#1201 - William von Hippel

November 13, 2018

William von Hippel is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. His new book "The Social Leap" is available now via Amazon.

Episode Sponsors

Help improve this transcript!

ladies and gentlemen how's everybody doing this episode of the podcast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter I need to hire somebody well if you need to hire someone you know you're probably low on resources it's fucking pain in the ass right enough time to run around all these different job sites and

check and resumes and shit well lucky for you there's a thing called ZipRecruiter and even lucky or for you you could try the shit out for free but tell me more zip recruiter folks ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates it finds them for you it has matching technology that scans thousands of resumes and identified people the right skills education and experience for your job and actively invites them to apply so you get qualified candidates fast and you could post to over 100 job sites with a single click that is why ZipRecruiter has been rated number 1 by Employers in the US that rain comes from hiring sites on trustpilot with over 1000 review

it right now listeners this podcast can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address ziprecruiter.com Rogan that ziprecruiter.com Rogan ziprecruiter.com Rogan ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire

yeah that's right we also brought to you by the cash app do you know well if you don't let me tell you how much I some of the cash out folks the cash app is an Innovative a genius application available for both iPhone and Android you can download it for free and it's a number one finance app on the on the App Store

but it also is is a thing called the cash card yes you can put the cash app in your mother fucken wallet with the cash card is the only debit card that offers you instant rewards and comes packed with premium features that not even a credit card can offer like boosts with the cash cards boost program you save up to 10% at Whole Foods Chipotle Shake Shack and more of your favorite spots even a dollar off coffee every time you swipe your cash card at coffee shops across the country you can also direct deposit your paycheck right into the app it's a beautiful debit card and put you in control of your money with extra in app safety features that let you pause your card with the touch and unlike a credit card there's no fees ever and a credit check is not required to get one fuck other cards download the cash app now and get your cash card for free

visit the app store or the Google Play Market now and of course when you download cash app enter the referral code Joe Rogan all one word you'll get $5 in the cash app will send $5 to Justin Brands fight for the Forgotten charity building Wells for the pygmies in the Congo we are also brought to you by simply safe home security have you been thinking about getting a SimpliSafe home security system but you've been waiting for the holidays when all the tech deals come out you've made a smart move because right now we can get you a deal on SimpliSafe if you order today you can get 25% off any new SimpliSafe system it is an amazing deal and they rarely do anything like this but they're doing it for you fuckers SimpliSafe is great protection for your home and your family they never make you sign a contract there are no hidden fees and would simply save

Round the Clock professional monitoring is just 1499 a month it's a sweet system is really highly praised by many different reviews like CNET pcmag Wirecutter they all say SimpliSafe is the best home security system date that there is that they is and it is a really sweet deal me 1499 a month is fucking fantastic head and on top of it 25% off protect your home today and get a great deal on home security go to SimpliSafe.com/Rogan and save 25% off your SimpliSafe system make sure you use that URL simplisafe.com/Rogan so that you that they know that we sent you and hurry cuz this deal ends November 26th you do not want to miss this is an awesome deal on an awesome system that is SimpliSafe.com/Rogan SimpliSafe simplisafe.com/Rogan

my guest today is William Von hippel and he is the author of a fantastic book called The Social leap the new evolutionary science of who we are where we come from and what makes us happy really enjoy talking to him super interesting really intelligent guy very engaging and absolutely brilliant and I can't wait to read this book I really enjoyed this conversation so please welcome

bill bill bill Von hippel

The Joe Rogan Experience

Summerville High School no man I am very excited to be here how much are they have here the social leap yes what's the socially I'll tell you all about it the story that I want to tell is basically how we got here how we became human and so that Story begins about 6 or 7 million years ago when our ancestors left the rainforest and so the question is why would they leave and how would they survive once they left and and that's what the socially Fatso takes a second to get it all out there okay so if you look back about 7 million years our ancestors and chimps we had a common ancestor about that point in time 6 or 7 million years ago and that common ancestor we don't know exactly what it look like but it was from all week until it was awfully close to today's temps and severe if you look at Kim's today you can get a pretty good sense of what life was like then and chips today I really interesting they're basically at the top of the food chain in the rainforest

Superfast up in the trees super athletic and date because of traveling groups even amazing tree climbers like leopards won't try to attack them in trees it's just they are too dangerous to fast but if you look at a chimp on the ground it can't even walk it sneeze it's it's kind of cute little stumbling along thing and then the question is why would an animal that runs the show in the canopy leave the rainforest for the Savannah and how to survive once it did that and that's that's the story of this book and then have that manifest itself to where we are today so really my goal on the psychologist I want understand why we are the way we are and so I'm trying to figure that out I said well let's take a look back all the way to our common ancestors and seeing some of the key events and how they might have had an influence on how we are today so the first question is why would we leave the trees right here we are at where dominant position where where food on the ground why would we ever take that risk and the basic story there is the great African Rift Valley I'm not sure if you've you're familiar with it at all but

it runs down from the Red Sea down to the coast of Mozambique and you can think of it like a geographic zipper in all the world since on these tectonic plates and sometimes they crash into each other like I'm India smashing into Asian crates Himalayas sometimes they literally tear apart and Africa's tearing apart at the great African Rift Valley so that plate that has Somalian Ethiopia Tanzania Kenya that's moving off to the lower right the rest of Africa is moving off to the upper left and I got no idea why I'm going on for quite a while but one of the consequences that is at the East Africa starting to rise up slowly bit by bit and when it rises up the rainforest dry out and so basically what you have is a situation where our ancestors were on the east side of that Rift Valley and it started to dry out and now they're in a situation where they've got this great lifestyle their dominant position but now they're pushed to forced out onto the ground increasingly more and more because there's more and more ground and less and less rainforest and so how did they survive that what do they do

in order to make that work and this is a what what. Time is this how many millions of years ago 6 or 7 6 or 7 does this coincide With the Wind when was the jump of the human brain size where double will get to that so when they're basically chimpanzees on the open Savannah and you can get a hint of how they did it because there's one chimpanzee group that does live on the savanna in Senegal and they they shove some differences between themselves another chance to travel and slightly larger groups they share more nicely with each other which is interesting that's kind of a human trait as well and they also avoid open space like they're just kind of trying to stay near the trees as much as possible and so

and if you look at other 8 not 8 but other primates it around the Savannah like Savannah baboons they're only monkeys so they're not as sharp as chimpanzees are but they have a similar strategy large groups to try to protect themselves and lots of ice look out for predators and they do fine on the Savannah and so but I suspect to happen is for the first 2 million years basically what you got is a chimp like animal that's kind of skirt in the edges of Savannah nowhere near the top dominant position that used to be and just kind of noodle in around and that takes I suspect that takes us for about the first three three and a half million years and if you look at who we are then or Australopithecus afarensis so it's if you looked at one of them you think it belongs in the zoo it looks almost like a chimpanzee until chimp brain and answer the first part of your question is about 380 an Australopithecus brain is about 450 to 3 million years of evolution and all we've got 47 degrees

why do we get so smart why do we take off in the next few minutes years and what is it in Australia pithecus did that help the surviving and why do I call that the social late that's all kind of tied together and the basic story is it by this point Australopithecus has become bipedal we can talk about how that happen if you'd like and so because they're bipedal their waist is now stretched out there they're musculature like if you could chimpanzee picks the aim up work because of course gyms climbing all the time I'm Australopithecus is more louder like we are we're basically completely lateral because things are side to side as far as we're concerned it's harder to climb a tree but it's a whole lot easier to do a lot of other things and we have much more limber shoulder we much more than the wrist all that sort of thing and a lot of that was in place by Australopithecus so once they became bipedal they gained a lot of these qualities

and then the questions why do those qualities matter well if you watch a chimpanzee throw it's terrible at it even though they're stronger than you and I are pound-for-pound by size of a margin when they throw their inept they can take very well may typically use two hands because they're not lined up all the throw if you watch a really good throw her like it you know Gridiron football player baseball player or hunter-gatherer throw you know it's a full body motion to step forward this is rotation in the very last minute you bring your wrist through well what that does is it creates an enormous amount of elastic energy across your muscles tendons and ligaments and the end of that throw for a human is like the snapping a rubber band some chips can't do that but not lined up properly but Australopithecus got to the point where they can probably do that pretty well and so now I'm just purely a byproduct of bipedalism because it's stretched out the whole body and they don't they're not climbing as much anymore so they're musculature is more lateral which would have been help them for throwing so now you get to a point where they have access

to the single most important military invention in history which is the capacity to kill at a distance so if you want to run around the Savannah and a lion attacks us and we got 50 of our best friends we could kill it with our bands a lot of us are going to die in the process right cuz you don't worry people you wouldn't worry very much but even if he could so we know what we're doing we're all armed with knives and so is a larger force of weaker individuals to to easily defeat a stronger and so once they gain this capacity to throw if they were attacked by lions or something like that where is in the past they just got it for the trees now they could throw stones at Independence elves throwing rocks at a line it's going to be in the belly of a slightly annoyed Lion in about 3 minutes right but 50 australopithecines throwing

Fox appliances a totally different story and so it's this is the daddy here's the throwing up since there wasn't what changed everything was strong and the reason it changed everything is it it cause does it it was first reason why we should have any effect of collective action because it's not a good strategy when you're on your own it's not a good strategy if I do it in the rest of the group hits head for the trees but it's a great strategy if we all do it together in time for the first time in history the group's goals and our history and our line the primate line the group skulls aligned with the individual goals which is let's go operating work together to try to drive away these look a lion and you look at someone throwing rocks it still seems like a really big ask right to drive that thing away or kill it throwing rocks and so but I'm Barber Isaac was one of the first Anthropologist to propose is hypothesis quite a while ago I went back and looked through the struggle record at least two extraordinary stories of how effective people are throwing rocks and so it when I'm

Portuguese went to the Canary Islands to try to subjugated they Rock up with you no armor guns crossbows and this isn't like 14 something and all the locals were on with stones and despite the fact that the Portuguese are there in Army trained in a ready to shoot and end in their armor they were just decimated by the local Stone rocks it and the store has happened over and over again and when you read these accounts are extraordinary I can read you some examples from here they just happened in Australia what happened in the Canary Islands that happened elsewhere they just throw rocks incredibly actually incredibly hard and really fast so and there's no accounting navigate basically killing a zebra with one blow her Rock to the Head

so I got a picture of major league pitcher what's a good rock who gets very accurate at it so do you think they they must have practiced constantly is it we evolve to like to throw rocks and so if I look at my son is a for example when he was 18 months old we would be walking back to the house if he saw a rock on the street he pick it up and start trying to throw it and then throw rocks it's only going to cause trouble for some thinking well maybe I'll develop a good aren't so I'm not go ahead let him anyway but but secondly he freaking wants to this is like something inherently friend humans enjoy throwing and it's it's stunning how good you can get it with practice so we were at the Ohio State Fair this before my son was born and it's walking by one of these dolls where you can throw in a radar gun and stuff out of the years that I was just started to date my wife and I found out he was a perfect chance compressor right now it's how much I am

so she's like sure and I was a little league right and it's like 50 miles an hour and pretty impressed because that's sounds fast right 12 years old probably weighs 85 pounds is total amount of muscle in his body like 65 miles an hour I mean she's not going to be impressed me this week next to me is kicking my ass right and so pick up the last ball as hard as I can hurts my shoulder flys off at an odd angle doesn't hit anything and it's like 57 miles an hour and that little guy who literally the size of an Australopithecus was only 65 and hitting the target every time and so it's obvious said it's skill it's practiced it would have made you could have this and if your life depends on it you're going to do it well that makes sense coming from a martial arts background like like coordinated movement where at the end of it you snap it does not make sense at this technique is so critical need me to go

larger person so it was better technique would have more of an impact with that so the throwing arm I'd read this and that was one of the hypothesis several hypothesis why the human brain doubled over. 2 million years another one was cooked meat right I figured out a way to get more nutrients out of meat by scratching it over fire that's the answer for the first time we put some pressure on ourselves to have an advantage to be smarter so imagine your zebra and what the hell good is it but it's our brains are 20% of our metabolic energy whether we're doing math or watching TV it's brought it and so what is why would they pay for that drain now just recently there was a paper that came out maybe 3 months ago now on a new brain expansion team they found her they think that's what it is called Notch to an l and it turns out and I'll 12:15 million years ago it was an accidental duplicate

Gene are Gino and it but it was ineffective and it just sat there doing nothing now that's a great way that Evolution work for it accidentally doubles a gene because then you don't you can mess with it and the old jeans still doing the job right so it sat there for about 9 million years in our line till about 3 million years ago round Australopithecus and then it duplicated itself and it came online again and what that Gene seems to do with it makes our brain remain as stem cells for longer she's a lot more to plication for the run away and start becoming neurons and so

if I had to guess I'd say that that probably that Gene coming online probably happened many times in the past and every time I have in the past it was more cost and it was worth and so what's the gym going to do with a little bit more brain and just means more calories in what is a gain from it but now that we're working together now that we have Collective action all sorts of things open up we could we could devise division of labor also hey man you do this and I'll do that Joshua pithecus they've got 70 more grams in a chimp they can't do things like that they can all throw rocks at the same time that's not rocket science but all the kinds of things that came next probably were in Able by that process of Us coming together and deciding to work together and cooperate so if you look at chimpanzees you don't cooperate very well for example one of the activities were they sort of cooperatives when they hunt monkeys and so the law gather round and I'll see some monkeys in the trees that come in from every angle it's not very coordinated it's kind of wild free for all but what's interesting about it is that when that's over that's how you just sat there the whole time and watch now I'm working

stop chasing these monkeys I got one you come up and bug me for and I don't I don't really handle you like keep nudging me till I share but I'm just as likely to share with you if you help cuz if you didn't I don't make any distinction and you never establish effective groups if you can't reward those who participate compared to those who don't even little kids 4 year old kids when you give them games to play and they aren't stickers if you didn't play you don't when you come up and ask you don't get it you play even if you didn't do your job right but you tried from you can have a sticker to eat humans immediately get that did you get rewarded for your activities as part of the group chimps don't seem to have that that's fascinating because chimps really do have a sense of fairness though and that that's one of the issues that happened with the the captive chimp that attacked the man who brought the birthday cake do you know that story I don't know that song. Sorry these this couple they kept a chimp as a pet for a long time and then as it got older and got a little violent and they had to bring it to a sanctuary and they brought it to the sanctuary and they would go

visited Machamp would remember them and they went to visit in that was on his birthday so they brought him a cake and the other Champs in the sanctuary were Furious that they didn't get the cake as well they didn't think it was fair or they're angry so they figured out somebody left the gate open and they got out and tore the sky apart because he didn't give them a cake so there's a the most famous example that is actually capuchin monkeys return dearly smartest chimp and it's amazing study by Sarah Brosnan Franz to wall and if you want to see it in action to wall has it on a TED talk it's really quite something to see what they doing that study is 80 cheese capuchin monkeys to date they give them Pebble and they teach the captions to return the pebble and they give it a cucumber slice and so it's learn the game for cucumber slices so if you wanted to ask does the monkey think that's a fair reward the answer as to BS right cuz it's it's doing that for cucumber so now you and I are both monkeys were in ArcheAge I return the pebble I get a cucumber now you return the pebble and they hand you a great captions much prefer grapes over cucumbers and some

what happens next well I've been doing this behavior for cucumbers but as soon as you get a grape I'm like yeah I'm not playing anymore and you watch this tape and the Capuchin they give you a great they give me the cucumber and the thing looks totally best it starts pounding on the ground of throws a cucumber back against Riven or is sexual selection and so sexual selection is it doesn't matter what everybody's getting so long as I'm getting about as much as everybody else but it the second that you're starting to get more than I have then whatever females in our group she's going to pick you before she picks me and everything is relative we may think know why do you care so much about what other people are doing why don't you just be happy with what you got but literally the day you find out that the guy in the next to the / salaries twice here's your salary sucks because it makes sense because we're literally she's going to choose him now before she chooses you

parasons the thief of Joy yeah that's exactly right it's a it's a really unfortunate fact because sometimes it matters a lot like for example imagine I invented drug and I say here take a dose and it'll double your IQ you're going to feel like a genius but I'm going nuts do I gave everybody two doses you walk out of there you're going to feel like a dumbass because they're so then it would matter where it's only just a residence for example is this amazing study where they show the people were making minimum just above minimum wage are the ones who don't want you to raise minimum wage for the most against it and why would that be well right now they've got a slight advantage over people making minimum wage the day minimum wage gets raised now they're not any better off than anybody else we would love to do the most likely to benefit from it because they may lose that job they have enough to take minimum wage there actually against it because it gives them a slight advantage over you not the guy next door based on one study cuz I would think that the people that would be most against it would be the people

hiring folks it's only it's only looking at in concert with the boss probably feels even the more negative of all and if you look at people's income in there and their feelings about raising minimum wage the people are making minimum wage wanted to go up two people one notch above do not and then at the higher you go they do again up until you get to the point where you're employing people and some doctors huge argument about that comes back to the capuchin monkeys does does the same effect happen whether it's a female or a male means I don't think the monkeys have a sense of fairness like you and I have but I do think they have a sense of hold on you're getting more than I am I can't let this happen otherwise I'm screwed and there's lots of great evidence it if you let that happen but do the females have that same sense of competitiveness that they they need to have the exact same thing as other bitches are having they get angry but here's the thing it depends on whether you're

heating system is going to be pair-bonding or not so if you're a frog or a lots of different frogs not all of them Alaskan tree frog or if you are a elephant seal or something we'll all the females mate with the best male cuz his job it's just sex and so every female can have the best one for the either in the situation that I got no choice like the elephant seals he controls the Rookery or in a situation where all the crow King and then I got you the best Kroger you're the dad but if you're pair bonding like humans or like lots of other animals Birds Etc then what you need is you got competition on both sides so she's always competing to get the best male and he's always competing to get the best female and those reasons why male male competition is always a bit more intense than female female competition but both of them are there in the Mormon argument system gets the more both sides can be for each other

interesting so what about in the case of like bonobos where they're so polyamorous are super interesting system so you got lots of polyamorous animals animals are interested chips are also know so if you look it up one of the great ways to look at our ancestors and what their lives were like cuz you look in your trousers and the size of your testicles tells you a lot about what sort of mating system your ancestors had so gorillas have tiny little testicles and the reason that they have such tiny testicles as they use their huge body to drive away the other males and then all the females are in his Harem some big testicles because the only reason of sperm in order to inseminate the females he's got it doesn't take much sperm to inseminate anyone female and testicles are really expensive tissue to make and if you want to pair and you land on you know I'm comfortable to write and so then you look at are testicles and they're quite a bit bigger than a gorilla's but they're nowhere near the size of a champ or bonobo both you know they're basically in many ways almost the same Beast

and so of a socially quite different and they have a system where they basically have to wash out the guy who was there before him and so it takes really big testicles to have sperm competition to their competition isn't by fighting each other although there's a degree that too they know full well that when she comes into estrus in the heat there's going to be a line and if your fifth in line and you can watch everybody out before you wash everybody has a funny way of putting it so there it's it's this this testicle size is directly proportional to the number of promiscuous females system rating system we clearly evolve to be largely monogamous but not entirely are testicles are unnecessarily large for an entirely monogamous species and so we are a little bit on the watch the guy ahead of us business many people that make arguments that are monogamous socially rainforest and it's not natural look up

what did we evolve to do is to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer societies particular if you look at what are called immediate return on togethers so there people who eat today with a kilt today do you got a lot of hunter-gatherers once they left the equator they can store food and everything change for them and they actually many the babies they look a lot like us so we can come back but if you like but if you look at hunter-gatherers around the equator there typically immediate return kill eat and so those guys tend to be 10 to be there's always a persimmon differences were super variable species but they tend to be serially monogamous and so some people pair up for Life lots of people pair up for 5 7 years and then break apart and pair up again until you have a sequence of children with the secrets of people time. Let me know every single animal you've ever described as monogamous when we do the DNA We Now find they're not entirely but they're mostly interesting so

sex at dawn what did you think of that no offense but I think it's total crap Chris ride to hear that shit everybody rock on your book bro what do you think it's crap about it I just don't think the system works that way then explain to people that make me not know what we're doing now since it came out to remind me that the idea is that we evolved in the small tribes the people that essentially shared sexual partners okay why do you believe that's bullshit because human beings have very clear of all jealousy systems and they're not just a product of the world that we live in today you can see jealousy among hunter-gatherers as well another thing is I get jealous about different things cuz of course many women has slightly different pressure on them but they both get Jealous by infidelity now that's not to say that the book is incorrect

about some Societies in some places because one of the interesting things about humans is our flexibility and so you can create a system and someone togethers have where there's a lot of that none of that for some really interesting ones were literally once a woman gets pregnant she then starts to sleep with all the other males because she thinks her baby will gain the qualities of all the men that she sleeps with so I'm not trying to claim that we're always been out of this because absolutely that's fine but I do think that the dominant system is one of Serial monogamy and the reason I think that that's a dominant system is this is kind of the deal that we made where to buy the males go out and do the hunting the females go out into Gathering and that's basically Universal she tends to cook for him and that comes back to the fire point you made which we can come back to and and so they share resources and and he's happy to do his best to kind of sort of look out for her kids I mean give me the miles aren't you don't take as much cares human females two of our kids for much better than the other grade 8 and so that level of investment he's going to make it

tends to be to the degree that he believes that he's the father of the kids that you have size where he doesn't know that really all are polyamorous like that by all means I don't know what percentage they are and it could even be there more, then I believe but when that happens the systems tend to change a little bit and he's a little bit less willing to look out try to help out kids other than to do her a favor and less the kid looks a lot like himself know what about why having a system of biological system where jealousy comes up what makes you think that that somehow or another negates the idea of polyamorous relationships just suggested they're not our default because it doesn't it more likely suggest that it encourages competition which is just natural I mean I think about Envy instead of jealousy and tell if I'm jealous I'm upset about that my wife slept with somebody else last night you could be a low life I don't envy you think about it I don't want anything but I'm gel

some of her behavior protective of what she's done and it says a wonderful experiment David Buss has run at the interstate I'll be there though I was jealous of the man as well you're not just jealous of her behavior you're you're jealous of this other mail that gets to have sex with your wife and could not possibly encourage competition and encourage meant to be more aggressive or more ingenious or just create encourage creativity and courage better hunting skills so you attract more women I mean all those things seem to be I would have natural wonderful study out of the Philippines were they on measurements huge number men's testosterone when they were single and then they waited a few years and measure it again after they're with their still single or now they're married another Meriden they have kits okay and I'm sure it wasn't a psychology study cuz we can't afford to do that it was probably some medical thing

mother used to tan to this interesting psychological question which was have who is most likely to get the Girl by the original testosterone levels and what happens when you do well the guys who got married in the intervening few years have higher testosterone than the guys who didn't so yeah you're actually right we're out there competing with other males in order to get the girl and ends lots and lots of goes on there tons of really interesting things but what's interesting is once you get the girl are testosterone drops and so if we once we partner up and if we're in a monogamous relationship not polyamorous put in a monogamous relationship or testosterone drops and then it drops again if we have kids and testosterone is a great hormone for getting out there and being competitive with other guys it's not a great home on for being nurturing for your children it's not a great hormone for being faithful to your partner until I think that we evolved to compete with other males in order to get into the meeting game

so if you look at our ancestral DNA you know how you can track or male and female ancestry through mitochondrial DNA on the side why you'll see that we have far more female ancestors than male

if I choose one but I think it's close to that and so what does that tell us well lots of guys are getting left out of the meeting game entirely and lots of guys are inseminating lots of different women to all the things you said are absolutely true and all that pushes for competition but part of what I believe goes on his part of that competition that we engaged in was in order to get the girl to get into that relationship in the first place could I stop you there because I think that if you're going to have a study on testosterone at you you have to have a study on lifestyle I mean it did you if you get married and you have children one of things that happens if you become less active you don't exercise as much you don't sleep as much all those things ever pretty radical effect on hormone production absolutely and it could well be that you know you always have to have a proximal to the distal causes as an evolved species to sell some super important to get us into the Mating Game but it's less use for once were in it well all you or you could all you have to do is have a system where

those things tend to down-regulate testosterone exactly like you said cuz you know those things are going to happen once you get partnered up and so remind your twenter answers just partnered up there still out hunting everyday and we may be right but we don't have studies on the issue is that I'm having with this we have studies on the General Health and testosterone and hormonal health of sedentary humans I would like to know what their lifestyle is I would like to know what they're doing to make any sense to me because one thing that everybody knows is that you get Dad bod right that's dad by what is Dad bod dad buys a guy that works all day comes home sits on the couch probably eats food he probably shouldn't eat hangs out with his kids doesn't get a whole lot of Exercise Works probably doesn't sleep as much as he should that that's a to me that's a symptom of poor health and fitness awesome to my ancestors ever experience like it's not this is not necessarily an indication of any sort of evolutionary

benefit of having low testosterone because we've demonstrated for sure that when people don't get sleep and when they don't get exercise their testosterone drops with those are two things that I absolutely have when you get married have children right and the only thing I would say is the times of the time span of the study was only over a few years that's even worse than thinking about it having this kind of a study and making these kind of a kind of conclusions based on weed and seaweed we know these mechanisms are in place we already know that there's natural facts of sedentary lifestyle lack of sleep and the effects are your hormone production drops your body suffers you become less healthy and this is this is not indicating monogamy this is just indicating poor health this is not like an evolutionary advantage to having low testosterone because it helps you raise children you get out of high testosterone still being a good dad and raise children and still have a stuffy nose

is one of the hardest part of the problem is is drawing conclusions on this one study and stating them as if they're facts almost exactly when you point out we got them on us right we don't have it until like the perfect example like things like female orgasm what role does it play will you need really good date on hunter gatherers to know the answer to that question if you look at hunter-gathers they don't have Dad bod right they're all running and whether their fathers are not because they're out there hunting everyday or gathering everything physically so if I over sold that my apologies cuz you're absolutely right I suspect though that you would find the same thing I don't know it it's all we got right now but how can you suspect it I mean it just there's no data what you said when you look at these guys I've I have a friend of mine who he was or how do you say the name that Yanomami and Bolivia Bolivia Venezuela Brazil

and he spend some time with them and you see these people in the lifestyle they lived there all Barefoot wandering to the Jungle they have these crazy looking feet with their toes splay out because they're just constantly dripping on the floor of the tub and it probably could choke you with their feet you know and these people just look so fit and healthy in their in their fifties and sixties and seventies and they have their shirt off and they're ripped and super-fit same holds if you look at the hives in Tanzania any of these groups but yeah no more interesting cuz they're Hunter horticulturalist so they're actually doing a little bit of gardening well but they're they're ripped and strong and don't have a visiter problem and so all I would say is that the same thing holds the one thing that we found in humans in our modern culture where we have these data is if you're married and have kids but you're still looking around your tea hasn't gone down as much are you going to point out quite rightly that's cool maybe that's a different kind of person than the person who marries and isn't looking around and so it's all confounded super hard to do experiments on these things will be a lot better off when we've got

we're losing the world last hunter-gatherers are disappearing and it's not easy to collect these kind of data but they're doing lots of genetic work with these people right now all over Africa cuz you know there's we got tons of genetic data now on European descent in East Asian descent almost none on African so that's a huge project underway and so for all I know they're working on hormones and other things as well yeah that's the reason why I'm asking about this issue you were so readily dismissing you were so willing to dismiss facts that are laid out of facts in the book don't really hold up and I wish I could read it more recently and so I could go through the details with you there's some really good reviews by anthropologists and by people who work in a non-sexual studies and stuff like that going through the two details we read it as a given this evolutionary Center Center for psychology in evolution and reread it and went through it and we weren't convinced I'm embarrassed him that I can

remember the details aggressive very smart guy is good friend mother really loved it is great but I would love to see him were talking about her heavily debated is a wonderful evolutionary biologists in Australia loves that book so the fact that I think it's bullshit is obviously one person's opinion I just missed that other people might say well if there's a lot of culture said that you have much more like the system I told you about where they have sex with lots of men after they were there humans are so flexible we can do all those things we just changed the nature of how we do things in the socially that I'm arguing about is not despair bonding thing it's about how are groups came together to engage in Collective action so in principle I'm agnostic on this issue I just happen to disagree with that I happen to feel like no I think we made these deals and said he can come back to the study of the David Buss did that I was started to tell you about so bus has this

he's got when he came along people talk to the two Sexes had similar levels of jealousy for infidelity and David with circle hooks inseminations internal and so then should be a lot more worried about her sleeping with somebody else and women should be because he men never know for sure if through the father they can't see it happen where as you know if you are Sam and you can tell Cam the debt I just watch that but females in Temptations Turtle but they know they're the mother that's not their concern they should be more concerned about things like his giving her resources to help her raise the kid and things like that and so what bus sound as if you ask people this question what would bother you more imagine your wife having sex with somebody that she just met for the first time I've been this great time and doing all these different funky things with them and then never doing it again or your wife's Phillips is no ongoing emotional connection with somebody she never touched him he never touches her but they talk and have share their feelings and stare deep into each other's eyes what would bother you

can you ask men and women that question so what would in your case hold bother you more to have your wife to know she had this one off Affair fling sex-only didn't care about the guy or she develops the sort of emotional bond with somebody never touches it

that's a good question I really have to think about that it's not I don't know cuz nobody likes you know yeah because it's a matter of time for that dude gets in that's a mailbox hang around the chick in this case I guarantee right it's a guarantee that they never touch never text and talk shit about me that's the problem those guys still treat her right on average man I'm more bothered by sex the 106 emotional action could lead to him leaving her and so I've been girl curves this way and it's like do you have this organ or something right

and women on average are much more bothered by the emotional connection yeah that's fast because I was reading something about inappropriate emotional relationships that people have at work and that this is an issue with the people that work together they develop these you know the office friendships that lead to inappropriate emotional relationships and I was like wow I've never worked in an office so I'm listen to this reading this rather than like what a strange world that is like I get it though I get it like a guy and he's married a girl and she's married but they meet at work and it's tearing each other's eyes all day and they go to lunch and maybe they even hold hands every now and then you cross the line with people when you hold hands that's fucking says intense that skin-to-skin it is serious concern

it's kind of think this deep conversation happening all that because I think about it if we evolved to basically partner for a while then there's always going to be the chance of that Bryce serial monogamy both males and females gain from not putting all their eggs into the basket so maybe when the situation changes are there in tomorrow's World some smaller with your guy would be handy in some way and so maybe she fed up part name with me next interesting yeah it is if it's any when you break it down that it really does become there's a biological reason for these behaviors in these the motivation for the jealousy and all these things that this night is a history of biological history all this stuff and we don't know

for me those kinds of things suggest that evolved in a lot of long-term monogamous circumstances it may have been cereal and it was certainly fooling around but if we're polyamorous like the book says we have bigger balls balls are so big though compared to a small yeah but I mean everything is Big with them I know are peanuts have way bigger than the large Paul smaller penises a penis problem getting the wing right time and and we also have this cryptic ovulation you know where she's not showing you that she's in heat so mail chips aren't interested unless she has that a normal swelling on her vagina and then they're like oh that's super attracted to me but what about bonobos because all the time have fun right

song about exhibit and you bring your kids to Under the Sea Resort the kids those kinds of things to show you that it's complicated right any kind of straightforward answer that it's going to have to break out of solute and I apologize if I get back to this issue so if we had a total bonobo chimp kind of system I don't think we have all of those systems of jealousy because what's what's to be gained by that we're not making his long-term Partners why would you get these differences again whenever I bring Chris's book up by in the have to defend it says have a couple times in the last year I have read it in at least 2 years and have to go back and go back over at 5 years ago but I want to come out when my friend's wife got a hold of it my friend got it and my friend's wife got all of it she threw a right nut rash she really like a paragraph or two just like fuck this

look at a lot of women react that way and I can't remember why I just don't have it loaded up whatever so when these chip like creatures from millions of years ago slowly started walking upright and started moving into the grasslands and making it making the experiments and traveling away from the jungle in this coincided with the development of the throwing arm and this could because they started walking up right when did this when did the cooked meat aspect can I come along they don't control fire little less than 2 million years ago to get to Homo erectus so once we get to home erectus we now gotten an ancestor that literally if it went to the seeds I wanted to kind of rough you and Guy

so so a chimp rain is 380 Australopithecus 450 and Homo erectus 960 Evo stick of traumatic event changes you think but along with that comes all sorts of capabilities now you're right about this book Catching Fire Richard wrangham argue that what an able. So if you look at the gutter of a gorilla or chimpanzee in their brain that got a lot of got for a little bit of rain because it takes a lot of digestion to keep the little bit of rain going we have a tiny got four huge brain and rang and I think quite rightly that the only way you can achieve this by releasing more nutrients from your food and the only way you can release more nutrients from your food is by cooking it so when he made that argument he thinks it goes back to the beginning of homo erectus I suspect he's right at this point when he made the argument it was only back to Adam ever have a million years 350,000 it's already back to a million years ago we found in caves in South Africa evidence of control fire and so it'll probably keep

push back at craps hard to find so this was a half million years and now it's back to a millionaire in a million years ago even though it did not technically it's not Homo Sapien still at home around 9 or so 1.7 million years ago and 1.9 I think and what Homo erectus could now do you remember what the argument is is the socially it's his Collective action that not only protects us from the Savannah what sets us on this new pathway it creates his noon-ish it's this Coggin initial though I think of it as a social cognition because it's the working together that gives you all these potential advantages to getting smarter and so now that when that Gene sitting in her head if it kicks into gear those and starts to work and and expansion those animals would have it will have an advantage because they can coordinate with each other better and so they can remember hey man you help me out last time but you weren't so I can count on you so I'm avoiding you I'm sticking with you

you do a lot of things with that brain power and by the time you get to Homo erectus in the brain Powers double we see all sorts of super interesting things so before Homo erectus when you look at our tools that's called an old woman to woman it's basically a barely sharpened Rock and you never find an older one tool to very far away from wherever it was quarried inmate like you know if you look at the Rock and the chips and not far away is where it's lying on the ground just made a much nicer to let's buy facial it took a lot of energy to make it when we teach modern anthropologists grad students or whatever to make them and you put them in an fmri magnet where to measure metabolism in your brain as you go you see that it takes a lot of frontal lobe functioning in order to make one because it's a lot of planning how am I going to hit it next to make this thing just right compared to an older one tool to make those doesn't take much fun to function I just like it there and it'll be sharp and so the first told me No Homo erectus invented that tool is this a schulien tool with his bifacial handbags

and one of my school is findings are some interesting working at 1.2 million year old site in India I'll buy carry shipped in where he finds that the the production of these ashulia tools the separated spatially about the place so that the first step is bashing loose a big piece of rock and that's done here and then 10 meters over there somebody's doing the initial tripping on it and 10 meters over there somebody's sharpening up the final touches now if you were making it by yourself why would you systematically walk around the side as you made it you almost assuredly wouldn't but if you got division of labor for the big strong guy you do the first thing that you hand it to me and I do the final sharpening it makes sense that it would be especially distributed about the site so does that Evans for division of labor is the evidence that they're bringing down some pretty fast animals like horses and potentially even bringing down elephant switch in those he's like twice the size of an elephant and then

the West beers would be in a wooden point so I think what they could tempting meaning the end of it like I didn't have so you can stick up with the spear tip and tax act exactly and so they there's no sign of that yet but there's no reason why they couldn't have a sharp and spear in fact we know that number the I mention the chimps in Senegal that live on the Savannah they're the only chips on her to do this dog bite the stick to sharpen the end Pokemon monkeys when they're in the Hall of a tree and stab did you see that recent discovery and I made is really recently there was an article I read one or two days ago about orangutangs when they gave them wire they use the wire to Fashion into Fish Hooks now I didn't. It's totally cool that they figured out what if how to make a fish hook independently that's amazing that's that at that picture is actually of an orangutan who's watched fisherman do that he couldn't do it

for that strength they got very poor motor control if you want I can type they can't do that and so do it to Fahrenheit easy though buddy just trying to use a tool like that you know there is Discord fashion hooks to yeah there's a lot of them do it and making tools will you seen the studies with crows where they use one stick to get a larger gas tank to get a large stick so it could be that their brains tiny though they are dedicated to a particular way of solving a particular problem because they are especially these ones that live in New Caledonia do this in the wild and so they professional out of palm fronds the tear it off and they reshape it and then they hook insects out of the bark of trees and stuff and so you can imagine that they kind of learned a specific way of problem solving but they can't do something that to you because you would solve that using some

did the main General mechanisms T looks the same but to them is totally different did you find a thing with your ringtones it's it's really crazy it's just well you know I read something here we go Ranch and spontaneously been straight wires and hooks to fish for food amazing yeah yeah yeah that's really really cool I had read something a few years back that said that did they were agreeing that chimpanzees had officially moved into the Stone Age yes are chimpanzees will use Stones as tools so they'll crack nuts with him for what they've never never been shown to modify Stonebriar tell if you want to say the Stones by all means if you want to see if modifying Stones the oldest evidence modified is 3.3 million years ago these lamech we tools but there's arguing about how legit those up

a lot of those sites to where they believe they find stone tools that are ancient cuz it could easily just spent shell or things over and over while she's running the layers are super orderly and then when you get to that later you know exactly what you got what's the chances of finding what you're after that right now when they say the Stone Age that's what they mean just the idea of consciously using a rock like smash open a clam or something like that I mean to me that does that but what we know is that chimps will do that their use rocks to fill even that it's their clever enough to have an anvil basically like a stone put a Rock On It smash enough to do chimps have partial theory of mind and see reminders this idea that I know that the contents of your mind differ from the contents of mine and all humans get there when they're little around age for and so the and you can see the penny drop

they just assume everybody knows the same thing that ever has the same preferences and that's why when the really little their stories give me hard to follow because they saying what's in your head is the same as theirs they seem you like the same things actually it turns out to the ones who have siblings learn it earlier because it's like all you like the red jelly beans I like the green ones awesome this is a beneficial deal. Both of us right right so I could see what you could say I know what you can say it your angle if I'm a champ and I know that I might differ from what I could say but they can't get to the point of knowing that you could represent beliefs that are true that you could have to believe that maybe I don't like bananas but he does like bananas and how do you teach somebody break and then. I'm like what's wrong with Joe here but I'm so used to teach their offspring to break these nuts open 10 years on average because they don't get a chance to do it right

that's got to be in Season II easy to break your fingers in that kind of slows you down but third of all occasion we make some very specific Corrections when they when The Offspring is doing it wrong but they don't know what the problem is because they don't know what the kid doesn't know it so when you don't know that you can't teach and that's why she was are stunningly effective teachers. Fascinating so chimps learn more just by observing and what's amazing about the way chimps observe is it because we have to remind we also do imitate differently So This is Amazing Experiment by Andy White and his colleagues and what they did is they created the treasure box and so inside this treasure box or something that a chamber a kid wants like a little piece of food and in the in one condition the boxes totally Opex you can't see how it works and they'll poke at the top of it and then the poke in the middle and it popped open and then they give it to the champ close it up chip does exact same thing poke poke poke poke pops open give it to a kid that's the exact same thing now they do that they do that

Nick's room but instead of having the Box bill pay kits translucent and you can see well and truly the poking the top does nothing the latch is actually right here and so that initial Polk was a waste of your time this second one actually one that open the box up when when ships watch that they skip the first one and they just open the box kids despite being smarter than a chimp poker the top first and then they poke it in the car this over imitation they're imitating clearly irrelevant actions know why would anybody imitate what advantage would he give you will if you have to remind you say that's Joe's box he know something about it there may be a reason why I can't see but then maybe reason why is poking at the top first until I better do everything that he does have better have the highest Fidelity copying that I possibly can because it may be valuable

I want to end up with the Sea Systems around the world where people eat these amazing foods that you think you know how on Earth could have ever figured that out what was probably develop step by step and everybody's always got a super high fidelity invitation cuz they're over imitating so my favorite samples in New Guinea they the sago palm not sure if you ever seen a sago palm but it does not look like an edible tree it just looks like a freaking tree right and it turns out that if you chop the tree down take the bark off take like an ass or something similar grind up the sawdust have all that sawdust you then wash it off in warm water cuz Chris all the water and you can even be nice and warm and it causes it's a super high starch tree that causes a starch molecules to separate from the side that's cuz it had points in edible so then they have these cloths and the starch molecules pass through the cloth asada swamped now they collect is cloudy water they put in these traditional canoes they let it sit overnight and all the start sinks to the bottom then they pour the water off the top and now they've got this flower but you have to dry it out in the sun really faster becomes toxic just like this 9

process that who on Earth could ever come up with it right but once it's in place once they slowly figured out to make it work everybody just doesn't the same way because even though they don't know that they may understand but they don't need to they just know this is how we deal right well that's like that what is that route that they eat cassava yeah that if you don't cook it correctly it's literally Cyanide and they have water from and have to take that water and they have the buckets of these water the water for that they're using to create that stuff and they just leave it laying around and kids are playing around it and pigs and animals around it and if they drank it they be dead I don't know that last about things that we strike II says really tell you exactly

that same show it's not the shows called mediator it's on my friend Steve rinella who went and spent some time with them down the jungle South America it's really interesting stop to see how these people functioning and they have this big fat and they're cooking the stuff and they were you know he's explaining like right now if you ate it your dad you got to wait a while and then like how the fuck did they figure this out researchers to get into the room and saw the sign I owe cyanide producing abilities cuz I was the third most important food source in tropical countries but it's one major problem the roots and leaves but poorly process cassava plants contain a substance that when eating can trigger the production of cyanide kill the shit out of you but it's weird like that that thing is like a major step on their diet but this is a really good example of a the value of human learning and in this over imitation process right cuz the first I'm not going to do that right what they did

how to learn to play baseball in pitch the ball and the person raises their knee almost up to their nipples and I'm like that's the most awkward pitching motion I've ever seen but I didn't occur to me I'm not going to do that right there must be a reason to do that so I'm what can I do to try to emulate that motion right me how you got to have a reason for doing that and that's the huge difference between us and everybody else but nobody else can do that. I think they make that assumption and that's why the chimps skip the stuff that they they know you know in that particular time it is really actually useless and kids don't so your concept is that as these animals that used to be monkeys start evolving and end in trying out new things one thing if they learn as a entrance this new climate as if there's a massive benefit to cooperation

monkeys or Apes I mean it's not a word in terms of scientific designation writing something about right but there's still more monkeys in New World monkeys by the all of them have the genus and species you know it's like Siri Google that Google there's a article an anthropologist wrote that not all apes or monkeys but all monkeys no not all monkeys or Apes but all apes or monkeys is monkeys almost a slang term cuz I think it's bullshit that will find out what I would say is that all monkeys are primates and it all started right so but then the Apes split off you got orangutan the great apes are orangutans gorillas chimps and

Define feel like that

I read this a few years ago so it confused the shit out of me cuz I didn't know that monkey was in a scientific term of scientist talk about old world monkeys in the world right but it's almost a slang term right isn't it whenever your if your if your proper biologist and you have the speech to say that in a chimpanzee. That's how long it's there's more to it apes or monkeys in the same way that monkeys are primates humans are apes and I'm a human it's called an acid higher that's right this is at it means it all ate two monkeys but not all monkeys or Apes just as all humans or elves but not all apes are humans zygoma click on that link

yeah this is what I read and I was just a is this a bullshit are apes or monkeys deal with it and Robbins rid of fun pieced to the lace trying to steal the day the incorrect term these monkeys describes it triggered article by Graham Smith for the Daily Mail in Martin's words a great crime against pedantry is in progress and it's time for someone to draw a line so is a pet on how do you say that yeah but I know you saved it with a professional interest in the issue I'm taking my stand to help ensure the that a miscarriage of pedantic Justice doesn't occur that guy like that word nested hierarchies apes or monkeys in the same way that monkeys primates humans are apes and I'm a human is called an s that hire can he has a primate nested hierarchy set up I just don't know I don't know the origin of the term

not right he's if anybody's right he's right or you're right I don't have no I have no knowledge of the ancestors who moved to the Savannah state champ camp and so once we get to Homo erectus they're basically like us although there are brains there around 1350 so we literally have a brain Ryan does a big difference in and you're upset right it's accelerating like crazy and I believe it was rolling it and so what you got is this process where are Evolution facilitator for the revolution right so that allows you to grow your brain and even larger because we can we can store fat can get more nutrients from the food we eat we can detoxify other things and fire super valuable even chimps will eat if they go through an area where there's a forest fire near the speaking what's going on locally they'll eat

like the roasted nuts first they really like that because you go on your kitchen you smell of raw steak it's like guitar notes on this is a great source of nutrients that's not so much that is interesting I've never thought about it that way but yeah there's a tremendous difference in the way your your body reacts to it and it's not just based on your experience heating it it just smells amazing is amazing and so you can't live on a diet of raw food unless you reading these like super fruits and stuff like that but basically we've Horticulture it into existence because raw food just doesn't give you enough calories so the example that he uses which is a great one is chimps literally spend something like 6 hours today chewing just to soften up the food enough so that they can swallow and digest it

do it at all right down the hatch a cow that's a great argument for gorillas as well right because gorillas are just eating Roots a fucking celery and send you the sagittal Crest right here with the bones of the muscles attached to it so they can chew hard enough to get through all that stuff and make it digest while I'm still there got his enormous yeah that is interesting the chimps have those are so we lost that's another example where somebody along the way lost I can't remember what that Gene was where muscles weakened in our job and it would have been that would have been a death knell if you're back before cooking cooking mama testa's free up space for get rid of some unnecessary muscle free up more screeneo space for brains the inside not the outside so is it likely that there was a bunch of different factors that there was natural selection and play and that there was also the the throwing arm and then also cooking and also this this Cooperative effort that led to people being a little bit more ingenious a little bit

martyr and how they hunted and how they tried to get food and then how they Protected Their fire how they cultivated fire but all these things led to more clever Behavior which led to a natural selection of clever more clever Champs with larger brains H rather with larger brains causes and so in this case all these kind of fact just came to get it now if you're standing at the outset and you're playing God and saying let's see what happens when I dry out the rainforest I think 9 times out of 10 The Chimps all end up dead but somehow we got really lucky and they went down this very particular Road and once they got their social act together and they started cooperating chips are never going to be very effective improved because they can't get along they can't cooperate very well but wants these animals probably does for the pickup but maybe not till later cause we don't know what we can look as what they were capable of but it fits the storyline that they would have been the one to develop that once I have

social becomes everything so we tend to think about what are the challenges of physical life like that take upon you move into that territory you got a freakin figure that out it seems enormous too complicated. Remember that before of modern travel was invented everybody walked everywhere which meant you spent your entire life basically in territory that you're familiar with or the kinds of animals that live there the kinds of problems that you face and so cognitively the train is not really a challenge for you and how do you even making food in those really complicated ways is not a challenge for you want you got theory of mind and you can learn how to do it but what is a huge challenge for you it's a social interactions with each other cuz as my group get smarter if I'm not smarter or so and then we talked about sexual selection I'm not going to get picked I'll get left behind II we live in a world where there's no law enforcement and so the day that you decide that I'm more trouble than I'm worth I go to sleep and I never wake up again until I have to go to manage some very complicated relationships it's a little bit every morning when you wake up it's do an episode of The Sopranos

how are you going to find a way to get through your day without getting whacked but and if you can't figure it out that's the end of your life have you ever read any Terrence McKenna I know you're familiar with something called the stoned ape Theory no sorry McKenna it was a he was an ethnobotanist news also a psychedelic Adventurer and he had a theory and the theory was that the what you're talking about this climate change that also coincided with a W in the human brain size his theory was that one of the things that was in play was that these Apes what experiment with different food sources as they moved into the grasslands and there was a lot of Anjali it's in this grasslands and that's silicide mushrooms which we know existed back then would grow and he's grasslands and that these monkeys Apes rather started consuming silicide mushrooms and it led them to be more creative and also led to specific traits like the development of language

that eating mushrooms in low doses increases visual Acuity which would lead them to be better Hunters more perceptive it also leads them to be hornier which would most likely involve more breeding more sexual activity and possibly select the the ones that shows the mushrooms would maybe possibly breed more than the ones that didn't choose the mushrooms because they were more into it than or more social more sexually active and he has a series of like his brother Dennis was still alive detailed it on a podcast we did the very first podcast we did in his brother is and it is an actual scientist and detailed it in terms of how Scylla syban affects the brain and what areas of the brain that it did what what what actually takes place when you're under the influence of this and that it could very pretentious

have led to the development of language and that this all these things and play the throwing arm that the developing these new social networks are you you need to communicate with each other along with harnessing of fire along with the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms on a regular basis because they were incredibly frequent and very edible best time to revive never heard of that flower that's a really good example of some random thing if it really did play that role how random that is that these freaking things happen to be growing there and they happen to be attracted to them we know that animals like to get high since we'll eat these fruit that are the brother drunk in this case it is over I will do that you've seen Jaguars it consume psychedelic plants and they rely on their back and stare at the sky it's amazing what Ayahuasca is Ayahuasca is a

it's a way that these people in the rainforest development Untold thousands of years ago of developing an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine do you know what time at the trip to me now I'm down in the okay that message up to me is the most potent psychedelic known to man so incredibly potent drug that is just ended intensely hallucinatory gives you these insane visions and it also is pretty the season here's a Jaguar it's really crazy this is in the Amazon these Jaguars eat these plants and these plants are they have the ingredients of Ayahuasca and these Jaguars are known to eat these things and then trip they're fucking balls off they eat them and their pupils dilate and they roll over on their back and stare at the sky mean they're clearly so this is something that you're going to say this one so this is what would Ayahuasca is is dimethyltryptamine like it's kind of cool watching this Jaguar trip balls

yeah I mean or it is there may be there an actual traveling it's amazing so what I want skizz is there is dimethyltryptamine which is this incredibly potent psychedelic drug is produced in the human body is produced by the liver is produced by the lungs and they also believe it's produced by the pineal gland which is literally your third eye pineal gland in certain reptiles actually is a rep retina in Allen's I mean it's like an eyeball and they fit in that the Egyptian called at the seat of the soul and they think that this is one of the reasons why there they have this obsession with this gland and Eastern mysticism somehow or another they figured out that this is the gland that produces this incredibly potent psychedelic truck this psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine also exist in thousands of different plants the problem is when you consume it orally your body produces something in your gut called monoamine oxidase monoamine oxidase breaks it down

so what these indigenous people figured out is how to combine one plant which contains the Psychedelic compound with another plant which contains a natural MAO inhibitor called Harmony so they brew this all together much like they did to the cassava which we have no one no idea how to figure that out right they brew this stuff up together in the crate is psychedelic tee called Ayahuasca and Ayahuasca now they have all these trips for people go down to Peru and take this stuff and trip to fucking balls off and this this could a combination of these things leads to this incredibly potent trench really transformative experience which is impossible to describe and that this this psychedelic drug by when I bring that up what was Jimson are these are the ancestors did something similar push them along this path is starting to come back but how do I get to DM 2

a couple of links in that chance because of animals that get high that's that's what it was so this is what this that that's exactly it was it was the Jaguar getting high on DMT that's what they think the Jaguars doing the Jaguar consuming is stuffies it's making a trip on DMT and EMTs I mean it's fun it's really exciting and so different kinds of work you were talking about going in the seventies call Z sorts of things of phenotypic indulgence right to Revolution gave these pleasure centers in your brain so that you do what's in your jeans best interests and kill the animal or get the girls or whatever in that makes you feel good and so we tend to like the things that are good for us and dislike the things that are bad for us we don't want to eat feces we do I need to stick so

there's cases like this where it short circuits that goes right to the pleasure Center you know what it's doing its kind of irrelevant but this is a case where maybe it wasn't irrelevant maybe it actually causes animals to then change the way that they behave to become more sociable but it's very possible something like that played a role along the way which is why if you replay the sequence of the vanishing rainforest 10 * only one time does it may be lead anything good and the other nine times leads to a bunch of dead chimps yeah well the process is probably incredibly slow right over millions of years of the climate did alter to slowly slowly said I got no choice solid figure it out and then I figured nothing out and nobody knows for sure what that pressure is one hypothesis that has some possible there's probably a lot of reasons right any time something big happens if a lot of causes so some people who said that you can cover ground more efficiently when you walk upright with you

calories especially this idea of slowly running down animals you may have heard about this man persistence hunting exactly that we talked about that yesterday another reason is so ask yourself so why would an animal so if we back up a little bit remember I talked about how old one tools which are made even later than when we first started walking so they're even after that all the ones will never care to denigrate distance from where they're required in made it so what you have is an animal just like 2 days Champs they can't plan for tomorrow so Jim can plan for needs that I currently feels it can say oh I want to go get termites out of that mound all break the stick off I'll skip the leaves and then I'll go over there and do that but I can't plan for the fact that it might have that need again tomorrow if it doesn't feel the need to can plan for it and humans can plan for unfilled needs and the best example that is notion taken the tool with you that you not used and say well tomorrow right

whichever Australopithecus was the first one to start walking upright was almost assuredly incapable of planning for the future for unfilled needs but it could plan for Phillip needs because it's Jim can do that and if you think about how would you feel if you're about to walk across the open Savannah and your kind of small and leopards and lions are way faster than you I think the primary think you'd feel is fear like something in my hands to help me defend myself Club stick something so I would I suspect is a part of the process is my desire to hold something in my hand as I'm looking around I'm scared in a bunch of us are doing that and so I suspect that's what led to play the role in leading to buy pillows and there would have been other factors at play like persistence hunting and stuff but I suspect that came later so who actually holding a weapon might have led to the beginning of that interest just because you you don't need to be a rocket scientist you're scared now you want something to defend yourself do we have evidence of them sharpening sticks for some water

Savannah to sharpen sticks modern Jazz. I hope do we have evidence of ancient man we just having sex and so surely they were sharpening sticks but all of its decayed so what year did we so we really don't know when they first start attaching the stone tools to Sticks right making axes and Spears how we know that that's happening very recently but Homo sapiens we don't know if it happened before that if I had to guess I would say that homo erectus did that if you look at the quality of other things that they've done so for example there's this amazing sight of the Sea of Galilee about 700,000 years old to remember human the homo sapiens let's call it 300,000 years or so years ago and this is elephant skull that's been turned over so that they can get access price range for this yeah

15 / so what you got if people are quite capable of working together they know what they trying to achieve they know how to access those things I suspect that they knew that they could sharpen the steak or maybe even have to put us down to make it even better it's just that we can't find any evidence 4th at least not yet you wasn't there so there was certainly really ancient evidence of cannibalism too because of the scrape marks inside of skulls and they think they're scooping out brain matter that's possible I'm sure you're aware of that little person that was discovered just a few years ago I think it was like a decade or so ago that I'm in denial Ana Flores yeah yeah they think that little person type thing used to stone tools right yes so what happened about 1.7 I don't remember exactly Homo erectus leaves

but they also stay to go home right this basically colonizing all of Africa and you got home erectus colonizing almost all of your up all of southern Asia and so they don't they don't go beyond that at least maybe they did but but they certainly covered all that ground and an outside of so now you got home right this in Africa and homework is outside of Africa and of course been overtime both of them are going to evolve and change the ones outside of Africa and up is neanderthals those the most recent recent instantiation of them the ones inside of Africa and that possess and so when we leave Africa the first thing we encounters neanderthals and that's the first point of entry Out of Africa and so we probably start ovulating with them there we know we start a conversation with him soon afterward so as we left that evolve somewhere else involved in Europe and Asia and so they had evolved from some other type of the same right

we know this Dennis Sullivan from a t-bone you know I'm right inside Russia and we have got blue eyes and things like that come from and they think we we in a bread with it denisovans as well right well not all of it so there's some evidence for melanesians if I remember I having denisovan blood but as it may turn out that we did I don't think so though but there's no evidence of humans interbred with the folks from Flora strength and I know I've never seen that it doesn't mean that if if if it's possible that we could have Australia by 65,000 years ago and I don't remember when the floor is people we hit Australia 65,000 years ago and that was some sort of boat traveling

musica would have still been Ice Age and so we would have had a lot less water so when you look at what the Pacific next piece of land not not as far away compared to now with the Seas much higher and you can see the land okay so when the Pacific Islanders like travel to Hawaii you think they could see things getting see a lot better and the most recent that the very last place to Pacific Islander settle is New Zealand that's only seven hundred years ago so that's the same as today but a lot of that was a lot lower and soda be a lot more sticking up that we don't currently sold 700 years ago they had much more sophisticated boats with Wayward scattered across the globe if you think about it it seems like it's all Ball Z exploration but I actually suspect a bigger part of his running away from the guy behind you

causing problems and so is my favorite example that is if you look at the cliff dwellings like in the American southwest and you go there and the people down the valley are scarier than the risk of falling outside UK If you're going to live up in a cave dwelling right where they go to climb up to get you and that's part of the sexual selection as a source of people don't like people also don't like on fairness between groups because if you want to make a deal and you know I'm from Ohio and you're from California to California benefit more than Ohio and even though my benefit you benefit more now I'm at risk because maybe your group no ancestor was going to cause my group problems interesting so when you're studying all this stuff that how does that make you feel as a person do you mean to you to give her internalized all this stuff and you were thinking about like all the weird ape-like creatures that turned into people and all the thousands and thousands of years of evolution and how it could

gone left and it did go ride and it's does that freak you out when you really get deep into the study of all this stuff and it personal I do this all the time we can talk about all the ways that you can predict things about our modern cells based on knowing these things in the past right but secondarily what freaks me out the most probably is enormous role of random chance in all this right and if you think about me just think about her own backgrounds of random chance it on Mom and Dad got to Amherst the night that they did right which sperm wins at race is so unlikely to be us where and so every roll of the dice has to go your way right into the role of chance and all this kind of freaked you out if you think about that your brother's probably a lot like you of my brother's probably a lot like me and my sister whatever and so you have one child or have more I've got a boy and a girl okay will you know then that they're so different right out of the box

yeah they are called blueprint Robert Plumbing is a behavioral geneticist but I haven't seen that it's a lovely book just came out and just out like really recent how do you say his name p l o m i n Robert plumbing and he's a wonderful Behavior geneticists covered in the UK and this book blueprint talks about the role of genes and all this and he he basically is one of these people have been in the field almost since it got started and and what they kept thinking is that the environment was going to play a huge role the parents were going to play a huge role but of course but they keep finding over and over again that you realize how DNA makes us who we are and and what they find over and over again and this would so disconcerting is first of all on average most things are about 50% genetic but the bummer is that the other half isn't and isn't what happened in your house and the way you brought up by your folks it's the right

anime other stuff like the first we don't even know what it is it's just that's what we call on shared environment maybe that first girlfriend had maybe you bite into a tree and you want to improve your face you know a million different things that that specifically happened to you it didn't happen to everybody else in your family and also the way you address those things that happened and that could have a factor that could be a factor in how you were raised and how you were taught to deal with stress how you were taught to deal with situations and character development because there's a few that your parents actually have a big influence on what religion you're in for example but not how religious you are so the biggest role that you're trying to play seems to be when spermatic it's a friend of mine the analogy they made when I had my first kid is Susie says here's what you're going to find out that your hand it when the baby's born your hand to the negative it's at the pictures already been taken and screw it up by being in the dark from a little bit wrong or you can help it a little

being in the dark I'm a little bit right but the photograph is already there and my son of my daughter a wildly different in some ways in some ways are quite similar but I feel like I'm along for the ride more than I feel like I'm shaping them to make them and they are but don't you think you're shaping I'm someone I'm trying but that's what we do right but the day to say know how would the date of no I mean so many different human being sniffed you have to take into account all the variables that took place during all the developmental periods of their life to do it right you need to do all that we can't do that yet and to do it right where I want you to have that actual genetic markers not just to know the jeans are there and that's all starting now but but we don't know yet but they do do is they'll say what we got a bunch with his two ways to go about this employment was at the front of oh-one you look at adopted studies versus kids were adopted into a family versus biological and you can compare the the parents of the adopted kids to the biological parents versus the home parents

and it turns out that the biological parents predict the whole lot more about the adopted child in the parents who raise them the parents raise them pretty good almost nothing low- I got two identical twins and you find that when you then they all share the same environment they're they're all brought it by you and me right where the parents of these kids but they also there's a lot of unshared environment and that's when they differ it's not because of you and me we can't find any evidence that you and me that you and I made any difference all we can find is evidence that other things in their life made a difference not to say that means what we really don't know is what what is that on Sheridan varmint all we know is it's not something about your household cuz that would cause fraternal and identical twins to both be more similar to each other and it doesn't obviously a lot there's not a lot of data in terms of when your measuring someone's entire life from birth to death we known that there's enough the people start to draw

inclusions one of the more interesting ones is when you see identical twins that were raised in different households without any knowledge of each other and then they run into each other 30 years later and they find out they have disturbing similarities and blueprint is that your jeans become more powerful as you age so that the heritability of things like IQ goes up as you get older and so the argument is that your jeans seem to be causing you to select out environments so you gave the example maybe the way that you discipline them or tell them to be resilient or whatever you do as a parent causes them to shape their environment doesn't seem to be the case but it does seem to be the case that the genes that you give them cause them to select you want them to play with Timmy but they want to play with Johnny that's what they're making those choices every day it's also the case that their peers matter a whole lot more than their parents do once they get to a certain date

you know I'm chop liver as soon as my kids are a bit older but when I'm young on their hero you say that your jeans become more powerful as you get older what do you mean by that though more predictive of the outcome and so if you look at the heritability of IQ when you're a kid it's lower than when you're an adult and slower still doing an older adult and so what seems to be happening to a lot of our traits probably are you saying that like if you have children as an older person this morning at about 8 1020 60 you find it identical twins come more more together as they age weather Aging in the same household or not and so there's it's something about selecting your parents so like here's one kid who loves to think you do puzzles and his identical twin loves to do the same and they come and get smarter the whole lives there's another kid is not interested in that they have other interest in they go in a different direction but when you're when you're the parent you can be busy

pushing them to do the things you want them to do Ryan so they're heritability Celeste wrong and it's there's lots of cool examples it's like when to tell Terry governments are eliminated in the school system becomes more fair heritability of intelligence goes happiness societies cuz kids are now more capable of selecting the schools they want to go to the environment that they want to be part of wow what we were so flexible so weird when you think about all the various styles of civilization that human beings exist in and thrive in writing and for me that's the key so open a lot of people here about this they sort it sounds like genetic determinism your jeans are forcing you to be a certain way but for me it's there's enough genetic determinism that you can think about is it a genetic Notch party is going to come from the DNA or inherited the part of its going to come from their vomit Apartments going to come from your own personal decision yeah so yeah my mind we talked about in terms of your mind cuz that's what sucks unless psychology but it any easier examples your muscles you know what some people inherit genes that they lift one wait once they're not there

other people's jeans they have to work out a lot if they want to gain anything but you can still decide I'm going to work out a lot or I'm not I'm going to eat these nutrients are in a lot of protein or not you can choose a lifestyle that leads you to be more muscular less so it's partially Choice it's partially environment it's person that interaction between your genes and environment which would make sense if you think about how flexible. We are we are because things have to learn how to survive in every environment on this planet if we were meerkats or something what we got a certain way of doing things in your jeans can basically tell you what to do is cause you to listen to One signal and just follow that but it's human being two genes have no choice but to give up control once we went down this cognitive pathway that emphasizes learning over inborn instincts you know they're worthless when they're babies right baby wildebeest gets up in the office can go and run away from a line it's just so fantastically complicated the developmental process from

birth to adulthood and that this is taking place simultaneously among hundreds and hundreds of millions of people and with varying results and all sorts of different levels of creativity and Ingenuity in mathematical prowess in the literature and is all these different things that are being created by all these different weird little ape creatures everywhere and there's so many different factors that determine what does ape creature becomes official ball of food it's me and the great thing about being a human Is It Anyway

any of those things there's an issue for you you will be beneficial because we evolve to all work together they'll be value in you you're my favorite boriska you're my favorite whatever whatever you're good at everybody's good at something and so the thing is it people worry about the sort of upcoming genetic Revolution that it's going to be but there's going to be the good and everybody else and that's just not going to happen because one of the things we know and you'll see this if you look at blueprint is that your ID kazillion jeans on July every trait through this like a thousand of them and for them to make a designer baby that has all these qualities cuz all you do is Noodle Round with five or six jeans does a couple of disorders that work that way but our personalities are abilities are proclivities are all heavily determined by large numbers of Gene to do lots and lots of different things we were talking about our understanding of genetics currently and it when you talk about things like genetic manipulation or the use of crisper or any of these maybe new tools at

working on right now they've already updated Christopher they were Chris 4.2 right now when this continues to evolve and and more and more Innovation takes place in the in that world don't you think they're going to get to a point where they're going to understand all the various factors and genetics and they're going to be able to create a person who looks like the war but yes and no sew ins for yes you've got like on a 3 billion base pairs in your DNA and most of those we all share all the same ones the ones that don't care about those okay we can do now what makes a complicated is it most of the ones that differ between people are actually non there and what we now call the regulatory Wheaton we used to think of his junk DNA but now we know well think about a company a company that makes widgets does just make widgets S7 sales Vestal marketing as to management and now we know will sure enough a lot of the DNA that's not coding for proteins is working with the other DNA to turn things on and turn things off and there's 3 billion

president that level of complexity that is outrageous right so but let's still but someday we'll get it right is it you can look at all the very very and you can say all right which one of these things are correlate with my outcome of interest and so you say oh education and they create what's call a polygenic score and you say let's predict how many years of education you're going to get and sure enough the Richer you are on average the higher your polygenic score is it you're born into a rich family probably why are polygenic score but if you're polygenic score for education is lower than the average for your thing you probably get poor across your life if it's hairy probably get richer is it a gene for being smart for sitting there and doing what you're told for self-control like it could be and there's a thousand things in there and each one of them accounts for one tenth of 1% of the variance but what makes it complicated is that whole set of genes also predicts how artistic you are

different combination and it predicts how friendly you want a different combination and so the genes that do one set of things almost always do lots of things and we have very few traits are all that they don't have lots and lots of jeans at each play tiny roll underneath them example Plumbing is in his book which I think is great and he says we started out looking for gold nuggets and we now realize we're looking for Gold Dust just lots of tiny stuff out there so in the in many ways when you're looking at a what one you know you talked about that did the human genome and our genetic code where we're really similar to computer programs and that there's millions and millions of lines of code in computer programs but we know how to make computer so we know like what these won't we don't I don't I don't have somebody smarter than both of us knows how to make these incredible cheat codes that lead operating systems and stand so if you look in neural networks the bean put levels in the output levels in the freaking computer decides how to mix those things together

we don't even know what that was done and two of them that are learning the same thing might get there be a different mechanisms so by that idea or with it through that idea wouldn't you think that artificial intelligence could lead to the mapping out of the human genome or rather the altering of the human genome mapping out a different type of human looking principal it could and it may run all I would say is that what we thought was it 35 smart jeans that really matter in the rest of trivial and so turn on those 5 Smart Ones every don't want that but there's not and to what that means I got to decide I would imagine a future world where I'm about to have a baby and I can crispr the whole thing and I have to decide which means I said well he's not going to be very friend that you know each other you can get the big dick Gene but it doesn't see his good glasses

awful right right right I suspect we're not going to Noodle around with her smarts in our personality because every single change you make is going to have a commenter change somewhere else or I can make him smarter then he's going to be depressed like that yeah that that is a boy that the idea of playing God like that mean that's that's really me we are playing Creator mean I'm not even necessarily think we should use the word God in that respects it's something that's already been created but we're taking this life form and radically altering it and can already do that and people will start doing it like when I was a kid when we were kids IVF is playing God Is it true that is crazy this is going to take place in our lifetime the movie Rush Hour China's going to make some super person. There's just too many genes of play too small of a roll and so the thing is that

it's too hard to mess around with it's too hard to make that two to create these things there's no reason to be a lot better off if you just did selective breeding and the reality is you don't even need 2 people already sorted of Lee mate they already choose Partners were similar to themselves if they value education the other person does to if they value Athletics the other person does to that works so much better than anything that we're capable of doing right now and it when you do these days with these polygenic scores and you say oh look you're born into a social classes suggested what color behind you is kind of low and sure enough you could pour across your life you're literally accounting for 3% of the variance you're barely explaining anything because even though we when we look at the behavioral genetic studies we can say wow intelligence is 50% genetic we can't come close to finding the jeans that actually do that run and part of the reason we don't know what part of the reason maybe that first of all source is 50% environmental and what those random things are we don't know and second think about how you would 3 billion base pairs how many things maybe when those two are in place and that

is it in the third what you know it really really complicated levels where you're almost at infinite and so that's why I don't think it happens when you and I are around to see it I think you're probably right but then I just realized that things like crisper which were invented by accident came out of nowhere less than a decade ago I believe it was less than a decade ago right it's super recent it's outside but I don't see if you really stop and think about even the mapping of the human genome they used to be an unbelievably difficult thing and then you know a checking your genetics was preposterously expensive now you just spit into a little too and send it to 23andMe and they they tell you hey bro you know it's wrong that you and I will see it and it's only 10 years away yeah

could do that so easily by workers while talks about that that we really don't see things in terms of the exponential increase in technology no Criswell believes all this is going to happen plus more he thinks you're going to be able to download your brain into a computer and you know and he's smart researchers just turned on the world's most powerful supercomputer designed to mimic a human brain big goose with a million core supercomputer that took over a decade to build Mother Mother of God this is a whole room full of computers just like the Apollo missions use the room for the computer said that can't fuck with your phone is really crazy

C7 right they did they had a room this iPhone furries that room full of fucking shitty ass Computers Plus it takes pictures me where I go and this is only from 2005 from a Netflix special I didn't 2005 which know it's 13 years ago but doesn't seem like that long ago but I was making fun of people texting because I was like hey bro why why you making me read call me I go you sending me texts from a phone or fucking call me takes you for presses to get an s that was back when you had your number from and then there was also back when people thought it was cool to have those walkie talkies those Nextel phones remember that that was like a big deal have a walkie-talkie in a funk that died out thankfully but this this whole

change in the way we view technology from 2005 to 2018 the world is a radically different place that you and I both make a living job both get it wrong constantly right every day what the hell is that Facebook

time every single time I'm wrong I follow quite a few people on Facebook that are nuts and I go to their page is just to see what kind of arguments are getting into like as a sociological experiment and there are people that are on Facebook arguing about Trump or abortion or Islam or in a fill in the blank environmental concerns fracking and they just fucking argue all day long it's fascinating you look at their timeline you look at the entries and you're like oh my God this is like 10 hours of this shit in a day and they just do it all day long and you just picture this sweaty person sitting in front of a computer arguing with the world I never would have thought that there would be people sitting in front of their desk arguing with people that they can't see all throughout the world. That would be fun I don't think it is funny I think it's an impulsive obsessive

the people get sucked into and I think they're vastly healthier and happier when they're not engaged in it I mean the truth of the matter is in this comes back to the past again so you we talked about all these differences so one of the really lovely things that you can do is look for the past and then say well how is that manifest itself today and one of my favorite examples is the whites to your eyes so chimpanzees have brown eyes the fiscal are around the cornea advertises the direction of your gaze why would you advertise the directions you guys because what that says is it on average does a human when I look over there and see something I want you to know that I saw it you and I are probably going to cooperate to help us achieve whatever the goal is that I just encountered a chimp wants to hide it from its fellowships because it was competitive right on average whatever the hell is over there you're not going to help me get it right or yeah exactly you're going to make it harder for me to get a chips ever do that

weather this in the group will be over the Great Barrier Reef in the fish is going in and go to the octopus in because of right there no I'm not looking for Scott it always works better than working on your own right now so is there real evidence that shows that the whites of our eyes developed in order to indicate which way were looking in all these cases all we can do is say let's do a little phylogenetic analysis who's got in the dude doesn't write on the great ape with whites to the octopus does chilling and is that a grouper weird looking for can I can change colors like that I know it yeah we've gone down massive rabbit holes with these things for hours at a time look at is changing right now it's worth watching him

so he's he's sitting there waiting and the fish tries to get out and the Ark and the group got you that's the octopus man's getting dark car has a URL cool his skin is so just changes in Morse as you're looking at it that is so bizarre what a crate I didn't know I didn't know that they could do this until my friend Remi Warren came on the podcast and he had a television show called apex predator and what in on the show they would study the various ways these animals would hunt and the way they would know all there they're different adaptations to their environment all the different ways that they would use the environment and in the who try to mimic those different ways and one of things they studied was octopus and what's that other fish that's like it the Cuttlefish which is also what is he doing

he's lounging picked it up this is crazy oh my God octopus is climbing inside a clam shell that encloses it

that is bananas is a BBC blue planet where it shows itself like a big ball and they are keeps going the super smart will they they eat sharks your see that one there was a video where they found this aquarium was having an issue with sharks are disappearing they couldn't figure out what was going on and they put a camera inside the aquarium but it turned out that the octopus was waiting just chilling on the Rock still the Sharks came by and they would snatch them and eat them watch this it's really cool to watch he's like dude who me don't bother me I'm just a piece of coral I'm just hanging out here being pampered. You can cuz he looks exactly even in texture like the core which is so fascinating but when they found this they were stunned they had no idea that octopus could do that could not only that they could do that but that they would eat a shot at the big fight

fat man's not though you want to squeeze and Mickey Mouse said first but it's an easy fight looks like he's the thing about octopus so too they could sacrifice a 1000 just broke back it's annoying but yeah we're just guessing right so just fascinating animals are cool and brown is a biologist had cuttlefish in his tank and they can signal they like and whatever color and in this dang he's got a bunch of emails in one side a bunch of mail from the other so mail goes in between them any signals two different sides his body he shows a female's he's mail but he chose the nails that he's female so they want to attack him for a side of the note to the female they split off from us hundreds of millions of years ago right as closely related to celery base yeah but they're so smart in their eyes are similar to ours and like in the development

actually the opposite so there are eyes are poorly designed there's a very well designed to have all the detecting stuff is in its own way it's backwards before I can get picked up by the detectors there's a Min the proper directions to this shit is in the way and we have this blind spot because the big thing the nerve connection they don't there's comes in from the back where it belongs so what that tells you he was at yeah we both start out with some kind of randoms light sensitive spot and there's happened to be much better if you want to turn it into it cuz Evolution can always it only can start with what you got for dessert work better because they could see in water I mean is that all night worrying because they're so if anything's retinal stationary it's wiggling a flea with your eyeball you ignore it and so you don't even know you have your own blind spot you feel it in your brain does amazing things to fix the problem if you have a piece of lint in your eye or something like that

we're literally attached eventually disappear and because your brain that's irrelevant until you can see your own blind spot unless you close one eye and then you sit there with a neutral back when you move your thumb across and literally a thumbnail disappears because and what happens with the octopus it doesn't have the nerve ending in from the back and saw the whole thing works beautifully they don't have to deal with a blind spot would that be as effective though in the world that we live in love dance that it's the light-sensitive pit that they had started to get innervated properly from the back and ours didn't and then as ours evolved into an eye fancy structures that we now need in front of it or in the way does anything happen I like an octopus that lives on land

free question I don't know I don't want to sell see I read something about eyes if they think that. Shyt information a bad memory that they too many shows man I don't have any memory anymore so it's like. Like my house is filled with the boxes of shit that I don't need that's have brains work on the Prairie must because I know that there's a lot of stuff in there that didn't used to be in there before but I also know I could like random people that I should remember that I don't remember you know the funny thing is we may never forget anything but we just lose our capacity to access it was the date of suggested to make still guide our Behavior to recall it cuz he gets in the way of what you want and so when we talk about forgetting we're actually talking about us being able to actually retrieve it in Tokyo House not too well also I can I can retrieve thing

far better if I get access to the file by someone else's memory so like if you and I had an experience like 10 years ago and I camping trip or something like that and I forgot something happen and you said you might would happen by the creek when Mike for hurt his foot appointment exactly oh my God I forgot about that and then they told me no so but if you could be a little Define the sneakers Rango holy crap you're looking for if it's important happened recently it probably should be retrieved if it is not let let it sit away and it'll still got your baby you won't put your foot in that same hole when you and Michael and the camping trip the next time but you won't even remember why write an unlikely significant lessons are important because they are seared in your memory of this is this is a significant will you figure something out they didn't know before and it changed the way you looked at the world so this is

weird in your memory so it's much more because your brain and what you ate yesterday for lunch I can never retrieve that right but that's one of the reasons why epidemiology studies on diet are so difficult because people don't really remember what the fuck they must think the same thing everyday yeah it's the human mind is so fascinating and it is very so much and there's so many different factors involved in whatever it becomes cultural factors and environmental factors dietary factors that means at this very limber knowledge and that means that we're going to have to learn from people older than us and people that experience there and that means in the best way to learn from them is High Fidelity copying and so if you happen to go off in the directions

use chopsticks world that's how you eat you have to go to Fort Direction that's how you eat there's a million ways to do things that's how we started with the sort of argument about me or not right and I'm arguing and large was monogamy because you've got these systems in place that are testicles are big enough we got cryptic ovulation which means that we can tell when she's fertile which means we have to be available sexually interested in available all the time so we can make sure where the father and so that allows her to pair bond with us and there's some evidence an orgasm is a pair bonding experience certainly for females probably for males it works and lots of animals the oxytocin and vasopressin all that kind of stuff right so all that suggests that probably on the average that we evolve to do it this way but we're so super duper flexible that went another society says we'll have this works for us off we go on we find a way to make that work are there studies that compare testicle size of different civilizations in different cultures

dance races right that's what I'm the lies a lot of it but it would have large testicles are not the genetics it would explain why two different individuals of the same species would be that way because the only way to make that ladder one work that you have to inherit a constellation of traits so if I'm going to herot the jeans for big and for compulsiveness and for having lots of kids and not care much about him at all the things that are supposedly go with that the do when you look between species there's no way for those that constellation cuz member I was talk about how polygenic everything is and so they don't literally need to sit next to each other on the chromosome if they've got any chance of being passed on as a package and they don't and you also get all the shifting around during meiosis I can remember the term for off the top my head but where the pieces of genetic and to move around at the virtually guarantees that you're not going in here at this huge constellation of traits within a species

species is dead easy and so Tim fathers don't pay any attention to Tim babies to speak of because well that's their mating system right where as you got pair bonded Gibbons and things and now parents start to play a much bigger even mail parents there's no studies that show that human beings with archer testicles tend to ignore the children while so this is just a people have tried to show that but here's the problem that argument it's called life history strategies where you say well you're going to develop one life history strategy in these circumstances and then other than these other circumstances the problem is that you end up with ethnic differences in testicle size which we know exist do you also have ethnic differences in where in in the kinds of Life the people currently lead the difficult thing as a super easy to look at the world we are in right now and this is what tripped me up earlier as well look at the world

we are right now in a symbol that's the way things have always been and they haven't answer right now you know the mathematics used to it for a while they're the best math in the world was taking place in Arabic world now it's not anymore it's okay if you don't know that passed you say well look people in Arabic World arms good at mathematics and they have these qualities and that you make an inference right now at the differences in testicles I believe but I can promise you that it is some different West African groups happened at the largest testicle size on average does West African groups tend to be poor right now there's a lot of things about life to go with being poor it look like in our strategy having lots of kids and paying less attention to them but what you're probably looking at is a coincidental association between some biology and some part some way that your your people having to live that didn't exist while ago and that won't exist in a while from now until it's really easy to try to use this research which people have to say well you got some primitive people who have

testicles and low print and leopard and you've got some more sophisticated people smaller testicles and her friends electric but that's genetically super naive one of the things that I learned when I was in Rome we took a tour of the Vatican by the sky who's the professor really interesting it was cool because we need to have a really enthusiastic guide and who who could explain a lot of things to you and he was really excited that you know me and my family very curious about these things too but one thing she said was really interesting I said I go wide all the dudes have little dicks like what's going on with that and he said that they believed that if you had a large penis that large penises were a symbol of barbaric behavior and that these were kruder people and that to be you know I'll talk to be a sophisticated person you wanted a smaller penis so they actually accentuated smaller penises in their gods and smaller penises in their statute and that's funny I mean you could see these kinds of things all

time so early pre Western contact if you look at Japanese women they're painted their painted with her eyes as of as late as possible post Western contact beautiful women have bigger eyes these things can change all over the map I personally suspected large penis sizes also product of sexual selection so it's more fun for her if he's got a large penises having sex for longer more regularly because ovulations hidden so he has to be available all the time so she has to be available all the time of the system doesn't work and that's what creates pair-bonding so humans primates with a single exception of bonobos and we have way bigger penises than any of the other great apes and I suspect that that's something that is female I mean women always say why are men so obsessed of the penis size by suspected to the creator of it and that's why we're so obsessed with it women you say that are playing games no

that's ridiculous I don't know that's like men who have some assholes out there that's playing games okay possibly you're right it is fascinating when you think about all these different things that lead to Natural Selection and the fact that there's so many variables that are in place and that we're trying to find out what is better and what is not and if you have a study and the study finds genetic differences and ethnic genetic differences if there is a lot of blow back and let her push back against that if you think about how Homo sapiens evolved in Africa then a small percentage of us left which means the majority of his didn't write them in those few ran into lived up in the top right-hand corner were available to go which means it all the rest of the earth comes out of a few small percentage of the population that could have left and so we now

I know this enormous genetic variation within Africa way more genetic variation within Africa than outside of Africa are there between any two people are could Chinese person in a Norwegian person I'm much more closely related to each other genetically then an African guy who lives in the next Village over and so because most of the genetic variability never left a continent and so we have this idea of race as if it is generic meaning of it doesn't but ethnicity does have genetic meaning right spot to deal with very certain problems and their body shape of a very West Africans were really jacked with these big must a lot of pictures my sister you don't see that over on East Africa very much you've got tall people in Denmark you don't see that you know and other parts of Europe etcetera so people are The annotation with the Inuit to deal with cold climates

what the population in South looking like it's just so amazing to consider that this entire species essentially except for the times that we interacted with interbred with neanderthals came from one part of Africa know that's one of the reasons why racism is so Preposterous cuz we're essentially all African we are all African that we've all of us were out have a little bit of other stuff in them just a tiny bit was so weird though we're so like we're so much like dogs you know like a Great Dane can breed with a poodle and they don't look anything like each other from another planet you go well that definitely two different things it's like if you looked at LeBron James and you know Traci Lords right those are two different things and things that aren't even alive

the tall ones are interesting cuz really they are cousins are cousins separated by a million years and some change and I don't know too much about them either which is really weird we know they had larger brains enough but we don't really know how smart is now an end and why did we replace them yeah like did we was a disease if we care that wipe them all out better organized so we competed then we killed them on purpose you know if it is a million Branch pieces we happen to know a lot about neanderthals cuz they are existed till very recently but we does all sorts of branching that took place early on lots of different australopithecines Etc didn't say yeah and the fact that we're the only one that comes out of that could mean well we got lucky or were mean as shit and we took care of all of our cousins who didn't you know we want to see what they had the latter so mean for me a million years ago

so we evolved to cooperate with each other but the key is we did not evolve to cooperate across different groups so once you get to Homo erectus and now you got division of labor and you've got the capacity to plan for unfilled needs for the caring is a shilling tools with them over great distances etcetera will now who's your most effective Predator vacational mammoths were saber tooth tiger will it kill the occasion one of us but they can't possibly take us all on the same way we can take them on is only one other thing on the planet they can take us on and that's ourselves to other groups of homo erectus would have probably been a major threat certainly by the time were homosapiens other groups would have been our only major threat so we evolve to be kind to each other within our group but we did not evolve to be kind of outside our group that doesn't mean we evolve to be mean we have all three neutral so let's see if you're going to be Friend or Foe net neutrality super important it has the potential for cooperation across group boundaries we can change women and men can mingle so we don't interbreed too much amongst ourselves we can trade with each other lots of good things going to happen

the second you guys get a little bit at grow with us you know now we're in a position to just go all out and try to exterminate you and to get the rates of violence within human groups compared to gems to like 500 times more violent physically aggressive than we are you look at the rates between human groups equal 1 to 1 ratio so we tend to think about while how could it be that we're both so nice and so mean but we have to remember that we want to cooperate and to be nice to each other to be more effective Killers it wasn't because let's make a hippie in a paradise it's like these lines are going to eat at you and I got to have to get together to sort out these guys and so are Cooperative Nature's literally the flip side of the coin of our competitive violent killing nature also the undeniable history of unbelievably ruthless tribal Warfare would indicate that we have a long history of fighting against others that are like us that we don't know absolutely

I need to come into conflict which is a huge percent of the time they literally fight to the death because if you catch me you're going to torture me to death if I'm female you're going to corporate to be in your system and then it's going to be okay not great but okay but if I mail I'm going to die so I might as well die fighting you now because I'm going to die I'm pleasantly later yeah that's super, that's everywhere we see it and just tons and tons of bodies that I have to healthily perforated that are the clearly the consequences this kind of work it's crazy dinner that is thought to be even in 2018 an inevitable part of being human being Warfare even to this day is thought to be inevitable because there's no I mean we would all love that one day there be no Warfare but there's no indication whatsoever that that's good take one almost there and I actually I think pink who's got the best answer to this question which is basically what what structures do you need to put in place to make the world a safer and less violent place in the end I don't know if you talk to him about his book better angels of our nature I know you talk to him about more recent ones

Raider Chapel example of how we become less and less violent than even over our lifetimes and part of that is undoubtedly better governance structure and all that but part of that I think of Cycles on itself so when I was a little kid in this kind of thing probably happened to you I was on when I was in kindergarden carpool with a cop so this cop is driving home in the back of his car he's got no seatbelts cuz this is 1969 and Carson a seat belt or something and come around the corner and they all slide up against me to the edge of the car seat and I'm trying to push back but I'm the little guy right and I can't get there I must have hit the elbow against the door in the Flies open I roll out of the car oh my God I go bounce it across the street right so does my mom and I'm bleeding and bruised and torn crew shirt and you don't like it expected bouncing out of a car and my mom who's a pediatrician so she could tell I wasn't badly damaged looks me over to sign looks fine don't worry about it

directions to leave your kid home so hey man really sorry Joe both on this planet and so what I think is part of what what pinker's documenting is as the world it's safer we start getting used to a limo Mayhem World these Mayhem events stand out in my mind and so it actually self perpetuates where the safer gets to see if we needed to be because every little thing that goes wrong stands out and sharper relief that's very fast way of looking at it you know what's interesting to me about Tinkers work is how much push-back he gets in particular about the world being a safer place like people want to keep putting pointing towards violent episodes and and and and racism and in crime and all these different things is different factors as if it's some sort of evidence against what he saying when he's incorporating that those current events into this

large database and he saying yes it's not that we don't live in Utopia but the world is vastly safer and better now than it was a thousand years ago or 10,000 years ago or even a hundred years ago but why is there so much push back against the amount that it doesn't look like a problem to be solved anymore but we didn't know it because they're not telling anybody because someone's going to kick their ass if they knew that they were gay but it's so much better than what you don't want no problem anymore because then you can allow them to still run into troubles and circumstances even though the trouble they run into today is a thousand times less than the same thing goes for sex isn't it all gotten so much better but

and sexual violence is a perfect example in a few looking if you said this isn't papers book if you said rape and homicide do you call it both of them whatever level there on 1972 a hundred and then you track them through to the early 2000s I'm homicide in the US, size drop down to like 50 grades drop down to like 25 but if you listen to women's advocacy groups in the reason you would know it is because they people worry well if you think the pain is getting better on its own then you won't keep doing anything to help fix it and that's a really unfortunate part of our psychology because it makes people feel like I've been no progress and when you feel like no progress than you think will maybe we need to completely overturn the whole system and try something new and that's like what's the point of takers newest book Enlightenment now know things are going freaking great turn it down all those things are really bad I just voted for somebody like Trump is a really bad idea because things are actually running along really nicely it's just that we tend to forget it because every advocacy group was all worried about whatever their particular issue is

doesn't want the word to get out the things are a lot better than I used to be because I think it's some fundamental level they think well 25 rates year isn't bad enough we better say that there's a hundred. I'm not saying that he was consciously or whatever the number is it is bad enough right it doesn't it doesn't have to be the numbers that used to be when I was a child to be a problem at all has to be as a number above zero people develop the vested interest in promoting an idea and they want to exaggerate that idea whatever it is whether it's the idea that the world is a safer place and it actually has or whether it's the world is an idea of a mordant the more dangerous place in a really is and for whatever reason once we have it in our mind that this is the thing we're married to wear married to this concept of polyamorous life into this is a natural way to live or that you know violence is inevitable and this is just a part of who we are we tend to promote that and we tend to have massive confirmation bias and it's it's I think it's because we

we associate yourself with ideas we don't look at ideas as being a thing like if you think that's something is one way and then your pointed towards evidence that you're incorrect you feel like personally you've been slighted or you're being somehow somehow you're being diminished by your lack of being correct but you're incorrect assumptions and Notions and part of being a person to person that's the hardest part about being a scientist because you want my immediate reactions to fight against it and that's it will hold on what you're saying now he's right I overstated that look back off right and so it is really lovely paper that came out in 2011 by Mercer and Dan sperber what they argued is I think they nailed it and they said here's what it is our brain actually we evolved are logical processing abilities not find out the truth of the world but to convince you of my point of view

so which teas are logical abilities involved in service of persuasion the truth because of course if I can persuade you that the world is the way it would and in a way that benefits bill at the world is something about waybill wants the world to be is true then the world's going to be a little kinder to me it'll fit my worldview and others will give me the things I want until I go through life trying to persuade you in my world you rather than trying to find out what's actually out there and so that's why it's for your particular point of view I think it's also a byproduct of ignorance because for the longest time you could tell me something and there was very little way that I could find out whether or not you're right or not I really could know you're correct unless I went and start doing research read some books and where is now I could just pull up my phone and say hey Bill just said this is that right and then the phone go know there's been a hundred

is it true that stand everybody would agree on their politics everybody would agree that the fake news was fake and was perhaps there was an evolutionary Advantage absolutely I say how I can plan something and Joe's mind it'll help me that ain't true but if he believes it is life will be better for me right and so as soon as kids learning theory of mind at age for they start to lie and probably where are you going to play next week I'm right here. And they also understand that they could perhaps

is the way you feel about them by manipulating the truth it's having kids and seeing kids that grow up and troubled homes one one thing you see me almost universally so those kids lie a lot you know and years and no choice condition you're in a bad spot and like one of my daughter's little friends this constantly lying that you know she has a broken home and situations not good and it's just it's unfortunate but this little kid is tormented because of it she's always making stuff up and all the other little girls roll their eyes and I know she's a liar and it's it's sad but the ability to be deceptive I feel like that you know this is there some sort of idea that we cling to that if you can deceive someone about certain particular aspects of your mind or your past or what you what you accomplished or what you you're capable of doing that you will have a better place in the social chain

no that's actually writing so what the way I think about it is I think about the difference between conspecific conflict conflict between members of the same species and conflicts between predator and prey so everytime predator and prey and eventually one of them is going to die yeah there's going to starve praise going to get eaten eating over something even if it's a very subtle level of competition we don't want to come to blows because if I'm trying to size you up yet physical blows or mental blows we just suffering on eat both sides if we have to Duke it out so I want to sell myself as being a little more than I really am I want to be Bill plus 20% you want to say something little more than you really are because we know that we're not fully going to test each other cuz there's negative consequences for testing and whenever this negative consequences even for the winter for testing is a lot of posturing it's going to go on and that posturing is something is literally built into our psyche and we go through life trying to self inflate on average matter because his butt on average trying to self inflate as much as we can in order the game

the things in life that we might not get if we were brutally honest about what our capabilities actually are that is so fascinating that we clean to all these ancient structures that are in place when it comes to the way we interact with each other and how important is like the social exchange is that we have and that I think this is one of the reasons why we cling to idea so much that these ideas like if you can push an idea through you what you've got some points on the board and probably going to benefit you and my average drive and so if I'm if I'm happily married and I'm not looking around with in monogamy is the great thing and sleeping around it's a sin but if I'm perfectly view service well and if I can plant My Views in your mind and I've benefited yeah I saw that a lot I mean to you or just got to see that a lot with everything but I guess more to what we're talking about

people that don't want to admit like with whip out when it comes like pinker's data about the world being a better place cuz they have almost a vested interest in stirring up fear and they're committed that in their mind they're committed to constantly studying that the the wrongs of the world in the evil of the world and that any sort of diminishing of that is actually going to cause harm to the people that are suffering I think they have a good purpose in their mind there's good intention I totally agree hey man things are great donate to this cause I will keep them 1989 my little brother and I were chatting about it we thought you know this will save some animals because it's a lot of animals that are consumed for their presumed potency Effects by like traditional Chinese medicine consumers and things like that and see if I ever actually works prior to Viagra nothing is out

it works how about this I'll have an impact and so we wrote this little letter off to send it to a journal and said you know that this is going to save certain animals like seals which they could be harvested to eat their penises Canadian seals I know what I know it's people that you're you're allowed to kill a certain number if you can't kill seagulls in America they're protected but in Canada a us but in Canada you can does a hood seal a limited men and a harp seal allotment and so people killing up to their allotments in selling you could do it solely for the penis and sell the penis for enough money to make your money back and what purpose does the seals penis have be on the seals original purpose is built right but they eat it because it's supposed to make you more potent little sinus what is a rhino horn Rhino horn is an example that's used for lots of different things so it's less likely to be helped but the seal penis is only 8 people basically only using first potency and then when fire comes along like little your shopping in the supermarket what you got hit by you going to get I'll have some seal peanuts or I'll take a Viagra but we just had people are going to switch we were very greedy throw both of them together

we we made this argument we literally were attacked by the World Wildlife Fund government looking at plan to revive seal penis sales what hold the fuck on is this recent it's was update as published in 2015 but was updated this may government is looking at a plan go back up to revive seal penis sales okay this must be a plan was brought to the government this must not be the worst way of like looking at that headline is at the government's thinking man we got a fucking revive these penis sales no one's buying silver their name because she may be thinking that because you got some relatively impoverished people are hunting for them and no one's buying them anymore

what's that real the report drafted by the fur Institute of medicine is aimed at creating new markets to support an earlier proposal to kill a hundred forty thousand grey seals over 5 years in the southern Gulf of st. Lawrence

70% of Grey seals that frequent the area so they're what they want to do they want to diminish that okay it's here's what it is they have long complained of the growing population of Grey seals is to blame for eating too many commercially viable fish which has resulted in repeated calls for a call okay so they want to kill the seals so just save the fish market so they going to get people to buy Dick's financially viable is racist the penis is of juvenile adult animals may be dried and sold as sexual enhancement product particular to Asian buyers why was uses of potency product I understand but the target those Asians was poor fools right I thought for the World Wildlife Fund it's going to be psyched because here's some good news for a change

forget that you got to have some good news along the way of people give up look at this it says here Asian consumers particularly athletes also consumer beverage called how do you say that Dallas an oral liquid that is made from seal penis and testicles was they believed to be energizing and performance enhancing how about some studies motherfucker before you start eating sealed Dick's good bro I don't need that so we actually because we got attacked by the world while the fun we sent it at one of my I need to send him to go back to Hong Kong for the holidays to you because you said it was wrong people won't switch they say what it how it how did they phrase it but I wrote an article that when we tried to get people to switch from Rhino and tiger horn to ask for and they wouldn't

they want it so they won't switch to Viagra and I'm like I got a headache so we argue that's different and so we actually went into these clinics and we asked people in traditional Chinese clinics in Hong Kong what do you take for a headache what do you take for gout what do you take for erectile dysfunction and that was the one case where they had switched so consumers all over the world they know when a better product comes along they know when they've got no options or nothing works maybe I'll get a little bit of a placebo effect or you know oh hey love to something that actually works that's what I'm going to buy what I read about the one of the issues with Rhino horn with some Asian buyers is it also it's a it's a signal of affluence at exactly right

creature that almost seems like a living dinosaur killing them for the horn but it's bananas it just doesn't make any sense to me that that is still that they haven't realized that there's no value in it that there's no physical value it doesn't really give you erections and physical supposed to do list unfortunately I still like it's so crazy that's so sad. My daughter's outside the door hi to me that there are these specific cases right like it's not like people are looking for a giraffe horns like dentist Association

black man need to get that horn and eat it dick get hard like to do think so because if you look at the long list of products they look pretty phallic and mostly people eat phallic things in order to gain potency is there something crazy about sealed looks like what's a good word for that I like that

I'm sure you know you think I eat that sucker I'll get the big to write your so weird but it's so weird that in the end in the face of new evidence of people have an adopted they know this new evidence and they still claim at least some people crazy ideas at all right but they might end up sick too and that seems almost like a magical transference and if you accept this and and they all know that like they don't realize that you're seriously outwardly sick and Contagious by the disgusting and so that kind of magical contagion it's super easy to see why it wasn't to make you think that will Rhino horn will make my dick bigger too I guess

I mean is there any instances where that stuff is real word does actually work that way not that I can think of any but it is the case that you you being sick will make me sick like you eat an animal's thing you consume you know after you have my jacket and now I go out with a jacket on and he's cool and I've got a little bit of your cool and now the girls are like me to head over his body and you kick some ass to have that thing that's true yeah yeah I guess it's just we're so weird you know I just ate the human animal self is a such a strange thing in the more you study at the more you go deeper and deeper into the layers of weirdness that we are pretty good about

it's cuz we can't predict that one out of a thousand Behavior right well we can break but people tend to do when the bell cruised into split we can't say with some random psycho or genius or artist or whatever will do under those circumstances cuz that's not what I'm always your design or it's some it's so interesting when you think about our interactions also with all the various animals that we've come up it come across like all all throughout our our life as as human beings and that people chosen some to some to cherish and some to some to take on as as food sources in some to worship and makes good sense that's a huge plus right it's worth at least tolerating it and it eats the scraps and some of them cats killing rats

kind of Herman would have been a real problem enlarging irrelevant when we're still hunter-gatherers but so we we had dogs we domesticated those what were hunter-gatherers but that's the best I know it's like ancient Egypt in these guys are not storing grain and things like that so those anxious systems make good sense of you're making a deal with an animal that can achieve something that you can achieve and of course you're living in a world without chemicals and machines and all that kind of stuff tons of them are just totally random and in this culture that thing is worshipped in this culture at Eton and you know and that that's where that stuff is super hard to predict now and studying all the stuff and writing this book how much is this change the way you just see humans like as you're just going to the mall but when he told a lie cuz I made and so we're the for the playground and this little boys playing with him and my son doesn't have a lunch box at all he doesn't own one and the little boy says I got a Spider-Man lunchbox and my son is like 4

funny looks of the kids and he doesn't know yet but he knows his lunch box you just made the shit at writing spiders write Spider-Man and beat Kino is it telling me stories are going to be important first place in the social hierarchy to the kid looks at me I'm like trying not to laugh right cuz I got to support my son and you can imagine that it without this background you might like we should discourage is kind of like a little bit of a different perspective got my back bro exactly

try to do something that Scott is it is also cattle worshiping is very fascinating to the like the Hindus and all these different different tribes in different cultures that worship cattle were other people just thought of him his food sources when you shift from being on together to basically killing and eating stuff to being a pastoralist so you're of cattle or sheep or whatever or to being a farmer you suddenly have to start taking on the long game so humans are perfectly capable of envisioning unfelt needs no matter what kind of society there in but I think there's a living for today and so it's get skillet

but once you shift to having hers or having land to can't that psychology doesn't work anymore and so was super interesting is it took literally like 10 or 20 thousand years we've got the improvements in place to call choice but we're not planting and it just would just grinding stuff that we gather and why does it take so long to plant when maybe it would have to shift your psychology over and see what I got to stop thinking about killing and eating it today I got to say well alright well would it be beneficial to me to keep this Beast around and have it for tomorrow and drink is blood or it's milk or whatever and one way to get there might have been well let's let's create a religion that says we can't eat them today cuz I'll solve it immediately that's one way to look at it but have you ever looked into some of the other hypothesis on the origin of cattle worship I think it again and has to do is Scylla syban because they could beat soda Crush

the really bad ideas the sources of infection and disease and death and those societies tend not to grow happened to be good idea to pass along until you got a lot of people on this planet to worship cows we suggest it whatever got that started actually probably had a benefit because those societies brew and because we're spincast not sound like when you come to me and say hey man I worship cows and I'm thinking okay I'd rather eat them but fine it's hard to imagine being persuaded but it's easy to imagine growing up in that system over imitating right we talked about that you automatically just copied that worships cows things are working out well for him I'll do the same and then you got and that's a good thing for your Society because you can drink his blood or it's milk or whichever it's your lactose tolerant whatever you do and then that allows just decided to grow was there anything surprising to you in and writing this book and researching it in and putting it together it was anything that really just made you step back and go wow I didn't see that one,

what does a lot of things that I didn't see comment and a lot of times where I thought I had an idea of how it all worked and then I thought I read a lot of more papers I call that's not even possible they didn't have that capability or whatever what would surprise me with a big heart of the way this book comes from is that then colleagues would say they would know I'm working on this and it's a will come give a talk at my conference on leadership and I'm single I don't know anybody leadership Nicole chili something it must have applications for that and every time they ask me to do that and I'd say okay I'll give it a try and then little you sit down and think about it you might as well there are important implications for leadership or innovation or happiness or sociology and I never saw them coming and so is literally friends of mine kind of force I had one goal which is to just understand social intelligence and how did he become so socially intelligent and and that was when I started in French is kept asking me to look at other things that every time I did that was an answer sometimes there's an answer is easier to find a since harder to find but it was always there and what that tells me is that there's really a lot of value and

taking the Anthropologie in the biology and putting them together and figure out where do we come from and now what can that tell us about who we are today that's an interesting stuff like sort of a intellectual exercise to write a different perspective on the material that you're going over and somebody forces you into a little box like tell me you know what what what have you know what's the influence on Norwood the impact on creativity Museum packed on leadership all these different I just to give you a different view let's look at it from the left let's look it up from the top so get from below and it's either we already know is true and now we could get new things that we would know about it or if it tells us something that we don't even know but that might explain the way the world is and both of those are that's what science is all about but some of them will hopefully not be dead and you will run off intestines holy shit now and I understand Innovation now I understand what's interesting about this kind of material is that it gives you

individual kiss me inside of my own behavior and I think it would do a lot of people do all of us some real good if we had a better understanding of what her motivations are and how we got to this point in Civilization what we actually are you know I mean maybe it will or won't change your behavior but at least it'll give you some insight into I totally agree getting upset because you disagree important things about you doesn't mean that you're like an evil person in must be overcome it means it probably we ought to be talking to each other and trying to find a compromise solution that makes things work best but there's this automatic Instinct I think that you are evil because you disagree with me

didn't do that we're screwed but now we don't need to anymore and so now we can sit will hold on I'm a lefty and you're in my example your a righty and we disagree about this particular president but a fine let's see if we can both agree on a goal that will make both of us happy rather know you're evil and all I have to use overcome you one of the things that I've really tried very hard from doing this podcast is to not be attached ideas and to do that as an exercise when I think over the course of the years I've been doing it so I've got no way way better at that but it's it's just so fascinated when I encounter in the raw form like when I go to a party and I just run into some guy was a dad and he bring something up and I tell him that's not totally true because of this and then you see this like the Blood starts pumping in the heart starts beating and the trying to look at some way you're wrong and it becomes a personal thing it gets very very heated it's easy for all of us to do that

akademiks there's no way I was abandoned that was lost all I was going to do well that's what science is and I like how you're right you're right I've got to start even though I was right rather than trying to just attack it which is my automatic instinct to say what what what is it that you're saying now might be a value that I should actually be incorporating and yeah and also just the ideas aren't you tend to have my ideas because they tend to make the world a more hospitable place to build then in a way I kind of do need to defend them because if you convince me know the way the world should work as well as strong as it gets everything while I'm stuffed

I need to try to fight against a lot of alternative use and I have to overcome in my efforts as well so it's just like we have tore the objects that we own that means something to us to our family to our group etcetera FL makes really good sense and and the other side of that coin is if we talk about the way things used to be in a pre medical world if you're the chance of you caring different pathogens and I carries reasonably hi and if you infect me I'm screwed now if you do things differently than I do think so you eat this food and I eat that food was different could actually be wrong for my perspective cuz if I do what you've done I might get myself sick cuz you've adapted to that that thing and so we literally probably for good jit evolutionary reason I came to view cultural ways of doing things that are different as if they're wrong because that saved us that protected us from the kind of pathogen vectors that you've got an adapter to but that I haven't that's fascinating so that this is almost like ingrained in US

evolve to be this way and so it's hard to undo that do you think that with the access to information that we're currently enjoying that because there's so much information now on so easy to get to that perhaps they'll be more instances of people not becoming attached their ideas and recognizing that they are there they are separate that you are just a thinking organism and what the facts are and what reality is is just something that's happening and you don't have to be personally attached to its not a part of your identity I hope so because I do world the things that were attached to that don't really matter I'm an iPhone guy and you're an Android about it and be silly and have a good time and then we could and know this this political strategy will make everyone poor or sick or whatever then we could be willing to change their minds because in the end I think we've got this evolved desire to latch onto these things these ideas

values and products even and I and so it be nice if we could do it with the trivial and let the stuff that really matters I said that the stuff that we do with trivial it's it stays actually trivial because there's so many people will I guess it goes with sports teams and but it also goes with like brands of cars like I've heard people say I have always been a Ford guy love for it's like okay I guess but it's funny it's like what is the best fucking car Evers is Chevy and you have the opportunity body like I'm a Ford guy like I was some strange reason to say there's some weird motivation to stick to your initial statements

the problem is if I move around with the Wynn's you look at me as a man nothing right you're asleep Flopper can't stand by what I believe in respect for me but what if what if you what you believe in is incorrect. That's that's how you supposed to clean do that right you show me that I'm in my attitudes are impeding my own goals then I'm willing to change them to achieve that value structure and I think the best politicians and scientists an artist and and Comedians and all the rest of the ones you can do that yeah why you like what you said like here's my value structure this is these are my ethics these are my morals this is how I treat people this is who I am but that other stuff is just information yeah it's a means to an end and so some people care a lot about loyalty other people care a lot about fairness other people care a lot about sanctity in Purity right there's different values that are important all of the world we all care about him but some people

$0.01 more important more than another said he does this work and he's one of the first people to push these ideas and you can predict them by people politics and stuff like that and see if we all agree they all matter what the problem is then we get into an argument where you tell me loyalty is more important than I take fairness or harm is important and then we're never going to see eye-to-eye so that you know it with two humans that are healthy that's an interesting discussion cuz why do you think fairness is more important why do I think discipline is more important than fairness or education is more whatever it is I think that when someone claims to this idea that this is the most significant aspect of human civilization that's always weird to you it's hard when they can't acknowledge other possibility sings her I hate to say it but they're like 50% genetic write some of us are more open-minded and some of us are more close-minded and there's probably good reasons to be that way they made your that made you successful under one set of Circa

Santa versus another because you're extraversion for example almost all people prefer extroverts over introverts and extroverts are all sorts of risk for disease because they're constantly up in everyone's face and so an ancestral environment is probably pretty costly to be extroverted and you did you pay the price and it that introverts didn't have to pay when you got sick but it's also like we getting so much creativity and inside from introverts or extroverts benefit introverts my Verizon running Microsoft and being the greatest artist and all that influence of epigenetics look at Super interesting so my my I know little about it very little about it my behavior genetics colleague and since there's no good evidence among humans from multigenerational epigenetic effects we know that they exist now and some animals week you can do the experiments pretty easily to get these multigenerational epigenetic epigenetics

can turn genes on and off in the simplest sense and so environmental factors will mad at like maybe when you're in utero there's a famine and that's a common thing that's looked at we'll look at that in and rats for example under feed the mother when the babies in there and that causes the babies methylation of some of the jeans I don't understand the science of it at all but it turns some jeans on and some jeans off and so a baby of a of a mother rat who was raised Who's In Utero when the mother was underfed Will mature more rapidly it'll eat everything that's not nailed down and it'll have sex with lots of more rats than a regular than a rat that wasn't didn't have its mother start and the key thing is that makes good sense cuz it's way too responsive times a fan go as fast as you can and reproduces quickly as you can because you know reproductions of currency of evolution the fact that you exist in Liv is Trivial fact you passed on your jeans that's what evolution works with so it's a great way to change with the local environment and there's some very interesting evidence that then those effects are even in the next

can soda the child of a rat that was that was in a mother who is underfed will also have some of these strategies damage in his card says none of those data robust enough it's sort of like some of the Christians you made of what I've said you're right the data suggest things that might be but there's lots of alternative is about longevity that there was some sort of evidence that points to the descendants of people who survived famine they they live longer until the question might be why so we know for example that if you're in utero during famine males are more like to be aborted than females when it gets really bad female fetuses are probably more but if you're that gender fight in all probability those fetuses that could survive and I might just be the more robust specimens right and so you might just be calling

you know you don't do experiments on these things in humans you can do experiments on mice and rats and and try to find these things out the downside is if you read about drugs that are really going to help us and then they disappear it's because it works in a mouse and it doesn't work in us and the downside of these things even mice and rats differ from each other and so and we're a long way from either them and so the epigenetic effects did they show there may be a good reason why we don't yeah there's some real ethical questions in regard to running studies like that on human being since we're going to have to develop headless humans in the lab that have no soul that we could do tests on but we could actually think that what will get really good at is that the issues raised earlier and that is I don't know everything that's ever happened to you but someday it'll be possible to know what ton of that stuff and I'll be able to rule out all sorts of alternative how do we know that this particular collection of foods will actually do

how do we know how well people are sticking to it and a big part of those Effexor actually the psychological effects of protein is a really good example that you know see Simpson argued in the early 90s that if you he started Locust that animals are motivated to eat as a function of how much protein that they've consumed and so the Atkins diet was the right idea but a misunderstanding of the cause it's just a protein we evolve to feel full when you get protein we didn't evolve to feel full from carbohydrates and there's always two reasons for that and is always have other effects of going on at the same time but the consequence of that is there when people's diets move around you say I'll look this diet is this affecting that one doesn't but you don't actually know what they've been doing because some diets are harder to maintain and they're cheating more whatever someday we'll have much better than all that you'll be wearing a device I'll know what you consume don't know what y'all an accelerometer on the wall everything that happened to you so that's another interesting aspect of genetics right there's one thing that we absolutely knows that some people respond differently to dice and other people do and you know for some person up a particular type of diet

is like beneficial in perfect and injust locsin and other person would be horrible absolute that's weird I cross the species of dogs are because the people have been eating different foods for a long period of time after a death to that and of course agriculture's only 12,000 years old total although we've been eating cereals before that and send lots of societies didn't have it at all or only had a very recently and so it's super hard for some people eat cranes compared to other people to Ukraine's because they're they haven't adapted to the diabetes wise are all the other kinds of things that can cause it to go wrong it certainly with alcohol at the Giants accidentally leave it there too long and it's right and so is an argument that we actually evolved to have a tolerance for beer rather than it did its taste for it because once were an early agricultural settlement for the first time ever were crap and we're we're drinking or not moving on and so we Fowler on drinking water so beers litter

you say for the drinks and water low beer and wine low grade alcohol and so what the date is suggest what people argue is that we evolved to actually have a taste for it but the tolerance to it rather than stay for what you make sense Evolution Alex getting drunk with hippos running around trying to be a good idea also if you think about wine or or any booze the first time you drink its disgust yeah exactly right and so and lots of things that weigh Tabasco you know lots of these spices have antibacterial effects for the added Wasabi to the sushi jungle in Africa

spicy food warm climate totally makes sense profusion of religions and languages to close you get to the Equator the more languages you out in the religions yet because people start saying in the valley literally you could have a pathogen that makes me sick it's all me to stay away from you and by staying away from you over time we develop different languages different religions again back to Sweden whatever you got I got those three things to have right that's so you're not interested me and we share the same language being a mango much more readily and is more ethnocentrism is Hugo close to the equator wow to keep it keep it apart makes good Evolution I sense under those circumstances but we live in a world where no one's even apart and now we live in a world where makes it much much more difficult and you don't necessarily Stan are in a blessed industrialized democracies where we got good medicines at least for now they still you don't need to anymore right but we also have these crazy factory farming setups that lead to the kind of horrible super bugs that can kill a milli

I remember when I first found that out that most of the major flus I gave Ian flu swine flu I didn't know why they were calling at the swine flu and then I found out now it's from domesticated pigs and somehow Morrison jumps to humans like why and that was the cost we pay the animal never lives long enough to give you the flu right right wow so everything is always pluses and minuses when you change how you do things and we you and I are really lucky we live in a time where all these great medicines exist and they haven't become worthless yet and now it's really a race against the Evolve evolution of the bacteria and s devising new medicines they can continue to defeat them because everything is becoming treatment-resistant right that's how Evolution works and and that's just starting to happen and so now scientists have to work double time to keep inventing new drugs to stay ahead of the game with the exception of some things it just for whatever reason

sure don't seem to be out of all resistances to them well what's fascinating to me is not just scientist creating these vaccines and all these different medicines to deal with these diseases but the the potential of shutting off jeans potential of altering the human genome in using things like whatever the the future version of Crispers going to be to let me and Dave are there I figured out a way to stop certain diseases of a single Gene things are great remember with everything being so apologetic and my diet should be 60% protein in your should be 15% or from I should have more leafy vegetables in yours whatever and we'll be able to know that we're going to respond to it and have your gut respond to it well that's one of things that 23andMe actually does they did a deuce show like what food you'd be more likely to be allergic to and what things do most likely to be attracted

do you how do you process Leaf process fats how do you process all that stuff and so because you know most of our way that's most of the variance and whether or obese or not but nobody was obese when you and I were kids so what does jeans really are is jeans to sensitivity to something change in our environment either activity levels of the food rating or how process they are or how much carbs whatever you don't know but that's what we're actually genetically sensitive to because all of us have the same underlying problem then Evolution didn't really worry about obesity because the problem is the opposite starving so we're not really good at telling when were full and there's interesting evidence that suggests really lovely studies that show that really one of the key guys of appetite was variety when you eat a lot less variety your bats when your stomach tells your phone really much more reliable but as you add variety to everybody on Earth can do that while everybody's got any money on Earth can do now that actually you you Short Circuit the best mechanism we had to tell us to stop eating yeah that's in

singing that was an argument that people who are experts on nutrition are are making about one of the more recent diet plans that people using the carnivore diet is that just eating only meat and there's a lot of people to doing that and they're finding that they're having all these like really rapid decrease is an autoimmune diseases and rapid recovery from eczema and seborrhea and psoriasis and the people that are a lot of people saying it's great for him and some nutrition experts more likely this is a calorie like you're at a calorie deficit and by putting your body into a calorie deficit you're almost like a nut in a state of fasting and your decreasing your body way cuz almost universally all these people that are talking about the positive benefits of these diets these elimination diets and just eating one thing one of things that they're showing as they did

shitload of weight is a perpetrator and who would ever know why the 4000 or it's literally the losing weight and then hopefully they're taking multivitamins to make up for all the stuff that they're not getting right yeah I don't think they are a lot of them are not doing that sorry it's really interesting I've been following it pretty closely and I've had quite a few people in the podcast including really intelligent guys like Jordan Peterson is on this and all he does is eat and eat and salt and for me that wouldn't work in Fruit basically and then very little else out about green leafy green vegetables know I should have but I don't like I don't like Brock Lesnar versus less bitter

your tongue says no broccoli is referred to being a little baby Jane a couple different foods and you try a few and then you eat one into your full and then went when you come back don't know if you know this work like Paul rosin started that music's if you if I if you're densely and isak so I talk to you I leave the room I come back five minutes later you don't know who I am but you got brain damage when I come back with lunch

literally the second lunch we have such poor Max is in the tells us were full we think we do by the knowledge that we just ate back in. He had to eat lunch to your phone it goes back into South time for lunch and literally they all need it again and so what's it what's amazing what these studies has been this follow-up study what they did is they served amnesics or control people food that they sampled in food that they to their full so you sample potato chips and then you eat a tuna sandwich and now I come back to you and say if your normal I say do you want to eat a potato chip do you want to eat a tuna sandwich if you're normally so I just had lunch I'm not really that candied either of them anymore if you're a music you say I don't want a tuna sandwich but yeah I'll have some potato chips and so you don't even need to know you ate it and answer your hunger mechanism is still there but the fact is you had a lot of tuna sandwich and that's controlling your appetite it's making you feel like you don't want to eat it anymore and so in the same sense you go to Steakhouse you think

when you finish it or not and then you pick up some stuff and some of the guys dessert actually yeah that does sound good right because now you're shifting and you're eating something else until I suspect it was the fact they had no variety what's for dinner was not a question you ever ask when it whatever dad kill her what her mom died. I just two things there right you're hungry every day everybody loves me he loves it is a big deal someone comes home with a big deal it's a big deal when you can afford to be very well said send that you can start to think differently and even have different preferences but you don't if you're hunter-gather until literally if dad killed a giraffe you're just stuff in his much traffic me down the pipes you can and it makes sense you would have been involved okay you're going to get nothing new out of the draft you eat other than you're going to pull it out the back end it's time to shut this dinner down right but if you told me all the free if we got this

hungry that's what they suggest because that's kind of the argument that these carnivore diet people use is that that is the most beneficial food because that's a food that you look forward to the most high protein it right but don't forget you only need to do this within every meal so if you sit down for your favorite lobster dinner just have lobster and then lunch or breakfast tomorrow now you can have whatever pancakes with in every meal minimize River IV because that's where the effect is having a tough it doesn't have to carry over time it doesn't mean you eat lobster every single meal you know it's interest that's that's actually the Gracie diet there's the Jiu-Jitsu family called the Gracie's that started the UFC and world famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu family but just a family full of killers and one of the founders I believe is Carlos Gracie invented this he invented a diet that was basically you shouldn't mix Foods together with your eating fruits you should eat fruits by themselves you meet you should eat that by itself and that in combining all

things together your body produces a variety of different enzymes you don't get as much nutritional absorption stop eating sooner if within anyone will you have less right it's okay like a logical dug up rocks raffle Deadshot so these sort of evolutionary traits that are inside of our bodies they would they would sort of encourage us to eat much more if we have a variety of different foods like if you're eating at a buffet in Vegas versus if you just eating chicken that's the only thing as much chicken is really you need and I will stop I don't want to deal with it

protein in Locust he when he took his biology students on field trips to the food to increase the protein in the food or decrease it in the food but exact same food like reading the same roles in the same sushi in increasing levels of protein in those foods and then it's a buffet and all he does is way the food when it starts and when it finishes across all the students eating it and he found it as the protein levels go up the amount of food do people eat at the buffet close down to two parallel mechanisms 1 were made of protein and said that seems carbs do Drive appetite but not nearly as strong as proteins to call Julie to shoot rounds and then I think the other side of that coin is his bride and the bad luck for us right now we live in a world where especially if you're poor proteins are expensive and hard-to-get so you can have these high carb diet and then everybody can a variety in variety is probably a really bad thing that is so fascinating use that are good

Fortune is our demise in so many ways I mean to seek of fat sugar and salt because they were short supply I mean everything you eat is fat sugar and salt zactly and then the other side and it's not just what you eat we also have also if there's a train right because I know you're nobody because those broadcast of novelty constantly their variety constantly and the rest of us well you know there may be right out there but they're not interested in me so it's kind of a relevant anymore thank you so much I can't wait to read your book for everybody it's available right now the social deep

go get it you fox is awesome thank you so much thank you it really fun to lot of fun thank you bye buddy thank you everyone for tuning into the podcast and thank you to our sponsors thank you to Simply Safe you motherfucker you can order today get 25% off any new SimpliSafe system and it's only 14 99 a month for around-the-clock professional monitoring from an awesome system CNET pcmag and Wirecutter all say SimpliSafe is the best security system there is protect your home today and get a great deal on home security go to Simply safe.com Rogen and save 25% off your SimpliSafe system make sure you use that URL so that they know we sent you and hurry cuz this deal ends November 26th you do not want to miss it that is simplisafe.com Rogan SimpliSafe simplisafe.com

slash Rogan SimpliSafe also brought to you by ZipRecruiter ZipRecruiter the fucking smart way to find someone to fill a job that's why is ZipRecruiter is rated number 1 by employees in the US and its rating comes from hiring sites on trustpilot with over 1000 reviews

and right now listen to this podcast can try ZipRecruiter app for free at this exclusive web address zip recruiter.com Rogan you can post your job do over 100 job sites with just one click why you fucking around when you could try Pop Free ziprecruiter.com Rogan ziprecruiter.com Rogan ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire and I mean it's free you can try for free but not fucking around why you why you waste your time

why waste your time and we're also brought to you by the cash out on the cash app the number one finance app in the app store

and get yourself a cash card while you're at it download the cash app now and get your cash card for free visit the app store for the Google Play Market now and of course when you download the cash app into the referral code Joe Rogan all one word you'll receive $5 and a cash apples and $5 to our good friend Justin runs fight for the Forgotten charity rent jet we get it much love to you all take care see you soon bye bye

Help improve this transcript!

Episode Sponsors