Amy Alkon

00:02five four three two Oh we jumped the gun hey how are Amy hey good thanks for doing this man appreciate it I'm glad to be here how's things well outside of you know Vegas everything's good I know right you have to say that everybody I mean this these things that happen that sort of just changed the whole world you got to think that's probably one of the reasons why these psychos do it in the first place right so that everyone talks about them it becomes their their big you know fireworks fourth of July grand finale before they leave yeah there was a very interesting post by a guy named Robert King on Psychology Today and I guess he's doing research in this and he talked about it as a way for men to get or chase status and that he saw two bumps I think one was at 23 and one at 41 in terms of the ages that people do this in a does tend to be men who have

01:02some kind of their marriage breaks up they lose their job in their 40s or the young men are just chasing status so it's it's it's at least some kind of explanation other than Oh someone just went wild they just went crazy which is not helpful because it doesn't tell us really what we can do to maybe prevent it or look at how how do we look for these people who do this yeah well to prevent it you have to lock all men up but not for that that's the only way I mean not obviously not the only way but it's all men that's a that's a giant issue right I mean it's you never see women go on mass shootings but well without men who we'd still be living in grass huts so listen I'm a man I'm all pro men but it's it's very weird that it's entirely men who do mass shootings and drive trucks into crowds and that kind of thing well I think we may start seeing women do that but actually I

01:56don't think it's weird that it's men because men if you look at how men and women evolved to get partners women just have to look hot you have to look like you're fertile and young and have good genes which is what we consider Beauty these what feminists say are arbitrary standards of beauty aren't anything like that they're very across cultures men like women with this hourglass figure and who have long shiny hair and who are not 72mm because if you had sex with the 72 year old your genes died out yeah this the feminist thing about arbitrary standards of beauty as a person who is deeply entrenched in science like that's got to be frustrating right because you're looking at something that's not accurate it's it's a you're pushing a narrative that's just not accurate there's this very take away culture take away you know all the all your personal feelings about human beings and you look

02:51at the mammal the human mammal and it's it's very clear why the certain males are gravitating towards certain females and contrary or conversely why certain females are gravitating towards certain males it's biological right and this it's so unhelpful it's really awful this idea that people should like you for what's on down the inside you know we don't see the people if you look at porn it's not the woman who buys a homeless man a sandwich you know who's in the porn it's the woman with those features that are just cross culturally appreciated by men what's also - we're talking only about sexual right because people do like you for who you are on the inside like Melissa McCarthy is a perfect example she's as vibrant hilarious woman and no one's no one's holding her up as the standard of beauty or sexual attractiveness you know you're looking at her is this fun person and that's why

03:47millions of people go see her in movies and her TV shows is giant hit I mean it's literally what's on the inside and how she carries herself right and she is very vibrant and if you look at that cross-cultural research David buss who is an evolutionary psychologist did the big big cross-cultural study and kindness was what both men and women wanted I think that was the top the top of each list but if you prioritize well okay well what do I what are my must-haves in a partner a guy is not going to want a very old unattractive woman as his partner if he can do better and woman is not going to want to have the guy who is sleeping in grandma's base playing Atari Atari I'm a girl so I don't know anything about football or video games my boyfriend tried to educate me on the way over about some I don't know some guy who'd said something insulting to female sports announcer Cam

04:42Newton pretty popular quarterback said he got a question from a beat reporter that works for the his team and asked him something about our wide receivers route running and he said it's surprising that a girl's asking about route running or something like that and he got a lot of about it right now I got a drop from a sponsor and it's also yeah I gone further is that all he said I'm it's surprising that a girl I believe so and then they I heard that they went further into it off off the record a little bit and he was rude as what she said oh okay okay we really expect the quarterback to be the height of you know politeness and social etiquette and okay Asian has said this and I think that these there are some incredible women who are sports announcers so I'm told by the boyfriend and I think it's sexy to be a knowledgeable woman in sports however we now prosecute everybody for everything

05:35and the reason we do that is there's too much media everybody's got a microphone and everyone's on Twitter so now the stuff the dumb stuff people would have said another era that would have just gone off into the ether now it is just it's a news story do you think it's that or is it I'm sure it is that but isn't it also that we're examining behavior on a much more intense scale than we've ever done before and we see things that we don't like and we're highlighting those things in a much more aggressive way than we've ever done before it's almost like there's accelerating social evolution that's going on right now and along the way you're getting a lot of bumps and a lot of weird stuff that's happening a lot of social justice warrior stuff and then you've got a lot of alt right stuff on the other side and they're battling it out with each other and it's almost like these intense

06:26extremes on this new landscape and people are jockeying for positioning on this new cultural standard playing field well I think what's happened is that now everyone has a microphone so everyone's on Twitter everyone can make a tweet that put out a tweet that gets tweeted and retweeted to four million people and so people are looking to have standing and they're doing it by putting out their opinions and they also when you're saying this about these tribes they do it to signal look I'm part of this tribe I'm a social justice warrior I'm on the right I'm an Tifa and so I think that that's a big part of it so they're looking for criminal behavior socially criminal behavior and whereas you know this guy I mean do I really expect every quarterback to have the most PC views no and okay he's gonna lose his sponsorship when he says something like this but you

07:19know if you open the quarterback can you're gonna see quarterback stuff in there and it's not you know the Emily Post well first of all with quarterbacks and with any football players you're dealing with head trauma you are 100% dealing with head trauma yes there is a extremely high likelihood that all those guys on the playing field are have erratic behavior due to the fact their heads been smashed a hundred and fifty times a year since they were a kid and that is just a fact there's no getting around that yeah and I actually I really appreciate that we're starting to see people look at that and bring that out so parents know you know would you want your son to play football or to play some other sport yeah I mean look I have kids and I would want my kids to fight even though I'm a commentator and fighting right I just think like God if you really want to do it

08:08I mean I'll support them in anything they really want to do but I would tell them look it's just the upside and the downside like if you can get out like some guys get out like Floyd Mayweather I mean he's just a brilliant tactician and incredibly good defensively and he got out relatively unscathed but you really won't know how unscathed until 10-15 years from now when you see him struggling with his words right right it's just not worth it your life his life is short but it's long if you're up oh absolutely and you see that from these guys I read some story about that the other day I'm trying to think who was the guy so so sad and this thing about it showing up much later where you get terribly mental it's mentally ill people they make those trade-offs where they think Oh well I can get money and fame this way and it's quick and everything like that

08:56but they don't really realize what the long-term consequences will be yeah well I think a lot of people in the got into football and even people that got into fighting they didn't they didn't know as much back then when they first entered this or journey yeah you know especially football I mean football I mean we really there was no conversation about that think about like the OJ trial you know I've been kind of on the OJ kick lately because I started watching that a Cuba Gooding jr. series well yes sort of you know reenact right and it's really kind of freaking me out I was bringing back the memories of the 90s and what what it was like when that when that thing went down I was with my girlfriend at the time and we were sitting in front of the television holding hands and you know like waiting for the verdict and when when they said not guilty she threw

09:43her hands on her face like she had just seen a horrible car accident she's like oh my god oh my god and she kept saying oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god and now today they're saying the the the the very doctor that was working with OJ said if they were going to do that case again today they would absolutely bring up CTE yeah I think you're right about that absolutely and there's so many football players who got in just not knowing who will come out like that I think within a number of years yeah that was only 20 years ago 23 years ago that's not long ago so 23 years ago nobody thought about brain trauma you tend to football which is just that's impossible now these guys are debilitated there's a whole bunch of different lawsuits that are going on right now with the NFL and you're seeing these older players I mean they have unreal sports at Bryant Gumbel and

10:35they're sitting there and they're shaking and they can't control themselves you know like wow well this is this is unheard of twenty years ago thirty years ago we never thought of this this is never in the public discourse yeah and I suspect if you go back and look at those tapes sort of forensic ly that you'll see that kind of thing the shaking and and also that if you look at to take a look at over football players how many people have these these diseases and mental illness that's related to this head trauma yeah I'm sure quite a bit but mean this football player guy that we're talking about Cam Newton you know what the only thing that's wrong with I mean it's not even wrong I mean he's trying to get sponsors that's the whole deal yeah and if you're whatever coca-cola or whatever the company is you don't want someone representing you that does something like that

11:22no and so it's sort of normal yeah well it's normal that they say okay we're dumping you and it's normal that he would say it but what's always funny is that these these companies they profess surprise when it's like really you know you thought that this person was gonna be this sort of curtailed reined in person it's like with Kathy Griffin oh you just figured out that she says events of things yeah that was a surprise to you well it wasn't I mean with with her was just like so poorly thought out it's like what do you what is the message there you're holding up a bloody head like Jesus Christ yeah I mean if you want to hold up the bloody head of some murderous dictator who's you know killed a bunch of people then I kind of understand but even then like what what is a you Isis like what's this message right well I think she didn't think it out and it was just okay

12:13outrage trying to be shocked he's trying to be shocking and then the sort of the fake apology and then okay take it back was the fake apology and then it was like he's a bully and he broke me and like come on like they playing the victim card yeah your comedian yeah you know and I know comedians have like that then you know what someone's gonna heckle you on and so you have stuff ready for that and this thing like where she saw like me you know my career is over I don't have a career now it's like oh alright just take a couple months off you'll be fun Yeah right people forget there's some new outrage well there's always gonna be this always has some new crazy thing and it's also gonna be a bunch of people that are probably excited that you did that too yeah they'll calm down after a while it won't be in the news anymore and yeah it's just we live in a time where everything

12:58is hyper examined yeah it is and and so that's standard and that's why I think we have to be more lenient with people this idea that you say something awful and then you're excommunicated you lose your job you're going to be living in a dumpster this is really wrong we need to understand that to be human is to be an we're all we all say shitty things to people I try to recognize my ashiness and apologize when I've been awful and make good if sometimes you have to put some money into making good it's it's what the situation calls for well you never know right look you especially when you run into someone in traffic and they're screaming at someone to give it on the finger like you don't know what that poor person has been through that day right obviously they're there they're at nine there they didn't start at one when they were in that traffic incident they're probably at nine

13:45already and then this happens you right that's where they're coming from raw nerve yeah and so it really is important people see it as a sign of weakness but it's actually a sign of strength to say I'm ashamed I did this bad thing I did this recently I shouted on the phone very bad to the some really nice person at the Kaiser pharmacy just cuz you know she should magically solve my problem it wasn't a problem she could solve but after I did that I thought like oh this is so terrible number one I talked to her she's kind she didn't deserve this so I actually I went in and I asked for her and I said I'm so ashamed I spoke to you terribly you didn't deserve this you're very kind in purpose excuse me and person oh yeah in person because well I was going there anyway to pick up a medication so it was easier but I actually asked to speak to her because I think it means something to

14:33people when you do that thing where you say you put your ego aside and say look I was bad and I was wrong people appreciate that you're doing that it gives them something back and it steals from people to just do something and then think haha I got away with it because you didn't you know it and actually they know it and they feel bad and I don't like to make people feel bad well also you feel less about yourself and I think that's as important as anything like one of the things about unless you're a sociopath when you do something mean to someone you feel bad about yourself you don't judge yourself the same way you look at yourself and your own behavior and you go mom I'm faulty I'm like I don't I'm not proud of that that's awful like what it what I did was a bad thing I feel bad about Who I am and if you just deny that you're just building up this weird wall of

15:24disconnect between you and reality and you're gonna make more and more shitty choices if you do that right and you are I I think that you are the sum total of your behaviors so you can feel all sorts of ways you can feel wimpy and afraid and feel like you don't want to apologize but if you behave the good way the better way the way you want to be then you're that person right it doesn't matter what your feelings are but this is one of the main issues that I have today with this right versus left social justice warrior thing that's going on it's like people are being so aggressive and so rude and so just the way they are trying to silence people from speaking the way they are describing people and attacking people it's a it's a very aggressive way and it's very short-sighted because when you have that sort of short-sighted aggressive bit what you're doing is like

16:17you're yelling shut the up well when you yell shut the up nobody wants to shut the up right don't just go oh okay like your your this is a childish way of approaching an issue like the the the more objective nuanced more thought-out way of approaching it is to take into consideration how this other person is going to view what you're saying like the only way to get people to change is to present them an art some sort of an argument or some sort of an idea that is both polite and well thought out and and there's no social issue involved in it like there's no negative back-and-forth between you where you're trying to get them and they're trying to get you the only way to get someone to really take into consideration your ideas is to have them in some way respect you or like you and as soon as you just tell someone shut the up like well that's out okay well that's out and now it's just

17:16like you're just gonna win by having more people yell or what are you gonna do you're gonna put a ski mask on and break windows like is that how you're gonna get this done you're not you're just going to cause an action reaction you're just gonna cause this sort of rubber band effect where you pull it back and then it snaps and then you've got some sort of ridiculous infighting where people go full tribal and they get one side goes against the other side and this is what you're seeing today and you're seeing people do it to get attention as well you're seeing people do it clearly when they know the cameras are on they wrap it and starts you know yelling obscenities and being more ridiculous about it and it's very odd it's very odd to watch it play out you know cuz it's so short-sighted yeah they practically wait okay are you rolling yeah 3 2 1 ok smash the window

18:02you know what you said reminded me the worst thing a man can say to a woman is calm down it always has the opposite effect a cop once said that to me I called that our local police station about some problem the guy told me calm down look does that work on your girlfriend because it's not working on me it never works on any woman so here's a tip dude what doesn't work on men either doesn't work on anybody maybe it works on kids can work on anyone tell my kids to calm down the go opposite effect always you know like shut up or any of these things these rude approaches and so the thing is when you get somebody what you do is you provoke somebody's defensiveness it's a fight-or-flight reaction you know this happens to us on an emotional plane as well and so you're provoking that whole reaction that's designed to make you get away from a bear yeah or some type of wild animal but instead of

18:50riding and burning off all those bio chemicals it's all pooling in you you're filling with hate and rage so this is not a state in which you can listen to anyone and so the moment you take it up to that area of invoking somebody's hate and defense and rage and all that stuff they are they're so far away from listening you might as well just crawl under the desk and go read a novel it's just so pointless to even engage with them and so the people who do want to engage if you engage on a polite level maybe possibly if someone is just not totally reeled in by confirmation bias they might listen and confirmation bias of course is that thing where we believe what we already believe and then we throw away any disconfirming evidence run and so you know we're if you recognize these propensity x' we have to do that to believe what we believe to be tribal to stick to this side to not

19:42listen to not change our views the may be of a hope of changing your views and maybe if you try to listen to other people who you know their differing views who are polite and trying to engage on a rational level you can learn something I try to be open-minded I try to take criticism I try to not reject it out of hand of course I don't take the criticism that comes from dear you ugly yeah but I always think like just drop the deer if you're gonna you ugly you know start with you ugly the humor comes in comes in when they're being polite whether it criticizes yeah it's so funny well people when they get in arguments it becomes a competition you know and that's that's a big part of the whole insult thing in the part of the shouting down thing it's like you're trying to win and you're trying to win an argument that very few people ever win I mean it's it's it's net it's usually like

20:34both people walk away just disgusted with a loss you know it's it's very rare that unless someone is egregiously incorrect and you literally have to shout them down because what they're doing is horrific and you need to point it out to them but that's usually not the case well usually it's a disagreement you know most of the time right and these people think they're so convinced it's religion they think that they're right we are on the left we're right we're on the right we're right and they are just unwilling to listen it's cartoonish now I saw something the other day about this great girl at Barnard Tony Erickson and she's this young journalist student there Tony or accidence a I re okay anyway I can't raksin yeah what a strange man I know she's from Ohio and from a poor family and got a scholarship to Barnard and you see how hard she works she's journalists and she looks to

21:24see different sides of things and I really respect that in her because you don't see that in a lot of people that age there's just such polarization event where I was bringing her up it's this thing oh I know she posted something so she wrote an article they have you know Columbia Republicans were you know who know where do they want to bring in like ben shapiro i love the idea that any would be afraid of ben shapiro if i saw behind me on the street I'd be like oh great fantastic dark alley ben shapiro no problem sorry Ben but who's a nice guy I don't know him but you know he seems fine you know where it's a little yarmulke and everything I'm post Jewish so I can make Jewish Jewish guys I mean escaped you and so they somebody posted something about being against white supremacists and it was really about like they're gonna have a Republican speaker yeah you

22:14and there is so ugly about Republicans and I thought God have you ever talked to one my parents are Republicans my friend Tom who's this Christian lawyer I know he feeds the homeless because he thinks that's what Jesus said you should do these are not horrible people who are burning crosses in lawns they're your next-door neighbor the Patriots of gross generalization that doesn't do anyone any good especially when you're talking about someone like ben shapiro right ben is a very well-read very well thought out very reasonable and when you talk to him in person he's a very kind guy there's nothing wrong with him he's just conservative you know and whether I agree or disagree and I'm sure I disagree with him on a lot of things I had a really pleasant time talking to him I think he's a very nice guy his ideas and his his the way he speaks is very well thought out he speaks very

23:02quickly and it's intimidating to a lot of people his ideas and the the idea that he is this extremely articulate right-wing guy immediately the best way to silence that is white supremacy KKK Nazi I've seen people call ben shapiro and nazi he wears a yama I know he's an Orthodox Jew right it's holy so amazing it's so amazing and that kind of thing we see it on both sides and there was something the other day so dana loesch she's a commentator and she's apparently very pro nra so people send her just the ugliest tweets and i'm sure i disagree with her on a number of things they don't really look at her views you know extensively but they were things like you know i hope you die in a hail of gunfire or something like that along those lines outside the NRA headquarters but i love this one the guy said dear God and he spelled god G - D we're gonna pussyfoot

24:02on the like that oh and in God on the vowels like boy I love that that's like extreme left people that won't even acknowledge the existence of God so even as they write it they put it like an asterisk I think he might have been a religious guy or something you know maybe so I write books with the title and I always want them to write the full but it's just it was like enough to get the in there with the asterisk and everything funny that we're afraid of words like oh my god like what do you what do you think you're confusing someone with that like oh they actually meant Oh petunia you know asterisk makes it all okay there are people at my favorite when some people reviewed one of my books they would say like this book is filled with profanity I mean it has what was your first clue yeah it's people are really really weird with that kind of stuff it's just you

24:54know what what they get upset about I know Dana I've met her she's very nice you know I've been our show once right after that Cecil the lion thing happened Oh Brady vaguely remember now she's uh you know she's she's like a right wing woman I'm pretty sure she started out her life I think she was very left-wing and one point in time and saw a lot of hypocrisy on the left and switched over to the right but again it's like we were talking about before she's very tribal you know she's in our a tribal pro-gun Second Amendment and they dig their heels in and that's it right you know bumps - I want the bump stock so I want the full auto I want I want magazines big magazines like no matter what happens right and I think you know to be I call myself an either I'm neither a Democrat nor Republican I'm libertarian fiscally conservative and I think that helps me identifying as sort

25:44of a nothing helps me to not succumb to so much of that you know I of course right being human I do have views and I tend to stick to them but I try to be open well when you go NRA though I mean this is the thing is like if you're like a very outspoken NRA person and she was famously involved in one of those really aggressive videos about the NRA did you see that video that was I don't think so it was like a sort of like it was really recently very controversial video talking about gun ownership and there's it was like a sort of pro NRA video that was like widely criticized on the left and I think the I you know the subject of gun ownership and just what happens are these mass tragedies I mean it is it is the conversation that stirs up tribalism logic it's it's a very complex very and also mental health issues I mean I know what was going on with this guy I

26:43want to know this Vegas guy was he on you know some sort of psychic mag meds cuz a giant percentage of these people are and what's the ramifications of that and what is causing this up behavior is it simply you know what people love to call toxic masculinity manifesting itself in the most horrific form or is there some other factors I mean these disassociative psych meds that they put these people on allow them to just deal with life in a way where they just don't feel you know I mean have you ever been on psych meds yeah I took sole oft once and when I take I forgot to gather all everyday do you yeah I am your pilled up it's great because I would talk so fast I might hurt people with my speech a lot of people in here that are on adderall because they feel like when they do a podcast they need to be ramped up to keep up and Jesus it's so obvious you're

27:33like slow I want to get them drinks and sometimes I offer them drinks Michael it's yeah let's have a drink oh no I know better even though it slows me down and I'm on the same dose at seven point five milligrams I'm the total lightweight of lightweights but so the Zoloft I took because I went to a psychiatrist in New York and you know they actually tried to give me like lithium and all these other things like for manic-depressive people my friend said you're manic you're not depressive and basically it's so crazy because all I was it wasn't some kind of inexplicable horrible depression I didn't have a boyfriend I didn't have any money and I was bummed right know like and I took Zoloft then I realized it just shaved off half my personality so I did the really dumb thing you're not supposed to do which is just I thought like this flushed it down the toilet and then I would like

28:16fell off a cliff emotionally whoa not only that would you do those poor fish my follow those bodies yeah well they said that there's like like noticeable like trace elements like you could actually like measure trace elements in some water supplies of antidepressant probably sorry everybody but isn't that funny that that saying that like I've talked to people that are extremely defensive about their use of antidepressants and when you bring in anybody discusses especially someone like you who tried them and is open about like what was the cause here I was bummed out I didn't have a boyfriend like if you say that to people they they love too close to generalize depression as a disease it is a disease there's a mental issue and that no no exercise diet change of lifestyle you know love in your life none of that's gonna fix it having a career that's really fulfilling none of

29:21that's gonna fix it I have a disease and I need medicine for my disease see that's such a just a sort of very OneNote idea and I love the research of this guy randy Nessie I love him he's a psychiatrist and an evolutionary psychologist and he talks about it's any sse and you can go on his website he's now at university of arizona because he was in Michigan's freezing there everybody else eventually moves to Arizona all these professors anyway so he talks about how depression you know the sad feelings these are adaptive and so when something bad happens to you being sad causes you to slow down you have the features of a sad person which has causes other people to gather around you and be empathetic now if it goes on for too long you may chase people away but this allows you to think about what dumb thing you did that made you get in the state and I talked about how

30:16emotions are motivational tools we think of them as sort of like wallpaper for our head to decorate our life but they're not emotions when you're happy that says do more of that when when you're depressed stop doing that reflect on it and so there are different kinds of depression there's a kind that is this medical depression that's inexplicable and that maybe drugs are needed for but often I think that doctors psychiatrists my experience was and my experience listening to other people because I write this advice column and I get letters from everybody and I've been doing this for a long time since the early 90s is that doctors just say here's a pill and a lot of these antidepressants they've been shown that they don't really work and so maybe it's the placebo effect which actually is a thing but a lot of times it's people are medicating away this health

31:08all part of depression and sadness which is reflecting and drawing people to you and all of this and so this idea of it's a disease that that you know it's also used with alcoholism just this idea people like to put these things in these neat boxes and it doesn't really work yeah I couldn't say that any better and I think that there are people that do have mental issues that do need medication we're not generalizing I think just like some people have liver problems some people have thyroid issues there are absolutely people that have issues with their brains ability to produce serotonin I mean it's just a fact and how many of those people is the real question and to generalize completely let's say you know all depression is a disease that should be medicated or all depression can be cured with exercise I don't know if I don't think it's healthy to go either way I know there's I know

32:00many people that have been in really bad places in their life they got on some sort of an SSRI and then they started feeling better and then they wean themselves off and now their life is in a way better place like a good buddy of mine he was suicidal he got on and the really interesting thing is when he got on medication like he couldn't find the right one and that is really so baffling so it's it's it's science obviously right and then you're talking about medicine you're talking about medication but there's there's a lot of like guesswork to this whole thing you know I have to say because I'm writing a big expose now I didn't intend to do this but I tried to shove it off on both Nina ty Schultz and doctors EADS and they wouldn't they wouldn't bite so I'm doing it reading medical research I can't even begin to tell you how none evidence-based maybe even most of our

32:48medical care is it's so terrible and I'm lucky that I have a psychiatrist now who is really evidence-based and went on for future training further training because I had been taking ritalin which just made me jumpy it didn't really help me Jesus Christ the sky he changed me I told him I actually started taking our self-medicating this is bad this is before I read as much science as I do I was taking mucinex and the guy's like oh my god next yeah is this the kind you get behind the counter it's like and it's some kind of like they make meth out of it you know like sign you know I was buying at different pharmacies and hoping I wouldn't get arrested you know I mean I'm just taking it to write not you know do anything I don't have a meth lab in my basement I don't have a basement so that helps but so this guy said okay we're gonna change you because I told

33:36him I couldn't focus he said you can't take this it's you know making your heart race or whatever and he said that this adderall what it does that's different it pushes a little dopamine up out into your brain besides being a dopamine reuptake inhibitor which is we here with serotonin with antidepressants so it regulates that but it also goes like squirt here's a little dopamine and the first day I was on that the first pill I took it was a best writing day I'd had really in 20 years it was amazing and so I'm still on the same dosage and everything but this guy he gave me my life back because it was torture to write before that and and and that really was a big deal and it's so much of a medical care if you look at the stuff on diet you know ty shows has been great on this Gary Taubes the EADS you know there are other people on this who have shown that look don't eat this

34:22high carb low fat diet the government recommends it will make you sick and fat and here this high-fat low-carbohydrate diet for many people maybe not all because we have individual differences this seems to be the most healthy diet and also not eating polyunsaturated fatty acids and stuff like that that we know about more and more you see more and more on that Yeah right and so but my doctor Kaiser I love to say this healthy whole grains on the wall there is no such thing there's healthy whole grains I haven't eaten a bun on a hamburger since 2009 you know I just wouldn't it's just dumb I eat bacon and grease all day and I'm very healthy I even though my doctor actually thinks I'm gonna have a heart attack heart attack by next week the truth is if you actually doctor think that well cuz my cholesterol is like 303 and then but what I know and this is from my kids the

35:16doctor the who wrote the protein power he he has this great blog where he talks he's very evidence-based but explains it very well there are these ratios you look at what's a ratio of your triglycerides to your HDL and so basically my ratios which the doctors don't it Kaiser don't understand they are so good that I say that I miss likely to have a heart attack as I am to be kicked in the knee by a unicorn I'm so not in danger of that and it's just terrible they sent me this letters to eat a low-fat diet things isn't that crazy though the doctors are doing this I mean I understand that they went to school a long time ago and I understand that a long time ago that is what people thought that if your cholesterol hit a certain point you needed to take some sort of medication to lower your cholesterol but if you eat a healthy diet and your body is doing well on that

36:04healthy diet like you have to take into consideration like what are the whole what are the what are all the factors involved in in health and vitality and the understanding of HDL vs. LDL and the balance of triglycerides if you're a doctor and you don't understand that and you're giving advice and you're telling people to get on statins it's disturb it's terrible it's terrible and those statins are terrible for you terrible effects that can cause diabetes they have just the worst side effects and this is the thing that I look at when I'm looking at research or looking at because I do what I call applied behavioral science so it's science help as opposed to self-help I look at what are the trade-offs if I tell you this what are the trade-offs in doing this where you know where are you gonna have a problem how worthwhile is this solution and and that's what doctors aren't looking at

36:57when they get people statins it's sort of like from the drug companies mouths to your gut well it's just so many doctors are basing their decisions and the advice they give on really old evidence or excuse me really old knowledge evidence quote-unquote he's fraudulent quote-unquote science and it's so terrible and the penalties yeah he did this quote/unquote research but he excluded countries that didn't show searchers this is it was in I think was in the 50s he did this multiple country study where he looked at what people ate and what he did it's like this there's AMA story from the Holocaust where a guy shot all these bull's-eyes in the wall and some army person came up to him said how did you learn to shoot that way he said it's easy I first shot the wall then I drew the bull's eye and so that's when an selkies did with this research and he excluded any

37:48Treece that didn't fit what he wanted to say which is eat this diet that we've been eating our government told us to eat for years this high carb low fat diet that actually causes you to be just hungry all day yeah bikes yeah and so you know what I learned from Gary Taubes was actually a friend of mine so I got in early on the low-carb thing because I heard while he was writing this that carbs so this is potatoes starchy vegetables fruits fruit juice they sugar these things cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat that makes you diabetic and all these things and there's some indication that maybe Alzheimer's as diabetes 3 diabetes of the brain they need more evidence on that but personally I do not eat sugar I eat one tiny little ice-cream thing a week just so I won't feel totally deprived but when I when I bacon and stuff all day steak and green beans drowning in butter

38:45I don't feel deprived and it's better for me and you know if you can do that that's not much of a sacrifice ok I won't eat the bun big deal I read that Gary's book and I had him on the podcast as well it's a fascinating thing very controversial to a lot of people emailed me I need to get on and refute what he said is all right relax I literally got dozens of people that did to me but the thing that's most shocking I started following mark Sissons primal blueprint diet and when I started doing it cut out all the sugar pretty much I mean I've around every now and then but one of the things that was so shocking was my appetite like my appetite was soem manageable like used to I was ravenous I would eat and then I would be exhausted and then I would be ravenous like four hours later like if I went three hours or four hours without eating I was starving and I regularly do

39:38intermittent fasting now or I'll you know I do 14 hours straight between it's really good for your body and I lost a lot of body fat for doing that and then the big but the big thing was that when it came time to eat it wasn't like I was holding my breath the entire time of the finally it wasn't that at all it was just so normal and I was like oh so there's some other process that I thought I need to hunger I was thinking okay I get really hungry but it's not just hunger its insulin its insulin it makes you hungry in that way before I stopped eating bread I went to Starbucks in Culver City and I would always get the thing that was the regular fatty thing croissant whatever you know and I know I love all that kind of food so good but I got by accident somebody gave me the sugar the fat free whatever and after about 20 minutes I mean I wanted to bite off somebody's arm in line I

40:35wanted to kill people the counter hits three things it makes you feel so terrible and I looked at all those years I had dieted and I at one point I just thought like yeah you know what if anybody doesn't like me a little rounder than other people them and I started going to bubbies diner in New York City having this chicken potato burrito which now I wouldn't eat the bread in the potato butt and I started losing weight just by eating like a normal human being and not excluding fat and that's what that was sort of instructive for this and now I just basically try to eat fat all day Greece Greece more Greece and you don't have that hunger and also I know it's so much healthier for me to not eat bread and to not eat these we don't eat bad oils anymore and and just to tell you another weight loss story um my boyfriend he was Elmore Leonard's researcher the crime writer

41:20for 33 years and he had to do this book djibouti and I begged him not to go to Africa cuz my boyfriend he has his look is I'm American kidnapped me I knew he would get kidnapped I mean he just yeah so I just you know I begged him not to they kidnap a lot of people and effort no but they would kidnap my boyfriend no he's gonna mad at me for saying this but he once got his pocket picked in in Paris he just looks like the American guy that you know do something too so and he the big guy from Detroit so it's not like he's wimpy or anything but I he needed to lose some weight and and some doctor gave him he's like candy bars that were $230 you know and and the thing of like being from Detroit not wanting to be ripped off I said okay if you do exactly what I say because he's a guy so he's not like you know I'll do exactly what you say but I said you will lose weight and you'll not be hungry so

42:14I put him on a diet of bacon eggs he could eat meat no vegetables and just coffee and spring water vegetables yeah this is like this is like remember dr. Atkins threw the Atkins induction diet you have to take magnesium or you could be blocked up like the Berlin Wall inside so but he lost 30 pounds in 5 weeks while sitting in his chair researching djibouti the book Delmar ended up doing and he did not leave his chair he terms librarians on the phone and embassy people and stuff like that but is no vegetables a good idea it seems like you need vitamins no eventually but actually topsis said we talked about this once and he said basically that meat has all the vitamins except vitamin C and I'm sort of paraphrasing from a long time ago so forgive me if I get this wrong but and that if you but if you are eating meat rather than carbs maybe you don't get vitamin C deficient look at the maasai

43:05and also the the Eskimos think it's the Inuit I think Steffensen was a guy who's up there and before they started eating a Western diet they just stayed blubber in way don't know meat and I guess they may be a penguin yeah the penguin with a different part of the world but nuggets yeah I'm really good on geography and thinking I'd say right well I know what you're saying know that they and they also had extremely low rates of cancer right they were just healthier humans it's changed as soon as they started eating the Western diet and Tom's brings up the Pima Indians same thing do they have horrible problems with diabetes also though the to throw some other stuff in there there was it was also an issue with alcoholism and cigarettes there's a like the cancer and the heart attacks and a lot of things that happen with the Inuit a lot of people okay there's a correlation between extreme

44:01consumption of cigarettes and alcohol so it's it's not just the American diet it's all the vices that go along yeah we're good at producing this yeah we suck we import horrible things I mean look what we did to not we obviously you and I weren't right well whoever looked like us that did that to the Native Americans introducing alcohol today and they you know they didn't know what to do with it yeah right bodies weren't used to it yeah it's some there's a doctor that I'm gonna have on the podcast soon who is on Twitter I mean I have no idea if this guy's we all not yeah everybody is I'll tell you right now but this gentleman is uh he's a full carnivore all he does is eat meat and he holds a bunch of records in like athletic pursuits it's really kind of interesting you know this guy what Stephen Finney is it I'll tell you in a minute pull him up real quick but he and I have

44:56been going back and forth trying to figure out a time to get him on the podcast but he's 50 years old and it's pretty impressive what he's been able to do and all he does is eat meat doesn't need anything but meat you know and he's an MD so of course the Internet's not working here what's going on with the internet here young Jamie yeah it's a piece of laptop this laptop has been the worst one I've ever had it was like connecting like it takes forever to reconnect yeah I hate that anyway I never leave the house so I'm always on my big computer you never leave the house not lately I wrote a book for three years that spent three years trying to kill me so Jesus probably know my boyfriend brought me food otherwise I would have eaten hot frozen hotdogs for three years like the meat guy but that's not good right I wasn't but the book you know what happens so you you plan on writing this

45:44book and I thought oh this will be easier this this book on how to transform to be confident and I thought okay this'll be easy because I've been writing this in my column for so many years and then I look into the science and I look a little deeper and I think oh my god this is so horrible and what happens is so this professor will do these people these researchers they do some research but they don't totally support it and then they don't work in a transdisciplinary way so you have to support this one's research but that one's research and this became this big thing and I just kept having nightmares about my editor who's a nice man chasing me down the street asking for my advance back with an X and X an ax all right like an X all right well this guy's don't even know his full name his his Twitter name is s Baker he is like charades s Baker MD is this Twitter

46:38name have an arena Fonte sport world-record-holding masters 50-plus athlete nutrition for performance and health healthcare not sick care no medical advice here and all he does is eat meat Wow well it's nothing but me the guy I mentioned so Steven Finney he is a dietary researcher he and Jeff Wallach wrote a very good book on low carb Jeff Alex also dietary researcher and fini I think bicycles competitively are very intensely and he says that eating low carb but there's apparently some hump you get over but then that is better it gives you more energy than this whole like during some Gatorade that that people have held is the conventional wisdom yeah but it's not the case with like extreme endurance sports and there's one guy that we talked about before will you got here Shaun Baker dr. Shaun Baker carnivore diet zero carb diet plan guy looks healthy as he's

47:37on the right yeah he does mean he's jacked yeah and he's dunks basketballs and lift weights and but he might just be some athletic freak I just don't know if it's alright genes to know I'm lucky I have good genes you know the boyfriend looks at a Saltine and he gains 3 pounds and I'm lucky so my family were Eastern European Jews and you know it probably wasn't a lot of food and I don't know somehow my body learned to manage that having a lot and having not a lot and it managed it better sure I'm just I'm wondering whether or not that's a really viable diet to just eat only meat it just seems like well them aside do it and and and they didn't they the Inuit did it and so the question is are you missing nutrients and I'm not the person to answer this are you missing nutrients and that's it the problem with being vegetarian there's a guy named Chris Kresser who's posted on this oh great

48:29yeah he and so he is some really good posts about what you're missing in favor vegetarian and people say oh I take vitamins but can you get the vitamins in the way you need in the way your body uses them from taking vitamin pills or even from eating you have to eat a ton of this you know I don't know bean curd or something and I don't want to have soy that's the problem that's the dishonesty about vegetarianism and some people knowingly make that trade-off but I sure wouldn't I'm sorry as much as the bunnies are cute well Chris Kresser was a vegan for a long time and you know he's he had some pretty serious health consequences because of that but you know that's just him some people are fine with the vegan diet and that's one of the most important things to talk about is that the the biodiversity in human beings is very it is a broad broad spectrum of

49:18what people need and what people don't need which is why some people like my friend Brian his mom can't even touch Brazil nuts if she ate a Brazil nut she'd go into shock and she'd be dead I mean I can eat them all day long they taste like I don't totally like them but you know there's there's a giant curve with right now this is the individual difference this thing that I was talking about before and there's there's this big push to say Oh men and women are alike and groups are no different from each other but you know you don't see Jews as NBA basketball stars right you know and Jews and people from North Eastern Europe tend to have lactose tolerance in a way other people do not so where we are from where we mainly our evolution took place that you know and that I mean that goes back way way way way back that that affects our skills our abilities as well as our

50:16digestive abilities you know can you eat this kind of thing can you drink liquor and not be really affected by it all those things and so that's the stuff that people don't like to look at everyone the way you were talking about before that people like to say it's just like this it's this thing this is a disease and it's wrong well you know that that lack of nuance that's just so stupid and it's so sort of anti solution what people like to do when people do that that thing of you know saying things are one way it's often in a way to I think that people try to feel superior to try to simplify things too much they do so that too because we like to understand things so I think it's that and then also there's um a tendency to want to prosecute people to say you are a slovenly fat person and the reason you are heavy is that you did not go to the gym and I went to the

51:05gym and I am a holy gym goer and you are a scummy terrible's couch sitter and that's not the case in fact Tubbs wrote a great piece for New York Magazine about how we think exercise makes us thinner but it doesn't and the reasons you were saying before for doing it for mental health I try to do that when I'm feeling just my worst I make myself get on the bike and do these high intensity intervals because I know that that'll help me mentally even though I'm sure you're seeing exercise doesn't make people thinner that's what that's what tubs in this piece says and that's what I see over and over again and believe me we don't want to believe that and I think people can lose weight through exercise that they get hungrier that's the problem it's no you know you exercise you get hungrier and you replace that I don't have all the nuances on this so everyone should look

51:52up that tubs piece of New York Magazine because he's just fantastic and with all that is it's very anecdotal you know when you start saying that diet is the way to go and that exercise does not make you thin it's anecdotal because some people exercise absolutely makes him thin I mean there's I know a lot of people that have started doing jiu-jitsu and lost 3040 pounds I know a lot of people that have done that and it works you know because it's extremely strenuous extremely rigorous you burn off a ton of ton of calories you accelerate your metabolism your metabolism starts burning off fat at a unprecedented rate for your body and it does work but it's like what kind of exercise you engage again you know that's that's another factor like are you just doing like a long slow jog with very low intensity or are you doing like powerlifting like there's a lot of

52:39evidence that actual weightlifting is way better for burning fat than anything else because when you weight lifts your body makes more muscle more muscle consumes more calories and if you have the same amount of calorie intake but now your body has more requirements you'll start burning off some of that fat yeah I think that's a really great point and I am NOT one to that's a nut and that's I'm not an expert in this area and I haven't read very much in it but I have read this what's the guy's name on shoot I'm not going to remember it my Keith wrote a book with him it's um it's slow burn Fitness and I see I do that I lift weights you lift them until your muscles are just screaming and I can lift like eight pounds because I'm totally wimpy but and you do really slowly look so slowly like times barely moving and that does increase your metabolism it improves

53:30your heart improves your cardiovascular system and what's the other thing and it does help weight loss so the new one there are nuances on that and I just I say that because when I look at the table thing all this stuff he supports stuff very well it makes sense but I'm a little light on what the details are so admittedly you know I think you bring up a good point on that and also the individual differences things that we are the thing that we are different and so some people are able to lose weight in ways that other people maybe are not but I think this you see with kids do you have kids no I have kids and one of the things you see is like you see kids that can just eat anything they eat anything and they're skinny and then you see other kids that they're just really struggling at a really early age and their their body packs on a ton of fat and they have those extreme endomorph

54:19bodies and there's you know it's clear differences and they're both on the playground together at the same time they're both the same age you're not dealing with a lifetime of abuse you're talking about ten year olds right and so it comes down to me - how does your body process nutrients how does it process the food you take in and how well does it do it and where does it store it and so you know those kids who are you know that if you have them do the same kind of play you will see that one kid ends up being fatter and one isn't and and it's not you know if you fed them the exact same things you can see that the factory is just working differently in one kid yeah genetics are real you know the other thing to take into consideration you were talking about lactose intolerance and tolerance one of the things that I read really recently is that a big part of lactose

55:06intolerance could be attributed to the homogenous Asian and pasteurization of milk and that you know we're very concerned about diseases rightly so and that's why I'm in freshness and butt milks not supposed to be able to sit on a shelf for three weeks it's just not supposed to you're supposed to get milk and if you drink it at all it should be fresh and that way it has the enzymes in it and what we're doing by boiling this milk and pasteurizing it and homogenizing it is where you're creating this dead protein liquid that your body doesn't know what the to do with and then the weirder ones is when you take it and you suck the fat out of it like when you have low fat milk and a lot of people don't even realize that low fat milk has sugar in it they literally add sugar to low fat milk to make it palatable so disgusting so you know that not you're not getting

55:51anything it's not it might be low fat as in fat content but isn't the effects it's gonna have on your body it's not low fat at all yeah actually Jeff folic that dietary researcher basically agreed with me when I said to him so is it basically child abuse to feed your child skim milk I mean here we are America we're a very wealthy country people are feeding their children nutrient free food it's so crazy well they just have not had enough time to study the research they have most people the what they hear is if you eat cholesterol you'll get fat if you eat saturated fats you'll have a heart attack and there you're talking about like nineteen sixties knowledge you talk to top of the food chain researchers today no pun intended in 2017 and they'll tell you quite the opposite they'll tell you that saturated fats and cholesterol are actually good for you that they are the precursors for

56:45hormones your body uses them to produce testosterone like your body uses them to produce hormones and that this idea that eating cholesterol raises your blood cholesterol that's not true right and actually we've been so credulous as as people I think probably it's not just us is probably around the globe for many many decades and now part of the good part of having all this media is that more of the sort of the counterpoint gets out there and so it's been sort of a religion people have believed this because the government pointed out the American Heart Association the AMA put it out saying fat is excuse me fat is bad and recently they did it again with no I and I had to send it to a bunch of people like Rhonda Patrick and other doctors and scientists that I know my day my wrong here or is this and on it wrote a piece one of the the researchers four on it wrote a piece

57:45essentially saying the American Heart Association is essentially whack it's kind of a whack institution they're not on top of the ball yeah I just found this with another Medical Association in this piece I'm writing and it's really terrible because what happens is so doctors say that you go to an HMO those doctors they go by the recommendations of these big associations so you've got the big associations telling basically medical fairy tales they're continuing to tell the same fairy tale that they've told and people are basing their health care decisions on that doctors are and then the patients are listening they assume okay you're wearing a white coat you went to medical school and I went to school of Google I guess I'll listen to you right and that's really really damaging and this is why I think Nina ty Schultz dr. EADS Gary Taubes all these people you know

58:33who have done this work to put this put out the real science they have saved an enormous amount of lives and stop people from having horrible diseases I really think that they're all heroic because it's been a fight to put that stuff out it's been a big battle for them and they have people fighting them all the time well most people that go to a doctor for advice but the reality about medical school is you take very little time to learn about nutrition right so a lot of these guys whether it's an orthopedic surgeon or the whatever the their specialty is the the idea that these people are the go-to expert on every single area of the body including nutritional absorption is ridiculous yes this is not the case and there's a great many people that know more about nutrition and especially state of the art nutrition that then your doctor does yeah unfortunately but see if you

59:23realize that then you're already ahead of the game and you can say okay I'm going to I'm going to use you for tests yeah and tried you know sucks it really sucks I'm a great doctor there are obviously some great doctors out there and that can give you some like my doctor dr. Gordon mark Gordon was he's also an expert in traumatic brain injury and you know he's a really nuanced guy and when I talked to him about cholesterol and all these different factors in LDL and HDL and triglycerides and he can give me a research-based sort of point of view on it because he's doing it himself I mean he's eating this way himself he's paying attention to all the latest stuff but he's got a voracious appetite for that stuff there's a lot of people that doesn't want to be bothered they got the degree in 1982 and they're done I know and it's so terrible and see if your

60:14doctor discloses that to you if they say look I really know nothing about diet and I'm gonna give you advice because they say that I should give you advice but really it's not based on anything other than they printed out some sheets here then okay because then you're informed it's not like your doctor is leading you on with the white coat but most people are being led on well it's just we have this idea you know we have this idea that you know what what do I need to do to be healthy well you know maybe I should go on a vegetarian diet that'll be healthy well listen if you meet cupcakes and burritos and cheese doodles all day yeah a vegan diet is gonna be amazing for you it's gonna really really do a great job the question is is it optimal it might be it might be optimal for you it but it might not be optimal for you you know it might be for me maybe it's my thing you

61:01know and but if trying and trial and error becomes really difficult for people because most people have jobs and families and obligations and hobbies and things they like to do they don't want to spend time going through PubMed Studies and trying to figure out what the luck is a good thing to eat and the bad thing to eat and you know what are the variables is it based on the you know the origin of my ancestors do I have to like think about you know those ancestral diet people that are really into that like you know like where are you where you're people from like where do they grow up doing you know right no it's very hard and the the great thing is that there there is more stuff out there that's written for laypeople where people who read the research explain it to people in a way that is very clear and understandable so people can make more of their own decision I think than

61:47they ever could before there's also people that are super cynical they're like hey man I grew up with dr. Seuss in the food pyramid it was always weed at the bottom and there's all this other stuff but now everybody's flipping the food pyramid and you just taken out the bottom part entirely like and so what what's gonna happen five years from now you're gonna tell me well high fat is actually terrible for your brain or you know it's just people are understandably tired of all this stuff and it's it's like real easy to just sort of compartmentalize and just push it away and just listen to your doctor yeah it really is and the thing the point made before about the people who are there eating the Cheetos and cupcakes dying well of course if you start eating a vegan diet you know you're not having Cheetos and cupcakes right you know you're gonna see an effect but is that a good effect you

62:33know in terms of your long-term health and you know we see that vegetarians don't have necessary proteins that you get very easily from meat you eat like balanced amino acid profile foods like I know P protein and hemp proteins very good quinoa you know more than I and this this isn't my area because I don't care about that stuff since I'm not vegetarian and wouldn't eat that way but I see that so people like Chris Crestor try to help people to say look here's the dl and so you can make some choices and decide you know is there a way for me as a vegetarian to get the nutrients I need or am i I always going to be deficient and how might that affect my health so what are the trade-offs yeah but some people they don't think of it purely as a health issue as well they also think about it as an ethical and morally right you know they say look I don't want to be a part of factory

63:24farming I don't want to have anything to do with the death of animals which I completely understand and I respect and appreciate what they're doing is they're trying to leave a smaller footprint on the world yeah that makes sense - well I can see that because I mean I don't think that animal cruelty is a good thing and I think animals should be humanely slaughtered and kept and so I think that that's a really good argument I have friends who are vegetarians for that reason who know about eating meat and and being a healthier way to to have a diet but they they choose to make that trade-off and as long as you're making a choice a reasoned choice and you know what you're trading off then I'm fine with that ya know I think that's and again for some people vegetarians probably the way to go and that's what gets really confusing it's like how do you figure

64:14out what is the right way to go what is there for you I mean you really what you're supposed to do is get blood tests you're supposed to do it a regular base is supposed to consult with someone who actually knows what they're talking about yeah and really just sort of just make these choices test the results and then make an educated decision based on that and here's a problem how do you find the evidence-based doctor because I'm in an HMO so I can just switch doctors forever and ever but I just stay with the doctor and then read stuff myself because I can do that that's what I do for a living but for other people who aren't in an HMO people want to find an evidence-based medicine practitioner people will say they are but then you hear their that what they suggest and they really aren't and that's that's a really big problem would be great if there were somebody could make a lot of

65:02money maybe doing a site saying look I'm this doctor and here's what I look at and think and so you could choose because we tried to find one for my boyfriend in Los Angeles and like no nobody knows right it's hard yeah you mean they're they're out there but it's hard to find them yeah you try to five six doctors you go through them and these are all doctor appointments you have to pay for them and everything and then you find out okay you don't know anything right onto the net it's it's also incredibly time-consuming like when I go to my doctor when I get blood work done we have a 75 minute consultation we have to sit down for 75 minutes and go over all the various micronutrient levels and all the different levels of you know everything niacin b12 be like but and and we go over diet and we go over like when you eating what time you eating like when when are you eating

65:50before you take the blood tests and you know how much water are you consuming are you dehydrated are you and there's a lot going on me if you want to like truly optimize your health it's better than ever but still extremely hard to find someone who knows what they're doing see the doctor you go to that seems like a smart if you're gonna spend money because that guy's probably really expensive but if you're gonna spend money you know a doctor who sees you for 72 minutes and looks you it looks at you that way that seems like a really wise investment in your future even if you're maybe somebody who is not doesn't have money to burn that that seems a really smart place to put it if you even if you have to make some sacrifices in other areas ya know I think so too and I think read as much as you can about not just read books by people and nutrition but read articles about those

66:39books you know read I mean pro and con and I've read a lot of con and you know you gotta go over that stuff with a fine-tooth comb look for bias look and it's hard to do it's hard it's really hard to do some of the important things are to look at the sample size look at people look look at the limitations sometimes they'll say them at the end always like those studies that do that sample size you know you when somebody has like oh we had 22 people in this study you know that's not the one you want look for you know and and you can't say necessarily oh it must be this number or that number look for a lot of people and what else like if they say something's really significant then I'm always I'm immediately suspicious significance you know well there's this whole argument about p-values and probably that's probability measure that's going on now and well okay let's take that some

67:25people are saying let's take that out of the equation and because that's people are using this as this sort of golden thing to say okay we have the spiny and it's fantastic and to look at him to look at the the whole study and the the findings in a more nuanced way than just the p-value yeah it's it's hard for people I mean one of the things that we've talked about a couple times recently that people keep throwing around is this these are the recent studies that show the people who eat a lot of red meat are more likely to get cancer and the issue with these studies is a bunch of issues one they don't differentiate what kind of meat they don't differentiate whether or not you eat it with vegetables or whether you eat it with white bread and spaghetti you know and this that that's huge whether you're eating grass fed bison or whether you're eating some

68:12burger right and you're just saying you eat meat five times a week that doesn't show me what's in your diet right these are called cohort studies and I called him if you see that cohort studies or observational or population-based you know observational study I call them leap to conclusions after the fact and they're just like the of studies you know because did the person you know like you're saying what caused this this thing that we're seeing okay they are they're you know have this effect there's food right yeah and it's just it's such it's it's such a crappy way and you see it reported in the media you know these these articles that say oh my god everyone should never eat this type of food ever again it's terrible for you and it doesn't say that at all but the reporters don't know that and they just care it's just a bunch of hits on their article and yeah and

69:05you'll see articles like that that even in like really respectable publications that have this really attractive headline and then you read this the actual article itself you're like wait what are you basing this on yeah it's really terrible and so that's the thing what you said to look at studies look at the opposite you know the opposite point of view that's really important to look at it it's just it's hard to read some of these studies I really appreciate researchers who write in clear language I think that's more and more important as people can get studies there's a site called SCI hub where you can get studies that are protected that the that the journals don't let you get and you can find them on professor's websites or ways to find these studies if you want to find them you can lose Google Scholar to look up the thing so it's just um scholar.google.com and then you can

69:54start finding these and try to get them through other sources if they are a password-protected because you don't want to just read the abstract because they can say the abstracts that part at the top where they tell you what the studies about only the significant finding and we found this than that and you will often not often but you will sometimes read a study and you'll see that the thing that they say they found is not what they found and that's why it's important to not just be this lazy person who reads only the abstract and the conclusion but to look at the methodology and see if their stuff screwed up I saw a study done by Harvard professors where they didn't have a control group for their third experiment and I thought did you forget I mean you're at Harvard if you guys don't know to put in a control group you know come on that was a study about it

70:35was a study on God I'm not gonna remember now it was mmm shoot it was the the third part was in a train station and I can't I can't run what the study was about I just I brought it with me in an evolutionary psychology conference thing thinking this will be easier write a column for him because I had a question that kind of matched I can't remember but it was in a train station and study in a train station they did to two of the experiments the first two experiments were where they played videos or something I think it had something to do with cellphones or something I can't quite remember Oh was someone trying to borrow a cell phone someone's saying can we borrow your cell phone and so and and I like these professors I reference one of their both of their work in my book could my next book but it was a psychology study yeah it was a social psychology study and I

71:24thought you know that why don't you have a control for your third through third experiment and so then I had to do a new question for my second question my comm and I was all annoyed too so I remembered it well there's a difference between science and then headlines from articles that are written about science by people that might not even necessarily be scientists or really truly understand the science they just want to get an article out there that people are gonna pay attention to well I'm sensitive to credentialism as I don't have a PhD and started out giving free advice in the street corner and Soho as a joke so but I've since then I started out giving advice on a street corner yeah well wacky broad well we just I had these two friends and we just thought it would be funny so we set up on the corner of West Broadway and Broome with a card table and some

72:12folding chairs said advice it said free advice from a panel of experts we've called the advice ladies and like love and dating and what you know when what year did you do this was in the late 80s and then in the 90s you just decided to do this on a whim yeah well we thought we just do it once no I act like I'm drunk at all times so no I'm just a weird person and we did this and we just thought we'd sit there and people walk past and laugh because I was like making people laugh I once went out an evening dress in a goatee in a mustache just to be funny i frighten a child and we did this and people it was New York you know free they lined up around the block and they didn't just ask us like about like their eyelashes or whatever like what can I get directions to Grand Street through Grand Street they were asking us serious questions than I thought holy I better know something and so I read

72:59through all of psychology and we were not reading psychology in school you think like oh my god Freud just made up it was really crazy and I discovered this guy Albert Ellis was the father at the same time as Aaron back of behavioral therapy basically and then started reading more and more and immersing myself more and more in science and going to scientific conferences and then because this thing where I look for people to criticize me so I can get better I mean not the people who are like hey on the internet but I would ask professors like did I get this wrong and sometimes I'd say yes and so I learned more and more and got better and better and incorporated more science so now what I do is sort of a synthesis from across science so I write a cognitive neuroscience textbook and I use evolutionary psychology I use that as sort of an underpinning theory to

73:47everything so I look at social science research and say how would this have made sense in an ancestral environment because if there's no sense to it then there's something empty and wrong with you know what they're finding or what they're concluding mmm now so you started out doing this you set up this card table and yeah free advice and then how did it progress to you having this column well so we're doing this and just because it was so fun and we got so much out of it and I learned this that basically if you help people if you do kindness to other people for other people you feel really good so there's self-interest in being kind especially to strangers so and that's what we were doing and so we did this for a few years and skywalk by he wrote for The New York Times Style section he did a little teeny piece on us like and then it got all cut down Erik Messenger and then

74:36because I'm a garment ojou I do like five things well one of those selling men oh yeah that means like you're in the garment district you're like Hawking clothing so I can like get dressed notice I don't say like you know I get dressed eat not cook what else anyway it's psychology that's one of them and then selling things and so I got us a TV deal with DeNiro my partners and me and then I got us a column The Daily News and a book agent and one of my partners ended up dying was very sad and so we I ended up doing the column myself at that point and and then just syndicated my own column because I thought well you know I'm writing this for one paper don't make very much money how do I make more money and I was an entrepreneur and so I got it in a whole bunch of papers even though all the syndicators who do that and and by the way if anyone asks it's not possible any more papers

75:26all going out of business but is that true papers wrong or they're very they're really struggling but back then I went to syndicator and they said yeah we think you write a really great column but Ann Landers and Dear Abby of all the real estate you'll never make any money and so I went to an alternative weekly newspaper conference in Montreal I stayed in like the hooker hotel because I couldn't afford the real hotel and I just went around saying like here are my little samples here my little samples and so papers started picking up my column so I built a business out of doing this this out of free advice and then over the years became increasingly science-based you know had to learn statistics I have a book I weep reading under my desk by OSHA's biostatistics the bare essentials I read a lot of stats websites and try to improve in that area in terms of scientific thinking and and

76:14understanding statistics so I can be better at assessing studies people gravitate towards advice they really do the advice columns and advice like calling advice shows like people love like dr. Laura like that kind of millions people calling you know what should i do what should i do well the thing that I do I just feel like I don't have a right to just give you my opinion so before it was a science base was very reasoned based I always loved critical thinking and reasoning and logic and so now you know I'll look at somebody's question and I'll sometimes think I know the answer but I'll always read to see oh actually no it's this I'll read a bunch of papers and I look for what's called the most parsimonious answer because there can be a bunch of answers to something but it's like what is the thing that most closely narrowly answers this person's question and then also

77:05there's this thing I see advice columns all the time they tell someone to do something that nobody would ever do so I always have like this sort of check on there if like come on it's not anybody ever gonna do this kind of stuff well it's like write stuff down all right stuff don't you know but you might do it and when people read those books self-help books it says like okay write this worksheet and do all this stuff I've never done that in my whole life and so write things down know what you have like a list of things to do oh no I have I have stuff written my house is like it's a fire hazard with the bed in an oven it's like a walk-in paper pile so no I write everything down I type everything out I am a blowhard on imprint but the thing is that in books when they say fill out this worksheet I like reading I don't want to stop and do this thing and so I've never done that

77:53and so in this next book that I wrote I have two ways to do some good lazy ass Amy L Conway or the way that's actually more efficient and will do better it's the way I change because I was this loser with no confidence and I transform myself and actually it's based in good science what I did I didn't know that I was just desperate and miserable but I say look if you make a list of these problems that you have the things you're afraid of this will help you then you can tackle them this is smarter but I didn't do that I still you know got to where I needed to go but it's just dumb to do it my way because you can just do a little writing work and get to tackle the stuff you need to tackle so you give advice that you don't really take just like saying like take write down all the different things that you have issue with and then you can tackle those you didn't really do that well because I

78:40didn't do it based in science what I'm saying is that I recognize that some people will be too lazy to write stuff down or they just don't do that and so but I what I did is I said here are the consequences if you do it my way like it's gonna be slower and you know you might not be as successful and this way like it seems worthwhile like if I could do this over again if I find a time machine and go back and say like hey miserable loser --is-- person here's what you do and write this down because then it's gonna take you you know this many years instead of like that many years I would do that now and so what I tried to do is persuade people to be smarter than I was basically well you're you're giving advice based on your personal experience like this would have been a better way to do it right this is a better way and I see that based in the science but I realized that some people

79:28won't do it so you can choose this is the thing it's like with the diet okay you eat that cupcake you're gonna enjoy it but here's the trade-off well writing things down one of the things that's important about that is it cements those things in your memory and it puts them in especially in my opinion physically writing I don't know why but like for notes like I have notes on my phone that I keep from like comedy sets of like things that I need to do they're not as effective as a notebook or keep a notebook as well and my notebook is not where I write in I write on a computer but my notebook is where I write things down that I need to remember like this the the subject of bits and the important points and bits and maybe even if it's a new bit I'll go over like the important punch lines and where they fit in and I'll write all this stuff out but that way like for

80:18some reason when you physically write things down they they get cemented in your mind the act of putting pen to paper and moving your hand around it makes sense see this is the this is the subject of my next book it's embodied cognition it's that we don't just think with our mind that our body is intimately involved and so and there is research that finds you are actually going to remember stuff more if you write it down that's why they say in class you should take notes in pen and ink rather than typing and so the truth is I mean I've lists all over my house it's just that self-help book you know genre that I never wrote anything and where they said to write stuff but I think that that's very important and also for memorization that that's that's an important thing that to write stuff when I have I I did a TED talk and I had to memorize stuff for it

81:06and I can see where I wrote stuff on the pages so I had the tight pages but then I had stuff where I scratched in notes and I can picture that still even now even though I don't have the greatest memory I don't think the places that I wrote notes in this colored ink there's something very memorable about that where it isn't with the type page mmm yeah I don't know what it is but it definitely works right well the physical is very important you know if you look at people who are you know feel bad they say you know about themselves they sort of hunched down and everything there's a different way of standing if you feel good about yourself and good about where you're going and walking going forward I mean all of these things are very important if you're depressed it really can help to take a walk and this is this kind of thing where you have to force yourself it's like when I force myself

81:54to get on the bike you know I want to do anything but that but I know that I just have to do it because I'll feel so much better not just then but the next day it seems to I see an effect on mood the next day you know at this thing in Vegas I very just in a dark place that day that happened and I just made myself get on a bike and it's the time I felt least like that and I mean like how dumb because all these people are going through this horrible stuff and I'm like oh I couldn't get on a bicycle but but it really is you have your own little world that's where you inhabit and you have to take care of it and that was what I did to just not I didn't want to go into depression well it's also a habit that's a good habit to form the habit of getting to off your ass in putting action just doing something right and sometimes it's hard for people that you know you can call procrastinating I saw

82:45I don't want to do or think about not doing it you have to get in the habit of just doing things getting the habit of getting up and doing where there's there's no option you don't have the option to not do it force yourself to do it and if you can do that you will appreciate your free time so much more if you people think that like well I just like being lazy and I like relax and I was sitting around you you may I believe you may but you won't like it as much as you would like it if you've accomplished your goals first so you're so right because then you feel good about something you've done something you feel good sitting on the couch I like sitting on the couch watching TV yeah because I work so much yeah I get done so when I put my feet up I can like feel good I'm not off I'm enjoying leisure time which is also important there's this classic social

83:31science research by this guy Karl Weick who talked about small wins and that's really important and they talk about that in a a make your bed in the morning and and the thing you were talking about with feelings I'm a big advocate of not letting your feelings be the boss of you that's how I say it and so for example I write to a timer because when I sit down to write so my stuff is funny so I you know always think like I'm not funny I have nothing to say I don't know what the science is I don't know what the answers that's those are those immediate feelings buzzing around like little flies in my head and it doesn't none of that matters because the timer I put on 52 minutes on 17 minutes break and that's all that matters how many times do you write a day it depends on the day because the night is 17 minutes for a break well do that and you know teens how did you come

84:16to that actually I read something I didn't even read the study it just I thought that sounds good there's thing called a Pomodoro where you do 20 minutes but that doesn't seem for like very much you know with the humor stuff sometimes if it's hard I have to just keep shooting the with myself and like looking up things on the internet like oh look a polar bear okay and and come up with some kind of joke or something like that and so it takes a while and I read this somewhere saying that 52:17 but I didn't even read the paper on it I didn't and so what I do often in the 17 minute break period especially if I'm doing something really hard is I will clean my house and I wish I could you know no one pays writers anymore so I'd actually like to have a team of maids and a butler little Butler I don't for not to say if you're okay a little person sorry little person

85:03Butler why a little person how about a giant because I always loved the Wizard of Oz I think that they're amazing looking so it's probably a terrible thing and I'm probably going to be happy to have people like you come after me and then what is this Jamie would you just pull up pomodoro is I've only heard of it and Italian cooking so yeah great it comes out of that little little tomato timer it's 20 minutes so each 25-minute block of work is a Pomodoro once you twenty-four Pomodoro's take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes to still help your brain relax and refocus before your next session so this is default mode processing that goes on what happens is you're more efficient if you take breaks see I'm from the family of the Puritan work ethic Jews of like just their beat the horse and have it worked for hours but that's really inefficient because your brain does

85:52background processing while you're doing this you know you're washing the dishes or whatever and so but I find that the thing about not having a maid and doing the work yourself you like cleaning the baseboard down here or take the little Clorox wipe and do something you have these small wins so you accomplish something even though it's just a little tiny thing you clean your countertop or whatever with bleach that you've done something and where maybe you're writing it's going it's frustrating and you haven't really accomplished much you didn't figure out the thing you needed to figure out so you have that elevated feeling of being you having done something that you're talking about I've heard a lot of people say they like to take breaks and walk and that during the walking that's when they sort of sort out all the different things they were writing

86:34about and they usually bring a phone or recorder and then they talk into it if they have an idea and then go over that or you know obviously use a transcription you have a smartphone who's a transcript Piatra I that dragon thing on my phone which I really like and the walking does seem helpful Nietzsche walked and I've read papers on this that walking is helpful and so I do that also if I have something that's just where I can't figure something out what I do is I go to the bank and get $20 out I'm just - so it doesn't seem like a meaningless trip there and then come home and go to the bank you get 20 bucks really well it's nearby it's like on Lincoln and I walk back and you know it's a short trip but it's enough of a walk that it's a walk and symbolic thing has no meaning it's just that you know if I just walk to the bank it would feel purposeless and then maybe I wouldn't do

87:23it the next time so it feels Center I know I'm a weird girl what can I say but I do that and that's just such a it sort of alleviates some kind of that pressing feeling of you have of like there's not a solution I don't know and you're moving you're doing this thing you're moving forward that's this thing about your brain not just we don't just think about solutions like we can actually move in ways that help your brain be more powerful and that's that the walking thing that seems to be one of these ways where you take some pressure off and actually that and I put things on the wall in my shower correct things and and I also put up things I don't understand to look at them over and over again and the other thing too is people feel bad if they are not instantly geniuses at figuring something out and what I like to do is go over and over and over think so on this thing that I'm

88:15writing now this medical care expose that I'm writing now the research is really new to me and complicated and so what I do is I have a pile of papers there's like a stepstool my bathroom it's really crazy my boyfriend goes in there he's sort of frightened by the insanity but the pile of paper so I put them on the bottom stool and then I reread them and I put them on the top so there's like a it's like a an escalator going back and forth because when you do it like that you get sort of a deep understanding that you don't when you just read it at first and I know this from writing that there's an understanding I can listen to someone present their work at a scientific conference and understand it but can I explain it to you and that's a whole different level of understanding that's deeper understanding yeah that doesn't make sense and when you're talking about a walking - do you think

89:02that walking has an effect also because it's a my very mild exercise so it's not exhausting you it's not hard but you are getting some good circulation because you're forcing your body to pick your legs up and move forward and your heart starts beating and and I think it's sort of a ignites some systems yeah I think that you're probably right about that and you feel just the sense you know because you're going forward hmm so forwards a metaphor for success and progress and all these things and I think that all that it sounds kind of silly but I looked at all this metaphor stuff and I don't think it's so silly you know you know a success is up moving forward as progress and so our bodies are connected that our first language as organisms the little wee organisms they had two things approach and avoid it's like oh look a yummy piece of plankton I'll approach that or oh oh that thing's

89:54gonna eat me and I'll back up right and those it's caught there's a term called neural reuse by the sky Anderson and and the guy named Dehaene said it in different way but the idea is that the human emotional system comes out of our scat they use of term scaffolded i don't think they use it right but this comes out of the approach and avoid mechanisms of tiny organisms so going forward that's approach going backward receding that's avoid and so if you look at it that way it makes sense that walking that going to the bank I'm gonna look and learn a little tennis shoes in my wear those Asian pull man sunglasses that you know we're retired no I got them from my neighbor she's Japanese in a garage so it was like they're like those wraparound it's basically like putting a strap you know how they like if they don't want to I identified in a photo they put a black bar over your gun

90:47on your face that's like the sunglasses version that they're huge and they're plastic shield I got them at her you know oh also because so I'm just like I'm related to white out and so I'm just hoping to not age like an old Hermes handbag you know but in California so don't spray like sunscreen over your face when you do that - no I use FDA banned sunblock Jesus Christ why'd you do that no because I don't know the FDA they're wrong to ban this that they don't allow the most protective sunblock witches with Mick sorrel that they sell in France that no French people have not been dropping dead in the streets they haven't been dying of cancer from using sunblock with this very protective ingredient the FDA allows the sunblock now to be sold here it's called Anthea Anthea Leo's but it's like with the whatever mucinex I used to take that they now have behind the counter they've

91:37sell the one up in the aisle that doesn't work they they remove the active ingredient and they sell the lesser ingredient in America so if you want to get the Anthelios that actually works you have to go to France I buy a case when I'm there other people bring back a dress I bring back $350 worth of sunshine you can well this is a great thing about the internet nowadays you pellet and feel it's a and thel iOS there's a little French yeah it's like you say if you're a French until EOS and Tilly oh yeah okay so this stuff is just way stronger than anything you get here in America well it's this next sorrel that's the ingredient that protects you from UVA and UVB and it's just it's really the the most protective ingredient you can also get it in Canada I got someone I was not even you know but I get it in France because I can get it cheaper there so I buy a whole case

92:30like I got you go to bad neighborhood and buy it there and some like yucky pharmacy there so when you're taking this stuff like what is the difference between that and say like copper tone or something you get in America well that doesn't I think it doesn't protect I can't remember whether it's UVA or UVB that it doesn't protect against fully the kind with the titanium dioxide protects but also the other problem with these sun blocks is that you know do they affect your endocrine system in terrible ways do that um I don't know but I'm so vain that I mean just don't want to be you know like look like a sheepdog your endocrine system well because you're putting these chemicals on your skin and stuff goes into your skin but again I haven't gone outside in a long time so that sort of mutes the effect so huge hat like that you know like it could be a wig

93:15black hat and that helps to have a crazy Amy I am I'm nuts it's one of my better qualities I guess are worse but that's it that is an interesting point about affecting your endocrine system that I never really took into consideration I've been thinking about sunscreen you know like because I was reading this thing about the the Great Barrier Reef being destroyed by sunscreen and spray sunscreen in particular over yeah someone someone sent me this message and I don't know if it's correct that the spray sunscreen is the issue with reefs and not the put the you know the the rub on stuff oh good I hate to be rude though I don't know if that's right see see if you could find out you did see something think I remember looking at stuff recently no the issue wasn't true see if for whatever reason there's something in the aerosol version that is more dangerous for reefs you know but it

94:12kind of makes sense maybe putting us right skanky chemical on you and then you jump it in the water I mean where's it going yeah well it would seem know that both kinds would work that way but maybe it's because the lotion kind probably absorbs more into your skin here goes no your sunscreen isn't good in the world's coral reef good bearing studies I found though so I don't know if this one is even accurate I found two other ones that said it is varying studies produced by the sun's clickbait I don't care scroll up and let's see what it says let's get a little larger there thank you sir swimming that swimmers that slather themselves in sunscreen are doing their skin a favor but it might not be so helpful to any nearby coral reefs that claim released in a recent scientific study sparked global headlines faulting sunscreen for the global decline of these hot beds of

95:01biodiversity it's disturbing idea that something so necessary for protecting humans from skin cancer could be doing so much environmental damage but what wait should we give the scientific finding not much turns out the authors of the report who hail from labs and universities in the US and Israel found that how do you say that oxybenzone an active ingredient in some sunscreens that protects against ultraviolet light is was present in significant quantities he's around reefs and Hawaii and the Virgin Islands that were favored by swimmers and divers they determined that the chemical has a detrimental effect on the DNA of coral in both its juvenile and adult stages the study was published in the journal archives and environmental contamination in toxicology the lab the researchers exposed core in allowed the researchers explorers exposed coral to high concentrations of oxybenzone not only

95:55did it deform coral larvae by trapping them in their own skeleton the study found that it was also a factor in coral bleaching Terry Hughes director of their Australian Research Council Center of Excellence coral reef studies at James Cook University told Mashable Australia he thought the report's findings were inconclusive he was paid off this particular study was done in a laboratory so they actually used artificial seawater he explained they put tiny bits into coral in aquaria and then added some chemicals it's not surprised in the coral didn't like chemicals thrown at them I don't know see this is a good point and this is something when you look at studies this is one of the things I look at they call it in vivo or in vitro you know are you looking at stuff do they pull out some cells and do something to them and does that and replicate or not replicate what

96:47what happens in the human body are there other things other reactions going on that are missing from them you know when you when you do that when you pull it out and just look at it in a petri dish yeah I would imagine but it seems like in that environment it showed that the coral does not like it I mean I would imagine that's not really terribly surprising I'd like to know what are the trace amounts that they're seeing in coral and can they mimic those in studies or are they just pouring it on them and you know like salt for instance right if you put a little bit of salt in your food you're gonna be fine you eat a pound of salt you'd be dead in an hour well this is the thing that you know if you look at studies this is why it's important to read them over and over like that and to really pick them apart if you want to assess them in any sort of reliable way because you have to look

97:33at those nuances and think well wait a second I call this thing to leave the lab syndrome where you look at something they've studied something you think like that's not how it works in real life why are you doing the experiment that way that's completely dumb and so and this is stuff you don't have to be a scientist but you could helps to think scientifically to think logically and so it's always good to enhance that thinking so you can look at that look for the mmm yeah but for other people they just see that headline Oh coral reefs dying because of sunscreen sunscreen bad right and we like to blame people and I felt bad when you said that I felt like right you know just for my skin so I don't look like an old hag well also cancer rate lung cancer well see here's the thing though there's so much stuff so much is more complicated than we think am I giving myself

98:20problems by not getting vitamin D the natural way and by taking a little pill cuz I take a little pill all right so that's one of those trade-offs and I think like okay I eat a ketogenic diet and then I put on the sunscreen and you look at all that you try to make the best guess you can that works also within what matters to you as a woman I don't want to look really Haggard you know when I'm 65 or you're supposed to be living in like Scotland or something if you look at your spray yeah you're supposed to be in some marsh somewhere right like a giant sunscreen right and so you know when when you change these things in modern environment they call it evolutionary mismatch you know what are you doing are you screwing yourself up in some way because you aren't getting this nutrient or whatever it is the way your body evolved to take it in yeah it is such a weird thing the color

99:15of people's skin is really just because we changed environments right you know I mean that's that's the whole the whole race thing is so thrown out the window when you take that in consideration the way we look the shape of our nose is the shape of our faces the shape the color of our skin all determined by the environment that our ancestors moving that all these people who are say I restore grew up in this place and so they are characteristic Irish features yeah and and it's just and accepting to see what's happened now is we can't make jokes anymore I skated with 20 black guys in New York oh I stopped the thing you said about the football thing I thought okay I earn a living writing and I do really can't do a lot else that if I cracked my open I might not be able to earn a living ever again yeah but these guys they called me whiteout which I thought

100:02was hilarious yeah and and when you are not racist I mean it's not it's not bad to joke about races racial stuff but now I mean it's just really the third rail of everything that you even say the slightest thing you make mention that someone's a different color I mean forget it but also there's no negative connotation to being white right so when you say you're white out it's not bad it's not like a charcoal like that people are coal they do charcoal doesn't seem like insulting and also black people don't seem chuckle I thought I had a black boyfriend he had chocolate his skin was the color of chocolate right black there's like super black well I think really dark I think they're beautiful those people from from Africa I do too with that gorgeous they're amazing until they start putting plates no lips plate lip thing how do you kiss someone like this you lick the plate like is there

100:58food left on the plate sorry bangies what's up they're called you bangies I think the people would like that yeah yeah I'm sory that's the part of Africa that they do that I believe that seems like one of the weirdest sort of habits or the you know behavior patterns that people have ever adopted words weird one of the weirdest cultural traits it's just passed down from generation to generation and the larger the plate in their lip the more cattle they're worth when they get married I can see gosh super twisted guys like how did that ever come about yeah no idea I don't know that area down there but that's there's some of these cultural things that go on are really crazy well whenever you think see body mutilation or which is essentially what that is I've read that also being connected and it's very vague now I'm trying to remember it but I remember it

101:52being connected somehow or another to the slave trade and that it made these women less likely to be raped oh interests yeah I don't know if that's true though so I probably shouldn't say it but I do always I don't know they just repeat it and let people sort it out folks don't listen to me but what we're saying about white people before it now actually I mean you see this probably all over Twitter - this thing of white privilege and I guess I thought it was like typhoid you know and and so now if you're white you're just guilty yeah you know there's nothing you can do and you see this there's some there was a video it was in Berkeley some social justice guy and the woman just it was like there's basically and that's what she said there's nothing you can do you're guilty I wish I remember the word shove it white privilege Yeah right it's a way to silence people it's also a

102:50way for you to be guilty of something whether or not you're you know you getting to have a clean slate you are on the defensive instantaneously you or you are already a guilty person right no they convert your signal they can decide that you know you you need to be punished or you need to be your opinion is invalidated because of your the melanin content in your skin I mean it's literally crazy it's the antithesis I love Martin Luther King and so the content of your character and that's so beautiful and it just it's it's so terrible this thing of you're white and you're wrong and people don't understand that's the same thing as the the racism that's been done to Black's you know for so so long and I mean I'm just I'm sort of stunned by that in this idea I mean basically your race this is now shut up that's you did you pay attention to what went on in Evergreen State College last

103:40day I love that guy Weinstein oh my god yes my rising and what happened was they for people don't know they essentially said we're gonna have a they used to have a day of absence of people of color and the idea is it's a very progressive school and they said look if we have a day where people of color are people of varying efforts where what it is they don't show up maybe they will be appreciated more maybe we'll take them into consideration more but more their absence will be felt so then they decided let's flip that around and force white people to stay home white staff members white teachers white students and Bret was like you're out of your mind this is racist it's one thing that you want to call attention to the value of people of color by not being there which is also arguably not the best way to handle it but at least you're not saying to someone that they cannot be there

104:37because of the color of their skin which is what you're saying by forcing these people to and then obviously all hell broke out you know people were protesting him they were they were looking for him with baseball bats the whole thing is horrific but it's this escalation this war of ideas where you're forcing your ideas and you are shouting people down and calling people guilty before they've ever done anything which is essentially what this is all about and you know now he's not at the school anymore I'm tragic and no school is imploding I mean it's really crazy and actually I would argue that you know for for people who are of color to to make a protest by not going to school for a day after people fought so hard I love that that little girl the picture of the girls in Little Rock going to school you know where they said they desegregated the school imagine being a

105:28little girl and that's you going with these police officers to school or composing and and to value an education and to not to skipping school okay so beyond that Bret Weinstein said his argument was I think this is racist and let's not do it and let's talk about it and his speech in the hallway there outside his classroom I saw him and I thought wow this is an amazing guy look at how rationally his measure and calm yeah and full of grace in you know there's just mob there you know they're calling him racist and shouting him back holding him down and I thought oh my god I want to study with this guy can you please do a you know MOOC on Coursera so I can take a class from you and learn how to do what you do in a heated situation Nick Nicholas Christakis at Yale is another one who had people screaming at him and was just a class act you know that was just as crazy I

106:23know and they've lost so you've lost Brett Weinstein from Evergreen he is I mean this guy was a valuable guy to have there and it's so sad that he is now it just wasn't safe for him when they were there with baseball bats I mean becomes a circus it's no longer about education you can see why he couldn't go back and his wife - it's very sad very very sad but this is what's happening that they're not allowing discussion this idea that accusation of your racist this is now just this thing it's a just giant muzzle you're supposed to shut up exactly what it is it's a giant muzzle just shut up and it's a way to silence you and it's a way to force their ideas down your throat see and you bring something up there I call it a way to have unearned power over other people yeah and so I think that part of this is the unpark that we have kids go to college who are not prepared for college

107:13and this is especially true if you go to some terrible school not if you're the child of wealthy parents who got all the SAT training and everything like that but so you get promoted because they want a certain caller face in there so maybe you do okay at Duke but they send you to Harvard because you can get in there because they're like oh we have all these Asian people screw you Asians we're gonna like kick you out and not admit you and well advance the craziest thing so terrible so maybe that if you clarified that because people don't know admission policies so Asians I mean I think it has to do something with the culture and the family there there's you know if you're Asian I had an Asian assistant before she lived at home with her mother father and her sisters and her grandma you know grandma answer the phone you didn't speak Korean she hung up on you but there was a very strong

108:01work ethic that you must succeed there were very strong family ethics it wasn't a single-parent household and that's what happens to a lot of these at-risk kids I speak at a school I created a program to try to help kids make it by showing example like saying look here I am I failed I slept on a door in New York on two milk crates I'm not from a wealthy family you have to be creative apprentice to somebody all this stuff kids don't get that they don't get that if you're if you grew up in a bad neighborhood and your parents don't model that sort of work ethic and the possibility to hope for success well why should you think there would be any hope for you and why should you work because the standards for Asians so they say oh look all of you Asians we have too many of these Asian faces here it's so terrible and so we're not going to admit you we're gonna take the standard standards

108:50for Asians are gonna be much higher than for everybody else and so if you get this grade point say it's like a 3.8 and you're Asian forget it you're out but if you are this person of this face color that we want we're gonna put you in there even though you know you have the same grade point as somebody who are kicking out sorry too round yeah do that that's what it is yeah they have higher standards for admission like they've essentially put the bar higher for them and it's racist it's racist it's terrible discrimination against a minority right and they are a minority and it's terrible and so what I figure minority than African Americans bigger minorities and Hispanics and Latinos it's a big minority in America I was thinking I saw I was nodding and then I thought are they oh that's really interesting yeah so what I suspect and I could be wrong this is just a guess on

109:38my part is that when you are promoted to a place where maybe you aren't capable of succeeding that maybe possibly you instead of putting your energy into succeeding you put your energy into protesting and saying the system is terrible and racist and unfair because that is the way that you become somebody and you have power and everything if you can't get it through the okay I'll work hard the way which isn't to say so people think that when you say that you're saying oh this group of people they're stupider or worse than other people but if you go back to the school's if you help those kids this is what they're doing with charter schools if you give those kids what they're missing there isn't you know we're individuals you can help people who might have been throwaway people to succeed if they just see look it's possible and here how do we put the stability or you you're a child of a

110:30single mother that comes with it certain comes with certain risks if you grow up in a certain kind of risky neighborhood there's a whole area of evolutionary psychology called life history theory that talks about this it's called having our fast life history strategy it's adaptive if you grow up in a risky terrible neighborhood where things are unstable to get pregnant early if you're a male to be violent all these these things that aren't helpful in our modern society but they're kicked off by that unstable unstable environment where you grow up so okay if instability is a problem we can't just say okay you're single mother should go back in time get in a time machine and go find a man and marry somebody before she has you that's not realistic we can't throw away people and that's what I see people advocating sometimes like okay well we've got to tell people to not get pregnant without

111:20a you know family and so because they've done that you don't punish the kids how do we give those kids the stability they lack and I think one of the ways is to have people going from the earliest grades and model what for example my parents modeled for me is these suburban not wealthy but just sort of middle-class suburban people work hard do this do that and you will be okay well I think also the problem with the Asian folks in in universities is they don't complain and the squeaky wheel gets the grease and these people aren't protesting and aren't screaming that it's racist what they're doing is they're putting their head down they're working and they're working hard and that's a part of their culture you know I grew up with a lot of Korean kids and they're extremely hard-working to the point that I felt like a lazy when I was around them and one of my good

112:10friends when I was a kid my friend jung-shik he was he was doing his residency for from medical school he was also competing on the u.s. national Taekwondo team he was going to school all day long and then he was training two to three hours a night his kid was a maniac and I would be around him and I just felt so lazy no matter how hard I worked it was so late but he never complained about anything ever and it was the culture the culture was to never complain just to work hard and never complain and you're seeing that in universities you're seeing that with their results but you're also seeing that with the fact that even though they're discriminated against like racially discriminated against by universities no one's complaining about it so they continue to do it so they do and they do it under the guise of diversity because so many of these Asian people are so successful in their

112:59academic careers they're doing so well and getting in schools they're pushing them out to try to balance it out but that doesn't balance out what you were you're doing is you're encouraging this sort of like weird way of looking at people you know you're not you're not you you want equality of outcome okay that's not real you know equality of opportunity is real equality of outcome is not real you know just people the equality of outcome happens when everyone works the same amount and this is the thing about a free society that people don't like to understand but when you have inequality inequality is by in in many ways because of freedom because you have the freedom to choose to work as much as you want or as little as you want you're gonna have inequality and outcome and there's other factors for sure there is absolutely discrimination there's sexism there's racism there's

113:53always different factors that play into account as well but there's also effort and to deny that and deny that effort is a factor in in outcome is preposterous and it sets up this Fantasyland that so many kids live in today while they're protesting ben shapiro calling them a Nazi that's where it all comes from right there's these you know these you you have a campus these these kids that are trying to shut down Republican speaking on campus by calling them and these blanket statements they're white supremacists and racists like okay well what about ben Carson he's a Republican too and he's black right there's a lot of people that are black to the Republicans this is a preposterous way of looking at the world and it's this sort of isolationist view and it's it's weird it's weird that they don't see how racist it is to discriminate against Asian peace it's

114:42terribly racist and also you know if you look at what real diversity is to me it's bringing in people who didn't have economic advantage because these the people who have a hard time it doesn't matter if they're black or white you know I know I have a number of black friends who are highly successful some of them are researchers and they grew up in suburban neighborhoods they grew up like I did they had a family their family was intact you know they didn't need a leg up from anybody because they did what I did which is work hard my mother told me so I grew up a Jewish kid in a neighborhood with no Jews and they like egg their house and everything like that my mother said to me you know there are people who hate Jews so you're gonna have to work harder than other people because some people are going to be prejudiced against you and try to keep you out so that was a message not oh we

115:26should whine about this and isn't this terrible asthma is murderous as my parents can be yeah it's I don't know it's it would be really beautiful if everybody just did the Martin Luther King thing right just judge people in the content of the character and not the color of their skin not the origin of their birth or their ancestors birth but unfortunately we are tribal and we do have these weird tendencies to sort of lump ourselves together and by the way for people that are listening to disagreeing if you're a social justice warrior you're tribal to if you're even you're a radical lefty you're tribal that's that's a tribal outlook you know and we would all be better off if we were a little bit more balanced me included well me included too I mean and if we listen what I try to do is to look at the other side you know the side I don't agree with like you were talking about this

116:15before where you maybe see things who see their point or you look at stuff that you want to agree with there is a Nick Kristof thing piece on okay here's what we have to do with guns and I looked at it because we all want there's this idea of like do something we want to do something but something is not a good thing to do and I looked at his piece wanting to find something in there that would say yes we just do these things in every single thing and there it was all meaningless stuff that wouldn't have stopped the guy in Vegas and so I looked at that wanting to see something you see nothing and so it's the thing of being honest being intellectually honest and honest when your side is full of too yeah and you know when it comes to something like the thing in Vegas we want to find some sort of solution when it doesn't necessarily exist there's so many

117:00different factors I mean obviously the access to weapons is a big one that's a huge one and to deny that is silly to deny that on the right like the people that are massive Second Amendment proponents like to deny that the access to weapons has no factor in someone using those weapons is pretty stupid I mean it doesn't make any sense but then to say that those weapons should not be accessible to people who are not criminals that's also weird because you're saying like well what if you have if we have laws in this country that allow a person to go and buy a gun for personal safety and then something like this happens where people get shot and murdered by some crazy person and then you take those rights away from the people who have done nothing wrong that's not good either I mean yeah it doesn't stop it either look at the Charlie Hebdo thing in France they don't love guns in France

117:53I don't know if the policeman armed I don't think they are that's a different thing right because it's Muslim extremists that we're acting on religious impulses well but they got guns they got horrible horrible guns that killed people I mean Minh automatic weapons I mean I don't want to use that term because I don't know anything about guns so I probably just used that wrong but they they don't allow guns in France since they got them and I think that criminals I live near the hood you know you can get whatever drug you want you know in the corner yeah can you get that they're like adderall um you know maybe a good question it's it's look access is it's wait look Australia is a perfect example they had one mass shooting they rounded up all the guns they haven't had a single one sense you know but Australia also has less people than Los Angeles and it's huge it's the size the United

118:41States so you know there's there's a there's a discussion to be had for sure and a long you know the way we need to discuss access to firearms that's that's a part of that discussion but you know we I talked about it the other day with my friend Alonzo Bodden and immediately people were put making articles saying that we were calling for a police state and confiscation of the guns I didn't say that no one said that but this is the right wing you know Second Amendment proponent knee-jerk reaction to an instantaneously demonize anyone who's critical of the guy having access to 23 rifles right and see the thing that that's happened with that polarization is that now just saying let's think about this you know because I'm libertarian I'm Pro Second Amendment but I also think let's look at this that's not bad to say let's look at this this doesn't mean we're gonna want to

119:32take away everybody's guns it means that we want to think about things it's ever been a clear instance that there's a giant problem with someone having access to guns like that what show it to me because this guy broke windows in a hotel and shot five hundred people in God example if that's not a clear situation where people need to look at it and go okay how does this get prevented and doesn't get prevented by burning your head in the sand it doesn't get prevented it doesn't get prevented by just going back to the Second Amendment and just yelling it out and stomping your feet and pound your fist on the table you know shall not be infringed that's not how you prevent your children from getting shot by a psycho see I think what's hard in this too is that we don't have any answers there's no well if it was just mental health or just this or just that because it's a

120:20mystery so people are just grasping at things and everybody's standing their ground they eat the pro-gun the anti-gun and they're saying see see and all the disgusting stuff on Twitter and people did try to curb this a bit the stuff of people using that as a ramp for their own whatever their views were sure and that was pretty ugly you know you're seeing those videos you always have that right well you always have that but in this you know when it's loss of life and it's not just Oh Trump said this dumb thing you know that's that that just barrage I saw that video of all the people running you know that that it was there's a it's like a ten minute video and the police hurrying them on some people didn't even realize it was gunfire and you hear that that that constant barrage when you hear that for that period of time that gun going off so many times and so many people being

121:10just that guy's victim that was so horrible you see that guy's brother getting interviewed no I just saw a photograph of a 90 minute interview and is one of the most bizarre interviews I've ever seen in my life he's so removed from his brother doing this and he's talking about what a great guy his brother is and how quirky his brother was and how his his brother was just he was eccentric and he was just talking about what his brother would have done and the casino people all knew his brother and to say they didn't know him was crane but this guy seems like a guy trying to act normal it is so weird I mean there might be like some sort of a mental health issue with the entire family because the dad apparently was a psycho and was a serial bank robber yeah I don't know but it's above the stranger where he's not like horrified he's not crying he's not stunned it's it's so weird

122:07and it brings me back to the whole mental aspect of it you have there has to be a lot of wrong with your mind for you to be able to do something like that what it in what it is I hope we figure it out but sure do to Jesus aim you thought it was gonna be a positive interview crazy girl look I'm so fine this is great it was fun I really enjoyed it me too so for people to that want to read your column it's advice goddess calm well yeah or actually I prefer they read it look it up in papers and some of them have changed it to the name I prefer which is science advice got a stuck on so don't feel like this chick who's just pulling out of her butt and then I have a new book unfuck ology feel guide in a lot of your book I know so terrible this is an accident and actually so it's a unfuck ology a field guide to living with guts and confidence and good manners from

122:59nice people who sometimes say thank you Amy a lot of fun talking to you it's great alright folks we'll be back a little bit with Russell Brand see ya