Joe Rogan Experience Review podcast - JRE review of 1274 with Nicholas Christakis

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

Nicholas is a sociologist and doctor who specializes in group behavior. His conversation with Joe gives some really interesting insights into why humans behave the way they do towards each other. And Joe manages to once again bring up Cuttlefish as being aliens.. Enjoy my review folks! Please email me with any suggestions and questions for future Reviews: [e-mail]

Hello there. How are you guys doing? Big thanks for all the downloads, appreciate it. I hit almost 60,000 last month. That's crazy. Really appreciate that. Cheers. Why anyone listens to this?

I have no idea. But it is cool that you do. So I'm going to continue making them. Today on the JRE review, we are reviewing episode 1274, Nicholas Christakis. This is an interesting one. Smart guy, really smart guy. Got into a lot of things. Nick, Nicholas, I call him Nick.

He's a sociologist, physician, and like knows a lot about behavioral science and like why we act the way that we do. And it really gave kind of an interesting insight into like why we do, you know, why people as a society work together, why do we have friends or the rest of it. Anyway, let's start this review.

One more. One more. One more. One more. One more. One more. One more. One more.

One more. One more. One more. One more. One more. One more. Welcome to the Joe Rogan Experience Room View! Where each week I review every single episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. What more do you want? So number one thing that they start out with is the recurring feature of kids in universities and how much of a god damn pain in the ass they are at the moment. These entitled little bastards are getting super worked up about their rights and what they should be called and how they should be treated. And you know, I don't mean to be too disrespectful to these kids.

I know they're just trying to express themselves, but I wasn't in college all that long ago and people weren't doing that then, you know. And this is new. And I think it's just a trend that won't last long. And then when we look back on it, we'll see that this was a way of behaving that was massively problematic, right? So he talks about why, you know, these kids are getting like this in college. Why is this happening?

And really, he says it's the breakdown of conversation. And you see that, it's just like one side shouting at the other, nothing but extremes. There's no middle ground, nobody wants to listen, everyone wants to be right. And, you know, they're really budding heads. And, you know, Nicholas talks about, well, okay, so what leads to these things? And why doesn't this work for us? And it doesn't because we're a species that cooperates. So even though we war against each other and we fight a lot as a species, what we're doing is we're doing it with cooperation

and we use friendship. And he said that friendships are quite rare. So mates, you have a mate, a lot of mammals and other species will breed, of course, so they have sex and they have a mate, a lot of mammals and other species will breed of course, so they have sex and they have a mate, whether they mate for life or it just happens once, that's very common. But friendships, not so much, and you do see it in some other ape species and I guess other hurting animals, I assume you would call that friendships, right?

I mean, if they're hurting together. But, you know, he's saying that's kind of not it, but why is that? Why is it rare and why is it important? Well, it's rare because there's a lot of competition. So animals will kill the weak ones and other ones within a group, and, you know, that can be pretty bad for you individually. But why it works well for humans

is because it's the best way to learn from others. We can learn by their actions. We can watch somebody do something stupid and be like, oh fuck I'm not doing that. That was really dumb. Or we see someone do something that works well that's beneficial. And then we're like, oh that's useful. I'm gonna take that knowledge. So the more of those types of people, or the more interactions you have in your life, the more open you are to them, the better you fit within your group. So that's where a kind of agreeableness comes in, and it's useful. So if you're finding yourself not being a very agreeable person, you find that

you argue a lot, but you also feel a little alone, then you know, whether you think you're right or wrong, you know, it doesn't really matter, but you're not being agreeable enough. So be a little bit more agreeable, argue less, and then you'll get a chance to learn from others. You'll learn more. Learning is super important for us, because look at what we can do with it. You know, if we all lived alone, lived alone, if we ran away from people and didn't want to be around them,

we wouldn't learn anything, right? We just know what as much as we know as an individual, which wouldn't be a lot. But when we build on top of everything, shit, now we've got tezeless, we've got spaceships. For one individual can build. So this cooperation for us, at least it's seen as is really useful. Because no one person knows how to build almost anything. But if we work together we've got also,

so we've got a lot of really cool shit. So anyway, that's kind of like the point the Nicholas is getting there. And you know, he's saying it's living alone as a substantial disadvantage, right? And for a lot of reasons, that's probably why it makes us feel depressed when we're isolated from others. Because it's our body telling us this is not the best way to survive. You need to do something else. I'm not going to make you feel good doing this. So off you go.

It has to be driving factor, right? Can't just be like unfortunate feelings. But you know, a big part of what's happening is well in these universities, and even online with what's, they're banning people from Twitter and all these different places, right? Alex Jones is the newest example for right or wrong,

and I know a lot of people get up and arms about what he thinks, but it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you think of the individual. What matters is that the individual was banned for speaking. And the solution is not to ban or stifle free speech. It's to allow more people to speak. If someone's saying something dumb, if I'm saying something dumb,

then people are gonna say, you're dumb, right? That's fine. So, there we go go that's how you know it's fine but you don't ban somebody for I'm not banning anyone I wouldn't ban the person who said I was dumb I would laugh and then go yeah you're probably right that's the only discourse that we have you know the message changes on its own people will figure it out right but the problem is we're going soft, right? And it Nicholas even talks about it when he's talking to Joey, talks about how we've domesticated

ourselves, which I found super interesting. So when you listen to that part of the podcast, pay attention to it. I found it really fascinating, the idea that we have somehow domesticated ourselves. We don't need to be as strong as we once were. We allow more of, I guess, weaker people to survive just because of the way that we've set up our system. And how this started to happen from what Nicholas was saying is that weaker people within a tribe, physically weaker, bound together to kill the more aggressive ones to overtake them. So then it became actually evolutionary, that's not a word, beneficial to maybe be weaker

as long as you could cooperate better. So now we've got this hunting and pack element which is stronger than just one person. I mean if you get 10 guys that can't really fight that good and one guy who's just a beast, you know even if it's Brock Lesnar. If you've got 10 regular size men you might be probably just gonna be able to hold them down. Eventually, I mean he's gonna fuck some people up but you're gonna get in there, right? So think of the advantage of that. What is Brock Lesnar? One in a thousand for like physical strength and power. I mean he's a very unusually unique

individual. Yet you could take any ten average dudes with no training which you could find everywhere. How do you find ten average dudes? What are the chances of going outside now and finding 10 average men? Pretty high because they're just average. And you just need those 10 to take out this very unique super warrior. It really takes a lot of power away from what the super warrior is. So this is kind of what he's saying. We've domesticated ourselves, but it works.

We have greater cooperation, so we're learning faster because we're interacting in that better way. And that builds like a really useful skill. And I like that. I like that a lot. They also talked a little bit about evolution. I don't know if he was an evolutionary scientist, but he is a very smart and qualified person.

So he probably knows a lot about it. But one of the questions that they were talking about is just, you know, evolution doesn't work if you don't die, right? So that's why it doesn't make sense to make anything immortal, right? Why is no life immortal? Because we just need to really live long enough to make kids, and then after that we can just slowly be dying, you know, while we try and hold the system together and pass more knowledge. I mean, really all of our value after the point of the kids being born would be is raising them to where they can exist on their own,

which is only like, what, 17 years? Really? I mean, a kid can figure it out then. It's not great, but they could. And then after that, it's just passing knowledge. So, you know, again, why don't we live forever? Well, accidents will happen, you know, you're gonna die eventually if something just by accident, hit by a car or whatever, no matter how, you know, and you'd have to make the world so safe for it not to happen. So I found that quite interesting. Also, it's probably really beneficial. The generations don't last too long, like people aren't living 500 years at a time, because in a way, all the ideas would take longer to recycle themselves.

You know what I mean? Like, when Joe had, excuse me, that lady on last week that was talking about the old medical science and surgeries and things and the doctors didn't believe in germ theory and they were pushing back on it. Well, the guy that was really pushing for germ theory and wanted people to know about it, he went to the younger students, the doctors, the new generation, and they accepted it, took it on, and eventually this idea just kind of like worked this way out. That's probably how ideas work. It probably is very beneficial that old generations leave and new ones come. They think that people will change their minds when they're like 300 years old about something

that they believe for a long time. That's probably not going to happen. So that would be a big problem as well. So maybe that's an issue, you know? Now that we're like getting people to live longer, if we can use CRISPR and get people to live 200 years, we might find that it actually slows down our development. Who knows? I'm just probably just talking bullshit,

but I have had a lot of coffee, so it's not unlikely I'll be saying that. The big thing, the big takeaway from this one I liked is talking about skills. Learn a skill and learn it well, master it. It almost doesn't matter what it is. If you enjoy it and you learn it well, it has value. You can use that value. You did get paid or just take a lot of pride in knowing something that awesome. And then of course, Joe gives his favorite quote from Miyomato Musashi. If you know the way broadly, you see it in all things,

which means really, if you're really fucking good at one thing, if you master one thing, you can start mastering lots of others because you see the types of steps that it takes to master something. And the master, he doesn't even need to be the same thing. It can be a very different thing, right? But you know that it takes hard work, dedication, practice, working at it a little bit every

day, not quitting. I mean, Joe's message is, you got really good at Taikwondo. He knew what it took. Took a lot of training. It was very scary. He had to push hard at it. He had to keep going. He had to see where that future laid and he had to know how to plan it out, right? Did the same thing with comedy and other things that he's done well at. That's how he was able to pull that stuff together And I like it. I think that message goes very well with the whole podcast. Also, bit of housekeeping,

sounds like Joe is off next week. He said he was going on vacation pretty soon, he was going to read this guy's book, take it with him, and therefore he might be off next week. Just a bit of an idea, I'm not sure, he doesn't usually announce that he's leaving But if that's the case this week I will be doing JRE classic. So I will be going back looking at classic podcast ones that are just awesome maybe I'll do an Anthony Bolden one out of respect for that guy got bless and miss him and And yeah, so if you have any when I get a message, please message me. And if I get any good suggestions on all podcasts to review, I'll do it. And the reason I do those is not just the fill time

and have a podcast for the sake of it, but it's to go back and listen to other good ones that maybe people have forgotten about or newer JRE, Joe Rogan fans have not listened to, because they're barely keeping up with the massive amounts of podcasts that he releases every week, but you know, it's nice to go back and find some old cool ones and go over them and Yeah, that's it. Thanks for listening guys. Again, I appreciate you. See you later Music