The Joe Rogan Experience - #897 - Hunter Maats

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

Hunter Maats is the co-author of "The Straight-A Conspiracy" and also co-host of The Bryan Callen Show podcast.

What's up Hunter? How are you doing Joe? I'm doing good. Now that we're actually live, it feels more formal. We were just talking about how crazy some of the people in Brian Callen's past have been. What is it like doing his show, man? You guys, you're like a co-host. You keep him on the level. Well, yeah. So, I mean, what happened was that a couple of years ago, Brian and I were talking about books. And Brian had just started doing his podcast at that point. And, you know, he was sort of interviewing strippers, a lot of strippers or like porn stars or like, you know, MMA guys.

And that was fine. But, you know, I was like, Brian, if you enjoy these books so much, why don't we get on some of these professors? And he was like, really? Like professors would talk to me. And I said, well, you know, what are your download numbers? And, you know, he told me them. And then I went off and I lied to the professors and like doubled or tripled them. How dare you? That's the way to do it though. Yeah. And then, you know, as a result, they were all like, that's great. Because if you're a New

York Times bestselling author, you usually have an audience of three. And so if you have a chance to like actually reach a decent number of people, then yeah, you're going to come on this weird podcast. You're like, I've heard of podcasting. What is that? Why not? Right. And so we started getting all of these professors and academics and scientists and all that stuff on. And, you know, that's sort of been the journey. And we're now 200 plus episodes in. Yeah, that'srian loves that kind of stuff but i've always felt like how come you never talk about that on stage he just he wants to be captain silly face on stage if we're joe are we willing to wander into the dark dark place that is brian

callan's mind dark dark place yeah are you ready to go there yeah i've been there for 20 years so i mean a lot of it comes down to Brian's own personal insecurities. Like, he loves it, but he doesn't feel confident engaging with and breaking with those ideas. See, I would disagree with that. I would say that he's just, his comedy, he prefers it to be silly. You know, because there's a difference between comedy, in Brian's mind especially, between what's really funny and what's really deep. Right. You know, and he doesn't find deep things to be very funny.

He's not – he doesn't – you know what I mean? Like he's – when he gets into deep subjects, he kind of gets into them just for what they are and not like tries to translate those into comedy. Yeah. Does that make sense? It does make sense. I mean, but part of what I've seen across the course of, you know,

these 200 episodes is I think that Brian Callen is growing up. Oh, no way. Finally, at like whatever age he is. 55. 55. Tomorrow. Yeah. There's starting to be an evolution.

And part of it is just sort of having actually talked to some of the smartest people in the world. He's like, oh, these are just people. And, you know, they know certain ideas that I didn't know. And now I know them. And, you know, maybe I can. And he's even started experimenting with, he particularly got really excited. We had a guy called Joe Henric on, who wrote this great book called The Secret of Our Success, which is all about cultural evolution, how cultural evolution works. And one of the things he talks about in there is, you know, why do we have black people? And why do we have white people? And, you know, it comes down to vitamin D and folate and all these sorts of things. Oh, I spent a lot of time in England and I got rid of most of my accent,

but there are weird words that come out like vitamin and bean. And so sometimes people think I'm Canadian, which is hilarious because they literally can't place it. Side story. When I was when I first went to college, you know, I wanted to major in linguistics for a while. And I met with my linguistics professor and he sits me down and we're having a conversation just like this. And then all of a sudden he stops me just like you did. And he says, wait a minute. And he proceeds to like ask me these really fucking bizarre questions like he's like if john and jane are in a race and john comes fifth and jane comes in afterwards what position does jane come in and i was like sixth and he goes

british and he like proceeds to like do all of these tests to basically spot my accent sixth sixth there's no s it's not oh sixth yeah it's super weird and then medicine is the other one they don't say medicine they say medicine oh so by sick wow that's interesting that's interesting because the x sound is really a k and then an s yeah even though we represent it as X. So he basically had all of these tests and he figured out pretty quickly that I was trying to pass as an American. And he's like, sorry, white boy, not so much. How long did you live in England for? 10 years.

10 years. Until you're 10? From the age of 8 until 18. Okay. So if you were in England, so you started out without an English accent. Yep. Right. So you learned in England, so you started out without an English accent. Yeah. Right. So you learned English here.

And then when you started speaking in England, did you sense that you were shifting over to English? Wow. And I sort of fought it. I fought it. Really? Because what happens is that people naturally sort of start to, you know, you're in a tribe and you start to like pick up the values and the speech patterns and all that sort of stuff of the tribe. And, you know, I really thought of myself as American in large part because I identified with my mom more than my dad. And so what happened was, is that, you know, I was like, oh, British accent creeping in. And so I fought that with everything that I could. But in spite of fighting the accent with everything I

could, these words that like bean and vitamin and medicine and sick that I wasn't watching for that No ordinary person would watch for crept into my mind. It's always interesting to me. There's a there's an added Insight that you get from people that come from another country and then live in America. Mm-hmm There's something different about like oh you guys don't know how weird this fucking place Like I know, you know, I've been to fucking place is like i know you know i've been to scotland i live there you know like those people have a different insight very different insight also i think we are so established in america in in so far as thinking that this is how people live in the world like this is where you go you go to bird king it's right over there

you get on the highway it's right over here and we see our landscape and we see our cityscapes and we see it as being normal. But if you don't go to another country, you don't go, oh, this is normal too. This is normal for them. Oh, this is normal for them. You really need to be there. I don't think that's absorbable from a DVD. No. And part of it is, I mean, this is a large part of what we've been doing and what Joe Henrick's work is about, is the fact that, you know, when you're in a tribe, whatever that tribe is, whether that's America or Christianity or Mormonism or Islam or, you know, some Papua New Guineans in the foothills of, you know, Papua New Guinea, whatever you do, you're like, that's our way.

That's just the way things are done. You don't question it, right? The tribe creates the sense that this is what normalcy is. And then the second you go outside the tribe, whatever that tribe is, you're suddenly like, oh, our tribe is fucking weird. There are other ways of doing things. And that's sort of been a large part of, like, the experience that Brian and I had growing up because Brian's dad was my dad's boss. And so that's the first place that I went after I was born in Saudi Arabia was Brian's house. Like, at birth, I went to Brian's house.

And so for the last, you know, and then we moved around and we moved to different places. He did, you know, Philippines, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. I did Saudi Arabia, Greece, Brazil, England. And then my parents moved to France and Libya and the UAE. And then, you know, I came to the U.S. So moving constantly between tribes, like that was a large part of my experience growing up as a kid, was I was constantly like, people are all the same and yet they're fucking different. And how does that work? And because I come from the background of science, my first

response was like, oh, well, there must be science of this, right? Why not go and look at that science and see what the science says about that? Turns out there's a massive amount of science all about it. Yeah, there's a massive amount of science all about it yeah there's a massive amount of science all about it and it's so fascinating when you stop and think that there are some people on i'm sure you've seen the most recent photos of that uncontacted tribe now contacted obviously in the amazon like really recently over the last couple weeks no oh it's amazing yeah really cool i mean these people are they're they don't have american t-shirt like sometimes you'll see like these tribes they're deep in the amazon but they have t-shirts on. They have a Coca-Cola Adidas thing, and you're like, how'd that get there?

There's some sort of interaction, but with these people, there's none. There's been no interaction with the West. They have stick bows that they've made, and they're all barefoot, and they're all wearing leaves and shit. These people, here they are, trucking along in 2017. And you got to think, 50,000, 60,000 years ago, they probably were living exactly the same way. Yep. And what's fascinating is just the degree to which those people have so much to teach us, because a lot of what happened in the beginning of the Enlightenment is that if you look at Locke and Rousseau and all these guys, they're trying to imagine the state of nature. But they're a group of people who are

sitting around in Europe. They've never met somebody from the Amazon or someone from Papua New Guinea. And now we really have a pretty good idea of what was life like before civilization. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's pretty damn fascinating. I mean, Jared Diamond has this great book, The World Until Yesterday, which is literally all about life before civilization. And what are the things that we can learn as moderns from these people? What are the things they get right that we get wrong? Like what was his examples? Well, he has, there's a bunch of interesting ones. One of my favorite ones is constructive paranoia. So what happens is when you have tribes people and they go outside of their

village, they suddenly become massively paranoid, like incredibly paranoid. And he's like, you know, these people are more paranoid than your average New York Jew, right? Like suddenly like wandering around the forest and they're like,

shit, is this tree going to fall down? Where can we sleep? Like they go and they check the trees. They look for footprints. Oh my God. Are those the footprints of, you know, some other tribe? Like what's going on? What is that sound? And he's like, what is this paranoia about? And for a long time, he thought this

paranoia was just misplaced, that it was inappropriate. But then he had this experience where he had a couple of experiences. One, which was around, you know, somebody, some other tribe that was potentially trying to kill him in Papua New Guinea. And then the other one was around, you know, somebody, some other tribe that was potentially trying to kill him in Papua New Guinea. And then the other one was around. He basically, you know, was getting on this boat. And, you know, if you're in the West and you get on a boat at the New York Port Authority or whatever, you feel like, oh, yeah, this boat's safe. Like there are safety rules. Probably someone would check it, whatever. So he gets on this boat. The boat goes out into the ocean and like capsizes and sinks and he almost drowns to death. And it's basically because these kids who were running the boat were running it way too fast.

And the water kept sloshing over the side in the high waves. And a certain point, there's so much water in the boat that the boat goes down. Jesus Christ. And, you know, when you're in that kind of environment, one of these societies that doesn't have protections and doesn't have rules and all that sort of stuff, being paranoid is super smart. It's the most appropriate thing you can do. And he then talks about how, you know, he's a 70, 80 year old man. He's like, I need to be more paranoid because the reality is if I go down, it's probably because I slip in the shower.

Like, you know, there are all these things that can actually kill me in my environment that I sort of take for granted because my world seems so safe. And so one of the things you learn from that is that paranoia is a tool. And rather than a lot of people have trouble with paranoia where they're indiscriminately paranoid. But the key is figuring out what to be paranoid about, when to be paranoid so that you're hyper alert to threats. It totally makes sense. Yeah. I mean, they're very vulnerable. They're so soft and fleshy.

Most of their body is exposed and they're around all sorts of different poisonous things and predatory things and cats and fucking spiders and whatever the hell's out there. And if you break a leg in the jungle, you're done. Yeah. And that's the point is they don't have the luxury of, oh, I was, you know, not paying attention in CrossFit. I dropped a barbell on my foot. Oh, I go to the doctor. I'm out for a few months. Not a big deal. Yeah. It's a shorter life though. It doesn't seem like nearly as fun. Well, the interesting thing is, is that in many ways that it's actually more fun because they have such a strong, like, you know, part of what we don't have. And obviously part of what you're creating with your podcast and what we're trying to create on a smaller level with our podcast is tribe.

Right. Like we, you know, a strong sense of community, a group of people that you belong with, you know, you're in it together, all of that sort of stuff. And, you know, America and he particularly talks about the elderly. You know, he talks about what is the experience of the elderly in a tribe. And, you know, you're super valuable until death. Everybody respects the shit out of you. You always have things to contribute to a tribe. What do we do with the elderly here? You stick them in a fucking old person's home and leave them to rot.

You know, they don't have that sense of belonging, that sense of purpose late in life. Do you think that's a sheer volume thing? It's almost like we don't value life as much because we're overwhelmed by it. We were talking on the last podcast about the number of people in America today versus when I was a kid. And when I was 14, there was, we figured there was 230, 200, what was it? 225. 225 million. Now there's a hundred million plus more. Just the sheer volume. It seems like if we lived in a small town and there was some guy that, you know, we really loved and he was starting to die, we'd want to take care of him. Right. But if it's that crazy asshole that's down the hallway

in your apartment building, you never even talked to that dude because there's a thousand people in your apartment building that you never talked to. Right. Well, part of it is like, what are neurological limits? Right. So in general, there's what's called the Dunbar number. And the Dunbar number, you know, it's like 150, 150. And then there are a series. Just explain that, what that is for people who haven't heard that. Yeah. So it's pretty simple. The easiest way to understand it is Facebook, right?

Like you may have 4000 friends on Facebook, but then you constantly find like, who the fuck are these people that I friended in some sort of like friending frenzy. It's almost like a song. Yeah. Well, hopefully not. I don't think that song is going to take off. But you find that like, oh, I only really know a few of these people. The majority of them, my brain can't track. Right.

Right. And you even get into that experience. Like, that's what I always find fascinating is you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, right on the street. And you're kind of avoiding the interaction because you're like, Oh, where the fuck do I know this guy from?

Yeah. And you also, then if you like really get into it, then you have to like dust off the relationship. You have to invest a whole bunch of time. It's fucking exhausting. Right. So there's a,

there's a real limit to like how many people any one human brain can handle isn't it more sort of like the top nine on myspace remember myspace yeah wasn't it nine wasn't it nine people yeah remember you'd have a top nine and like those those are the people that you were like pretty tight with you gotta have your boys all your friends in the top nine well there's a there's a series of dumb bar numbers right and there's like you know there's essentially like two or three people who are like you would tell anything to, right? And then there's sort of like your top nine, right? You're sort of like, oh, we're cool.

We can all go hang out. If I was going to have a bachelor party, these are the people I would invite, right? And then, you know, you sort of get out into larger and larger circles. 150 is sort of the size of a tribe. sort of get out into larger and larger circles. 150 is sort of the size of a tribe. But then, you know, even though there's 150, there's, you know, whatever, 4,000 people, 5,000 people who's like, you'd recognize their face, but you're like, I don't totally fucking know you.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a series of all these things. But whatever the numbers are, it's not 7 billion. That's not even close, right? It's not $7 billion. That's not even close, right? Well, that's what's interesting about small towns is that there's a feeling in small towns of an invasion of your privacy as much as there is a feeling of camaraderie.

There's also like a nosiness. Yeah. So like if there's 2,000 people living in an apartment building, nobody wants to know shit about anybody, right? Yeah. But if it's 2,000 people living in a town, it's the whole town, and everybody needs to know everything about everybody else. Yep. That hunter boy, you hear what he's up to?

And what about that Brian Callen? Oh, he's a wacky one. And everybody wants to gossip and exchange information. Well, and gossip is what Dunbar's work is really about. So his big book is Grooming Gossip and the Origins of Language. And so Dunbar's whole thesis is the big question has always been like, why do we talk? Right? Like, why do humans have language? What is the function of language? looked at what's the natural group size of different primates, right? So, you know, there's a natural group size for apes, for chimpanzees, and, you know, orangutans, and all this sort of stuff. And what ends up happening is, is that when you, if you're chimps, right, you know, you can groom all the members of your troop, right? That's not a big problem. But if your troop is 150 people, like it is for humans, there's no way you can physically groom all of

those people. So it becomes too many people to physically groom. So essentially, the idea is, is that language is how we groom each other without having to do it physically. And that's what gossip is about. It's really that we're like grooming each other, we're maintaining social relationships, and we're trading information about who's trustworthy, who's not trustworthy, who did what to who, and passing information around in the tribe. Totally makes sense. Yeah. I mean, it seems also when you think about how women are really into gossiping and chatting,

whereas men really appreciate quiet and then get upset if people are too flashy. Yeah. It's about men going off into hunting parties, right? And the women staying back and going, you know, this crazy motherfucker's doing what no one's looking. And they have to try to assess what the dangers are in their environment. Yep. And specifically men, like what you're saying about like making sure that nobody's getting too flashy. That's, I mean, you know, that's a real function of teasing, right?

The real function of teasing is that, you know, if you look at these hunter-gatherer tribes, they have all these mechanisms for making sure that nobody's head gets too big, right? So, for example, you know, they'll do things where, for example, I'll give you my arrow and you'll go hunt with my arrow. So then even if you kill a deer, it's actually not your kill because it was done with my arrow. It's everybody's kill. It's everybody's kill. It's everybody's kill. So and then also, you know, when they, for example, they'll have all these rituals when someone is elected the big man of the tribe or whatever it is, they will then all the group will get around and make fun of him. Right. And they'll sort of humiliate him.

And it's a sort of it's proto democracy. It's a way of like keeping him his ego in check. So this is what Donald Trump is avoiding. Exactly. way of like keeping him his ego in check so this is what donald trump is avoiding exactly this is he's he's avoiding this inevitable reality of being mocked that's why he's so mad at alec baldwin well and he should he should embrace it i mean that's the point right he should because i mean that it's that's if his social function right the leader's social function is to be humble right because we you know powers, like that's what it does to human psychology. That's not a function of Donald Trump. That's just a function of the human brain, right? And, you know, we know that. I mean, that's, you know, that's being studied now.

There's a guy at UC Berkeley, Dacher Keltner, who's also awesome, who's studied power. And specifically, you know, there's this old quote from Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. He went and studied that and he got more specific and he found out that power does two things. It makes people more impulsive and it makes them less empathetic. So it makes people good impulsive and bad impulsive in the sense that you'll have celebrities who will be like,

I'm giving away all my fucking money, right? And you're like, oh, that was fucking dumb. Or, you know, like Wesley Snipes had that great idea of like, I'm just going to not pay taxes, right? I think in his defense that he just got one of those wacky attorneys and had him convinced that there's some loophole in the Constitution and they don't want this Constitution loophole exposed. Let me tell you something, man.

If they found out that no one has to pay taxes, the government goes down. There's a lot of people that actually had that conversation with me. Oh, really? They were telling me that you don't have to pay taxes and that the Constitution says that the only time you're supposed to pay taxes is during war. And that's when they came up with federal taxes in the first place. And it's not legal. And that's why they can't really charge you with it. And if you just resist, like, bitch, they will put you in a cage. They will take all your money and they'll put you in a cage.

Yep. Like, that is a one time. There's two really fascinating things when it comes to money. That's a really fascinating one. It's that if you don't pay your taxes, it's one of those debts where it doesn't matter. You go to fucking jail. Like, you go to jail. They take everything you have. Even if you have no ability to pay it when you get out, you still owe it,

and you go to jail. That's fascinating because you can't just pay it off. It's not like, oh, you owed $50,000 in back taxes. No, you fucking lied to us about paying money, so now you go to jail. You weren't honest, so it's not just you owe the money, now you pay it, now you're clean. No, no, no. No, you go to jail. You take all your money So it's not just you owe the money. Now you pay it. Now you're clean. No, no, no. Now you go to jail. You take all your money and then you get out and you hadn't made money in a long time. And now you got to get back on your feet and fuck you.

P.S. Fuck you. And the other time the P.S. Fuck you is student loans. So one thing that you can't fucking go bankrupt with. That's horrible. That is the worst idea ever. Saddle down young, impulsive children who are just getting out of their parents' grasp, saddle them down with debt, and then have them enter into a diminishing job market. And if you start off something in 2016, what are the fucking

odds, especially if it's tech-related, that anything you learn is going to be applicable in four years? Well, I mean, if you want to talk about the university system, I mean, you know, there's a ship that is sinking pretty damn fast. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Isn't it? Having Jordan Peterson on your podcast, you guys had him before I had him on. And I've been paying attention to his work for a long time. And he's one of the few people that are out, that's standing out there in the river screaming.

Yeah. You know, I mean, that's what he's doing. He's like, this is madness. Right. You guys aren't being honest about things here. Did you see this recent thing with this women's march in the New York Times? They're separating the women by color, and white women are being told to check their privilege. Yeah.

In this march against discrimination. Where does one check one's privilege? We're going to find out. See, I put that up on my Twitter. Pull it up because it's fucking hilarious. And this is not some fringe newspaper. This is the New York Times printing this. And Michael Shermer posted it.

Women's March on Washington opens contentious dialogues about race. Oh, my God. What was the headline that was on my Twitter thing about it? Because the headline's hilarious. Look at what Shermer said. To protest racism now dividing women by skin color, whites told to check your privilege. Get the fuck out of here. And that's what you were talking about with power and power corrupting.

That is power. Yeah. power and power corrupting. That is power. And that's one of the things that's going on with this social justice warrior movement is not just people deciding that some people should be more ethical or kind or loving or open or progressive. No, no, no. It's exerting power over people to enforce your standard of thinking and behaving on them. That's a giant problem. That's what Jordan Peterson is fighting. Well, and it's the power of, A, a just cause, right? Like, okay, you're fighting racism. You're fighting sexism. Like, these are things to fight.

Like, I'm all down with you. But the fact that, you know, if you have any problem with it, right, Jordan Peterson takes issue with some of that behavior. They're then like, so you're saying racism and sexism and discrimination are okay? Of course no one's saying that. And that's like the stupid game that they play. Exactly. They try to paint you into a corner instantaneously with their opening statement. Well, you're a bigot, so, you know, oh, I'm a bigot. Is that what's really going on?

Just because we disagree on things, I'm a bigot? Yeah, and if you look at, I mean, the argument I think particularly about pronouns, it really comes down to a linguistic one in the sense that, you know, words are tools, right? And so if you look, if you want to talk about pronouns, look at English in the time of Shakespeare, right? They had this thing, thou, right? It was another pronoun. And then they got the fuck rid of it, right? And why did they get rid of it? Because they were like, man, it doesn't really add anything. Sounds good when you say to thine self be true. Yeah, it sounds fancy, but it's not, it doesn't practically add anything. Sounds good when you say to thine self be true. Self be true. Yeah. It sounds fancy, but it's not. It doesn't practically add anything, right?

Right. So it's the same thing as the Romance languages where it was a distinction between formal and informal you. And essentially we decided we didn't need that distinction. So that pronoun dropped away. And in general, that's what has happened over time. That's a big part of Joe Henrich's work is that language simplifies over time. The tools become more and more powerful and more refined. In the same way that, say, a stone tools, right,

you see the early stone tools, they're shit, and then over time they get more and more elegant and more refined. The same thing has been happening with language for the entirety of human history. They get whittled down. So what the fuck do you think happens if you introduce 70 gender pronouns? Well, you get equality. You fucking racist, cisgendered piece of shit.

Oh, shit. I forgot. That's the problem, Joe. For guys like us, we have so much privilege. Yep. Like, we're going to be there, like, checking it in for, like, half an hour, an hour. Well, we have to even out the world. That is true.

That's what we have to do. The world must be evened out. So there's no more competition, by the way. Which is one of the more hilarious things about people that actually think that they're communist. Just shut your fucking mouth. If you are, and if you really do subscribe to that, I guarantee you, you're not contributing.

You're like one of those hippies that always wants weed and you never bring some. Come on, man. Let's all share. How about you bring your own weed you fuck? They never have it right and that's all the communist people the people that are really into the idea of communism Yeah, and I'm theory about everybody sharing and not worrying about money. That'd be great There's only the three of us We were the only people in the world is my example that I always love to use if there's a three of us and there

Was like three million dollars in the world and we all said well It's all just split it up up and then money won't be nothing. We'll just trade back and forth and everything should be even. Okay, cool. And we'd be fine with that. And then we would go on about our merry way. But there's too many fucking people and there's inevitably going to be some form of competition. And in some form of competition, some people are going to get out ahead.

And there's going to be some people that are upset that people are ahead. And there's going to be all sorts of reasons. Some people are going to be out ahead. And there's going to be some people that are upset that people are ahead. And there's going to be all sorts of reasons. Some people are going to be ahead because they're assholes. Some people are going to be ahead because they get up at 5 o'clock in the morning while you sleep until fucking noon. That's true too. These are all true. There's some people that are totally ethical and they just do a lot of work and they do better. And they're going to do better.

They didn't steal from anybody. They didn't rip anybody off. But this narrative keeps getting repeated by people who don't get up at 7 o'clock in the morning or don't have the same kind of ambition or feel bad because some people do want a fucking private jet and fly all over the world and ball like Dan Bilzerian. All these things are true. I mean, it's both things. It's like you can be an ethical person and be like a super ambitious crazy person who wants to succeed in business for some reason. They're not mutually exclusive. Nope.

So when everybody says capitalism is evil and it's the problem, man. No, no, no. You saying that is a problem. It's not a problem. The whole reason why you have a fucking laptop to complain on is because of capitalism. Right. And the point is that the lesson of 2016 is that there are a lot of shit ideas out there and there are shit ideas spread all around the political spectrum. Right. Yeah. And I think the challenge of 2017 is how do we kill those ideas?

But also in the defense of the people that are anti-corporate or anti-corporation, there is an issue when these gigantic groups get together and their only their only motivation is acquiring more money every year. Right. That does become a problem. And then there's a diffusion of responsibility when you're locked into that giant system and you're just a middle manager of some Exxon group that's fucking killing seals. And you don't give a shit. You know, those poor seals, why are they living in the Arctic anyway? It's where all the oil is.

Stupid fucking seals covered up with oil. You know? Yeah. I mean, it becomes that, right? It becomes you're just a part of the thing, but look, I got a new BMW. It drives itself. Hey, we got a house in the Hamptons. Everybody's happy.

And that's a problem, too. So there's two problems. Well, there's a million of them. Yeah. But that is a problem with money, too. The issue might be corporations in itself might be a problem. That is a problem with money, too. It's like the issue might be corporations in itself might be a problem. Like that is a power thing. Like you're talking about absolute power.

Well, the problem is not power per se. It's unchecked power. Right. Right. And so, I mean, the founding fathers understood that. That's why you had, you know, checks and balances. And the problem is, is that a lot of the checks and balances on intellectuals, what's happening at universities, have broken down. And the checks on corporations, which is government, is broken down.

And the check on government is the people, and that's broken down. And so what's happened is a lot of the checks and balances have failed. And the ultimate check and balance is the people. But the problem is that you can't get the wisdom of crowds if the crowd isn't wise. it's not that yeah it's a real big fucking problem one and so it's a good statement and the the problem is is that a large part of this is these are large historical forces namely specialization so you know if we get you know the 300 million people in america it's not that everybody's an idiot right it's that oh you're a lawyer and you know the law and you know nothing else, right? Or you are a teacher and you know your subject, you know history, you know whatever, right? Or if you go into academia and you talk to a bunch of scientists,

you'll find, oh, you know your subdiscipline of psychology, of biology, of chemistry, of whatever, and literally nothing else that is happening in science. So the problem is, is that what that happens is if you look at the founding fathers, they read really, really widely. And, you know, I was recently involved in an intellectual dispute with some libertarians, right? And so I went to libertarianism.org, which is run by the Cato Institute. What was the intellectual dispute regarding? So the big beef that I've been taking is with fundamentalists.

Across the board. Across the board. I don't really care what kind of fundamentalist you are. I have an issue with fundamentalism in general. And if you look at what you were just doing, Joe, is that you were able to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind, right? I think it's important, right? It's incredibly important. You were able to say there's a problem with people who oppose capitalism and there's a problem with

much of what corporations are doing. And then that's how you start to figure out reality is you're like, oh, fuck, there are these two opposing things. How do I reconcile them? And you have to go around, you have to think, you have to read, you have to talk to people, you have to do all that sort of stuff. Fundamentalists aren't burdened with that problem. read, you have to talk to people, you have to do all that sort of stuff. Fundamentalists aren't burdened with that problem. They have a much easier time because they know that they are the good guys. They know that there is one thing that is the answer to all of our problems and that there is one thing that is bad. And whatever that bad thing is, if we can just get rid of that bad thing, then all of our problems will be solved. And then they go about figuring out how to strip

away more and more and more of that bad thing, right? So you look at the obvious example is Islamic fundamentalism. They're like, it's the way of the Prophet. We just have to live the way of the Prophet Muhammad. And so then we have to strip out anything that interferes with that, like toothbrushes and kites and women's education. Women driving themselves around. Yeah, exactly. All these really problematic things, right? And it's not that the Prophet You know, women's education. Women driving themselves around. All these really problematic things, right? And, you know, it's not that the Prophet Muhammad didn't have a toothbrush. It was just a stick toothbrush.

And, you know, I'm not a dentist, but I think that an oral bee is better than a stick toothbrush. He had a stick? They had, like, sticks that were, like, bristled at the end or something. Like, they would break up the stick and then, you know, just get that stick in there. Really? Yeah. So you're supposed to use that today to this day? Well, if you listen to some imams, yeah.

Wow. If you want to go super, super deep. Yeah. Well, exactly. That's the point. And it's always about going super, super deep. But it's not the case with Christianity and all religions, right? There's people that are just, you know, kind of like casual Christians, just like there's people that are casual Muslims.

And then there's people that go whole hog. That's right. And think that the reckoning's there's people that go whole hog. That's right. And think that the reckoning's coming and Jesus is on his way. That's right. And you better pack your bags because you're going to need clothes in heaven. Like there's people that are packed, ready for Jesus to take them away. And those people give the rest of Christianity or the rest of Islam a bad name. But they also give us amazing movies like Left Behind and Left Behind 2. I don't know

if you've seen them, but they're Kirk Cameron's greatest work. They are an incredible work of comedy that he didn't know was comedy while he was making it. Dude, it's so bad. Have you seen it? Left Behind and Left Behind 2? It's so good. I bought it

on VHS. I saw it at Walmart and I snatched it up like a greedy child. I'm going to write this down. Left Behind and Left Behind 2? It's so good, I bought it on VHS. I saw it at Walmart, and I snatched it up like a greedy child. I'm going to write this down. Left Behind and Left Behind 2. I'm sure you can probably get it on iTunes or something. See if it's on iTunes or Netflix. Find out where people can watch it, because it's fucking unbelievably bad. It's on YouTube, Amazon Video, or Google Play.

Yes! And it was based on these cataclysmic books that were written by these Looney Tunes dudes. Is it one Looney Tunes dude or two Looney Tunes dudes that wrote the Left Behind series? These Christian guys. And by the way, they've sold like a hundred million copies of this fucking shit bag book. It's so dumb. But it's amazing. Yeah.

What's that? Two guys it's amazing. Yeah. What's that? Two guys. Two guys, yeah. But my favorite part. They took turns sucking each other off in between. I made that up. What? Gay Christians?

Don't get mad. Gay Christians? Don't get mad. Don't sue me. I'm sure your book's amazing. Your book's the best. I'll take it back. I'll take it back.

You know, I'm going to never forget some of Kirk Cameron's best work. On Growing Pains? His best work is avoiding dicks. Oh, is this it? Oh, wow. Yeah, it's amazing. But the cinematography, the fact that this was made in 2000 and that's the cinematography,

that's really impressive. He's adorably religious. Have you ever seen the one where Ray Comfort, who's his buddy in all these videos, describes how a banana is an atheist's worst nightmare? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. How wonderful is that? Is that amazing?

It's a wonderful video, and that's his right-hand man. He's like, God designed a banana for a very specific purpose. This banana's an atheist's worst nightmare. Like, what? Okay, well, what is a coconut then, you fuckhead? Coconuts are more nutritious than bananas. Guess what, cunt face? You really shouldn't even be eating bananas.

You should eat like one of them in a day. They're high in sugar. Okay? You really shouldn't be eating bananas, Ray. But wouldn't that be amazing if you managed to convince Christians that, like, you know, actually instead of the Eucharist, you should be eating bananas? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, there's some people that believe bananas are like super good. Well, they're potassium. There's something to them. But a coconut's better for you. And you got to break that fucking thing open. You got to get through that husk. Yeah. Like somebody had to figure out that husk.

Yeah. And then the hard part, you had to be so hungry, you're banging on a rock. And then luckily for you, there's meat and water inside. Like, whoa, what are the odds? Like you had to do a lot of work. I bet it was probably somebody whose loved one was killed by a falling coconut and got fucking pissed and smashed that coconut with a rock thinking that coconut had killed their mom. Or somebody who killed their mom with that fucking coconut. That too.

150 people die every year because coconuts fall on their head. What a way to go. 21 people in America are killed by armed toddlers every year. What would you rather go by, coconut or toddler? Coconut all day. I'll take God dropping a rock on my head all day to being shot by a one-year-old. That's really embarrassing. You get shot by a one-year-old.

You're like, what? I mean, I know you're retired, but why'd you leave a loaded gun in your purse, you crazy bitch? I know you get mom brain, but maybe you should fucking keep that gun on your hip. Yeah, they leave guns in purses and they leave the kids with the guns

and the kids pull it out. Oh, I seen that on TV. Bang. And they shoot mommy. 21 people a year. Think of that. That's not a good way to go. But in general, I mean seen that on TV. Bang. And they shoot mommy. 21 people a year. Think of that. That's not a good way to go. But in general, I mean, you know.

That's two a month. Yeah. Bang. One just probably happened right now. It's like there's a timer that's going off. Like, we're waiting. It's like the slowest national debt clock. Bang.

We should have an arm toddler app where you get a notification every time an armed toddler kills a person. Because it's 21 a year just in this country. Well, I think probably primarily in this country. Folks, get on that. I'll promote your app. Please send it to me. Tag me on Instagram.

Make that app. We'll promote it. The Arm Toddler app. That's a lot of fucking people, man. Toddlers shootings in 2015. Oh, only 13. It says they killed more. Oh, my God.

It says that 13 had inadvertently killed themselves. Oh, 13 kids had killed themselves with firearms. 13 more injured themselves. 10 injured other people. And two killed. Oh, 13 kids had killed themselves with firearms, 13 more injured themselves, 10 injured other people, and 2 killed Oh, so there's only 2? This is the statement I was looking up though. Toddlers killed more Americans than terrorists in 2015.

But how many did they kill? It says they only killed 2. 2 killed other people. 2 killed other people. Well, they were suicide bombers who killed themselves that's the point

okay so when you're saying that they killed 15 people 13 of those 15 were the baby themselves yeah oh well that's

not the same right that's not that but I've read where is this where are you getting this from this was on Snopes I just typed in

armed toddlers didn't we talk about snopes about the the guy married a hooker i think yeah yeah the guy who owned snopes left his wife married a hooker who had a website that's a active escort website with reviews you know like as recently as 2015 people review it so nothing wrong with being a hooker no that's cool but it's the oldest profession but when i think about a dude marrying a hooker no that's cool, but it's the oldest profession But when I think about a dude marrying a hooker I think about a dude who's off the rails

Well, I think about a dude in his 50s who marries an escort like oh he might there's a 50-50 chance That guy might be out of his fucking mind So like one of the criticisms of Snopes during this election was that it wasn't there was a pro-Hillary bias to some of the information that Snopes was reporting on. And apparently she had been involved in some sort of an anti-Bush, anti-Republican website in the past and, you know, leans left, the whole deal.

So Snopes might be a little wacky. Or not. Maybe beside all those things, they still stick to science. Well, and that's the thing. I mean, you know, wouldn't that be nice if people actually stuck

to the statistics, the facts, reality? I would way rather have someone who goes off and marries some crazy escort lady and they both do ecstasy every night, but when it comes down to the snopes work,

they do solid work. She's got some big old... Oh, wow. That's our big old... Husband and wife, now married. And that's the old... There you go. Happy couple.

Maybe they're having a good time. The guy's smiling. Who gives a shit if she got paid for sex? People are so goddamn prudish. That's when she was at her best. But presumably... At her peak. I mean, that's also the weird thing always with with like fundamentalists and like wanting to marry a virgin.

Like, don't you want somebody who has some experience? There's the old wife, though. Look at this one. She's mad, dude. Yeah. She mad. This should be like a meme. Just says she mad.

Yeah. Well, I guess. Yeah. Someone with experience for sure. You want someone who's worked out all the toothy blow jobs so that when they get to you, they know what they're doing. Right. And is there much of a difference between a woman who gets paid for each individual sexual encounter versus a woman who marries a guy for money, which is pretty much normal. Same thing.

It's kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. You just have one John for life. Yeah. Or at least until your looks run out. Yeah.

Until he casts you as a model. Yeah. Exactly. Until he upgrades you. Model number four. Yeah. Exactly. Those guys, like, that's the a model. Yeah, exactly. Until he upgrades you. Model number four. Yeah, exactly. Those guys, like, that's the Trump move, right?

You know, those super rich dudes. They keep getting baller and more baller wives. Like, the new one is like, God damn. Well, but at a certain point, like, that's the problem. He can't really, he can't replace Melania. Not while he's president. With a hotter one? Yeah.

Yes, he can. You think he can? Fuck yeah. Yeah, he's the king of the assholes. Think of how many people who have come out of the closet as assholes now. Yeah. You know? I mean, this is a rare time.

It's not just that he doesn't represent a lot of people that wanted to lean more right. He also represents a lot of men that are kind of dicks. Yeah. Right? Right? Yeah. I mean And they get excited about this. There's definitely more overt, asshole-ish behavior in the name of Trump. Yep. You know, like he's tapped into that vein, which I didn't really see.

I don't remember seeing that from any other candidate ever. Well, I think, you know, that frustration has been building a lot for a long time with those guys. They didn't get that representation until now. So if he kicked his wife out, if she said something stupid, if she said, I'm tired of his breath, then fuck him. And he kicks her to the curb. And I mean, people would be like, yeah, get rid of O'Donnell, get a new one. And it'd be like a gigantic nationwide woman hunt to find the perfect person who

just knows to do what she's told and just to obey the Donald and just to take care of him. As long as she doesn't look too much like Ivanka, right? She's got to look hot as fuck, for sure. I mean, he's the goddamn president of the United States. And his wife is hot as fuck. It's not like he's going to go down. No. He's not he's gonna go down. No, he's not gonna get a less He's only gonna go down in age. Yeah, cuz he keeps going up right he went with his first wife

Then went Marlowe maple maples. She's super hot and then this one is even more super hot. Yeah, this one's off the charts Well Eastern European women Yeah, what's that all about? Well, I think actually like a large part of it is I think also cultural, right? There's a certain like arrogance that Eastern European women have where there's sort of like, who are you? Like, are you good enough for me? There's a certain haughtiness, right? And a certain skepticism, like an unavailability emotionally.

Are you a racist? What are you saying? No, I'm speaking about- Such a generalist. No, but I'm speaking about culture. This is outrageous. Well, do you want to have outrageous conversations, Joe? I mean, you seem like a guy who likes them, right? I do. Yeah, I do. But yeah. Do you think that's because of the war? A lot of those Russian men died in the war. I mean, there was a mass culling of males, right? It's a much, much older phenomenon than the war, right? So

in terms of cultural evolution, the way that cultural evolution works is we all have certain mindsets, right? So every human has optimism and pessimism, right? But for example, we talked about Americans earlier, right? And how outsiders see Americans and Americans are, you know, historically massively optimistic. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came here, right, a French guy comes here, he's like, Americans are so optimistic. What is up with that? Right? That's what we kick ass on. Well, but it is.

I mean, honestly, like, because their optimism has certain benefits, which is that it makes you super productive, right, super happy. And these have always been a large part of what American success is about. super happy. And these have always been a large part of what American success is about. But optimism does have a problem, which is that optimism has a tendency to make you delusional, right? That's a problem. That's a problem. And so if you look at what is the most optimistic group of humans on the planet, it's actors in Los Angeles, right? Are they really the most optimistic you think? Well, I think the people who are to move to L.A. right. You have to really believe that out of all the people in the world that somehow you're going to make it right. So optimism is what attracts people out here.

But then what happens is that a lot of them end up sort of sitting in optimism. Right. They're always sitting there and being like, I'm going to get discovered. I'm going to get discovered. I'm going to win the lottery. Right. Essentially, it's that sort of mindset. And then they're just waiting for things to happen. They don't have an actual plan for going about it. That's obviously not true of all actors. Some people are like, man, okay, I'm out here now. If I'm going to make it, I need to hustle. I need to do things. I need to do all that sort of stuff. But there is that trajectory for actors who come out here hoping they're going to get discovered, you know, are waiting to be discovered for 40, 50 years.

And then like, oh, shit, I'm 70. And then they crash. And then, you know, they become the super depressed, cynical actors who sit around like, you know, being like, fuck the industry. The industry is the fucking worst. Oh, yeah. We've all met those. Exactly. Those people are rough to be around.

They are rough to be around. They just spit it out. It's all negative. It's like coming out of them like a sprinkler system. And that is where a lot of middle America is right now, because they've had this hope of the American dream, the American dream, the American dream, the American dream. And then there's those hopes have been crushed. Right. It hasn't delivered.

It hasn't panned out the way that it was supposed to. And so you're seeing a lot of pessimism, which is the opposite side. And pessimism has certain strengths. And the strengths of pessimism, it's that constructive paranoia we talked about that they practice in Papua New Guinea, which is that you're super alive to threats. But you're actually so alive to threats that you see threats that aren't even there, right? You're paranoid. Right. But the problem is that it also comes with substance abuse.

So you find that, you know, for example, what's happened in Middle America is there's a lot of substance abuse going on, all these opioid addictions, all that sort of stuff. Right. But don't you think that's a function of being exposed to those things as much as it's a function of the society that we live in? Those things are super dangerous to be exposed to. And because of these corporations that we were talking about that constantly want to up their bottom line, they're selling these things. Totally. They're pushing them on doctors. I mean, that could be as much of the cause of despair as a symptom of the issue. Well, of course.

Of course that's a factor. But at the same time, look at Russia. Russia is a place that is famous for substance abuse, right? 30.5% of Russians die from alcohol-related causes. And that's as compared to, say, 3% in America, right? So 10 times as many Russians are dying from alcohol-related causes, right? And they drink fucking anything, right? Like, they pioneer weird fucking drugs like Crocodile that are just, like, fucking gnarly.

Skin-rotting shit. Yeah, exactly.narly yeah exactly you see their exposed bones and they're they're periodically there's all this weird stuff that happens in russia where for example they'll drink like you know some weird detergent some glade plug-in or something like that because there's a tiny bit of alcohol in it right so there's a certain psychology that comes with that massive pessimism. And that massive pessimism evolved because of the context of Russian history. Right. So Russian history, if you ever want to truly be depressed, just read some Russian history. Right. That'll do it for you. And you find that like I mean, Russia has always been a meat grinder. Right. It just chews people up. It spits them out. And so the way that you survive in that environment is being massively paranoid. right? The winter will kill you, right? The leadership will kill you. There's all sorts

of things that will kill you. And so the Eastern European mindset tends towards this massive, massive pessimism. And the pessimism is useful in the same way that it is for the Papua New Guineans, where you're massively alive to possible threats. But it sets up these problems. And the problems that it sets up are substance abuse. And it also sets up the problem of sort of anticipating threats that aren't actually there. And just overall despair. Yep. And so what ends up happening is that there's then the problem that pessimists and optimists misunderstand each other, right? They don't get each other, right? The optimist is is like you're just fucking depressing and you know sort of see threats that aren't there and like your life sucks and the pessimist looks at

the optimist is like you're fucking delusional dude like you got to get real you got to understand how things really work so if you look at what happens in russian and american relations what happens is that you'll have two the same situation but interpreted in two totally different ways so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States made some sort of promise or some sort of intimation that it would not expand NATO any further east. And the Russians took that as, okay, you're not expanding NATO any further east, right? But in fact, what ended up happening is that the United States and the West and its sort of oblivious hopefulness is like, let's keep expanding NATO.

Right. They didn't take this comment very seriously. And they moved NATO all the way to Estonia, all the way to the Russian border. Now, the Russians sitting on their side interpret that as a violation of the promise. So sitting there is the pessimists that they are. They're tracking each of these moves. They're like, OK, you're moving another country over. You're moving another country over. You're moving another country over. We see what you're doing.

And that's a lot of what the tension that boiled up between Russia and America was about. Well, don't you think right now Russia's in the weirdest place ever with Putin? Because he's essentially a dictator. No, he is a dictator. And he's right out in front as a dictator. And all of the people that are opposing him, they wind up getting murdered. Like really publicly. Yep.

But that's because the dictators are godfathers. That's what they are. And you, you know. Godfather's household? Well, in the sense that. You mean in Russian culture? No, just dictators in general. Who is Gaddafi?

Who is Saddam Hussein? Who are any of these guys? They function as the godfather of their society. So there's basically, you know, what you've—there's—and I should clarify just so that people know where is this all coming from. This is all coming from books and interviewing academics. And if you are curious about anything, tweet me. Let me know. And if there's any comments that you're curious about, I'll direct you to the book, and you can go read it, and you can work your way up the science chain and figure it out.

Prepare for an onslaught of dick pics. Asked to be tweeted to. Here it comes. Exactly. Or dick pics. I don't know what I'll do with those, but, you know. Save them. Save them?

Never know when you want to send them back. Well, that's true. It's like re-gifting. So Russian civilization, where were we? So there's essentially, if you look at, if we talk about those hunter-gatherers, right, they have two big problems, right? And one big problem is band-level genocide. So what will happen is that periodically one tribe will just go and wipe the other fucking tribe out, right?

They'll kill them down to the last man. They'll kill the babies. They'll do all that sort of stuff. And this can happen super, super quickly. So Jared Diamond, when we had him on the podcast, he told this great story about, you know, there's these two tribes in Papua New Guinea. They've been living side by side for years and years and years, perfectly happily. They love each other. They get along.

They cooperate, all this sort of stuff. And then resources get scarce, right? There's some change in the environment. Suddenly there's not as much food around. And as people start to get hungry, one of the tribes goes off. And in the course of half an hour, they tell each other made up stories that get increasingly fantastic. And by the end of the half an hour, they have convinced themselves that the other tribe are vermin, that they need to be exterminated, that they are a scourge on the land, that they're not really human, and they go and wipe them the fuck out. And that is one of the dangerous potentials in human psychology is the fact that when resources get scarce, we identify some sort of threat in the environment, some sort of group of humans, and we go and we wipe them the fuck out. So if you look at, for example, what happened in Germany in 1933, right, there's the Great Depression, there's hyperinflation, there are all these problems. And, you know, that old psychology that hasn't changed in tens of thousands of years is still there. And so naturally, people start looking around for a scapegoat. And the anti-Semitism that is sort of already lingering in, you know, the German cultural environment,

you know, suddenly that becomes the target group. And Hitler, the political opportunist, comes along and says, oh, you can blame it on them. That's the source of all your problems. It's almost like there's a death mode locked in the human consciousness that when things get scarce and like, oh, you might die, we're now on death mode. That's right.

And death mode means you kill other people quickly. That's right. And you have to understand, I mean, this is the brutal reality of evolution is that in that hunter-gatherer context, that's fucking useful. It's really useful if resources get scarce to be the one who acts first, who wipes out the other tribe first. It's interesting that we even think that this is unusual or bizarre when we look at nature and when you look at all the different systems in nature that are set up, like how many times lions will kill cubs to make sure that those males don't grow up to dominate them. That's right. Especially cubs that aren't theirs. And that's, I mean, that's a big problem of sort of what's happening on college campuses is that there are a lot of unpleasant things in human psychology and unpleasant things in human nature. And, you know, for humanity, really the good

things come from being realistic. When we're realistic about how disease works, we get to control it. When we're realistic about how electrons work, we get to control them. Let me ask you this, because this is really important to this subject. This issue with Marxism spreading across universities. What do you think is the cause of that? Like, why is that so attractive to people? And why are people so confident to openly proclaim themselves as Marxist without understanding how ridiculous that is?

Well, it's, you know, so John Haidt, who, you know, is at NYU, he has what's called moral foundations theory. And essentially, it's that we have, we all have these sort of basic impulses of morality. So, for example, fairness, right? So, you know, you can watch little kids and they're like, are tracking fairness. What's fair? Who got more? Who got to play with the toy more and all that sort of stuff? That doesn't change, right?

But we have these notions of fairness play out in different ways as we're adults. But different political groups and different tribes favor these other notions of fairness more than some others. So take, for example, the issue of pro-life versus pro-choice, right? Okay, so you have, let's just, here's the question. Are liberals pro-life or are liberals pro-choice? They're more pro-choice. On the issue of abortion. Yes. Right?

So on abortion, it's about freedom. Right. Okay. Well, it's very much about women's rights. Yeah. Women's freedom. It's a big, it's not even thought of like as a human freedom because it's about the woman, not about the child.

That's right. So it's about the woman's freedom, right? So they've hooked up to that idea of freedom, right? Yes. And then, you know, conservatives are pro-life. This is about caring and protecting from harm and all that sort of stuff. Okay. Unless you're talking about war.

Unless you're talking about war. And that's exactly the point is that, you know, are all humans hypocrites or is it that we selectively use these same intuitions that we all have for different causes? So if you look at, for example, gun control, are liberals pro-choice or pro-life? They're definitely pro-life. Aha. So what you see is that on abortion, they're pro-choice and on gun control, they're pro-life. And when it comes the other way. Exactly.

Republicans are pro-choice when it comes to guns. So we all have these same intuitions, but we use them in different ways to justify our political arguments. Well, what's interesting too, is that there's two positions that are taking place in the American psyche, at least, that we're almost reluctantly agreeing to. And it's that the Republicans are, or the conservatives, are more realistic, more hardcore, ready to kick ass, ready to fight for what's right. Whereas the liberals are a bunch of whiny crybabies looking to give away their money and they're creating welfare babies. Well, that's certainly-

And they just, if it wasn't for the conservatives, these fucking people would be speaking German, living in Vietnam. Yeah, exactly. Right? Well, all tribes, the nature of tribes, you tell something that makes your tribe look like the good guys. Right. Right. So each tribe has, that's the conservative story.

And then the liberal story is like we're fighting racism and sexism. Did you see the Golden Globes? I did see the Golden Globes. Did you see the Meryl Streep speech? I did see the Meryl Streep speech. God bless her. God the Meryl Streep speech? I did see the Meryl Streep speech. God bless her. God bless Meryl. Well, she was talking about mixed martial arts.

People got so mad. And I was like, of course she doesn't watch cage fighting. She's talking out of her ass for sure. But to say that some people aren't artists, martial artists aren't artists, well, that's completely open to interpretation. What do you think is beautiful? You think that fucking stupid movie where you played that rock star? What was that one that nobody went to see?

Ricky, get your gun or whatever the fuck that is? Listen, that wasn't art. That wasn't art. And Anderson Silva front kick to the face is a thousand times more beautiful than that piece of shit movie you put out, lady. I'm sure she's a very nice person. She probably thinks that she's Standing up for what's right Get ready for Ricky

It's Ricky Flash get the fuck out of here Three people saw that movie and they're all related to her Nobody saw that movie Did you see that movie I was like what are they doing She's an 80 year old lady she's gonna be a rock star Ricky's coming back But it's also like such weird casting for her, too, because

she does these emotionally difficult Sophie's Choice movies, and then she's trying to do a poppy rock star movie. Well, she was interested in it. She's an amazing actress. She's an amazing artist in her realm. And I just think you could sort of say that

without disparaging what other people enjoy, including disparaging what a lot of women enjoy and foreigners. One of the things you were saying is that Hollywood's crawling with foreigners. If you take them out, all you have left is MMA and football and MMA, mixed martial arts, not the arts. But you wouldn't. That's not true because 80% of the fighters in the UFC are from other countries. They're from Ireland, like Conor McGregor. They're from Brazil, like Amanda Nunes.

I mean, this is an incredibly diverse lineup of people from all over the world. So for her to say that is like so silly. But I can understand saying that you don't think it's an art by your interpretation. I understand that. But the larger point is that humans are silly, right? Humans in general are silly, and we're not individually that smart. I think performance arts, like as far as dance, I mean, dance is clearly an art, right? If you watch Mikhail Baryshnikov, that's clearly art.

And I think in many ways competition in performance, like gymnastics, is also an art. We don't think of it as an art. We think of it as a sport. But when you look at the ability to execute these spectacular moves, yeah, maybe they're not doing it to a concerto, but it's still art. You know, like you see some amazing gymnast fly through the air and nail a landing. It's beautiful.

It's glorious. Well, that's art in competition, but it's not one-on-one competition. Now, art in one-on-one competition is Edson Barboza wheel-kicking Terry Edom. I know it doesn't look like art to some people, but to me it does. Well, and it's a technically extremely difficult move. Incredibly difficult to do. It's taken a lot of time to practice and get good at. So it's just the fact that when he does his beautiful pirouette, it just lands in someone's face.

Well, someone has to suffer. And because someone has to suffer, and perhaps sometimes both people have to suffer in terms of a very brutal fight. But if you look at Amanda Nunes' knockout of Ronda Rousey, if you're an Amanda Nunes fan, that is a beautiful

work of art. Because she didn't get any promotion for that fight. She was looked at like cannon fodder to go in there and fight Rousey. A lot of people were predicting a first round victory and she went out there and fucked her up in 48 seconds. That's art to some people. It might not be to her, but. Well, but also, I mean, this comes down to liberals, right? So in general, liberals massively over favor the notion of caring. That's like their big, big moral intuition, right? So they care about the environment, right?

They care about protecting children, toddlers from dangerous guns, right? They just sort of everything is interpreted through caring and wanting to protect. So understandably, when they look at an MMA fight, they're like, oh, that's bad because there's not caring and people are getting hurt. Right. They're getting their feelings hurt. And so when Jordan Peterson is on here and he's talking about how it's this very sort of maternal thing, it is a very maternal thing. is that what ends up happening is that when you have an echo chamber like college campuses, which are incredibly liberal with very few outside opinions, that that's the rabbit hole that they go down. They go down the caring rabbit hole. And when you go down the caring rabbit hole, you end up at Marxism. And when you're surrounded by people who essentially think like you, there's no one to sit you down and be like, that's fucking nuts. Let's talk about-

Why do you think though, that is, why do you think going down the caring rabbit hole leads you to Marxism? Well, because, you know, you don't want anyone's feelings to get hurt. You want everybody to have enough, you know, you want to share. And it's important to realize back to your point where you said, like, you know, if it was the three of us, communism might work, right? It comes back to the Dunbar number. If you actually look at hunter gatherer tribes, they're communists, right? They're really, really socialist. And what they do is, for example, they have these behaviors where, for example, they'll drag, if you go and kill a deer, we drag it into the middle of the village so everybody can see the deer. And then we divide

it up. And then you make sure that you give it to everybody else first and then you take the last piece and you take the smallest piece so it's you know what you do with birthday cake you're trying to show everybody like i'm being super sherry here isn't this great i'm not thinking about myself and at the level of a tribe you and i can track all of the interactions we can attract we can track the fact that you know oh you know uh fucking over there is not pulling his weight he's such a piece of shit and that's the point we go and we talk about um we talk shit about um and then we go and we go and we confront um and we say um you fucking piece of shit like we go out all hunting all day and then you sit around and you know uh there's always

going to be an um there is always going to be an unh. There is always going to be an unh. And if you have enough people, for sure you're going to have one. If you have a hundred people, there's going to be one unh. And that's just evolution. It's a strategy that works. My foot hurts. I can't hunt today. Oh, you fat sack of shit. You're always sitting. You come back. He's eating all the guava.

You ate all of it, you shithead. And there's unh. And then you have to plot to kill Ung. Well, or to get Ung to pull his weight. Fuck him. No, you just say kill him? Yeah, take him hunting. Yeah, take him hunting and have him have an accident?

Take him over the fucking cliff. Yeah, exactly. Look over there, dude. Look at that waterfall. Or get him to hang out with the toddler with a gun. Yeah. They don't have guns, though. That's not going to work.

Toddler with a bow and arrow? With a spear? Yeah. Good luck. The little kid's arms can't even stretch that far. It's not going to work. Toddler with a bow and arrow. With a spear. Good luck. Little kid's arms can't even stretch that far. It's not going to end now. You have zero worry about being shot by a bow and arrow from a toddler. Another reason why arrows are superior.

Yeah. So, but Marxism being like a communist ideology. Yeah. Marxism being that, you know, everyone should be more equal, sharing more. But as Jordan Peterson pointed out so eloquently on your podcast and on my podcast, that doesn't really work. It doesn't work at 7 billion people or 300 million people. It might work at 50. It works at 50 or 150 because that's what our brain can track.

Right. The problem is that I can't track all the ums. It works great without technology. It works great without access to people all over the world. It works great in a consolidated environment, a small, controlled, contained environment. But it doesn't work when essentially you're in an apartment building of 2,000 people and you don't want to fucking talk to anybody. Right. But what if people say, well, it should work and we can make it work.

It's just this old, outdated mindset that you fuckers grew up, you guys grew up way back in the day, before the influence of the internet, now we understand that Z is a very respectable pronoun, and we need to be using X-I-R, how do you say that, Xer? Xer.

I think so, I don't know. And there's 75 options, or whatever the fuck they are, you nutty cunts. Well, I mean, I think that— Oxford's making people use it. Well, Oxford has, again, also gone down the rabbit hole. But these, you know, colleges and academia are not going to go back out of the rabbit hole. They're going to keep going down the rabbit hole until the larger community holds them accountable.

So do you think that that's happening at all now? I mean, there was the president of Chicago University that said, hey, listen, there's not going to be any safe spaces this year. There's not going to be any trigger warnings. Just shut the fuck up and go to work and learn. This is the marketplace of ideas. That's right. Express yourself.

Get your ideas challenged. Debate these ideas. Let's find out what's right rather than what's safe. Well, and I think a large part of how you do that faster, I mean, firstly, people are already doing it. There's the guy at Chicago, there's Jordan Peterson, you know, the larger community is having a conversation about this. But the faster way to do this is science, right? You confront people with science, and then you force people to either, are you either accepting reality or are you denying reality? And if you're denying reality, then you got a real problem because now you look like a fool.

Well, when you talk about science, you run into a real issue when it comes to gender. Yep. Gender and science, like gender as is discussed on campuses today, things get real weird. It gets real sort of loose and open to interpretation. And even though you're biologically a male, you can identify as a woman. And the correct way to treat you is to treat you as a woman. So we're gone. We're outside the realm of science now.

We're into the world of social constructs and read-upon behavior. But the science exists. It's just in journals. And it hasn't been brought and made accessible to these children. And there are ways to do it very simply. So, for example, do you know the story of David Reimer? No. hospital the surgeon decides to use an electrocautery needle to circumcise him and basically there's a huge botch up and he manages to yeah he manages to chop off most of his dick right and so the parents are like okay can't put that back on what do we do and so um they end up going to the world's leading specialist in the 1960s or whatever it was, 50s, 60s, on gender identity and all this stuff, which is this guy, Dr. Money.

And they go and see Dr. Money. Jesus Christ, his name is Dr. Money. Right? Cuts dicks off. And Dr. Money convinces them to castrate their penisless son and to raise him as a girl. And so they have to go and, know take their son in and you know david who is now going to be raised as brenda um is you know dr money is showing pictures of naked men to brenda and saying like this is what girls like and all this sort of stuff

and you know uh is forcing him to wear women's clothing, and they're going to do hormone therapy, and all this sort of stuff. Now, Dr. Money is, meanwhile, publishing papers that is saying, oh, this is a tremendous success, it's amazing, like, gender is all a construct, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, perfectly adjusting to life as a girl, all this stuff, and the plan is that, you know, they're going to do surgery, and give him a vagina, and all, all this stuff. And the plan is that they're going to do surgery and give him a vagina and all this sort of stuff. Now, meanwhile, what is Brenda doing?

Brenda's hitting things with sticks. Brenda has no interest in playing with her sewing machine except for the one time that she takes a screwdriver and picks it apart to figure out how it works. And doesn't want to hang out with girls, only wants to hang out with boys, only wants to play with with boys, only wants to play with her brother's toys, you know, so all these sorts of things.

And at some point, you know, when the kid is like 13, 14, the jig is up. They figure out that they better tell Brenda the truth. And Brenda finds out the truth and proceeds to essentially, you know, have a mastectomy to remove her breasts, switches to male hormones and, you know, instantly a mastectomy to remove her breasts, switches to male hormones, and, you know, instantly goes to living as a boy. Now, what happens is that, you know, Brenda, now David, grows up, marries a woman, and, you know, has a relationship, but unsurprisingly has a whole bunch of psychological issues and ultimately goes into a supermarket uh parking lot and blows his brains out

now the point is is that i think that if you really want to talk about gender you should force anybody who wants to deny gender to talk about david reimer you make david reimer a household name and we're all going to talk about what lessons can we learn from the tragedy of david reimer and if you get for example know, how many listeners do you have at this point? A lot. Reimer a household name, we're going to make sure that the tragedy of David Reimer is something that everybody knows about and learns about, and that everybody's tweeting and talking about David Reimer, then suddenly it becomes very hard for anybody to say that gender is purely a construct. There may be spectrums and there may be like, you know, weird in-between areas, but the

reality is that a lot of gender is genetic, and the science is there, and you're not going to get a bunch of social justice warriors to read science because most people don't actually read science, but you will get them to engage with the story of David slash Brenda Reimer. Well, there's most certainly is a spectrum, but there's also a high percentage of people that operate in a very specific area of that spectrum. And you're going to get some kids that are convinced that they are boys. That's right. But guess what? Some of those kids grow up and they change their mind as they get older. And that's something that really disturbs the shit out of me when I see nine

year olds that are on hormones. And I'm like, this seems crazy. Like if this kid really thinks he's a girl, let him think he's a girl like as is like, why are you adding hormones to the mix? Why are you, why are you suggesting surgery when he turns 15 or whatever the fuck the age is? This seems like something that should be worked out by a grown adult with a fully developed frontal cortex. That's right. It doesn't seem. And also the influence of the parents to change how this kid. If you have a kid and you have a daughter and your daughter just wants to cut all her hair off and climb trees and like, let her do that.

Yeah. Like if she wants to be a boy, let her think she's a boy and work it all out one day. That's right. But to work it all out and to encourage that behavior or to say, we're going to bring you to a transgender specialist right away and they're going to prescribe this and that. Like how many of these people are going to be like Brenda Reimer's original doctor? What was the male name? Was the male name you used? David Reimer.

David Reimer's original doctor who were proclaiming it was such a success, and it's horseshit. In general, reality denial leads to tragedy. So what we have to be engaged with is what is reality? And it's not that I sit here and have read literally all of the science. I can't. Like, it's far too vast a project. And science isn't supposed to be an individual project. It's supposed to be a collective project where we're all trying to really figure out what is this bitch known as reality that has evaded us for millions of years, right?

Or tens, hundreds of thousands of years. And, you know, the point is that if you want to talk about, like, gender, for example, let's talk about people who are intersex. There are some people who are born and it's not, you know, their genitalia at birth aren't clearly male or female. And what they now do, you know, the medical community is that you basically find out what are they genetically. Are they XY or are they XX? And then you raise them as that. But you don't do hormones and you don't do surgery precisely because you're going to let them decide, right? And if you are, I mean, you know, how much better, okay, so why is the surgeon

using an electrocautery needle to do circumcision? Who the fuck knows, right? Like it's a dumb choice by a surgeon. But imagine if they'd said, okay, that fuck up happened. We can't unfuck that up. But we're not going to now make it worse by chopping off his balls. Well, this was what year? This is in the 60s, 50s, 60s. The amount of data they had back then was so limited. Yeah.

And we've now got a lot more data. And, you know, David Brenda Reimer is not an isolated incident. There have been other incidents like that. And, you know, David Brenda Reimer is not an isolated incident. There have been other incidents like that. And, you know, they vary. Like, it's not that everything turns out like David Brenda Reimer, right? But if you really care about children and you really care about people, which is the sort of the big liberal value, then, you know, the Hippocratic Oath, the whole point of being a doctor is their first responsibility is do no harm. Right. You're not supposed to make things worse. Right. If you can make things better without, you know, really possibly making things worse, then that's great.

And so, again, again, we don't let children vote. We don't let children drive. Why would we let them make such a huge decision at such a young age? And I think whatever the decision ends up being, you know, people are going to make their own individual decisions, so be it. But you want to make sure that the decision is an informed decision. There's also there's forbidden territory when it comes to gender and gender identity as far as like what you are allowed to debate or not allowed to debate. There's a lot of forbidden territory. Yeah. And it becomes pretty obvious that the origin of that forbidden behavior, forbidden thinking is that people that are transgender or gay or marginalized in any way have been discriminated against and treated poorly. in any way have been discriminated against and treated poorly.

And we recognize that. So we automatically stop any critical thinking when it comes to those people. Like, they can't be crazy. They must be, you know, it's just a transgender issue. It couldn't be that they're crazy and transgender. Well, that's never discussed. It can't be he's gay and stupid as fuck. No, no, no, no, no.

Gay people are wonderful. Yeah. They're all amazing Yeah, because they've all been discriminated against right and the point is you don't I mean, you know human beings are human beings And so for example when we had Jordan Peterson on one of the questions that I asked him Which I think is a super important question is Jordan's a psychologist, right? And I asked him okay, so let's imagine you had a patient who came here and said, you know I want to be called by one of the 70 pronouns, right? What as your patient would you then do? And he said, well, if you came to me and said to me that you were Jesus Christ, I would have to, as a responsible

doctor, first decide that it was in my best interest to call you Jesus Christ. So I have to figure out really what is that about, and is it going to serve your outcome to be able to do that? And again, you know, there's unaccountability for any human, whether it's a celebrity or a sports star or a rapper or a gay person or a transgender person or a politician or a scientist is bad. Like humans need accountability. Like that's just the reality. Otherwise we go fucking nut balls. So if for any reason a human is denied accountability to other humans, you've got a problem, right? Yeah, you're doing them a disservice by thinking that you are in somehow or another helping them. Or, you know, like that stupid article earlier today that we were talking about, about these people showing up at the racism conference and then the white people being forced to check their privilege.

Like, you're ruining the whole thing with this kind of short-sighted, shitty thinking. Do you want to really go down the rabbit hole? I would love to. Let's do it. Let's do it. So do you know Thomas Sowell? I know that name. Why do I know that name?

Thomas Sowell is a big, famous conservative. He's at Stanford. He's at the Hoover Institute, I think. Anyway, so, you know, within this, I mean, first, just to set all this up, we should set up briefly, how does culture work, right? And the way culture works is that it, like genetic evolution, it works based on blind copying. So what ends up happening is that you are in awe of people, right? You look up to people. And so you blindly copy the things they do. And specifically, you start by blindly copying from the outside, and then you work in. So the first thing you do is you see someone and you're like,

oh, that person's fucking amazing, that rock star, that sports star, whatever. And you start dressing like them, you start walking like them, and all of that sort of stuff. Now, in a hunter gatherer context, that would be, you know of stuff now in a hunter-gatherer context that would be you know somebody who is a hunter or is a gatherer and you're like man you know she finds all the best guavas how does she do that and then un-fucking-eats them right yeah um and so you know you would you would like hang out with her you'd sort of like shimmy up to her you'd be seeing what she'd be doing and she she's like, oh, okay, she looks for a very particular color of guava. She, you know, squeezes them in a certain way. And over time, you learn what she's doing. And then ultimately, you even learn how

she's thinking. But in a large scale society like ours, I don't meet Michael Jordan, right? Michael Jordan just becomes this sort of distant person that I idolize. And so advertisers have figured out how to hijack these mechanisms. And they know if you put a burger next to Michael Jordan's face, that I'm like, oh, I want to be like Michael Jordan. So I'm going to eat a Big Mac, right? And little children are dumb. And so they blindly copy that or, oh, I want to be like James Dean. He has a cigarette in his mouth. I want to blindly copy that. And we don't understand that the burger or the cigarette is not actually the key to being as successful or as cool as or as good at basketball as Michael Jordan or James Dean. Right. We don't understand that that's where that comes from.

So we have this tendency to blindly copy anything we can. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And in a mass society, we never work our way in. We never learn the mastery. Right? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And in a mass society, we never work our way in. We never learn the mastery, right? We just sort of remain at this sort of very superficial level. So what that means is that... Where did this all start?

It's a good question. Yeah. Where were you going with this? Well, we were starting at... Culture, how culture works? Oh, yeah, how culture works. Oh, okay. So now we're going to talk about black people. Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. So Thomas Sowell is a black guy, right? And Thomas Sowell has for years and years and years been trying to fight racism. But he's been trying to fight racism by having a conversation about culture, right? And the fact that there are essentially two different sort of, you know,

we're speaking broadly here, right? But this is for the purposes of communication. We're going to tell a simple story to start off with, right? So broadly speaking, he puts two different cultures of people with dark skin next to each other. And one culture is these people from the West Indies. And one culture is this group of people who grew up in the South with slavery and all that sort of stuff. Now, one group, the West Indies group, does really well. So a lot of the successful Black people, people like Colin Powell, are originally from that cultural heritage. The other group is the group that you find in ghettos and African American communities and all that sort of stuff. They don't do well, right? They don't get good education. They, you know, shoot each other. There are all these sorts of things. And the reason why Sowell has been telling this story is because he's been trying

to say, you know, when liberals look at the people in ghettos, they say, ah, racism, that's why they're not succeeding. And Sowell is saying, no, it's not. Because if you look at this group from the West Indies, they also came from the experience of slavery. There was slavery in the West Indies. They are also black, so they also face racism, and yet they do well. So it has to be something else. And that other thing is the fact that these black people who are in the South, there's always been a big question, were black people robbed of their culture or did they preserve their authentic African culture? And what Sowell is saying is that they were robbed of their culture. And so they picked up the culture of the people around them and the people around them were rednecks.

And if you look at the white redneck culture and the black redneck culture, they have a lot of the same values. They don't particularly respect education. They love Jesus. They use violence in their conflicts. And they, you know, there's just, you know, a lot of the same values and a lot of the same outcomes. And even Ebonics, which is, you know, black English, is actually all from the west of England.

So it's actually this... What? It's from the west of England. So it's actually this. What? It's from the west of England. So, for example, if you go to places like Cornwall, there used to be this amazing, these amazing ads on British TV, right, for this Devon custard or whatever. And they would always say, Devon knows how they make it so creamy. And they all talk like this, right? And so it doesn't sound like Black English.

But they do say things like, I be doing that, and we be doing this, and you be doing that, and they be doing that. And so there's that use of that copula be, right? Where instead of saying, I am, you are, he is, she is, they are, they just say, I be, you be, we be, they be, which is the classic feature of Black English, African American vernacular English. Right. Now, right now the point is is that mind blower mind blower now let's imagine that how do you think that thomas sewell has been received by liberal america not well not well not well and so for example sewell has a book called black rednecks white liberals okay and his whole point is that, you know, if you actually, and you know, again, like Sowell is, you know, he researches the shit out of this stuff. He really does his work.

Now, if you, if you look at the experience of African Americans after slavery, after slavery, they do really, they, they start to make real progress, right? And a large part of the reason why they make progress is because you start to get a lot of people from New England, either black people from New England or white people from New England, who come down and sort of reshape the culture. They create these schools, and they're teaching those New England values, right? It's those Puritan values of hard work, tenacity, all of that sort of stuff. And so there's all this progress. And you have people like Booker T. Washington. And Booker T. Washington was an actual slave. And then after he got his freedom, he got to go work

in a salt mine, which is literally the worst job ever. And in Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, he tells this great story about seeing a schoolhouse, right? And that, you know, he thought that going into a schoolhouse was about as close to heaven on earth as you could get. Like, this is a dude who wanted an education really, really badly. And that's a lot of what you find in the, you know, early black experience in, you know, the post-slavery period. And in fact, you know, blacks, you know, before sort of World War II actually had higher rates of marriage than whites.

All of these sorts of things that, you know, are now supposedly a problem. And then there's this turnaround, right? The black experience starts to go south. Right. It starts to get worse. And what year is this around? This is post World War Two. Right. So post slavery, black people experience a rebounding. They're starting to make some progress. There's ambition. And I mean, you know, if in terms of books to read, like, you know, just because a large, you know, a large part of what I'm trying to do in general is really let's move to the place of all people are created equal. Like, let's remove all these stupid distinctions. Right. And really live that principle. And the problem is, is that in order to really live that principle, you need a new narrative that beats slavery. In order to really live that principle, you need a new narrative that beats slavery. So, you know, it's not if you go and talk to racists, you can't just say racism is bad.

Like that doesn't destroy racism. Right. Right. What destroys racism is when you make sense of the things that they know. Right. They see, you know, people who are violent in the ghettos or they see crime or they see a lack of education or they see that Africa is poor. crime or they see a lack of education or they see that Africa is poor and you're able to tell a better story that makes sense of the things that they know, but also comes out with the conclusion, oh, we actually all have the same potential. Right. But if you have this issue with people imitating their atmosphere and imitating their environment and this Southern style talk with the Southern redneck influence on the African-American slaves, former slaves. How do you stop that? And how do you turn that around?

Well, in general, for humanity, I mean, this is sort of a big problem for humanity in general, is that there's not a culture alive today that is well-suited to the world that we're living in. And that's because, you know, culture is adapted to environment in the same way as any evolutionary thing, right? So for example, you know, if you look at, like, let's talk about these hunter-gatherers, right? The Yanomamo or something like that. So there's a great story in The Lost City of Z where, you know, Percy Fawcett, who was an explorer, comes across, you know, all these tribes in the Amazon. And one of the examples that the author gives in there is David Grand. He talks about how, you know, there's this group of tribesmen in the Amazon, and what they'll do is there's this special leaf, and they go and they squeeze

this leaf, right? They crush it up, and this milky substance runs into the water. And then all of a sudden, the fish float up to the surface upside down, right? They've been anesthetized by this whatever substance in the leaf. And this little boy goes into the river, and he plucks out all the fattest fish. And then as the milky cloud dissipates, the other fish swim away. Right? Impressive as fuck. Like, how the fuck do these tribesmen who don't have science, don't have any of these things, figure this thing out? And it's cultural evolution. That's what happens is that that's the nature of evolution. That's the nature of markets, because markets are an evolutionary process. You know, intelligent answers and intelligent solutions can emerge from just sort of competing forces. And so all of these cultures are well

adapted to a particular environment. So if you know, if you like, we talked about American culture, and we talked about Russian culture, Russian culture selects for pessimism, American culture, because you had to move all the way across the ocean, right? If you've got villages in Italy, you know, Vietnam, whatever it is, who is the person in that village who says, I'm going to go across the ocean to a country I know nothing about and, you know, make a fortune, right? It's the most optimistic individual. And so it's basically a magnet for all the most optimistic individuals in the world. The analogy I always use is, do you ever see American Tail?

The like old animated movie from like the, must be the 90s or whatever? Probably. I don't think I saw that. Well, it's about a group of animated it's animated yeah um who made it i don't know um trying to remember um it's not disney that's it no i don't think i saw that oh steven spielberg well anyway it's it's sort of about the it's about the immigrant experience more generally and then specifically sort of about the Russian Jewish experience. And it's about this family, the Mouskovitzes.

And right there on that trunk, there's Fievel Mouskovitz. And Fievel Mouskovitz, you know, in the first part, they're in Russia and they're all being persecuted by cats. Right. Because they're mice. And Fievel Mauskiewicz sings a song with all of the other Mauskiewicz's called There Are No Cats in America. Right. Which is so much of what the American immigrant experience is about. Right. You're like, oh, it's all going to be perfect. Land of opportunity. The streets are paved with gold, except in an American tale. The streets are paved with gold, except in an American tale, the streets are paved with cheese. American T-A-L-E or T-A-I-L. T-A-I-L. Yeah, T-A-I-L.

Yeah, tail, like rat tail. Right, exactly. Okay, mouse tail. So these different environments, right, just as you have different environments, for different different, you know, beaks or wings or, you know, whatever it is, select for different mindsets, different ways of thinking, different cultural traits. Right. And what ends up happening is that we become well adapted to a particular environment. So what happens to the point of the lost city of Z is what happened to all of these European explorers who went into the Amazon? to all of these european explorers who went into the amazon well a lot of them fucking died and that's because they're doing things that are well suited to england like walking around in wool suits and eating cans of chipped beef but suddenly when you're in the 100 degree heat of the amazon and there's all these animals you don't understand and you don't know how to use the plants that you

squeeze and have the anesthetic in them and all that sort of stuff you can't survive right and what they called in velocity of z all the explorers they called it the amazon a counterfeit paradise it looked like a paradise it was so lush it was so tropical but they were like there's nothing to fucking eat except clearly there was because amazonian people had been living there for tens of thousands of years. The Westerners didn't have the cultural software that was well-suited to surviving in that environment. So how does this translate into African Americans? So what is the environment that created that Southern redneck culture? And the environment, it turns out, is herding, right?

So raising sheep, raising goats, and all that sort of stuff. Because most of the people who are in the South originally came from the Scots-Irish. And when you look at herding cultures around the world, they all have certain traits in common, right? So if you're a herder, you have a big, big problem. And that big, big problem is property rights. So if you're a farmer, there are clear boundaries on my land. Now, there are ways you can try and fuck me. You can try and move the boundary stones on my land slowly into your field over, over, over, over. But, you know, what we usually have is we have some sort of government. There's a local town official that we go to, and he is responsible for policing the boundaries. And so towns would do things where, you know, you would essentially all get together and we go

walk the boundary stones and we make sure that none of those boundary stones had moved. So the intuition of people from the north, Puritans, people like that, is if we have a problem, we go to the government and we resolve it through the government. Right. In the environment of herding, you can come over and you can steal my sheep and you can mix the sheep in with your flock. And I have no way to prove which my which sheep steal my sheep and you can mix the sheep in with your flock and I have no way to prove which my which sheep are my sheep so we evolve things like branding right where I have a brand I put it on my sheep and all that sort of stuff but there's another strategy that is used that evolved before branding and that earlier strategy is being a crazy motherfucker you establish a reputation as the kind of guy that you don't fuck with. You come on my land, I kill you.

You touch my sheep or my women, I fucking kill you. And I use such an aggressive level of violence that you know that there is no point in fucking with, I mean, this is not plausible because I'm saying it, but let's imagine a much tougher person. Conor McGregor, for example, is a great example. You don't fuck with Conor McGregor, right? He has a reputation as just being a badass motherfucker who will fuck you up, right? Right. So that's how you keep people off your land. That's right.

And if you look at, let's look at a couple of herder cultures. So herder cultures include the Scots-Irish, who are the rednecks. Herder cultures include the Mongolians, right? The Mongols, notoriously a very gentle, peace-loving people, right? And they include the Bedouins, who are the Arabs, right, who had camels and all that sort of stuff. And you'll notice that there is that same use of violence. And mostly they fight amongst themselves. There's this inter-clan warfare.

But periodically a charismatic figure emerges who unites the clans. So Genghis Khan manages to unite the Mongols. And then what do the Mongols proceed to do? They proceed to go use that aggressive use of violence. They have those horses which allow them to move quickly, right? And they're really effective. And they go and they fuck everybody up, right? Because, you know, the gentle farmers of China aren't prepared for that.

And the gentle farmers of Persia aren't prepared for that. What happens with the Arabs? The Arabs are mostly fighting amongst themselves. But then along comes this charismatic figure with a new belief system that unites them, Muhammad. And he unites them. And suddenly they fuck everybody up. And they create this great empire, the caliphate, right, that spreads all across Central Asia and the Middle East and all across North Africa. Right.

And in many ways, that is what Donald Trump is. They've been you know, the rednecks have been fighting amongst themselves for a long time. And then Donald Trump, the Genghis Khan of America, the Mohammed of America has succeeded in uniting the clans. And you know, in our time, you don't do it by going out and like raping and pillaging. You go and you seize the ballot box and you vote and, you know, you really like take back power. And so that's what they've done. But there are if you look, there are certain problems that occur across these herder cultures. So if you're, you know, as a friend of mine who you're saying, essentially saying that the South is that the reason why Donald Trump has been elected is because of the South, because of the herder culture. Well, and it's also – so if you've read Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's book, it's excellent, right? But he's really talking about this hillbilly culture. And so it's not just the South, right? So what happened is, is that –

It's rednecks. It's rednecks, which is – or, you know, whatever – or hillbillies or whatever you want to call them. Simple folk. Well, it's not even simple folk. It's just acks, which is, or, you know, whatever, or hillbillies or whatever you want to call them. Simple folk. Well, it's not even simple folk. It's just a particular culture and they have certain values. And I just, it's also worth clarifying because of the way that I sound and where I come from and the fact that I went to Harvard. Vitamins. Yeah, and vitamin.

And that I'm not a part of that tribe that, you know, Americans owe a tremendous debt to the hillbilly culture. And that tremendous debt is that overwhelmingly they are the people who have served in the military. And they are overwhelmingly the people who have fought our wars and bled and died and all that sort of stuff. And that's not a stuff that, you know, I may sound like a liberal, but I don't really sit in either of those cultures, right? I can critique the liberal culture, and I can critique the hillbilly culture, right? And, you know, white liberals, the whole reason why I started this thing off is because white liberals have their own weird things that are dysfunctional and that aren't helping black people and all that stuff. If you just wore a bow tie, people would think you were conservative. That's all you have to do.

Well, then there you go. Or maybe have a detachable bow tie. A bolo tie, 100%. Actually, I would like to do that. Like, I like the Texan culture. You're a rancher. Yeah, I'd be a rancher. You have a little piece of jade right there.

You mean pull a George W. Bush, be from Connecticut, but dress like a cowboy? He was from Maine. Yeah, exactly. Even more crazy. Maine is, I mean, Kennebunkport. That's where they're from. That is the whitest of white fucking northern people ever. A lot of it French folks.

Maine is filled with French folks. Maniacs. Yeah. Also, originally, more your neck of the woods, right? Yes. Yeah, Boston. I did a lot of gigs in Maine. Yeah.

Maine's a fascinating place because it's entirely abandoned. Yeah. There's a couple of cities, and you have to drive vast distances in between them. When you go from Portland to Bangor, there's this 50-plus mile stretch where there's nothing on the road. It's a two-lane highway, and there ain't shit on that road. No gas, no nothing. If you don't have gas, you're fucked. You run out of gas.

Did you ever hear there's a friend of mine, her dad's from Maine, and he has all these great Maine-isms, and one of them is, oh, you gotta go up past Sawyer's Barn. And past Sawyer's Barn is any place that is far away. Oh. Which is, I think, fucking amazing.

Wow. So that's sort of like the version of the Islamic 72 virgins. Yeah. Right? Like 72 virgins just means a shitload. Shitload of virgins. Yeah. It doesn't really mean the number 72.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you're saying you have a passel of virgins yeah it doesn't really mean the number 72 yeah yeah well you know it's you're saying you have a passel of virgins like there's a good chunk of virgins right so we get back to this um african-american culture so how does it how does it correct itself so what ends up happening yeah what you have to do is is that you just have to have a much larger conversation about culture and you have to talk about how culture works you have to say it's not your fault right because the point is is that you you know, we imitate our atmosphere. And the reality is, is that, you know, these cultures are very old. That herder culture is the same one. And

that's the big irony is, is that you're not saying that it's about black people. It's about rednecks, whether they're white rednecks or black rednecks. And so that herder culture has just inexorably tied itself into the African-American culture without the African-Americans even knowing that it happened. Exactly, which is the nature of culture. And it's also it's only tied itself into this very specific subset of Africa, of black culture. Which is why the people in the West Indies have a completely different. Oh, wow. in the West Indies have a completely different... Oh, wow. And if you talk to people who are literally Africans

who immigrated to America, like from Ethiopia or Kenya or anything like that, you know, if you ever get an Ethiopian cab driver... Oh, they're so hardworking. Yeah. Talk to them about how they feel about that sort of ghetto black culture, those black rednecks.

They fucking hate it. They fucking hate it. And the point is, is because, A, it gives them a bad name, right? You know, people see a black person and they're like, oh, you're like probably this, this, this, this, this. Because again, human stereotype because of the Dunbar number, because we can only track 150 people. And so we have to make up stories about-

Categorize them. Yeah, we have to. Oh, you fit into this redneck spot. That's right. Oh, you have a Dukes of Hazzard t-shirt on. That's right. There you are. Yep.

And we do that. And you know, that's the point. The listeners are going to be sitting here and they're going to be trying to categorize me and all of this sort of stuff. And, you know, part of what you're dealing with is you start talking about gender or anything like that. And the social justice warriors try and put you into some bucket and you're like, no, I don't belong in that bucket. You're constantly trying to say I'm not in that bucket. So you can imagine if you're Ethiopian, right, and you've moved here and you really sort of believe in the American dream, the land of opportunity, and we work

hard and we all do this sort of stuff, and you keep getting put in that bucket with all this sort of rap culture or anything like that, you're going to be annoyed at those people. Like if you're a Sikh and people want to beat your ass because the Muslims bombed, you know, 9-11. It's not even near the same part of

the world, you fuckheads. Nope. Totally different headgear. Exactly. But to the person on the outside trying to categorize. That's right. They're trying to make sense of it. And that's the point is that when you start to have a conversation that is about culture, then you start to realize that race doesn't actually matter. And what you'll find is, so let's take a look at, for example, Asians, right? Asians do very well in school. They're very productive and all that sort of stuff, except for the Hmong, right? So there's a group of people called the Hmong, and they're the big Asian exception. And, you know, they do- Big time hunters. And, you know, they do big time hunters, big time hunters.

You know, there's a lot of violence, not a lot of education. Right. They don't sort of fall into that sort of, you know, stereotype of becoming engineers and doctors. Where are they from? What part of the world? They're like Cambodia, Vietnam, like what used to be called Indochina. And they don't have their own country. No, no. And they don't have their own country. They just can't get enough of the straight line. And so they were just like, and you know, like that, the straight line works in middle America because you've already wiped out all the tribes. Right. Right.

But it doesn't work so well in Africa where there are still tribes or Southeast Asia where you suddenly start like drawing a line right between two tribal groups or across a tribal group. And suddenly now shit's all fucked up. And they're, what they're trying to do when they're having all these civil wars is they're trying to unfuck the boundaries. straight lines are annoying yeah they are you know it's really hilarious when you get busted for transporting something across straight lines like am i allowed to drive around with this or not like what what's the fucking law like if you have pot

in particular i mean you cross a state line you go from being someone who is innocent 100% to someone who's guilty 100% of a felony. Yeah. It's so bizarre. I mean, on one side, states' rights are an amazing idea for testing ideas out. Sure. You know, like testing out with Colorado and legal marijuana, again. That's right. It worked out. It worked out great. And people went, look, this is working. It's profitable. It helps everybody. Let's go.

Yeah. And then it sold the idea to other people. That's right. And then there's other places like Open Carry. And you're like, uh, hey, are you sure? Are you sure? Concealed carry? Okay.

You could just have a gun on you everywhere you go. You go to the movie theater. Okay. But where are the places where that's true? The South. Yeah. where you go you have the movie theater okay but where are the places where that's true south yeah and that's because it's again it comes down to the what this is being driven by it's being driven by old cultural baggage that doesn't necessarily make sense so the guy who so there's really in terms of honor cultures there are four books right that i think that if you want to go into this like don't get angry at me just just read the four books, right? What are those books? Those books are Black, Rednecks, White Liberals, Thomas Sowell's books, A Culture of Honor,

which is Richard Nisbet's book, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and then a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. And those four books, essentially, if you read those four books and you're still saying that what I'm saying is unsubstantiated, you know, well, then we should talk about it. Well, aren't there a lot of liberals that are up in arms when you propose these things? Of course. Especially when you start bringing up the herder culture. No, what about the patriarchy? Yeah.

What about white racism? Exactly. You know, you can't be racist towards white people. That's one of my favorite things that people are saying today. What, that you can't be racist to white people? Yeah. There's a lot of favorite things to say. People are saying a lot of weird and wacky shit. But that's one of my favorite things that people are saying today what you can't be racist to white people Yeah, there's a lot of favorite things to say people are saying a lot of weird and wacky shit That's one of the wackiest like of course you can yeah like that's

Racism only works when someone has power well when you're racist to someone you have power over period I get cultural power like what presumed across the board Yeah, like black and white like real real simple, yes or no, binary, one or a zero. Is that what we're doing? Is that people? Of course not. No, of course not. Of course not. Of course you could be racist. You could judge someone prejudicely. Well, and in fact, that is the key thing with Richard Nisbet's book, The Culture of Honor. So Nisbet was a professor in the 90s at the height of political correctness, and he wanted to study culture. And the problem was that he's a white man from the South, and he knew that if you studied any culture, you would

have to say bad things about it. So what does Richard Nisbet do? He says, oh, I know one culture that I can say bad things about on a college campus. I can say bad things about Southern culture. That's a culture I can criticize freely. And so what he did, and, you know, this, I think, gets really down to what are the strengths of, you know, sort of broadly Northern and Southern culture. Right. And, you know, Kennedy, John F. Kennedy had this great line about Washington, D.C. He said that it was a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. That's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, the potential for America is to be a country of southern charm and northern efficiency. But we're kind of got it backwards right now.

Right. But so what what Nisbet is doing is, is that he's charming the liberals. Right. Which is what southerners do. He's like, I'm going to study culture, but I'm going to study white Southern culture, and I'm going to show how bad it is, right? And so they're like, okay, that feels safe and comfortable, right? And that's essentially how he works his way into the conversation. And specifically, what he knew is he knew that Southern culture had this very particular problem. And this very particular problem was that it had higher rates of homicide in very specific categories. So it had higher rates of, you know, basically killings around trespassing and then killings around, you know, lover's triangles. And so, for example, until 1970, if you found your wife in bed with another man in Texas, you could shoot him and it was justifiable homicide until 1970.

Is it really only 70? I thought it was really recent. Well, I mean, that's my recollection. I think that might still be a law. Isn't there like a crime of passion law in Texas? I feel like there is for some reason. Well, they may have just moved the name or something. I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong. But I know that people have been exonerated because of crimes of passion. Because of? Like you're allowed to get pissed off and shoot people. Yep. Here it goes. Crime of passion, legal definition. There's sometimes called the law of Texas since injuries in that state are supposedly lenient to cuckolded lovers.

I love that expression. Who wreak their own vengeance or wreck their own vengeance. The benefit of eliminating premeditation is to lessen the provable homicide to manslaughter with no death penalty and limited prison terms. So that's crimes of passion. So it's not legal, but it's a much lesser crime. Well, I think until 70, it was actually just straight up justifiable homicide. So it was like straight up legal. Crime of passion. And now it's like a homicide. It's a manslaughter or whatever.

Now you go to jail for six months. Yeah. But when you get out, everybody knows what the fuck is up. It's basically stay off my property. Exactly. God damn it. It's that same psychology that plays out. And so Nisbet, and by contrast in the North, there are a lot of what are called, there are more 7-11 murders, which are basically murders or instrumental murders, which is where people kill people trying to get cash.

They're trying to get rich. So there are these different, there's homicide in both places, but there are different types of homicides that predominate. And Nisbet, essentially, you know, the big thing was to figure out why is that true, right? And the answer is that it's this culture of honor that comes out of hurting. And so the irony is that Southerners, who very often are the ones who feel most strongly about how problematic Muslims are, have the same culture. And they engage in honor killings and they do all these sorts of things. But they don't do it to the same extent. No, because in general, America is much less violent place, right?

But if it was more violent, then they would be forced to adapt to the new culture. That's right. Which is Mad Max style. That's right. And what would happen to all the liberals? Ah! Right. And when your resources are extremely limited, like you live in a fucking desert, you're

forced to become even more vicious about your protecting your boundaries and your property and your resources. Yep. Fuck. Fuck. So again, how do we straighten out the African American problem with crime and violence and terrible atmospheres that they have to imitate. Well, that's the point is that the thing that allows people to move past their cultural baggage is understanding their cultural baggage.

So it's that answer of why it's storytelling. I did this in this environment because it made sense. We are no longer in that environment. Now it is problematic to me. Therefore, it screws me up. So now I should behave in this way. And then you can start to retrain what your impulses are. So, you know, somebody bumps you, you know, somebody comes on your land

and your first impulse is not to go grab your shotgun and kill them, right? And you don't worry so much of what it comes down to, because it's crucially like their honor killings, right? So those cultures are obsessed with honor. And for particular, what you hear with African-Americans is don't diss me. Don't disrespect me. Right. So there's a real policing of one's honor and really making sure that nobody is fucking with me.

And it's the same thing with, you know, white rednecks, white southerners. Right. Southern pride. That's right. Texas pride. Don't mess with Texas. Yeah. Nobody says Delaware pride.

Well, that's because if you've been to Delaware, there's... Maine pride. There's just Maine pride. All the dudes love Maine. Those fucking poor fucks. Yeah, they do. Trapped up there in a frozen wasteland. With blueberries and lobster.

And Stephen King. And Stephen King, yeah. God bless him. Yeah. He's up there for the summer. Summer. And winter's in Florida. Yeah, yeah. God bless him. He's up there for the summer. Summer. And winter's in Florida. Yeah, he's a snowbird.

It's in many ways bad to not talk about this, right? That is correct. People that have the issue with even discussing the origins of certain types of behavior and comparing different types of black people and different types of African Americans trying to figure out, or African former slaves, like why did the people in the West Indies behave differently than the people in America?

And, you know, it opens up this weird can of worms where people are not willing to discuss it openly. It becomes taboo. And that is why Sowell called his book Black Redneck White Liberals, because the problem is that because white liberals are not willing to discuss these things, what ends up happening is that you get African pride. Right. And, you know, as Sowell points out, right, when was pride ever a good thing? Right.

Pride is the feeling of that, you know, it all that you have nothing to learn. Right. It's that feeling of arrogance. I just happen to be from motherfucking america exactly you wouldn't know about all that living your daydream time in fucking england when you're a little shit you lived here 18 in england right yeah it's a problem it is a problem there's just can't be trusted that's a lot of cultural baggage yeah exactly they got you what the what would the we know the siberian candidate what's the is there Manchurian candidate type shit. Yeah, exactly. They got you. We know the Siberian candidate.

Is there a Siberian candidate? Well, people are saying Donald Trump is the Siberian candidate because Putin installed him. Yeah, what do you think about this whole situation with Russia today? Because it seems like that poor country doesn't know how to fucking get rid of that one guy who's their main dude, as much as Garry Kasparov talks about him. Look at that hair. That is wonderful. What the hell is going on there?

Intel chiefs present Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him. Whoa. Around this afternoon, like breaking news sort of thing. I don't know how breaking it is. Russian efforts to compromise him. They're playing to his ego. Wow. Look at his eyebrows.

Did you read the thing by- Hold on a second. Scroll back up to his ego. Wow. Look at his eyebrows. Did you read the thing by... He's like a... But hold on a second. Scroll back up to that picture. Tell me that's not a Dr. Seuss character. That's the mayor of Whoville. That is the fucking mayor of Whoville. I mean, the whole thing is just...

What's happening here? What is all that? Wow. So they're presenting him. I wonder what he's going to do about all that? Wow. So they're presenting him. I wonder what he's going to do about all that, including allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump. Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN. Hmm. The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to report on Russian intelligence in the 2016 election.

The allegations came in part from memos compiled by former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed. This is a weird time, man. It is a very weird time. So fucking, so crazy to think that we're in a Cold War again. How did we duck that forever? Through the whole Clinton administration, that was a non-issue.

Through the entire Bush administration, non-issue. Through the entire Obama administration, non-fucking-issue until 2012-ish. And then you start hearing about it again. Well, a large part of what's happened is that our environment has changed, but our culture has not. So if you look at in the 1950s, right, if you're talking about the marketplace of ideas, you had these guys like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and they had a thing called

journalistic integrity, right? What about Brian Williams? And Brian fucking Williams, right? Yeah, that guy. He's just as good as any of them. Tell you what, that guy can tell a good story. Yeah, exactly. But journalistic integrity is now gone.

Don Lemon? Don Lemon, yes. Step back. Yeah, exactly. Respect Lemon. Step back and respect him. He's had to check people. I don't know if you know.

No? He's had to check people. Jesus. That was one of my favorite things that he ever said on TV. Someone was talking about something. It was something about, I don't remember what it was. What was it when Don Lemon was saying he had to check people? I've had to check some people in my life.

It was like people talking sexist or something like that. He was just telling people he had to check people. I've had to check some people in my life. It was like people talking sexist or something like that. And he was just telling people he had to check people in his life. Shut the fuck up, Don Lemon. You're not checking anybody. Anybody you check tells you to shut your mouth. What's so funny? Part of, I guess, something in this report that just came out, which is also going around now. I'll let you go ahead and read this.

Report Trump allegedly hired prostitutes for a golden shower party on Ritz Moscow bed where Obama Michelle slept. This is right out of the report. This highlighted part. There were aspects of Trump's engagement with Russian authorities, one of which had borne fruit to them was exploit Trump's

personal obsessions with sexual perversion in order to obtain sustainable compromising material on him. According to Source D, whereas he had been present, Trump's perverted in brackets conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, whom he hated, in parentheses, had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia and defiling

the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform golden showers, urination show, in front of him. Hmm. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to. Holy shit. They just go to the Ritz-Carlton and they set up microphones and cameras? Oh, yeah. That's the Russian way.

But the Ritz-Carlton? Oh, yeah. That's crazy. But that's the nature. I mean, you know. So if you jerk off at the Ritz-Carlton, what do you put a blanket over? Where do you... Where's the fucking camera?

You'd have to put a blanket over everything because there are going to be a lot of cameras in that room. My friend Mike, Mike Swick, who's a former UFC fighter, worked in Russia with the American Secret Service a long time ago. And he said that they found these listening devices hidden inside buildings that were powered by the movement of the building during the wind. Like, what? Yeah. They have their own, their power source is literally the building moving in the wind. He said it was so far beyond anything that they had ever figured out, that the Americans had figured out at the time. And they were just all about surveillance.

Well, that was the things that the Soviet Union did well, right? Yeah. There were a few things that the Soviet Union really put their attention on, like space and surveillance and espionage and all that sort of stuff, and the military. And they did those very well. That sounds like horseshit to me. That sounds like something somebody would say if you're trying to make- Well, it is from BuzzFeed.

But it sounds like something someone would say, but the quote is not, though, right? No, where's the quote from? The quote is from... The story was from BuzzFeed, but that's just the actual report is where that was from. That report that they were talking about in the previous article we brought up. Oh, so it's from the Intel. Oh, shit. Not the CIA, but...

I'll show you the thing here. This is the report here. It's like a Intel. Oh, shit. Not the CIA, but Australia. This is the report here. It's like a- Company intelligence report. Yeah, it's a long report. U.S. presidential. Hold on. Sorry. Go back up there.

U.S. presidential election. Republican candidate Donald Trump's activity in Russia and compromising relationship with the Kremlin. Wow. It's just long pages in this paper right here. So now we have to talk about golden showers, apparently. But here's the thing. We know.

Okay, we know. We've always known that intelligence agencies will distribute propaganda. We know that. That's 100% factual. But that's the problem, and that's the problem in general, is that you know that the CIA engages in that sort of behavior. Of course. You know that the FSB, the Russian Security Service, engages in that behavior.

Of course. Who do you trust? Who do you trust? And that's the basic problem of 2017, 2016. 100%. Who the fuck do you trust? So you got to know that if someone from any agency is telling you something, and what would it serve them to tell you 100% the truth without any manipulation whatsoever in order to gain favor, in order to gain influence, in order to gain—

Would the CIA have any motivation to be 100% accurate about it? Why? Well, I mean, you know, the CIA—obviously obviously Donald Trump is not clearly a friend to the CIA, right? He's already made it clear that he has issues with the intelligence community. Boy, it sounds so crazy because he's not even in there yet. Nope. And he hasn't been briefed by them and he's been rejecting that. And, I mean, that's the point. We live in, you know, the old Chinese curse.

We live in, you know, the old Chinese curse. We live in interesting times. I'll tell you one thing, though. If it comes out that there was a bunch of girls that he hired to piss all over the bed, people are going to cheer him in the streets. Well, some people will. There's the people that loved him in the first place. Yeah. There's going to be a ton of them. They're going to be like, who cares? The guy had a good time. Yep.

And that's because, again, it's clan. You know, it is that culture of authority and grouping around and being loyal and all that sort of stuff. Of course. And those those are the big sort of conservative, you know, hillbilly redneck intuitions. Right. As opposed to liberals are like, let's care for everybody. Like, that's amazing. Let's not hurt anyone's feelings and let's have trophies for participation and all that sort of stuff. And so for a long time, you know, the liberals have had a lot of power over the media and politics and all that sort of stuff. And so that's the rabbit hole that the country went down. And now, you know, the conservatives have sort of, you know, gotten pissed off and, you know, have, you know, it's sort of like, I mean, in the ideal situation,

the Republicans and the Democrats work like mommy and daddy. Right. And, you know, it's not that mommy and daddy have it all figured out. But if mommy and daddy have a productive working relationship, then the then the sort of like take personal responsibility, you know, man up, like do all these sorts of things is counteracted by a certain understanding, compassion, all that sort of stuff and then the parenting that emerges is better than what they would either of them would do on their own or they can both get dysfunctional as fuck and mommy becomes an enabling you know snowflake machine right and you know and daddy just becomes an abusive asshole who won't pay child support and just berates his children and is like what the fuck is wrong with you grow the fuck up come on pussy come on pussy and so that's that's really where america is is mommy and daddy are fighting and you know and fundamentally like mommy and daddy are having the most dysfunctional relationship possible and russia's our crazy neighbor who's like what a great opportunity to come in and fuck mommy right wow russia's trying to fuck mom i can't believe

this makes sense but it's also it's good for Putin, because what does the godfather want? The godfather, the so I think it's important to understand, like, the disaster of American foreign policy. What is that about? Right. And it's because modern Americans have grown up in, you know, essentially the most successful, most productive, most stable country in history. Right. And so, you know, if you're, you know, essentially the most successful, most productive, most stable country in history, right? And so, you know, if you're, you know, as many generations into democracy as you are, there's not a real understanding of how you get to democracy, right? We just sort of inherited democracy. And we're like, I don't know how you make one. And then you get these ridiculous fables that Americans have about themselves, where they think that essentially, you know,

King George III was this awful, vicious dictator. And then we kick the dictator out and then democracy. And so that's all you have to do is you have to go in and you have to remove dictators. And if we just keep removing dictators, then democracy will emerge. Well, what happens when you remove Saddam Hussein? Vacuum. Yeah. Fills up with? ISIS. Isn't that delicious, right? Or, you know, you remove Gaddafi, right? What happens?

Vacuum. Yeah. And then what happens? ISIS. Al-Qaeda, all these sorts of things. So the big question that, you know, that has always been in political science and that Francis Fukuyama frames is that it's always been, why is it that the American Revolution succeeded and the French Revolution descended into bloody violence? And the answer is,

is that they were actually at two different stages of development. Incorrect. The answer is America is the shit and French are a bunch of pussies and they couldn't pull it off. Exactly. That is correct. That is correct.

That's how freedom fries. Have some freedom fries and kick back and relax. Yeah. So that's actually the answer. And I'm sorry I take back everything that I said earlier. But it is the blaming of, you know, not necessarily blaming, but understanding the root of the behavior as being cultural and that we have these ideologies that we become imprisoned to, these patterns of behavior that we become imprisoned to, and that we're all subject to it. Anyone with an accent understands that this is where it comes from, that we imitate behavior

that is around us. And if we're in around an area, like're talking about the Middle East with poor resources and scarcity and a lot of violence, this is the type of behavior that we're going to we're going to control our women, dress them up, cover them up like beekeepers. We've got to keep them keep away from the other swinging dicks. That's right. Fucking assholes are going to come over the hill with those swords and the horses. That's right. Because that's what's been going on forever. Exactly. I mean, if you look at Iraq, one of the craziest stories about Iraq was Iraq with Baghdad being invaded by the Mongols and then killing everybody and running the streets red with blood and black with ink and the rivers would fucking be filled with the philosophy and all the writings from all these Islamic theorists and all these different scholars who were far ahead of that aspect of the world or the rest of that part of the world at the time.

That's right. I mean, so much mathematics, so much philosophy, so much knowledge came from that part of the world. It was totally lost when they were invaded. And so much of it is that there's an old quote that floats around, which is that if Nobel Prizes had been given out in the year 1000, they all would have gone to Arabs. Yeah, amazing, isn't it? They were at the forefront. And the point is that tells you something, which is that success is not a permanent condition.

Cultures can gain it and cultures can lose it. And you better figure out what is it that makes a culture successful so you can preserve those values, fight for those values, instill them, spread them, all that sort of stuff. And that's why Putin is jockeying for power because he believes that there's a turnover going on right now. And they just hired a fucking reality star to run the biggest nuclear arsenal the world has ever known. Holy shit, this might be the time. Yep. And the instability that has been created is that, you know, you gave everyone a microphone.

That's what the internet is, right? Right. Like, we're literally sitting here, right? And, you know, you can start a show, and if people resonate with the show, great. And the point is that there are some people like you who can hold two contradictory ideas in their head, right? And you can, like, wrestle with that. And you're like, man, how do I make sense of both of these things? That, you know, capitalism is, you know,

fundamentally generates wealth and prosperity and all that sort of stuff. But corporations can do fucked up things, right? How do I reconcile those two different things? And then there's a whole bunch of people out there on the internet who are fundamentalists or who offer some sort of very, very simple narrative that is very easy for people to get. And people can go and go down the rabbit hole of their prejudices. They can go down the rabbit hole of caring and compassion, and they end up at Marxism, right? Or people can go down the libertarian rabbit hole of freedom. And so they come up with this idea called anarcho-capitalism. And anarcho-capitalism is the idea that we're just going to remove all government, and then the free market will solve all problems. So there's literally going to be minimal or no government.

They're the most annoying people. They're incredibly annoying. Anarchists, to me, are the most annoying people. You don't know that that's going to follow the shit. You don't know that people aren't going to fix the streets. Where's the money for education coming from? Who's going to hire cops? Anybody?

No laws at all? No laws at all? Shut the fuck up. Well, but what I love particularly- God, that's so stupid. Well, I got in a big fight over the Christmas holidays with a group of anarcho-capitalists, and it was literally because one of them, there were two things. We interviewed, there's this guy Peter Schiff, and Peter Schiff is a libertarian.

Yeah, I've had him on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, so I interviewed Peter Schiff, and Peter Schiff is a libertarian. Yeah, I've had him on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, so I interviewed Peter Schiff, and we, you know, part of the experience of doing this podcast with Brian Callen is, you know, we interviewed all these academics, right? Two hundred and, you know, six of them, right? And then at episode 206, there were two things that we sort of noticed. A, there were all these amazing ideas. B, you would find that any academic knew about his amazing idea and nobody else's like they didn't know about anything else

that was going on in science or anything like that sort of like meryl streep doesn't understand mma exactly um so it's the meryl streep effect right that's that's what academics are like and it again it actually comes out of sort of what the Western cultural bias is, which is towards this thing called atomism. Right. Like scientists are super focused on a tiny, tiny question. They don't look for the bigger picture. And we reach this frustration where essentially we were like these ideas. You can't you know, there's an old George Bernard Shaw joke about economists. He said all the economists late end to end would never reach a conclusion. And it's the same thing with academics. All the academics laid end to end would never reach a conclusion. All this science that piles up, all this sort of stuff, what does

it mean? Like, what should we do? How should we live our lives? How do we solve the problems of people in the ghettos? How do we solve the problems of the people in the Middle East? How do we make liberals have some sort of perspective? Like, how do we do these things? And that's, you know, science should turn into practical things. And in some areas it does, right? So, you know, there's a good sort of, you know, there's physics has this adjacent profession, engineering, right? And engineers go and they look at the laws of physics and they figure out how to engineer quantum computers and all this other stuff, right? But when you talk about the human sciences, the adjacent profession that's supposed to be there is storytelling. So there's what's called the science to narrative

chain, where you're supposed to take science, all of this research, and supposed to turn it into simple stories that people can understand and get. And there is, in fact, just to give you a sense of this problem, like everybody knows that scientists aren't the best communicators, right? Like the ones that are, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? You get on this show because you're like, man, a fucking scientist who can communicate like a human, right? Or Carl Sagan or, but you know, these people are fucking unicorns, right? They're very, very rare in the scientific community. So I had my very specific experience was i i when i graduated from college i started tutoring just to pay my bills but i was really trying to figure out i had this weird experience where i would be working with kids and i would hear them say things like oh i didn't get the math gene

and i was like what the fuck is that math gene because i was a biochemistry major so i'm like wait a minute like you're 13 and failing biology and you're telling me that you have a math gene and I just majored in biochemistry and we don't know about any math gene over there. So what the fuck are you talking about? Someone's telling them that. Somehow they're picking that up. And they're getting this idea. That's right. Limited potential.

That's right. Now, so that was a detective hunt that I went on. I was like, because there's a lot of these things. I don't have a natural ear for languages. Right. That's another big one we heard. And, you know, oh, I'm not a natural writer and all these sorts of things. And I was like, what are all these fucking beliefs? Right. And I could tell that they were they were problematic and that they were self-defeating. And specifically, you know, having moved between all of these these cultures i'd seen that different cultures have very different ideas about intelligence so especially if you like my mother and my father

side by side on the issue of learning languages my dad is dutch okay now when you're dutch you grow up with one great certainty in life which is that no one will ever fucking learn dutch like literally no one is ever going to fucking learn Dutch. So if you want to get a job and you want to be competitive, you better learn literally everybody else's fucking language. So, you know, it's routine in Holland to speak three, four languages. And, you know, my dad spoke 10, right? He studied 10 different languages in his life. That's crazy. Well, and it's actually there are anybody who comes from a lot of these minority languages, sort of smaller, shittier languages. You find they do this. So Poles routinely learn a lot of languages.

People from Southeast Asia routinely learn a lot of languages. And again, it's that environment. Like you lost the language lottery. And so you better make up for it. Like you're just going to have to do that. And at a certain point when you've learned three or four languages, it's now like, oh, you've like sussed this thing out. You're like, oh, I get how this works. Like this is just about work. And there are certain techniques and certain approaches, you start to get really, really good at it. So, you know, I really sort of from my dad picked up this love of learning languages. And my dad is, you know, sort of especially into languages, like, every time they he didn't really like school. And every time they would tell him he had to take another subject, he would look up another language to take.

So for example, he ended up taking Swedish, because in the 60s and 70s, all the pornos were made in Swedish. And he wanted to know what they were saying between sexual thrusts, right? Oh, that's hilarious. So he learned Swedish, he learns all these fucking weird languages, right?

Because they were like, okay, you need me to take another class. I'm going to do something that I enjoy. Right? Like pretty normal. Makes sense. But then on the other hand, my mom's from Kansas. And in Kansas, they don't speak foreign languages. Like that's not the thing that's done.

And so there would be this experience of like, you know, I took Japanese in high school. And I would be like, oh, yeah, I'm taking Japanese. And they'd go like, what the fuck? Like, who are you? And you've taken Latin and ancient Greek. And they're like, that's fucking weird. And, you know, so you're moving between these two different environments and you're like, I feel like the issue here is that you just think about languages in different ways. Like, I don't know that it's that you have different potential. You just have different attitudes to it. Right. So hearing all these kids say all these bizarre things. And, you know, at the time I was doing a tutoring company with a friend of mine from college who

is from New England. And, you know, the New England is that Puritan culture, right? It's, you know, all self-denial, no fun, work hard, all that sort of stuff so she also heard all these weird and wacky beliefs and she was like you know reacted in the most puritan way possible which is like you're just being fucking lazy like fucking like do your fucking work no excuses right it's that boston attitude that is a so prevalent attitude and so you know you've got this bostonian and then you've got this half dutch half american you know lived with the lime, you know, you've got this Bostonian and then you've got this half-Dutch, half-American, you know, lived with the Limeys, you know, all this sort of stuff, right?

And we're like, we're the outsiders. It's that experience that you talked about of foreigners who come to America or anybody and we're like, this culture of LA is fucking weird. Now, what brought you here? Well, I always wanted to move to the West Coast.

So, you know, I watched Triggered last night, and I agree with you that California is the best place on Earth. But particularly because, I mean, you know, I mean, it is the part of what I found, like a lot of what I was reacting against, right? You leave places because there's like something you don't like, and then you go to the most opposite place you can find. And so I didn't like the culture of England. I didn't like aristocracy. I didn't like that whole class system. I fucking hated it. And then when I went to Boston and New York, I felt like there was still a lot of that sort of hierarchy. And I think that L.A. is the place where it's like nobody gives a fuck where you come from. Like there isn't that hierarchy. you know, all of that sort of stuff doesn't matter. It's the wild West.

And I love that. It definitely is in a lot of ways. I mean, to me, I think it's the last place that people, we know they landed on the East coast. They made their way to the West coast. They said,

well, I don't want to live in Hawaii. So this is where we'll stay. And that's literally, and the people that did move to Hawaii, that's why. I mean, I,

I fucking love Hawaii. And one of the things I love about it is the expats, the people that go, you know what, man, fuck it. Yeah. Fuck it. I'm just out here now. Yep. And that's the culture that I always wanted to be a part of was the culture that it's like, who the fuck cares? Like, we're done with that shit. But Hawaii is too much, right? Well, you know, I mean, I probably should have gone to Hawaii. It seems like it's hard. Well, it seems like now it's more viable than ever before. Yeah. Because the internet, you know, I mean, I probably should have gone to Hawaii. It seems like it's hard. Well, it seems like now it's more viable than ever before. Yeah. Because the Internet, you know, it's just pretty much access evenly to everything other than like what's immediately in your area.

But also, I think also it's important to talk about like how do humans actually work. Right. And it's often that, you know, I mean, so a large part of what comes out of the science is that thinking and feeling are always linked. Right. And so we're often driven by feelings that we can't quite explain. So, you know, the why was I also motivated by L.A.? I think there was some attraction to the entertainment industry, comedy, storytelling. I don't really, you know, like if you're being really honest, like why the fuck do you make any decision that you make when you're 22 23 right right like you're just who knows there's and there's some sort of cultural baggage that's driving you there they watch they watch like exactly but you have some

sort of fantasy version it is the fievel mouskovitz effect where you're like you know you you think there are no cats in los angeles and the streets are paved with cheese and then you get out here and you're like there are fucking Scientologists everywhere. Yeah, man. Well, dude, that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about before we get... I wanted to talk to you about, you're calling Richard Dawkins a Scientologist. Yeah. So you've now gotten a taste of some of the things that are going on across science.

Right. Right? There's lots of really exciting stuff that can actually change and improve and help people's lives. But one of the things that I think that you pointed out that's incredibly critical is that in order to be at the top of your field, you must be completely absorbed in that particular subject. And oftentimes, a lot like all the other systems that we find limited resources and you really don't have the time or the energy or even the inclination to study all these other comparable systems or different disciplines or it's like i mean there's many many many many examples of that but singular focus is what usually leads to greatness and when you're reading about some professor's peer-reviewed work that's incredibly groundbreaking,

oftentimes you're dealing with a form of greatness, and that requires massive tunnel vision. Well, that's the interesting thing. So we should talk about what tunnel vision is, right? So there's, you know, just as we have optimism and pessimism, there are these other two mindsets, atomism and holism, right? And atomism is seeing the tree, right? You, like, ignore the fucking forest and you're just like, I'm going to look at that one fucking tree and become the world's expert in that. And then there's holism, which is seeing the big picture, seeing the forest, seeing all that sort of stuff. Now, again, everybody has these mindsets, but different cultures favor them differently, again, because of the environmental pressures of that environment. So the Greeks massively favored atomism.

And if you look at the behavior of the Greeks, right, the ancient Greeks, they were constantly picking everything apart, right, because they were pirates. They were pirates and traders and fishermen. And in that environment, it's not about cooperation or anything like that. It's about everybody just trying to get ahead for themselves and all that sort of stuff. Very individualistic, all of that stuff. And so when they would have leisure time, what were the things they did? Well, they would go and they would go into the marketplace and they would argue with each other and pick apart each other's arguments. And they would just pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. And that's what logic is and rhetoric and all that sort of stuff um and then they would also you know when they had other

leisure time they would go and see who could throw shit furthest right like who could run fastest it's all about standing out it's all about trying to excel and be the best and what happened is is that you know the during the renaissance the they say that that again. Renaissance or Renaissance. No one in America says it like that. Renaissance. So what is the American way? I want to fit in, Joe. Renaissance.

Renaissance. Renaissance. Renaissance. Yeah, like Paris. Or like the Renaissance Fair. It's not Paris. It's Paris. Paris.

France. Say France. France. Not France. France. France. Well, I just have France. Not France. France. France. Well, I just have to really channel my inner Kansas. Sorry, the Renaissance.

Well, whatever you want to fucking call it. The rebirth. The rebirth, right? They basically were obsessed with the Greeks. The Romans were obsessed with the Greeks. And then when the rebirth, the Renaissance happened, they were obsessed with the Romans and the Greeks. And so they became obsessed with this culture. And that's how you start to get this culture of individualism that develops. The founding fathers were obsessed with that. And so that becomes a

lot of the spirit of the West, right? Is this real atomistic culture? Meanwhile, over in Asia, right, they have different incentives, which is rice farming and so what happens is that rice farming is you know you have to be super cooperative because the water runs down the mountain it runs through my paddy field but then it runs through your neighbor's paddy field and all that sort of stuff so i have to have relations with my neighbor and that neighbor and then i have to think about how it affects the next guy and the next guy and the next guy and the next guy so they favor holism how does everything fit? And so if you look at what is Eastern culture about, what are those ancient Asian cultures about, it's all about yin and yang, things fitting together

and complementing it all being part of a larger system. And Confucianism was all about the family and relationships and everybody has their proper role and you all sort of have to belong and all of that sort of stuff. Right. So which set of biases do you think that science has baked into its culture? Atomism. Yeah. And so what when you get the structure of scientific culture as it stands today, it's super atomistic. Right. Now, if you look at things like economics and psychology and, you know, biology and all of these sorts of things, they're all studying the natural world. And in fact, there's a whole bunch of disciplines that are all studying humans and how they behave and all that sort of stuff. And yet they're all broken up into separate disciplines. And now they're sort of

doubling down on those intuitions. And they're now breaking up those disciplines into sub-disciplines and smaller disciplines and smaller disciplines. And left to their own devices, they'll just keep splitting up and getting smaller and smaller. And where does feminism fit in all this? Well, what happens is that as you get smaller and smaller and smaller disciplines, it doesn't necessarily make the science better. It can make the science worse. And the reason why it makes the science worse, the easiest way to understand it is the story of the blind men and the elephant, right? So this is an old story from India about religion. So a group of blind men come along and they decide to figure out the elephant. So what this thing is, right?

They don't know it's an elephant. So the first one comes up and he feels the tail and he feels the end of it and he feels the little hairs at the end he says it's a rope right and the second one goes along and he feels the trunk and it rides in his hands and he jumps back startled and he's like it's a snake right and the third one feels a leg he thinks it's a column the fourth one feels the side he thinks it's a wall and then the fifth one feels the ear and decides that it's a palm leaf. And then they all proceed to beat the shit out of each other because clearly everybody else is a fucking idiot and they need to die because they know that it's a rope, it's a snake, it's a leg, it's a wall, it's a column, whatever it is, right? Now, if you look at something like feminism, right, feminism is making certain claims about biology, right? It's making claims about how male gender works, how female gender works. You know, they should be looking at things

like genetics, and they should be looking at, you know, chromosomes, and they should be looking at evolution to see how evolution might have selected for differences in men and women, because there are different competing pressures for men and women. And in fact, if you go into, you know, actual science, you'll find that there's actually lots of science about that. But what's happened is that feminism has become its own tribe, right? And as a tribe, it rejects the findings of other tribes, right? So if I go into, you know, the circles of feminism or sociology or, you know, any other tribe, and I start talking about the evidence of some other tribe, they're like, oh, that doesn't count, right? It's easy to rationalize it away.

And so now we're no longer grounded in reality. And what we can do is we can take that tail and we can convince ourselves that it's a rope, right? Because we're not accountable to all of these other fields that's surrounding it. Does that make sense? Yes. So if you want to solve the problem, what you have to do is that you have to make each discipline accountable to all the other disciplines. You have to make people responsive to evidence outside of their field. So if you take someone like Richard Dawkins, right? Has Richard Dawkins gone down his particular rabbit hole of figuring out, you know, his tiny piece of the world? Yes, he has done that. And what makes you think that?

Well, I can tell you. So in general, what you're going to find is that there's, in a lot of different fields, you're going to find that there are two competing theories right now. So for example, if you look in economics, there's this idea, you know, there's sort of what are called classical economics. And they have this idea called rational agent theory. And they basically think it's a reasonable approximation to assume that people are rational, right, that they act as rational individuals and all this sort of stuff. And then meanwhile, there's another school called behavioral economics. And because of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who were these two Israeli psychologists in the

1970s, who started to study human rationality, and, you know, I'm sure this will come as a huge surprise, but what they found is that humans aren't that rational, right? And so there was a group of economists who say, hey, our whole discipline is based on this idea of rational agent theory. But when we look at psychology, that assumption doesn't check out and it leads to a whole bunch of bad conclusions. So they formed a new school of economics called behavioral economics, which is based on all the findings of psychology, how humans actually think and all that sort of stuff. Now, these two schools are warring, right? They're two fighting tribes. But what ends up happening is that they can't solve that discipline.

They can't solve that in the context of academia, right? They fire papers back and forth. Lots of discussions are had and all that sort of stuff. But essentially, you have a recurring problem in science, which is that scientists won't let go of their pet theories. They won't let their theories die. And Max Planck, the physicist, had this famous quote that he said, science proceeds one funeral at a time. And essentially what happens is that science doesn't progress because, you know, people are like, hey, new evidence came out. Turns out I was wrong.

People are like, hey, new evidence came out. Turns out I was wrong. Now I'm going to change my mind because it's their theory. And so they keep on fighting for and defending their theory until they're dead. And then the discipline is like, oh, okay, now that that guy's dead, obviously that was dumb all along. Let's move forward. So ego becomes a sort of trap. Huge problem. Huge problem for science in general.

And so if you look at, for example, that rational agent theory dispute, there's one of the big founders of behavioral economics, this guy Richard Thaler. Basically, you know, he tells a great story. And the story is that he's at a dinner party. And at this dinner party, there's this famous economist from the whole rational agent theory camp and this uh there's also like a bunch of other academics like a psychologist and so the guy who believes in rational agent theory is going on and on about how fucking dumb people are right how irrational they are so he's going on about his own wife he says my wife is so irrational she just bought a new car but she won't drive it. And that makes

no sense because she's worried about dinging it, but she's already paid for the car. She should use it. God, humans are so irrational. And then he goes, and my students, my students are so fucking dumb, right? They can't even understand the most basic economic concepts and all that sort of stuff. And so the psychologist pipes up and says, how come all the people in your theories are geniuses, but all the people you know in real life are idiots? And that's a problem. That's a real problem for your theory, right? Because your observations about reality do not fit your theory. do not fit your theory. But what does this guy do? Does this guy say, you know what? I'm going to fall on my sword.

I'm going to throw out 30, 40 years of work on a bad idea. No, he's not going to say that. Instead, what he does is he does what Richard Thaler calls the invisible hand wave, where he proceeds to wave his hand and say, well, you know, there might be some irrationality, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in the end, markets sort things out, right? And he's rationalizing.

Scientists rationalize. Humans rationalize. They want to defend their own most cherished ideas. And so this is not a problem of Richard Dawkins. This is a problem of humans, right? And if humans have power and intellectual power is a form of power and it's not checked, they will continue to rationalize their bad ideas. So specifically, what bad ideas is Dawkins rationalizing?

Well, so there's, you know, the intellectual dispute is this. So in the 1960s, there was this idea of group selection. But it was very fuzzy and it was a shitty version of group selection, right? Which is the idea that natural selection happens not only at the level of genes, but also at the level of human groups. And the idea that selection is happening at many, many, many levels. And so Dawkins in 1976 writes this big, important book, The Selfish Gene. And it's basically that you actually don't need group selection to make sense of a lot of behavior. You can just use what's called kin selection. So for example, you might do something nice for your sister, or you might potentially, you know, die to save your

sister. But we can make sense of that at the level of genes, because essentially, you know, your sister shares many of the same genes. So you know, you don't need this idea that groups matter. Now, since then, what's happened is, is that there are, and this is a large part of what the problem is, is that some people read that book, including Jeff Skilling, and they concluded that what that means is that the way to get ahead is to be selfish. Jeff Skilling is the CEO of Enron. And you'll hear in business circles, you'll hear this idea of like, oh, it's all about law of the jungle, kill or be killed. Like that's how you get ahead, you know, survival of the fittest. So it's confirmation bias. They're looking for something to confirm their ideas about competing in business.

That's right. And, you know, that's what Skilling probably wanted to believe. And so he read Dawkins' book and he's like, ah, now I have intellectual credibility for what I wanted to do anyway. And so Skilling runs Enron based on those ideas. Is this what he said? Skilling? Yes. So he said that he based it on Dawkins' ideas?

Well, he said that The Selfish Gene was his favorite book. Okay. To find out, I don't know exactly everything that Skilling has said. Right. But he said it was his favorite book. And this is, in general, a big problem. science is the big magic of our time right like it's if you want to justify like feminists when they try and justify their if the sort of feminists who try and say that gender doesn't matter it's all social construct yeah they try and do it all in terms of

science right when they not do that i right? What science do they point to? Well, they have, you know, some sort of idea of culture or whatever. But there are a lot of ideas that masquerade as science, right? So, you know, the Nazis, the eugenics movement, you know, the Nazis, that was based on some sort of idea that they thought was science at the time. that they thought was science at the time. You know, the Soviets had this guy, Lysenko, who was the opposite. And he believed that, you know, genes could be,

like he thought you could literally shock and electrocute seeds to make them do what you wanted them to do because genes didn't really matter and it was all conditioning, right? Or, you know, behaviorism, right, was B.F. Skinner's idea, which was the idea that it was all stimulus response. The human mind didn't exist. There idea that it was all stimulus response. The human mind

didn't exist. There were no beliefs and all that stuff. And a lot of the way that education, for example, a lot of the educational choices that were made in the 50s were based on Skinner's ideas, which then fucks up a whole bunch of kids. You know, either what ends up happening is that either science is applied or it's misapplied or it's misinterpreted or people, you know, read a particular scientific study and don't have the context on it. And so, you know, these bad ideas permeate and they're applied and all that sort of stuff. Right. And so the debate, for example, around rational agent theory is not some act. It is an academic debate. But in addition to being an academic debate, economists apply those ideas. an academic debate, economists apply those ideas. And, you know, the public needs to,

if the public wants its experts and its leaders to make the right decision, then it has to hold them accountable on their ideas. And so, you know, if you have, you know, science also has to police who has their backing, right? And it needs, it has a responsibility to communicate to the public what is the best scientific understanding available today. So Skilling takes the selfish gene and he runs with that. And clearly that's thinking that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, the me generation, all that sort of stuff. So the selfish gene sort of slots into a culture that is already sort of looking for that to be true. And it lends this credibility. And what has happened is that the science has now moved on to this idea of multi-level selection theory. And a lot of what we've been talking about today in terms of how groups work and how culture works is all based on those ideas. And there's a whole group of academics in a whole bunch of

different disciplines that have these ideas. And, you know, there are people like John Haidt, people like Joe Henrich, people like David Sloan Wilson, who's the big multi-level selection guy. And when you put all of theirs, or Daniel Kahneman, right, Amos Tversky, you know, the list goes on and on and on.

But when you put all of these ideas together, you get a really, really compelling narrative. Now, Dawkins says that his work was misinterpreted and that essentially the, you know, Jeff Skilling misunderstood his work. Now, Dawkins says very clearly in The Selfish Gene that, you know, our nature is selfish, right? So, I mean, that's, that seems pretty clear that I don't know that Jeff Skilling entirely misinterpreted. But what David Sloan Wilson and the multi-level selection people are saying is something very simple. And E.O. Wilson said this as well, which is that altruist, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

So if you want to get ahead, right, you can get ahead by being a selfish asshole and fucking everyone, right? But if you have a group that is based on selfishness and you're trying to fuck everyone, then your group's going to fall apart and it's going to lose out to an altruistic group. So if you compare side by side a company like Enron and a company like Pixar,

which you can read about in Creativity Inc., you're going to find that they have two very different environments, right? Pixar is fundamentally a cooperative environment. It's a high-trust environment. Everybody works together, you know, all of that sort of stuff. And it's a sustainable company that year after year turns out great films and does great work and all that sort of stuff. Enron is a toxic environment because everybody is just trying to get ahead. There is no I in team.

They're just fucking each other. And so the thing blows up. Now, again, science has a responsibility to communicate clearly. And what should happen, I think, in terms of our economy not blowing the fuck up, right, in terms of corporations not engaging that sort of toxic behavior,

is that, you know, I don't have the authority because I'm a nobody, right, in terms of corporations not engaging that sort of toxic behavior, is that, you know, I don't have the authority because I'm a nobody, right? So I can't come out and say, this is what science is. In fact, there is literally no human alive today that can come out and say what science is, because people can only come out and speak about their tiny field, right? There's no consistent message from science. I still don't understand what Dawkins is arguing against, because didn't he also argue for cooperation in this book? Like, wasn't one of the chapters of his book, Nice Guys Finish First? Well, but he refuses to acknowledge this idea of group, that group selection happens, right? He's refusing to acknowledge... Like, what is his actual statements? How is he... Well, I mean, the larger academic debate is like, so specifically, he rejects the idea that, and it's important to realize that the group selection people are not denying kin selection.

So they're not denying Dawkins' work, right? They're building off of Dawkins' work and saying there's this extra effect, right? And how do they describe that extra effect? They describe that effect as selfish individuals outcompete altruistic individuals, altruistic groups outcompete selfish groups, right? But if you were to have Richard Dawkins in this room today, he would not agree with that statement. What would he think? He would say that selection does not happen at the level of groups. And will be the evidence pro and con?

Well, ultimately, what I would like, Joe, and the reason why I call them a Scientologist, is because what should happen in academic debate is that ideas should die, right? The point of scientific progress is- One should live and one should die. One should die, right? It's Thunderdome. Two ideas enter, one ideas leave. Right? Now, the point is that that's not happening in science. What happened to that dinner party with Richard Thaler is two ideas entered and two ideas left. Right?

And in general, that's a big recurring problem in science. It's happening in economics, and it's also happening in evolutionary biology. Now, the point is that I'm a single individual. I can't be an expert in all the nuances and all the details of all of these things. But what I can do is I can show you the general pattern that's happening. And I can show you what the consequences are for you of these beliefs not changing. So the area in which I do know the most right is the area of education and you have some daughters i believe is that true yeah so these beliefs that your daughters have about their

intelligence whatever those beliefs may be as of today will have a huge effect on the choices they make in school the choice how they do in education what their experience of school is whether they're happy in school whether they're productive whether they're productive, whether they're successful, and whether they're set up for a knowledge economy, which is all about constantly learning. Do they emerge from school hating school, or do they emerge from school loving school? Do they emerge from school with confidence that they can learn whatever is required, or do they feel like they can only be good

at some things and not good at other things? Before we get too far off track, I'm still confused as to how you feel Dawkins is ignoring the arguments against his work. What are his statements? He's denied this idea of group selection. Has anybody had a debate with him about this? They have had debates. Is there anything that we can watch somewhere or listen to?

Well, there have been debates. And what has happened is that, for example, what the debate is currently is the debate is currently about how many people are on each side. So John Haidt, for example, was on Sam Harris's podcast and Sam Harris would agree with Richard Dawkins. Right. And John Haidt, you know, they John Haidt and Sam Harris disagree on multiple things. Right. They've had many disagreements. And the whole point of their podcast was to try and have a civil conversation. And the whole point of their podcast was to try and have a civil conversation. And, you know, John Haidt said, you know, the difference between you and Sam, you and I, Sam, is that I'm an intuitionist and you're a rationalist. Right. So Sam, John, John Haidt believes.

And if you look across the science, I think this is what's supported is that thinking and feeling are always linked. So we're always being driven by these intuitions, even if we don't always understand that. There is, on the other hand, this idea of Descartes error, which is the idea that Descartes came up with that reason and emotion are separate. And there are a lot of—that's what the rational agent theory is about. It's the idea that, you know, there's reason and it's separate from emotion. Are these mutually incompatible, though? Yes. Okay. Then that's the point of science, is that you're supposed to kill certain ideas.

So while there's—Descartes' error specifically comes from— there's this book by Antonio Damasio at USC, and it's based on a series of experiments around this guy named Elliot and people like him. And so Elliot was this banker, financial guy, happy family man, all this sort of stuff. And he had a brain tumor. And so they chopped it out. The brain tumor was right here, right up at the top of the base of his nose. And at first, it seemed like chopping out this piece of his brain had done nothing, right? It hadn't affected him. Oh, totally disposable bit of brain, didn't really have a function. Look at that. It was just an optional accessory, like the appendix of the brain.

But then what happens is they come to find out that all of a sudden, Elliot has all these problems. Even though his IQ is unaffected, even though his verbal intelligence is not affected, right? What's happening is that he's making all these terrible decisions. He leaves his wife for a stripper. He... Snopes. That's actually who Elliot is. He's the Snopes guy. And it's because he had cancer, so don't make fun of him. How dare you. Yeah.

But, you know, his business decision-making falls apart. He falls for all these con men. He's making all these horrible choices, and he can't decide where to go to lunch. So what ends up happening is that at 11 a.m., he'll try and decide, where am I going to go to lunch? And then by 4 p.m., lunch has passed. And that's because he sat around and tried to calculate rationally, where should I go to lunch, right? He thought about, oh, you know, should I go, like, based on tables and calories and all this sort of stuff? And he couldn't make a decision. And the reason why is because this

bit of the brain that was removed, turns out, is what links thinking and feeling. It's your ventromedial prefrontal cortex. And deciding where to go to lunch is influenced constantly by our emotions. Because, you know, you feel like Thai or, you know, you feel like something light or you feel like a meatball sub or whatever it may be, or you feel like if you go to this restaurant, you'll run into that really hot waitress or whatever it may be. So that, along with the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the work of people like John Haidt, there's now an immense amount of information that basically understands that Descartes, who lived 400 years ago, was making shit up when he came up with his theory of the brain, right?

And his theory of the brain of this idea of reason and emotion, which has floated around in the West for ages and ages and ages, it doesn't fit the evidence. Now, that's the basic problem is that, and I will tell you, having worked with students, your ability to improve their lives, once you understand that thinking and feeling are always linked, goes massively up. Because now when a student starts telling me, oh, I don't have the math gene, or I don't have a natural ear for languages, I don't waste my time dealing with that rationalization. Instead, I ask the kid, how do you feel about math, right? How do you feel about your teacher? And we start to deal with the feelings and we start to sort through the feelings until we get the feelings lined up in such a way that you're making the right choices. And that's,

that's for me, the heart is that that's the problem that I first came to this from was education. When you're talking about these kids, though, sorry to interrupt you, but it seems almost like you're talking about a user-operator error. It's like they're just programmed incorrectly to know how to view the world. By their culture.

Yeah. Their culture is fucking them. God damn it! And that's what you have to understand is is that you know that's human hardware doesn't human hardware has not really changed in the last hundred thousand years but human software the culture that we picked up has evolved over time right it's constantly changing and it's constantly changing and now especially because the environment is changing so fast because of technology and all these sorts of snap. Snapchat filters.

We need to change the culture fast and we need to change the culture intentionally. So, but who decides how the culture gets changed? Is it Donald Trump or is it Hunter Mott? And it's not either of us. It should be the group. And the point is to spark a conversation so that we can have this conversation. But the point is, is there are certain academics who are going to try and stand in the way of that conversation and will use their authority to try and shut down that conversation because they're trying to defend their pet theory in whatever discipline it is. And this is where you come back to Dawkins. And this is Dawkins. But the point is to recognize it's not about Dawkins particularly. And if you want to get into the woods on like, you know, all of

the nuances of all this sort of stuff, you should get on either David Sloan Wilson or John Hyde or Joe Henrich, and they can like take you through the whole thing. But, and the basic problem is, is that there's a lot of science that is really, really useful, but you know, one man can't figure it all out. Impossible. Impossible. And you can't hold on to a theory. No. You have to expose it to the marketplace of ideas. It has to be tested. And what I can do, because a lot of this comes down to what's permissible in the culture of science. So if you've got guys like, you know, you can go if you want to go and like read about what David Sloan Wilson is saying and all of these guys. You can either go read their books, which are excellent.

You can also go to David Sloan Wilson because he has also seen practically how much of these ideas can make a difference in people's lives and actually make people's lives better. He's also trying to popularize the science. So he has a whole website, you know, This View of Life and Evonomics and all this sort of stuff. And if you want, there's a great article by Peter Turchin, who's another guy, and he'll take you through some of the stuff around Dawkins and all this stuff. But my goal with all of this stuff, with Thomas Sowell's work,

with David Sloan Wilson, John Haidt, Carol Dweck's work, which is a lot of this education stuff, is that I know that it's not realistic to expect people to— that I can't just put a list on the Internet of 50 books and be like everybody has to read these 50 books like people have other shit to worry about. Right. Yeah. But if you just don't even concern yourself with that, if you just suggest it, enough

people will. The ideas will start to permeate. But you also what you're going to what you run into. And this is part of what I've run into with education. Right. Is so, you know, along with Katie, Katie my Bostonian friend we took seven different fields of neuroscience and psychology and we condensed them all into one book that we wrote to the teenager because we wanted to have a message problem is most these

books are written to adults and you write the book to the adult the adult reads it the parent reads it and they're like oh it's so great and then now they're in the uncomfortable comfort position of like having to have a conversation about school with kids. And then the ideas die. The ideas don't move. So we were like, let's skip the middle man or middle woman and let's write straight to the kid. What's the book? It's called The Straight A Conspiracy.

And the reason why we called it The Straight A Conspiracy is because we at the time were working with the son of a guy named Stan Rogo, who was the executive producer on Lizzie McGuire. And we'd been, I mean, this is the power of emotions, by the way, like super brilliant. What is Lizzie McGuire? Lizzie McGuire was like that Hillary Duff kids TV show. Oh, okay. In the 90s, it was like super big. It was the Miley Cyrus of like, or early 2000s, I think. But anyway, so we, you know, we were struggling with how do you have a conversation about education and school and your potential and all these sorts of things with kids. And, you know, our intuitions are, we're sort of the classic teacher intuitions, which is like, you can do it. You're amazing. Like you have so much potential. And we sat down with Stan and

Stan said, listen, I've been making kids TV for a long time. And if I've learned one thing about teenagers, it's this, their lives suck. They may not suck in any sort of objective sense or any sort of geographical sense or anything like that, but on an emotional subjective level, they suck. And so the only thing you can ever tell them that they will believe is that they've been lied to. And so that's what we did. And he said, the title of your book is The Something Conspiracy. I don't know what it is, right? And so we went away and we did The Straight A Conspiracy. And rather than getting kids to believe in themselves, we got them to doubt their doubts. And once you got them doubting their doubts, and you know,

all the things that they believed about math genes, is that really true? How do we know that, bro? Like, is that really, you know, all that sort of stuff? And then you get that process where they're now starting to question things. And, you know, we did the first chapter is all about genius myths, which are, you know, essentially very clever marketing schemes that, again, rely on that thing of awe. So if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, right? Steve Jobs was a very smart marketer, right? And he created this image, right? This, you know, cult of personality around himself, which is that, you know, he made himself seem like this genius who out of nowhere came out of all these things.

People called him the iGod and the cult of Mac. And what is the effect of awe? The effect of awe is blind copying. We just had to have that Mac product. And what is the effect of awe? The effect of awe is blind copying. We just had to have that Mac product. And in that, he was copying the playbook of another guy much, much earlier, Thomas Edison, who in his own time created this own cult of personality around himself, and at the time he was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park. But in reality, did Edison invent the light bulb? No, he did not.

The light bulb was around 45 years before he was even born. Edison ripped off Tesla. That's what he did to that fuckhead. You watch Drunk History? Ever see Duncan Trussell's version of Drunk History? It's all on Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison being a cunt. It's amazing. And that's the point is that these people were people. And the myths that you have about geniuses are actually clever advertising schemes. But the problem is that it's an ad jingle that is so good that we've essentially had that jingle

trapped in our heads for hundreds and hundreds of years. So there are ideas that are passed on, like Edison had 1,000 patents to his name by the time he died. He did. That's because when you set up an industrial research lab, you make sure that your name is on all the patents, because that's the whole point of employing a bunch of people is that, you know, you want to own the IP. And that's true for, you know, Mozart was the Michael Jackson of the 1700s. Isaac Newton, you know, they basically

knew that they couldn't sell the ideas of gravity. So they sold Newton as the man, this guy who had this great vision and blah, blah, blah, the story of the apple so they sold Newton as the man, this guy who had this great vision and blah, blah, blah, and the story of the apple and all that bullshit. And then Einstein, they needed to package the new physics that was being done by lots and lots of physicists like Heisenberg and Planck and all that sort of stuff. But there was this guy, Arthur Eddington, who knew he couldn't sell that. So he sold the idea of a boy wonder with crazy hair who had beaten Newton and was displacing Newton.

Now, the point is, you go and you talk to physicists and they'll tell you, well, it's not really true. Like Einstein didn't really displace Newton, right? We still use Newtonian mechanics. We only use Einsteinian mechanics when we start to get near the speed of light, right? So there are all these marketing schemes, right? But in the marketplace of ideas, part of what happens is that, you know,

there are these big public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, right? And they have a lot of power. And it becomes very difficult to challenge them. And in particular, I don't think that anybody particularly wants to go up against Richard Dawkins, right? He's a sacred cow. He is a sacred cow. And if you go up against the new atheists or you

challenge anything about the new atheists and i have you know i like the the whole rationalist intuitionist thing because i've been trying to talk about emotions on our podcast and i said you know hey look you don't have to believe me there's this guy john height who's a big famous scientist and all that stuff and then there's this guy, Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience. But John Height is saying rationalist versus intuitionist. There's a difference, right? And I want to talk about that. And I'm going to tell you that I think that in light of the evidence, Sam Harris is wrong. And I got a whole bunch of angry tweets from a guy named at atheist sensei, who proceeded to tell me that I was a fucking idiot and blah, blah, blah. And what did I know and how arrogant I was and how dare you and all this sort of stuff.

But what do you understand your argument? He didn't really. So what did he just jump at you because of the fact that you're questioning his boy? Yeah. Right. He basically. And then what I. His man.

His man. And but it was it was it was it was productive because what he said is like he said, what are you even talking about? Sam Harris knows that most people are being emotional most of the time. But the issue isn't what Sam Harris knows about other people. It's what does Sam Harris believe about his own brain, right? And Sam Harris is really, and this is not Sam's fault as an individual, just as none of the cultural stuff that we've been talking about is his fault. When I was in college, I also believed in this whole idea of Descartes' error, that reason and emotion are separate. And then I

moved out to LA and I was in an acting class. And I moved from an environment that worshipped reason to an environment that worshipped reason to an environment that worshipped emotion right that's what actors do all day they fucking talk about their feelings and so for somebody who had come from that environment it was super fucking annoying i found actors really really annoying because they would not stop talking about their feelings and it pissed me off it pissed me off it pissed me off and at a certain point i got so annoyed. I was like you fuckers don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The only real authorities are scientists. So what

did I do? I went off and I read The Scientist and I found out that the actors were right and it was fucking humiliating. I don't understand. They were right how? They were right about the importance of emotions. Emotions are hugely important. They drive thinking. Yeah but that's not what these actors are doing. I understand that they're just being emotional because it's indulgent.

They're being indulgent and they're not managing their emotions, which is what you're supposed to do. Right. But what you find, for example, so here's a simple thing. You know, there's a reason why we say that. And then, you know, that intersected with working with students. Right. So if you say, for example, students say, I intersected with working with students, right? So if you say, for example, students say, I feel stupid, turns out that stupid is a feeling. Specifically,

it's the feeling of shame, right? And so- Or, and also being ineffective in your intellectual pursuits. And a sense of helplessness and all that sort of stuff. It's feel inadequate. That's right. And it's specifically, it's a feeling called learned helplessness. Right. In in academic circles where there are terrible names for everything. Right. So but the feeling of shame motivates a very specific behavior, which is that you avoid the source of their shame, your shame. So when students get back a bad test, what they do is they wad it up and they throw it away and they avoid math. They avoid math. Right. Now, the? Now, the point is that that behavior is literally the worst response you can have to failure, right? If you're screwing up in math

or any other subject, what you should be doing is getting out your mistakes, analyzing your mistakes, and using them to get better. And so that very simple thing is what we did with all of our students. We sat them down. We made them confront their mistakes. We made them say, okay, number three, why did you get number three wrong? And then you figure out why number three is wrong, and then you fix that. Now, how does this oppose what Sam Harris believes? The point is that if Ad Atheist Sensei, and I will tell you that I think that Ad Atheist Sensei is pretty right in his assessment of what Sam Harris believes about, like, most people are emotional most of the time, but I don't think that Sam Harris believes

that thinking and feeling are always linked, so that his brain is all... Do you know this for a fact? Have you discussed this with him? Because I know I'm getting a text from him in about fucking five minutes. Well, I'll tell you, for example, okay, so how does Sam Harris feel about God? Or how does Sam Harris feel about religion? That's a pretty open-ended question. He doesn't believe in religion, and I don't think he necessarily believes in any form of a deity. Well, let's talk about— Because there's no evidence for that. Let's talk about it.

I know that you have a relationship with Sam, right? That's okay, but forget about that. Why those questions? Well, so if you look at, let's look at, for example, your friends, the anarcho-capitalists, right? Okay. And libertarians, right? Who just want to get rid of government, right? And they're just trying to get rid of all government, right? Okay.

So what is that thinking about? What is that psychology about? Or any sort of, or Muslim fundamentalists, they just want to get rid of these Western influences. They basically think that a certain thing is bad and they're constantly trying to strip it out, strip it out, strip it out, strip it out. That's the nature of fundamentalism. And Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are atheist fundamentalists. And specifically, Richard Dawkins has talked about militant atheism. And Richard Dawkins has said that religion is the scourge of humanity, and that we need to get rid of religion. Now, in reality, if you look at the scientific evidence, what you're going to find out is that religion has a very checkered

past, right? And that it's, you know, that religion has, you know, in terms of the history of violence, right? Steven Pinker has this book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and he talks about the fact that what the new atheists are saying about religion is not supported by the evidence. That in history, religion has not been any one thing. It's had some good things. It's had some bad things. So that's not a scientifically appropriate belief to go around and saying that religion is the scourge of all humanity or to be waging war about over religion. And you're talking Dawkins and specifically? Dawkins and, you know, Sam Harris and all that sort of stuff.

And particularly Dawkins, because he's the most militant of them, right? Right. Separately, you know, why do people believe in religion? What is religion really about, right? It's because people don't understand how to control their environment. And so their minds fill in and they're trying to make sense of how do we get the things. It's also like all the rest of culture. It's passed down. That's right. Learn behavior and imitating atmospheres and adopting predetermined patterns of behavior.

Yeah. And thinking. Exactly. And so if you if, you know, Dawkins and Sam Harris, their stated objective, right, is they want to promote evolution. you know, Dawkins and Sam Harris, their stated objective, right, is they want to promote evolution, right? Okay, yeah. Now, I taught, I had to tutor some students who were at a Christian school that taught creationism, and it's Oaks Christian and, you know, Thousand Oaks, right? And I had never, like, honestly, like, pre-doing that experience, I had never thought much about the New Atheists. Like, they just weren't a big deal. I was like, OK, those guys are out doing whatever they're doing. Right. And then I went into this Christian fundamentalist school or whatever it is, or school that teaches creationism.

And all they could talk about was Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Right. They were talking about them constantly. And in their minds, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris represent science. They are the face of science in the same way that, you know, some guy in their minds, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris represent science. They are the face of science. In the same way that, you know, some guy in the Midwest, when he thinks about Islam, he's thinking about ISIS or al-Qaeda or all that sort of stuff. He doesn't understand that those people don't represent the majority of Muslims. And in the same way, in this school, right, Dawkins and Harris were being used to represent science in general and to represent evolution in general.

Right. So they are essentially for a lot of people forming the stereotype of science. Now, in opposition to them? I mean, were they in opposition to Dawkins and Harris? Yeah. And there were certain things they did in their teaching like they would do, you know, the school. I mean, it was a weird experience because, one, the school had the very best rhetoric department that I've ever seen of any school because they knew that they were going to have people attacking their beliefs for their whole life. And so you had to know all the logical fallacies, straw man, you know, two quoque, all that sort of stuff. And the worst science department i've ever fucking seen in my life sure yeah i wonder why well exactly and so you know they did all sorts of things like for example they had a whole unit on isms right they were like nazism fascism communism and how bad isms were and then right after that they taught the controversy around evolution so

they were like well there are four different theories of the origins of life, right? One is young earth creationism. One is intelligent design. One is earth as metaphorical day. And then the fourth one is evolutionism. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. So evolutionism, right?

After telling you the evils of isms. That's right. So you're going on a long, circuitous route here. Well, I know. Because you made some accusations about Harris. So what's wrong with his views on God and what's wrong with his views on religion? Well, that's the point, is that religion is a set of beliefs. And actually, many of these beliefs are adapted to their environment, even though they seem kooky.

And they're also ideologies that are strictly enforced. And I think that's one of the things he has a big issue with. But the point is, is that is the issue if you want to. So this comes down to how do you change people's minds and what does the science say about how you change people's minds and how do you move ideas? OK, so you're saying that his mocking of these ideas is contrary to the expanding of knowledge. It's people are going to resist it. Yeah. And it's it doesn't promote a productive exchange of ideas between tribes. But isn't that debatable? Because a lot of people in listening to really excellent constructed arguments against religion will change their mind.

Well, like everything, right? So, you know, rule 34, right? Right. So rule 34, if you can imagine it, there is porn of it, right? So in the same way, if you can imagine it, there is science of it, right? Right. But hold on. Okay, go ahead. So there's actually science on how ideas move. There's a whole field of it. And there's this book called The Diffusion of Innovations, right?

And I had, because I was working with these students, right? I was trying to figure out how do we get these ideas to move? And so I was like, oh, thank God, There's a book all about how ideas move. Right. And what you come to find out is, is that all of the research shows there's a whole bunch of things that make ideas move. One thing is, is they have to be compatible with people's existing beliefs. And then also they have to be practical. So they have to confer some sort of practical benefit, right? Okay. So in terms of moving evolution, the first thing is to recognize that, you know, if we really want

to like not just spend another 150 years, you know, having a fight between science and religion and all that sort of stuff, the first thing to realize is that what people like David Sloan Wilson are saying is fundamentally compatible with Christianity, right? Because they understand that, you know, that altruism matters, right? All this sort of stuff, right? The sort of Dawkins type notion of it's all about selfishness and everybody just trying to fuck everybody and all that sort of stuff. Part of it is that doesn't fit well with Christianity, right? Doesn't fit well with religious notions, right? Secondly, all of this stuff that I'm talking about with cultural evolution is deeply practical, right?

You can see that if we have a conversation as humanity about culture and how my choices are being driven and all that sort of stuff, so that I can change my culture and all that sort of stuff that we can fix a whole lot of things. That notion of culture relies on group selection, right? It relies on this multi-level selection idea that Dawkins is not on board with and all

that sort of stuff and that Sam Harris is not on board with. So ultimately, what I want to do is I want to move these ideas. But the whole point is, Joe, is that part of the reason why you brought me on this podcast today is specifically because I called out Richard Dawkins. No, no, no, no. I brought you on because Brian Cowan recommends you and I listen to you on his podcast. Okay. Had nothing to do with that. I just thought that'd be an interesting topic of discussion. Okay. But I still don't understand. So you're saying that essentially Sam Harris's refusion or refuting rather of religion and his ideas about spreading what he believes are the empirical truths about science are in somehow or another causing a resistance to these very ideas? Yeah.

Because of the way he's presenting them. Because he's not presenting them in a form that's psychologically digestible. Is that what you're saying? Yes. And also, fundamentally, he creates this stereotype of scientists that is being formed around him. And what is that? Well, it's that they're angry, aggressive. He doesn't seem aggressive.

Do you think he seems aggressive? It's not about really—I mean, that was the point of spending time at Oaks Christian. It's not really about how I was perceiving them because I wasn't thinking about them beforehand. Well, these are people that are pushing a ridiculous ideology, and the enemies of that ridiculous ideology, they attack. And so they're attacking these guys. But the basic problem is attacking. Right, but it's a very small segment of schools that are doing this, right? You're talking about this one example of this Christian school.

How many people believe in evolution? It's probably a giant number, right? Well, I mean, you know, you can look at different polls, but it's like 50-50. Yeah. I think it's like 46% according to a recent Gallup poll, but my joke was always like, who the fuck answers polls? Exactly. I mean, is it like one out of a hundred?

Well, exactly. Like it triggered last night, right? Yeah. The people dumb enough to answer polls. That's right. One percent. But, but ultimately that's the, the, you know, the sort of the larger thing that I would like to achieve, right, is a scientific reformation, right?

So, you know, you, the, you know, Martin Luther triggers this, this reformation with the Catholic church and all that sort of stuff. At the core of the Catholic Church was this idea of love thy neighbor as thyself. And basically Martin Luther said the people in the power, in the religious establishment, are not living that principle. At the core of science is this idea that we should be responsive to evidence. Right. Right. science is this idea that we should be responsive to evidence, right? And the scientific establishment is often not living, or the academic establishment is not living that, you know, principle, right?

So, and part of the problem is that left to their own devices, they will continue to remain in their tiny lanes. And a lot of these academic disputes can only be solved by going outside their lanes. So, for example, if Sam Harris was here, right, and I've said this on the podcast with Brian, the one thing that I would want to talk about, the only thing that I would want to talk about is this rationalist versus intuitionist idea, and try and reach some sort of definitive conclusion on that. Because if Sam Harris's thinking and feeling are always being linked, then he has to decide how his feelings about religion are driving his thinking, decide how his feelings about religion are

driving his thinking and whether his feelings about religion are appropriate in light of the evidence or whether they're not appropriate. Does that make sense? Well, religion as itself, though, when you're talking about evidence, it's extremely lacking in that. So what he's talking about is people that are subscribing to a very rigid ideology that he thinks is compromising growth. In the same way that racism justifies the behavior of social justice warriors. So it's not, I'm not, so, you know, you understand, I understand. But this religious discrimination is based on an ideology that's written on animal skins

from thousands of years ago and extreme ignorance. So there's much more to it then than just saying that it's similar to racism. Well, no, but what I'm saying is that, you know, this is, again, so there's a larger principle here, right? And again, you can find it in, you know, John Hyde's book, The Happiness Hypothesis, right? Which is, this is something that Jesus talked about a long time ago, right? book, The Happiness Hypothesis, right? Which is, this is something that Jesus talked about a long time ago, right? Which is that it's easy to see the splinter in my brother's eye, but hard to see the log in my own. So in general, when you talk to people, right? Like if you look at Jordan Peterson, right? Jordan Peterson criticizes people on college campuses, right? And he, you know, for us,

right? He comes on my show, he comes on your show, and we all cheer him on. We're like, that's so fucking great, right? Uh-huh. What is the reaction that Jordan Peterson gets on his campus? It's mixed. It's very mixed. Some people are saluting him. Some people are saluting him. Some people are very upset at him.

That's right. And so, for example, when I took, when I challenged these, you know, the anarcho-capitalists, the libertarians, all that sort of stuff, I got some people cheering me on, and then a lot of people calling me intellectually dishonest or whatever and all that sort of stuff, right? These arguments, nobody is saying that these arguments,

as they currently stand, are easy. There's a lot of material to track, right? And, you know, in the end, like, my job is to communicate them as clearly as possible. Okay. But what I'm saying saying is is that if you want to move science like science has a communication problem right okay now if you read people in science like a tool go on day he'll just be like people are fucking dumb science is complicated right you you're going you go on these big broad journeys right before you come back. So what I'm saying is that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are the kind of friends, with friends like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, science doesn't need enemies. They are alienating, they are not helping us, and they're getting in the way of communicating science.

I understand because of the very approach that they're taking. If science was to adopt the approach of we are here in light of the diffusion of innovations, which is the book all about how— Do you feel the same way about Neil deGrasse Tyson and his open criticism of religion? Well, I think in general that I don't think that the criticism of religion is helping science. It's a 150-year-old—science has been at war with religion for 150 years. So you don't think that science should be honest or that scientists should be honest about their own personal beliefs? Well, but the point is that I believe that scientists should read science widely.

And if you look at someone like John Haidt, part of the reason why John Haidt and Sam Harris have fought is because John Haidt doesn't have a problem with religion. Because when you update your view of the brain, you come to realize that what's really going on is that you blindly internalize the beliefs of science and your community and all that sort of stuff. And they blindly internalize the beliefs of their community. And that if you want to move ideas, if you want to move scientific ideas, what we have to do is establish trust. But what specifically are they blindly interpreting? It's this idea of that reason and emotion are separate. But how does that apply strictly to religion and his beliefs on religion being incorrect? Because if you look at the behavior of fundamentalists, right, they get very into the literal text and the wording and all of that sort of stuff, right? And it's the

same thing with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, right? They're super into, like, breaking apart what does the Quran say, what does the Bible say, and all this sort of stuff. And what really matters is what is the spirit in which it's being approached. How do you feel about these things? So if you look at something like gay marriage, right, or homosexuals, right, what does the Bible say on homosexuality well it says two totally different things right there's what's what it says about sodom and gomorrah and then there's what it says about uh you know love thy neighbor as thyself and if you hate gays you're going to be like oh sodom and gomorrah that's the thing right and if you like gay people you have a nice gay neighbor or whatever you're like oh love thy neighbor as thyself, right? Right. So the issue is not the text.

The issue is what does the person feel about the thing, right? That's the psychology that is driving it, right? Okay. So the point is, is that if you want to fix the problem, right, you don't worry about the text, right? You don't worry about what are the literal- But if the text is preposterous, it should be discussed. about what are the literal... But if the text is preposterous, it should be discussed.

Well... I mean, if the text promotes violence against women or against any particular group that doesn't believe what you believe, it's discussed because it's problematic, right? But different people, like, has the Bible changed in the last 400 years? No, but different people's interpretations of the Bibles have. Right. Right. Right. And so, for example, if you look at, for example, where are Muslims now and where are Christians now, right? Look at Christianity in the 1600. Well, this is an issue that Michael Shermer wrote about recently, about Islam not experiencing the enlightenment, that other religions have gone through this. Well, it's specifically about Islam experiencing a de-enlightenment, right? Because in the year 1000, they were.

But so the real thing that if you want to fix Islam, and again, like, you know, I was born in Saudi Arabia, my parents live in Dubai, like there are conversations happening about this. What you have to do is that you have to change the intellectual climate. But the intellectual climate has nothing to do with the text. It has to do with a lot of what people believe about learning, what they believe about themselves, whether they find ideas threatening. And the text that when Islam in the year 1000, right,

was the most intellectually advanced place on the planet, and the text that Islam is using now has not changed. So what happens is that people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, they get super caught up in the text. But really, if you want to fix these problems, you have to talk about, you know, what are your beliefs about your intentional intelligence? How do you feel about other cultures? You have to talk about feelings. And that's really where the conversation changes. And the point is, is that rationalists don't talk about feelings. So that's the real, I mean, that is the core of what needs to happen. And the science is there to do that. But the point is, is that, you know,

let's put these people side by side. John Haidt has a following of essentially zero, right? Richard Dawkins has a huge following, right? Sam Harris has a big following. Someone like Joe Henrich probably maybe has three Twitter followers. So the people who are representing science, right, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, no one's questioning, like, does Neil deGrasse Tyson know way the fuck more about astrophysics than I do? 100%. But I don't know that Neil deGrasse Tyson has, for example, read The Diffusion of Innovations, because I will tell you that I've had numerous academics on the podcast, for example, David Sloan Wilson. David Sloan Wilson, right, I asked him, you know, he sent me this thing back in 2014, and it was a 67-page paper. And it said, you know, it was towards the science of intentional behavior change or something like that. And I read the 67 pages. And at the end of the 67 pages, I'm like, I feel like what you're actually talking about is how do you move ideas?

And wasn't that already solved with the diffusion of innovations? And he said, oh, I, you know, I've obviously heard of the diffusion of innovations like Everett Rogers' famous work, but I've never made a close study of it. Now, the diffusion of innovations was written in 1967. It is an innovation that hasn't diffused. And that's specifically because even though it preaches one thing about how ideas move, it's written in that dry scientific technical style. So a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or David Sloan Wilson or John Hyde or Joe Henrich or any of these guys often have not heard of ideas that are relevant to the conversations that we're having. It's not just that the ideas aren't moving between sciences. But isn't this a bizarre conversation to have if you don't know whether or not they've read that? Well, but you can look at people's behavior.

And you can see from people's behavior whether they understand certain things or not. Or whether they agree with certain things. I mean, just because their behavior isn't compatible to that paper doesn't mean that they haven't read it and just decided that they don't agree or they have another point of view. Well, I mean, if we're going to really get into this we really can't we're way over we're like 25 minutes over so i was trying to figure out a way to skirt out of here quick but yeah but i mean the the the point that i'm trying to the large i think the main point is this that you that from all of our conversations about culture, there are ideas out there trapped in books, which is the whole point of what we're doing on The Brian Callen Show, that have real practical value to improving people's lives. Those ideas are not moving. Don't you think they're all kind of moving?

It's moving right now. Everything is moving. Well, so part of the diffusion of innovations, right? So the book opens with a story about scurvy, right? So scurvy is this problem that killed 2 million people, right? And it all comes down to vitamin C deficiency, and it's the simplest solution in the world. You just suck on a lime. It's the simplest solution in the world.

You just suck on a lime. So between scurvy being figured out, right, in a sort of academic context, and between it being applied, 150 years passed. 150 years. So the point is that ideas don't move. Well, they didn't have the internet. But it's not even about that. Isn't it? I mean, isn't it the best way to distribute information is the Internet? The fact that it took 150 years for scurvy to be cured, even though the information was there,

don't you think that directly coincides with the lack of ability to express that information? Nope. It has to do with, and that's the point of the diffusion of information, it has to do with the ideas being packaged in a way that is culturally and psychologically compatible with what people already believe, and it being shown that they have practical value. The basic barrier is this. Why have these—you know, the science of evolution has been around for 150 years. But there's that vitamin C example that you're using. You're talking about an extremely limited amount of education available when people are not expressing this.

Well, what, 1847? Yeah, in comparison to 2016 or 17. Giant difference. Yeah, but if you've got 2 million people dying, right? There were 2 million people dying. It was a huge problem. They didn't know how to solve it. And these ideas didn't move.

Right. But how can you compare that to today? How can you compare that to today? Well, I mean, Joe, we can't do the experiment where we have one world where we don't do anything to package and move the ideas. And we have another world where we do actively work to try and package and move these ideas. We can't do that. But it's 160 years difference in time. The world is a different world. Well, the technology is different, but the human mind hasn't changed.

The human mind hasn't changed really in 10,000 years. The human mind might not have changed genetically, but its understanding of the world has changed radically. So its understanding of what a vitamin is is gigantically different between now and then. Well, but that's also important is that it's important to realize that when this whole scurvy conversation was going on, they didn't have the concept of a vitamin. And there are concepts that you don't have right now in terms of this idea that thinking and feeling are always linked, right? This idea of Descartes' error. That's not, our culture doesn't talk about emotions in a way where they understand, oh, this behavior of the student where they wad up the test and they throw it all away, that is being driven by an emotion. Well, a lot of people understand that, though.

Do they? Sure, sure. A lot of people understand that people get humiliated by failure and then it makes them pull back and they don't grow. And when people teach people, there's a lot of things that people teach about when learning new information to make it encouraging and to make it enjoyable and to express boundless potential and not express very clear, rigid boundaries that you're never going to cross and that you can impart these very limiting ideas into children's minds or you can expand upon their potential horizons by promoting this idea of accessibility and of massive potential. Of course, but is it a standard practice in America's schools today

when a student gets a bad test that we all work through those mistakes and analyze them? I don't know what the standard is today. I mean, I assume that that's just shitty teaching, but it's not a matter of lack of understanding amongst certain individuals about the way people are motivated and not motivated. Well, there may be a small number of individuals, but that doesn't mean that that is the general consensus. I don't even know if it's a small number. I think it's a very large number. It's just not the consensus.

Why do you think that Asian cultures do better in school than American culture? Probably discipline. Well, a lot of it is that faith and intelligence. They really believe practice makes perfect. And if you work hard at something, that you'll get better. It's also cultural, isn't it? That is cultural. That's what we were talking about before.

Americans don't have that culture today. They don't have that faith that if you bust your ass and you really work hard, that you'll get better. They did have that. You don't think that people have that idea today? Some do. That's a giant generalization, isn't it? Well, but look at the results. Americans don't have, but look at the results.

America is a massive hotbed of innovation and creativity and arts. Which part of America in particular is a massive hotbed of innovation and creativity and arts. Which part of America in particular is a massive hotbed of innovation? Which subculture? It's Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is incredibly innovative. What about the artistic community? What about musicians? Massive amounts of comedy.

Massive amounts of writing, literature, fiction. A lot of it's coming from America. Totally. All corners of the spot. Totally. But at the same time, why aren't American students doing well in school? Shitty students or shitty, excuse me, shitty teachers, rather. Shitty culture.

Well, yeah, that too. And also a lack of resources being applied to schools. I mean, you find out what a teacher's salary is, you find out how little they're respected. I mean, it's a real issue for sure. I think we absolutely agree on that. And a large part of it is that there are complicated fixes, like fixing how much we pay teachers and all of that sort of stuff. And there are simple fixes and things that we can fix pretty simply and ideas that you can promote are, you know, embrace your mistakes, analyze your mistakes, fail forward. And that is the cornerstone value of the FAA, which is why you're safer flying than walking.

It's the cornerstone value of Silicon Valley. And I will tell you that having worked with lots and lots of students and traveled all across the country, that is not the core value of a lot of American students. Hunter, we've got to wrap this up. I'm so sorry. It's already 5 o'clock. I'm in trouble. But thank you very much, man. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. We'll do it again, man. It seems like we've got a lot more to talk about. There's a lot to talk about. All right, you fucks. See you tomorrow. Bye. Thanks, man.

Sorry, dude. No, no, no. See you. See you. See you. See you. See you. See you.

See you. See you.