The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #897 - Hunter Maats

00:00:05.000 What's up, Hunter?

00:00:06.000 How are you doing, Joe?

00:00:06.000 I'm doing good.

00:00:07.000 Now that we're actually live, it feels more formal, right?

00:00:10.000 We were just talking about how crazy some of the people in Brian Callen's past have been.

00:00:15.000 What is it like doing his show, man?

00:00:16.000 You guys, you're like a co-host.

00:00:18.000 You keep him on the level.

00:00:19.000 Well, yeah.

00:00:19.000 So, I mean, what happened was that a couple of years ago, Brian and I were talking about books, and Brian had just started doing his podcast at that point.

00:00:27.000 And, you know, he was sort of interviewing strippers, a lot of strippers or like porn stars or like, you know, MMA guys, and that was fine.

00:00:35.000 But, you know, I was like, Brian, if you enjoy these books so much, why don't we get on some of these professors?

00:00:41.000 And he was like...

00:00:41.000 Really?

00:00:42.000 Like professors would talk to me and I said, well, you know, what are your download numbers?

00:00:46.000 And, you know, he told me them.

00:00:48.000 And then I went off and I lied to the professors and like doubled or tripled them.

00:00:51.000 How dare you?

00:00:53.000 That's a way to do it, though.

00:00:54.000 Yeah.

00:00:54.000 And then, you know, as a result, they were all like, that's great.

00:00:56.000 Because if you're a New York Times bestselling author, you usually have an audience of...

00:01:00.000 Three.

00:01:01.000 And so if you have a chance to, like, actually reach a decent number of people, then yeah, you're going to come on this weird podcast.

00:01:07.000 You're like, I've heard of podcasting.

00:01:09.000 What is that?

00:01:10.000 Why not?

00:01:10.000 Right?

00:01:10.000 And so we started getting all of these professors and academics and scientists and all that stuff on.

00:01:17.000 And, you know, that's sort of been the journey.

00:01:20.000 And we're now 200 plus episodes in.

00:01:22.000 Yeah, Brian loves that kind of stuff, but I always say, how come we never talk about that on stage?

00:01:28.000 He wants to be Captain Sillyface on stage.

00:01:33.000 Joe, are we willing to wander into the dark, dark place that is Brian Callen's mind?

00:01:37.000 Dark, dark place.

00:01:39.000 Are you ready to go there?

00:01:41.000 Yeah, I've been there.

00:01:44.000 So, I mean, a lot of it comes down to Brian's own personal insecurities.

00:01:47.000 Like, he loves it, but he doesn't feel confident engaging with and breaking with those ideas.

00:01:52.000 See, I would disagree with that. 0.88

00:01:52.000 I would say that he's just—his comedy, he prefers it to be silly. 0.88

00:01:56.000 You know, because, like, there's a difference between comedy, in Brian's mind especially, between what's really funny and what's really deep.

00:02:04.000 Right.

00:02:04.000 You know, and he doesn't find deep things to be very funny.

00:02:06.000 He's not—he doesn't— You know what I mean?

00:02:09.000 When he gets into deep subjects, he kind of gets into them just for what they are and not tries to translate those into comedy.

00:02:18.000 Does that make sense?

00:02:19.000 It does make sense.

00:02:20.000 But part of what I've seen across the course of these 200 episodes is I think that Brian Callen is growing up.

00:02:26.000 Oh, no way.

00:02:29.000 Finally, at like whatever age he is.

00:02:31.000 55. 55. Tomorrow.

00:02:33.000 Yeah.

00:02:34.000 There's starting to be an evolution.

00:02:36.000 And part of it is just sort of having actually talked to some of the smartest people in the world.

00:02:40.000 He's like, oh, these are just people.

00:02:42.000 And, you know, they know certain ideas that I didn't know, and now I know them, and, you know, maybe I can.

00:02:48.000 And he's even started experimenting with, he particularly got really excited, we had a guy called Joe Henrik on, who wrote this great book called The Secret of Our Success, which is all about cultural evolution, how cultural evolution works.

00:03:00.000 And one of the things he talks about in there is, you know, why do we have black people and why do we have white people?

00:03:06.000 And, you know, it comes down to vitamin D and folate and all these sorts of things.

00:03:10.000 I like how you said vitamin.

00:03:10.000 Where are you from?

00:03:11.000 Oh, I spent a lot of time in England, and I got rid of most of my accent, but there are weird words that come out like vitamin and bean.

00:03:20.000 And so sometimes people think I'm Canadian, which is...

00:03:22.000 Ah, that's hilarious.

00:03:25.000 Because they literally can't place it.

00:03:29.000 Side story, when I first went to college, I wanted to major in linguistics for a while, and I met with my linguistics professor, and he sits me down, and we're having a conversation just like this.

00:03:39.000 And then all of a sudden, he stops me, just like you did, and he says...

00:03:42.000 Wait a minute. 0.99

00:03:43.000 And he proceeds to ask me these really fucking bizarre questions. 0.97

00:03:47.000 He's like, if John and Jane are in a race, and John comes fifth, and Jane comes in afterwards, what position does Jane come in? 0.97

00:03:54.000 And I was like, sixth?

00:03:56.000 And he goes, British. 0.90

00:03:57.000 And then he Proceeds to do all of these tests to basically spot my accent.

00:04:03.000 Sixth?

00:04:04.000 Sixth.

00:04:05.000 There's no S. Oh, sixth.

00:04:07.000 Yeah, it's super weird.

00:04:09.000 Sixth.

00:04:09.000 Medicine is the other one.

00:04:11.000 They don't say medicine, they say medicine.

00:04:13.000 Oh, so by sick, wow, that's interesting.

00:04:16.000 That's interesting.

00:04:17.000 Because the X sound is really a K and then an S, even though we represent it as an X. So he basically had all of these tests, and he figured out pretty quickly that I was trying to pass as an American...

00:04:29.000 And he's like, sorry, white boy, not so much. 0.98

00:04:32.000 How long did you live in England for?

00:04:34.000 10 years.

00:04:35.000 10 years.

00:04:35.000 Till you're 10?

00:04:37.000 From the age of 8 until 18. Okay.

00:04:39.000 So if you were in England, so you started out without an English accent.

00:04:43.000 Yep.

00:04:43.000 Right?

00:04:43.000 So you learned English here.

00:04:44.000 And then when you started speaking in England, did you sense that you were shifting over to an English?

00:04:50.000 Wow.

00:04:51.000 And I sort of fought it.

00:04:52.000 I fought it.

00:04:53.000 Really?

00:04:53.000 Because what happens is that people naturally sort of start to—you're in a tribe, and you start to pick up the values and the speech patterns and all that sort of stuff of the tribe.

00:05:03.000 And I really thought of myself as American, in large part because I identified with my mom more than my dad.

00:05:10.000 And so what happened was that I was like— Uh-oh, British accent creeping in.

00:05:15.000 And so I fought that with everything that I could.

00:05:17.000 But in spite of fighting the accent with everything I could, these words like bean and vitamin and medicine and sick that I wasn't watching for, that no ordinary person would watch for, crept into my mind.

00:05:29.000 It's always interesting to me, there's an added insight that you get from people that come from another country and then live in America. 0.98

00:05:38.000 There's something different about like, oh, you guys don't know how weird this fucking place is. 0.98

00:05:43.000 Like, I know. 0.99

00:05:44.000 I've been to Scotland.

00:05:45.000 I live there.

00:05:46.000 Those people have a different insight.

00:05:49.000 Very different insight.

00:05:50.000 Also, I think we're so established...

00:05:54.000 In America, insofar as thinking that this is how people live in the world.

00:05:59.000 Like, this is where you go.

00:06:00.000 You go to Burger King, it's right over there.

00:06:02.000 You get on the highway, it's right over here.

00:06:03.000 And we see our landscape, and we see our cityscapes, and we see it as being normal.

00:06:09.000 But if you don't go to another country, you don't go, oh, this is normal too.

00:06:13.000 This is normal for them.

00:06:15.000 Oh, this is normal for them.

00:06:17.000 You really need to be there.

00:06:19.000 I don't think that's absorbable from a DVD. No.

00:06:25.000 And part of it is—I mean, this is a large part of what we've been doing and what Joe Henrik's work is about—is the fact that when you're in a tribe, whatever that tribe is, whether it's America or Christianity or Mormonism or Islam or some Papua New Guineans in the foothills of Papua New Guinea— Yeah.

00:07:10.000 And so the first place that I went after I was born in Saudi Arabia was Brian's house.

00:07:16.000 Like at birth, I went to Brian's house.

00:07:20.000 And so for the last, you know, and then we moved around and we moved to different places.

00:07:23.000 He did, you know, Philippines, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever.

00:07:27.000 I did Saudi Arabia, Greece, Brazil, England.

00:07:30.000 And then my parents moved to France and Libya and the UAE. And then, you know, I came to the U.S., So moving constantly between tribes, like that was a large part of my experience growing up as a kid, was I was constantly like, people are all the same, and yet they're fucking different. 0.95

00:07:46.000 And how does that work?

00:07:48.000 And because I come from the background of science, my first response was like, oh, well, there must be science of this, right?

00:07:56.000 Why not go and look at that science and see what the science says about that?

00:07:59.000 Turns out there's a massive amount of science all about it.

00:08:03.000 Yeah, there's a massive amount of science all about it, and it's so fascinating when you stop and think that there are some people...

00:08:08.000 I'm sure you've seen the most recent photos of that uncontacted tribe, now contacted, obviously, in the Amazon, like, really recently over the last couple weeks?

00:08:16.000 No.

00:08:17.000 Oh, it's amazing.

00:08:18.000 Yeah.

00:08:18.000 Really cool.

00:08:19.000 I mean, these people, they don't have American t-shirts.

00:08:22.000 Sometimes you'll see, like, these tribes, and they're deep in the Amazon, but they have t-shirts on.

00:08:25.000 They have, like, a Coca-Cola Adidas thing, and you're like...

00:08:28.000 How'd that get there?

00:08:29.000 There's some sort of interaction with these people.

00:08:33.000 There's none.

00:08:33.000 There's been no interaction with the West.

00:08:35.000 They have stick bows that they've made, and they're all barefoot, and they're all wearing leaves and shit. 0.98

00:08:41.000 These people, here they are, trucking along in 2017. And you've got to think, 50,000, 60,000 years ago, they probably were living exactly the same way. 0.96

00:08:51.000 Yep.

00:08:51.000 And what's fascinating is just the degree to which those people have so much to teach us, because a lot of what happened in the beginning of the Enlightenment is that if you look at Locke and Rousseau and all these guys, they're trying to imagine the state of nature.

00:09:05.000 But they're a group of people who are sitting around in Europe...

00:09:08.000 They've never met somebody from the Amazon or someone from Papua New Guinea.

00:09:11.000 And now we really have a pretty good idea of what was life like before civilization.

00:09:17.000 And it's pretty damn fascinating.

00:09:20.000 I mean, Jared Diamond has this great book, The World Until Yesterday, which is literally all about life before civilization.

00:09:27.000 And what are the things that we can learn as moderns from these people?

00:09:32.000 What are the things they get right that we get wrong?

00:09:35.000 Like, what was his examples?

00:09:36.000 Well, there's a bunch of interesting ones.

00:09:38.000 One of my favorite ones is constructive paranoia.

00:09:42.000 So what happens is when you have tribespeople and they go outside of their village, they suddenly become massively paranoid, like incredibly paranoid.

00:09:51.000 And he's like, you know, these people are more paranoid than your average New York Jew, right?

00:09:56.000 Yeah.

00:10:15.000 But then he had this experience where he had a couple of experiences.

00:10:19.000 One, which was around, you know, somebody, some other tribe that was potentially trying to kill him in Papua New Guinea.

00:10:25.000 And then the other one was around he basically, you know, was getting on this boat.

00:10:29.000 And, you know, if you're in the West and you get on a boat at the New York Port Authority or whatever, you feel like, oh, yeah, this boat's safe.

00:10:36.000 Like there are safety rules.

00:10:37.000 Probably someone would check it, whatever.

00:10:39.000 So he gets on this boat.

00:10:40.000 The boat goes out into the ocean and like capsizes and sinks and he almost drowns to death.

00:10:54.000 Jesus Christ.

00:10:58.000 Jesus Christ.

00:11:08.000 And he then talks about how, you know, he's a 70, 80-year-old man.

00:11:12.000 He's like, I need to be more paranoid because the reality is if I go down, it's probably because I slip in the shower.

00:11:18.000 Like, you know, there are all these things that can actually kill me in my environment that I sort of take for granted because my world seems so safe.

00:11:27.000 And so one of the things you learn from that is that paranoia is a tool.

00:11:31.000 And rather than a lot of people have trouble with paranoia where they're indiscriminately paranoid.

00:11:36.000 But the key is figuring out what to be paranoid about, when to be paranoid, so that you're hyper alert to threats.

00:11:43.000 It totally makes sense.

00:11:44.000 Yeah.

00:11:44.000 I mean, they're very vulnerable.

00:11:46.000 They're so soft and fleshy. 0.99

00:11:48.000 Most of their body's exposed and they're around all sorts of different poisonous things and predatory things and cats and fucking spiders and whatever the hell's out there. 0.99

00:11:58.000 And if you break a leg in the jungle, you're done. 0.94

00:12:01.000 And that's the point is they don't have the luxury of, oh, I was not paying attention in CrossFit.

00:12:06.000 I dropped a barbell on my foot.

00:12:08.000 Oh, I go to the doctor.

00:12:08.000 I'm out for a few months.

00:12:10.000 Not a big deal.

00:12:11.000 Yeah, it's a shorter life, though.

00:12:13.000 It doesn't seem like nearly as fun.

00:12:16.000 Well, the interesting thing is that in many ways it's actually more fun, because they have such a strong, like, you know, part of what we don't have, and obviously part of what you're creating with your podcast and what we're trying to create on a smaller level with our podcast, is tribe.

00:12:31.000 Right?

00:12:31.000 Like, you know, a strong sense of community, a group of people that you belong with, you know, you're in it together, all of that sort of stuff.

00:12:39.000 And, you know, America, and he particularly talks about the elderly, you know, he talks about what is the experience of the elderly in a tribe?

00:12:46.000 And, you know, you're super valuable until death. 0.99

00:12:48.000 Everybody respects the shit out of you. 0.96

00:12:50.000 You always have things to contribute to a tribe. 0.99

00:12:52.000 What do we do with the elderly here? 1.00

00:12:54.000 You stick them in a fucking old person's home and leave them to rot. 1.00

00:12:58.000 You know, they don't have that sense of belonging, that sense of purpose late in life. 1.00

00:13:01.000 Do you think that's a sheer volume thing?

00:13:02.000 It's almost like we don't value life as much because we're overwhelmed by it.

00:13:07.000 We were talking on the last podcast about the number of people in America today versus when I was a kid.

00:13:12.000 And when I was 14, we figured there was 230, what was it?

00:13:18.000 25. 225 million.

00:13:20.000 Mm-hmm.

00:13:21.000 Now there's a hundred million plus more.

00:13:24.000 Just the sheer volume.

00:13:25.000 It seems like if we lived in a small town and there was some guy that, you know, we really loved and he was starting to die, we'd want to take care of him.

00:13:31.000 Right. 0.97

00:13:32.000 But if it's that crazy asshole that's down the hallway in your apartment building, you never even talked to that dude because there's a thousand people in your apartment building that you never talked to. 1.00

00:13:40.000 Right. 1.00

00:13:40.000 Well, part of it is, like, what are neurological limits? 1.00

00:13:44.000 Yeah.

00:13:44.000 Right?

00:13:44.000 So, in general, there's what's called the Dunbar number.

00:13:48.000 Mm-hmm.

00:13:48.000 And the Dunbar number, you know, it's like 150. And then there are a series.

00:13:52.000 Explain that what that is for people who haven't heard.

00:13:54.000 Yeah.

00:13:55.000 So it's pretty simple.

00:13:56.000 The easiest way to understand it is Facebook, right? 0.75

00:13:59.000 Like you may have 4000 friends on Facebook, but then you constantly find like, who the fuck are these people that I friended in some sort of like friending frenzy. 0.81

00:14:08.000 It's almost like a song. 0.65

00:14:09.000 Yeah, well, hopefully not.

00:14:10.000 I don't think that song's going to take off.

00:14:15.000 But you find that, like, oh, I only really know a few of these people.

00:14:18.000 The majority of them, my brain can't track, right?

00:14:21.000 And you even get into that experience.

00:14:23.000 Like, that's what I always find fascinating is you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, right, on the street, and you're kind of avoiding the interaction, right?

00:14:30.000 Because you're like, oh. 0.66

00:14:32.000 Where the fuck do I know this guy from? 0.97

00:14:33.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:14:33.000 And also then if you really get into it, then you have to dust off the relationship. 0.98

00:14:38.000 You have to invest a whole bunch of time. 0.93

00:14:40.000 It's fucking exhausting, right? 0.97

00:14:42.000 So there's a real limit to how many people any one human brain can handle. 0.97

00:14:48.000 Isn't it sort of like the top nine on MySpace?

00:14:50.000 Remember MySpace?

00:14:51.000 Yeah.

00:14:52.000 Wasn't it nine?

00:14:53.000 Wasn't it nine people?

00:14:54.000 Yeah.

00:14:54.000 Remember you'd have a top nine, and those are the people that you were pretty tight with.

00:14:58.000 You had to have your boys, all your friends in the top nine.

00:15:02.000 Well, there's a series of Dunbar numbers, right?

00:15:04.000 And there's essentially two or three people who you would tell anything to, right?

00:15:10.000 And then there's your top nine, right?

00:15:13.000 You're sort of like, oh, we're cool.

00:15:14.000 We can all go hang out.

00:15:15.000 If I was going to have a bachelor party, these are the people I would invite, right?

00:15:18.000 Right.

00:15:19.000 And then, you know, you sort of get out into larger and larger circles.

00:15:22.000 150 is sort of the size of a tribe. 0.92

00:15:24.000 But then, you know, even though there's 150, there's, you know, whatever, 4,000 people, 5,000 people who's like, you'd recognize their face, but you're like, I don't totally fucking know you. 0.72

00:15:34.000 Yeah.

00:15:35.000 So there's a series of all these things.

00:15:37.000 But whatever the numbers are, it's not 7 billion.

00:15:41.000 LAUGHTER That's not even close, right?

00:15:44.000 Well, that's what's interesting about small towns is that there's a feeling in small towns of an invasion of your privacy as much as there is a feeling of camaraderie.

00:15:56.000 There's also like a nosiness.

00:15:57.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:15:58.000 So like if there's 2,000 people living in an apartment building, nobody wants to know shit about anybody.

00:16:05.000 But if it's 2,000 people living in a town, it's the whole town, and everybody needs to know everything about everybody else. 0.92

00:16:11.000 That hunter boy, you hear what he's up to?

00:16:14.000 And what about that Brian Callen?

00:16:15.000 Oh, he's a wacky one.

00:16:17.000 And everybody wants to gossip and exchange information.

00:16:21.000 And gossip is what Dunbar's work is really about.

00:16:24.000 So his big book is Grooming, Gossip, and the Origins of Language.

00:16:29.000 And so Dunbar's whole thesis is the big question has always been, like, why do we talk, right?

00:16:34.000 Like, why do humans have language?

00:16:35.000 What is the function of language?

00:16:37.000 And what Dunbar did was he basically looked at what's the natural group size of different primates, right?

00:16:43.000 So, you know, there's a natural group size for apes, for chimpanzees, and, you know, orangutans, and all this sort of stuff.

00:16:50.000 And what ends up happening is that if you're chimps, you can groom all the members of your troop. 0.90

00:16:58.000 That's not a big problem.

00:16:59.000 But if your troop is 150 people like it is for humans, there's no way you can physically groom all of those people.

00:17:06.000 So it becomes too many people to physically groom.

00:17:09.000 So essentially the idea is that language is how we groom each other without having to do it physically.

00:17:14.000 And that's what gossip is about.

00:17:16.000 It's really that we're like grooming each other, we're maintaining social relationships, and we're trading information about who's trustworthy, who's not trustworthy, who did what to who, and passing information around in the tribe.

00:17:30.000 That totally makes sense.

00:17:31.000 Yeah.

00:17:31.000 I mean, it seems also when you think about how women are really into gossiping and chatting, whereas men really appreciate quiet and then get upset if people are too flashy.

00:17:42.000 Yep.

00:17:43.000 It's about men going off into hunting parties, right?

00:17:45.000 Yep. 1.00

00:17:46.000 And the women staying back and going, you know what this crazy motherfucker's doing while no one's looking? 1.00

00:17:49.000 And they have to try to assess what the dangers are in their environments. 0.99

00:17:52.000 Yep.

00:17:53.000 And specifically, men, like what you're saying about making sure that nobody's getting too flashy, that's a real function of teasing, right?

00:18:01.000 The real function of teasing is that if you look at these hunter-gatherer tribes, they have all these mechanisms for making sure that nobody's head gets too big.

00:18:09.000 Right?

00:18:10.000 So, for example, you know, they'll do things where, for example, I'll give you my arrow and you'll go hunt with my arrow.

00:18:17.000 So then even if you kill a deer, it's actually not your kill because it was done with my arrow.

00:18:23.000 It's everybody's kill.

00:18:24.000 It's everybody's kill.

00:18:25.000 So, and then also, you know, when they, for example, they'll have all these rituals when someone has elected the big man of the tribe or whatever it is, they will, then all the group will get around and make fun of him.

00:18:35.000 Right?

00:18:36.000 And they'll sort of humiliate him.

00:18:37.000 And it's a sort of, it's It's proto-democracy.

00:18:39.000 It's a way of keeping his ego in check.

00:18:42.000 So this is what Donald Trump is avoiding.

00:18:44.000 Exactly.

00:18:46.000 He's avoiding this inevitable reality of being mocked.

00:18:50.000 That's why he's so mad at Alec Baldwin.

00:18:52.000 Well, and he should embrace it.

00:18:54.000 I mean, that's the point.

00:18:55.000 He should, right?

00:18:55.000 He should, because his social function, the leader's social function, is to be humble.

00:19:02.000 Right?

00:19:02.000 Because we, you know, power corrupts.

00:19:05.000 Like, that's what it does to human psychology.

00:19:06.000 That's not a function of Donald Trump.

00:19:08.000 That's just a function of the human brain.

00:19:09.000 Right?

00:19:10.000 And, you know, we know that.

00:19:12.000 I mean, that's, you know, that's being studied now.

00:19:14.000 There's a guy at UC Berkeley, Dacher Keltner, who's also awesome, who's studied power.

00:19:22.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:19:44.000 And you're like, oh, that was fucking dumb. 0.99

00:19:46.000 Or, you know, like Wesley Snipes had that great idea of like, I'm just going to not pay taxes, right? 0.99

00:19:52.000 I think in his defense that he just got one of those wacky attorneys and had him convinced that there's some loophole in the Constitution and they don't want this Constitution loophole exposed.

00:20:01.000 Let me tell you something, man.

00:20:03.000 If they found out that no one has to pay taxes, the government goes down.

00:20:08.000 There's a lot of people that actually had that conversation with me.

00:20:11.000 Oh, really?

00:20:11.000 They were telling me that you don't have to pay taxes, and that the Constitution says that the only time you're supposed to pay taxes is during war, and that's when they came up with federal taxes in the first place, and it's not legal, and that's why they can't really charge you with it, and if you just resist, I'm like,

00:20:27.000 bitch, they will put you in a cage. 1.00

00:20:29.000 They'll take all your money, and they'll put you in a cage. 1.00

00:20:32.000 That is the one time.

00:20:33.000 There's two really fascinating things when it comes to money.

00:20:36.000 That's a really fascinating one.

00:20:38.000 If you don't pay your taxes, it's one of those debts where it doesn't matter. 1.00

00:20:42.000 You go to fucking jail. 1.00

00:20:44.000 You go to jail. 1.00

00:20:45.000 They take everything you have.

00:20:46.000 Even if you have no ability to pay it when you get out, you still owe it, and you go to jail.

00:20:51.000 That's fascinating.

00:20:52.000 Because you can't just pay it off.

00:20:54.000 It's not like, oh, you owed $50,000 in back taxes. 0.98

00:20:57.000 No, you fucking lied to us about paying money, so now you go to jail. 0.94

00:21:01.000 Like, you weren't honest, so it's not just you owe the money, now you pay it, now you're clean. 0.99

00:21:04.000 No, no, no.

00:21:05.000 No, you go to jail. 1.00

00:21:06.000 You take all your money, and then you get out, and you haven't made money in a long time, and now you gotta get back on your feet and fuck you. 1.00

00:21:12.000 P.S. Fuck you. 1.00

00:21:14.000 And the other time the P.S. Fuck you is student loans. 1.00

00:21:16.000 It's the one thing that you can't fucking go bankrupt with. 1.00

00:21:20.000 That's it. 0.99

00:21:21.000 Horrible.

00:21:22.000 That is the worst idea ever.

00:21:25.000 Saddle down young, impulsive children who are just getting out of their parents' grasp, saddle them down with debt, and then have them enter into a diminishing job market. 0.69

00:21:34.000 And if you start off something in 2016, what are the fucking odds, especially if it's tech-related, that anything you learn is going to be applicable in four years?

00:21:42.000 Well, I mean, if you want to talk about the university system, I mean, you know, there's a ship that is sinking pretty damn fast. 0.73

00:21:48.000 It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

00:21:50.000 Isn't it?

00:21:50.000 Having Jordan Peterson on your podcast, you guys had him before I had him on, and I've been paying attention to his work for a long time, and he's one of the few people that are standing out there in the river screaming.

00:22:03.000 Yeah.

00:22:04.000 I mean, that's what he's doing.

00:22:05.000 He's like, this is madness.

00:22:08.000 You guys aren't being honest about things here.

00:22:10.000 Did you see this recent thing with this women's march in the New York Times?

00:22:15.000 They're separating the women by color, and white women are being told to check their privilege. 1.00

00:22:22.000 Where does one check one's privilege?

00:22:24.000 We're going to find out.

00:22:25.000 See, I put that up on my Twitter. 0.97

00:22:27.000 Pull it up because it's fucking hilarious. 0.97

00:22:29.000 And this is not some fringe newspaper. 0.98

00:22:32.000 This is the New York Times printing this.

00:22:34.000 And Michael Shermer posted it.

00:22:36.000 Women's March on Washington opens contentious dialogues about race.

00:22:40.000 What was the headline that was on my Twitter thing about it?

00:22:45.000 Because the headline's hilarious.

00:22:48.000 Look at what Shermer said.

00:22:50.000 To protest racism, now dividing women by skin color, whites told to check your privilege. 1.00

00:22:56.000 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

00:22:58.000 And that's what you were talking about with power and power corrupting. 0.99

00:23:01.000 That is power.

00:23:02.000 Yeah.

00:23:03.000 That's one of the things that's going on with this social justice warrior movement is not just people deciding that some people should be more ethical or kind or loving or open or progressive.

00:23:12.000 No, no, no.

00:23:12.000 It's exerting power over people to enforce your standard of thinking and behaving on them.

00:23:18.000 That's a giant problem.

00:23:20.000 That's what Jordan Peterson is fighting.

00:23:22.000 Well, and it's the power of, A, a just cause, right?

00:23:25.000 Like, okay, you're fighting racism.

00:23:26.000 You're fighting sexism.

00:23:28.000 Like, these are things to fight.

00:23:29.000 Like, I'm all down with you.

00:23:31.000 But the fact that, you know, if you have any problem with it, right, Jordan Peterson takes issue with some of that behavior, they're then like, so you're saying racism and sexism and discrimination are okay?

00:23:43.000 Of course no one's saying that.

00:23:44.000 Saying that, right.

00:23:45.000 Exactly.

00:24:06.000 Right?

00:24:06.000 And so if you look, if you want to talk about pronouns, look at English in the time of Shakespeare, right?

00:24:12.000 They had this thing, thou, right?

00:24:14.000 It was another pronoun. 0.93

00:24:15.000 And then they got the fuck rid of it, right? 0.92

00:24:17.000 And why did they get rid of it? 0.88

00:24:19.000 Because they were like, man, it doesn't really add anything.

00:24:21.000 Sounds good when you say to thine self be true.

00:24:23.000 Yeah, it sounds fancy, but it doesn't practically add anything, right?

00:24:28.000 Right.

00:24:29.000 It's the same thing as the Romance languages where it was a distinction between formal and informal you.

00:24:33.000 And essentially we decided we didn't need that distinction.

00:24:36.000 So that pronoun dropped away.

00:24:37.000 And in general, that's what has happened over time.

00:24:40.000 That's a big part of, you know, Joe Henrik's work is that language simplifies over time.

00:24:44.000 The tools become more and more powerful and more refined in the same way that, say, a stone tools, right? 0.99

00:24:50.000 You see the early stone tools, they're shit. 0.97

00:24:53.000 And then over time they get more and more elegant and more refined. 0.99

00:24:56.000 The same thing has been happening with language for the entirety of human history.

00:25:00.000 They get whittled down. 0.96

00:25:01.000 So what the fuck do you think happens if you introduce 70 gender pronouns? 0.97

00:25:05.000 Do you get equality? 1.00

00:25:07.000 You fucking racist cisgendered piece of shit. 1.00

00:25:10.000 Oh shit! 1.00

00:25:11.000 How dare you? 1.00

00:25:13.000 That's the problem, Joe.

00:25:14.000 For guys like us, we have so much privilege.

00:25:16.000 We're going to be there checking it in for half an hour, an hour.

00:25:20.000 Well, we have to even out the world.

00:25:22.000 That's what we have to do.

00:25:23.000 The world must be evened out.

00:25:24.000 So there's no more competition, by the way.

00:25:27.000 Which is one of the more hilarious things about people that actually think that they're communist. 1.00

00:25:31.000 Just shut your fucking mouth. 1.00

00:25:33.000 If you are, and if you really do subscribe to that, I guarantee you're not contributing. 1.00

00:25:38.000 You're like one of those hippies that always wants weed and you never bring some.

00:25:41.000 You know, come on, man, let's all share. 1.00

00:25:43.000 How about you bring your own weed, you fuck? 1.00

00:25:45.000 They never have it, right? 1.00

00:25:47.000 And that's the communist people.

00:25:48.000 The people that are really into the idea of communism.

00:25:50.000 Yeah, on theory, about everybody sharing and not worrying about money, that would be great.

00:25:55.000 If there was only the three of us, if we were the only people in the world, this is my example that I always love to use.

00:25:59.000 If there was the three of us, and there was like $3 million in the world, and we all said, well, let's all just split it up, and then money won't be nothing.

00:26:07.000 We'll just trade back and forth, and everything should be even.

00:26:09.000 Okay, cool.

00:26:10.000 And we'd be fine with that. 0.98

00:26:11.000 And then we go on about our merry way, but there's too many fucking people, and there's inevitably going to be some form of competition. 0.98

00:26:18.000 And in some form of competition, some people are going to get out ahead. 0.98

00:26:21.000 And there's going to be some people that are upset that people are ahead.

00:26:23.000 And there's going to be all sorts of reasons. 1.00

00:26:25.000 Some people are going to be ahead because they're assholes. 1.00

00:26:27.000 Some people are going to be ahead because they get up at 5 o'clock in the morning while you sleep till fucking noon. 1.00

00:26:31.000 That's true too. 0.96

00:26:32.000 These are all true.

00:26:34.000 There's some people that are totally ethical and they just do a lot of work and they do better.

00:26:38.000 They're gonna do better.

00:26:39.000 They didn't steal from anybody.

00:26:41.000 They didn't rip anybody off. 0.95

00:26:41.000 But this narrative keeps getting repeated by people who don't get up at 7 o'clock in the morning or don't have the same kind of ambition or feel bad because some people do want a fucking private jet and fly all over the world and ball like Dan Bilzerian. 0.95

00:26:56.000 All these things are true. 0.60

00:26:57.000 I mean, it's both things.

00:26:59.000 It's like you can be an ethical person and be like a super ambitious, crazy person who wants to succeed in business for some reason.

00:27:06.000 They're not mutually exclusive.

00:27:07.000 Nope.

00:27:07.000 So when everybody says capitalism is evil and it's the problem, man.

00:27:11.000 No, no, no.

00:27:12.000 You saying that is a problem.

00:27:14.000 It's not a problem. 0.99

00:27:15.000 The whole reason why you have a fucking laptop to complain on is because of capitalism. 0.99

00:27:19.000 Right. 1.00

00:27:20.000 And the point is that the lesson of 2016 is that there are a lot of shit ideas out there. 1.00

00:27:25.000 And there are shit ideas spread all around the political spectrum, right? 1.00

00:27:29.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:27:29.000 And I think the challenge of 2017 is how do we kill those ideas? 0.99

00:27:33.000 But also in the defense of the people that are anti-corporate or anti-corporation, there is an issue when these gigantic groups get together and they're only...

00:27:42.000 Their only motivation is acquiring more money every year.

00:27:46.000 Right. 0.99

00:27:46.000 That does become a problem, and then there's a diffusion of responsibility when you're locked into that giant system, and you're just a middle manager of some Exxon group that's fucking killing seals, and you don't give a shit. 0.99

00:27:57.000 You know, those poor seals, why are they living in the Arctic anyway? 0.98

00:28:00.000 It's where all the oil is. 1.00

00:28:01.000 Stupid fucking seals covered up with oil. 1.00

00:28:04.000 You know? 1.00

00:28:04.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:28:05.000 It becomes that, right?

00:28:06.000 It becomes you're just a part of the thing, but look, I got a new BMW. It drives itself.

00:28:11.000 Hey, we got a house in the Hamptons.

00:28:12.000 Everybody's happy.

00:28:14.000 And that's a problem, too.

00:28:15.000 So there's two problems.

00:28:17.000 Well, there's a million of them.

00:28:19.000 But that is a problem with money, too.

00:28:21.000 It's like...

00:28:23.000 The issue might be corporations in itself might be a problem.

00:28:27.000 That is a power thing.

00:28:29.000 You're talking about absolute power.

00:28:30.000 The problem is not power per se.

00:28:33.000 It's unchecked power.

00:28:35.000 The Founding Fathers understood that.

00:28:37.000 That's why you had checks and balances.

00:28:40.000 The problem is that a lot of the checks and balances on intellectuals, what's happening at universities, have broken down.

00:28:47.000 And the checks on corporations, which is government, is broken down.

00:28:52.000 And the check on government is the people, and that's broken down.

00:28:55.000 And so what's happened is a lot of the checks and balances have failed.

00:28:58.000 And the ultimate check and balance is the people.

00:29:01.000 But the problem is that you can't get the wisdom of crowds if the crowd isn't wise. 0.99

00:29:05.000 And it's not that—it's a real big fucking problem. 0.98

00:29:09.000 That's a good one. 0.99

00:29:09.000 That's a good statement. 0.99

00:29:11.000 And the problem is that a large part of this is these are large historical forces, namely specialization. 0.98

00:29:16.000 So if we get the 300 million people in America, it's not that everybody's an idiot, right? 0.98

00:29:22.000 It's that, oh, you're a lawyer, and you know the law, and you know... 0.99

00:29:26.000 Nothing else, right?

00:29:27.000 Or you are a teacher and you know your subject, you know history, you know whatever, right?

00:29:32.000 Or if you go into academia and you talk to a bunch of scientists, you'll find, oh, you know your sub-discipline of psychology, of biology, of chemistry, of whatever, and literally nothing else that is happening in science.

00:29:44.000 So the problem is that what happens is if you look at the Founding Fathers, they read really, really widely.

00:29:51.000 And I was recently involved in an intellectual dispute with some libertarians, right?

00:29:57.000 And so I went to libertarianism.org, which is run by the Cato Institute.

00:30:01.000 What was the intellectual dispute regarding?

00:30:03.000 So the big beef that I've been taking is with fundamentalists.

00:30:08.000 Across the board?

00:30:09.000 Across the board.

00:30:09.000 I don't really care what kind of fundamentalist you are.

00:30:13.000 I have an issue with fundamentalism in general.

00:30:15.000 And if you look at what you were just doing, Joe, is that you were able to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind, right?

00:30:21.000 I think it's important.

00:30:22.000 It's incredibly important.

00:30:23.000 You were able to say there's a problem with people who oppose capitalism, and there's a problem with much of what corporations are doing. 0.95

00:30:30.000 And then that's how you start to figure out reality, is you're like, oh, fuck, there are these two opposing things. 0.94

00:30:36.000 How do I reconcile them? 0.97

00:30:38.000 And you have to go around, you have to think, you have to read, you have to talk to people, you have to do all that sort of stuff.

00:30:42.000 Fundamentalists aren't burdened with that problem.

00:30:45.000 Mm-hmm.

00:31:06.000 Right?

00:31:06.000 So you look at the obvious example is Islamic fundamentalism.

00:31:10.000 They're like, it's the way of the prophet.

00:31:12.000 We just have to live the way of the prophet Muhammad. 1.00

00:31:14.000 And so then we have to strip out anything that interferes with that, like toothbrushes and kites and, you know, women's education. 1.00

00:31:22.000 Women driving themselves around. 1.00

00:31:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:24.000 All these really problematic things, right?

00:31:27.000 And, you know, it's not that the Prophet Muhammad didn't have a toothbrush.

00:31:30.000 It was just a stick toothbrush.

00:31:31.000 And, you know, I'm not a dentist, but I think that an Oral-B is better than a stick toothbrush.

00:31:36.000 He had a stick?

00:31:36.000 They had, like, sticks that were, like, bristled at the end or something.

00:31:40.000 Like, they would break up the stick and then, you know, just get that stick in there.

00:31:43.000 Really?

00:31:44.000 Yeah.

00:31:44.000 So you're supposed to use that today, to this day?

00:31:46.000 Well, if you listen to some imams, yeah. 1.00

00:31:49.000 Wow, if you want to go super, super deep.

00:31:51.000 Yeah.

00:31:51.000 Well, exactly.

00:31:52.000 That's the point.

00:31:52.000 And it's always about going super, super deep.

00:31:54.000 But it's not the case with Christianity in all religions, right? 0.51

00:31:58.000 There's people that are just, you know, kind of like casual Christians, just like there's people that are casual Muslims.

00:32:03.000 And then there's people that go whole hog.

00:32:05.000 That's right.

00:32:05.000 And think that the reckoning's coming and Jesus is on his way.

00:32:09.000 That's right.

00:32:10.000 And you better pack your bags because you're going to need clothes in heaven. 0.98

00:32:12.000 There's people that are packed, ready for Jesus to take them away.

00:32:15.000 And those people give the rest of Christianity or the rest of Islam a bad name.

00:32:20.000 But they also give us amazing movies like Left Behind and Left Behind 2. I don't know if you've seen them, but they're Kirk Cameron's greatest work.

00:32:29.000 They are an incredible work of comedy that he didn't know was comedy while he was making it.

00:32:36.000 No.

00:32:36.000 Dude, it's so bad.

00:32:38.000 Have you seen it?

00:32:38.000 No.

00:32:39.000 Left Behind and Left Behind 2?

00:32:40.000 It's so good, I bought it on VHS. I saw it at Walmart and I snatched it up like a greedy child.

00:32:47.000 I'm gonna write this down.

00:32:48.000 Oh, Left Behind and Left Behind 2. I'm sure you can probably get it on iTunes or something.

00:32:52.000 See if it's on iTunes or Netflix. 0.98

00:32:54.000 Find out where people can watch it because it's fucking unbelievably bad.

00:32:58.000 It's on YouTube, Amazon Video, or Google Play. 0.98

00:33:01.000 Yes!

00:33:02.000 And it was based on these cataclysmic books that were written by these Looney Tunes dudes.

00:33:08.000 Is it one Looney Tunes dude or two Looney Tunes dudes that wrote the Left Behind series?

00:33:12.000 These Christian guys. 0.99

00:33:13.000 And by the way, they've sold like a hundred million copies of this fucking shitbag book. 1.00

00:33:19.000 It's so dumb. 1.00

00:33:23.000 But it's amazing. 0.99

00:33:24.000 Yeah.

00:33:25.000 What's that?

00:33:26.000 Two guys.

00:33:26.000 Two guys, yeah.

00:33:27.000 They took turns sucking each other off in between. 1.00

00:33:30.000 I made that up. 0.99

00:33:31.000 What? 0.98

00:33:31.000 Gay Christians? 0.98

00:33:32.000 Don't get mad. 1.00

00:33:33.000 Gay Christians? 0.99

00:33:33.000 Don't get mad. 0.99

00:33:34.000 Don't sue me.

00:33:34.000 I'm sure your book's amazing.

00:33:36.000 Your book's the best.

00:33:38.000 I'll take it back.

00:33:39.000 I'll take it back.

00:33:39.000 You know, I'm going to never forget some of Kirk Cameron's best work.

00:33:44.000 On Growing Pains?

00:33:45.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:33:46.000 His best work is avoiding dicks. 0.99

00:33:48.000 Oh, is this it? 1.00

00:33:49.000 Oh, wow.

00:33:50.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

00:33:51.000 I'm not showing it, but this is just for us.

00:33:52.000 Yeah, this is for us.

00:33:53.000 But the cinematography, the fact that this was made in 2000 and that's the cinematography, like, that's really impressive.

00:33:58.000 It's adorable.

00:33:59.000 He's adorably religious.

00:34:01.000 Have you ever seen the one where Ray Comfort, who's his buddy in all these videos, describes how a banana is an atheist's worst nightmare? 0.96

00:34:08.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:09.000 How wonderful is that?

00:34:10.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:34:11.000 Yeah.

00:34:11.000 It's a wonderful video, and that's his right-hand man.

00:34:14.000 He's like, God designed a banana for a very specific purpose.

00:34:18.000 This banana is an atheist's worst nightmare. 1.00

00:34:22.000 Like, what? 1.00

00:34:23.000 Okay, well, what is a coconut then, you fuckhead? 1.00

00:34:25.000 Coconuts are more nutritious than bananas. 1.00

00:34:27.000 Guess what, cuntface? 1.00

00:34:28.000 You really shouldn't even be eating bananas. 0.99

00:34:30.000 You should eat, like, one of them in a day.

00:34:31.000 They're high in sugar.

00:34:33.000 Okay, you really shouldn't be eating bananas, Ray.

00:34:36.000 But wouldn't that be amazing if you managed to convince Christians that like, you know, actually instead of the Eucharist, you should be eating bananas? 0.91

00:34:42.000 Yeah.

00:34:43.000 Well, there's some people that believe bananas are like super good.

00:34:45.000 Well, then you have potassium.

00:34:46.000 There's something to them. 0.99

00:34:47.000 But the coconut's better for you, and you got to break that fucking thing open. 0.99

00:34:50.000 You got to get through that husk. 0.99

00:34:51.000 Yeah.

00:34:51.000 Like somebody had to figure out that husk.

00:34:53.000 Yeah.

00:34:54.000 And then the hard part, you had to be so hungry, you're banging on a rock.

00:34:58.000 And then luckily for you, there's meat and water inside.

00:35:03.000 Like, whoa, what are the odds?

00:35:05.000 You had to do a lot of work. 0.98

00:35:07.000 I bet it was probably somebody whose loved one was killed by a falling coconut and got fucking pissed and smashed that coconut with a rock thinking that coconut had killed their mom. 1.00

00:35:18.000 Or somebody who killed their mom with that fucking coconut. 1.00

00:35:21.000 That too. 1.00

00:35:23.000 150 people die every year because coconuts fall on their head.

00:35:26.000 What a way to go.

00:35:27.000 21 people in America are killed by armed toddlers every year.

00:35:32.000 What would you rather go by, coconut or toddler?

00:35:35.000 Coconut all day. 0.63

00:35:36.000 I'll take God dropping a rock on my head all day to being shot by a one-year-old. 0.95

00:35:41.000 That's really embarrassing. 0.95

00:35:42.000 You get shot by a one-year-old, you're like, what? 1.00

00:35:45.000 I mean, I know you're tired, but why'd you leave a loaded gun in your purse, you crazy bitch? 1.00

00:35:50.000 I know you get mom brain, but maybe you should fucking keep that gun on your hip. 1.00

00:35:56.000 Yeah, they leave guns and purses and they leave the kids with the guns and the kids pull it out. 0.99

00:36:00.000 Oh, I seen that on TV. Bang!

00:36:02.000 And they shoot mommy. 1.00

00:36:03.000 21 people a year.

00:36:05.000 Think of that.

00:36:06.000 That's not a good way to go.

00:36:08.000 But in general, I mean, you know.

00:36:09.000 Dude, that's two a month.

00:36:11.000 Yeah.

00:36:12.000 Bang! 1.00

00:36:13.000 One just probably happened right now.

00:36:15.000 It's like there's a timer that's going off, like we're waiting.

00:36:19.000 It's like the slowest national debt clock.

00:36:21.000 Bang! 1.00

00:36:23.000 We should have an armed toddler app where you get a notification every time an armed toddler kills a person.

00:36:31.000 Because it's 21 a year just in this country.

00:36:33.000 Well, I think probably primarily in this country.

00:36:36.000 Folks, get on that. 0.98

00:36:38.000 I'll promote your app.

00:36:40.000 Please send it to me.

00:36:42.000 Tag me on Instagram.

00:36:43.000 Make that app.

00:36:44.000 We'll promote it.

00:36:45.000 The armed toddler app. 1.00

00:36:48.000 That's a lot of fucking people, man. 1.00

00:36:50.000 Toddlers shootings in 2015. Oh, only 13. It says they killed more. 1.00

00:36:57.000 Oh, my God.

00:36:58.000 It says that 13 had inadvertently killed themselves.

00:37:01.000 Oh, 13 kids had killed themselves with firearms, 13 more injured themselves, 10 injured other people, and 2 killed others.

00:37:08.000 Oh, so there's only 2?

00:37:09.000 This is the statement I was looking up, though.

00:37:11.000 Hmm.

00:37:13.000 Toddlers killed more Americans than terrorists in 2015. But how many did they kill?

00:37:18.000 It says they only killed two.

00:37:20.000 Two killed other people.

00:37:22.000 Two killed other people.

00:37:23.000 So toddlers...

00:37:24.000 Well, they were suicide bombers who killed themselves.

00:37:27.000 That's the point.

00:37:28.000 Okay, so when you're saying that they killed 15 people, 13 of those 15s were the baby themselves.

00:37:33.000 Yeah.

00:37:34.000 Oh.

00:37:34.000 Well, that's not the same, right?

00:37:36.000 That's not that...

00:37:37.000 But I've read...

00:37:38.000 Where is this...

00:37:39.000 Where are you getting this from?

00:37:40.000 This was on Snopes.

00:37:41.000 I just typed in armed toddlers.

00:37:43.000 Do you know...

00:37:43.000 Didn't we talk about Snopes?

00:37:45.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:37:45.000 About the guy married a hooker? 0.99

00:37:47.000 I think, yeah. 0.87

00:37:48.000 Yeah, the guy who owned Snopes, left his wife, married a hooker, who had a website that's an active escort website with reviews.

00:37:58.000 You know, as recently as 2015, people were reviewing. 0.85

00:38:01.000 So nothing wrong with being a hooker. 1.00

00:38:02.000 No. 0.98

00:38:03.000 That's cool.

00:38:03.000 It's the oldest profession.

00:38:05.000 But when I think about a dude marrying a hooker, I think about a dude who's off the rails. 1.00

00:38:09.000 When I think about a dude in his 50s who marries an escort, I'm like, oh, there's a 50-50 chance that guy might be out of his fucking mind. 0.99

00:38:18.000 So one of the criticisms of Snopes during this election was that there was a pro-Hillary bias to some of the information that Snopes was reporting on. 0.98

00:38:26.000 And apparently she had been involved in some sort of an anti-Bush, anti-Republican website in the past and, you know, leans left, the whole deal.

00:38:38.000 So Snopes might be a little wacky.

00:38:41.000 Or not.

00:38:42.000 Maybe beside all those things, they still stick to science.

00:38:46.000 Well, and that's the thing.

00:38:47.000 I mean, you know, wouldn't that be nice if people actually stuck to the statistics, the facts, reality?

00:38:52.000 I would way rather have someone who goes off and marries some crazy escort lady and they both do ecstasy every night. 1.00

00:38:57.000 But when it comes down to the Snopes work, they do solid work.

00:39:01.000 She's got some big old... 0.98

00:39:02.000 Oh, wow.

00:39:03.000 That's a big old...

00:39:06.000 Husband and wife, now married.

00:39:08.000 And that's the old...

00:39:09.000 There you go.

00:39:10.000 Happy couple.

00:39:11.000 Maybe they're having a good time.

00:39:12.000 The guy's smiling. 1.00

00:39:13.000 Who gives a shit if she got paid for sex? 1.00

00:39:15.000 People are so goddamn prudish. 1.00

00:39:17.000 That's when she was at our best. 0.99

00:39:18.000 At her peak.

00:39:19.000 But presumably...

00:39:20.000 I mean, that's also the weird thing always with fundamentalists and wanting to marry a virgin.

00:39:25.000 Don't you want somebody who has some experience?

00:39:27.000 There's the old wife, though. 0.98

00:39:29.000 Look at this one. 0.85

00:39:29.000 She's mad, dude. 0.85

00:39:30.000 Yeah.

00:39:31.000 She mad.

00:39:32.000 This should be like a meme.

00:39:34.000 It just says, she mad.

00:39:37.000 Yeah.

00:39:37.000 Yeah, I guess.

00:39:38.000 Yeah, you'd want someone with experience, for sure. 0.68

00:39:40.000 You want someone who's worked out all the toothy blow jobs so that when they get to you, they know what they're doing. 1.00

00:39:44.000 Right. 0.97

00:39:45.000 And is there much of a difference between a woman who gets paid for each individual sexual encounter versus a woman who marries a guy for money, which is pretty much normal.

00:39:53.000 Same thing.

00:39:53.000 It's kind of the same thing.

00:39:54.000 Yeah.

00:39:55.000 You just have one John for life.

00:39:57.000 Yeah.

00:39:57.000 Or at least until your looks run out.

00:39:59.000 Yeah, until he casts you.

00:40:01.000 Exactly, until he upgrades you.

00:40:02.000 Model number four.

00:40:03.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:04.000 Those guys, like, that's the Trump move, right?

00:40:08.000 You know, those super rich dudes, they keep getting baller and more baller wives. 1.00

00:40:13.000 Like the new one, it's like, god damn. 0.99

00:40:15.000 Well, but at a certain point, that's the problem. 0.98

00:40:18.000 He can't really...

00:40:19.000 He can't replace Melania. 0.58

00:40:21.000 Not while he's president.

00:40:22.000 With a hotter one?

00:40:23.000 Yeah.

00:40:24.000 Yes, he can.

00:40:24.000 You think he can?

00:40:25.000 Fuck yeah. 1.00

00:40:26.000 Yeah, he's the king of the assholes. 1.00

00:40:27.000 Think of how many people have come out of the closet as assholes now. 1.00

00:40:31.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:40:32.000 You know?

00:40:32.000 I mean, this is a rare time.

00:40:35.000 It's not just that he doesn't represent a lot of people that wanted to lean more right. 0.99

00:40:40.000 He also represents a lot of men that are kind of dicks, right? 0.99

00:40:45.000 They get excited about this. 1.00

00:40:47.000 There's definitely more overt asshole-ish behavior in the name of Trump. 0.98

00:40:54.000 He's tapped into that vein, which I didn't really see. 0.95

00:40:58.000 I don't remember seeing that from any other candidate ever.

00:41:01.000 Well, I think, you know, that frustration has been building a lot for a long time with those guys.

00:41:07.000 They didn't get that representation until now. 0.99

00:41:09.000 So if he kicked his wife out, if she said something stupid, you know, and she said, I'm tired of his breath, then fuck him, and he kicks her to the curb, and, I mean, people would be like, yeah! 1.00

00:41:20.000 Get rid of her, Donald! 1.00

00:41:21.000 Get a new one! 0.71

00:41:22.000 And it'd be like a gigantic nationwide woman hunt to find the perfect person who just knows to do what she's told and just to obey the Donald and just to take care of him. 0.98

00:41:35.000 As long as she doesn't look too much like Ivanka, right? 1.00

00:41:38.000 She's got to look hot as fuck, for sure. 1.00

00:41:41.000 I mean, he's the goddamn president of the United States. 1.00

00:41:43.000 And his wife is hot as fuck. 1.00

00:41:44.000 It's not like he's going to go down. 1.00

00:41:45.000 No.

00:41:46.000 He's not going to get a less hot version.

00:41:47.000 He's only going to go down in age.

00:41:49.000 Yeah.

00:41:50.000 Because he keeps going up, right?

00:41:51.000 He went with his first wife, then he went with Marlo Maples.

00:41:55.000 She was super hot. 1.00

00:41:56.000 And then this one is even more super hot.

00:41:58.000 Yeah.

00:41:58.000 This one's off the charts.

00:41:59.000 Well, Eastern European women, right? 0.93

00:42:02.000 Yeah.

00:42:02.000 What's that all about?

00:42:04.000 Well, I think actually like a large part of it is I think also cultural, right?

00:42:08.000 There's a certain like arrogance that Eastern European women have where they're sort of like, who are you? 1.00

00:42:13.000 Like, are you good enough for me?

00:42:15.000 There's a certain haughtiness, right?

00:42:17.000 And a certain skepticism, like an unavailability emotionally.

00:42:20.000 Are you a racist?

00:42:21.000 What are you saying?

00:42:21.000 No, I'm speaking about- Such a generalist.

00:42:23.000 No, but I'm speaking about culture.

00:42:25.000 This is outrageous.

00:42:26.000 Well, do you want to have outrageous conversations, Joe?

00:42:28.000 I mean, you seem like a guy who likes them, right?

00:42:31.000 I do.

00:42:32.000 But yeah, do you think that's because of the war?

00:42:35.000 A lot of those Russian men died in the war.

00:42:39.000 I mean, there was a mass culling of males.

00:42:43.000 It's a much, much older phenomenon than the war, right?

00:42:46.000 So in terms of cultural evolution, the way that cultural evolution works is we all have certain mindsets, right?

00:42:52.000 So every human has optimism and pessimism, right?

00:42:55.000 But, for example, we talked about Americans earlier, right, and how outsiders see Americans.

00:42:59.000 And Americans are, you know, historically massively optimistic.

00:43:03.000 Even Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came here, right, a French guy comes here, he's like, Americans are so optimistic.

00:43:08.000 What is up with that, right? 0.99

00:43:10.000 That's why we kick ass on... 0.97

00:43:11.000 Well, but it is. 0.93

00:43:13.000 I mean, honestly, because optimism has certain benefits, which is that it makes you super productive, right?

00:43:19.000 Super happy.

00:43:21.000 And these have always been a large part of what American success is about.

00:43:24.000 But optimism does have a problem, which is that optimism has a tendency to make you delusional, right?

00:43:31.000 Ah.

00:43:32.000 That's a problem.

00:43:33.000 That's a problem.

00:43:33.000 And so if you look at what is the most optimistic group of humans on the planet, it's actors in Los Angeles, right?

00:43:40.000 Oh.

00:43:41.000 Yeah.

00:43:59.000 Right?

00:43:59.000 They're always sitting there and being like, I'm gonna get discovered.

00:44:02.000 I'm gonna get discovered.

00:44:03.000 I'm gonna win the lottery, right?

00:44:04.000 Essentially, it's that sort of mindset.

00:44:06.000 And then they're just waiting for things to happen.

00:44:08.000 They don't have an actual plan for going about it.

00:44:10.000 It's obviously not true of all actors.

00:44:12.000 Some people are like, man, okay, I'm out here now.

00:44:14.000 If I'm gonna make it, I need to hustle.

00:44:16.000 I need to do things.

00:44:17.000 I need to do all that sort of stuff. 0.92

00:44:19.000 But there is that trajectory for actors who come out here hoping they're going to get discovered, you know, are waiting to be discovered for 40, 50 years, and then like, oh shit, I'm 70. And then they crash, and then, you know, they become the super depressed, cynical actors who sit around like, 0.92

00:44:34.000 you know, being like, fuck the industry, the industry's the fucking worst. 1.00

00:44:38.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:44:39.000 We've all met those.

00:44:41.000 Exactly.

00:44:41.000 Those people are rough to be around.

00:44:42.000 They are rough to be around.

00:44:44.000 They just spit it out.

00:44:45.000 It's all negative.

00:44:46.000 It's coming out of them like a sprinkler system.

00:44:48.000 And that is where a lot of middle America is right now, because they've had this hope of the American Dream, the American Dream, the American Dream, the American Dream, and then those hopes have been crushed, right?

00:44:58.000 It hasn't delivered, it hasn't panned out the way that it was supposed to.

00:45:02.000 And so you're seeing a lot of pessimism, which is the opposite side.

00:45:06.000 And pessimism has certain strengths, and the strengths of pessimism, it's that constructive paranoia we talked about that they practice in Papua New Guinea, which is that you're super alive to threats.

00:45:16.000 But you're actually so alive to threats that you see threats that aren't even there, right?

00:45:20.000 You're paranoid.

00:45:21.000 Right.

00:45:22.000 But the problem is that it also comes with substance abuse.

00:45:26.000 So you find that, for example, what's happened in Middle America is there's a lot of substance abuse going on, all these opioid addictions, all that sort of stuff.

00:45:34.000 Right.

00:45:34.000 But don't you think that's a function of being exposed to those things as much as it's a function of the society that we live in?

00:45:40.000 I mean, those things are super dangerous to be exposed to.

00:45:42.000 Mm-hmm.

00:45:42.000 And because of these corporations that we were talking about that constantly want to up their bottom line, they're selling these things.

00:45:49.000 Totally.

00:45:49.000 And they're pushing them on doctors.

00:45:50.000 I mean, that could be as much of the cause of despair as a symptom of the issue.

00:45:56.000 Well, of course.

00:45:58.000 Of course that's a factor.

00:46:00.000 But at the same time, look at Russia.

00:46:02.000 Right? 0.95

00:46:02.000 Russia is a place that is famous for substance abuse. 0.95

00:46:05.000 Right?

00:46:06.000 30.5% of Russians die from alcohol-related causes.

00:46:10.000 And that's as compared to, say, 3% in America.

00:46:13.000 Right?

00:46:13.000 So 10 times as many Russians are dying from alcohol-related causes.

00:46:17.000 Right? 1.00

00:46:17.000 And they drink fucking anything. 1.00

00:46:19.000 Right? 1.00

00:46:19.000 Like, they pioneer weird fucking drugs like Crocodile that are just, like, fucking gnarly. 1.00

00:46:24.000 Skin rotting shit. 1.00

00:46:25.000 Remember that? 1.00

00:46:26.000 Yeah.

00:46:26.000 You'd see their exposed bones.

00:46:27.000 Mm-hmm.

00:46:28.000 And periodically there's all this weird stuff that happens in Russia where, for example, they'll drink some weird detergent, some Glade plug-in or something like that because there's a tiny bit of alcohol in it, right?

00:46:40.000 So there's a certain psychology that comes with that massive pessimism.

00:46:44.000 And that massive pessimism evolved because of the context of Russian history, right?

00:46:48.000 Right.

00:46:49.000 Russian history, if you ever want to truly be depressed, just read some Russian history, right? 1.00

00:46:54.000 That'll do it for you.

00:46:55.000 And you find that, like, I mean, Russia has always been a meat grinder, right? 1.00

00:46:59.000 It just chews people up, it spits them out.

00:47:01.000 And so the way that you survive in that environment is being massively paranoid, right?

00:47:05.000 The winter will kill you, right? 0.69

00:47:07.000 The leadership will kill you. 0.99

00:47:09.000 There's all sorts of things that'll kill you.

00:47:10.000 And so the Eastern European mindset tends towards this massive, massive pessimism.

00:47:15.000 And the pessimism is useful in the same way that it is for the Papua New Guineans, where you're massively alive to possible threats.

00:47:21.000 But it sets up these problems.

00:47:23.000 And the problems that it sets up are substance abuse, and it also sets up the problem of sort of anticipating threats that aren't actually there.

00:47:32.000 And just overall despair.

00:47:33.000 Yep.

00:47:34.000 And so what ends up happening is that there's then the problem that pessimists and optimists misunderstand each other, right?

00:47:40.000 They don't get each other, right? 0.99

00:47:42.000 The optimist is like, you're just fucking depressing and, you know, sort of see threats that aren't there and, like, your life sucks. 1.00

00:47:49.000 And the pessimist looks at the optimist and is like, you're fucking delusional, dude. 1.00

00:47:53.000 Like, you gotta get real. 0.99

00:47:54.000 You gotta understand how things really work.

00:47:55.000 So if you look at what happens in Russian and American relations, what happens is that you'll have the same situation but interpreted in two totally different ways.

00:48:04.000 So after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States made some sort of promise or some sort of intimation that it would not expand NATO any further east.

00:48:14.000 And the Russians took that as, okay, you're not expanding NATO any further east, right?

00:48:19.000 But in fact, what ended up happening is the United States and the West and its sort of oblivious hopefulness is like, let's keep expanding NATO! Right?

00:48:27.000 They didn't take this comment very seriously, and they moved NATO all the way to Estonia, all the way to the Russian border.

00:48:33.000 Now, the Russians sitting on their site interpret that as a violation of the promise.

00:48:37.000 So sitting there as the pessimists that they are, they're tracking each of these moves.

00:48:41.000 They're like, oh, okay, you're moving another country over.

00:48:43.000 You're moving another country over.

00:48:45.000 We see what you're doing.

00:48:46.000 And that's a lot of what the tension that boiled up between Russia and America was about.

00:48:51.000 Well, don't you think right now Russia's in the weirdest place ever with Putin?

00:48:55.000 Because he's essentially a dictator.

00:48:57.000 No, he is a dictator.

00:48:59.000 And he's right out in front as a dictator.

00:49:01.000 And all of the people that are opposing him, they wind up getting murdered, like really publicly.

00:49:08.000 Yep.

00:49:09.000 But that's because the dictators are godfathers.

00:49:11.000 That's what they are.

00:49:14.000 Godfather's household?

00:49:15.000 You mean in Russian culture?

00:49:17.000 No, just dictators in general.

00:49:19.000 Who is Gaddafi?

00:49:20.000 Who is Saddam Hussein?

00:49:21.000 Who are any of these guys?

00:49:22.000 They function as the godfather of their society.

00:49:25.000 So there's basically, you know, what you've...

00:49:27.000 And I should clarify just so that people know where is this all coming from.

00:49:31.000 This is all coming from books and interviewing academics.

00:49:33.000 And if you are curious about anything, tweet me, let me know.

00:49:37.000 And if there's any comments that you're curious about, I'll direct you to the book and you can go read it and you can work your way up the science chain and figure it out for yourself. 0.99

00:49:44.000 Prepare for an onslaught of dick pics. 0.99

00:49:45.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:49:46.000 It has to be tweeted to.

00:49:48.000 Here it comes.

00:49:48.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:49:49.000 Or dick pics. 0.99

00:49:50.000 I don't know what I'll do with those, but, you know. 0.99

00:49:53.000 Save them.

00:49:54.000 Save them?

00:49:54.000 Never know when you want to send them back.

00:49:55.000 Well, that's true.

00:49:55.000 It's like we're gifting.

00:50:00.000 So, Russian civilization, where were we?

00:50:04.000 So, there's essentially, if you look at, if we talk about those hunter-gatherers, right, they have two big problems, right?

00:50:11.000 And one big problem is band-level genocide. 0.99

00:50:13.000 So, what'll happen is, is that periodically, one tribe will just go and wipe the other fucking tribe out. 0.99

00:50:19.000 We're good to go. 0.99

00:50:41.000 And then resources get scarce, right?

00:50:43.000 There's some change in the environment.

00:50:45.000 Suddenly there's not as much food around.

00:50:47.000 And as people start to get hungry, one of the tribes goes off, and in the course of half an hour, they tell each other made-up stories that get increasingly fantastic. 0.99

00:50:57.000 And by the end of the half an hour, they have convinced themselves that the other tribe are vermin, that they need to be exterminated, that they are a scourge on the land, that they're not really human, and they go and wipe them the fuck out. 0.99

00:51:09.000 I think we're good to go. 0.99

00:51:29.000 And, you know, that old psychology that hasn't changed in tens of thousands of years is still there.

00:51:35.000 And so naturally, people start looking around for a scapegoat.

00:51:38.000 And the anti-Semitism that is sort of already lingering in, you know, the German cultural environment, you know, suddenly that becomes the target group.

00:51:46.000 And, you know, Hitler, the political opportunist, comes along and says, oh, you can blame it on them. 0.74

00:51:51.000 That's the source of all your problems.

00:51:53.000 It's almost like there's a death mode locked in the human consciousness that when things get scarce and like, oh, you might die...

00:51:59.000 We're now on death mode.

00:52:01.000 That's right. 0.99

00:52:01.000 And death mode means you kill other people quickly. 0.99

00:52:03.000 That's right. 0.99

00:52:04.000 And you have to understand, this is the brutal reality of evolution, is that in that hunter-gatherer context, that's fucking useful. 0.95

00:52:13.000 It's really useful, if resources get scarce, to be the one who acts first, who wipes out the other tribe first. 1.00

00:52:20.000 It's interesting that we even think that this is unusual or bizarre when we look at nature.

00:52:25.000 When you look at all the different systems in nature that are set up, like how many times lions will kill cubs to make sure that those males don't grow up to dominate them.

00:52:35.000 That's right.

00:52:35.000 Especially cubs that aren't theirs.

00:52:37.000 And that's, I mean, that's a big problem of sort of what's happening on college campuses is that there are a lot of unpleasant things in human psychology and unpleasant things in human nature.

00:52:46.000 And, you know, for humanity, really the good things come from being realistic.

00:52:52.000 When we're realistic about how disease works, we get We get to control it.

00:52:56.000 When we're realistic about how electrons work, we get to control them.

00:52:59.000 Let me ask you this, because this is really important to this subject.

00:53:02.000 This issue with Marxism spreading across universities, what do you think is the cause of that?

00:53:08.000 Why is that so attractive to people, and why are people so confident to openly proclaim themselves as Marxists without understanding how ridiculous that is?

00:53:18.000 Well, it's, you know, so John Height, who, you know, is at NYU, he has what's called moral foundations theory.

00:53:26.000 And essentially, it's that we have, we all have these sort of basic impulses of morality.

00:53:32.000 So for example, fairness, right?

00:53:34.000 So, you know, you can watch little kids and they're like, are tracking fairness.

00:53:38.000 What's fair?

00:53:38.000 Who got more?

00:53:39.000 Who got to play with the toy more and all that sort of stuff?

00:53:41.000 That doesn't change, right?

00:53:43.000 But we have these notions of fairness play out in different ways as we're adults.

00:53:47.000 But different political groups and different tribes favor these other notions of fairness more than some others.

00:53:54.000 So take, for example, the issue of pro-life versus pro-choice, right?

00:53:59.000 Okay, so you have—let's just—here's the question.

00:54:02.000 Are liberals pro-life or are liberals pro-choice?

00:54:05.000 They're more pro-choice.

00:54:07.000 On the issue of abortion, right?

00:54:09.000 Yes.

00:54:10.000 So on abortion, it's about freedom.

00:54:12.000 Right.

00:54:13.000 Okay.

00:54:14.000 Well, it's very much about women's rights.

00:54:16.000 Yeah, women's freedom. 1.00

00:54:18.000 It's not even thought of as a human freedom, because it's about the woman, not about the child.

00:54:24.000 That's right.

00:54:25.000 So it's about the woman's freedom, right?

00:54:27.000 So they've hooked up to that idea of freedom, right?

00:54:29.000 Yes.

00:54:30.000 And then, you know, conservatives are pro-life.

00:54:32.000 This is about caring and protecting from harm and all that sort of stuff, okay?

00:54:36.000 Unless you're talking about war.

00:54:37.000 Unless you're talking about war.

00:54:38.000 And that's exactly the point, is that, you know, are all humans hypocrites, or is it that we selectively use these same intuitions that we all have for different causes?

00:54:48.000 So if you look at, for example, gun control, are liberals pro-choice or pro-life?

00:54:53.000 They're definitely pro-life.

00:54:54.000 Aha! 0.94

00:54:55.000 So what you see is that on abortion, they're pro-choice, and on gun control, they're pro-life.

00:55:00.000 And when it comes the other way...

00:55:02.000 Exactly.

00:55:03.000 Exactly.

00:55:04.000 Republicans are pro-choice when it comes to guns.

00:55:07.000 So we all have these same intuitions, but we use them in different ways to justify our political arguments.

00:55:14.000 Well, what's interesting, too, is that there's two positions that are taking place in the American psyche, at least, that we're almost reluctantly agreeing to.

00:55:21.000 And it's that the Republicans are, or the conservatives, are more realistic, more hardcore, ready to kick ass, ready to fight for what's right. 0.97

00:55:32.000 Whereas the liberals are a bunch of whiny crybabies looking to give away their money, and they're creating welfare babies. 1.00

00:55:39.000 If it wasn't for the conservatives, these fucking people would be speaking German, living in Vietnam. 1.00

00:55:46.000 Well, all tribes, the nature of tribes, you tell something that makes your tribe look like the good guys. 0.99

00:55:52.000 So each tribe, that's the conservative story.

00:55:55.000 And then the liberal story is like, we're fighting racism and sexism.

00:55:59.000 Did you see the Golden Globes?

00:56:00.000 I did see the Golden Globes.

00:56:02.000 Did you see the Meryl Streep speech?

00:56:03.000 I did see the Meryl Streep speech.

00:56:04.000 God bless her. 1.00

00:56:26.000 God bless Meryl. 1.00

00:56:27.000 What was that one that nobody went to see?

00:56:29.000 Ricky, get your gun? 0.99

00:56:30.000 Whatever the fuck that is. 0.99

00:56:31.000 Listen, that wasn't art. 0.99

00:56:33.000 That wasn't art. 1.00

00:56:34.000 And Anderson Silva front kick to the face is a thousand times more beautiful than that piece of shit movie you put out, lady. 0.99

00:56:41.000 I'm sure she's a very nice person. 0.99

00:56:43.000 She probably thinks that she's standing up for what's right.

00:56:47.000 Get ready for Ricky.

00:56:48.000 It's Ricky Flash. 0.99

00:56:50.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:56:51.000 Three people saw that movie and they're all related to her. 1.00

00:56:54.000 Nobody saw that movie.

00:56:56.000 Did you see that movie?

00:56:57.000 I even heard of it.

00:56:58.000 It was like, what are they doing?

00:56:59.000 She's an 80-year-old lady. 0.99

00:57:00.000 She's going to be a rock star.

00:57:01.000 Ricky's coming back.

00:57:03.000 But it's also such weird casting for her, too, because she does these emotionally difficult Sophie's Choice movies, and then she's trying to do a poppy rock star movie.

00:57:12.000 Well, she was interested in it.

00:57:13.000 You know, she's an amazing actress. 1.00

00:57:15.000 She's an amazing artist in her realm.

00:57:18.000 And I just think you could sort of say that without disparaging what other people enjoy, including disparaging what a lot of women enjoy and foreigners.

00:57:29.000 One of the things she was saying is that Hollywood's crawling with foreigners.

00:57:32.000 If you take them, all you have left is MMA and football and MMA, mixed martial arts, not the arts.

00:57:38.000 But you wouldn't.

00:57:39.000 That's not true, because 80% of the fighters in the UFC are from other countries.

00:57:44.000 They're from Ireland, like Conor McGregor.

00:57:46.000 They're from Brazil, like Amanda Nunes. 0.67

00:57:48.000 I mean, this is an incredibly diverse lineup of people from all over the world. 0.98

00:57:53.000 So for her to say that is so silly.

00:57:55.000 But I can understand saying that you don't think it's an art by your interpretation. 0.93

00:58:00.000 I understand that. 0.99

00:58:01.000 But the larger point is that humans are silly, right? 1.00

00:58:04.000 Humans in general are silly, and we're not individually that smart. 0.99

00:58:08.000 I think performance arts, like as far as dance, I mean, dance is clearly an art, right? 0.99

00:58:14.000 If you watch Mikhail Baryshnikov, that's clearly art.

00:58:16.000 And I think in many ways competition in performance, like...

00:58:22.000 Gymnastics is also an art.

00:58:23.000 We don't think of it as an art.

00:58:24.000 We think of it as a sport.

00:58:25.000 But when you look at the ability to execute these spectacular moves, yeah, maybe they're not doing it to a concerto, but it's still art.

00:58:35.000 You see some amazing gymnast fly through the air and nail a landing.

00:58:40.000 It's beautiful.

00:58:41.000 It's glorious.

00:58:42.000 Well, that's art in competition, but it's not one-on-one competition.

00:58:46.000 Now, art in one-on-one competition is Edson Barboza wheel-kicking Terry Edom.

00:58:51.000 I know it doesn't look like art to some people, but to me it does.

00:58:55.000 Well, and it's a technically extremely difficult move.

00:58:57.000 It's taken a lot of time to practice and get good at.

00:59:00.000 So it's just the fact that when he does his beautiful pirouette, it just lands in someone's face.

00:59:06.000 Well, someone has to suffer.

00:59:08.000 And because someone has to suffer, and perhaps sometimes both people have to suffer.

00:59:13.000 In terms of a very brutal fight.

00:59:16.000 Right.

00:59:16.000 But if you look at like Amanda Nunes' knockout of Ronda Rousey, if you're an Amanda Nunes fan, that is a beautiful work of art.

00:59:22.000 Yeah.

00:59:23.000 Because she didn't get any promotion for that fight. 0.98

00:59:26.000 She was looked at like cannon fodder to go in there and fight Rousey. 1.00

00:59:30.000 A lot of people were predicting a first round victory and she went out there and fucked her up in 48 seconds. 1.00

00:59:34.000 That's art to some people. 0.99

00:59:37.000 It might not be to her, but...

00:59:39.000 Well, but also, I mean, this comes down to, you know, liberals, right?

00:59:43.000 So in general, liberals massively over-favor the notion of caring.

00:59:49.000 That's like their big, big moral intuition, right?

00:59:53.000 So they care about the environment, right?

00:59:56.000 They care about protecting children, toddlers from dangerous guns, right?

01:00:00.000 They just sort of...

01:00:01.000 Everything is interpreted through caring and wanting to protect.

01:00:04.000 So understandably, when they look at an MMA fight, they're like, oh, that's bad because there's not caring and people are getting hurt, right?

01:00:11.000 They're getting their feelings hurt.

01:00:12.000 And so when Jordan Peterson is on here and he's talking about how it's this very sort of maternal thing, it is a very maternal thing.

01:00:18.000 And the problem is that, you know, what ends up happening is that when you have an echo chamber like college campuses, which are incredibly liberal with very few outside opinions, that that's the rabbit hole that they go down.

01:00:30.000 They go down the caring rabbit hole.

01:00:33.000 And when you go down the caring rabbit hole, you end up at Marxism. 0.99

01:00:36.000 And, you know, when you're surrounded by people who essentially think like you, there's no one to, like, sit you down and be like, that's fucking nuts. 0.98

01:00:43.000 Like, let's talk about... 0.96

01:00:44.000 Why do you think, though, that is?

01:00:46.000 Why do you think going down the caring rabbit hole leads you to Marxism?

01:00:49.000 Mm-hmm.

01:01:06.000 Right.

01:01:30.000 Like, I'm being super sherry here.

01:01:33.000 Isn't this great?

01:01:34.000 I'm not thinking about myself.

01:01:35.000 And at the level of a tribe, you and I can track all of the interactions. 0.98

01:01:40.000 We can attract, we can track the fact that, you know, oh, you know, fucking Ung over there is not pulling his way. 0.98

01:01:48.000 Ung. 1.00

01:01:48.000 Oh, he's such a piece of shit. 1.00

01:01:49.000 He's such a piece of shit. 1.00

01:01:50.000 Lazy fucker. 1.00

01:01:51.000 And that's the point. 1.00

01:01:52.000 We go and we talk about Ung, we talk shit about Ung, and then we go and we confront Ung, and we say, Ung, you fucking piece of shit. 1.00

01:01:59.000 Like, we go out hunting all day, and then you sit around and, you know... 1.00

01:02:02.000 There's always going to be an Ung, right? 1.00

01:02:04.000 There is always going to be an Ung. 0.99

01:02:05.000 And if you have enough people, for sure you're going to have one.

01:02:08.000 Always.

01:02:08.000 If you have a hundred people, there's going to be one Ung.

01:02:09.000 And that's just evolution.

01:02:10.000 It's a strategy that works.

01:02:12.000 My foot hurts.

01:02:12.000 I can't hunt today.

01:02:14.000 Oh, you fat sack of shit. 1.00

01:02:16.000 Meanwhile, he's sitting, he comes back, he's eating all the guava... 1.00

01:02:20.000 Like, you ate all of it, you shithead. 1.00

01:02:23.000 Right? 1.00

01:02:23.000 And there's Ung, and then you have to plot to kill Ung. 1.00

01:02:26.000 Well, or to get Ung to pull his weight. 1.00

01:02:28.000 Fuck him. 1.00

01:02:28.000 No, you just say kill him? 1.00

01:02:30.000 Yeah, take him hunting. 1.00

01:02:30.000 Yeah, take him hunting and have him have an accident. 1.00

01:02:33.000 Take him over the fucking cliff. 1.00

01:02:34.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

01:02:34.000 Look over there, dude. 1.00

01:02:35.000 Look at that waterfall.

01:02:36.000 Or get him to hang out with the toddler with the gun.

01:02:39.000 Yeah.

01:02:39.000 They don't have guns, though.

01:02:40.000 That's not going to work.

01:02:41.000 Toddler with a bow and arrow?

01:02:42.000 With a spear?

01:02:42.000 Yeah.

01:02:43.000 Good luck.

01:02:43.000 Little kid's arms can't even stretch that far.

01:02:46.000 It's not going to know.

01:02:47.000 You have zero worry about being shot by a bow and arrow from a toddler.

01:02:50.000 Another reason why arrows are superior.

01:02:55.000 But Marxism being a communist ideology.

01:03:01.000 Marxism being that everyone should be more equal, sharing more.

01:03:07.000 But as Jordan Peterson pointed out so eloquently on your podcast and on my podcast, that doesn't really work.

01:03:13.000 It doesn't work at 7 billion people or 300 million people.

01:03:16.000 It might work at 50. It works at 50 or 150 because that's what our brain can track.

01:03:21.000 The problem is that I can't track all the ungs. 1.00

01:03:24.000 It works great without technology.

01:03:26.000 It works great without access to people all over the world.

01:03:29.000 It works great in a consolidated environment, a small, controlled, contained environment. 0.97

01:03:34.000 But it doesn't work when essentially you're in an apartment building of 2,000 people and you don't want to fucking talk to anybody. 0.98

01:03:40.000 Right. 0.83

01:03:41.000 But what if people say, well, it should work and we can make it work. 1.00

01:03:44.000 It's just this old, outdated mindset that you fuckers grew up. 0.99

01:03:48.000 You guys grew up way back in the day before the influence of the internet. 0.98

01:03:52.000 Now we understand that Z is a very respectable pronoun and we need to be using X-I-R. How do you say that? 0.99

01:03:58.000 Zir? 0.95

01:03:59.000 Zir. 0.98

01:04:00.000 I think so.

01:04:00.000 I don't know.

01:04:01.000 And the other 75 options or whatever the fuck they are, you nutty cunts. 1.00

01:04:07.000 Oxford's making people use it. 1.00

01:04:09.000 Well, Oxford has again also gone down the rabbit hole.

01:04:12.000 But colleges and academia are not going to go back out of the rabbit hole.

01:04:17.000 They're going to keep going down the rabbit hole until the larger community holds them accountable.

01:04:23.000 So do you think that that's happening at all now?

01:04:26.000 I mean, there was the president of Chicago University that said, hey, listen, there's not going to be any safe spaces this year.

01:04:30.000 There's not going to be any trigger warnings. 0.99

01:04:32.000 Just shut the fuck up and go to work and learn. 0.99

01:04:35.000 This is the marketplace of ideas. 1.00

01:04:36.000 That's right.

01:04:36.000 Express yourself.

01:04:38.000 Get your ideas challenged.

01:04:40.000 Debate these ideas.

01:04:41.000 Let's find out what's right rather than what's safe.

01:04:44.000 Well, and I think a large part of how you do that faster—I mean, firstly, people are already doing it.

01:04:49.000 There's the guy at Chicago.

01:04:50.000 There's Jordan Peterson.

01:04:52.000 You know, the larger community is having a conversation about this.

01:04:54.000 But the faster way to do this is science, right?

01:04:57.000 You confront people with science, and then you force people to either—are you either accepting reality or are you denying reality? 0.99

01:05:04.000 And if you're denying reality, then you've got a real problem, because now you look like a fool. 0.97

01:05:09.000 Well, when you talk about science, you run into a real issue when it comes to gender. 0.99

01:05:14.000 Yep.

01:05:15.000 Gender in science, like gender as is discussed on campuses today, things get real weird.

01:05:22.000 It gets real sort of loose and open to interpretation, and even though you're biologically a male, you can identify as a woman, and the correct way to treat you is to treat you as a woman.

01:05:33.000 So we're gone.

01:05:34.000 We're outside the realm of science now.

01:05:36.000 We're into the world of social constructs and agreed-upon behavior.

01:05:40.000 But the science exists.

01:05:41.000 It's just in journals.

01:05:43.000 And it hasn't been brought and made accessible to these children.

01:05:46.000 And there are ways to do it very simply.

01:05:48.000 So, for example, do you know the story of David Reimer?

01:05:50.000 No.

01:05:51.000 Okay.

01:05:51.000 So this was a kid in the 60s who I think was Canadian.

01:05:55.000 And for some bizarre reason, right, at the hospital, the surgeon decides to use an electrocautery needle to circumcise him. 0.99

01:06:05.000 And basically there's a huge botch up and he manages to chop off most of his dick, right? 0.99

01:06:11.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:06:12.000 And so the parents are like, okay, can't put that back on.

01:06:17.000 What do we do?

01:06:18.000 And so they end up going to the world's leading specialist in the 1960s or whatever it was, 50s, 60s, on gender identity and all this stuff, which is this guy, Dr. Money.

01:06:29.000 And they go and see Dr. Money.

01:06:31.000 Jesus Christ, his name is Dr. Money.

01:06:34.000 Cut sticks off. 0.99

01:06:35.000 And Dr. Money convinces them to castrate their penis-less son and to raise him as a girl. 0.99

01:06:42.000 And so they have to go and, you know, take their son in.

01:06:47.000 And, you know, David, who is now going to be raised as Brenda, is, you know, Dr. Money is showing pictures of naked men to Brenda and saying, like, this is what girls like and all this sort of stuff.

01:07:01.000 And, you know, is forcing him to wear women's clothing, and they're going to do hormone therapy and all this sort of stuff. 0.97

01:07:08.000 Now, Dr. Money is meanwhile publishing papers that is saying, oh, this is a tremendous success, it's amazing, like gender is all a construct, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, perfectly adjusting to life as a girl, all this stuff, and the plan is that, you know, they're going to do surgery and give him a vagina and all this sort of stuff. 0.76

01:07:26.000 Now, meanwhile, what is Brenda doing? 1.00

01:07:30.000 Brenda's hitting things with sticks. 1.00

01:07:32.000 Brenda has no interest in playing with her sewing machine, except for the one time that she takes a screwdriver and picks it apart to figure out how it works.

01:07:40.000 And doesn't want to hang out with girls, only wants to hang out with boys, only wants to play with her brother's toys. 1.00

01:07:47.000 So all these sorts of things.

01:07:48.000 And at some point, when the kid is like 13, 14, the jig is up.

01:07:52.000 They figure out that they better tell Brenda the truth.

01:07:55.000 Brenda finds out the truth and proceeds to essentially have a mastectomy to remove her breasts, switches to male hormones, and instantly goes to living as a boy. 0.95

01:08:11.000 Brenda, now David, grows up, marries a woman, and has a relationship, but unsurprisingly has a whole bunch of psychological issues and ultimately goes into a supermarket parking lot and blows his brains out.

01:08:28.000 Ugh.

01:08:33.000 Yeah.

01:09:09.000 A lot.

01:09:10.000 Then suddenly it becomes very hard for anybody to say that gender is purely a construct.

01:09:15.000 There may be spectrums and there may be like, you know, weird in between areas, but the reality is that a lot of gender is genetic and the science is there.

01:09:24.000 And you're not going to get a bunch of social justice warriors who read science because most people don't actually read science, but you will get them to engage with the story of David slash Brenda Reimer.

01:09:32.000 Well, there most certainly is a spectrum.

01:09:35.000 Yeah.

01:09:35.000 But there's also a high percentage of people that operate in a very specific area of that spectrum.

01:09:41.000 And you're going to get some kids that are convinced that they are boys.

01:09:45.000 That's right.

01:09:45.000 But guess what?

01:09:46.000 Some of those kids grow up and they change their mind as they get older. 0.98

01:09:49.000 And that's something that really disturbs the shit out of me when I see nine-year-olds that are on hormones. 0.77

01:09:53.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:09:54.000 And I'm like, this seems crazy.

01:09:55.000 If this kid really thinks he's a girl, let him think he's a girl as is. 0.99

01:09:59.000 Why are you adding hormones to the mix? 1.00

01:10:01.000 That's right. 0.97

01:10:02.000 Why are you suggesting surgery when he turns 15 or whatever the fuck the age is? 0.98

01:10:06.000 This seems like something that should be worked out by a grown adult with a fully developed frontal cortex. 0.99

01:10:13.000 That's right.

01:10:13.000 It doesn't seem...

01:10:14.000 And also, like, the influence of the parents to change how this kid...

01:10:18.000 Like, if you have a kid and you have a daughter and your daughter just wants to cut all her hair off and climb trees and, like, let her do that.

01:10:26.000 Yeah.

01:10:26.000 Like, if she wants to be a boy, let her think she's a boy and work it all out one day.

01:10:31.000 That's right.

01:10:31.000 But to work it all out and to encourage that behavior or to say, we're going to bring you to a transgender specialist right away and they're going to prescribe this and that.

01:10:43.000 Original doctor.

01:10:45.000 What was the male name you used?

01:10:47.000 David Reimer. 0.97

01:10:49.000 David Reimer's original doctor who were proclaiming it was such a success when it's horseshit. 0.72

01:10:55.000 In general, reality denial leads to tragedy.

01:10:59.000 So what we have to be engaged with is what is reality?

01:11:02.000 And it's not that I sit here and have read literally all of the science.

01:11:06.000 I can't.

01:11:06.000 Like, it's far too vast a project.

01:11:09.000 And science isn't supposed to be an individual project.

01:11:11.000 It's supposed to be a collective project where we're all trying to really figure out what is this bitch known as reality that has evaded us for millions of years, right? 0.96

01:11:19.000 Or tens, hundreds of thousands of years.

01:11:21.000 And, you know, the point is that if you want to talk about, like, gender, for example, let's talk about people who are intersex.

01:11:29.000 I think?

01:11:45.000 But you don't do hormones and you don't do surgery precisely because you're going to let them decide, right?

01:11:52.000 And if you are, I mean, you know, how much better...

01:11:55.000 Okay, so why is the surgeon using an electrocautery needle to do circumcision? 0.99

01:11:59.000 Who the fuck knows, right? 1.00

01:12:01.000 Like, it's a dumb choice by a surgeon. 1.00

01:12:03.000 But imagine if they'd said, okay, that fuck-up happened. 0.99

01:12:06.000 We can't unfuck that up. 1.00

01:12:08.000 But we're not going to now make it worse by chopping off his balls. 1.00

01:12:11.000 Well, this was what year? 0.99

01:12:13.000 This was in the 60s, 50s, 60s.

01:12:15.000 The amount of data they had back then was so limited.

01:12:18.000 Yeah.

01:12:18.000 And we've now got a lot more data, and David Brenda Reimer is not an isolated incident.

01:12:24.000 There have been other incidents like that.

01:12:26.000 And they vary.

01:12:28.000 It's not that everything turns out like David Brenda Reimer, right?

01:12:34.000 But if you really care about children and you really care about people, which is sort of the big liberal value, then the Hippocratic Oath, the whole point of being a doctor, is your first responsibility is do no harm.

01:12:46.000 You're not supposed to make things worse.

01:12:48.000 If you can make things better without really possibly making things worse, then that's great.

01:12:54.000 And so, again, we don't let children vote.

01:12:58.000 We don't let children drive.

01:13:00.000 Why would we let them make It's such a huge decision at such a young age.

01:13:06.000 And I think whatever the decision ends up being, you know, people are going to make their own individual decisions, so be it.

01:13:12.000 But you want to make sure that the decision is an informed decision.

01:13:15.000 There's also, there's forbidden territory when it comes to gender and gender identity as far as like what you are allowed to debate or not allowed to debate.

01:13:25.000 There's a lot of forbidden territory.

01:13:27.000 Yeah, and it becomes pretty obvious that the origin of that forbidden behavior, forbidden thinking, is that people that are transgender or gay or marginalized in any way have been discriminated against and treated poorly,

01:13:43.000 and we recognize that, so we automatically stop any critical thinking when it comes to those people.

01:13:51.000 They can't be crazy. 0.93

01:13:53.000 They must be, you know, it's just a transgender issue. 1.00

01:13:56.000 It couldn't be that they're crazy and transgender. 0.99

01:13:59.000 Well, that's never discussed. 1.00

01:14:00.000 It can't be he's gay and stupid as fuck. 1.00

01:14:02.000 No, no, no, no, no. 1.00

01:14:03.000 Gay people are wonderful and they're all amazing because they've all been discriminated against.

01:14:07.000 Right.

01:14:08.000 And the point is, you don't—I mean, you know, human beings are human beings.

01:14:11.000 And so, for example, when we had Jordan Peterson on, one of the questions that I asked him, which I think is a super important question, is Jordan's a psychologist, right?

01:14:19.000 And I asked him, okay, so let's imagine you had a patient who came here and said, you know, I want to be called by one of the 70 pronouns, right?

01:14:26.000 What, as your patient, would you then do?

01:14:29.000 And he said, well, if you came to me and said to me that you were Jesus Christ— I would have to, as a responsible doctor, first decide that it was in my best interest to call you Jesus Christ.

01:14:40.000 So I have to figure out, really, what is that about?

01:14:42.000 And is it going to serve your outcome to be able to do that?

01:14:46.000 And again, you know, there's unaccountability for any human, whether it's a celebrity or a sports star or a rapper or a gay person or a transgender person or a politician or a scientist, is bad.

01:15:00.000 Like, humans need accountability.

01:15:01.000 That's just the reality. 1.00

01:15:03.000 Otherwise, we go fucking nutballs. 0.99

01:15:04.000 So if for any reason a human is denied accountability to other humans, you've got a problem, right? 0.99

01:15:10.000 Yeah, you're doing them a disservice by thinking that you are in somehow or another helping them or, you know, like that stupid article earlier today that we were talking about, about... 0.97

01:15:21.000 These people showing up at the racism conference and then the white people being forced to check their privilege. 1.00

01:15:27.000 You're ruining the whole thing with this kind of short-sighted, shitty thinking. 0.99

01:15:33.000 Do you want to really go down the rabbit hole? 0.99

01:15:35.000 I would love to.

01:15:35.000 Let's do it.

01:15:36.000 So, do you know Thomas Sowell?

01:15:39.000 I know that name.

01:15:40.000 Why do I know that name?

01:16:00.000 So what ends up happening is that you are in awe of people, right?

01:16:04.000 You look up to people.

01:16:05.000 And so you blindly copy the things they do.

01:16:08.000 And specifically, you start by blindly copying from the outside, and then you work in.

01:16:13.000 So the first thing you do is you see someone and you're like, oh, that person's fucking amazing, that rock star, that sports star, whatever.

01:16:19.000 And you start dressing like them, you start walking like them, and all of that sort of stuff.

01:16:24.000 Now, in a hunter-gatherer context, that would be, you know, somebody who is a hunter or is a gatherer, and you're like, man, you know, she finds all the best guavas.

01:16:32.000 How does she do that? 1.00

01:16:33.000 And then Ung fucking eats them, right? 1.00

01:16:35.000 Fucking Ung again. 1.00

01:16:36.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:16:37.000 And so, you know, you would, like, hang out with her.

01:16:40.000 You'd sort of, like, shimmy up to her.

01:16:41.000 You'd be seeing what she'd be doing, and she's like, oh, okay.

01:16:44.000 She looks for a very particular color of guava.

01:16:47.000 She, you know, squeezes them in a certain way.

01:16:49.000 And over time, you learn what she's doing, and then ultimately you even learn how she's thinking.

01:16:54.000 But in a large-scale society like ours, I don't meet Michael Jordan, right?

01:17:01.000 Michael Jordan just becomes this sort of distant person that I idolize.

01:17:04.000 And so advertisers have figured out how to hijack these mechanisms.

01:17:07.000 I think?

01:17:26.000 That the burger or the cigarette is not actually the key to being as successful or as cool or as good at basketball as Michael Jordan or James Dean.

01:17:34.000 We don't understand that that's where that comes from.

01:17:37.000 So we have this tendency to blindly copy anything we can.

01:17:40.000 Does that make sense?

01:17:42.000 Yeah.

01:17:42.000 And in a mass society, we never work our way in.

01:17:45.000 We never learn the mastery.

01:17:47.000 We just sort of remain at this very superficial level.

01:17:51.000 So what that means is that Where did this all start?

01:17:56.000 That's a good question.

01:17:57.000 Yeah.

01:17:58.000 Where were you going with this?

01:17:59.000 Well, we were starting at- Culture, how culture works?

01:18:01.000 Oh, yeah, how culture works.

01:18:02.000 Oh, okay.

01:18:02.000 So now we're going to talk about black people.

01:18:04.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

01:18:05.000 Jesus Christ.

01:18:06.000 So Thomas Sowell is a black guy, right?

01:18:11.000 And Thomas Sowell has for years and years and years been trying to fight racism.

01:18:16.000 But he's been trying to fight racism by having a conversation about culture, right?

01:18:21.000 And the fact that there are essentially two different sort of—we're speaking broadly here, right?

01:18:27.000 But this is for the purposes of communication.

01:18:30.000 We're going to tell a simple story to start off with, right?

01:18:33.000 I think?

01:18:58.000 Welcome to my show!

01:19:21.000 And Sowell is saying, no, it's not.

01:19:23.000 Because if you look at this group from the West Indies, they also came from the experience of slavery.

01:19:29.000 There was slavery in the West Indies.

01:19:30.000 They are also black, so they also face racism, and yet they do well.

01:19:35.000 So it has to be something else. 0.55

01:19:37.000 And that other thing is the fact that these black people who are in the South, there's always been a big question, were black people robbed of their culture, or did they preserve their authentic African culture? 0.90

01:19:49.000 And what Seoul is saying is that they were robbed of their culture, and so they picked up the culture of the people around them, and the people around them were rednecks. 0.81

01:19:58.000 And if you look at the white redneck culture and the black redneck culture, they have a lot of the same values. 0.74

01:20:04.000 They don't particularly respect education.

01:20:08.000 We're good to go.

01:20:22.000 So it's actually this...

01:20:24.000 What?

01:20:24.000 It's from the West of England.

01:20:25.000 So, for example, if you go to places like Cornwall, there used to be these amazing ads on British TV, right, for this Devon custard or whatever.

01:20:36.000 And they would always say, Devon knows how they make it so creamy.

01:20:39.000 And they all talk like this, right?

01:20:40.000 And so it doesn't sound like Black English.

01:20:42.000 But they do say things like, I be doing that, and we be doing this, and you be doing that, and they be doing that.

01:20:49.000 And so there's that use of that copula, be, right?

01:20:52.000 Where instead of saying, I am, you are, he is, she is, they are, they just say, I be, you be, we be, they be, which is the classic feature of black English, African American, black English. 0.60

01:21:02.000 Right.

01:21:03.000 Now, the point is, is that...

01:21:06.000 Mind blower.

01:21:07.000 Now, let's imagine that how do you think that Thomas Sowell has been received by liberal America?

01:21:14.000 Not well.

01:21:15.000 Not well.

01:21:16.000 And so, for example, Sowell has a book called Black Rednecks, White Liberals.

01:21:21.000 Okay.

01:21:21.000 And his whole point is that, you know, if you actually and, you know, again, like Sowell is, you know, he researches.

01:21:29.000 Yeah.

01:21:55.000 And they're teaching those New England values, right?

01:21:57.000 It's those Puritan values of hard work, tenacity, all that sort of stuff.

01:22:00.000 And so there's all this progress.

01:22:01.000 And you have people like Booker T. Washington.

01:22:03.000 And Booker T. Washington was an actual slave.

01:22:06.000 And then after he got his freedom, he got to go work in a salt mine, which is literally the worst job ever.

01:22:11.000 And in Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, he tells this great story about seeing a schoolhouse, right?

01:22:16.000 And that he thought that going into a schoolhouse was about as close to heaven on earth as you could get.

01:22:22.000 Wow.

01:22:23.000 Like, this is a dude who wanted an education really, really badly.

01:22:26.000 And that's a lot of what you find in the, you know, early black experience in, you know, the post-slavery period.

01:22:33.000 And in fact, you know, blacks, you know, before sort of World War II actually had higher rates of marriage than whites.

01:22:39.000 All of these sorts of things that, you know, are now supposedly a problem.

01:22:43.000 And then there's this turnaround, right?

01:22:45.000 The black experience starts to go south, right? 1.00

01:22:48.000 It starts to get worse.

01:22:49.000 And what year is this around?

01:22:50.000 This is post-World War II, right?

01:22:53.000 So...

01:22:53.000 So post-slavery, black people experience a rebounding.

01:22:59.000 They're starting to make some progress.

01:23:00.000 There's ambition.

01:23:00.000 Making progress.

01:23:01.000 Yeah.

01:23:02.000 And I mean, you know, in terms of books to read, like, you know, just of...

01:23:05.000 Because a large part of what I'm trying to do in general is really let's move to the place of all people are created equal.

01:23:13.000 Like, let's remove all these stupid distinctions, right, and really live that principle. 0.63

01:23:18.000 And the problem is that in order to really live that principle, you need a new narrative that beats slavery. 0.99

01:23:24.000 So if you go and talk to racists, you can't just say racism is bad.

01:23:30.000 That doesn't destroy racism.

01:23:32.000 What destroys racism is when you make sense of the things that they know.

01:23:36.000 They see people who are violent in the ghettos, or they see crime, or they see a lack of education, or they see that Africa is poor.

01:23:43.000 And you're able to tell a better story that makes sense of the things that they know, But also comes out with the conclusion, oh, we actually all have the same potential, right?

01:23:53.000 But if you have this issue with people imitating their atmosphere and imitating their environment and this Southern-style talk with the Southern redneck influence on the African-American slaves, former slaves, how do you stop that and how do you turn that around?

01:24:11.000 Well, in general, for humanity, I mean, this is sort of a big problem for humanity in general, is that there's not a culture alive today that is well-suited to the world that we're living in.

01:24:21.000 And that's because, you know, culture is adapted to environment in the same way as any evolutionary thing, right?

01:24:27.000 So, for example, you know, if you look at, like, let's talk about these hunter-gatherers, right?

01:24:31.000 The Yanomamo or something like that.

01:24:33.000 So there's a great story in The Lost City of Z where, you know, Percy Fawcett, who was an explorer, comes across, you know, all these tribes in the Amazon.

01:24:42.000 And one of the examples that the author gives in there is David Gran.

01:24:46.000 He talks about how, you know, there's this group of tribesmen in the Amazon, and what they'll do is there's this special leaf, and they go and they squeeze this leaf, right?

01:24:57.000 They crush it up, and this milky substance runs into the water.

01:25:00.000 And then all of a sudden, the fish float up to the surface, upside down, right?

01:25:05.000 They've been anesthetized by this whatever substance in the leaf.

01:25:08.000 And this little boy goes into the river, and he plucks out all the fattest fish, and then as the milky cloud dissipates, the other fish swim away.

01:25:16.000 Right? 0.99

01:25:17.000 Impressive as fuck. 1.00

01:25:18.000 Like, how the fuck do these tribesmen who don't have science, don't have any of these things, figure this thing out? 1.00

01:25:23.000 And it's cultural evolution. 0.97

01:25:25.000 That's what happens.

01:25:26.000 That's the nature of evolution.

01:25:27.000 That's the nature of markets, because markets are an evolutionary process.

01:25:31.000 You know, intelligent answers and intelligent solutions can emerge from just sort of competing forces.

01:25:37.000 And so all of these cultures are well adapted to a particular environment.

01:25:41.000 So, like we talked about American culture and we talked about Russian culture.

01:25:46.000 Russian culture selects for pessimism. 1.00

01:25:48.000 American culture, because you had to move all the way across the ocean, right?

01:25:52.000 If you've got villages in Italy, you know, Vietnam, whatever it is, who is the person in that village who says, I'm going to go across the ocean to a country I know nothing about and, you know, make a fortune, right?

01:26:06.000 It's the most optimistic individual, right?

01:26:08.000 And so it's basically a magnet for all the most optimistic individuals in the world.

01:26:12.000 The analogy I always use is, do you ever see American Tail?

01:26:16.000 The, like, old animated movie from, like, the, must be the 90s or whatever?

01:26:21.000 Probably.

01:26:21.000 I don't think I saw that.

01:26:23.000 Well, it's about a group of...

01:26:25.000 It was animated?

01:26:25.000 It's animated, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:28.000 Who made it?

01:26:29.000 I don't know.

01:26:31.000 I'm trying to remember.

01:26:33.000 It's not Disney.

01:26:35.000 That's it.

01:26:36.000 No, I don't think I saw that.

01:26:38.000 Oh, Steven Spielberg.

01:26:38.000 Well, anyway, it's sort of about the immigrant experience more generally and then specifically sort of about the Russian-Jewish experience.

01:26:46.000 And it's about this family, the Mauskovitzes.

01:26:52.000 And right there on that trunk, there's Fievel Malskovitz.

01:26:57.000 And Fievel Malskovitz, you know, in the first part, they're in Russia, and they're all being persecuted by cats, right?

01:27:05.000 Because they're mice. 0.67

01:27:06.000 And Fievel Malskovitz sings a song with all of the other Malskovitzes called, There Are No Cats in America.

01:27:13.000 Right?

01:27:14.000 Which is so much of what the American immigrant experience is about, right?

01:27:18.000 You're like, oh, it's all going to be perfect, land of opportunity, the streets are paved with gold, except in an American tale, the streets are paved with cheese.

01:27:29.000 American T-A-L-E or T-A-I-L? T-A-I-L. Yeah, T-A-I-L. Yeah, tail, like rat tail. 0.66

01:27:35.000 Exactly.

01:27:36.000 Okay, mouse tail.

01:27:37.000 So these different environments, right, just as you have different environments select for different beaks or wings or whatever it is, select for different mindsets, different ways of thinking, different cultural traits, right?

01:27:51.000 Right.

01:27:54.000 Yeah.

01:28:16.000 And there's all these animals you don't understand, and you don't know how to use the plants that you squeeze and have the anesthetic in them and all that sort of stuff.

01:28:24.000 You can't survive, right?

01:28:27.000 And what they called in Velocity of the Sea, all the explorers, they called it, the Amazon, a counterfeit paradise.

01:28:33.000 It looked like a paradise.

01:28:34.000 It was so lush.

01:28:35.000 It was so tropical. 0.98

01:28:36.000 But they were like, there's nothing to fucking eat. 0.96

01:28:39.000 Except clearly there was because Amazonian people had been living there for tens of thousands of years. 0.96

01:28:45.000 The Westerners didn't have the cultural software that was well suited to surviving in that environment. 0.91

01:28:51.000 So how does this translate into African Americans?

01:28:53.000 So what is the environment that created that southern redneck culture? 0.59

01:28:59.000 And the environment, it turns out, is herding.

01:29:01.000 Right?

01:29:02.000 So raising sheep, raising goats, and all that sort of stuff.

01:29:04.000 Because most of the people who are in the South originally came from the Scots-Irish.

01:29:10.000 And when you look at herding cultures around the world, they all have certain traits in common, right? 0.99

01:29:15.000 So if you're a herder, you have a big, big problem. 1.00

01:29:18.000 And that big, big problem is property rights.

01:29:21.000 So if you're a farmer, there are clear boundaries on my land. 1.00

01:29:25.000 Now, there are ways you can try and fuck me. 1.00

01:29:26.000 You can try and move the boundary stones on my land slowly into your field over, over, over, over. 0.99

01:29:32.000 But, you know, what we usually have is we have some sort of government.

01:29:35.000 There's a local town official that we go to, and he is responsible for policing the boundaries.

01:29:40.000 And so towns would do things where, you know, you would essentially all get together and we go walk the boundary stones, and we make sure that none of those boundary stones had moved.

01:29:48.000 So the intuition of people from the North, Puritans, people like that, is if we have a problem, we go to the government. 0.99

01:29:54.000 We resolve it through the government.

01:29:56.000 In the environment of herding, you can come over and you can steal my sheep, and you can mix the sheep in with your flock, and I have no way to prove which sheep are my sheep.

01:30:07.000 So we evolve things like branding, where I have a brand, I put it on my sheep, and all that sort of stuff.

01:30:12.000 But there's another strategy that is used that evolved before branding. 0.99

01:30:16.000 And that earlier strategy is being a crazy motherfucker. 1.00

01:30:20.000 You establish a reputation as the kind of guy that you don't fuck with. 1.00

01:30:24.000 You come on my land, I kill you. 1.00

01:30:27.000 You touch my sheep or my women, I fucking kill you. 1.00

01:30:30.000 And I use such an aggressive level of violence that you know... 1.00

01:30:35.000 There is no point in fucking with, I mean, this is not plausible because I'm saying it, but let's imagine a much tougher person. 0.95

01:30:42.000 Conor McGregor, for example, is a great example. 0.99

01:30:44.000 You don't fuck with Conor McGregor, right? 1.00

01:30:46.000 He has a reputation as just being a badass motherfucker who will fuck you up. 1.00

01:30:50.000 Right. 1.00

01:30:51.000 So that's how you keep people off your land.

01:30:52.000 That's right.

01:30:53.000 And if you look at, let's look at a couple of herder cultures. 1.00

01:30:55.000 So herder cultures include the Scots-Irish, who are the rednecks. 1.00

01:31:00.000 Herder cultures include the Mongolians, right? 0.59

01:31:03.000 The Mongols, notoriously a very gentle, peace-loving people.

01:31:06.000 Right?

01:31:07.000 And they include the Bedouins, who are the Arabs, right, who had camels and all that sort of stuff.

01:31:12.000 And you'll notice that there is that same use of violence.

01:31:15.000 And mostly they fight amongst themselves.

01:31:17.000 There's this inter-Klan warfare.

01:31:18.000 But periodically a charismatic figure emerges.

01:31:24.000 We're good to go.

01:31:44.000 What happens with the Arabs? 0.99

01:31:46.000 The Arabs are mostly fighting amongst themselves. 0.95

01:31:48.000 But then along comes this charismatic figure with a new belief system that unites them, Muhammad.

01:31:53.000 And he unites them, and suddenly they fuck everybody up, and they create this great empire, the Caliphate, that spreads all across Central Asia and the Middle East and all across North Africa. 0.93

01:32:03.000 Right. 0.71

01:32:04.000 And in many ways, that is what Donald Trump is.

01:32:07.000 They've been, you know, the rednecks have been fighting amongst themselves for a long time. 0.99

01:32:11.000 And then Donald Trump, the Genghis Khan of America, the Mohammed of America, has succeeded in uniting the clans. 0.96

01:32:18.000 And, you know, in our time, you don't do it by going out and like raping and pillaging.

01:32:23.000 You go and you seize the ballot box and you vote and, you know, you really like take back power.

01:32:29.000 And so that's what they've done.

01:32:30.000 Um, But there are, if you look, there are certain problems that occur across these herder cultures. 1.00

01:32:37.000 So if you're, you know, as a friend of mine who...

01:32:39.000 So you're essentially saying that the South is, that the reason why Donald Trump has been elected is because of the South, because of the herder culture. 0.99

01:32:46.000 Well, and it's also, so if you've read Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's book, it's excellent, right?

01:32:53.000 But he's really talking about this hillbilly culture.

01:32:55.000 And so it's not just the South, right?

01:32:57.000 So what happened is, is that...

01:32:59.000 It's redneck. 0.97

01:33:00.000 It's rednecks, or hillbillies, or whatever you want to call them. 0.99

01:33:04.000 Simple folk.

01:33:05.000 Well, it's not even simple folk.

01:33:06.000 It's just a particular culture, and they have certain values.

01:33:08.000 And it's also worth clarifying because of the way that I sound, and where I come from, and the fact that I went to Harvard.

01:33:14.000 Vitamin.

01:33:15.000 Yeah, and vitamin, and that I'm not a part of that tribe, that, you know, Americans owe a tremendous debt to the hillbilly culture, and that tremendous debt is that overwhelmingly they are the people who have served in the military, and they are overwhelmingly the people who have fought our wars and bled and died and all that sort of stuff.

01:33:32.000 And that's not a stuff that, you know, I may sound like a liberal, but I don't really sit in either of those cultures, right?

01:33:38.000 I can critique the liberal culture, and I can critique the hillbilly culture.

01:33:43.000 Right? 0.92

01:33:43.000 And, you know, white liberals, the whole reason why I started this thing off is because white liberals have their own weird things that are dysfunctional and that aren't helping black people and all that stuff. 0.92

01:33:52.000 If you just wore a bow tie, people would think you were conservative. 0.82

01:33:54.000 That's all you have to do.

01:33:55.000 Well, then there you go.

01:33:56.000 Or maybe have a detachable bow tie.

01:33:58.000 A bolo tie, 100%.

01:33:59.000 Actually, I would like to do that.

01:34:01.000 Like, I like the Texan culture.

01:34:03.000 You're a rancher.

01:34:03.000 Yeah, it's a rancher.

01:34:04.000 You might be a little piece of jade right there.

01:34:05.000 You mean pull a George W. Bush, be from Connecticut, but dress like a cowboy?

01:34:09.000 Yes, he was from Maine.

01:34:09.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:34:10.000 Even more crazy.

01:34:11.000 Maine is, I mean, Kennebunkport.

01:34:13.000 That's where they're from. 0.99

01:34:14.000 That is the whitest of white fucking northern people ever. 1.00

01:34:19.000 A lot of it French folks. 1.00

01:34:20.000 Yeah.

01:34:21.000 Maine is filled with French folks.

01:34:22.000 Maniacs.

01:34:23.000 Yeah.

01:34:24.000 Also, originally, you know, more your neck of the woods, right?

01:34:27.000 Yes.

01:34:27.000 Yeah, Boston.

01:34:28.000 Yeah.

01:34:28.000 I did a lot of gigs in Maine.

01:34:30.000 Yeah.

01:34:30.000 Maine's a fascinating place because it's entirely abandoned.

01:34:35.000 Yeah.

01:34:35.000 There's a couple of cities.

01:34:36.000 Yeah.

01:34:50.000 Mm-hmm.

01:34:53.000 You run out of gas.

01:34:54.000 Did you ever hear there's a friend of mine, her dad's from Maine, and he has all these great Maine-isms?

01:35:00.000 And one of them is, oh, you gotta go up past Sawyer's barn.

01:35:04.000 And past Sawyer's barn is any place that is far away.

01:35:08.000 Oh. 0.98

01:35:09.000 Which is, I think, fucking amazing. 0.98

01:35:11.000 Wow. 0.98

01:35:12.000 So that's sort of like the version of the Islamic 72 virgins.

01:35:17.000 Yeah.

01:35:18.000 Right? 0.95

01:35:19.000 Like, 72 virgins just means a shitload. 0.96

01:35:20.000 A shitload of virgins, yeah. 0.98

01:35:21.000 Yeah, it doesn't really mean the number 72. 72, yeah. 0.87

01:35:24.000 Yeah.

01:35:25.000 Well, you know, you're saying you have a passel of virgins.

01:35:27.000 Like, there's a good chunk of virgins, right? 0.98

01:35:30.000 So, we get back to this African-American culture.

01:35:33.000 Yeah.

01:35:33.000 How does it correct itself?

01:35:35.000 So what ends up happening...

01:35:36.000 Yeah, what you have to do is that you just have to have a much larger conversation about culture.

01:35:40.000 And you have to talk about how culture works.

01:35:43.000 You have to say it's not your fault, right?

01:35:45.000 Because the point is that...

01:35:47.000 We imitate our atmosphere.

01:35:48.000 We imitate our atmosphere.

01:35:49.000 And the reality is that these cultures are very old.

01:35:52.000 That herder culture is the same one. 1.00

01:35:55.000 And that's the big irony, is that you're not saying that it's about black people. 0.97

01:35:58.000 It's about rednecks, whether they're white rednecks or black rednecks. 0.99

01:36:02.000 And so that herder culture has just inexorably tied itself into the African-American culture without the African-Americans even knowing that it happened. 0.97

01:36:10.000 Exactly.

01:36:11.000 Which is the nature of culture.

01:36:13.000 And it's also, it's only tied itself into this very specific subset of black culture.

01:36:19.000 Which is why the people in the West Indies have a completely different...

01:36:22.000 Oh, wow.

01:36:23.000 And if you talk to people who are literally Africans who immigrated to America, like from Ethiopia or Kenya or anything like that, you know, if you ever get an Ethiopian cab driver...

01:36:33.000 Oh, they're so hardworking.

01:36:34.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:36:35.000 Talk to them about how they feel about that sort of ghetto black culture, those black rednecks. 1.00

01:36:41.000 They fucking hate it. 1.00

01:36:43.000 And the point is, is because A, it gives them a bad name, right? 1.00

01:36:46.000 You know, people see a black person and they're like, oh, you're like probably this, this, this, this, this.

01:36:51.000 Because again, human stereotype because of the Dunbar number, because we can only track 150 people.

01:36:57.000 And so we have to make up stories about- Categorize them.

01:36:59.000 Yeah, we have to.

01:36:59.000 You fit into this redneck spot.

01:37:00.000 That's right.

01:37:01.000 Oh, you have a Dukes of Hazzard t-shirt on.

01:37:03.000 That's right.

01:37:03.000 There you are.

01:37:04.000 Yep.

01:37:04.000 And we do that.

01:37:05.000 And that's the point.

01:37:07.000 The listeners are going to be sitting here, and they're going to be trying to categorize me and all of this sort of stuff.

01:37:11.000 And part of what you're dealing with is you start talking about gender or anything like that, and the social justice warriors try and put you into some bucket.

01:37:17.000 And you're like, no, I don't belong in that bucket.

01:37:20.000 You're constantly trying to say, I'm not in that bucket.

01:37:22.000 So you can imagine if you're Ethiopian...

01:37:25.000 And you've moved here, and you really sort of believe in the American dream, the land of opportunity, and we work hard, and we all do this sort of stuff, and you keep getting put in that bucket with all this sort of rap culture or anything like that, you're going to be annoyed at those people. 0.99

01:37:38.000 Like if you're a Sikh and people want to beat your ass because the Muslims bombed 9-11. 1.00

01:37:44.000 But it's not even near the same part of the world, you fuckheads. 1.00

01:37:48.000 Nope. 0.99

01:37:49.000 Totally different headgear.

01:37:50.000 Exactly.

01:37:51.000 But...

01:37:52.000 To the person on the outside trying to categorize.

01:37:55.000 That's right.

01:37:55.000 They're trying to make sense of it.

01:37:57.000 And that's the point, is that when you start to have a conversation that is about culture, then you start to realize that race doesn't actually matter.

01:38:04.000 And what you'll find is, so let's take a look at, for example, Asians, right?

01:38:09.000 Asians do very well in school.

01:38:10.000 They're very productive and all that sort of stuff, except for the Hmong, right? 1.00

01:38:15.000 So there's a group of people called the Hmong, and they're the big Asian exception. 1.00

01:38:20.000 And, you know, they do think- Hunters.

01:38:22.000 Big time hunters.

01:38:24.000 You know, there's a lot of violence, not a lot of education, right?

01:38:30.000 They don't sort of fall into that sort of stereotype of becoming engineers and doctors.

01:38:35.000 Where are they from?

01:38:35.000 What part of the world?

01:38:36.000 They're like Cambodia, Vietnam, like what used to be called Indochina.

01:38:40.000 And they don't have their own country?

01:38:42.000 No.

01:38:42.000 No, they're tribal grouping that sort of exists across national boundaries, because in general, you know, one of the great destructive forces in human history is the British mapmaker.

01:38:55.000 You know what I mean?

01:38:56.000 Like, Europeans just love a straight line. 1.00

01:38:59.000 Yeah.

01:39:00.000 They just can't get enough of the straight line.

01:39:02.000 That's funny.

01:39:03.000 And you know, the straight line works in middle America because you've already wiped out all the tribes. 0.99

01:39:09.000 Right. 0.99

01:39:09.000 But it doesn't work so well in Africa where there are still tribes or Southeast Asia where you suddenly start drawing a line right between two tribal groups or across a tribal group and suddenly now shit's all fucked up. 0.99

01:39:21.000 And what they're trying to do when they're having all these civil wars is they're trying to unfuck the boundaries. 0.98

01:39:27.000 Straight lines are annoying.

01:39:28.000 Yeah, they are.

01:39:29.000 You know, it's really hilarious when you get busted for transporting something across state lines.

01:39:33.000 Like, am I allowed to drive around with this or not? 0.99

01:39:36.000 Like, what's the fucking law? 0.99

01:39:38.000 Like, if you have pot in particular, I mean, you cross a state line, you go from being someone who is innocent 100% to someone who's guilty 100% of a felony. 0.99

01:39:48.000 Yep.

01:39:49.000 Yeah, it's so bizarre.

01:39:51.000 I mean, on one side, states' rights are an amazing idea for testing ideas out.

01:39:56.000 Sure.

01:39:57.000 You know, like testing out with Colorado and legal marijuana, again.

01:40:01.000 That's right.

01:40:01.000 It worked out.

01:40:02.000 It worked out great.

01:40:03.000 And people went, look, this is working.

01:40:04.000 It's profitable.

01:40:05.000 It helps everybody.

01:40:06.000 Let's go.

01:40:06.000 Yeah.

01:40:07.000 And then it sold the idea to other people.

01:40:09.000 That's right.

01:40:10.000 And then there's other places like Open Carry.

01:40:12.000 And you're like, uh, hey...

01:40:15.000 Are you sure?

01:40:17.000 Concealed carry?

01:40:18.000 Okay, you could just have a gun on you everywhere you go?

01:40:20.000 You go to the movie theater?

01:40:21.000 Okay.

01:40:22.000 But where are the places where that's true?

01:40:24.000 The South.

01:40:25.000 Yeah.

01:40:25.000 And that's because, again, it comes down to what this is being driven by.

01:40:30.000 It's being driven by old cultural baggage that doesn't necessarily make sense.

01:40:34.000 So there's really, in terms of honor cultures, there are four books that I think that if you want to go into this, don't get angry at me, just read the four books.

01:40:43.000 One of those books.

01:40:43.000 Those books are Black Rednecks White Liberals, Thomas Sowell's book, A Culture of Honor, which is Richard Nisbet's book, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and then a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.

01:40:59.000 And those four books, essentially, if you read those four books and you're still saying that what I'm saying is unsubstantiated, you know, well, then we should talk about it.

01:41:09.000 Aren't there a lot of liberals that are up in arms when you propose these things?

01:41:12.000 Of course!

01:41:13.000 Especially when you start bringing up the herder culture. 1.00

01:41:14.000 No, what about the patriarchy?

01:41:15.000 What about white racism?

01:41:17.000 Exactly.

01:41:17.000 You know, you can't be racist towards white people.

01:41:20.000 That's one of my favorite things that people are saying today.

01:41:22.000 What, that you can't be racist to white people?

01:41:24.000 Yeah.

01:41:24.000 There's a lot of favorite things to say.

01:41:26.000 People are saying a lot of weird and wacky shit. 1.00

01:41:28.000 That's one of the wackiest. 1.00

01:41:29.000 Like, of course you can.

01:41:32.000 Racism only works when someone has power.

01:41:35.000 Well, when you're racist to someone, you have power over them.

01:41:37.000 Period.

01:41:38.000 Cultural power, like what, presumed across the board?

01:41:41.000 Yep.

01:41:41.000 Like black and white, like real simple, yes or no.

01:41:44.000 Binary, one or a zero.

01:41:45.000 Is that what we're doing?

01:41:46.000 Yep.

01:41:47.000 Is that people?

01:41:47.000 Of course not.

01:41:48.000 No, of course not.

01:41:49.000 Of course not.

01:41:49.000 Of course you could be racist.

01:41:51.000 You could judge someone prejudicely.

01:41:53.000 Well, and in fact, that is the key thing with Richard Nisbet's book, The Culture of Honor.

01:41:58.000 So Nisbet was a professor in the 90s at the height of political correctness, and he wanted to study culture.

01:42:04.000 And the problem was that he's a white man from the South, and he knew that if you studied any culture, you would have to say bad things about it.

01:42:12.000 So what does Richard Nisbet do?

01:42:15.000 He says, oh, I know one culture that I can say bad things about on a college campus.

01:42:20.000 I can say bad things about Southern culture.

01:42:23.000 That's a culture I can criticize freely.

01:42:26.000 And so what he did—and, you know, this, I think, gets really down to what are the strengths of, you know, sort of broadly Northern and Southern culture, right?

01:42:33.000 And, you know, Kennedy—John F. Kennedy had this great line about Washington, D.C. He said that it was a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

01:42:41.000 Right?

01:42:43.000 That's interesting.

01:42:44.000 Yeah.

01:42:45.000 And, you know, the potential for America is to be a country of Southern charm and Northern efficiency, but we're kind of got it backwards right now, right?

01:42:54.000 But so what Nisbet is doing is that he's charming the liberals, right?

01:42:59.000 Right?

01:42:59.000 Which is what Southerners do.

01:43:00.000 He's like, I'm going to study culture, but I'm going to study white Southern culture, and I'm going to show how bad it is. 0.85

01:43:07.000 Right?

01:43:08.000 And so they're like, okay, that feels safe and comfortable.

01:43:11.000 Right?

01:43:12.000 And that's essentially how he works his way into the conversation.

01:43:15.000 And specifically what he knew is he knew that Southern culture had this very particular problem.

01:43:20.000 And this very particular problem was that it had higher rates of homicide in very specific categories.

01:43:25.000 Right?

01:43:26.000 So it had higher rates of, you know, basically killings around trespassing and then killings around, you know, lover's triangles.

01:43:35.000 And so, for example, until 1970, if you found your wife in bed with another man in Texas, you could shoot him and it was justifiable homicide until 1970. Is it really only 70?

01:43:48.000 I thought it was really recent.

01:43:50.000 Well, I mean, that's my recollection.

01:43:52.000 I think that might still be a law.

01:43:57.000 Isn't there like a crime of passion law in Texas?

01:44:00.000 I feel like there is for some reason.

01:44:03.000 Well, they may have just moved the name or something.

01:44:05.000 I don't know.

01:44:06.000 Maybe I'm wrong.

01:44:07.000 But I know that people have been exonerated because of crimes of passion.

01:44:13.000 Like you're allowed to get pissed off and shoot people.

01:44:15.000 Here it goes. 0.96

01:44:16.000 Crime of passion, legal definition.

01:44:19.000 There's sometimes called a law of Texas since injuries in that state are supposedly lenient to cuck-holded lovers.

01:44:24.000 I love that expression.

01:44:26.000 Who wreak their own vengeance or wreck their own vengeance.

01:44:29.000 The benefit of eliminating premeditation is to lessen the provable homicide to manslaughter with no death penalty and limited prison terms.

01:44:37.000 So that's crimes of passion.

01:44:40.000 So it's not legal, but it's a much lesser crime.

01:44:45.000 Well, I think until 70, it was actually just straight up justifiable homicide.

01:44:49.000 So it was like straight up legal.

01:44:51.000 Now it's just crime of passion.

01:44:52.000 And now it's like a homicide.

01:44:53.000 It's a manslaughter or whatever.

01:44:54.000 Now you go to jail for six months.

01:44:55.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:44:56.000 But when you get out, everybody knows what the fuck is up. 0.99

01:44:59.000 It's basically, stay off my property. 0.99

01:45:01.000 Exactly. 0.99

01:45:02.000 God damn it. 0.99

01:45:02.000 It's that same psychology that plays out. 0.99

01:45:05.000 And so Nisbet – and by contrast, in the North, there are a lot of what are called – there are more 7-Eleven murders, which are basically murders or instrumental murders, which is where people kill people trying to get cash.

01:45:17.000 They're trying to get rich.

01:45:19.000 So there are these different – there's homicide in both places, but there are different types of homicides that predominate.

01:45:25.000 And Nisbet, essentially, you know, the big thing was to figure out why is that true, right?

01:45:31.000 And the answer is that it's this culture of honor that comes out of hurting.

01:45:35.000 And so the irony is that Southerners, who very often are the ones who feel most strongly about how problematic Muslims are, have the same culture. 0.90

01:45:45.000 And they engage in honor killings, and they do all these sorts of things.

01:45:50.000 But they don't do it to the same extent.

01:45:51.000 No, because in general, America is much less violent place, right?

01:45:54.000 But if it was more violent, then they would be forced to adapt to the new culture, which is Mad Max style.

01:46:00.000 That's right.

01:46:01.000 And what would happen to all the liberals? 0.98

01:46:03.000 And when your resources are extremely limited, like you live in a fucking desert, you're forced to become even more vicious about your protecting your boundaries and your property and your resources. 1.00

01:46:15.000 Fuck! 1.00

01:46:16.000 Fuck! 1.00

01:46:17.000 So again, how do we straighten out the African-American problem with crime and violence and terrible atmospheres that they have to imitate? 1.00

01:46:27.000 Well, that's the point, is that the thing that allows people to move past their cultural baggage is understanding their cultural baggage.

01:46:34.000 So it's that answer of why.

01:46:36.000 It's storytelling.

01:46:37.000 I did this in this environment because it made sense.

01:46:41.000 We are no longer in that environment.

01:46:43.000 Now it is problematic to me, therefore it screws me up.

01:46:46.000 So now I should behave in this way.

01:46:49.000 And then you can start to retrain what your impulses are.

01:46:52.000 So, you know, somebody bumps you, you know, somebody comes on your land, and your first impulse is not to go grab your shotgun and kill them. 0.79

01:46:59.000 Right?

01:46:59.000 And you don't worry so much of what it comes down to because it's crucially like they're honor killings, right?

01:47:04.000 So those cultures are obsessed with honor and in particular what you hear with African Americans is don't diss me, don't disrespect me, right? 0.98

01:47:12.000 So there's a real policing of one's honor and really making sure that nobody is fucking with me. 0.99

01:47:18.000 And it's the same thing with, you know, white rednecks, white Southerners, right? 0.99

01:47:21.000 Southern pride.

01:47:22.000 That's right.

01:47:23.000 Texas pride.

01:47:24.000 Don't mess with Texas.

01:47:25.000 Yeah.

01:47:26.000 Nobody says Delaware pride.

01:47:28.000 Yeah.

01:47:29.000 Well, that's because if you've been to Delaware, there's...

01:47:31.000 Maine pride.

01:47:33.000 It's just Maine pride.

01:47:34.000 Oh, they do love Maine. 1.00

01:47:35.000 Those fucking poor fucks. 1.00

01:47:36.000 Yeah, they do. 1.00

01:47:37.000 Trapped up there in a frozen wasteland.

01:47:39.000 With blueberries and lobster.

01:47:40.000 And Stephen King.

01:47:41.000 And Stephen King, yeah.

01:47:42.000 God bless him.

01:47:43.000 Yeah.

01:47:43.000 He's up there for the summer.

01:47:45.000 Summer.

01:47:45.000 And winters in Florida.

01:47:47.000 Yeah, he's a snowbird.

01:47:51.000 It's in many ways bad to not talk about this, right?

01:47:56.000 That is correct.

01:47:57.000 People that have the issue with even discussing the origins of certain types of behavior and comparing Different types of black people and different types of African Americans trying to figure out, or African former slaves, like why did the people in the West Indies behave differently than the people in America?

01:48:12.000 And it opens up this weird can of worms where people are not willing to discuss it openly.

01:48:18.000 It becomes taboo.

01:48:19.000 And that is why Sowell called his book Black Redneck White Liberals.

01:48:23.000 Because the problem is that because white liberals are not willing to discuss these things, what ends up happening is that you get African pride, right?

01:48:31.000 And you know, as Sowell points out, right, when was pride ever a good thing, right?

01:48:36.000 Pride is the feeling of that you know it all, that you have nothing to learn, right?

01:48:40.000 It's that feeling of arrogance. 0.99

01:48:42.000 Or he just happened to be from motherfucking America, son. 0.99

01:48:46.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

01:48:46.000 You wouldn't know about all that living your daydream time in fucking England when you're a little shit. 1.00

01:48:54.000 You lived until you were 18 in England, right? 1.00

01:48:56.000 Yeah.

01:48:56.000 It's a problem.

01:48:57.000 It is a problem.

01:48:58.000 Yeah, you can't be trusted.

01:48:59.000 That's a lot of cultural baggage. 1.00

01:49:01.000 It's Manchurian candidate type shit. 1.00

01:49:01.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

01:49:02.000 They got you.

01:49:03.000 We know the Siberian candidate.

01:49:06.000 Is there a Siberian candidate?

01:49:07.000 Well, people are saying Donald Trump is the Siberian candidate because Putin installed him.

01:49:11.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

01:49:12.000 Yeah, what do you think about this whole situation with Russia today? 0.91

01:49:15.000 Because it seems like that poor country doesn't know how to fucking get rid of that one guy who's their main dude, as much as Garry Kasparov talks about him. 0.91

01:49:24.000 Look at that hair. 0.97

01:49:24.000 That is wonderful. 0.97

01:49:26.000 What the hell is going on there?

01:49:28.000 Intel chiefs present Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.

01:49:32.000 Yeah.

01:49:32.000 Whoa.

01:49:32.000 Around this afternoon, like, breaking news sort of thing.

01:49:36.000 I don't know how breaking it is, but...

01:49:37.000 Russian efforts to compromise him.

01:49:39.000 They're playing to his ego.

01:49:43.000 Look at his eyebrows.

01:49:45.000 Did you read the thing by...

01:49:46.000 But hold on a second.

01:49:47.000 Scroll back up to that picture.

01:49:48.000 Tell me that's not a Dr. Seuss character.

01:49:51.000 That's the mayor of Whoville. 1.00

01:49:54.000 That is the fucking mayor of Whoville. 0.99

01:49:56.000 I mean, the whole thing is just, what's happening here? 1.00

01:50:00.000 What is all that?

01:50:03.000 Wow.

01:50:05.000 So they're presenting him.

01:50:07.000 I wonder what he's going to do about all that, including allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.

01:50:15.000 Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN... Hmm.

01:50:20.000 The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to report on Russian intelligence in the 2016 election.

01:50:28.000 The allegations came in part from memos compiled by former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible.

01:50:38.000 The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed...

01:50:47.000 This is a weird time, man.

01:50:49.000 It is a very weird time. 0.99

01:50:50.000 So fucking... 0.98

01:50:52.000 It's so crazy to think that we're in a Cold War again. 1.00

01:50:54.000 How did we duck that forever?

01:50:56.000 Through the whole Clinton administration, that was a non-issue.

01:50:59.000 Through the entire Bush administration, non-issue. 0.97

01:51:02.000 Through the entire Obama administration, non-fucking-issue until 2012-ish. 0.90

01:51:07.000 And then you start hearing about it again. 0.95

01:51:09.000 Well, a large part of what's happened is that our environment has changed, but our culture has not.

01:51:14.000 So if you look at in the 1950s, right, if you're talking about the marketplace of ideas, you had these guys like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and they had a thing called journalistic integrity, right?

01:51:25.000 What about Brian Williams?

01:51:26.000 And Brian Williams. 0.99

01:51:28.000 Ryan fucking Williams, right? 0.99

01:51:30.000 Yeah, that guy. 0.99

01:51:31.000 He's just as good as any of them.

01:51:33.000 Tell you what, that guy can tell a good story.

01:51:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:51:37.000 But journalistic integrity is now gone.

01:51:39.000 Don Lemon?

01:51:40.000 Don Lemon?

01:51:41.000 Step back.

01:51:42.000 Respect Lemon.

01:51:44.000 Step back and respect him.

01:51:46.000 He's had to check people.

01:51:47.000 I don't know if you know.

01:51:48.000 No?

01:51:48.000 He's had to check people.

01:51:51.000 Jesus.

01:51:51.000 It was one of my favorite things that he ever said on TV. Someone was talking about something.

01:51:56.000 It was something about...

01:51:56.000 I don't remember what it was.

01:51:58.000 What was it when Don Lemon was saying he had to check people?

01:52:01.000 I had to check some people in my life.

01:52:02.000 It was like people talking sexist or something like that.

01:52:06.000 He was just telling people he had to check people in his life. 1.00

01:52:09.000 Shut the fuck up, Don Lemon. 1.00

01:52:10.000 You're not checking anybody. 1.00

01:52:12.000 Anybody you check tells you to shut your mouth.

01:52:14.000 What's so funny?

01:52:16.000 I guess something in this report that just came out, which is also going around now.

01:52:20.000 I'll let you go ahead and read this.

01:52:21.000 Report Trump allegedly hired prostitutes for a golden shower party on Ritz Moscow bed where Obama Michelle slept.

01:52:29.000 What?

01:52:30.000 This is right out of the report, this highlighted part.

01:52:33.000 Okay, here it says, there were aspects of Trump's engagement with Russian authorities, one of which had borne fruit to them, was exploit Trump's personal obsessions with sexual perversion in order to obtain a sustainable compromising material on him.

01:52:47.000 According to Source D, where he had been present, Trump's perverted conduct Wow.

01:53:19.000 The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to. 0.99

01:53:28.000 Holy shit! 0.99

01:53:29.000 They just go to the Ritz-Carlton and they set up microphones and cameras? 1.00

01:53:32.000 Oh yeah, that's the Russian way.

01:53:34.000 Oh, but the Ritz-Carlton?

01:53:36.000 Oh, yeah.

01:53:37.000 That's crazy.

01:53:38.000 But that's the nature.

01:53:39.000 I mean, you know.

01:53:39.000 So if you jerk off of the Ritz-Carlton, what do you put a blanket over?

01:53:43.000 Where's the fucking camera? 0.99

01:53:46.000 You'd have to put a blanket over everything, because there are going to be a lot of cameras in that room. 0.99

01:53:51.000 My friend Mike Swick, who's a former UFC fighter, worked in Russia with the American Secret Service a long time ago, and he said that they found these listening devices hidden inside buildings that were powered by the movement of the building during the wind.

01:54:08.000 Like, what?

01:54:09.000 Yeah.

01:54:10.000 They have their own...

01:54:10.000 Their power source is literally the building moving in the wind was...

01:54:15.000 He said it was so far beyond anything that they had ever figured out, that the Americans had figured out at the time.

01:54:21.000 And they were just all about surveillance.

01:54:23.000 Well, that was the things that the Soviet Union did well, right?

01:54:26.000 There were a few things that the Soviet Union really put their attention on, like space and surveillance and espionage and all that sort of stuff, and the military, and they did those very well. 0.82

01:54:37.000 That sounds like horseshit to me.

01:54:39.000 That sounds like something somebody would say if you're trying to make... 0.99

01:54:43.000 Well, it is from BuzzFeed.

01:54:44.000 But it sounds like something someone would say, but the quote is not, though, right?

01:54:48.000 No, where's the quote from?

01:54:49.000 The quote is from...

01:54:51.000 The story was from BuzzFeed, but that's just the actual report is where that was from.

01:54:55.000 That report that they were talking about in the previous article we brought up.

01:54:58.000 Oh, so it's from the...

01:54:59.000 It's from the CIA. Not the CIA, but...

01:55:03.000 I'll show you the thing here.

01:55:05.000 This is the report here.

01:55:07.000 It's like a...

01:55:08.000 Company intelligence report.

01:55:09.000 Yeah, it's a long report.

01:55:10.000 U.S. presidential...

01:55:11.000 Hold on.

01:55:11.000 Sorry.

01:55:12.000 Go back up there.

01:55:13.000 U.S. presidential election.

01:55:14.000 Republican candidate Donald Trump's activity in Russia in compromising relationship with the Kremlin.

01:55:19.000 Wow.

01:55:20.000 It's just long pages in this paragraph right here.

01:55:22.000 So now we have to talk about golden showers apparently.

01:55:25.000 But here's the thing.

01:55:28.000 We know.

01:55:29.000 We've always known that intelligence agencies will distribute propaganda.

01:55:34.000 We know that.

01:55:35.000 That's 100% factual.

01:55:37.000 But that's the problem, and that's the problem in general, is that you know that the CIA engages in that sort of behavior.

01:55:44.000 Of course.

01:55:44.000 You know that the FSB, the Russian Security Service, engages in that behavior.

01:55:48.000 Of course.

01:55:49.000 Who do you trust?

01:55:50.000 Who do you trust?

01:55:51.000 And that's the basic problem of 2017, 2016. 100%.

01:55:55.000 Who the fuck do you trust? 1.00

01:55:56.000 Who the fuck do you trust? 0.99

01:55:56.000 So you gotta know that if someone from any agency is telling you something, what would it serve them to tell you 100% the truth without any manipulation whatsoever in order to gain favor, 0.99

01:56:13.000 in order to gain influence, in order to gain...

01:56:16.000 Would the CIA have any motivation to be 100% accurate about it?

01:56:21.000 Why?

01:56:22.000 Well, I mean, you know, I mean, the CIA, obviously Donald Trump is not clearly a friend to the CIA, right?

01:56:28.000 He's already made it clear that he has issues with the intelligence community.

01:56:32.000 Boy, it sounds so crazy because he's not even in there yet.

01:56:35.000 Nope.

01:56:35.000 And he hasn't been briefed by them and he's been rejecting that.

01:56:38.000 And I mean, that's the point. 0.80

01:56:40.000 We live in, you know, the old Chinese curse. 1.00

01:56:42.000 We live in interesting times.

01:56:43.000 I'll tell you one thing, though.

01:56:45.000 If it comes out that there was a bunch of girls that he hired to piss all over the bed, people are going to cheer him in the streets. 0.99

01:56:53.000 Well, some people will.

01:56:54.000 There's the people that loved him in the first place.

01:56:56.000 There's going to be a ton of them.

01:56:58.000 They're going to be like, who cares?

01:56:59.000 The guy had a good time.

01:57:00.000 Yep.

01:57:01.000 And that's because, again, it's Klan. 0.67

01:57:03.000 You know, it is that culture of authority and grouping around and being loyal and all that sort of stuff.

01:57:08.000 Of course.

01:57:09.000 And those are the big sort of conservative, you know, hillbilly redneck intuitions, right? 0.64

01:57:15.000 As opposed to liberals are like, let's care for everybody.

01:57:17.000 Mm-hmm.

01:57:37.000 I mean, in the ideal situation, the Republicans and the Democrats work like mommy and daddy, right?

01:57:43.000 And, you know, it's not that mommy and daddy have it all figured out.

01:57:47.000 But if mommy and daddy have a productive working relationship, then the sort of, like, take personal responsibility, you know, man up, like, do all these sorts of things, is counteracted by a certain understanding, compassion, all that sort of stuff.

01:58:00.000 And then the parenting that emerges is better than what either of them would do on their own. 0.98

01:58:05.000 Or they can both get dysfunctional as fuck, and mommy becomes an enabling snowflake machine, right? 1.00

01:58:13.000 And daddy just becomes an abusive asshole who won't pay child support and just berates his children and is like, what the fuck is wrong with you? 1.00

01:58:20.000 Grow the fuck up! 1.00

01:58:21.000 Come on, pussy! 1.00

01:58:22.000 Come on, pussy! 1.00

01:58:22.000 And so that's really where America is, is mommy and daddy are fighting, and you know... 1.00

01:58:28.000 And fundamentally, like, mommy and daddy are having the most dysfunctional relationship possible.

01:58:33.000 And Rush is our crazy neighbor. 1.00

01:58:34.000 Who's like, what a great opportunity to come in and fuck mommy, right? 1.00

01:58:38.000 Wow. 1.00

01:58:39.000 Rush is trying to fuck mommy. 1.00

01:58:41.000 I can't believe this. 1.00

01:58:43.000 Makes sense.

01:58:44.000 But it's also—it's good for Putin because what does the godfather want?

01:58:48.000 The godfather—so I think it's important to understand, like, the disaster of American foreign policy.

01:58:54.000 What is that about, right?

01:58:56.000 And it's because modern Americans have grown up in, you know, essentially the most successful, most productive, most stable country in history, right?

01:59:05.000 And so, you know, if you're, you know, as many generations into democracy as you are, there's not a real understanding of how you get to democracy, right?

01:59:14.000 Right?

01:59:14.000 We just sort of inherited democracy.

01:59:16.000 And we're like, I don't know how you make one. 0.90

01:59:18.000 And then you get these ridiculous fables that Americans have about themselves where they think that essentially, you know, King George III was this awful, vicious dictator. 0.85

01:59:29.000 And then we kick the dictator out and then democracy. 0.91

01:59:32.000 And so that's all you have to do is you have to go in and you have to remove dictators.

01:59:36.000 And if we just keep removing dictators, then democracy will emerge.

01:59:39.000 Well, what happens when you remove Saddam Hussein? 0.87

01:59:42.000 Vacuum.

01:59:42.000 Yeah!

01:59:43.000 Fills up with...

01:59:44.000 Isis!

01:59:46.000 Isn't that delicious, right?

01:59:48.000 Or, you know, you remove Gaddafi, right?

01:59:50.000 What happens?

01:59:52.000 Vacuum.

01:59:53.000 Yeah.

01:59:53.000 And then what happens?

01:59:55.000 ISIS! Al-Qaeda, all these sorts of things.

01:59:58.000 So the big question that has always been in political science and that Francis Fukuyama frames is that it's always been, why is it that the American Revolution succeeded and the French Revolution descended into bloody violence?

02:00:12.000 And the answer is, is that they were actually at two different stages of development.

02:00:16.000 Yeah.

02:00:17.000 Incorrect. 1.00

02:00:18.000 The answer is America is the shit, and French are a bunch of pussies, and they couldn't pull it off! 1.00

02:00:25.000 Exactly. 1.00

02:00:26.000 That is correct.

02:00:27.000 That is correct.

02:00:28.000 Freedom fries.

02:00:29.000 Have some freedom fries.

02:00:30.000 Kick back and relax.

02:00:32.000 Yeah, so that's actually the answer, and I'm sorry I take back everything that I said earlier.

02:00:36.000 But it is the blaming of, you know, not necessarily blaming, but understanding the root of the behavior as being cultural.

02:00:45.000 Mm-hmm.

02:00:48.000 Ideologies that we become imprisoned to, these patterns of behavior that we become imprisoned to, and that we're all subject to it.

02:00:55.000 Anyone with an accent understands that this is where it comes from, that we imitate behavior that is around us.

02:01:00.000 And if we're in around an area, like we're talking about the Middle East, with poor resources and scarcity and a lot of violence, this is the type of behavior that we're going to control our women, dress them up, cover them up like beekeepers. 1.00

02:01:13.000 We've got to keep them away from the other swinging dicks. 0.99

02:01:15.000 That's right. 1.00

02:01:16.000 Those fucking assholes that are going to come over the hill with the swords and the horses. 1.00

02:01:19.000 That's right. 1.00

02:01:19.000 Because that's what's been going on forever. 1.00

02:01:21.000 Exactly.

02:01:21.000 I mean, if you look at Iraq, one of the craziest stories about Iraq was Iraq with Baghdad being invaded by the Mongols and then killing everybody and running the streets red with blood and black with ink and the rivers would fucking be filled with the philosophy and all the writings from all these Islamic There's theorists and all these different scholars who were far ahead of that aspect or the rest of that part of the world at the time.

02:01:51.000 That's right.

02:01:52.000 I mean, so much mathematics, so much philosophy, so much knowledge came from that part of the world.

02:01:57.000 It was totally lost when they were invaded.

02:02:00.000 And so much of it is that there's an old quote that floats around, which is that if Nobel Prizes had been given out in the year 1000, they all would have gone to Arabs.

02:02:09.000 Yeah, amazing, isn't it?

02:02:11.000 They were at the forefront, and the point is that it tells you something, which is that success is not a permanent condition.

02:02:17.000 Cultures can gain it, and cultures can lose it, and you better figure out what is it that makes a culture successful so you can preserve those values, fight for those values, instill them, spread them, all that sort of stuff.

02:02:28.000 And that's why Putin is jockeying for power, because he believes that there's a turnover going on right now. 0.68

02:02:34.000 And they just hired a fucking reality star to run the biggest nuclear arsenal the world has ever known. 0.99

02:02:39.000 Holy shit, this might be the time. 1.00

02:02:41.000 Yep. 0.99

02:02:41.000 And the instability that is being created is that you gave everyone a microphone. 0.99

02:02:48.000 That's what the internet is.

02:02:50.000 Right?

02:02:50.000 Like, we're literally sitting here, right?

02:02:52.000 And, you know, you can start a show, and if people resonate with the show, great!

02:02:56.000 And the point is that there are some people like you who can hold two contradictory ideas in their head, right?

02:03:03.000 And you can, like, wrestle with that.

02:03:05.000 And you're like, man, how do I make sense of both of these things?

02:03:08.000 That, you know, capitalism is, you know, fundamentally generates wealth and prosperity and all that sort of stuff, but corporations can do fucked up things, right?

02:03:16.000 How do I reconcile those two different things?

02:03:18.000 Right.

02:03:41.000 And so they come up with this idea called anarcho-capitalism.

02:03:44.000 And anarcho-capitalism is the idea that we're just going to remove all government, and then the free market will solve all problems.

02:03:51.000 So there's literally going to be minimal or no government.

02:03:54.000 They're the most annoying people. 0.89

02:03:57.000 Anarchists, to me, are the most annoying people. 1.00

02:03:58.000 You don't know that that's going to fall to shit. 1.00

02:04:01.000 You don't know that people aren't going to fix the streets. 0.98

02:04:02.000 Where's the money for education coming from?

02:04:04.000 Who's going to hire cops? 0.76

02:04:05.000 Anybody?

02:04:05.000 No laws at all?

02:04:07.000 No laws at all? 1.00

02:04:08.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

02:04:09.000 God, that's so stupid. 1.00

02:04:10.000 Well, I got in a big fight over the Christmas holidays with a group of anarcho-capitalists, and it was literally, because one of them, there were two things. 1.00

02:04:20.000 We interviewed, there's this guy, Peter Schiff.

02:04:22.000 Yeah, I've had him on.

02:04:23.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:04:24.000 So anyway, so I interviewed Peter Schiff, and part of the experience of doing this podcast with Brian Callen is we interviewed all these academics, right?

02:04:35.000 206 of them, right?

02:04:36.000 And then at episode 206, there were two things that we sort of noticed.

02:04:41.000 A, there were all these amazing ideas.

02:04:43.000 B, you would find that any academic knew about his amazing idea and nobody else's.

02:04:50.000 Like, they didn't know about anything else that was going on in science or anything like that.

02:04:53.000 Sort of like Meryl Streep doesn't understand MMA. Exactly. 0.90

02:04:56.000 So it's the Meryl Streep effect, right?

02:04:59.000 That's what academics are like.

02:05:01.000 And again, it actually comes out of sort of what the Western cultural bias is, which is towards this thing called atomism, right?

02:05:07.000 Like scientists are super focused on a tiny, tiny question.

02:05:10.000 They don't look for the bigger picture.

02:05:12.000 And we reached this frustration where essentially we were like, these ideas, you can't, you know, there's an old George Bernard Shaw joke about economists.

02:05:22.000 He said all the economists laid end to end would never reach a conclusion.

02:05:26.000 LAUGHTER I think?

02:05:46.000 Right.

02:05:47.000 How do we do these things?

02:05:48.000 Right.

02:06:11.000 So there's what's called the science-to-narrative chain, where you're supposed to take science, all of this research, and supposed to turn it into simple stories that people can understand and get.

02:06:19.000 And there is, in fact, just to give you a sense of this problem, like, everybody knows that scientists aren't the best communicators, right?

02:06:25.000 Like, the ones that are, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? 0.95

02:06:29.000 You get on this show, because you're like, man, a fucking scientist who can communicate like a human, right? 0.99

02:06:34.000 Or Carl Sagan, or, but, you know, these people are fucking unicorns. 0.99

02:06:37.000 They're very, very rare in the scientific community. 0.97

02:06:40.000 So my very specific experience was when I graduated from college, I started tutoring just to pay my bills.

02:06:48.000 But I was really trying to figure out, I had this weird experience where I would be working with kids, and I would hear them say things like, oh, I didn't get the math gene. 0.98

02:06:56.000 I was like, what the fuck is that? 0.99

02:06:58.000 Math gene? 0.99

02:06:58.000 Because I was a biochemistry major. 0.99

02:07:00.000 So I'm like, wait a minute, you're 13 and failing biology, and you're telling me that you have a math gene, and I just majored in biochemistry, and we don't know about any math gene over there, so what the fuck are you talking about? 0.95

02:07:14.000 Someone's telling them that. 0.91

02:07:15.000 Somehow they're picking that up.

02:07:17.000 And they're getting this idea.

02:07:18.000 That's right.

02:07:18.000 Limited potential.

02:07:20.000 That's right.

02:07:21.000 Now, so that was a detective hunt that I went on.

02:07:24.000 I was like, because there's a lot of these things.

02:07:25.000 I don't have a natural ear for languages, right?

02:07:27.000 That's another big one we heard.

02:07:28.000 And, you know, oh, I'm not a natural writer and all these sorts of things. 0.99

02:07:32.000 And I was like, what are all these fucking beliefs, right? 0.98

02:07:36.000 And I could tell that they were problematic and that they were self-defeating. 0.99

02:07:40.000 And specifically, you know, having moved between all of these cultures, I'd seen that different cultures have very different ideas about intelligence.

02:07:47.000 So, especially if you, like, my mother and my father side by side on the issue of learning languages.

02:07:53.000 My dad is Dutch, okay? 0.96

02:07:55.000 Now, when you're Dutch, you grow up with one great certainty in life, which is that no one will ever fucking learn Dutch. 0.99

02:08:01.000 Like, literally no one is ever going to fucking learn Dutch. 0.99

02:08:05.000 So if you want to get a job and you want to be competitive, you better learn literally everybody else's fucking language. 0.98

02:08:10.000 So, you know, it's routine in Holland to speak three, four languages. 0.98

02:08:15.000 And, you know, my dad spoke ten, right?

02:08:17.000 He studied ten different languages in his life.

02:08:20.000 That's crazy.

02:08:20.000 Well, and it's actually, anybody who comes from a lot of these minority languages, sort of smaller, shittier languages, you find they do this.

02:08:28.000 So Poles routinely learn a lot of languages.

02:08:30.000 People from Southeast Asia routinely learn a lot of languages.

02:08:33.000 And again, it's that environment.

02:08:34.000 Like, you lost the language lottery, and so you better make up for it. 0.71

02:08:38.000 Like, you're just going to have to do that.

02:08:40.000 And at a certain point, when you've learned three or four languages, it's now like, oh, you've, like, sussed this thing out.

02:08:46.000 You're like, oh, I get how this works.

02:08:48.000 Like, this is just about work, and there are certain techniques and certain approaches.

02:08:51.000 You start to get really, really good at it.

02:08:53.000 So, you know, I really sort of, from my dad, picked up this love of learning languages.

02:08:57.000 And my dad is, you know, sort of especially into languages.

02:09:00.000 Like...

02:09:01.000 He didn't really like school, and every time they would tell him he had to take another subject, he would look up another language to take.

02:09:07.000 So, for example, he ended up taking Swedish because in the 60s and 70s, all the pornos were made in Swedish.

02:09:15.000 And he wanted to know what they were saying between sexual thrusts, right? 0.91

02:09:20.000 Oh, that's hilarious. 0.86

02:09:21.000 So he learns Swedish. 0.99

02:09:22.000 He learns all these fucking weird languages, right? 0.99

02:09:24.000 Because they were like, okay, you need me to take another class. 0.99

02:09:27.000 I'm going to do something that I enjoy, right?

02:09:29.000 Like pretty normal.

02:09:30.000 Makes sense.

02:09:31.000 But then on the other hand, my mom's from Kansas. 0.68

02:09:33.000 Yeah.

02:09:36.000 Yeah.

02:09:56.000 I feel like the issue here is that you just think about languages in different ways.

02:10:01.000 Like, I don't know that it's that you have different potential, you just have different attitudes to it.

02:10:06.000 Right.

02:10:06.000 So, hearing all these kids say all these bizarre things, and, you know, at the time I was doing a tutoring company with a friend of mine from college who is from New England.

02:10:16.000 And, you know, the New England is that Puritan culture, right?

02:10:19.000 It's, you know, all self-denial, no fun, work hard, all that sort of stuff.

02:10:24.000 So she also heard all of these weird and wacky beliefs. 0.99

02:10:27.000 And she was like, you know, reacted in the most Puritan way possible, which is like, you're just being fucking lazy. 1.00

02:10:34.000 Like, fucking, like, do your fucking work. 1.00

02:10:36.000 No excuses, right? 1.00

02:10:37.000 It's that Boston attitude, right?

02:10:39.000 That is a so prevalent attitude.

02:10:42.000 And so, you know, you've got this Bostonian, and then you've got this half-Dutch, half-American, you know, lived with the Limeys, you know, all this sort of stuff, right?

02:10:50.000 And we're like, we're the outsiders. 0.94

02:10:52.000 It's that experience that you talked about of foreigners who come to America or anybody, and we're like, this culture of L.A. is fucking weird. 0.85

02:11:00.000 Now, what brought you here?

02:11:02.000 Well, I always wanted to move to the West Coast.

02:11:05.000 So, you know, I watched Triggered last night, and I agree with you that California is the best place on Earth.

02:11:10.000 LAUGHTER Right. 0.99

02:11:36.000 And I think that LA is the place where it's like, nobody gives a fuck where you come from. 0.99

02:11:41.000 Like, there isn't that hierarchy. 0.97

02:11:43.000 You know, all that sort of stuff doesn't matter.

02:11:45.000 It's the Wild West, and I love that.

02:11:47.000 It definitely is in a lot of ways.

02:11:49.000 I mean, to me, I think it's the last place that people, you know, they landed on the East Coast.

02:11:53.000 They made their way to the West Coast.

02:11:54.000 They said, well, I don't want to live in Hawaii, so this is where we'll stay.

02:11:57.000 And the people that did move to Hawaii, that's why. 0.97

02:12:01.000 I mean, I fucking love Hawaii. 0.82

02:12:03.000 One of the things I love about it is the expats. 0.97

02:12:05.000 We're good to go.

02:12:27.000 Because the internet, you know, it's just pretty much access evenly to everything other than like what's immediately in your area.

02:12:34.000 But also, I think also it's important to talk about like how do humans actually work, right?

02:12:39.000 And it's often that, you know, I mean, so a large part of what comes out of the science is that thinking and feeling are always linked, right?

02:12:46.000 And so we're often driven by feelings that we can't quite explain, right?

02:12:49.000 So, you know, why was I also motivated by L.A.? I think there was some attraction to the entertainment industry, comedy, storytelling.

02:12:59.000 I don't really, you know, like, if you're being really honest, like, why the fuck do you make any decision that you make when you're 22, 23? 0.80

02:13:05.000 Right. 0.93

02:13:06.000 Who knows?

02:13:07.000 And there's some sort of cultural baggage that's driving you there.

02:13:10.000 Baywatch.

02:13:11.000 Baywatch.

02:13:11.000 Exactly.

02:13:12.000 But you have some sort of fantasy version.

02:13:14.000 It is the Feivel-Mauskiewicz effect.

02:13:16.000 Sure.

02:13:16.000 Where you're like, you know, you think there are no cats in Los Angeles and the streets are paved with cheese.

02:13:22.000 And then you get out here and you're like, there are fucking Scientologists everywhere. 0.99

02:13:26.000 Yeah, man. 0.98

02:13:27.000 Well, dude, that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about before we get...

02:13:32.000 I wanted to talk to you about your calling Richard Dawkins a Scientologist.

02:13:37.000 Yeah.

02:13:38.000 So you've now gotten a taste of some of the things that are going on across science.

02:13:43.000 Right.

02:13:44.000 There's lots of really exciting stuff that can actually change and improve and help people's lives.

02:13:50.000 But one of the things that I think you pointed out that's incredibly critical is that...

02:13:54.000 In order to be at the top of your field, you must be completely absorbed in that particular subject and oftentimes a lot like all the other systems that we find, limited resources and you really don't have the time or the energy or even the inclination to study all these other Comparable systems or different disciplines or it's like I mean There's many many many many examples of that but singular focus is which usually leads to greatness and

02:14:24.000 when you're reading about some professor's peer-reviewed work that's incredibly groundbreaking Oftentimes you're dealing with a form of greatness and that requires massive tunnel vision Well, that's the interesting thing.

02:14:37.000 So we should talk about what tunnel vision is, right?

02:14:39.000 So there's, you know, just as we have optimism and pessimism, there are these other two mindsets, atomism and holism, right?

02:14:46.000 And atomism is seeing the tree, right? 0.92

02:14:49.000 You, like, ignore the fucking forest and you're just like, I'm going to look at that one fucking tree and become the world's expert in that. 0.92

02:14:55.000 And then there's holism, which is seeing the big picture, seeing the forest, seeing all that sort of stuff. 0.98

02:15:00.000 Now, again, everybody has these mindsets, but different cultures favor them differently, again, because of the environmental pressures of that environment.

02:15:08.000 So the Greeks massively favored atomism.

02:15:11.000 And if you look at the behavior of the Greeks, right, the ancient Greeks, they were constantly picking everything apart, right?

02:15:17.000 Because they were pirates, right?

02:15:19.000 They were pirates and traders and fishermen. 0.98

02:15:21.000 And in that environment, it's not about cooperation or anything like that.

02:15:25.000 It's about everybody just trying to get ahead for themselves and all that sort of stuff.

02:15:28.000 Very individualistic, all of that stuff.

02:15:31.000 And so when they would have leisure time, what were the things they did?

02:15:35.000 Well, they would go and they would go into the marketplace and they would argue with each other and pick apart each other's arguments.

02:15:40.000 And they would just pick, [...

02:15:42.000 And that's what logic is and rhetoric and all that sort of stuff. 0.90

02:15:45.000 And then they would also, you know, when they had other leisure time, they would go and see who could throw shit furthest, right? 0.98

02:15:52.000 Like, who could run fastest. 0.97

02:15:54.000 It's all about standing out.

02:15:56.000 It's all about trying to excel and be the best.

02:15:58.000 And what happened is that, you know, during the Renaissance, they...

02:16:03.000 Say that again?

02:16:04.000 Renaissance?

02:16:04.000 Or Renaissance?

02:16:06.000 Renaissance?

02:16:06.000 No one in America says it like that.

02:16:09.000 Renaissance.

02:16:11.000 So what is the American way?

02:16:13.000 I want to fit in, Joe.

02:16:14.000 Renaissance.

02:16:15.000 Renaissance.

02:16:16.000 Yeah, like Paris.

02:16:17.000 Or like the Renaissance Fair?

02:16:18.000 It's not Paris.

02:16:20.000 It's Paris.

02:16:21.000 Paris.

02:16:21.000 France.

02:16:22.000 Say France.

02:16:23.000 France.

02:16:23.000 Not France.

02:16:24.000 France.

02:16:25.000 Well, I just have to really channel my inner Kansas.

02:16:29.000 Sorry, the Renaissance. 0.98

02:16:30.000 Well, whatever you want to fucking call it, right? 0.96

02:16:32.000 The rebirth, right? 0.98

02:16:33.000 The rebirth, right?

02:16:34.000 They basically were obsessed with the Greeks.

02:16:37.000 The Romans were obsessed with the Greeks.

02:16:39.000 And then when the rebirth, the Renaissance happened, they were obsessed with the Romans and the Greeks.

02:16:56.000 Mm-hmm.

02:17:01.000 Over in Asia, right, they have different incentives, which is rice farming.

02:17:05.000 And so what happens is that rice farming is, you know, you have to be super cooperative because the water runs down the mountain, it runs through my paddy field, but then it runs through your neighbor's paddy field and all that sort of stuff.

02:17:15.000 So I have to have relations with my neighbor and that neighbor, and then I have to think about how it affects the next guy and the next guy and the next guy and the next guy.

02:17:22.000 So they favor holism.

02:17:24.000 How does everything fit together?

02:17:26.000 And so if you look at What is Eastern culture about?

02:17:30.000 What are those ancient Asian cultures about?

02:17:31.000 It's all about yin and yang, things fitting together and complementing it all being part of a larger system.

02:17:37.000 And Confucianism was all about the family and relationships and everybody has their proper role and you all sort of have to belong and all of that sort of stuff, right?

02:17:47.000 So, which set of biases do you think that science has baked into its culture?

02:17:52.000 Atomism.

02:17:53.000 Yeah!

02:17:54.000 And so when you get the structure of scientific culture as it stands today, it's super atomistic, right?

02:18:01.000 Now, if you look at things like economics and psychology and, you know, biology and all of these sorts of things, they're all studying the natural world.

02:18:10.000 And in fact, there's a whole bunch of disciplines that are all studying humans and how they behave and all of that sort of stuff.

02:18:16.000 And yet they're all broken up into separate disciplines.

02:18:18.000 And now, they're sort of doubling down on those intuitions, and they're now breaking up those disciplines into sub-disciplines, and smaller disciplines, and smaller disciplines.

02:18:27.000 And left to their own devices, they'll just keep splitting up and getting smaller and smaller.

02:18:31.000 And where does feminism fit in all this? 1.00

02:18:33.000 Well, what happens is that as you get smaller and smaller and smaller disciplines, it doesn't necessarily make the science better.

02:18:44.000 It can make the science worse.

02:18:47.000 Yeah.

02:19:09.000 Right?

02:19:09.000 And the second one goes along and he feels the trunk and it rides in his hands and he jumps back startled and he's like, it's a snake!

02:19:15.000 Right?

02:19:15.000 And the third one feels the leg.

02:19:17.000 He thinks it's a column.

02:19:18.000 The fourth one feels the side.

02:19:19.000 He thinks it's a wall.

02:19:20.000 And then the fifth one feels the ear and decides that it's a palm leaf. 1.00

02:19:24.000 And then they all proceed to beat the shit out of each other because clearly everybody else is a fucking idiot and they need to die because they know that it's a rope, it's a snake, it's a leg, it's a wall, it's a column, whatever it is. 1.00

02:19:36.000 Right? 1.00

02:19:37.000 Now, if you look at something like feminism, right? 1.00

02:19:41.000 Feminism is making certain claims about biology, right? 1.00

02:19:44.000 It's making claims about how male gender works, how female gender works.

02:19:49.000 You know, they should be looking at things like genetics, and they should be looking at, you know, chromosomes, and they should be looking at evolution to see how evolution might have selected for differences in men and women because there are different competing pressures for men and women.

02:20:02.000 And in fact, if you go into, you know, So if I go into,

02:20:20.000 you know, the circles of Yes.

02:20:47.000 So if you want to solve the problem, what you have to do is that you have to make each discipline accountable to all the other disciplines.

02:20:54.000 You have to make people responsive to evidence outside of their field.

02:20:59.000 So if you take someone like Richard Dawkins, has Richard Dawkins gone down his particular rabbit hole of figuring out his tiny piece of the world?

02:21:10.000 Yes, he has done that.

02:21:11.000 And what makes you think that?

02:21:13.000 Well, I can tell you.

02:21:14.000 So, in general, what you're going to find is that there's, in a lot of different fields, you're going to find that there are two competing theories right now.

02:21:23.000 So, for example, if you look in economics, there's this idea, you know, there's sort of what are called classical economics, and they have this idea called rational agent theory.

02:21:33.000 And they basically think it's a reasonable approximation to assume that people are rational, right?

02:21:38.000 That they act as rational individuals and all this sort of stuff.

02:21:41.000 And then, meanwhile, there's another school called Behavioral Economics.

02:21:45.000 And because of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who were these two Israeli psychologists in the 1970s, who started to study human rationality, and, you know, I'm sure this will come as a huge surprise, but what they found is that humans aren't that rational.

02:21:58.000 Right?

02:21:59.000 And so there was a group of economists who say, hey, our whole discipline is based on this idea of rational agent theory, but when we look at psychology, that assumption doesn't check out, and it leads to a whole bunch of bad conclusions.

02:22:13.000 So they formed a new school of economics called behavioral economics, which is based on all the findings of psychology, how humans actually think, and all that sort of stuff.

02:22:22.000 Now, these two schools are warring, right?

02:22:24.000 They're two fighting tribes.

02:22:26.000 But what ends up happening is that they can't solve that discipline.

02:22:30.000 They can't solve that in the context of academia, right?

02:22:34.000 They fire papers back and forth.

02:22:36.000 Lots of discussions are had and all that sort of stuff.

02:22:38.000 But essentially, you have a recurring problem in science, which is that scientists won't let go of their pet theories.

02:22:46.000 They won't let their theories die.

02:22:48.000 And Max Planck, the physicist, had this famous quote that he said, science precedes one funeral at a time.

02:22:55.000 And essentially what happens is that science doesn't progress because, you know, people are like, hey, new evidence came out.

02:23:02.000 Turns out I was wrong.

02:23:04.000 Now I'm going to change my mind because it's their theory.

02:23:08.000 And so they keep on fighting for and defending their theory until they're dead. 0.99

02:23:12.000 And then the discipline is like, oh, OK, now that that guy's dead, obviously that was dumb all along. 0.99

02:23:18.000 Let's move forward. 0.98

02:23:19.000 Yeah.

02:23:19.000 Interesting.

02:23:20.000 So ego becomes this sort of trap.

02:23:22.000 Huge problem.

02:23:23.000 Huge problem for science in general.

02:23:25.000 And so if you look at, for example, that rational agent theory dispute, there's one of the big founders of behavioral economics, this guy Richard Thaler.

02:23:35.000 Basically, you know, he tells a great story.

02:23:37.000 And the story is that he's at a dinner party.

02:23:40.000 And at this dinner party, there's this famous economist from the whole rational agent theory camp.

02:23:46.000 And there's also like a bunch of other academics, like a psychologist.

02:23:51.000 Right. 1.00

02:24:12.000 And then he goes, and my students, my students are so fucking dumb, right? 1.00

02:24:16.000 They can't even understand the most basic economic concepts and all that sort of stuff. 1.00

02:24:21.000 And so the psychologist pipes up and says, how come all the people in your theories are geniuses, but all the people you know in real life are idiots? 1.00

02:24:32.000 And that's a problem. 1.00

02:24:34.000 That's a real problem for your theory, right?

02:24:36.000 Because your observations about reality do not fit your theory.

02:24:43.000 But what does this guy do?

02:24:44.000 Does this guy say, you know what?

02:24:46.000 I'm going to fall my sword.

02:24:48.000 I'm going to throw out 30, 40 years of work on a bad idea.

02:24:51.000 No, he's not going to say that.

02:24:52.000 Instead, what he does is he does what Richard Thaler calls the invisible hand wave.

02:24:56.000 Where he proceeds to wave his hand and say, well, you know, there might be some irrationality, blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:25:03.000 But in the end, markets sort things out, right?

02:25:07.000 And he's rationalizing.

02:25:09.000 Scientists rationalize.

02:25:10.000 Humans rationalize.

02:25:11.000 They want to defend their own most cherished ideas.

02:25:14.000 And so this is not a problem of Richard Dawkins.

02:25:18.000 This is a problem of humans, right?

02:25:19.000 And if humans have power and intellectual power is a form of power and it's not checked, they will continue to rationalize their bad ideas So specifically, what bad ideas is Dawkins rationalizing?

02:25:29.000 Well, so there's, you know, the intellectual dispute is this.

02:25:33.000 So in the 1960s, there was this idea of group selection.

02:25:39.000 But it was very fuzzy and it was a shitty version of group selection, right?

02:25:42.000 Which is the idea that natural selection happens not only at the level of genes, but also at the level of human groups.

02:25:47.000 And the idea that selection is happening at many, many, many levels.

02:25:50.000 And so Dawkins, in 1976, writes this big, important book, The Selfish Gene.

02:25:56.000 And it's basically that you actually don't need group selection to make sense of a lot of behavior.

02:26:01.000 You can just use what's called kin selection.

02:26:03.000 So, for example, you might do something nice for your sister, or you might potentially, you know, die to save your sister, but we can make sense of that at the level of genes because, essentially, you know, your sister shares many of the same genes, so, you know, you don't need this idea that groups matter.

02:26:20.000 Now, since then, what's happened is that there are—and this is a large part of what the problem is—is that some people read that book, including Jeff Skilling, and they concluded that what that means is that the way to get ahead is to be selfish.

02:26:36.000 Jeff Skilling is the CEO of Enron, right?

02:26:39.000 And you'll hear in business circles, you'll hear this idea of like, oh, it's all about law of the jungle, kill or be killed, like that's how you get ahead, you know, survival of the fittest.

02:26:49.000 So it's confirmation bias.

02:26:50.000 Exactly.

02:26:50.000 They're looking for something to confirm their ideas about competing in business.

02:26:54.000 That's right.

02:26:55.000 And, you know, that's what Skilling probably wanted to believe.

02:26:58.000 And so he read Dawkins' book and he's like, ah, now I have intellectual credibility for what I wanted to do anyway.

02:27:05.000 And so Skilling runs Enron based on those ideas.

02:27:10.000 Is this what he said?

02:27:11.000 Skilling?

02:27:12.000 Yes.

02:27:12.000 So he said that he based it on Dawkins' ideas?

02:27:15.000 Well, he said that The Selfish Gene was his favorite book.

02:27:17.000 Okay.

02:27:18.000 To find out, I don't know exactly everything that Skilling has said.

02:27:22.000 Right.

02:27:22.000 But he said it was his favorite book.

02:27:24.000 And this is, in general, a big problem.

02:27:27.000 Science is the big magic of our time, right?

02:27:30.000 If you want to justify feminists when they try and justify the sort of feminists who try and say that gender doesn't matter and it's all a social construct, they try and do it all in terms of science, right? 0.94

02:27:43.000 What science do they point to?

02:27:46.000 Well, they have, you know, some sort of idea of culture or whatever, but there are a lot of ideas that masquerade as science, right?

02:27:53.000 So, you know, the Nazis, the eugenics movement, you know, the Nazis, that was based on some sort of idea that they thought was science at the time.

02:28:02.000 You know, the Soviets had this guy, Lysenko, who was the opposite, and he believed that, you know, genes could be true. 0.60

02:28:09.000 He thought you could literally shock and electrocute seeds to make them do what you wanted them to do because genes didn't really matter and it was all conditioning.

02:28:17.000 Or behaviorism was B.F. Skinner's idea, which was the idea that it was all stimulus response.

02:28:24.000 The human mind didn't exist.

02:28:26.000 There were no beliefs and all that stuff.

02:28:28.000 And a lot of the way that education, for example, a lot of the educational choices that were made in the 50s were based on Skinner's ideas, which then fucks up a whole bunch of kids.

02:28:37.000 What ends up happening is that either science is applied, or it's misapplied, or it's misinterpreted, or people read a particular scientific study and don't have the context on it.

02:28:48.000 And so these bad ideas permeate and they're applied and all that sort of stuff.

02:28:52.000 Right?

02:28:53.000 And so the debate, for example, around rational agent theory is not some...it is an academic debate, but in addition to being an academic debate, economists supply those ideas.

02:29:03.000 And, you know, the public needs to...if the public wants its experts and its leaders to make the right decision, then it has to hold them accountable on their ideas.

02:29:12.000 And so, you know, if you have...you know, science also has to police who has their backing.

02:29:20.000 And it has a responsibility to communicate to the public what is the best scientific understanding available today.

02:29:27.000 So Skilling takes the selfish gene and he runs with that, and clearly that's thinking that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, the me generation, all that sort of stuff.

02:29:37.000 So the selfish gene sort of slots into a culture that is already sort of looking for that to be true, right?

02:29:45.000 And it lends this credibility.

02:29:47.000 And what has happened is that the science has now moved on.

02:29:52.000 To?

02:29:52.000 To this idea of multi-level selection theory.

02:29:55.000 And a lot of what we've been talking about today in terms of how groups work and how culture works is all based on those ideas.

02:30:01.000 And there's a whole group of academics and a whole bunch of different disciplines that have these ideas.

02:30:06.000 And, you know, there are people like John Height.

02:30:09.000 People like Joe Henrik, people like David Sloan Wilson, who's the big multi-level selection guy.

02:30:14.000 And when you put all of theirs, or Daniel Kahneman, right, Amos Tversky, you know, the list goes on and on and on.

02:30:21.000 But when you put all of these ideas together, you get a really, really compelling narrative.

02:30:26.000 Now, Dawkins says that his work was misinterpreted.

02:30:30.000 And that, essentially, Jeff Skilling misunderstood his work.

02:30:35.000 Now, Dawkins says very clearly in The Selfish Gene that our nature is selfish, right?

02:30:42.000 So, I mean, that seems pretty clear.

02:30:44.000 I don't know that Jeff Skilling entirely misinterpreted.

02:30:46.000 But what David Sloan Wilson and the multi-level selection people are saying is something very simple.

02:30:51.000 And E.O. Wilson said this as well, which is that Selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

02:31:01.000 So if you want to get ahead, you can get ahead by being a selfish asshole and fucking everyone, right? 1.00

02:31:08.000 But if you have a group that is based on selfishness and you're trying to fuck everyone... 1.00

02:31:13.000 Then your group's going to fall apart, and it's going to lose out to an altruistic group.

02:31:17.000 So if you compare side-by-side a company like Enron and a company like Pixar, which you can read about in Creativity, Inc., you're going to find that they have two very different environments, right?

02:31:28.000 Pixar is fundamentally a cooperative environment.

02:31:30.000 It's a high-trust environment.

02:31:31.000 Everybody works together, you know, all of that sort of stuff.

02:31:34.000 And it's a sustainable company that year after year turns out great films and does great work and all that sort of stuff.

02:31:41.000 Enron is a toxic environment because everybody is just trying to get ahead.

02:31:45.000 There is no I in team. 1.00

02:31:47.000 They're just fucking each other. 0.99

02:31:48.000 And so the thing blows up. 0.99

02:31:51.000 Now, again, science has a responsibility to communicate clearly.

02:31:55.000 And what should happen, I think, in terms of our economy not blowing the fuck up, in terms of corporations not engaging that sort of toxic behavior, is that I don't have the authority because I'm a nobody.

02:32:08.000 So I can't come out and say, this is what science is.

02:32:12.000 In fact, there is literally no human alive today that can come out and say what science is, because people can only come out and speak about their tiny field.

02:32:20.000 There's no consistent message from science.

02:32:23.000 I still don't understand what Dawkins is arguing against, because didn't he also argue for cooperation in his book?

02:32:29.000 Wasn't one of the chapters of his book, Nice Guys Finish First?

02:32:32.000 Well, but he refuses to acknowledge this idea that group selection happens.

02:32:36.000 He's refusing to acknowledge...

02:32:38.000 What is his actual statement?

02:32:40.000 How is he...

02:32:41.000 Well, I mean, the larger academic debate is like, so specifically, he rejects the idea that, and it's important to realize that the group selection people are not denying kin selection.

02:32:53.000 So they're not denying Dawkins' work, right?

02:32:56.000 They're building off of Dawkins' work and saying there's this extra effect, right?

02:33:01.000 Okay.

02:33:02.000 And how do they describe that extra effect?

02:33:03.000 They describe that effect as selfish individuals outcompete altruistic individuals, altruistic groups outcompete selfish groups, right?

02:33:09.000 But if you were to have Richard Dawkins in this room today, he would not agree with that statement.

02:33:16.000 What would he think?

02:33:18.000 He would say that selection does not happen at the level of groups.

02:33:22.000 Hmm.

02:33:24.000 And will be the evidence pro and con?

02:33:27.000 Well, ultimately, what I would like, Joe, and the reason why I call him a Scientologist, is because, you know, what should happen in academic debate is that ideas should die, right?

02:33:37.000 The point of scientific progress is...

02:33:40.000 One should live and one should die.

02:33:41.000 One should die, right? 0.96

02:33:42.000 It's Thunderdome. 0.98

02:33:43.000 Two ideas enter, one ideas leave, right?

02:33:46.000 Now, the point is that that's not happening in science.

02:33:49.000 What happened at that dinner party with Richard Thaler is two ideas entered and two ideas left.

02:33:54.000 Right?

02:33:55.000 And in general, that's a big recurring problem in science.

02:33:58.000 It's happening in economics, and it's also happening in evolutionary biology.

02:34:03.000 Now, the point is that I'm a single individual.

02:34:05.000 I can't be an expert in all the nuances and all the details of all of these things.

02:34:11.000 But what I can do is I can show you the general pattern that's happening.

02:34:15.000 And I can show you what the consequences are for you of these beliefs not changing.

02:34:20.000 So the area in which I do know the most, right, is the area of education.

02:34:24.000 And you have some daughters, I believe.

02:34:27.000 Is that true?

02:34:28.000 Yeah.

02:34:29.000 So these beliefs that your daughters have about their intelligence, whatever those beliefs may be as of today, will have a huge effect on the choices they make in school, how they do in education, what their experience of school is, whether they're happy in school, whether they're productive, whether they're successful— And whether they're set up for a knowledge economy,

02:34:47.000 which is all about constantly learning.

02:34:48.000 Do they emerge from school hating school or do they emerge from school loving school?

02:34:52.000 Do they emerge from school with confidence that they can learn whatever is required or do they feel like they can only be good at some things and not good at other things?

02:34:59.000 Before we get too far off track, I'm still confused as to how you feel Dawkins is ignoring the arguments against his work.

02:35:08.000 What are his statements?

02:35:09.000 Well, he's denied this idea of group selection.

02:35:11.000 Has anybody had a debate with him about this?

02:35:14.000 They have had debates.

02:35:14.000 Is there anything that we can watch somewhere or listen to?

02:35:16.000 Well, there have been debates, and what has happened is that, for example, what the debate is currently is the debate is currently about how many people are on each side.

02:35:28.000 So John Haidt, for example, was on Sam Harris's podcast, and Sam Harris would agree with Richard Dawkins.

02:35:33.000 Right?

02:35:34.000 And John Height, you know, John Height and Sam Harris disagree on multiple things, right?

02:35:38.000 They've had many disagreements, and the whole point of their podcast was to try and have a civil conversation.

02:35:43.000 And, you know, John Height said, you know, the difference between you and Sam, you and I, Sam, is that I'm an intuitionist and you're a rationalist.

02:35:49.000 Right?

02:35:50.000 So John Haidt believes, and if you look across the science, I think this is what's supported, is that thinking and feeling are always linked.

02:35:58.000 So we're always being driven by these intuitions, even if we don't always understand that.

02:36:02.000 There is, on the other hand, this idea of Descartes' error, which is the idea that Descartes came up with that reason and emotion are separate.

02:36:08.000 And that's what the rational agent theory is about.

02:36:11.000 It's the idea that, you know, there's reason and it's separate from emotion.

02:36:14.000 Are these mutually incompatible, though?

02:36:16.000 Yes.

02:36:17.000 And that's the point of science, is that you're supposed to kill certain ideas.

02:36:21.000 So Descartes' era specifically comes from, there's this book by Antonio Damasio at USC, and it's based on a series of experiments around this guy named Elliot, and people like him.

02:36:30.000 And so Elliot was this banker, financial guy, happy family man, all this sort of stuff.

02:36:38.000 And he had a brain tumor.

02:36:40.000 And so they chopped it out.

02:36:42.000 The brain tumor was right here, right up at the top of the base of his nose.

02:36:45.000 And at first, it seemed like chopping out this piece of his brain had done nothing, right?

02:36:50.000 It hadn't affected him.

02:36:51.000 Oh, totally disposable bit of brain.

02:36:53.000 Didn't really have a function.

02:36:54.000 Look at that.

02:36:55.000 It was just an optional accessory, like the appendix of the brain.

02:36:57.000 But then what happens is they come to find out that all of a sudden, Eliot has all these problems.

02:37:02.000 Even though his IQ is unaffected, even though his verbal intelligence is not affected, what's happening is that he's making all these terrible decisions.

02:37:14.000 He leaves his wife for a stripper.

02:37:17.000 Snopes.

02:37:19.000 That's actually who Elliot is.

02:37:21.000 He's the Snopes guy.

02:37:23.000 And it's because he had cancer, so don't make fun of him.

02:37:25.000 How dare you.

02:37:26.000 Yeah.

02:37:27.000 But, you know, his business decision-making falls apart.

02:37:32.000 He falls for all these con men.

02:37:34.000 He's making all these horrible choices, and he can't decide where to go to lunch.

02:37:38.000 So what ends up happening is that at 11 a.m., he'll try and decide, where am I going to go to lunch?

02:37:42.000 And then by 4 p.m., lunch has passed.

02:37:46.000 And that's because he sat around and tried to calculate rationally where should I go to lunch, right?

02:37:50.000 He thought about, oh, you know, should I go, like, based on tables and calories and all this sort of stuff?

02:37:56.000 And he couldn't make a decision.

02:37:58.000 And the reason why is because this bit of the brain that was removed turns out is what links thinking and feeling.

02:38:12.000 Mm-hmm.

02:38:24.000 So that, along with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the work of people like John Haidt, there's now an immense amount of information that basically understands that Descartes, who lived 400 years ago, was making shit up when he came up with his theory of the brain, 0.90

02:38:41.000 right?

02:38:41.000 And his theory of the brain, of this idea of reason and emotion, which has floated around in the West for ages and ages and ages, it doesn't fit the evidence.

02:38:50.000 Now, that's the basic problem.

02:38:52.000 And I will tell you, having worked with students, your ability to improve their lives, once you understand that thinking and feeling are always linked, goes massively up.

02:39:01.000 Because now when a student starts telling me, oh, I don't have the math gene, or I don't have a natural ear for languages, I don't waste my time dealing with that rationalization.

02:39:10.000 Instead, I ask the kid, how do you feel about math?

02:39:13.000 Right?

02:39:13.000 How do you feel about your teacher?

02:39:15.000 And we start to deal with the feelings and we start to sort through the feelings until we get the feelings lined up in such a way that you're making the right choices.

02:39:22.000 And that's, for me, the hardest is that that's the problem that I first came to this from, was education.

02:39:29.000 When you're talking about these kids, though, sorry to interrupt you, but it seems almost like you're talking about a user-operator error.

02:39:34.000 It's like they're just programmed incorrectly to know how to view the world.

02:39:39.000 By their culture.

02:39:40.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:39:40.000 Their culture is fucking them. 1.00

02:39:43.000 Goddammit! 1.00

02:39:43.000 And that's what you have to understand. 1.00

02:39:47.000 Human hardware has not really changed in the last 100,000 years.

02:39:53.000 But human software, the culture that we picked up, has evolved over time.

02:39:57.000 And it's constantly changing.

02:39:59.000 And it's constantly changing.

02:40:00.000 And now, especially because the environment is changing so fast because of technology and all these sorts of things.

02:40:05.000 Snapchat filters.

02:40:06.000 We need to change the culture fast and we need to change the culture intentionally.

02:40:10.000 So, but who decides how the culture gets changed?

02:40:13.000 Is it Donald Trump or is it Hunter Mons?

02:40:15.000 No.

02:40:15.000 And it's not either of us.

02:40:17.000 It should be the group.

02:40:18.000 Right.

02:40:18.000 And the point is to spark a conversation so that we can have this conversation.

02:40:23.000 But the point is that there are certain academics who are going to try and stand in the way of that conversation and will use their authority to try and shut down that conversation because they're trying to defend their pet theory.

02:40:34.000 In whatever discipline it is.

02:40:36.000 And this is where you come back to Dawkins.

02:40:37.000 And this is Dawkins.

02:40:38.000 But the point is to recognize it's not about Dawkins particularly.

02:40:41.000 And if you want to get into the woods on, like, you know, all of the nuances of all this sort of stuff, you should get on either David Sloan Wilson or John Hyatt or Joe Henrich, and they can, like, take you through the whole thing.

02:40:54.000 And the basic problem is that there's a lot of science that is really, really useful, but, you know, one man can't figure it all out.

02:41:03.000 Impossible.

02:41:04.000 And you can't hold on to a theory.

02:41:07.000 No.

02:41:07.000 You have to expose it to the marketplace of ideas.

02:41:10.000 It has to be tested.

02:41:11.000 And what I can do, because a lot of this comes down to what's permissible in the culture of science.

02:41:16.000 So if you've got guys like, you know, you can go if you want to go and like read about what David Sloan Wilson is saying and all of these guys...

02:41:23.000 We're good to go.

02:41:51.000 But my goal with all of this stuff, with Thomas Sowell's work, with David Sloan Wilson, John Haidt, Carol Dweck's work, which is a lot of this education stuff, is that I know that it's not realistic to expect people to, that I can't just put a list on the internet of 50 books and be like,

02:42:07.000 everybody has to read these 50 books. 0.66

02:42:09.000 People have other shit to worry about. 0.99

02:42:10.000 Right? 0.96

02:42:11.000 Yeah, but if you just don't even concern yourself with that, if you just suggest it, enough people will, the ideas will start to permeate.

02:42:18.000 But you also, what you run into, and this is part of what I've run into with education, right, is so, you know, along with Katie, my Bostonian friend, we took seven different fields of neuroscience and psychology, and we condensed them all into one book that we wrote to the teenager,

02:42:33.000 because we wanted to have a message.

02:42:35.000 The problem is most of these books are written to adults.

02:42:37.000 And you write the book to the adult, the adult reads it, the parent reads it, and they're like, oh, this is so great.

02:42:42.000 And then now they're in the uncomfortable position of having to have a conversation about school with kids.

02:42:47.000 And then the ideas die.

02:42:48.000 The ideas don't move.

02:42:49.000 So we were like, let's skip the middleman or middlewoman and let's write straight to the kid.

02:42:54.000 What's the book?

02:42:55.000 It's called The Straight A Conspiracy.

02:42:56.000 And the reason why we called it the Straight A Conspiracy is because we, at the time, were working with the son of a guy named Stan Rogo, who was the executive producer on Lizzie McGuire.

02:43:06.000 And we'd been, I mean, this is the power of emotions, by the way, like super brilliant.

02:43:10.000 What is Lizzie McGuire?

02:43:11.000 Lizzie McGuire was like that Hilary Duff kids' TV show.

02:43:15.000 Oh, okay.

02:43:16.000 In the 90s, it was like super big.

02:43:17.000 It was the Miley Cyrus of like, or early 2000s, I think.

02:43:20.000 Mm-hmm.

02:43:21.000 But anyway, so we, you know, we were struggling with how do you have a conversation about education and school and your potential and all these sorts of things with kids?

02:43:30.000 And, you know, our intuitions are sort of the classic teacher intuitions, which is like, you can do it.

02:43:36.000 You're amazing.

02:43:37.000 Like, you have so much potential.

02:43:38.000 And we sat down with Stan, and Stan said, listen, I've been making kids TV for a long time, and if I've learned one thing about teenagers, it's this. 0.98

02:43:48.000 Their lives suck. 0.98

02:43:49.000 They may not suck in any sort of objective sense or any sort of geographical sense or anything like that, but on an emotional, subjective level, they suck. 1.00

02:43:57.000 And so the only thing you can ever tell them that they will believe is that they've been lied to. 0.99

02:44:04.000 I think?

02:44:19.000 And once you got them doubting their doubts and, you know, all the things that they believed about math genes, is that really true?

02:44:26.000 How do we know that, bro?

02:44:27.000 Like, is that really, you know, all that sort of stuff.

02:44:30.000 And then you get that process where they're now starting to question things.

02:44:33.000 And, you know, we did the first chapter is all about genius myths, which are, you know, Essentially very clever marketing schemes that again rely on that thing of awe.

02:44:43.000 So if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, right?

02:44:46.000 Steve Jobs was a very smart marketer, right?

02:44:49.000 And he created this image, right?

02:44:51.000 This, you know, cult of personality around himself, which is that, you know, he made himself seem like this genius who out of nowhere came out of all these things.

02:44:59.000 People called him the eye god and the cult of Mac.

02:45:02.000 And what is the effect of awe?

02:45:03.000 The effect of awe is blind copying.

02:45:05.000 We just had to have that Mac product.

02:45:07.000 And in that, he was copying the playbook of another guy much, much earlier, Thomas Edison, who in his own time created this own cult of personality around himself, and at the time he was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park.

02:45:18.000 But in reality, did Edison invent the lightbulb?

02:45:20.000 No, he did not.

02:45:21.000 The lightbulb was around 45 years before he was even born.

02:45:24.000 Edison ripped off Tesla. 1.00

02:45:25.000 That's what he did to that fuckhead. 1.00

02:45:27.000 You watch Drunk History? 1.00

02:45:29.000 Ever see Duncan Trussell's version of Drunk History?

02:45:31.000 It's all on Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. 1.00

02:45:34.000 Thomas Edison being a cunt. 0.99

02:45:36.000 It's amazing. 0.99

02:45:38.000 And that's the point, is that these people were people.

02:45:42.000 And the myths that you have about geniuses are actually clever advertising schemes.

02:45:47.000 But the problem is that it's an ad jingle that is so good that we've essentially had that jingle trapped in our heads for hundreds and hundreds of years.

02:45:55.000 So there are ideas that are passed on, like Edison had a thousand patents to his name by the time he died.

02:46:02.000 He did.

02:46:03.000 That's because when you set up an industrial research lab, you make sure that your name is on all the patents, because that's the whole point of employing a bunch of people, is that you want to own the IP. And that's true for, you know, Mozart was the Michael Jackson of the 1700s.

02:46:17.000 Isaac Newton, you know, they basically knew that they couldn't sell the ideas of gravity, so they sold Newton as the man, this guy who had this great vision and blah, blah, blah, and the story of the apple and all that bullshit.

02:46:28.000 And then Einstein, you know, they needed to package the new physics that was being done by lots and lots of physicists like Heisenberg and Planck and all that sort of stuff.

02:46:36.000 But there was this guy, Arthur Eddington, who knew he couldn't sell that.

02:46:39.000 So he sold the idea of a boy wonder with crazy hair who had beaten Newton and was displacing Newton.

02:46:46.000 Now the point is you go and you talk to physicists and they'll tell you, well, it's not really true.

02:46:50.000 Like Einstein didn't really displace Newton, right?

02:46:52.000 We still use Newtonian mechanics.

02:46:54.000 We only use Einsteinian mechanics when we start to get near the speed of light.

02:46:58.000 So there are all these marketing schemes.

02:47:02.000 But in the marketplace of ideas, part of what happens is that there are these big public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, and they have a lot of power.

02:47:13.000 And it becomes very difficult to challenge them.

02:47:15.000 And in particular, I don't think that anybody particularly wants to go up against Richard Dawkins, right?

02:47:21.000 He's a sacred cow.

02:47:22.000 He is a sacred cow.

02:47:23.000 And if you go up against the new atheists or you challenge anything about the new atheists, and I have, you know, like the whole rationalist intuitionist thing, because I've been trying to talk about emotions on our podcast, and I said, you know, hey, look, you don't have to believe me.

02:47:39.000 I think? 0.99

02:47:59.000 Who proceeded to tell me that I was a fucking idiot and blah blah blah and what did I know and how arrogant I was and how dare you and all this sort of stuff. 1.00

02:48:08.000 Did he understand your argument? 1.00

02:48:09.000 He didn't really...

02:48:11.000 Or did he just jump at you because of the fact that you're questioning...

02:48:14.000 His boy, right?

02:48:16.000 He basically...

02:48:17.000 His man.

02:48:18.000 His man.

02:48:19.000 But it was productive because what he said is like, he said, what are you even talking about?

02:48:27.000 Sam Harris knows that most people are being emotional most of the time.

02:48:33.000 But the issue isn't what Sam Harris knows about other people.

02:48:37.000 It's what does Sam Harris believe about his own brain, right?

02:48:41.000 And Sam Harris is really—and this is not Sam's fault as an individual, just as none of the cultural stuff that we've been talking about is his fault.

02:48:49.000 When I was in college, I also believed in this whole idea of Descartes' error, that reason and emotion are separate.

02:48:56.000 And then I moved out to L.A. and I was in an acting class.

02:49:00.000 And I moved from an environment that worshipped reason to an environment that worshipped emotion.

02:49:05.000 Right?

02:49:06.000 That's what actors do. 1.00

02:49:07.000 All day, they fucking talk about their feelings. 0.99

02:49:09.000 And so for somebody who had come from that environment, it was super fucking annoying. 0.99

02:49:14.000 I found actors really, really annoying because they would not stop talking about their feelings. 0.77

02:49:18.000 And it pissed me off.

02:49:19.000 It pissed me off.

02:49:20.000 And at a certain point, I got so annoyed. 1.00

02:49:22.000 I was like, you fuckers don't know what the fuck. 1.00

02:49:25.000 What the fuck you're talking about? 1.00

02:49:26.000 The only real authorities are scientists. 1.00

02:49:29.000 So what did I do?

02:49:30.000 I went off and I read the scientists and I found out that the actors were right. 0.99

02:49:33.000 And it was fucking humiliating. 0.98

02:49:35.000 I don't understand. 0.99

02:49:36.000 They were right how?

02:49:37.000 They were right about the importance of emotions.

02:49:39.000 Emotions are hugely important.

02:49:41.000 They drive thinking.

02:49:42.000 Yeah, but that's not what these actors are doing. 0.88

02:49:44.000 I understand that, you know, they're just being emotional because it's indulgent.

02:49:49.000 They're being indulgent and they're not managing their emotions, which is what you're supposed to do.

02:49:53.000 Right.

02:49:54.000 But what you find, for example, so here's a simple thing.

02:49:58.000 You know, there's a reason why we say that, and then, you know, that intersected with working with students, right? 0.99

02:50:04.000 So if you say, for example, students say, I feel stupid, turns out that stupid is a feeling. 0.99

02:50:10.000 Specifically, it's the feeling of shame, right? 1.00

02:50:13.000 And also being ineffective in your intellectual pursuits.

02:50:16.000 And a sense of helplessness and all that sort of stuff.

02:50:18.000 It's feel inadequate.

02:50:19.000 That's right.

02:50:20.000 And specifically, it's a feeling called learned helplessness, right?

02:50:23.000 In academic circles, where there are terrible names for everything, right?

02:50:28.000 But the feeling of shame motivates a very specific behavior, which is that you avoid the source of your shame.

02:50:34.000 So when students get back a bad test, What they do is they wad it up and they throw it away.

02:50:40.000 And they avoid math.

02:50:41.000 They avoid math, right?

02:50:43.000 Now, the point is that that behavior is literally the worst response you can have to failure, right?

02:50:51.000 If you're screwing up in math or any other subject, what you should be doing is getting out your mistakes Yeah.

02:51:12.000 Now, how does this oppose what Sam Harris believes?

02:51:14.000 The point is that if Ad Atheist Sensei, and I will tell you that I think that Ad Atheist Sensei is pretty right in his assessment of what Sam Harris believes about, like, most people are emotional most of the time, but I don't think that Sam Harris believes that thinking and feeling are always linked.

02:51:33.000 So that his brain is all— Do you know this for a fact?

02:51:36.000 Have you discussed this with him? 0.99

02:51:37.000 Because I know I'm getting a text from him in about fucking five minutes. 0.98

02:51:40.000 Well, I'll tell you. 0.96

02:51:40.000 For example, okay, so how does Sam Harris feel about God? 0.96

02:51:44.000 Or how does Sam Harris feel about religion?

02:51:50.000 Well, that's a pretty open-ended question.

02:51:52.000 He doesn't believe in religion, and I don't think he necessarily believes in any form of a deity.

02:51:57.000 Well, let's talk about— Because there's no evidence for that.

02:52:00.000 Let's talk about it.

02:52:00.000 I know that you have a relationship with Sam, right?

02:52:02.000 That's okay, but forget about that.

02:52:04.000 Why those questions?

02:52:06.000 Well, so if you look at—let's look at, for example, your friends, the anarcho-capitalists, right?

02:52:11.000 Okay.

02:52:12.000 Libertarians, right?

02:52:13.000 Who just want to get rid of government.

02:52:15.000 And they're just trying to get rid of all government.

02:52:18.000 So what is that thinking about?

02:52:21.000 What is that psychology about?

02:52:22.000 Or Muslim fundamentalists, they just want to get rid of these Western influences. 0.83

02:52:27.000 They basically think that a certain thing is bad, and they're constantly trying to strip it out, strip it out, strip it out, strip it out.

02:52:32.000 That's the nature of fundamentalism.

02:52:34.000 And Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are atheist fundamentalists.

02:52:38.000 And specifically, Richard Dawkins has talked about militant atheism.

02:52:42.000 And Richard Dawkins has said that religion is the scourge of humanity and that we need to get rid of religion.

02:52:48.000 Now, in reality, if you look at the scientific evidence, what you're going to find out is that religion has a very checkered past.

02:52:56.000 Right?

02:52:56.000 And then it's, you know, that religion has, you know, in terms of the history of violence, right?

02:53:02.000 Steven Pinker has this book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and he talks about the fact that, you know, what the new atheists are saying about religion is not supported by the evidence, right?

02:53:11.000 That in history, religion has not been any one thing, right?

02:53:15.000 It's had some good things, it's had some bad things.

02:53:18.000 Okay.

02:53:18.000 That's not a scientifically appropriate belief to go around and saying that religion is the scourge of all humanity or to be waging war over religion.

02:53:26.000 And you're talking Dawkins in specific?

02:53:28.000 Dawkins and, you know, Sam Harris and all that sort of stuff.

02:53:30.000 And particularly Dawkins because he's the most militant of them, right?

02:53:35.000 Separately, you know, why do people believe in religion?

02:53:38.000 What is religion really about, right?

02:53:40.000 It's because people don't understand how to control their environment.

02:53:44.000 And so their minds fill in and they're trying to make sense of how do we get the things that we want.

02:53:49.000 Well, it's also like all the rest of culture.

02:53:50.000 It's passed down and learned behavior and imitating atmospheres and adopting predetermined patterns of behavior and thinking.

02:53:58.000 Exactly.

02:53:58.000 And so Dawkins and Sam Harris, their stated objective is they want to promote evolution, right?

02:54:05.000 Okay, yeah.

02:54:06.000 Now, I had to tutor some students who were at a Christian school that taught creationism.

02:54:13.000 And it's Oaks Christian and, you know, Thousand Oaks, right?

02:54:17.000 And I had never, like, honestly, like, pre-doing that experience, I had never thought much about the New Atheists.

02:54:24.000 Like, they just weren't a big deal.

02:54:25.000 I was like, okay, those guys are out doing whatever they're doing, right?

02:54:29.000 And then I went into this Christian fundamentalist school, or whatever it is, or school that teaches creationism, and all they could talk about was Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

02:54:38.000 Right?

02:54:38.000 They were talking about them constantly.

02:54:40.000 And in their minds, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris represent science.

02:54:44.000 They are the face of science.

02:54:46.000 In the same way that some guy in the Midwest, when he thinks about Islam, he's thinking about ISIS or al-Qaeda or all that sort of stuff.

02:54:56.000 He doesn't understand that those people don't represent the majority of Muslims.

02:55:00.000 And in the same way, in this school, Dawkins and Harris were being used to represent science in general and to represent evolution in general.

02:55:11.000 So they are essentially, for a lot of people, forming the stereotype of science.

02:55:15.000 Now, in opposition to them?

02:55:18.000 So they're in opposition to Dawkins and Harris, okay.

02:55:45.000 I'm sure.

02:55:46.000 I wonder why.

02:55:47.000 Well, exactly.

02:55:48.000 And so, you know, they did all sorts of things.

02:55:51.000 Like, for example, they had a whole unit on isms, right?

02:55:54.000 They were like Nazism, fascism, communism, and how bad isms were. 0.99

02:55:58.000 And then right after that, they taught the controversy around evolution.

02:56:03.000 So they were like, well, there are four different theories of the origins of life, right?

02:56:07.000 One is young earth creationism.

02:56:09.000 One is intelligent design.

02:56:10.000 One is earth is metaphorical day.

02:56:12.000 And then the fourth one is evolutionism.

02:56:17.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

02:56:19.000 Yeah.

02:56:19.000 So evolutionism, right?

02:56:21.000 After telling you the evils of isms.

02:56:23.000 That's right.

02:56:24.000 So you're going on a long, circuitous route here because you made some accusations about Hera.

02:56:28.000 So what's wrong with his views on God and what's wrong with his views on religion?

02:56:33.000 Well, that's the point, is that religion is a set of beliefs, and actually many of these beliefs are adapted to their environment, even though they seem kooky.

02:56:40.000 And there are also ideologies that are strictly enforced, and I think that's one of the things he has a big issue with.

02:56:45.000 But the point is, is the issue, if you want to, so this comes down to how do you change people's minds, and what does the science say about how you change people's minds, and how do you move ideas?

02:56:55.000 Okay, so you're saying that his mocking of these ideas is contrary to the expanding of knowledge, that people are going to resist it.

02:57:03.000 Yeah, and it doesn't promote a productive exchange of ideas between tribes.

02:57:07.000 But isn't that debatable?

02:57:08.000 Because a lot of people, in listening to really excellent, constructed arguments against religion, will change their mind.

02:57:14.000 Well, like everything, right?

02:57:16.000 So, you know, Rule 34, right?

02:57:18.000 Right.

02:57:19.000 So, Rule 34, if you can imagine it, there is porn of it, right?

02:57:23.000 Mm-hmm.

02:57:23.000 I think?

02:57:43.000 And so I was like, oh, thank God, there's a book all about how ideas move, right?

02:57:48.000 And what you come to find out is that all of the research shows there's a whole bunch of things that make ideas move.

02:57:55.000 One thing is they have to be compatible with people's existing beliefs, and then also they have to be practical.

02:58:02.000 So they have to confer some sort of practical benefit.

02:58:05.000 Okay.

02:58:06.000 So, in terms of moving evolution, the first thing is to recognize that, you know, if we really want to, like, not just spend another 150 years, you know, having a fight between science and religion and all that sort of stuff, the first thing to realize is that what people like David Sloan Wilson are saying is fundamentally compatible with Christianity,

02:58:25.000 right?

02:58:26.000 Because they understand that, you know, that altruism matters, right, all this sort of stuff, right?

02:58:31.000 Okay. 0.66

02:58:32.000 The sort of Dawkins-type notion of it's all about selfishness and everybody just trying to fuck everybody and all that sort of stuff, part of it is that it doesn't fit well with Christianity, right? 0.80

02:58:42.000 Doesn't fit well with religious notions, right?

02:58:45.000 Secondly, all of this stuff that I'm talking about with cultural evolution is deeply practical.

02:58:51.000 You can see that if we have a conversation as humanity about culture and how my choices are being driven and all that sort of stuff so that I can change my culture and all that sort of stuff, that we can fix a whole lot of things.

02:59:04.000 That notion of culture relies on group selection.

02:59:07.000 It relies on this multi-level selection idea that Dawkins is not on board with and all that sort of stuff and that Sam Harris is not on board with.

02:59:17.000 So, ultimately, what I want to do is I want to move these ideas.

02:59:20.000 But the whole point is, Joe, is that part of the reason why you brought me on this podcast today is specifically because I called out Richard Dawkins.

02:59:28.000 No, no, no, no.

02:59:29.000 I brought you on because Brian Callen recommends you and I listen to you on his podcast.

02:59:33.000 Okay.

02:59:33.000 Had nothing to do with that.

02:59:34.000 I just thought that'd be an interesting topic of discussion.

02:59:36.000 Okay.

02:59:36.000 Yeah.

02:59:54.000 Are in somehow or another causing a resistance to these very ideas because of the way he's presenting them.

03:00:01.000 That he's not presenting them in a form that's psychologically digestible.

03:00:06.000 Is that what you're saying?

03:00:07.000 Yes.

03:00:07.000 And also, fundamentally, he creates this stereotype of scientists that is being formed around him.

03:00:12.000 And what is that?

03:00:14.000 Well, is it that they're angry, aggressive?

03:00:16.000 He doesn't seem aggressive.

03:00:18.000 Do you think he seems aggressive?

03:00:19.000 It's not about really...

03:00:20.000 I mean, that was the point of spending time at Oaks Christian.

03:00:23.000 It's not really about how I was perceiving them, because I wasn't thinking about them beforehand. 0.90

03:00:27.000 Well, these are people that are pushing a ridiculous ideology, and the enemies of that ridiculous ideology, they attack.

03:00:35.000 And so they're attacking these guys. 0.66

03:00:38.000 But the basic problem is attacking.

03:00:39.000 Right, but it's a very small segment of...

03:00:42.000 I mean, schools that are doing this, right?

03:00:45.000 You're talking about this one example of this Christian school.

03:00:47.000 How many people believe in evolution?

03:00:49.000 It's probably a giant number, right?

03:00:51.000 Well, I mean, you know, you can look at different polls, but it's like 50-50. 0.99

03:00:54.000 Yeah, I think it's like 46% according to a recent Gallup poll, but my joke was always like, who the fuck answers polls? 0.99

03:01:01.000 Exactly. 0.97

03:01:01.000 I mean, is it like one out of a hundred? 0.97

03:01:02.000 Well, exactly.

03:01:03.000 Like on Triggered last night, right? 1.00

03:01:05.000 Yeah, the people dumb enough to answer polls. 1.00

03:01:07.000 That's right. 1.00

03:01:07.000 1%. 1.00

03:01:08.000 But ultimately, that's sort of the larger thing that I would like to achieve, right, is a scientific reformation, right?

03:01:18.000 So, you know, Martin Luther triggers this reformation with the Catholic Church and all that sort of stuff.

03:01:27.000 At the core of the Catholic Church was this idea of love thy neighbor as thyself, and basically Martin Luther said the people in the power in the religious establishment are not living that principle, right?

03:01:38.000 At the core of science is this idea that we should be responsive to evidence.

03:01:42.000 Okay, right.

03:01:43.000 And the scientific establishment is often not living, or the academic establishment is not living that, you know, principle, right?

03:01:52.000 So, and part of the problem is that left to their own devices, they will continue to remain in their tiny lanes.

03:01:58.000 And a lot of these academic disputes can only be solved by going outside their lanes.

03:02:03.000 So, for example, if Sam Harris was here, right, and I've said this on the podcast with Brian, the one thing that I would want to talk about, the only thing that I would want to talk about is this rationalist versus intuitionist idea, and try and reach some sort of definitive conclusion on that.

03:02:18.000 Because if Sam Harris's thinking and feeling are always being linked, then he has to decide how his feelings about religion are driving his thinking, and whether his feelings about religion are appropriate in light of the evidence, or whether they're not appropriate.

03:02:32.000 Does that make sense?

03:02:34.000 Well, religion as itself, though, when you're talking about evidence, it's extremely lacking in that.

03:02:39.000 So what he's talking about is people that are subscribing to a very rigid ideology that he thinks is compromising growth.

03:02:46.000 In the same way that racism justifies the behavior of social justice warriors.

03:02:51.000 So it's not...

03:02:52.000 I'm not...

03:02:52.000 So, you know, you understand...

03:02:54.000 I understand...

03:02:55.000 But this religious discrimination is based on an ideology Of course.

03:03:00.000 That's written on animal skins from thousands of years ago and extreme ignorance.

03:03:05.000 So there's much more to it then than just saying that it's similar to racism.

03:03:11.000 Well, no, but what I'm saying is that, you know, this is, again, so there's a larger principle here, right?

03:03:18.000 Right.

03:03:20.000 Right.

03:03:27.000 Right.

03:03:46.000 What is the reaction that Jordan Peterson gets on his campus?

03:04:10.000 These arguments, nobody is saying that these arguments, as they currently stand, are easy.

03:04:14.000 There's a lot of material to track, right?

03:04:16.000 And, you know, in the end, like, my job is to communicate them as clearly as possible.

03:04:22.000 Okay.

03:04:23.000 What I'm saying is, is that if you want to move science, like, science has a communication problem, right?

03:04:29.000 Okay.

03:04:30.000 Now, if you read people in science, like Atul Gawande, he'll just be like... 1.00

03:04:35.000 People are fucking dumb. 1.00

03:04:36.000 Science is complicated, right? 1.00

03:04:38.000 You go on these big, broad journeys before you come back.

03:04:42.000 So what I'm saying is that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are the kind of friends, with friends like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, science doesn't need enemies.

03:04:54.000 They are alienating, they are not helping us, and they're getting in the way of communicating science.

03:04:59.000 I understand because of the very approach that they're taking.

03:05:02.000 If science was to adopt the approach of we are here in light of the diffusion of innovations, which is the book all about how...

03:05:09.000 Do you feel the same way about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his open criticism of religion?

03:05:13.000 Well, I think in general that I don't think that the criticism of religion is helping science.

03:05:18.000 It's a 150-year-old...

03:05:19.000 Science has been at war with religion for 150 years.

03:05:22.000 So you don't think that science should be honest?

03:05:25.000 Or that scientists should be honest about their own personal...

03:05:28.000 Well, but the point is that I believe that scientists should read science widely.

03:05:32.000 And if you look at someone like John Hite, part of the reason why John Hite and Sam Harris have fought is because John Hite doesn't have a problem with religion.

03:05:39.000 Because when you update your view of the brain, you come to realize that what's really going on is that you blindly internalize the beliefs of science and your community and all that sort of stuff, and that they blindly internalize the beliefs of their community.

03:05:54.000 And that if you want to move ideas, if you want to move scientific ideas, what we have to do is establish trust.

03:06:00.000 But what specifically are they blindly interpreting?

03:06:03.000 It's this idea of that reason and emotion are separate.

03:06:07.000 But how does that apply strictly to religion and his beliefs on religion being incorrect?

03:06:12.000 Right.

03:06:30.000 And what really matters is what is the spirit in which it's being approached.

03:06:34.000 How do you feel about these things?

03:06:36.000 So if you look at something like gay marriage or homosexuals, what does the Bible say on homosexuality?

03:06:55.000 Right.

03:06:58.000 Right.

03:07:06.000 The issue is what does the person feel about the thing, right?

03:07:09.000 That's the psychology that is driving it, right?

03:07:12.000 Okay.

03:07:12.000 So, the point is that if you want to fix the problem, right, you don't worry about the text, right?

03:07:19.000 You don't worry about what are the literal- But if the text is preposterous, it should be discussed.

03:07:24.000 I mean, if the text promotes violence against women or against any particular group that doesn't believe what you believe, it's discussed because it's problematic, right?

03:07:36.000 But different people, like, has the Bible changed in the last 400 years?

03:07:41.000 No, but different people's interpretations of the Bibles have.

03:07:44.000 Right.

03:07:44.000 And so, for example, if you look at, for example, where are Muslims now and where are Christians now?

03:07:51.000 Look at Christianity in the 1600s.

03:07:53.000 Well, this is an issue that Michael Shermer wrote about recently, about Islam not experiencing the Enlightenment, that other religions have gone through this.

03:08:02.000 Well, it's specifically about Islam experiencing a de-enlightenment, right? 1.00

03:08:07.000 Because in the year 1000, they were.

03:08:08.000 But so the real thing that if you want to fix Islam, and again, like, you know, I was born in Saudi Arabia, my parents live in Dubai, like, there are conversations happening about this.

03:08:18.000 What you have to do is that you have to change the intellectual climate.

03:08:25.000 Right.

03:08:39.000 It was the most intellectually advanced place on the planet, and the text that Islam is using now has not changed. 0.96

03:08:46.000 So what happens is that people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, they get super caught up in the text.

03:08:51.000 But really, if you want to fix these problems, you have to talk about, you know, what are your beliefs about your intelligence?

03:08:57.000 How do you feel about other cultures?

03:08:59.000 You have to talk about feelings.

03:09:01.000 And that's really where the conversation changes.

03:09:03.000 And the point is that rationalists don't talk about feelings.

03:09:07.000 So that's the real, I mean, that is the core of what needs to happen.

03:09:11.000 And the science is there to do that.

03:09:13.000 But the point is, is that, you know, let's put these people side by side.

03:09:17.000 John Haidt has a following of essentially zero, right?

03:09:20.000 Richard Dawkins has a huge following, right?

03:09:22.000 Sam Harris has a big following.

03:09:24.000 Someone like Joe Henrik probably maybe has three Twitter followers.

03:09:28.000 So the people who are representing science, right, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, no one's questioning, like, does Neil deGrasse Tyson know way the fuck more about astrophysics than I do?

03:09:38.000 100%.

03:09:39.000 But I don't know that Neil deGrasse Tyson has, for example, read The Diffusion of Innovations.

03:09:44.000 Because I will tell you that I've had numerous academics on the podcast.

03:09:48.000 For example, David Sloan Wilson.

03:09:50.000 David Sloan Wilson, right, I asked him, you know, he sent me this thing back in 2014, and it was a 67-page paper.

03:09:58.000 And it said, you know, it was towards the science of intentional behavior change or something like that.

03:10:03.000 And I read the 67 pages.

03:10:05.000 And at the end of the 67 pages, I'm like, I feel like what you're actually talking about is how do you move ideas?

03:10:11.000 And wasn't that already solved with the diffusion of innovations?

03:10:16.000 And he said, oh, I've obviously heard of the diffusion of innovations, like Everett Rogers' famous work, but I've never made a close study of it.

03:10:27.000 Now, the Diffusion of Innovations was written in 1967. It is an innovation that hasn't diffused.

03:10:33.000 And that's specifically because even though it preaches one thing about how ideas move, it's written in that dry scientific technical style.

03:10:43.000 So a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or David Sloan Wilson or John Hyde or Joe Henrik or any of these guys often have not heard of ideas that are relevant to the conversations that we're having.

03:10:58.000 Like, it's not just that the ideas aren't moving between science.

03:11:01.000 Isn't this a bizarre conversation to have if you don't know whether or not they've read that?

03:11:04.000 Well, but you can look at people's behavior, and you can see from people's behavior whether they understand certain things or not.

03:11:11.000 Or whether they agree with certain things.

03:11:13.000 I mean, just because their behavior isn't compatible to that paper doesn't mean that they haven't read it and just decided that they don't agree or they have another point of view.

03:11:21.000 Well, I mean, if we're going to really get into this...

03:11:27.000 We really can't.

03:11:29.000 We're way over.

03:11:30.000 We're like 25 minutes over, so I was trying to figure out a way to skirt out of here quick.

03:11:35.000 Yeah, but I mean, the point that I'm trying to...

03:11:38.000 I think the main point is that from all of our conversations about culture, There are ideas out there, trapped in books, which is the whole point of what we're doing on The Brian Callen Show, that have real practical value to improving people's lives.

03:11:56.000 Those ideas are not moving.

03:11:59.000 Don't you think they're all kind of moving?

03:12:02.000 It's moving right now.

03:12:03.000 Everything is moving.

03:12:04.000 Well, so part of the diffusion of innovations, right?

03:12:08.000 So the book opens with a story about scurvy, right?

03:12:12.000 So scurvy is, you know, this problem that killed two million people, right?

03:12:17.000 And, you know, it all comes down to vitamin C deficiency, and it's the simplest solution in the world. 0.99

03:12:21.000 You just suck on a lime.

03:12:22.000 So between scurvy being figured out, right, in a sort of academic context, and between it being applied, 150 years passed. 0.99

03:12:33.000 150 years.

03:12:34.000 So the point is that ideas don't move.

03:12:37.000 Well, they didn't have the internet.

03:12:38.000 But it's not even about that.

03:12:40.000 Isn't it?

03:12:41.000 I mean, isn't it the best way to distribute information is the internet?

03:12:43.000 The fact that it took 150 years for scurvy to be cured even though the information was there, don't you think that directly coincides with the lack of ability to express that information?

03:12:54.000 Nope.

03:12:54.000 It has to do with, and that's the point of the diffusion of innovations, it has to do with the ideas being packaged in a way that is culturally and psychologically compatible with what people already believe, and it being shown that they have practical value.

03:13:07.000 The basic barrier is this.

03:13:11.000 The science of evolution has been around for 150 years.

03:13:16.000 But there's that vitamin C example that you're using, you're talking about an extremely limited amount of education available when people are not expressing this.

03:13:24.000 Well, what, 1847?

03:13:26.000 Yeah, in comparison to 2016 or 17?

03:13:29.000 Giant difference.

03:13:30.000 Yeah, but if you've got 2 million people dying, right?

03:13:33.000 There were 2 million people dying, it was a huge problem, they didn't know how to solve it, and these ideas didn't move.

03:13:39.000 Right, but how can you compare that to today?

03:13:41.000 Well, I mean, Joe, we can't do the experiment where we have one world where we don't do anything to package and move the ideas, and we have another world where we do actively work to try and package and move these ideas.

03:13:58.000 We can't do that.

03:13:59.000 But it's a 160 years difference in time.

03:14:01.000 The world is a different world.

03:14:03.000 Well, the technology is different, but the human mind hasn't changed.

03:14:05.000 The human mind hasn't changed really in 10,000 years.

03:14:09.000 The human mind might not have changed genetically, but its understanding of the world has changed radically.

03:14:14.000 So its understanding of what a vitamin is is gigantically different between now and then.

03:14:20.000 Well, but that's also important, is that it's important to realize that when this whole scurvy conversation was going on, they didn't have the concept of a vitamin.

03:14:27.000 And there are thick concepts that you don't have right now in terms of this idea that thinking and feeling are always linked, right?

03:14:33.000 This idea of Descartes' error.

03:14:36.000 Our culture doesn't talk about emotions in a way where they understand, oh, this behavior of the student where they wad up the test and they throw it all away, that is being driven by an emotion.

03:14:44.000 Well, a lot of people understand that, though.

03:14:46.000 Do they?

03:14:47.000 Sure.

03:14:47.000 A lot of people understand that people get humiliated by failure and then it makes them pull back and they don't grow.

03:14:53.000 And when people teach people, there's a lot of things that people teach about when learning new information to make it encouraging and to make it enjoyable and to express boundless potential and not express You know, very clear, rigid boundaries that you're never going to cross and that you can impart these very limiting ideas into children's minds,

03:15:13.000 or you can expand upon their potential horizons by promoting this idea of accessibility and of massive potential.

03:15:20.000 Of course, but is it a standard practice in America's schools today when a student gets a bad test that we all work through those mistakes and analyze them?

03:15:30.000 I don't know what the standard is today. 0.63

03:15:33.000 I assume that that's just shitty teaching.

03:15:35.000 But it's not a matter of lack of understanding amongst certain individuals about the way people are motivated and not motivated.

03:15:42.000 Well, there may be a small number of individuals, but that doesn't mean that that is the general consensus.

03:15:46.000 I don't even know if it's a small number.

03:15:48.000 I think it's a very large number.

03:15:49.000 It's just not the consensus.

03:15:51.000 Why do you think that Asian cultures do better in school than American culture?

03:15:55.000 Probably discipline.

03:15:56.000 Well, a lot of it is that faith and intelligence.

03:15:58.000 They really believe practice makes perfect.

03:16:00.000 And if you work hard at something, that you'll get better.

03:16:02.000 It's also cultural, isn't it?

03:16:03.000 That is cultural.

03:16:04.000 That's what we were talking about before.

03:16:05.000 Americans don't have that culture today. 0.99

03:16:07.000 They don't have that faith that if you bust your ass and you really work hard, that you'll get better. 0.98

03:16:12.000 You don't think that people have that idea today? 0.99

03:16:15.000 Some do.

03:16:16.000 That's a giant generalization, isn't it?

03:16:18.000 Well, but look at the results.

03:16:18.000 Americans don't have...

03:16:20.000 But look at the results.

03:16:21.000 America is a massive hotbed of innovation and creativity.

03:16:24.000 Well, which part of America in particular is a massive hotbed of innovation?

03:16:29.000 Which subculture?

03:16:30.000 It's Silicon Valley.

03:16:31.000 Silicon Valley is incredibly innovative.

03:16:35.000 What about the artistic community?

03:16:36.000 What about musicians?

03:16:37.000 Massive amounts of comedy, massive amounts of writing, literature, fiction.

03:16:42.000 A lot of it's coming from America.

03:16:43.000 Totally.

03:16:44.000 All corners of the spot.

03:16:45.000 Totally.

03:16:46.000 But at the same time, is the, you know, why aren't American students doing well in school? 0.99

03:16:52.000 Shitty students, or shitty, excuse me, shitty teachers, rather. 1.00

03:16:55.000 Shitty culture. 1.00

03:16:56.000 And, well, yeah, that too.

03:16:57.000 Shitty culture.

03:16:57.000 And also a lack of resources being applied towards schools.

03:17:02.000 I mean, you find out what a teacher's salary is, you find out how little they're respected.

03:17:07.000 I mean, it's a real issue, for sure.

03:17:08.000 Yeah.

03:17:08.000 I think we absolutely agree on that.

03:17:10.000 And a large part of it is that there are complicated fixes, like fixing how much we pay teachers and all that sort of stuff.

03:17:17.000 And there are simple fixes.

03:17:19.000 And things that we can fix pretty simply, and ideas that you can promote, are embrace your mistakes, analyze your mistakes, fail forward.

03:17:27.000 And that is the cornerstone value of the FAA, Which is why you're safer flying than walking.

03:17:33.000 It's the cornerstone value of Silicon Valley.

03:17:36.000 And I will tell you that having worked with lots and lots of students and traveled all across the country, that is not the core value of a lot of American students.

03:17:44.000 Hunter, we've got to wrap this up.

03:17:45.000 I'm so sorry.

03:17:46.000 It's already 5 o'clock.

03:17:47.000 I'm in trouble.

03:17:48.000 But thank you very much, man.

03:17:49.000 Thanks so much for having me on.

03:17:50.000 We'll do it again, man.

03:17:51.000 It seems like we've got a lot more to talk about.

03:17:52.000 There's a lot to talk about. 0.99

03:17:53.000 Alright, you fucks. 0.99

03:17:54.000 See you tomorrow. 1.00

03:17:54.000 Bye. 1.00

03:17:56.000 Thanks, man.

03:17:56.000 Sorry, dude.

03:17:57.000 No, no, no.

03:18:12.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 10, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #897 - Hunter Maats

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