Hunter Maats and Joe Rogan dissect how Brian Callen’s podcast grew from a viral prank to a 200-episode platform featuring intellectuals, while critiquing modern liberalism’s echo chambers and ideological fundamentalism—from Marxism’s scalability flaws to Dawkins’ divisive "atheist extremism." Maats links tribal psychology (e.g., Hitler’s exploitation of anti-Semitism or Papua New Guinean band-level genocide) to cultural evolution, arguing that herding societies’ violent norms persist in Southern U.S. communities despite environmental changes, and that education myths like "math genes" stifle critical thinking. The episode concludes with a call for science to adopt evidence-based storytelling—like Luther’s Reformation—to bridge gaps between biology, culture, and public perception, emphasizing emotional resonance over adversarial rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
So, I mean, what happened was that a couple of years ago, Brian and I were talking about books, and Brian had just started doing his podcast at that point.
And, you know, he was sort of interviewing strippers, a lot of strippers or like porn stars or like, you know, MMA guys, and that was fine.
But, you know, I was like, Brian, if you enjoy these books so much, why don't we get on some of these professors?
And he was like...
Really?
Like professors would talk to me and I said, well, you know, what are your download numbers?
And, you know, he told me them.
And then I went off and I lied to the professors and like doubled or tripled them.
And part of it is just sort of having actually talked to some of the smartest people in the world.
He's like, oh, these are just people.
And, you know, they know certain ideas that I didn't know, and now I know them, and, you know, maybe I can.
And he's even started experimenting with, he particularly got really excited, we had a guy called Joe Henrik on, who wrote this great book called The Secret of Our Success, which is all about cultural evolution, how cultural evolution works.
And one of the things he talks about in there is, you know, why do we have black people and why do we have white people?
And, you know, it comes down to vitamin D and folate and all these sorts of things.
Side story, when I first went to college, I wanted to major in linguistics for a while, and I met with my linguistics professor, and he sits me down, and we're having a conversation just like this.
And then all of a sudden, he stops me, just like you did, and he says...
Wait a minute.
And he proceeds to ask me these really fucking bizarre questions.
He's like, if John and Jane are in a race, and John comes fifth, and Jane comes in afterwards, what position does Jane come in?
And I was like, sixth?
And he goes, British.
And then he Proceeds to do all of these tests to basically spot my accent.
Because the X sound is really a K and then an S, even though we represent it as an X. So he basically had all of these tests, and he figured out pretty quickly that I was trying to pass as an American...
Because what happens is that people naturally sort of start to—you're in a tribe, and you start to pick up the values and the speech patterns and all that sort of stuff of the tribe.
And I really thought of myself as American, in large part because I identified with my mom more than my dad.
And so what happened was that I was like— Uh-oh, British accent creeping in.
And so I fought that with everything that I could.
But in spite of fighting the accent with everything I could, these words like bean and vitamin and medicine and sick that I wasn't watching for, that no ordinary person would watch for, crept into my mind.
And part of it is, I mean, this is a large part of what we've been doing and what Joe Henrik's work is about, is the fact that, you know, when you're in a tribe, whatever that tribe is, whether it's America or Christianity or Mormonism or Islam or, you know, some Papua New Guineans in the foothills of, you know, Papua New Guinea, whatever you some Papua New Guineans in the foothills of, you know, Papua New Guinea, whatever you do, That's just the way things are done.
You don't question it, right?
The tribe creates the sense that this is what normalcy is.
And then the second you go outside the tribe, whatever that tribe is, you're suddenly like, oh, our tribe is fucking weird.
There are other ways of doing things.
And that's sort of been a large part of, like, the experience that Brian and I had growing up because Brian's dad was my dad's boss.
And so that's the first place that I went after I was born in Saudi Arabia was Brian's house.
Like at birth, I went to Brian's house.
And so for the last, you know, and then we moved around and we moved to different places.
He did, you know, Philippines, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever.
I did Saudi Arabia, Greece, Brazil, England.
And then my parents moved to France and Libya and the UAE. And then, you know, I came to the U.S., So moving constantly between tribes, like that was a large part of my experience growing up as a kid, was I was constantly like, people are all the same, and yet they're fucking different.
And how does that work?
And because I come from the background of science, my first response was like, oh, well, there must be science of this, right?
Why not go and look at that science and see what the science says about that?
Turns out there's a massive amount of science all about it.
Yeah, there's a massive amount of science all about it, and it's so fascinating when you stop and think that there are some people...
I'm sure you've seen the most recent photos of that uncontacted tribe, now contacted, obviously, in the Amazon, like, really recently over the last couple weeks?
There's some sort of interaction with these people.
There's none.
There's been no interaction with the West.
They have stick bows that they've made, and they're all barefoot, and they're all wearing leaves and shit.
These people, here they are, trucking along in 2017. And you've got to think, 50,000, 60,000 years ago, they probably were living exactly the same way.
And what's fascinating is just the degree to which those people have so much to teach us, because a lot of what happened in the beginning of the Enlightenment is that if you look at Locke and Rousseau and all these guys, they're trying to imagine the state of nature.
But they're a group of people who are sitting around in Europe...
They've never met somebody from the Amazon or someone from Papua New Guinea.
And now we really have a pretty good idea of what was life like before civilization.
And it's pretty damn fascinating.
I mean, Jared Diamond has this great book, The World Until Yesterday, which is literally all about life before civilization.
And what are the things that we can learn as moderns from these people?
What are the things they get right that we get wrong?
So what happens is when you have tribespeople and they go outside of their village, they suddenly become massively paranoid, like incredibly paranoid.
And he's like, you know, these people are more paranoid than your average New York Jew, right?
wandering around the forest, and they're like, shit, is this tree going to fall down?
Where can we sleep?
Like, they go and they check the trees.
They look for footprints.
Oh, my God, are those the footprints of, you know, some other tribe?
Like, what's going on?
What is that sound?
And he's like, what is this paranoia about?
And for a long time, he thought this paranoia was just misplaced, that it was inappropriate.
But then he had this experience where he had a couple of experiences— One, which was around, you know, somebody, some other tribe that was potentially trying to kill him in Papua New Guinea.
And then the other one was around he basically, you know, was getting on this boat.
And, you know, if you're in the West and you get on a boat at the New York Port Authority or whatever, you feel like, oh, yeah, this boat's safe.
Like there are safety rules.
Probably someone would check it, whatever.
So he gets on this boat.
the boat goes out into the ocean and capsizes and sinks, and he almost drowns to death.
And it's basically because these kids who were running the boat were running it way too fast, and the water kept sloshing over the side in the high waves.
And at a certain point, there's so much water in the boat that the boat goes down.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
And he then talks about how, you know, he's a 70, 80-year-old man.
He's like, I need to be more paranoid because the reality is if I go down, it's probably because I slip in the shower.
Like, you know, there are all these things that can actually kill me in my environment that I sort of take for granted because my world seems so safe.
And so one of the things you learn from that is that paranoia is a tool.
And rather than a lot of people have trouble with paranoia where they're indiscriminately paranoid.
But the key is figuring out what to be paranoid about, when to be paranoid, so that you're hyper alert to threats.
Most of their body's exposed and they're around all sorts of different poisonous things and predatory things and cats and fucking spiders and whatever the hell's out there.
Well, the interesting thing is that in many ways it's actually more fun, because they have such a strong, like, you know, part of what we don't have, and obviously part of what you're creating with your podcast and what we're trying to create on a smaller level with our podcast, is tribe.
Right?
Like, you know, a strong sense of community, a group of people that you belong with, you know, you're in it together, all of that sort of stuff.
And, you know, America, and he particularly talks about the elderly, you know, he talks about what is the experience of the elderly in a tribe?
And, you know, you're super valuable until death.
Everybody respects the shit out of you.
You always have things to contribute to a tribe.
What do we do with the elderly here?
You stick them in a fucking old person's home and leave them to rot.
You know, they don't have that sense of belonging, that sense of purpose late in life.
It seems like if we lived in a small town and there was some guy that, you know, we really loved and he was starting to die, we'd want to take care of him.
But if it's that crazy asshole that's down the hallway in your apartment building, you never even talked to that dude because there's a thousand people in your apartment building that you never talked to.
The easiest way to understand it is Facebook, right?
Like you may have 4000 friends on Facebook, but then you constantly find like, who the fuck are these people that I friended in some sort of like friending frenzy.
But you find that, like, oh, I only really know a few of these people.
The majority of them, my brain can't track, right?
And you even get into that experience.
Like, that's what I always find fascinating is you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, right, on the street, and you're kind of avoiding the interaction, right?
And then, you know, you sort of get out into larger and larger circles.
150 is sort of the size of a tribe.
But then, you know, even though there's 150, there's, you know, whatever, 4,000 people, 5,000 people who's like, you'd recognize their face, but you're like, I don't totally fucking know you.
Well, that's what's interesting about small towns is that there's a feeling in small towns of an invasion of your privacy as much as there is a feeling of camaraderie.
So his big book is Grooming, Gossip, and the Origins of Language.
And so Dunbar's whole thesis is the big question has always been, like, why do we talk, right?
Like, why do humans have language?
What is the function of language?
And what Dunbar did was he basically looked at what's the natural group size of different primates, right?
So, you know, there's a natural group size for apes, for chimpanzees, and, you know, orangutans, and all this sort of stuff.
And what ends up happening is that if you're chimps, you can groom all the members of your troop.
That's not a big problem.
But if your troop is 150 people like it is for humans, there's no way you can physically groom all of those people.
So it becomes too many people to physically groom.
So essentially the idea is that language is how we groom each other without having to do it physically.
And that's what gossip is about.
It's really that we're like grooming each other, we're maintaining social relationships, and we're trading information about who's trustworthy, who's not trustworthy, who did what to who, and passing information around in the tribe.
I mean, it seems also when you think about how women are really into gossiping and chatting, whereas men really appreciate quiet and then get upset if people are too flashy.
And specifically, men, like what you're saying about making sure that nobody's getting too flashy, that's a real function of teasing, right?
The real function of teasing is that if you look at these hunter-gatherer tribes, they have all these mechanisms for making sure that nobody's head gets too big.
Right?
So, for example, you know, they'll do things where, for example, I'll give you my arrow and you'll go hunt with my arrow.
So then even if you kill a deer, it's actually not your kill because it was done with my arrow.
So, and then also, you know, when they, for example, they'll have all these rituals when someone has elected the big man of the tribe or whatever it is, they will, then all the group will get around and make fun of him.
He should, because his social function, the leader's social function, is to be humble.
Right?
Because we, you know, power corrupts.
Like, that's what it does to human psychology.
That's not a function of Donald Trump.
That's just a function of the human brain.
Right?
And, you know, we know that.
I mean, that's, you know, that's being studied now.
There's a guy at UC Berkeley, Dacher Keltner, who's also awesome, who's studied power.
And specifically, you know, there's this old quote from Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
He went and studied that, and he got more specific, and he found out that power does two things.
It makes people more impulsive, and it makes them less empathetic.
So it makes people good impulsive and bad impulsive in the sense that you'll have celebrities who will be like, I'm giving away all my fucking money, right?
And you're like, oh, that was fucking dumb.
Or, you know, like Wesley Snipes had that great idea of like, I'm just going to not pay taxes, right?
I think in his defense that he just got one of those wacky attorneys and had him convinced that there's some loophole in the Constitution and they don't want this Constitution loophole exposed.
Let me tell you something, man.
If they found out that no one has to pay taxes, the government goes down.
There's a lot of people that actually had that conversation with me.
They were telling me that you don't have to pay taxes, and that the Constitution says that the only time you're supposed to pay taxes is during war, and that's when they came up with federal taxes in the first place, and it's not legal, and that's why they can't really charge you with it, and if you just resist, I'm like, bitch, they will put you in a cage.
They'll take all your money, and they'll put you in a cage.
That is the one time.
There's two really fascinating things when it comes to money.
That's a really fascinating one.
If you don't pay your taxes, it's one of those debts where it doesn't matter.
You go to fucking jail.
You go to jail.
They take everything you have.
Even if you have no ability to pay it when you get out, you still owe it, and you go to jail.
That's fascinating.
Because you can't just pay it off.
It's not like, oh, you owed $50,000 in back taxes.
No, you fucking lied to us about paying money, so now you go to jail.
Like, you weren't honest, so it's not just you owe the money, now you pay it, now you're clean.
No, no, no.
No, you go to jail.
You take all your money, and then you get out, and you haven't made money in a long time, and now you gotta get back on your feet and fuck you.
P.S. Fuck you.
And the other time the P.S. Fuck you is student loans.
It's the one thing that you can't fucking go bankrupt with.
Saddle down young, impulsive children who are just getting out of their parents' grasp, saddle them down with debt, and then have them enter into a diminishing job market.
And if you start off something in 2016, what are the fucking odds, especially if it's tech-related, that anything you learn is going to be applicable in four years?
Having Jordan Peterson on your podcast, you guys had him before I had him on, and I've been paying attention to his work for a long time, and he's one of the few people that are standing out there in the river screaming.
Did you see this recent thing with this women's march in the New York Times?
They're separating the women by color, and white women are being told to check their privilege.
Where does one check one's privilege?
We're going to find out.
See, I put that up on my Twitter.
Pull it up because it's fucking hilarious.
And this is not some fringe newspaper.
This is the New York Times printing this.
And Michael Shermer posted it.
Women's March on Washington opens contentious dialogues about race.
What was the headline that was on my Twitter thing about it?
Because the headline's hilarious.
Look at what Shermer said.
To protest racism, now dividing women by skin color, whites told to check your privilege.
Get the fuck out of here.
And that's what you were talking about with power and power corrupting.
That is power.
Yeah.
That's one of the things that's going on with this social justice warrior movement is not just people deciding that some people should be more ethical or kind or loving or open or progressive.
No, no, no.
It's exerting power over people to enforce your standard of thinking and behaving on them.
Well, and it's the power of, A, a just cause, right?
Like, okay, you're fighting racism.
You're fighting sexism.
Like, these are things to fight.
Like, I'm all down with you.
But the fact that, you know, if you have any problem with it, right, Jordan Peterson takes issue with some of that behavior, they're then like, so you're saying racism and sexism and discrimination are okay?
They try to paint you into a corner instantaneously with their opening statement, "Well, you're a bigot, so, oh, I'm a bigot." Is that what's really going on?
And if you look at, I mean, the argument, I think, particularly about pronouns, it really comes down to a linguistic one in the sense that words are tools, right?
And so if you look, if you want to talk about pronouns, look at English in the time of Shakespeare, right?
They had this thing, thou, right?
It was another pronoun.
And then they got the fuck rid of it, right?
And why did they get rid of it?
Because they were like, man, it doesn't really add anything.
Which is one of the more hilarious things about people that actually think that they're communist.
Just shut your fucking mouth.
If you are, and if you really do subscribe to that, I guarantee you're not contributing.
You're like one of those hippies that always wants weed and you never bring some.
You know, come on, man, let's all share.
How about you bring your own weed, you fuck?
They never have it, right?
And that's the communist people.
The people that are really into the idea of communism.
Yeah, on theory, about everybody sharing and not worrying about money, that would be great.
If there was only the three of us, if we were the only people in the world, this is my example that I always love to use.
If there was the three of us, and there was like $3 million in the world, and we all said, well, let's all just split it up, and then money won't be nothing.
We'll just trade back and forth, and everything should be even.
Okay, cool.
And we'd be fine with that.
And then we go on about our merry way, but there's too many fucking people, and there's inevitably going to be some form of competition.
And in some form of competition, some people are going to get out ahead.
And there's going to be some people that are upset that people are ahead.
And there's going to be all sorts of reasons.
Some people are going to be ahead because they're assholes.
Some people are going to be ahead because they get up at 5 o'clock in the morning while you sleep till fucking noon.
That's true too.
These are all true.
There's some people that are totally ethical and they just do a lot of work and they do better.
They're gonna do better.
They didn't steal from anybody.
They didn't rip anybody off.
But this narrative keeps getting repeated by people who don't get up at 7 o'clock in the morning or don't have the same kind of ambition or feel bad because some people do want a fucking private jet and fly all over the world and ball like Dan Bilzerian.
All these things are true.
I mean, it's both things.
It's like you can be an ethical person and be like a super ambitious, crazy person who wants to succeed in business for some reason.
But also in the defense of the people that are anti-corporate or anti-corporation, there is an issue when these gigantic groups get together and they're only...
Their only motivation is acquiring more money every year.
That does become a problem, and then there's a diffusion of responsibility when you're locked into that giant system, and you're just a middle manager of some Exxon group that's fucking killing seals, and you don't give a shit.
You know, those poor seals, why are they living in the Arctic anyway?
It's where all the oil is.
Stupid fucking seals covered up with oil.
You know?
Yeah.
It becomes that, right?
It becomes you're just a part of the thing, but look, I got a new BMW. It drives itself.
Hey, we got a house in the Hamptons.
Everybody's happy.
And that's a problem, too.
So there's two problems.
Well, there's a million of them.
But that is a problem with money, too.
It's like...
The issue might be corporations in itself might be a problem.
And the problem is that a large part of this is these are large historical forces, namely specialization.
So if we get the 300 million people in America, it's not that everybody's an idiot, right?
It's that, oh, you're a lawyer, and you know the law, and you know...
Nothing else, right?
Or you are a teacher and you know your subject, you know history, you know whatever, right?
Or if you go into academia and you talk to a bunch of scientists, you'll find, oh, you know your sub-discipline of psychology, of biology, of chemistry, of whatever, and literally nothing else that is happening in science.
So the problem is that what happens is if you look at the Founding Fathers, they read really, really widely.
And I was recently involved in an intellectual dispute with some libertarians, right?
And so I went to libertarianism.org, which is run by the Cato Institute.
But wouldn't that be amazing if you managed to convince Christians that like, you know, actually instead of the Eucharist, you should be eating bananas?
And then the hard part, you had to be so hungry, you're banging on a rock.
And then luckily for you, there's meat and water inside.
Like, whoa, what are the odds?
You had to do a lot of work.
I bet it was probably somebody whose loved one was killed by a falling coconut and got fucking pissed and smashed that coconut with a rock thinking that coconut had killed their mom.
And is there much of a difference between a woman who gets paid for each individual sexual encounter versus a woman who marries a guy for money, which is pretty much normal.
So if he kicked his wife out, if she said something stupid, you know, and she said, I'm tired of his breath, then fuck him, and he kicks her to the curb, and, I mean, people would be like, yeah!
Get rid of her, Donald!
Get a new one!
And it'd be like a gigantic nationwide woman hunt to find the perfect person who just knows to do what she's told and just to obey the Donald and just to take care of him.
Well, I think the people who are to move to L.A., right?
You have to really believe that out of all the people in the world that somehow you're going to make it.
Right.
So optimism is what attracts people out here.
But then what happens is that a lot of them end up sort of sitting in optimism.
Right?
They're always sitting there and being like, I'm gonna get discovered.
I'm gonna get discovered.
I'm gonna win the lottery, right?
Essentially, it's that sort of mindset.
And then they're just waiting for things to happen.
They don't have an actual plan for going about it.
It's obviously not true of all actors.
Some people are like, man, okay, I'm out here now.
If I'm gonna make it, I need to hustle.
I need to do things.
I need to do all that sort of stuff.
But there is that trajectory for actors who come out here hoping they're going to get discovered, you know, are waiting to be discovered for 40, 50 years, and then like, oh shit, I'm 70. And then they crash, and then, you know, they become the super depressed, cynical actors who sit around like, you know, being like, fuck the industry, the industry's the fucking worst.
And that is where a lot of middle America is right now, because they've had this hope of the American Dream, the American Dream, the American Dream, the American Dream, and then those hopes have been crushed, right?
It hasn't delivered, it hasn't panned out the way that it was supposed to.
And so you're seeing a lot of pessimism, which is the opposite side.
And pessimism has certain strengths, and the strengths of pessimism, it's that constructive paranoia we talked about that they practice in Papua New Guinea, which is that you're super alive to threats.
But you're actually so alive to threats that you see threats that aren't even there, right?
You're paranoid.
Right.
But the problem is that it also comes with substance abuse.
So you find that, for example, what's happened in Middle America is there's a lot of substance abuse going on, all these opioid addictions, all that sort of stuff.
And periodically there's all this weird stuff that happens in Russia where, for example, they'll drink some weird detergent, some Glade plug-in or something like that because there's a tiny bit of alcohol in it, right?
So there's a certain psychology that comes with that massive pessimism.
And that massive pessimism evolved because of the context of Russian history, right?
Right.
Russian history, if you ever want to truly be depressed, just read some Russian history, right?
That'll do it for you.
And you find that, like, I mean, Russia has always been a meat grinder, right?
It just chews people up, it spits them out.
And so the way that you survive in that environment is being massively paranoid, right?
The winter will kill you, right?
The leadership will kill you.
There's all sorts of things that'll kill you.
And so the Eastern European mindset tends towards this massive, massive pessimism.
And the pessimism is useful in the same way that it is for the Papua New Guineans, where you're massively alive to possible threats.
But it sets up these problems.
And the problems that it sets up are substance abuse, and it also sets up the problem of sort of anticipating threats that aren't actually there.
And so what ends up happening is that there's then the problem that pessimists and optimists misunderstand each other, right?
They don't get each other, right?
The optimist is like, you're just fucking depressing and, you know, sort of see threats that aren't there and, like, your life sucks.
And the pessimist looks at the optimist and is like, you're fucking delusional, dude.
Like, you gotta get real.
You gotta understand how things really work.
So if you look at what happens in Russian and American relations, what happens is that you'll have the same situation but interpreted in two totally different ways.
So after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States made some sort of promise or some sort of intimation that it would not expand NATO any further east.
And the Russians took that as, okay, you're not expanding NATO any further east, right?
But in fact, what ended up happening is the United States and the West and its sort of oblivious hopefulness is like, let's keep expanding NATO! Right?
They didn't take this comment very seriously, and they moved NATO all the way to Estonia, all the way to the Russian border.
Now, the Russians sitting on their site interpret that as a violation of the promise.
So sitting there as the pessimists that they are, they're tracking each of these moves.
They're like, oh, okay, you're moving another country over.
You're moving another country over.
We see what you're doing.
And that's a lot of what the tension that boiled up between Russia and America was about.
And I should clarify just so that people know where is this all coming from.
This is all coming from books and interviewing academics.
And if you are curious about anything, tweet me, let me know.
And if there's any comments that you're curious about, I'll direct you to the book and you can go read it and you can work your way up the science chain and figure it out for yourself.
So, there's essentially, if you look at, if we talk about those hunter-gatherers, right, they have two big problems, right?
And one big problem is band-level genocide.
So what will happen is that periodically one tribe will just go and wipe the other fucking tribe out.
They'll kill them down to the last man.
They'll kill the babies.
They'll do all that sort of stuff.
And this can happen super, super quickly.
So Jared Diamond, when we had him on the podcast, he told this great story about there's these two tribes in Papua New Guinea.
They've been living side by side for years and years and years, perfectly happily.
They love each other.
They get along.
They cooperate, all this sort of stuff.
And then resources get scarce, right?
There's some change in the environment.
Suddenly there's not as much food around.
And as people start to get hungry, one of the tribes goes off, and in the course of half an hour, they tell each other made-up stories that get increasingly fantastic.
And by the end of the half an hour, they have convinced themselves that the other tribe are vermin, that they need to be exterminated, that they are a scourge on the land, that they're not really human, and they go and wipe them the fuck out.
And that is one of the dangerous potentials in human psychology is the fact that when resources get scared, scarce, we like identify some sort of threat in the environment, some sort of group of humans, and we go and we wipe them the fuck out.
So if you look at, for example, what happened in Germany in 1933, right, there's the Great Depression, there's hyperinflation, there are all these problems.
And, you know, that old psychology that hasn't changed in tens of thousands of years is still there.
And so naturally, people start looking around for a scapegoat.
And the anti-Semitism that is sort of already lingering in, you know, the German cultural environment, you know, suddenly that becomes the target group.
And, you know, Hitler, the political opportunist, comes along and says, oh, you can blame it on them.
It's interesting that we even think that this is unusual or bizarre when we look at nature.
When you look at all the different systems in nature that are set up, like how many times lions will kill cubs to make sure that those males don't grow up to dominate them.
And that's, I mean, that's a big problem of sort of what's happening on college campuses is that there are a lot of unpleasant things in human psychology and unpleasant things in human nature.
And, you know, for humanity, really the good things come from being realistic.
When we're realistic about how disease works, we get We get to control it.
When we're realistic about how electrons work, we get to control them.
Let me ask you this, because this is really important to this subject.
This issue with Marxism spreading across universities, what do you think is the cause of that?
Why is that so attractive to people, and why are people so confident to openly proclaim themselves as Marxists without understanding how ridiculous that is?
And that's exactly the point, is that, you know, are all humans hypocrites, or is it that we selectively use these same intuitions that we all have for different causes?
So if you look at, for example, gun control, are liberals pro-choice or pro-life?
Well, what's interesting, too, is that there's two positions that are taking place in the American psyche, at least, that we're almost reluctantly agreeing to.
And it's that the Republicans are, or the conservatives, are more realistic, more hardcore, ready to kick ass, ready to fight for what's right.
Whereas the liberals are a bunch of whiny crybabies looking to give away their money, and they're creating welfare babies.
If it wasn't for the conservatives, these fucking people would be speaking German, living in Vietnam.
But it's also such weird casting for her, too, because she does these emotionally difficult Sophie's Choice movies, and then she's trying to do a poppy rock star movie.
And I just think you could sort of say that without disparaging what other people enjoy, including disparaging what a lot of women enjoy and foreigners.
One of the things she was saying is that Hollywood's crawling with foreigners.
If you take them, all you have left is MMA and football and MMA, mixed martial arts, not the arts.
But you wouldn't.
That's not true, because 80% of the fighters in the UFC are from other countries.
They're from Ireland, like Conor McGregor.
They're from Brazil, like Amanda Nunes.
I mean, this is an incredibly diverse lineup of people from all over the world.
So for her to say that is so silly.
But I can understand saying that you don't think it's an art by your interpretation.
Well, but also, I mean, this comes down to, you know, liberals, right?
So in general, liberals massively over-favor the notion of caring.
That's like their big, big moral intuition, right?
So they care about the environment, right?
They care about protecting children, toddlers from dangerous guns, right?
They just sort of...
Everything is interpreted through caring and wanting to protect.
So understandably, when they look at an MMA fight, they're like, oh, that's bad because there's not caring and people are getting hurt, right?
They're getting their feelings hurt.
And so when Jordan Peterson is on here and he's talking about how it's this very sort of maternal thing, it is a very maternal thing.
And the problem is that, you know, what ends up happening is that when you have an echo chamber like college campuses, which are incredibly liberal with very few outside opinions, that that's the rabbit hole that they go down.
They go down the caring rabbit hole.
And when you go down the caring rabbit hole, you end up at Marxism.
And, you know, when you're surrounded by people who essentially think like you, there's no one to, like, sit you down and be like, that's fucking nuts.
And what they do is, for example, they have these behaviors where, for example, they'll drag, if you go and kill a deer, we drag it into the middle of the village so everybody can see the deer, and then we divide it up, and then you make sure that you give it to everybody else first, and then you take the last piece and you take the smallest piece. and then you take the last piece and you take So it's, you know, what you do with birthday cake.
You're trying to show everybody, like, I'm being super sherry here, Isn't this great?
I'm not thinking about myself.
And at the level of a tribe, you and I can track all of the interactions.
We can attract, we can track the fact that, you know, oh, you know, fucking Ung over there is not pulling his way.
Gender in science, like gender as is discussed on campuses today, things get real weird.
It gets real sort of loose and open to interpretation, and even though you're biologically a male, you can identify as a woman, and the correct way to treat you is to treat you as a woman.
So we're gone.
We're outside the realm of science now.
We're into the world of social constructs and agreed-upon behavior.
And so the parents are like, okay, can't put that back on.
What do we do?
And so they end up going to the world's leading specialist in the 1960s or whatever it was, 50s, 60s, on gender identity and all this stuff, which is this guy, Dr. Money.
And Dr. Money convinces them to castrate their penis-less son and to raise him as a girl.
And so they have to go and, you know, take their son in.
And, you know, David, who is now going to be raised as Brenda, is, you know, Dr. Money is showing pictures of naked men to Brenda and saying, like, this is what girls like and all this sort of stuff.
And, you know, is forcing him to wear women's clothing, and they're going to do hormone therapy and all this sort of stuff.
Now, Dr. Money is meanwhile publishing papers that is saying, oh, this is a tremendous success, it's amazing, like gender is all a construct, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, perfectly adjusting to life as a girl, all this stuff, and the plan is that, you know, they're going to do surgery and give him a vagina and all this sort of stuff.
Now, meanwhile, what is Brenda doing?
Brenda's hitting things with sticks.
Brenda has no interest in playing with her sewing machine, except for the one time that she takes a screwdriver and picks it apart to figure out how it works.
And doesn't want to hang out with girls, only wants to hang out with boys, only wants to play with her brother's toys.
So all these sorts of things.
And at some point, when the kid is like 13, 14, the jig is up.
They figure out that they better tell Brenda the truth.
Brenda finds out the truth and proceeds to essentially have a mastectomy to remove her breasts, switches to male hormones, and instantly goes to living as a boy.
Brenda, now David, grows up, marries a woman, and has a relationship, but unsurprisingly has a whole bunch of psychological issues and ultimately goes into a supermarket parking lot and blows his brains out.
And if you get your tens of millions of listeners, 30 million plus listeners talking about David Reimer, and you're like, we're going to make David Reimer a household name.
We're going to make sure that the tragedy of David Reimer is something that everybody knows about and learns about, and that everybody's tweeting and talking about David Reimer.
Then suddenly it becomes very hard for anybody to say that gender is purely a construct.
There may be spectrums and there may be like, you know, weird in between areas, but the reality is that a lot of gender is genetic and the science is there.
And you're not going to get a bunch of social justice warriors who read science because most people don't actually read science, but you will get them to engage with the story of David slash Brenda Reimer.
But to work it all out and to encourage that behavior or to say, we're going to bring you to a transgender specialist right away and they're going to prescribe this and that.
So what we have to be engaged with is what is reality?
And it's not that I sit here and have read literally all of the science.
I can't.
Like, it's far too vast a project.
And science isn't supposed to be an individual project.
It's supposed to be a collective project where we're all trying to really figure out what is this bitch known as reality that has evaded us for millions of years, right?
Or tens, hundreds of thousands of years.
And, you know, the point is that if you want to talk about, like, gender, for example, let's talk about people who are intersex.
There are some people who are born and it's not, you know, their genitalia at birth aren't clearly male or female.
And what they now do, you know, the medical community is that you basically find out what are they genetically.
Are they X, Y, or are they XX?
And then you raise them as that.
But you don't do hormones and you don't do surgery precisely because you're going to let them decide, right?
And if you are, I mean, you know, how much better...
Okay, so why is the surgeon using an electrocautery needle to do circumcision?
Who the fuck knows, right?
Like, it's a dumb choice by a surgeon.
But imagine if they'd said, okay, that fuck-up happened.
We can't unfuck that up.
But we're not going to now make it worse by chopping off his balls.
And we've now got a lot more data, and David Brenda Reimer is not an isolated incident.
There have been other incidents like that.
And they vary.
It's not that everything turns out like David Brenda Reimer, right?
But if you really care about children and you really care about people, which is sort of the big liberal value, then the Hippocratic Oath, the whole point of being a doctor, is your first responsibility is do no harm.
You're not supposed to make things worse.
If you can make things better without really possibly making things worse, then that's great.
And so, again, we don't let children vote.
We don't let children drive.
Why would we let them make It's such a huge decision at such a young age.
And I think whatever the decision ends up being, you know, people are going to make their own individual decisions, so be it.
But you want to make sure that the decision is an informed decision.
There's also, there's forbidden territory when it comes to gender and gender identity as far as like what you are allowed to debate or not allowed to debate.
Yeah, and it becomes pretty obvious that the origin of that forbidden behavior, forbidden thinking, is that people that are transgender or gay or marginalized in any way have been discriminated against and treated poorly, and we recognize that, so we automatically stop any critical thinking when it comes to those people.
They can't be crazy.
They must be, you know, it's just a transgender issue.
It couldn't be that they're crazy and transgender.
Well, that's never discussed.
It can't be he's gay and stupid as fuck.
No, no, no, no, no.
Gay people are wonderful and they're all amazing because they've all been discriminated against.
And the point is, you don't—I mean, you know, human beings are human beings.
And so, for example, when we had Jordan Peterson on, one of the questions that I asked him, which I think is a super important question, is Jordan's a psychologist, right?
And I asked him, okay, so let's imagine you had a patient who came here and said, you know, I want to be called by one of the 70 pronouns, right?
What, as your patient, would you then do?
And he said, well, if you came to me and said to me that you were Jesus Christ— I would have to, as a responsible doctor, first decide that it was in my best interest to call you Jesus Christ.
So I have to figure out, really, what is that about?
And is it going to serve your outcome to be able to do that?
And again, you know, there's unaccountability for any human, whether it's a celebrity or a sports star or a rapper or a gay person or a transgender person or a politician or a scientist, is bad.
Like, humans need accountability.
That's just the reality.
Otherwise, we go fucking nutballs.
So if for any reason a human is denied accountability to other humans, you've got a problem, right?
Yeah, you're doing them a disservice by thinking that you are in somehow or another helping them or, you know, like that stupid article earlier today that we were talking about, about...
These people showing up at the racism conference and then the white people being forced to check their privilege.
You're ruining the whole thing with this kind of short-sighted, shitty thinking.
Anyway, so, you know, within this, I mean, first, just to set all this up, we should set up briefly, how does culture work, right?
And the way culture works is that it, like genetic evolution, it works based on blind copying.
So what ends up happening is that you are in awe of people, right?
You look up to people.
And so you blindly copy the things they do.
And specifically, you start by blindly copying from the outside, and then you work in.
So the first thing you do is you see someone and you're like, oh, that person's fucking amazing, that rock star, that sports star, whatever.
And you start dressing like them, you start walking like them, and all of that sort of stuff.
Now, in a hunter-gatherer context, that would be, you know, somebody who is a hunter or is a gatherer, and you're like, man, you know, she finds all the best guavas.
And so, you know, you would, like, hang out with her.
You'd sort of, like, shimmy up to her.
You'd be seeing what she'd be doing, and she's like, oh, okay.
She looks for a very particular color of guava.
She, you know, squeezes them in a certain way.
And over time, you learn what she's doing, and then ultimately you even learn how she's thinking.
But in a large-scale society like ours, I don't meet Michael Jordan, right?
Michael Jordan just becomes this sort of distant person that I idolize.
And so advertisers have figured out how to hijack these mechanisms.
And they know if you put a burger next to Michael Jordan's face that I'm like, oh, I want to be like Michael Jordan.
So I'm going to eat a Big Mac.
Right.
And little children are dumb.
And so they blindly copy that or, oh, I want to be like James Dean.
He has a cigarette in his mouth.
I want to blindly copy that.
And we don't understand that the burger or the cigarette is not actually the key to being as successful or as cool as or as good at basketball as Michael Jordan or James Dean.
We don't understand that that's where that comes from.
So we have this tendency to blindly copy anything we can.
And Thomas Sowell has for years and years and years been trying to fight racism.
But he's been trying to fight racism by having a conversation about culture, right?
And the fact that there are essentially two different sort of—we're speaking broadly here, right?
But this is for the purposes of communication.
We're going to tell a simple story to start off with, right?
So broadly speaking, he puts two different cultures of people with dark skin next to each other.
And one culture is these people from the West Indies.
And one culture is this group of people who grew up in the South with slavery and all that sort of stuff.
Now, one group, the West Indies group, does really well.
So a lot of the successful black people, people like Colin Powell, are originally from that cultural heritage.
The other group is the group that you find in ghettos and African-American communities and all that sort of stuff.
They don't do well, right?
They don't get good education.
They, you know, shoot each other.
There are all these sorts of things.
And the reason why Sol has been telling this story is because he's been trying to say, you know, when liberals look at the people in ghettos, they say, ah, racism.
That's why they're not succeeding.
And Sowell is saying, no, it's not.
Because if you look at this group from the West Indies, they also came from the experience of slavery.
There was slavery in the West Indies.
They are also black, so they also face racism, and yet they do well.
So it has to be something else.
And that other thing is the fact that these black people who are in the South, there's always been a big question, were black people robbed of their culture, or did they preserve their authentic African culture?
And what Seoul is saying is that they were robbed of their culture, and so they picked up the culture of the people around them, and the people around them were rednecks.
And if you look at the white redneck culture and the black redneck culture, they have a lot of the same values.
They don't particularly respect education.
They love Jesus.
They use violence in their conflicts.
And they, you know, there's just, you know, a lot of the same values and a lot of the same outcomes.
And even Ebonics, which is, you know, black English, is actually all from the west of England.
So it's actually this— What?
It's from the West of England.
So, for example, if you go to places like Cornwall, there used to be these amazing ads on British TV, right, for this Devon custard or whatever.
And they would always say, Devon knows how they make it so creamy.
And they all talk like this, right?
And so it doesn't sound like Black English.
But they do say things like, I be doing that, and we be doing this, and you be doing that, and they be doing that.
And so there's that use of that copula, be, right?
Where instead of saying, I am, you are, he is, she is, they are, they just say, I be, you be, we be, they be, which is the classic feature of black English, African American, black English.
Now, let's imagine that how do you think that Thomas Sowell has been received by liberal America?
Not well.
And so, for example, Sowell has a book called Black Rednecks, White Liberals.
Okay.
And his whole point is that, you know, if you actually and, you know, again, like Sowell is, you know, he researches.
He's the shit out of this stuff.
He really does his work.
Now, if you look at the experience of African Americans after slavery, after slavery, they do really, they start to make real progress, right?
And a large part of the reason why they make progress is because you start to get a lot of people from New England, either, you know, black people from New England or white people from New England who come down and sort of reshape the culture.
They create these schools and they're teaching those New England values, right?
It's those Puritan values of hard work, tenacity, all that sort of stuff.
And so there's all this progress.
And you have people like Booker T. Washington.
And Booker T. Washington was an actual slave.
And then after he got his freedom, he got to go work in a salt mine, which is literally the worst job ever.
And in Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, he tells this great story about seeing a schoolhouse, right?
And that he thought that going into a schoolhouse was about as close to heaven on earth as you could get.
And I mean, you know, in terms of books to read, like, you know, just of...
Because a large part of what I'm trying to do in general is really let's move to the place of all people are created equal.
Like, let's remove all these stupid distinctions, right, and really live that principle.
And the problem is that in order to really live that principle, you need a new narrative that beats slavery.
So if you go and talk to racists, you can't just say racism is bad.
That doesn't destroy racism.
What destroys racism is when you make sense of the things that they know.
They see people who are violent in the ghettos, or they see crime, or they see a lack of education, or they see that Africa is poor.
And you're able to tell a better story that makes sense of the things that they know, But also comes out with the conclusion, oh, we actually all have the same potential, right?
But if you have this issue with people imitating their atmosphere and imitating their environment and this Southern-style talk with the Southern redneck influence on the African-American slaves, former slaves, how do you stop that and how do you turn that around?
Well, in general, for humanity, I mean, this is sort of a big problem for humanity in general, is that there's not a culture alive today that is well-suited to the world that we're living in.
And that's because, you know, culture is adapted to environment in the same way as any evolutionary thing, right?
So, for example, you know, if you look at, like, let's talk about these hunter-gatherers, right?
The Yanomamo or something like that.
So there's a great story in The Lost City of Z where, you know, Percy Fawcett, who was an explorer, comes across, you know, all these tribes in the Amazon.
And one of the examples that the author gives in there is David Gran.
He talks about how, you know, there's this group of tribesmen in the Amazon, and what they'll do is there's this special leaf, and they go and they squeeze this leaf, right?
They crush it up, and this milky substance runs into the water.
And then all of a sudden, the fish float up to the surface, upside down, right?
They've been anesthetized by this whatever substance in the leaf.
And this little boy goes into the river, and he plucks out all the fattest fish, and then as the milky cloud dissipates, the other fish swim away.
Right?
Impressive as fuck.
Like, how the fuck do these tribesmen who don't have science, don't have any of these things, figure this thing out?
And it's cultural evolution.
That's what happens.
That's the nature of evolution.
That's the nature of markets, because markets are an evolutionary process.
You know, intelligent answers and intelligent solutions can emerge from just sort of competing forces.
And so all of these cultures are well adapted to a particular environment.
So, like we talked about American culture and we talked about Russian culture.
Russian culture selects for pessimism.
American culture, because you had to move all the way across the ocean, right?
If you've got villages in Italy, you know, Vietnam, whatever it is, who is the person in that village who says, I'm going to go across the ocean to a country I know nothing about and, you know, make a fortune, right?
It's the most optimistic individual, right?
And so it's basically a magnet for all the most optimistic individuals in the world.
The analogy I always use is, do you ever see American Tail?
The, like, old animated movie from, like, the, must be the 90s or whatever?
Which is so much of what the American immigrant experience is about, right?
You're like, oh, it's all going to be perfect, land of opportunity, the streets are paved with gold, except in an American tale, the streets are paved with cheese.
So these different environments, right, just as you have different environments select for different beaks or wings or whatever it is, select for different mindsets, different ways of thinking, different cultural traits, right?
Right.
well adapted to a particular environment.
So what happens to the point of the lost city of Z is what happened to all of these European explorers who went into the Amazon?
Well, a lot of them fucking died.
And that's because they're doing things that are well suited to England, like walking around in wool suits and eating cans of chipped beef.
But suddenly when you're in the 100 degree heat of the Amazon, and there's all these animals you don't understand, and you don't know how to use the plants that you squeeze and have the anesthetic in them and all that sort of stuff.
You can't survive, right?
And what they called in Velocity of the Sea, all the explorers, they called it, the Amazon, a counterfeit paradise.
It looked like a paradise.
It was so lush.
It was so tropical.
But they were like, there's nothing to fucking eat.
Except clearly there was because Amazonian people had been living there for tens of thousands of years.
The Westerners didn't have the cultural software that was well suited to surviving in that environment.
So what is the environment that created that southern redneck culture?
And the environment, it turns out, is herding.
Right?
So raising sheep, raising goats, and all that sort of stuff.
Because most of the people who are in the South originally came from the Scots-Irish.
And when you look at herding cultures around the world, they all have certain traits in common, right?
So if you're a herder, you have a big, big problem.
And that big, big problem is property rights.
So if you're a farmer, there are clear boundaries on my land.
Now, there are ways you can try and fuck me.
You can try and move the boundary stones on my land slowly into your field over, over, over, over.
But, you know, what we usually have is we have some sort of government.
There's a local town official that we go to, and he is responsible for policing the boundaries.
And so towns would do things where, you know, you would essentially all get together and we go walk the boundary stones, and we make sure that none of those boundary stones had moved.
So the intuition of people from the North, Puritans, people like that, is if we have a problem, we go to the government.
We resolve it through the government.
In the environment of herding, you can come over and you can steal my sheep, and you can mix the sheep in with your flock, and I have no way to prove which sheep are my sheep.
So we evolve things like branding, where I have a brand, I put it on my sheep, and all that sort of stuff.
But there's another strategy that is used that evolved before branding.
And that earlier strategy is being a crazy motherfucker.
You establish a reputation as the kind of guy that you don't fuck with.
You come on my land, I kill you.
You touch my sheep or my women, I fucking kill you.
And I use such an aggressive level of violence that you know...
There is no point in fucking with, I mean, this is not plausible because I'm saying it, but let's imagine a much tougher person.
Conor McGregor, for example, is a great example.
You don't fuck with Conor McGregor, right?
He has a reputation as just being a badass motherfucker who will fuck you up.
And if you look at, let's look at a couple of herder cultures.
So herder cultures include the Scots-Irish, who are the rednecks.
Herder cultures include the Mongolians, right?
The Mongols, notoriously a very gentle, peace-loving people.
Right?
And they include the Bedouins, who are the Arabs, right, who had camels and all that sort of stuff.
And you'll notice that there is that same use of violence.
And mostly they fight amongst themselves.
There's this inter-Klan warfare.
But periodically, a charismatic figure emerges who unites the clans.
So Genghis Khan manages to unite the Mongols.
And then what do the Mongols proceed to do?
They proceed to go use that aggressive use of violence.
They have those horses which allow them to move quickly, right?
And they're really effective.
And they go and they fuck everybody up, right?
Because the gentle farmers of China aren't prepared for that, and the gentle farmers of Persia aren't prepared for that.
What happens with the Arabs?
The Arabs are mostly fighting amongst themselves.
But then along comes this charismatic figure with a new belief system that unites them, Muhammad.
And he unites them, and suddenly they fuck everybody up, and they create this great empire, the Caliphate, that spreads all across Central Asia and the Middle East and all across North Africa.
Right.
And in many ways, that is what Donald Trump is.
They've been, you know, the rednecks have been fighting amongst themselves for a long time.
And then Donald Trump, the Genghis Khan of America, the Mohammed of America, has succeeded in uniting the clans.
And, you know, in our time, you don't do it by going out and like raping and pillaging.
You go and you seize the ballot box and you vote and, you know, you really like take back power.
And so that's what they've done.
Um, But there are, if you look, there are certain problems that occur across these herder cultures.
So if you're, you know, as a friend of mine who...
So you're essentially saying that the South is, that the reason why Donald Trump has been elected is because of the South, because of the herder culture.
Yeah, and vitamin, and that I'm not a part of that tribe, that, you know, Americans owe a tremendous debt to the hillbilly culture, and that tremendous debt is that overwhelmingly they are the people who have served in the military, and they are overwhelmingly the people who have fought our wars and bled and died and all that sort of stuff.
And that's not a stuff that, you know, I may sound like a liberal, but I don't really sit in either of those cultures, right?
I can critique the liberal culture, and I can critique the hillbilly culture.
Right?
And, you know, white liberals, the whole reason why I started this thing off is because white liberals have their own weird things that are dysfunctional and that aren't helping black people and all that stuff.
cities and you have to drive like vast distances in between them when you go from portland to bangor there's just like 50 plus mile stretch where there's nothing on the road it's a two-lane highway and there ain't shit on that road no gas no nothing if you don't have gas you're fucked You run out of gas.
And so that herder culture has just inexorably tied itself into the African-American culture without the African-Americans even knowing that it happened.
And if you talk to people who are literally Africans who immigrated to America, like from Ethiopia or Kenya or anything like that, you know, if you ever get an Ethiopian cab driver...
The listeners are going to be sitting here, and they're going to be trying to categorize me and all of this sort of stuff.
And part of what you're dealing with is you start talking about gender or anything like that, and the social justice warriors try and put you into some bucket.
And you're like, no, I don't belong in that bucket.
You're constantly trying to say, I'm not in that bucket.
So you can imagine if you're Ethiopian...
And you've moved here, and you really sort of believe in the American dream, the land of opportunity, and we work hard, and we all do this sort of stuff, and you keep getting put in that bucket with all this sort of rap culture or anything like that, you're going to be annoyed at those people.
And that's the point, is that when you start to have a conversation that is about culture, then you start to realize that race doesn't actually matter.
And what you'll find is, so let's take a look at, for example, Asians, right?
Asians do very well in school.
They're very productive and all that sort of stuff, except for the Hmong, right?
So there's a group of people called the Hmong, and they're the big Asian exception.
And, you know, they do think- Hunters.
Big time hunters.
You know, there's a lot of violence, not a lot of education, right?
They don't sort of fall into that sort of stereotype of becoming engineers and doctors.
No, they're tribal grouping that sort of exists across national boundaries, because in general, you know, one of the great destructive forces in human history is the British mapmaker.
But it doesn't work so well in Africa where there are still tribes or Southeast Asia where you suddenly start drawing a line right between two tribal groups or across a tribal group and suddenly now shit's all fucked up.
And what they're trying to do when they're having all these civil wars is they're trying to unfuck the boundaries.
You know, it's really hilarious when you get busted for transporting something across state lines.
Like, am I allowed to drive around with this or not?
Like, what's the fucking law?
Like, if you have pot in particular, I mean, you cross a state line, you go from being someone who is innocent 100% to someone who's guilty 100% of a felony.
And that's because, again, it comes down to what this is being driven by.
It's being driven by old cultural baggage that doesn't necessarily make sense.
So there's really, in terms of honor cultures, there are four books that I think that if you want to go into this, don't get angry at me, just read the four books.
Those books are Black Rednecks White Liberals, Thomas Sowell's book, A Culture of Honor, which is Richard Nisbet's book, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and then a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.
And those four books, essentially, if you read those four books and you're still saying that what I'm saying is unsubstantiated, you know, well, then we should talk about it.
Well, and in fact, that is the key thing with Richard Nisbet's book, The Culture of Honor.
So Nisbet was a professor in the 90s at the height of political correctness, and he wanted to study culture.
And the problem was that he's a white man from the South, and he knew that if you studied any culture, you would have to say bad things about it.
So what does Richard Nisbet do?
He says, oh, I know one culture that I can say bad things about on a college campus.
I can say bad things about Southern culture.
That's a culture I can criticize freely.
And so what he did—and, you know, this, I think, gets really down to what are the strengths of, you know, sort of broadly Northern and Southern culture, right?
And, you know, Kennedy—John F. Kennedy had this great line about Washington, D.C. He said that it was a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
And, you know, the potential for America is to be a country of Southern charm and Northern efficiency, but we're kind of got it backwards right now, right?
But so what Nisbet is doing is that he's charming the liberals, right?
Right?
Which is what Southerners do.
He's like, I'm going to study culture, but I'm going to study white Southern culture, and I'm going to show how bad it is.
And so they're like, okay, that feels safe and comfortable.
Right?
And that's essentially how he works his way into the conversation.
And specifically what he knew is he knew that Southern culture had this very particular problem.
And this very particular problem was that it had higher rates of homicide in very specific categories.
Right?
So it had higher rates of, you know, basically killings around trespassing and then killings around, you know, lover's triangles.
And so, for example, until 1970, if you found your wife in bed with another man in Texas, you could shoot him and it was justifiable homicide until 1970. Is it really only 70?
And so Nisbet – and by contrast, in the North, there are a lot of what are called – there are more 7-Eleven murders, which are basically murders or instrumental murders, which is where people kill people trying to get cash.
They're trying to get rich.
So there are these different – there's homicide in both places, but there are different types of homicides that predominate.
And Nisbet, essentially, you know, the big thing was to figure out why is that true, right?
And the answer is that it's this culture of honor that comes out of hurting.
And so the irony is that Southerners, who very often are the ones who feel most strongly about how problematic Muslims are, have the same culture.
And they engage in honor killings, and they do all these sorts of things.
And when your resources are extremely limited, like you live in a fucking desert, you're forced to become even more vicious about your protecting your boundaries and your property and your resources.
People that have the issue with even discussing the origins of certain types of behavior and comparing Different types of black people and different types of African Americans trying to figure out, or African former slaves, like why did the people in the West Indies behave differently than the people in America?
And it opens up this weird can of worms where people are not willing to discuss it openly.
And that is why Sowell called his book Black Redneck White Liberals.
Because the problem is that because white liberals are not willing to discuss these things, what ends up happening is that you get African pride, right?
And you know, as Sowell points out, right, when was pride ever a good thing, right?
Pride is the feeling of that you know it all, that you have nothing to learn, right?
It's that feeling of arrogance.
unidentified
Or he just happened to be from motherfucking America, son.
Yeah, what do you think about this whole situation with Russia today?
Because it seems like that poor country doesn't know how to fucking get rid of that one guy who's their main dude, as much as Garry Kasparov talks about him.
Look at that hair.
That is wonderful.
What the hell is going on there?
Intel chiefs present Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.
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Yeah.
Whoa.
Around this afternoon, like, breaking news sort of thing.
I mean, the whole thing is just, what's happening here?
What is all that?
Wow.
So they're presenting him.
I wonder what he's going to do about all that, including allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.
Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN... Hmm.
The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to report on Russian intelligence in the 2016 election.
The allegations came in part from memos compiled by former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible.
The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed...
Well, a large part of what's happened is that our environment has changed, but our culture has not.
So if you look at in the 1950s, right, if you're talking about the marketplace of ideas, you had these guys like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and they had a thing called journalistic integrity, right?
Okay, here it says, there were aspects of Trump's engagement with Russian authorities, one of which had borne fruit to them, was exploit Trump's personal obsessions with sexual perversion in order to obtain a sustainable compromising material on him.
According to Source D, where he had been present, Trump's perverted conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, Trump's perverted conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, whom he hated, in parentheses, had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia had stayed on one of their official
Urination show in front of him.
The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
Holy shit!
They just go to the Ritz-Carlton and they set up microphones and cameras?
My friend Mike Swick, who's a former UFC fighter, worked in Russia with the American Secret Service a long time ago, and he said that they found these listening devices hidden inside buildings that were powered by the movement of the building during the wind.
Well, that was the things that the Soviet Union did well, right?
There were a few things that the Soviet Union really put their attention on, like space and surveillance and espionage and all that sort of stuff, and the military, and they did those very well.
So you gotta know that if someone from any agency is telling you something, what would it serve them to tell you 100% the truth without any manipulation whatsoever in order to gain favor, in order to gain influence, in order to gain...
Would the CIA have any motivation to be 100% accurate about it?
And those are the big sort of conservative, you know, hillbilly redneck intuitions, right?
As opposed to liberals are like, let's care for everybody.
Like, that's amazing.
Let's not hurt anyone's feelings.
And let's have trophies for participation and all that sort of stuff.
And so for a long time, you know, the liberals have had a lot of power over the media and politics and all that sort of stuff.
And so that's the rabbit hole that the country went down.
And now, you know, the conservatives have sort of, you know, gotten pissed off and, you know, have, you know, it's sort of like, I mean, in the ideal situation, the Republicans and the Democrats work like mommy and daddy, right?
And, you know, it's not that mommy and daddy have it all figured out.
But if mommy and daddy have a productive working relationship, then the sort of, like, take personal responsibility, you know, man up, like, do all these sorts of things, is counteracted by a certain understanding, compassion, all that sort of stuff.
And then the parenting that emerges is better than what either of them would do on their own.
Or they can both get dysfunctional as fuck, and mommy becomes an enabling snowflake machine, right?
And daddy just becomes an abusive asshole who won't pay child support and just berates his children and is like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
But it's also—it's good for Putin because what does the godfather want?
The godfather—so I think it's important to understand, like, the disaster of American foreign policy.
What is that about, right?
And it's because modern Americans have grown up in, you know, essentially the most successful, most productive, most stable country in history, right?
And so, you know, if you're, you know, as many generations into democracy as you are, there's not a real understanding of how you get to democracy, right?
Right?
We just sort of inherited democracy.
And we're like, I don't know how you make one.
And then you get these ridiculous fables that Americans have about themselves where they think that essentially, you know, King George III was this awful, vicious dictator.
And then we kick the dictator out and then democracy.
And so that's all you have to do is you have to go in and you have to remove dictators.
And if we just keep removing dictators, then democracy will emerge.
Well, what happens when you remove Saddam Hussein?
So the big question that has always been in political science and that Francis Fukuyama frames is that it's always been, why is it that the American Revolution succeeded and the French Revolution descended into bloody violence?
And the answer is, is that they were actually at two different stages of development.
Ideologies that we become imprisoned to, these patterns of behavior that we become imprisoned to, and that we're all subject to it.
Anyone with an accent understands that this is where it comes from, that we imitate behavior that is around us.
And if we're in around an area, like we're talking about the Middle East, with poor resources and scarcity and a lot of violence, this is the type of behavior that we're going to control our women, dress them up, cover them up like beekeepers.
We've got to keep them away from the other swinging dicks.
I mean, if you look at Iraq, one of the craziest stories about Iraq was Iraq with Baghdad being invaded by the Mongols and then killing everybody and running the streets red with blood and black with ink and the rivers would fucking be filled with the philosophy and all the writings from all these Islamic There's theorists and all these different scholars who were far ahead of that aspect or the rest of that part of the world at the time.
And so much of it is that there's an old quote that floats around, which is that if Nobel Prizes had been given out in the year 1000, they all would have gone to Arabs.
They were at the forefront, and the point is that it tells you something, which is that success is not a permanent condition.
Cultures can gain it, and cultures can lose it, and you better figure out what is it that makes a culture successful so you can preserve those values, fight for those values, instill them, spread them, all that sort of stuff.
And the instability that is being created is that you gave everyone a microphone.
That's what the internet is.
Right?
Like, we're literally sitting here, right?
And, you know, you can start a show, and if people resonate with the show, great!
And the point is that there are some people like you who can hold two contradictory ideas in their head, right?
And you can, like, wrestle with that.
And you're like, man, how do I make sense of both of these things?
That, you know, capitalism is, you know, fundamentally generates wealth and prosperity and all that sort of stuff, but corporations can do fucked up things, right?
How do I reconcile those two different things?
And then there's a whole bunch of people out there on the internet who are fundamentalists or who offer some sort of very, very simple narrative that is very easy for people to get.
And people can go and go down the rabbit hole of their prejudices.
They can go down the rabbit hole of caring and compassion, and they end up at Marxism, right?
Or people can go down the libertarian rabbit hole of freedom.
And so they come up with this idea called anarcho-capitalism.
And anarcho-capitalism is the idea that we're just going to remove all government, and then the free market will solve all problems.
So there's literally going to be minimal or no government.
Well, I got in a big fight over the Christmas holidays with a group of anarcho-capitalists, and it was literally, because one of them, there were two things.
So anyway, so I interviewed Peter Schiff, and part of the experience of doing this podcast with Brian Callen is we interviewed all these academics, right?
206 of them, right?
And then at episode 206, there were two things that we sort of noticed.
A, there were all these amazing ideas.
B, you would find that any academic knew about his amazing idea and nobody else's.
Like, they didn't know about anything else that was going on in science or anything like that.
And again, it actually comes out of sort of what the Western cultural bias is, which is towards this thing called atomism, right?
Like scientists are super focused on a tiny, tiny question.
They don't look for the bigger picture.
And we reached this frustration where essentially we were like, these ideas, you can't, you know, there's an old George Bernard Shaw joke about economists.
He said all the economists laid end to end would never reach a conclusion.
And it's the same thing with academics.
All the academics laid end to end would never reach a conclusion.
All this science that piles up, all this sort of stuff, what does it mean?
What should we do?
How should we live our lives?
How do we solve the problems of people in the ghettos?
How do we solve the problems of the people in the Middle East?
How do we make liberals have some sort of perspective?
How do we do these things?
And that's, you know, science should turn into practical things.
And in some areas it does, right?
So, you know, there's a good sort of, you know, there's physics has this adjacent profession engineering, right?
And engineers go and they look at the laws of physics and they figure out how to engineer quantum computers and all this other stuff, right?
But when you talk about the human sciences, the adjacent profession that's supposed to be there is storytelling.
So there's what's called the science to narrative chain, where you're supposed to take science, all of this research, and supposed to turn it into simple stories that people can understand and get.
And there is, in fact, just to give you a sense of this problem, like, everybody knows that scientists aren't the best communicators, right?
Like, the ones that are, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?
You get on this show, because you're like, man, a fucking scientist who can communicate like a human, right?
Or Carl Sagan, or, but, you know, these people are fucking unicorns.
They're very, very rare in the scientific community.
So my very specific experience was when I graduated from college, I started tutoring just to pay my bills.
But I was really trying to figure out, I had this weird experience where I would be working with kids, and I would hear them say things like, oh, I didn't get the math gene.
I was like, what the fuck is that?
Math gene?
Because I was a biochemistry major.
So I'm like, wait a minute, you're 13 and failing biology, and you're telling me that you have a math gene, and I just majored in biochemistry, and we don't know about any math gene over there, so what the fuck are you talking about?
So, hearing all these kids say all these bizarre things, and, you know, at the time I was doing a tutoring company with a friend of mine from college who is from New England.
And, you know, the New England is that Puritan culture, right?
It's, you know, all self-denial, no fun, work hard, all that sort of stuff.
So she also heard all of these weird and wacky beliefs.
And she was like, you know, reacted in the most Puritan way possible, which is like, you're just being fucking lazy.
And so, you know, you've got this Bostonian, and then you've got this half-Dutch, half-American, you know, lived with the Limeys, you know, all this sort of stuff, right?
And we're like, we're the outsiders.
It's that experience that you talked about of foreigners who come to America or anybody, and we're like, this culture of L.A. is fucking weird.
So, you know, I watched Triggered last night, and I agree with you that California is the best place on Earth.
but particularly because I mean you know I mean it is the what part of what I found like a lot of what I was reacting against right you leave places because there's like something you don't like and then you go to the most opposite place you can find and so I didn't like the culture of England I didn't like aristocracy I didn't like that whole class system I fucking hated it
and then when I went to Boston and New York I felt like there was still a lot of that sort of hierarchy and I think that LA is the place where it's like nobody gives a fuck where you come from.
But one of the things that I think you pointed out that's incredibly critical is that...
In order to be at the top of your field, you must be completely absorbed in that particular subject and oftentimes a lot like all the other systems that we find, limited resources and you really don't have the time or the energy or even the inclination to study all these other Comparable systems or different disciplines or it's like I mean There's many many many many examples of that but singular focus is which usually leads to greatness and
when you're reading about some professor's peer-reviewed work that's incredibly groundbreaking Oftentimes you're dealing with a form of greatness and that requires massive tunnel vision Well, that's the interesting thing.
So we should talk about what tunnel vision is, right?
So there's, you know, just as we have optimism and pessimism, there are these other two mindsets, atomism and holism, right?
And atomism is seeing the tree, right?
You, like, ignore the fucking forest and you're just like, I'm going to look at that one fucking tree and become the world's expert in that.
And then there's holism, which is seeing the big picture, seeing the forest, seeing all that sort of stuff.
Now, again, everybody has these mindsets, but different cultures favor them differently, again, because of the environmental pressures of that environment.
So the Greeks massively favored atomism.
And if you look at the behavior of the Greeks, right, the ancient Greeks, they were constantly picking everything apart, right?
Because they were pirates, right?
They were pirates and traders and fishermen.
And in that environment, it's not about cooperation or anything like that.
It's about everybody just trying to get ahead for themselves and all that sort of stuff.
Very individualistic, all of that stuff.
And so when they would have leisure time, what were the things they did?
Well, they would go and they would go into the marketplace and they would argue with each other and pick apart each other's arguments.
And they would just pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick.
And that's what logic is and rhetoric and all that sort of stuff.
And then they would also, you know, when they had other leisure time, they would go and see who could throw shit furthest, right?
Like, who could run fastest.
It's all about standing out.
It's all about trying to excel and be the best.
And what happened is that, you know, during the Renaissance, they...
Well, whatever you want to fucking call it, right?
The rebirth, right?
The rebirth, right?
They basically were obsessed with the Greeks.
The Romans were obsessed with the Greeks.
Greeks, and then when the rebirth, the Renaissance happened, they were obsessed with the Romans and the Greeks.
And so they became obsessed with this culture, and that's how you start to get this culture of individualism that develops.
The Founding Fathers were obsessed with that, and so that becomes a lot of the spirit of the West, right, is this real atomistic culture.
Over in Asia, right, they have different incentives, which is rice farming.
And so what happens is that rice farming is, you know, you have to be super cooperative because the water runs down the mountain, it runs through my paddy field, but then it runs through your neighbor's paddy field and all that sort of stuff.
So I have to have relations with my neighbor and that neighbor, and then I have to think about how it affects the next guy and the next guy and the next guy and the next guy.
So they favor holism.
How does everything fit together?
And so if you look at What is Eastern culture about?
What are those ancient Asian cultures about?
It's all about yin and yang, things fitting together and complementing it all being part of a larger system.
And Confucianism was all about the family and relationships and everybody has their proper role and you all sort of have to belong and all of that sort of stuff, right?
So, which set of biases do you think that science has baked into its culture?
And so when you get the structure of scientific culture as it stands today, it's super atomistic, right?
Now, if you look at things like economics and psychology and, you know, biology and all of these sorts of things, they're all studying the natural world.
And in fact, there's a whole bunch of disciplines that are all studying humans and how they behave and all of that sort of stuff.
And yet they're all broken up into separate disciplines.
And now, they're sort of doubling down on those intuitions, and they're now breaking up those disciplines into sub-disciplines, and smaller disciplines, and smaller disciplines.
And left to their own devices, they'll just keep splitting up and getting smaller and smaller.
Well, what happens is that as you get smaller and smaller and smaller disciplines, it doesn't necessarily make the science better.
It can make the science worse.
And the reason why it makes the science worse, the easiest way to understand it is the story of the blind men and the elephant, right?
So this is an old story from India about religion.
So a group of blind men come along and they decide to figure out the elephant.
So what this thing is, right?
They don't know it's an elephant.
So the first one comes up and he feels the tail and he feels the end of it and he feels the little hairs at the end and he says, it's a rope, right?
And the second one goes along and he feels the trunk and it rides in his hands and he jumps back startled and he's like, it's a snake!
Right?
And the third one feels the leg.
He thinks it's a column.
The fourth one feels the side.
He thinks it's a wall.
And then the fifth one feels the ear and decides that it's a palm leaf.
And then they all proceed to beat the shit out of each other because clearly everybody else is a fucking idiot and they need to die because they know that it's a rope, it's a snake, it's a leg, it's a wall, it's a column, whatever it is.
Right?
Now, if you look at something like feminism, right?
Feminism is making certain claims about biology, right?
It's making claims about how male gender works, how female gender works.
You know, they should be looking at things like genetics, and they should be looking at, you know, chromosomes, and they should be looking at evolution to see how evolution might have selected for differences in men and women because there are different competing pressures for men and women.
And in fact, if you go into, you know, So if I go into, you know, the circles of feminism or sociology or, you know, any other tribe.
And I start talking about, you know, the evidence of some other tribe.
They're like, oh, that doesn't count, right?
It's easy to rationalize it away.
And so now we're no longer grounded in reality.
And what we can do is we can take that tail and we can convince ourselves that it's a rope, right?
Because we're not accountable to all of these other fields that's surrounding it.
So, in general, what you're going to find is that there's, in a lot of different fields, you're going to find that there are two competing theories right now.
So, for example, if you look in economics, there's this idea, you know, there's sort of what are called classical economics, and they have this idea called rational agent theory.
And they basically think it's a reasonable approximation to assume that people are rational, right?
That they act as rational individuals and all this sort of stuff.
And then, meanwhile, there's another school called Behavioral Economics.
And because of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who were these two Israeli psychologists in the 1970s, who started to study human rationality, and, you know, I'm sure this will come as a huge surprise, but what they found is that humans aren't that rational.
Right?
And so there was a group of economists who say, hey, our whole discipline is based on this idea of rational agent theory, but when we look at psychology, that assumption doesn't check out, and it leads to a whole bunch of bad conclusions.
So they formed a new school of economics called behavioral economics, which is based on all the findings of psychology, how humans actually think, and all that sort of stuff.
Now, these two schools are warring, right?
They're two fighting tribes.
But what ends up happening is that they can't solve that discipline.
They can't solve that in the context of academia, right?
They fire papers back and forth.
Lots of discussions are had and all that sort of stuff.
But essentially, you have a recurring problem in science, which is that scientists won't let go of their pet theories.
They won't let their theories die.
And Max Planck, the physicist, had this famous quote that he said, science precedes one funeral at a time.
And essentially what happens is that science doesn't progress because, you know, people are like, hey, new evidence came out.
Turns out I was wrong.
Now I'm going to change my mind because it's their theory.
And so they keep on fighting for and defending their theory until they're dead.
And then the discipline is like, oh, OK, now that that guy's dead, obviously that was dumb all along.
And so if you look at, for example, that rational agent theory dispute, there's one of the big founders of behavioral economics, this guy Richard Thaler.
Basically, you know, he tells a great story.
And the story is that he's at a dinner party.
And at this dinner party, there's this famous economist from the whole rational agent theory camp.
And there's also like a bunch of other academics, like a psychologist.
And so the guy who believes in rational agent theory is going on and on about how fucking dumb people are, right?
How irrational they are.
So he's going on about his own wife.
He says, my wife is so irrational.
She just bought a new car, but she won't drive it.
And that makes no sense because she's worried about dinging it, but she's already paid for the car.
She should use it.
God, humans are so irrational.
And then he goes, and my students, my students are so fucking dumb, right?
They can't even understand the most basic economic concepts and all that sort of stuff.
And so the psychologist pipes up and says, how come all the people in your theories are geniuses, but all the people you know in real life are idiots?
And that's a problem.
That's a real problem for your theory, right?
Because your observations about reality do not fit your theory.
But what does this guy do?
Does this guy say, you know what?
I'm going to fall my sword.
I'm going to throw out 30, 40 years of work on a bad idea.
No, he's not going to say that.
Instead, what he does is he does what Richard Thaler calls the invisible hand wave.
Where he proceeds to wave his hand and say, well, you know, there might be some irrationality, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But in the end, markets sort things out, right?
And he's rationalizing.
Scientists rationalize.
Humans rationalize.
They want to defend their own most cherished ideas.
And so this is not a problem of Richard Dawkins.
This is a problem of humans, right?
And if humans have power and intellectual power is a form of power and it's not checked, they will continue to rationalize their bad ideas So specifically, what bad ideas is Dawkins rationalizing?
Well, so there's, you know, the intellectual dispute is this.
So in the 1960s, there was this idea of group selection.
But it was very fuzzy and it was a shitty version of group selection, right?
Which is the idea that natural selection happens not only at the level of genes, but also at the level of human groups.
And the idea that selection is happening at many, many, many levels.
And so Dawkins, in 1976, writes this big, important book, The Selfish Gene.
And it's basically that you actually don't need group selection to make sense of a lot of behavior.
You can just use what's called kin selection.
So, for example, you might do something nice for your sister, or you might potentially, you know, die to save your sister, but we can make sense of that at the level of genes because, essentially, you know, your sister shares many of the same genes, so, you know, you don't need this idea that groups matter.
Now, since then, what's happened is that there are—and this is a large part of what the problem is—is that some people read that book, including Jeff Skilling, and they concluded that what that means is that the way to get ahead is to be selfish.
Jeff Skilling is the CEO of Enron, right?
And you'll hear in business circles, you'll hear this idea of like, oh, it's all about law of the jungle, kill or be killed, like that's how you get ahead, you know, survival of the fittest.
If you want to justify feminists when they try and justify the sort of feminists who try and say that gender doesn't matter and it's all a social construct, they try and do it all in terms of science, right?
Well, they have, you know, some sort of idea of culture or whatever, but there are a lot of ideas that masquerade as science, right?
So, you know, the Nazis, the eugenics movement, you know, the Nazis, that was based on some sort of idea that they thought was science at the time.
You know, the Soviets had this guy, Lysenko, who was the opposite, and he believed that, you know, genes could be true.
He thought you could literally shock and electrocute seeds to make them do what you wanted them to do because genes didn't really matter and it was all conditioning.
Or behaviorism was B.F. Skinner's idea, which was the idea that it was all stimulus response.
The human mind didn't exist.
There were no beliefs and all that stuff.
And a lot of the way that education, for example, a lot of the educational choices that were made in the 50s were based on Skinner's ideas, which then fucks up a whole bunch of kids.
What ends up happening is that either science is applied, or it's misapplied, or it's misinterpreted, or people read a particular scientific study and don't have the context on it.
And so these bad ideas permeate and they're applied and all that sort of stuff.
Right?
And so the debate, for example, around rational agent theory is not some...it is an academic debate, but in addition to being an academic debate, economists supply those ideas.
And, you know, the public needs to...if the public wants its experts and its leaders to make the right decision, then it has to hold them accountable on their ideas.
And so, you know, if you have...you know, science also has to police who has their backing.
And it has a responsibility to communicate to the public what is the best scientific understanding available today.
So Skilling takes the selfish gene and he runs with that, and clearly that's thinking that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, the me generation, all that sort of stuff.
So the selfish gene sort of slots into a culture that is already sort of looking for that to be true, right?
And it lends this credibility.
And what has happened is that the science has now moved on.
And a lot of what we've been talking about today in terms of how groups work and how culture works is all based on those ideas.
And there's a whole group of academics and a whole bunch of different disciplines that have these ideas.
And, you know, there are people like John Height.
People like Joe Henrik, people like David Sloan Wilson, who's the big multi-level selection guy.
And when you put all of theirs, or Daniel Kahneman, right, Amos Tversky, you know, the list goes on and on and on.
But when you put all of these ideas together, you get a really, really compelling narrative.
Now, Dawkins says that his work was misinterpreted.
And that, essentially, Jeff Skilling misunderstood his work.
Now, Dawkins says very clearly in The Selfish Gene that our nature is selfish, right?
So, I mean, that seems pretty clear.
I don't know that Jeff Skilling entirely misinterpreted.
But what David Sloan Wilson and the multi-level selection people are saying is something very simple.
And E.O. Wilson said this as well, which is that Selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups.
So if you want to get ahead, you can get ahead by being a selfish asshole and fucking everyone, right?
But if you have a group that is based on selfishness and you're trying to fuck everyone...
Then your group's going to fall apart, and it's going to lose out to an altruistic group.
So if you compare side-by-side a company like Enron and a company like Pixar, which you can read about in Creativity, Inc., you're going to find that they have two very different environments, right?
Pixar is fundamentally a cooperative environment.
It's a high-trust environment.
Everybody works together, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
And it's a sustainable company that year after year turns out great films and does great work and all that sort of stuff.
Enron is a toxic environment because everybody is just trying to get ahead.
There is no I in team.
They're just fucking each other.
And so the thing blows up.
Now, again, science has a responsibility to communicate clearly.
And what should happen, I think, in terms of our economy not blowing the fuck up, in terms of corporations not engaging that sort of toxic behavior, is that I don't have the authority because I'm a nobody.
So I can't come out and say, this is what science is.
In fact, there is literally no human alive today that can come out and say what science is, because people can only come out and speak about their tiny field.
Well, I mean, the larger academic debate is like, so specifically, he rejects the idea that, and it's important to realize that the group selection people are not denying kin selection.
So they're not denying Dawkins' work, right?
They're building off of Dawkins' work and saying there's this extra effect, right?
Well, ultimately, what I would like, Joe, and the reason why I call him a Scientologist, is because, you know, what should happen in academic debate is that ideas should die, right?
Now, the point is that that's not happening in science.
What happened at that dinner party with Richard Thaler is two ideas entered and two ideas left.
Right?
And in general, that's a big recurring problem in science.
It's happening in economics, and it's also happening in evolutionary biology.
Now, the point is that I'm a single individual.
I can't be an expert in all the nuances and all the details of all of these things.
But what I can do is I can show you the general pattern that's happening.
And I can show you what the consequences are for you of these beliefs not changing.
So the area in which I do know the most, right, is the area of education.
And you have some daughters, I believe.
Is that true?
Yeah.
So these beliefs that your daughters have about their intelligence, whatever those beliefs may be as of today, will have a huge effect on the choices they make in school, how they do in education, what their experience of school is, whether they're happy in school, whether they're productive, whether they're successful— And whether they're set up for a knowledge economy, which is all about constantly learning.
Do they emerge from school hating school or do they emerge from school loving school?
Do they emerge from school with confidence that they can learn whatever is required or do they feel like they can only be good at some things and not good at other things?
Well, there have been debates, and what has happened is that, for example, what the debate is currently is the debate is currently about how many people are on each side.
So John Haidt, for example, was on Sam Harris's podcast, and Sam Harris would agree with Richard Dawkins.
Right?
And John Height, you know, John Height and Sam Harris disagree on multiple things, right?
They've had many disagreements, and the whole point of their podcast was to try and have a civil conversation.
And, you know, John Height said, you know, the difference between you and Sam, you and I, Sam, is that I'm an intuitionist and you're a rationalist.
Right?
So John Haidt believes, and if you look across the science, I think this is what's supported, is that thinking and feeling are always linked.
So we're always being driven by these intuitions, even if we don't always understand that.
There is, on the other hand, this idea of Descartes' error, which is the idea that Descartes came up with that reason and emotion are separate.
And that's what the rational agent theory is about.
It's the idea that, you know, there's reason and it's separate from emotion.
And that's the point of science, is that you're supposed to kill certain ideas.
So Descartes' era specifically comes from, there's this book by Antonio Damasio at USC, and it's based on a series of experiments around this guy named Elliot, and people like him.
And so Elliot was this banker, financial guy, happy family man, all this sort of stuff.
And he had a brain tumor.
And so they chopped it out.
The brain tumor was right here, right up at the top of the base of his nose.
And at first, it seemed like chopping out this piece of his brain had done nothing, right?
It hadn't affected him.
Oh, totally disposable bit of brain.
Didn't really have a function.
Look at that.
It was just an optional accessory, like the appendix of the brain.
But then what happens is they come to find out that all of a sudden, Eliot has all these problems.
Even though his IQ is unaffected, even though his verbal intelligence is not affected, what's happening is that he's making all these terrible decisions.
And it's because he had cancer, so don't make fun of him.
How dare you.
Yeah.
But, you know, his business decision-making falls apart.
He falls for all these con men.
He's making all these horrible choices, and he can't decide where to go to lunch.
So what ends up happening is that at 11 a.m., he'll try and decide, where am I going to go to lunch?
And then by 4 p.m., lunch has passed.
And that's because he sat around and tried to calculate rationally where should I go to lunch, right?
He thought about, oh, you know, should I go, like, based on tables and calories and all this sort of stuff?
And he couldn't make a decision.
And the reason why is because this bit of the brain that was removed turns out is what links thinking and feeling.
It's your ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
And deciding where to go to lunch is influenced constantly by our emotions.
Because, you know, you feel like Thai or, you know, you feel like something light or you feel like a meatball sub or whatever it may be.
Or you feel like if you go to this restaurant, you'll run into that really hot waitress or whatever it may be.
So that, along with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the work of people like John Haidt, there's now an immense amount of information that basically understands that Descartes, who lived 400 years ago, was making shit up when he came up with his theory of the brain, right?
And his theory of the brain, of this idea of reason and emotion, which has floated around in the West for ages and ages and ages, it doesn't fit the evidence.
Now, that's the basic problem.
And I will tell you, having worked with students, your ability to improve their lives, once you understand that thinking and feeling are always linked, goes massively up.
Because now when a student starts telling me, oh, I don't have the math gene, or I don't have a natural ear for languages, I don't waste my time dealing with that rationalization.
Instead, I ask the kid, how do you feel about math?
Right?
How do you feel about your teacher?
And we start to deal with the feelings and we start to sort through the feelings until we get the feelings lined up in such a way that you're making the right choices.
And that's, for me, the hardest is that that's the problem that I first came to this from, was education.
And the point is to spark a conversation so that we can have this conversation.
But the point is that there are certain academics who are going to try and stand in the way of that conversation and will use their authority to try and shut down that conversation because they're trying to defend their pet theory.
But the point is to recognize it's not about Dawkins particularly.
And if you want to get into the woods on, like, you know, all of the nuances of all this sort of stuff, you should get on either David Sloan Wilson or John Hyatt or Joe Henrich, and they can, like, take you through the whole thing.
And the basic problem is that there's a lot of science that is really, really useful, but, you know, one man can't figure it all out.
And what I can do, because a lot of this comes down to what's permissible in the culture of science.
So if you've got guys like, you know, you can go if you want to go and like read about what David Sloan Wilson is saying and all of these guys.
You can either go read their books, which are excellent.
You can also go to David Sloan Wilson because he has also seen practically how much of these ideas can make a difference in people's lives and actually make people's lives better.
He's also trying to popularize the science.
So he has a whole website, you know, this view of life and evonomics and all this sort of stuff.
And if you want, there's a great article by Peter Turchin, who's another guy, and he'll take you through some of the stuff around Dawkins and all this stuff.
But my goal with all of this stuff, with Thomas Sowell's work, with, you know, David Sloan Wilson, John Haidt, you know, Carol Dweck's work, which is a lot of this education stuff, is that I know that it's not realistic to expect people to that.
I can't just like put a list on the Internet of 50 books and be like.
But you also, what you run into, and this is part of what I've run into with education, right, is so, you know, along with Katie, my Bostonian friend, we took seven different fields of neuroscience and psychology, and we condensed them all into one book that we wrote to the teenager, because we wanted to have a message.
The problem is most of these books are written to adults.
And you write the book to the adult, the adult reads it, the parent reads it, and they're like, oh, this is so great.
And then now they're in the uncomfortable position of having to have a conversation about school with kids.
And then the ideas die.
The ideas don't move.
So we were like, let's skip the middleman or middlewoman and let's write straight to the kid.
And the reason why we called it the Straight A Conspiracy is because we, at the time, were working with the son of a guy named Stan Rogo, who was the executive producer on Lizzie McGuire.
And we'd been, I mean, this is the power of emotions, by the way, like super brilliant.
But anyway, so we, you know, we were struggling with how do you have a conversation about education and school and your potential and all these sorts of things with kids?
And, you know, our intuitions are sort of the classic teacher intuitions, which is like, you can do it.
You're amazing.
You're amazing.
Like, you have so much potential.
And we sat down with Stan, and Stan said, listen, I've been making kids TV for a long time, and if I've learned one thing about teenagers, it's this.
Their lives suck.
They may not suck in any sort of objective sense or any sort of geographical sense or anything like that, but on an emotional, subjective level, they suck.
And so the only thing you can ever tell them that they will believe is that they've been lied to.
And so that's what we did.
And he said, the title of your book is The Something Conspiracy.
I don't know what it is, right?
And so we went away and we did the straight-A conspiracy.
And rather than getting kids to believe in themselves, we got them to doubt their doubts.
And once you got them doubting their doubts and, you know, all the things that they believed about math genes, is that really true?
How do we know that, bro?
Like, is that really, you know, all that sort of stuff.
And then you get that process where they're now starting to question things.
And, you know, we did the first chapter is all about genius myths, which are, you know, Essentially very clever marketing schemes that again rely on that thing of awe.
So if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, right?
Steve Jobs was a very smart marketer, right?
And he created this image, right?
This, you know, cult of personality around himself, which is that, you know, he made himself seem like this genius who out of nowhere came out of all these things.
People called him the eye god and the cult of Mac.
And what is the effect of awe?
The effect of awe is blind copying.
We just had to have that Mac product.
And in that, he was copying the playbook of another guy much, much earlier, Thomas Edison, who in his own time created this own cult of personality around himself, and at the time he was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park.
But in reality, did Edison invent the lightbulb?
No, he did not.
The lightbulb was around 45 years before he was even born.
And that's the point, is that these people were people.
And the myths that you have about geniuses are actually clever advertising schemes.
But the problem is that it's an ad jingle that is so good that we've essentially had that jingle trapped in our heads for hundreds and hundreds of years.
So there are ideas that are passed on, like Edison had a thousand patents to his name by the time he died.
He did.
That's because when you set up an industrial research lab, you make sure that your name is on all the patents, because that's the whole point of employing a bunch of people, is that you want to own the IP. And that's true for, you know, Mozart was the Michael Jackson of the 1700s.
Isaac Newton, you know, they basically knew that they couldn't sell the ideas of gravity, so they sold Newton as the man, this guy who had this great vision and blah, blah, blah, and the story of the apple and all that bullshit.
And then Einstein, you know, they needed to package the new physics that was being done by lots and lots of physicists like Heisenberg and Planck and all that sort of stuff.
But there was this guy, Arthur Eddington, who knew he couldn't sell that.
So he sold the idea of a boy wonder with crazy hair who had beaten Newton and was displacing Newton.
Now the point is you go and you talk to physicists and they'll tell you, well, it's not really true.
Like Einstein didn't really displace Newton, right?
We still use Newtonian mechanics.
We only use Einsteinian mechanics when we start to get near the speed of light.
So there are all these marketing schemes.
But in the marketplace of ideas, part of what happens is that there are these big public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, and they have a lot of power.
And it becomes very difficult to challenge them.
And in particular, I don't think that anybody particularly wants to go up against Richard Dawkins, right?
And if you go up against the new atheists or you challenge anything about the new atheists, and I have, you know, like the whole rationalist intuitionist thing, because I've been trying to talk about emotions on our podcast, and I said, you know, hey, look, you don't have to believe me.
There's this guy, John Haidt, who's a big famous scientist and all that stuff.
And then there's this guy, Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience.
But John Haidt is saying rationalist versus intuitionist.
There's a difference, right?
And I want to talk about that, and I'm going to tell you that I think that in light of the evidence, Sam Harris is wrong.
And I got a whole bunch of angry tweets from a guy named at Atheist Sensei, who proceeded to tell me that I was a fucking idiot and blah, blah, blah.
And what did I know and how arrogant I was and how dare you and all this sort of stuff.
Now, the point is that that behavior is literally the worst response you can have to failure, right?
If you're screwing up in math or any other subject, what you should be doing is getting out your mistakes, analyzing your mistakes, and using them to get better.
And so that very simple thing is what we did with all of our students.
We sat them down.
We made them confront their mistakes.
We made them say, okay, number three, why did you get number three wrong?
And then you figure out why number three is wrong, and then you fix that.
The point is that if Ad Atheist Sensei, and I will tell you that I think that Ad Atheist Sensei is pretty right in his assessment of what Sam Harris believes about, like, most people are emotional most of the time, but I don't think that Sam Harris believes that thinking and feeling are always linked.
So that his brain is all— Do you know this for a fact?
And they're just trying to get rid of all government.
So what is that thinking about?
What is that psychology about?
Or Muslim fundamentalists, they just want to get rid of these Western influences.
They basically think that a certain thing is bad, and they're constantly trying to strip it out, strip it out, strip it out, strip it out.
That's the nature of fundamentalism.
And Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are atheist fundamentalists.
And specifically, Richard Dawkins has talked about militant atheism.
And Richard Dawkins has said that religion is the scourge of humanity and that we need to get rid of religion.
Now, in reality, if you look at the scientific evidence, what you're going to find out is that religion has a very checkered past.
Right?
And then it's, you know, that religion has, you know, in terms of the history of violence, right?
Steven Pinker has this book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and he talks about the fact that, you know, what the new atheists are saying about religion is not supported by the evidence, right?
That in history, religion has not been any one thing, right?
It's had some good things, it's had some bad things.
Okay.
That's not a scientifically appropriate belief to go around and saying that religion is the scourge of all humanity or to be waging war over religion.
Now, I had to tutor some students who were at a Christian school that taught creationism.
And it's Oaks Christian and, you know, Thousand Oaks, right?
And I had never, like, honestly, like, pre-doing that experience, I had never thought much about the New Atheists.
Like, they just weren't a big deal.
I was like, okay, those guys are out doing whatever they're doing, right?
And then I went into this Christian fundamentalist school, or whatever it is, or school that teaches creationism, and all they could talk about was Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
Right?
They were talking about them constantly.
And in their minds, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris represent science.
They are the face of science.
In the same way that some guy in the Midwest, when he thinks about Islam, he's thinking about ISIS or al-Qaeda or all that sort of stuff.
He doesn't understand that those people don't represent the majority of Muslims.
And in the same way, in this school, Dawkins and Harris were being used to represent science in general and to represent evolution in general.
So they are essentially, for a lot of people, forming the stereotype of science.
And there were certain things they did in their teaching, like they would do, you know, the school—I mean, it was a weird experience because, one, the school had the very best rhetoric department that I've ever seen of any school because they knew that they were going to have people attacking their beliefs for their whole life.
And so you had to know all the logical fallacies, straw man, you know, Tu Quo Quay, all that sort of stuff, and the worst science department I've ever fucking seen in my life.
Well, that's the point, is that religion is a set of beliefs, and actually many of these beliefs are adapted to their environment, even though they seem kooky.
But the point is, is the issue, if you want to, so this comes down to how do you change people's minds, and what does the science say about how you change people's minds, and how do you move ideas?
And there's this book called The Diffusion of Innovations, right?
And I had, because I was working with these students, right, I was trying to figure out how do we get these ideas to move.
And so I was like, oh, thank God, there's a book all about how ideas move, right?
And what you come to find out is that all of the research shows there's a whole bunch of things that make ideas move.
One thing is they have to be compatible with people's existing beliefs, and then also they have to be practical.
So they have to confer some sort of practical benefit.
Okay.
So, in terms of moving evolution, the first thing is to recognize that, you know, if we really want to, like, not just spend another 150 years, you know, having a fight between science and religion and all that sort of stuff, the first thing to realize is that what people like David Sloan Wilson are saying is fundamentally compatible with Christianity, right?
Because they understand that, you know, that altruism matters, right, all this sort of stuff, right?
The sort of Dawkins-type notion of it's all about selfishness and everybody just trying to fuck everybody and all that sort of stuff, part of it is that it doesn't fit well with Christianity, right?
Doesn't fit well with religious notions, right?
Secondly, all of this stuff that I'm talking about with cultural evolution is deeply practical.
You can see that if we have a conversation as humanity about culture and how my choices are being driven and all that sort of stuff so that I can change my culture and all that sort of stuff, that we can fix a whole lot of things.
That notion of culture relies on group selection.
It relies on this multi-level selection idea that Dawkins is not on board with and all that sort of stuff and that Sam Harris is not on board with.
So, ultimately, what I want to do is I want to move these ideas.
But the whole point is, Joe, is that part of the reason why you brought me on this podcast today is specifically because I called out Richard Dawkins.
So you're saying that essentially Sam Harris's refuting of religion and his ideas about spreading what he believes are the empirical truths about science are in somehow or another causing a resistance to these very ideas because of the way he's presenting them.
That he's not presenting them in a form that's psychologically digestible.
But ultimately, that's sort of the larger thing that I would like to achieve, right, is a scientific reformation, right?
So, you know, Martin Luther triggers this reformation with the Catholic Church and all that sort of stuff.
At the core of the Catholic Church was this idea of love thy neighbor as thyself, and basically Martin Luther said the people in the power in the religious establishment are not living that principle, right?
At the core of science is this idea that we should be responsive to evidence.
And the scientific establishment is often not living, or the academic establishment is not living that, you know, principle, right?
So, and part of the problem is that left to their own devices, they will continue to remain in their tiny lanes.
And a lot of these academic disputes can only be solved by going outside their lanes.
So, for example, if Sam Harris was here, right, and I've said this on the podcast with Brian, the one thing that I would want to talk about, the only thing that I would want to talk about is this rationalist versus intuitionist idea, and try and reach some sort of definitive conclusion on that.
Because if Sam Harris's thinking and feeling are always being linked, then he has to decide how his feelings about religion are driving his thinking, and whether his feelings about religion are appropriate in light of the evidence, or whether they're not appropriate.
And so, for example, when I took, when I challenged these, you know, the anarcho-capitalists, the libertarians, all that sort of stuff, I got some people cheering me on, and then a lot of people calling me intellectually dishonest or whatever and all that sort of stuff, right?
These arguments, nobody is saying that these arguments, as they currently stand, are easy.
There's a lot of material to track, right?
And, you know, in the end, like, my job is to communicate them as clearly as possible.
So what I'm saying is that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are the kind of friends, with friends like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, science doesn't need enemies.
They are alienating, they are not helping us, and they're getting in the way of communicating science.
I understand because of the very approach that they're taking.
If science was to adopt the approach of we are here in light of the diffusion of innovations, which is the book all about how...
Well, but the point is that I believe that scientists should read science widely.
And if you look at someone like John Hite, part of the reason why John Hite and Sam Harris have fought is because John Hite doesn't have a problem with religion.
Because when you update your view of the brain, you come to realize that what's really going on is that you blindly internalize the beliefs of science and your community and all that sort of stuff, and that they blindly internalize the beliefs of their community.
And that if you want to move ideas, if you want to move scientific ideas, what we have to do is establish trust.
I mean, if the text promotes violence against women or against any particular group that doesn't believe what you believe, it's discussed because it's problematic, right?
Well, this is an issue that Michael Shermer wrote about recently, about Islam not experiencing the Enlightenment, that other religions have gone through this.
Well, it's specifically about Islam experiencing a de-enlightenment, right?
Because in the year 1000, they were.
But so the real thing that if you want to fix Islam, and again, like, you know, I was born in Saudi Arabia, my parents live in Dubai, like, there are conversations happening about this.
What you have to do is that you have to change the intellectual climate.
has nothing to do with the text.
It has to do with a lot of what people believe about learning, what they believe about themselves, whether they find ideas threatening.
And the text that when Islam in the year 1000, right, was the most intellectually advanced place on the planet, and the text that Islam is using now has not changed.
So what happens is that people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, they get super caught up in the text.
But really, if you want to fix these problems, you have to talk about, you know, what are your beliefs about your intelligence?
How do you feel about other cultures?
You have to talk about feelings.
And that's really where the conversation changes.
And the point is that rationalists don't talk about feelings.
So that's the real, I mean, that is the core of what needs to happen.
And the science is there to do that.
But the point is, is that, you know, let's put these people side by side.
John Haidt has a following of essentially zero, right?
Richard Dawkins has a huge following, right?
Sam Harris has a big following.
Someone like Joe Henrik probably maybe has three Twitter followers.
So the people who are representing science, right, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, no one's questioning, like, does Neil deGrasse Tyson know way the fuck more about astrophysics than I do?
100%.
But I don't know that Neil deGrasse Tyson has, for example, read The Diffusion of Innovations.
Because I will tell you that I've had numerous academics on the podcast.
For example, David Sloan Wilson.
David Sloan Wilson, right, I asked him, you know, he sent me this thing back in 2014, and it was a 67-page paper.
And it said, you know, it was towards the science of intentional behavior change or something like that.
And I read the 67 pages.
And at the end of the 67 pages, I'm like, I feel like what you're actually talking about is how do you move ideas?
And wasn't that already solved with the diffusion of innovations?
And he said, oh, I've obviously heard of the diffusion of innovations, like Everett Rogers' famous work, but I've never made a close study of it.
Now, the Diffusion of Innovations was written in 1967. It is an innovation that hasn't diffused.
And that's specifically because even though it preaches one thing about how ideas move, it's written in that dry scientific technical style.
So a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or David Sloan Wilson or John Hyde or Joe Henrik or any of these guys often have not heard of ideas that are relevant to the conversations that we're having.
Like, it's not just that the ideas aren't moving between science.
I mean, just because their behavior isn't compatible to that paper doesn't mean that they haven't read it and just decided that they don't agree or they have another point of view.
I think the main point is that from all of our conversations about culture, There are ideas out there, trapped in books, which is the whole point of what we're doing on The Brian Callen Show, that have real practical value to improving people's lives.
I mean, isn't it the best way to distribute information is the internet?
The fact that it took 150 years for scurvy to be cured even though the information was there, don't you think that directly coincides with the lack of ability to express that information?
It has to do with, and that's the point of the diffusion of innovations, it has to do with the ideas being packaged in a way that is culturally and psychologically compatible with what people already believe, and it being shown that they have practical value.
The basic barrier is this.
The science of evolution has been around for 150 years.
But there's that vitamin C example that you're using, you're talking about an extremely limited amount of education available when people are not expressing this.
Well, I mean, Joe, we can't do the experiment where we have one world where we don't do anything to package and move the ideas, and we have another world where we do actively work to try and package and move these ideas.
Well, but that's also important, is that it's important to realize that when this whole scurvy conversation was going on, they didn't have the concept of a vitamin.
And there are thick concepts that you don't have right now in terms of this idea that thinking and feeling are always linked, right?
This idea of Descartes' error.
Our culture doesn't talk about emotions in a way where they understand, oh, this behavior of the student where they wad up the test and they throw it all away, that is being driven by an emotion.
A lot of people understand that people get humiliated by failure and then it makes them pull back and they don't grow.
And when people teach people, there's a lot of things that people teach about when learning new information to make it encouraging and to make it enjoyable and to express boundless potential and not express You know, very clear, rigid boundaries that you're never going to cross and that you can impart these very limiting ideas into children's minds, or you can expand upon their potential horizons by promoting this idea of accessibility and of massive potential.
Of course, but is it a standard practice in America's schools today when a student gets a bad test that we all work through those mistakes and analyze them?
And a large part of it is that there are complicated fixes, like fixing how much we pay teachers and all that sort of stuff.
And there are simple fixes.
And things that we can fix pretty simply, and ideas that you can promote, are embrace your mistakes, analyze your mistakes, fail forward.
And that is the cornerstone value of the FAA, Which is why you're safer flying than walking.
It's the cornerstone value of Silicon Valley.
And I will tell you that having worked with lots and lots of students and traveled all across the country, that is not the core value of a lot of American students.