Aug. 11, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:47:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What's up, brother? | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Hey, so good to see you. | ||
| The Godfather. | ||
| I'm back. | ||
| You're one of the few college professors that has a sense of humor about yourself. | ||
| Like that, where you can joke around about that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| the show started about this recent article in the Atlantic and as soon as I saw it I'm like oh this is just right up your alley and it's the coddling of the American mind and this article is all about one of the things that you have been talking about a lot lately and it's been on a lot of people's minds that work in academia because it's it's it's very confusing and it's very frustrating | ||
| But there's severe limitations on the words that you can use and the thoughts even that you can have. | ||
| And this article is all about trigger warnings and that in one case... | ||
| Professors, listen to this. | ||
| Law students were asking fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law. | ||
| And in one case, even used the word violate, as in that violates the law. | ||
| Lest it cause distress. | ||
| The article is called The Coddling of the American Mind. | ||
| It's in the newest version of TheAtlantic.com. | ||
| It's just a couple of days old. | ||
| And it's fucking crazy what's going on with kids today. | ||
| And this article gets into it, and one of them was about something that there was a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym, and he wrote an essay for Vox. | ||
| Called, I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students terrify me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| Like, what is going on where people are getting in trouble for words like violate? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, by the way, one of the authors of that article is a good friend of mine who is the director of FIRE. I can't remember what the acronym stands for. | ||
| But he basically goes around, his organization goes around trying to protect freedom of speech. | ||
| First Amendment at campuses, precisely because of the unbelievable chilling effect of these types of, you know, lunacy movements. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| And you know what else is strange? | ||
| It seems like you're not allowed to be conservative in a university. | ||
| And by conservative, I don't mean restrictive of other people's liberties, like anti-gay rights or anti-choice or anti... | ||
| I'm talking about fiscally conservative. | ||
| I'm talking about, you know, being a person who... | ||
| It has the ideas that some in the Republican Party espouse. | ||
| You're not allowed to. | ||
| I'm not sure if we discussed this before, but even if we did, it's worth repeating. | ||
| I talked about an article that was done by some colleagues of mine, I don't know them well, but some academics, where they looked at the political affiliation of professors at top, I think it was Californian schools, whether they identified it or whether they actually had Democratic affiliation or Republican. | ||
| And as you might imagine, it was extraordinarily skewed towards Democrats. | ||
| But then depending on the field of study, so for example, in sociology and in the humanities and in women's studies, women with a Y, by the way, please don't write women with an E. That would be sexist. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| They think that to have men as part of the word women is itself a form of aggression, so they've altered the spelling to women. | ||
| Oh no, that's not real. | ||
| See, your audience already has the price of admission covered with that story. | ||
| But it's still the word women. | ||
| It's still the same word. | ||
| Why do you have to change the letters? | ||
| So in sociology... | ||
| Do you change the word trigger because it sounds like the n-word? | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| You're getting triggered. | ||
| I'm triggered. | ||
| I'm triggered. | ||
| Well, I'm fucking triggered. | ||
| And if I was black, I'd be super triggered. | ||
| Well, I don't know if you notice some of my tweets now. | ||
| Whenever I tweet anything, I put trigger warning, trigger warning. | ||
| It's now become part of the vernacular to make it satirical. | ||
| It's too close to the N-word. | ||
| Way too close. | ||
| I'm triggered. | ||
| But anyways. | ||
| To finish the point about that study, 44 to 1, the ratio in sociology. | ||
| So imagine if you are a student doing an undergrad in sociology, right? | ||
| It's not a very good thing to have almost all of the professors that you will ever come across be of one particular persuasion. | ||
| Now, some people will write to me and say, but what do you mean? | ||
| The Democrats have everything right. | ||
| They have truth on their side, and the Republicans are a bunch of hacks. | ||
| Now, when it comes to evolution... | ||
| Evolution, that's true, right? | ||
| If on average, Republicans are more likely to deny evolution, then that point is well taken. | ||
| But when it comes to issues, is the death penalty right or wrong? | ||
| What kind of fiscal policy should you have? | ||
| What type of foreign policy should you have? | ||
| This is not a one plus one scientific equation. | ||
| So you should be exposed to multiple viewpoints. | ||
| But of course, you shouldn't be because you should only interact with people who are similar to you. | ||
| Well, that is a problem with a lot of people that go to college, graduate, get their PhD, get their doctorate, and then start teaching and never enter the real world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| They stay in this sort of insulated world of academia, and then they espouse these same ideas, they promote these same ideas, they promote the same way of thinking as if this is the real world, because this is the only world they know. | ||
| True. | ||
| You know one of the things about comedians is a lot of them are like really crazy and fucked up and they do a lot of drugs and they're just out of control and nuts and they kind of forget that other people aren't like that and sometimes I'll bring like one of my regular friends around like the Comedy Store and they're around some of my comedian friends that are fucking crazy and they go Jesus Christ these guys just talk about ridiculous shit that they did like it's no big deal and And I'm like, | ||
| well, in their world, it isn't a big deal. | ||
| In their world, this is the normal world. | ||
| And everyone else is a civilian. | ||
| That's how they look at it. | ||
| That's how, you know, the quote-unquote hardcore comedians look at it. | ||
| I think in academia, you have a similar sort of a situation where they really do believe in microaggressions. | ||
| They think that microaggressions are real. | ||
| There was a fucking... | ||
| This is one of the parts of the article that was really hilarious. | ||
| There was... | ||
| They were trying to raise awareness about microaggressions, but in doing so and raising awareness for microaggressions, they had to give examples of these microaggressions, which triggered people! | ||
| It's an infinite loop of victimology. | ||
| So this guy had to apologize. | ||
| He had to apologize for triggering people with his microaggression examples. | ||
| And some of them were like, aren't you all supposed to be good at math to Asians? | ||
| Like, that is a microaggression. | ||
| I mean, is it a microaggression to say good things? | ||
| This is what confuses me. | ||
| Because, like... | ||
| If you said to a black guy, you guys all have big dicks, right? | ||
| Is that a microaggression? | ||
| Well, it's perpetuating racial stereotypes. | ||
| Right, it is. | ||
| But isn't it a good stereotype? | ||
| Everybody wants a big dick, allegedly. | ||
| Here's another microaggression that I thought was hilarious. | ||
| I'm colorblind. | ||
| I don't see race. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a microaggression. | ||
| You should see race. | ||
| Yes, you should see race. | ||
| So Stephen Colbert, when he says he doesn't see race, he is engaging in microaggressions. | ||
| It's a microaggression. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| American, the word American, by the way, is an aggression. | ||
| American's an aggression? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| Well, because you're usurping all of the Americas to imply that it's only the United States of America. | ||
| So by saying that it's America, it's as if the rest of the countries don't exist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pshew! | |
| Wow. | ||
| One of them is, America is the land of opportunity. | ||
| That is a microaggression. | ||
| Why is that one offensive? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Or here's another microaggression. | ||
| I believe the most qualified person should get the job. | ||
| Oh, that's elitist. | ||
| That's a meritocracy. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| How could it be bad for the most qualified person to get a job? | ||
| Isn't that the whole idea of job applications? | ||
| You're so elitist. | ||
|
unidentified
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How dare you? | |
| We have a sponsor for this podcast called ZipRecruiter. | ||
| And one of ZipRecruiter's things is if they're trying to fill out a job, it allows you to post to 100 plus job sites with one click. | ||
| And the idea is to find the most qualified candidate, which would in turn get you the best person for the job, which is a microaggression. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So ZipRecruiter is a micro-aggression company. | ||
| God, how horrible. | ||
| It's lunacy. | ||
| I mean, you wonder if at some point there'll be some sort of auto-correction of all this. | ||
| I would hope so. | ||
| I think that that is what's going on with a lot of our culture. | ||
| I think what a lot of our culture is, is an auto-correction for the ignorance and hypocrisy of like the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. | ||
| And so we're going way the other way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, with like, did you see Bernie Sanders' speech get interrupted for Black Lives Matter? | ||
| Like, who doesn't think Black Lives Matter? | ||
| I mean, I want someone who doesn't think Black Lives Matter to speak. | ||
| Because all I've heard is people who agree, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| I mean, everybody agrees. | ||
| I don't know anybody who doesn't think that these shootings, the police shootings are horrific. | ||
| But to interrupt a guy who is easily the most liberal... | ||
| That's what I was going to say, exactly. | ||
| Out of all the candidates for president, a guy who is the most diverse, a guy who marched with Martin Luther fucking King. | ||
| He marched in the civil rights movement. | ||
| He's been a civil rights advocate since the 1960s, and they interrupt his presidential speeches. | ||
| You know, I have a theory that a lot of these folks, you know, are the Che Guevara wearing t-shirt wearing guys, right? | ||
| They want to feel part of a greater cause. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So even though many of those battles have passed them by, they've been won. | ||
| I mean, civil rights. | ||
| I mean, of course, there's still racism. | ||
| But in terms of institutionalized endemic racism, we certainly are much better than we were 50 years ago. | ||
| But yet, you know, they're young kids, they're revolutionary, they're wearing Che Guevara, you know, viva la revolution, and they have to engage in this kind of behavior. | ||
| 30 years from now, they'll watch that YouTube clip and they'll think they're a bunch of buffoons. | ||
| I think that's a very valid possibility. | ||
| I think another possibility is that when you look at people and they're trying to find, like, causes to support, I think there's a lot of people out there that are just fucking assholes. | ||
| And what they're doing is trying to find something that allows them to get out that asshole aggression and be justified. | ||
| You know, something that allows them to be righteous. | ||
| Black Lives Matter, you fucking piece of shit! | ||
| And they're screaming at someone who believes Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Screaming at someone who's not even remotely racist. | ||
| But they will yell it in your face the way they did at this Bernie Sanders thing in order to just get their rocks off. | ||
| Whatever personal frustrations, whatever psychological failures that they have got bouncing around inside their head, whatever closed loop thinking they have, they're using these valid points and these things that a lot of people think about as a sounding board, which is why they're using these valid points and these things that a lot of people think about as Right. | ||
| It's not that this demands attention at this moment in order to solve a problem, because there's a fucking fire. | ||
| We have to put this fire out right now or people are going to die. | ||
| No, this that has nothing to do with that It gives them the opportunity to grandstand to take a moral high ground and to scream out and beg for attention Right and to be good because nobody could you can't say it like racism fucking sucks Nobody can say hey, it's not that bad. | ||
| You know he can't say that So you could be like super aggressive and really shitty and confrontational and insulting about a cause you believe in. | ||
| And that is one of the problems that I have with this whole social justice warrior movement. | ||
| Because I find a lot of these people that are involved in it to be asshole human beings. | ||
| And even though I agree with a lot of what they support, I think they suck. | ||
| And when I go to their Twitter pages, and I look at what their interactions are, all their interactions are insulting people, and getting angry at people, and it's all negative. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Yeah, if I can interject. | ||
| I think they don't have an ability to accept that people might have differing opinions, right? | ||
| You and I can debate many issues, and yet we can leave here both being respectful of one another. | ||
| And so I think the discourse is, I'm right. | ||
| If you think otherwise, you must be an asshole, and I will shut you down. | ||
| And so they really don't have this capacity, this critical capacity, to engage in reasoned dialogue. | ||
| I saw it, I mean... | ||
| I'm lucky in that I don't really get many of these social justice warrior trolls. | ||
| I mean, 99% of the people that interact with me are very nice and very sweet. | ||
| But that small 1% to 5% group that, as you mentioned, are real assholes, it's almost impenetrable to try to speak to them, right? | ||
| I mean, I engage them in a very dispassionate manner, you know, hopefully providing them with facts, trying to be polite. | ||
| But I am an asshole simply for disagreeing with them. | ||
| And so most of the people that I've blocked, there aren't that many, but the ones that I've blocked, it's because I try to engage them. | ||
| And the only way they can engage in return is to insult. | ||
| And so it's a real breakdown of civil discourse. | ||
| And also, insult when it's just a matter of opinion about things that are debatable. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, here's one. | ||
| You know the story about Occidental University, or Occidental College? | ||
| College. | ||
| Occidental College, where there was two students that got drunk, and a boy and a girl, they texted each other, and the boy and the girl had sex, and the boy got accused of rape and kicked out of the school where the girl stayed. | ||
| And I was like, well, that's crazy. | ||
| Like, first of all, You're changing the rules of human behavior, because people have been getting drunk and having sex since the beginning of time. | ||
| And so to call it rape now, after all these years, just on a whim, especially when two people are consenting adults. | ||
| They're consenting adults. | ||
| They can go to war. | ||
| I mean, they can't really vote yet. | ||
| They're 18, right? | ||
| Can you vote at 18? | ||
| Yeah, you can't drink. | ||
| They can't drink yet. | ||
| You can in Montreal. | ||
| You can in Montreal, and you're a crazy country. | ||
| But the idea that the boy is responsible and the girl's not, to me, seems ridiculous. | ||
| And it seems contradictory to the whole idea of feminism in the first place is that we're equal. | ||
| Now, if we are equal, why are we not equal in terms of our ability to take... | ||
| Responsibility for being under the influence. | ||
| I mean, if you were responsible for being under the influence when you're driving, if you're responsible for being under the influence if you commit violence, why are you not responsible for being under the influence when you have sex if you're a girl? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Well, when I said this, oh my God, the amount of people that called me a misogynist... | ||
| Rape and a lot. | ||
| A rape enabler, an enablist, an ableist, a piece of shit. | ||
| But it was all insulting. | ||
| It's like, how can it be insulting when this is a debatable point? | ||
| This is a clearly rational, debatable point. | ||
| You're talking about two human beings that are adults that got drunk, but the male is the rapist. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| I don't know the exact details, but there are now, on some university campuses, you actually have a consent form where you sort of go through the iterative steps as you're starting to engage in sex. | ||
| So we are now in the foreplay stage. | ||
| Do you hereby consent? | ||
| And we both sign. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| I think putting on Barry White music might be a bit more mood-inducing than signing an iterative legal document. | ||
| Well, Barry White music is rape-enabling because what you're doing is you're coercing. | ||
| You're making the women aroused, hence they don't have all their faculties. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| Therefore, Barry White is a genocidal rapist. | ||
| I see it. | ||
| That's the language that they're using, is I was unable to consent. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Which, obviously, there's a scale, right? | ||
| We can all agree that there is a level where people are at. | ||
| You're breathing deeply into that mic, sir. | ||
| We had an issue with it the other day. | ||
| Is this better? | ||
| Because, yeah, my friend Barry Crimmins was here, and he got a little hammered, and he was breathing into the mic. | ||
| I got like a hundred stop people from breathing into the mic tweets. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| Uh, Is this real? | ||
| Jake was drunk. | ||
| Josie was drunk. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| I've seen this. | ||
| Jake and Josie hooked up. | ||
| Josie could not consent. | ||
| The next day, Jake was charged with rape. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| That's a real poster? | ||
| I tweeted that. | ||
| I remember this. | ||
| You know, for example, if a high-status male seduces a lower-status woman, that itself could be construed as a form of rape, precisely because his power is so intoxicating. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| Like a professor and a student, perhaps. | ||
| But in that sense, I mean, you have ethical boundaries, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, forget it. | ||
| I mean, just a guy who meets a girl at a bar and he happens to be a professor. | ||
| So a rich man and a poor woman. | ||
| Right. | ||
| By virtue of the difference in hierarchy, that itself could be construed as coercive because she wasn't able to control herself in the face of this overpowering man. | ||
| Not physically, just because of his high status. | ||
| Well, the reality of being a male is if an attractive woman comes on to a man, she's raping him. | ||
| Because you have no control. | ||
| Like, if a beautiful woman comes on to a guy like Jamie at a bar, that poor kid's fucked. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| This is Jamie? | ||
| That's Jamie. | ||
| Look at him over there. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| If some Tracy Lords in her prime-looking chick comes up to Jamie... | ||
| Wow, that's a reference from the 19th? | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Yeah, I met her. | ||
| She's hot. | ||
| Still. | ||
| Wasn't she a porn star at 15? | ||
| Easy, easy. | ||
| Stop wrecking the party. | ||
| Yeah, I believe she was. | ||
| By the way, since we're on porn references, can I tell you maybe the greatest, I receive a lot of comments on my stuff, maybe the greatest one I've ever received, somebody wrote, I hope I'm getting the exact quote, in reference to me, he wrote, this guy is the Ron Jeremy of evolutionary psychology. | ||
| I said, I could drop the mic and just, you know, retire. | ||
| Well, that means you're disgusting but effective. | ||
| I'm fat and sweaty and hairy. | ||
| That's what you're saying? | ||
| Well, the whole thing about Ron Jeremy was Ron Jeremy existed in an era where the guys were supposed to be gross because people watching porn were all guys. | ||
| So you wanted like a guy who was disgusting to be getting laid. | ||
| So you're like, I got a chance. | ||
| This could happen. | ||
| Look how hot she is. | ||
| And she fucks Ron Jeremy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Nowadays, the men are equally unattainable as well, and the idea is that the women watch it with men, allegedly. | ||
| I don't know anything about that. | ||
| I'm sure porn is raping their culture anyway. | ||
| By the way, I was contacted once by a former porn star who had already had, I think, an MBA. And he wanted to pursue his PhD with me. | ||
| He actually came up to Montreal, spent a few days with me, visited my lab, and then ended up not going on for a PhD. | ||
| So that's the closest I've come to a porn star, a guy who almost became my doctoral student. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Maybe I could even say his name. | ||
| I think a man who does that has a bit more freedom to move around. | ||
| If a woman does that, she's sort of labeled by our culture in some sort of a weird way. | ||
| Maybe less so in Canada. | ||
| Less so in Canada, you think? | ||
| In terms of... | ||
| You guys are a little bit more loose, actually. | ||
| Well, you've been to Montreal. | ||
| You were there recently. | ||
| You see that every second store is a strip bar. | ||
| Yeah, you guys have a lot of strip bars up there, but it's also just the way people talk and act about sex. | ||
| It just doesn't seem shameful. | ||
| Less puritanical. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're so fucking poisoned. | ||
| Quebec is even more so what you're saying. | ||
| Because it's French. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it's got that European vibe. | ||
| So in the context of Canada, some of the Anglo-Saxon provinces historically might be closer to Americans. | ||
| But Quebec, it's a free-for-all. | ||
| Yeah, Quebec is crazy. | ||
| So, like, the more conservative spots where there's very few people and everyone's scared and you believe in Jesus more. | ||
| Don't go to Saskatchewan if you want to get lucky. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I'm joking, Saskatchewan. | ||
| Saskatchewan right now, they're fucking warming up their fingers for hate mail. | ||
| But that's how it is in America, too. | ||
| It's like the spots that are, like, really... | ||
| There's not a lot of people. | ||
| They're in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| There's fucking churches everywhere in those spots. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I found that in Latin America, too, or Central America. | ||
| I was in Costa Rica recently, and the poor of the neighborhood, the prevalence of churches was like through the roof. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| We were driving to the cloud forest, and as we're driving up there, you pass through all these really small, rural communities, and God, you see a lot of churches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, people, I guess they need hope in those spots that are kind of... | ||
| Solves the biggest existential angst of all, mortality. | ||
| By the way, speaking of mortality, let me do the segue. | ||
| It is your birthday. | ||
| It is my birthday. | ||
| Officially, the Godfather is hereby wishing you a happy birthday. | ||
| I feel blessed. | ||
| What can I get Joe as a gift? | ||
| By the way, I owe you a copy of one of my books signed. | ||
| Forgive me, I didn't send it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This guy's got fame. | ||
| He's got the looks. | ||
| He's got charisma. | ||
| He's got money. | ||
|
unidentified
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Keep going. | |
| I can't get him anything. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Except I can get him. | ||
| You. | ||
| Godfather. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| August 11th. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want anything. | ||
| People keep giving... | ||
| Jamie gave me something cool, though. | ||
| But, you know, I think that the existential angst of death being solved by religion, for a lot of people, is like a nice little scaffolding to just sort of like carry your way through life. | ||
| You know, people have gotten angry at me for suggesting that. | ||
| I'm not suggesting it for you or for anybody. | ||
| I mean, I'm not suggesting... | ||
| There's a lot of things that people do that I wouldn't want to do that they do to kind of get by in this life, whether it's take Xanax or drink every night after work in order to keep from kicking their dog. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck is going on in your head, but for a lot of people in these bad rural-type situations, it seems to be a common theme. | ||
| And if you really look at everything as being natural, which is what I try to do, that term nature, Everybody wants to look at that as like wildlife outside of cities. | ||
| I kind of look at everything as nature. | ||
| And I look at human behavior patterns and how much they repeat themselves as being pretty natural. | ||
| And these weird little spots where there's not a lot of people seems to attract a lot of churches. | ||
| You know, I wrote an article on that point, I think maybe a year or two ago. | ||
| It was somebody else's research that I was summarizing, looking at the content of prayers. | ||
| So what is it that people pray about? | ||
| Money. | ||
| No, but as a function of their income status, their socioeconomic status. | ||
| And as you might predict, the content of what I pray to God about drastically changes as a function of where I fit in that hierarchy. | ||
| What do people that are really rich pray about? | ||
| Maybe health. | ||
| Must be, right? | ||
| Health and family and stuff like that. | ||
| It's one of those things where I reluctantly not just accept it, but I almost support it. | ||
| You mean religiosity? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For people that are in bad places and bad situations, I see that it helps. | ||
| Well, so chapter eight of one of my books, I titled it very provocatively, perhaps, Marketing Hope by Selling Lies. | ||
| And I give different examples of hope peddlers, medical quacks, self-help gurus, And, of course, I argue that the greatest peddler of hope is, of course, religion. | ||
| And so you're exactly right. | ||
| I think it takes almost a maladaptive honesty to not believe because it is so much more comforting to believe. | ||
| And also the people that decide not to believe, it's almost like they have to try so hard in those areas to not believe that they become angry about it. | ||
| They become angry about their disbelief. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I'm a non-believer. | ||
| I'm not angry. | ||
| I'm very jovial. | ||
| Well, you're a very intelligent man. | ||
| You can recognize these patterns and not succumb. | ||
| But for a lot of folks also, you're dealing with so many people in your community. | ||
| They're also part of that. | ||
| And then the church becomes like a sort of a community center by proxy. | ||
| Well, David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist, a good friend of mine, very famous biologist, he looks at the evolutionary roots of religion. | ||
| And he actually argues, a great book, I'm doing this plugging for him now, I think he wrote in 2002, Darwin's Cathedral, where he actually demonstrated or argued that groups that are religious actually out-survive those that are not, using an argument of communality, right? | ||
| Groups that are religious are more cohesive, band together, are more communal, therefore they should be able to out-survive other groups. | ||
| Now his theories are a bit contentious because many evolutionary psychologists And evolutionary biologists reject the idea that evolution can happen at the group level. | ||
| They argue that evolution should happen at the individual, at the gene level. | ||
| And this is a fight that he's been having for many years now. | ||
| But that's one example where you could actually study religion, not only from a scientific perspective, but from an evolutionary perspective. | ||
| I have a friend who lives in a, they're married, the male and female are married in a sort of a rural area. | ||
| And a long time ago I was having this conversation with them where the wife was just sort of explaining how if it wasn't for religion, her and the husband wouldn't be together. | ||
| And the way she was saying it was kind of like her husband was dumb and like he needs something to keep him like on this good path and pattern and they'd been married for like at the time I think like 15 or 20 years and she was like do you think that we would have still been together if it wasn't for our belief in God and the Lord and whether or not and then she goes whether or not it's real Wow. | ||
| And I was like, whoa, this is some heavy shit. | ||
| It's almost like she's giving her husband some sort of placebo to keep this guy from drinking and fucking getting on a train like a hobo or whatever the hell she thinks he would do. | ||
| You know, like God kind of kept them together and kept the family together. | ||
| But she was looking at it in a very pragmatic way. | ||
| And I was like, wow, this is deep. | ||
| You know, in the Middle East, and I've seen it in my own family, there is this incredible fatalism that comes with religiosity. | ||
| So I have a family member. | ||
| I won't mention who it is. | ||
| Ariel Helwani? | ||
| Not Ariel Helwani. | ||
| By the way, shout out to my nephew and to all the Twitters out there. | ||
| He really is my nephew. | ||
| He's my sister's son. | ||
| But anyways, so this male member, not Ariel. | ||
| Shout out to Ariel. | ||
| He views everybody. | ||
| He views everything through the lens of it's God's will. | ||
| So if he opens up a store and the store doesn't do well, well, it's not that he might have made some bad, poor business decisions. | ||
| It must be God's will. | ||
| Had God wanted it to be differently, then things would have turned out differently. | ||
| And that type of fatalism is actually quite... | ||
| Depressing in that it doesn't allow for a feedback loop, right? | ||
| I mean, you don't get feedback from the environment that says, change course of action. | ||
| If everything that happens, happens because it's God's will, then you're really just an empty vessel that's just executing God's will. | ||
| And you see that a lot in the Middle East, if God wants inshallah, if God this, if God that, if it was meant to be. | ||
| It's really part of the parlance of Arabic language. | ||
| Yeah, practice and feedback loops are what it's all about. | ||
| I mean, that's what life is. | ||
| And when you're opening a business or doing a sport or, you know, whatever the fuck it is, it's practice, reviewing data, feedback loop, making possible corrections, objectivity. | ||
| All those things are what makes people improve. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I read an article recently about music. | ||
| They were discussing music, that the inherent qualities of someone's music are really just a lot of what makes a great musician is practice and feedback loops. | ||
| I mean, that's really what it is. | ||
| It's not God's will. | ||
| But if you believe that... | ||
| It's limiting and empowering at the same time. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Because if you also are involved in this practice feedback loop, but you really think God's on your side because you play a fucking mean axe. | ||
| There's actually a psychological trait that maps onto what we're talking about. | ||
| It's a locus of control. | ||
| Are you familiar with this term? | ||
| Do you know it? | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| So locus of control is basically the idea, some of us are internally Driven in terms of our locus of control, meaning that we attribute things that happen to us to us. | ||
| I did well on the exam because I studied hard, because I'm intelligent. | ||
| Versus external locus of control, as you attribute it to environmental factors. | ||
| I did poorly on the exam, not because I didn't study, but because the professor is an asshole. | ||
| He's an idiot, right? | ||
| And so people who score high on external locus of control, then you can predict certain other behaviors. | ||
| For example, they're much more likely to be gamblers. | ||
| Precisely because it's fatalism, right? | ||
| I mean, my turn will come. | ||
| It's written in the skies. | ||
| The black, it should be up soon, right? | ||
| If you're internally locus of control, then you know that all that stuff is random. | ||
| And the red and black, they come or go, depending on how that ball drops. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, that's a lot of people do really firmly believe in that. | ||
| And that's how they get through this life. | ||
| And it's very much a blinder. | ||
| It puts them in a very narrow channel that's very difficult to escape. | ||
| Once you have that firm belief, You know, that these patterns are sort of clearly established. | ||
| It's going to be my time. | ||
| My time's coming. | ||
| My time. | ||
| Going back to the gambling, casinos actually are, or operators are very smart. | ||
| They play on that cognitive illusion. | ||
| Because what they do is they give you this card where you keep track of how many times it's come on red and how many times the number 13 has come. | ||
| It's a complete illusion, right? | ||
| They give you a card? | ||
| You could take a card. | ||
| It's when you play roulette? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So if you go to the Montreal casino, you can get those cards. | ||
| Oh, look, 13 has come up 14 times, but I think 37 is up, should be up soon, right? | ||
| What it's doing, basically, is it's giving you a sense of control over otherwise completely random events, right? | ||
| Each of those throws of the ball are independent events. | ||
| I mean, unless it's a rigged machine. | ||
| So the casino operators understand you in psychology and they play on it. | ||
| And then the idiots succumb to it. | ||
| How rude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a... | |
| The... | ||
| But what's crazy is when luck is on their side, it seems real. | ||
| Like when you get a hot hand, like I don't play craps, but I've seen people play craps, and they get a hot hand, they start rolling dice, and yes! | ||
| And they feel like they can't lose, and they'll go on a hot streak. | ||
| They'll go on a hot streak with blackjack as well. | ||
| They get the right cards and poker. | ||
| And it feels like it's happening. | ||
| But because that hot streak is itself a random pattern. | ||
| I'll tell you a great story. | ||
| And I'll actually mention who it is. | ||
| I hope he won't be upset if I mention it. | ||
| It's my father, who's an avid 649 player. | ||
| I bet your dad doesn't listen to this shit. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| 649 basically is a lottery game played in Quebec. | ||
| You choose six numbers out of 49. Your chances of getting it are infinitesimally small. | ||
| And so one day he had called me at the office, at my university office. | ||
| He said, hey son, I'm playing some cards. | ||
| Give me six numbers. | ||
| I said, oh dad, I have some students in my office. | ||
| Can I call you back? | ||
| He goes, just give me six numbers. | ||
| So I said, all right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So then he goes, well, if you're not going to take the damn game seriously, why am I calling you, right? | ||
| Now, why did he do that? | ||
| Because he actually was convinced that the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and I bet some of your listeners will also think that, that the numbers 1 through 6... | ||
| It's less likely of a combination to come up than any other combination of six numbers, simply because it has the illusion of looking ordered. | ||
| But it isn't. | ||
| It is just one of the 14 million possible combinations. | ||
| I think it's one out of 14 million. | ||
| So again, these biases, these cognitive traps are so alluring, and it's so easy for people to succumb to them. | ||
| Is it single-digit numbers? | ||
| Can it be double-digit numbers? | ||
| No, it goes up to 49. 49 digits? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| 49 numbers. | ||
| 1 to 49, you pick your 6. Oh, I see. | ||
| So you can pick 12, 18, 39, 42. Oh, I see. | ||
| And so I just picked 1 through 6, and he was absolutely convinced that that combination of 6 numbers is simply... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's ridiculous. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a fool. | ||
| I'm an idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The lottery itself is such a trap. | ||
| My grandmother used to only talk about the lottery. | ||
| She'd talk about the lottery and dead people that were talking to her. | ||
| My grandmother was like, she was crazy. | ||
| And she firmly believed that she had some psychic ability. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And she's always like, I knew that number was going to come up. | ||
| She would always tell you, I was gonna bet, and she would talk about what number she was gonna bet, and I was gonna bet nine, and I didn't put it in. | ||
| You know, nine came through. | ||
| Six, two, five, you know, she'd rattle off whatever the fuck the number was. | ||
| And this was back in the day in New Jersey, where they would play the numbers, which is like this local, created sort of lottery that the mob ran. | ||
| It was this weird thing, and my grandmother was a part of it. | ||
| She would, like, help run the numbers. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah, she, I don't know what her function was, but she was a part of it to the point where she got arrested and did six months in jail. | ||
| For running the numbers? | ||
| Yeah, because she wouldn't rat anybody out. | ||
| So, you know, my grandmother would like knit Like little scarves and shit for the guards and do all kinds of weird shit. | ||
| I didn't find out about this until later. | ||
| When I was a kid, we just thought Grandma was just fucking busy traveling or something. | ||
| We had no idea where the hell she was. | ||
| We'd go visit, you know, Grandpa. | ||
| Where's Grandma? | ||
| We couldn't find her. | ||
| She was, oh, she's visiting your Aunt Mary. | ||
| It was always like something, but she was in the pokey. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Doing a hard time for numbers. | |
| Speaking of kind of kooky family members, I have a paternal aunt. | ||
| And I've actually written about this. | ||
| Do you know what tassiography is? | ||
| It's a fancy term for something that you might otherwise know. | ||
| Is that term? | ||
| No. | ||
| So tassiography is the reading of your fate, since we're talking about these issues, through... | ||
| In the Middle East, we do it with... | ||
| Tea leaves or some shit? | ||
| You could do it with tea leaves, or you could do it with the residue that's what you flip over the coffee mug, the Turkish, right? | ||
| So the residue that's left, that's what you read. | ||
| So this lady would come over to our house, and I was, you know, maybe a seven, eight, nine-year-old boy, and I already knew that the jig was up on this thing. | ||
| And when she would come over, it would be like the Pope is visiting, right? | ||
| And Laura is coming over to tell us about our future. | ||
| So then she would start, you know, she'd look at these random patterns and the things that she would say are, you know, I see happiness in your future. | ||
| Well, I could have a good bowel movement later and that's happiness. | ||
| The Dallas Cowboys could win and that's happiness. | ||
| My wife and I can have sex tonight and that's happiness. | ||
| So there is no way to falsify her profoundly general prediction, right? | ||
| She never looked at the... | ||
| At the residue and said, you will be getting a 13.7% increase in your income, right? | ||
| Specificity is the enemy of these fortune tellers, right? | ||
| So they give you these vague predictions, which you could then fill into your life in any infinite number of possible ways. | ||
| Yeah, we had this guy on the sci-fi show that I did. | ||
| His name is Banachek and he's a master at what he calls, they call it mentalism or something like that. | ||
| He's a mentalist. | ||
| And he is one of those guys that will tell you absolutely straightforward, this is bullshit. | ||
| I am using tricks, and I won't tell you what the tricks are, but I will tell you right now, I am not a psychic. | ||
| This is not magic. | ||
| Magic is not real. | ||
| He actually gets angry at people that pretend that they could... | ||
| Like, you remember there was a whole series of those shows that they've since pulled off the air, but where there were psychics and, you know, there was like the Long Island medium. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| You remember when they were talking to people's dead relatives and all this stuff? | ||
| They have something to do with dead animals. | ||
| Was there one of those? | ||
| I think there's one. | ||
| So there is a cross-species psychic. | ||
| Can you imagine your fucking dog doesn't say jack shit to you when he's alive, but when he's dead, he starts talking to psychics. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I didn't like the way you pet me, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pet the back of my head like I'm an asshole. | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, this idea that someone can actually read into your past and pull this information... | ||
| Is so appealing to people that they mistake the way the person's questioning them and the clues and the little bits of information that they give and how this person is really just good at forming puzzles based on pattern chunking. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They just know how to... | ||
| They've done this so many times. | ||
| They know how to get it. | ||
| But this guy, even though he told me what he was doing, we had some people in the audience. | ||
| We had a small audience and we had him perform... | ||
| These tasks on these folks, have them come up, and he would ask them questions. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| I mean, he's just really, really fucking good at it. | ||
| So despite the fact that you knew all the tricks, it was easy to sort of succumb to the illusion. | ||
| Here's the thing, though. | ||
| I don't know the tricks. | ||
| I just know they are tricks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| I see. | ||
| He wouldn't tell us what the tricks were, but he said, like, I'm telling you, I am not a psychic by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| And he did a bunch of other cool stuff, like he bent spoons and stuff like that with his mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's bullshit. | ||
| He's like, it's all bullshit. | ||
| I'm using trickery. | ||
| He goes, but I won't tell you how I do it, but I'm not magic. | ||
| Which would be really rude if he actually was magic. | ||
| And he's just like, his shtick is calling out all these other people who are also actually magic. | ||
| Imagine that? | ||
| It was like a sellout for all the real magic people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| My sister was in high school. | ||
| She went to one of her friends, hired a psychic, and they all sat around, and the psychic would slowly but surely read them. | ||
| I was always very skeptical of stuff like that, from the time I was little, because I knew my grandmother was fucking crazy, and she always claimed to be psychic. | ||
| But listen to my sister come back, she would tell me all this stuff. | ||
| She knew all about this, and she knew all about that, and she knew about the time I did that. | ||
| I'm like, didn't you know about all that stuff? | ||
| She's not telling you anything you don't already know. | ||
| She's telling you stuff you already know. | ||
| Yeah, I'm telling you, it was amazing, though. | ||
| I was like, how is it amazing that she tells you shit that you already know? | ||
| Like, that's not amazing. | ||
| There's a study. | ||
| I can't remember the exact reference. | ||
| You could take the astrological predictions, you know, the 12, and you give it to people randomly. | ||
| And anyone that I give you, you'd be able to argue that it perfectly fits you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Precisely because it is so vague that you could infuse your life into any one of these sort of vague descriptors. | ||
| Yeah, they're ultra vague. | ||
| But those are stupid. | ||
| Like those, today will be an amazing day for business. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| You know, you want to know specifics, right? | ||
| But I had a friend who ran into someone in Venice Beach. | ||
| And the guy was like one of those Save the Rainforest type dudes. | ||
| He had like some little stand set up. | ||
| And he said, if I guess your birthday, will you listen to me? | ||
| And my friend was like, go ahead. | ||
| And he guessed his birthday on the day. | ||
| And then he goes, how the fuck did you do that? | ||
| He goes, will you listen to my story now about the rainforest? | ||
| And he goes, do that to my friend. | ||
| He brought his friend over. | ||
| And he guessed his friend's birthday too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm reserving judgment on that story. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| No, it's a true story. | ||
| My friend definitely didn't lie. | ||
| Because he's baffled by it. | ||
| Here's where I told Penn Jillette, obviously. | ||
| He's a magician, rather, and a good friend of mine. | ||
| And so I said, how does this guy do that? | ||
| He goes, there's techniques you can do that. | ||
| How the fuck are you doing it, man? | ||
| Guy shows up and he says to you... | ||
| You know, I can guess your birthday. | ||
| He doesn't know you. | ||
| You don't know him. | ||
| How the fuck is that possible? | ||
| He told me there's techniques. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| There's 365 days in a year. | ||
| How is a guy going to guess that? | ||
| I'm stumped. | ||
| And it's not even one in 365, right? | ||
| The odds of you nailing it is probably higher than one in 365, right? | ||
| Isn't that how math works? | ||
| There are interesting probabilities where, for example, if you were to say, how likely are two people in a room to have the same birthday? | ||
| That number, and I don't remember how to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've seen that. | |
| A lot higher than you think. | ||
| It's a lot higher than you think. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| A lot higher than you think. | ||
| And I remember when I took Probability and Stats as a math undergrad, that's one of the classic examples that you study precisely because it is so counterintuitive. | ||
| Yeah, there was a show where someone did that and they went into... | ||
| It was like one of these con men dudes went into... | ||
| He bet people and he went into a restaurant and he had the day. | ||
| To find two people. | ||
| He had a certain amount of time to find two people that shared the same birthday that worked there. | ||
| Or that were customers there. | ||
| And he nailed it in like an hour. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Just a bunch of people coming in. | ||
| You get like a May 12th or whatever the fuck it would be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, but the idea that someone could just point at you, gadfather, I believe... | ||
| Your Bostonian accent came out there, huh? | ||
| Gad. | ||
| Gadfather. | ||
| Father. | ||
| You know, I don't know how anybody does that, but according to Penn Jillette, I gotta listen to him, though, because he's a fucking magician, and those guys are all tricksters. | ||
| They know how to do shit. | ||
| Like, One of the cool things about Penn and Teller, if you ever go to watch them, is that they'll tell you it's bullshit while they're doing it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And you have no idea what the fuck they just did, how they did it. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's all really sneaky stuff. | ||
| It's just managing illusions, basically, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what was really cool about the Banachek character was that he was like really adamant about that stuff and very angry about people steal money from folks by claiming to be mediums and talking to their relatives. | ||
| And he's like, I just think that anyone who would try to give someone hope that perhaps their dead relative is talking from the grave and telling them important things they need to know, but meanwhile they're just making it up. | ||
| It's just a foul, disgusting human being. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| My grandmother would have bought it. | ||
| Hook, line, and sinker. | ||
| She believed it, man. | ||
| We had a dude die in my grandmother's house. | ||
| There was a guy who, during, I think it was like the 50s or the 60s, they were pretty poor, and there was this guy in the neighborhood who needed a place to live, and he would pay them to rent a room in their house. | ||
| It was pretty common back in those days. | ||
| And, you know, sometimes you'd eat dinner with them and what have you. | ||
| And he died in his room one day. | ||
| And they believed that this guy was talking to them. | ||
| They believed this guy was in the house and that she would go up into the attic sometimes and he would be up there and she would see him and talk to him. | ||
| That would freak me the fuck out, man. | ||
| It's very creepy. | ||
| Did you ever hear, I'm not sure if I'm going to get her name right, I think it's Emily Rosa, does that name? | ||
| No. | ||
| Youngest woman or girl to ever publish, it's going to relate to some of this Hocus Pocus stuff that we're talking about. | ||
| Youngest girl to ever publish a paper in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, a very prestigious journal. | ||
| I think she was maybe 9 or 10 or 11. I discussed this in one of my books. | ||
| And basically as a grade 4 or 5 science project, she wanted to explore touch therapy. | ||
| Are you familiar with what that is? | ||
| So touch therapy is one of those quackery things. | ||
| But I'm triggered right now by you saying touch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| You just triggered me. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So basically... | ||
| The touch healer has some sort of energy in his or her hands that they can sort of levitate around your pain area. | ||
| Like Reiki? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And so she wanted to test whether those claims were true. | ||
| So she set up an extraordinarily simple experiment to test their abilities. | ||
| And so what basically she did is she would put out her hand And then they had to determine whether it's her right hand. | ||
| In other words, there's a barrier where they can't see which of her hands is out. | ||
| And if they have the ability of touch, they should be able to predict whether on the right or left is where her hand is. | ||
| And of course, they ended up doing worse than random. | ||
| In other words, less than 50, I mean, you have one in two chance of just guessing randomly whether it's the right or left, right? | ||
| And she demonstrated that these touch healers, who supposedly are able to cure cancer by levitating their hand over areas, are not even able to predict whether the hand that's out is on the right or left. | ||
| I mean, so imagine what an elegant experiment that is and it was published in that journal. | ||
| Now, what do you think those touch healers came back with as a rebuttal? | ||
| Can you think of anything? | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Other than that, they basically said that when you set up these types of experiments in a laboratory, That ends up, wait for it, affecting the energy fields. | ||
| And therefore, by testing our abilities, you are ultimately removing our abilities. | ||
| Therefore, it's an unfalsifiable position. | ||
| Hence, it's not science. | ||
| I have heard that expression. | ||
| I've heard that thought when people were talking about people who don't believe in psychics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that if you talk to a psychic but you don't believe in them, your negative energy interferes with their gift. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| So how could you ever test it, right? | ||
| That's why all of these sort of quackery movements are part of the sort of non-science epistemology, right? | ||
| Destiny, right? | ||
| The idea of destiny. | ||
| If I walk out of my house now and I get hit by a car, that was my destiny. | ||
| If I walk out of my house and I don't get hit by a truck, that was my destiny. | ||
| So what state of the world would have to happen for me to be able to test the destiny or non-destiny? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| Anything that happens is my destiny. | ||
| So it's unfalsifiable. | ||
| You know, I have a little piece of Hocus Pocus that I don't necessarily believe, but I entertain it from time to time, and that is synchronicity. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Like, when you're discussing an object, then something will come up, whether it's on television or the news, that just, like, perfectly fits into what you're talking about. | ||
| And you're like, well, how goddamn convenient is this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, I was having a text conversation with a friend of mine this morning, and he lives on the East Coast, and I live on the West Coast. | ||
| We're going back and forth, and he's having health issues, and he's going to talk to a doctor about probiotics. | ||
| And while we're having this conversation, I go downstairs, and I'm about to work out, and I turn on the television, and Good Morning America is having an expert discuss probiotics and how gut health can affect all sorts of various things, including your mood, all sorts of various illnesses, and, like, literally at the same moment I'm having this text conversation with my friend, it's on, so I take a photo of the television, And I said, I send it to him. | ||
| I'm like, how crazy is this? | ||
| Like, we're talking about this and bam, it's on TV like that. | ||
| Can I demystify that story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why would you want to fuck it up for me, man? | |
| With dual apologies. | ||
| This is actually called the cell A bias. | ||
| So for example, if you say, you know, every time I get in the shower, the phone rings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mmm. | |
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Happens to me. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, what are the events that you're not coding in your brain? | ||
| Oh, the other times the phone rang? | ||
| No, well, so the phone can ring or cannot ring, and you can get into the shower or not get into the shower. | ||
| So it's a two-by-two matrix. | ||
| Your brain is only coding the instances, the cell A bias, one of the biases, where the two events happen. | ||
| The phone rings and I get in the shower. | ||
| The three other events, your brain never codes because they're non-events. | ||
| Therefore, you end up overestimating the likelihood of that event. | ||
| My God, every time the phone rings, I'm in the shower. | ||
| So this is what's happening with that probiotic story, right? | ||
| There's a million other times that you spoke to him about something else. | ||
| And then you turned on the TV, but there wasn't, to use your term, synchronicity. | ||
| But that one time where it happened, you quote it as something magical, mystical. | ||
| No? | ||
| You don't seem very convinced. | ||
| I'm not buying your fucking bullshit at all, mister. | ||
| So you're sticking with your magical thinking. | ||
| Yes! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen, the universe is all working together to sort this out, man. | |
| That science stuff is overrated, I hear you. | ||
| A lot of it's bullshit, bro. | ||
| That's what I hear. | ||
| A lot of it is guesswork. | ||
| They don't know what they're doing. | ||
| I just think that it was a beautiful coincidence. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That's how I look at it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And there's a series of these beautiful coincidences that happen all the time when you're tuned in to the vibe of the universe, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I need to recover from that spirituality. | ||
| A lot of people believe that, right? | ||
| That's a big one, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The vibe of the universe. | ||
| Moving away from spirituality, do you want to talk about some real science or do you want to keep doing the... | ||
| No, absolutely, yeah. | ||
| I don't really believe... | ||
| I think it's fun for people listening. | ||
| Serious? | ||
| No. | ||
| We're joking around, but it is weird when stuff like that happens. | ||
| And you do wonder. | ||
| Are you familiar, I'm sure you are, with simulation theory? | ||
| Tell me a bit about it to see what you mean. | ||
| Simulation theory is the idea, and this is not just being banded about by comedians, but by actual physicists who contemplate the... | ||
| When you extrapolate the nature of technology and where we're at now and what's possible today with Oculus Rift and all these... | ||
| Virtual reality programs they're developing that are extraordinarily effective. | ||
| I mean, I haven't seen the newest version of Oculus Rift, but apparently it's in 4K. These are what, immersive games? | ||
| No, it's not games. | ||
| Oculus Rift, they're going to apply it to games, but with Oculus Rift, it's like a ski goggle thing that you put on that is a virtual reality program that runs while this is happening. | ||
| And a lot of... | ||
| What they're doing when they're running these is they're recording these incredible scenarios where apparently they put cameras all over a person's body and they have them go through these rooms and then they take all of the data from all of that and then put it into this program so that when you're wearing these goggles you can look around up and down and there is data. | ||
| That's what it looks like. | ||
| There's data for every single aspect of the room every single area of the rooms as you look left and right all that's been covered and it's all computing so as computational power and Video cards and all these different things that can compute the visual images as they improve and get better and better It's gotten to the point now where it's 4k 4k is what? | ||
| This television right here is, which is the latest, greatest version of HD. It's very high resolution, beautiful images. | ||
| And my friend Duncan put it on, tried it out at one of these developer conferences and called me just screaming and raving. | ||
| He's like, this is bigger than the internet. | ||
| This is bigger than the wheel. | ||
| This is the biggest thing. | ||
| He's like, this is going to fucking change everything. | ||
| He walked into a room in this virtual reality demonstration and there was a man playing the piano. | ||
| Pianto? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Man playing the piano. | ||
| He said the piano sounded more realistic. | ||
| As he got closer to it, it got louder. | ||
| He could see the man playing it. | ||
| He would step to the side and see the man playing it. | ||
| Look over the top of the piano, see the man playing it. | ||
| Go underneath the piano and see the man playing it. | ||
| It's like this is fucking crazy and it really looks like there's a guy in front of you playing the piano, but nothing's happening. | ||
| The idea being that if that technology exists today in 2015, there is going to come a time, whether that time is a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now, where there will be an artificial reality that is indecipherable from the reality that we live in right now, from this touch, feel, hear, see reality that we just all accept as real. | ||
| That there is going to be something that is artificially created, but is indistinguishable from what we're experiencing. | ||
| And if that is true, how do we not know that we haven't already been in it? | ||
| How do we not know? | ||
| Because we're not talking about voodoo. | ||
| We're talking about technology. | ||
| And we're talking about... | ||
| Pretty trackable stuff. | ||
| Like, if you follow Moore's Law, if you follow any of the technological laws of extrapolation from the point that we're at now to the point that they're projecting just within 5, 10, 15, 20 years, they're talking about incredible stuff. | ||
| Have you seen Magic Leap? | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was going to say, I haven't seen The Matrix either, but it sounds like that's sort of the scene, isn't it? | ||
| Well, it's similar along those lines. | ||
| But I'm not familiar with that scene. | ||
| Well, The Matrix seemed like a total horseshit just when it came out. | ||
| It seemed like, wow, this is a cool science fiction movie about some shit that's not real and never could be real. | ||
| But now, The Matrix looks closer and closer to reality with every passing day. | ||
| With every passing year, it looks like, wow, it's inevitable. | ||
| Whether it's 100 years from now or whatever... | ||
| They're going to be able to give you an experience that is indistinguishable from this experience that we think is real. | ||
| You know, my only sort of jumping point from what you're talking about, when I was a student in computer science and math, I took artificial intelligence. | ||
| But now this is going back to, not to date myself, you know. | ||
| The 20s? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| See what I did there? | ||
| 1985, about, 1984, 85. And at the time, one of the things that we had learned in this course was, so you know about how now there are computers that can easily match the grandmasters in chess? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So at the time when I was in school, some of the early versions of those computers were just about at the level of the grandmasters. | ||
| And so one of the assignments that we had to do in that course was to develop an algorithm. | ||
| So if you look at the chess decision tree, the number of nodes that it has is something like, I can't Pull it out. | ||
| Something like 10 to the 100 possibilities. | ||
| And so it would take you more than the age of the universe if you wanted to exhaustively search through every possible option. | ||
| So rather, what you have to do is use some sort of search algorithm to prune out, to weed out huge parts of the decision tree. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| So that way, this huge decision tree, you only go through the parts that seem promising. | ||
| And so we didn't do it for chess. | ||
| We did it for another game. | ||
| But at that time, I already had found it almost mystical, the type of stuff that we were learning in AI to try to sort of model this artificial intelligence that could mimic the capacities of a human grandmaster player. | ||
| And what you're talking about, of course, is many generations ahead of that. | ||
| So incredible stuff. | ||
| Many generations ahead of that, and again, you're talking about 30 years. | ||
| It's not that long. | ||
| It's not that long, yeah. | ||
| It's really not. | ||
| In terms of culture, it's like, if you went by, if 30 years went by in the 1200s, nothing would change. | ||
| Right, true. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And 30 years today is almost an eternity when it comes to technology. | ||
| Well, actually, yesterday we were sitting at the beach in Laguna, my wife and I and the kids. | ||
| And I asked her, and I wonder if you have an answer to this. | ||
| I'm sure we could pull it out. | ||
| How many people do they still use non-smartphones? | ||
| Ari Shafir. | ||
| So probably, you think, what, like 5%? | ||
| If I had a guess, I'd bet it's less than that. | ||
| Yeah, incredible. | ||
| I bet it's about 10. Or I'd bet it's rather... | ||
| 1%. | ||
| No, I was going to say 3. But I would say, I would bet that... | ||
| Out of all the people that use cell phones on a regular basis, yeah, I would say it's less than 5%. | ||
| I would say it's probably around 3 or something like that. | ||
| Less than 10 for sure. | ||
| What do you think, Jamie? | ||
| What would you guess? | ||
| 3? | ||
| Like 3%? | ||
| If you see people that are walking around... | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm trying to think. | |
| I can't remember the last time that I saw somebody sort of flipping a phone. | ||
| I think my mom has one still. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| She texts me. | ||
| It's pretty obvious. | ||
| Still, like, letter U. She uses U. If you have an iPhone and you use U instead of Y-O-U, you're a lazy bitch. | ||
| Just write Y-O-U, right? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I'm not going to agree with that sentiment to your mother. | ||
| No, not my mom. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| My mom has a smartphone. | ||
| She doesn't have a smartphone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| At least I don't think she does. | ||
| What is the percentage, Jamie? | ||
| It's a percentage of people that don't use smartphones. | ||
| All I can find is it's just two-thirds of American adults have a smartphone, so I guess it'd be that one-third don't. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know if that's a fit. | |
| Yeah, what does that mean, though? | ||
| Do they have any kind of phone? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| A lot of them may not have any phones. | ||
| They're fucking animals. | ||
| If you're living in 2015, you don't have a cell phone, you're some fucking barbarian creature. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I've got a good jumping point because we're talking about innovations. | ||
| You ready for this? | ||
| Birth order and innovations. | ||
| Birth order? | ||
| Yeah, birth order. | ||
| As far as like where you were born? | ||
| Right, so you ready for this? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| So first I'll give you the background to that story, and then I'll tell you about some research that we did in a consumer context. | ||
| So there's this gentleman by the name of Frank Soloway. | ||
| He's a historian of science and a huge Darwin supporter. | ||
| He wrote a book in 1996, highly recommended, called Born to Rebel, where he looked at the 28 most radical scientific innovations in the history of human thought. | ||
| The reason for 28, there's nothing magical about number 28. There was some criterion by which something got into that list or not. | ||
| So he looked at the 28 most radical scientific theory of evolution would be one, right? | ||
| Something that really changed our understanding of the world. | ||
| And then he looked at the birth order, through historical records, of either the people who espoused the theory, Or those who were the staunchest detractors, opponents to the theory. | ||
| And what he found is that the later borns were much more likely to be the ones to espouse the radical scientific innovations. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And I'll explain in a second why. | ||
| So he argued basically that when a child is born... | ||
| The first sort of adaptive problem that he has to solve is how to maximize parental investment to himself or herself. | ||
| And the way you do that is by occupying a unique niche in the eyes of your parents. | ||
| So if you're first born, there are no other niches that have been occupied. | ||
| So for example, a niche would be, I want to be a good boy. | ||
| I want to be a rebel would be another niche, right? | ||
| He called this Darwinian partitioning niche hypothesis, right? | ||
| So it's a positioning. | ||
| Proposition, right? | ||
| How do I position myself to be maximally different from all the other children? | ||
| So the first born has nobody, all the niches are available. | ||
| As you go down the sip ship, there are fewer and fewer niches that are available. | ||
| This forces later borns to be more out-of-the-box thinkers, to be more malleable, to be less rigid, to be less conforming. | ||
| And the data was actually quite astonishing. | ||
| So for 23 out of the 28 radical scientific innovations, that's exactly what he found. | ||
| Incidentally, do you want to guess what the godfather's birth order is? | ||
| Last! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Fourth of four. | ||
| That's why I always said, expect great things from the Godfather. | ||
| It's meant to be. | ||
| But anyways, so we took this idea and we applied it to, since we were talking about adoption of phones and smartphones, we applied it to the context of, are you a product innovator? | ||
| Do you adopt something early or late and so on? | ||
| And we exactly replicated Soloway's findings. | ||
| First borns were much more conforming. | ||
| Later borns were much more innovative and That actually makes a ton of sense. | ||
| Another thing I think could possibly be a consideration is that when you're younger, you get fucked with by your older brothers and sisters. | ||
| Because they can. | ||
| Because they're tired of taking shit from the parents. | ||
| And you're forced to think outside the box because you gotta work around these fuckers. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Constantly trying to mess your game up at every point in turn. | ||
| They cheat. | ||
| They make up rules. | ||
| They tell you what mom said when mom didn't really say anything yet. | ||
| You get in trouble. | ||
| Are you last born? | ||
| No. | ||
| First. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm devious. | ||
| I don't do that. | ||
| You're not supposed to have all these tattoos as a firstborn. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No, well. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Only in the conforming sense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hmm. | |
| On the other hand, you could argue that maybe within your social milieu, this is conforming, right? | ||
| Could be, yeah. | ||
| Or you just like tattoos. | ||
| Or you just like tattoos. | ||
| And you're not scared of pain. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I think that's more likely. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's fascinating when you look at what causes someone to be innovative and what causes someone... | ||
| I mean, it's one of the things that I've thought of as a parent, and many of my friends have the same issue, it's... | ||
| All my interesting friends came from fucked up childhoods. | ||
| All my interesting friends had parents that were a mess, and childhood was chaos, and it forced them to develop a unique character. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| And I'm trying my best to make my children's lives as easy and comfortable as possible, but in doing so, am I hampering them? | ||
| Am I hampering their development in some sort of a way? | ||
| Maybe like a random smack on the head once in a while, just to keep it... | ||
| Push them, get out of my way! | ||
| I think that there's other ways, and this is my theory, there's other ways to encourage innovation or creativity or to pursue your passion and dreams. | ||
| And one of the things I'm also quite shocked at with having children, It is how absolutely unique they are right out of the box. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In a happy environment with no stress, no financial issues, no, you know, there's no arguing and screaming from the parents. | ||
| Like, what is it about kids that, right out of the vagina, are just a totally different person, like from day one? | ||
| You mean from each other? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| So different. | ||
| Well, so different. | ||
| That speaks to the fact that there are innate elements to our personhood, right? | ||
| Or astrology. | ||
| Or astrology, yes. | ||
| Maybe that's real. | ||
| Maybe you need to just come over to the mystical side a little bit, Mr. Scientist. | ||
| I think I need to do that. | ||
| Have you ever talked to someone who can read those charts? | ||
| My paternal aunt. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| You already forgot what we spoke about. | ||
| No, but can she read those charts? | ||
| No, she could read the coffee stains. | ||
| No, but that's nonsense. | ||
| I'm talking about astrological charts. | ||
| Okay, the real stuff. | ||
| Yeah, you know those people that can read those things where Mercury's in retrograde and they know where Pluto is, the time your dad came and your mom? | ||
| They can figure that stuff out. | ||
| I don't hang around in those circles, so unfortunately not, no. | ||
| Apparently there are people that are absolutely consumed by the uber complex aspects of astrology. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like real astrology. | ||
| Not like the stuff that you get in your Sunday paper. | ||
| Oh, I'm a Leo, so today's a good day to take a shit. | ||
| Whatever the hell it would be, right? | ||
| All those really random... | ||
| But apparently, there's just volumes of books written on constellations and the alignment of these constellations and where the stars are at any particular time, and it's dependent upon what time of year, what time of day. | ||
| Do you buy into that in any way, shape, or form? | ||
| Because there are a lot of people that believe that Leos have a very distinct personality and have distinct personality traits that are trackable. | ||
| I don't care about Leos. | ||
| I'm Libra. | ||
| Tell me about Libra. | ||
| Okay, I don't know about Libras. | ||
| I'm a Leo. | ||
| I don't even understand. | ||
| Libras are extremely good-looking, very charismatic, very brilliant. | ||
| What happened to you? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| I'm the outlier. | ||
| Outlier. | ||
| I'm the black sheep. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Black sheep. | ||
| That's triggering. | ||
| That's racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You triggered me. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Black sheep. | |
| And you said trigger, which is even more of a trigger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I'm so triggered. | ||
| I don't even know what to do. | ||
| Here was another one that I wanted to bring up with you about that trigger shit because it was something that you were helping about. | ||
| Yes, I sent you. | ||
| You sent me and I tweeted it. | ||
| I went wild with that one. | ||
| Oh my god, it was about- I was so angry. | ||
| The woman who was a professor- Laura Kipnis. | ||
| Yes, but explain the story because I'm searching for it. | ||
| So basically the idea is that there's all these movements about how horrifyingly violent campuses are in terms of sexual violence, which is of course not true. | ||
| And she had written an article where she was criticizing that position, sort of the lunacy, the hysteria involved with that narrative, right? | ||
| One out of every five women will be raped on campus, which is complete nonsense. | ||
| Is it nonsense? | ||
| It is. | ||
| What are the actual numbers? | ||
| So I haven't studied it carefully, but... | ||
| I thought that was true. | ||
| Well, because it depends how you defined, right? | ||
| I think if you look at them... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The male gaze is a form of visual rape. | ||
| That's why, by the way, I've written an article about this. | ||
| You should check it out. | ||
| The bikini is patriarchal oppression, while the burqa is liberating. | ||
| This is Western feminists who argue this, and they argue this because, exactly using the argument of the male gaze, since the burqa liberates women from the male gaze, and the bikini draws the male gaze, the bikini's bad, the burqa's good. | ||
| What is the grape smuggler? | ||
| What's the grape smuggler? | ||
| That's where men wear those little tiny little Jean-Claude Van Damme underwear things that people wear like in France and stuff. | ||
| You know, those little bikini boots for men. | ||
| That reference went over my head. | ||
| Oh, you mean like the little Speedos? | ||
| Yeah, Speedos. | ||
| But, well, women don't respond to the visual stimuli the way that men do to women, right? | ||
| Oh, you say that. | ||
| I mean, evolutionary psychology, come on. | ||
| Listen, when girls see Channing Tatum doing that magic mic shit, dancing around on stage, you tell me they're not responding to visual stimuli? | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| That's a bunch of convenient bullshit by guys who have shitty bodies, who don't want to think that their girlfriend's drooling at Channing Tatum. | ||
| With his little fucking Daisy Dukes on or whatever, how he's wearing his construction boots. | ||
| So you actually think that men and women are indistinguishable in the manner by which they respond to... | ||
| Didn't say that. | ||
| I didn't say that, but they absolutely respond visually. | ||
| They respond, of course. | ||
| That's why men want to have six-packs. | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Because girls get excited by it. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| I just don't think it's the same sort of... | ||
| I think there's pursuit stimuli, where a guy will see a girl who's got a hot body in a bikini and go, Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And they literally go running up to them to try to talk to them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't think that same thing happens with females to males as much. | ||
| But I think that's also... | ||
| Just gender roles, has to deal with testosterone, has to deal with many, many things, culture, normal behavior as far as male, female behavior. | ||
| I think both sexes, when they look at each other, are looking for important cues that are relevant to the mating market. | ||
| So you're absolutely right that women are looking. | ||
| For example, they like tight buttocks because that sends an important signal. | ||
| The guy's in shape. | ||
| The guy's in shape. | ||
| Good sperm. | ||
| The 0.9 waist to hip ratio on a man, sort of the male swimmer's build, is very attractive. | ||
| Wide shoulders, thin waist. | ||
| So I'm not suggesting that women don't respond to visual cues, but they certainly don't respond nearly as much as men. | ||
| I think they respond probably with an equal intensity, but not act in an equal intensity, and certainly not act in a threatening way. | ||
| And that's where the male gaze comes in. | ||
| So why aren't there a million male stripper shops targeting heterosexual women? | ||
| You should get into that market. | ||
| You make a lot of money. | ||
| There's a lot of male strip shows and in fact in Vegas those are the things that they advertise the airport when you go there the Thunder Down Under and all this jazz bunch of guys with their shirts off sweaty but women don't feel comfortable going into those environments the way men feel comfortable so they go in these Packs of wild, estrogen-oozing creatures, and they scream and yell. | ||
| I used to have a bit about it, that it's a totally, that Ladies' Night Out, it's a totally different kind of experience. | ||
| When they go, they scream and cheer and yell, where guys sit there and don't say much of anything. | ||
| They just kind of stare. | ||
| But that speaks to the sex difference, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's definitely a difference. | ||
| It's sisterhood of the ya-ya pants or whatever that is. | ||
| They're banding together, right? | ||
| But I just think that women don't have the correct outlet, which is why when a book like Fifty Shades of Grey comes out, they all go fucking bananas. | ||
| Like, finally, we've got a channel to funnel all of our sex urges through. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You see them, they're reading porn on planes. | ||
| You're passing by on planes, they're reading gag porn. | ||
| Well, by the way, if you want to understand male versus female sexuality... | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You do. | ||
| But please carry on. | ||
| If you want to understand male sexuality... | ||
| Then you do a content analysis of pornography. | ||
| If you want to understand female sexuality, you do a content analysis of romance novels. | ||
| So if you look at the archetype of the male hero in romance novels, irrespective of which culture the romance novel is written in, it could be Romania or Egypt or Newport Beach, He's always the same guy. | ||
| He's a tall guy. | ||
| He's got a six-pack. | ||
| He's a count, meaning a prey, right? | ||
| He's also a neurosurgeon. | ||
| He wrestles alligators on his six-pack. | ||
| He's reckless. | ||
| He's risky, but only to be tamed by the love of that one good woman, right? | ||
| So I've already told you about every single archetype that you've... | ||
| I mean, the same archetype in every romance novel. | ||
| The reason why the archetype is there is because it exactly caters to women's evolved fantasies. | ||
| Sometimes he's like half a chick. | ||
| Like he's got long hair and he has like very chick-like behavior. | ||
| He wears like flowing, very sheer shirts, which no guy in their right mind would ever wear. | ||
| And if you did wear in public, women would mock you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If you had long flowing Fabio hair and you had like a blouse on and you went out to a nightclub, people go, what the fuck is wrong with that guy? | ||
| But in a romance novel, you're on the cover, baby. | ||
| Well, because you have to also send out some cues of sensitivity, right? | ||
| Is that what that is? | ||
| The blouse? | ||
| It's a bit artistic. | ||
| It's a bit sensitive. | ||
| I think it's just not a real person. | ||
| Just like the vampires. | ||
| There's a reason why women fell in love with those fucking stupid vampires. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Vampires that don't even burn up in the sun. | ||
| They sparkle. | ||
| What was all that about? | ||
| I don't know those narratives. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Twilight, goddammit. | ||
| I don't watch that stuff. | ||
| You knew. | ||
| I'm too busy watching Lionel Messi. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, those books sold fucking millions of copies. | ||
| The vampire ones? | ||
| Yes, millions and millions of copies. | ||
| And they were essentially a form of romance, porn, vampire bullshit for chicks. | ||
| And again, these men in these books, these vampires, they didn't exist. | ||
| Not only did they not exist, they didn't make sense. | ||
| Like the main one, that one that, you know, there's Kristen, whatever the hell her name was, and Ed, whatever the fuck his name is, Rob, whatever the fuck his name is. | ||
| I don't know any of those references, but carry on. | ||
| The guy was supposed to be like 90 years old or something like that. | ||
| He got like in the Spanish plague is when he died. | ||
| And that's when he became a vampire. | ||
| But he has to still go to high school because when he became a vampire he was like 17. So he has to show up and go to high school with all normal people. | ||
| But he goes to high school in the Pacific Northwest because it's never sunny out. | ||
| So he doesn't glitter. | ||
| It's one of the dumbest fucking books of all time. | ||
| Why did you watch that stuff? | ||
| Well, I didn't. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But you know a lot about it. | ||
| I know a lot about it. | ||
| I watched little moments of it before I panicked and shut it off. | ||
| Actually, I did watch one of them. | ||
| I think I watched the second one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyway, point being, I watched the one where they became werewolves. | |
| It was fucking so stupid. | ||
| It made me mad. | ||
| But, point being, like, this guy is 90 fucking years old and he's hanging around with a 17-year-old. | ||
| That guy's an asshole, right? | ||
| He's pretending to be 17. He falls in love with a 17-year-old and even has sex with her eventually. | ||
| Which is pedophilia. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not just pedophilia, but like, what the fuck is wrong with you? | ||
| What do you have in common? | ||
| You've been around for 90 years and you've got something in common with this girl who's 17 years old. | ||
| It's fucking ridiculous. | ||
| More than 90 years, really. | ||
| Because in the 1920s or whatever the hell it was, We're assuming that he was, you know, 17 years old then. | ||
| So he's more than 100 years old. | ||
| It's the dumbest fucking book of all time. | ||
| But it was huge. | ||
| Women loved it. | ||
| And it didn't represent a real person. | ||
| It represented the exact opposite of a real person. | ||
| Like, what guys like actually exists. | ||
| Guys like sluts, okay? | ||
| And those are real. | ||
| And when I say sluts, it's with all due respect. | ||
| I'm not slut-shaming, which is, by the way, another trigger. | ||
| Don't slut-shame. | ||
| Because then you're mocking girls for their ability to choose their sexual partners, and that's part of the patriarchy. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| It is, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I'm strongly against the patriarchy. | ||
| Are you going to get in trouble for this podcast in any way? | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| Last time you didn't? | ||
| No. | ||
| No one said anything? | ||
| I mean, some trolls. | ||
| Did they? | ||
| Usually it was the Jew, the Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. | ||
| They got mad at you for being Jewish? | ||
| Jew, he's a Zionist shill, Jew. | ||
| That's usually the extent of the negative stuff. | ||
| Goddamn Zionist shills. | ||
| Let's go back to your friend, Laura Kipnis. | ||
| How do you say her name? | ||
| Kipnis. | ||
| Kipnis. | ||
| Laura Kipnis. | ||
| She's a professor at Northwestern University. | ||
| So she wrote this essay, A Chronicle of Higher Education. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And in the article in The Atlantic, it brings it up. | ||
| Describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia. | ||
| And she was then subject to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And by a tweet that she sent, filed a Chapter 9 complaint against her. | ||
| Now what does that mean? | ||
| I think it's that women should have equal access to education and so on and be in a safe... | ||
| So she was somehow suppressing that? | ||
| Well, because by her making light of the endemic sexual violence on campus, in quotes, she was condoning it. | ||
| And therefore, she was making all these women feel unsafe and unwelcome and threatened on campus. | ||
| And so two students started that process. | ||
| Now, I don't know the details. | ||
| I mean, I'm not a constitutional lawyer. | ||
| But basically, once sort of the complaint is filed, then sort of the train starts. | ||
| And it becomes this Orwellian thing that's just – I mean, it's a complete nightmare. | ||
| And so I read that stuff, and I just got so angry. | ||
| And I spent pretty much that whole day – Rallying up the forces and you were kind enough to tweet it and just, you know, your tweet got me something like a hundred thousand views. | ||
| And then I communicated with her because I wanted to send her a signal that, you know, there are some of us that still have testicular fortitude that are willing to, I mean, in academia. | ||
| You shouldn't even say testicular fortitude. | ||
| What about your women, YN, counterparts, compatriots? | ||
| And so, you know, I just wanted to tell her that some of us were supporting her. | ||
| Yeah, I read it and I thought it was really disturbing. | ||
| I thought it was really disturbing because it seems so common. | ||
| That's the most disturbing aspect of it. | ||
| It's not some unusual occurrence where kids are freaking out about nothing and overreacting where you'd look at it like, what is this? | ||
| It's like, oh, this again. | ||
| And that's what bugs me the most about it. | ||
| It's this again. | ||
| It's the idea that looking at data and looking at the realities of the climate of free speech on these campuses and how it's suppressed and it's not free speech. | ||
| You are free to think as they do. | ||
| And if you don't think as they do, you are not free. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| This issue of how cowardly most academics have become, and I say this realizing that I'm going to piss off many of my colleagues, I'm astonished how academics who are in the business of engaging in public discourse are so tepid because they've been silenced into fear. | ||
| And I mean, I see it in many, many different ways, but I'll just share one example, which I think I shared in another show recently. | ||
| So I put up a clip on Facebook of an Iraqi astronomer who was arguing that in the Quran it says that the Earth is flat and it's clear that the Earth is flat. | ||
| So I shared that clip to demonstrate sort of the lunacy that religious dogma can have on an otherwise supposedly intelligent person. | ||
| I mean an Iraqi astronomer. | ||
| Now, what do you think the reaction was? | ||
| Islamophobia, Zionist, asshole. | ||
| He's allowed to have those thoughts. | ||
| He's part of a suppressed culture. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So she didn't have the courage to tackle me that way, but she wrote publicly, not privately. | ||
| This was an academic white woman from California who's writhen with guilt. | ||
| I hate her already. | ||
| She wrote to me saying, you know, don't you think that, you know, it's bad of you to be sharing this? | ||
| Don't you think it's bad that you're sort of stigmatizing them? | ||
| So step for a second and think about what this means, right? | ||
| This scientist colleague of mine was not offended that a fellow scientist would actually hold such a astonishingly false position, right? | ||
| He's a member of the Flat Earth Society. | ||
| Rather, she was offended that I would point to his lunacy. | ||
| So I think that small anecdote really captures the culture of fear that you see on campuses. | ||
| And in a sense, if I can sort of toot my own horn, I'm really a very rare breed, sort of the guy who walks around not caring, saying it as it is, because that's my personality. | ||
| I can't be anything else. | ||
| But you also are a very open-minded guy. | ||
| And so when it comes down to the core values that these people promote, whether it is lack of racial insensitivity or racial stereotyping, gender issues, whether it's sexism or homophobia, you're on the liberal side of all that stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| So you're essentially a liberal, right? | ||
| If I can say I'm a true liberal, not the liberals that exist today. | ||
| Because the liberals of today, as our common friend Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have said, have a huge blind spot when it comes to certain issues where they fall really on the wrong side of the issue. | ||
| So a true liberal is one who doesn't mince word, who doesn't fall prey to cultural and moral relativism, who doesn't say, well, who are we to judge the cutting off of clitorises of women? | ||
| That's their culture, right? | ||
| So that's a true liberal. | ||
| So I'm a true liberal. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're fake liberals. | ||
| Well, I think what they're doing is they're subscribing to the current trend of discourse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And the current trend of discourse is anything Islamic, leave it alone. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think a lot of that's being a pussy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I really do. | ||
| I think a lot of that is cowardice. | ||
| They're afraid of backlash. | ||
| They're afraid of the label Islamophobia. | ||
| It's a very strange label because there's no Christianophobia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And even anti-Semitic, you know... | ||
| There's a certain amount of anti-Semitic logic and thinking that is promoted in certain Islamic cultures that's ignored as well. | ||
| So you can get away with that in certain ways. | ||
| Like, did you see that video of the guy that was walking through Paris dressed in a very Jewish way? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Whoa, was that fucking disturbing. | ||
| If you haven't seen it, it's just showing how openly... | ||
| In the most sickening way, openly anti-Jewish so many people are in Paris. | ||
| And by the way, I should make it clear, and of course now there will be the hate comments, it's not anti-Israel, right? | ||
| It's anti-Jewish. | ||
| Yes, it's anti-Jewish. | ||
| It's anti-Semitic, 100%. | ||
| I don't like the term Semitic because Semitic is like Semitic people. | ||
| It represents a lot of people that aren't Jewish. | ||
| It's anti-Jewish, right? | ||
| I mean, although the term is understood typically, anti-Semitic means it's synonymous, but your point is well taken. | ||
| Why is it anti-Semitic? | ||
| Because there's a lot of Semitic cultures that aren't Jewish. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I don't know the original historical context for why that term... | ||
| But when you want to appear to be smart, you say anti-Semitic. | ||
| You don't say anti-Jewish. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It sounds a bit more... | ||
| More educated. | ||
| More educated. | ||
| Since I'm a confirmed dummy, I can go with anti-Jewish. | ||
| I think I'm doing the right thing. | ||
| You can't be a dummy and a good comic, which you are, because as I think we might have discussed before, or maybe we didn't, there is a correlation between being funny and being highly intelligent. | ||
| But you probably have, there's a type of intelligence. | ||
| Like, mathematically, I'm basically retarded. | ||
| I'm really bad. | ||
| But you probably have good social intelligence, right? | ||
| Because how else are you able to come up with those anecdotes, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have acuity to see patterns in terms of social interactions. | ||
| Otherwise, what would be funny about the show? | ||
| I'm not much for patting myself on the back, so I'll let you do that real quick, and then we'll move on. | ||
| I'm overwhelmed by your charisma, Joe. | ||
| Thank you very much, sir. | ||
| But getting back to this video, I didn't see anyone freaking out over it, but anything that maybe Sam Harris, our friend, would say... | ||
| Overblown and blown out of proportion to the extreme because it's a target. | ||
| Because that label, Islamophobia, is so easy. | ||
| Like, when Ben Affleck, that fucking dumbass, when he went after him on the Bill Maher show and just really, like... | ||
| It was such an obvious ploy to fit into that idea. | ||
| It wasn't like a well thought out, well examined point of view. | ||
| It was like, I can't believe what you're saying. | ||
| What you're saying is so racist. | ||
| He's arrogant in his ignorance. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Arrogant in the fact that he felt like this was an easy thing to pull off. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| And he'd get the applause from the audience. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| He was searching for social brownie points, surfing social brownie points. | ||
| But going back to the anti-Jewish stuff, I mean, I grew up in Lebanon, as you know, and I'm Jewish. | ||
| I mean, I'm an atheist, but I'm Jewish. | ||
| Tough action. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By the way, for anybody who's going to write and say, but how could he be Jewish and an atheist? | ||
| You can be both. | ||
| Some of the most famous Jews were all atheists. | ||
| Judaism is more than just adherence to a set of religious narratives, right? | ||
| There's There's a cultural element. | ||
| There is a historical element. | ||
| There are all sorts of facets to being Jewish that don't necessarily mean you have to believe in bugabuga stuff, right? | ||
| Booga booga! | ||
| Now I'm going to get hate mail from the rabbis. | ||
| You're going to get hate from the booga boogas, too. | ||
| But anyways, so I grew up in Lebanon. | ||
| Now you might say, oh, but Lebanon was such a progressive, tolerant, wonderful place where everybody got along. | ||
| I wouldn't say that. | ||
| I used to date a Lebanese girl. | ||
| And what did she say? | ||
| She told me it was fucking craziness. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| But she was... | ||
| Well, she grew up in America, but her family was from Lebanon. | ||
| Well, the typical sort of narrative that you hear is that Lebanon was, of all countries in the Middle East, was the most progressive one. | ||
| And to some extent, that was true. | ||
| But what they don't understand is that progressive in the context of the Middle East is very, very different than progressive in the West, right? | ||
| So if you were Jewish, you were, quote, tolerated. | ||
| That means that we'll tolerate you until we no longer tolerate you. | ||
| And hence, that's why we left Lebanon, because we were going to be executed, right? | ||
| So I grew up sort of with a dark secret. | ||
| I'm Jewish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, right? | |
| You didn't wear a Star of David. | ||
| Now, if people wanted to find out if you were Jewish, they could easily do that. | ||
| They could go to synagogue on Saturday. | ||
| So it's not as though it was absolutely hidden. | ||
| But you certainly, you know, know your place amongst the greater crowd. | ||
| You're a minority and we tolerate you. | ||
| You live, if you like, I don't know if you know the term. | ||
| Do you know the term dimmi? | ||
| No. | ||
| Dimmi is a second, third-class citizen as enshrined in the Islamic texts for people of the book, meaning Christians and Jews, meaning monotheists, right? | ||
| Not the pagans, not the polytheists, not the Hindus, not the Buddhists, not the atheists, but Jews and Christians. | ||
| Under Islamic law could be afforded protection as long as they pay the jizya. | ||
| That means they pay sort of a pull tax to be protected by their Muslim overlords. | ||
| That's called to live as a dhimmi. | ||
| So in Lebanon, you didn't officially have to pay that pull tax, but what you did is you knew your place. | ||
| So for example, my brother David, who was a... | ||
| You would like this because you're a fighter guy, MMA guy. | ||
| He used to be in the Olympics in judo in 1976. Well, in the early 70s, he had won several Lebanese championships. | ||
| And then one day, he was visited by some guys who told him that, you know, Jew boy, it's time to sort of stop winning, so it's time to retire, or else you might end up at the bottom of a river. | ||
| Then he left to pursue his career in Judo in France. | ||
| This was before the Civil War started. | ||
| When we escaped Lebanon, I mean, literally, we're escaping execution. | ||
| This is the first time that anybody hears this particular story. | ||
| So that's your birthday gift. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So as the captain said that we were out of Lebanese airspace, this is when we're leaving Lebanon to emigrate to Canada. | ||
| And he says, we're out of Lebanese. | ||
| My mother takes out a Star of David, puts it around my neck and says, now you don't have to hide who you are. | ||
| Now this is in progressive Lebanon, pluralistic Lebanon. | ||
| So now watch what's going to happen now. | ||
| I'm going to receive comments of people saying, what a hate monger he is. | ||
| He's just trying to make those other folks look bad. | ||
| So my whole personal history is somehow negated. | ||
| I'm either making it up Or, why am I talking about this? | ||
| So I'm the hateful guy for mentioning that I escaped execution of others. | ||
| Well, I don't think you should pay those people any mind. | ||
| Certainly not address them when they're not even communicating with you. | ||
| You're sort of artificially bringing up their voices and then responding to their voices. | ||
| There's no need for that, Godfather. | ||
| Let's move on. | ||
| But this, it disturbed me that this video wasn't, this video of this guy walking through Paris. | ||
| Was he, he was a Jewish gentleman who was dressed very obviously Jewish? | ||
| I don't know if he was Jewish or not, but he was, exactly. | ||
| It was like that girl that walked through Manhattan and got all the cat calls. | ||
| Cat calls, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was exactly. | |
| The idea behind it was to sort of let everybody know. | ||
| There's a similar, there's almost the identical clip in Cairo. | ||
| You could look it up on YouTube, where a guy wears sort of the Hasidic look, and he starts walking around Cairo, and it's not pretty what happens. | ||
| Oof, lucky you didn't get killed. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It's just so fucking crazy that we're in this world where we're at now, where people are so terrified of the label Islamophobia and of Islam, of what happened with Charlie Hebdo. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Things along those lines. | ||
| Charlie Hebdo, if you don't know the story, it's a magazine in Paris. | ||
| They would draw these cartoons of Muhammad, and all the cartoonists were killed by gunmen, Muslim gunmen. | ||
| So what does it say right here? | ||
| Scroll down up to the top, please, Jamie. | ||
| Watch the abuse the Jewish man gets as he walks through Paris, and this is from time.com. | ||
| And it's just fucking crazy. | ||
| The team filmed for 10 hours to get 90 seconds of material that they had to go to the roughest parts of Paris to get. | ||
| Oh, so they're saying, okay, so this is very similar. | ||
| So what they're saying, I guess, is that they really kind of blew it out of proportion because they edited it down from this 10 hours to get 90 seconds? | ||
| Is that what they're saying, Jamie? | ||
| Is that 90 seconds? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, you don't need to watch this YouTube clip. | ||
| I just have to tell you about my personal history in Lebanon. | ||
| Do you want to hear some more stuff? | ||
| Sure, please. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| I'm maybe nine years old, maybe equivalent of grade four here, grade three or four. | ||
| Teacher says, okay, everybody, here's the exercise for the next, whatever, half an hour. | ||
| Get up and tell the class what you want to be when you grow up. | ||
| So, hi, my name... | ||
| I want to be a soccer player. | ||
| I want to be a policeman. | ||
| I want to be this. | ||
| Hisham gets up. | ||
| I remember his name. | ||
| I actually can even recognize his face in the old photos. | ||
| He says, when I grow up, teacher, I want to be a Jew killer. | ||
| Jew killer, Jew killer. | ||
| Everybody breaks out into applause. | ||
| Now, does that mean that everybody in Lebanon was this rabid anti-Semite? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| But are those feelings pervasive throughout every social fabric, whether it be on TV, in political speeches, in dramas, in soap operas? | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| It's endemic to every single DNA of those societies. | ||
| And so that's why you have these types of problems. | ||
| I'll give you another quick example. | ||
| Let's go over that one real quick, if you don't mind. | ||
| Now we're getting into some serious stuff. | ||
| 9, 8, 10, I'm not sure. | ||
| Whatever it was in that area. | ||
| And what was going through your mind? | ||
| And this is a time where you kind of, as you said, you knew your place, so you didn't openly talk about your Judaism? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you just, you know... | ||
| Did people know you were Jewish? | ||
| People could know you're Jewish. | ||
| Did you think your students did? | ||
| No, I was a student. | ||
| But do you think the students, I mean, just your students, your fellow students. | ||
| Oh, my fellow students, my cohorts. | ||
| I think many of them probably didn't know that I was Jewish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm almost certain. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I didn't sit there and talk about these issues. | ||
| So when this kid said, Jew killer, what the fuck, man? | ||
| What did that feel like? | ||
| Well, it feels like you're different. | ||
| It feels like you're in a precarious situation always. | ||
| It feels like You know, in French there's an expression, sois belle et taitois, which means be pretty and sit quietly, right? | ||
| That's what it is, know your place, okay? | ||
| So that's what it means to be tolerant, right? | ||
| To be tolerated. | ||
| It's not that you're equal, right? | ||
| You're never equal. | ||
| You can't be Prime Minister of Lebanon as a Jew. | ||
| I'll give you another quick story. | ||
| Do you know all Egyptian politics from, say, the 70s? | ||
| Abdel Nasser was a famous pan-Arabist who brought together the Arab world. | ||
| He was an Egyptian president who was viewed as the hero because he was going to sort of unite the Arab world against the colonial powers and so on. | ||
| And so he was this kind of larger-than-life superhero of the Arab world. | ||
| When he died in 1970, As often happens in the Middle East, there are all these incredibly sort of violent demonstrations on the streets. | ||
| And I was sitting in my house. | ||
| I was maybe five years old, almost six. | ||
| And as this mass of people passed by, all you hear, death to Jews, death to Jews. | ||
| What did the Jews have to do with this politician? | ||
| Passing away in Egypt. | ||
| But that's just the reflex, right? | ||
| I mean, it must be some Zionist conspiracy. | ||
| So I'm sitting there sort of hiding in my balcony as these people are passing, and it's etched in my memory the chants of death to Jews. | ||
| And there are all these sort of Arabic chants that I could repeat now, but people wouldn't understand them. | ||
| That's just part of how things were. | ||
| Now, does that mean that on every single day of my life there I was being persecuted? | ||
| Of course not, right? | ||
| I mean, I lived a normal life until I was going to be executed. | ||
| So that's the reality of the Middle East. | ||
| And that's why today you almost have no religious minorities to speak of anywhere in the Middle East, right? | ||
| I mean, the remaining bastions of Christianity in the Middle East are now either being clobbered or they're forced to leave, right? | ||
| In Iraq. | ||
| In the Copts in Egypt. | ||
| To some extent, now we're seeing it also in Nigeria. | ||
| And so, you know, this idea that we all kind of coexist in the Middle East is baloney. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| You're tolerated at best. | ||
| What was the percentage of people that were Jews in Lebanon when you were there? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we were part of the last remaining Jews in Lebanon. | ||
| At one point, I think, I could be off on the numbers, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, later maybe in the descriptor. | ||
| Maybe 15,000 at most, 15, 20,000 out of a population of about maybe 3 million at the zenith of, right? | ||
| So a very small minority. | ||
| Now, when Israel came along in 1948, it made it that much more difficult to be Jewish in Arab countries. | ||
| Now, this is not to give cover to anti-Semitism, which is independent of Israel, right? | ||
| Anti-Semitism has existed for 1,400 years in those parts of the world. | ||
| Independently of Israel. | ||
| But once Israel came about in 1948, it just made it that much more precarious for Jews to live in Libya and in Iraq and in Egypt and in Syria and in Lebanon. | ||
| And so there'd be these mass exoduses of Jews from Arab lands, sometimes forced, other times by choice because it just became untenable for Jews to be there. | ||
| We were part of the last wave of remaining Jews because we were very entrenched within, you know, Lebanese society. | ||
| But then once the Civil War started, it just wasn't possible to be there. | ||
| In Lebanon, you had these internal ID cards that you carried around, like a passport, but internally, that stated your religion on it. | ||
| So in the context of the Lebanese Civil War, where they would set up these roadblocks, these militia would set up roadblocks, if you get to a roadblock and somebody says, in Arabic, you say, give me your ID card. | ||
| Well, that ID card has your religion on it. | ||
| If you're the wrong religion, it's goodbye. | ||
| Well, that was what's going on with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Fucking roadblocks. | ||
| Roadblocks to kill people. | ||
| Well, the problem in the Middle East is that you have endless Abrahamic religions. | ||
| And again, it's not just the Muslims. | ||
| And I'm not trying to be relativists here. | ||
| But all the Abrahamic religions sort of have a narrative of uniqueness. | ||
| And it's very, very hard to coexist when, you know, each of us is the chosen people. | ||
| I have my theory about the Middle East. | ||
| And my theory is that they're the townies of the world. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Townies are the people that never left their neighborhood. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| And if you look at the cradle of civilization, it's Babylon. | ||
| It's Sumer. | ||
| That's the oldest written language, oldest mathematics. | ||
| That's where Iraq is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that area is a clusterfuck today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And everybody moved out of there. | ||
| Everybody moved out of Africa. | ||
| Africa's chaos, right? | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| I think that much like small towns you grow up in, if you go back to it, you go, Jesus, these fucking assholes are still hanging around the high school, you know, being annoying at the gas station. | ||
| They're the same people. | ||
| They're stuck in the same ways. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They have not evolved. | ||
| They have not moved past like the rest of the world has. | ||
| And it seems like with a lot of these religions... | ||
| They're so rigid in their ideology and the standards of their behavior and the classifications of the individuals that are involved in it that it's almost inescapable. | ||
| These rigid ideologies seem like it's... | ||
| Any idea of progressive thinking or progressive thought, it's almost... | ||
| They're almost mutually exclusive. | ||
| You can't have that and exist in that form. | ||
| You know, coalitional thinking is an endemic part of human psychology, right? | ||
| The idea of us versus them is part of human nature. | ||
| And what these Abrahamic religions do is they take this and they put it on steroids, right? | ||
| There's a great study, I can't remember who it is, or I might botch it up a bit, but it goes something like this. | ||
| You bring in people into the lab, And you make them wait in a waiting area. | ||
| And you just put a sticker, either blue or red, on them. | ||
| And then you say, oh, you know, I'm going to come back in a few minutes. | ||
| I'm going to go off to do something else. | ||
| I'll be back in a few minutes. | ||
| The real point of the experiment is to see what people end up doing during that time that you're out. | ||
| What do you think happens? | ||
| The people who have the red stickers start speaking to each other. | ||
| So you're taking a completely random cue And you're forcing people to now assort along that queue, right? | ||
| Now it no longer matters what my sexual orientation is or whether I'm Muslim or Christian or Jewish. | ||
| It's red people band together versus blue people. | ||
| There are various versions of this experiment that have been done in classic social psychology. | ||
| But what that speaks to is this This inescapable trap of coalitional psychology. | ||
| And that's what happens in the Middle East. | ||
| Everything is viewed through the prism of my faith, and anybody who's not my faith is the other. | ||
| And the other is not to be trusted, is to be hated, is to be scorned out. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that every single person subscribes to that, but it certainly means that the narrative, the religious narrative, certainly condones that. | ||
| Yeah, with rigid ideologies and tribal behavior, and then add that to a very harsh environment, physical environment, where it's just unforgiving, it's real hard to move past that. | ||
| It's real hard to find forgiveness and enlightenment and see. | ||
| As a matter of fact, that was one of the things, it's another issue that I believe it was Michael Shermer who wrote an article about the difference between Islam and some of the other religions, is that they never went through the enlightenment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I think one of the problems, one of the... | ||
| You now see many vociferous public intellectuals that are coming out to call for an Islamic reformation. | ||
| But that's actually been happening for 1,400 years. | ||
| The problem is, it's easy to call for a reformation if you assume that there's something to be reformed. | ||
| If you think it's perfect, there's nothing to be reformed. | ||
| You're an apostate for even considering that. | ||
| But if you're going to reform it, how do you go about doing that? | ||
| When one of the tenets, the starting tenets, is that in Arabic you say... | ||
| meaning every single letter of the Quran is immutable, is eternal, and is perfect. | ||
| Well, how can you have an exegesis, how could you, exegesis, like, I'm not pronouncing it right, but like, how could you interpret text or reinterpret text when in reality you doing that becomes a form of apostasy, sacrilegious, right? | ||
| So that's the problem. | ||
| In the context of the other Abrahamic religions, There was the capacity for the light of reformation to squeeze its way into those little holes so there could be new interpretations and so on. | ||
| In Islam, it's a bit more of a challenge. | ||
| So what about people that are Islamic reformers, who are the members of the people? | ||
| There are people today that consider themselves Muslim, but also are atheists. | ||
| There are people that consider themselves Muslims, like you consider yourself a Jew, but you're an atheist. | ||
| What about those people that aren't so ideologically rigid? | ||
| They all moved, right? | ||
| They all moved out of the Middle East. | ||
| They certainly never openly stated their non-belief in the Middle East. | ||
| Did they eat during Ramadan? | ||
| That would not be good. | ||
| That would not be good. | ||
| They'll fuck you up if you eat during Ramadan, right? | ||
| Well, and certainly ISIS now has killed many people who violated Ramadan rules. | ||
| Now, of course, then you'll hear back that they're not really, they're not Islamic, right? | ||
| I do hear that. | ||
| Listen, I've engaged people in various forms where we start chatting and then I'll quote something from, say, do you know who Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is? | ||
| He's the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the foremost leaders of the Sunni sect as a religious scholar, right? | ||
| I mean, all the perfect right pedigree from an Islamic scholar's perspective. | ||
| So I'll quote something by him. | ||
| What do you think the rebuttal will be? | ||
| What? | ||
| He's not a real Muslim. | ||
| Then I'll quote something from al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph of ISIS, who has a PhD in Islamic studies. | ||
| What do you think they'll answer? | ||
| He's not a real Muslim. | ||
| So it's play hide the ball, right? | ||
| So if you have so much duplicity in your discourse that guys who by definition are leaders and experts of Islam who are then being, you pretend that they're not Muslim because they say something that you find objectionable, then how can we have an open and honest discourse? | ||
| You can't. | ||
| So how do we fix that? | ||
| That's my running theme, by the way, in this podcast. | ||
| How do we fix this? | ||
| I think we fix it by having people who have the courage, as some of your guests have, and maybe I can include myself in this group, who are open, who are honest, who are reasonable, who are not filled with hate, who are dispassionate. | ||
| Also, they moved. | ||
| All of them moved. | ||
| Moved out of the Middle Eastern. | ||
| So you're saying that they can't implement these changes on the ground? | ||
| I'm not saying that, but I'm like, how do you? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think if I've got the answer, then I would be getting the Nobel Prize. | ||
| Who was the writer, something Roy, that was hacked to death with a machete recently? | ||
| Oh, the Bangladeshi. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's been four of them so far. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was somewhere else doing some sort of a speech on his book. | ||
| And then he went back to Bangladesh and he was hacked, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, hacked to death by machetes on the street in front of him. | ||
| His wife was hacked up, too. | ||
| It was horrible. | ||
| You know what the response is when I've challenged people on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| What they did was not Islamic. | ||
| Look, let me give you an example. | ||
| There was a recent Orthodox Jew in a gay pride parade in Tel Aviv. | ||
| Did you hear about this? | ||
| Yeah, I did hear about this. | ||
| He was stabbing people. | ||
| Stabbing people, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he didn't do this because he was alienated. | ||
| He didn't do this as a response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. | ||
| I'm using examples, by the way, from Russell Brand's The comedian Russell Brand? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The luminary Russell Brand? | ||
| Sarcastically, yes. | ||
| He basically was arguing that he came up with every single possible cause that you could think of other than religious fervor to explain why people move 4,000 miles away to join ISIS. It was due. | ||
| So let me give you a few. | ||
| There were about maybe seven or eight I covered on my YouTube clip, but I'll try to come up with three or four. | ||
| They were alienated. | ||
| They felt that they weren't part of the political process. | ||
| Want to say it the way he says it? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| They were alienated? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They didn't feel like they were part of the political process? | |
| Yeah, I can't do it as well as you can. | ||
| They were upset about the financial meltdown in 2007, 2008. Financial meltdown? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They hated greedy, rampant, evil capitalism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Greedy, rampant capitalism! | |
| Right. | ||
| Am I saying all the right words? | ||
| Very good. | ||
| So, I mean, really? | ||
| That's the reason why people join... | ||
| It has nothing to do with religion. | ||
| Absolutely nothing to do with it. | ||
| So how could we have an honest discourse when this is the kind of nonsense that you keep hearing? | ||
| But you're talking to comedians. | ||
| And again, you're talking to a comedian right now. | ||
| So don't expect any logic out of this either. | ||
| No, but some people actually challenge me and say, well, why do you even take the time... | ||
| To counter this guy's views. | ||
| Well, and my answer is, he's got a lot bigger platform than I do. | ||
| He has much more power to influence minds than I do. | ||
| It doesn't matter that I might be better equipped than him. | ||
| As does Ben Affleck. | ||
| As does Ben Affleck. | ||
| And it's the same sort of thing, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it seems like they're both kind of fishing for social brownie points. | ||
| Right instead of calling it Islam or instead of calling it anything if you just looked at it as a pattern of behavior And if you look to that pattern of behavior this ideological pattern or behavior that would seek out to murder people They don't agree with those thoughts any rational person would go well | ||
| Well, that's crazy That's these people are fucked like this is bad We can't tolerate this but once you start calling it anything whether you call it Islam or just fill in the blank make up your own name for it and then that becomes an oppressed segment of our civilization and Or at least thought of as an oppressed or boxed into that political sort of segment where you're not supposed to shit on it because it's thought to be marginalized already. | ||
| And you're just piling on. | ||
| I want to go back in a second to the Jewish guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please do. | |
| But let me answer this last point you made. | ||
| Do you think that in the 57 countries that are a member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the OIC, Muslims are marginalized? | ||
| No, right? | ||
| In most of those 57 countries, they constitute an extraordinary majority, if not complete majority, right? | ||
| So this narrative that Muslims are marginalized is really laughable because if you think about Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and on and on and on. | ||
| They're not marginalized. | ||
| They constitute 99% to 100% of the population, right? | ||
| If anything, it's the religious minorities that are no longer existent there that have been marginalized, right? | ||
| Or eliminated. | ||
| Or eliminated or genocidally removed. | ||
| So it's an informational war. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's the most important part. | ||
| It's an informational war and that information and ideology. | ||
| It's these things. | ||
| These are thoughts and patterns. | ||
| Instead of calling them religion, instead of calling this cherished tradition or cultural... | ||
| Ancient thing that you're supposed to worship, instead of calling it that, it's ideas. | ||
| These are ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| These ideas that this ancient script is directly handed down from God, that every word is perfect, if that's not preposterous, you tell me what the fuck is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Because I get real confused when people who grew up without any science, I mean, they literally knew almost nothing when they wrote this in comparison to what we know today. | ||
| Obviously back then they were scholars, but In comparison, it's laughable to think that anybody had all the answers in 1200. What year was the Quran written, supposedly? | ||
| In terms of the revelations? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So 600-something. | ||
| 600. So 600 AD. Yep. | ||
| About 1400 years ago. | ||
| Try reading any fucking textbook from 1400 years ago and finding correct information. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What year was Galileo prosecuted? | ||
| 15-something? | ||
| Going back to the Jewish guy, I tweeted about it and I shared it. | ||
| And of course, he undoubtedly got his ideas from, I think, reading Leviticus, where, you know, if you lay with another man, you should be killed and so on, right? | ||
| So if I make that claim, right, which is an absolutely correct claim, that for this guy who took his Old Testament very seriously and then went around knifing people, It's an absolutely appropriate claim to make. | ||
| I didn't get attacked as anti-Semitic, right? | ||
| I mean, everybody says, yeah, no kidding. | ||
| An Orthodox Jew, which is very rare for an Orthodox Jew to go around killing people. | ||
| But the fact that I could make that link, there was no blowback. | ||
| But unfortunately, the West has now been convinced that if you ever make that link for one particular religion, then you are hateful. | ||
| That's a profoundly dangerous situation to be in. | ||
| It seems to be legal in this game, you can shit all over Christians. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| As a matter of fact, if you do that, you're really progressive. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Amongst my academic friends, if you repeatedly demonstrate what a bunch of buffoons these Christian hicks are, then that garners you brownie points. | ||
| Yeah, why are Christian hicks any less profound Because Islam wrongly is associated with brown people. | ||
| And you don't mess with that. | ||
| Yeah, but a lot of Baptists are black. | ||
| True, true. | ||
| Do people mock Southern Baptists as much as they mock like... | ||
| That's an open empirical question. | ||
| It's a good question, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good question. | ||
| I bet they kind of leave that alone. | ||
| They start singing and chanting. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's folksy. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's soulful. | |
| There's a lot of black people involved. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Soulful. | |
| They're singing. | ||
| It's apostolic. | ||
| It's like an apostle. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| So it's tough dealing with all this stuff on a daily basis on Twitter and so on. | ||
| Well, people don't want to be judged in a negative way, and especially in this society, in this culture, in this easy-to-act culture, because it's really easy to make a tweet about someone or write a Facebook post about someone or a blog entry about someone attacking them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then once you've done that, boy, you have opened up the floodgates. | ||
| And they will just experience all sorts of pylons from all these other people that either agree or support or don't want to be labeled such themselves. | ||
| So they'll attack you to make sure everyone knows that they're not like you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's interesting that you say this because some of the biggest blowback I've gotten on my public Facebook page has been whenever I've called out Russell Brand on something. | ||
| Apparently, some of my fans are also Russell Brand fans, which I don't know how these two worldviews can coexist. | ||
| But they got really upset that, you know, I was being elitist. | ||
| You know, he's doing a lot of social good. | ||
| Yes, some of his stuff is quackery, but he's a good guy. | ||
| His heart is in the right place. | ||
| And I'm being an asshole for criticizing him. | ||
| And I really, really vitriol for some of these folks. | ||
| But you don't know. | ||
| You've never lived in the middle. | ||
| Oh, wait. | ||
| You've never heard anybody yell, kill the... | ||
| Oh, you did. | ||
| Now, incidentally, I should mention that my first exposure to Russell Brand, before I knew about all his political stuff... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Funny movies. | |
| Well, exactly. | ||
| And one in particular... | ||
| Did some great movies. | ||
| One in particular, which I must have seen about 10 times, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. | ||
| Great movie. | ||
| And so I've sat there and laughed and thought he was a very funny guy. | ||
| And then I came across his political rants, and I no longer thought he was such a cool guy. | ||
| Well, as I've said on Twitter, I believe that he is neck deep in hippie pussy right now and really has no idea what's going on. | ||
| I think it cuts off his circulation. | ||
| When there's that much hippie pussy coming at you, I think the circulation to your brain, it's very hard for the heart to pump it through all the kisses that he receives on his neck. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the going theory? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's my theory. | ||
| I think it's a pretty good one. | ||
| Oh, dude, they throw themselves at that poor guy. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He's beautiful. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Used to date Katy Perry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Did he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Married to her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| Shazam, son. | ||
| So what happened to that blissful union? | ||
| He had to save the world, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's true. | |
| Come out of time for pop stars. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| California girl. | ||
| All that frivolous shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By the way, she was very religious. | ||
| She was? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't know her exact story, but apparently... | ||
| She was very, very religious and her original sort of foray into the music industry was all that sort of religious music. | ||
| And then when that sort of didn't stick, then she became, you know, kind of deviated from that and became a pop star. | ||
| But her roots are very much, you know, Christian based. | ||
| Well, you know, I think that a lot of these folks, that they're trying to do good, like Russell, I probably get along with him great if I sat down and talked to him. | ||
| And I think when I hear him talk and I hear the things that he's saying, I feel like he is doing a lot of good. | ||
| I think he is opening up a lot of people's eyes because he is a very public figure, and he is saying a lot of things that make a lot of sense about the financial world, about... | ||
| About war and about the nature of controlling natural resources. | ||
| There's a lot of things that he says that I agree with. | ||
| But I think that when you get caught up in that world, there are some very clear sort of behavior patterns that you have to subscribe to. | ||
| And this Islamophobia label is one you want to avoid at all fucking costs. | ||
| If you get hit with that one, that's a heavy one today. | ||
| It's a heavy one in this politically charged world. | ||
| You know, I made this point on a show recently that in the West, the Islam narrative doesn't yet have the power to literally behead people. | ||
| I mean, if you say some really nasty stuff against Islam in the Middle East, well, we can solve that problem easily. | ||
| We get rid of you. | ||
| But in the West, what you could do is you could behead somebody's reputation, right? | ||
| I mean, a metaphorical beheading. | ||
| And that's what happens to guys like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| I mean, fortunately, you know, I've never really faced this kind of blowback. | ||
| Maybe because I'm somewhat more measured in how I speak. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure why. | ||
| Well, you're also talking about your personal experiences in Lebanon. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Which gives you more authenticity, whereas Sam is viewed as some white guy who's speaking from his... | ||
| Fucking cracker. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But, I mean, that's really what you see. | ||
| There are all these guys, and I don't know if you know about them, I won't even mention them, so I don't give them any airplay, that go around pretty much blaming everything on so-called new atheists. | ||
| So, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are these sort of evil patriarchs. | ||
| And Hitchens before he died. | ||
| And Hitchens before he died. | ||
| Who's the fourth Daniel Dennett. | ||
| I don't know that dude. | ||
| Are you joking or are you being serious? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's a philosopher at some school in Boston, actually. | ||
| Maybe Brandeis? | ||
| I'm not exactly sure. | ||
| One of those schools. | ||
| But anyways, they go around. | ||
| Just smearing these guys, right? | ||
| They're hate mongers, they're evil. | ||
| There's a lot of gravity attached to that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And now people who want to come into the discussion have to really think hard whether they want to be exposed to this kind of blowback. | ||
| And so you get self-censorship, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I've had, and I don't think I've shared this story ever again, so double happy birthday. | ||
| I can't believe this. | ||
| So amazing. | ||
| I've had my wife, so I open up my laptop and I start typing something. | ||
| And she'll come around nervously looking at what I'm typing. | ||
| I say, why are you hovering over me? | ||
| And she said, and this should give chills to anybody listening to this, she'll say, remember, we have two children. | ||
| Oh God. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now I'm thinking, in the 21st century, a professor in Canada, now even if my wife were paranoid, even if she's overestimating the threat of the risk, the fact that she has the reflex, the intuition, to actually engage in that behavior, to have those thought patterns, as you said, is really demonstrating that the canary is singing in the proverbial coal mine, and it's not pretty, right? | ||
| And now I have two choices at that point. | ||
| I could either tweet whatever it is I was tweeting, right? | ||
| Or I could say, yeah, you know, she might be right. | ||
| Let me engage in self-censorship. | ||
| And every time that someone who otherwise would be weighing in on the conversation engages in self-censorship, the other side wins. | ||
| And that's where we're at now. | ||
| So to answer your question, how do we resolve this issue? | ||
| Hopefully people grow a pair and start weighing in on the matter. | ||
| Well, wasn't that one of the arguments about publishing the images from Charlie Hebdo that no one wanted to do? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, isn't that astonishing? | ||
| These people lost their lives in the fight of a fundamental, right? | ||
| The foundational bedrock of all our freedoms is freedom of speech. | ||
| They lost their lives defending that, and every single Western media cowered and decided not to show it. | ||
| Every single one? | ||
| I mean, pretty much every single one. | ||
| Yeah, every single magazine's... | ||
| I mean, New York Times didn't. | ||
| Wall Street Journal didn't. | ||
| Time didn't. | ||
| I mean, nobody did. | ||
| As a matter of fact, there's one guy, Ezra Levant, in Canada, who published the original in 2006, and he was taken to a hate speech tribunal in Canada. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| How Orwellian is that? | ||
| A guy could be taken to a hate speech tribunal for publishing these cartoons. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| Well, supposedly the cartoons are offensive. | ||
| I've seen some of the cartoons and I just thought they were kind of stupid. | ||
| You know, they seem a little on the racist side, some of them, but the idea that these could get you fucking killed. | ||
| Do you want me to show you the cartoons that are published every day in the Middle East media about Jews? | ||
| Oh, I couldn't imagine. | ||
| Okay, so you know what I mean? | ||
| Now, the reality is we should all try to get along. | ||
| We should all be respectful of one another. | ||
| You shouldn't go out of your way to harm other people's feelings. | ||
| But when it comes to testing the boundaries of freedom of speech, there should be no boundaries that can't be crossed. | ||
| Yeah, there should be. | ||
| There should be? | ||
| There should be no boundaries. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you, but when these things come up where your life is at stake, like your wife hanging over your shoulder saying, remember we have children, and these people that have Time Magazine, that own New York Times, Los Angeles Times, they think about publishing these things and they just back off. | ||
| They back off. | ||
| They have families. | ||
| They have lives. | ||
| They don't want to be the sacrificial lamb. | ||
| They have to put a name to those articles and they publish them. | ||
| And they know that the editor knows, the publisher knows. | ||
| They all know that someone's going to find out who they are. | ||
| And that's crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Look, I understand the pragmatism, but we all have to weigh in in some form or another. | ||
| Yeah, they failed. | ||
| They failed. | ||
| They failed. | ||
| Free speech took a big blow. | ||
| Now, I don't know if you know this. | ||
| Now, here's the kicker. | ||
| You want to talk about chutzpah, right? | ||
| You know what chutzpah is. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, I can't remember the organization. | ||
| One of the sort of Islamic organizations in the U.S., Gave an Islamophobia award to the slain Charlie Hebdo folks. | ||
| So not only did those people die for drawing cartoons, they were smeared post-mortem. | ||
| I mean, it's a level of diabolical grotesqueness that's unimaginable, right? | ||
| I mean, let them at least die in peace, right? | ||
| So this is a real big battle of ideas, and we all have to weigh in on it. | ||
| And I think that there's a lot of folks that do not want to die like that, and they also don't want to be confused with those folks that were drawing these cartoons. | ||
| They don't want to be lumped in in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| So they will come out against it a la Ben Affleck in a very strong fashion. | ||
| They will let everyone know that they are not on that team. | ||
| They do think it's racist, without any consideration whatsoever for the overall effect of those words, of calling something like that Islamophobic, or what is Islamophobic? | ||
| A fear of an ideology that is so rigid they'll kill you for a cartoon. | ||
| If that doesn't scare you, if you're not phobic of that, it seems to me, and I'm not saying you shouldn't be Muslim, you should be whatever the fuck you want, but as soon as it comes down to killing people over cartoons, we have a very weird problem on our hands. | ||
| And when we're dealing with an entire chunk of the Western world that thinks that that's okay, That should be overlooked, but you can shit all over Christians or shit all over Mormons or shit all over anybody else. | ||
| It's safe and it's okay. | ||
| Well, Book of Mormons, right? | ||
| Think about the play. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| I mean, people pay money to go and watch, you know, actors making fun openly about a religion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Try to do that with one particular religion. | ||
| Yeah, try to do the Book of Quran. | ||
| Try that out. | ||
| So, I mean, I don't know if you've heard the term bigotry of lowered expectations, or there are different versions of bigotry of softened expectations. | ||
| The idea is that somehow, you know, Islam should not be held to the same standard as every other ideology, because, you know, they'll go crazy. | ||
| That itself is racist, right? | ||
| So when I gave you earlier the example of the Iraqi scientist who said that the earth is flat, and the lady writes to me, well, why are you criticizing this guy? | ||
| She's actually racist, right? | ||
| Because she's saying that somehow this guy doesn't have the capacity to be criticized. | ||
| Whereas when I criticized the rabbi that I went to visit, this is a true story. | ||
| I was invited to a rabbi's house for Shabbat dinner, Sabbath dinner. | ||
| And as I enter the house, he introduces me to everybody. | ||
| He says, well, this is a professor, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| He studies evolution, but everybody knows that evolution has been falsified, so I'm not sure what he studies. | ||
| Well, that guy was being an idiot, right? | ||
| Now, how come when I criticize this rabbi, it's perfectly fair game? | ||
| How come when I criticize the Republican senator who denies evolution because of his Christian faith, because he's a young earth creationist, That's perfectly fair. | ||
| But if I criticize the Iraqi astronomer because he believes that the Earth is flat, that's racist? | ||
| Well, it's human folly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's what it is. | ||
| I mean, we're in a very weird predicament with this one very large segment of our population on this planet. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about a billion people, right? | ||
| 1.6. | ||
| 1.6? | ||
| 1.6. | ||
| That's a large chunk. | ||
| Goddamn, that's a lot of fucking people. | ||
| Now, how do you see the trajectory? | ||
| Do you see this ever, the pendulum swinging the other way? | ||
| What do you think would be the catalyst to redress some of this grand folly? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Psychedelic drugs. | ||
| For real. | ||
| I think it's the only thing that's going to work. | ||
| They need to talk to the real God. | ||
| Have a real conversation with homeboy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the only way to get to him is through psychedelic drugs? | ||
| I think that's the best way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So I'm an atheist because I've never taken psychiatric drugs. | ||
| Not psychiatric. | ||
| Psychedelic. | ||
| You've never taken psychedelic drugs? | ||
| You want to hear something? | ||
| I've never taken any drugs. | ||
| I've never smoked a single cigarette in my life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You get drunk? | ||
| Very, very rarely. | ||
| As a matter of fact, the first time I ever drank, I used to be a very competitive soccer player. | ||
| I was maybe 22. I had very long hair. | ||
| Very proud of my Samsonian hair. | ||
| A bunch of soccer players on my team held me down, brought scissors, and they said, you either drink today or the hair is off. | ||
| That was the first time I ever drank. | ||
| I must have been 21, 22. Wow. | ||
| So my only vice has been maybe my dietary choices. | ||
| But you still drink occasionally, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Occasionally. | |
| Well, that's a drug, right? | ||
| You know that. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So how can you say you don't do drugs? | ||
| You know what I mean. | ||
| But I don't. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That's just as much of a blinder as religion is. | ||
| The idea that you don't perturb your consciousness through a very distinct method. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I have a glass of wine. | ||
| You get fucked up. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You throw them back. | ||
| You get crazy. | ||
| You smash glasses inside the chimney. | ||
| If my wife is watching right now, she does have a photo of me drunk on... | ||
| Absinthe. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| We were at Club Med, and I had drank too much, and I'm totally sloshed. | ||
| So that photo exists somewhere. | ||
| Club Med, huh? | ||
| Club Med. | ||
| You fucking dangerous bastard. | ||
| Maybe write to her. | ||
|
unidentified
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Maybe she'll release it on Twitter. | |
| I think there's certain psychedelic drugs that could help people alter their perceptions of this world and give you a reset, and that's what they do. | ||
| I mean, I think this is a very long conversation that I've had many, many times on this podcast, and we could have it some other time maybe if you would like to, off air or whatever, but there are... | ||
| There are psychedelic drugs that are most likely the root of all religious experiences. | ||
| In fact, there's a scholar out of Jerusalem, a pretty famous guy, I forgot the argument, but what he's essentially saying is that the burning bush that Moses described was most likely the acacia tree, or the acacia bush, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is the most potent psychedelic drug known to man. | ||
| And I've experienced this particular drug. | ||
| And this particular drug gives you a very intense feeling of joining with the mother, with communicating with God, with getting in contact with some intelligent power, some intelligent mind, something that is above and beyond what exists in our normal dimension that we exist in. | ||
| It's filled with complex geometric patterns that communicate with you telepathically. | ||
| It is a very, very crazy experience. | ||
| And one of the things that happens in these DMT trips is that they give you... | ||
| Like lessons of how to live life and the lessons all seem to... | ||
| You never have like these psychedelic DMT trips where they tell you what you need to do is rape more and beat the fuck out of people and steal as much shit as you can. | ||
| It's more like love. | ||
| Like love people. | ||
| Love you. | ||
| Love yourself. | ||
| Love everyone around you. | ||
| Be kind. | ||
| Don't worry about all the bullshit. | ||
| Just be nice to each other. | ||
| Just have fun. | ||
| Just enjoy it. | ||
| Spread it. | ||
| Don't lie. | ||
| Don't lie. | ||
| Don't deceive. | ||
| Don't deceive yourself. | ||
| Don't deceive anyone else and don't lose perspective. | ||
| You're gonna be here and then you're gonna be there and you're gonna be here and you're gonna be there and it's gonna go on and on and on. | ||
| It's this perpetual cycle that continues from birth to death. | ||
| Through infinity. | ||
| And you're an infinitesimal part of an endless cycle. | ||
| And this is the experience in a nutshell. | ||
| This is what you get out of it. | ||
| And very similar to the idea that you would come out of this experience with a set of tenets. | ||
| A set of rules, like Moses' commandments. | ||
| It totally makes sense that Moses could be this guy who is into smoking DMT and telling people, look, we're fucking up. | ||
| We're having all these sword fights and shooting arrows at each other and poisoning our neighbors. | ||
| You're going to get death threats from Jewish extremists now. | ||
| I doubt it, because this guy in Israel... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm being facetious. | |
| I know you are. | ||
| But this guy in Israel... | ||
| See if you find it, Jamie. | ||
| See if you find that article. | ||
| But it was a pretty interesting paper, because this is a real academic who's basing this on years of research. | ||
| Well, isn't it the case that many religious rituals of various cultures engage in these types of consummatory behavior? | ||
| behaviors. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| As part of their religious rituals, correct? | ||
| Well, as a matter of fact, John Marco Allegro, who is one of the main scholars that was assigned to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the oldest version of the Bible known, right? | ||
| And also, I think the only version in Aramaic, it was found in these clay pots in Qumran in like 1940-something. | ||
| It took forever for them to decipher these things. | ||
| And this guy, John Marco Allegro, worked on them for 14-plus years, and he was the only agnostic on the committee that was assigned to decipher it. | ||
| He was originally an ordained minister. | ||
| And over time, he became disenchanted with the idea of religion when he found all these contradictions in religion and these comparisons to other texts, and he realized that a lot of this is probably bullshit. | ||
| And so he wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. | ||
| And after 14 years of deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was his interpretation that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding, that what it was originally about Was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And that it was a fertility cult. | ||
| Because back then, it wasn't about birth control. | ||
| It was about, get pregnant, because there's not many of us. | ||
| We need more. | ||
| And the Romans might be coming, and they might fucking kill everybody. | ||
| We're going to need warriors. | ||
| We're going to need a large group of us. | ||
| And we can't let them know about these mushrooms. | ||
| And he even traced the etymology of the word Christ to an ancient Sumerian word that meant a mushroom covered in God's semen. | ||
| And what they thought was, according to John Marco Allegro, what they thought was that when it rained, it was God coming on the world. | ||
| Like a cosmic money shot. | ||
| Cosmic money shot. | ||
| And that these mushrooms would grow out of the ground. | ||
| You know how it is when you have a rain and then you go outside. | ||
| In the morning you see mushrooms that are already grown. | ||
| They weren't even there last night and now they're there. | ||
| They grow so quickly. | ||
| You would find these and they would eat these and have these intense psychedelic experiences, of course. | ||
| And so if you... | ||
| Okay, hold on a second. | ||
| But leave it up. | ||
| Leave it up. | ||
| So that these people that would experience these would have these intense transformative trips and without any science, without any knowledge of what the components of these mushrooms are, which is very similar, by the way, to human neurochemistry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| DMT is NN-dimethyltryptamine and that exists in the human brain. | ||
| It's produced by the liver and the lungs and They now have proven, due to this guy, Dr. Rick Strassman's work, he wrote this great book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule. | ||
| He's a professor of the University of New Mexico and got DEA approved clinical tests on subjects using DMT. And this Cottonwood Research Foundation that he helped start has proven that it's produced in the pineal gland of live rats. | ||
| And what the pineal gland is, the third eye. | ||
| In reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens. | ||
| I mean, it literally is in the center of the brain where the third eye is in Eastern mysticism. | ||
| It's producing this intense psychedelic drug. | ||
| And that's what this Hebrew University researcher Moses was tripping at Mount Sinai. | ||
| I mean, is he... | ||
| I obviously don't know this literature. | ||
| Is he viewed as a sort of outlier quack? | ||
| You would have to, like, research it and find out more about it, because I did a cursory examination, because I'm so familiar with the drug, it only makes sense to me. | ||
| This is, he visited the Amazon and drank ayahuasca, and he has this idea that that is what this was probably all about, because ayahuasca has been, they believe, it's very difficult to find out what, when the Amazonian indigenous people were drinking this brew, but ayahuasca is a form of DMT. And much like the acacia bush is very rich in DMT, thousands of plants are rich in DMT. DMT exists in plants. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| But what they're doing with this ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT because it has one plant that has DMT and another plant that has something called an MAO inhibitor because DMT is broken down in the gut by something called monoamine oxidase. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Do you know this ritual at one of the Amazonian tribes? | ||
| I discussed this in one of my books with the bullet ants. | ||
| Are you familiar with this? | ||
| Yeah, incredible. | ||
| Let me just mention briefly for your viewers who might not know it. | ||
| Because I think they drink some psychotropic mixture. | ||
| Yeah, I think they do. | ||
| I think it might be Hachuma or one of those. | ||
| There's a bunch of different crazy psychedelic drugs they take down there. | ||
| But apparently, so they basically have to, they sedate these bullet ants. | ||
| And then they wear these gloves. | ||
| With smoke, right? | ||
| With smoke. | ||
| And then they wear these gloves where they then sort of weave the ants into the glove. | ||
| As the ants come out of their stupor, they start biting the wearer. | ||
| Now, one bite from that ad, I mean, it's called bullet ad because the pain is greater than if you were hit by a bullet. | ||
| Apparently, it's the highest pain-inducing thing in nature. | ||
| And they have to do it 20 times. | ||
| On 20 different occasions before they're sort of accepted into manhood or whatever the individual is. | ||
| But I mean, the point, the link to your story is that I think they're under some psychotropic... | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Those are the myths. | ||
| My friend Steve was bitten by a bullet ant. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In Bolivia. | ||
| Yeah, he got bitten on his heel. | ||
| He said it was unbelievably painful. | ||
| Really, huh? | ||
| He said it lasted for hours, too. | ||
| But he said when it was over, it was really weird. | ||
| It was so painful that he was delusional, and he couldn't even remember which heel got bit after it was over. | ||
| Because once it subsided, it was like he woke up from a trance or something like that. | ||
| He said it was really, really painful and really difficult. | ||
| Difficult to concentrate on anything like that. | ||
| On a slightly less spiritual... | ||
| Can we segue from the money shots to an actual study on money shots? | ||
| On sperm? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the reason why I thought about this is because I know that in your... | ||
| Someone's got a fucking one-track mind. | ||
| No, because I know that... | ||
| By the way, thank you very much for inviting me to your show in Montreal and to the UFC. That was really fun. | ||
| Oh, I'm glad you had a good time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so when I was at your show with my wife, I think you had a little bit on sperm. | ||
| I can't remember what it was. | ||
| I'm sure I did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyways, and I think I might have sent you a direct message that kind of spoke to some of the issues that you raised. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| Let's talk about the science of sperm and porn. | ||
| You ready? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So this was a study done a few years ago by some colleagues of mine, where they wanted to look at the content of porno movies. | ||
| So if you think of the typical male fantasy, a man wants to have sex with many women, right? | ||
| So most societies are polygynous, meaning one man with multiple women, right? | ||
| That's how it should be. | ||
| Goddammit. | ||
| That's most societies? | ||
| Most societies. | ||
| 85% of societies have historically condoned polygyny. | ||
| Well, what the fuck? | ||
| By the way, people wrongly say polygamy. | ||
| Polygamy just means one with many. | ||
| Polygyny is one man with many women. | ||
| Polyandry is one woman with many men. | ||
| So stay with me. | ||
| Well, that's horseshit. | ||
| You don't want that. | ||
| Actually, there are very few societies that have that. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| I've been telling everybody this, Jamie. | ||
| Because of paternity uncertainty, by the way. | ||
| Oh, of course, right. | ||
| So here it goes. | ||
| So polygyny is what men want. | ||
| Basically, harem building, one man with many women. | ||
| Yet, if you do a content analysis of porn movies, what you find... | ||
| That study has been done by a guy by the name, aptly Nicholas Pound. | ||
| That's a shout-out to this guy. | ||
| He owes me now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, he did a content analysis where he showed that polyandrous depictions are much more common in porn movies, meaning one woman with multiple men, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And he argued basically that the reason for that is because it's an excitatory cue for sperm competition. | ||
| So watch this now. | ||
| So then these other researchers came along and said, well, how can we test this? | ||
| So what they did is basically they asked men to take one of two images home, either with women having sex or one woman with multiple guys, polyandry. | ||
| And then masturbate to those images, and then bring back their sperm to the lab to be evaluated, or as I like to say, the fruits of their manual labor. | ||
| And guess what they found? | ||
| That the sperm that originated from the masturbations to polyandrous images had greater motility. | ||
| In other words, they were more vigorous, they moved a lot more, which supported the idea of sperm competition. | ||
| And this is exactly what you get in animal husbandry, right? | ||
| When you want your stud to be riled up to have sex, you often will show another male having sex with a female, and then this will get the rise out of him. | ||
| So this explains, if you like, the disconnect between how come men are so desirous to have sex with many women at once, and yet that's what you would think would be depicted in porn movies, and that's not what you get. | ||
| You get a lot more of two, three guys on one woman. | ||
| So now I have elucidated the mysteries of porn for you. | ||
| That makes sense on a biological level because the more promiscuous the females are around men, the larger their testicles are because their testicles grow, right? | ||
| The testicles grow and they produce more sperm because of the competition. | ||
| As a matter of fact, so that, let me jump on that. | ||
| So if you look across primates at the size of the testicle of the males of that species, As a function of female promiscuity in that species, you see a perfect correlation. | ||
| So mountain gorillas... | ||
| Little tiny balls, little tiny dick. | ||
| Very good, right? | ||
| They're hugely impressive, but they have a complete sexual territoriality. | ||
| Yeah, they fucked up. | ||
| They became too powerful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Chimps, on the other hand, massive testicles. | ||
| They're walking testicles, basically, right? | ||
| Precisely because it's an adaptation to female promiscuity within that species. | ||
| Humans are closer to the chimp end of the scale. | ||
| Now, speaking about the thought police and all this BS stuff that you see on campuses, when I describe those particular studies, the feminists in the crowd will be very, very pleased because then I'm demonstrating that women can be promiscuous. | ||
| That fits the narrative of feminism. | ||
| If on the other hand, I might five minutes later say, yeah, but when it comes to sexual variety, men have a slightly greater penchant for sexual variety than women, then I suddenly become Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor. | ||
| So basically, the evolutionary finding that I discuss Is either liberating to the feminist if it fits with the narrative, or it is a form of patriarchal sexist BS if it doesn't fit there. | ||
| And that, again, is the problem with what you see on campuses, right? | ||
| Rather than an open, honest discourse about the veracity of scientific findings, we judge these findings as a function of our pet ideology. | ||
| The pet ideology when it comes to gender identification and gender identities. | ||
| I think that there's a real interesting point to be made with that when it comes to science, too, because one of the things that's always being touted about is diversity in science and gender diversity in science, but when it comes to what people actually want to do... | ||
| There's been studies. | ||
| You give a boy a certain toy or a girl a certain toy, they're going to gravitate towards things that are more in line with their gender. | ||
| That fucks people up. | ||
| They don't want to hear that. | ||
| Some boys like trucks and some girls like dolls. | ||
| But what it should be is, what do they like? | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| If the girl likes trucks or the boys like dolls, who gives a fuck? | ||
| But let's let the data speak for itself. | ||
| Let's try to understand. | ||
| I'm so happy you mentioned toy preferences because that's one of my favorite examples to demonstrate the lunacy of the whole social constructivist stuff. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So usually in the social sciences, or certainly social constructivists, the ones who argue that everything is due to socialization, will use toy preferences as, if you like, the starting point of how gender role socialization happens, right? | ||
| Johnny is taught to play rough with G.I. Joe. | ||
| Linda is taught to play nurturing with the pink doll. | ||
| And that starts the cascade of arbitrary sexist gender role socialization. | ||
| So I decided that I wanted to take that premise on and I wanted to bring data from a very, very broad range of fields to completely dismantle this bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| So here we go. | ||
| So if you take children who are in the pre-socialization stage of their cognitive development, meaning that they don't yet have the capacity to be socialized, and you give them tests, let's say, of eye gazing, they can either stare at dolls or at trucks or play with dolls or trucks, then you already see the sex specificity of the they can either stare at dolls or at trucks or play with dolls or trucks, then you already see the sex specificity of the toy preferences in the pre-socialization Let's keep going. | ||
| If you take other species, you take vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys, and you take infants of those species, it replicates the sex specificity of toy preferences of human infants. | ||
| Let's go on. | ||
| If you take little girls who suffer from something called an endocrinological disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, This is a disorder that masculinizes little girls. | ||
| It masculinizes their morphology, their physical traits, but it also masculinizes their behaviors. | ||
| Guess what happens to their toy preferences? | ||
| They become more like little boys. | ||
| If you go to Sweden, which is the... | ||
| The most gender-neutral country in the world. | ||
| Actually, it's been studied. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Gender-neutral household? | ||
| So, in other words, basically what happens in Sweden is that the government has systematically tried to completely eradicate, as a big social experiment, any gender markers. | ||
| You remove the gender pronouns. | ||
| Gender pronouns are being removed? | ||
| Gender pronouns are being removed? | ||
| You don't say he or she in Sweden? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I mean, I don't speak Swedish, but that's what I hear. | ||
| And there's a scale that's developed by a gentleman called Hofstede, where he ranks the countries from around the world on this gender score, and Sweden is off the chart on its femininity. | ||
| It's just outrageous. | ||
| And so if you now go to that country and study, it's a perfect field experiment, right? | ||
| Because they've spent 40 years trying to eradicate arbitrary sexist gender stereotypes, and therefore you should see that maybe the toy preferences would now be no longer like everywhere else. | ||
| Guess what you find in those countries? | ||
| It's exactly the same as anywhere else. | ||
| If you go to 3,000 years ago to funerary arts, like on funerary monuments where little children are depicted in ancient Greece, and you study how the children are depicted, the little boys are shown with wheels and trucks and so on. | ||
| Not trucks, but like wheelbarrow stuff. | ||
| And the girls are shown with dolls. | ||
| You could study cultures in various areas of Africa, indigenous cultures, as has been done by a French anthropologist, and the exact same behaviors manifest themselves. | ||
| That just shows you how long we've been under the oppressive thumb of the patriarchy. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| Prehistorical. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| The patriarchy, exactly. | ||
| The mass media has been around even before then. | ||
| How do we explain this? | ||
| It's written in clay tablets. | ||
| They were bullshitting even back then. | ||
| Men are assholes. | ||
| By the way, you know what the 2D, 4D digit ratio is? | ||
| Are you familiar with that? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So please explain. | ||
| So the 2D, 4D is the length of the ratio of your index finger to your ring finger. | ||
| And it is a sexually dimorphic trait, meaning that men have much longer ring fingers than index fingers, whereas women, the two fingers are roughly the same length. | ||
| Why is this important to this discussion? | ||
| Because that morphological feature is actually shaped in utero as a function of how much testosterone you've been exposed to in utero. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Therefore, what some researchers have done is they've looked at the digit ratio of little boys and then linked that to their play pattern behaviors. | ||
| And again, what do you find? | ||
| Little boys who have more masculinized digit ratios have more masculinized toy preferences. | ||
| Same thing has been done, by the way, with actually circulating testosterone. | ||
| You take seven-day-old children, and until six months old, you measure their testosterone, and testosterone level predicts toy preferences. | ||
| So look how many different disparate lines of evidence I've just come up with to demonstrate that it is not due to arbitrary sexist socialization. | ||
| It's very uncomfortable for me that people want to ignore that and put this all on cultural ideas and stereotypes that people subscribe to because they don't want their child to be ostracized by the community. | ||
| It's very uncomfortable for me. | ||
| It drives me nuts because I think it fucks people's heads up too. | ||
| Because then they feel like there's something wrong with them for liking masculine things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And being masculine or liking masculine things seems less and less of a favorable pursuit in 2015 than it's kind of ever been before. | ||
| It's like men get kind of shit on in this society because we get blamed for a lot of things. | ||
| And I'm not saying poor men, you know, because I think being a man is pretty fucking badass. | ||
| I like it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I enjoy it. | |
| But I just also don't think that we're necessarily evil, either. | ||
| I mean, if some men do evil shit, it doesn't mean that men are evil. | ||
| And if boys like trucks or girls like dolls, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with either one of them. | ||
| But it is wrong when we try to ascribe or prescribe... | ||
| When we try to put that into some sort of an ideological box, and we dismiss it or we categorize it as being a part of the problem with our culture, when it's so clearly a natural thing. | ||
| Well, I think it stems, this lunacy, and I'm not sure if we discussed it last time I was on the show, but this lunacy, I think, comes from a good place. | ||
| An idiotic place, but a good place. | ||
| The idea of a brain being empty slate. | ||
| How is biological determinism nonsense? | ||
| How so? | ||
| Because almost everything is an inextricable mix of your biology and environmental inputs. | ||
| Almost nothing that you could think of doesn't incorporate some environmental input into whoever you become. | ||
| So the idea of it being completely independent of any... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the idea of nature versus nurture is really a silly moot dichotomy. | ||
| Because it's a big, broad spectrum of inputs. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the example that I love to give to drive that point home, some of your viewers might have heard me say it before, it's the cake metaphor. | ||
| So if you take a cake, you take all the ingredients of the cake. | ||
| Here's the baking soda, here's the flour, here's the eggs, here's the sugar. | ||
| It's a vegan cake. | ||
| Once you put it all together, you're unable to then point. | ||
| Once the cake is made, you can't point, show me where the eggs are. | ||
| It's an inextricable mix. | ||
| That's the idea of nature versus nurture. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| We're this big melange. | ||
| We're this cake. | ||
| So I think it comes from the idea that biology is scary because it somehow doesn't carry with it degrees of freedom. | ||
| You know, if boys are supposed to be this and girls are supposed to be that, then we're doomed to those biological imperatives. | ||
| And again, that's not true. | ||
| I mean, some people are more this way, some people are more that way. | ||
| So there's nothing really deterministic. | ||
| Also, just another point, for example, men have an evolved desire to seek status. | ||
| That's the biological imperative because women desire status in men. | ||
| But now the way Joe and Gad go about instantiating that evolutionary imperative is completely different as a function of their idiosyncratic talents. | ||
| That shows you that it's not determined, right? | ||
| It's not that we both have to become comics and that's the only way to gain status. | ||
| What is common to both of us is we both aspire to To ascend the social hierarchy. | ||
| That's the common biological imperative. | ||
| How we go about it is completely determined based on your unique personhood. | ||
| So again, there's nothing deterministic about it. | ||
| What do you think it is about the current climate where people want to ignore all these biological markers like you were talking about with children and gravitating towards certain toys and testosterone versus estrogen in babies? | ||
| What do you think it is about people that want to avoid these things, ignore this data? | ||
| Well, it's exactly that. | ||
| It's the fact that it's very, very hopeful, or the narrative is very hopeful, to assume that we all start with equal potentiality, with an app that makes us completely indistinguishable. | ||
| That's a very hopeful message because it basically says that we are infinitely malleable, right? | ||
| You know, had Joe had a different upbringing, maybe he would have been Michael Jordan. | ||
| No, you wouldn't have been. | ||
| Could have been a black guy? | ||
| I was just saying about how good a basketball player could be. | ||
| There are unique realities about the random combination of genes that made Lionel Messi that makes it such that, notwithstanding the fact that he trains a lot, much harder than most other people, He is endowed with unique talents that not every other kid would have been privy to those talents. | ||
| I always bring that point up when I talk about Jon Jones. | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| Jon, how dare you? | ||
| Uh-oh, sorry. | ||
| Former UFC light heavyweight champion. | ||
| He was one of the most talented fighters that's ever lived. | ||
| Really tall, long-reached, spectacular athletic ability, and he was the youngest ever UFC champion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And just dominates people. | ||
| Which era? | ||
| This era. | ||
| He beat Mauricio Shogun Hua for the title and just destroyed him in his first title fight. | ||
| Shogun is a famous world-class MMA fighter who has fought the best of the best throughout history. | ||
| I always say, no matter how hard you train, if you're just a regular dude, you're never going to beat that guy. | ||
| If he trains just as hard, you're fucked. | ||
| He's just very talented, very physically talented. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| We're not created equal. | ||
| We're just not. | ||
| Just not. | ||
| I mean, Einstein... | ||
| You've seen Ron Jeremy's dick. | ||
| I have indeed. | ||
| I have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have? | |
| I have. | ||
| Not in person, but I've seen it in person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| As a 13 or 14-year-old trying to sneak into... | ||
| And you go, good lord. | ||
| That is impressive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Can I also mention that he's Jewish? | ||
| Just to... | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
By the way, if you look at... | |
| There's this world atlas of penis sizes that came out... | ||
| And I wish to engage in modesty, but you might want to check the scores of the Lebanese men just for fun. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Giant dick, huh? | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Congratulations on your people. | ||
| Second place to black folks, though, right? | ||
| They were up there, I think. | ||
| They were up there. | ||
| No. | ||
| Everyone starts out... | ||
| It's just patriarchy that's making... | ||
| Women have bigger dicks than men. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's the patriarchy that makes their clitorises smaller than penises. | ||
| Do you think that there's going to become a time in our lifetimes at all, ever, where this climate is going to adjust back? | ||
| Is it going to take 100 years for it to adjust back to some sort of an even ground? | ||
| I find that question so fascinating because it's hard for me to predict what the trajectory would be. | ||
| On the one hand, on my pessimistic day, I think that all great empires implode from within. | ||
| You've heard that, right? | ||
| It's not that there's sort of this horde of other folks that come in. | ||
| It's the empire that It becomes cancerous within itself and it implodes. | ||
| I think on my pessimistic days, I say, no, we're screwed. | ||
| This is just going to go on further and further until the whole West collapses in this grand lunacy that we're engaged in. | ||
| But it's not the whole West. | ||
| It's not everyone. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that aren't represented by this ideology. | ||
| But not the intelligentsia who control information, right? | ||
| But they don't really control information anymore, is my point. | ||
| The internet controls information. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And it's not even the intelligentsia that's doing this. | ||
| It's children. | ||
| It's students that are scaring the fuck out of teachers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, that's really what it is. | ||
| It's like Tumblr and Facebook and these people that form these insulated groups where they're echo chambers. | ||
| And they, you know, they believe that this is reality. | ||
| And they want to yell it at Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| And then they get the fucking mic, which is even crazier. | ||
| They let those kids who screamed and yelled, they let them talk. | ||
| Yeah, incredible. | ||
| Just like, that's the worst fucking message to send, by the way. | ||
| We will let you have the mic, we will let you have the mic. | ||
| And they're fucking screaming at them. | ||
| So are you more optimistic? | ||
| Do you think there will be... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| How would it work? | ||
| Because kids today are growing up listening to conversations like this and realizing how retarded these 20-year-olds are. | ||
| And they're going, I want to be that when I get older. | ||
| I want to look at things for what they really are. | ||
| And I think that as they get to that position, this new crop will have grown up and come out of this dark hole that is the clan that grew up with social media. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| and this confirmation bias I think is kind of in these certain ways it's kind of dangerous you know I mean not to blow smoke up your proverbial behind on your birthday but one of the the wonderful things in the last year has been to appear on your show precisely because I've seen the reach that you have just in terms of how people have responded to my work right I I mean, most scientists will toil in their respective disciplines. | ||
| I mean, hopefully they do good stuff. | ||
| But the number of people that they ultimately are communicating with is a very restrained small number, right? | ||
| But by coming on these types of shows, that's why I think we were talking earlier about coming out of your shell, engaging in the public discourse, weighing in on these issues. | ||
| I always debate some of my colleagues, many of whom are very much in the ivory tower, right? | ||
| We only communicate with other members of the clergy, right? | ||
| With other members of our restricted class of highbrow. | ||
| And I think that that's not really what the job of a professor is. | ||
| I mean, that's part of the job. | ||
| We have to create knowledge and communicate it to other academics. | ||
| But if we're good academics, if we're good men of ideas, we also have to be engaging the public, right? | ||
| I mean, ultimately, the public also pays for my salary through taxes. | ||
| It's also, that's how information really gets spread. | ||
| It doesn't get spread by bouncing it around amongst each other like a little beach ball at a concert. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It gets spread by getting it out there into the great channel of the Internet. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the number of people... | ||
| That have heard of my evolutionary psychology work as applied to consumer behavior and so on. | ||
| Through just having been on your show, it will probably take me 10 careers before I could reach as many people through some other forum. | ||
| And so I agree with you in that sense that these types of forums are profoundly important. | ||
| I only wish that more academics would actually have the courage to start coming on these types of social knowledge. | ||
| Well, it's very dangerous for them, unless they're financially independent in these environments that we have today. | ||
| I mean, you could cherry pick a million things that I've said in this show and take them out of context and paint me out to be some sort of a monster. | ||
| True. | ||
| That's just the nature of having a conversation with someone where you're joking around, whereas if you take it and put it in quotes in print, It's more controlled. | ||
| You take something out of the context of the conversation and put it in print, and you can infer all sorts of different ways that this person's trying to communicate that could be construed as being offensive. | ||
| And then it gets gross. | ||
| The difference between back then and now is now you could always just go on a podcast and talk about You could always write a Facebook blog and explain yourself in great detail with no editorial input whatsoever. | ||
| No one can come along and take away from it. | ||
| You know, I've talked to many people that have written things and then had those things, even published in online magazines, had those things heavily edited. | ||
| And chopped up and even had words put in their mouth. | ||
| I had a dispute with this journalist and we were talking about something. | ||
| I'm going, why did you say that? | ||
| And she goes, I didn't say that. | ||
| The editor put that in there. | ||
| I go, you're kidding me. | ||
| They can do that? | ||
| And she goes, yeah, they add things to it. | ||
| That's fucking insane. | ||
| I've experienced something similar to that on several occasions. | ||
| So one time a guy called me when my trade book came out. | ||
| The book has pornography in its title, The Consumer Instinct, in its subtitle. | ||
| And he really, I mean, the key point he wanted to get to was that Professor Saad argues that there is a gene for porn, which, of course, I'm not at all arguing that. | ||
| So I kept repeatedly explaining to him that to explain the evolutionary basis of why men might enjoy porn doesn't suggest that there is a set of genes in your genome that code for porn preferences. | ||
| I explained, I said, please don't, next day, you know, exactly what he wanted to write. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Right? | ||
| But you just learned that that's part of the beast. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| They're not trying to be honest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not intellectual honesty. | ||
| What it is, is they're trying to get clicks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're trying to get people to pay attention to it, and that's what they do. | ||
| And they can do it for now, but this is a transitionary time, between this time that we're at now, where there is still this, a bit of cloudiness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's a bit of fog in the air of information. | ||
| Sometimes it's hard to find out exactly what the fuck is going on. | ||
| But that fog is very, very close to being lifted, and sheer intent, I think, will be displayed. | ||
| It'll be a part of discourse in a way that I don't think has existed before in the near future. | ||
| I think you're going to be able to know a lot more about what someone's trying to portray just in the next decade or so than we've ever known in the past. | ||
| And also the transparency. | ||
| That you have, the transparency, not just in your words and how you are able to communicate and describe things, but also in how you're able to defend those things if something comes up. | ||
| That just didn't exist before. | ||
| You had no recourse. | ||
| If somebody misquoted you, and I've had that happen before, A long time ago in like 99, this woman wrote an article about my show or one of my CDs. | ||
| She did a review of my CD and not just took me out of context, but completely misquoted me and changed the words of my bits to make them horrible. | ||
| And I had a conversation on the phone with her with my publicist. | ||
| I'm like, why did you do that? | ||
| And she's like, well, that's what I heard when I heard your work. | ||
| I go, that's what you heard. | ||
| That's what you heard. | ||
| I go, well, that's not what I wrote. | ||
| That's not what I said. | ||
| It's not what I wrote. | ||
| And so you lied. | ||
| I go, you're a fucking liar. | ||
| I go, you're not a journalist. | ||
| You're a liar. | ||
| And she thought I left the phone. | ||
| She thought I left and hung up because I just, I go, well, we're done talking then. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And so she goes, there was a pause, and so she says to the publishers, your client is losing it. | ||
| And I go, I'm not losing it. | ||
| You're a fucking liar. | ||
| Do you not understand what happened here? | ||
| So I wrote a story about her in my blog. | ||
| I called it Yellow Journalism, I think was the title of it, about how ridiculous she was. | ||
| And it was the first time that anybody could ever do something like that. | ||
| In the old days, you would have to get it printed somewhere. | ||
| You'd have to get it printed in a magazine. | ||
| Good luck writing an article about how you wanted to love someone because they were so full of shit. | ||
| I forget what I said. | ||
| I was just trying to be ridiculous. | ||
| I was trying to upset her. | ||
| That used to be what they could do. | ||
| You know, that some guy could listen to you talk about genes and pornography and how, you know, men could be more attracted to pornography and go, oh, I know how to make this fucking salacious. | ||
| I know how to make that guy look like an asshole. | ||
| I'm just going to say, this professor thinks there's a gene for pornography. | ||
| There. | ||
| Print, send, done. | ||
| What can he do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, what can he do? | |
| What's his name? | ||
| What's that guy's name? | ||
| Oh, I don't remember. | ||
| Well, fuckhead, whoever you are. | ||
| I could probably find it out. | ||
| Whoever you are, fuckhead, we know what you did. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know what you did, too, you cunt. | ||
| You know, but, I mean, you've had a platform because of being in entertainment, but I'm amazed by guys who start YouTube channels. | ||
| I recently appeared on a YouTube channel. | ||
| This guy, he calls himself Sargon of Akkad. | ||
| I mean, he's a nobody in the sense of not having come from, you know, an acting world or not being a public figure. | ||
| But this guy is brilliant. | ||
| He now has over 150,000 YouTube subscribers, maybe 25, 30 million viewers. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| That's how it should be, based on merit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This guy would never have had a voice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| We're not for the mediums that are now afforded to us. | ||
| And so that's why I feel like a kid in a candy store to appear on all these shows because it offers me a voice to spread memes, right? | ||
| I mean, I consider my job as a meme creator, meme propagator. | ||
| And so any way that I can do that, including coming on this brilliant podcast... | ||
| I consider myself unbelievably fortunate, and I don't see why other academics don't see the value in that. | ||
| Well, I think they will eventually, and some do. | ||
| I mean, I've had quite a few on now, but I think that what we're dealing with is a new thing. | ||
| What we're dealing with is this completely new pathway for information to travel. | ||
| And it has to be kind of recognized and accepted, and it's slowly being done so. | ||
| Like, there's a sign in front of the comedy store in one of the hotels, like, you know, they paint the sign, like a billboard on the entire side of the hotel, and it's a YouTube channel that has millions of subscribers. | ||
| So this woman's YouTube channel, I've never heard of her before, but she's got millions of subscribers. | ||
| And there's a few of those that YouTube has put up all around the city, and... | ||
| What they're getting for each individual video that they put out is very similar to what a hit cable show gets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's reality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Incredible. | |
| And you can't fuck with that. | ||
| Those are real numbers and real people that are the same kind of people that watch television. | ||
| And it's just a new pathway for information. | ||
| It just makes it harder for people to lie and bullshit. | ||
| And like that guy who wrote that article, he's just lazy. | ||
| He's lazy and his work sucks and his mind's weak. | ||
| And so he wants to come up with some way that he can turn something into some click-baity bullshit article. | ||
| So that's what he does. | ||
| He distorts reality to fit his own agenda and for his own game. | ||
| And he does so in a way that he doesn't care if it damages you because he has power over you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he doesn't have any power over you anymore. | ||
| No one does. | ||
| No one has any power over anyone. | ||
| And this whatever of Akhmard or whatever the fuck the guy's name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's his name? | |
| Sargon of Akhmard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now he's going to get millions of you. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| That's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good for him. | |
| But this guy, he got there based on merit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And there's a lot of those guys out there now. | ||
| And they cover a wide variety of topics, too, whether it's sports, there's martial arts There's commentators that have done that. | ||
| There's people that do that about technology. | ||
| It's just, we live in a beautiful time for information. | ||
| My nephew has 274,000 followers. | ||
| I mean, I know it's nothing compared to your numbers. | ||
| It's a lot! | ||
| But that's, I mean, that's astonishing. | ||
| Well, Ariel's on television, though. | ||
| He's on Fox all the time. | ||
| And he's a legit journalist for MMA. But yeah, it's beautiful. | ||
| But he started on the internet as well. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We live in a beautiful time. | ||
| We do. | ||
| And speaking of time, gotta wrap this bitch up. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| Do we do any promotional stuff? | ||
| Do you want to? | ||
| What do you want to do? | ||
| They can follow me on Twitter at Gadsad. | ||
| G-A-D-S-A-A-D. They could go to my YouTube channel, which is Gadsad again. | ||
| And you have a great YouTube channel, by the way, where you sit down and you talk about a lot of things and you speak unedited in front of the camera and express yourself. | ||
| It's a wonderful way to... | ||
| So subscribe to that and they can follow me on my public page. | ||
| Glorious. | ||
| Let's do this again. | ||
| Anytime. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thanks for being here on my birthday, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, sir. | |
| All right, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back tomorrow. | ||
| Until then, enjoy your life. |
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