In this week's episode, we talk about the perils of germs, and how to deal with them. We also talk about what to do if you get sick, and what not to do when you do get sick. And we have a special guest on the show this week, the Godfather himself, who's not only a writer, but also a friend of the show's host, Alex Blumberg. We talk about how he got over his asthma when he was a kid, and why he doesn't get sick when he's around other people. And he's not the only one who gets sick, either. We also discuss the dangers of antibiotics, and whether or not you should be worried about getting sick if you don't have a good immune system. And of course, we discuss brain worms. We can't forget about brain worms, which is a condition that affects the west and affects the rest of the world, and we can't wait to talk about them! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Ian Dorsch. We do not own the rights to either of these songs used in this episode. If you like them, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. or wherever else you get your music, we'd love to hear them on the next episode. Thank you for the music you've listened to us. Thank you so much for all the support us, we really appreciate the support we've gotten so far. We really appreciate it. -Maggie and the feedback we've been getting through this project. -- Thank you. Sarah, Sarah, Matt, Jamie, Caitie, Jack, Evan, Ben, Joe, and Alex, James, and the Effy, etc., etc., and all of your support, etc. -- thank you. etc. Thanks so much! -- much love, Sarah and Joe. -- -- Sarah, Caitlyn, Elyssa, Emily, Rachel, and Matt, Johnathan, and Jamie, and Sarah, and Mike, and everyone else. -- Thankyou so much, Caitlin, and all the love you all of you, thank you, and your support is so much love you, so much so much more. -- Alyssa and the rest. -- thanks so much to you, bye bye, bye, good night.
00:00:33.000Around puberty, it often subsides, especially if you're quite athletic, which I was.
00:00:40.000And then it completely went away by about 13 and only came back by about 25. But now I'm not full-blown asthmatic.
00:00:48.000Only when I get sick, if I, let's say, get a cold, it will migrate to my chest, turn into bronchitis, and what will take you four days to fight might take me a month of whooping cough.
00:01:04.000Well, that's why when I came out of the bathroom, my instinct was to tell Jamie as I was shaking his hand, I washed my hands, because I'm always careful about shaking other people's hands, so I'd like to extend them the same courtesy.
00:01:14.000Yeah, man, I shake some people's hands, and it's like they just dunked it in the pool.
00:01:19.000Some people, like, they get so sweaty, and you shake their hand, you go, whoa, okay, but what's going on with this hand?
00:01:28.000I read this article that was saying that water bottles, when you reuse a water bottle, they've tested them, and they say that there's less bacteria on dog toys.
00:01:38.000Well, that's why, by the way, I've resorted to fist bumping.
00:01:41.000Not because I'm cool, but it just reduces the amount of germ transfer from one person to the other by just going like this.
00:01:48.000But don't you think that that compromises your immune system by not exposing it to a lot of different things?
00:01:53.000I mean, there is actually research on this, right?
00:01:54.000From evolutionary medicine, kids who grow up in very sterile environments end up suffering from greater respiratory ailments precisely because their system hasn't been kicked up.
00:02:14.000Don't you threaten me with a good time.
00:02:17.000I think it's also really important, I don't know how much you partake of this, but to consume probiotics, do you eat acidophilus or yogurt or...
00:03:03.000There's a lot of healthy soaps that use like tea tree oil and eucalyptus that are really good for you that are probiotic.
00:03:10.000Keep the idea of worm in mind because later I'd like to talk about brain worms and how it relates to a condition that is affecting the West.
00:03:59.000Yeah, so basically I argue that in the same way that there are all sorts of animals that once they are infected with this brain worm, and there are different instantiations of it, They become zombified, right?
00:04:13.000Just to give you another example, the spider wasp will sting the spider, which is much bigger than it, rendering it zombified.
00:04:21.000It then carries it into its burrow, lays its eggs.
00:04:28.000And then when the eggs hatch, they eat it in vivo.
00:04:31.000And I argue that the political correctness is akin to the spider wasp's sting because it zombifies us into walking quietly to the abyss of infinite darkness while horrible things are happening around us.
00:04:45.000But while we think that we're doing the right thing.
00:04:47.000While we think that, yeah, we're being not racist and good and progressive.
00:04:51.000But to go back to the brain worm idea, so...
00:04:54.000I coined the term, not to be cute, but to actually name this collective condition.
00:05:15.000And it's really taken on a life of its own at this point.
00:05:18.000I'm actually thinking of studying this scientifically, not just as something that I talk about in my public engagement.
00:05:23.000What is it that causes some people to be more likely to be parasitized by the types of mindsets that would cause you to suffer from Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome?
00:05:35.000So a classic example would be, which I guess we'll get into...
00:05:39.000How much evidence do you need to see around the world that there might be some religious ideology that is somewhat problematic and antithetical to secular, liberal, modern values?
00:05:49.000How much information or what is the type of information that you would need to see before you're able to arrive to such a conclusion?
00:05:57.000And so one of the things I'm thinking of doing is to formally Quantify a score of OPS, how much somebody suffers from OPS, as a type of mindset, and what are some predictors that could help us understand who is more or less likely to be afflicted by this mindset?
00:06:13.000Well, there's certain people that just never want to hurt anyone's feelings, except when they think that it is within their rights to attack that person, because that person is somehow or another victimizing someone else, and then they'll be far more egregious than the original offense.
00:06:29.000Did you know about that guy in Canada that's getting sued?
00:06:31.000Well, the Human Rights Council fined him $12,000 because he walked into an apartment that he owned with shoes on because there was a Muslim family living there.
00:06:42.000Their lease was up, and he was looking to rent the apartment.
00:06:48.000And so he opened up the apartment to show this apartment that he owns, and because he walked into a building that he owns with his shoes on, he has to pay them $12,000 for failing to accommodate their religious practices while showing their apartment to prospective tenants.
00:07:16.000I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the Human Rights Count Tribunal of Ontario also found that he harassed them and created a poisoned housing environment.
00:07:52.000And the pet cause is almost like being a contrarian to a lot of far-right people who are...
00:07:58.000Really terrified of Muslims like they're trying to like figure out How to balance that out with their own ridiculous left-wing version of it?
00:08:06.000Well, I think there are two elements to it.
00:08:08.000One is that they're just afraid to criticize Muslims because there are greater repercussions to do so than to criticize Seventh-day Adventists.
00:08:16.000So just from a very basic sort of survival instinct.
00:08:19.000But I think secondly, which is kind of part of the ostrich parasitic syndrome I'm speaking of, there are all sort of erroneous ideas that people have been infected with.
00:08:28.000You know, the The Muslim religion is a religion for the downtrodden, the brown people, the exotic others.
00:08:36.000And so to criticize them when they are a hapless, exotic minority is simply racist and sexist.
00:08:44.000Even though most of the countries that these people are coming from, when they come to the West, not only are they the majority, they're almost the exclusive majority.
00:08:52.000So they are out of, I think, 56 countries that constitute the...
00:08:57.000OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, something like 29 or 30 countries, they're exclusively Islamic.
00:09:04.000There are no longer any religious minorities.
00:09:08.000So to argue that people who come from these countries are, you know, religious minorities.
00:09:13.000Well, I mean, they're religious minorities when they come to the West, but they're all coming from countries where, never mind that they're the majority, they've never interacted with someone who did not share their faith.
00:09:23.000I don't think people understand that if that happens here, like, you can't turn back from that without violence.
00:09:30.000I mean, I'm not saying that it would happen in the United States, but the fact that it can happen anywhere means it can happen everywhere.
00:09:40.000I mean, it's a big reach on my part to say that, because there's no evidence whatsoever that it's going to happen here.
00:09:45.000But if you really look at some of the countries that are suffering under There's these really oppressive religious ideologies where women aren't allowed to drive where they have to wear Covering all over their body that signifies that they're a part of this religious sect Like if that if someone tried to do that today Like if you had some blonde haired blue-eyed guy that made all women wear a certain outfit and they weren't allowed to drive and they weren't allowed to have the same rights How many people would be standing up for them?
00:10:12.000It's incredible Especially if it was a new thing there's something about old things like old ideology is them legitimacy So strange.
00:10:38.000But to speak to your point about, well, that you were stretching about it happening in the United States, you're not stretching it at all.
00:10:44.000As a matter of fact, I've argued, for example, when Trump won, that if you look at a long-term view of the issue of Islamic immigration, if what you focus on is I think?
00:11:23.000And so, yes, if you look at it from the perspective of 10, 20, 50, 100 years, the U.S. stands no threat.
00:12:38.000If no, then maybe we should have an honest conversation about this.
00:12:41.000An honest conversation is what's really important because these things get so emotionally charged, like the infamous Ben Affleck-Sam Harris debacle on Bill Maher's show.
00:12:51.000But that to me is a perfect example because Sam speaks in such a measured way.
00:13:00.000He's not making these big gigantic leaps, but people love to jump on him and call racism.
00:13:07.000He sent me some video that I just watched the other day where a bunch of people are just Taking complete out-of-context statements Attributing him to him as being like this is what he believes on things when if you listen to the full Extent of the conversation.
00:14:24.000It's just you and I. We can talk and we can have these long-form conversations.
00:14:29.000But on that show, you don't have the time to unpack what's wrong with anything.
00:14:35.000All ideologies, all things that tell you how to think.
00:14:39.000Forget about whether or not you think it came from Jesus or the prophet Muhammad or Joseph Smith.
00:14:44.000Anytime there's a doctrine that tells you how to think because of some mystical presence, some god or deity or prophet who has gotten the wisdom of the universe, and you must not question it, and women have to wear veils and dress up like beekeepers.
00:15:00.000I mean, all that stuff is very, very problematic because people are prone For whatever reason, I mean, I guess it's something that goes back to tribalism and alpha male chimpanzee behavior.
00:16:04.000I don't know how much you followed, but a lot of people who've all escaped from this world, either they still consider themselves Muslim, but not Muslim-lite, or ex-Muslims in many cases.
00:16:16.000So imagine, you know, so there is some woman who went to Wellesley College who doesn't know anything about Islam short of whatever she learned in her bullshit progressive course.
00:16:26.000She will lecture to us what true Islam is.
00:16:40.000Because, like, when you see them do it, like...
00:16:42.000I mean, anytime someone goes so far overboard that objective reasoning is out the window and you're...
00:16:48.000You know, you're so committed to whatever position that you're in that you can't look at both sides of it.
00:16:53.000I mean, I could see why a lot of religious traditions would be comforting to people, remind them of where they came from, give them pride of their homeland, give them a personal good feeling that they're connected to some sort of an ancient tradition, as long as it's not oppressing other human beings.
00:17:10.000And there's got to be some, I mean, actually cultural patterns of behavior that people do, like celebrations, like Oktoberfest or something like that.
00:17:20.000Those things, you know, promote some sort of a pride, like I guess a pride in Germany and their beer making and all that stuff, without oppressing people, you know?
00:19:00.000It comes from the Quran, it comes from the Hadith, and it comes from the Sirah, the biography of Muhammad.
00:19:05.000So this kind of false narrative that people are promulgating so that they seem as though they're not frontally attacking a religion, while laudable, while nice, I get that reflex, it's false.
00:19:19.000And so again, to go back to our point of talking honestly, We need to talk honestly.
00:19:34.000Now, you're a person that goes out of your way to say, we're not talking about the kind, sweet Islamic people that just want to raise their children.
00:19:43.000So how do you sort of manage those two ideas, that they're the same?
00:19:49.000Like when the term radical Islam gets thrown around.
00:20:32.000In the same way that you might identify as coming from Boston, and there's a shared history from all people who grew up around the time that you grew up in Boston...
00:20:41.000And there is a sense of affiliation and tribalism with that reality.
00:20:46.000Being Jewish, as far as I'm concerned, and for most Jews, is exactly that.
00:20:50.000We don't necessarily take the religious elements very seriously.
00:20:54.000Now, that doesn't mean that we are practicing a light Judaism or non-radical Judaism.
00:21:00.000We're simply ignoring those parts of Judaism that we choose to ignore.
00:21:04.000So there is no such thing as radical Islam.
00:21:07.000There are no books called radical Islam.
00:21:09.000There is a set of doctrines called Islam, and then I could do what's called cafeteria Islam, which is I pick and choose the parts that I wish to adhere to.
00:21:18.000So again, the discourse is a false narrative.
00:21:21.000I understand the reason for it, because people find it rather gauche to attack frontally a religion, or at least to attack Islam.
00:21:29.000So they have to, I call this the ism magic heuristic, right?
00:21:33.000You add ism to something, it makes it bad.
00:21:39.000For you, I would like to defend you, if there's a lot of people that are listening right now, or offer up some, not even defend you, but offer up some information.
00:21:48.000You grew up in a place where being Jewish was lethal.
00:22:17.000Yeah, you explain it, but please do again.
00:22:20.000So a dimmi is a third-class citizen, comes out of Quranic edicts that basically said that when Islam comes into a society, you basically have three choices if you're not a Muslim.
00:22:32.000You could either convert, you could either get killed, or if you are people of the book, meaning Christians and Jews, meaning people of the book that you're also monotheistic, you're also from an Abrahamic faith, Then you could live as a dimmi.
00:22:46.000A dimmi is a protected class, protected in quotes.
00:22:51.000And in order to tolerate you, we're going to remind you repeatedly of your subservient position.
00:22:58.000Now, at different points across the last 1400 years, that mechanism was either instituted very forcefully or more lightly.
00:23:07.000So in the context of Lebanon, which was a very progressive and modern country in the Middle Eastern context, There wasn't somebody knocking on our door and levying the jizya.
00:23:15.000Pay us or else we're going to rape your daughters.
00:23:18.000But you didn't wear a big star of David because that might be construed as inflammatory, just like the example that you started off the show.
00:23:26.000You're hurting our sensibilities by pushing your Judaism on us, right?
00:23:31.000So your status did not always have been threatened in that my head is going to come off at any minute, right?
00:24:20.000And it's kind of interesting when you talk about this idea about how people are reluctant to criticize Islam because they're worried about the repercussions of this.
00:24:31.000It kind of speaks to how rare it is that people do violate those principles in those countries.
00:24:39.000Because if you do have a culture that's 99% Islamic, Especially if they go by the book, like, every step of the way.
00:24:48.000Like, there's not going to be a lot of people that are stepping on the line for fear of the horrific repercussions.
00:24:54.000Now, psychologically in this country, you're seeing that for some strange reason emerging from the left.
00:25:20.000It's a really strange position to be a progressive who's reinforcing the ideologies of a regressive culture that's very ancient.
00:25:30.000But what's incredible is that they'll come up with ways to defend this cognitive inconsistency.
00:25:36.000And hence, that's part of the ostrich parasitic syndrome that I was mentioning earlier.
00:25:39.000What are some ways that they defend it?
00:25:41.000Let me just give you a few manifestations of ostrich logic.
00:25:46.000My friend Mohammed is a very nice guy and he drinks and he fornicates and he's very liberal.
00:25:52.000So the idea then becomes that as long as I can identify a single exemplar of an Islamic person who does not otherwise adhere to what Islam dictates, then it's not true that Islam is bad.
00:26:06.000Now, this is a manifestation of a more general cognitive bias, which goes like this.
00:26:11.000If I walk into class and I say, look, homo sapiens are sexually dimorphic.
00:26:16.000There are innate sex differences between the two sexes.
00:27:45.000It's not something that is structured with objective reasoning.
00:27:50.000It's something that's structured with their own particular ideology that does not want to criticize this one segment of the human population that they think is being persecuted.
00:29:02.000By the way, I've predicted that in Europe...
00:29:04.000This is on record, we can probably find it, that in Europe, within 15, 20, 25, 50 years, we're going to have Lebanon all over the place.
00:29:12.000And now it's starting to happen, right?
00:29:13.000At one point, we were having daily attacks all over Europe.
00:29:17.000So again, if you're going to increase Islamic immigration to the West, Of course, most people are nice and just want to escape to a better world.
00:29:26.000But are you willing to take the risks for what's about to happen?
00:29:30.000Are you willing to accept people whose cultural and religious values are perfectly antithetical to yours?
00:29:37.000If you do Pew surveys from around the Middle East or Islamic countries about your views on Jews, well, you'll get things like 95 to 99 percent Jew hatred.
00:29:48.000So if I am a Canadian Jew, right, and I see that 50,000 Syrians are going to come in, Is it that I'm filled with hatred towards Syrians or am I simply someone who calculates statistical regularities and basically says that out of 50,000 people,
00:30:04.000if 95% have endemic Jew hatred as part of their identity, do I have a right to be concerned about this?
00:31:27.000I mean, any kind, caring person who...
00:31:30.000Has concern for our fellow human beings sees these people fleeing and sees the horrific conditions that they're confronted with in their own country and they really don't have a lot of options and they're trying to escape to the West.
00:31:59.000If the dad is with the wife and the children, you can't just have the father stay back behind the tent and you let the mom go to Toronto with the kids.
00:32:20.000I mean, or at the very least, it's prejudiced, right?
00:32:23.000I mean, you're singling people out because of their ideology or because of what religion they're from, not because of their past behavior or any predictors whatsoever about their future behavior.
00:32:34.000But we do have some statistical regularity about...
00:32:36.000What types of values those guys are going to come with.
00:32:40.000So I'm not suggesting we close the door.
00:32:42.000Right, but wouldn't that, in a way, I mean, just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't that, in a way, kind of put the Muslims in Toronto, who do immigrate, whatever, pick that city, who try to immigrate to Canada, in the same sort of a position that your family was in, in Lebanon,
00:32:57.000where you were hiding the fact that you were Jews?
00:33:01.000No one has an inalienable right to immigrate anywhere, correct?
00:33:06.000So if you wish to immigrate to the West, then leave every single syllable that constitutes a belief, attitude, position, value that is contrary to ours at the door and then welcome in my brother.
00:33:21.000Man, isn't that a crazy thing to say to someone whose entire life and their ideology is a big part of their identity and who they are, like how they view the world.
00:33:31.000That's the structure for which they interface with other human beings.
00:33:39.000I agree with you overall when I talk about the entire human population that it would be wonderful if we did that.
00:33:44.000But from individual to individual, we know about the trials and tribulations that people go through in a day-to-day life and religious freedom and a religious ideology in many cases helps people get through the pains of life.
00:33:59.000It helps them get through the struggles.
00:34:00.000I'm not saying that it's rational, but I am saying that in many ways it's a scaffolding for their own personal behavior.
00:34:09.000You would have to then ensure that your religious practice is exclusively practiced privately.
00:34:18.000Never should there ever be an intrusion into the public sphere.
00:34:22.000No asking for prayer rooms at the university.
00:34:26.000The example that you gave is the slight creeping jihad, right?
00:34:32.000So my next book is called, tentatively, it might change, Death of the West by a Thousand Cuts, right?
00:34:37.000It's the idea that when you take, again, a parable of the frog, when you put it in boiling water and you do it very slowly, the frog, if you do it very, very slowly, if it falls below a just noticeable difference, it doesn't notice that the temperature is rising until it's too late and it boils to death, right?
00:34:52.000So this idea of just noticeable difference is something that's very important in this conversation.
00:34:57.000We're not going to get Islamized overnight, but Egypt, before it became Islamic, used to be non-Islamic once upon a time.
00:35:04.000Today it's about 10% Coptic Christians.
00:35:35.000One possibility, which I've discussed with folks on my show who are trained lawyers, is that There are provisions in the law, at least in the United States, to declare an ideology as being seditious, right?
00:35:48.000So in the same way that you could say that Nazism is seditious to our values or communism, there are elements of Islam, the non-spiritual parts, that it doesn't take Einstein to recognize that they are perfectly antithetical to every single value that you and I would hold dear as Westerners.
00:36:10.000So take, for example, Sharia law, which is the Islamic law by which you organize society.
00:36:18.000The first premise of Islamic law is that the crime, its severity, and its punishment depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the victim.
00:36:30.000So imagine the idea in the American Constitution that justice is blind.
00:36:33.000Well, that is already violated as the most fundamental tenet of Sharia law.
00:36:37.000If a Muslim kills a Jew, it's a very, very different crime than if a Jew kills a Muslim.
00:36:43.000You can just go look up Reliance of the Traveler, which is the English translation of Sharia law, and you'll see all these things.
00:36:51.000So why should we tolerate this kind of stuff, right?
00:36:55.000Come in, my Muslim brothers, but keep the stuff that you yourself escaped from out of our country.
00:37:01.000And if you keep it out, come in and let's grow together and hug it out.
00:37:06.000But why should I be tolerant towards the intolerable?
00:37:09.000I agree with you in theory, but I think the problem is as soon as you tell someone to not follow certain aspects of their ideology, those aspects become even more attractive.
00:37:19.000And especially if they consider the West to be decadent and filled with sin and fornicating and drinking and all the things that they think are disgusting.
00:37:47.000I really think you need transcendent experiences to escape from the day-to-day vibration of normal life.
00:37:56.000How about just the commitment to reason and science?
00:37:58.000It would be wonderful if we could do that, but people are so terrified of death, and they're so terrified of the unknown, and they're so terrified of not having structure.
00:38:07.000People love having ideological structure that they can govern their life by.
00:40:07.000Just because of your statistical regularity that you'd calculate which group is more likely to impart violence on you, then you might avoid the alley with the four young men, even though not all young men, right?
00:40:20.000Even though the probability that a young man is going to jump you and gang rape you and mug you and stab you is a small one.
00:40:27.000But your brain has evolved to calculate those statistical regularities and to then...
00:40:31.000Be very careful, be very risk aversive in putting yourself in harm's way.
00:40:37.000So again, even though most Muslims are very nice and very lovely, I think we have enough data right now if we look at the last, since 2011. In 2001, 9-11, there's been over 30,000 terror attacks committed in the name of Islam,
00:40:53.000I challenge anybody in your comments section to list me another ideology that comes remotely close.
00:40:59.000If you added up every single other ideology since 2001, you wouldn't come up to 100. So what is the statistical numbers that you need to see before you're able to simply say, look, let's have an honest conversation, notwithstanding that not all Muslims and most are nice.
00:41:23.000Let's stop with the bullshit euphobisms.
00:41:25.000There are inherent elements, contents within Islam that are problematic.
00:41:30.000It's not my job to find a way to get rid of them.
00:41:33.000But if you wish to be part of our Western societies, then you need to find a way to expunge that stuff.
00:41:38.000If you do it, welcome my brother, we're all brothers.
00:41:41.000If you don't, then I should show preference to people who share similar cultural values to me.
00:41:47.000That's called Now, what about people that would say that there's inherent problems with the Jewish religion?
00:41:54.000There's inherent problems with subscribing to that ideology, that they have been persecuting Islamic people in Palestine, that they've been prosecuting and treating Islamic people as inferior to Jewish people?
00:42:08.000That's, I mean, I know you're not necessarily saying it, but that's part of ostrich logic.
00:42:12.000That's what I call, but muh, the Crusades, right?
00:42:14.000And it's not me who actually came up with the but muh, right?
00:42:27.000I think I first saw it in, he'll be happy that I'm giving a shout out, I think a guy on YouTube who goes by the name of T and Kraut, or Kraut and T, he's a German YouTuber.
00:42:58.000But you're kind of claiming an ideology, right?
00:43:02.000But when you're saying you're Jewish, and I support you saying this 100%, especially considering of all people, you should be in some ways proud of who you are, considering that you come from a line of oppressed people that escaped a horrible situation.
00:43:16.000No one is arguing that there is a monopoly of ugliness that only stems from Islam.
00:43:22.000Jews can engage in ugliness, Christians, atheists.
00:43:52.000In the same way, by the way, I recently put up a clip on my channel where I talked about academic lineage.
00:43:59.000So in the same way that you could build a genealogy of your family tree or of a people's, you could do what's called an academic genealogy.
00:44:06.000So for example, my doctoral supervisor is my academic father, and then I could look to see who was his academic supervisor and who was his academic supervisor.
00:46:04.000So be proud of your cultural identity, and if that incorporates an Islamic identity, great, but reject all the bullshit, right?
00:46:14.000And so I think that's where Judaism and Christianity at this point is somewhat different from Islam.
00:46:20.000For most people who are Islamic, even if they don't necessarily believe it, They'll feel very reticent to openly admit it, that they despise a lot of the ugliness.
00:46:31.000They'll say it's not true, it doesn't exist, you didn't understand it, you misinterpreted it.
00:48:29.000Actually, what happens with a lot of the guests that I bring in on my show who are Arabic, we always start off the start of our show speaking only in Arabic.
00:48:38.000Because for most Westerners, it's fetishized.
00:49:13.000We never thought of that in the last 1400 years.
00:49:16.000But the reality is that there are elements within the doctrines of Islam that simply don't permit for this reformation to take place.
00:49:23.000And even if it could take place, we don't necessarily have the time to wait another 400 years while we deliberate how each syllable in each of the problematic passages should be reinterpreted while people's bodies are being stacked up all over the world.
00:49:38.000And so therefore, I think that there needs to be a much more direct intervention.
00:49:42.000And what I mean by direct intervention, no, there doesn't need to be reformed, doesn't need to be interpreted, it needs to be expunged.
00:49:50.000These types of ideas, if Judaism has certain ideas that are belligerent to women's clitorises, then I want those ideas in Judaism out.
00:50:00.000They don't belong in the public arena of ideas.
00:50:11.000Because at one point in time, Christianity was a very repressive religion, and the apostasy, the idea of it was much more oppressed than today.
00:50:22.000Right now, like, Islam is the only religion that I'm aware of.
00:50:25.000I mean, maybe there's more that I'm just ignorant to, where if you leave the religion, They can kill you.
00:54:11.000In the way that he did it, as you said, it's a very assiduous process.
00:54:16.000It takes a long time before, and as a matter of fact, the rabbis are supposed to try to dissuade you from converting to Judaism because that, in a sense, tests your faith, your desire to change.
00:54:28.000In Islam, do you know what you have to do to convert?
00:56:25.000I ran into a guy just a few days ago, and he said hello to me, and then he explained to me that he trains jujitsu with the Machados, and immediately we were like brothers, because that's my lineage.
00:57:35.000Because the reason that's a good segue is because I actually raised it with him on the plane.
00:57:41.000I used to live in an area in Montreal called Outremont, for the Montrealists out there who don't know where it is, where there are a lot of Hasidic Jews.
00:57:48.000So now you would think that Within this very small group of people called Jews, within an even smaller group of people called Hasidic Orthodox Jews, once you're an Orthodox Jew, you're an Orthodox Jew.
00:59:14.000But do you want to talk more about this?
00:59:17.000So I was very interested in asking him things that I actually thought about studying scientifically as part of my research.
00:59:25.000So one of the things that I study, as you know, is, well, I apply evolutionary psychology to all sorts of things, one of which is mating preferences.
00:59:32.000You know, are there certain mating preferences that are universally true, irrespective of culture, right?
00:59:39.000So whether you go to the Yanomomo tribe in Brazil, a closed society, or you go walk around in LA, there are certain things that men will look for in women and other things that women will look for in men that tend to be universal for clear evolutionary reasons.
00:59:52.000So I was interested at one point in studying the mating preferences of the Hasidic community.
00:59:58.000Again, the idea being that here you're taking a community that culturally and religiously is very close, where the cultural and religious brainwashing is very, very strong.
01:00:08.000And this movement that you're making with your hands, does that represent the sheet with the hole in it?
01:00:30.000The idea is that when a Hasidic couple has sex, they have a sheet between them where they make a hole where the genitalia goes, and that's how you get it on.
01:00:40.000That's what I thought while you kept doing that.
01:00:45.000And so my idea was, at one point, is to see if I can get access to the Hasidic community, which would probably not be easy to get into the Hasidic community and ask them about their mating preferences.
01:00:56.000And so it was a small idea I had over, you know, an afternoon and then kind of dropped it and moved on to other things.
01:01:02.000But here I was sitting with a couple, a Hasidic couple, and I thought, okay, I can't do a scientific study, but at least I could come up with some anecdotes to discuss.
01:01:11.000And so I actually asked them things like, you know, can we talk about some mating preferences that take place within the Hasidic community?
01:01:18.000And there were some really incredible insights that came out.
01:01:21.000So for example, the wife said that one of the attributes that she absolutely was looking for in a prospective mate was that he be taller than her.
01:01:31.000And it turns out that this is called assortative mating, birds of a feather flock together.
01:01:36.000So if you look at naturally occurring couples, it is almost never the case that the woman is taller than the man.
01:01:43.000There was actually a study done with 720 couples.
01:01:45.000A single couple, the woman was taller than the man.
01:01:52.000Physical desire, in this case, I just need the man, not to be tall, just taller than me, right?
01:01:58.000That was replicating in a completely different context in the Hasidic community.
01:02:03.000I even asked them about things like, well, will a Hasidic woman ever look at a non-Hasidic guy that's walking down the street, a bad boy, that has tattoos and greased back hair?
01:02:15.000and you know the swimmer's body and desire him or has the cultural and religious brainwashing been so great that her eyes are shut off to these possibilities and she actually said that no I mean bottom line As E.O. Wilson said,
01:02:35.000In other words, no matter how much cultural and religious brainwashing you have, if you scratch far enough, you'll get the same human nature.
01:02:43.000And that's what I basically got from my conversation with them.
01:02:45.000That's a fascinating way of describing it.
01:03:43.000What he's basically saying is that that political system of we're all equal under communism is a great idea, but it applies to social ants.
01:04:50.000She felt like she was getting bored and she had to take care of the kids while I was having this...
01:04:55.000As a matter of fact, I thought later, wouldn't it have been wonderful if we could have taped it and I could have released this conversation on my show?
01:06:42.000So we really got into some heavy stuff.
01:06:43.000By the way, that's one of the differences between, I think, in his case, he's an extremist Jew in the sense that he is the most practicing of Jews.
01:06:52.000Well, how come we could have this very, very difficult conversation and leave at the end shaking hands, both richer for it, and no one's heads come off?
01:07:15.000My point is that I think part of Jewish tradition, even when you, for example, go to the yeshiva to study, say, the Talmud, is that there is this mechanism of we constantly argue about everything.
01:08:14.000I mean, Thomas Aquinas is the guy who always argued, I think, in the 12th century about the first mover, that you could always go back and say, at time zero, what started that?
01:08:35.000It is odd that we're all willing to believe the most insane version of the creation of the universe ever, without a doubt.
01:08:45.000Like every person of science, people that believe in genes and atoms and subatomic particles and quarks and gluons, they believe that at one point in time there was something that was smaller than the head of a pen that became The infinite space that we see in front of us that's constantly expanding.
01:09:04.000And so infinite that one of the things that Lawrence Krauss really, really fucked my mind up when he was here.
01:09:11.000He was explaining to me that when we're seeing the universe, we're talking about 13.7 billion years or whatever it is.
01:09:19.000Well, yes, not just seeing as it was, but he said you're only seeing the observable universe because the universe itself is moving faster than the light that you see from it.
01:09:31.000So it's entirely possible that it goes back far further than that.
01:09:56.000Okay, I'm not too familiar with that stuff.
01:09:58.000But he talks about middle world, the idea being that our brains evolved to understand phenomena at a level that our brain interacts with, right?
01:10:33.000When you and I, or actually most physicists, when they study things at those levels, they will tell you that the stuff is so esoteric, right?
01:10:40.000Richard Feynman, the very famous physicist, right?
01:10:42.000Said, you know, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics or something to that effect, right?
01:10:48.000That it is so esoteric and difficult for human brains to understand things at that level, small or very big.
01:10:56.000But that notwithstanding, that doesn't mean that scientists succumb to belief just like religious people do.
01:11:04.000Because scientists have epistemic humility, which basically means what?
01:12:20.000I mean, I probably, just as a layperson in physics, probably 1% of what I see in a National Geographic on physics, I can even remotely understand, right?
01:12:49.000And then the concept of life and death is also like our physical limitations.
01:12:55.000Because we know that we live and die and we know that the Sun is going to burn out and we know that life on Earth lives and dies and things change.
01:13:02.000So we impose these physical restrictions on the very universe itself when in fact it might be some constant process of expanding and contracting.
01:13:12.000That's one of the most disturbing ideas is that the universe is going to expand infinitely and then contract infinitely and then do it all over again so that Right.
01:14:20.000And so I was trying to come up with a table that listed all of the various scientific disciplines where evolutionary principles have made headway.
01:14:29.000The field at the highest level, remember we were talking about middle world and cosmic...
01:14:33.000He argued that the process of natural selection operates at the cosmological level, where this grand set of universes are being selected.
01:14:48.000In other words, in the same way that we select genes, right?
01:14:50.000Some genes get selected and others die out.
01:14:54.000That that mechanism, sort of a cosmological natural selection at the cosmological level.
01:15:17.000Well, it is fascinating to think of how much the universe, how many possibilities exist in the universe, right?
01:15:24.000I mean, how many different solar systems exist?
01:15:27.000Hundreds of billions just in this galaxy, one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
01:15:32.000It's almost like for our little tiny worlds, like when we try to look at it in terms of the big picture, we're not capable.
01:15:39.000We don't have enough processing power.
01:15:41.000We don't have enough hard drive space.
01:15:43.000We can't Take all of these points of data and bring them into our head and consider them.
01:15:50.000But it's entirely possible that everything you see in the ant world in terms of competition, everything you see in the human world in terms of competition, natural selection, and the constant and never-ending desire for innovation.
01:16:20.000They always want to come up with something that has better airbags, faster zero to 60, more protection for the passenger, automated controls.
01:16:28.000You can sit back and sleep while your car drives you to work.
01:16:31.000There's all these things that we just take for granted, but they're always moving in the direction of improvement.
01:16:37.000And you could do that with life on Earth.
01:16:40.000You go back to single-celled organisms, which become multi-celled organisms, and we always look at it like, oh, that's just a coincidence.
01:16:46.000And it's dinosaurs, and then it becomes mammals, and then it becomes humans, and then it becomes animals.
01:16:52.000Airplane riding, cell phone using, video having, you know, I mean, it just gets more and more complex, but we just, oh, that's just coincidence.
01:17:04.000Or is it moving in this constant state of improvement until we create an artificial being that can accelerate things far faster than our biological limitations are capable of doing?
01:17:18.000So I'm not sure if this is where you want to go, but as you were describing this sort of quest for improvement, one of the threats of that reflex, or one of the dangers of that reflex, is precisely how totalitarian ideologies develop,
01:17:34.000where they argue that our current state of the world is faulty.
01:17:39.000And if only you implement our ideology de jour, it could be communism, it could be Islam.
01:18:07.000His book is called The Great Divide, where he actually lays out some of the sort of fundamental foundational differences I think we're good to go.
01:18:39.000View our brain as being blank slate, right?
01:18:45.000And so if you see differences between people, it can't be because there was a starting point difference.
01:18:52.000Michael Jordan was not innately different.
01:18:57.000There were some environmental conditions that led Michael Jordan to become who he is and not Gat Saad to be the best NBA player ever.
01:19:06.000And if only we can find the appropriate social intervention strategies, then we could all have equality of outcomes.
01:19:13.000And so that is a faulty understanding of human nature, because human nature, as of course you know, is really an interaction of our biology and our society.
01:19:23.000But so much of the welfare state is based on this idea that, no, we need more of your tax money so that we could implement a social engineering program so that we could reach that utopia where we are all equal outcome.
01:19:38.000And frankly, I think that that's complete nonsense.
01:19:41.000It is fascinating that people seek comfort in communism and socialism for that very reason, like they almost are trying to slow down the competition that they can't win.
01:20:43.000Probably our first conversation you and I had when I was saying that, you know, I would love to eventually come to Southern California, because at least in the United States, the society has been less parasitized by the social welfare idea.
01:20:56.000Of course, the Democrats are more so than the Republicans, but as a general rule...
01:21:02.000Canada is basically pure social welfare.
01:21:24.000Actually, a few people tweeted, oh, please talk to Joe Rogan about this.
01:21:28.000So Omar Khadr is a Muslim guy whose family had become Canadian citizens, but the father had taken them away, I think, to Pakistan at one point and to Afghanistan at another.
01:21:42.000And at one point they were living in Taliban territory.
01:21:48.000And the U.S. military had engaged in some firefight.
01:21:53.000At one point, they even lived in the compound of Bin Laden.
01:21:56.000So these were really real apple pie Canadian folks.
01:21:59.000And Omar Khader, who was 15 years old, apparently threw a grenade, engaged in a firefight, killed one U.S. soldier, and I think blinded a second one.
01:22:10.000He was taken to Guantanamo Bay as a 15-year-old, spent many years there.
01:22:15.000He was a military tribunal, U.S. Guantanamo Tribunal, gave him a symbolic sentence of 40 years, but it was symbolic in that I think it was only going to be eight years.
01:22:27.000They agreed on a plea deal of eight years.
01:22:32.000Very quickly after that, he was released because he already served quite a few years in Guantanamo.
01:22:37.000And then he filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government for not having protected his Canadian charter rights because he was a child soldier and so on.
01:22:49.000And he just settled on a $10.5 million settlement and an official apology by the Canadian government.
01:24:09.000I don't know how much blame you can put on a kid now when it comes to throwing a bomb at someone and taking the life of another human being Well, there's got to be a lot of circumstances involved in that, and I would like to know what they are before I think about any judgment whatsoever,
01:24:27.000because I don't know, were they shooting at him?
01:24:29.000Were they shooting at someone he knew?
01:24:30.000Did someone he knew get murdered by a U.S. soldier?
01:24:33.000Was he actively engaged in some sort of military training and considering becoming a militant?
01:24:57.000My father was 19. My mother was almost 16 when they got married.
01:25:01.000So you can procreate and have a child, but you don't understand the...
01:25:05.000Yeah, but let's be real about physiologically.
01:25:08.000Your frontal cortex isn't even formed until you're 25. When you're 15 years old, you're not capable of making, especially living in a war zone, you're not capable of making moral and ethical judgments above and beyond the ideology that you're being raised in.
01:25:39.000Later, if you check when we get off the air, sort of the cues of this family, they don't seem as though they are assimilating very nicely within Canadian value system.
01:25:53.000For most Canadians, the reflex of taking this guy who seems to be quite resistant to liberty and modernity and freedoms and rewarding him with $10.5 million.
01:26:06.000By the way, this is $10.5 Canadian, so it's probably $30 American.
01:26:41.000The worst that I've ever seen it was when we lived in California in 2001 to 2003. At one point it was 0.64 or 65. Now it's at about 0.75.
01:26:51.000So it's not the worst that it's ever been, but we're heading in that direction.
01:26:55.000But since we're talking about Canada, maybe you'd like to talk about, and I know that you've had Jordan Peterson on, did you follow both of our respective testimonies in front of the Canadian Senate regarding Bill C-16?
01:27:09.000You know, I've read a lot of Jordan's stuff on that.
01:27:12.000I've seen him speak a lot, and I saw that one conversation that he had on television in Canada with some person who is a professor in gender studies.
01:27:44.000There's obviously a broad spectrum of variation in both sexes and they kind of coalesce in the middle somewhere with some.
01:27:53.000Well, what's amazing is that I've been fighting this battle in academia precisely because of what I do, which is introduce evolutionary psychology in the social sciences.
01:28:03.000So these types of conversations, these ludicrous conversations, I've been experiencing them for much of my scientific career.
01:28:11.000What's extraordinary at this point is that some of this nonsense is now becoming law in Canada.
01:28:17.000So to kind of give you the background to what happened, so I was invited both to speak in front of the Canadian Senate and also to give a talk on Parliament Hill.
01:28:27.000The Canadian Senate part was Bill C-16, which is a bill that seeks to incorporate gender identity and gender expression under the rubric of hate crimes.
01:28:39.000So in the same way that I can't discriminate against you for your religion or your race or your ethnicity, I can't discriminate against you because of your gender identity or gender expression because then that would be a hate crime.
01:28:50.000And so I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate to simply say that, while of course everybody's personhood should be respected and we're all equal under the law, the manner by which the bill was tabled, the way it was written, it was so vague as for it to be dangerous.
01:29:13.000Harvard University, their LGBTQ office, came out with a pamphlet that said that the idea of promulgating, and I'm going to quote, fixed binaries and biological essentialism, close quote.
01:30:02.000In the general sense, I think it's the desire to come up with ever-broadening definitions of violence so that any transgression that you commit could fit under that rubric.
01:30:22.000I said, look, Every single thing that I teach in my courses would constitute transphobic systemic violence based on that sort of standard, right?
01:31:55.000How do you respond to that when someone says that?
01:31:57.000So then my response, which you could see, I'm paraphrasing, he said, well, I'm not sure that given the fact that I escaped execution in Lebanon because of my Jewish heritage, that I need to be lectured about genocide.
01:32:22.000That's what happens when you have your brain parasitized by Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome.
01:32:25.000How is it okay to study all of these behavior patterns in ants and monkeys and dogs and what have you, but you can't with human beings?
01:32:35.000Because if you do with human beings somehow or another...
01:32:38.000Anything that you find about generalized behavior patterns or specific sexual preferences that somehow or another marginalizes or in some way diminishes how another person is living their life to the point where it becomes violence.
01:32:55.000So there's actually a term for what you just asked.
01:32:58.000It's called the human reticence effect.
01:33:00.000And simply put, A lot of people are perfectly happy to use evolutionary arguments to explain the behavior of the salamander, the hyena, the mosquito, the dog.
01:33:12.000But if you use the exact same evolutionary principle to explain human phenomena, then suddenly it's no-go.
01:33:21.000Do you think it's because we're aspiring to something better?
01:33:23.000I think it's because people succumb to, wrongly so, to the idea of biological determinism.
01:33:29.000They think that if you call up in explaining a phenomenon a biological principle, that means you're doomed to your biology.
01:33:37.000It's a fatalistic thing, which of course is nonsense because there's no such thing as biological determinism because most of the things So,
01:33:54.000the idea of biological determinism is a false worry.
01:34:00.000Much of what we do, it's called the interactionist viewpoint, much of who we are is an interaction of our genes and our environments.
01:34:07.000But for most people, there is something vulgar about reducing the richness of the human condition to our biology.
01:34:55.000His claim to fame is he's got a very, and hats off to him, he's got an incredibly popular scientific blog called Faringula, which gets 100 million views or something.
01:35:10.000But he's the guy who is perfectly happy to use evolutionary principles to explain the mating behavior of the salamander.
01:35:19.000But if I come along as an evolutionary psychologist and use the exact same principle, the exact same logical structure to explain human behavior, well, what's this Gatsad doing with this bullshit evolutionary psychology stuff?
01:35:41.000But humans, they're not prone to biology.
01:35:45.000And I'll just give you two other examples.
01:35:47.000Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewington, who were very, very famous Harvard evolutionists, also despised evolutionary psychology, but for other reasons.
01:36:25.000So E.O. Wilson, the social ants guy, wrote a book called Sociobiology in 1975, where he explained how evolutionary theory could explain behavior across all sorts of animals.
01:36:49.000He couldn't go anywhere to give a talk without being shouted down.
01:36:52.000Not unlike how you're seeing Milo today being shouted down.
01:36:55.000Well, E.O. Wilson went through those culture wars 30 years ago because evolutionary psychology was attacking the pet political ideologies of his colleagues at Harvard.
01:37:06.000I don't know if Milo is a valid comparison.
01:37:07.000I think Jordan Peterson would probably be a better comparison.
01:37:10.000Because Milo is obviously a provocateur and he did it on purpose.
01:37:13.000But instead of pointing the finger at individuals, I would like to try to figure out, obviously we're not going to, but let's discuss it.
01:37:25.000Why do people resist these ideas of looking at the data of human interaction and genetics and sexual preference?
01:37:34.000Why do they resist Examining these factors like what is it about and what is it about people that like that guy that you're talking about that wants to point at you for examining these factors and call you horrific names and just for looking at Actual provable data data that you can mean you could show it you could do a minutes reviewed you can What's the motivation?
01:40:24.000Now that doesn't mean that if you're not symmetric...
01:40:38.000So to answer your question, there is something very non-hopeful about blackness.
01:40:45.000Buying the idea that we are biological beings.
01:40:48.000It's a lot more comforting to know we are infinitely malleable, infinitely socializable, because then any of us could be anything.
01:40:55.000Given the right conditions, I could be the next Lionel Messi.
01:40:59.000That's hopeful, and therefore I'd like to subscribe to that.
01:41:03.000I think there's absolutely something to what you're saying, but I think there is also this very strange and vague possibility that we are aspiring to a higher standard because we recognize that human beings are evolving and that we're moving into some strange place where we're no longer just creatures of the flesh.
01:41:22.000And that this need to put people on this even playing field is a part of this aspiration.
01:41:30.000I definitely think there's these influences and I definitely think there are these...
01:41:35.000There's a lot of people that look at beautiful people and they get upset.
01:41:40.000I mean, there's a way that they do it where they feel that they're justified in being prejudiced.
01:41:46.000Like, they can see a guy like The Rock, for example, who's a...
01:42:03.000He controls his mind far better than a lot of overweight people that would criticize him and call him a fool.
01:42:10.000But meanwhile, they let their body rot to this state of decay, which is not an intellectual thing to do.
01:42:16.000If you're looking at your body in a Like, as a finite resource, and how do you manage that resource?
01:42:21.000Well, very poorly if you're eating ringdings, drinking fucking soda, and smoking cigarettes, and then talking about The Rock being an idiot, right?
01:42:29.000I mean, these are obviously straw man examples.
01:42:34.000What we're doing with what's going on in Canada and this liberal social justice warrior approach to everybody being equal and if they're not, let's try to make them equal and if there's anybody that's superior,
01:42:49.000let's try to push them down and bring the brown people up and I wonder if we're trying to achieve some sort of equilibrium, some sort of balance, some sort of Some sort of state where we're no longer just monkeys.
01:43:03.000We're no longer just creatures of, you know, I want to fuck her because she's got big tits.
01:43:34.000You must suppress those, because we're eventually moving past the flesh.
01:43:38.000And you are of the new generation, the new generation that will someday be neutered, and there will be some non-binary expression of your humanity that, you know, exists as an avatar in some virtual reality world that you'll be forced to subscribe to when you join Yale.
01:43:54.000But by the way, when you talk about the male gaze, I'm not sure if we've discussed this on this show before, but it's precisely this type of thinking that causes the Western feminists to view the burqa as liberating and the bikini as liberating.
01:44:52.000So when I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome, I don't just use it as a metaphor.
01:44:57.000It's genuinely the case that people's minds are becoming infected with such garbage that they're incapable to rationalize, to think with reason.
01:45:06.000And that's what I end up doing most of the time.
01:45:08.000That's what Jordan Peterson ends up doing most of the time, which is we are committed to truth, unencumbered by political correctness.
01:45:15.000Earlier you were saying, what would be some, you know, how can we get ourselves out of You know, succumbing to this tribalism and so on.
01:45:22.000I think the only way you could do it, and I'm not saying that anybody can reach that level, is to simply be dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
01:45:30.000When I was on Sam Harris' show, you know, earlier this year, about six, seven months ago, he asked me, is there any research question that you would not tackle in your scientific career that is too taboo?
01:45:47.000As long as you address the question honestly and objectively, there is nothing that should be off limits, right?
01:45:55.000Because then it becomes very easy to say, well, sex differences, we shouldn't study that because then it will marginalize one sex or the other.
01:46:01.000Race differences, we shouldn't study them for the same reason and so on.
01:46:18.000And I think one of the reasons that Jordan Peterson's message and my message has resonated now with a lot of people is because at least they see that we are ascribing to that ideal to the best of our abilities.
01:46:29.000What if that truth hurts your feelings?
01:46:40.000Well, this podcast has an effect on people.
01:46:43.000I think it's a bunch of different things going on all at once.
01:46:49.000And there's obviously some tribalism going on even amongst these Social justice warriors he's a virtue signaling people who are trying to Get as much credit much, you know social justice warrior street cred as they can like what?
01:47:07.000Happened with Brett Weinstein up in evergreen college and when I had him on I just read some recent thing where they're doubling down on their hate of him and you know me they They're accusing him of all of this by simply going on the Tucker Carlson show.
01:47:39.000I'm not critical of all their stuff, but it's very left-leaning, like openly regarded.
01:47:44.000They had a piece breaking down how preposterous these students are, and the faculty, and the president, and what they have done to Brett Weinstein, and criticized each step of it by showing a transcription of his conversation on the Tucker Carlson show,
01:48:04.000which lasted like five minutes, I think.
01:48:07.000And, you know, they called Tucker Carlson alt-right.
01:49:08.000Blaming other people for your lack of success is really easy and it's something that people do all the time but when you do that if you look at things in that way then you're diminishing the struggles that downtrodden people and minorities and the oppressed and all these different you know Small groups that have been somehow or another marginalized.
01:49:30.000You're diminishing their struggle, which is absolutely not the case.
01:49:33.000But there have been people that have emerged from those groups and done amazing things.
01:49:39.000But, oh, those are outliers, and you can't hold people up to the standards of those outliers.
01:49:44.000And, you know, the real problem is that the competition is stacked in the favor of these white men who experience white privilege.
01:49:51.000And what we really need to do is squash white men.
01:51:51.000The psychiatric syndrome wasn't my radar.
01:51:54.000And then as I started seeing all these social justice warriors Navigating the world through a game of Oppression Olympics, where the highest goal you could achieve is to be declared the winner of the Oppression Olympics game, right?
01:52:12.000It's, can I be anointed as the guy with the greatest?
01:52:16.000And I call this collective Munchhausen because it becomes a form of Munchhausen, but at the collective level, right?
01:52:23.000Let me give you another example as relating to Donald Trump.
01:52:26.000When Donald Trump won the election, just on my Facebook page, private personal Facebook page, I would see people outdoing each other almost as if it were satirical in terms of their collective munchausen.
01:52:40.000I am a brown woman who's attending this university.
01:52:44.000Now that Donald Trump has won, I'm afraid to go to classes.
01:52:49.000Just think about how outrageous that sounds.
01:52:54.000Do you genuinely believe that your ability to take classes in your bullshit college in Maine is going to be affected?
01:53:02.000You're going to experience personal safety because Donald Trump is setting up Roadblocks so that he could create internment camps for all women of color so that they get gang raped.
01:53:12.000What is the fear that you have that you're literally right?
01:53:51.000It's weird how prevalent it is, though, and how it's almost one of those things that you, as a professor, are not really allowed to discuss with the people that are exhibiting that behavior because then you're diminishing their fear.
01:54:14.000Because I always can pull out my victimology card, which usually outranks all of them because they're screaming while sitting at Wellesley paying $60,000 that they are marginalized.
01:54:28.000Whereas I say, I'm not sure if I could be sympathetic because let me tell you my personal history.
01:54:33.000Well, that's what you did with that guy in the meeting when he accused you of genocide.
01:54:41.000And so now, by the way, the only way I can improve my score, as I have jokingly said, is if I self-identify as a woman, hence I'm transgendered, Would you shave, though?
01:54:52.000If you self-identified as a woman, why do you have to assume the appearance of a woman?
01:54:56.000I mean, if really appearances don't matter.
01:56:08.000Now, by you restricting your preference to this old antiquated term of women, meaning that they have vaginas, you're actually engaging in a form of cis-sexism because there are women who have nine-inch penises who should also be privy to your attention.
01:56:32.000So by you saying, yes, I'm attracted to women, But only the women that are cisgendered that have female genitalia, that's a form of cis-sexism.
01:57:13.000And I think that's one of the reasons why Donald Trump got into office, is people were so upset with political correctness, they went with the exact opposite, which is buffoonery.
01:57:21.000Outrageous, braggadocious male buffoonery.
01:57:27.000I mean, he's a braggadocious buffoon in a lot of respects, especially the way he talks about his ratings and, you know, talks about himself in the third person, you know, like he was describing Kanye West, that Kanye loves Trump.
01:57:41.000I mean, could you imagine saying that about yourself, like describing yourself in the third person, but a famous person loving you?
01:57:49.000Well, you know, a lot of people who follow me think that, I joke that, That, you know, they think that I have these Trump posters in my room and, you know, he's my big hero, which of course he's not.
01:58:01.000And by the way, I'm Canadian, so I truly don't have a dog in this fight.
01:58:04.000The reason why they think that is because I offered, prior to the election...
01:58:09.000Being done, I offered some compelling reasons, psychological reasons, why people might vote for Donald Trump.
01:58:17.000So most famously, perhaps, in my chat with Sam Harris, I explained the psychological mechanisms that could lead to otherwise perfectly reasonable people to vote for Trump.
01:58:28.000Simply proposing these was complete I'm sure you're aware of what's going on with Scott Adams.
01:58:36.000I mean, Scott Adams has lost millions of dollars for simply stating that he believes that Donald Trump is a very persuasive person and correctly predicting that that power of persuasion would allow him to win the presidency.
01:59:04.000So just to kind of repeat what I had told Sam, so there are different decision rules that one can use when they're making a choice between competing alternatives.
01:59:13.000So, for example, if you're choosing between cars, each car is defined by many attributes, right?
01:59:17.000It's gas efficiency, it's the power of its engine, its price, and so on.
01:59:22.000And so there are different ways that I could apply a decision rule in choosing between car A and car B. So here's one rule.
01:59:28.000I could take all the attributes, put them together, multiply them by the importance rate of each attribute, and pick the best product.
01:59:35.000So using that decision rule, maybe Hillary Clinton would have won.
01:59:39.000Because maybe if you put all the attributes together, she ends up scoring higher than Donald Trump.
01:59:47.000The lexicographic rule basically says, I simply look at my most important What's the attribute that I care most when I'm making the choice within this category?
01:59:57.000And I simply choose the alternative that scores higher on that most important attribute.
02:00:02.000So for example, if it were cars, I only care about the power of the engine, so I choose car A because it has a stronger power engine, right?
02:00:10.000In the case of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, suppose that my lexicographic rule is, I care only about the position on immigration.
02:00:23.000Well, it's very reasonable for people to think that Donald Trump had a more conservative, tough view on immigration than Hillary Clinton.
02:00:31.000So if I use that decision rule, that psychological rule, I would choose Donald Trump.
02:00:37.000It wouldn't make me a guy who is sleeping with my sister and I'm a toothless guy in Arkansas and a hick.
02:00:43.000It simply means that I'm using a particular decision rule that causes me to choose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
02:00:49.000So again, all I did, not unlike what Scott Adams did in his own way, is offer the different psychological processes by which a very reasonable person can end up choosing Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton.
02:01:03.000And it's unbelievable the kind of flack I got.
02:01:06.000Well, it's crazy because it's your absolute area of expertise.
02:01:09.000I mean, it's what your education is in.
02:02:41.000I mean, if you ask me questions about certain things that are in my constant day-to-day existence, like maybe perhaps stand-up comedy or martial arts, I can give you a staggering amount of information off the top of my head.
02:02:53.000But there's a lot of stuff that we talk about in these podcasts.
02:02:58.000It's just people say, well, you should have prepared for it.
02:03:00.000Well, I didn't know we were going to talk about it.
02:03:02.000It's one of the things that makes the conversation so interesting.
02:03:05.000So in that sense, I'm giving myself a get-out-of-jail-free pass.
02:04:02.000One of the craziest ones is if someone gets unfairly or unjustly or inaccurately accused of rape, immediately that person's a rapist, and they did it.
02:04:16.000And it is incredibly difficult to exonerate yourself from that.
02:04:21.000And people that have been accused of rape, I mean, not people like Bill Cosby when he gets accused of it 50 fucking times or something crazy, but I've known people that were accused of rape and it was all a lie.
02:04:33.000And it was done by an ex and it was just someone who was a scorned lover and was angry and they wanted to cast the worst possible light on this person in order to give them some taste of the pain that they feel from rejection or from whatever reason.
02:04:51.000I mean, I don't know what the statistics are as far as false rape accusations versus actual rape versus people who are raped who don't talk about it.
02:05:00.000But either one does not invalidate the other.
02:05:03.000By saying that a lot of women actually have been raped, which neither you nor I would ever argue with, of course.
02:05:08.000And it's a horrible crime, and it's a terrible fucking thing to do to a person to take away their humanity in that way.
02:05:25.000I mean, we can quantify what's worse or what's better, you know, and I think we would all agree that it's probably worse to be physically raped than it is to be accused of rape when you didn't do it.
02:06:01.000I think false rape accusations, especially if you like really chase it down and try to get this person locked up, I mean there's so much wrong with that.
02:06:22.000But I mean, think of it this way, not to get too philosophical.
02:06:25.000Every day that a guy spends in prison as a falsely accused rapist, while you, the woman who falsely accused him, is sitting in your house, I mean, you are, quote, Committing the crime every day of his life, right?
02:06:40.000Every day that you don't step forward, you're punishing, right?
02:06:43.000I mean, again, not to diminish that one act of rape, but you are raping this guy, metaphorically, if not literally, because he probably is going to be raped in prison for having...
02:06:54.000That accusation on top of his head, right?
02:06:56.000Right, because that's a targeted person.
02:06:59.000So, in a sense, you're almost as diabolical as a true rapist because you are living with that false information and every day you're going to buy your tomatoes and groceries unencumbered by the fact that there is a guy sitting in prison who's probably passing some very ugly moments because you're unwilling to correct the wrong that you've done.
02:07:19.000So, I think it's a pretty diabolical person who does that.
02:07:24.000The problem is whenever you bring up this diabolical person, you automatically get lumped in with someone who is some sort of an enabler, some cisgendered, white male, privileged piece of shit who doesn't care about actual rape victims because you're more concerned with men who get falsely accused of rape.
02:08:30.000But it's one of those things where we'll allow that because we All agree that women have a harder go of it in this country in particular and other countries far more so, right?
02:08:42.000And we could go back to ideology for the reason for that, what we were talking about earlier.
02:08:46.000By the way, speaking of rape, I don't think we've mentioned this ever on this show.
02:08:50.000Two of my colleagues, one of whom I know well, the other one not so much, if at all, wrote a book around 2000 or 2002 offering an adaptive evolutionary explanation for rape.
02:09:08.000So actually, I'll tell you their names.
02:09:11.000So Randy Thornhill, who's a very, very serious scientist, and Craig Palmer, they wrote a book, I think it was in 2000. Now, they weren't, of course, justifying rape.
02:09:23.000They were saying, look, if you wish to understand rape, Then you better have a good scientific basis for why it happens.
02:09:31.000And therefore, they offered an adaptive argument.
02:09:34.000Which, by the way, that's one of the main things that people who hate evolutionary psychology commit as a fallacy.
02:09:39.000They think that when you explain a phenomenon, you are justifying it.
02:09:43.000So if you explain why men and women might cheat on one another in monogamous unions, or you're offering a scientific justification for cheating, of course you're not.
02:10:32.000So the book that got me into evolutionary psychology, I've mentioned this story before, maybe not on the show.
02:10:41.000It was my first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell.
02:10:45.000And the professor, this was an advanced social psychology course, and the professor assigned a book called Homicide.
02:10:50.000By two pioneers of evolutionary psychology, husband and wife team, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, where the book is about understanding patterns of criminality via an evolutionary lens.
02:11:02.000And one of the things in the book that had struck me as so powerful was looking at child abuse in a home and then Demonstrating that there's a very clear evolutionary reason why that happens.
02:11:39.000As a matter of fact, that one factor is a hundredfold greater than that.
02:11:44.000So in other words, typically when you say what's called an odds likelihood ratio, 1.2, so you have a 20% greater chance of getting cancer if you smoke.
02:11:55.000So just having 1.2 greater odds is considered a big number.
02:11:59.000Here I'm telling you a hundredfold greater.
02:12:02.000So it's something that's almost never seen in science.
02:13:10.000What happens to the females, the lionesses, When they kill them, they go into an estrus.
02:13:16.000So I mean, instead of playing Barry White music and the violin to get them in the mood, kill their children and they get in the mood, right?
02:13:47.000That means it's okay to do it because you're explaining it?
02:13:49.000So look how they conflate explaining a phenomenon with justifying the phenomenon.
02:13:55.000So I think rape, child abuse, and probably marital infidelity are the three evolutionary phenomena that when you explain using an evolutionary lens, people go completely wacko.
02:15:06.000And as soon as you think of people that are liberal and progressive, you think these are nonviolent folks that just want peace and happiness and love.
02:15:49.000I mean, he's just a really open-minded, progressive guy who, he doesn't, but he doesn't want racism against white people to exist any more than he wants it against black people.
02:15:58.000But by the way, I was, so he came on my show too.
02:16:53.000I mean, to think that, hey, man, we should all be the same, regardless if you have dreadlocks or a shaved head or if you're white or black.
02:17:02.000Like, sexual preference, we were talking about this before, like, if a man is only sexually attracted, if he says, I am sexually attractive, I prefer white women, you are a fucking racist.
02:17:14.000But if you say, I prefer black women, like, ooh, spicy.
02:19:45.000But imagine if it were the other way around, right?
02:19:47.000If she had written him a letter saying, hey, dear Tupac, I would have loved to continue this relationship, but given that you're a black guy, her career would be over.
02:25:36.000Alright, so we'll do this, and it won't be on YouTube, so the people listening right now on YouTube are not going to hear shit, but this is what we'll do.
02:26:32.000I mean, there's a lot of influences that they had from old blues songs that they added to some of their songs, which is more forgivable, almost akin to what they do today with rap music, with sampling.
02:29:18.000Is there a place that you would be invited for a very large sum of money that you would refuse because you disagree politically or ideologically with whatever that person who's inviting you stands for?
02:29:33.000But certainly they didn't think they were bought for some price.
02:29:37.000Well, it's a little bit different what they do because they would go over there and I guess they would know what their material would be.
02:29:45.000If they went over there to perform 99 Problems, Jay-Z's lyrics are out there.
02:29:52.000They say, hey, we would like you, we're going to give you six million bucks, we want you to sing 99 Problems and all these different songs.
02:30:00.000But if someone like me went over there and did comedy, who was it?
02:30:06.000One of the guests I had in the past, Hal Sparks, I think it was Hal Sparks, that went over to Dubai, and he did a bit, and he was told by one of the people in the audience that he was going to be arrested,
02:30:22.000because he referred to one of the royal family by the wrong name.
02:30:27.000He called him Sir instead of Your Highness.
02:30:33.000But then some other member of the royal family stepped in and stopped it because they said, no, he was respectful and he just didn't understand the tradition.
02:30:57.000Look, man, there's a real problem with Canada right now.
02:31:00.000I know you know what happened in Vancouver, where a comic was heckled by these lesbians, and he shit all over them, and then they sued him and won, because he had done something to violate their human rights, because they were heckling not just him, but people before him.
02:31:15.000They were disrupting a live performance.
02:31:18.000So do you think that this trend of famous comics refusing to perform at universities is only going to continue to increase?
02:31:29.000Or again, have we reached the maximum and now there's going to be blowback?
02:31:33.000Because I know Jerry Seinfeld doesn't do it.
02:32:01.000Not that there's anything wrong with being 18. Or whatever, 19. But I want someone who's got some living under their belt so they know what the fuck I'm talking about.
02:32:10.000I don't want to have to explain everything.
02:33:54.000That's why I don't even do corporate gigs I get a lot of offers to do these corporate gigs and they'll they'll pay you a lot of money because they'll be to tame the audience they won't know it's just like it's not a it's not a real comedy show It's like you guys are paid.
02:34:07.000It's like you're Gadsad paying 50 grand to have these guys sing in your backyard some weird ego thing right I saw my friend Dana White who was the He's the head of the UFC. He had a birthday party years back, and Stone Temple Pilots played before that dude died of an overdose.
02:34:38.000And when I even introduced them, when I introduced Stone Temple Pilots, people didn't even think that it was really going to be Stone Temple Pilots.
02:35:27.000Comparing your career as a stand-up comic or in fighting to the truth that comes in science, and you were comparing that to acting, which is very ephemeral and fuzzy, and you were saying basically, look, when you're a scientist, you have to present stuff,
02:35:42.000and it's either right or wrong, and people are going to judge you, and you analogized it to comedy.
02:36:20.000It's like when you consider art, what's really like fighting even, it's like...
02:36:26.000It's not necessarily even who's necessarily better.
02:36:31.000Sometimes it's like what happened in the moment.
02:36:34.000Sometimes dudes collide heads and it changes the course of a fight and it's not because of a skill.
02:36:40.000It's because in the moment something happened chaotic or someone got poked in the eye and they couldn't see well and then they got knocked out.
02:39:56.000In terms of actionable feedback, do you look for it from other professional comics because you trust their opinions more, or are you looking for the civilians in the audience to give you that feedback?
02:40:07.000Which one is more actionable from your perspective as you're trying to improve your craft?
02:40:11.000It's very problematic to play for the comedians, because comedians like weird shit.
02:40:17.000Like, we might like something completely obscure that we don't see coming, you know, but an audience might not be laughing, and you might hear one comic in the back of the room going, BAH! That's fucking ridiculous!
02:40:28.000And the audience doesn't think it's funny.
02:40:31.000And then there's a trap that the comedians will fall into where they start playing for their peers specifically.
02:40:40.000I don't want to call anybody out, but there's people that have ruined their career because they essentially became the comical place at the back of the room.
02:40:47.000And the audience didn't think they were funny.
02:40:50.000And essentially they're making fun of people who try to be funny.
02:40:54.000And instead, exonerating themselves from any real pressure to be funny.
02:40:59.000Because, hey, I'm here to make the comics laugh.
02:41:11.000He's got the full package where there's a lot of comics that bomb in front of the audience, but you'll have like 20 guys in the back of the room that think it's cool to chuckle at obscure references and very bizarre words that get used in some sort of strange way.
02:41:26.000Dennis Miller would be sort of like that, right?
02:41:27.000Because just to follow his references takes you like a flowchart of 20 pages long, right?
02:41:33.000I talked to Norm Macdonald about him once.
02:43:15.000You know, it's a weird thing to be somehow or another to feel diminished by information or a lack of information.
02:43:20.000But it's so funny that you say this because...
02:43:22.000In my classes, students will oftentimes ask me a question that has me stumped, and I will usually answer, you know what, I actually don't know the answer to that.
02:43:31.000Could you send me an email so I could look it up?
02:43:59.000I mean, you've accumulated a massive amount of knowledge from seeking this knowledge and studying very hard.
02:44:06.000So it's something that you should be proud of.
02:44:08.000But it's not something that you look at, like, when you're proud of it, you're not diminishing other people that don't have that information.
02:44:14.000You're saying, like, this is what I know to be true, and this is a fact.
02:44:18.000But that's a beautiful thing that you could also say, I don't know about something that you don't know.
02:44:23.000That will give the people that are listening, that will give them so much more of a sense of respect for you than horse shitting around and pretending.
02:44:32.000That's such a weird thing that people do.
02:44:34.000And by the way, in the media, oftentimes they want you to weigh in on things as a scientist which you don't feel that your area of expertise would allow you to.
02:44:44.000And they get frustrated because then they feel as though you're equivocating.
02:44:48.000Look, I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to make that statement with that level of certainty.
02:44:52.000But they want it because that's what the headline has to say.
02:44:55.000And then they get frustrated that you're tippy-toeing.
02:44:58.000But I'm just being humble about what is true and what I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough to say is true.
02:45:04.000Yeah, I've had people get upset at me about talking about upcoming martial arts fights because I don't give predictions.
02:45:12.000I very, very, very rarely give predictions unless there's some gross mismatch that really shouldn't be happening in the first place.
02:45:19.000Because you really have no idea what's going to happen.
02:45:21.000There's a high likelihood that something might happen.
02:45:24.000If I look at the way one guy moves versus another guy moves and I go into my database of experiences of seeing a lot of live competition and knowing what one person is capable of, I can make I can make a statement with reasonable certainty,
02:45:43.000but I don't know if they were injured in training.
02:45:46.000I don't know if they come into the fight sick.
02:45:48.000I don't know if they're breaking up with their girlfriend.
02:45:50.000I don't know if they got staph infection two weeks before the fight and they're on antibiotics.
02:45:57.000I don't know if they might get headbutted, like we talked about earlier, or they might have an injury, like in the middle of the fight, like something goes wrong and their knee blows out.
02:46:14.000No, I'm not criticizing you, but I love when someone is so far removed, but they're still aware of something that's like a big cultural event.
02:48:17.000I was too young to appreciate the Muhammad Ali days, but I would imagine that when Muhammad Ali was challenging Sonny Liston, half of the fun was Muhammad Ali talking shit.
02:49:46.000To write a one-sided thing where you don't even know the guy.
02:49:50.000You don't really know them, like really know them.
02:49:53.000You've seen some videos, maybe you've read some things.
02:49:56.000And that you would muster such animus towards a person that you haven't met, right?
02:50:01.000I mean, I'm fortunate enough to not have too many of these haters and trolls, but there is one or two guys that have come to my attention that it seems as though they spend 90% of their day Doing trash stuff about me.
02:50:14.000And you think, what could it be that I could so trigger in them that they would construe it as a valuable use of their time to take on someone whom they've never even met, but somehow they're pissed at you and they think it's a worthwhile cause to trash talk you all day.
02:50:32.000Like, even if they have a valid point, there becomes some sort of weird symbiotic slash parasitic relationship with the person that you're criticizing.
02:50:40.000Like, you are inexorably connected to them.
02:50:50.000Like, that's the weird thing about thinking, right?
02:50:52.000Like, when you're on stage and you are giving a lecture...
02:50:56.000One of the more amazing things that happens when someone is on stage talking about something is you allow them to kind of think for you in the sense that when you are and it's one of the reasons why it's so important to be articulate and so important to be very aware of What you're going to say in advance,
02:51:13.000the point where it comes out smoothly and there's good entertainment value to it, is that it's pleasing to listen to.
02:51:21.000You're aware of how annoying certain speech patterns can be and you avoid those.
02:51:27.000You're aware of how compelling other speech patterns can be and you embrace those.
02:51:30.000And so it makes it pleasing for the person to listen to.
02:51:33.000So they can just sit back and listen to you talk about evolutionary psychology.
02:51:37.000Whereas when a person sucks at it, it's like grading, it's Painful it gets in your head.
02:51:44.000You're not allowing them to think about for you, right?
02:51:47.000There's there's that happens with comedy to like when someone's really good like you see like a great comic like a Louis CK or someone like that when he's on stage and he's he's really in the groove You're kind of allowing him to think for you, right?
02:52:00.000You're like letting him take the reins of your imagination and your mind and your visualization and But boy, it must be a tough job because I always think, what if you just had a fight with your wife?
02:53:32.000And tell everybody how to get a hold of your podcast, get a hold of your YouTube videos, rather.
02:53:36.000Right, so if you want to follow me on Twitter, at GAD, G-A-D, S-A-A-D. If you want to follow me on my YouTube channel, just enter GADSAD or the SAD S-A-A-D truth.