Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1022 - Eric Weinstein
Uploaded: 2017-10-11T00:52:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1022 - Eric Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-10-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1022 - Eric Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-10-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1022 - Eric Weinstein

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do
Boom. Yes?
We're live. Hello, Eric.
Hello, Joe.
Thanks for doing this, man.
Jamie had a question.
You're not related to that other fellow, the other Weinstein fellow that's in
trouble right now?
Brett Weinstein?
No, that's your brother. The other guy.
Oh, Weinstein?
The other guy. Yeah, I don't know him.
Okay. That other guy's in trouble.
Oh, that's it.
Like two more women, Angelina Jolie and they both came out today?
Yeah, I don't think it's going to stop there.
Seems like he might have had a little bit of an issue.
Isn't that amazing that someone can get away with something like that for so
long
and then one or two people come clean and the walls come down?
The oppressive fist of just his fucking tyranny, whatever that guy did.
Yeah, I mean, I think it does speak to the idea that power really exists in an
industry in a town like this.
Well, it's always been the, that's been the cliche, right?
The casting couch, right?
Yes, but I didn't know in the modern era how much power anyone still had.
Yeah, I wonder, you know, it's just, and it's also like super left-wing guy,
you know, like really politically connected to social justice ideologies,
fighting gun control.
I mean, you know, promoting gun control and stumping for Hillary and all this.
Yeah.
It seems like overcompensation.
I didn't want to bring this up right up right above the bat.
We were going to talk about cuttlefish.
I asked you to save the cuttlefish and this conversation about a giant cuttlefish.
Well, we were talking about, I mean, all of these are just like incredible hot
button topics.
But we were talking before about your conversation on male and female
programming in the mind on male and female biological frames.
And what I was going to talk about there was that you can actually have in
other species, which aren't nearly as controversial as humans,
a rational basis for something like transphobia in an evolutionary context.
So the giant cuttlefish, which I think is called sepia poma, I'm not a biologist,
the males are incredibly large.
They're very sexually dimorphic.
And you've got these tiny or smaller males who don't have a good strategy for
keeping a lot of females underneath them.
So the males are incredibly large or the females?
Males are incredibly large.
Okay.
The females tend to be much smaller.
Okay.
And when the females are impressed, they accept shelter underneath one of these
giant males.
But then you have these other males who aren't nearly as big, which might be
called sneaker males.
And the sneaker males start retracting the tentacles that identify them as male
and changing through their chromatophores,
their sort of their presentation to look female.
And then the giant males invite these males disguised as females through
behavioral change underneath.
And we've now proven, I believe, that these sneaker males inseminate the
females while the larger males are getting duped.
Now, are the larger males larger because they just have better genetics or are
they larger because they're older?
Well, you know, the question about better genetics, key question is who leaves
the lineages that matter over time.
So if you're wasting all of your energy on a strategy and, in fact, what you're
doing is you're providing protection for sneaker males to get busy with the
females who seem to be equally happy to reward a devious male as a strong one.
You know, I'm putting in mind of the old Willie Dixon blues song, I'm a backdoor
man.
The men don't know, but the little girls understand.
You know, definitely females favor a variety of strategies, whether
communicating strength and dominance, cleverness, or anything that females are
likely to decide will benefit their offspring.
Yeah, that's a great name for them, too.
Sneaker males?
Is that like the technical male?
The technical term for those small males?
I've seen it in lizards, and I don't know the sepia pama giant cuttlefish
system, but I'm obsessed with cephalopods, so I should probably go back and do
some homework on them.
I didn't know we would be starting out with Harvey Weinstein and giant cuttlefish.
Weinstein versus Weinstein, that's the difference.
I'm definitely keeping that distinction, yeah.
It's a good distinction now, right now.
It's good to make a separation.
So cephalopods, including cuttlefish, octopods, squids.
Nautilus.
And then they all sort of came from mollusks, right?
This is the craziest thing in the world, right?
I mean, we're not guaranteed to meet an alien intelligence during our lifetimes.
But the idea that such genius exists in mollusks where you least expect it is
probably the closest we're ever going to get to aliens.
So, I mean, I think that it's sort of, there's a secret international
conspiracy.
People who have realized this and, you know, just freak out on cephalopods.
They know every crazy thing that cephalopods have been proven to understand and,
you know, where their cognitive capabilities just sort of wow us.
Yeah, the cognitive capabilities, their camouflage capabilities, the strategies
that they use for attacking bait fish.
And there's a video that I put up on my Twitter really recently of a cuttlefish
that opens up like a flower and shoots its tongue out and gets this fish and
then just sucks it into its body.
And it's like you're looking at some kind of an alien.
It's totally, I mean, I forget, it's like sevenfold symmetry or, you know, it's
really on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree.
And I think that, you know, the dazzle patterns where you just start seeing
these neon signs that are effectively made out of the chromatophores.
And if you've seen the videos where people put them on against like really
artificial patterns like chess boards or chintz or things,
then the cuttlefish has to figure out, okay, how do I blend in with that?
Yeah, yeah.
And they do their best to mock it.
But the natural world, they mimic perfectly.
Well, not really, I think.
Was it octopus can do it?
Some octopus can do it.
I think what happens is that...
Or octopi.
Yeah.
I don't know that one.
I guess it's octopi.
But I think what they do is they actually sort of do much less than we are
imagining.
And they use the fact that we, our brains are interpolating.
So they're in part not matching the background as well as we think, but they're
doing it well enough that our brains sort of make up the difference.
Huh.
That's weird.
I mean, but what would be the difference between the way we interpret their
visual, whatever camouflage they're giving off?
Because it's a visual camouflage, right?
Yeah.
If you look at some of the camouflage videos, like the first seven times you
see it, you can't imagine.
Yeah.
But then after a while, you say, oh, wow, there really is a difference.
And somehow I just, I did the interpolation to help out that which is trying to
escape my detection.
Well, I mean, there's definitely a distinction.
You can kind of tell once you look at it, but it's so insanely impressive in
comparison to pretty much almost every other life form.
You know, what they can do in terms of like they could change their texture.
That's one of the, like when they, when they sit on a coral reef and they start
looking like a coral reef, like, whoa.
Have you, uh, have you checked out the mimic octopus?
Yes.
Right.
So like that one, five or six different disguises.
Yeah.
I can't even imagine that.
Usually when you have mimicry, it's dedicated or obligate, like a, you know, a
stick bug or a leaf insect.
It's only going to do that one trick.
You know, what's interesting too is like, I've heard a real legitimate argument
for people that are opposed to eating animal protein that, uh, mollusks,
especially like clams and mussels and things along those lines are more
primitive in terms of their ability to recognize or have any, any sense of what
pain is, any sort of communication, any sort of interpretation of danger.
That all they do is just close, right?
And that in closing, we've interpreted that to being, it's an animal and that
this animal life form is like, it's like eating a living thing versus like
eating plants.
But I've heard it argued, actually Sam Harris is the first one to bring it up.
This is actually a moral argument that they sense less than plants do and that
they are more, they're more primitive than plants are.
But yet from the mollusk family, you have octopus and there's a good argument
that you probably shouldn't be eating octopus.
Like you shouldn't be eating monkeys, you know, like an octopus is fucking
smart, like crazy sneaky smart.
It's them or us, Joe.
Oh, that's a good way of looking at it.
In that case, they are delicious.
Yeah.
I think if you ever look at Humboldt squid, um, you know, schooling and
descending as one of the great nightmares of all time.
I don't think I've seen a Humboldt squid.
What's a Humboldt squid?
Sometimes they, if we get, they call them red devils or like the coast of Baja,
California.
And they're just social and they're terrifying because they attack in groups.
So they plan it or they coordinate in some way.
In some way.
I mean, obviously the chromatophores must have some ability to do signaling.
And I think that, you know, with respect to, we have to figure out, um, whether
it's really intelligence that causes us to become empathic.
Um, because, you know, obviously if you're at war and you think highly of your
enemy, you have to guard against your own empathy so that you can be an
effective warrior.
You have to ask the question, uh, you know, if monkeys, um, and apes are among
the most intelligent beings, do I actually feel some revulsion for just how
savage chimpanzees are as compared to say bonobos or gibbons?
Yeah, isn't that the real argument or the real fascinating conversation is what
happened on the, in the evolutionary chain?
Like why did bonobos become these peaceful sexual creatures and chimps become
these warring savage psychos?
Like what they look so similar, like what happened?
Well, that, that one, I don't know, but there's an interesting system in dung
beetles where, um, if you look at the, uh, armaments that they have on their
head, um, uh, for warring, uh, between males, there's a conserved quantity
between the length of the copulatory apparatus and the size of the weaponry.
So the more weapons, the smaller, uh, the penises.
And so, you know, there are all these crazy trade-offs in apes between, um,
relative testicular size and penal size.
For gorillas, right?
For gorillas have tiny little penises, but enormous bodies and giant fangs and
little tiny wench penis.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah.
And probably pretty little.
But chimpanzees have big penises and big testicles.
Both?
Yeah, see, they say that chimpanzees, there's a direct correlation between promiscuous
females and the size of their testicles.
Hmm.
I don't, I don't remember that one.
But the question about, I also worry that we've, um, we've idealized the bonobos
too much.
And, you know, we, we're sort of, it's very hard to be sympathetic with the
chimps after, uh, Jane Goodall showed us what they're capable of.
Right.
Um, but in part, uh, you know, the, the cold logic of the natural world, um, in
general, you know, it's usually some reason that, uh, makes complete sense.
It's, it's, it can't be sentimental anytime you bring sentimentality, uh, and
you usually screw up a good theory.
Um, and so, you know, I, I, I, I worry that our comparisons are driven by our
needs to, to locate ourselves, uh, farther away from chimpanzees and closer to
something that we, we feel comfortable.
So our idealizing the bonobos is not necessarily based on what they actually
are, but based on like our little sort of hippie version of life.
Like, look, we could be like the bonobos loving and sexual and affectionate, or
we can be like the warring, horrible, horrible chimpanzees.
Well, you know, it's also the case that, uh, how great does it feel to be
sexual if you're being sexually outcompeted by others?
It's always unfun to be, you kn