#1022 - Eric Weinstein

Joe Rogan (0:07)

Boom, yes, we'll live. Hello, Eric. Hello, Joe thanks for doing this man.

Jamie had a question. You're not related to that other fellow? The other Weinstein fellow that's in trouble right now?

Eric Weinstein (0:21)

Brett Weinstein?

Joe Rogan (0:22)

No, that's your brother, the other guy.

Eric Weinstein (0:24)

Oh, Weinstein?

Joe Rogan (0:25)

Or the other guy, yeah.

Eric Weinstein (0:26)

Yeah, I don't know him.

Joe Rogan (0:28)

That other guy's in trouble.

Like, two more women, Angelina Jo Lee and... They both came out today.

Eric Weinstein (0:37)

Yeah, I don't think it's gonna stop there.

Joe Rogan (0:40)

Seems like you might have had a little bit of an issue. Isn't it amazing that someone can get away with something like that for so long, and then one or two people come clean and the walls come down, the oppressive fist of just his fucking tyranny, whatever that guy did.

Eric Weinstein (0:59)

Yeah, I mean, I think it does speak to the idea that power really exists in an industry in a town like this.

Joe Rogan (1:06)

Well, it's always been the, that's been the cliche, right? The casting couch, right?

Eric Weinstein (1:11)

Yes, but I didn't know in the modern era how much power anyone still had.

Joe Rogan (1:18)

Yeah, I wonder, you know? It's just, and it's also like super left-wing guy, you know, like really politically connected to social justice ideologies, fighting gun control, I mean, you know, promoting gun control and stumping for Hillary and all this.

Eric Weinstein (1:37)

Yeah, it seems like overcompensation.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

I didn't want to bring this up right up front. We were going to talk about cuttlefish. I asked you to save the cuttlefish in this conversation about giant cuttlefish?

Eric Weinstein (1:50)

Well, we were talking about, I mean, all of these are just like incredible hot button topics. But we were talking before about your conversation on male and female programming in the mind on male and female biological frames.

And what I was going to talk about there was that you can actually have, in other species, which aren't nearly as controversial as humans, a rational basis for something like transphobia in an evolutionary context. So the giant cuttlefish, which I think is called Sepia palma, I'm not a biologist, the males are incredibly large. They're very sexually dimorphic. And you've got these tiny or smaller males who don't have a good strategy for keeping a lot of females underneath them.

Joe Rogan (2:48)

So the males are incredibly large, or the females?

Eric Weinstein (2:50)

The males are incredibly large. The females tend to be much smaller.

When the females are impressed, they accept shelter underneath one of these giant males. But then you have these other males who aren't nearly as big, which might be called sneaker males. And the sneaker males start retracting the tentacles that identify them as male and changing through their chromatophores their presentation to look female. And then the giant males invite these males disguised as females through behavioral change underneath. And we've now proven, I believe, that these sneaker males inseminate the females while the larger males are getting duped.

Joe Rogan (3:40)

Now are the larger males larger because they just have better genetics or are they larger because they're older?

Eric Weinstein (3:45)

Well, you know, the question about better genetics, key question is who leaves the lineages that matter over time. So if you're wasting all of your energy on a strategy, and in fact what you're doing is you're providing protection for sneaker males to get busy with the females who seem to be equally happy to reward a devious male as a strong one. You know, I put in mind of the old Willie Dixon blues song, I'm a backdoor man. The men don't know, but the little girls understand.

You know, definitely females favor a variety of strategies, whether communicating strength and dominance, cleverness, or anything that females are likely to decide will benefit their offspring.

Joe Rogan (4:38)

Yeah, that's a great name for them, too. Sneaker males. Is that like the technical term for those small males?

Eric Weinstein (4:46)

I've seen it in lizards, and I don't know the sepia palma giant cuttlefish system, but I'm obsessed with cephalopods, so I should probably go back and do some homework on them. I didn't know we would be starting out with Harvey Weinstein and giant cuttlefish.

Joe Rogan (5:02)

Weinstein versus Weinstein, that's the difference.

Eric Weinstein (5:05)

I'm definitely keeping that distinction.

Joe Rogan (5:06)

That's a good distinction now. Right now, it's good to make a separation. So cephalopods, including cuttlefish, octopods, squids...

Eric Weinstein (5:15)