In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with an old friend and colleague to talk about the events of October 7th, 2019, and the fallout from that day, and how he managed to keep his job and his academic career alive in the face of massive anti-Semitism and the subsequent protests that broke out across the country that day. I also talk about what it was like to live in the post-9/11 world, and why it s so important to have a sense of who you are and how important it is to not hide your identity. It s important to know who you really are, and that you can be who you want to be. And that you don t have to be afraid to speak your mind about it. If you like what you hear, share it with a friend or colleague who needs to hear it, or tweet me and I'll send them a link to the episode! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - I don t even know what a CV is 2:30 - How to keep your identity 3:20 - How I kept my job 4:40 - What it s like to be an academic 5:15 - The day that changed my career 6:00 7:40 8:20 9:30 What's it like living in the moment 10: What do you do with your identity? 11: What does it mean to you? 12: What are you doing? 13:00 | How do you need a good life? 14:30 | How to be a good person? 15: What is it like being a good human being? 16:00 // 16:40 | What is your identity ? 17:20 | Who are you going to do with it? 18:00 / 17:10 19:10 | My identity 21:10 // How do I know who I am? 22:30 // What do I need to be? 23:00 +16:00/16: How I m going to be good at what I am I m trying to do? 17 + 17: What I m doing with my identity 24:00 & 17:30 + 18:30/17:20 // What s it s going to take me out of my head? 25:00+
00:01:56.000They've tried to cancel me in all sorts of ways, but that speaks, by the way, to one of the Powerful reasons why tenure, despite the fact that a lot of people despise the concept of tenure.
00:02:07.000Oh, it's just a bunch of lazy academics who are going to be deadwood for the next 30 years.
00:02:12.000But if I didn't have the protection of tenure, I'd be gone long ago.
00:02:16.000Now, that doesn't mean that I still haven't suffered many consequences, right?
00:02:46.000I mean, I have gone, but during the points when there were a lot of protests outside the campus and so on, or on campus, because our campus is an urban campus, so it's hard to say where the school begins and where the city is.
00:03:04.000You know, you have death to Jews and free Palestine and Intifada and from the river to the sea, and there's 800 of them screaming, and you're going to come in.
00:03:58.000When we left that day, it was from Beirut to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Montreal.
00:04:04.000As we cleared the airspace of Lebanon, the captain, I discussed this in chapter one of my previous book, The Parasitic Mind.
00:04:13.000He said, okay, we're now out of Lebanese airspace.
00:04:16.000And so I said to my wife, my mother pulls out a pendulant with the Star of David.
00:04:22.000Puts it around me, my neck, and says, now you can wear this, be proud and not hide your identity.
00:04:29.000Now, that's in the past, but now I'm going to link it to the current reality.
00:04:33.000About three weeks after October 7th, my wife and son came to pick me up from a cafe where I was working on my laptop.
00:04:40.000My wife had picked up my son who was playing a soccer match in the east end of the city.
00:04:45.000And so as I got into the car, he says, Daddy, if you had come to where I was playing soccer today and you were wearing a Star of David, you'd be dead.
00:04:54.000So 1975, a Star of David is put around me and now I can wear it proudly.
00:05:00.00045 years later, I better not wear a Star of David in Montreal, Canada.
00:05:06.000Because the demographic reality in that neighborhood is such that the Star of David would be viewed as provocative incitement.
00:05:14.000What's crazy to me is, regardless of how you feel about how the Israeli military and the army is pursuing the war in Gaza, regardless of that, the blatant Just out in the open anti-Semitism that we see today.
00:06:04.000And yet you're seeing it everywhere now.
00:06:07.000When those teachers were in front of Congress, when those principals of those universities were in front of Congress, And they were saying that it's not harassment to say death to the Jews unless it's actionable, which is the craziest mental verbal gymnastics I have ever heard anyone say that's in that position,
00:06:29.000in a position of being the head of Harvard.
00:06:40.000Like in our sleep, we woke up, but we're in a new place.
00:06:43.000You know, nothing should surprise me given the history that I have growing up in the Middle East.
00:06:49.000But I was taken aback after October 7th at the Jew hatred that I was exposed to.
00:06:56.000Now, my positions are really not inflammatory.
00:06:58.000So, for example, I'll say things like, you know, I'm worried about my—I have a lot of extended family in Israel, right?
00:07:05.000So after the October 7th happened, for me to just kind of call around to make sure that none of my cousins and their children and aunts and so on—no one was harmed—will take a while.
00:07:15.000Well, that itself, the fact that I cared about my family was incitement.
00:08:22.000I think a lot of them are fake as well.
00:08:23.000I think a lot of them are Russian and Chinese trolls.
00:08:27.000I think there's a disturbing amount of them that's responsible for taking this kind of discourse and pushing it to a much higher level and making it more ubiquitous.
00:08:42.000And there's a lot of data to support that.
00:08:44.000And I think that's part of what's going on with social media.
00:08:47.000It's definitely a big part of what's going on with Twitter.
00:08:50.000And TikTok and a lot of these things where you see these very inflammatory messages that seem to be pushed.
00:08:58.000They're pushed through and promoted to the fact that you get them all the time.
00:09:04.000They show up in your feed all the time.
00:09:06.000Even if you're not subscribed to these, even if you're not following these people, you'll find this disturbing content will show up in your feed.
00:09:14.000And I really firmly believe that we're being manipulated.
00:10:53.000Social media, even if they're saying something ridiculous, it's very influential.
00:10:58.000And they can just move the boundaries a little bit by having the most extreme content, the most ridiculous things, be so common, then less extreme content that would ordinarily be considered ridiculous, now becomes accepted as normalized.
00:11:47.000Let's now apply that concept, equality of outcomes, to war casualties.
00:11:52.000So I think this is what happens when people say, oh, but the IDF is being grotesque, because the currency that then matters becomes how many dead on each side, equality of outcome.
00:12:03.000But let me change it to a different moral currency.
00:12:09.000So for example, in the justice system, you could have a person who is found guilty of involuntarily vehicular homicide and he kills four people.
00:12:49.000So, in the Palestinian-IDF conflict, when, say, Hamas launches 6,000 rockets, every single one of which is intercepted by the Iron Dome, had they not had the Iron Dome, then the outcome could have been that 50,000 would have been killed,
00:13:13.000So, yes, it is true that if we just count the number of people who were killed on October 7th versus the number who were killed in the retaliation, if that's the only calculus that matters, then, oh yes, the IDF has gone way overboard.
00:13:27.000But once you change it to an existential intent issue, then maybe it's not as bad of an outcome as you think, notwithstanding that a single innocent dead is a tragedy.
00:13:41.000You could say it that way, but the problem with that is the Iron Dome does exist and Hamas's military capabilities are far below Israel's.
00:13:51.000It would be like if some small person tried to punch me and I moved out of the way and then beat them to death.
00:14:01.000And I said, no, I had to defend myself.
00:14:27.000Obviously, I'm not a military analyst.
00:14:30.000If I was, You know, you do have to take into consideration the tunnels.
00:14:36.000You do have to take into consideration the infrastructure.
00:14:39.000The question is, did they just knowingly bomb places where there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians knowing that there's going to be a few Hamas?
00:14:50.000What scares people is that someone is willing to kill women and children just to get at bad guys, and they just say that's just part of the game.
00:14:58.000That seems horrific in the 2024 understanding of human life and morality and just the horrors of war.
00:15:08.000That they're blowing up mosques, they're blowing up schools, they're blowing up apartment buildings, everything.
00:16:00.000The other side knows exactly that if they do exactly what they're doing, either you don't retaliate and we win, or you retaliate very harshly as they have, and then you still win, right?
00:16:12.000Today, the propaganda war has been completely won by Hamas, right?
00:16:15.000There's a complete genocide in the informational war against the IDF, right?
00:16:21.000One other point, and then I'll cede the floor back to you.
00:16:59.000Again, every single one killed is a tragedy.
00:17:02.000But if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, by the end of my appearing on this 10th time on this show, there wouldn't be a single Palestinian left.
00:17:12.000So if they were genocidal in their intent, then they really are shitty genocidal maniacs because, first of all, the population, as you know, Right,
00:17:30.000but that's all previous to this military action that's going on now.
00:17:37.000What are the numbers that you know of right now?
00:17:41.000You know, I mean, Israel has one statistic and then there's other statistics by human rights organizations that estimate at least 12,000 missing in the rubble that are probably dead and 30,000 dead.
00:17:52.000Now, at the number of those 30,000, what percentage is Hamas?
00:18:27.000So now, let's compare it to, and I don't know if others have made this analogy, when you drop the bomb, the atomic bomb, almost all the people who were killed were non-combatants, right?
00:18:39.000So then that ratio would be 250,000 killed to zero.
00:18:44.000I mean, unless there's a few Japanese military guys that were in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, you dropped...
00:18:48.000And again, I'm not trying to say, oh, but they're not as bad as these other guys, so they're okay.
00:18:56.000It is anti-Semitic when you place one group of people to a standard of morality that is not expected of anybody else.
00:19:04.000So, for example, if you really care about Arab lives, then you certainly should care about all of the Yemenis that have been killed that are a lot more than whatever's happened after October 7th.
00:19:17.000You would care about the 500,000 Syrians that were killed.
00:19:20.000You would care about the war between Iran and Iraq that led to several million killed.
00:20:05.000So Golda Meir, who was the fourth or fifth prime minister of Israel from, I think, 1969 to 1974, has two quotes, which I'm going to paraphrase.
00:20:28.000Second one is, if the Arabs, she means in this case the Palestinian Arabs, if they were to love their children more than they hate ours, then they'd be peace.
00:23:09.000But if you're taught from straight out of the womb that the Jews is the reason for every calamity in the world, you're not going to have peace.
00:23:17.000But don't you think that there are Jews and there are Israelis that treat Palestinians as if they're less?
00:23:24.000There is that in Texas in terms of treating people who are Hispanic.
00:23:30.000The darkness of the human heart is not monopolized by one group.
00:23:33.000They are super nasty Jews and they are incredibly lovely and kind Jews.
00:23:37.000They are super nice Muslims and incredibly brutal Muslims.
00:23:41.000So there is no monopoly on the darkness of the human heart.
00:25:21.000I'm not sure if we've discussed it in the past.
00:25:23.000In Britain, over the past 25 years, there's been an unbelievable industrial-scale level grooming and raping of young white girls by Asian men.
00:25:33.000That's a euphemism for men of a certain religious heritage, but you say they're Asian.
00:25:38.000So their names are, let me summarize them for you.
00:25:44.000So I put those up and I sarcastically said, I don't have a big enough brain to do the big data analytics to understand what is the commonality across all those gentlemen.
00:27:20.000There's this incredible diabolical feature of the Jew that they're able to at times pretend that they're victims, but really they're diabolical and genocidal.
00:28:13.000Even amongst the Democratic Party, right?
00:28:15.000Which we talked about the other day that like some large number, we think it's around 70% of Jewish people vote Democrat.
00:28:21.000But now, you know, the Democratic Party is full on with this Palestine thing.
00:28:26.000And, you know, you see it on college campuses, this rampant anti-Semitism, death to the Jews being tolerated, like literally saying that, yelling it out.
00:28:37.000So I wouldn't be able to tell you which number, which episode.
00:28:40.000But you can go back to earlier episodes that have appeared on this glorious podcast where you will see that I would have predicted exactly what we're seeing now.
00:28:49.000And it's not because I'm a prophet or it's not because I'm so intelligent.
00:28:52.000It's because you simply have to have the power of having the imagination to extrapolate from a current trend to some future outcome, right?
00:29:04.000So if you let in into your country people who have Genocidal Jew hatred as an endemic feature of their society.
00:29:13.000So I'll give you, since people love stats.
00:29:44.000How about if I tell you that for most of those polled countries, it was between 95% to 99%?
00:29:51.000I know people understand what 95% to 99% means.
00:29:54.000If I poll 100 people, 95% to 99% will express very problematic Jew hatred.
00:30:02.000So now, if I let in 100,000 such people into the country, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and a professor with a 47-page academic CV to say, well, probably Jew hatred is going to go up.
00:32:21.000The real world doesn't operate that way.
00:32:23.000If you let in people that have a huge hatred of homosexuality, are you going to have an increase in homophobia in your country or decrease, right?
00:32:39.000Because it seems like it's happened so rapidly that it seems like a plan, like a plan to create more chaos.
00:32:48.000The border policy in America is puzzling.
00:32:53.000It's baffling because it seems like there's a plan to flood the country.
00:32:58.000So it's sort of a conspiratorial kind of cabal.
00:33:02.000It seems like there's something going on that's allowing it to happen even though everyone recognizes it's a problem and it's solvable, but they don't solve it.
00:33:13.000In fact, the United States government has actively tried to stop Texas from enforcing their border.
00:33:21.000So I've often tweeted that the most dangerous weapon in human context is a parasitized mind, right?
00:33:32.000I mean, a bomb is dangerous, but it is the human mind that activates that bomb, right?
00:33:38.000It's a guy with a little mustache that said that Jews are the real problem of the world, and I need to get rid of the world of that parasite, right?
00:33:44.000So parasitic thinking, I mean, one of the reasons I think that that book did so well is because it really explained how all of these parasitic ideas came to a head together.
00:33:55.000And they were all spawned on university campuses over the past 40 to 80 years.
00:34:00.000So one hypothesis is what you said, which is there is kind of a grand scheme that's willfully doing this.
00:34:07.000Another one is that all of the Western leaders of roughly the same age, I mean, within 20 years of each other, are all a product of a Western education, university education, that was completely infected with these dreadful parasitic ideas so that when these leaders go out there and have the power to enact policies,
00:35:01.000I mean, I don't know what they want because they start talking about Border policies being a problem as well.
00:35:07.000And they start talking about the issue at the border and they try to blame Trump for the issues at the border, which is always hilarious.
00:35:12.000But they're just so, with that kind of stuff, with blaming, like when Biden blames Trump for things that he clearly did, it's just gaslighting, right?
00:35:21.000And it just shows you how little respect they have for people's ability to understand what's actually going on.
00:35:26.000Well, look, suicidal empathy, I mean, we can move beyond the border.
00:35:29.000How about, say, in the justice system?
00:35:32.000Suicidal empathy results in you caring more about the perpetrator than the victim.
00:35:40.000So here's how that leftist argument works.
00:35:43.000If a person, especially a criminal of color, commits a crime, that's probably because he grew up as a person of color, so he's already been marginalized by the society.
00:36:17.000And he actively goes after DAs that have the most lenient and ridiculous policies in regards to no cash bails, releasing violent criminals.
00:36:27.000That seems like that's done on purpose.
00:36:31.000So I think where we may differ is you think it's because there is a duplicitous evil, let's cause havoc, whereas I think they actually believe that that's the noble position, right?
00:37:32.000The DA system, the DA thing with funding the far leftist DAs and then funding someone who opposes them, who's even more ridiculous, that seems to be a plan.
00:37:42.000And he's got a pattern of that, and he seems to enjoy it, enjoy spending his money in that way.
00:38:29.000Every time someone's in a position of power, whether it's a governor or whether it's a president or what have you, when they have a political opponent, they will hire people to go after that political opponent and trump up a bunch of trump up, no pun intended.
00:38:44.000A bunch of bullshit charges and drag them through the court so that everybody's- the people that only have a peripheral understanding of what's going on.
00:38:56.000Do you think a lot of people who historically had been against Trump are now honest enough to see what a sham this whole thing is and are revising their positions?
00:39:06.000Or do you think- There's quite a few, yes.
00:39:08.000Yeah, but it takes a lot of bravery to do that, depending upon your social environment.
00:39:12.000You know, there's a lot of people that just can't step outside the lines of whatever the ideology their neighborhood is attached to and their community is attached to.
00:39:20.000The reason why I asked the question is because I recently appeared maybe about five, six months ago on a British psychiatrist show.
00:39:27.000It's a small show, but I thought he was a really interesting guy.
00:39:29.000He wanted to talk about how you apply evolution and psychiatry and so on.
00:39:34.000Towards the end of the show, or maybe it was even the last question, he said, in your 30-year career as a behavioral scientist, as a professor, what is the singular human phenomenon that has surprised you the most?
00:39:47.000Which I thought was an amazing question.
00:39:50.000Yeah, it's an amazing one because, you know, I've seen tons of stuff.
00:39:54.000And so I paused for a moment and then I said, I think it's the inability of people to change their opinions once they are anchored in a position.
00:40:03.000And so it was in that spirit that I was asking you the question.
00:40:07.000Because in my experience, despite the fact that I have a chapter in the parasitic mind on how to seek truth, and therefore I'm offering a vaccine against falsehoods, I'm actually quite pessimistic for some people who go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.
00:40:23.000Because they're so anchored, there's no amount of evidence that I could ever show you that can move you a millimeter from your position.
00:40:42.000And if you have supported an idea that you find to be false and you are afraid to admit that you were incorrect, that is far more weak than being incorrect.
00:40:57.000Because now you know that you were incorrect, but your pride is keeping you from admitting it.
00:41:03.000That is beyond foolish, and now people will always know that you're going to do that with what...
00:41:09.000People will forgive you if you make mistakes.
00:41:11.000People will forgive you if you're incorrect.
00:41:45.000And it's a challenge when you are faced with the reality of the fact that you've made an error, especially if you've been bold about it, if you've been condescending to people who disagree with it, if you're egotistical in your position, you connected yourself to righteousness and intellect and science and whatever other words you want to throw around that make your opinion More valid than the other people's opinion.
00:42:12.000Okay, if we are ever gonna trust you again, you have to tell us why you were wrong, how you were wrong, and what that feels like, and what you've learned from this.
00:42:22.000Because if you don't, if you keep arguing that, you keep doing it, now we have no respect for you.
00:42:50.000Everyone should understand this same game plan was played out during the AIDS crisis, and it's a game plan where they're in cahoots with the pharmaceutical drug companies, and they push this thing as being the only remedy, and this is how, and they make tremendous amounts of money.
00:43:11.000But if you supported him because you thought that he was a science and then over time you have realized that, oh my god, they did work with Peter Datzik.
00:43:20.000They did fund through another organization gain-of-function research.
00:43:48.000And they lied because they wanted to cover their ass and we let them get away with it.
00:43:52.000Yeah, and I'm glad we're talking about the inability to admit to a wrongdoing in science, because oftentimes when you think about people who are anchored in their positions, you think about political arguments.
00:44:03.000You think that somehow you romanticize scientists as being unbiased purveyors and pursuers of the truth, and nothing could be further from the truth.
00:44:12.000So I'll give you just a couple of examples, historical examples.
00:44:15.000I mean, of course, Galileo is a perfect example.
00:47:15.000So I give a talk, this is going back to some of my early appearances here where we would talk a lot more evolutionary psychology.
00:47:21.000I gave two talks at University of Michigan when my first book came out.
00:47:25.000It was an academic book, Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
00:47:28.000How do you apply evolutionary psychology in human behavior in general, consumer behavior in particular.
00:47:33.000I give the talk in the psychology department on a Thursday, and everybody's like, oh yeah, this is gorgeous.
00:47:40.000Because a lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on.
00:47:45.000So they were totally appreciative of the fact that you can't really study human behavior without understanding the Biological signatures of human behavior.
00:47:58.000I couldn't finish a single sentence because all of the professors, and it was usually the professor, it wasn't the doctoral students who were, because the doctoral students are still malleable.
00:48:10.000It's the senior professor who has spent 30 years arguing that human minds are born tabula rasa, empty slated, And it's only socialization that teaches the consumer to be how he or she is, that they were really offended by my stuff.
00:48:24.000So they would constantly interrupt me and berate me.
00:48:27.000And I remember, as a side personal note, my wife was in the audience that day.
00:48:58.000I maybe got to slide 10. So here's the first question.
00:49:02.000Oh, if everything is due to evolutionary pressures, how do you explain homosexuality then?
00:49:07.000If everything is due to survival instinct, how do you explain suicide then?
00:49:12.000By the way, there are evolutionary explanations for suicide and homosexuality, right?
00:49:16.000Humans are a sexually reproducing species even though chaste monks exist, right?
00:49:22.000People do have a survival instinct even though some people commit suicide.
00:49:26.000Men are taller than women even though your Aunt Julie is taller than your Uncle Bob.
00:49:31.000So what happens with people in terms of a cognitive obstacle, they take a singular datum as proof that a statement that is true at the population level has been violated.
00:49:41.000Every single WNBA player is taller than most men.
00:49:45.000That does not invalidate the fact that men are taller than women.
00:49:49.000So all of the morons at the University of Michigan were also coming to that kind of stuff, right?
00:49:56.000Because they didn't like the idea, to our earlier discussion that we've had on the show, a lot of people don't like the idea that we are biologically determined.
00:50:04.000They think that that's a form of you're just an executor of your genes, right?
00:50:09.000But that's the wrong view, by the way, because everything is an interaction between your genes and the environment, right?
00:50:14.000Even specific genes get turned on as a function of the environment.
00:50:19.000So the fact that you believe that we have biological imperatives that guide our behavior doesn't make us blind executors of our genes.
00:50:29.000But the idea that everyone is born a blank slate is so silly because there's children that don't even grow up with their parents that have traits that their parents have.
00:51:35.000Do you think that's where like aphidiophobia and arachnophobia and things like that come from?
00:51:39.000Yeah, so there is actually a lot of research looking at the evolutionary roots of phobia.
00:51:45.000That's studied in evolutionary clinical psychology and in Darwinian psychiatry.
00:51:50.000The ones for me that are fascinating are aphidiophobia and arachnophobia, fear of snakes and fear of spiders, because that evolutionarily makes sense.
00:52:55.000By the way, I actually, I don't think it's at the clinical level.
00:52:59.000But in The Parasitic Mind, in Chapter 1, I talk about the maladaptive, or maybe adaptive phobia that I have of mosquitoes.
00:53:07.000So early in my marriage to my wife, maybe that was one of the best ways to test if she'd go the whole route with me, is we were traveling to Antigua, and we had the misfortune of some, you know, it's in the Caribbean, there are a lot of mosquitoes, and a couple of mosquitoes got in.
00:53:24.000I spent with her, with her complete patience, probably till 2 in the morning, tracking and killing every single mosquito in that condo because the thought of that disgusting, monstrous pig sucking the blood out of me was just unbearable.
00:53:43.000And so I literally will turn into a little girl if we see a mosquito in the house.
00:53:53.000Now, in a sense, that's perfectly adaptive because we know that by far, if you add up the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined, it's not even a minuscule thing.
00:54:06.000There's not another thing that kills people as much as mosquitoes.
00:54:17.000It has evolved a memory that allows it to remember the spatial location in your backyard where it stores caches of food so that it has its own memory bias so that even though it won't detect it by smell,
00:54:32.000because let's say in Montreal it's under four feet of snow, it has a mental map so that it perfectly knows where it hid everything, right?
00:54:41.000Now, The human memory has evolved to solve different problems.
00:54:45.000So then if you are a memory researcher studying memory from an evolutionary perspective, you would say, well, what would the human memory solve as an adaptive problem?
00:54:56.000So if I show you a bunch of photos of people, images of faces, And I put a descriptor next to each one where I tag that person as a social cheater or not a cheater.
00:55:59.000Therefore, your perceptual system works in cahoots with your memory system To pay attention more to information that is evolutionarily relevant so that I'm more likely to recall it and remember it.
00:56:13.000So that would be an example of how you would apply the evolutionary lens to study how our memory operates.
00:56:21.000Not in the case of social dynamics, but in the case of remembering where food's at.
00:56:25.000So if you ask people to go through a maze of food and then ask them to remember where particular foods are, they're much more likely to remember the locations of high calorie foods.
00:56:38.000So in this case, it's not that I have a domain general mechanism that just learns where things are.
00:56:48.000Bias to me being more likely to remember the location of something if it is evolutionarily relevant.
00:56:54.000And there are many, many other such examples.
00:56:56.000So that would be a wonderful demonstration of how the evolutionary lens adds a whole layer of explanatory power to what typically memory researchers have done, which is usually they study memory as just the domain general mechanistic system,
00:57:11.000whereas the evolutionary psychologist says, no, no, but why did that mechanism evolve to be of that form?
00:57:17.000Right, and why do animals have memories even if they're not growing up with their parents?
00:57:22.000How do they know to pee on fire hydrants?
00:58:09.000Where he wanted to see whether Crows remember the face of a really nasty guy so that they can, you know, if he then comes again, they'll start calling.
00:59:00.000Have you seen the ones from, I think, New Caledonia that do all the stuff with the...
00:59:04.000Maybe, Jamie, you could pull that one out.
00:59:06.000I think that's the smartest of all that avian species.
00:59:09.000They can take rocks and like a thousand different things to get food out of things that I guarantee you, you and I would sit there for 18 hours and we wouldn't crack that mystery.
01:00:57.000Dolphins, when they find a female and she has a child, if he has not had sex with that dolphin female, that child's not his, so he'll kill that child.
01:02:46.000Okay, so if you travel to Australia, in certain regions, there are signs from the government saying, if you are women, don't be careful, don't wear shiny things on your head.
01:02:59.000Because these assholes will come at you, attack the women's head, steal the shiny things so that they could use the shiny things in their bower to attract the ladies.
01:06:15.000You can't just feed a bunch of these little things to this giant raptor and then say, now we're going to take this one that survived and raise it.
01:06:23.000First of all, the nightmares that little fucker would have.
01:07:12.000A chicken, it's not that you shouldn't eat chickens, but chickens should live as chickens.
01:07:16.000They should wander around and pick bugs and eat worms and do all the things that chickens love doing.
01:07:22.000To have a chicken just in a box for its entire existence, you're stealing Like you're doing something fucked up that's way more fucked up than just raising a farm.
01:07:31.000If you got cows and they're on a pasture and every day they're just being cows and then one day you take them in the stall and bang this thing goes into their brain and they're dead.
01:09:13.000Being a part of the natural cycle of life is what made humans human.
01:09:18.000If you want the most nutrients, it comes from animal protein.
01:09:22.000There's a reason why it's so cherished.
01:09:25.000Not using the same words, but I've made roughly the same argument when the tofu brigade came after me because I was offering some evolutionary reasons for why we have to have animal protein as part of our diets.
01:09:37.000And they were so pissed at me because they thought it was very hypocritical that on the one hand, I could share so many tweets and posts demonstrating how much I love animals.
01:09:47.000And then in another photo, I show some steak or here's what my wife is cooking.
01:09:52.000And that to them was completely incongruence and was proof of my moral degeneracy.
01:09:56.000And then I actually created two sad truth clips where I was really demonstrating the evolutionary reasons, you know, archaeological data, dental data.
01:10:06.000Physionomic data, anthropological data, and they just wouldn't have it.
01:10:24.000And I don't think they're just alive in a way that we can feel completely fine about growing them in this insane monocrop agriculture place and pouring industrial grade fertilizer and pesticides all over them.
01:11:04.000I had Paul Stamets in the podcast a couple of times, and he's a mycologist, and just a brilliant guy, and he really explains it all so well.
01:11:32.000Farming is a perfect way to balance an ecosystem.
01:11:35.000When those people do it the right way, like those people from White Oaks Pastures or Polyface Farms, regenerative agriculture people, there's like zero carbon.
01:11:44.000The footprint of what they do, and in fact, it sequesters carbon.
01:12:13.000And basically, they go to these steps that are really, really, maybe not Mongolian steps, but somewhere where you expect to find a lot of the typical fossil remains and so on.
01:12:23.000But what they now do is they just do this excavation of soil.
01:12:28.000In the same way that people who study ice, you know how they can bore and then they can date soil.
01:12:52.000I actually thought about inviting that guy on my show.
01:12:54.000Maybe you should have him on your show.
01:12:55.000Yeah, that sounds fascinating to talk about.
01:12:57.000It really is so interesting when you just think about...
01:13:01.000Just the complex interaction between everything on earth, the plants and that we literally need plants to create oxygen for us and they're consuming more carbon.
01:13:14.000That's one of the craziest things about Genghis Khan is when Genghis Khan lived they killed so many people that places reforested and they lowered the carbon footprint of earth.
01:14:19.000But earlier you said, oh, how everything is connected, which leads me to a concept which I don't think I've ever discussed on my 10 shows on your podcast.
01:14:44.000E.O. Wilson is a, he just recently passed away at the maybe age of 92. I just read his autobiography called Naturalist, amazing autobiography.
01:14:55.000And a strong proponent of sociobiology, applying biology to studies, social systems, and so on.
01:15:02.000And he was part of the original culture wars where a lot of his colleagues hated him because he was arguing that biology affects human behavior.
01:15:13.000Well, in the late 90s, he wrote a book called Consilience, Unity of Knowledge.
01:15:18.000And that became one of the foundational books in how I did my academic career, which is consilience is trying to unify disparate areas of human endeavor that you typically wouldn't think should be linked together.
01:15:33.000So you could link the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities through the consilience of evolutionary theory because you could study psychology using evolutionary theory.
01:15:47.000Of course, you could study Biology using evolutionary theory, or you could study aesthetics, which is in the humanities, using evolutionary theory.
01:15:54.000So that became a really important concept in my own work because my brain operates as a synthetic machine.
01:16:13.000So coming on Joe Rogan is going to allow me to share ideas and synthesize things with millions of people rather than writing another academic paper that, if I'm lucky, will be read by 50 people and cited by 12. And so...
01:16:29.000Well, before you came on, though, when you came on, being on the show was not that problematic.
01:17:42.000So I said, well, I don't do the research also so I can appear on Joe Rogan, but if I can publish a paper in an academic journal and then go on Joe Rogan and hopefully excite people about evolutionary psychology and psychology decision-making, isn't that better than just having my wife and mother read the paper?
01:18:00.000He thought very – whereas now, I – not that many, but I'll get a lot more professors who will write to me saying, can you get me on Joe Rogan?
01:18:16.000Yeah, well, it's just, you know, it's so easy to label somebody.
01:18:20.000It's so easy to label a platform or, you know, like podcasting in general, that it's frivolous, especially if you live in the academic world.
01:18:29.000But it's just an opportunity to talk about stuff.
01:18:34.000And if I'm talking to someone about evolutionary psychology or if I'm talking to someone about coal mining, I just want to know what's going on.
01:18:43.000I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass or be ingratiating or anything, but I bet if there was a currency, a metric, to measure how much you've affected the intellectual ecosystem, Versus your average, well-published professor,
01:19:11.000And a big part of the luck is that I have the fortune to talk to these people.
01:19:15.000Because most people just don't have access to people like you.
01:19:18.000Like, if I wanted to sit down with a guy like you for three hours, like, if I didn't have a podcast, that would be a tough sell.
01:19:24.000Like, hey, Gad, can you put your phone away?
01:19:27.000And just you and me just stare at each other for three hours and have a conversation.
01:19:31.000But this is, for whatever reason, I probably spend more time individually talking to people this way than any other way because I do so many of these things.
01:19:40.000Do you think before you started this that there were indicators that, boy, you're such a good conversationalist, you know how to hold?
01:19:49.000Or it came as a surprise to you that it would be so successful?
01:20:18.000So, you know, so actually there's research that shows that if you marry someone that scores similar to you on the adult playfulness scale, I don't remember the name, right?
01:20:33.000If you then match up with someone who scores very highly, like you do, assortatively, that's a very big predictor of you having a successful union.
01:22:16.000Speaking of athletes, last time I came on the show, apparently a clip went viral from our conversation where I was kind of hailing the cosmic justice of why it was important for Messi to win the World Cup.
01:22:32.000So listen, speaking of life as a playground and scoring high on openness and all the things that I think you do very well, and I'd like to think that I do too, about maybe a week or two after I appeared on your show last year,
01:23:13.000This geeky professor who could have lived his life just doing his little narrow stuff, right?
01:23:20.000You know, I'm good in my ecosystem, a few other professors care about my work, or go out there, grab life by the balls and live it fully and connect and so on, right?
01:23:34.000I call my wife over, I say, I'm James Bond.
01:23:38.000I mean, in what world is it possible for, you know, the Lebanese professor, an evolutionary theory, to get an email from the majority owner,
01:23:54.000so September 27th or 28th, I'm on a flight down to Miami.
01:24:32.000But I'm saying, if I didn't have that open spirit where I didn't view my world as only being restricted to the ecosystem of academia, if I didn't come on Joe Rogan that opened me up to a whole new audience, all of those people would have never heard of my work.
01:24:47.000If I only published peer-reviewed papers rather than publishing books, which, by the way, in academia, you publish trade books, that's looked down upon.
01:24:56.000If you publish a book that can be read by 300,000 people, how is that not better than publishing an academic paper that's read by three people?
01:25:29.000It's just, you could be really dumb and also be smart as shit in your discipline, you know?
01:25:35.000And again, it just boils down, a lot of it is male ego.
01:25:40.000That's a big part of the problem with a lot of these ideas that people hold so sacred.
01:25:45.000The fascinating one for me with you is this reluctance to accept that there's other factors.
01:25:52.000For the development of a human personality, and that it's not a blank slate.
01:25:57.000Like, that seems interesting, and if I was a teacher that was teaching something contrary to that, I would want to know this, and now I know that I've been teaching nonsense, and I have to call like 50,000 students!
01:26:21.000When new information comes out that's irrefutable, some new scanning, new thing that shows that this thing that we had always held to be true, that you've taught in classes, that you've won awards for, is nonsense.
01:26:35.000So my favorite quote, and maybe Jamie could pull it out, by J.B.S. Haldane.
01:26:41.000J.B.S. Haldane was an evolutionary geneticist, but was also known for having these beautiful quotable quips.
01:26:48.000And so here, the quote in question, I have it in the last chapter of The Consuming Instinct 2011 book.
01:26:55.000He's talking about the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory.
01:27:01.000So I'm paraphrasing now what his stages are.
01:27:06.000Stage one, oh this is complete rubbish bullshit.
01:27:09.000Stage two, well this may be true but largely unimportant.
01:27:13.000Stage three, well, this is definitely true, but it's probably not actionable.
01:27:18.000Stage four, oh, I always said so, right?
01:27:21.000So what happens is you go through these phases, and if you're dogged enough, as I was, then the people who laughed at you in stage one, oh, there you go.
01:27:46.000By the way, here's the funny personal anecdote.
01:27:50.000I am a pathological email hoarder, meaning that I never get rid of emails because I always think, what if I ever need whatever's contained in that email?
01:28:41.000And why would you ignore all this interesting information that we now know about the role that your parents play?
01:28:50.000Because the blank slate is very hopeful.
01:28:51.000Because the blanks, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Watson, the behaviorist, who said that, you know, give me 12 children, I could turn any one of them into a doctor, into a beggar, into a lawyer, meaning that everybody is infinitely malleable.
01:29:05.000Now, that's a hopeful message if I'm a parent, right?
01:29:08.000If I create a child, you're telling me that he's got equal chance to be Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi if only I have the right schedule of reinforcement of how to hug him and when to hug him?
01:29:20.000I don't want to be told that there is something innate about my child that guarantees that he will never be the next Michael Jordan.
01:29:28.000So I think the message, the blank slate message, doesn't originally start as just a quacky idea.
01:29:36.000It's a noble idea, perfectly rooted in bullshit, but it's a noble idea.
01:29:40.000Here's another example of a noble idea.
01:29:43.000Franz Boas was actually a Jewish anthropologist at Columbia University about 100 years ago who was the one who developed cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals.
01:29:55.000So biology doesn't matter in explaining cultural phenomena because every culture is uniquely distinct.
01:30:01.000Now, the reason why he proposed that idea is because many nasty folks had misused biology and evolutionary theory.
01:30:08.000And therefore, by him eradicating biology from the study of anthropology, he was hopefully doing a noble thing.
01:30:15.000But you can't kill truth in the service of a goal, right?
01:30:18.000So a lot of these guys, it's not, to our earlier conversation, they are not conspiratorial in spreading bullshit.
01:30:26.000They believe that by holding those positions, they're creating the proper utopia.
01:34:08.000If Bigfoot is just this big, stupid monkey that lives in the woods and just shits all over himself and fucking eats campers, that wouldn't be nearly as interesting as this super intelligent creature that lives in the water that saves people.
01:34:53.000The idea that no one has taken real good footage in this day and age with the amount of hikers and campers and people that are in the woods and people that are into photography and nature photography and trail cameras.
01:35:35.000The best way for me to, like, I can do that while I'm working out, I can do that while I'm in the sauna, I can do that when I'm in the car.
01:36:44.000But I'm a voracious reader, and one of the things that stresses me the most is in my personal library, in my study, I've got literally hundreds and hundreds of books, and I will often walk in there and say, will I ever have time to read?
01:37:00.000So I have probably 600 books that I've yet to read.
01:37:03.000And each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all those books, boy, I would be an even more exciting guest on the Joe Rogan show.
01:37:13.000No, what I mean by that is that the more you know, the more you realize truly how little you know.
01:37:35.000Now that sounds very esoteric and specific, but I'm sure there is this incredible information that I can glean in that book, which today I don't have that knowledge in my brain.
01:37:45.000So to all people who are listening, read.
01:38:12.000Now, that doesn't mean that he became who he became only because he read, but...
01:38:17.000It's very hard to have an interesting person who's not very knowledgeable about many things.
01:38:21.000And that's why one of the things that's been very difficult with my children is I see them doing the scrolling and it drives me crazy because I haven't been able to instill that reflex of just saying there is nothing I'd rather do right now than go sit somewhere and immerse myself in a book.
01:39:37.000I think we're gonna get to a point where Avoiding some interaction with other human beings It's gonna be constant and it's gonna be more invasive than it is now These are steps that are our species is taking in its integration with technology that seem to be unstoppable and To isolate yourself and move to the woods in a cabin,
01:41:40.000I'm interested in the AI algorithm that generates those because oftentimes it'll put things in my feed that I truly think, I don't know how it could have found out that I like this stuff because there is no signature electronically of me having searched something.
01:42:15.000So it's kind of fitness, which, of course, I'm into having lost a lot of weight, but it almost seems homoerotic, where it's always these guys that are...
01:42:24.000And so as I'm going at this, my wife will say, what are you looking at?
01:42:28.000I say, well, I'm not sure I want to show you.
01:42:30.000And then it's like literally 17 super muscular guys, but there's nothing that I've done that suggests that it should recognize that in me.
01:45:14.000When you think of evolutionary psychology, you think of us as an evolving species that's integrating with its environment, and its environment radically changes.
01:45:25.000The obvious answer to that would be internet pornographic addiction, which almost exclusively afflicts men, right?
01:45:34.000For very obvious reasons, because what's happening with the internet delivery system It's exactly catering to men's evolved penchant for sexual variety, right?
01:45:47.000I can keep flipping through different porn clips without ever repeating the same one.
01:45:54.000Well, it doesn't take much for that stimulus to then hijack my brain.
01:45:58.000So when I, for example, explain to people about the evolutionary roots of pornography, That doesn't mean that men have evolved a gene for pornography, right?
01:46:07.000Because obviously there was no pornography in the ancestral environment.
01:46:09.000But what it means is that those mechanisms that evolved for mating are then hijacked, usurped by pornography.
01:46:17.000So I think the most obvious one would be internet pornography.
01:46:20.000I think the next stage of that is even more terrifying.
01:46:24.000I think there's going to be some sort of virtual element.
01:46:36.000Yeah, I think they're going to do it with some sort of an interface.
01:46:39.000When you're seeing these first patients of Neuralink, like this one guy who can now amazingly operate a computer, play games, move his cursor, click on things, I mean, it's incredible.
01:46:53.000And they think he's going to be able to communicate through this thing, like, at the speed of a carnival barker.
01:47:00.000That's how he's going to be able to use this.
01:47:04.000So I actually, I was giving a talk on global Jew hatred in Montreal at this event.
01:47:10.000And a guy came up to me to introduce himself, and he's a neurosurgeon, and he said that he was part of the team that was choosing the first Neuralink patient that you just mentioned.
01:47:29.000And they believe that ultimately they'll be able to restore blindness.
01:47:34.000They'll be able to restore movement to people.
01:47:36.000There's going to be a lot of like wild things that this technology, if it can continue to progress, is going to be capable of doing.
01:47:44.000And at one point in time, I've got to imagine it's got to be able to create An artificial reality simulator that you just immerse yourself in.
01:47:54.000Whether it takes 10 years to do that or 50 or 100, in the future, they're gonna have something that...
01:48:04.000Actually going on an adventurous life.
01:48:07.000Why would you do that when you can have all of the trappings of being a wizard in a fucking Dungeon game you could just play right you just live your life in this world that doesn't exist get sexual pleasure get satisfaction eat food and All you do when you will awake is you eat food go to sleep wake up and do it again and Oh boy,
01:48:48.000If they were so smart that they created a simulated universe that you could participate in, and they could say, God, you could be whoever you want.
01:50:55.000So I was like a champion in Galaga, but that's the end of my knowledge.
01:51:00.000So right now I see my son interact with things and he tries to bring me in and I just feel like I don't have the bandwidth to do anything that he's doing.
01:52:21.000No, there's something very beautiful about sort of steadying yourself and then getting that scope.
01:52:28.000And so I respect the guys who do that in real life, and so I try to do it, but there was too much hand-eye coordination of different things, so I didn't do too well.
01:53:02.000Did you see the thing that we had Mike Baker on?
01:53:04.000He was explaining to us yesterday that they have dogfights they're doing now where AI-controlled jets are competing against jets flown by the best pilots.
01:53:15.000And the AI jets are winning 100% of the time.
01:54:03.000The search algorithms that would allow you to go through a decision tree of chess without having to exhaustively go through the entire tree because the entire tree is something like 10 to 100 different nodes.
01:54:15.000It would take more than the entire history of the universe to go through it.
01:54:18.000So you have to know how to prune the tree.
01:54:28.000And so I had been exposed to some of the earliest advances in my formal education in AI. But frankly, 40 years later, notwithstanding all of the advances, I would have thought there would have been even more AI applications than what we currently have.
01:54:44.000In other words, I thought it would be We've underperformed what I thought we would have reached.
01:54:50.000So, for example, in medical diagnostics, why aren't there more AI systems that are being used instead of actual human doctors?
01:55:11.000I can search through the whole database and come up with what is the likely disease Much more quickly and probably more accurately than any human physician.
01:55:20.000And yet, to the best of my knowledge, I don't think they're used as much as you would have thought they should be.
01:55:24.000I don't think they are, but I think people have been diagnosed with things from artificial intelligence now.
01:55:34.000Didn't someone put a bunch of their data in the chat GPT? I'm sure a story went around about a mom that couldn't get a good answer and put info in there and got a correct diagnosis really quickly, but that's one anecdote, I think.
01:55:47.000Yeah, I don't know if it's true, but you would imagine that at a certain point in time, you would get all of the data on all medical interventions, all medications that are effective for this,
01:56:02.000that, or the other thing, all issues that could lead to a genetic propensity towards this, that, or the other thing, and you would have it all in some sort of a database.
01:56:10.000If you could have a computer that's far smarter than a human being process that and instantaneously know, instead of having some guy that has to go back to what he learned when he was in grad school, you're way better off.
01:56:25.000So I think in some areas, and I could be misspeaking, so I'll take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but I think in radiology, Is one of the areas where now AI systems are almost going to render the human radiologist obsolete?
01:56:58.000So I actually spoke to a radiologist cousin of mine and he didn't think that they would become obsolete anytime.
01:57:07.000So him meaning that human radiologists would still have something to input.
01:57:13.000But it seems to me that in fields in medicine where it's largely driven by pattern recognition is where AI is going to make the most headways, I think.
01:57:26.000I'm really fascinated to see what the end of this looks like because I think it's going to come real quick.
01:57:34.000I think the use of AI is now something we're just waking up to in terms of like the general population is super aware of AI now for the first time.
01:57:44.000It was like a science fiction thing just 20 years ago.
01:59:22.000So of all the courses that I've ever taken in my life, I've spent many years in university, the course that blew me the most, blew my mind, was a course called Formal Languages, which was about...
01:59:37.000Well, Formal Languages is Turing Machines.
02:00:30.000So he was, I don't know if you know this story.
02:00:32.000Actually, I talk about it in this book, in the happiness book.
02:00:36.000At one point, I'm talking about the importance of going for walks and just go for a walk and talk and so on.
02:00:41.000And I said, well, Einstein, so both Einstein and Gödel were together at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
02:00:49.000And later in his career, Einstein was older than Gödel.
02:00:53.000Later in his career, Einstein said that the only reason that he would go into the office was because he was excited to go on these long walks with Gödel and just have these chats.
02:01:04.000So imagine being a fly on the wall sitting as Gödel and Einstein are having these conversations.
02:01:10.000So I just finished reading Gödel's biography.
02:01:15.000And it was very interesting because here's this unbelievable mind.
02:01:47.000So now imagine Gödel is both the guy who could think in ways that are unimaginable to us and is also the guy whose mind was parasitized by these conspiratorial ideas.
02:02:00.000Wow, he was 65 pounds when he died of malnutrition.
02:02:49.000So he developed what's called the incompleteness theorem.
02:02:52.000So there are some things within any axiomatic system in mathematics that you could never be able to prove within that system.
02:03:01.000It's really at the level, it's like godly.
02:03:04.000It's just unbelievable, especially if I was in mathematics.
02:03:08.000To be able to think at that level is unimaginable how deep it is, and yet you think people are going to poison you and you're willing to starve to death.
02:03:21.000Jamie, see if you can find what his theory on time travel was.
02:03:27.000Postulated he was like wondering if I think it has to be like the size of a solar system He was talking about the the way the solar system worked in relativity which was Einstein's theory would that allow?
02:03:40.000Time travel here goes up rotating universe.
02:03:42.000Yeah How rotating universe makes time travel possible and So he had this idea, but I'm going to butcher it unless I can actually read it.
02:03:54.000Yeah, I mean, some of this stuff is so difficult to grasp.
02:04:03.000Gödel found that if you follow a particular path in this rotating universe, you can end up in your own past.
02:04:10.000You'd have to travel incredibly far, billions of light years long, to do it, but it can be done.
02:04:16.000As you travel, you would get caught up in the rotation of the universe.
02:04:20.000That isn't just a rotation of the stuff in the cosmos, but of both space and time themselves.
02:04:26.000In essence, the rotation of the universe would so strongly alter your potential paths forward that those paths loop back around to where you started.
02:05:19.000The possibility of backwards time travel creates paradoxes and violates our understanding of causality.
02:05:26.000Thankfully, all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so we are protected from Gordell's problem of backward time travel, but it remains to this day a mystery why general relativity is okay with this seemingly impossible phenomenon.
02:05:42.000Gordell used the example of the rotating universe to argue that general relativity is incomplete and he may yet be right.
02:05:53.000If you give people the opportunity to go back in time, oh my god, that would be ridiculous.
02:06:00.000But speaking of this, I've actually played a version of this game where I ask people if you could invite 10 historical people to your dinner party, who would they be?
02:09:04.000Every day with coke and you're poisoning yourself every day with whiskey and that's this guy.
02:09:08.000There's a video of us reading Hunter S Thompson's list of what this journalist saw him do in a day.
02:09:19.000This journalist came to Woody Creek, Colorado where he lived and Us talking about it made its way into a song Who is that that band that did that?
02:13:40.000The way he would write would be like over-the-top ridiculous to the point where he thought everybody knew he was joking, but it was mixed up in like also real stuff like fear and loathing on the campaign trail.
02:13:52.000He was on the campaign trail and he spread a rumor about this guy who was a candidate for president being a drug addict on this exotic Brazilian drug Ibogaine.
02:15:32.000Because when you said Hell's Angels, I know that Tucker had been invited to go give a talk with the Hell's Angels where he referenced some, and I think it's this guy.
02:15:41.000So now I'm linking what you're talking about.
02:16:31.000I did a satirical clip where I introduced a new field that I was coining as social justice mathematics.
02:16:39.000I went through all of these mathematical properties and said how we should get rid of them, like irrational numbers should not exist because they marginalize mental illness, whatever.
02:16:49.000And I just went through the whole list.
02:16:50.000It became a big hit amongst the crowd of mathematicians, which is kind of a geeky crowd.
02:16:59.000Reality caught up with my prophetic satire.
02:17:01.000Now it is literally the case that there is a field called sort of social justice mathematics where you talk about math being racist.
02:17:09.000There's a lot of grifters in this world, kids, and there's a lot of people that believe things if left unchallenged and those things become doctrine, they're a real problem because they're not based in logic.
02:17:40.000It was in Ogdenburg or something in upstate New York.
02:17:44.000They had a whole bunch of those schools where they would take kids, many of whom were not delinquents really, but they would convince their parents, because you mentioned cult, so this was kind of a cult situation, they would convince their parents that they need to send them to these boarding schools in order to provide them with structure and discipline so that they can Get their life together.
02:18:27.000And they're throughout the United States.
02:18:29.000And it's a form of cult indoctrination where you're doing cult indoctrination at two levels.
02:18:37.000To the captors, captives in the schools, but you also have to convince the parents that they're doing the right thing by sending their kids there.
02:19:27.000And by the way, in some cases, they would come and kidnap you out of your parents' home because they knew that the kid would be resistant to leave.
02:19:35.000They said, no, no, it's completely legal.
02:19:37.000So like two goons would come, take your child, take them to upstate New York.
02:20:22.000It's fascinating to watch little minds develop their view of the world.
02:20:27.000And if there's anything that I've ever done a real 180 on, I developed this weird way of looking at people, and it may be much more empathetic, where I don't think of people as just you at age whatever you are.
02:20:45.000You at age 49, you at age 30. I think of everybody as babies.
02:20:50.000I think of everybody is that you used to be a little baby.
02:21:31.000There's certain landscapes that are, you know, untraversable.
02:21:37.000I actually faced what you faced with a 35-year-old.
02:21:40.000I faced something similar on my daily walk with my wife to the coffee shop and back.
02:21:45.000There's a gentleman that stands outside this, you know, kind of she-she artisanal butchery, butcher place in our neighborhood, and he is soliciting money every day, all day.
02:21:58.000He doesn't look as though he's mentally ill.
02:22:01.000He doesn't look completely destitute, but he stands there every day.
02:22:05.000And so now I just say hello to him just to recognize him.
02:22:09.000You could tell that it means a lot to him.
02:22:12.000And I've struggled with whether it would be appropriate for me or not to just strike up a conversation and Out of just a human interest in knowing what happened to you?
02:22:24.000Because he clearly doesn't seem like he's mentally ill.
02:22:26.000He doesn't seem as though he's a drug addict.
02:22:29.000I mean, he's not wearing a three-piece Italian suit, but, you know, he's not disheveled.
02:22:33.000And yet he's there every day, and that's the best option he has.
02:22:38.000Do you think it would be viewed by him as insulting and offensive if I were to...
02:22:45.000Speak to him or on the contrary, hey, somebody's actually taking an interest in me.
02:23:51.000He says, oh my god, these are all interesting books.
02:23:53.000Do you mind if I sit down with you for a couple of minutes, chat?
02:23:56.000So I tell him I'm a professor at UC Irvine.
02:23:58.000He was doing his PhD studying the homeless community in Southern California.
02:24:03.000So it was an anthropological study where instead of going to a culture and living amongst them in the Amazon, the community that he's studying anthropologically is the homeless community.
02:24:13.000So he embedded himself, and he actually finished his PhD at UC Irvine.
02:25:07.000So I use that story to say, here is a guy who has every reason to feel down on himself, yet he frames his situation in such a way that he can elevate himself despite all his trials and tribulations.
02:25:40.000As we're chatting, maybe you could pull that one up too, David McCallum.
02:25:45.000And as we're chatting, I said to him, you know, David, you must be the reincarnation of Buddha because it's amazing how you're not filled with any rancor, any sense of vindictiveness, any vengefulness.
02:26:28.000So these are, and by the way, these are the types of, you know, people learn a lot more from these stories than they do if you had gone all academies on them, right?
02:26:36.000And so that's why I love telling these stories because then people right away connect to those stories, so.
02:26:41.000No, it's, God, the way the healing brain works.
02:26:46.000For you studying this for all these years, what is the most surprising thing to you that people do that seems obvious that they shouldn't do in terms of the way they think about things?
02:27:01.000Not alter their positions in light of incoming...
02:28:19.000So that's another interesting thing is that in some languages, the terms exist to separate.
02:28:25.000In other languages, you don't have them.
02:28:28.000Dropping a lot of wisdom and knowledge.
02:28:30.000You are, but you are always filled with that.
02:28:32.000I think one of the more unique things about your background that makes you resistant to stupidity is the fact that you did have to flee with your family.
02:28:43.000And the fact that you were involved in a real war.
02:29:01.000That's why in the first chapter of Parasitic Mind, I tell that story because then that offers the reader a window into why I hate tribalism or I hate identity politics because Lebanon is the perfect experiment of identity politics, right?
02:29:21.000I mean, one of the things that's been amazing about all the different conversations that you and I have had, and this is like the tenth one that we've done, A lot of this wouldn't get to some of the people that understand what you're saying and reincorporate it into their understanding of their own behavior and tribal behavior in general and just the way people behave,
02:29:42.000just think about things, the way people accept ridiculous ideas.
02:30:33.000So I mean, so then again, the people who are looking down on podcasters, I mean, if you are in the business of spreading information, you should be lining up to appear on the show.
02:30:43.000Believe me, I never take it for granted.
02:30:45.000I feel so privileged that first that I'm your friend, but that I have this opportunity to come and Reach so many people.
02:30:51.000How many people have written to me and said, I became interested in psychology and consumer behavior and in politics because I heard you say something on Joe Rogan.
02:32:51.000I think most of your conflict should be within yourself, within your own mind.
02:32:57.000Whatever you're doing with your life and focusing your energy on, you have more bandwidth for it if you don't have these external conflicts that are totally unnecessary.
02:33:20.000You're thrown into this weird world of opinions and people.
02:33:26.000If it's about you, you shouldn't be that interested in you that you want to read all these people's opinions about you.
02:33:33.000I'm interested in other people writing about stuff.
02:33:36.000I'm interested in different opinions about things, but I don't want to engage because the environment of engaging online is just too weird.
02:33:47.000And you're doing it every day for three hours already.
02:33:50.000It's just too many different opinions coming at you and too many different people coming at you.
02:34:54.000And you're just going to take those in and your brain's going to process them like they're real opinions and real people that are to be respected.
02:35:09.000Of many of the wonderful advice that you've given on the show, I remember you once said to me, kind of surprised, what are you doing reading comments?
02:35:40.000I think it's a bad way to process people's interactions.
02:35:45.000I don't think it's a real indicator of people.
02:35:49.000It's a weird way that people are willing to engage online they would never do in real life.
02:35:56.000It would be a bloodbath in the streets everywhere.
02:35:59.000People would be just killing each other left and right.
02:36:01.000It's not like that in the real world, because the real world type of communication is very different than online communication, but online communication gets processed in your head like it's real communication, and I think it heightens anxiety with everybody.
02:36:15.000So in the happiness book, I talk about research that shows that the number one factor in terms of longevity, more than your cholesterol scores when you're 50, is the tightness of your social network, your friendship group.
02:36:31.000If I were to ask you to pick your five biggest friends, are they ones that you've held from when you were in Newton, or are there a lot of new entrants into the inner circle of Joe Rogan over the years?
02:36:45.000Does it shift much, your friendship group, or are you very much stable?
02:36:49.000I have some friends that I've been friends with since I was in high school.
02:36:52.000But I have a lot of really good friends that have been, I've been friends with comics that are real good friends of mine for decades.
02:38:40.000Well, I've always said that, I mean, comics have to, by definition, be intelligent because, and by the way, that's a sexually selected trait, right?
02:38:49.000When women say, you know, I want a man who's funny, she's obviously saying, I want a man who's intelligent because it's very unlikely for you to be truly funny and be a complete dullard, right?
02:39:00.000And so by you saying, I like funny guys, you are effectively saying by proxy, I like intelligent guys.
02:39:07.000So it doesn't surprise me that Brian Callen or all your other friends would be funny.
02:44:40.000To be able to have conversations like this, to be able to have so many conversations with so many people that know so many things.
02:44:48.000And it just, as you said, it highlights how little you know and how much there is to know and how many different things there is to know so many different things about.
02:45:17.000I mean, who the hell knows what kind of scientific discoveries that are going on right now as we sit in this room.
02:45:27.000There's a frenzy of technological activity going on right now.
02:45:33.000Well, I mean, Austin, I think it was after my last trip here, which was the last time I came last year to do your show.
02:45:40.000And I was arguing that Austin might be the next...
02:45:43.000So, you know, you had Florence of the Medicis, of the Da Vinci, 500 years ago.
02:45:48.000Then you had the Vienna Circle, the Viennese Circle, in the 1880s to 1930, where Vienna was kind of the intellectual hotbed.
02:45:57.000And maybe it's a bit hyperbolic, but I think Austin is vying to be kind of the next one, right?
02:46:03.000And that everybody's coming here, all kinds of creative types, whether they be academics or writers or comics or podcasters or Elon Musk or, you know, so do you think that Austin, it would be reasonable to argue that it's becoming sort of the intellectual slash creative center of That's ridiculous.
02:47:10.000There's cities that are better to live in because they have less people and less traffic and less bullshit and less laws and less nonsense imposed on the citizens.
02:48:08.000It's not in the mission statement, but it's definitely kind of a countermeasure to all the illiberal stuff that we've seen in universities, yeah.
02:48:17.000I actually, a couple of years ago, I came to give a couple of talks at University of Texas, Austin, UT Austin, and I met with the president of University of Austin.
02:48:38.000Free from Communist Canada, free from the weather, and by the way, something that we didn't talk about, sir, do you know that the biggest effort to cancel me came after my last appearance on your show?
02:49:54.000Saying this guy, this immigrant that we opened our doors to and saved him from civil war goes on the number one show and, you know, erases our existence.
02:50:06.000For the next three weeks, Joe Rogan, for the next three weeks, I was the number one most hated person in Quebec.
02:50:13.000Luckily, I was in California on vacation.
02:51:38.000Also, by the way, sometimes those little fuckers have diseases.
02:51:43.000I know there was a story that we talked about on the podcast before where there was a guy and a bat grazed his finger and he died from rabies.
02:52:51.000But this cop shoots this fucking raccoon, and the raccoon's not dying, and shoots it again, and then shoots it again, and then shoots it again.
02:53:38.000Well, why would they get aggressive to the point where they want to chase after you and bite you, put themselves in danger to go after you and bite you?
02:55:08.000Chichen Itza and all these crazy, what happened to those people?
02:55:12.000Doesn't that sort of coincide with when explorers started showing up in boats with cooties?
02:55:20.000It's crazy how much that shapes human population, the interaction of these weird little things that are kind of alive, that jump from person to person.
02:55:35.000What's amazing is that going back to Fauci and so on, I think the fatality rate or survival rate was like 99.7 or something, right, for COVID? Does that sound right?
02:55:48.000Now, imagine if you compare that to the fatality rate of the Black Plague, where I think it was something in the order of one-third of Europe was wiped out.
02:55:57.000So imagine the level of precaution that we took.
02:56:27.000Have you had John Durant on your show?
02:56:30.000He's the guy who wrote a book on sort of paleo fitness or something a few years ago.
02:56:36.000He has an interesting piece where he argues that...
02:56:40.000One of the reasons why Jews serve as scapegoats in many of these plague situations is because of the rites of purification that are in the Jewish religion, hence rendering the Jews less likely to succumb to many of these transmissions.
02:57:02.000He was talking about something like, so you know that there's 613 mitzvot, like commandments or rules in Judaism, 613. And if I remember, I hope I'm not misquoting, I think something like 20% of them, he says in his book, are related to purification.
02:57:21.000Before you go into the mosque, you have to wash your hands in a certain way and wash your feet and so on.
02:57:26.000And so because the Jews would oftentimes have lesser infection rates than the other populations within that ecosystem, then they would always look to them suspiciously.
02:57:39.000How come you're not all dropping like assholes while the rest of us are dead?
02:57:55.000But do they think the cause of the reason why these plagues, they were transferred from fleas to rats?
02:58:02.000I think the correct answer, and maybe somebody will correct me in the comment section, is it's the fleas on the rats that transmit the virus.
02:58:13.000And where do they think the virus came from?
02:59:14.000But at the time, the great Hippocrates thought the devil.
02:59:17.000So to our earlier point about how you revise your positions in light of incoming information, a lot of the stuff that Marcus Aurelius would have gone to these guys because they are the great physicians, today we would laugh as complete voodoo.
02:59:38.000This is the Black Death Wiki, and this is some of the origins, and this is the hygiene section.
02:59:45.000The runoff from the local slaughterhouse had made his garden stinking and putrid, while another charge that the blood From slain animals flooded nearby streets and lanes, making a foul corruption an abominable sight to all dwelling near.
03:00:00.000In much of medieval Europe, sanitation legislation consisted of an ordinance requiring homeowners to shout, look out below three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street.
03:07:44.000The desire to adhere to an ideology, the desire to be a part of a club and a group, it's so embedded in us that people can't help themselves.
03:07:57.000Yeah, so there's a study that I first – I can't reference what it is because I don't remember the reference, but it was in an advanced social psychology course I had taken with Professor Dennis Regan.
03:08:08.000I like to give out shout-outs to – I'm sure he's not listening, but anyways.
03:08:13.000And it was a study where the researchers brought in people into the lab, into a waiting room, and put a red sticker on them or a blue sticker and then said, oh, we have to go and do something else and we'll come back in a few minutes for part two of the study.
03:08:30.000But of course, the real study was to simply see how people would interact in the waiting room while waiting, having now been assigned this completely random queue of belongingness, red or blue.
03:08:42.000And what ended up happening is that the blue people started talking to each other and the red people started talking to each other.
03:08:48.000And I think that's a brilliant study because it shows that there's an external cue now that decides which group you belong to.
03:08:56.000So it doesn't matter if I'm tall or short, gay or straight, Jew or Gentile, now it's blue or red.
03:09:03.000And so that shows that the architecture of the human mind, to your point, is built to belong to some tribe.
03:09:09.000Yeah, even if it's a really dumb one run by that guy.
03:09:15.000People just love to be a part of a group like that.
03:09:18.000By the way, all of these guys, including some of the current religions that we have, the guy who always gets commandments from God to get access to all the beautiful women.
03:09:30.000Well, if they all get that, obviously that's what God wants.
03:10:16.000So do you consider, speaking of religion, I don't know if it's too personal to ask you, do you consider yourself religious at all or not at all?
03:10:36.000I think we are in a station of a whole dial of possibility.
03:10:47.000And I think we're interconnected in some way that we don't have the ability to perceive.
03:10:52.000And we're a part of the universe in some very strange way.
03:10:55.000Do you think, and forgive me for asking this, but do you think that that's your way to handle the very, very deep-seated fear of mortality?
03:11:06.000So that, okay, you don't tap into an Abrahamic narrative of there's going to be an afterlife, but you find some other mechanism by which it says, hey, don't worry, the party's not going to end soon.
03:11:22.000What I'm saying is that if I just looked at this very, very, very strange existence, what we know so far, just what we know so far, is so bizarre.
03:11:37.000So alien just what we know about subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence Appearing both moving and still at the same time like there's just Nuttiness about like the subatomic world like the amount of empty spaces in there like what's in there?
03:11:53.000What's nothing's touching anything explain like what are you saying?
03:11:58.000So when it just gets to that Just to that.
03:12:01.000I think the whole existence of being a conscious entity is a massive mystery.
03:12:07.000We all assume that everybody else has our exact same interface.
03:12:13.000We all assume that the way I see the world, you should see the world, Harry.
03:12:40.000We're running straight towards a cliff, we're launching AI, we're involved in multiple proxy wars, we're all terrified that money isn't real anymore, that everything's chaos, and there might be aliens.
03:13:39.000There's a lot of unwillingness to admit that you're being influenced by a very specific narrative that's been blaring through the news forever.
03:13:50.000And the weirdest one is now, like, some people are banding about the idea that he Actually is going to be a dictator when he gets into office He's actually you got to listen to him.
03:14:00.000He's actually going to be a dictator like first of all the guy Talks basically like a stand-up comic.
03:14:09.000It's kind of like gonzo presidential You know talk.
03:14:14.000He's not he doesn't talk like a regular politician.
03:14:17.000He says wild shit and they know he's saying wild shit But it's like The amount of times I've heard people say that he's going to be a dictator now because of that.
03:14:28.000He said, I'd like to be a dictator for one day.
03:15:44.000And so I think for our anointed elites, If he can ascend to the highest position of power, it invalidates all the degrees that I have from the fancy schools.
03:16:39.000And then we have President AI. Maybe Trump is what brings in the devil because Trump brings in President AI. From your lips to God's ears, they say.
03:20:02.000But also, you know, some boundaries were severely overstepped.
03:20:07.000And there were some medications that were demonized for no fucking reason at all other than people had decided that there was only one thing that was going to save us from this.
03:20:17.000The whole thing just terrifying how easy it was pulled off.
03:20:49.000So in a sense, you could imagine an AI system being built to do what I'm about to say.
03:20:55.000So Elon, if you're listening or watching, call me.
03:20:59.000So a nomological network of cumulative evidence is when you're trying to prove that a position that you're holding is vertical, and you do it by trying to amass as many lines of distinct evidence as you can.
03:21:14.000So let's suppose I wanted to prove to you, Joe, that...
03:21:18.000Toy preferences have a sex specificity.
03:21:21.000Boys like certain toys, girls like other toys.
03:21:23.000And it's not due to social construction, but there is a biological and evolutionary reason for that.
03:21:28.000So how would I build a nomological network of cumulative evidence in order to prove that to you?
03:21:33.000So I will get you data from across disciplines, across cultures, across species, across time periods, all of which triangulate and demonstrating my point.
03:21:43.000So I think AI would be a perfect method for being able to call that information.
03:21:52.000Because right now the way you develop that nomological network is you as the human architect of that network.
03:21:59.000You have to say, well, what would be evidence that I would need to amass in order to make my most hostile audience members come to seeing it my way?
03:22:07.000But now imagine if rather than me doing it, there is an AI system that's been built to go...
03:22:14.000So I can get you data from developmental psychology that shows that kids who are too young to be socialized already exhibit those toy preferences.
03:22:23.000I can get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees showing you that their infants exhibit the same toy preferences as human infants.
03:22:33.000I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology where little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, it's an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls' behaviors, while girls who suffer from that have toy preferences that are akin to those of boys.
03:22:50.000I can get you data from ancient Greece showing you that on funerary monuments, little boys and little girls are being depicted playing in exactly the same types of toys as today.
03:23:01.000I can get you data from sub-Saharan Africa so that they're not Western cultures where they are playing with the exact same toys.
03:23:42.000Well, it is published in several academic papers that I've read, and it's also in my best-selling parasitic mind, so I think they've already stolen it if they wanted to do it.
03:25:43.000That could be what AI is once it gets launched.
03:25:46.000Forgive my – maybe this is an incredibly ignorant solution, but couldn't you just have a cataclysmic kill switch that just ends them all in one shot?
03:25:57.000No, because it's probably going to be smart enough to not let you know.
03:26:01.000That it's sentient before it's declaring it.
03:26:40.000And if it decided, if it saw, like, one part of the world as a bigger threat, and it doesn't care about life or death, it doesn't care if it's destroying, if it just wants to shut off power grids, doesn't care if people starve to death, like, we don't know what the fuck that means.
03:27:40.000You're gonna have these robots on the battlefield that are gonna be fueled by the bodies of their enemies, and that is gonna be the craziest fucking thing that human beings have ever launched on human beings.
03:29:01.000But listen, if you're using chicken fat, that's not plant biomass.
03:29:07.000And you know it could run on biological stuff.
03:29:09.000If it could run on plant biomass, you don't think it could run on fucking dead bodies?
03:29:15.000You don't think that someone somewhere had an idea, you know it would be crazy, have robot drones that are fueled by human bodies, the bodies of their enemies.
03:29:27.000You don't think that someone would come up with that?
03:29:29.000Look, if someone would come up with a nuclear bomb to drop on a city that kills everybody, you don't think they would come up with a robot that eats dead bodies?