In this episode, Dr. Aaron Horschig discusses evolutionary theories about why eating disorders are more common in women than in men, and why this is a good thing. We also discuss the benefits of tanning beds, eating disorders, and the role of social media in shaping our perception of the world, and whether or not eating disorders can be traced back to biological causes. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. It was produced and produced by Riley Bray. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. The show was mixed by Matthew Boll and Matthew Boll. Special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Mashup. Music by Zapsplat and our featured artist, Evan Handyside. Additional music by Jeff Perla. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional Compositions by David Fincher The theme song is by Haley Shaw and the album art for this episode was done by Ian Dorsch, with additional selections from Fugue, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Please consider calling in todays episode if you have a burning desire to be featured on the next episode of the podcast, we'll be in touch with you. and we'll get back to it next week! Thank you for listening to this episode of Thick & sending us your thoughts on the podcast in the comments section. in the next few episodes of Thick and Thin? . If you like it, please leave us a review it in the iTunes store, we're listening to it on Apple Podcasts! and/or your thoughts/trying it out in the podcast/tweet us out on your podcast/instant feedback/tweeding it out on Insta story we'll consider it on insta or your thoughts about it in a review/tune in , and we're reviewing it on your feed :) etc. Thanks again for listening and sharing it out! - your feedback is appreciated! -- Thank you so much, Sarah, Sarah Good Morning America? -- Timestamps: Sarah Goodson - Sarah Goodrich & the rest of the entire episode is Thanks for listening?
00:00:54.000You need that vitamin D. That's a big thing apparently with people that live in Seattle in the winter, is taking vitamin D and even suntanning beds.
00:01:02.000People don't realize that suntanning beds, although it's kind of counterintuitive, you think they're really bad for you, it's actually not that bad for you.
00:01:09.000As long as you don't burn yourself, it's actually good.
00:01:11.000I did a study, well a paper I wrote, it was a theoretical paper with a dermatologist a few years ago, where we looked at some evolutionary explanations for the epidemiology of suntanning.
00:01:23.000So if I were to ask you now, without you knowing anything about it, or not much about evolutionary theory, what's the typical demographic of the sort of obsessive suntaner?
00:01:47.000So it doesn't matter whether I'll get melanoma when I'm 73. I'm going tonight to the party and Tony might be there and I'd like to have that go.
00:01:54.000And so this dermatologist friend of mine had written to me.
00:03:37.000The evolutionary perspective is to then look at, to the extent that these human universals manifest themselves in exactly the same way across time and place, what might be some of these biological drivers.
00:03:48.000Compulsive buying, almost exclusively women, 90% women.
00:03:54.000Pornographic addictions, almost exclusively male.
00:03:57.000Right, but let's just stick with this one.
00:03:58.000Let's just stick with this one, the anorexia nervosa.
00:04:02.000First of all, when you're talking about Hippocrates, you're talking about one lone individual, so a completely anecdotal piece of evidence, and he said that women were throwing up.
00:04:11.000Wasn't it a status symbol back then for women to be overweight?
00:04:55.000Now, secondary amenorrhea is where you already had your menstrual cycle, and then it's shut off once you have anorexia nervosa.
00:05:03.000But what happens when you have amenorrhea is that your reproductive potential is shut off.
00:05:10.000And so what evolutionary scientists have found is that it turns out that when women suffer from anorexia nervosa, there is some environmental trigger that they're being exposed to, rightly so or wrongly so, that they think they should shut off their menses, their reproductive potential,
00:05:45.000Or just how much food she can have, right?
00:05:48.000Does she have access to enough calories to sustain her gestational period, right?
00:05:52.000Well, it turns out that in mammalian species, a wide range of mammalian species, Somehow there is a mechanism, an evolutionary mechanism, that either causes the females of the species to either shut off their reproductive window, or if they're already pregnant, and then there's an environmental input that says,
00:06:19.000So in this case, you have the child, but you realize for whatever environmental reason that it's not going to be fruitful to raise that child.
00:06:27.000And by the way, you see it in human cultures where typically the one who is killed is the last born, as you would expect because the other children, now you've invested quite a bit in them.
00:06:36.000And so if you're going to get rid of some of your genetic package, you get rid of the one that you've invested the least in.
00:06:42.000So all of these mechanisms that are part of something called the reproductive suppression model, the idea is that eating disorders is a special instantiation of that.
00:06:51.000Because what the eating disorder is doing, it's shutting off your reproductive potential because you're getting amenorrhea.
00:06:58.000Right, but is that absolutely connected to why women get anorexic?
00:07:02.000Because it could easily be just a side effect of them wanting to be ridiculously skinny.
00:07:09.000I would understand with a cow, with something that's living in a very wild life, a wild world, this animal out there just eating grass, and when resources are depleted, nature kicks in, but there's no conscious decision-making process.
00:07:23.000When a woman is deciding to be anorexic, At least there's some form of decision-making process that wants her to lean towards a slimmer physique.
00:07:33.000So that speaks to a very interesting distinction.
00:07:45.000And actually that speaks to the article that I had sent you.
00:07:48.000That's one of the points that I discussed in that article.
00:07:50.000Proximate explanations in science explain the how and the what of something.
00:07:54.000Much of science operates at the proximate level.
00:07:57.000If you want to explain what diabetes is exactly, physiologically speaking, you explain it at the proximate level.
00:08:03.000The ultimate explanation is the Darwinian why.
00:08:06.000Why would something have evolved to be of that form?
00:08:10.000So let's discuss it in relation to something related to eating disorders, pregnancy sickness, right?
00:08:15.000So pregnancy sickness is a phenomenon that women experience around the world.
00:08:19.000It's a universal phenomenon found in all cultures.
00:08:22.000Approximate explanation might be, or approximate exploration might be, how do shifts in a woman's estrogen levels affect the severity of her symptoms?
00:08:49.000By the way, I call it pregnancy sickness, but the typical colloquial term is morning sickness, but some women don't experience it in the morning.
00:09:00.000So pregnancy sickness happens during the first trimester of gestation, during a period called organogenesis.
00:09:08.000This is when the fetus is developing its main organs.
00:09:11.000During that particular period, it's particularly important that the women not be exposed to food pathogens, teratogens, that might harm the developmental pathway of gestation.
00:09:25.000Therefore, all of the mechanisms that she experiences, attraction to certain foods, pickles, a propulsion from other foods, The feeling of being nauseous, the throwing up, all of those built-in mechanisms are evolved mechanisms that are meant to protect possibly the fetus from being exposed to teratogens.
00:09:47.000And it's perfectly timed so that once organogenesis ends, that's when the pregnancy symptoms end.
00:09:55.000So the difference between proximate and ultimate, it's not that one is a better explanation than the other, it's that you need both levels of explanations To perfectly understand something.
00:10:05.000Well, that makes total sense, but it doesn't necessarily apply to why women become anorexic because the desire to be slim, to look very thin in public is very strong because of social media or media, rather, depictions of women.
00:10:22.000They're always almost impossibly slim.
00:10:24.000And then on top of that, they also add Photoshop to it.
00:10:27.000So the evolutionary explanation to the eating disorder story is there is something in the environment that the woman in question is thinking is a threat to her.
00:10:40.000Can you think the same thing as the cow felt for the lack of calories?
00:10:43.000Can you think in the human context what might be such a threat?
00:10:51.000So, for example, if you feel, rightly or wrongly, right?
00:10:53.000It doesn't matter whether objectively it's true or not.
00:10:55.000Whatever she feels is what the reality is, right?
00:10:57.000If she feels that there isn't going to be sufficient either kin support, extended kin support, when she raises a child, or the most likely thing is partner support.
00:11:08.000If she feels that there isn't likely to be a good partner who's going to support her since we're a bi-parental species, then she engages...
00:11:17.000And shutting down her reproductive window.
00:11:20.000Hence, what you said is true at the proximate level, right?
00:11:24.000Her thinking can become disordered so that she actually looks at herself in the mirror, even though she's only 70 pounds, and she still thinks that she's fat.
00:11:52.000So the research shows, the evolutionary research shows that the environmental threats equivalent to lacking of grazing area for the cow is lack of extended kin support or mate support to the woman.
00:12:12.000And that's why, by the way, you see it in cultures of plenty rather than in Ethiopia.
00:12:17.000Because you would expect that the woman who shuts off her reproductive potential today, it's because she's hoping that in some future state, things will be better for her to get back on the reproductive train.
00:12:29.000When you're in Ethiopia, I don't have a chance to shut off my reproductive potential.
00:12:34.000I need to get the food tomorrow or I'm going to die.
00:12:38.000But what that still doesn't cover is Hippocrates.
00:12:42.000So Hippocrates is just one guy who had a sufficient database at the time to describe the findings in very similar forms to the current ones.
00:12:54.000What I'm saying basically is that if it were that it's due to media images, then Well, he didn't have media images at that time, right?
00:13:03.000I mean, so how would it be that in ancient Greece, it is also the case that it is only women who experienced anorexia nervosa?
00:13:25.000I mean, the usual universal that we typically talk of in terms of body types is that it be an hourglass figure, which actually is going to speak to the second point of a paper that I send you.
00:13:35.000So in evolutionary theory, what we do typically is we build what are called...
00:14:18.000Of the adaptive argument, the evolutionary argument as to why men might prefer the hourglass figure.
00:14:24.000Well, it would be so that they should have bigger hips, it would make it easier for her to breed, larger fat deposits in the breasts and the ass, it makes it healthier, she has fat storing, she'll have healthy offspring.
00:14:38.000So if you had medical and reproductive data that shows that women who have that particular body type Are more likely to conceive, then that would be one check.
00:15:10.000You pointed to some of the depictions.
00:15:12.000So we can look at data from ancient Greece, from ancient Egypt, the pharaohs and so on, from Africa, from India, and we could take the statues from those cultures spanning several thousand years and do a content analysis of the statues and show that they come very close to that hourglass figure.
00:15:29.000We could take, if that's not enough data, this one's going to clinch it for you, but there's many others that I could give you.
00:15:36.000You could take congenitally blind men.
00:15:39.000These are men who have never had the gift of sight.
00:15:42.000And you could show haptically through touch that they prefer women that have the hourglass figure, which immediately negates the possibility that it's due to the fact that they were taught those preferences through the media.
00:15:58.000And so you systematically collect data from multiple converging lines of evidence where that data becomes overwhelming.
00:16:08.000And that's how you built an adaptive argument.
00:16:10.000So contrary to all the guys who say, oh, evolution has just come up with these cute post hoc stories, we're actually profoundly more meticulous and assiduous in the data that we collect.
00:16:21.000Well, has that really been established that so many men prefer soft, mushy, hourglass-type figures as opposed to hard-bodied women?
00:16:32.000How many women are you letting these blind guys grope?
00:16:35.000Are they getting a real study sample to choose from?
00:17:02.000Well, because probably it might be difficult to have the ethics approval board of universities Have young blind men, or maybe they're not young, feel off a bunch of women.
00:17:14.000Well, I guess the ethics board doesn't like science.
00:17:16.000Because you can't just judge what a guy likes in women by letting him touch a doll.
00:17:59.000FMRI, right, brain imaging studies of men that are exposed to women of different waist-to-hip ratios and their pleasure centers in their brain light up more when exposed to women that have that hourglass figure.
00:18:13.000So again, the data is unassailable because it comes from multitude of countries, multitude of time periods using different methodologies.
00:18:21.000Well, I'm not denying that men enjoy that.
00:18:59.000And as you would expect, their hair color changes and their skin color changes, but the average Waist to hip ratio was close to that 0.7.
00:19:09.000And so here what you're demonstrating is that marketers, right, these guys that are producing these products, are producing products that are in line with our evolved preferences.
00:19:17.000If they didn't do that, if they produced sex dolls that look like East German female slash male swimmers, it's not going to work well.
00:20:21.000Yeah, it's weird because women oftentimes think that men are because they see these models in these magazines.
00:20:27.000And I think that does lean towards the desire for some women to get into that anorexic state because you sort of get this body dysmorphia thing going on by looking at these almost completely unrealistic depictions.
00:20:39.000I mean, I know people who are actually built like that, but they're extremely rare.
00:20:43.000It's like knowing someone who's built like a professional basketball player.
00:20:46.000They absolutely exist, but boy, good luck finding one on a random day.
00:20:51.000Finding some seven foot tall super athlete.
00:20:56.000There's all sorts of differences between what images that you see sometimes and what people truly prefer.
00:21:01.000I think it's really strange how women always want to paint it as women being victimized by these unrealistic body images, but you never hear the same from men when it comes to bodybuilders.
00:21:13.000When men see a guy who's just giant muscles and a big six-pack and just looks like a stud, men never feel like they're being victimized by these unrealistic body depressions.
00:23:50.000Have been liberated from all of the typical problems that we see in other parts of the world.
00:23:55.000I've got to look for a new victim narrative, and boom, that's a good one.
00:23:58.000Well, isn't it also, though, that it is an unrealistic body shape and that they do feel it's like a completely impossible task for a lot of women who are built like normal people.
00:24:10.000Have you seen the body shapes of male superheroes in toys?
00:24:42.000But I wouldn't have phrased it that way.
00:24:44.000I would phrase it in more of a term of frustration than some sort of a psychological disorder.
00:24:48.000I would think that women are just frustrated with this.
00:24:51.000One of the differences being that if a woman is large-boned or she has a wide waist or something like that, there's very little she can do to try to achieve that model shape.
00:25:01.000Whereas if a man is slight, he can lift weights and eat a lot of food and get a personal trainer, do a lot of squats and deadlifts and build his body up.
00:25:12.000A man can make his body look more masculine.
00:25:15.000It's very difficult outside of surgery for a woman to change the shape of her body.
00:25:37.000By the way, that exactly speaks to some of the antipathy that people feel towards evolutionary psychology.
00:25:43.000I mean, you hit the nail on the head, yeah.
00:25:47.000Because there is, wrongly so, there's this idea that evolutionary theory is sort of biological determinism, right?
00:25:54.000If people prefer facially symmetric faces, and if my face is not facially symmetric, I'm doomed to a life of twiddling my thumbs and a life of celibacy, right?
00:26:05.000And that's why there's this narrative that became famous with Naomi Wolf.
00:26:35.000That men can still cause harm to women, that they can still dominate women, and this is going to speak to one of the points that you raised, is by creating this false narrative about the types of women that men prefer.
00:26:48.000And by pushing this narrative, it makes women feel insecure about themselves.
00:27:07.000She's reasonably young and still very productive.
00:27:11.000But, you know, again, it's a message that sells.
00:27:14.000Because if I am unattractive, if genetically speaking, I don't score well on some of these universal metrics of beauty, I would much rather hear a story that basically says, oh, it's all due to arbitrary construction of beauty standards.
00:27:28.000There's nothing innate about these, right?
00:27:31.000I think there's a lot of women that are very intelligent that run into asshole men so many times that they develop this distorted perception of what a man is and so they can formulate this theory and feel justified in doing so.
00:27:45.000They just run into so many weak bitches out there that they start thinking that all men are trying to harm them and all men are trying to hurt their feelings.
00:27:52.000And that this theory is valid in her eyes because it's based on the anecdotal evidence that she's acquired through her whole life of running it.
00:29:20.000So I'll tell you a quick story that I discussed in one of my other books.
00:29:23.000It was a documentary that I had watched on speed dating, I think it was, where there was a profoundly overweight woman, I don't know how many, 500 pounds, who was basically arguing that it's unfair that all these men at this speed dating event are not paying closer attention to her.
00:30:30.000Well, isn't that just the world of just so many different people with varied opinions that are trying to justify their own physical condition?
00:30:50.000Many times where people are trying to justify their own obesity by saying that there's this distorted perception of whether or not people are healthy because they are thin, and that in fact there are some diseases, and this is kind of true, it's sort of a weird contradiction, there's some sort of diseases where people actually do better And recover because they're overweight.
00:31:10.000But the reason for that is not because being overweight is healthy.
00:31:13.000The reason for that is there's a lot of diseases where you don't take in any nutrients while you're sick, and so your body goes into a state of ketosis where it starts burning fat, and you're better off using that fat for fuel if you are overweight than if you're a very lean person who has no fat to burn.
00:31:29.000Then your body starts burning off tissue, muscle tissue, which is much less healthy for you and much more dangerous.
00:31:35.000Incidentally, what you said, there's, I think, now a movement to start fattest studies at universities.
00:31:42.000You know how you have women's studies and peace studies?
00:31:45.000So fattest studies, the narrative is exactly what you led off with, which is the idea that there's this kind of medical conspiracy that's pushing a false narrative that basically says being overweight is a bad thing, when in reality there is no such evidence.
00:36:14.000It doesn't mean that he can't be intelligent in other areas of his life, but he's most certainly shutting down or ignoring some really clear information that we have been given over the past 50-plus years.
00:36:26.000Well, I think actually what you're talking about speaks to a point that I raised in some of my writings, the idea of whether we make choices simply because we don't have the right information to make better choices.
00:36:37.000That's usually the typical argument that public policy makers use.
00:36:41.000So they basically say, oh, if you're engaging in risky sexual behavior or if you're engaging in a sedentary lifestyle, it's because you don't know any better.
00:36:51.000So let's set up public service announcements that teach you better And then hopefully people will act better.
00:36:58.000So the issue is not so much that people, you know, it's not as though I don't know that being overweight is a bad thing.
00:37:06.000And now that you've taught me better, I will now change my behavior.
00:37:10.000The problem stems from the fact that there are these Darwinian pulls that make it difficult for us to extricate ourselves.
00:37:16.000Whether it be whether you're addicted to drugs because it tickles your pleasure center in your brain or whether it be because you're addicted to sex or whether you're addicted to a bit more food than you should be eating.
00:37:26.000Those are the Darwinian pulls that make it difficult for us to do the optimal decision.
00:37:32.000It's not because we're too dumb to know better or we don't have the right information.
00:37:35.000Yeah, but you're talking about food now, not the cigarettes that this doctor was smoking that you were using as an example.
00:38:18.000I mean, we've got the seven deadly sins since, you know, for thousands of years, precisely because very smart people understood that these are some traps that we all succumb to, whether it be greed or lust or gluttony, in my case.
00:39:19.000So I just do a heavy protein diet, minimal carbs with a lot of vegetables.
00:39:24.000So a six ounce steak with broccoli and whatever, something like that, with the tomato juice.
00:39:31.000And I'll lose kind of like the, well not the Atkins in the sense that you eat as much fat as you want, but it's really a lot of protein and a lot of vegetables.
00:39:40.000Well, honestly, the Atkins is, when you're saying eat as much fat as you want, that is actually the trend.
00:39:46.000The trend is towards a ketogenic diet.
00:39:49.000When you're talking about getting your body to burn fat, a lot of athletes are getting involved in getting on fat-burning diets, and I actually switched my own diet to that.
00:39:59.000I didn't really have a problem being overweight, but I was definitely heavier and I had more body fat than I have now.
00:40:05.000And what I did was I switched over to this, there's a guy named Mark Sisson who was on my podcast before, and he wrote this book called The Primal Blueprint.
00:40:13.000And the idea behind it is that when you're eating a lot of simple carbs and a lot of pastas and breads, you're getting insulin spikes, your body's processing all that sugar, and your body stores it, and then your body starts burning sugar.
00:40:27.000Whereas if you can get your body to a ketogenic state, meaning your body burns fats and uses that for fuel rather than carbohydrates, you don't really want high protein.
00:40:39.000You want what you're supposed to have, which is like, you know, a six-ounce steak is fine, but what you really want is a bunch of healthy fats like coconut oil, avocados.
00:40:50.000Excellent, but also because it's excellent because it supplies you with omega-6s and 3s, the essential fatty acids, which are really important for brain function.
00:40:58.000But people, this idea, this is also a big fucking problem that people have.
00:41:02.000We've been lied to about fats, about the danger of saturated fats and the danger of cholesterol.
00:41:09.000Dietary cholesterol barely moves the needle on blood lipids.
00:41:13.000It's not dietary cholesterol that's a problem.
00:41:21.000There's a bunch of factors that cause people to be fat, and it's not necessarily saturated fats or cholesterol.
00:41:29.000In fact, saturated fats and cholesterol, that's the substrate for building testosterone.
00:41:36.000Diet of having my body burn fat, and not just me, but a ton of my friends.
00:41:41.000My friend Denny, who's an elite athlete, is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world champion.
00:41:47.000My friend John Rollo, who's an MMA fighter, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
00:41:52.000These guys have all reported, and me included, gigantic spikes in their testosterone production.
00:41:57.000And it's because that is the building blocks for testosterone.
00:42:00.000So when you're eating these low-fat diets and these minimalistic diets to try to get your body to be more healthy, you're dropping your body's sex hormone production.
00:42:12.000Well, we'll have to ask my wife if she has any complaints in that department.
00:43:41.000So I keep my body fat down because of that.
00:43:44.000So even if my diet is shit, I still keep my body fat down because of tremendous working out.
00:43:50.000But then, when I adjust my diet as well, I saw a big difference in my energy levels, in my cognitive function, and a big difference in just overall wellness.
00:44:02.000I mean, I'm an extremist when it comes to physical performance because obviously I've been around it my whole life and I'm in the martial arts world and I'm trying to get my body to do certain things that are very unusual, but I just think that People are not designed to eat big plates of pasta or bread or all these sugars that everybody downs in the form of corn syrup drinks It's just not good for you.
00:44:28.000Have you seen the Documentary, sugar, I can't remember.
00:44:56.000Next time I'm on your show, I should hopefully be visibly thinner.
00:45:01.000Yeah, what you're going to do is you're going to wait until two weeks before the show, and then you're going to stop your period, and you're going to...
00:45:39.000When they needed those calories and grains, like, look, if you're out hiking every day, you talk to people that are mountain climbers and hikers, they are eating massive amounts of calories.
00:45:48.000I have friends that go on these gigantic mountain trips, and they literally cannot consume enough food because they pack all their food.
00:45:57.000My friend Jason just got back from this big trip that he was taking to the Yukon.
00:46:25.000So you have to eat the most calorie-dense two pounds of food that you could carry because, you know, for this trip, you know, you're only carrying a certain amount of food because you have to have your sleeping bag on your back, your tent, all that jazz.
00:46:37.000And you come out of there, you're 15 pounds lighter.
00:46:39.000And, you know, you just had this incredible...
00:46:42.000I mean, it's like running a marathon every day almost.
00:46:45.000Are you familiar with the field of evolutionary medicine?
00:46:58.000So evolutionary medicine is basically trying to infuse within medicine evolutionary ideas.
00:47:04.000Typically, most physicians are trained in the proximate world, right?
00:47:07.000We were talking about proximate and ultimate, about how to deal with the how and what of a disease without ever asking the ultimate why, Darwinian why.
00:47:15.000So as relating to something that we're talking about now, if you look at the top killers around the world, colon cancer and diabetes and heart disease and high blood pressure, they're all related, as evolutionary medicine folks argue, to what's called the mismatch hypothesis.
00:47:32.000The idea being that those things that were adaptive to us in an environment of scarcity become grossly maladaptive in an environment of plenty like we have today, right?
00:47:45.000And so basically what you're having, I mean, my gustatory preferences don't change.
00:47:49.000So my desire to eat the fatty food remains.
00:47:52.000But what has changed is the fact that I had to do 20,000 calories of expenditure to hunt it down then, and now I could go to the grocery store and get it.
00:48:01.000There's no caloric uncertainty, no caloric scarcity.
00:48:04.000And so if you look at hunter-gatherer societies that most closely mimic our evolutionary past, Thank you.
00:48:30.000That totally makes sense that people would have to expend massive amounts of calories to track down food because that was, at one point in time, what we did all day with our day.
00:48:39.000Whether it's hunting or gathering or farming, we were constantly working to try to acquire food.
00:48:46.000Now that food is so easy, we still have the same genes, right?
00:48:51.000So, look, natural selection, right, the mechanism of how species evolve traits that they have, I mean, when I'm teaching my students, I start off by colloquially saying, look, most animals, including humans, throughout their history have faced, you know, either you don't want to become somebody else's dinner,
00:49:08.000and you want to get enough for dinner for yourself.
00:49:11.000Those are the sort of two big adaptive problems.
00:49:14.000And then you just add to that sexual selection, which is, it's not enough to simply survive, then you have to mate.
00:50:21.000I like fermented cabbage and sauerkrauts and natural sauerkrauts and things along those lines.
00:50:25.000I drink a bunch of different kinds of them and take a bunch of different kinds of them every day, along with this thing called the Onnit Total Gut Health, which is a packet that I take with every meal.
00:50:35.000It's a massive factor because what's in your gut, like your gut flora, is incredibly important for your overall health and for supporting your immune system.
00:51:49.000I think it's really important to take in healthy cultures.
00:51:52.000Here's another example from evolutionary medicine that relates to children, since you mentioned children.
00:51:57.000You probably have heard of the studies that show that if you grow up in an environment that doesn't have any natural allergens, you're at an increased risk of developing respiratory illnesses like asthma.
00:52:15.000To have the types of responses that you typically would have encountered.
00:52:19.000So if you have a mother or a father or both parents who are incredibly OCD about having a perfectly sterile and spotless home, prepare for the onset of asthma.
00:52:29.000That's another example of a That's asthma, but not necessarily allergies.
00:52:33.000One of my daughters is allergic to cats, and we've had cats her whole life.
00:52:53.000She's also so allergic to horses that we were in Italy and we were riding on one of those horse carriages and she wasn't even on the horse or touching the horse, just being behind the horse on a horse carriage.
00:53:04.000She started sneezing and coughing and we had to get off the carriage.
00:53:08.000Do you know if it's the saliva of the horse or the dander?
00:53:19.000Now that you've convinced me that I need to lose weight, as if I didn't know better.
00:53:22.000Well, I'm not saying that you need to lose weight, but I'm saying you're a healthy guy, you're a smart guy, you think about your life, you're very handsome, you're bronze, you're shiny.
00:53:31.000You're thinking in these terms of like looking at the big picture, but yet you've got this blind spot.
00:53:37.000And this blind spot is because you have this indulgence for food and you look forward to it, it becomes your reward.
00:53:43.000At the end of the day and you sit down and you indulge and then you say, hey, I've worked hard for this and I can enjoy it and I'm married, I've got kids, I don't need to look beautiful.
00:54:06.000When you're in the dark, cold winters of Montreal, and the only reward delivery system is for us to be foodies, then that's the problem, right?
00:55:31.000There's nothing wrong, and actually there is some studies that suggest that it's actually pretty healthy to have a glass of wine or two with a meal, and you're getting resveratrol, and also there's some studies or some Indications that point to people developed for a long time drinking wine because they couldn't drink still water because they would get traveler's disease.
00:55:58.000If they found water, it would have pathogens in it and they would wind up getting sick.
00:56:02.000So they drank wine for that purpose because you can carry it around with you and it's not going to go bad.
00:56:07.000But getting drunk, like we were drinking whiskey.
00:56:10.000We were drinking Jameson or something like that on the rocks.
00:56:33.000Because there's a natural tendency towards distraction.
00:56:36.000You know, the pressure of attempting to be successful at something, the pressure of whether it's competition or whether it's just this yearning for achievement.
00:56:47.000You look for a release, you know, from that pressure.
00:57:25.000And by doing that, it's almost like they can, by saying, fuck it, I don't care about my health, they could say, fuck it, I don't care about my student loans.
00:57:33.000Fuck it, I don't care about my wife leaving me.
00:57:35.000Fuck it, I don't care about my mortgage.
00:57:37.000Fuck it, I don't care about losing my job.
00:57:39.000It's like this sort of denial of reality by indulging in something that's not healthy.
00:57:46.000It reminded me of an irrational position that one of my former students took to justify him smoking.
00:57:53.000I don't know if you do this in the United States, but in Canada, Health Canada has this program where they put very vivid images on cigarette packets.
00:58:55.000But it shows you how, even though we often are fully cognizant objectively about some truth, our ability to engage in self-deception is limitless, right?
00:59:07.000Well, it is for some folks, and I think, again, that goes back to mindfulness.
00:59:15.000Most people live their lives in a constant state of momentum.
00:59:18.000The momentum of the past constantly propelling themselves forward, and they're always adjusting and trying to make up for all the mistakes that their past has made.
00:59:26.000They don't live their life in a state of in the now.
00:59:28.000They live their life in a state of, fuck, why did I do that?
00:59:55.000Look, we live in a world where we're exposed, because in the public eye, we're exposed to a lot of negativity, even though we're exposed to a hundred-fold more positivity.
01:00:06.000And then my solace is coming home to the purity and innocence of my children.
01:00:12.000And then the reality is that you can't bottle up that innocence And that purity forever.
01:00:17.000And so speaking of the here and now, rather than oftentimes just enjoying the moment, I'm always worried that, you know, in five years she's going to be a prepubescent girl and then there's going to be a bunch of piggish young boys that are going to come around.
01:00:30.000So that's something that truly bothers me.
01:01:30.000Well, it's kind of hard to go to Google while you're driving and having a conversation about some observation they just made.
01:01:35.000But it just shows you, again, the purity of the child and sort of looking at the world and hitting you with questions that you frankly can't answer.
01:01:44.000Well, I always like to say that I can't answer it.
01:01:46.000I think it's important to let kids know that you don't know everything.
01:02:08.000And we're very fortunate that we have this thing called the Internet so we can find out what it is that we're trying to get the answer for.
01:02:16.000And incidentally, I do that with my students.
01:02:19.000When they ask a question, and let's say I don't know the answer, I'm very open.
01:02:23.000I say, you know what, I think you got me with this one.
01:02:25.000Why don't you send me an email, remind me, and I look into it.
01:02:28.000And I do it just naturally, but oftentimes they'll write back to me and say, you know, wow, that was so refreshing.
01:02:34.000You know, you were humble enough to not pretend that you know everything about every single thing, you know?
01:02:40.000And it's so frustrating when you're talking to someone who's really smart who doesn't want to admit that they don't know something or wants to deny something's true when they haven't researched it.
01:03:25.000He's a very smart guy, and he wants to be the smartest guy in the room all the time.
01:03:30.000And so it just gets really frustrating, especially if we're somewhere where there's no internet service.
01:03:35.000You're like, we're going to get to internet service, motherfucker, and then you're going to apologize.
01:03:38.000It's this thing that people do where when you're having a conversation with someone, they're not just talking to you, they're engaged in a contest.
01:04:03.000Because admitting that you're wrong makes you lose face.
01:04:06.000And that's such a detrimental dynamic to have, right?
01:04:10.000I mean, you know, I might come home at night and I've had a tough day and I might respond curtly to my dog and I actually will go back and then hug my dog because I have enough self-awareness to realize that I didn't give her enough attention, right?
01:04:24.000So I have enough humility to never mind another human.
01:04:36.000My wife or kids, but the family that I was born into, that have never apologized about anything because they come from a cultural landscape where to apologize to your child, to somebody younger, is to lose face.
01:04:52.000And I mean, that might work when you're two, but when you're both now adults, I think you sort of have to get out of that and realize that we all make mistakes and we all have to own up to them.
01:05:01.000We all have to apologize honestly when we make a mistake.
01:05:05.000It's super unhealthy and it's unhealthy for the person who doesn't admit they make the mistake too because then it puts you in this position of being in denial of what you know to be the truth.
01:05:14.000You're going to run around pretending that you were right all along when you know in your head that you were wrong.
01:05:19.000So it diminishes your own personal opinions about yourself.
01:05:33.000This is one of the key problem people in my family.
01:05:37.000And he says something to the effect of, oh, you know, those ancient Greeks, those Christians were really anti-Semitic, or I can't remember the exact details.
01:05:47.000I said, oh, well, you know, I'm sorry, I don't mean to correct you, but those ancient Greeks were not Christian.
01:05:53.000As a matter of fact, the way we mark that era, as we say BCE before Common Era or BCE before Christ.
01:05:59.000So by definition, those guys were marked as not being Christian.
01:06:04.000So when he's now faced with sort of historical evidence that suggests that he was wrong, what do you think he does?
01:06:10.000It's so grotesque that I'm not even sure you can guess what he did.
01:07:14.000Well, I suspect that one of the reasons why your podcast is so successful is because you exhibit that generosity.
01:07:21.000If you came to every discussion thinking that there is nothing that the other person can bring to the table, you're not going to have a show that's going to last long, no?
01:07:31.000We're not talking about like the 1950s when people have this narrow view of the world that was defined by their own environment.
01:07:38.000We're talking about this broad place now where you can just access all sorts of data.
01:07:43.000And one of the beautiful things about the podcast is by sitting down with people like you or all the other awesome guests I get to sit down with, I get to experience the wisdom and the information of someone who's lived a completely different life than me.
01:07:57.000And I just find that really fascinating.
01:08:00.000And I just think that that arrogance that someone would display by doing what that guy did to you and switching around your points, that's just a child.
01:08:10.000That's like a developmental dead end that this person went down.
01:08:25.000So this is a paper that I was invited to write in one of the leading journals in the field, Journal of Marketing Research, where I was asked to talk about the methods of evolutionary psychology.
01:08:38.000How do evolutionary psychologists conduct research?
01:08:41.000And it was specifically to address some of the common Canards that we hear from the tractors of evolutionary psychology.
01:08:48.000Oh, it's all a bunch of post-hoc storytelling and so on.
01:08:51.000And so the paper basically looks at three points, two of which we've already sort of covered.
01:08:54.000One is the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations.
01:08:58.000And again, that's a very important point to make because it basically argues that Mm-hmm.
01:09:16.000The second method of evolutionary psychology is the building of these networks of cumulative evidence, like the one I gave you with the waist-to-hip ratio.
01:09:25.000Maybe I'll give you another one as an example of this mechanism.
01:09:30.000So, for example, if I want to argue that toy preferences have sex specificity that is innate, right?
01:09:39.000Because typically in the social sciences, we hear that what makes little boys little boys and little girls little goys Yeah, but that's dismissed.
01:09:53.000I mean, you hear that, but it's very fringe.
01:11:10.000Vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys and now there's some research with chimps showing that they exhibit the same sex specificity with these types of toys as human infants do.
01:11:26.000Clinical population, so there's a disorder known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological problem that masculinizes little girls, that masculinizes little girls both in their morphology but also in their behaviors.
01:11:39.000So if you take little girls who suffer from this disorder, what do you think happens in their toy preferences?
01:11:44.000They become more like those of little boys.
01:11:46.000We could take depictions on funerary monuments, you know, these big mausoleums of dead people, From ancient Greece, and you look at depictions of little boys and little girls, and you see that the little boys are depicted with the typical toys, with a ball,
01:12:13.000And so what you do, again, in evolutionary theory is you build this nomological network of cumulative evidence coming from completely different data sets that then makes it unassailable to argue against it.
01:12:25.000So that's the second method of evolutionary psychology.
01:12:31.000Evolutionary psychology operates on what are called consilient trees of knowledge.
01:12:36.000Consilience is a term that had sort of lost its way.
01:12:40.000It basically refers to unity of knowledge.
01:12:42.000So if you say, for example, physics is more consilient than sociology, it's because physics has these organized knowledge elements.
01:12:52.000So what is a typical tree of knowledge in evolutionary theory?
01:12:56.000So you could start with something like sexual selection.
01:12:58.000Sexual selection is basically the idea that how does a peacock evolve its big tail?
01:13:03.000So how do animals evolve their traits to give them reproductive advantage?
01:13:08.000That's been established from the time of Darwin through a million different species.
01:13:12.000So now that leads to down the tree to another theory.
01:13:16.000It's called the mid-level theory called parental investment theory.
01:13:19.000Parental investment theory basically says that if you want to know about sex differences within a species, look at the minimal obligatory parental investment that each sex has to have in that species.
01:13:53.000Parental investment theory leads to another theory that basically says that In the human context, females will make more judicious mate choices than men.
01:14:03.000In other words, women are more careful in the types of mate choices that they must make precisely because they have greater costs if they make a wrong mating choice.
01:14:13.000Which leads to a study that I did looking at how much information do men and women look at before they either reject mates or choose mates.
01:14:22.000And what do you think the result shows?
01:14:24.000When it comes to rejecting mates, women need less convincing.
01:14:28.000In other words, they acquire less information before they decide all these mates are losers.
01:14:33.000On the other hand, when it comes to choosing a mate, women look at more information prior to choosing.
01:14:39.000So what I've shown you here is how you start with a general principle and work down a tree to a specific hypothesis.
01:14:46.000That's called a tree of knowledge of evolutionary theory.
01:14:49.000That's what the method of evolutionary psychology is.
01:14:53.000So contrary to what typical detractors, there'll be some buffoon, some castrato at the bottom of your comments section that says, but evolutionary science says, that's not a real science.
01:15:10.000Those singers that had their balls chopped off.
01:15:12.000I usually call them the Castrati Brigade.
01:15:15.000And of course, in the singular form, it's Castrato, right?
01:15:18.000So it's a guy who walks around without testes, but a very inflated ego, who then tells you, you know, despite the fact that you've spent 20 plus years studying something, he knows more than you.
01:15:27.000All of you evolutionary scientists are, you know...
01:15:30.000It's interesting to me that there would be people that would be involved in universities that would debate this sort of very objective research.
01:15:43.000I mean, especially when it comes to gender, and obviously there's variables, but when it comes to the gravitating towards certain types of toys and tasks, and then it also pertains to career choices as well.
01:15:55.000Like, there's this big push to get women involved in STEM, and women involved in technology, and there's discrimination, women in tech.
01:16:54.000Just hinting at that led him to eventually stepping down as president of Harvard.
01:17:01.000Well, there's a real problem in colleges and universities today with this denial of reality to help other people's feelings or to placate other people's feelings.
01:17:10.000And it's also this repeating that even Obama's been involved in, repeating this myth that women working the same job make 77 cents for every dollar their man makes.
01:18:21.000But it's one of those things that if you tell people, they don't believe you.
01:18:25.000You have to send them studies and then they read it.
01:18:29.000This myth has been perpetrated so pervasively.
01:18:33.000It's so common that people parrot it and no one questions it.
01:18:37.000The fucking president parrots it on television.
01:18:41.000Like, intellectually, that is so incredibly dishonest for him to do.
01:18:45.000That if he is aware of the actual stats, and he says that just because he knows that's what people want to hear, like, oh, Obama does care.
01:18:53.000He's caring and sympathetic, and he's not a pig.
01:18:57.000I mean, similar narrative has been proposed, and you probably can fill in the details, regarding the, I don't know what the number is, you know, one in five women on university campuses will experience a sexual assault.
01:21:16.000Because if that were criminal, as I think I might have mentioned on your show before, 95% of people who are engaged in online dating are rapists.
01:23:38.000That the reason why I have to first believe in a lie before selling it to you is because when I lie, I actually have these micro-expressions that serve as telltale signs of my lying.
01:23:49.000If I could suppress these so that when you're trying to look at my face to see if there are any signatures of lies, Deception on my face.
01:24:40.000How about if I'm actually a very apathetic guy who can't get out of bed till 11 o'clock in the morning, but yet I convince whomever I'm going out with that I have this infinite bottled up ambition.
01:24:55.000So I'm not even faking the Rolex watch.
01:25:48.000Now, when you were talking about evolutionary psychology receiving a lot of criticism, you sort of glossed over it real quickly to make your point.
01:25:58.000Where's the vast majority of this coming from?
01:27:49.000They don't have any ideological reasons for hating evolutionary psychology, but because they don't know much about evolutionary psychology, they typically will argue, oh, evolutionists come up with all these fanciful post-hoc stories.
01:27:59.000And in a sense, the article that I wrote, that I discussed on your show today, seeks to address that.
01:28:04.000That contrary to what people think, the standard of evidence that evolutionary scientists typically seek to meet prior to Accepting an explanation is actually much, much higher than other sciences by the very nature of the epistemology of the field,
01:28:22.000by the very nature of how knowledge is created and generated in evolutionary theory.
01:28:25.000So for all sorts of reasons, none of which is valid, there's a long queue of, frankly, buffoons who despise evolutionary theory.
01:28:36.000Now, the reality is that they're going to lose this battle, right?
01:28:40.000There will be a day when it will become banal to argue that humans are driven by evolutionary imperatives.
01:28:47.000And I already see it from my own scientific career.
01:28:50.000If I look at the antipathy that I faced 15 years ago versus today, it's very, very different, right?
01:28:57.000The antipathy that I felt from sometimes the same person.
01:29:00.000I could still have emails from somebody who wrote me 10 years ago thinking that my work was full of shit, who's now inviting me to his university with all sorts of deference.
01:29:10.000And so that's the nature of science, right?
01:29:34.000And not only that, are unwilling to take into account that it might not be a case of either or, but it might be a case of there's a bunch of combining factors.
01:29:44.000And that evolution must certainly continue to play.
01:29:48.000It's the idea that we've completely transcended evolution with culture and thinking and logic and language.
01:30:39.000And the example I like to give, the metaphor I give is the cake metaphor.
01:30:42.000If you take the separate ingredients of a cake, here's the sugar, here's the eggs, here's the baking soda, whatever the parts are, the butter, they're separate at first.
01:31:03.000We are an inextricable mix of our genes and our unique environments and our unique talents and our unique personhoods.
01:31:10.000The problem with much of the social sciences has been, and they're losing now by the day, has been that they've completely rejected biology as in any way relevant in explaining anything.
01:31:23.000Mating, criminality, political choice.
01:31:27.000For example, there's a field called evolutionary politics or biopolitics, which tries to infuse evolutionary theory within political science.
01:32:35.000Where usually they're anonymous, and oftentimes I'm anonymous.
01:32:38.000So in a double-blind review process, I don't know who they are, they don't know who I am, and then we're engaging in a debate.
01:32:45.000And oftentimes the paper gets rejected because they're the reviewer, they're the editor, and then they have the final say.
01:32:50.000So in that context I've debated, or I've debated publicly typically when I go after somebody on Twitter who's espousing these kinds of stupidities, but I've never done it publicly in this way.
01:32:58.000Have you had a paper rejected that was logical and objective and made a lot of sense?
01:33:06.000So the paper, when I was talking to you about the tree of knowledge going down the tree of sexual selection.
01:33:11.000So I had a paper where I had looked at how much information do men and women look at before they either reject a mate or choose a mate, which I mentioned earlier.
01:33:22.000That paper, originally I had sent it to a top journal in consumer psychology.
01:33:27.000And to kind of just summarize the position, it was, well, this is all biology.
01:33:33.000What does this have to do with psychology?
01:33:35.000So these very esteemed psychologists somehow thought that biology existed in a separate realm to psychology.
01:33:53.000The other thing that they were upset about As they were talking about, well, why is this person who's an otherwise, very patronizing, who's an otherwise clearly a bright behavioral scientist, talking about sex differences when we should be looking at things that make us similar to one another?
01:34:09.000Well, when you're talking about sex differences in mating behavior, you study sex differences, right?
01:34:14.000I mean, it's a fundamental difference.
01:34:54.000If I navigate amongst my social science friends, well, they're less loving and less receptive, but they're coming around.
01:35:01.000So I think the problem stems from the empty slate premise, the idea that we are born with empty minds that are only subsequently filled by a wide range, by a cascading...
01:35:16.000It is, but also I have a problem with someone saying, why are you looking at this instead of looking at that?
01:35:22.000Well, looking at this, just because you're looking at something, it doesn't make it so that you can't understand why we are all similar in many ways.
01:35:30.000But the denial of these preferences, of these genetic preferences, of these evolutionary tendencies, that's not scientific at all.
01:35:43.000And the fact that that's being taught to kids, and that they go leave these institutions with these thoughts in their head that are based on a bunch of people that have never even existed in the outside world.
01:35:53.000That's what's fucked up about schools in a lot of ways.
01:35:56.000Is they're going from learning by these people to becoming one of these people, teaching in these schools, and never existing, a gigantic percentage, never existing outside of academia.
01:36:09.000So to speak to your point about have I ever faced this type of antipathy and so on, I gave two talks when my first book came out at a university in the psychology department and in the business school.
01:36:20.000They were back-to-back on two separate days.
01:36:23.000So this was a talk on my book, How Do You Darwinize the Field of Consumer Behavior?
01:36:28.000I gave it in the psychology department first, which is made up of a lot of people who have background in neurosciences and biology.
01:36:34.000And they all listened and said, yeah, beautiful.
01:36:57.000So this is a very interesting question.
01:36:59.000So I think business practitioners, in other words, business people, not business academics, Actually love my work or historically love my work because they're not vested in a particular paradigm.
01:37:25.000I don't give a shit about your paradigmatic fights in academia.
01:37:29.000Yes, but the academics who've been vested in social constructivism or in cultural relativism, every culture is relative, there are no human universals, there is no shared human nature, there is no shared biological heritage, then I come in on my biology train.
01:38:21.000Because their first instinct, no pun intended, instinct is an evolutionary term.
01:38:28.000They want to show that if everything is evolutionary, if everything is adaptive, then how could you explain something like homosexuality, which by definition is Darwinian, at that end, right?
01:38:38.000Well, then I say, well, there are some evolutionary theories that try to explain homosexuality, but that's not really the focus of my talk.
01:38:49.000Now, if we are these adaptive creatures that have this survival instinct, how do you explain the fact that there's an epidemiology of suicide?
01:38:56.000Why would somebody take their own life?
01:39:51.000The second thing that I'll point, when you said it's very rude, I actually got upset.
01:39:56.000I tried to stay with decorum and politeness, but as we were leaving, I took a couple of those senior folks and I said, you know, what is the point of inviting me here?
01:40:05.000And wasting your money and our respective time by not giving me a chance to get through my talk.
01:40:11.000Wouldn't it make more sense to give me the forum?
01:40:13.000And then at the end of the day, if you decide that it's not worthwhile, you throw it in the garbage, but at least you've given me the opportunity to share my ideas with you.
01:40:21.000Oh, no, no, Professor Saad, you mistook our interruptions.
01:40:37.000I usually ask people to hold off their questions till the Q&A period, but I don't know why, but especially in business schools, and certainly in some of the top business schools, there is this culture A very sort of alpha maleness where you hammer at the person.
01:41:30.000As a young doctoral student, there is this one professor who's interrupting him in the way that those folks were interrupting me at that school.
01:41:38.000And from the corner somewhere, apparently, Albert Einstein says, don't you think we owe the young man the respect to let him finish speaking?
01:41:46.000And then I'm sure at the end of his talk, he'll have plenty of opportunities to answer us.
01:41:50.000And then after that, nobody said anything.
01:41:52.000So I think it's part of that baboon sort of guerrilla thing.
01:41:55.000I'm going to show you that I'm the smartest guy in the room.
01:41:57.000So you typically see it from not the truly elite.
01:42:00.000The truly elite don't have to do this.
01:42:02.000But the guys just below want to show that they're the toughest guys in the prison yard, and therefore they interrupt you, they harass you, they heckle you, and so on.
01:42:11.000The same type of people that would go after you with like a hate blog.
01:42:15.000Professors that are just fringe intellectuals that just really aren't that smart, but they've achieved this notoriety and a status because of the fact they're teaching at some school.
01:45:17.000There's a lot of people like that out there.
01:45:19.000And there's, again, there's a lot of attention in doing something like that.
01:45:24.000You know, and if unfortunately it negates some really good points that they might have about a bunch of different issues because you have to look at it through the lens of this really poisonous person.
01:45:36.000You know, the first I had heard of him, There was an incident that happened on Psychology Today with a gentleman by the name of Satoshi Kanazawa.
01:45:47.000So Satoshi Kanazawa is a professor, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics.
01:45:52.000It's a very, very prestigious school in London, England, who was a very popular blogger at Psychology Today.
01:45:59.000But he had a very sort of bombastic style of writing that sort of drew a lot of attention because of the way he phrased things.
01:46:08.000But I guess he thought that he was so popular that he was sort of untouchable.
01:46:12.000And at one point he wrote a blog article summarizing somebody else's work looking at racial differences in attractiveness.
01:46:20.000So for example, who's most attractive, white women or black women, white men or black men?
01:46:24.000And one of the results from that data set, this wasn't his own study, he was summarizing somebody else's work, was that black women had been rated as less attractive And he gave some, I guess, speculative reasons as to why that might be.
01:47:31.000So then I wrote an article, which I frankly, if you don't mind me saying, took a lot of courage, where I, and you could probably pull it up, well, you could pull it up if you wanted, where I basically argued that to...
01:47:43.000Purge a blogger would set a very dangerous precedent, right?
01:47:46.000If you disagree with whatever Satoshi Kanazawa is saying, let his words come back to haunt him, right?
01:48:30.000I mean, I know what's right, and I'm going to support that principle, which is you don't ban people based on ideas that they write.
01:48:37.000Let their ideas come back to haunt them if they are bad ideas.
01:48:40.000Not only that, why is it okay to say that there's...
01:48:46.000There's an evolutionary desire for women to breed with an alpha male, like one of these romance novel guys.
01:48:54.000Why is it okay to say that women are more inclined to favor taller men with broader shoulders and longer, or whatever the fuck it is, or...
01:49:05.000Why is it okay to say that women are less attractive to obese, short men?
01:49:10.000Why is it okay to say that men would be less attractive to obese women?
01:50:52.000Incidentally, the king on this issue is a gentleman by the name of Philip Rushton, who has now passed away a few years ago, who was a Canadian psychologist who spent his career studying racial differences.
01:51:04.000Specifically, he studied differences in IQ. And I actually had a personal anecdote with him because early on in my career, I think two years into my original professorship, I think it was in 96, I was giving a talk at a conference.
01:51:22.000This hall had maybe 1,500 people, and I hadn't looked at who were the other speakers in my session, but I noticed that people were very, seemed there was a lot of poison in the air.
01:51:32.000And it turned out, I should have maybe checked before going into the hall, that the gentleman who was speaking immediately before me was this gentleman, Philip Rushton, and he was going to talk about cranial capacity, post-mortem cranial capacity, Of black men, black women, white men,
01:51:48.000white women, and then he would show some racial differences which would get everybody riled up.
01:51:52.000And this was probably the only time ever where I was about to give a talk where I was genuinely terrified because I thought that I would just get lynched by proxy because I'm the next guy in line and they're just gonna kill me just because I was next on the same stage as him.
01:52:05.000The good news for me is that After he finished his talk, so the room, let's say, had 1,500 people.
01:53:03.000You know, and who knows what the origin of that is?
01:53:06.000I mean, you could go into that from an evolutionary standpoint and try to figure out what part of the world they come from, what their ancestors did.
01:53:13.000What would have been the selection pressures that would have resulted in this adaptation?
01:54:13.000And it specifically sort of breaks down the types of research questions that if you want to have a viable career as a scientist, you should stay away from.
01:54:24.000And I think pretty much on top of that list is studying racial differences, especially racial differences that might eventually point to a finding that is politically incorrect.
01:54:37.000That's an excellent way for you to become the pariah of science.
01:54:45.000I actually did a sad truth clip on my YouTube channel where I talked about, you know, facts are not racist, right?
01:54:53.000I mean, in Boolean logic, in mathematical logic, you take a statement and it's either true or false.
01:55:06.000So the idea that a statement is racist scientifically, no, it's either false or not false or provisionally true.
01:55:15.000But apparently the argument from the other camp is the mere fact that you ask these questions What is the value in asking that question?
01:55:30.000So they sort of infer a nefarious motive to you going down that alley.
01:55:36.000Yeah, but you can't do that because it's an appeal to ignorance.
01:55:40.000You're saying that let's all feign ignorance and not look at the actual facts of just the physical bodies of human beings and that they vary based on climate, based on, you know, what area of the world,
01:55:55.000what the people were up to that were living there for generation after generation that led to the genetics expressing themselves and the way they do in 2016. It's crazy.
01:56:08.000It's weird, and it's almost like in response to what they believe to be illogical criticism that's inevitable.
01:56:14.000It's like this illogical criticism is inevitable, so hedge your bets early and say there's no difference between the sexes, there's no difference between the races, I don't want to get any arguments, I want tenure, I just want to keep promoting ignorance at an institution of learning.
01:56:44.000Proponents of sort of this anti-evolutionary position came from anthropologists who saw the potential for biology being misused or Darwinian theory to be misused, right?
01:56:57.000So the Nazis can refer to, you know, Darwinian theory, there's a struggle between the races and we are the Aryans, the Jews lost, so what's wrong with getting rid of them?
01:58:30.000But the cultural anthropologists are driven by a premise of cultural relativism.
01:58:34.000Which, incidentally, our common friend Sam Harris tells a great story about moral relativism.
01:58:40.000And I hope I don't botch the story, but apparently he was at a conference somewhere where he had a chance to speak to the bioethicist who is sitting on the President's Commission on Bioethics.
01:58:49.000And she apparently is a sort of moral relativist type.
01:58:53.000And he asked her, I mean, are you sure that there are no universal moral truths?
01:58:57.000I mean, are you not able to pronounce a position on whether if there were a culture where people were told that every fourth child has to have his eyes gouged so that he can walk towards the light without eyes, would you support?
01:59:12.000So this bioethicist was unable to pass a moral judgment as to whether If you had a religious narrative that says that every fourth child should have his eyes gouged out, she couldn't pronounce the position.
01:59:26.000And the reason why she couldn't is because she is shackled.
01:59:29.000She's intellectually shackled by the narrative of cultural relativism.
01:59:35.000Hence the lack of criticism for things like female genital mutilation in the Islamic communities.
01:59:40.000And that's why the castrato-in-chief, Justin Trudeau, That's why, before he was prime minister, when he was a minister in parliament, he got very upset when somebody referred to child bride, honor killing, genital mutilation,
01:59:56.000throwing acid in their faces when they refused marriage or whatever.
02:00:00.000Somebody referred to these practices as barbaric and there is no place for them in Canadian society.
02:00:05.000He didn't get upset by those practices.
02:00:08.000He got upset by the other politician referring to them as barbaric.
02:01:44.000But from his perspective, he is simply shackled by his inability to have a clear moral compass that says this is right, this is wrong, because all he sees is the parasites in his brain.
02:02:02.000There are some things that are right and some things that are wrong.
02:02:04.000And when we're talking about things like people objecting to the analysis of cranial capacity of different people...
02:02:14.000I could see why some people would be uncomfortable with that, because I could see how some people would perceive that as being some sort of a justification for racism, and so they would stand there.
02:02:23.000But as a person who's not racist, I'm not racist, and I don't think you are either, when we're discussing this, it becomes a matter of just being a very curious biological trait.
02:02:34.000And it doesn't make someone superior or inferior.
02:02:38.000And it's fascinating to me, because I'm looking at the human Evolution of the species as being this massive complex algorithm that's been going on since the beginning of single-celled organisms branching off into multi-celled organisms.
02:02:52.000So there's been this process of change and what has made this process so that people that live in Iceland are so big You know, you look at those men that win those strongman competitions, how many of them are from fucking Iceland?
02:03:47.000Now that is not viewed as racist because ultimately you're talking about success.
02:03:53.000On the other hand, if you talk about race A is somehow less good at something than race B and where race A scores high on the victimology Olympics, forgive the pun, then you're screwed.
02:04:04.000There was a fantastic Radiolab podcast that dealt with people from one particular part of the world that were amazing at running.
02:04:11.000And they were talking about their ability to endure pain because of the rituals that they had to endure, the rites of passage as men.
02:04:18.000Their circumcision done with sharp sticks and having to crawl naked through thorn bushes and really dark, dark shit that they had to do.
02:04:28.000And it was interesting because one guy who had gone through that and became this unbelievably successful runner and just had this unbelievable ability to shut off the pain signal, to ignore it.
02:04:38.000But he was also talking about he wouldn't want his son to go through that same process and that he believes that the benefits are not worth it.
02:05:33.000So it's not just biology with them, but it's also this unbelievable ability to die.
02:05:39.000And the actual episode is called Cut and Run because it's about circumcision, about what they're forced to do while they have a stick poking through their dick.
02:07:33.000What's interesting is my friend Steve, he got stung by this bullet ant.
02:07:37.000He said it's unbelievably painful for about an hour or two hours, like where you just like you can't believe how much pain you're enduring.
02:07:43.000And then he said after that he couldn't remember which ankle got stung.
02:09:34.000He said, look, I'll book the range for two hours, and either you'll be the type of guy who'll go there and will use the two hours, or you'll shoot once, and you'll say, this is not for me.
02:10:18.000Well, I have some really powerful rifles that were even different, I'm sure, than anything you shot.
02:10:23.000I have some hunting rifles, like a.300 Win Mag, that is like getting punched in the shoulder every time you shoot it, because it's designed to shoot moose and elk and big giant animals.
02:12:54.000It forces you to exist in the conscious mind versus the reactive mind.
02:12:58.000You are consciously engaging in a process.
02:13:02.000So, like, there's a thing called target panic that many archers face, and it's a huge issue because of nerves, especially people that aren't used to performing under nerves.
02:13:14.000They go into this really almost like tunnel vision sort of a state, and they start panicking, and they just want to shoot the shot as quick as possible.
02:13:27.000Because there's a lot of things involved in shooting a bow and arrow correctly.
02:13:31.000Bow and arrows, it takes so much more discipline than it does to shoot a rifle.
02:13:36.000Because with a rifle, essentially what you have to do is have your face in the proper position, put your finger on the trigger and squeeze so the shot goes off almost as a surprise.
02:13:44.000And as long as you're looking through the scope correctly, you have your rifle centered in, or you have your rifle sighted in correctly, It should hit where you want to aim it if the rifle is accurate.
02:13:58.000With a bow and arrow, there's so many different anchor points.
02:14:01.000You have to have the string touching the tip of your nose.
02:14:03.000You have to have your hand in the exact same place every time.
02:14:05.000You have to have practice countless times.
02:14:07.000You have to make sure that you're holding your shoulder, your front shoulder in the right position.
02:14:11.000Your hand has to be holding the bow in a very specific position where you're not torquing the bow left and right.
02:14:16.000And so when you go through your shot process, You go through this checkpoint in your mind.
02:14:35.000And then when I go through it in a hunting scenario where obviously you have to keep your mouth shut, I go through that same checklist in my mind.
02:14:42.000And that sort of in many ways prevents a lot of the panic because...
02:14:48.000That sort of panic exists in the conscious mind.
02:14:51.000You start thinking, oh my god, here we go.
02:14:53.000Oh my god, I can't believe it's happening.
02:14:57.000And it's because of this reaction to the overwhelming, unusual stimulation of the event, of the panic sets in, and you succumb to that unusual pressure.
02:15:11.000The protocols that I'm talking about, they come of two varieties.
02:15:14.000There's what's called concurrent protocols or retrospective protocols.
02:15:19.000Concurrent protocols is where you verbalize as you're doing the task.
02:15:23.000The benefit of that is that it's live.
02:16:08.000So as is true in most of these methodological choices when you're making these scientific decisions, there is no absolute optimal strategy.
02:16:16.000There's always pros and cons to any methodology you use.
02:16:20.000Yeah, and I think there's also something that happens to people when they do something so many times where it becomes this subconscious action and then when you ask them to verbalize what the steps are, oftentimes they don't know because they've programmed it into their mind.
02:16:53.000You know, you just go through this standard process.
02:16:56.000And that happens with martial artists a lot.
02:16:57.000There's a lot of martial artists that have certain techniques that they've gotten down to a science, but then when you ask them to teach it, you say, okay, what are you doing first?
02:18:41.000You drill these moments over and over into your mind so that when you're fighting, they actually just come out subconsciously or they come out without conscious thought because you don't really have the time to say, okay, I'm going to slip this right hand and then throw the left to the body and the right high kick.
02:18:57.000It has to sort of be an automatic response.
02:19:00.000So you have to be able to go into this Zen state.
02:19:03.000Which is fine in these big movements, these explosive movements like a martial arts thing.
02:19:09.000But in terms of like an archery thing, you don't want fast, big, twitching, explosive movements to come out automatically.
02:19:16.000What you want is a very controlled process where you maintain very strict form and you stay calm.
02:19:23.000And so in that sort of a process, going over this conscious shot-making process is probably better for you.
02:20:24.000You would never imagine, like for years, for decades rather, we had no idea that heading a ball could have detrimental effects.
02:20:31.000But now we're finding out that certain soccer players who consistently headed the ball over a long career develop all sorts of cognitive issues with memory, impulsiveness, all the same sort of symptoms that you find from fighters.
02:20:44.000It's amazing because it's not a concussion thing.
02:20:46.000It's a sub-concussive trauma thing where you're constantly engaging that connective tissue inside your brain to try to stabilize the brain as it swashes around inside your skull and it starts failing.
02:20:58.000And then the damage of your brain moving around inside of there starts accumulating.
02:21:02.000Speaking of soccer and your MMA stuff, I'm triggered by, and you're going to be impressed, Conan McGregor.
02:27:39.000Fortunately now, there's a lot of stem cell doctors and specialists that are in the United States that are having incredible success with injuries and a lot of mixed martial artists do it.
02:27:50.000Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson, who's the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, just had some stem cells shot into his knee.
02:27:55.000So this is a really common thing, that you deal with some doctors who aren't athletes and don't work with athletes, and then they tell you things like, don't ever lift something again.
02:28:37.000And he couldn't, as a person who is an expert in physiology and a person who's an expert in exercise and teaching people how to get strong, he couldn't understand why if an injury, a compression of the disc caused the disc to herniate, why couldn't a decompression of the disc cause it to reset or to heal?
02:28:56.000So he developed this machine that does exactly that.
02:29:43.000Yoga is huge because there's a bunch of positions in yoga where you are actively decompressing your back.
02:29:49.000There's one where you reach back, you grab yourself behind the heels, you straighten your legs out, and you literally are pulling with your arms and you feel your back go like pop, pop, pop.
02:29:59.000You're releasing tension and pressure and you're actively stretching your back.
02:30:11.000But it's really important for people to work on their core and their spine.
02:30:16.000And there's so many people that don't.
02:30:17.000I have a friend of mine who's this big, strong, powerful guy.
02:30:20.000And he played football and he's done a bunch of different things, but he's never done any real...
02:30:26.000Significant core work, and I started showing him some different exercises like windmills and things along those lines, and he was stunned at how weak his lower back is.
02:30:34.000Because so many people don't work those muscles, and those muscles are critical for athletic performance, for your ability to move and to protect your spine from injury.
02:30:43.000There's a lot of injuries that you can avoid by just being strong in your core, in your column, your spinal column, and developing strength around that whole Really super sensitive and delicate area of your back.
02:31:42.000It's a really important part of back health.
02:31:44.000The way I'm sitting right now is not good.
02:31:46.000Yeah, I mean, that's why these chairs that we're sitting in, we're sitting in these Ergo Depot chairs, and these chairs are designed to make you sit at a good posture.
02:31:55.000So if you sit like this, you'll sit with your spine in a good position.
02:31:59.000Normal chairs, a lot of times, your back gets rounded, and you sit into them, and you sink, and you develop this pain.
02:32:05.000Like right around your mid-back or maybe perhaps your lower back, depending on whatever ailments you've got.
02:32:11.000These chairs, I sit in these fucking things for hours.
02:32:42.000Like as you're sitting there, you have to kind of keep yourself in a posture.
02:32:46.000There's also a lot of those standing desks.
02:32:48.000They develop these standing surfaces that are a surface that's very varied.
02:32:54.000So instead of standing on this absolute flat, static sort of a floor where you're in the same position all the time, instead it's this dynamic surface where it has all these humps to it and you move around on it.
02:33:08.000So you'll lean on the left leg, you'll lean on the right leg.
02:33:19.000I had a complete rupture of my Achilles tendon when I was a soccer player and one of the things that I had to do in 14 months of rehab is to stand on one of those boards with a ball.
02:33:30.000Just to relearn how to move your ankle to adjust.
02:33:33.000Did you have to have it repaired surgically?
02:33:47.000When you get ACL surgery, instead of replacing your ACL with a cadaver ACL, which is significantly weaker, they take the ACL tendon and replace it with Achilles, which is way bigger and way stronger.
02:33:59.000It makes your ACL 150% stronger than a regular one.
02:34:06.000I don't know if you're aware of how it works with cadavers, but...
02:34:09.000When they replace a ligament, what it does is essentially acts as a scaffolding and your body re-proliferates this cadaver ligament around your own cells.
02:34:19.000So instead of it being a normal size, it becomes this fat cord that really keeps your knee in place.
02:34:24.000Because I've had both my knees blow out.
02:36:21.000But, you know, there's all these different solutions that people try to come up with for the real problem, which is not sitting in the proper posture at a chair.
02:36:29.000And I sit in this desk doing these podcasts for hours.
02:36:47.000It's not that big a deal, as long as you're eating food.
02:36:50.000Well, the reason I ask this is because earlier in my teaching career, I could do back-to-back lectures, each one being three hours, and it was no problem.
02:36:59.000Now I can't do it, not because of mental acuity problems, but because when I stand up, my back starts hurting by about hour four.
02:37:12.000It'll make a big difference in the health of your back because it's one thing they just don't look into enough and the only time they look into it is when they're already injured.
02:37:22.000And I really wish people would pay way more attention and I wish I had known this before I got injured.
02:37:29.000I got injured from martial arts because just the nature of jujitsu and wrestling, there's a lot of people that I get in.
02:37:34.000I know a lot of guys that have had disc replacements and all sorts of fusions and stuff.
02:37:39.000And it's just the brutal nature of the sport.
02:37:42.000But I think some of that, at least, can be prevented with proper maintenance and proper spine health, decompression, stretching.