The Godfather is back and better than ever! Joe Rogan is in Los Angeles visiting his daughter and his son-in-law. They talk about the blizzard that's going on in Southern California and how to deal with it. Joe also talks about being a hypocrite and how he deals with online haters. And, of course, the Godfather talks about his new book, "The Consuming Instinct" and what it teaches us about human nature. Also, he gives us a signed copy of one of his new books, "Gift Giving" by The Godfather, which is out now! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! You can also join the FB group and join the conversation by using the hashtag , and on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! and Good Luck Out There! Timestamps: 5:00 - How to Deal with the Blame It On the Weather 6:15 - What's the Worst Thing You've Ever Done? 7:00 8:30 - How To Deal With a Bad Weather Day 9:20 - What Would You Do with the Weather? 11:40 - What s the Worst Weather Day of Your Life? 12:00 | What's a Good Day? 15: What's Your Worst Day of the Week? 16:30 17: What Are You Gonna Do You Can Do with It? 18:15 19: How Can I Give Me a Drink or Don t I Can I Have It Better Than That? 21:50 - How Will I Deal With It Better? 26:30 | How I'm Gonna Deal With This? 27:40 29:10 - Is There Any Good Thing I Can Have It Any Other Idea? 30: What Would I Do It Better Next Time? 32:00 Is There's A Little More Than That's My Reaction To That's Not Enough? 35:40 | Is It's Not Really That Good? 36:00 -- Is There A Good Thing? 37:00 Can I Get More Than I Can Help You Help Me Out? 39:40 -- Is It Better than That Or Not? 45:30 -- I Can't Wait?
00:02:04.000I try to avoid them, but once in a while I get sucked in and they can piss me off.
00:02:09.000Well, I always equate it to snake venom.
00:02:12.000It's like if you get a little bit of snake venom, you get immune to it, you get accustomed to it, whereas if you get a big burst of it, it can poison you.
00:02:20.000So if you just get a little bit of it every now and then, when a big burst comes your way, like someone calling you a cheap Jew, you go, you motherfucker.
00:02:30.000You just realize there's a lot of people out there that a lot of the reason why they're saying these mean things is because they're trying to find something that they can say that'll get you to respond.
00:03:08.000So these guys then, because I've blocked them, start going around saying, well, you know, he's supposedly a proponent of freedom of speech, yet he blocks me, as though I'm the purveyor of freedom of speech, right?
00:03:21.000I mean, I'm not allowed to come to your house.
00:03:24.000Break into your house and start calling you names, and if you stop me, I accuse you of not supporting free speech, right?
00:03:30.000But in their minds, if I block them simply because I no longer want to engage them, I am being a hypocrite because I'm not supporting their freedom to insult me.
00:03:40.000See, again, I have to go back to what I said earlier.
00:04:10.000So when you get this individual who simply can't modulate his behavior, To even sort of adhere to the most basic social norms once in a while, I just get pissed off.
00:04:47.000So when you have anonymity in the form of, like, you have a Twitter account and it's just an egg and you call yourself Fuck McGee and you just start trolling the gadfather, Makes no sense.
00:04:58.000Well, it's, you know, that's not a normal interaction.
00:05:02.000There shouldn't be a method where someone could just contact you like that.
00:05:07.000Because our bodies and our minds and all our systems, our social systems, they're just not set up for that.
00:05:14.000So it's saying rude things without consequence.
00:05:17.000Basically, you're offering, by the way, an evolutionary argument.
00:05:29.000We don't really have a long history of it.
00:05:31.000I mean, we have a history of just doing this.
00:05:33.000The realistic history, at the extreme level, is 20 years.
00:05:38.00094-ish, 96-ish, somewhere around then, when it started, right?
00:05:42.000But the real history is probably less than 10 of it really being incredibly pervasive the way it is today, like with Twitter and Facebook and all this Instagram comments and things along those lines.
00:06:36.00090% of the world's data today has been created in the last two years alone.
00:06:45.000Well, by the way, a lot of business schools now have programs in data analytics or big data where they try to teach students how to navigate through the complexity of this type of big data sets.
00:06:58.000So it's a really hot field in business schools.
00:10:28.000I bet if you were in a plane and you're flying over the United States and there was a light bulb that went off over everyone's head that jerks off for 12 hours a day.
00:10:45.000I think there's a lot of people out there that get overwhelmed by the possibilities of doing that, like the choice.
00:10:54.000They don't have the discipline to handle that.
00:10:57.000It was actually a conversation that I was having with my friend Duncan.
00:11:00.000The other day about discipline and how important discipline is to living a good and healthy life and that getting the things that you need to get done will allow you to actually enjoy your free time, whereas if you don't get those things done, the free time and these pursuits,
00:11:16.000these things, they almost become obsessions and you kind of dive into them to avoid the pressure of getting those things done and it becomes sort of counterintuitive.
00:12:37.000Where they're just going, come on, you're wasting time, you're wasting effort.
00:12:41.000And also there's a lot of people that are attaching themselves to these ridiculous movements just because they have an identity in that movement.
00:13:27.000It kind of covers the safe spaces and the microaggressions and the trigger warnings.
00:13:33.000And one of the examples that I picked, I really tried to pick some really outlandish examples that should only belong in The Onion.
00:13:40.000One of the examples was some, I think it was some students at University of Oregon Wanted to take down the classic quote by Martin Luther King, you know, the I Have a Dream stuff?
00:13:51.000Because it was insufficiently inclusive.
00:15:47.000It's almost like a preposterous civil war.
00:15:49.000I think, in a sense, our politics in this country have always been a civil war, just by nature of having only two choices, just by the dual party system and this ridiculous idea that there's independent parties.
00:16:14.000I would like to see Bernie Sanders win.
00:16:17.000Not because of his financial policies, which I think are ridiculous, but I think his social policies are interesting.
00:16:22.000And what I should clarify, here's what's ridiculous about his financial policies.
00:16:27.000Don't make more taxes, because more taxes just means more government.
00:16:32.000And more government is not what we fucking need right now.
00:16:34.000If you want to organize charitable institutions that will legitimately help people, and have people donate money, and have people work towards, you know, like, these donations will actually take away from your taxes.
00:16:47.000Let's figure out some way where we make it beneficial for people to be charitable.
00:16:53.000Take some of the money that we're spending on shit that we really don't need to spend money on.
00:16:57.000Some subsidies that we probably don't need that are benefiting gigantic corporations and instead use those to help the education systems in poor communities.
00:17:05.000Use those to try to provide jobs and industry in poor communities.
00:18:03.000I just think that it's an insane burden to put on young people, to have them enter into the free market, enter into the world, and be already saddled down by insane amounts of debt.
00:18:15.000I think there's got to be a way around that.
00:18:17.000And I don't think that it's a terrible idea to have publicly funded universities.
00:18:21.000I just don't think it's a terrible idea.
00:18:23.000I don't think it's an insurmountable idea.
00:18:25.000So I like Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways.
00:19:01.000There's this separation between these people that live in these communities that are terrified of the police and they're really worried about being shot all the time, and then everybody else that's on the outside that's looking in and saying, well, if you just followed the law, you wouldn't have those problems.
00:19:21.000And I think he's one of the few guys that's addressing this imbalance, this social imbalance, this cultural imbalance, this economic imbalance that we have in this country in a really radical way.
00:20:01.000I mean, he's not very presidential in his mannerisms.
00:20:06.000You know, I think he's a real successful guy, and I think what he's doing is he's tapping into this real frustration that a lot of people have.
00:20:14.000And there's a lot of people that don't like the bullshit that's involved in politics, or people aren't saying what they really think.
00:21:20.000And then he was talking about how his children were being threatened, and he was worried they were going to get kidnapped.
00:21:26.000It was all this crazy shit, and it got me down a lot of rabbit holes, you know, like conspiracy theory rabbit holes, watching that guy do that.
00:21:34.000But I think that what Donald Trump is, is like a more rabid, informed version of that.
00:21:41.000More informed meaning our culture's more informed.
00:21:44.000Meaning, you know, we're here in the age of the internet where it's...
00:21:48.000If you go out on television and say something about the Federal Reserve, people understand that you're talking about an insane institution now.
00:21:55.000Whereas back then, people are like, what?
00:22:27.000She's spooky in her inability to convey, even if she tried to fake genuine emotions.
00:22:33.000Whereas on the other hand, whether you like him or don't, Trump seems to speak from the heart.
00:22:39.000And so to the extent that a lot of people are disillusioned with politicians, then this guy comes along and I can at least tap into that and hang on that element of his personality.
00:22:49.000So I think that's what explains his success.
00:23:39.000The ostrich brigade is a term that I popularized, which basically refers to folks who have their head deep in the sand so that they can't really accept some of the most basic regularities in the world, right?
00:23:51.000You know, there is no link between Islam and any terrorist act anywhere in the world.
00:23:56.000And to suggest otherwise it'd be Islamophobic.
00:26:30.000But let me, if I could finish my point about Justin Trudeau.
00:26:33.000So Justin Trudeau, at one point when he was a member of parliament, someone had said that things like female genital mutilations and child brides and honor killings was the type of barbarism that we don't need in Canada.
00:27:18.000Have you followed some of our debates regarding allowing the sort of open, well, not open door, but allowing massive number of Syrian immigrants?
00:27:29.000No, I haven't followed your debates, but I see what's going on in other countries.
00:27:32.000Well, so, of course, in Europe, they look at our issue and they sort of say, come on, are you serious?
00:27:38.000We have, you know, 800,000 migrants coming through to Germany.
00:27:45.000Well, look what happened with Cologne, where the mayor of Cologne, after these attacks on New Year's Eve, was telling women to dress different and stay away from men.
00:27:56.000I mean, that is a very culturally diverse area that has existed in a very peaceful way for a long time until all of a sudden they let in all these immigrants and they're having a massive problem with women being sexually assaulted.
00:28:11.000So instead of protecting these women and trying to do their best to...
00:28:14.000Ramp up the police force, or do something to stop it, or make sure the people are safe, or really put out there that, look, you're in a new fucking place, and if you want to assimilate in our culture, you've got to leave these fucking women alone, or we're going to get rid of you.
00:28:26.000Everyone who does anything to women in our country, we're going to get rid of you.
00:28:29.000You can't be here and make people feel unsafe.
00:28:34.000So, one of the reasons why I'm very concerned about the 25,000 that are coming in, people say, well, come on, how many of them are likely to be ISIS members?
00:28:43.000People only think of ISIS members as a danger, right?
00:28:46.000But when you've got 25,000 people of whom a very large majority will adhere to certain values that are perfectly antithetical to ours, right?
00:29:35.000I mean, how do you find out what percentage of those are going to hold views that are grotesque to us and then should we be letting them in?
00:29:46.000I mean, how could you possibly find out what their views are?
00:29:50.000You would have to sit down with each one individually and quiz them and then you would have to verify their claims or their answers.
00:29:57.000Well, at the very least, I would argue that you should never be allowed under the guise of your religious practice to espouse hateful things, right?
00:30:11.000I mean, if you go to a house of worship, and that house of worship is...
00:30:18.000Praying certain things that you and I would consider genocidal hatred, then my right to be free of the genocidal hatred that's coming my way supersedes your right to practice your religion of genocidally hating me.
00:30:34.000And so that simply has to be the rule.
00:30:36.000And if we don't wake up to that reality, we're going to have problems.
00:30:41.000Yeah, I would say that that's a very reasonable statement.
00:30:44.000And I think that there's a lot of people in this country that like to say things like what you were claiming Trudeau said about culture.
00:30:52.000Like how dare you criticize their culture.
00:31:25.000Different cultures are differentially able to engender happiness to more or less people, right?
00:31:32.000So if you are part of whatever it means, Taliban culture, you can on average predict that women in that culture will be less self-actualized than in Western countries.
00:31:44.000That is an empirically demonstrable fact.
00:31:46.000And so the idea that who are we to judge other cultures, this idea of cultural relativism, which is part, which is endemic of multiculturalism, It's profoundly incorrect and it has to go.
00:32:07.000You could look at it in terms of, you know, there's a real good argument that in this country there's less freedom than there is in other countries because more people are in jail.
00:32:15.000You could look at the disproportionate amount of people that are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses in this country and say, well, this country is obviously a fucked up place.
00:32:36.000Not only that, there's a very real thing going on in the world where as the age of information washes upon us, and I think this is the new age of information, the age of pure information, As this washes upon us, we're seeing massive changes in our own country.
00:32:53.000We're seeing massive changes in our political system.
00:32:57.000And I think the social justice warrior thing is sort of a side effect of that, where these disenfranchised people, then some of them may be mentally ill.
00:33:07.000Some of them, let's not say ill, imbalanced.
00:33:11.000Maybe they're radical because they're young and idealist and they haven't looked at all the right ways and then one day they'll balance out like many people have.
00:33:20.000There's many young radicals who become very rational people in their 50s and 60s and whatever.
00:33:26.000This thing is taking place here, and it's also taking place all over the world.
00:33:32.000Well, where information is being resisted, that's where we have problems in the world.
00:33:37.000Where fundamental religious values are superseding the age of information.
00:33:45.000They're squashing people's ability to express themselves, people's ability to try new things, explore new things.
00:33:52.000Their sexual values their identities all those things like as soon as you have like an ancient fucking Scripture some shit that was written on animal skins a thousand years ago like as soon as that is at the head and That takes precedent over everything else because it was supposedly the word of God or who else?
00:34:13.000Someone who talked to God whatever the fuck it is that you got a problem a real problem there because religion Religion in and of itself is an idea, and it's an idea that is one of the very few ideas that we accept that literally has no basis in reality.
00:34:47.000You got a wall that's put up for progress.
00:34:51.000Now, when people develop in that environment, you have stifled people.
00:34:57.000Just like I have a friend and him and his wife, they were Mormons until they were like 40. And then they decided slowly, they lived overseas for a bit.
00:35:08.000And they kind of experienced the world, and it opened their eyes to a lot of different things, and they decided to move away from the church.
00:35:28.000She says, I... Growing up in this really fundamentalist religion, I think I developed a really bad way of looking at things where I'm easily confused.
00:35:42.000Like a charlatan could take her over or a cult member could...
00:35:47.000Chapter 8 of the book that I just gave you...
00:35:50.000It's called Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.
00:35:52.000And basically what I argue there is that there are different peddlers of hope that are successful precisely because they could sell you hope in the areas that are most important in sort of Darwinian insecurities, right?
00:36:04.000How to be a better lover, how to live forever, how to be a better parent, right?
00:36:09.000So all of the key Darwinian pursuits that keep us up at night There is a peddler out there who can give you the recipe, whether he be a self-help guru, whether he be a medical quack, whether he be religion.
00:36:23.000And so that's why those products are so successful, because they peddle us hope.
00:36:28.000Yes, but growing up with religion, especially fundamentalist religion, it cannot be questioned.
00:37:10.000Well, I'm definitely not against multiculturalism.
00:37:12.000I'm against religious fundamentalism on a global scale.
00:37:18.000Because I'm not against God, and this is what people have to understand.
00:37:21.000I would be the last person to tell you I have any idea about something that I have never experienced.
00:37:28.000And what I've never experienced is the afterlife.
00:37:31.000I am open to the idea that this life is one stage in an infinite, fractal, Can I interject?
00:37:50.000Could that simply be the fact that you are finding an alternate way, not through religion, but through some alternate means to Live on forever.
00:38:01.000So I could take this pill called religion that will grant me immortality, or I could do your fractal mumbo-jumbo stuff, no disrespect, and that could still get me to...
00:38:11.000Whereas the reality, the intellectually honest position is that we really have absolutely no evidence.
00:38:17.000This is a very small party that will last, if you're lucky, 85 years.
00:38:21.000And it's profoundly fear-inducing because I want to be coming back on this podcast for the next 4,000 years.
00:38:28.000But it really worries me that I won't.
00:39:26.000Literally, the cells and the carbon from every fucking human being on this planet came from a star that exploded.
00:39:34.000Death becomes life in some sort of strange way.
00:39:37.000And I don't think that it's impossible that that could be the same thing with consciousness, with energy, with whatever the fuck it is inside of us that makes us alive and aware and makes our minds tune in to all of the possibilities and the wonders of the world.
00:39:52.000I don't know if this is the end, but you don't either.
00:39:57.000And as soon as someone comes along and tells you they do know, and this is the only way to the afterlife, this is the only way to heaven, you've got a real problem.
00:40:04.000You've got a real problem because human beings are malleable and you can guide them and you can direct them and you can mold them and you could turn them into religious slaves.
00:40:13.000You could turn them into ideological slaves.
00:40:16.000And we should recognize that from a psychological perspective, from an educated perspective, from a perspective of recognizing cult behavior.
00:40:24.000I was watching this thing on This guy, Steve Hassan, the guy who was on our podcast before, is a cult expert.
00:40:31.000He sent me an email today and I watched this piece on cults and cult behavior and cults on the internet.
00:40:36.000It's terrifying how malleable people's minds are and how someone who's an inscrupulous person or unscrupulous person or someone who has nefarious ideas can convince people to blow themselves up to get virgins in the afterlife.
00:41:15.000And if you think one thing, if you think, I think this is it, carpe diem, live for the day, this is our only shot here, you might be right.
00:41:22.000Or this guy who's done a fucking pound of mushrooms might have come back from the other side and say, listen, I have this idea, and I think that love is eternal, and it goes on forever.
00:41:32.000And what we really are here, we're this being that's trying to figure itself out in this very brief amount of time, and the best we can do is leave behind information.
00:41:41.000We have this wonderful thing called communication.
00:41:45.000The next generation comes along and tries to pick up where the last generation left off, gather up as much data as they can, and then move it forward a little bit before they expire.
00:41:55.000And we keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it until, hopefully, we move towards some level of enlightenment as a species.
00:42:03.000See, I can repackage that and slightly...
00:44:50.000Well, these are really common, you know, and I had this guy Randall Carlson on the podcast a few times and he's dedicated his life to paying attention to the signs of astral impacts all throughout history and all throughout the world.
00:45:47.000Puzzling moments in civilization where you have they'll find things like Gobekli Tepe these beautiful structures that are really complex that are 14,000 years old 12,000 years old they're like who the fuck was building this stuff back then when we thought people were hunter-gatherers and then right after that boom We get hit by rocks Most people die a lot of people die and then they have to regroup again and I think that that That's most likely going to be the end of humanity.
00:46:15.000Just like it was the end of the dinosaurs.
00:48:22.000And so that's an argument that was proposed by Pascal Boyer, where he's basically saying that religion did not specifically evolve because itself it is adaptive, but it piggybacks on other things that have evolved.
00:48:34.000And then a third way to study religion is to just do a content analysis of the narratives within religion.
00:48:43.000So there's a great study done by a Darwinian historian where she looked at, in the Old Testament, how many women are ascribed to a different male in the Old Testament as a function of a status.
00:48:55.000So the higher the status of the male, the more sexual partners he had, which is exactly what you would predict from an evolutionary perspective.
00:49:04.000High status to men confers reproductive success.
00:49:08.000So there are different ways that evolution, and there are several other ways, that can study religion from an evolutionary perspective.
00:49:43.000So listen, you don't want to go to hell, so don't kill people.
00:49:45.000All these things that people have done throughout history, if you look at religion on a global scale, there's some key components to almost all religions.
00:50:04.000And like you were saying, the idea of people living longer and being more successful as a culture, yeah, well, senses of community.
00:50:11.000If you have a sense of community, if you establish community and you establish a bond between people and a higher good or a higher reason to exist...
00:50:52.000The one that is infected versus the one that is not infected, you can't sensorially tell the difference, either through smell, either through sight.
00:51:38.000So there are very, very easy earthly biological reasons to take food taboos, religious taboos, and demonstrate that they have nothing.
00:51:46.000But of course, when I say this in a classroom where there are people who might otherwise be religious, they see it, yet they can't completely follow you.
00:52:48.000But anyways, I think in his book, he talks about, I don't remember the exact number, but he looked at the 613 commandments in Jewish law.
00:52:57.000And some outlandish number, say something like 20% of them, deal with purity rituals.
00:53:05.000And those purity rituals are ultimately means, very earthly means, to try to remove the possibility that you've been exposed to dangerous pathogens.
00:53:14.000So again, you see how something that is cloaked in the robe of religion is ultimately solving a very basic earthly biological problem.
00:53:23.000Well, also, if you talk about sexual...
00:53:30.000Controlling that controls sexually transmitted diseases, which like syphilis and a lot of the really terminal ones, before they had medication for those things, they killed a lot of people.
00:54:09.000If you're around and you see a lot of rabbits, you see rabbits all over the place, and then like three years later there's no rabbits, what happens is rabbits get to a high population level and then they'll develop a disease and they die off.
00:55:05.000And they can just have piglets three times a year, and each time they do it, they'll have a bunch of them, and they'll just overtake places.
00:55:14.000There was a news story on the other day where these people were in their house, and the pigs were knocking over their garbage can and eating up their lawn in a normal residential neighborhood.
00:55:25.000Like, I mean, a pretty crowded neighborhood.
00:55:27.000And these wild pigs are just roaming through the streets now.
00:55:51.000Versus, although on that scale they would be less so, versus elephant, humans, where it, you know, the gestational period, the length of parental investment that is required before you reach sexual maturity as much.
00:56:04.000So it's either a lot of quantity, hoping that a few survive, or much less quantity, but heavily parental investment.
00:56:14.000Whether you are a species that is R or K selected, the reason for the R or K term doesn't matter, has a profound effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species.
00:56:25.000So things, for example, like humans are a bi-parental species.
00:56:30.000So even though males invest parentally less than females in the human context, we are really champion dads.
00:56:37.000I mean, in the greater context of mammals, Human dads are just outlandishly good.
00:58:50.000Well, actually, and it's even been linked to the fact that little boys are encouraged to play rough house and tumble, whereas little girls are dissuaded from doing so.
00:59:04.000And that's what sets them on their trajectory so that Bubba, who plays center for University of Nebraska, can bench press 500 pounds.
00:59:15.000But anyway, so going back to differences across species, so some species are very sexually dimorphic, elephant seals.
00:59:24.000You have a male who's massive, four times the size of a female, or mountain gorillas, right?
00:59:30.000So if you look at the extent to which there is or isn't sexual dimorphism with the species, that itself Perfectly predicts the mating system within that species.
00:59:42.000Meaning, if there is a huge sexual dimorphism, typically the males are bigger than the females, but sometimes you have a sexual reversal species, then you have polygynous mating.
00:59:53.000One male monopolizes sexual access to many females.
00:59:58.000And the reason why they develop that size is because that's the combat that they engage in, where the winner then gets the genetic lottery.
01:00:05.000On the other hand, when you have species where the two sexes are equal-sized, then you have typically monogamous mating, like in the case of some bird species.
01:00:15.000But even there, by the way, even though they're supposed to be monogamous, once in a while they go behind the bush, genetic tests have shown.
01:00:21.000Well, birds are really only, like penguins are a big one that people bring up.
01:00:27.000But even within what you consider to be a monogamous window, there are some tests that show that once in a while we do go behind the bushes.
01:01:12.000Here's an evolutionary explanation for why child abuse happens if there's a step-parent in the family.
01:01:17.000Here's why people might have difficulty staying true to their monogamous unions.
01:01:22.000Then people will get very upset at you because they somehow conflate the fact that you are explaining the phenomenon using science as meaning that you are saying it clears your moral judgment.
01:01:44.000The whole reason why the Mormons set up this compound in Mexico, why they moved to Mexico, is when polygamy was made illegal in the United States.
01:02:57.000So therefore, by creating a system where, okay, not everybody could be guaranteed that their reproductive fitness is going to be assured, but at least their kin selection will be assured.
01:03:10.000I share half of my genes on average with my brother.
01:03:13.000So either I will impregnate the woman, in which case, great, or my brother will impregnate her, in which case I'm still indirectly, not through direct reproductive fitness, but through kin selection, I'm still extending my genes.
01:03:27.000So even in cases where men share a woman, it has to be in the context of all in the family.
01:03:48.000That's called, by the way, an operational sex ratio, if there are imbalances between males and females within a particular niche.
01:03:56.000Sometimes it could be because of certain inheritance structures where it's only the eldest who can have enough money through inheritance so the other guys can't really afford a wife.
01:04:08.000So there are all sorts of institutional reasons beyond sex racial reasons where some men may otherwise be out of the mating market.
01:04:18.000And we know that societies where a lot of men are sitting around sexually frustrated are not going to be societies that are conducive to quiet.
01:04:27.000And so therefore, even in the context where you have something like polyandry, which is something that typically, evolutionary speaking, you wouldn't expect, when it arises, it arises as a response to a real evolutionary problem.
01:04:41.000Most things that you could think of ultimately have some evolutionary explanation.
01:04:46.000And that's why I fell in love with evolution, because The explanatory power that is afforded, once you have that key to understand things via evolutionary thinking, it becomes incredibly powerful.
01:04:59.000And once the parameters and the variables change, the behavior changes to adapt to those parameters and variables.
01:05:55.000And you both would do missions together.
01:05:58.000There's like an intense bond between you guys.
01:06:00.000And, you know, you would just swap wives.
01:06:03.000You would just say, look, you know, the idea is like if you die, if you get shot down and you die, you know, you want your wife to be taken care of by someone who loves her.
01:08:16.000Philip Rushton, he recently passed away.
01:08:19.000He was a Canadian-based psychologist who is probably the preeminent psychologist who studied racial differences and offered evolutionary explanations for why these racial differences might exist.
01:08:32.000And most notably, he had looked at supposed racial differences in intelligence using post-mortem cranial size.
01:08:43.000So the fact is that if the cranial cavity is bigger or smaller, Then you assume that that means the person from this race is more intelligent than that race.
01:08:57.000So anyways, so this guy gets up to present his stuff and he starts putting up slides of black male, black female, white male, white female.
01:09:04.000And you see the crowd is sharpening their knives to lynch this guy.
01:09:09.000And I have to get up and present right after him.
01:09:13.000And I'm thinking that just by proxy, just by being close to him, I'm going to get killed.
01:09:20.000Now, the good news is that immediately after he finished his presentation, out of the about 1,500 people who were there, about 1,425 left the room to find him.
01:09:54.000So usually, you would leave, depending on the size of, I mean, let's say you have 25 minutes, so you might do 20 minutes, leaving five minutes for Q&A. He went to the last second, so that there was no opportunity for questions, and then he sort of, you know, was whisked out.
01:10:10.000And so I was really, really pleased that almost nobody stayed for my talk.
01:10:16.000What's interesting about that is there's certain truths that you're not allowed to explore.
01:10:22.000And you're not allowed to explore the possibility that some human beings may be not as intelligent as other human beings.
01:10:31.000On an individual level or on a group level?
01:11:13.000There's certain things that we don't accept, though, and one of the big ones is intelligence.
01:11:18.000We don't accept that some people could live in a soft world where things are easy and they develop a slow, lazy mind, whereas some people develop in a very tricky world with this constant innovation going on and they develop a sharper mind.
01:11:31.000We resist that because we don't want anyone thinking that they're dumber than other people.
01:11:37.000Well, the point, though, is that I'm not sure that anybody has offered compelling explanation for why there would be selection pressures in environment A versus environment B for there to be greater intelligence.
01:11:52.000But there is some evidence that especially European Jews who have more Nobel Prize awards than anyone else.
01:12:01.000Why do you have to diss me by saying European Jews?
01:12:59.000Why don't you put on the proverbial suit and maybe work with me for a few years before you go on to get your PhD?
01:13:04.000It might be a nice thing for you to get some work experience outside of academia.
01:13:09.000I wasn't really entertaining it, but my mother heard of this possibility.
01:13:15.000And so when I went back to Montreal, she took me aside to one of the rooms and very, very concerned.
01:13:20.000She said to me, remember, if you don't go on to get your PhD, I mean, do you want people to remember you as somebody who's dropped out of school?
01:13:28.000So from her perspective, from the standards that were expected, somebody who would, you know, I'd gotten an undergrad in mathematics and computer science, I'd gotten an MBA. If I stopped at that point, I would be a dropout.
01:13:44.000I have an MBA from a top school, right?
01:13:47.000Now, of course, I didn't do a PhD for my parents' approval, but it just gives you a sense of, Of the type of expectations, the imparting of love for learning, for knowledge, for wisdom, and achievement, that is inbred in you from the minute you come out of the womb.
01:14:06.000So whether there is a genetic component or not, I don't know, but I can certainly say that the environmental component is very alluring.
01:14:17.000I had a good buddy of mine when I was a kid who was Korean who was on the U.S. national Taekwondo team while he was in his residency as a doctor.
01:16:07.000Well, I'll give you a very concrete example, right?
01:16:10.000You were asking earlier, you know, why don't you get a job here?
01:16:13.000Well, listen, by me taking very open positions on topics that are, quote, politically incorrect, I'm not being a careerist.
01:16:21.000If I would shut my mouth about all these issues, Maybe some university that might otherwise be very impressed with my scientific dossier might say, hey, this guy's good.
01:16:31.000But if he's a shit-stirrer, if he appears on Joe Rogan and makes fun of trigger warnings and talks about Islam, well, he's a bit of a loose cannon.
01:16:40.000The amount of input that you can have on a culture based out of teaching a classroom of 100 people or more, whatever it is, in comparison to what you're doing already on your YouTube videos...
01:17:15.000Not only that, it'll exist in perpetuity.
01:17:19.000As long as we have digital content, it'll exist.
01:17:21.000So, there's people listening to this right now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now.
01:17:26.000If they're still alive, if there's still a world to live in 100 years from now, people are going to be listening to this.
01:17:32.000You know, you are literally, you know, music to my ears what you're saying because I just had this conversation recently where I was talking to a university about the importance, actually to a dean, where I was talking about the importance of how do we judge academics.
01:17:49.000I mean, academics are meme creators, right?
01:17:51.000We create memes through our science, but we're also meme propagators.
01:18:33.000Well, university itself, okay, this is not the only way you can learn.
01:18:37.000These ideas that the only way to get an education is to get a degree, to go, to sit in class, to do all the work the teacher prescribes, all the stuff that you have to turn in, and all the papers that you have to do, that's not the only way to get an education.
01:19:08.000Especially when you're dealing with all these fucking assholes in these campuses that are instituting all these ridiculous rules on social behavior and all these social misfits that want to level the playing field and all this nonsense that's going on that's really...
01:20:06.000But the mere fact that they contacted me as one of the prospective people to put together a course for them, a Great Courses course on evolutionary psychology and so on.
01:21:10.000I mean, you go to his YouTube channel, you know, whatever, 900,000 views, 1.1 million, you know, of a lecture that typically would have been viewed by 80 people, right?
01:21:19.000I bet I sent a couple hundred thousand people to those things.
01:21:32.000So he's got research, because you mentioned baboons, showing that in a sort of hierarchical society of baboons, the lower ranked baboons will have higher cortisol levels, will have more stress hormones.
01:21:50.000Intuitively, you might think the opposite.
01:21:51.000You might think that the higher the rank of the baboon, the more stressed he is because he has to defend against all the other dangers and maintain his position and so on.
01:22:00.000So people took this exact study and applied it in an organizational context where they looked at an organizational hierarchy and And took cortisol levels of people in a big organization, I think it was the public health system in Britain,
01:22:17.000the higher the rank of the employee, the lower his or her cortisol level.
01:22:23.000And the argument, so you might say, well, why would that be?
01:22:26.000Wouldn't the person who is higher rank be more stressed?
01:22:29.000I mean, a CEO has to have more stress than the janitor.
01:22:33.000And one of the arguments, at least that they proposed, was the idea of freedom.
01:22:39.000The guy who's at the lowest rung of the hierarchy has to be told when he could go and relieve himself with his bodily functions.
01:22:47.000The amount of free destiny that he has in his daily life is very limited.
01:22:52.000Whereas at least the CEO, even though he's working very hard, He's more master of his daily life.
01:23:01.000I can work 10, 12, 15, 18-hour days, but yet I feel like I'm always free because there's nobody who's telling me what to do at any time.
01:23:08.000And apparently just that has a profound effect on your cortisol levels.
01:23:12.000And the origins of that whole study were originally due to Sapolsky's work with baboons, if I'm correct.
01:23:19.000Well, you know, that finding is mirrored in special ops guys versus enlisted men, versus your average soldier.
01:23:29.000Like, one of the big issues that people have today is PTSD, right?
01:23:33.000And one of the factors in PTSD is people who are waiting for things to happen Versus people who are making things happen.
01:23:41.000Whereas SEALs, Rangers, people that they send in to go and kick ass and take names, those guys have way less stress, which is kind of crazy.
01:23:52.000Way less instances of PTSD and, you know, obviously still tremendously stressful and still a lot of instances of PTSD, but less.
01:24:01.000And the more guys that I talk to that have served will tell you that the reason is that they're active.
01:24:09.000They're the ones who are moving in and doing these things.
01:24:11.000And they're going after these bad guys and hunting them down, essentially.
01:24:15.000Whereas the other people are sitting around the base worrying they're going to get attacked or, you know, staying on their post or driving in a car worrying they're going to hit an IED. Very interesting.
01:24:25.000So let's propose another hypothesis, maybe somebody who's a graduate student might test.
01:25:53.000Have you ever seen the study, and I don't know if we've mentioned it here before, I think it was published in a journal called Emotion, where they looked at, I think it was MMA fighters, whether they smiled or not before the contest.
01:26:06.000Okay, just send me a private message and I'll look for it.
01:26:09.000I can't remember the exact details, but there was some nonverbal cues that were studied prior to a fight that, if I remember the study correctly, were highly predictive of the eventual outcome.
01:26:45.000Well, that makes sense because if you're smiling, it most likely means that you're not really in the game.
01:26:51.000As expected, smile intensity predicted both the outcomes of fights as well as the more detailed measures of in-fight hostility.
01:26:58.000Interestingly, the smiles predicted both reduced hostility from the smiler as well as increased hostility from his opponent.
01:27:07.000In other words, it seemed that both fighters were attuned to the information being communicated in the pre-fight smile.
01:27:12.000These results held even when controlling for existing differences in skill, i.e.
01:27:18.000the betting odds of the fight and strength, height and weight.
01:27:21.000Though don't go drastically altering your gambling strategy just yet, the betting line still did a better job overall in predicting fights compared to just smile intensity.
01:27:31.000Have we talked here about digit ratio?
01:27:43.000I've always – actually, I think I've thought about at some point either asking you or my nephew to get access to MMA fighters to take some measures – That capture how androgenized they are, how much exposure to testosterone they've had.
01:28:01.000Whether it be, for example, through certain facial features, or through their 2D-4D ratio, which is a measure of how much testosterone you've been exposed to in utero.
01:28:13.000And so I actually have a study right now with one of my graduate students, Vlad Irimia, where we're looking at the links between testosterone and extreme sports, using the exact same idea.
01:28:23.000And so I'm, of course, An obvious hypothesis might be that on average, MMA fighters compared to a control normal population, non-fighters, will be more androgynized.
01:28:36.000You would think that that has to be true, right?
01:28:47.000So we moderated by what their trajectory in their career was.
01:28:51.000I think there are a lot of people who enter into mixed martial arts or martial arts in general Because they recognize there's a lot of benefit in trying to overcome extreme challenges and that they're attracted to these things because they get addicted to the rush the adrenaline rush of a challenge and It's very few challenges that are intense as one-on-one competition with another person And I think there's a lot of people who gravitate towards those not necessarily even it seems counterintuitive,
01:29:21.000but You would think that they would be the most violent people or the most angry people, and they're doing that because they want to dominate.
01:29:29.000Well, mixed martial arts is different in a lot of ways.
01:29:32.000First of all, because in boxing, a lot of times you're seeing people that are searching for a way out.
01:29:38.000They're searching for a way out of poverty.
01:29:40.000They're searching for a way out of bad neighborhoods and crime, and they do so through fighting.
01:30:22.000And wrestling is probably one of the most important skills to have, if not the most important in MMA, because the fighter can dictate where the fight takes place.
01:30:30.000If a really strong wrestler takes you down, he can control you.
01:30:33.000Whereas if you're a really good kickboxer, your kickboxing can't really be effective if someone can take you down at will.
01:30:41.000There's the wrestling, which they get in college and they get in high school, which is at least fairly free.
01:30:46.000College, if they have a scholarship, they get it for free.
01:30:50.000But martial arts, like jujitsu and kickboxing and things along those lines, taekwondo, karate, traditional martial arts, it costs money to take those things.
01:30:58.000So you're seeing a lot of very educated people that are getting into MMA. There's a lot of MMA fighters that are extremely articulate.
01:31:04.000Wasn't there a guy who was a biology teacher or something?
01:31:14.000And there's a lot of other very, very intelligent guys who speak multiple languages, you know, really brilliant people.
01:31:21.000So you get—it's a different— Style of fighter, you know, I think there's people out there that are fighting because they were abused as a child, they were bullied, and then they have this anger inside of them and they want to express it.
01:31:35.000So you get a lot of that, but you also get people that just, you know, they're just tough.
01:31:40.000They're just tough and they want to overcome challenges and they get some sort of benefit out of these extreme challenges.
01:31:48.000So I would wonder, you know, I would wonder what the results of that would be.
01:31:53.000I think this is probably an obvious hypothesis, but do you think that if one were to take salivary assays to measure testosterone levels, pre-fight, post-fight, and post-fight, you're looking at the winner and the loser,
01:32:09.000clearly the testosterone scores would sort along whether I won or Oh, sure.
01:32:15.000Yeah, well, also, depending upon how much brain damage they acquired during the fight, that has a pretty significant effect on your pituitary gland, apparently.
01:32:24.000I had, by the way, since you're a professional stand-up comedian, one of my former students, a postdoc, who I think I want to mention, he studied evolutionary roots of humor.
01:32:36.000And so one of the things that we wanted to study when he was doing his postdoc with me, but then he ended up leaving after a year to take a position, anyways.
01:32:43.000Was to use the Montreal Just For Laugh festivals to study the testosterone responses of comedians, you know, prior to getting on stage and then after finishing and to see whether their testosterone response Would be moderated by whether,
01:33:03.000objectively speaking, it was a successful set or not, right?
01:33:07.000I mean, sometimes you get up and you just kill the house.
01:33:09.000Other times, it's death silent, right?
01:33:11.000So will my endocrinological system response track that reality?
01:33:18.000And so that's something that I still, hopefully, will test with some future students.
01:33:32.000I can't imagine there would be any benefit to bombing other than maybe your testosterone would spike because you would need the energy to run away from the crowd.
01:33:42.000Now, let's say when you are doing a show and you feel as though it's not going well, are you ever able to redirect the ship?
01:33:53.000Or is there a point where there's no return?
01:34:08.000Is it that your delivery that day is not working or is it there's something endemic to the crowd that for whatever reason they're just not digging your style?
01:34:37.000There's a lot of variables involved in whether or not you go down with the ship.
01:34:42.000But also, it could be that you didn't address it.
01:34:45.000Sometimes things are going bad, and a guy will address that it's going bad, and they pull themselves out of it, and then it becomes great again.
01:34:53.000I've had bad moments where you address that bad moment, and things snap back, or you just reassess your approach.
01:35:03.000There's a lot of variables involved in stand-up comedy, but ultimately what's going on, I've tried to explain this, and I've gone over this with many, many comedian friends of mine, and we all seem to agree on this, that there's a moment where things are going really well, where the audience is laughing, and you're in the zone, and you're delivering your jokes that you've prepared for a long time,
01:35:21.000everything's done right, and there's a lot of great timing and everything.
01:35:33.000When he's on stage and he's killing and I'm watching and I'm laughing my ass off, what I am doing is allowing him to think for me.
01:35:40.000So I'm allowing him to, you know, if he's talking about having a female president or something like that...
01:35:46.000He's going through his thought process of what it would be like.
01:35:50.000And as he's going through it, I'm not really doing any calculations.
01:35:55.000I'm allowing him to do all those calculations.
01:35:57.000I'm allowing him to take up all of my thought process with his sentences and the images that he's depicting.
01:36:05.000And that's what makes it really funny and the whole audience we're all in it together So there's a community effect of this group hypnosis So we're all laughing because we're all on the same page We're all like these thoughts that he's saying are so funny and we're all going along with it But when someone's bad Or when the joke doesn't work,
01:37:03.000Because you're forced to consider his process, his failures, or her failures, her bad jokes, all those things.
01:37:13.000Do you think there are certain elements of humor?
01:37:17.000I mean, clearly there are culture-specific manifestations of humor.
01:37:21.000Maybe physical comedy is more appreciated in culture A than culture B. But are there specific humor mechanisms that are, or not mechanisms, but, you know, whatever, humor content that would be universally successful?
01:38:34.000You know, unfortunately, and the really super supportive crowds that gather together, it's almost like they got kicked out of the cool playground, so they made their own playground.
01:38:44.000And there's a comedy festival that's going on right now, or supposed to be going on somewhere in New York, where somebody sent me this thing, and I looked at it for a couple seconds, I had to throw it away.
01:38:54.000I just like, I can't even get into this, where...
01:38:58.000They're charging different amounts and different access to people who are white males.
01:39:05.000They want to have as few white males as possible, so they want to make it as diverse as possible, so they're opening it up to people of color, LBGTQ. X, Y, Z. And this is their solution.
01:39:23.000Their solution is to not just have the funniest people that they think are there, regardless of race, color, creed, ethnicity.
01:39:53.000If the best ones turn out to be white men with beards, go with that information and try to figure out why that's the case.
01:39:58.000So from that perspective, are we to assume that I now know what your position is on affirmative action?
01:40:04.000Well, my position on affirmative action is I think it has good intentions.
01:40:10.000I think the idea is to try to stop racism.
01:40:13.000However, if you're getting someone and they become a firefighter, but they're less physically fit and less intelligent than someone who could have gotten the job, but unfortunately the other guy was of Croatian descent.
01:40:56.000I think we should address the core problem, which is why is it harder?
01:41:02.000For people who grow up in African-American communities or Mexican-American communities, why is it harder for them to get a better education?
01:42:10.000I think one of the things that we were talking about earlier that I think is really important is that cultures become patterns and patterns repeat.
01:42:18.000And that these patterns that these people are born into, it's not their choice.
01:42:24.000And we recognize it as someone who wasn't born in that pattern.
01:42:27.000You look at a bad pattern of someone being born, say, like in Baltimore, in an extremely impoverished community that's filled with crime and gang violence, and you go, God, how does this get corrected?
01:42:38.000You know, I had Michael Wood on, who's an interesting guy who was a former cop.
01:42:43.000In Baltimore and a really, really interesting dude.
01:42:45.000And I think he's trying to run for like...
01:42:47.000He's trying to be a police commissioner in Chicago, right?
01:43:04.000Michael Wood was talking about when he was on the podcast was that they had found, I guess, a directive from the 1970s when they were going through the archives of all the shit that they have in Baltimore.
01:43:15.000The police directive from the 1970s was Exactly the same as what he was dealing with in the 2000s as far as the neighborhoods that had drugs, the neighborhoods with crime.
01:43:28.000We're repeating the same patterns over and over and over again and no one has done anything to try to socially engineer Some beneficial change in these communities.
01:43:38.000Instead, they just continue to lock up the same people.
01:43:40.000And I agree with him that it's essentially, at that point, it becomes institutionalized racism.
01:43:48.000And I think that's the issue that needs to be addressed.
01:43:51.000And I don't think that affirmative action is the best way to do it because I think that also it starts to produce this feeling of resentment from people that are more qualified that don't get the jobs.
01:44:05.000Well, and I would think, let's say, for the black applicant who, let's say, goes to law school They will never know whether they went through the whole process simply on their merit or whether they were helped in some way.
01:44:47.000At the end of that process, I won't absolutely know for sure whether it was strictly based on what I wanted, which is the merit of my dossier, or whether there was something that helped me along the way because of this institutionalized affirmative action.
01:45:03.000I guess it could be, but I would assume that by the time you've gone through university, you know, now you're talking about a much higher level of education, and it should be pretty...
01:45:13.000I hate to use the term black and white, but it should be right there.
01:45:16.000I mean, you should see their grades, and you see...
01:45:18.000Professors are hired as a function of these things.
01:46:03.000So I'm not admitting whether that's true or not, but apparently I was one of the finalists and at least I had heard from some people who were maybe on the inside that they were really looking for a woman and that to the extent that I might not be able to ovulate might be a problem.
01:46:21.000So I don't know if that ended up being the main reason why I didn't get the job, but I've often heard that.
01:46:26.000You know, you're not of the right race.
01:47:21.000So if I'm a number theorist, I'm a mathematician, does the amount of melanin that I have determine how I study the distribution of prime numbers?
01:47:31.000The idea that you would have students demanding...
01:47:35.000That there be a person of color speaker series.
01:48:00.000I don't think it's making, instead of having an even playing field for all and considering all with equal merit, to change the level of the playing field and boost people up that aren't qualified.
01:48:53.000You give more people education, more people chances, and more people who are disenfranchised and who are stuck in these bad situations.
01:49:01.000Give them an opportunity to get out some way or another, whether it's through continued education, whether it's through Community centers, whether it's through combat.
01:49:10.000I mean, what Larry Elder's talking about, about not having fathers.
01:49:13.000Boy, well, we can't just say, fuck them.
01:49:52.000By the same token, do you think that other cultures might be creating environments that are exactly the opposite of that?
01:49:59.000In other words, yes, there might be some endemic institutional reasons why people don't succeed, but there are also individual responsibility or collective responsibility within the family or the culture.
01:50:11.000I think just alluding to that will cause people to level an accusation of racism against you.
01:51:16.000Well, if you're fucked and you you grow up in a place without with no hope and a lot of despair I mean, I remember when I first moved to New York when I was in my really early 20s and I didn't really have that many friends at first and it was and I had a few friends that I just I was really disappointed with them and one of them because he just would say so much racist shit It would drive me crazy And I just,
01:51:40.000I wasn't, I just, I was like, God damn it.
01:51:43.000Like, I can't find friends like I had in Boston.
01:51:46.000You know, I was, I had a bunch of knuckleheads that I knew.
01:51:50.000And I needed to, you know, it takes a while when, especially when you're young.
01:51:54.000And by the way, no internet back then.
01:51:55.000So you're trying to find good friends, and friends that were in my profession as stand-up comics.
01:52:03.000So I had to get closer to a few people that are in these communities.
01:52:08.000And it took a long time, but I remember feeling really depressed when I first moved there.
01:52:12.000And it was a cause for me to reconsider moving back to Boston.
01:52:19.000Even though I had just signed with this new manager that's still my manager to this day, and there's all this hope and promise that, like, wow, I'm actually going to have a career now.
01:52:28.000I was so bummed out by the people that I was around with that I would go back to Boston and do gigs, and I'd be like, fuck, I want to move back here, man.
01:52:37.000For all of its faults, you know, is a very smart place, as is New York, but I had infiltrated into a really great community in Boston, and I hadn't done that yet in New York.
01:52:50.000So this is a very small, you know, obviously a couple years later I was fine, but...
01:52:55.000It was when you're not around positive people it doesn't feel good I was living in Newark, New Jersey when I first moved there Because that's where my grandfather lived and I didn't have any money So I stayed with him for a while and he was in a terrible neighborhood And he had bought a house there a long time ago and the community had changed several times and gotten worse and worse and the kid next door Before I had moved in I think somewhere around the time that I was living there His door got broken down by the cops and he was selling crack and it was it was it was real bad So I
01:54:04.000So that environment of being in this really poor neighborhood, being poor myself, I had no fucking money, being around bad, didn't have good friends, it's depressing.
01:54:34.000Imagine if I was there my whole life and I'd just been around fucked up people or I'd been sexually abused or physically abused or my mother was selling crack or my brother was in jail or who knows?
01:54:45.000There's a lot of variables that can lead to a terrible state of mind.
01:54:50.000And it's insanely hard to overcome the patterns of the past and the patterns of your environment.
01:54:56.000And until we address that, this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is fucking ridiculous.
01:55:02.000The idea of, well, the cops wouldn't be shooting these young black kids if they just didn't commit crimes.
01:55:35.000Well, because of doing this podcast, it's allowed me to communicate with some really fascinating people.
01:55:40.000And that's definitely allowed me to formulate some new friendships.
01:55:43.000And it's allowed me to evolve my perspective, to examine my own ideas, and to, you know, I think all of us...
01:55:52.000That I'm friends with, we've sort of all experienced that sort of same, similar growth pattern.
01:55:57.000Because, you know, as you take in more information, you communicate with each other about things, you kind of evolve ideas.
01:56:03.000So there was a study done, I think a longitudinal study, and I believe I mentioned it in the book, at Harvard.
01:56:10.000I think the lead investigator, I think his name is George, in French you would say, I guess Vaillant, or Vaillant, I think that's his name.
01:56:18.000And out of 75 years of research in terms of what is sort of the number one predictor that makes people happy or content, I can't remember the exact dependent measure, the number one thing was establishing meaningful connections with others.
01:56:33.000So, I mean, 75 years of research out of a million possible causal factors were distilled to that one fact.
01:56:58.000Really sad and really lonely and really weird.
01:57:00.000Well, I mean, I don't know if we've ever mentioned this on this broadcast, but if you take prisoners, many of them will prefer to be in general population where they might be jumped and stabbed and raped.
01:57:49.000And of course, there's the public side of me, which is very extroverted and sociable and so on.
01:57:53.000Once in a while, when I've spent several days very much cocooned, and then I go out, even to meet a graduate student to discuss ideas or a friend, I literally come back refreshed in a way that is akin to satiating a thirst or hunger or sexual need,
01:59:23.000And it didn't feel good like I wanted a fucker.
01:59:26.000It felt good like warmth, like love, like an actual person being kind to me.
01:59:32.000I was so weirded out by being in this strange place and living in L.A. I'd just gotten accustomed to...
01:59:41.000I'd just established a community in New York.
01:59:44.000I'd established some friends and I was just starting to be happy in New York and all something out in L.A. Well, so in Darwinian psychiatry, which is a field of psychiatry that applies evolutionary principles, there's this idea of...
01:59:56.000So, for example, we've evolved in bands of about up to 150 people, right?
02:00:01.000You might have heard of Robin Dunbar's number.
02:00:34.000You're surrounded by 8 million people.
02:00:36.000You think, how could somebody be lonely when you step outside and you bump into 17,000 people?
02:00:42.000Yet the rates of depression in this very lonely place but yet very filled place is much greater than the 150, precisely because there's a mismatch between the environment in which we've evolved and the contemporary environment.
02:00:55.000And so that's in the field of evolutionary psychiatry, you study these types of things.
02:02:00.000For you, for example, perfect example.
02:02:03.000You start doing this podcast, your podcast is taking off, your YouTube series is taking off, and then people want to become friends with you because they think that they can get on your show or that they can piggyback on your success.
02:02:14.000They calculate and they look at you and they say, if I could just get in with The Godfather, I'll be in.
02:02:20.000Then I'll get a YouTube following, then I'll get a little Twitter following, then I can get a career.
02:02:24.000There's people that do calculate, things like that.
02:02:27.000And I've met people like that in the world of stand-up, where people have said, hey, you know, take me under your wing.
02:02:37.000I barely have time to do what I'm doing right now and continue my own stuff.
02:02:42.000Like, you see funny, like, but there's certain comics, so I'll see them, and I know they're really good, and they're working really hard, and then I'll take them on the road with me, like Tony Hinchcliffe is a perfect example.
02:02:53.000I think he was opening for you in Montreal when you...
02:03:30.000They'll bring these guys on the road with them, and they're terrible comedians, but what they do is they know how to stroke their ego and kiss their ass, and they've become a part of their system.
02:03:40.000And a lot of my friends who have had this, they have had real problems with these people, where there's a deep resentment that gets established when that person's career doesn't take off.
02:04:35.000And monitor your thoughts and monitor your life and then go forth from that with some directives, with some ideas, with some guidelines of what you want to do and what you want to accomplish.
02:04:45.000Because if you don't do that, you sort of live life untethered.
02:04:48.000Untethered to your dreams or your ideas or I mean even dreams as far as like community and family like those aren't like lofty aspirations in the sense of like unachievable things like climbing Everest in your underwear we're talking about things that can be done but oftentimes aren't because you don't pursue them with that directive like my directive to establish a happy family to be a good friend to be a good neighbor to do all these things people don't You oftentimes don't consider how much
02:05:18.000of a factor those things play in your overall happiness and the happiness of the people around you.
02:05:23.000And you can do that, but you have to think about it.
02:05:27.000Earlier, of course your viewers don't know, I introduced you to one of my friends who was an FBI special agent, and we were chatting.
02:05:34.000I've been here for a few days, so we had gone out together.
02:05:36.000And I was telling him that oftentimes I get an itch for like a man's man companionship.
02:05:46.000Because – I mean not to stereotype but sometimes the intellectual types with whom I can go out who are part of my world, who are my colleagues – Right.
02:06:26.000And I find that recently, maybe because, of course, I think we both have young children where you somewhat cocoon, I've lost a bit of the...
02:07:17.000Well, you're focused on one thing, and you're surrounded by these men, and everyone is allowed to be themselves.
02:07:22.000And you're also engaging in this intensely, quote-unquote, manly activity that is almost the polar opposite of raising children and coddling little girls.
02:07:33.000It becomes this manly, rugged pursuit, and it's very satisfying on a deep, genetic level.
02:07:40.000Because I think there's these reward systems that are established thousands of years ago in our DNA. It's like, why you like being around a campfire?
02:08:08.000Being around other men, it's oftentimes thought that these men are going to get together and they're going to think men things and they're going to come back and be sexist and patriarchal and they're going to come back and ruin all this progress that we've had.
02:08:21.000And there is that idea that somehow or another that manly Is anti-progressive and anti-equal, anti-equal rights, anti-equal values.
02:08:32.000It's funny, by the way, that when you ask a lot of women what types of men they want, they will typically point to the male archetype that is most viewed with disdain by the current wave of third wave feminism,
02:08:50.000If you talk to those women when they're being honest and alone, Yeah, if they don't get called out by it.
02:08:56.000I mean, so I was once communicating with, I think she was either Swedish or Danish, where she was saying that, especially, I think she was Swedish, where, you know, in Sweden, they've had this sort of long-standing experiment where they try to remove gender pronouns.
02:10:35.000And so men have become so tentative, apparently, in Sweden, that oftentimes these women, the reason why they like guys, sort of the stereotypical Italian guy when they go, is not only, of course, Italian guys on average are very stylish and good looking, but it's because that political correctness that has stifled natural dynamics between men and women hasn't formed.
02:12:07.000That people, their unrequited love and affairs that take place because people are working together in these environments for eight hours a day staring at each other.
02:12:27.000The thoughts, I mean, and managing those thoughts becomes incredibly tricky, which is why you need to establish very strict behavior, you know...
02:12:36.000Laws and rules and regulations in the workforce, because you don't want women to have to deal with bullshit.
02:12:41.000You know, I've had men that were in here.
02:12:43.000I had that guy, The Amazing Atheist, who was talking about this woman that he had that was like, she was his boss, and he was getting sexually harassed on a daily basis.
02:13:07.000And so, you know, he was talking about it from his perspective where people don't look at it like that he was in any sort of a bad situation at all.
02:13:35.000Especially Speaking of not sexual harassment, but continuing on that train of thought, I had a public exchange with a woman who is trying to pass a bill, I think in New Jersey, maybe New York, I can't remember.
02:13:59.000So the basic idea is that she's arguing that when you...
02:14:02.000In the same way that you enter a contract with somebody, and if you do so under false pretense, then you are engaging in a fraudulent action.
02:14:12.000Well, when you get somebody to go to bed with you under false pretense, you lie about your background, your education, you lie about whatever...
02:14:21.000And you get that person to acquiesce to your advances and you have sex with them.
02:14:26.000Well, then that is an instantiation of rape by fraud, right?
02:14:32.000You were able to have sex with me under false pretenses.
02:15:24.000And then she goes on to say that you better stop critiquing my ideas because you're going to have a lawsuit from my lawyer for being libelous and defamatory to me.
02:15:43.000So maybe I'm paraphrasing, but I mean the fact that I'm coming after her.
02:15:46.000So this woman thought that her putting up an idea in the marketplace of ideas and having somebody scrutinize that idea as harassment was a form of defamation of it being libelous.
02:16:04.000And I thought that was just breathtaking.
02:16:05.000And I had two other cases with two Forbes, both happened to be Forbes journalists, female journalists, where we went back and forth.
02:16:14.000It very, very quickly disintegrated on Twitter.
02:16:17.000They started doing this, you're cyberbullying me when I had done no such thing.
02:17:38.000I think, like, if you say you're a prince from another country and you want to take this person to your land and they will live forever in a Garden of Eden and this woman thinks, oh my god, I met the perfect guy.
02:18:14.000But there's something that we value very intensely about intimacy.
02:18:19.000And someone who achieves intimacy through false pretenses, it's different than someone That, like, you know, says they're gonna pay for lunch, tomorrow they're gonna give you a million dollars, and they don't.
02:19:21.000I think in her case, I know that she has experienced...
02:19:26.000I think a very bad deception where the guy whom she, I don't know if she married him or not, you know, had said that he was A, B, C, but it turned out to not be true and he had maybe...
02:19:43.000I mean, that happened to Cindy Crawford, not Cindy Crawford, Christy Brinkley.
02:19:46.000She married some guy she was in a helicopter crash with and he turned out to be kind of a con man.
02:19:51.000And as time went on, she realized it and, you know, it cost her a lot of money.
02:19:55.000A woman who fakes an orgasm with you is raping you because the next time that you have sex with her, under the false pretense that you receive positive feedback that you're a great lover, Because you gave her an orgasm, but she was faking her orgasm.
02:21:03.000But I think there's a certain amount of validity to what this woman's saying.
02:21:07.000As far as someone who is very deceptive, who uses that deception to have sex with you and you find out they're a liar, that feels terrible.
02:22:01.000I'd have to think about what the parameters are.
02:22:03.000But, I mean, if you were engaging in a repeat interaction where you defrauded the person through a misrepresentation...
02:22:10.000But, I mean, the idea that to get somebody to date you or have sex with you and through the pursuit of that objective you lie...
02:22:20.000As reprehensible, let me be clear again, it's reprehensible and I certainly don't live my life that way, although I'm married now, but I never have lived my life that way.
02:22:28.000You can't criminalize a central feature of human nature.
02:22:33.000It is incumbent on each individual to do their homework.
02:22:37.000I mean, you do your due diligence and find out if the guy that you're speaking to is a Nigerian prince.
02:22:42.000Right, but doesn't this woman have like kind of fairly cut and dry parameters that she's establishing?
02:22:51.000If she did, maybe that would give it more validity of something that she's been thinking about for a long time.
02:22:55.000But I can never imagine that it would ever be able to meet the standards of it being called rape.
02:23:02.000You know what's interesting about this conversation is that what we're talking about is a person who's been fucked over and that person has gone out of their way to make sure this never happens again because they've been hurt and they've been tortured.
02:23:13.000I think you see a lot of that with really radical feminism in general.
02:23:19.000What you see is a lot of women who their interactions with men have not been positive.
02:23:24.000And unfortunately, the stereotype is that these are very unattractive women.
02:23:30.000Well, if you're a very unattractive woman and you go through life just being rejected by men or being treated like shit by men, there's like a natural tendency to think that men are terrible.
02:23:41.000Because they've rejected, like maybe you're attracted to a man and he laughs at you and mocks you.
02:23:51.000I had a friend that I watched him evolve into a woman hater.
02:23:55.000He had aspirations and hopes, find a good girl, and he had this one girl he was dating, and she fucked him over, and then another girl fucked him over, and just women weren't that attracted to him, and it just got darker and darker as he got older and older, to the point where...
02:24:11.000He genuinely would say, like, just generalize terrible things about women.
02:24:16.000Like, women, they're all fucking whores, man.
02:24:31.000I'm attracted to them, I come up to them, this shit on me.
02:24:33.000I'm attracted to them, I come up to them, this shit on me.
02:24:35.000Over and over and over again to the point where he broke.
02:24:37.000It was easier for him to form these generalizations and to act on these or to have these in his mindset.
02:24:45.000And I think that this is the unfortunate reality about sexual attraction as it pertains to the dynamics of men and women interacting with each other.
02:24:56.000When you look at unattractive Feminist versus over and over again.
02:25:00.000You see one after the other after the other.
02:25:02.000By the way, there's a study that was done, I think published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, where they measured the digit ratio and administered a scale of gender, you know, how much you score on masculinity and femininity, if I remember correctly, or dominance or something.
02:25:54.000So you're saying that it's a response?
02:25:55.000They're saying that they believe it is a response to women being independent and being forced to provide for themselves, that they develop more testosterone.
02:26:02.000I don't know how the fuck they prove that.
02:26:22.000There's a lot going on that's not as simple.
02:26:25.000I think my last sad truth clip was on exactly that, where I was arguing that the whole idea of biological determinism As applied to evolutionary psychology is complete nonsense.
02:26:35.000And one of the examples that I give is exactly the words that you use, which is that genes are turned on or off as a function of environmental inputs, right?
02:26:44.000So the idea when people levy, you say, oh, you're an evolutionary psychologist.
02:26:48.000Also, you believe everything is biologically determined.
02:26:51.000Somebody who says that is effectively saying, I understand nothing about biology.
02:27:17.000To not take into account all these incredibly complex variables that determine whether a human being is this way or that way, whether they're more masculine or more.
02:28:56.000That familiar with her other than I've seen a couple of her videos about video games and I'm like, and they've also seen Thunderfoot stuff on her, which is really interesting, which explains that she had this background in marketing and mass marketing and, you know, is obviously,
02:29:12.000whether or not she's entirely invested in these ideas, she's obviously aware that she's marketing her ideas towards a very specific group.
02:29:21.000And she's got these beta males that cling to her and are attached to her, which are Hilarious human beings.
02:30:31.000And I argue, I haven't tested it, but I think it would be interesting to do so, that some of these sort of social justice warrior beta males are engaging in a form of sneaker fucker strategies.
02:32:44.000Yeah, there's so much manipulation going on there with Image and so many different consultants.
02:32:50.000I mean, they have that on television shows.
02:32:51.000I can only imagine what it would be like.
02:32:53.000Well, when George Bush was debating, I don't know if it was Kerry, I can't remember which one, His camp had come up with all sorts of rules of what kind of camera shots you can do and so on.
02:35:05.000They're hanging their head on this guy that most people see right through because there's certain...
02:35:10.000There's a thing that happens when you talk to that guy where his intellect, like Ted Cruz, like maybe he's intelligent, maybe he's, I don't know, you know, supposedly went to Harvard, supposedly he's very wise.
02:35:23.000The way he talks, the way he establishes himself, the way he communicates is not enough.
02:35:51.000He looks very unhealthy, but he's willing to stand up for his beliefs, and he speaks with clarity, and he speaks with a certain amount of force.
02:36:01.000And I don't think he's the king, but I think we live in a time where only assholes want to be president.
02:36:24.000And this internet thing that we have created, this way of establishing information or expressing information, it is so far superior to anything that existed back when they invented the electoral college or representative government that That voting and having a leader,
02:36:40.000one single higher primate leader, one single top ape that runs all the other apes, it's dumb.
02:37:02.000It's a figurehead more than it is anything.
02:37:04.000If that doesn't explain why Obama shifted almost all of his policies that he said that he was going to do once he got into office, once he actually got into office, changed so many of the things he did, including his idea and stance on whistleblowers.
02:37:18.000There was a big part of his Hope and Change website that they had to redact.
02:37:21.000So who believes that the president really is responsible for the entire country, really is the one guy that runs the entire show?
02:37:39.000We need to figure out a way to have an effective form of government with a giant group of really intelligent people that vote on it.
02:37:46.000People that have proven to be intelligent and objective and well-educated and have a reasoned response to all these different various scenarios.
02:37:55.000Well I guess the parliamentary system of Canada or Britain Would probably be more akin to what you're talking about.
02:38:06.000Yeah, I mean, the figurehead is a bad idea.
02:38:09.000And I think it's a bad idea because I think that this hope and this idea that we need a king, we need a number one primate, I mean, that's really what it is.
02:38:19.000These are like chimpanzee hierarchy systems that have existed for thousands and millions of years.
02:38:25.000But you don't think that humans succumb to the same dominance hierarchies?
02:38:28.000I just don't think we need it anymore.
02:38:30.000I think we're moving towards this idea of a global community.
02:38:34.000Moving towards this idea of a world with the boundaries that we have had in the past oftentimes have been because we try to stay safe.
02:38:55.000I just think that's less and less relevant today and that it's more and more relevant to have a large group of very informed people that can help a large group of people that are collectively calling themselves a country.
02:39:08.000Plato talked about philosopher kings, right?
02:39:10.000He talked about that those who should lead should be the wise philosophers and it should be sort of an amalgamation of those guys.
02:39:40.000Somebody probably came to him with a big deal, and, you know, it's a funny commercial, and they're all attacking him, trying to get his iPhone.
02:40:06.000If George W. started doing a commercial for a video game where he's running away from a bunch of assassins that are trying to steal his phone, it would get really weird.
02:40:35.000No, I think it would be a violation, if you like, in quotes, of the presidential office.
02:40:40.000Well, I think one thing that would hinder them is the financial reward of being a president is really about those gigantic speeches that they give.
02:43:08.000Meditation or anything else you're talking about like really strict guidelines for living and they don't make sense and they're they're ancient and You know in a lot of ways Those places where those guidelines were established where it was the cradle of civilizations where civilization first emanated and first took off and I have this Sort of joke that I never I never really figured out how to do it on stage But that essentially the Middle East is like the townies of the world Do you know what a townie is?
02:43:40.000It's just like you think that patterns are intensely hard to break, and it's one of the reasons why the United States is the most, as far as like artistically, one of the most diverse places in the world, and as far as our ability to express ourselves in film, in music, in stand-up comedy,
02:43:56.000and things along those lines, and even in podcasting, it's the most diverse and the most potent, and it's because We're the people that escaped.
02:44:06.000My grandparents came from Italy and Ireland, and they all came over on a boat when they were young, and they established themselves in the East Coast.
02:44:15.000And that's where my parents were born, and that's where I was born.
02:44:17.000And these are just second, third generation immigrants that were trying to get the fuck away from the horrors of Europe.
02:44:35.000There wasn't a caste system like there is in England.
02:44:38.000I mean, there's a very clear class system that goes on in a lot of countries throughout the world that has existed back from the days when they had kings.
02:44:48.000The Canadian government, I can't remember exactly when, specifically to avoid that caste system, the royal caste system, made it a law that Canadians can't be knighted.
02:45:00.000Because any country that's under the Commonwealth, so you're Nigerian or you're Indian, you could be knighted by the Queen.
02:45:44.000And you're being held back by these parameters and these guidelines that are set in place by people that have a very limited amount of information to work with.
02:45:52.000They didn't understand the consequences of these rules.
02:45:54.000They didn't understand the consequences of these patterns of behavior that you're forcing people to follow in.
02:46:01.000And that's why America, in a lot of ways, represents still the beacon of freedom to people.
02:46:07.000I mean, there's a lot of problems with America, a huge amount of problems with America, but that alone, that it represents the most recent of the big countries, the most recent of the nation.
02:46:18.000And, I don't know if it's coincidentally, the big one.
02:46:22.000I mean, I don't know if that's a coincidence.
02:46:24.000Earlier, we were talking about friendships.
02:46:26.000So let me link that to some of the stuff that you're talking about America.
02:46:29.000So one of the arguments as to why Americans seem to form more sort of ephemeral, transient friendships, you know, not as...
02:46:39.000I mean, it might be a stereotype, but I can tell you that when I was a graduate student in the U.S., All the non-American students complain that Americans are very quick to be friendly with you, but they don't form the same tight bonds.
02:47:01.000And so I actually talk about this, not in this book, but in an earlier book of mine, a 2007 book.
02:47:05.000That the fact that Americans face greater geographic mobility, today I could be in Boston, tomorrow I could be in LA, and socioeconomic mobility, the Stratton that I was born into is not necessarily the one that I might die in.
02:47:23.000So because of these various forms of mobility, It creates a more transient definition of friendship.
02:47:31.000Not that Americans can't form strong bonds, but there is a bit of a shallowness to the original encounters because tomorrow I might be somewhere else.
02:47:39.000Whereas the guy who comes from Lebanon, where he's born is where he's going to die, where his word is his contract...
02:47:48.000Is going to have a different definition of friendship if only because life is not as anonymous, it's not as open to mobility as it would be the case in say California.
02:49:11.000What's ridiculously easy to us in comparison to our grandparents is going to be a joke to our grandchildren who could beam each other on the moon anytime they want.