Gad Saad and Joe Rogan explore how self-help, religion, and porn exploit human psychology—Marketing Hope by Selling Lies ties hope to evolutionary insecurities, while YouTube’s algorithm fuels endless dopamine-driven content. They critique performative activism (e.g., Yale’s "responsibility struggles," Oregon students censoring MLK Jr.’s speech) and cultural relativism, citing Trudeau’s policies enabling harmful practices like FGM. Saad’s Darwinian psychiatry highlights modern life’s mismatch with evolutionary social bonds, where cities like NYC stifle trust despite density. Studies show deep connections—not quotas—drive happiness, yet systemic biases persist, from father absence to affirmative action’s meritocracy doubts. Even Sweden’s gender-neutral experiments failed, as kids defaulted to sex-specific toys, proving biology over social engineering. Rogan warns against fame’s opportunists and the dangers of "untethered" living without intentional bonds. [Automatically generated summary]
It's like if you get a little bit of snake venom, you get immune to it, you get accustomed to it, whereas if you get a big burst of it, it can poison you.
So if you just get a little bit of it every now and then, when a big burst comes your way, like someone calling you a cheap Jew, you go, you motherfucker.
It doesn't work anymore.
Right.
You just realize there's a lot of people out there that a lot of the reason why they're saying these mean things is because they're trying to find something that they can say that'll get you to respond.
So these guys then, because I've blocked them, start going around saying, well, you know, he's supposedly a proponent of freedom of speech, yet he blocks me, as though I'm the purveyor of freedom of speech, right?
I mean, I'm not allowed to come to your house.
Break into your house and start calling you names, and if you stop me, I accuse you of not supporting free speech, right?
But in their minds, if I block them simply because I no longer want to engage them, I am being a hypocrite because I'm not supporting their freedom to insult me.
So when you get this individual who simply can't modulate his behavior, To even sort of adhere to the most basic social norms once in a while, I just get pissed off.
Look, first of all, you've got to realize that anonymity is a really confusing thing for people.
It's the ability to communicate with people anonymous has never existed before.
Other than...
Some serial killer making some note by cutting out little pieces of paper out of the newspaper and, you know, using the words from that.
There's no anonymity, man.
It doesn't exist, right?
So when you have anonymity in the form of, like, you have a Twitter account and it's just an egg and you call yourself Fuck McGee and you just start trolling the gadfather, Makes no sense.
Well, it's, you know, that's not a normal interaction.
There shouldn't be a method where someone could just contact you like that.
Because our bodies and our minds and all our systems, our social systems, they're just not set up for that.
It's a completely new thing that we really just don't have the mechanisms for.
We're not accustomed to it.
We don't really have a long history of it.
I mean, we have a history of just doing this.
The realistic history, at the extreme level, is 20 years.
94-ish, 96-ish, somewhere around then, when it started, right?
But the real history is probably less than 10 of it really being incredibly pervasive the way it is today, like with Twitter and Facebook and all this Instagram comments and things along those lines.
Well, by the way, a lot of business schools now have programs in data analytics or big data where they try to teach students how to navigate through the complexity of this type of big data sets.
It seems like the brain just doesn't know what to do with that.
Especially if you're by yourself.
Close the door.
What's going on here?
I mean, there's people that just will watch pornography 10, 12 hours a day.
And it's not just a few.
I bet if you could highlight...
I bet if you were in a plane and you're flying over the United States and there was a light bulb that went off over everyone's head that jerks off for 12 hours a day.
You'd be stunned.
You'd be stunned.
You'd be able to read by it.
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You'd be able to hold a magazine up to the window and read.
I think there's a lot of people out there that get overwhelmed by the possibilities of doing that, like the choice.
They don't have the discipline to handle that.
It was actually a conversation that I was having with my friend Duncan.
The other day about discipline and how important discipline is to living a good and healthy life and that getting the things that you need to get done will allow you to actually enjoy your free time, whereas if you don't get those things done, the free time and these pursuits, these things, they almost become obsessions and you kind of dive into them to avoid the pressure of getting those things done and it becomes sort of counterintuitive.
I did an invited lecture at University of Ottawa on the thought police and political correctness.
I'm not sure if you saw it.
If not, you should check it out.
It kind of covers the safe spaces and the microaggressions and the trigger warnings.
And one of the examples that I picked, I really tried to pick some really outlandish examples that should only belong in The Onion.
One of the examples was some, I think it was some students at University of Oregon Wanted to take down the classic quote by Martin Luther King, you know, the I Have a Dream stuff?
I think, in a sense, our politics in this country have always been a civil war, just by nature of having only two choices, just by the dual party system and this ridiculous idea that there's independent parties.
They're not.
They're not independent.
Unless Trump decides to go independent, he's going to win.
Not because of his financial policies, which I think are ridiculous, but I think his social policies are interesting.
And what I should clarify, here's what's ridiculous about his financial policies.
Don't make more taxes, because more taxes just means more government.
And more government is not what we fucking need right now.
If you want to organize charitable institutions that will legitimately help people, and have people donate money, and have people work towards, you know, like, these donations will actually take away from your taxes.
Let's figure out some way where we make it beneficial for people to be charitable.
Where we set up community programs.
Take some of the money that we're spending on shit that we really don't need to spend money on.
Some subsidies that we probably don't need that are benefiting gigantic corporations and instead use those to help the education systems in poor communities.
Use those to try to provide jobs and industry in poor communities.
These are all really good ideas.
So I'm in favor of that kind of socialism.
I'm absolutely in favor of free universities.
I don't think that people should get out of school and be a quarter million dollars in debt.
I think that's madness.
I think if you're going to make $50,000 a year, okay?
If you've got a really good job, you make $50,000 a year, right?
You get out of school.
If you get out of school and you make $50,000 a year, you're fucking kicking ass, right?
Everything's going great for you.
You're not really making $50,000.
You're making about $34,000, right?
And then you've got taxes.
You've got sales taxes if you live in a place like California.
You've got state taxes.
So you're living off of somewhere in the late 20s, 30s, something like that.
And you've got $250,000 of debt you've got to deal with.
I just think that it's an insane burden to put on young people, to have them enter into the free market, enter into the world, and be already saddled down by insane amounts of debt.
I think there's got to be a way around that.
And I don't think that it's a terrible idea to have publicly funded universities.
I just don't think it's a terrible idea.
I don't think it's an insurmountable idea.
So I like Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways.
I think he's a compassionate guy.
I think he's an open-minded guy.
I think he says a lot of really radical things.
I love the fact that he goes out on a limb with his Black Lives Matter stuff.
I like that he's making a big deal about these cops shooting these young black kids.
And then it's gotta fucking stop.
It's gotta stop.
It's madness.
How many videos have to come out?
After a while, there's obviously some clear problem.
How is Trump not handling this?
How is Hillary not handling this?
This is a real problem in our culture, in our society.
There's a divisiveness.
There's this separation between these people that live in these communities that are terrified of the police and they're really worried about being shot all the time, and then everybody else that's on the outside that's looking in and saying, well, if you just followed the law, you wouldn't have those problems.
Try being born there.
Try being raised there.
We're not on an even playing field.
And I think he's one of the few guys that's addressing this imbalance, this social imbalance, this cultural imbalance, this economic imbalance that we have in this country in a really radical way.
So I like him for that.
I think that would be a good thing for this country, for a guy like that.
Would it really happen?
I don't know.
I take him over the others.
I take him over the other ones.
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I think Trump is just, he says too much crazy shit.
You know, I think the main thing about Trump that people are tapping into is, rightly or wrongly, that he comes across as authentic.
So if you look on some metric of authenticity between Hillary...
I mean, Hillary Clinton could not be any more inauthentic.
I mean, she freaks you out, right?
She's spooky in her inability to convey, even if she tried to fake genuine emotions.
Whereas on the other hand, whether you like him or don't, Trump seems to speak from the heart.
And so to the extent that a lot of people are disillusioned with politicians, then this guy comes along and I can at least tap into that and hang on that element of his personality.
The ostrich brigade is a term that I popularized, which basically refers to folks who have their head deep in the sand so that they can't really accept some of the most basic regularities in the world, right?
You know, there is no link between Islam and any terrorist act anywhere in the world.
But let me, if I could finish my point about Justin Trudeau.
So Justin Trudeau, at one point when he was a member of parliament, someone had said that things like female genital mutilations and child brides and honor killings was the type of barbarism that we don't need in Canada.
at the time was, how dare you use the word barbarism in describing other people's cultures, right?
So he wasn't offended by having women's clitorises cut.
He was offended by people who described that behavior as barbaric.
Well, look what happened with Cologne, where the mayor of Cologne, after these attacks on New Year's Eve, was telling women to dress different and stay away from men.
I mean, that is a very culturally diverse area that has existed in a very peaceful way for a long time until all of a sudden they let in all these immigrants and they're having a massive problem with women being sexually assaulted.
So instead of protecting these women and trying to do their best to...
Ramp up the police force, or do something to stop it, or make sure the people are safe, or really put out there that, look, you're in a new fucking place, and if you want to assimilate in our culture, you've got to leave these fucking women alone, or we're going to get rid of you.
Everyone who does anything to women in our country, we're going to get rid of you.
So, one of the reasons why I'm very concerned about the 25,000 that are coming in, people say, well, come on, how many of them are likely to be ISIS members?
But the danger is not only...
People only think of ISIS members as a danger, right?
But when you've got 25,000 people of whom a very large majority will adhere to certain values that are perfectly antithetical to ours, right?
What are your views on...
What are your views on religious minorities, on Jews?
If we let in 25,000 Syrians, statistically speaking, is it more likely or less likely that they'd be anti-Semitism?
I mean, that's an empirical statement that we could test, right?
So it's not only about the fact that how many of these 25,000 are ISIS members.
It's how many of these 25,000 people will hold values that are perfectly congruent with ours.
And so we have every right without having the threat of being called racist and Islamophobe over our head to engage in a discussion.
On how do we vet these people?
I mean, how do you find out what percentage of those are going to hold views that are grotesque to us and then should we be letting them in?
Well, at the very least, I would argue that you should never be allowed under the guise of your religious practice to espouse hateful things, right?
I mean, if you go to a house of worship, and that house of worship is...
Praying certain things that you and I would consider genocidal hatred, then my right to be free of the genocidal hatred that's coming my way supersedes your right to practice your religion of genocidally hating me.
And so that simply has to be the rule.
And if we don't wake up to that reality, we're going to have problems.
Part of multiculturalism is this idea that all cultures are unique, distinct, and equal in their own right.
And actually, that is a truly, profoundly incorrect statement.
Cultures are not equal, right?
Different cultures are differentially able to engender happiness to more or less people, right?
So if you are part of whatever it means, Taliban culture, you can on average predict that women in that culture will be less self-actualized than in Western countries.
That is an empirically demonstrable fact.
And so the idea that who are we to judge other cultures, this idea of cultural relativism, which is part, which is endemic of multiculturalism, It's profoundly incorrect and it has to go.
You could look at it in terms of, you know, there's a real good argument that in this country there's less freedom than there is in other countries because more people are in jail.
You could look at the disproportionate amount of people that are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses in this country and say, well, this country is obviously a fucked up place.
Right.
And that's a legit claim as well.
But the idea of numerical value, equal, making it equal.
We're all cultures equal.
That's foolishness.
That's not true.
Not only that, there's a very real thing going on in the world where as the age of information washes upon us, and I think this is the new age of information, the age of pure information, As this washes upon us, we're seeing massive changes in our own country.
We're seeing massive changes in our political system.
We're seeing massive changes socially.
And I think the social justice warrior thing is sort of a side effect of that, where these disenfranchised people, then some of them may be mentally ill.
They have a voice.
Some of them, let's not say ill, imbalanced.
Maybe they're radical because they're young and idealist and they haven't looked at all the right ways and then one day they'll balance out like many people have.
There's many young radicals who become very rational people in their 50s and 60s and whatever.
This thing is taking place here, and it's also taking place all over the world.
Well, where information is being resisted, that's where we have problems in the world.
Where fundamental religious values are superseding the age of information.
They're squashing people's ability to express themselves, people's ability to try new things, explore new things.
Their sexual values their identities all those things like as soon as you have like an ancient fucking Scripture some shit that was written on animal skins a thousand years ago like as soon as that is at the head and That takes precedent over everything else because it was supposedly the word of God or who else?
Someone who talked to God whatever the fuck it is that you got a problem a real problem there because religion Religion in and of itself is an idea, and it's an idea that is one of the very few ideas that we accept that literally has no basis in reality.
It has no basis in fact.
It has no basis in anything provable, and that's why we have this concept of faith.
Well, as soon as you have religion that's dominating information, you have You have a problem.
You got a bottleneck.
You got a wall that's put up for progress.
Now, when people develop in that environment, you have stifled people.
Just like I have a friend and him and his wife, they were Mormons until they were like 40. And then they decided slowly, they lived overseas for a bit.
And they kind of experienced the world, and it opened their eyes to a lot of different things, and they decided to move away from the church.
And basically what I argue there is that there are different peddlers of hope that are successful precisely because they could sell you hope in the areas that are most important in sort of Darwinian insecurities, right?
How to be a better lover, how to live forever, how to be a better parent, right?
So all of the key Darwinian pursuits that keep us up at night There is a peddler out there who can give you the recipe, whether he be a self-help guru, whether he be a medical quack, whether he be religion.
And so that's why those products are so successful, because they peddle us hope.
So I could take this pill called religion that will grant me immortality, or I could do your fractal mumbo-jumbo stuff, no disrespect, and that could still get me to...
Whereas the reality, the intellectually honest position is that we really have absolutely no evidence.
This is a very small party that will last, if you're lucky, 85 years.
And it's profoundly fear-inducing because I want to be coming back on this podcast for the next 4,000 years.
But it really worries me that I won't.
But it's honest.
It's honest to know that you've got 85 years.
In a sense, it's liberating because it forces me.
And you, if you're an atheist, to really carpe diem it, right?
You really have to seize the day because there are no do-overs.
There is no eternity.
There is no afterlife.
It's all right here what we do.
And so in a sense, there is a glory to the finiteness that is afforded by atheism.
My perspective, though, is that we really just don't know, and that energy continues to move forward in a lot of different ways.
We see this throughout all of nature, whereas things die, they get reabsorbed into the ground.
The very energy and the essence that they had when they were alive fuels all these different microbes and bacteria in the ground that...
It makes the soil richer.
It grows more plants.
Animals eat those plants.
It nourishes them.
Literally, the cells and the carbon from every fucking human being on this planet came from a star that exploded.
Death becomes life in some sort of strange way.
And I don't think that it's impossible that that could be the same thing with consciousness, with energy, with whatever the fuck it is inside of us that makes us alive and aware and makes our minds tune in to all of the possibilities and the wonders of the world.
I don't know if this is the end, but you don't either.
And as soon as someone comes along and tells you they do know, and this is the only way to the afterlife, this is the only way to heaven, you've got a real problem.
You've got a real problem because human beings are malleable and you can guide them and you can direct them and you can mold them and you could turn them into religious slaves.
You could turn them into ideological slaves.
And we should recognize that from a psychological perspective, from an educated perspective, from a perspective of recognizing cult behavior.
I was watching this thing on This guy, Steve Hassan, the guy who was on our podcast before, is a cult expert.
He sent me an email today and I watched this piece on cults and cult behavior and cults on the internet.
It's terrifying how malleable people's minds are and how someone who's an inscrupulous person or unscrupulous person or someone who has nefarious ideas can convince people to blow themselves up to get virgins in the afterlife.
And when someone comes along and says, I do know, and this is the truth, it becomes a real problem.
Because you can't fucking prove it.
You can't prove it.
You don't have any facts.
You don't have any data.
There's nothing you can measure.
There's nothing you can weigh.
And you're not saying you think.
You're saying you know.
And if you think one thing, if you think, I think this is it, carpe diem, live for the day, this is our only shot here, you might be right.
Or this guy who's done a fucking pound of mushrooms might have come back from the other side and say, listen, I have this idea, and I think that love is eternal, and it goes on forever.
And what we really are here, we're this being that's trying to figure itself out in this very brief amount of time, and the best we can do is leave behind information.
We have this wonderful thing called communication.
And language.
We store this information.
The next generation comes along and tries to pick up where the last generation left off, gather up as much data as they can, and then move it forward a little bit before they expire.
And we keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it until, hopefully, we move towards some level of enlightenment as a species.
Well, these are really common, you know, and I had this guy Randall Carlson on the podcast a few times and he's dedicated his life to paying attention to the signs of astral impacts all throughout history and all throughout the world.
Yeah, and he believes that what's happened is all throughout human history there's been these resets.
Where people accumulated a lot of data, they learned a lot, society moved forward, and then boom, we got hit.
And then a lot of people died.
And then they had to regroup, start all over again.
And there's a lot of evidence in the physical form.
This stuff called trite, I think it's called tritonite.
It's nuclear glass, they call it.
And it's the same substance that they find when they do nuclear tests in the desert and stuff.
And they found it all throughout Europe and Asia.
And they find it when they do core samples between 10,000 and 12,000 years.
So it's exactly the same time as the end of the Ice Age.
It coincides with the end of the Ice Age.
And with these...
Puzzling moments in civilization where you have they'll find things like Gobekli Tepe these beautiful structures that are really complex that are 14,000 years old 12,000 years old they're like who the fuck was building this stuff back then when we thought people were hunter-gatherers and then right after that boom We get hit by rocks Most people die a lot of people die and then they have to regroup again and I think that that That's most likely going to be the end of humanity.
So one argument is based on, it's an adaptive argument, right?
So the idea is, if religion exists, does it confer an adaptive advantage to people?
And so there is some work done by a good friend of mine, David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, where he argues using a group selectionist argument that groups that are religious out-survive groups that are not by virtue of them being more communal, more cohesive, more banded.
So that argument is an adaptive argument for why religion exists.
There is another argument by other evolutionists that is based on an exaptation argument.
In other words, it's something that evolved not because itself it confers an adaptive advantage, but rather it's piggybacking.
So for example, the fact that your skeletal system is the color that it is, that itself is not adaptive.
It is a byproduct of other evolutionary processes.
So from that perspective, Religion piggybacks on computational systems in our brains that evolve for other things.
You follow what I mean?
So for example, coalitional thinking.
The idea of viewing the world as us versus them.
Blue team versus red team.
That is an innate part of our psychology.
Now, religion piggybacks on that, right?
It takes that computational system that already exists in us and it puts it on steroid, right?
So you think about the Abrahamic religions, right?
Every one of them has us versus them.
They are the Jews, the Gentiles, the believers, the kuffar, right?
And so agency detection, detecting agency in things, is something that is innate to us.
Religion plays on that.
The agent becomes God.
And so that's an argument that was proposed by Pascal Boyer, where he's basically saying that religion did not specifically evolve because itself it is adaptive, but it piggybacks on other things that have evolved.
And then a third way to study religion is to just do a content analysis of the narratives within religion.
So there's a great study done by a Darwinian historian where she looked at, in the Old Testament, how many women are ascribed to a different male in the Old Testament as a function of a status.
So the higher the status of the male, the more sexual partners he had, which is exactly what you would predict from an evolutionary perspective.
High status to men confers reproductive success.
So there are different ways that evolution, and there are several other ways, that can study religion from an evolutionary perspective.
So listen, you don't want to go to hell, so don't kill people.
All these things that people have done throughout history, if you look at religion on a global scale, there's some key components to almost all religions.
So there are very, very easy earthly biological reasons to take food taboos, religious taboos, and demonstrate that they have nothing.
But of course, when I say this in a classroom where there are people who might otherwise be religious, they see it, yet they can't completely follow you.
Controlling that controls sexually transmitted diseases, which like syphilis and a lot of the really terminal ones, before they had medication for those things, they killed a lot of people.
When animals become overpopulated, all of a sudden they start developing diseases and they fall off.
I mean, that's the rabbit cycle.
If you're not aware, people who aren't aware, rabbits go in a seven-year cycle.
So...
If you're around and you see a lot of rabbits, you see rabbits all over the place, and then like three years later there's no rabbits, what happens is rabbits get to a high population level and then they'll develop a disease and they die off.
And then there's only a few rabbits.
And then it takes seven years until they reach this peak again, then they die off again.
And they can just have piglets three times a year, and each time they do it, they'll have a bunch of them, and they'll just overtake places.
They got a problem in San Jose.
There was a news story on the other day where these people were in their house, and the pigs were knocking over their garbage can and eating up their lawn in a normal residential neighborhood.
Like, I mean, a pretty crowded neighborhood.
And these wild pigs are just roaming through the streets now.
Versus, although on that scale they would be less so, versus elephant, humans, where it, you know, the gestational period, the length of parental investment that is required before you reach sexual maturity as much.
So it's either a lot of quantity, hoping that a few survive, or much less quantity, but heavily parental investment.
And just that...
Whether you are a species that is R or K selected, the reason for the R or K term doesn't matter, has a profound effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species.
So things, for example, like humans are a bi-parental species.
So even though males invest parentally less than females in the human context, we are really champion dads.
I mean, in the greater context of mammals, Human dads are just outlandishly good.
Well, actually, and it's even been linked to the fact that little boys are encouraged to play rough house and tumble, whereas little girls are dissuaded from doing so.
And that's what sets them on their trajectory so that Bubba, who plays center for University of Nebraska, can bench press 500 pounds.
It's completely social construction.
It has nothing to do with muscle mass, nothing to do with testosterone.
But anyway, so going back to differences across species, so some species are very sexually dimorphic, elephant seals.
You have a male who's massive, four times the size of a female, or mountain gorillas, right?
So if you look at the extent to which there is or isn't sexual dimorphism with the species, that itself Perfectly predicts the mating system within that species.
Meaning, if there is a huge sexual dimorphism, typically the males are bigger than the females, but sometimes you have a sexual reversal species, then you have polygynous mating.
Meaning what?
One male monopolizes sexual access to many females.
And the reason why they develop that size is because that's the combat that they engage in, where the winner then gets the genetic lottery.
On the other hand, when you have species where the two sexes are equal-sized, then you have typically monogamous mating, like in the case of some bird species.
But even there, by the way, even though they're supposed to be monogamous, once in a while they go behind the bush, genetic tests have shown.
By the way, incidentally, this whole idea of taking an evolutionary explanation and then people thinking that that then justifies or condones a behavior is a classic reason why people hate evolutionary psychology, right?
So if you explain, you know, here's an evolutionary explanation for rape.
Here's an evolutionary explanation for why child abuse happens if there's a step-parent in the family.
Here's why people might have difficulty staying true to their monogamous unions.
Then people will get very upset at you because they somehow conflate the fact that you are explaining the phenomenon using science as meaning that you are saying it clears your moral judgment.
And of course it doesn't.
But that's one of the places where people get really upset at you and will send you hate mail.
So therefore, by creating a system where, okay, not everybody could be guaranteed that their reproductive fitness is going to be assured, but at least their kin selection will be assured.
Meaning what, right?
I share half of my genes on average with my brother.
So either I will impregnate the woman, in which case, great, or my brother will impregnate her, in which case I'm still indirectly, not through direct reproductive fitness, but through kin selection, I'm still extending my genes.
So even in cases where men share a woman, it has to be in the context of all in the family.
That's called, by the way, an operational sex ratio, if there are imbalances between males and females within a particular niche.
Sometimes it could be because of certain inheritance structures where it's only the eldest who can have enough money through inheritance so the other guys can't really afford a wife.
So there are all sorts of institutional reasons beyond sex racial reasons where some men may otherwise be out of the mating market.
And we know that societies where a lot of men are sitting around sexually frustrated are not going to be societies that are conducive to quiet.
And so therefore, even in the context where you have something like polyandry, which is something that typically, evolutionary speaking, you wouldn't expect, when it arises, it arises as a response to a real evolutionary problem.
Most things that you could think of ultimately have some evolutionary explanation.
And that's why I fell in love with evolution, because The explanatory power that is afforded, once you have that key to understand things via evolutionary thinking, it becomes incredibly powerful.
You would just say, look, you know, the idea is like if you die, if you get shot down and you die, you know, you want your wife to be taken care of by someone who loves her.
I'll tell you a great story about racial differences.
So in 1995, I think it was 1995 or 96, I'm giving a talk.
So this is shortly after my PhD.
I just started as a young assistant professor.
I'm giving a talk at this big international psychology conference.
And there's maybe 1,500 people in this room.
And that's quite a big size for academic conference.
And there's a real buzz in the room, as if there's tension.
And I'm not exactly sure why.
There's certainly not tense about me at that point.
I was just a young guy.
Nobody knew who the hell I was.
Immediately before I get up to present, so the guy who was immediately before me is a gentleman by the name of Philip Rushton.
Do you know him?
Philip Rushton, he recently passed away.
He was a Canadian-based psychologist who is probably the preeminent psychologist who studied racial differences and offered evolutionary explanations for why these racial differences might exist.
And most notably, he had looked at supposed racial differences in intelligence using post-mortem cranial size.
So the fact is that if the cranial cavity is bigger or smaller, Then you assume that that means the person from this race is more intelligent than that race.
It's controversial research.
Very, very spicy research.
So anyways, so this guy gets up to present his stuff and he starts putting up slides of black male, black female, white male, white female.
And you see the crowd is sharpening their knives to lynch this guy.
And I have to get up and present right after him.
And I'm thinking that just by proxy, just by being close to him, I'm going to get killed.
Now, the good news is that immediately after he finished his presentation, out of the about 1,500 people who were there, about 1,425 left the room to find him.
So usually, you would leave, depending on the size of, I mean, let's say you have 25 minutes, so you might do 20 minutes, leaving five minutes for Q&A. He went to the last second, so that there was no opportunity for questions, and then he sort of, you know, was whisked out.
And so I was really, really pleased that almost nobody stayed for my talk.
But it's interesting that there's certain genetic variables that we'll accept that are...
of the environment in which these people develop.
Like for instance, Inuits are much more adapted to cold, their hands don't get numb, they don't get frostbite nearly as easy, they can operate, they have much better circulation in cold weather in their hands and their feet, and that's because they've been living up there for generation after generation.
There's certain things that we don't accept though, and one of the big ones is intelligence.
We don't accept that some people could live in a soft world where things are easy and they develop a slow, lazy mind, whereas some people develop in a very tricky world with this constant innovation going on and they develop a sharper mind.
We resist that because we don't want anyone thinking that they're dumber than other people.
Well, the point, though, is that I'm not sure that anybody has offered compelling explanation for why there would be selection pressures in environment A versus environment B for there to be greater intelligence.
But the cultural element, I'll share with you a personal anecdote.
I don't think I've ever shared it on this show before.
If I have, it's still worth repeating.
After I finished my MBA, I mean, I knew I was going to go on and do my PhD and become a professor.
But at one point, I have a brother who lives in Southern California who was a very successful businessman.
And I was coming out here to see whether I wanted to go and do my PhD at UC Irvine versus other schools where I had been accepted.
And he said, hey, you know what?
Why don't you put on the proverbial suit and maybe work with me for a few years before you go on to get your PhD?
It might be a nice thing for you to get some work experience outside of academia.
I wasn't really entertaining it, but my mother heard of this possibility.
And so when I went back to Montreal, she took me aside to one of the rooms and very, very concerned.
She said to me, remember, if you don't go on to get your PhD, I mean, do you want people to remember you as somebody who's dropped out of school?
So from her perspective, from the standards that were expected, somebody who would, you know, I'd gotten an undergrad in mathematics and computer science, I'd gotten an MBA. If I stopped at that point, I would be a dropout.
I'm a dropout from school.
I have an MBA from a top school, right?
Now, of course, I didn't do a PhD for my parents' approval, but it just gives you a sense of, Of the type of expectations, the imparting of love for learning, for knowledge, for wisdom, and achievement, that is inbred in you from the minute you come out of the womb.
So whether there is a genetic component or not, I don't know, but I can certainly say that the environmental component is very alluring.
Well, I'll give you a very concrete example, right?
You were asking earlier, you know, why don't you get a job here?
Well, listen, by me taking very open positions on topics that are, quote, politically incorrect, I'm not being a careerist.
If I would shut my mouth about all these issues, Maybe some university that might otherwise be very impressed with my scientific dossier might say, hey, this guy's good.
But if he's a shit-stirrer, if he appears on Joe Rogan and makes fun of trigger warnings and talks about Islam, well, he's a bit of a loose cannon.
The amount of input that you can have on a culture based out of teaching a classroom of 100 people or more, whatever it is, in comparison to what you're doing already on your YouTube videos...
You know, you are literally, you know, music to my ears what you're saying because I just had this conversation recently where I was talking to a university about the importance, actually to a dean, where I was talking about the importance of how do we judge academics.
I mean, academics are meme creators, right?
We create memes through our science, but we're also meme propagators.
Now, to me, one of the highlights of coming to Southern California, and that's saying a lot given how much I love Southern California, is to appear on your show.
Because I know that the platform that you have, it'll take me 16,000 years to be able to even come close to achieving that type of – and it's not because of a narcissist thing I want to be famous.
Because ultimately, I'm about spreading ideas.
And it's exactly what you said.
I mean, a million people are going to listen to.
So if I can get 1% of that million to be interested in evolutionary theory after what we've discussed, how does that compare to having 25 students in my classroom?
But most universities, you're exactly right, haven't caught up with the times.
Well, university itself, okay, this is not the only way you can learn.
These ideas that the only way to get an education is to get a degree, to go, to sit in class, to do all the work the teacher prescribes, all the stuff that you have to turn in, and all the papers that you have to do, that's not the only way to get an education.
That's nonsense.
It's a human construct.
And we're living in a world where that doesn't make much sense anymore.
You're going to have, in the future, primary education is going to be online.
It's without a doubt.
Why travel somewhere?
Why go somewhere?
Especially when you're dealing with all these fucking assholes in these campuses that are instituting all these ridiculous rules on social behavior and all these social misfits that want to level the playing field and all this nonsense that's going on that's really...
It stifles a lot of open discussion.
It stifles a lot of exchanges of information because of these ideas these people have.
These rigid ideas that cannot be breached.
I think we're living in a world now where you have instant access to information.
To go to a physical place to learn seems to me to be kind of archaic.
But the mere fact that they contacted me as one of the prospective people to put together a course for them, a Great Courses course on evolutionary psychology and so on.
I'm saying no to everybody, maybe some point in the future.
Which, of course, I completely understand.
But, you know, look at this guy.
I mean, you go to his YouTube channel, you know, whatever, 900,000 views, 1.1 million, you know, of a lecture that typically would have been viewed by 80 people, right?
So he's got research, because you mentioned baboons, showing that in a sort of hierarchical society of baboons, the lower ranked baboons will have higher cortisol levels, will have more stress hormones.
Intuitively, you might think the opposite.
You might think that the higher the rank of the baboon, the more stressed he is because he has to defend against all the other dangers and maintain his position and so on.
So people took this exact study and applied it in an organizational context where they looked at an organizational hierarchy and And took cortisol levels of people in a big organization, I think it was the public health system in Britain, the higher the rank of the employee, the lower his or her cortisol level.
And the argument, so you might say, well, why would that be?
Wouldn't the person who is higher rank be more stressed?
I mean, a CEO has to have more stress than the janitor.
And one of the arguments, at least that they proposed, was the idea of freedom.
The guy who's at the lowest rung of the hierarchy has to be told when he could go and relieve himself with his bodily functions.
The amount of free destiny that he has in his daily life is very limited.
Whereas at least the CEO, even though he's working very hard, He's more master of his daily life.
So, for example, I work all the time.
I can work 10, 12, 15, 18-hour days, but yet I feel like I'm always free because there's nobody who's telling me what to do at any time.
And apparently just that has a profound effect on your cortisol levels.
And the origins of that whole study were originally due to Sapolsky's work with baboons, if I'm correct.
Well, you know, that finding is mirrored in special ops guys versus enlisted men, versus your average soldier.
Like, one of the big issues that people have today is PTSD, right?
And one of the factors in PTSD is people who are waiting for things to happen Versus people who are making things happen.
Whereas SEALs, Rangers, people that they send in to go and kick ass and take names, those guys have way less stress, which is kind of crazy.
Way less instances of PTSD and, you know, obviously still tremendously stressful and still a lot of instances of PTSD, but less.
And the more guys that I talk to that have served will tell you that the reason is that they're active.
They're proactive.
They're the ones who are moving in and doing these things.
And they're going after these bad guys and hunting them down, essentially.
Whereas the other people are sitting around the base worrying they're going to get attacked or, you know, staying on their post or driving in a car worrying they're going to hit an IED. Very interesting.
Have you ever seen the study, and I don't know if we've mentioned it here before, I think it was published in a journal called Emotion, where they looked at, I think it was MMA fighters, whether they smiled or not before the contest.
Okay, just send me a private message and I'll look for it.
I can't remember the exact details, but there was some nonverbal cues that were studied prior to a fight that, if I remember the study correctly, were highly predictive of the eventual outcome.
Well, that makes sense because if you're smiling, it most likely means that you're not really in the game.
As expected, smile intensity predicted both the outcomes of fights as well as the more detailed measures of in-fight hostility.
Interestingly, the smiles predicted both reduced hostility from the smiler as well as increased hostility from his opponent.
In other words, it seemed that both fighters were attuned to the information being communicated in the pre-fight smile.
These results held even when controlling for existing differences in skill, i.e.
the betting odds of the fight and strength, height and weight.
Though don't go drastically altering your gambling strategy just yet, the betting line still did a better job overall in predicting fights compared to just smile intensity.
I've always – actually, I think I've thought about at some point either asking you or my nephew to get access to MMA fighters to take some measures – That capture how androgenized they are, how much exposure to testosterone they've had.
Whether it be, for example, through certain facial features, or through their 2D-4D ratio, which is a measure of how much testosterone you've been exposed to in utero.
And so I actually have a study right now with one of my graduate students, Vlad Irimia, where we're looking at the links between testosterone and extreme sports, using the exact same idea.
And so I'm, of course, An obvious hypothesis might be that on average, MMA fighters compared to a control normal population, non-fighters, will be more androgynized.
I think there are a lot of people who enter into mixed martial arts or martial arts in general Because they recognize there's a lot of benefit in trying to overcome extreme challenges and that they're attracted to these things because they get addicted to the rush the adrenaline rush of a challenge and It's very few challenges that are intense as one-on-one competition with another person And I think there's a lot of people who gravitate towards those not necessarily even it seems counterintuitive,
but You would think that they would be the most violent people or the most angry people, and they're doing that because they want to dominate.
Well, mixed martial arts is different in a lot of ways.
First of all, because in boxing, a lot of times you're seeing people that are searching for a way out.
They're searching for a way out of poverty.
They're searching for a way out of bad neighborhoods and crime, and they do so through fighting.
It's a classic meme, right?
It's a classic trope.
But I think there's something going on with MMA fighters that's very different in that martial arts seem to be something that costs money.
And so to join these classes and get proficient, you have to be able to afford them.
And so you're getting people that enter into martial arts from two different venues, right?
You get wrestlers Who classically get it from school.
And wrestling is probably one of the most important skills to have, if not the most important in MMA, because the fighter can dictate where the fight takes place.
If a really strong wrestler takes you down, he can control you.
Whereas if you're a really good kickboxer, your kickboxing can't really be effective if someone can take you down at will.
So there's that.
There's the wrestling, which they get in college and they get in high school, which is at least fairly free.
College, if they have a scholarship, they get it for free.
But martial arts, like jujitsu and kickboxing and things along those lines, taekwondo, karate, traditional martial arts, it costs money to take those things.
So you're seeing a lot of very educated people that are getting into MMA. There's a lot of MMA fighters that are extremely articulate.
And there's a lot of other very, very intelligent guys who speak multiple languages, you know, really brilliant people.
So you get—it's a different— Style of fighter, you know, I think there's people out there that are fighting because they were abused as a child, they were bullied, and then they have this anger inside of them and they want to express it.
So you get a lot of that, but you also get people that just, you know, they're just tough.
They're just tough and they want to overcome challenges and they get some sort of benefit out of these extreme challenges.
So I would wonder, you know, I would wonder what the results of that would be.
I think this is probably an obvious hypothesis, but do you think that if one were to take salivary assays to measure testosterone levels, pre-fight, post-fight, and post-fight, you're looking at the winner and the loser, clearly the testosterone scores would sort along whether I won or Oh, sure.
Yeah, well, also, depending upon how much brain damage they acquired during the fight, that has a pretty significant effect on your pituitary gland, apparently.
I had, by the way, since you're a professional stand-up comedian, one of my former students, a postdoc, who I think I want to mention, he studied evolutionary roots of humor.
And so one of the things that we wanted to study when he was doing his postdoc with me, but then he ended up leaving after a year to take a position, anyways.
Was to use the Montreal Just For Laugh festivals to study the testosterone responses of comedians, you know, prior to getting on stage and then after finishing and to see whether their testosterone response Would be moderated by whether, objectively speaking, it was a successful set or not, right?
I mean, sometimes you get up and you just kill the house.
Other times, it's death silent, right?
So will my endocrinological system response track that reality?
And so that's something that I still, hopefully, will test with some future students.
I think with bombing, especially, it comes to depression.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
It's a horrible feeling.
I can't imagine there would be any benefit to bombing other than maybe your testosterone would spike because you would need the energy to run away from the crowd.
Is it that your delivery that day is not working or is it there's something endemic to the crowd that for whatever reason they're just not digging your style?
There's a lot of variables involved in whether or not you go down with the ship.
But also, it could be that you didn't address it.
Sometimes things are going bad, and a guy will address that it's going bad, and they pull themselves out of it, and then it becomes great again.
I've seen that.
I've done that.
I've had bad moments where you address that bad moment, and things snap back, or you just reassess your approach.
There's a lot of variables involved in stand-up comedy, but ultimately what's going on, I've tried to explain this, and I've gone over this with many, many comedian friends of mine, and we all seem to agree on this, that there's a moment where things are going really well, where the audience is laughing, and you're in the zone, and you're delivering your jokes that you've prepared for a long time, everything's done right, and there's a lot of great timing and everything.
It's a mass hypnosis.
It's like when I watch a really funny comedian, if I watch a...
Bill Burr, per se.
When he's on stage and he's killing and I'm watching and I'm laughing my ass off, what I am doing is allowing him to think for me.
So I'm allowing him to, you know, if he's talking about having a female president or something like that...
He's going through his thought process of what it would be like.
And as he's going through it, I'm not really doing any calculations.
I'm allowing him to do all those calculations.
I'm allowing him to take up all of my thought process with his sentences and the images that he's depicting.
And that's what makes it really funny and the whole audience we're all in it together So there's a community effect of this group hypnosis So we're all laughing because we're all on the same page We're all like these thoughts that he's saying are so funny and we're all going along with it But when someone's bad Or when the joke doesn't work, then everybody's like, oh, Christ.
Oh, no.
This isn't working.
Oh, no.
And you look around and see everybody else is uncomfortable.
And then you see he's uncomfortable.
And you're like, oh, Jesus.
He's bombing right now.
And when someone's bombing, then you're forced completely out of the spell.
And now you have to do all these calculations.
You have to think.
You have to do all these considerations going on.
There's a lot happening that wouldn't be happening if a guy was just killing.
When someone's killing, it's effortless to watch.
You just laugh.
And then you leave, you feel great.
So it's when it goes bad.
It's uncomfortable for everybody.
It's uncomfortable for the audience.
It's uncomfortable for the comedian.
It's just...
Because you're forced to consider his process, his failures, or her failures, her bad jokes, all those things.
I mean, clearly there are culture-specific manifestations of humor.
Maybe physical comedy is more appreciated in culture A than culture B. But are there specific humor mechanisms that are, or not mechanisms, but, you know, whatever, humor content that would be universally successful?
You know, unfortunately, and the really super supportive crowds that gather together, it's almost like they got kicked out of the cool playground, so they made their own playground.
And there's a comedy festival that's going on right now, or supposed to be going on somewhere in New York, where somebody sent me this thing, and I looked at it for a couple seconds, I had to throw it away.
I just like, I can't even get into this, where...
They're charging different amounts and different access to people who are white males.
They want to have as few white males as possible, so they want to make it as diverse as possible, so they're opening it up to people of color, LBGTQ. X, Y, Z. And this is their solution.
Their solution is to not just have the funniest people that they think are there, regardless of race, color, creed, ethnicity.
Well, my position on affirmative action is I think it has good intentions.
I think the idea is to try to stop racism.
However, if you're getting someone and they become a firefighter, but they're less physically fit and less intelligent than someone who could have gotten the job, but unfortunately the other guy was of Croatian descent.
He would say, "What is the reason for all the things that you said?
Why this?
Why that?
Father absence." Now, I don't know whether he is overusing that causal factor, but he certainly seems to be quoting a lot of data that suggests that many of these sort of deleterious downstream effects are due to nothing more than father absence.
Solve that problem and many of these issues will go away.
And we recognize it as someone who wasn't born in that pattern.
You look at a bad pattern of someone being born, say, like in Baltimore, in an extremely impoverished community that's filled with crime and gang violence, and you go, God, how does this get corrected?
You know, I had Michael Wood on, who's an interesting guy who was a former cop.
In Baltimore and a really, really interesting dude.
And I think he's trying to run for like...
He's trying to be a police commissioner in Chicago, right?
And, you know, I think he would be a great person for that job.
He's got a lot of information and a lot of really...
He's very smart.
A lot of common sense when it comes to this.
But one of the things that...
Michael Wood was talking about when he was on the podcast was that they had found, I guess, a directive from the 1970s when they were going through the archives of all the shit that they have in Baltimore.
The police directive from the 1970s was Exactly the same as what he was dealing with in the 2000s as far as the neighborhoods that had drugs, the neighborhoods with crime.
He's like, it's the same pattern.
We're repeating the same patterns over and over and over again and no one has done anything to try to socially engineer Some beneficial change in these communities.
Instead, they just continue to lock up the same people.
And I agree with him that it's essentially, at that point, it becomes institutionalized racism.
And that's a real issue.
And I think that's the issue that needs to be addressed.
And I don't think that affirmative action is the best way to do it because I think that also it starts to produce this feeling of resentment from people that are more qualified that don't get the jobs.
Well, and I would think, let's say, for the black applicant who, let's say, goes to law school They will never know whether they went through the whole process simply on their merit or whether they were helped in some way.
What I mean is when you got in, did you get in strictly on the merits of your dossier?
Let's suppose I actually don't want...
I'm a person of color, and I don't want anything to be affecting the decision other than purely the merits of my dossier.
So now I go through the process.
At the end of that process, I won't absolutely know for sure whether it was strictly based on what I wanted, which is the merit of my dossier, or whether there was something that helped me along the way because of this institutionalized affirmative action.
I guess it could be, but I would assume that by the time you've gone through university, you know, now you're talking about a much higher level of education, and it should be pretty...
I hate to use the term black and white, but it should be right there.
I mean, you should see their grades, and you see...
So I'm not admitting whether that's true or not, but apparently I was one of the finalists and at least I had heard from some people who were maybe on the inside that they were really looking for a woman and that to the extent that I might not be able to ovulate might be a problem.
So I don't know if that ended up being the main reason why I didn't get the job, but I've often heard that.
I don't think it's making, instead of having an even playing field for all and considering all with equal merit, to change the level of the playing field and boost people up that aren't qualified.
Right.
You're talking also about the end result.
You're talking about the finished product of an education.
Literally, at the highest level, a professor.
So I think that if you're looking at that, Really, it all comes down to what is it that's making certain people have less opportunity?
And that needs to be engineered from a societal level, from a culture level.
I've said this many, many times, that the biggest issue With any culture is the weakest link, right?
But what's the best way to have a more successful country?
What's the best way to have a more successful union?
Well, less losers.
Well, how do you have less losers?
You give more people education, more people chances, and more people who are disenfranchised and who are stuck in these bad situations.
Give them an opportunity to get out some way or another, whether it's through continued education, whether it's through Community centers, whether it's through combat.
I mean, what Larry Elder's talking about, about not having fathers.
Boy, well, we can't just say, fuck them.
They should have a dad.
The dad should get involved.
You're not going to fix people like that.
The children are the ones that are still malleable and still have potential.
So we have to figure out a way to provide them with some sort of resources, some sort of...
By the same token, do you think that other cultures might be creating environments that are exactly the opposite of that?
In other words, yes, there might be some endemic institutional reasons why people don't succeed, but there are also individual responsibility or collective responsibility within the family or the culture.
I think just alluding to that will cause people to level an accusation of racism against you.
I mean, think about Bill Cosby.
Bill Cosby, I know he's not popular now, but at one point he was walking around and saying exactly that, right?
That blacks have to take responsibility for some of their failures.
He's saying it from someone who's very successful.
Right.
I think people imitate their atmosphere.
I think cultures exist because it's easy to pattern yourself around what's around you.
And that exists in a religious sense, and it exists in a behavioral sense.
You become a lot like the people that you surround yourself with.
That's why it's so important to surround yourself with positive people.
It's one of the most important lessons you could ever learn as a human being.
The more positive people you surround yourself with, the more you'll aspire to be like them.
The more you have a high standard that...
Exists all around you.
Well, if you're fucked and you you grow up in a place without with no hope and a lot of despair I mean, I remember when I first moved to New York when I was in my really early 20s and I didn't really have that many friends at first and it was and I had a few friends that I just I was really disappointed with them and one of them because he just would say so much racist shit It would drive me crazy And I just, I wasn't, I just, I was like, God damn it.
Like, I can't find friends like I had in Boston.
You know, I was, I had a bunch of knuckleheads that I knew.
And I needed to, you know, it takes a while when, especially when you're young.
And by the way, no internet back then.
So you're trying to find good friends, and friends that were in my profession as stand-up comics.
So I had to get closer to a few people that are in these communities.
And it took a long time, but I remember feeling really depressed when I first moved there.
And it was a cause for me to reconsider moving back to Boston.
It was at one point in time.
Even though I had just signed with this new manager that's still my manager to this day, and there's all this hope and promise that, like, wow, I'm actually going to have a career now.
I was so bummed out by the people that I was around with that I would go back to Boston and do gigs, and I'd be like, fuck, I want to move back here, man.
For all of its faults, you know, is a very smart place, as is New York, but I had infiltrated into a really great community in Boston, and I hadn't done that yet in New York.
So this is a very small, you know, obviously a couple years later I was fine, but...
It was when you're not around positive people it doesn't feel good I was living in Newark, New Jersey when I first moved there Because that's where my grandfather lived and I didn't have any money So I stayed with him for a while and he was in a terrible neighborhood And he had bought a house there a long time ago and the community had changed several times and gotten worse and worse and the kid next door Before I had moved in I think somewhere around the time that I was living there His door got broken down by the cops and he was selling crack and it was it was it was real bad So I
have felt depressed living there.
And the environment that I found myself in, my grandmother had had a stroke.
She had a really bad stroke, but somehow she hung on by a thread for a long time.
And my grandfather used to have to change her sheets, and she had bed sores because she would just lay in one place.
She couldn't really move.
It was awful.
It was awful.
So that environment of being in this really poor neighborhood, being poor myself, I had no fucking money, being around bad, didn't have good friends, it's depressing.
It's depressing.
Now, obviously, I had an opportunity.
I had a career.
There's a way to get out of that.
But I got a taste, I think, even though the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest taste of despair, of what it's like to be stuck in a shit situation.
Now, imagine being born in that situation, because I moved there when I was in my 20s.
I was like 23 or something like that.
Imagine if I was there my whole life and I'd just been around fucked up people or I'd been sexually abused or physically abused or my mother was selling crack or my brother was in jail or who knows?
There's a lot of variables that can lead to a terrible state of mind.
And it's insanely hard to overcome the patterns of the past and the patterns of your environment.
And until we address that, this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is fucking ridiculous.
The idea of, well, the cops wouldn't be shooting these young black kids if they just didn't commit crimes.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
Because it's not even.
It's not an even playing field.
It's not even for me comparing myself of 23 to myself of 48. I have way more opportunity now.
It's a way easier life.
It's way easier.
I have way better friends.
I've established a nice community with my friends.
So there was a study done, I think a longitudinal study, and I believe I mentioned it in the book, at Harvard.
I think the lead investigator, I think his name is George, in French you would say, I guess Vaillant, or Vaillant, I think that's his name.
And out of 75 years of research in terms of what is sort of the number one predictor that makes people happy or content, I can't remember the exact dependent measure, the number one thing was establishing meaningful connections with others.
So, I mean, 75 years of research out of a million possible causal factors were distilled to that one fact.
Well, I mean, I don't know if we've ever mentioned this on this broadcast, but if you take prisoners, many of them will prefer to be in general population where they might be jumped and stabbed and raped.
than to be put in solitary confinement, precisely because solitary confinement is the ultimate of punishments to a social species, right?
And I feel it often because, of course, in my career, there are two parts of me.
There is the I cocoon in my study.
I'm working on a book.
And for the next, you know, 16 months, I'm pretty much focused on that.
And I become sort of a cave dweller.
And of course, there's the public side of me, which is very extroverted and sociable and so on.
Once in a while, when I've spent several days very much cocooned, and then I go out, even to meet a graduate student to discuss ideas or a friend, I literally come back refreshed in a way that is akin to satiating a thirst or hunger or sexual need, right?
I mean, you genuinely feel that I went out with Joe and we had coffee and I really needed that.
I'd established some friends and I was just starting to be happy in New York and all something out in L.A. Well, so in Darwinian psychiatry, which is a field of psychiatry that applies evolutionary principles, there's this idea of...
So, for example, we've evolved in bands of about up to 150 people, right?
Because computationally, you want to be able to mark who's trustworthy, who's not.
This guy reciprocated, this guy doesn't.
Once you get past 150, it becomes very difficult to maintain all these in your head.
Well, so in the context of the environments in which we've evolved, small groups, repeat interactions, our need for social interaction is certainly met.
On the other hand, you could live in New York.
You're surrounded by 8 million people.
You think, how could somebody be lonely when you step outside and you bump into 17,000 people?
Yet the rates of depression in this very lonely place but yet very filled place is much greater than the 150, precisely because there's a mismatch between the environment in which we've evolved and the contemporary environment.
And so that's in the field of evolutionary psychiatry, you study these types of things.
But, you know, you just find other like-minded people.
You just find people that are like you or similar.
Yeah, you got to be picky, you know?
And also, there's a lot of weight to it.
You know, if you...
For you, for example, perfect example.
You start doing this podcast, your podcast is taking off, your YouTube series is taking off, and then people want to become friends with you because they think that they can get on your show or that they can piggyback on your success.
They calculate and they look at you and they say, if I could just get in with The Godfather, I'll be in.
Then I'll get a YouTube following, then I'll get a little Twitter following, then I can get a career.
There's people that do calculate, things like that.
And I've met people like that in the world of stand-up, where people have said, hey, you know, take me under your wing.
Like, what?
Are you fucking crazy?
There's no wing.
Like, go get your own wing.
I don't have any time.
I barely have time to do what I'm doing right now and continue my own stuff.
Like, you see funny, like, but there's certain comics, so I'll see them, and I know they're really good, and they're working really hard, and then I'll take them on the road with me, like Tony Hinchcliffe is a perfect example.
And then there's other ones like that, you know, where I meet them.
And they're working hard, and they're hustling, and then I can help them.
But some people, they don't want to work hard.
They just want to sort of cling on to you, like a lamprey.
And then they think somehow or another it'll take them to...
And you've got to know who those people are, and some people don't.
And I have friends that don't.
They don't know.
So I'll be hanging around with them.
I'm like, who the fuck is this guy?
And I'm like, oh, he's a good guy, he's a good guy.
I'm like, they're good.
What are you doing, man?
What are you doing?
They'll bring these guys on the road with them, and they're terrible comedians, but what they do is they know how to stroke their ego and kiss their ass, and they've become a part of their system.
And a lot of my friends who have had this, they have had real problems with these people, where there's a deep resentment that gets established when that person's career doesn't take off.
You know, it doesn't happen because they really don't have that much talent.
They're just really good at kissing ass, and they get upset.
This person's not helping them.
Like, what the fuck have you done?
You've let this knucklehead into your life because they figured out a way how to woo you in the beginning.
So you have to be careful, but you also have to be careful with yourself.
You have to be careful with your own behavior.
You have to objectively monitor your own thinking, and you have to spend time, like, alone.
Just thinking.
And that's something that people don't like to do.
And that's something I think is absolutely critical.
It's one of the most critical things for a grown person to do is to spend some time And just think.
Alone, just thinking.
And monitor your thoughts and monitor your life and then go forth from that with some directives, with some ideas, with some guidelines of what you want to do and what you want to accomplish.
Because if you don't do that, you sort of live life untethered.
Untethered to your dreams or your ideas or I mean even dreams as far as like community and family like those aren't like lofty aspirations in the sense of like unachievable things like climbing Everest in your underwear we're talking about things that can be done but oftentimes aren't because you don't pursue them with that directive like my directive to establish a happy family to be a good friend to be a good neighbor to do all these things people don't You oftentimes don't consider how much
of a factor those things play in your overall happiness and the happiness of the people around you.
And you can do that, but you have to think about it.
Because – I mean not to stereotype but sometimes the intellectual types with whom I can go out who are part of my world, who are my colleagues – Right.
I mean, not that I'm not myself in other contexts, but there are different sort of rules of conduct in different settings, right?
The way you act.
And I find that recently, maybe because, of course, I think we both have young children where you somewhat cocoon, I've lost a bit of the...
Male bonding and camaraderie.
It comes with playing in a soccer team or, and many, many professional athletes, as you know, when they retire, they will always say, you know, they don't miss playing in front of a hundred thousand people or the adulation, but they miss the camaraderie, the brotherhood with their, and, and that, that element the brotherhood with their, and, and that, that element of male, male bonding is something that sometimes I miss because of how busy my life is.
Well, you're focused on one thing, and you're surrounded by these men, and everyone is allowed to be themselves.
And you're also engaging in this intensely, quote-unquote, manly activity that is almost the polar opposite of raising children and coddling little girls.
It becomes this manly, rugged pursuit, and it's very satisfying on a deep, genetic level.
There's so many benefits to having this fire that when you have one, it's like naturally satisfying.
We all huddle around it and it's odd to leave it.
I think that...
Being around other men, it's oftentimes thought that these men are going to get together and they're going to think men things and they're going to come back and be sexist and patriarchal and they're going to come back and ruin all this progress that we've had.
And there is that idea that somehow or another that manly Is anti-progressive and anti-equal, anti-equal rights, anti-equal values.
It's funny, by the way, that when you ask a lot of women what types of men they want, they will typically point to the male archetype that is most viewed with disdain by the current wave of third wave feminism, right?
I mean, so I was once communicating with, I think she was either Swedish or Danish, where she was saying that, especially, I think she was Swedish, where, you know, in Sweden, they've had this sort of long-standing experiment where they try to remove gender pronouns.
And so men have become so tentative, apparently, in Sweden that oftentimes these women, the reason why they like guys, sort of the stereotypical Italian guy when they go, is not only, of course, Italian guys on average are very stylish and good looking, but it's because that political correctness that has stifled natural but it's because that political correctness that has stifled natural dynamics between men and women hasn't fully permeated, say, Italian culture.
So that when women pass by, yes, you don't want them to be catcalling them, but guys will approach you, guys will hit on you, guys will tell you you're beautiful.
And in the deep recesses of even the most ardent feminists, you like that.
I mean, it's part of the natural dynamics of men and women, right?
That people, their unrequited love and affairs that take place because people are working together in these environments for eight hours a day staring at each other.
It's normal thoughts and ideas.
It's an abnormal environment for men and women to be in these workplaces and not have those thoughts.
That's abnormal.
The thoughts, I mean, and managing those thoughts becomes incredibly tricky, which is why you need to establish very strict behavior, you know...
Laws and rules and regulations in the workforce, because you don't want women to have to deal with bullshit.
Or men.
You know, I've had men that were in here.
I had that guy, The Amazing Atheist, who was talking about this woman that he had that was like, she was his boss, and he was getting sexually harassed on a daily basis.
And it was torturous.
It was brutal.
She would grab his ass, she would try to get him to fuck her, and he didn't want to.
Especially Speaking of not sexual harassment, but continuing on that train of thought, I had a public exchange with a woman who is trying to pass a bill, I think in New Jersey, maybe New York, I can't remember.
And then she goes on to say that you better stop critiquing my ideas because you're going to have a lawsuit from my lawyer for being libelous and defamatory to me.
So maybe I'm paraphrasing, but I mean the fact that I'm coming after her.
So this woman thought that her putting up an idea in the marketplace of ideas and having somebody scrutinize that idea as harassment was a form of defamation of it being libelous.
And I thought that was just breathtaking.
And I had two other cases with two Forbes, both happened to be Forbes journalists, female journalists, where we went back and forth.
It very, very quickly disintegrated on Twitter.
They started doing this, you're cyberbullying me when I had done no such thing.
I was very, very tepid and so on.
And I used against both of them.
Some people might have already heard the story.
I used against both of them the fact that I score higher on oppression Olympics or victimology poker.
Brown man from the Middle East, Jew, Arab, overweight.
I think, like, if you say you're a prince from another country and you want to take this person to your land and they will live forever in a Garden of Eden and this woman thinks, oh my god, I met the perfect guy.
But there's something that we value very intensely about intimacy.
And someone who achieves intimacy through false pretenses, it's different than someone That, like, you know, says they're gonna pay for lunch, tomorrow they're gonna give you a million dollars, and they don't.
I think in her case, I know that she has experienced...
I think a very bad deception where the guy whom she, I don't know if she married him or not, you know, had said that he was A, B, C, but it turned out to not be true and he had maybe...
A woman who fakes an orgasm with you is raping you because the next time that you have sex with her, under the false pretense that you receive positive feedback that you're a great lover, Because you gave her an orgasm, but she was faking her orgasm.
But, I mean, if you were engaging in a repeat interaction where you defrauded the person through a misrepresentation...
But, I mean, the idea that to get somebody to date you or have sex with you and through the pursuit of that objective you lie...
As reprehensible, let me be clear again, it's reprehensible and I certainly don't live my life that way, although I'm married now, but I never have lived my life that way.
You can't criminalize a central feature of human nature.
It is incumbent on each individual to do their homework.
I mean, you do your due diligence and find out if the guy that you're speaking to is a Nigerian prince.
You know what's interesting about this conversation is that what we're talking about is a person who's been fucked over and that person has gone out of their way to make sure this never happens again because they've been hurt and they've been tortured.
I think you see a lot of that with really radical feminism in general.
What you see is a lot of women who their interactions with men have not been positive.
And unfortunately, the stereotype is that these are very unattractive women.
Well, if you're a very unattractive woman and you go through life just being rejected by men or being treated like shit by men, there's like a natural tendency to think that men are terrible.
Because they've rejected, like maybe you're attracted to a man and he laughs at you and mocks you.
I had a friend that I watched him evolve into a woman hater.
He had aspirations and hopes, find a good girl, and he had this one girl he was dating, and she fucked him over, and then another girl fucked him over, and just women weren't that attracted to him, and it just got darker and darker as he got older and older, to the point where...
He genuinely would say, like, just generalize terrible things about women.
Like, women, they're all fucking whores, man.
They all just want your money.
They're all fucking pigs.
Fuck them.
Who gives a shit?
I hope they all get raped.
Like, he would say crazy shit like that, and he'd be like, whoa!
Like, where did this come from?
Well, it came from a lifetime of rejection and associating women with a negative feeling.
By the way, there's a study that was done, I think published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, where they measured the digit ratio and administered a scale of gender, you know, how much you score on masculinity and femininity, if I remember correctly, or dominance or something.
At a feminist conference.
And the women were more masculinized at that conference.
So there is empirical evidence for sort of your anecdotal intuition.
They're saying that they believe it is a response to women being independent and being forced to provide for themselves, that they develop more testosterone.
I think my last sad truth clip was on exactly that, where I was arguing that the whole idea of biological determinism As applied to evolutionary psychology is complete nonsense.
And one of the examples that I give is exactly the words that you use, which is that genes are turned on or off as a function of environmental inputs, right?
So the idea when people levy, you say, oh, you're an evolutionary psychologist.
Also, you believe everything is biologically determined.
Somebody who says that is effectively saying, I understand nothing about biology.
So we're talking about a fairly new science that is, or a fairly new data, I should say, that a lot of people just haven't accepted yet.
And it's very convenient to generalize instead.
Yes.
To not take into account all these incredibly complex variables that determine whether a human being is this way or that way, whether they're more masculine or more.
It's like, what have you had to do?
How have you had to fend for yourself?
How have you had to get through life?
What have you had to do as far as, like, who have you We had to nurture and take care of.
There's a lot of variables that lead to a person being a person.
And there's a lot of different styles of people.
And some men like really strong, dominant mother figure wives.
They love it.
That's what they want.
They want some woman to take care of everything and tell them what to do.
I have friends like that.
They want that woman to yell at them and tell them what to do.
It alleviates a lot of questions and choices, and that's what they look forward to.
And then I have other friends that want the wife to be like some 1950s housewife from a movie.
That familiar with her other than I've seen a couple of her videos about video games and I'm like, and they've also seen Thunderfoot stuff on her, which is really interesting, which explains that she had this background in marketing and mass marketing and, you know, is obviously, whether or not she's entirely invested in these ideas, she's obviously aware that she's marketing her ideas towards a very specific group.
And she's got these beta males that cling to her and are attached to her, which are Hilarious human beings.
I'm not sure if it was a term that was introduced by Richard Dawkins.
I can't remember who it was.
He called it sneaker?
I hope I'm not misspeaking.
Maybe Jamie can pull it up.
But anyways, it basically refers to some species where males come in different phenotypes.
In other words, different physical manifestations.
So there might be, say for example, a type of fish species where the typical male is a big phenotype, whatever that is.
Then there are other males that mimic the phenotype of females.
So when the male is standing around looking to protect his area, that male who looks like a female will sneak in and then get some quick copulations with some of the females that otherwise should be inaccessible to him.
And that became known as a sneaker fucker strategy in zoology.
And I argue, I haven't tested it, but I think it would be interesting to do so, that some of these sort of social justice warrior beta males are engaging in a form of sneaker fucker strategies.
Well, when George Bush was debating, I don't know if it was Kerry, I can't remember which one, His camp had come up with all sorts of rules of what kind of camera shots you can do and so on.
But this guy running for president has nothing to do...
Jesus Christ.
The guy's boring.
Nobody gives a fuck.
He's not a leader.
It's like Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush, not a leader.
That's why he had to back out of it.
Ted Cruz, not a leader.
They're hanging their head on this guy that most people see right through because there's certain...
There's a thing that happens when you talk to that guy where his intellect, like Ted Cruz, like maybe he's intelligent, maybe he's, I don't know, you know, supposedly went to Harvard, supposedly he's very wise.
The way he talks, the way he establishes himself, the way he communicates is not enough.
It's like we have Morse code and we also have cell phones.
Well, you're not going to use fucking Morse code.
It's goofy.
And this internet thing that we have created, this way of establishing information or expressing information, it is so far superior to anything that existed back when they invented the electoral college or representative government that That voting and having a leader, one single higher primate leader, one single top ape that runs all the other apes, it's dumb.
It's dumb.
One person being president is a fucking really stupid idea.
If that doesn't explain why Obama shifted almost all of his policies that he said that he was going to do once he got into office, once he actually got into office, changed so many of the things he did, including his idea and stance on whistleblowers.
There was a big part of his Hope and Change website that they had to redact.
So who believes that the president really is responsible for the entire country, really is the one guy that runs the entire show?
I think almost no one now.
Almost no one.
So it's a ridiculous figurehead position that I think we need to stop.
We need to stop pretending that we have a king.
We need to stop.
We need to figure out a way to have an effective form of government with a giant group of really intelligent people that vote on it.
People that have proven to be intelligent and objective and well-educated and have a reasoned response to all these different various scenarios.
And I think it's a bad idea because I think that this hope and this idea that we need a king, we need a number one primate, I mean, that's really what it is.
These are like chimpanzee hierarchy systems that have existed for thousands and millions of years.
I think we're moving towards this idea of a global community.
Moving towards this idea of a world with the boundaries that we have had in the past oftentimes have been because we try to stay safe.
We try to establish borders.
We want to stay safe.
We want to keep people together.
We want to keep all the outsiders out.
We need a king.
We need a king.
A king to guard the borders.
A king to lead us into war.
I just think that's less and less relevant today and that it's more and more relevant to have a large group of very informed people that can help a large group of people that are collectively calling themselves a country.
If George W. started doing a commercial for a video game where he's running away from a bunch of assassins that are trying to steal his phone, it would get really weird.
Meditation or anything else you're talking about like really strict guidelines for living and they don't make sense and they're they're ancient and You know in a lot of ways Those places where those guidelines were established where it was the cradle of civilizations where civilization first emanated and first took off and I have this Sort of joke that I never I never really figured out how to do it on stage But that essentially the Middle East is like the townies of the world Do you know what a townie is?
It's just like you think that patterns are intensely hard to break, and it's one of the reasons why the United States is the most, as far as like artistically, one of the most diverse places in the world, and as far as our ability to express ourselves in film, in music, in stand-up comedy, and things along those lines, and even in podcasting, it's the most diverse and the most potent, and it's because We're the people that escaped.
And they tried to find a new place, a new opportunity, and they escaped the tradition of the past.
And the tradition of this new place was different.
It was different.
It was more open.
There was more hope.
There wasn't a caste system like there is in England.
I mean, there's a very clear class system that goes on in a lot of countries throughout the world that has existed back from the days when they had kings.
The Canadian government, I can't remember exactly when, specifically to avoid that caste system, the royal caste system, made it a law that Canadians can't be knighted.
Because any country that's under the Commonwealth, so you're Nigerian or you're Indian, you could be knighted by the Queen.
There's real problems in established caste systems like that.
Real problems that are intensely hard to break.
And I think that the beauty of America is that you can come here with nothing and become somebody.
And the real lesson in that is not that America is different.
It's that really everybody is somebody.
You're being held back by tradition.
And you're being held back by these parameters and these guidelines that are set in place by people that have a very limited amount of information to work with.
They didn't understand the consequences of these rules.
They didn't understand the consequences of these patterns of behavior that you're forcing people to follow in.
And that's why America, in a lot of ways, represents still the beacon of freedom to people.
I mean, there's a lot of problems with America, a huge amount of problems with America, but that alone, that it represents the most recent of the big countries, the most recent of the nation.
And, I don't know if it's coincidentally, the big one.
So let me link that to some of the stuff that you're talking about America.
So one of the arguments as to why Americans seem to form more sort of ephemeral, transient friendships, you know, not as...
I mean, it might be a stereotype, but I can tell you that when I was a graduate student in the U.S., All the non-American students complain that Americans are very quick to be friendly with you, but they don't form the same tight bonds.
So I thought about it and I thought, well, it can't be inherently that Americans are more shallow.
So what might be some reasons?
And so I actually talk about this, not in this book, but in an earlier book of mine, a 2007 book.
That the fact that Americans face greater geographic mobility, today I could be in Boston, tomorrow I could be in LA, and socioeconomic mobility, the Stratton that I was born into is not necessarily the one that I might die in.
So because of these various forms of mobility, It creates a more transient definition of friendship.
Not that Americans can't form strong bonds, but there is a bit of a shallowness to the original encounters because tomorrow I might be somewhere else.
Whereas the guy who comes from Lebanon, where he's born is where he's going to die, where his word is his contract...
Is going to have a different definition of friendship if only because life is not as anonymous, it's not as open to mobility as it would be the case in say California.
What's ridiculously easy to us in comparison to our grandparents is going to be a joke to our grandchildren who could beam each other on the moon anytime they want.
Let's just go to the base on Mars.
Are you kids going to go to Mars today?
They're just going to fucking beam each other up all over the galaxy.
We're dealing with a very strange and ever-changing world.