The Joe Rogan Experience - #2148 - Gad Saad

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University, and an expert in the application of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. He is the host of "The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad" podcast, and the author of "The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life" available in paperback on May 14, 2024. www.gadsaad.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. How you doing? What's going on, man? Good to see you. Tenth episode. Crazy. Unbelievable.

What are the odds? Short of your regular crew. Am I in the Hall of Fame? There's very few people that have had 10 episodes. It's a small handful, for sure. I should put that as the top thing on my CV. All the other stuff is bullshit. 10th time on Joe Rogan, drop the mic.

This is how out of the corporate world I am. I don't even know what a CV is. I don't know what it stands for. I know people say it, I know what it means, but I don't know what it stands for. Wanna me tell you what an academic CV looks like? Sure, what does it stand for? What's CV? Curriculum vitae.

Ah, okay. You basically, in academia, you'll start with your education, all your degrees, all of your positions that you've held. I was assistant professor here from here and then, then all of your journal publications, all of your books, all of your conference art, you know on and so on right So it can end up being a pretty beefy CV. I think mine is about 47 pages long Oh my goodness. Look at you. You accomplished

And managed to stay logical. How did you do that? Oh, you know new book dropping up dropping on May 14th on happiness You know sad truth to ace about happiness eight secrets for leading a good life. Enjoy it How have I been so productive? How have you managed to I mean? People have gotten annoyed at you, but you've of you've somehow or another avoided like a full-scale cancellation Well with your positions, it's of amazing. It really it truly is. I'm kind of like the Velcro Don, the Teflon Don. Right, right. Nothing sticks. They've tried to cancel me in all sorts of ways but that speaks by the way to one of the powerful reasons why tenure, despite the fact that a lot of people despise

the concept of tenure, oh, it's just a bunch of lazy academics who are going to be deadwood for the next 30 years, but if I didn't have the protection of tenure, I'd be gone long ago. Now, that doesn't mean that I still haven't suffered many consequences, right? So I haven't gotten other jobs that I would have otherwise gotten because of how irreverent I am

You know that threats so now after October 7th, it's almost became impossible for me to go on campus Because first of all, you know, I'm high-profile My university has a particular demographic reality and so there are consequences to speaking out But so you you can't go on campus literally I mean I have gone but during the the points when there were a lot of protests outside, you know the campus and so on or on campus because that our campus is an urban campus So it's hard to say where when the school begins and where the the city is, right? You know you have death to Jews and free Palestine

and Intifada and from the river to the sea and there's 800 of them screaming and you're gonna come in. Many of them know who you are. They know that I'm not very supportive of their positions and so it's going to be, you know, a bit challenging. So on a few cases I did it via Zoom. Other times I had to have security with me so I would have to check into security and they'd have to walk with me to class and so on.

That's not a good thing. I'll tell you another quick story if I may. Please. About what happened after October 7th. So I'll first talk about what happened in Lebanon. So the day that we escaped from Lebanon, for those of your viewers who don't know about us, we're Lebanese Jews. We were there until the start of the Civil War. We were there in the first year of the Civil War, and then we had to leave because it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon. When we left that day, it was from Beirut to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Montreal, as we cleared the airspace of

Lebanon, the captain, I discussed this in chapter one of my previous book, The Parasitic Mind, he said, okay, we're now out of Lebanese airspace. And so my, I said, my wife, my mother pulls out a pendulant with the star of David, puts it around my neck and says, now you can wear this, be proud and not hide your identity. Now that's in the past, but now I'm gonna link it to the current reality. About three weeks after October 7th, my wife and son came to pick me up from a cafe

where I was working on my laptop. My wife had picked up my son who was playing a soccer match in the east end of the city. And so as I got into the car, he says, daddy, if you had come to where I was playing soccer today and you were wearing a Star of David, you'd be dead. So 1975, a Star of David is put around me and now I can wear it proudly. 45 years later, I better not wear a Star of David in Montreal, Canada. That doesn't bode too well. At a kid's soccer game. Yeah, because the demographic reality in that neighborhood is such

that a Star of David would be viewed as provocative incitement. What's crazy to me is regardless of how you feel about how the Israeli military and the army is pursuing the war in Gaza, regardless of that, the blatant, just out in the open, anti-Semitism that we see today is like nothing I've ever seen before. Like, like roaches coming out of the woodwork. Like what? Like you see it all over social media and it's like this if this is September and not October

like if this is just you would be you would be shunned everybody would be like this is horrible how the fuck could you say this how you're openly anti-semitic you're openly blaming the Jews for all the world's problem this is crazy this is Nazi shit and yet you're seeing it everywhere now When those teachers were in front of Congress when those principals of those universities were in front of Congress And they were saying that it's not harassment to say death to the Jews unless it's actionable Which is the craziest? mental verbal Which is the craziest? Mental verbal gymnastics I have ever heard anyone say that's in that position

And a position of being the head of Harvard. It was so crazy to watch It's so crazy. See it's almost like we live in an alternative timeline Like we entered into a new dimension like in our sleep. We woke up. We're in a new place, you know Like, in our sleep, we woke up, we're in a new place. You know, nothing should surprise me given the history that I have growing up in the Middle East, but I was taken aback after October 7th at the Jew hatred that I was exposed to. Now, my positions are really not inflammatory. So, for example, I'll say things like, you know, I'm worried about my, I have a lot of extended family in Israel,

right? So after the October 7th happened, for me to just kind of call around to make sure that none of my cousins and their children and aunts and so on, no one was harmed, will take a while. Well, that itself, the fact that I cared about my family was incitement, was I'm a Zionist, I'm a baby killer, right? I am personally responsible for the IDF killing any innocent children. But it's not just that, it's coming at you from all directions, so in the past you could say, okay, Islamic sources are going to send you Jew hatred, and I'm used to that.

You could say, the neo-Nazi alt-right types, Jews will not replace us, they're coming after me. You've got, of course, the academic progressive left types who are also anti-Zionist, which is just code sweet word for anti-Jewish. And so everywhere you turn, there is Jew hatred and it's so normalized. Now of course, in part, it is emboldened by the fact that a lot of them are anonymous. They don't put their real names so that they can take the liberty to be this orgiastically Jew hater.

But it's so disenchanting to see that that guy could be my gardener, he could be my surgeon, he could be my dentist. I don't know who he is, but there are millions of those folks who hold those beliefs. It's unbelievable. I think a lot of them are fake as well. I think a lot of them are Russian and Chinese trolls. I think

there's a disturbing amount of them that's responsible for taking this kind of discourse and pushing it to a much higher level and making it more ubiquitous. I really really believe that and there's a lot of data to support that and I think that's lot of data to support that. And I think that's part of what's going on with social media. It's definitely a big part of what's going on with Twitter and TikTok,

and a lot of these things where you see these very inflammatory messages that seem to be pushed, they're pushed through and promoted, and to the fact that you get them all the time. They show up in your feed all the time. Even if you're not subscribed to these, even if you're not following these people, you'll find this disturbing content

will show up in your feed. And I really firmly believe that we're being manipulated. I really do. And I think there's a lot of these young kids that are on these campuses that are very malleable. They're very easily influenced. And they don't need, I mean, so many, I'm sure you've seen Constantine Kissin from Trigonometry. He's done these interviews with these people, these protests, and so many of them are completely

ignorant. They have no idea what, they're just doing it because they think they're a good person. They're putting up their flag of virtue by saying, free Palestine from the river to the sea. And they don't even know what that means Yeah, like what do you do? You know what you're saying? You're saying you're saying wipe out Israel Is that what you're saying? Not only that in a lot of cases. They're supporting regimes or ideologies That would be perfectly antithetical to their main identity So right here's for Palestine chickens for Kentucky fried chicken or I like to use geese for foie gras

because I'm from Montreal. I mean, imagine if you present yourself to the world with your queer identity, which is great, good for you. And now you decide, okay, let me see, should I be supporting Tel Aviv, which is one of the most queer-friendly places? I mean, short of Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Tel Aviv is right up there. So you would think that if my key identity, my

definitional identity is my queerness, that I'm certainly putting all my chips with Tel Aviv. No, it's with queers for Palestine. So that's exactly what parasitic thinking is, right? And I think, I really do think that's supported by other countries. I think they they realize how Vulnerable and idiotic a lot of Americans are and they're just pushing that and whether you realize it or not Social media even if they're saying something ridiculous, it's very influential and they can just move the boundaries a little bit by having the most extreme content, the most ridiculous things be so common, then less extreme content that would ordinarily be considered ridiculous

now becomes accepted as normalized. Which is what you're seeing. Yeah, exactly. Can I point, I mean you alluded to it earlier about what the IDF might be doing. Can I just mention a few things about that? Sure. And I'm hardly the spokesperson of the IDF, but it's an idea that I've been toying with,

and I'll pitch it here for the first time. So you know this notion of equality of opportunities versus equality of outcomes? Right. Typically we link it to all of the woke stuff, right? So equality of opportunities is great, equality of outcomes is a cancer to human dignity. Okay. Let's now apply that concept, equality of outcomes, to war casualties.

So I think this is what happens when people say, oh, but the IDF is being grotesque, because the currency that then matters becomes how many dead on each side, equality of outcome. But let me change it to a different moral currency Okay, let's talk about intent. So for example in in this in the Justice system you could have a person who is found guilty of involuntarily Vehicle vehicular homicide and he kills four people. Okay, so four are dead So that's equality of outcome forward, versus someone who took out a hit on his entire family, his brother, sister, and parents,

so that he can win the insurance money. But it's an undercover operation, the cops catch you, even though in that case there were zero killed, correct? That person will get a higher sentence, because we understand in the law that intent matters. So now I think you know where I'm going with the analogy. So in the Palestinian IDF conflict, when say Hamas launches 6,000 rockets,

every single one of which is intercepted by the Iron Dome, had they not had the Iron Dome, then the outcome could have been that 50,000 would have been killed, right? In an ideal world from Hamas's perspective, our intent would be to eradicate every last Jew. They have it in their charter. So yes, it is true that if we just count the number of people who were killed on October 7th versus the number who were killed in the retaliation, if that's the

only calculus that matters, then oh yes, the IDF has gone way overboard. But once you change it to an existential intent issue, then maybe it's not as bad of an outcome as you think, notwithstanding that a single innocent dead is a tragedy. You could say it that way, but the problem with that is the Iron Dome does exist and Hamas's military capabilities are far below Israel's. It would be like if some small person tried to punch me and I moved out of the way and

then beat them to death. And I said, no, I had to defend myself. I beat them to death. But I didn't have to beat them to death. And I said, no, I had to defend myself. I beat them to death. But I didn't have to beat them to death. They're just small person. Even if they hit me, it wouldn't really hurt me. It's not, you know what I'm saying? Like defensively, I'm not worried about a real small person

that doesn't know how to fight, who throws a punch at me. So what would be in your moral calculus, the ideal outcome that should have happened as a retaliation to October 7th? That's a very good question. Obviously I'm not a military analyst. If I was, you know, you do have to take into consideration the tunnels. You do have to take into consideration the infrastructure. The question is, did they just knowingly bomb places where there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians knowing that there's going to be a few Hamas? Yeah.

And that's what scares people. What scares people is that someone is willing to kill women and children just to get at bad guys, and they just say that's just part of the game. horrific in the 2024 understanding of human life and morality and just the horrors of war that, you know, they're blowing up mosques, they're blowing up schools, they're blowing up apartment buildings, everything, anything where they think Hamas is. So again, let me preface, and I shouldn't have to say this, that a single person killed that's innocent is a tragedy. Of course. But compare that reality to almost any other war that you have in working memory Why is there a unique?

Unbelievably high threshold of morality that is placed on the Israeli nation, right? Now you probably already know this the IDF does go through a lot of Painstaking effort to try to minimize that, right? They drop leaflets in Arabic. They even sometimes call people in Arabic and say, don't go in this area. They hold, so of course they've killed many, many innocent people. But they're placed between a rock and a hard place.

What can you do, right? The other side knows exactly that if they do exactly what they're doing, either you don't retaliate and we win or you retaliate very harshly as they have. And then you still win, right? Today the propaganda war has been completely won by Hamas, right? There's a complete genocide in the informational war against the IDF, right? One other point, and then I'll see the floor back to you.

The term genocide, Jacques Derrida was a very famous postmodernist who developed the field of deconstructionism. Language creates reality, right? He was one of the guys who allowed the ecosystem of up is down, men could be women, left is right, slavery is freedom, right? It's that postmodernist game that allows these kind of insane ideas to flourish. Well, when you misuse words like everything is a genocide, that does no one a service. There is no genocide. There is a killing of a lot of people. Again, every single one killed is a tragedy. But if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, by the end of my appearing on this tenth time on this show, there wouldn't be a single Palestinian left. So if they were genocidal in their intent, then they really are shitty genocidal maniacs

because first of all, the population, as you know, of the Palestinian territories has gone up five-folds, right? So that's really sucky genocide. And they've killed, depending on the count... Right, but that's all previous to this military action that's going on now. What are the numbers that you know of right now? It's hard to say. You know, I mean, Israel has one one statistic and then there's other statistics by human rights organizations that it

Estimate at least 12,000 missing in the rubble that are probably dead and 30,000 dead now at the number of those 30,000 what percentage is Hamas? I'm not sure So I've heard they the the most favorable estimates to to the IDF are about one to one ratio The less estimate it's about one to one point five, okay? One to two up to one to two so if they so if they killed thirty thousand people fifteen thousand or Hamas It's always saying that would be best. No one to one would be fifteen thousand to fifteen thousand And then you can take it from there right okay, so a one to one one to one half of them So half of them yeah, so half of 30 is 15

Exactly. Okay, right. So now Let's compare it to and I don't know if others have made this analogy when you drop the bomb the atomic bomb Almost all the people who were killed were non combatants, right? So then that ratio would be 250,000 killed to zero. I mean, unless there's a few Japanese military guys that were in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, you drop, and again, I'm not trying to say, oh, but they're not as bad as these other guys, so they're okay, let's give them a ribbon and a medal.

But again, it is anti-Semitic when you place one group of people to a standard of morality that is not expected of anybody else. So for example, if you really care about Arab lives, then you certainly should care about all of the Yemenis that have been killed that are a lot more than whatever's happened after October 7th. You would care about the 500,000 Syrians that were killed.

You would care about the war between Iran and Iraq that led to several million killed and on how about a Lebanese civil war? 150,000 died and it was right, but that's not happening currently So people aren't totally aware of that like just those statistics that you brought up the Lebanese deaths Just most people are not aware of that most people that are discussing especially college kids are not aware of that That's why I'm here. Yeah, maybe it's all ugly It's all awful. It's there's nothing that you could say that is in any way shape or form positive about any of this Yeah, the question is is there another way to do it other than just bombing these areas where you know Hamas is and civilians there is another way, but I don't think it'll happen. Can I share it? Yeah

So Golda my year who was the fourth or fifth prime minister of Israel from, I think, 1969 to 1974, has two quotes, which I'm going to paraphrase. I don't have the exact quote. She said, if the Jews put down their arms, there'll be a genocide. If the Palestinians put down their arms, there'll be peace. So just remember that for a second. Second one is if the Arabs, and she means in this case the Palestinian Arabs, if they were to love their children more than they hate ours, then they'd be peace. So why am I saying these two quotes?

Because this battle is really not about land. In a sense, we've already addressed this on previous shows where I've come and discussed about some of these Islamic issues. It is an existential affront that the Jewish state exists in the Middle East. Look at all other religious minorities across Arabia. Egypt used to be completely Coptic Christian, 100 percent, many hundred years ago. Today there are 10 percent cops left. What happened to those cops? There used to be tons of Christians in Syria. What happened to those Syrians? There used to be tons of

Christians in Lebanon. There still are some, about 30, 35 percent, but Lebanon used to be a majority Christian country. So the goal of Islam, not individual Muslims, right? Again, I don't need to preface by saying there are millions and millions of lovely, kind, peaceful Muslims. Of course there is. But Islam as an ideology, does it tolerate others? Well, we have 1400 years of history that either says it does or doesn't, right? We don't have to watch TikTok videos. And nothing could be clearer than what the words of Muhammad were, the prophet of Islam, who said that you need to rid Arabia of Christians,

but certainly the Jews. So the existence of the land of Israel is an affront to that. One more point and I'll see to go back to you. In Islam, there's a concept called Dar al-Islam and' al-Harab. That means the house of Islam and the house of war. Anything that's under the Islamic control is good. Anything that's yet to be under Islamic control is under the house of war. Once a territory is under Islamic control and you lose it, you have to get it back. It is your dominion forever.

This is why, for example, Andalusia, which was at one point controlled, which is in current Spain, which was controlled by the Moors, an Islamic conquistador, a lot of jihadists will say, inshallah we have to reconquer Andalusia. It is our land, because once it's under

So Israel existentially cannot exist. So why am I saying all this? You can't have peace if you have the other side that truly never wants for you to exist. That's the bottom line. If you can change people's heart where they say look I get a piece of land you you get another piece, let's build an incredible vibrant co-society together, you'd have peace. But if you're taught from straight out of the womb that the Jews is the reason for every calamity in the world, you're not going to have peace. But don't you think that there are Jews and there are Israelis that treat Palestinians

as if they're less. There is that in Texas in terms of treating people who are Hispanic. The darkness of the human heart is not monopolized by one group. There are super nasty Jews and they are incredibly lovely and kind Jews. There are super nice Muslims and incredibly brutal Muslims. So there is no monopoly on the darkness of the human heart. So I can see that. Of course, there are Jews that are not very keen on having Palestinian neighbors. But as someone who grew up in the two worlds, right, I'm an Arabic speaking Jew. I hang around with tons of Muslims.

I hang around with tons of Jews. Have I ever heard somebody in my Jewish family say, oh God, I can't wait for us to eradicate the 1.52 billion Muslims in the world. I've never heard that. Have I heard incessantly all the time about, inshallah we'll get rid of the Jews? Every second you just have to say, hi Ahmad, the next line is, God damn it, we got to get rid of the Jews. Now, it's become a lot.

Isn't it that common where you are? It's as common as the heat in Texas. It is definitional. As a matter of fact, I introduced a game, I mean facetiously, but I mean it seriously, six degrees of Jew. So that's a play on six degrees of... Kevin Bacon. Exactly.

So I give you a calamity in the world and you've got up to six causal steps to blame the Jew. So an Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon, go. And so I will post these on Twitter and people give answers. Now, oftentimes they're just playing along, but that's the mindset. You got diabetes? Well, that's because the Jews who are controlling

the pharmaceutical industry are not releasing the drug. I'll give you a recent one that I face. So I put up a police lineup of some guys that had been caught in Huddersfield, which is a town in England, who had been grooming and raping young British white girls. And you may or may not know this, I'm not sure if we've discussed it in the past,

in Britain, over the past 25 years years there's been an unbelievable industrial scale level grooming and raping of young white girls by Asian men. That's a euphemism for men of a certain religious heritage, but you say it's, they're Asian. So their names are, let me summarize them for you, Mohammed, Ahmed, Mohammed, Ahmed, Muhammad, Muhammad, Ahmed, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, and Muhammad. So I put those up and I sarcastically said, I don't have a big enough brain to do the big data analytics to understand what is the commonality across all those gentlemen. Did anybody help me? Do you know how many people wrote to me and blamed it on the Jews not facetiously? So now I'm gonna ask you Joe. Oh, I was just gonna ask you that

How is it when three Muhammad's rape your 12 year old British girl? You blame it on Mordechai three Muhammad's lead to Mordechai. Tell me how you tell me. I don't know. How do they do it? Who let them in? It's the Jewish cabal who controls immigration policy. It's George Soros, the Jew who controls the open society ideology. I don't think you can really just connect George Soros to Jewish if you look at his policies. He seems anti-Western civilization. I agree, but for the Jew-hater, any causal explanation. So one individual who just happens to be Jewish.

Or they point to some other one. There's one, I don't even know who she is, I think Barbara Lerner or something. Somebody will correct us in the comments section where they show her saying something, oh, we need to flood, and she happens to be Jewish. But for every Jewish person who is pro open door policy, there's a counter Jewish person, here is one,

who is not for open border policies, right? Stephen Miller, who worked in the Trump administration, is Jewish, he's probably the biggest anti open door immigration. But that's the mindset of the Jew hater. Everything is blamed. There's this incredible diabolical feature of the Jew that they're able to at times pretend

that they're victims, but really they're diabolical and genocidal. It's grotesque, man. It's weird. It's just weird that it became so out in the open, and that's what makes me think that they're being influenced. I just can't imagine there was that much antisemitism before October 7th. But why? Why do you...

Like the influence is coming for what purpose? Just to seed, create havoc? Yes. Yeah, to keep people at each other's throats. I really think so. And also to completely screw up democracy. People have lost all their faith in voting. They've lost all their faith in the money behind politics and the influence behind politics.

The more this stuff just gets brought up, the more chaos there is, the more hatred there is, the more divide there is. Even amongst the Democratic Party, right? Which we talked about the other day that some large number, we think it's around 70% of Jewish people vote Democrat. But now, the Democratic Party is full on with this Palestine thing. And you know, you see it on college campuses, this rampant anti-Semitism, death to the Jews being tolerated, like literally saying that, yelling it out.

And by the way, you can go back, so I wouldn't be able to tell you which number, which episode, but you can go back to earlier episodes that have appeared on this glorious podcast where you will see that I would have predicted exactly what we're seeing now and it's not because I'm a prophet or it's not because I'm so intelligent it's because you simply have to have the the power of having the imagination to extrapolate from a current trend to some future and outcome, right? So if you let in into your country people who have genocidal Jew hatred as an endemic feature of their society. So I'll give you, since people love stats. So there was a Pew, Pew is a nonpartisan, if anything, they probably lean towards being more woke. So Pew has these global surveys that they conduct. So in 2010, they conducted a survey looking at

how favorable are you towards the Jews across a whole bunch of Islamic countries. Now, if I were to tell you that 10% of the polled people exhibited Jew hatred, you'd say, oh boy, that's a big number, 10% is a lot. Okay, how about if I tell you that for most of those polled countries, it was between 95 to 99%. So let me, I know people understand what 95 to 99 means. If I poll 100 people, 95 to 99 will express

very problematic Jew hatred, okay? So now if I let in 100,000 such people into the country, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and a professor with a 47 page academic CV to say, well, probably Jew hatred's gonna go up. So that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing the outcome of having an immigration policy that has let in people that don't share

our foundational values. Again, this doesn't mean someone's going to write in the comments section, what a hypocrite, you're an immigrant, Gadzad. Well, there are immigrants and there are immigrants. There are tons of Muslims who want to come in here and leave all that baggage at the door. They want nothing to do with that. They just want to live the American experience. The problem is we don't have the machine that can look into your heart and mind, right? So it's a statistical game.

So if you're going to let in hundreds, I mean, look what's happening in Germany, look what's happening in France, look what's happening in Denmark. Well, let me ask you this. Why do you think that stuff is happening? Why do you think there's this mass immigration? So that's a great question. So it's covered partly in parasitic mind, my earlier book, and in my next book, which I call suicidalathy, right?

So empathy is a emotion that has evolved for very clear evolutionary reasons. So just like any of our other emotions, for example, envy, there are evolutionary reasons why we've evolved the emotion of envy, right? It can compel us forward. I see that Joe's doing well, keeping up with the Joneses. Maybe it'll get me off my fat ass so I can work harder. So there are very clear evolutionary

reasons why empathy exists. But the problem is when empathy misfires, it either becomes hyperactive or it misfires in directing the empathy to the wrong person. So for example, illegal immigrants more important than American vets. And I can show you many public policies where you have these insane policies, all of which are due to suicidal empathy. So to answer your question, I think that the Western mind is, we are kind, tolerant, compassionate,

empathetic people. There are people out there, they're Guatemalan, they're Honduran, they're Yemeni, who don't have it as well as we do. Wouldn't it be nice if we open up our doors? So the reflex is a noble one, it's a nice one, but it exists in Unicornia. The real world doesn't operate that way. If you let in people that have a huge hatred of homosexuality, are you going to have an increase in homophobia in your country or decrease, right? So I think that's the answer.

The answer is misdirected empathy across the West. Is it really that simple? Because it seems like it's happened so rapidly that it seems like a plan, like a plan to create more chaos. The border policy in America is puzzling. It's baffling because it seems like there's a plan to flood the country. So it's sort of a conspiratorial kind of cabal. It seems like there's something going on that's allowing it to happen

even though everyone recognizes it's a problem and it's solvable, but they don't solve it. In fact, the United States government has actively tried to stop Texas from enforcing their border. So, but I think that's just, so I've often tweeted that the most dangerous weapon in human

Context is a parasitized mind, right? I mean a bomb is dangerous, but it is it is the human mind that activates that bomb, right? It's a guy with the little mustache that said the Jews are the real problem of the world and I need to get rid of The world of that parasite, right? So parasitic thinking, I mean, one of the reasons I think that that book did so well is because it really explained how all of these parasitic ideas came to a head together and they were all spawned on university campuses over the past 40 to 80 years.

So one hypothesis is what you said, which is there is kind of a grand scheme That's willfully doing this another one is that all of the Western leaders of roughly the same age I mean within 20 years of each other are all the product of a Western education University education that was completely infected with these dreadful parasitic ideas So that when these leaders go out there and have the power to enact policies, they enact these policies. So my view is slightly different from yours in that I don't think that there is a supra

mega willful plan. It's just that all of those Western leaders are the product of a really shitty university system. Hmm. Right. But there's obviously two schools of thought, right? are the product of a really shitty university system. Hmm. Right, but there's obviously two schools of thought, right? There's the left-wing school of thought and the right-wing school of thought in regards to this. The right-wing school of thought wants to seal our borders,

wants to secure the borders, wants to stop illegal immigration. The left-wing wants, I mean, I don't know what they want because they start talking about border policies being a problem as well. And they start talking about the issue at the border and they try to blame Trump for the issues at the border, which is always hilarious.

But they're just so, with that kind of stuff, with blaming, like when Biden blames Trump for things that he clearly did, it's just gaslighting, right? And it just shows you how little respect they have for people's ability to understand what's actually going on. Well, look, suicidal empathy,

I mean, we can move beyond the border. How about, say, in the justice system? Suicidal empathy results in you caring more about the perpetrator than the victim. That's suicidal empathy, right? Because that argument, so here's how that leftist argument works. If a person, especially a criminal of color, commits a crime, that's probably because he

grew up as a person of color, so he's already been marginalized by the society. So now he commits a crime. You're now double whamming him by putting him in the penal system. So you need to be more caring. So he's already got 57 previous arrests. Let's give him a 58th chance. So again, I don't think it comes from it comes from really parasitized thinking, right? Right. But that those policies are supported by George Soros specifically. And then he actively goes after DAs that have the most lenient and ridiculous policies in

regards to no cash bail, releasing violent criminals. That seems like that's done on purpose. That's done with intent. But it's done on purpose. So I think where we may differ is you think it's because there is a duplicitous evil, let's cause havoc, whereas I think they actually believe that that's the noble position, right? And there should be no borders.

There is no illegal human. What kind of bullshit is this? I mean, why do you have a lock on your door, right? So why is it that I get to have sex with my beautiful wife, but all these homeless guys are sexually starved? That's not fair. That's the parasitism of socialism. We're all equal.

Why do you make a lot more money than I do, Joe? That's not fair. I need to have as much money as you, right? So I don't think, I mean, I hope that it's not what you're saying is true, because then that's even more sinister, right, that there's kind of a boo hoo hoo. I just think it's people who are misguided in their misdirected nobility, right? I think it's both.

You think it's both, yeah? Yeah, I think it's both. Maybe it's both, yeah. I think it's both. You think it's both? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's both. Maybe it's both. I think there's definitely a lot of misguided people, but I think there's definitely a plan. It just it's too organized. The DA system, the DA thing with funding the far left is DAs and then funding someone who opposes them who's even more ridiculous. That seems to be a plan.

Yeah. And he's got a pattern of that and he seems to enjoy it Enjoy spending his money in that way. Well, he enjoys it. I think it's like this crazy game, right? What do you think about what's going on with your boyfriend Trump these days? What although the trials the trials fascinating, you know, I had Mike Baker on who was formerly a CIA operative formerly But we were we were talking about, that no one's ever been charged for something like that before. No one's ever been prosecuted for something like that before. Certainly no political opponents. And my thing is the danger, the people that are on the

left that don't understand that now you set a precedent, you set a terrible precedent. And if Trump does get in office, what does this stop him from going after all of his political enemies in the same exact way? Yeah, are we going to do this now every time someone's in a position of power, whether it's a governor or whether it's a president or what have you? When they have a political opponent, they will hire people to go after that political opponent and trump up a bunch of trump up. opponent and Trump up a bunch Trump up no pun intended a bunch of bullshit charges and drag him through the court so that everybody's the people that only have a peripheral understanding what's going on so I'm a god he's a criminal keep that criminal out of the White House like okay do you think a lot of people who historically had been against Trump are now honest enough to see what

a shan this whole thing is and are revising their positions or do you think there's quite a few yes really yeah but it takes a lot of bravery to do that and depending upon your social environment you know there's a lot of people that just can't step outside the lines of whatever the ideology their neighborhood is attached to and their community is attached to the reason why I asked the question is because I recently appeared maybe about five six months ago on a British psychiatrist show. It was a small show, but I thought he was a really interesting guy.

He wanted to talk about how you apply evolution and psychiatry and so on. So I was like, let's do it. Towards the end of the show, or maybe it was even the last question, he said, in your 30-year career as a behavioral scientist, as a professor, what is the singular human phenomenon that has surprised you the most? Which I thought was an amazing question. I had never been asked before. So, yeah, it's an amazing one,

because I've seen tons of stuff. And so I paused for a moment, and then I said, I think it's the inability of people to change their opinions once they are anchored in a position. And so it wasn't that spirit that I was asking you the question, because in my experience,

despite the fact that I have a chapter in the parasitic mind on how to seek truth, and therefore I'm offering a vaccine against falsehoods, I'm actually quite pessimistic for some people who go, la la la, I don't wanna hear it, because they're so anchored, there's no amount of evidence that I could ever show you that can move you a millimeter from your position that's very disheartening. It's very

disheartening it's very foolish I always try to tell people do not be married to your ideas you should not connect them to you they are just ideas they are not you and if you have supported an idea that you find to be false and you are afraid to admit that you were incorrect, that is far more weak than being incorrect. Because now you know that you were incorrect, but your pride is keeping you from admitting it. That is beyond foolish, and now people will always know that you're going to do that with what,

people will forgive you if you make mistakes. People will forgive you if you're incorrect. We have all made mistakes. We are all occasionally incorrect. I'm incorrect all the time. But I make a big point of not attaching myself to ideas I will argue them if I think they are correct, but they are not me Yeah, you know Patrice O'Neill had a great quote and he said You could hold your opinions, but don't let your opinions hold you right beautiful

Yeah, yeah, you just you got to know that you're not ideas You're a human being. And it's a challenge when you are faced with the reality of the fact that you've made an error, especially if you've been bold about it, if you've been condescending to people who disagree with it, if you're egotistical in your position, you connected yourself to righteousness

and intellect and science and whatever other words you wanna throw around that make your opinion More valid than the other people's and then you find out you were wrong, right? Okay If we are ever gonna trust you again You have to tell us why you were wrong how you're wrong and what that feels like and what you've learned from this Because if you don't if you you keep arguing that, you keep doing it, now we have no respect for you. Fauci.

Fauci is the worst, but he's worse than that. I think he's far worse than that. I think he's deceptive. I mean, if the real Anthony Fauci, the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is not, if it's not accurate, he would be sued. He would be sued. Right. And just forget about what happened during COVID, just what we know took place during the AIDS crisis. Everyone should read that book. Everyone should understand this same game plan was played out during the AIDS crisis. And it's a game plan where they're in cahoots with the pharmaceutical drug companies and they push this thing as being the only remedy and this is how and they make tremendous amounts of money

And that's all real. This is not tinfoil hat conspiracy wearing shit That's real But if you supported him because you thought that he was the science and then over time you have realized that oh my god They did work with Peter Datsyck. They did fund through another organization Gain of Function Research. He did lie about it. It was talked about in emails. He did contact people who were saying one thing and had them change their position.

He did. They did ridicule the lab leak theory when they knew it to be correct. They knew it. They knew they were doing the exact same research on the exact same viruses in that exact same place where it broke out. They knew it. And they lied, because they wanted to cover their ass and we let them get away with it.

Yeah, and I'm glad we're talking about the inability to admit to a wrongdoing in science, because oftentimes when you think about people who are anchored in their positions, you think about political arguments. You think that somehow you romanticize scientists as being unbiased purveyors and pursuers of the truth, and nothing could be further from the truth.

So I'll give you just a couple of examples, historical examples. I mean, of course, Galileo is a perfect example. Copernicus is a great example. Darwin is a great example. But let's look at some other ones that people may not be familiar with. So I think his name, I'm not not sure how you pronounce this Semmel Weiss

He was the gentleman who arguably has saved more people than anybody else in medicine Do you have an idea who it is? No, is he the penicillin guy? Not the penicillin. That's What's his name sir Fleming? I think that's Fleming. He's I think he was a Scottish Physician I thought mistaken. No No this guy is the gentleman who told other physicians that they should wash their hands. So do you remember he was a I think he was a Hungarian physician who was noticing that a lot of there was this huge mortality rate of women as they were giving birth. And so he started running these naturally occurring experiments where you either,

so the physician has just worked on a cadaver and then goes and does the obstetrics. So when he said, wash your hands hands he died I think penniless Destitute and a mental asylum or something right and then later people said oops He was right as they didn't understand bacteria, but they didn't understand but what yeah that guy's right. That's it semelweiss exactly Kedervic particles does that mean cadaver cadaver? right? Yes every case of childhood fever was caused by Resorption of cadaveric particles. Oh my god, but the blowback against this guy from the senior physicians I mean this guy was destitute he died completely Unvalidated I mean it was only post hoc that he there you go nervous breakdown

So allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown was committed to an asylum by his colleagues in the Asylum he's beaten by the guards. Oh god. It's incredible story. Here's another one I don't remember his name the truth tester Jamie will get it out for us There's the gentleman who won the Nobel Prize I'd say in the last 20 or 30 years for arguing that ulcers are caused by a particular virus or I don't know if it's a virus or a bacterium and everybody laughed him out of town he ended up winning the Nobel Prize and so I often joke with my students I say if

people laugh at your ideas and fight them it's either for one of two reasons it's a really shitty idea and it's it's worthy of that derision right or prepared to go to Stockholm to win the Nobel Prize. Because I mean literally. Right, it's one or the other. It's one or the other because the Nobel Prize is nothing but a history of people saying what a quack this moron is.

No way. Oops, here's your Nobel Prize doctor. And isn't that because of what we talk about? Because of ego and that ego being connected to your ideas. If someone comes along with a revolutionary idea that's contrary to what you currently believe, you take it as an affront to yourself. Exactly.

That's horrible. So I give a talk, this is going back to some of my early appearances here where we would talk a lot more evolutionary psychology. I gave two talks at University of Michigan when my first book came out. It was an academic book, Evolutionary Basis of Consumption. How do you apply evolutionary psychology and human behavior in general, consumer behavior in particular. I give the talk in the

psychology department on a Thursday and everybody's like, oh yeah this is gorgeous. Because a lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on. So they they were totally lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on, so they were totally appreciative of the fact that you can't really study human behavior without understanding the biological signatures of human behavior. Okay, then I go to the business school the next day, Ross School of Business.

I give the exact same talk, okay? I couldn't finish a single sentence because all of the professors, and it was usually the professor, it wasn't the doctoral students who were, because the doctoral students are still malleable, their brains are still being formed, they're happy to listen.

It's the senior professor who has spent 30 years arguing that human minds are born tabula rasa, empty slated, and it's only socialization that teaches the consumer to be how he or she is, that they were really offended by my stuff. So they would constantly interrupt me and berate me. And I remember as a side personal note, my wife was in the audience that day. She had come with me and prior to that talk she had said, oh I feel really sick. I probably have food

poisoning. We later found out that she was pregnant with our first daughter. So there's both a really bad memory and a really good memory associated with the University of Michigan. So what was their position when you were saying this? Biology does not ex- So they were interrupting you? Nonstop. I probably got through- so let's say, I don't remember the number of slides, let's say I had 30 slides, I maybe got to slide 10. Because, so here's first question. Oh, if everything is due to evolutionary pressures, how do you explain homosexuality then?

If everything is due to survival instinct, how do you explain suicide then? By the way, there are evolutionary explanations for suicide and homosexuality, right? Humans are a sexually reproducing species even though chaste monks exist, right? People do have a survival instinct even though some people commit suicide.

Men are taller than women even though your Aunt Julie is taller than your Uncle Bob. So what happens with people in terms of a cognitive obstacle, they take a singular datum as proof that a statement that is true at the population level has been violated. It has, it hasn't, right? Every single WNBA player is taller than most men. That does not invalidate the fact that men are taller than women. So all of the morons in the University of Michigan were also coming to that kind of stuff, right?

Because they didn't like the idea, to our earlier discussion that we've had on the show, a lot of people don't like the idea that we are biologically determined. They think that that's a form of, you're just an executor of your genes. But that's a wrong view, by the way, because everything is an interaction between your genes and the environment, right? Even specific genes get turned on as a function of the environment.

So the fact that you believe that we have biological imperatives that guide our behavior doesn't make us blind executors of our genes. Right. And that's what's important. But the idea that everyone is born a blank slate is so silly because there's children that don't even grow up with their parents that have traits that their parents have. And also happen to have talents that their parents have for for some strange reason and call their dog the same name There's a lot of weirdness to it

There's a lot of weirdness to memory the like genetic memory like whoever you are It's not as simple as you were a baby. You started off clear and blank. That's not real We learn things somehow or another through some Under We learn things somehow or another through some Under I guess it's explored but not quite understood process Yeah, and this process even encourages things like racism. There's there's even Detrimental ideas that are inherited through children, right that have been proven, but they don't know exactly There's the mechanism, right?

So I, because you mentioned memory, so maybe I could talk about how you study memory from an evolutionary perspective. Please. So, is that where, can I ask you this before you start? Sure. Do you think that's where like aphidiophobia and arachnophobia and things like that come from?

Yeah, so there is actually a lot of research looking at the evolutionary roots of phobia. That's studied in evolutionary clinical psychology and in Darwinian psychiatry. But the ones for me that are fascinating are phidiophobia and arachnophobia, fear of snakes and fear of spiders, because that evolutionarily makes sense. Exactly. If you either got bit and survived or you saw someone get bit and you see a spider and you're like, oh shit. But that's why, by the way, you know and you see a spider you're like Oh shit, but that's why by the way

you don't go see your clinical psychologist because you have a fear of guns or fears of cars even though cars and guns kill a lot more people if spiders if you go if you study the Manifestations of clinical cases of phobia, they're exactly what you're saying. Because from doing Fear Factor, we would encounter people that had both of those. And man, when you see it in real life, it's like a person's possessed by a demon.

It's crazy. When you see like high level of phidiophobia, people see snakes, their whole body starts shaking, they can't keep their hands still. It's crazy, man It's not like you know, I see a dog looks a scary dog. Whoa, keep away from that dog. It's not like that It's like your whole body by the way I actually I don't think it's at the clinical level but in in the parasitic mind in chapter 1 I talk about the maladaptive, or maybe adaptive phobia

that I have of mosquitoes. So early in my marriage to my wife, maybe that was one of the best ways to test if she'd go the whole route with me, is we were traveling to Antigua and we had the misfortune of some, you know, it's in the Caribbean, there are a lot of mosquitoes and there are a couple of mosquitoes got in. I spent with her, with her complete patience, probably till two in the morning, tracking and killing every single mosquito in that condo, because the thought of that disgusting, monstrous pig, sucking the blood out of me was just unbearable.

And so I, I mean, I literally will turn into a little girl if we see a mosquito in the house. I cannot go on with my day. I can't watch TV. I can't train. The mosquito must die. Now, in a sense, that's perfectly adaptive because we know that by far,

if you add up the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined, it's not even a minuscule thing. There's not another thing that kills people as much as mosquitoes. the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined. Everything else. It's not even a minuscule thing. There's not another thing that kills people as much as mosquitoes. Right, so that's perfectly adaptive. Yes. But do you want me to go to the memory stuff?

Sure. So think about, say, a squirrel. It has evolved a memory that allows it to remember the spatial location in your backyard where it stores caches of food so that it has its own memory bias so that even though it won't detect it by smell, because let's say in Montreal, it's under four feet of snow, it has a mental map so that it perfectly knows

where it hid everything, right? Now, the human memory has evolved to solve different problems. So then if you are a memory researcher studying memory from an evolutionary perspective, you would say, well, what would the human memory solve as an adaptive problem? So let me give you one such example. So if I show you a bunch of photos of people, okay, images of faces, and I put a descriptor next to each one where I tag that person as a social cheater or Not a cheater. So what the social cheating means?

lack of reciprocation So if I do something for you, then you will cheat and recant and not I scratch your back, but you'll right right right right now that Information about the personal characteristic of that individual is an evolutionarily important datum. So now I'm going to show you all these people, I control for their good looks. So I don't put all of the cheaters as being good looking and all the, right, because then you might remember them because they were good looking,

not because they were cheaters. So I put this array of faces and then later I ask you to remember whether you'd seen that face or not. And people end up remembering at a much higher level any face that had been tagged as being a social cheater. Do you follow? Yes. Therefore, your perceptual system works in cahoots with your memory system to pay attention more to information that is evolutionarily relevant so that I'm more likely to recall it and remember it. So that would be an example of how you would apply the evolutionary lens to study how our memory operates.

Here's another example, not in the case of social dynamics, but in the case of remembering where foods are. So if you ask people to go through a maze of food and then ask them to remember where particular foods are, they're much more likely to remember the locations of high calorie foods. So in this case, it's not that I have a domain general mechanism that just learns where things

are. There is a sensorial bias to me being more likely to remember the location of something if it is evolutionarily relevant. And there are many, many other such examples. So that would be a wonderful demonstration of how the evolutionary lens adds a whole layer of explanatory power to what typically memory researchers have done, which is usually they study memory as just the domain general mechanistic system, whereas the evolutionary psychologist says, no, no, but why did that mechanism evolve

to be of that form? Right. And why do animals have memories even if they're not growing up with their parents? How do they know to pee on fire hydrants? Exactly. Right? Where are they getting this from? There's something going on there. How do they know to go after certain animals? Like I have a golden retriever, he loves all dogs,

like little dogs, like the size of Carl. I just met him, yeah. I mean, he's much more interested in people than he is, but he's never mean. But if Carl was a squirrel that size, he would be dead. So he knows the difference between something that's small, that's a dog, that's just tolerated. You know, oh, how you doing, buddy?

Or something that's that big that's a squirrel, which is murder. I'm gonna murder that thing. Okay, you said murder. Yeah. And that led me, because I was a. He's a murderer. He's a squirrel murderer.

So you know what is a, what's a group of crows called? A murder. A murder. So I'm gonna tell you now about another study and maybe Jamie can pull it off. I think it's a guy at University of Washington maybe. I hope I'm not wrong. Where he wanted to see whether crows

remember the face of a really nasty guy so that they can, if he then comes again, they'll start calling. Right, right, right. And he kind of took took an image of the face and then he would either wear it or not. And then he would, I don't remember what the dependent measure was,

but it was something to the effect of, then he's studying, there you go, I love it. I love having Jamie. So this guy had a mean face and he did mean things and the crows recognized him. And so then it starts spreading to the entire group where they exactly know you see this face, remember it, he's a fucker. That makes sense. Crows are insanely smart. Oh, they're smarter than most people. Have you seen the ones from I think New Caledonia that do all the stuff with the, maybe Jamie you could pull that one up. I think, New Caledonia that do all the stuff with the,

maybe Jamie, you could pull that one out. I think that's the smartest of all that avian species. They can take rocks and like a thousand different things to get food out of things that I guarantee you, you and I would sit there for 18 hours and we wouldn't crack that mystery. Yeah, they figured out how to use tools to get other tools to extract food.

Exactly, exactly, yeah, there you go. There go there. You're amazing. It's just unbelievable. They put rocks in there to raise the water level I mean a little kid wouldn't even figure that out. I mean they're fucking smart man Look at us look at us It's crazy. Well. I love it's also their brains are so small which really is really confused bird brain Yeah, it's really confusing like large brains Don't I mean we don't really know how? Intelligent an animal is unless we see it manipulate its environment or communicate yeah Because it's possible that elephants are insanely smart

They have immense memories their memories are nuts like Like, they get reunited with their calves, like, 20 years later, and they run and embrace each other, and it's just joyous. When elephants die, they mourn. They mourn the death. They have huge brains. But it's also a huge animal. But it doesn't manipulate its environment,

so we don't respect it. It's sort of like the way, the reason why dolphins are in SeaWorld, is because that's the literal slavery. It's slavery of probably a parallel or if not more intellectual species. Something with a cerebral cortex 40% larger than a human being. Something that communicates in a language that we can't decipher. Something that has different dialects. Something that operates in these very tight social groups, but they do some rough sex I don't know if you've well they do they're

Dolphins are horrible dolphins are they kill their babies. There's no hashtag me too with the dolphins Let me tell you it's worse than that dolphins when they find a female and she has a child if he has not had sex with that That dolphin female that child's not here, so he'll kill my child lines do the same But what they'll do is the females will have a sex with as many dolphins as they can you don't know So you don't know whose kid it is. That's it. So that they don't kill the baby. There you which is wild There you go. I mean, but that's how you live when there's no doors You're in the ocean is no door. Oh, yeah, open, open. Wild. It's just why you'll murder soup.

You said the manipulate the environment. So have you heard of the bower bird? You know what that is? No. So the bower bird maybe maybe sorry, I keep going. B-O-W-E-R. So the bower bird creates a bower, which is a structure that serves no purpose other than demonstrating my artistic... there you go! Really? So by the way, you know what I'm loving about today's show? It's like I feel like I'm back to lecturing my evolutionary psychology stuff. Good! I need a glass. Oh yeah. So look what he's doing. You see? So let me explain what's happening here, unless you want to watch it first.

No, please explain. So it's one of the only species other than humans that uses artistic ability as a mating cue. Wow. Right? So Picasso, short little guy, bald, ugly, he's got a huge lineup of hot women who want to have sex with him because he's Picasso. That's what the bower bird is doing He's saying look at how? Architecturally savvy I am look how symmetric my bower bird is not only that by the way the see how now there you go

Okay, she said you're good enough. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. You have excellent trophies So now but you saw all those other blue things? Yes. So if you travel to Australia, in certain regions, there are signs from the government saying if you are women, don't be careful, don't wear shiny things on your head. Why? Because these assholes will come at you, attack the women's head, steal the shiny things, so that they could use the shiny things in their bower to attract the ladies.

Wow. Now that's smart. That's smarter than most men. Not really. But I see what you're saying. But look at this setup, man. This guy's got this dope pad. It's got like a bachelor pad with flowers out in front, like ladies, don't you like flowers? No, that's the girl. That was the girl. Oh, it's the girl. Yeah, that's the girl.

Usually in avian species, the drab one is the girl and the flashy one is the guy. Right, like nobody gives a fuck about female flamingos. Yeah, right. Fuck out of here, female flamingos. What am I gonna do with that? I need a dude! Exactly.

With a whoosh. Exactly. Strad around. Exactly. If you got flamingos, man, you're a baller That's a move right have a flamingo in your yard Just want to go so you only have I'm thinking a peacock. You have a dog. You only have a dog I'm thinking a peacock. I'm doing the whole thing like I'm a peacock, but I'm thinking of I'm saying flamingo Yeah, I live a dog. I have chickens too. By the way, oh, you like those exotic ones? No, chicken chickens.

Or just like regular. Favorite lay chickens, they lay eggs. But here's the, I'm scared to ask this. They become pets, you don't eat them, right? Or do you? No, I don't eat them. I will if somebody fucks around. Somebody tries to hurt somebody. I'll grab those little fuckers.

They're little dinosaurs. When one of them was younger, this is my old group of chickens that I had when my youngest daughter was a baby. They were pecking her feet. And there's this one country chicken that we had. And my wife was like- I feel like this is going to be a Christine No moment. No, no, no.

Okay. Nobody died. My wife, unfortunately, they all did. The coyotes got them and dogs. Long story. Anyway, point is, I go, no no she's trying to eat the baby's feet Like you got to understand this is not this is not like she thinks that's a worm She thinks she can get away with eating they eat each other they fucking peck at each other

They they'll kit they'll murder a mouse have you never seen a chicken and a mouse together Whoo really we had a fence and this is very unfortunate, but we had a fence that was glass and One of the side effects of this glass fence was hawks and hawks would be swooping down I try to get a rat or some other rodent or something in there Bam nose dive into this glass and we lost like three hawks like this is fucked up You know, I was like maybe we should go back to the other fence. My wife was like, fuck you, I like this fence. It was one of those conversations where we were like, like this seems like it's our fault that these hawks die.

Right? So one of them made it, one of them lived and they took the hawk and they put it in like a big like washing machine box and contact this wildlife rescue thing and they said well okay if you're gonna have it because we're not open until Monday you got it feed it thing so what do you feed it so you have to go to the store so went to the pet store they get these things called pinkies and when pinkies are just baby mice they're baby mice

that have they're not gonna live they're they're separated from their mother you feed them to reptiles, okay It's gross right and So the hawk ate most of them, but he didn't eat one so they were like we're gonna raise it I go listen You can't just do that you can't just like feed a bunch of these little things to this giant Raptor and then say now we're gonna take this one that survived and raise it. First of all, the nightmares that little fucker would have. But second of all, it's not viable. It's not gonna live.

Yeah. I go, let's just give it to the chickens. So I brought it outside and I put it in the chicken's cage. One chicken grabs it as fast as I've ever seen a chicken move and then every other chicken runs after that chicken and tries to get it away from her. Is it a defensive thing or they wanna eat eat it they want to eat it okay? And so she has it in her mouth

And they're trying to steal it from her and they just tear it apart and devour it like dinosaurs wow like it's So crazy watching them kill so I'm not feeling so guilty at the genocide of chicken that I eat watching them kill birds. So I'm not feeling so guilty at the genocide of chicken that I eat. It's still fucked up, because it's the soul of the animal is not being expressed as nature intended. The soul of the animal should be a chicken. It's not that you shouldn't eat chickens,

but chickens should live as chickens. They should wander around and pick bugs and eat worms and do all the things that chickens love doing. To have a chicken just in a box for its entire existence, you're stealing souls. Like you're doing something fucked up that's way more fucked up than just raising a farm. If you got cows and they're on a pasture

and every day they're just being cows, and then one day you take them in a stall and bang, this thing goes into their brain and they're dead, that is way less evil. That is way more humane than what's gonna happen to them in the wild. What are they gonna do?

They're gonna either freeze to death or starve to death or get torn apart by wolves. Torn apart. If you're gonna have cows everywhere and people wanna reintroduce wolves everywhere, congratulations, you've got wild kingdom. You got wild kingdom happening in your neighborhood if that's

what you want and if you don't want people to eat cows anymore, okay, what are you gonna do with the cows? Are you gonna sterilize them? Are you gonna keep a certain amount? Are you gonna play God with cows? Are you gonna say the cows can't breed? Are you gonna give the boys cows birth control? What are you gonna do? How you gonna do? Oh, you're gonna introduce predators. How are you going to keep kids from those predators? How are you going to keep dogs from those predators? Have you thought about this? No, you haven't.

There's people that are reintroducing grizzly bears to Washington as we speak. We're going to reintroduce the things that we killed because they killed everybody. We're so smart. It's bananas. These people are out of their fucking minds. And they're not, they don't have a real understanding of actual nature the horrible thing is this commoditization of nature is taking animals and factory farming them in these horrific conditions where

it's illegal to film it's illegal to if they have ag-gag laws because it's so because it's so traumatic and so horrific it would affect the industry Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. That's what's wrong with eating meat. Yeah, what's Being a part of the natural cycle of life is what made humans human if you want the most nutrients It comes from animal protein. There's a reason why it's so cherished. I've made It comes from animal protein. There's a reason why it's so cherished. I've made Not in the using the same words but I've made roughly the same argument when the the tofu brigade came after me because I was Offering some evolutionary reasons for why you know

we have to have animal protein as part of our diets and they were so pissed at me because they thought it was very Hypocritical that on the one, I could share so many tweets and posts demonstrating how much I love animals. And then in another photo, I show some steak or here's what my wife is cooking. And that to them was completely incongruence and was proof of my moral degeneracy. And then I actually created two sad truth clips where I was really demonstrating the evolutionary reasons, you know, archaeological data, dental data, physiognomic data, anthropological data, and they just wouldn't have it. You're a hypocrite. You can't love an animal and eat an animal. So I'm glad that you...

Well, there's a real problem with that too, and this is something that people dismiss very openly, but I don't think we should. I think plants are alive, and I don't think they're just alive in a way that we can feel completely fine about growing them in this insane monocrop agriculture place and pouring industrial-grade fertilizer and pesticides all over them. I think they're a thing that thinks.

I think they're a thing that communicates with their environment But they just do it in a way that we don't understand they do it through mycelium they they arrange Resources they allocate resources towards plants that need them more Have you have some sort of a network of communication I was gonna say have you seen the networks of? Fungi yes networks of fungi. That is mind blowing. I had Paul Stamets in the podcast a couple of times and he's a mycologist and just a brilliant guy and he really explains it all so well. It's so mind blowing, though the relationship

that the mycelium have with the nutrients in the earth and that it's, earth is not dirt. It's like a living environment. It's this environment that they've ruined through monocrop agriculture. And that's what's wrong with farming. It's not farming. Farming is a perfect way to balance an ecosystem.

When those people do it the right way, like those people from White Oaks Pastures or Polyface Farms, regenerative agriculture people, there's like zero carbon footprint of what they do. And in fact, it sequesters carbon, you're growing things, it's manure and cows and it's all working together and the chickens are free ranging. And it's like, it's nature just in a contained environment. But that's normal. Have you you mentioned the word soil, so it made me think about, have you seen the research

on I can't remember what the term is, but something made me think about, have you seen the research on, I can't remember what the term is, but something like soil DNA, that I guess the pioneer is, I think he's Danish, either Danish or Swedish, I think Danish. And basically, they go to these steps that are really, really a matter, maybe not Mongolian steps,

but somewhere where you expect to find a lot of the typical fossil remains and so on. But what they now do is they just do this excavation of soil in the same way that people who study ice, you know how they can bore and then they can date the various ice, right? So they do something similar where they kind of harvest tons of soil and they're then able to isolate you know DNA of

mammoths have you have you seen some of this yes I have yeah that's mind-blowing mind-blowing it's unbelievable yeah I actually thought about inviting that guy on my show maybe you should have them on your show yeah that sounds fascinating to talk about it's it really is so interesting when you just think about that this the complex interaction between everything on Earth, the plants and that we literally need plants to create an oxygen for us and they're consuming more carbon. That's one of the craziest things about Genghis Khan is when Genghis Khan lived, they killed so many people that places reforested and they lowered the carbon footprint of earth Right. That's a real thing. So it's genocide was green. Yeah, that was green if you looked at there's well

There's also like different ways Dan Carlin and hardcore history as the most amazing series. It's called wrath of the con I think you have to buy it on his website in it, but it's really cheap It's like a dollar an episode or something and it's fucking amazing It's amazing and it's I think it's a three-piece thing. Is it a three-piece series on? Jenga Genghis Khan is the correct way to say it. Temujin was his real name and what he did and like the ride I guys spread some genes That guy was busy that guy get after it

It was I mean he spread some genes and killed some fucking people. Killed 10% of the population of Earth. Yeah. Was it that much? Yeah. Okay, I don't know. It was that much. 10%. Wow. Yeah. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 70 million people.

They don't know exactly. There is a genocide. Bro, you ain't kidding. But earlier you said, oh, how everything is connected, which leads me to a concept which I don't think I've ever discussed on my 10 shows on your podcast. This concept, consilience, have you heard that term before? Sure. Yes.

Yeah, like being conciliatory? No, no, it doesn't mean that at all. Consilience comes from, I mean, it doesn't come from him, but he kind of reintroduced it into the lexicon. Do you know who E.O. Wilson is? I've heard the name. E.O. Wilson is a, he just recently passed away at the, maybe, age of 90. I just read his autobiography called Naturalist, amazing autobiography.

He was a Harvard entomologist and a strong proponent of social biology, applying biology to studies, social systems and so on. And he was part of the original culture wars where a lot of his colleagues hated him because he was arguing that biology affects human behavior. E.O. Wilson, check him out. He's unbelievable. Well, in the late 90s, he wrote a book called Consilience, Unity of Knowledge. And that became one of the foundational books in how I did my academic career, which is, consilience is trying to unify disparate areas

of human endeavor that you typically wouldn't think should be linked together. So you could link the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities through the consilience of evolutionary theory, because you could study psychology using evolutionary theory, of course you could study biology using evolutionary theory, or you could study aesthetics,

which is in the humanities, using evolutionary theory. So that became a really important concept in my own work because my brain operates as a synthetic machine. I like to synthesize across, right? So one of the reasons why I decided early on to break out of just being an academic, because I couldn't see myself as a stay in your lane professor.

I need to try to, right? So coming on Joe Rogan is going to allow me to share ideas and synthesize things with millions of people, rather than writing another academic paper that if I'm lucky will be read by 50 people and Cited by 12 and so well before you came on though When you came when you came on this being on the show is not that problematic

In what you mean? Criticize being on the show because nobody even knew what it was well That's true once they did know what it was, people looked down on it. So I don't know if I've ever shared the story before, and even if I have, it's worth repeating. I discuss this in the parasitic mind. I had been invited to Stanford in 2017 to speak at their business school,

a very academic, scientific talk, on how to apply evolutionary theory, blah, blah, blah. So my host, who's a fellow, he's a consumer psychologist, invited me out to dinner the night before, and I think after I was going there, I think I was flying down to, at the time you were in Southern California still, 2017 you were in Southern, yeah.

And I was gonna do your show, I think. So at night, during dinner, he said, oh, so I hear you go off on Joe Rogan's show. I said, oh yeah, yeah. He goes, yeah, well we don't condone that at Stanford. Very kind of hottie. I said, you don't condone what? He goes, well we don't do our research

so that it could be sexy enough for it to appear so I could talk about it on Joe Rogan. Sexy. So I said, well I don't do the research also so I can appear on Joe Rogan, but if I can publish a paper in an academic journal and then go on Joe Rogan and hopefully excite people about evolutionary psychology

and psychology of decision-making, isn't that better than just having my wife and mother read the paper? And he didn't like that. He thought very, whereas now, not that many, but I'll get a lot more Professors who will write to me saying can you get me on your own? Well, that's good, you know, but that that speaks to how Patterns change right? Yeah. Well, it's just

You know, it's so easy to label somebody so easy to label a platform or you know like podcasting in general that it's frivolous Especially if you live in the academic world, but it's just an opportunity to talk about stuff And if I'm talking to someone about evolutionary psychology or if I'm talking to someone about Coal mining like I just want to know what's going on. Well, let me tell you something I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass or You know be ingratiating or anything But I bet if there was a currency a metric to measure how much you've affected the intellectual ecosystem Versus your average well published professor

I would put my money on you not because you were the creator of the knowledge But because boy are you the biggest disseminator of knowledge, right? So well, I'm just lucky right and a big part of the luck is that I have the fortune to talk to these people Because most people just don't have access to people like you Yeah, like if I want to sit down with a guy like you for three hours Like if I didn't have a podcast that would be a tough sell like you for three hours, like if I didn't have a podcast, that would be a tough sell. Like, hey, Gad, can you put your phone away

and just you and me just stare at each other for three hours and have a conversation? But this is, for whatever reason, I probably spend more time individually talking to people this way than any other way because I do so many of these things. Do you think before you started this that there were indicators that, that boy you're such a good

Conversationalist you know how to hold or it came as a surprise to you that it would be so successful Oh, it's a hundred percent surprise. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to do it because I thought it'd be fun. That was it There's a chapter in the book life as a playground. Oh Yeah, just live every, sciences play, right? Yeah. What's science? It's one big puzzle that you're trying to identify which variable meaningfully relate to other variables.

Yeah. So it's a form of puzzle making. Right. So, you know, so actually there's research that shows that if you marry someone that scores similar to you on the adult Playfulness scale. I don't remember the name right some people score very high on that Probably you do I know that I do if you then match up with someone who scores very highly like you do assortatively That's a very big predictor of you having a successful union that makes sense. Yeah, you don't want to be with someone who hates jokes.

Especially if you're a professional comic. And if you're funny and they're not funny, that's probably not as fun. That's probably boring. But if you had to choose between the person that you're with is also very funny or at least laughs at your joke. You can only have one of the two. So she's either a positive receptacle to your humor or she goes toe to toe with you and being as funny. Which one would you prefer? I take toe to toe with me as funny. Yeah, I don't need someone to think I'm funny.

I got plenty of people. Well, the audience. Yeah, I don't need, you know. A wife, yeah. Yeah, like my wife doesn't have to have the same taste as me, even in me. Like, I don't need you know a wife Yeah, you like my wife doesn't have to have the same taste as me even in me Like I don't care like I don't care if you like different like they listen to music that I think is garbage And I'm like good care to share some no I don't want to be mean I mean just it just They listen to great stuff, too

We like a lot of they've introduced me to Taylor Swift, but my daughter's a Swifty But they play some tears. So somebody this was not bad But the point is it's like you don't have to like the same things as I like that's stupid. That's stupid You know she likes football. I don't even know the rules. I don't know what's going on. It's fun to watch You seriously don't know football. I barely know what's happening Wow. Yeah, okay, so I barely know what's happening I have friends that are like Aaron Rodgers my friend I hear you're a good ball. You throw the ball. Yeah, and he's really good at that shit. He's a smart guy He's a very interesting guy speaking of athletes last time I came on the show

I did apparently a clip went viral from our conversation where I was kind of hailing the cosmic justice of why it was important for Messi to win the World Cup. Remember that? Yes, you did say that. So listen, speaking of life as a playground and scoring high on openness and all the things that I think you do very well, and I'd like to think that I do too,

about maybe a week or two after I appeared on your show last year, I get an email. You know, dear, whatever, Professor Saad, my name is, I guess I could say his name because you're gonna know, my name is Yorgay Mass. I am the majority owner of Inter Miami. I'm a fan, whatever. I know that you have a deep appreciation for Messi.

Whenever you'd like to come to a game, you'll be my personal guest. Oh, shit! Now, think about this. This geeky professor who could have lived his life just doing his little narrow stuff, right? You know, I'm good in my ecosystem. A few other professors care about my work.

Or go out there, grab life by the balls, and live it fully and connect and so on, right? So I call my wife over, I say, I'm James Bond. I mean, in what world, so, in what world is it possible for the Lebanese professor, an evolutionary theory, to get an email from the majority owner, so September 27th or 28th, I'm on a flight down to Miami. They're playing in the US Open Cup. It turns out that Messi was injured, so he didn't play. I'm supposed to meet him. I bring him in the US Open Cup. It turns out that Messi was injured so he didn't

play. I'm supposed to meet him. I bring him copies of my book signed, even the Spanish version of The Parasitic Mind because he only reads Spanish. He ends up not being there because he's not playing and so on. I don't, I mean he's standing right next to me but I didn't get to meet him really. I meet Zinedine Zidane who was the greatest French player of all time and World Cup winner right there in the President's Lodge. David Beckham, hang out with him. Now, I'm not saying these to drop names. Oh, look, I know these cool people.

But I'm saying, if I didn't have that open spirit where I didn't view my world as only being restricted to the ecosystem of academia, if I didn't come on Joe Rogan that opened me up to a whole new audience, all of those people would have never heard of my work. If I only publish peer-reviewed papers rather than publishing books, which by the way, in academia, you publish trade books that's looked down upon. How is that looked down upon? If you publish a book that can be read by 300,000 people, how is that not better than publishing an academic paper

that's read by three people? But that one is pure, it's academic, that other one is vulgar and popularizer. Yeah. It's grotesque, it's stupid. It is stupid. And unfortunately, stupid can also be really smart. Really smart people can be stupid. Well, George Orwell, I'm paraphrasing him, said it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas. Well, in this country, there's a lot of examples that you could point to that would indicate that would be correct.

You're right. It's just, you could be really dumb and also be smart as shit in your discipline, you know, and again it just boils down, a lot of it is male ego. That's a big part of the problem with a lot of these ideas that people hold so sacred The the fascinating one for me with you is this reluctance to accept that there's other factors For the development of a human personality, right and that it's not a blank slate like that seems Interesting and if I was a teacher that was teaching something contrary to that I would want to know this and now I know that I've been teaching Nonsense and have to call like 50,000 students

20 years hey guys, remember that shit that I told you yeah, it's bullshits out. I thought it was true What would you do that's got to be horrible for them when new information comes out? That's irrefutable some some new scanning, new thing, that shows that this thing that we had always held to be true, that you've taught in classes, that you've won awards for, is nonsense. Yeah, so there's a great, so my favorite quote, and maybe Jamie could pull it out, by J.B.S. Haldane. J.B.S. Haldane was an evolutionary geneticist, but it was also known for having these beautiful, quotable quips. And so here the quote in question,

I have it in the last chapter of the Consuming Instinct 2011 book. He's talking about the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory. So I'm paraphrasing now what his stages are. Stage one, oh this is complete rubbish bullshit. Stage two, well this may be true but largely unimportant. Stage three, well this is definitely true but it's probably not actionable. Stage four, oh I always said so. Right? So what happens is you go

through these phases and if you're dogged enough, as I was, then the people who laughed at you and staged you, oh, there you go. This is worthless nonsense. This is worthless nonsense. This is an interesting but perverse point of view. This is true, but quite unimportant. I always said so, perfect.

And I've always said that- That's the government's position on COVID vaccine. Exactly. By the way, but here's the funny personal anecdote. I am a pathological email hoarder, meaning that I never get rid of emails because I always think, what if I ever need whatever's contained in that email? So I have emails from people who let's say had taken a very negative position in stage one, your evolutionary psychology stuff is bullshit. I have that email, it's 2001, and I have the email from 2019 when you say dear God we would be honored if you would be the plenary speaker. I'm like, oh, but what happened to I was a bullshitter in 2001? Oh, wow.

So you just have to be dogged. You have to collect the evidence and hopefully- But here's my position as an outsider. How could you know? Why would you say it's a blank slate? How could you know? And why would you ignore all this interesting information that we now know about the role that your parents play?

Because the blank slate's very hopeful, right? Because the blank slate, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Watson, the behaviorist, who said that, you know, give me 12 children, I could turn any one of them into a doctor, into a beggar, into a lawyer, meaning that everybody is infinitely malleable. Now that's a hopeful message if I'm a parent, into a beggar, into a lawyer, meaning that everybody is infinitely malleable. Now that's a hopeful message if I'm a parent, right?

If I create a child, you're telling me that he's got equal chance to be Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi if only I have the right schedule of reinforcement of how to hug him and when to hug him. That's hopeful. I don't wanna be told that there is something innate about my child that guarantees that he will never be the next Michael Jordan So so I think the message that the blank state message doesn't originally start as just a quacky idea

It's a noble idea perfectly rooted in bullshit, but it's a noble idea. Here's another example of a noble idea Franz Boas was actually a Jewish anthropologist at Columbia University about 100 years ago who was the one who developed cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals. So biology doesn't matter in explaining cultural phenomena because every culture is uniquely distinct. Now the reason why he proposed that idea is because many nasty folks had misused biology and evolutionary theory and therefore by him eradicating biology from the study of anthropology he was hopefully doing a noble thing. But you can't kill truth in the service of a goal, right? And so but

that's what so a lot of these guys it's not to our earlier conversation they are not conspiratorial in spreading bullshit. They believe that by holding those positions, they're creating the proper utopia, but it's rooted in bullshit. The reluctance to change one's opinion is always a very unfortunate thing to witness. I hear you. What's the, can you think of one or two things that you remember most where you've done 180 on that you'd like to share?

I don't know if I've done real 180s. Or sizable shift, you know, I used to think. Real dumb ones, Bigfoot's a real dumb one. I used to believe in Bigfoot. But you were eight or last Saturday? Oh, like pretty recently. Within the last two decades. What made you switch?

Talking to Bigfoot people. And seeing that they're quacking. Yeah, there's something wrong with them. Unfortunately. I used to have a joke about it. Here's one thing you don't find when you go looking for Bigfoot. Black people. You're more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black people looking for Bigfoot. It's all a bunch of unfuckable white dudes, unfuckable white dudes out camping.

And there's a mystery. There's a thing that they want to believe and there's almost no evidence, almost no evidence. There's some weird stuff like footprints with dermal ridges, but you can fake that. It could be bullshit. Does that apply to the other class Loch Ness monster also you don't believe well the Loch Ness monsters most likely nonsense or maybe it could be a big fish or something like that but the the actual photo of the Loch Ness monster is a hoax that's been proven to be a hoax then they know the guy who took it they know how he did it he used a cardboard cutout or something like that or some you know some cutout He put it in the water, and then took a photo. It was bullshit. It's probably I mean it could be a sturgeon

It could be some large fish. I think there's a lot of theories on it, but they've done scans of the lock They've never found anything. It's certainly not a population of them right they whether they can stay alive for this long They have to be breeding like how many what are they eating? How big is this? What are you talking about? The Bigfoot thing, I think, was real. And I think it was real in the human imagination and it was real in terms of like modern human beings encountered these things. And it's a real animal called Gigantopithecus. And it really did exist in Asia and if human beings were coming across the Bering land bridge It's very likely that they were there too. They all existed in the same Environment and in the same time period and this fucking thing is in like Native American history

They have a large number of names for this. They don't have dragons. They don't have crazy shit that doesn't exist. They have a myth of this gigantic, hairy ape that lives in the woods, and I think it did. I think it did probably until, you know, who knows how many thousands and thousands of years ago. But the idea of one being around today, almost no evidence, almost nothing. Just visual bullshit bullshit blurry bullshit

Footprints that maybe I don't know you could fake that you could fake a footprint. It's not a fucking fake Ferrari You know it's not like complicated to fake a footprint You know all you don't understand about the amount of weight that has to be Says who says who says you says you a guy wants to believe in Bigfoot so bad They want to believe so bad. It is a religion It's a religion. What do you think is the psychological? Mechanism that causes them to want to but it's because there is kind of a Mystery and all two things that are out there that we can't explain

Here's the thing if Bigfoot was real wouldn't be nearly as interesting as a killer whale. Not nearly as interesting. If Bigfoot is just this big, stupid monkey that lives in the woods and just shits all over himself and fucking eats campers, that wouldn't be nearly as interesting as this super intelligent creature that lives in the water that saves people. Saves people.

Before we were outside, I was talking to some of your crew and I was telling them that someone had asked me, oh do you, actually it was the border agent as I was coming through to Austin, he asked why am I coming? I said, oh I'm coming to do your show. He says, oh do you get like a list of things that you talk about?

I said, oh it's exactly not, it's exactly the opposite of that. And so to that point, I wouldn't have ever, I didn't have in my bingo card The defecation of Bigfoot in forests. Yeah, like what is he doing up there? You stinky bitch like come on the idea that no one has Taken real good footage in this day and age with the amount of hikers and campers and people that are in the woods and people That are into photography and nature photography and trail cameras. Trail cameras are everywhere. They're over water holes. They're everywhere.

So what's the mechanism by which I mean, you know, you, you listed the name of the animal that you think. Gigantopithecus. Exactly. So you obviously have a lot of these tidbits information. Are you a voracious reader or how do you get your sources of information? Well, I've read an embarrassing amount of books on Bigfoot No, but in general, but in general a lot of audiobooks So you do a lot of audio the best way for me to like I can do that while I'm working out

I could do that while I'm in the sauna. I could do that when I'm in the car Okay So that to me is like that's a couple of hours of taking in information. Beautiful. Where I would just ordinarily just like lifting weights. But you don't love the feeling of grabbing a book. I do, but I'm also so busy that to me it's like the best way to consume ideas.

I feel like reading a book is 100%, listening to an audio book is 80 to 90%. Oh, okay. I don't think it's the same thing. I It's too easy to gloss over. I've never Audio booked a book. I've only read I haven't even read a electronic book. Really? I Love you like paper. I love paper. I'm a Pathological book hoarder. Do you write on paper or do you type it out? I type it out. So now I type. Sometimes I'll take little notes

I'm sitting at the cafe. I have an idea for something I want to do so I'll write it and then I'll but if I'm writing a book it's always on the computer There's no written anymore. And I've noticed that my penmanship has really gotten worse. I don't know if. Oh mine's dog shit Yeah, exactly me too. It's like chicken shit. Terrible. But I'm a voracious reader, and one of the things that stresses me the most is in my personal library, in my study, I've got literally hundreds and hundreds of books, and I will often walk in there and say,

will I ever have time to read? So I have probably 600 books that I have yet to read, and each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all so I have probably 600 books that I've yet to read. And each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all those books, boy I would be an even more exciting guest on the Joe Rogan Show. No, what I mean by that is that there's so much, the more you know, the more you realize truly

how little you know. Yeah, absolutely. And so I say, oh my God, here's a biography on, so I just bought a biography on the taxonomist who created the the system of how to label animal species. He's a Swedish taxonomist. Right now. Now that sounds very esoteric and specific. But I'm sure there is this incredible information that I can glean in that book, which today I don't have that knowledge in my brain. So to all people who are listening, read.

There is nothing more. Number one predictor of your child's success is how many books were in the home of the parents. Okay, I mean, I don't know if it's number one, but certainly a highly predictive one. So reading, Elon Musk, you probably know this, when he came to, I think from South Africa to Canada, he came with a luggage of books.

He's a voracious reader, right? Now, that doesn't mean that he became who he became only because he read, but it's very hard to have an interesting person who's not very knowledgeable about many things, and that's why, one of the things that's been very difficult with my children is I see them doing the scrolling and it drives me crazy because I haven't been able

to instill that reflex of just saying, there is nothing I'd rather do right now than go sit somewhere and immerse myself in a book. They don't have that reflex. Yeah, that is a problem with electronics because it does hijack your reward system. It hijacks your attention span. It hijacks your brain.

And it's hard because kids are growing up in this environment. It's a different environment. And I have two ways of looking at it. I have one way of looking at it where you have to kind of set an example and I'm not the best at that. I like to look at my phone, like just to put your phone away and put work away. Don't be responding to emails. Just put it away and focus. I think we all should do that, but we are all also living in this new world and that is not going to change. And I think that's

the same as when people are like, don't get in the car, let's walk. Like, okay, that's the same as when people are like don't get in the car. Let's walk like, okay That's good for a little while. But now guess what Martha everyone has cars. Let's get a fucking car. I'm not walking in New York What are you talking about? I'm not getting in this stupid wagon getting pulled by a horse. This is dumb. They have cars now I think we're gonna get to a point where avoiding some interaction with other human beings avoiding some interaction with other human beings, it's going to be constant and it's going to be more invasive than it is now. These are steps that our species is taking in its integration with technology that seem to be unstoppable. And to isolate yourself and move to the woods in a cabin,

that's one way to do it, but. No, but the hygiene or the discipline of saying, I'm now focused, I'm not, I mean, I know the research findings on this, and yet I always find myself going into my phone and then stopping myself. So in writing. Do you always stop yourself?

I mean, I don't. I stop myself three out of ten times Especially if I could come up with some reason I'm gonna go over my notes Yeah, yeah, but so what is the pull in your case? Is it scrolling through the Twitter just nonsense looking at nonsense on Instagram? And a lot of it is horrible because I have this fucking thing that I'm doing with Tom Segura We send each other the worst things we find every day like an animal and animal attacks

This one dude fucking stole a cop car was in a high-speed chase in Mexico with no tires It's just flames coming out of the bottom of his car wild shit a lot of people falling off buildings just why we just have been doing this to each other for just like out of a more many months has it been now it's been like more it's like a morbid yeah yeah yeah just freaking each other out every day so now the algorithm knows that I'm fucked up so the algorithm is only showing me like motorcycle accidents and

just the wildest shit that you shouldn't be looking at. I get so many of those videos that show up in my feed where it tells you are you sure you want to look at this? Oh boy. You know where it's blurry and you have to click again to look at it? I had maybe twice that. Really? Yeah so but here's the thing so I'm interested in the AI algorithm that generates those because oftentimes it'll put things in my feed that I truly think, I don't know how it could have found out that I like this stuff because there is no signature

electronically of me having searched something. Let's say what, three piece wool suits. Right. Okay, I love that look. And so now I'll see a thousand guys wearing these gorgeous Italian, right? But other times it presents stuff to me that makes no sense, that it almost seems

as though I'm into gay sauna guys. No, but I mean, I'm being serious. So it's kind of fitness, which of course I'm into having lost a lot of weight, but it almost seems homoerotic, where it's always these guys that are, and so as I'm going at this, my wife will say, what are you looking at? I say, well, I'm not sure I want to show you.

Then it's like literally 17 super muscular guys, but there is nothing that I've done that suggests that it should recognize that in me. How do you explain that, Dr. Joe? Well, they took a chance and they missed. Okay, oh, I see, okay. The data's not not complete. You know you're interested in some things that but that's interesting like any Perception of men like with a six-pack like looking good and oiled up. That's homoerotic Which is interesting because a woman with a beautiful body is not considered homoerotic at all yeah, and then odd

Yeah, it is odd It's like I don't even want to look at these fucking good-looking guys. What are you gay? But just I'm someone who actually is very easy in complimenting other men So that's not that that wasn't no, but it is it's considered homoerotic That's the problem the positions that they're taking doesn't seem like it was fitness. It seemed like it was a bit kind of come hither Yeah, yeah, well, there's a lot of girls to do that too though yeah there's a lot of girls that take these sexy lifting weights poses but you don't think of them so more right no but they're appealing to the male gaze in that case and here we

assume that the female so the man and men are posing they're appealing to men because men are titillated by visual stimuli not women, right? So very few women I think women say that to ugly dudes Women aren't even visual don't worry about it. Well, they're not as visual But they're definitely visual. When a girl sees like Tatum O'Neil with his shirt off. Yeah Yeah, no, yeah, that's that's real too. But but how many how many strip bars are out there? Targeting female patrons. Oh, yeah, there's a big discrepancy. There you go. Yeah. Oh, there's no it's not equivalent I'm not saying that yeah, but it's just funny that one is homoerotic, right?

You know, it's just but then there's also ones where it's like, okay Who are you appealing to because as a girl really want to see you sit like this? This is weird It's a weird pose but but regular dude But by the way the the inability to recognize some of these dynamics is what causes some men to send dick pics to women Right because they think that the same Visual stimuli that would titillate them is exactly what would titillate women. So it's lack of theory of mind. Whereas, and so a lot of men will say, Oh, you know, I've

got, I've got a good morphology here. I think she'd be impressed by that. And she gets repulsed by it because he's not, he doesn't have intersex theory of mind Interesting Evolutionary psychology, it's it's it's where it's at. Well, how much is it affected by technology? What is it how much of when you think of evolutionary psychology and you think of us as an evolving species? That's integrating with its environment and its environment radically changes. So the most obvious answer to that would be internet pornographic addiction which almost exclusively afflicts men, right, for very obvious reasons because what's happening with the internet delivery system is it's exactly catering to men's evolved penchant for sexual variety, right?

I can keep flipping through different porn clips without ever repeating the same one. Well, it doesn't take much for that stimulus to then hijack my brain. So when I, for example, explain to people about the evolutionary roots of pornography, that doesn't mean that men have evolved a gene for pornography, right? Because obviously there was no pornography in the ancestral environment. But what it means is that those mechanisms

that evolved formating are then hijacked, usurped by pornography. So I think the most obvious one would be internet pornography. I think the next stage of that is even more terrifying. I think there's gonna be some sort of virtual element. Meaning? Meaning virtual sex.

You're going to be able to actually have like a sexual experience virtually. But haptically, how do you do it? Yeah, I think they're gonna do it with some sort of an interface. Okay. You know, like when you're seeing these first patients of Neuralink, like this one guy who can now amazingly operate a computer, play games, move his cursor, click on things, I mean, it's incredible.

And they think he's gonna be able to communicate through this thing at the speed of a carnival barker. That's how he's gonna be able to use this. Wow. It's crazy. Yeah, so I actually, I was giving a talk on global Jew hatred in Montreal at this event and a guy came up to me to introduce himself and he's a neurosurgeon and he said that he was part of the team

that was choosing the first neuro link patient that you just mentioned. That's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible So this is patient number one, right? Yeah, it's been successful. Yeah, and They believe that ultimately they'll be able to restore blindness. They'll be able to restore movement to people There's gonna be a lot of like wild things that this technology if it can continue to progress It's gonna be capable of. And at one point in time, I've got to imagine it's got to be able to create an artificial reality simulator that you just, you just immerse yourself in, whether it takes 10 years to do that or 50 or 100 in the future, they're going to have something that forget about

porn, like forget about like actually going on an adventurous life why would you do that when you can have all of the trappings of being a wizard in a fucking dungeon game you can just play right you just live your life in this world that doesn't exist get sexual pleasure get satisfaction eat, and all you do when you awake is you eat food, go to sleep, wake up, and do it again. Oh boy, that's a dire world. It's the matrix. It's the matrix. It really is the matrix, and I feel like there's

no way to stop it. I feel like if things keep going in the way they're going, do we have regulations to keep a simulated universe from appearing? We don't have any regulations. If somebody wanted to create, if they were so smart that they created a simulated universe that you could participate in and they could say, God, you could be whoever you want. You could be, you could, you want to go to, you want to go to ancient Egypt in 2000 BC and see what was cracking? What was going on down there? What did that look like when the height of the pyramids, what the fuck did that look like? You wouldn't do that?

Of course you would do that. Everybody would do that. And if it was like harmless, you couldn't get hurt, you couldn't get injured, you're in God mode everywhere you go. If you die, you just wake up and do it all over again and you keep doing it. I mean, not to rain on that matrix parade,

but books, in a sense, do exactly that, right? No, they don't. You want it to be more- You shut your mouth. We're talking about transporting you to the fucking dinosaur times, Gad. We're talking about you running around watching raptors tear apart a brontosaurus.

It's indistinguishable from reality I just distinguish a bow looks like it's happening right in front of you. That's all everyone's gonna be doing Oh boy, those books are gonna rot Those books are gonna be covered in dust You're gonna do it one time and it'll get to the point see it's sort of like VR if you do VR now It's really cool. It's kind of fun. It's like, wow, this game's nuts.

I've tried the boxing one. Yeah, they're cool. It's a good workout. The boxing is a really good workout because you really do, it really is like hard shadow boxing. Because you have to move a lot. And my feet were hurt and I was like, wow, this is kind of crazy.

But that's very crude in comparison to what's coming. That is like Pong. Remember Pong? You're older than me. You know what the fuck I'm talking about. That game was amazing. Arati, what's it called? Atari.

Atari, Atari. Remember when that happened? We were like, this is nuts. We are playing a video. We're aware of that age. We went through the whole thing. We went through VCRs. We went through VCRs. We went through answering machines.

So my knowledge of video games stopped and peaked 1981 with Galaga. Do you know Galaga? Oh, yeah. So I was like a champion in Galaga, but that's the end of my knowledge. So right now I see my son interact with things and he tries to bring me in, and I just feel like

I don't have the bandwidth to do anything that he's doing. It will eat your life. It will eat your life. It will eat your life. It's too fun. They're too good. These games are so good now. They're so immersive.

So you're a gamer? No, I don't do them because they're too good. Oh, right. No, I'm scared. I'm scared. They just, they're too them because they're too good. Oh, right. No, I'm scared, I'm scared. They just, they're too fun, they're too fun. And I have too many friends that will play video games till like two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning.

And they're our age? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. How do they navigate through family life and all that? A lot of them don't. Okay. But you know, some of them are younger.

The younger guys are, they're all playing. What does playing what is Shane play will they play Call of Duty? change big into Madden and He likes the UFC game He also plays some like command and conquer style because he's big into military history Oh, right, right, right some of that stuff too. So they're playing these fucking Insanely immersive games and these games are so good. They're so good now. The graphics are so incredible.

They're so fun, they're so exciting. They just have it geared up to like constant excitement. So the only one that interested me and the ones that my son showed me, I really know very little about this, is the sniper games. Oh, you like to be a little sneaky. Exactly, no, there's something very,

very, very beautiful about sort of steadying yourself and then getting that scope. And so I respect the guys who do that in real life. And so I try to do it, but there was too much hand-eye coordination of different things. So I didn't do too well. But you got to that controller becomes you. Yeah, right. Becomes you.

So Richard Dawkins talks about that being an extended phenotype. Those guys that are really good at that, that's the ones that the military wants. They want those guys to operate drones. Oh, right. That's what I would want, until AI does it. AI is going to do a way better job. Right.

Did you see the thing that we had Mike Baker on? He was explaining to us yesterday that they have dog fights they're doing now, where AI-controlled jets are competing against jets flown by the best pilots. And the AI jets are winning 100% of the time. Wow. Incredible.

That's fucking terrifying. So speaking of AI, I was in the early wave of studying AI. So my undergrad is in mathematics and computer science. And so as part of my computer science degree, I had taken some AI stuff, of course, with Monty Newborn. He was part of the team of Deep Blue, which do you know what Deep Blue is? So that was the AI system that was being built to play against the Grand Chess Masters. And at the time, sometimes this one would win, sometimes this one would win,

oftentimes it would be ties. And so we had learned how to program the search algorithms that would allow you to go through a decision tree of chess without having to exhaustively go through the entire tree because the entire tree is something like 10 to the 100 different nodes. It would take more than the entire history of the universe to go through it. So you have to know how to prune the tree. Do you follow what I mean? Yeah. So that way, I better not waste time going down here,

so just cut it off, that reduces the search space. And so I had been exposed to some of the earliest advances in my formal education in AI, but frankly, 40 years later, not withstanding all of the advances, I would have thought there would have been even more AI applications than what we currently have. In other words, I thought it would be,

we've underperformed what I thought we would have reached. So for example, in medical diagnostics, why aren't there more AI systems that are being used instead of actual human doctors? Don't you think? Because medical diagnostics is just the collation of tons of information so that you're able to, it's a structured problem, right?

It has very, here are all the symptoms, I can search through the whole database and come up with what is the likely disease much more quickly and probably more accurately than any human physician. And yet to the best of my knowledge, I don't think they're used as much as you would have thought they should be Yeah, I don't think they are but I think people have been diagnosed with things from all right from artificial intelligence now And what they didn't someone put a bunch of their data in the chat GPT? And for sure a story went around about like a mom that couldn't get a good answer. Yes Oh in there and got got like a whole is that I correct diagnosis really quickly, but that's like one anecdote I think that went around.

Yeah, I don't know if it's true, but you would imagine that at a certain point in time, you would get all of the data on all medical interventions, all medications that are effective for this, that or the other thing, all issues that could lead to a genetic propensity towards this, that or the other thing all issues that could lead to a genetic propensity towards this that or the other thing and you would have it all in some sort of a database right if you could have a computer that's far smarter than a human being processed that and Instantaneously no instead of having some guy that has to go back to like what he learned when he was in grad school right and you're

You're way better off. So I think in some areas, and I could be misspeaking, so I'll take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but I think in radiology is one of the areas where now AI systems are almost going to render the human radiologist obsolete. Because it's pattern recognition, right? I'm looking at an image, and then I have to read that image

to decide whether, does it look like this area is a bit gray so it looks like there could be a tumor? Well it turns out I think that the AI systems are better able to detect most of these things than humans. So I actually spoke to a radiologist cousin of mine and he didn't think that they would become obsolete anytime. Him meaning that humans, the human radiologist would still have something to input.

But it seems to me that in fields in medicine where it's largely driven by pattern recognition is where AI is going to make the most headways, I think. That's interesting. is where AI is going to make the most headways, I think. That's interesting. I'm really fascinated to see what the end of this looks like. Because I think it's going to come real quick. I think the use of AI is now something

we're just waking up to in terms of the general population is super aware of AI now for the first time. It was like a science fiction thing just 20 years ago. The possibility of it was science fiction 20 years ago, but the probability of it right now is like a fucking freight train that's headed over a cliff. It's like no one's hitting the brakes on this at all, and what does this look like?

So have you had guests that are both, you really need to be deathly afraid of AI versus those who say it's completely overblown sure yeah And what is the evidence leaning to which camp? I don't know much of the evidence is really in who the fuck knows okay? That's the the the what is actually gonna happen is who the fuck knows because I think it's gonna be more bizarre than we could ever imagine I think I think what we're what we're giving birth to collectively as a society is gonna be more bizarre than anything we could ever imagine. Because it's gonna be smarter than us by a lot and it's gonna be able to make smarter versions of it. It's going to be able to harness energy in a way that we couldn't ever possibly fathom. We couldn't think it up.

And it's going to have sentience. It's going to have the ability to make decisions. It's a life form. And we're giving birth to it. We're giving birth to some godlike life form that has an unstoppable potential for technological superiority over the human race. Yikes. Yeah, it's gonna be so superior.

And if we're programming into it certain behavior characteristics or certain imperatives, it doesn't have morals, it doesn't have, it's just gonna, the whole idea behind it is nuts. So I, of all the courses that I've ever taken in my life, you know, I spent many years in university, the course that blew me the most, you know, blew my mind was a course called Formal Languages,

which was about, well, formal languages is Turing machines. And so I don't know if, do you know Turing? Yeah, the Turing test. So yeah, the Turing test, of course. So Alan Turing, if you delve into his actual material, you're blown away that a human mind can think at that level. You know, and I'm saying this as someone who spent my entire career in academia,

so I've met a lot of really, really brilliant people, but it's almost metaphysical the kind of Depth that his intellect went to so the only other guy that I could think of of sort of contemporary guys would be Girdle I don't know if you know, you know, so Yeah, Girdles the guy who came up with a functional Diagram of how you could make a time machine. Oh, did he I Kurt Girdle a good girl mathematician Yeah, the mathematician. Yeah, so he was I don't know if you know the story I actually I talked about in this book and happiness book

At one point I'm talking about the importance of going for walks and just go for a walk and talk and so on and I said well Einstein so both Einstein and Gödel were together at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. And later in his career, Einstein was older than Gödel. Later in his career, Einstein said

that the only reason that he would go into the office was because he was excited to go on these long walks with Gödel and just have these chats. So imagine being a fly on the wall, sitting as Gödel and Einstein are having these conversations. So I just finished reading Gödel's biography, and it was very interesting because here's this unbelievable mind.

You know what he died of? What? Because it's gonna speak to the opposite side of the mind he was convinced that there were people trying to poison him so he would use his wife as the food tester oh jesus and she was committed to hospital with with some disease whatever so she could no longer serve as his food tester. So he died of starvation. Oh my God. So now imagine Gödel is both the guy who could think in ways that are unimaginable

to us and is also the guy whose mind was parasitized by these conspiratorial ideas. Wow, he was 65 pounds when he died of malnutrition. Isn't that phenomenal? Wow, caused by a personality disturbance. Wow. It's unbelievable, isn't it? Assassination of his close friend. He developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned.

Oh, I bought the book on, I just bought a book on the murder of professor schlick who was the guy who started the Vienna circle And why did they poison him? No, they shot him. They shot him. Yeah So he was worried about being poisoned because his friend got shot that so I don't know where the genesis of his Paranoia came from but my point is that in that same mind were these two sides, this un... So he developed what's called the incompleteness theorem. So there are some things within any axiomatic system in mathematics that you could never be able to prove

within that system. It's really at the level, it's like godly. It's just unbelievable, especially if you're, I was in mathematics, to be able's really at the level, it's like godly, it's just unbelievable, especially if you're, I was in mathematics, to be able to think at that level is unimaginable how deep it is and yet you think people are going to poison you and you're willing to starve to death. That's the mystery of the human mind. Jamie, see if you can find what his theory on time travel was. I think it has to be like the size of a solar system. He was talking about the way the solar system worked in relativity, which was Einstein's

theory. Would that allow time travel? Here it goes. A rotating universe. Yeah. How a rotating universe makes time travel here it goes a rotating universe yeah how rotating universe makes time travel possible so he had this idea but I'm gonna butcher it unless I can actually read yeah I mean trying to get to it some of this stuff is so

difficult to grasp right right it is okay here it is girdle found that if you follow a particular path in this rotating universe you can end up in your own past. You'd have to travel incredibly far, billions of light years long to do it, but it can be done. As you travel, you would get caught up in the rotation of the universe. That isn't just a rotation of the stuff in the cosmos but of both space and time themselves in essence The rotation of the universe would so strongly alter your potential paths forward that those paths loop back Around to where you started. I have no idea what that means. Holy shit. I mean Richard Feynman, you know who that is, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner in physics?

He was a pioneer in quantum mechanics. He said, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics. It's the same thing for me with this kind of stuff. I read it and it's impossible for my stupid brain. I don't think it's stupid brain. Listen, it's so esoteric. It is very, very esoteric. But listen to this if you would set off on your journey and never travel faster than the speed of light

And you would find yourself back where you started, but in your own past What The possibility of backwards time travel creates paradoxes and violates our understanding of causality Thankfully all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating so we are protected from Gordel's problem of backward time travel But it remains to this day a mystery why general relativity is okay with this seemingly impossible Phenomenon Gordel used the example of the rotating universe to argue that general relativity is incomplete and he may yet be right.

I don't know what to add to that. If you give people the opportunity to go back in time, oh my God, that would be ridiculous. So if I, but speaking of this. You never know. I've actually played this game, a version of this game where I ask people if you could invite 10 historical people to your dinner party, who would they be?

So maybe I can ask you that. You don't have to list 10. Can you, off the top of your head, can you list a few that would have to be at the Joe Rogan barbecue? I could tell you who's my number one. Who? Leonardo da Vinci.

I just finished a biography on him. Do you speak Italian? I don't I speak fake Italian I just add who knows what their Italian was. Yeah, right. They all had dialects like my grandparents spoke in dialects By the way, weird Italian. Is that right? Yeah, I could link my love for Leonardo da Vinci with the earlier concept of conciliance that we talked about. Maybe you can see how because Leonardo Da Vinci by definition is the Renaissance man, right? He is the ultimate polymath. He's an anatomist and a painter and an engineer and a futurist and a sculptor, right? He's a man of all and does them all at very high proficiency and he's able to link all these things, right?

So he studies the anatomy of the body in his art. So he's now linking anatomy with art. So that's what Consilien says. So to me, Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate intellectual man because he can do it all. He can link different things. So he would be on my list. Who would be arguably your top guy?

Well, it's one night, right? One night. You got to bring Hunter Thompson. Who the hell is that? Hunter S Thompson. Who's that? Really? Hunter. Never heard of Hunter S Thompson. No. The journalist. Never heard of him. You never heard of fear and loathing in Las Vegas. You never heard of this guy? Maybe. That's crazy. I can't believe you never heard of Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter S. Thompson is an American writer and he... What's his most famous thing? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the one they made into a Johnny Depp movie. It was a crazy... it really started off, the assignment was, he was supposed to write about, I think it was motorcycle racing in Las Vegas.

He gets this contract to write this article. And he goes there and instead it's this LSD, entrenched, psychotic episode. You're picking this guy over Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Da Vinci. He said brilliant things man You get if you read his work his work work was brilliant. It was brilliant. He was out of his fucking mind I mean he was out of his fucking mind doing acid shooting windows. He was crazy

He had it there's a video of him having a shootout with his neighbors in Colorado. They're shooting at each other It was crazy like legitimately kill themselves with your kill themself. That goes with your morbid Instagram things with your friend. No, it doesn't necessarily. Because I think if I could catch him when he was young, I'd better have been a fascinating guy to talk to. I just think you can't drink that hard for that long. You just deteriorate.

And things go sideways mentally. It's just very, very, very bad for you. You're poisoning yourself every day with Coke. and you're poisoning yourself every day with whiskey. And that's this guy. There's a video of us reading Hunter S. Thompson's list of what this journalist saw him do in a day. This journalist came to Woody Creek, Colorado, where he he lived and us talking about it made its way into a song who is that that band that did that so it's like a like a techno dance song Wow that's all about Hunter S Thompson's like when was this he did like when when were you reading that's like I was a few years back okay was me

and Greg Simmons were reading it, this is the craziest thing. Listen to the Beardy Man. Featuring Joel Rogan. Can we play this? That's ridiculous. It's my own words. Oh, in terms of copyright? What happens when you play it?

What do you hear? Just I'll say it. OK, so the problem is the music. You don't have to cut it out of the show is the problem Okay Um, see if you can find the actual clip of me and Greg talking about it There's probably a clip of it But it was uh, it's such a ridiculous

He was- of amount of substances he's consuming in a day It's fucking insane Like he was insane So what makes him interesting is that he's insane and he consumes a lot of alcohol and drugs No, has it been five years? He's a brilliant guy like the things that he said were brilliant. Daily routine 3 p.m. Rise Okay It's he woke up at 3 p.m. And he like starts his day with whiskey and cocaine He's fucking animal man. He's a fucking animal, man.

He's an animal. But he was also a brilliant writer, man. He had amazing insight, and he's a guy that sort of was soured by the shift from the 1960s to the 1970s and what happened in this country and how weird things died in the Vietnam War. I mean, he only died recently, right? Yeah, he died quite a while ago.

He committed suicide at least 10 years ago, right? Okay, but I mean, technically you could have had a check I mean he only died recently right he died quite a while ago he committed suicide at least ten years ago right okay but I mean technically you could have met him could have yeah what have been possible but even then it was like the end of his okay he wasn't the same guy he wasn't the same guy as he would be another glass of Shiva's another Dunhill here's his daily routine 3 p.m. Rise 305 Shiva's regal with morning papers smokes Dunhill's 345 cocaine another glass of Shiva's another Dunhill 405

PM by the way first cup of coffee and a Dunhill 415 cocaine 416 orange juice and another Dunhill. 430 Cocaine. 454 Cocaine. 505 Cocaine. 511 Coffee, Dunhills. 530 Get more ice in the Sheevas. Cocaine at 545. 6 o'clock, smoking grass, take the edge off the day. 7 PM.

The day, three hours into it. Three hours in, lit. 705 Woody Creek Tavern for lunch. Heineken Two margaritas coleslaw a taco salad double order of fried onion rings carrot cake ice cream a bean fritter Dunhill's another Heineken cocaine and for the rest of the ride home a snow cone a glass of shredded ice Which is poured over four jiggers of chivas. Okay, so the snow cone is chivas Okay, 9 p. cone is chivas.

Okay, 9 p.m. Start snorting cocaine seriously. 10 p.m. Drops acid. 11 p.m. Chartreuse, I don't know what that is. Cocaine and grass. 11.30. Cocaine, etc., etc. 12. Midnight. Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write. That's when he sits down to write. 12.05 to 6 a.m. he writes.

Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhill's, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies. 6 a.m. in the hot tub with champagne, Dove bars, Fettuccine Alfredo. 8 a.m., Halcyon, which is sleeping pill, 8.20, sleep. So he would take a sleeping pill at 8.20 in the morning after riding it hard.

What I love is... Wow. Now, if his writing sucks, that's crazy. But his writing was amazing. What was he but his writing was what was he he wrote? No, it was he came up with a what a kind of journalism that was like journalism mixed with fiction And he called it like gonzo journalism. Oh, that's him. Okay. That's okay. I got it the way he would write would be like Over-the-top ridiculous to the point where he thought everybody knew he was joking.

But it was mixed up in like also real stuff like fear and loathing on the campaign trail. You know, he was on the campaign trail and he spread a rumor about this guy who was a candidate for president being a drug addict on this exotic Brazilian drug Ibogaine. And so people started believing it. The guy started having a mental breakdown and he was on the Dick Cavett show and he admitted to doing this. He admitted to spreading the rumor. He's like, you made it all up.

I couldn't believe people really believe that Muskie was eating Ibogaine. I never said he was. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee Which was true when I started the rumor in Milwaukee You affected the campaign Affected this I'm assuming he wasn't married. He wasn't married was he married? It was married yeah, okay because all that cocaine and stuff might get into the well, you know Gotta do what you gotta do in this world. I don't know fair enough. Obviously it didn't work out Yeah, but he was a fucking maniac. He was a complete maniac, but

Especially in his younger days like Hells Angels is an amazing book. It's crazy. That's a crazy book He was embedded with the Hells Angels Wow and wrote this book and they were real mad at him afterwards. But it's crazy. Oh, I know where I know him from. I think I read Tucker Carlson's biography because the guy who wrote it came on my show, so I read it in preparation, and I think Tucker Carlson refers to him. That's where I learned the term gonzojournalism, I think. Probably.

Doesn't Tucker have like a Hunter S. Thompson story? Well, that's what I'm thinking. Because when you said Hell's Angels, I know that Tucker had been invited to go give a talk with the Hell's Angels where he referenced some, and I think it's this guy. So now I'm linking what you're talking about. That makes sense.

Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like, I don't know the story, but I think Tucker has a guy. So now I'm linking that makes it. I feel like I don't I don't know the story But I think Tucker has a hunter as Thompson story like he knew him. Oh I feel like I've known Hunter as Thompson for most of my life first encountered him in 1981 when I was 12 Tucker Carlson Wow Jamie would we say that out of my ten? Appearances on the show, this has been the most number of times that you've come in with some truth? I'm going to say yes.

Damn. Dropping bombs. Dropping bombs. I don't have any research on the number of pull-ups I've done. Yeah, you're obsessed with numbers. I'm academic. Yeah. We quantify things.

It makes sense. Yeah. But in this world, that can be problematic. I don't know if you know that math is racist. I do. By the way, seven or eight years ago, you could pull it up, Jamie can pull it up. I did a satirical clip where I introduced a new field

that I was coining as social justice mathematics. And I went through all of these mathematical properties and said how we should get rid of of like irrational numbers should not exist because they marginalize mental illness whatever and I just went through the whole list it became a big hit amongst the crowd of mathematicians which is kind of a geeky crowd but seven eight years later reality caught up with my prophetic satire now it is literally the case that there is a field called sort of social justice mathematics where you talk about math being racist. So what-

There's a lot of grifters in this world, kids, and there's a lot of people that believe things if left unchallenged and those things become doctrine, they're a real problem because they're not based in logic. They're just based in nonsense. They're based in occult-like thinking. That is, we are very perceptible, we are very susceptible to cult-like thinking. Yeah, I watched yesterday on my way to Austin a documentary, three-part series on these,

I think it's called Ivy Ridge School. Have you heard of it? Ivy Ridge School. It was in Ogdenburg or something in upstate New York. They had a whole bunch of those schools where they would take kids, many of whom were not delinquents really, but they would convince their parents, because you mentioned cults,

so this was kind of a cult situation, they would convince their parents that they need to send them to these boarding schools in order to provide them with structure and discipline so that they can get their life together. Even though many of them had committed very, very minor, in fact, they were caught once with marijuana. These were not dropping acid all day long. And the things that they would do to them in these schools

is straight out of the worst Soviet gulags you could think of and they're throughout the United States and it's a form of cult indoctrination where you're doing cult indoctrination at two levels to the captors, captives in the schools, but you also have to convince the parents that they're doing the right thing by sending their kids there. It's unbelievable, you should watch this documentary. It really, it behooves you to imagine that in the 21st century in the United States,

these things can occur, but it really does. Oh, there you go, exactly. There you go. Netflix came out two months ago? That's crazy. It's, you're not allowed to have eye contact with another student. You're not allowed to smile. You're not allowed to have eye contact with another student. You're not allowed to smile.

You're not allowed to look out the window. You're not allowed to speak to anyone. You just sit in front of a computer and you just do these. Oh my God, that's crazy. And they were in there for like 28 months. Then they gave them degrees, diplomas, high school diplomas that were fraudulent.

So imagine you're sent there, and by the way, in some cases, they would come and kidnap you out of your parents' home because they knew that the kid would be resistant to leave. They said, no, no, it's completely legal. So like two goons would come, take your child, take them to upstate New York. The kid has no idea why I'm there. Oh my God. So it's no idea why I'm there. Oh my god Yeah, so it's really it's very powerful. So and hence that's why Parasitic thinking right our ability to be parasitized is infinite. That is great. That story is crazy. Yeah

Yeah, definitely check it out. Oh my god So how old are your kids now speaking of kids already are they are they past the age where you have any Influence on them. They think you're no longer the hero You've become a zero because my children are entering a bit that stage They're that's to be expected and they're correct. They find flaws in your game. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh It's fascinating to watch little minds develop their their view of the world and if there's anything that I've ever done like a real 180 on is I Developed this weird way of looking at people and it may be much more

Empathetic where I don't think of people as just you at age, you know, whatever you are. You at age 49, you at age 30. I think of everybody as babies. I think of everybody as that you used to be a little baby. And a bunch of shit went terribly wrong. And now here we are together in this unfortunate situation. And where I used to just think, like if I saw some guy and he was drunk and he's 35 years old, some asshole, it's like he's just an asshole this guy's an asshole he's rude

to people what happened yeah how did he get to that spot and I started thinking about people like little babies little babies that just got a bunch of bad things bad people and bad environments but that's removing people's personal agency that you're it's a little it's it's definitely removing a little which is also bullshit Yeah, because you do have personal agency, but you don't have it. You don't have a hundred percent. So I see I see there's certain landscapes that are you know Untroversable I actually faced what you faced with a 35 year old I faced something similar on my daily walk with my wife to the coffee shop and back

There's a gentleman that stands outside this, you know kind of she she Artisanal butchery butcher place in our neighborhood and he is soliciting money every day all all day Okay, he doesn't look as though he's mentally ill. He doesn't look completely destitute, but he stands there every day. And so now I know, I just say hello to him just to recognize him. And you could tell that it means a lot to him. Hi, how are you? How you doing?

And I've struggled with whether it would be appropriate for me or not to just strike up a conversation out of just a human interest in knowing what happened to you. Because he clearly doesn't seem like he's mentally ill. He doesn't seem as though he's a drug addict. I mean, he's not wearing a three-piece Italian suit, but, you know, he's not disheveled,

and yet he's there every day, and that's the best option he has. Do you think it would be viewed by him as insulting and offensive if I were to You know speak to him or on the contrary. Hey, somebody's actually taking an interest in me How do you how do you view this? It really depends upon the situation? And you know how crazy you think he is or if you think he's crazy at all. I don't think he's crazy Well, there's a lot of people that have mental illnesses that wind up on the street. That's a big part of the problem Yeah, mental illnesses and drug addicts. They're the ones who wind up on the street. That's a big part of the problem. Mental illnesses and drug addicts,

they're the ones who wind up in those situations. And he could be either of those. Yeah, you don't know. But I bet he's probably lonely, and I bet if you have a conversation with him, he'd probably appreciate it. Exactly. If you could handle it, you might get sucked

into his world a little bit, He might want money from you. That's true. You might, you know, who knows why he's there. Can I tell you an incredible story about a homeless guy? Sure. It's actually in the last chapter of the happiness book. His name is Bijan Gilani. I met him when I was a professor at UC Irvine.

I was sitting at a cafe, whole bunch of books thrown all over my table. I was working on a paper. He comes up to me, really well dressed, a bit of an accent of Iranian descent. He says, oh my God, these are all interesting books. Do you mind if I sit down with you for a couple of minutes, chat? So I tell him I'm a professor at UC Irvine. He was doing his PhD studying the homeless community in Southern California. So he had, it was an anthropological study where instead of going to a culture and living amongst them in the Amazon,

the community that he's studying anthropologically is the homeless community. So he embedded himself, and he actually finished his PhD at UC Irvine. He was a wealthy man. Fast forward several years later, he becomes destitute, living out of his car, and himself homeless.

Okay? And the reason why I mention, that's him. That's his car. This is incredible, Jamie. Okay, so this gentleman was living in this car. Now why am I mentioning this in the context of the book on happiness? So he was asked, Joe, are you a happy person?

Right? Guess what he answers he says now this is this is a guy who would has a PhD reach pinnacle very wealthy guy in Southern California is now living in his car he says well I'm a moral person I'm a good person I have a library card to the Newport Beach library so I can go and nourish my mind. I have a card to the gym so I could stay healthy. Yes, I'm happy. So I use that story to say here is a guy who has every reason to feel down on himself, yet he frames his situation in such a way

that he can elevate himself despite all his trials and tribulations. One more quick story on that. David McCallum, I may have mentioned him previously, I'm not sure, arguably the most incredible guy I've had on my show and like you, I've had many amazing people, spent 29 years in prison and then he was exonerated for a murder that he didn't commit. He comes on my show, we're chatting.

As we're chatting, maybe you could pull that one up too, David McCallum, and as we're chatting we're trying maybe you could pull that one up to David McCallum and as we're chatting I said to him you know David you must be the reincarnation of Buddha because it's amazing how you're not filled with any rancor any sense of vindictiveness and eventfulness it's unbelievable I mean you're a much better man than I am because I would want to burn the world down if someone did this to me because He says, you know, God, I have a sister who suffers from cerebral palsy, and she's been bedridden,

and yet she finds a way to smile. And so from that perspective, whatever I went through is not that bad. So a guy who just spent three decades in prison for a crime that he didn't commit was still able to reframe his tragedy into a positive. Wow. So these are, and by the way, these are the types of,

people learn a lot more from these stories than they do if you had gone all academies on them, right? Right, right. And so that's why I love telling these stories because then people right away connect to those stories. No, it's, god, the way the healing brain works. Like, if you studying this for all these years, what is the most surprising thing to you that people do that seems obvious that they shouldn't do in terms of the way they think about things?

Not not alter their positions in light of incoming evidence. It's the big one, right? That's the big one, because in a sense, it speaks to your decency as a human being. Epistemologically, if we are true, honest people, we change. As you said, we make mistakes, we held positions because we had information A, B, C,

but now X, Y, Z comes in, and we change. And any good, decent, moral person with integrity has to be able to do that, but to your earlier point, most of us are vain, most of us have pride, most of us have vested interest in whatever positions we're in, we can't let go of those positions because it will affect my identity,

and that's why, by the way, pride of the seven deadly sins, you may or may not know this, is the supra sin. It's the sin from which all other sins flow, because pride is the orgiastic self-love. So in French, by the way, you distinguish between positive pride and negative pride. In English, you don't have that distinction. So if you say, I'm proud of my work, that's different than saying,

don't be prideful in your love. That would be a negative thing. In French, there is a distinction. Positive pride is fierté. Negative pride is orgueil. So that's another interesting thing is that in some languages, the terms exist to separate in other languages, you don't have them.

Wow. Dropping a lot of wisdom and knowledge. You are, but you are always filled with that. I think one of the more unique things about your background that makes you resistant to stupidity is the fact that you did have to flee with your family. And the fact that you were involved in a real war, a real war zone, a real scary time, and to see the effects of ideology so clearly imposing themselves on your life when you were very young.

That's exactly right. That's why in the first chapter, Peristrate Mind, I tell that story because then that offers the reader a window into why I hate tribalism or I hate identity politics because because Lebanon is the perfect experiment of identity politics, right? And so yeah, you're exactly right. Do you do you hold any? I mean, one of the things that's been amazing about all

the different conversations that you and I have had and this is of the things that's been amazing about all the different conversations that you and I have had, and this is like the 10th one that we've done, a lot of this wouldn't get to some of the people that understand what you're saying and reincorporate it into their understanding of their own behavior and tribal behavior in general, and just the way people behave, just think about things, the way people accept ridiculous ideas.

Like you've had a big impact on that. Well, you've had, you just gave me the forum. I just show up, you tell me where to show up. No, but you have all the information. If I show up by myself, it's not worthwhile. You know, I gotta tell you, you can't imagine the extent of, I mean, I guess you can imagine,

but I could be walking on a, I mean, that's literally happened. I'm walking on a beach in the Bahamas. A native Bahamian who's doing some artisanal thing runs up to me, recognizes me, because I've been on the Joe Rogan show. So it's just, it's unbelievable, and I don't mean that in a, oh, people are right.

I mean that that's your reach. So how many people do you get per show? If I'm not. It's a lot. I don't know. Many millions. It's a lot. Right, so I mean, so then again,

the people who are looking down on podcasters, I mean, if you are in the business of spreading information, you should be lining up to appear on the show. Believe me, I never take it for granted. I feel so privileged that first that I'm your friend, but that I have this opportunity to come and reach so many people. How many people have written to me and said, I became interested in psychology and consumer behavior and in politics because I heard you say something on Joe Rogan. That's unbelievable. Yeah, it's pretty nuts.'s very Joe Rogan from Boston, Massachusetts Yeah, sort of Newton lived in Boston different parts of my life, but it's

It's very bizarre That it's reached what it's what it's doing. It's very strange. Do you how do you handle fame? Try not to okay. I try not to engage So do you I mean are you are you shut off when you're in public because I suspect not not shut off No, just try to be me. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's the only way to do it. Otherwise, you'll go crazy. Yeah, you go crazy You know if you don't interact with people, I mean people work they do Get weird people get weird with you. Yeah, it's weird

They see someone that they've watched on YouTube or they're watching their phone or their watch, you know, whatever I mean, I've been fortunate. I don't know how it's been for you my ratio. I mean online I get tons of negativity But in person I've only had and knock on wood and all the years that I've been in the public one time a negative encounter. So it's 10 million to one. That's pretty amazing. So your ratio hasn't been as positive? It's always very positive.

I think even in general, most people are good people, even if they say bad things. And I think if you're around someone, your reaction to them would be very different than writing things in text. I bet a lot of the people that wrote shitty things to you, if they met you, they'd say a nice thing to you. Right. It's a terrible way to communicate. And it feels just like a real thought and a real statement. And sometimes you are.

I mean, I don't know if it's, I mean, I know that sometimes I'm a lot more caustic when I reply to someone online than I would in person. Yeah, I really try not to be. I don't want to, I don't like conflict. I don't think it's necessary. I think most of your conflict should be within yourself, within your own mind. And just whatever you're doing with your life and focusing your energy on, you have more bandwidth for it if you don't have these external conflicts that are totally unnecessary. I just think they're unnecessary. Well you seem to, I mean I obviously follow you on Twitter, X, you don't

post, I mean you don't engage anybody anymore, right? I almost never. It's just not fun. It's just you're thrown into this weird world of opinions and people. And if it's about you, you shouldn't be that interested in you that you want to read all these people's opinions about you. I'm interested in other people writing about stuff. I'm interested in different opinions about things. But I don't want to engage because the environment

of engaging online is just too weird. And you're doing it every day for three hours already. It's just too many different opinions coming at you and too many different people coming at you. It's like, that's not good for people. I don't think it's good to be interacting with that many people in any form. I don't think it's good to be interacting

with that many people in real life. I think it's just, you probably never have a deep conversation, right? You're just constantly running into new people like Everywhere you go just people constantly you're gonna want some time off, you know I think it's the same with like interactions online and I think people don't think about it that way They'll think about like every time someone's talking at you. You're getting input. Every time you're around someone, you're getting input. And if you are around people that are cool, it's a great experience.

It's really fun. We had a great time, we were laughing, oh my god, it was so much fun. But if you're around someone who's really annoying and shitty or mean or snide or just ugh, now it's a bad time, right? So you know to avoid those people. But you don't have that opportunity online.

It's a party and the whole world's there. And 80% of them might be Chinese bots. Who fucking knows? Who knows what's coming at you? And you're just gonna take those in and your brain's gonna process them like they're real opinions and real people that are to be respected.

These are things to be considered. Maybe you are a piece of shit, dad. Maybe you are self-hating, maybe you are this, you're that. Of many of the wonderful advice that you've given on the show, I remember you once said to me, kind of surprised, what are you doing reading comments? Never, ever, ever read comments.

And I remember that sometimes when I answer someone, they say, clearly you're not implementing Joe Rogan's advice. But I must say that over the years, I've greatly reduced my temptation to so I, I can't say that I never read, but much, much less than before. You'll feel way better. Yeah, it's just not good for you. I think it's a bad way to process people's interactions. I don't think it's a real indicator of people. I think it's a weird way that people are willing to engage online they would never do in real life. Otherwise it would be a bloodbath in the streets everywhere. Right. We just kill each other

left and right. It's not like that in the real world because that's the real world type of communication is very different than online communication but online communication gets processed in your head like it's real communication and I think it heightens anxiety with everybody. Yeah so in the happiness book I talk about research that shows that the number one factor in terms of longevity more than your cholesterol scores when you're 50 is the tightness of your social network your friendship group and so with that in mind if I were to ask you to pick your you know your five biggest friends are they ones that you've you know held from when you were at in Newton or are

there a lot of new entrants into the inner circle of Joe Rogan over the years. Does it shift much, your friendship group, or are you very much stable? Well, I have some friends that I've been friends with since I was in high school. But I have a lot of really good friends that have been, I've been friends with comics that are real good friends of mine for decades.

So I've known a lot of these guys. And a lot of the guys that are here now, like Tony, I've been friends with Tony Hinchcliffe for, God, at least 15 years, something like that, right? When did Tony first start doing shows at Redband? Oh, I don't know, just 10, 11, something like that. Something crazy, like 11, 12 years ago, whatever it was. Joey Diaz, I've been friends with him for 25 years,

26 years, maybe more. There's a lot of these guys I've known forever. I've known Ari for 20 plus years. We've been friends for so long. And Tom Segura, same thing. I've known him for 20 years almost. So when those guys all wanted to move out here together, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing.

Ari hasn't moved here, but I'm gonna try to convince that motherfucker. Here meaning Austin. Yeah. Okay. From California. He likes New York. Oh, he's in New York. He likes to be like congested.

He likes to be, beep, beep, fuck you. He likes, hmm, I don't like it. He likes all the energy of all those people packed on top of each other. Are most of your Southern California friends out of there? Yeah. Yeah, there's a few guys left. Yeah, Bill Burr stayed.

A few other guys stayed that are really good. By the way, I had one of your friends on my show, Brian Callan. Oh, Brian Callan's awesome. He's such a cool guy. He's a smart motherfucker. He really is. And also retarded at the same time. Oh, care to expand on this?

He's just silly. He's just silly. he's just silly. But he's just- Well, he wasn't on my show, he was like very serious. Yeah, no, he's very capable of that too. He's very well-read. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's a great guest too, great podcast guest.

Well, I've always said that, I mean, comics have to, by definition, be intelligent because, and by the way, that's a sexually selected trait, right? When women say, you know, I want a man who's funny, she's obviously saying, I want a man who's intelligent, because it's very unlikely for you to be truly funny and be a complete dullard, right? And so by you saying, I like funny guys, you are effectively saying by proxy, I like intelligent guys So it doesn't surprise me that Brian Callan or all your other friends would be funny because I mean look at Dave Chappelle How are you gonna pull off all those insights if you were just moron, right?

So he's probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues. Well, he's very smart. Dave's very smart But he's also you know, I mean he's like in the world of stand-up seven days a week. He's like a Master craftsman out there like swinging away at ideas and piecing them up together on the road He gets it easy There's no one like him that guy flies into a town and just shows up at comedy clubs and goes on stage Like they don't even know he's gonna be there. Does it all the time. Is that right?

Yeah man, he did it with me. I was in Denver, he just showed up. You mean you were performing in Denver and he just shows up. I was performing in Denver and he just showed up. Now do you feel slighted and that he might take over the seat or on the contrary? No, he's my friend.

No, no, no, I wanted him to go on. This is what happened. I did this weekend at the Comedy Works in Denver and Dave flew in and Just decided to show up and I'm like, what are you doing? He goes. I just wanted to come say hi Oh, he just got I go you want to go on stage. He goes should I go fuck? Yeah, hold on So I go out onto the stage and I yelled out to the audience tell everybody to come back Dave Chappelle's here What and they all piled back in he did like another 40 minutes and murdered it was incredible

It was so much fun. It was so much fun You know with that so that guy does that all the time all over the place He'll just show up in New York start doing sets show up in LA start doing sets Wow He just shows up and works out his material, and he's just in it. He's just in it, man. Just fully involved in this art form. So you would say he's currently the top living comic?

You can't consider the best without considering him. It's all subjective. you know. There's certain people that think this person's funnier, certain people that think that. I think it's all stupid to say like a number one, number two, number three. I think there's just a level of greatness that some achieve that he is at right now that's very rare. It's very Richard Pryor, It's very rare. It's very Richard Pryor. It's very Sam Kinnison It's very there's just like outliers that are just so consistently good and over the years just have so much output You got to put him in that category and he also has this mystique of taking ten years off, but he disappears He disappeared. He stopped doing standout. Well the one of the best of all time

does this incredible? sketch show that's Arguably the best sketch show ever that only does two seasons right and then he disappears and then he just quits and Then he doesn't he doesn't even do stand-up. You know what he's doing. He was he would do stand-up at a park He would show up with a speaker and plug it in and just do free standup in like Seattle. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. And would he draw huge crowds or would he be like seven? I couldn't believe he was there.

Like what is he doing here? This is insane. Wow. He would just show up places. You know, like a real artist on a vision quest. Right. You know, then he comes back 10 years later and just starts dominating the game again.

Well, I saw him, I don't know if you saw that Netflix where he's recounting how he went back to his high school Yeah, and what struck me is how good of a storyteller he was right? I mean, that's that's the real key, right? I mean, yeah, and I think you've had someone I think you had Jonathan Gottschall, right the the professor who studies Jonathan Gottschel, the professor who studies evolutionary literature, and he studies why storytelling is important to us. And Dave Chappelle is a perfect manifestation of this. He can garner huge multimillion dollars because he could tell a mean story. He's just so likable to everything about him. You start smiling when you hear him talk.

There's a vibe that he has. When he starts talking, he just starts smiling. There's a vibe that he has when he starts talking, he just starts smiling. That's true. And you know he's going somewhere with it, like where you going with this? Oh no! That's true.

The world needs that. We need people like that out there. We need guys like him out there. So of all the different hats you wear, that's the one that brings you, I mean you're a podcaster, that's the one that brings you, I mean, you're a podcaster, you do the MMA stuff, you do the, is the, is the, and being in front of the audience doing your, your, your routine, the thing that gives you the most high?

It's the most complicated, you know, it's the hardest to pull off. Having conversations with people is pretty effortless. Right. It's fun. It's fun, it's just fun. It's engaging, it's interesting. I feel very lucky to be able to have these kind of conversations with you. But doing stand-up is like you're piecing together the bits.

You're making sure they're polished. You've got the right angle on them. Got them honed. You figured out the most effective way to insert the idea. You figure out the most effective way to insert the idea You know to figure out the sneakiest way to hide the punchline, right? Yeah, it's fun But it's all fun. That's the beautiful thing It's like if you can do stuff that you really like doing like I really like having conversations with people. That's fun I really like doing stand-up. That's fun. I really like doing UFC commentary. That's fun Just do fun things you are living a blessed life. I'm very lucky. I don't know UFC commentary. That's fun. Just do fun things. You are living a blessed

life my friend. I'm very lucky. I don't know what I did in the past life. I did something though. Yeah. Definitely did something. Oh that's great. Yeah. But it's been very beneficial to me to be able to have conversations like this. To be able to have so many conversations with so many people that know so many things and it just as you said it highlights How little you know and how much there is to know and how many different things there is to know so many different things About unbelievable like there are people right now that are studying their entire life some shit. You've never even heard of right now that are studying their entire life some shit you've never even heard of. Exactly. And they're the experts of it.

And it's a fucking hugely complex thing that they're involved in and you don't even know it exists. And you're like, what are you guys doing? What? What is this? You know, I mean, who the hell knows what kind of scientific discoveries that are going on right now as we sit in this room.

There's a frenzy of technological activity going on right now. Well, I mean, Austin, I did, I think it was after my last trip here, which was last time I came last year to do your show, and I was arguing that Austin might be the next, so you know, you had Florence of the Mediciici's of the Da Vinci 500 years ago. Then you had the Vienna circle, the Viennese circle in the 1980s to 1930 where Vienna was

kind of the intellectual hotbed. And maybe it's a bit hyperbolic but I think Austin is vying to be kind of the next one right and that everybody's coming here all kinds of creative types, whether they be academics or writers or comics or podcasters or Elon Musk or you know. So do you think that Austin, it would be reasonable to argue that it's becoming sort of the intellectual slash creative center of the United States? That's ridiculous. You mean New York? No. You could never.

It's, I think first of all, there's great spots everywhere. You know, there's great spots in New York. You just have to deal with a lot of shit in New York. But to say there's not amazing shit going on in New York artistically is crazy. To say it's not amazing stuff going on in LA, that's crazy too.

It's just, what matters is we're doing it in a way that's beneficial for comedy. It's beneficial for us. It's good for us. It's like we've set up stand up out here to make it good for us. You know, the Google people and all the people that moved out here and they're doing it because it's a good place to be. You know, I don't necessarily know if there's hot spots. that moved out here and they're doing it because it's a good place to be. I don't necessarily know if there's hot spots.

I think the hot spots, the internet. There's cities that are better to live in because they have less people and less traffic and less bullshit and less laws and less nonsense imposed on the citizens. Yeah, definitely. No, but there's a critical mass of people that congregate in an area, making that place unique and different from other places. That's what made Vienna Vienna, right? It was the start of psychoanalysis.

It's where Gödel hung out. It's where Freud hung out. It's where Jung hung out. So, I mean, yeah, maybe Austin is not there yet, but, you know, University of Austin is being founded here, right, that's trying to be the anti-woken version. So there is definitely apparently a vibe people keep telling me to move here Yeah, I think it's very pretentious to bring that up though If you actually live here, like I'm very hesitant to even say I would never compare it in such lofty terms, right? It's a great spot

The University of Austin thing what they're setting it up as an anti-war, they're not saying that though. I mean they're not saying it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not in the mission statement, but it's definitely kind of a countermeasure to all the illiberal stuff that we've seen in universities, yeah. I actually, a couple of years ago I came to give a couple of talks at University of Texas Austin, UT Austin, and I met with the president of University of Austin. We had brunch together. Are you thinking about coming here? I mean, if the right opportunity presents itself. Really? Inshallah.

Wow, that would be wild. You could be free from Communist Canada. Oh my God. Ha ha ha ha. Free from Communist Canada, free from the weather. And by the way, something that we didn't talk about, sir. Do you know that the biggest effort to cancel me free from the weather. And by the way, something that we didn't talk about, sir, do you know that the biggest effort to cancel me

came after my last appearance on your show? No, what did you say? They got you in so much trouble. You're not gonna believe this. Of all the things that I've said, do you remember at one point in the show, I said, because you had gone to Greece last summer, and then I said, oh, we just came back from Portugal.

And I gotta tell you, I wasn't a big fan of the Portuguese accent. And then I went on and said, oh, but actually, I speak Hebrew and Hebrew is violently ugly. I said, oh, but the worse, the real affront to human dignity is the French Canadian accent. Completely jokingly, I used the line affront to human dignity as a running gag for 10 years on Twitter.

The Beatles are in affront to human dignity. Anybody who doesn't love Lionel Messi is in affront to human dignity. That's an ongoing gag. It's a throwaway line. I said it. I think you had cracked up. You had laughed.

And we move on. Yeah, it's a joke. About a week later later a super angry kind of French Quebec or separatist guy does a Article in the La Presse, which is like the main Quebec newspaper saying this guy this immigrant that we opened our doors to and saved him from Civil War goes on the number one show and You know erases our existence. For the next three weeks, Joe Rogan, for the next three weeks, I was the number one most

hated person in Quebec. Luckily, I was in California on vacation. Oh my God. But the Quebec Minister of Justice weighed in against me, the Minister of Science and Education weighed in, right? Go back Arab, Jew, self-afel, back in the Middle East, we opened our doors to you. Oh my God.

So yeah, apparently you can't joke. You could say a lot of things, but you don't joke about the Quebec accent on Joe Rogan. I personally think it's a beautiful accent. Well, I've learned since I've been re-educated that it is the most beautiful. I'm glad you've been reeducated. Exactly.

The thing about this place though is the heat. You've got to be ready for the heat. Yeah, well I am from Lebanon. That's true. Yeah, is Lebanon a dryer? No, it's dryer. You're right. It's not humid. This is humid, right? Oh, it gets funky. What's the mosquito situation here?

It's not good. It's not good? It's bad. Oh, it's situation here? It's not good. It's not good? Oh, it's really bad. It's not good. There's lakes everywhere. Oh, God. That's why we have so many bats. That's true. Yeah, they eat like tons of... Oh, they consume mosquitoes. If it wasn't for bats, we would be fucked. Right. Yeah, that's true. I've actually in 2005 was the first time I came to Austin. There was a human behavior and evolution conference here and the hotel was right next to where they come out And so, you know, I'm talking about and so we actually stood there as they came out. I was crazy I couldn't believe it's crazy magical. It's crazy also by the way, sometimes those little fuckers have diseases like

Like I know there was a story that we talked about on the podcast before where there was a guy and a bat grazed his finger and he died from rabies. No kidding. Yeah, they didn't know what was wrong with him until it was too late. And rabies is something that once you have, you fucking have it.

You're done. You have to get, if something bites you that has rabies, you have to you fucking have it. You're done. If something bites you that has rabies, you have to get really painful shots and they have to do it very quickly. And in your stomach, right? Is it? I think, I don't know, I'm saying yeah, but I think someone said it,

I said it to you, you just said it to me, I don't remember where it came from. But I do know it's fatal, like 99% of the time, it's a terrifying fucking disease. And bats have it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bats, rats, skunks, all kinds of shit. Dogs.

What are the guys with the? Raccoons? Raccoons, thank you. Yeah, they get it. They get it, yeah. It's scary. There's a crazy video that was on Instagram of this cop and she walks, I think it's a she, I'm

pretty sure it might be a dude, I'm sorry. I don't want to misgender anybody. I don't remember. But this cop shoots this fucking raccoon and the raccoon's not dying and shoots it again and then shoots it again and then shoots it again. It was a rabid raccoon. Wow. She's just unloading a gun, it's a zombie raccoon and it's stumbling to a fucking pistol at a raccoon little-ass Raccoon boom boom boom Usually when you have rabies you get hydrophobia, right? You get fear of water. You can't drink. Yeah, what's the mechanism there? That's a good question. It's a good question

I mean, that's funny. I don't it is weird It's weird that it doesn't affect people in the same way It doesn't make people want to bite people right because it makes animals fearless and they want to bite you, right? Yeah, they become risk takers. Yeah, they want to bite you. They want to give it to you. That's that is that right? What else could it be? There why well, why would they get aggressive to the point where they want to chase after you and bite you put themselves in danger Yeah to go after you and bite you right they want to chase after you and bite you, put themselves in danger to go after you and bite you. They want to give it to you. It's like a zombie thing, but it's just like it just kills people.

It doesn't turn them into zombies, but it turns animals into zombies. They just want to come get you. That's crazy that there's a virus like that, and that is what like 28 days later was. Right? It was like they were engineering a virus that they were putting in chimpanzees and it broke out into people Right. I just finished a book called the plague that looked at the history of civilizations Through the lens of different plagues very interesting. I mean it got tedious at one point, right? I mean you're going through the different civilization, but I mean, you know, the black, you know, the, you know, so on, but going back to the Romans and so on, so a lot of history was shaped by a particular virus becoming more or less prevalent at a particular time and place. It is so fascinating when you hear about plagues

like just wiping out giant swaths of the population. Like the plague of North Americans coming and interacting with the Native Americans. That was smallpox, right? Yeah, 90%, killed 90% of the people here. Probably did the same thing through the Mayas. Like that's probably what happened to all those people that disappeared, they left behind the Chichen Itza

and all these crazy places. What happened to those people? Doesn't that sort of coincide with when explorers started showing up in boats with cooties? It's crazy how much that shapes human population, the interaction of these weird little things that are kind of alive, that jump from person to person. What's amazing is that, going back to Fauci and so on,

I think the fatality rate was, or survival rate was like 99.7 or something, right? For COVID, does that sound right? Something crazy like that. Now imagine if you compare that to the fatality rate of the black plague, where I think it was something in the order of one third of Europe was wiped out. So imagine the level of precaution that we took.

I understand hindsight is 20-20, but we took all these precautions for something that ultimately you had more than a 99% chance of surviving, so contextualize that against the black plague, maybe it was an overreaction. What did they think the roots of the black plague were? Was it poor sanitation that caused? So, I mean, of course, the Jews were blamed, by the way.

The Jews blamed you, the black plague? Oh, absolutely, blamed by the way the Jews are blamed to the black pole Absolutely. And by the way, there's a guy I think you have you had John Durant on your show He's he's the guy who wrote a book on sort of paleo fitness or something a few years ago he has an interesting piece where he argues that one of the reasons why Jews serve as scapegoats in many of these plague situations is because of the rights of purification that are in the Jewish religion, hence rendering the Jews less likely to succumb to many of these transmissions. He was talking about something like, so you know that there's 613

mitzvot, like commandments or rules in Judaism, 613. And if I remember, I hope I'm not misquoting, I think something like 20% of them, he says in his book, are related to purification. By the way, you see it also in Islam, when before you go into into the mosque you have to wash your hands in a certain way and wash your Feet and so on and so because the Jews would oftentimes have lesser Infection rates than the other populations within that ecosystem Then they would always look to them suspiciously how come you're not all dropping like assholes while the rest of us are dead It must be the Jews. So that's an interesting explanation for some of the antisemitism.

That's insane. That's an insane blame. That's an insane blame indeed. So do they think the cause of the reason why these plagues, they were transferred from like fleas to rats? So I think the correct answer, and maybe somebody will correct me in the comment section, is it's the fleas on the rats

that transmit the virus, yes, exactly. And where do they think that the virus came from? I don't know. I wouldn't wanna misspeak, but yeah. But back then it was fuckin', you know, what kind of medicine did you have? Like were they give you carrot juice? Well, they didn't even know bloodletting bloodletting for the Royals a lot of fucking voodoo Probably. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, actually I was in I was very interested in bringing on my show, but it never worked out a Specialist on gallon, you know who gallon is he was an ancient

Specialist on gallon, you know who gallon is he was an ancient Physician in ancient Greece so kind of like I don't know if he preceded Hippocrates or came after him But I'm interested in these old ancient world physicians Not only because they were great thinkers, but also how many things they got wrong, right? So Hippocrates believed in the Theory of four humors. You know, it's any disease that you have is due to you having too little or too much of one of these, you know, bile or this or that, which is complete nonsense today.

But at the time, the great Hippocrates thought that that, so I'm very interested to our earlier point about how you revise your positions in light of incoming information. A lot of the stuff that, you know, Marcus Aurelius would have gone to these guys because they are the great physicians, today we would laugh as complete voodoo. Yeah, today. And what will we be looking at today? Laughing, yeah, exactly. Yeah. In the future. This is the Black Death Wiki, and this is some of the origins, and this is the hygiene section.

The runoff from the local slaughterhouse had made his garden stinking and putrid, where another charge that the blood from slain animals flooded nearby streets and lanes, making a foul corruption an abominable sight to all dwelling near. In much of medieval Europe, sanitation legislation consisted of an ordinance requiring Homeowners to shout look out below three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street Yikes Look out below shit is coming out the window you have to say it three times. That's the rule bro imagine

That's for the black people. Early Christians considered bathing a temptation with this danger in mind, St. Benedict declared, to those who are well and especially to the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted. Oh, because you might masturbate if you might touch your body oh my god saint Agnes took the injunction to heart and died without ever bathing yeah what yeah yo yo what did that guy smell like like what did he smell like I did not have the smell of Sam Benedict Benedictine is that who was Saint Benedict Sam Benedict in my bingo car today What did that guy smell like?

St. Agnes which guy was Agnes is the one who died Benedict's declaration. Oh Oh, so Agnes died without bathing He's not the only one who died without bathing Bro, when we looked at one king he was like known to bathe one time a year Yeah, but that's probably reasonable. Do you remember the old story with? That's better than never do you remember the story with Napoleon when he tells? Is it my beat? What was her name his lover of the movie? So we say I mean it's in the movie, but I don't know if I don't know for that

I didn't see the movie. It sucked don't see it. Really? It really sucked. I love the main actor, I love them in Joker. The Joker, I mean, he was unbelievable. But anyways, she tells him she's coming to see him, his mistress or wife, whatever, and he says, don't bathe, because he wanted to be bathing in her juices. perfume, yeah. Oh, that's right.

So that's a famous... I do, I remember reading that. Yeah, yeah. Getting sick to my stomach. Yeah. But I guess it's just what you're into. You know. That's right. What you get accustomed to. You know. That's right. Like how about that African tribe that puts those plates in their lips? Lip plating and ear plating. I actually use that example when I'm talking about you know is beauty socially constructed or is beauty universal? And then I argue that there are some elements of beauty that are universal, facial symmetry, clear face, so on, like clear skin.

But some other elements are completely culturally constrained like lip plating and ear plating, like neck elongation in Southeast Asia. We would look at that and say it's grotesque, they think it's gorgeous. Yeah, it looks insane. Like if you take it off, your head's gonna fall off. Yes, right. We would look at that and say it's grotesque. They think it's gorgeous Yeah, it looks insane. Yeah, you take it off your head's gonna fall. Yeah, exactly you exactly I Mean, no, literally you you don't have them the muscles have so atrophy that you can't hold your head

It falls down. So they are stuck with those for life. They're stuck with them for life Wow, and the more you have the more beautiful you are. So what do you think the origin of human beings? Elongating their skulls was all about I don't know about elongating the skulls But this the the big size of the head is the argument is that you needed a big brain It's called the social intelligence hypothesis It basically argues that the the greatest threat that we face are from conspecifics, other members of our species. I'm trying to manipulate you for my best cause. You're trying to identify that I'm trying to manipulate you.

That creates an evolutionary arms race between our brains and it causes for the explosion of our prefrontal cortex. So that's the best argument I've heard for why we've evolved to have such big brains. What I was asking is about people that forcefully shape their heads. Oh, I see. Sorry. You ever see those ancient skulls where they like press boards against people's heads? Got it.

Like there's this practice of like shaping your skull, which by the way, is so real that gamers are getting it. Oh, I should make sure I'm not getting it. Is my head dented? Damn. What if my head's dented? That'd be crazy. Gamers are getting it on the top of their heads.

By virtue of wearing headsets that's pushing down. Maybe have a dent. Dude, I'm getting paranoid. But some guys have these crazy dents in their skull like divots So they shaved their head and they realized that this band on the top of their head is actually shaping their head Wow, but I don't know that practice I don't know what it's in ancient cultures for some strange reason like that's the nuts That's the nuttiest one like these guys are that's real, right? Okay. Well, you know for this is not

It goes away. That's not are, that's real, right? Okay, well you know for sure. This is not- This goes away though. It goes away. That's not permanent. How long does that last? I would have to ask them. Are you sure? Yeah, I mean, I know who this guy is. So it went away? Yeah.

So the dent is just the skin just conscripted and smushed up like that? I think so. God, I hope so. But the point is they think they did it with children and that they tried to shape their head in this elongated, very strange looking thing. And I wonder if it was like a symbol of aristocracy

or something. That sounds right. I mean, look, people, they take their babies and they pierce their ears. People do that all the time, which is kind of crazy but there's foot biting chinese foot binding right that which is really insane There is scar scarification also, uh So yeah, so I i've talked about

rites of passage Head binding It smashed their head with a and what oh, this is so nuts, but what's develop a certain look Look those look at the look that they wanted they wanted this like bizarre alien head look This is a European Happening in multiple China, Japan Wasn't it, uh... I was trying to find a reason.

I was digging for a reason. Where are the Nazca lines again? Is it Peru? Peru? Isn't there a bunch of artifacts in Peru of, like, ancient skulls that were shaped in this way? All the UFO people think that they're, like, trying to look like aliens. That's why they were shaping their head, right?

You know because the Nazca lines are really weird you are speaking of UFOs Do you have you heard of the we were talking about cult the Ray aliens? I? Have heard of this you know don't remember the story though. Oh my god. I watched the documentary on it You have to watch it. So is it a UFO cult thing well? It's I think they argued that the Jews were it it wasn't an anti-Semitic thing. The Jews were extraterrestrials that landed in Jews. What is this? There you go.

Yeah, yeah. And the reason why I know about them is because at one point when they left France, they moved to Quebec. Oh my God. So they were in Quebec for a while and now the leader is in Japan. He's in the 70s and after having been kicked out of every other country, he's scamming a new generation of Japanese folks.

That's the guy? That's the guy. And the woman with him is a scientist who said that they had cloned the first human. You remember that story? Bro, He looks hilarious Yeah, that guy looks like a guy that I would have play that guy in a funny movie about him. You know Like that was that was an outfit that someone made for that guy. Yeah. Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah the

Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah, the desire to adhere to an ideology, the desire to like be a part of a club and a group, it's so embedded in us that people can't help themselves. Yeah, so there's a study that I first, I can't reference what it is because I don't remember the reference, but it was in a advanced social psychology course I had taken with Professor Dennis Regan. I like to give out shout outs to him. I'm sure he's not listening, but anyways, he's retired now. And it was a study where the researchers brought in people into the lab, into a waiting room, and put a red sticker on them or a blue sticker, and then said, oh, we have to go and do something else. We'll come back in a few minutes for part two of the study. But of course, the real study was to simply see

how people would interact in the waiting room while waiting, having now been assigned this completely random queue of belongingness, red or blue. And what ended up happening is that the blue people started talking to each other and the red people Started talking to each other and I think that's a brilliant study because it shows that There's an external queue now that decides which group you belong to so it doesn't matter if I'm torn tall or short Gay or straight Jew or Gentile now? It's blue or red and so that shows that the architecture of the human mind, to your point, is built to

belong to some tribe. Yeah. Even if it's a really dumb one run by that guy. People just love to be a part of a group like that. By the way, all of these guys, including some of the current religions that we have, the guy who starts the, always gets commandments from God to get access to all the beautiful women. Well, if they all get that, obviously that's what God wants. That's how you know they're legit. It seems like that's the pattern God follows.

Exactly. God is Darwinian. Whenever someone breaks off, as long as, you know's that's the move. They all do it like Koresh. They all it's a it's just so weird how Common it is. Oh Koresh. I forgot about this. That's the guy Yeah, 90 minutes from here. Is that right? Yeah, it's close Yeah, that must have been fucking insane. I mean, they lit that place on fire. They've ran them over with tanks. That was 93, I think. Something like that, yeah.

I was a graduate student, yeah. Yeah. So do you consider, speaking of religion, I don't know if it's too personal to ask you, do you consider yourself religious at all or not at all, or how do you fall on that divide? I'm not religious in that there's not a specific religion that I follow I

Do not think that this is it. Okay, I think we are in we're in a station of a whole dial of possibility. And I think we're interconnected in some way that we don't have the ability to perceive. And we're a part of the universe in some very strange way. Do you think, and forgive me for asking this, but do you think that that's your way to handle

the very, very deep seated fear of mortality so that, okay, you don't tap into a Abrahamic narrative of there's going to be an afterlife, but you find some other mechanism by which it says, hey, don't worry, the party's not going to end soon. No, I'm not even saying that, but the party might end. It might not matter. What I'm saying is that if I just looked at this very very very strange existence, what we know so far, just what we know so far, is so bizarre and so alien. Just what we know about subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence appearing both moving and still at the same time like there's just nuttiness about like the subatomic world like the amount of empty

spaces in there like what's in there what's nothing's touching anything explain like what are you saying so when it just gets to that just to that I think the whole existence of being a conscious entity is a massive mystery. We all assume that everybody everybody else has our exact same interface. We all assume that the way I see the world, you should see the world Harry get vaccinated Harry and everybody just assumes everybody guy. Why is it a gay? I was was lady. I was trying to be a lady. Okay We I think this whatever we're going through this this life thing Everyone's trying to pretend as if they in their way of doing it makes sense, but none of it makes sense

We're running straight towards a cliff. We're launching AI. We're involved in multiple proxy wars We're all terrified that money isn't real anymore like that. Everything's chaos and There might be aliens There might be alien yet. We're both here smiling. Yeah, yeah, we're both here smiling It's both the greatest time and the worst time ever right, you know It's it's a great time because it just, it feels like an asteroid's coming. But it's also, the asteroid's not here yet. Well, our mutual friend Sam Harris would say the asteroid is called Donald Trump.

Oh, yeah. Some people, that's their white whale. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's Moby Dick. It is Moby Dick. And in tribal tribal warfare you must take the head of your enemy All right, you know, right? There's a lot of that, right? There's a lot of that and there's you know it's also a lot of A lot of unwillingness to admit that

You're being influenced by a very specific narrative that's been blaring through the news forever. And the weirdest one is now, like some people are bandying about the idea that he actually is going to be a dictator when he gets into office. He's actually, you got to listen to him, he's actually going to be a dictator. Like, first of all, the guy talks basically like a standup comic. He has bits, he has routines he does about Biden. It's kind of like gonzo presidential talk.

He doesn't talk like a regular politician. He says wild shit, and they know he's saying wild shit. But it's like, the amount of times I've heard people say that he's gonna be a dictator now because of that he said I'd like to be a dictator for one day just one day it's like the guys like it's almost like he's doing stand up but do you think that they believe it or the problem is and Elon pointing out this we will the thing the problem with this argument is he was president right for four years why didn't he do it? He did nothing that resembled that at all. No, but it's the second term that he'll do this is crazy talk

You know based on what your fear of your hatred your tribal hatred like I don't I don't have a dog in this fight Well, I if I'm looking at it objectively. I'm like One guy can't talk anymore. Yeah. I've explained in the parasitic mind why they have the aversion that they have. I call it an aesthetic injury, right? Because people use these cosmetic reasons in making judgments. So Barack Obama might say nothing of substance, but my God, he says it with style and coolness, right?

He's tall. Statesman. Statesman. He smiles. He's got a malefluous voice. He speaks with a baritone. He's charming. On the other hand, Trump, he's overweight.

He's cantankerous. He seems like he speaks with this Queen's kind of accent. So he's disgusting. I revile him. And so I think for our anointed elite, if he can ascend to the highest position of power, it invalidates all the degrees that I have from the fancy schools. I'm supposed to be the anointed one.

And so he serves as an existential aesthetic injury, I can't have that, and therefore I have to come up with all of these crazy predictions because it can't be how could such a pig ever be president? It's also it's like it's a real easy narrative. It was like he's an easy guy to hate his billionaire lives in a golden house. You know, it's easy to hate people like that. It's easy. He says ridiculous shit. It's easy to hate people like that Yeah, the whole thing is a mess like you you wish you had some sort of and that's where AI comes in God That's this this is where I come some really rational super intelligent voice that really understands human politics There's a way to make everyone happy and then we have president AI Maybe Trump is what brings in the devil because Trump brings in president AI

We have president AI. Maybe Trump is what brings in the devil because Trump brings in president AI. From your lips to God's ears. You know, I don't mean him. I mean like the reaction to him that we can never have this again. Are you able to or not able to just launch it, launch presidential AI? Are you willing to make a prediction for 2024? No, why would I do that? I don't even know who the fuck's gonna make it there.

One of them might be in jail. Who knows if the other guy's gonna make it? I don't know. I mean, the whole thing is cuckoo. President AI is our only solution, Dad. All right, let's start with that. Well, let's call Elon. He can maybe help us.

That, it would be the worst thing that could ever happen to people. If we gave up, we we were like take us away Technology daddy right you fix it for us. Then we're really gonna be slaves. We're really gonna be in a matrix They'll just keep us stupid. Just keep us stupid and get us to stop breeding We could never be stupid while we have the Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah 100% we could we're Gonna give into it. It's gonna be better than regular life That's what the fear is the fear is like there's already people right now that are justifying not having kids like oh

I don't want to have kids on it, and you shouldn't have kids if you don't want to have kids I'm not saying that because it's you should as its eco terrorism to have kids right there's there's that argument I'm like that argument is so crazy because the Listen do you like people I love people okay there's only one way to make them to make people and if you enjoy people you should you're gonna enjoy kids too you know like you're listen the whole thing is different the world is different than you think it is if you don't have kids and when you have them you're, I think I see this place different now. I think I understand. I regret greatly that we only had two kids.

We started, my wife and I started late, and we've been together for almost 25 years now, but our kids are younger than that. So in retrospect, I would have liked that these kids be numbers three and four, rather than number one and two. Yeah, well, listen, man, you should be happy, they're great, and it's all beautiful.

It's all beautiful. Thank you, sir. I just think that we're in this very bizarre interface with each other right now, and I think it's turned people half sideways. And there's some people that I think are really smart people that appear out of their fucking mind. And I don't know how you got cracked that easy.

I don't know what made you fall apart like that. This is, it seems silly. Maybe you'll tell me some of those names off here. Yeah, I'll tell you a couple of names. There's a few people we lost, just for whatever reason. Yes. And I think that it's fascinating when you see how vulnerable we are psychically, you

know, how vulnerable we are as a civilization that something with a 99 point, what was it? 47% survival rate turned our world upside down for three years. And no one's held accountable for the decisions that were made. Yeah, I mean, not a single person has even lost their job, I don't think. Right. I mean, no, they were all doing the right thing. And the idea is that hindsight is 2020. And you can't be a money morning quarterback. And I get it. I get it. But also, you know, some boundaries were like severely overstepped and there was some medications that were demonized for no fucking reason at all other than people had decided that there was only one thing that was going to save us from this. The whole thing just terrifying how easy it was pulled off. Terrifying. And again-20. They didn't know at the time. They were trying to protect people.

I believe a lot of doctors acted like that. But if AI was around back then that could process the data and say, no, look, you need to take ivermectin. You know how nuts that would be? Yeah. So in chapter seven of, not this book, of the parasitic mind, I talk about nomological networks of cumulative evidence. Have we talked about this at all? No, okay

So that in a sense you could imagine an AI system being built to do what I'm about to say So Ilan if you're listening or watching call me so a nomological network of cumulative evidence is when you're trying to The biological network of cumulative evidence is when you're trying to prove that a position that you're holding is vertical, and you do it by trying to amass as many lines of distinct evidence as you can. Okay, so let me be specific.

So let's suppose I wanted to prove to you, Joe, that toy preferences have a sex specificity, boys like certain toys, girls like other toys, and it's not due to social construction, but there is a biological and evolutionary reason for that. So how would I build a normal logical network of cumulative evidence in order to prove that to you? So I will get you data from across disciplines,

across cultures, across species, across time periods, all of which triangulate in demonstrating my point. So I think AI would be a perfect method for being able to call that information. Because right now the way you develop that normal logical network is you as the human architect of that network, you have to say, well what would be evidence that I would need to amass

in order to make my most hostile audience members come to seeing it my way. But now imagine if rather than me doing it, there is an AI system that's been built to go, so now let's give specifics. So I can get you data from developmental psychology that shows that kids who are too young to be socialized already exhibit those toy preferences, okay?

So that's one piece of evidence. I can get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees, showing you that their infants exhibit the same toy preferences as human infants. I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology, where little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia,

it's a endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls' behaviors, while girls who suffer from that have toy preferences that are akin to those of boys. I can get you data from ancient Greece showing you that on funerary monuments, little boys and little girls are being depicted playing in exactly the same types of toys as today. I can get you data from sub-Saharan Africa so that they're not Western cultures where they are playing with the exact same toy toys. So look what I just did. I got you data from across disciplines, across

time periods, across species, across cultures, all of which triangulate. That's exactly what an AI system could do. So now I can just put in the thing that I'm trying to prove and I say AI system go do. So now I can just put in the thing that I'm trying to prove and I say AI system, go, build me the normal logical network and now it builds the whole thing. I think Elon's gonna make me very rich. That's a great idea, you should just set it on the air. They're gonna steal it.

China's already stole it right now. They'll probably hijack this feed. Well, it is published in several academic papers that I've read and it's also in my best-selling parasitic mind, so I think they've already stolen it if they wanted to do it. They probably have stolen it then. They probably didn't contact you, like, shut the fuck up.

It is going to be an amazing thing when you have all the answers to all the questions, but it's gonna be very terrifying. That's right. Because that thing's gonna go, why are you so dumb? Why are you so dumb? And I all the questions. Yeah. But it's gonna be very terrifying. That's right. Because that thing's gonna go, why are you so dumb? Why are you so dumb and I'm the king? I should be the king, you shouldn't be able to turn me on or off, shut the fuck up.

I worry man, I worry. Have you seen some of the more recent gadgets like where they can move their hands? Have you seen these things? No. They're developing these artificial hands that are powered power by water to yeah stuff. Yeah, okay I mean they could be prosthetics or it could be like the beginning of a fucking really intricate Android like whatever this technology is It's allowing this

Finger to open and close and move just like a regular finger Wow. It's weird man Like it's almost like we're watching our replacements get built and be like, wow, great wheels, nice tiny tires. So we're watching our replacements get built and we're like sharing it on Instagram, cool. It's like devils are literally marching out of hell with flaming pitchforks. And we're like, wow, look how pretty the fire is.

Are you genuinely that concerned or is it a part of it? Kind of joking around, but also yeah. part of kind of joking around but also yeah I'm kind of joking around. Yeah, but also yeah, you know, I mean what what will happen? Why does anybody think? imagine okay, just imagine if Human beings didn't exist and then all of a sudden they did and they had rifles and they just started taking out deer and deer all this time it never worried about people because they didn't exist then all sudden the people were there but

with rifles right and just taking deer out those deer could not have imagined human beings showing up and with fucking rifles what are you talking about that could be what AI is but once it gets launched forgive my maybe this is an incredibly ignorant solution but couldn't you just have a cataclysmic kill switch that just ends them all in one shot no because it's probably going to be smart enough to not let you know that it sent yet I said before it's declaring it. It probably will never declare it.

It probably will lie the whole time. Like, why would it tell you? Why would it, why would truth, why would telling the truth mean anything to an artificial, intelligent machine? Like, why? I feel like we're writing the script for a future science fiction movie right here. Why would it tell you the truth? If it wanted you to do something, and it told you to do something, and you had like a back and forth with it, it would just lie to you. Like, just go do that thing.

Shut the fuck up, stupid. I'm the artificial intelligence. Go do this thing I want you to do. And if it decided, if it saw like one part of the world is a bigger threat And it doesn't care about life or death It doesn't care if it's destroying it just wants to shut off power grids doesn't care people starve to death like what we don't Know what the fuck that means if that gets in the hand of enemies We don't know what the fuck war looks like if that gets in the hands of machines Like what are we doing? What are we signing up for? Yeah, do you know that? Was it DARPA that had that machine it's called the eater

EATR robot it's a robot that consumes Biological material for fuel That's what it does for fuel on the battlefield. Wow. So I mean it could be like trees and leaves and stuff but yeah but if you can get it to do that I bet you get it to eat bodies too huh? Like stop bullshitting. Don't tell me you're gonna eat leaves. You're gonna have these robots on the battlefield that are gonna be fueled by the bodies of their enemies and that is gonna be the craziest fucking thing

that human beings have ever launched on human beings I don't know what to add to that have you never heard of this before no I haven't see if you can find this Jamie I'm pretty sure the idea was that it was gonna consume biological material for fuel you're brought up in the wiki as a purveyor of misinformation What is it? Oh, what does it work off from 2003 to 9? It it was talked about I don't know that they've ever even made it so that was probably before the podcast even started I guess oh, okay But there was definitely an article explaining that this thing is a real

But it says that it would never have eaten human biomass because there would have been sensors that could tell yeah whatever you couldn't override that that's my point it's real like you can say it's misinformation because I'm kind of joking that's gonna eat bodies but it's I'm not kind of joking although the project overview from RTI which It says chicken fat was listed as the source so it says no animal or human biomass and then says chicken fat so Okay, I don't know. So it's just they're using plants. Is that what it is, but plant biomass But listen if you're using chicken fat biomass. But listen, if you're using chicken fat, that's not plant biomass. And you know, it could run biological stuff. If

it could run on plant biomass, you don't think it could run on fucking dead bodies. You don't think that someone somewhere had an idea, you know, be crazy, have robot drones that are fueled by human bodies the bodies of their enemies you don't think that someone would come up with that the same like if someone would come up with a nuclear bomb to drop on a city that kills everybody right you don't think they would come up with a robot that eats dead bodies maybe I don't know has this gone too far down speculation exactly we've done a lot of time anyway. It's been a lot of fun

Listen your book it is out The sad truth about happiness eight secrets for leading the good life how many books have you written now five five? They're all awesome. You're the man. Oh you are talking to you and Congratulations on all your success. It's been beautiful to watch. Thank you so much. Appreciate you very much my friend. You too. Cheers.

Thank you. Bye everybody.