Joe Rogan & Hunter Maats on Cultural Evolution

Hello freak bitches. Do you want to really go down the rabbit hole? I would love to. Let's do it. Alright, so do you know Thomas Sowell? I know that name. Why do I know that name? Thomas Sowell is a big, famous conservative. He's at Stanford. He's at the Hoover Institute, I think. Anyway, so, you know, within this, I mean, first, just to set all this up, we should set up briefly how does culture work, right? And the way culture works is that, like genetic evolution, it works based on blind copying. So what ends up happening is that you are in awe of people, right? You look up to people, and so you blindly copy the things they do. And specifically, you start by blindly copying from the outside, and then you work in. So the first thing you do is you see someone and you're like, oh, that person's fucking amazing, that rock star, that sports star, whatever, and you start dressing like them, you start walking like them, and all of that sort of stuff. Now, in a hunter-gatherer context, that would be, you know, somebody who is a hunter or is a gatherer, and you're like, man, you know, she finds all the best guavas. How does she do that? And then Ung fucking eats them, right? Mm, fucking Ung again. Yeah. And so, you know, you would like hang out with her, you'd sort of like shimmy up to her, you'd be seeing what she'd be doing, and she's like, oh, okay, she looks for a very particular color of guava, she, you know, squeezes them in a certain way, and over time you learn what she's doing, and then ultimately you even learn how she's thinking. But in a large-scale society like ours, I don't meet Michael Jordan, right? Michael Jordan just becomes this sort of distant person that I idolize, and so advertisers have figured out how to hijack these mechanisms, and they know if you put a burger next to Michael Jordan's face, that I'm like, oh, I want to be like Michael Jordan, so I'm going to eat a Big Mac, right? And little children are dumb, and so they blindly copy that, or, oh, I want to be like James Dean, he has a cigarette in his mouth, I want to blindly copy that, and we don't understand that the burger or the cigarette is not actually the key to being as successful or as cool as, or as good at basketball as Michael Jordan or James Dean, right? We don't understand that that's where that comes from, so we have this tendency to blindly copy anything we can, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, and in a mass society, we never work our way in, we never learn the mastery, right? We just sort of remain at this sort of very superficial level. So what that means is that, where did this all start? That's a good question. Yeah. Where were you going with this? Well, we were starting at- Culture, how culture works? Oh, yeah, yeah, how culture works. Oh, okay, so now we're going to talk about black people. Oh, great. Jesus Christ. So Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Thomas Sowell is a black guy, right? Okay. And Thomas Sowell has for years and years and years been trying to fight racism, but he's been trying to fight racism by having a conversation about culture, right? And the fact that there are essentially two different sort of, you know, we're speaking broadly here, right? But this is for the purposes of communication. We're going to tell a simple story to start off with, right? So broadly speaking, he puts two different cultures of people with dark skin next to each other. And one culture is these people from the West Indies, and one culture is this group of people who grew up in the South with slavery and all that sort of stuff. Now, what one group, the West Indies group, does really well. So a lot of the successful black people, people like Colin Powell, are originally from that cultural heritage. The other group is the group that you find in ghettos and African-American communities and all that sort of stuff. They don't do well, right? They don't get good education. They, you know, shoot each other. They're all these sorts of things. And the reason why Sowell has been telling this story is because he's been trying to say, you know, when liberals look at the people in ghettos, they say, ah, racism. That's why they're not succeeding. And Sowell is saying, no, it's not. Because if you look at this group from the West Indies, they also came from the experience of slavery. There was slavery in the West Indies. They are also black, so they also face racism. And yet they do well. So it has to be something else. And that other thing is the fact that these black people who are in the South, there's always been a big question, were black people robbed of their culture? Or did they preserve their authentic African culture? And what Sowell is saying is that they were robbed of their culture. And so they picked up the culture of the people around them. And the people around them were rednecks. And if you look at the white redneck culture and the black redneck culture, they have a lot of the same values. They don't particularly respect education. They love Jesus. They use violence in their conflicts. And there's just a lot of the same values and a lot of the same outcomes. And even Ibanics, which is black English, is actually all from the West of England. So it's actually this... What? It's from the West of England. So for example, if you go to places like Cornwall, there used to be these amazing ads on British TV for this Devin custard or whatever. And they would always say, Devin knows how they make it so creamy. And they would talk like this, right? And so it doesn't sound like black English. But they do say things like, Oi be doing that, and we be doing this, and you be doing that, and they be doing that. And so there's that use of that copula be, right? Where instead of saying, I am, you are, he is, she is, they are, they just say, I be, you be, we be, they be, which is the classic feature of black English, African-Americans of the active English. Right. Now, the point is that... Mind-blower. Mind-blower. Now, let's imagine that how do you think that Thomas Sowell has been received by liberal America? Not well. Not well. Not well. And so, for example, Sowell has a book called Black Rednecks, White Liberals. OK. And his whole point is that, you know, if you actually... And, you know, again, like Sowell is, you know, he researches the shit out of this stuff. He really does his work. Now, if you look at the experience of African-Americans after slavery, after slavery, they do really... They start to make real progress. Right. And a large part of the reason why they make progress is because you start to get a lot of people from New England, either, you know, black people from New England or white people from New England, who come down and sort of reshape the culture. They create these schools and they're teaching those New England values. Right. It's those Puritan values of hard work, tenacity, all that sort of stuff. And so there's all this progress. And you have people like Booker T. Washington. And Booker T. Washington was an actual slave. And then after he got his freedom, he got to go work in a salt mine, which is literally the worst job ever. And in Booker T. Washington's Up for him Slavery, he tells this great story about seeing a schoolhouse. Right. And that, you know, he thought that going into a schoolhouse was about as close to heaven on earth as you could get. Wow. Like this is a dude who wanted an education really, really badly. And that's a lot of what you find in the, you know, early black experience in, you know, the post-slavery period. And in fact, you know, blacks, you know, before sort of World War II actually had higher rates of marriage than whites. All of these sorts of things that, you know, are now supposedly a problem. And then there's this turnaround. Right. The black experience starts to go south. Right. It starts to get worse. And what year is this around? This is post-World War II. Right. So. So post-slavery, black people experience a rebounding. They're starting to make some progress. They're making progress. Yeah. And I mean, you know, if in terms of books to read, like, you know, just to, because a large, you know, a large part of what I'm trying to do in general is really let's move to the place of all people are created equal. Like let's remove all these stupid distinctions. Right. And really live that principle. And the problem is, is that in order to really live that principle, you need a new narrative that beats slavery. So, you know, it's not if you go and talk to racists, you can't just say racism is bad. Like that doesn't destroy racism. Right. Right. What destroys racism is when you make sense of the things that they know. Right. They see, you know, people who are violent in the ghettos or they see crime or they see a lack of education where they see that Africa is poor. And you're able to tell a better story that makes sense of the things that they know, but also comes out with the conclusion, oh, we actually all have the same potential. Right. But if you have this issue with people imitating their atmosphere and imitating their environment and this southern style talk with the southern redneck influence on the African American slaves, former slaves, how do you, how do you stop that and how do you turn that around? Well, in general for humanity, I mean, this is sort of a big problem for humanity in general, is that there's not a culture alive today that is well suited to the world that we're living in. And that's because, you know, culture is adapted to environment in the same way as any evolutionary thing. Right. So, for example, you know, if you look at like, let's talk about these hunter gatherers, right? The Yanomama or something like that. So there's a great story in the lost city of Z where, you know, Percy Fawcett, who was an explorer comes across, you know, all these tribes in the Amazon. And one of the examples that the author gives in there is David Gran. He talks about how, you know, there's this group of tribesmen in the Amazon. And what they'll do is there's this special leaf and they go and they squeeze this leaf, right? They crush it up and this milky substance runs into the water. And then all of a sudden the fish float up to the surface upside down, right? They've been anesthetized by this, this whatever substance in the leaf. And this little boy goes into the river and he plucks out all the fattest fish. And then as the milky cloud dissipates, the other fish swim away. Right? Impressive as fuck. Like how the fuck do these tribesmen who don't have science, don't have any of these things figure this thing out. And it's cultural evolution. That's what happens. That's the nature of evolution. That's the nature of markets because markets are an evolutionary process. You know, intelligent answers and intelligent solutions can emerge from just sort of competing forces. And so all of these cultures are well adapted to a particular environment. So if, you know, if you like, we talked about American culture and we talked about Russian culture, Russian culture selects for pessimism. American culture, because you had to move all the way across the ocean, right? If you've got villages in Italy, you know, Vietnam, whatever it is, who is the person in that village who says, I'm going to go across the ocean to a country I know nothing about and, you know, make a fortune, right? It's the most optimistic individual. And so it's basically a magnet for all the most optimistic individuals in the world. The analogy I always use is, do you ever see American Tail, the like old animated movie from like the must be the 90s or whatever? Probably. I don't think I saw that. Well, it's about a group of animated. It's animated. Yeah. Who made it? I don't know. I'm trying to remember. It's not Disney. That's it. No, I don't think I saw that. Oh, Steven Spielberg. Well, anyway, it's sort of about the it's about the immigrant experience more generally and then specifically sort of about the Russian Jewish experience. And it's about this family, the mouse Kvitz's. And right there on that on that trunk, there's five old mouse Kvitz and five old five old mouse Kvitz, you know, in the first part, they're in Russia and they're all being persecuted by cats. Right. Because they're mice and five old mouse Kvitz sings a song with all of the other mouse Kvitz's called There Are No Cats in America. Right. Which is so much of what the American immigrant experience is about. Right. You're like, oh, it's all going to be perfect land of opportunity. The streets are paved with gold, except in an American tale. The streets are paved with cheese. American T.A.L. Yeah, exactly. Or T.A.I.L. T.A.I.L. Yeah. T.A.I.L. Like rat tail. Exactly. Mouse tail. So so these different environments, right, just as you have different environments, select for different different, you know, beaks or wings or, you know, whatever it is, select for different mindsets, different ways of thinking, different cultural traits. Right. And what ends up happening is we become well adapted to a particular environment. So what happens to the point of the lost city of Z is what happened to all of these European explorers who went into the Amazon? Well, a lot of them fucking died. And that's because they're doing things that are well suited to England, like walking around in wool suits and eating cans of chip beef. But suddenly when you're in the hundred degree heat of the Amazon and there's all these animals you don't understand and you don't know how to use the plants that you squeeze and have the anesthetic in them and all that sort of stuff, you can't survive. Right. And what they called in the lost city of Z, all the explorers, they called it the Amazon, a counterfeit paradise. It looked like a paradise. It was so lush. It was so tropical. But they were like, there's nothing to fucking eat. Except clearly there was because Amazonian people had been living there for tens of thousands of years. They just did the Westerners didn't have the cultural software that was well suited to surviving in that environment. So how does this translate into African-Americans? So what is the environment that created that southern redneck culture? And the environment, it turns out, is hurting, right? So raising sheep, raising goats and all that sort of stuff, because most of the people who are in the south originally came from the Scots-Irish. And when you look at hurting cultures around the world, they all have certain traits in common. Right. So if you're a herder, you have a big, big problem. And that big, big problem is property rights. So if you're a farmer, there are clear boundaries on my land. Now, there are ways you can try and fuck me. You can try and move the boundary stones on my land slowly into your field over, over, over, over. But, you know, what we usually have is we have some sort of government. There's a local town official that we go to, and he is responsible for policing the boundaries. And so towns would do things where, you know, you would essentially all get together and we go walk the boundary stones. And we make sure that none of those boundary stones had moved. So the intuition of people from the north, Puritans, people like that, is if we have a problem, we go to the government. We resolve it through the government. Right. In the environment of hurting, you can come over and you can steal my sheep. And you can mix the sheep in with your flock. And I have no way to prove which sheep are my sheep. So we evolve things like branding, right? Where I have a brand, I put it on my sheep and all that sort of stuff. But there's another strategy that is used that evolved before branding. And that earlier strategy is being a crazy motherfucker. You establish a reputation as the kind of guy that you don't fuck with. You come on my land, I kill you. You touch my sheep or my women, I fucking kill you. And I use such an aggressive level of violence that you know that there is no point in fucking with... I mean, this is not plausible because I'm saying it, but let's imagine a much tougher person, Connor McGregor, for example, is a great example. You don't fuck with Connor McGregor, right? He has a reputation as just being a badass motherfucker who will fuck you up, right? Right. So that's how you keep people off your land. That's right. And if you look at, let's look at a couple of herder cultures. So herder cultures include the Scots-Irish, who are the rednecks. Herder cultures include the Mongolians, right? The Mongols, notoriously a very gentle, peace-loving people, right? And they include the Bedouins, who are the Arabs, right? Who had camels and all that sort of stuff. And you'll notice that there is that same use of violence. And mostly they fight amongst themselves. There's this inter-clan warfare. But periodically, a charismatic figure emerges, who unites the clans. So Genghis Khan manages to unite the Mongols. And then what do the Mongols proceed to do? They proceed to go use that aggressive use of violence. They have those horses which allow them to move quickly, right? And they're really effective. And they go and they fuck everybody up, right? Because, you know, the gentle farmers of China aren't prepared for that. And the gentle farmers of Persia aren't prepared for that. What happens with the Arabs? The Arabs are mostly fighting amongst themselves. But then along comes this charismatic figure with the new belief system that unites them, Muhammad. And he unites them, and suddenly they fuck everybody up. And they create this great empire, the caliphate, right? That spreads all across Central Asia and the Middle East and all across North Africa, right? And in many ways, that is what Donald Trump is. They've been, you know, the rednecks have been fighting amongst themselves for a long time. And then Donald Trump, the Genghis Khan of America, the Muhammad of America, has succeeded in uniting the clans. And, you know, in our time, you don't do it by going out and, like, raping and pillaging. You go and you seize the ballot box and you vote. And, you know, you really, like, take back power. And so that's what they've done. But there are, if you look, there are certain problems that occur across these herder cultures. So if you're, you know, as a friend of mine who... So you're essentially saying that the South is... that the reason why Donald Trump has been elected is because of the South, because of the herder culture. Well, and it's also... So if you've read Hillbillyology, J.D. Vance's book, it's excellent, right? But he's really talking about this Hillbilly culture. And so it's not just the South, right? So what happened is that... It's rednecks. It's rednecks, which is... or, you know, whatever... or Hillbillies or whatever you want to call them. Simple folk. Well, it's not even simple folk. It's just a particular culture and they have certain values. And I just... it's also worth clarifying because of the way that I sound and where I come from and the fact that I went to Harvard... Vitamin. Yeah, and vitamin, and that I'm not a part of that tribe, that, you know, Americans owe a tremendous debt to the Hillbilly culture, and that tremendous debt is that overwhelmingly they are the people who have served in the military. And they are overwhelmingly the people who have fought our wars and bled and died and all that sort of stuff. And that's not a stuff that, you know, I may sound like a liberal, but I don't really sit in either of those cultures, right? I can critique the liberal culture and I can critique the Hillbilly culture, right? And, you know, white liberals... the whole reason why I started this thing off is because white liberals have their own weird things that are dysfunctional and that aren't helping black people and all that stuff. If you just wore a bow tie, people would think you're a conservative. That's all you have to do. Well, then there you go. Or maybe you have a detachable bow tie. A bow-low tie, 100%. Actually, I would like to do that. Like, I like the Texan culture. You're a rancher. Yeah, a rancher. You might be a little piece of jade right there. Do you mean pull a George W. Bush beef from Connecticut but dress like a cowboy? Yes, use some mane even more crazy. Yeah, exactly. Thanks for watching!