The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #519 - Gad Saad

00:00:02.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:04.000 That sound in the back is not me going to the bathroom.

00:00:07.000 It's just pouring coffee, folks.

00:00:09.000 Don't get crazy.

00:00:10.000 This episode of the podcast is brought to you by a new sponsor.

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00:00:15.000 And Blue Apron, I just tried this out this week.

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00:00:30.000 I was a bit skeptical at first.

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00:00:41.000 All the meals are between 500 and 700 calories per serving.

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00:01:08.000 What's that stuff called?

00:01:08.000 Dry ice.

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00:01:11.000 But It sat inside my house for like 10 hours, and it was still nice and cold when I opened it up and put it in the refrigerator.

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00:05:01.000 Then that's it for now.

00:05:03.000 Let's just get cracking.

00:05:05.000 We've got a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, ladies and gentlemen.

00:05:08.000 We have a very special guest.

00:05:10.000 Cue the music, young Jamie, and I'll introduce him to the world.

00:05:24.000 We have...

00:05:25.000 Is it okay to call you the gadfather? 0.77

00:05:27.000 Please do.

00:05:29.000 The Gadfather is here, ladies and gentlemen, and this is in reference to a music video that you were a part of.

00:05:37.000 Gad, how do I say your last name?

00:05:39.000 Saad.

00:05:40.000 Just Saad.

00:05:40.000 That's fine.

00:05:41.000 Gad Saad.

00:05:41.000 It's two A's.

00:05:43.000 It gets tricky when it's two A's.

00:05:44.000 Because it's the guttural sound from Arabic. 1.00

00:05:46.000 Oh, how would you say it?

00:05:47.000 Saad.

00:05:48.000 Saad.

00:05:49.000 But since most Westerners couldn't pronounce that, you just do a double A. Oh, that's got to be annoying.

00:05:55.000 That's weird.

00:05:56.000 We gentrify everything.

00:05:57.000 We smoosh everything down.

00:06:00.000 You are an expert in evolutionary psychology.

00:06:06.000 This is where it gets really fascinating.

00:06:08.000 Evolutionary psychology and its effect on consumerism.

00:06:12.000 Right.

00:06:13.000 So I basically apply...

00:06:15.000 Evolutionary psychology to understand our consumatory nature.

00:06:18.000 What are the biological forces that compel us to be the consumers that we are?

00:06:22.000 But I define consumption very broadly.

00:06:24.000 It's not just consuming Coca-Cola, but we consume friendships, we consume religion, we consume marriages.

00:06:30.000 So it's a consumption with a capital C. That's fascinating to me because, you know, we have these general definitions that we use in culture.

00:06:41.000 One of them is consumerism.

00:06:43.000 Consumerism almost always pertains to buying things.

00:06:46.000 But what you're looking at it in is, I like that better.

00:06:50.000 Because it is kind of what we do.

00:06:51.000 We do consume relationships, don't we?

00:06:53.000 Exactly.

00:06:54.000 I mean, we consume cultural products, right?

00:06:56.000 So, you know, why is it that certain songs are so appealing to us?

00:06:59.000 I mean, what is it about song lyrics that trigger an emotional pull in us?

00:07:06.000 Why are movies appealing?

00:07:08.000 You study these cultural products because they say something really about the evolution of the human mind.

00:07:13.000 Do you study songs that are annoying as well?

00:07:16.000 Because I've always wondered why some songs are super appealing to some, but then just infuriating to other people.

00:07:22.000 Yeah, so that would probably be more a musicologist who would study the musical structure of songs to know what makes them appealing or not.

00:07:29.000 I'm specifically looking at the lyrics.

00:07:32.000 So, for example, if you look at hip-hop videos, they're a wonderful Darwinian laboratory because all the political correctness is cut out.

00:07:40.000 And basically your real Darwinian being shines through, right?

00:07:43.000 So men are going to signal, hey, I've got the Maserati, I've got the Porsche, get with me.

00:07:49.000 Women are going to signal, you know, beauty markers. 1.00

00:07:51.000 It's only women, for example, who denigrate men if they have low social status, right?

00:07:55.000 It's never going to be a guy saying, hey, Linda, you...

00:07:58.000 You don't work hard enough, so you're not ambitious enough. 0.99

00:08:02.000 I'm not going to have sex with you. 0.97

00:08:03.000 But the other way around, you see a million songs like that, right? 0.84

00:08:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:07.000 You know, like, she's not a gold digger, but, you know, that kind of song.

00:08:13.000 Yeah, that's very interesting.

00:08:15.000 A musicologist, is that a real person?

00:08:18.000 That's a real person, yes.

00:08:19.000 And a musicologist would study lyrics and notes?

00:08:40.000 The lyrics would be the thing that would be annoying to most, though. 0.93

00:08:43.000 I mean, that would be the thing that would really chime out as being annoying, like some inane, retarded songs. 1.00

00:08:48.000 Taylor Swift. 0.96

00:08:49.000 Well, you said it, not me.

00:08:51.000 How dare you?

00:08:52.000 How dare you?

00:08:52.000 That poor little girl.

00:08:53.000 Has she not suffered enough?

00:08:55.000 I know one thing. 1.00

00:08:57.000 If you date Terrell Swift, you're a fucking idiot. 1.00

00:08:59.000 Because that chick will write songs about you for the end of time. 1.00

00:09:02.000 She's got whole books about John Mayer.

00:09:04.000 Is that his name?

00:09:05.000 Mayer or Mayer?

00:09:05.000 I always say it wrong.

00:09:06.000 John Mayer.

00:09:07.000 That chick's got books on that guy. 1.00

00:09:09.000 That's unfair.

00:09:11.000 Imagine that?

00:09:13.000 So your thing would be more along the lines of studying why people find it appealing, like the rap type song, why they find it appealing like the Taylor Swift song.

00:09:25.000 Or the contents of those songs.

00:09:26.000 So for example, if you take an ancient Greek poem, right?

00:09:32.000 We still study it at university today, 3,000 years later, precisely because that poem is going to speak to certain Sibling rivalry, status competition, parental conflicts with their offspring, paternal uncertainty.

00:09:50.000 All of these factors is what makes literature interesting.

00:09:54.000 So we could study those.

00:09:55.000 Ancient Greek poems today and still it resonates with us precisely because they are speaking about some universal truths.

00:10:03.000 That is amazing, isn't it?

00:10:04.000 That stuff from 2,000, 3,000 plus years ago is still studied on a daily basis.

00:10:10.000 But some books from like 50 years ago are gone, yeah.

00:10:14.000 That's got to be frustrating as hell if you're a writer.

00:10:16.000 If you're an author and you're just like, that guy is so overrated.

00:10:21.000 I'm so tired of hearing about Aristotle. 1.00

00:10:26.000 Go fuck yourself, bro. 1.00

00:10:28.000 That shit was so long ago. 1.00

00:10:29.000 You didn't know anything. 1.00

00:10:30.000 Well, they knew a lot.

00:10:31.000 They did know a lot.

00:10:32.000 They certainly knew the mysteries of human nature.

00:10:35.000 I'm fascinated by that.

00:10:36.000 I am absolutely fascinated by what was going on thousands and thousands of years ago and, like, what was the mindset and communication with those people.

00:10:45.000 And you can kind of pull a little bit of it out of their writing.

00:10:48.000 But, man, if I could go back in time to some – I mean, it would have to be a culture, obviously, that speaks English where I could understand what they're saying.

00:10:56.000 Yeah.

00:10:56.000 I think that would be incredibly fascinating to go back three or four thousand years ago and communicate with people and just try to figure out how they see the world.

00:11:03.000 Absolutely.

00:11:04.000 You know, a lot of people are very stuck on identifying cultural differences, right?

00:11:08.000 So the French eat this type of food, the Malaysians do this type of dance. 1.00

00:11:12.000 But what they miss is that underneath all of these important cross-cultural differences is this bedrock of human universals that make us a lot more similar than different from one another.

00:11:22.000 And especially in the social sciences where people are really focused on just identifying differences, differences, differences.

00:11:30.000 But of course, there are also things that are so common.

00:11:32.000 So that, for example, beauty markers.

00:11:34.000 There are certain beauty markers that if I went to the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon, they're going to find exactly the same things attractive in the beautiful girls in rap videos as you and I would.

00:11:46.000 And that's because those beauty markers are evolutionary markers. 1.00

00:11:49.000 And so, yes, culture matters.

00:11:51.000 Nobody denies the fact that culture is important.

00:11:53.000 But underneath these cultural differences is a biological heritage that makes you and I very similar to one another.

00:11:59.000 What changes over time that makes beauty markers differently?

00:12:03.000 I've always been fascinated by, like, if you look at the Renaissance paintings, the women were very...

00:12:07.000 You can't even call them voluptuous.

00:12:09.000 They're overweight.

00:12:11.000 Rubenesque.

00:12:11.000 Yeah.

00:12:12.000 Rubenesque, like they eat a lot of Rubens.

00:12:14.000 Yeah.

00:12:14.000 What does Ruben Ask mean?

00:12:15.000 Well, Ruben was a painter who particularly had a penchant for drawing these voluptuous women. 0.86

00:12:22.000 He was a fatty chaser. 0.84

00:12:23.000 He was a bit of a fatty chaser, Ruben.

00:12:26.000 I must say, this is the first time that I've held an interview where fatty chaser has come up, so thank you. 1.00

00:12:31.000 Well, you need to be involved in more podcasting because fatty chasers, it's important. 1.00

00:12:36.000 You know, people say now that you're fat-shaming.

00:12:38.000 That's the newest thing.

00:12:39.000 Right.

00:12:39.000 Do you follow these ultra-supersensitive terms and their evolution?

00:12:44.000 Oh, you said we've got up to three hours?

00:12:46.000 I could talk about this for about 30 hours.

00:12:48.000 Please.

00:12:48.000 I actually went recently to...

00:12:50.000 We can come back to the Ruben S thing.

00:12:52.000 Okay, we'll come back to that.

00:12:53.000 I recently gave a talk at Wellesley College.

00:12:56.000 All-women's college.

00:12:57.000 All-women's college.

00:12:58.000 Nice data checker went there.

00:12:59.000 Is that right?

00:13:00.000 Tough times.

00:13:01.000 Tough times back in the day.

00:13:03.000 Was it Taylor Swift?

00:13:04.000 No.

00:13:04.000 It was a gal who did not shave her legs.

00:13:06.000 Oh, because it was patriarchal to beautify yourself.

00:13:10.000 Yeah.

00:13:10.000 She could pull it off because she was blonde, but whoa, her roommate was a hobbit, essentially.

00:13:15.000 She had hairy feet, the whole thing. 1.00

00:13:17.000 But hey, you know, whatever.

00:13:18.000 It's just cultural norms.

00:13:19.000 That's it.

00:13:20.000 So anyways, I gave a talk there on their...

00:13:22.000 This thing called the Freedom Project, which tries to promote sort of iconoclastic ideas that kind of break the shackles of political correctness.

00:13:31.000 And it was just amazing the kind of stuff that was happening there.

00:13:36.000 I mean, I'll just give you one or two examples.

00:13:39.000 Apparently, it was a form of oppression for a professor to assume that when he meets students, he right away categorizes them as either being male or female.

00:13:51.000 So, for example, if I see you in my class and I say, hey, sir, blah, blah, blah, well, that would be a form of oppression because I'm assuming based on your Outer markers that you are male.

00:14:03.000 Rather, what I should do is sort of do a quick polling of each person in terms of how they'd like to be addressed.

00:14:11.000 So you may be biologically male, but you are transgender.

00:14:17.000 You could be queer. 0.99

00:14:18.000 You could be queer. 0.99

00:14:18.000 You could be this. 0.99

00:14:19.000 As you know, Facebook has 50 markers.

00:14:23.000 50?

00:14:23.000 There's 50. Five-zero?

00:14:24.000 Five-zero.

00:14:26.000 Not two.

00:14:27.000 I could count about ten.

00:14:28.000 Right.

00:14:29.000 Wow.

00:14:30.000 Fifty.

00:14:31.000 And for folks who don't know, queer is not a slur.

00:14:34.000 When I'm saying queer, I'm like, yeah, you're queer. 1.00

00:14:36.000 I'm not saying it like that.

00:14:37.000 Queer is they do not want to be interpreted as male or female. 0.93

00:14:43.000 They want to be just whatever they are.

00:14:45.000 Right.

00:14:46.000 And so now you have at universities a discussion as to whether you should have not male and female bathrooms, but you should have gender-neutral bathrooms, and so on and so forth.

00:14:57.000 And so in academia and the world that I reside in, it's there.

00:15:02.000 Why is it getting so squirrely?

00:15:03.000 What's going on?

00:15:04.000 Are we too soft?

00:15:04.000 Do we have to hunt for our own food?

00:15:06.000 Do we have to deal with the winter more?

00:15:08.000 Do we have to chop wood to keep warm?

00:15:11.000 What is making us concentrate on these frivolous matters?

00:15:15.000 It's not just a politically correct thing.

00:15:18.000 It's coddling the most ridiculously oversensitive notions that human beings have ever constructed.

00:15:24.000 I think we've been parasitized by an astonishing form of political correctness.

00:15:29.000 What is parasitized? 0.89

00:15:30.000 Like a parasite that enters you, right?

00:15:32.000 So in the same way that viruses can enter your body, viruses of the mind can also take over your... 0.82

00:15:42.000 I mean, religion is an example of a memoplex, a form of... 0.78

00:15:46.000 I mean, some people would be upset by what I'm saying, but a form of parasite that kind of rewires your thinking. 0.78

00:15:51.000 And so political correctness is an astonishing form of parasitic thinking, where everything is viewed through the lens of, I should not offend anyone.

00:16:02.000 And so common sense and just reason goes out the window in the pursuit of non-offense.

00:16:08.000 You know what, though?

00:16:09.000 I have an issue with it, that most people who practice this in the extreme form, they say that they should not offend.

00:16:16.000 But you know who they offend?

00:16:17.000 They offend anyone who does not agree with their notion that you should not offend. 0.71

00:16:21.000 They will be violent and angry and fucking incredibly insulting to people who do not agree with their terms of what is offensive and what's not offensive.

00:16:32.000 I have been Some of the meanest, nastiest things have been said to me by people who claim to be in this sort of ultra-sensitive, super open-minded category, which is quite fascinating to me. 0.93

00:16:47.000 You're exactly right.

00:16:48.000 I'll give you a fantastic quote.

00:16:49.000 I might be paraphrasing it slightly.

00:16:51.000 I think it's Thomas Sowell, an economist, who basically was criticizing so-called diversity.

00:16:58.000 So at American universities or in Western universities, everybody talks about diversity, but the only form of diversity that's not allowed is intellectual and political diversity, right?

00:17:08.000 So we want diversity in terms of skin color, we want diversity in terms of sexual orientation, we want diversity in terms of genders, right?

00:17:15.000 So all forms of diversity are welcome, but don't you dare step out of line with the accepted politically correct positions.

00:17:22.000 Now that's diversity that we don't want. 1.00

00:17:24.000 Yeah, what is that?

00:17:26.000 I mean, how do they not see that...

00:17:28.000 Stop police.

00:17:29.000 Yeah.

00:17:29.000 And I face it in...

00:17:31.000 I mean, eventually, I guess we'll come back to my work.

00:17:33.000 I face it very much in my work because I rile up all sorts of different people out of the woodwork.

00:17:39.000 So, for example, radical feminists hate my work because how dare you say that we are biological beings? 1.00

00:17:45.000 How dare you say that there are innate sex differences?

00:17:47.000 Postmodernists will hate my work because truth is all relative.

00:17:51.000 There's no such thing as scientific truth.

00:17:53.000 It's all relative.

00:17:54.000 The religious folks will hate my work because if Darwinian theory is correct, it is, then where is God in all this?

00:18:01.000 So there's this long queue of people Who will come out of the woodworks to criticize you, not for any valid scientific reasons, but because it shakes their ideological beliefs.

00:18:10.000 It's fascinating to me the parallels between religious nutters and politically correct nutters, because it's very similar in a lot of ways.

00:18:17.000 Their ideology is just so cemented in their consciousness.

00:18:22.000 It's immobile.

00:18:23.000 It's rock solid.

00:18:25.000 It's not going anywhere. 1.00

00:18:26.000 If you disagree, you You patriarchal piece of shit. 1.00

00:18:29.000 You male fucking suppressor. 1.00

00:18:32.000 You horrible thing. 1.00

00:18:34.000 It's quite fascinating.

00:18:36.000 If there are not differences, any differences in the sexes, what do they use, these radical feminists, what do they use to define the reason why humans have such varying behavior between the male and female genders? 0.97

00:18:49.000 So you ready for this?

00:18:50.000 Yes.

00:18:52.000 Everything short of genitalia is a social construction, right?

00:18:56.000 So even, for example, the fact that Bubba grew up to be a block center for the University of Oklahoma and hence he could bunch print 500 pounds.

00:19:08.000 That's not due to, for example, any physiological reasons that he is so strong.

00:19:12.000 It's because what happened is his parents aggressively nurtured rough tumble play, whereas for girls, they told them, listen, Linda, you should not be playing so rough.

00:19:24.000 And that then either gives the green light or the red light to express your physicality.

00:19:29.000 That's insane.

00:19:30.000 It is.

00:19:30.000 That's absolutely insane.

00:19:31.000 That idea is insane, that there's not a difference in the physiological properties of the bodies of men and women.

00:19:39.000 I mean, the biological differences are scientific.

00:19:43.000 Well, there are some feminists, and again, I'm paraphrasing their quote. 1.00

00:19:46.000 They'll say, there is no such thing as a male or female brain as there is no such thing as a male or female pancreas or liver. 0.67

00:19:53.000 So the organ that defines your personhood is actually gender neutral.

00:19:59.000 Now that is astonishing because we are a sexually reproducing species.

00:20:03.000 So one of the foundational tenets on which biological understanding happens is that we have two types of personalities.

00:20:12.000 Polymorphisms, if you like, two types.

00:20:13.000 We have a male and a female so that we could sexually reproduce.

00:20:16.000 So the idea that much of this is social construction is just laughable.

00:20:21.000 I think it comes, though, I mean, just to be fair to them, I think it originally comes from a desire to fight institutionalized sexism.

00:20:30.000 But what happens is that they mix...

00:20:33.000 Equality under the law as being indistinguishable beings, right? 0.89

00:20:37.000 We could be different beings, yet we should be equal under the law.

00:20:40.000 But they argue that if you admit to the fact that we are different, then that makes it easier for the status quo sexist patriarchy to maintain its privileged position.

00:20:51.000 And so they create this edifice of the past 50 to 100 years of social science research that is completely laughable, but that they hang on to like religious belief.

00:21:02.000 It's so fascinating.

00:21:03.000 There was a woman that has a video online on YouTube where she claims that there is no difference in the physical strength of men and women, and it's just that men have been encouraged to engage in weightlifting and all these different things, and if women did the same thing, they'd be just as strong.

00:21:17.000 That is insane.

00:21:19.000 It's so insane.

00:21:20.000 Men have ten times more testosterone than women. 0.98

00:21:22.000 Is that a social construction?

00:21:24.000 Well, it's also insane because women who are athletes, women who are elite, world-class athletes, if they compare their hand strength to men who don't even exercise, men are stronger.

00:21:36.000 Just the ability to grab things and grip things.

00:21:38.000 Right.

00:21:39.000 There was an issue where there was a woman who was a transgender. 0.54

00:21:43.000 She became a transgender woman and she used to be a man.

00:21:46.000 She was a man for 30 years.

00:21:47.000 And then she didn't tell anybody.

00:21:48.000 She started fighting women in women's MMA. And I was furious.

00:21:50.000 I went crazy about it.

00:21:52.000 And I got so much hate from people that were calling me transphobic.

00:21:56.000 Is your chest full?

00:21:56.000 And I'm like, that's amazing.

00:21:58.000 Like, you don't understand there's a difference in the male frame.

00:22:01.000 There's a difference in the shape of the hips, the mechanics of the shoulder, like everything.

00:22:06.000 The whole body's built different.

00:22:08.000 And not only that, the fact that it takes 30 years, like your 30 years of being a man with full testosterone, and then it takes like 10 years before your bone density even starts decreasing.

00:22:18.000 But they wanted to make it so it's completely indistinguishable.

00:22:22.000 And they also have support from transgender surgeons, which is quite fascinating and completely biased.

00:22:29.000 These transgender surgeons who want to, or reassignment doctors, and they want to pretend that they're exact equals physiologically. 0.95

00:22:38.000 I got a great story on that.

00:22:39.000 So in my first book, I talk about John Money, who was a very famous psychologist at Johns Hopkins, really around maybe the 50s to 70s.

00:22:49.000 He was a big gender theorist who basically argued that everything is due to socialization so that when surgeons would go see him, Because they had to do gender reassignment, either, for example, let's say at a circumcision, in the rare case where you botch the circumcision,

00:23:05.000 and now you have a problem in terms of having a functioning penis, or if you have, for example, a condition micro-penis, where you're unlikely to be a functioning male when you grow up, well, he would say, don't worry about it.

00:23:16.000 Just have the surgery, put a dress on the kid, and raise them as a girl, and there'd be absolutely no problem. 1.00

00:23:23.000 And, of course, the reality is that that's not how biological sex is determined.

00:23:28.000 And the most famous case is David Reimer, who was one of his patients, who, after having gone through the treatment, committed suicide.

00:23:34.000 Yeah, I remember that case.

00:23:35.000 It was a fascinating story.

00:23:38.000 The reality of What you said, one of the more fascinating aspects of it is the difference between us all being equal as human beings and being the same.

00:23:49.000 Because we are not equal.

00:23:52.000 We are very different.

00:23:53.000 But we all should be equal as far as our rights.

00:23:56.000 You know, as far as, like, how we're treated by each other and the law and what a person can get away with, you know, what keeps our society civil and kind.

00:24:06.000 Yeah, we should all have equality, including children and old people and everyone.

00:24:10.000 Everyone should have equality in that aspect.

00:24:12.000 That's what makes a civilized, caring society.

00:24:16.000 The idea that there's no differences as far as the other...

00:24:20.000 I mean, that we are equal as far as, like, physical strength or as equal as far as, like, our wants and desires and needs, that's denying hundreds of years of literature of the struggle, the struggle in all cultures between the male trying to understand the female,

00:24:37.000 the female trying to understand the male.

00:24:40.000 We're completely alien to each other.

00:24:42.000 We exist amongst each other and we gather information over...

00:24:45.000 A long period of time.

00:24:46.000 But then we say ridiculous things like, here's one of the things that people love to say. 0.87

00:24:51.000 Happy wife, happy life. 0.93

00:24:52.000 Right.

00:24:53.000 Why is that?

00:24:53.000 Because make her happy and she'll stop screaming.

00:24:55.000 You don't understand her.

00:24:56.000 Just make her happy, do whatever she wants, and then she'll calm down and you'll be good.

00:25:02.000 But believe me, you can't just be yourself.

00:25:04.000 Right. 1.00

00:25:04.000 You can't just be what you want to be and do what you want to do because that's going to drive her fucking crazy because you want to have sex with 100 women, you want to drive 50,000 miles an hour, you want to... 1.00

00:25:14.000 Disappear for weeks at a time. 1.00

00:25:16.000 You've been taught by the patriarchy. 0.78

00:25:18.000 I've been brainwashed. 0.99

00:25:19.000 You've been brainwashed.

00:25:20.000 By the way, speaking of sexual variety, which is kind of a central issue in evolutionary psychology, you should see some of the hate mail I get when I state something as banal as, you know, men would have evolved a greater penchant for sexual variety for terribly trivial reasons to explain,

00:25:36.000 right?

00:25:36.000 I mean, women have a thing called greater parental investment, right?

00:25:40.000 Women, on average, have from when the menses start to when they have menopause, 400 eggs.

00:25:45.000 Right?

00:25:46.000 400 eggs.

00:25:46.000 So it's a scarce, rare resource.

00:25:48.000 Men, in one ejaculation, have 250 spermatozoa.

00:25:53.000 So our gametes are very cheap and abundant.

00:25:57.000 And then, of course, you add the cost of gestation, right?

00:26:02.000 The likelihood of having mortality when you're giving birth.

00:26:05.000 So for all these reasons, women have much greater minimal parental obligations. 0.98

00:26:10.000 Therefore, evolutionary theory would predict that they would be much more judicious when they're making a mate choice.

00:26:15.000 Because if they make a poor mate choice, it looms much larger for them.

00:26:19.000 That, on the other hand, for men, the costs of making a poor maid choice are not as great, but the benefits of having multiple mating opportunities are quite beneficial.

00:26:28.000 And therefore, that's why, on average, you expect men to have a much greater penchant for sexual variety. 0.99

00:26:34.000 Now, that's been documented in 17 trillion different ways, and yet you still have people that will send you hate mail saying, my God, are you a sexist pig? 1.00

00:26:43.000 How could you promulgate this garbage? 0.99

00:26:45.000 Well, I think when you're looking at human beings and you're talking about these variables, you're looking at it as objectively and scientifically as possible. 0.98

00:26:55.000 When people want that concrete world that we've discussed, this politically correct, they have this resistance To looking at it in any way other than the way that they have.

00:27:10.000 It's completely non-scientific.

00:27:12.000 And that's why it's religious, right? 0.81

00:27:14.000 Absolutely.

00:27:15.000 And that's actually one of the criticisms that you often get about evolution psychology.

00:27:18.000 People think that you are trying to justify behaviors.

00:27:21.000 For example, if you explain why people are likely to cheat on their monogamous unions, then they say, oh, well, you're offering father why people should do it.

00:27:31.000 And of course, my rebuttal is, I'm certainly doing no such thing similar to how an oncologist studies cancer.

00:27:39.000 He's not justifying cancer.

00:27:40.000 He's not for cancer.

00:27:42.000 He just explains, he or she explains, cancer.

00:27:46.000 And so I don't have a moral position, right?

00:27:49.000 I don't come to the table when I'm doing my scientific research hoping for one thing or another.

00:27:54.000 The data speaks for itself.

00:27:55.000 But again, the ideologues will say, no, but if this forbidden knowledge gets out, it makes it easier for people to justify this behavior or that behavior.

00:28:05.000 It's absolutely fascinating to me how human beings react and act, and so this subject is quite near and dear to my heart.

00:28:13.000 I love it.

00:28:15.000 I'm fascinated by the chaos of it all.

00:28:18.000 I love watching people flail and scream and get angry about, whether it's religious anger, people who are legitimately Christian. 0.95

00:28:27.000 I love the God Hates Fags people, the Westboro Baptist people. 1.00

00:28:30.000 I don't love them.

00:28:31.000 I love everybody in one way.

00:28:33.000 I would like everybody to be nice.

00:28:34.000 But I love the fact that they exist because I'm absolutely fascinated by their folly.

00:28:38.000 I'm absolutely fascinated by this idea that they have in their head that's so concrete that they believe that soldiers are dying because men are being allowed to marry other men.

00:28:49.000 It's unbelievably weird, but compelling to me.

00:28:53.000 And in an equal way, the idea that you saying that there is some sort of an invested commitment that a woman has that a man does not have, objectively, just looking at us as a biological reproducing species, that you would experience hate because of that.

00:29:10.000 As a scientist, as a person just analyzing data, I'm amazed and I'm fascinated and I'm just drawn into it.

00:29:16.000 I can't help myself.

00:29:17.000 You want to talk about some religious stuff?

00:29:19.000 Sure.

00:29:21.000 Well, you know, I was born in Lebanon.

00:29:24.000 We're Lebanese Jews, although I'm a non-believing Jewish guy.

00:29:29.000 How dare you?

00:29:30.000 I know, I know.

00:29:31.000 You believe in some things.

00:29:32.000 Tell you what?

00:29:33.000 I believe in science and truth and reason.

00:29:35.000 And so we escaped Lebanon actually during the civil war.

00:29:40.000 My parents in 1980 were kidnapped by Fatah, the very peaceful of Fatah because, you know, it's all peaceful.

00:29:46.000 And then after that, we've never gone back to Lebanon.

00:29:50.000 And so I, from a very young age, I think I already had sort of the innate penchant to question religious belief, which certainly created friction within my family, because you should just believe and shut up.

00:30:03.000 But then when I saw the hatred that religion engenders firsthand, I mean, facing execution as we're trying to escape Lebanon... 1.00

00:30:12.000 And then coming to the West, I think I became that much more forceful in my convictions to try to combat religious dogma.

00:30:22.000 And of course, some of the biggest hate mail that you get is when you do that.

00:30:26.000 I've even had real professional situations where I've lost professionally because of my position.

00:30:33.000 Actually, here in California, I've had several schools who otherwise were very, very interested in making me very, very lucrative offers who, after maybe doing a bit of due diligence on me and seeing that I'd written stuff that was critical of religion, suddenly I became persona non grata.

00:30:48.000 Really?

00:30:49.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:49.000 Really?

00:30:50.000 That's fascinating.

00:30:50.000 I wouldn't think that that would be the case as far as...

00:30:53.000 There are even schools in Southern California that won't...

00:30:57.000 And they do this legally because they are a religiously founded institution.

00:31:01.000 If you're not a Seventh-day Adventist, we can't grant you tenure. 0.65

00:31:06.000 There's another school that had a God Squad whereby you go up in front of the God Squad.

00:31:11.000 I mean, that's literally their term where you have to sort of show that you're...

00:31:17.000 Accepting Jesus in your heart.

00:31:18.000 That's a school?

00:31:19.000 A college?

00:31:20.000 A very, very prominent school.

00:31:22.000 Please say the name.

00:31:23.000 I better not.

00:31:24.000 Can you rhyme it?

00:31:25.000 Say what it rhymes with.

00:31:27.000 Loyola Marymount?

00:31:28.000 No, it's not.

00:31:29.000 But it's within that general area.

00:31:31.000 There's another school three years ago who was going to make me a huge, huge offer in Orange County that didn't work out.

00:31:38.000 Now, to the person who wanted me to appear in front of the God Squad, this was several years ago when I was at UC Irvine, I told him, you do realize that I am an atheist Lebanese Jew evolutionist, so it's going to be a while before I accept Jesus in my heart.

00:31:56.000 And his answer was, well, no, no, but don't worry, we'll coach you as to what to say.

00:32:02.000 Oh, good Lord.

00:32:04.000 So that's a euphemism for lying, right?

00:32:06.000 How does that fit with the whole...

00:32:08.000 So, you know, this is right here in 21st century Southern California and academia. 0.96

00:32:13.000 You know, you better hold certain religious beliefs, otherwise we'll punish you, Jew boy. 1.00

00:32:18.000 That's amazing. 0.97

00:32:19.000 And that's some colleges and then, or some universities and then other universities.

00:32:23.000 The complete opposite.

00:32:24.000 If you're not an atheist, I'm sure that you take a lot of slack. 1.00

00:32:28.000 True, true.

00:32:29.000 Well, at other universities or in academia in general, it is quite progressive to criticize certainly Christianity, right? 1.00

00:32:39.000 Because you're seen as a progressive guy who doesn't buy into all this branch age superstitions.

00:32:44.000 But there is one religion that you should... 0.95

00:32:46.000 Islam.

00:32:48.000 Islamophobia.

00:32:49.000 Islamophobia.

00:32:51.000 Isn't that fascinating?

00:32:52.000 I love that. 0.64

00:32:53.000 There's the same ultra-progressives that, you know, would give you a million different ways to address someone based on whatever gender they identify with or, you know, whatever the fuck else weird, ultra-supersensitive thing. 0.85

00:33:06.000 I find that completely fascinating, this Islamophobia thing. 0.95

00:33:09.000 There's several websites that I frequent just to freak myself out.

00:33:14.000 And the super sensitive ones on a regular basis will go over this Islamophobia.

00:33:20.000 Well, because it's actually a very astute way to...

00:33:24.000 To have intellectual warfare.

00:33:26.000 You're actually saying that people who are concerned about particular aspects of this ideology are crazy, right?

00:33:34.000 They suffer from a phobia.

00:33:35.000 So you are denigrating them at their core. 0.97

00:33:38.000 You must be nuts to actually fear this, right? 0.98

00:33:41.000 Yeah. 0.83

00:33:42.000 And actually the term started as...

00:33:44.000 You may or may not know, it started with the Muslim Brotherhood, a very smart strategy, where they knew that the West is very open to being tolerant and so on, and so they kind of piggybacked on that. 0.95

00:33:55.000 And so in academia, you just never criticize that one idea.

00:33:58.000 Now that's very dangerous, because in a sane world, All beliefs should be open to criticism.

00:34:05.000 Absolutely.

00:34:05.000 And not only that, how about the one that is responsible for most of the suicide bombing?

00:34:10.000 Oh, that is so Islamophobic. 0.78

00:34:12.000 I am Islamophobic.

00:34:13.000 Said it.

00:34:14.000 I'm Islamophobic.

00:34:15.000 I'm Jewophobic. 0.74

00:34:16.000 I'm Catholicophobic. 0.53

00:34:17.000 I'm Christianophobic. 0.54

00:34:19.000 I'm afraid of all of them.

00:34:21.000 Yes, I do.

00:34:23.000 Well, I was raised a Catholic for a very short amount of time, and I had a very tumultuous childhood.

00:34:30.000 And when I was in first grade, my parents put me in Catholic school.

00:34:35.000 And up until then, I was...

00:34:37.000 Obviously, I don't remember much of this, but I was very religious.

00:34:41.000 And it was because my parents were divorcing...

00:34:44.000 And there was a lot of violence in the household and I had this idea in my head that like somehow or another God was the right way and everybody else was wrong.

00:34:53.000 Going to Catholic school cured me of that entirely. 0.98

00:34:56.000 The nun that I had, Sister Mary Josephine, I don't remember much about being six years old, but I remember that bitch. 1.00

00:35:04.000 She was very important to me. 0.93

00:35:06.000 She really straightened me out because I realized that she has no connection whatsoever to anything holy or majestic.

00:35:14.000 She represented and she showed all of the horrors of humanity.

00:35:23.000 Meanness, evilness, being nasty to children, fear-mongering, and this idea.

00:35:30.000 Guilt.

00:35:30.000 Guilt, everything, all the above.

00:35:32.000 It was just...

00:35:32.000 There was nothing holy about it.

00:35:35.000 It was pretty obvious pretty quickly that it was all bullshit. 1.00

00:35:37.000 So it was cured from one year of Catholic school. 0.99

00:35:41.000 I told my parents I was going to run away from home if they tried to put me in second grade.

00:35:44.000 Wow.

00:35:45.000 I was like, I'm done.

00:35:46.000 You don't understand what it's like.

00:35:47.000 I went from being around my mother, who was this Great person, sweet.

00:35:51.000 My grandparents are great.

00:35:53.000 To all of a sudden, and I didn't go to kindergarten.

00:35:55.000 I just went to first grade.

00:35:56.000 It was my first year in school.

00:35:57.000 To being around these monsters.

00:35:59.000 And this monster school that was just filled with darkness.

00:36:03.000 It was like the whole school was just dark.

00:36:05.000 All the priests, I remember their faces.

00:36:08.000 They all had these gin blossoms all over their faces from drinking. 0.99

00:36:11.000 You know, the nuns were all overweight and bitter and angry and their fucking skin was having a bad relationship with their face. 1.00

00:36:20.000 It was like hanging off of them. 1.00

00:36:21.000 Everything about them was just monstrous, the evilness.

00:36:24.000 I'm keeping a counter of the amount of hate mail that's going to come to both of us. 1.00

00:36:27.000 Let it come, bitches. 1.00

00:36:28.000 Let it come. 1.00

00:36:29.000 I'll send it right back to you.

00:36:31.000 I don't get it.

00:36:32.000 I don't get it.

00:36:33.000 You know, I'm fascinated by it, but I understand that people need the- they have this desire to believe in things.

00:36:41.000 I understand that. 0.89

00:36:43.000 But I don't understand how you can be a rational, intelligent, objective person who looks at some shit that people wrote thousands of years ago and say, no, this is- This is immobile. 0.96

00:36:55.000 You cannot alter it. 0.98

00:36:57.000 This is what it is.

00:36:58.000 This is written in stone.

00:37:01.000 There's no way around this.

00:37:02.000 This is God's Word. 0.99

00:37:03.000 Anybody who questions it is a fool. 0.97

00:37:05.000 So I do, in one of my latest books, I have a chapter which I think got me in trouble with one of the Southern California schools that I was getting an offer from because I'd given them a signed copy of the book. 0.98

00:37:16.000 And then they probably got to that chapter.

00:37:19.000 That chapter is called Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.

00:37:21.000 And so what I do in that chapter is I go through different hope peddlers, of which religion is the greatest, but others would be medical quackery, self-help gurus, and so on.

00:37:32.000 So different agents that peddle hope, and I argue, again, from an evolutionary perspective, because they're very successful because they cater to these very basal Darwinian insecurities.

00:37:43.000 None greater than the very obvious one of existential angst, right?

00:37:48.000 We're the only animal that we're aware of that actually is aware that we are on a death sentence, right?

00:37:52.000 I mean, I know that I've got another, luckily, maybe 40 years, right?

00:37:56.000 Well, if I have high cholesterol, I go to my physician, he gives me Lipitor, boom, LDL goes down, everybody's happy.

00:38:02.000 But what pill do I take to solve this really looming problem that's at the end of the road called my death?

00:38:08.000 Well, different religions will give you different dances, but they all certainly promise you some form of eternity.

00:38:15.000 It could be in the form of reincarnation.

00:38:16.000 It could be I'll be with Jesus.

00:38:18.000 It could be, you know, with the virgins.

00:38:20.000 But there are all sorts of ways by which I can secure my eternity.

00:38:25.000 And I think for most people, it's very difficult to not drink that Kool-Aid.

00:38:31.000 I think it takes almost a pathological and dysfunctional honesty to say, I'm not going to buy that.

00:38:37.000 I realize that I've got 80 years, and I'm going to really do the best that I can during those 80 years.

00:38:42.000 I think it's a lot more comforting to say, no, this party's going to go on forever.

00:38:46.000 It's certainly more comforting.

00:38:47.000 It's also, there's something about human beings where we realize somewhere along the line that there's no one alive that has any more answers about what lies beyond the great beyond, you know, after death,

00:39:03.000 what lies beyond the yawning grave.

00:39:05.000 No one has any answers.

00:39:06.000 Can I give you what the answer is?

00:39:08.000 Nothing.

00:39:09.000 You would hope so, or you would think that you have that answer, but have you ever done psychedelic drugs?

00:39:14.000 I haven't.

00:39:14.000 There you go.

00:39:15.000 So don't answer so quickly.

00:39:17.000 But I tell you, there are two ways of seeking to reach immortality.

00:39:22.000 One, of course, is, it might seem a bit crass, but through just the genetic propagation, your children are, in a sense, your form of immortality.

00:39:31.000 But I don't buy that.

00:39:32.000 You don't like that one?

00:39:32.000 It's not immortal, because the Earth doesn't last.

00:39:35.000 I mean, unless someone figures out how to get off the planet, we only have, what, 1.9 billion years of sunlight?

00:39:41.000 Yeah, yeah, okay.

00:39:42.000 I mean, we don't have enough time for anything.

00:39:44.000 There's no way.

00:39:45.000 There's no immortality unless there's some sort of a fractal nature to the universe where life and death is this completely ongoing cycle where the deeper you go, it starts again.

00:39:56.000 Yeah, I don't know about that.

00:39:57.000 I don't know about that either.

00:39:58.000 But it is possible.

00:40:00.000 Yeah, it's possible.

00:40:01.000 The universe itself is so bizarre and unexpected.

00:40:04.000 The more you look into the universe...

00:40:06.000 I remember when I was a kid, I used to think of space like a neighborhood.

00:40:11.000 I really did.

00:40:12.000 I remember very succinctly that I would like look at like Buck Rogers and all these different space.

00:40:19.000 I'm like, oh, they're going to go over to this town and they're going to come back and this is our neighborhood.

00:40:24.000 They're going to go to that neighborhood and come back.

00:40:26.000 And then as I got older and I started studying astronomy and I started studying the, and as I got older, also the knowledge that they had about the amount of stars changed.

00:40:38.000 And they started talking about how there's more stars in our galaxy than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. 0.98

00:40:47.000 And then I remember just thinking, well, this is a motherfucker of a neighborhood. 0.98

00:40:50.000 This is starting to get really strange. 0.99

00:40:52.000 And then...

00:40:54.000 As you get older still, you realize that there's no way they know how big it all is.

00:41:00.000 They have a general sense of 14 plus billion light years.

00:41:03.000 But then there's the fractal nature of black holes, the possibility that inside every galaxy is a black hole that contains an entirely new universe.

00:41:12.000 And this is something that's being thrown about, not by freaks, but by real serious legitimate scientists.

00:41:19.000 So that alone is so bizarre.

00:41:21.000 The idea that you live and die seems like very trivial.

00:41:24.000 They come back again or reincarnation.

00:41:27.000 I mean, why not?

00:41:28.000 If a supernova can exist, you know, why is it so crazy that a person lives for eternity and just continues to reincarnate?

00:41:35.000 Well, and in light of all that vastness that you said, isn't it incredible that all the monotheistic Abrahamic religions would argue that on some small speck of sand, in some Bronze Age point, God spoke to some prophet and told him, you really better not eat.

00:41:52.000 Yeah.

00:41:53.000 So in this great universe, this cosmos, it's really important that you don't wear leather shoes at Yom Kippur or whatever the rule is.

00:42:02.000 It's just astonishing to me that people actually buy this stuff.

00:42:06.000 Well, I think that the reason for the pig stuff, and I've talked about this recently with my friend Ari, who was raised very religious in Judaism. 0.98

00:42:17.000 And then as he got older, just decided to abandon it all. 0.97

00:42:20.000 Now he's a dirty comedian. 0.97

00:42:21.000 Hilarious. 0.98

00:42:22.000 But we were talking about that the pork thing was probably due to diseases.

00:42:27.000 I talk about that in my book.

00:42:29.000 Trichinosis.

00:42:29.000 Yeah.

00:42:30.000 So I don't do the analysis for pork.

00:42:33.000 I do it for shellfish.

00:42:35.000 And so if you look at shellfish...

00:42:37.000 Red tide and things along those lines.

00:42:38.000 Right.

00:42:38.000 So you can't tell which one is infected.

00:42:42.000 You can't look at the water and predict which one would likely have the bacterium.

00:42:49.000 And so all you know is that once in a while somebody would eat it and drop dead.

00:42:54.000 Since you don't have any ability during the Bronze Age to refrigerate and so on, well, you don't have any access to the germ theory.

00:43:02.000 Certainly they didn't know anything about that.

00:43:04.000 Well, then it must be some malediction.

00:43:06.000 And so you're exactly right that there are very, very clear, obvious biological explanations for most of these food taboos.

00:43:13.000 Yeah, it's just ridiculous that in 2014, people don't realize the origins of these.

00:43:18.000 Like, yes, it was a great idea 2,000 years ago, before we understood thermometers, that you have to cook your meat to 150 degrees.

00:43:25.000 It kills the bacteria.

00:43:26.000 And then it's perfectly, totally healthy.

00:43:28.000 But if you try to eat...

00:43:34.000 Exactly.

00:43:35.000 Exactly.

00:43:44.000 Yeah, so religion has been the biggest blowback of your work, or has it been?

00:43:51.000 Actually, probably the ones that were the most acerbic in their criticisms have been other social scientists.

00:43:59.000 Really?

00:44:00.000 Yeah, because the social sciences have very much developed over the past hundred years with a complete rejection of biology.

00:44:09.000 How is that a science, then, if they call it social sciences?

00:44:12.000 You reject biology, which is immeasurable, and social science is sort of...

00:44:16.000 Well, what they argue is that what makes us human is that we transcend our biology.

00:44:22.000 So don't use the evolutionary mechanisms that explain the behavior of the zebra and the dog and the mosquito.

00:44:28.000 To explain our behaviors.

00:44:30.000 What makes us human is precisely that we're able to transcend these biological imperatives.

00:44:35.000 And so the field of anthropology, not bio-anthropology, which is a subset of anthropology that recognizes biology, but for example cultural anthropology is all about going to all of these exotic cultures and demonstrating how each culture is unique and different and hence there are no such thing as human universals.

00:44:52.000 Social psychology is pretty much operated without any understanding of biology.

00:44:56.000 So what I did in my work I came along and I founded this field, which I coined evolutionary consumption, where I apply evolutionary theory and biology to study consumer behavior.

00:45:06.000 But more generally, my real goal is to what I call, maybe it's a grand goal, to Darwinize the business school.

00:45:12.000 The idea is that you can't study anything.

00:45:14.000 You can't study investment psychology or personnel psychology or organizational behavior or consumer behavior.

00:45:21.000 Without recognizing that all of these players are biological beings, right?

00:45:25.000 The decision that you make if your blood sugar is low and you're hungry is very different than the decision you make if you're satiated, right?

00:45:32.000 I mean, that's a trivial example, but a very obvious one.

00:45:34.000 So the idea that economists have spent, you know, 100 years developing all these fanciful mathematical models without ever recognizing that there are these biological forces that compel us to be the...

00:45:46.000 Decision-makers that we are.

00:45:48.000 It's astounding to me.

00:45:49.000 So the greatest blowback has been from social scientists who typically have been very reticent to accept what this biology boy is saying about consumer behavior and so on.

00:46:01.000 Fascinating.

00:46:01.000 Now, the good news...

00:46:02.000 Can I go on?

00:46:03.000 Yes, please.

00:46:05.000 I always use a quote by...

00:46:07.000 There's a guy called J.B.S. Haldane, who was a very famous evolutionary geneticist who was very quotable, had all these great quips.

00:46:14.000 So he said that there are four stages that scientists go through before they accept a theory.

00:46:20.000 And I'll start you paraphrasing. 0.99

00:46:22.000 So stage one, this is bullshit. 1.00

00:46:24.000 This is garbage. 1.00

00:46:25.000 Stage two, well, this might be true, but it's rather perverse. 0.97

00:46:29.000 Stage three, well, this is true, but largely unimportant.

00:46:33.000 And stage four, oh, I always said so.

00:46:36.000 Now, the reason why that quote captures, I mean, if I ever did an autobiography of my scientific career, that quote is basically my book, because I've seen people go through these four stages in their responses to my work.

00:46:49.000 At first, I couldn't get an invitation to get 20 minutes at a conference to speak, because what does biology have to do with anything?

00:46:57.000 And now, of course, science is an autocorrective process.

00:47:00.000 The evidence is coming in my way, and I don't mean to gloat about it.

00:47:04.000 Gloat away!

00:47:05.000 Gloat away!

00:47:05.000 But now they're all coming fast and furious.

00:47:08.000 Man, you're the man.

00:47:09.000 And I said, but wait a minute.

00:47:10.000 I remember 10 years ago.

00:47:11.000 I've still kept your email where you said I was a bullshitter.

00:47:14.000 No, no, that wasn't me.

00:47:16.000 That must have been my research assistant who hacked my email and wrote that to you.

00:47:21.000 Hal Dane is a great guy to quote.

00:47:23.000 He had a fantastic quote that I love.

00:47:25.000 Not only is the universe queerer than we suppose, it's queerer than we can suppose.

00:47:29.000 You know what?

00:47:30.000 You're my new coolest guy to actually know who Hal Dane is.

00:47:34.000 So, you're the man.

00:47:35.000 Well, that's a special quote.

00:47:37.000 That's just an amazing quote.

00:47:38.000 There's another one on the Beatles.

00:47:39.000 I don't know the exact...

00:47:40.000 Do you know this one?

00:47:40.000 No.

00:47:41.000 I think there are something like...

00:47:42.000 I hope I'm not getting it wrong, but maybe 300,000 species of...

00:47:47.000 Beetles.

00:47:48.000 And so in his quote, he basically says, you know, if God exists, he must have a particular penchant for beetles for having spent so much effort in coming up with all of these different species variations.

00:48:00.000 Yeah, no kidding, right?

00:48:02.000 Is it frustrating being a man who is an intellectual who is trying to...

00:48:10.000 Go over the variables and try to figure it all out and piece it together.

00:48:15.000 Is it frustrating to you to see these obvious biases and this obvious muddy thinking that enters into this sort of debate?

00:48:25.000 It is on two levels.

00:48:27.000 On sort of the intrinsic level, I'm a dogged pursuer of the truth and so I almost get offended by these positions.

00:48:34.000 And so in that sense, it's frustrating.

00:48:36.000 But there's also an extrinsic, a real sort of tangible way that it's frustrating.

00:48:40.000 A lot of these gatekeepers are the ones who decide whether I get a position in Southern California or not.

00:48:46.000 And so if I play within the paradigm, if I do the research that is expected of me, that doesn't sort of bust any existing theories, then I'm good.

00:48:57.000 But if I'm this guy from the outside who's trying to biologize the field, well, who does this guy think he is?

00:49:02.000 So in that sense, I think it's also frustrating.

00:49:04.000 I mean, my wife always tells me, well, don't worry.

00:49:07.000 If you can keep this closer.

00:49:09.000 Oh, sorry.

00:49:09.000 Sorry, it makes a big difference.

00:49:10.000 Is that better?

00:49:10.000 Yeah, you can move it around.

00:49:11.000 Oh, sure.

00:49:12.000 Sorry.

00:49:12.000 Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you.

00:49:13.000 No, no worries.

00:49:13.000 So your wife tells you?

00:49:14.000 Yeah, so my wife tells me, you know, I mean, don't worry.

00:49:17.000 You know, you'll get all your vindication.

00:49:19.000 I said, well, I don't want to get vindicated when I'm...

00:49:22.000 Dead.

00:49:22.000 Post-mortem.

00:49:23.000 I want the rewards now.

00:49:26.000 And not in a narcissistic way, but because there are also perks to people finding out that hopefully you are correct.

00:49:32.000 Now the reality is that more and more people are coming around.

00:49:36.000 And so if I look at the level of hostility that I faced 10 years ago versus today, it's night and day.

00:49:42.000 What was the first major backlash that you experienced?

00:49:47.000 From social scientists?

00:49:49.000 Yes.

00:49:49.000 I mean, having my papers desk rejected by editors.

00:49:53.000 So desk, are you familiar with that term?

00:49:55.000 Yes, but explain for people.

00:49:56.000 So that means basically when you send your paper to a scientific journal, usually the editor will look at your paper and say, okay, well, here are three reviewers that I think would be appropriate for this paper.

00:50:08.000 And then he sends it off, and then the process starts, and it goes back and forth for probably several years.

00:50:14.000 When he desk rejects this, he's basically saying that this paper is not worthy of even going out for review.

00:50:20.000 And so, you know, I would send all of these papers to these top journals, and the editor would write back to me, sorry, I'm not even sending it through the review process.

00:50:29.000 Do you remember what one of the original ones was, was the subject of?

00:50:34.000 Well, probably the first one was one where I was introducing the theoretical framework of how to apply evolutionary psychology in understanding marketing. 0.88

00:50:44.000 And usually the argument that I would receive, which is breathtakingly inane in its stupidity, is, well, evolutionary theory is just a bunch of just-so storytelling, right? 0.78

00:50:58.000 You just come up with these fanciful post-hoc stories, since obviously you're not conducting... 0.98

00:51:05.000 An experiment in a lab to demonstrate evolution.

00:51:08.000 And of course, that is so laughable because if that were true, how is it that astrophysicists study the origin of the universe that's 14 billion years ago, right?

00:51:17.000 They certainly don't conduct an experiment in the lab.

00:51:20.000 Yeah, to build their own stars.

00:51:22.000 To build their own stars, right?

00:51:23.000 But again, if you're very paradigmatically bound to manipulating something in the lab, Then somehow evolutionary theory seems epistemologically, in terms of the philosophy of science, it seems as though you're just waving your hand and telling stories,

00:51:39.000 post-hoc stories.

00:51:40.000 Now the reality is that that's exactly the opposite of what we do.

00:51:43.000 If anything, there is no intellectual idea that has received as much empirical support as evolution.

00:51:51.000 I mean, it is as clear as gravity.

00:51:54.000 Yet people somehow can't get around to understanding how you could explain something that happened hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago.

00:52:03.000 And so the original rejections were always, oh, but come on, we don't take things at faith here.

00:52:08.000 We need concrete evidence.

00:52:10.000 So that's how it all started.

00:52:12.000 So that was the first blowback.

00:52:14.000 Did you hesitate when you first experienced this?

00:52:18.000 Did you go, man, I'm going down a dark road?

00:52:20.000 Right.

00:52:20.000 No, because I, and that's a great question, because I think I was fortunate enough to have the personality for this endeavor.

00:52:29.000 In other words, it's not just that you had to have the brains to do what I was doing.

00:52:33.000 If I would suck my thumb, go into a fetal position and start crying every time somebody rejected me, rejected my work, then it wouldn't.

00:52:41.000 But because I was a fighter, because I was a high testosterone guy, then that only compelled me to come back and say, I'm going to prove these guys wrong.

00:52:49.000 But it delayed the process because I was kept out of many of the leading consumer behavior and marketing journals.

00:52:56.000 So I kind of went around them.

00:52:58.000 I published books that became bestsellers.

00:53:00.000 I published in medicine and economics and psychology.

00:53:03.000 And only recently have I tried to come back to the folks that I'm most trying to convince, and those are the consumer psychologists.

00:53:10.000 Now, luckily, I'm their friend, but for years I was really sort of at the periphery.

00:53:15.000 It's fascinating as well that the attitudes about these subjects have evolved and changed within science and within modern academia.

00:53:24.000 It's really interesting to see this sort of evolution of these ideas and this acceptance of ideas that didn't exist before, but along with The new craziness.

00:53:36.000 The new fat acceptance and all this other nonsense.

00:53:40.000 These new politically correct terms and this parasitic thinking that you so described so well.

00:53:47.000 This is the new threat to unbiased objective thinking.

00:53:52.000 Absolutely.

00:53:53.000 This desire to offend no one ever.

00:53:55.000 Absolutely.

00:53:56.000 Absolutely.

00:53:58.000 You know, the reality is that now there's a thing called...

00:54:01.000 Have you heard of trigger warnings?

00:54:03.000 Love it.

00:54:04.000 I love them.

00:54:05.000 My whole life's a trigger warning.

00:54:07.000 That's exactly what I said.

00:54:08.000 I'm going to put in my course outline, warning.

00:54:12.000 Life is a trigger warning.

00:54:14.000 That's it.

00:54:15.000 So, I mean, imagine that...

00:54:17.000 As a matter of fact, in my Wellesley talk that I mentioned earlier, I put up a list of suggested topics that these trigger warning folks were saying require trigger warnings.

00:54:30.000 It was literally everything.

00:54:32.000 The discussion of pregnancy, of sex, of disease, of war, of criminality, of mating, all of these things could potentially cause some distress to somebody And should therefore come with a trigger warning.

00:54:48.000 Now, for somebody who escaped Lebanon under immediate threat of execution, I look at that and I say, this is a decadent society in that if that's the things that worry people, they should really go spend a day in the neighborhoods where I grew up,

00:55:07.000 and then maybe they'd have a different perspective as to what they should be picketing against.

00:55:12.000 I agree entirely.

00:55:13.000 My thought is that people are just so used to this soft life of everything being really easy to achieve that they have never developed this understanding of, first of all, how fortunate we are to be living in this time and age,

00:55:32.000 to experience this easy life that we live in, but that we're really lucky.

00:55:37.000 We're really lucky.

00:55:39.000 To focus on a bunch of nonsense and to get carried away thinking about all these ultra-supersensitive notions and to dwell on them as if in some way you're going to make the world a better place by doing that. 0.79

00:55:54.000 It's nonsense. 0.95

00:55:55.000 It's preposterous. 0.92

00:55:57.000 Because they're posers, right?

00:55:59.000 It's a way to demonstrate that I care.

00:56:02.000 But in doing it with very little cost to me, it takes a lot more guts to stand up against Islam than to stand up against some hick, evolution-denying senator who's Republican. 0.89

00:56:14.000 So, for example, if I look at my Facebook friends, if I put up a post that is critical of the senator who is a redneck Republican... 0.82

00:56:25.000 I'll get from my academic colleagues 80 likes. 0.95

00:56:29.000 And it's some inane, silly thing. 0.80

00:56:31.000 But if I put some horrifying reality about 200,000 Syrians being butchered, they are so loud in their silence. 0.95

00:56:41.000 Because that's scary, right?

00:56:43.000 And so, for example, the Western feminists are very, very quick to chastise David Letterman if he makes a sexist joke or whatever it was to his intern. 1.00

00:56:53.000 That shows great courage.

00:56:55.000 But to speak against genital mutilation in the Islamic world or other parts of the world or all kinds of other injustices that women face, well, we should be quiet about that. 0.91

00:57:05.000 I mean, look at the Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

00:57:07.000 Are you familiar with that issue?

00:57:09.000 No.

00:57:09.000 Do you know who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is?

00:57:11.000 Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a woman who was born into Islam, who escaped an arranged marriage, moved to Netherlands, became a Dutch parliamentarian, and then was part of a documentary that was offensive to some Muslims, 0.92

00:57:28.000 and then she had to have protection for the rest of her life, now has moved to the United States. 1.00

00:57:33.000 And has spent pretty much her entire career fighting for the rights of women, not just Muslim women, women in general, but of course many Muslim women in those areas are mistreated.

00:57:43.000 So Brandeis University decides to bestow her, this is very recently, a couple of months ago, bestow her a, I think, maybe honorary doctorate or speech convocation, to speak at the convocation.

00:57:54.000 And then all of the professors Oh,

00:58:13.000 God.

00:58:15.000 So, you know, I mean, we're pretty much lost as a society if we can't identify who the heroes are and who is on the right side of each issue.

00:58:25.000 Not just that, but the educators are the ones that are having this issue.

00:58:28.000 The educators are the ones that are having a hard time recognizing who's on the right side of things.

00:58:33.000 I think there's one very important thing that you brought up, and that's the social aspect, the social gratification, the social reward aspect of supporting things that we all agree upon, like that these Hick senators are bad, 1.00

00:58:50.000 and then the scariness of Islam, the scariness of criticizing the Muslim world, and then this concept of Islamophobia.

00:59:02.000 Right.

00:59:11.000 Right.

00:59:26.000 And I'm not a nationalist. 0.61

00:59:28.000 I think it's all nonsense.

00:59:29.000 I really do.

00:59:30.000 I mean, I would love it if we could all understand each other.

00:59:32.000 I think it would make a lot more sense if we spoke one language so I could understand people in China.

00:59:37.000 But I don't feel about them any differently than I feel about a guy who lives down the street.

00:59:42.000 I try very hard to work on that.

00:59:44.000 So when I get this thing where people start identifying with one gender and one gender specifically, And there's another thing that men are doing where they're not only proclaiming themselves as a male feminist, but they're also saying that if they are unjustly accused of something,

01:00:04.000 that they would happily be unjustly accused of something if it could somehow or another prevent women from being persecuted.

01:00:11.000 What martyrs.

01:00:12.000 Isn't that amazing?

01:00:13.000 They're so cool and strong like that.

01:00:16.000 Well, I think it's, I don't know if you know, do you know the term identity politics?

01:00:19.000 Yes, I've heard the term.

01:00:21.000 So basically, you have sort of this balkanization of different identity groups, and there is what's called a poker identity game.

01:00:31.000 You know, which identity group has larger victimology and greater grievances?

01:00:37.000 And the top group that you really can't touch are people of the Muslim faith. 1.00

01:00:42.000 What about Islamic transgender male feminists? 0.99

01:00:46.000 That's the royal flush. 0.81

01:00:49.000 You're holding the royal flush right there. 1.00

01:00:51.000 You're a fucking... 1.00

01:00:52.000 Yeah, you can't be beat, man. 1.00

01:00:54.000 You got five jokers.

01:00:56.000 At my university, right now in Montreal, at one point I sat, precisely because people had a sense of some of the positions I held, they asked me to come in and sit on a Religious Accommodation Committee.

01:01:09.000 We're a secular university in a secular society, officially, as the official law.

01:01:15.000 So what does it mean to say that we're going to now enact A religious accommodation policy.

01:01:20.000 I mean, that's like saying, I am a virgin, but I'm pregnant.

01:01:23.000 I mean, the term can't make sense, right?

01:01:26.000 So my position was, I am equally non-pliant to anybody's religious beliefs.

01:01:33.000 If Jews come to my class and say, we want to do Yom Kippur, blah, blah, blah, well, I'm Jewish, and I'm still going to come to the lecture. 0.91

01:01:41.000 But now, if Muslims come and say, we want to take Hajj for three weeks at Mecca, so we won't be showing up to your class for three weeks, Well, I'm equally unreceptive to that idea. 0.86

01:01:51.000 Well, it seemed like most people were pretty happy with my general position as long as it didn't apply to this one particular group.

01:01:58.000 Now, that's suicidal, right?

01:02:00.000 That can't be because that's already institutionalizing the fact that people are not all equal.

01:02:06.000 Some people deserve more accommodations than others.

01:02:11.000 That's dangerous, right?

01:02:13.000 So in the US, freedom of religion also includes, as you know, I mean, it's a cliche, freedom from religion.

01:02:19.000 Be religious. 0.80

01:02:20.000 Just don't put it in my face.

01:02:21.000 But I think in our desperate desire to constantly accommodate people, we're going down the wrong path.

01:02:26.000 But not just constantly accommodate people, but accommodate people that are perceived to have been persecuted only.

01:02:33.000 Not accommodate people that have a contrary point of view.

01:02:37.000 Not debate them or look at them all objectively.

01:02:40.000 True.

01:02:40.000 And consider all the various possibilities.

01:02:42.000 Have we been incorrect in our thinking?

01:02:44.000 Is this a possibility?

01:02:45.000 Like the woman that you were talking about from Brandeis.

01:02:48.000 I mean, that's unbelievably shocking for someone who has gone through something so horrifying.

01:02:53.000 To be escaping, running for their life, really, escaping to America, and then to be called an Islamophobe.

01:03:00.000 That's right.

01:03:00.000 And as you said, who is spearheading that?

01:03:03.000 The professors.

01:03:05.000 And by the way, Brandeis University, as you may know, was founded by a liberal, well, by Brandeis, who was trying to kind of found an institution that That would be open to all, that would be pluralistic precisely because of some of the anti-Semitism that Jewish students would have faced at some of the sort of Northeastern schools.

01:03:25.000 And so the school is founded on these principles and then at first opportunity you violate everything that you stand for.

01:03:31.000 Is there any movement to try to change this?

01:03:33.000 Is there any discussion to try to illuminate this sort of real issue with academia?

01:03:40.000 Well, if I can be modest, I think it's guys like me who are really in the wilderness who try to come out of the woodworks and have the courage and the big...

01:03:52.000 I have testicles to try to do that, but I think most people have herd instincts. 0.98

01:03:56.000 But even if you say that, you have the testicles to do this? 0.99

01:03:59.000 How dare you? 1.00

01:03:59.000 You can't do this with ovaries? 1.00

01:04:01.000 Is that what you're saying?

01:04:03.000 More patriarchy! 1.00

01:04:04.000 I apologize for having said that I have testicles. 0.99

01:04:07.000 No. 0.99

01:04:07.000 No, it's an expression. 0.99

01:04:09.000 It's courage. 0.99

01:04:09.000 Women have balls, too. 0.99

01:04:10.000 I know a lot of chicks with balls, you know, if you look at it that way. 1.00

01:04:13.000 But it's unfortunate that a woman has to hear that and go, oh, well, great, it's associated with male gender. 1.00

01:04:18.000 Well, that's true, but if a guy's a great guy, oh, that guy's the tits. 1.00

01:04:22.000 I mean, that is something that people say, too. 0.99

01:04:24.000 Like, my friend Steve, he says everything is good, he calls titties. 0.93

01:04:28.000 Like, oh, that is a titties movie, man.

01:04:30.000 You know, I used to be a competitive soccer player, and... 0.95

01:04:35.000 The kind of trash talking that would happen, as you would know, I mean, you're an athlete.

01:04:42.000 It's astounding, the things that would be said. 0.99

01:04:44.000 For example, calling you some homophobic slur name.

01:04:48.000 That's a go-to move. 0.86

01:04:49.000 Or calling you...

01:04:51.000 I remember at one point I played in a league called the Black League, where there were only two non-black guys.

01:04:56.000 I was one of them. 1.00

01:04:58.000 If somebody would tackle me, say, stop whining, get up, white bitch. 1.00

01:05:04.000 Usually the way I fought that is I'd say, I'm not going to... 1.00

01:05:10.000 Get by this guy next time around, and I'm going to score a goal.

01:05:13.000 I didn't kind of curl into a fetal position and start crying.

01:05:16.000 Well, today, they are, I mean, facetiously, they are commissars standing around the field making sure that nobody utters any of these slur words because then you could be taken to a hate speech code tribunal, right?

01:05:29.000 I mean, in Canada, we have hate speech laws.

01:05:32.000 I mean, how could that be?

01:05:33.000 Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that we should all be Insulting one another.

01:05:36.000 And of course we should all be kind and gentle to each other. 0.99

01:05:39.000 But the idea that if you tell me, white bitch, I could actually impose upon you to go to a hate speech tribunal is astounding. 1.00

01:05:48.000 I mean, what's freedom of speech? 1.00

01:05:49.000 I mean, freedom of speech is the right to also be an asshole, correct? 1.00

01:05:53.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:05:54.000 But unfortunately now everything is sanitized.

01:05:56.000 Everything is, you know, just... 1.00

01:05:58.000 Well, freedom of speech is the right to be an asshole, but in other terms, freedom of speech, on the other hand, in response to your being an asshole, is the right to ostracize you. 1.00

01:06:08.000 It's the right to just get you out of social groups, and that's how you recognize assholes. 1.00

01:06:12.000 Exactly. 0.99

01:06:13.000 But when you...

01:06:14.000 Sanitize the world and remove half the language and put trigger warnings out for everything that everybody says, it's very difficult to get to the heart of what someone's trying to communicate.

01:06:23.000 When we're making mouth noises, trying to express our thoughts, and we're limited in such an amazing way by so many different forms of expression.

01:06:33.000 Here's a great example that's happening all over the West and certainly in Canada and the US. Try to give a lecture or invite somebody either that has a pro-Israel position or an anti-Islam position and see what happens.

01:06:47.000 Go to UC Irvine and see what happens.

01:06:49.000 The former ambassador of Israel tried to come and give a lecture.

01:06:55.000 It wasn't an incendiary thing.

01:06:57.000 He wasn't going to be saying some horribly controversial things.

01:07:01.000 And yet they tried to shut him down.

01:07:03.000 Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister of Israel, was shut down at my university.

01:07:10.000 Wow!

01:07:11.000 At Concordia University in Montreal, the prime minister of a democratically elected government Our only supposed true ally in the Middle East was unable to speak because there was great threat of danger.

01:07:26.000 Now that's astonishingly dangerous.

01:07:29.000 If that guy can't speak, probably you and I are not going to have much of a voice.

01:07:35.000 There was a university in Toronto.

01:07:37.000 I forget which one but there was a speech by a guy who was considered to be a men's rights advocate with the insult as they call them MRAs and he had written a book and he was giving the speech And these feminists were protesting.

01:07:52.000 I think York University.

01:07:53.000 Was it York?

01:07:54.000 I think it was York.

01:07:54.000 And violent opposition.

01:07:57.000 And what they had said that he said and what he actually said, it was so completely diametrically...

01:08:04.000 I mean, it was so incorrect that it was almost like they had never read what he had said.

01:08:09.000 They had just decided that this guy was a target because he was an example.

01:08:13.000 He was a figurehead of the patriarchy.

01:08:15.000 And so these people were showing up for these lectures.

01:08:18.000 Look, like I said, I read websites that I don't agree with.

01:08:22.000 I watch Republican debates.

01:08:26.000 I watch these bizarre Republican Fox News talk shows where they have these insane views of the world.

01:08:34.000 I don't agree with them.

01:08:35.000 I watch it because I'm fascinated. 0.93

01:08:37.000 I watch it because I want to know what this knucklehead thinks about God and climate change. 0.89

01:08:42.000 God has a great sense of humor.

01:08:44.000 We played a video the other day of a woman who's running for Congress. 1.00

01:08:49.000 She's a crazy bitch. 1.00

01:08:50.000 She said, I can prove there's no global warming with a simple tool, a thermometer. 1.00

01:08:56.000 And she pulls it out.

01:08:57.000 I'm fascinated by that lady. 1.00

01:08:59.000 I will watch that lady talk. 1.00

01:09:00.000 It doesn't mean I agree with her. 1.00

01:09:02.000 So these feminists, these radical feminists, as it were, whenever you're radical anything, you're usually an idiot. 1.00

01:09:08.000 But these radical feminists were keeping people from attending this. 1.00

01:09:12.000 Not just the people that were speaking.

01:09:15.000 They weren't protesting the people that were speaking.

01:09:18.000 They were screaming and yelling at the people that were trying to go in to listen to this person talk.

01:09:22.000 Agree or disagree.

01:09:23.000 The idea that you are...

01:09:25.000 Trying to oppose or trying to stop, you're in opposition of a person listening to a contrary point of view.

01:09:32.000 That's amazing.

01:09:34.000 Very dangerous.

01:09:35.000 Very dangerous.

01:09:36.000 I wrote an article on my Psychology Today blog maybe about two years ago where this wasn't my study.

01:09:41.000 I was simply summarizing somebody else's work.

01:09:45.000 What he had basically done, or I think there were several researchers, they had looked at the political leanings of professors at American universities, whether they're Democrat or Republican, and they actually then broke it down by departments.

01:10:01.000 So, for example, what would be the Democrat versus Republican ratio in sociology versus in physics?

01:10:07.000 What they found is that I think if I'm going on memory, I think that the ratio is about 5 to 1 Democrat to Republican.

01:10:16.000 And in some departments, most notably, for example, in the humanities and sociology and so on, it was 44 to 1. Now, I didn't present this as this is good or this is bad, but I certainly was trying to make the point that on some issues,

01:10:31.000 that's not a good idea.

01:10:33.000 For example, what should be fiscal policy?

01:10:37.000 What should be our position regarding immigration?

01:10:40.000 What is the position regarding the death penalty?

01:10:42.000 These are not clear sort of scientifically, right?

01:10:45.000 I mean, it depends.

01:10:47.000 And to have a sanitized vehicle The only thing that protects me in such situations is that being Canadian,

01:11:03.000 I could say these things without appearing as though I have a dog in the fight.

01:11:08.000 Hey, I'm not Democrat.

01:11:08.000 I'm not Republican.

01:11:09.000 I'm Canadian.

01:11:10.000 So I must be unbiased.

01:11:12.000 And so in a sense, they'll give me a bit of a get out of jail card because it doesn't appear as though I'm fighting for one or the other.

01:11:19.000 But still, the blowback was astonishing because how dare I point to this as though it were a bad thing?

01:11:25.000 I mean, everybody knows that every Democrat is perfect on everything. 1.00

01:11:29.000 And every Republican is an idiot, you know, toothless, evolution-denying buffoon. 1.00

01:11:35.000 And that strikes me as astonishing from otherwise intelligent people. 1.00

01:11:38.000 The world is more nuanced, right?

01:11:40.000 There are many issues on which I agree with Democrats as a Canadian.

01:11:43.000 There are a few issues on which I actually agree more with Republicans.

01:11:47.000 And so I kind of pick and choose my battles.

01:11:49.000 But that's not how it is in academia.

01:11:52.000 Well, in their defense, though, the points that are taken by the Republicans so often are, they're really, if you had to choose, like, one side that's paying attention to science and one side that's paying attention to religion,

01:12:07.000 it's pretty clear.

01:12:08.000 Well, listen, and I'm an evolutionist, so obviously when it's going to come on that issue, I'm going to be a lot more with the Democrats than all the, but, for example, my position, you may disagree, I hope you don't kick me out of here.

01:12:19.000 I will never kick you out of here.

01:12:20.000 You're very kind. 1.00

01:12:21.000 The death penalty. 0.99

01:12:23.000 I think that if you are caught having raped and killed 10 children and we've got the DNA of you in the 10 children, it's incontrovertible that you are guilty. 0.99

01:12:34.000 I don't see it as a terrible moral issue that we could potentially discuss the possibility of executing you. 0.97

01:12:43.000 As a matter of fact, I think that in some cases, the amount of rights that we give to otherwise homeless Horrifying monsters, that itself is barbaric.

01:12:50.000 So on that dimension, I'm likely to be much more, quote, And I am as well.

01:12:56.000 I agree with you 100%.

01:12:57.000 So nuanced thinking is a mark of somebody who kind of has a sense of what the world looks like.

01:13:03.000 Yeah, and I think that that's also a mark of someone who doesn't have a dog in the fight, as you said before.

01:13:08.000 I think when you look at the world, there's a lot of variables that must be taken into consideration.

01:13:14.000 As soon as you deny those variables because you have a specific stance, it's a predetermined... 0.94

01:13:19.000 Pattern of thinking that you've aligned yourself with I'm on the left and as a Democrat like I was having a conversation with someone the other day and they were talking about Upcoming elections and they said if we lose the house if we lose like he's a fucking comedian He's a comedian that I'm talking to and he's talking about the Democrats and he's on team we and I'm like wow I'm a hundred percent for the death penalty in term in like a Ted Bundy type character some monster and But my problem with it, 0.92

01:13:48.000 my number one problem with it, is that I don't believe that the system is a good system.

01:13:54.000 I don't believe it's infallible.

01:13:57.000 I think there's a lot of issues when it comes to people who are prosecutors who deny evidence, withhold evidence.

01:14:04.000 They know that they're wrong and they still arrest people.

01:14:08.000 They still prosecute people.

01:14:10.000 There's been so many instances of that.

01:14:11.000 I can't trust their judgment.

01:14:13.000 I can't trust.

01:14:14.000 There was a video the other day of a man who was a police officer pulling some woman.

01:14:18.000 She was trying to resist.

01:14:20.000 He threw her to the ground and he's beating her, punching her in the face in Los Angeles.

01:14:25.000 And as long as that is a part of our legal system, this guy...

01:14:28.000 I mean, she wasn't fighting back.

01:14:30.000 He wasn't fighting for his life.

01:14:32.000 She was resisting... 0.68

01:14:33.000 I don't know what the circumstances were, but whatever I know is if that is the only way you can handle that woman, you shouldn't be a police officer. 0.99

01:14:40.000 And that's ridiculous. 0.81

01:14:40.000 As long as that exists, that's part of our legal system. 0.81

01:14:44.000 That's just a human flaw.

01:14:45.000 That exists on all levels.

01:14:47.000 That'll exist as far as a police officer who's on the street.

01:14:50.000 That'll exist as far as a prosecutor, as a judge, a person running a prison.

01:14:56.000 There's going to be human flaws in the entire system.

01:14:59.000 And that's the only reason why I hesitate as far as...

01:15:02.000 I hear you.

01:15:03.000 But in that sense, yeah, I'm way more Republican than I am Democrat.

01:15:06.000 I tell you a story about sort of police misconduct.

01:15:11.000 Many years ago, I had met a guy who had served as a public defender in the L.A. County system.

01:15:20.000 And as we were chatting, I was very interested in all the stuff that he had to say.

01:15:23.000 He said to me, one advice I could give you is don't ever do anything in California that would have you end up in L.A. County jail.

01:15:31.000 I said, oh, why is that?

01:15:33.000 I said, give me an example of why would somebody like me?

01:15:35.000 He goes, let's suppose you're a recidivist, drink-and-drive kind of guy, and the cops are pissed off at you.

01:15:42.000 They'll take you to the jail, they'll throw you with all the gangbangers, and they'll simply scream out, fresh fish out of water.

01:15:48.000 That's exactly the term that he used, which basically is the code word for, have at him, boys, and we won't hear his screams.

01:15:58.000 And I remember, this was in the late 80s, And subsequently, I actually met the son of this guy, coincidentally, and later found out that that was his father.

01:16:09.000 He was an academic also.

01:16:11.000 But anyway, so that's an example of misconduct where, you know, if you piss off these cops, they could do all sorts of things to you that can have some profound consequences on your body.

01:16:21.000 Yeah, I just want to state for the record, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement.

01:16:24.000 Always have been.

01:16:25.000 One bad cop does not.

01:16:27.000 Cops make bad.

01:16:28.000 Make all cops bad.

01:16:30.000 It's humans.

01:16:31.000 We're flawed.

01:16:32.000 You know, not every doctor is a good person.

01:16:35.000 I mean, I have a friend who used to work when he was younger.

01:16:37.000 He worked at a resort.

01:16:39.000 And he said he would overhear these doctors, very specifically remember, overhearing these doctors bragging about talking this guy into a surgery department.

01:16:47.000 And about how he's going to buy a car now.

01:16:50.000 You know, like, that's a new whatever it was, you know, Porsche, whatever.

01:16:54.000 For me, you know, he was bragging about talking to this guy into surgery.

01:16:58.000 Incredible.

01:16:59.000 Yeah, I mean, and that's real.

01:17:01.000 That does happen.

01:17:02.000 Sure.

01:17:02.000 You know, they're...

01:17:04.000 There's bad people in all walks of life, and I think that is my number one, my only, really, resistance to something like the death penalty.

01:17:12.000 But when you look at the recidivism rates for child rapists, it's just through the roof.

01:17:17.000 It's crazy.

01:17:18.000 I don't know if you've seen the stat, and I can't cite who came up with it, but apparently when you catch a pedophile, he's on average committed 100 transgressions prior to you catching him for the first time.

01:17:32.000 So why does this guy benefit from all of our legals?

01:17:38.000 I mean, if you've done this stuff so many times, why do we have to be so humane?

01:17:45.000 I would actually argue it's inhumane to be so humane to this guy.

01:17:48.000 And I wrote an article on Psychology Today where I was talking about...

01:17:52.000 I don't know if you remember the case with these two guys in Connecticut who did a home invasion.

01:17:58.000 And they raped the girls and the mother and set the house on fire, beat the father, but he survived and so on.

01:18:05.000 And so it was coming up to their death penalty.

01:18:08.000 And so as a tribute to that case, I wrote an article on my Psychology Today blog, which I think I titled, Is the Death Penalty Barbaric?

01:18:16.000 And I was arguing that for these kinds of guys, no, it's not.

01:18:19.000 Well, you should have seen my progressive, enlightened, cafe-sipping academic colleagues Scoff at my barbarism, right?

01:18:28.000 I mean, what kind of hick must I be to actually even hold those sentiments?

01:18:32.000 Well, I got news for you, man. 0.99

01:18:33.000 If it comes between putting me in jail for the rest of my life in some cage where I have to be constantly in fear of men raping me and stabbing me with toothbrushes that they've sharpened in knives, I'll take death. 0.99

01:18:43.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.97

01:18:43.000 I think we should all. 0.97

01:18:45.000 If there's no possible, reasonable hope for parole, the idea of keeping someone in a jail to rot for the rest of their life is probably more suffering.

01:18:53.000 More cruel, exactly.

01:18:54.000 Yeah.

01:18:54.000 It's just bizarre.

01:18:56.000 The idea that that's somehow or another humane is so crazy.

01:19:01.000 And a lot of them, by the way, solitary confinement, which is probably one of the worst things that you could do to a person.

01:19:07.000 Well, especially a social analyst such as us.

01:19:09.000 Well, a person.

01:19:10.000 People are weird.

01:19:11.000 We need to be connected so much, and one of the worst punishments you could do is just leave us alone.

01:19:16.000 While we're in prison...

01:19:18.000 Surrounded by murderers, rapists, thieves, thugs, drug dealers, the worst thing they can do is put you by yourself.

01:19:26.000 That's exactly right. 0.84

01:19:27.000 Amazing.

01:19:28.000 There's a guy, I don't remember his name, a Harvard professor who had studied, you know, what makes people healthy for something like 60 years.

01:19:37.000 And I think the bottom line, if I'm paraphrasing him, is that people need social relationships to be healthy.

01:19:44.000 That's sort of the number one thing that It maintains your health, psychological and physiological.

01:19:49.000 And happy social relationships too.

01:19:52.000 I mean, everyone that I know that has these horrible relationships with either boyfriends and girlfriends or with their parents or with their job, they seem to carry those on all the time.

01:20:04.000 It becomes almost a part of the norm of relationships.

01:20:07.000 But the people that I know that have Healthy relationships with their boyfriends and girlfriends or wives and husbands.

01:20:13.000 Healthy relationships with their children.

01:20:15.000 Healthy relationships with their friends.

01:20:16.000 Those are the happiest people I know.

01:20:18.000 You can foster that and you can somehow or another generate this sort of beautiful environment around the closest people to you.

01:20:27.000 You'll have a much better life.

01:20:28.000 It's just that simple.

01:20:29.000 And by the way, evolutionary psychologists study all these kinds of things.

01:20:33.000 Why is it that we would jump into a river to save two brothers?

01:20:37.000 Or better yet, why would we jump into a river to save a stranger?

01:20:40.000 And it boils down to the fact that it's tit for tat, right?

01:20:45.000 It's what's called reciprocal altruism.

01:20:47.000 Are you familiar with this notion?

01:20:50.000 You would hope that someone would do that for you someday.

01:20:52.000 Exactly.

01:20:53.000 And so the idea that You know, as you said, that it's a real punishment to put people in confinement is bore out by evolutionary theory.

01:21:02.000 My friend Remy jumped into a river to save a woman.

01:21:05.000 She was in a canoe.

01:21:07.000 The canoe flipped over.

01:21:08.000 Her husband drowned.

01:21:09.000 The husband's body floated face first past him and the woman was screaming, help me.

01:21:14.000 And he saw her in the river and he just dove in.

01:21:17.000 And as lucky, he's in incredible shape and he's an outdoorsman.

01:21:20.000 He's there.

01:21:21.000 He's a very good athlete, very good swimmer.

01:21:24.000 He's got real good endurance.

01:21:25.000 So he got to death's door, like literally was on death's door, thought it was over, thought he's not going to make it out of here.

01:21:32.000 Like he just sacrificed his life to try to save this woman and then rescued her.

01:21:36.000 They figured out their way to shore.

01:21:38.000 But when he describes the feeling and the experience, it was almost beyond his control.

01:21:43.000 He saw this woman.

01:21:45.000 It was only him.

01:21:46.000 There was no one else there.

01:21:47.000 He had to do it and just jumped in.

01:21:50.000 Well, there's this thing, speaking of guys who are in the business of doing heroic acts, you've heard of the fireman fantasy.

01:21:57.000 I mean, the fact that women find guys, well, firemen, to be very attractive.

01:22:02.000 And it actually turns out that there was a study that was done that actually shows this to be the case.

01:22:06.000 And I discussed this in one of my articles on Psychology Today.

01:22:09.000 If you have a guy approach women either wearing a fireman's suit or not, his chances of getting her phone number increases quite substantially if he is wearing a fireman.

01:22:21.000 How do they know this?

01:22:22.000 Did they do a study?

01:22:23.000 They actually got a guy to wear a fireman's outfit?

01:22:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:22:26.000 But did they have the same guy not wear the fireman's outfit?

01:22:29.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:22:29.000 With the same approach and the same...

01:22:31.000 Same words, same scripts, same everything.

01:22:34.000 It's called the field experiment.

01:22:35.000 In one version, you approach women at a cafe wearing the stuff, and in another version, you don't.

01:22:40.000 The guy who actually did that research is a French psychologist.

01:22:44.000 His name is Nicolas Guéguin, and I've actually covered a few of his studies on my website.

01:22:50.000 My most read article ever, over maybe three, four hundred thousand readers, It's one of his studies where I was simply, because we're going to talk about the blowback issue now and here again.

01:23:03.000 It was a study where he looked at the likelihood of women being picked up as hitchhikers as a function of their breast size.

01:23:12.000 So he actually had the same woman And they, you know, artificially manipulated her breast size, and on different days she would stand there, and of course it turned out that men were much more likely to pick up the woman if she had, the same woman,

01:23:27.000 if she had bigger breast size. 1.00

01:23:28.000 So I just summarized that study, put it up, and then I remember I'd gone on vacation, came back from vacation, found out that it had completely gone viral, but I had a million hate mail Not just from readers, but from fellow Psychology Today bloggers who were arguing that I was peddling pornography.

01:23:48.000 Because I had a picture as the teaser image for that article.

01:23:51.000 I had a photo of a woman sitting in a passenger seat with large breasts. 1.00

01:23:56.000 Well, it seemed appropriate for the topic given that that's what the topic of the study was.

01:24:00.000 But by putting that image, I was objectifying women. 0.99

01:24:04.000 I was treating them as mere sex objects. 0.94

01:24:07.000 And so even though I had nothing to do with the study and I was simply summarizing somebody else's work, I was a horrifying pornographic peddler. 0.93

01:24:15.000 Isn't it funny that just a photograph of a woman with large breasts is considered pornographic? 0.83

01:24:20.000 But now listen to this. 0.97

01:24:21.000 So then I've also written articles on Psychology Today where I talk about all kinds of issues dealing with penis size. 0.99

01:24:27.000 So do women want a guy with a bigger penis? 1.00

01:24:29.000 Are they more likely to have orgasm if he's got a bigger penis? 1.00

01:24:32.000 If you're in a gay relationship, man-man, are you likely to be top or bottom as a function of your penis size? 1.00

01:24:41.000 That study has been done by science. 0.99

01:24:42.000 And so for those articles, I put sexy images of men.

01:24:48.000 So then I wrote to each of those people who had written The Hate Man.

01:24:52.000 I said... 0.57

01:24:53.000 Well, in all fairness, you now have to write an equally hateful thing because I am also sexually exploiting men's bodies.

01:25:01.000 Of course, they went away and never came back.

01:25:04.000 Yeah, well, the idea being that women are more suppressed than men, it's not equal, but it is equal. 0.91

01:25:11.000 Right.

01:25:11.000 Yeah, it's very tricky.

01:25:13.000 But the idea that a woman with big breasts sitting there and passed her seat of a car could somehow or another be pornographic is ridiculous. 1.00

01:25:20.000 Women have big breasts. 1.00

01:25:21.000 Some of them, they exist. 1.00

01:25:22.000 Some men have big penises. 1.00

01:25:23.000 It's all real stuff. 0.99

01:25:25.000 Some people have two eyes.

01:25:27.000 Some people have noses.

01:25:28.000 Interestingly, some of these psychologists, these are psychologists, were saying, why do you write about these issues of sexuality?

01:25:34.000 What does that have to do with psychology?

01:25:37.000 So that psychologists could actually argue that issues dealing with sexuality were outside the purview of psychology, that's breathtaking. 1.00

01:25:47.000 Well, it's stupid. 1.00

01:25:48.000 It's really, it's scary stupid because it's denying reality in order to fit with your ideology. 1.00

01:25:56.000 This ideology of politically correct thinking. 1.00

01:25:58.000 And I don't like the term politically correct.

01:26:01.000 I don't like it because it's been sort of overrun and overused and it's kind of like it's a beaten term.

01:26:07.000 But it's the appropriate one just to convey the idea.

01:26:12.000 Right.

01:26:14.000 It's so prevalent.

01:26:15.000 It's so prevalent.

01:26:16.000 And the fact that it's so prevalent amongst academics is really disturbing to me.

01:26:21.000 Yeah, I'm with you.

01:26:22.000 Have you had many other academics on the show?

01:26:25.000 Yeah, quite a few.

01:26:26.000 And how are they like in terms of their general positions?

01:26:30.000 Well, many of them share your points of view.

01:26:34.000 Oh, really?

01:26:34.000 Yeah, luckily.

01:26:35.000 Now, is it just that you happen to...

01:26:37.000 To gravitate towards guys that you would think that already would sort of not be these little wimpy guys?

01:26:42.000 Or, I mean, how come it turns out that they're all sharing...

01:26:46.000 Because we're certainly in the minority in academia, so how...

01:26:48.000 Those are the only ones I'm interested in talking to, I guess.

01:26:51.000 I mean, I'm actually quite fascinated in talking...

01:26:53.000 I would love to talk to some ardent male feminist who shares these Islamophobic, hating ideas, like hating Islamophobia and hating male patriarchy. 1.00

01:27:03.000 I'll send you some names. 0.50

01:27:05.000 But the problem is, you know, it would get ugly somewhere along the line.

01:27:08.000 You know, I'm sure one of us would resort to insults.

01:27:12.000 Not, I wouldn't be, I mean, I wouldn't, but I am utterly fascinated by ideology.

01:27:18.000 Ideologies that I support or do not support.

01:27:21.000 Right.

01:27:21.000 You know, all of them.

01:27:22.000 I mean, I'm fascinated by the Dalai Lama.

01:27:25.000 I'm fascinated by how many people take a guy who only wears orange robes seriously.

01:27:29.000 Like, come on. 0.99

01:27:30.000 Do you really think God gives a fuck what clothes you wear? 1.00

01:27:32.000 Is he staying warm in that outfit? 1.00

01:27:34.000 He's no different than that fucking Phil Robertson guy that's from Duck Dynasty who always wears camo. 1.00

01:27:39.000 He's wearing a goddamn outfit. 0.99

01:27:41.000 And by that outfit, you recognize that, oh, he's a man of peace and of enlightened thinking. 1.00

01:27:46.000 No, he's a silly man who wears orange who doesn't have sex, okay? 1.00

01:27:50.000 And why does he not have sex? 1.00

01:27:51.000 Because he has an ideology.

01:27:53.000 This ideology tells him that he's a holy man from birth. 0.97

01:27:57.000 And if you don't think that's fucking ridiculous because he's friends with Sharon Stone, you and I have nothing to talk about. 0.98

01:28:02.000 Oh, he's buddies with Richard Gere. 0.99

01:28:04.000 He must be holy. 1.00

01:28:05.000 Get the fuck out of here, man. 0.99

01:28:07.000 You know, it's funny you talk about these Hollywood types. 1.00

01:28:09.000 I wrote an article, which one of those really popular ones on Psychology Today, where I was talking about the narcissism and grandiosity of celebrities.

01:28:22.000 Madonna, because of her Kabbalah juice... 1.00

01:28:25.000 She says that the radiation problem in some lake in Ukraine could be resolved by putting some Kabbalah juice on it.

01:28:33.000 What?

01:28:34.000 She's really astounded.

01:28:35.000 Come on.

01:28:36.000 Wait a minute.

01:28:37.000 What's Kabbalah juice?

01:28:38.000 I don't know.

01:28:39.000 Some Kabbalah holy water.

01:28:40.000 I don't know what it is.

01:28:41.000 I don't want to help her in any way by bringing this up anymore.

01:28:45.000 Gwyneth Paltrow had some other thing about beauty.

01:28:49.000 The autism girl I've written about.

01:28:53.000 Oh, Jenny McCarthy. 0.97

01:28:53.000 Jenny McCarthy. 0.97

01:28:54.000 The autism girl.

01:28:56.000 Was shocked that the NIH, the National Institute of Health, was not taking her scientific research seriously, demonstrating that that's what...

01:29:06.000 Is she a scientist?

01:29:08.000 No.

01:29:08.000 She has research?

01:29:09.000 I think she must have played once at some point.

01:29:11.000 No, but seriously, and what I argue there is that You know, if you're walking all day with yes-men catering to each of your whims, you actually live in a world where you truly start thinking that you're a deity.

01:29:27.000 I mean, you really did save the world.

01:29:28.000 I'm Tom Cruise and I saved the world in Mission Impossible, whatever.

01:29:32.000 And therefore, it is perfectly reasonable that I have something profound to say about everything.

01:29:37.000 Right?

01:29:38.000 Therefore, Tom Cruise says that there is no such thing as psychiatric illnesses.

01:29:43.000 You just have to do exercise and vitamins.

01:29:46.000 And that we don't take that seriously is really an affront to him.

01:29:50.000 And so I had written an article where I was saying that it's really astounding the type of narcissism that these folks...

01:29:56.000 And I argued that in part it comes from a form of guilt.

01:30:02.000 That deep in the recesses of their bedrooms when they turn off the lights, many of them actually know that they are frauds that are not really deserving of all of the perks that they've received.

01:30:12.000 And so one of the ways that maybe I could fix that is by demonstrating that I'm much more than a mere actor.

01:30:18.000 I'm really helping in Darfur.

01:30:20.000 I'm really helping solve the radiation problem in the Ukraine and so on and so forth.

01:30:25.000 Because then I seem as though maybe I am more worthy of all the accolades that are being bestowed upon me.

01:30:31.000 That's a very fascinating way of looking at it, and I think you probably are onto something there.

01:30:35.000 I think the knowledge and the understanding that they're frauds, the deep-seated knowledge, whether they avoid it and deny it or not, there's a lot of people that are horrible people that are involved in charitable organizations.

01:30:50.000 And one of the reasons being is to sort of show that they...

01:30:54.000 Exactly.

01:30:55.000 There's a guy who's a pretty blatant plagiarist who's involved in some pretty interesting charities.

01:31:03.000 Good charities.

01:31:04.000 Very good charities.

01:31:05.000 But I had a conversation with someone about it, and they were talking about, hey, you know what?

01:31:09.000 He does so much good for this organization, I don't care.

01:31:13.000 I go, do you understand that that's probably why he does that?

01:31:16.000 Exactly. 0.99

01:31:16.000 Like, the guy's a complete sociopath. 0.99

01:31:18.000 He's fucked over his friends, he's stolen their work, and passed it off as his own, yet he supports firefighters. 1.00

01:31:25.000 Do you not understand that that's what's going on there? 0.99

01:31:27.000 I mean, he's pretty obvious.

01:31:29.000 If you listen to him talk for any long period of time, there's something wrong.

01:31:32.000 There's like some connections inside the mind that are not being made, and he's had a strategy.

01:31:37.000 And the strategy to avoid criticism is to show charitable work.

01:31:40.000 Like Lance Armstrong, whenever he was confronted about his drug use, he'd always talk about how much he's doing for cancer.

01:31:46.000 For cancer research.

01:31:47.000 That was his whole thing.

01:31:48.000 Despite the fact that he'd sued people that had claimed that their lives had been affected by his drug use, that people that they love had been drug tested, and that they lost their entire career,

01:32:04.000 and that they were aligned with Lance Armstrong, did drugs with Lance Armstrong.

01:32:08.000 Lance Armstrong would sue these people.

01:32:10.000 And then finally came out and told the truth and passed off his organization to other people. 1.00

01:32:15.000 Now he's a fucking broken man. 1.00

01:32:18.000 Rightly so. 1.00

01:32:19.000 Because he's a goddamn sociopath. 1.00

01:32:20.000 But this instance, or this insistence rather, of being a part of a charitable organization and being the figurehead. 1.00

01:32:27.000 Not just silently.

01:32:30.000 I'm a big fan of not talking about charities that I contribute to.

01:32:35.000 I don't like to.

01:32:35.000 Because I think there's something sneaky about...

01:32:38.000 It's almost like it...

01:32:40.000 Like, if you give $1,000 to a charity, but then you let everybody know, hey, I just gave $1,000 to a charity.

01:32:45.000 I talk about that in my books.

01:32:46.000 Let me tell you.

01:32:47.000 So there's something...

01:32:48.000 Do you know who Maimonides is?

01:32:50.000 An old Jewish philosopher from the 12th century.

01:32:53.000 He's a very, very important guy in Jewish moral philosophy.

01:32:56.000 He talked about eight levels of tzedakah.

01:32:59.000 Tzedakah is charity, giving, in terms of the purity of the act.

01:33:05.000 The most pure form of tzedakah is where the altruist and the recipient of the altruism don't know of one another.

01:33:13.000 And he said this a thousand years ago where he had no evolutionary training, but I then package it as an evolutionary argument.

01:33:20.000 Because there's great social signaling rewards that come from you writing the Joe Rogan Cancer Award, right?

01:33:28.000 Yes!

01:33:30.000 Why do the upper uppers don't drive Maseratis? 0.99

01:33:34.000 Because everybody in their circle can also buy a Maserati.

01:33:37.000 So they actually drive pretty, oftentimes pretty, you know, cheapish cars because that's not going to be a very honest signal of my true value because everybody in my social group can imitate it.

01:33:47.000 But if I can give a hundred million dollars to the so-and-so cancer or buy a hundred million dollar painting that a two-year-old could have otherwise painted, boy, that's an honest signal of my quality, right?

01:33:58.000 And so I actually talk about this exact idea of not advertising your generosity.

01:34:05.000 Yeah, I call it happiness bombs when I leave a big tip at a restaurant and I get out of there before the waiter can see what the tip is.

01:34:11.000 Oh, that's nice.

01:34:11.000 I like to do that.

01:34:12.000 I like to leave big tips and then run! 1.00

01:34:14.000 Get the fuck out of there. 1.00

01:34:14.000 I don't want to see that person. 1.00

01:34:16.000 I say thank you to them on the way out the door, but I don't want them to see the tip and then thank me back because it almost like...

01:34:22.000 It takes away from it.

01:34:23.000 Like I said, if someone donates $1,000 but then tells the world they donated $1,000, I think you owe another $1,000.

01:34:30.000 You owe a silent $1,000.

01:34:32.000 You must know the show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

01:34:35.000 Yes.

01:34:36.000 So there is an episode on Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David is at some function with Ted Danson.

01:34:43.000 They both gave anonymous donations.

01:34:46.000 But everybody keeps walking up to Ted Danson telling him, oh, congratulations on this donation.

01:34:51.000 That was so generous of you. 1.00

01:34:53.000 So Larry Davis goes crazy because he goes, that's bullshit, man. 1.00

01:34:56.000 You're benefiting from this whole thing. 1.00

01:34:58.000 It's not anonymous.

01:34:59.000 Nobody knows.

01:34:59.000 It's exactly what we're talking about, right?

01:35:01.000 So that whole episode was a great episode because whoever wrote it actually understands our human nature.

01:35:08.000 Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating aspect of human beings, this need to be considered altruistic, this need to be considered benevolent.

01:35:16.000 You know, to advertise it instead of just being, you know, that you can't exist in the silence of the personal satisfaction of contributing and giving out love and generosity, that you have to be rewarded for it.

01:35:31.000 Well, I have a section in my first book which I titled Philanthropy as a Costly Signal.

01:35:36.000 The costly signaling in biology, so the peacock's tail is a costly signal because it actually serves as a really honest signal of my worth.

01:35:45.000 For me to carry this burdensome tail and avoid predators, then you really should take me seriously, all you female hens, because I am here and I've survived.

01:35:53.000 So that's called an honest signal or a costly signal.

01:35:56.000 Well, philanthropy, I argue, in many cases, is that honest signal precisely for the reasons that we're talking about.

01:36:02.000 I am fascinated by peacocks.

01:36:04.000 I'm fascinated by black guys who go to clubs with $100,000 worth of jewelry on them.

01:36:10.000 You know, it's amazing that aspect of especially the rap community.

01:36:14.000 Well, you know, the throwing the money in all the videos?

01:36:17.000 Yeah, making it rain.

01:36:19.000 I've got an article on that, man.

01:36:21.000 Did you ever think that you would have a scientist on your show talking about the evolutionary roots of making it rain?

01:36:27.000 No, no.

01:36:28.000 I'm so happy to talk to you now.

01:36:29.000 Well, I was happy to talk to you already, but now more so.

01:36:32.000 What is that, like the diamonds and the gold chains?

01:36:36.000 And why is it specifically connected to the African-American community as opposed to...

01:36:42.000 I mean, the Italian-American community was always gold chains, but not as much diamonds and...

01:36:49.000 I mean, black people took it to a totally new level. 1.00

01:36:52.000 Right.

01:36:52.000 I can't speak to why one culture decides to use one particular form of status.

01:36:58.000 If you're the Maasai tribe in Africa, it might be the number of cattle heads that you have that is the peacocking, right? 1.00

01:37:05.000 So what we do know is that different cultures will use different forms of peacocking, but in all cultures it is going to be the males in that culture who engage in the act.

01:37:15.000 That's the universal.

01:37:16.000 The peacocking in the African-American community is most fascinating because a lot of these rappers come from these very poor neighborhoods.

01:37:23.000 So they're dealing with a lot of poverty and crime as they're growing up.

01:37:28.000 And then as they get older, their identities, once they become connected to success, are also connected to firearms and diamonds.

01:37:38.000 Specifically diamonds.

01:37:40.000 Yeah.

01:37:40.000 They have blinged out everything.

01:37:42.000 Blinged out teeth.

01:37:43.000 Teeth, yeah.

01:37:43.000 I mean, how crazy is that?

01:37:44.000 You're walking around with $100,000 worth of dental appliances.

01:37:48.000 I mean, probably more.

01:37:50.000 I don't understand diamonds, so I don't own any diamonds.

01:37:53.000 So when I say $100,000, I might be way off.

01:37:56.000 There was a company called, I don't remember the name of the company, but the project was called American Brandstand, a play on American Bandstand.

01:38:05.000 Dick, what was the guy's name?

01:38:06.000 Yeah, Dick Clark.

01:38:07.000 Dick Clark.

01:38:08.000 So what they did is they did a content analysis of brand mentions in Billboard Top 100 to see how often brands are mentioned.

01:38:20.000 You know, hey girl, I've got the Maserati.

01:38:22.000 And what they found, not surprisingly, is that it's almost exclusively in hip-hop videos.

01:38:27.000 It's almost exclusively male rappers who do this behavior.

01:38:32.000 And it wasn't diamonds, actually.

01:38:33.000 The number one product was cars.

01:38:36.000 So cars were overwhelmingly the most often cited form of peacocking in rap songs.

01:38:45.000 I was at an event, a kickboxing event in Los Angeles the other day with my friends Eddie and Tate.

01:38:49.000 And when we showed up, this guy pulled up in this bright orange Lamborghini, this crazy car with the gold wing doors that pop up.

01:38:59.000 And we were talking and I'm a fan of cars.

01:39:02.000 I love cars.

01:39:03.000 But I do not like Lamborghinis. 0.99

01:39:05.000 I think they're foolish. 1.00

01:39:07.000 I think the doors are foolish. 1.00

01:39:09.000 I mean, they break all the time. 0.94

01:39:10.000 I have a friend who reviews cars and he reviewed this Lamborghini Aventador and he said it broke down after like two days.

01:39:17.000 They had it for two days and the transmission exploded. 0.99

01:39:20.000 And I was laughing about it, and I was like, what the fuck? 0.99

01:39:22.000 Like, why would you spend a half a million dollars on that car? 0.99

01:39:25.000 Like, there's some brilliant pieces of...

01:39:27.000 I'm a big fan of cars.

01:39:28.000 I'm a big fan of engineering in general.

01:39:30.000 I love well-engineered watches.

01:39:32.000 I love a well-engineered table.

01:39:34.000 I love laptops.

01:39:35.000 I'm fascinated by human innovation.

01:39:39.000 So when I see certain cars, I am fascinated by them.

01:39:42.000 But when I see that one, I just think, that's just so goofy. 1.00

01:39:44.000 And my friends were like, bro, that car gets you pussy. 1.00

01:39:49.000 And I was like, really? 1.00

01:39:50.000 Does it really?

01:39:50.000 Like, come on, man.

01:39:51.000 Would a girl bank... 1.00

01:39:53.000 So we had this debate. 1.00

01:39:54.000 Would a girl have sex with you if she saw you in that car? 1.00

01:39:57.000 Let me answer the question for you. 1.00

01:39:59.000 Please do.

01:39:59.000 As opposed to, let's say, a Corvette.

01:40:02.000 And they're like, no, man, anybody can get a Corvette.

01:40:03.000 A Corvette is a...

01:40:04.000 Like, my friend Tay goes, man, a girl will hop in your car just to see where you live if you have that car. 1.00

01:40:09.000 They just want to see where your house is.

01:40:10.000 You got a $500,000 car? 0.99

01:40:12.000 What the fuck does that dude's house look like? 0.98

01:40:14.000 So I'll tell you three scientific studies, one of which is mine, and then a personal story of my brother who lives in Southern California. 0.99

01:40:21.000 So Nicolas Gauguin, the guy who did the breast and...

01:40:23.000 French guy.

01:40:25.000 Did a study, very much similar in spirit, where instead of manipulating the fireman suit, he had the same guy approach different women as a function of, and manipulated which car he was driving.

01:40:37.000 I can't remember the exact details, but something like, there's a three-time increase in the likelihood of a woman giving you her phone number if you are driving a high-status car versus a low-status car.

01:40:47.000 Really?

01:40:48.000 It's the exact same guy.

01:40:48.000 Three times?

01:40:49.000 Three times greater.

01:40:50.000 Wow.

01:40:51.000 And the same guy, by the way, Did another study where the guy who was approaching the women was either with a baby or not and in another version with a dog or not.

01:41:05.000 Having a dog increases digits of attention.

01:41:09.000 And interacting with a baby also increases it.

01:41:13.000 So I joke that you should be driving a Lamborghini while having a dog next to you and a baby while wearing a fireman suit.

01:41:22.000 You're going to get all the ladies in Orange County and Newport Beach. 1.00

01:41:27.000 So that's one.

01:41:28.000 Another study, and then I'm going to come to my study in a second.

01:41:31.000 In another study, not by this guy, they took the same man, put him either in a Bentley or in a Ford Fiesta, and did the same thing with a woman.

01:41:42.000 And then it was opposite sex ratings.

01:41:44.000 So the women would rate the two guys. 0.95

01:41:47.000 And the same guy, when he is in the Bentley, We're good to go.

01:42:13.000 Did not depend on which car she was seated in.

01:42:15.000 I would think that with men and with women, that the women, it would be more intimidating to the men if the women drove a Bentley. 0.97

01:42:24.000 Oh, because they have high status.

01:42:26.000 Perhaps.

01:42:27.000 Well, especially if you have a Toyota. 0.96

01:42:29.000 Some crappy car, yeah. 0.53

01:42:30.000 Nice car, Toyota, you know. 0.91

01:42:32.000 Not a bad car, but just not a high-status car.

01:42:35.000 But if you pulled up in a, you know, whatever, you know, name it, Chevy Cobalt or something like that.

01:42:40.000 Right.

01:42:41.000 And, you know, the girl you're going to go on a date with pulls up in a Lamborghini. 1.00

01:42:44.000 You're like, oh, what the fuck? 0.99

01:42:45.000 Right. 1.00

01:42:46.000 I would think that for some men, they find that...

01:42:48.000 Some men find women that are very successful, intimidating, and unattractive.

01:42:53.000 They were just asking them, how good-looking do you think they are?

01:42:56.000 Oh, I see.

01:42:57.000 Specific to physical attraction.

01:42:58.000 Okay.

01:42:58.000 Yeah.

01:42:59.000 So, yeah, I would say the physical attraction wouldn't change, but I would say that the desire to approach that person or the willingness to approach that person...

01:43:06.000 I'm with you.

01:43:07.000 Yeah, I think women with, like, a really expensive car would be intimidating. 1.00

01:43:11.000 Third study.

01:43:12.000 And then the personal story from my brother.

01:43:14.000 I did a study a few years ago where I brought...

01:43:17.000 This was a former graduate student of mine.

01:43:19.000 We brought people into the lab and then we rented a Porsche.

01:43:25.000 This wasn't imagine you're driving a Porsche.

01:43:28.000 We actually rented a Porsche.

01:43:29.000 As I tell in one of my TED talks, try to get a granting agency to release money to do research where you're saying basically, I'm going to rent a Porsche for the weekend as part of my research.

01:43:41.000 So we rented a Porsche and then we had some other beaten up car.

01:43:45.000 We had the same men drive both cars either in downtown Montreal on a Friday evening where everybody could see you driving the car or on a semi-deserted highway where nobody could see you.

01:43:56.000 And at the end of each of the driving conditions, we collected salivary assays to then measure their fluctuating levels of testosterone.

01:44:06.000 And the idea being that when you put them in the Porsche, it's going to explode.

01:44:10.000 And that's exactly what we found.

01:44:12.000 Now, one of the reviewers had written, he said, but how do you know that's just not because they're driving fast?

01:44:18.000 And so that's causing a rise in testosterone.

01:44:21.000 And the way we could control for that is on downtown Montreal, On a Friday evening, it's bumper to bumper traffic.

01:44:28.000 I mean, it's like being in a parking lot.

01:44:31.000 So it's certainly not because you were driving fast.

01:44:33.000 It's because everybody could see that I am sitting in a Porsche.

01:44:37.000 So your endocrinological system exploded simply because of this imbuing of social status to you.

01:44:44.000 And we know this from other animals where if you and I fight, if we're two males, we fight.

01:44:47.000 If you win, your testosterone goes up.

01:44:49.000 If I lose, my testosterone goes down.

01:44:51.000 And so here we were applying this exact idea to the consumer setting.

01:44:54.000 So the person that was in the fast car that was on a deserted stretch of highway just going fast, their testosterone didn't rise?

01:45:03.000 No, it did.

01:45:03.000 It did.

01:45:09.000 We're good to go.

01:45:30.000 It resulted in the same increase in testosterone.

01:45:32.000 Well, isn't it also an engine thing, too, with young men?

01:45:35.000 I know that they've done studies where they had young men rev engines, just like a V8, a powerful V8, just the sound of...

01:45:43.000 And that increased Increases testosterone?

01:45:46.000 Yeah, increases testosterone.

01:45:47.000 Oh, I don't think I know that study.

01:45:48.000 You're going to need to send me that email.

01:45:50.000 Yeah, I will as soon as I find it.

01:45:52.000 But the test that you give them, how much of a variance was there between not driving that car and driving that car?

01:46:01.000 Well, statistically significant, so it was certainly strong enough to pick up a big difference from the Toyota to the other car.

01:46:09.000 Right.

01:46:09.000 Do you remember the percentage?

01:46:10.000 I don't.

01:46:10.000 I could send you the paper.

01:46:12.000 I think that would be big.

01:46:12.000 For athletes, just drive around in a fast car and it'd be good for your recovery.

01:46:17.000 Right?

01:46:18.000 Because your testosterone would increase.

01:46:19.000 Well, I always joke with my wife and I tell her that since men, as they enter middle age, their testosterone goes down.

01:46:26.000 If I now have to buy a luxury car, that's just medically mandated.

01:46:31.000 Well, is that what's going on when men have this midlife crisis?

01:46:35.000 Like, that's what women... 1.00

01:46:37.000 I mean, it's always the joke with women that they see a guy in a Ferrari and he's like 50 years old. 1.00

01:46:41.000 Sorry about your penis. 1.00

01:46:42.000 You know? 1.00

01:46:43.000 Yeah.

01:46:44.000 But is that...

01:46:45.000 Well, I have a study that's not yet published, speaking of...

01:46:49.000 The car you drive and some morphological feature.

01:46:51.000 You're going to like this one.

01:46:53.000 So this is not published yet with one of my former doctoral students.

01:46:56.000 We actually created online dating profiles of a man where everything is the same except that in one version his prized favorite position is a fancy red Porsche or some shitty Kia or whatever it is.

01:47:12.000 And then we asked men and women who were looking at this profile to evaluate the guy's height.

01:47:20.000 Watch what happened.

01:47:21.000 Men, when they evaluate the guy with the Porsche, denigrate his height.

01:47:27.000 He's shorter.

01:47:28.000 Women increase his height. 1.00

01:47:30.000 This is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective, right?

01:47:33.000 Sure.

01:47:34.000 Right?

01:47:34.000 Status is a threatening cue for men.

01:47:37.000 Therefore, it serves as an intrasexual rivalry cue.

01:47:40.000 So if you are in a fancy car, oh, Joe must be some short, wimpy guy.

01:47:43.000 Sure.

01:47:43.000 Women, on the other hand, will look at Joe, the exact same Joe, your height didn't magically change, and say, wow, Joe was a tall guy.

01:47:50.000 That's fascinating.

01:47:52.000 You should study haters.

01:47:53.000 You should study, like, haters of celebrities, like someone who becomes, like, a Justin Bieber-type character, especially.

01:48:00.000 Someone who's a famous person who women just go... 1.00

01:48:03.000 Like, if Justin Bieber goes anywhere in public, women will literally scream and faint and pass out.

01:48:07.000 Like, almost Elvis-like in some certain ways.

01:48:10.000 You should study, like...

01:48:11.000 What the reaction is to, man, I wonder if there's a way to study that.

01:48:14.000 That's fascinating to me.

01:48:16.000 Studying haters.

01:48:17.000 That's a good one.

01:48:18.000 So let me tell you about my...

01:48:19.000 Are we still okay on time?

01:48:20.000 Yes, we're great.

01:48:21.000 We have an hour.

01:48:22.000 Oh, great.

01:48:23.000 So I have a brother who's lived in California for 30 years, who, by the way, I think I'd sent you this by email, was a fighter, was an Olympian judo fighter who competed in the 1976 Olympics.

01:48:37.000 And he used to always say, by the way, before there was ever an MMA, I would always ask him, if you were in a fight at a bar against some boxer or some karate guy, who would win?

01:48:50.000 Which was kind of what started the whole MMA thing.

01:48:53.000 And he used to always tell me...

01:48:55.000 Oh, I will destroy them because they might get one hit on me, but once I get them, and once we go down on the ground, they're done.

01:49:05.000 So anyways, he made a lot of money in the software industry in Southern California.

01:49:12.000 And so he was the classic kind of peacocking guy.

01:49:16.000 He owned three Ferraris, an Aston Martin Lagunda, and so on.

01:49:21.000 And so we would play this game.

01:49:24.000 To my chagrin, he liked to play this game.

01:49:27.000 We'd go to a nightclub.

01:49:28.000 This is before I was married, in case my wife was listening.

01:49:33.000 No, but this was before we were married.

01:49:36.000 We would walk into a bar, these fancy schmancy clubs, and he'd say, take your time and look around and find the most stunning, unattainable woman in this place. 0.97

01:49:48.000 Now, take your time.

01:49:50.000 So I'd go around, look around, I'd pick the girl who's not only the most beautiful, but the one who is clearly accompanied by a guy who looks like a brute, and they seem to be very intensely in love.

01:50:02.000 So now I've really raised the bar of him not being able to get her.

01:50:06.000 Now, my brother is about 5'3", so he's not tall and so on. 0.98

01:50:10.000 But boys, he's carrying the big testicles of owning all those Ferraris. 0.81

01:50:14.000 And so he'd say, okay, that's the girl you want me to approach? 0.98

01:50:18.000 Okay.

01:50:19.000 So he'd wait like a shark, and then the guy would go to the bathroom.

01:50:25.000 He'd approach the girl.

01:50:26.000 He'd come up to about here on her.

01:50:28.000 I mean, it was just incredible to watch.

01:50:31.000 He'd come back to me and say, she'll call me tomorrow.

01:50:33.000 I said, absolutely zero chance, David.

01:50:36.000 It's not going to happen.

01:50:37.000 Next morning, he'd say, yeah, come over here.

01:50:39.000 At the time, we had the answering machines.

01:50:42.000 This is like maybe early 90s.

01:50:44.000 Hi David, it's Candy.

01:50:46.000 We met you.

01:50:47.000 Well, what got him Candy?

01:50:50.000 It was the fact that he owned...

01:50:51.000 So what would he say to them?

01:50:52.000 I don't know.

01:50:53.000 I have three Ferraris.

01:50:54.000 Come with me.

01:50:55.000 I like that you're putting in Arabic accent. 1.00

01:50:57.000 I know you have a man, but he is stupid. 1.00

01:51:00.000 He's big, but he does not have cars. 1.00

01:51:02.000 Something like that.

01:51:03.000 Well, look, the reality is that whenever we went anywhere in one of those cars, I just noticed anecdotally that the women would be all over the place.

01:51:11.000 Is that changing with time when people become more aware of how kind of peacocky and it becomes more of a cultural sort of caricature?

01:51:20.000 Right.

01:51:21.000 So I think what happens is that the product that we use for the peacocking might change.

01:51:26.000 So, for example, maybe in the cafe...

01:51:29.000 Sipping parties in Hollywood, it might be that I drive a Prius.

01:51:34.000 I was so happy you just said that.

01:51:36.000 Right?

01:51:36.000 So that now makes me the top dog.

01:51:39.000 There's actually a paper by a colleague of mine, I think it's called Green to be Seen.

01:51:45.000 Yeah!

01:51:46.000 That's so true.

01:51:47.000 Which is basically a form of conspicuous consumption based on being green rather than being in the big Hummer or whatever.

01:51:54.000 Right.

01:51:54.000 So the bottom line is that the signal itself will change.

01:51:57.000 But the need to signal as a form of a mating strategy is always there.

01:52:02.000 More progressive brownie points. 0.89

01:52:03.000 More progressive brownie points. 0.89

01:52:04.000 I keep track of the amount of Priuses that I catch throwing cigarettes out the window.

01:52:08.000 I'm up to eight.

01:52:09.000 Eight Priuses in my life I have observed throwing cigarettes out the window. 1.00

01:52:14.000 I get fucking furious because I know those fucks. 1.00

01:52:17.000 I know what they're doing. 1.00

01:52:18.000 A lot of them drive those things not for the consumption, not for gas, keeping gas prices down.

01:52:25.000 They're doing it because they want to appear green.

01:52:26.000 Exactly.

01:52:29.000 There are actually studies that look at how much are you willing to pay extra for a green product.

01:52:36.000 And oftentimes what people say attitudinally and then what they do, if it affects their dollar, there's a big incongruity.

01:52:44.000 So you see the hypocrisy of people, right?

01:52:46.000 Again, it's deposing, right?

01:52:48.000 I mean, I want to appear as though I'm enlightened, progressive, I care about Mother Earth and so on.

01:52:52.000 Well, most certainly.

01:52:53.000 I mean, I'm a hunter, and I've experienced this weird thing where people who wear leather and eat meat get angry at you for hunting.

01:53:01.000 And one of the reasons why they're angry at you for hunting is somehow or another what you're doing is animal cruelty, that you don't have to do it.

01:53:08.000 Why not go to a supermarket?

01:53:10.000 This is an incredibly narrow-minded way of thinking.

01:53:12.000 And I'm like, you have a leather couch.

01:53:15.000 Do you understand that the animal that you sit on every day...

01:53:20.000 Suffered unimaginable cruelty.

01:53:22.000 The animal that I shot didn't even know I was there until I put an arrow through its heart.

01:53:27.000 Do you ever feel any...

01:53:31.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:53:34.000 It's not an easy thing to do.

01:53:36.000 I eat meat.

01:53:37.000 I like meat.

01:53:38.000 I've always eaten meat.

01:53:38.000 I work out a lot.

01:53:40.000 I've tried being a vegetarian once when I was competing, back when I was fighting, and I didn't perform as well.

01:53:47.000 I didn't have as much energy.

01:53:47.000 I didn't feel as good.

01:53:49.000 Granted, in all fairness, my knowledge of nutrition was Far less than than it is now, and I didn't have the best diet in the world, and I was also very young.

01:53:58.000 But, you know, animals, like humans, live a finite life, and I think that they eat each other.

01:54:05.000 The world that they live in is unbelievably cruel, and if it wasn't for getting killed by a hunter, it's not like they're gonna live forever and become magic, okay?

01:54:13.000 They get killed by coyotes and mountain lions and I like going into that world and acquiring meat.

01:54:20.000 My goal is, at the end of 2014, all the meat I eat at home to only be from my hunting.

01:54:25.000 No kidding.

01:54:26.000 Yeah, because I feel like that's the most ethical way to acquire meat.

01:54:28.000 So where do you do this?

01:54:29.000 I go to different places.

01:54:30.000 I've only been hunting four times.

01:54:34.000 I shot two deer.

01:54:36.000 I shot a pig and a wild pig.

01:54:40.000 And I shot a bear recently. 0.78

01:54:42.000 Only animals that I eat.

01:54:43.000 Only animals that I want to eat.

01:54:45.000 And...

01:54:46.000 My freezer's filled with bear meat and venison.

01:54:50.000 That's what I try to eat.

01:54:52.000 I try to eat that.

01:54:53.000 First of all, it's super healthy.

01:54:54.000 The animal you know hasn't been shot up with antibiotics and hormones.

01:54:59.000 It's just a natural animal.

01:55:01.000 Again, it's living its life in a wild way until I dip into the food chain and remove it.

01:55:08.000 It feels good to accomplish it.

01:55:12.000 The first time I did it, it was much more somber than it is now.

01:55:16.000 Now it seems like I'm sort of Accepted what it is, and I'm happier after it's over.

01:55:24.000 I don't have this sort of somber feeling.

01:55:27.000 The first time, it was happiness, but also like, wow, I just took an animal's life.

01:55:32.000 Big animal, 180-pound deer.

01:55:34.000 There's a lot involved in this.

01:55:37.000 This is real.

01:55:39.000 But what's your position?

01:55:40.000 We're talking about conspicuous consumption and signaling.

01:55:43.000 How about trophy hunting?

01:55:44.000 I don't like that at all.

01:55:45.000 I have a real problem with that.

01:55:46.000 Not only do I have a real problem with trophy hunting, I have a real problem with...

01:55:50.000 What they're doing in Africa these days is high fence hunting. 0.98

01:55:55.000 Yeah, it's horrible.

01:55:56.000 But it's very strange.

01:55:57.000 And here's the contradiction.

01:55:59.000 Here's where it gets weird.

01:56:00.000 I had Louis Theroux.

01:56:02.000 Do you know who he is?

01:56:02.000 The documentarian from England?

01:56:05.000 Not sure.

01:56:06.000 Great guy and really fascinating and beautiful documentarian.

01:56:11.000 He's just really wonderful documentaries.

01:56:14.000 And he had this one where he went to this African hunting camp for several weeks and stayed there and tried to really understand what it was all about and interviewed all these people and a lot of them were just despicable.

01:56:25.000 They're just these real hickey people like, yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna try to get the big five. 0.98

01:56:30.000 I'm gonna get a rhino, I'm gonna get an elephant. 0.96

01:56:32.000 All they want to do is like spend money and bring home tusks and horns and all this different shit. 0.99

01:56:36.000 It's pretty gross because it's just they're killing to acquire trophies. 0.99

01:56:40.000 And what they're doing is they're killing inside these high fences where these animals, it's not like you're out there.

01:56:45.000 You're going to...

01:56:47.000 And it's not to say that I'm opposed to high fence hunting because I think if you're hunting like deer or an animal that you're just going to eat...

01:56:56.000 It's essentially not that much different than going to a lake that's been stocked.

01:57:02.000 If you're going to a lake and they stock the lake with trout to ensure that there's fish deficient, those fish are not going to get out of that lake and fly to Nebraska.

01:57:09.000 That's where they live.

01:57:10.000 They're stuck there.

01:57:11.000 And I don't think there's any difference between that and these high-fence hunting operations in Texas, which I don't have any problem with at all.

01:57:17.000 They have these...

01:57:17.000 1,000 acres, and one of them I know of is 14,000 acres, and they keep deer on it.

01:57:23.000 And why do they have the fences up?

01:57:25.000 Well, to keep poachers out.

01:57:26.000 And they also make a living off of guiding people to hunt these animals.

01:57:32.000 And for them, it's like the ethical acquiring of your own meat.

01:57:37.000 And it's venison.

01:57:38.000 It's very delicious.

01:57:39.000 It tastes good.

01:57:40.000 It's good for you.

01:57:41.000 It's very healthy meat.

01:57:42.000 I don't have a problem with that.

01:57:43.000 The African thing is so confusing because...

01:57:46.000 There was a woman recently that was on the news this past week.

01:57:51.000 She was 19 years old.

01:57:52.000 She went to Africa and took all these photos with her with a lion that she killed.

01:57:56.000 I might have shared that on my show.

01:57:58.000 But that wasn't a week ago.

01:57:59.000 I did one.

01:57:59.000 You did recently, but it was a different one.

01:58:01.000 Oh, it was different.

01:58:02.000 I followed all your stuff.

01:58:04.000 I've been paying attention for a while. 0.71

01:58:06.000 But you said it's disgusting.

01:58:09.000 She was holding the mouth of the lion open.

01:58:10.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:58:11.000 Yeah, that's dark.

01:58:13.000 There's something dark about that, man.

01:58:15.000 I mean, if you're not going to eat that animal...

01:58:16.000 I have a friend who's going lion hunting in the wild.

01:58:20.000 He's a bow hunter.

01:58:21.000 His name's Cameron Haynes.

01:58:22.000 He's going to eat a lion, though.

01:58:24.000 He's going to go over there, and he's going to hunt it, not in a high fence.

01:58:27.000 He's going to Zimbabwe in the actual jungle. 0.73

01:58:30.000 He's going to hunt a lion, and he's going to eat it. 1.00

01:58:32.000 He's fucking crazy. 1.00

01:58:33.000 To collect salivary assays from these types of guys pre-kill, post-kill... 1.00

01:58:40.000 Well, he's got plenty of testosterone before and after.

01:58:44.000 Oh, right.

01:58:44.000 But I guarantee you that it jumps up when he shoots it.

01:58:47.000 He's the one who took me bear hunting.

01:58:49.000 Wow.

01:58:50.000 Yeah, he's probably one of the most famous bow hunters in America today.

01:58:54.000 Probably in the world, actually.

01:58:55.000 He's a legit bow hunter.

01:58:57.000 I mean, he makes his living doing that, and he's very famous because of it.

01:59:01.000 Very ethical, though.

01:59:02.000 He does not shoot anything he does not eat.

01:59:04.000 Right.

01:59:04.000 Everything he shoots, he eats.

01:59:05.000 And I think that's where I have an issue with this Africa thing. 1.00

01:59:10.000 But where it gets weird is that those animals, many of them were on the verge of extinction, but now they're in very high numbers.

01:59:17.000 The reason being is that they're in these high fence operations, so it's such a catch-22.

01:59:22.000 On one hand, they were on the verge of extinction, and on another hand, Now they have these high populations, and they're super healthy, but they only exist as a commodity to be hunted down.

01:59:33.000 I mean, and the way they're doing it is like there's a waterhole, and there's like a hundred animals in front of the waterhole, and these people just sit there, and they just shoot one.

01:59:41.000 They go, look what I did on my hunt.

01:59:43.000 Like, is that even a hunt?

01:59:44.000 Right.

01:59:44.000 You're in a park.

01:59:45.000 Yeah.

01:59:45.000 I mean, you're in a fenced-in, like, you know, it's someone's yard.

01:59:49.000 Yeah, you're not tracking or anything.

01:59:50.000 They're like pets.

01:59:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:59:51.000 I mean, you're not only not tracking...

01:59:55.000 Those animals, they're never going to leave and go 100 miles away to a different place and then go across a river.

02:00:03.000 Mule deer, they discovered that mule deer in America, this is a really recent discovery, they had no idea how far they migrate, but they migrate as much as 150 miles in a year.

02:00:14.000 150 miles is a lot of walking, man, for a deer. 0.94

02:00:18.000 That's like here to fucking San Diego for a deer. 0.98

02:00:21.000 And they're just starting to understand their migratory patterns. 0.99

02:00:25.000 But that's a wild animal.

02:00:27.000 Now, that's what I consider fair chase. 0.96

02:00:30.000 You go out hunting, you find a mule deer that's walking 150 miles, you figure out where they're going to be and stalk them and get into a good position and shoot them and eat them.

02:00:40.000 It's about as fair and ethical a way as you can acquire your own meat.

02:00:44.000 If you're going all the way to Africa and you're not even going to eat that animal, and you're just going to stuff it and stick it on your wall to let everybody know how Billy Badass you are...

02:00:53.000 That's weird, man.

02:00:55.000 I hear you.

02:00:56.000 It's a weird aspect of human beings that we would even consider that to be a form of recreation.

02:01:01.000 And people go, well, hey, it's totally legal.

02:01:04.000 And well, hey, there's nothing.

02:01:05.000 The money goes to conservation.

02:01:08.000 And I guess it does, in a way.

02:01:10.000 I guess it does. 0.89

02:01:11.000 It does go to keep these animals alive so they can keep killing them. 0.86

02:01:14.000 Right.

02:01:15.000 It's weird.

02:01:15.000 It's very weird.

02:01:16.000 So are you also a paleo guy?

02:01:19.000 Well, you know what?

02:01:20.000 That whole paleo thing.

02:01:21.000 I don't like that term, paleo, because the term has been debunked by science.

02:01:26.000 When you talked about what people did or did not eat, I think that natural foods are more easily digestible.

02:01:34.000 I try to stay away from bread as much as possible.

02:01:37.000 Although I have started eating more sprouted bread recently, like Ezekiel-type bread, I feel like my body digests that more easily.

02:01:44.000 I think it's a little healthier.

02:01:46.000 I keep away from white flour and pastas and things along those lines, and I try to avoid processed foods as much as possible and sugar as much as possible.

02:01:56.000 So in that sense, yeah, I eat a lot of vegetables.

02:01:58.000 I eat a lot of protein, animal protein, fish and things along those lines, but...

02:02:02.000 I just think that I'm just real...

02:02:04.000 I noticed because I work out so much and because I do athletics where you sort of measure your progress, you know, whether it's my workout routines like strength and conditioning routines or martial arts, I can kind of see when I'm on and when I'm off.

02:02:19.000 And I can anecdotally or directly correlate that to my diet.

02:02:24.000 And I find that when I take supplements and I make sure that I have plenty of vitamins and plenty of green, leafy vegetables, that's one of the most important ones, I think, and healthy proteins.

02:02:33.000 So in that sense, I eat along the lines that a lot of those paleo guys eat.

02:02:38.000 Right.

02:02:38.000 When I used to be a very competitive soccer player, I was grossly underweight my whole life.

02:02:44.000 I mean, 125, 130 pounds, 4% body fat.

02:02:48.000 Just from running all the time?

02:02:49.000 Running all the time, training.

02:02:50.000 I even ran some marathons.

02:02:52.000 The day that I stopped training...

02:02:54.000 It was this sort of pernicious and insidious weight gain.

02:02:59.000 It wasn't sort of you saw me one year I was 125 and the next year I was 180. It was always 4, 5, 8 pounds a year.

02:03:06.000 And then one day, 8, 9 years later, I get on the scale and I'm tipping 200. And the most I got up is 252. I'm 5'6".

02:03:15.000 252?

02:03:16.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:03:16.000 You're a heavyweight. 0.71

02:03:18.000 Exactly.

02:03:19.000 And now I've lost about 25, 30 pounds.

02:03:21.000 But still, even now, I mean, I'm over 200 pounds.

02:03:23.000 And one of the things that I've been doing is eating, as you said, a lot of vegetables and a lot of protein, staying away from all the starchy stuff.

02:03:33.000 And I'm using...

02:03:35.000 Do you know MyFitnessPal.com?

02:03:36.000 Do you know this thing, this Cali...

02:03:38.000 Counting program?

02:03:39.000 No.

02:03:40.000 It's part of this whole quantify yourself.

02:03:43.000 So basically, I have to give credit to my wife.

02:03:46.000 She literally counts every single calorie that goes into my body.

02:03:50.000 I have to basically have 1,400 calories net a day.

02:03:54.000 Including exercise and so on.

02:03:56.000 So as long as I hit 1,400 calories net that day.

02:03:58.000 And I've lost so far 25 pounds in maybe three months.

02:04:01.000 That's amazing.

02:04:02.000 That's a great number.

02:04:04.000 25 pounds in three months is really healthy.

02:04:06.000 It's not too fast, too.

02:04:07.000 That's good.

02:04:09.000 Now it's getting a bit rough.

02:04:10.000 I can't seem to break the next sort of hump.

02:04:13.000 What do you do for exercise?

02:04:14.000 So I'm a cardio guy.

02:04:16.000 So maybe, I don't know, maybe you'll guide me in better ways.

02:04:19.000 So I just do tons of cardio.

02:04:21.000 So it could be I run on the treadmill or I do stationary bike or I do elliptical.

02:04:26.000 I usually try to average between 45 minutes to an hour.

02:04:29.000 Well, cardio is great.

02:04:30.000 No doubt about it.

02:04:31.000 And, you know, there's nothing better than having a good gas tank and having a healthy heart.

02:04:34.000 Right.

02:04:35.000 But one of the things that burns calories the most is muscle.

02:04:38.000 Yeah.

02:04:38.000 And the more muscle that you can put on your body, the stronger you can make yourself.

02:04:43.000 It's kind of strange, but you get leaner.

02:04:45.000 Yeah, your metabolism goes up.

02:04:46.000 I just feel better when I'm stronger.

02:04:50.000 My body works better.

02:04:52.000 I like the way it feels better.

02:04:53.000 And I think that I can eat more.

02:04:55.000 Right. 0.99

02:04:56.000 You know, I'm a pig. 0.88

02:04:57.000 I like eating, but I'm pretty lean for someone who eats as much as I eat. 0.65

02:05:01.000 Like, have you ever seen me eat?

02:05:02.000 People freak out.

02:05:03.000 Like, especially, like, after comedy shows, I'll do, like, two shows in a night, and I'll have two entrees and a salad and an appetizer.

02:05:10.000 Right.

02:05:10.000 Like, to the point where waitresses think I'm joking.

02:05:12.000 And I'm like, nope, I'm serious.

02:05:14.000 I'm going to eat all that, too.

02:05:15.000 Right.

02:05:15.000 Wow.

02:05:16.000 I eat a lot of food, and I love it.

02:05:18.000 So the way I make sure that I stay lean is I do a lot of exercise and a lot of weightlifting.

02:05:24.000 I think that weightlifting, and by weightlifting, I'm not doing a lot of the traditional stuff like bench pressing.

02:05:29.000 Most of the stuff I do is full body exercises.

02:05:32.000 Kettlebells, things along those lines.

02:05:34.000 But when I do that, all that intense strain, that's not available through cardio.

02:05:39.000 Through cardio, you can do sprinting, and you can really get your heart rate up and really get exhausted.

02:05:43.000 You certainly burn off a lot of calories, but that intense strain of...

02:05:48.000 That's what makes bone density.

02:05:50.000 That's what makes your tendons stronger, muscle density more thick.

02:05:56.000 I think that also helps your calorie consumption.

02:05:59.000 Oh, cool.

02:05:59.000 Speaking of comedians, because it's very organic what's going on, I just hired a postdoc whose claim to fame so far, until he gets into my research program, was he was studying the evolutionary roots of humor.

02:06:13.000 Oh, that's interesting.

02:06:15.000 And so what he basically looked at is humor as a sexually selected trait as a proxy for intelligence.

02:06:21.000 And so with his former doctoral supervisor, who's a well-known evolutionary psychologist, They would go into comedy clubs and rate people's impressions of how funny the comedian is and then would administer IQ tests to them.

02:06:41.000 And it turns out that funnier people are actually smarter people.

02:06:46.000 And so when women say, you know, I love, you know, they always say, I want a guy with a sense of humor.

02:06:52.000 I want a guy who makes me laugh.

02:06:53.000 What they're effectively saying as a proxy measure is, I want a guy who's intelligent.

02:06:58.000 Because intelligence is a heritable trait.

02:07:01.000 Interesting, but I bet that's wrong.

02:07:04.000 Here's why I bet that's wrong.

02:07:06.000 My favorite comedian of all time is my friend Joey Diaz.

02:07:10.000 I think he's the funniest guy that's ever lived.

02:07:12.000 And he is a very smart guy as far as like street smarts and wisdom and he knows a lot about life. 0.99

02:07:19.000 If you gave him a fucking IQ test though, he might barely beat a chimp. 1.00

02:07:23.000 Right, so I think what you're basically saying is that IQ might not be the way to measure intelligence. 1.00

02:07:29.000 But what But you are admitting that he is probably very intelligent.

02:07:33.000 Oh, he's most certainly very intelligent.

02:07:35.000 So then that's supporting the general theory.

02:07:37.000 Oh, the general theory is on.

02:07:39.000 I just think that IQ intelligence doesn't measure social intelligence.

02:07:42.000 He's very socially intelligent.

02:07:45.000 He's a predator in some ways.

02:07:47.000 He spots the weakness a person has. 1.00

02:07:50.000 And he's like, look at this motherfucker with his goofy... 1.00

02:07:52.000 You know, he'll find out the one thing about you. 1.00

02:07:55.000 Oh, yeah, that's not what you're thinking.

02:07:57.000 You know, he'll find the one thing that, you know, you're trying to pretend you're not, but you truly are.

02:08:02.000 And it'll, like, illuminate itself, like, glowing.

02:08:05.000 Ding!

02:08:06.000 Here, this guy's actually this.

02:08:08.000 He's actually that.

02:08:09.000 He's lying about this.

02:08:10.000 Most certainly.

02:08:11.000 You know, there's a study that was done with CEOs, and the number one thing that they all had in common, other than, on average, being taller than the norm.

02:08:20.000 CEOs are taller than the norm?

02:08:21.000 Yeah.

02:08:22.000 Fascinating.

02:08:23.000 They're, I think, six foot two or something.

02:08:25.000 I can't remember exactly the number.

02:08:27.000 Is that they had very high social intelligence.

02:08:30.000 Yeah, it makes sense.

02:08:31.000 Well, it makes sense, right?

02:08:32.000 If you're an operating officer, you're trying to keep everybody in line.

02:08:36.000 There's a lot of social intelligence required to do that, to manage a giant group of people and keep everybody happy and foster morale.

02:08:45.000 Yeah, there's a lot involved in that.

02:08:47.000 Here's an interesting one.

02:08:48.000 Remember earlier we were talking about how these Hollywood types are lying to themselves and the privacy of their bedrooms? 0.99

02:08:56.000 Yeah, I'm glad we brought that back up again.

02:08:58.000 There's more to talk about there.

02:08:59.000 Yeah, so you're going to like this one.

02:09:00.000 So, I've often wondered whether they believe the hype that they say.

02:09:06.000 In other words, when somebody is posing in this way, do they truly kind of internalize this or not?

02:09:13.000 There's a fantastic evolutionary theory that looks at the evolutionary roots of self-deception.

02:09:18.000 In other words, why is it that we are so good at self-deceiving ourselves?

02:09:24.000 This is by a guy by the name of Robert Trivers, a phenomenal evolutionary biologist.

02:09:28.000 And he proposed a theory that I think is brilliant in its simplicity.

02:09:32.000 And then what I usually do is to demonstrate the phenomenon, I go to a television show like Seinfeld to find a manifestation of that phenomenon, which I'll talk about in a sec.

02:09:42.000 So he says that...

02:09:44.000 One of the biggest dangers that we face as humans is to navigate all of these social threats in our environment.

02:09:51.000 So I'm trying to manipulate you while you're trying to read me to see my manipulative intent.

02:09:58.000 That's called Machiavellian intelligence or social intelligence.

02:10:00.000 So one of the ways that I could fool you without you picking up that I am fooling you is if any visual cue in my face that would signal that I am lying, I would shut it off.

02:10:15.000 Because then you can't read that.

02:10:18.000 And the way you do that is by deceiving yourself.

02:10:21.000 In other words, you understand what I'm saying?

02:10:24.000 So I want to lie to you.

02:10:25.000 I want to deceive you.

02:10:27.000 I want to make you do A. But you're going to be looking at me to see whether there is any visual signals that shows that I'm lying.

02:10:36.000 If I could suppress those by first lying to myself, then you can't pick up that I'm lying.

02:10:42.000 So there's a show on Seinfeld.

02:10:44.000 So I said, you know, how can I demonstrate this to make it sort of more sexy in my book?

02:10:48.000 So there's a show on Seinfeld where George Costanza, who was kind of a duplicitous, devious guy...

02:10:56.000 He's trying to teach Jerry how to be a better liar.

02:11:00.000 And one day as he's about to leave his apartment, he looks at him and says, remember Jerry, it's not a lie if you believe it.

02:11:07.000 And I said, that's it.

02:11:08.000 That's exactly the evolutionary roots of self-deception, right?

02:11:12.000 So, you see, evolutionary theory is everywhere, man.

02:11:14.000 It explains everything.

02:11:15.000 I certainly think you're correct in that, and I think there's definitely something there.

02:11:19.000 But I can also offer some unique insight to the celebrity thing and what it is, because I've been a part of it, and I've also experienced it myself.

02:11:28.000 I've experienced my own self-deception or my own ego swelling in an unnatural way.

02:11:35.000 It's because of the environment that you're constantly in and the data that you're getting.

02:11:39.000 The data that you're getting if you're a star. 0.98

02:11:40.000 Like I've seen, now I'm a nice person, but I've seen people get shows and become these fucking ruthless dictators. 0.93

02:11:50.000 Like people that have sitcoms or shows that revolve. 0.98

02:12:01.000 We're good to go.

02:12:22.000 But also the pressure of being the one.

02:12:26.000 The pressure of being this one person where when Brett Butler shows up on the set, everyone has a coffee for her.

02:12:32.000 There's a script.

02:12:33.000 Can we get anything Brett?

02:12:33.000 They're all treading lightly.

02:12:35.000 They're all worried constantly that she's going to be upset at them.

02:12:39.000 So their data, the data that a person like Brett Butler or some star has, is that they are special.

02:12:46.000 That's all the data they're getting.

02:12:48.000 The data that someone who has, you know, someone who's not attractive, the only data, like a lot of data that comes from a person who is not physically attractive is like, well, I found out that I can get people to like me if I make them laugh.

02:13:04.000 So I'm going to develop a good sense of humor because my nose isn't getting any smaller.

02:13:07.000 My ears aren't getting any littler.

02:13:09.000 I'm not getting any taller. 0.98

02:13:10.000 I'm fucking not losing any weight. 0.98

02:13:12.000 So let me just become funny. 0.98

02:13:14.000 And then you see a lot of funny guys that are my friends that are not good looking at all but have beautiful girlfriends.

02:13:20.000 Like, what is that from?

02:13:21.000 Well, they figured out the one thing that they do have that they can find that's attractive.

02:13:25.000 The data that these actors and these people that get that are famous, they're constantly getting love.

02:13:32.000 And they're getting love from people that don't know them.

02:13:35.000 They only know their work.

02:13:36.000 They only know this thing that they've pretended to be in a movie where they were a superhero or in this thing where they were a doctor or in that show where they were...

02:13:45.000 They always had the right answer and they were on top of things. 1.00

02:13:48.000 How many people that we've seen in movies that we thought were really smart, intelligent people, then you see them in an interview and you go, oh, he's a fucking idiot. 1.00

02:13:56.000 He's an idiot who's playing a role. 1.00

02:13:58.000 Their data that they get is completely unnatural. 1.00

02:14:01.000 That environment where you...

02:14:04.000 For whatever reason, they decide that you're going to be the guy.

02:14:07.000 They put you in this thing.

02:14:08.000 They project you on a screen that's 60 feet wide.

02:14:11.000 Every time you talk, the words that come out of your mouth were carefully constructed by a team of writers that labored over those words for weeks and weeks.

02:14:20.000 There's music playing.

02:14:22.000 I mean, it's amazing.

02:14:24.000 So that environment is so completely unnatural.

02:14:28.000 The data that they get because of that is so unnatural.

02:14:30.000 When Brad Pitt shows up at an... 0.98

02:14:33.000 Some awards party or something like that and he goes down the red carpet and people fucking go bananas and scream.

02:14:39.000 He handles it remarkably well for someone who's in that scenario because that is a completely unnatural scenario and must be insanely difficult to maintain objectivity in that situation.

02:14:51.000 So that has to be taken into account.

02:14:53.000 Just the data that those people get is so different from the data That a guy who is working at a camera shop gets.

02:15:00.000 A guy who is a normal person in a normal life.

02:15:03.000 The data that they get is, when they interact with people, people judge them based on their appearance, how they talk, what their background is.

02:15:11.000 They start communicating.

02:15:12.000 They gather up data.

02:15:13.000 When you see Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, you automatically like him.

02:15:18.000 You automatically have all this attached to him.

02:15:20.000 And that's a totally unnatural world to live in.

02:15:23.000 There is actually some studies that have looked at why is it that people love celebrities so much.

02:15:30.000 And the argument is that it's because it's tricking our ancestral brain, right?

02:15:36.000 You're coming into my television screen every day on news radio.

02:15:42.000 I actually, you now become part of my, what's called my, you know what Dunbar number is, right?

02:15:47.000 150 people.

02:15:47.000 150, yeah.

02:15:48.000 Very nice.

02:15:48.000 So you, you know, Joe Rogan, I know this guy.

02:15:51.000 I mean, I remember when my kid was born, Joe Rogan, I know Joe Rogan.

02:15:55.000 And so I think what ends up happening is that since we obviously didn't evolve in an environment where there were televisions, but I now feel so intimately connected to you, that barrier is removed.

02:16:06.000 Yeah, it gets even weirder when you do something like this, like podcasts, because this is even more intimate because we're in people's ears.

02:16:12.000 We're in earbuds.

02:16:13.000 I'm inside your head.

02:16:14.000 I'm talking to you right now.

02:16:15.000 Maybe you're on a treadmill.

02:16:17.000 Maybe you're on a plane.

02:16:18.000 Maybe you're sitting on the subway.

02:16:19.000 Buy my books.

02:16:20.000 Yeah, buy God's odds books.

02:16:24.000 Remember those subliminal things?

02:16:26.000 Did those work?

02:16:26.000 Those things like buy popcorn?

02:16:28.000 Remember those things?

02:16:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:16:29.000 The Flash in the movie?

02:16:30.000 That famous sort of popcorn and Coke.

02:16:33.000 Apparently the...

02:16:34.000 I don't know the exact story, but I think apparently the company that... 0.99

02:16:41.000 A little fuckery. 1.00

02:16:53.000 It's not specifically the desire to buy that product that increased, but rather your hunger and your thirst increased. 0.98

02:17:01.000 You see what I mean?

02:17:02.000 So it didn't increase your likelihood of saying, yes, I'd like to buy a Big Mac.

02:17:05.000 But when they were asked post the subliminal thing, are you hungry?

02:17:09.000 Then the subliminal cue would affect their hunger and their thirst, but not to the specific product.

02:17:15.000 So the evidence is equivocal.

02:17:18.000 So there's a little something in there.

02:17:19.000 There's something a little.

02:17:20.000 Like if you see someone eating a piece of cake on TV and it looks awesome, you do say, oh, I like that.

02:17:24.000 Yeah, right.

02:17:24.000 And that's real.

02:17:25.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:17:26.000 So that is kind of a subliminal message or is that not subliminal?

02:17:29.000 Well, it's not subliminal because it's conscious.

02:17:30.000 It has to be below my conscious awareness for it to be subliminal.

02:17:34.000 Do you remember those things they used to sell?

02:17:36.000 I don't think they have them anymore, but they used to be CDs or audio tapes, and you would hear like the sound of the ocean or something like that, but then behind it was supposedly a message.

02:17:48.000 Stop smoking.

02:17:48.000 Yeah.

02:17:48.000 For a session of smoking and so on.

02:17:49.000 Yeah.

02:17:50.000 Well, I don't know if those work because I don't think they're on the market anymore.

02:17:53.000 No.

02:17:54.000 I think the market has spoken.

02:17:56.000 Yeah, they were quite popular for a while.

02:17:59.000 You hear like...

02:18:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:18:02.000 And somewhere in there apparently was like, lose weight, stop eating Cheetos.

02:18:07.000 Doesn't Scientology have a similar thing with getting the clear state or something?

02:18:12.000 Yes, yes.

02:18:13.000 I had a neighbor who was... 1.00

02:18:15.000 Poor bastard. 0.99

02:18:16.000 There was a piece of property that he wanted to buy, and I found out he was a Scientologist because of this conversation. 0.99

02:18:21.000 He wanted to buy this piece of property, and I said, yeah, this is right next to his house.

02:18:25.000 I said, would you build on it?

02:18:28.000 He was like, well, you know what, I can't even buy it right now because my wife is about to go clear.

02:18:33.000 And I go, what does that mean?

02:18:34.000 You know, I didn't know what it meant.

02:18:35.000 And he goes, well, you know, we're Scientologists.

02:18:37.000 And then so, you know, I tried to just be as objective as possible and kind and started asking him, like, what does that mean?

02:18:46.000 He was telling me that she will no longer be influenced by any outside stimuli Any outside influence, any outside suggestions, and that she will be able to go through this world without being affected by negative anything.

02:19:00.000 Anybody yelling at her, anybody insulting her, they will no longer get in there.

02:19:04.000 But it costs $50,000.

02:19:06.000 That's it.

02:19:07.000 That's the ringer.

02:19:09.000 And then I remember I was going like, what is this, what happens?

02:19:11.000 And he was explaining that she goes through the ceremony.

02:19:14.000 I'm like, that costs 50 grand.

02:19:16.000 Why does it cost 50 grand?

02:19:17.000 I don't know.

02:19:18.000 It's just, you know, it's worth it. 1.00

02:19:22.000 Fucking poor bastard. 1.00

02:19:23.000 Now, why is it that so many people, since you're in that industry, why is it that it is particularly accepted within the Hollywood crowd? 1.00

02:19:31.000 Good question.

02:19:32.000 I've only met a few.

02:19:33.000 I've only met a few legit Scientologists, and one thing that they radiate is this weird sort of positive energy, this alien, artificial, positive energy that's very difficult to put your finger on.

02:19:45.000 Hey, Gad.

02:19:46.000 Nice to meet you, man.

02:19:47.000 That's amazing.

02:19:48.000 So you're doing evolutionary psychology as it applies to marketing.

02:19:54.000 Amazing stuff.

02:19:55.000 I like it a lot.

02:19:57.000 It's not like a genuine enthusiasm.

02:19:59.000 It's this weird extra level.

02:20:01.000 But it's almost like you want to follow.

02:20:05.000 I want to see how long you can keep this up.

02:20:06.000 I want to follow you all day.

02:20:08.000 I want to know when the crash is coming.

02:20:10.000 You know, I'm pretty sure that if I followed you around, I'm just guessing, but based on our two-hour-and-a-half conversation, that if I followed you around, you're pretty much like this all the time.

02:20:18.000 This is you. 0.99

02:20:19.000 But when you're talking to a Scientologist, you fucking know that this is going to end. 0.99

02:20:23.000 You can't keep this up, man. 0.99

02:20:25.000 It's like if a guy's putting on a fake English accent.

02:20:27.000 I'm talking all day like this.

02:20:29.000 It's a so important time where you're going to know that I can't do this forever.

02:20:34.000 You know, and this is something that they're doing when they've got this amazing stuff, Gad.

02:20:38.000 I love it.

02:20:38.000 Love what you're doing.

02:20:39.000 Like, man, you're going to hit the rocks, bro.

02:20:41.000 You're going to crash.

02:20:42.000 Something's going to go wrong.

02:20:44.000 But their centers that they have in L.A., one of the most interesting ones is they have this anti-psychiatry.

02:20:51.000 Anti-psychiatry center.

02:20:53.000 Psychiatry kills. 1.00

02:20:54.000 And they have this big billboard where a guy's got like shock, electric shock therapy shit on his head. 0.99

02:21:00.000 He's screaming in agony. 0.97

02:21:01.000 And what you don't realize when you go to that is that it's a Scientology front.

02:21:06.000 I mean, you go in there and they get you hooked on Dianetics.

02:21:10.000 Wow.

02:21:11.000 The story of this guy is quite extraordinary, right?

02:21:15.000 He's amazing.

02:21:16.000 Amazingly bad, too.

02:21:18.000 Amazingly bad writer.

02:21:19.000 And the fact that he openly spoke about creating your own religion.

02:21:23.000 That if you want to have real power and real money, you need to make your own religion.

02:21:27.000 And then, made his own religion. 1.00

02:21:28.000 And his books are fucking atrocious. 0.99

02:21:31.000 His movie, Battlefield Earth, have you ever seen the John Travolta movie? 0.99

02:21:35.000 No.

02:21:35.000 Oh my god, we were talking about it last week.

02:21:37.000 My friend Eliza Schlesinger and I were laughing about it.

02:21:41.000 It's an insanely bad movie with John Travolta. 0.76

02:21:45.000 He's like a monster. 0.95

02:21:47.000 Giant alien guy. 0.95

02:21:48.000 And it's him and... 1.00

02:21:50.000 What's the fucking dude's name with the lazy eye, the black guy? 1.00

02:21:56.000 Forrest Whitaker. 1.00

02:21:57.000 Oh, Forrest Whitaker.

02:21:57.000 Forrest Whitaker's in it too.

02:21:58.000 He's also a Scientologist?

02:21:59.000 I don't think he's a Scientologist, but he's an alien in this movie.

02:22:03.000 You'd be amazed at how many Scientologists there are.

02:22:06.000 Right.

02:22:06.000 Of, like, high-level people when you start, like, looking, like, weird ones, like Beck, the singer Beck.

02:22:12.000 Is that one?

02:22:13.000 Yeah.

02:22:13.000 Juliette Lewis.

02:22:14.000 As you go, like, down the list of people that are actual Scientologists, it's pretty extensive.

02:22:20.000 I think what it provides them is a scaffolding for...

02:22:25.000 I think Hollywood and the idea of being, and most notably actors, because acting itself is one of the most unstable professions.

02:22:34.000 You have to be chosen.

02:22:35.000 What you do is based entirely on the merits of your work.

02:22:39.000 What you do is based entirely on your education, Your qualifications and the data that you've provided and the writing that you've done based on that data.

02:22:49.000 It's all really rock-solid stuff. 0.98

02:22:51.000 It's all right in front of you, despite the fact that the ideologues attack you and the fucking politically correct knuckleheads will go after you. 0.93

02:22:59.000 What you're doing is, it's all based on the merits of your work. 0.92

02:23:02.000 What an actor is doing is trying so desperately to get other people to accept them and choose them.

02:23:09.000 And it's very weird.

02:23:11.000 It's ephemeral.

02:23:12.000 It's fleeting.

02:23:13.000 It's not just fleeting.

02:23:14.000 It's so weird that they don't have their own opinions.

02:23:17.000 It's very rare that you talk to actors and they have their own opinions.

02:23:20.000 It's like what they have is this sort of conglomeration of opinions that they've sort of subscribed to because they believe that this is going to ingratiate them with the overlords of Hollywood. 0.95

02:23:31.000 So everyone is goddamn politically correct. 0.99

02:23:33.000 Everyone's driving a fucking Prius. 1.00

02:23:35.000 Everyone's voting Democrat. 1.00

02:23:36.000 You know, everyone is wearing pink ribbons when it's the appropriate time because it's breast cancer awareness. 0.96

02:23:42.000 Hashtag bring our girls home.

02:23:44.000 Mm-hmm, yeah.

02:23:44.000 Oh, yeah.

02:23:46.000 Hashtag yes, all women. 1.00

02:23:47.000 You better fucking have that shit. 1.00

02:23:48.000 You better have a good quote about it. 1.00

02:23:49.000 Right.

02:23:50.000 Hashtag. 1.00

02:23:50.000 Hashtag go fuck yourself. 1.00

02:23:52.000 So they all get up. 1.00

02:23:54.000 They become a part of this sort of really unstable.

02:23:58.000 And to be fair to someone who wants to be an actor in the first place, oftentimes...

02:24:04.000 You're incredibly unstable at first.

02:24:06.000 The original you.

02:24:08.000 Before you get to Hollywood.

02:24:09.000 Why do you want to be an actor?

02:24:10.000 Because you want to be super special.

02:24:12.000 Not just regular special.

02:24:13.000 You want to be the guy.

02:24:15.000 I actually wanted to ask you about this because my theory is that very few actors want to be actors because of the love of the craft.

02:24:24.000 I mean, yes, there's Al Pacino and Robert De Niro who really do this because they're real artists.

02:24:29.000 But most people are really looking for the extrinsic perks, right?

02:24:33.000 It's really cool for me to walk around and people throwing themselves off balconies when I make an appearance, right?

02:24:38.000 And to make tons of money.

02:24:39.000 So, would you agree that that's true?

02:24:42.000 I mean, is that...

02:24:42.000 Yeah.

02:24:43.000 It's a sickness.

02:24:44.000 You know, there's a lot of people, they see, like a guy, like, go back to Brad Pitt, for instance.

02:24:49.000 They see the love that Brad Pitt gets.

02:24:51.000 They want to be like him.

02:24:52.000 And what's the best way to be like him?

02:24:54.000 To do what he does.

02:24:55.000 And so what does he do?

02:24:56.000 He acts.

02:24:57.000 How hard is that?

02:24:57.000 It's just pretending.

02:24:58.000 I'm going to get into acting.

02:24:59.000 They have a hole in their soul they need to fill up with other people's attention. 0.98

02:25:04.000 And almost all of them that are really extremely successful had some fucking wacky childhood. 0.98

02:25:09.000 Me personally, I had a very bad childhood. 0.98

02:25:11.000 It was not good.

02:25:13.000 And because of that bad childhood, it wasn't the worst.

02:25:16.000 I have friends that have way worse childhoods.

02:25:17.000 But it was enough to create a deficit that I had this burning desire to fill in to show that I wasn't a loser. 1.00

02:25:25.000 That it wasn't this child who was ignored and treated like shit. 0.99

02:25:31.000 That I wasn't that. 0.99

02:25:33.000 That I'll show you.

02:25:34.000 And that I'll show you is what sort of leads to...

02:25:37.000 By getting fame by becoming...

02:25:38.000 Or being great at athletics.

02:25:40.000 I mean, that's what initially led me to fighting.

02:25:42.000 That's what initially led me to comedy.

02:25:44.000 It wasn't as much I'll get fame as I'll show you.

02:25:48.000 Like, I'm going to get great at something.

02:25:49.000 And then somewhere along the line I started acting.

02:25:52.000 But that was completely by accident.

02:25:55.000 Oh, really?

02:25:55.000 Yeah, I've never taken any acting classes or anything like that.

02:25:59.000 I just got a development deal because of stand-up comedy.

02:26:02.000 I took a handful of private one-on-one acting classes with a crazy person.

02:26:08.000 Oh, this crazy lady was constantly trying to get me to, if I did get a show, to cast her as my mother and working her way in. 1.00

02:26:17.000 Oh, so gross. 0.98

02:26:19.000 Oh, the conversations that I had with this lady were so brutal. 0.67

02:26:22.000 And it was one of the first interactions that I had ever had with someone who is deep, deep in the acting world and the business.

02:26:29.000 And I got to be around some of these people that were also taking her classes. 0.99

02:26:33.000 I'm like, you people are fucking gross! 0.99

02:26:35.000 There's something gross about just the disingenuous behavior. 0.99

02:26:41.000 But again, as we said, I think it all boils down to what is that world?

02:26:46.000 So are many of your personal friends in the industry?

02:26:49.000 Are they more in fighting?

02:26:50.000 Most of them are comedians.

02:26:52.000 Most of my good friends are stand-up comics.

02:26:54.000 Because stand-up comics is like...

02:26:56.000 And the other ones are martial artists.

02:26:58.000 Those two worlds are as solid as you can get.

02:27:01.000 If you're not funny, no one laughs. 1.00

02:27:03.000 If you don't know how to fight, you're going to get your ass kicked. 1.00

02:27:06.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

02:27:07.000 Even if you don't know jiu-jitsu, someone's going to strangle you.

02:27:11.000 These are all rock-solid worlds.

02:27:13.000 There's no getting around them.

02:27:14.000 Where things get weird and airy-fairy is when you're pretending to be a superhero.

02:27:20.000 I just think it's an unnatural position to be in.

02:27:25.000 And for human beings, as you were saying, we have this evolutionary trait where we look at successful behavior and we want to emulate it.

02:27:33.000 Well, if you find the guy who's the head of the tribe, He's got the scars and the wisdom.

02:27:38.000 That's the guy that you want to pay attention to because you can learn from other people's mistakes.

02:27:42.000 He shows wisdom.

02:27:43.000 You can emulate his behavior and you can become successful.

02:27:46.000 Well, when someone is on TV or in a movie theater and their head's 60 feet tall and everything they're saying is perfect, you want to be them.

02:27:56.000 You want to follow them.

02:27:57.000 You want to worship them.

02:27:59.000 Because they seem to be exhibiting this evolutionary thing.

02:28:02.000 And I also think that the media itself, whether it's music or whether it's movies and television, there's an inescapable quality to being on film that is unavoidable in some very strange way.

02:28:17.000 And that your body's not designed to absorb it.

02:28:21.000 Your body is not designed to absorb movies.

02:28:24.000 Your body is designed to absorb the wisdom of the natural world.

02:28:28.000 Like the wisdom of, you know, that guy got bitten by a tiger.

02:28:30.000 Stay out of the tall grass. 0.98

02:28:32.000 You know, it's real fucking simple. 0.98

02:28:33.000 You know, like, oh, he went in the river and he drowned. 0.98

02:28:35.000 Don't go in the river.

02:28:36.000 You know, all these lessons we learn from the natural world, all these things that we see that exist in the material, you know, world that's in front of us.

02:28:44.000 But when this world has all of a sudden been changed and now you're looking at dragons and you're looking at, you know, spaceships and fucking lightning bolts and all these things that are taking place on a screen that aren't real, the whole thing gets very squirrely in our minds.

02:28:59.000 We don't know what to do with it. 0.59

02:29:01.000 So, do you ever get blowbacks?

02:29:03.000 We're talking about blowback about me.

02:29:05.000 Do you get blowback from people in the industry for speaking so critically of the Hollywood types?

02:29:10.000 They're scared.

02:29:11.000 Especially actors.

02:29:12.000 Terrified to have an opinion on anything. 0.99

02:29:15.000 Opinion on someone shitting on actors. 0.97

02:29:17.000 Because the problem is, then people would start examining. 0.98

02:29:20.000 Well, let's examine your behavior.

02:29:21.000 Let's examine what actors really are.

02:29:23.000 Let's examine some of the things you said.

02:29:24.000 They're probably getting mad. 1.00

02:29:25.000 Fuck him, but I'm not going to say it. 0.99

02:29:27.000 So you won't get actors on this show? 1.00

02:29:29.000 Oh, I've had actors on the show.

02:29:30.000 It's not all actors.

02:29:31.000 It's like saying... 1.00

02:29:32.000 I mean, a lot of comedians are fucked up. 1.00

02:29:35.000 But it's not all comedians. 1.00

02:29:36.000 A lot of fighters are fucked up. 0.99

02:29:38.000 But not all of them. 0.99

02:29:39.000 I mean, there's a lot of actors that are really nice.

02:29:41.000 I mean, I've done some...

02:29:42.000 I've done movies with people like Rosario Dawson, who's beautiful and famous. 0.68

02:29:47.000 She's about as nice and normal as you're ever going to be around.

02:29:50.000 She's so cool.

02:29:52.000 When you're around her, you would never believe in a million years that she's famous.

02:29:56.000 She seems completely unaffected by...

02:29:58.000 Whatever mechanism.

02:29:59.000 I don't know how she got there.

02:30:00.000 And not fake modesty?

02:30:01.000 No, she's totally normal.

02:30:03.000 I wish I had a video of her playing with my daughter when my daughter was two.

02:30:07.000 It was hilarious.

02:30:08.000 She was grabbing her and stuffing her whole hand in her mouth. 1.00

02:30:11.000 My daughter would scream laughing and she kept doing it again. 1.00

02:30:14.000 It was so funny.

02:30:15.000 She's really funny.

02:30:16.000 My daughter was crying at the monster outside.

02:30:18.000 Oh, the werewolf?

02:30:19.000 Yeah, sorry man.

02:30:20.000 I should have warned you.

02:30:22.000 I didn't know you were going to bring kids. 1.00

02:30:24.000 Werewolf's a motherfucker. 1.00

02:30:25.000 That's scary. 1.00

02:30:26.000 No, there's a lot of nice people that are actors.

02:30:28.000 Like, there's a lot of nice people, I'm sure, that do all sorts of things.

02:30:31.000 I know a lot of dudes that are in Special Forces that are nice as hell.

02:30:34.000 Right.

02:30:34.000 And they've killed folks.

02:30:35.000 You know?

02:30:36.000 It's like...

02:30:37.000 There's a lot of nice people out there.

02:30:38.000 I got, last year when we came to California, we come here every year to vacation.

02:30:43.000 I don't know if you knew.

02:30:44.000 This is the wrong time.

02:30:45.000 Why don't you come in the winter, man?

02:30:46.000 I know, I know, I know.

02:30:46.000 You live in Montreal.

02:30:48.000 I was at UC Irvine for a couple of years and then headed back to Montreal and have been trying to get back to California. 0.98

02:30:54.000 Yeah, that winter is a motherfucker up there. 0.97

02:30:56.000 You've been to Montreal? 0.99

02:30:57.000 Oh yeah, many times, yeah.

02:30:59.000 Well, Georges Saint-Pierre, I guess.

02:31:01.000 Yeah, well, I grew up in Boston and I used to do comedy at the Montreal Comedy Festival every year.

02:31:05.000 Oh, there you go.

02:31:06.000 Yeah.

02:31:07.000 Which is happening soon, I guess.

02:31:08.000 Yes, every summer.

02:31:09.000 I started going up there in, I think, 92. Oh, cool.

02:31:12.000 So you were saying about the special forces.

02:31:14.000 So we always hang out at one of the beaches.

02:31:16.000 We meet people.

02:31:17.000 We chat.

02:31:17.000 We're very friendly.

02:31:18.000 And so I met, who's become now a very good friend, a FBI special agent whose job it is to tailgate all of these Muslim extremists around the UC Irvine area. 1.00

02:31:32.000 Whoa, tailgate them. 0.94

02:31:33.000 Well, yeah.

02:31:34.000 I hope he's not going to be upset that I said this.

02:31:36.000 Well, no worries.

02:31:39.000 So yeah, so he's told me some unbelievable stories.

02:31:43.000 And he too, I mean, he's an FBI agent who's been under a lot of pressure to do the politically correct thing, right?

02:31:50.000 As you probably know that you're not supposed to say Islamic extremists or Islam or this or that.

02:31:56.000 And so when he hears me in some of my discourse, he finds it quite liberating.

02:32:02.000 Whose job it is to protect us from some of these dangers, who faces some of the politically correct shackles that we've been talking about.

02:32:11.000 Our mutual friend, Sam Harris, has had an incredible amount of blowback in his honest and objective assessment of Muslim extremists.

02:32:20.000 Incredible.

02:32:21.000 The Muslim extremists that he's documented, that he has put on his blog, like, he had this thing where he was saying, like, There's a video of this guy who's speaking.

02:32:34.000 I forget what country he's in, but he's speaking in English to this group of Islamic people.

02:32:40.000 And he's talking about the differences between what people think of him as radical Islam and what is just Islam.

02:32:48.000 And he starts talking about it.

02:32:49.000 He goes, how many of you...

02:32:51.000 Believe in the works of the Quran, in the word of the Quran, and how many of you follow it?

02:32:57.000 And they all raise their hand.

02:32:58.000 How many of you believe that the word of God is the best way to deal with homosexuals and that whatever the Quran says... 1.00

02:33:08.000 Whether it says they should be stoned to death, that this is the word of God, and they all raise their hand.

02:33:13.000 And he goes into this thing about how many of you think that women should be silent and that they should listen to their man because this is what God has said, and they all raise their hand.

02:33:23.000 And he's like, see, this is not radical Islam.

02:33:26.000 This is just Islam. 0.99

02:33:27.000 So all these people that say, oh, they're so radical, they're radical Islam.

02:33:30.000 And he doesn't even realize that he's demonstrating radical Islam.

02:33:35.000 Exactly.

02:33:36.000 He's demonstrating. 0.98

02:33:37.000 Sam Harris got so much fucking hate just for putting this video up. 0.99

02:33:41.000 I saw all these people, oh, I see what you're doing, shielding your Islamophobic with one person and your Islamophobia. 0.99

02:33:48.000 And what's astonishing is that, you know, he is a true liberal.

02:33:52.000 Yes.

02:33:52.000 And yet he is painted to be some hate monger.

02:33:56.000 Well, he also gets painted that way because it's perceived that he supports war because he wants to suppress this aspect of humanity.

02:34:06.000 And why is it?

02:34:07.000 Well, it's because it's not over here yet.

02:34:08.000 If it was over here and it was invading and you were getting suicide bombs on a daily basis, you would have a real issue with it too.

02:34:14.000 I'll tell you a great story along those lines.

02:34:18.000 A woman approached me who used to be a friend. 0.99

02:34:21.000 Now she no longer is a friend.

02:34:23.000 You'll know by the end of the story why.

02:34:25.000 She said, you know, you know a lot about this issue, God.

02:34:27.000 You grew up in the region.

02:34:28.000 What is the position on Islam regarding Jews?

02:34:32.000 Okay.

02:34:33.000 Well, I mean, we escaped Lebanon because we're going to be executed.

02:34:36.000 Okay.

02:34:37.000 It wasn't by the Amish.

02:34:40.000 So I said, you know what?

02:34:41.000 Rather than kind of go into a whole treaty, here's what I'm going to do.

02:34:44.000 I'm going to share with you a montage of Imams from around the world. 0.97

02:34:48.000 So this is not culture specific.

02:34:50.000 There's an Indonesian Imam, a Malaysian, Kuwaiti, Yemeni.

02:34:53.000 So these are at their sermons.

02:34:55.000 This is at the mosque where they are preaching what should be done to the Jews. 0.99

02:35:00.000 And one of the particular imams was showing images of the Nazis bulldozing skeletons into the ditches. 0.99

02:35:09.000 And he was lamenting to God, why, God, didn't you give us the pleasure of exterminating those Jewish rats? 1.00

02:35:16.000 Why do you hate us so much? 1.00

02:35:17.000 Those Jewish rats? 1.00

02:35:19.000 Some version of that, right? 1.00

02:35:20.000 So I mean, even by that standard, it was diabolical.

02:35:23.000 So I share with her the link, and I made absolutely no interpretations, right?

02:35:27.000 I wasn't saying it's good, it's bad.

02:35:29.000 I just shared the link.

02:35:30.000 Now, she's a Jewish woman whose grandparents, I can't remember on which side, had suffered in the Holocaust.

02:35:37.000 Her response back to me, well, in you sharing this video, you're exhibiting the same extremism.

02:35:45.000 So when your moral compass is so broken that the guy who shares a video in response to a question that you asked me...

02:35:56.000 Is no different than the people who are generating the content in the video.

02:36:02.000 We're doomed.

02:36:03.000 We need a better term for political correctness.

02:36:06.000 Because that's even more extreme than political correctness.

02:36:09.000 It's denial of reality based on your own ideology.

02:36:12.000 And that's what it is. 0.98

02:36:13.000 It's just this crazy sickness that people who consider themselves intelligent, intellectual, progressive, open-minded, these are the people that exhibit this ridiculous trait. 0.73

02:36:23.000 Because I think they just have this instinct that to criticize an other is gauche, is wrong.

02:36:29.000 Especially when that other...

02:36:32.000 Is their religious views.

02:36:34.000 But is that true?

02:36:34.000 Because they have no problem criticizing the hick Republican senator who believes in creationism and wants to teach it in school.

02:36:40.000 They'll fucking hate to the end of time about that fool. 1.00

02:36:43.000 That's true. 1.00

02:36:44.000 But if it's some imam who thinks that, you know, women should cover themselves up like they look like Jabba the Hutt or what is it?

02:36:50.000 Was it Boba Fett?

02:36:51.000 Whichever one.

02:36:53.000 Whatever it is.

02:36:54.000 Please direct your hate mail to Joe Rogan. 1.00

02:36:56.000 Bring it on, bitches. 1.00

02:36:58.000 It's silliness. 1.00

02:37:00.000 And my silliness is not... 0.93

02:37:02.000 I almost have more disdain for the people that are progressive that have an issue with someone criticizing this than I do the people that were brainwashed and ingrained with this religion. 0.87

02:37:15.000 Because...

02:37:16.000 The people that are supposedly intellectuals or supposedly responsible for guiding the thought of the young people, the people that are supposed to be the folks that are the ones that are the curators of these ideas, the ones that are the ones who are teaching children in school,

02:37:34.000 these are the wise ones who are professionally intelligent.

02:37:37.000 You're supposed to be professionally objective, professionally wise.

02:37:42.000 And you have this ridiculous notion because of the environment that we live in where this politically correct, whatever you want to call it, ideology has gotten so infected. 0.80

02:37:53.000 It's such a bizarre computer virus of the mind. 0.89

02:37:56.000 Well, the king of these guys, although it has nothing to do with Islam, is Norm Chomsky.

02:38:03.000 Sure, yeah.

02:38:20.000 In six causal links or less, you have to tell me why it is the fault of the U.S. military industrial complex as to why that frog died.

02:38:28.000 Because he views the whole world through very, very, you know, myopic lens.

02:38:34.000 Right?

02:38:36.000 Hamas is nice. 1.00

02:38:38.000 Israel is a evil, apartheid, racist state. 0.99

02:38:41.000 And you think, this is a Jewish guy who's spewing this from his safety of his confines in MIT office. 0.99

02:38:50.000 Now, I grew up in that world.

02:38:51.000 I promise you, they're not going to take too kindly to you when the lights are off.

02:38:56.000 And so it's just, it really is amazing to kind of understand the schizophrenic position.

02:39:01.000 Or for example, Queers for Palestine is another one, right? 0.97

02:39:04.000 Queers for Palestine? 0.74

02:39:05.000 Yeah.

02:39:06.000 That's a huge movement.

02:39:08.000 I need a t-shirt.

02:39:09.000 I need a Queers for Palestine t-shirt. 0.99

02:39:11.000 It's fine.

02:39:12.000 They have a cafe press.

02:39:13.000 Which area in the Middle East can you be open and assume your sexual orientation?

02:39:20.000 It's in Israel.

02:39:21.000 Yes.

02:39:21.000 Yet, what's going to happen to you in some of those other areas is not going to be very pretty.

02:39:27.000 And yet, these people are able to completely disassociate from that reality.

02:39:30.000 It's like Uncle Tom's.

02:39:32.000 Right?

02:39:33.000 Right.

02:39:33.000 It's kind of along those lines.

02:39:35.000 I suppose.

02:39:36.000 In a way.

02:39:37.000 The idea that, for whatever reason, this one religion is the one that you're not supposed to criticize.

02:39:45.000 I don't understand how that happened.

02:39:47.000 I wonder if it's connected in some way to the suppression of the people that live in these places where their natural resources are being stolen by the war machine, which is undeniable.

02:39:58.000 Undeniable what's going on in Iraq or in Afghanistan, how much of the hustle has to do with the natural resources, whether it be the poppy fields, whether it be the minerals in Afghanistan, whether it's the oil in Iraq.

02:40:09.000 Undeniable that these people are being, for sure, they're subject to the war machine that's coming in to steal the resources.

02:40:16.000 Right.

02:40:18.000 That's something that people are aware of, and you see these images of these people in these Islamic countries that are dying, that are getting bombed on, and also the dehumanism that they're subjected to by a lot of people that are trying to justify these wars.

02:40:36.000 That is the only thing that makes sense to me.

02:40:38.000 And also the fact that this has happened over the course of, since 2001, this is when this anti, this Islamophobia notion has been really, really pushed harder and harder.

02:40:51.000 Well, I think it's also because that's the way that I demonstrate how tolerant and progressive I am by showing that I am not going to lump everybody with those crazy 9-11 people.

02:41:02.000 And so again, it's part of that progressive posing.

02:41:05.000 No ideology, no belief system is free from mockery, from criticism.

02:41:13.000 And the quicker we find that out and the quicker we kind of fix this problem, the better we'll be off.

02:41:18.000 Do you think that that's possible?

02:41:19.000 I mean, this is the internet, and this is where it gets really weird.

02:41:23.000 The internet is supposedly where the ideas come to be vetted out.

02:41:28.000 I mean, this is the age of information.

02:41:30.000 This is where it's all on the table.

02:41:32.000 So you're saying, is it going to be possible to suppress criticisms of Islam for much longer? 0.97

02:41:38.000 Yeah, is it going to be possible to keep up this ridiculous facade? 0.96

02:41:41.000 Well, I think...

02:41:43.000 One of the ways that you suppress it is by creating an ethos of self-censorship.

02:41:49.000 So if I open up my laptop and I can write on my Psychology Today blog to 3 million people, I have a real clear choice to make that day.

02:42:01.000 Am I going to write something that can bring heat to my young children?

02:42:06.000 And then I have to decide whether I'm willing to do that or not.

02:42:08.000 Now, the fact that I've already engaged in that calculus and that calculation suggests that we are...

02:42:15.000 I mean, the canary is singing in the cold mine.

02:42:18.000 And so I think we have to be in an environment where we don't engage in this type of self-censorship.

02:42:23.000 So I think we're definitely down the wrong road.

02:42:27.000 I think many academics privately...

02:42:30.000 We'll speak about these issues very openly with me, but we'll never even as so far as go as to like something on Facebook, lest they will be found out.

02:42:39.000 That's so crazy!

02:42:41.000 You gotta worry about your standing.

02:42:43.000 You gotta worry about your public standing.

02:42:45.000 You gotta worry about your job.

02:42:47.000 More people should be self-sufficient.

02:42:49.000 You have less to think about in that regard.

02:42:51.000 But when you're an educator, how can you be?

02:42:53.000 In one sense, you have tenure.

02:42:55.000 That kind of helps a lot.

02:42:56.000 But tenure creates a lot of hubris.

02:42:59.000 There's a lot of guys who have tenure that all of a sudden become untouchable.

02:43:02.000 And they force-feed their students their ideologies.

02:43:06.000 Absolutely.

02:43:07.000 And actually, I wrote an article on my Psychology's Day blog where I was talking about the necessity for tenure, but also its potential for misuse, right?

02:43:15.000 Because you do get an incredible amount of deadwood with tenure, right?

02:43:20.000 Do you foresee a time where universities won't be the main source of education that was somehow or another to be taken care of online?

02:43:28.000 That's a good question.

02:43:29.000 I mean, right now there's a development of...

02:43:31.000 Have you heard of...

02:43:32.000 You know what MOOCs are?

02:43:33.000 No.

02:43:34.000 MOOCs are...

02:43:34.000 Well, I know what Joey Diaz calls MOOCs.

02:43:36.000 There's fucking MOOC over here. 1.00

02:43:37.000 Oh, you're a dummy. 1.00

02:43:38.000 Okay, as a derogatory term. 1.00

02:43:40.000 You goofball. 0.98

02:43:40.000 Oh, you're right. 0.98

02:43:41.000 You're a MOOC. No, MOOCs are massive online.

02:43:47.000 I can't remember the rest of the acronym.

02:43:48.000 These are courses that are oftentimes offered under the auspices of a university, but they're free courses where people can massively register.

02:43:57.000 You have, you know, teaching a course, 100,000 people.

02:44:00.000 MIT does that, right?

02:44:01.000 MIT does that.

02:44:02.000 And actually, I try to hook up with these guys called Coursera that organizes a portal for this, but they don't have a contract with Concordia, and it has to be between a university and the organization for it to fly.

02:44:17.000 So I do see a potential eventually for sort of a more democratization of knowledge, but I don't suspect that we're going to lose the university anytime soon.

02:44:26.000 This is a social aspect of it that's so interesting.

02:44:29.000 People go away, and they party, and they have fun.

02:44:31.000 They find themselves.

02:44:32.000 Not in Canada, though.

02:44:33.000 No?

02:44:34.000 It's very interesting, because I've studied both in the U.S. and in Canada as part of my study.

02:44:38.000 And so this Greek system, going away to college, not being close to your parents, the drinking games, that's very much, much more so of an American culture.

02:44:50.000 Right of passage than it is a Canadian. 0.62

02:44:52.000 Most Canadian students end up going to the school that is physically closest to them.

02:44:57.000 That's interesting.

02:44:58.000 Is that because it's paid for by the government?

02:45:01.000 That's it.

02:45:02.000 You got it.

02:45:02.000 So in Canada, you don't have historically...

02:45:05.000 I mean, now some programs are getting a bit more privatized, but historically, everything is Big Brother.

02:45:10.000 So there isn't this huge hierarchy of universities, right?

02:45:15.000 Harvard and then whatever.

02:45:17.000 All schools are public.

02:45:19.000 And so, yes, McGill University is more famous than some other Canadian universities, but on average, all Canadian schools are quite good.

02:45:27.000 And you have about 40 universities, and so there's really no point in choosing between them and going across the country.

02:45:33.000 In the US, you have 3,000 universities.

02:45:35.000 You know, colleges and universities, there's widely varying on everything in terms of price, in terms of quality.

02:45:42.000 And so I think that's what makes it a bit more exciting to choose and pick.

02:45:46.000 But in Canada, they're all good.

02:45:48.000 That's interesting.

02:45:49.000 In the United States, they also have universities that cater specifically to religious ideas.

02:45:55.000 Exactly.

02:45:56.000 Like, what was the one that someone got in trouble for during one of the elections for taking support from and that they wouldn't allow interracial couples?

02:46:05.000 Was that Brigham Young?

02:46:07.000 Was it Brigham Young?

02:46:08.000 It might have been Brigham Young.

02:46:10.000 I don't remember which one it was, but it was some southern university.

02:46:13.000 And I forget who they were supporting, but it became a big problem with them.

02:46:17.000 They had become aligned with this university that didn't...

02:46:22.000 Didn't allow interracial couples. 0.99

02:46:25.000 The real problem with that, obviously it's racist, but also the varying scales of race.

02:46:34.000 Is it only pure blood? 1.00

02:46:36.000 What are you, a fucking vampire? 1.00

02:46:38.000 What if someone is like one-sixteenth Native American? 1.00

02:46:42.000 Uh-oh.

02:46:42.000 Is he interracial?

02:46:45.000 If he's dating a blonde woman from Norway?

02:46:47.000 Right.

02:46:48.000 What if the woman is like one-eighth Chinese? 1.00

02:46:52.000 One-quarter?

02:46:53.000 When do we draw the line?

02:46:55.000 Half?

02:46:55.000 She's half Chinese?

02:46:57.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:46:58.000 What if she lies about it and says she's Eskimo? 1.00

02:47:01.000 To think that if only I converted to Seventh-day Adventist, I could be living in Southern California, man. 1.00

02:47:06.000 Dude, you could have been rocking it and teaching bullshit and teaching bullshit and lying about Jesus. 1.00

02:47:11.000 It would have been awesome. 1.00

02:47:11.000 Maybe I still might accept it. 1.00

02:47:13.000 Tanning.

02:47:14.000 Yeah, you've been tanning.

02:47:15.000 You can tan in Montreal, too, for about three weeks.

02:47:17.000 Montreal, you probably know this joke, we have four seasons, winter, winter, winter, and July.

02:47:23.000 That's true.

02:47:24.000 Well, July is pretty awesome, though, and everybody's very festive.

02:47:27.000 One of the things that I love about any place like Canada or a lot of parts of Canada is that they really appreciate the summertime because of the fact the winter is so brutal.

02:47:38.000 That's exactly right.

02:47:40.000 It's the festival sort of city of the world because we're completely cocooned from, say, end of November till, say, mid-April.

02:47:48.000 And so we make up for it.

02:47:50.000 I think it also develops character, too.

02:47:52.000 I've talked about Los Angeles and that a lot of people that are born and raised in Los Angeles are like spoiled rich kids that also won the lottery.

02:47:59.000 They don't realize how easy they've got it.

02:48:01.000 The worst the weather gets here, you have to hit a button and turn the AC on.

02:48:05.000 It's the most brutal thing you have to do is use your finger to press a button.

02:48:09.000 Well, I remember when we lived here, when I was at UC Irvine, one time we were driving on the highway and there was a Warning weather advisory because there was going to be 10 minutes of rain.

02:48:19.000 And when it rains, the roads apparently become a bit more slippery because of the oil stay.

02:48:25.000 I don't know exactly what it was.

02:48:27.000 And so I'm thinking, you know, we drive in minus 30 degrees in snowstorms.

02:48:31.000 They have warning advisories when it rains for 10 minutes.

02:48:34.000 It's true.

02:48:35.000 You guys have character.

02:48:36.000 We have none.

02:48:37.000 We're done.

02:48:38.000 We're done here.

02:48:38.000 I'll give up my character to move to Southern California.

02:48:41.000 Well, you've lived a bunch of years up there.

02:48:43.000 You realize that the winters are not worth it.

02:48:45.000 They are brutal, especially if you have to go anywhere.

02:48:49.000 If you could work out of your house all winter long and you had a good supply of wood and water and food ready for you.

02:48:54.000 And a bear once in a while to shoot, then you're set.

02:48:56.000 Yes, there you go.

02:48:57.000 Then you can stay warm and full.

02:48:59.000 But California, there's pros and cons.

02:49:02.000 The con is obviously that everybody knows about it.

02:49:04.000 So you've been here?

02:49:05.000 Since 94. Oh, okay.

02:49:07.000 So you've been here for 20 years.

02:49:08.000 Yeah.

02:49:09.000 But I grew up in Boston and also delivered newspapers.

02:49:14.000 So I drove every day, 365 days a year.

02:49:17.000 So snowstorms, everything.

02:49:18.000 One thing is good.

02:49:19.000 I know how to drive in snow.

02:49:20.000 I know how to drive real good.

02:49:22.000 When the ass end of my car kicks out, I don't sweat it at all. 0.63

02:49:26.000 I just counter-steer. 0.93

02:49:27.000 It's like instinctive.

02:49:29.000 But, you know, it's more pleasurable to live here, for sure.

02:49:32.000 But you don't have the...

02:49:33.000 I mean, could you break out into the Bostonian accent if you wanted to?

02:49:36.000 Yeah, I kind of...

02:49:37.000 You know what?

02:49:37.000 I fought once in the Bay State Games, which was this big Olympic festivals when Taekwondo was going into the Olympics.

02:49:44.000 Okay.

02:49:45.000 And I won it, so I got interviewed on television.

02:49:47.000 I heard myself on TV. I was like, oh my god, I sound like a fucking idiot. 1.00

02:49:52.000 My accent was so strong. 1.00

02:49:54.000 Yeah, we've been working hard, training hard for this.

02:49:57.000 I was like, oh, I didn't realize.

02:49:59.000 I didn't realize how gross it sounded, so I abandoned it.

02:50:02.000 You worked hard, too.

02:50:04.000 I just abandoned it.

02:50:05.000 I mean, it comes out every now and then if I have a couple drinks, you may hear a little bit of it.

02:50:09.000 But it's a weird accent because I have a little bit of New Jersey, too.

02:50:12.000 I'm born in New Jersey.

02:50:14.000 Man, we're just about out of time.

02:50:15.000 Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before?

02:50:18.000 Just wanted to thank you.

02:50:19.000 I can't believe all the...

02:50:20.000 Three hours?

02:50:21.000 Three hours.

02:50:21.000 It feels like three minutes, man.

02:50:22.000 I know.

02:50:22.000 You're the best interviewer ever.

02:50:24.000 Ah, that's ridiculous. 0.76

02:50:25.000 You're the best guest ever. 0.92

02:50:26.000 Well, thank you.

02:50:27.000 It was pretty easy to do.

02:50:28.000 Look, we could do this a hundred times, man.

02:50:29.000 Let me know when you're back in town again.

02:50:30.000 We'll do this again for sure.

02:50:32.000 You're on.

02:50:32.000 Well, your books, what can people buy?

02:50:35.000 Where can they buy it?

02:50:36.000 What do you suggest?

02:50:37.000 So, probably if they want the sort of trade book, the book that's written for the masses, The Consuming Instinct.

02:50:43.000 The Consuming Instinct.

02:50:44.000 Yeah.

02:50:44.000 What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving Reveal About Human Nature.

02:50:49.000 So that they could get on Amazon and they'll be listing of my other books there.

02:50:53.000 They could check out my Psychology Today blog, Homo Consumericus, where I write about everything, religion, politics.

02:50:59.000 When you say Homo, you better say something else real quick.

02:51:01.000 Yeah.

02:51:02.000 You know, you can't have a pause.

02:51:04.000 What are you, some kind of homo sapien boy? 0.92

02:51:05.000 What are you, kind of homo consumerist? 1.00

02:51:09.000 You've got to be real careful.

02:51:11.000 Okay, well listen, thank you very much.

02:51:13.000 This was a really fun conversation.

02:51:14.000 I really, really appreciate you coming down here and spreading some knowledge and information.

02:51:18.000 It was really fun to talk to you too.

02:51:20.000 Cheers.

02:51:20.000 We really appreciate it.

02:51:21.000 Likewise.

02:51:21.000 You can follow GAD on Twitter.

02:51:23.000 It's Gadsahad.

02:51:25.000 Did I say it right?

02:51:26.000 Yep, G-A-D-S-A-A-D. G-A-D-S-A-A-D on Twitter.

02:51:32.000 And the links there are also to his website.

02:51:34.000 And you can find his books on Amazon.

02:51:36.000 Do you have any books on tape?

02:51:38.000 They're not.

02:51:39.000 I need to do that.

02:51:41.000 You need to audio tape your books, man.

02:51:43.000 Just read your books.

02:51:44.000 And with that sexy radio voice. 0.67

02:51:47.000 That's what I'm talking about, dog.

02:51:48.000 Do it.

02:51:49.000 You got it.

02:51:50.000 Flawing it.

02:51:51.000 Alright, folks.

02:51:51.000 So we got another podcast coming up in a little bit tonight with David Seaman.

02:51:55.000 He'll be here in about 10 minutes.

02:51:57.000 So until then, much love, my friends.

02:52:00.000 Much love.

02:52:01.000 Please support our sponsors.

02:52:03.000 Blue Apron.

02:52:04.000 Go to blueapron.com forward slash Rogan.

02:52:09.000 That's Blue Apron. 1.00

02:52:10.000 Is that it?

02:52:10.000 Why am I having a hard time finding it here?

02:52:13.000 Where's the copy?

02:52:16.000 Oh, there's two copies here.

02:52:17.000 Okay.

02:52:18.000 Blueapron.com forward slash Rogan.

02:52:21.000 That was correct.

02:52:21.000 And you will get two free meals.

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02:52:32.000 It's all delivered to your house.

02:52:33.000 Give it a shot and like I said, you'll get two free meals.

02:52:36.000 Blueapron.com forward slash Rogan.

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02:52:40.000 Go to Rogan.Ting.com for $25 off of any of their products.

02:52:45.000 Delicious cellular devices.

02:52:47.000 Alright, we'll see you soon.

02:52:48.000 Bye.

02:52:49.000 Big kiss.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 07, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #519 - Gad Saad

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