The Joe Rogan Experience - #342 - Christopher Ryan

Episode Date: March 25, 2013

Christopher Ryan, PhD is a psychologist, speaker, and author of New York Times bestseller Sex At Dawn.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. International man of mystery, world travel man, author extraordinaire. You have a broad range of experiences that you can draw upon, Mr. Chris Ryan. I do. I appreciate you very much coming back here again. Thanks, man.

It's an honor. Oh, please. It's an honor to have you back. Your book is amazing. If you haven't read it, I've been reading it over the past few months along with the new Steve Rinella book, Meat Eater. I throw you back and forth with this book. It's a great book, man.

There's so much interesting shit in it. It's such a fascinating sort of exposure about sexuality and evolution and how we sort of evolved and how we've got to this point where it's kind of a – it's gotten away from us and there's all this – I think Duncan Trussell said it best. He said that you exercise shame from people. You know what? I love that term. I told you I'm working on a new website using Squarespace. Yes. Which is not bullshit. I'm not saying that because they're your sponsor.

But we've got Chris Ryan and then under it says author, public speaker or something, shame exorcist. Seriously. I love that phrase. That book is, yeah, for a lot of people, it makes you go, oh, OK. That's where these fucked up thoughts are coming. I'm not fucked up. Everybody's – the system is fucked up. Oh, we're living in this crazy time of shame, time of oddly defined identities and roles that we're supposed to take on that seem very unnatural.

You know, and it's weird times. We live in weird times sexually. I think we do. You know, the Chinese thing, you know, may you live in interesting times, which is a curse. But I think we do. We do live in very interesting times. There's a quote we use in the book from the playwright Arthur Miller, who was married to Marilyn Monroe for a while. He said, an era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted. I love that quote. Its basic illusions have been exhausted. And I think we

live in a time where pretty much all our basic illusions are exhausted. Politics, nobody thinks there. The shit that's going on in Washington is anything other than back deal trading for whatever. Banking, nobody believes banking is for the good of the country anymore. It's like people have realized that everyone is on the take. The institutions are not respected and that includes marriage to a large extent. And so there's this struggle going on over marriage and monogamy and gay rights in terms of same-sex marriage. So I think we're in this war.

I mean there are so many things, diet. You're on the forefront of a lot of this sort of recalibrating what works, what's right, what actually has benefits as opposed to the bullshit that we're being fed all the time? And I think a lot of it's due to the internet probably that you can – if your message is strong enough, it doesn't matter who you are or who's backing you. You can reach people. So I think, yeah, I think we're in really interesting times. effect on our culture that the workforce the workplace brings and it's excuse me every day during the workplace at the workplace you want some of my black butt oh no good thanks that's a beer that's a beer at least it's black butte oh yeah b-u-t-t-e sir butte it's a delicious

porter ale i would like to have one of those can jim get one? Yeah, I drank some of that for the first time when I was, man, I want to say Chicago? I think I was in Chicago? Yeah. It was like the greatest beer I've ever had in my life. From Bend, Oregon. Yeah, what's the name of the company? Deschutes. Yeah, Deschutes Brewery.

Hey, how dare you? They should be a sponsor. Really? How about we just pump them be a sponsor. I mean, really. How about we just pump them up for free? For free. All right. Well, it's good beer. And that's from a guy who doesn't like porter much.

I was saying earlier, it's normally kind of heavy and sweet for me. But this is nice. Yeah, no, no, that's delicious. What were we talking about before we got off? Workplace. You were talking about the workplace. Thank you, sir. I really feel like because of the fact that you have to – when you're in an office all day, especially with men and women working together, there's this sort of professionalism that you have to project. There's this sort of fake way of communicating where you've completely eradicated anything sexual from the menu of conversation.

And even discussing it in the periphery, dancing around it with a joke can easily get you fired. You know about this dongle gate thing? Are you aware of this? No. I've heard reference to it, but I haven't looked into it. It's a fascinating story that has taken place over the last few days in the tech world. There was a woman, a self-professed feminist, a blogger woman. Sorry, folks.

I got a little phlegm. Jim, give me some tissues. I got to blow my nose. This woman was at a conference, and some men behind her made a joke about dongles. It was, you know, someone said dongle on stage. They essentially were like— What is a dongle? I don't know.

Some part of something. But what they were essentially doing was doing like a high-tech version of Beavis and Butthead. Like he said dongle. I wonder how big his dongle was. So these guys – I don that photo online and says, hey, these guys are violating the code of conduct for the seminar. These guys are on, you know, in your conference. They're making jokes about dongles. Not cool.

Right. Because these guys get fired. And one guy gets fired. He's got three kids and this woman writes this blog sort of justifying like the environment that you know that sort of makes cool and that the reason why she decided to come out is because there was a little girl on stage or a little girl in the room or whatever and she was thinking what what this little girl you know if i don't stand up and stop this what is she going to be exposed to?

Which is kind of grandiose when you're talking about dongles. I mean Jesus fucking Christ. But what's truly fascinating about this whole thing is first of all the response by the internet. Because the man was fired – don't put those guys online, dude. Why are we doing that? I mean there's no need to keep – yeah, I know. I mean I just don't think – they didn't ask those guys online, dude. Why are we doing that? I mean there's no need to keep – I'm just showing. Yeah, I know. I mean I just don't think – they didn't ask to be online. Those guys never asked to be – those photos were taken by this woman and turned into this big thing.

She has like an online media thing that she does already. So she has like a big presence, a lot of Twitter followers. And she just took a photo of these guys and just put them out in the world for no reason i mean they didn't ask for it and she says here's the guys that tell the dongle joke so one guy gets fired she writes this crazy blog and anonymous jumps in they're like what fuck you oh really they were, this is absolutely fucking preposterous. The way this woman's behaving is repulsive. And it just, they went off.

And so they threatened the company. And they said they were going to go after their clients. And they were going to denial of service attacks and whatever they were going to do. They're like, I don't know if they even directly threatened it or indirectly threatened it. But they're like, this is just the beginning. You've got to get rid of this chick. And they fired her immediately. Oh, I thought you meant the company that fired the guy.

Did they bring the guy back? I don't know if they brought the guy back. But really, the guy should get a job at a company that's not a bunch of fucking pussies. Because that's the most ridiculous shit ever. Good luck finding one, man. The word dongle is nothing. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. I haven't had a job since the 80s. so I'm not the guy that really, you know. Right. But I can't imagine pissing into a cup to have a job. I don't understand that. Drug tests. Yeah. Drug tests.

Insanity. Complete insanity. What the fuck does it matter if I smoked a joint two weeks ago and I come into work today? What the hell are we talking about? It's insane. Complete, total insanity. to work today. What the hell are we talking about? It's insane. Complete total insanity. And it's just this sort of design to get people moving in this direction of blind obedience. And that's what your employer would like for you.

Right. But by the way, I think that's another one of these basic illusions that's exhausted. We got Rand Paul coming out for legalizing drugs. I just saw the headline. So I think maybe we've turned a corner. It's gotten so crazy that Anonymous is standing up. That's great. I think the internet represents the real mind of the people today. And I think when a big movement like this sweeps across the internet, and this is a very minor one. Let's go with a major one. Let's go with WikiLeaks.

The overwhelming support of WikiLeaks by people online as opposed to how it's represented in the mainstream media is a big difference. Well, isn't it people online, it's like people 35 and under mostly? I don't think so anymore. No, I don't think that's applicable anymore. I think pretty much everybody's online. I think there's been, over the last decade, there's been this assimilation towards older and older folks and then the people who are 30 are now 40 and it's just – I think the ideas are too powerful and the method of distribution is too powerful. And now we're dealing with this ancient paradigm that doesn't really work with the amount of information that we have today. It's like this old car that we're trying to keep fixing and putting new tires on.

But it's a fucking Model T. It's a piece of shit. Worse than Cuba because Cuba's got at least cool old cars. Exactly. They really take care of well. Oh, beautiful. It's an amazing model of like recycling, true recycling and the unnecessary aspects of constantly getting new and improved things. A friend of mine wrote a book called Chez Chevrolet and Castro's Oldsmobile or something like that.

I mean his name is Richard Schweid. This guy is so interesting. interesting. He's published like seven books, one on chili peppers, one on cockroaches, one on, you know, life after death, one on Cuban cars. He just like eels. He's got a book on eels. He just like gets a hair up his ass and decides something's interesting and he'll just like, you know, run it down and write a book about it and then move on to something else. That's amazing. Yeah. What I was saying earlier before I got, before I got sidetracked, um, about the workplace is that the suppression of your true humanity in the workplace, your, your ability to be free and to be yourself and to be, to joke around and have fun. Uh, especially when there's intersex politics, when there's, you know, there's a cross

of men and women working together, there's this sort of like fakeness that goes on all day. And then there's this other level of fakeness that goes on when you're out in the nightlife time and you're trying to get laid. So there's that fakeness as well. And there's just such a small percentage of time that humans, men and women throughout the day interact with each other on a truly honest level you know so like it takes fucking decades to understand each other it takes decades as a man to under just try to wrap your head around the idea of wanting babies growing inside of you and wanting dicks and you know and being attracted to men just wrapping your head around that it's a very strange concept.

And because we bullshit each other all day at work, because we bullshit each other when we go out on dates or social events, we pretend to be someone more sophisticated or interesting than we truly are. I think that the amount of time it takes before you start understanding how people really are as opposed to these bizarre patterns that we keep following. You know, it seems – And you didn't even mention media. Yeah. Think of all the bullshit media pumps into us about each other, men and women.

You know, I have had a unique relationship with television and then I've been on a couple shows that went on a long time i was on news radio for five years and then i was on fear factor for six years right so when people say oh there's a conspiracy and the government's trying to dumb us down through television that's not what's happening what's happening is that's what you're buying right that's what they're selling because that's what you're buying and that's one of the reasons why it's gotten darker and weirder over the past few years is because you're on the internet now. And The Walking Dead could not have fucking existed a decade ago.

There's no way you could have that on television. I saw a dude get his leg hacked off with a hatchet. I mean, you see crazy shit. I couldn't believe what was on there. But the sheer violence and insanity of The Walking Dead is impossible without the internet. Right. And video games. Yes.

Video games, absolutely. These uncensored environments. But that information is there now. So they have to adjust and change things. But the reason why Fear Factor existed or CSI exists, it's not that the government is like trying to convince you if you make a mistake, we'll catch you. We can take your fingerprints from the air. You know,

like, no, no, no, no, no. It's just, that's what you want.

You want crime shows. You're buying crime shows. If you buy crime shows, well, cause you're scared. Cause you're like, what's happening in the world? Well,

oh, what if the bad guy? So you're living your life in these weird paranoid ideas through this artificial medium. Right. But no one is trying to brainwash you. You think they are, but it's really more a matter of this is what people actually buy. Yeah. And is it because that's what they've been sold forever?

Yeah, that too. Definitely that too. But there's a lot of dummies out there. There's a lot of dummies that just want to sit in front of that TV and watch someone go go to what's going to happen on law and order i'm gonna guess the bad guy's gonna lose because i'm in the final act in the final you know i agree i agree with you i although i do think that there is it's not brainwashing but i think who is it marshall mccluhan who said the medium is the message right so there's certain things that you sell that are easier to sell through TV. So you sell those, right?

And the structure, I mean, I'm writing this book now. It's Civilized to Death, it's called. And so I'm really like deep into this shit. But it's like there are institutions are organic beings. Companies are organic beings. Institutions are organic beings. Companies are organic beings. So they – you're right. They sell – they provide what sells because they need to eat.

They need to feed and grow. But I do think that there are structural – how can I say it? Like structural biases that divert or sort of focus the media in different ways. And I think internet is great because it's so dispersed, whereas TV is very, I'm selling to you. I don't hear a thing you say except through Nielsen ratings or some shit like that. Yeah, it's like they're getting smoke signals. They're not getting in conversation.

Right, whereas internet, it's like, wow, you've got clicks. You've got eyes. You can measure everything. It's interesting. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The idea of this is what we're going to offer you it doesn't exist on the internet the the choices are so vast that yeah and the the freedom that anybody like you have a podcast right yeah yeah tangentially speaking as you can tell it's my style perfect yeah me too yeah you're perfect for this podcast.

Anything along these lines, the YouTube videos that people have, the Young Turks, people have these video. My last episode was with the Young Turks. Yeah. See, that couldn't have existed. We talked about you. Yeah. They like you. I like them too.

It couldn't have existed without the YouTube possibility, the internet possibility, without that sort of a platform. And I think that's sort of overwhelming the old paradigm and it's slowly starting to erode. But I also feel that the workplace, like people having to bullshit all day is counterproductive to it. And it becomes a major part of your awake time programming. It's so American, too. Yes. I have to say in Spain, you know, I can't speak for Spain in general, but I've been there 20 years.

So, you know, I'm pretty well familiar with the culture. But it's like one of the things I love about Spain is that politically correct sort of, you know, men are the enemies of women and, you know, adolescent joking can get you fired from your job. That isn't happening. Now, women could have a legitimate point by saying, yeah, because women's status in Spain isn't as high as it is in, you know, there aren't legal protections and, you know, women get, you women get harassed in the street or whatever. And that's all true. So I don't mean to say Spain is across the board better.

But one thing I notice in Spain and I love about Spain is that women don't assume you're a rapist because you smile at them. They don't assume you've got bad intentions. In fact, they assume you probably have good intentions and you just find them attractive and they smile back and everybody keeps walking and there's no, it's like a win-win, you know, there's no assumption of victimization going on. And I think in America, there's this assumption, you know, that, that, you know, there's a little girl on stage and these guys are making a dumbass joke. Somehow that's connected and I got to expose this? I don't see that.

In Spain, you don't see that sort of shit. Well, the fury that people had was this. They weren't joking with her. They weren't. Yeah. They're joking amongst themselves in literally the most innocent language possible for describing a dick or alluding to a dick. Right. And that was enough for her to go, I've had enough.

There's a craziness to that. And someone made a video called Toxic Women and Stupid Men, and it's on YouTube, and it in a very intelligent way details why people that think like this are a real issue. And the men who allow them to get away with it without saying this is preposterous, they're a real issue too. Because there's a lot of white knights out there. There's a lot of really dumb, weak dudes that want to pretend that they're with the girls. They think like, you know, you're right.

These men are assholes. And they'll make videos about it. And what they're looking for is like feminine brownie points. They want feminists to look at them and say, yeah, you're one of us. And it's not necessarily that they don't actually think that way. A lot of people are like, you're wrong. I believe you do think like that. But I'm telling you that the motivation for anybody thinking like that is false.

You have a crazy, ridiculous way of looking at things. It's unbalanced. If you had no sex whatsoever, not male nor female, and you looked at that as two human beings, and one human being was fired because another human being made a joke about something that was being referenced on stage in a playful manner should that person be take sex out of it should that person be fired right and if you say yes you're a cunt right that's that's the reality of the situation you're you're a fucking toxic person that's a shitty way of looking at things and by the way i would stress that this woman did not want these guys to be fired she did not think that was her intent. She wanted them shut up.

And it's whatever it is. Maybe she's self-righteous. Maybe she likes to go off on tangents. I don't think she should be fired. I don't think he should be fired. I think it has nothing to do with whatever the fuck they do during the day. But I think it's fascinating when people are forced to behave in a certain way. Like you're locked into this sort of nonsense environment where you can't even talk about dongles.

Yeah. You know, there's an article on salon.com I think last week. I linked to it and it started this big firestorm on my Facebook page where a woman wrote about an experience she'd had. The first time she'd had sex. I think she was 15 or something and she was with a guy a couple of years older and she just – so she had a few – I read this. You read it. Yeah.

And so she was saying that wasn't rape. I made a bad decision. I had sex that I later regretted. It wasn't rape. And apparently like, whew, there's a huge firestorm around this. Yes, there is because there's the feminist movement right now. Yes, there is because there's the feminist movement right now. Then one of the ideas that they're pushing is the idea that is in place, I believe, in Sweden.

Whereas the you know where the the idea being that regret means that you can withdraw your consent. Which is where Julian Assange is being accused of rape. Even though the woman he supposedly raped went out with him again the next night. And had sex with him right before. He was being accused of – I don't want to speak out of school but I'm pretty sure it was called surprise sex. That was the idea. They were sleeping and they had sex again without a condom. Exactly. And she didn't want this or she was upset at this or whatever.

Obviously they were looking to get at him for something else. But that's about as obvious as you can get. That that one i mean that is just fucking oh it just so happens that it's the same guy oh you got no beef with him about leaking all that information that's cool because there's no law against that right is that what's going on yeah but the other shit you can you can lock them up in a fucking embassy manning what the fuck man they torture bradley manning you know they truly torture he's. Yeah. That guy was in solitary confinement for some insane hundreds and hundreds of days with no contact with another person. Yeah. Which they say literally can make you crazy.

Yeah, sure. And they would take his clothes off because they thought that he was a security risk. So he's cold and naked. Lights all night. Lights all night. Lights constantly. And for what? Because he did what really his patriotic duty led him to believe

that he should do right he should release information that he believes is contrary to the nature of the the contrary to the idea of what most people view of the military as as only good guys over there killing bad guys and contrary to the the law yes you know international and american law. Yeah. What he did was what the New York Times is supposed to do. Right. What Daniel Ellsberg did. Yeah.

So I think the view of that, that's getting back to the internet thing, on the internet, that's pretty, I mean, amongst the people that I communicate with, that's pretty much unanimous. I mean, pretty much everybody is like, well, at the very least, this exposes a real issue that should be dealt with in the military. But you don't hear that from mainstream media. From mainstream media, they have eliminated that guy from the discussion.

You never hear him being talked about. See, that's what I was saying earlier. Like the structure of the institution dictates what information can go through there. So because of the corporate interest, because GE owns NBC or whatever, and GE also makes the fucking missiles and the helicopters and the rest of it, they're not going to be able to take that perspective because they're not independent. That's bullshit, right? As some people like the young turks come along they really become archaic they don't make any sense anymore because the young turks will tell you you know they're going to tell you what they believe 100 what that guy believes what they

might not be right they might be i mean he was off about breitbart about with the whole andrew wiener thing he made fun of breitbart for releasing that jank yeah saying hot jank. Yeah, saying he's an idiot for doing it. And it turned out to be true. Right. But you know that that's him. That's him. Right. You know what I mean?

He's talking straight to the camera. So maybe he doesn't have the correct information at the time. But what he's telling you, it's not being pushed by producers. It's not being pushed by a network. It's not being pushed by a corporate entity behind the network. You can't say that about the news that we've come to accept as the mainstream news, whether it's CNN or Fox. There's no individual voice.

There's no individual point of view. And, you know, especially being occasionally you have people give editorials, but those editorials are just Jesus Christ. They're like cartoonish. They're cartoonish and nonsensical, especially like Fox News is going to be about the Democrats. Obama's fucking up and returning to socialism. It's going to be so obvious. You don't even have to say it.

Just show me what color flag are you holding up. You got a red flag or a blue flag? I got your message. Just show me a red. Show me a flash of red. And that idea is basically just as good as whatever the fuck comes out of your mouth. Yeah. You're going to have to have me back a third time because we're never going to talk about this.

No, we will though, man. We will. We will. But I really wanted to have you on after this thing, this dongle gate broke out because I think one of the things that your book really highlights is the weirdness in which women are not supposed to accept their sexuality or accept the fact that they get horny or broadcast it in any way or even you know acknowledge it and that if there's a sexual joke going on where a man even if he doesn't even involve that woman makes some sort of a sexual joke that somehow that woman is a victim because she doesn't want to have anything to do with sex. Right.

She doesn't want to have anything to do with either their advances or jokes about it. It's a very Victorian image. You know, the Victorian era, you only had sex with your wife in order to have babies. Right. You had sex to have sex with courtesans, with prostitutes, with, you know, the housemaid, with whatever. You didn't fuck your wife for fun or for pleasure. Was that across the board?

They agreed to? Upper class Victorian British society across the board. In France and in other European societies, there was a different vibe. But that's the society Darwin came out of, right? And as we try to explain in the book, that's the mentality that informs our understanding and the scientific view of human sexual evolution because Darwin was an uptight guy. He was great. He was a genius. He was a cool guy. But he was super repressed sexually.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah. He never had sex ever, right? Isn't that the case? Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Only with his wife who was his first cousin from the Wedgwood family, which the Wedgwood China fortune, you know, they still they're still making China and England. And she was 30. I think he was 29. And his brother married. I confused it with Newton. Right. Newton was a. Yeah. Newton was asexual. Right. Yeah. Didn't in during the excuse me, during the Victorian era, didn't they cover up like legs of pianos? Right, and tables and chairs. Are you serious? Yes.

Oh, yeah, because it would excite people. Yes. Oh, my god. It's so amazing. It's like the burqa now. Oh, it's crazier than the burqa. But you know what's cool about the burqa? I'm doing this – I'm pitching this TV show, which seems like it's going to get picked up by the way

and one of the episodes is about is based on the story I heard from a woman who worked at Victoria's Secret in London and she told me that most of the lingerie they sold was to

very wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti women who came in and would just like buy out the store because they wear sexy lingerie under their burkas. Yeah, but it's under that stupid tent. But they feel sexy. Yeah, they do. I mean it's got to be compensating for the fact that they're forced to wear that stupid outfit. I don't think there's anything good about that outfit.

I mean the only thing good about it is if you're the man. Like, man, nobody gets a look at this shit. This is mine. I'm going into the tent. It's just what's offensive is not the religious connection to it, but the suppression, the idea that a woman has to wear that. Right. It's the most suppressing thing ever. You're covering everything about your identity.

Right. Especially it fucks up a girl if she's in a shit relationship and she's looking for another dude she's looking for a little escape plan you know that guy's know what the fuck he's getting into right she's getting abused and nobody can see her her bruises marks that's another way yeah that's another point yeah anyway i jumped off what were we talking about I don't know. Aren't you the host? Barkers and shit. Before that. What the hell was it? Oh, man. I'm not even stoned.

We were just talking about the suppression of sexuality that women don't feel like. Oh, Victorians and Darwin and all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we originally pitched this book, it was called What Darwin Didn't Know About Sex. book it was called what darwin didn't know about sex and the idea was to write a biography of darwin's sex life and then like tie that into our modern misconceptions of sexuality because he went and he had lots of opportunity right he went on the beagle all down around south america across the south pacific they stopped in tahiti which is sexual paradise especially in the 19th century it

was it was sexual paradise that's why the mutiny on the bounty happened. Because the bounty, you've seen the movie, right? The Marlon Brando. No, I haven't. I never saw that movie. Well, it's this. So the bounty, I guess, was Captain, I don't remember what his name was, Captain something Flesher or something like that. But anyway, it was a British whaling ship, I think, or mapping ship maybe.

But anyway, it stopped in Tahiti to spend about a month or two months there to, like, you know, get fresh water and fix the ship and do all this stuff. Meanwhile, the dudes went down and they were on the island. And there's a very relaxed sexual situation in Tahiti and in many parts of the world. situation in Tahiti and in many parts of the world. And so these repressed British sailors who hadn't seen a woman in God knows how long, suddenly there are all these beautiful women around who are happy to have sex with them just for fun. And so these guys are getting laid left and right. And then the badass captain says, all right, everybody back on the ship. We're going back to sea. They get about four hours out to sea and there's a mutiny because the dudes are like, fuck this. I don't want to go back to England.

We're going back to Tahiti, man. So that's what they did. So this is this famous case because there was like lots of nice pussy in Tahiti. You mean nice women. When you say pussy, you're objectifying women. You're breaking them down to one body part. You're right. Nice gash.

I know what you're – hey, that's even worse. I know your intentions are pure, sure. But for our women friends out there, that would be the white knight take on it. Well done. Calling them by their sexual organs is really not cool, man. Well, last night I was at a party and a woman said said something said some guy was a real dick and I and everyone laughed and I said that's funny if I said someone was a cunt would be sort of nasty right and like so we got into this whole conversation about how come one body

parts offensive and the other isn't well cunt is like if she called him a cock that guy's a cock that might even that is still, depending on how the guy felt about the girl. If he thought she thought he was the shit, that would be a problem. That would be devastating. A couple weeks ago I gave a TED Talk, talking about this corporate environment. And Ted is wonderful. I think you had a guest. You had a guy who was there.

Eddie Huang. Yeah, exactly. And Graham Hancock, I think you had a guest. You had a guy who was there. Eddie Huang. Yeah, exactly. And Graham Hancock who also has had issues with him recently. Graham Hancock has had a very interesting situation and Sheldrake. By the way, Rupert Sheldrake is good friends with Stanley Krippner who you're going to be interviewing Saturday. Saturday. Yeah. He probably knows Hancock as well.

I don't know. All those old hippies stick together. Yeah, yeah. Intellectual, freaky guys. All those old hippies stick together. Yeah, yeah, intellectual, freaky guys. But anyway, so I've got this presentation, and when I did the rehearsal, one of the slides in the presentation that I've used all over and, you know, colleges all over and stuff,

it's got, I'm talking about testicular ratio and how that explains certain things about our ancestors. So I've got in one corner there's a gorilla lying on his back in the sun, and there's like nothing. He's got no balls at all. They're like the size of kidney beans. They're inside his abdomen, so you don't see anything. On the other corner, there's a bonobo who's got balls the size of chicken eggs. And in the middle, there's a picture of this buddy of mine in a Speedo sitting on a hammock and he's got pretty big balls. And so it says like gorilla, bonobo, and over my friend it says Italian, right?

And that always gets a huge laugh when I do that. I did this at TED and they were like, okay, you know, after the rehearsal, they were like, oh, that was really good. That's great. Except that one slide. And they thought Italians would be offended. Oh, my God. And I was saying, you tell that Italian he's got big balls.

That's a compliment. Little do they know they have big balls because the Italian women are so promiscuous. You read the book. Yes. Devastating. Devastating to the Italian mentality. Exactly. Damn, I can't believe it.

Maybe that's the part that's insulting. The size of your package is directly proportionate to how slutty the girls around you are. Yeah. I shouldn't say slutty. And that was another fascinating aspect of your book that I learned the origins of the word promiscuous. That everybody sort of assumes that promiscuous – when you say girls promisciscuous that she just sleeps with strangers and runs around she's got loose morals that's not the root of the word the root of the word is mixed meaning she has sex with more than one person or she has relations with more than one person and generally speaking probably knew those people her entire life because the the real origins of these

sort of orgiastic tribal societies of that there's only 50 of them they're living together in the woods and they knew each other from the time they were born and they they had sex with each other they had sexual relationships with more than one person and our ideas of you know monogamy monogamy it's great if it works for you if it works for you in 2013 and the corporate world and the legal world is great. But if you look at 50 people living alone in the woods, staying bonded together, the best way for everybody to truly love each other is everybody fucks everybody. I mean you really are like monkey people. I mean you're monkey people with more advanced genetics and more advanced tools and shit. But you're essentially living not much different than you know than an animal with tools you know you're gyms yeah i mean

that's how people at the dawn of time lived yeah those people it would benefit them to be sexually engaged each other it would benefit them to be polyamorous it would benefit them to have love spread out, deep intense love with a bunch of tribal members. Yeah, yeah. No question. In fact, when I was – I had done all this research on tribal people and their really interesting rituals that are – seem designed to make sure that people don't break down into nuclear families, right? They're designed to make sure, even though you and this woman really like being together and, you know,

your hammocks are next to each other and you spend most of your time together, that's great. And we're not saying that there was no pair bonding, right, in prehistory. But all these cultures seem to have these rituals to make sure that you and your woman both have sex with other people right so like there are tattooing ceremonies where everybody has sex and it's prohibited to have sex with your normal partner whoa or where what wacky fucking culture is this it's in the amazon there are lots of the men in the south pacific that's what happens when you don't have the internet. You start getting crazy.

Yeah. That's one asshole's idea. You know, it's one guy. Listen, I'm going to fuck your wife. You're going to fuck my wife. I don't want to fuck your wife, dude. Come on. I'm going to make it a law.

Make it a law. Anytime you have to make it a law, that's fucking silly. I mean, their social engineering is no better than ours. Just go do what you want to do. There's this other society, it's the Kulina. Don Pollock was the anthropologist who lived with them for 20 years. He talks about this ritual.

I don't know how to pronounce it, but it translates to the order to get meat. And the women wake up in the morning and they get together and they say, OK, let's do this thing today. So they all start singing. And they'll go around the village singing the song that translates to you guys are lazy. We don't get enough meat. When are you going to give us some meat?

We want meat. So they're singing this. And I asked him, does meat have a double meaning? And he said, yeah, definitely. It's like same as go hunting, but also give us some dick. Right. So while they're singing the song, they go around and the women will beat on the post that's holding the guy's hammock. And that means if you go hunting today and you bring back some meat, I'll sleep with you tonight. So it's like a motivation to, you know, get out of your hammock and go hunting, but you can't hit the post of your normal partner. It has to be someone else. Right. So then the men can, if they don't, like, if you don't want to have sex with a woman who hit your post, you can say, Oh, my stomach today,

you know, whatever. And I'm feeling well, you don't have to do it but so the guys who get up they'll like get up and be all oh you know grumbly and pissed off and then they they'll go leave the village together but this area they hunt mostly monkeys and so they hunt independently right because their monkeys are spread out so but before they split up to go hunting they'll agree to meet at this certain point before they go into the village or the camp or whatever. So they'll go out. Some of them will get a monkey. Some won't. They meet back at this place and they cut up the monkey so that everybody has a piece

of meat going back into the village. So everybody gets laid, right? So it's like pretty clearly this is all about mixing it up. And it's not just like for fun because there's nothing else to do. It's also to mitigate the risk of conflict, right? Because if you get possessive about other people and their sexuality, you're going to have lots of conflicts. And conflict among this small social group, as you say, it's 50 to 150 maximum, right? Because of Dunbar's number, which we can get into

if you want, but we can be pretty sure that the groups were never more than 150 individuals. So the worst thing that can happen is you get schisms within that group because you're all depending on each other. You know, some people are better hunters than others. Some people are better at cooking or making bows and arrow sheds and all this kind of stuff. Is that the origin of Dunbar's number? Is that why we only have room in our head for supposedly like 150 close relationships? Yeah. Dunbar is a biologist at either Cambridge or Oxford.

I don't remember which. But he was looking at the brain size of different primates. And he found that he could predict the social – the group of the social – size of the social group of any primate by looking at its neocortex. And so when he looked at humans and made that calculation, he said, OK, it should be about 150. And then they looked at the anthropological record and they found, yeah, interesting. When the social groups grew to more than 150, they split. They tend to split into other groups, not acrimoniously just because of this. So we've sort of developed a need for a certain amount of space. Yeah.

It's like that's as many people as we can keep track of. And because we didn't encounter large groups, that was adequate for the time. And it takes a long fucking time for the human genetics to adjust to the new environment, which is very odd. But it made sense for a million years. For a million years, it totally made sense until the last few hundred. And then things just have gotten so strange that the human genetics are essentially the same as those people that are living in the Amazon.

Yeah. I mean, there have been some changes. There's a great book called The 10,000-Year Explosion that talks about the genetic changes that have happened since agriculture. What are the most significant ones? Well, eye color, skin color, hair color. There were no blue-eyed people 10,000 years ago. How do they know that? DNA, I guess.

Wow. Wow. They've got like 10,000-year-old people DNA, like that old dude that fell in the Iceman. Yeah. Fell in the glacier. Itsy. Itsy, yeah. If you haven't heard of that story, it's an unbelievably amazing story because it's such a rare find.

This guy died and he fell in a crevice and the glacier went over him and didn't wipe him out. And that's really rare. Most things, the glaciers were like a mile high plus sometimes. And as they moved across Europe and across North America, across everywhere in the world, I mean at one point in time there's glaciers, right? Well, except for the equatorial region. Except for the equator, right? What they would do is just completely erase everything that's in front of them.

Just houses, trees, just crush everything. Rivers, valleys. Mile high, crush it all. So anything that died back then that got crushed by this slow-moving glacier, we have nothing. We have no evidence of it. That's – you know, I've got a book idea that relates to this. That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about the glaciers erasing stuff like that.

What I thought – the book idea is – you remember how Rumsfeld going into Iraq said there are the known knowns and the known unknowns and the unknown – you remember that whole thing? I don't remember that. He gave his press conference and somebody was talking about predicting what was going to happen. of his press conference and somebody was you know talking about predicting what was going to happen and he said there are the known knowns the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns so the things you know you know things you know you don't know and the things you don't know that you don't know whoa all right it's kind of an interesting concept shitty idea to go to war with that exactly so what i was thinking is write a book about the known unknowns, the things we know we don't know but that we ignore. Like, for example, in anthropology, archaeology, you're talking about the glaciers wiping out whatever was there, which is absolutely – I mean they didn't just wipe out houses.

They would wipe out the valley. Like it's gone. Flat, yeah. So it's pretty complete, you know. But the other was like one, you know, people left Africa, the current understanding is about 70,000 years ago and spread out around, or 40,000 years ago. 70,000 years ago was the Toba eruption,

which almost wiped out our species. There were genetic tests show that there were about 3,000 years ago was the Toba eruption, which almost wiped out our species. Genetic tests show that there were about 3,000 couples, reproducing couples, that have the genetic line has continued. So there was this huge bottleneck because the Lake Toba, what is now Lake Toba in Sumatra, was this eruption that triggered an immediate ice age and like a feat of ash all over Asia and just like killed everything and triggered winter. It was really nasty. But anyway, about 40,000 years ago, our ancestors left Africa, the out of Africa, you know, event. And they spread out around the world, but they mostly followed the coastline, right? Which you would, right? Because that's where like food's washing up and there's shellfish and you've got good sight lines.

So those bears and leopards and shit, you'll see them coming, right? You can run into the water to get away from them and, you know, the sort of the water that's not too deep. You don't have sharks, but it's deep enough to keep the leopards away, right? Right, right. So that's – and it's easier to walk on the beach, right? So that was the root of the huge to walk on the beach, right? So that's, that was the root of the huge exodus that went around the world. But sea levels were about 300 feet lower then. So the stuff they're finding, you know, the whatever, the stone tools or the

remains that they're finding from 30, 40,000 years ago, those weren't typical at all. The typical people were down on the beach. So those must have been hunting parties or people who were exiled or whatever. But they weren't at all typical. That's interesting. So I bet we're missing a lot of the fossils and the little bits of evidence of those people that lived on the beach, which was the majority of the people. And that's the stuff that's representative. lived on the beach, which was the majority of the people.

And that's the stuff that's representative. So it's pretty weird to build your image of a society based on evidence that you know is extraordinary. Yeah. But that's what we do because that's all we got. I can remember really clearly being in college thinking about human history. I don't remember what the subject of the class was. But then I remember being in class and just getting an idea just for the first time and very roughly of how little we know about just what the fuck actually happened. And I'm reading about – I was reading about Custer's Last Stand and the account of the Indians account and the Survivors account. And I'm trying to piece it all together.

I'm like, how crazy is it? This is really difficult to piece this together in my head. But today I can watch September 11 happen. I can watch a plane hit the tower. September 11 happen I can watch a plane hit the tower I can like the the way we have recorded things today is so vastly more intricate that when I look at what I know of you know JFK getting shot what I know of seeing troops in Vietnam like this history that is you know that I think of when you look at how little we know about 10,000 years years ago 30 000 years ago 40

000 years ago and then the idea that the only way you find things is if people died in like a volcano or a mudslide because you got to get a fossil or fell into a peat bog yeah yeah it's like how many people fall into peat bogs yeah how much you know not enough fucking crazy what if all the smart people just rotted in the ground i'm not going to this fucking peat bogs yeah how much you know not enough fucking crazy what if all the smart people just rotted in the ground i'm not going to this fucking peat bog there's a whole race of super intelligent people that never went into peat bogs ever you know the the first neanderthal remains that were found um were like hunched over and sort of deformed. And so for a long time, the image of a Neanderthal was this deformed crazy. Turns out that was like a really diseased individual.

Right. It wasn't a typical Neanderthal. Wasn't it? It's, isn't it typical though to find them very damaged? Oh yeah. Especially their spines. And like there,

there's a lot of times they're really fucked up. A lot of, yeah. A lot of, um, hunting accidents and also like apparently a lot of wear and tear on the teeth and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

I would imagine. Yeah. Neanderthals. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. It's just, it's really strange. I've often said that human beings today, it's almost like we're waking up in the middle of history.

human beings today, it's almost like we're waking up in the middle of history. As a person, as an individual, I've felt that way sometimes watching a documentary or reading a book about something or trying to imagine what it would have been like several hundred years ago. It's like all this has happened already and it's all real clear. You can sort of piece it together and go, and then we got here. It's like we woke up. We woke up and go, where are we? Where are we? We're on Earth. Okay. How did we get to Earth?

Well, this is what we've calculated. And they lay out a piece of paper. Okay, Earth is near the sun, and the sun is surrounded by these other planets. There's another Earth? Maybe. Probably. Most likely. Actually, it's infinite, so every possibility will exist infinite numbers of times.

That's the real infinite. So you're like, okay, what? What the fuck are you talking about? And then someone goes, hey, man, I figured some shit out. It's called quantum theory. So you're like, okay, what? What the fuck are you talking about? And then someone goes, hey, man, I figured some shit out. It's called quantum theory. And you're like, what the fuck are you saying? And then, dude, there's gorillas. You go to the jungle.

They found fucking gorillas. They're big. They're black. They're sort of human-like. Get the fuck out of here. I'm telling you, there's monsters out there. Like, all that was, that's the 1800s. I mean, they didn't, the Western world didn't know the existence of gorillas until the 1800s.

So it's kind of fascinating when you really think of like where we are right now and how much we know about how we got here. And they didn't know about bonobos until the 1970s. Wow. Or really start studying them and they thought they were just a subspecies of chimp. They called them pygmy chimps. It turns out they're so completely different from chimps that they've forced us to completely reevaluate the primate origins of human beings. Yeah. It really threw a monkey wrench in the whole explanation of why we're so warring and horrible and violent.

I didn't mean to do that. I swear to God. No pun intended. But for folks who don't know, bonobos are like super sexual. They solve everything with sex. And the only sex they don't have is the mother doesn't have sex with the son. Man, you did

your homework. No, I've just been fascinated by monkeys my whole life. Apes. Chimps, sorry. Mostly chimps, but other apes as well. But yeah, apes. I know monkey sounds cooler though. Monkeys have transgender. Monkeys have tails. You're right.

Monkey balls is such a good phrase. I mean I use it all the time even though I'm always talking about ape balls. But ape ball just doesn't ring. Yeah. That's why one of my comedy specials was talking monkeys in space. Because talking apes in space just didn't – it's missing something. In Spanish, there's no word for ape actually. Really?

Yeah, which makes things complicated in translating our book to Spanish. So is it just primates? Yeah. Various primates. Simians. Simian. That's another good one. Yeah.

Yeah, the monkey wrench that was thrown in though to get back to the bonobos was bonobos are not violent. They don't kill other bonobos. Then they just fuck all the time. It's weird. Frans de Waal, the great Dutch primatologist who's responsible for bringing bonobos to public light to a large extent, he said chimps use violence to get sex. Bonobos use sex to avoid violence. And bonobos are very interesting. And as you know, so people understand the chimps and bonobos are our two closest primate relatives by far.

And in fact, we're more closely related to them than they are to any other primate. So if you go to a zoo and you're looking at a chimp cage, that chimp shares more DNA with you than he does with a gorilla or an orangutan or anything, right? Yeah. So in fact Jared Diamond wrote a book called The Third Chimpanzee where he argued that humans, chimps and bonobos are basically three subspecies of chimpanzee. We're so closely related. We're more closely related to them than an Indian elephant is to an African elephant, right?

We're like super close in terms of DNA. But they're very close to each other. So I think of it as like if I've got twin brothers, they're closest to each other but after each other comes me and I'm equally related to each of them. So the chimp, as you say, is kind of badass, kind of very male-dominated, very hierarchical, kind of conflictive, can be really nasty, rip people's faces off in Connecticut. But the bonobo, in 50 years of observation in the wild and in captivity, no one has ever

seen a bonobo kill or rape another bonobo. They don't have to rape. They just fuck. They don't do it. If you want to not get raped, just give it up. Everywhere you look. That's ridiculous. They don't do it. If you want to not get raped, just give it up. Everywhere you look. That's ridiculous. Yeah.

We can never live like them. I'd just like to say I do not agree with that. I'm just saying in the animal world, that's what they do, right? I mean that's why they never kill a rape. You know, rape is very interesting when you're talking about animals. Like a lot of people say that orangutan sex is rape because it's the male chases the female through the treetops and she's screaming and apparently trying to get away. Doesn't dolphins rape? There is indication of dolphin rape.

Dolphins are also involved in mass genocide, infanticide rather. They kill baby dolphins. They kill them to get the females to breed. That's typical of a lot of mammals. Lions do that. Bears do that. Wolves do that. When there's an alpha male, gorillas, when there's an alpha male and he takes over, often he'll kill that. Or if there's a coalition, they'll kill the babies to get the women back into estrus. That's brutal.

In fact, that's one of the theories. Sarah Hurdy, who's written widely, she's a very well-known primatologist, anthropologist. One of the theories is that the reason that females are promiscuous in some primate species is to confuse paternity so that males won't be tempted to kill babies in order to get women back into – females back into estrus. And that's the current thinking on dolphins as well. Oh, really? Yeah. Dolphin females are known to be like the sluts of the ocean.

They have sex with as many guys as possible. So the guy comes over and goes, maybe my kids. Yeah. Or they have that bond with that person. What do they establish as the main reason why chimpanzees and bonobos, though so genetically similar, are so different behaviorally? That's a really good question. There's no perfect theory. The best-known theory is that the chimps and bonobos were the same species and there was a change in the Congo, the root of the Congo River, I think about five million years ago,

and that's been verified. And so one population got isolated on the south side of the Congo and the other on the north, and the ones on the south became bonobos. The ones on the north became chimps. And the idea, and this is Richard Wrangham at Harvard proposed this idea, is that the chimps on the North were competing with gorillas for some of the same food sources, whereas there are no gorillas south of Congo. So the bonobos weren't competing for those food sources. So they didn't have to get gangster. Right. But the problem with that theory is that it basically dismisses the assumptions of Darwinian evolution based on Malthus, which is that any population will quickly grow to the point where the food resources are saturated. And so you get competition between individuals for whatever's there, right? He seems to be saying the population of bonobos never grew to the point where they were competing

for food, therefore they never had to get competitive. If that's true, that's a radical statement. It happens to be a statement I agree with. I've made the same statement about early humans. I'm saying, hey, early humans were like these pythons that are introduced into the Everglades. They're like, whoa, there's nothing else here competing for this niche. Well, it kind of makes sense if you really think about it in terms of how we

look at socialism, because what is the number one complaint from manly men about socialism? It's going to make us soft. You're going to have a bunch of fucking pussies. You're going to have a bunch of socialists out there. That's the idea. The idea is socialists out there. Yeah, that's the idea. The idea is to soften everybody the fuck up, to reduce the need of competition. And to a lot of people, especially people that have adopted sort of advantageous positions, they look at that as like, hey, fucking pussies, you got to earn it.

Socialism is... And then the idea sort of makes sense if you look at the bonobo community. Right. Right. Yeah. They didn't have competition, so everybody just chilled out and they developed a style of being that's more chilled out. Right. Right. And there's a great story.

I'll tell you, a guy you should interview. I think I mentioned him last time. Robert Sapolsky. Yes, I tried. I'm trying. He's in the middle of teaching, though. Oh, OK. So you've been in touch with him.

He's such a smart dude. I'll fly that guy out for sure. I learned everything about toxoplasma, which this fucking podcast has turned to death. They got so tired of me talking about toxoplasma. Do you tell the same story sometimes? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, yeah. I get tweets from people like, dude, love your podcast, but you told that story three times.

How do you keep track? Well, it's really hard when you have a guest if the guest is not aware of the information because i i don't want to like write it down and say okay when the podcast is over i gotta tell you about crazy fucking parasite that changes the way you behave right um so sometimes if it's a new guest and they don't know about it i kind of i'm sort of forced to i try to give them the cliff notes version of it. I know about it. Sapolsky had an amazing video where he detailed and even went into that when he was a med student, they would find cadavers, like guys who died on motorcycles. And there was a disproportionate amount of them that tested positive for toxoplasma. Risk takers. Yes, risk takers. And that doesn't cause – it's not an effect. It's just a –

Correlation. Correlation, yeah. And that it's just you're dealing with people that live in impoverished areas. People in impoverished areas have higher incidence of feral cats. Higher incidence of feral cats is more likely toxoplasma. Right. That they're also more desperate and maybe more invested in soccer and more aggressive in their approach because it means so much to them because it's a way out. Much like impoverished people in America, sometimes they make some of the greatest athletic stories

or someone who came from nothing and never wanted to go back to that again and had so much drive. So I don't know if they can absolutely connect the two of them together, but it is a fascinating theory. Talking about taking risks uh as i've gotten older i've developed this concept i call the the fuck it list did we talk about this no no so the you know the bucket list is stuff you want to do before you die right right but like i turned 51 a couple weeks ago and i'm at this stage now where i've got a fuck it list where things i used to think i wanted to do before i die and now I'm like, yeah, fuck it. Like what?

Bungee jumping. No, no, no. Fuck it. That's definitely on the fuck it list. Yeah. I'll show you a video where a guy bungee jumps and his cord was not long enough. So he slams off the ground in agony and then with his broken body. Yeah, his cord is too long. With his broken body, slams off the ground again.

Yeah. And it does it like several times. He's got like a helmet camera on, and the screams that he makes are horrific. Oh, he didn't die? No, he lived. Oh. Because it slowed him down a little bit, but I mean, it just broke him. And then spring up in the air, and then smash back down again. I mean, I don't know if he lived after the video but he's alive during the video

and it'll cure you of any ideas of bungee jumping i hope that wasn't on tosh.0 he probably covered it he's probably got a fucking 10 minutes in his act about it sandal silly yeah yeah he's covered everything fucked up that's ever been released on the internet he's over there with the young turks he's in the same building oh is he yeah i i did his show with uh Stano recently. We went and we did this thing where there was a guy who was a lifelong virgin and we were trying to give him advice on how to get laid. But that fuck it list, that's a good one for the fuck it list.

Fuck it list, bungee jumping. What else? Skydiving? I could be convinced to skydive if it was with some friends. Fuck no. Tell them. Tell them the story. My dad was – this girl that my dad worked with skydived all the time yeah and every you know she always tried to get

him to do it so finally he was going to do it and then like a week before he was supposed to do it uh she jumped and her uh chute didn't open and then the reserve chute started tangling with the other shooter and she died so it's like my dad was supposed to do it like the following week or something all right we can add that to the fuck yeah fuck it that's all and she did it she was a pro it was just you know a bad shoot i did uh para i always forget parasailing paragliding what's the difference parasailing is behind a boat yes yeah no i did paragliding jumping off a mountain oh my god and i did this in india i took yeah i know it was really dumb but cheap it was cheap i bet it was so's your life it was and jumping off a mountain. Oh, my God. And I did this in India. Yeah, I know. It was really dumb, but cheap.

It was cheap. I bet it was. So was your life. It was in Goa. Wow. And there's this German guy on the beach where I was staying, this hippie beach in Goa called Arambol. Where's Goa?

Goa is just below Mumbai in India. It's on the west coast of India. And it's like this legendary hippie place. Really? Since the 60s, hippies have been going there to chill out on these amazing beaches and smoke ash and do yoga and shit. So I was there 10 years ago or something. And we were there for two weeks.

No, two months on this beach. I didn't wear shoes for two months. It was just so great. And so I was looking for stuff to do. And there was this German guy, Uwe, who was teaching. You know, he'd do these classes. And it was like for 10 jumps, 100 bucks or something. So I signed up.

And you do the first day theory. And you learn some weird shit. Like there are these cloud formations that will suck you up into them. And when you're like in the cloud, you don't know what's up and what's down. Oh, no. So there are all these things. It's like instrument control. You have to like – even if you think you're falling upward, you have to pull the shit and fall.

And it's like all this weird, horrible stuff. What is the cloud formation that sucks you up? What's that all about? I don't remember. I just remember like I will not go near those clouds. Like the Wizard of Oz type of situation? It was some particular cloud formation

that has like a really strong updraft. It's like, you know, what's it called on the beach where you get sucked out to ocean? The undertow. Like you have to go against it. I mean, against it 90 degree angle. Not try to get out of it.

Like you don't swim against the undertow. You swim across the undertow. Right. Same thing in this case because you get sucked up. Your body freezes and then they'll find you like far, far away. Frozen, solid. Like Itsy the Iceman. Like Itsy the Iceman.

Yeah, we didn't finish the Itsy the Iceman story. The reason why this guy didn't get smushed is because he, like, fell into the bottom of this crevice and got covered and turned into, like, essentially, like – Frozen dinner. Yeah, and a mummy. Yeah. A frozen mummy. Yeah. So if people are like, what the fuck? He never finished that story.

Do you know Brad Pitt has a tattoo of Itsy on his arm? Does he really? Yeah, he's really into Itsy. That's fascinating. Yeah. Why? I guess he's just super into Itsy no no maybe okay we'd have to ask brad pitt you've got a better chance of getting him on the phone than i do right i don't think he talked to me after all the shit i've talked about his perfume ads his new movie looks badass world war z

yeah maybe those perfume ads fucking do it for me though have you seen them no might be the douchiest commercial the world has ever known next to steven dorf's electronic cigarette commercial they're right there like what he needs the money well you know the only thing that i leave for him is maybe he puts that money to use in some positive way he's very active i know there's a lot of a lot of stuff both in america and abroad so it could be that you know they were gonna donate a shitload of money to something and he did it but it's chanel number five it's like such a dorky but it's good to bring this up anyway because i wanted to talk to you about perfume because it's fucking hilarious where it all came from oh oh yeah

cover the stink this is not they remade the commercial using kim jong kim jong il oh no no put the actual no no put the actual one man put the actual i don't want to see this you gotta you gotta see his stupid face while he's doing it uh yeah what's ridiculous it's one of the most ridiculous commercials of all time because it's a guy who's a fucking multi multi millionaire that you know doesn't wear this stupid stinky shit his wife has as much money as he does yeah and he's doing a chanel number five commercial you like right somebody has videos of him sucking a million cocks or something that's how they did it there's something or they you know they promise to cure aids this is it is it. But we go on.

The world turns and we turn with it. The world turns and we turn with it. Plans disappear. Dreams take over. But wherever I go, there you are. My luck, my fate, my fortune chanel number five that's a god that's a fucking goddamn saturday night live sketch okay wow that does seem like a parody of a commercial starring it also seems like a parody of tree of life did you see that

yes no i didn't no that's the Tom Hanks one, right? No, no. Which one is Tree of Life? It's with Brad Pitt. It's directed by the guy who did the – he's a very interesting director. He does like one movie every ten years or something. I can't remember his name right now. This is not the Interconnected Lives.

Oh, no. That's the Atlas, the Cloud Atlas. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. No, this is like – it is really trippy, though. It's like there's all this, it'll have, Brad Pitt is a father, a couple kids. I'm sure most of your listeners know who I'm talking about.

He's a well-known director. He did a really funky movie about the Pacific Theater, World War II, with Sean Penn in it. the Pacific Theater World War II with Sean Penn in it. And the guy from Saturday Night Fever, the gay guy, bathhouses. John Travolta. How dare you? The gay guy.

How about the amazing dancer? How about the really talented actor from Pulp Fiction? You're right. No, the gay guy that likes to fly. All those things. You know that dude that likes to suck dick and soar through the air. It took you a nanosecond to know who I was talking about, though, didn't it? Yeah. If you were playing charades, I would applaud you.

Anyway, yeah. So that seemed like a parody of that movie. There it is. Like the sun bursting and there's just real slow visuals. Yeah. I don't know what the fucking motivation was but it's preposterous yeah just completely ridiculous commercial the idea behind the perfume itself is very fascinating though um i don't like it i've never liked it i don't i mean there's like a couple like oils that girls

can put on i think that smells kind of cool but generally i like the way people smell when they're clean you know and that's why perfume was invented because people weren't fucking clean they were dirty stinky animals that were scared of water right and that's also why spices were so valuable during those centuries of this you know spices pepper black pepper was worth more than because the food was rotting so they would spice the shit up so you couldn't taste how horrible it was. Did a lot of people die from horrible digestive issues back then? Well, yeah, in the medieval period, a lot of people were dying from all sorts of nastiness related to the nastiness of the food, but also the fact that they were shitting in the

street and there's no sewage and everything. But what's interesting, I think this is like cutting edge medical research. Is that thing still playing in the background? Is there music in the background there? Yeah, I've heard it since the movie was on just now. Oh. What is that? I don't know.

Is that your iPad you fuck? Jesus, Brian. I thought I was going crazy again. Oh, cutting-edge medical research, I think you're probably tuned into this because of the body hacking and all that, the microflora of the stomach. Yes. Really interesting. Yeah. So in those days, people would have had really robust intestinal flora to deal with all that.

To deal with the amount of bacteria that you're absorbing in your system on a daily basis, which dogs have. That's why dogs can drink water and people who live in india and you know i spent a lot of time and i went swimming in a fucking lake in india i don't know what i was do you not have the science channel no do you not have discovery do you not watch those things where people come back with fucking football size parasites growing inside their head dude this was this was a long time ago, and I was young and invincible. What happened to you? I did a lot of stupid shit. Nothing.

You got lucky. And I've been, like, healthy as shit. You know, I'm like the guy who never gets sick. Maybe that's what it is. Well, I think, honestly, when I was traveling a lot in, you know, Asia and Latin America and stuff, I took a lot of acidophilus and raw garlic. Talk about body smells, man. I ate so much raw garlic.

And the raw garlic's good. It keeps mosquitoes away. They don't like the smell of garlic and it comes out through your skin. Keeps women away too, I found. Not Italian women. Yeah. They just accept it.

Italian men keep the Italian women away but yeah and I you say that but the balls show a different story

are we going to put our balls on the table the women's the Italian balls the larger it's the women's fault that the balls

are large right they're the director well I think it's more of a species I mean there is some cultural there is evidence

that Asian balls are smaller. I almost started talking Spanish there. Quite a bit smaller than black balls and white balls are somewhere in the middle. Being very sort of, I don't know if that's politically incorrect to say, but it seems to be true. And my wife has, I don't think I told you this story last time. Casilda was here last time. A couple of years into our relationship, one night we were hanging out with a friend in

Barcelona, smoking a joint. And this friend, this funny guy, he was giving me a hard time by giving her a hard time, essentially. And so he was saying, you know, you're so innocent. You know, you were in medical school and then you were married all these years and, you know, you hook up with Chris when you're like 40. You know, you're just starting to see the world as Chris is corrupting you. Right. And he said, you're so innocent. You probably think Chris has a big dick. And she said, well, no, I've inspected a thousand penises.

And we were like, what? She said, yeah, when I was doing that research for the World Health Organization in Africa, I had to inspect a thousand penises and vaginas. It turns out, I mean, I knew she had done this research, but I didn't know it involved. Actually holding the cocks. Actually, you know yeah and so we get gloves or no gloves gloves gloves does it count then it sort of counts doesn't matter me I mean if I were gonna be uptight about shit like that believe me I'd be in a different business but uh but the funny thing was like he was like but you know she's hot she was 27 or something

at the time and like what about erections and she just laughed and she said oh yeah you just flick so casilda's sort of like the anti-fluffer she knows how to bring it down there's like you flick right under the head and the erection is gone immediately really yeah try it when you get home sounds annoying yeah just you annoy the shit out of them but But somewhere out there, there's a guy that's like, it wouldn't stop me. That's what I like. I like a little flicking. So she can prove, you know, she's like one of the rare individuals that's seen the broad

spectrum of the races. And she says- Well, she's seen a thousand African. Oh, it's all African. That was all in Africa. Oh, okay. So it was all African people. So it's a thousand Africans and me.

Oh. That's her pool. Oh, yeah yeah she's uh not impressed i haven't asked i don't even ask i don't want to know the answer i'm not gonna ask that's funny what a douchebag friend you have by the way i would cut that guy off just the way he communicates is he a dickhead he's a strange dude actually he's a jazz musician who went to – grew up and went to college in Philadelphia at Temple, which is 98 percent black. And he's white, Jewish. He's like a hairy, dark-skinned Jewish guy. He's a big, tall guy. And he talks like an inner-city Philadelphia black dude.

He sounds wonderful. But he's not doing it. He's not racist. Like he just grew up with these guys and, you know, you learn to like sort of communicate the way your community communicates. But it could be awkward because he would, you know, as much as he would use the N-word liberally. Really?

Yeah. Among like a white crowd or – and with his black friends who knew him. But then it would get weird if we were at a party or something and he'd be like, yo, my – He sounds like a fucking idiot. What are you hanging out with this guy for? This is a long time. Making fun of you for having a regular-sized dick to your wife? What a douchebag.

Dropping N-bombs. Yeah, bring them to my parties. Yeah, no. Sounds like a treat. He knows. I love white guys who talk black, too. Oh, one of my favorite things. Yeah.

Can't get enough of them in my life. That's what you really want to go to if you're really confused about the world. You need a confidant. You need someone. Yeah, you got to go to a white guy who talks black. Yeah. But, I mean mean it happens hey look at all these kids with their their pants hanging down around their asses and you know showing gang signs and you know flicker photos and what are you doing that pants hanging around your your ass means one thing you don't know how to check leg kicks

because i guarantee you right yeah if you've done any muay Thai at all, you wouldn't have your fucking pants. It's going to hamper your style. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Someone is just going to kick your legs. There's nothing you can do about it. Your buckles over your dick. You can't move your hips right. You're not going to get out of the way.

You can't walk. Did you say look at those kids with their baggy pants and their Flickr photos? Did I? Those fancy kids with their Flickr photos. And those gang signs in their Flickr photos. Oh, I didn't mean that. The gang signs in their Flickr photos. I admit that. The gang signs in their Flickr photos. I don't even know if Flickr –

Do they really put the gang signs online? I mean you see these like kids from Pacific Palisades doing shit. It's like what are you doing? There is an issue with those kids that grow up in those like really rich places where they want to overcompensate because of the fact that their parents are so not street. Right. And they get like intermixed with inner city kids. They get shipped there and then they want to prove their worth. And I actually had a friend who had a kid who went to one of those Pacific, Pacific

Palisades or Malibu, one of those high schools. And he's like, you'd be fucking amazed at how bad it was. They had to pull the kid out of there because it's constant drugs and violence and chaos and craziness, and there are a massive amount of kids in those areas that grow up. And it kind of makes sense if you think about it. These people that have a fuckload of money, a lot of them also, they have issues with pills. Right. Or they have pills at home or there there's a shallow

sort of materialistic vibe to the family and it gets its gets distributed to the kids and then the kids start doing a lot of pills it's like it was Malibu or one of those high schools I can't really wish I could remember but they were to snorting oxys it was like a big issue you know I've heard about that in Thousand Oaks too that they have a problem with girls doing – like there's been quite a few girls that have gotten in trouble for doing Oxycontins. They're doing heroin and they're doing it in high school. And these are really wealthy neighborhoods, wealthy areas.

But these people are probably never around for their fucking kids. If you've got enough money to buy a $9 million house, you work your dick off. You probably are not around that much. And the kids are raised by nannies in many cases. Yeah, especially in those dual career households when your wife works her ass off as well. You're both working your ass off all day and then you're trying to become parents at night.

I mean, it's a fucking grind. That's a hard grind. You know if you lease a lot of poor people they involve their families in that grind you know they bring in the grandmother or you know they live in a neighborhood where there's a lot of family members nearby and they can sort of take turns taking care of all the children together which actually could turn out to be healthier as long as it's not a high crime area on that see that relates back to prehistory. Yes. Right? You know, this whole idea. And Casilda grew up in Mozambique.

And she talked about, like, you know, at night, nobody worried about where you were. Your parents didn't worry about where you were. Wherever you were or somebody, there was some adult there taking care of you, being cool, you know. And you could eat dinner at somebody else's house and come home later or sleep there. You know, it's like whatever. It's a community. It sounds so utopian. Yeah. But yet not because nobody wants to live in mozambique you know no one here happening man you say that oh

but it's the brazil of beverly hills and say hey who wants to go to mozambique yeah they're gonna go bitch are you crazy we're not gonna move to mozambique nice beach and you're like you could just let your kids go no one needs to worry like fuck're like, you can just let your kids go. No one needs to worry. You're like, fuck you. What? You're going to let your kids go at night in Africa? Yeah. Are you fucking crazy? Yeah.

Yeah. No one's going to believe you. But that's the truth, man. So what is it like? You said it's like the Brazil. Well, I haven't been to Mozambique. So you're talking shit. I'm talking shit. But my wife grew up there.

So I hear a lot about it. And she was just there a couple months ago. And it's like 8% economic growth. Africa's booming right now. Wow. Because the Chinese are buying up all the natural resources. a couple months ago and she said and it's like eight percent economic growth it's africa's booming right now because the chinese are buying up all the natural resources they're buying up land it's it's happening wow yeah and mozambique's uh you know famous for their amazing beaches and seafood and it's it's like a pretty raw beautiful spot on Earth. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, Africa's a trippy fucking place, man.

The idea of leaving your kids just wandering around in Africa. Aren't there lions in Mozambique? Yeah, in fact, she had a German shepherd that got eaten by a lion when she was a kid. Christ. Yeah. Yeah. Mountain lions are scary. Lions, way scarier than mountain lions. Yeah. Yeah. Mountain lions are scary. Lions, way scarier than mountain lions.

Yeah. Nobody gets away from the lions. But you know what kills most people in Africa? Hippos. Yeah. Fucking hippos. And ants. Oh, really? Ants are a motherfucker.

That's not a good way to tell me. There's a video I saw once of ants eating an elephant. And they were going up the elephant's leg into its ear. Oh, no. And they were essentially up the elephant's leg into its ear. Oh, no. And they were essentially attacking this elephant, eating its ear first, just going right through the ear. And there wasn't a goddamn thing the elephant can do to stop it. Oh, man, that's not a good idea.

In Alaska, you get that with mosquitoes. Yeah, I've seen that on TV. Oh, it's horrible. I've never experienced it live, but I've watched those Alaska sustenance shows. Have you ever seen those shows? I saw one or two, yeah, where they put these like a reality show thing. No, no, no, no, no. These are actually people that live there.

There are these people that – there's a bunch of different ones. There's one of them is called Yukon Men and the other one's called Alaska, The Last Frontier. And they're essentially these people that live in these very small hunting communities, hunting, fishing communities. And they make no income other than furs that they occasionally get. And they

have three months of summer where they're all just frantically trying to gather up resources. And then they lock down for seven, eight, nine months. Right. And it's crazy to watch. Yeah. And these people in the summertime,

they're dealing with fucking swarms of mosquitoes, like aggressive, desperate mosquitoes that you know. And they're like an inch across. And they know they only have a couple months. Yeah. So they just go for it. Yeah. I remember, you know, when dus dusk when the mosquitoes come out and

you can see a swarm coming at you and you're setting up your tent you know and like i remember setting up my tent and like every second moving my shirt so they couldn't like get in through the shirt you know i had to keep moving the shirt while i'm setting up the tent and then you get in there and you can hear it's like hail banging against the side of the tent. You can hear them banging on the tent. Oh, my God. Yeah, they're little helicopters. What the fuck did people do before they figured out tents?

Well, the Eskimos, I believe that they smeared fat on their skin that would, certain kinds of fat would keep the mosquitoes off them. And they've got all sorts of really clever adaptations. You know, we sort of assume that we would be helpless, but that's because we didn't grow up there and our culture didn't, you know. Right. So, and there's, you know who Wade Davis is? No.

He's an anthropologist. He's written a bunch of books. Really interesting guy. He's like anthropologist in residence at the Smithsonian in Washington. He wrote a book called The Wayfarers, I think was his last book, about traditional, like about how these guys could navigate across the Pacific just looking at the stars and the color of the water and smelling and whatever. Anyway, one of the stories he tells is about this Eskimo guy, old guy, and the family sort of took the keys to the car away from him. Like, you can't go anymore.

They were afraid he would go out and die the traditional way. When Eskimo people got old, they would just, like, wander off into the ice and die so as not to be a burden to the family, right? be a burden to the family right and he was a traditional guy and they were worried that he would take the the snow machine out and just die out there somewhere or hurt himself hunting or whatever so they had this whole intervention and so that night he goes out gets out of the house takes a shit in his hand forms the shit into a knife blade, spits on it, and the spit is freezing along the edge, and he hones that down so he gets a nice sharp edge with his spit, takes his shit knife, kills a dog or a couple of dogs, and takes their ribs and makes a sled out of it.

And with the sinews and whatever other pieces of the dogs, you know, he knew all this stuff from his childhood, hooks up a couple other dogs to the sled, and he takes off into the snow on his, you know, sled with his shit knife. What? Yeah. Oh, my God. That might be the most insane story I've ever heard. And they're so clever.

You know how they kill polar bears? I know they take blood and put it on a blade. I know that method. That was actually wolves. They did that with wolves. The wolves would lick the blade and they would cut themselves to death. Similar kind of thing. What they would do is they'd make a wooden box and they would take a

seal uh rib and sharpen the two ends of the seal rib and they're pretty flexible so they'd bend it and stick it into the box right and then they'd pour melted fat into the box and let it solidify freeze and then they knock it out so you've got a fat cube with this flexed two bladed thing inside it and they'd leave that in the snow. The polar bear would come along, swallow it, and it opens in the polar bear. Wow. And they'd just follow the blood drops.

And it would kill them? Yeah, because of internal hemorrhaging. How long would it take to kill them? I don't know. I don't know. I just remember that. I mean, there are stories like that all over the world. You know the Indian monkey trap, the East Indian monkey trap?

I don't know how interested your readers are your listeners are well that system is and this is a good metaphor too i always remember this one they would take a same thing take a box with a hole about you know a little smaller than a fist in the in the box and then they put a mango in the box and then hammer it shut and tie it to a tree. So the mango starts rotting. The monkey smells it. Monkey comes along, can stick his hand in and feel the mango,

but he can't get his hand out as long as he's holding on to the mango. And they won't let go of the mango. All they have to do is let go and they can leave. But they've got the mango in their hands and they won't let go. And so the guy comes around to check the traps.

There's the monkey standing there with his hand in the box. Hit it on the head. You got your monkey. Whoa. There's a little something about greed there. That's an awesome story. That is a perfect metaphor too. Yeah.

That's amazing. Wow. Let go of the mango. That's my advice. Yeah. That's a good – that should be a t-shirt. Not a bumper sticker. It fucks.

Bumper sticker, bad. T-shirt, good. Shit knife is a better bumper sticker. That shit knife is a crazy fucking story. A guy killed a dog with a frozen piece of shit. How stupid was that dog? Why are you doing this? Was he sleeping there when this guy came up? Like, man, you got shit in your hand, like, why are you doing this? Was he sleeping there when this guy came up?

Like, man, you got shit in your hand? What the fuck are you doing? Dogs love shit. Weren't you at Esalen, weren't you going to talk people into shitting in their hand or something like that? Wasn't that one of your... Yeah, I forgot. Did I talk to you about that? No, no.

I believe you talked to Duncan about that. Oh, okay. All right. You sit on Duncan's feet? We were talking about wiping yourself and about how weird it is that we sort of like smudge tissue over our assholes after we shit. And then in other countries that we consider these people to be savage, they wash their hand you know and they wash their ass with their hand in water and we're like that is fucking crazy yeah exactly and it's the reason why your left hand is the inappropriate hand to shake hands with or to eat with or to eat an arab and yeah yeah and

that they they always clean with their left hand yeah the the shit experiment did you actually make people do that i didn didn't, no. What happened? I pussied out. To fucking Ted again? Did Ted get involved, those bitches? No balls, no shit. You're out of here, pal.

Do you want in the cult, yes or no? They just took down a couple more videos recently. Oh, yeah? Of whose? I forget. Here, I'll find it. But didn't they put the Hancock and Sheldrake ones back up on a different part of the site or something? I don't think they ever took them down totally. They took them off of one part and they put it on another part and they put it up with a disclaimer because they felt like there was poor science, that there was bad science.

Yeah, pseudoscience. Which if the scientists can prove, it makes sense. But I think that if you're going to invite someone to talk and you're going to say that they have pseudoscience, I say at the very least you should allow them to have an appropriate response or allow them to debate. Debate them on the merits of this science. Exactly. Because I don't know who's right or who's wrong. Well, the anonymous scientific panel that they use, that's what I think is bullshit. Because they've got a lot of mainstream people who are going to say, you know, whatever, ayahuasca is bullshit.

But, you know, let Sheldrake debate that. Or in that case, it was Hancock. I think he was talking about ayahuasca. You know, or get Andrew Weil, who's an expert on this or Wade Davis actually Wade Davis and Andrew Weil were both graduate students of Richard Evans Schultes who was probably the most important biologist sorry botanist of the 20th century. He's the one who discovered the plants behind and named the plants behind ayahuasca. And he did his graduate work on peyote.

He never, he was a very sort of straight guy himself. He never took any of this stuff, but he discovered dozens of psychoactive plants in the Amazon. He was down there like 20 years. That sounds, that's all great. I mean, that's absolutely great for expanding people's knowledge on the Amazon. He was down there like 20 years. That sounds, that's all great. I mean, that's absolutely great for expanding people's knowledge on the subject. But in their particular situation, what was kind of disturbing was that

on the website of TED, the accusations that they had or the reasons that they had for censoring Hancock's work, he asked them specifically, cite where I said this, cite where I imply this, this is not what I said. So he was saying that they sort of made this justification that didn't sort of jive with his talk. Now, Rupert Sheldrake, who I think is a bit more controversial in his statements, what Hancock is trying to say is that ayahuasca has had this profound effect on humanity. And it's based on his own actual personal experiences taking it the experiences of other people that have taken it the i the idea being that this indigenous population was not the only peoples that have discovered psychedelic plants but then in fact there's a cave art that details people in altered

states of consciousness also details what they believe to be certain psychedelic substances and that it's most likely responsible for a lot of art. And I think that's a pretty reasonable thing to say. And if you don't think it's reasonable, the only thing I could say is I doubt you've had any psychedelic experiences because psychedelic experiences would be incredibly profound to primitive man. And to state any less seems to me that you're not being honest. You're ignorant. You're either ignorant to the effects of these things or you're not being honest about the effects of these things because you're worried about the perception that mainstream academia,

that most people in the media, when you start talking about mushrooms, they think you're a silly person. You're a fool. There it is again, right? That's the institution determining the information that's allowed to flow through that institution. Yeah, I interviewed Charles Grobe a couple weeks ago who's at UCLA. He's a psychiatrist at UCLA who uses psilocybin.

And I think he's also used MDMA in psychotherapy with people who have end-stage cancer to help them. And it's been very effective in helping them deal with the fear of death. Because of the sort of transcendent experience that often accompanies these substances, they feel a sense of union with the universe. They lose a lot of that, you know, I'm just my body feeling, which helps them deal with death. So transfer that to what you're saying about hunter-gatherer people or pre-agricultural people around the world or post-agricultural people, Soma in India and a lot of the Elysian fields in ancient Greeks. A lot of these rituals were apparently based on Amenita Muscaria, which is highly hallucinogenic.

It's the red mushroom with the white spots in Alice in Wonderland. The Santa Claus connection is very famous. The Amenita Muscaria is Soma? Has that been proven? No, it's a theory that was proposed by Gordon Wasson who – this is all stuff you can like mine Stanley on Saturday. Stanley met the woman, the shaman in Mexico who brought mushrooms into the Western world, Maria – Sabina Maria, I think is her name. Anyway, the point I was making is that, you know, here's this guy using this stuff to alleviate the fear of death with dramatic results.

And yet, as you say, it's still considered fringe. Although, relating back to our earlier conversation about institutions being in the state of crisis, because people sort of recognize the false values in these institutions, the government is finally allowing research in this stuff. Yeah, really. And it's pretty radical findings. The John Hopkins study on psilocybin and behavioral change and how it just one trip affected people's behavior and personalities positively 20 years later. And what Hancock was talking about was specifically the effect of some hallucinogens on addiction.

Yes. And he was using his own personal addiction to cannabis. He had a lifelong history of abuse, as he called it, with cannabis. And he did say – sorry to interrupt you, but just the last point on that. I didn't listen to Sheldrake's thing, but I did listen to Hancock's. And he framed the whole thing in, I think, very scientific terms. He said this may have caused this leap forward in consciousness. This may have been responsible for this and that.

It's absolutely a fascinating possibility to consider. And the only people, in my opinion, that would not consider it are, again, people that have had no experiences with it or people that were worried about the mainstream academic approval. And so they step back and go, oh, this is preposterous. No, this is not. It's an incredibly powerful experience. It cannot be denied. And yet, for whatever reason, we've lumped it into silliness. And I really, I struggle with that. Or criminality. Or criminality, yes. Even more scary than silliness. Yeah. It's really boggled my mind. And the only thing that makes sense is that

it's ignorance. It's the illegality of it, which was hoisted onto the American people in the 1970s when they were just trying to control this mass change in culture that had happened so radically between the 50s and the 60s and we we lost a lot of information in that and we also got a lot of people that were scared scared about going to jail scared about losing their jobs and that all that fear and ignorance clouds the actual argument it clouds the the actual facts that surround these weird substances. And they're not the cure-all. They're not for everybody. But what they are is incredibly powerful experiences.

I don't think that can be denied. And to deny the impact of one of the most amazing transcendental experiences that a human being can ever possibly experience and the fact that it's an orally active thing that grows all over the place where these people absolutely lived, to deny the connection seems like really silly. It seems like you're being a fool

and you're ignoring information. And people all over the world who have access to these plants, wherever you find them, consider them to be the greatest gift of the gods. Yes. And then you've got our culture that says if you get caught with, what, an ounce of psilocybin mushrooms or 100 hits of acid at a Grateful Dead show, you go to prison under minimum mandatory sentencing for longer than second degree murder. What the fuck is that? That's complete pure insanity.

That's insanity. But what's even more insanity is to me that people in positions of prominence academically who will talk on these subjects have not had this experience. Right. And I'm like, my God, you're children. And it sounds so arrogant to say that. But someone who's like talking about the negative effects of psychedelic drugs that hasn't had psychedelic drugs will feel like a child after he has a mushroom chip you will feel like a fool you will feel like you are the dumbest person in

the world to have ignored that and poo-pooed that take six grams of mushrooms get in an isolation tank and tell me you don't have some regrets for how you looked at that shit before. They're not having it. And these are the same people that are pulling these things down. I guarantee you the people that have had profound mushroom trips are not interested in silencing this Graham Hancock war on consciousness, which originally was called beating, I think something about the green bitch. He originally – defeating the green bitch, which was his addiction to cannabis and how the ayahuasca helped him see who he was, his abusive relationship.

He's a really fascinating guy because he's not down on marijuana at all. He sort of attributes it to his own abuse of it and like using it as a crutch instead of using it to enhance. So he had whatever addictive issues he had. That's how they – I mean that is a real issue with addiction, right? It's like it's not necessarily the substance, the biological triggers. What's going on with you that makes you obsessed with scratch tickets? Who's the guy, the British actor, skinny comedian, really funny guy sleeping with a woman? Russell Brand.

Russell Brand, thank you. We should play. This is what happens when you get old, man. I can't remember. The gay guy with the fucking planes. You give me my brain. Suck dick in the air. Massage guy.

He likes massages. Russell Brand wrote a thing recently about addiction, and he said something I thought was really wise. He said drugs weren't my problem. Drugs were my answer to my problem. And it's exactly what you just said. And I agree completely. Drugs aren't causing the addiction.

You've got an addiction. It can manifest in marijuana, in gambling, in jerking off, in a million different ways. And if you locate the problem in the substance, then you'll never solve the problem because that's just a symptom. But there is a physiological issue that goes along with that as well because there's two types of situations. There's the gambling situation where you're sort of getting addicted to the response. But then there's a real like an OxyContin thing. getting addicted to the response. But then there's a real like an OxyContin thing.

Like I have a friend who had a back operation and then after his back operation, they threw him on some Oxy's and he was fucked up for a long time. He started getting prescriptions from more than one different doctor and he was a mess. He just went – just went into this crazy spiral and it was absolutely a physiological addiction because before that, he really didn't exhibit crazy addictive or impulsive behaviors and they were manifesting itself with his situation changed with that pain and the gambler is also getting a chemical uh high yes you know the brain is releasing endorphins or whatever it is in that case so there you know you could argue they're both physiological on some level. But yeah, the point is that there's some,

in his case, it was chronic pain. In another case, it could be PTSD. It could be fucked up childhood. It could be whatever. That is a funny way to look at it. I don't think I ever looked at it that way before, that it is still a chemical addiction. It's just sort of an endogenous one.

Yeah, that's funny. I never thought about it that way. I always knocked it off still a chemical addiction it's just sort of an endogenous one yeah yeah that's funny i never thought about it that way i always knocked it off to a behavioral thing yeah i mean orgasm yeah those people would jerk off in front of the computer all day they're get there's some we're talking to you yeah that's you that's you you motherfucker you know you are yeah yeah that's well that's also sort of just – it becomes like impulsive. Like it's not even a reward sometimes. It just sort of repeat a pattern like you're stuck. You got a scratch on the record.

It hurts when you stop, right? And that's what addiction is, right? It hurts when you stop. You were talking earlier. We were talking about so-called primitive societies and stuff. You reminded me of this amazing story I read recently where this BBC team went into Papua New Guinea, way back some river, and they were doing a special on these very so-called primitive people back there, you know, no internet, no nothing.

And one of the guys, after they'd finished filming, one of the guys said, well, we've shown you our world. Why don't you bring me to your world? I'd like to see your world. So when he was back in London, he talked to some people and they said, well, we've shown you our world. Why don't you bring me to your world? I'd like to see your world. So when he was back in London, he talked to some people and they said, well, okay, we'll fund it. That would be an interesting thing, bring these guys into London and do this whole thing sort of in reverse. It's like a sitcom. What's that?

It's a sitcom. Yeah. Reality show. These dudes from the jungle. It's a fucking reality show. Stick them in London. Yeah. It's Jersey Shore for the UK.

So this guy, his concern was that once this guy saw the modern world, he would never want to go home. So he called up an anthropologist and he said, look, I'm really worried about this. I'd like to do this, but I'm – and the anthropologist said, you arrogant asshole. do this but i'm and the anthropologist said you arrogant asshole you really think this guy is going to be so impressed by london that he'd never want to go back to his friends and family and you know his whole world and all that just calm down that's not going to happen right trust me so they fly this guy a few guys up to london they take them all around show them you know whatever all these different things and one of the things they really wanted to see was um something like a an archery range so they took them to this archery range and they were so fascinated by the arrows that had feathers on the arrows because yeah their feathers didn't have

arrows and their arrows didn't have feathers sorry their arrows didn't have feathers so anyway at the end of this whole experience of being in lond, the only thing they wanted to take back was this knowledge of how you put the feathers on the arrow. They weren't interested in iPhones. You know what the moral to that story is? What's that? London ain't Tahiti. That's the moral to that story. That is the moral.

If they landed in Tahiti, the anthropologists would be like, yeah, they're not going home. Exactly. Don't even try to get them on a ship drunk white like paper eating fish and chips they're gonna want to get the fuck out of there as quickly as they got there new guinea's a trip man um because new guinea has those semen warriors yeah that's uh one of the weirdest i mean i was gonna bring that up earlier when we were talking about um these patterns that sort of develop in these tribal societies. One of the most bizarre ones is these – they take young boys away from their mother when they're like six or seven and they live with men that are like an anal father, an anal son. That's how they call it.

They're like an anal father, an anal son. Like that's how they call it. And the man just fucks these kids and they believe that the kid has to swallow and ingest semen into his body in order for him to grow up strong and be a man. Right. And that they only use women for procreation. Right. That this entire culture of thousands of people is wrapped around little kids sucking guys' dicks to grow old, to grow strong. Right. Fucking – that is one of the craziest ones I've ever written – or read, rather.

Yeah. That somehow or another they convinced thousands of people into that one. What's the origins of that? Oh, who knows? No one knows? There's no way to know. But you find origins of that? Oh, who knows? No one knows? There's no way to know. But you find stuff like that all over the world. One bad motherfucker just likes getting his dick sucked.

Yeah. Like one pope can just ruin a whole damn religion. Maybe there were missionaries. Because, you know, that happened in the Amazon. There's a case of Lizot was his name. He's a French missionary. He was the – or an anthropologist. He's a French missionary. He was the, or an anthropologist. He wasn't a missionary.

He was an anthropologist who studied under the great French, Lévi-Strauss. And he went to the Yanomami people in Venezuela. And he was fucking all the boys and doing all this crazy shit and telling them that this was the way it worked in the world. And, you know, he's still there, I think. He's's still alive this is part of the whole napoleon shagnon situation i don't know if you're familiar with that no yeah it's very controversial stuff uh that happened uh shagnon is he wrote the fierce people which is the best-selling anthropology book of all time

and uh he was like a hemingway kind of guy and he just published a book recently talking about trying to redeem his reputation because it turns out like what he did was he went to the Amazon in the late 60s or the Orinoco really, which is a tributary of the Amazon in Venezuela and he was studying the Yanomami people and he wrote a thesis

calling them the fierce people, saying that they killed each other at such high rates and this justifies this Hobbesian view of the origins of human violence that were really nasty and so we need these governments and religions to keep us in check.

It's very political, right? But he was just saying it's anthropology. But it resonated with the culture. Vietnam was happening and there's all this discussion of why are we violent? Is it our nature or is it institutional? The whole hippies versus the institution debate. So anyway, he wrote this book and it was a huge bestseller and he became super famous. So anyway, he wrote this book and it was a huge bestseller and he became super famous.

Turns out that when he went into this area, he brought lots of machetes. And these people didn't have lots of machetes. They didn't have metal tools at all. So he brings in the machetes and he starts giving the machetes to certain groups in exchange for their cooperation. And his research was on genealogy. so he needed to get the names of ancestors. But it turns out that the Yanomami, it's a great taboo to ever say the name of a dead person. So what he would do is say, okay, I'll give you this machete if you tell me the names of the father and grandfather of that guy from that other village. So he would bribe them to get this information. But that's a great taboo to say the names of that guy's father or grandfather, right?

So then he would go to the other village and as a way to confirm whether the information was correct, he would say, so-and-so over there said your father and grandfather were blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. And if they got really pissed off, he knew it was correct. So that would confirm his information. Then they would have all these wars, and they'd kill each other with these machetes. And then he reported back saying, oh, the Yanomami are very fierce, destructive, warlike people, and this is the origins of humanity, and yada, yada, yada.

Fucking bullshit, man. Complete bullshit. That's amazing yeah so there's a book called darkness in el dorado that came out a few years ago it was a big bestseller and exposed a lot of this stuff and it also went further and accused him of genocide him and this other guy neil for it accused them of using a vaccination program as a way to sort of test immune responses. And that appears to be false. That appears not to have been true.

Right. But the other stuff with the machetes and sowing violence and all that and then reporting that they're. And the molestation from the other guy. That's the other guy. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. What a fucking group of victimized people trying to just get along.

And these white people come along and fuck everything up again. Yeah. I write about the situation in Sex at Dawn and they even, the Yanomami have a special word called, I think it's anthro, which means like a crazy destructive white person. So he's not even allowed ever to go back to Venezuela. He's barred from the country. Wow. Yeah. I don't know why I was talking about that.

I don't remember what tangent. It doesn't matter. Well, it's just the distortion of our image of these people and how these crazy cultures can erupt. And that might have been missionaries that caused these guys to blow all these kids. Yeah. And by the time – oh, that's what it was. Kids blowing them, rather. I mean you see these interesting sexual practices all over the world.

And so a lot of stuff – that one, I was talking about that one last night at a cocktail party in Venice actually. I was talking with this gay guy and we were talking about how we think we know what it means to be gay. But you look at a culture like that and you say, well, are they gay? I don't think they consider it to be normal sexual development, conventional. That's what you do. Or the Maasai. The Maasai, the herdsmen who drink blood and milk in Kenya, they have a similar sort of thing where the younger boys go out on these long – when they're out with the herds for weeks or months at a time, they go out with the older boys.

And the older boys will have sex with them, not anal sex, but they'll put their penis between the thighs of the younger boy. That was how the Romans did it as well. Right. Yeah. There's a name for that. I can't remember the word, the specific word for that. Either way, it's still gay. Let them know.

Well, that's the thing. They would say it's not because then they get older. They marry a woman. They have kids. That's just normal growing up. Normal fuckery. Yeah. Now, I think once you know what kind of a damaging effect that has on the young boys.

But it doesn't. That's the thing. If it's considered normal, it doesn't. Don't knock it until you thigh it. Oh, doesn't. That's the thing. If it's considered normal, it doesn't. Don't knock it until you thigh it. Oh, how dare you. Oh. How dare you.

He was so proud of himself right there. Yeah, he was saving that one up. I've been hanging out with Hinchcliffe too long. The idea, though, that it's not going

to have an effect is only based on the fact that they're going to do it to more young boys and they're not going to complain. And that's one of the weird things about sexual abuse is that it sort of re-manifests itself in the victim

and they sort of start to become the accuser. I mean, they also become the perpetrator. In fact, a guy I was speaking to recently who identifies as gay, he said to me, I don't think I was born gay. I think I'm gay because I was sexually abused as a child by my stepfather from the time I was three. And we got into this whole discussion of how there's a term erotic plasticity and how different it is for men and women. In men and males of other mammals, there seems to be a developmental window where we imprint something and that window closes. And if you got an imprint that sticks with you for life, which is why virtually all fetishists are men, right? There are a lot of men who will say, well, I can't get off unless, you know, there's latex or she's wearing red high-heeled shoes or she's got this or that, right?

Right, right, right. Women don't say that. Like women, you know, they're much more flexible and they adapt to the situation. with male-male sex and pleasure involved with that, then you could sort of, like, have that as a fetish, even though you were born, you know, your sort of genetic components or your brain development or whatever, they're different theories, is heterosexual. So they're different.

According to this idea, there are different ways to be gay. You could be born gay or you could be gay as a fetish in a way. But anyway, related to what you're saying about the trauma, there's research showing that what really causes the trauma is the shame generated by the culture. That boys who are what we would call sexually abused or girls that were sexually abused at a young age, if there's not pain involved, right, if it's inappropriate touching or whatever, the trauma comes about when they're told that was really bad. And they're told that that's a horrible thing that happened. It doesn't necessarily come about from the experience itself. And I don't mean this to justify anything or give anyone cover.

But aren't there a variety of different types of experiences? Sure. Are these consensual and just innocent or are these actual hold you down rape? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Physical pain is a whole different thing. If it's just two little kids diddling each other. Right.

Some mothers would say that's abuse. That's a horrible, oh, my God, what happened? The best thing to do is just say, hey, nothing happened. It's no big deal. Right. And there are psychological studies showing that the lasting effects are negligible unless it's framed as, oh, my God, what happened? That completely makes sense. As does the framing thing. The framing thing completely makes sense as well, that there's like something happens in their life and they just get imprinted.

And that's – I mean otherwise why would so many abuse victims become abusers themselves? You would think that like you would – the last thing you would do is repeat that. Oh my god. That's the thing that fucked you up and ruined you. You would say like, man, I would never want to do this to another person. Right. And that would be how we would evolve. So it seems like there's like a hitch in the developmental process that allows weird things just to be accepted and become the standard.

Right. They become eroticized and associated with pleasure. And so you try to relive them later. There's a great experiment with, it happened in Scotland, I think, where they took, one year they had like a herd of goats and a herd of sheep. And so they took all the babies, all the baby goats, and they put them with the sheep. And they took all the baby sheep and put them with the goats so they were raised thinking they were the other species right so all the goats grew up around the sheep thinking i'm just a weird looking sheep right and the vice versa so they

waited till they got sexually mature and started you know having sex and then they switched them back and what happened was that the males refused to have sex with their own species because they had learned that no no like the male goats had learned like i fuck sheep right the male sheep no no i fuck goats the females were like yeah whatever you know they just sort of like went with it but the males refused they were stuck with it because they were imprinted and that was it that is fascinating. What the fuck evolutionary purpose does that play? Who knows? That's a good question. I don't know, but it's a common mistake, I would say, and I'm not saying just among people

reading books for the first time, but among experts, there's a mistake of thinking that everything has an evolutionary function. Sometimes it could just be the tide went that way and that's what happened. Right. And there's something Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary theorist, called spandrels, which are things that look like they have a function, but they're actually sort of a side effect of something else. You know, like the chin.

You know, why did the chin evolve the way it did? Well, we have a word for this thing we call the chin, but it's not actually a thing. It's where the two jawbones fuse. So it's, it does, you know, it exists as a linguistic concept, but not necessarily as a biological concept. So they're, they're weird, you know, they're murky waters you can get lost in when you're looking at evolutionary stuff. And you always, I advise people, you always, if you say, what's the evolutionary function of that? Be clear on what that is and that it actually would necessarily have an evolutionary function, you know. I've always been fascinated by why at the same time all over the world people who are human beings or you can breed with each other but have such incredibly varied ways of behaving. Yeah.

And that this has always been this way. I'm really into this Dan Carlin podcast recently. He's got this podcast called Hardcore History and he does this really detailed history of the Mongols over like five episodes. And it's amazing. It's amazing. It's just fucking craziness. The way these people just took over Europe and just conquered and just the madness and how they were so different from anyone that existed at that time and that they were so extreme and intense. But at the same time, they lived somewhere in the Amazon.

There were a bunch of people doing ayahuasca and eating fish and polyamorous people. It's amazing that this all took place all along during the same time. Do you ever read The Travels of Marco Polo? No. You know the story? Yes. Yeah. It read The Travels of Marco Polo? No. You know the story? Yes. Yeah.

It's like 1400s or something like that, or 1300s. And he went to, he was with the Mongols. Wow. And he walked all across Asia on the, what they call the spice route, with his uncles. And yeah, he was with, I don't know if it was Genghis Khan or Kublai Khan or which of the Mongol kings it was. And along the way, talking about interesting people, he stayed with the Mosuo people of southwestern China who still exist and apparently still have this very interesting marital, well, not even marital, sexual behavior, where both men and women are completely autonomous sexual beings. You have sex with whomever you want. There's no slut shaming. There's no shame involved with multiple partners, whatever. You do what you want. When a girl becomes sexually

mature, she gets her own room called a flower room that has a door that opens into the central courtyard of her mother's house where she lives and also has a door that opens into the central courtyard of her mother's house where she lives and also has a door that opens into the street and so that girl from you know 13 14 whatever sexual maturity she can let anyone she wants come in and spend the night in her room with her the only rule is he can't be there for breakfast right so no no nobody's invited for breakfast get get out by sunrise. But she can sleep with whoever she wants. Then what happens when she gets pregnant is that the child is cared for by her brothers and her sisters. So as a man, your paternal responsibility is to your sister's kids,

not to your biological child. In fact, biological fatherhood is a non-issue in this society. That's amazing. Yeah, really interesting society. And Marco Polo stayed with them, and he wrote about them. And he thought, typical Italian, right, he thought that he was screwing these women behind the men's backs. Marco Polo was getting some. He was getting some. He just thought he was screwing these women behind the men's backs and playing. Marco Polo was getting some. He was getting some.

He just thought he was slick. He thought he was a cool guy, but it turns out the women were just like, yo, foreigners. That's funny. It is amazing when you think about the variables. It's amazing when you think about the variety of different cultures that evolve simultaneously all over the world. And how, I mean, is it their environment that causes that? Or is it this? Is it missionaries move in and give them machetes

and talk about their ancestors? I mean, the various things that happen are so, and I know I confuse those two stories, the missionary and the researcher. No, but it's all, you know what I mean? Yeah, and smallpox comes in. Oh, yeah. And then you've got the ice ages and – but I tend to be a materialist.

There's a book called Cultural Materialism by Marvin Harris, which is a great book. And he wrote a more popular book called Cannibals and Kings, which covers some of the same stuff. And he looked at things like why are some societies cannibals and others aren't right so you've got the you know the clash of european societies and the aztecs and the mayan and all that and so you know you can't say the europeans weren't bloodthirsty you know crazy killers they just didn't eat what they killed the people they killed whereas the aztecs were killing the people that are eating the people they killed. Why is that?

Or why on some South Pacific islands were the people cannibalistic and others they weren't, right? So what he did was he did a materialistic analysis. And what he found was that without exception in the societies that were cannibalistic, there was no other source of protein that didn't compete with humans for the same food. So like they didn't have pigs, right? Pigs will eat stuff humans can't eat, right? So you can raise pigs without feeding them your own food. But dogs, you feed them stuff you would eat because dogs eat meat, right? So in Mexico, there was nothing that they could raise, no animal that could be domesticated that they could raise for meat. And so that's why they ate the dead people,

because they were protein starved. Wow. Right. And then he applied that same thing to the different islands in the South Pacific, and he found the same thing. And American Indians, Native Americans in the harshest climates were the ones that were tending towards cannibalism, like towards the Great Lakes, like the Native American people from the Great Lakes area. Those are the ones that there's the stories of them cannibalizing people. Yeah. Yeah. And you also have to look at midwinter.

Yeah, sure. But also in that kind of thing, you want to look at ritualistic cannibalism versus like, okay, dinner time, you know? Yeah. Because they had some interesting torture ceremonies as well in those Canadian Great Lakes, Iroquois kind of – it was an honor to be tortured to death. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. that I was telling you about his book, Meat Eater, he told me some crazy stories about the people that lived off the Missouri River, like in Montana, and the trappers and all these different people

that have these conflicts with the Indians and how they would kill them. There was a lot of cannibalism going on, a lot more than I would have ever imagined. It's because that's not really something that gets brought up in high school history. They don't really tell you, oh, by the way, Indians occasionally used to eat people. As did the settlers, I'm sure.

The Donner Party. North America itself is one of the most spectacular examples of how quickly things can change. Yeah, you're right. If you stop and think about North America just 1,000 years ago, just 1,000. Anywhere in Europe, 1,000 is like – there's still people, man. There's still nuttiness. There's still – I've hung out in bars that were more than 1,000 years old.

I'm sure. What is the oldest bar in like London? Isn't there like a bar that's from like the fucking – Yeah. I don't know. Barcelona, I could take you to them. How old is it? Several of them.

Well, the oldest continually open bar is from the 1700s. It's Bar Amiral. I've been there many times. But the place I'm thinking of when I've said the thousand years old, it's a bar down in the Gótico section of Barcelona where one wall of the bar is a Roman wall from the original Roman building that was there. So you're like leaning up against the Roman wall drinking your beer. It's really cool. Holy shit.

Yeah. Not America. And that's 2,000 years old. 1,000 years ago, no Manhattan, no Los Angeles, no Chicago, no Atlanta. Just stop and think of that alone. Just what radical changes to the landscape we've seen over the past few hundred years. Forget a thousand. A thousand years ago, you wind up in New York on a boat, and what are you looking at?

Looking at some fucking wooden shacks that are huddled up together eating beaver pelts? What the fuck are you looking at? You know? This thing has changed so fast i i met a guy at a wedding a few years ago who was like one of the world's leading experts on seashells sounds kind of boring right but we ended up talking about wampum and he told me something i'd never read anywhere which you know wampum right it was made from seashells. I know the name, but I don't know.

It was money that Native Americans used in the Northeast, right, when the Dutch first arrived in the very early days of New York, is what reminded me of it. It was made from a particular type of seashell that only grew in a certain area. So like all currencies, it had a very restricted source, you know, like gold or whatever, beaver pelts or whatever it was. By the way, you know, that's why 20 bucks, that's deerskins. That deerskins were used as currency in the colonial period.

Yeah. That's why we say 20 bucks. Yeah. But anyway, so the wampum, they'd make these belts of wampum that you could use to buy and sell things, right? So the Dutch, clever bastards that they are, figured out how they were making this wampum and what sort of seashells it was. And they learned to cultivate that particular mollusk. So they were basically printing, you know, counterfeit wampum. Wow.

So they didn't even just rip off the Indians when they bought Manhattan. They bought it with fake money. Holy shit. Fake Indian money. That's hilarious. They bought it with seashells. Yeah. Imagine how much a condo goes for now and just think that the whole thing went for seashells.

That's a lot of seashells. That's a change in the real estate market right there. You know what I love? I lived in Manhattan for ahells. That's a lot of seashells. That's a change in the real estate market right there. You know what I love? I lived in Manhattan for a few years, and last year I was there, I worked on a construction site. And since we're just talking randomly interesting things here, the guy, one of the laborers on the construction site explained to me why the buildings are really high in Midtown, and then they go down, and then they go back back up and they're high again down in Wall Street in the financial district. You know, if you look at Manhattan from New Jersey or from Queens or Brooklyn or whatever, I always thought that was just like, you know, what you're saying is like there are all these strange things that come together, whether it's finance or, you know, whatever happenstance

somebody wanted to build here or there. Turns out, no, there's a logic to this. And the logic is that the rock, the geological rock comes up near the surface at Midtown, and then it goes way down again under Soho and the village and all that. And then it comes back up close to the surface at Wall Street. So to build a really tall building, you have to drill, anchor it into the rock. So you can't do that where there's a lot of really tall building you have to drill anchor it into the rock so you can't do that where there's a lot of dirt you'd have to like dig down so far to get to it you'd like excavate the hole so you can only build a 50 story building where the bedrock is close to the surface and you can anchor it into there right so it's stable totally Totally makes sense. So what you're seeing when you look at that skyline is like an echo of the geology of the island.

Wow. Isn't that interesting? That is absolutely fascinating. It brings me up to this quote I was going to bring up earlier when you talked about Marshall McLuhan. A lot of folks don't know who Marshall McLuhan was, but he said a lot of amazing things. And one of the things he said, I think it was like in either the 50s. I think he said in the 50s. He said that man becomes the sex organs of the machine world.

That's beautiful. That's the craziest statement ever. If you stop and think about how premature it was or how precocious it was to say that in whatever he said in 1950 or 1960. Yeah. And look at what's going on now with our symbiotic connection to technology, the true machine that's taking over. I'm writing that down because I'm going to use that thing. I've thought about that so many times without even having read his quote,

but I wasn't able to put it so eloquently in my head. Yeah. Because they look like a life form. I mean, I have skeletons in my head is that if that that they look like a life form i mean i have skeletons in my garage it's an old mac old shitty fucking like tan thing with the stupid rainbow apple on it i have one of those things it's like really old and it's hilarious i look at it i'm like this is like a dinosaur so might as well be like a dead dinosaur a dead useless thing and now you know we don't have dinosaurs anymore now we got chickens you know, we don't have dinosaurs anymore.

Now we got chickens, you know, now we got whatever. Yeah. I mean, it really does seem like. Yeah. I wrote an article about the future of sex for this European called the European magazine. It's like it's a German magazine, but they publish in English as well. They asked me to write this thing a few months ago and I could have used that McLuhan quote. That was really good. But I said, like, basically, the way I see the future of sex is peeling off in two different possible directions, depending upon whether there's world collapse or not. And if there's not, I see us, as many people do, merging with machines, what they call the singularity, but also in terms of sexuality that, you know, now we've got fleshlights, but in a few years, we're going to

have holographic images. We're going to have like, the technology is always driven by this sexual hunger. There's a book called The Erotic Engine, where this guy argues that every communication advance was driven by money coming from erotic energy. You know, VHS tapes and then DVDs and the internet, like all the first money's coming in for porn. You know, even photography. First adapters, first-time adapters like HTML5 and all that. first-time adapters like html5 and all that as soon as people realized that the iphone wasn't going to uh go with flash and that uh html5 seemed like the the future when it comes to uh animated things online right porn went right to it sure you know whereas a lot of websites you still you go to it on an iphone and it'll show you the adobe thing not supported and not porn they figured out

right away. They're on the ball. Yeah, they got to make it so you can watch people fuck on your phone. Yeah. Isn't it amazing, though, that that is sort of, again, in the closet? It's sort of a background sort of reality, like all the banks in Miami being funded by cocaine. It's like everybody knows it, but nobody talks about it. Why is there so many banks in Miami?

Because that's where the fucking cocaine came from. Why is technology moving towards HTML5? What is online streaming technology? Where's its roots? Its roots are in people watching people fuck. That's where they got it down. That's where they got really good at it. Yeah, that's where the money is.

And that might, I mean, what percentage of that was responsible for the development of the CD-ROM? What percentage of that, you know, how much? I would like to know. Check out the erotic engine. He talks about all that. Yeah. Because before the internet came along, I mean, how many people bought movies as opposed to how many people bought dirty movies?

What was the share of the market? It's a big fucking chunk right yeah well in the cinemas you know yeah the porn that was another thing from your book that i found completely fascinating that i didn't think about was how we have this idea of corporate america not being not profit profiting in porn but how in fact like chains of hotels are like the biggest porn providers in the world yeah yeah they're making huge proportion of their profits from those on-demand movies last week when I was in San Diego I literally went through the whole entire list of porn because they were so funny titles it was probably 300

titles that they just had there mm had there and they're selling for like what 20 bucks or something yeah i think 10 whatever it is i mean that's pure profit at a certain point you know once they pay the the licensing fee off or whatever it is so them and you know who what was the other example you had of uh people that were profiting off a point that you would not expect yeah i, I don't remember. I remember the corporate thing you're talking about. And I think the corporation in question might have been Coca-Cola or somebody owned by Mormons or something. It was some, like, really conservative public image, but they were the biggest supplier to the hotel chains.

Yeah. Chick-fil-A. That would be hilarious. That would be... It's only anal. Chick-fil-A is only into chickens and dicks and asses. That's it. The other day I interviewed Nina Hartley from my podcast.

She's really interesting. I had to run away from her. She was on Kevin Pereira's podcast, and as soon as she was talking about how she only has sex with gloves on, I was like, bitch. Did you say that? You lost me. You lost me, bitch. I gotta go. She only has sex with gloves on. I was like, bitch, you lost me. You lost me, bitch. I gotta go.

She's all into fisting and fingering and assholes and pussies and she doesn't want fingernails. It makes sense, but she's a goddamn professional. She's got this clinical snap rubber glove approach to sex. She's also a nurse.

And she also has a flashlight. She has her own flashlight. She's got her own nurse. And she also has a fleshlight. She has her own fleshlight. Oh, that's right. She's got her own model. It resembles a missile hitting a large mammal. What you would get. Nice lady.

I mean, look, she's an old freak. She's very smart. Yeah, she is smart. She's an old hippie freak. That's what she is, you know? Yeah. But that's where I gotta walk away

when we start talking about I only have sex with gloves on. Okay, you lost lost me i just put a little bit of gold bond on it and then i rub it with my she's not that old dude you made her like past she's something past the milf though right it's like we talked about that yeah she's in a new category she's 53 54 somewhere in there still fucking throwing down throwing down she's an She's an educator. She's great. You're talking about gloves, man. A friend of mine told me this story. He was with a woman who's polyamorous, all right?

And so he, you know, whatever, they were going out to dinner. And he gets a text from her a few hours before dinner saying, look, I just want to be upfront about this as polyamorous people often are. My agreement with my partner is, what was the detail? The agreement is no intercourse. So we can do whatever else, but no intercourse, right? So he's thinking, well, geez, I thought it was was just dinner right so I guess right that's pretty good news I mean it right seems like everything else is on the table yeah so then they end up back in

her place and she says oh sorry the you know we the rule changed a little bit now it's like I know genital contact so they're making out and she says okay sorry you know my boyfriend says no genital contact. Right. So he says, okay, that's fine. So then she says, wait a minute, they're getting all hot and heavy. She says, wait a minute. She goes to the other room. She comes back in. She's got these black latex gloves on and she starts giving him a handjob because like, apparently with the gloves, there's no contact. Right. And then she gives him a dildo. So there's no contact right and then she gives him a dildo so there's like all this crazy stuff is going on and he told me the story he's like this was so far beyond what i would have you know anticipated exactly and it got really freaky because of these rules of course it made me

think about drugs you know like hey if coca leaf is illegal well then they're going to make cocaine you know if grass if you can't just grow grass in your backyard then you're going to get hydroponic you know super grass it's like you make these rules you know like hard liquor right the prohibition is what started gin and all this kind of stuff right so you make rules to try to contain a natural human appetite and what happens is it gets explosive right just like a bomb the bomb needs the containment to be explosive otherwise it's just nothing well it's a natural human inclination i can see loud and clearly with my kids when you try to keep kids from doing things, they automatically are like, why the fuck should I listen to you?

That's what I want to do. They get angry. It's a natural human response because all of our entire history of humanity has been people trying to dominate people, people trying to control people. So our natural thing is to resist control. That's why the biggest sluts always have like super religious parents. There you go. Jesus Christ, folks. Is it that easy? To resist control. That's why the biggest sluts always have like super religious parents. There you go.

Jesus Christ, folks. Is it that easy? Does Dr. Christopher Ryan have to explain it that easy? Yes. Although Nina Hartley's parents, interestingly, were communists who were blacklisted in Berkeley. Really interesting. Yeah. She's an old hippie. Yeah.

She's an odd case. She's an odd case. Yeah. Hippie. Yeah. She's an odd case. She's an odd case. Yeah. She's one of the rare ones where you always connect human – like girls who are into porn or get into that.

You always connect it with some sort of an abuse. Yeah. Some human aberration. Right. But now with her, she seems like just a crazy old hippie freak. Yeah. It doesn't seem dirty. It seems like she's having fun.

Yeah. It's weird. Yeah. No, she's an interesting person. I enjoy her. What is the weirdest thing you've gotten out of this study of human sexuality? Because your book is incredibly enlightening, and I think Duncan's definition of you as a shame exorcist is really a perfect one. Because it puts so many things into perspective, and it makes so many weird patterns of behavior that we follow

it sort of enlightens you on the the origins of them but what is like one of the weirdest things that you found in this pursuit well yeah there's so many you know obviously these things pop up in every conversation but i think one of the most uh memorable and and moving in a way was when I went looking for the first documented case of key parties and, you know, partner swapping and that sort of thing in modern America, not these sects in the 19th century, but 20th century stuff. I thought it would be, you know, some commune in Berkeley with a bunch of hippies and hendrix posters and you know whatever waterbeds and you know that kind of thing and uh but it wasn't it was world war ii fighter pilots in the pacific who had the highest fatality rate of any branch of the

military in world war ii 25 of them died in action well when they were back on base, I guess in Hawaii or the West Coast, they had key parties where they and their partners would come to these parties, put the keys in, you know, like in the ice storm. I don't know if you saw that movie. Great movie. And randomly sleep with each other's wives or girlfriends, right? And, you know, these are all like super, you know, genetically, yeah, good looking dudes, all alpha males, obviously, and the women they were with were hot.

So I don't think anyone was worried about, you know, pulling the short straw out of the short key. But, you know, I thought, well, okay, sure, these guys are facing death. They want to get it while they can, right? But then in the interviews I read with the survivors, what they said was, yeah, OK, we were young. We were strong. We were getting laid. But we could have gotten laid anywhere.

We could have gone to a bar and gotten laid. Because we wanted those other guys, we wanted our buddies to love our women so that if I die, I know these guys will take care of her. Whoa. Because they love her. Because they've been with her and they know her, right? It's like it moved me so much to read that because a lot of the accounts from the Amazon are the same. These guys are facing a difficult life. You know, you can go hunting one day and you get, you're the hunty, you know, things can go wrong really fast. So you want people to love each other, not exclusively, because then they take care of

each other. They take care of each other's kids. They share their food. They, you know, they look out for each other. And that's really the essence of humanity. Have you explored the idea that the opposite trend that we are finding ourselves in now where people are gravitating towards monogamy, at least culturally, at least on paper, that this move towards that ideal is because we're safer, is because we're more likely to be protected. We don't need these – and sort of it's a natural inclination to move towards like a deeper bond with one individual person. I don't know that I'd call it a natural inclination, but I tend to see it more as a byproduct of institutional and economic forces. I see that as also being natural.

And I know it sounds very contradictory. No, I hear you. But when I look at wolf behavior, I don't take our crazy, fucked up, weird behavior and not think that it's natural. Even though there's consciousness involved and choices involved, there's something about the pattern of human behavior when I look at it as a whole where I see it's kind of arrogant to assume that this isn't natural. It seems that almost everything is natural. That's the thing. It depends how you define natural, right? Right.

I mean, you could, if you take a real global perspective, you could say, as I tend to think of it, that we are not, we're the ants in the anthill. Right. And the anthill is what's evolving. And that's the sort of the location of the selection. In other words, as individuals, we think we're what's evolving but I think what's evolving is societies, corporations, these institutions that include us and they don't give a shit if we're happy or not.

Right. This larger being that we're a part of. And as we fuel them with electricity, with commerce, with whatever, they literally act like a life form. Exactly. The same way as technology, like Marshall McLuhan said, we are the sexual organs of machines. Well, as we fuel the desire for new laptops, we keep that alive.

Right, right. And, you know, when what Mitt Romney said, corporations are people, my friend. I don't think he was thinking in these terms. Right. But they're not people, but they're living beings. They have a stake in staying alive. Right. They have a vested interest in success.

Exactly. And if they have to step on us to do it, they'll do it, you know. How fucking crazy is that? And they can get people to do it for them. Frankenstein. Yeah. You know, that was the whole Frankenstein myth. And it's happened. Yeah. You know, don't fear it. How in 2001? Sure.

It's here. It's been happening for quite a while. Monsanto doesn't give a shit if they produce food that kills us. No. As long as they've cornered the market. Well, they also produce DDT and Agent Orange. Sure. It sells, right?

They've been making fucked up choices for a long time. You know what? I told that story about the pilots in San Diego. I was giving a talk down there. And this guy came up to me after and he said, I was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. Same thing. Different war, same thing. Wow.

So it's a natural behavior pattern. Apparently, it's a culture among fighter pilots that, A, they're facing death, right? And I found it. I've done a lot of research in hospitals, and I found a very amplified sexuality in hospitals among doctors. Cops as well. Cops, yeah, sure. Yeah. Sure, anybody who's on the edge.

And Hulk Hogan. Oh, yeah, brother. Hulk Hogan swings. He didn't fight that Hogan. Oh, yeah, brother. Hulk Hogan swings. He didn't fight that MMA fighter. No, he's not. He's just interviewed at the airport and he just said something silly. Everybody blew that out of proportion. Yeah, Hulk Hogan, he was a wife swapper.

Yeah? Yeah, it was on video. A lot of guys. The coach of the, was it the New York Jets or the Giants? Ryan. There was this, did you hear about this? No. It was this controversy because there were pictures on the internet of him, his wife, and another dude.

And the wife was like either naked or in lingerie and the other dude was sucking her toes or something. Oh, Jesus Christ. That's where I check out. That's where you want the gloves. We're weird about that, man. We're real weird about that. That's where I check out. That's where you want the gloves. We're weird about that, man. We're real weird about that. It's interesting. It's fascinating to just see the trends and how they change with the environment.

Yeah, and how different they are, as you were saying, in cultures. At the same time that thing was happening in the States and it was a huge to-do, Like there was a – at the same time that thing was happening in the States and it was a huge to-do, there was a soccer coach in England who got nabbed coming out of a massage parlor with happy endings and all that. And the press was there and snapping all these pictures and they said, do you know there are Thai hookers in there? He said, of course I know there are Thai hookers in there. That's why I go there. And it was like, what? How dare you not be ashamed?

And then they went and interviewed his wife. And his wife said, oh, God, if I could get him to go to Thai hookers twice a week, I'd pay for it. It relaxes him. He's better at his job. How is this any of your business? Just completely trumped the assumption that she'd be ashamed and run away from it like hey this is none of your damn business sounds like you got a good wife he nailed it imagine if the clintons had done that maybe they did in private you know maybe i think they did maybe hillary was just mad that he wasn't bringing chicks home

i mean who knows who Who fucking cares? Exactly. Whose business is it? It's just so weird how the desire for sex and our appetite for sex is not represented in any way. I mean, it's represented a bit in the media and film and advertising and stuff like that. But it's not honestly engaged. It's not honestly described. But it's not honestly engaged. It's not honestly described. It's funny, though, because I saw this commercial a couple weeks ago for some plunger, some plumbing thing to clear your drains.

And the idea was, and it was whatever the major brand plumbing thing is. And this stuff has the chemical nastiness, but it also has like a plastic thing you can stick down to pull the hair thing out and so it's like double action right and so the ad was this woman answers the door and it's this really good looking dude and the dude's like yeah i'm here to snake your drain baby and she says oh oh and she's like all flustered and oh yes come with me and then someone else knocks and she opens it's another dude and he's like yeah i'm here to help oh oh two of you oh what what country that's here in the states and i i linked to it i tweeted i said has this actually been on tv because i someone sent me the link on youtube i said has anyone seen this on tv and a bunch of people wrote back say oh yeah i've seen it on tv it It's on. I'm like, wow.

Wow. What's up with that? Well, congratulations, whatever company put that out. Congratulations for sneaking that through. Can we end on that? Can we pull that commercial? Yeah, pull it up. What's it called? It's quite good.

I think it's plunger, dual action plunger or whatever that chemical. I'm trying to find that, dude. Dual action plunger. That's hilarious. And the woman's like in the grocery store and she sees these two guys and has this whole fantasy. What's going on with that TV show? Your idea. Well, it's great, man.

Last time I was here, I guess we talked probably off the air about it a little bit. Like a whole shitload of production companies want to do it. It's great, yeah. Everybody thinks it's going to go. Is this it? Yeah. Double impact. Double impact.

I'm here to snake your drink. She's hot, too. He's hot, too. Mike, come on in. I'm here to flush your pipe. OK. What a good kid. Wow, she's letting her hair down and everything.

Meanwhile, he's going to go upstairs and it's just nothing but shit floating in her bowl. She takes these massive logs. Yeah, look at her poop. Yeah, these fucking wood chips in her poop. Make a sword out of that. It's just snot and blood. You got the very white voiceover

and she just woke up that's her that's her fantasy yeah the undersexed housewife shit's reality and the gay guy holding the fruit

the melons gay guy working with the melons and two of them are just gonna use her as an excuse to get together that's how they're doing

I didn't get that that's what double penetration is when two guys when they're both in the vagina at the's how they're doing. I didn't get that. That's what double penetration is. When two guys, when they're both in the vagina at the same time, they're just using the woman as a container so they could rub dicks. Become scrotum buddies. Yeah, that's what they're doing. Listen, fascinating again. Three hours just flew right by, man.

Yeah. We could do this every time. We still talked about like one paragraph in your book. We'll cover it one page. But it's a brilliant book. Thank you. And folks, if you haven't read it it's called sex at dawn you can get it on amazon which is a sponsor of the show um it's available as an

audio book it's also available of course uh in in book form and it's fucking great and you're you were working on another book too is that civilized to death is that is that coming out soon it's due october 1st should come out next spring unless I don't get to it. I'm going to start real soon. Sex is Dawn. It's available now. And your podcast, how do people get it? Tangentially speaking, you can get it at feralaudio.com or you can get it on iTunes.

It's on iTunes. Beautiful. And it's Chris Ryan, PhD, on Twitter. And thanks, brother. Really appreciate it. Really enjoyed it. Always good times. Always good times. All right. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Thanks to everybody. Really appreciate it. Really enjoyed it. Always good times. Always good times.

All right. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Thanks to everybody who came out to Nashville this weekend. We had a great fucking time. Nashville was awesome. It was exactly what I needed. I wanted to go to a small club and work out some new material. And, man, there's nothing like working at a comedy club.

I've been doing a lot of theaters lately. I forgot how much fun it is to do a weekend, like a 300-seater. Nashville is awesome. What a fucking great town. Thank you, everybody who came out, because I had the time of my life. It was beautiful. And Tommy Bunz was with me as well, Tom Segura. That's great.

We had a great time. It was seriously some of the best sets I've ever had in my life. You people were amazing. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. If you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, you can sign up. You don't even have to use your credit card. But if you decide to sign up, use the code name Joe and the number three, and you will save yourself some moolah, you sexy bitches.

And you're like, no way, Joe. And I'm like, yeah, way. Save some money, and it's an awesome fucking website. We're also brought to you by Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan, and you can save yourself 10% off any and all supplements. Go to Rogan.ting.com. That is our last and final sponsor.

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Bill Burr, one of my favorite human beings and one of the funniest comics working today. We'll see you then, you fucks. We love the shit out of uh so we'll see you then you fucks we love the shit out of you and we'll see you soon big kiss Thank you. Thank you.