The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #766 - Gad Saad

00:00:03.000 Fighting the nonsense of the world, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:06.000 The Godfather's back.

00:00:08.000 How you doing?

00:00:08.000 How are you, buddy?

00:00:09.000 Good to see you, man.

00:00:10.000 Good to see you.

00:00:11.000 What's going on?

00:00:12.000 What's going on?

00:00:13.000 I'm here in Southern California.

00:00:14.000 You escaped.

00:00:15.000 I escaped.

00:00:16.000 Minus 30 with windchill last week.

00:00:19.000 Didn't leave the house from Friday to Monday.

00:00:22.000 Well, the windchill factor's minus 30 or it's actually minus 30?

00:00:25.000 I mean, with the windchill.

00:00:26.000 So I'd say it's minus 15. With windchill, minus 30. Phew!

00:00:31.000 You guys have become too soft in Southern California.

00:00:34.000 What do you mean become?

00:00:34.000 100%.

00:00:35.000 We've been too soft. 0.99

00:00:37.000 This is a ridiculous place to live. 0.99

00:00:37.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:00:39.000 Well, I don't know about that.

00:00:40.000 It is.

00:00:41.000 This is like a lottery winner place to live.

00:00:43.000 It's like the weather lottery.

00:00:45.000 And these people, they don't understand what the weather is.

00:00:47.000 They're just running around.

00:00:49.000 I swear to God, if it gets 50 here, people start complaining.

00:00:52.000 I've seen weather advisories when I used to live here where there'd be a 10-minute spell of rain and there'd be endless warnings.

00:01:00.000 Be careful.

00:01:01.000 Be careful.

00:01:02.000 You know, we go through blizzards.

00:01:04.000 Yeah.

00:01:04.000 There is one reason for that, though.

00:01:06.000 The oil slick.

00:01:07.000 Yeah.

00:01:08.000 When it doesn't rain for a long time, all the oil from people's cars, the residue gets on the road.

00:01:14.000 And as soon as just a little bit of water gets on that, it gets really slippery.

00:01:17.000 And that is...

00:01:18.000 Reality.

00:01:19.000 But still.

00:01:20.000 Before we start.

00:01:21.000 Before we start.

00:01:22.000 Last time when I was here, it was on your birthday.

00:01:25.000 And some guy wrote in a very non-anti-Semitic way, here goes God being a Jew, not giving Joe Rogan a gift on his birthday.

00:01:34.000 So I thought that I would correct that by giving you a signed copy.

00:01:39.000 Of one of my books.

00:01:40.000 Oh, thank you.

00:01:41.000 So there you go.

00:01:42.000 There you go.

00:01:43.000 The Consuming Instinct.

00:01:45.000 Now you can grow.

00:01:46.000 What juicy burgers, Ferraris, pornography, and gift-giving reveal about human nature.

00:01:53.000 There you go, buddy.

00:01:53.000 By the Godfather.

00:01:54.000 And signed.

00:01:55.000 By the Godfather.

00:01:55.000 Thank you so much.

00:01:57.000 Very exciting.

00:01:59.000 Yeah, well, you can't read those things that people say, those mean things.

00:02:03.000 Oh, yeah.

00:02:04.000 I try to avoid them, but once in a while I get sucked in and they can piss me off.

00:02:09.000 Well, I always equate it to snake venom.

00:02:12.000 It's like if you get a little bit of snake venom, you get immune to it, you get accustomed to it, whereas if you get a big burst of it, it can poison you. 1.00

00:02:20.000 So if you just get a little bit of it every now and then, when a big burst comes your way, like someone calling you a cheap Jew, you go, you motherfucker. 1.00

00:02:28.000 It doesn't work anymore. 1.00

00:02:29.000 Right.

00:02:30.000 You just realize there's a lot of people out there that a lot of the reason why they're saying these mean things is because they're trying to find something that they can say that'll get you to respond.

00:02:39.000 Exactly right.

00:02:40.000 That's a big part of it.

00:02:41.000 So recently, the latest one is, so somebody trolls you endlessly in a very impolite manner, right?

00:02:48.000 Okay.

00:02:49.000 Sometimes I try to engage them, but I find them obnoxious. 0.96

00:02:52.000 I know, it's ridiculous. 0.91

00:02:52.000 Do you really? 0.91

00:02:54.000 You're a Disney man.

00:02:55.000 You're an actual professor.

00:02:55.000 I am.

00:02:57.000 At a legitimate university.

00:02:57.000 I am, indeed.

00:02:58.000 I am, indeed.

00:02:59.000 Isn't it crazy that I would even entertain there?

00:03:02.000 Yeah.

00:03:02.000 So anyway, so once in a while, I get sucked into the trap.

00:03:05.000 They're impolite.

00:03:05.000 Okay.

00:03:06.000 So after a while, I block them.

00:03:08.000 So these guys then, because I've blocked them, start going around saying, well, you know, he's supposedly a proponent of freedom of speech, yet he blocks me, as though I'm the purveyor of freedom of speech, right?

00:03:21.000 I mean, I'm not allowed to come to your house.

00:03:24.000 Break into your house and start calling you names, and if you stop me, I accuse you of not supporting free speech, right?

00:03:30.000 But in their minds, if I block them simply because I no longer want to engage them, I am being a hypocrite because I'm not supporting their freedom to insult me. 0.94

00:03:40.000 See, again, I have to go back to what I said earlier.

00:03:43.000 Why?

00:03:44.000 Why?

00:03:44.000 You're so smart.

00:03:46.000 How is this even getting into your mind?

00:03:49.000 Can I tell you what it is oftentimes?

00:03:51.000 I find it galling that somebody could be so insulting.

00:03:51.000 Yes.

00:03:57.000 Galling.

00:03:58.000 What does that word mean?

00:04:00.000 Right?

00:04:00.000 Yes.

00:04:01.000 Right?

00:04:01.000 I mean...

00:04:02.000 We interact, you and I, with a million people a day.

00:04:05.000 With most of the people, they're lovely, they're sweet, they're polite.

00:04:08.000 The vast, vast majority.

00:04:10.000 So when you get this individual who simply can't modulate his behavior, To even sort of adhere to the most basic social norms once in a while, I just get pissed off.

00:04:10.000 Right.

00:04:20.000 But usually I'm able to avoid it.

00:04:22.000 Well, you shouldn't even once in a while.

00:04:23.000 Look, first of all, you've got to realize that anonymity is a really confusing thing for people.

00:04:31.000 It's the ability to communicate with people anonymous has never existed before.

00:04:35.000 Other than...

00:04:37.000 Some serial killer making some note by cutting out little pieces of paper out of the newspaper and, you know, using the words from that.

00:04:43.000 There's no anonymity, man.

00:04:46.000 It doesn't exist, right? 0.97

00:04:47.000 So when you have anonymity in the form of, like, you have a Twitter account and it's just an egg and you call yourself Fuck McGee and you just start trolling the gadfather, Makes no sense.

00:04:58.000 Well, it's, you know, that's not a normal interaction. 0.55

00:05:02.000 There shouldn't be a method where someone could just contact you like that.

00:05:07.000 Because our bodies and our minds and all our systems, our social systems, they're just not set up for that.

00:05:14.000 So it's saying rude things without consequence.

00:05:17.000 Basically, you're offering, by the way, an evolutionary argument.

00:05:20.000 Yes.

00:05:20.000 That's exactly right.

00:05:21.000 Beautiful.

00:05:21.000 Perfect.

00:05:22.000 It's a completely new thing that we really just don't have the mechanisms for.

00:05:26.000 We're not accustomed to it.

00:05:29.000 We don't really have a long history of it.

00:05:31.000 I mean, we have a history of just doing this.

00:05:33.000 The realistic history, at the extreme level, is 20 years.

00:05:38.000 94-ish, 96-ish, somewhere around then, when it started, right?

00:05:42.000 But the real history is probably less than 10 of it really being incredibly pervasive the way it is today, like with Twitter and Facebook and all this Instagram comments and things along those lines.

00:05:54.000 Go ahead.

00:05:55.000 No, no, I was just saying it's a new thing that we have to work out because it is a massive, massive part of our culture.

00:06:01.000 There was some statistic recently about the amount of data that people produce in a day.

00:06:08.000 Worldwide. 1.00

00:06:09.000 And most of the data is LOL, fuck you, you know, bullshit. 1.00

00:06:12.000 But it is, you know, ones and zeros, binary code. 1.00

00:06:14.000 It's all that data.

00:06:16.000 There's more produced in a day than, it's some staggering statistic.

00:06:21.000 Than the rest of human history.

00:06:23.000 Yeah, it's like, it's something crazy.

00:06:23.000 Yeah.

00:06:24.000 Like, here it goes.

00:06:25.000 Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created daily.

00:06:32.000 Incredible. 0.99

00:06:33.000 What in the fuck is that? 0.98

00:06:36.000 90% of the world's data today has been created in the last two years alone. 0.99

00:06:45.000 Well, by the way, a lot of business schools now have programs in data analytics or big data where they try to teach students how to navigate through the complexity of this type of big data sets.

00:06:58.000 So it's a really hot field in business schools.

00:07:00.000 Well, it's impossible.

00:07:01.000 I mean, what it is is there's a pattern, a very clear pattern emerging.

00:07:07.000 That pattern is...

00:07:10.000 Of anyone being able to access any information at any time.

00:07:15.000 And it's getting closer and closer to that all the time.

00:07:18.000 And some of that means communication.

00:07:21.000 It doesn't just mean being able to access, you know, Googling some facts or some knowledge.

00:07:27.000 It also, it's being able to communicate with people.

00:07:30.000 And it's gotten to this really crazy place.

00:07:33.000 Speaking of information, my doctoral dissertation more than 20 years ago was about...

00:07:39.000 How do people decide when to stop acquiring additional information and commit to a choice?

00:07:45.000 So suppose I'm choosing between cars, or between mates, or between job applicants, or between jobs to take, whatever the decision is.

00:07:54.000 Did you say between mates?

00:07:55.000 Mates, yeah.

00:07:57.000 You should see, I did look at some of the comments right after I appear, right?

00:08:03.000 Then I lose interest and I don't. 1.00

00:08:04.000 But there was one guy who wrote something like, this guy is swimming in pussy. 1.00

00:08:11.000 And then everybody starts ganging up on that comment. 1.00

00:08:14.000 You know what it is, man?

00:08:15.000 It's that beer commercial.

00:08:17.000 The most interesting man in the world is that.

00:08:19.000 I look like him?

00:08:20.000 Yeah, that's what it is.

00:08:21.000 That look, it's become a thing now.

00:08:24.000 I got you.

00:08:24.000 The beautiful white beard and a man of wisdom in years.

00:08:28.000 Thank you.

00:08:29.000 So anyway, in my doctoral dissertation, I had looked at...

00:08:34.000 Whoa, I think I'm better looking than this guy.

00:08:36.000 I'm sure you do think that.

00:08:39.000 You know, that guy's Canadian too.

00:08:40.000 Is he?

00:08:41.000 Yeah, he's not even really Spanish.

00:08:43.000 And he's much older than me.

00:08:44.000 You think so?

00:08:45.000 What do you mean?

00:08:46.000 He's like 70. Okay, I don't know.

00:08:46.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:08:48.000 I'm 51. I don't know how old a guy is.

00:08:50.000 So anyway, so the whole psychology of decision making, I've addressed it in my research.

00:08:55.000 Very interesting stuff, yeah.

00:08:56.000 Well, what is the...

00:08:58.000 Well, this is a different sort of decision making thing.

00:09:01.000 Because I think...

00:09:03.000 You definitely can get lost where you can just go online.

00:09:07.000 And, you know, one of the things that YouTube does now that makes it really difficult is you watch a video.

00:09:12.000 Say if I was watching some video today on a rhino slamming into a car.

00:09:17.000 It was removed, though, some copyright infringement. 0.99

00:09:20.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.98

00:09:22.000 This rhino charges this car and slams into it. 0.99

00:09:25.000 The problem is, once you watch a video, immediately after that, it offers up another video and it starts playing.

00:09:32.000 It'll give you like 10 seconds and then it starts playing again.

00:09:35.000 And then you look on the side and there's all these suggestions.

00:09:38.000 It's not as simple as one video.

00:09:40.000 It's an endless web.

00:09:42.000 That's why, by the way...

00:09:44.000 Internet pornography for men is such an alluring trap, right?

00:09:48.000 Because our visual system and our need for variety-seeking is there.

00:09:52.000 And now you mean I can satiate this by going online, having endless, different, nubile, ready-to-mate women? 1.00

00:10:02.000 So it's easy for our computational system to be parasitized by the Internet.

00:10:02.000 Yes.

00:10:07.000 Well, it's also...

00:10:08.000 It's probably really not... 0.99

00:10:11.000 We're not really set up to watch people fuck. 0.99

00:10:13.000 It seems like the brain just doesn't know what to do with that. 1.00

00:10:17.000 Especially if you're by yourself.

00:10:19.000 Close the door.

00:10:20.000 What's going on here?

00:10:21.000 I mean, there's people that just will watch pornography 10, 12 hours a day.

00:10:25.000 And it's not just a few.

00:10:27.000 I bet if you could highlight... 0.97

00:10:28.000 I bet if you were in a plane and you're flying over the United States and there was a light bulb that went off over everyone's head that jerks off for 12 hours a day.

00:10:36.000 You'd be stunned.

00:10:38.000 You'd be stunned.

00:10:39.000 You'd be able to read by it.

00:10:40.000 You'd be able to hold a magazine up to the window and read.

00:10:44.000 I'm not joking.

00:10:45.000 I think there's a lot of people out there that get overwhelmed by the possibilities of doing that, like the choice.

00:10:54.000 They don't have the discipline to handle that.

00:10:57.000 It was actually a conversation that I was having with my friend Duncan.

00:11:00.000 The other day about discipline and how important discipline is to living a good and healthy life and that getting the things that you need to get done will allow you to actually enjoy your free time, whereas if you don't get those things done, the free time and these pursuits,

00:11:16.000 these things, they almost become obsessions and you kind of dive into them to avoid the pressure of getting those things done and it becomes sort of counterintuitive.

00:11:26.000 Counterproductive.

00:11:27.000 Yeah, going back to the pornography I had on my YouTube channel.

00:11:31.000 Do you know who Mercedes Carrera is?

00:11:33.000 I've met her.

00:11:33.000 Sure, yeah.

00:11:34.000 Have you?

00:11:34.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:11:35.000 She came to one of my shows with, I guess, her husband or boyfriend or something like that.

00:11:39.000 Very nice guy.

00:11:40.000 Very smart girl.

00:11:41.000 But I'd seen her on Gavin McGinnis' podcast.

00:11:46.000 And she's very smart.

00:11:46.000 Right.

00:11:48.000 Of course.

00:11:48.000 Well...

00:11:49.000 I mean, otherwise, I mean, what would we have to talk about?

00:11:52.000 Well, she's an engineer, right? 0.98

00:11:53.000 She's very, very heavily vested into the whole social justice warrior bullshit. 0.99

00:11:53.000 She's an engineer. 0.99

00:11:59.000 The other way.

00:12:01.000 Fighting against it.

00:12:02.000 Fighting against it, exactly.

00:12:03.000 So I'd seen her on a few, you know, popular podcasts.

00:12:06.000 Yeah.

00:12:06.000 And I thought, I mean, she's just, not only is she, of course, beautiful, but so well-spoken.

00:12:10.000 And so I had her on the show, and we've communicated since several times.

00:12:13.000 And so that's been really fun.

00:12:15.000 I mean, sort of to mimic what you do with your podcast of bringing in so many interesting people.

00:12:20.000 In my YouTube channel, I've had people from, you know, guys who fight Islam to, you know, porn stars who used to be former engineers. 0.92

00:12:28.000 So it's been really fun to meet all these people.

00:12:30.000 Yeah, there's a cool movement going on now where there's a lot of very intelligent people that are resisting nonsense.

00:12:36.000 Right.

00:12:37.000 Where they're just going, come on, you're wasting time, you're wasting effort.

00:12:41.000 And also there's a lot of people that are attaching themselves to these ridiculous movements just because they have an identity in that movement.

00:12:48.000 Right. 0.61

00:12:55.000 Yes, I saw it.

00:13:06.000 With activism. 1.00

00:13:07.000 What fucking activism? 0.99

00:13:09.000 This isn't activism. 1.00

00:13:10.000 You're just holding up signs and complaining.

00:13:12.000 This is not activism. 0.95

00:13:14.000 You're not changing a goddamn thing other than people's opinions about you. 0.85

00:13:18.000 Have you seen the one with... 0.97

00:13:19.000 I did an invited lecture at University of Ottawa on the thought police and political correctness.

00:13:25.000 I'm not sure if you saw it.

00:13:26.000 If not, you should check it out.

00:13:27.000 It kind of covers the safe spaces and the microaggressions and the trigger warnings.

00:13:33.000 And one of the examples that I picked, I really tried to pick some really outlandish examples that should only belong in The Onion.

00:13:40.000 One of the examples was some, I think it was some students at University of Oregon Wanted to take down the classic quote by Martin Luther King, you know, the I Have a Dream stuff?

00:13:51.000 Because it was insufficiently inclusive.

00:13:51.000 Yes.

00:13:56.000 By him, you know, focusing his ire on racism and not looking at whatever it is, transgenderism and so on, he was being divisive.

00:14:06.000 So when Martin Luther King can draw the ire of these guys, none of us are safe.

00:14:12.000 Yeah.

00:14:13.000 No one is safe.

00:14:14.000 Well, they're not safe either.

00:14:14.000 Yeah.

00:14:16.000 I mean, they're eating themselves.

00:14:17.000 They're attacking themselves.

00:14:18.000 We had this podcast where we went over this story about this woman who joined Wellesley College, which is an all-girls college.

00:14:25.000 I've spoken there.

00:14:27.000 Do you know the story behind it?

00:14:28.000 Go ahead.

00:14:29.000 The woman joined Wellesley College, and then once she joined Wellesley College, she decided that she's going to identify as a man.

00:14:35.000 Oh, yes.

00:14:35.000 I know that stuff.

00:14:36.000 Masculine of center genderqueer is what her distinction was. 0.99

00:14:39.000 I've seen your shtick on it, and I was cracking up in my house.

00:14:42.000 I was crying laughing.

00:14:43.000 I was screaming laughing. 0.99

00:14:44.000 Because then she wanted to be the head person of diversity, chairman of Denver, whatever the fuck the title was. 0.98

00:14:52.000 But it had something to do with diversity. 0.99

00:14:55.000 And they were boycotting her because now she was a white man.

00:14:59.000 This is glorious.

00:15:01.000 This is glorious.

00:15:02.000 They're literally eating themselves. 1.00

00:15:04.000 They're so ridiculous. 1.00

00:15:06.000 They've spun around in circles and they're biting their own asses. 1.00

00:15:09.000 It's what's going on. 0.99

00:15:11.000 But I truly feel, though, that they've sort of reached the zenith and it's going to start decaying forever.

00:15:16.000 No, it's going to get crazier and crazier and crazier and then there's going to be, there's a culture war.

00:15:21.000 Right.

00:15:21.000 Yeah.

00:15:22.000 I don't think they've stopped.

00:15:23.000 I don't even think they started.

00:15:24.000 I think they're just, they're right now scrambling.

00:15:26.000 I think they don't, they don't hold weight amongst rational people anymore, but that's not going to stop their movement.

00:15:33.000 Their movement will continue to be irrational at a frenzied pace and they're literally going to cannibalize each other.

00:15:33.000 Right.

00:15:39.000 So what do you think is the end trajectory?

00:15:41.000 I mean, at some point it has to crash, right?

00:15:45.000 Well, it's almost like a civil war.

00:15:47.000 It's almost like a preposterous civil war.

00:15:49.000 I think, in a sense, our politics in this country have always been a civil war, just by nature of having only two choices, just by the dual party system and this ridiculous idea that there's independent parties.

00:16:04.000 They're not.

00:16:04.000 They're not independent.

00:16:05.000 Unless Trump decides to go independent, he's going to win.

00:16:09.000 You think he's gonna win the presidency?

00:16:10.000 He's gonna win.

00:16:10.000 Yeah, he's gonna win.

00:16:12.000 Hillary can't beat him. 1.00

00:16:13.000 I don't think she could beat him.

00:16:14.000 I would like to see Bernie Sanders win.

00:16:17.000 Not because of his financial policies, which I think are ridiculous, but I think his social policies are interesting.

00:16:22.000 And what I should clarify, here's what's ridiculous about his financial policies.

00:16:27.000 Don't make more taxes, because more taxes just means more government. 0.97

00:16:32.000 And more government is not what we fucking need right now.

00:16:34.000 If you want to organize charitable institutions that will legitimately help people, and have people donate money, and have people work towards, you know, like, these donations will actually take away from your taxes. 0.93

00:16:47.000 Let's figure out some way where we make it beneficial for people to be charitable.

00:16:51.000 Where we set up community programs. 0.98

00:16:53.000 Take some of the money that we're spending on shit that we really don't need to spend money on. 0.93

00:16:57.000 Some subsidies that we probably don't need that are benefiting gigantic corporations and instead use those to help the education systems in poor communities. 0.97

00:17:05.000 Use those to try to provide jobs and industry in poor communities.

00:17:09.000 These are all really good ideas.

00:17:11.000 So I'm in favor of that kind of socialism.

00:17:14.000 I'm absolutely in favor of free universities.

00:17:17.000 I don't think that people should get out of school and be a quarter million dollars in debt.

00:17:22.000 I think that's madness.

00:17:24.000 I think if you're going to make $50,000 a year, okay?

00:17:26.000 If you've got a really good job, you make $50,000 a year, right?

00:17:29.000 You get out of school. 1.00

00:17:30.000 If you get out of school and you make $50,000 a year, you're fucking kicking ass, right? 0.99

00:17:34.000 Everything's going great for you. 0.98

00:17:35.000 You're not really making $50,000.

00:17:36.000 You're making about $34,000, right?

00:17:38.000 And then you've got taxes.

00:17:39.000 You've got sales taxes if you live in a place like California.

00:17:42.000 You've got state taxes.

00:17:43.000 So you're living off of somewhere in the late 20s, 30s, something like that.

00:17:48.000 And you've got $250,000 of debt you've got to deal with.

00:17:53.000 And you've studied women's studies, which is a very actionable set of skills. 0.99

00:17:58.000 Well, how many people study that?

00:18:00.000 Well, enough at Wellesley.

00:18:01.000 There's a couple.

00:18:03.000 I just think that it's an insane burden to put on young people, to have them enter into the free market, enter into the world, and be already saddled down by insane amounts of debt.

00:18:15.000 I think there's got to be a way around that.

00:18:17.000 And I don't think that it's a terrible idea to have publicly funded universities.

00:18:21.000 I just don't think it's a terrible idea.

00:18:23.000 I don't think it's an insurmountable idea.

00:18:25.000 So I like Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways.

00:18:28.000 I think he's a compassionate guy.

00:18:29.000 I think he's an open-minded guy.

00:18:31.000 I think he says a lot of really radical things.

00:18:33.000 I love the fact that he goes out on a limb with his Black Lives Matter stuff. 0.76

00:18:38.000 I like that he's making a big deal about these cops shooting these young black kids. 1.00

00:18:42.000 And then it's gotta fucking stop. 1.00

00:18:44.000 It's gotta stop. 0.99

00:18:45.000 It's madness.

00:18:46.000 How many videos have to come out?

00:18:48.000 After a while, there's obviously some clear problem.

00:18:52.000 How is Trump not handling this?

00:18:54.000 How is Hillary not handling this? 1.00

00:18:56.000 This is a real problem in our culture, in our society.

00:18:59.000 There's a divisiveness.

00:19:01.000 There's this separation between these people that live in these communities that are terrified of the police and they're really worried about being shot all the time, and then everybody else that's on the outside that's looking in and saying, well, if you just followed the law, you wouldn't have those problems.

00:19:15.000 Try being born there.

00:19:17.000 Try being raised there.

00:19:19.000 We're not on an even playing field.

00:19:21.000 And I think he's one of the few guys that's addressing this imbalance, this social imbalance, this cultural imbalance, this economic imbalance that we have in this country in a really radical way.

00:19:35.000 So I like him for that.

00:19:36.000 I think that would be a good thing for this country, for a guy like that.

00:19:40.000 Would it really happen?

00:19:43.000 I don't know.

00:19:44.000 I take him over the others.

00:19:46.000 I take him over the other ones. 1.00

00:19:47.000 I think Trump is just, he says too much crazy shit. 1.00

00:19:51.000 Right. 1.00

00:19:51.000 The shit he said about Mexico, like, they're gonna pay for that wall! 1.00

00:19:54.000 And they called me up and they said, what do you think about this? 1.00

00:19:56.000 And how could you say that?

00:19:57.000 You know what?

00:19:58.000 The wall just got ten feet higher!

00:20:00.000 That's not what we need.

00:20:01.000 I mean, he's not very presidential in his mannerisms.

00:20:06.000 You know, I think he's a real successful guy, and I think what he's doing is he's tapping into this real frustration that a lot of people have. 0.69

00:20:14.000 And there's a lot of people that don't like the bullshit that's involved in politics, or people aren't saying what they really think.

00:20:21.000 So here's this guy who comes along. 0.97

00:20:23.000 He doesn't need anybody's money.

00:20:24.000 He's insanely wealthy.

00:20:26.000 He's a multi-billionaire. 0.99

00:20:28.000 And he can say whatever the fuck he wants. 1.00

00:20:30.000 And he's used to saying whatever the fuck he wants. 0.99

00:20:31.000 And every time he does it, people cheer. 0.99

00:20:33.000 So that's good, too.

00:20:35.000 Because finally, it's almost like we've got an insane Ross Perot.

00:20:35.000 It's good, too.

00:20:40.000 It's like, remember Ross Perot?

00:20:40.000 You know?

00:20:41.000 I do, I do. 0.93

00:20:42.000 Ross Perot fucked up the election for George. 0.97

00:20:44.000 1992 with the big ears. 0.97

00:20:45.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:20:46.000 He fucked it up for George Bush's dad. 0.95

00:20:48.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:20:48.000 Because the older Bush, you know, they slated him for a second term. 0.97

00:20:52.000 A lot of people thought he was going to win.

00:20:54.000 Ross Perot came along and explained on television.

00:20:56.000 He bought a half an hour of primetime TV. Pre-internet, ladies and gentlemen.

00:21:01.000 He bought a half-an-hour primetime TV and explained to the Federal Reserve to people. 0.99

00:21:06.000 Explained how you're getting fucked. 0.88

00:21:07.000 And I remember, you know, there was no internet back then. 0.98

00:21:10.000 So I remember me and some friends, we got together afterwards, and we were going, did you fucking see that?

00:21:16.000 Like, is that right? 0.71

00:21:17.000 Is what he's saying true?

00:21:18.000 Like, how does that make any sense?

00:21:20.000 And then he was talking about how his children were being threatened, and he was worried they were going to get kidnapped. 0.99

00:21:26.000 It was all this crazy shit, and it got me down a lot of rabbit holes, you know, like conspiracy theory rabbit holes, watching that guy do that. 0.99

00:21:34.000 But I think that what Donald Trump is, is like a more rabid, informed version of that. 0.99

00:21:41.000 More informed meaning our culture's more informed.

00:21:44.000 Meaning, you know, we're here in the age of the internet where it's...

00:21:48.000 If you go out on television and say something about the Federal Reserve, people understand that you're talking about an insane institution now.

00:21:55.000 Whereas back then, people are like, what?

00:21:57.000 What is he saying?

00:21:58.000 The Federal Reserve is not a part of the government?

00:22:00.000 Nobody knew that.

00:22:01.000 Nobody knew the Federal Bank wasn't...

00:22:03.000 Why is it called the Federal Bank if it's not federal?

00:22:05.000 It's so confusing.

00:22:07.000 You know, I think the main thing about Trump that people are tapping into is, rightly or wrongly, that he comes across as authentic.

00:22:15.000 So if you look on some metric of authenticity between Hillary...

00:22:20.000 I mean, Hillary Clinton could not be any more inauthentic.

00:22:24.000 I mean, she freaks you out, right?

00:22:27.000 She's spooky in her inability to convey, even if she tried to fake genuine emotions.

00:22:33.000 Whereas on the other hand, whether you like him or don't, Trump seems to speak from the heart.

00:22:39.000 And so to the extent that a lot of people are disillusioned with politicians, then this guy comes along and I can at least tap into that and hang on that element of his personality.

00:22:49.000 So I think that's what explains his success.

00:22:52.000 Yeah, and also white men.

00:22:54.000 Yeah, there's a lot of white men out there that are excited to this really bold white man.

00:23:00.000 As a contrast effect, you mean, to Obama?

00:23:02.000 Yeah, as a contrast to Obama, definitely as a contrast to Hillary. 1.00

00:23:06.000 And, you know, Bernie Sanders is chumming up with the black folks, you know? 0.92

00:23:11.000 Yeah.

00:23:11.000 Have you seen, have you followed our politics in Canada?

00:23:14.000 Yeah, your Trudeau guy.

00:23:15.000 I like that guy.

00:23:16.000 You do?

00:23:16.000 I do.

00:23:17.000 I like that guy.

00:23:18.000 Because he's young and he seems smart.

00:23:20.000 And he has nice hair.

00:23:21.000 He's got beautiful hair.

00:23:22.000 He boxed.

00:23:24.000 He did.

00:23:25.000 He did do that.

00:23:26.000 But what's bad about him?

00:23:29.000 To the extent that I think we both despise social justice warriors, the ostrich brigade, the regressive left. 0.88

00:23:37.000 Explain the ostrich brigade.

00:23:39.000 The ostrich brigade is a term that I popularized, which basically refers to folks who have their head deep in the sand so that they can't really accept some of the most basic regularities in the world, right? 0.89

00:23:51.000 You know, there is no link between Islam and any terrorist act anywhere in the world.

00:23:56.000 And to suggest otherwise it'd be Islamophobic.

00:23:59.000 Exactly.

00:23:59.000 So somebody who exhibits this type of behavior is exhibiting ostrich logic.

00:24:04.000 So Justin Trudeau is the kingpin of the ostrich brigade. 1.00

00:24:09.000 Damn it. 1.00

00:24:10.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:24:10.000 Handsome fellow. 1.00

00:24:11.000 So he basically, his dad, his dad instituted as part of our Canadian ethos multiculturalism.

00:24:20.000 And multiculturalism means two different things.

00:24:22.000 Multiculturalism, when it's used in everyday language, means many cultures, right?

00:24:27.000 LA is multicultural, meaning it's pluralistic.

00:24:29.000 But multiculturalism as a political philosophy is actually a very dangerous idea, right?

00:24:34.000 It basically says that when immigrants come into your land, they don't have to assimilate within your cultural values.

00:24:42.000 Rather, you allow everybody to get ghettoized because who are we to judge the values of another?

00:24:49.000 Ghetto-ized?

00:24:50.000 Yeah, like...

00:24:50.000 You mean like a Dominican community?

00:24:52.000 There's a Dominican community.

00:24:53.000 Here are the Muslims are here.

00:24:55.000 The North Sharia zone here. 0.88

00:24:57.000 But ghetto is like a poor...

00:24:59.000 No, no, no.

00:24:59.000 No, ghetto-ized in the sense that everybody who is of the same background lives in that space.

00:25:04.000 But that's not a ghetto.

00:25:06.000 I mean, the term is used in different ways.

00:25:08.000 It's not ghetto in the sense of hip-hop ghetto.

00:25:11.000 Is there a term?

00:25:12.000 Ghetto?

00:25:12.000 Is that like a legitimate term?

00:25:13.000 To be ghetto-ized, yeah.

00:25:14.000 What does that mean?

00:25:15.000 Because I've always...

00:25:16.000 I mean, I'm just saying, ghetto in this country is always referred to as a poor community.

00:25:23.000 No, I think it has a broader meaning, at least as I understand it.

00:25:26.000 So, for example, if you say you're ghettoizing people into different areas of the city...

00:25:32.000 I've never even heard it as a verb.

00:25:33.000 Well, that's why I'm here.

00:25:36.000 Ghettoize.

00:25:38.000 There you go.

00:25:38.000 Yeah, here we go.

00:25:39.000 New immigrants still tended to ghettoize in the cities.

00:25:44.000 I mean, it's exactly what I just defined.

00:25:46.000 Yeah, what's the origin of ghettoize?

00:25:48.000 I don't know the etymology.

00:25:49.000 Is it actually based on the word ghetto?

00:25:51.000 I'm guessing.

00:25:56.000 Brace yourselves, folks.

00:25:57.000 I'm going to say a word that's confusing.

00:25:59.000 Niggardly. 1.00

00:26:00.000 And it has nothing to do with the N-word.

00:26:03.000 Yes.

00:26:04.000 It has to do with, like, find the origins of that word.

00:26:09.000 Because it has to do, it's about being miserly or cheap.

00:26:13.000 Yes. 0.93

00:26:13.000 But it has nothing to do with black people whatsoever. 0.93

00:26:16.000 Reluctant to give or spend, stingy and miserly, and the origin, what's the origin of it? 0.67

00:26:25.000 Where does it say?

00:26:26.000 Does it say?

00:26:27.000 No?

00:26:29.000 Doesn't have an origin?

00:26:30.000 But let me, if I could finish my point about Justin Trudeau.

00:26:33.000 So Justin Trudeau, at one point when he was a member of parliament, someone had said that things like female genital mutilations and child brides and honor killings was the type of barbarism that we don't need in Canada.

00:26:52.000 Oh, no. 0.53

00:26:59.000 Oh, no.

00:27:09.000 So, he's not a fan of the Godfathers.

00:27:11.000 Oh, no.

00:27:12.000 Or I'm not a fan of his, rather.

00:27:15.000 Oh, Canada.

00:27:16.000 Yeah.

00:27:18.000 Have you followed some of our debates regarding allowing the sort of open, well, not open door, but allowing massive number of Syrian immigrants?

00:27:29.000 No, I haven't followed your debates, but I see what's going on in other countries.

00:27:32.000 Well, so, of course, in Europe, they look at our issue and they sort of say, come on, are you serious?

00:27:38.000 We have, you know, 800,000 migrants coming through to Germany.

00:27:43.000 You're complaining about 25,000.

00:27:45.000 Well, look what happened with Cologne, where the mayor of Cologne, after these attacks on New Year's Eve, was telling women to dress different and stay away from men.

00:27:53.000 Ostrich Brigade. 0.99

00:27:54.000 That's fucking insane. 1.00

00:27:56.000 I mean, that is a very culturally diverse area that has existed in a very peaceful way for a long time until all of a sudden they let in all these immigrants and they're having a massive problem with women being sexually assaulted. 1.00

00:28:11.000 So instead of protecting these women and trying to do their best to... 0.99

00:28:14.000 Ramp up the police force, or do something to stop it, or make sure the people are safe, or really put out there that, look, you're in a new fucking place, and if you want to assimilate in our culture, you've got to leave these fucking women alone, or we're going to get rid of you. 1.00

00:28:26.000 Everyone who does anything to women in our country, we're going to get rid of you. 1.00

00:28:29.000 You can't be here and make people feel unsafe. 0.96

00:28:32.000 Instead of doing that...

00:28:34.000 So, one of the reasons why I'm very concerned about the 25,000 that are coming in, people say, well, come on, how many of them are likely to be ISIS members?

00:28:41.000 But the danger is not only...

00:28:43.000 People only think of ISIS members as a danger, right?

00:28:46.000 But when you've got 25,000 people of whom a very large majority will adhere to certain values that are perfectly antithetical to ours, right?

00:28:56.000 What are your views on...

00:28:58.000 What are your views on religious minorities, on Jews?

00:29:01.000 If we let in 25,000 Syrians, statistically speaking, is it more likely or less likely that they'd be anti-Semitism?

00:29:10.000 I mean, that's an empirical statement that we could test, right?

00:29:20.000 Right.

00:29:33.000 On how do we vet these people?

00:29:35.000 I mean, how do you find out what percentage of those are going to hold views that are grotesque to us and then should we be letting them in?

00:29:44.000 Well, what are the options?

00:29:46.000 I mean, how could you possibly find out what their views are?

00:29:50.000 You would have to sit down with each one individually and quiz them and then you would have to verify their claims or their answers.

00:29:57.000 Well, at the very least, I would argue that you should never be allowed under the guise of your religious practice to espouse hateful things, right?

00:30:11.000 I mean, if you go to a house of worship, and that house of worship is...

00:30:18.000 Praying certain things that you and I would consider genocidal hatred, then my right to be free of the genocidal hatred that's coming my way supersedes your right to practice your religion of genocidally hating me.

00:30:34.000 And so that simply has to be the rule.

00:30:36.000 And if we don't wake up to that reality, we're going to have problems.

00:30:41.000 Yeah, I would say that that's a very reasonable statement.

00:30:44.000 And I think that there's a lot of people in this country that like to say things like what you were claiming Trudeau said about culture.

00:30:52.000 Like how dare you criticize their culture. 1.00

00:30:54.000 Culture is a bullshit word. 1.00

00:30:56.000 It's human behavior. 1.00

00:30:58.000 You're looking at human behavior.

00:30:59.000 Some human behavior is acceptable, some is not.

00:31:02.000 And if it's acceptable in other countries to eat people, guess what?

00:31:05.000 It's not acceptable here.

00:31:06.000 You can't cook people, you can't eat them, we don't allow it.

00:31:08.000 Right.

00:31:09.000 Well, let me add to that.

00:31:12.000 Part of multiculturalism is this idea that all cultures are unique, distinct, and equal in their own right.

00:31:18.000 And actually, that is a truly, profoundly incorrect statement.

00:31:23.000 Cultures are not equal, right?

00:31:25.000 Different cultures are differentially able to engender happiness to more or less people, right?

00:31:32.000 So if you are part of whatever it means, Taliban culture, you can on average predict that women in that culture will be less self-actualized than in Western countries. 0.98

00:31:44.000 That is an empirically demonstrable fact.

00:31:46.000 And so the idea that who are we to judge other cultures, this idea of cultural relativism, which is part, which is endemic of multiculturalism, It's profoundly incorrect and it has to go.

00:31:57.000 Well, it's a blind statement.

00:31:59.000 It's not a real statement.

00:32:01.000 You can't really say that.

00:32:03.000 I mean, you could look at it economically.

00:32:05.000 You could look at it socially.

00:32:07.000 You could look at it in terms of, you know, there's a real good argument that in this country there's less freedom than there is in other countries because more people are in jail.

00:32:13.000 Right.

00:32:14.000 You could look at it that way. 1.00

00:32:15.000 You could look at the disproportionate amount of people that are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses in this country and say, well, this country is obviously a fucked up place. 1.00

00:32:23.000 Right. 0.99

00:32:25.000 And that's a legit claim as well.

00:32:28.000 But the idea of numerical value, equal, making it equal.

00:32:32.000 We're all cultures equal. 0.98

00:32:34.000 That's foolishness.

00:32:35.000 That's not true.

00:32:36.000 Not only that, there's a very real thing going on in the world where as the age of information washes upon us, and I think this is the new age of information, the age of pure information, As this washes upon us, we're seeing massive changes in our own country.

00:32:53.000 We're seeing massive changes in our political system.

00:32:56.000 We're seeing massive changes socially. 0.91

00:32:57.000 And I think the social justice warrior thing is sort of a side effect of that, where these disenfranchised people, then some of them may be mentally ill.

00:33:06.000 They have a voice.

00:33:07.000 Some of them, let's not say ill, imbalanced.

00:33:11.000 Maybe they're radical because they're young and idealist and they haven't looked at all the right ways and then one day they'll balance out like many people have.

00:33:20.000 There's many young radicals who become very rational people in their 50s and 60s and whatever.

00:33:26.000 This thing is taking place here, and it's also taking place all over the world.

00:33:32.000 Well, where information is being resisted, that's where we have problems in the world.

00:33:37.000 Where fundamental religious values are superseding the age of information.

00:33:45.000 They're squashing people's ability to express themselves, people's ability to try new things, explore new things. 0.95

00:33:52.000 Their sexual values their identities all those things like as soon as you have like an ancient fucking Scripture some shit that was written on animal skins a thousand years ago like as soon as that is at the head and That takes precedent over everything else because it was supposedly the word of God or who else? 0.87

00:34:13.000 Someone who talked to God whatever the fuck it is that you got a problem a real problem there because religion Religion in and of itself is an idea, and it's an idea that is one of the very few ideas that we accept that literally has no basis in reality. 0.97

00:34:32.000 It has no basis in fact. 0.98

00:34:34.000 It has no basis in anything provable, and that's why we have this concept of faith.

00:34:39.000 Well, as soon as you have religion that's dominating information, you have You have a problem. 0.91

00:34:46.000 You got a bottleneck.

00:34:47.000 You got a wall that's put up for progress.

00:34:51.000 Now, when people develop in that environment, you have stifled people.

00:34:57.000 Just like I have a friend and him and his wife, they were Mormons until they were like 40. And then they decided slowly, they lived overseas for a bit.

00:35:08.000 And they kind of experienced the world, and it opened their eyes to a lot of different things, and they decided to move away from the church. 0.99

00:35:15.000 They're fucking lost, man. 0.99

00:35:16.000 They're lost. 1.00

00:35:17.000 They're almost like grown-up children.

00:35:19.000 I think you might have told me about them last time.

00:35:21.000 I think I did.

00:35:21.000 They're wonderful people.

00:35:22.000 They're great people.

00:35:23.000 But the wife is really interesting, because she's very self-aware. 1.00

00:35:26.000 And she even talks about it.

00:35:28.000 She says, I... Growing up in this really fundamentalist religion, I think I developed a really bad way of looking at things where I'm easily confused.

00:35:39.000 Easily confused and easily led.

00:35:42.000 Right.

00:35:42.000 Like a charlatan could take her over or a cult member could...

00:35:47.000 Chapter 8 of the book that I just gave you...

00:35:50.000 It's called Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.

00:35:52.000 And basically what I argue there is that there are different peddlers of hope that are successful precisely because they could sell you hope in the areas that are most important in sort of Darwinian insecurities, right?

00:36:04.000 How to be a better lover, how to live forever, how to be a better parent, right?

00:36:09.000 So all of the key Darwinian pursuits that keep us up at night There is a peddler out there who can give you the recipe, whether he be a self-help guru, whether he be a medical quack, whether he be religion.

00:36:23.000 And so that's why those products are so successful, because they peddle us hope.

00:36:28.000 Yes, but growing up with religion, especially fundamentalist religion, it cannot be questioned.

00:36:33.000 It becomes a real problem because...

00:36:34.000 There's these rigid areas where you're only allowed to think one way.

00:36:38.000 Now, you develop these patterns in your mind.

00:36:40.000 Then when you move to a new place, it doesn't support those ideas.

00:36:43.000 And you want to use general mutilation. 1.00

00:36:45.000 You want to wrap women up in fucking mummy cloth and make sure they can't drive. 1.00

00:36:50.000 Like, you want to do that same shit in Canada that you're doing in Saudi Arabia. 1.00

00:36:55.000 You got a real fucking problem. 1.00

00:36:56.000 That's a real problem. 1.00

00:36:59.000 And Justin Trudeau would say, who are we to judge their practices?

00:37:03.000 Whereas what you're saying is you're against multiculturalism because you are taking a position against it.

00:37:08.000 So you don't like Justin Trudeau.

00:37:10.000 Well, I'm definitely not against multiculturalism.

00:37:12.000 I'm against religious fundamentalism on a global scale.

00:37:18.000 Because I'm not against God, and this is what people have to understand.

00:37:21.000 I would be the last person to tell you I have any idea about something that I have never experienced.

00:37:28.000 And what I've never experienced is the afterlife.

00:37:31.000 I am open to the idea that this life is one stage in an infinite, fractal, Can I interject?

00:37:50.000 Could that simply be the fact that you are finding an alternate way, not through religion, but through some alternate means to Live on forever.

00:38:00.000 Well, exactly, right?

00:38:00.000 No.

00:38:01.000 So I could take this pill called religion that will grant me immortality, or I could do your fractal mumbo-jumbo stuff, no disrespect, and that could still get me to...

00:38:11.000 Whereas the reality, the intellectually honest position is that we really have absolutely no evidence.

00:38:17.000 This is a very small party that will last, if you're lucky, 85 years.

00:38:21.000 And it's profoundly fear-inducing because I want to be coming back on this podcast for the next 4,000 years.

00:38:28.000 But it really worries me that I won't.

00:38:30.000 But it's honest.

00:38:32.000 It's honest to know that you've got 85 years.

00:38:34.000 In a sense, it's liberating because it forces me.

00:38:38.000 And you, if you're an atheist, to really carpe diem it, right?

00:38:42.000 You really have to seize the day because there are no do-overs.

00:38:45.000 There is no eternity.

00:38:47.000 There is no afterlife.

00:38:48.000 It's all right here what we do.

00:38:50.000 And so in a sense, there is a glory to the finiteness that is afforded by atheism.

00:38:57.000 You can certainly look at it that way.

00:38:58.000 My perspective, though, is that we really just don't know, and that energy continues to move forward in a lot of different ways.

00:39:06.000 We see this throughout all of nature, whereas things die, they get reabsorbed into the ground.

00:39:12.000 The very energy and the essence that they had when they were alive fuels all these different microbes and bacteria in the ground that...

00:39:21.000 It makes the soil richer.

00:39:22.000 It grows more plants.

00:39:23.000 Animals eat those plants. 0.99

00:39:25.000 It nourishes them. 0.99

00:39:26.000 Literally, the cells and the carbon from every fucking human being on this planet came from a star that exploded. 0.99

00:39:34.000 Death becomes life in some sort of strange way. 0.97

00:39:37.000 And I don't think that it's impossible that that could be the same thing with consciousness, with energy, with whatever the fuck it is inside of us that makes us alive and aware and makes our minds tune in to all of the possibilities and the wonders of the world.

00:39:52.000 I don't know if this is the end, but you don't either.

00:39:55.000 I don't.

00:39:55.000 Well, no one does.

00:39:56.000 Right.

00:39:57.000 That's the point.

00:39:57.000 And as soon as someone comes along and tells you they do know, and this is the only way to the afterlife, this is the only way to heaven, you've got a real problem.

00:40:04.000 You've got a real problem because human beings are malleable and you can guide them and you can direct them and you can mold them and you could turn them into religious slaves. 0.98

00:40:13.000 You could turn them into ideological slaves.

00:40:16.000 And we should recognize that from a psychological perspective, from an educated perspective, from a perspective of recognizing cult behavior.

00:40:24.000 I was watching this thing on This guy, Steve Hassan, the guy who was on our podcast before, is a cult expert.

00:40:31.000 He sent me an email today and I watched this piece on cults and cult behavior and cults on the internet.

00:40:36.000 It's terrifying how malleable people's minds are and how someone who's an inscrupulous person or unscrupulous person or someone who has nefarious ideas can convince people to blow themselves up to get virgins in the afterlife.

00:40:52.000 I mean, that's a reality.

00:40:53.000 To get very earthly Darwinian things in the afterlife, right?

00:40:57.000 Well, people don't know.

00:41:00.000 And that's my point.

00:41:01.000 And when someone comes along and says, I do know, and this is the truth, it becomes a real problem. 0.98

00:41:06.000 Because you can't fucking prove it. 0.97

00:41:07.000 You can't prove it. 0.99

00:41:08.000 You don't have any facts.

00:41:09.000 You don't have any data.

00:41:10.000 There's nothing you can measure.

00:41:11.000 There's nothing you can weigh.

00:41:12.000 And you're not saying you think.

00:41:14.000 You're saying you know.

00:41:15.000 And if you think one thing, if you think, I think this is it, carpe diem, live for the day, this is our only shot here, you might be right.

00:41:22.000 Or this guy who's done a fucking pound of mushrooms might have come back from the other side and say, listen, I have this idea, and I think that love is eternal, and it goes on forever.

00:41:32.000 And what we really are here, we're this being that's trying to figure itself out in this very brief amount of time, and the best we can do is leave behind information. 0.94

00:41:41.000 We have this wonderful thing called communication.

00:41:43.000 And language.

00:41:44.000 We store this information.

00:41:45.000 The next generation comes along and tries to pick up where the last generation left off, gather up as much data as they can, and then move it forward a little bit before they expire.

00:41:55.000 And we keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it until, hopefully, we move towards some level of enlightenment as a species.

00:42:03.000 See, I can repackage that and slightly...

00:42:06.000 More earthly and less esoteric terms.

00:42:08.000 I think that we can achieve immortality in quotes in two ways, right?

00:42:13.000 Through genetic propagation.

00:42:14.000 That's why you and I have children.

00:42:16.000 I mean, literally, we are extending our genes.

00:42:19.000 And also through mimetic propagation.

00:42:21.000 And mimetic propagation is, you know, you read this book and it now infects your brains.

00:42:26.000 I'm not reading it now.

00:42:27.000 You're not infecting me, man.

00:42:29.000 By the way, next time I come, there's a 100% final exam on this book. 1.00

00:42:33.000 Goddamn professors and their exams. 0.99

00:42:36.000 Is there like a cheat sheet? 0.99

00:42:38.000 So memetic propagation is basically anything that can be part, if you like, of your legacy, right?

00:42:44.000 So the collection of stuff that people can go and watch about you is part of Joe Rogan's memetic propagation.

00:42:52.000 And long after...

00:42:53.000 You may be gone.

00:42:54.000 People will be able to consume Joe Rogan's ideas and all of the wonderful things that he's done for many, many years to come.

00:43:01.000 And so in that sense, I think, either through genetic propagation or mimetic propagation, we can be immortal.

00:43:07.000 And that's why it is really important to do all the wonderful things that people do because that is your ticket to immortality.

00:43:13.000 I mean, again, you might say, well, how do you know?

00:43:16.000 I don't know.

00:43:17.000 But until I have any evidence of otherwise, I'm going to take the intellectually honest position and say, the party's going to end.

00:43:23.000 Well, really, let's get further than that, because immortality is nonsense. 0.99

00:43:28.000 This fucking sun doesn't have an immortal life. 0.99

00:43:31.000 Yeah, we've got like four billion years, right? 1.00

00:43:33.000 If we're lucky, that's assuming that we don't get hit by one of these gigantic fucking rocks that keeps flying around. 0.98

00:43:40.000 You hear about that one that went off over the Atlantic Ocean the other day? 0.99

00:43:42.000 No.

00:43:43.000 Oh my God! 1.00

00:43:45.000 A fucking meteor exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. 1.00

00:43:49.000 Nobody knew about it. 1.00

00:43:50.000 Nobody heard about it.

00:43:51.000 Nobody knew it was coming.

00:43:52.000 Pull this up, Jamie, because the amount of energy that it released is insane.

00:43:57.000 So if it would have hit, let's say, New York, what would have happened?

00:43:58.000 Dead.

00:43:59.000 Everyone.

00:43:59.000 Dead.

00:44:00.000 Dead.

00:44:01.000 Like Hiroshima. 0.69

00:44:01.000 Bigger than Hiroshima. 0.69

00:44:02.000 Here it is.

00:44:03.000 A meteor exploded over the Atlantic.

00:44:05.000 Pull up the amount of power that it had.

00:44:07.000 I had it on my...

00:44:08.000 Wow.

00:44:09.000 I had it on my Twitter where it talked about in relationship to Hiroshima, like how big of it was.

00:44:18.000 500,000 tons of TNT. Jesus fucking Christ. 0.99

00:44:25.000 It's insane. 1.00

00:44:27.000 It says that was the one over Russia.

00:44:28.000 Oh, this is the one over, what is this one?

00:44:30.000 13,000 tons of TNT. Okay.

00:44:34.000 Oh, the Russian one I remember from a few years ago, yes. 0.99

00:44:37.000 But what's the Atlantic Ocean one?

00:44:39.000 Well, pull up the article that I had on my Twitter, because it compared it to a nuclear bomb.

00:44:49.000 Wow.

00:44:50.000 Yeah.

00:44:50.000 Well, these are really common, you know, and I had this guy Randall Carlson on the podcast a few times and he's dedicated his life to paying attention to the signs of astral impacts all throughout history and all throughout the world.

00:45:03.000 He's an astronomer?

00:45:04.000 Yeah, and he believes that what's happened is all throughout human history there's been these resets.

00:45:10.000 Where people accumulated a lot of data, they learned a lot, society moved forward, and then boom, we got hit.

00:45:17.000 And then a lot of people died.

00:45:19.000 And then they had to regroup, start all over again.

00:45:21.000 And there's a lot of evidence in the physical form.

00:45:23.000 This stuff called trite, I think it's called tritonite.

00:45:26.000 It's nuclear glass, they call it.

00:45:28.000 And it's the same substance that they find when they do nuclear tests in the desert and stuff.

00:45:33.000 And they found it all throughout Europe and Asia.

00:45:35.000 And they find it when they do core samples between 10,000 and 12,000 years.

00:45:39.000 So it's exactly the same time as the end of the Ice Age.

00:45:42.000 It coincides with the end of the Ice Age.

00:45:44.000 And with these...

00:45:47.000 Puzzling moments in civilization where you have they'll find things like Gobekli Tepe these beautiful structures that are really complex that are 14,000 years old 12,000 years old they're like who the fuck was building this stuff back then when we thought people were hunter-gatherers and then right after that boom We get hit by rocks Most people die a lot of people die and then they have to regroup again and I think that that That's most likely going to be the end of humanity.

00:46:15.000 Just like it was the end of the dinosaurs.

00:46:17.000 65 million years ago.

00:46:18.000 It's much more common than we really would like to think about.

00:46:25.000 So definitely don't sweat the small stuff.

00:46:28.000 Yeah, there's no immortality as far as this dimension.

00:46:31.000 It's not going to happen.

00:46:33.000 So you want me to tell you a bit about the evolutionary roots of religion?

00:46:36.000 How you would study religion as an evolutionist?

00:46:40.000 Okay.

00:46:41.000 You ready?

00:46:41.000 Yeah.

00:46:42.000 So one argument is based on, it's an adaptive argument, right?

00:46:45.000 So the idea is, if religion exists, does it confer an adaptive advantage to people?

00:46:50.000 And so there is some work done by a good friend of mine, David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, I think?

00:47:13.000 There is another argument by other evolutionists that is based on an exaptation argument.

00:47:18.000 Have you ever heard that term?

00:47:19.000 Exaptation?

00:47:20.000 No.

00:47:20.000 What does that mean?

00:47:20.000 So that's a byproduct of evolution.

00:47:23.000 In other words, it's something that evolved not because itself it confers an adaptive advantage, but rather it's piggybacking.

00:47:30.000 So for example, the fact that your skeletal system is the color that it is, that itself is not adaptive.

00:47:35.000 It is a byproduct of other evolutionary processes.

00:47:38.000 So from that perspective, Religion piggybacks on computational systems in our brains that evolve for other things.

00:47:46.000 You follow what I mean?

00:47:46.000 So for example, coalitional thinking.

00:47:48.000 The idea of viewing the world as us versus them. 0.94

00:47:51.000 Blue team versus red team.

00:47:53.000 That is an innate part of our psychology.

00:47:56.000 Now, religion piggybacks on that, right?

00:47:59.000 It takes that computational system that already exists in us and it puts it on steroid, right?

00:48:04.000 So you think about the Abrahamic religions, right?

00:48:06.000 Every one of them has us versus them. 0.88

00:48:09.000 They are the Jews, the Gentiles, the believers, the kuffar, right? 1.00

00:48:13.000 And so agency detection, detecting agency in things, is something that is innate to us.

00:48:19.000 Religion plays on that.

00:48:21.000 The agent becomes God.

00:48:22.000 And so that's an argument that was proposed by Pascal Boyer, where he's basically saying that religion did not specifically evolve because itself it is adaptive, but it piggybacks on other things that have evolved.

00:48:34.000 And then a third way to study religion is to just do a content analysis of the narratives within religion.

00:48:43.000 So there's a great study done by a Darwinian historian where she looked at, in the Old Testament, how many women are ascribed to a different male in the Old Testament as a function of a status.

00:48:55.000 So the higher the status of the male, the more sexual partners he had, which is exactly what you would predict from an evolutionary perspective.

00:49:04.000 High status to men confers reproductive success.

00:49:08.000 So there are different ways that evolution, and there are several other ways, that can study religion from an evolutionary perspective.

00:49:16.000 That's pretty fascinating.

00:49:17.000 Well, I also think that we've always, as cultures, have sort of tried to stay alive and have tried to maintain order.

00:49:27.000 We've always tried to establish sets of rules and boundaries and things.

00:49:31.000 And it only makes sense that you would say, hey, you know, there's a real reason why you can't kill people.

00:49:38.000 And it's not because it makes everybody upset. 0.99

00:49:40.000 It's because you're going to go to hell. 0.99

00:49:42.000 Right. 0.98

00:49:43.000 So listen, you don't want to go to hell, so don't kill people.

00:49:45.000 All these things that people have done throughout history, if you look at religion on a global scale, there's some key components to almost all religions.

00:49:57.000 Right.

00:49:58.000 And those seem to benefit order.

00:50:02.000 They seem to benefit culture.

00:50:04.000 And like you were saying, the idea of people living longer and being more successful as a culture, yeah, well, senses of community.

00:50:11.000 If you have a sense of community, if you establish community and you establish a bond between people and a higher good or a higher reason to exist...

00:50:19.000 Well, I'll give you another example.

00:50:21.000 Kosher laws.

00:50:22.000 I actually discussed this in this book.

00:50:24.000 So I try to offer a biological explanation that is not rooted in religious narratives for why kosher laws would have evolved.

00:50:34.000 So think about the kosher edict that you shouldn't eat shellfish.

00:50:40.000 Well, so I did a lot of research when I was writing the book on this issue.

00:50:45.000 It turns out that when you have shellfish that is infected with a particular pathogen...

00:50:49.000 Red tide.

00:50:50.000 ...that could kill you, right?

00:50:51.000 Yes.

00:50:52.000 The one that is infected versus the one that is not infected, you can't sensorially tell the difference, either through smell, either through sight.

00:51:03.000 So number one.

00:51:04.000 Number two, it's not as though the one that's coming from an infected lives in mercury or water.

00:51:08.000 So there is nothing...

00:51:11.000 That you could use in terms of observational learning that can offer you some statistical regularity of if I do A, B will happen.

00:51:19.000 Once in a while, somebody eats a shellfish, they drop dead.

00:51:22.000 I don't have a means, I'm thinking as a Bronze Age guy running around the Middle East, to ever learn from this malediction. 0.71

00:51:31.000 Therefore, the only thing that I can do is then say, it is an edict from God, boom, don't do it.

00:51:37.000 Of course.

00:51:38.000 So there are very, very easy earthly biological reasons to take food taboos, religious taboos, and demonstrate that they have nothing.

00:51:46.000 But of course, when I say this in a classroom where there are people who might otherwise be religious, they see it, yet they can't completely follow you.

00:51:54.000 Of course.

00:51:55.000 Yeah, well, because they have this doctrine in their mind that is just the word of God. 0.99

00:51:59.000 Well, also pigs, eating pigs. 0.99

00:52:01.000 Exactly.

00:52:01.000 I mean, we all know that pigs contain trichinosis and bears as well.

00:52:05.000 You're not supposed to eat bears.

00:52:06.000 There's a lot of reasons why kosher living in, you know, a thousand, five thousand years ago, whatever, was really smart. 0.95

00:52:12.000 Yeah.

00:52:12.000 Smart way to go.

00:52:13.000 Have you ever read, I'm giving him here a thumbs up, maybe it'll help his book, The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant.

00:52:23.000 No, I haven't, but John and I have been talking back and forth on Twitter.

00:52:27.000 He's moving here.

00:52:28.000 So when he moves here...

00:52:29.000 He's dead to me.

00:52:30.000 You just said he's moving here.

00:52:32.000 I want to be in Southern California.

00:52:33.000 He's dead to me.

00:52:35.000 Why don't you just move here?

00:52:37.000 You were here for like three months, right?

00:52:39.000 Weren't you here for a bunch of months?

00:52:40.000 I'm here all the time.

00:52:41.000 Why don't you move here?

00:52:42.000 Because I need a professorship here. 1.00

00:52:43.000 Get a fucking job here. 1.00

00:52:44.000 You're a smart guy. 1.00

00:52:45.000 You're selling books.

00:52:46.000 You're doing well.

00:52:47.000 You're right.

00:52:48.000 But anyways, I think in his book, he talks about, I don't remember the exact number, but he looked at the 613 commandments in Jewish law.

00:52:57.000 And some outlandish number, say something like 20% of them, deal with purity rituals.

00:53:05.000 And those purity rituals are ultimately means, very earthly means, to try to remove the possibility that you've been exposed to dangerous pathogens.

00:53:14.000 So again, you see how something that is cloaked in the robe of religion is ultimately solving a very basic earthly biological problem.

00:53:23.000 Well, also, if you talk about sexual... 0.82

00:53:27.000 You know, promiscuity. 0.53

00:53:29.000 Right.

00:53:30.000 Controlling that controls sexually transmitted diseases, which like syphilis and a lot of the really terminal ones, before they had medication for those things, they killed a lot of people.

00:53:39.000 Right.

00:53:39.000 A lot of people died from having sex.

00:53:42.000 Right.

00:53:42.000 Which is just a ruthless, cruel thing.

00:53:45.000 And you've got to assume that that's probably nature trying to strike some sort of a balance, right?

00:53:50.000 Right.

00:53:50.000 We don't want to think about it that way, but...

00:53:53.000 That exists all throughout nature.

00:53:55.000 When animals become overpopulated, all of a sudden they start developing diseases and they fall off.

00:54:00.000 I mean, that's the rabbit cycle.

00:54:02.000 If you're not aware, people who aren't aware, rabbits go in a seven-year cycle.

00:54:08.000 So...

00:54:09.000 If you're around and you see a lot of rabbits, you see rabbits all over the place, and then like three years later there's no rabbits, what happens is rabbits get to a high population level and then they'll develop a disease and they die off.

00:54:24.000 And then there's only a few rabbits.

00:54:26.000 And then it takes seven years until they reach this peak again, then they die off again.

00:54:30.000 This is in a natural setting. 1.00

00:54:32.000 Natural, constant seven-year cycle to regulate the population of rabbits, because we all know that rabbits fuck like rabbits. 1.00

00:54:39.000 And they make a lot of babies. 1.00

00:54:42.000 And they don't have that, unfortunately, with pigs. 1.00

00:54:45.000 Pigs are so hardy and so ruthless that they will have litters three, four times a year.

00:54:52.000 I think a female pig can have a litter as soon as like, look this up, Jamie, but I want to say it's like within six months. 1.00

00:55:00.000 Within six months of being born, she can give birth.

00:55:03.000 Which is crazy.

00:55:04.000 Right.

00:55:05.000 And they can just have piglets three times a year, and each time they do it, they'll have a bunch of them, and they'll just overtake places.

00:55:12.000 They got a problem in San Jose.

00:55:14.000 There was a news story on the other day where these people were in their house, and the pigs were knocking over their garbage can and eating up their lawn in a normal residential neighborhood.

00:55:25.000 Like, I mean, a pretty crowded neighborhood.

00:55:27.000 And these wild pigs are just roaming through the streets now. 0.90

00:55:30.000 They're everywhere.

00:55:31.000 Have you ever heard the term RK-selected?

00:55:33.000 Does that ring a bell?

00:55:34.000 Yes, but I don't remember what it means.

00:55:36.000 So basically, it's the idea that some species produce many offspring with the hope that very few will survive until sexual maturity.

00:55:46.000 Alligator.

00:55:47.000 Right.

00:55:48.000 Frog. 0.99

00:55:48.000 Right. 0.99

00:55:49.000 Many fish. 0.96

00:55:50.000 Pigs.

00:55:50.000 Right.

00:55:51.000 Versus, although on that scale they would be less so, versus elephant, humans, where it, you know, the gestational period, the length of parental investment that is required before you reach sexual maturity as much.

00:56:04.000 So it's either a lot of quantity, hoping that a few survive, or much less quantity, but heavily parental investment.

00:56:11.000 And just that...

00:56:14.000 Whether you are a species that is R or K selected, the reason for the R or K term doesn't matter, has a profound effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species.

00:56:25.000 So things, for example, like humans are a bi-parental species.

00:56:30.000 So even though males invest parentally less than females in the human context, we are really champion dads.

00:56:37.000 I mean, in the greater context of mammals, Human dads are just outlandishly good.

00:56:43.000 Yeah, there's no one like us.

00:56:44.000 Nothing like us.

00:56:45.000 Except, for example, penguins, but of course they're not mammals.

00:56:48.000 So in the human context, then, because we are a biparental species, you would expect the evolution of a few things.

00:56:55.000 One of which, and actually recently I discussed this in one of my lectures because somebody asked that exact question.

00:57:01.000 So the evolution of romantic love...

00:57:04.000 Is if you like a solution to this very important problem, which is you and I, male-female, have to pair bond for a certain period of time.

00:57:13.000 We have to be able to stand one another for a sufficiently large enough period of time to get our child to sexual maturity.

00:57:20.000 And hence, there are selection pressures for us to evolve the affective system that we call romantic love.

00:57:28.000 So this shows you how, depending on the particular history of the species, you get completely different, interesting trajectories.

00:57:37.000 That is fascinating, and it completely makes sense, if you think about it.

00:57:42.000 And there are certain animals, like rats or mice, that are constantly being preyed upon.

00:57:47.000 They have to develop large litters.

00:57:48.000 Right.

00:57:49.000 Here's another one.

00:57:50.000 Here, coping with feral hogs.

00:57:51.000 Oh, nice.

00:57:52.000 Five and six pigs per litter.

00:57:54.000 Sows of approximately 1.5 litters per year.

00:57:57.000 Yeah, but when can they get pregnant? 1.00

00:57:58.000 They get the first litter when they're 13 months of age.

00:58:01.000 They can be sexually mature at six months.

00:58:04.000 What's their life expectancy?

00:58:05.000 That's a good question.

00:58:08.000 What does it say?

00:58:09.000 48 years of age?

00:58:11.000 That's if they don't get killed by a cougar.

00:58:12.000 So here's another one.

00:58:13.000 You ready?

00:58:15.000 Yes.

00:58:16.000 All right.

00:58:16.000 Check this out.

00:58:17.000 So you know what sexual dimorphism is?

00:58:19.000 Yes.

00:58:20.000 Right?

00:58:20.000 So humans are sexually dimorphic.

00:58:22.000 But take, for example- Why don't you explain it to people who don't know what it means?

00:58:24.000 Oh, sorry.

00:58:25.000 Yes.

00:58:25.000 So where there is an innate sex difference.

00:58:29.000 Typically we talk about, for example- Sexist. 0.99

00:58:31.000 You're a sexist. 0.99

00:58:31.000 I'm sexist. 0.99

00:58:32.000 I didn't realize.

00:58:32.000 You know, sexual dimorphism is just a cultural contrast.

00:58:35.000 Social destruction.

00:58:36.000 It's a cultural construct.

00:58:37.000 It's not real.

00:58:38.000 And I like how you say it with the affectation of the wealthy person.

00:58:41.000 I watch a woman in a video explain that women are not inherently weaker than men. 0.97

00:58:46.000 They just engage in less strength-based activities.

00:58:49.000 Oh, yeah.

00:58:49.000 I've heard the exact same thing.

00:58:50.000 That's hilarious.

00:58:50.000 Well, actually, and it's even been linked to the fact that little boys are encouraged to play rough house and tumble, whereas little girls are dissuaded from doing so.

00:59:04.000 And that's what sets them on their trajectory so that Bubba, who plays center for University of Nebraska, can bench press 500 pounds.

00:59:11.000 It's completely social construction.

00:59:13.000 It has nothing to do with muscle mass, nothing to do with testosterone.

00:59:15.000 Yeah.

00:59:15.000 But anyway, so going back to differences across species, so some species are very sexually dimorphic, elephant seals.

00:59:24.000 You have a male who's massive, four times the size of a female, or mountain gorillas, right? 0.82

00:59:30.000 So if you look at the extent to which there is or isn't sexual dimorphism with the species, that itself Perfectly predicts the mating system within that species.

00:59:42.000 Meaning, if there is a huge sexual dimorphism, typically the males are bigger than the females, but sometimes you have a sexual reversal species, then you have polygynous mating.

00:59:53.000 Meaning what?

00:59:53.000 One male monopolizes sexual access to many females.

00:59:58.000 And the reason why they develop that size is because that's the combat that they engage in, where the winner then gets the genetic lottery.

01:00:05.000 On the other hand, when you have species where the two sexes are equal-sized, then you have typically monogamous mating, like in the case of some bird species.

01:00:15.000 But even there, by the way, even though they're supposed to be monogamous, once in a while they go behind the bush, genetic tests have shown.

01:00:21.000 Well, birds are really only, like penguins are a big one that people bring up.

01:00:25.000 Exactly.

01:00:25.000 But they're only monogamous for a year.

01:00:26.000 Right.

01:00:27.000 But even within what you consider to be a monogamous window, there are some tests that show that once in a while we do go behind the bushes.

01:00:35.000 Behind the bushes.

01:00:37.000 I try to once in a while use my evolutionary stuff on my wife to explain why it might be okay to do this. 1.00

01:00:47.000 She hasn't really bought into the whole thing yet.

01:00:49.000 She needs to read more.

01:00:50.000 Get her head out of the bushes. 1.00

01:00:52.000 Exactly.

01:00:53.000 Sand, wherever.

01:01:12.000 Here's an evolutionary explanation for why child abuse happens if there's a step-parent in the family.

01:01:17.000 Here's why people might have difficulty staying true to their monogamous unions. 0.82

01:01:22.000 Then people will get very upset at you because they somehow conflate the fact that you are explaining the phenomenon using science as meaning that you are saying it clears your moral judgment.

01:01:33.000 And of course it doesn't.

01:01:34.000 But that's one of the places where people get really upset at you and will send you hate mail.

01:01:38.000 And that moral judgment is also cultural, which gets really strange when you look at certain religions like the Mormons.

01:01:43.000 Right.

01:01:44.000 The whole reason why the Mormons set up this compound in Mexico, why they moved to Mexico, is when polygamy was made illegal in the United States.

01:01:55.000 Right.

01:01:57.000 To Mexico.

01:01:58.000 And that's where Mitt Romney's family came from, which is really bizarre.

01:02:02.000 And isn't it amazing how whenever there are these polygynous rulings from God, it's always that it's one man with multiple women. 0.64

01:02:10.000 It's never been a polyandrous thing.

01:02:12.000 It's never been the other way around.

01:02:13.000 Yeah, women don't want to get gangbanged. 1.00

01:02:15.000 They don't want a bunch of dudes sticking.

01:02:16.000 Well, you know, there is one place in the world where there is polyandry.

01:02:21.000 Do you know where it is? 0.99

01:02:22.000 Somewhere that sucks. 0.99

01:02:23.000 It's called Tibetan polyandry. 0.99

01:02:25.000 Told you.

01:02:27.000 It's fraternal Tibetan polyandry.

01:02:30.000 Fraternal?

01:02:31.000 Yeah, which means?

01:02:32.000 Means brothers and sisters?

01:02:34.000 No, meaning- They're in a frat together?

01:02:36.000 No, meaning that the woman who is being shared across many men, those men are brothers.

01:02:43.000 That's crazy.

01:02:44.000 But here's the evolutionary explanation, right?

01:02:47.000 Imagine where you have a system, for whatever reason, where not every man could be mated.

01:02:51.000 Right.

01:02:51.000 That's not a good thing, because you have a lot of men who are going to be sexually frustrated, right?

01:02:55.000 Like China. 0.94

01:02:56.000 Exactly.

01:02:57.000 Yeah.

01:02:57.000 So therefore, by creating a system where, okay, not everybody could be guaranteed that their reproductive fitness is going to be assured, but at least their kin selection will be assured.

01:03:09.000 Meaning what, right?

01:03:10.000 I share half of my genes on average with my brother.

01:03:13.000 So either I will impregnate the woman, in which case, great, or my brother will impregnate her, in which case I'm still indirectly, not through direct reproductive fitness, but through kin selection, I'm still extending my genes.

01:03:27.000 So even in cases where men share a woman, it has to be in the context of all in the family.

01:03:35.000 I'm blowing your mind.

01:03:36.000 That's an intense thing.

01:03:38.000 And that must be just a reaction to the fact that there's much more men than there are women.

01:03:43.000 And why would that be?

01:03:44.000 Why are there more men than there are women? 0.98

01:03:46.000 So sometimes it could be...

01:03:48.000 That's called, by the way, an operational sex ratio, if there are imbalances between males and females within a particular niche.

01:03:56.000 Sometimes it could be because of certain inheritance structures where it's only the eldest who can have enough money through inheritance so the other guys can't really afford a wife.

01:04:08.000 So there are all sorts of institutional reasons beyond sex racial reasons where some men may otherwise be out of the mating market.

01:04:18.000 And we know that societies where a lot of men are sitting around sexually frustrated are not going to be societies that are conducive to quiet.

01:04:27.000 And so therefore, even in the context where you have something like polyandry, which is something that typically, evolutionary speaking, you wouldn't expect, when it arises, it arises as a response to a real evolutionary problem.

01:04:41.000 Most things that you could think of ultimately have some evolutionary explanation.

01:04:46.000 And that's why I fell in love with evolution, because The explanatory power that is afforded, once you have that key to understand things via evolutionary thinking, it becomes incredibly powerful.

01:04:59.000 And once the parameters and the variables change, the behavior changes to adapt to those parameters and variables.

01:05:06.000 Exactly right.

01:05:07.000 A perfect example of that is fighter pilots.

01:05:10.000 Fighter pilots are classically wife swappers. 1.00

01:05:13.000 Is that true?

01:05:14.000 Yeah, there's a lot of that goes on in those communities because these people are...

01:05:18.000 Like swingers, you mean?

01:05:19.000 Yeah, well, sort of, yeah.

01:05:20.000 You know what it is?

01:05:21.000 They know that they're probably going to die.

01:05:24.000 And if they love their wife, they want someone else to love their wife as much as they do.

01:05:28.000 And the idea is that if they all just share...

01:05:31.000 Life is different.

01:05:32.000 It's much more fleeting.

01:05:34.000 It's much more fragile than it is in the world of the accountant.

01:05:39.000 So I think it makes sense that it's very prevalent in those communities.

01:05:45.000 So if you like, the sexual risk-taking is a form of insurance policy.

01:05:49.000 Say like if you were married and Jamie was married and you were both fighter pilots.

01:05:55.000 Right.

01:05:55.000 And you both would do missions together.

01:05:58.000 There's like an intense bond between you guys.

01:06:00.000 And, you know, you would just swap wives. 0.94

01:06:03.000 You would just say, look, you know, the idea is like if you die, if you get shot down and you die, you know, you want your wife to be taken care of by someone who loves her.

01:06:11.000 Right. 1.00

01:06:11.000 As long as they had a smaller penis than me. 1.00

01:06:13.000 Jamie's got a hog. 1.00

01:06:14.000 I'll tell you, he's got a hog on the kid.

01:06:18.000 So good luck with that. 0.99

01:06:20.000 By the way, I'll send you the link to the global penis sizes around the world, and I'll just point you to where Lebanon scores on that. 0.96

01:06:32.000 How's it go? 0.95

01:06:33.000 Pretty good?

01:06:34.000 Top. 0.98

01:06:35.000 Is it like where people are like, where there's more danger, dicks are bigger? 0.98

01:06:40.000 I've never heard that. 0.95

01:06:41.000 This is the first time.

01:06:42.000 Well isn't like, Africa is like one of the most dangerous places, right? 0.97

01:06:46.000 Danger in an environment.

01:06:47.000 In terms of violence and crime and like, look, if you, classically, let's all, let's, Put away all pretenses of racism, right? 1.00

01:06:58.000 Black guys supposedly have the biggest dicks, right? 1.00

01:07:00.000 Why is that? 1.00

01:07:01.000 Do they have more athleticism, too?

01:07:05.000 That's a lot of things that people connect to it.

01:07:07.000 Testosterone, athleticism.

01:07:09.000 Scientifically, has that been absolutely proven?

01:07:11.000 You know it, and I know it.

01:07:12.000 Let's let it go.

01:07:14.000 I know that anecdotally we hear that.

01:07:16.000 You're like, no, no, no, Lebanese. 1.00

01:07:17.000 If you just check, it's Lebanese people.

01:07:20.000 No, I mean, it's always...

01:07:22.000 I know it's a stereotype, but I truly don't know whether...

01:07:24.000 There's certain stereotypes that are just...

01:07:27.000 There's a reason there.

01:07:29.000 And that's one that is acceptable when you talk about black people.

01:07:34.000 Yeah, because it's complimentary.

01:07:35.000 Yeah, it's complimentary.

01:07:36.000 Right, right, right.

01:07:37.000 I'll tell you a great story about racial differences.

01:07:40.000 So in 1995, I think it was 1995 or 96, I'm giving a talk.

01:07:44.000 So this is shortly after my PhD.

01:07:46.000 I just started as a young assistant professor.

01:07:48.000 I'm giving a talk at this big international psychology conference.

01:07:52.000 And there's maybe 1,500 people in this room.

01:07:54.000 And that's quite a big size for academic conference.

01:07:57.000 And there's a real buzz in the room, as if there's tension.

01:08:00.000 And I'm not exactly sure why.

01:08:02.000 There's certainly not tense about me at that point.

01:08:05.000 I was just a young guy.

01:08:06.000 Nobody knew who the hell I was.

01:08:08.000 Immediately before I get up to present, so the guy who was immediately before me is a gentleman by the name of Philip Rushton.

01:08:14.000 Do you know him?

01:08:16.000 Philip Rushton, he recently passed away.

01:08:19.000 He was a Canadian-based psychologist who is probably the preeminent psychologist who studied racial differences and offered evolutionary explanations for why these racial differences might exist.

01:08:32.000 And most notably, he had looked at supposed racial differences in intelligence using post-mortem cranial size.

01:08:43.000 So the fact is that if the cranial cavity is bigger or smaller, Then you assume that that means the person from this race is more intelligent than that race.

01:08:53.000 It's controversial research.

01:08:54.000 Very, very spicy research.

01:08:57.000 So anyways, so this guy gets up to present his stuff and he starts putting up slides of black male, black female, white male, white female.

01:09:04.000 And you see the crowd is sharpening their knives to lynch this guy.

01:09:09.000 And I have to get up and present right after him. 0.96

01:09:13.000 And I'm thinking that just by proxy, just by being close to him, I'm going to get killed.

01:09:20.000 Now, the good news is that immediately after he finished his presentation, out of the about 1,500 people who were there, about 1,425 left the room to find him.

01:09:31.000 Really?

01:09:32.000 So there was like nearly no one left to listen to my talk.

01:09:35.000 And that was one of the few times where I was actually very pleased to have very few people listening to me.

01:09:41.000 So they left the room and what do they do to him?

01:09:44.000 Well, I think they wanted to sort of, you know, challenge him and confront him and so on.

01:09:49.000 When a guy does a speech like that, does he allow a question-answer period?

01:09:52.000 Very good question.

01:09:54.000 So usually, you would leave, depending on the size of, I mean, let's say you have 25 minutes, so you might do 20 minutes, leaving five minutes for Q&A. He went to the last second, so that there was no opportunity for questions, and then he sort of, you know, was whisked out.

01:10:10.000 And so I was really, really pleased that almost nobody stayed for my talk.

01:10:16.000 What's interesting about that is there's certain truths that you're not allowed to explore.

01:10:22.000 And you're not allowed to explore the possibility that some human beings may be not as intelligent as other human beings.

01:10:31.000 On an individual level or on a group level?

01:10:33.000 Well, I was going to...

01:10:34.000 Oh, sorry.

01:10:34.000 Go ahead.

01:10:35.000 On an individual level, we accept that.

01:10:38.000 But on a group level, we're not willing to.

01:10:40.000 On an individual level...

01:10:42.000 Some don't accept it at the individual level, even. 1.00

01:10:43.000 Well, they're retarded. 0.99

01:10:45.000 That's why it's proof. 0.84

01:10:47.000 But it's interesting that there's certain genetic variables that we'll accept that are...

01:10:55.000 Yeah.

01:11:13.000 There's certain things that we don't accept, though, and one of the big ones is intelligence.

01:11:18.000 We don't accept that some people could live in a soft world where things are easy and they develop a slow, lazy mind, whereas some people develop in a very tricky world with this constant innovation going on and they develop a sharper mind.

01:11:31.000 We resist that because we don't want anyone thinking that they're dumber than other people.

01:11:37.000 Well, the point, though, is that I'm not sure that anybody has offered compelling explanation for why there would be selection pressures in environment A versus environment B for there to be greater intelligence. 0.65

01:11:52.000 But there is some evidence that especially European Jews who have more Nobel Prize awards than anyone else.

01:12:01.000 Why do you have to diss me by saying European Jews?

01:12:03.000 Why don't you insult the Arab Jews? 1.00

01:12:04.000 Well, it's true, though. 0.95

01:12:06.000 Well, you're a very intelligent man, obviously, but I'm sort of European.

01:12:12.000 I'm Italian.

01:12:14.000 You know, there's something fascinating about that to me, and I wonder if that's cultural.

01:12:18.000 I wonder if that's educational.

01:12:19.000 I mean, what is that?

01:12:20.000 So I can certainly definitively point to the cultural element.

01:12:25.000 The genetic element is debatable.

01:12:27.000 Right.

01:12:28.000 And so it's neither yes or no.

01:12:30.000 It's unclear.

01:12:30.000 But the cultural element, I'll share with you a personal anecdote.

01:12:34.000 I don't think I've ever shared it on this show before.

01:12:36.000 If I have, it's still worth repeating.

01:12:39.000 After I finished my MBA, I mean, I knew I was going to go on and do my PhD and become a professor.

01:12:45.000 But at one point, I have a brother who lives in Southern California who was a very successful businessman.

01:12:50.000 And I was coming out here to see whether I wanted to go and do my PhD at UC Irvine versus other schools where I had been accepted.

01:12:57.000 And he said, hey, you know what?

01:12:59.000 Why don't you put on the proverbial suit and maybe work with me for a few years before you go on to get your PhD?

01:13:04.000 It might be a nice thing for you to get some work experience outside of academia.

01:13:09.000 I wasn't really entertaining it, but my mother heard of this possibility.

01:13:15.000 And so when I went back to Montreal, she took me aside to one of the rooms and very, very concerned.

01:13:20.000 She said to me, remember, if you don't go on to get your PhD, I mean, do you want people to remember you as somebody who's dropped out of school?

01:13:28.000 So from her perspective, from the standards that were expected, somebody who would, you know, I'd gotten an undergrad in mathematics and computer science, I'd gotten an MBA. If I stopped at that point, I would be a dropout.

01:13:42.000 I'm a dropout from school.

01:13:44.000 I have an MBA from a top school, right?

01:13:47.000 Now, of course, I didn't do a PhD for my parents' approval, but it just gives you a sense of, Of the type of expectations, the imparting of love for learning, for knowledge, for wisdom, and achievement, that is inbred in you from the minute you come out of the womb.

01:14:06.000 So whether there is a genetic component or not, I don't know, but I can certainly say that the environmental component is very alluring.

01:14:13.000 The cultural component.

01:14:14.000 It exists very strongly in the Korean community.

01:14:16.000 Exactly right.

01:14:17.000 I had a good buddy of mine when I was a kid who was Korean who was on the U.S. national Taekwondo team while he was in his residency as a doctor.

01:14:26.000 There you go. 0.99

01:14:26.000 I mean, he was a fucking animal, this kid. 0.99

01:14:29.000 I mean, I've never met anybody who worked harder. 1.00

01:14:32.000 He slept like three or four hours a night.

01:14:34.000 He was always exhausted.

01:14:35.000 Every time you look at him, he had giant bags under his eyes.

01:14:37.000 And he couldn't possibly have physically worked harder than he did.

01:14:40.000 I mean, he did everything he possibly could.

01:14:42.000 Won the U.S. national title.

01:14:44.000 Went on to compete in international competitions, all while he was going to medical school.

01:14:49.000 Incredible.

01:14:50.000 Madness.

01:14:51.000 And the way he described it to me, you know, it was...

01:14:55.000 It was more of a prison, the way he described it.

01:14:57.000 He was just burdened.

01:14:58.000 He was always tired, and it was just expected of him.

01:15:02.000 He was really upset about it.

01:15:03.000 Yeah, it's not quite as...

01:15:05.000 I don't know what the right term is.

01:15:08.000 Autocratic or dictatorial.

01:15:09.000 I think it's more...

01:15:13.000 Debating, right?

01:15:14.000 I mean, think about, for example, the Talmudic tradition, right?

01:15:18.000 You sit there and you debate, you discuss, you debate.

01:15:19.000 So there's this endless inculcation of the pursuit of knowledge just for the sake of knowledge that is endemic to all Jewish homes. 0.99

01:15:32.000 And to the extent that some of my family members did not have that particular orientation...

01:15:39.000 Frankly, I didn't get along with them as well.

01:15:41.000 Wow.

01:15:42.000 Because I have some family members who are quite mercantile in their approach.

01:15:45.000 They just care about money.

01:15:46.000 And I was always, maybe to a fault, somebody who cared more about ideas than I did about money.

01:15:52.000 What could be a fault?

01:15:53.000 How could there be a fault there?

01:15:54.000 In not pursuing money?

01:15:56.000 Yeah.

01:15:57.000 Well, in the sense, for example, that I'm not a careerist.

01:15:59.000 In other words, I do things out of purity.

01:16:01.000 I don't strategize.

01:16:03.000 Sounds like an awesome dude.

01:16:04.000 Well, thank you.

01:16:07.000 Well, I'll give you a very concrete example, right?

01:16:10.000 You were asking earlier, you know, why don't you get a job here?

01:16:13.000 Well, listen, by me taking very open positions on topics that are, quote, politically incorrect, I'm not being a careerist.

01:16:21.000 If I would shut my mouth about all these issues, Maybe some university that might otherwise be very impressed with my scientific dossier might say, hey, this guy's good. 0.98

01:16:31.000 But if he's a shit-stirrer, if he appears on Joe Rogan and makes fun of trigger warnings and talks about Islam, well, he's a bit of a loose cannon. 0.99

01:16:39.000 This is why I disagree. 0.97

01:16:40.000 The amount of input that you can have on a culture based out of teaching a classroom of 100 people or more, whatever it is, in comparison to what you're doing already on your YouTube videos...

01:16:52.000 Thank you.

01:16:53.000 It's phenomenal, the reach that you have right now.

01:16:56.000 I'm gonna send this to some of the universities that are supposed to hire me.

01:17:00.000 Look, they're all in the past.

01:17:02.000 These people, they don't understand what's going on right now.

01:17:05.000 Right now, there's...

01:17:08.000 There's a podcast that you're doing right now that will be heard and watched by more than a million people, for sure.

01:17:14.000 Without a doubt.

01:17:15.000 Not only that, it'll exist in perpetuity.

01:17:19.000 As long as we have digital content, it'll exist.

01:17:21.000 So, there's people listening to this right now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now.

01:17:26.000 If they're still alive, if there's still a world to live in 100 years from now, people are going to be listening to this.

01:17:32.000 You know, you are literally, you know, music to my ears what you're saying because I just had this conversation recently where I was talking to a university about the importance, actually to a dean, where I was talking about the importance of how do we judge academics.

01:17:49.000 I mean, academics are meme creators, right?

01:17:51.000 We create memes through our science, but we're also meme propagators.

01:17:58.000 I think?

01:18:26.000 How does that compare to having 25 students in my classroom?

01:18:29.000 But most universities, you're exactly right, haven't caught up with the times.

01:18:33.000 No one has.

01:18:33.000 Well, university itself, okay, this is not the only way you can learn.

01:18:37.000 These ideas that the only way to get an education is to get a degree, to go, to sit in class, to do all the work the teacher prescribes, all the stuff that you have to turn in, and all the papers that you have to do, that's not the only way to get an education.

01:18:54.000 That's nonsense.

01:18:55.000 It's a human construct.

01:18:56.000 And we're living in a world where that doesn't make much sense anymore.

01:18:59.000 You're going to have, in the future, primary education is going to be online.

01:19:05.000 It's without a doubt.

01:19:06.000 Why travel somewhere?

01:19:07.000 Why go somewhere? 1.00

01:19:08.000 Especially when you're dealing with all these fucking assholes in these campuses that are instituting all these ridiculous rules on social behavior and all these social misfits that want to level the playing field and all this nonsense that's going on that's really... 1.00

01:19:22.000 It stifles a lot of open discussion. 0.99

01:19:25.000 It stifles a lot of exchanges of information because of these ideas these people have.

01:19:31.000 These rigid ideas that cannot be breached.

01:19:34.000 I think we're living in a world now where you have instant access to information.

01:19:40.000 To go to a physical place to learn seems to me to be kind of archaic.

01:19:46.000 It's kind of retro.

01:19:47.000 Listen, I was just recently asked, and maybe I shouldn't be commenting publicly, but I go ahead and do it.

01:19:52.000 There's a company called Great Courses.

01:19:54.000 Have you heard of them?

01:19:55.000 Yeah, they were a sponsor of the podcast in the beginning.

01:19:57.000 No kidding.

01:19:57.000 Yeah, I have one of them at home on psychology.

01:20:00.000 So I was honored to be asked to...

01:20:03.000 It hasn't yet...

01:20:04.000 I haven't signed a contract.

01:20:05.000 They're still looking into it.

01:20:06.000 But the mere fact that they contacted me as one of the prospective people to put together a course for them, a Great Courses course on evolutionary psychology and so on.

01:20:15.000 That's awesome.

01:20:16.000 Thank you.

01:20:16.000 So, I mean, imagine the number of people that I can potentially reach by putting together that course.

01:20:22.000 Look, there's this guy.

01:20:24.000 You should, by the way, check him out.

01:20:25.000 Robert Sapolsky.

01:20:26.000 Are you familiar?

01:20:26.000 Yeah, I know very well.

01:20:27.000 No kidding.

01:20:28.000 Yeah, from Stanford.

01:20:29.000 I'm a big fan of his work on toxoplasmosis.

01:20:33.000 I've been studying him for years.

01:20:35.000 Look at this.

01:20:35.000 And his stuff on baboons.

01:20:37.000 Isn't it mind-blowing?

01:20:38.000 Oh, my God.

01:20:39.000 He spends...

01:20:40.000 Like, months every year in Africa studying baboons.

01:20:43.000 Have you seen all his YouTube clips?

01:20:44.000 Yeah, I'm a big fan of that guy.

01:20:46.000 So anyway, so I wrote to him, by the way.

01:20:47.000 Maybe I shouldn't be advertising a failure, but it's okay.

01:20:51.000 So I wrote to him because I really wanted him on my show.

01:20:55.000 Right.

01:20:55.000 And he was very gracious.

01:20:56.000 He responded right away.

01:20:57.000 He said, look, I'd love to, you know, so on.

01:20:59.000 I'm just, I'm working, I think, on two books.

01:21:01.000 I'm shutting down everything.

01:21:03.000 I'm saying no to everybody, maybe some point in the future.

01:21:06.000 Which, of course, I completely understand.

01:21:08.000 But, you know, look at this guy.

01:21:10.000 I mean, you go to his YouTube channel, you know, whatever, 900,000 views, 1.1 million, you know, of a lecture that typically would have been viewed by 80 people, right?

01:21:19.000 I bet I sent a couple hundred thousand people to those things.

01:21:22.000 No kidding.

01:21:23.000 I'm a big fan of that guy.

01:21:24.000 I've been sending people to his videos and his lectures for years.

01:21:28.000 So let's talk about what are the findings from his work.

01:21:30.000 Do you want to do that?

01:21:31.000 Sure.

01:21:32.000 So he's got research, because you mentioned baboons, showing that in a sort of hierarchical society of baboons, the lower ranked baboons will have higher cortisol levels, will have more stress hormones.

01:21:50.000 Intuitively, you might think the opposite.

01:21:51.000 You might think that the higher the rank of the baboon, the more stressed he is because he has to defend against all the other dangers and maintain his position and so on.

01:22:00.000 So people took this exact study and applied it in an organizational context where they looked at an organizational hierarchy and And took cortisol levels of people in a big organization, I think it was the public health system in Britain,

01:22:17.000 the higher the rank of the employee, the lower his or her cortisol level.

01:22:23.000 And the argument, so you might say, well, why would that be?

01:22:26.000 Wouldn't the person who is higher rank be more stressed?

01:22:29.000 I mean, a CEO has to have more stress than the janitor.

01:22:33.000 And one of the arguments, at least that they proposed, was the idea of freedom.

01:22:39.000 The guy who's at the lowest rung of the hierarchy has to be told when he could go and relieve himself with his bodily functions.

01:22:47.000 The amount of free destiny that he has in his daily life is very limited.

01:22:52.000 Whereas at least the CEO, even though he's working very hard, He's more master of his daily life.

01:22:59.000 So, for example, I work all the time.

01:23:01.000 I can work 10, 12, 15, 18-hour days, but yet I feel like I'm always free because there's nobody who's telling me what to do at any time.

01:23:08.000 And apparently just that has a profound effect on your cortisol levels.

01:23:12.000 And the origins of that whole study were originally due to Sapolsky's work with baboons, if I'm correct. 0.66

01:23:19.000 Well, you know, that finding is mirrored in special ops guys versus enlisted men, versus your average soldier.

01:23:29.000 Like, one of the big issues that people have today is PTSD, right?

01:23:33.000 And one of the factors in PTSD is people who are waiting for things to happen Versus people who are making things happen.

01:23:41.000 Whereas SEALs, Rangers, people that they send in to go and kick ass and take names, those guys have way less stress, which is kind of crazy.

01:23:52.000 Way less instances of PTSD and, you know, obviously still tremendously stressful and still a lot of instances of PTSD, but less.

01:24:01.000 And the more guys that I talk to that have served will tell you that the reason is that they're active.

01:24:08.000 They're proactive.

01:24:09.000 They're the ones who are moving in and doing these things.

01:24:11.000 And they're going after these bad guys and hunting them down, essentially.

01:24:15.000 Whereas the other people are sitting around the base worrying they're going to get attacked or, you know, staying on their post or driving in a car worrying they're going to hit an IED. Very interesting.

01:24:25.000 So let's propose another hypothesis, maybe somebody who's a graduate student might test.

01:24:32.000 Coaches versus players.

01:24:34.000 So based on your logic of the finding that you just said, the coach should probably have much higher cortisol levels.

01:24:44.000 It's out of its control.

01:24:45.000 That's why you see them on the sidelines freaking out, going crazy, because you really can't affect much influence on the game.

01:24:52.000 Right.

01:24:53.000 I mean, you can at the margins in terms of the strategies and so on.

01:24:56.000 But the guys that are in the battle, I mean, I was a competitive soccer player, and of course you're an athlete.

01:25:01.000 I mean, a few minutes before, you've got butterflies.

01:25:04.000 Once you're in the thick of things, you're not stressed.

01:25:06.000 I mean, you're focused.

01:25:07.000 I mean, you're in the flow.

01:25:08.000 But the coaches, they're the ones who are about to have a heart attack.

01:25:11.000 So I think you can test that.

01:25:12.000 That is probably also a big factor why it's so difficult to beat a champion in combat sports.

01:25:19.000 Because the champion is the one who's in control.

01:25:21.000 And the champion is the one who's been dominating.

01:25:23.000 He has fear and intimidation on his side.

01:25:24.000 Therefore, he has less stress.

01:25:26.000 Right.

01:25:27.000 He's been...

01:25:27.000 I mean, he's going to have stress no matter what if you're entering into a fight.

01:25:30.000 But the person who's trying to overcome the psychological barrier that is the champion in front of them.

01:25:35.000 Like, there's this big...

01:25:38.000 There's a persona that's attached.

01:25:41.000 A good example is Mike Tyson when he was in his prime.

01:25:44.000 Nobody wanted to believe that he could be beaten, and men would lose before they ever got into the ring.

01:25:48.000 Then Buster Douglas came.

01:25:50.000 Yeah, he did.

01:25:53.000 Have you ever seen the study, and I don't know if we've mentioned it here before, I think it was published in a journal called Emotion, where they looked at, I think it was MMA fighters, whether they smiled or not before the contest.

01:26:04.000 Have you seen this before?

01:26:05.000 No.

01:26:06.000 Okay, just send me a private message and I'll look for it.

01:26:09.000 I can't remember the exact details, but there was some nonverbal cues that were studied prior to a fight that, if I remember the study correctly, were highly predictive of the eventual outcome.

01:26:22.000 Wow, that's fascinating.

01:26:23.000 Isn't that cool?

01:26:24.000 Well, I bet they're highly predictive of the amount of focus that the fighters entering to the octagon with.

01:26:28.000 Here it goes. 0.99

01:26:29.000 Smiles are for losers. 1.00

01:26:30.000 Oh, there you go. 0.99

01:26:31.000 I love how you come up with this.

01:26:33.000 Studies show that MMA fighters who smile before fights don't do well.

01:26:37.000 Well, this is at a weigh-in, which I doubt you could really tell.

01:26:40.000 That was published in emotion.

01:26:41.000 Is that what they're saying?

01:26:41.000 The pre-fight stare-down.

01:26:43.000 Okay.

01:26:43.000 So the pre-fight steered on.

01:26:45.000 Well, that makes sense because if you're smiling, it most likely means that you're not really in the game.

01:26:51.000 As expected, smile intensity predicted both the outcomes of fights as well as the more detailed measures of in-fight hostility.

01:26:58.000 Interestingly, the smiles predicted both reduced hostility from the smiler as well as increased hostility from his opponent.

01:27:07.000 In other words, it seemed that both fighters were attuned to the information being communicated in the pre-fight smile.

01:27:12.000 These results held even when controlling for existing differences in skill, i.e.

01:27:18.000 the betting odds of the fight and strength, height and weight.

01:27:21.000 Though don't go drastically altering your gambling strategy just yet, the betting line still did a better job overall in predicting fights compared to just smile intensity.

01:27:31.000 Have we talked here about digit ratio?

01:27:35.000 Yes.

01:27:36.000 No, but I know what you're talking about, though, like the size of fingers.

01:27:40.000 Well, not the relative length.

01:27:43.000 I've always – actually, I think I've thought about at some point either asking you or my nephew to get access to MMA fighters to take some measures – That capture how androgenized they are, how much exposure to testosterone they've had.

01:28:01.000 Whether it be, for example, through certain facial features, or through their 2D-4D ratio, which is a measure of how much testosterone you've been exposed to in utero.

01:28:13.000 And so I actually have a study right now with one of my graduate students, Vlad Irimia, where we're looking at the links between testosterone and extreme sports, using the exact same idea.

01:28:23.000 And so I'm, of course, An obvious hypothesis might be that on average, MMA fighters compared to a control normal population, non-fighters, will be more androgynized.

01:28:36.000 You would think that that has to be true, right?

01:28:40.000 I don't know.

01:28:42.000 Okay.

01:28:42.000 Because I would wonder what are the...

01:28:44.000 I would say maybe probably successful ones.

01:28:46.000 I see.

01:28:47.000 So we moderated by what their trajectory in their career was.

01:28:51.000 I think there are a lot of people who enter into mixed martial arts or martial arts in general Because they recognize there's a lot of benefit in trying to overcome extreme challenges and that they're attracted to these things because they get addicted to the rush the adrenaline rush of a challenge and It's very few challenges that are intense as one-on-one competition with another person And I think there's a lot of people who gravitate towards those not necessarily even it seems counterintuitive,

01:29:21.000 but You would think that they would be the most violent people or the most angry people, and they're doing that because they want to dominate.

01:29:29.000 Well, mixed martial arts is different in a lot of ways.

01:29:32.000 First of all, because in boxing, a lot of times you're seeing people that are searching for a way out.

01:29:38.000 They're searching for a way out of poverty.

01:29:40.000 They're searching for a way out of bad neighborhoods and crime, and they do so through fighting.

01:29:45.000 It's a classic meme, right?

01:29:46.000 It's a classic trope.

01:29:47.000 But I think there's something going on with MMA fighters that's very different in that martial arts seem to be something that costs money.

01:29:58.000 And so to join these classes and get proficient, you have to be able to afford them.

01:30:04.000 And so you're getting people that enter into martial arts from two different venues, right?

01:30:09.000 You get wrestlers Who classically get it from school.

01:30:13.000 Like Greco-Roman wrestlers, you mean?

01:30:16.000 Freestyle or Greco-Roman.

01:30:19.000 It doesn't matter.

01:30:20.000 There's successful examples of both.

01:30:22.000 And wrestling is probably one of the most important skills to have, if not the most important in MMA, because the fighter can dictate where the fight takes place.

01:30:30.000 If a really strong wrestler takes you down, he can control you.

01:30:33.000 Whereas if you're a really good kickboxer, your kickboxing can't really be effective if someone can take you down at will.

01:30:39.000 So there's that.

01:30:41.000 There's the wrestling, which they get in college and they get in high school, which is at least fairly free.

01:30:46.000 College, if they have a scholarship, they get it for free.

01:30:50.000 But martial arts, like jujitsu and kickboxing and things along those lines, taekwondo, karate, traditional martial arts, it costs money to take those things.

01:30:58.000 So you're seeing a lot of very educated people that are getting into MMA. There's a lot of MMA fighters that are extremely articulate.

01:31:04.000 Wasn't there a guy who was a biology teacher or something?

01:31:07.000 Oh.

01:31:07.000 Math teacher, Rich Franklin.

01:31:08.000 Yeah, math teacher.

01:31:09.000 Yeah, who was a former champion.

01:31:11.000 Yeah, he was a UFC champion.

01:31:12.000 Very smart guy.

01:31:13.000 Very smart guy.

01:31:14.000 And there's a lot of other very, very intelligent guys who speak multiple languages, you know, really brilliant people.

01:31:21.000 So you get—it's a different— Style of fighter, you know, I think there's people out there that are fighting because they were abused as a child, they were bullied, and then they have this anger inside of them and they want to express it.

01:31:35.000 So you get a lot of that, but you also get people that just, you know, they're just tough.

01:31:40.000 They're just tough and they want to overcome challenges and they get some sort of benefit out of these extreme challenges.

01:31:48.000 So I would wonder, you know, I would wonder what the results of that would be.

01:31:52.000 What about this?

01:31:53.000 I think this is probably an obvious hypothesis, but do you think that if one were to take salivary assays to measure testosterone levels, pre-fight, post-fight, and post-fight, you're looking at the winner and the loser,

01:32:09.000 clearly the testosterone scores would sort along whether I won or Oh, sure.

01:32:15.000 Yeah, well, also, depending upon how much brain damage they acquired during the fight, that has a pretty significant effect on your pituitary gland, apparently.

01:32:24.000 I had, by the way, since you're a professional stand-up comedian, one of my former students, a postdoc, who I think I want to mention, he studied evolutionary roots of humor.

01:32:36.000 And so one of the things that we wanted to study when he was doing his postdoc with me, but then he ended up leaving after a year to take a position, anyways.

01:32:43.000 Was to use the Montreal Just For Laugh festivals to study the testosterone responses of comedians, you know, prior to getting on stage and then after finishing and to see whether their testosterone response Would be moderated by whether,

01:33:03.000 objectively speaking, it was a successful set or not, right?

01:33:07.000 I mean, sometimes you get up and you just kill the house.

01:33:09.000 Other times, it's death silent, right?

01:33:11.000 So will my endocrinological system response track that reality?

01:33:18.000 And so that's something that I still, hopefully, will test with some future students.

01:33:22.000 What do you think?

01:33:22.000 You think that's a viable hypothesis?

01:33:24.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:33:25.000 I think with bombing, especially, it comes to depression.

01:33:28.000 Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:33:30.000 It's a horrible feeling.

01:33:32.000 I can't imagine there would be any benefit to bombing other than maybe your testosterone would spike because you would need the energy to run away from the crowd. 0.80

01:33:42.000 Now, let's say when you are doing a show and you feel as though it's not going well, are you ever able to redirect the ship?

01:33:53.000 Or is there a point where there's no return? 0.98

01:33:57.000 I'm going to suck today. 0.98

01:33:58.000 It's just not working. 0.98

01:33:59.000 I'm not connecting.

01:34:00.000 There's both.

01:34:01.000 There's definitely times where you're not getting out of the hole.

01:34:04.000 You could dig yourself into a hole that you can't get out of.

01:34:06.000 What determines that?

01:34:08.000 Is it that your delivery that day is not working or is it there's something endemic to the crowd that for whatever reason they're just not digging your style?

01:34:16.000 It's all of the above.

01:34:18.000 It could be your delivery.

01:34:20.000 It could be your subject matter.

01:34:22.000 It could be an event, something that went on with the audience.

01:34:25.000 It could be the way you're reacting to them, that you chose a path that was ineffective.

01:34:32.000 You were making fun of them, but that got them to gang up more on you.

01:34:35.000 It could certainly be that.

01:34:37.000 There's a lot of variables involved in whether or not you go down with the ship.

01:34:42.000 But also, it could be that you didn't address it.

01:34:45.000 Sometimes things are going bad, and a guy will address that it's going bad, and they pull themselves out of it, and then it becomes great again.

01:34:51.000 I've seen that.

01:34:52.000 I've done that.

01:34:53.000 I've had bad moments where you address that bad moment, and things snap back, or you just reassess your approach.

01:35:03.000 There's a lot of variables involved in stand-up comedy, but ultimately what's going on, I've tried to explain this, and I've gone over this with many, many comedian friends of mine, and we all seem to agree on this, that there's a moment where things are going really well, where the audience is laughing, and you're in the zone, and you're delivering your jokes that you've prepared for a long time,

01:35:21.000 everything's done right, and there's a lot of great timing and everything.

01:35:24.000 It's a mass hypnosis.

01:35:26.000 It's like when I watch a really funny comedian, if I watch a...

01:35:31.000 Bill Burr, per se.

01:35:33.000 When he's on stage and he's killing and I'm watching and I'm laughing my ass off, what I am doing is allowing him to think for me.

01:35:40.000 So I'm allowing him to, you know, if he's talking about having a female president or something like that...

01:35:46.000 He's going through his thought process of what it would be like.

01:35:50.000 And as he's going through it, I'm not really doing any calculations.

01:35:55.000 I'm allowing him to do all those calculations.

01:35:57.000 I'm allowing him to take up all of my thought process with his sentences and the images that he's depicting.

01:36:05.000 And that's what makes it really funny and the whole audience we're all in it together So there's a community effect of this group hypnosis So we're all laughing because we're all on the same page We're all like these thoughts that he's saying are so funny and we're all going along with it But when someone's bad Or when the joke doesn't work,

01:36:24.000 then everybody's like, oh, Christ.

01:36:26.000 Oh, no.

01:36:27.000 This isn't working.

01:36:28.000 Oh, no.

01:36:28.000 And you look around and see everybody else is uncomfortable.

01:36:30.000 And then you see he's uncomfortable.

01:36:32.000 And you're like, oh, Jesus.

01:36:33.000 He's bombing right now.

01:36:35.000 And when someone's bombing, then you're forced completely out of the spell.

01:36:39.000 And now you have to do all these calculations.

01:36:41.000 You have to think.

01:36:42.000 You have to do all these considerations going on.

01:36:46.000 There's a lot happening that wouldn't be happening if a guy was just killing.

01:36:50.000 When someone's killing, it's effortless to watch.

01:36:52.000 You just laugh.

01:36:53.000 And then you leave, you feel great.

01:36:55.000 So it's when it goes bad.

01:36:57.000 It's uncomfortable for everybody.

01:36:59.000 It's uncomfortable for the audience.

01:37:00.000 It's uncomfortable for the comedian.

01:37:02.000 It's just...

01:37:03.000 Because you're forced to consider his process, his failures, or her failures, her bad jokes, all those things.

01:37:13.000 Do you think there are certain elements of humor?

01:37:17.000 I mean, clearly there are culture-specific manifestations of humor.

01:37:21.000 Maybe physical comedy is more appreciated in culture A than culture B. But are there specific humor mechanisms that are, or not mechanisms, but, you know, whatever, humor content that would be universally successful?

01:37:35.000 No.

01:37:35.000 Oh, so you think it's always culture-dependent?

01:37:38.000 Culture dependent, taste dependent.

01:37:43.000 There's certain styles of humor that some people really enjoy and other people hate.

01:37:48.000 Some people like alt humor, which is like keep the mic in the stand, don't move, deadpan delivery, put very little effort forth.

01:37:58.000 Some people like that.

01:37:59.000 That's what they prefer.

01:38:00.000 The balding guy with the curly hair.

01:38:03.000 Balding guy with a curly hair.

01:38:04.000 From like 20 years ago, he speaks with a very low...

01:38:06.000 Oh, Stephen Wright?

01:38:06.000 Yeah.

01:38:07.000 Well, he's an absurdist.

01:38:08.000 What is that?

01:38:09.000 Oh, absurd.

01:38:09.000 Yeah, he's like, used to work at a fire hydrant factory.

01:38:15.000 Couldn't park anywhere near the place.

01:38:18.000 You know, it's like, that's Stephen Wright.

01:38:20.000 You know, he's that kind of comedy.

01:38:22.000 It's all like really bizarre, absurd one-liners.

01:38:25.000 Right.

01:38:26.000 So, that's not alt.

01:38:29.000 That's just really funny and original.

01:38:31.000 And alt is a lot of times really bad.

01:38:34.000 You know, unfortunately, and the really super supportive crowds that gather together, it's almost like they got kicked out of the cool playground, so they made their own playground.

01:38:44.000 Right.

01:38:44.000 And there's a comedy festival that's going on right now, or supposed to be going on somewhere in New York, where somebody sent me this thing, and I looked at it for a couple seconds, I had to throw it away.

01:38:54.000 I just like, I can't even get into this, where...

01:38:58.000 They're charging different amounts and different access to people who are white males.

01:39:05.000 They want to have as few white males as possible, so they want to make it as diverse as possible, so they're opening it up to people of color, LBGTQ. X, Y, Z. And this is their solution. 0.94

01:39:23.000 Their solution is to not just have the funniest people that they think are there, regardless of race, color, creed, ethnicity.

01:39:29.000 Nope.

01:39:30.000 Nope. 0.99

01:39:30.000 Exclude the white men. 0.99

01:39:32.000 And token white bearded men is one of the things that they discussed.

01:39:35.000 And by the way, the people that run the group are all women.

01:39:38.000 It's hilarious.

01:39:39.000 I mean... 0.97

01:39:40.000 If you want to run a festival, you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want.

01:39:43.000 But the idea that you want to run an art festival, but you want to exclude certain people, pick the best ones.

01:39:52.000 How about pick the best ones?

01:39:53.000 If the best ones turn out to be white men with beards, go with that information and try to figure out why that's the case. 0.76

01:39:58.000 So from that perspective, are we to assume that I now know what your position is on affirmative action?

01:40:04.000 Well, my position on affirmative action is I think it has good intentions.

01:40:10.000 I think the idea is to try to stop racism.

01:40:13.000 However, if you're getting someone and they become a firefighter, but they're less physically fit and less intelligent than someone who could have gotten the job, but unfortunately the other guy was of Croatian descent. 0.88

01:40:24.000 Right.

01:40:25.000 And he looks like a white man who's privileged.

01:40:29.000 But meanwhile, this guy came from a family of very poor immigrants who struggled and scratched and scraped. 1.00

01:40:35.000 And people could look at him as the oppressor, which is fucking preposterous. 0.97

01:40:40.000 There's a lot of that going on. 0.99

01:40:41.000 And I think that's ridiculous. 0.95

01:40:43.000 I agree with that. 0.85

01:40:44.000 I think this idea of...

01:40:47.000 People who all have a certain amount of melanin in their skin, they should get a job versus people who don't have melanin in their skin. 1.00

01:40:54.000 That's stupid. 0.99

01:40:56.000 I think we should address the core problem, which is why is it harder? 1.00

01:41:02.000 For people who grow up in African-American communities or Mexican-American communities, why is it harder for them to get a better education?

01:41:11.000 Why is it harder for them to succeed?

01:41:13.000 Why is it harder for them to resist crime?

01:41:15.000 Why are they involved in these impoverished areas?

01:41:18.000 And how do we fix that?

01:41:19.000 So you know what, Larry?

01:41:20.000 How do we balance that out?

01:41:21.000 You know who Larry Elder is?

01:41:23.000 Yes.

01:41:23.000 The Sage of L.A.? Have you ever had him on the show?

01:41:25.000 No, but I will.

01:41:25.000 He and I have been going back and forth through Twitter.

01:41:28.000 Of course, you know what his answer would be?

01:41:30.000 Well, he's an African American.

01:41:31.000 He's also...

01:41:57.000 And many of these issues would go away.

01:41:59.000 Well, I think that's a little simplistic.

01:42:01.000 Yeah, it is. 1.00

01:42:01.000 Because if your dad's a fucking piece of shit and he lives in your house, you've got a real problem. 1.00

01:42:05.000 Right, yeah, sure. 1.00

01:42:05.000 I don't think that's necessarily the only way to do it. 1.00

01:42:08.000 And I think you can't just blame...

01:42:10.000 I think one of the things that we were talking about earlier that I think is really important is that cultures become patterns and patterns repeat.

01:42:18.000 And that these patterns that these people are born into, it's not their choice.

01:42:24.000 Right.

01:42:24.000 And we recognize it as someone who wasn't born in that pattern.

01:42:27.000 You look at a bad pattern of someone being born, say, like in Baltimore, in an extremely impoverished community that's filled with crime and gang violence, and you go, God, how does this get corrected?

01:42:38.000 You know, I had Michael Wood on, who's an interesting guy who was a former cop.

01:42:43.000 In Baltimore and a really, really interesting dude.

01:42:45.000 And I think he's trying to run for like...

01:42:47.000 He's trying to be a police commissioner in Chicago, right?

01:42:50.000 Yeah, he applied for it.

01:42:51.000 Yeah.

01:42:51.000 And, you know, I think he would be a great person for that job.

01:42:56.000 He's got a lot of information and a lot of really...

01:43:00.000 He's very smart.

01:43:01.000 A lot of common sense when it comes to this.

01:43:02.000 But one of the things that... 0.96

01:43:04.000 Michael Wood was talking about when he was on the podcast was that they had found, I guess, a directive from the 1970s when they were going through the archives of all the shit that they have in Baltimore.

01:43:15.000 The police directive from the 1970s was Exactly the same as what he was dealing with in the 2000s as far as the neighborhoods that had drugs, the neighborhoods with crime.

01:43:26.000 He's like, it's the same pattern.

01:43:28.000 We're repeating the same patterns over and over and over again and no one has done anything to try to socially engineer Some beneficial change in these communities.

01:43:38.000 Instead, they just continue to lock up the same people.

01:43:40.000 And I agree with him that it's essentially, at that point, it becomes institutionalized racism.

01:43:46.000 And that's a real issue.

01:43:48.000 And I think that's the issue that needs to be addressed.

01:43:51.000 And I don't think that affirmative action is the best way to do it because I think that also it starts to produce this feeling of resentment from people that are more qualified that don't get the jobs.

01:44:05.000 Well, and I would think, let's say, for the black applicant who, let's say, goes to law school They will never know whether they went through the whole process simply on their merit or whether they were helped in some way.

01:44:23.000 And I think that itself is injuries.

01:44:25.000 Well, won't they know, though, if they graduate?

01:44:27.000 No, no, no.

01:44:27.000 What I mean is when you got in, did you get in strictly on the merits of your dossier?

01:44:33.000 Let's suppose I actually don't want...

01:44:36.000 I'm a person of color, and I don't want anything to be affecting the decision other than purely the merits of my dossier.

01:44:45.000 So now I go through the process.

01:44:47.000 At the end of that process, I won't absolutely know for sure whether it was strictly based on what I wanted, which is the merit of my dossier, or whether there was something that helped me along the way because of this institutionalized affirmative action.

01:45:01.000 Isn't that a bit problematic?

01:45:03.000 I guess it could be, but I would assume that by the time you've gone through university, you know, now you're talking about a much higher level of education, and it should be pretty...

01:45:13.000 I hate to use the term black and white, but it should be right there.

01:45:16.000 I mean, you should see their grades, and you see...

01:45:18.000 Professors are hired as a function of these things.

01:45:23.000 What?

01:45:24.000 I once applied.

01:45:25.000 For real?

01:45:25.000 I'll say this here publicly.

01:45:27.000 I once applied...

01:45:29.000 So this is...

01:45:29.000 I was coming out on the market, finishing my PhD.

01:45:33.000 You're on the market like a cow or something.

01:45:35.000 The academic market.

01:45:37.000 And the way the academic market works is you interview round one and then in one place...

01:45:44.000 All the schools come there.

01:45:45.000 And then in round two, they invite you for a campus visit.

01:45:47.000 And so I was interviewing at one of the most prestigious places that you could ever hope to imagine.

01:45:53.000 It's actually from your neck of the woods in Boston.

01:45:56.000 Okay.

01:45:57.000 Harvard?

01:45:58.000 Right.

01:45:59.000 Maybe I shouldn't have said that.

01:46:00.000 Too late.

01:46:01.000 I don't think you said it, I did.

01:46:02.000 Yeah, right.

01:46:03.000 So I'm not admitting whether that's true or not, but apparently I was one of the finalists and at least I had heard from some people who were maybe on the inside that they were really looking for a woman and that to the extent that I might not be able to ovulate might be a problem.

01:46:21.000 So I don't know if that ended up being the main reason why I didn't get the job, but I've often heard that.

01:46:26.000 You know, you're not of the right race. 1.00

01:46:28.000 We need more diversity.

01:46:29.000 We need more gender diversity.

01:46:31.000 We need more racial diversity.

01:46:32.000 How do you get diversity and make it fair and even, though?

01:46:36.000 I mean, how is that ever achieved?

01:46:37.000 Well, frankly, I think it's grotesque.

01:46:39.000 Look, there was a, I don't know if you saw, I had a sad truth clip where I titled it, Okay.

01:46:58.000 Okay.

01:47:08.000 If you saw that list, and I go through some of that on my YouTube channel, it's simply baffling.

01:47:15.000 We have to have a professor of color speaker series.

01:47:20.000 I mean, think about that, right?

01:47:21.000 So if I'm a number theorist, I'm a mathematician, does the amount of melanin that I have determine how I study the distribution of prime numbers?

01:47:31.000 The idea that you would have students demanding...

01:47:35.000 That there be a person of color speaker series.

01:47:39.000 I mean, it's grotesque, right?

01:47:41.000 I mean, nobody's denying the fact that racism has existed and to some extent continues to exist.

01:47:46.000 But to have these types of demands, to me, seems problematic.

01:47:52.000 Well, I definitely don't think it's the most intellectual approach to the issue at hand, which is combating racism.

01:47:59.000 Right.

01:48:00.000 I don't think it's making, instead of having an even playing field for all and considering all with equal merit, to change the level of the playing field and boost people up that aren't qualified.

01:48:10.000 Right.

01:48:11.000 You're talking also about the end result.

01:48:13.000 You're talking about the finished product of an education.

01:48:17.000 Literally, at the highest level, a professor.

01:48:20.000 So I think that if you're looking at that, Really, it all comes down to what is it that's making certain people have less opportunity?

01:48:31.000 And that needs to be engineered from a societal level, from a culture level.

01:48:38.000 I've said this many, many times, that the biggest issue With any culture is the weakest link, right?

01:48:45.000 But what's the best way to have a more successful country?

01:48:48.000 What's the best way to have a more successful union? 0.71

01:48:50.000 Well, less losers. 0.84

01:48:51.000 Well, how do you have less losers?

01:48:53.000 You give more people education, more people chances, and more people who are disenfranchised and who are stuck in these bad situations.

01:49:01.000 Give them an opportunity to get out some way or another, whether it's through continued education, whether it's through Community centers, whether it's through combat.

01:49:10.000 I mean, what Larry Elder's talking about, about not having fathers. 1.00

01:49:13.000 Boy, well, we can't just say, fuck them. 1.00

01:49:15.000 They should have a dad. 1.00

01:49:16.000 The dad should get involved.

01:49:17.000 You're not going to fix people like that.

01:49:19.000 The children are the ones that are still malleable and still have potential.

01:49:24.000 So we have to figure out a way to provide them with some sort of resources, some sort of...

01:49:31.000 Some sort of mentorship.

01:49:33.000 Some hope.

01:49:35.000 I don't know how to do that.

01:49:36.000 Let me thread through this carefully because it's a thorny topic.

01:49:41.000 Earlier we spoke about the culture of achievement that we find that is endemic within Jewish homes.

01:49:51.000 Yes.

01:49:52.000 By the same token, do you think that other cultures might be creating environments that are exactly the opposite of that?

01:49:59.000 In other words, yes, there might be some endemic institutional reasons why people don't succeed, but there are also individual responsibility or collective responsibility within the family or the culture.

01:50:11.000 I think just alluding to that will cause people to level an accusation of racism against you.

01:50:20.000 I mean, think about Bill Cosby.

01:50:21.000 Bill Cosby, I know he's not popular now, but at one point he was walking around and saying exactly that, right?

01:50:27.000 That blacks have to take responsibility for some of their failures. 1.00

01:50:32.000 And that message was not very well received. 0.89

01:50:36.000 Well, he's saying it from an easy place.

01:50:38.000 He's saying it from someone who's very successful.

01:50:40.000 Right.

01:50:41.000 I think people imitate their atmosphere.

01:50:44.000 I think cultures exist because it's easy to pattern yourself around what's around you.

01:50:50.000 And that exists in a religious sense, and it exists in a behavioral sense.

01:50:55.000 You become a lot like the people that you surround yourself with.

01:50:59.000 That's why it's so important to surround yourself with positive people.

01:51:02.000 It's one of the most important lessons you could ever learn as a human being.

01:51:04.000 The more positive people you surround yourself with, the more you'll aspire to be like them.

01:51:10.000 The more you have a high standard that...

01:51:14.000 Exists all around you. 0.98

01:51:16.000 Well, if you're fucked and you you grow up in a place without with no hope and a lot of despair I mean, I remember when I first moved to New York when I was in my really early 20s and I didn't really have that many friends at first and it was and I had a few friends that I just I was really disappointed with them and one of them because he just would say so much racist shit It would drive me crazy And I just, 0.99

01:51:40.000 I wasn't, I just, I was like, God damn it. 0.99

01:51:43.000 Like, I can't find friends like I had in Boston. 0.98

01:51:46.000 You know, I was, I had a bunch of knuckleheads that I knew.

01:51:50.000 And I needed to, you know, it takes a while when, especially when you're young.

01:51:54.000 And by the way, no internet back then.

01:51:55.000 So you're trying to find good friends, and friends that were in my profession as stand-up comics.

01:52:03.000 So I had to get closer to a few people that are in these communities.

01:52:08.000 And it took a long time, but I remember feeling really depressed when I first moved there.

01:52:12.000 And it was a cause for me to reconsider moving back to Boston.

01:52:17.000 It was at one point in time.

01:52:19.000 Even though I had just signed with this new manager that's still my manager to this day, and there's all this hope and promise that, like, wow, I'm actually going to have a career now. 0.96

01:52:28.000 I was so bummed out by the people that I was around with that I would go back to Boston and do gigs, and I'd be like, fuck, I want to move back here, man. 0.97

01:52:35.000 Right. 0.92

01:52:37.000 For all of its faults, you know, is a very smart place, as is New York, but I had infiltrated into a really great community in Boston, and I hadn't done that yet in New York.

01:52:50.000 So this is a very small, you know, obviously a couple years later I was fine, but...

01:52:55.000 It was when you're not around positive people it doesn't feel good I was living in Newark, New Jersey when I first moved there Because that's where my grandfather lived and I didn't have any money So I stayed with him for a while and he was in a terrible neighborhood And he had bought a house there a long time ago and the community had changed several times and gotten worse and worse and the kid next door Before I had moved in I think somewhere around the time that I was living there His door got broken down by the cops and he was selling crack and it was it was it was real bad So I

01:53:25.000 have felt depressed living there.

01:53:27.000 And the environment that I found myself in, my grandmother had had a stroke.

01:53:32.000 So she would like moan.

01:53:34.000 This is the grandmother who's a mafia runner?

01:53:36.000 Yeah.

01:53:37.000 That was earlier in her life when she was mobile.

01:53:40.000 But she had had a stroke and they gave her 70...

01:53:45.000 72 hours to live.

01:53:47.000 She lived for 12 years.

01:53:48.000 They were like, she's probably going to die.

01:53:51.000 She had a really bad stroke, but somehow she hung on by a thread for a long time.

01:53:55.000 And my grandfather used to have to change her sheets, and she had bed sores because she would just lay in one place. 1.00

01:54:01.000 She couldn't really move.

01:54:02.000 It was awful.

01:54:03.000 It was awful. 0.97

01:54:04.000 So that environment of being in this really poor neighborhood, being poor myself, I had no fucking money, being around bad, didn't have good friends, it's depressing. 0.97

01:54:13.000 It's depressing. 0.96

01:54:14.000 Now, obviously, I had an opportunity.

01:54:16.000 I had a career.

01:54:17.000 There's a way to get out of that. 0.99

01:54:19.000 But I got a taste, I think, even though the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest taste of despair, of what it's like to be stuck in a shit situation. 0.97

01:54:27.000 Now, imagine being born in that situation, because I moved there when I was in my 20s. 0.98

01:54:32.000 I was like 23 or something like that. 0.90

01:54:34.000 Imagine if I was there my whole life and I'd just been around fucked up people or I'd been sexually abused or physically abused or my mother was selling crack or my brother was in jail or who knows? 0.90

01:54:45.000 There's a lot of variables that can lead to a terrible state of mind. 0.92

01:54:50.000 And it's insanely hard to overcome the patterns of the past and the patterns of your environment. 0.99

01:54:56.000 And until we address that, this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is fucking ridiculous. 0.99

01:55:02.000 The idea of, well, the cops wouldn't be shooting these young black kids if they just didn't commit crimes. 1.00

01:55:06.000 That's crazy. 1.00

01:55:07.000 That's crazy.

01:55:08.000 Because it's not even.

01:55:09.000 It's not an even playing field.

01:55:11.000 It's not even for me comparing myself of 23 to myself of 48. I have way more opportunity now.

01:55:18.000 It's a way easier life.

01:55:19.000 It's way easier.

01:55:20.000 I have way better friends.

01:55:21.000 I've established a nice community with my friends.

01:55:24.000 Do you still form a lot of new friendships?

01:55:29.000 Yeah, I have new friendships.

01:55:32.000 You.

01:55:32.000 Well, thank you.

01:55:33.000 I'm honored to be amongst that group.

01:55:35.000 Well, because of doing this podcast, it's allowed me to communicate with some really fascinating people.

01:55:40.000 And that's definitely allowed me to formulate some new friendships.

01:55:43.000 And it's allowed me to evolve my perspective, to examine my own ideas, and to, you know, I think all of us...

01:55:52.000 That I'm friends with, we've sort of all experienced that sort of same, similar growth pattern.

01:55:57.000 Because, you know, as you take in more information, you communicate with each other about things, you kind of evolve ideas.

01:56:03.000 So there was a study done, I think a longitudinal study, and I believe I mentioned it in the book, at Harvard.

01:56:10.000 I think the lead investigator, I think his name is George, in French you would say, I guess Vaillant, or Vaillant, I think that's his name.

01:56:18.000 And out of 75 years of research in terms of what is sort of the number one predictor that makes people happy or content, I can't remember the exact dependent measure, the number one thing was establishing meaningful connections with others.

01:56:33.000 So, I mean, 75 years of research out of a million possible causal factors were distilled to that one fact.

01:56:40.000 I would agree with that.

01:56:41.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:56:42.000 I would agree with that.

01:56:42.000 The saddest people I know are lonely.

01:56:44.000 Exactly.

01:56:45.000 The saddest people I know.

01:56:46.000 I know a few comedians who don't have comedian friends, too, which is really weird.

01:56:52.000 They're sort of ostracized by the community in some weird way.

01:56:55.000 And those people are really sad.

01:56:58.000 Really sad and really lonely and really weird.

01:57:00.000 Well, I mean, I don't know if we've ever mentioned this on this broadcast, but if you take prisoners, many of them will prefer to be in general population where they might be jumped and stabbed and raped. 0.68

01:57:13.000 Oh, yeah.

01:57:35.000 In my career, there are two parts of me.

01:57:38.000 There is the I cocoon in my study. 0.97

01:57:41.000 I'm working on a book.

01:57:42.000 And for the next, you know, 16 months, I'm pretty much focused on that.

01:57:47.000 And I become sort of a cave dweller.

01:57:49.000 And of course, there's the public side of me, which is very extroverted and sociable and so on.

01:57:53.000 Once in a while, when I've spent several days very much cocooned, and then I go out, even to meet a graduate student to discuss ideas or a friend, I literally come back refreshed in a way that is akin to satiating a thirst or hunger or sexual need,

01:58:12.000 right?

01:58:12.000 I mean, you genuinely feel that I went out with Joe and we had coffee and I really needed that.

01:58:18.000 Yeah.

01:58:19.000 Right?

01:58:19.000 That exactly speaks to that, yeah.

01:58:21.000 Yeah, I think, I feel like that all the time when I see my friends.

01:58:25.000 You know, I worked with my good friend Joey Diaz last night.

01:58:29.000 At the comedy store.

01:58:30.000 And when I saw him, you know, I hadn't seen him in a couple days or so.

01:58:34.000 I may see him all the time, but I hadn't seen him and he gave me a big hug and I'm hugging him.

01:58:38.000 I'm like, ah, it's so good to see this guy.

01:58:40.000 By the way, you know what is a hormonal marker of the hugging?

01:58:42.000 What?

01:58:43.000 Release of oxytocin.

01:58:44.000 Makes sense.

01:58:45.000 Yeah.

01:58:45.000 Makes sense.

01:58:45.000 You know, I mean, a friend that I genuinely love and he genuinely loves me.

01:58:51.000 We see each other, big smiles, big hug.

01:58:53.000 Yeah.

01:58:53.000 It's warm and it's awesome.

01:58:54.000 You know, and when you don't have that in life, you suffer.

01:58:57.000 When I first moved to LA, I had gone here to do some acting and I was here for a couple weeks and I didn't have any friends.

01:59:06.000 Again, same sort of situation.

01:59:08.000 And I had gone, you know, like maybe like two weeks being here and really not really knowing anybody.

01:59:16.000 And this girl that I was working with on the set gave me a hug.

01:59:21.000 And I remember that hug felt so good. 0.99

01:59:23.000 And it didn't feel good like I wanted a fucker. 0.97

01:59:26.000 It felt good like warmth, like love, like an actual person being kind to me. 0.98

01:59:32.000 I was so weirded out by being in this strange place and living in L.A. I'd just gotten accustomed to...

01:59:41.000 I'd just established a community in New York.

01:59:44.000 I'd established some friends and I was just starting to be happy in New York and all something out in L.A. Well, so in Darwinian psychiatry, which is a field of psychiatry that applies evolutionary principles, there's this idea of...

01:59:56.000 So, for example, we've evolved in bands of about up to 150 people, right?

02:00:01.000 You might have heard of Robin Dunbar's number.

02:00:04.000 Yes.

02:00:04.000 Yeah.

02:00:05.000 So the idea is...

02:00:12.000 We're good to go.

02:00:34.000 You're surrounded by 8 million people.

02:00:36.000 You think, how could somebody be lonely when you step outside and you bump into 17,000 people?

02:00:42.000 Yet the rates of depression in this very lonely place but yet very filled place is much greater than the 150, precisely because there's a mismatch between the environment in which we've evolved and the contemporary environment.

02:00:55.000 And so that's in the field of evolutionary psychiatry, you study these types of things.

02:00:59.000 That's fascinating.

02:01:00.000 The mismatch is true. 0.99

02:01:01.000 And also there's an intimacy wall that people put up because there's too many folks.

02:01:05.000 Right.

02:01:06.000 There's too many people.

02:01:07.000 And when there's too many people, you can't make friends with everybody.

02:01:10.000 Right.

02:01:10.000 Whereas if you're in a small town, you wave to people as you're driving by them.

02:01:13.000 Right.

02:01:13.000 You don't wave to people in New York.

02:01:15.000 You'd go fucking crazy. 1.00

02:01:17.000 Sure. 0.99

02:01:17.000 And imagine if you had to wave to every cab that passed you in New York if you're driving. 0.99

02:01:20.000 It's not possible.

02:01:22.000 So in your case, as somebody who obviously is well known and so on, a lot of people are trying to befriend you.

02:01:29.000 Does that result in you having a bit more of a precautionary approach with people because you always think that there might be some...

02:01:38.000 It doesn't have to be a sinister angle, but I just want to be...

02:01:41.000 You know, friends with this famous person.

02:01:42.000 Does that ever come into play in your interactions?

02:01:45.000 Yeah, you're definitely going to have that.

02:01:47.000 But, you know, you just find other like-minded people.

02:01:51.000 You just find people that are like you or similar.

02:01:54.000 Yeah, you got to be picky, you know?

02:01:56.000 And also, there's a lot of weight to it.

02:01:59.000 You know, if you...

02:02:00.000 For you, for example, perfect example.

02:02:03.000 You start doing this podcast, your podcast is taking off, your YouTube series is taking off, and then people want to become friends with you because they think that they can get on your show or that they can piggyback on your success.

02:02:14.000 They calculate and they look at you and they say, if I could just get in with The Godfather, I'll be in.

02:02:20.000 Then I'll get a YouTube following, then I'll get a little Twitter following, then I can get a career.

02:02:24.000 There's people that do calculate, things like that.

02:02:27.000 And I've met people like that in the world of stand-up, where people have said, hey, you know, take me under your wing.

02:02:32.000 Like, what? 1.00

02:02:32.000 Are you fucking crazy? 1.00

02:02:33.000 There's no wing. 1.00

02:02:34.000 Like, go get your own wing.

02:02:36.000 I don't have any time.

02:02:37.000 I barely have time to do what I'm doing right now and continue my own stuff.

02:02:42.000 Like, you see funny, like, but there's certain comics, so I'll see them, and I know they're really good, and they're working really hard, and then I'll take them on the road with me, like Tony Hinchcliffe is a perfect example.

02:02:53.000 I think he was opening for you in Montreal when you...

02:02:57.000 Yes.

02:02:57.000 He was very funny.

02:02:58.000 He was hilarious.

02:02:59.000 I take him with me everywhere.

02:03:00.000 And then there's other ones like that, you know, where I meet them.

02:03:04.000 And they're working hard, and they're hustling, and then I can help them.

02:03:08.000 But some people, they don't want to work hard.

02:03:11.000 They just want to sort of cling on to you, like a lamprey.

02:03:15.000 And then they think somehow or another it'll take them to...

02:03:17.000 And you've got to know who those people are, and some people don't.

02:03:20.000 And I have friends that don't.

02:03:22.000 They don't know.

02:03:23.000 So I'll be hanging around with them. 1.00

02:03:24.000 I'm like, who the fuck is this guy? 0.99

02:03:25.000 And I'm like, oh, he's a good guy, he's a good guy. 0.99

02:03:27.000 I'm like, they're good.

02:03:28.000 What are you doing, man?

02:03:29.000 What are you doing? 1.00

02:03:30.000 They'll bring these guys on the road with them, and they're terrible comedians, but what they do is they know how to stroke their ego and kiss their ass, and they've become a part of their system. 0.93

02:03:40.000 And a lot of my friends who have had this, they have had real problems with these people, where there's a deep resentment that gets established when that person's career doesn't take off. 0.97

02:03:50.000 Right.

02:03:51.000 You know, it doesn't happen because they really don't have that much talent. 0.99

02:03:53.000 They're just really good at kissing ass, and they get upset. 0.99

02:03:56.000 This person's not helping them. 1.00

02:03:57.000 Like, what the fuck have you done? 0.99

02:03:59.000 You've let this knucklehead into your life because they figured out a way how to woo you in the beginning. 1.00

02:04:04.000 So you have to be careful, but you also have to be careful with yourself. 0.97

02:04:07.000 You have to be careful with your own behavior.

02:04:09.000 You have to objectively monitor your own thinking, and you have to spend time, like, alone.

02:04:16.000 Just thinking.

02:04:17.000 And that's something that people don't like to do.

02:04:20.000 And that's something I think is absolutely critical.

02:04:25.000 It's one of the most critical things for a grown person to do is to spend some time And just think.

02:04:33.000 Alone, just thinking.

02:04:35.000 And monitor your thoughts and monitor your life and then go forth from that with some directives, with some ideas, with some guidelines of what you want to do and what you want to accomplish.

02:04:45.000 Because if you don't do that, you sort of live life untethered.

02:04:48.000 Untethered to your dreams or your ideas or I mean even dreams as far as like community and family like those aren't like lofty aspirations in the sense of like unachievable things like climbing Everest in your underwear we're talking about things that can be done but oftentimes aren't because you don't pursue them with that directive like my directive to establish a happy family to be a good friend to be a good neighbor to do all these things people don't You oftentimes don't consider how much

02:05:18.000 of a factor those things play in your overall happiness and the happiness of the people around you.

02:05:23.000 And you can do that, but you have to think about it.

02:05:27.000 Earlier, of course your viewers don't know, I introduced you to one of my friends who was an FBI special agent, and we were chatting.

02:05:34.000 I've been here for a few days, so we had gone out together.

02:05:36.000 And I was telling him that oftentimes I get an itch for like a man's man companionship.

02:05:45.000 You know what I mean?

02:05:45.000 Yes.

02:05:46.000 Because – I mean not to stereotype but sometimes the intellectual types with whom I can go out who are part of my world, who are my colleagues – Right.

02:06:03.000 Right.

02:06:10.000 Not fellow sexists, but fellow guys who can sort of let the hair down, right?

02:06:16.000 Yeah, but you're allowed to be yourself, yeah.

02:06:18.000 I mean, not that I'm not myself in other contexts, but there are different sort of rules of conduct in different settings, right?

02:06:24.000 The way you act.

02:06:26.000 And I find that recently, maybe because, of course, I think we both have young children where you somewhat cocoon, I've lost a bit of the...

02:06:38.000 Male bonding and camaraderie.

02:06:40.000 Yeah.

02:07:03.000 Yes, I completely agree.

02:07:06.000 And I've found that the most potent form of that is hunting camps.

02:07:11.000 Okay.

02:07:11.000 That hunting camps, when you go hunting, and you're camping out, and you have a campfire.

02:07:16.000 You're focused on one, yeah.

02:07:17.000 Well, you're focused on one thing, and you're surrounded by these men, and everyone is allowed to be themselves.

02:07:22.000 And you're also engaging in this intensely, quote-unquote, manly activity that is almost the polar opposite of raising children and coddling little girls.

02:07:33.000 It becomes this manly, rugged pursuit, and it's very satisfying on a deep, genetic level.

02:07:40.000 Exactly.

02:07:40.000 Because I think there's these reward systems that are established thousands of years ago in our DNA. It's like, why you like being around a campfire?

02:07:48.000 Like, why is that?

02:07:49.000 Because it's super beneficial to have a fire.

02:07:51.000 Wards off predators, keeps you warm, it cooks your food.

02:07:54.000 Keeps off the mosquitoes.

02:07:55.000 Keeps off the mosquitoes.

02:07:55.000 There's so many benefits to having this fire that when you have one, it's like naturally satisfying.

02:08:01.000 We all huddle around it and it's odd to leave it.

02:08:06.000 I think that...

02:08:08.000 Being around other men, it's oftentimes thought that these men are going to get together and they're going to think men things and they're going to come back and be sexist and patriarchal and they're going to come back and ruin all this progress that we've had.

02:08:21.000 And there is that idea that somehow or another that manly Is anti-progressive and anti-equal, anti-equal rights, anti-equal values.

02:08:32.000 It's funny, by the way, that when you ask a lot of women what types of men they want, they will typically point to the male archetype that is most viewed with disdain by the current wave of third wave feminism,

02:08:49.000 right?

02:08:50.000 If you talk to those women when they're being honest and alone, Yeah, if they don't get called out by it. 0.73

02:08:56.000 I mean, so I was once communicating with, I think she was either Swedish or Danish, where she was saying that, especially, I think she was Swedish, where, you know, in Sweden, they've had this sort of long-standing experiment where they try to remove gender pronouns.

02:09:10.000 Why don't you explain that?

02:09:11.000 Because it's very bizarre.

02:09:13.000 Explain that to people.

02:09:14.000 Well, the idea is that they're trying to, as much as they can, remove any gender markers in any setting.

02:09:24.000 And so the idea is that we should be gender neutral in every possible way.

02:09:28.000 Incidentally, there was a study on toy preferences.

02:09:30.000 Done in Sweden, right?

02:09:31.000 The mecca of gender neutrality.

02:09:34.000 And guess what?

02:09:35.000 Little boys and little girls gravitate to exactly the same sex-specific toys as everywhere else on Earth.

02:09:41.000 So despite 40 years of social engineering, it hasn't done anything.

02:09:45.000 But anyways, so the men there have been so ravaged by third-wave feminism.

02:09:52.000 I mean, literally, they're... 0.99

02:09:54.000 They have no testicles. 0.98

02:09:56.000 Well, metaphorically, not literally. 0.99

02:09:59.000 And so we were chatting and she was saying that she misses the pursuit.

02:10:07.000 A man courting her.

02:10:09.000 I mean, not sexually harassing her, but there is a dance that happens. 0.99

02:10:13.000 Well, it's sexually harassing when you're not attracted to that man.

02:10:16.000 Exactly.

02:10:17.000 That's when it gets confusing.

02:10:18.000 Right.

02:10:19.000 Because if the right man, you know, if it's Johnny Depp or something, is pursuing you, it's hot. 1.00

02:10:25.000 If some fat slob with dirty breath is pursuing you, then it's harassment. 1.00

02:10:31.000 Exactly. 1.00

02:10:32.000 Yeah, I mean, that's...

02:10:35.000 And so men have become so tentative, apparently, in Sweden, that oftentimes these women, the reason why they like guys, sort of the stereotypical Italian guy when they go, is not only, of course, Italian guys on average are very stylish and good looking, but it's because that political correctness that has stifled natural dynamics between men and women hasn't formed.

02:11:04.000 I think?

02:11:13.000 You like that.

02:11:13.000 I mean, it's part of the natural dynamics of men and women, right?

02:11:16.000 Yeah.

02:11:17.000 But it's so confusing now for anyone because you don't know.

02:11:20.000 I mean, if I tell you you look good today at work, is that sexual harassment or not?

02:11:24.000 Should I only tell my male colleague that he really looks good in this tie, but I shouldn't, right?

02:11:29.000 Well, the problem is if you are unattracted to this man and he tells you you look good and you say, why, thank you. 1.00

02:11:34.000 And he's like, I'd love to stick my dick in your mouth. 1.00

02:11:36.000 Like, okay, you fucked it up. 1.00

02:11:39.000 You know? 0.99

02:11:40.000 How far do people take it?

02:11:42.000 If it's a gender or a sexual neutral thing, like, hey, Deborah, you look wonderful today.

02:11:48.000 I love your dress.

02:11:49.000 You look fantastic.

02:11:50.000 Well, thank you, Mike.

02:11:51.000 And then, you know, he goes to work and you go to work and everybody's happy and you are friends.

02:11:55.000 There's a neutrality, a sexual neutrality there.

02:11:58.000 But the plutonic values that people would like to see in the workplace rarely exist.

02:12:04.000 There's always, like, coveted sexual desires.

02:12:07.000 Yeah.

02:12:07.000 That people, their unrequited love and affairs that take place because people are working together in these environments for eight hours a day staring at each other.

02:12:15.000 It's normal thoughts and ideas.

02:12:17.000 It's an abnormal environment for men and women to be in these workplaces and not have those thoughts.

02:12:26.000 That's abnormal.

02:12:27.000 The thoughts, I mean, and managing those thoughts becomes incredibly tricky, which is why you need to establish very strict behavior, you know... 0.99

02:12:36.000 Laws and rules and regulations in the workforce, because you don't want women to have to deal with bullshit. 1.00

02:12:40.000 Or men. 0.99

02:12:41.000 You know, I've had men that were in here.

02:12:43.000 I had that guy, The Amazing Atheist, who was talking about this woman that he had that was like, she was his boss, and he was getting sexually harassed on a daily basis.

02:12:52.000 And it was torturous.

02:12:53.000 It was brutal. 1.00

02:12:54.000 She would grab his ass, she would try to get him to fuck her, and he didn't want to. 1.00

02:12:57.000 He wasn't attracted to her, but she was his boss. 1.00

02:12:59.000 The Amazing Atheist was the recipient of that harassment.

02:13:01.000 Yes, yes.

02:13:02.000 He's a YouTube guy.

02:13:03.000 I know him.

02:13:03.000 I was on a show.

02:13:04.000 The Drunken Peasants.

02:13:05.000 Yeah.

02:13:06.000 Yeah.

02:13:06.000 Good dude.

02:13:07.000 Yeah.

02:13:07.000 And so, you know, he was talking about it from his perspective where people don't look at it like that he was in any sort of a bad situation at all.

02:13:15.000 They laugh it off because he's a man.

02:13:18.000 Right. 1.00

02:13:18.000 You know, he's like, what the fuck? 1.00

02:13:19.000 So he's like psychologically devastated. 1.00

02:13:22.000 He's got to go to work all the time. 1.00

02:13:23.000 This lady's going to grab his ass and she's gross and she's above him. 1.00

02:13:27.000 Right. 1.00

02:13:27.000 And so he's experiencing what a lot of women experience. 1.00

02:13:30.000 Right.

02:13:31.000 Only no one cares because he's a man.

02:13:33.000 You know, it's like, ugh.

02:13:35.000 Especially Speaking of not sexual harassment, but continuing on that train of thought, I had a public exchange with a woman who is trying to pass a bill, I think in New Jersey, maybe New York, I can't remember.

02:13:49.000 It's called Rape by Fraud. 0.97

02:13:51.000 Oh yeah, I've seen that, yeah.

02:13:53.000 Have you seen it through me?

02:13:54.000 No, I've seen that law that they're trying to pass.

02:13:56.000 It's hilarious.

02:13:57.000 Explain the law because it's just...

02:13:59.000 So the basic idea is that she's arguing that when you...

02:14:02.000 In the same way that you enter a contract with somebody, and if you do so under false pretense, then you are engaging in a fraudulent action.

02:14:12.000 Well, when you get somebody to go to bed with you under false pretense, you lie about your background, your education, you lie about whatever...

02:14:21.000 And you get that person to acquiesce to your advances and you have sex with them. 0.95

02:14:26.000 Well, then that is an instantiation of rape by fraud, right? 0.99

02:14:32.000 You were able to have sex with me under false pretenses. 0.92

02:14:35.000 And so I saw this thing. 0.95

02:14:37.000 I thought it was...

02:14:40.000 Right.

02:14:44.000 Right.

02:14:46.000 Right.

02:14:58.000 Show that it's a real thing.

02:14:59.000 Show it's a real thing.

02:15:00.000 Show the reference.

02:15:00.000 As a scientist.

02:15:02.000 So she starts hammering at me. 0.80

02:15:07.000 She puts up this website.

02:15:10.000 I'm sure you could probably find it.

02:15:11.000 Maybe I shouldn't have given this platform for her.

02:15:15.000 Maybe you shouldn't put it because she'll just get more attention.

02:15:18.000 But anyways, she's saying that I am a rape by fraud enabler.

02:15:23.000 Yeah.

02:15:24.000 And then she goes on to say that you better stop critiquing my ideas because you're going to have a lawsuit from my lawyer for being libelous and defamatory to me.

02:15:37.000 Did she say in those words?

02:15:39.000 In roughly those words, yeah.

02:15:41.000 Wow, critiquing an idea.

02:15:43.000 So maybe I'm paraphrasing, but I mean the fact that I'm coming after her.

02:15:46.000 So this woman thought that her putting up an idea in the marketplace of ideas and having somebody scrutinize that idea as harassment was a form of defamation of it being libelous. 1.00

02:16:04.000 And I thought that was just breathtaking.

02:16:05.000 And I had two other cases with two Forbes, both happened to be Forbes journalists, female journalists, where we went back and forth.

02:16:14.000 It very, very quickly disintegrated on Twitter.

02:16:17.000 They started doing this, you're cyberbullying me when I had done no such thing.

02:16:21.000 I was very, very tepid and so on.

02:16:23.000 And I used against both of them.

02:16:25.000 Some people might have already heard the story.

02:16:27.000 I used against both of them the fact that I score higher on oppression Olympics or victimology poker.

02:16:34.000 Brown man from the Middle East, Jew, Arab, overweight. 1.00

02:16:37.000 And so then I started- From Lebanon.

02:16:39.000 From Lebanon.

02:16:39.000 You tell your story.

02:16:40.000 Exactly.

02:16:40.000 The story that you told in this podcast.

02:16:42.000 Exactly.

02:16:42.000 That's about as oppressed as it gets.

02:16:44.000 Exactly.

02:16:44.000 And so I turned it against them.

02:16:47.000 Guess what?

02:16:47.000 They disappeared.

02:16:48.000 So imagine how grotesque their mindset is. 1.00

02:16:50.000 As long as they thought they could say, you know, you're a pig, you're cyberbullying me. 0.99

02:16:55.000 Maybe we can talk about the Anita Sarkeesian Twitter things. 0.99

02:16:57.000 Yeah.

02:16:58.000 They felt safe.

02:16:59.000 The second I started, I actually was satirizing, saying, why are you attacking a brown man?

02:17:04.000 Why are you attacking me just because I'm overweight?

02:17:06.000 I have feelings.

02:17:07.000 Yeah.

02:17:07.000 They disappeared faster than you could say godfather.

02:17:11.000 Because they knew that they would be accused of anti...

02:17:14.000 And I literally use those things.

02:17:16.000 Like, you know, you're an anti-Semite. 0.98

02:17:18.000 You're an Arabophobe. 0.91

02:17:20.000 And it works.

02:17:21.000 It's magical. 1.00

02:17:22.000 It's so stupid. 1.00

02:17:23.000 It's so stupid, right? 1.00

02:17:24.000 It's so stupid. 1.00

02:17:25.000 Why don't you just engage me in ideas? 1.00

02:17:27.000 No.

02:17:28.000 It's about identity politics. 1.00

02:17:29.000 Well, I think there's some value and some merit in the idea that you shouldn't be able to lie to people and fuck them. 1.00

02:17:38.000 Right. 0.99

02:17:38.000 I think, like, if you say you're a prince from another country and you want to take this person to your land and they will live forever in a Garden of Eden and this woman thinks, oh my god, I met the perfect guy. 0.99

02:17:50.000 But it's not raped by fraud.

02:17:52.000 Okay, but what is it?

02:17:53.000 No, I actually, in my clip, I made it clear that I find it morally and ethically reprehensible.

02:17:59.000 I believe that people should be maximally honest in their daily affairs.

02:18:03.000 Okay, I do too.

02:18:04.000 Exactly.

02:18:04.000 But don't call it rape by fraud.

02:18:06.000 Okay, it's not rape.

02:18:08.000 But what is it?

02:18:09.000 Duplicity.

02:18:11.000 It's caveat emptor, right?

02:18:13.000 Buyer beware.

02:18:14.000 But there's something that we value very intensely about intimacy.

02:18:19.000 And someone who achieves intimacy through false pretenses, it's different than someone That, like, you know, says they're gonna pay for lunch, tomorrow they're gonna give you a million dollars, and they don't.

02:18:34.000 Do you know what I'm saying?

02:18:35.000 Yeah, I do. 0.86

02:18:36.000 95% of online dating would be, then, rape.

02:18:40.000 Yeah, that's what I'm saying it should be. 0.97

02:18:42.000 It should be all rape. 1.00

02:18:43.000 I mean, men lie about their education, about their income, about their height. 1.00

02:18:48.000 Women lie about their age, about their weight. 1.00

02:18:50.000 They wear push-up bras.

02:18:52.000 Part of the mating ritual, as detestable as it might be, is that people engage in deceptive signaling.

02:18:59.000 Animals evolve deceptive signals. 0.95

02:19:01.000 So let's call everybody a rape. 0.98

02:19:04.000 I mean, everybody is a rapist. 0.96

02:19:05.000 Well, you're getting real extreme because we're talking about what kind of lies are we talking about where it would be raped by fraud? 0.97

02:19:15.000 Is it established?

02:19:16.000 Do they have certain parameters that would achieve that distinction?

02:19:18.000 I don't know the boundaries.

02:19:21.000 I think in her case, I know that she has experienced...

02:19:26.000 I think a very bad deception where the guy whom she, I don't know if she married him or not, you know, had said that he was A, B, C, but it turned out to not be true and he had maybe...

02:19:36.000 Okay, it's dreadful.

02:19:38.000 It's horrible.

02:19:39.000 But that's called life.

02:19:41.000 Yeah, you learn from that.

02:19:43.000 I mean, that happened to Cindy Crawford, not Cindy Crawford, Christy Brinkley. 1.00

02:19:46.000 She married some guy she was in a helicopter crash with and he turned out to be kind of a con man.

02:19:51.000 And as time went on, she realized it and, you know, it cost her a lot of money. 0.99

02:19:55.000 A woman who fakes an orgasm with you is raping you because the next time that you have sex with her, under the false pretense that you receive positive feedback that you're a great lover, Because you gave her an orgasm, but she was faking her orgasm. 1.00

02:20:12.000 She's raping me. 1.00

02:20:14.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

02:20:15.000 I'm satirizing. 0.98

02:20:16.000 I get it.

02:20:17.000 But that's so far off the beaten path because the woman is saying, you gave her pleasure.

02:20:23.000 There's no loss to you.

02:20:25.000 It doesn't hurt you in any way.

02:20:27.000 If that woman said, you made me come, so because you made me come, I'm going to give you a million dollars. 1.00

02:20:33.000 And then you can quit your job.

02:20:34.000 So you quit your job. 1.00

02:20:35.000 You're like, I'm the best pussy eater ever. 1.00

02:20:36.000 I'm going to get paid for this. 0.99

02:20:37.000 And you quit your job because of that.

02:20:39.000 And then it turns out that she doesn't really have a million dollars. 0.79

02:20:41.000 And you didn't even make her have an orgasm. 1.00

02:20:43.000 Well, then you fucked up. 1.00

02:20:45.000 No, the only reason I wanted to have sex with her again is because of the feedback I received for the great... 1.00

02:20:51.000 That's no reason.

02:20:52.000 You don't want your own pleasures of secondary nature.

02:20:56.000 I'm a very giving guy.

02:20:58.000 I'm completely altruistic.

02:20:59.000 That is such a stress.

02:21:00.000 You should abandon it immediately.

02:21:01.000 This is a terrible argument.

02:21:03.000 But I think there's a certain amount of validity to what this woman's saying. 0.99

02:21:07.000 As far as someone who is very deceptive, who uses that deception to have sex with you and you find out they're a liar, that feels terrible. 0.98

02:21:16.000 Yes. 0.98

02:21:17.000 But what should it be?

02:21:19.000 What if...

02:21:21.000 I mean, what could it be?

02:21:24.000 I mean, if a guy says he's one-eighth Indian, you know, my mom's Apache and my grandfather's... 0.99

02:21:30.000 But it's all bullshit. 0.98

02:21:31.000 I mean, you're attracted to that in some strange way because you really like dream catchers. 1.00

02:21:35.000 You know, I've always wanted to be with a Native American. 0.99

02:21:38.000 And then you find out the guy's really German, Irish, and he's a liar. 1.00

02:21:42.000 Is that rape? 1.00

02:21:44.000 Of course not.

02:21:45.000 Right.

02:21:45.000 Okay, so what is that?

02:21:46.000 That's just a liar.

02:21:48.000 It's called life.

02:21:49.000 But when is it a problem?

02:21:51.000 It's a problem when someone does it and somehow or another it harms the person who's been deceived.

02:21:57.000 It becomes a crime, right?

02:21:59.000 I think if there is...

02:22:01.000 I mean, I don't know.

02:22:01.000 I'd have to think about what the parameters are.

02:22:03.000 But, I mean, if you were engaging in a repeat interaction where you defrauded the person through a misrepresentation...

02:22:10.000 But, I mean, the idea that to get somebody to date you or have sex with you and through the pursuit of that objective you lie...

02:22:20.000 As reprehensible, let me be clear again, it's reprehensible and I certainly don't live my life that way, although I'm married now, but I never have lived my life that way.

02:22:28.000 You can't criminalize a central feature of human nature.

02:22:33.000 It is incumbent on each individual to do their homework.

02:22:37.000 I mean, you do your due diligence and find out if the guy that you're speaking to is a Nigerian prince.

02:22:42.000 Right, but doesn't this woman have like kind of fairly cut and dry parameters that she's establishing? 1.00

02:22:49.000 I frankly don't know.

02:22:50.000 I don't know either.

02:22:51.000 If she did, maybe that would give it more validity of something that she's been thinking about for a long time.

02:22:55.000 But I can never imagine that it would ever be able to meet the standards of it being called rape.

02:23:02.000 You know what's interesting about this conversation is that what we're talking about is a person who's been fucked over and that person has gone out of their way to make sure this never happens again because they've been hurt and they've been tortured.

02:23:13.000 I think you see a lot of that with really radical feminism in general. 1.00

02:23:19.000 What you see is a lot of women who their interactions with men have not been positive.

02:23:24.000 And unfortunately, the stereotype is that these are very unattractive women. 1.00

02:23:30.000 Well, if you're a very unattractive woman and you go through life just being rejected by men or being treated like shit by men, there's like a natural tendency to think that men are terrible. 0.99

02:23:41.000 Because they've rejected, like maybe you're attracted to a man and he laughs at you and mocks you. 0.99

02:23:47.000 I've seen that on the male side, too.

02:23:49.000 Right.

02:23:49.000 And with a close friend.

02:23:51.000 I had a friend that I watched him evolve into a woman hater. 0.98

02:23:55.000 He had aspirations and hopes, find a good girl, and he had this one girl he was dating, and she fucked him over, and then another girl fucked him over, and just women weren't that attracted to him, and it just got darker and darker as he got older and older, to the point where... 0.99

02:24:11.000 He genuinely would say, like, just generalize terrible things about women. 1.00

02:24:16.000 Like, women, they're all fucking whores, man. 1.00

02:24:17.000 They all just want your money. 1.00

02:24:18.000 They're all fucking pigs. 1.00

02:24:19.000 Fuck them. 1.00

02:24:20.000 Who gives a shit? 1.00

02:24:20.000 I hope they all get raped. 1.00

02:24:21.000 Like, he would say crazy shit like that, and he'd be like, whoa! 1.00

02:24:24.000 Like, where did this come from? 1.00

02:24:25.000 Well, it came from a lifetime of rejection and associating women with a negative feeling.

02:24:30.000 Right. 1.00

02:24:31.000 I'm attracted to them, I come up to them, this shit on me. 1.00

02:24:33.000 I'm attracted to them, I come up to them, this shit on me. 1.00

02:24:35.000 Over and over and over again to the point where he broke. 0.99

02:24:37.000 It was easier for him to form these generalizations and to act on these or to have these in his mindset.

02:24:45.000 And I think that this is the unfortunate reality about sexual attraction as it pertains to the dynamics of men and women interacting with each other.

02:24:54.000 There's a lot going on there.

02:24:56.000 When you look at unattractive Feminist versus over and over again. 1.00

02:25:00.000 You see one after the other after the other.

02:25:02.000 By the way, there's a study that was done, I think published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, where they measured the digit ratio and administered a scale of gender, you know, how much you score on masculinity and femininity, if I remember correctly, or dominance or something.

02:25:18.000 At a feminist conference. 0.91

02:25:20.000 And the women were more masculinized at that conference. 1.00

02:25:25.000 So there is empirical evidence for sort of your anecdotal intuition.

02:25:30.000 It makes sense.

02:25:31.000 And also women that are forced to work. 1.00

02:25:33.000 They've found that women in the workplace generally develop more testosterone.

02:25:38.000 Is that right?

02:25:38.000 Yes.

02:25:38.000 Women that are forced to fend for themselves generally develop more testosterone.

02:25:43.000 It literally alters the way their hormones express themselves.

02:25:47.000 So it's not that...

02:25:48.000 Depending on the fields that they go into, they start off with more or less testosterone?

02:25:53.000 No.

02:25:54.000 So you're saying that it's a response?

02:25:55.000 They're saying that they believe it is a response to women being independent and being forced to provide for themselves, that they develop more testosterone. 0.99

02:26:02.000 I don't know how the fuck they prove that. 0.98

02:26:04.000 I don't know. 0.58

02:26:04.000 I'd like to see that study. 0.58

02:26:05.000 The problem is you would have to have the exact same person with the exact same genetics take two completely different paths.

02:26:10.000 So you'd have to deal with identical twins.

02:26:13.000 With very similar input, right?

02:26:16.000 Because your genes, a lot of what's going on, the way they express themselves, is dependent upon your environment, your experiences.

02:26:22.000 Exactly right.

02:26:22.000 There's a lot going on that's not as simple.

02:26:25.000 I think my last sad truth clip was on exactly that, where I was arguing that the whole idea of biological determinism As applied to evolutionary psychology is complete nonsense.

02:26:35.000 And one of the examples that I give is exactly the words that you use, which is that genes are turned on or off as a function of environmental inputs, right?

02:26:44.000 So the idea when people levy, you say, oh, you're an evolutionary psychologist.

02:26:48.000 Also, you believe everything is biologically determined.

02:26:51.000 Somebody who says that is effectively saying, I understand nothing about biology.

02:26:56.000 Right.

02:26:56.000 Yeah.

02:26:57.000 It's very complex and only being recently understood within the last couple decades.

02:27:04.000 Right.

02:27:04.000 So we're talking about a fairly new science that is, or a fairly new data, I should say, that a lot of people just haven't accepted yet.

02:27:13.000 And it's very convenient to generalize instead.

02:27:17.000 Yes.

02:27:17.000 To not take into account all these incredibly complex variables that determine whether a human being is this way or that way, whether they're more masculine or more.

02:27:28.000 It's like, what have you had to do?

02:27:30.000 How have you had to fend for yourself?

02:27:32.000 How have you had to get through life?

02:27:34.000 What have you had to do as far as, like, who have you We had to nurture and take care of.

02:27:39.000 There's a lot of variables that lead to a person being a person.

02:27:43.000 And there's a lot of different styles of people.

02:27:45.000 And some men like really strong, dominant mother figure wives. 1.00

02:27:50.000 They love it.

02:27:51.000 That's what they want.

02:27:52.000 They want some woman to take care of everything and tell them what to do. 1.00

02:27:54.000 I have friends like that.

02:27:55.000 They want that woman to yell at them and tell them what to do. 1.00

02:27:58.000 It alleviates a lot of questions and choices, and that's what they look forward to.

02:28:03.000 And then I have other friends that want the wife to be like some 1950s housewife from a movie. 1.00

02:28:09.000 Right.

02:28:10.000 Leave it to beaver.

02:28:11.000 You come home, dinner's on the table, she gives you a kiss, and, you know, it's like real, like, traditional values.

02:28:17.000 But there's feminists that will look at that woman and, like, she's an enemy. 1.00

02:28:22.000 Right.

02:28:22.000 Like, that her life, although it makes her happy to exist in this way, they have a really cooperative relationship.

02:28:30.000 She doesn't have a right to that choice.

02:28:31.000 Exactly.

02:28:32.000 And a man doesn't have a right to be masculine.

02:28:34.000 Yeah.

02:28:34.000 Men don't have a right to go on these hunting camps.

02:28:36.000 First of all, you should only eat vegetables.

02:28:37.000 You should be a vegan.

02:28:39.000 And then in doing so, you definitely shouldn't be a hunter.

02:28:41.000 And you definitely shouldn't be involved in masculine sports or activities.

02:28:44.000 You definitely shouldn't enjoy weightlifting or anything that's going to make you more men.

02:28:49.000 Because it'll make you toxic. 1.00

02:28:50.000 You're a toxic male. 1.00

02:28:51.000 Toxic masculinity. 1.00

02:28:52.000 That's hilarious.

02:28:53.000 Do we want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian quickly?

02:28:55.000 Well, you know, I'm not...

02:28:56.000 That familiar with her other than I've seen a couple of her videos about video games and I'm like, and they've also seen Thunderfoot stuff on her, which is really interesting, which explains that she had this background in marketing and mass marketing and, you know, is obviously,

02:29:12.000 whether or not she's entirely invested in these ideas, she's obviously aware that she's marketing her ideas towards a very specific group.

02:29:21.000 And she's got these beta males that cling to her and are attached to her, which are Hilarious human beings.

02:29:27.000 Have you heard my theory about the...

02:29:29.000 It's actually a real term. 0.99

02:29:30.000 Sneaker fucker strategy. 1.00

02:29:32.000 Excuse me? 1.00

02:29:32.000 Sneaker fucker. 1.00

02:29:33.000 Sneaker fucker? 1.00

02:29:34.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:29:35.000 No.

02:29:35.000 I can't wait.

02:29:37.000 There you go.

02:29:38.000 That's...

02:29:39.000 I think it's a...

02:29:40.000 I'm not sure if it was a term that was introduced by Richard Dawkins.

02:29:42.000 I can't remember who it was.

02:29:44.000 He called it sneaker?

02:29:45.000 I hope I'm not misspeaking.

02:29:47.000 Maybe Jamie can pull it up.

02:29:49.000 But anyways, it basically refers to some species where males come in different phenotypes.

02:29:57.000 In other words, different physical manifestations.

02:29:59.000 So there might be, say for example, a type of fish species where the typical male is a big phenotype, whatever that is.

02:30:06.000 Then there are other males that mimic...

02:30:09.000 I think? 0.97

02:30:31.000 And I argue, I haven't tested it, but I think it would be interesting to do so, that some of these sort of social justice warrior beta males are engaging in a form of sneaker fucker strategies. 0.97

02:30:46.000 What do you think? 0.97

02:30:46.000 A hundred percent. 0.97

02:30:47.000 Oh, look at that.

02:30:48.000 A hundred percent, without a doubt.

02:30:49.000 I mean, you have to do what you got to do.

02:30:50.000 Yeah.

02:30:51.000 There's a desperation involved.

02:30:53.000 Like, if you can't be...

02:30:55.000 You know, this beautiful stud male that all these women fawn after.

02:30:59.000 Joe Rogan.

02:30:59.000 Not me.

02:31:00.000 I'm too short.

02:31:01.000 And I'm old.

02:31:01.000 If you're too short, I'm non-existent, man.

02:31:04.000 Give me a chance.

02:31:04.000 You're shorter than me, dude.

02:31:05.000 You're fucked. 1.00

02:31:06.000 I know. 1.00

02:31:06.000 I'm finished. 1.00

02:31:07.000 It's done.

02:31:07.000 But you know what?

02:31:08.000 There is research that shows...

02:31:10.000 Listen to the study.

02:31:11.000 Uh-oh.

02:31:11.000 You're getting defensive.

02:31:12.000 No, not at all.

02:31:13.000 You ready?

02:31:14.000 You ready?

02:31:15.000 What?

02:31:16.000 So you bring in a guy to a room.

02:31:17.000 Mm-hmm.

02:31:18.000 And the only thing that you manipulate is the ascribed academic status that you give to the guy.

02:31:23.000 He comes into a room and in one version of the experiment, he's an assistant professor.

02:31:27.000 In the second version, he's an associate professor.

02:31:30.000 In the third version, he's a world-famous professor.

02:31:33.000 Then, when he steps out, the only thing that you test is people's perception of his height.

02:31:40.000 His height magically becomes taller as his ascribed academic status goes up.

02:31:47.000 And so I always joke that I may be only 5'0", but...

02:31:52.000 How tall are you?

02:31:52.000 I'm 7'4", baby!

02:31:55.000 How tall are you?

02:31:57.000 That's hurtful.

02:31:58.000 No, it's not.

02:31:59.000 It's reality.

02:32:00.000 I feel very uncomfortable.

02:32:02.000 I mean, on a really good day where the hair is spiked, 5'6".

02:32:08.000 Actually, somebody...

02:32:10.000 On a really good day where the hair is spiked.

02:32:12.000 I was in a photo yesterday with Dave Rubin, and I did his show and so on.

02:32:17.000 And somebody wrote, he goes, oh, I learned something new.

02:32:20.000 I thought the Godfather was much taller.

02:32:23.000 You gotta wear some stilts.

02:32:24.000 I gotta wear something.

02:32:25.000 I gotta wear the Rubio heels, maybe.

02:32:27.000 What's a Rubio heel?

02:32:29.000 Rubio, the presidential candidate, wasn't there a rumor that he was patting his heels to make himself taller?

02:32:36.000 Is that real?

02:32:37.000 That's what I'd heard.

02:32:38.000 I wouldn't be shocked when you think about political circles and what kind of manipulations they have.

02:32:43.000 Height matters.

02:32:44.000 Yeah, there's so much manipulation going on there with Image and so many different consultants.

02:32:50.000 I mean, they have that on television shows.

02:32:51.000 I can only imagine what it would be like.

02:32:53.000 Well, when George Bush was debating, I don't know if it was Kerry, I can't remember which one, His camp had come up with all sorts of rules of what kind of camera shots you can do and so on.

02:33:04.000 Whoa, look at his heels.

02:33:07.000 Isn't it beautiful how everything I say is validated by Jamie?

02:33:11.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

02:33:12.000 This guy's got fucking four inch heels on. 1.00

02:33:15.000 I love Jamie. 0.99

02:33:16.000 I should have him around everywhere.

02:33:17.000 Like when I'm in class, I say something and he just pops the stuff up.

02:33:21.000 First of all, those would be seriously uncomfortable.

02:33:23.000 Well, okay.

02:33:23.000 Well, hold on now.

02:33:24.000 How much taller are those things than like cowboy boots?

02:33:27.000 Because cowboy boots are like that.

02:33:28.000 That's at least three inches.

02:33:29.000 Those are bigger than three inches.

02:33:31.000 Those are giant.

02:33:31.000 Well, maybe you're right.

02:33:33.000 Those are giant.

02:33:33.000 So he's a short guy.

02:33:34.000 How tall is Rubio supposed to be?

02:33:36.000 I don't know.

02:33:36.000 Oh, yeah, he has giant heels.

02:33:38.000 Because look at those Italian shoes. 0.99

02:33:39.000 That's not normal for those ones on the left.

02:33:41.000 Exactly.

02:33:41.000 That's not normal.

02:33:42.000 That's by design.

02:33:43.000 Yeah.

02:33:44.000 There you go.

02:33:45.000 You got to just suck it up, man.

02:33:47.000 Deal with the height.

02:33:49.000 Messi's 5'6".

02:33:50.000 He could get any woman he wants in the world.

02:33:52.000 Who's that guy?

02:33:53.000 Oh, for the love of God.

02:33:55.000 Who are you talking about?

02:33:57.000 Lionel Messi.

02:33:58.000 You don't know who that is?

02:33:58.000 No.

02:34:00.000 Who's that?

02:34:01.000 Why are you looking at me funny?

02:34:02.000 Last time...

02:34:03.000 Who's Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson?

02:34:05.000 I don't know. 1.00

02:34:06.000 Then shut your mouth. 0.99

02:34:08.000 Greatest pound-for-pound fighter that's ever lived. 0.99

02:34:10.000 How dare you?

02:34:11.000 Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player who ever lived.

02:34:15.000 Oh, it's soccer.

02:34:16.000 Okay, right.

02:34:17.000 The girly sport, yeah.

02:34:18.000 No, it's not girly.

02:34:19.000 It's just not something I'm interested in.

02:34:21.000 Yeah, yeah, you know this guy.

02:34:21.000 So he's 5'6".

02:34:22.000 Oh, you know what?

02:34:23.000 I saw that guy on television. 0.98

02:34:25.000 They were doing some special on his movement and what he can do to balls. 0.99

02:34:31.000 Not like my balls, but like soccer balls and how he can manipulate them and it was fucking spectacular. 0.99

02:34:36.000 He's an incredible, incredible athlete. 0.99

02:34:39.000 But I didn't know what his name was.

02:34:41.000 Yeah.

02:34:41.000 Lionel Messi.

02:34:42.000 Now you know.

02:34:43.000 Okay.

02:34:43.000 There you go.

02:34:44.000 All right.

02:34:45.000 Okay.

02:34:45.000 You should show his wife at some point.

02:34:47.000 I'm sure she's hot as fuck. 1.00

02:34:49.000 It's okay. 1.00

02:34:49.000 You don't have to show it. 1.00

02:34:50.000 I get it.

02:34:51.000 But this guy running for president has nothing to do...

02:34:55.000 Jesus Christ.

02:34:56.000 The guy's boring. 1.00

02:34:57.000 Nobody gives a fuck. 1.00

02:34:58.000 He's not a leader. 0.99

02:34:59.000 It's like Jeb Bush.

02:35:00.000 Jeb Bush, not a leader.

02:35:01.000 That's why he had to back out of it.

02:35:03.000 Ted Cruz, not a leader.

02:35:05.000 They're hanging their head on this guy that most people see right through because there's certain...

02:35:10.000 There's a thing that happens when you talk to that guy where his intellect, like Ted Cruz, like maybe he's intelligent, maybe he's, I don't know, you know, supposedly went to Harvard, supposedly he's very wise.

02:35:23.000 The way he talks, the way he establishes himself, the way he communicates is not enough.

02:35:29.000 It's not enough to run the world.

02:35:31.000 We all recognize it.

02:35:33.000 He's not powerful enough in his ideas. 1.00

02:35:36.000 Bernie Sanders might be a crazy old socialist. 0.99

02:35:39.000 He might be. 0.99

02:35:40.000 But when that guy speaks with passion, I buy it.

02:35:45.000 I'd buy it.

02:35:45.000 He doesn't exude a wimpiness?

02:35:47.000 No.

02:35:48.000 Doesn't exude a wimpiness.

02:35:48.000 Really?

02:35:48.000 He's got terrible posture.

02:35:51.000 He looks very unhealthy, but he's willing to stand up for his beliefs, and he speaks with clarity, and he speaks with a certain amount of force. 0.99

02:36:01.000 And I don't think he's the king, but I think we live in a time where only assholes want to be president. 0.99

02:36:08.000 Right. 0.99

02:36:08.000 Look, this president thing is not going to last. 0.99

02:36:12.000 It's not.

02:36:13.000 It's not going to last.

02:36:13.000 No.

02:36:14.000 I think it's like fucking, it's like Morse code. 1.00

02:36:16.000 It's like we need something better. 1.00

02:36:18.000 This is stupid. 1.00

02:36:19.000 It's like we have Morse code and we also have cell phones. 1.00

02:36:22.000 Well, you're not going to use fucking Morse code. 0.99

02:36:23.000 It's goofy. 0.96

02:36:24.000 And this internet thing that we have created, this way of establishing information or expressing information, it is so far superior to anything that existed back when they invented the electoral college or representative government that That voting and having a leader, 0.99

02:36:40.000 one single higher primate leader, one single top ape that runs all the other apes, it's dumb. 0.99

02:36:48.000 It's dumb. 1.00

02:36:48.000 One person being president is a fucking really stupid idea. 1.00

02:36:52.000 It just doesn't make any sense. 1.00

02:36:54.000 But who makes the decisions then?

02:36:55.000 Should be a lot of people.

02:36:56.000 Should be a gigantic council of really intelligent people.

02:36:59.000 Shared governance.

02:36:59.000 Yes, 100%.

02:37:01.000 I think it is already.

02:37:02.000 It is already.

02:37:02.000 It's a figurehead more than it is anything.

02:37:04.000 If that doesn't explain why Obama shifted almost all of his policies that he said that he was going to do once he got into office, once he actually got into office, changed so many of the things he did, including his idea and stance on whistleblowers.

02:37:18.000 There was a big part of his Hope and Change website that they had to redact.

02:37:21.000 So who believes that the president really is responsible for the entire country, really is the one guy that runs the entire show?

02:37:30.000 I think almost no one now.

02:37:31.000 Almost no one. 0.58

02:37:32.000 So it's a ridiculous figurehead position that I think we need to stop.

02:37:36.000 We need to stop pretending that we have a king. 0.91

02:37:38.000 We need to stop.

02:37:39.000 We need to figure out a way to have an effective form of government with a giant group of really intelligent people that vote on it.

02:37:46.000 People that have proven to be intelligent and objective and well-educated and have a reasoned response to all these different various scenarios.

02:37:55.000 Well I guess the parliamentary system of Canada or Britain Would probably be more akin to what you're talking about.

02:38:03.000 Maybe, but you still have Trudeau.

02:38:04.000 You still have a figurehead.

02:38:06.000 You still have a one...

02:38:06.000 You do.

02:38:06.000 Yeah, I mean, the figurehead is a bad idea.

02:38:09.000 And I think it's a bad idea because I think that this hope and this idea that we need a king, we need a number one primate, I mean, that's really what it is.

02:38:19.000 These are like chimpanzee hierarchy systems that have existed for thousands and millions of years.

02:38:25.000 But you don't think that humans succumb to the same dominance hierarchies?

02:38:28.000 I just don't think we need it anymore.

02:38:30.000 I think we're moving towards this idea of a global community.

02:38:34.000 Moving towards this idea of a world with the boundaries that we have had in the past oftentimes have been because we try to stay safe.

02:38:44.000 We try to establish borders.

02:38:46.000 We want to stay safe.

02:38:47.000 We want to keep people together.

02:38:49.000 We want to keep all the outsiders out. 1.00

02:38:50.000 We need a king.

02:38:51.000 We need a king.

02:38:52.000 A king to guard the borders.

02:38:53.000 A king to lead us into war.

02:38:55.000 I just think that's less and less relevant today and that it's more and more relevant to have a large group of very informed people that can help a large group of people that are collectively calling themselves a country.

02:39:08.000 Plato talked about philosopher kings, right?

02:39:10.000 He talked about that those who should lead should be the wise philosophers and it should be sort of an amalgamation of those guys.

02:39:17.000 Maybe the godfather.

02:39:18.000 Maybe the godfather.

02:39:19.000 You were born in another country. 1.00

02:39:20.000 You're fucked. 1.00

02:39:20.000 But you changed the constitution for me, no? 1.00

02:39:22.000 Ah, we tried for Arnold.

02:39:24.000 We wanted Schwarzenegger.

02:39:25.000 Until he got popped.

02:39:26.000 Right.

02:39:27.000 But what's the deal with him now doing those video game commercials?

02:39:32.000 I mean, does it not seem...

02:39:33.000 He's getting that scratch, son.

02:39:34.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:39:34.000 I'm going to get that paper.

02:39:35.000 I'm going to pay for that divorce.

02:39:36.000 A lot of money involved.

02:39:37.000 I see.

02:39:38.000 I mean, he's doing movies, doing a lot of different things.

02:39:40.000 Right.

02:39:40.000 Somebody probably came to him with a big deal, and, you know, it's a funny commercial, and they're all attacking him, trying to get his iPhone.

02:39:45.000 Yeah.

02:39:46.000 I don't know. 1.00

02:39:46.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:39:47.000 It doesn't bother me. 1.00

02:39:47.000 Does it bother you? 1.00

02:39:48.000 No, but, I mean, it seems like...

02:39:49.000 For a former governor?

02:39:51.000 Yeah, I mean, maybe it's...

02:39:52.000 He's not a governor anymore.

02:39:53.000 Yeah, okay.

02:39:54.000 Fair enough.

02:39:55.000 Yeah.

02:39:55.000 I don't spend too much time thinking about it.

02:39:58.000 I mean, it would be weird if Bush started doing one of those.

02:40:01.000 Right.

02:40:02.000 Bush, the president.

02:40:03.000 Or the current guy.

02:40:04.000 No, the former president.

02:40:06.000 The former president, yeah.

02:40:06.000 If George W. started doing a commercial for a video game where he's running away from a bunch of assassins that are trying to steal his phone, it would get really weird.

02:40:14.000 Right. 1.00

02:40:14.000 Or if Obama left office and started doing commercials for shit. 1.00

02:40:19.000 Right. 1.00

02:40:20.000 Is there a law against that?

02:40:22.000 About what?

02:40:23.000 A president doing commercials.

02:40:26.000 Like a former president representing Pepsi-Cola or something like that.

02:40:29.000 I suspect not what would be the law.

02:40:31.000 It would fall into what rubric.

02:40:32.000 I don't know.

02:40:34.000 You've never seen it.

02:40:35.000 No, I think it would be a violation, if you like, in quotes, of the presidential office.

02:40:40.000 Well, I think one thing that would hinder them is the financial reward of being a president is really about those gigantic speeches that they give.

02:40:48.000 Right. 1.00

02:40:49.000 You know, Hillary Clinton, here's a fucking crazy one. 0.99

02:40:53.000 Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions of dollars in speeches. 1.00

02:41:01.000 They gave their daughter a $3 million wedding party.

02:41:05.000 Yeah.

02:41:06.000 Three million dollars.

02:41:07.000 But they're people of the masses.

02:41:09.000 They're just like you and me. 0.98

02:41:10.000 Well, this just should show you how insanely fucked up the political system is in this country. 0.86

02:41:16.000 And that's why a president, it would actually be a negative to them if they had any mark on their record, like doing a Pepsi commercial. 0.96

02:41:24.000 Whatever Pepsi would pay them, it wouldn't be enough. 0.94

02:41:27.000 Because a guy like Bill Clinton, he makes un-fucking-believable amounts of money.

02:41:32.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.85

02:41:32.000 He was at least a partially disgraced president, but it doesn't matter. 0.85

02:41:37.000 It still didn't harm the financial possibilities.

02:41:42.000 Do you think it will ever be the case where a sitting U.S. president can claim to be an atheist?

02:41:48.000 I think an agnostic is more likely.

02:41:51.000 An actual atheist.

02:41:52.000 An atheist is someone who says, I don't believe in God.

02:41:55.000 No God.

02:41:56.000 I think more likely someone that could say, I don't know.

02:41:59.000 Or someone who...

02:42:01.000 Is there anybody that chooses to...

02:42:05.000 Who engage in a bunch of different traditional practices of worship, but doesn't necessarily believe in a God?

02:42:12.000 As a politician?

02:42:13.000 Yeah, like someone who tries going to a Jewish synagogue, and then one day, and then you go to a Catholic church.

02:42:17.000 Well, I mean, they do all these things when it's campaigning season.

02:42:19.000 Do they wear the garb and do the service?

02:42:23.000 Oh, I could send you photos.

02:42:25.000 Please pull them up.

02:42:26.000 There's a bunch of photos of Justin Trudeau being able to...

02:42:30.000 I'm done with that guy.

02:42:32.000 He's in every extremist mosque in Canada prostrating himself as a sort of Muslim. 0.68

02:42:41.000 Did he do that to get into office?

02:42:45.000 What else would he have done it for?

02:42:46.000 Right, but once he's in office, then how does he behave?

02:42:49.000 I'm not sure.

02:42:50.000 It's only been 100 days, so we'll have to...

02:42:52.000 I reserve judgment, but I'm not sure that I like that very much.

02:42:56.000 Yeah.

02:42:56.000 Well, it's problematic when you support any ideologies that really just don't make sense.

02:43:04.000 Yeah.

02:43:04.000 And that's...

02:43:05.000 We're not talking about, like...

02:43:08.000 Meditation or anything else you're talking about like really strict guidelines for living and they don't make sense and they're they're ancient and You know in a lot of ways Those places where those guidelines were established where it was the cradle of civilizations where civilization first emanated and first took off and I have this Sort of joke that I never I never really figured out how to do it on stage But that essentially the Middle East is like the townies of the world Do you know what a townie is?

02:43:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:43:35.000 Actually, last time we were on, I didn't know what that term was.

02:43:38.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

02:43:38.000 Yeah, we talked about it last time.

02:43:40.000 It's just like you think that patterns are intensely hard to break, and it's one of the reasons why the United States is the most, as far as like artistically, one of the most diverse places in the world, and as far as our ability to express ourselves in film, in music, in stand-up comedy,

02:43:56.000 and things along those lines, and even in podcasting, it's the most diverse and the most potent, and it's because We're the people that escaped.

02:44:04.000 Exactly.

02:44:05.000 All the other spots.

02:44:06.000 My grandparents came from Italy and Ireland, and they all came over on a boat when they were young, and they established themselves in the East Coast.

02:44:15.000 And that's where my parents were born, and that's where I was born.

02:44:17.000 And these are just second, third generation immigrants that were trying to get the fuck away from the horrors of Europe. 0.99

02:44:24.000 Right. 0.69

02:44:24.000 And they tried to find a new place, a new opportunity, and they escaped the tradition of the past. 0.69

02:44:28.000 And the tradition of this new place was different.

02:44:31.000 It was different.

02:44:32.000 It was more open.

02:44:34.000 There was more hope.

02:44:35.000 There wasn't a caste system like there is in England.

02:44:38.000 I mean, there's a very clear class system that goes on in a lot of countries throughout the world that has existed back from the days when they had kings.

02:44:46.000 By the way, in Canada...

02:44:48.000 The Canadian government, I can't remember exactly when, specifically to avoid that caste system, the royal caste system, made it a law that Canadians can't be knighted.

02:45:00.000 Because any country that's under the Commonwealth, so you're Nigerian or you're Indian, you could be knighted by the Queen.

02:45:06.000 You become Sir, Dame, so on.

02:45:07.000 Canadians can't.

02:45:09.000 Wow.

02:45:09.000 Precisely because the argument was that the Canadian ethos is contrary to having these hierarchical royal titles.

02:45:17.000 So I can never be Sir Godfather.

02:45:19.000 Good.

02:45:19.000 I like that.

02:45:20.000 You don't want to be a sir.

02:45:21.000 No, no, I know.

02:45:22.000 I think...

02:45:24.000 There's real problems in established caste systems like that.

02:45:29.000 Real problems that are intensely hard to break.

02:45:31.000 And I think that the beauty of America is that you can come here with nothing and become somebody.

02:45:38.000 And the real lesson in that is not that America is different.

02:45:41.000 It's that really everybody is somebody.

02:45:42.000 You're being held back by tradition.

02:45:44.000 And you're being held back by these parameters and these guidelines that are set in place by people that have a very limited amount of information to work with.

02:45:52.000 They didn't understand the consequences of these rules.

02:45:54.000 They didn't understand the consequences of these patterns of behavior that you're forcing people to follow in.

02:46:01.000 And that's why America, in a lot of ways, represents still the beacon of freedom to people.

02:46:07.000 I mean, there's a lot of problems with America, a huge amount of problems with America, but that alone, that it represents the most recent of the big countries, the most recent of the nation.

02:46:18.000 And, I don't know if it's coincidentally, the big one.

02:46:21.000 Right.

02:46:21.000 It's the superpower.

02:46:22.000 I mean, I don't know if that's a coincidence.

02:46:24.000 Earlier, we were talking about friendships.

02:46:26.000 So let me link that to some of the stuff that you're talking about America.

02:46:29.000 So one of the arguments as to why Americans seem to form more sort of ephemeral, transient friendships, you know, not as...

02:46:39.000 I mean, it might be a stereotype, but I can tell you that when I was a graduate student in the U.S., All the non-American students complain that Americans are very quick to be friendly with you, but they don't form the same tight bonds.

02:46:52.000 That's interesting.

02:46:52.000 I've never heard that before.

02:46:53.000 But listen to the story.

02:46:54.000 So I thought about it and I thought, well, it can't be inherently that Americans are more shallow.

02:46:59.000 So what might be some reasons?

02:47:01.000 And so I actually talk about this, not in this book, but in an earlier book of mine, a 2007 book.

02:47:05.000 That the fact that Americans face greater geographic mobility, today I could be in Boston, tomorrow I could be in LA, and socioeconomic mobility, the Stratton that I was born into is not necessarily the one that I might die in.

02:47:23.000 So because of these various forms of mobility, It creates a more transient definition of friendship.

02:47:31.000 Not that Americans can't form strong bonds, but there is a bit of a shallowness to the original encounters because tomorrow I might be somewhere else.

02:47:39.000 Whereas the guy who comes from Lebanon, where he's born is where he's going to die, where his word is his contract... 1.00

02:47:48.000 Is going to have a different definition of friendship if only because life is not as anonymous, it's not as open to mobility as it would be the case in say California.

02:47:58.000 That seems reasonable.

02:47:59.000 That makes sense.

02:48:00.000 That makes sense.

02:48:01.000 I saw you trying to poke a hole into it, but you couldn't find it.

02:48:06.000 Well, it just makes sense.

02:48:07.000 It makes sense.

02:48:08.000 I mean, we are in a lot of ways captive by the initial impulses of the people who created us and the land that they established.

02:48:17.000 And this place is established by people that were so transient.

02:48:21.000 They got in a boat and they sailed away before they had pictures. 0.84

02:48:26.000 There wasn't even fucking pictures when people came here in the 1700s. 0.87

02:48:30.000 They had to draw things. 0.97

02:48:31.000 Look at this drawing.

02:48:33.000 This is what's waiting for you on the other side of the ocean.

02:48:35.000 It's only going to take three months. 1.00

02:48:36.000 Don't be a pussy. 1.00

02:48:37.000 And you're likely to die. 1.00

02:48:38.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:48:39.000 People don't want to get on a fucking plane for 10 hours and go to England. 0.99

02:48:42.000 Oh, that's too far. 1.00

02:48:44.000 That's a fucking not even a day! 0.98

02:48:46.000 You could wake up in Los Angeles, get on a plane, you could have dinner in London. 0.98

02:48:51.000 That's incredible.

02:48:53.000 That's insane.

02:48:54.000 Is it Louis C.K.? Is that how you pronounce it?

02:48:56.000 Yes.

02:48:56.000 Is he the one who does the bit where he says about how he's flying in a tube in the sky?

02:49:03.000 Yeah, the Wi-Fi joke.

02:49:04.000 And yet he manages.

02:49:06.000 Yeah.

02:49:07.000 Yeah.

02:49:07.000 Well, it's all relative, right?

02:49:11.000 What's ridiculously easy to us in comparison to our grandparents is going to be a joke to our grandchildren who could beam each other on the moon anytime they want.

02:49:19.000 Let's just go to the base on Mars.

02:49:20.000 Are you kids going to go to Mars today? 0.95

02:49:22.000 They're just going to fucking beam each other up all over the galaxy. 0.96

02:49:25.000 We're dealing with a very strange and ever-changing world. 0.97

02:49:30.000 Very nice. 0.98

02:49:31.000 This is a fucking badass podcast, brother. 0.99

02:49:33.000 This is what you do. 0.99

02:49:34.000 This is your thing, man.

02:49:36.000 I live a truly blessed life to know guys like you.

02:49:39.000 I do too.

02:49:40.000 To know guys like you is what makes this podcast so cool to be able to have conversations with guys like you.

02:49:44.000 Thank you so much.

02:49:45.000 This is your future, man.

02:49:46.000 This is what it is. 1.00

02:49:47.000 These fucking stuffy classrooms with 20 fucking kids who barely pay attention who are judging you. 1.00

02:49:53.000 Fuck those people. 1.00

02:49:54.000 Fuck him! 1.00

02:49:55.000 Fuck him all! 1.00

02:49:56.000 Don't listen to universities. 1.00

02:49:58.000 Don't listen to him.

02:49:59.000 Don't hire him.

02:50:00.000 You'll make so much more money doing this anyway.

02:50:03.000 Your YouTube page is...

02:50:06.000 So, YouTube slash C slash Got Sad.

02:50:09.000 It's The Sad Truth.

02:50:11.000 The Sad Truth.

02:50:12.000 S-A-A-D. Truth.

02:50:15.000 S-A-A-D. But it's not sad.

02:50:18.000 It's not sad.

02:50:18.000 It's not.

02:50:19.000 It's happy.

02:50:19.000 I'm always smiling.

02:50:20.000 He was always smiling.

02:50:21.000 At Gadsad, G-A-D-S-A-A-D is my Twitter feed and then my public Facebook page, whatever they start, doctor, period, gad, period, sad.

02:50:32.000 Always a pleasure, my brother.

02:50:34.000 Thank you, sir.

02:50:34.000 Open invitation anytime you want.

02:50:35.000 Come on back.

02:50:36.000 Thank you so much.

02:50:36.000 We can do this every day.

02:50:37.000 Thank you so much, buddy.

02:50:38.000 Thank you, brother.

02:50:38.000 Cheers.

02:50:39.000 Good night, everybody.

02:50:41.000 That was lovely, man.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 25, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #766 - Gad Saad

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