Joe Rogan Experience #1501 - James Lindsay

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   ... do, what? You…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      ... do, what? You can ride an elephant in Thailand. I rode an elephant in Thailand.

   2. NANarrator0:04

      Nice.

   3. JLJames Lindsay0:05

      Yeah. It was actually, they were actually healthy, happy elephants that were well taken care of, because it's an elephant rescue. Um, so they're free. They're free elephants. They, they wander around. They, I mean, they literally came out of the mist in the jungle-

   4. NANarrator0:19

      (laughs) Oh, man.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      Like, like a movie. It was crazy. And they're treated really, really well. So, um, I didn't like the riding part.

   6. NANarrator0:27

      No.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:27

      I thought that was kind of fucked up. But they don't give a fuck, man. You-

   8. NANarrator0:30

      They're huge.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:30

      ... you are literally like a hat to them.

   10. JLJames Lindsay0:32

       Yeah, they're huge.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:33

       Yeah.

   12. JLJames Lindsay0:33

       And strong.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:34

       But they came over, and, um, the whole idea was you pay for this experience with the elephants. And, uh, in that, they rehabilitate these elephants and they've released many of them back to the wild.

   14. JLJames Lindsay0:46

       Oh, that's good stuff.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:47

       'Cause they can... They don't need to be trained to be able to just eat vegetables and, and then let their-

   16. JLJames Lindsay0:52

       Right.

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:52

       ... vegetation. They just do it. So they came over, and you were introduced to the elephant that you were gonna take care of for the day, and then you, you start feeding it sugarcane, and they love you.

   18. JLJames Lindsay1:01

       (laughs)

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02

       So you're feeding them and you touch them. They're super gentle, like, the, the, the most gentle creatures. And then you actually clean them off. You wash them off, and you, you, you... So there's, like, this grooming thing.

   20. JLJames Lindsay1:13

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:13

       And then when you go to get on them, they know you're trying to get on them, so they actually lift their leg up like this, so that you can step on their leg.

   22. JLJames Lindsay1:21

       Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:21

       And then you step on them and you climb on top of them. It's difficult. Like-

   24. JLJames Lindsay1:24

       It was hard, dude.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:25

       ... it's hard to ride them. But, um, they literally don't give a fuck if you're on them, 'cause you're so light to them. And then they make their way through the jungle. But it was pretty cool.

   26. JLJames Lindsay1:33

       That's nuts, man.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:34

       Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. It was, um... It's humbling, you know? But that's, that's the only way I'd wanna be around them other than in the wild. Like, I get, I get bummed out at zoos.

   28. JLJames Lindsay1:47

       I do, too. That's... I mean, that's my story, right? So I've been yelled at for that. That's like the story of 2020, is getting yelled at for everything. But I rode... When I was a kid, you could ride elephants at the zoo. And so, I don't know-

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:58

       People got mad at you for that? (laughs)

   30. JLJames Lindsay1:59

       'Cause I... I mean, I told the story one time and people, like, lost their minds on me, 'cause I guess it's not okay now. It was, like, cost a dollar, so they weren't rehabilitating elephants or doing anything good with it.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Right. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      yes, as well.

   2. JLJames Lindsay15:00

      Right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      But particularly if you're a woman and you were on steroids for 30 years and you get off them. That's what being a man is. It's not just being on steroids for 30 years and then transitioning to no steroids. It's also having the physical structure of a man. The differences in the hips, the shoulders-

   4. JLJames Lindsay15:15

      Right.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:15

      ... the size of the hands. There's a lot going on there.

   6. JLJames Lindsay15:18

      There's a lot going on there.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:19

      And this is an area of my own p-... I has- I have very few areas of expertise, but beating the fuck out of people is one of my areas of expertise.

   8. JLJames Lindsay15:28

      (laughs)

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:28

      I'm a professional commentator-

   10. JLJames Lindsay15:30

       Uh, that's right.

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:30

       ... on this. So when I see that... I mean, I used to teach martial arts for a living.

   12. JLJames Lindsay15:34

       Right.

   13. JRJoe Rogan15:34

       I understand it. I understand fighting more than I probably understand most things. You're crazy if you think there's not a difference between f- female and male bodies. I-

   14. JLJames Lindsay15:43

       I mean, the data are un- une- unequivocal about that.

   15. JRJoe Rogan15:47

       Yeah, but it was one of those things where I, like, I was like, "Okay, this is one of the rare places where I really..." If I go down on this one, like, this is not, this is not... You... I can't see trans women just dominating in women's MMA. It's crazy.

   16. JLJames Lindsay16:00

       No, I hear ya.

   17. JRJoe Rogan16:01

       I do not mind that they choose to fight trans women if they know in advance.

   18. JLJames Lindsay16:07

       Sure.

   19. JRJoe Rogan16:08

       The Fallon Fox issue was she had fought twice as a woman without letting anyone know-

   20. JLJames Lindsay16:13

       A: Yeah, that's not cool.

   21. JRJoe Rogan16:14

       ... that she used to be a man for 30 years. And I was like, "You're crazy. You can't just do that." If someone wants to fight a trans woman and they're cool with it, like... There's a woman who fought in the, uh, UFC, her name is Ashley Evans Smith, and she wound up actually beating Fallon Fox-

   22. JLJames Lindsay16:25

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw that.

   23. JRJoe Rogan16:26

       ... and made her way to the UFC. But she's just far more skillful.

   24. JLJames Lindsay16:29

       Very skillful, yeah, is all that.

   25. JRJoe Rogan16:29

       Yeah, but that's all that was.

   26. JLJames Lindsay16:31

       Right, right.

   27. JRJoe Rogan16:31

       She's a real UFC-caliber fighter. That's why she was able... Like, like if I had to choose between, like...

   28. JLJames Lindsay16:36

       Oh, yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan16:36

       Fallon Fox fought Amanda Nunes, who's like the greatest woman of all time, Amanda Nunes would kill her.

   30. JLJames Lindsay16:41

       Sure, yeah.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JLJames Lindsay30:00

      you know, back in... 2000, 3000 years ago, you know, some- something weird happened and then, you know, uh, people... one person tells another and another and another and then it's like, "And I swear, you know, an angel came down from the sky and touched him and he was healed and he could walk again." You know, and so it's like a miracle story, but mediated through partially informative video.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:20

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JLJames Lindsay30:20

      It's, it's almost like, you know, everybody's scared that deepfake is coming where they can basically put your face on whatever porn star or saying some horrible thing that you never said or whatever, but AI-

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:29

      Yeah. That's definitely coming, right?

   5. JLJames Lindsay30:30

      It's, it's... it is the precursor to that.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:32

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JLJames Lindsay30:33

      Because you can cut that clip just right-... and then all of a sudden, it means one thing, and if you cut it just another way, it means something exactly the opposite or totally different. And different groups that wanna push a narrative, which is, like, everybody, latches onto it and runs with it. And this, of course, causes crazy polarization.

   8. JRJoe Rogan30:51

      Yeah.

   9. JLJames Lindsay30:52

      Right? So that same clip I saw, I don't know that it would be a good example, but you know, you could take it as the riots and, you know, the... yeah, well, that black guy's sick of the riots, and so the right wing's all over it. Like, "Look at this guy," you know. And then, boom, this president's so divisive and now it's the left's story, and you cut it right there, and the next thing you know, it's President Obama, you know. And all of a sudden-

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:12

       It's history.

   11. JLJames Lindsay31:12

       ... it's switched si- it switches sides again.

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:14

       And it's-

   13. JLJames Lindsay31:14

       Right.

   14. JRJoe Rogan31:15

       ... it's also history.

   15. JLJames Lindsay31:15

       And it's also history.

   16. JRJoe Rogan31:16

       Yeah.

   17. JLJames Lindsay31:16

       And then even the thing I watched that was longer was four and a half minutes, and then the whole thing is like an hour.

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:22

       Oh, wow.

   19. JLJames Lindsay31:22

       So what really... w- was really the whole g- the pole- the guy's-

   20. JRJoe Rogan31:26

       Right.

   21. JLJames Lindsay31:26

       ... whole point? And so, um, we're getting away from being able to understand because, you know, our attention spans are so short. You live in Twitter, it's like you have the attention span of, like, a goldfish, man. You can't pay attention to anything. We're marinating in dopamine all the time. Brain doesn't work right. So you don't have time to, like, parse anything together. You see this thing, you're pissed off, you retweet, you know, snarky comment.

   22. JRJoe Rogan31:45

       Don't you think that also just the, the format of Twitter itself is just... I think it's detrimental to people's mental health.

   23. JLJames Lindsay31:53

       Big time.

   24. JRJoe Rogan31:54

       Communicating through these small little sentences-

   25. JLJames Lindsay31:58

       That's right.

   26. JRJoe Rogan31:59

       ... and, and little paragraphs of 280 words-

   27. JLJames Lindsay32:01

       That's right.

   28. JRJoe Rogan32:01

       ... or characters.

   29. JLJames Lindsay32:02

       Characters, yeah, yeah, so it's like 30 words.

   30. JRJoe Rogan32:04

       Yeah, yeah.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Hmm. …

   1. JLJames Lindsay45:00

      thing versus the easy thing? I mean, everybody who did... I mean, I, I majored in math. I'm gonna be my little elitist, you know, dorky thing here. Everybody who majored in something hard watched people bounce off of their hard major into the easier majors-

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:11

      Hmm.

   3. JLJames Lindsay45:12

      ... and, like, so they could still just get a degree. So you start... Like, they call this overproduction, a cultural overproduction or cultural elite overproduction. You start putting too many people into degree programs that, that they're not, you know, they're, they're not gonna graduate with an engineering degree. It's freaking hard. And so what they end up doing is they get these degrees in things that are easy. Well, complaining is easy. Tearing down is easy. Building up is hard. So there's this bias that's happened over the last 100 years in academia toward this easier thing, criticism, and away from the harder thing, which is understanding and developing, you know, fundamental research and so on. And i- it's basically taken over academia now. And that's how we... I think that's actually a lot of how we got here, is that the easy thing is the easy thing, and complaining is cheap.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:57

      Is there pushback against that idea? Or did... Is there any?

   5. JLJames Lindsay46:00

      Uh, uh, which part?

   6. JRJoe Rogan46:01

      A- about whether or not these people initially started in difficult studies and then moved their way into, like, these-

   7. JLJames Lindsay46:09

      So, yeah. So it's a-

   8. JRJoe Rogan46:09

      ... soft social...

   9. JLJames Lindsay46:10

      It sort of really... I mean, well, that just happens.

   10. JRJoe Rogan46:13

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JLJames Lindsay46:13

       I mean, my, my best friend in college was, you know, he was gonna be a mechanical engineer, and then calculus just took care of that. He was not going (laughs) to be a mechanical engineer anymore, 'cause he couldn't pass calculus. So that... I mean, but he did graduate college with another degree. So there is this kind of chopping down to easier degrees.

   12. JRJoe Rogan46:30

       Right.

   13. JLJames Lindsay46:31

       Um, but as far as, like, this anti-intellectualism trend that, that I was describing, this actually did... It, it, it was recognized along the way. So there's this... One of the guys in the Frankfurt School's name was Herbert Marcuse. This is the guy who laid out the idea of repressive tolerance, that you have to violently fight against ideas that might cause intolerance to rise up. He did that in 1965. What happened in 1967 and 1968? You know, riots, um, following his ideas exactly. And so Marcuse was on TV in, like, '77 right before he died. He died, I think, in the early 80s or late 70s. And he complained about his own movement that he started, that it had got completely anti-intellectual. They weren't doing the hard work.

   14. JRJoe Rogan47:12

       Hmm.

   15. JLJames Lindsay47:12

       They weren't doing the right stuff. They were just doing the easy stuff. And he actually complained on TV that this had happened, that there'd been a sliding away from the serious work and toward the easier complaining stuff. And so, yeah, I think that it's, it's historically justifiable that that's exactly what happened. And of course, you know, I was here before, and we talked about those fake papers that-

   16. JRJoe Rogan47:32

       Yes.

   17. JLJames Lindsay47:32

       ... Peter and Helen and I wrote.

   18. JRJoe Rogan47:33

       Let's tell everybody what those are just, just because-

   19. JLJames Lindsay47:35

       Okay. (laughs)

   20. JRJoe Rogan47:35

       ... it's an amazing source of enjoyment and entertainment for folks that are looking for something to read.

   21. JLJames Lindsay47:41

       Right. So, sp- so we don't lose the point, real quick, we did, in less than, like, 10 months, the almost equivalent of a whole academic career in this stuff, and we're amateurs. So it's easy.

   22. JRJoe Rogan47:52

       And you did it as a joke-

   23. JLJames Lindsay47:53

       As a joke.

   24. JRJoe Rogan47:54

       ... and it got passed off as real and then actually applauded.

   25. JLJames Lindsay47:57

       That's right. So we wrote, uh, 20 fake academic papers in these exact fields, critical race theory, gender studies-

   26. JRJoe Rogan48:03

       So we should tell... Uh, Peter Boghossian did it with you.

   27. JLJames Lindsay48:05

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan48:05

       And, uh-

   29. JLJames Lindsay48:06

       Helen Pluckrose.

   30. JRJoe Rogan48:06

       ... Helen, Helen. It's Pluckrose.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:06:12

   So you've put somebody…

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      is an explicit racial derogations."

   2. JLJames Lindsay1:00:04

      So you've put somebody down on purpose.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:06

      I know, but that's a weird way of describing it. "An explicit racial derogations," plural?

   4. JLJames Lindsay1:00:11

      Oh, yeah. Some-

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:12

      N-

   6. JLJames Lindsay1:00:13

      Who wrote that?

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:13

      ... versus singular.

   8. JLJames Lindsay1:00:14

      Yeah, that's not right.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:00:15

      And then-

   10. JLJames Lindsay1:00:15

       Yeah. They need an editor.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:00:17

       And then... Derogations, plural, characterized primarily by verbal or non-verbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, there's your hyphen, avoidant behavior or purposeful discriminatory, dot, actions, dot.

   12. JLJames Lindsay1:00:31

       (laughs) The, the grammar on that's broken all to pieces.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:00:33

       It's a mess.

   14. JLJames Lindsay1:00:34

       It is a mess.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:00:34

       And that's, uh, kzu.edu. Reason.kzu.edu.

   16. JLJames Lindsay1:00:39

       Nice. I mean, it's like all these-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:00:40

       They, they didn't even bother like editing that motherfucker. Look at that.

   18. JLJames Lindsay1:00:43

       (laughs) There's so many of these things that are like for education that are like this.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:00:46

       Ugh.

   20. JLJames Lindsay1:00:46

       And it's like the, uh, they say stuff like themself and it's just like-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:00:50

       Hmm.

   22. JLJames Lindsay1:00:51

       ... this is supposed to be for education and it's barely literate.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:00:53

       Right.

   24. JLJames Lindsay1:00:53

       What is going on?

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:00:54

       Well, that's a problem when you're using they and them as well, right?

   26. JLJames Lindsay1:00:56

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:00:56

       You start using they and them pronouns, which are really supposed to, I mean, f- for the most part indicate multiple people.

   28. JLJames Lindsay1:01:04

       Yeah, right.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:01:05

       Yeah.

   30. JLJames Lindsay1:01:05

       Right, yeah, the singular they-

Episode duration: 3:02:46