considered altruistic, this need to be considered benevolent.
01:35:16.000You know, to advertise it instead of just being, you know, that you can't exist in the silence of the personal satisfaction of contributing and giving out love and generosity, that you have to be rewarded for it.
01:35:31.000Well, I have a section in my first book which I titled Philanthropy as a Costly Signal.
01:35:36.000The costly signaling in biology, so the peacock's tail is a costly signal because it actually serves as a really honest signal of my worth.
01:35:45.000For me to carry this burdensome tail and avoid predators, then you really should take me seriously, all you female hens, because I am here and I've survived.
01:35:53.000So that's called an honest signal or a costly signal.
01:35:56.000Well, philanthropy, I argue, in many cases, is that honest signal precisely for the reasons that we're talking about.
01:36:52.000I can't speak to why one culture decides to use one particular form of status.
01:36:58.000If you're the Maasai tribe in Africa, it might be the number of cattle heads that you have that is the peacocking, right?
01:37:05.000So what we do know is that different cultures will use different forms of peacocking, but in all cultures it is going to be the males in that culture who engage in the act.
01:37:16.000The peacocking in the African-American community is most fascinating because a lot of these rappers come from these very poor neighborhoods.
01:37:23.000So they're dealing with a lot of poverty and crime as they're growing up.
01:37:28.000And then as they get older, their identities, once they become connected to success, are also connected to firearms and diamonds.
01:37:50.000I don't understand diamonds, so I don't own any diamonds.
01:37:53.000So when I say $100,000, I might be way off.
01:37:56.000There was a company called, I don't remember the name of the company, but the project was called American Brandstand, a play on American Bandstand.
01:40:25.000Did a study, very much similar in spirit, where instead of manipulating the fireman suit, he had the same guy approach different women as a function of, and manipulated which car he was driving.
01:40:37.000I can't remember the exact details, but something like, there's a three-time increase in the likelihood of a woman giving you her phone number if you are driving a high-status car versus a low-status car.
01:40:51.000And the same guy, by the way, Did another study where the guy who was approaching the women was either with a baby or not and in another version with a dog or not.
01:41:05.000Having a dog increases digits of attention.
01:41:09.000And interacting with a baby also increases it.
01:41:13.000So I joke that you should be driving a Lamborghini while having a dog next to you and a baby while wearing a fireman suit.
01:41:22.000You're going to get all the ladies in Orange County and Newport Beach.
01:41:28.000Another study, and then I'm going to come to my study in a second.
01:41:31.000In another study, not by this guy, they took the same man, put him either in a Bentley or in a Ford Fiesta, and did the same thing with a woman.
01:42:59.000So, yeah, I would say the physical attraction wouldn't change, but I would say that the desire to approach that person or the willingness to approach that person...
01:43:29.000As I tell in one of my TED talks, try to get a granting agency to release money to do research where you're saying basically, I'm going to rent a Porsche for the weekend as part of my research.
01:43:41.000So we rented a Porsche and then we had some other beaten up car.
01:43:45.000We had the same men drive both cars either in downtown Montreal on a Friday evening where everybody could see you driving the car or on a semi-deserted highway where nobody could see you.
01:43:56.000And at the end of each of the driving conditions, we collected salivary assays to then measure their fluctuating levels of testosterone.
01:44:06.000And the idea being that when you put them in the Porsche, it's going to explode.
01:46:53.000So this is not published yet with one of my former doctoral students.
01:46:56.000We actually created online dating profiles of a man where everything is the same except that in one version his prized favorite position is a fancy red Porsche or some shitty Kia or whatever it is.
01:47:12.000And then we asked men and women who were looking at this profile to evaluate the guy's height.
01:48:23.000So I have a brother who's lived in California for 30 years, who, by the way, I think I'd sent you this by email, was a fighter, was an Olympian judo fighter who competed in the 1976 Olympics.
01:48:37.000And he used to always say, by the way, before there was ever an MMA, I would always ask him, if you were in a fight at a bar against some boxer or some karate guy, who would win?
01:48:50.000Which was kind of what started the whole MMA thing.
01:49:28.000This is before I was married, in case my wife was listening.
01:49:33.000No, but this was before we were married.
01:49:36.000We would walk into a bar, these fancy schmancy clubs, and he'd say, take your time and look around and find the most stunning, unattainable woman in this place.
01:49:50.000So I'd go around, look around, I'd pick the girl who's not only the most beautiful, but the one who is clearly accompanied by a guy who looks like a brute, and they seem to be very intensely in love.
01:50:02.000So now I've really raised the bar of him not being able to get her.
01:50:06.000Now, my brother is about 5'3", so he's not tall and so on.
01:50:10.000But boys, he's carrying the big testicles of owning all those Ferraris.
01:50:14.000And so he'd say, okay, that's the girl you want me to approach?
01:51:03.000Well, look, the reality is that whenever we went anywhere in one of those cars, I just noticed anecdotally that the women would be all over the place.
01:51:11.000Is that changing with time when people become more aware of how kind of peacocky and it becomes more of a cultural sort of caricature?
01:52:53.000I mean, I'm a hunter, and I've experienced this weird thing where people who wear leather and eat meat get angry at you for hunting.
01:53:01.000And one of the reasons why they're angry at you for hunting is somehow or another what you're doing is animal cruelty, that you don't have to do it.
01:53:49.000Granted, in all fairness, my knowledge of nutrition was Far less than than it is now, and I didn't have the best diet in the world, and I was also very young.
01:53:58.000But, you know, animals, like humans, live a finite life, and I think that they eat each other.
01:54:05.000The world that they live in is unbelievably cruel, and if it wasn't for getting killed by a hunter, it's not like they're gonna live forever and become magic, okay?
01:54:13.000They get killed by coyotes and mountain lions and I like going into that world and acquiring meat.
01:54:20.000My goal is, at the end of 2014, all the meat I eat at home to only be from my hunting.
01:56:06.000Great guy and really fascinating and beautiful documentarian.
01:56:11.000He's just really wonderful documentaries.
01:56:14.000And he had this one where he went to this African hunting camp for several weeks and stayed there and tried to really understand what it was all about and interviewed all these people and a lot of them were just despicable.
01:56:25.000They're just these real hickey people like, yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna try to get the big five.
01:56:30.000I'm gonna get a rhino, I'm gonna get an elephant.
01:56:32.000All they want to do is like spend money and bring home tusks and horns and all this different shit.
01:56:36.000It's pretty gross because it's just they're killing to acquire trophies.
01:56:40.000And what they're doing is they're killing inside these high fences where these animals, it's not like you're out there.
01:56:47.000And it's not to say that I'm opposed to high fence hunting because I think if you're hunting like deer or an animal that you're just going to eat...
01:56:56.000It's essentially not that much different than going to a lake that's been stocked.
01:57:02.000If you're going to a lake and they stock the lake with trout to ensure that there's fish deficient, those fish are not going to get out of that lake and fly to Nebraska.
01:57:11.000And I don't think there's any difference between that and these high-fence hunting operations in Texas, which I don't have any problem with at all.
01:59:05.000And I think that's where I have an issue with this Africa thing.
01:59:10.000But where it gets weird is that those animals, many of them were on the verge of extinction, but now they're in very high numbers.
01:59:17.000The reason being is that they're in these high fence operations, so it's such a catch-22.
01:59:22.000On one hand, they were on the verge of extinction, and on another hand, Now they have these high populations, and they're super healthy, but they only exist as a commodity to be hunted down.
01:59:33.000I mean, and the way they're doing it is like there's a waterhole, and there's like a hundred animals in front of the waterhole, and these people just sit there, and they just shoot one.
01:59:51.000I mean, you're not only not tracking...
01:59:55.000Those animals, they're never going to leave and go 100 miles away to a different place and then go across a river.
02:00:03.000Mule deer, they discovered that mule deer in America, this is a really recent discovery, they had no idea how far they migrate, but they migrate as much as 150 miles in a year.
02:00:14.000150 miles is a lot of walking, man, for a deer.
02:00:18.000That's like here to fucking San Diego for a deer.
02:00:21.000And they're just starting to understand their migratory patterns.
02:00:27.000Now, that's what I consider fair chase.
02:00:30.000You go out hunting, you find a mule deer that's walking 150 miles, you figure out where they're going to be and stalk them and get into a good position and shoot them and eat them.
02:00:40.000It's about as fair and ethical a way as you can acquire your own meat.
02:00:44.000If you're going all the way to Africa and you're not even going to eat that animal, and you're just going to stuff it and stick it on your wall to let everybody know how Billy Badass you are...
02:01:46.000I keep away from white flour and pastas and things along those lines, and I try to avoid processed foods as much as possible and sugar as much as possible.
02:01:56.000So in that sense, yeah, I eat a lot of vegetables.
02:01:58.000I eat a lot of protein, animal protein, fish and things along those lines, but...
02:02:04.000I noticed because I work out so much and because I do athletics where you sort of measure your progress, you know, whether it's my workout routines like strength and conditioning routines or martial arts, I can kind of see when I'm on and when I'm off.
02:02:19.000And I can anecdotally or directly correlate that to my diet.
02:02:24.000And I find that when I take supplements and I make sure that I have plenty of vitamins and plenty of green, leafy vegetables, that's one of the most important ones, I think, and healthy proteins.
02:02:33.000So in that sense, I eat along the lines that a lot of those paleo guys eat.
02:03:19.000And now I've lost about 25, 30 pounds.
02:03:21.000But still, even now, I mean, I'm over 200 pounds.
02:03:23.000And one of the things that I've been doing is eating, as you said, a lot of vegetables and a lot of protein, staying away from all the starchy stuff.
02:05:59.000Speaking of comedians, because it's very organic what's going on, I just hired a postdoc whose claim to fame so far, until he gets into my research program, was he was studying the evolutionary roots of humor.
02:06:15.000And so what he basically looked at is humor as a sexually selected trait as a proxy for intelligence.
02:06:21.000And so with his former doctoral supervisor, who's a well-known evolutionary psychologist, They would go into comedy clubs and rate people's impressions of how funny the comedian is and then would administer IQ tests to them.
02:06:41.000And it turns out that funnier people are actually smarter people.
02:06:46.000And so when women say, you know, I love, you know, they always say, I want a guy with a sense of humor.
02:08:11.000You know, there's a study that was done with CEOs, and the number one thing that they all had in common, other than, on average, being taller than the norm.
02:08:59.000Yeah, so you're going to like this one.
02:09:00.000So, I've often wondered whether they believe the hype that they say.
02:09:06.000In other words, when somebody is posing in this way, do they truly kind of internalize this or not?
02:09:13.000There's a fantastic evolutionary theory that looks at the evolutionary roots of self-deception.
02:09:18.000In other words, why is it that we are so good at self-deceiving ourselves?
02:09:24.000This is by a guy by the name of Robert Trivers, a phenomenal evolutionary biologist.
02:09:28.000And he proposed a theory that I think is brilliant in its simplicity.
02:09:32.000And then what I usually do is to demonstrate the phenomenon, I go to a television show like Seinfeld to find a manifestation of that phenomenon, which I'll talk about in a sec.
02:09:44.000One of the biggest dangers that we face as humans is to navigate all of these social threats in our environment.
02:09:51.000So I'm trying to manipulate you while you're trying to read me to see my manipulative intent.
02:09:58.000That's called Machiavellian intelligence or social intelligence.
02:10:00.000So one of the ways that I could fool you without you picking up that I am fooling you is if any visual cue in my face that would signal that I am lying, I would shut it off.
02:11:15.000I certainly think you're correct in that, and I think there's definitely something there.
02:11:19.000But I can also offer some unique insight to the celebrity thing and what it is, because I've been a part of it, and I've also experienced it myself.
02:11:28.000I've experienced my own self-deception or my own ego swelling in an unnatural way.
02:11:35.000It's because of the environment that you're constantly in and the data that you're getting.
02:11:39.000The data that you're getting if you're a star.
02:11:40.000Like I've seen, now I'm a nice person, but I've seen people get shows and become these fucking ruthless dictators.
02:11:50.000Like people that have sitcoms or shows that revolve.
02:12:48.000The data that someone who has, you know, someone who's not attractive, the only data, like a lot of data that comes from a person who is not physically attractive is like, well, I found out that I can get people to like me if I make them laugh.
02:13:04.000So I'm going to develop a good sense of humor because my nose isn't getting any smaller.
02:13:36.000They only know this thing that they've pretended to be in a movie where they were a superhero or in this thing where they were a doctor or in that show where they were...
02:13:45.000They always had the right answer and they were on top of things.
02:13:48.000How many people that we've seen in movies that we thought were really smart, intelligent people, then you see them in an interview and you go, oh, he's a fucking idiot.
02:14:08.000They project you on a screen that's 60 feet wide.
02:14:11.000Every time you talk, the words that come out of your mouth were carefully constructed by a team of writers that labored over those words for weeks and weeks.
02:14:33.000Some awards party or something like that and he goes down the red carpet and people fucking go bananas and scream.
02:14:39.000He handles it remarkably well for someone who's in that scenario because that is a completely unnatural scenario and must be insanely difficult to maintain objectivity in that situation.
02:14:53.000Just the data that those people get is so different from the data That a guy who is working at a camera shop gets.
02:15:00.000A guy who is a normal person in a normal life.
02:15:03.000The data that they get is, when they interact with people, people judge them based on their appearance, how they talk, what their background is.
02:15:48.000So you, you know, Joe Rogan, I know this guy.
02:15:51.000I mean, I remember when my kid was born, Joe Rogan, I know Joe Rogan.
02:15:55.000And so I think what ends up happening is that since we obviously didn't evolve in an environment where there were televisions, but I now feel so intimately connected to you, that barrier is removed.
02:16:06.000Yeah, it gets even weirder when you do something like this, like podcasts, because this is even more intimate because we're in people's ears.
02:17:26.000So that is kind of a subliminal message or is that not subliminal?
02:17:29.000Well, it's not subliminal because it's conscious.
02:17:30.000It has to be below my conscious awareness for it to be subliminal.
02:17:34.000Do you remember those things they used to sell?
02:17:36.000I don't think they have them anymore, but they used to be CDs or audio tapes, and you would hear like the sound of the ocean or something like that, but then behind it was supposedly a message.
02:18:34.000You know, I didn't know what it meant.
02:18:35.000And he goes, well, you know, we're Scientologists.
02:18:37.000And then so, you know, I tried to just be as objective as possible and kind and started asking him, like, what does that mean?
02:18:46.000He was telling me that she will no longer be influenced by any outside stimuli Any outside influence, any outside suggestions, and that she will be able to go through this world without being affected by negative anything.
02:19:00.000Anybody yelling at her, anybody insulting her, they will no longer get in there.
02:19:33.000I've only met a few legit Scientologists, and one thing that they radiate is this weird sort of positive energy, this alien, artificial, positive energy that's very difficult to put your finger on.
02:20:08.000I want to know when the crash is coming.
02:20:10.000You know, I'm pretty sure that if I followed you around, I'm just guessing, but based on our two-hour-and-a-half conversation, that if I followed you around, you're pretty much like this all the time.
02:22:35.000What you do is based entirely on the merits of your work.
02:22:39.000What you do is based entirely on your education, Your qualifications and the data that you've provided and the writing that you've done based on that data.
02:22:51.000It's all right in front of you, despite the fact that the ideologues attack you and the fucking politically correct knuckleheads will go after you.
02:22:59.000What you're doing is, it's all based on the merits of your work.
02:23:02.000What an actor is doing is trying so desperately to get other people to accept them and choose them.
02:23:14.000It's so weird that they don't have their own opinions.
02:23:17.000It's very rare that you talk to actors and they have their own opinions.
02:23:20.000It's like what they have is this sort of conglomeration of opinions that they've sort of subscribed to because they believe that this is going to ingratiate them with the overlords of Hollywood.
02:23:31.000So everyone is goddamn politically correct.
02:27:43.000You can emulate his behavior and you can become successful.
02:27:46.000Well, when someone is on TV or in a movie theater and their head's 60 feet tall and everything they're saying is perfect, you want to be them.
02:27:59.000Because they seem to be exhibiting this evolutionary thing.
02:28:02.000And I also think that the media itself, whether it's music or whether it's movies and television, there's an inescapable quality to being on film that is unavoidable in some very strange way.
02:28:17.000And that your body's not designed to absorb it.
02:28:21.000Your body is not designed to absorb movies.
02:28:24.000Your body is designed to absorb the wisdom of the natural world.
02:28:28.000Like the wisdom of, you know, that guy got bitten by a tiger.
02:28:36.000You know, all these lessons we learn from the natural world, all these things that we see that exist in the material, you know, world that's in front of us.
02:28:44.000But when this world has all of a sudden been changed and now you're looking at dragons and you're looking at, you know, spaceships and fucking lightning bolts and all these things that are taking place on a screen that aren't real, the whole thing gets very squirrely in our minds.
02:31:18.000And so I met, who's become now a very good friend, a FBI special agent whose job it is to tailgate all of these Muslim extremists around the UC Irvine area.
02:31:39.000So yeah, so he's told me some unbelievable stories.
02:31:43.000And he too, I mean, he's an FBI agent who's been under a lot of pressure to do the politically correct thing, right?
02:31:50.000As you probably know that you're not supposed to say Islamic extremists or Islam or this or that.
02:31:56.000And so when he hears me in some of my discourse, he finds it quite liberating.
02:32:02.000Whose job it is to protect us from some of these dangers, who faces some of the politically correct shackles that we've been talking about.
02:32:11.000Our mutual friend, Sam Harris, has had an incredible amount of blowback in his honest and objective assessment of Muslim extremists.
02:32:21.000The Muslim extremists that he's documented, that he has put on his blog, like, he had this thing where he was saying, like, There's a video of this guy who's speaking.
02:32:34.000I forget what country he's in, but he's speaking in English to this group of Islamic people.
02:32:40.000And he's talking about the differences between what people think of him as radical Islam and what is just Islam.
02:32:58.000How many of you believe that the word of God is the best way to deal with homosexuals and that whatever the Quran says...
02:33:08.000Whether it says they should be stoned to death, that this is the word of God, and they all raise their hand.
02:33:13.000And he goes into this thing about how many of you think that women should be silent and that they should listen to their man because this is what God has said, and they all raise their hand.
02:33:23.000And he's like, see, this is not radical Islam.
02:36:13.000It's just this crazy sickness that people who consider themselves intelligent, intellectual, progressive, open-minded, these are the people that exhibit this ridiculous trait.
02:36:23.000Because I think they just have this instinct that to criticize an other is gauche, is wrong.
02:37:02.000I almost have more disdain for the people that are progressive that have an issue with someone criticizing this than I do the people that were brainwashed and ingrained with this religion.
02:37:16.000The people that are supposedly intellectuals or supposedly responsible for guiding the thought of the young people, the people that are supposed to be the folks that are the ones that are the curators of these ideas, the ones that are the ones who are teaching children in school,
02:37:34.000these are the wise ones who are professionally intelligent.
02:37:37.000You're supposed to be professionally objective, professionally wise.
02:37:42.000And you have this ridiculous notion because of the environment that we live in where this politically correct, whatever you want to call it, ideology has gotten so infected.
02:37:53.000It's such a bizarre computer virus of the mind.
02:37:56.000Well, the king of these guys, although it has nothing to do with Islam, is Norm Chomsky.
02:39:47.000I wonder if it's connected in some way to the suppression of the people that live in these places where their natural resources are being stolen by the war machine, which is undeniable.
02:39:58.000Undeniable what's going on in Iraq or in Afghanistan, how much of the hustle has to do with the natural resources, whether it be the poppy fields, whether it be the minerals in Afghanistan, whether it's the oil in Iraq.
02:40:09.000Undeniable that these people are being, for sure, they're subject to the war machine that's coming in to steal the resources.
02:40:18.000That's something that people are aware of, and you see these images of these people in these Islamic countries that are dying, that are getting bombed on, and also the dehumanism that they're subjected to by a lot of people that are trying to justify these wars.
02:40:36.000That is the only thing that makes sense to me.
02:40:38.000And also the fact that this has happened over the course of, since 2001, this is when this anti, this Islamophobia notion has been really, really pushed harder and harder.
02:40:51.000Well, I think it's also because that's the way that I demonstrate how tolerant and progressive I am by showing that I am not going to lump everybody with those crazy 9-11 people.
02:41:02.000And so again, it's part of that progressive posing.
02:41:05.000No ideology, no belief system is free from mockery, from criticism.
02:41:13.000And the quicker we find that out and the quicker we kind of fix this problem, the better we'll be off.
02:42:30.000We'll speak about these issues very openly with me, but we'll never even as so far as go as to like something on Facebook, lest they will be found out.
02:43:07.000And actually, I wrote an article on my Psychology's Day blog where I was talking about the necessity for tenure, but also its potential for misuse, right?
02:43:15.000Because you do get an incredible amount of deadwood with tenure, right?
02:43:20.000Do you foresee a time where universities won't be the main source of education that was somehow or another to be taken care of online?
02:43:41.000You're a MOOC. No, MOOCs are massive online.
02:43:47.000I can't remember the rest of the acronym.
02:43:48.000These are courses that are oftentimes offered under the auspices of a university, but they're free courses where people can massively register.
02:43:57.000You have, you know, teaching a course, 100,000 people.
02:44:02.000And actually, I try to hook up with these guys called Coursera that organizes a portal for this, but they don't have a contract with Concordia, and it has to be between a university and the organization for it to fly.
02:44:17.000So I do see a potential eventually for sort of a more democratization of knowledge, but I don't suspect that we're going to lose the university anytime soon.
02:44:26.000This is a social aspect of it that's so interesting.
02:44:29.000People go away, and they party, and they have fun.
02:44:34.000It's very interesting, because I've studied both in the U.S. and in Canada as part of my study.
02:44:38.000And so this Greek system, going away to college, not being close to your parents, the drinking games, that's very much, much more so of an American culture.
02:44:50.000Right of passage than it is a Canadian.
02:44:52.000Most Canadian students end up going to the school that is physically closest to them.
02:45:56.000Like, what was the one that someone got in trouble for during one of the elections for taking support from and that they wouldn't allow interracial couples?
02:47:24.000Well, July is pretty awesome, though, and everybody's very festive.
02:47:27.000One of the things that I love about any place like Canada or a lot of parts of Canada is that they really appreciate the summertime because of the fact the winter is so brutal.
02:47:50.000I think it also develops character, too.
02:47:52.000I've talked about Los Angeles and that a lot of people that are born and raised in Los Angeles are like spoiled rich kids that also won the lottery.
02:47:59.000They don't realize how easy they've got it.
02:48:01.000The worst the weather gets here, you have to hit a button and turn the AC on.
02:48:05.000It's the most brutal thing you have to do is use your finger to press a button.
02:48:09.000Well, I remember when we lived here, when I was at UC Irvine, one time we were driving on the highway and there was a Warning weather advisory because there was going to be 10 minutes of rain.
02:48:19.000And when it rains, the roads apparently become a bit more slippery because of the oil stay.