#1022 - Eric Weinstein

Hello, Joe.

Thanks for doing this, man. Jamie had a question. You're not related to that other fella? The other Weinstein fella that's in trouble right now?

Bret Weinstein?

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

Oh, weinstein, the other guy. Yeah, I don't know him.

Okay. That other guy's in trouble. Like two more women, Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow. They both came out today.

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

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 then the walls come down, the oppressive fist of just his fucking tyranny, whatever that guy did.

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

Well, that's been the cliche, right? The casting couch. Right?

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

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

Yeah, it seems like overcompensation.

I didn't want to bring this up right up. Right about the bat. We were going to talk about cuttlefish. I asked you to save the cuttlefish conversation about cuttlefish.

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, where.

So the males are incredibly large or.

The females are incredibly large.

Okay.

The females tend to be much smaller. And 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 sort of 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.

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

Well, 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. I'm 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. 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.

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

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. We can talk about Harvey Weinstein.

That's a good thing. Giant, giant cuttlefish, Weinstein versus Weinstein. That's the difference.

I'm definitely keeping that distinction.

Yeah, it's a good distinction. Now, right now, it's good to make a separation. So cephalopods, including cuttlefish, octopods, squids, nautilus, and then they all sort of came from mollux. Right.

This is the craziest thing in the world, right? I mean, we're not guaranteed to meet an alien intelligence during our lifetimes, but the idea that such genius exists in mollusks, where you least expect it, is probably the closest we're ever going to get to aliens. I think that there's a secret international conspiracy, people who have realized this and just freak out on cephalopods, and they know every crazy thing that cephalopods have been proven to understand and where their cognitive capabilities just sort of wow us. Yeah.

The cognitive capabilities, their camouflage capabilities, the strategies that they use for attacking bait fish. And there's a video that I put up on my twitter really recently of a cuttlefish that opens up like a flower and shoots its tongue out and gets this fish and then just sucks it into its body. And it's like you're looking at some kind of an alien.

It's totally, I mean, I forget it's like seven fold symmetry or it's really on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree. And I think that the dazzle patterns where you just start seeing these neon signs that are effectively made out of the chromatophores. And if you've seen the videos where people put them on against really artificial patterns like chessboards or chints or things, and the cuttlefish has to figure out, okay, how do I blend in with that?

Yeah. And they do their best to mock it, but the natural world, they mimic perfectly well.

Not really, I think, was it octopus can do it?

Some octopus can do it.

I think what happens is octopi. Yeah, I don't know that one. I guess it's octopi. But I think what they do is they actually sort of do much less than we are imagining. And they use the fact that our brains are interpolating. So they're in part not matching the background as well as we think. But they're doing it well enough that our brains sort of make up the difference.

That's weird. But what would be the difference between the way we interpret whatever camouflage they're giving off? Because it's a visual camouflage, right?

Yeah. If you look at some of the camouflage videos, like the first seven times you see it, you can't imagine.

Yeah.

But then after a while you say, oh, wow, there really is a difference. And somehow I did the interpolation to help out that which is trying to escape my detection.

Well, I mean, there's definitely a distinction. You can kind of tell once you look at it. But it's so insanely impressive in comparison to pretty much almost every other life form. What they can do in terms of, like, they could change their texture. That's one of the, like when they sit on a coral reef and they start looking like a coral reef, like, whoa.

Have you checked out the mimic octopus?

Yes.

Right, that one. Five or six different disguises.

Yeah.

I can't even imagine that. Usually when you have mimicry, it's dedicated or obligate, like a stick bug or a leaf insect. It's only going to do that one trick.

You know what's interesting, too, is I've heard a real legitimate argument for people that are opposed to eating animal protein. That mollusks, especially, like clams and mussels and things along those lines are more primitive in terms of their ability to recognize or have any sense of what pain is, any sort of communication, any sort of interpretation of danger, that all they do is just close. Right. And that in closing, we've interpreted that to be, it's an animal. And that this animal life form is like. It's like eating a living thing versus like eating plants. But I've heard it argued. Actually, Sam Harris is the first one to bring it up. This is actually a moral argument, that they sense less than plants do and that they're more primitive than plants are. But yet from the mollusks family, you have octopus, and there's a good argument that you probably shouldn't be eating octopus. Like, you shouldn't be eating. Like, an octopus is fucking smart. Like, crazy, sneaky smart.

It's them or us, Joe. Oh, that's a good way to look at it. In that case.

They are delicious.

Yeah. I think if you ever look at, you know, schooling and descending as one of the great nightmares of all time.

I don't think I've seen a Humboldt