Joe and Hunter talk about what it's like to be a co-host on Brian Callen's show, Captain Sillyface, and how they keep him on the level. They also talk about how much they've learned from each other over the years, and why they think he's a better comedian than they do. And, of course, there's a surprise guest appearance from the one and only Joe Henrik, the author of the book The Secret of Our Success, which is a book about why we have black people and why we don't have white people. The secret of our success is that we have a black guy who has a weird accent and likes to talk about things like vitamin D and why it's a good thing he doesn't have a job. Joe and Hunter also discuss how they think Brian is growing up, and what it means to be an adult in the 21st century. And they talk about a lot of other things, too. This episode is sponsored by VaynerSpeakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Review our new ad-free version of the podcast, The Nod, wherever you get your stuff! Rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast! Rate and review in iTunes! Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcast and review our other shows! We're listening to them on Podchaser, too! and share the podcast on your favourite podchips! so you can be apart of the podlife! Thank you for listening and supporting us! Timestamps: 5 stars! 5 stars is much appreciated! 6 stars is a big thank you! I'll be looking out there! 7 stars is the best way to support us on the pod? 8 stars is more than 5 stars on iTunes? 9 stars is better than the pod is a review? 10 stars is also a review on a good day in the podcatcher? 11 stars 12 stars is enough 13 stars is recommended? 15 stars is helpful? 16 stars is good enough? 17 stars is really helps me out there? 18 stars is appreciated? 19 stars is very much more than that? 21 stars is helping me out here 16 days ago 17 years of a good night 18 days ago? 14 stars is not enough??
00:00:19.000So, I mean, what happened was that a couple of years ago, Brian and I were talking about books, and Brian had just started doing his podcast at that point.
00:00:27.000And, you know, he was sort of interviewing strippers, a lot of strippers or like porn stars or like, you know, MMA guys, and that was fine.
00:00:35.000But, you know, I was like, Brian, if you enjoy these books so much, why don't we get on some of these professors?
00:01:52.000I would say that he's just—his comedy, he prefers it to be silly.
00:01:56.000You know, because, like, there's a difference between comedy, in Brian's mind especially, between what's really funny and what's really deep.
00:02:42.000And, you know, they know certain ideas that I didn't know, and now I know them, and, you know, maybe I can.
00:02:48.000And he's even started experimenting with, he particularly got really excited, we had a guy called Joe Henrik on, who wrote this great book called The Secret of Our Success, which is all about cultural evolution, how cultural evolution works.
00:03:00.000And one of the things he talks about in there is, you know, why do we have black people and why do we have white people?
00:03:06.000And, you know, it comes down to vitamin D and folate and all these sorts of things.
00:03:25.000Because they literally can't place it.
00:03:29.000Side story, when I first went to college, I wanted to major in linguistics for a while, and I met with my linguistics professor, and he sits me down, and we're having a conversation just like this.
00:03:39.000And then all of a sudden, he stops me, just like you did, and he says...
00:04:17.000Because the X sound is really a K and then an S, even though we represent it as an X. So he basically had all of these tests, and he figured out pretty quickly that I was trying to pass as an American...
00:04:29.000And he's like, sorry, white boy, not so much.
00:04:53.000Because what happens is that people naturally sort of start to—you're in a tribe, and you start to pick up the values and the speech patterns and all that sort of stuff of the tribe.
00:05:03.000And I really thought of myself as American, in large part because I identified with my mom more than my dad.
00:05:10.000And so what happened was that I was like— Uh-oh, British accent creeping in.
00:05:15.000And so I fought that with everything that I could.
00:05:17.000But in spite of fighting the accent with everything I could, these words like bean and vitamin and medicine and sick that I wasn't watching for, that no ordinary person would watch for, crept into my mind.
00:05:29.000It's always interesting to me, there's an added insight that you get from people that come from another country and then live in America.
00:05:38.000There's something different about like, oh, you guys don't know how weird this fucking place is.
00:06:19.000I don't think that's absorbable from a DVD. No.
00:06:25.000And part of it is—I mean, this is a large part of what we've been doing and what Joe Henrik's work is about—is the fact that when you're in a tribe, whatever that tribe is, whether it's America or Christianity or Mormonism or Islam or some Papua New Guineans in the foothills of Papua New Guinea— Yeah.
00:07:10.000And so the first place that I went after I was born in Saudi Arabia was Brian's house.
00:07:16.000Like at birth, I went to Brian's house.
00:07:20.000And so for the last, you know, and then we moved around and we moved to different places.
00:07:23.000He did, you know, Philippines, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever.
00:07:27.000I did Saudi Arabia, Greece, Brazil, England.
00:07:30.000And then my parents moved to France and Libya and the UAE. And then, you know, I came to the U.S., So moving constantly between tribes, like that was a large part of my experience growing up as a kid, was I was constantly like, people are all the same, and yet they're fucking different.
00:07:48.000And because I come from the background of science, my first response was like, oh, well, there must be science of this, right?
00:07:56.000Why not go and look at that science and see what the science says about that?
00:07:59.000Turns out there's a massive amount of science all about it.
00:08:03.000Yeah, there's a massive amount of science all about it, and it's so fascinating when you stop and think that there are some people...
00:08:08.000I'm sure you've seen the most recent photos of that uncontacted tribe, now contacted, obviously, in the Amazon, like, really recently over the last couple weeks?
00:08:33.000There's been no interaction with the West.
00:08:35.000They have stick bows that they've made, and they're all barefoot, and they're all wearing leaves and shit.
00:08:41.000These people, here they are, trucking along in 2017. And you've got to think, 50,000, 60,000 years ago, they probably were living exactly the same way.
00:08:51.000And what's fascinating is just the degree to which those people have so much to teach us, because a lot of what happened in the beginning of the Enlightenment is that if you look at Locke and Rousseau and all these guys, they're trying to imagine the state of nature.
00:09:05.000But they're a group of people who are sitting around in Europe...
00:09:08.000They've never met somebody from the Amazon or someone from Papua New Guinea.
00:09:11.000And now we really have a pretty good idea of what was life like before civilization.
00:09:36.000Well, there's a bunch of interesting ones.
00:09:38.000One of my favorite ones is constructive paranoia.
00:09:42.000So what happens is when you have tribespeople and they go outside of their village, they suddenly become massively paranoid, like incredibly paranoid.
00:09:51.000And he's like, you know, these people are more paranoid than your average New York Jew, right?
00:10:15.000But then he had this experience where he had a couple of experiences.
00:10:19.000One, which was around, you know, somebody, some other tribe that was potentially trying to kill him in Papua New Guinea.
00:10:25.000And then the other one was around he basically, you know, was getting on this boat.
00:10:29.000And, you know, if you're in the West and you get on a boat at the New York Port Authority or whatever, you feel like, oh, yeah, this boat's safe.
00:11:08.000And he then talks about how, you know, he's a 70, 80-year-old man.
00:11:12.000He's like, I need to be more paranoid because the reality is if I go down, it's probably because I slip in the shower.
00:11:18.000Like, you know, there are all these things that can actually kill me in my environment that I sort of take for granted because my world seems so safe.
00:11:27.000And so one of the things you learn from that is that paranoia is a tool.
00:11:31.000And rather than a lot of people have trouble with paranoia where they're indiscriminately paranoid.
00:11:36.000But the key is figuring out what to be paranoid about, when to be paranoid, so that you're hyper alert to threats.
00:11:48.000Most of their body's exposed and they're around all sorts of different poisonous things and predatory things and cats and fucking spiders and whatever the hell's out there.
00:11:58.000And if you break a leg in the jungle, you're done.
00:12:01.000And that's the point is they don't have the luxury of, oh, I was not paying attention in CrossFit.
00:12:16.000Well, the interesting thing is that in many ways it's actually more fun, because they have such a strong, like, you know, part of what we don't have, and obviously part of what you're creating with your podcast and what we're trying to create on a smaller level with our podcast, is tribe.
00:12:31.000Like, you know, a strong sense of community, a group of people that you belong with, you know, you're in it together, all of that sort of stuff.
00:12:39.000And, you know, America, and he particularly talks about the elderly, you know, he talks about what is the experience of the elderly in a tribe?
00:12:46.000And, you know, you're super valuable until death.
00:12:48.000Everybody respects the shit out of you.
00:12:50.000You always have things to contribute to a tribe.
00:13:25.000It seems like if we lived in a small town and there was some guy that, you know, we really loved and he was starting to die, we'd want to take care of him.
00:13:32.000But if it's that crazy asshole that's down the hallway in your apartment building, you never even talked to that dude because there's a thousand people in your apartment building that you never talked to.
00:13:56.000The easiest way to understand it is Facebook, right?
00:13:59.000Like you may have 4000 friends on Facebook, but then you constantly find like, who the fuck are these people that I friended in some sort of like friending frenzy.
00:14:10.000I don't think that song's going to take off.
00:14:15.000But you find that, like, oh, I only really know a few of these people.
00:14:18.000The majority of them, my brain can't track, right?
00:14:21.000And you even get into that experience.
00:14:23.000Like, that's what I always find fascinating is you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, right, on the street, and you're kind of avoiding the interaction, right?
00:15:24.000But then, you know, even though there's 150, there's, you know, whatever, 4,000 people, 5,000 people who's like, you'd recognize their face, but you're like, I don't totally fucking know you.
00:15:35.000So there's a series of all these things.
00:15:37.000But whatever the numbers are, it's not 7 billion.
00:15:41.000LAUGHTER That's not even close, right?
00:15:44.000Well, that's what's interesting about small towns is that there's a feeling in small towns of an invasion of your privacy as much as there is a feeling of camaraderie.
00:17:16.000It's really that we're like grooming each other, we're maintaining social relationships, and we're trading information about who's trustworthy, who's not trustworthy, who did what to who, and passing information around in the tribe.
00:17:31.000I mean, it seems also when you think about how women are really into gossiping and chatting, whereas men really appreciate quiet and then get upset if people are too flashy.
00:17:53.000And specifically, men, like what you're saying about making sure that nobody's getting too flashy, that's a real function of teasing, right?
00:18:01.000The real function of teasing is that if you look at these hunter-gatherer tribes, they have all these mechanisms for making sure that nobody's head gets too big.
00:18:25.000So, and then also, you know, when they, for example, they'll have all these rituals when someone has elected the big man of the tribe or whatever it is, they will, then all the group will get around and make fun of him.
00:19:44.000And you're like, oh, that was fucking dumb.
00:19:46.000Or, you know, like Wesley Snipes had that great idea of like, I'm just going to not pay taxes, right?
00:19:52.000I think in his defense that he just got one of those wacky attorneys and had him convinced that there's some loophole in the Constitution and they don't want this Constitution loophole exposed.
00:20:11.000They were telling me that you don't have to pay taxes, and that the Constitution says that the only time you're supposed to pay taxes is during war, and that's when they came up with federal taxes in the first place, and it's not legal, and that's why they can't really charge you with it, and if you just resist, I'm like,
00:21:06.000You take all your money, and then you get out, and you haven't made money in a long time, and now you gotta get back on your feet and fuck you.
00:21:25.000Saddle down young, impulsive children who are just getting out of their parents' grasp, saddle them down with debt, and then have them enter into a diminishing job market.
00:21:34.000And if you start off something in 2016, what are the fucking odds, especially if it's tech-related, that anything you learn is going to be applicable in four years?
00:21:42.000Well, I mean, if you want to talk about the university system, I mean, you know, there's a ship that is sinking pretty damn fast.
00:21:50.000Having Jordan Peterson on your podcast, you guys had him before I had him on, and I've been paying attention to his work for a long time, and he's one of the few people that are standing out there in the river screaming.
00:23:03.000That's one of the things that's going on with this social justice warrior movement is not just people deciding that some people should be more ethical or kind or loving or open or progressive.
00:23:31.000But the fact that, you know, if you have any problem with it, right, Jordan Peterson takes issue with some of that behavior, they're then like, so you're saying racism and sexism and discrimination are okay?
00:25:48.000The people that are really into the idea of communism.
00:25:50.000Yeah, on theory, about everybody sharing and not worrying about money, that would be great.
00:25:55.000If there was only the three of us, if we were the only people in the world, this is my example that I always love to use.
00:25:59.000If there was the three of us, and there was like $3 million in the world, and we all said, well, let's all just split it up, and then money won't be nothing.
00:26:07.000We'll just trade back and forth, and everything should be even.
00:26:41.000But this narrative keeps getting repeated by people who don't get up at 7 o'clock in the morning or don't have the same kind of ambition or feel bad because some people do want a fucking private jet and fly all over the world and ball like Dan Bilzerian.
00:27:29.000And I think the challenge of 2017 is how do we kill those ideas?
00:27:33.000But also in the defense of the people that are anti-corporate or anti-corporation, there is an issue when these gigantic groups get together and they're only...
00:27:42.000Their only motivation is acquiring more money every year.
00:27:46.000That does become a problem, and then there's a diffusion of responsibility when you're locked into that giant system, and you're just a middle manager of some Exxon group that's fucking killing seals, and you don't give a shit.
00:27:57.000You know, those poor seals, why are they living in the Arctic anyway?
00:29:27.000Or you are a teacher and you know your subject, you know history, you know whatever, right?
00:29:32.000Or if you go into academia and you talk to a bunch of scientists, you'll find, oh, you know your sub-discipline of psychology, of biology, of chemistry, of whatever, and literally nothing else that is happening in science.
00:29:44.000So the problem is that what happens is if you look at the Founding Fathers, they read really, really widely.
00:29:51.000And I was recently involved in an intellectual dispute with some libertarians, right?
00:29:57.000And so I went to libertarianism.org, which is run by the Cato Institute.
00:30:01.000What was the intellectual dispute regarding?
00:30:03.000So the big beef that I've been taking is with fundamentalists.
00:32:10.000And you better pack your bags because you're going to need clothes in heaven.
00:32:12.000There's people that are packed, ready for Jesus to take them away.
00:32:15.000And those people give the rest of Christianity or the rest of Islam a bad name.
00:32:20.000But they also give us amazing movies like Left Behind and Left Behind 2. I don't know if you've seen them, but they're Kirk Cameron's greatest work.
00:32:29.000They are an incredible work of comedy that he didn't know was comedy while he was making it.
00:34:33.000Okay, you really shouldn't be eating bananas, Ray.
00:34:36.000But wouldn't that be amazing if you managed to convince Christians that like, you know, actually instead of the Eucharist, you should be eating bananas?
00:35:07.000I bet it was probably somebody whose loved one was killed by a falling coconut and got fucking pissed and smashed that coconut with a rock thinking that coconut had killed their mom.
00:35:18.000Or somebody who killed their mom with that fucking coconut.
00:38:05.000But when I think about a dude marrying a hooker, I think about a dude who's off the rails.
00:38:09.000When I think about a dude in his 50s who marries an escort, I'm like, oh, there's a 50-50 chance that guy might be out of his fucking mind.
00:38:18.000So one of the criticisms of Snopes during this election was that there was a pro-Hillary bias to some of the information that Snopes was reporting on.
00:38:26.000And apparently she had been involved in some sort of an anti-Bush, anti-Republican website in the past and, you know, leans left, the whole deal.
00:39:45.000And is there much of a difference between a woman who gets paid for each individual sexual encounter versus a woman who marries a guy for money, which is pretty much normal.
00:40:47.000There's definitely more overt asshole-ish behavior in the name of Trump.
00:40:54.000He's tapped into that vein, which I didn't really see.
00:40:58.000I don't remember seeing that from any other candidate ever.
00:41:01.000Well, I think, you know, that frustration has been building a lot for a long time with those guys.
00:41:07.000They didn't get that representation until now.
00:41:09.000So if he kicked his wife out, if she said something stupid, you know, and she said, I'm tired of his breath, then fuck him, and he kicks her to the curb, and, I mean, people would be like, yeah!
00:41:22.000And it'd be like a gigantic nationwide woman hunt to find the perfect person who just knows to do what she's told and just to obey the Donald and just to take care of him.
00:41:35.000As long as she doesn't look too much like Ivanka, right?
00:41:38.000She's got to look hot as fuck, for sure.
00:41:41.000I mean, he's the goddamn president of the United States.
00:44:19.000But there is that trajectory for actors who come out here hoping they're going to get discovered, you know, are waiting to be discovered for 40, 50 years, and then like, oh shit, I'm 70. And then they crash, and then, you know, they become the super depressed, cynical actors who sit around like,
00:44:34.000you know, being like, fuck the industry, the industry's the fucking worst.
00:44:46.000It's coming out of them like a sprinkler system.
00:44:48.000And that is where a lot of middle America is right now, because they've had this hope of the American Dream, the American Dream, the American Dream, the American Dream, and then those hopes have been crushed, right?
00:44:58.000It hasn't delivered, it hasn't panned out the way that it was supposed to.
00:45:02.000And so you're seeing a lot of pessimism, which is the opposite side.
00:45:06.000And pessimism has certain strengths, and the strengths of pessimism, it's that constructive paranoia we talked about that they practice in Papua New Guinea, which is that you're super alive to threats.
00:45:16.000But you're actually so alive to threats that you see threats that aren't even there, right?
00:45:22.000But the problem is that it also comes with substance abuse.
00:45:26.000So you find that, for example, what's happened in Middle America is there's a lot of substance abuse going on, all these opioid addictions, all that sort of stuff.
00:46:28.000And periodically there's all this weird stuff that happens in Russia where, for example, they'll drink some weird detergent, some Glade plug-in or something like that because there's a tiny bit of alcohol in it, right?
00:46:40.000So there's a certain psychology that comes with that massive pessimism.
00:46:44.000And that massive pessimism evolved because of the context of Russian history, right?
00:47:23.000And the problems that it sets up are substance abuse, and it also sets up the problem of sort of anticipating threats that aren't actually there.
00:47:54.000You gotta understand how things really work.
00:47:55.000So if you look at what happens in Russian and American relations, what happens is that you'll have the same situation but interpreted in two totally different ways.
00:48:04.000So after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States made some sort of promise or some sort of intimation that it would not expand NATO any further east.
00:48:14.000And the Russians took that as, okay, you're not expanding NATO any further east, right?
00:48:19.000But in fact, what ended up happening is the United States and the West and its sort of oblivious hopefulness is like, let's keep expanding NATO! Right?
00:48:27.000They didn't take this comment very seriously, and they moved NATO all the way to Estonia, all the way to the Russian border.
00:48:33.000Now, the Russians sitting on their site interpret that as a violation of the promise.
00:48:37.000So sitting there as the pessimists that they are, they're tracking each of these moves.
00:48:41.000They're like, oh, okay, you're moving another country over.
00:49:22.000They function as the godfather of their society.
00:49:25.000So there's basically, you know, what you've...
00:49:27.000And I should clarify just so that people know where is this all coming from.
00:49:31.000This is all coming from books and interviewing academics.
00:49:33.000And if you are curious about anything, tweet me, let me know.
00:49:37.000And if there's any comments that you're curious about, I'll direct you to the book and you can go read it and you can work your way up the science chain and figure it out for yourself.
00:49:44.000Prepare for an onslaught of dick pics.
00:50:43.000There's some change in the environment.
00:50:45.000Suddenly there's not as much food around.
00:50:47.000And as people start to get hungry, one of the tribes goes off, and in the course of half an hour, they tell each other made-up stories that get increasingly fantastic.
00:50:57.000And by the end of the half an hour, they have convinced themselves that the other tribe are vermin, that they need to be exterminated, that they are a scourge on the land, that they're not really human, and they go and wipe them the fuck out.
00:51:29.000And, you know, that old psychology that hasn't changed in tens of thousands of years is still there.
00:51:35.000And so naturally, people start looking around for a scapegoat.
00:51:38.000And the anti-Semitism that is sort of already lingering in, you know, the German cultural environment, you know, suddenly that becomes the target group.
00:51:46.000And, you know, Hitler, the political opportunist, comes along and says, oh, you can blame it on them.
00:51:51.000That's the source of all your problems.
00:51:53.000It's almost like there's a death mode locked in the human consciousness that when things get scarce and like, oh, you might die...
00:52:04.000And you have to understand, this is the brutal reality of evolution, is that in that hunter-gatherer context, that's fucking useful.
00:52:13.000It's really useful, if resources get scarce, to be the one who acts first, who wipes out the other tribe first.
00:52:20.000It's interesting that we even think that this is unusual or bizarre when we look at nature.
00:52:25.000When you look at all the different systems in nature that are set up, like how many times lions will kill cubs to make sure that those males don't grow up to dominate them.
00:52:37.000And that's, I mean, that's a big problem of sort of what's happening on college campuses is that there are a lot of unpleasant things in human psychology and unpleasant things in human nature.
00:52:46.000And, you know, for humanity, really the good things come from being realistic.
00:52:52.000When we're realistic about how disease works, we get We get to control it.
00:52:56.000When we're realistic about how electrons work, we get to control them.
00:52:59.000Let me ask you this, because this is really important to this subject.
00:53:02.000This issue with Marxism spreading across universities, what do you think is the cause of that?
00:53:08.000Why is that so attractive to people, and why are people so confident to openly proclaim themselves as Marxists without understanding how ridiculous that is?
00:53:18.000Well, it's, you know, so John Height, who, you know, is at NYU, he has what's called moral foundations theory.
00:53:26.000And essentially, it's that we have, we all have these sort of basic impulses of morality.
00:54:38.000And that's exactly the point, is that, you know, are all humans hypocrites, or is it that we selectively use these same intuitions that we all have for different causes?
00:54:48.000So if you look at, for example, gun control, are liberals pro-choice or pro-life?
00:55:04.000Republicans are pro-choice when it comes to guns.
00:55:07.000So we all have these same intuitions, but we use them in different ways to justify our political arguments.
00:55:14.000Well, what's interesting, too, is that there's two positions that are taking place in the American psyche, at least, that we're almost reluctantly agreeing to.
00:55:21.000And it's that the Republicans are, or the conservatives, are more realistic, more hardcore, ready to kick ass, ready to fight for what's right.
00:55:32.000Whereas the liberals are a bunch of whiny crybabies looking to give away their money, and they're creating welfare babies.
00:55:39.000If it wasn't for the conservatives, these fucking people would be speaking German, living in Vietnam.
00:55:46.000Well, all tribes, the nature of tribes, you tell something that makes your tribe look like the good guys.
00:55:52.000So each tribe, that's the conservative story.
00:55:55.000And then the liberal story is like, we're fighting racism and sexism.
00:57:03.000But it's also such weird casting for her, too, because she does these emotionally difficult Sophie's Choice movies, and then she's trying to do a poppy rock star movie.
00:57:18.000And I just think you could sort of say that without disparaging what other people enjoy, including disparaging what a lot of women enjoy and foreigners.
00:57:29.000One of the things she was saying is that Hollywood's crawling with foreigners.
00:57:32.000If you take them, all you have left is MMA and football and MMA, mixed martial arts, not the arts.
01:00:01.000Everything is interpreted through caring and wanting to protect.
01:00:04.000So understandably, when they look at an MMA fight, they're like, oh, that's bad because there's not caring and people are getting hurt, right?
01:00:12.000And so when Jordan Peterson is on here and he's talking about how it's this very sort of maternal thing, it is a very maternal thing.
01:00:18.000And the problem is that, you know, what ends up happening is that when you have an echo chamber like college campuses, which are incredibly liberal with very few outside opinions, that that's the rabbit hole that they go down.
01:00:33.000And when you go down the caring rabbit hole, you end up at Marxism.
01:00:36.000And, you know, when you're surrounded by people who essentially think like you, there's no one to, like, sit you down and be like, that's fucking nuts.
01:05:15.000Gender in science, like gender as is discussed on campuses today, things get real weird.
01:05:22.000It gets real sort of loose and open to interpretation, and even though you're biologically a male, you can identify as a woman, and the correct way to treat you is to treat you as a woman.
01:06:18.000And so they end up going to the world's leading specialist in the 1960s or whatever it was, 50s, 60s, on gender identity and all this stuff, which is this guy, Dr. Money.
01:06:35.000And Dr. Money convinces them to castrate their penis-less son and to raise him as a girl.
01:06:42.000And so they have to go and, you know, take their son in.
01:06:47.000And, you know, David, who is now going to be raised as Brenda, is, you know, Dr. Money is showing pictures of naked men to Brenda and saying, like, this is what girls like and all this sort of stuff.
01:07:01.000And, you know, is forcing him to wear women's clothing, and they're going to do hormone therapy and all this sort of stuff.
01:07:08.000Now, Dr. Money is meanwhile publishing papers that is saying, oh, this is a tremendous success, it's amazing, like gender is all a construct, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, perfectly adjusting to life as a girl, all this stuff, and the plan is that, you know, they're going to do surgery and give him a vagina and all this sort of stuff.
01:07:32.000Brenda has no interest in playing with her sewing machine, except for the one time that she takes a screwdriver and picks it apart to figure out how it works.
01:07:40.000And doesn't want to hang out with girls, only wants to hang out with boys, only wants to play with her brother's toys.
01:07:48.000And at some point, when the kid is like 13, 14, the jig is up.
01:07:52.000They figure out that they better tell Brenda the truth.
01:07:55.000Brenda finds out the truth and proceeds to essentially have a mastectomy to remove her breasts, switches to male hormones, and instantly goes to living as a boy.
01:08:11.000Brenda, now David, grows up, marries a woman, and has a relationship, but unsurprisingly has a whole bunch of psychological issues and ultimately goes into a supermarket parking lot and blows his brains out.
01:09:10.000Then suddenly it becomes very hard for anybody to say that gender is purely a construct.
01:09:15.000There may be spectrums and there may be like, you know, weird in between areas, but the reality is that a lot of gender is genetic and the science is there.
01:09:24.000And you're not going to get a bunch of social justice warriors who read science because most people don't actually read science, but you will get them to engage with the story of David slash Brenda Reimer.
01:09:32.000Well, there most certainly is a spectrum.
01:10:14.000And also, like, the influence of the parents to change how this kid...
01:10:18.000Like, if you have a kid and you have a daughter and your daughter just wants to cut all her hair off and climb trees and, like, let her do that.
01:10:31.000But to work it all out and to encourage that behavior or to say, we're going to bring you to a transgender specialist right away and they're going to prescribe this and that.
01:11:09.000And science isn't supposed to be an individual project.
01:11:11.000It's supposed to be a collective project where we're all trying to really figure out what is this bitch known as reality that has evaded us for millions of years, right?
01:11:19.000Or tens, hundreds of thousands of years.
01:11:21.000And, you know, the point is that if you want to talk about, like, gender, for example, let's talk about people who are intersex.
01:12:28.000It's not that everything turns out like David Brenda Reimer, right?
01:12:34.000But if you really care about children and you really care about people, which is sort of the big liberal value, then the Hippocratic Oath, the whole point of being a doctor, is your first responsibility is do no harm.
01:12:46.000You're not supposed to make things worse.
01:12:48.000If you can make things better without really possibly making things worse, then that's great.
01:12:54.000And so, again, we don't let children vote.
01:13:00.000Why would we let them make It's such a huge decision at such a young age.
01:13:06.000And I think whatever the decision ends up being, you know, people are going to make their own individual decisions, so be it.
01:13:12.000But you want to make sure that the decision is an informed decision.
01:13:15.000There's also, there's forbidden territory when it comes to gender and gender identity as far as like what you are allowed to debate or not allowed to debate.
01:13:27.000Yeah, and it becomes pretty obvious that the origin of that forbidden behavior, forbidden thinking, is that people that are transgender or gay or marginalized in any way have been discriminated against and treated poorly,
01:13:43.000and we recognize that, so we automatically stop any critical thinking when it comes to those people.
01:14:08.000And the point is, you don't—I mean, you know, human beings are human beings.
01:14:11.000And so, for example, when we had Jordan Peterson on, one of the questions that I asked him, which I think is a super important question, is Jordan's a psychologist, right?
01:14:19.000And I asked him, okay, so let's imagine you had a patient who came here and said, you know, I want to be called by one of the 70 pronouns, right?
01:14:26.000What, as your patient, would you then do?
01:14:29.000And he said, well, if you came to me and said to me that you were Jesus Christ— I would have to, as a responsible doctor, first decide that it was in my best interest to call you Jesus Christ.
01:14:40.000So I have to figure out, really, what is that about?
01:14:42.000And is it going to serve your outcome to be able to do that?
01:14:46.000And again, you know, there's unaccountability for any human, whether it's a celebrity or a sports star or a rapper or a gay person or a transgender person or a politician or a scientist, is bad.
01:15:04.000So if for any reason a human is denied accountability to other humans, you've got a problem, right?
01:15:10.000Yeah, you're doing them a disservice by thinking that you are in somehow or another helping them or, you know, like that stupid article earlier today that we were talking about, about...
01:15:21.000These people showing up at the racism conference and then the white people being forced to check their privilege.
01:15:27.000You're ruining the whole thing with this kind of short-sighted, shitty thinking.
01:15:33.000Do you want to really go down the rabbit hole?
01:16:05.000And so you blindly copy the things they do.
01:16:08.000And specifically, you start by blindly copying from the outside, and then you work in.
01:16:13.000So the first thing you do is you see someone and you're like, oh, that person's fucking amazing, that rock star, that sports star, whatever.
01:16:19.000And you start dressing like them, you start walking like them, and all of that sort of stuff.
01:16:24.000Now, in a hunter-gatherer context, that would be, you know, somebody who is a hunter or is a gatherer, and you're like, man, you know, she finds all the best guavas.
01:17:26.000That the burger or the cigarette is not actually the key to being as successful or as cool or as good at basketball as Michael Jordan or James Dean.
01:17:34.000We don't understand that that's where that comes from.
01:17:37.000So we have this tendency to blindly copy anything we can.
01:19:37.000And that other thing is the fact that these black people who are in the South, there's always been a big question, were black people robbed of their culture, or did they preserve their authentic African culture?
01:19:49.000And what Seoul is saying is that they were robbed of their culture, and so they picked up the culture of the people around them, and the people around them were rednecks.
01:19:58.000And if you look at the white redneck culture and the black redneck culture, they have a lot of the same values.
01:20:25.000So, for example, if you go to places like Cornwall, there used to be these amazing ads on British TV, right, for this Devon custard or whatever.
01:20:36.000And they would always say, Devon knows how they make it so creamy.
01:20:40.000And so it doesn't sound like Black English.
01:20:42.000But they do say things like, I be doing that, and we be doing this, and you be doing that, and they be doing that.
01:20:49.000And so there's that use of that copula, be, right?
01:20:52.000Where instead of saying, I am, you are, he is, she is, they are, they just say, I be, you be, we be, they be, which is the classic feature of black English, African American, black English.
01:23:32.000What destroys racism is when you make sense of the things that they know.
01:23:36.000They see people who are violent in the ghettos, or they see crime, or they see a lack of education, or they see that Africa is poor.
01:23:43.000And you're able to tell a better story that makes sense of the things that they know, But also comes out with the conclusion, oh, we actually all have the same potential, right?
01:23:53.000But if you have this issue with people imitating their atmosphere and imitating their environment and this Southern-style talk with the Southern redneck influence on the African-American slaves, former slaves, how do you stop that and how do you turn that around?
01:24:11.000Well, in general, for humanity, I mean, this is sort of a big problem for humanity in general, is that there's not a culture alive today that is well-suited to the world that we're living in.
01:24:21.000And that's because, you know, culture is adapted to environment in the same way as any evolutionary thing, right?
01:24:27.000So, for example, you know, if you look at, like, let's talk about these hunter-gatherers, right?
01:24:33.000So there's a great story in The Lost City of Z where, you know, Percy Fawcett, who was an explorer, comes across, you know, all these tribes in the Amazon.
01:24:42.000And one of the examples that the author gives in there is David Gran.
01:24:46.000He talks about how, you know, there's this group of tribesmen in the Amazon, and what they'll do is there's this special leaf, and they go and they squeeze this leaf, right?
01:24:57.000They crush it up, and this milky substance runs into the water.
01:25:00.000And then all of a sudden, the fish float up to the surface, upside down, right?
01:25:05.000They've been anesthetized by this whatever substance in the leaf.
01:25:08.000And this little boy goes into the river, and he plucks out all the fattest fish, and then as the milky cloud dissipates, the other fish swim away.
01:25:27.000That's the nature of markets, because markets are an evolutionary process.
01:25:31.000You know, intelligent answers and intelligent solutions can emerge from just sort of competing forces.
01:25:37.000And so all of these cultures are well adapted to a particular environment.
01:25:41.000So, like we talked about American culture and we talked about Russian culture.
01:25:46.000Russian culture selects for pessimism.
01:25:48.000American culture, because you had to move all the way across the ocean, right?
01:25:52.000If you've got villages in Italy, you know, Vietnam, whatever it is, who is the person in that village who says, I'm going to go across the ocean to a country I know nothing about and, you know, make a fortune, right?
01:26:06.000It's the most optimistic individual, right?
01:26:08.000And so it's basically a magnet for all the most optimistic individuals in the world.
01:26:12.000The analogy I always use is, do you ever see American Tail?
01:26:16.000The, like, old animated movie from, like, the, must be the 90s or whatever?
01:26:38.000Well, anyway, it's sort of about the immigrant experience more generally and then specifically sort of about the Russian-Jewish experience.
01:26:46.000And it's about this family, the Mauskovitzes.
01:26:52.000And right there on that trunk, there's Fievel Malskovitz.
01:26:57.000And Fievel Malskovitz, you know, in the first part, they're in Russia, and they're all being persecuted by cats, right?
01:27:14.000Which is so much of what the American immigrant experience is about, right?
01:27:18.000You're like, oh, it's all going to be perfect, land of opportunity, the streets are paved with gold, except in an American tale, the streets are paved with cheese.
01:27:29.000American T-A-L-E or T-A-I-L? T-A-I-L. Yeah, T-A-I-L. Yeah, tail, like rat tail.
01:27:37.000So these different environments, right, just as you have different environments select for different beaks or wings or whatever it is, select for different mindsets, different ways of thinking, different cultural traits, right?
01:28:16.000And there's all these animals you don't understand, and you don't know how to use the plants that you squeeze and have the anesthetic in them and all that sort of stuff.
01:29:02.000So raising sheep, raising goats, and all that sort of stuff.
01:29:04.000Because most of the people who are in the South originally came from the Scots-Irish.
01:29:10.000And when you look at herding cultures around the world, they all have certain traits in common, right?
01:29:15.000So if you're a herder, you have a big, big problem.
01:29:18.000And that big, big problem is property rights.
01:29:21.000So if you're a farmer, there are clear boundaries on my land.
01:29:25.000Now, there are ways you can try and fuck me.
01:29:26.000You can try and move the boundary stones on my land slowly into your field over, over, over, over.
01:29:32.000But, you know, what we usually have is we have some sort of government.
01:29:35.000There's a local town official that we go to, and he is responsible for policing the boundaries.
01:29:40.000And so towns would do things where, you know, you would essentially all get together and we go walk the boundary stones, and we make sure that none of those boundary stones had moved.
01:29:48.000So the intuition of people from the North, Puritans, people like that, is if we have a problem, we go to the government.
01:29:56.000In the environment of herding, you can come over and you can steal my sheep, and you can mix the sheep in with your flock, and I have no way to prove which sheep are my sheep.
01:30:07.000So we evolve things like branding, where I have a brand, I put it on my sheep, and all that sort of stuff.
01:30:12.000But there's another strategy that is used that evolved before branding.
01:30:16.000And that earlier strategy is being a crazy motherfucker.
01:30:20.000You establish a reputation as the kind of guy that you don't fuck with.
01:31:46.000The Arabs are mostly fighting amongst themselves.
01:31:48.000But then along comes this charismatic figure with a new belief system that unites them, Muhammad.
01:31:53.000And he unites them, and suddenly they fuck everybody up, and they create this great empire, the Caliphate, that spreads all across Central Asia and the Middle East and all across North Africa.
01:32:30.000Um, But there are, if you look, there are certain problems that occur across these herder cultures.
01:32:37.000So if you're, you know, as a friend of mine who...
01:32:39.000So you're essentially saying that the South is, that the reason why Donald Trump has been elected is because of the South, because of the herder culture.
01:32:46.000Well, and it's also, so if you've read Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's book, it's excellent, right?
01:32:53.000But he's really talking about this hillbilly culture.
01:32:55.000And so it's not just the South, right?
01:33:15.000Yeah, and vitamin, and that I'm not a part of that tribe, that, you know, Americans owe a tremendous debt to the hillbilly culture, and that tremendous debt is that overwhelmingly they are the people who have served in the military, and they are overwhelmingly the people who have fought our wars and bled and died and all that sort of stuff.
01:33:32.000And that's not a stuff that, you know, I may sound like a liberal, but I don't really sit in either of those cultures, right?
01:33:38.000I can critique the liberal culture, and I can critique the hillbilly culture.
01:33:43.000And, you know, white liberals, the whole reason why I started this thing off is because white liberals have their own weird things that are dysfunctional and that aren't helping black people and all that stuff.
01:33:52.000If you just wore a bow tie, people would think you were conservative.
01:35:55.000And that's the big irony, is that you're not saying that it's about black people.
01:35:58.000It's about rednecks, whether they're white rednecks or black rednecks.
01:36:02.000And so that herder culture has just inexorably tied itself into the African-American culture without the African-Americans even knowing that it happened.
01:36:23.000And if you talk to people who are literally Africans who immigrated to America, like from Ethiopia or Kenya or anything like that, you know, if you ever get an Ethiopian cab driver...
01:37:07.000The listeners are going to be sitting here, and they're going to be trying to categorize me and all of this sort of stuff.
01:37:11.000And part of what you're dealing with is you start talking about gender or anything like that, and the social justice warriors try and put you into some bucket.
01:37:17.000And you're like, no, I don't belong in that bucket.
01:37:20.000You're constantly trying to say, I'm not in that bucket.
01:37:22.000So you can imagine if you're Ethiopian...
01:37:25.000And you've moved here, and you really sort of believe in the American dream, the land of opportunity, and we work hard, and we all do this sort of stuff, and you keep getting put in that bucket with all this sort of rap culture or anything like that, you're going to be annoyed at those people.
01:37:38.000Like if you're a Sikh and people want to beat your ass because the Muslims bombed 9-11.
01:37:44.000But it's not even near the same part of the world, you fuckheads.
01:37:57.000And that's the point, is that when you start to have a conversation that is about culture, then you start to realize that race doesn't actually matter.
01:38:04.000And what you'll find is, so let's take a look at, for example, Asians, right?
01:38:42.000No, they're tribal grouping that sort of exists across national boundaries, because in general, you know, one of the great destructive forces in human history is the British mapmaker.
01:39:09.000But it doesn't work so well in Africa where there are still tribes or Southeast Asia where you suddenly start drawing a line right between two tribal groups or across a tribal group and suddenly now shit's all fucked up.
01:39:21.000And what they're trying to do when they're having all these civil wars is they're trying to unfuck the boundaries.
01:39:38.000Like, if you have pot in particular, I mean, you cross a state line, you go from being someone who is innocent 100% to someone who's guilty 100% of a felony.
01:40:25.000And that's because, again, it comes down to what this is being driven by.
01:40:30.000It's being driven by old cultural baggage that doesn't necessarily make sense.
01:40:34.000So there's really, in terms of honor cultures, there are four books that I think that if you want to go into this, don't get angry at me, just read the four books.
01:40:43.000Those books are Black Rednecks White Liberals, Thomas Sowell's book, A Culture of Honor, which is Richard Nisbet's book, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and then a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.
01:40:59.000And those four books, essentially, if you read those four books and you're still saying that what I'm saying is unsubstantiated, you know, well, then we should talk about it.
01:41:09.000Aren't there a lot of liberals that are up in arms when you propose these things?
01:41:53.000Well, and in fact, that is the key thing with Richard Nisbet's book, The Culture of Honor.
01:41:58.000So Nisbet was a professor in the 90s at the height of political correctness, and he wanted to study culture.
01:42:04.000And the problem was that he's a white man from the South, and he knew that if you studied any culture, you would have to say bad things about it.
01:42:15.000He says, oh, I know one culture that I can say bad things about on a college campus.
01:42:20.000I can say bad things about Southern culture.
01:42:23.000That's a culture I can criticize freely.
01:42:26.000And so what he did—and, you know, this, I think, gets really down to what are the strengths of, you know, sort of broadly Northern and Southern culture, right?
01:42:33.000And, you know, Kennedy—John F. Kennedy had this great line about Washington, D.C. He said that it was a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
01:42:45.000And, you know, the potential for America is to be a country of Southern charm and Northern efficiency, but we're kind of got it backwards right now, right?
01:42:54.000But so what Nisbet is doing is that he's charming the liberals, right?
01:43:26.000So it had higher rates of, you know, basically killings around trespassing and then killings around, you know, lover's triangles.
01:43:35.000And so, for example, until 1970, if you found your wife in bed with another man in Texas, you could shoot him and it was justifiable homicide until 1970. Is it really only 70?
01:44:26.000Who wreak their own vengeance or wreck their own vengeance.
01:44:29.000The benefit of eliminating premeditation is to lessen the provable homicide to manslaughter with no death penalty and limited prison terms.
01:45:02.000It's that same psychology that plays out.
01:45:05.000And so Nisbet – and by contrast, in the North, there are a lot of what are called – there are more 7-Eleven murders, which are basically murders or instrumental murders, which is where people kill people trying to get cash.
01:45:19.000So there are these different – there's homicide in both places, but there are different types of homicides that predominate.
01:45:25.000And Nisbet, essentially, you know, the big thing was to figure out why is that true, right?
01:45:31.000And the answer is that it's this culture of honor that comes out of hurting.
01:45:35.000And so the irony is that Southerners, who very often are the ones who feel most strongly about how problematic Muslims are, have the same culture.
01:45:45.000And they engage in honor killings, and they do all these sorts of things.
01:45:50.000But they don't do it to the same extent.
01:45:51.000No, because in general, America is much less violent place, right?
01:45:54.000But if it was more violent, then they would be forced to adapt to the new culture, which is Mad Max style.
01:46:01.000And what would happen to all the liberals?
01:46:03.000And when your resources are extremely limited, like you live in a fucking desert, you're forced to become even more vicious about your protecting your boundaries and your property and your resources.
01:46:17.000So again, how do we straighten out the African-American problem with crime and violence and terrible atmospheres that they have to imitate?
01:46:27.000Well, that's the point, is that the thing that allows people to move past their cultural baggage is understanding their cultural baggage.
01:46:49.000And then you can start to retrain what your impulses are.
01:46:52.000So, you know, somebody bumps you, you know, somebody comes on your land, and your first impulse is not to go grab your shotgun and kill them.
01:46:59.000And you don't worry so much of what it comes down to because it's crucially like they're honor killings, right?
01:47:04.000So those cultures are obsessed with honor and in particular what you hear with African Americans is don't diss me, don't disrespect me, right?
01:47:12.000So there's a real policing of one's honor and really making sure that nobody is fucking with me.
01:47:18.000And it's the same thing with, you know, white rednecks, white Southerners, right?
01:47:57.000People that have the issue with even discussing the origins of certain types of behavior and comparing Different types of black people and different types of African Americans trying to figure out, or African former slaves, like why did the people in the West Indies behave differently than the people in America?
01:48:12.000And it opens up this weird can of worms where people are not willing to discuss it openly.
01:48:19.000And that is why Sowell called his book Black Redneck White Liberals.
01:48:23.000Because the problem is that because white liberals are not willing to discuss these things, what ends up happening is that you get African pride, right?
01:48:31.000And you know, as Sowell points out, right, when was pride ever a good thing, right?
01:48:36.000Pride is the feeling of that you know it all, that you have nothing to learn, right?
01:49:12.000Yeah, what do you think about this whole situation with Russia today?
01:49:15.000Because it seems like that poor country doesn't know how to fucking get rid of that one guy who's their main dude, as much as Garry Kasparov talks about him.
01:50:07.000I wonder what he's going to do about all that, including allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.
01:50:15.000Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN... Hmm.
01:50:20.000The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to report on Russian intelligence in the 2016 election.
01:50:28.000The allegations came in part from memos compiled by former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible.
01:50:38.000The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed...
01:50:56.000Through the whole Clinton administration, that was a non-issue.
01:50:59.000Through the entire Bush administration, non-issue.
01:51:02.000Through the entire Obama administration, non-fucking-issue until 2012-ish.
01:51:07.000And then you start hearing about it again.
01:51:09.000Well, a large part of what's happened is that our environment has changed, but our culture has not.
01:51:14.000So if you look at in the 1950s, right, if you're talking about the marketplace of ideas, you had these guys like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and they had a thing called journalistic integrity, right?
01:52:30.000This is right out of the report, this highlighted part.
01:52:33.000Okay, here it says, there were aspects of Trump's engagement with Russian authorities, one of which had borne fruit to them, was exploit Trump's personal obsessions with sexual perversion in order to obtain a sustainable compromising material on him.
01:52:47.000According to Source D, where he had been present, Trump's perverted conduct Wow.
01:53:19.000The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
01:53:46.000You'd have to put a blanket over everything, because there are going to be a lot of cameras in that room.
01:53:51.000My friend Mike Swick, who's a former UFC fighter, worked in Russia with the American Secret Service a long time ago, and he said that they found these listening devices hidden inside buildings that were powered by the movement of the building during the wind.
01:54:10.000Their power source is literally the building moving in the wind was...
01:54:15.000He said it was so far beyond anything that they had ever figured out, that the Americans had figured out at the time.
01:54:21.000And they were just all about surveillance.
01:54:23.000Well, that was the things that the Soviet Union did well, right?
01:54:26.000There were a few things that the Soviet Union really put their attention on, like space and surveillance and espionage and all that sort of stuff, and the military, and they did those very well.
01:55:56.000So you gotta know that if someone from any agency is telling you something, what would it serve them to tell you 100% the truth without any manipulation whatsoever in order to gain favor,
01:56:13.000in order to gain influence, in order to gain...
01:56:16.000Would the CIA have any motivation to be 100% accurate about it?
01:57:37.000I mean, in the ideal situation, the Republicans and the Democrats work like mommy and daddy, right?
01:57:43.000And, you know, it's not that mommy and daddy have it all figured out.
01:57:47.000But if mommy and daddy have a productive working relationship, then the sort of, like, take personal responsibility, you know, man up, like, do all these sorts of things, is counteracted by a certain understanding, compassion, all that sort of stuff.
01:58:00.000And then the parenting that emerges is better than what either of them would do on their own.
01:58:05.000Or they can both get dysfunctional as fuck, and mommy becomes an enabling snowflake machine, right?
01:58:13.000And daddy just becomes an abusive asshole who won't pay child support and just berates his children and is like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
01:58:56.000And it's because modern Americans have grown up in, you know, essentially the most successful, most productive, most stable country in history, right?
01:59:05.000And so, you know, if you're, you know, as many generations into democracy as you are, there's not a real understanding of how you get to democracy, right?
01:59:16.000And we're like, I don't know how you make one.
01:59:18.000And then you get these ridiculous fables that Americans have about themselves where they think that essentially, you know, King George III was this awful, vicious dictator.
01:59:29.000And then we kick the dictator out and then democracy.
01:59:32.000And so that's all you have to do is you have to go in and you have to remove dictators.
01:59:36.000And if we just keep removing dictators, then democracy will emerge.
01:59:39.000Well, what happens when you remove Saddam Hussein?
01:59:55.000ISIS! Al-Qaeda, all these sorts of things.
01:59:58.000So the big question that has always been in political science and that Francis Fukuyama frames is that it's always been, why is it that the American Revolution succeeded and the French Revolution descended into bloody violence?
02:00:12.000And the answer is, is that they were actually at two different stages of development.
02:00:48.000Ideologies that we become imprisoned to, these patterns of behavior that we become imprisoned to, and that we're all subject to it.
02:00:55.000Anyone with an accent understands that this is where it comes from, that we imitate behavior that is around us.
02:01:00.000And if we're in around an area, like we're talking about the Middle East, with poor resources and scarcity and a lot of violence, this is the type of behavior that we're going to control our women, dress them up, cover them up like beekeepers.
02:01:13.000We've got to keep them away from the other swinging dicks.
02:01:21.000I mean, if you look at Iraq, one of the craziest stories about Iraq was Iraq with Baghdad being invaded by the Mongols and then killing everybody and running the streets red with blood and black with ink and the rivers would fucking be filled with the philosophy and all the writings from all these Islamic There's theorists and all these different scholars who were far ahead of that aspect or the rest of that part of the world at the time.
02:01:52.000I mean, so much mathematics, so much philosophy, so much knowledge came from that part of the world.
02:01:57.000It was totally lost when they were invaded.
02:02:00.000And so much of it is that there's an old quote that floats around, which is that if Nobel Prizes had been given out in the year 1000, they all would have gone to Arabs.
02:02:11.000They were at the forefront, and the point is that it tells you something, which is that success is not a permanent condition.
02:02:17.000Cultures can gain it, and cultures can lose it, and you better figure out what is it that makes a culture successful so you can preserve those values, fight for those values, instill them, spread them, all that sort of stuff.
02:02:28.000And that's why Putin is jockeying for power, because he believes that there's a turnover going on right now.
02:02:34.000And they just hired a fucking reality star to run the biggest nuclear arsenal the world has ever known.
02:03:05.000And you're like, man, how do I make sense of both of these things?
02:03:08.000That, you know, capitalism is, you know, fundamentally generates wealth and prosperity and all that sort of stuff, but corporations can do fucked up things, right?
02:03:16.000How do I reconcile those two different things?
02:04:10.000Well, I got in a big fight over the Christmas holidays with a group of anarcho-capitalists, and it was literally, because one of them, there were two things.
02:04:20.000We interviewed, there's this guy, Peter Schiff.
02:04:24.000So anyway, so I interviewed Peter Schiff, and part of the experience of doing this podcast with Brian Callen is we interviewed all these academics, right?
02:05:01.000And again, it actually comes out of sort of what the Western cultural bias is, which is towards this thing called atomism, right?
02:05:07.000Like scientists are super focused on a tiny, tiny question.
02:05:10.000They don't look for the bigger picture.
02:05:12.000And we reached this frustration where essentially we were like, these ideas, you can't, you know, there's an old George Bernard Shaw joke about economists.
02:05:22.000He said all the economists laid end to end would never reach a conclusion.
02:06:11.000So there's what's called the science-to-narrative chain, where you're supposed to take science, all of this research, and supposed to turn it into simple stories that people can understand and get.
02:06:19.000And there is, in fact, just to give you a sense of this problem, like, everybody knows that scientists aren't the best communicators, right?
02:06:25.000Like, the ones that are, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?
02:06:29.000You get on this show, because you're like, man, a fucking scientist who can communicate like a human, right?
02:06:34.000Or Carl Sagan, or, but, you know, these people are fucking unicorns.
02:06:37.000They're very, very rare in the scientific community.
02:06:40.000So my very specific experience was when I graduated from college, I started tutoring just to pay my bills.
02:06:48.000But I was really trying to figure out, I had this weird experience where I would be working with kids, and I would hear them say things like, oh, I didn't get the math gene.
02:07:00.000So I'm like, wait a minute, you're 13 and failing biology, and you're telling me that you have a math gene, and I just majored in biochemistry, and we don't know about any math gene over there, so what the fuck are you talking about?
02:07:28.000And, you know, oh, I'm not a natural writer and all these sorts of things.
02:07:32.000And I was like, what are all these fucking beliefs, right?
02:07:36.000And I could tell that they were problematic and that they were self-defeating.
02:07:40.000And specifically, you know, having moved between all of these cultures, I'd seen that different cultures have very different ideas about intelligence.
02:07:47.000So, especially if you, like, my mother and my father side by side on the issue of learning languages.
02:08:20.000Well, and it's actually, anybody who comes from a lot of these minority languages, sort of smaller, shittier languages, you find they do this.
02:08:28.000So Poles routinely learn a lot of languages.
02:08:30.000People from Southeast Asia routinely learn a lot of languages.
02:09:01.000He didn't really like school, and every time they would tell him he had to take another subject, he would look up another language to take.
02:09:07.000So, for example, he ended up taking Swedish because in the 60s and 70s, all the pornos were made in Swedish.
02:09:15.000And he wanted to know what they were saying between sexual thrusts, right?
02:10:06.000So, hearing all these kids say all these bizarre things, and, you know, at the time I was doing a tutoring company with a friend of mine from college who is from New England.
02:10:16.000And, you know, the New England is that Puritan culture, right?
02:10:19.000It's, you know, all self-denial, no fun, work hard, all that sort of stuff.
02:10:24.000So she also heard all of these weird and wacky beliefs.
02:10:27.000And she was like, you know, reacted in the most Puritan way possible, which is like, you're just being fucking lazy.
02:10:34.000Like, fucking, like, do your fucking work.
02:10:42.000And so, you know, you've got this Bostonian, and then you've got this half-Dutch, half-American, you know, lived with the Limeys, you know, all this sort of stuff, right?
02:10:52.000It's that experience that you talked about of foreigners who come to America or anybody, and we're like, this culture of L.A. is fucking weird.
02:12:27.000Because the internet, you know, it's just pretty much access evenly to everything other than like what's immediately in your area.
02:12:34.000But also, I think also it's important to talk about like how do humans actually work, right?
02:12:39.000And it's often that, you know, I mean, so a large part of what comes out of the science is that thinking and feeling are always linked, right?
02:12:46.000And so we're often driven by feelings that we can't quite explain, right?
02:12:49.000So, you know, why was I also motivated by L.A.? I think there was some attraction to the entertainment industry, comedy, storytelling.
02:12:59.000I don't really, you know, like, if you're being really honest, like, why the fuck do you make any decision that you make when you're 22, 23?
02:13:44.000There's lots of really exciting stuff that can actually change and improve and help people's lives.
02:13:50.000But one of the things that I think you pointed out that's incredibly critical is that...
02:13:54.000In order to be at the top of your field, you must be completely absorbed in that particular subject and oftentimes a lot like all the other systems that we find, limited resources and you really don't have the time or the energy or even the inclination to study all these other Comparable systems or different disciplines or it's like I mean There's many many many many examples of that but singular focus is which usually leads to greatness and
02:14:24.000when you're reading about some professor's peer-reviewed work that's incredibly groundbreaking Oftentimes you're dealing with a form of greatness and that requires massive tunnel vision Well, that's the interesting thing.
02:14:37.000So we should talk about what tunnel vision is, right?
02:14:39.000So there's, you know, just as we have optimism and pessimism, there are these other two mindsets, atomism and holism, right?
02:14:46.000And atomism is seeing the tree, right?
02:14:49.000You, like, ignore the fucking forest and you're just like, I'm going to look at that one fucking tree and become the world's expert in that.
02:14:55.000And then there's holism, which is seeing the big picture, seeing the forest, seeing all that sort of stuff.
02:15:00.000Now, again, everybody has these mindsets, but different cultures favor them differently, again, because of the environmental pressures of that environment.
02:15:08.000So the Greeks massively favored atomism.
02:15:11.000And if you look at the behavior of the Greeks, right, the ancient Greeks, they were constantly picking everything apart, right?
02:17:01.000Over in Asia, right, they have different incentives, which is rice farming.
02:17:05.000And so what happens is that rice farming is, you know, you have to be super cooperative because the water runs down the mountain, it runs through my paddy field, but then it runs through your neighbor's paddy field and all that sort of stuff.
02:17:15.000So I have to have relations with my neighbor and that neighbor, and then I have to think about how it affects the next guy and the next guy and the next guy and the next guy.
02:17:26.000And so if you look at What is Eastern culture about?
02:17:30.000What are those ancient Asian cultures about?
02:17:31.000It's all about yin and yang, things fitting together and complementing it all being part of a larger system.
02:17:37.000And Confucianism was all about the family and relationships and everybody has their proper role and you all sort of have to belong and all of that sort of stuff, right?
02:17:47.000So, which set of biases do you think that science has baked into its culture?
02:17:54.000And so when you get the structure of scientific culture as it stands today, it's super atomistic, right?
02:18:01.000Now, if you look at things like economics and psychology and, you know, biology and all of these sorts of things, they're all studying the natural world.
02:18:10.000And in fact, there's a whole bunch of disciplines that are all studying humans and how they behave and all of that sort of stuff.
02:18:16.000And yet they're all broken up into separate disciplines.
02:18:18.000And now, they're sort of doubling down on those intuitions, and they're now breaking up those disciplines into sub-disciplines, and smaller disciplines, and smaller disciplines.
02:18:27.000And left to their own devices, they'll just keep splitting up and getting smaller and smaller.
02:18:31.000And where does feminism fit in all this?
02:18:33.000Well, what happens is that as you get smaller and smaller and smaller disciplines, it doesn't necessarily make the science better.
02:19:20.000And then the fifth one feels the ear and decides that it's a palm leaf.
02:19:24.000And then they all proceed to beat the shit out of each other because clearly everybody else is a fucking idiot and they need to die because they know that it's a rope, it's a snake, it's a leg, it's a wall, it's a column, whatever it is.
02:19:37.000Now, if you look at something like feminism, right?
02:19:41.000Feminism is making certain claims about biology, right?
02:19:44.000It's making claims about how male gender works, how female gender works.
02:19:49.000You know, they should be looking at things like genetics, and they should be looking at, you know, chromosomes, and they should be looking at evolution to see how evolution might have selected for differences in men and women because there are different competing pressures for men and women.
02:20:02.000And in fact, if you go into, you know, So if I go into,
02:20:47.000So if you want to solve the problem, what you have to do is that you have to make each discipline accountable to all the other disciplines.
02:20:54.000You have to make people responsive to evidence outside of their field.
02:20:59.000So if you take someone like Richard Dawkins, has Richard Dawkins gone down his particular rabbit hole of figuring out his tiny piece of the world?
02:21:14.000So, in general, what you're going to find is that there's, in a lot of different fields, you're going to find that there are two competing theories right now.
02:21:23.000So, for example, if you look in economics, there's this idea, you know, there's sort of what are called classical economics, and they have this idea called rational agent theory.
02:21:33.000And they basically think it's a reasonable approximation to assume that people are rational, right?
02:21:38.000That they act as rational individuals and all this sort of stuff.
02:21:41.000And then, meanwhile, there's another school called Behavioral Economics.
02:21:45.000And because of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who were these two Israeli psychologists in the 1970s, who started to study human rationality, and, you know, I'm sure this will come as a huge surprise, but what they found is that humans aren't that rational.
02:21:59.000And so there was a group of economists who say, hey, our whole discipline is based on this idea of rational agent theory, but when we look at psychology, that assumption doesn't check out, and it leads to a whole bunch of bad conclusions.
02:22:13.000So they formed a new school of economics called behavioral economics, which is based on all the findings of psychology, how humans actually think, and all that sort of stuff.
02:22:22.000Now, these two schools are warring, right?
02:23:25.000And so if you look at, for example, that rational agent theory dispute, there's one of the big founders of behavioral economics, this guy Richard Thaler.
02:23:35.000Basically, you know, he tells a great story.
02:23:37.000And the story is that he's at a dinner party.
02:23:40.000And at this dinner party, there's this famous economist from the whole rational agent theory camp.
02:23:46.000And there's also like a bunch of other academics, like a psychologist.
02:24:12.000And then he goes, and my students, my students are so fucking dumb, right?
02:24:16.000They can't even understand the most basic economic concepts and all that sort of stuff.
02:24:21.000And so the psychologist pipes up and says, how come all the people in your theories are geniuses, but all the people you know in real life are idiots?
02:25:19.000And if humans have power and intellectual power is a form of power and it's not checked, they will continue to rationalize their bad ideas So specifically, what bad ideas is Dawkins rationalizing?
02:25:29.000Well, so there's, you know, the intellectual dispute is this.
02:25:33.000So in the 1960s, there was this idea of group selection.
02:25:39.000But it was very fuzzy and it was a shitty version of group selection, right?
02:25:42.000Which is the idea that natural selection happens not only at the level of genes, but also at the level of human groups.
02:25:47.000And the idea that selection is happening at many, many, many levels.
02:25:50.000And so Dawkins, in 1976, writes this big, important book, The Selfish Gene.
02:25:56.000And it's basically that you actually don't need group selection to make sense of a lot of behavior.
02:26:01.000You can just use what's called kin selection.
02:26:03.000So, for example, you might do something nice for your sister, or you might potentially, you know, die to save your sister, but we can make sense of that at the level of genes because, essentially, you know, your sister shares many of the same genes, so, you know, you don't need this idea that groups matter.
02:26:20.000Now, since then, what's happened is that there are—and this is a large part of what the problem is—is that some people read that book, including Jeff Skilling, and they concluded that what that means is that the way to get ahead is to be selfish.
02:26:36.000Jeff Skilling is the CEO of Enron, right?
02:26:39.000And you'll hear in business circles, you'll hear this idea of like, oh, it's all about law of the jungle, kill or be killed, like that's how you get ahead, you know, survival of the fittest.
02:27:24.000And this is, in general, a big problem.
02:27:27.000Science is the big magic of our time, right?
02:27:30.000If you want to justify feminists when they try and justify the sort of feminists who try and say that gender doesn't matter and it's all a social construct, they try and do it all in terms of science, right?
02:27:46.000Well, they have, you know, some sort of idea of culture or whatever, but there are a lot of ideas that masquerade as science, right?
02:27:53.000So, you know, the Nazis, the eugenics movement, you know, the Nazis, that was based on some sort of idea that they thought was science at the time.
02:28:02.000You know, the Soviets had this guy, Lysenko, who was the opposite, and he believed that, you know, genes could be true.
02:28:09.000He thought you could literally shock and electrocute seeds to make them do what you wanted them to do because genes didn't really matter and it was all conditioning.
02:28:17.000Or behaviorism was B.F. Skinner's idea, which was the idea that it was all stimulus response.
02:28:26.000There were no beliefs and all that stuff.
02:28:28.000And a lot of the way that education, for example, a lot of the educational choices that were made in the 50s were based on Skinner's ideas, which then fucks up a whole bunch of kids.
02:28:37.000What ends up happening is that either science is applied, or it's misapplied, or it's misinterpreted, or people read a particular scientific study and don't have the context on it.
02:28:48.000And so these bad ideas permeate and they're applied and all that sort of stuff.
02:28:53.000And so the debate, for example, around rational agent theory is not some...it is an academic debate, but in addition to being an academic debate, economists supply those ideas.
02:29:03.000And, you know, the public needs to...if the public wants its experts and its leaders to make the right decision, then it has to hold them accountable on their ideas.
02:29:12.000And so, you know, if you have...you know, science also has to police who has their backing.
02:29:20.000And it has a responsibility to communicate to the public what is the best scientific understanding available today.
02:29:27.000So Skilling takes the selfish gene and he runs with that, and clearly that's thinking that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, the me generation, all that sort of stuff.
02:29:37.000So the selfish gene sort of slots into a culture that is already sort of looking for that to be true, right?
02:30:44.000I don't know that Jeff Skilling entirely misinterpreted.
02:30:46.000But what David Sloan Wilson and the multi-level selection people are saying is something very simple.
02:30:51.000And E.O. Wilson said this as well, which is that Selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups.
02:31:01.000So if you want to get ahead, you can get ahead by being a selfish asshole and fucking everyone, right?
02:31:08.000But if you have a group that is based on selfishness and you're trying to fuck everyone...
02:31:13.000Then your group's going to fall apart, and it's going to lose out to an altruistic group.
02:31:17.000So if you compare side-by-side a company like Enron and a company like Pixar, which you can read about in Creativity, Inc., you're going to find that they have two very different environments, right?
02:31:28.000Pixar is fundamentally a cooperative environment.
02:31:51.000Now, again, science has a responsibility to communicate clearly.
02:31:55.000And what should happen, I think, in terms of our economy not blowing the fuck up, in terms of corporations not engaging that sort of toxic behavior, is that I don't have the authority because I'm a nobody.
02:32:08.000So I can't come out and say, this is what science is.
02:32:12.000In fact, there is literally no human alive today that can come out and say what science is, because people can only come out and speak about their tiny field.
02:32:20.000There's no consistent message from science.
02:32:23.000I still don't understand what Dawkins is arguing against, because didn't he also argue for cooperation in his book?
02:32:29.000Wasn't one of the chapters of his book, Nice Guys Finish First?
02:32:32.000Well, but he refuses to acknowledge this idea that group selection happens.
02:32:41.000Well, I mean, the larger academic debate is like, so specifically, he rejects the idea that, and it's important to realize that the group selection people are not denying kin selection.
02:32:53.000So they're not denying Dawkins' work, right?
02:32:56.000They're building off of Dawkins' work and saying there's this extra effect, right?
02:33:27.000Well, ultimately, what I would like, Joe, and the reason why I call him a Scientologist, is because, you know, what should happen in academic debate is that ideas should die, right?
02:33:37.000The point of scientific progress is...
02:34:29.000So these beliefs that your daughters have about their intelligence, whatever those beliefs may be as of today, will have a huge effect on the choices they make in school, how they do in education, what their experience of school is, whether they're happy in school, whether they're productive, whether they're successful— And whether they're set up for a knowledge economy,
02:34:47.000which is all about constantly learning.
02:34:48.000Do they emerge from school hating school or do they emerge from school loving school?
02:34:52.000Do they emerge from school with confidence that they can learn whatever is required or do they feel like they can only be good at some things and not good at other things?
02:34:59.000Before we get too far off track, I'm still confused as to how you feel Dawkins is ignoring the arguments against his work.
02:35:14.000Is there anything that we can watch somewhere or listen to?
02:35:16.000Well, there have been debates, and what has happened is that, for example, what the debate is currently is the debate is currently about how many people are on each side.
02:35:28.000So John Haidt, for example, was on Sam Harris's podcast, and Sam Harris would agree with Richard Dawkins.
02:35:34.000And John Height, you know, John Height and Sam Harris disagree on multiple things, right?
02:35:38.000They've had many disagreements, and the whole point of their podcast was to try and have a civil conversation.
02:35:43.000And, you know, John Height said, you know, the difference between you and Sam, you and I, Sam, is that I'm an intuitionist and you're a rationalist.
02:35:50.000So John Haidt believes, and if you look across the science, I think this is what's supported, is that thinking and feeling are always linked.
02:35:58.000So we're always being driven by these intuitions, even if we don't always understand that.
02:36:02.000There is, on the other hand, this idea of Descartes' error, which is the idea that Descartes came up with that reason and emotion are separate.
02:36:08.000And that's what the rational agent theory is about.
02:36:11.000It's the idea that, you know, there's reason and it's separate from emotion.
02:36:14.000Are these mutually incompatible, though?
02:36:17.000And that's the point of science, is that you're supposed to kill certain ideas.
02:36:21.000So Descartes' era specifically comes from, there's this book by Antonio Damasio at USC, and it's based on a series of experiments around this guy named Elliot, and people like him.
02:36:30.000And so Elliot was this banker, financial guy, happy family man, all this sort of stuff.
02:36:55.000It was just an optional accessory, like the appendix of the brain.
02:36:57.000But then what happens is they come to find out that all of a sudden, Eliot has all these problems.
02:37:02.000Even though his IQ is unaffected, even though his verbal intelligence is not affected, what's happening is that he's making all these terrible decisions.
02:38:24.000So that, along with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the work of people like John Haidt, there's now an immense amount of information that basically understands that Descartes, who lived 400 years ago, was making shit up when he came up with his theory of the brain,
02:38:41.000And his theory of the brain, of this idea of reason and emotion, which has floated around in the West for ages and ages and ages, it doesn't fit the evidence.
02:38:52.000And I will tell you, having worked with students, your ability to improve their lives, once you understand that thinking and feeling are always linked, goes massively up.
02:39:01.000Because now when a student starts telling me, oh, I don't have the math gene, or I don't have a natural ear for languages, I don't waste my time dealing with that rationalization.
02:39:10.000Instead, I ask the kid, how do you feel about math?
02:39:15.000And we start to deal with the feelings and we start to sort through the feelings until we get the feelings lined up in such a way that you're making the right choices.
02:39:22.000And that's, for me, the hardest is that that's the problem that I first came to this from, was education.
02:39:29.000When you're talking about these kids, though, sorry to interrupt you, but it seems almost like you're talking about a user-operator error.
02:39:34.000It's like they're just programmed incorrectly to know how to view the world.
02:40:18.000And the point is to spark a conversation so that we can have this conversation.
02:40:23.000But the point is that there are certain academics who are going to try and stand in the way of that conversation and will use their authority to try and shut down that conversation because they're trying to defend their pet theory.
02:40:38.000But the point is to recognize it's not about Dawkins particularly.
02:40:41.000And if you want to get into the woods on, like, you know, all of the nuances of all this sort of stuff, you should get on either David Sloan Wilson or John Hyatt or Joe Henrich, and they can, like, take you through the whole thing.
02:40:54.000And the basic problem is that there's a lot of science that is really, really useful, but, you know, one man can't figure it all out.
02:41:11.000And what I can do, because a lot of this comes down to what's permissible in the culture of science.
02:41:16.000So if you've got guys like, you know, you can go if you want to go and like read about what David Sloan Wilson is saying and all of these guys...
02:41:51.000But my goal with all of this stuff, with Thomas Sowell's work, with David Sloan Wilson, John Haidt, Carol Dweck's work, which is a lot of this education stuff, is that I know that it's not realistic to expect people to, that I can't just put a list on the internet of 50 books and be like,
02:42:11.000Yeah, but if you just don't even concern yourself with that, if you just suggest it, enough people will, the ideas will start to permeate.
02:42:18.000But you also, what you run into, and this is part of what I've run into with education, right, is so, you know, along with Katie, my Bostonian friend, we took seven different fields of neuroscience and psychology, and we condensed them all into one book that we wrote to the teenager,
02:42:55.000It's called The Straight A Conspiracy.
02:42:56.000And the reason why we called it the Straight A Conspiracy is because we, at the time, were working with the son of a guy named Stan Rogo, who was the executive producer on Lizzie McGuire.
02:43:06.000And we'd been, I mean, this is the power of emotions, by the way, like super brilliant.
02:43:21.000But anyway, so we, you know, we were struggling with how do you have a conversation about education and school and your potential and all these sorts of things with kids?
02:43:30.000And, you know, our intuitions are sort of the classic teacher intuitions, which is like, you can do it.
02:43:38.000And we sat down with Stan, and Stan said, listen, I've been making kids TV for a long time, and if I've learned one thing about teenagers, it's this.
02:43:49.000They may not suck in any sort of objective sense or any sort of geographical sense or anything like that, but on an emotional, subjective level, they suck.
02:43:57.000And so the only thing you can ever tell them that they will believe is that they've been lied to.
02:44:27.000Like, is that really, you know, all that sort of stuff.
02:44:30.000And then you get that process where they're now starting to question things.
02:44:33.000And, you know, we did the first chapter is all about genius myths, which are, you know, Essentially very clever marketing schemes that again rely on that thing of awe.
02:44:43.000So if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, right?
02:44:46.000Steve Jobs was a very smart marketer, right?
02:44:51.000This, you know, cult of personality around himself, which is that, you know, he made himself seem like this genius who out of nowhere came out of all these things.
02:44:59.000People called him the eye god and the cult of Mac.
02:45:07.000And in that, he was copying the playbook of another guy much, much earlier, Thomas Edison, who in his own time created this own cult of personality around himself, and at the time he was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park.
02:45:18.000But in reality, did Edison invent the lightbulb?
02:45:38.000And that's the point, is that these people were people.
02:45:42.000And the myths that you have about geniuses are actually clever advertising schemes.
02:45:47.000But the problem is that it's an ad jingle that is so good that we've essentially had that jingle trapped in our heads for hundreds and hundreds of years.
02:45:55.000So there are ideas that are passed on, like Edison had a thousand patents to his name by the time he died.
02:46:03.000That's because when you set up an industrial research lab, you make sure that your name is on all the patents, because that's the whole point of employing a bunch of people, is that you want to own the IP. And that's true for, you know, Mozart was the Michael Jackson of the 1700s.
02:46:17.000Isaac Newton, you know, they basically knew that they couldn't sell the ideas of gravity, so they sold Newton as the man, this guy who had this great vision and blah, blah, blah, and the story of the apple and all that bullshit.
02:46:28.000And then Einstein, you know, they needed to package the new physics that was being done by lots and lots of physicists like Heisenberg and Planck and all that sort of stuff.
02:46:36.000But there was this guy, Arthur Eddington, who knew he couldn't sell that.
02:46:39.000So he sold the idea of a boy wonder with crazy hair who had beaten Newton and was displacing Newton.
02:46:46.000Now the point is you go and you talk to physicists and they'll tell you, well, it's not really true.
02:46:50.000Like Einstein didn't really displace Newton, right?
02:46:54.000We only use Einsteinian mechanics when we start to get near the speed of light.
02:46:58.000So there are all these marketing schemes.
02:47:02.000But in the marketplace of ideas, part of what happens is that there are these big public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, and they have a lot of power.
02:47:13.000And it becomes very difficult to challenge them.
02:47:15.000And in particular, I don't think that anybody particularly wants to go up against Richard Dawkins, right?
02:47:23.000And if you go up against the new atheists or you challenge anything about the new atheists, and I have, you know, like the whole rationalist intuitionist thing, because I've been trying to talk about emotions on our podcast, and I said, you know, hey, look, you don't have to believe me.
02:47:59.000Who proceeded to tell me that I was a fucking idiot and blah blah blah and what did I know and how arrogant I was and how dare you and all this sort of stuff.
02:48:19.000But it was productive because what he said is like, he said, what are you even talking about?
02:48:27.000Sam Harris knows that most people are being emotional most of the time.
02:48:33.000But the issue isn't what Sam Harris knows about other people.
02:48:37.000It's what does Sam Harris believe about his own brain, right?
02:48:41.000And Sam Harris is really—and this is not Sam's fault as an individual, just as none of the cultural stuff that we've been talking about is his fault.
02:48:49.000When I was in college, I also believed in this whole idea of Descartes' error, that reason and emotion are separate.
02:48:56.000And then I moved out to L.A. and I was in an acting class.
02:49:00.000And I moved from an environment that worshipped reason to an environment that worshipped emotion.
02:50:43.000Now, the point is that that behavior is literally the worst response you can have to failure, right?
02:50:51.000If you're screwing up in math or any other subject, what you should be doing is getting out your mistakes Yeah.
02:51:12.000Now, how does this oppose what Sam Harris believes?
02:51:14.000The point is that if Ad Atheist Sensei, and I will tell you that I think that Ad Atheist Sensei is pretty right in his assessment of what Sam Harris believes about, like, most people are emotional most of the time, but I don't think that Sam Harris believes that thinking and feeling are always linked.
02:51:33.000So that his brain is all— Do you know this for a fact?
02:52:56.000And then it's, you know, that religion has, you know, in terms of the history of violence, right?
02:53:02.000Steven Pinker has this book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and he talks about the fact that, you know, what the new atheists are saying about religion is not supported by the evidence, right?
02:53:11.000That in history, religion has not been any one thing, right?
02:53:15.000It's had some good things, it's had some bad things.
02:53:18.000That's not a scientifically appropriate belief to go around and saying that religion is the scourge of all humanity or to be waging war over religion.
02:53:26.000And you're talking Dawkins in specific?
02:53:28.000Dawkins and, you know, Sam Harris and all that sort of stuff.
02:53:30.000And particularly Dawkins because he's the most militant of them, right?
02:53:35.000Separately, you know, why do people believe in religion?
02:54:25.000I was like, okay, those guys are out doing whatever they're doing, right?
02:54:29.000And then I went into this Christian fundamentalist school, or whatever it is, or school that teaches creationism, and all they could talk about was Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
02:54:46.000In the same way that some guy in the Midwest, when he thinks about Islam, he's thinking about ISIS or al-Qaeda or all that sort of stuff.
02:54:56.000He doesn't understand that those people don't represent the majority of Muslims.
02:55:00.000And in the same way, in this school, Dawkins and Harris were being used to represent science in general and to represent evolution in general.
02:55:11.000So they are essentially, for a lot of people, forming the stereotype of science.
02:56:24.000So you're going on a long, circuitous route here because you made some accusations about Hera.
02:56:28.000So what's wrong with his views on God and what's wrong with his views on religion?
02:56:33.000Well, that's the point, is that religion is a set of beliefs, and actually many of these beliefs are adapted to their environment, even though they seem kooky.
02:56:40.000And there are also ideologies that are strictly enforced, and I think that's one of the things he has a big issue with.
02:56:45.000But the point is, is the issue, if you want to, so this comes down to how do you change people's minds, and what does the science say about how you change people's minds, and how do you move ideas?
02:56:55.000Okay, so you're saying that his mocking of these ideas is contrary to the expanding of knowledge, that people are going to resist it.
02:57:03.000Yeah, and it doesn't promote a productive exchange of ideas between tribes.
02:58:06.000So, in terms of moving evolution, the first thing is to recognize that, you know, if we really want to, like, not just spend another 150 years, you know, having a fight between science and religion and all that sort of stuff, the first thing to realize is that what people like David Sloan Wilson are saying is fundamentally compatible with Christianity,
02:58:32.000The sort of Dawkins-type notion of it's all about selfishness and everybody just trying to fuck everybody and all that sort of stuff, part of it is that it doesn't fit well with Christianity, right?
02:58:42.000Doesn't fit well with religious notions, right?
02:58:45.000Secondly, all of this stuff that I'm talking about with cultural evolution is deeply practical.
02:58:51.000You can see that if we have a conversation as humanity about culture and how my choices are being driven and all that sort of stuff so that I can change my culture and all that sort of stuff, that we can fix a whole lot of things.
02:59:04.000That notion of culture relies on group selection.
02:59:07.000It relies on this multi-level selection idea that Dawkins is not on board with and all that sort of stuff and that Sam Harris is not on board with.
02:59:17.000So, ultimately, what I want to do is I want to move these ideas.
02:59:20.000But the whole point is, Joe, is that part of the reason why you brought me on this podcast today is specifically because I called out Richard Dawkins.
03:01:08.000But ultimately, that's sort of the larger thing that I would like to achieve, right, is a scientific reformation, right?
03:01:18.000So, you know, Martin Luther triggers this reformation with the Catholic Church and all that sort of stuff.
03:01:27.000At the core of the Catholic Church was this idea of love thy neighbor as thyself, and basically Martin Luther said the people in the power in the religious establishment are not living that principle, right?
03:01:38.000At the core of science is this idea that we should be responsive to evidence.
03:01:43.000And the scientific establishment is often not living, or the academic establishment is not living that, you know, principle, right?
03:01:52.000So, and part of the problem is that left to their own devices, they will continue to remain in their tiny lanes.
03:01:58.000And a lot of these academic disputes can only be solved by going outside their lanes.
03:02:03.000So, for example, if Sam Harris was here, right, and I've said this on the podcast with Brian, the one thing that I would want to talk about, the only thing that I would want to talk about is this rationalist versus intuitionist idea, and try and reach some sort of definitive conclusion on that.
03:02:18.000Because if Sam Harris's thinking and feeling are always being linked, then he has to decide how his feelings about religion are driving his thinking, and whether his feelings about religion are appropriate in light of the evidence, or whether they're not appropriate.
03:04:38.000You go on these big, broad journeys before you come back.
03:04:42.000So what I'm saying is that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are the kind of friends, with friends like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, science doesn't need enemies.
03:04:54.000They are alienating, they are not helping us, and they're getting in the way of communicating science.
03:04:59.000I understand because of the very approach that they're taking.
03:05:02.000If science was to adopt the approach of we are here in light of the diffusion of innovations, which is the book all about how...
03:05:09.000Do you feel the same way about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his open criticism of religion?
03:05:13.000Well, I think in general that I don't think that the criticism of religion is helping science.
03:05:19.000Science has been at war with religion for 150 years.
03:05:22.000So you don't think that science should be honest?
03:05:25.000Or that scientists should be honest about their own personal...
03:05:28.000Well, but the point is that I believe that scientists should read science widely.
03:05:32.000And if you look at someone like John Hite, part of the reason why John Hite and Sam Harris have fought is because John Hite doesn't have a problem with religion.
03:05:39.000Because when you update your view of the brain, you come to realize that what's really going on is that you blindly internalize the beliefs of science and your community and all that sort of stuff, and that they blindly internalize the beliefs of their community.
03:05:54.000And that if you want to move ideas, if you want to move scientific ideas, what we have to do is establish trust.
03:06:00.000But what specifically are they blindly interpreting?
03:06:03.000It's this idea of that reason and emotion are separate.
03:06:07.000But how does that apply strictly to religion and his beliefs on religion being incorrect?
03:07:12.000So, the point is that if you want to fix the problem, right, you don't worry about the text, right?
03:07:19.000You don't worry about what are the literal- But if the text is preposterous, it should be discussed.
03:07:24.000I mean, if the text promotes violence against women or against any particular group that doesn't believe what you believe, it's discussed because it's problematic, right?
03:07:36.000But different people, like, has the Bible changed in the last 400 years?
03:07:41.000No, but different people's interpretations of the Bibles have.
03:07:53.000Well, this is an issue that Michael Shermer wrote about recently, about Islam not experiencing the Enlightenment, that other religions have gone through this.
03:08:02.000Well, it's specifically about Islam experiencing a de-enlightenment, right?
03:08:08.000But so the real thing that if you want to fix Islam, and again, like, you know, I was born in Saudi Arabia, my parents live in Dubai, like, there are conversations happening about this.
03:08:18.000What you have to do is that you have to change the intellectual climate.
03:09:24.000Someone like Joe Henrik probably maybe has three Twitter followers.
03:09:28.000So the people who are representing science, right, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, no one's questioning, like, does Neil deGrasse Tyson know way the fuck more about astrophysics than I do?
03:10:05.000And at the end of the 67 pages, I'm like, I feel like what you're actually talking about is how do you move ideas?
03:10:11.000And wasn't that already solved with the diffusion of innovations?
03:10:16.000And he said, oh, I've obviously heard of the diffusion of innovations, like Everett Rogers' famous work, but I've never made a close study of it.
03:10:27.000Now, the Diffusion of Innovations was written in 1967. It is an innovation that hasn't diffused.
03:10:33.000And that's specifically because even though it preaches one thing about how ideas move, it's written in that dry scientific technical style.
03:10:43.000So a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or David Sloan Wilson or John Hyde or Joe Henrik or any of these guys often have not heard of ideas that are relevant to the conversations that we're having.
03:10:58.000Like, it's not just that the ideas aren't moving between science.
03:11:01.000Isn't this a bizarre conversation to have if you don't know whether or not they've read that?
03:11:04.000Well, but you can look at people's behavior, and you can see from people's behavior whether they understand certain things or not.
03:11:11.000Or whether they agree with certain things.
03:11:13.000I mean, just because their behavior isn't compatible to that paper doesn't mean that they haven't read it and just decided that they don't agree or they have another point of view.
03:11:21.000Well, I mean, if we're going to really get into this...
03:11:30.000We're like 25 minutes over, so I was trying to figure out a way to skirt out of here quick.
03:11:35.000Yeah, but I mean, the point that I'm trying to...
03:11:38.000I think the main point is that from all of our conversations about culture, There are ideas out there, trapped in books, which is the whole point of what we're doing on The Brian Callen Show, that have real practical value to improving people's lives.
03:12:41.000I mean, isn't it the best way to distribute information is the internet?
03:12:43.000The fact that it took 150 years for scurvy to be cured even though the information was there, don't you think that directly coincides with the lack of ability to express that information?
03:12:54.000It has to do with, and that's the point of the diffusion of innovations, it has to do with the ideas being packaged in a way that is culturally and psychologically compatible with what people already believe, and it being shown that they have practical value.
03:13:11.000The science of evolution has been around for 150 years.
03:13:16.000But there's that vitamin C example that you're using, you're talking about an extremely limited amount of education available when people are not expressing this.
03:13:30.000Yeah, but if you've got 2 million people dying, right?
03:13:33.000There were 2 million people dying, it was a huge problem, they didn't know how to solve it, and these ideas didn't move.
03:13:39.000Right, but how can you compare that to today?
03:13:41.000Well, I mean, Joe, we can't do the experiment where we have one world where we don't do anything to package and move the ideas, and we have another world where we do actively work to try and package and move these ideas.
03:14:03.000Well, the technology is different, but the human mind hasn't changed.
03:14:05.000The human mind hasn't changed really in 10,000 years.
03:14:09.000The human mind might not have changed genetically, but its understanding of the world has changed radically.
03:14:14.000So its understanding of what a vitamin is is gigantically different between now and then.
03:14:20.000Well, but that's also important, is that it's important to realize that when this whole scurvy conversation was going on, they didn't have the concept of a vitamin.
03:14:27.000And there are thick concepts that you don't have right now in terms of this idea that thinking and feeling are always linked, right?
03:14:36.000Our culture doesn't talk about emotions in a way where they understand, oh, this behavior of the student where they wad up the test and they throw it all away, that is being driven by an emotion.
03:14:44.000Well, a lot of people understand that, though.
03:14:47.000A lot of people understand that people get humiliated by failure and then it makes them pull back and they don't grow.
03:14:53.000And when people teach people, there's a lot of things that people teach about when learning new information to make it encouraging and to make it enjoyable and to express boundless potential and not express You know, very clear, rigid boundaries that you're never going to cross and that you can impart these very limiting ideas into children's minds,
03:15:13.000or you can expand upon their potential horizons by promoting this idea of accessibility and of massive potential.
03:15:20.000Of course, but is it a standard practice in America's schools today when a student gets a bad test that we all work through those mistakes and analyze them?
03:15:30.000I don't know what the standard is today.
03:15:33.000I assume that that's just shitty teaching.
03:15:35.000But it's not a matter of lack of understanding amongst certain individuals about the way people are motivated and not motivated.
03:15:42.000Well, there may be a small number of individuals, but that doesn't mean that that is the general consensus.
03:15:46.000I don't even know if it's a small number.
03:17:19.000And things that we can fix pretty simply, and ideas that you can promote, are embrace your mistakes, analyze your mistakes, fail forward.
03:17:27.000And that is the cornerstone value of the FAA, Which is why you're safer flying than walking.
03:17:33.000It's the cornerstone value of Silicon Valley.
03:17:36.000And I will tell you that having worked with lots and lots of students and traveled all across the country, that is not the core value of a lot of American students.