The Joe Rogan Experience - #766 - Gad Saad

Episode Date: February 25, 2016

Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing & Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption and author of "The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption" and "The Consuming Instinct" "The Saad Truth" on YouTube -- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa-VfOWrqWJ1TUk6pvudnkhI91whoR7XP

fighting the nonsense of the world ladies and gentlemen the godfather's back how are you buddy oh good to see you man good to see you what's going on what's going on i'm here in southern california you escaped i escaped minus 30 with windchill last week didn't leave the house from friday to monday with the windchill factors minus 30 or it's actually minus 30? I mean, with the wind chill. So I'd say it's minus 15 with wind chill, minus 30. You guys have become too soft in Southern California.

100%. What do you mean become? We've been too soft. Yeah. This is a ridiculous place to live. Well, I don't know about that. It is. This is like a lottery winner place to live. It's like the weather lottery. And these people, they don't understand what weather is. They're just running around. I think, I don't know about that. It is. This is like a lottery winner place to live. It's like the weather lottery. And these people, they don't understand what weather is. They're just running around.

I swear to God, if it gets 50 here, people start complaining. I've seen weather advisories when I used to live here where there'd be a 10-minute spell of rain and there'd be endless warnings. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. We go through blizzards. There is one reason for that, though. The oil slick on the island.

Yeah. When it doesn't rain for a long time, all the oil from people's cars, the residue gets on the road. And as soon as just a little bit of water gets on that, it gets really slippery. And that is reality. But still. Before we start. Before we start. Last time when I was here, it was on your birthday, and some guy wrote in a very non-antisemitic way,

here goes God being a Jew, not giving Joe Rogan a gift on his birthday. So I thought that I would correct that by giving you a signed copy of one of my books. Oh, thank you. So there you go. There you go. The Consuming Instinct. Now you can grow. What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature.

There you go, buddy. By the Godfather. And signed by the Godfather. Thank you so much. Very exciting. Yeah, well, you can't read those things that people say, those mean things. Oh, yeah. I try to avoid them, but once in a while I get sucked in and they can piss me off.

Well, I always equate it to snake venom. It's like if you get a little bit of snake venom, you get immune to it, you get accustomed to it. Whereas if you get a big burst of it, it can poison you. So if you just get a little bit of it every now and then, when a big burst comes your way, like someone calling you a cheap Jew, you go, you motherfucker. It doesn't work anymore. You know? You just realize there's a lot of people out there that a lot of the reason why they're saying these mean things is because they're trying to find something that they can say that'll get you to respond.

Exactly right. That's a big part of it. So recently, the latest one is, so somebody trolls you endlessly in a very impolite manner, right? Okay. Usually, sometimes I try to engage them, but I find them obnoxious. Do you really? I know. It's ridiculous.

But you're a busy man. I am. You're an actual professor. I am indeed. At a legitimate university. I am indeed. Isn't it crazy that I would even entertain their- Yeah.

So anyway, so once in a while, I get sucked into the trap. Okay. They're impolite. So anyway, so once in a while I get sucked into the trap. Okay. They're impolite. So after a while I block them. So these guys then, because I've blocked them, start going around saying, well, you know, he's supposedly a proponent of freedom of speech, yet he blocks me as though I'm the purveyor of freedom of speech. Right. I mean, I'm not allowed to come to your house, break into your house and start calling you names. And if you stop me, I accuse you of not supporting free speech, right?

But in their minds, if I block them simply because I no longer want to engage them, I am going, I am being a hypocrite because I'm not supporting their freedom to insult me. See, again, I have to go back to what I said earlier. Why? Why? You're so smart. Like, how is this even getting into your mind? Can I tell you what it is? Oftentimes. Yes. I find it galling that somebody could be so insulting.

Galling. What does that word mean? Like, right? Yes. Right? I mean, we interact, you and I, with a million people a day. With most of the people, they're lovely, they're sweet, they're polite. The vast, vast majority.

Right. So when you get this individual who simply can't modulate his behavior to even sort of adhere to the most basic social norms, once in a while, I just get pissed off. But usually I'm able to avoid it. Well, you shouldn't even once in a while. I just get pissed off. But usually I'm able to avoid it. Well, you shouldn't even once in a while. Look, first of all, you got to realize that anonymity is a really confusing thing for people.

Right. It's the ability to communicate with people anonymous has never existed before. Right. Other than some serial killer making some note by cutting out little pieces of paper out of the newspaper and using the words from that. There's no anonymity, man. It doesn't exist, right? So when you have anonymity in the form of, like, you have a Twitter account and it's just an egg and you call yourself Fuck McGee and you just start trolling the Gadfather. Makes no sense.

Well, it's, you know, that's not a normal interaction. There shouldn't be a method where someone could just contact you like that. Because our bodies and our minds and all our systems, our social systems, they're just not set up for that. So it's saying rude things without consequence. Basically, you're offering, by the way, an evolutionary argument. Yes. That's exactly right. Perfect.

Beautiful. It's a completely new thing that we really just don't have the mechanisms for. We're not accustomed to it. We don't really have a long history of it. I mean, we have a history of just doing this. The realistic history at the extreme level is 20 years, 94-ish, 96-ish, somewhere around then when it started, right? But the real history is probably less than 10

of it really being incredibly pervasive the way it is today, like with Twitter and Facebook and all this Instagram comments and things along those lines. Go ahead. No, no, I was just saying it's a new thing that we have to work out because it is a massive, massive part of our culture. There was some statistic recently about the amount of data that people produce in a day worldwide and most of the data is lol fuck you you know bullshit but it

is you know ones and zeros binary code it's all all that data there's more produced in a day then it's it's some staggering statistic than the rest of human history. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's something crazy. Here it goes. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created daily. Incredible. What in the fuck is that? 90% of the world's data today has been created in the last two years alone. Wow. Well, by the way, a lot of business schools now have programs and data analytics or big data where they try to teach students how to navigate

through the complexity of this type of big data sets. So it's a really hot field in business schools. Well, it's impossible. I mean, the real navigation, I mean, what it is, is there is a pattern, a very clear pattern emerging. That pattern is of anyone being able to access any information at any time. And it's getting closer and closer to that all the time. And some of that means communication. means communication. It doesn't just mean being able to access, you know, Googling some facts or some knowledge. It also, it's being able to communicate with people. And it's gotten to this really crazy place. Speaking of information, my doctoral dissertation more than 20 years ago was about how do people decide when to stop acquiring additional information and commit to a choice? So suppose I'm choosing between cars or between mates or between job applicants or between jobs to take. Whatever the decision is. Did you say between mates?

Mates, yeah. So you got like a gang of bitches waiting for the dad father. You should see. I did look at some of the comments right after I appear, right? Then I lose interest and I don't. But there was one guy who wrote something like, this guy is swimming in pussy. And then everybody starts ganging up on that comment. You know what it is, man? It's that beer commercial.

The most interesting man in the world is that. I look like him? Yeah, that's what it is. Like that look, like it's become a thing now, you know? I got you. With the beautiful white beard and a man of wisdom in years. Thank you. So anyway, so in that, in my doctoral dissertation, I looked at, whoa, I think I'm better looking

than this guy. I'm sure you do think that. You know, that guy's Canadian too. Is he? Yeah. He's not even really Spanish. And he's much older than me. You think so? What do you mean? Yeah, I think so. He Spanish. And he's much older than me. You think so?

What do you mean? Yeah, I think so. He's like 70. Okay, I don't know. I'm 51. I don't know how old the guy is. So anyway, so the whole psychology of decision making, I've addressed it in my research. Very interesting stuff, yeah.

Well, this is a different sort of decision making thing. Because I think you definitely can get lost where you can just go online. And one of the things that YouTube does now that makes it really difficult is you watch a video. Say if I was watching some video today on a rhino slamming into a car. It was removed though, some copyright infringement. It's fucking crazy this rhino charges car and slams into it the problem is once you watch a video immediately after that it it offers up another video and it starts playing it'll give you like 10 seconds like and then it starts playing again and then you look on the side and there's all these suggestions it's not as simple as one video it's an endless web that's

why by the way internet pornography for men is such an alluring trap, right? Because our visual system and our need for variety seeking is there. And now you mean I can satiate this by going online, having endless, different, nubile, ready to mate women? Yes. So it's easy for our computational system to be parasitized by the internet. Well, it's also, it's probably really not, we're not really set up to watch people fuck. You know, it just,

it seems like the brain just doesn't know what to do with that. You know, especially if you're by yourself, you close the door, what's going on here? Yeah, I mean, there's people that just will watch pornography 10, 12 hours a day.

It's not just a few. I bet if you could highlight. I bet if you were in a plane and you're flying over the United States and there was a light bulb that went off over everyone's head that jerks off for 12 hours a day. You'd be stunned. You'd be stunned. You'd be able to read by it. You'd be able to hold a magazine

up to the window and read. I'm not joking. I think there's a lot of people out there that get overwhelmed by the possibilities of doing that, like the choice. They don't have the discipline to handle that. And it was actually a conversation that I was having with my friend Duncan the other day about discipline and how important discipline is to living a good and healthy life. And that getting the things that you need to get done will allow you to actually enjoy your free time. Whereas if you don't get those things done, the free time and those, these pursuits, these things, they almost become obsessions and you, you kind of dive into them to

avoid the pressure of getting those things done. And it becomes sort of counterintuitive. Counterproductive. Yeah. Going back to the pornography I had on my YouTube channel. Do you know who Mercedes Carrera is? Sure. Yeah. I've met her.

Have you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She came to one of my shows with, I guess, her husband or boyfriend or something like that. Very nice guy. Very smart girl.

But I'd seen her on Gavin McInnes' podcast. Right. And she's very smart. Well, of course. I mean, otherwise, I mean, what would we have to talk about? Well, she's an engineer, right? She's an engineer. She's very, very heavily vested into the whole social justice warrior bullshit.

The other way. Fighting against it. Fighting against it. Exactly. So I'd seen her on a few popular podcasts. And I thought, I mean, she's just not only, of course, beautiful, but so well-spoken. And so I had her on the show, and we've communicated since several times. And so that's been really fun.

I mean, sort of to mimic what you do with your podcast of bringing in so many interesting people. In my YouTube channel, I've had people from guys you know, guys who fight Islam to, you know, porn stars who used to be former engineers. So it's been really fun to meet all these people. Yeah. There's a cool movement going on now where there's a lot of very intelligent people that are resisting nonsense, where they're just going, come on, you're wasting time. You're wasting effort. And also there's a lot of people that are attaching themselves to these ridiculous movements just because they have an identity in that movement. And then they fill their void, whatever social void they have in their life, with this new thing, this new being an SJW. I'm a social justice warrior.

There was an article recently about Yale, about students at Yale having a hard time balancing out their responsibilities with activism. What fucking activism? This isn't activism. You're just holding up signs and complaining. This is not activism. You're not changing a goddamn thing other than people's opinions about you. Have you seen the one with...

I did an invited lecture at University of Ottawa on the thought police and political correctness. I'm not sure if you saw it. If not, you should check it out. It kind of covers the safe spaces and the microaggressions and the trigger warnings. And one of the examples that I picked, I really tried to pick some really outlandish examples that should only belong in the onion. One of the examples was some, I think it was some students at University of Oregon wanted to take down the classic quote by Martin Luther King, you know, the I have a dream stuff. Yes. Because it was insufficiently inclusive by him, you know, focusing his ire on racism and not looking at whatever it is, transgenderism and so on.

He was not, he was being divisive. So when Martin Luther King can draw the ire of these guys, none of us are safe. No one is safe. Yeah. Well, they're not safe either. I mean, they're eating themselves. They're attacking themselves. We had this podcast where we went over this story about this woman who joined Wellesley

College, which is an all-girls college. I've spoken there. Do you know the story behind it? Go ahead. The woman joined Wellesley College, and then once she joined Wellesley College, she decided that she's going to identify as a man. Oh, yes. Masculine of center, genderqueer is what her distinction was.

I've seen your shtick on it, and I was cracking up in my house. I was crying laughing. I was screaming laughing. stick on it and I was cracking up in my house. I was crying laughing. I was screaming laughing because then she voted to be, she wanted to be the head person of diversity, chairman of diversity, whatever the fuck

the title was, but it had something to do with diversity. And they were boycotting her because now she was a white man. This is glorious. This is glorious. They're literally eating themselves. They're so ridiculous. They've spun around in circles and they're biting their own asses.

It's what's going on. But I truly feel, though, that they've sort of reached the zenith and it's going to start decaying. No, it's going to get crazier and crazier and crazier. And then there's going to be, there's a culture war. Right. Yeah. I don't think they've stopped. I don't even think they've started.

I think they're just, they're right now scrambling. I think they don't hold weight amongst rational people anymore. But that's not going to stop their movement. Right. Their movement will continue to be irrational at a frenzied pace. And they're literally going to cannibalize each other. So what do you think is the end trajectory? I mean, at some point it has to crash, right?

Well, it's almost like a civil war, right? It's almost like a preposterous civil war. Like, I think in a sense, our politics in this country have always been a civil war just by nature of having only two choices, just by the, the, the dual party system and this ridiculous idea that there's independent parties. They're not, they're not independent. Unless Trump decides to go independent. He's going to win. You think he's going to win the presidency?

He's going to win. Yeah, he's going to win. Hillary can't beat him. I don't think she could beat him. I would like to see Bernie Sanders win. Not because of his financial policies, which I think are ridiculous, but I think his social policies are interesting. What I should clarify, here's what's ridiculous about its financial policies

Don't make more taxes because more taxes just means more government and more government is not what we fucking need right now If you want to organize charitable institutions that will legitimately help people and have people donate money and have people Work towards you know like these donations will actually take away from your taxes. Let's figure out some way where we make it beneficial for people to be charitable. Where we set up community programs, take some of the money that we're spending on shit that we really don't need to spend money on, some subsidies that we probably don't need that are benefiting gigantic corporations and instead use those to help the education systems in poor communities. Use those to try to help the education systems in poor communities.

Use those to try to provide jobs and industry in poor communities. These are all really good ideas. So I'm in favor of that kind of socialism. I'm absolutely in favor of free universities. Right. I don't think that people should get out of school and be a quarter million dollars in debt. I think that's madness. I think if you're going to make $50,000 a year, okay, if you've got a really good job, you make $50,000 a year, right,

you get out of school. If you get out of school and you make $50,000 a year, you're fucking kicking ass, right? Everything's going great for you. You're not really making $50,000. You're making about $34,000, right? And then you've got taxes. You've got sales taxes if you live in a place like California.

You've got state taxes. So you're living off of somewhere in the late 20s 30s something like that and you've got two hundred and fifty thousand dollars Of debt you've got to deal with and you've studied women's studies, which is a very actionable Set of skills well how many people study that well? Wellesley there's a couple I mean, I just think that it's an insane burden to put on young people, to have them enter into the free market, enter into the world, and be already saddled down by insane amounts of debt. I think there's got to be a way around that. And I don't think that it's a terrible idea to have publicly funded universities.

I just don't think it's a terrible idea. I don't think it's an insurmountable idea. So I like Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways. I think he's a compassionate guy. I think he's an open-minded guy. I think he says a lot of really radical things. I love the fact that he goes out on a limb with this Black Lives Matter stuff. I like that he's making a big deal about these cops shooting these young black kids. And then it's got to fucking stop. It's got to stop. It's madness. How many videos have to come out before you see, after a while,

there's obviously some clear problem. How is Trump not handling this? How is Hillary not handling this? This is a real problem in our culture, in our society. There's a divisiveness. There's this separation between these people that live in these communities that are terrified of the police, and they're really worried about being shot all the time.

And then everybody else that's on the outside that's looking in and saying, well, if you just followed the law, you wouldn't have those problems. Try being born there. Try being raised there. We're not on an even playing field. an even playing field, you know? And I think he's one of the few guys that's addressing this imbalance, this social imbalance, this cultural imbalance,

this economic imbalance that we have in this country, in a really radical way. So I like him for that. I think that would be a good thing for this country, for a guy like that. Would it really happen? I don't know. I mean, I'd take him over the others.

I take him over the other ones. I think Trump is just, he says too much crazy shit. This shit he said about Mexico, like, they're going to pay for that wall. And they called me up and they said, what do you think about this? And how could you say that? You know what? The wall just got 10 feet higher. That's not what we need.

I mean, he's not very presidential in his mannerisms. You know, I think he's a real successful guy. And I think what he's doing is he's tapping into this real frustration that a lot of people have. And there's a lot of people that don't like the bullshit that's involved in politics. Or people aren't saying what they really think. So here's this guy who comes along. He doesn't need anybody's money. He's insanely wealthy.

He's a multi-billionaire. And he can say whatever the fuck he wants. And he's used to saying whatever the fuck he wants. And every time he does it, people cheer. So that's good, too. It's good, too, because finally we've got, it's almost like we've got an insane Ross Perot. You know?

It's like, remember Ross Perot? I do, I do. Ross Perot fucked up the election for George. 1992 with the big ears. Yeah. He fucked it up for remember Ross Perot. I do. Ross Perot fucked up the election 1992 with the big ears Yeah, he fucked it up for George Bush's dad. Yeah, cuz the older Bush, you know They they slated him for a second term. A lot of people thought he was gonna win Ross Perot came along and explained on television He bought a half an hour of primetime TV pre-internet ladies and gentlemen He bought a half an hour primetime TV and explained to the Federal Reserve to people

Explained how you're getting fucked and I remember you know there was no internet back then so I remember me and some friends We got together afterwards, and we were we were going did you fucking see that like is that right is what he's saying true I kind of make any sense And then he was talking about how was his children were being threatened He was worried they were going to get kidnapped. It was all this crazy shit. And it got me down a lot of rabbit holes, you know, like conspiracy theory rabbit holes, watching that guy do that. But I think that what Donald Trump is is like a more rabid, informed version of that.

More informed meaning our culture is more informed. Meaning we're here in the age of the internet where if you go out on television and say something about the Federal Reserve, people understand that you're talking about an insane institution now. Whereas back then, people were like, what? What is he saying? The Federal Reserve is not a part of the government? Nobody knew that. Nobody knew the Federal Bank was it. Why is it called the federal bank? It's not federal. You know, it's so confusing. You know, I think the main thing about Trump that people are tapping into is rightly or wrongly that he comes across as authentic. I mean, Hillary Clinton could not be any more inauthentic. I mean, she freaks you out, right? She's spooky in her inability to convey, even if she tried to fake genuine emotions. Whereas on the other hand, whether you like him or don't, Trump seems to speak from the heart.

And so to the extent that a lot of people are disillusioned with politicians, then this guy comes along and I can at least tap into that and hang on that element of his personality. So I think that's what explains his success. Yeah, and also white men. Meaning? Yeah, there's a lot of white men out there that are excited that this really bold white man. As a contrast effect, you mean to Obama? Yeah, as a contrast to Obama, definitely as a contrast to Hillary. And, you know, Bernie Sanders is chumming up with the black folks, you know.

Have you seen, have you followed our politics in Canada? Yeah, your Trudeau guy. I like that guy. You do? I do. I like that guy. Because he's young and he seems smart. And he has nice hair.

He's got beautiful hair. He boxed. He did. He did do that hair. He's got beautiful hair. He boxed. He did. He did do that. But what's bad about him? To the extent that I think we both despise social justice warriors, the ostrich brigade, the regressive left. Explain the ostrich brigade. that I popularized, which basically refers to folks who have their head deep in the sand so that they can't really accept some of the most basic regularities

in the world, right? You know, there is no link between Islam and any terrorist act anywhere in the world. And to suggest otherwise would be Islamophobic. Exactly. So somebody who exhibits

this type of behavior is exhibiting ostrich logic. Right. So Justin Trudeau is the king is exhibiting ostrich logic. So Justin Trudeau is the kingpin of the ostrich brigade. Damn it. Yeah.

Handsome fellow. So he basically, his dad instituted, as part of our Canadian ethos, multiculturalism. And multiculturalism means two different things. Multiculturalism,

when it's used in everyday language, means many cultures, right? L.A LA is multicultural, meaning it's pluralistic. But multiculturalism as a political philosophy is actually a very dangerous idea, right? It basically says that when immigrants come into your land, they don't have to assimilate within your cultural values. Rather, you allow everybody to get ghettoized, because who are we to judge the values of another? Ghettoized? Yeah, like, you know. You mean like a Dominican community? Here are the Muslims are here, the non-sharia zone here. But ghetto is like a poor. No, no, no. No, ghettoized in the sense that everybody who is of the same background lives in that space. But that's not a ghetto. I is of the same background lives in that space. But that's not a ghetto. I mean, the term is used in different ways.

It's not ghetto in the sense of hip-hop ghetto. Is zero a term? Ghetto? Is that like a legitimate term? To be ghettoized? Yeah. What does that mean? Because I've always, I don't, I mean, I'm just saying, ghetto in this country is always referred to as a poor community. No, I think it has a broader meaning at least

as i understand it so for example if you say you're ghettoizing people into different areas of the city i've never even heard it as a verb well that's why i'm here ghetto eyes there you go yeah here we go new immigrants still tended to ghettoize in the cities so is that i mean it's exactly what I just defined. Yeah. What's the origin of ghettoize? I don't know the etymology. Is it actually based on the word ghetto?

I'm guessing. Or is it a totally, is it like, brace yourselves, folks. I'm going to say a word that's confusing. Niggardly. And it has nothing to do with the N word. Yes. It has to do with, like, find the origins of that word. Because it has to, it's about being miserly or cheap.

Yes. But it has nothing to do with black people whatsoever. Reluctant to give or spend, stingy and miserly. And the origin, what's the origin of it? Where's it set? Does it say? No? Doesn't have an origin?

But let me, if I could finish my point about Justin Trudeau. Okay, go ahead. Please do. Yeah. So Justin Trudeau, at one point when he was a member of parliament, someone had said that things like female genital mutilations and child brides and honor killings was the type of barbarism that we don't need in Canada. And Justin Trudeau's position at the time

was, how dare you use the word barbarism in describing other people's cultures, right? So he wasn't offended by having women's clitorises cut, he was offended by people who described that behavior as barbaric. So he is the king of the ostriches. So he's not a fan of the godfathers. Oh, no. Or I'm not a fan of his, rather. Oh, Canada. Yeah.

Have you followed some of our debates regarding allowing the sort of open, well, not open door, but allowing massive number of Syrian immigrants? No, I haven't followed your debates, but I see what's going on in other countries. Well, so of course in Europe, they look at our issue and they sort of say, come on, are you serious? We have 800,000 migrants coming through to Germany. You're complaining about 25,000. Well, look what happened with Cologne.

The mayor of Cologne, after these attacks on New Year's Eve, was telling women to dress different and stay away from men. Ostrich Brigade. That's fucking insane. I mean, that is a very culturally diverse area that has existed in a very peaceful way for a long time until all of a sudden they let in all these immigrants and they're having a massive problem with women being sexually assaulted. So instead of protecting these women and trying to do their best

to ramp up the police force or do something to stop it or make sure that people are safe or really put out there that, look, you're in a new fucking place. And if you want to assimilate in our culture, you've got to leave these fucking women alone or we're going to get rid of you. Everyone who does anything to women in our country, we're going to get rid of you. You can't be here and make people feel unsafe. Instead of doing that.

But see, that's so one of the reasons why I'm very concerned about the 25,000 that are coming in. People say, well, come on, how many of them are likely to be ISIS members? But the danger is not only, people only think of ISIS members as a danger, right? But when you've got 25,000 people of whom a very large majority will adhere to certain values that are perfectly antithetical to ours, right?

What are your views on homosexuals? What are your views on religious minorities, on Jews? If we let in 25,000 Syrians, statistically speaking, is it more likely or less likely that it'd be anti-Semitism? I mean, that's an empirical statement that we could test, right? So it's not only about the fact that how many of these 25,000 are ISIS members, it's how many of these 25,000 people will hold values that are perfectly congruent with ours. And so we have every right, without having the threat of being called racist and Islamophobe over our head,

to engage in a discussion on how do we vet these people? I mean, how do you find out what percentage of those are going to hold views that are grotesque to us, and then should we be letting them in? Well, what are the options? I mean, how could you possibly find out what their views are? You would have to sit down with each one individually and quiz them, and then you would have to verify their claims or their answers. Well, at the very least, I would argue that you should never be allowed,

You should never be allowed under the guise of hatred that's coming my way supersedes your right to practice your religion of genocidally hating me. And so that simply has to be the rule. And if we don't wake up to that reality, we're going to have problems. Yeah, I would say that that's a very reasonable statement. And I think that there's a lot of people in this country that like to say things like what you were claiming Trudeau said about culture like how dare you criticize their culture their culture is a bullshit word It's human behavior you looking at human behavior some human behavior is acceptable Some is not and if it's acceptable in other countries to eat people guess what it's not's not acceptable here. You can't cook people. You can't eat them. We don't allow it. Right. Well, let me add to that. Part of multiculturalism is this idea that all cultures

are unique, distinct, and equal in their own right. And actually, that is a truly, profoundly incorrect statement. Cultures are not equal, right? Different cultures are differentially able to engender happiness to more or less people, right? So if you are part of whatever it means, Taliban culture, you can on average predict that women in that culture will be less self-actualized than in Western countries. That is an empirically demonstrable fact. And so the idea that who are we to judge other cultures, this idea of cultural

relativism, which is part, which is endemic of multiculturalism, is profoundly incorrect and it has to go. Well, it's a blind statement. It's not a real statement. You can't really say that. It's not, I mean, you could look at it economically. You could look at it socially. You could look at it in terms of, you know, there's a real good argument that in this country, there's less freedom than there is in other countries because more people are in jail. You could look at it that way. You could look at the disproportionate amount of people that are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses in this country and say, well, this country is obviously a fucked up place. Right. And that's a legit claim as well.

But the idea of numerical value, equal, making it equal, we're all cultures equal. That's foolishness. That's not true. Not only that, there's a very real thing going on in the world where as the age of information washes upon us, and I think this is the new age of information, the age of pure information. As this washes upon us, we're seeing massive changes in our own country. We're seeing massive changes in our political system. We're seeing massive changes socially.

And I think the social justice warrior thing is sort of a side effect of that. Where these disenfranchised people, some of them may be mentally ill they have a voice you know some of them let's not say ill imbalanced um maybe they're radical because they're young and idealist and they haven't looked at all at all the right ways and then one day they'll balance out like many people have as many young radicals who become very rational people in their 50s and 60s and whatever. But this thing is taking place here, and it's also taking place all over the world. Well, where information is being resisted, that's where we have problems in the world. Right.

Where fundamental religious values are superseding the age of information. They're squashing people's ability to express themselves, people's ability to try new things, explore new things, their sexual values, their identities, all those things. As soon as you have an ancient fucking scripture, some shit that was written on animal skins a thousand years ago, as soon as that is Is at the head and that takes precedent over everything else because it was supposedly the word of God or who else?

Right someone who talked to God whatever the fuck it is that you got a problem a real problem there because religion religion in and of itself is an idea. And it's an idea that is one of the very few ideas that we accept that literally has no basis in reality. It has no basis in fact. It has no basis in anything provable. And that's why we have this concept of faith. Well, as soon as you have religion that's dominating information, have you have a problem you got a bottleneck you got a wall that's put up for progress now when people develop in that environment

you have stifled people just like i have a friend um and him and his wife they were mormons until they were like 40 and And then they decided slowly. They literally lived overseas for a bit. And they kind of experienced the world. And it opened their eyes to a lot of different things. And they decided to move away from the church. They're fucking lost, man. They're lost.

Like they're almost like grown-up children. I think you might have told me about them. I think I did. They're wonderful people. They're great people. But the wife is really interesting because she's very self-aware. And she even talks about it. She says, growing up in this really fundamentalist religion, I think I developed a really bad way of looking at things where I'm easily confused.

Easily confused and easily led. Right. Like a charlatan could take her over or a cult member could. Chapter eight of the book that I just gave you is called Marketing Hope by Selling Lies. And basically what I argue there is that there are different peddlers of hope that are successful precisely because they could sell you hope in the areas that are most important. It's sort of Darwinian insecurities, right? How to be a better lover, how to live forever, how to be a better parent, right? So all of the key Darwinian pursuits that keep us up at night, there is a peddler out

there who can give you the recipe, whether he be a self-help guru, whether he be a medical quack, whether he be religion. And so that's why those products are so successful because they peddle us hope. Yes. But growing up with religion, especially fundamentalist religion, it cannot be questioned. It becomes a real problem because there's these rigid areas where you're only allowed to think one way. Right.

Now you develop these patterns in your mind. Then when you move to a new place, it doesn't support those ideas and you want to use general mutilation. You want to wrap women up in fucking mummy cloth and make sure they can't drive like you want to do that same shit in canada that you're doing in saudi arabia you got a real fucking problem that's a real problem and see and justin trudeau would say who are we to judge their practices whereas what you're saying is you're against multiculturalism because you are taking a position against it. So you don't like Justin Trudeau. Well, I'm definitely not against multiculturalism. I'm against religious

fundamentalism on a global scale because I'm not against God. And this is what people have to understand. I would be the last person to tell you I have any idea about something that I have never experienced. And what I've never experienced is the afterlife. Right. I've never. I am open to the idea that this life is one stage and an infinite fractal, like a gigantic. Infinite number of experiences that are, our energy can,

can go through. Can I interject? Yeah. Could that simply be the fact that you are finding an alternate way, not through religion, but through some alternate means to address. Live on forever. Well,

exactly right now. So I could, I could take the spill called religion that will grant me immortality, or I could do your fractal mumbo jumbo stuff, and no disrespect, and that could still get me to inf— whereas I want to be coming back on this podcast for the next 4,000 years, but it really worries me that I won't. But it's honest. It's honest to know that you've got 85 years. In a sense, it's liberating because it forces me, and you if you're an atheist,

to really carpe diem it, right? You really have to seize the day because there are no do-overs. There is no eternity. There is no afterlife. It's all right here what we do. And so in a sense, there is a glory to the finiteness that is afforded by atheism. You can certainly look at it that way. My perspective, though, is that we really just don't know.

And that energy continues to move forward in a lot of different ways we see this throughout all of nature whereas things die they get reabsorbed into the ground the very energy and the essence that they had when they were alive fuels all these different microbes and bacteria in the ground that it makes the soil richer it grows more plants animals eat those plants that nourishes them they all they literally the cells and the the carbon from every fucking human being on this planet came from a star that exploded death becomes life in some sort of strange way and i don't think that it's impossible that that could be the same thing with consciousness, with energy, with whatever the fuck it is inside of us

that makes us alive and aware and makes our minds tune in to all of the possibilities and the wonders of the world. I don't know if this is the end, but you don't either. I don't. Well, no one does. Right. That's the point. And then as soon as someone comes along and tells you they do know, and this is the only

way to the afterlife, this is the only way to heaven, you've got a real problem. You've got a real problem because human beings are malleable and you can guide them and you can direct them and you can mold them and you could turn them into religious slaves. You could turn them into ideological slaves. And we should recognize that from a psychological perspective, from an educated perspective, from a perspective of recognizing cult behavior. I was watching this thing on this guy, Steve Hassan, the guy who was on our podcast before, he's a cult expert.

He sent me an email today and I watched this piece on cults and cult behavior and cults on the internet. And it's terrifying how malleable people's minds are and how someone who's an inscrupulous person or unscrupulous person or someone who has nefarious ideas can convince people to blow themselves up, to get virgins in the afterlife. I mean, that's a reality. To get very earthly Darwinian things in the afterlife, right? Well, people don't know. And that's my point.

And when someone comes along and says, I do know and this is the truth, it becomes a real problem because you can't fucking prove it. You can't prove it. You don't have any facts You don't have any data. There's nothing you can measure There's nothing you can weigh and you're not saying you think you're saying, you know And if you think one thing if you think I think this is it carpe diem live for the day This is our only shot here You might be right or this guy who's done a fucking pound of mushrooms might have come back from the other side and say, listen, I have this idea. And I think that love is eternal and it goes on forever. And what we really are here, we're this being that's trying to figure itself out in this very brief amount of time.

And the best we can do is leave behind information. We have this wonderful thing called communication and language. We store behind information. We have this wonderful thing called communication and language. We store this information. The next generation comes along and tries to pick up where the last generation left off, gather up as much data as they can, and then move it forward a little bit before they expire. And we keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it until hopefully we move towards some level of enlightenment as a species. See, I can repackage that in slightly more earthly and less esoteric terms. I think that we can achieve immortality in quotes in two ways, right? Through genetic propagation.

That's why you and I have children. I mean, literally, we are extending our genes. And also through memetic propagation. And memetic propagation is, you know, you read this book and it now infects your brains I'm not reading it now you're not infecting me man by the way next time I come there's a 100% final exam on this book so you better damn professors exams right like a cheat sheet or so so memetic propagation is basically anything that can be part if you like of your legacy right so the collection of stuff that people can go and watch about you

is part of Joe Rogan's memetic propagation. And long after you may be gone, people will be able to consume Joe Rogan's ideas and all of the wonderful things that he's done for many, many years to come. And so in that sense, I think, either through genetic propagation or memetic propagation, we can be immortal. And that's why it is really important to do all the wonderful things that people do, because that is your ticket to immortality. I mean, again, you might say, well, how do you know? I don't know. But until I have any evidence of otherwise,

I'm going to take the intellectually honest position and say, the party's going to end. Well, really, let's let's get further than that because immortality is nonsense this fucking sun doesn't have an immortal life yeah we got like four billion four billion years right if we're lucky and that's that's assuming that we don't get hit by one of these gigantic fucking rocks that keeps flying around you hear about that one that went off over the at Ocean the other day? No. Oh, my God. A fucking meteor exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody knew about it.

Nobody heard about it. Nobody knew it was coming. Pull this up, Jamie, because the amount of energy that it released is insane. So if it would have hit, let's say, New York, what would have happened? Dead. Everyone. Dead. Dead. Like Hiroshima.

Bigger than Hiroshima. Here it is. A meteor exploded over the Atlantic. Pull up the amount of power that it had. I had it on my Twitter where it talked about in relationship to Hiroshima, like how big of it it was. 500,000 tons of TNT. Jesus fucking Christ. It's insane.

It says that was the one over Russia. Oh, this is the one over... What is this one? It was 13,000 tons of TNT. Okay. Oh, the Russian one I remember from a few years ago, yes. But what's the Atlantic Ocean one? Well, pull up the one that compared it to...

Pull up the article that I had on my Twitter, because it compared it to a pull up to the article that i had on my um on my twitter because it compared it to uh a nuclear bomb wow yeah well these are really common you know and i had this guy randall carlson on the podcast a few times and he's dedicated his life to paying attention to the signs of astroial impacts all throughout history and all throughout the world he's an astronomer yeah and he believes that what's happened is all throughout human history There's been these resets where people accumulated a lot of data They learned a lot society move forward and then boom We got hit and then a lot of people died and then they had a regroup start all over again And there's a lot of evidence in the physical form this stuff called trite. I think it's called trite night

It's called new it's nuclear glass They call it and it's the same substance that they find when they do nuclear tests in the desert and stuff and they found it All throughout Europe and Asia and they find it when they do core samples between like 10 and 12 thousand years So it's exactly the same time as the end of the Ice Age coincides at the end of the Ice Age. And with these like puzzling moments in civilization where you have, they'll find things like Gobekli Tepe, these beautiful structures that are really complex that are 14,000 years old, 12,000 years old. They're like, who the fuck was building this stuff back then when we thought people were hunter gatherers? And then right after that, boom! We get hit by rocks.

Most people die. A lot of people die. And then they have to regroup again. And I think that that's most likely going to be the end of humanity. Just like it was the end of the dinosaurs. 65 million years ago. It's much more common than we really would like to think about. So definitely don't sweat the small stuff. Yeah, there's no immortality as far as this dimension.

It's just, it's not going to happen. So you want me to tell you a bit about the evolutionary roots of religion? How you would study religion as an evolutionist? Okay. You ready? Yeah. So one argument is based on, it's an adaptive argument, right? So the idea is,

if religion exists, does it confer an adaptive advantage to people? And so there is some work done by a good friend of mine, David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, where he argues, using a group selectionist argument,

that groups that are religious out-survive groups that are not by virtue of them being more communal, more cohesive, more banded. So that argument is an adaptive argument for why religion exists. There is another argument by other evolutionists that is based on an exaptation argument. Have you ever heard that term? Exaptation? No. What does that mean?

So that's a byproduct of evolution. In other words, it's something that evolved not because itself it confers an adaptive advantage, but rather it's piggybacking. So, for example, the fact that your skeletal system is the color that it is, that itself is not adaptive. It is a byproduct of other evolutionary processes. So from that perspective, religion piggybacks on computational systems in our brains that evolve for other things. You follow what I mean? So, for example, coalitional thinking, the idea of viewing the world as us versus them, blue team versus red team, that is an innate part of our psychology.

Now, religion piggybacks on that, right? It takes that computational system that already exists in us, and it puts it on steroid, right? So you think about the Abrahamic religions, right? Every one of them has us versus them. They are the Jews, the Gentiles, the believers, the kuffar, right? And so agency detection, detecting agency in things is something that is innate to us. Religion plays on that. The agent becomes God. And so that's an argument that was proposed by Pascal Boyer, where he's basically saying that religion did not specifically evolve because itself it is adaptive, but it piggybacks on other things that have evolved.

And then a third way to study religion is to just do a content analysis of the narratives within religion. of the narratives within religion. So there's a great study done by a Darwinian historian where she looked at, in the Old Testament, how many women are ascribed to a different male in the Old Testament as a function of a status. So the higher the status of the male, the more sexual partners he had, which is exactly what you would predict

from an evolutionary perspective. High status to men confers reproductive success. So there are different ways that evolution, and there are several other ways, that can study religion from an evolutionary perspective. That's pretty fascinating. I also think that we've always, as cultures, sort of tried to stay alive and have tried to maintain order. We've always tried to establish sets of rules and boundaries and things. And it only makes sense that you would say, Hey, you know, there's a real reason why you can't kill people. And it's not because

it makes everybody upset. It's because you're going to go to hell. Right. So listen, you don't want to go to hell. so don't kill people. All these things that people have done throughout history, I mean, if you look at religion on a global scale, there are some key components to almost all religions. And those seem to benefit order. They seem to benefit culture. And like you were saying,

that the idea of people living longer and being more successful as a culture, yeah, well, senses of community. If you have a sense of community, if you establish community and you establish a bond between people and a higher good or a higher reason to exist. Well, I'll give you another example.

Kosher laws. I actually discussed this in this book, right? So I try to offer a biological explanation that is not rooted in religious narratives for why kosher laws would have evolved. So think about the kosher edict that you shouldn't eat shellfish. Well, so I did a lot of research when I was writing the book on this issue. It turns out that when you have shellfish that is infected with a particular pathogen. Red tide. That could kill you, right?

Yes. The one that is infected versus the one that is not infected, you can't sensorially tell the difference, either through smell, either through sight. So number one. Number two, it's not as though the one that's coming from an infected lives in mercury or water. So there is nothing that you could use in terms of observational learning that can offer you some statistical regularity of, if I do A, B will happen. Once in a while, somebody eats a shellfish, they drop dead. I don't have a means, I'm thinking as a bronze age guy running around the Middle East, to ever learn from this malediction. Therefore, the only thing that I can do is then say, it is an edict from God, boom, don't do it. So there are very, very

easy earthly biological reasons to take food taboos, religious taboos, and demonstrate that they have nothing. But of course, when I say this in a classroom where there are people who might otherwise be religious, they see it, yet they can't completely follow you. Of course. Yeah. Well, because they have this doctrine in their mind that is just the word of God. Well, also pigs, eating pigs.

Exactly. I mean, we all know that pigs contain trichinosis and bears as well. You're not supposed to eat bears. There's a lot of reasons why kosher living in, you know, a thousand, five thousand years ago, whatever, was really smart. Smart way to go. Have you ever read, I'm giving him here a thumbs up, maybe it'll help his book, The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant? No, I haven't, but John and I have been talking back and forth on Twitter. He's moving here.

So when he moves here... He's dead to me. You just said he's moving here. I want to be in Southern California. He's dead to me. Why don't you just move here? You were here for like three months, right? Weren't you here for a bunch of months?

I'm here all the time. Why don't you move here? Because I need a professorship here. Get a fucking job here. You're a smart guy. You're selling books. You're doing well. You're right.

But anyways, I think in his book, he talks about, I don't remember the exact number, but he looked at the 613 commandments in Jewish law. And some outlandish number, say something like 20% of them, deal with purity rituals. say something like 20% of them deal with purity rituals. And those purity rituals are ultimately means, very earthly means, to try to remove the possibility that you've been exposed to dangerous pathogens. Right. Right.

So again, you see how something that is cloaked in the robe of religion is ultimately solving a very basic earthly biological problem. Well, also, if you talk about sexual promiscuity, controlling that controls sexually transmitted diseases, which like syphilis and a lot of the really terminal ones, before they had medication for those things, they killed a lot of people. A lot of people died from having sex, which is just a ruthless, cruel thing. And you've got to assume that that's probably nature trying to strike some sort of a balance, right? We don't want to think about it that way, but it exists all throughout nature.

When animals become overpopulated, all of a sudden they start developing diseases and they fall off. I mean, that's the rabbit cycle. If you're not aware, people who aren't aware, rabbits go in a seven-year cycle. So if you're around and you see a lot of rabbits, you see rabbits all over the place. And then like three years later, there's no rabbits. What happens is rabbits get to a high population level and then they'll develop a disease and they die off. And then there's only a few rabbits and then it takes seven years until they reach this peak again then they die off again

and it's this is in a natural setting natural constant seven year cycle to regulate the population of rabbits because we all know that rabbits fuck like rabbits right and they they make a lot of babies and they don't have that, unfortunately, with pigs. Pigs are so hardy and so ruthless that they will have litters three, four times a year. I think a female pig can have a litter as soon as, like, look this up, Jamie, but I want to say it's like within six months. Within six months of being born, she can give birth, which is crazy. Within six months of being born, she can give birth, which is crazy. And they can just have piglets three times a year, and each time they do it, they'll have a bunch of them, and they'll just overtake places. They got a problem in San Jose.

There was a news story on the other day where these people were in their house, and the pigs were knocking over their garbage can and eating up their lawn in a normal residential neighborhood. Like, I mean, a pretty crowded neighborhood. And these wild pigs are just roaming through the streets now. They're everywhere. Have you ever heard the term RK selected? Does that ring a bell? Yes, but I don't remember what it means. So basically, it's the idea that some species produce many offspring with the hope that very few will survive until sexual maturity. Alligator,

frog, many fish, although on that scale, they would be less so versus elephant humans, where the gestational period, the length of parental investment that is required before you reach sexual maturity is much. So it's either a lot of quantity, hoping that a few survive, or much less quantity, but heavily parental investment. And just that, right, whether you are a species that is R or K selected, the reason for the R or K term doesn't matter, has a profound effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species, right? So things, for example, like humans are a biparental species, right? So even though males invest parentally less than females in the human context, we are really champion dads.

I mean, in the greater context of mammals, human dads are just outlandishly good. Yeah, there's no one like us. Nothing like us, except for example, penguins, but of course they're not mammals. So in the human context, then because we are a biparental species, you would expect the evolution of a few things. One of which, and I actually recently, I discussed this in one of my lectures because somebody asked that exact question. So the evolution of romantic love is, if you like, a solution to this very important problem, which is you and I, male, female, have to pair bond for a certain period

of time. We have to be able to stand one another for a sufficiently large enough period of time to get our child to sexual maturity. And hence, there are selection pressures for us to evolve the affective system that we call romantic love. So this shows you how, depending on the particular history of the species, you get completely different interesting trajectories. That is fascinating. And it completely makes sense if you think about it. And there are certain animals like rats or mice that are constantly being preyed upon. They have to develop large litters. Right.

Here's another one. Here, coping with feral hogs. Oh, nice. Five and six pigs per litter, sows of approximately 1.5 litters per year. Yeah, but when can they get pregnant? They get their first litter when they're 13 months of age. Wow. They can be sexually mature at six months.

What's their life expectancy? That's a good question. Let's see. 48 years of age. That's if they don't get killed by a cougar. So here's another one. You ready? Yes.

All right. Check this out. So you know what sexual dimorphism is? Yes. Right? So humans are sexually dimorphic. But take, for example- Why don't you explain it to people who don't know what it means?

Oh, sorry, yes. So where there is an innate sex difference. Typically, we talk about, for example, sex. Sexist. You're a sexist. I'm sexist. I didn't realize. You know, sexual dimorphism is just a cultural construct. It's a cultural construct. It's not real. And I like how you say it with the affectation of a wealthy person.

I watched a woman in a video explain that women are not inherently weaker than men, just engage in less strength-based activities. Oh, I've heard the exact same thing. That's hilarious. Well, actually, and it's even been linked to the fact that little boys are encouraged to

play rough house and tumble, whereas little girls are dissuaded from doing so. And that's what sets them on their trajectory so that Bubba, who plays center for University of Nebraska, can bench press 500 pounds. It's completely social construction. It has nothing to do with muscle mass, nothing to do with testosterone. But anyway, so going back to differences across species. So sexual dimorphism.

So some species are very sexually dimorphic. Elephant seals. You have a male who's massive, four times the size of a female. Or mountain gorillas. So if you look at the extent to which there is or isn't sexual dimorphism with the species, that itself perfectly predicts the mating system within that species. Meaning, if there is a huge sexual dimorphism, typically the males are bigger than the females,

but sometimes you have a sexual reversal species, then you have pillaginous mating. Meaning what? One male monopolizes sexual access to many females. And the reason why they develop that size is because that's the combat that they engage in, where the winner then gets the genetic lottery. on the other hand when you have species where the two sexes are equal sized then you have typically monogamous mating like in the case of some bird species but even there by the

way even though they're supposed to be monogamous once in a while they go behind the bush genetic tests have shown well birds are really only like penguins are a big one that people bring exactly but they're only monogamous for a year right but even even within what you consider to be a monogamous window there are some tests that show that once in a while we do go behind the bushes that it's behind the bushes they're not here with the guy i i try to once in a while uh use my evolutionary stuff on my wife to explain why it might be okay to do this. She hasn't really bought into the whole thing yet. She needs to read more. Get her head out of the bushes.

Exactly. Sand, wherever. By the way, incidentally, this whole idea of taking an evolutionary explanation and then people thinking that that then justifies or condones a behavior is a classic reason why people hate evolutionary psychology. So if you explain, you know, here's an evolutionary explanation for rape. Here's an evolutionary explanation for why child abuse happens if there's a step-parent in the family. Here's why people might have difficulty staying true to their monogamous unions. staying true to their monogamous unions, then people will get very upset at you because they somehow conflate the fact that you are explaining the phenomenon using science as meaning that you are saying it clears your moral judgment. And of course it doesn't, but that's one of the places

where people get really upset at you and will send you hate mail. And that moral judgment is also cultural, which gets really strange when you look at certain religions like the Mormons. Right. Like the whole reason why the Mormons set up this compound in Mexico, why they moved to Mexico was when polygamy was made illegal in the United States. Right. So they were like, well, we're just going to go to Mexico. And that's where Mitt Romney's family came from. Which is really bizarre. And isn't it amazing how whenever there are these polygynous rulings from God, it's always

that it's one man with multiple women. It's never been a polyandrous thing. It's never been the other way around. Yeah, women don't want to get gangbanged. They don't want a bunch of dudes sticking. Well, you know, there is one place in the world where there is polyandry. Do you know where it is? Somewhere that sucks?

It's called Tibetan polyandry. Do you know where it is? Somewhere that sucks? It's called Tibetan polyandry. Told you. It's fraternal Tibetan polyandry. Fraternal? Yeah, which means? It means brothers and sisters? No, meaning... They're in a frat together?

No, meaning that the woman who is being shared across many men, those men are brothers. That's crazy. But here's the evolutionary explanation right imagine where you have a system for whatever reason where not every man could be mated right that's not a good thing because you have a lot of men who are going to be sexually frustrated right like china right exactly yeah so therefore by creating a system where okay not everybody could

be guaranteed that their reproductive fitness is going to be assured, but at least their kin selection will be assured. Meaning what? I share half of my genes on average with my brother. So either I will impregnate the woman, in which case, great, or my brother will impregnate her, in which case I'm still indirectly, not through direct reproductive fitness, but through kin selection, I'm still indirectly, not through direct reproductive fitness, but through kin selection, I'm still extending my genes. So even in cases where men share a woman, it has to be in the context of all in the family. Whoa. I'm blowing your mind. That's an intense thing. And that must be just a reaction to the fact that there's much more men than there are women. And why would that be? Why are there more men than there are women? why would that be why are there more men than so I think so sometimes it could be that's

called by the way an operational sex ratio if there are imbalances between males and females within a particular niche sometimes it could be because of certain inheritance structures where it's only the eldest who can have enough money through inheritance so the other guys can have enough money through inheritance so the other guys can't really afford a wife. So there are all sorts of institutional reasons beyond sex racial reasons where some men may otherwise be out of the mating market. And we know that societies where a lot of men are sitting around sexually frustrated are not going to be societies that are conducive to quiet. And so therefore, even in the context where you have something like polyandry, which is something that typically evolutionary speaking, you wouldn't expect,

when it arises, it arises as a response to a real evolutionary problem. So every, I mean, most things that you could think of ultimately have some evolutionary explanation and that's why i fell in love with evolution because the explanatory power that is afforded once you have that key to understand things via evolutionary thinking it becomes incredibly powerful and once the parameters and the variables change, the behavior changes to adapt to those parameters and variables. Exactly right. A perfect example of that is fighter pilots.

Fighter pilots are classically wife swappers. Is that true? Yeah, there's a lot of that goes on in those communities because these people are- Like swingers, you mean? Yeah, well, sort of. Yeah. Well, you know what it is? They know that they're probably going to die.

And if they love their wife They want someone else to love their wife as much as they do and the idea is that if they all just shit like life Is it's different. It's much more fleeting It's much more fragile than it is in the world of the accountant You know, so I think it makes sense that that's it's very prevalent in those communities. So if you like, the sexual risk-taking is a form of insurance policy. Say like if you were married and Jamie was married and you were both fighter pilots. Right.

And you both would do missions together. There's like an intense bond between you guys. And you would just swap wives. You would just say, look, the idea is like if you die, if you get shot down and you know you would just swap wives you would just say look you know the idea is like if you die if you get shot down you die you know you want your wife to be taken care of by someone who loves her right as long as they had a smaller penis than me jamie's got a hog i'll tell you he's got a hog on the kid uh but but going going good luck with that going back to, by the way, I'll send you the link to the global penis sizes around the world. And I'll just point you to where Lebanon scores on that.

How's it go? Pretty good? Top. Is it like where people are like, where there's more danger, dicks are bigger? I've never heard that. This is the first time. Well, isn't like, Africa is one of the most dangerous places, right? Danger in an environment.

In terms of violence and crime and... Like, look, if you... Classically, let's put away all pretenses of racism, right? Black guys supposedly have the biggest dicks, right? Why is that? Do they have more athleticism, too? That's a lot of things that people connect to it. has that has that has that scientifically has that been absolutely proven you know it and i know i know that anecdotally we hear that you're like no no lebanese if you just check

it's lebanese people no i mean it's always i know it's a stereotype but i truly don't know whether it's scientific i mean there's certain stereotypes... I know it's a stereotype, but I truly don't know whether scientists... There's certain stereotypes that are just... There's a reason there. And that's one that is acceptable when you talk about black people. Yeah, because it's complimentary. Yeah, it's complimentary. Right, right, right.

I'll tell you a great story about racial differences. So in 1995, I think it was 1995 or 96, I'm giving a talk. So this is shortly after my PhD I just started as a young assistant professor I'm giving a talk at this big international psychology conference and there's maybe a thousand five hundred people in this room and that's quite a big size for academic conference and there's a real buzz in the room as if there's tension and I'm not exactly sure why they're certainly not tense up about me at that point i was just a young guy nobody knew who the hell i was uh immediately before i get up to

present so the guy who was immediately before me is a gentleman by the name of philip rushton have you ever do you know him so philip rushton is a uh was a he recently passed away he was a canadian based psychologist who is probably the preeminent psychologist who studied racial differences and offered evolutionary explanations for why these racial differences might exist. And most notably, he had looked at supposed racial differences in intelligence using post-mortem cranial size, right? So the fact is that if the cranial cavity is bigger or smaller, then you assume that that means the person from this race is more intelligent than that race.

It's controversial research, very, very spicy research. So anyways, so this guy gets up to present his stuff and he starts putting up slides of, you know, black male, black female, white male, white female. And you see the, I mean, the crowd is like, the crowd is sharpening their knives to lynch this guy. And I have to get up and present right after him. And I'm thinking that just by proxy, just by being close to him, I'm going to get killed.

Now, the good news is that immediately after he finished his presentation, out of the about 1,500 people who were there, about 1,425 left the room to find him. Really? So there was like nearly no one left to listen to my talk. And that was one of the few times where I was actually very pleased to have very few people listening to me. So they left the room and what did they do to him? Well, I think they wanted to sort of, you know, challenge him and confront him and so on. When a guy does a speech like that, does he allow a question-answer period,

or is there just not enough time? Very good question. So usually you would leave, depending on the size of the, I mean, let's say you have 25 minutes, so you might do 20 minutes leaving five minutes for Q&A. He went to the last second so that there was no opportunity for questions and then he sort of you know was whisked out and so i was really really pleased

that almost nobody stayed for my talk what's interesting about that is there's certain truths that you're not allowed to explore and you're not allowed to explore. And you're not allowed to explore the possibility that some human beings may be not as intelligent as other human beings. On an individual level or in group level? Well, I was going to. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. As on an individual level, we accept that. But on a group level, we're not willing to.

On an individual level. Some don't accept that at the individual level even. Well, they're retarded. Well. That's why it's proof but but it's interesting that like there's certain genetic variables that will accept that are a product of the environment in which these people develop like for instance Inuits are much more adapted to cold their hands don't get numb they don't get frostbite nearly as easy.

They can operate. They have much better circulation in cold weather in their hands and their feet. And it's because they've been living up there for generation after generation. There's certain things that we don't accept, though. And one of the big ones is intelligence. We don't accept that some people could live in a soft world where things are easy and they develop like a slow, lazy mind. Whereas some people develop in a very tricky world with this constant innovation going on and they develop a sharper mind.

You know, we resist that because we don't want anyone thinking that they're dumber than other people. Right. Well, the point, though, is that I'm not sure that anybody has offered compelling explanation right now for why there would be selection pressures in environment a versus environment b right for there to be greater intelligence so i think there is some evidence that especially european jews who have more nobel prize uh awards than anyone else why do you have to diss me by saying european jews why don't you include the arab jews well it's true, though. It's just because I'm a Lebanese Jew. You're a very intelligent man, obviously, but I'm neither

European. Well, I'm sort of European. I'm Italian. There's something fascinating about that to me, and I wonder if that's cultural. I wonder if that's educational. What is that? So, I can certainly definitively point to the cultural element.

The genetic element is debatable. And so it's neither yes or no. It's unclear. But the cultural element, I'll share with you a personal anecdote. I don't think I've ever shared it on this show before. If I have, it's still worth repeating. After I finished my MBA, I mean, I knew I was going to go on and do my PhD and become a professor. But at one point, I have a brother who lives in Southern California, was a very successful businessman.

And I was coming out here to see whether I wanted to go and do my PhD at UC Irvine versus other schools where I had been accepted. And he said, hey, you know what, why don't you put on the proverbial suit and maybe work with me for a few years before you go on to get your PhD. It might be a nice thing for you to get some work experience outside of academia. I wasn't really entertaining it, but my mother heard of this possibility. And so when I went back to Montreal, she took me aside to one of the rooms and very, very concerned. She said to me, remember, if you don't go on to get your PhD, I mean, do you want people to remember you as somebody who's dropped out of school? So from her perspective, from the standards that were expected, somebody who had gotten an undergrad in mathematics and computer science and I'd gotten an MBA, if I stopped at that point, I would be a dropout. I'm a dropout from school.

I have an MBA from a top school, right? Now, of course, I didn't do a PhD for my parents' approval, but it just gives you a sense of the type of expectations, the imparting of love for learning, for knowledge, for wisdom. And achievement. And achievement. That is inbred in you from the minute you come out of the womb so whether there is a genetic component or not i don't know but i can certainly say that the environmental component is very alluring the cultural component it exists very strong in the korean community exactly right a good buddy of mine when i was a kid who's korean

who was on the u.s national taekwondo team while he was in his residency as a doctor. There you go. I mean, he was a fucking animal, this kid. I mean, I've never met anybody who worked harder. He slept like three or four hours a night. He was always exhausted. Every time he looked at me, he had giant bags under his eyes. And he couldn't possibly have physically worked harder than he did.

I mean, he did everything he possibly could. Won the U.S. national title. Went on to compete in international competitions all while possibly could, won the U.S. national title, went on to compete in international competitions, all while he was going to medical school. It was madness. And the way he described it to me, it was more of a prison, the way he described it. He was just burdened. He was always tired, and it was just expected of him. He was really upset about it. Yeah, it's not quite as, I don't know what the right term is,

autocratic or dictatorial. I think it's more debating, right? I mean, think about, for example, the Talmudic tradition, right? You sit there and you debate, you discuss, you debate. So there's this endless inculcation of the pursuit of knowledge just for the sake of knowledge that is endemic to all Jewish homes.

And to the extent that some of my family members did not have that particular orientation, frankly, I didn't get along with them as well. Because I have some family members who are quite mercantile in their approach. They just care about money. And I was always maybe to a fault, somebody who cared more about ideas than I did about money. What could be a fault? How could there be a fault there? In not pursuing... Yeah. Well, in the sense, for example, that I'm not a careerist. In other words, I do things out of purity. I don't strategize. I don't- Sounds like an awesome dude. Well, thank you. Well, I'll give you a very concrete example, right? You were asking earlier, why don't you get a job here? Well, listen, by me taking very open positions on topics that are quote politically incorrect, I'm not being a careerist. If I would shut my mouth about all

these issues, maybe some university that might otherwise be very impressed with my scientific dossier might say, hey, this guy's good. But if he's a shit stirrer, if he appears on Joe Rogan and makes fun of trigger warnings and talks about Islam, well, he's a bit of a loose cannon. This is why I disagree. The amount of input that you can have on a culture based out of teaching a classroom of 100 people or more, whatever it is, in comparison to what you're doing already on your YouTube videos. Thank you. It's phenomenal, the reach that you have right now. I'm going to send this to some of the universities that are supposed to hire me.

Well, they don't. Look, they're all in the past. You know, these people, they don't understand what's going on right now. Right now, there's a podcast that you're doing right now that will be heard and watched by more than a million people, for sure, without a doubt. Not only that, it'll exist in perpetuity. As long as we have digital content, it'll exist. So there's people listening to this right now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, if they're still alive, if there's still a world to live in a hundred years from now, people are going to be living, listening to this. You know, you, you are

literally, you know, music to my ears, what you're saying, because I just had this conversation recently where I was talking to a university about the importance, actually to a dean, where I was talking about the importance of how do we judge academics? I mean, academics are meme creators, right? We create memes through our science, but we're also meme propagators. Now, to me, one of the highlights of coming to Southern California, and that's saying a lot given how much I love Southern California, is to appear on your show.

Because I know that the platform that you have, it'll take me 16,000 years to be able to even come close to achieving that type of... And it's not because of a narcissistic thing I want to be famous. Because ultimately, I'm about spreading ideas. And it's exactly what you said. I mean, a million people are going to listen to. So if I can get 1% of that million to be interested in evolutionary theory after what we've discussed, how does that compare to having 25 students in my classroom? But most universities, you're exactly right, haven't caught up with the times. No one has. Well, university itself, okay, this is not the only way you can learn.

to get an education is to get a degree, to go, to sit in class, to do all the work the teacher prescribes, all the stuff that you have to turn in and all the papers that you have to do. That's not the only way to get an education. That's nonsense. It's a human construct. And we're living in a world where that doesn't make much sense anymore. You're going to have, in the future, a primary education is going to be online. It's it's without a doubt why travel somewhere Why go somewhere especially when you're dealing with all these fucking assholes and these campuses that are instituting all these ridiculous rules on social behavior and all these social misfits that want to level the playing field and all this nonsense that's going on that's really it stifles a lot of open, it stifles a lot of open discussion.

It stifles a lot of exchanges of information because of these ideas these people have. These rigid ideas that cannot be breached. I think we're living in a world now where you have instant access to information. To go to a physical place to learn seems to me to be kind of archaic. It's kind of retro. Listen, I was just recently asked, and maybe I shouldn't be commenting publicly, but I go ahead and do it. There's a company called Great Courses. Have you heard of them? Yeah, they were a sponsor of the podcast in the beginning. No kidding. Yeah, yeah. I have one of them at home on psychology. So I was honored to be asked to, it hasn't yet, we haven't signed a contract.

They're still looking into it. But the mere fact that they contacted me as one of the prospective people to put together a course for them, a great courses course on, you know, evolutionary psychology and so on. That's awesome. Thank you. So, I mean, imagine the number of people that I can potentially reach by putting together that course. Look, there's this guy, you should, by the way, check him out. Robert Sapolsky. Are you familiar?

Yeah, I know very well. No kidding. Yeah, from Stanford. I'm a big fan of his work on toxoplasmosis. I've been studying him for years. Look at this. And his stuff on baboons. Isn't it mind-blowing?

Oh, my God. He spends months every year in Africa studying baboons. Have you seen all his YouTube clips? Yeah, I'm a big fan of that guy so anyway so i wrote to him by the way maybe i shouldn't be advertising a failure but it's okay so i wrote to him because i really wanted him on uh on on my show right uh and he was very gracious he responded right away he said look i'd love to you know so on i'm just i'm working i think on two books i'm shutting everything. I'm saying no to everybody, maybe some point in the future, which, of course, I completely understand.

But look at this guy. I mean, you go to his YouTube, whatever, 900,000 views, 1.1 million of a lecture that typically would have been viewed by 80 people. I bet I sent a couple hundred thousand people to those things. No kidding. I'm a big fan of that guy. I've been sending people to his videos and his lectures for years. So let's talk about one of the findings from his work. Do you want to do that?

Sure. So he's got research, because you mentioned baboons, showing that in a sort of hierarchical society of baboons, the lower ranked baboons will have higher cortisol levels, will have more stress hormones. While intuitively you might think the opposite, you might think that the higher the rank of the baboon, the more stressed he is because he has to defend against all the other dangers and maintain his position and so on. So people took this exact study and applied it in an organizational context, where they looked at an organizational hierarchy and took cortisol levels of people in a big organization. I think it was the public health system in Britain. The higher the rank of the

employee, the lower his or her cortisol level. And the argument, so you might say, well, why would that be? Wouldn't the person who is higher rank be more stressed? I mean, a CEO has to have more stress than the janitor. And one of the arguments, at least that they proposed, was the idea of freedom. The guy who's at the lowest rung of the hierarchy has to be told when he could go and relieve himself with

his bodily functions, right? I mean, the amount of free destiny that he has in his daily life is very limited. Whereas at least the CEO, even though he's working very hard, he's more master of his daily life. So for example, I work all the time. I can work 10, 12, 15, 18 hour days, but yet I still, I feel like I'm always free because there's nobody who's telling me what to do at any time. And apparently just that has a profound effect on your cortisol levels. And the origins of that whole study were originally due to Sapolsky's work with baboons, if I'm correct. Well, you know, that finding is mirrored in special ops guys versus enlisted men versus your average soldier. Like one of the big issues that people have today is PTSD.

Right. Right. And one of the factors in PTSD is people who are waiting for things to happen versus people who are making things happen. Whereas SEALs, Rangers, people that they send in to go and kick ass and take names, those guys have way less stress, which is kind of crazy. Way less instances of PTSD. And, you know, obviously, it's still tremendously stressful and still a lot of instances of PTSD, but less.

And the more guys that I talk to that have served will tell you that the reason is that they're active, that they're proactive. They're the ones who are moving in and doing these things. And they're going after these bad guys and hunting them down, essentially. Whereas the other people are sitting around the base worrying they're going to get attacked, or staying on their post, or driving in a car worrying they're going to hit an IED. Very interesting. So let's propose another hypothesis. Maybe somebody who's a graduate student might test, uh, coaches versus players. So based on your logic of the finding that you just said, the coach should probably have much higher cortisol levels because one,

right. It's out of its control right that's why you see them on the sidelines freaking out going crazy because you really can't affect much influence on the game right i mean you can at the margins in terms of the strategies and so on but the guys that are in the battle i mean i you know i was a competitive soccer player and of course you're an athlete i mean a few minutes before you're you've butterflies. Once you're in the thick of things, you're not stressed. I mean, you're focused. I mean, you're in the flow. But the coaches, they're the ones who are about to have a heart attack.

So I think you can test that. That is probably also a big factor why it's so difficult to beat a champion in combat sports. Because the champion is the one who's in control. And the champion is the one who's been dominating. He has fear and intimidation on his side, and therefore he has less stress. Right. He's been, I mean, he's going to have stress no matter what if you're entering into a fight, but the person who's trying to overcome the psychological barrier that is the champion in front of them,

like there's this big, you know, there's a persona that's attached. Like a good example is like Mike Tyson when he was in his prime. Right. Nobody wanted to believe that he could be beaten, and men would lose before they ever got into the ring. Then Buster Douglas came. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Have you ever seen the study?

And I don't know if we've mentioned it here before. I think it was published in a journal called Emotion where they looked at, I think it was MMA fighters, whether they smiled or not before the contest. Have you seen this before? No. Okay. Just send me a private message and I'll look for it. I can't remember the exact details, but there was some nonverbal cues that were studied prior to a fight that if I remember the study correctly, were highly predictive of the eventual outcome. Wow. That's fascinating. Is that cool? Well, I bet they're highly predictive of the eventual outcome Wow that's fast is that cool well I bet they're highly predictive of the amount of focus that the fighters entering to the octagon with here goes smiles are for losers oh I love how you study show that MMA fighters who smile before fights don't do well well this is at a

weigh-in which I doubt you could really tell that was published that what they're saying the pre-fight stare down okay so the pre-fight stare down. Okay. So the pre-fight stare down. Well, that makes sense because if you're smiling, it most likely means that you're not really in the game. Right. As expected, smile intensity predicted both the outcomes of fights as well as the more detailed measures of in-fight hostility. Interestingly, the smiles predicted both reduced hostility from the smiler as well as increased hostility from his opponent. In other words, it seemed that both fighters were attuned to the information being communicated in the pre-fight smile. These results held even when controlling for existing differences in skill, i.e. the betting odds of the fight and strength, height and weight. Though don't go drastically altering your gambling

strategy just yet the betting line still did a better job overall in predicting fights compared to just smile intensity yeah huh have you have we talked here about uh digit ratio yes no but i i've i know what you're talking about though like the size of fingers and well not the the the relative length i've always i've actually i think I've thought about at some point either asking you or my nephew to get access to MMA fighters to take some measures that capture how androgynous they are, how much exposure to testosterone they've had. testosterone yeah whether it be for example through certain facial features or through uh well their 2d 4d ratio which is a measure of how much testosterone you've been exposed to in the womb in utero and so i actually have a study right now with one of my graduate students vlad irimia where we're looking at the links between testosterone and extreme sports using the exact same idea and so i'm of, an obvious hypothesis might be that on average,

MMA fighters compared to a control normal population, non-fighters, will be more androgynized. You would think that that has to be true, right? I don't know. Okay. Because I would wonder what are the, I would say maybe probably successful ones. I see. So it would be moderated by what their trajectory in their career was.

I think there are a lot of people who enter into mixed martial arts or martial arts in general because they recognize there's a lot of benefit in trying to overcome extreme challenges. And that they're attracted to these things because they get addicted to the rush, the adrenaline rush of a challenge. And it's very few challenges that are intense as one-on-one competition with another person. And I think there's a lot of people who gravitate towards those, not necessarily even, it seems counterintuitive, but you would think that they would be the most violent people or the most angry people, and they're doing that because they want to dominate. Well, mixed martial arts is different in a lot of ways. First of all, because in boxing, a lot of times you're seeing people that are searching for a way out.

They're searching for a way out of poverty. They're searching for a way out of bad neighborhoods and crime, and they do so through fighting. It's a classic meme, right? It's a classic trope. But I think there's something going on with MMA fighters that's very different in that martial arts seem to be something that costs money. And so to join these classes and get proficient, you have to be able to afford them. And so you're getting people that enter into martial arts from two different venues, right? You get wrestlers who classically get it from school. You get it from high school. Like Greco-Roman wrestlers, you mean? Freestyle or Greco-Roman, depending on, it doesn't matter. There's successful examples of both. And wrestling is probably one of the most important skills to have if not the most important in MMA because the fighter can dictate where the fight takes place

if a really strong wrestler takes you down he can control you whereas if you're a really good kickboxer your kickboxing can't really be effective if someone can take you down at will so there's that there's the wrestling which they get in college and they get in high school which is you know at least fairly free college if they wrestling, which they get in college and they get in high school, which is at least fairly free.

College, if they have a scholarship, they get it for free. But martial arts like jujitsu and kickboxing and things along those lines, taekwondo, karate, traditional martial arts, it costs money to take those things. So you're seeing a lot of very educated people that are getting into MMA. There's a lot of MMA fighters that are extremely articulate. Wasn't there a guy who was a biology teacher or something? Math teacher, Rich Franklin. Yeah.

Math teacher. Yeah. Who was a former champion. Yeah. He was UFC champion. Very smart guy. Very smart guy. And there's a lot of other very,

very intelligent guys speak multiple languages, you know, really brilliant people. Um, so you get, it's a different style of fighter. I think there's people out there that are fighting because they were abused as a child, they were bullied, and then they have this anger inside of them and they want to express it.

So you get a lot of that, but you also get people that just, you know, they're just tough. They're just tough and they want to overcome challenges and they get some sort of benefit out of these extreme challenges. So I would wonder what the results of that would be. What about this? I think this is probably an obvious hypothesis, but do you think that if one were to take salivary assays to measure testosterone levels pre-fight, post-fight. And in post-fight, you're looking at the winner and the loser. Clearly, the testosterone scores would assort along whether I won or lost.

Oh, sure. Yeah, well, also dependent upon how much brain damage they acquired during the fight. That has a pretty significant effect on your pituitary gland, apparently. I had, by the way, since you're a stand-up professional, stand-up comedian, one of my former students, a postdoc who had – I think I want to mention he studied evolutionary roots of humor. but then he ended up leaving after a year to take a position anyways, was to use the Montreal Just for Laugh festivals to study the testosterone responses of comedians, you know, prior to getting on stage and then after finishing and to see whether their testosterone response

would be moderated by whether, objectively speaking, it was a successful set or not, right? I mean, sometimes you get up and you just kill the house. Other times it's death silent, right? So will my endocrinological system response track that reality? And so that's something that I still hopefully will test with some future student. What do you think?

You think that's a viable hypothesis? Yeah, definitely. I think with bombing, especially, it a viable hypothesis? Yeah, definitely. I think with bombing especially comes depression. Testosterone will go down. Yeah, definitely. It's a horrible feeling. I can't imagine there would be any benefit to bombing. Right.

Other than maybe your testosterone would spike because you would need the energy to run away from the crowd. to run away from the crowd. Now, let's say when you are doing a show and you feel as though it's not going well, are you ever able to redirect the ship? Or is there a point where there's no return? I'm going to suck today. It's just not working. I'm not connecting.

There's both. There's definitely times where you're not getting out of the hole. You could dig yourself into a hole that you can't get out what determines that is it that your delivery that day is not working or is it there's something endemic to the crowd that for whatever reason they're just not digging your style it's all the above there's it could be your delivery it could be your subject matter it could be an event something that went on with the audience it could be the way you're reacting to them, that you chose a path that was ineffective.

It could be- You were making fun of them, but that got them to gang up more on you. It could certainly be that. There's a lot of variables involved in whether or not you go down with the ship, but also it could be that you didn't address it. You know, sometimes things are going bad and a guy will address that it's going bad and they pull themselves out of it and then it becomes great again. Right. I've seen that.

I've done that. I've had like bad moments where you address that bad moment and things snap back or you, you know, you just, you reassess your approach. There's a lot of variables involved in stand-up comedy, but ultimately what's going on, I've tried to explain this and I've gone over this with many, many comedian friends of mine.

We all seem to agree on this, that there's a moment when things are going really well, where the audience is laughing and you're in the zone and you're delivering your jokes that you've prepared for a long time. Everything's done right. There's a lot of great timing and everything. It's a mass hypnosis it's like when i watch a really funny comedian if i watch a bill burr for say um when when he's on stage and he's killing and i'm watching and i'm laughing my ass off what i am doing is allowing him to think for me right so i'm allowing him to you know if he's talking about having a female president or something like that,

he's going through his thought process of what it would be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as he's going through it, I'm not really doing any calculations. I'm allowing him to do all those calculations. I'm allowing him to take up all of my thought process with his sentences and the images that he's depicting. And that's what makes it really funny. And the whole audience, we're all in it together. So there's a community effect of this group hypnosis. So we're all laughing because we're all on the same page.

We're all like these thoughts that he's saying are so funny and we're all going along with it. But when someone's bad or when the joke doesn't work then everybody's like oh christ oh no this isn't working oh no and you look around and see everybody else is uncomfortable and then you see he's uncomfortable like oh jesus he's he's bombing right now and when someone's bombing then you're forced completely out of the spell and now you have to do all these calculations you have to think you have to do all this there. You have to think. You have to do all this. There's all these considerations going on. There's a lot happening that wouldn't be happening if a guy was just killing. When someone's killing, it's effortless to watch.

You're just laughing. And then you leave. You feel great. So it's when it goes bad. It's uncomfortable for everybody. It's uncomfortable for the audience. It's uncomfortable for the comedian it's just because you're forced to consider his process his failures or her failures her bad jokes her all those things do you think

there are certain elements of humor i mean clearly there are culture specific manifestations of humor maybe physical comedy is more appreciated in culture a than culture b but are there specific humor mechanisms that are or not mechanism but you know whatever humor content that would be universally successful no oh so you think it's always culture dependent culture dependent um culture dependent uh taste dependent there are certain styles of humor that some people really enjoy and other people hate. Some people like alt humor, which is like keep the mic in the stand, don't move, deadpan delivery, put very little effort forth. Some people like that.

That's what they prefer. The balding guy with the curly hair. Balding guy with the curly hair. From like 20 years ago, he speaks with a very low voiceven right yeah well he's an absurdist what is that oh absurd yeah he's like uh he used to work at a fire hydrant factory couldn't park anywhere near the place you know it's like that's that's even right you know it's that kind of comedy. It's all really bizarre, absurd one-liners. So that's not alt. That's just really funny and original.

And alt is a lot of times really bad, unfortunately. And the really super supportive crowds that gather together, it's almost like they got kicked out of the cool playground, so they made their own playground. And there's a comedy festival that's going on right now or is supposed to be going on somewhere in New York where somebody sent me this thing. And I looked at it for a couple seconds. I had to throw it away. I can't even get into this, where they're charging different amounts and different access to people who are white males.

for and different access to people who are white males they they want to have as few white males as possible so they want to make it as diverse as possible so they're opening it up to people of color LBGTQ XYZ and and this is like this is their solution their solution is to not just have the funniest people that they think are there, regardless of race, color, creed, ethnicity. Nope. Nope. Exclude the white men. And token white bearded men is one of the things that they discussed. And by the way, the people that run the group are all women.

It's hilarious. I mean, if you want to run a festival, you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want. But the idea that you want to run an art festival, but you want to exclude certain people, like pick the best ones. How about pick the best ones? If the best ones turn out to be white men with beards, go with that information and try to figure out why that's the case. So from that perspective, are we to assume that I now know what your position is on affirmative action? Well, my position on affirmative action is I think it has good intentions. I think the idea is to try to stop racism. However, if you're getting someone and they become a firefighter, but they're less physically fit and less intelligent than someone who could have gotten the job.

But unfortunately, the other guy was of Croatian descent. Right. You know, and he looks like a white man who's privileged. But meanwhile, this guy came from a family of very poor immigrants who struggled and scratched and scraped, and people could look at him as the oppressor, which is fucking preposterous. Right.

There's a lot of that going on. Yeah. And I think that's ridiculous. I agree with that. Yeah. And I think that's ridiculous. So I think that- I agree with that. Yeah. I think this idea of people who all have a certain amount of melanin in their skin, they should get a job versus people who don't have melanin in their skin. Right. That's stupid.

Right. I think we should address the core problem, which is why is it harder for people who grow up in African-American communities or Mexican-American communities, why is it harder for people who grow up in African-American communities or Mexican-American communities? Why is it harder for them to get a better education? Why is it harder for them to succeed? Why is it harder for them to resist crime? Why are they involved in these impoverished areas? And how do we fix that?

So you know what, Larry? How do we balance that out? You know who Larry Elder is? Yes. The Sage of LA? Have you ever had him on the show? No, but I will. He and I have been going back and forth through Twitter.

Of course, you know what his answer would be to you? Well, he's an African-American. He's also- But he would say, what is the reason for all the things that you said? Why this? Why that? Father absence. Now, I don't know whether he is overusing that causal factor.

But he certainly seems to be quoting a lot of data that suggests that many of these sort of deleterious downstream effects are due to nothing more than father absence. Solve that problem, and many of these issues will go away. Well, I think that's a little simplistic. Yeah, it is.

Because if your dad's a fucking piece of shit and he lives in your house, you've got a real problem. Right. I don't think that's necessarily the simplistic. Yeah, it is. Because if your dad's a fucking piece of shit and he lives in your house, you've got a real problem. Right. I don't think that's necessarily the only way to do it. And I think you can't just blame. I think one of the things that we were talking about earlier that I think is really important is that cultures become patterns and patterns repeat. And that these patterns that these people are born into, it's not their choice.

Right. And we recognize it as someone who wasn't born in that pattern. You look at a bad pattern of someone being born, say, like in Baltimore, in an extremely impoverished community that's filled with crime and gang violence, and you go, God, how does this get corrected? I had Michael Wood on who's an interesting guy who was a former cop in Baltimore and a really, really interesting dude.

And I think he's trying to run for like, he's trying to be a police commissioner in Chicago, right? He applied for it. Yeah. And, you know, I think he would be a great person for that job. He's got a lot of information and a lot of really, he's very smart, a lot of common sense when it comes to this. But one of the things that Michael Wood was talking about when he was on the podcast was that they had found

uh i guess a directive from the 1970s when they were going through the archives of all the shit that they have in baltimore um the police directive from the 1970s was exactly the same as what he was dealing with in the 2000s as far as the neighborhoods that had drugs the neighborhoods with crime He's like it's the same pattern Repeating the same patterns over and over and over again and no one has done anything to try to socially engineer some beneficial change in these communities instead They just continue to lock up the same people and I agree with him that it's essentially at that point it becomes the same people. And I agree with him that it's essentially at that point, it becomes institutionalized racism. And that's a real issue. And I think that that's the issue that needs to

be addressed. And I don't think that affirmative action is the best way to do it because I think that also it starts to produce this feeling of resentment from people that are more qualified that don't get the jobs well and i would think let's say for the for the black applicant who let's say goes to law school uh they they will never know whether they went through the whole process simply on their merit or whether they were helped in some way and i I think that itself is injurious. Well, won't they know, though, if they graduate? No, no, no. What I mean is when you got in, did you get in strictly on the merits of your dossier?

Let's suppose I actually don't want, I'm a person of color, and I don't want anything to be affecting the decision other than purely the merits of my dossier. So now I go through the process. At the end of that process, I won't absolutely know for sure whether it was strictly based on what I wanted, which is the merit of my dossier, or whether there was something that helped me along the way because of this institutionalized affirmative action. Isn't that a bit problematic? I guess it could be, but I would assume that by the time

you've gone through university, now you're talking about a much higher level of education, and it should be pretty, I hate to use the term black and white, but it should be right there. I mean, you should see their grades and you see, so our black applicants- Professors are hired as a function of these things. What? I once applied. For real? I'll say this here publicly. I once applied. So this is, I was, you know, coming out on the market, finishing my PhD.

You're on the market. You're like a cow or something. The academic market. And the way academic market works is you interview round one. And then in one place, all the schools come there. And then in round two, they invite you for a campus visit. And so I was interviewing at one of the most prestigious places that you could ever hope to imagine. It's actually from your neck of the woods in Boston.

Okay. Harvard? Right. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. Too late. I don't think you said it. I did. Yeah, right.

So I'm not admitting whether that's true or not. But apparently I was one of the finalists and at least I had heard from some people who were maybe on the inside that they were really looking for a woman and that to the extent that I might not be able to ovulate might be a problem. So I don't know if that ended up being the main reason why I didn't get the job. But I've often heard that, you know. You're not of the right race. We need more diversity. We need more gender diversity. We need more racial diversity. How do you get diversity and make it fair and even though? I mean, how has that ever achieved? Well, frankly, I think it's grotesque. Look, there was a, I don't know if you saw, I had a sad truth clip where I titled it, The All-Time Greatest Social Justice Warriors. It was based on a group of Dartmouth students that had occupied, I think, the president's office with a set of, have you seen this?

No. It's called the Freedom Project. Maybe you could put it up. So the Dartmouth Freedom Project, where they had sort of like a manifesto. Here are the things that we absolutely expect Dartmouth to implement. If you saw that list, and I go through some of that on my YouTube channel, it's simply baffling. We have to have a professor of color speaker series.

I mean, think about that. So if I'm a number theorist, I'm a mathematician, I mean, think about that, right? I mean, so if I'm a number theorist, I'm a mathematician, does the amount of melanin that I have determine how I study the distribution of prime numbers? The idea that you would have students demanding that there be a person of color speaker series, I mean, it's grotesque, right? I mean, nobody's denying the fact that racism has existed and to some extent continues to exist. But to have these types of demands to me seems problematic. Well, I definitely don't think it's the most intellectual approach to an even playing field for all and considering all with equal merit, to change the level of the playing field and boost people up that aren't qualified. I think that's, you're talking also about the end result. You're talking about like the finished product of an education. You know, I mean, literally at the highest level, a professor.

Right. So I think that if you're looking at that, it really, it all comes down to what is it that's making certain people have less opportunity. And that needs to be engineered from a societal level, from a culture level. I've said this many, many times that the biggest issue with any culture is the weakest link, right? But what's the best way to have a more successful country? What's the best way to have a more successful union? Well, less losers. Well, how do you have less losers? You give more people education, more people chances,

and more people who are disenfranchised and who are stuck in these bad situations. Give them an opportunity to get out some way or another, whether it's through continued education, whether it's through community centers, whether it's through combat. I mean, what Larry Elder's talking about, about not having fathers. Boy, well, we can't just say, fuck them. They should have a dad. The dad should get involved. You're not going to fix people like that. The children are the ones that they're still malleable and still have potential. So we have to figure out a way to provide them with some sort of resources, some sort of mentorship, some hope. I don't know how to do that. Let me thread through this carefully because it's a thorny topic.

thorny topic. Earlier, we spoke about the culture of achievement that we find that is endemic within Jewish homes. Yes. By the same token, do you think that other cultures might be creating environments that are exactly the opposite of that? In other words, yes, there might be some endemic institutional reasons why people don't succeed, but there are also individual responsibility or collective responsibility within the family or the culture. I think just alluding to that will cause people to level an accusation of racism against you. I mean, think about Bill Cosby. I mean, think about Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby, I know he's not popular now, but at one point he was walking around and saying exactly that, right, that blacks have to take responsibility for some of their failures. And think cultures exist because it's easy to pattern yourself around what's around you. And that exists in a religious sense, and it exists in a behavioral sense. You become a lot like the people that you surround yourself with. That's why it's so important to surround yourself with positive people. It's one of the

most important lessons you could ever learn as a human being. The more positive people you surround yourself with, the more you'll aspire to be like them. The more you, you know, you have a high standard that exists all around you. Well, if you're fucked and you, you grow up in a place without, with no hope and a lot of despair. I mean, I remember when I first moved to New York, when I was in my really early twenties and, uh, I didn't really have that many friends at first. And it was, and I had a few friends that I just, I was really disappointed with them. And one of them, uh, because he just would say so much racist shit, it would drive me crazy. And I just, I wasn't, I just, I was like, God damn it. Like, I can't find friends like I had in Boston.

You know, I was, I was, I had a bunch of knuckleheads that I was, that I knew and I needed to establish, you know, it takes a while when, especially when you're young. And by the way, no internet back then. So you're trying to find good friends and friends that were like in my profession as standup comics. So I had to like, you know, get closer to a few people that are in these communities. And it took a long time. But I remember feeling really depressed when I first moved there. And it was a cause for me to reconsider moving back to Boston. There was one point in time, even though I had just signed with this new manager that's still my manager to this day.

And there's all this hope and promise that, like, wow, I'm actually going to have a career now. I was so bummed out by the people that I was around with that I would go back to Boston and do gigs. And I'd be like, fuck, I want to move back here, man. Because I was like Boston for all of its faults and, you know, is a very smart place. And as is New York. But I had just I had infiltrated into a really great community in Boston, and I hadn't done that yet in New York. So this is a very small, obviously a couple years later I was fine. But when you're not around positive people, it doesn't feel good. I was

living in Newark, New Jersey when I first moved there, because that's where my grandfather lived, and I didn't have any money, so I stayed with him for a while and he was in a terrible neighborhood and he had bought a house there a long time ago and the community had changed several times and gotten worse and worse. And the kid next door before I'd moved in, I think somewhere around the time that I was living there, his door got broken down by the cops and he was selling crack and it was, it was, it was real bad right you know so i felt depressed living there and the environment that i found myself in my grandmother had had a stroke so she would like moan and this is the grandmother who's a mafia runner yeah numbers

yeah yeah yeah she that was earlier in her life when she was mobile but she had uh she had had a stroke and she she they gave they gave her 72 hours to live. She lived for 12 years. Wow. Yeah. They were like, she's probably going to die. She had a really bad stroke. But somehow she hung on by a thread for a long time.

And my grandfather used to have to change her sheets, and she had bed sores because she would just lay in one place. She couldn't really move. It was awful. It was awful. So that environment of being in this really poor neighborhood being poor myself I had no fucking money being around bad like didn't have good friends. It's depressing That's depressing now obviously I had opportunity I had a career There's there's a way to get out of that, but I got a taste

I think even though the tiniest tiniest tiniest taste of Despair right what it's like to be stuck in a shit situation. Now imagine being born in that situation because I, you know, I moved there when I was in my twenties. I was like 23 or something like that. Imagine if I was there my whole life and I just been around fucked up people or I'd been sexually abused or physically abused or, you know, my mother was selling crack or, you know, my brother was in jail or who knows? There's a lot of variables that can lead to a terrible state of mind. And it's insanely hard to overcome the patterns of the past and the patterns of your environment. And until we address that, this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is fucking

ridiculous. The idea of, well, the cops wouldn't be shooting these young black kids if they just didn't commit crimes. That's crazy. That's crazy. Because it's not even. It's not an even playing field. It's not even for me comparing myself of 23 to myself of 48. I have way more opportunity now.

It's a way easier life. It's way easier. I have way better friends. I've established a nice community with my friends. easier. I'm way, way, way better friends. I've established a nice community with my friends. Do you still form a lot of new friendships or do you have? Yeah, I have new friendships. Yeah, I definitely saw you. Well, thank you. I'm honored to be amongst that group.

Well, because of doing this podcast, it's allowed me to communicate with some really fascinating people. And that's definitely allowed me to formulate some new friendships. any people. And that, that's definitely allowed me to formulate some new friendships and it's allowed me to, um, to evolve my perspective, to examine my own ideas and to, you know, I think all of us that, uh, that I'm friends with, we've, we've sort of all experienced that sort of same, similar growth pattern because, you know, as you take in more information, you communicate with each other about things, you kind of evolve ideas.. So there was a study done, I think a longitudinal study, and I believe I mention it in the book, at Harvard. I think the lead investigator, I think his name is George, in French you would say, I guess, Vaillant, or Vaillant,

I think that's his name. And out of 75 years of research in terms of what is sort of the number one predictor that makes people happy or content. I can't remember the exact dependent measure. The number one thing was establishing meaningful connections with others. So, I mean, 75 years of research out of a million possible causal factors were distilled to that one fact. I would agree with that. Yeah, exactly.

I would agree with that. The saddest people I know are lonely. Exactly. The saddest people I know are lonely. Exactly. The saddest people I know. I know a few comedians who don't have comedian friends too, which is really weird. They're sort of ostracized by the community in some weird way. And those people are really sad, really sad and really lonely and really weird. Well, I mean, I don't know if we've ever mentioned this on this broadcast, but if you take prisoners, many of them will prefer to be in general population where they might be jumped and stabbed and raped than to be put in solitary confinement, precisely because solitary confinement is the ultimate of punishments to a social species, right? Yeah, we need each other.

And these biological requirements that we don't consider because we meet them on a daily basis. You know, that's one of them is getting outside. And you know, I, I feel it often, because of course, in my career, there are two parts of me, there is the I cocoon in my study, I'm working on a book. And for the next 16 months, I'm pretty much focused on that. And I become sort of a cave dweller. And of course, there's the public side of me, which is very extroverted and sociable and so on. Once in a while, when I've spent several days very much cocooned, and then I go out, even to meet a graduate student to discuss ideas or a friend, I literally come back refreshed in a way that is akin to satiating a thirst or hunger or sexual need.

Right. I mean, you genuinely feel that I went out with Joe and we had coffee and I really needed that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That exactly speaks to that.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I feel like that all the time when I see my friends, you know, I work with my good friend Joey Diaz last night at the comedy store. And when I saw him, you know, I hadn't seen him a couple days or so. I may see him all the time, but I hadn't seen him. And he gave me a big hug and I'm hugging him. I'm like, ah, it's so good to see this guy.

By the way, you know what is a hormonal marker of the hugging? What? Release of oxytocin. Makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense. You know, I mean, a friend that I genuinely love and he genuinely loves me. We see each other, big smiles, big hug.

Yeah. It's warm and it's awesome. You know, and when you don't have that in life, you suffer. When I first moved to L.A., I had gone here to do some acting and I was here for for a couple weeks, and I didn't have any friends. Again, same sort of situation. And I had gone, you know, like maybe like two weeks being here and really not really knowing anybody. And this girl that I was working with on the set gave me a hug. And I remember that hug felt so good.

And it didn't feel good like i wanted a fucker right it felt good like yeah like warmth like love like an actual person being kind to me you know or else like i was so weirded out by being in this strange place and living in la and like i just gotten accustomed to i just established like a community in new york you know i established some friends and i was just just starting to be happy in new york and all something out in la well and so in darwinian psychiatry which is a field of psychiatry that applies evolutionary principles there's this idea of so for example we've evolved uh in bands of about up to 150 people right you might have heard of rob robin dunbar's number yes yeah so the idea is 150 people, right? You might have heard of Robin Dunbar's number. Yes. Yeah. So the idea is- 150 people you can keep in like your social memory.

Exactly right. Because computationally, you want to be able to mark who's trustworthy, who's not. This guy reciprocate, this guy doesn't. Once you get past 150, it becomes very difficult to maintain all these in your head. Well, so in the context of the environments in which we've evolved, small groups, repeat interactions, our need for social interaction is certainly met. On the other hand, you could live in New York. You're surrounded by 8 million people. You think, how could somebody be lonely when you step outside and you bump into 17,000 people? Yet,

the rates of depression in this very lonely place, but yet very filled place is much greater than the 150, precisely because there's a mismatch between the environment in which we've evolved and the contemporary environment. And so that's in the field of evolutionary psychiatry, you study these types of things. That's fascinating. The mismatch is true. And also there's an intimacy wall that people put up because there's too many folks right there's too many people and when there's too many people you can't make friends with everybody whereas if you're in a small town you wave to people as you're driving by right you don't wave to people in new york you'd be you'd go fucking crazy you know imagine if you had to wave to every cab that passed you in new york if you're driving you just it's it's not possible

so in your case as somebody who obviously is well known and so on, a lot of people are trying to befriend you. Does that result in you having a bit more of a precautionary approach with people because you always think that there might be some, that doesn't have to be a sinister angle, but I just want to be friends with this famous person. Does that ever come into play in your interactions yeah you're definitely going to have that but you know you just find other like-minded people you just find people that are like you or or similar and similar yeah you got to be picky you know and also there's there's a lot of weight to it you know if you like for you for example

perfect example like you you start doing this podcast, your podcast has taken off, your YouTube series has taken off. And then people want to become friends with you because they think that they can get on your show or that they can piggyback on your success. And they, they calculate and they look at you and they say, if I could just get in with the Godfather, I will be, I'll be in. And then I'll, I'll get a YouTube following. Then I'll get a little Twitter following that I can get a career. Like there's people that do calculate things like that. And I've met people like that in the world of stand-up where people have said, hey, you know, take me under your wing. Like what?

Are you fucking crazy? There's no wing. Like go get your own wing. Yeah. I don't have any time. I barely have time to do what I'm doing right now and continue my own stuff. Like you see funny, like but there's certain comics Well see them and I know they're really good and they're they're working really hard

And then I'll take them on the road with me like Tony Hinchcliffe is a perfect example I think he was opening for you in Montreal when you yes Hilarious I take him with me everywhere, and then there's other ones like that. You know where I meet them and They're working hard there. They're're hustling and then I can help them, you know. But some people don't, they don't want to work hard. They just want to sort of like cling on to you like a lamprey. Right. And then they think somehow or another it'll take them to, and you got to know who those people are.

And some people don't. And I have friends that don't. They don't know. So I'll be hanging around with them. I'm like, who the fuck is this guy and like oh he's good guys good guy Mike there what are you doing man what are you doing like they'll bring these guys in the road with them and they're terrible comedians but what they do is they know how to stroke their ego and kiss their ass and they've you know

become a part of their system and the they a lot of my friends who have had this they have had real problems with these people where there's a deep Resentment that gets established when the person's career doesn't take off right? You know it doesn't happen because they really don't have that much talent They're just really good at kissing ass and they get upset this person not helping them like what the fuck have you done? You've let this knucklehead into your life because they figured out a way how to woo you in the beginning So you have to be careful, but you also have to be careful with yourself. You have to be careful with your own behavior. You have to, you have to objectively monitor your own thinking and you have

to spend time like alone, just thinking. And that's something that people don't like to do. Right. And that's something I, I think is absolutely critical. It's one of the most critical things for a grown person to do is to spend some time and just think alone, just thinking and monitor your thoughts and monitor your life. And then go forth from that with some directives, with some ideas, with some guidelines of what you want to do and what you want to accomplish. Because if you don't do that, you sort of live life untethered, untethered to your dreams or your ideas. I mean, even dreams as far as community and family. Those aren't lofty aspirations in the sense of unachievable things like climbing Everest in your underwear.

We're talking about things that can be done but oftentimes aren't because you don't pursue them with that directive, like my directive to establish a happy family, to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to do all these things. People oftentimes don't consider how much of a factor those things play in your overall happiness and the happiness of the people around you. And you can do that. But you have to think about it.

Earlier, of course, your viewers don't know, I introduced you to one of my friends who's an FBI special agent. And we were chatting. I've been here for a few days, so we had gone out together. And I was telling him that oftentimes I get an itch for like a man's man companionship. You know what I mean? Yes. yes because i mean not not to stereotype but sometimes the intellectual types with whom i can go out who are part of my world who are my colleagues will will satisfy a particular itch but of course i used to be a soccer player and i'm

i'm a guy's guy and i need right i, we need to be able to talk about certain things that are not necessarily within the confines. You need fellow sexists. Say it. Not fellow sexists, but fellow guys who can sort of let the hair down. Yeah, but you're allowed to be yourself. And I mean, not that I'm

not myself in other contexts, but there are different sort of rules of conduct in different settings, right? The way you act. And I find that recently, maybe because of course, I think we both have young children where you somewhat cocoon, I've lost a bit of the male bonding and camaraderie that comes with playing in a soccer team or and many many professional athletes as you know when they retire they will always say you know they don't miss playing in front of a hundred thousand people or the adulation but they miss the camaraderie the yes the brotherhood with their and and that that element of male male bonding is something that sometimes i miss because

of how busy my life is. Yes, I completely agree. And I've found that the most potent form of that is hunting camps. Okay. That hunting camps, when you go hunting and you're camping out and you have a campfire. You're focused on one, yeah. Well, you're focused on one thing and you're surrounded by these men and everyone is allowed to be themselves. And everyone is allowed to be themselves. And you're also engaging in this intensely, quote unquote, manly activity. Right.

That is almost the polar opposite of raising children and coddling little girls. It becomes this manly, rugged pursuit. And it's very satisfying at a deep genetic level. Exactly. Because I think there's these reward systems that are established thousands of years ago in our DNA It's like why you like being around a campfire like why is that because it's super beneficial to have a fire Words off predators keeps you warm it cooks off the mosquitoes keeps off the mosquitoes So many benefits to having this fire that when you have one it's like naturally satisfying

Yeah, well, you know we all huddle around it. It's odd to leave it. I think that being around other men, it's oftentimes thought that these men are going to get together and they're going to think men things. They're going to come back and be sexist and patriarchal and they're going to come back and ruin all this progress that we've had. And there is that idea that somehow or another that manly is anti-progressive and anti-equal, anti-equal rights, anti-equal values. It's funny, by the way, that when you ask a lot of women what types of men they want, they will typically point to the male archetype that is most viewed with disdain by the current wave of third wave feminism, right? If you talk to those women when they're being honest and alone, yeah, I think she was Swedish, where, you know, in Sweden, they've had this sort of longstanding experiment where they try to remove gender pronouns.

Yeah. Why don't you explain that? Because it's very bizarre. Explain that to people. Well, the idea is that they're trying to, as much as they can, remove any gender markers in any setting. And so the idea is that we should be gender neutral in every possible way. Incidentally, there was a study on toy preferences done in Sweden, right? The mecca

of gender neutrality. And guess what? Little boys and little girls gravitate to exactly the same sex-specific toys as everywhere else on earth. So despite 40 years of social engineering, as everywhere else on earth. So despite 40 years of social engineering, it hasn't done anything. But anyways, and so the men there have been so ravaged by third wave feminism. I mean, literally, they have no testicles. Well, metaphorically, not literally.

And so we were chatting on it, whatever, and she was saying that she misses the pursuit. I mean, a man courting her. I mean, not sexually harassing her, but there is a dance that happens. Well, it's sexually harassing when you're not attracted to that man. Exactly. That's when it gets confusing. Right.

Because if the right man, if it's Johnny Depp or something is is pursuing you it's it's hot if if some fat slob with dirty breath is pursuing you then it's harassment exactly yeah i mean that's oftentimes and so men have become so tentative apparently in sweden that oftentimes these women the reason why they like guys you know sort of the stereotypical italian guy when they go it's not only of course italian guys on average are very stylish and good looking. But it's because that political correctness that has stifled natural dynamics between men and women hasn't fully, you know, permeated, say, Italian culture. So that when women pass by, yes, you don't want them to be catcalling them, but guys will approach you. Guys will hit on you.

Guys will tell you you're beautiful. And in the deep recesses of even the most ardent feminists, you like that. I mean, it's part of the natural dynamics of men and women, right? Yeah. But it's so confusing now for anyone because you don't know. I mean, if I tell you you look good today at work, is that sexual harassment or not? Should I only tell my male colleague that he really looks good in this tie? But I shouldn't, right?

Well, the problem is if you are unattracted to this man and he tells you you look good and you say, well, thank you. And he's like, I'd love to stick my dick in your mouth. Like, okay, you fucked it up. How far do people take it? If it's a gender or a sexual neutral thing like, hey, Deborah, you look wonderful today. I love your dress. You look fantastic. Well, thank you, Mike.

And then he goes to work and you go to work and everybody's happy and you are friends. There's a neutrality, a sexual neutrality there. But the plutonic values that people would like to see in the workplace rarely exist. There's always like coveted sexual desires that people, their unrequited love and affairs that take place because people are working together in these environments for eight hours a day staring at each other. It's normal thoughts and ideas. It's an abnormal environment for men and women to be in these workplaces and not have those thoughts. That's abnormal.

The thoughts, I mean, and managing those thoughts becomes incredibly tricky, which is why you need to establish very strict behavior, you know, laws and rules and regulations in the workforce because you don't want women to have to deal with bullshit or men. You know, I've had men that were in here. I had that guy guy the amazing atheist was talking about this woman that he had that was like she was his boss and he was uh getting sexually harassed like on a daily basis and it was torturous it was brutal she would grab his ass who tried to get him to fuck her and he didn't want to he wasn't attracted to her but this is

amazing atheist was the recipient of that yes yes he's, yes. He's a YouTube guy. I know him. I was on a show. The Drunken Peasants. Yeah. Yeah. Good dude. Yeah. And so, you know, he was talking about it from his perspective where people don't look at it like that he was in any sort of a bad situation at all. They laugh it off because he's a man. Right.

You know, he's like, what the fuck? So he's like psychologically devastated. He's got to go to work all the time. This lady's going to grab his ass and she's gross and she's above him. Right. And so he's experiencing what a lot of women experience. Right. Only no one cares because he's a man, you know, and it's like, oh.

Speaking of not sexual harassment, but continuing on that train of thought, I had a public exchange with a woman who is trying to pass a bill, I think in New Jersey, maybe New York, I can't remember. It's called the rape by fraud. Oh, yeah, I've seen that, yeah. Have you seen it through me? No, I've seen that law that they're trying to pass. It's hilarious. Explain the law because it's just...

So the basic idea is that she's arguing that when you, in the same way that you enter a contract with somebody, and if you do so under false pretense, then you are engaging in a fraudulent action. you lie about whatever, and you get that person to acquiesce to your advances and you have sex with them, well, then that is an instantiation of rape by fraud, right? You were able to have sex with me under false pretenses. And so I saw this thing. I thought it was breathtaking how idiotic it was. I said, well, okay, let me put together a sad truth YouTube clip.

And in the clip, I didn't mention her. I didn't attack the woman who's trying to move this idea. But, of course, I linked back to her site because I want to be judicious and link. Right. Show that it's a real thing. Show it's a real thing. Show the reference. As a scientist. So she starts hammering at me.

She puts up this website. I'm sure you could probably find it. Maybe I shouldn't have given this platform for her. Maybe you shouldn't put it because she'll just get more attention. But anyways, she's saying that I am a rape by fraud enabler. that I am a rape by fraud enabler. And then she goes on to say that you better stop critiquing my ideas because you're going to have a lawsuit from my lawyer

for being libelous and defamatory to me. So the mindset of this person- Is she saying those words? Roughly those words, yeah. Wow, critiquing an idea. So maybe I'm paraphrasing, but I mean the fact that I'm coming after her. Right?

So this woman thought that her putting up an idea in the marketplace of ideas and having somebody scrutinize that idea. As harassment. As harassment was a form of defamation of it being libelous. And I thought that was just breathtaking. And I had two other cases with two Forbes, both happened to be Forbes journalists, female journalists, where we went back and forth.

It very, very quickly disintegrated on Twitter. They started doing this, you're cyber bullying me when I had done no such thing. I was very, very tepid and so on. And I used against both of them, some people might have already heard the story. I used against both of them the fact that I score higher on oppression Olympics or victimology poker, brown man from the Middle East, Jew, Arab, overweight. And so then I started-

From Lebanon. You tell your story. Exactly. The story that you told in this podcast. Exactly. That's about as oppressed as it gets. Exactly. And so I turned it against them guess what they disappeared so imagine how grotesque their mindset is as long as they thought they could say you know you're a pig you're cyber bullying me maybe we'll talk about the anita sarkeesian twitter things yeah okay uh they felt

safe the second i started i actually was satir saying, why are you attacking a brown man? Why are you attacking me just because I'm overweight? I have feelings. They disappeared faster than you could say Godfather. Because they knew that they would be accused of anti. And I literally use those things like, you know, you're an anti-Semite. You're an Arabophobe. And it works. It's magical.

It's so stupid. It's so stupid, right? It's so stupid. Why don't you just engage me in ideas? No. It's magical. It's so stupid. It's so stupid, right? It's so stupid. Why don't you just engage me in ideas? No. It's about identity politics. Well, I think there's some value and some merit in the idea that you shouldn't be able to lie to people and fuck them. Right.

I think, like, if you say you're a prince from another country and you want to take this person to your land and they will live forever in a garden of eden and this woman thinks oh my god i met the perfect guy but it's not raped by fraud okay but what is it no i actually in my in my clip i made it clear that i find it morally and ethically reprehensible i believe that people should be maximally honest in their daily affairs so i do too exactly. But don't call it rape by fraud. Okay, it's not rape. But what is it? Duplicity.

It's caveat emptor. It's right, buyer beware. But there's something that we value very intensely about intimacy. And someone who achieves intimacy through false pretenses, And someone who achieves intimacy through false pretenses. It's different than someone that, like, you know, says they're going to pay for lunch. 95% of- Tomorrow, they're going to give you a million dollars and they don't. Okay, but-

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. 95% of online dating would be then rape. Yeah, that's what I'm saying it should be. It should be all rape. Right? I mean, men lie about their education, about their income, about their height. Women lie about their age, about their weight.

They wear push-up bras. Part of the mating ritual, as detestable as it might be, is that people engage in deceptive signaling. Animals evolve deceptive signals. Right. So let's call everybody a rape. I mean, everybody is a rapist. Well, under that, well, you're getting real extreme. Because we're talking about, like, what kind of lies are we talking about where it would

be rape by fraud? Like, is it established? Do they have, like, certain parameters that would achieve that distinction? I don't know the boundaries. I think in her case, I know that she has experienced a very bad deception where the guy whom she, I don't know if she married him or not,

had said that he was ABC but it turned out to not be true and he had maybe okay, it's dreadful. It's horrible. But that's called life. You learn from that. I mean, that happened to Cindy Crawford, not Cindy Crawford, Christy Brinkley. She married some guy she was in a helicopter crash with and he turned out to be kind of a con man.

And as time went on, she's raping me. That's ridiculous. I'm satirizing. But that's so far off the beaten path because the woman is saying like you gave her pleasure. There's no loss to you. Like, it doesn't hurt you in any way. Like, if that woman said, like, you made me come, so because you made me come, I'm going to give you a million dollars. And then you can quit your job.

So you quit your job. You're like, I'm the best pussy eater ever. I'm going to get paid for this. And you quit your job because of that. And then it turns out that she doesn't really have a million dollars. And you'd even make her have an orgasm. Well, then you fucked up No, the only reason I wanted to have sex with her again is because of the feedback I received for the great

That's the reason lover prize. I want your own pleasures of secondary nature. Come on. I'm a very giving guy I'm completely all that is such a stress. You should abandon it immediately is a terrible argument but I think there is there's a certain amount of validity to what this woman's saying like as far as like someone who is like Very deceptive who uses that deception to have sex with you and you find out they're a liar that feels terrible Yes, so like but what should it be like what if I? Mean what what would what could it be I mean if a guy says he's one-eighth Indian, you know, my mom's Apache and my grandfather's, but it's all bullshit. Right. I mean, you're attracted to that in some sort of strange way because you really like dream catchers.

Right. You know, I've always wanted to be with a Native American. And then you find out the guy's really, like, German, Irish, and, you know, he's a liar. Like, is that right? Of course not. Right. Okay, so what is that? That's just a liar. Like, is that right? Of course not. Right. Okay. So what is that?

That's just a liar. It's about life. But when is it a problem? It's a problem when someone does it and somehow or another it harms the person who's been deceived. It becomes a crime, right? I think if there is, I mean, I don't know. I'd have to think about what the parameters are.

But I mean, if you were engaging in a repeat interaction where you defrauded the person through a misrepresentation. But I mean, the idea that to get somebody to date you or have sex with you and through the pursuit of that objective, you lie as reprehensible. Let me be clear again. It's reprehensible. And I certainly don't live my life that way. Although I'm married now, but I never have lived my life that way. You can't criminalize a central feature of human nature. It is incumbent on each individual to do their homework. I mean, you do your due diligence and find out if the guy that you're speaking to is a Nigerian prince. Right. But doesn't this woman have kind of fairly cut and dry parameters

that she's establishing? I frankly don't know. I don't know either. If she did, maybe that would give it more validity if it's something that she's been thinking about for a long time. But I can never imagine that it would ever be able to meet the standards of it being called rape.

You know what's interesting about this conversation is that what we're talking about is a person who's been fucked over and that person has gone out of their way to make sure this never happens again because they've been hurt and they've been tortured. I think you see a lot of that with like really radical feminism

in general. What you see is a lot of women who their interactions with men have not been positive and unfortunately the stereotype is that these are very unattractive women. Well, if you're a very unattractive woman and you go through life just being rejected by men or being treated like shit by men, there's like a natural tendency to think that men are terrible because they've rejected. Like maybe you're attracted to a man and he, he laughs at you and mocks you.

That's, I've seen that on the male side too. Right. And, and with a close friend, I had a friend that I watched him evolve into a woman hater. He had aspirations and hopes, find a good girl. And he had this one girl he was dating and she fucked him over. And then another girl fucked him over and just women weren't that attracted to him. And, you know, it just got darker and darker as he got older and older to the point where he genuinely would say, like,

just generalize terrible things about women. Like, women, they're all fucking whores, man. They all just want your money. They're all fucking pigs. Fuck them. Who gives a shit? I hope they all get raped. He would say crazy shit like that and you'd be like, whoa.

Like, where did this come from? Well, it came from a lifetime of rejection and associating women with a negative feeling. I'm attracted to them. I come up to them. They shit on me. I'm attracted to them. I come up to them. They shit on me.

Over and over and over again to the point where he broke. It was easier for him to form these generalizations and to act on these or to have these in his mindset. And I think that this is the unfortunate reality about sexual attraction as it pertains to the dynamics of men and women interacting with each other. There's a lot going on there. When you look at unattractive feminists versus over and over again, you see one after the other after the other. over and over again. You see one after the other after the other. By the way, there's a study that was done, I think published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,

where they measured the digit ratio and administered a scale of gender, how much you score on masculinity, femininity, if I remember correctly, or dominance or something, at a feminist conference. And the women were more masculinized at that conference. So there is empirical evidence for sort of your anecdotal intuition. It makes sense. And also women that are forced to work.

They've found that women in the workplace generally develop more testosterone. Is that right? Yes, yes. Women that are forced to fend for themselves generally develop more testosterone. It literally alters the way their hormones express themselves. So it's not that depending on the fields that they go into,

they start off with more or less testosterone? No. So you're saying that it's a response? They're saying that they believe it is a response to women being independent and being forced to provide for themselves, that they develop more testosterone. I don't know how the fuck they prove that.

I don't know how they... I'd like to see that study. The problem is you would have to have the exact same person with the exact same genetics take two completely different paths. So you'd have to do it with identical twins with very similar input, right? Because like your genes, a lot of what's going on, the way they express themselves is dependent upon your environment, your experiences.

Exactly right. There's a lot going on that's not as simple. I think my last sad truth clip was on exactly that, dependent upon your environment, your experiences. Exactly right. There's a lot going on that's not as simple. I think my last sad truth clip was on exactly that, where I was arguing that the whole idea of biological determinism as applied to evolutionary psychology is complete nonsense. And one of the examples that I give is exactly the words that you use, which is that genes are turned on or off as a function of environmental inputs. So the idea when people levy, you say, oh, you're an evolutionary psychologist,

also you believe everything is biologically determined, somebody who says that is effectively saying, I understand nothing about biology. Right. Yeah. It's very complex and only being recently understood within the last couple decades. Right. and only being recently understood within the last couple decades. So we're talking about a fairly new science that is, or a fairly new data, I should say, that a lot of people just haven't accepted yet.

And it's very convenient to generalize instead. Yes. To not take into account all these incredibly complex variables that determine whether a human being is this way or that way, whether they're more masculine or more, it's like, what have you had to do? How have you had to fend for yourself? How have you had to get through life? What have you had to do as far as like, who have you had to nurture and take care of? There's a lot of variables that lead to a person being a person. And there's a lot of different styles of people. And some men like really strong, dominant mother figure wives. They love it.

That's what they want. They want some woman to take care of everything and tell them what to do. I have friends like that. They want that woman to yell at them and tell them what to do. It alleviates a lot of questions and choices. And that's what they look forward to. And then I have other friends that want the wife to be like some 1950s housewife from, uh, from a movie where, you know, it's just, you know, you come home, dinner's on the table, she gives you a kiss and you know,

it's like real, like traditional values, but there's feminists that will look at that woman and like, she's an enemy, right? That her life, although it makes her happy to exist in this way, they have a really cooperative relationship. She doesn't have a right to that choice. Exactly. And a man doesn't have a right to be masculine. Men don't have a right to go on these hunting camps. First of all, you should only eat vegetables. You should be a vegan, you know? And then in doing so, you definitely shouldn't be a hunter and you definitely shouldn't be involved in masculine sports or activities. You definitely shouldn't enjoy weightlifting or anything that's going to make you more men because it'll make you toxic.

You're a toxic male. Toxic masculinity. That's hilarious. Do we want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian quickly? Well, I'm not that familiar with her other than I've seen a couple of her videos about video games. And I'm like, and I've also seen Thunderfoot stuff on her yes it's really interesting which explains that she had this background in marketing and mass marketing and you know is obviously whether or not she's entirely invested in these ideas she's obviously aware that she's marketing her ideas towards a very specific right and she's got these

beta males that cling to her and are attached to her, which are hilarious human beings. Have you heard my theory about the, it's actually a real term, sneaker fucker strategy? Excuse me? Sneaker fucker. Sneaker fucker? Yeah. No.

I can't wait. See, there you go. That's, I think it's, I'm not sure if it was a term that was introduced by Richard Dawkins. I can't remember who it was. He called it sneaker, if Dawkins called it sneaker fucker. I hope I'm not misspeaking. Maybe Jamie that was introduced by Richard Dawkins. I can't remember who it was. He called it sneaker. If Dawkins called it sneaker, fucker. I hope I'm not misspeaking. Maybe Jamie can pull it up.

No, it's okay. But anyways, it basically refers to some species where males come in different phenotypes. In other words, different physical manifestations. So there might be, say, for example, a type of fish species where the typical male is a whatever, a big phenotype, whatever that is. Then there are other males that mimic the phenotype of females. So when the male is standing around looking to protect his area, that male who looks like a female will sneak in and then get some quick copulations with some of the females that otherwise should be inaccessible to him. And that became known as a sneaker fucker strategy in zoology. And I argue, I haven't tested it, but I think it would be interesting to do so,

that some of these sort of social justice warrior beta males are engaging in a form of sneaker fucker strategies what do you think a hundred percent oh look at that a hundred percent without a doubt i mean you have to do what you got to do yeah there's a desperation involved like if you can't be you know this beautiful stud male that all these women fawn after not me i'm too short but and i'm if you're too short i'm i'm non-existent, man. Give me a chance. You're shorter than me, dude. You're fucked. I know.

I'm finished. It's done. But you know what? There is research that shows. Listen to the study. Uh-oh. You're getting defensive. No, not at all.

You ready? You ready? What? So you bring in a guy to a room, and the only thing that you manipulate is the ascribed status, academic status that you give to the guy. Okay. He comes into a room, and in one version of the experiment, he's an assistant professor. In the second version, he's an associate professor.

In the third version, he's a famous, world-famous professor. Then when he steps out, the only thing that you test is people's perception of his height. His height magically becomes taller as his ascribed academic status goes up. And so I always joke that I may be only 5'4", but I'm 7'4", baby. How tall are you? That's hurtful.

No, it's not. I need to go to the same street. I feel very uncomfortable. I mean, on a really good day where the hair is spiked, five, six centipedes. Actually, somebody. On a really good day where the hair is spiked. I was in a photo. I didn't measure that, man.

I was in a photo yesterday with Dave Rubin and I did his show and so on. And somebody wrote, he goes, oh, I learned something new. I thought the Godfather was much taller. You got to wear some stilts. I got to wear something. I got to wear some stilts. I got to wear something. I got to wear the Rubio heels, maybe. What's a Rubio heel?

Rubio, the presidential candidate. Wasn't there a rumor that he was patting his heels to make himself taller? Is that real? That's what I'd heard. I don't know. I wouldn't be shocked when you think about political circles and what kind of manipulations they have. It matters. Yeah. When you think about political circles and what kind of manipulations they have.

Yeah, there's so much manipulation going on there with image and so many different consultants. I mean, they have that on television shows. I can only imagine what it would be like. Well, when George Bush was debating, I don't know if it was Kerry. I can't remember which one. His camp had come up with all sorts of rules of what kind of camera shots you can do and so on. Whoa, look at his heels. Isn't it beautiful how everything I say is validated by Jamie?

Jesus Christ. This guy's got fucking four-inch heels on. I love Jamie. I should have him around everywhere. Like when I'm in class, I say something and he just pops the stuff up. First of all, those would be seriously uncomfortable. Well, okay. Well, hold on now. How much taller are those things

than, like, cowboy boots? Because cowboy boots are like that. That's at least three inches. Those are bigger than three inches. Those are giant. Well, maybe you're right. Those are giant. So he's a short guy. How tall is Rubio supposed to be? I don't know. I have no idea. Oh, yeah, he has giant heels. Because look at those Italian shoes. That's not normal for those ones on the left. Exactly.

That's not normal. That's by design. Yeah. Right. There you go. You gotta just suck it up, man. Deal with the height. You know, that's not normal. That's by design. There you go. You got to just suck it up, man. Deal with the height. Messi's 5'6". He could get any woman he wants in the world. Who's that guy? Oh, for the love of God.

Who are you talking about? Lionel Messi. You don't know who that is? No. Who's that? Why are you looking at me funny? Last time. Who's Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson?

I don't know. Then shut your mouth. Greatest pound for pound fighter that's ever lived. How dare you? Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player who ever lived. Oh, soccer. Okay, right. The girly sport.

No, it's not girly. It's just not something I'm interested in. Yeah, you know this guy. So he's 5'6". You know what? I saw that guy on television. They were doing some special on his movement and what he can do to balls. Not like my balls, but like soccer balls and how he can manipulate them.

And it was fucking spectacular. He's an incredible, incredible athlete. But I didn't know what his name was. Yeah, Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi. Okay. There you go. All right.

You should show his wife at some point. I'm sure she's hot name was. Yeah. Lionel Messi. Now you know. Okay. There you go. All right. Okay. You should show his wife at some point. I'm sure she's hot as fuck. It's okay. You don't have to show it. I get it. But yeah, but this guy running for president has nothing to do. Jesus Christ.

The guy's boring. Nobody gives a fuck. He's not a leader. It's like Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush, not a leader. Yeah. That's why he had to back out of it. Ted Cruz, not a leader. They're hanging their head to back out of it you know ted cruz not a

leader you know they're hanging their head on this guy that most people see right through because there's certain there's a there's a there's a thing that happens when you talk to that guy where his intellect like ted cruz like maybe he's intelligent maybe he's i don't know you know that supposedly went to harvard supposedly he's very The way he talks, the way he establishes himself, the way he communicates is not enough. It's not enough to run the world. We all recognize it. He's not powerful enough in his ideas. Bernie Sanders might be a crazy old socialist.

He might be. But when that guy speaks with passion, I buy it you don't buy it he doesn't exude a wimpiness no doesn't exude a wimp he's got terrible posture he's got terrible posture see i consider him very unhealthy but he's willing to stand up for his beliefs and he he speaks with clarity and he speaks with a certain amount of force and uh i don't think i don't think he's the king you know but i think we live in a time where only assholes want to be president right you know look this this president thing is not gonna last it's not it's not gonna last no i think it's like fucking it's like uh morse code

it's like we need something better like this is stupid it's like we have morse code and we also have cell phones well you're not gonna use fucking morse code it's goofy and this internet thing that we have created this way of establishing information or expressing information it is so far superior to anything that existed back when they invented the electoral college or representative government that that voting and and having a leader one single higher primate leader one singer single top ape that runs all the other apes, it's dumb. It's dumb. You can't, one person being president is a fucking really stupid idea. It just doesn't make any sense.

But who makes the decisions then? Should be a lot of people. Should be a gigantic council of really intelligent people. Shared governance. Yes, 100%. I think it is already. It is already. It's a figurehead more than it is anything.

Yes, 100%. I think it is already. It is already. It's a figurehead more than it is anything. If that doesn't explain why Obama shifted almost all of his policies that he said that he was going to do once he got into office, once he actually got into office, changed so many of the things he did, including his idea and stance on whistleblowers. There was a big part of his hope and change website that they had to redact. So who believes that the president really is responsible for the entire country, really is the one guy that runs the entire show?

I think almost no one now. Right. Almost no one. So it's a ridiculous figurehead position that I think we need to stop. We need to stop pretending that we have a king. We need to stop. We need to figure out a way to have an effective form of government with a giant group of really intelligent people that vote on it. People that have proven to be intelligent and objective and well-educated and have a reasoned response to all these different various scenarios.

Well, I guess the parliamentary system of Canada or Britain would probably be more akin to what you're talking about. Maybe, but you still have Trudeau. You do. I mean, you still have a figurehead. You do. You still have a one. Yeah, I mean, the figurehead is a bad idea. And I think it's a bad idea because I think that this hope and this idea that we need a king,

we need a number one primate, I mean, that's really what it is. These are like chimpanzee hierarchy systems that have existed for thousands and millions of years. But you don't think that humans succumb to the same dominance hierarchies? I just don't think we need it anymore. I think we're moving towards this idea of a global community, moving towards this idea of a world with the boundaries that we have had in the past oftentimes have been because we try to stay safe. We try to establish borders. We want to stay safe. We want to keep people together. I'm going to keep all the outsiders out. We need a king. We need a king, a king to guard the borders, a king to lead us

into war. I just think that's less and less relevant today. And it's more and more relevant to have a large group of very informed people that can help a large group of people that are collectively calling themselves a country. Plato talked about philosopher kings, right? He talked about that those who should lead should be the wise philosophers, and it should be sort of an amalgamation of those guys. Maybe the godfather. Maybe the godfather.

You were born in another country. You're fucked. But you changed the constitution for me, no? Ah, we tried for Arnold. We wanted Schwarzenegger until he got popped right but what's the deal with him now doing those video game commercials i mean does it not seem getting that scratch yeah i'm gonna get that paper i'm gonna pay for that divorce a lot of money involved i mean he's doing movies doing a lot of different things right he probably came to him with a big deal and you know it's a funny commercial and

they're all attacking him trying to get his iPhone. I don't know. It doesn't bother me. Does it bother you? No, but I mean it seems like – For a former governor? Yeah, I mean maybe it's – He's not a governor anymore.

Yeah, okay. Fair enough. But I don't spend too much time thinking about it. I mean it would be weird if Bush started doing one of those. Bush the president? Yeah. Or the current guy. You mean the –

No, the former president. Bush the president? Yeah. Or the current guy? No, the former president. The former president, yeah. If George W. started doing a commercial for a video game where he's running away from a bunch of assassins that are trying to steal his phone, it would get really weird. Right. You know, or if Obama left office and started doing commercials for shit. Right. Is there a law against that? What?

A president doing commercials. Like a former president representing Pepsi-Cola or something like that. I suspect not. What would be the law? It would fall under what rubric? I don't know. You've never seen it. No, I think it would be a violation, if you like, in quotes of the presidential office.

I think one thing that would hinder them is the financial reward of being a president is really about those gigantic speeches that they give. Hillary Clinton, here's a fucking crazy one. Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions of dollars in speeches. They gave their daughter a three million dollar wedding party. Three million dollars for the wedding. But they're people of the masses. They're just like you and me. Well, this just should show you how insanely fucked up

the political system is in this country. And that's why a president, it would actually be a negative to them if they had any mark on their record like doing a Pepsi commercial. Whatever Pepsi would pay them wouldn it wouldn't be enough. Because a guy like Bill Clinton, he makes un-fucking-believable amounts of money. And he was at least a partially disgraced president.

But it doesn't matter. It still didn't harm his financial possibilities. Do you think it will ever be the case where a sitting u.s president can claim to be an atheist i think an agnostic is more likely okay an actual atheist an atheist is someone who says i don't believe in god no god yeah yeah i think more likely someone that could say i don't know you know or someone who is is there anybody that chooses to engage in a bunch of different traditional practices of worship but doesn't necessarily believe in a God? As a politician? Yeah, like someone who tries going to a Jewish synagogue and then one day they go to a Catholic church.

Well, I mean, they do all these things when it's campaigning season. But do they wear the garb and do the service? Oh, I could send you photos. Please pull them up. There's a bunch of photos of Justin Trudeau being able to... I'm done with that guy. He's in every extremist mosque in Canada, prostrating himself as a sort of Muslim. Did he do that to get into office?

What else would he have done it for? Right. But once he's in office, then how does he behave? Uh, I'm not sure. It's only been a hundred days, so we'll have to, I reserve judgment, but, uh, I'm not sure that I like that very much. Yeah. Well, it's problematic when you support any ideologies that really just don't make sense. Yeah. And that's, it's, we're not talking about like meditation or anything else. You're talking about like really strict guidelines for living and they don't make sense. And they're,

they're ancient. And you know, in a lot of ways, those places where those guidelines were established, where it was the cradle of civilizations, where civilization first emanated and first took off and i have this sort of joke that i never i never really figured out how to do it on stage but that essentially the middle east is like the townies of the world do you know what a townie

is yeah yeah actually last time we were on i didn't know what that term was yeah yeah exactly we talked about it last time it's just like think that patterns are intensely hard to break and it's one of the reasons why the united states is the most, as far as like artistically, one of the most diverse places in the world. And as far as our ability to express ourselves in film, in music, in stand-up comedy, and things along those lines. And even in podcasting, it's the most diverse and the most potent. And it's because we're the people that escaped all the other spots. You know, my grandparents came from Italy and Ireland, and they all came over on a boat when they were young, and they established themselves in the East Coast. And that's where my parents

were born. And that's where I was born. And these are just like second, third generation immigrants that were trying to get the fuck away from the horrors of Europe. And they tried to find a new place with new opportunity, and they escaped the tradition of the past. And the tradition of this new place was different. It was different. It was more open. It was more, there was more hope. There wasn't a caste system like there is in England. I mean, there's like a very clear class system that goes on in a lot of countries throughout the world that has existed back from the days when they had kings. By the way, in Canada, the Canadian government, I can't remember exactly when, specifically to avoid that caste system, the royal caste system, made it a law that Canadians can't be knighted. Because any country that's under the Commonwealth,

so you're Nigerian or you're Indian, you could be knighted by the queen.'s under the commonwealth so you're nigerian or you're indian you could be knighted by the queen you become sir dame so on canadians can't wow precisely because the the argument was that the canadian ethos is contrary to having these hierarchical royal titles so i could never be sir godfather good i like that you don't want to be a sir. No, no, I know. I think there's real problems in established caste systems like that, real problems that are intensely hard to break. And I think that the beauty of America is that you can come here with nothing and become somebody. And the real lesson in that is not that America is different. It's that really everybody is somebody. You're being held back by tradition and you're being held back by these parameters and these guidelines that are set in

place by people that had a very limited amount of information to work with. They didn't understand the consequences of these rules. They didn't understand the consequences of these patterns of behavior that you're forcing people to follow in. And that's why America, in a lot of ways, represents still the beacon of freedom to people. I mean, there's a lot of problems with America, a huge amount of problems with America, but that alone, that it represents the most recent of the big countries, the most recent of the nation. And I don't know if it's coincidentally the big one, right? It's the superpower. I mean, I don't know if that's a coincidence. But earlier we were talking about friendships. So let me link that to some of the stuff that

you're talking about America. So one of the arguments as to why Americans seem to form more sort of ephemeral transient friendships, you know, not as the, I mean, it might be a stereotype, but I know I could tell you that when I was a graduate student in the US, all the non-American students would complain that Americans are very quick to be friendly with you, but they don't form the same tight bonds. That's interesting. I've never heard that before. But listen to the story. So I thought about it, and I thought, well, it can't be inherently that Americans are more shallow.

So what might be some reasons? might be some reasons. And so I actually talk about this, not in this book, but in an earlier book of mine, 2007 book, that the fact that Americans face greater geographic mobility, today I could be in Boston, tomorrow I could be in LA, and socioeconomic mobility. The stratum that I was born into is not necessarily the one that I might die in. So because of these various forms of mobility, it creates a more transient definition of friendship. Not that Americans can't form strong bonds, but there is a bit of a shallowness to the original encounters because tomorrow I might be somewhere else. Whereas the guy who comes from Lebanon, where he's born is where he's going to die, where his word is his contract, is going to have a different definition of friendship if only because life is not as anonymous. It's not as open to mobility as it would be the case in, say, California.

That seems reasonable. That makes sense. That makes sense. You know, I think it's probably something that… I saw you trying to poke a hole into it, but you couldn't find it. Well, it makes sense. It makes sense you know i i think uh i i probably saw you i saw you i saw you trying to poke a hole into it but you know it just makes sense it makes sense i mean we we are in a lot of ways um captive right by the initial impulses of the people who created us and the land that they established you know and this place is established by people that were were so transient

they they got in a boat and they they sailed away before they had pictures. You know? I mean, there wasn't even fucking pictures when people came here in the 1700s. They had to draw things. You know?

Look at this drawing. This is what's waiting for you on the other side of the ocean. It's only going to take three months. Don't be a pussy. Right. And you're likely to die. Yeah.

I mean, people don't want to get on a fucking plane for 10 hours and go to England. Oh, it's too far. But people,

that's a fucking, not even a and go to england oh it's too far but people that's a fucking not even a day you could wake up in in los angeles get on a plane you could have dinner in london that's incredible that's insane is it louis is it louis ck is that how you pronounce it yes is he the one who does the bit where he says about how you know he's flying in a tube in the sky. Yeah, the Wi-Fi joke. And yet he manages to... Yeah, yeah. Well, it's all relative, right? Right. What's ridiculously easy to us

in comparison to our grandparents is going to be a joke to our grandchildren who could beam each other on the moon any time they want. Let's just go to the base on Mars. Are you kids going to go to Mars today? They're just going to fucking beam each other up all over the galaxy.

I mean, we're dealing with a fucking beam each other up all over the galaxy. I mean, that's what we're dealing with, a very strange and ever-changing world. Very nice. This is a fucking badass podcast, brother. Man, you are the best. This is what you do. This is your thing, man. I live a truly blessed life to know guys like you. I do, too, to know guys like you.

This is what makes this podcast so cool, to be able to have conversations with guys like you. Thank you so much. This is your future, man. you is what makes this podcast so cool to be able to have conversations with guys like you but this this is your future man this is what it is these fucking stuffy classrooms with 20 fucking kids who barely pay attention who are judging you fuck those people fuck them fuck them all don't listen to universities don't listen to him don't hire him let him you make so much more money doing this anyway um your youtube page is uh so youtube slash c slash got sad it's the sad truth uh sad truth s a a d truth s a a d but it's not sad it's not sad it's not it's happy i'm always smiling and i was always smiling. At Gadsad, G-A-D-S-A-A-D is my Twitter feed

and then my public Facebook page, whatever they start, doctor, period, gad, period, sad. Always a pleasure, my brother. Thank you, sir.

Open invitation anytime you want. Come on back. Thank you so much. We can do this every day. Thank you so much, brother. Cheers.

Good night, everybody. That was lovely. I always loved it when I did that.