The Joe Rogan Experience

When I first heard about your book and I started going over the details of it and the subject matter, I was shocked.

What has been the response to your - first of all, you're releasing your first book... It has been kind of surprising how much interest there is and how much people are taking this up.

The Robin D'Angelo one where you gave that guy money for reparations and you got her, she thought it was uncomfortable.

When we had the idea for the film to talk about race, we knew we needed to get Robin D'Angelo.

I didn't think we'd get her because I figured she'd be a lot more cautious.

But apparently she has no idea what's happening outside of her bubble at all.

So she didn't know who I was. I mean, I gave her my name and she had no clue.

Did Dickens write Tom Sawyer? Or Huck Finn? No, no, no. That was, um, King? Samuel Clemens. Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens. What the hell did Dickens write?

The housing bubble was, there have been great books written on the housing bubble. Michael Lewis' book, The Big Short, is a good book on it. Good movie too. A couple other books, yeah.

And Cass Sunstein as a legal scholar and he wrote a book called Nudge he was very famous it was used as sort of a handbook during the Obama administration and the idea was well if we can just use a non-forcible means to sort of Nudge people in a particular direction without them even knowing they're being Nudged then shouldn't we do that and I think no you shouldn't you shouldn't because transparency is the only way I can tell what kind of bullshit you're trying to sell me

You know, 50 years ago or whatever, 1968, Paul Ehrlich writes the "Population Bomb", and it's just the population is just going to exponentially grow.

that's another Michael Lewis book yeah oh is it Flash Boys yeah okay yeah these guys figured out what was going on and then they started a trading floor where there was so much cable that no one could benefit from those you know those nanoseconds of advantage yeah yeah of course the other banks tried to close it down

I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've ever heard of this book. It was big in the 70s and won the Pulitzer Prize.

and one of the wealth of nations

Moby Dick misadventures.

Every book we read in high school, college, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, 1980, or Animal Farm, like The Giver, which we read in middle school.

I think you've had Jonathan Height on the show and his book The Righteous Mind is brilliant about this that we were evolved to be religious creatures in a certain way

Sam Harris's wife just wrote a book about over one of the subjects of it's called conscious and conscious or consciousness sorry I don't remember which I haven't read it yet but I heard them talked about it on his podcast and the concept that used to be like super woo woo was what if everything has consciousness yeah with everything had but it just it can't move it can express itself can't change its environment it's limited just like we can't fly and we can't swim underwater and breathe water like we we're limited in our physical abilities right but we assume that whatever limitations that we have like this is where it ends this is where the buck stops here yeah like everything that doesn't move it's gotta be stupid yeah but it might not be.

I do have one that Hemingway actually wrote a movable feast on.

Somebody, a fan sent it to me.

A typewriter?

Yeah, he wrote a movable feast on it. It came up for auction right before COVID. So January of 2020, the guy that started Newman's Own with Paul Newman. He was also kind of a manager at AE Hotchter. I don't think I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. But he was like a mover and shaker in those types of circles back in the day. And so he had all this Hemingway stuff and it went up for auction after he passed away. And so I have, yeah, Hemingway's typewriter. So I typed a Hemingway quote on it when it arrived and then I let it sit. Of course, the kids have walked by and like, you know. So it's not exactly Christine anymore.

I love audiobooks. That guy... I was listening to the Lord of the Rings audiobook and he just smoothly transitions into Smeagol. It's great.

I didn't want to wait for the second season so I got the book and I ended up reading all five books.

and that, I don't even know if it's five books in my life. I didn't even know that did that good?

oh, that was fucking great. I loved it so much, I did it on my iPad.

This Blitz book is insane, because it's a story about how the Nazis were jacked up on meth, and they just went all the way through Poland in three days, and that they just never, they never slept. They were just marching.

I think it's called history of the greater united states.

I have this book or this book that we're going to talk about that is an important thing in my life and stanchiates my values. It talks about what I think is important about the world.

The book is about the evolutionary origins of a good society it's also a kind of response a kind of pushback to a long tradition in the sciences of attention to the bad parts of our nature.

I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves because we have also evolved to love and to befriend each other and to be kind to each other and to cooperate and to teach each other all these good things.

It's clear that our genes shape the structure and function of our bodies it is increasingly clear that our genes also straight shape the structure and function of our minds our behaviors whether you're risk averse uh how intelligent you are uh whether you uh have wanderlust uh these properties are properties that depend in part on your genes but it's also clear to me and that's what the book argues is that our genes shape not just the structure and function of our bodies not just the structure and function of our minds but also the structure and function of our societies and to really prove that what we would need is something known as the forbidden experiment and the forbidden experiment is an experiment in which we took a group of babies who had never been taught anything who were a cultural had no culture and stranded them on an island and left them on their own to see what kind of society they would make when they grew up.

The argument in the book is that everywhere in the world people have friendship people love their partners people cooperate people teach each other these are fundamental common principles shared by everyone even though there's also a lot of variation even in a place like North Korea.