The Godfather is back, and he's got a new segment called "Trigger Warning" in which he talks about the increasing use of "trigger warnings" as a tool to keep people safe from certain ideas and ideas that might upset them. He also talks about a new study that shows that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, and why this is a problem. And, of course, the Godfather talks about why you shouldn't have to be a conservative in college and why you should be exposed to multiple viewpoints in order to make sense of the world around you. Also, he's going to talk about how to deal with people who don't agree with you, and how you should deal with them in a way that makes sense to you, not only in the classroom, but in the real world. And he'll talk about why it's a good thing you're not allowed to be conservative in a university, because you'll get a better idea of what's going on in the world and what you should and shouldn't be allowed to think about in it. And, he'll also talk about a study that proves that the Democrats are more likely to believe evolution is a bad thing than the Republicans, and that evolution is better than you think it is, in fact, because it's better than the other way around. Enjoy! - The Godfather is a podcast that doesn't have it all, and it's not even close to being good enough, but it's good enough for you to know that it's actually good enough to make you feel good about it, so you should listen to it and think about it and reflect on it and write about it in your notes and write it and send it to someone who does it well enough so you don't have enough of it and make it better than it is good enough that you can do it in a thoughtful, thoughtful enough to actually care about it. You're not going to want to miss it, are you listening to it? Thank you for listening to this one, brother? - Tom and I hope you enjoy it, and don't forget about it? - Tom is back. -Tom and I love you, Tom is a good one, too. Tom's back, Tom's Back, too, Tomahawk Tom is Back! - and we'll see you next week, right, Tom?
00:01:28.000And it's fucking crazy what's going on with kids today.
00:01:33.000And this article gets into it, and one of them was about something that there was a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym, and he wrote an essay for Vox.
00:01:47.000Called, I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students terrify me.
00:02:00.000Well, by the way, one of the authors of that article is a good friend of mine who is the director of FIRE. I can't remember what the acronym stands for.
00:02:09.000But he basically goes around, his organization goes around trying to protect freedom of speech.
00:02:15.000First Amendment at campuses, precisely because of the unbelievable chilling effect of these types of, you know, lunacy movements.
00:02:50.000I'm not sure if we discussed this before, but even if we did, it's worth repeating.
00:02:54.000I talked about an article that was done by some colleagues of mine, I don't know them well, but some academics, where they looked at the political affiliation of professors at top, I think it was Californian schools, whether they identified it or whether they actually had Democratic affiliation or Republican.
00:03:13.000And as you might imagine, it was extraordinarily skewed towards Democrats.
00:03:18.000But then depending on the field of study, so for example, in sociology and in the humanities and in women's studies, women with a Y, by the way, please don't write women with an E. That would be sexist.
00:04:54.000If on average, Republicans are more likely to deny evolution, then that point is well taken.
00:04:59.000But when it comes to issues, is the death penalty right or wrong?
00:05:03.000What kind of fiscal policy should you have?
00:05:05.000What type of foreign policy should you have?
00:05:06.000This is not a one plus one scientific equation.
00:05:10.000So you should be exposed to multiple viewpoints.
00:05:14.000But of course, you shouldn't be because you should only interact with people who are similar to you.
00:05:18.000Well, that is a problem with a lot of people that go to college, graduate, get their PhD, get their doctorate, and then start teaching and never enter the real world.
00:05:28.000They stay in this sort of insulated world of academia, and then they espouse these same ideas, they promote these same ideas, they promote the same way of thinking as if this is the real world, because this is the only world they know.
00:05:43.000You know one of the things about comedians is a lot of them are like really crazy and fucked up and they do a lot of drugs and they're just out of control and nuts and they kind of forget that other people aren't like that and sometimes I'll bring like one of my regular friends around like the Comedy Store and they're around some of my comedian friends that are fucking crazy and they go Jesus Christ these guys just talk about ridiculous shit that they did like it's no big deal and And I'm like,
00:06:11.000well, in their world, it isn't a big deal.
00:06:14.000In their world, this is the normal world.
00:06:38.000They were trying to raise awareness about microaggressions, but in doing so and raising awareness for microaggressions, they had to give examples of these microaggressions, which triggered people!
00:10:32.000I mean, of course, there's still racism.
00:10:34.000But in terms of institutionalized endemic racism, we certainly are much better than we were 50 years ago.
00:10:39.000But yet, you know, they're young kids, they're revolutionary, they're wearing Che Guevara, you know, viva la revolution, and they have to engage in this kind of behavior.
00:10:47.00030 years from now, they'll watch that YouTube clip and they'll think they're a bunch of buffoons.
00:10:51.000I think that's a very valid possibility.
00:10:54.000I think another possibility is that when you look at people and they're trying to find, like, causes to support, I think there's a lot of people out there that are just fucking assholes.
00:11:09.000And what they're doing is trying to find something that allows them to get out that asshole aggression and be justified.
00:11:17.000You know, something that allows them to be righteous.
00:11:20.000Black Lives Matter, you fucking piece of shit!
00:11:22.000And they're screaming at someone who believes Black Lives Matter.
00:11:25.000Screaming at someone who's not even remotely racist.
00:11:27.000But they will yell it in your face the way they did at this Bernie Sanders thing in order to just get their rocks off.
00:11:36.000Whatever personal frustrations, whatever psychological failures that they have...
00:11:54.000It's not that this Demands attention at this moment in order to solve a problem because there's a fucking fire We have to put this fire out right now or people are gonna die.
00:12:08.000No, this that has nothing to do with that It gives them the opportunity to grandstand to take a moral high ground and to scream out and beg for attention Right and to be good because nobody could you can't say it like racism fucking sucks Nobody can say hey,
00:12:24.000You know he can't say that So you could be like super aggressive and really shitty and confrontational and insulting about a cause you believe in.
00:12:34.000And that is one of the problems that I have with this whole social justice warrior movement.
00:12:39.000Because I find a lot of these people that are involved in it to be asshole human beings.
00:12:45.000And even though I agree with a lot of what they support, I think they suck.
00:12:51.000And when I go to their Twitter pages, and I look at what their interactions are, all their interactions are insulting people, and getting angry at people, and it's all negative.
00:14:23.000Occidental College, where there was two students that got drunk, and a boy and a girl, they texted each other, and the boy and the girl had sex, and the boy got accused of rape and kicked out of the school where the girl stayed.
00:14:39.000Like, first of all, You're changing the rules of human behavior, because people have been getting drunk and having sex since the beginning of time.
00:14:47.000And so to call it rape now, after all these years, just on a whim, especially when two people are consenting adults.
00:15:04.000You can in Montreal, and you're a crazy country.
00:15:06.000But the idea that the boy is responsible and the girl's not, to me, seems ridiculous.
00:15:12.000And it seems contradictory to the whole idea of feminism in the first place is that we're equal.
00:15:17.000Now, if we are equal, why are we not equal in terms of our ability to take...
00:15:23.000Responsibility for being under the influence.
00:15:26.000I mean, if you were responsible for being under the influence when you're driving, if you're responsible for being under the influence if you commit violence, why are you not responsible for being under the influence when you have sex if you're a girl?
00:16:05.000I don't know the exact details, but there are now, on some university campuses, you actually have a consent form where you sort of go through the iterative steps as you're starting to engage in sex.
00:17:23.000You know, for example, if a high-status male seduces a lower-status woman, that itself could be construed as a form of rape, precisely because his power is so intoxicating.
00:17:48.000By virtue of the difference in hierarchy, that itself could be construed as coercive because she wasn't able to control herself in the face of this overpowering man.
00:17:59.000Not physically, just because of his high status.
00:18:01.000Well, the reality of being a male is if an attractive woman comes on to a man, she's raping him.
00:18:33.000By the way, since we're on porn references, can I tell you maybe the greatest, I receive a lot of comments on my stuff, maybe the greatest one I've ever received, somebody wrote, I hope I'm getting the exact quote, in reference to me, he wrote, this guy is the Ron Jeremy of evolutionary psychology.
00:18:52.000I said, I could drop the mic and just, you know, retire.
00:18:56.000Well, that means you're disgusting but effective.
00:19:04.000Well, the whole thing about Ron Jeremy was Ron Jeremy existed in an era where the guys were supposed to be gross because people watching porn were all guys.
00:19:13.000So you wanted like a guy who was disgusting to be getting laid.
00:21:37.000We were driving to the cloud forest, and as we're driving up there, you pass through all these really small, rural communities, and God, you see a lot of churches.
00:22:26.000But, you know, I think that the existential angst of death being solved by religion, for a lot of people, is like a nice little scaffolding to just sort of like carry your way through life.
00:22:39.000You know, people have gotten angry at me for suggesting that.
00:22:41.000I'm not suggesting it for you or for anybody.
00:22:47.000There's a lot of things that people do that I wouldn't want to do that they do to kind of get by in this life, whether it's take Xanax or drink every night after work in order to keep from kicking their dog.
00:22:58.000I don't know what the fuck is going on in your head, but for a lot of people in these bad rural-type situations, it seems to be a common theme.
00:23:10.000And if you really look at everything as being natural, which is what I try to do, that term nature, Everybody wants to look at that as like wildlife outside of cities.
00:23:22.000I kind of look at everything as nature.
00:23:24.000And I look at human behavior patterns and how much they repeat themselves as being pretty natural.
00:23:31.000And these weird little spots where there's not a lot of people seems to attract a lot of churches.
00:23:36.000You know, I wrote an article on that point, I think maybe a year or two ago.
00:23:42.000It was somebody else's research that I was summarizing, looking at the content of prayers.
00:24:26.000For people that are in bad places and bad situations, I see that it helps.
00:24:32.000Well, so chapter eight of one of my books, I titled it very provocatively, perhaps, Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.
00:24:39.000And I give different examples of hope peddlers, medical quacks, self-help gurus, And, of course, I argue that the greatest peddler of hope is, of course, religion.
00:24:52.000I think it takes almost a maladaptive honesty to not believe because it is so much more comforting to believe.
00:24:59.000And also the people that decide not to believe, it's almost like they have to try so hard in those areas to not believe that they become angry about it.
00:25:09.000They become angry about their disbelief.
00:25:28.000And then the church becomes like a sort of a community center by proxy.
00:25:32.000Well, David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist, a good friend of mine, very famous biologist, he looks at the evolutionary roots of religion.
00:25:41.000And he actually argues, a great book, I'm doing this plugging for him now, I think he wrote in 2002, Darwin's Cathedral, where he actually demonstrated or argued that groups that are religious actually out-survive those that are not, using an argument of communality,
00:25:58.000Groups that are religious are more cohesive, band together, are more communal, therefore they should be able to out-survive other groups.
00:26:07.000Now his theories are a bit contentious because many evolutionary psychologists And evolutionary biologists reject the idea that evolution can happen at the group level.
00:26:16.000They argue that evolution should happen at the individual, at the gene level.
00:26:20.000And this is a fight that he's been having for many years now.
00:26:22.000But that's one example where you could actually study religion, not only from a scientific perspective, but from an evolutionary perspective.
00:26:29.000I have a friend who lives in a, they're married, the male and female are married in a sort of a rural area.
00:26:38.000And a long time ago I was having this conversation with them where the wife was just sort of explaining how if it wasn't for religion, her and the husband wouldn't be together.
00:26:51.000And the way she was saying it was kind of like her husband was dumb and like he needs something to keep him like on this good path and pattern and they'd been married for like at the time I think like 15 or 20 years and she was like do you think that we would have still been together if it wasn't for our belief in God and the Lord and whether or not and then she goes whether or not it's real Wow.
00:27:14.000And I was like, whoa, this is some heavy shit.
00:27:16.000It's almost like she's giving her husband some sort of placebo to keep this guy from drinking and fucking getting on a train like a hobo or whatever the hell she thinks he would do.
00:27:26.000You know, like God kind of kept them together and kept the family together.
00:27:30.000But she was looking at it in a very pragmatic way.
00:28:58.000And when you're opening a business or doing a sport or, you know, whatever the fuck it is, it's practice, reviewing data, feedback loop, making possible corrections, objectivity.
00:29:11.000All those things are what makes people improve.
00:29:14.000As a matter of fact, I read an article recently about music.
00:29:17.000They were discussing music, that the inherent qualities of someone's music are really just a lot of what makes a great musician is practice and feedback loops.
00:29:38.000Because if you also are involved in this practice feedback loop, but you really think God's on your side because you play a fucking mean axe.
00:29:45.000There's actually a psychological trait that maps onto what we're talking about.
00:29:54.000So locus of control is basically the idea, some of us are internally Driven in terms of our locus of control, meaning that we attribute things that happen to us to us.
00:30:03.000I did well on the exam because I studied hard, because I'm intelligent.
00:30:08.000Versus external locus of control, as you attribute it to environmental factors.
00:30:12.000I did poorly on the exam, not because I didn't study, but because the professor is an asshole.
00:31:20.000Because what they do is they give you this card where you keep track of how many times it's come on red and how many times the number 13 has come.
00:32:11.000But what's crazy is when luck is on their side, it seems real.
00:32:16.000Like when you get a hot hand, like I don't play craps, but I've seen people play craps, and they get a hot hand, they start rolling dice, and yes!
00:32:23.000And they feel like they can't lose, and they'll go on a hot streak.
00:32:26.000They'll go on a hot streak with blackjack as well.
00:33:12.000So I said, all right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So then he goes, well, if you're not going to take the damn game seriously, why am I calling you, right?
00:33:19.000Because he actually was convinced that the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and I bet some of your listeners will also think that, that the numbers 1 through 6...
00:33:28.000It's less likely of a combination to come up than any other combination of six numbers, simply because it has the illusion of looking ordered.
00:34:28.000And she's always like, I knew that number was going to come up.
00:34:32.000She would always tell you, I was gonna bet, and she would talk about what number she was gonna bet, and I was gonna bet nine, and I didn't put it in.
00:34:41.000Six, two, five, you know, she'd rattle off whatever the fuck the number was.
00:34:44.000And this was back in the day in New Jersey, where they would play the numbers, which is like this local, created sort of lottery that the mob ran.
00:34:55.000It was this weird thing, and my grandmother was a part of it.
00:34:58.000She would, like, help run the numbers.
00:36:04.000You could do it with tea leaves, or you could do it with the residue that's what you flip over the coffee mug, the Turkish, right?
00:36:10.000So the residue that's left, that's what you read.
00:36:12.000So this lady would come over to our house, and I was, you know, maybe a seven, eight, nine-year-old boy, and I already knew that the jig was up on this thing.
00:36:20.000And when she would come over, it would be like the Pope is visiting, right?
00:36:24.000And Laura is coming over to tell us about our future.
00:36:28.000So then she would start, you know, she'd look at these random patterns and the things that she would say are, you know, I see happiness in your future.
00:36:36.000Well, I could have a good bowel movement later and that's happiness.
00:36:40.000The Dallas Cowboys could win and that's happiness.
00:36:42.000My wife and I can have sex tonight and that's happiness.
00:36:45.000So there is no way to falsify her profoundly general prediction, right?
00:37:37.000He actually gets angry at people that pretend that they could...
00:37:40.000Like, you remember there was a whole series of those shows that they've since pulled off the air, but where there were psychics and, you know, there was like the Long Island medium.
00:38:15.000Well, this idea that someone can actually read into your past and pull this information...
00:38:22.000Is so appealing to people that they mistake the way the person's questioning them and the clues and the little bits of information that they give and how this person is really just good at forming puzzles based on pattern chunking.
00:39:39.000She went to one of her friends, hired a psychic, and they all sat around, and the psychic would slowly but surely read them.
00:39:47.000I was always very skeptical of stuff like that, from the time I was little, because I knew my grandmother was fucking crazy, and she always claimed to be psychic.
00:39:55.000But listen to my sister come back, she would tell me all this stuff.
00:39:59.000She knew all about this, and she knew all about that, and she knew about the time I did that.
00:40:03.000I'm like, didn't you know about all that stuff?
00:40:06.000She's not telling you anything you don't already know.
00:40:08.000She's telling you stuff you already know.
00:40:10.000Yeah, I'm telling you, it was amazing, though.
00:40:12.000I was like, how is it amazing that she tells you shit that you already know?
00:42:23.000And I remember when I took Probability and Stats as a math undergrad, that's one of the classic examples that you study precisely because it is so counterintuitive.
00:42:33.000Yeah, there was a show where someone did that and they went into...
00:42:37.000It was like one of these con men dudes went into...
00:42:41.000He bet people and he went into a restaurant and he had the day.
00:43:17.000You know, I don't know how anybody does that, but according to Penn Jillette, I gotta listen to him, though, because he's a fucking magician, and those guys are all tricksters.
00:43:26.000Like, One of the cool things about Penn and Teller, if you ever go to watch them, is that they'll tell you it's bullshit while they're doing it.
00:43:42.000Yeah, and that's what was really cool about the Banachek character was that he was like really adamant about that stuff and very angry about people steal money from folks by claiming to be mediums and talking to their relatives.
00:43:54.000And he's like, I just think that anyone who would try to give someone hope that perhaps their dead relative is talking from the grave and telling them important things they need to know, but meanwhile they're just making it up.
00:44:06.000It's just a foul, disgusting human being.
00:44:16.000We had a dude die in my grandmother's house.
00:44:19.000There was a guy who, during, I think it was like the 50s or the 60s, they were pretty poor, and there was this guy in the neighborhood who needed a place to live, and he would pay them to rent a room in their house.
00:44:35.000It was pretty common back in those days.
00:44:37.000And, you know, sometimes you'd eat dinner with them and what have you.
00:44:42.000And they believed that this guy was talking to them.
00:44:46.000They believed this guy was in the house and that she would go up into the attic sometimes and he would be up there and she would see him and talk to him.
00:44:53.000That would freak me the fuck out, man.
00:45:54.000And so she wanted to test whether those claims were true.
00:45:57.000So she set up an extraordinarily simple experiment to test their abilities.
00:46:04.000And so what basically she did is she would put out her hand And then they had to determine whether it's her right hand.
00:46:12.000In other words, there's a barrier where they can't see which of her hands is out.
00:46:20.000And if they have the ability of touch, they should be able to predict whether on the right or left is where her hand is.
00:46:26.000And of course, they ended up doing worse than random.
00:46:29.000In other words, less than 50, I mean, you have one in two chance of just guessing randomly whether it's the right or left, right?
00:46:35.000And she demonstrated that these touch healers, who supposedly are able to cure cancer by levitating their hand over areas, are not even able to predict whether the hand that's out is on the right or left.
00:46:49.000I mean, so imagine what an elegant experiment that is and it was published in that journal.
00:46:53.000Now, what do you think those touch healers came back with as a rebuttal?
00:47:01.000Other than that, they basically said that when you set up these types of experiments in a laboratory, That ends up, wait for it, affecting the energy fields.
00:47:14.000And therefore, by testing our abilities, you are ultimately removing our abilities.
00:47:23.000Therefore, it's an unfalsifiable position.
00:48:19.000You know, I have a little piece of Hocus Pocus that I don't necessarily believe, but I entertain it from time to time, and that is synchronicity.
00:48:32.000Like, when you're discussing an object, then something will come up, whether it's on television or the news, that just, like, perfectly fits into what you're talking about.
00:48:40.000And you're like, well, how goddamn convenient is this?
00:48:43.000Like, I was having a text conversation with a friend of mine this morning, and he lives on the East Coast, and I live on the West Coast.
00:48:52.000We're going back and forth, and he's having health issues, and he's going to talk to a doctor about probiotics.
00:48:59.000And while we're having this conversation, I go downstairs, and I'm about to work out, and I turn on the television, and Good Morning America is having an expert discuss probiotics and how gut health can affect all sorts of various things,
00:49:16.000including your mood, all sorts of various illnesses, and, like, literally at the same moment I'm having this text conversation with my friend, it's on, so I take a photo of the television, And I said, I send it to him.
00:52:16.000Oculus Rift, they're going to apply it to games, but with Oculus Rift, it's like a ski goggle thing that you put on that is a virtual reality program that runs while this is happening.
00:52:30.000What they're doing when they're running these is they're recording these incredible scenarios where apparently they put cameras all over a person's body and they have them go through these rooms and then they take all of the data from all of that and then put it into this program so that when you're wearing these goggles you can look around up and down and there is data.
00:52:55.000There's data for every single aspect of the room every single area of the rooms as you look left and right all that's been covered and it's all computing so as computational power and Video cards and all these different things that can compute the visual images as they improve and get better and better It's gotten to the point now where it's 4k 4k is what?
00:53:18.000This television right here is, which is the latest, greatest version of HD. It's very high resolution, beautiful images.
00:53:25.000And my friend Duncan put it on, tried it out at one of these developer conferences and called me just screaming and raving.
00:53:33.000He's like, this is bigger than the internet.
00:53:59.000He would step to the side and see the man playing it.
00:54:01.000Look over the top of the piano, see the man playing it.
00:54:04.000Go underneath the piano and see the man playing it.
00:54:06.000It's like this is fucking crazy and it really looks like there's a guy in front of you playing the piano, but nothing's happening.
00:54:13.000The idea being that if that technology exists today in 2015, there is going to come a time, whether that time is a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now, where there will be an artificial reality that is indecipherable from the reality that we live in right now,
00:54:30.000from this touch, feel, hear, see reality that we just all accept as real.
00:54:39.000That there is going to be something that is artificially created, but is indistinguishable from what we're experiencing.
00:54:47.000And if that is true, how do we not know that we haven't already been in it?
00:55:00.000Like, if you follow Moore's Law, if you follow any of the technological laws of extrapolation from the point that we're at now to the point that they're projecting just within 5, 10, 15, 20 years, they're talking about incredible stuff.
00:55:22.000Well, The Matrix seemed like a total horseshit just when it came out.
00:55:25.000It seemed like, wow, this is a cool science fiction movie about some shit that's not real and never could be real.
00:55:31.000But now, The Matrix looks closer and closer to reality with every passing day.
00:55:37.000With every passing year, it looks like, wow, it's inevitable.
00:55:41.000Whether it's 100 years from now or whatever...
00:55:43.000They're going to be able to give you an experience that is indistinguishable from this experience that we think is real.
00:55:50.000You know, my only sort of jumping point from what you're talking about, when I was a student in computer science and math, I took artificial intelligence.
00:55:58.000But now this is going back to, not to date myself, you know.
00:56:06.0001985, about, 1984, 85. And at the time, one of the things that we had learned in this course was, so you know about how now there are computers that can easily match the grandmasters in chess?
00:57:14.000But at that time, I already had found it almost mystical, the type of stuff that we were learning in AI to try to sort of model this artificial intelligence that could mimic the capacities of a human grandmaster player.
00:57:27.000And what you're talking about, of course, is many generations ahead of that.
00:59:53.000So first I'll give you the background to that story, and then I'll tell you about some research that we did in a consumer context.
00:59:59.000So there's this gentleman by the name of Frank Soloway.
01:00:01.000He's a historian of science and a huge Darwin supporter.
01:00:04.000He wrote a book in 1996, highly recommended, called Born to Rebel, where he looked at the 28 most radical scientific innovations in the history of human thought.
01:00:16.000The reason for 28, there's nothing magical about number 28. There was some criterion by which something got into that list or not.
01:00:22.000So he looked at the 28 most radical scientific theory of evolution would be one, right?
01:00:28.000Something that really changed our understanding of the world.
01:00:31.000And then he looked at the birth order, through historical records, of either the people who espoused the theory, Or those who were the staunchest detractors, opponents to the theory.
01:00:44.000And what he found is that the later borns were much more likely to be the ones to espouse the radical scientific innovations.
01:02:13.000But anyways, so we took this idea and we applied it to, since we were talking about adoption of phones and smartphones, we applied it to the context of, are you a product innovator?
01:02:26.000Do you adopt something early or late and so on?
01:02:29.000And we exactly replicated Soloway's findings.
01:02:32.000First borns were much more conforming.
01:02:34.000Later borns were much more innovative and That actually makes a ton of sense.
01:02:44.000Another thing I think could possibly be a consideration is that when you're younger, you get fucked with by your older brothers and sisters.
01:04:22.000I think that there's other ways, and this is my theory, there's other ways to encourage innovation or creativity or to pursue your passion and dreams.
01:04:32.000And one of the things I'm also quite shocked at with having children, It is how absolutely unique they are right out of the box.
01:05:36.000Yeah, you know those people that can read those things where Mercury's in retrograde and they know where Pluto is, the time your dad came and your mom?
01:06:08.000But apparently, there's just volumes of books written on constellations and the alignment of these constellations and where the stars are at any particular time, and it's dependent upon what time of year, what time of day.
01:06:24.000Do you buy into that in any way, shape, or form?
01:06:28.000Because there are a lot of people that believe that Leos have a very distinct personality and have distinct personality traits that are trackable.
01:07:11.000Oh my god, it was about- I was so angry.
01:07:13.000The woman who was a professor- Laura Kipnis.
01:07:16.000Yes, but explain the story because I'm searching for it.
01:07:19.000So basically the idea is that there's all these movements about how horrifyingly violent campuses are in terms of sexual violence, which is of course not true.
01:07:29.000And she had written an article where she was criticizing that position, sort of the lunacy, the hysteria involved with that narrative, right?
01:07:37.000One out of every five women will be raped on campus, which is complete nonsense.
01:08:03.000The bikini is patriarchal oppression, while the burqa is liberating.
01:08:09.000This is Western feminists who argue this, and they argue this because, exactly using the argument of the male gaze, since the burqa liberates women from the male gaze, and the bikini draws the male gaze, the bikini's bad, the burqa's good.
01:08:46.000I mean, evolutionary psychology, come on.
01:08:48.000Listen, when girls see Channing Tatum doing that magic mic shit, dancing around on stage, you tell me they're not responding to visual stimuli?
01:08:57.000That's a bunch of convenient bullshit by guys who have shitty bodies, who don't want to think that their girlfriend's drooling at Channing Tatum.
01:09:04.000With his little fucking Daisy Dukes on or whatever, how he's wearing his construction boots.
01:09:08.000So you actually think that men and women are indistinguishable in the manner by which they respond to...
01:09:45.000Just gender roles, has to deal with testosterone, has to deal with many, many things, culture, normal behavior as far as male, female behavior.
01:09:55.000I think both sexes, when they look at each other, are looking for important cues that are relevant to the mating market.
01:10:03.000So you're absolutely right that women are looking.
01:10:05.000For example, they like tight buttocks because that sends an important signal.
01:10:46.000There's a lot of male strip shows and in fact in Vegas those are the things that they advertise the airport when you go there the Thunder Down Under and all this jazz bunch of guys with their shirts off sweaty but women don't feel comfortable going into those environments the way men feel comfortable so they go in these Packs of wild,
01:11:05.000estrogen-oozing creatures, and they scream and yell.
01:11:11.000I used to have a bit about it, that it's a totally, that Ladies' Night Out, it's a totally different kind of experience.
01:11:16.000When they go, they scream and cheer and yell, where guys sit there and don't say much of anything.
01:11:33.000But I just think that women don't have the correct outlet, which is why when a book like Fifty Shades of Grey comes out, they all go fucking bananas.
01:11:40.000Like, finally, we've got a channel to funnel all of our sex urges through.
01:11:58.000If you want to understand male sexuality...
01:12:01.000Then you do a content analysis of pornography.
01:12:03.000If you want to understand female sexuality, you do a content analysis of romance novels.
01:12:09.000So if you look at the archetype of the male hero in romance novels, irrespective of which culture the romance novel is written in, it could be Romania or Egypt or Newport Beach, He's always the same guy.
01:13:08.000If you had long flowing Fabio hair and you had like a blouse on and you went out to a nightclub, people go, what the fuck is wrong with that guy?
01:13:17.000But in a romance novel, you're on the cover, baby.
01:13:19.000Well, because you have to also send out some cues of sensitivity, right?
01:13:56.000And they were essentially a form of romance, porn, vampire bullshit for chicks.
01:14:03.000And again, these men in these books, these vampires, they didn't exist.
01:14:08.000Not only did they not exist, they didn't make sense.
01:14:11.000Like the main one, that one that, you know, there's Kristen, whatever the hell her name was, and Ed, whatever the fuck his name is, Rob, whatever the fuck his name is.
01:14:18.000I don't know any of those references, but carry on.
01:14:20.000The guy was supposed to be like 90 years old or something like that.
01:14:25.000He got like in the Spanish plague is when he died.
01:14:31.000But he has to still go to high school because when he became a vampire he was like 17. So he has to show up and go to high school with all normal people.
01:14:38.000But he goes to high school in the Pacific Northwest because it's never sunny out.
01:17:50.000Rallying up the forces and you were kind enough to tweet it and just, you know, your tweet got me something like a hundred thousand views.
01:17:56.000And then I communicated with her because I wanted to send her a signal that, you know, there are some of us that still have testicular fortitude that are willing to, I mean, in academia.
01:18:04.000You shouldn't even say testicular fortitude.
01:18:06.000What about your women, YN, counterparts, compatriots?
01:18:12.000And so, you know, I just wanted to tell her that some of us were supporting her.
01:18:18.000Yeah, I read it and I thought it was really disturbing.
01:18:21.000I thought it was really disturbing because it seems so common.
01:18:25.000That's the most disturbing aspect of it.
01:18:26.000It's not some unusual occurrence where kids are freaking out about nothing and overreacting where you'd look at it like, what is this?
01:18:38.000It's the idea that looking at data and looking at the realities of the climate of free speech on these campuses and how it's suppressed and it's not free speech.
01:18:55.000This issue of how cowardly most academics have become, and I say this realizing that I'm going to piss off many of my colleagues, I'm astonished how academics who are in the business of engaging in public discourse are so tepid because they've been silenced into fear.
01:19:13.000And I mean, I see it in many, many different ways, but I'll just share one example, which I think I shared in another show recently.
01:19:19.000So I put up a clip on Facebook of an Iraqi astronomer who was arguing that in the Quran it says that the Earth is flat and it's clear that the Earth is flat.
01:19:32.000So I shared that clip to demonstrate sort of the lunacy that religious dogma can have on an otherwise supposedly intelligent person.
01:20:07.000She wrote to me saying, you know, don't you think that, you know, it's bad of you to be sharing this?
01:20:12.000Don't you think it's bad that you're sort of stigmatizing them?
01:20:15.000So step for a second and think about what this means, right?
01:20:17.000This scientist colleague of mine was not offended that a fellow scientist would actually hold such a astonishingly false position, right?
01:20:27.000He's a member of the Flat Earth Society.
01:20:29.000Rather, she was offended that I would point to his lunacy.
01:20:33.000So I think that small anecdote really captures the culture of fear that you see on campuses.
01:20:41.000And in a sense, if I can sort of toot my own horn, I'm really a very rare breed, sort of the guy who walks around not caring, saying it as it is, because that's my personality.
01:20:53.000But you also are a very open-minded guy.
01:20:57.000And so when it comes down to the core values that these people promote, whether it is lack of racial insensitivity or racial stereotyping, gender issues, whether it's sexism or homophobia,
01:21:14.000you're on the liberal side of all that stuff.
01:21:17.000So you're essentially a liberal, right?
01:21:21.000If I can say I'm a true liberal, not the liberals that exist today.
01:21:25.000Because the liberals of today, as our common friend Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have said, have a huge blind spot when it comes to certain issues where they fall really on the wrong side of the issue.
01:21:37.000So a true liberal is one who doesn't mince word, who doesn't fall prey to cultural and moral relativism, who doesn't say, well, who are we to judge the cutting off of clitorises of women?
01:23:45.000You can't be a dummy and a good comic, which you are, because as I think we might have discussed before, or maybe we didn't, there is a correlation between being funny and being highly intelligent.
01:23:56.000But you probably have, there's a type of intelligence.
01:26:19.000But what they don't understand is that progressive in the context of the Middle East is very, very different than progressive in the West, right?
01:26:26.000So if you were Jewish, you were, quote, tolerated.
01:26:30.000That means that we'll tolerate you until we no longer tolerate you.
01:26:34.000And hence, that's why we left Lebanon, because we were going to be executed, right?
01:26:37.000So I grew up sort of with a dark secret.
01:27:03.000Dimmi is a second, third-class citizen as enshrined in the Islamic texts for people of the book, meaning Christians and Jews, meaning monotheists, right?
01:27:15.000Not the pagans, not the polytheists, not the Hindus, not the Buddhists, not the atheists, but Jews and Christians.
01:27:22.000Under Islamic law could be afforded protection as long as they pay the jizya.
01:27:27.000That means they pay sort of a pull tax to be protected by their Muslim overlords.
01:27:35.000So in Lebanon, you didn't officially have to pay that pull tax, but what you did is you knew your place.
01:27:42.000So for example, my brother David, who was a...
01:27:44.000You would like this because you're a fighter guy, MMA guy.
01:27:48.000He used to be in the Olympics in judo in 1976. Well, in the early 70s, he had won several Lebanese championships.
01:27:56.000And then one day, he was visited by some guys who told him that, you know, Jew boy, it's time to sort of stop winning, so it's time to retire, or else you might end up at the bottom of a river.
01:28:07.000Then he left to pursue his career in Judo in France.
01:28:10.000This was before the Civil War started.
01:28:13.000When we escaped Lebanon, I mean, literally, we're escaping execution.
01:28:19.000This is the first time that anybody hears this particular story.
01:30:35.000The team filmed for 10 hours to get 90 seconds of material that they had to go to the roughest parts of Paris to get.
01:30:41.000Oh, so they're saying, okay, so this is very similar.
01:30:46.000So what they're saying, I guess, is that they really kind of blew it out of proportion because they edited it down from this 10 hours to get 90 seconds?
01:33:28.000Do you know all Egyptian politics from, say, the 70s?
01:33:32.000Abdel Nasser was a famous pan-Arabist who brought together the Arab world.
01:33:37.000He was an Egyptian president who was viewed as the hero because he was going to sort of unite the Arab world against the colonial powers and so on.
01:33:48.000And so he was this kind of larger-than-life superhero of the Arab world.
01:33:52.000When he died in 1970, As often happens in the Middle East, there are all these incredibly sort of violent demonstrations on the streets.
01:36:01.000But once Israel came about in 1948, it just made it that much more precarious for Jews to live in Libya and in Iraq and in Egypt and in Syria and in Lebanon.
01:36:09.000And so there'd be these mass exoduses of Jews from Arab lands, sometimes forced, other times by choice because it just became untenable for Jews to be there.
01:36:20.000We were part of the last wave of remaining Jews because we were very entrenched within, you know, Lebanese society.
01:36:28.000But then once the Civil War started, it just wasn't possible to be there.
01:36:32.000In Lebanon, you had these internal ID cards that you carried around, like a passport, but internally, that stated your religion on it.
01:36:41.000So in the context of the Lebanese Civil War, where they would set up these roadblocks, these militia would set up roadblocks, if you get to a roadblock and somebody says, in Arabic, you say, give me your ID card.
01:36:53.000Well, that ID card has your religion on it.
01:36:57.000If you're the wrong religion, it's goodbye.
01:36:59.000Well, that was what's going on with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq.
01:37:55.000I think that much like small towns you grow up in, if you go back to it, you go, Jesus, these fucking assholes are still hanging around the high school, you know, being annoying at the gas station.
01:38:10.000They have not moved past like the rest of the world has.
01:38:13.000And it seems like with a lot of these religions...
01:38:16.000They're so rigid in their ideology and the standards of their behavior and the classifications of the individuals that are involved in it that it's almost inescapable.
01:38:25.000These rigid ideologies seem like it's...
01:38:29.000Any idea of progressive thinking or progressive thought, it's almost...
01:39:21.000The people who have the red stickers start speaking to each other.
01:39:27.000So you're taking a completely random cue And you're forcing people to now assort along that queue, right?
01:39:34.000Now it no longer matters what my sexual orientation is or whether I'm Muslim or Christian or Jewish.
01:39:39.000It's red people band together versus blue people.
01:39:42.000There are various versions of this experiment that have been done in classic social psychology.
01:39:47.000But what that speaks to is this This inescapable trap of coalitional psychology.
01:39:55.000And that's what happens in the Middle East.
01:39:57.000Everything is viewed through the prism of my faith, and anybody who's not my faith is the other.
01:40:03.000And the other is not to be trusted, is to be hated, is to be scorned out.
01:40:08.000Now, that doesn't mean that every single person subscribes to that, but it certainly means that the narrative, the religious narrative, certainly condones that.
01:40:16.000Yeah, with rigid ideologies and tribal behavior, and then add that to a very harsh environment, physical environment, where it's just unforgiving, it's real hard to move past that.
01:40:27.000It's real hard to find forgiveness and enlightenment and see.
01:40:31.000As a matter of fact, that was one of the things, it's another issue that I believe it was Michael Shermer who wrote an article about the difference between Islam and some of the other religions, is that they never went through the enlightenment.
01:40:43.000Well, I think one of the problems, one of the...
01:40:45.000You now see many vociferous public intellectuals that are coming out to call for an Islamic reformation.
01:40:54.000But that's actually been happening for 1,400 years.
01:40:56.000The problem is, it's easy to call for a reformation if you assume that there's something to be reformed.
01:41:02.000If you think it's perfect, there's nothing to be reformed.
01:41:04.000You're an apostate for even considering that.
01:41:06.000But if you're going to reform it, how do you go about doing that?
01:41:09.000When one of the tenets, the starting tenets, is that in Arabic you say...
01:41:15.000meaning every single letter of the Quran is immutable, is eternal, and is perfect.
01:41:23.000Well, how can you have an exegesis, how could you, exegesis, like, I'm not pronouncing it right, but like, how could you interpret text or reinterpret text when in reality you doing that becomes a form of apostasy, sacrilegious,
01:41:40.000In the context of the other Abrahamic religions, There was the capacity for the light of reformation to squeeze its way into those little holes so there could be new interpretations and so on.
01:41:52.000In Islam, it's a bit more of a challenge.
01:41:54.000So what about people that are Islamic reformers, who are the members of the people?
01:42:01.000There are people today that consider themselves Muslim, but also are atheists.
01:42:06.000There are people that consider themselves Muslims, like you consider yourself a Jew, but you're an atheist.
01:42:11.000What about those people that aren't so ideologically rigid?
01:42:40.000Listen, I've engaged people in various forms where we start chatting and then I'll quote something from, say, do you know who Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is?
01:42:48.000He's the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the foremost leaders of the Sunni sect as a religious scholar, right?
01:42:59.000I mean, all the perfect right pedigree from an Islamic scholar's perspective.
01:43:29.000So if you have so much duplicity in your discourse that guys who by definition are leaders and experts of Islam who are then being, you pretend that they're not Muslim because they say something that you find objectionable,
01:43:44.000then how can we have an open and honest discourse?
01:43:53.000I think we fix it by having people who have the courage, as some of your guests have, and maybe I can include myself in this group, who are open, who are honest, who are reasonable, who are not filled with hate, who are dispassionate.
01:45:37.000He basically was arguing that he came up with every single possible cause that you could think of other than religious fervor to explain why people move 4,000 miles away to join ISIS. It was due.
01:47:26.000Would seek out to murder people that don't agree with those thoughts any rational person would go.
01:47:31.000Well, that's crazy That's these people are fucked like this is bad We can't tolerate this but once you start calling it anything whether you call it Islam or just fill in the blank make up your own name for it and then that becomes an oppressed segment of our civilization and Or at least thought of as an oppressed or boxed into that political sort of segment where you're not supposed to shit on it because it's thought to be marginalized already.
01:48:17.000In most of those 57 countries, they constitute an extraordinary majority, if not complete majority, right?
01:48:23.000So this narrative that Muslims are marginalized is really laughable because if you think about Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and on and on and on.
01:49:22.000These ideas that this ancient script is directly handed down from God, that every word is perfect, if that's not preposterous, you tell me what the fuck is.
01:49:31.000Because I get real confused when people who grew up without any science, I mean, they literally knew almost nothing when they wrote this in comparison to what we know today.
01:49:42.000Obviously back then they were scholars, but In comparison, it's laughable to think that anybody had all the answers in 1200. What year was the Quran written, supposedly?
01:50:11.000Going back to the Jewish guy, I tweeted about it and I shared it.
01:50:17.000And of course, he undoubtedly got his ideas from, I think, reading Leviticus, where, you know, if you lay with another man, you should be killed and so on, right?
01:50:27.000So if I make that claim, right, which is an absolutely correct claim, that for this guy who took his Old Testament very seriously and then went around knifing people, It's an absolutely appropriate claim to make.
01:50:40.000I didn't get attacked as anti-Semitic, right?
01:50:43.000I mean, everybody says, yeah, no kidding.
01:50:44.000An Orthodox Jew, which is very rare for an Orthodox Jew to go around killing people.
01:50:48.000But the fact that I could make that link, there was no blowback.
01:50:53.000But unfortunately, the West has now been convinced that if you ever make that link for one particular religion, then you are hateful.
01:51:01.000That's a profoundly dangerous situation to be in.
01:51:05.000It seems to be legal in this game, you can shit all over Christians.
01:51:17.000Amongst my academic friends, if you repeatedly demonstrate what a bunch of buffoons these Christian hicks are, then that garners you brownie points.
01:51:27.000Yeah, why are Christian hicks any less profound Because Islam wrongly is associated with brown people.
01:52:06.000So it's tough dealing with all this stuff on a daily basis on Twitter and so on.
01:52:11.000Well, people don't want to be judged in a negative way, and especially in this society, in this culture, in this easy-to-act culture, because it's really easy to make a tweet about someone or write a Facebook post about someone or a blog entry about someone attacking them.
01:52:28.000And then once you've done that, boy, you have opened up the floodgates.
01:52:32.000And they will just experience all sorts of pylons from all these other people that either agree or support or don't want to be labeled such themselves.
01:52:40.000So they'll attack you to make sure everyone knows that they're not like you.
01:52:46.000It's interesting that you say this because some of the biggest blowback I've gotten on my public Facebook page has been whenever I've called out Russell Brand on something.
01:52:55.000Apparently, some of my fans are also Russell Brand fans, which I don't know how these two worldviews can coexist.
01:53:04.000But they got really upset that, you know, I was being elitist.
01:53:07.000You know, he's doing a lot of social good.
01:53:10.000Yes, some of his stuff is quackery, but he's a good guy.
01:53:59.000When there's that much hippie pussy coming at you, I think the circulation to your brain, it's very hard for the heart to pump it through all the kisses that he receives on his neck.
01:54:35.000I mean, I don't know her exact story, but apparently...
01:54:37.000She was very, very religious and her original sort of foray into the music industry was all that sort of religious music.
01:54:45.000And then when that sort of didn't stick, then she became, you know, kind of deviated from that and became a pop star.
01:54:51.000But her roots are very much, you know, Christian based.
01:54:55.000Well, you know, I think that a lot of these folks, that they're trying to do good, like Russell, I probably get along with him great if I sat down and talked to him.
01:55:07.000And I think when I hear him talk and I hear the things that he's saying, I feel like he is doing a lot of good.
01:55:13.000I think he is opening up a lot of people's eyes because he is a very public figure, and he is saying a lot of things that make a lot of sense about the financial world, about...
01:55:24.000About war and about the nature of controlling natural resources.
01:55:29.000There's a lot of things that he says that I agree with.
01:55:31.000But I think that when you get caught up in that world, there are some very clear sort of behavior patterns that you have to subscribe to.
01:55:39.000And this Islamophobia label is one you want to avoid at all fucking costs.
01:55:44.000If you get hit with that one, that's a heavy one today.
01:55:47.000It's a heavy one in this politically charged world.
01:55:49.000You know, I made this point on a show recently that in the West, the Islam narrative doesn't yet have the power to literally behead people.
01:56:01.000I mean, if you say some really nasty stuff against Islam in the Middle East, well, we can solve that problem easily.
01:56:39.000But, I mean, that's really what you see.
01:56:41.000There are all these guys, and I don't know if you know about them, I won't even mention them, so I don't give them any airplay, that go around pretty much blaming everything on so-called new atheists.
01:56:51.000So, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are these sort of evil patriarchs.
01:58:02.000Now I'm thinking, in the 21st century, a professor in Canada, now even if my wife were paranoid, even if she's overestimating the threat of the risk, the fact that she has the reflex, the intuition, to actually engage in that behavior,
01:58:20.000to have those thought patterns, as you said, is really demonstrating that the canary is singing in the proverbial coal mine, and it's not pretty, right?
01:58:29.000And now I have two choices at that point.
01:58:31.000I could either tweet whatever it is I was tweeting, right?
01:58:34.000Or I could say, yeah, you know, she might be right.
01:59:30.000As a matter of fact, there's one guy, Ezra Levant, in Canada, who published the original in 2006, and he was taken to a hate speech tribunal in Canada.
02:00:34.000I mean, I agree with you, but when these things come up where your life is at stake, like your wife hanging over your shoulder saying, remember we have children, and these people that have Time Magazine, that own New York Times,
02:00:49.000Los Angeles Times, they think about publishing these things and they just back off.
02:01:25.000So, I can't remember the organization.
02:01:28.000One of the sort of Islamic organizations in the U.S., Gave an Islamophobia award to the slain Charlie Hebdo folks.
02:01:40.000So not only did those people die for drawing cartoons, they were smeared post-mortem.
02:01:49.000I mean, it's a level of diabolical grotesqueness that's unimaginable, right?
02:01:55.000I mean, let them at least die in peace, right?
02:02:00.000So this is a real big battle of ideas, and we all have to weigh in on it.
02:02:05.000And I think that there's a lot of folks that do not want to die like that, and they also don't want to be confused with those folks that were drawing these cartoons.
02:02:14.000They don't want to be lumped in in any way, shape, or form.
02:02:17.000So they will come out against it a la Ben Affleck in a very strong fashion.
02:02:23.000They will let everyone know that they are not on that team.
02:02:27.000They do think it's racist, without any consideration whatsoever for the overall effect of those words, of calling something like that Islamophobic, or what is Islamophobic?
02:02:41.000A fear of an ideology that is so rigid they'll kill you for a cartoon.
02:02:47.000If that doesn't scare you, if you're not phobic of that, it seems to me, and I'm not saying you shouldn't be Muslim, you should be whatever the fuck you want, but as soon as it comes down to killing people over cartoons, we have a very weird problem on our hands.
02:03:00.000And when we're dealing with an entire chunk of the Western world that thinks that that's okay, That should be overlooked, but you can shit all over Christians or shit all over Mormons or shit all over anybody else.
02:03:30.000So, I mean, I don't know if you've heard the term bigotry of lowered expectations, or there are different versions of bigotry of softened expectations.
02:03:38.000The idea is that somehow, you know, Islam should not be held to the same standard as every other ideology, because, you know, they'll go crazy.
02:03:50.000So when I gave you earlier the example of the Iraqi scientist who said that the earth is flat, and the lady writes to me, well, why are you criticizing this guy?
02:04:01.000Because she's saying that somehow this guy doesn't have the capacity to be criticized.
02:04:06.000Whereas when I criticized the rabbi that I went to visit, this is a true story.
02:04:11.000I was invited to a rabbi's house for Shabbat dinner, Sabbath dinner.
02:04:15.000And as I enter the house, he introduces me to everybody.
02:04:18.000He says, well, this is a professor, blah, blah, blah.
02:04:20.000He studies evolution, but everybody knows that evolution has been falsified, so I'm not sure what he studies.
02:04:26.000Well, that guy was being an idiot, right?
02:04:28.000Now, how come when I criticize this rabbi, it's perfectly fair game?
02:04:33.000How come when I criticize the Republican senator who denies evolution because of his Christian faith, because he's a young earth creationist, That's perfectly fair.
02:04:42.000But if I criticize the Iraqi astronomer because he believes that the Earth is flat, that's racist?
02:07:12.000I think there's certain psychedelic drugs that could help people alter their perceptions of this world and give you a reset, and that's what they do.
02:07:21.000I mean, I think this is a very long conversation that I've had many, many times on this podcast, and we could have it some other time maybe if you would like to, off air or whatever, but there are...
02:07:32.000There are psychedelic drugs that are most likely the root of all religious experiences.
02:07:36.000In fact, there's a scholar out of Jerusalem, a pretty famous guy, I forgot the argument, but what he's essentially saying is that the burning bush that Moses described was most likely the acacia tree, or the acacia bush,
02:07:52.000which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is the most potent psychedelic drug known to man.
02:07:58.000And I've experienced this particular drug.
02:08:00.000And this particular drug gives you a very intense feeling of joining with the mother, with communicating with God, with getting in contact with some intelligent power, some intelligent mind,
02:08:17.000something that is above and beyond what exists in our normal dimension that we exist in.
02:08:24.000It's filled with complex geometric patterns that communicate with you telepathically.
02:08:33.000And one of the things that happens in these DMT trips is that they give you...
02:08:40.000Like lessons of how to live life and the lessons all seem to...
02:08:44.000You never have like these psychedelic DMT trips where they tell you what you need to do is rape more and beat the fuck out of people and steal as much shit as you can.
02:10:31.000And also, I think the only version in Aramaic, it was found in these clay pots in Qumran in like 1940-something.
02:10:41.000It took forever for them to decipher these things.
02:10:43.000And this guy, John Marco Allegro, worked on them for 14-plus years, and he was the only agnostic on the committee that was assigned to decipher it.
02:10:53.000He was originally an ordained minister.
02:10:55.000And over time, he became disenchanted with the idea of religion when he found all these contradictions in religion and these comparisons to other texts, and he realized that a lot of this is probably bullshit.
02:11:06.000And so he wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
02:11:10.000And after 14 years of deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was his interpretation that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding, that what it was originally about Was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
02:12:31.000So that these people that would experience these would have these intense transformative trips and without any science, without any knowledge of what the components of these mushrooms are, which is very similar, by the way, to human neurochemistry.
02:12:47.000DMT is NN-dimethyltryptamine and that exists in the human brain.
02:12:52.000It's produced by the liver and the lungs and They now have proven, due to this guy, Dr. Rick Strassman's work, he wrote this great book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule.
02:13:01.000He's a professor of the University of New Mexico and got DEA approved clinical tests on subjects using DMT. And this Cottonwood Research Foundation that he helped start has proven that it's produced in the pineal gland of live rats.
02:13:17.000And what the pineal gland is, the third eye.
02:13:20.000In reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens.
02:13:23.000I mean, it literally is in the center of the brain where the third eye is in Eastern mysticism.
02:13:28.000It's producing this intense psychedelic drug.
02:13:31.000And that's what this Hebrew University researcher Moses was tripping at Mount Sinai.
02:13:38.000I obviously don't know this literature.
02:13:40.000Is he viewed as a sort of outlier quack?
02:13:43.000You would have to, like, research it and find out more about it, because I did a cursory examination, because I'm so familiar with the drug, it only makes sense to me.
02:13:52.000This is, he visited the Amazon and drank ayahuasca, and he has this idea that that is what this was probably all about, because ayahuasca has been, they believe, it's very difficult to find out what, when the Amazonian indigenous people were drinking this brew,
02:14:10.000but ayahuasca is a form of DMT. And much like the acacia bush is very rich in DMT, thousands of plants are rich in DMT. DMT exists in plants.
02:14:21.000But what they're doing with this ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT because it has one plant that has DMT and another plant that has something called an MAO inhibitor because DMT is broken down in the gut by something called monoamine oxidase.
02:18:13.000So, he did a content analysis where he showed that polyandrous depictions are much more common in porn movies, meaning one woman with multiple men, right?
02:18:35.000So then these other researchers came along and said, well, how can we test this?
02:18:38.000So what they did is basically they asked men to take one of two images home, either with women having sex or one woman with multiple guys, polyandry.
02:18:50.000And then masturbate to those images, and then bring back their sperm to the lab to be evaluated, or as I like to say, the fruits of their manual labor.
02:19:02.000That the sperm that originated from the masturbations to polyandrous images had greater motility.
02:19:12.000In other words, they were more vigorous, they moved a lot more, which supported the idea of sperm competition.
02:19:17.000And this is exactly what you get in animal husbandry, right?
02:19:20.000When you want your stud to be riled up to have sex, you often will show another male having sex with a female, and then this will get the rise out of him.
02:19:30.000So this explains, if you like, the disconnect between how come men are so desirous to have sex with many women at once, and yet that's what you would think would be depicted in porn movies, and that's not what you get.
02:19:42.000You get a lot more of two, three guys on one woman.
02:19:45.000So now I have elucidated the mysteries of porn for you.
02:19:49.000That makes sense on a biological level because the more promiscuous the females are around men, the larger their testicles are because their testicles grow, right?
02:20:01.000The testicles grow and they produce more sperm because of the competition.
02:20:04.000As a matter of fact, so that, let me jump on that.
02:20:06.000So if you look across primates at the size of the testicle of the males of that species, As a function of female promiscuity in that species, you see a perfect correlation.
02:20:36.000Precisely because it's an adaptation to female promiscuity within that species.
02:20:40.000Humans are closer to the chimp end of the scale.
02:20:44.000Now, speaking about the thought police and all this BS stuff that you see on campuses, when I describe those particular studies, the feminists in the crowd will be very, very pleased because then I'm demonstrating that women can be promiscuous.
02:21:03.000If on the other hand, I might five minutes later say, yeah, but when it comes to sexual variety, men have a slightly greater penchant for sexual variety than women, then I suddenly become Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor.
02:21:18.000So basically, the evolutionary finding that I discuss Is either liberating to the feminist if it fits with the narrative, or it is a form of patriarchal sexist BS if it doesn't fit there.
02:21:32.000And that, again, is the problem with what you see on campuses, right?
02:21:35.000Rather than an open, honest discourse about the veracity of scientific findings, we judge these findings as a function of our pet ideology.
02:21:44.000The pet ideology when it comes to gender identification and gender identities.
02:21:49.000I think that there's a real interesting point to be made with that when it comes to science, too, because one of the things that's always being touted about is diversity in science and gender diversity in science, but when it comes to what people actually want to do...
02:22:29.000I'm so happy you mentioned toy preferences because that's one of my favorite examples to demonstrate the lunacy of the whole social constructivist stuff.
02:22:47.000Of how gender role socialization happens, right?
02:22:50.000Johnny is taught to play rough with G.I. Joe.
02:22:53.000Linda is taught to play nurturing with the pink doll.
02:22:55.000And that starts the cascade of arbitrary sexist gender role socialization.
02:23:00.000So I decided that I wanted to take that premise on and I wanted to bring data from a very, very broad range of fields to completely dismantle this bullshit.
02:23:09.000So if you take children who are in the pre-socialization stage of their cognitive development, I think?
02:23:35.000If you take other species, you take vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys, and you take infants of those species, it replicates the sex specificity of toy preferences of human infants.
02:23:47.000If you take little girls who suffer from something called an endocrinological disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, This is a disorder that masculinizes little girls.
02:24:00.000It masculinizes their morphology, their physical traits, but it also masculinizes their behaviors.
02:24:06.000Guess what happens to their toy preferences?
02:24:21.000So, in other words, basically what happens in Sweden is that the government has systematically tried to completely eradicate, as a big social experiment, any gender markers.
02:24:41.000I mean, I don't speak Swedish, but that's what I hear.
02:24:44.000And there's a scale that's developed by a gentleman called Hofstede, where he ranks the countries from around the world on this gender score, and Sweden is off the chart on its femininity.
02:24:58.000And so if you now go to that country and study, it's a perfect field experiment, right?
02:25:04.000Because they've spent 40 years trying to eradicate arbitrary sexist gender stereotypes, and therefore you should see that maybe the toy preferences would now be no longer like everywhere else.
02:25:15.000Guess what you find in those countries?
02:25:17.000It's exactly the same as anywhere else.
02:25:20.000If you go to 3,000 years ago to funerary arts, like on funerary monuments where little children are depicted in ancient Greece, and you study how the children are depicted, the little boys are shown with wheels and trucks and so on.
02:25:35.000Not trucks, but like wheelbarrow stuff.
02:25:40.000You could study cultures in various areas of Africa, indigenous cultures, as has been done by a French anthropologist, and the exact same behaviors manifest themselves.
02:25:50.000That just shows you how long we've been under the oppressive thumb of the patriarchy.
02:26:12.000So the 2D, 4D is the length of the ratio of your index finger to your ring finger.
02:26:18.000And it is a sexually dimorphic trait, meaning that men have much longer ring fingers than index fingers, whereas women, the two fingers are roughly the same length.
02:26:28.000Why is this important to this discussion?
02:26:30.000Because that morphological feature is actually shaped in utero as a function of how much testosterone you've been exposed to in utero.
02:26:40.000Therefore, what some researchers have done is they've looked at the digit ratio of little boys and then linked that to their play pattern behaviors.
02:26:52.000Little boys who have more masculinized digit ratios have more masculinized toy preferences.
02:26:58.000Same thing has been done, by the way, with actually circulating testosterone.
02:27:02.000You take seven-day-old children, and until six months old, you measure their testosterone, and testosterone level predicts toy preferences.
02:27:22.000It's very uncomfortable for me that people want to ignore that and put this all on cultural ideas and stereotypes that people subscribe to because they don't want their child to be ostracized by the community.
02:28:06.000But I just also don't think that we're necessarily evil, either.
02:28:09.000I mean, if some men do evil shit, it doesn't mean that men are evil.
02:28:13.000And if boys like trucks or girls like dolls, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with either one of them.
02:28:20.000But it is wrong when we try to ascribe or prescribe...
02:28:25.000When we try to put that into some sort of an ideological box, and we dismiss it or we categorize it as being a part of the problem with our culture, when it's so clearly a natural thing.
02:28:39.000Well, I think it stems, this lunacy, and I'm not sure if we discussed it last time I was on the show, but this lunacy, I think, comes from a good place.
02:29:33.000And the example that I love to give to drive that point home, some of your viewers might have heard me say it before, it's the cake metaphor.
02:29:40.000So if you take a cake, you take all the ingredients of the cake.
02:29:43.000Here's the baking soda, here's the flour, here's the eggs, here's the sugar.
02:30:35.000Also, just another point, for example, men have an evolved desire to seek status.
02:30:43.000That's the biological imperative because women desire status in men.
02:30:47.000But now the way Joe and Gad go about instantiating that evolutionary imperative is completely different as a function of their idiosyncratic talents.
02:30:57.000That shows you that it's not determined, right?
02:30:59.000It's not that we both have to become comics and that's the only way to gain status.
02:31:05.000What is common to both of us is we both aspire to To ascend the social hierarchy.
02:31:11.000That's the common biological imperative.
02:31:13.000How we go about it is completely determined based on your unique personhood.
02:31:17.000So again, there's nothing deterministic about it.
02:31:20.000What do you think it is about the current climate where people want to ignore all these biological markers like you were talking about with children and gravitating towards certain toys and testosterone versus estrogen in babies?
02:31:35.000What do you think it is about people that want to avoid these things, ignore this data?
02:31:42.000It's the fact that it's very, very hopeful, or the narrative is very hopeful, to assume that we all start with equal potentiality, with an app that makes us completely indistinguishable.
02:31:55.000That's a very hopeful message because it basically says that we are infinitely malleable, right?
02:32:00.000You know, had Joe had a different upbringing, maybe he would have been Michael Jordan.
02:32:08.000I was just saying about how good a basketball player could be.
02:32:11.000There are unique realities about the random combination of genes that made Lionel Messi that makes it such that, notwithstanding the fact that he trains a lot, much harder than most other people, He is endowed with unique talents that not every other kid would have been privy to those talents.
02:32:31.000I always bring that point up when I talk about Jon Jones.
02:36:02.000Because kids today are growing up listening to conversations like this and realizing how retarded these 20-year-olds are.
02:36:07.000And they're going, I want to be that when I get older.
02:36:09.000I want to look at things for what they really are.
02:36:11.000And I think that as they get to that position, this new crop will have grown up and come out of this dark hole that is the clan that grew up with social media.
02:36:55.000But the number of people that they ultimately are communicating with is a very restrained small number, right?
02:37:00.000But by coming on these types of shows, that's why I think we were talking earlier about coming out of your shell, engaging in the public discourse, weighing in on these issues.
02:37:09.000I always debate some of my colleagues, many of whom are very much in the ivory tower, right?
02:37:16.000We only communicate with other members of the clergy, right?
02:37:21.000With other members of our restricted class of highbrow.
02:37:25.000And I think that that's not really what the job of a professor is.
02:37:56.000That have heard of my evolutionary psychology work as applied to consumer behavior and so on.
02:38:01.000Through just having been on your show, it will probably take me 10 careers before I could reach as many people through some other forum.
02:38:09.000And so I agree with you in that sense that these types of forums are profoundly important.
02:38:14.000I only wish that more academics would actually have the courage to start coming on these types of social knowledge.
02:38:19.000Well, it's very dangerous for them, unless they're financially independent in these environments that we have today.
02:38:24.000I mean, you could cherry pick a million things that I've said in this show and take them out of context and paint me out to be some sort of a monster.
02:38:31.000That's just the nature of having a conversation with someone where you're joking around, whereas if you take it and put it in quotes in print, It's more controlled.
02:38:42.000You take something out of the context of the conversation and put it in print, and you can infer all sorts of different ways that this person's trying to communicate that could be construed as being offensive.
02:38:57.000The difference between back then and now is now you could always just go on a podcast and talk about You could always write a Facebook blog and explain yourself in great detail with no editorial input whatsoever.
02:39:10.000No one can come along and take away from it.
02:39:12.000You know, I've talked to many people that have written things and then had those things, even published in online magazines, had those things heavily edited.
02:39:20.000And chopped up and even had words put in their mouth.
02:39:23.000I had a dispute with this journalist and we were talking about something.
02:39:37.000I've experienced something similar to that on several occasions.
02:39:40.000So one time a guy called me when my trade book came out.
02:39:42.000The book has pornography in its title, The Consumer Instinct, in its subtitle.
02:39:46.000And he really, I mean, the key point he wanted to get to was that Professor Saad argues that there is a gene for porn, which, of course, I'm not at all arguing that.
02:39:57.000So I kept repeatedly explaining to him that to explain the evolutionary basis of why men might enjoy porn doesn't suggest that there is a set of genes in your genome that code for porn preferences.
02:40:12.000I explained, I said, please don't, next day, you know, exactly what he wanted to write.
02:40:27.000They're trying to get people to pay attention to it, and that's what they do.
02:40:30.000And they can do it for now, but this is a transitionary time, between this time that we're at now, where there is still this, a bit of cloudiness.
02:40:37.000There's a bit of fog in the air of information.
02:40:40.000Sometimes it's hard to find out exactly what the fuck is going on.
02:40:44.000But that fog is very, very close to being lifted, and sheer intent, I think, will be displayed.
02:40:49.000It'll be a part of discourse in a way that I don't think has existed before in the near future.
02:40:55.000I think you're going to be able to know a lot more about what someone's trying to portray just in the next decade or so than we've ever known in the past.
02:41:06.000That you have, the transparency, not just in your words and how you are able to communicate and describe things, but also in how you're able to defend those things if something comes up.
02:41:23.000If somebody misquoted you, and I've had that happen before, A long time ago in like 99, this woman wrote an article about my show or one of my CDs.
02:41:33.000She did a review of my CD and not just took me out of context, but completely misquoted me and changed the words of my bits to make them horrible.
02:41:44.000And I had a conversation on the phone with her with my publicist.
02:42:55.000You know, that some guy could listen to you talk about genes and pornography and how, you know, men could be more attracted to pornography and go, oh, I know how to make this fucking salacious.
02:43:05.000I know how to make that guy look like an asshole.
02:43:08.000I'm just going to say, this professor thinks there's a gene for pornography.
02:43:59.000We're not for the mediums that are now afforded to us.
02:44:04.000And so that's why I feel like a kid in a candy store to appear on all these shows because it offers me a voice to spread memes, right?
02:44:11.000I mean, I consider my job as a meme creator, meme propagator.
02:44:16.000And so any way that I can do that, including coming on this brilliant podcast...
02:44:20.000I consider myself unbelievably fortunate, and I don't see why other academics don't see the value in that.
02:44:25.000Well, I think they will eventually, and some do.
02:44:27.000I mean, I've had quite a few on now, but I think that what we're dealing with is a new thing.
02:44:32.000What we're dealing with is this completely new pathway for information to travel.
02:44:37.000And it has to be kind of recognized and accepted, and it's slowly being done so.
02:44:41.000Like, there's a sign in front of the comedy store in one of the hotels, like, you know, they paint the sign, like a billboard on the entire side of the hotel, and it's a YouTube channel that has millions of subscribers.
02:44:51.000So this woman's YouTube channel, I've never heard of her before, but she's got millions of subscribers.
02:44:55.000And there's a few of those that YouTube has put up all around the city, and...
02:44:59.000What they're getting for each individual video that they put out is very similar to what a hit cable show gets.
02:46:33.000They can follow me on Twitter at Gadsad.
02:46:36.000G-A-D-S-A-A-D. They could go to my YouTube channel, which is Gadsad again.
02:46:42.000And you have a great YouTube channel, by the way, where you sit down and you talk about a lot of things and you speak unedited in front of the camera and express yourself.