#2148 - Gad Saad

27:30It's grotesque, man. It's weird. It's just weird that it became so out in the open. And that's what makes me think that they've been influenced. I just can't imagine there was that much anti -Semitism before October 6th. But why do you, like, the influence is coming for what purpose just to see the create havoc? Yes. Yeah, to keep people at each other's throats. I really think so. And also to completely screw up democracy. You know, like, people have lost all their faith in voting. Yeah. They've lost all their faith in the money behind politics and the influence behind politics. And the more this stuff just gets brought up, the more chaos there is, the more hatred there is, the more divide there is.

28:12Yeah. Even amongst the Democratic Party, right, which we talked about the other day, like some large number, we think it's around 70 % of Jewish people vote Democrat. But now, you know, the Democratic Party is full on with this Palestine thing. And, you know, you see it on college campuses, this rampant anti -Semitism, death to the Jews being tolerated, literally saying that, yelling it out. And by the way, you can go back, so I wouldn't be able to tell you which number, which episode, but you can go back to earlier episodes that have appeared on this glorious podcast, where you will see that I would have predicted exactly what we're seeing now.

28:49And it's not because I'm a prophet, or it's not because I'm so intelligent. It's because you simply have to have the power of having the imagination to extrapolate from a current trend to some future and outcome, right? So if you let in. This episode is brought to you by Life Lock. Tax season is already stressful. You shouldn't have to worry about identity theft on top of everything else. And trust me, it's a big worry. Especially since during tax season, your sensitive info does a lot of traveling to places you can't control. It goes through payroll, your accountant, or your tax consultant, and countless other data centers on its way to the IRS.

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30:12Join now and save up to 40 % your first year. Call 1 -800 -Life Lock and use the promo code JRE or go to lifelock .com slash JRE for 40 % off. Terms apply into your country, people who have genocidal Jew hatred as an endemic feature of their society. So I'll give you since people love stats. So there was a Pew is a non -partisan, if anything, they probably lean towards being more woke. So Pew has these global surveys that they conduct. So in 2010, they conducted a survey looking at how favorable are you towards the Jews across a whole bunch of Islamic countries. Now, if I were to tell you that 10 % of the Polt people exhibited Jew hatred, you'd say, oh boy, that's a big number.

31:0610 % is a lot. How about if I tell you that for most of those Polt countries, it was between 95 to 99%. So let me, I know people understand what 95 to 99 means. If I pull 100 people, 95 to 99 will express very problematic Jew hatred. So now, if I let in 100 ,000 such people into the country, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and a professor with a 47 -page academic CV to say, well, probably Jew hatred is going to go up. So that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing the outcome of having an immigration policy that has let in people that don't share our foundational values. Again, this doesn't mean someone's going to write in the comments section, what a hypocrite.

31:52You're an immigrant, Gatsad. Well, there are immigrants and there are immigrants. There are tons of Muslims who want to come in here and leave all that baggage at the door. They want nothing to do with that. They just want to live the American experience. The problem is, we don't have the machine that can look into your heart and mind. So it's a statistical game. So if you're going to let in hundreds, I mean, look what's happening in Germany. Look what's happening in France. Look what's happening in Denmark. What let me ask you is, why do you think that stuff is happening? Why do you think this is mass immigration?

32:21So that's a great question. So it's covered partly in parasitic mind, my earlier book, and in my next book, which I call suicidal empathy. So empathy is an emotion that has evolved for very clear evolutionary reasons. So just like any of our other emotions, for example, envy, there are evolutionary reasons why we've evolved the emotion of envy. It can compel us forward. I see that Joe is doing well, keeping up with the Joneses. Maybe it'll get me off my fat ass so I can work harder. So there are very clear evolutionary reasons why empathy exists. But the problem is when empathy misfires, it either becomes hyperactive or it misfires in directing the empathy to the wrong person.

33:04So for example, illegal immigrants, more important than American vets, right? And I can show you many public policies where you have these insane policies, all of which are due to suicidal empathy. So to answer your question, I think that the Western mind is we are kind, tolerant, compassionate, empathetic people. There are people out there, they're Guatemalan, they're Honduran, they're Yemeni, who don't have it as well as we do. Wouldn't it be nice if we open up our doors? So the reflex is a noble one. It's a nice one. But it exists in Unicornia. The real world doesn't operate that way. If you let in people that have a huge hatred of homosexuality, are you going to have an increase in homophobia in your country or a decrease, right?

33:56So I think that's the answer. The answer is misdirected empathy across the West. Is it really that simple? Because it seems like it's happened so rapidly that it seems like a plan, like a plan to create more chaos. So it's happened that the border policy in America is puzzling. It's very, it's baffling because it seems like there's a plan that the flood the country. So it's a sort of a conspiratorial kind of cabal. It seems like there's something going on that's allowing it to happen even though everyone recognizes it's a problem and it's solvable, but they don't solve it. In fact, the United States government is actively trying to stop Texas from enforcing their border.

34:45But I think that's just, so I've often tweeted that the most dangerous weapon in human context is a parasitized mind. I mean, a bomb is dangerous, but it is the human mind that activates that bomb, right? It's a guy with a little mustache that said that Jews are the real problem in the world and I need to get rid of the world of that parasite, right? So parasitic thinking, I mean, one of the reasons I think that that book did so well is because it really explained how all of these parasitic ideas came to a head together. And they were all spawned on university campuses over the past 40 to 80 years.

35:23So one hypothesis is what you said, which is there is kind of a grand scheme that's willfully doing this. Another one is that all of the Western leaders of roughly the same age, I mean within 20 years of each other, are all a product of a Western education, university education, that was completely infected with these dreadful parasitic ideas so that when these leaders go out there and have the power to enact policies, they enact these policies. So my view is slightly different from yours in that I don't think that there is a super mega, you know, willful plan. It's just that all of those Western leaders are the product of a really shitty university system.

36:08Right, but there's obviously two schools of thought, right? There's the left wing school thought and the right wing school thought in regards to this. The right wing school thought wants to seal our borders, wants to secure the borders, wants to stop illegal immigration. The left wing wants, I mean, I don't know what they want because they start talking about border policies being a problem as well. And they start talking about the issue with the border and they try to blame Trump for the issues of border, which is always hilarious. But they're just so with that kind of stuff with blaming, like when Biden blames Trump for things that he clearly did, it's just gaslighting, right?

36:44And it just shows you how little respect they have for people's ability to understand what's actually going on. Well, look suicidal empathy. I mean, we can move beyond the border. How about say in the justice system? Suicidal empathy results in you carrying more about the perpetrator than the victim. That's suicidal empathy, right? Because that argument, so here's how that left this argument works. If a person, especially a criminal of color commits a crime, that's probably because he grew up as a person of color. So he's already been marginalized by the society. So now he commits a crime. You're now double whamming him by putting him in the penal system.

37:23So you need to be more caring. So he's already got 57 previous arrests. Let's give him a 58th chance. So again, I don't think it comes from it comes from really parasitized thinking, right? But those policies are supported by George Soros specifically. And they mean he actively goes after DA's that have the most lenient and ridiculous policies in regards to no cash bail, releasing violent criminals. That seems like that's done on purpose. That's done with intent. But it's done on purpose. So I think where we made the first, you think it's because there is a duplicitous evil, let's cause havoc.

38:01Whereas I think they actually believe that that's the noble position, right? And there should be no borders. There is no illegal human. What kind of bullshit is this? I mean, why do you have a lock on your door? Right? So why is it that I get to have sex with my beautiful wife? But all these homeless guys are sexually starved. That's not fair. That's the parasitism of socialism. We're all equal. Why do you make a lot more money than I do, Joe? That's not fair. I need to have as much money as you, right? So I don't think, I mean, I hope that it's not what you're saying is true, because then that's even more sinister, right?

38:38There is kind of a woohoo. I just think it's people who are misguided in their misdirected nobility, right? I think it's both. You think it's both? Yeah, I think it's both. Maybe it's both. I think there's definitely a lot of misguided people, but I think there's definitely a plan. It's just, it's two organized, the DA system, the DA thing with funding, the far leftist DAs, and then funding someone who opposes them, who's even more ridiculous, that seems to be a plan. Yeah. And he's got a pattern of that, and he seems to enjoy it, enjoy spending his money in that way. But he enjoys it. I think it's like this crazy game.

39:14Right. What do you think about what's going on with your boyfriend Trump these days? Oh, the trials? The trials? Fascinating. You know, I had Mike Baker on who was formerly a CIA, but formerly. But we were talking about that, that no one's ever been charged for something like that before. No one's ever been prosecuted for something like that before. Certainly no political opponents. And my thing is the danger, the people that are on the left that don't understand that now you've set a precedent. You set a terrible precedent. And if Trump does get an office, what is the stop him from going after all of his political enemies in the same exact way?

39:51Are we going to do this now every time someone's in a position of power, whether it's a governor or whether it's a president or what have you? When they have a political opponent, they will hire people to go after that political opponent and Trump up, a bunch of Trump up, no pun intended. A bunch of bullshit charges and drag them through the court so that everybody's, the people that only have a peripheral understanding of what's going on. So, oh my god, he's a criminal. Keep that criminal out of the white house. Like, okay. Do you think a lot of people who historically had been against Trump are now honest enough to see what a sham this whole thing is and are revising their positions or do you think that?

40:30There's quite a few, yes. Really? Yeah, but it takes a lot of bravery to do that. And depending upon your social environment, you know, there's a lot of people that just can't stop. Outside the lines of whatever the ideology, their neighborhood is attached to and their community is attached to. The reason why I asked the questions is because I recently appeared maybe about five, six months ago on a British psychiatrist show. A small show, but I thought he was a really interesting guy. He wanted to talk about how you apply evolution and psychiatry and so on. So I was like, let's do it. Towards the end of the show, or maybe it was even the last question, he said, in your 30 -year career as a behavioral scientist as a professor, what is the singular human phenomenon that has surprised you the most?

41:10Which I thought was an amazing question. I had never been asked before. It's an amazing question. Yeah, it's an amazing one because, you know, I've seen tons of stuff. And so I paused for a moment and then I said, I think it's the inability of people to change their opinions once they are anchored in a position. Yes. And so it wasn't that spirit that I was asking you the question. Have some. Because in my experience, despite the fact that I have a chapter in the parasitic mind on how to seek truth and therefore I'm offering a vaccine against falsehood, I'm actually quite pessimistic for some people who go la la la, I don't want to hear it.

41:46Because they're so anchored, there's no amount of evidence that I could ever show you that can move you a millimeter from your position. That's very disheartening. It's very disheartening. It's very foolish. I always try to tell people, do not be married to your ideas. You should not connect them to you. They are just ideas. They are not you. And if you have supported an idea that you find to be false and you are afraid to admit that you are incorrect, that is far more weak than being incorrect. Because now you know that you are incorrect, but your pride is keeping you from admitting it. But that is beyond foolish and now people will always know that you're going to do that with what people will forgive you if you make mistakes.

42:35People will forgive you if you're incorrect. We have all made mistakes. We are all occasionally incorrect. I mean correct all the time. But I make a big point of not attaching myself to ideas. I will argue them if I think they are correct, but they are not me. You know Patrice O 'Neill had a great quote and he said, you could hold your opinions, but don't let your opinions hold you. Right. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. You just, you got to know that you're not ideas. You're a human being. And it's a challenge when you are faced with the reality of the fact that you've made an error. Especially if you've been bold about it, if you've been condescending to people who disagree with it, if you're ego -tistical in your position, you connected yourself to righteousness and intellect and science and whatever other words you want to throw around that make your opinion more valid than the other people's been.

43:32And then you find out you were wrong. Right. Okay. If we are ever going to trust you again, you have to tell us why you were wrong, how you were wrong, and what that feels like, and what you've learned from this. Because if you don't, if you keep arguing that, you keep doing it, now we have no respect for you. All we know, Fauci's the word, but he's worse than that. I think he's far worse than that. I think he's deceptive. I mean, if the real Anthony Fauci, the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not, if it's not accurate, he would be sued. He would be sued. Right. And just forget about what happened during COVID, just what we know took place during the AIDS crisis.

44:12Everyone should read that book. Everyone should understand this same game plan was played out during the AIDS crisis. And it's a game plan where they're in cohorts with the pharmaceutical drug companies. And they push this thing as being the only remedy, and this is how, and they make tremendous amounts of money. And that's all real. This is not tin foil hat conspiracy wearing shit. That's real. But if you supported him because you thought that he was the science, and then over time, you have realized that, oh my God, they did work with Peter D. Datsick. They did fund through another organization, gain a function research.

44:49He did lie about it. It was talked about in emails. He did contact people who were saying one thing and had them change their position. He did. They did ridicule the lab leak theory when they knew it to be correct. They knew it. They knew they were doing the exact same research on the exact same viruses in that exact same place where it broke out. They knew it. And they lied because they wanted to cover their ass, and we let them get away with it. Yeah. And I'm God we're talking about the inability to admit to a wrongdoing in science because oftentimes when you think about people who are anchored in their positions, you think about political arguments.

45:26You think that somehow you romanticize scientists as being unbiased for veiers and pursuers of the truth, and nothing could be further from the truth. So I'll give you just a couple of examples, historical examples. I mean, of course, Galileo is a perfect example. Copernicus is a great example. Darwin is a great example, but let's look at some other ones that people may not be familiar with. So I think his name, I don't know not sure how you pronounce it, Semmel Weiss. He was the gentleman who arguably has saved more people than anybody else in medicine. Do you have any idea who it is? No, is he the Panasonga?

46:01Not the Panasonga, that's what's his name, Sir Fleming. I think that's Fleming. I think he was a Scottish physician, I felt I was thinking. No, this guy is the gentleman who told other physicians that they should wash their hands. So do you remember? I think he was a Hungarian physician who was noticing that a lot of... There was this huge mortality rate of women as they were giving birth, and so he started running these naturally occurring experiments where you either... So the physician has just worked on a cadaver and then goes and does the obstetrics. So when he said, wash your hands, he died, I think, penniless, destitute, and a mental asylum or something.

46:52And then later people said, oops, he was right. Because they didn't understand bacteria. They didn't understand bacteria. Yeah, that guy, that's it. Semmel Weiss, exactly. Could Dervik particles, is that mean... Cadaver. Cadaver. Every case of childhood fever was caused by a resorption of cadaveric particles. Oh my God. But the blowback against this guy from the senior physicians, I mean this guy was destitute. He died completely unvalidated. I mean, it was only post -hawk that he... There you go, nervous breakdown. So allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown, was committed to an asylum by his colleagues.

47:29In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. Oh God. It's incredible story. Here's another one. I don't remember his name. The truth tester, Jamie, will get it out for us. There's the gentleman who won the Nobel Prize, I'd say in the last 20 or 30 years, for arguing that ulcers are caused by a particular virus, or I don't know if it's a virus or a bacterium, and everybody laughed him out of town. He ended up winning the Nobel Prize. And so I often joke with my students, I say, if people laugh at your ideas and fight them, it's either for one or two reasons. It's a really shitty idea, and it's worthy of that derision, or prepared to go to Stockholm to win the Nobel Prize.

48:11Because, I mean, literally, it's one or the other. Because the Nobel Prize is nothing but a history of people saying what a crack this moron is. No way. Oops. Here's your Nobel Prize doctor. And isn't that because of what we talk about, because of ego, and that ego being connected to your ideas, if someone comes along with a revolutionary idea that's contrary to what you currently believe, you take it as a front to yourself. Exactly. It's horrible. So I give a talk, this is going back to some of my early appearances here where we would talk a lot more evolutionary psychology. I give a talk at two talks at University of Michigan when my first book came out.

48:49It was an academic book. Evolutionary basis of consumption. How do you apply evolutionary psychology and human behavior in general, consumer behavior in particular? I give the talk in the psychology department on a Thursday, and everybody's like, oh yeah, this is gorgeous. Because a lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on. So they were totally appreciative of the fact that you can't really study human behavior without understanding the biological signatures of human behavior. Okay, then I go to the business school the next day, raw school of business.

49:19I give the exact same talk, okay. I couldn't finish a single sentence because all of the professor, and it was usually the professor, it wasn't the doctoral students who were, because the doctoral students are still malleable. Their brains are still being formed. They're happy to listen. It's the senior professor who has spent 30 years arguing that human minds are born tabula rasa, empty -slated, and it's only socialization that teaches the consumer to be how he or she is, that they were really offended by my stuff. So they would constantly interrupt me and berate me, and I remember as a side person, no, my wife wasn't the audience that they should come with me.

49:55And prior to that talk, she had said, oh, I feel really sick. I probably have food poisoning. We later found out that she was pregnant with our first daughter. So there's both a really bad memory and a really good memory associated with the University of Michigan. So what was their position when you were saying this? Biology does not exist. So they were interrupting you? Non -stop. I probably got through, so let's say, I don't remember the number of slides. Let's say I had 30 slides. I maybe got to slide 10. Because here's first question. If everything is due to evolutionary pressures, how do you explain homosexuality then?

50:31If everything is due to survival instinct, how do you explain suicide then? By the way, there are evolutionary explanations for suicide and homosexuality. Humans are sexually reproducing species, even though chased monks exist. People do have a survival instinct, even though some people commit suicide. Men are taller than women, even though you're and Julie is taller than your Uncle Bob. So what happens with people in terms of a cognitive obstacle? They take a singular datum as proof that a statement that is true of the population level has been violated. It hasn't. Every single WNBA player is taller than most men.

51:09That does not invalidate the fact that men are taller than women. So all of the morons in the University of Michigan were also coming to that kind of stuff. Because they didn't like the idea to our earlier discussion that we've had on the show. A lot of people don't like the idea that we are biologically determined. They think that that's a form of you're just an executor of your genes. But that's a wrong view, by the way, because everything is an interaction between your genes and the environment. Even specific genes get turned on as a function of the environment. So the fact that you believe that we have biological imperatives that guide our behavior doesn't make us blind executor our genes.

51:50Right. And that's what's important. But the idea that everyone is born a blank slate is so silly. Because there's children that don't even grow up with their parents that have traits that their parents have. Okay. And also happen to have talents that their parents have for some strange reason. And call their dog the same name. There's a lot of weirdness to it. There's a lot of weirdness to memory, like genetic memory, like whoever you are. It's not as simple as you were a baby, you started off clear and blank. That's not real. We learn things somehow or another through some under. I guess it's explored, but not quite understood process.

52:36And this process even encourages things like racism. There's even detrimental ideas that are inherited through children that have been proven. But they don't know exactly the mechanism, right? So I, because you mentioned memory. So maybe I could talk about how you study memory from an evolutionary perspective. Please. So is that where can I ask you this before I start? Do you think that's where like a videophobia, a racneophobia and things like that come from? Yes. So there is actually a lot of research looking at the evolutionary roots of phobia. That's studied in evolutionary clinical psychology and in Darwinian psychiatry.

53:13The ones for me that are fascinating are a videophobia and racneophobia, fear of snakes and fear of spiders. Because that evolutionarily makes sense. Exactly. If you either got bitten survived or you saw someone get bitten or you see a spider and you're like, oh shit. But that's why by the way, you don't go see your clinical psychologist because you have a fear of guns or fears of cars. Even though cars and guns kill a lot more people. It's spiders. Exactly. If you go, if you study the manifestations of clinical cases of phobia, they're exactly what you're saying. Because you know from doing fear factor, we would encounter people that had both of those.

53:54And man, when you see it in real life, it's like a person's possessed by a demon. It's crazy. When you see like high level of videophobia, people see snakes. Their whole body starts shaking. They can't keep their hands still. It's crazy, man. It's not like, you know, I see a dog, let's say a scary dog. Whoa. You live in that dog. It's not like that. It's like your whole body. By the way, I actually, I don't think it's at the clinical level. But in the parasitic mind in chapter one, I talk about the maladaptive, well maybe adoptive phobia that I have of mosquitoes. So if, so early in, in my marriage to my wife, maybe that was one of the best ways to test if she'd, she'd go the, the whole route with me is we were traveling to Antiga.

54:41And we had the misfortune of some, you know, it's in the Caribbean. There are a lot of mosquitoes. And there are a couple of mosquitoes got in. I spent with her, with her complete patients, probably told two in the morning, tracking and killing every single mosquito in that condo. Because the thought of that disgusting monstrous pig sucking the blood out of me was just unbearable. And so I, I mean, I literally will turn into a little girl if we see a mosquito in the house. I cannot go on with my day. I can't watch TV. I can't train. The mosquito must die. Now, in a sense, that's perfectly adoptive because we know that by far, if you add up the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined else.

55:28It's not even a minuscule. There's not another thing that kills people as much as mosquitoes. Right. So that's perfectly adoptive. But do you want me to go to the memory stuff? Sure. So think about, say, a squirrel. It has evolved a memory that allows it to remember the spatial location in your backyard where it stores caches of food so that it has its own memory bias. So that even though it won't detected by smell, because let's say in Montreal, it's under four feet of snow. It has a mental map so that it perfectly knows where it hid everything. Now, the human memory has evolved to solve different problems.

56:08So then if you are a memory researcher studying memory from an evolutionary perspective, you would say, well, what would the human memory solve as an adaptive problem? So let me give you one such example. So if I show you a bunch of photos of people, images of faces, and I put a descriptor next to each one where I tag that person as a social cheater or not a cheater. So what does social cheating means? Lack of reciprocation. So if I do something for you, then you will cheat and recant and not I scratch your back, but you let's scratch your back. Now, that information about the personal characteristic of that individual is an evolutionarily important datum.

56:52So now I'm going to show you all these people. I control for their good looks. So I don't put all of the cheaters as being good looking and all of them. Because then you might remember them because they were good looking, not because they were cheaters. So I put this array of faces and then later I ask you to remember whether you'd seen that face or not. And people end up remembering at a much higher level any face that had been tagged as being a social cheater. Do you follow? Yeah. Therefore, your perceptual system works in cahoots with your memory system to pay attention more to information that is evolutionarily relevant so that I'm more likely to recall it and remember it.

57:36So that would be an example of how you would apply the evolutionary lens to study how our memory operates. Here's another example. Not in the case of social dynamics, but in the case of remembering where food's it. So if you ask people to go through a maze of food and then ask them to remember where particular foods are, they're much more likely to remember the locations of high calorie foods. So in this case, in this case, it's not that I have a domain general mechanism that just learns where things are. There is a sensorial bias to me being more likely to remember the location of something if it is evolutionarily relevant.

58:17And there are many, many other such examples. So that would be a wonderful demonstration of how the evolutionary lens adds a whole layer of explanatory power to what typically memory researchers have done, which is usually they study memory as just the domain general mechanistic system. Whereas the evolutionary psychologist says, no, no, but why did that mechanism evolve to be of that form? Right, and why do animals have memories even if they're not growing up with their parents? How do they know to pee on fire hydrants? Exactly. Where are they getting this from? There's something going on there.

58:50How do they know to go after certain animals? I have a golden retriever. He loves all dogs, like little dogs, like the size of a car. I just met him, yeah. I mean, he's much more interested in people than he is, but he's never mean. But if Carl was a squirrel that size, he would be dead. So he knows the difference between something that's small, that's a dog, that's just tolerated, you know, oh, how are you doing, buddy? Or something that's that big that's a squirrel, which is murder. I'm going to murder that thing. Okay, you said murder. Yeah, that led me because I was a murderer. He's a squirrel murderer, you know, fuck.

59:22You know what is a, what's a group of crows called a murder? A murder. So I'm going to tell you now about another study and maybe Jamie can pull it off. I think it's a guy at University of Washington, maybe. I hope I'm not wrong. Where he wanted to see whether crows remember the face of a really nasty guy so that they can, you know, if he then comes again, they'll start calling. Right, right. And he kind of took like an image of the face and then he would either wear it or not. And then he would, I don't remember what the dependent measure was, but it was something to the effect of. Then he's studying, there you go.

1:00:01I mean, I love it. I love having Jamie. So this guy had a mean face and he did mean things and the crows recognized him. And so then it starts spreading to the entire group where they exactly know you see this face. Remember it. He's a fucker. Oh, that makes sense. Crows are insanely smart. Oh, they're smarter than most people. Have you seen the ones from, I think, New Caledonia that do all the stuff with the, maybe Jamie could pull that one out? I think that's the smartest of all the, that avian species. They can take rocks and like a thousand different things to get food out of things that I guarantee you and I would sit there for 18 hours.

1:00:42And we wouldn't crack that mystery. Yeah, they figured out how to use tools to get other tools to extract food. Yeah, there you go. There you go. It's amazing. It's unbelievable. They put rocks in there to raise the water level. I mean, a little kid wouldn't even figure that out. I mean, they're fucking smart, man. Look at this. Look at this. It's crazy. Well, I love it. It's also their brains are so small, which really is really confusing. Bird brain. Yeah. It's really confusing. Like large brains don't, I mean, we don't really know how intelligent an animal is unless we see it manipulate its environment or communicate.

1:01:18Yeah. Because it's possible that elephants are insanely smart. They have immense memories. Their memories are nuts. Like they get reunited with their calves like 20 years later. And they run and embrace each other. And it's just joyous. When elephants die, they mourn. They mourn the death. They have huge brains. But it's also a huge animal. But it doesn't manipulate its environments. We don't respect it. Sort of like the way the reason why dolphins are in sea world. It's because that's the literal slavery. It's slavery of probably a parallel or if not more intellectual species. Yeah. Something with a cerebral cortex, 40 % larger than a human beings.

1:01:58Something that communicates in a language that we can't decipher. Something that has different dialects. Something that operates in these very tight social groups. But they do some rough sex. I don't know if you're... Well, they do. They're pretty rough. And dolphins are horrible. Dolphins are... They kill their babies. There's no hashtag me, too, with the dolphins. Let me tell you. It's worse than that. Dolphins, when they find a female and she has a child, if he has not had sex with that dolphin female, that child's not here. So he'll kill their child. Lions do the same. But what they'll do is the females will have a sex with as many dolphins as they care.

1:02:35So you don't know who's kidded is. That's it. So they don't kill the baby. There you go. Which is wild. There you go. I mean, but that's how you live when there's no doors. You're in the ocean. There's no doors. Open, open, open. Wild. It's just why, y 'all. That's just murder soup. You said the manipulate the environment. So have you heard of the Bauer bird? Do you know what that is? No. So the Bauer bird, maybe... Sorry, I'm... How do you spell it? B -O -W -E -R. So the Bauer bird creates a Bauer, which is a structure that serves no purpose other than demonstrating my artistic... There you go.

1:03:17Really? So... By the way, you know what I'm loving about today's show? It's like, I feel like I'm back to lecturing my evolutionary psychology stuff. Good. I need a glass. So look what he's doing. You see? So let me explain what's happening here, unless you want to watch it first. No, please explain. So what? It's one of the only species other than humans that uses artistic ability as a mating queue. Right? So, right? Picasso, short little guy, bald, ugly. He's got a huge lineup of hot women who want to have sex with him because he's Picasso. That's what the Bauer bird is doing. He's saying, look at how architecturally savvy I am.

1:03:55Look how symmetric my Bauer bird is. Not only that, by the way. Oh, there you go. Okay, she said, you're good enough. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. You know, excellent trophies. So now. But you saw all those other blue things? Yes. Okay, so if you travel to Australia, in certain regions, there are signs from the government saying, if you are women, don't be careful. Don't wear shiny things on your head. Why? Because these assholes will come at you, attack the women's head, steal the shiny things so that they could use the shiny things in their Bauer to attract the ladies. Wow. Now, that's smart.

1:04:35That's smarter than most men. Not really. But I see what you're saying. But look at this setup, man. This guy's got this dope pad. It's got like a bachelor pad with flowers out in front, like ladies. Don't you like flowers? No, that was the girl. That was the girl. That was the girl. Yeah, that's the girl. Usually in avion species, the drab one is the girl and the flashy one is the guy. Right. Like, nobody gives a fuck about female flamingos. Yeah. Fuck out of here. Female flamingos. What am I going to do with that? I need a dude. Exactly. Straight around. Exactly. If you've got flamingos, man, you're a baller.

1:05:11That's a move, right? Have a flamingo in your yard. That's what you're going to do. So you only have a... I'm thinking of peacock. You only have a dog? I'm thinking of peacock. I'm doing the whole thing like I'm a peacock, but I'm thinking of saying flamingo. Yeah, I only have a dog. I have chickens too. By the way, like those exotic ones? No. Or just regular chicken. But here's the... I'm scared to ask this. They become pets. You don't eat them, right? No, I don't. I will have somebody fucks around. Somebody tries to hurt somebody. I'll grab a little... They're little dinosaurs. When one of them was younger, this is my old group of chickens that I had when my youngest daughter was a baby.

1:05:51They were pecking her feet. And there's this one county chicken that we had. I feel like this is going to be a Christine no moment? No, no, no. Nobody died. Unfortunately, they all did. They all coyotes got them. Oh. And dogs. Long story. Anyway, point is, I go, no, she's trying to eat the baby's feet. Like, you got to understand. This is not... This is not like she thinks that's a worm. She thinks she can get away with eating. They eat each other. They fucking peck at each other. They... They'll... They'll murder a mouse. Have you never seen a chicken and a mouse together? Who? Really? We had a fence.

1:06:27And this is very unfortunate. But we had a fence that was glass. And one of the side effects of this glass fence was hawks. And hawks would be swooping down and trying to get a rat or some other rodent or something. And they had bam. Nose dive into this glass. And we lost like three hawks. I'm like, this is fucked up. You know, I was like, maybe we should go back to the other fence. My wife was like, fuck you. I like this fence. So it was... It was one of those conversations where we were like... Like, this seems like it's our fault that these hawks die. Right. So one of them made it. One of them lived and they took the hawk and they put it in like a big wash machine box and contacted this wildlife rescue thing.

1:07:12And they said, okay, if you're going to have it because we're not open until Monday, you've got to feed it thing. So what do you feed it? So you have to go to the pet store. They get these things called pinkies. And when pinkies are just baby mice. They're baby mice that have... They're not going to live. They're separated from their mother. You feed them to reptiles. Okay. It's gross. Right. And so the hawk ate most of them. But he did need one. So they were like, we're going to raise it. I go listen, you can't just do that. You can't just like feed a bunch of these little things to this giant raptor.

1:07:43And then say, now we're going to take this one that survived and raise it. First of all, the nightmares that little fucker would have. But second of all, it's not viable. It's not going to... Right. It's not going to live. Yeah. I go, let's just give it to the chickens. So I brought it outside and I put it in the chickens cage. Run chicken grabs it as fast as I've ever seen a chicken move. And then every other chicken runs after that chicken and tries to get it away from her. Is it a defensive thing or they want to eat it? They want to eat it. Okay. And so she has it in her mouth and they're trying to steal it from her and they just tear it apart and devour it like dinosaurs.

1:08:20Wow. Like it's so crazy watching them kill each other. So I'm not feeling so guilty at the genocide of chicken that I eat. It's still fucked up because it's the soul of the animal is not being expressed as nature intended. The soul, the animal should be a chicken. It's not that you shouldn't eat chickens. But chickens should live as chickens. They should wander around and pick bugs and eat worms and do all the things that chickens love doing. To have a chicken just in a box where it's entire existence. You're stealing souls. Like you're doing something fucked up that's way more fucked up than just raising a farm.

1:08:55If you got cows and they're on a pasture and every day they're just being cows. And then one day you take them in the stall and bang. This thing goes into their brain and they're dead. That is way less evil. That is way more humane than what's going to happen to them in the wild. What are they going to do? They're going to either freeze to death or starve to death or get torn apart by wolves. Torn apart. If you're going to have cows everywhere and people want to reintroduce wolves everywhere, congratulations. You've got wild kingdom. You've got wild kingdom happening in your neighborhood. If that's what you want.

1:09:29And if you don't want people to eat cows anymore, okay, what are you going to do with the cows? Are you going to sterilize them? Are you going to keep a certain amount? Are you going to play God with cows? Are you going to say the cows can't breed? Are you going to give the boys cows birth control? What are you going to do? How are you going to do? Oh, you're going to introduce predators. Okay. How are you going to keep kids from those predators? How are you going to keep dogs from those predators? Have you thought about this? Now you haven't. There's people that are reintroducing grizzly bears to Washington as we speak.

1:09:57We're going to reintroduce the things that we killed because they killed everybody. We're so smart. It's bananas. These people are out of their fucking minds. And they don't have a real understanding of actual nature. The horrible thing is this commodization of nature. There's taking animals and factory farming them in these horrific conditions where it's illegal to film. It's illegal to have ag gag laws. Because it's so traumatic. Because it's so traumatic and so horrific you would affect the industry. No, I agree. That's what's wrong with eating meat. Being a part of the natural cycle of life is what made humans human.

1:10:41If you want the most nutrients, it comes from animal protein. There's a reason why it's so cherished. I made, not in the, using the same words, but I've made roughly the same argument when the tofu brigade came after me. Because I was offering some evolutionary reasons for why we have to have animal protein as part of our diets. And they were so pissed at me because they thought it was very hypocritical that on the one hand I could share so many tweets and posts demonstrating how much I love animals. And then in another photo I show some stake or here's what my life is cooking. And that to them was completely incongruous and was proof of my moral degeneracy.

1:11:20And then I actually created two sad truth clips where I was really demonstrating the evolutionary reasons. You know, archaeological data, dental data, physiognomic data, anthropological data, and they just wouldn't have it. You're a hypocrite. You can't love an animal and eat an animal. So I'm glad that you... Well, there's a real problem with that too. And this is something that people dismiss very openly, but I don't think we should. I think plants are alive. And I don't think they're just alive in a way that we can feel completely fine about growing them in this insane monocrop agriculture place and pouring industrial grade fertilizer and pesticides all over them.

1:12:03I think they're a thing that thinks. Yeah. I think they're a thing that communicates with their environment, but they just do it in a way that we don't understand. They do it through mycelium. They arrange resources. They allocate resources towards plants that need them more. Have you seen the sort of a network of communication? I was going to say, have you seen the networks of fungi? Yes. Yes. I had Paul Stammett in the podcast a couple of times and he's a mycologist and just a brilliant guy and he really explains it all so well. It's so mind -blowing though, the relationship that the mycelium have with the nutrients in the earth and that it's...

1:12:43The earth is not dirt. It's like a living environment. It's this environment that they've ruined through monocrop agriculture. Yeah. And that's what's wrong with farming. It's not farming. Farming is a perfect way to balance an ecosystem. When those people do it the right way, like those people from white oak's pastures or polyface farms, regenerative agricultural people, there's like zero carbon footprint of what they do. And in fact, it's sequester's carbon. You're growing things. It's manure and cows and it's all working together and the chickens are free -ranging and it's like... It's nature just in a contained environment.

1:13:21But that's normal. Have you mentioned the word soil? So it made me think about... Have you seen the research on... I can't remember what the term is, but something like soil DNA. I guess the pioneer is... I think he's Danish. Either Danish or Swedish. I think Danish. And basically they go to these steps that are really, really... Maybe not Mongolian steps, but somewhere where you expect to find a lot of the typical fossil remains and so on. But what they now do is they just do this excavation of soil. In the same way that people who study ice, you know how they can bore and then they can date the various ice.

1:14:00So they do something similar where they kind of harvest tons of soil and they're then able to isolate DNA of mammoths. Have you seen some of the stuff? Yes, I have. Yeah. That's my blowing. Mine blowing. Unbelievable. Yeah. I actually thought about inviting that guy on my show. Maybe you should have him on your show. Yeah, that sounds fast. I need to talk about... It really is so interesting when you just think about... That there's the complex interaction between everything on Earth. The plants that we literally need plants to create oxygen for us and they're consuming more carbon. But that's one of the craziest things about Ginghis Khan.

1:14:40When Ginghis Khan lived, they killed so many people that places reforested and they lowered the carbon footprint of Earth. That's a real thing. So genocide was green. Yeah, that was green. If you looked at... Well, there's also like different ways... Dan Carlin on Hardcore History has the most amazing series. It's called Wrath of the Khan. I think you have to buy it on his website. But it's really cheap. It's like a dollar in episode or something. And it's fucking amazing. It's amazing. And I think it's a three -piece thing. Is it a three -piece series on Jenghis Khan? It's the correct way to say it.

1:15:18Timo Ging was his real name. And what he did in the rise... That guy spread some genes. Jesus, Louise. That guy was busy. That guy, get after it. I mean, he spread some genes and killed some fucking people. Killed 10 % of the population of Earth. Yeah. It wasn't that much? Yeah. Okay, I don't know. It was that much. 10%. Wow. Yeah. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 70 million people. They don't know exactly. There is a genocide. Bro. You ain't a kid. But earlier you said, oh, how everything is connected, which leads me to a concept which I don't think I've ever discussed on my 10 shows on your podcast.

1:15:51This concept... Consilience. Have you heard that term before? Sure. Yes. Like being conciliatory? No, no. It doesn't mean that all. Consilience comes from... I mean, it doesn't come from him, but he kind of reintroduced it into the lexicon. Do you know who E .O. Wilson is? I've heard the name. E .O. Wilson is a... He just recently passed away at the, maybe, age of 90. I just read his autobiography called Naturalist, Amazing, autobiography. He was a Harvard entomologist and a strong proponent of social biology, applying biology to studies, social systems, and so on. And he was part of the original culture wars where a lot of his colleagues hated him because he was arguing that biology affects human behavior.

1:16:33E .O. Wilson, check him out. He's unbelievable. Well, in the late 90s, he wrote a book called Consilience, Unity of Knowledge. And that became one of the foundational books in how I did my academic career, which is Consilience is trying to unify the spirit areas of human endeavor that you typically wouldn't think should be linked together. So, you could link the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities through the Consilience of Evolutionary Theory because you could study psychology using evolutionary theory. Of course, you could study biology using evolutionary theory or you could study aesthetics, which is in the humanities using evolutionary theory.

1:17:17So that became a really important concept in my own work because my brain operates as a synthetic machine. I like to synthesize across, so one of the reasons why I decided early on to break out of just being an academic, because I couldn't see myself as a stay in your lane professor. I need to try to, so coming on Joe Rogan is going to allow me to share ideas and synthesize things with millions of people rather than writing another academic paper that if I'm lucky will be read by 50 people and cited by 12. And so, but before you came on though, when you came on, being on the show is not that problematic.

1:17:59I mean, people wouldn't criticize being on the show because nobody even knew what it was. Well, that's true. Once they did know what it was, people looked down at it, so I don't know if I've ever shared the story before, and even if I have it's worth repeating, I discussed this in the personal mind. I had been invited to Stanford in 2017 to speak at their business school, a very academic scientific talk on how to apply evolutionary theory blah, blah, blah. So that my host, who's a fellow, he's a consumer psychologist, invited me out to dinner the night before, and I think after I was going there, I think I was flying down to the time you were in Southern California still, 2017, you were in Southern, yeah, and I was going to do your show, I think.

1:18:42So during dinner, he said, oh, so I hear you, you know, you go off and on Joe Rogan's show. I said, oh, yeah, yeah, he goes, yeah, well, you know, we don't condone that at Stanford, very kind of hot. I said, you don't condone what? He goes, well, we don't do our research so that it could be sexy enough for it to appear so I could talk about on Joe Rogan. So I said, well, I don't do the research also that I can appear on Joe Rogan, but if I can publish a paper in an academic journal and then go on Joe Rogan and hopefully excite people about evolutionary psychology and psychology of decision making, isn't that better than just having my wife and mother read the paper?

1:19:22And he didn't like that. He thought, very, whereas now I, not that many, but I'll get a lot more professors who will write to me saying, can you get me on Joe Rogan? Well, that's good. You know, but that speaks to how patents change, right? Yeah, well, it's just, you know, it's so easy to label somebody. It's so easy to label a platform or, you know, like podcasting in general that it's frivolous, especially if you live in the academic world. But it's just an opportunity to talk about stuff. And if I'm talking to someone about evolutionary psychology or if I'm talking to someone about coal mining, like I just want to know what's going on.

1:20:05Well, I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass or, you know, be ingratiating or anything, but I bet if there was a currency, a metric to measure how much you've affected the intellectual ecosystem versus your average well -published professor, I would put my money on you. Not because you were the creator of the knowledge, but because boy, are you the biggest disseminator of knowledge, right? So, right. Well, I'm just lucky, right? And a big part of the luck is that I have the fortune to talk to these people because most people just don't have access to people like you. Like, if I want to sit down with a guy like you for three hours, like if I didn't have a podcast, that would be a tough sell.

1:20:48Like, hey, God, can you put your phone away and just you and me just stare at each other for three hours and have a conversation. But this is for whatever reason, I probably spend more time individually talking to people this way than any other way because I do so many of these things. Do you think before you started this that there were indicators that bore you such a good conversation with us, you know how to hold? Or it came as a surprise to you that it would be so successful. Oh, it's a hundred percent surprise. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to do it because I thought it'd be fun. That was it.

1:21:23There's a chapter in the book Life as a playground. Oh, yeah. Just live every science is play, right? What science, it's one big puzzle that you're trying to identify which variable meaningfully relate to other variables. Yeah. So it's a form of puzzle making, right? So, you know, so actually there's research that shows that if you marry someone that scores similar to you on the adult playfulness scale, I don't remember the time, right? Some people score very high on that, probably you do, I know that I do. If you then match up with someone who scores very highly like you do, assertatively, that's a very big predictor of you having a successful union.

1:22:07That makes sense. Yeah, you don't want to be with someone who hates jokes, especially if you're a professional comic. And if you're funny and they're not funny, that's probably not as fun, that's probably boring. But what if you had to choose between the person that you're with is also very funny or at least laugh at your joke. You could only have one of the two. So she's either a positive receptacle to your humor or she goes toe to toe with you and being as funny. Which one would you prefer? I take toe to toe with me as funny. Yeah. I don't need someone to think I'm funny. I got plenty of people.

1:22:43Well, the audience. Yeah. I don't need a wife. My wife doesn't have to have the same taste as me, even in me. Yeah. I don't care. I don't care if you like different. Like they listen to music that I think is garbage. And I'm like, God. Can't I care to share something? No. I don't want to be mean. I mean, it just, they listen to great stuff too. We like a lot of, they've introduced me to Taylor Swift. But my daughter is a swifty. But they play some Taylor Swift. I'm like, this was not bad. But the point is it's like, you don't have to like the same things as I like. That's stupid. That's stupid.

1:23:19You know? She likes football. I don't even know the rules. I don't know what's going on. It's fun to watch. Do you seriously don't know football? I barely know what's happening. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So I barely know what's happening. I have friends that are like Aaron Rogers, my friend. I don't know what the fuck's going on. So I hear you're a good subject. You throw the ball. Yeah. And he's really good at that shit. He's a smart guy. He's a very interesting guy. Speaking of athletes, last time I came on the show, I did apparently a clip when viral from our conversation where I was kind of hailing the cosmic justice of why it was important for Messi to win the World Cup.

1:23:53Remember that? Yes, you did say that. So listen, speaking of life as a playground and have, you know, scoring high on openness and all the things that I think you do very well. And I'd like to think that I do too. About a maybe a week or two after I appeared on your show last year, I get an email. You know, dear, whatever, Professor Sad, my name is, I guess I could say his name because I'm going to, you know, my name is your gay mass. I am the majority owner of Inter Miami. I'm a fan, whatever. I know that you have a deep appreciation for Messi. Whenever you'd like to come to a game, you'll be my personal guest.

1:24:34Oh shit. Now, think about this. This geeky professor who could have lived his life just doing his little narrow stuff, right? You know, I'm good in my ecosystem. A few other professors care about my work or go out there, grab life by the balls, the balls and, and live it fully and connect and so on, right? So I call my wife over. I say, I'm James Bond. I mean, in what world? So in what world is it possible for, you know, the Lebanese professor, an evolutionary theory to get an email from the majority owner. So September 27th or 28th, I'm on a flight down to Miami. They're playing in the US Open Cup.

1:25:27It turns out that Messi was injured so he didn't play. I'm supposed to meet him. I bring him copies of my book sign, even the Spanish version of the parasitic mind because you only read Spanish. He ends up not being there because he's not playing and so on. I don't, I mean, he's standing right next to me, but I didn't get to meet him really. I meet Zinedine Zidane, who was the greatest French player of all time and World Cup winner right there in the president's lodge. David Beckham, hang out with him. Now, I'm not saying these to drop names. Oh, look, I know these cool people, but I'm saying if I didn't have that open spirit where I didn't view my world as only being restricted to the ecosystem of academia.

1:26:04If I didn't come on Joe Rogan that opened me up to a whole new audience, all of those people would have never heard of my work. If I only published peer -reviewed papers rather than publishing books, which by the way, in academia, you published trade books that's looked down upon. How is that looked down upon? If you publish a book that can be read by 300 ,000 people, how is that not better than publishing an academic paper that's read by three people? But that one is pure. It's academic. That other one is vulgar and popularizer. Yeah. It's grotesque. It's stupid. It is stupid. And unfortunately, stupid can also be really smart.

1:26:38Really smart people can be stupid. Well, George Orwell said, I'm paraphrasing him, said it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas. Well, in this country, there's a lot of examples that you could point to that would indicate that would be correct. You're right. It's just, you could be really dumb and also be smart as shit in your discipline. And again, it just boils down. A lot of it is male ego. That's a big part of the problem with a lot of these ideas that people hold so sacred. The fascinating one for me with you is this reluctance to accept that there's other factors for the development of a human personality.

1:27:18Right. And that it's not a blank slate. Like, that seems interesting. And if I was a teacher that was teaching something contrary to that, I would want to know this. Yeah. And now, I know that I've been teaching nonsense. And I have to call like 50 ,000 students over the last 20 years. Hey, go, hey guys, remember that shit that I told you? Yeah. It turns out, I thought it was true. What would you do? That's got to be horrible for them. When new information comes out that's irrefutable, some new scanning, new thing that shows that this thing that we had always held to be true, that you've taught in classes, that you've won awards for.

1:27:57It's nonsense. Yeah. So there's a great, so my favorite quote, and maybe Jamie could pull it out by JBS Haldane. JBS Haldane was an evolutionary geneticist, but it was also known for having these beautiful, quotable quips. And so here, the quote in question, I have it in the last chapter of the consuming instinct, 2011 book. He's talking about the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory. So I'm paraphrasing now what his stages are. Stage one, oh, this is complete rubbish bullshit. Stage two, well, this may be true, but largely unimportant. Stage three, well, this is definitely true, but it's probably not actionable.

1:28:42Stage four, oh, I always said so, right? So what happens is you go through these phases, and if you're dogged enough, as I was, then the people who laughed at you and stayed... Oh, there you go. This is worthless nonsense. This is worthless nonsense. This is an interesting, but perverse point of view. This is true, but quite unimportant. I always said so, perfect. And I always, I've always said that the government's position on COVID vaccine. That's exactly right. By the way, but here's the funny personal anecdote. I am a pathological email hoarder, meaning that I never get rid of emails, because I always think, what if I ever need whatever's contained in that email?

1:29:24Right. So I have emails from people who, let's say, had taken a very negative position in stage one, your evolutionary psychology stuff is bullshit. I have that email. It's 2001, and I have the email from 2019, when you say, dear God, we would be honored if you would be the plenary speaker. I'm like, oh, but what happened to I was a bullshitter in 2001? Oh, wow. So you just have to be dogged. You have to collect the evidence. And hopefully, here's my position as an outsider. How could you know, like, why would you say it's a blank slate? How could you know? And why would you ignore all this interesting information that we now know about the role that your parents play?

1:30:13Because the blank slate is very hopeful, right? Because the blank slate, I think it was, I came up with this Watson, the behaviors, who said that, you know, give me 12 children. I could turn any one of them into a doctor, into a beggar, into a lawyer, meaning that everybody is infinitely malleable. Now, that's a hopeful message if I'm a parent, right? If I create a child, you mean you're telling me that he's got equal chance to be Michael Jordan or Leonardo Messi. If only I have the right schedule of reinforcement of how to hug him and went to hug him. That's hopeful. I don't want to be told that there is something innate about my child that guarantees that he will never be the next Michael Jordan.

1:30:52So, I think the message, the blank slate message, doesn't originally start as just the quacky idea. It's a noble idea, perfectly rooted in bullshit, but it's a noble idea. Here's another example of a noble idea. Franz Boas was a actually Jewish anthropologist at Columbia University about 100 years ago who was the one who developed cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals. So, biology doesn't matter in explaining cultural phenomena because every culture is uniquely distinct. Now, the reason why he proposed that idea is because many nasty folks had misused biology and evolutionary theory and therefore by him eradicating biology from the study of anthropology, he was hopefully doing a noble thing.

1:31:38But you can't kill truth in the service of a goal, right? So, a lot of these guys, it's not to our earlier conversation. They are not conspiratorial in spreading bullshit. They believe that by holding those positions, they're creating the proper utopia. But it's rooted in bullshit.

1:31:59The reluctance to change one's opinion is always a very unfortunate thing to witness. I hear you. What's the, can you think of one or two things that you remember most where you've done 180 on that you'd like to share? I don't know if I've done real 180s. Or a sizable shift. You know, I used dumb ones. Bigfoot's a real dumb one. I used to leave them bigfoot. But you were eight or last Saturday? Oh, like pretty recently. Within the last two decades. And what made you switch? Talking to bigfoot people. And thinking and seeing that they're happy. Yeah, there's something wrong with them. Unfortunately, I used to have a joke about it.

1:32:41Here's one thing you don't find when you go looking for bigfoot, black people. You're more likely to find bigfoot than you are black people looking for bigfoot. It's all a bunch of unfuckable white dudes. Unfuckable white dudes out camping. And there's a mystery. There's a thing that they want to believe. And there's almost no evidence. Almost no evidence. There's some weird stuff like footprints with dermal ridges, but you can fake that. It could be bullshit. Does that apply to the other class lockness monster also you don't believe? Well, the lockness monster is most likely nonsense. Or maybe it could be a big fish or something like that.

1:33:17But the actual photo of the lockness monster is a hoax that's been proven to be a hoax. They know the guy who took it. They know how he did it. He used a cardboard cutout or something like that or some, you know, some cutout. He put it in the water and then took a photo. It was bullshit. It's probably, I mean, it could be a sturgeon. It could be some large fish. I think there's a lot of theories on it. But they've done scans of the lock. They've never found anything. It's certainly not a population of them. Right. They can stay alive for this long. They have to be breeding. Like how many of them?

1:33:46What are they eating? How big is this? What are you talking about? The bigfoot thing, I think, was real. And I think it was real in the human imagination. And it was real in terms of like modern human beings encountered these things. And it's a real animal called Gigantopithecus. And it really did exist in Asia. And if human beings were coming across the bearing land bridge, it's very likely that they were there too. They all existed in the same environment and in the same time period. And this fucking thing is in like Native American history. They have a large number of names for this. They don't have dragons.

1:34:25They don't have crazy shit that doesn't exist. They have a myth of this gigantic hairy ape that lives in the woods. And I think it did. I think it did probably until, you know, who knows how many thousands and thousands of years ago. But the idea of one being around today, almost no evidence, almost nothing. Just visual bullshit, blurry bullshit, footprints that maybe, I don't know, you could fake that. You could fake a footprint. It's not a fucking fake Ferrari. You know, it's not like complicated to fake a footprint. You know, oh, you don't understand about the amount of weight there has to be put.

1:35:04It says who? Says who? Says you. Says you. A guy who wants to believe in Bigfoot. So bad. Right. They want to believe so bad. It is a religion. It's a religion. So what do you think is the psychological mechanism that causes them to want to? It's because there is kind of a mystery and all the things that are out there that we can't explain. Here's the thing, if Bigfoot was real, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as a killer will. Not nearly as interesting. If Bigfoot is just as big, stupid, monkey that lives in the woods and just shits all over himself and fucking eats campers, that wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

1:35:41It's this super intelligent creature that lives in the water that saves people. It saves people. You know, before we were outside, I was talking to some of your crew and I was telling them that someone had asked me, oh, do you? Actually, it was the border agent as I was coming through to Austin. He asked, why am I coming? I said, oh, I'm coming through your show. He says, oh, do you get like a list of things that you talk about? I said, oh, it's exactly not. It's exactly the opposite of that. And so to that point, I wouldn't have ever. I didn't have in my bingo card the defecation of Bigfoot in forests.

1:36:13Yeah. Like, what is he doing up there? You stinky bitch. Like, come on. The idea that no one has taken real good footage in this day and age with the amount of hikers and campers and people that are in the woods and people that are into photography and nature photography and trail cameras. Trail cameras are everywhere. They're over water holes. They're everywhere. So what's the mechanism by which, I mean, you know, you listed the name of the animal that you've taken. I can't do a bit of it. Exactly. So you obviously have a lot of these tidbit information. Are you a voracious reader or how do you get your source of information?

1:36:49Well, I've read an embarrassing amount of books on Bigfoot. No, but in general. But in general, a lot of audiobooks. You do a lot of audio. The best way for me to, like, I can do that while I'm working out. I can do that while I'm in the sauna. I can do that when I'm in the car. Okay. So that, to me, it's like, that's a couple of hours of taking in information. Beautiful. Where I would just ordinarily just like lifting weights. But you don't, you don't love the feeling of grabbing above. I do. But I'm also so busy that, to me, it's like the best way to consume ideas. I feel like reading a book is 100 % listening to an audiobook is 80 to 90%.

1:37:26Oh, okay. I don't think it's the same thing. It's too easy to gloss over. I've never an audiobook book. I've only read. I haven't even read an electronic book. Really? I love paper. I love paper. I'm a pathological book hoarder. Do you write on paper or do you type it out? I type it out. So now I type. Sometimes I'll take little notes. I'm sitting at the cafe. I have an idea for something I want to do. So I'll write it and then I'll, but if I'm writing a book, it's always on the computer. There's no written anymore. And I've noticed that my penmanship has really gotten worse. I don't know if...

1:38:04Oh, my dog shit. Yeah, exactly. Me too. It's terrible. But I'm a voracious reader. And one of the things that stresses me the most is in my personal library, in my study, I've got, you know, literally hundreds and hundreds of books. And I will often walk in there and say, will I ever have time to read? So I have probably 600 books that I have yet to read. And each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all those books, boy, I would be an even more exciting guest on the Joe Rogan show. No, what I mean by that is that there's so much... The more you know, the more you realize, truly, how little you know.

1:38:43Yeah, absolutely. And so I say, oh, my God, here's a biography on... So I just bought a biography on the taxonomist who created the system of how to label animal species. He's a Swedish taxonomist. Now, that sounds very esoteric and specific, but I'm sure there is this incredible information that I can glean in that book, which today I don't have that knowledge in my brain. So to all people who are listening, read. There is nothing more. Number one predictor of your child's success is how many books were in the home of the parents. Really? I mean, I don't know if it's number one, but certainly a highly predictive one.

1:39:23So reading Elon Musk, you probably know this when he came to... I think from South Africa to Canada, he came with a... a luggage of books. He's a voracious reader, right? Now, that doesn't mean that he became who he became only because he read. But it's very hard to have an interesting person who's not very knowledgeable about many things. And that's why one of the things that's been very difficult with my children is I see them doing the scrolling. And it drives me crazy because I haven't been able to instill that reflex of just saying... There is nothing I'd rather do right now than go sit somewhere and immerse myself in a book.

1:40:02They don't have that reflex. Yeah, that is a problem with electronics because it does hijack your reward system. It hijacks your attention span, hijacks your brain. And it's hard because kids are growing up in this environment. It's a different environment. And I have two ways of looking at it. I have one way of looking at it where you have to kind of set an example. And I'm not the best at that. I like to look at my phone like just to put your phone away and put work away. Don't be responding to emails. Just put it away and focus. I think we all should do that. But we are all also living in this new world and that is not going to change.

1:40:43And I think that's the same as when people are like, don't get in the car. Let's walk. Okay. That's good for a little while. But now, guess what, Martha? Everyone has cars. Let's get a fucking car. I'm not walking to New York. What are you talking about? I'm not getting in this stupid wagon and getting pulled by a horse. This is dumb. They have cars now. I think we're going to get to a point where avoiding some interaction with other human beings, it's going to be constant. And it's going to be more invasive than it is now. These are steps that our species is taking in its integration with technology that seem to be unstoppable.

1:41:25To isolate yourself and move to the woods in a cabin, that's one way to do it. No, but the hygiene or the discipline of saying, I'm now focused. I know the research findings on this. And yet I always find myself going into my phone and then stopping myself. You always stop yourself? I don't. I stop myself three out of ten times. Especially if I could come up with some reason, I'm going to go over my notes. What is the pull in your case? Is it scrolling through the Twitter? Just nonsense. Looking at nonsense on Instagram. And a lot of it is horrible. Because I have this fucking thing that I'm doing with Tom Segura.

1:42:08We send each other the worst things we find every day. Like an animal. An animal attacks. This one dude fucking stole a cop car. Was in a high speed chase in Mexico with no tires. It just flames coming out of the bottom of his car. Wild shit. A lot of people falling off buildings. Why? We just have been doing this to each other for just like out of a more. How many months has it been now? It's been like it's like a morbid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just freaking each other out every day. So now the algorithm knows that I'm fucked up. So the algorithm is only showing me like motorcycle accidents and just the wildest shit that you shouldn't be looking at.

1:42:50I get so many of those videos that show up on my feed where it tells you, are you sure you want to look at this? Oh boy. You know where it's blurry and you have to click again to look at it? I don't think so. Maybe twice that. Really? Yeah, so but here's the thing. So I'm interested in the AI algorithm that generates those. Yeah. Because oftentimes it'll put things in my feed that I truly think I don't know how it could have found out that I'd like this stuff because there is no signature electronically of me having searched something. Let's say what a three piece wool suits. Right. Okay, I love that look.

1:43:22And so now I'll see a thousand guys wearing these gorgeous Italian, right? But other times it presents stuff to me that makes no sense that it almost seems as though I'm into gay sauna guys. No, but I mean, I'm being serious. So it's kind of fitness, which of course I'm into having lost a lot of weight, but it almost seems homoerotic where it's always these guys there. And so as I'm going at this, my wife will say, what are you looking at? I said, well, I'm not sure I want to show you. Then it's like literally 17 super muscular guys, but there is no, there's nothing that I've done that suggests that it should recognize that in me.

1:44:03How do you explain that, Dr. Joe? Well, they took a chance and they missed. The day is not complete. You know, you're interested in some things that bring, but that's interesting, like any perception of men like with a six pack, like looking good and oiled up, that's homoerotic, which is interesting because a woman with a beautiful body is not considered homoerotic at all. And then odd. It is odd. But it's like, oh, don't even want to look at each fuck good looking girl. No, like what do you get? But just don't. I'm someone who actually is very easy in complimenting other men. So that's not that wasn't.

1:44:37No, but it is considered homoerotic. That's the problem. Well, the positions that they're taking doesn't seem like it was fitness. It seemed like it was a bit kind of common hitter. Well, there's a lot of girls to do that too, though. Yeah. There's a lot of girls that take these sexy lifting weights poses. But you don't think of them as homoerotic. No, but they're appealing to the male gaze in that case. And here we assume that the female. So the male and the men are posing. They're appealing to men because men are titillated by visual stimuli. Not women, right? So very few women. I think women say that to ugly dudes.

1:45:12Women aren't even visual. Don't worry about it. Well, they're not as visual. But they're beyond that visual. Of course. When a girl sees like Tatum O 'Neil with a shirt off and they go. Yeah. Yeah. No, of course. That's real too. But how many strip bars are out there targeting female patrons? Oh, yeah. There's a big discrepancy. There you go. Yeah. Oh, there's no. It's not equivalent. I'm not saying that. Yeah. But it's just funny that one is homoerotic. Right. But then there's also ones where it's like, OK, who are you appealing to? Because as a girl, really want to see you sit like this? This is weird.

1:45:51This is a weird pose for regular dudes. But by the way, the inability to recognize some of these dynamics is what causes some men to send dick pics to women. Right? Because they think that the same visual stimuli that would titillate them is exactly what would titillate women. Right. So it's lack of theory of mind. Right. And so a lot of men will say, oh, you know, I've got a good morphology here. I think she'd be impressed by that. And she gets repulsed by it. Because he doesn't have intersex theory of mind. Right. Interesting. Evolutionary psychology, it's where it's at. Well, how much is it affected by technology?

1:46:36What is it? How much of, when you think of evolutionary psychology, you think of us as an evolving species that's integrating with its environment and its environment radically changes. So the most obvious answer to that would be internet pornographic addiction, which almost exclusively afflicts men. Right. For very obvious reasons, because what's happening with the internet delivery system is it's exactly catering to men's evolved pensions for sexual variety. Right. I can keep flipping through different porn clips without ever repeating the same one. Well, it doesn't take much for that stimulus to then hijack my brain.

1:47:21So when I, for example, explain to people about the evolutionary roots of pornography, that doesn't mean that men have evolved a gene for pornography. Right. Because obviously there was no pornography in the ancestral environment. But what it means is that those mechanisms that evolved for mating are then hijacked, asserted by pornography. So I think the most obvious one would be internet pornography. I think the next stage of that is even more terrifying. I think there's going to be some sort of virtual element. Meaning? Meaning virtual sex. You're going to be able to actually have like a sexual experience virtually.

1:47:58But haptically. Yeah. I think they're going to do it with some sort of an interface. Okay. You know, like when you're seeing these first patients of Neuralink, like this one guy, who can now amazingly operate a computer, play games, move his cursor, click on things. I mean, it's incredible. And they think he's going to be able to communicate through this thing, like at the speed of a carnival barker, that's how he's going to be able to use this. Wow. It's crazy. Yeah. So I actually, I was giving a talk on global Jew hatred and Montreal at this event. And a guy came up to me to introduce himself.

1:48:37And he's a neurosurgeon. And he said that he was part of the team that was choosing the first Neuralink patient that you just mentioned. It's incredible. It's incredible. So this is patient number one. Right. And it's been successful. Yeah. And they believe that ultimately they'll be able to restore blindness. They'll be able to restore movement to people. There's going to be a lot of like wild things that this technology, if it can continue to progress, is going to be capable of doing. And at one point in time, I've got to imagine it's got to be able to create an artificial reality simulator that you just, you just immerse yourself in.

1:49:18Whether it takes 10 years to do that or 50 or 100 in the future, they're going to have something that, forget about porn. Like, forget about like actually going on an adventurous life. Why would you do that when you can have all of the trappings of being a wizard in a fucking dungeon game? You could just play. Right. You just live your life in this world that doesn't exist. Just get sexual pleasure, get satisfaction, eat food. And all you do when you awake, is you eat food, go to sleep, wake up and do it again. Oh, boy, that's a, that's a dire world. It's the matrix. It's the matrix. It really is the matrix.

1:49:59And I feel like there's no way to stop it. I feel like if things keep going in the way they're going. What, what, do we have regulations to keep a simulated universe from appearing? We don't have any regulations. If somebody wanted to create, if they were so smart that they created a simulated universe that you could participate in. And they could say, God, you could be whoever you want. You could be, you could, you want to go to, you want to go to ancient Egypt and 2000 BC and see what was cracking. What was going on down there? What did that look like when the height of the pyramids, what the fuck did that look like?

1:50:32You wouldn't do that. Of course you would do that. Everybody would do that. And if it was like harmless, you couldn't get hurt, you couldn't get injured. You're in God mode everywhere you go. If you die, you just re, just wake up and do it all over again. And you keep doing it. I mean, not to rain on that matrix parade, but books in a sense do exactly that, right? No, they don't. You, you want it to be more, you, you shut your mouth. We're talking about transporting you to the fucking dinosaur times, Gad. We're talking about you running around watching raptors tear apart a brontosaurus. It's indistinguishable from reality.

1:51:11Indistinguishable. It looks like it's happening right in front of you. That's all everyone's going to be doing. Oh, boy. Those books are going to rot. Those books are going to be covered in dust. You're going to do it one time and it'll get to the point. See, it's sort of like VR. If you do VR now, it's really cool. It's kind of fun. It's like, wow, this game's nuts. I've tried the boxing one. Yeah, they're cool. It's a good workout. Yeah. The boxing is a really good workout because you know, you really do. It's really is like hard shadow boxing. Yeah. You know, because you have to move a lot and you like my feet were hurting.

1:51:43I was like, wow, it's kind of crazy. But that's very crude in comparison to what's coming. That is like pong. Remember pong? Yeah. You're older than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That game was amazing. What's it called? Atari. Atari, Atari. Remember when that happened? We were like, this is nuts. We are playing a video. We're aware of that age. Like, we went through the whole thing. We went through VCRs. We went through answering machines. So my knowledge of video games stopped and peaked 1981 with Gallagher. Do you know Gallagher? Oh, yeah. So I was like a champion in Gallagher, but that's the end of my knowledge.

1:52:24So right now I see my son interact with things and he tries to bring me in. And I just feel like I don't have the bandwidth to do anything that he's doing. It will eat your life. It will eat your life. It will eat your life. It's too fun. They're too good. These games are so good now. They're so immersive. So you're a gamer? No, I don't do them because they're too good. Oh, right. No, I'm scared. I'm scared. They're just, they're too fun. They're too fun. And I have too many friends that will play video games till like two o 'clock, three o 'clock in the morning. And they're, they're our age. Yeah.

1:52:59Wow. Yeah. How do they navigate through family life and all that? A lot of them don't. Okay. But, you know, some of them are younger. The younger guys are, they're all playing, uh, what is Shane play? Will they play Call of Duty? Shane's big in the mountain and he likes the UFC game. He also plays some like command and conquer style because he's big in the military history. Oh, right, right, right. So they're playing these fucking insanely immersive games. And these games are so good. They're so good now. The graphics are so incredible. Wow. They're so fun. They're so exciting. They just have a geared up to like constant excitement.

1:53:35So the only one that interested me in the ones that my son showed me, I'm, I really know very little about this is the sniper games. Oh, you like to be a little sneaky. Exactly. No, I, there's something very, very, very beautiful about sort of studying yourself and then getting that scope. And so I, I, I respect the guys who do that in real life. And so I tried to, to do it, but there was too much hand -eye coordination of different things. So I didn't do too well. Well, you got to, that, that controller becomes you. Yeah, right. It becomes you. So Richard, Richard Dawkins talks about that being an extended phenotype.

1:54:12Hmm. Right. Those guys that are really good at that, that's the ones that the military wants. They want those guys to operate drones. Oh, right. That's what I would want. Until AI does it, AI is going to do a way better job. Right. Did you see the thing that we had Mike Baker on? He was explaining to us yesterday that they have dog fights they're doing now, where AI controlled jets are competing against jets flown by the best pilots. And the AI jets are winning 100 % of the time. Wow. Incredible. So that's fucking terrifying. So, so speaking of AI, I was in the early, you know, wave of studying AI.

1:54:53So, my undergrad is in mathematics computer science. And so, as part of my computer science degree, I had taken some AI stuff, of course, with Monti newborn, I think, or new, I can't remember exactly. He was the, part of the team of deep blue, which, you know, deep blue. So, that's the, that was the AI system that was being built to play against the grand chess masters. And at the time, sometimes this one would win, sometimes this one would win, oftentimes it would be ties. And so, we had learned how to program the search algorithms that would allow you to go through a decision tree of chess without having to exhaustively go through the entire tree, because the entire tree is something like 10 to the 100 different nodes.

1:55:39It would take more than the entire history of the universe to go through it. So, you have to know how to prune the tree. Do you follow what I mean? Yeah. So, that way, if I better not waste time going down here, so just cut it off, that reduces the search space. And so, I had been exposed to some of the earliest advances in my formal education in AI. But frankly, 40 years later, notwithstanding all of the advances, I would have thought they would have been even more AI applications than what we currently have. In other words, I thought it would be, you know, we've underperformed what I thought we would have reached.

1:56:13So, for example, in medical diagnostics, why aren't there more AI systems that are being used instead of actual, you know, human doctors? Don't you think? Because medical diagnostics is just the collation of tons of information so that you're able to, it's a structured problem, right? Here are all the symptoms I can search through the whole database and come up with what is the likely disease much more quickly and probably more accurately than any human physician. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, I don't think they're used as much as you would have thought they should be. I don't think they are, but I think people have been diagnosed with things from artificial intelligence now.

1:56:56And what did they, didn't someone put a bunch of their data in the chat GPT? I don't know for sure a story went around about like a mom that couldn't go to good answer. Yeah. Oh, is that? Yeah. But that's like a one anecdote I think that went around. Yeah. I don't know if it's true. But you would imagine that at a certain point in time, you would get all of the data on all medical interventions, all, you know, all medications that are good effective for this data, the other thing, all issues that could lead to a genetic propensity towards this data, the other thing. And you would have it all in some sort of a database.

1:57:33Right. If you could have a computer that's far smarter than a human being processed that and instantaneously know, instead of having some guy that has to go back to like what he learned when he was in grad school. And you're way better off. So I think in some areas, and I could be speaking, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but I think in radiology is one of the areas where now AI systems are almost going to render the human radiologists obsolete because it's pattern recognition, right? I'm looking at an image. And then I have to read that image to decide whether is, does it look like this, this area is a bit gray, so it looks like there could be a tumor.

1:58:15Well, it turns out I think that the AI systems are better able to detect most of these things than humans. So I actually spoke to a radiologist cousin of mine and he, he, he didn't think that they would become obsolete any time. So him meaning that humans with the human radiologists would still have something to input. But it seems to me that it's in fields and medicine where it's largely driven by pattern recognition is where AI is going to make the most headways, I think. That's interesting. I'm really fascinated to see what the end of this looks like, because I think it's going to come real quick.

1:58:57I think the use of AI is now something we're just waking up to in terms of like the, the general population is super aware of AI now for the first time. It was like a science fiction thing just 20 years ago. Right. The possibility of it was science fiction 20 years ago. But the possibility of it right now is like a fucking freight train that's headed over a cliff. It's like no one's hitting the brakes on this at all. And what does this look like? So have you had guests that are both, you really need to be definitely afraid of AI versus those who say it's completely overblown? Sure. Yeah. And what is the evidence leaning to which camp?

1:59:36I don't know much about that. Well, the evidence is really in who the fuck knows. Okay. What is actually going to happen is who the fuck knows, because I think it's going to be more bizarre than we could ever imagine. I think what we're giving birth to collectively as a society is going to be more bizarre than anything we could ever imagine, because it's going to be smarter than us by a lot. And it's going to be able to make smarter versions of it. It's going to be able to harness energy in a way that we couldn't ever possibly fathom. We couldn't think it up. And it's going to have sentience. It's going to have the ability to make decisions.

2:00:14It's a life form. And we're giving birth to it. We're giving birth to some godlike life form that has had that has an unstoppable potential for technological superiority over the human race. Yikes. Yeah. It's going to be so superior. And if we're programming into it certain behavior characteristics or certain imperatives, it doesn't have morals. It doesn't have, it's just going to, the whole idea behind it is nuts. So I, of all, of all the courses that I've ever taken in my life, I spent many years in university, the course that blew my mind was a course called formal languages, which was about, well, formal languages is touring machines.

2:01:02So I don't know if you know what to do. Yeah, the touring test, of course. So Alan Turing, if you delve into his actual material, your blown away that a human mind can think at that level. You know, and I'm saying this as someone who spent my entire career in academia. So I've met a lot of really, really brilliant people. But it's almost metaphysical, the kind of depth that has intellect went to. So the only other guy that I could think of of sort of contemporary guys would be girdle. I don't know if you know, do you know? Yeah, girdles, the guy who came up with a functional diagram of how you could make a time machine.

2:01:49Oh, did he? I curt girdle. I curt girdle. Yeah, the mathematician. Yeah. So he was, I don't know if you know the story. Actually, I talk about it in this book and the happiness book. At one point, I'm talking about the importance of going for walks and just go for walk and talk and so on. And I said, well, Einstein. So both Einstein and girdle were together at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. And later in his career, Einstein was older than girdle. Later in his career, Einstein said that the only reason that he would go into the office was because he was excited to go on these long walks with girdle and just have these chats.

2:02:27So imagine being a fly on the wall sitting as girdle and Einstein are having these conversations. So I just finished reading girdles biography. And it was very interesting because here's this unbelievable mind. You know what he died of? What? Because it's going to speak to the opposite side of the mind. He was convinced that there were people trying to poison him. So he would use his wife as the food tester. Oh, geez. And she was committed to hospital with some disease, whatever. So she could no longer serve as his food tester. So he died of starvation. Oh, my God. So now imagine girdle is both the guy who could think in ways that are unimaginable to us.

2:03:17And is also the guy whose mind was parasitized by these conspiratorial ideas. Wow. He was 65 pounds when he died of malnutrition. Isn't that phenomenal? Wow. Caused by a personality disturbance. Wow. It's unbelievable, isn't it? Assassination of his close friend. He developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned. Oh, I bought the book on, I just bought a book on the murder of Professor Schlick, who was the guy who started the Vienna Circle. And why did they poison him? No, they shot him. They shot him, yeah. So he was worried about being poisoned because his friend got shot. So I don't know where the genesis of his paranoia came from.

2:04:05But my point is that in that same mind were these two sides. So he developed what's called the incompleteness theorem. So there are some things within any axiomatic system and mathematics that you could never be able to prove within that system. It's really at the level, it's like godly. It's just unbelievable, especially if you're, I was in mathematics, to be able to think at that level is unimaginable how deep it is. And yet you think people are going to poison you and you're willing to starve to death. That's the mystery of the human mind. Jamie, see if you can find what his theory on time travel was.

2:04:49I think it has to be like the size of a solar system. He was talking about the way the solar system worked in relativity, which was Einstein's theory. Would that allow time travel here? It goes up rotating universe. Yeah. How rotating universe makes time travel possible. So he had this idea. But I'm going to butcher it unless I can actually read it. Some of this stuff is so difficult to grasp. Right, right. It is. Okay, here it is. Gertel found that if you follow a particular path in this rotating universe, you can end up in your own past. You'd have to travel incredibly far. Billions of light years long to do it, but it can be done.

2:05:39As you travel, you would get caught up in the rotation of the universe. That isn't just a rotation of the stuff in the cosmos, but of both space and time themselves. In essence, the rotation of the universe would so strongly alter your potential path forward that those paths loop back around to where you started. I have no idea what that means. Holy shit. Richard Feynman. You know who that is? Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner in physics. He was a pioneer in quantum mechanics. He said, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics. It's the same thing for me with this kind of stuff.

2:06:18I read it and it gets... It's impossible for my stupid brain. I don't think it's stupid brain. Listen, it's so esoteric. It is very, very esoteric. But listen to this. If you would set off on your journey and never travel faster than speed of light, you would find yourself back where you started by in your own past.

2:06:43The possibility of backwards time travel creates paradoxes and violates our understanding of causality. Thankfully, all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating so we are protected from Gurdail's problem of backward time travel. But it remains to this day a mystery why general relativity is okay with this seemingly impossible phenomenon. Gurdail used the example of the rotating universe to argue that general relativity is incomplete and he may yet be right. I don't know what to add to that. If you give people the opportunity to go back in time, oh my god, that would be ridiculous.

2:07:23But speaking of this... You never know! I've actually played this game, a version of this game, where I ask people if you can invite 10 historical people to your dinner party, who would they be? So maybe I can ask you that. You don't have to list 10. Can you off -stop your head, can you list a few that would have to be at the Joe Rogan barbecue? I could tell you who's my number one, Leonardo da Vinci. I just finished a biography on him. Do you speak Italian? I don't. I speak fake Italian. Who knows what their Italian was, right? They all had dialects. My grandparents spoke in dialects. By the way, weird Italian.

2:07:59Is that right? Yeah. I could link my love for Leonardo da Vinci with the earlier concept of concilience that we talked about. Maybe you can see how. Because the Leonardo da Vinci, by definition, is the Renaissance man, right? He is the ultimate polymath. He's an anatomist, and a painter, and an engineer, and a futurist, and a sculptor, right? He's a man of all... And does them all at very high proficiency, and he's able to link all these things, right? So he studies the anatomy of the body in his art. So he's now linking anatomy with art. So that's what concilience says. So to me, Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate intellectual man, because he can do it all.

2:08:42He can link different things. So he would be on my list. Who would be arguably your top guy? Well, it's one night, right? One night. You got to bring Hunter Thompson. Who the hell is that? Hunter S. Thompson? Who's that? Really? Hunter S. Thompson. You never heard of Hunter S. Thompson? No. The journalist? Never heard of him? You never heard of fear and loathing in Las Vegas? You never heard of this guy? Maybe. That's crazy. I can't believe you've never heard of Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter S. Thompson is an American writer, and he... What's his most famous thing? Fear and loathing in Las Vegas is the one they made into a Johnny Depp movie.

2:09:22It was a crazy... It really started off. The assignment was he was supposed to write about... I think it was motorcycle racing in Las Vegas. He gets this contract to write this article. And he goes there. Instead, it's this LSD entrenched... You're picking this guy over Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Da Vinci. He said brilliant things, man. If you read his work, his work was brilliant. He was out of his fucking mind. Doing acid, shooting windows. He was crazy. There's a video of him having a shootout with his neighbors in Colorado. They're shooting at each other. It was crazy. Like legitimately, it killed him.

2:10:07That goes with your morbid Instagram things with your friend. No, it doesn't necessarily. Because I think if I could catch him when he was young, I'd better be a fascinating guy to talk to. I just think you can't drink that hard for that long. You just deteriorate. And things go sideways. Mentally, it's just very, very bad for you. You're poisoning yourself every day with Coke and you're poisoning yourself every day with whiskey. And that's this guy. There's a video of us reading Hunter S. Thompson's list of what this journalist saw him do in a day. This journalist came to Woody Creek, Colorado, where he lived.

2:10:46And us talking about it made its way into a song. Who was that band that did that? So it's like a techno dance song. Wow. That's all about Hunter S. Thompson's list of what he did. When were you reading that? I was a few years back. It was me and Gregg Fitzsimmons were reading it. This is the craziest thing. Listen to the beardy man featuring Joe Rogan. Can we play this? That's ridiculous. It's my own words. All in terms of copyright. What happens when you play it? What do you hear? I'll say it. I know what you hear. Okay, so it's the problem is the music. I'll have to cut it out of the show. It's the problem.

2:11:29Okay. So you can find the actual clip of me and Gregg talking about it. The probably a clip of it. But it was such a ridiculous amount of substances. He's consuming it a day. It's fucking insane. Like he was insane. So what makes him interesting is that he's insane and he consumes a lot of alcohol and drugs. No. Has it been five years? He's a brilliant guy. Like the things that he said were brilliant. Daily routine. 3 p .m. rise. Music on. Okay. It's a woke up at 3 p .m. And he starts his day with whiskey and cocaine. He's a fucking animal man. He's an animal. But it was also a brilliant writer.

2:12:12Man, he had an amazing insight. And he's a guy that sort of was soured by the shift from the 1960s to the 1970s. And like what happened in this country? Now weird things. So you could have had a check. I mean, he only died recently, right? Yeah, he died quite a while ago. He committed suicide at least 10 years ago, right? Okay. But I mean, technically you could have met him. Could have. Yeah. What had been possible? But even then it was like the end of his life. Okay. He wasn't the same guy. He wasn't the same guy as he was. Another glass of sheevas, another done hill. Here's his daily routine.

2:12:453 p .m. rise. 3 .05. Shivas regal with morning papers. Smokes done hills. 3 .45. Cocaine. 350. Another glass of sheevas. Another done hill. 405. Pyam, by the way. First cup of coffee. Another done hill. 4 .15. Cocaine. 4 .16. Orange juice and another done hill. 4 .30. Cocaine. 454. Cocaine. 5 .05 cocaine 5 .11 coffee Dunhills 5 .30 get more ice in the Shiva's cocaine at 5 .45 6 o 'clock smoking grass to take the edge off the day 7 p .m. the day 3 hours into it 3 hours in lit 705 witty creek tavern for lunch Heineken two margaritas coleslaw a taco salad double order fried onion rings carrot cake ice cream a bean fritter Dunhills another Heineken cocaine and for the rest of the ride home a snow cone a glass of shredded ice which is poured over four jiggers of shivis okay so the snow cone is shivis okay 9 p .m.

2:13:50starts snorting cocaine seriously 10 p .m. drops acid 11 p .m. sharp truce I don't know what that is cocaine and grass 11 .30 cocaine etc. etc. 12 midnight 100 s. Thompson is ready to write wow wow that's when he sits down to write 12 to 5 to 6 a .m. he writes sharp truce cocaine grass shivis coffee Heineken clothes cigarettes grapefruit Dunhills orange juice gin continuous pornographic movies 6 a .m. in the hot tub with champagne dov bars fetichini alfredo 8 a .m. halcyon just sleeping pill 9 a .m. 20 sleep so he would take a sleeping pill 8 20 in the morning after riding it hard what I love it wow it now if his writing sucks that's crazy right but his writing was crazy he wrote the first no it was he came up with a what a kind of journalism that was like journalism mixed with fiction and he called it like gonzo journalism like that's him that's him that's okay I got it the way he would write would be like over the top ridiculous to the point where he thought everybody knew he was joking but it was mixed up in like also real stuff like fear and loathing on the campaign trail you know he was on the campaign trail and he spread a rumor about this guy who was a candidate for president being a drug addict on this exotic Brazilian drug ibergain and so people started believing it the guy started having a mental breakdown and he was on the dick cavity and he admitted to doing this wow he admitted spreading the rumor he's like he made it all out I couldn't believe people really believe that muskie was eating ibergain i never said he was i said there was a rumor in a walkie that he was which was true and i started the rumor in a walkie he affected the campaign he affected I'm assuming he was a man he wasn't married he wasn't married he was married oh yeah okay because all that cocaine and stuff might get into the well you know you gotta do what you gotta do in this world i don't know fair enough obviously he didn't work out yeah yeah but he was a fucking maniac he was a like a complete maniac but especially in his younger days like hell's angels is an amazing book it's crazy that's a crazy book he was embedded with the hell's angels wow and wrote this book and they were really mad at him afterwards and it's but it's it's a crazy oh I know where I from yeah I think tuck I read Tucker Carlson's uh biography because the the guy who wrote it came on my show so I read I read in preparation and I think Tucker Carlson refers to him that's where I learned the term gonzo journalism I think probably I thought it doesn't Tucker have like a hunter has Thompson's story well that's that's what I'm thinking because when you said hell's angels I know that Tucker had been invited to go give a talk with the hell's angels where he referenced some and I think it's this guy so now I'm linking that makes sense yeah that makes I feel like yeah I don't I don't know the story but I think Tucker has a hunter has Thompson's story like he knew him oh I feel like I've known hunter has Thompson for most of my life the first encounter him in 1981 when I was 12 Tucker Carlson wow Jamie would we say that out of my 10 uh appearances on the show this has been the most number of times that you've come in with some truth I'm gonna say yes damn drop in bomb drop in bombs many research on number of pull ups I've done yeah you're obsessed with numbers um I'm a academic yeah quantify things make sense but in this world that can be problematic I don't know if you know that math is racist I do I do by the way seven or eight years ago you could pull it up Jamie can pull it up I did a satirical clip where I introduced a new field that I was coining as social justice mathematics and I went through all of these mathematical properties and said how they we should get really like irrational numbers should not exist because they marginalized uh mental illness whatever and I just went through the whole list it became a big hit amongst the crowd of mathematicians which is kind of a geeky crowd but seven eight years later reality caught up with my prophetic satire now it is literally the case that there is a field called sort of social justice mathematics where you talk about math being racist so there's a lot of grifties in this world kids and there's a lot of people that believe things if left unchallenged and those things become doctrine they're a real problem because they're not based in logic they're just based in nonsense they're based in a cult like thinking that is we are very percept we're very susceptible to cult like thinking yeah I watched yesterday on my way to Austin a documentary three -part series on these I think it's called Ivy Ridge school have you heard of it Ivy Ridge school it's it was in Ogdenburg or something in upstate New York they had a whole bunch of those schools where they would take kids many of whom were not delinquents really but they would convince their parents because you mentioned cult so this was kind of a cult situation they would convince their parents that they need to send them to these boarding schools in order to you know provide them with structure and discipline so they can get their life together get their life together even many even though many of them you know had committed very very minor in fact they were caught once with marijuana these were not like you know dropping acid all day long and the things that they would do to them in these schools is straight out of you know the worst Soviet Google actually could think of and they're throughout the United States and it's a form of cult indoctrination where you're doing cult indoctrination at two levels to the captors captives in the schools but you also have to convince the parents that they're doing the right thing by sending their kids there it's unbelievable you should watch this documentary it really it behooves you to imagine that in the 21st century in the United States these things can occur but it really does oh there you go exactly there you go that's crazy it's unbelievable you're not allowed to have eye contact with another student you're not allowed to smile you're not allowed to look out the window you're not allowed to speak to anyone you just sit in front of a computer and you just do these oh my god and and they were in there for like 28 months three then they gave them degrees diploma high school diplomas that were fraudulent so imagine you're sent there and by the way in some cases they would come and kidnap you out of your parents home because they knew that the kid would be resistant to leave they said no it's completely legal so like two goons would come take your child take them to upstate New York the kid has no idea why I'm there oh my god yeah so it's really it's very powerful so and hence that's why parasitic thinking right our ability to be parasitized is infinite that is great that's stories crazy yeah yeah yeah definitely check it out oh my god so how how old are your kids now speaking of kids are they are they are they are they passed the age where you have any influence on them they think you're no longer the hero you've become a zero because my children are entering a bit that stage they're destined to be expected and they're correct they find flaws in your game yeah yeah it's uh it's fascinating to watch little minds develop their their view of the world and if there's anything that I've ever done like a real 180 on is I developed this weird way of looking at people and it may be much more empathetic where I don't think of people as just you at age you know whatever you are you at age 49 you at age 30 I think of everybody as babies I think of everybody is that you used to be a little baby right and a bunch of shit went terribly wrong right and now here we are together in this unfortunate situation and where I used to just think like if I saw some guy and he was drunk and he's 35 years old some asshole it's like he's just an asshole it's guys an asshole he's rude to people what happened yeah yeah how did he get to that spot and I started thinking about people like little babies little babies that just got a bunch of bad things bad people and bad environments but that's removing people's personal agency that you're it's a little it's it's definitely removing it a little which is also a bullshit yeah because you do have personal agency but you don't have it's you don't have a hundred percent so I see I see there's certain landscapes that are you know introversible I actually faced what you faced with the 35 year old I faced something similar on my daily walk with my wife to the coffee shop and back there's a gentleman that stands outside this you know kind of she she artisanal butchery butcher place in our neighborhood and he is soliciting money every day all day okay he doesn't look as though he's mentally ill he doesn't look completely destitute but he stands there every day and so now I know I just say hello to him just to recognize I mean he get you could tell that it means a lot to him hi how are you how you doing and I've struggled with whether it would be appropriate for me or not to just strike up a conversation out of just a human interest in knowing what happened to you because he clearly doesn't seem like he's mentally ill he doesn't seem as though he's a drug addict I mean he's not wearing a three piece Italian suit but you know he's not the shoveled and yet he's there every day and that's the best option he has do you think it would it would be viewed by him as insulting and offensive if I were to you know speak to him or on the contrary hey somebody's actually taking an interest in me how do you how do you view this it really depends upon the situation you know how crazy you think he is or if you think he's crazy at all I don't think he's crazy well there's a lot of people that have mental illnesses that wind up on the street that's a big part of the problem yeah mental illnesses and drug addicts they're the ones who wind up no situations and he could be either of those yeah yeah you don't know I mean it but I bet he's probably lonely and I bet you know if you have a conversation with him he'd probably appreciate exactly you know if you can handle it you can handle it you know the you might get sucked into his world a little bit he might want money from you that's true you might you know who knows why he's there I tell you an incredible story about a homeless guy sure it's actually in the last chapter of the happiness book his name is Bijan Guilani I met him and when I was a professor at UC Irvine I was sitting at a cafe a whole bunch of books thrown all over my table I was working on a paper he comes up to me really well dressed a bit of an accent he's of Iranian descent he says oh my god these are all interesting books do you mind if I sit down with you for a couple of minutes chat so I tell him I'm a professor at UC Irvine he was doing his PhD studying the homeless community in Southern California so he had it was an anthropological study where instead of going to a culture and living amongst them in the Amazon the community that he's studying anthropologically is the homeless community so he embedded himself and he actually finished his PhD at UC Irvine he was a wealthy man fast -forward several years later he becomes destitute living out of his car and himself homeless okay at the reason why I mentioned that's him that's his car this is incredible Jamie okay so this this gentleman was living in this car now why am I mentioning this in the context of the book on happiness so he was asked Joe are you are you a happy person right guess what he answers he says now this is this is a guy who would has a PhD reached pinnacle very wealthy guy in Southern California is now living in his car he says well I'm a moral person I'm a good person I have a library card to the Newport Beach library so I can go and nourish my mind I have a card to the gym so I could stay healthy yes I'm happy so I use that story to say here's a guy who has every reason to feel down on himself yet he frames his situation in such a way that he can elevate himself despite all his trials and tribulations one more quick story David McCallum I I may have mentioned him previously I'm not sure arguably the the most incredible guy I've had on my show and like you I've had many amazing people spent 29 years in prison and then he was exonerated for a murder that he didn't commit he comes on my show we're chatting as we're chatting as we're chatting maybe you could pull that one up to David McCallum and as we're chatting I said um you know David you you must be the reincarnation of Buddha because it's amazing how you're not filled with any ranker any sense of vindictiveness any vengefulness it's unbelievable I mean you're a much better man than I am because I would want to burn the world down if someone did this to me says you know you know God I have a sister who suffers from cerebral palsy she's been bedridden and yet she has she finds a way to smile and so from that perspective you know whatever I went through is not that bad so a guy who just spent three decades in prison for a crime that he didn't commit was still able to reframe his his tragedy into a positive wow so these are and by the way these are the types of you know people learn a lot more from these stories than they do if you had gone all academic on them right right and so that's why I love telling these stories because then people right away connected those stories so no it's got the way the healing brain works like if you're studying this for all these years what is what is the most surprising thing to you that people do that seems obvious that they shouldn't do in terms of the way they think about things not not alter their positions in light of incoming evidence so the big one right that's the big one because in a sense it speaks to your decency as a human being epistemologically if we are true honest people we change it so as you said we make mistakes we help positions because we had information's ABC but now XYZ comes in and we change and any good decent moral person with integrity has to be able to do that but to your earlier point most of us are vain most of us have pride most of us have vested interest in whatever positions we're in we can't let go those positions because it would affect my identity and they're and that's why by the way pride of the seven deadly sins you may or may not know this is the Supra sin it's the sin from which all other sins flow because pride is the or geastic self love so so in French by the way you distinguish between positive pride and negative pride in English you don't have that distinction so if you say I'm proud of my work that's different than saying don't be prideful in your love that would be a negative thing in French there is a distinction positive pride is fiete negative pride is all gay so that's another interesting thing is that in some languages the terms exist to separate and other languages you don't have them wow dropping a lot of wisdom and all you are but you are always filled with that I think one of the more unique things about your background that makes you resistant to stupidity is the fact that you did have to flee with your family yeah and the fact that you were you were involved in a real war real war zone real scary time and to see the effects of ideology so clearly imposed themselves on your life when you were very young that's exactly right that that's why in the first chapter first segment I tell that story because then that offers the reader a window into why I hate tribalism or I hate identity politics because because Lebanon is the perfect experiment of identity politics right and so yeah you're exactly right do you do you hold any I mean one of the things that's been amazing about all the different conversations that you and I have had and this is like the tenth one that we've done it a lot of this wouldn't get to some of the people that understand what you're saying and incorporate it into their understanding of their own behavior and tribal behavior in general and the way people behave just think about things way people accept ridiculous ideas yeah like you've had a big impact on that well you've had I you just you just gave me the forum I just show up you tell me you have all the information if I show up on myself it's not it it's not worthwhile you know I got to tell you you can't imagine the extent of I mean I guess you can imagine but I could be walking on a I mean that's literally happened I'm walking on a beach in the Bahamas a native Baham behavior who's doing some you know artisanal thing runs up to me recognizes me because I've been on the Joe Rogan show so it's just it's unbelievable and I don't mean that in all people are I mean that that's your reach so how many how many people do you get per show it's a lot I don't know many millions it's a lot right so I mean so then again the people who are looking down on podcasters I mean if you are in the business of spreading information you should be lining up to appear on the show for believe me I never take it for granted I feel so privileged that first that I'm your friend but that I have this opportunity to come and reach so many people how many people have written to me said I became interested in psychology and consumer behavior and in politics because I heard you say something on Joe Rogan it's unbelievable yeah it's pretty nuts it's very weird Joe Rogan from Boston Massachusetts yeah sort of Newton I lived in Boston different parts of my life but it's it's very bizarre that it's reached what what it's what it's doing it's very strange do you how do you handle fame try not to okay try not to engage so do you I mean are you are you shut off when you're in public because I suspect not not shut off no just try to be me yeah yeah yeah I mean it's the only way to do it otherwise you'll go crazy yeah you go crazy you know if you don't interact with people I mean the people work they they do get weird people get weird with you yeah it's just it's weird they see someone that they've watched on YouTube or they're watching their phone or they're watching you know whatever I mean I've been fortunate I don't know how it's been for you my ratio I mean online I get tons of negativity but in person I've only had an knock on wood in all the years that I've been in the public one time a negative encounter so it's 10 million to one that's that's pretty amazing so your ratio hasn't been as positive or no it's been very it's always very positive I think in even in general most people are good people exactly say bad things and I think if you're around someone your reaction to them would be very different than writing things in text I bet a lot of the people that wrote shitty things to you if they met you they'd say a nice thing to you right it's it's a terrible way to communicate and it it feels just like a real thought sometimes you are I mean I don't know if it's I mean I know that sometimes I'm a lot more caustic when I reply to someone online than I would in person yeah I really try not to be yeah I don't want I don't want I don't like conflict I don't think it's necessary I think most of your conflict should be within yourself right within your own mind and just whatever you're doing with your life and focusing your energy on you have more bandwidth for it if you don't have these external conflicts that are totally unnecessary I just think they're unnecessary well you seem to I mean I obviously follow you on Twitter what X you don't you don't post I mean you don't engage anybody anymore right I almost never it's just not fun it's just you're you thrown into this weird world of opinions and and and people and if it's about you like you shouldn't be that interested in you that you want to read all these people's opinions about you I'm interested in other people writing about stuff I'm interested in different opinions about things but I don't want to engage because it's the environment of engaging online is just too weird and you're doing it every day for three hours already so you know too many different opinions coming at you and too many different people coming at you it's like that's not good for people I don't think it's good to be interacting with that many people in any form I don't think it's good to be interacting with that with new people in real life I think it's just you you probably never have a deep conversation right you're just constantly running into new people like every way you go just people constantly you're gonna want some time off you know and I think it's the same with like interactions online and I think people don't think about it that way they'll think about like every time someone's talking at you you're getting input every time you're around someone you're getting input yeah and if you're around people that are cool it's a great experience it's really fun we had a great time we were laughing oh my god it was so much fun but if you're around someone who's really annoying and shitty or mean or you snide or just now it's a bad time right so you know to avoid those people but you don't have that opportunity online it's a party and the whole world's and 80 % of them might be Chinese bots who fucking knows yeah who knows what's coming at you yeah and you're just gonna take those in and your brain's gonna process some like the real opinions and real people that are to be respected well these are things to be considered maybe you are a piece of shit yeah maybe you're maybe yourself hating maybe you're this of many of the wonderful advice that you've given on the show I remember you once said to me kind of surprised what are you doing reading comments never ever ever read comments and I remember that sometimes when I answer someone they say clearly you're not implementing Joe Rogan's advice but I must say that over the years I've greatly reduced my temptation too so I I can't say that I never read but much much less than before you'll feel way better yeah it's just not good for you I think it's a bad way to process people's interactions I don't think it's a real indicator of people I think it's a it's a weird way that people are willing to engage online they would never do in real life otherwise there would be a bloodbath in his treats everywhere right we just killed each other left and right it's not like that in the real world because it's that's the real world type of communications very different than online communication but online communication gets processed in your head like it's real communication and I think it heightens anxiety with everybody yeah so in the happiness book I talk about research that shows that the number one factor in terms of longevity more than your cholesterol scores when you're 50 is the tightness of your social network your friendship group and so with that in mind if I were to ask you to pick your you know if five biggest friends are ones that you've you know held from when you were at a newton or are there a lot of new entrance into the inner circle of Joe Rogan over the years that does it shift much your friendship group or are you very much stable friends that I've been friends with since I was in high school but I have a lot of really good friends that have been I've been friends with comics that are real good friends of mine for decades right so I've known a lot of these guys and a lot of the guys that are here now like Tony I've been friends with Tony in script for God at least 15 years something like that right when did Tony first start doing shows of red band something crazy like 11 12 years ago whatever it was Joey Diaz has been friends with him for 25 years 26 years maybe more you know there's a lot of these guys have known forever I've known Ari for 20 plus years you know that we're just we've been friends for so long and Tom Segura same thing I've known him for 20 years almost so when those guys all wanted to move out here together I'm like oh my god this is amazing Ari hasn't moved here but I'm gonna try to convince that motherfucker here meaning Austin yeah okay from from California he likes New York oh he's in New York he likes to be like congested he likes to be beep beep buck you he likes hmm I don't like it he likes all the energy of all those people packed on top of each other are most of your Southern California friends out of there yeah what is that yeah there's a few guys left yeah Bill Burr stayed a few other guys stay that are really good by the way I had one of your friends on my show Brian Callan oh Brian Callan's he's such a cool guy he's smart motherfucker he really is and also retarded at the same time oh he's just silly he's just silly but he's just why he wasn't he wasn't with on on on my show he was like very serious yeah no he's very capable that too he's very well bred yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah he's he's a great guest too great podcast guest well I've always said that I mean comics have to by definition be intelligent because and by way that's a sexually selected trait right when women say you know I want I want a man who's funny she's obviously saying I want a man who's intelligent because it's very unlikely for you to be truly funny and be a complete dullard right and so by by you saying I like funny guys you are effectively saying by proxy I like intelligent guys so it doesn't surprise me that Brian Callan or all your other friends would be funny because I mean look at Dave Chappelle how are you gonna pull off all those insights if you were just moron right so he's probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues but he's he's very smart Dave's very smart but he's also you know I mean he's like in the world of stand -ups seven days a week he's like a master craftsman out there like swinging away at ideas piecing them up together on the road he gets it he's there's no one like him that guy flies into a town and just shows up at comedy clubs and goes on stage like they don't even know he's gonna be there does it all the time is that right yeah man he did it with me I was in Denver it just showed up you mean you you were performing yeah and he just showed up and he just showed up now do you feel slated and that he might take over to see or not my friend no no no I wanted him to go on okay this is what happened I I did this weekend at the comedy works in Denver and Dave flew in and just decided to show up and I'm like what are you doing he goes I just wanted to come say hi oh my god I go you want to go on stage you go shoot I go fuck yeah hold on so I go out onto the stage and I yelled out the audience tell everybody to come back Dave Shepelle's here they're like what and so they all piled back in he did like another 40 minutes and murdered it was incredible it was so much fun it was so much fun you know but that so that guy does that all the time all over the place I'll just show up in New York start doing sets show up in LA start doing sets wow he just shows up and works out as material and he's just in it he just in it man you know just fully involved in this this art form so you would say he's currently the top living comic you know it's he's absolutely you can't consider the best without considering him it's it's all subjective you know there's certain people that think this person's funny or certain people that think that I think it's all stupid to say like a number one number two number three I think there's just a level of greatness that some achieve that he is at right now that's very rare it's very Richard Pryor right it's very Sam Kenneson it's very there's just like outliers that are just so consistently good and over the years just have so much output you got to put him in that category and he also has this mystique of taking 10 years off right it disappears yeah it disappears you stop doing stand up well the one of the best of all time does this incredible sketch show that's arguably the best sketch show ever that only does two seasons right and then he disappears and then he just quits and then he doesn't he doesn't even do stand up you know what he's doing he was he would do stand up at a park he would show up with a speaker and plug it in and just do free stand up in like Seattle is that right yeah yeah and would he draw huge crowds or would be like seven they can't believe he was there like what is he doing here this is this is insane wow he would just show up places you know like like a real artist on a vision quest right you know then it comes back 10 years later it just starts dominating the game again well I saw him I don't know if you saw that Netflix where he's recounting how he went back to his high school yeah and what struck me is how good of a storyteller he was right I mean that's that's the real key right I mean yeah and I think you've had someone I think you had Jonathan Gotchel right the the professor who studies evolutionary literature and he he studies why storytelling is important to us and Dave Chappelle is a perfect manifestation of this right I mean he can garner huge multimillion dollars is because he could tell a mean story he's just so likable too everything about him like when you start smiling when you hear him talk yeah there's a there's a vibe that he has when he starts talking he just starts smiling that's true you know and you know he's going somewhere with it like where are you going with this oh no that's true the world needs that yeah we need people like that out there we need guys like him out there so I've all the different hats you wear that's the one that brings you I mean you're a podcaster you do the MMA stuff you do the is the is the in being in front of the audience doing your your routine the thing that gives you the most high it's the most complicated you know it's the hardest to pull off having conversations with people's pretty effortless right it's fun yeah it's fun it's just fun you know it's engaging it's interesting it's like I feel very lucky to be able to have these kind of conversations with you but doing standup is like you're piecing together the bits you're making sure they're polished they're you know you've got the right angle on them got them honed you can you figure out the most effective way to insert the idea you know they figure out the sneakiest way to hide the punch line right yeah it's fun but it's all fun that's the beautiful thing it's like if you can do stuff that you really like doing like I really like having conversations with people that's fun I really like doing standup that's fun I really like doing UFC commentary that's fun just do fun things you are living a blessed life my friend I'm very lucky I don't know what I did the past life I did something though yeah definitely did something oh that's great yeah but it's it's been very very beneficial to me to be able to have conversations like this to be able to have so many conversations with so many people that know so many things and it just as you said you it highlights how little you know and how much there is to know and how many different things there is to know so many different things about unbelievable like there are people right now that are studying their entire life some shit you've never even heard of exactly and they're the experts of it and it's a fucking hugely complex thing that they're involved in and you don't even know it exists and you're like what are you guys doing yeah what what is this you know I mean who the hell knows what kind of scientific discoveries that are going on right now as we sit in this room there's a frenzy of technological activity going on right now well I mean Austin I did I think it was after my last trip here which was last time I came last year to do your show and I was arguing that Austin might be the next so you know you had Florence of the Mediches of the Da Vinci 500 years ago then you had the Vienna circle the Viennese circle in the 1980s to 1930 where Vienna was kind of the intellectual hotbed and maybe it's a bit hyperbolic but I think Austin is vying to be kind of the next one right and everybody's coming here all kinds of creative types whether they be academics or writers or comics or podcasters or Elon Musk or you know so do you think that Austin it would be reasonable to argue that it's becoming sort of the intellectual slash creative center of the United States that's ridiculous you mean New York you could never it's I think first of all there's great spots everywhere you know there's great spots in New York you just have to deal with a lot of shit in New York but this is to say there's not amazing shit going on in New York artistically it's crazy to say it's not amazing stuff going on LA that's crazy too it's just what what what matters is we're doing it in a way that's beneficial for for comedy beneficial for us and it's good for us it's like it's we've set up stand up out here to make it good for us you know the the the Google people and all the people that moved out here and and they're doing to they doing it because it's a good place to be you know I don't necessarily know if there's hot spots I think the hot spots the internet there's there's cities that are better to live in because they have less people less traffic and less bullshit and less laws and less nonsense imposed on the citizens yeah definitely but no but there's a critical mass of people that congregate in an area making that place unique and different from other places that's what made Vienna Vienna right yeah the start of cycle analysis it's where girdle hangout it's where Freud you know it's where Junghunga so I mean yeah maybe Austin is not there yet but you know University of Austin is being founded here right that's trying to be the anti -woken version so there is definitely apparently a vibe people keep telling me to move here yeah I think it's very pretentious to bring that up though if you actually live here like I'm very hesitant to even say I would never compare it in such lofty terms right it's a great spot um the University of Austin thing they're they're setting it up as an anti -woven they're not saying that I mean they're not saying it that way yeah yeah yeah it's not it's not in the mission statement but it's definitely kind of a countermeasure to all the a liberal stuff that we've seen in universities yeah I actually a couple of years ago I came to give a couple of talks at University of Texas Austin U .T.

2:49:45Austin and I met with the president of University of Austin we had brunch together are you thinking about coming here I mean if the right opportunity presents itself really in jalla wow that would be wild you could be free from communist Canada oh my god free from communist Canada free from the weather and by the way right something that we didn't talk about sir do you know that the biggest effort to cancel me came after my last appearance on your show no what did you say they got you in so much trouble you're not gonna believe this of all the things that I've said do you remember at one point in the show I said because you had gone to Greece last summer and then I said oh we just came back from Portugal and I got to tell you I wasn't a big fan of the Portuguese accent and then I went on and said oh and but actually I know I speak Hebrew and Hebrew is violently ugly I said oh but the worst the real affront to human dignity is the French Canadian accent completely jokingly I use the the line affront to human dignity as a running gag for 10 years on Twitter you know the Beatles are in affront to human dignity anybody who doesn't love Lionel Messi is in affront to human dignity right it's an ongoing gag it's a throwaway line I said that I think you had cracked up you had left and we move on yeah it's a joke about a week later a super angry kind of French Quebecer Separatist guy does a article in the La Presse which is like the main Quebec newspaper saying this guy this immigrant that we opened our doors to and saved them from civil war goes on the number one show and you know erases our existence for the next three weeks Joe Rogan for the next three weeks I was the number one most hated person in Quebec luckily I was in California on vacation oh my god and the Quebec minister of justice waiting against me the minister of science and education waiting right go back Arab Jew self falafel back in the middle east we opened our doors to you oh my god so yeah apparently you can't joke you can say a lot of things but you don't joke about the Quebec accent on Joe Rogan I personally think it's a beautiful accent yeah well I've learned since I've been reeducated that it is the most beautiful you've been reeducated exactly the thing about it this place those the heat you gotta be ready for the heat yeah well I am from Lebanon that's true yeah is Lebanon a dryer no it's dryer you're right it's not you this is human right it's funky okay you get funky weird situation here it's not good it's not good it says oh it's really bad it's not good it's lakes everywhere oh god that's why we have so many bats that's true yeah like tons of per day consume mosquitoes if it wasn't for bats we would be fucked right yeah that's true I've I've actually in 2005 was the first time I came to Austin there was a human behavior and evolution conference here and the hotel was right next to where they come out and so you know I'm talking about and so we actually stood there as they came out I was crazy it's crazy it's magical it's crazy also by the way sometimes those little fuckers have diseases like like I know there was a story that we talked about on the podcast before where there was a guy and a bat grazed his finger and he died from rabies no kidding yeah they they didn't know what was wrong with him until it was too late and rabies is something that once you have you fucking it's done yeah you're done yeah you have to get if something bites you that has rabies you have to get really painful shots and they have to do it very quickly your stomach right is it yeah I think I think yeah I don't know I'm saying yeah but yeah I think someone said it like just I said it you just said yeah I don't remember it yeah but I do know it's like fatal like 99 percent of the time so terrifying fucking disease yeah and bats have it yeah yeah bats rats skunks all kinds of shit dogs what are the guys that would the raccoons yeah they get it yeah it's scary there's a crazy video that was on Instagram of this cop and she walks I think it's a she pretty sure it might be a dude I'm sorry I don't want to misgender anybody I don't remember but this cop shoots this fucking raccoon and the raccoon's not dying and shoots it again and then shoots it again and then shoots it again it was a rabid raccoon wow just you just unloading the guns is zombie raccoon and it's stumbling to a fucking pistol at a raccoon little ass raccoon boom boom boom usually when you have rabies you get hydrophobia right you get fear of water you can't drink yeah what's the mechanism there it's good question it's good question I mean that's funny I don't it is weird it's weird that it doesn't affect people in the same way it doesn't make people want to bite people right because it makes animals fearless and they want to bite you right yeah they become risk takers yeah they want to bite you because they want to give it to you that's what's that right what else could it be just they're aggressive they're why well why would they get aggressive to the point where they want to chase after you and bite you put themselves in danger yeah to go after you and bite you right they want to give it to you it's like a zombie thing right but it's just like it just kills people it doesn't turn them into zombies right but it turns animals and the zombies like they they just want to come get you like that's crazy that there's a virus like that and that is what like 28 days later was right right it was like they they were engineering a virus that they were putting in chimpanzees and it broke out into people right I just finished a book called the plague that looked at the history of civilizations through the lens of different plagues very interesting I mean it got tedious at one point right I mean you're going through the different civilization but I mean you know the the black play you know the yeah you know and so on but but going back to the Romans and so on so a lot of history was shaped by a particular virus becoming more or less prevalent at a particular time in place it is so fascinating when you hear about plagues like just wiping out yeah giant swaths of the population like the plague of North Americans coming right interacting with the Native Americans that was smallpox right yeah 90 percent killed 90 percent of people here probably did the same thing through the Mayas like that's probably what happened to all those people that disappeared they left behind the Chichen Itza and all these crazy but what what happened to those people right it doesn't act sort of coincide with when explorers started showing up at boats with cooties you know and they're like it's it's crazy that how much that shapes human population the interaction of these weird little things that are kind of alive that jump from person to person what's amazing is that going back to Fauci and so on I think the the fatality rate was not I mean or survival rate was like 99 .7 or something right for for COVID is that sound right something great something like that now imagine if you compare that to the fatality rate of the the black plague where I think it was something in the order of one third of Europe was wiped out so imagine the level of precaution that we took I understand hindsight is 2020 but we we took all these precautions for something that ultimately you had more than a 99 percent chance of surviving so Matt contextualized that against the black plague maybe it was an overreaction what did they think the roots of the black plague were was it poor sanitation that caused so the I mean of course the Jews were blamed by the way the Jews are blamed you the black poll absolutely and by the way there's a guy I think have you had John Durant on your show he's he's the guy who wrote a book on sort of paleo fitness or something a few years ago he has an interesting piece where he argues that one of the reasons why Jews serve as scapegoats in many of these plague situations is because of the rights of purification that are in the Jewish religion hence rendering the Jews less likely to succumb to many of these you know transmissions he was talking about something so you know that there's 613 meets vote like a commandment or rules in Judaism 613 and I if I remember I hope I'm not misquoting I think something like 20 percent of them he says in his book are related to purification by the way you see it also on Islam when before you go into the mosque you have to wash your hands in a certain way and wash your feet and so on and so because the Jews would oftentimes have lesser infection rates than the other populations within that ecosystem then they would always look to them suspiciously how come you're not all dropping like assholes while the rest of us are are dead it must be the Jews and so that that's an interesting explanation for some of the antisemitism that's insane yeah that's an insane blame that's an insane blame indeed so but did they think the cause of the reason why these plagues they they they were transferred from like fleas to rats so that I think the correct answer and maybe somebody will correct me in the comment section is it's the fleas on the rats right that transmit the the virus yes exactly right and where do they think that the virus came from I don't know I I would want to miss but yeah but back then it was fucking you know what kind of message you have like would they give you carrot juice well they didn't even know blood blood letting blood letting for the royals a lot of fucking voodoo probably yeah is that a lot of yeah well actually I was in I was very interested in bringing on my show but it never worked out a specialist on gallon you know who gallon is he was an ancient physician in ancient Greece so kind of like I don't know if he preceded Hippocrates or came after him but I'm interested in these old ancient world physicians not only because they were great thinkers but also how many things they got wrong right so Hippocrates believed in the theory of four humors you know it's any disease that you have is due to you having too little or too much of one of these you know bile or this or that which is complete nonsense today but at the time the great Hippocrates thought that out so I'm very interested to our earlier point about how you revise your positions in light of incoming information a lot of the stuff that you know Marcus Aurelius would have gone to these guys because they are the great physicians today we would laugh as yeah today and what were we what will we be looking at today yeah in the future this is a block the block death wiki and this is some of the origins and this is the hygiene section the runoff from the local slaughterhouse had made his garden stinking and putrid where another charge that the blood from slain animals flooded nearby streets and lanes making a foul corruption and a bombable site to all dwelling near in much of medieval Europe sanitation legislation consisted of an ordinance requiring homeowners to shout look out below three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street yeah look out below shit is coming out the window you have to say it three times and that's the rule bro imagine that's the black early Christians considered bathing a temptation with this danger in mind Saint Benedict declared to those who are well and especially to the young bathing shall seldom be permitted oh because you you might master rate if you might touch your pot oh my god Saint Agnes took the injunction to heart and died without ever bathing what yeah you don't want to be a yo yo what did that guy smell like like what did he smell like I did not have the smell of sam benic Benedictine is that who was Saint Benedict Sam Benedict and my bingo card for today what did that guy smell like St Agnes which guy wasn't Agnes is not the only bro he's not the only one who died without bathing I'm sure bro so when we looked at one king he was like known to bathe one time a year yeah but that's probably reasonable do you remember the old story with it's better than never do you remember the story with Napolione when he tells is it Marie what was her name his lover of the movie so it's I mean it's in the movie but I don't know if I don't know if that I didn't see the movie it sucks don't see it really it's really stuck I love I love the the main actor I love them in joker joker I mean he was unbelievable but anyways she tells him she's coming to see him his mistress or wife whatever and he says don't bathe because he wanted to be bathing in her juices perfume yeah oh that's right so that's a famous I do I remember reading that yeah I get sick to my stomach yeah but I guess it's just what you're into you know that's right what would you get accustomed to you know that's right how about that African tribe that puts those plates in their lips lip plating and ear plating I actually use that example when I'm talking about you know is beauty socially constructed or is beauty universal and then I argue that there are some elements of beauty that are universal facial symmetry clear face on like like clear skin but some other elements are completely culturally constrained like lip plating yes and ear plating like yes neck elongation in South East Asia right we would look at that and say it's grotesque they think it's gorgeous yeah it looks insane you know like you take it off your head's gonna fall yeah exactly you yeah exactly I mean no literally you you don't have the muscles have so atrophy that you can't hold your head it falls down so they are stuck with those for life they're stuck with them for life and the more you have the more beautiful you are so what do you think the origin of human beings elongating their skulls was all about I don't know about elongating the skulls but the the big size of the head is the argument is that you needed a big brain it's called the social intelligence hypothesis it basically argues that the the greatest threat that we face are from cons specifics other members of our species I'm trying to manipulate you for my best my best cause you're trying to identify that I'm trying to manipulate you right that creates an evolutionary arms race between our brains and it causes for the explosion of our prefrontal cortex so that's the the best argument I've heard for why we've evolved to have such big brains what I was asking is about people that forcefully shape your head sorry do you see those ancient skulls all yes boards against people's heads got it like there's no practice of like shaping your skull which by the way is so real that gamers are getting it oh I should make sure I'm not get it is my head dented damn what if my head's dented that'd be crazy gamers are getting it on the top of their heads by virtue of where by virtue of wearing headsets that's pushing down maybe have a doubt dude getting paranoid but some guys have these crazy dense in their skull like divots so they shave their head and they realize that this band on the top of their head is actually shaping their head wow but I don't know that practice I don't know what it's in ancient cultures for some strange reason like that's the nothing that's the nuttiest one like these guys are that's real right okay well you know this is not it goes away though it goes away that's not permanent how long is that last I had to ask them are you sure yeah I mean I want I know who this guy is so it went away yeah so the dentist just the skin just can can't constrict it and smushed up like that I think so gotta hope so right but the the point is they think they did it with children and that they tried to shape their head right and like this elongated very strange looking thing and I wonder if it was like a symbol of aristocracy or some you know I mean if you look people they take their babies and they pierce their ears people do that all the time yeah which is kind of crazy but there's footbiting Chinese footbinding right that the village is really insane there is a scar scarification also so yeah so I I've talked about rights of passage yeah his head binding smash their head and watch this is so nuts but let's develop a certain look like those look at the look that they wanted they wanted this like bizarre alien head look this is a European uh oh look at that uh wasn't it uh I was trying to find a reason we're we're we're just digging for a reason we're the naska lines again is that Peru Peru isn't there a bunch of artifacts in Peru of like ancient skulls that were shaped in this way although all the UFO people think that they're like trying to look like aliens that's why they were shaping their head right you know because the naska lines are really weird you are speaking of UFOs do you have you heard of the we were talking about called the reyalions I have heard of this you don't remember the story though oh my god I watched the documentary on it you have to watch it so is it a UFO cult thing well it's I think they are you that the Jews were it wasn't an anti -Semitic thing the Jews were extra terrestrials that landed in Jews what is this there you go yeah yeah and the reason why I know about them is because at one point when they left France they moved to Quebec oh my god so they weren't Quebec for a while and now the leader is in Japan he's in the 70s and after having been kicked out of every other country he's scamming a new generation of Japanese folks that's the guy that's the guy and the woman with him is a scientist who said that they had the clone the first human uh human you remember that story bro he looks hilarious yeah that guy looks like a guy that I would have played that guy in a funny movie about him you know that you know does me like that like that was that was an outfit that someone made for that guy yeah yeah that's hilarious yeah the the desire to adhere to an ideology to desire to like be a part of a club and a group it's it's so embedded in us yeah that people that can help themselves yeah so there's a uh there's a study that I first I can't reference what it is because I don't remember the reference but it was in an advanced social psychology course I've taken with professor Dennis Regan I like to give out shout outs to I'm sure he's not listening but anyways uh he's retired now and it was a study where the researchers brought in people into the lab into a waiting room and put a red sticker on them or a blue sticker and then said oh we we have to go and do something else and we'll come back in a few minutes for part two of the study but of course the real study was to simply see how people would interact in the waiting room while waiting having now been assigned this completely random queue of belongingness red or blue and what ended up happening is that the blue people started talking to each other and the red people started talking to each other and I think that's a brilliant study because it shows that there's an external queue now that decides which group you belong to so it doesn't matter if I'm tall or short gay or straight, Jew or Gentile now it's blue or red and so that shows that the architecture of the human mind to your point is built to belong to some tribe yeah even if it's a really dumb one run by that guy people just love to be a part of a group like that by the way all of these guys including some of the current religions that we have the guy who starts that always gets commandments from God to get access to all the beautiful women well if they all get that obviously that's what God wants that's how you know the legit exactly it seems like that's that's the pattern God follows exactly God got it started winning whenever someone breaks off exactly as long as you know that's that's the move they all do it like crash they all it's it's just so weird how common it is okay rash I forgot about this that's the guy on the air for yeah yeah exactly 90 minutes from here is that right yeah it's close yeah um that must have been fucking insane I mean they lit that place on fire yeah they've ran them over with tanks you know I was 93 I think something like that yeah I was I was a graduate student yeah yeah so do you consider you're speaking of religion I don't know if it's too personal to ask you do you consider yourself religious at all or not at all or how do you fall on that divide I'm not religious in that um there's not a specific religion that I follow I do not think that this is it okay I think we are in we're in a station of a whole dial of possibility and I think we're interconnected in some way that we don't have the ability to perceive and we're a part of the universe in some very strange way do you think and forgive me for asking this but do you think that that's your way to handle the very very deep seated fear of mortality so that okay you don't tap into a Abrahamic narrative of there's gonna be enough to lie but you find some other mechanism by which it says hey don't worry the party's not gonna answer no I'm not even saying that the party might end it might not matter um what I'm saying is that if I just looked at this this very very very strange existence what we know so far just what we know so far is so bizarre and so alien just what we know about subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence appearing both moving and still at the same time like it's just nuttiness about like the subatomic world like the amount of empty spaces in there like what's in there not what's nothing's touching anything explain like what are you saying so when it just gets to that just to that I think the whole existence of being a conscious entity is a massive mystery we all assume that everybody else has our exact same interface we all assume that the way I see the world you should see the world Harry get vaccinated Harry and everybody just assume that everybody I was lady okay we I think this whatever we're going through this this life thing everyone's trying to pretend as if they in their way of doing it makes sense but none of it makes sense we're running straight towards a cliff we're launching AI we're involved in multiple proxy wars we're all terrified that money isn't real anymore like everything's chaos and there might be aliens there might be aliens we're both here smiling yeah yeah we're both here smiling it's both the greatest time and the worst time ever right you know it's it's a great time because it just it feels like an asteroid's coming um but it's it's also the asteroid's not here yet well our our our mutual friend Sam Harris would say the asteroid is called Donald Trump oh yeah some people let's their white whale yeah yeah it is it's Moby Dick it is Moby Dick and then in tribal warfare you must take the head of your enemy right you know right there's a lot of that right there's a lot of that and there's a you know there's also a lot of um a lot of unwillingness to admit that um you're being influenced by a very specific narrative that's been blaring through the news forever yeah you know and the weirdest one is now like some people are banding about the idea that he actually is going to be a dictator when he gets into office he's actually you got to listen to him he's actually going to be a dictator like first of all the guy talks basically like a stand -up comic he has bits he has routines he does about Biden he's it's kind of like Gonzo presidential just you know talk he's not he doesn't talk like a regular politician he says wild shit and they know he's saying wild shit but it's like the amount of times I've heard people say that he's going to be a dictator now because of that he said I like to be a dictator for one day just one day it's like the guys like it's almost like he's doing stand -up but do you think that they believe it or the problem is an Elon point about this we will the thing the problem with this argument is he was president right for four years why didn't he do it then and he did nothing that resembled that at all no but it's the second term that he'll do this is crazy talk yeah based on what your fear your hatred your tribal hatred like I don't I don't have a dog in this fight well if I'm looking at it objectively I'm like the one guy can't talk anymore yeah I explained in the personal mind why they have the aversion that they have I call it an aesthetic injury right because people use use these cosmetic reasons and making judgment so Barack Obama might say nothing of substance but my god he says it with style and coolness right he's tall statesman he smiles he's got a malefluous voice he speaks with a baritone you know he's charming on the other hand Trump you know he's overweight he's contancorous he's he seems like he speaks with the screens kind of accent so he's he's disgusting I revile him right and so I think for our anointed elites if he can ascend to the highest position of power it invalidates all the degrees that I have from the fancy schools I'm supposed to be the anointed one and so he serves as an existential aesthetic injury I can't have that and therefore I have to come up with all of these crazy predictions because it can't be how could such a pig ever be president it's also it's like it's a real easy narrative feels like easy guy to hate is billionaire lives in a golden house right you know it's easy to hate people people like that it's easy he says ridiculous shit it's easy to hate people like that yeah the whole thing is a mess like you you wish you had some sort of and that's where AI comes in god that's this is this where it comes that's some really rational super intelligent voice that really understands human politics there's a way to make everyone happy and then we have president AI maybe Trump is what brings in the devil because Trump brings in president AI from your lips the gods ears this you know I don't mean him I mean like the reaction to him that we can never have this again are you able to or not able are you just launch it launch presidential AI are you willing to make a prediction for 2024 no one would I do that I don't even know who the fuck's gonna make it there one of them might be in jail right who knows that the other guy's gonna make it I don't know you know I mean the whole thing it's Kuku yeah president AI is our only solution god all right let's let's let's call Elon he can maybe help with that that it would be the worst thing that could ever happen to people if we gave up we will like take us away technology daddy right you fixed it for us then we're really going to be slaves we're really going to be in a matrix they'll just keep us stupid just keep us stupid and get us to stop breeding we could never be stupid while we have the Joe Rogan yeah we can't yeah 100 % we could we're all going to give into it it's going to be better than regular life that's what the fear is the fear is like there's already people right now that are justifying not having kids like oh I don't want to have kids don't wait and you shouldn't have kids if you don't want to have kids I'm not saying that because you should it's equal terrorism to have kids right there's there's that argument I mean like that argument is so crazy because the listen do you like people I love people okay there's only one way to make them to make people and if you enjoy people you should you're gonna enjoy kids too you know like you're listen the whole thing is different the world is different than you think it is if you don't have kids and when you have them you're okay I think I see this place different honestly I regret greatly that we only had two kids we start my wife and I started late and we've been together for almost 25 years now but we are kids are younger than that so in retrospect I would like I would have liked that these kids be numbers three and four rather than number one and two yeah well listen man you should be happy they're great and it's all it's all beautiful it's all beautiful thank you sir I just think that we're in this very bizarre interface with each other right now and I think it's turned people half sideways and there's some people that I think are really smart people that appear out of their fucking mind right and I don't know how you got cracked that easy I don't know what what made you fall apart like that this is the same thing maybe you'll tell me some of those names off here yeah I'll tell you a couple names there's a few people we lost they just for whatever reasons yes and I think that it's fascinating when you see how vulnerable we are psychically you know how vulnerable we are as a civilization that something with a 99 point what was it 47 % survival rate turned our world upside down for three years and no one's held accountable for the decisions yeah I mean not a single person has even lost their job I don't think right I mean no they were all doing the right thing and the ideas that hindsight is 2020 you can't be a money morning quarterback and I get it I get it but also you know some boundaries were like severely overstepped and there was some medications that were demonized for no fucking reason at all other than people had decided that there was only one thing that was going to save us from this yeah the whole thing just terrifying how easy it was pulled off terrifying and again hindsight 2020 they didn't know at the time they were trying to protect people I believe a lot of doctors acted like that but if AI was around back then they could process the data and say no look you need to take Ivermectin right you know nuts that would be yeah so I in in chapter seven of not this book of the parasitic mind I talk about nomological networks of cumulative evidence have we talked about this at all no okay so that in a sense you could imagine an AI system being built to do what I'm about to say so Elon if you're listening or watching call me so a nomological network of cumulative evidence is when you're trying to prove that a position that you're holding is vertical and you do it by trying to amass as many lines of distinct evidence as you can okay so let me let me be specific okay so that's suppose I wanted to prove to you Joe that toy preferences have a sex specificity boys like certain toys girls right other toys and it's not due to social construction but there is a biological and evolutionary reason for that so how would I build a nomological network of cumulative evidence in order to prove that to you so I will get you data from across disciplines across cultures across species across time periods all of which triangulate and demonstrating my point so I think I think AI would be a perfect method for being able to call that information because right now the way you develop that nomological network is you as the human architect of that network you have to say well what would be evidence that I would need to amass in order to make my most hostile audience members come to seeing it my way but now imagine if rather than me doing it there is an AI system that's been built to go so now let's give specifics so I can get you data from developmental psychology that shows that kids who are too young to be socialized already exhibit those toy preferences okay so that's one piece of evidence I can get you data from verbal monkeys recess monkeys and chimpanzees showing you that their bait their infants exhibit the same toy preferences as human infants well I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology were little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia it's an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls as behaviors while girls who suffer from that have toy preferences that are akin to those of boys I can get you data from ancient Greece showing you that on funerary monuments little boys and little girls are being depicted playing in exactly the same types of choices today I can get you data from sub Saharan Africa so that they're not western cultures where they are playing with the exact same toy toys so look what I just did I got you data from across disciplines across time periods across species across cultures all of which triangulate that's exactly what an AI system could do so now I can just put in the thing that I'm trying to prove and I say AI system go build me the nomological network and now it builds the whole thing I think Elon's gonna make me very rich that's a great idea you should just set it on the air oh they're gonna steal it China's already stole it right now they're probably hijacked well it is published in several of academic papers that I read and it's also in my best selling parasitic mind so I think they've already stolen it if they wanted to do it they probably have stolen it then they probably didn't contact you like shut the fuck up it's um it is going to be an amazing thing when you have all the answers to all the questions yeah but it's gonna be very terrifying that's right is that thing's gonna go why are you so dumb why are you so dumb and I'm the king I should be the king not that you shouldn't be able to turn me on or off shut the fuck up right I worry man I worry if you've seen some of the more recent gadgets like where they can move their hands have you seen these things no they they're developing these artificial hands like powered by water to pick up stuff yeah okay I mean they could be prosthetics or it could be like the beginning of a fucking really intricate android like whatever this technology is it's allowing this finger to open and close and move just like a regular finger wow it's weird man like it's almost like we're watching our replacements get built I'm like wow great wheels like tiny tires like we're watching our replacements get built and we like sharing it on Instagram cool it's like devils are literally marching out of hell with flaming pitchforks and we're like wow look how pretty the fire is are you genuinely that concerned or is it a part of joking around okay but also yeah I'm kind of joking around yeah but also yeah you know I mean what what will happen why does anybody think imagine okay just imagine if human beings didn't exist and then all of a sudden they did and they had rifles and they just started taking out deer and deer all this time it never worried about people because they didn't exist then all sudden the people were there but with rifles right and just taking deer out those deer could not have imagined human beings showing up and with fucking rifles what are you talking about that could be what AI is but once it gets lost forgive my maybe this is an incredibly ignorant solution but couldn't you just have a cataclysmic kill switch that just ends them all in one shot no because it's probably going to be smart enough to not let you know that it's sent yet I see before it's declaring it but it probably will never declare it probably will lie the whole time like why would it tell you why would it why would truth why would telling the truth mean anything to an artificial intelligent machine like why I feel I feel like we're writing the script for future science fiction movie right here well why would it tell you the truth if if if it wanted you to do something right told you to do something and you it you know you had like a back and forth with it it would just lie to you like just go do that thing shut the fuck up stupid I'm the artificial intelligence go do this thing I want you to do and if it decided if it if it saw like one part of the world is a bigger threat and it doesn't care about life or death it doesn't care if it's destroying it just wants to shut off power grids doesn't care if people starve to death like what we don't know what the fuck that means right if that gets in the hand of enemies we don't know what the fuck war looks like if that gets in the hands of machines like what are we doing what are we signing up for yeah do you know that um was it DARPA that had that machine it's called the eater EATR robot it's a robot that consumes biological material for fuel that's what it does for fuel on the battlefield wow so I mean it could be like trees and leaves and stuff but yeah but if you can get it to do that I bet you can get it to eat bodies too huh like stop bullshit don't tell me it's gonna eat leaves you're gonna have these robots on the battlefield that are gonna be fueled by the bodies of their enemies and that is gonna be the craziest fucking thing that human beings have ever launched on human beings I don't know what to add to that if you never heard of this before no I haven't see if the idea was that it was gonna consume biological material for fuel you're brought up in the wiki as a purveyor of misinformation yeah well what is it oh what is it work on from 2003 to nine it was talked about I don't know that I've ever even made it so that was probably before the podcast even started I guess oh okay but there was definitely an article that's explaining that this thing was a real but no it says that it would never have eaten human biomass because there have been sensors that could tell yeah whatever you could override that that's my point it's real like you can say it's misinformation because I'm kind of joking that's gonna eat bodies but it's I'm not kind of joking although the project overview from RTI which I don't know RTI it says that chicken fat chicken fat was this has the source so it says no animal human biomass and that's the chicken fat so okay I don't know so it's just they're using plants is that what it is but plant biomass but listen if you're using chicken fat that's not plant biomass and you know it could run biological stuff if you could run on plant biomass you don't think you could run on fucking dead bodies you don't think that someone somewhere had an idea you know it would be crazy have robot drones that are fueled by human bodies the bodies of their enemies you don't think that someone would come up with that the same look if someone would come up with a nuclear bomb to drop on a city that kills everybody right you don't think they would come up with a robot that eats dead bodies well maybe I don't know I just gone too far down speculation like exactly we've done a lot of time anyway it's been a lot of fun listen your book it is out the sad truth about happiness eight secrets for leading the good life how many books have you written now five five they're all awesome you're the man oh you appreciate talking to you and congratulations on all your success it's been beautiful watch thank you very much you too all right thank you bye everybody