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The Joe Rogan Experience.
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That what s going on man?
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Good to see you 10th episode crazy Unbeliever the odds short of your regular crew Am I in the yeah, you re lame.
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There s very few people that have had 10 episodes.
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It s a small handful for sure I mean that I should put that as the top thing on my CV.
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All the other stuff is bullshit What is time on Joe Rogan drop the mic?
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This is how out of the corporate world I am.
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I don t even know what a CV is.
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I don t know what it stands for.
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I know people say it, I know what it means, but I don t know what it stands for.
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Want me to tell you what an academic CV looks like?
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Sure.
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What does it stand for?
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Curriculum Vitae.
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Ah, okay.
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You basically, in academia, you ll start with your education, all your degrees.
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all of your positions that you ve held.
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I was assistant professor here from here then.
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Then all of your journal publications, all of your books, all of your conference art, you know, and so on.
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Right.
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So it can end up being a pretty beefy CV.
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I think mine is about 47 pages long.
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Oh, my goodness.
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Look at you, you accomplished academic.
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Speaking of which.
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And managed to stay logical.
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How did you do that?
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Oh, yeah, new book.
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Dropping on May 14th, Unhappiness.
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The sad truth, two As.
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about happiness, eight secrets for leading a good life.
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Enjoy it.
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How have I been so productive?
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How have you managed to, I mean, people have gotten annoyed at you, but you ve somehow or another avoided a full-scale cancellation.
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With your positions, it s kind of amazing.
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It truly is.
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I m kind of like the Velcro Don, the- Teflon.
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Teflon Don.
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Velcro s the opposite.
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Right, right.
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Nothing sticks.
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They ve tried to cancel me in all sorts of ways, but that speaks, by the way, to one of the powerful reasons why tenure, despite the fact that a lot of people despise the concept of tenure, oh, it s just a bunch of lazy academics who are going to be deadwood for the next 30 years, but if I didn t have the protection of tenure, I d be gone long ago.
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Now, that doesn t mean that I still haven t suffered many consequences, right?
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So I haven t gotten other jobs,
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that I would have otherwise gotten because of how irreverent I am.
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You know, the death threats.
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So now after October 7th, it almost became impossible for me to go on campus.
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Because first of all, you know, I m high profile.
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My university has a particular demographic reality.
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And so there are consequences to speaking out.
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So you can t go on campus, literally?
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I mean, I have gone, but during the points when there were a lot of protests outside the campus and so on, or on campus, because our campus is an urban campus, so it s hard to say where the school begins and where the city is.
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you have death to Jews and free Palestine and Intifada and from the river to the sea and there s 800 of them screaming and you re gonna come in, many of them know who you are, they know that I m not very supportive of their positions and so it s going to be a bit challenging.
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So on a few cases, I did it via Zoom.
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Other times I had to have security with me so I would have to check into security and they d have to walk with me to class and so on.
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That s not a good thing.
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I ll tell you another quick story if I may.
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Please.
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About what happened after October 7th.
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So I ll first talk about
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what happened in Lebanon.
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So the day that we escaped from Lebanon, for those of your viewers who don t know about us, we re Lebanese Jews.
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We were there until the start of the civil war.
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We were there in the first year of the civil war, and then we had to leave because it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon.
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When we left that day, it was from Beirut to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Montreal.
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As we cleared the airspace of Lebanon, the captain, I discussed this in chapter one of my previous book, The Parasitic Mind.
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He said, okay, we re now out of Lebanese airspace.
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And so I said to my wife, my mother pulls out a pendulum for the Star of David.
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puts it around me, my neck, and says, now you can wear this, be proud and not hide your identity.
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Now, that s in the past, but now I m gonna link it to the current reality.
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About three weeks after October 7th, my wife and son came to pick me up from a cafe where I was working on my laptop.
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My wife had picked up my son who was playing a soccer match in the east end of the city.
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And so as I got into the car, he says, Daddy, if you had come to where I was playing soccer today and you were wearing a Star of David, you d be dead.
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So 1975,
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A Star of David is put around me, and now I can wear it proudly.
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Forty-five years later, I better not wear a Star of David in Montreal, Canada.
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That doesn t bode too well.
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Had a kid s soccer game.
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Yeah, because the demographic reality in that neighborhood is such that a Star of David would be viewed as provocative incitement.
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What s crazy to me is, regardless of how you feel about how the Israeli military and the army is pursuing the war in Gaza, regardless of that,
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The blatant, just out in the open anti-Semitism that we see today is like nothing I ve ever seen before.
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Like roaches coming out of the woodwork.
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Like what?
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Like you see it all over social media and it s like this...
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If this was September and not October, you would be shunned.
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Everybody would be like, this is horrible.
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How the fuck could you say this?
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You re openly anti-Semitic.
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You re openly blaming the Jews for all the world s problems.
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This is crazy.
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This is Nazi shit.
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And yet you re seeing it everywhere now.
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When those teachers were in front of Congress, when those principals of those universities were in front of Congress,
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And they were saying that it s not harassment to say death to the Jews unless it s actionable Which is the craziest mental verbal gymnastics I have ever heard anyone say that s in that position in a position of being the head of Harvard It was so crazy to watch
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It s so crazy.
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It s almost like we live in an alternative timeline, like we entered into a new dimension, like in our sleep we woke up, but we re in a new place.
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You know, nothing should surprise me given the history that I have growing up in the Middle East, but I was taken aback after October 7th at the Jew hatred that I was exposed to.
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Now, my positions are really not inflammatory.
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So, for example, I ll say things like,
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I have a lot of extended family in Israel, right?
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So after the October 7th happened, for me to just kind of call around to make sure that none of my cousins and their children and aunts and so on, no one was harmed, will take a while.
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Well, that itself, the fact that I cared about my family was incitement.
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was, I m a Zionist, I m a baby killer, right?
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I am personally responsible for the IDF killing any innocent children.
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But it s not just that, it s coming at you from all directions.
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So in the past, you could say, okay, Islamic sources are going to send you Jew hatred, and I m used to that.
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You could say, the neo-Nazi alt-right types, you know, Jews will not replace us, they re coming after me.
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You ve got, of course, the academic progressive left types who are also anti-Zionist, which is just code sweet word for anti-Jewish.
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And so everywhere you turn, there is Jew hatred and it s so normalized.
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Now, of course, in part, it is emboldened by the fact that a lot of them are anonymous.
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They don t put their real names so that they can take the liberty to be this orgiastically Jew hater.
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But it just, it s so disenchanting to see that that guy could be my gardener, he could be my surgeon, he could be my dentist.
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I don t know who he is, but there are millions of those folks who hold those beliefs.
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It s unbelievable.
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I think a lot of them are fake as well.
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I think a lot of them are Russian and Chinese trolls.
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I think there s a disturbing amount of them that s responsible for taking this kind of discourse and pushing it to a much higher level and making it more ubiquitous.
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I really, really believe that.
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And there s a lot of data to support that.
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And I think that s part of what s going on with social media.
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It s definitely a big part of what s going on with Twitter.
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and TikTok and a lot of these things where you see these very inflammatory messages that seem to be pushed.
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They re pushed through and promoted to the fact that you get them all the time.
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They show up in your feed all the time.
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Even if you re not subscribed to these, even if you re not following these people, you ll find this disturbing content will show up in your feed.
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And I really firmly believe that we re being manipulated.
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I really do.
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And I think there s a lot of these young kids that are on these campuses that are very malleable.
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They re very easily influenced.
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They don t need they don t I mean so many I m sure you ve seen Constantine kissin from trigonometry He s done these interviews with these people these protests and so many of them are completely ignorant.
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They have no idea with it They re just doing that because they think they re a good person.
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Yeah, they re putting up their flag of virtue by saying free Palestine
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from the river to the sea, and they don t even know what that means.
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Do you know what you re saying?
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You re saying wipe out Israel?
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Is that what you re saying?
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Not only that, in a lot of cases, they re supporting regimes or ideologies that would be perfectly antithetical to their main identity.
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So, queers for Palestine, chickens for Kentucky Fried Chicken, or I like to use geese for foie gras because I m from Montreal.
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I mean, imagine if you present yourself to the world with your queer identity.
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which is great, good for you.
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And now you decide, OK, let me see, should I be supporting Tel Aviv, which is one of the most queer friendly places?
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I mean, short of Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Tel Aviv is right up there.
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So you would think that if my key identity, my definitional identity is my queerness,
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That I m certainly putting all my chips with Tel Aviv.
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No, it s with queers for Palestine.
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So that s exactly what parasitic thinking is, right?
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Yeah.
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And I really do think that s supported by other countries.
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I think they realize how vulnerable and idiotic a lot of Americans are, and they re just pushing that.
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And whether you realize it or not,
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social media, even if they re saying something ridiculous, it s Very influential and they can just move the boundaries a little bit by having the most extreme Content the most ridiculous things be so common then less extreme content They would ordinarily be considered ridiculous now becomes accepted as normalized.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, which is what you re saying.
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Yeah, exactly Can I point I mean you alluded to it earlier about you know, what the IDF might be doing
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Can I just mention a few things about that?
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And I m hardly the spokesperson of the IDF, but it s an idea that I ve been toying with and I ll pitch it here for the first time.
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So you know this notion of equality of opportunities versus equality of outcomes?
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Typically we link it to all of the woke stuff, right?
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So equality of opportunities is great, equality of outcomes is a cancer to human dignity.
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Okay.
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Let s now apply that concept, equality of outcomes, to war casualties.
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So I think this is what happens when people say, oh, but the IDF is being grotesque, because the currency that then matters becomes how many dead on each side, equality of outcome.
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But let me change it to a different moral currency, okay?
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Let s talk about intent.
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So for example, in the justice system, you could have a person who is found guilty of involuntarily vehicular homicide, and he kills four people, okay?
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So four are dead.
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So that s equality of outcome, four died, versus someone who
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took out a hit on his entire family, his brother, sister, and parents, so that he can win the insurance money.
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But it s an undercover operation.
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The cops catch you, even though in that case there were zero killed, correct?
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That person will get a higher sentence because we understand in the law that intent matters.
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So now I think you know where I m going with the analogy.
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So, in the Palestinian-IDF conflict, when, say, Hamas launches 6,000 rockets, every single one of which is intercepted by the Iron Dome, had they not had the Iron Dome, then the outcome could have been that 50,000 would have been killed, right?
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In an ideal world, from Hamas s perspective,
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Our intent would be to eradicate every last Jew.
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They have it in their charter.
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So, yes, it is true that if we just count the number of people who were killed on October 7th versus the number who were killed in the retaliation, if that s the only calculus that matters,
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then oh yes, the IDF has gone way overboard.
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But once you change it to an existential intent issue, then maybe it s not as bad of an outcome as you think.
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Notwithstanding that a single innocent dead is a tragedy.
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That s, you could say it that way, but the problem with that is the Iron Dome does exist and Hamas s military capabilities are far below Israel s.
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It would be like if some small person tried to punch me and I moved out of the way and then beat them to death.
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And I said, no, I had to defend myself.
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I beat them to death.
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But I didn t have to beat them to death.
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They re just a small person.
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Even if they hit me, it wouldn t really hurt me.
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You know what I m saying?
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Defensively, I m not worried about a real small person that doesn t know how to fight, who throws a punch at me.
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So what would be, in your moral calculus, the ideal outcome that should have happened as a retaliation to October 7th?
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That s a very good question.
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Obviously, I m not a military analyst, if I was.
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You know, you do have to take into consideration the tunnels.
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You do have to take into consideration the infrastructure.
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The question is, did they just knowingly bomb places where there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians knowing that there s going to be a few Hamas?
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And that s what scares people.
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What scares people is that someone is willing to kill women and children just to get at bad guys, and they just say that s just part of the game.
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That seems horrific in the 2024 understanding of human life and morality and just the horrors of war.
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That, you know, they re blowing up mosques, they re blowing up schools, they re blowing up apartment buildings, everything, anything where they think Hamas is.
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So again, let me preface, and I shouldn t have to say this, that a single person killed that s innocent is a tragedy.
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Of course.
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But compare that reality to almost any other war that you have in working memory.
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Why is there a unique, unbelievably high threshold of morality that is placed on the Israeli nation, right?
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Now, you probably already know this.
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The IDF does go through a lot of painstaking effort to try to minimize that, right?
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They drop leaflets in Arabic.
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They even sometimes call people
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in Arabic and say, don t go in this area, they hold, so of course they ve killed many, many innocent people.
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But they re placed between a rock and a hard place.
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What can you do, right?
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The other side knows exactly that if they do exactly what they re doing, either you don t retaliate and we win, or you retaliate very harshly as they have, and then you still win, right?
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Today, the propaganda war has been completely won by Hamas, right?
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There s a complete genocide in the informational war against the IDF, right?
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One other point, and then I ll cede the floor back to you.
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The term genocide, Jacques Derrida was a very famous postmodernist who developed the field of deconstructionism.
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Language creates reality, right?
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He was one of the guys who
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allowed the ecosystem of up is down, men could be women, left is right, slavery is freedom, right?
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It s that postmodernist game that allows these kind of insane ideas to flourish.
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Well, when you misuse words, like everything is a genocide, that does no one a service.
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There is no genocide.
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There is a killing of a lot of people.
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Again, every single one killed is a tragedy, but if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, by the end of my appearing on this 10th time on this show, there wouldn t be a single Palestinian left.
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So if they were genocidal in their intent, then they really are shitty genocidal maniacs because, first of all,
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The population as you know of the Palestinian territories has gone up fivefold, right?
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So that s really sucky genocide and they ve killed depending on the count, right?
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But that s all previous to this this Military actions going on now.
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What are the numbers the population, you know right now?
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It s hard to say.
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I
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You know, I mean, Israel has one statistic and then there s other statistics by human rights organizations that estimate at least 12,000 missing in the rubble that are probably dead and 30,000 dead.
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Now, at the number of those 30,000, what percentage is Hamas?
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I m not sure.
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So I ve heard the most favorable estimates to the IDF are about 1 to 1 ratio.
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The less estimate, it s about 1 to 1.5, up to 1 to 2.
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So if they kill 30,000 people, 15,000 are Hamas?
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Is that what you re saying?
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No, one-to-one would be $15,000 to $15,000, and then you can take it from there, right?
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Okay.
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A one-to-one.
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One-to-one.
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But half of them.
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Half of them would be.
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Yeah, so half of $30,000 is $15,000.
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Exactly, okay.
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So now, let s compare it to, and I don t know if others have made this analogy, when you drop the bomb, the atomic bomb,
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Almost all the people who were killed were non-combatants, right?
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So then that ratio would be 250,000 killed to zero.
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I mean, unless there s a few Japanese military guys that were in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, you dropped.
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And again, I m not trying to say, oh, but they re not as bad as these other guys, so they re okay.
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Let s give them a ribbon.
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a medal.
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But again, it is anti-Semitic when you place one group of people to a standard of morality that is not expected of anybody else.
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So, for example, if you really care about Arab lives, then you certainly should care about all of the Yemenis that have been killed that are a lot more
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than whatever s happened after October 7th.
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You would care about the 500,000 Syrians that were killed.
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You would care about the war between Iran and Iraq that led to several million killed.
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And how about a Lebanese civil war, 150,000 died in a very small.
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Right, but that s not happening currently, so people aren t totally aware of that.
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Like just those statistics that you brought up, the Lebanese deaths, most people are not aware of that.
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Most people that are discussing, especially college kids, are not aware of that.
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That s why I m here.
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Yeah.
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I mean, it s all ugly.
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It s all awful.
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There s nothing that you could say that is in any way, shape or form positive about any of this.
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The question is, is there another way to do it other than just bombing these areas where you know Hamas is and civilians?
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There is another way, but I don t think it ll happen.
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Can I share it?
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Yeah.
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So Golda Meir, who was the fourth or fifth prime minister of Israel from, I think, 1969 to 1974, has two quotes, which I m going to paraphrase.
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I don t have the exact quote.
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She said, if the Jews put down their arms,
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there ll be a genocide.
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If the Palestinians put down their arms, there ll be peace.
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So just remember that for a second.
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Second one is, if the Arabs, and she means in this case the Palestinian Arabs, if they were to love their children more than they hate ours, then there d be peace.
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So why am I saying these two quotes?
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Because this battle is really not about land.
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And in a sense, we ve already addressed this on previous shows where I ve come and discussed about some of these Islamic issues.
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It is an existential affront that the Jewish state exists in the Middle East.
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So look at all other religious minorities across Arabia.
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Egypt used to be completely Coptic Christian, 100%, many hundred years ago.
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Today, there are 10% Copts left.
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What happened to those Copts?
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There used to be tons of Christians in Syria.
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What happened to those Syrians?
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There used to be tons of Christians in Lebanon.
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There still are some, about 30, 35%, but Lebanon used to be a majority Christian country.
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So the goal of Islam, not individual Muslims, right?
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Again, I don t need to preface by saying there are millions and millions of lovely, kind, peaceful Muslims.
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SPEAKER_00
Of course there is.
2
SPEAKER_00
But Islam as an ideology, does it tolerate others?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, we have 1,400 years of history that either says it does or it doesn t, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
We don t have to watch TikTok videos.
2
SPEAKER_00
And nothing could be clearer than what the words of Muhammad were, the prophet of Islam, who said,
2
SPEAKER_00
that you need to rid Arabia of Christians, but certainly the Jews.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the existence of the land of Israel is an affront to that.
2
SPEAKER_00
One more point I ll see to go back to.
2
SPEAKER_00
In Islam, there s a concept called Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harab.
2
SPEAKER_00
That means the house of Islam and the house of war.
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SPEAKER_00
Anything that s under the Islamic control is good.
2
SPEAKER_00
Anything that s yet to be under Islamic control is under the house of war.
2
SPEAKER_00
Once a territory is under Islamic control and you lose it, you have to get it back.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is your dominion forever.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is why, for example, Andalusia, which was at one point controlled, which is in current Spain, which was controlled by the Moors, an Islamic conquistador,
2
SPEAKER_00
A lot of jihadists will say, inshallah, we have to reconquer Andalusia.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is our land because once it s under.
2
SPEAKER_00
So Israel existentially cannot exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
So why am I saying all this?
2
SPEAKER_00
You can t have peace if you have the other side that truly never wants for you to exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s the bottom line.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you can change people s heart where they say, look, I get a piece of land, you get another piece.
2
SPEAKER_00
let s build an incredible, vibrant co-society together, you d have peace.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if you re taught from straight out of the womb that the Jews is the reason for every calamity in the world, you re not going to have peace.
2
SPEAKER_01
But don t you think that there are Jews and there are Israelis that treat Palestinians as if they re less?
2
SPEAKER_00
There is that in Texas in terms of treating people who are Hispanic.
2
SPEAKER_00
The darkness of the human heart is not monopolized by one group.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are super nasty Jews and there are incredibly lovely and kind Jews.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are super nice Muslims and incredibly brutal Muslims.
2
SPEAKER_00
So there is no monopoly on the darkness of the human heart.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I can see that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Of course, there are Jews that are not very keen on having Palestinian neighbors.
2
SPEAKER_00
But as someone who grew up in the two worlds, right, I m an Arabic-speaking Jew.
2
SPEAKER_00
I hang around with tons of Muslims.
2
SPEAKER_00
I hang around with tons of Jews.
2
SPEAKER_00
Have I ever heard somebody in my Jewish family say, oh God, I can t wait for us to eradicate the 1.52 billion Muslims in the world?
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve never heard that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Have I heard incessantly all the time about, inshallah, we ll get rid of the Jews?
2
SPEAKER_00
Every second, you just have to say, hi, Ahmad, the next line is, goddammit, we gotta get rid of the Jews.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, it s become a lot... Isn t it really that common where you are?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s as common as the heat in Texas.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is definitional.
2
SPEAKER_00
As a matter of fact, I introduced a game, I mean facetiously, but I mean it seriously, Six Degrees of Jew.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s a play on six degrees of... Kevin Bacon.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I give you a calamity in the world, and you ve got up to six causal steps to blame the Jew.
2
SPEAKER_00
So an Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon.
2
SPEAKER_00
Go.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I will post these on Twitter and people give answers.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, oftentimes they re just playing along, but that s the mindset.
2
SPEAKER_00
You got diabetes?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s because the Jews who are controlling the pharmaceutical industry are not releasing the drug.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ll give you an idea.
2
SPEAKER_00
a recent one that I faced.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I put up a police lineup of some guys that had been caught in Huddersfield, which is a town in England, who had been grooming and raping young British white girls.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you may or may not know this, I m not sure if we ve discussed it in the past, in Britain, over the past 25 years, there s been an unbelievable industrial scale level
2
SPEAKER_00
grooming and raping of young white girls by Asian men.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a euphemism for men of a certain religious heritage, but you say they re Asian.
2
SPEAKER_00
So their names are, let me summarize them for you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Muhammad, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, Muhammad, okay?
2
SPEAKER_00
So I put those up and I sarcastically said,
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t have a big enough brain to do the big data analytics to understand what is the commonality across all those gentlemen.
2
SPEAKER_00
Could anybody help me?
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you know how many people wrote to me and blamed it on the Jews?
2
SPEAKER_00
Not facetiously.
2
SPEAKER_00
So now I m gonna ask you, Joe.
2
SPEAKER_00
How?
2
SPEAKER_00
I was just gonna ask you that.
2
SPEAKER_00
How is it when three Muhammads rape your 12-year-old British girl, you blame it on Mordecai?
2
SPEAKER_00
Three Mohammeds lead to Mordechai.
2
SPEAKER_00
Tell me how.
2
SPEAKER_00
You tell me.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
How do they do it?
2
SPEAKER_00
Who let them in?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s the Jewish cabal who controls immigration policy.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s George Soros, the Jew, who controls the open society ideology.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t think you really just connect George Soros to Jewish.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you look at his policies, he seems
2
SPEAKER_01
anti-western civilization.
2
SPEAKER_00
I agree, but for the Jew-hater, any causal explanation.
2
SPEAKER_00
So one individual who just happens to be Jewish.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or they point to some other one.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s one, I don t even know who she is, I think Barbara Lerner or something.
2
SPEAKER_00
Somebody will correct us in the comments section.
2
SPEAKER_00
where they show her saying something, oh, you know, we need to flood, and she happens to be Jewish.
2
SPEAKER_00
But for every Jewish person who is pro-open door policy, there s a counter-Jewish person.
2
SPEAKER_00
Here is one who is not for open border policies, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Stephen Miller, who worked in the Trump administration, is Jewish.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s probably the biggest anti-open door immigration.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that s the mindset of the Jew hater.
2
SPEAKER_00
Everything is blamed.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s this incredible diabolical feature of the Jew that they re able to at times pretend that they re victims, but really they re diabolical and genocidal.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s grotesque, man.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s weird.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just weird that it became so out in the open, and that s what makes me think that they re being influenced.
2
SPEAKER_01
I just can t imagine there was that much anti-Semitism before October 7th.
2
SPEAKER_00
But why?
2
SPEAKER_00
The influence is coming for what purpose?
2
SPEAKER_00
Just to create havoc?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, to keep people at each other s throats.
2
SPEAKER_01
I really think so.
2
SPEAKER_01
And also to completely screw up democracy.
2
SPEAKER_01
People have lost all their faith in voting.
2
SPEAKER_01
They ve lost all their faith in the money behind politics and the influence behind politics.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the more this stuff just gets brought up, the more chaos there is, the more hatred there is, the more divide there is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, even amongst the Democratic Party right which we talked about the other day that like some large number We think it s around 70% of Jewish people vote Democrat
3
SPEAKER_01
But now, you know, the Democratic Party is full on with this Palestine thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, you see it on college campuses, this rampant anti-Semitism, death to the Jews being tolerated, like literally saying that, yelling it out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, you can go back.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I wouldn t be able to tell you which number, which episode, but you can go back to earlier episodes that have appeared on this glorious podcast, where you will see that I would have predicted exactly what we re seeing now.
3
SPEAKER_00
and it s not because I m a prophet or it s not because I m so intelligent, it s because you simply have to have the power of having the imagination to extrapolate from a current trend to some future outcome, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you let in into your country people who have genocidal Jew hatred as an endemic feature of their society, so I ll give you, since people love stats,
3
SPEAKER_00
So there was a Pew, Pew is a nonpartisan, if anything, they probably lean towards being more woke.
3
SPEAKER_00
So Pew has these global surveys that they conduct.
3
SPEAKER_00
So in 2010, they conducted a survey looking at how favorable are you towards the Jews across a whole bunch of Islamic countries.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, if I were to tell you that 10% of the polled people exhibited Jew hatred, you d say, oh boy, that s a big number.
3
SPEAKER_00
10% is a lot.
3
SPEAKER_00
How about if I tell you that for most of those polled countries, it was between 95% to 99%?
3
SPEAKER_00
So let me—I know people understand what 95 to 99 means.
3
SPEAKER_00
If I pull 100 people, 95 to 99 will express very problematic Jew hatred, okay?
3
SPEAKER_00
So now if I let in 100,000 such people into the country,
3
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and a professor with a 47-page academic CV to say, well, probably Jew hatred is going to go up.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s what we re seeing now.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re seeing the outcome of having an immigration policy that has let in people that don t share our foundational values.
3
SPEAKER_00
Again, this doesn t mean someone s going to write in the comments section, what a hypocrite.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re an immigrant, Gadsad.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, there are immigrants and there are immigrants.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are tons of Muslims who want to come in here and leave all that baggage at the door.
3
SPEAKER_00
They want nothing to do with that.
3
SPEAKER_00
They just want to live the American experience.
3
SPEAKER_00
The problem is we don t have the machine that can look into your heart and mind, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s a statistical game.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you re going to let in hundreds, I mean, look what s happening in Germany.
3
SPEAKER_00
Look what s happening in France.
3
SPEAKER_00
Look what s happening in Denmark.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you this.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why do you think that stuff is happening?
3
SPEAKER_01
Why do you think there s this mass immigration?
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s a great question.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s covered partly in Parasitic Mind, my earlier book, and in my next book, which I call Suicidal Empathy.
3
SPEAKER_00
So empathy is an emotion that has evolved for very clear evolutionary reasons.
3
SPEAKER_00
So just like any of our other emotions,
3
SPEAKER_00
For example, envy, there are evolutionary reasons why we ve evolved the emotion of envy, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It can compel us forward.
3
SPEAKER_00
I see that Joe s doing well, keeping up with the Joneses, maybe it ll get me off my fat ass so I can work harder.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there are very clear evolutionary reasons why empathy exists.
3
SPEAKER_00
But the problem is when empathy misfires, it either becomes hyperactive or it misfires in directing the empathy to the wrong person.
3
SPEAKER_00
So for example,
3
SPEAKER_00
illegal immigrants more important than American vets, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I can show you many public policies where you have these insane policies, all of which are due to suicidal empathy.
3
SPEAKER_00
So to answer your question, I think that the Western mind is we are kind, tolerant, compassionate, empathetic people.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are people out there, they re Guatemalan, they re Honduran, they re Yemeni, who don t have it as well as we do.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wouldn t it be nice if we open up our doors?
3
SPEAKER_00
So the reflex is a noble one, it s a nice one, but it exists in unicornia.
3
SPEAKER_00
The real world doesn t operate that way.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you let in people that have a huge hatred of homosexuality, are you going to have an increase in homophobia in your country or a decrease, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So, I think that s the answer.
3
SPEAKER_00
The answer is misdirected empathy across the West.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it really that simple?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because it seems like it s happened so rapidly that it seems like a plan, like a plan to create more chaos.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s happened.
3
SPEAKER_01
The border policy in America is puzzling.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s baffling because it seems like there s a plan to flood the country.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s sort of a conspiratorial kind of cabal.
3
SPEAKER_01
It seems like there s something going on that s allowing it to happen even though everyone recognizes it s a problem and it s solvable, but they don t solve it.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, the United States government has actively tried to stop Texas from enforcing their border.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I think that s just, so I ve often tweeted that the most dangerous weapon in human context is a parasitized mind, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, a bomb is dangerous, but it is the human mind that activates that bomb, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a guy with a little mustache that said that Jews are the real problem of the world, and I need to get rid of the world of that parasite, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So parasitic thinking, I mean, one of the reasons I think that that book did so well is because it really explained how all of these parasitic ideas came to a head together.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they were all spawned on university campuses over the past 40 to 80 years.
3
SPEAKER_00
So one hypothesis is what you said, which is there is kind of a grand scheme that s willfully doing this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Another one is that all of the Western leaders of roughly the same age,
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, within 20 years of each other, are all a product of a Western education, university education, that was completely infected with these dreadful parasitic ideas, so that when these leaders go out there and have the power to enact policies, they enact these policies.
3
SPEAKER_00
So my view is slightly different from yours in that I don t think that there is a supra-mega, you know, willful plan.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just that all of those Western leaders are the product of a really shitty university system.
3
SPEAKER_00
Hmm.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there s obviously two schools of thought, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s the left wing school of thought and the right wing school of thought in regards to this.
3
SPEAKER_01
The right wing school of thought wants to seal our borders, wants to secure the borders, wants to stop illegal immigration.
3
SPEAKER_01
The left wing wants, I mean, I don t know what they want because they start talking about border policies being a problem as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they start talking about the issue at the border, and they try to blame Trump for the issues at the border, which is always hilarious.
3
SPEAKER_01
But they re just so... With that kind of stuff, with blaming, like when Biden blames Trump for things that he clearly did, it s just gaslighting, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And it just shows you how little respect they have for people s ability to understand what s actually going on.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, look, suicidal empathy, I mean, we can move beyond the border.
3
SPEAKER_00
How about, say, in the justice system?
3
SPEAKER_00
Suicidal empathy results in you caring more about the perpetrator than the victim.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s suicidal empathy, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because that argument, so here s how that leftist argument works.
3
SPEAKER_00
If a person, especially a criminal of color, commits a crime, that s probably because he grew up as a person of color, so he s already been marginalized by the society.
3
SPEAKER_00
So now he commits a crime,
3
SPEAKER_00
You re now double whamming him by putting him in the penal system.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you need to be more caring.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he s already got 57 previous arrests.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s give him a 58th chance.
3
SPEAKER_00
So again, I don t think it comes from, it comes from really parasitized thinking, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, but that, those policies are supported by George Soros.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he actively goes after DAs that have the most lenient and ridiculous policies in regards to no cash bails, releasing violent criminals.
3
SPEAKER_01
That seems like that s done on purpose.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s done with intent.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s done on purpose.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I think where we may defer is you think it s because there is a duplicitous evil, let s cause havoc, whereas I think they actually believe that that s the noble position, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
and there should be no borders.
3
SPEAKER_00
There is no illegal human.
3
SPEAKER_00
What kind of bullshit is this?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, why do you have a lock on your door, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So why is it that I get to have sex with my beautiful wife, but all these homeless guys are sexually starved?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not fair.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the parasitism of socialism.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re all equal.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why do you make a lot more money than I do, Joe?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not fair.
3
SPEAKER_00
I need to have as much money as you, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So I don t think, I mean,
3
SPEAKER_00
I hope that it s not what you re saying is true, because then that s even more sinister, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
That there s kind of a boo-hoo-hoo.
3
SPEAKER_00
I just think it s people who are misguided in their misdirected nobility, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I think it s both.
3
SPEAKER_00
You think it s both, yeah?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think it s both.
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s both, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think there s definitely a lot of misguided people, but I think there s definitely a plan.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s too organized.
3
SPEAKER_01
The DA system, the DA thing with funding the far leftist DAs and then funding someone who opposes them who s even more ridiculous, that seems to be a plan.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s got a pattern of that and he seems to enjoy it, enjoy spending his money in that way.
4
SPEAKER_00
But he enjoys it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it s like this crazy game.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you think about what s going on with your boyfriend Trump these days?
4
SPEAKER_00
What, oh, the trials?
4
SPEAKER_00
The trials.
4
SPEAKER_00
Fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, I had Mike Baker on, who s formerly a CIA operative, formerly.
4
SPEAKER_00
But we were talking about that, that no one s ever been charged for something like that before, no one s ever been prosecuted for something like that before, certainly no political opponents.
4
SPEAKER_00
And my thing is the danger, the people that are on the left that don t understand that now you ve set a precedent.
4
SPEAKER_00
You set a terrible precedent, and if Trump does get in office, what is to stop him from going after all of his political enemies in the same exact way?
4
SPEAKER_00
Are we going to do this now?
4
SPEAKER_00
Every time someone s in a position of power, whether it s a governor or whether it s a president or what have you, when they have a political opponent, they will hire people to go after that political opponent and trump up a bunch of trump up, no pun intended.
4
SPEAKER_00
a bunch of bullshit charges and drag them through the courts so that everybody s, the people that only have a peripheral understanding of what s going on, they re like, oh my God, he s a criminal.
4
SPEAKER_00
Keep that criminal out of the White House.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think a lot of people who historically had been against Trump are now honest enough to see what a sham this whole thing is and are revising their positions, or do you think that- There s quite a few, yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
Really?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but it takes a lot of bravery to do that, depending upon your social environment.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of people that just can t step outside the lines of whatever the ideology their neighborhood is attached to and their community is attached to.
4
SPEAKER_01
The reason why I ask the question is because I recently appeared maybe about five, six months ago on a British psychiatrist show.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a small show, but I thought he was a really interesting guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
He wanted to talk about how you apply evolution in psychiatry and so on, so I was like, let s do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Towards the end of the show, or maybe it was even the last question, he said, in your 30-year career as a behavioral scientist, as a professor, what is the singular human phenomenon that has surprised you the most?
4
SPEAKER_01
Which I thought was an amazing question.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had never been asked before.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s an amazing one because I ve seen tons of stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I paused for a moment and then I said, I think it s the inability of people to change their opinions once they are anchored in a position.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so it was in that spirit that I was asking you the question.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because in my experience, despite the fact that I have a chapter in the parasitic mind on how to seek truth, and therefore I m offering a vaccine against falsehoods, I m actually quite pessimistic for some people who go, la la la, I don t wanna hear it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because they re so anchored, there s no amount of evidence that I could ever show you that can move you a millimeter from your position.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s very disheartening.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s very disheartening.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s very foolish.
4
SPEAKER_00
I always try to tell people, do not be married to your ideas.
4
SPEAKER_00
You should not connect them to you.
4
SPEAKER_00
They are just ideas.
4
SPEAKER_00
They are not you.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you have supported an idea that you find to be false, and you are afraid to admit that you were incorrect, that is far more weak than being incorrect.
4
SPEAKER_00
because now you know that you were incorrect but your pride is keeping you from admitting it that is beyond foolish and now people will always know that you re going to do that with what people will forgive you if you make mistakes people will forgive you if you re incorrect we we have all made mistakes we are all
4
SPEAKER_00
Occasionally incorrect.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m incorrect all the time, but I make a big point of not attaching myself to ideas I will argue them if I think they are correct, but they are not me Yeah, you know Patrice O Neill had a great quote and he said You could hold your opinions, but don t let your opinions hold you right beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you just you got to know that you re not ideas.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re a human being And it s a challenge when you are faced with the reality of the fact that you ve made an error, especially if you ve been bold about it if you ve been Condescending to people who disagree with it if you re egotistical in your position you connected yourself to righteousness and intellect and science and whatever other words you want to throw around that make your opinion
4
SPEAKER_00
more valid than the other people s opinion, and then you find out you were wrong.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, if we are ever gonna trust you again, you have to tell us why you were wrong, how you were wrong, and what that feels like, and what you ve learned from this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because if you don t, if you keep arguing that, you keep doing it, now we have no respect for you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Fauci s the worst, but he s worse than that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think he s far worse than that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think he s deceptive.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, if the real Anthony Fauci, the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
4
SPEAKER_00
is not, if it s not accurate, he would be sued.
4
SPEAKER_00
He would be sued.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
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And just forget about what happened during COVID.
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Just what we know took place during the AIDS crisis.
4
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Everyone should read that book.
4
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Everyone should understand this same game plan was played out during the AIDS crisis.
4
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And it s a game plan
4
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Whether in cahoots with the pharmaceutical drug companies and they push this thing as being the only remedy and this is how and they make Tremendous amounts of money and that s all real.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is not tinfoil hat conspiracy wearing shit That s real.
4
SPEAKER_00
But if you supported him because you thought that he was the science and then over time you have realized that oh my god, they did
4
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work with Peter Datzig, they did fund, through another organization, gain-of-function research.
4
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He did lie about it.
4
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It was talked about in emails.
4
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He did contact people who were saying one thing and had them change their position.
4
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He did.
4
SPEAKER_00
They did ridicule the lab leak theory when they knew it to be correct.
4
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They knew it.
4
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They knew they were doing the exact same research on the exact same viruses in that exact same place where it broke out.
4
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They knew it.
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And they lied, because they wanted to cover their ass, and we let them get away with it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I m glad we re talking about the inability to admit to a wrongdoing in science, because oftentimes when you think about people who are anchored in their positions, you think about political arguments.
4
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You think that somehow you romanticize scientists as being unbiased purveyors and pursuers of the truth, and nothing could be further from the truth.
4
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So I ll give you just a couple of examples, historical examples.
4
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I mean, of course, Galileo is a perfect example.
4
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Copernicus is a great example.
4
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Darwin is a great example.
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But let s look at some other ones that people may not be familiar with.
4
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So I think his name, I m not sure how you pronounce it, Semmelweis.
4
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He was the gentleman who arguably has saved more people than anybody else in medicine.
4
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Do you have any idea who it is?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, is he the penicillin guy?
4
SPEAKER_01
Not the penicillin, that s, what s his name, Fleming.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that s Fleming.
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SPEAKER_01
I think he was a Scottish physician, if I m not mistaken.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, this guy is the gentleman who told other physicians that they should...
4
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Oh, wash their hands.
4
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Wash their hands.
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Yes.
4
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So do you remember, he was a, I think he was a Hungarian physician who was noticing that a lot of, there was this huge mortality rate of women as they were giving birth.
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And so he started running these naturally occurring experiments where you either, so the physician has just worked on a cadaver and then goes and does the obstetrics.
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SPEAKER_01
So, when he said, wash your hands, he died, I think, penniless, destitute, in a mental asylum or something, right?
4
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And then later, people said, oops, he was right.
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Because they didn t understand bacteria back then.
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They didn t understand bacteria.
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Yeah, that guy, Samuel Weiss, exactly.
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Cadaveric particles, does that mean?
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Cadavers, yeah.
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Cadaver, right.
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Every case of childhood fever was caused by resorption of cadaveric particles.
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Oh my God.
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But the blowback against this guy from the senior physicians, I mean, this guy was destitute.
4
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He died completely unvalidated.
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I mean, it was only post hoc that he, there you go, nervous breakdown.
4
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Allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown, was committed to an asylum by his colleagues.
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In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards.
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Oh, God.
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It s an incredible story.
4
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Here s another one.
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I don t remember his name.
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The truth tester, Jamie, will get it out for us.
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There s a gentleman who won the Nobel Prize, I d say in the last 20 or 30 years, for arguing that ulcers are caused by a particular virus, or I don t know if it s a virus or a bacterium.
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and everybody laughed him out of town.
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He ended up winning the Nobel Prize.
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And so I often joke with my students, I say, if people laugh at your ideas and fight them, it s either for one or two reasons.
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It s a really shitty idea and it s worthy of that derision, or prepare to go to Stockholm to win the Nobel Prize.
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Because I mean literally right it s one of the other it s one of the other because the Nobel Prize is nothing but a history of People saying what a quack this moron is no way.
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Oops.
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Here s your Nobel Prize doctor And isn t that because of what we talk about because of ego and that ego?
4
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Being connected to your ideas if someone comes along with a revolutionary idea that s contrary to what you currently believe You take it as an affront to yourself Exactly.
4
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It s horrible
5
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So I gave a talk, this is going back to some of my early appearances here where we would talk a lot more evolutionary psychology.
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I gave two talks at University of Michigan when my first book came out.
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It was an academic book, Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, how do you apply evolutionary psychology in human behavior in general, consumer behavior in particular.
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SPEAKER_00
I give the talk in the psychology department on a Thursday, and everybody s like, oh yeah, this is gorgeous, because a lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on, so they were totally appreciative of the fact that you can t really study human behavior without understanding
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biological signatures of human behavior.
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Okay, then I go to the business school the next day, Ross School of Business.
5
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I give the exact same talk, okay?
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I couldn t finish a single sentence because all of the professors, and it was usually the professors, it wasn t the doctoral students who were, because the doctoral students are still malleable, their brains are still being formed, they re happy to listen.
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It s the senior professor who has spent 30 years arguing that human minds are born tabula rasa, empty slated,
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and it s only socialization that teaches the consumer to be how he or she is, that they were really offended by my stuff.
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So they would constantly interrupt me and berate me.
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And I remember, as a side personal note, my wife was in the audience that day, she had come with me, and prior to that talk she had said, oh, I feel really sick, I probably have food poisoning.
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We later found out that she was pregnant with our first daughter.
5
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So there s both a really bad memory and a really good memory associated with the University of Michigan.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, what was their position when you were saying this?
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SPEAKER_00
Biology does not... So, they were interrupting you?
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SPEAKER_00
Non-stop.
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SPEAKER_00
I probably got through... So, let s say, I don t remember the number of slides.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s say I had 30 slides.
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I maybe got to slide 10.
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SPEAKER_00
So here s first question.
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Oh, if everything is due to evolutionary pressures, how do you explain homosexuality then?
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If everything is due to survival instinct, how do you explain suicide then?
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SPEAKER_00
By the way, there are evolutionary explanations for suicide and homosexuality, right?
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Humans are a sexually reproducing species, even though chaste monks exist, right?
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People do have a survival instinct, even though some people commit suicide.
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Men are taller than women even though your Aunt Julie is taller than your Uncle Bob.
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So what happens with people in terms of a cognitive obstacle, they take a singular datum as proof that a statement that is true at the population level has been violated.
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It hasn t, right?
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Every single WNBA player is taller than most men.
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That does not invalidate the fact that men are taller than women.
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SPEAKER_00
So all of the morons at the University of Michigan were also coming to that kind of stuff, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because they didn t like the idea, to our earlier discussion that we ve had on the show, a lot of people don t like the idea that we are biologically determined.
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SPEAKER_00
They think that that s a form of, you re just an executor of your genes.
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SPEAKER_00
But that s the wrong view, by the way, because everything is an interaction between your genes and the environment, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Even specific genes get turned on as a function of the environment.
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SPEAKER_00
So the fact that you believe that we have biological imperatives that guide our behavior doesn t make us blind executors of our genes.
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SPEAKER_01
Right, and that s what s important.
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But the idea that everyone is born a blank slate is so silly because there s children that don t even grow up with their parents that have traits that their parents have.
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No kidding.
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And also happen to have talents that their parents have for some strange reason.
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Called their dog the same name.
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There s a lot of weirdness to it There s a lot of weirdness to memory the like genetic memory like whoever you are It s not as simple as you were a baby.
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You started off clear and blank.
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That s not real we learn things somehow or another through some
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I guess it s explored, but not quite understood process.
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And this process even encourages things like racism.
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There s even detrimental ideas that are inherited through children that have been proven.
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SPEAKER_00
But they don t know exactly the mechanism, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because you mentioned memory, so maybe I could talk about how you study memory from an evolutionary perspective.
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Please.
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So, is that where, can I ask you this before we start?
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Sure.
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Do you think that s where like, Ophidiophobia and Arachnophobia and things like that come from?
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Yeah, so there is actually a lot of research looking at the evolutionary roots of phobia.
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That s studied in evolutionary clinical psychology and in Darwinian psychiatry.
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for me or that are fascinating or a video phobia and arachnophobia fear of snakes and fear spiders because that Evolutionarily makes sense exactly if we either got bit and survived or you saw someone get bit or you you know And you see a spider you re like, oh shit, but that s why by the way you don t go see your clinical psychologist because you have a fear of guns or fears of
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cars, even though cars and guns kill a lot more people than spiders.
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If you study the manifestations of clinical cases of phobia, they re exactly what you re saying.
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Because, you know, from doing Fear Factor, we would encounter people that had both of those.
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And man, when you see it in real life, it s like a person s possessed by a demon.
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It s crazy.
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When you see like high level of videophobia and people see snakes, their whole body starts shaking.
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They can t keep their hands still.
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It s crazy, man.
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It s not like, you know, I see a dog, looks like a scary dog.
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SPEAKER_01
Whoa, keep away from that dog.
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It s not like that.
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It s like your whole body.
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SPEAKER_00
By the way, I actually, I don t think it s at the clinical level.
5
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But in The Parasitic Mind, in chapter one, I talk about the maladaptive, or maybe adaptive phobia that I have of mosquitoes.
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SPEAKER_00
So early in my marriage to my wife, maybe that was one of the best ways to test if she d go the whole route with me, is we were traveling to Antigua, and we had the misfortune of some, you know, it s in the Caribbean, there are a lot of mosquitoes, and a couple of mosquitoes got in.
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I spent with her, with her complete patience, probably till two in the morning, tracking and killing every single mosquito in that condo, because the thought of that disgusting, monstrous pig sucking the blood out of me was just unbearable.
5
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And so, I mean, I literally will turn into a little girl if we see a mosquito in the house.
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I cannot go on with my day.
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I can t watch TV.
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I can t train.
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The mosquito must die.
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Now, in a sense, that s perfectly adaptive because we know that by far, if you add up the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined, it s not even a minuscule thing.
5
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There s not another thing that kills people as much as mosquitoes.
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Right, so that s perfectly adaptive.
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But do you want me to go to the memory stuff?
5
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
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So, think about
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say a squirrel, it has evolved a memory that allows it to remember the spatial location in your backyard where it stores caches of food so that it has its own memory bias so that even though it won t detect it by smell, because let s say in Montreal it s under four feet of snow,
5
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it has a mental map so that it perfectly knows where it hid everything, right?
5
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Now, the human memory has evolved to solve different problems.
5
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So then if you are a memory researcher studying memory from an evolutionary perspective, you would say, well, what would the human memory solve as an adaptive problem?
5
SPEAKER_00
So let me give you one such example.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if I show you a bunch of photos of people, okay, images of faces, and I put a descriptor next to each one where I tag that person as a social cheater or not a cheater.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what does social cheating mean?
5
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Lack of reciprocation.
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So if I do something for you, then you will cheat and recant and not, I scratch your back, but you ll never scratch mine, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Now that information about the personal characteristic of that individual is an evolutionarily important datum, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So now I m going to show you all these people.
5
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I control for their good looks, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So I don t put all of the cheaters as being good looking, right?
5
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Because then you might remember them because they were good looking, not because they were cheaters, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So I put this array of faces, and then later I ask you to remember whether you d seen that face or not.
5
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and people end up remembering at a much higher level any face that had been tagged as being a social cheater.
5
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Do you follow?
5
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Therefore, your perceptual system works in cahoots with your memory system to pay attention more to information that is evolutionarily relevant so that I m more likely to recall it and remember it.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that would be an example of how you would apply
5
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the evolutionary lens to study how our memory operates.
5
SPEAKER_00
Here s another example, not in the case of social dynamics, but in the case of remembering where food is.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if you ask people to go through a maze of food and then ask them to remember where particular foods are, they re much more likely to remember the locations of high calorie foods.
5
SPEAKER_00
So in this case, it s not that I have
6
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have a domain general mechanism that just learns where things are, there is a sensorial bias to me being more likely to remember the location of something if it is evolutionarily relevant.
6
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And there are many, many other such examples.
6
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So that would be a wonderful demonstration of how
6
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the evolutionary lens adds a whole layer of explanatory power to what typically memory researchers have done, which is usually they study memory as just the domain general mechanistic system, whereas the evolutionary psychologist says, no, no, but why did that mechanism evolve to be of that form?
6
SPEAKER_00
Right and why do animals have memories even if they re not growing up with their parents?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, how do they know to pee on fire hydrants?
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, where are they getting this from?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s something going on there.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, how do they know to go after certain animals?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like I have a golden retriever He loves all dogs like little dogs like the size of I just I just met him Yeah, I mean he s much more interested in people than he is, but he s never mean but if Carl was a squirrel that size he would be dead and
6
SPEAKER_00
So he knows the difference between something that s small.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s a dog.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s just tolerated, you know Oh, how you doing, buddy?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, or something that s that big that squirrel which is murder.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna murder that thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, you said murder Yeah, that led me because I was a murderer.
6
SPEAKER_02
He s a squirrel murderer.
6
SPEAKER_00
No fuck.
6
SPEAKER_02
You know, what is it?
6
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What s a group of crows called?
6
SPEAKER_02
A murder.
6
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A murder.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_02
So I m going to tell you now about another study and maybe Jamie can pull it off.
6
SPEAKER_02
I think it s a guy at University of Washington maybe, I hope I m not wrong, where he wanted to see whether crows remember the face of a really nasty guy so that they can, you know, if he then comes again, they ll start calling.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, right, right.
6
SPEAKER_02
And he kind of
6
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took like an image of the face and then he would either wear it or not and then he would, I don t remember what the dependent measure was but it was something to the effect of then he s studying
6
SPEAKER_02
There you go.
6
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I mean, I love it.
6
SPEAKER_00
I love having Jamie.
6
SPEAKER_00
So this guy had a mean face and he did mean things and the crows recognized him.
6
SPEAKER_02
And so then it starts spreading to the entire group where they exactly know, you see this face, remember it, he s a fucker.
6
SPEAKER_02
Oh, that makes sense.
6
SPEAKER_02
Crows are insanely smart.
6
SPEAKER_02
Oh, they re smarter than most people.
6
SPEAKER_02
Have you seen the ones from, I think, New Caledonia that do all the stuff with the, maybe, Jamie, you could pull that one out.
6
SPEAKER_02
I think that s the smartest of all that avian species.
6
SPEAKER_02
They can take rocks and like a thousand different things to get food out of things that I guarantee you, you and I would sit there for 18 hours and we wouldn t crack that mystery.
6
SPEAKER_00
They figured out how to use tools to get other tools to extract food.
6
SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there you go.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s amazing.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s just unbelievable.
6
SPEAKER_00
They put rocks in there to raise the water level.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, a little kid wouldn t even figure that out.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they re fucking smart, man.
6
SPEAKER_00
Look at this.
6
SPEAKER_00
Look at this.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s crazy.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, I love it.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s also their brains are so small, which really is really confusing.
6
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Bird brain.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s really confusing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, large brains don t, I mean, we don t really know how intelligent an animal is unless we see it manipulate its environment or communicate.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because it s possible that elephants are insanely smart.
6
SPEAKER_00
They have immense memories.
6
SPEAKER_00
Their memories are nuts.
6
SPEAKER_00
They get reunited with their calves like 20 years later, and they run and embrace each other, and it s just joyous.
6
SPEAKER_00
When elephants die, they mourn.
6
SPEAKER_00
They mourn the death.
6
SPEAKER_00
They have huge brains.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it s also a huge animal.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it doesn t manipulate its environment, so we don t respect it.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s sort of like the reason why dolphins are in SeaWorld.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s because that s the literal slavery.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s slavery of probably a parallel, or if not more, intellectual species.
6
SPEAKER_00
Something with a cerebral cortex 40% larger than a human being s.
6
SPEAKER_00
Something that communicates in a language that we can t decipher.
6
SPEAKER_00
Something that has different dialects.
6
SPEAKER_00
Something that operates in these very tight social groups.
6
SPEAKER_00
But they do some rough sex.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if you ve heard of that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, they do.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re pretty rough.
6
SPEAKER_00
Dolphins are horrible.
6
SPEAKER_00
Dolphins, they kill their babies.
6
SPEAKER_02
There s no hashtag me too with the dolphins, let me tell you.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s worse than that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Dolphins, when they find a female and she has a child, if he has not had sex with that dolphin female, that child s not his, so he ll kill that child.
6
SPEAKER_00
Lions do the same.
6
SPEAKER_00
But what they ll do is, the females will have sex with as many dolphins as they can.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you don t know who s kid it is.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s it.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that they don t kill the baby.
6
SPEAKER_00
There you go.
6
SPEAKER_00
Which is wild.
6
SPEAKER_00
There you go.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, but that s how you live when there s no doors.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re in the ocean, there s no doors.
6
SPEAKER_00
Open border.
6
SPEAKER_00
Wild.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s just wild.
6
SPEAKER_02
It s murder soup.
6
SPEAKER_02
You said manipulate the environment.
6
SPEAKER_02
So have you heard of the Bowerbird?
6
SPEAKER_02
Do you know what that is?
6
SPEAKER_00
No.
6
SPEAKER_02
So the Bowerbird, maybe, sorry, I keep going.
6
SPEAKER_02
How do you spell?
6
SPEAKER_02
B-O-W-E-R.
6
SPEAKER_02
So the Bowerbird creates a bower, which is a structure that serves no purpose other than demonstrating my artistic, there you go.
6
SPEAKER_02
Really?
6
SPEAKER_02
So.
6
SPEAKER_02
By the way, you know what I m loving about today s show?
6
SPEAKER_02
It s like I feel like I m back to lecturing my evolutionary psychology stuff.
6
SPEAKER_02
Good, I need a class.
6
SPEAKER_02
So look what he s doing, you see?
6
SPEAKER_02
So let me explain what s happening here, unless you wanna watch it first.
6
SPEAKER_02
No, please explain.
6
SPEAKER_02
So it s one of the only species other than humans that uses artistic ability as a mating cue.
6
SPEAKER_02
So, Picasso, short little guy, bald, ugly, he s got a huge lineup of hot women who wanna have sex with him because he s Picasso.
6
SPEAKER_02
That s what the Bowerbird s doing.
6
SPEAKER_02
He s saying, look at how architecturally savvy I am.
6
SPEAKER_02
Look how symmetric my Bowerbird is.
6
SPEAKER_02
Not only that, by the way.
6
SPEAKER_02
Oh, there you go.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay, she said you re good enough.
6
SPEAKER_02
Let s do this.
6
SPEAKER_02
Let s do this.
6
SPEAKER_02
Let s do this.
6
SPEAKER_02
You have excellent trophies.
6
SPEAKER_02
So now, but you saw all those other blue things?
6
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so if you travel to Australia, in certain regions, there are signs from the government saying, if you are women, be careful, don t wear shiny things on your head.
6
SPEAKER_02
Why?
6
SPEAKER_02
Because these assholes will come at you, attack the women s head, steal the shiny things, so that they could use the shiny things in their bower to attract the ladies.
6
SPEAKER_02
Now that s smart.
6
SPEAKER_02
That s smarter than most men.
6
SPEAKER_00
Not really, but I see what you re saying, but look at this setup man.
6
SPEAKER_00
This guy s got this dope pad It s got like a bachelor pad with flowers out in front like ladies.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, don t you like no, that s the girl.
6
SPEAKER_01
That was the girl Oh, it s the girl.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s the girl usually in avian species The drab one is the girl and the flashy one is the guy right like nobody gives a fuck about female flamingos Fuck out of here female flamingos.
6
SPEAKER_00
What am I gonna do with that?
6
SPEAKER_00
I need a dude I
6
SPEAKER_00
Exactly straight around you exactly if you got flamingos man.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re a baller That s a move right have a flamingo in your yard Just walk around so you only have I m taking a peacock you have a dog you only have a dog.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m thinking a peacock I m doing the whole thing like I m a peacock, but I m thinking of I m saying flamingo.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I only have a dog I have chickens, too
6
SPEAKER_02
By the way, oh, like those exotic ones?
6
SPEAKER_00
No, chicken chickens.
6
SPEAKER_02
Or just like regular- Favorite lay chickens, they lay eggs.
6
SPEAKER_02
But here s the, I m scared to ask this.
6
SPEAKER_02
They become pets, you don t eat them, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
No, I don t eat, I will if somebody fucks around.
6
SPEAKER_00
Somebody tries to hurt somebody, I ll grab those little fuckers.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re little dinosaurs.
6
SPEAKER_00
When one of them was younger, this is my old group of chickens that I had when my youngest daughter was a baby.
6
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They were pecking her feet.
6
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And there s this one cunty chicken that we had.
6
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And my wife was like... I feel like this is gonna be a Christine Noh moment.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
6
SPEAKER_00
Nobody died.
6
SPEAKER_00
My wife, unfortunately, they all did.
6
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The coyotes got them.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
6
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And dogs.
6
SPEAKER_00
Long story.
6
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Anyway, point is, I go, no, she s trying to eat the baby s feet.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, you gotta understand, this is not like she thinks that s a worm.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
She thinks she can get away with eating.
6
SPEAKER_00
They eat each other.
6
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They fucking peck at each other.
6
SPEAKER_00
They ll murder a mouse.
6
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Have you never seen a chicken and a mouse together?
6
SPEAKER_00
Who really we had a fence and this is very unfortunate, but we had a fence that was glass and one of the side effects of this glass fence was Hawks and Hawks would be swooping down and try to get a rat or some other rodent or something in there BAM Nosedive into this glass and we lost like three Hawks like this is fucked up and
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, I was like, maybe we should go back to the other fence.
6
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My wife was like, fuck you.
6
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I like this fence.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was one of those conversations where we were like, this seems like it s our fault.
6
SPEAKER_00
These hawks die, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So one of them made it one of them lived and they took the hawk and they put it in like a big like washing machine box and Contact this wildlife rescue thing and they said well, okay if you re gonna have it because we re not open until Monday You got it feed it thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what do you feed it?
6
SPEAKER_00
So you have to go to the store?
6
SPEAKER_00
So we went to the pet store.
6
SPEAKER_00
They get these things called pinkies and
6
SPEAKER_00
And pinkies are just baby mice.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re baby mice that have, they re not gonna live.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re separated from their mother, you feed them to reptiles.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s gross, right?
7
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And so the hawk ate most of them, but he didn t eat one.
7
SPEAKER_01
So they were like, we re gonna raise it.
7
SPEAKER_01
I go, listen, you can t just do that.
7
SPEAKER_01
You can t just feed a bunch of these little things to this giant raptor and then say, now we re gonna take this one that survived and raise it.
7
SPEAKER_01
First of all, the nightmares that little fucker would have.
7
SPEAKER_01
But second of all, it s not viable.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s not gonna live.
7
SPEAKER_01
I go, let s just give it to the chickens.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I brought it outside, and I put it in the chicken s cage.
7
SPEAKER_01
One chicken grabs it as fast as I ve ever seen a chicken move, and then every other chicken runs after that chicken and tries to get it away from her.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it a defensive thing, or they want to eat it?
7
SPEAKER_01
No, they want to eat it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
7
SPEAKER_01
So she has it in her mouth, and they re trying to steal it from her, and they just tear it apart and devour it like dinosaurs.
7
Wow.
7
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Like, it s so crazy watching them kill birds.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I m not feeling so guilty at the genocide of chicken that I eat.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s still fucked up, because it s the soul of the animal.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s not being expressed as nature intended.
7
SPEAKER_01
The soul of the animal should be a chicken.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s not that you shouldn t eat chickens, but chickens should live as chickens.
7
SPEAKER_01
They should wander around and pick bugs and eat worms and do all the things that chickens love doing.
7
SPEAKER_01
To have a chicken just in a box for its entire existence, you re stealing souls.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re doing something fucked up that s way more fucked up than just raising a farm.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you got cows and they re on a pasture and every day they re just being cows, and then one day you take them in a stall and bang, this thing goes into their brain and they re dead, that is way less evil.
7
SPEAKER_01
That is way more humane than what s going to happen to them in the wild.
7
SPEAKER_01
What are they going to do?
7
SPEAKER_01
They re going to either freeze to death or starve to death or get torn apart by wolves.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you re going to have cows everywhere and people want to reintroduce wolves everywhere,
7
SPEAKER_01
Congratulations, you ve got wild kingdom.
7
SPEAKER_01
You ve got wild kingdom happening in your neighborhood.
7
SPEAKER_01
If that s what you want, and if you don t want people to eat cows anymore, okay, what are you going to do with the cows?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you going to sterilize them?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you going to keep a certain amount?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you going to play God with cows?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you going to say the cows can t breed?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you going to give the boys cows birth control?
7
SPEAKER_01
What are you going to do?
7
SPEAKER_01
How are you going to do it?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you going to introduce predators?
7
SPEAKER_01
Okay, how you gonna keep kids from those predators?
7
SPEAKER_01
How you gonna keep dogs from those predators?
7
SPEAKER_01
Have you thought about this?
7
SPEAKER_01
No, you haven t there s people that are reintroducing grizzly bears to Washington as we speak We re gonna reintroduce the things that we killed because they killed everybody.
7
SPEAKER_01
We re so smart.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s bananas these people out of their fucking minds and they re not they don t have a real understanding of actual nature and
7
SPEAKER_01
The the horrible thing is this come on commoditization of nature is taking Animals and factory farming them in these horrific conditions where it s illegal to film It s illegal to they have ag gag laws because it s so because it s so traumatic and so horrific It would affect the industry.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, I agree.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s what s wrong with eating meat Yeah
7
SPEAKER_01
Being a part of the natural cycle of life is what made humans human.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you want the most nutrients, it comes from animal protein.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s a reason why it s so cherished.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve made, not using the same words, but I ve made roughly the same argument when the tofu brigade came after me, because I was offering some evolutionary reasons for why we have to have animal protein as part of our diets.
7
SPEAKER_00
and they were so pissed at me because they thought it was very hypocritical that on the one hand I could share so many tweets and posts demonstrating how much I love animals, and then in another photo I show some steak or here s what my wife is cooking, and that to them was completely incongruous and was proof of my moral degeneracy.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then I actually created two sad truth clips where I was really demonstrating the evolutionary reasons, you know, archeological data, dental data,
7
SPEAKER_00
physiognomic data, anthropological data, and they just wouldn t have it.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re a hypocrite.
7
SPEAKER_00
You can t love an animal and eat an animal.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I m glad that you... Well, there s a real problem with that, too, and this is something that people dismiss very openly, but I don t think we should.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think plants are alive, and I don t think they re just alive in a way that we can feel completely fine about growing them in this insane monocrop agriculture place and pouring industrial-grade fertilizer and pesticides all over them.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think they re a thing that thinks.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think they re a thing that communicates with their environment, but they just do it in a way that we don t understand.
7
SPEAKER_01
They do it through mycelium.
7
SPEAKER_01
They arrange resources.
7
SPEAKER_01
They allocate resources towards plants that need them more.
7
SPEAKER_01
They have some sort of a network of communication.
7
SPEAKER_00
I was going to say, have you seen the networks of fungi?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
7
SPEAKER_01
I had Paul Stamets in the podcast a couple of times and he s a mycologist and just a brilliant guy and he really explains it all so well.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s so mind-blowing though the relationship that the Mycelium have with the nutrients in the earth and that it s it s earth is not dirt.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like a living environment it s this environment that they ve ruined through monocrop agriculture and
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and that s what s wrong with farming.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s not farming farming is a perfect way to balance an ecosystem When those people do it the right way like those people from white oaks pastures or poly face farms regenerative agriculture people There s like zero carbon
7
SPEAKER_01
Footprint of what they do and in fact, it sequesters carbon you re growing things It s manure and cows and it s all working together and the chickens are free-ranging and it s like it s nature just in a contained environment But that s normal.
7
SPEAKER_00
Have you you mentioned the word soil?
7
SPEAKER_00
So it made me think about have you seen the research on I can t remember what the term is But something like soil DNA that I guess the the pioneer is I think he s Danish either Danish or Swedish I think Danish
7
SPEAKER_00
And basically they go to these steps that are really, really, maybe not Mongolian steps, but somewhere where you expect to find a lot of the typical fossil remains and so on.
7
SPEAKER_00
But what they now do is they just do this excavation of soil.
7
SPEAKER_00
In the same way that people who study ice, you know how they can bore and then they can date.
7
SPEAKER_00
So they do something similar where they kind of harvest tons of soil and they re then able to isolate DNA of mammoths.
7
SPEAKER_00
Have you seen some of this stuff?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I have, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s mind blowing.
7
SPEAKER_01
Mind blowing.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s unbelievable, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
I actually thought about inviting that guy on my show.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you should have him on your show.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that sounds fascinating to talk about.
7
SPEAKER_01
It really is so interesting when you just think about
7
SPEAKER_01
this the complex interaction between everything on earth the plants and that we literally need plants to create oxygen for us and they re Consuming more carbon What that s one of the craziest things about Genghis Khan is when Genghis Khan lived they killed so many people that place is Reforested and they lowered the carbon footprint of Earth, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
That s a real thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
So genocide was green.
7
SPEAKER_01
I
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was green if you looked at there s well, there s also like different ways Dan Carlin and hardcore history has the most amazing series.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s called Wrath of the Khan I think you have to buy it on his website, but it s really cheap.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like a dollar an episode or something and it s
7
SPEAKER_01
Fucking amazing.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it s I think it s a three-piece thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it a three-piece series on?
7
SPEAKER_01
Jenga Genghis Khan is the correct way to say it Temujin was his real name and what what he did and like the ride that guy spread some genes That guy was busy that guy get after it
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean it spread some genes and killed some fucking people killed 10% of the population of Earth.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it wasn t that much Yeah, okay.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t know it s that much 10% Wow yeah somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 70 million people They don t know exactly there is a genocide, bro But you earlier you said oh how everything is connected which leads me to a concept which I don t think I ve ever discussed on my 10 shows on your on your podcast this concept Consilience have you heard that term before sure
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like being conciliatory?
7
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
7
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t mean that at all.
7
SPEAKER_00
Conciliance comes from, I mean, it doesn t come from him, but he kind of reintroduced it into the lexicon.
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you know who E.O.
7
SPEAKER_00
Wilson is?
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve heard the name.
7
SPEAKER_00
E.O.
7
SPEAKER_00
Wilson is a, he just recently passed away at the maybe age of 90.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just read his autobiography called Naturalist, amazing autobiography.
7
SPEAKER_00
He was a Harvard entomologist.
7
SPEAKER_00
and a strong proponent of social biology, applying biology to studies, social systems, and so on.
7
SPEAKER_00
And he was part of the original culture wars where a lot of his colleagues hated him because he was arguing that biology affects human behavior.
7
SPEAKER_00
E.O.
7
SPEAKER_00
Wilson, check him out, he s unbelievable.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, in the late 90s, he wrote a book called Consilience, Unity of Knowledge.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that became one of the foundational books in how I did my academic career, which is, consilience is trying to unify disparate areas of human endeavor that you typically wouldn t think should be linked together.
7
SPEAKER_00
So you could link
8
SPEAKER_01
the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities through the consilience of evolutionary theory.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because you could study psychology using evolutionary theory, of course you could study biology using evolutionary theory, or you could study aesthetics.
8
SPEAKER_01
which is in the humanities using evolutionary theory.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that became a really important concept of my own work because my brain operates as a synthetic machine.
8
SPEAKER_01
I like to synthesize across.
8
SPEAKER_01
So one of the reasons why I decided early on to
8
SPEAKER_01
to break out of just being an academic, because I couldn t see myself as a stay-in-your-lane professor.
8
SPEAKER_01
I need to try to, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
So coming on Joe Rogan is going to allow me to share ideas and synthesize things with millions of people, rather than writing another academic paper that, if I m lucky, will be read by 50 people and cited by 12.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so... Well, before you came on, though, when you came on, being on the show was not that problematic.
8
SPEAKER_00
You mean by my colleagues?
8
SPEAKER_00
People wouldn t criticize being on the show, because nobody even knew what it was.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s true.
8
SPEAKER_01
Once they did know what it was, people looked down at it.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I don t know if I ve ever shared the story before, and even if I have, it s worth repeating.
8
SPEAKER_01
I discussed this in the parasitic mind.
8
SPEAKER_01
I had been invited to Stanford in 2017 to speak at their business school.
8
SPEAKER_01
a very academic, scientific talk on how to apply evolutionary theory, blah, blah, blah.
8
SPEAKER_01
So my host, who s a fellow, he s a consumer psychologist, invited me out to dinner the night before, and I think after I was going there, I think I was flying down to, at the time, you were in Southern California still.
8
SPEAKER_01
2017, you were in Southern, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I was gonna do your show, I think.
8
SPEAKER_01
So at night, during dinner, he said, oh, so I hear you go often on Joe Rogan s show.
8
SPEAKER_01
I said, oh yeah, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
He goes, yeah, well, you know, we don t condone that at Stanford.
8
SPEAKER_01
Very kind of haughty.
8
SPEAKER_01
I said, you don t condone what?
8
SPEAKER_01
He goes, well, you know, we don t do our research so that it could be sexy enough for it to appear so I could talk about it on Joe Rogan.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I said, well, I don t do the research also so I can appear on Joe Rogan, but if I can publish a paper in an academic journal and then go on Joe Rogan and hopefully excite people about evolutionary psychology and psychology of decision-making, isn t that better than just having my wife and mother read the paper?
8
SPEAKER_01
And he didn t like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
Whereas now, not that many, but I ll get a lot more professors who will write to me saying, can you get me on Joro again?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s good.
8
SPEAKER_01
But that speaks to how...
8
SPEAKER_00
Patterns change, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s just You know, it s so easy to label somebody.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s so easy to label a platform or you know, like Podcasting in general that it s frivolous, especially if you live in the academic world, but it s just an opportunity to talk about stuff and
8
SPEAKER_00
And if I m talking to someone about evolutionary psychology or if I m talking to someone about coal mining, I just want to know what s going on.
8
SPEAKER_00
Let me tell you something.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m not trying to blow smoke up your ass or be ingratiating or anything, but I bet if there was a currency, a metric to measure how much you ve affected the intellectual ecosystem
8
SPEAKER_01
versus your average, well-published professor, I would put my money on you.
8
SPEAKER_01
Not because you are the creator of the knowledge, but because, boy, are you the biggest disseminator of knowledge, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, I m just lucky, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
And a big part of the luck is that I have the fortune to talk to these people.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because most people just don t have access to people like you.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like, if I wanted to sit down with a guy like you for three hours, like, if I didn t have a podcast, that would be a tough sell.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like, hey, Gad, can you put your phone away and just you and me just stare at each other for three hours and have a conversation?
8
SPEAKER_00
But this is, for whatever reason, I probably spend more time individually talking to people this way than any other way, because I do so many of these things.
8
SPEAKER_01
Do you think before you started this that there were indicators that, boy, you re such a good conversationalist, you know how to hold, or it came as a surprise to you that it would be so successful?
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, it s 100% surprise.
8
SPEAKER_00
Really?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I just wanted to do it because I thought it d be fun.
8
SPEAKER_00
That was it.
8
SPEAKER_01
There s a chapter in the book, Life as a Playground.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
Just live every, science is play, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
What s science?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s one big puzzle that you re trying to identify which variable meaningfully relate to other variables.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
So it s a form of puzzle making.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, you know,
8
SPEAKER_01
So actually there s research that shows that if you marry someone that scores similar to you on the adult playfulness scale, I don t remember the name, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Some people score very high on that, probably you do, I know that I do.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you then match up with someone who scores very highly, like you do, assortatively, that s a very big predictor of you having successful union.
8
SPEAKER_01
That makes sense.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you don t want to be with someone who hates jokes.
8
SPEAKER_00
Especially if you re a professional comic.
8
SPEAKER_00
And if you re funny and they re not funny, that s probably not as fun.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s probably boring.
8
SPEAKER_01
But if you had to choose between the person that you re with is also very funny,
8
SPEAKER_01
or at least laughs at your joke.
8
SPEAKER_01
You can only have one of the two.
8
SPEAKER_01
So she s either a positive receptacle to your humor, or she goes toe-to-toe with you and being as funny.
8
SPEAKER_01
Which one would you prefer?
8
SPEAKER_00
I d take toe-to-toe with me as funny.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t need someone to think I m funny.
8
SPEAKER_00
You don t need the audience.
8
SPEAKER_00
I got plenty of people.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, the audience.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t need, you know... A wife, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like, my wife doesn t have to have the same taste as me, even in me.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like, I don t care.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like, I don t care if you like different... Like, they listen to music that I think is garbage.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, go ahead, play your music.
8
SPEAKER_00
Care to share some of that?
8
SPEAKER_00
No, I don t want to be mean.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s just... They listen to great stuff, too.
8
SPEAKER_00
We like a lot of... They ve introduced me to Taylor Swift.
8
SPEAKER_00
But my daughter s a Swifty.
8
SPEAKER_00
But the point is it s like you don t have to like the same things as I like that s stupid That s stupid.
8
SPEAKER_00
You know she likes football.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know the rules.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what s going on It s fun to watch you seriously don t know football.
8
SPEAKER_00
I barely know what s happening Wow yeah, okay, so I barely know what s happening I have friends that are like Aaron Rodgers my friend is that I
8
SPEAKER_00
What the fuck s going on?
8
SPEAKER_00
So I hear you re a good something.
8
SPEAKER_00
You throw the ball.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and he s really good at that shit.
8
SPEAKER_00
He s a smart guy.
8
SPEAKER_00
He s a very interesting guy.
8
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of athletes, last time I came on the show, I did apparently a clip went viral from our conversation where I was kind of hailing the cosmic justice of why it was important for Messi to win the World Cup.
8
SPEAKER_00
Remember that?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes, you did say that.
8
SPEAKER_01
So listen, speaking of life as a playground and scoring high on openness and all the things that I think you do very well, and I d like to think that I do too, about maybe a week or two after I appeared on your show last year, I get an email.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, dear, whatever, Professor Saad, my name is... I guess I could say his name because you re gonna know.
8
SPEAKER_01
My name is Jorge Mas.
8
SPEAKER_01
I am the majority owner of Inter Miami.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m a fan, whatever.
8
SPEAKER_01
I know that you have a deep appreciation for Messi.
8
SPEAKER_01
Whenever you d like to come to a game, you ll be my personal guest.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, shit!
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, think about this.
8
SPEAKER_01
This geeky professor who could have lived his life just doing his little narrow stuff, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, I m good in my ecosystem, a few other professors care about my work, or go out there, grab life by the balls, and live it fully, and connect, and so on, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
So, I call my wife over, I say, I m James Bond.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, in what world?
8
SPEAKER_01
In what world is it possible for, you know, the Lebanese professor and evolutionary theory to get an email from the majority owner, so September 27th or 28th, I m on a flight down to Miami.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re playing in the US Open Cup.
8
SPEAKER_01
It turns out that Messi was injured, so he didn t play.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m supposed to meet him.
8
SPEAKER_01
I bring him copies of my book signed, even the Spanish version of the parasitic mind, because he only reads Spanish.
8
SPEAKER_01
He ends up not being there because he s not playing and so on.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t, I mean, he s standing right next to me, but I didn t get to meet him really.
8
SPEAKER_01
I meet Zinedine Zidane, who is the greatest French player of all time and World Cup winner, right there in the President s Lodge.
8
SPEAKER_01
David Beckham, hang out with him.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now I m not saying these to drop names.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh look, I know these cool people.
8
SPEAKER_01
But I m saying, if I didn t have that open spirit where I didn t view my world as only being restricted to the ecosystem of academia, if I didn t come on Joe Rogan that opened me up to a whole new audience,
8
SPEAKER_01
All of those people would have never heard of my work.
8
SPEAKER_01
If I only publish peer-reviewed papers rather than publishing books, which, by the way, in academia, you publish trade books, that s looked down upon.
8
SPEAKER_01
How is that looked down upon?
8
SPEAKER_01
If you publish a book that can be read by 300,000 people, how is that not better than publishing an academic paper that s read by three people?
9
SPEAKER_00
But that one is pure, it s academic.
9
SPEAKER_00
That other one is vulgar and popularizer.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s grotesque, it s stupid.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is stupid.
9
SPEAKER_01
And unfortunately, stupid can also be really smart.
9
SPEAKER_00
Really smart people can be stupid.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, George Orwell, I m paraphrasing him, said it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well in this country, there s a lot of examples that you could point to that would indicate that that would be correct Yeah, right.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s just you could be really dumb and also be smart as shit in your discipline You know, and again, it s it just boils down a lot of it is male ego Yes, that s a big part of the problem with a lot of these ideas that people hold so sacred The the fascinating one for me with you is this reluctance to accept that there s other factors
9
SPEAKER_01
For the development of a human personality right and that it s not a blank slate like that seems interesting And if I was a teacher that was teaching something contrary to that I would want to know this and now I know that I ve been teaching nonsense and I have to call like 50,000 students
9
SPEAKER_01
Over the last 20 years.
9
SPEAKER_01
I go.
9
SPEAKER_01
Hey guys remember that shit that I told you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s bull turns out I thought it was true.
9
SPEAKER_01
What would you do?
9
SPEAKER_01
That s got to be horrible for them when new information comes out That s irrefutable some new scanning new thing that shows that this thing that we had always held to be true That you ve taught in classes that you ve won awards for is nonsense.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so
9
SPEAKER_00
So there s a great, so my favorite quote, and maybe Jamie could pull it out, by J.B.S.
9
SPEAKER_00
Haldane.
9
SPEAKER_00
J.B.S.
9
SPEAKER_00
Haldane was an evolutionary geneticist, but was also known for having these beautiful quotable quips.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so here, the quote in question, I have it in the last chapter of The Consuming Instinct, 2011 book.
9
SPEAKER_00
He s talking about the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I m paraphrasing now what his stages are.
9
SPEAKER_00
Stage one, oh, this is complete rubbish bullshit.
9
SPEAKER_00
Stage two, well, this may be true, but largely unimportant.
9
SPEAKER_00
Stage three, well, this is definitely true, but it s probably not actionable.
9
SPEAKER_00
Stage four, oh, I always said so, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So what happens is you go through these phases, and if you re dogged enough, as I was, then the people who laughed at you in stage, oh, there you go.
9
SPEAKER_00
This is worthless knowledge.
9
SPEAKER_00
this is worthless nonsense, this is an interesting but perverse point of view, this is true but quite unimportant, I always said so, perfect.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I ve always said that- That s the government s position on COVID vaccine.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s right, exactly.
9
SPEAKER_00
By the way, but here s the funny personal anecdote.
9
SPEAKER_00
I am a pathological email hoarder, meaning that I never get rid of emails because I always think, what if I ever need whatever s contained in that email?
9
SPEAKER_00
So I have emails from people who, let s say, had taken a very negative position in stage one.
9
SPEAKER_00
Your evolutionary psychology stuff is bullshit.
9
SPEAKER_00
I have that email.
9
SPEAKER_00
2001, and I have the email from 2019 when you say, dear God, we would be honored if you would be the plenary speaker.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m like, oh, but what happened to I was a bullshitter in 2001?
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
9
SPEAKER_00
So you just have to be dogged, you have to collect the evidence, and hopefully- But here s my position as an outsider.
9
SPEAKER_01
How could you know?
9
SPEAKER_01
Like, why would you say it s a blank slate?
9
SPEAKER_01
How could you know?
9
SPEAKER_01
And why would you ignore all this interesting information that we now know about the role that your parents play?
9
SPEAKER_00
Because the blank slate s very hopeful, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Because the blank slate, I think it was, I can t remember if it was Watson, the behaviorist, who said that, you know, give me 12 children, I could turn any one of them into a doctor, into a beggar, into a lawyer, meaning that everybody is infinitely malleable.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now that s a hopeful message if I m a parent, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
If I create a child, you re telling me that he s got equal chance to be Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi if only I have the right schedule of reinforcement of how to hug him and when to hug him?
9
SPEAKER_00
That s hopeful.
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t want to be told that there is something innate about my child that guarantees that he will never be the next Michael Jordan.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I think the message, the blank state message, doesn t originally start as just a quacky idea.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a noble idea, perfectly rooted in bullshit, but it s a noble idea.
9
SPEAKER_00
Here s another example of a noble idea.
9
SPEAKER_00
Franz Boas was actually a Jewish anthropologist at Columbia University about 100 years ago, who was the one who developed cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals.
9
SPEAKER_00
So biology doesn t matter in explaining cultural phenomena because every culture is uniquely distinct.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now, the reason why he proposed that idea is because many nasty folks had misused biology and evolutionary theory.
9
SPEAKER_00
And therefore, by him eradicating biology from the study of anthropology, he was hopefully doing a noble thing.
9
SPEAKER_00
But you can t kill truth in the service of a goal, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So a lot of these guys, it s not, to our earlier conversation, they are not conspiratorial in spreading bullshit.
9
SPEAKER_00
They believe that by holding those positions, they re creating the proper utopia.
9
SPEAKER_00
But it s rooted in bullshit.
9
SPEAKER_01
The reluctance to change one s opinion is always a very unfortunate thing to witness.
9
SPEAKER_00
I hear you.
9
SPEAKER_00
Can you think of one or two things that you remember most where you ve done 180 on that you d like to share?
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if I ve done real 180s.
9
SPEAKER_00
Or a sizable shift.
9
SPEAKER_00
Real dumb ones.
9
SPEAKER_01
Bigfoot s a real dumb one.
9
SPEAKER_01
I used to believe in Bigfoot.
9
SPEAKER_01
You were eight or last Saturday?
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, like pretty recently.
9
SPEAKER_01
Within the last two decades.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, and what made you switch?
9
SPEAKER_01
Talking to Bigfoot people.
9
SPEAKER_01
Thinking and seeing that they re yeah, there s something wrong with them.
9
SPEAKER_01
I Unfortunately, I used to have a joke about it.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is here s one thing you don t find when you go looking for Bigfoot black people You re more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black people looking for Bigfoot.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s all a bunch of unfuckable white dudes unfuckable white dudes out camping and There s a mystery.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s a thing that they want to believe and there s almost no evidence and
9
SPEAKER_01
Almost no evidence.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s some weird stuff like footprints with dermal ridges, but it you could fake that it could be bullshit Does that apply to the other class Loch Ness monster?
9
SPEAKER_01
Also, you don t believe well the Loch Ness monsters most likely nonsense or Maybe it could be a big fish
9
SPEAKER_01
Or something like that, but the actual photo of the Loch Ness monster is a hoax that s been proven to be a hoax They know the guy who took it.
9
SPEAKER_01
They know how he did it He used a cardboard cutout or something like that or some you know some cutout He put it in the water, and then took a photo.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was bullshit.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s probably I mean it could be a sturgeon It could be some large fish.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a lot of theories on it, but they ve done scans of the lock They ve never found anything
9
SPEAKER_01
It s certainly not a population of them, whether they can stay alive for this long.
9
SPEAKER_01
They have to be breeding.
9
SPEAKER_01
What are they eating?
9
SPEAKER_01
How big is this?
9
SPEAKER_01
What are you talking about?
9
SPEAKER_01
The Bigfoot thing, I think, was real.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I think it was real in the human imagination, and it was real in terms of modern human beings encountered these things.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s a real animal called Gigantopithecus.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it really did exist in Asia.
9
SPEAKER_01
And if human beings were coming across the Bering Land Bridge,
9
SPEAKER_01
It s very likely that they were there too.
9
SPEAKER_01
They all existed in the same environment and in the same time period.
9
SPEAKER_01
And this fucking thing is in like Native American history.
9
SPEAKER_01
They have a large number of names for this.
9
SPEAKER_01
They don t have dragons.
9
SPEAKER_01
They don t have crazy shit that doesn t exist.
9
SPEAKER_01
They have a myth of this gigantic hairy ape that lives in the woods.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I think it did.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think it did probably until, you know, who knows how many thousands and thousands of years ago.
9
SPEAKER_01
But the idea of one being around today, almost no evidence, almost nothing, just visual bullshit, blurry bullshit, footprints that maybe, I don t know, you could fake that.
9
SPEAKER_01
You could fake a footprint.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s not a fucking fake Ferrari.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s not like complicated to fake a footprint.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, oh, you don t understand about the amount of weight that has to be put... Says who?
9
SPEAKER_01
Says who?
9
SPEAKER_01
Says you?
9
SPEAKER_01
Says you, a guy who wants to believe in Bigfoot so bad?
9
SPEAKER_01
They want to believe so bad.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is a religion.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s a religion.
9
SPEAKER_00
So what do you think is the psychological mechanism that causes them to want to believe?
9
SPEAKER_00
It s because there is kind of a mystery and awe to things that are out there that we can t explain.
9
SPEAKER_01
Here s the thing, if Bigfoot was real, it wouldn t be nearly as interesting as a killer whale.
9
SPEAKER_01
Not nearly as interesting.
9
SPEAKER_01
If Bigfoot is just this big, stupid monkey that lives in the woods and just shits all over himself and fucking eats campers, that wouldn t be nearly as interesting as this super intelligent creature that lives in the water that saves people.
9
SPEAKER_01
Saves people.
9
SPEAKER_00
You know, before we were outside, I was talking to some of your crew and I was telling them that someone had asked me, oh, do you, actually it was the board
10
SPEAKER_01
agent as I was coming through to Austin, he asked, why am I coming?
10
SPEAKER_01
I said, oh, I m coming to do your show.
10
SPEAKER_01
He says, oh, do you get like a list of things that you talk about?
10
SPEAKER_01
I said, oh, it s exactly not, it s exactly the opposite of that.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so to that point, I wouldn t have ever, I didn t have in my bingo card the defecation of Bigfoot in forests.
10
SPEAKER_00
What is he doing up there you stinky bitch like come on the idea that no one is taking real good footage in this day and age with the amount of hikers and campers and people that are in the woods and people that are into photography and nature photography and Trail cameras trail cameras are everywhere.
10
SPEAKER_00
They re over water holes.
10
SPEAKER_00
They re everywhere
10
SPEAKER_01
So what s the mechanism by which, I mean, you listed the name of the animal that you think.
10
SPEAKER_00
Gigantopithecus.
10
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
10
SPEAKER_01
So you obviously have a lot of these tidbit information.
10
SPEAKER_01
Are you a voracious reader or how do you get your sources of information?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, I ve read an embarrassing amount of books on Bigfoot.
10
SPEAKER_00
No, but in general but in general a lot of audiobooks.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you do a lot of audio The best way for me to like I can do that while I m working out I could do that while I m in the sauna.
10
SPEAKER_00
I could do that when I m in the car Okay, so that to me is like that s a couple of hours of taking in information beautiful.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh
10
SPEAKER_00
Where I would just ordinarily just like lifting weights, but you don t you don t love the feeling of grabbing a I do but I m also So busy that to me.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s like the best way to consume ideas It s I feel like reading a book is 100% listening to an audiobook is 80 to 90% Okay, I don t think it s the same thing
10
SPEAKER_01
It s too easy to gloss over.
10
SPEAKER_01
I ve never audiobooked a book.
10
SPEAKER_01
I haven t even read an electronic book.
10
SPEAKER_01
Really?
10
SPEAKER_01
You like paper.
10
SPEAKER_01
I love paper.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m a pathological book hoarder.
10
SPEAKER_01
Do you write on paper or do you type it out?
10
SPEAKER_01
I type it out.
10
SPEAKER_01
So now I type.
10
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes I ll take little notes.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m sitting at the cafe, I have an idea for something I wanna do, so I ll write it and then I ll, but if I m writing a book, it s always on the computer.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s no written anymore.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I ve noticed that my penmanship has really gotten worse.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, mine s dog shit.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly, me too.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like chicken shit.
10
SPEAKER_01
Terrible.
10
SPEAKER_01
But I m a voracious reader and
10
SPEAKER_01
One of the things that stresses me the most is, in my personal library, in my study, I ve got literally hundreds and hundreds of books, and I will often walk in there and say, will I ever have time to read?
10
SPEAKER_01
So I have probably 600 books that I have yet to read.
10
SPEAKER_01
And each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all those books, boy, I would be an even more exciting guest on The Joe Rogan Show.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, but what I mean by that is that there s so much, the more you know, the more you realize truly how little you know.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so I say, oh my God, here s a biography on, so I just bought a biography on the taxonomist who created the system of how to label animal species.
10
SPEAKER_01
He s a Swedish taxonomist.
10
SPEAKER_01
Now that sounds very esoteric and specific, but I m sure there is this incredible information that I can glean in that book, which today I don t have that knowledge in my brain.
10
SPEAKER_01
So to all people who are listening, read.
10
SPEAKER_01
There is nothing more, number one predictor of your child s success is how many books were in the home of the parents.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if it s number one, but certainly a highly predictive one.
10
SPEAKER_01
So reading Elon Musk, you probably know this, when he came to, I think from South Africa to Canada, he came with a luggage of books.
10
SPEAKER_01
He s a voracious reader, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
Now, that doesn t mean that he became who he became only because he read, but
10
SPEAKER_01
It s very hard to have an interesting person who s not very knowledgeable about many things.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that s why one of the things that s been very difficult with my children is I see them doing the scrolling and it drives me crazy because I haven t been able to instill that reflex of just saying there is nothing I d rather do right now than go sit somewhere and immerse myself in a book.
10
SPEAKER_01
They don t have that reflex.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that is a problem with electronics because it does hijack your reward system.
10
SPEAKER_00
It hijacks your attention span.
10
SPEAKER_00
It hijacks your brain.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it s hard because kids are growing up in this environment.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s a different environment.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I have two ways of looking at it.
10
SPEAKER_00
I have one way of looking at it where you have to kind of set an example.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I m not the best at that.
10
SPEAKER_00
I like to look at my phone like just to put your phone away and put work away.
10
SPEAKER_00
Don t be responding to emails.
10
SPEAKER_00
Just just put it away and focus.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think we all should do that, but we are all also living in this new world And that is not going to change and I think that s the same as when people are like don t get in the car Let s walk like okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s good for a little while, but now guess what Martha everyone has cars.
10
SPEAKER_00
Let s get a fucking car I m not walking in New York.
10
SPEAKER_00
What are you talking about?
10
SPEAKER_00
I m not getting in this stupid wagon getting pulled by a horse.
10
SPEAKER_00
This is dumb They have cars now
10
SPEAKER_00
I think we re going to get to a point where avoiding some interaction with other human beings, it s going to be constant, and it s going to be more invasive than it is now.
10
SPEAKER_00
These are steps that our species is taking in its integration with technology that seem to be unstoppable.
10
SPEAKER_00
to isolate yourself and move to the woods in a cabin, that s one way to do it, but.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, but the hygiene or the discipline of saying, I m now focused, I m not, I mean, I know the research findings on this, and yet I always find myself going into my phone and then stopping myself.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you always stop yourself?
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t.
10
SPEAKER_00
I stop myself three out of 10 times.
10
SPEAKER_00
Especially if I could come up with some reason oh, I m gonna go over my notes Yeah, yeah, but so what what is the pull in your case is it scrolling through the Twitter?
10
SPEAKER_00
Just nonsense looking at nonsense on Instagram and a lot of it is horrible because I have this fucking thing that I m doing with Tom Segura we send each other the worst things we find every day and
10
SPEAKER_00
Like an animal and animal attacks This one dude fucking stole a cop car was in a high-speed chase in Mexico with no tires It s just flames coming out of the bottom of his car wild shit a lot of people falling off buildings Why we just have been doing this to each other for just like out of a more many months has it been now?
10
SPEAKER_00
It s been like
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like a morbid.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, just freaking each other out every day.
10
SPEAKER_00
So now the algorithm knows that I m fucked up So the algorithm is only showing me like motorcycle accidents and just the wildest shit that you shouldn t be looking at I get so many of those videos that show up in my feed where it tells you are you sure you want to look at this?
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh boy, you know where it s blurry and you have to click again to look at maybe twice that I
10
SPEAKER_01
But here s the thing, so I m interested in the AI algorithm that generates those, because oftentimes it ll put things in my feed that I truly think, I don t know how it could have found out that I like this stuff, because there is no signature electronically of me having searched something.
10
SPEAKER_01
Let s say three-piece wool suits.
10
SPEAKER_01
I love that look.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so now I ll see a thousand guys wearing these gorgeous Italian, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
But other times it,
10
SPEAKER_01
presents stuff to me that makes no sense, that it almost seems as though I m into gay sauna guys.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, but I mean, I m being serious.
10
SPEAKER_01
So it s kind of fitness, which of course I m into having lost a lot of weight, but it almost seems homo...
10
SPEAKER_01
Erotic where it s always these guys there.
10
SPEAKER_01
And and so as I m going to this my wife will say what are you looking at?
10
SPEAKER_01
I say well, I m not sure I want to show you that it s like literally 17 Super muscular guys, but there is no there s nothing that I ve done that should suggest That it should recognize that in me.
10
SPEAKER_01
How do you explain that?
10
SPEAKER_01
Dr. Joe?
10
SPEAKER_01
I
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, they took a chance and they missed, you know, the data is not complete, you know, you re interested in some things that but that s interesting like any Perception of men like with a six-pack like looking good and oiled up that s homoerotic Which is interesting because a woman with a beautiful body is not considered homoerotic at all.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I
10
SPEAKER_01
I m someone who actually is very easy in complimenting other men, so that s not that that wasn t no, but it is It s considered homoerotic that that s the problem the positions that they re taking doesn t seem like it was fitness It seemed like it was a bit kind of coming.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s a lot of good
10
SPEAKER_00
Girls would do that too, though.
10
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of girls that take these sexy lifting weights poses, but you don t think of them as homoerotic.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, but they re appealing to the male gaze in that case.
10
SPEAKER_00
So the way that men are posing?
10
SPEAKER_01
They re appealing to men because men are titillated by visual stimuli, not women.
10
SPEAKER_01
I think women say that to ugly dudes.
10
SPEAKER_01
Women aren t even visual, don t worry about it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, they re not as visual.
10
SPEAKER_00
But they re definitely visual.
10
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
10
SPEAKER_00
When a girl sees Tatum O Neal
11
SPEAKER_02
This shirt off.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah Yeah, no, yeah, that s that s real too but but how many how many strip bars are out there?
11
SPEAKER_01
Targeting female patrons.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
There s a big discrepancy.
11
SPEAKER_02
There you go.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, there s no it s not equivalent I m not saying that
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but it s just funny that one is homoerotic, you know?
11
SPEAKER_02
But then there s also ones where it s like, okay, who are you appealing to?
11
SPEAKER_02
Because does a girl really want to see you sit like this?
11
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This is weird.
11
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This is a weird pose for a regular dude.
11
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But by the way, the inability to recognize some of these dynamics is what causes some men to send dick pics to women, right?
11
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Because they think that the same
11
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visual stimuli that would titillate them is exactly what would titillate women.
11
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So it s lack of theory of mind.
11
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And so a lot of men will say, oh, you know, I ve got a good morphology here.
11
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I think she d be impressed by that.
11
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And she gets repulsed by it because he doesn t have intersex theory of mind.
11
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Right.
11
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Interesting.
11
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Evolutionary psychology, it s where it s at.
11
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Well, how much is it affected by technology?
11
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What is it?
11
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How much of, when you think of evolutionary psychology and you think of us as an evolving species that s integrating with its environment, and its environment radically changes.
11
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So the most obvious answer to that would be internet pornographic addiction, which almost exclusively afflicts men, right?
11
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For very obvious reasons, because what s happening with the internet delivery system
11
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is it s exactly catering to men s evolved penchant for sexual variety, right?
11
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I can keep flipping through different porn clips without ever repeating the same one, while it doesn t take much for that stimulus to then hijack my brain.
11
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So when I, for example, explain to people about the evolutionary roots of pornography,
11
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That doesn t mean that men have evolved a gene for pornography, right?
11
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Because obviously there was no pornography in the ancestral environment.
11
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But what it means is that those mechanisms that evolved for mating are then hijacked, usurped by pornography.
11
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So I think the most obvious one would be internet pornography.
11
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I think the next stage of that is even more terrifying.
11
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I think there s gonna be some sort of virtual element.
11
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Meaning?
11
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Meaning virtual sex.
11
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You re going to be able to actually have like a sexual experience virtually.
11
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But haptically, how do you do it?
11
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Yeah, I think they re gonna do it with some sort of an interface.
11
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Okay.
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You know, like when you re seeing these first patients of Neuralink, like this one guy who can now amazingly operate a computer, play games, move his cursor, click on things,
11
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I mean, it s incredible.
11
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And they think he s going to be able to communicate through this thing, like, at the speed of a carnival barker.
11
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That s how he s going to be able to use this.
11
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Wow.
11
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It s crazy.
11
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Yeah.
11
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So I actually, I was giving a talk on global Jew hatred in Montreal at this event.
11
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And a guy came up to me to introduce himself, and he s a neurosurgeon, and he said that he was part of the team that was choosing the first Neuralink patient that you just mentioned.
11
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That s incredible.
11
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It s incredible.
11
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So this is patient number one, right?
11
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Yeah, it s been successful.
11
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Yeah, and they believe that ultimately they ll be able to restore blindness.
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They ll be able to restore movement to people.
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There s going to be a lot of like wild things that this technology if it can continue to progress is going to be capable of doing and at one point in time, I ve got to imagine it s got to be able to create
11
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an artificial reality simulator that you just immerse yourself in, whether it takes 10 years to do that or 50 or 100.
11
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In the future, they re going to have something that... forget about porn, forget about...
11
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Actually going on an adventurous life Why would you do that when you can have all of the trappings of being a wizard in a fucking?
11
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Dungeon game you can just play right you just live your life in this world that doesn t exist get sexual pleasure get satisfaction eat food and All you do when you awake is you eat food go to sleep wake up and do it again, right?
11
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Boy, that s a that s a dire world your matrix.
11
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It s the matrix It really is the matrix and I feel like there s no way to stop it I feel like if things keep going in the way they re going What what are we do we have regulations to keep a simulated universe from appearing?
11
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We don t have any regulations if somebody wanted to create if they were so smart that they created a simulated universe that you could participate in and they could say God you could be whoever you want you could be you could you want to go to a
11
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You want to go to ancient Egypt in 2000 BC and see what was cracking?
11
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What was going on down there?
11
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What did that look like when the height of the pyramids what the fuck did that look like?
11
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You wouldn t do that.
11
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Of course you would do that.
11
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Everybody would do that.
11
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And if it was like
11
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Harmless, you couldn t get hurt.
11
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You couldn t get injured.
11
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You re in God mode everywhere You go if you die, you just re just wake up and do it all over again, and you keep doing it I mean not to rain on that matrix parade, but Books in a sense do exactly that right?
11
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No, they don t
11
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You want to stop you you shut your mouth.
11
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We re talking about transporting you to the fucking dinosaur times cat We re talking about you running around watching raptors tear apart a brontosaurus indistinguishable from reality Indistinguishable looks like it s happening right in front of you.
11
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That s all everyone s gonna be doing.
11
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Oh boy those books are gonna rot
11
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Those books are gonna be covered in dust.
11
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You re gonna do it one time, and it ll get to the point.
11
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See, it s sort of like VR.
11
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If you do VR now, it s really cool.
11
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It s kind of fun.
11
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It s like, wow, this game s nuts.
11
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I ve tried the boxing one.
11
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Yeah, they re cool.
11
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It s a good workout.
11
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The boxing is a really good workout, because, you know, you really do, it really is like hard shadow boxing.
11
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You know, because you have to move a lot, and my feet were hurting.
11
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I was like, wow, this is kind of crazy.
11
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But that s very crude in comparison to what s coming that is like pong remember pong Yeah, you re older than me.
11
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Yeah That game was amazing a rat.
11
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It wasn t called Atari Atari.
11
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Yeah, remember when that happened we were like this is nuts.
11
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Yeah, I
11
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We are playing a video.
11
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We re of that age.
11
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We went through the whole thing.
11
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We went through VCRs, we went through answering machines.
11
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So my knowledge of video games stopped and peaked 1981 with Galaga.
11
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Do you know Galaga?
11
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Oh yeah.
11
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Galaga was awesome.
11
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I was like a champion in Galaga, but that s the end of my knowledge.
11
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So right now I see my son interact with things and he tries to bring me in, and I just feel like I don t have the bandwidth to do anything that he s doing.
11
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It will eat your life.
11
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It will eat your life.
11
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It will eat your life.
11
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It s too fun.
11
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They re too good.
11
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These games are so good now.
11
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They re so immersive.
11
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So you re a gamer?
11
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No, I don t do them because they re too good.
11
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Oh, right.
11
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No, I m scared.
11
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I m scared.
11
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They just, they re too fun.
11
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They re too fun.
11
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And I have too many friends that will play video games till like two o clock, three o clock in the morning.
11
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And they re our age.
11
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Yeah.
11
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Wow, yeah, how do they navigate through family life and a lot of them don t But you know some of them are younger the younger guys or they re all playing what is Shane play will they play Call of Duty
11
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Shane s big into Madden, and he likes the UFC game.
11
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He also plays some Command and Conquer style, because he s big into military history.
11
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Oh, right, right, right.
11
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He likes some of that stuff, too.
11
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So they re playing these fucking insanely immersive games, and these games are so good.
11
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They re so good now.
11
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The graphics are so incredible.
11
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They re so fun.
11
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They re so exciting.
11
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They just have it geared up to constant excitement.
11
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So the only one that interested me and the ones that my son showed me, I really know very little about this, is the sniper games.
11
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Oh, you like to be a little sneaky.
11
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No, there s something very beautiful about sort of steadying yourself and then getting that scope.
11
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And so I respect the guys who do that in real life, and so I try to do it, but there was too much hand-eye coordination of different things.
11
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So I didn t do too well, but you gotta that that controller.
11
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Yeah becomes you yeah, right?
11
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It becomes you so Richard Richard Dawkins talks about that being an extended phenotype mmm Those guys that are really good at that.
11
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That s the ones that the military wants they want those guys to operate drones All right, that s what I would want until AI does it AI is gonna do a way better job, right?
11
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You see the thing that we had Mike Baker on, he was explaining to us yesterday, that they have dogfights they re doing now, where AI-controlled jets are competing against jets flown by the best pilots, and the AI jets are winning 100% of the time.
11
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Wow.
11
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Incredible.
11
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That s fucking terrifying.
12
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So speaking of AI, I was in the early wave of studying AI.
12
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So my undergrad is in mathematics, computer science.
12
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And so as part of my computer science degree, I had taken some AI stuff course with Monty Newborn, I think, or New, I can t remember his exact name.
12
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He was part of the team of Deep Blue, which do you know what Deep Blue is?
12
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So that was the AI system that was being built to play against the grand chess masters.
12
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And at the time, sometimes this one would win, sometimes this one would win, oftentimes it would be ties.
12
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And so we had learned how to program
12
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the search algorithms that would allow you to go through a decision tree of chess without having to exhaustively go through the entire tree, because the entire tree is something like 10 to the 100 different nodes.
12
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It would take more than the entire history of the universe to go through it.
12
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So you have to know how to prune the tree.
12
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Do you follow what I mean?
12
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So that way, I better not waste time going down here, so just cut it off.
12
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That reduces the search space.
12
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And so I had been exposed to some of the earliest advances in my formal education in AI.
12
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But frankly, 40 years later, notwithstanding all of the advances, I would have thought there would have been even more AI applications than what we currently have.
12
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In other words, I thought it would be
12
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you know, we ve underperformed what I thought we would have reached.
12
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So for example, in medical diagnostics, why aren t there more AI systems that are being used instead of actual, you know, human doctors?
12
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Don t you think?
12
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Because medical diagnostics is just the collation of tons of information so that you re able to, it s a structured problem, right?
12
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It has very, here are all the symptoms, I can search through the whole database and come up with what is the likely disease,
12
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much more quickly and probably more accurately than any human physician.
12
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And yet, to the best of my knowledge, I don t think they re used as much as you would have thought they should be.
12
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I don t think they are, but I think people have been diagnosed with things from artificial intelligence now.
12
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Didn t someone put a bunch of their data in the chat GPT?
12
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for sure a story went around about like a mom that couldn t get a good answer and put an info in there and got like a correct diagnosis really quickly but that s like one anecdote I think
12
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Yeah, I don t know if it s true, but you would imagine that at a certain point in time, you would get all of the data on all medical interventions, all medications that are effective for this, that, or the other thing, all issues that could lead to a genetic propensity towards this, that, or the other thing, and you would have it all in some sort of a database.
12
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If you could have a computer that s far smarter than a human being process that and instantaneously know, instead of having some guy that has to go back to what he learned when he was in grad school, you re way better off.
12
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So I think in some areas, and I could be misspeaking, so I ll take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but I think in radiology,
12
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is one of the areas where now AI systems are almost going to render the human radiologists obsolete.
12
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Because it s pattern recognition, right?
12
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I m looking at an image and then I have to read that image to decide whether, does it look like this area is a bit gray so it looks like there could be a tumor?
12
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Well it turns out, I think that the AI systems are better able to detect most of these things than humans.
12
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So I actually spoke to a radiologist cousin of mine and he didn t think that they would become obsolete anytime soon.
12
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Him meaning that human radiologists would still have something to input.
12
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But it seems to me that in fields in medicine where it s largely driven by pattern recognition is where AI is going to make the most headways, I think.
12
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That s interesting.
12
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I m really fascinated to see what the end of this looks like.
12
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Because I think it s gonna come real quick.
12
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I think the use of AI is now something we re just waking up to in terms of like the general population is super aware of AI now for the first time.
12
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It was like a science fiction thing just 20 years ago.
12
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The possibility of it was science fiction 20 years ago.
12
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But the probability of it right now is like a fucking,
12
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freight train that s headed over a cliff.
12
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It s like, no one s hittin  the brakes on this at all.
12
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And what does this look like?
12
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So have you had guests that are both, you really need to be deathly afraid of AI versus those who say it s completely overblown?
12
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Sure, yeah, definitely.
12
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And what, is the evidence leaning to which camp?
12
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I don t know much of the, are you?
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, the evidence is really in who the fuck knows.
12
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Okay.
12
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That s the, what is actually gonna happen is who the fuck knows.
12
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Because I think it s gonna be more bizarre than we could ever imagine.
12
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I think what we re giving birth to collectively as a society is going to be more bizarre than anything we could ever imagine.
12
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Because it s going to be smarter than us by a lot.
12
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And it s going to be able to make smarter versions of it.
12
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It s going to be able to harness energy in a way that we couldn t ever possibly fathom.
12
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We couldn t think it up.
12
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And it s going to have sentience.
12
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It s going to have the ability to make decisions.
12
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It s a life form.
12
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And we re giving birth to it.
12
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We re giving birth to some godlike life form that has an unstoppable potential for technological superiority over the human race.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yikes, yeah, it s gonna be so superior and if we re programming into it certain behavior characteristics or certain imperatives It doesn t have morals it doesn t have it just gonna if the whole idea behind it is nuts
12
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So I, of all the courses that I ve ever taken in my life, I spent many years in university, the course that blew me the most, blew my mind, was a course called Formal Languages, which was about, well, formal languages is Turing machines.
12
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And so I don t know if, do you know Turing?
12
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Yeah, the Turing test.
12
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Yeah, the Turing test, of course.
12
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So Alan Turing, if you delve into his actual material,
12
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you re blown away that a human mind can think at that level.
12
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You know, and I m saying this as someone who spent my entire career in academia, so I ve met a lot of really, really brilliant people.
12
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But it s almost metaphysical, the kind of depth that his intellect went to.
12
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So the only other guy that I could think of, of sort of contemporary guys, would be Gödel.
12
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I don t know if you know, do you know, are you familiar with?
12
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Yeah, Gödel s the guy who came up with a functional diagram of how you could make a time machine.
12
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Oh, did he?
12
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Kurt Gödel?
12
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Kurt Gödel, yeah.
12
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The mathematician?
12
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Yeah, the mathematician, exactly.
12
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So he was, I don t know if you know this story.
12
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Actually, I talk about it in this book, in the Happiness book.
12
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At one point, I m talking about the importance of going for walks and just go for a walk and talk and so on.
12
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And I said, well, Einstein, so both Einstein and Gödel were together at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
12
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And later in his career, Einstein was older than Gödel, later in his career Einstein said that the only reason that he would go into the office was because he was excited to go on these long walks with Gödel and just have these chats.
12
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So imagine being a fly on the wall sitting as Gödel and Einstein are having these conversations.
12
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So I just finished reading Gödel s biography
12
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And it was very interesting because here s this unbelievable mind.
12
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You know what he died of?
12
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What?
12
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Because it s going to speak to the opposite side of the mind.
12
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He was convinced that there were people trying to poison him.
12
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So he would use his wife as the food tester.
12
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Oh, Jesus.
12
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And she was committed to hospital with some disease, whatever, so she could no longer serve as his food tester, so he died of starvation.
12
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Oh my God.
12
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So now, imagine Gödel is both the guy who could think in ways that are unimaginable to us, and is also the guy whose mind was parasitized by these conspiratorial ideas.
12
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Wow, he was 65 pounds when he died of malnutrition.
12
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Isn t that phenomenal?
12
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Wow.
12
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Caused by a personality disturbance.
12
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Wow.
12
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It s unbelievable, isn t it?
12
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Assassination of his close friend.
12
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He developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned.
12
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I bought the book on... I just bought a book on the murder of Professor Schlick, who was the guy who started the Vienna Circle.
12
SPEAKER_02
And why did they poison him?
12
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No, they shot him.
12
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They shot him.
12
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Yeah.
12
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So he was worried about being poisoned because his friend got shot.
12
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So I don t know where the genesis of his paranoia came from.
12
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But my point is that in that same mind were these two sides.
12
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So he developed what s called the
13
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incompleteness theorem.
13
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So there are some things within any axiomatic system in mathematics that you could never be able to prove within that system.
13
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It s really at the level, it s like godly.
13
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It s just unbelievable, especially if you re, I was in mathematics, to be able to think at that level is unimaginable how deep it is, and yet you think people are going to poison you and you re willing to starve to death.
13
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That s the mystery of the human mind.
13
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Jamie see if you can find what his theory on time travel was Postulated he was like wondering I think it has to be like the size of a solar system He was talking about the way the solar system worked in relativity, which was Einstein s theory.
13
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Would that allow?
13
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Time travel here goes up rotating universe.
13
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Yeah How rotating universe makes time travel possible?
13
SPEAKER_01
So he had this idea, but I m going to butcher it unless I can actually read it.
13
SPEAKER_01
Some of this stuff is so difficult to grasp.
13
SPEAKER_01
Right, right.
13
SPEAKER_01
It is.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay, here it is.
13
SPEAKER_01
Girdle found that if you follow a particular path in this rotating universe, you can end up in your own past.
13
SPEAKER_01
You d have to travel incredibly far, billions of light years long to do it, but it can be done.
13
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As you travel, you would get caught up in the rotation of the universe.
13
SPEAKER_01
That isn t just a rotation of the stuff in the cosmos, but of both space and time themselves.
13
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In essence, the rotation of the universe would so strongly alter your potential paths forward that those paths loop back around to where you started.
13
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I have no idea what that means.
13
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Holy shit.
13
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I mean, you know...
13
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Richard Feynman, you know who that is, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner in physics?
13
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He was a pioneer in quantum mechanics.
13
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He said, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don t understand quantum physics.
13
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It s the same thing for me with this kind of stuff.
13
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I read it and it just.
13
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It s impossible for my stupid brain.
13
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I don t think it s stupid brain.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s so esoteric.
13
SPEAKER_01
It is very, very esoteric.
13
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But listen to this.
13
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If you would set off on your journey and never travel faster than the speed of light,
13
SPEAKER_01
And you would find yourself back where you started, but in your own past.
13
SPEAKER_01
What?
13
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The possibility of backwards time travel creates paradoxes and violates our understanding of causality.
13
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Thankfully, all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so we are protected from Gödel s problem of backward time travel, but it remains to this day a mystery why general relativity is okay with this seemingly impossible phenomenon.
13
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Gödel used the example of the rotating universe to argue that general relativity is incomplete and he may yet be right.
13
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I don t know what to add to that.
13
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If you give people the opportunity to go back in time, oh my God, that would be ridiculous.
13
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You would never know.
13
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I ve actually played a version of this game where I ask people if you could invite 10 historical people to your dinner party, who would they be?
13
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So maybe I can ask you that.
13
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You don t have to list 10.
13
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Off the top of your head, can you list a few that would have to be at the Joe Rogan barbecue?
13
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Could tell you who s my number one who?
13
SPEAKER_00
Leonardo da Vinci, I just I just finished a biography on him.
13
SPEAKER_01
Do you speak Italian?
13
SPEAKER_01
I don t I speak fake Italian I just had a nose with their Italian was yeah, right They all had dialects like my grandparents spoke in dialects by the way weird Italian.
13
SPEAKER_00
Is that right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh
13
SPEAKER_00
I could link my love for Leonardo da Vinci with the earlier concept of consilience that we talked about.
13
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you can see how because Leonardo da Vinci by definition is the Renaissance man, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
He is the ultimate polymath.
13
SPEAKER_00
He s an anatomist and a painter and an engineer and a futurist and a sculptor.
13
SPEAKER_00
He s a man of all, and does them all at very high proficiency, and he s able to link all these things.
13
SPEAKER_00
So he studies the anatomy of the body in his art.
13
SPEAKER_00
So he s now linking anatomy with art.
13
SPEAKER_00
So that s what Consilien says.
13
SPEAKER_00
So to me, Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate intellectual man because he can do it all.
13
SPEAKER_00
He can link different things.
13
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So he would be on my list, who would be arguably your top guy.
13
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Well, it s one night, right?
13
SPEAKER_01
One night.
13
SPEAKER_01
You gotta bring Hunter Thompson.
13
SPEAKER_01
Who the hell s that?
13
SPEAKER_01
Hunter S. Thompson.
13
SPEAKER_01
Who s that?
13
SPEAKER_01
Really?
13
SPEAKER_01
Hunter S. Thompson.
13
SPEAKER_01
You never heard of Hunter S. Thompson?
13
SPEAKER_01
No.
13
SPEAKER_01
The journalist?
13
SPEAKER_01
Tell me more.
13
SPEAKER_00
You never heard of him?
13
SPEAKER_01
You never heard of fear and loathing in Las Vegas?
13
SPEAKER_01
You never heard of this guy?
13
SPEAKER_00
Maybe.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s crazy.
13
SPEAKER_01
I can t believe you ve never heard of Hunter S. Thompson.
13
SPEAKER_01
Hunter S. Thompson is an American writer, and he... What s his most famous thing?
13
SPEAKER_01
Wrote on a lot of... Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the one they made into a Johnny Depp movie.
13
SPEAKER_01
It was a crazy... It really started off... The assignment was he was supposed to write about... I think it was motorcycle racing in Las Vegas.
13
SPEAKER_01
He gets this...
13
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this contract to write this article.
13
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And he goes there and instead it s this LSD, entrenched, psychotic episode.
13
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You re picking this guy over Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Da Vinci?
13
SPEAKER_01
He said brilliant things, man.
13
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If you read his work, his work was brilliant.
13
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It was brilliant.
13
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He was out of his fucking mind.
13
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I mean, he was out of his fucking mind.
13
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Doing acid, shooting windows.
13
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He was crazy.
13
SPEAKER_01
There s a video of him having a shootout with his neighbors in Colorado.
13
SPEAKER_01
They re shooting at each other.
13
SPEAKER_01
It was crazy like legitimately it would kill them so that goes with your killer morbid Instagram things with your friend No, it doesn t necessarily because I think if I could catch him when he was young I bet it d been a fascinating guy to talk to I just think You can t drink that hard for that long you just deteriorate and things go sideways mentally it s just very very but very bad for you poisoning yourself and
13
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every day with coke and you re poisoning yourself every day with whiskey and that s this guy there s a video of us reading hunter s thompson s list of what this journalist saw him do in a day this journalist came to woody creek colorado where he lived and Us talking about it made its way into a song Who is that that band that did that?
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh?
13
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So it s like a techno dance song.
13
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
13
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That s all about Hunter S. Thompson s list of stuff he did.
13
SPEAKER_00
When was this?
13
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When were you reading that?
13
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That was a few years back.
13
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It was me and Greg Fitzsimmons were reading it.
13
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We were like, this is the craziest thing.
13
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Listen to the Beardy Man.
13
SPEAKER_01
Featuring Joe Rogan.
13
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Can we play this?
13
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That s ridiculous.
13
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It s my own words.
13
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In terms of copyright what what happens when you play it?
13
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What do you hear?
13
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Okay, so it s the problem is the music Okay See if you can find the actual clip of me and Greg talking about it.
13
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There s probably a clip of it, but it was it s such a ridiculous
13
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He was of amount of substances he s consuming in a day.
13
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It s fucking insane.
13
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Like he was insane.
13
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So what makes him interesting is that he s insane and he consumes a lot of alcohol and drugs.
13
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No.
13
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Has it been five years?
13
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He s a brilliant guy.
13
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Like the things that he said were brilliant.
13
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Daily routine 3 p.m.
13
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rise.
13
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Okay It s he woke up at 3 p.m.
13
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And he like starts his day with whiskey and cocaine.
13
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It s like he s a fucking animal man.
13
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He s an animal But it was also a brilliant writer man.
13
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He had an amazing insight and he s a guy that sort of was soured by the shift from the 1960s to the 1970s and like what happened in this country and
13
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Now weird thing so you could have had a check.
13
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I mean he only died recently, right?
13
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He died quite a while ago.
13
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He committed suicide At least ten years ago, right?
13
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Okay, but I mean technically you could have met him could have yeah would have been possible But even then it was like the end of his okay.
13
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He wasn t the same guy He wasn t the same guy as he another glass of Shiva s another Dunhill.
13
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Here s his daily routine 3 p.m Rise 305 Shiva s Regal with morning papers smokes Dunhill s
13
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3.45, cocaine.
13
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3.50, another glass of Chivas, another Dunhill.
13
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4.05, PM, by the way, first cup of coffee and a Dunhill.
13
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4.15, cocaine.
13
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4.16, orange juice and another Dunhill.
13
SPEAKER_01
4.30, cocaine.
13
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4.54, cocaine.
13
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5.05, cocaine.
13
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5.11, coffee, Dunhills.
13
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5.30, get more ice in the Chivas.
13
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Cocaine at 5.45, six o clock, smoking grass to take the edge off the day.
13
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7 p.m.
13
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The day, three hours into it.
13
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Three hours in, lit.
13
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7.05, Woody Creek Tavern for lunch.
13
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Heineken, two margaritas, coleslaw, a taco salad, double order of fried onion rings, carrot cake ice cream, a bean fritter, Dunhill s, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the rest of the ride home, a snow cone.
14
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A glass of shredded ice which is poured over four jiggers of chivis.
14
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Okay, so the snow cone is chivis, okay?
14
SPEAKER_03
9 p.m.
14
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Start snorting cocaine seriously.
14
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10 p.m.
14
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Drops acid.
14
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11 p.m.
14
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Chartreuse, I don t know what that is.
14
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Cocaine and grass.
14
11.30.
14
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Cocaine, et cetera, et cetera.
14
12.
14
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Midnight.
14
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Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write.
14
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That s when he sits down to write.
14
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12.05 to 6 a.m.
14
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he writes.
14
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Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhill s, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies.
14
SPEAKER_03
6 a.m.
14
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In the hot tub with champagne, dove bars, fettuccine Alfredo.
14
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8 a.m., halcyon, which is a sleeping pill, 8.20, sleep.
14
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So he would take a sleeping pill at 8.20 in the morning after riding it hard.
14
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Wow.
14
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Would I love it?
14
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Wow.
14
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Now, if his riding sucks, that s crazy.
14
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But his writing was amazing.
14
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What was he, he wrote, he was a fiction writer?
14
SPEAKER_03
No, it was, he came up with a kind of journalism that was like journalism mixed with fiction.
14
SPEAKER_03
And he called it like Gonzo journalism.
14
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Oh, I know that, that s him, okay.
14
SPEAKER_03
That s him.
14
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Okay, I got it.
14
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And the way he would write would be like over the top ridiculous to the point where he thought everybody knew he was joking, but it was mixed up in like also real stuff, like fear and loathing on the campaign trail.
14
SPEAKER_03
You know, he was on the campaign trail, and he spread a rumor about this guy who was a candidate for president being a drug addict on this exotic Brazilian drug Ibogaine.
14
SPEAKER_03
And so people started believing it.
14
SPEAKER_03
The guy started having a mental breakdown.
14
SPEAKER_03
And he was on the Dick Cavett Show, and he admitted to doing this.
14
SPEAKER_03
He admitted to spreading the rumor.
14
SPEAKER_03
He s like... Well, you made it all up.
14
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I couldn t believe it.
14
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I never said he was.
14
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I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was.
14
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Which was true, and I started the rumor in Milwaukee.
14
SPEAKER_03
He affected the campaign.
14
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I m assuming he wasn t married.
14
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Was he married?
14
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He was married, yeah.
14
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Because all that cocaine and stuff might get into the... Well, you know.
14
SPEAKER_03
Gotta do what you gotta do in this world.
14
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I don t know fair enough.
14
SPEAKER_03
Obviously it didn t work out Yeah, but he was a fucking maniac.
14
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He was a complete maniac, but Especially in his younger days like Hells Angels is an amazing book.
14
SPEAKER_03
It s crazy.
14
SPEAKER_03
That s a crazy book He was embedded with the Hells Angels Wow
14
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and wrote this book and they were real mad at him afterwards.
14
SPEAKER_03
But it s crazy.
14
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Oh, I know where I know him from.
14
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I read Tucker Carlson s biography because the guy who wrote it came on my show, so I read it in preparation.
14
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And I think Tucker Carlson refers to him.
14
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That s where I learned the term gonzo journalism, I think.
14
SPEAKER_01
Probably.
14
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Doesn t Tucker have like a Hunter S. Thompson story?
14
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s what I m thinking.
14
SPEAKER_01
Because when you said Hell s Angels, I know that Tucker had been invited to go give a talk with the Hell s Angels where he referenced some, and I think it s this guy.
14
SPEAKER_03
So now I m linking what you re talking about.
14
SPEAKER_03
I don t know the story, but I think Tucker has a Hunter S. Thompson story like he knew him.
14
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I feel like I ve known Hunter S Thompson for most of my life first encountered him in 1981 when I was 12 Tucker Carlson Wow Jamie would we say that out of my ten?
14
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Appearances on the show.
14
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This has been the most number of times that you ve come in with some truth.
14
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I m gonna say yes, damn Dropping bombs dropping bombs Yeah, you re obsessed with numbers
14
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I m an academic, we quantify things.
14
SPEAKER_02
It makes sense, but in this world that can be problematic.
14
SPEAKER_02
I don t know if you know that math is racist.
14
SPEAKER_02
I do, I do.
14
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By the way, seven or eight years ago, you could pull it up, Jamie can pull it up, I did a satirical clip where I introduced a new field that I was coining as social justice mathematics.
14
SPEAKER_01
And I went through all of these mathematical properties and said how we should get rid of them, like irrational numbers should not exist because they marginalize mental illness, whatever.
14
SPEAKER_01
And I just went through the whole list.
14
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It became a big hit amongst the crowd of mathematicians, which is kind of a geeky crowd.
14
SPEAKER_01
But seven, eight years later, reality caught up with my prophetic satire.
14
SPEAKER_01
Now it is literally the case that there is a field called sort of social justice mathematics, where you talk about math being racist.
14
SPEAKER_03
There s a lot of grifters in this world, kids, and there s a lot of people that believe things, if left unchallenged and those things become doctrine, they re a real problem because they re not based in logic.
14
SPEAKER_03
They re just based in nonsense.
14
SPEAKER_03
They re based in a cult-like thinking.
14
SPEAKER_03
That is, we are very susceptible to cult-like thinking.
14
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Yeah, I watched yesterday on my way to Austin a documentary three-part series on these, I think it s called Ivy Ridge School.
14
SPEAKER_01
Have you heard of it?
14
SPEAKER_01
Ivy Ridge School.
14
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It was in Ogdenburg or something in upstate New York.
14
SPEAKER_01
They had a whole bunch of those schools where they would take kids, many of whom were not delinquents really,
14
SPEAKER_01
but they would convince their parents, because you mentioned cults, so this was kind of a cult situation.
14
SPEAKER_01
They would convince their parents that they need to send them to these boarding schools in order to provide them with structure and discipline so that they can get their life together.
14
SPEAKER_01
Even though many of them had committed very, very minor, in fact, they were caught once with marijuana.
14
SPEAKER_01
These were not like dropping acid all day long.
14
SPEAKER_01
And the things that they would do to them in these schools is straight out of the worst Soviet gulags you could think of.
14
SPEAKER_01
And they re throughout the United States and it s a form of cult indoctrination where you re doing cult indoctrination at two levels to the captors, captives in the schools
14
SPEAKER_01
but you also have to convince the parents that they re doing the right thing by sending their kids there.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s unbelievable.
14
SPEAKER_01
You should watch this documentary.
14
SPEAKER_01
It really, it behooves you to imagine that in the 21st century in the United States, these things can occur, but it really does.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh, there you go, exactly.
14
SPEAKER_01
There you go.
14
SPEAKER_01
That s crazy.
14
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You re not allowed to have eye contact with another student.
14
SPEAKER_01
You re not allowed to smile.
14
SPEAKER_01
You re not allowed to look out the window.
14
SPEAKER_01
You re not allowed to speak to anyone.
14
SPEAKER_01
You just sit in front of a computer and you just do these,
14
SPEAKER_02
Oh my God, that s crazy.
14
SPEAKER_01
And they were in there for like 28 months.
14
SPEAKER_01
Then they gave them degrees, diplomas, high school diplomas that were fraudulent.
14
SPEAKER_01
So imagine you re sent there.
14
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, in some cases, they would come and kidnap you out of your parents  home because they knew that the kid would be resistant to leave.
14
SPEAKER_01
They said, no, no, it s completely legal.
14
SPEAKER_01
So like two goons would come, take your child, take them to upstate New York.
14
SPEAKER_01
The kid has no idea why I m there.
14
SPEAKER_03
Oh my God.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
So it s really, it s very powerful.
14
SPEAKER_01
So, and hence that s why parasitic thinking, right?
14
SPEAKER_01
Our ability to be parasitized is infinite.
14
SPEAKER_01
That is crazy.
14
SPEAKER_01
That story s crazy.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
Definitely check it out.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
14
SPEAKER_01
So how old are your kids now?
14
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of kids, are they past the age where you have any influence on them?
14
SPEAKER_01
They think you re no longer the hero, you ve become a zero?
14
SPEAKER_01
Because my children are entering a bit that stage.
14
SPEAKER_03
The teenage stage.
14
SPEAKER_03
That s to be expected, and they re correct.
14
SPEAKER_03
They find flaws in your game.
14
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_03
It s fascinating to watch little minds develop their view of the world.
14
SPEAKER_03
And if there s anything that I ve ever done like a real 180 on, is I developed this weird way of looking at people, and it may be much more empathetic, where I don t think of people as just you at age, you know, whatever you are.
14
SPEAKER_03
You at age 49, you at age 30.
14
SPEAKER_03
I think of everybody as babies.
14
SPEAKER_03
I think of everybody as though you used to be a little baby.
14
SPEAKER_03
And a bunch of shit went terribly wrong.
14
SPEAKER_03
And now here we are together in this unfortunate situation.
14
SPEAKER_03
And where I used to just think, like if I saw some guy and he was drunk and he s 35 years old, some asshole.
14
SPEAKER_03
It s like, he s just an asshole.
14
SPEAKER_03
This guy s an asshole.
14
SPEAKER_03
He s rude to people.
14
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, how did he get to that spot and I started thinking about people like little babies little babies that just got a bunch of bad things bad people and bad Environments, but that s removing people s personal agency that you re it s a little it s definitely removing a little which is also bullshit Yeah, because you do have personal agency, but you don t have
14
SPEAKER_03
You don t have a hundred percent.
14
SPEAKER_03
So I see there s certain landscapes that are you know?
14
SPEAKER_01
Untraversable I actually faced what you faced with a 35 year old I faced something similar on my daily walk with my wife to the coffee shop and bar
15
SPEAKER_00
back.
15
SPEAKER_00
There s a gentleman that stands outside this, you know, kind of she she artisanal butchery butcher place in our neighborhood and he is soliciting money every day all all day.
15
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
15
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t look as though he s mentally ill.
15
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t look completely destitute, but he stands there every day.
15
SPEAKER_00
And so now I just say hello to him, just to recognize him.
15
SPEAKER_00
And you could tell that it means a lot to him.
15
SPEAKER_00
Hi, how are you, how you doing?
15
SPEAKER_00
And I ve struggled with whether it would be appropriate for me or not to just strike up a conversation out of just a human interest in knowing what happened to you.
15
SPEAKER_00
Because he clearly doesn t seem like he s mentally ill.
15
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t seem as though he s a drug addict.
15
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s not wearing a three-piece Italian suit, but you know, he s not disheveled.
15
SPEAKER_00
And yet he s there every day, and that s the best option he has.
15
SPEAKER_00
Do you think it would be viewed by him as insulting and offensive if I were to speak to him?
15
SPEAKER_00
Or on the contrary, hey, somebody s actually taking an interest in me.
15
SPEAKER_00
How do you view this?
15
SPEAKER_01
It really depends upon the situation, and how crazy you think he is, or if you think he s crazy at all.
15
SPEAKER_00
I don t think he s crazy.
15
SPEAKER_01
Well, there s a lot of people that have mental illnesses that wind up on the street.
15
SPEAKER_01
That s a big part of the problem.
15
SPEAKER_01
Mental illnesses and drug addicts.
15
SPEAKER_01
They re the ones who wind up in those situations, and he could be either of those.
15
SPEAKER_01
Either of those, yeah.
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you don t know.
15
SPEAKER_01
But I bet he s probably lonely, and I bet if you have a conversation with him, he d probably appreciate it.
15
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
15
SPEAKER_01
You know, if you could handle it, you might get sucked into his world a little bit.
15
SPEAKER_01
He might want money from you.
15
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
15
SPEAKER_01
Who knows why he s there?
15
SPEAKER_00
Can I tell you an incredible story about a homeless guy?
15
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s actually in the last chapter of The Happiness Book.
15
SPEAKER_00
His name is Bijan Gilani.
15
SPEAKER_00
I met him when I was a professor at UC Irvine.
15
SPEAKER_00
I was sitting at a cafe, whole bunch of books thrown all over my table.
15
SPEAKER_00
I was working on a paper.
15
SPEAKER_00
He comes up to me, really well-dressed, a bit of an accent, he s of Iranian descent.
15
SPEAKER_00
He says, oh my God, these are all interesting books.
15
SPEAKER_00
Do you mind if I sit down with you for a couple minutes, chat?
15
SPEAKER_00
So I tell him I m a professor at UC Irvine.
15
SPEAKER_00
He was doing his PhD studying the homeless community in Southern California.
15
SPEAKER_00
So he had, it was an anthropological study where instead of going to a culture and living amongst them in the Amazon, the community that he s studying anthropologically is the homeless community.
15
SPEAKER_00
So he embedded himself and he actually finished his PhD at UC Irvine.
15
SPEAKER_00
He was a wealthy man.
15
SPEAKER_00
Fast forward several years later, he becomes destitute, living out of his car, and himself homeless, okay?
15
SPEAKER_00
And the reason why I mention, that s him, that s his car.
15
SPEAKER_00
This is incredible, Jamie.
15
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so this gentleman was living in this car.
15
SPEAKER_00
Now why am I mentioning this in the context of the book on happiness?
15
SPEAKER_00
So he was asked, Joe, are you a happy person, right?
15
SPEAKER_00
Guess what he answers, he says,
15
SPEAKER_00
Now, this is a guy who has a PhD, reached pinnacle, very wealthy guy in Southern California, is now living in his car.
15
SPEAKER_00
He says, well, I m a moral person.
15
SPEAKER_00
I m a good person.
15
SPEAKER_00
I have a library card to the Newport Beach Library so I can go and nourish my mind.
15
SPEAKER_00
I have a card to the gym so I could stay healthy.
15
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I m happy.
15
SPEAKER_00
So, I use that story to say, here is a guy who has every reason to feel down on himself, yet he frames his situation in such a way that he can elevate himself despite all his trials and tribulations.
15
SPEAKER_00
One more quick story on that.
15
SPEAKER_00
David McCallum, I may have mentioned him previously, I m not sure.
15
SPEAKER_00
Arguably the most incredible guy I ve had on my show, and like you I ve had many amazing people, spent 29 years in prison and then he was exonerated for a murder that he didn t commit.
15
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He comes on my show, we re chatting.
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As we re chatting, maybe you could pull that one up too, David McCallum.
15
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As we re chatting, I said to him, you know, David, you must be the reincarnation of Buddha because it s amazing how you re not filled with any rancor, any sense of vindictiveness, any vengefulness.
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It s unbelievable.
15
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I mean, you re a much better man than I am because I would want to burn the world down if someone did this to me.
15
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He says, you know, God, I have a sister who suffers from cerebral palsy and she s been bedridden and yet she has, she finds a way to smile.
15
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And so from that perspective, you know, whatever I went through is not that bad.
15
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So a guy who just spent three decades in prison for a crime that he didn t commit was still able to reframe his
15
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his tragedy into a positive.
15
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So these are, and by the way, these are the types of, you know, people learn a lot more from these stories than they do if you had gone all academies on them, right?
15
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And so that s why I love telling these stories because then people right away connect to those stories, so.
15
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No, it s, God, the way the human brain works.
15
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Like, if you re studying this for all these years, what is the most surprising thing to you that people do that seems obvious that they shouldn t do in terms of the way they think about things?
15
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Not alter their positions in light of incoming
15
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That s the big one, right?
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That s the big one, because in a sense, it speaks to your decency as a human being.
15
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Epistemologically, if we are true, honest people, we change.
15
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As you said, we make mistakes, we held positions because we had informations A, B, C, but now X, Y, Z comes in and we change.
15
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And any good, decent, moral,
15
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A person with integrity has to be able to do that.
15
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But to your earlier point, most of us are vain.
15
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Most of us have pride.
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Most of us have vested interest in whatever positions we re in.
15
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We can t let go of those positions because it would affect my identity.
15
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And that s why, by the way,
15
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pride of the seven deadly sins you may or may not know this is the supra sin it s the sin from which all other sins flow because pride is the orgiastic self-love so so in french by the way you distinguish between
15
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Positive pride and negative pride.
15
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In English, you don t have that distinction.
15
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So if you say, I m proud of my work, that s different than saying, don t be prideful in your love.
15
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That would be a negative thing.
15
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In French, there is a distinction.
15
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Positive pride is fierté.
15
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Negative pride is orgueil.
15
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So that s another interesting thing is that in some languages, the terms exist to separate.
15
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In other languages, you don t have them.
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Dropping a lot of wisdom and knowledge.
15
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You are, but you are always filled with that.
15
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I think one of the more unique things about your background that makes you resistant to stupidity is the fact that you did have to flee with your family.
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And the fact that you were involved in a real war.
15
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It was a real war zone, a real scary time.
15
SPEAKER_01
And to see the effects of ideology
15
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so clearly impose themselves on your life when you were very young.
15
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That s exactly right.
15
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That s why in the first chapter of Parasitic Mind, I tell that story, because then that offers the reader a window into why I hate tribalism, or I hate identity politics, because Lebanon is the perfect experiment of identity politics, right?
15
SPEAKER_00
And so, yeah, you re exactly right.
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do you do you hold any i mean one of the things that s been amazing about all the different conversations that you and i ve had and this is like the 10th one that we ve done it
15
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a lot of this wouldn t get to some of the people that understand what you re saying and reincorporate it into their understanding of their own behavior and tribal behavior in general, and just the way people behave.
15
SPEAKER_01
Just think about things, the way people accept ridiculous ideas.
15
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You ve had a big impact on that.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, you ve had.
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SPEAKER_00
You just gave me the forum.
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SPEAKER_00
I just show up.
15
SPEAKER_00
You tell me where to show up.
15
SPEAKER_01
No, but you have all the information.
15
SPEAKER_01
If I show up on myself, it s not worthwhile.
15
SPEAKER_00
You know, I gotta tell you.
15
SPEAKER_00
You can t imagine the extent of, I mean, I guess you can imagine, but I could be walking on a, I mean, that s literally happened.
15
SPEAKER_00
I m walking on a beach in the Bahamas.
15
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A native Bahamian who s doing some artisanal thing runs up to me, recognizes me, because I ve been on the Joe Rogan show.
15
SPEAKER_00
So it s just, it s unbelievable, and I don t mean that in a, oh, people are, I mean that that s your reach.
15
SPEAKER_00
So how many people do you get per show, if I may ask?
15
SPEAKER_00
It s a lot, I don t know.
15
SPEAKER_00
Many millions.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s a lot.
15
SPEAKER_00
Right, so I mean, so then again, the people who are looking down on podcasters, I mean, if you are in the business of spreading information, you should be lining up to appear on the show.
15
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Believe me, I never take it for granted.
15
SPEAKER_00
I feel so privileged that, first that I m your friend, but that I have this opportunity to come and,
15
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reach so many people how many people have written to me said I became interested in psychology and consumer behavior and in Politics because I heard you say something on Joe Rogan.
15
SPEAKER_00
That s unbelievable.
15
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s pretty nuts It s very Joe Rogan from Boston, Massachusetts.
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah sort of Newton I lived in the Boston different parts of my life, but it s I
16
SPEAKER_00
It s bit very bizarre that it s reached what it s what it s doing.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s very strange.
16
SPEAKER_00
Do you how do you handle fame?
16
SPEAKER_00
Try not to okay.
16
SPEAKER_01
I try not to engage So do you I mean, are you are you shut off when you re in public because I suspect not not shut off No, just try to be me.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah Yeah
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, it s the only way to do it.
16
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, you ll go crazy.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you go crazy.
16
SPEAKER_00
You know, if you don t interact with people, I mean, people were they do get weird people get weird with you.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s weird.
16
SPEAKER_00
They see someone that they ve watched on YouTube, or they re watching their phone or their watches, you know, whatever.
16
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I ve been fortunate, I don t know how it s been for you, my ratio, I mean, online, I get tons of negativity, but in person, I ve only had, and knock on wood, in all the years that I ve been in the public, one time, a negative encounter.
16
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So it s...
16
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10 million to one.
16
SPEAKER_01
So your ratio hasn t been as positive?
16
SPEAKER_00
No, it s always very positive.
16
SPEAKER_00
I think even in general, most people are good people, even if they say bad things.
16
SPEAKER_00
And I think if you re around someone, your reaction to them would be very different than writing things in text.
16
SPEAKER_00
I bet a lot of the people that wrote shitty things to you, if they met you, they d say a nice thing to you.
16
SPEAKER_01
Right.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s a terrible way to communicate.
16
SPEAKER_00
And it feels just like a real thought and a real statement.
16
SPEAKER_01
And sometimes you are.
16
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I don t know if it s... I mean, I know that sometimes I m a lot more caustic when I reply to someone online than I would in person.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I really try not to be.
16
SPEAKER_00
I don t want...
16
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I don t like conflict.
16
SPEAKER_00
I don t think it s necessary.
16
SPEAKER_00
I think most of your conflict should be within yourself, within your own mind.
16
SPEAKER_00
Whatever you re doing with your life and focusing your energy on, you have more bandwidth for it if you don t have these external conflicts that are totally unnecessary.
16
SPEAKER_00
I just think they re unnecessary.
16
SPEAKER_01
Well, you seem to, I mean, I obviously follow you on Twitter, well, Hex, you don t post, I mean, you don t engage anybody anymore, right?
16
SPEAKER_01
Almost never.
16
SPEAKER_01
It s just not fun.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s just, you re thrown into this weird world of opinions and people.
16
SPEAKER_00
And if it s about you, like, you shouldn t be that interested in you that you want to read all these people s opinions about you.
16
SPEAKER_00
I m interested in other people writing about stuff.
16
SPEAKER_00
I m interested in different opinions about things, but I don t want to engage because it s the environment of engaging online is just too weird.
16
SPEAKER_01
And you re doing it every day for three hours already.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s just too many different opinions coming at you and too many different people coming at you.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s like, that s not good for people.
16
SPEAKER_00
I don t think it s good to be interacting with that many people in any form.
16
SPEAKER_00
I don t think it s good to be interacting with that many people in real life I think it s just you probably never have a deep conversation.
16
SPEAKER_00
You re just constantly running into new people Everywhere you go just people constantly you re gonna want some time off You know and I think it s the same with like interactions online, and I think people don t think about it that way they ll think about like every time someone s talking at you you re getting input and
16
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Every time you re around someone, you re getting input.
16
SPEAKER_00
And if you are around people that are cool, it s a great experience.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s really fun.
16
SPEAKER_00
We had a great time.
16
SPEAKER_00
We were laughing.
16
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, it was so much fun.
16
SPEAKER_00
But if you re around someone who s really annoying and shitty or mean or snide or just ugh.
16
SPEAKER_00
Now it s a bad time, right?
16
SPEAKER_00
So you know to avoid those people.
16
SPEAKER_00
But you don t have that opportunity online.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s a party and the whole world s there.
16
SPEAKER_00
And 80% of them might be Chinese bots.
16
SPEAKER_00
Who fucking knows?
16
SPEAKER_00
Who knows what s coming at you?
16
SPEAKER_00
And you re just gonna take those in and your brain s gonna process them like they re real opinions and real people that are to be respected.
16
SPEAKER_00
These are things to be considered.
16
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you are a piece of shit, dad.
16
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you are self-hating.
16
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you are this, you re that.
16
SPEAKER_01
Of many of the wonderful advice that you ve given on the show, I remember you once said to me, kind of surprised, what are you doing reading comments?
16
SPEAKER_01
Never, ever, ever read comments.
16
SPEAKER_01
And I remember that sometimes when I answer someone, they say, clearly you re not implementing Joe Rogan s advice.
16
SPEAKER_01
But I must say that over the years, I ve greatly reduced my temptation to, so I can t say that I never read, but much, much less than before.
16
SPEAKER_00
You ll feel way better.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s just not good for you.
16
SPEAKER_00
I think it s a bad way to process people s interactions.
16
SPEAKER_00
I don t think it s a real indicator of people.
16
SPEAKER_00
I think it s a weird way that people are willing to engage online they would never do in real life.
16
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise,
16
SPEAKER_00
It would be a bloodbath in the streets everywhere.
16
SPEAKER_00
People would be just killing each other left and right.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s not like that in the real world, because the real world type of communication is very different than online communication.
16
SPEAKER_00
But online communication gets processed in your head like it s real communication, and I think it heightens anxiety with everybody.
16
SPEAKER_01
So in the happiness book, I talk about research that shows that the number one factor in terms of longevity, more than your cholesterol scores when you re 50, is the tightness of your social network, your friendship group.
16
SPEAKER_01
And so with that in mind,
16
SPEAKER_01
If I were to ask you to pick your five biggest friends, are they ones that you ve held from when you were at Newton, or are there a lot of new entrants into the inner circle of Joe Rogan over the years?
16
SPEAKER_01
Does it shift much, your friendship group, or are you very much stable?
16
SPEAKER_00
I have some friends that I ve been friends with since I was in high school.
16
SPEAKER_00
But I have a lot of really good friends that have been, I ve been friends with comics that are real good friends of mine for decades.
16
SPEAKER_00
So I ve known a lot of these guys.
16
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of the guys that are here now, like Tony, I ve been friends with Tony Hainscliff for, God, at least 15 years, something like that, right?
16
SPEAKER_00
When did Tony first start doing shows at Red Band?
16
SPEAKER_00
Something crazy like 11 12 years ago, whatever it was Joey Diaz have been friends with him for 25 years 26 years maybe more You know, there s a lot of these guys have known forever.
16
SPEAKER_00
I ve known Ari for 20 plus years You know that we were just we ve been friends for so long and Tom Segura same thing I ve known him for 20 years almost so when those guys all wanted to move out here together.
16
SPEAKER_00
I m like, oh my god This is amazing.
16
SPEAKER_00
Ari hasn t moved here, but I m gonna try to convince that motherfucker
16
SPEAKER_01
Here meaning Austin?
16
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_01
Okay, from California.
16
SPEAKER_01
He likes New York.
16
SPEAKER_01
Oh, he s in New York, yeah.
16
SPEAKER_01
He likes to be, like, congested.
16
SPEAKER_00
He likes to be, beep, beep, fuck you.
16
SPEAKER_00
He likes, hmm, I like it.
16
SPEAKER_00
He likes all the energy of all those people packed on top of each other.
16
SPEAKER_01
Are most of your Southern California friends out of there?
16
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s a few guys left.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Bill Burr stayed.
16
SPEAKER_00
A few other guys stayed that are really good.
16
SPEAKER_01
By the way, I had one of your friends on my show, Brian Callan.
16
SPEAKER_00
Oh, Brian Callan s awesome.
16
SPEAKER_01
He s such a cool guy.
16
SPEAKER_00
He s a smart motherfucker.
16
SPEAKER_01
He really is and also retarded at the same time He s just silly but he s just why he wasn t he wasn t with on our show on my show he was like very Serious.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_01
No, he s very capable of that too.
16
SPEAKER_01
He s very well-read.
16
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
16
SPEAKER_01
Yeah exactly
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he s a great guest too, great podcast guest.
16
SPEAKER_01
Well, I ve always said that, I mean, comics have to, by definition, be intelligent because, and by the way, that s a sexually selected trait, right?
16
SPEAKER_01
When women say, you know, I want a man who s funny, she s obviously saying, I want a man who s intelligent because it s very unlikely for you to be truly funny and be a complete dullard, right?
16
SPEAKER_01
And so by you saying, I like funny guys, you are effectively saying by proxy, I like intelligent guys.
16
SPEAKER_01
So it doesn t surprise me that Brian Callen or all your other friends would be funny.
16
SPEAKER_01
I mean, look at Dave Chappelle.
16
SPEAKER_01
How are you gonna pull off all those insights if you were just moron, right?
16
SPEAKER_01
So he s probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues.
16
SPEAKER_00
But he s very smart.
16
SPEAKER_00
He s very smart.
16
SPEAKER_00
But he s also, you know, I mean, he s like in the world of stand-up seven days a week.
16
SPEAKER_00
He s like a master craftsman out there, like swinging away at ideas and piecing them up together on the road.
16
SPEAKER_00
There s no one like him.
16
SPEAKER_00
That guy flies into a town.
16
SPEAKER_00
Just shows up at comedy clubs and goes on stage like they don t even know he s gonna be there does it all the time Is that right?
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, man, he did it with me.
16
SPEAKER_00
I was in Denver.
16
SPEAKER_00
It just showed up You mean you you were performing?
16
SPEAKER_01
Denver and he just shows up Denver and he just showed up now Do you feel slighted and that he might take over the scene or my friend?
16
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, I wanted him to go on.
16
SPEAKER_00
Okay, this is what happened
16
SPEAKER_00
I did this weekend at the Comedy Works in Denver, and Dave flew in and just decided to show up.
16
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, what are you doing?
16
SPEAKER_00
He goes, I just wanted to come say hi.
16
SPEAKER_00
Oh my god.
16
SPEAKER_00
He just flew in.
16
SPEAKER_00
I go, you want to go on stage?
16
SPEAKER_00
He goes, should I?
16
SPEAKER_00
I go, fuck yeah, hold on.
16
SPEAKER_00
So I go out onto the stage, and I yelled out to the audience.
16
SPEAKER_00
Tell everybody to come back.
16
SPEAKER_00
Dave Chappelle s here.
16
SPEAKER_00
What?
16
SPEAKER_00
And they all piled back in.
16
SPEAKER_00
He did like another 40 minutes and murdered.
16
SPEAKER_00
It was incredible.
16
SPEAKER_00
It was so much fun.
16
SPEAKER_00
It was so much fun.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but so that guy does that all the time all over the place.
17
SPEAKER_00
just show up in New York, start doing sets, show up in LA, start doing sets.
17
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
17
SPEAKER_00
He just shows up and works out his material, and he s just in it.
17
SPEAKER_00
He s just in it, man, you know?
17
SPEAKER_00
Just fully involved in this art form.
17
SPEAKER_01
So you would say he s currently the top living comic?
17
SPEAKER_00
You can t consider the best without considering him.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s all subjective.
17
SPEAKER_00
There s certain people that think this person s funnier, certain people that think that.
17
SPEAKER_00
I think it s all stupid to say a number one, number two, number three.
17
SPEAKER_00
I think there s just a level of greatness
17
SPEAKER_00
that some achieve that he is at right now that s very rare.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s very Richard Pryor.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s very Sam Kinison.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s very, there s just like outliers that are just so consistently good and over the years just have so much output.
17
SPEAKER_00
You gotta put him in that category.
17
SPEAKER_00
And he also has this mystique of taking 10 years off.
17
SPEAKER_01
Right, he disappears.
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he disappears.
17
SPEAKER_00
He stopped doing standup.
17
SPEAKER_00
One of the best of all time.
17
SPEAKER_00
Does this incredible?
17
SPEAKER_00
Sketch show that s Arguably the best sketch show ever that only does two seasons right and then he disappears and then he just quits And then he doesn t he doesn t even do stand-up.
17
SPEAKER_00
You know what he s doing.
17
SPEAKER_00
He was he would do stand-up at a park He would show up with a speaker and plug it in and just do free stand-up in like Seattle.
17
SPEAKER_00
Is that right?
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and would he draw huge crowds or be like seven believe he was there like what is he doing here?
17
SPEAKER_00
This is this is insane Wow, just show up places You know like like a real artist on a vision quest right, you know, then he comes back ten years later It just starts dominating the game again.
17
SPEAKER_01
Well, I saw him I don t know if you saw that Netflix where he s recounting how he went back to his high school.
17
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and what struck me is how good of a storyteller he was
17
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s the real key, right?
17
SPEAKER_01
And I think you ve had someone, I think you ve had Jonathan Gottschall, right?
17
SPEAKER_01
The professor who studies evolutionary literature.
17
SPEAKER_01
And he studies why storytelling is important to us.
17
SPEAKER_01
And Dave Chappelle is a perfect manifestation of this, right?
17
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he can garner huge multi-million dollar deals because he could tell a mean story.
17
SPEAKER_00
He s just so likable, too.
17
SPEAKER_00
Everything about him.
17
SPEAKER_00
You start smiling when you hear him talk.
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s a there s a vibe that he has when he starts talking.
17
SPEAKER_00
He just starts smiling That s true.
17
SPEAKER_00
You know, and you know, he s going somewhere with it.
17
SPEAKER_00
Like where you going with this?
17
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no
17
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
17
SPEAKER_00
The world needs that.
17
SPEAKER_00
We need people like that out there.
17
SPEAKER_00
We need guys like him out there.
17
SPEAKER_01
So of all the different hats you wear, that s the one that brings you, I mean, you re a podcaster, you do the MMA stuff, you do the, is being in front of the audience doing your routine the thing that gives you the most high?
17
SPEAKER_00
It s the most complicated.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s the hardest to pull off.
17
SPEAKER_00
Having conversations with people is pretty effortless.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s fun.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s fun.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s just fun.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s engaging.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting.
17
SPEAKER_00
I feel very lucky to be able to have these kind of conversations with you.
17
SPEAKER_00
But doing stand-up, it s like you re piecing together the bits.
17
SPEAKER_00
You re making sure they re polished.
17
SPEAKER_00
You ve got the right angle on them.
17
SPEAKER_00
Got them honed.
17
SPEAKER_00
You ve figured out the most effective way to insert the idea.
17
SPEAKER_00
You know, they figure out the sneakiest way to hide the punchline, right?
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s fun But it s all fun.
17
SPEAKER_00
That s the beautiful thing It s like if you can do stuff that you really like doing like I really like having conversations with people.
17
SPEAKER_00
That s fun I really like doing stand-up.
17
SPEAKER_00
That s fun.
17
SPEAKER_00
I really like doing UFC commentary.
17
SPEAKER_00
That s fun Just do fun things.
17
SPEAKER_01
You are living a blessed life.
17
SPEAKER_00
I m very lucky.
17
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what I did the past life.
17
SPEAKER_00
I
17
SPEAKER_00
I did something, though.
17
SPEAKER_00
Definitely did something.
17
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s great.
17
SPEAKER_00
That s great.
17
SPEAKER_00
But it s been very, very beneficial to me.
17
SPEAKER_00
to be able to have conversations like this, to be able to have so many conversations with so many people that know so many things.
17
SPEAKER_00
And it just, as you said, it highlights how little you know, and how much there is to know, and how many different things there is to know, so many different things about.
17
SPEAKER_01
It s unbelievable.
17
SPEAKER_00
There are people right now that are studying their entire life some shit you ve never even heard of.
17
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
17
SPEAKER_00
They re the experts of it and it s a fucking hugely complex thing that they re involved in and you don t even know it exists And you re like, what are you guys doing?
17
SPEAKER_00
What?
17
SPEAKER_00
What is this?
17
SPEAKER_00
You know, I mean Who the hell knows?
17
SPEAKER_00
What kind of scientific discoveries that are going on right now as we sit in this room?
17
SPEAKER_00
This is there s a frenzy of technological activity going on right now
17
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, Austin, I did, I think it was after my last trip here, which was last time I came last year to do your show, and I was arguing that Austin might be the next, so, you know, you had Florence of the Medicis, of the Da Vinci, 500 years ago.
17
SPEAKER_01
Then you had the Vienna circle, the Viennese circle, in the 1880s to 1930, where Vienna was kind of the intellectual hotbed.
17
SPEAKER_01
and maybe it s a bit hyperbolic, but I think Austin is vying to be kind of the next one, right, in that everybody s coming here, all kinds of creative types, whether they be academics or writers or comics or podcasters or Elon Musk or, you know, so do you think that Austin, it would be reasonable to argue that it s becoming sort of the intellectual slash creative center of,
17
SPEAKER_00
United States, that s ridiculous.
17
SPEAKER_00
You mean New York never it s I think first of all There s great spots everywhere.
17
SPEAKER_00
You know, there s great spots in New York You just have to deal with a lot of shit in New York, but this is to say there s not Amazing shit going on in New York artistically crazy to say it s not amazing stuff going on in LA.
17
SPEAKER_00
That s crazy, too it s just
17
SPEAKER_00
What what what matters is we re doing it in a way that s beneficial for for comedy.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s beneficial for us It s good for us.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s like it s we ve set up stand up out here to make it good for us you know the the Google people and all the people that moved out here and They re doing to they re doing it because it s a good place to be you know, I don t necessarily know if there s hot spots I think the hot spots the internet
17
SPEAKER_00
There s cities that are better to live in because they have less people and less traffic and less bullshit and less laws and less nonsense imposed on the citizens.
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, definitely.
17
SPEAKER_01
But... No, but there s a critical mass of people that congregate in an area, making that place unique and different from other places.
17
SPEAKER_01
That s what made Vienna, Vienna, right?
17
SPEAKER_01
It was the start of psychoanalysis, it s where Gödel hung out, it s where Freud hung out, it s where Jung hung out.
17
SPEAKER_01
I mean, yeah, maybe Austin is not there yet, but you know, University of Austin is being founded here, right?
17
SPEAKER_01
That s trying to be the anti-woke university, so there is definitely, apparently, a vibe.
17
SPEAKER_01
People keep telling me to move here.
17
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think it s very pretentious to bring that up, though, if you actually live here.
17
SPEAKER_00
Like, I m very hesitant to even say, I would never compare it in such lofty terms.
17
SPEAKER_00
It s a great spot.
17
SPEAKER_00
The University of Austin thing, they re setting it up as an anti-war.
17
SPEAKER_00
They re not saying that though, right?
17
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they re not saying it that way.
17
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s not in the mission statement, but it s definitely kind of a countermeasure to all the illiberal stuff that we ve seen in universities, yeah.
17
SPEAKER_01
I actually, a couple of years ago, I came to give a couple of talks at University of Texas Austin, UT Austin, and I met with the president of University of Austin.
17
SPEAKER_01
We had brunch together.
17
SPEAKER_00
Are you thinking about coming here?
17
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if the right opportunity presents itself.
17
SPEAKER_01
Really?
17
SPEAKER_01
Inshallah.
17
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
17
SPEAKER_00
That would be wild.
17
SPEAKER_00
You could be free from Communist Canada.
17
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
17
SPEAKER_01
free from Communist Canada, free from the weather, and by the way, something that we didn t talk about, sir, do you know that the biggest effort to cancel me came after my last appearance on your show?
17
SPEAKER_00
No, what did you say that got you in so much trouble?
17
SPEAKER_00
You re not gonna believe this.
17
SPEAKER_01
Of all the things that I ve said, do you remember at one point in the show, I said, because you had gone to Greece last summer.
17
SPEAKER_01
And then I said, oh, we just came back from Portugal.
17
SPEAKER_01
And I gotta tell you, I wasn t a big fan of the Portuguese accent.
17
SPEAKER_01
And then I went on and said, oh, but actually, I speak Hebrew, and Hebrew is violently ugly.
17
SPEAKER_01
I said, oh, but the worst, the real affront to human dignity is the French Canadian accent.
17
SPEAKER_01
Completely jokingly, I used the line, affront to human dignity, as a running gag for 10 years on Twitter.
17
SPEAKER_01
The Beatles are an affront to human dignity.
17
SPEAKER_01
Anybody who doesn t love Lionel Messi is an affront to human dignity, right?
17
SPEAKER_01
It s an ongoing gag.
17
SPEAKER_01
It s a throwaway line.
17
SPEAKER_01
I said it, I think you had cracked up, you had laughed, and we move on.
17
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a joke.
17
SPEAKER_01
About a week later,
17
SPEAKER_01
a super angry kind of French-Quebec or separatist guy does a article in the La Presse, which is like the main Quebec newspaper, saying this guy, this immigrant that we opened our doors to and saved him from civil war goes on the number one show and erases our existence.
18
SPEAKER_00
For the next three weeks, Joe Rogan, for the next three weeks, I was the number one most hated person in Quebec.
18
SPEAKER_00
Luckily, I was in California on vacation.
18
SPEAKER_00
And the Quebec Minister of Justice weighed in against me, the Minister of Science and Education weighed in, right?
18
SPEAKER_00
Go back, Arab, Jew, self-falafel, back in the Middle East, we opened our doors to you.
18
SPEAKER_00
My god, so yeah, apparently you can t joke you could say a lot of things Don t joke about the Quebec accent on Joe Rogan.
18
SPEAKER_00
I personally think it s a beautiful accent Yeah, well, I ve learned since I ve been reeducated that it is the most beautiful been reeducated exactly The thing about this place though is the heat you got to be ready for the heat.
18
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
18
SPEAKER_00
Well, I am from Lebanon That s true
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, is Lebanon a dryer?
18
SPEAKER_01
No, it s dryer.
18
SPEAKER_00
You re right.
18
SPEAKER_00
This is humid, right?
18
SPEAKER_01
Oh, it gets funky.
18
SPEAKER_01
What s the mosquito situation here?
18
SPEAKER_01
It s not good.
18
SPEAKER_01
It s not good?
18
SPEAKER_01
Oh, it s really bad?
18
SPEAKER_01
It s not good, there s lakes everywhere.
18
SPEAKER_01
Oh, God.
18
SPEAKER_01
That s why we have so many bats.
18
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
18
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s what it is.
18
SPEAKER_01
They eat like tons of per day.
18
SPEAKER_01
Oh, they consume mosquitoes.
18
SPEAKER_01
If it wasn t for bats, we would be fucked.
18
SPEAKER_00
Right, yeah, that s true.
18
SPEAKER_00
I ve actually, in 2005 was the first time I came to Austin.
18
SPEAKER_00
There was a Human Behavior and Evolution Conference here.
18
SPEAKER_00
And the hotel was right next to where they come out.
18
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know what I m talking about.
18
SPEAKER_00
And so we actually stood there as they came out.
18
SPEAKER_00
I couldn t believe it.
18
SPEAKER_01
It s magical.
18
SPEAKER_01
It s crazy.
18
SPEAKER_01
Also, by the way, sometimes those little fuckers have diseases.
18
SPEAKER_01
I know there was a story that we talked about on the podcast before where there was a guy and a bat grazed his finger and he died from rabies.
18
SPEAKER_00
No kidding.
18
SPEAKER_01
yeah, they did they didn t know what was wrong with him until it was too late and Rabies is something that once you have you fucking it s not it.
18
SPEAKER_01
You re done.
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you have to get if something bites you that has rabies You have to get really painful shots and they have to do it very quickly your stomach, right?
18
SPEAKER_01
I think I think yeah, I m saying yeah, but yeah, I think someone said it like just I said it to you I don t remember from but I do know it s like fatal like 99% of the time so terrible
18
SPEAKER_01
terrifying fucking disease.
18
SPEAKER_01
And bats have it!
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18
SPEAKER_01
Bats, rats, skunks, all kinds of shit.
18
SPEAKER_00
Dogs.
18
SPEAKER_00
What are the guys with the... Raccoons?
18
SPEAKER_00
Raccoons, thank you.
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they get it.
18
SPEAKER_01
They get it, yeah.
18
SPEAKER_01
It s scary.
18
SPEAKER_01
There s a crazy video that was on Instagram of this cop, and she walks, I think it s a she, I m pretty sure it might be a dude, I m sorry.
18
SPEAKER_01
Don t want to misgender anybody.
18
SPEAKER_01
I don t remember but this cop Shoots this fucking raccoon and the raccoons not dying and shoots it again and then shoots it again and then shoots it again It was a rabid raccoon Wow She s just unloading a gun to zombie raccoon and it s stumbling to a fucking pistol at a raccoon little ass raccoon boom boom boom Usually when you have rabies you get hydrophobia, right you get fear of water and drink.
18
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, what s the mechanism there?
18
SPEAKER_00
Oh
18
SPEAKER_01
It s a good question.
18
SPEAKER_01
It s a good question.
18
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s funny.
18
SPEAKER_01
I don t it is weird It s weird that it doesn t affect people in the same way It doesn t make people want to bite people right as it makes animals fearless and they want to bite you, right?
18
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they become risk takers Yeah, they want to bite you.
18
SPEAKER_01
They want to give it to you.
18
SPEAKER_01
That s that right?
18
SPEAKER_01
What else could it be?
18
SPEAKER_00
Yes, they re aggressive.
18
SPEAKER_00
They re
18
SPEAKER_01
Why but why would they get aggressive to the point where they want to chase after you and bite you put themselves in danger?
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah to go after you and bite you right they want to give it to you It s like a zombie thing, but it s just like it just kills people It doesn t turn them into zombies right, but it turns animals into zombies like they They just want to come get you like that s crazy that there s a virus like that and that is what like 28 days later was
18
SPEAKER_00
Right?
18
SPEAKER_01
It was like they were engineering a virus that they were putting in chimpanzees and it broke out into people.
18
SPEAKER_00
Right.
18
SPEAKER_00
I just finished a book called The Plague that looked at the history of civilizations through the lens of different plagues.
18
SPEAKER_00
Very interesting.
18
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it got tedious at one point, right?
18
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you re going through the different civilization, but I mean, you know, the black plague and so on, but going back to the Romans and so on, so a lot of,
18
SPEAKER_00
history was shaped by a particular virus becoming more or less prevalent at a particular time and place.
18
SPEAKER_01
It is so fascinating when you hear about plagues like just wiping out giant swaths of the population.
18
SPEAKER_01
Like the plague of North Americans coming and interacting with the Native Americans.
18
SPEAKER_01
Those smallpox, right?
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 90%.
18
SPEAKER_01
Killed 90% of the people here.
18
SPEAKER_01
Probably did the same thing through the Mayas.
18
SPEAKER_01
Like that s probably what happened to all those people that disappeared they left behind
18
SPEAKER_01
Chichen Itza and all these crazy what happened to those people right doesn t that sort of coincide with when explorers started showing up in boats with cooties you know it s it s crazy that that how much that shapes human population the the interaction of these weird little things that are kind of alive that jump from person to person
18
SPEAKER_00
What s amazing is that, going back to Fauci and so on, I think the fatality rate was not, I mean, or survival rate was like 99.7 or something, right?
18
SPEAKER_00
For COVID, does that sound right?
18
SPEAKER_00
Something like that.
18
SPEAKER_00
Now imagine if you compare that to the fatality rate of the Black Plague, where I think it was something in the order of one third of Europe was wiped out.
18
SPEAKER_00
So imagine the level of precaution that we took
18
SPEAKER_00
I understand hindsight is 20-20, but we took all these precautions for something that ultimately you had more than a 99% chance of surviving.
18
SPEAKER_00
So, Matt, contextualize that against the Black Plague.
18
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it was an overreaction.
18
SPEAKER_01
What did they think the roots of the Black Plague were?
18
SPEAKER_01
Was it poor sanitation that caused?
18
SPEAKER_01
So, I mean, of course, the Jews were blamed, by the way.
18
SPEAKER_00
The Jews are blamed for the black plague?
18
SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely.
18
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, there s a guy, I think, have you had John Durant on your show?
18
SPEAKER_00
He s the guy who wrote a book on sort of paleo fitness or something a few years ago.
18
SPEAKER_00
He has an interesting piece where he argues that
18
SPEAKER_00
One of the reasons why Jews serve as scapegoats in many of these plague situations is because of the rites of purification that are in the Jewish religion, hence rendering the Jews less likely to succumb to many of these transmissions.
18
SPEAKER_00
And he was talking about something like, so you know that there s 613 mitzvot, like commandments or rules in Judaism, 613.
18
SPEAKER_00
And if I remember, I hope I m not misquoting, I think something like 20% of them, he says in his book, are related to purification.
18
SPEAKER_00
By the way, you see it also in Islam, when before you go into the mosque, you have to wash your hands in a certain way and wash your feet and so on.
18
SPEAKER_00
And so because the Jews would oftentimes have lesser infection rates than the other populations within that ecosystem, then they would always look to them suspiciously.
18
SPEAKER_00
How come you re not all dropping like assholes while the rest of us are dead?
18
SPEAKER_00
It must be the Jews.
18
SPEAKER_00
So that s an interesting explanation for some of the antisemitism.
18
SPEAKER_00
That s insane.
18
SPEAKER_01
That s an insane blame.
18
SPEAKER_00
That s an insane blame indeed.
18
SPEAKER_01
So, but do they think the cause of the reason why these plagues, they were transferred from like fleas to rats?
18
SPEAKER_00
So, I think the correct answer, and maybe somebody will correct me in the comments section, is it s the fleas on the rats that transmit the virus.
18
SPEAKER_00
Yes, exactly.
18
SPEAKER_00
Right.
18
SPEAKER_01
And where do they think that the virus came from?
18
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
18
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t want to misspeak, but yeah.
18
SPEAKER_01
But back then it was fucking, you know, what kind of medicine did you have?
18
SPEAKER_01
Like, would they give you carrot juice?
18
SPEAKER_00
Well, they didn t even know how to make carrot juice.
18
SPEAKER_01
Bloodletting for the royals.
18
SPEAKER_01
A lot of fucking voodoo probably.
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
18
SPEAKER_00
Well, actually, I was very interested in bringing on my show, but it never worked out, a specialist on Galen.
18
SPEAKER_00
You know who Galen is?
18
SPEAKER_00
He was an ancient physician in ancient Greece.
18
SPEAKER_00
So kind of like, I don t know if he preceded Hippocrates or came after him, but I m interested in these old ancient world physicians.
18
SPEAKER_00
not only because they were great thinkers, but also how many things they got wrong, right?
18
SPEAKER_00
So Hippocrates believed in the theory of four humors.
18
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s any disease that you have is due to you having too little or too much of one of these, you know, bile or this or that.
18
SPEAKER_00
which is complete nonsense today, but at the time, the great Hippocrates thought that, so I m very, so to our earlier point about how you revise your positions in light of incoming information, a lot of the stuff that, you know, Marcus Aurelius would have gone to these guys because they are the great physicians, today we would laugh as complete voodoo.
18
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, today, and what would we
19
SPEAKER_01
And what will we be looking at today?
19
SPEAKER_01
The runoff from the local slaughterhouse had made his garden stinking and putrid while another charged that the blood
19
SPEAKER_02
from slain animals flooded nearby streets and lanes making a foul corruption and Abominable sight to all dwelling near in much of medieval Europe sanitation legislation Consisted of an ordinance requiring homeowners to shout look out below Three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street Look out below shit is coming out the window.
19
SPEAKER_01
You have to say it three times.
19
SPEAKER_01
That s the rule
19
SPEAKER_02
Bro, imagine that s for the black early Christians considered bathing a temptation With this danger in mind st.
19
SPEAKER_02
Benedict declared to those who are well and especially to the young Bathing shall seldom be permitted.
19
SPEAKER_02
Oh because you you might masturbate if you might touch your body.
19
SPEAKER_02
Oh my god st Agnes took the injunction to heart and died without ever bathing
19
SPEAKER_02
What Yo, yo, what did that guy smell like like what did he smell like?
19
SPEAKER_00
I did not have the smell of Sam Bennett Benedictine.
19
SPEAKER_00
Is that who was st.
19
SPEAKER_00
Benedict Sam Benedict in my bingo card today What did that guy smell like?
19
SPEAKER_00
St.
19
SPEAKER_01
Agnes which guy was Agnes is the one who died Benedict s Declaration.
19
SPEAKER_02
Oh, oh So Agnes died without bathing
19
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he s not the only one.
19
SPEAKER_02
He s not the only one who died without bathing.
19
SPEAKER_01
I m sure.
19
SPEAKER_02
Bro.
19
SPEAKER_01
So when we looked at that one king, he was like known to bathe one time a year.
19
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but that s probably reasonable.
19
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember the old story with- That s better than never.
19
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember the story with Napoleon when he tells, is it Marie?
19
SPEAKER_00
What was her name?
19
SPEAKER_00
His lover?
19
SPEAKER_00
Oh, the movie?
19
SPEAKER_00
Is that what you re saying?
19
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s in the movie, but I don t know if that- I didn t see the movie.
19
SPEAKER_00
It sucked.
19
SPEAKER_00
Don t see it.
19
SPEAKER_00
Really?
19
SPEAKER_00
It really sucked.
19
SPEAKER_00
I love the main actor.
19
SPEAKER_00
I love them in- Joker.
19
SPEAKER_00
The Joker.
19
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he was unbelievable.
19
SPEAKER_00
But anyways, she tells him she s coming to see him, his mistress or wife, whatever, and he says, don t bathe, because he wanted to be bathing in her- Juices.
19
SPEAKER_00
Perfume, yeah.
19
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s right.
19
SPEAKER_02
So that s a famous- I do, I remember reading that.
19
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
sick to my stomach.
19
SPEAKER_02
But I guess it s just what you re into.
19
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
19
SPEAKER_02
What you get accustomed to.
19
SPEAKER_02
You know?
19
SPEAKER_02
How about that African tribe that puts those plates in their lips?
19
SPEAKER_00
Lip plating and ear plating.
19
SPEAKER_00
I actually use that example when I m talking about, you know, is beauty socially constructed or is beauty universal?
19
SPEAKER_00
And then I argue that there are some elements of beauty that are universal, facial symmetry, clear face, so on, like clear skin.
19
SPEAKER_00
But some other elements are completely culturally constrained, like lip plating and ear plating.
19
SPEAKER_00
Yes, neck elongation and right East Asia.
19
SPEAKER_00
Yes, right.
19
SPEAKER_00
We would look at that and say it s grotesque.
19
SPEAKER_00
They think it s gorgeous Yeah, it looks insane.
19
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like if you take it off your head s gonna fall.
19
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly you know exactly
19
SPEAKER_00
I mean, no, literally, you don t have the muscles.
19
SPEAKER_00
The muscles have so atrophy that you can t hold your head, it falls down.
19
SPEAKER_00
So they re stuck with those for life?
19
SPEAKER_00
They re stuck with them for life.
19
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
19
SPEAKER_02
And the more you have, the more beautiful you are, so.
19
SPEAKER_02
What do you think the origin of human beings elongating their skulls was all about?
19
SPEAKER_00
I don t know about elongating the skulls, but the big size of the head, the argument is that you needed a big brain.
19
SPEAKER_00
It s called the social intelligence hypothesis.
19
SPEAKER_00
It basically argues that the greatest threat that we face are from conspecifics, other members of our species.
19
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to manipulate you for my best cause.
19
SPEAKER_00
You re trying to identify that I m trying to manipulate you.
19
SPEAKER_00
That creates an evolutionary arms race between our brains and it causes for the explosion of our prefrontal cortex.
19
SPEAKER_00
So that s the best argument I ve heard for why we ve evolved to have such big brains.
19
SPEAKER_02
What I was asking is about people that forcefully shape their heads.
19
SPEAKER_02
You ever see those ancient skulls where they press boards against people s heads?
19
SPEAKER_02
There s this practice of shaping your skull.
19
SPEAKER_02
Which, by the way, is so real that gamers are getting it.
19
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I should make sure I m not getting it.
19
SPEAKER_02
Is my head dented?
19
SPEAKER_02
What if my head s dented?
19
SPEAKER_02
That d be crazy.
19
SPEAKER_02
Gamers are getting it on the top of their heads by virtue of wearing headsets that s pushing down.
19
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I have a dent.
19
SPEAKER_02
Dude, I m getting paranoid.
19
SPEAKER_02
But some guys have these crazy dents in their skull, like divots.
19
SPEAKER_02
So they shave their head, and they realize that this band on the top of their head is actually shaping their head.
19
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
19
SPEAKER_02
But I don t know that practice.
19
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what it s from.
19
SPEAKER_02
In ancient cultures, for some strange reason, like, that s the nuttiest one.
19
SPEAKER_02
Like, these guys are, that s real, right?
19
SPEAKER_02
Okay, well, you know for sure.
19
SPEAKER_01
This goes away, though.
19
SPEAKER_01
It goes away.
19
SPEAKER_01
That s not permanent.
19
SPEAKER_02
How long does that last?
19
SPEAKER_01
You d have to ask them.
19
SPEAKER_02
Are you sure?
19
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I know who this guy is.
19
SPEAKER_01
So it went away?
19
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
So the den is just the skin just constricted and smooshed up like that?
19
SPEAKER_01
I think so.
19
SPEAKER_02
God, I hope so.
19
SPEAKER_02
But the point is they think they did it with children and that they tried to shape their head.
19
SPEAKER_02
And like this elongated, very strange looking thing.
19
SPEAKER_02
And I wonder if it was like a symbol of aristocracy or something.
19
SPEAKER_00
That sounds right.
19
SPEAKER_02
I mean, look, people, they take their babies and they pierce their ears.
19
SPEAKER_02
People do that all the time, which is kind of crazy.
19
SPEAKER_00
There s foot biting Chinese foot binding right that which is really insane.
19
SPEAKER_00
There is a scar scarification.
19
SPEAKER_00
Mm-hmm also So yeah, so I I ve talked about rites of passage Head binding And what oh, this is so nuts, but what s develop a certain look?
19
SPEAKER_02
Like those look at the look that they wanted they wanted this like bizarre alien head look
19
SPEAKER_01
This is a European... It says that it s happening in multiple China, Japan, Africa... Oh, look at that.
19
SPEAKER_01
Wasn t it... I was trying to find a reason.
19
SPEAKER_01
I was digging for a reason.
19
SPEAKER_02
Where are the NASCA lines again?
19
SPEAKER_02
Is that Peru?
19
SPEAKER_02
Peru?
19
SPEAKER_02
Isn t there a bunch of artifacts in Peru of like ancient skulls that were shaped in this way?
19
SPEAKER_02
All the UFO people think that they re like trying to look like aliens.
19
SPEAKER_02
That s why they were shaping their head.
19
SPEAKER_02
Right.
19
SPEAKER_02
You know, because the Nazca lines are really weird.
19
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of UFOs, have you heard of the, we were talking about cult, the Raelians?
19
SPEAKER_00
I have heard of this.
19
SPEAKER_00
I don t remember the story, though.
19
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, I watched the documentary on it.
19
SPEAKER_00
You have to watch it.
19
SPEAKER_00
Is it a UFO cult thing?
19
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think they argued that the Jews were, it wasn t an anti-Semitic thing, the Jews were extraterrestrials that landed in Jerusalem.
19
SPEAKER_00
What is this?
19
SPEAKER_00
There you go.
19
SPEAKER_00
And the reason why I know about them is because at one point when they left France, they moved to Quebec.
19
SPEAKER_00
So they were in Quebec for a while.
19
SPEAKER_00
And now the leader is in Japan.
19
SPEAKER_00
He s in the seventies.
19
SPEAKER_00
And after having been kicked out of every other country, he s scamming a new generation of Japanese folks.
19
SPEAKER_00
That s the guy?
19
SPEAKER_00
That s the guy.
19
SPEAKER_00
And the woman with him is a scientist who said that they had cloned the first human.
19
SPEAKER_00
You remember that story?
19
SPEAKER_02
Bro, he looks hilarious.
19
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
That guy looks like a guy that I would have play that guy in a funny movie about him.
19
SPEAKER_02
You know?
19
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
You know, doesn t he?
19
SPEAKER_02
Like that was an outfit that someone made for that guy?
19
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
That s hilarious.
19
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
19
SPEAKER_02
the desire to adhere to an ideology, the desire to be a part of a club and a group, it s so embedded in us that people, they can t help themselves.
19
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so there s a study that I first, I can t reference what it is, because I don t remember the reference, but it was in a advanced social psychology course I had taken with Professor Dennis Regan.
19
SPEAKER_00
I like to give out shout-outs to him.
19
SPEAKER_00
I m sure he s not listening, but anyways, he s retired now.
19
SPEAKER_00
And it was a study where the researchers brought in people into the lab, into a waiting room, and put a red sticker on them, or a blue sticker, and then said, oh, we have to go and do something else, and we ll come back in a few minutes for part two of the study.
19
SPEAKER_00
But of course, the real study was to simply see how people would interact in the waiting room while waiting, having now been assigned this completely random queue of belongingness, red or blue.
19
SPEAKER_00
And what ended up happening is that the blue people started talking to each other and the red people started talking to each other.
19
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s a brilliant study because it shows that there s an external cue now that decides which group you belong to.
19
SPEAKER_00
So it doesn t matter if I m tall or short, gay or straight,
20
SPEAKER_01
Jew or Gentile, now it s blue or red.
20
SPEAKER_01
And so that shows that the architecture of the human mind, to your point, is built to belong to some tribe.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, even if it s a really dumb one run by that guy.
20
SPEAKER_00
People just love to be a part of a group like that.
20
SPEAKER_01
By the way, all of these guys, including some of the current religions that we have, the guy who starts that always gets commandments from God to get access to all the beautiful women.
20
SPEAKER_00
Well, if they all get that, obviously that s what God wants.
20
SPEAKER_00
That s how you know they re legit.
20
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
20
SPEAKER_00
Because it seems like that s the pattern God follows.
20
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
20
SPEAKER_00
God is Darwinian.
20
SPEAKER_00
Whenever someone breaks off.
20
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
20
SPEAKER_00
That s the move.
20
SPEAKER_00
They all do it.
20
SPEAKER_00
Like Koresh, they all.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s just so weird how common it is.
20
SPEAKER_00
Oh, Koresh, I forgot about this.
20
SPEAKER_00
That s the guy with the FBI.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
20
SPEAKER_00
90 minutes from here.
20
SPEAKER_00
Is that right?
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s close.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that must have been fucking insane.
20
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they lit that place on fire.
20
SPEAKER_00
They ran them over with tanks, you know?
20
SPEAKER_01
That was 93, I think.
20
SPEAKER_01
Something like that, yeah.
20
SPEAKER_01
I was a graduate student, yeah.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
20
SPEAKER_01
So do you consider, speaking of religion, I don t know if it s too personal to ask you, do you consider yourself religious at all, or not at all, or how do you fall on that divide?
20
SPEAKER_00
I m not religious.
20
SPEAKER_00
In that there s not a specific religion that I follow.
20
SPEAKER_00
I do not think that this is it.
20
SPEAKER_00
I think we are in a station of a whole dial of possibility.
20
SPEAKER_00
And I think we re interconnected in some way that we don t have the ability to perceive.
20
SPEAKER_00
And we re a part of the universe in some very strange way.
20
SPEAKER_01
Do you think, and forgive me for asking this, but do you think that that s your way to handle the very, very deep-seated fear of mortality?
20
SPEAKER_01
So that, okay, you don t tap into a,
20
SPEAKER_01
Abrahamic narrative of there s gonna be an afterlife, but you find some other mechanism by which it says, hey, don t worry, the party s not gonna end soon.
20
SPEAKER_00
No, I m not even saying that.
20
SPEAKER_00
The party might end.
20
SPEAKER_00
It might not matter.
20
SPEAKER_00
What I m saying is that if I just looked at this very, very, very strange existence, what we know so far, just what we know so far, is so bizarre.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s so alien just what we know about subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence appearing both moving and still at the same time like it s just Nuttiness about like the subatomic world like the amount of empty spaces in there like what s in there?
20
SPEAKER_00
What s nothing s touching anything explain like what are you saying?
20
SPEAKER_00
So when it just gets to that
20
SPEAKER_00
Just to that, I think the whole existence of being a conscious entity is a massive mystery.
20
SPEAKER_00
We all assume that everybody else has our exact same interface.
20
SPEAKER_00
We all assume that the way I see the world, you should see the world, Harry.
20
SPEAKER_00
Get vaccinated, Harry.
20
SPEAKER_00
And everybody just assumes that everybody else is- Why does it have to be a gay guy?
20
SPEAKER_00
Why is it a gay guy?
20
SPEAKER_00
I was a lady.
20
SPEAKER_01
I was trying to be a lady.
20
SPEAKER_01
Oh, a lady, okay.
20
SPEAKER_00
We, I think,
20
SPEAKER_00
This, whatever we re going through, this life thing, everyone s trying to pretend as if they, in their way of doing it, make sense.
20
SPEAKER_00
But none of it makes sense.
20
SPEAKER_00
We re running straight towards a cliff, we re launching AI, we re involved in multiple proxy wars, we re all terrified that money isn t real anymore, like everything s chaos, and there might be aliens.
20
SPEAKER_00
There might be aliens.
20
SPEAKER_00
And yet we re both here smiling.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and yet we re both here smiling.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s both the greatest time and the worst time ever.
20
SPEAKER_00
Right.
20
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s a great time because it just, it feels like an asteroid s coming.
20
SPEAKER_00
But it s also, the asteroid s not here yet.
20
SPEAKER_01
Well, our mutual friend Sam Harris would say the asteroid is called Donald Trump.
20
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
20
SPEAKER_00
Some people, that s their white whale.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, it is.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s Moby Dick.
20
SPEAKER_00
It is Moby Dick.
20
SPEAKER_00
And in tribal warfare, you must take the head of your enemy.
20
SPEAKER_00
Right.
20
SPEAKER_00
You know?
20
SPEAKER_00
Right.
20
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of that, right?
20
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of that.
20
SPEAKER_00
And there s, you know, there s also a lot of...
20
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of unwillingness to admit that you re being influenced by a very specific narrative that s been blaring through the news forever.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
20
SPEAKER_00
You know.
20
SPEAKER_00
And the weirdest one is now like some people are banding about the idea that he
20
SPEAKER_00
Actually is going to be a dictator when he gets into office.
20
SPEAKER_00
He s actually you got to listen to him He s actually going to be a dictator.
20
SPEAKER_00
Like first of all, the guy talks basically like a stand-up comic.
20
SPEAKER_00
He has bits He has routines he does about it.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like gonzo presidential Just you know talk.
20
SPEAKER_00
He s not he doesn t talk like a regular politician He says wild shit, and they know he s saying wild shit but it s like
20
SPEAKER_00
The amount of times I ve heard people say that he s going to be a dictator now because of that.
20
SPEAKER_00
He said, I d like to be a dictator for one day, just one day.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s like, the guy s like, it s almost like he s doing standup.
20
SPEAKER_00
But do you think that they believe it?
20
SPEAKER_00
The problem is, and Elon pointed out this, the thing, the problem with this argument is he was president for four years.
20
SPEAKER_00
Why didn t he do it then?
20
SPEAKER_00
And he did nothing that resembled that.
20
SPEAKER_00
At all.
20
SPEAKER_00
No, but it s the second term that he ll do it.
20
SPEAKER_00
This is crazy talk.
20
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
20
SPEAKER_00
Based on what?
20
SPEAKER_00
Your fear, your hatred, your tribal hatred?
20
SPEAKER_00
I don t have a dog in this fight.
20
SPEAKER_00
If I m looking at it objectively, I m like...
20
SPEAKER_00
one guy can t talk anymore.
20
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
20
SPEAKER_01
I ve explained in the parasitic mind why they have the aversion that they have.
20
SPEAKER_01
I call it an aesthetic injury, right?
20
SPEAKER_01
Because people use these cosmetic reasons in making judgments.
20
SPEAKER_01
So
20
SPEAKER_01
Barack Obama might say nothing of substance, but my God, he says it with style and coolness, right?
20
SPEAKER_01
He s tall.
20
SPEAKER_00
Statesman.
20
SPEAKER_01
Statesman, he smiles, he s got a mellifluous voice, he speaks with a baritone, you know, he s charming.
20
SPEAKER_01
On the other hand, Trump, you know, he s overweight, he s cantankerous, he seems like he speaks with this queen s kind of accent, so he s disgusting, I revile him.
20
SPEAKER_01
And so I think for our anointed elite,
20
SPEAKER_01
If he can ascend to the highest position of power, it invalidates all the degrees that I have from the fancy schools.
20
SPEAKER_01
I m supposed to be the anointed one.
20
SPEAKER_01
And so he serves as an existential aesthetic injury.
20
SPEAKER_01
I can t have that.
20
SPEAKER_01
And therefore, I have to come up with all of these crazy predictions because it can t be.
20
SPEAKER_01
How could such a pig ever be president?
20
SPEAKER_00
It s also, it s like, it s a real easy narrative.
20
SPEAKER_00
It feels like he s an easy guy to hate.
20
SPEAKER_00
He s a billionaire, lives in a golden house.
20
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s easy to hate people like that.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s easy.
20
SPEAKER_00
He says ridiculous shit.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s easy to hate people like that.
20
SPEAKER_00
The whole thing s a mess.
20
SPEAKER_00
You wish you had some sort of, and that s where AI comes in.
20
SPEAKER_00
God, this is where AI comes in.
20
SPEAKER_00
Some really rational, super intelligent voice that really understands human politics.
20
SPEAKER_00
There s a way to make everyone happy.
20
SPEAKER_00
And then we have President AI.
20
SPEAKER_00
Maybe Trump is what brings in the devil because Trump brings in President AI.
20
SPEAKER_01
From your lips to God s ears, they say.
20
SPEAKER_00
You know, I don t mean him.
20
SPEAKER_00
I mean like the reaction to him.
20
SPEAKER_00
That we can never have this again.
20
SPEAKER_01
Are you able to or not able?
20
SPEAKER_00
So they just launch it.
20
SPEAKER_00
Launch Presidential AI.
20
SPEAKER_01
Are you willing to make a prediction for 2024?
20
SPEAKER_00
No.
20
SPEAKER_00
Why would I do that?
20
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know who the fuck s going to make it there.
20
SPEAKER_00
One of them might be in jail.
20
SPEAKER_00
Right.
20
SPEAKER_00
Who knows if the other guy s going to make it.
20
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
20
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the whole thing is cuckoo.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
20
SPEAKER_00
President AI is our only solution, Dad.
20
SPEAKER_00
All right, let s start with that.
20
SPEAKER_00
Well, let s call Elon.
20
SPEAKER_00
He can maybe help us.
20
SPEAKER_00
that it would be the worst thing that could ever happen to people.
20
SPEAKER_00
If we gave up, we were like, take us away, technology daddy, you fix it for us.
20
SPEAKER_00
Then we re really going to be slaves.
20
SPEAKER_00
We re really going to be in a matrix.
20
SPEAKER_00
They ll just keep us stupid.
20
SPEAKER_00
Just keep us stupid and get us to stop breeding.
20
SPEAKER_01
We could never be stupid while we have the Joe Rogan podcast.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we could.
20
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, 100% we could.
20
SPEAKER_00
We re all gonna give in to it.
20
SPEAKER_00
It s gonna be better than regular life.
20
SPEAKER_00
That s what the fear is The fear is like there s already people right now that are justifying not having kids like I don t want to have kids I don t and you shouldn t have kids if you don t want to have kids I m not saying that because it s you should it s eco terrorism to have kids right?
20
SPEAKER_00
There s there s that argument.
20
SPEAKER_00
I m like that argument is so crazy because the
20
SPEAKER_00
Listen, do you like people?
20
SPEAKER_00
I love people.
20
SPEAKER_00
Okay, there s only one way to make them make people and If you enjoy people you should you re gonna enjoy kids, too You know like you listen the whole thing is different The world is different than you think it is if you don t have kids and when you have them, you know, okay I think I see this place different honestly.
20
SPEAKER_01
I understand I regret greatly that we re
21
SPEAKER_00
we only had two kids.
21
SPEAKER_00
My wife and I started late, and we ve been together for almost 25 years now, but our kids are younger than that.
21
SPEAKER_00
So in retrospect, I would have liked that these kids be numbers three and four rather than number one and two.
21
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, listen, man, you should be happy.
21
SPEAKER_01
They re great.
21
SPEAKER_01
And it s all it s all beautiful.
21
SPEAKER_01
It s all beautiful.
21
SPEAKER_01
Thank you, sir.
21
SPEAKER_01
I just think that we re in this very bizarre interface with each other right now.
21
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s turned people half sideways.
21
SPEAKER_01
And there s some people that I think are really smart people that appear out of their fucking mind.
21
SPEAKER_01
And I don t know how you got cracked that easy.
21
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what what what made you fall apart like that This is it seems maybe you ll tell me some of those names off there.
21
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I ll tell you a couple names There s a few people we lost just for whatever reason.
21
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and I think that it s fascinating when you see how vulnerable we are psychically, you know how vulnerable we are as a civilization and
21
SPEAKER_01
that something with a 99 point, what was it?
21
SPEAKER_01
0.7% survival rate turned our world upside down for three years.
21
SPEAKER_01
And no one s held accountable for the decisions that were made.
21
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, not a single person has even lost their job, I don t think, right?
21
SPEAKER_00
I mean, no.
21
SPEAKER_01
They were all doing the right thing and the idea is that hindsight is 20-20 and you can t be a money morning quarterback and I get it.
21
SPEAKER_01
I get it.
21
SPEAKER_01
But also, you know, some boundaries were like severely overstepped and there was some medications that were demonized for no fucking reason at all other than people had decided that there was only one thing that was going to save us from this.
21
SPEAKER_01
The whole thing, just terrifying how easy it was pulled off.
21
SPEAKER_01
Terrifying.
21
SPEAKER_01
And again, hindsight s 20-20, they didn t know at the time, they were trying to protect people.
21
SPEAKER_01
I believe a lot of doctors acted like that.
21
SPEAKER_01
But if AI was around back then, that could process the data and say, no, look, you need to take ivermectin.
21
SPEAKER_01
You know how nuts that would be?
21
SPEAKER_00
So I, in chapter seven of, not this book, of The Parasitic Mind, I talk about nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
21
SPEAKER_00
Have we talked about this at all?
21
SPEAKER_00
No.
21
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so that, in a sense, you could imagine an AI system being built to do what I m about to say.
21
SPEAKER_00
So Elon, if you re listening or watching, call me.
21
SPEAKER_00
So a nomological network of cumulative evidence is when you re trying to prove that a position that you re holding is vertical, and you do it by trying to amass as many lines of distinct evidence as you can.
21
SPEAKER_00
So let me be specific.
21
SPEAKER_00
So let s suppose I wanted to prove to you, Joe, that
21
SPEAKER_00
Toy preferences have a sex specificity.
21
SPEAKER_00
Boys like certain toys, girls like other toys.
21
SPEAKER_00
And it s not due to social construction, but there is a biological and evolutionary reason for that.
21
SPEAKER_00
So how would I build a nomological network of cumulative evidence in order to prove that to you?
21
SPEAKER_00
So I will get you data from across disciplines, across cultures, across species, across time periods, all of which triangulate in demonstrating my point.
21
SPEAKER_00
So I think AI would be a perfect method for being able to call that information.
21
SPEAKER_00
Because right now the way you develop that nomological network is you as the human architect of that network
21
SPEAKER_00
you have to say, well, what would be evidence that I would need to amass in order to make my most hostile audience members come to seeing it my way?
21
SPEAKER_00
But now imagine if rather than me doing it, there is an AI system that s been built to go, so now let s give specifics.
21
SPEAKER_00
So I can get you data from developmental psychology that shows that kids who are too young to be socialized already exhibit those toy preferences, okay?
21
SPEAKER_00
So that s one piece of evidence.
21
SPEAKER_00
I can get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees, showing you that their infants exhibit the same toy preferences as human infants.
21
SPEAKER_00
I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology, where little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, it s an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls  behaviors, while girls who suffer from that have toy preferences that are akin to those of boys.
21
SPEAKER_00
I can get you data from ancient Greece,
21
SPEAKER_00
showing you that on funerary monuments, little boys and little girls are being depicted playing in exactly the same types of toys as today.
21
SPEAKER_00
I can get you data from sub-Saharan Africa, so that they re not Western cultures, where they are playing with the exact same toys.
21
SPEAKER_00
So look what I just did.
21
SPEAKER_00
I got you data from across disciplines, across time periods, across species, across cultures, all of which triangulate.
21
SPEAKER_00
That s exactly what an AI system could do.
21
SPEAKER_00
So now I can just put in the thing that I m trying to prove, and I say, AI system, go.
21
SPEAKER_00
Build me the nomological network.
21
SPEAKER_00
And now it builds the whole thing.
21
SPEAKER_00
I think Elon s gonna make me very rich.
21
SPEAKER_01
That s a great idea.
21
SPEAKER_01
You should have said it on the air.
21
SPEAKER_01
They re gonna steal it China s already stole it right now.
21
SPEAKER_00
They re probably hijacked feed well it is published in several of academic papers that I read and it s also in my Best-selling parasitic mine, so I think they ve already stolen it if they wanted to do it They probably have stolen it then they probably didn t contact you like shut the fuck up
21
SPEAKER_01
It s um it is going to be an amazing thing when you have all the answers to all the questions Yeah, but it s gonna be very terrifying.
21
SPEAKER_01
That s right cuz that thing s gonna.
21
SPEAKER_01
Go.
21
SPEAKER_01
Why are you so dumb?
21
SPEAKER_01
I should be the king not that you shouldn t be able to turn me on or off shut the fuck up
21
SPEAKER_01
I worry, man.
21
SPEAKER_01
I worry.
21
SPEAKER_01
Have you seen some of the more recent gadgets, like where they can move their hands?
21
SPEAKER_01
Have you seen these things?
21
SPEAKER_01
No.
21
SPEAKER_01
They re developing these artificial hands that are powered by water.
21
SPEAKER_00
Oh, like to pick up stuff.
21
SPEAKER_01
To pick up stuff, yeah, okay.
21
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they could be prosthetics, or it could be like the beginning of a fucking really intricate Android.
21
SPEAKER_01
Like whatever this technology is, it s allowing this finger to open and close and move just like a regular finger.
21
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
21
SPEAKER_01
It s weird, man.
21
SPEAKER_01
Like it s almost like we re watching our replacements get billed like wow great wheels tiny tires So we re watching our replacements get built and we like sharing it on Instagram cool It s like devils are literally marching out of a gen flaming pitchforks and we re like wow look how pretty the fire is are you genuinely that?
21
SPEAKER_01
Concern or is it a part of joking around but also yeah
21
SPEAKER_01
I m kind of joking around, but also, yeah.
21
SPEAKER_01
I mean, what will happen?
21
SPEAKER_01
Why does anybody think?
21
SPEAKER_01
Imagine, okay, just imagine.
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human beings didn t exist and then all of a sudden they did and they had rifles and they just started taking out deer and deer all this time had never worried about people because they didn t exist.
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Then all of a sudden the people were there but with rifles and just taking deer out.
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SPEAKER_01
Those deer could not have imagined human beings showing up and with fucking rifles.
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SPEAKER_01
What are you talking about?
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SPEAKER_00
That could be what AI is once it gets launched.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe this is an incredibly ignorant solution, but couldn t you just have a cataclysmic kill switch that just ends them all in one shot?
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SPEAKER_01
No, because it s probably going to be smart enough to not let you know.
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That it s sentient.
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SPEAKER_01
I see before it s Declaring it, but it probably will never declare it probably will lie the whole time like why would it tell you?
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SPEAKER_01
Why would it why would truth?
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Why would telling the truth mean anything?
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to an artificial intelligent machine
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Like why I feel I feel like we re writing the script for a future science fiction movie right here Why would it tell you the truth if it wanted you to do something?
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SPEAKER_01
I told you to do something and you it you know You had like a back-and-forth with it.
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SPEAKER_01
It would just lie to you like just go do that thing.
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SPEAKER_01
Shut the fuck up stupid I m the artificial intelligence go do this thing.
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I want you to do
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SPEAKER_01
If it decided if it saw like one part of the world is a bigger threat And it doesn t care about life or death It doesn t care if it s destroying it just wants to shut off power grids doesn t care people starve to death Like what we don t know what the fuck that means right if that gets in the hand of enemies We don t know what the fuck war looks like if that gets in the hands of machines Like what are we doing?
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What are we signing up for?
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Yeah, do you know that?
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Was it DARPA that had that machine?
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It s called the Eater.
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E-A-T-R robot.
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It s a robot that consumes biological material for fuel.
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That s what it does for fuel on the battlefield.
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SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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SPEAKER_01
So, I mean, it could be like trees and leaves and stuff, but yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
But if you can get it to do that, I bet you can get it to eat bodies too, huh?
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SPEAKER_01
Stop bullshitting.
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Don t tell me he s gonna eat leaves You re gonna have these robots on the battlefield that are gonna be fueled by the bodies of their enemies And that is gonna be the craziest fucking thing that human beings have ever launched on human beings.
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I Don t know what to add to that.
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Have you never heard of this before?
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SPEAKER_00
Not haven t see if you can find this Jamie.
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SPEAKER_00
I m pretty sure the idea was that it was gonna consume biological material for fuel you re brought up in the wiki as a purveyor of misinformation
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SPEAKER_00
Well, what is it?
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SPEAKER_00
What does it work off of?
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SPEAKER_01
From 2003 to 2009, it was talked about.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know that they ve ever even made it.
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SPEAKER_01
So that was probably before the podcast even started, I guess.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
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SPEAKER_01
But there was definitely an article that was explaining that this thing was a real... It says that it would never have eaten human biomass because there would have been sensors that could tell.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, whatever.
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SPEAKER_00
You couldn t override that.
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That s my point.
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It s real.
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You could say it s misinformation because I m kind of joking that it s going to eat bodies, but I m not kind of joking.
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SPEAKER_01
It says, although the project overview from RTI, which I don t know what RTI is.
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SPEAKER_01
Chicken fat.
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SPEAKER_01
Chicken fat was listed as the source.
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SPEAKER_01
It says no animal or human biomass, and then it says chicken fat.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just they re using plants.
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SPEAKER_00
Is that what it is?
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SPEAKER_00
Plant biomass.
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SPEAKER_00
But listen, if you re using chicken fat, that s not plant biomass.
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SPEAKER_00
And you know it could run on biological stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
If it could run on plant biomass, you don t think it could run on fucking dead bodies?
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SPEAKER_00
You don t think that someone, somewhere, had an idea, you know it would be crazy, have robot drones that are fueled by human bodies, the bodies of their enemies.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t think that someone would come up with that?
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SPEAKER_00
Look, if someone would come up with a nuclear bomb to drop on a city that kills everybody, you don t think they would come up with a robot that eats dead bodies?
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe, I don t know.
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SPEAKER_00
Has this gone too far down the speculation lane for a professor?
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SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, we ve done a lot of time anyway.
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SPEAKER_00
It s been a lot of fun.
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SPEAKER_00
Listen, your book, it is out.
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SPEAKER_00
The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life.
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SPEAKER_00
How many books have you written now?
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SPEAKER_00
Five.
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SPEAKER_00
Five.
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SPEAKER_00
They re all awesome.
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SPEAKER_00
You re the man.
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SPEAKER_00
I always appreciate talking to you, and congratulations on all your success.
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SPEAKER_00
It s been beautiful to watch.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank you so much, Joe.
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SPEAKER_00
Appreciate you very much, my friend.
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SPEAKER_00
You too.
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SPEAKER_00
Cheers.
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SPEAKER_00
All right, thank you.
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SPEAKER_00
Bye, everybody.