Gad Saad and Joe Rogan debate evolutionary psychology’s role in explaining behaviors like suntanning, anorexia, and mate preferences—challenging media narratives with data-driven models. They critique cultural relativism in anthropology, exposing its failure to condemn child brides or honor killings, while defending neutral biological observations (e.g., East Africans’ running adaptations). Saad highlights academic suppression of race-based research, like Satoshi Kanazawa’s attractiveness studies, as an appeal to ignorance over truth. Ultimately, they argue that ignoring biology distorts science and society, even when discussing health or ethics. [Automatically generated summary]
You need that vitamin D. That's a big thing apparently with people that live in Seattle in the winter, is taking vitamin D and even suntanning beds.
People don't realize that suntanning beds, although it's kind of counterintuitive, you think they're really bad for you, it's actually not that bad for you.
As long as you don't burn yourself, it's actually good.
I did a study, well a paper I wrote, it was a theoretical paper with a dermatologist a few years ago, where we looked at some evolutionary explanations for the epidemiology of suntanning.
So if I were to ask you now, without you knowing anything about it, or not much about evolutionary theory, what's the typical demographic of the sort of obsessive suntaner?
White girls.
Women, young, single, and they usually tend to discount the future consequences for the immediate benefits, right?
Hippocrates, founder of modern medicine 2,000 plus years ago, had documented the exact same epidemiology of eating disorders in women.
So it certainly can't be because of media, right?
So there must be something biological that explains the sex specificity of these different dark side consumption.
Okay.
The evolutionary perspective is to then look at, to the extent that these human universals manifest themselves in exactly the same way across time and place, what might be some of these biological drivers.
Compulsive buying, almost exclusively women, 90% women.
Let's just stick with this one, the anorexia nervosa.
First of all, when you're talking about Hippocrates, you're talking about one lone individual, so a completely anecdotal piece of evidence, and he said that women were throwing up.
Wasn't it a status symbol back then for women to be overweight?
And so what evolutionary scientists have found is that it turns out that when women suffer from anorexia nervosa, there is some environmental trigger that they're being exposed to, rightly so or wrongly so, that they think they should shut off their menses, their reproductive potential, for a better future.
Does she have access to enough calories to sustain her gestational period, right?
Well, it turns out that in mammalian species, a wide range of mammalian species, Somehow there is a mechanism, an evolutionary mechanism, that either causes the females of the species to either shut off their reproductive window, or if they're already pregnant, and then there's an environmental input that says, hey, this is not looking good.
So in this case, you have the child, but you realize for whatever environmental reason that it's not going to be fruitful to raise that child.
And by the way, you see it in human cultures where typically the one who is killed is the last born, as you would expect because the other children, now you've invested quite a bit in them.
And so if you're going to get rid of some of your genetic package, you get rid of the one that you've invested the least in.
So all of these mechanisms that are part of something called the reproductive suppression model, the idea is that eating disorders is a special instantiation of that.
Because what the eating disorder is doing, it's shutting off your reproductive potential because you're getting amenorrhea.
Right, but is that absolutely connected to why women get anorexic?
Because it could easily be just a side effect of them wanting to be ridiculously skinny.
I would understand with a cow, with something that's living in a very wild life, a wild world, this animal out there just eating grass, and when resources are depleted, nature kicks in, but there's no conscious decision-making process.
When a woman is deciding to be anorexic, At least there's some form of decision-making process that wants her to lean towards a slimmer physique.
So pregnancy sickness happens during the first trimester of gestation, during a period called organogenesis.
This is when the fetus is developing its main organs.
During that particular period, it's particularly important that the women not be exposed to food pathogens, teratogens, that might harm the developmental pathway of gestation.
The fetus's organs.
Therefore, all of the mechanisms that she experiences, attraction to certain foods, pickles, a propulsion from other foods, The feeling of being nauseous, the throwing up, all of those built-in mechanisms are evolved mechanisms that are meant to protect possibly the fetus from being exposed to teratogens.
And it's perfectly timed so that once organogenesis ends, that's when the pregnancy symptoms end.
So the difference between proximate and ultimate, it's not that one is a better explanation than the other, it's that you need both levels of explanations To perfectly understand something.
Well, that makes total sense, but it doesn't necessarily apply to why women become anorexic because the desire to be slim, to look very thin in public is very strong because of social media or media, rather, depictions of women.
They're always almost impossibly slim.
And then on top of that, they also add Photoshop to it.
So the evolutionary explanation to the eating disorder story is there is something in the environment that the woman in question is thinking is a threat to her.
Can you think the same thing as the cow felt for the lack of calories?
Can you think in the human context what might be such a threat?
So, for example, if you feel, rightly or wrongly, right?
It doesn't matter whether objectively it's true or not.
Whatever she feels is what the reality is, right?
If she feels that there isn't going to be sufficient either kin support, extended kin support, when she raises a child, or the most likely thing is partner support.
If she feels that there isn't likely to be a good partner who's going to support her since we're a bi-parental species, then she engages...
And shutting down her reproductive window.
Hence, what you said is true at the proximate level, right?
Her thinking can become disordered so that she actually looks at herself in the mirror, even though she's only 70 pounds, and she still thinks that she's fat.
But that's a proximate explanation.
But the explanation that I've given you is the ultimate Darwinian why.
Together, they make a full, complete explanation of the phenomenon.
So the research shows, the evolutionary research shows that the environmental threats equivalent to lacking of grazing area for the cow is lack of extended kin support or mate support to the woman.
And that's why, by the way, you see it in cultures of plenty rather than in Ethiopia.
Because you would expect that the woman who shuts off her reproductive potential today, it's because she's hoping that in some future state, things will be better for her to get back on the reproductive train.
When you're in Ethiopia, I don't have a chance to shut off my reproductive potential.
I need to get the food tomorrow or I'm going to die.
I mean, the usual universal that we typically talk of in terms of body types is that it be an hourglass figure, which actually is going to speak to the second point of a paper that I send you.
So in evolutionary theory, what we do typically is we build what are called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
In other words, when you're trying to make an evolutionary argument, you don't just come up with a post hoc story, as some people who don't understand evolutionary theory like to say, that, oh, we just concoct these post hoc speculative evolutionary stories.
As a matter of fact, the evidentiary threshold that evolutionists typically seek to achieve is actually very high.
So let's take the hourglass figure, for example.
So what is some data that would convince people that men have evolved the penchant for the hourglass figure?
So in other words, if I wanted to convince you unequivocally of the adaptive argument, the evolutionary argument as to why men might prefer the hourglass figure… Well, it would be so that they should have bigger hips, it would make it easier for her to breed, larger fat deposits in the breasts and the ass, it makes it healthier, she has fat storing, she'll have healthy offspring.
So if you had medical and reproductive data that shows that women who have that particular body type Are more likely to conceive, then that would be one check.
And we have it.
Then we might look for human universals of that preference.
In other words, we don't simply use data from UCLA undergrads to tell us what types of body types we prefer.
We go to the Anomomo tribe in the Amazon and ask them what type of body types they prefer and so on.
So if you then demonstrate the universality of that preference, that's another check.
Now we could look at art data.
You pointed to some of the depictions.
So we can look at data from ancient Greece, from ancient Egypt, the pharaohs and so on, from Africa, from India, and we could take the statues from those cultures spanning several thousand years and do a content analysis of the statues and show that they come very close to that hourglass figure.
We could take, if that's not enough data, this one's going to clinch it for you, but there's many others that I could give you.
You could take congenitally blind men.
These are men who have never had the gift of sight.
And you could show haptically through touch that they prefer women that have the hourglass figure, which immediately negates the possibility that it's due to the fact that they were taught those preferences through the media.
And so you systematically collect data from multiple converging lines of evidence where that data becomes overwhelming.
It becomes unassailable.
And that's how you built an adaptive argument.
So contrary to all the guys who say, oh, evolution has just come up with these cute post hoc stories, we're actually profoundly more meticulous and assiduous in the data that we collect.
Well, because probably it might be difficult to have the ethics approval board of universities Have young blind men, or maybe they're not young, feel off a bunch of women.
FMRI, right, brain imaging studies of men that are exposed to women of different waist-to-hip ratios and their pleasure centers in their brain light up more when exposed to women that have that hourglass figure.
So again, the data is unassailable because it comes from multitude of countries, multitude of time periods using different methodologies.
And as you would expect, their hair color changes and their skin color changes, but the average Waist to hip ratio was close to that 0.7.
And so here what you're demonstrating is that marketers, right, these guys that are producing these products, are producing products that are in line with our evolved preferences.
If they didn't do that, if they produced sex dolls that look like East German female slash male swimmers, it's not going to work well.
Yeah, it's weird because women oftentimes think that men are because they see these models in these magazines.
And I think that does lean towards the desire for some women to get into that anorexic state because you sort of get this body dysmorphia thing going on by looking at these almost completely unrealistic depictions.
I mean, I know people who are actually built like that, but they're extremely rare.
It's like knowing someone who's built like a professional basketball player.
They absolutely exist, but boy, good luck finding one on a random day.
I think it's really strange how women always want to paint it as women being victimized by these unrealistic body images, but you never hear the same from men when it comes to bodybuilders.
When men see a guy who's just giant muscles and a big six-pack and just looks like a stud, men never feel like they're being victimized by these unrealistic body depressions.
So Munchausen syndrome, for the viewers who don't know, is this, you know, you get sympathy and attention by being victim.
And so you feign an illness to get attention.
Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when you hurt someone else who's in your care, typically an elderly person or a pet or typically your biological child, because that will garner you empathy points.
Well, so then to answer your question, why do women do that?
Because some women ultimately are trapped in a sort of big Munchausen love fest where I need to constantly get reaffirmation and empathy by being the victim.
To the extent that Western women have been liberated from all of the typical problems that we see in other parts of the world.
I've got to look for a new victim narrative, and boom, that's a good one.
Well, isn't it also, though, that it is an unrealistic body shape and that they do feel it's like a completely impossible task for a lot of women who are built like normal people.
I would phrase it in more of a term of frustration than some sort of a psychological disorder.
I would think that women are just frustrated with this.
One of the differences being that if a woman is large-boned or she has a wide waist or something like that, there's very little she can do to try to achieve that model shape.
Whereas if a man is slight, he can lift weights and eat a lot of food and get a personal trainer, do a lot of squats and deadlifts and build his body up.
A man can make his body look more masculine.
It's very difficult outside of surgery for a woman to change the shape of her body.
She can get in shape.
If she's overweight, she can diminish that.
She can lose some fat.
She can put some meat on her butt and her legs.
But she can't grow breasts.
She can't do anything that would make her appear more outwardly feminine.
By the way, that exactly speaks to some of the antipathy that people feel towards evolutionary psychology.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head, yeah.
Because there is, wrongly so, there's this idea that evolutionary theory is sort of biological determinism, right?
If people prefer facially symmetric faces, and if my face is not facially symmetric, I'm doomed to a life of twiddling my thumbs and a life of celibacy, right?
And that's why there's this narrative that became famous with Naomi Wolf.
I don't know.
Do you know who that is?
She wrote a book that sold I don't know how many millions copies called The Beauty Myth, which I actually critique in my first book.
I talked about the myth about the beauty myth.
In The Beauty Myth, basically, she provides this liberatory argument against these beauty standards.
And here's her argument, which I will sort of summarize very quickly.
She basically says, look, women are now winning in every facet of life.
And the only place...
That men can still cause harm to women, that they can still dominate women, and this is going to speak to one of the points that you raised, is by creating this false narrative about the types of women that men prefer.
And by pushing this narrative, it makes women feel insecure about themselves.
Because if I am unattractive, if genetically speaking, I don't score well on some of these universal metrics of beauty, I would much rather hear a story that basically says, oh, it's all due to arbitrary construction of beauty standards.
I think there's a lot of women that are very intelligent that run into asshole men so many times that they develop this distorted perception of what a man is and so they can formulate this theory and feel justified in doing so.
They just run into so many weak bitches out there that they start thinking that all men are trying to harm them and all men are trying to hurt their feelings.
So I'll tell you a quick story that I discussed in one of my other books.
It was a documentary that I had watched on speed dating, I think it was, where there was a profoundly overweight woman, I don't know how many, 500 pounds, who was basically arguing that it's unfair that all these men at this speed dating event are not paying closer attention to her.
Well, there's a new study that they put out recently about the myth of healthy obesity.
Because I've seen that read many times.
I've read that, rather.
Many times where people are trying to justify their own obesity by saying that there's this distorted perception of whether or not people are healthy because they are thin, and that in fact there are some diseases, and this is kind of true, it's sort of a weird contradiction, there's some sort of diseases where people actually do better And recover because they're overweight.
But the reason for that is not because being overweight is healthy.
The reason for that is there's a lot of diseases where you don't take in any nutrients while you're sick, and so your body goes into a state of ketosis where it starts burning fat, and you're better off using that fat for fuel if you are overweight than if you're a very lean person who has no fat to burn.
Then your body starts burning off tissue, muscle tissue, which is much less healthy for you and much more dangerous.
Incidentally, what you said, there's, I think, now a movement to start fattest studies at universities.
You know how you have women's studies and peace studies?
So fattest studies, the narrative is exactly what you led off with, which is the idea that there's this kind of medical conspiracy that's pushing a false narrative that basically says being overweight is a bad thing, when in reality there is no such evidence.
Well, it's correlated to his objective assessment of what is intelligent to do with your meat vehicle.
This guy is stupid if he's smoking cigarettes.
That is a stupid thing to do.
It doesn't mean that he can't be intelligent in other areas of his life, but he's most certainly shutting down or ignoring some really clear information that we have been given over the past 50-plus years.
Well, I think actually what you're talking about speaks to a point that I raised in some of my writings, the idea of whether we make choices simply because we don't have the right information to make better choices.
That's usually the typical argument that public policy makers use.
So they basically say, oh, if you're engaging in risky sexual behavior or if you're engaging in a sedentary lifestyle, it's because you don't know any better.
So let's set up public service announcements that teach you better And then hopefully people will act better.
And that doesn't actually work.
So the issue is not so much that people, you know, it's not as though I don't know that being overweight is a bad thing.
And now that you've taught me better, I will now change my behavior.
The problem stems from the fact that there are these Darwinian pulls that make it difficult for us to extricate ourselves.
Whether it be whether you're addicted to drugs because it tickles your pleasure center in your brain or whether it be because you're addicted to sex or whether you're addicted to a bit more food than you should be eating.
Those are the Darwinian pulls that make it difficult for us to do the optimal decision.
It's not because we're too dumb to know better or we don't have the right information.
In general, when we make poor decisions that lead to deleterious health outcomes, it's not because we don't know any better.
So let's go back to the suntanning example.
women know more about the deleterious effects of sun exposure than men do, yet they do it more.
If it were only a question of, you know, it's because I don't know any better, then we wouldn't expect women to be doing it more.
So it's not a question of not having the right information.
It's whether ultimately you have the control to not succumb to these poles.
I mean, we've got the seven deadly sins since, you know, for thousands of years, precisely because very smart people understood that these are some traps that we all succumb to, whether it be greed or lust or gluttony, in my case...
So I just do a heavy protein diet, minimal carbs with a lot of vegetables.
So a six ounce steak with broccoli and whatever, something like that, with the tomato juice.
And I'll lose kind of like the, well not the Atkins in the sense that you eat as much fat as you want, but it's really a lot of protein and a lot of vegetables.
Well, honestly, the Atkins is, when you're saying eat as much fat as you want, that is actually the trend.
The trend is towards a ketogenic diet.
When you're talking about getting your body to burn fat, a lot of athletes are getting involved in getting on fat-burning diets, and I actually switched my own diet to that.
I didn't really have a problem being overweight, but I was definitely heavier and I had more body fat than I have now.
And what I did was I switched over to this, there's a guy named Mark Sisson who was on my podcast before, and he wrote this book called The Primal Blueprint.
And the idea behind it is that when you're eating a lot of simple carbs and a lot of pastas and breads, you're getting insulin spikes, your body's processing all that sugar, and your body stores it, and then your body starts burning sugar.
Whereas if you can get your body to a ketogenic state, meaning your body burns fats and uses that for fuel rather than carbohydrates, you don't really want high protein.
You want a minimal protein.
You want what you're supposed to have, which is like, you know, a six-ounce steak is fine, but what you really want is a bunch of healthy fats like coconut oil, avocados.
I eat a lot of avocados.
Salmon.
Salmon is excellent.
Excellent, but also because it's excellent because it supplies you with omega-6s and 3s, the essential fatty acids, which are really important for brain function.
But people, this idea, this is also a big fucking problem that people have.
We've been lied to about fats, about the danger of saturated fats and the danger of cholesterol.
Dietary cholesterol barely moves the needle on blood lipids.
It's not dietary cholesterol that's a problem.
It's sedentary lifestyle.
It's overeating.
It's a consumption of excess carbs.
There's a bunch of factors that cause people to be fat, and it's not necessarily saturated fats or cholesterol.
In fact, saturated fats and cholesterol, that's the substrate for building testosterone.
Diet of having my body burn fat, and not just me, but a ton of my friends.
My friend Denny, who's an elite athlete, is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world champion.
My friend John Rollo, who's an MMA fighter, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
These guys have all reported, and me included, gigantic spikes in their testosterone production.
And it's because that is the building blocks for testosterone.
So when you're eating these low-fat diets and these minimalistic diets to try to get your body to be more healthy, you're dropping your body's sex hormone production.
Well, I mean, I'm just saying this because I'm your friend.
I want to get you a copy of this book.
I would love you to try to, you know, do it.
But it's not hard to just eat till you're satisfied and not eat till you're full.
That's a big factor.
That alone is probably 20% of everyone's meal.
A lot of people eat and then they keep going.
I love to do that.
It's fucking awesome.
I love to eat a giant bowl of pasta and eat a big steak.
But I also work out like a terrorist.
I work out almost every day.
And I work out hard.
So I keep my body fat down because of that.
So even if my diet is shit, I still keep my body fat down because of tremendous working out.
But then, when I adjust my diet as well, I saw a big difference in my energy levels, in my cognitive function, and a big difference in just overall wellness.
You know, I just don't...
I mean, I'm an extremist when it comes to physical performance because obviously I've been around it my whole life and I'm in the martial arts world and I'm trying to get my body to do certain things that are very unusual, but I just think that People are not designed to eat big plates of pasta or bread or all these sugars that everybody downs in the form of corn syrup drinks It's just not good for you.
Yeah, what you're going to do is you're going to wait until two weeks before the show, and then you're going to stop your period, and you're going to...
When they needed those calories and grains, like, look, if you're out hiking every day, you talk to people that are mountain climbers and hikers, they are eating massive amounts of calories.
I have friends that go on these gigantic mountain trips, and they literally cannot consume enough food because they pack all their food.
My friend Jason just got back from this big trip that he was taking to the Yukon.
Got it.
And they were eating two pounds of food a day.
That's all you could take.
So you have to eat the most calorie-dense two pounds of food that you could carry because, you know, for this trip, you know, you're only carrying a certain amount of food because you have to have your sleeping bag on your back, your tent, all that jazz.
And you come out of there, you're 15 pounds lighter.
And, you know, you just had this incredible...
I mean, it's like running a marathon every day almost.
Actually, I had one of the pioneers of the field on my show.
His name is Randy Nesse.
He's a physician by training.
So evolutionary medicine is basically trying to infuse within medicine evolutionary ideas.
Typically, most physicians are trained in the proximate world, right?
We were talking about proximate and ultimate, about how to deal with the how and what of a disease without ever asking the ultimate why, Darwinian why.
So as relating to something that we're talking about now, if you look at the top killers around the world, colon cancer and diabetes and heart disease and high blood pressure, they're all related, as evolutionary medicine folks argue, to what's called the mismatch hypothesis.
The idea being that those things that were adaptive to us in an environment of scarcity become grossly maladaptive in an environment of plenty like we have today, right?
And so basically what you're having, I mean, my gustatory preferences don't change.
So my desire to eat the fatty food remains.
But what has changed is the fact that I had to do 20,000 calories of expenditure to hunt it down then, and now I could go to the grocery store and get it.
There's no caloric uncertainty, no caloric scarcity.
And so if you look at hunter-gatherer societies that most closely mimic our evolutionary past, they don't have all those diseases.
So once they clear the early childhood mortality threats, then they actually live quite long lifespans, precisely because they don't suffer from, I think, their nine top killers.
So that's a way of taking some of the stuff that you're very interested in and infusing it with a bit more of an evolutionary twist.
That totally makes sense that people would have to expend massive amounts of calories to track down food because that was, at one point in time, what we did all day with our day.
Whether it's hunting or gathering or farming, we were constantly working to try to acquire food.
That was it.
Now that food is so easy, we still have the same genes, right?
So, look, natural selection, right, the mechanism of how species evolve traits that they have, I mean, when I'm teaching my students, I start off by colloquially saying, look, most animals, including humans, throughout their history have faced, you know, either you don't want to become somebody else's dinner, and you want to get enough for dinner for yourself.
Those are the sort of two big adaptive problems.
And then you just add to that sexual selection, which is, it's not enough to simply survive, then you have to mate.
You want to get the right mannequin.
There you go.
So that's basically natural and sexual selection in one sentence, right?
Don't become somebody's dinner.
Get enough dinner and then get a mate and there's your evolutionary...
Probiotics are one of the most important aspects of healthy bodies.
Like your gut health can affect your mood, it can affect cognitive function, it can affect your personality.
There's all these studies being done now on probiotics and of gut health and bacteria content and gut.
Candida if you have a high level of candida, which a lot of people do we eat a lot of sugar and simple carbs it Develop you develop this intense craving and hunger for sugar and simple carbs When you adjust your gut bacteria when you start taking in healthy probiotics in the form of kefir I like kombucha I like kimchi.
I like fermented cabbage and sauerkrauts and natural sauerkrauts and things along those lines.
I drink a bunch of different kinds of them and take a bunch of different kinds of them every day, along with this thing called the Onnit Total Gut Health, which is a packet that I take with every meal.
It's a massive factor because what's in your gut, like your gut flora, is incredibly important for your overall health and for supporting your immune system.
Here's another example from evolutionary medicine that relates to children, since you mentioned children.
You probably have heard of the studies that show that if you grow up in an environment that doesn't have any natural allergens, you're at an increased risk of developing respiratory illnesses like asthma.
To have the types of responses that you typically would have encountered.
So if you have a mother or a father or both parents who are incredibly OCD about having a perfectly sterile and spotless home, prepare for the onset of asthma.
She's also so allergic to horses that we were in Italy and we were riding on one of those horse carriages and she wasn't even on the horse or touching the horse, just being behind the horse on a horse carriage.
She started sneezing and coughing and we had to get off the carriage.
Well, I'm not saying that you need to lose weight, but I'm saying you're a healthy guy, you're a smart guy, you think about your life, you're very handsome, you're bronze, you're shiny.
You're thinking in these terms of like looking at the big picture, but yet you've got this blind spot.
And this blind spot is because you have this indulgence for food and you look forward to it, it becomes your reward.
At the end of the day and you sit down and you indulge and then you say, hey, I've worked hard for this and I can enjoy it and I'm married, I've got kids, I don't need to look beautiful.
I just enjoy having drinks with friends and getting stupid and laughing.
I just know it's not healthy.
There's nothing healthy about booze.
There's nothing wrong, and actually there is some studies that suggest that it's actually pretty healthy to have a glass of wine or two with a meal, and you're getting resveratrol, and also there's some studies or some Indications that point to people developed for a long time drinking wine because they couldn't drink still water because they would get traveler's disease.
If they found water, it would have pathogens in it and they would wind up getting sick.
So they drank wine for that purpose because you can carry it around with you and it's not going to go bad.
But getting drunk, like we were drinking whiskey.
We were drinking Jameson or something like that on the rocks.
It felt great.
We're hammered and laughing.
But goddammit, it's so bad for your body.
So if there's an indulgence that I take part in that's not good, it's the occasional getting fucked up.
I'm pretty good at not having a lot of those things in my life.
But it's easy to do that.
It's easy to trip yourself up.
Because there's a natural tendency towards distraction.
You know, the pressure of attempting to be successful at something, the pressure of whether it's competition or whether it's just this yearning for achievement.
You look for a release, you know, from that pressure.
And that's what a lot of people do.
They go to cigarettes or they go to booze or they go to food or whatever it is.
And by doing that, it's almost like they can, by saying, fuck it, I don't care about my health, they could say, fuck it, I don't care about my student loans.
Fuck it, I don't care about my wife leaving me.
Fuck it, I don't care about my mortgage.
Fuck it, I don't care about losing my job.
It's like this sort of denial of reality by indulging in something that's not healthy.
But it shows you how, even though we often are fully cognizant objectively about some truth, our ability to engage in self-deception is limitless, right?
Well, it is for some folks, and I think, again, that goes back to mindfulness.
It goes back to meditation.
It goes back to reflection.
Most people live their lives in a constant state of momentum.
The momentum of the past constantly propelling themselves forward, and they're always adjusting and trying to make up for all the mistakes that their past has made.
They don't live their life in a state of in the now.
They live their life in a state of, fuck, why did I do that?
Look, we live in a world where we're exposed, because in the public eye, we're exposed to a lot of negativity, even though we're exposed to a hundred-fold more positivity.
It's a rough ride out there.
And then my solace is coming home to the purity and innocence of my children.
And then the reality is that you can't bottle up that innocence And that purity forever.
And so speaking of the here and now, rather than oftentimes just enjoying the moment, I'm always worried that, you know, in five years she's going to be a prepubescent girl and then there's going to be a bunch of piggish young boys that are going to come around.
And it's so frustrating when you're talking to someone who's really smart who doesn't want to admit that they don't know something or wants to deny something's true when they haven't researched it.
It's very frustrating.
I have a friend who's a brilliant guy who does that.
You bring something up, he's like, that's not true.
And you're like, oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
We just Google it.
And I've done it with him over and over and over again.
I had to have a conversation with him.
I said, listen, man, if I tell you something is true, I'm not making it up.
And if I'm wrong, it's an honest mistake.
But if you just Google it, then you'll know.
But you're saying it's not true, and you've never even looked at it.
But here we are in 2016. You have a device in your pocket where you can get the answer to virtually anything at any time.
Because admitting that you're wrong makes you lose face.
And that's such a detrimental dynamic to have, right?
I mean, you know, I might come home at night and I've had a tough day and I might respond curtly to my dog and I actually will go back and then hug my dog because I have enough self-awareness to realize that I didn't give her enough attention, right?
So I have enough humility to never mind another human.
My dog is just as important to me.
And if I responded curtly, I will sort of apologize to her.
Yet I've got family members.
Again, this is not my family of...
My wife or kids, but the family that I was born into, that have never apologized about anything because they come from a cultural landscape where to apologize to your child, to somebody younger, is to lose face.
A parent is always right.
And I mean, that might work when you're two, but when you're both now adults, I think you sort of have to get out of that and realize that we all make mistakes and we all have to own up to them.
We all have to apologize honestly when we make a mistake.
It's super unhealthy and it's unhealthy for the person who doesn't admit they make the mistake too because then it puts you in this position of being in denial of what you know to be the truth.
You're going to run around pretending that you were right all along when you know in your head that you were wrong.
So it diminishes your own personal opinions about yourself.
This is one of the key problem people in my family.
And he says something to the effect of, oh, you know, those ancient Greeks, those Christians were really anti-Semitic, or I can't remember the exact details.
I said, oh, well, you know, I'm sorry, I don't mean to correct you, but those ancient Greeks were not Christian.
As a matter of fact, the way we mark that era, as we say BCE before Common Era or BCE before Christ.
So by definition, those guys were marked as not being Christian.
So when he's now faced with sort of historical evidence that suggests that he was wrong, what do you think he does?
It's so grotesque that I'm not even sure you can guess what he did.
Well, I suspect that one of the reasons why your podcast is so successful is because you exhibit that generosity.
If you came to every discussion thinking that there is nothing that the other person can bring to the table, you're not going to have a show that's going to last long, no?
We're not talking about like the 1950s when people have this narrow view of the world that was defined by their own environment.
We're talking about this broad place now where you can just access all sorts of data.
And one of the beautiful things about the podcast is by sitting down with people like you or all the other awesome guests I get to sit down with, I get to experience the wisdom and the information of someone who's lived a completely different life than me.
And I just find that really fascinating.
And I just think that that arrogance that someone would display by doing what that guy did to you and switching around your points, that's just a child.
That's like a developmental dead end that this person went down.
So this is a paper that I was invited to write in one of the leading journals in the field, Journal of Marketing Research, where I was asked to talk about the methods of evolutionary psychology.
How do evolutionary psychologists conduct research?
And it was specifically to address some of the common Canards that we hear from the tractors of evolutionary psychology.
Oh, it's all a bunch of post-hoc storytelling and so on.
And so the paper basically looks at three points, two of which we've already sort of covered.
One is the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations.
And again, that's a very important point to make because it basically argues that you'll never have a full explanation of any phenomenon involving biological agents if you don't study the phenomenon at both the proximate and ultimate level.
Proximate how, what, ultimate is the Darwinian why.
So that's one.
We've already covered that one.
The second method of evolutionary psychology is the building of these networks of cumulative evidence, like the one I gave you with the waist to hip ratio.
Maybe I'll give you another one as an example of this mechanism.
So, for example, if I want to argue that toy preferences have sex specificity that is innate, right?
So it's not that...
Because typically in the social sciences, we hear that what makes little boys little boys and little girls little goys Yeah, but that's dismissed.
So that's what I'm going to do next, is I'm going to demonstrate how.
Mm-hmm.
is truly laughable.
How would I go about doing it?
And so that's one of the things that I did in the paper.
So we could look at children who are in the pre-socialization stage of their cognitive development, meaning that by definition, they're too young to have been socialized And we could do studies on them to see what is it that they approach first or what is it that they gaze at longer.
And we see that there is a sex specificity in such young children.
So already it demonstrates that it's probably not due to socialization.
So that's evidence line number one.
We could take other species.
Vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys and now there's some research with chimps showing that they exhibit the same sex specificity with these types of toys as human infants do.
Data number two.
We could take data from...
Clinical population, so there's a disorder known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological problem that masculinizes little girls, that masculinizes little girls both in their morphology but also in their behaviors.
So if you take little girls who suffer from this disorder, what do you think happens in their toy preferences?
They become more like those of little boys.
We could take depictions on funerary monuments, you know, these big mausoleums of dead people, From ancient Greece, and you look at depictions of little boys and little girls, and you see that the little boys are depicted with the typical toys, with a ball, with something, with a wheel thing.
Little girls are depicted with dolls.
You could do the studies across a wide range of cultures that are very different from Western cultures.
The phenomenon manifests itself again.
And so what you do, again, in evolutionary theory is you build this nomological network of cumulative evidence coming from completely different data sets that then makes it unassailable to argue against it.
So that's the second method of evolutionary psychology.
The third one I argue is...
Evolutionary psychology operates on what are called consilient trees of knowledge.
Consilience is a term that had sort of lost its way.
It basically refers to unity of knowledge.
So if you say, for example, physics is more consilient than sociology, it's because physics has these organized knowledge elements.
So what is a typical tree of knowledge in evolutionary theory?
So you could start with something like sexual selection.
Sexual selection is basically the idea that how does a peacock evolve its big tail?
So how do animals evolve their traits to give them reproductive advantage?
That's been established from the time of Darwin through a million different species.
So now that leads to down the tree to another theory.
It's called the mid-level theory called parental investment theory.
Parental investment theory basically says that if you want to know about sex differences within a species, look at the minimal obligatory parental investment that each sex has to have in that species.
So in most species...
It's the female that has more parental investment, so typically they're smaller.
It's the males who fight for access to females.
Females are more careful about the main choices they make.
But you also have sex role reversal species, where it's the males who have greater parental investment.
What do you think happened to the sex differences?
They're exactly reversed, right?
So that has been also established.
So now we go down.
Parental investment theory leads to another theory that basically says that In the human context, females will make more judicious mate choices than men.
In other words, women are more careful in the types of mate choices that they must make precisely because they have greater costs if they make a wrong mating choice.
Which leads to a study that I did looking at how much information do men and women look at before they either reject mates or choose mates.
And what do you think the result shows?
When it comes to rejecting mates, women need less convincing.
In other words, they acquire less information before they decide all these mates are losers.
On the other hand, when it comes to choosing a mate, women look at more information prior to choosing.
So what I've shown you here is how you start with a general principle and work down a tree to a specific hypothesis.
That's called a tree of knowledge of evolutionary theory.
That's what the method of evolutionary psychology is.
So contrary to what typical detractors, there'll be some buffoon, some castrato at the bottom of your comments section that says, but evolutionary science says, that's not a real science.
And of course, in the singular form, it's Castrato, right?
So it's a guy who walks around without testes, but a very inflated ego, who then tells you, you know, despite the fact that you've spent 20 plus years studying something, he knows more than you.
All of you evolutionary scientists are, you know...
I mean, especially when it comes to gender, and obviously there's variables, but when it comes to the gravitating towards certain types of toys and tasks, and then it also pertains to career choices as well.
Like, there's this big push to get women involved in STEM, and women involved in technology, and there's discrimination, women in tech.
Well, no.
Women don't gravitate towards those particular jobs.
They don't want to do them.
Some do, and the ones that do, they cry sexism.
Because there's so few of them.
Well, it's just not something that they naturally gravitate towards overwhelmingly.
Well, there's a real problem in colleges and universities today with this denial of reality to help other people's feelings or to placate other people's feelings.
And it's also this repeating that even Obama's been involved in, repeating this myth that women working the same job make 77 cents for every dollar their man makes.
That's not true.
I don't know if you've ever researched that or gone into that.
I mean, similar narrative has been proposed, and you probably can fill in the details, regarding the, I don't know what the number is, you know, one in five women on university campuses will experience a sexual assault.
I think I might have mentioned on the show before, and even if I have it, it's worth repeating.
There's a gentleman, a very famous biologist by the name of Robert Trivers, who talked about the evolutionary roots of self-deception, right?
Why is it that we deceive ourselves?
And then the argument there is that the reason why I have to first believe in a lie before selling it to you is because when I lie, I actually have these micro expressions that serve as telltale signs of my lying.
If I could suppress these so that when you're trying to look at my face to see if there are any signatures of lies, Deception on my face.
How about if I'm actually a very apathetic guy who can't get out of bed till 11 o'clock in the morning, but yet I convince whomever I'm going out with that I have this infinite bottled up ambition.
Your personhood, who you are as a human being, right?
There are some guys who...
They don't have any ideological reasons for hating evolutionary psychology, but because they don't know much about evolutionary psychology, they typically will argue, oh, evolutionists come up with all these fanciful post-hoc stories.
And in a sense, the article that I wrote, that I discussed on your show today, seeks to address that.
That contrary to what people think, the standard of evidence that evolutionary scientists typically seek to meet prior to Accepting an explanation is actually much, much higher than other sciences by the very nature of the epistemology of the field, by the very nature of how knowledge is created and generated in evolutionary theory.
So for all sorts of reasons, none of which is valid, there's a long queue of, frankly, buffoons who despise evolutionary theory.
Now, the reality is that they're going to lose this battle, right?
There will be a day when it will become banal to argue that humans are driven by evolutionary imperatives.
And I already see it from my own scientific career.
If I look at the antipathy that I faced 15 years ago versus today, it's very, very different, right?
The antipathy that I felt from sometimes the same person.
I could still have emails from somebody who wrote me 10 years ago thinking that my work was full of shit, who's now inviting me to his university with all sorts of deference.
And so that's the nature of science, right?
It's autocorrective.
And the reality is the cat's out of the bag.
Everything is evolutionary, right?
By the way, we could talk about the range of fields where evolution has made its way and fields where you wouldn't typically think so.
Is that something that interests you that we could talk about?
And not only that, are unwilling to take into account that it might not be a case of either or, but it might be a case of there's a bunch of combining factors.
And that evolution must certainly continue to play.
It's the idea that we've completely transcended evolution with culture and thinking and logic and language.
So by its very nature, evolution itself recognizes the importance of the environment, right?
So anybody who exhibits hatred or rejection of biology using those types of arguments is simply...
Advertising they know very little about biology.
The reality is it's an interaction.
And the example I like to give, the metaphor I give is the cake metaphor.
If you take the separate ingredients of a cake, here's the sugar, here's the eggs, here's the baking soda, whatever the parts are, the butter, they're separate at first.
Now you bake the cake.
If I then ask you when you have the final cake in front of you, point to the sugar or point to the eggs, you can't.
We are an inextricable mix of our genes and our unique environments and our unique talents and our unique personhoods.
The problem with much of the social sciences has been, and they're losing now by the day, has been that they've completely rejected biology as in any way relevant in explaining anything.
Anything.
Mating, criminality, political choice.
For example, there's a field called evolutionary politics or biopolitics, which tries to infuse evolutionary theory within political science.
Well, no kidding.
I mean, what happens when we're making political choices?
Suddenly our biology ceases to matter.
So evolutionary theory is relevant anywhere in That you're studying biological agents.
Yeah, so I've debated them in typically one of two ways.
Either through the review process.
Where usually they're anonymous, and oftentimes I'm anonymous.
So in a double-blind review process, I don't know who they are, they don't know who I am, and then we're engaging in a debate.
And oftentimes the paper gets rejected because they're the reviewer, they're the editor, and then they have the final say.
So in that context I've debated, or I've debated publicly typically when I go after somebody on Twitter who's espousing these kinds of stupidities, but I've never done it publicly in this way.
So the paper, when I was talking to you about the tree of knowledge going down the tree of sexual selection.
So I had a paper where I had looked at how much information do men and women look at before they either reject a mate or choose a mate, which I mentioned earlier.
That paper, originally I had sent it to a top journal in consumer psychology.
And to kind of just summarize the position, it was, well, this is all biology.
What does this have to do with psychology?
So these very esteemed psychologists somehow thought that biology existed in a separate realm to psychology.
The other thing that they were upset about As they were talking about, well, why is this person who's an otherwise, very patronizing, who's an otherwise clearly a bright behavioral scientist, talking about sex differences when we should be looking at things that make us similar to one another?
Well, when you're talking about sex differences in mating behavior, you study sex differences, right?
I mean, it's a fundamental difference.
quality of humans that they are sexually dimorphic.
They are innate differences between men and women.
So here are people who did not want to accept that there were sex differences between men and women, and they didn't want to accept that biology has something important to say about psychology, right?
Now, if I speak to neuroscientists, if I speak to biopsychologists, they would listen to my stuff and say, oh yeah, no kidding.
So in a sense, I've existed in a fractured life in my academic life.
If I am navigating amongst my natural science colleagues, then they're all like, oh yeah, I love your stuff.
I love you.
If I navigate amongst my social science friends, well, they're less loving and less receptive, but they're coming around.
So I think the problem stems from the empty slate premise, the idea that we are born with empty minds that are only subsequently filled by a wide range, by a cascading...
It is, but also I have a problem with someone saying, why are you looking at this instead of looking at that?
Well, looking at this, just because you're looking at something, it doesn't make it so that you can't understand why we are all similar in many ways.
But the denial of these preferences, of these genetic preferences, of these evolutionary tendencies, that's not scientific at all.
Like, that's really preposterous.
And the fact that that's being taught to kids, and that they go leave these institutions with these thoughts in their head that are based on a bunch of people that have never even existed in the outside world.
That's what's fucked up about schools in a lot of ways.
Is they're going from learning by these people to becoming one of these people, teaching in these schools, and never existing, a gigantic percentage, never existing outside of academia.
So to speak to your point about have I ever faced this type of antipathy and so on, I gave two talks when my first book came out at a university in the psychology department and in the business school.
They were back-to-back on two separate days.
So this was a talk on my book, How Do You Darwinize the Field of Consumer Behavior?
I gave it in the psychology department first, which is made up of a lot of people who have background in neurosciences and biology.
And they all listened and said, yeah, beautiful.
No kidding.
I mean, of course, to study our consumatory nature, we have to understand the biological impulses that drive us.
Great.
Exact same talk the next day in the business school.
So I think business practitioners, in other words, business people, not business academics, Actually love my work or historically love my work because they're not vested in a particular paradigm.
I don't give a shit about your paradigmatic fights in academia.
Yes, but the academics who've been vested in social constructivism or in cultural relativism, every culture is relative, there are no human universals, there is no shared human nature, there is no shared biological heritage, then I come in on my biology train.
I'm dangerous.
We've got to shut this guy down.
Now, the reality is, if you're sufficiently confident about what you're doing, you ride out that storm.
And luckily for me, now 20 years into the game, more people are coming to seeing things in the way that I'm saying them.
But it's taken a lot of dogged fighting to convince people of the veracity of what I'm saying.
Because their first instinct, no pun intended, instinct is an evolutionary term.
They want to show that if everything is evolutionary, if everything is adaptive, then how could you explain something like homosexuality, which by definition is Darwinian, at that end, right?
Well, then I say, well, there are some evolutionary theories that try to explain homosexuality, but that's not really the focus of my talk.
Can I just go on?
How do you explain suicide?
Here's the other...
Now, if we are these adaptive creatures that have this survival instinct, how do you explain the fact that there's an epidemiology of suicide?
So the doctoral students, who took me out to lunch after, were all like, oh man, I love your stuff, professor.
Now why?
Again, anecdotally, we can understand why.
Because the more senior professors are vested in their paradigms.
Therefore, their brains are closed to any ideas that might challenge the status quo.
The doctoral student who's still surfing, who's surfing at the buffet of ideas, is open to the idea.
Oh yeah, biology seems to make sense.
The second thing that I'll point, when you said it's very rude, I actually got upset.
I tried to stay with decorum and politeness, but as we were leaving, I took a couple of those senior folks and I said, you know, what is the point of inviting me here?
And wasting your money and our respective time by not giving me a chance to get through my talk.
Wouldn't it make more sense to give me the forum?
And then at the end of the day, if you decide that it's not worthwhile, you throw it in the garbage, but at least you've given me the opportunity to share my ideas with you.
Oh, no, no, Professor Saad, you mistook our interruptions.
It's because we were so engaged.
I said, well, it can't be really engaged when you're not allowing me to finish the syllable.
I usually ask people to hold off their questions till the Q&A period, but I don't know why, but especially in business schools, and certainly in some of the top business schools, there is this culture A very sort of alpha maleness where you hammer at the person.
I think I read it in his book, Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman.
So I hope I don't botch the story, but the story goes something like this.
He's giving his sort of pre-final dissertation talk, his sort of departmental talk.
He's still a doctoral student at Princeton in front of the who's who of leading physicists throughout.
I mean, Einstein is there and everybody's there.
And as he's giving his talk...
As a young doctoral student, there is this one professor who's interrupting him in the way that those folks were interrupting me at that school.
And from the corner somewhere, apparently, Albert Einstein says, don't you think we owe the young man the respect to let him finish speaking?
And then I'm sure at the end of his talk, he'll have plenty of opportunities to answer us.
And then after that, nobody said anything.
So I think it's part of that baboon sort of guerrilla thing.
I'm going to show you that I'm the smartest guy in the room.
So you typically see it from not the truly elite.
The truly elite don't have to do this.
But the guys just below want to show that they're the toughest guys in the prison yard, and therefore they interrupt you, they harass you, they heckle you, and so on.
Professors that are just fringe intellectuals that just really aren't that smart, but they've achieved this notoriety and a status because of the fact they're teaching at some school.
And, you know, he's the grand poobah of the retarded social justice warriors.
Very true.
There's a lot of people like that out there.
And there's, again, there's a lot of attention in doing something like that.
You know, and if unfortunately it negates some really good points that they might have about a bunch of different issues because you have to look at it through the lens of this really poisonous person.
So Satoshi Kanazawa is a professor, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics.
It's a very, very prestigious school in London, England, who was a very popular blogger at Psychology Today.
But he had a very sort of bombastic style of writing that sort of drew a lot of attention because of the way he phrased things.
But I guess he thought that he was so popular that he was sort of untouchable.
And at one point he wrote a blog article summarizing somebody else's work looking at racial differences in attractiveness.
So for example, who's most attractive, white women or black women, white men or black men?
And one of the results from that data set, this wasn't his own study, he was summarizing somebody else's work, was that black women had been rated as less attractive And he gave some, I guess, speculative reasons as to why that might be.
So that caused a huge furor.
He's a racist.
He's Japanese, by the way.
He's a racist.
He hates blacks.
He hates this.
They tried to get him out of psychology today.
They eventually kicked him out.
They started a petition to try to revoke his tenure at London School of Economics.
But I'll mention two points.
Number one, P. Z. Myers takes this example and says, look, here's what evolutionary psychology is.
Here's this racist who happens to be an evolutionary psychologist.
All evolutionary psychologists are racist.
Well, I mean, that's what racism usually is, right?
I know a friend who is Jewish and who was caught cheating on his taxes.
That shows you Jews cheat when it comes to money because they're always looking to make the most money.
That's what happens with those Jews, right?
So he doesn't see the irony of that.
So then I wrote an article, which I frankly, if you don't mind me saying, took a lot of courage, where I, and you could probably pull it up, well, you could pull it up if you wanted, where I basically argued that to...
Purge a blogger would set a very dangerous precedent, right?
If you disagree with whatever Satoshi Kanazawa is saying, let his words come back to haunt him, right?
His words will be there.
If they are truly racist, if he is espousing racial theories that are pure quackery, that will be the biggest punishment he could suffer.
But to remove him from the discourse, the public arena of ideas sets a very dangerous precedent.
Now, guess what happened?
A lot of my academic colleagues wrote to me privately, said, my God, thank you for having the courage to write that article.
That's exactly what I thought, but I didn't want to write the article because then people might think that I'm supporting Satoshi.
In many ways, you could make the argument that there are women that are far more beautiful than any...
that are black, that are far more beautiful than any white woman that you know.
I mean, there's a broad range of attractiveness in all sorts of different races and creeds in different parts of the world.
And there's also...
different people have different...
Things that they're attracted to like some people are attracted to short Asian women some people attracted to tall women from Norway, you know I mean it's there's a lot of variety and what people personal preference sure but when you're just looking at sheer numbers And which is I'm sure he wasn't saying black women are completely unattractive.
Absolutely not As a matter of fact, I think in the same study, if I'm not mistaken, he pointed to the fact that black men had scored as more attractive.
So the result that demonstrates a finding that is racially acceptable is gleaned over.
The one that is unacceptable then makes him a KKK Nazi.
Incidentally, the king on this issue is a gentleman by the name of Philip Rushton, who has now passed away a few years ago, who was a Canadian psychologist who spent his career studying racial differences.
Specifically, he studied differences in IQ. And I actually had a personal anecdote with him because early on in my career, I think two years into my original professorship, I think it was in 96, I was giving a talk at a conference.
This hall had maybe 1,500 people, and I hadn't looked at who were the other speakers in my session, but I noticed that people were very, seemed there was a lot of poison in the air.
And it turned out, I should have maybe checked before going into the hall, that the gentleman who was speaking immediately before me was this gentleman, Philip Rushton, and he was going to talk about cranial capacity, post-mortem cranial capacity, Of black men, black women, white men, white women, and then he would show some racial differences which would get everybody riled up.
And this was probably the only time ever where I was about to give a talk where I was genuinely terrified because I thought that I would just get lynched by proxy because I'm the next guy in line and they're just gonna kill me just because I was next on the same stage as him.
The good news for me is that After he finished his talk, so the room, let's say, had 1,500 people.
There's a great paper that was published, I think, in 2005 or 2006, either in science or nature.
I love the title of the paper.
I think it's Forbidden Knowledge.
And it specifically sort of breaks down the types of research questions that if you want to have a viable career as a scientist, you should stay away from.
And I think pretty much on top of that list is studying racial differences, especially racial differences that might eventually point to a finding that is politically incorrect.
That's an excellent way for you to become the pariah of science.
I actually did a sad truth clip on my YouTube channel where I talked about, you know, facts are not racist, right?
I mean, in Boolean logic, in mathematical logic, you take a statement and it's either true or false.
It has a binary value, one or zero.
I mean, that's how we create circuitry, architectural circuitry of a computer, right?
It has a truth value.
Yes, no, right?
So the idea that a statement is racist scientifically, no, it's either false or not false or provisionally true.
But apparently the argument from the other camp is the mere fact that you ask these questions What is the value in asking that question?
So they sort of infer a nefarious motive to you going down that alley.
Yeah, but you can't do that because it's an appeal to ignorance.
You're saying that let's all feign ignorance and not look at the actual facts of just the physical bodies of human beings and that they vary based on climate, based on, you know, what area of the world, what the people were up to that were living there for generation after generation that led to the genetics expressing themselves and the way they do in 2016. It's crazy.
But it's weird.
It's weird, and it's almost like in response to what they believe to be illogical criticism that's inevitable.
It's like this illogical criticism is inevitable, so hedge your bets early and say there's no difference between the sexes, there's no difference between the races, I don't want to get any arguments, I want tenure, I just want to keep promoting ignorance at an institution of learning.
You remember earlier you were asking me, so who are some of these detractors of evolutionary psychology?
So what you just mentioned kind of can bring us back to that point.
Some of the early...
Proponents of sort of this anti-evolutionary position came from anthropologists who saw the potential for biology being misused or Darwinian theory to be misused, right?
So the Nazis can refer to, you know, Darwinian theory, there's a struggle between the races and we are the Aryans, the Jews lost, so what's wrong with getting rid of them?
That's Darwinian.
Of course, it has nothing to do with Darwinian theory, but I usurp the theory For my nefarious pursuits.
British class elitists said, hey, there's a struggle between the classes.
We are the upper class.
Who cares if the lower class are eliminated if we don't fund them, if we don't give them health care, if we don't educate them?
That's natural selection.
Eugenicists said the same thing.
You know, what's wrong if we sterilize people who are dull, you know, mentally deficient, people who are Maybe a bit too dark.
People who are homosexual.
Hey, that's cleaning out the gene pool.
Hey, that's Darwinian, right?
So some anthropologists thought, well, you know, there is going to be misuse of biology.
So let's now create a new worldview built on bullshit.
So the edifice is built on bullshit after bullshit.
But at least there won't be an opportunity for people to otherwise misuse biology.
And so how do they express that?
They created a narrative that basically says that Cultural relativism is what defines humanity.
Every culture is unique.
Every culture is different.
There is no such thing as human universals, because that would necessitate biological commonalities, which we don't accept.
And so therefore, for a hundred years, anthropology departments have been built on an edifice of pure bullshit.
At least the cultural anthropologists.
The bio-anthropologists recognize biology.
But the cultural anthropologists are driven by a premise of cultural relativism.
Which, incidentally, our common friend Sam Harris tells a great story about moral relativism.
And I hope I don't botch the story, but apparently he was at a conference somewhere where he had a chance to speak to the bioethicist who is sitting on the President's Commission on Bioethics.
And she apparently is a sort of moral relativist type.
And he asked her, I mean, are you sure that there are no universal moral truths?
I mean, are you not able to pronounce a position on whether if there were a culture where people were told that every fourth child has to have his eyes gouged so that he can walk towards the light without eyes, would you support?
Well, who am I to judge?
So this bioethicist was unable to pass a moral judgment as to whether If you had a religious narrative that says that every fourth child should have his eyes gouged out, she couldn't pronounce the position.
And the reason why she couldn't is because she is shackled.
She's intellectually shackled by the narrative of cultural relativism.
And that's why the castrato-in-chief, Justin Trudeau, That's why, before he was prime minister, when he was a minister in parliament, he got very upset when somebody referred to child bride, honor killing, genital mutilation, throwing acid in their faces when they refused marriage or whatever.
Somebody referred to these practices as barbaric and there is no place for them in Canadian society.
He didn't get upset by those practices.
He got upset by the other politician referring to them as barbaric.
But from his perspective, he is simply shackled by his inability to have a clear moral compass that says this is right, this is wrong, because all he sees is the parasites in his brain.
That says, who am I to judge?
Well, judge, asshole.
There are some things that are right and some things that are wrong.
And when we're talking about things like people objecting to the analysis of cranial capacity of different people...
I could see why some people would be uncomfortable with that, because I could see how some people would perceive that as being some sort of a justification for racism, and so they would stand there.
But as a person who's not racist, I'm not racist, and I don't think you are either, when we're discussing this, it becomes a matter of just being a very curious biological trait.
And it doesn't make someone superior or inferior.
It makes someone different.
And it's fascinating to me, because I'm looking at the human Evolution of the species as being this massive complex algorithm that's been going on since the beginning of single-celled organisms branching off into multi-celled organisms.
So there's been this process of change and what has made this process so that people that live in Iceland are so big You know, you look at those men that win those strongman competitions, how many of them are from fucking Iceland?
Their muscle structures are very different, right?
Slow twitch versus the longer one.
So the East Africans, so Ethiopians and Eritreans and so on, Kenyans, have these elongated bodies that are just built for long distance.
The other guys are these packers.
That's why you get those differences.
Now that is not viewed as racist because ultimately you're talking about success.
On the other hand, if you talk about race A is somehow less good at something than race B and where race A scores high on the victimology Olympics, forgive the pun, then you're screwed.
There was a fantastic Radiolab podcast that dealt with people from one particular part of the world that were amazing at running.
And they were talking about their ability to endure pain because of the rituals that they had to endure, the rites of passage as men.
Their circumcision done with sharp sticks and having to crawl naked through thorn bushes and really dark, dark shit that they had to do.
And it was interesting because one guy who had gone through that and became this unbelievably successful runner and just had this unbelievable ability to shut off the pain signal, to ignore it.
But he was also talking about he wouldn't want his son to go through that same process and that he believes that the benefits are not worth it.
So it's not just biology with them, but it's also this unbelievable ability to die.
And the actual episode is called Cut and Run because it's about circumcision, about what they're forced to do while they have a stick poking through their dick.
It's really hardcore.
And that this ability to shut off pain and ability to endure is a key factor in their ability to succeed in running.
That it's a mental toughness thing as well.
Like they've maybe perhaps turned on this aspect of their brain.
He said, look, I'll book the range for two hours, and either you'll be the type of guy who'll go there and will use the two hours, or you'll shoot once, and you'll say, this is not for me.
I don't like it, and we'll leave.
Because I was asking him, when should my wife and kids come back to pick me up?
Yeah.
Well, it turned out that I stayed for the full two hours.
But I can understand sort of the response that people might have because it's a lot more powerful than you think.
You can speak to this probably better than I can.
I shot also the submachine gun, the FBI. I found that a lot easier because it's kind Right, recoil.
The recoil.
But the guns, and I think they were of different calibers,.22,.45, I don't remember the exact numbers.
Well, I have some really powerful rifles that were even different, I'm sure, than anything you shot.
I have some hunting rifles, like a.300 Win Mag, that is like getting punched in the shoulder every time you shoot it, because it's designed to shoot moose and elk and big giant animals.
It's a heavy thing.
Really strong, powerful round.
And yeah, the vulnerability that you feel when that trigger goes off and you hear that boom!
I'm sure you're wearing headgears or ear guards, which you really have to.
That's so important.
There's so many people out there that hunt and shoot without ear protection and they wind up having tendonitis or tinnitus.
It forces you to exist in the conscious mind versus the reactive mind.
You are consciously engaging in a process.
So, like, there's a thing called target panic that many archers face, and it's a huge issue because of nerves, especially people that aren't used to performing under nerves.
They go into this really almost like tunnel vision sort of a state, and they start panicking, and they just want to shoot the shot as quick as possible.
And so they make a lot of errors.
Because there's a lot of things involved in shooting a bow and arrow correctly.
Bow and arrows, it takes so much more discipline than it does to shoot a rifle.
Because with a rifle, essentially what you have to do is have your face in the proper position, put your finger on the trigger and squeeze so the shot goes off almost as a surprise.
And as long as you're looking through the scope correctly, you have your rifle centered in, or you have your rifle sighted in correctly, It should hit where you want to aim it if the rifle is accurate.
With a bow and arrow, there's so many different anchor points.
You have to have the string touching the tip of your nose.
You have to have your hand in the exact same place every time.
You have to have practice countless times.
You have to make sure that you're holding your shoulder, your front shoulder in the right position.
Your hand has to be holding the bow in a very specific position where you're not torquing the bow left and right.
And so when you go through your shot process, You go through this checkpoint in your mind.
When I do it by myself, I say it.
I say, okay, hand in the right position, front shoulder position.
And it's because of this reaction to the overwhelming, unusual stimulation of the event, of the panic sets in, and you succumb to that unusual pressure.
Yeah, and I think there's also something that happens to people when they do something so many times where it becomes this subconscious action and then when you ask them to verbalize what the steps are, oftentimes they don't know because they've programmed it into their mind.
You know, you just go through this standard process.
And that happens with martial artists a lot.
There's a lot of martial artists that have certain techniques that they've gotten down to a science, but then when you ask them to teach it, you say, okay, what are you doing first?
Are you doing this first?
And they go, huh.
I'm not sure.
And they literally don't know.
I've talked to that with certain archers, too.
Certain archers, I've asked them, are you looking at the site first, or are you looking at the target first?
When you release the arrow, are you looking at the target or the site?
They don't know.
They don't know.
Where it falls into this sort of subconscious state where they've made repetition.
They've repeated the process so many times.
They've made this repetition cemented in their subconscious where they could just sort of go into this zombie state.
You drill these moments over and over into your mind so that when you're fighting, they actually just come out subconsciously or they come out without conscious thought because you don't really have the time to say, okay, I'm going to slip this right hand and then throw the left to the body and the right high kick.
It has to sort of be an automatic response.
So you have to be able to go into this Zen state.
Which is fine in these big movements, these explosive movements like a martial arts thing.
But in terms of like an archery thing, you don't want fast, big, twitching, explosive movements to come out automatically.
What you want is a very controlled process where you maintain very strict form and you stay calm.
And so in that sort of a process, going over this conscious shot-making process is probably better for you.
You would never imagine, like for years, for decades rather, we had no idea that heading a ball could have detrimental effects.
But now we're finding out that certain soccer players who consistently headed the ball over a long career develop all sorts of cognitive issues with memory, impulsiveness, all the same sort of symptoms that you find from fighters.
It's a sub-concussive trauma thing where you're constantly engaging that connective tissue inside your brain to try to stabilize the brain as it swashes around inside your skull and it starts failing.
And then the damage of your brain moving around inside of there starts accumulating.
It's way more now because they found so many different methods of acquiring stem cells.
But during the Bush administration, it was hugely problematic.
And that's one of the reasons why Europe got so far ahead of America.
And there's a lot of people that go to get certain treatments.
They had to go to other countries.
Fortunately now, there's a lot of stem cell doctors and specialists that are in the United States that are having incredible success with injuries and a lot of mixed martial artists do it.
Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson, who's the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, just had some stem cells shot into his knee.
So this is a really common thing, that you deal with some doctors who aren't athletes and don't work with athletes, and then they tell you things like, don't ever lift something again.
I'm going to show you a machine when we get off today.
I'll show you in a couple minutes because we're going to end soon.
There's a machine that I have in the back called Reverse Hyper.
And it was created by this guy.
I've talked about this so many times.
People are like, not again!
But it was created by this guy named Louie Simmons.
And Louie Simmons is this guy who runs this very famous powerlifting gym called Westside Barbell.
And he had a bulging disc himself.
And his doctors were telling him they're going to have to fuse your disc and you're going to have to have an operation.
He was like, what?
And he couldn't, as a person who is an expert in physiology and a person who's an expert in exercise and teaching people how to get strong, he couldn't understand why if an injury, a compression of the disc caused the disc to herniate, why couldn't a decompression of the disc cause it to reset or to heal?
So he developed this machine that does exactly that.
It's called the reverse hyper.
And I have one of these in the back.
So you see when he's lifting the weights up, it's strengthening the back.
When the weights go down, it's actually pulling the back apart.
It's slowly decompressing the back in an active form.
I mean, no peer-reviewed studies, but athletes have used this time and time again, along with decompression.
Spinal decompression is also really important.
Spinal decompression, meaning like hanging from your ankles, hanging from your waist.
I have a couple different devices in the back that I can show you that allow you to relax your back and relax.
Yoga is also critical.
Yoga is huge because there's a bunch of positions in yoga where you are actively decompressing your back.
There's one where you reach back, you grab yourself behind the heels, you straighten your legs out, and you literally are pulling with your arms and you feel your back go like pop, pop, pop.
Wow.
You're releasing tension and pressure and you're actively stretching your back.
But it's really important for people to work on their core and their spine.
And there's so many people that don't.
I have a friend of mine who's this big, strong, powerful guy.
And he played football and he's done a bunch of different things, but he's never done any real...
Significant core work, and I started showing him some different exercises like windmills and things along those lines, and he was stunned at how weak his lower back is.
Because so many people don't work those muscles, and those muscles are critical for athletic performance, for your ability to move and to protect your spine from injury.
There's a lot of injuries that you can avoid by just being strong in your core, in your column, your spinal column, and developing strength around that whole Really super sensitive and delicate area of your back.
But decompression is real.
There's a bunch of machines that doctors have.
And when I hurt my neck, one of the things that I did is went to this doctor.
They would have this machine that kind of straps you in.
Yeah, I mean, that's why these chairs that we're sitting in, we're sitting in these Ergo Depot chairs, and these chairs are designed to make you sit at a good posture.
So if you sit like this, you'll sit with your spine in a good position.
Normal chairs, a lot of times, your back gets rounded, and you sit into them, and you sink, and you develop this pain.
Like right around your mid-back or maybe perhaps your lower back, depending on whatever ailments you've got.
These chairs, I sit in these fucking things for hours.
I don't have any problem.
And I think they're actually in some way beneficial because they force a good posture.
Like as you're sitting there, you have to kind of keep yourself in a posture.
There's also a lot of those standing desks.
They develop these standing surfaces that are a surface that's very varied.
So instead of standing on this absolute flat, static sort of a floor where you're in the same position all the time, instead it's this dynamic surface where it has all these humps to it and you move around on it.
So you'll lean on the left leg, you'll lean on the right leg.
Have you seen those things?
See if you can find one of those surfaces, standing surfaces for standing chairs.
I had a complete rupture of my Achilles tendon when I was a soccer player and one of the things that I had to do in 14 months of rehab is to stand on one of those boards with a ball.
I have an Achilles tendon from a cadaver in my knee.
Yeah.
When you get ACL surgery, instead of replacing your ACL with a cadaver ACL, which is significantly weaker, they take the ACL tendon and replace it with Achilles, which is way bigger and way stronger.
It makes your ACL 150% stronger than a regular one.
I don't know if you're aware of how it works with cadavers, but...
When they replace a ligament, what it does is essentially acts as a scaffolding and your body re-proliferates this cadaver ligament around your own cells.
So instead of it being a normal size, it becomes this fat cord that really keeps your knee in place.
Because I've had both my knees blow out.
I've had two ACL reconstructions.
One in each knee.
No, that's not it.
There's other ones.
That's just a chair this guy's on.
It's a standing desk surface.
Standing surface.
Pull up standing surface for standing desk.
Or surface for standing desk.
Standing desk surface for standing on?
I don't know.
I bet Ergo Depot has it.
There's a bunch of those different kinds of standing desks, but moving surface for standing desk.
And it's just an uneven surface that has many different layers to it.
Many different...
No, that's not it either.
Whatever.
There's a bunch of them.
I'm sure.
But, you know, there's all these different solutions that people try to come up with for the real problem, which is not sitting in the proper posture at a chair.
And I sit in this desk doing these podcasts for hours.
Well, the reason I ask this is because earlier in my teaching career, I could do back-to-back lectures, each one being three hours, and it was no problem.
Now I can't do it, not because of mental acuity problems, but because when I stand up, my back starts hurting by about hour four.
It'll make a big difference in the health of your back because it's one thing they just don't look into enough and the only time they look into it is when they're already injured.
And I really wish people would pay way more attention and I wish I had known this before I got injured.
I got injured from martial arts because just the nature of jujitsu and wrestling, there's a lot of people that I get in.
I know a lot of guys that have had disc replacements and all sorts of fusions and stuff.
And it's just the brutal nature of the sport.
But I think some of that, at least, can be prevented with proper maintenance and proper spine health, decompression, stretching.