Name: Joe Rogan Experience #837 - Gad Saad
Uploaded: 2016-08-24T05:27:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #837 - Gad Saad' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-08-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #837 - Gad Saad' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-08-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #837 - Gad Saad

and we're back what's up buddy how are you how you see it great to see you look
tan we've been
enjoying the southern california weather sir my my biggest problem every day is
to decide which
beach between la and san diego to hit what are you bragging bragging about your
lax problems my
privileged life your brown privilege my brown privilege it's like a bronze it's
a very
bronze in a few days it'll settle in and that's when the true glory of god
comes out i bet your
vitamin d levels are at an all-time high i need to take them in for the montreal
winters right do you
supplement when you're in the winter in montreal i don't you don't yeah 100
yeah vitamin d is a
it's a critical factor or i just come back to do your show in winter and then
that's how i get my
supplement i don't think that's enough i need that vitamin d that's a big thing
with apparently with
people that live in seattle in the winter um is uh taking vitamin d and even
sun tanning beds
yeah people don't realize that sun tanning beds although it's kind of counterintuitive
you think
they're really bad for you it's actually not that bad for you as long as you
don't burn yourself
it's actually good i did a study if well a paper i wrote it was a theoretical
paper with a dermatologist
a few years ago where we looked at some evolutionary explanations for the
epidemiology of sun tanning
so if i were to ask you now without you knowing anything about it or not much
about evolutionary
theory who do you what's the typical demographic of the sort of obsessive sun tanner
white girls
well it's women young right single and they usually tend to discount the future
consequences for the
immediate benefits right right so don't smoke and cigarettes they probably
smoke exactly so it doesn't
matter whether i'll get melanoma when i'm 73 i'm going tonight to the party and
tony might be there and i'd like to
have that and so we so so with this this dermatologist friend of mine had
written to me he was doing his
fellowship and he said look i've as part of my research requirements i have to
write a paper can i
you know you're the big researcher can i do a paper with you i said but you're
a dermatologist what can
we talk about and then i thought well let's do the evolutionary roots of sun
tanning and there and
that's how that paper came to be is how is that evolutionary though because
what's evolutionary about white
girls that don't think about the future well no it's it's are there particular
ways that we can predict
the demographics of people who do certain behaviors so for example pathological
gambling who do you
think is likely to succumb to that affliction pathological gambling i would say
uh men or women
adult men adult men in their 30s low status low status yeah on average okay and
the reason is because
it's it's it's one of a multitude of strategies to acquire resources right it's
the same reason that
men rob banks not women and so you could okay let's do another one uh eating
disorders who do you think
succumbs to eating disorders more anorexia nervosa in particular okay women
women now typically the social
science explanation is oh it's due to exposure to media images right now that
turns out to be a laughably
false premise why is it laughable so here we go here's the evolutionary angle
okay hippocrates founder
of modern medicine 2000 plus years ago had documented the exact same epidemiology
of eating disorder
disorders in women so it certainly can't be because of media right so there
there must be something
biological that explains the sex specificity of these different uh you know
dark side consumption okay
and so the evolutionary perspective is to then look at to the extent that these
human universals manifest
themselves in exactly the same way across time and place what might be some of
these biological drivers
compulsive buying almost exclusively women 90 percent women uh pornographic addictions
almost exclusively
male and right but let's just stick with this one let's just stick with this
one the anorexia nervosa
you're first of all when you're talking about hippocrates you're talking about
one lone individual so
completely anecdotal piece of evidence and he said that women were throwing up
wasn't it a status
symbol back then for women to be overweight so actually it's a good question
the uh eating disorders are
much more likely to occur in cultures of plenty right precisely because the
argument is that you can
shut off your reproductive window today because what happens when you so here's
the evolutionary
angle when you when you suffer from eating disorder the first thing that
happens physiologically is
you get what's called amenorrhea the primary amenorrhea is where you haven't
had your menses yet and now
they don't come up they don't there's no menstrual cycle menstrual cycle yeah
yeah you said did you say
menses your menses yeah is that is that like the technical term for it it's the
it's the fancy term for it
yeah menses it sounds like something a little kid would call it mommy i didn't
get my menses well uh
now secondary amenorrhea is where you already had your menstrual cycle and then
it's shut off once
you become once you have anorexia nervosa okay but what happens when you have
anorexia when you have
anorexia is that you you know your your reproductive potential is shut off
right and so what evolutionary
scientists have found is that it turns out that when women suffer from anorexia
nervosa there is some
environmental trigger that they're being exposed to rightly so or wrongly so
that they think they
should shut off their menses their reproductive potential for a better future
do you understand
what i'm saying whoa so and let me give you the background to this there's a
model called the
reproductive suppression model found in other mammalian species let's say a cow
okay so if you take a cow
what would be the biggest environmental threat that it faces other than
predators what would you think
it might be tainted water or food or just how much food she can have right
right that she had access
to enough calories to sustain her gestational period right well it turns out
that in a mammalian species
a wide range of mammalian species somehow there is a mechanism an evolutionary
mechanism that either
causes the females of the species to either shut off their reproductive window
or if they're already
pregnant and then there's an environmental input that says hey this is not
looking good what do you think
happens to their body what they do with the baby they abort the fetus they
abort the fetus right and now
postnatally you have infanticide so in this case you have the child but you
realize for whatever
environmental reason that it's not going to be fruitful to raise that child and
you by the way you
see it in human cultures where typically the one who is killed is the last born
as you would expect
because the other children now you've invested quite a bit in them and so if
you're going to get rid of some
of your genetic package you get rid of the one that you've invested the least
in so all of these
mechanisms that are part of something called the reproductive suppression model
the idea is that
eating disorders is a special instantiation of that because what the eating
disorder is doing it's
shutting off your reproductive potential because you're getting amenorrhea
right but is that absolutely
connected to why women get anorexic because it could easily be just a side
effect of them wanting to be
ridiculously skinny like it like i would understand with a cow with something
that's living in a very
wild life a wild world you know this animal out there just eating grass and
when resources are
depleted like nature kicks in but but there's no conscious decision making
process when a woman is
deciding to be anorexic at least there's some form of decision making process
that wants her to lean
towards a slimmer physique so that speaks to a very interesting distinction and
so bear with me as i
set it up okay there's something in evolutionary theory known as proximate
versus ultimate explanations
and actually that speaks to the article that i had sent you that's one of the
points that i discussed in
that article proximate explanations in science explain the how and the what of
something much of science
operates at the proximate level if you want to explain what diabetes is exactly
physiologically
speaking you explain it at the proximate level the ultimate explanation is the
darwinian why why would
something have evolved to be of that form so let's discuss it in relation to
something related to eating
disorders pregnancy sickness right so pregnancy sickness is a phenomenon that
women experience around the world
it's a universal phenomenon found in all cultures a proximate explanation might
be or approximate
exploration might be how do shifts in a woman's uh estrogen levels affect the
severity of her symptoms
that's a proximate question the ultimate question is why have women evolved
that physiological response
before i give the answer do you can you guess what that might be why do they
develop that ultimate
response so why is it that women experience by the way i call it pregnancy
sickness but i mean the
typical colloquial term is morning sickness but some women don't experience it
in the morning i have no
idea why tell me why you ready yeah so pregnancy sickness happens during the
first trimester of gestation
during a period called organogenesis this is when the fetus is developing its
main organs during that
particular period it's particularly important that the women not be exposed to
food pathogens teratogenesis
that might harm the developmental pathway of the fetus's organs therefore all
of the mechanisms that she
experiences attraction to certain foods pickles a propulsion from other foods
uh the the feeling of feeling uh you
know being nauseous the throwing up all of those built-in mechanisms are
evolved mechanisms that are meant
to protect possibly the fetus from being exposed to teratogens and it's
perfectly timed so that once
organogenesis ends that's when the pregnancy symptoms end so the difference
between proximate and ultimate it's
not that one is a better explanation than the other is that you need both
levels of explanations to perfectly
understand something well that makes total sense but it doesn't necessarily
apply to why women become
anorexic because the the desire to be slim to look very thin in public is very
strong because of social
media or media rather uh depictions of women they're always almost impossibly
slim and then on top of that
they also add photoshop to it right so in the in the the evolutionary
explanation to the eating disorder
story is there is something in the environment that the woman in question is
thinking is a threat to her
could you think the same thing as the cow felt for the lack of calories can you
think in the human context
what might be such a threat do you see what i'm saying so well i don't know
what would be such a threat
for example if you feel rightly or wrongly right it doesn't it doesn't matter
whether objectively it's
true or not whatever she feels is what the reality is right if she feels that
there isn't going to be
sufficient either kin support extended kin support when she raises a child or
the most likely thing is
partner support if she feels that there isn't likely to be a good partner who's
going to support her
since we're a bi-parental species then she engages in shutting down her
reproductive window hence what
you said is true at the proximate level right her thinking can become this disordered
so that she
actually looks at herself in the mirror even though she's only 70 pounds and
she still thinks that she's
fat but that's a proximate explanation but the explanation that i've given you
is the ultimate darwinian
why together they make a full complete explanation of the phenomenon so it
doesn't occur in people that
have very healthy relationships with a spouse or it occ