In this episode, Dr. Heather Hying and Dr. Brett Weinstein discuss the decline of romance and romance in the modern world, and how we can find a way to recover some of the romance that was lost in the postmodernist era. They talk about what they believe is the root cause of this decline, and what we can do to make things better for romance and dating in the 21st century. This episode was produced and edited by Brett Weinstein. Additional audio mixing and mastering by Matthew Boll. Special thanks to Brett Weinstein for his contributions to this episode and to Heather for her contributions to the discussion. Our theme music is by my main amigo, Evan Handyside, and our ad music is from Fugue, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your stuff. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Why is romance dead? 4:30 - What is romance extinct? 5:15 - Why do we need romance? 6:20 - Why does romance exist? 7:40 - How can we get back romance back? 8:00 9:30 What are we all lost in a postmodern world? 11:00 | What is sex and dating? 12:30 | How do we learn to be more romantic? 13:20 14: What does romance mean to us? 15:15 | What do we have in a modern society? 16: What is the difference between men and women? 17: Should we learn about sex? 18:40 | What does it mean? 19: What do you want? 21:40 22:20 | How we can we learn from sex and gender? 20: What are you going to do with sex and relationships? 26:30 Can we have romance and sex and romance and what does it matter? 27:30 What is a good thing? 25: What should we do about sex and sex in modernity? 29:30 Is there a third way? ? 30:30 Are we all of sex and sexual identity? 35:00 Can we learn more about romance and sexual expression? 31:00 What does sex and sexuality? 32:00 Is sex better than a man and a woman?
00:00:54.000I taught for 14 years at Evergreen, and we spent a lot of time Dealing with students and trying to help them see how clarifying an evolutionary viewpoint is with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we function and how we interact and that was very Enjoyable to us and it was very empowering to students to discover that there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a person and we're now watching the conversation
00:01:25.000out in civilization about sex and gender devolve into an absurdity and on the one hand that's kind of frightening.
00:01:33.000I mean for us it's not directly an issue.
00:01:37.000We're happily married and so Well, we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days, and our kids are too young to be navigating it yet.
00:01:47.000Maybe this will all be clarified by the time they're involved in dating, but we also have a tremendous number of millennial friends, former students, who are trying to navigate this stuff and finding it difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that Frankly,
00:02:05.000there's a much better alternative if one can stand to think in evolutionary terms, if we can really look at ourselves as we are, as we came to be through evolutionary forces, then actually we can improve the landscape for romance and dating a great deal.
00:02:26.000But we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms that actually aren't right.
00:02:33.000What is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now?
00:02:38.000Well, I think we'd love to see a third way.
00:02:42.000So they're the pre-moderns, as it were, who have a very traditionalist conservative approach.
00:02:48.000Trying to get this sucker up close to you.
00:02:52.000The pre-moderns who have a very traditional conservative approach to gender roles, to sex, to relationship.
00:02:58.000And there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject a lot of that.
00:03:03.000And then there are the postmoderns who want to throw out everything, want to throw out everything that evolution handed us, and in the meantime, pretend that it didn't happen, right?
00:03:13.000Pretend that it's not even based on reality.
00:03:14.000And there's a third way, and maybe we need to call it modern as opposed to pre- or post-modern, but there's a third way to navigate what evolution has given us, what we can change, what we can't change, and how to actually recover some of...
00:03:31.000You know the sexiness and sex and the love and love and the romance and romance and you know understand that human beings are what we are from Not just a hundred years back, but a thousand and ten thousand a hundred million years back.
00:03:45.000We've had sex Since you both taught at a university level you you've been around these students and you've seen this sort of post-modernist movement Gain steam.
00:04:01.000Like, what is the reason why people are projecting this sort of distorted idea that there's no differences between men and women and that all the differences in the genders are all, it's all propaganda or cultural or...
00:04:15.000So I think it actually arises from a relatively simple cause, that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught.
00:04:26.000We detect there's something not right about the way civilization is structured.
00:04:30.000We can tell that there's nobody really at the helm.
00:04:34.000And you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that to them is incredibly glaring, something that just absolutely needs to be solved.
00:04:43.000And so what they do is they look at that issue and they say, what would we have to say in order for that issue to be fully addressed?
00:04:52.000And the problem is that we're dealing with a complex system.
00:04:55.000And if you optimize for any one solution, you cause a catastrophe across all of the other things that it's connected to.
00:05:03.000And if you're not focused on those unintended consequences, you tend not to understand why people are resistant to your solution.
00:05:11.000So, for example, let's deal with the transgender issue.
00:05:15.000For the transgender community, and I don't, you know, this is not a monolithic community.
00:05:20.000I actually know quite a number of people within it who have a heterodox position.
00:05:24.000But in general, there's a sense that it is disrespectful not to simply recognize anybody who has decided to transition as a full-fledged member of the sex to which they have moved.
00:05:40.000And if you are focused on the humanitarian side of the question, Maybe it even is right.
00:05:47.000But the problem is, if you say a person who identifies as a particular sex is that sex, suddenly you've actually caused a whole bunch of consequences that you weren't thinking of over in a biology class,
00:06:05.000I mean, is it true that somebody who says that they are female gets to go to a women's prison?
00:06:11.000Do we want to put Violent sex offenders in a women's prison because they declare themselves to be female.
00:06:19.000So not tracking the consequences that were not in your view when you decided on a particular solution is the reason that so many people have signed up for these really absurd notions.
00:06:33.000And part of what I hope we will get to today is that There is a principle at the core of understanding all complex adaptive systems, and it is diminishing returns.
00:06:46.000And diminishing returns sounds kind of arcane.
00:06:49.000It has too close an association with economics where it was first outlined.
00:06:54.000But the message of diminishing returns is that you can very often get 90% of a solution that you want and not disrupt other things unduly.
00:07:06.000But if you say, I want 100% of the solution to this problem, you'll cause a catastrophe.
00:07:11.000So getting people to realize, don't shoot for the utopia in which the problem you're talking about is 100% solved.
00:07:18.000If you can accept a 90% solution, then you can have a whole bunch of other things that you don't even realize you're using.
00:07:24.000In defense of people that would try to go for 100%, though, isn't it one of those things where, like, if you would negotiate, if you want $100, you ask for $150?
00:07:36.000Unfortunately, I mean, I think you're identifying something correct, that in part, the positions that we hear being deployed are not an honest reflection of the beliefs of many of the people who are espousing them.
00:07:57.000Biology is what it is and then we can talk about which parts of it are amenable to being changed.
00:08:02.000And as Heather pointed out, we're not advocating for a return to some traditional way of interacting between the sexes.
00:08:10.000We're advocating for an enlightened way that takes advantage of the freedoms we have that our ancestors didn't and Tries to navigate the hazards that we're stuck with.
00:08:35.000But if you're going to require that we lie about what's true biologically in order to navigate to a solution, I guarantee you it will be unstable in the end.
00:08:43.000Yeah, the zeitgeist has begun to include such nonsense as chromosomes exist on a continuum.
00:08:50.000You know, there are X chromosomes and there are Y chromosomes.
00:09:02.000I think what they intended to do was carve out freedom from a biological truth.
00:09:07.000And so if you say chromosomes are on a continuum, then it's very hard to disagree with that because it doesn't mean anything that we can unpack.
00:09:14.000Well, I would say it's actually really easy to disagree with it and say no.
00:09:17.000You know, gametes aren't on a continuum.
00:10:02.000For your first two sentences there, it sounded like there was a giant crayfish descending on europe it was a female and she's mad she's tired all these lobster dinners and that's going to work for a while right and like asexuality has actually evolved in a few lineages a few vertebrate lineages there's some lizards that are asexual and it's all females and it goes great until the environment changes because if you're cloning yourself you your children are going to experience exactly
00:10:32.000are going to be exactly the same thing that you were so If you were a good fit for your environment, the next environment better be the same or else your kids aren't going to be a good fit.
00:10:40.000So my feeling is that crayfish, I haven't followed the story a lot, but that crayfish is going to do terrifically moving into exactly the landscapes that it first mutated into existence in.
00:10:51.000And if you change the landscape a bit, it's going to stop doing so well.
00:10:54.000I think they just farm it for food if it's tasty.
00:10:57.000We don't have to worry about them breeding.
00:11:08.000Heather and I were talking before the podcast started about, I think, a very important point when it comes to a lot of these either progressive or right-wing issues is that people tend to be extremely tribal and what they're really concerned with is winning.
00:11:23.000It becomes a competition of us versus them.
00:11:26.000It becomes our side versus their side and they tend to exploit weaknesses and then attack to score points and all ideas of being honest intellectually or looking at things objectively kind of go out the window.
00:11:42.000You ignore facts that diminish your position or your team's position and highlight things even if they're not real that would diminish the other side's position.
00:11:53.000This is a real problem that humans have with arguments, with being tribal, with being on different sides.
00:12:01.000We see it with people, where when there's a certain time when you see people arguing, there's a certain point where the argument has deteriorated to a competition.
00:12:11.000And it's no longer about what you're actually discussing.
00:13:06.000With respect to values that we all share or something like that.
00:13:09.000So what you're describing is a very common state.
00:13:13.000It is a lower, less capable state than a good faith environment where people who may disagree intensely agree on the basic rules and the desirability of figuring out what's true.
00:13:26.000What we can do here is try to point to where the good faith conversation can get to that the bad faith conversation is incapable of getting to.
00:13:41.000And it's really something that I would hope more people would adopt going into the future.
00:13:46.000Stop connecting yourself to these ideas and just let these ideas exist on their own and examine them objectively and rely on science.
00:13:56.000Rely on actual science to formulate your, when you're talking about biological issues.
00:14:02.000When I say science is the answer to this, it's not necessarily that we should accept, no one should accept the findings of science just at face value, but a scientific approach is, I've got this idea.
00:14:15.000What would have to be true if that were true?
00:14:18.000And how can I possibly prove it wrong?
00:14:20.000And you work harder and harder and harder to prove it wrong.
00:14:23.000And if you can't, then you have greater and greater and greater confidence that maybe it's right.
00:14:27.000And so this is what we don't see in bad faith arguments, is no one is trying to prove themselves wrong.
00:14:33.000And that sounds backwards the first time you hear it, but...
00:14:37.000If you try to actually demonstrate that your own cherished beliefs are wrong and you can't do it, you have pretty good confidence at the end of that, and there is no actual end, but the longer you've gone, you have pretty good confidence that actually, I'm probably seeing something real here.
00:14:51.000I've asked myself, I've asked my friends, I've asked my enemies, is this thing right?
00:14:55.000And you know, in an actual formal scientific setting, you do an experiment, you run the data, you do the analysis, but Is it right or is it not?
00:15:04.000Let's see if I can prove it's not, even though I really think it is.
00:15:16.000Which is, if you've tried to take your cherished idea, some hypothesis that you've come up with, and you've tried 16 different ways to show that it's wrong, and you keep failing, Well, every one of those things you did to see whether what you thought was true is actually false now prepares you when somebody now challenges you and they say,
00:15:38.000You've been through it 16 different ways and that gives you the ability to navigate almost anything that's thrown at you because you have taken on the role of being your own harshest critic in order to make sure that what's left at the end of that process is really robust.
00:15:55.000The other thing that I want to insert here is that I think, A, I don't want to be put in the position of defending everything that's been published in the scientific literature as true because it looks like science.
00:16:09.000A lot of what's published in the scientific literature is not valid.
00:16:13.000The methodology does not establish what people claim it does.
00:16:15.000And that's a big hazard for people like Heather and myself because you have to sort the wheat from the chaff in order to figure out what to defend and what to be agnostic about.
00:16:25.000But I do think those of us who more or less get the story of what, let's say, human sexuality is about at a scientific level, and there's still a lot of mystery, but there's an awful lot that those of us who have studied it are in agreement about, and civilization is not yet on the same page with those of us who have looked at it scientifically.
00:16:45.000One thing we have failed to do, I think, is to articulate what you will get in exchange for signing up for a scientific worldview on this topic.
00:16:57.000People do not realize that a scientific worldview is actually the thing that empowers you to navigate your own love life in an intelligent way.
00:17:09.000It's a lot more fun than it sounds when you say it that way.
00:17:11.000Yeah, it's, well, you know, there are all of these famous arguments about unweaving the rainbow or, you know, somebody challenged Feynman that he was the kind of guy who would take apart a flower and destroy its beauty in order to figure out how it worked.
00:17:33.000You will waste less of your time on people that you shouldn't be interested in if you understand what game they're playing, even if they don't understand it.
00:17:41.000Where do you think that argument is coming from?
00:17:43.000The argument that science would disturb beauty?
00:17:45.000Well, I think there's a way in which the...
00:17:49.000I hate to borrow a chemical analogy here, but there's something called the activation energy of a chemical reaction, which is the energy necessary to get it to happen.
00:17:59.000And the activation energy for understanding Your own self, your sexual self even, as a product of evolution that is wired in a particular way for particular objectives that may or not be relevant to your conscious person's objective,
00:18:23.000But you know, if we were teaching a class, it might take Three or four weeks full-time with one set of students before people who had walked through the door not thinking in those terms at all about their own love life could begin to spot how this actually maps onto what they have experienced and what it suggests they might.
00:19:01.000It's not like, you know, an aphorism that you can adopt and suddenly your life functions.
00:19:08.000What it begins to do as people start to realize the power of an evolutionary take on sex and gender or whatever it is we're talking about is it opens up doors to inquiry and it makes it allows people to make sense of their lives and then it becomes more beautiful and more powerful and once people have seen how you can use these evolutionary tools and and the knowledge that evolution the study of evolution has given us like Male and female are universals.
00:19:36.000Like, male and female have existed for over 100 million years.
00:19:40.000And everywhere it shows up, it looks really similar.
00:19:44.000And yes, there are exceptions all over the place.
00:19:47.000There's amazing ways that, you know, like this crayfish, that you have, you know, a sexually reproducing ancestor that's gone asexual, or you have sexual reversal in some species.
00:19:57.000You have hyenas, which have a very strange system going on.
00:20:00.000Lots and lots of these exceptions, but the truth underlying them is always the same.
00:22:00.000So they do the pseudocopulation, and whether they're playing the female role or the male role in the pseudocopulation depends on their status in the ovulatory cycle.
00:22:09.000But the kicker is, and you know, Heather and I were actually teaching from this and trying to figure out how the system could possibly be stable long term, and what we predicted actually was that they had to be borrowing genetic variation periodically,
00:23:05.000Oh, the aphids are sexual once a season, right?
00:23:09.000So they're asexual within the season and at the end of the season they breed sexually.
00:23:13.000And so the point is all of these exceptions Are exceptions that prove the rule.
00:23:18.000The universality of sex in complex animals is broken in certain cases, but each case that it's broken has a way of recovering the value of sex.
00:23:53.000It's very rare in vertebrates at all, and where it does happen, it tends to be lizards, and it's still pretty rare as far as we know, but really, you know, for the most part, it would only be in zoos that we would know for the most part.
00:24:03.000But the hypothesis is that this is an adaptation for, and these are big swimming lizards that are living on these islands, they're relatively close together, they can swim between these islands, that having arrived at an island where there's none else that looks like you,
00:24:23.000It probably makes sense to clone yourself at that point.
00:24:25.000And actually, I think they're not clonal, they're parthenogenetic, but it doesn't matter.
00:24:29.000If it requires two individuals to make that swim successfully in order to populate a new island, the chances are much lower than if it just takes one.
00:24:38.000And so you can get sex switched on and off, even in Komodo dragons.
00:24:46.000Think about how many times one of these animals must have crossed one of these water barriers and been alone, and where it had an island that it was perfectly ecologically capable of exploiting, it had no way of making offspring, right?
00:25:00.000That's a terrible price to pay in Darwinian terms if the solution is, well, let's suspend the requirement of sex for a generation, produce some offspring, and then we can reinstate it.
00:25:12.000More than likely, this happens a lot more than we think.
00:25:15.000And because we assume that sex is the explanation for vertebrates when we see them, when we encounter them in the wild, we don't think, is this individual the result of a clonal event?
00:25:24.000Or is this individual the result of sex?
00:25:27.000And it's only when somebody puts them in a zoo in isolation that we can be 100% certain there is no way this animal got fertilized by another animal.
00:25:38.000And that's when we start asking the question.
00:25:39.000But now that we've started to spot these things, we're going to see them more and more frequently because so many animals over evolutionary history have been caught in a situation that was paradise except for the fact that there wasn't a second one.
00:25:52.000That is incredibly fascinating, though, that they can just switch on and off like that.
00:25:57.000Well, and if you think about it, I mean, monitor lizards are interesting because they are the...
00:26:05.000People say they are the most mammal-like of lizards.
00:26:09.000Yeah, people report, people who work on monitor lizards say you can look into their eyes, and it's a little bit like looking into a dog's eyes.
00:26:14.000They've been paying attention too much to lizards.
00:26:50.000So it's impossible to say whether any lizards, including monitors, have something like loneliness.
00:26:57.000Although in other cases, when we look at elephants, we see clear evidence of grief.
00:27:03.000And we know that elephants didn't get grief from a shared ancestor with us that had grief.
00:27:07.000They separately evolved grief because they're So it's not impossible that loneliness might not feel exactly the same to a monitor lizard, but if it had a value to detect how lonely you were and then to trigger a physiological response that kick-started the ability to be evolutionarily successful,
00:27:58.000Something like, I mean, you know, there would be some cascade, but yeah, there'd be some perception that I haven't seen another one like me in a very long time, and then it would cause some sort of a shift in behavior.
00:28:08.000Maybe it would cause searching behavior, and searching wouldn't net any evidence.
00:28:13.000You know, you don't necessarily have to see another individual to know that they're around.
00:28:17.000But anyway, there'd be some cascade of things, and then maybe some neurotransmitter would trigger the release of a hormone that would cause...
00:28:26.000But it would clearly be limited to females.
00:28:47.000But they have all the cytoplasm and sperm really fast, but doesn't have any of the material necessary to make a cell.
00:28:54.000A sperm can't mature into a zygote, unfertilized, because it doesn't have mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum and all the other stuff of a cell.
00:29:01.000So they're doing different things, just like male and female are different strategies, egg and sperm are different strategies.
00:29:06.000But there are certain animals, certain things that can switch sexes.
00:29:21.000Are there land creatures that do that?
00:29:24.000There's one frog where there's a little bit of evidence, but it seems it may be an artifact of a zoo setting, effectively, which might mean that it can happen in the wild and we just haven't seen it, but it's well known in reef fish.
00:29:35.000There are a lot of species of reef fish, and it goes both ways.
00:29:40.000It's called sequential hermaphroditism, where in some species everyone's born female, and then some transition into males.
00:29:48.000And in some it's the other way around.
00:30:00.000And if you are the most dominant female in a landscape and the male just died, it makes sense to turn into a male so that you can now fertilize all those females.
00:30:11.000So that's the sequential, you know, where one individual will transition between sexes.
00:30:17.000But there are also cases like turtles, where there's no chromosomal sex determination, and the sex is effectively chosen by the environmental conditions, by temperature in the nest.
00:30:30.000And so one individual lives its entire life within a sex, but that sex was not dictated when the egg was laid.
00:30:35.000It was dictated by the environment the egg created.
00:30:39.000Isn't that the case with crocodiles as well?
00:30:41.000Crocodiles and in fact most every vertebrate that we know except for mammals and birds.
00:30:46.000And in mammals and birds it's a different evolution of genetic sex determination.
00:30:49.000So most lizards, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, turtles, teleost fish have some kind of environmental sex determination.
00:30:58.000And actually, as long as we're going down this road, I promise you there's some place cool to go with humans here.
00:31:20.000Yeah, there are only three species left on Earth.
00:31:22.000That's a remnant of an early branch on the mammal tree.
00:31:25.000But in most mammals, like us, we have chromosomal sex determination, and males are XY, and females are XX. In birds, the situation is exactly reversed, as it is in butterflies.
00:31:41.000So what that tells you is that to the extent that...
00:31:43.000So by reversed, what brett means is, and we just use different letters just so as not to be confused, Males are so-called homogametic, or WW, whereas in mammals, females are homogametic, XX, and in birds, males are homogametic, WW, and females are WZ,
00:31:58.000which means that female birds can't clone themselves as the way that, say, a Komodo dragon could.
00:32:06.000But the reason I raise it is because we have a sense of male and female that, I think it's just wrong, that male and female are actually akin to a niche, that these are roles that the universe discovers periodically because they make sense,
00:34:51.000This is one flower that does not agree with itself about how enthusiastic to be about sex with strangers.
00:34:57.000Well, you can predict this just on the numbers too, right?
00:34:59.000It's going to produce I don't know what orders of magnitude more pollen than it has ovules to be fertilized.
00:35:07.000So it's only got a few chances at picking the right pollen to be fertilized but the pollen can be broadcast and go anywhere and if it's successful and it's not that successful it's still okay.
00:35:18.000So the payoff for putting up with talking about plants here is that you realize there's something in the universe that even when it's building a plant which is really not like an animal Even when it's building a plant and we look at it and we say, ah, these are the boy parts and those are the girl parts.
00:35:35.000They actually have some analogy to males and females amongst animals where we can spot the behavior easily and that that is mind-blowing because, you correct me if I'm wrong here, but the common ancestor between these plants,
00:35:52.000these land plants that have pollen and ovules like this, And animals that have eggs and sperm.
00:36:00.000The common ancestor is a single-celled photosynthetic ocean creature.
00:36:15.000So what that means is that two totally different clades that are built around totally different rules.
00:36:21.000At the point they get around to spitting out something that looks like two sexes, It recovers some of the things that we as human beings are familiar with from Shakespeare, right?
00:36:32.000The point about male and female is so general that it even covers plants.
00:37:06.000So that's very powerful when we're reaching into biology and we're saying male and female are patterns of behavior that tend to be associated with certain types of gametes.
00:37:18.000When you have two gamete types, something called anisogamy, you will have two sexes.
00:37:23.000And those sexes will follow rules that we see over and over and over again, repeated.
00:37:30.000One of the things that we discussed in the green room before the show started was that what we are is some weird animal that can communicate in very, very complex ways.
00:37:40.000And one of the things that we do when we can communicate in such complex ways is explain all these things that we've learned about science.
00:37:48.000But another thing that we do is we distort reality to fit what we would desire it to be rather than what it is.
00:37:55.000How much of that is what's going on today?
00:38:01.000And unpacking that, learning not to impose your expectations on nature is key to understanding it.
00:38:12.000And it really is a skill you have to learn.
00:38:15.000And that way, when nature does tell you something about what males and females are like, and you know that you're not talking about something that you've learned by being human, you're talking about something you've learned by looking at other creatures, Then there's a lot of power in understanding what those patterns are,
00:38:32.000especially when you get to humans, because of all the creatures, I think this is fair to say, of all the creatures that I've spent any time thinking about, humans are maybe sexually the weirdest.
00:40:14.000Four to five thousand species of these things.
00:40:17.000Human beings are the only one of those mammal species in which breasts remain enlarged when not lactating.
00:40:28.000I find that fact absolutely remarkable.
00:40:30.000You have four to five thousand species of lactating animals and in human beings breasts have been made persistent when not lactating and in sexual interactions they've obviously become a signal and we know more or less what they are a signal of.
00:40:51.000They are a signal of Having the resources to produce a baby, which doesn't register with us as important as it should.
00:41:03.000It's much more important to our ancestors.
00:41:06.000It was a vital characteristic because most of the time, females were either pregnant, they were feeding a baby and therefore not fertile.
00:41:15.000They were starving and therefore not fertile.
00:41:19.000And so a fertile female who is essentially advertising that she has the resources to produce a viable offspring is a rare commodity.
00:41:31.000I mean, I hate to talk in those terms.
00:41:54.000So one of the other things that is unique about humans, at least with regard to our most recent ancestors, the other primates, is that we have concealed ovulation.
00:42:04.000So you can't tell when a woman is fertile.
00:42:08.000Whereas you can tell when a baboon is fertile, or a vervet monkey, or a chimp.
00:42:12.000You've got sexual swellings and other indicators of fertility.
00:42:18.000Because if they determine which female plays the stimulation role in the ovulation cycle...
00:42:25.000It's probably going to be chemical, so some kind of smell, pheromone, scent thing.
00:42:29.000So you see reptiles putting out their tongue.
00:42:35.000What they're doing is they're picking up large molecules that don't volatilize, and then they are touching an organ that they have that's connected to their brains to detect a kind of chemical signal That weirdly enough, I don't know how true this story is going to end up being.
00:42:50.000Probably true, but I have a little trepidation about it.
00:42:53.000There's an organ that detects these large molecules, the vomeronasal organ, and it's like having another sense of smell that we just don't, we can't intuit what it would be like because we don't have it.
00:43:05.000But we actually do have remnants of the organ, it's just not plugged in.
00:43:09.000Yeah, the story is humans have it, but it's not connected up.
00:43:14.000How not connected up it is is something that we're not totally confident of.
00:43:17.000I won't be surprised if it turns out to be important in some way we didn't know, the way tonsils or the appendix have turned out to have values that we should have guessed.
00:43:25.000But but so humans have these you know persistent constant sexual signals in the form of breasts among other things and then also have obscured when we are and are not fertile and so more than any other primates humans have basically constant sexual availability constant sexual interest and yes they're ebbs and flows and such but but female humans more than female chimps or baboons or any other primates are interested in sex more reliably across their ovulatory cycle than than any
00:44:31.000Some women claim to be able to, and there may be some self-knowledge possible there.
00:44:35.000Some people also claim to be able to pick lottery tickets.
00:44:38.000I can pick them, just not winning ones.
00:44:41.000I'm not prepared to say that that never happens.
00:44:44.000Right, but the interesting fact is that this...
00:44:49.000When a woman is fertile, it does not have to be obscure to the woman at all.
00:44:53.000Evolution appears to have taken that piece of information away.
00:44:56.000A baboon would know when it was fertile and it would alter its behavior.
00:45:00.000But so would all the baboon boys know when she was fertile.
00:45:03.000Do you think that's because over time people have discerned, I mean over the course of evolution, people have discerned that having a child also is partially a burden and so maybe more intelligent creatures as humans got more and more intelligent this seems like a little inconvenient to have a child whereas a baboon would not think that way and not contemplate the future so there was some sort of evolutionary advantage for it to be concealed
00:45:33.000in humans and for outright displays of sexuality to be prominent Throughout their entire life?
00:45:40.000I suspect the answer is a whole lot more horrible than that.
00:46:38.000But it is interesting, arriving at the present, we have modern women and we can say it is interesting that evolution has robbed women themselves of a piece of information That one would initially think would be so valuable that it would be prominent.
00:46:54.000For it to be obscure at all is fascinating.
00:46:58.000So the other thing that Heather mentioned, which I think belongs front and center in this conversation, is Having sex for pleasure rather than reproductive purposes.
00:47:10.000And we're not the only ones to do that.
00:48:08.000I believe orcas also have that pattern.
00:48:11.000But anyway, all of these things are so different about humans and they have so much to do with sex that having a mind-numbing conversation about sexual signals in modern times is actually just kind of painful to listen to it because you want all of these pieces of information on the table so that at the point we get to the discussion about what do we do about modernity that we are not,
00:49:37.000This I think actually is a window into much that is wrong with what we think about human sexuality.
00:49:45.000I think most people, if you ask them, without doing that little experiment, to conjure or to define what it is for somebody to be hot, you would get answers and people would tell you that hot was sort of like the height of beauty,
00:50:12.000The discovery that beauty actually is a different parameter tells a whole different story about what's going on with us people, with men and with women.
00:50:24.000And I think both men and women are confused by this.
00:50:28.000So, if it is true, and I mean I know it is true, I can look inside my own mind and I can say that at least for some men it is true that beauty and hotness are almost uncorrelated.
00:50:38.000There are people who have both traits, but I have no trouble seeing that image of a woman who is hot but not the least bit beautiful.
00:50:47.000And I know lots of women who are beautiful and not hot.
00:50:51.000And I also, if I take the category of women who are beautiful but not hot, There are a lot of older women in it.
00:51:01.000I know women in their 60s and 70s who have poise, have aged gracefully.
00:51:54.000Because males are males, they have I want to say they have two reproductive strategies.
00:52:01.000Really, they have three reproductive strategies, and one of them is so awful that it's really just unpleasant to even enter it into the discussion.
00:52:12.000So the first reproductive strategy that men have, the one that would generally have succeeded, and by the way, we can talk about monogamy versus polyamory and all of that at some point, but I'm not saying anything that is inherent.
00:52:41.000Because human babies are so needy that one person trying to raise them on their own is hobbled by just the sheer difficulty of trying to manage an infant and a toddler while trying to accomplish the other things of being a person.
00:52:56.000So let me just add here that the idea that monogamy has been ubiquitous throughout human history is not completely accepted, but that there is good evidence for it on a lot of fronts.
00:53:06.000And one of the points against it is that we remain somewhat sexually dimorphic, that men are on average a bit taller, much more muscular, but that we are so much less sexually dimorphic than even our ancestors,
00:53:22.000you know, I think you said something that was unclear at the beginning.
00:53:35.000There has been a lot of polygyny where one male has multiple females in human history.
00:53:41.000Probably the majority of human cultures have been polygynous.
00:54:36.000But, a male who is investing in their offspring, should they happen on an opportunity in which a female who is fertile and capable of producing an offspring does not require commitment from them in order to have sex, that's an evolutionary bargain.
00:54:52.000A male who can either convince a female or finds a female who's willing to produce a baby but not expect any support in return, that's such a power, it's like winning the lottery evolutionarily.
00:55:03.000So it would have almost never happened in history because women, because babies are so expensive, are wired to avoid this like the plague.
00:55:11.000You don't want to get stuck raising a baby on your own if you could through Males, in general,
00:55:27.000have succeeded reproductively by investing in their offspring and their offspring's mothers.
00:55:34.000When they have the opportunity to produce offspring with no commitment, they have a hard time resisting that opportunity because it's such an evolutionary win.
00:55:43.000But that doesn't mean it would have been very common in history because females would avoid it.
00:55:47.000So can't look away from hot is about that second strategy.
00:55:52.000So hot is this channel that men They are wired in such a way that they actually, we've been robbed of every useful term, they are triggered by the sight of a woman who is broadcasting hotness,
00:56:16.000The thing that I think is most important about this is we now live in a culture where we have advertisers essentially creating a kind of insecurity because insecurity causes people to spend money they otherwise wouldn't.
00:56:30.000That insecurity has women trying to capture male attention by broadcasting hotness, which of course works because men have a hard time ignoring hotness.
00:56:40.000But what I think women often don't understand is that Getting a man's attention by broadcasting hotness has him in the frame of mind of the second reproductive strategy and it is actually counterproductive to getting his attention for the first reproductive strategy because men have historically...
00:57:02.000This is, by the way, this is where I'm going to get in huge trouble with people because this is going to sound like an accusation.
00:57:07.000Really, I'm just trying to describe what has been and then we can talk about what we should do about it.
00:57:14.000A woman who values herself highly in reproductive terms will not leap on a sexual opportunity just because it's available, because what's at stake is so great historically for women.
00:57:29.000This is not true anymore because of birth control, but historically it would be true that a sexual interaction is basically baby roulette, and baby roulette is a dangerous game to play.
00:57:42.000And so we get at some of what's true underneath the stereotype of the Madonna whore dichotomy.
00:57:51.000That neither of those words is quite right because no one wants a Madonna, no one wants a virgin as a life partner.
00:57:58.000You want to have a vibrant sexual relationship with your life partner, but the, are you triggering the hotness, can I get a baby out of you and never see it, strategy in men?
00:58:12.000Or are you triggering the, oh my god, you're gorgeous and I feel like we could do this together?
00:58:18.000I hate to interrupt you, but you gotta pull this thing close to you.
00:58:47.000But men are interested in both of these reproductive strategies, but they are not interested.
00:58:54.000They are not paradoxically searching for them in the same individual.
00:58:58.000Well, isn't there an issue also that today, human beings, males in particular, are not looking at women purely in terms of someone to reproduce with.
00:59:08.000They're looking in terms of what is sexually pleasurable.
00:59:38.000I mean, there are not very reliable forms of birth control in lots of cultures around the world, but actually fully reliable birth control is decades old.
00:59:48.000So we shouldn't expect the stories we tell ourselves about what we're looking for to be a match for what we're actually looking for yet.
00:59:55.000Because we haven't had time to update our software even.
00:59:59.000Right, so the software is still wired the same way to look at a woman who you believe would be a good carrier of babies, someone who would be very maternal, someone who's attractive,
01:00:15.000they have good features, this would be someone who you'd want to breed with, whereas the second option would be someone who you could sneak it in on.
01:00:23.000Well, I would say with regard to the first strategy, it's more than that.
01:00:27.000So that the first strategy, as you just described it, sounds very traditional female role, right?
01:00:33.000And mostly, especially when populations were moving across frontiers and actually like expanding the scope of where humans were, what you needed in a partner, both male and female, was someone with whom you could share all of life's challenges.
01:00:47.000It wasn't just about taking care of baby, because dad was also doing parental care, but mothers and fathers were in it together.
01:01:05.000Some tasks end up highly gendered across cultures, but which gender does it is different.
01:01:10.000Like weaving turns out to be a pretty highly gendered task in different cultures, but sometimes it's only women who do it, and sometimes it's only men.
01:01:17.000And, you know, there are some things that really only men do in most cultures.
01:01:22.000And this is a great review, an anthropology paper from the early 70s.
01:01:26.000So this is mostly pre-industrial cultures they're looking at.
01:01:29.000But the jobs that, across cultures where it happens, only men do include the hunting of large marine mammals and iron smelting.
01:01:53.000You keep quenching the thing by accident.
01:01:57.000Yeah, so I think the answer to the question you asked is that the whole system has been hijacked by the novelty of our current circumstances.
01:02:09.000And what I was trying to get at before is that the...
01:02:15.000The size of the win of an ancestral male who reproduced with a female that didn't require investment from them.
01:02:22.000The size of that win is so great that it causes men to default to thinking about that when it appears to be available.
01:02:31.000And so in a world where there's birth control and therefore the stakes for women for having sex have been greatly reduced and therefore more women are interested in having sex without commitment, The problem is men don't really know what they're looking for because there is this level of triggering that they cannot overcome.
01:02:54.000And so the other point I want to make on this front is, yes, men are interested in sexual pleasure, as are women.
01:03:02.000Men and women are overlapping, but distinct in what that means.
01:03:07.000But I think if we were to say, hey, sexual pleasure is awesome, and you should live your life so as to maybe not maximize it, but come close to maximizing it, that sexual pleasure is so desirable that you should live your life in a way that you get as much of that thing as you can.
01:03:28.000That would not necessarily say that the way to do it was to go around banging strangers, right?
01:03:33.000Because this is a multifaceted phenomenon.
01:03:38.000And there is one thing that gets left out of this discussion almost every time I hear people talk about it, which is that the sex that one has when the stakes are really high, right?
01:03:51.000When you're really into somebody, that's...
01:03:55.000That's a very pleasurable kind of sex that is not reproduced by low-stakes situation.
01:04:00.000And so we are comparing things, and it sounds like, well, if sexual pleasure is what you're after, then more sex is certainly the way to get there.
01:04:35.000I mean, college students, you know, tell you anything for 50 bucks.
01:04:39.000So there are lots of these studies that do involve asking a lot of college students, which is not a very broad sample.
01:04:45.000But again, this is a fairly new phenomenon in the last five, six decades where you could do it and not worry about reproducing.
01:04:52.000Well, so the question really is, if we step back from our own lives and we say, what would the rules be?
01:05:01.000If I wanted to maximize this set of things, if I wanted to get these values out of my life, how would I alter my behavior?
01:05:11.000I don't think you would come up with, hey, sex with strangers is the answer to all of this.
01:05:17.000In fact, I think sex with strangers is, it's pretty low grade in terms of what it delivers.
01:05:26.000So there are some cultures that encourage a lot of early fooling around between individuals and it's considered low stakes and it stops at some point and that's one thing that what's going on in modern American culture is there's no end point.
01:05:45.000It's just considered a good that more sex with more strangers is inherently going to result in more pleasure and therefore if we're actually interested in sexual pleasure that's what we should be doing.
01:05:55.000And if you look at cultures that have taken sexual pleasure seriously, if you look at like tantric sex, right?
01:06:05.000It's about cultivating a sexual relationship that increases sexual pleasure to an extreme height that you won't reach if you aren't careful in architecting it.
01:06:16.000So in other words, it's about delayed gratification.
01:06:18.000I mean, really, that's the missing idea here is that delayed gratification is actually a strong Contributor to sexual pleasure.
01:06:26.000Isn't this sex with strangers thing attractive because it's difficult to accomplish?
01:06:48.000And it's because it's imagined that symmetry is equality.
01:06:55.000I think that's maybe one of the main things we're pushing back against here, is that we are not making the claim that one sex is better than the other, but the idea that we are identical is absurd on its face.
01:07:06.000Well, in our culture today, one of the things that is a big standout as being very novel is social media.
01:08:27.000There is what I would call a two-way failure of empathy.
01:08:31.000So if you'll give me a little leash here.
01:08:35.000We empathize with another individual by using our own minds and whatever it is that we have as the content of our minds and then we run the data of somebody else's situation through our minds and we say, how would I feel in that situation?
01:08:50.000And in general, this works really well if you share circuitry with somebody.
01:08:55.000And it works not so well where your circuitry is different.
01:08:58.000So there are lots of places where males and females who grew up...
01:09:03.000Heather and I both grew up in LA. There's a certain amount of stuff that we can intuit about what the other would think about something just based on the fact that we grew up in the same period in the same place.
01:09:14.000But males and females, there's a place where we top out and we can't understand what the other is experiencing because it is very unlike what we would experience.
01:09:26.000So, for example, if you were walking down the street, let's say before you were a well-known guy, you're an anonymous guy walking down the street and imagine that there's a group of women talking somewhere and you walk by and they're like...
01:10:05.000Right, but it's very different with the opposite sex because there's no threat.
01:10:10.000It's very different with the opposite sex, not only because...
01:10:13.000Let's neutralize the threat part of it.
01:10:15.000Which is, I mean, it's huge, for sure, but there's other stuff going on, too.
01:10:19.000But here's the part that I think men don't intuit until somebody points it out to them.
01:10:24.000Because men have two different reproductive strategies, and one of them is about long-term investment, and the other one is about have sex with them, impregnate them, and never see them again.
01:10:35.000When a man whistles at a woman, right, and he compliments essentially how hot she looks, he is essentially offering to stick her with a child that will then be her responsibility for the better part of two decades.
01:10:52.000That's not a very nice compliment, right?
01:10:55.000Well, that's a weird way of looking at it.
01:11:32.000Yes, it's a total objectification and it renders the woman involved who was receiving this thing as almost a non-entity, but it feels totally personal and yet it's not necessarily about the woman.
01:11:43.000And so, you know, all the discussion of, oh my god, these catcalls are awful, and it's a pain in the ass to walk down the street and have to deal with it for a young woman.
01:11:52.000It's true, but it's also ignoring the fact of it being communication between men.
01:12:05.000That type of communication, though, only occurs if you've been raised poorly, you don't have any sisters, or you don't have any daughters.
01:12:14.000And if you have all those things, you're some kind of a monster.
01:12:19.000Like, if you have a mother that you love, and a sister that you love, and if you have daughters, and you still catcall at some woman walking down the street, there's something really wrong with you.
01:12:48.000I mean, this is interesting because I think this is something actually Heather probably won't intuit either, but I'm wondering if you'll spot it when I mention it.
01:12:57.000Which is, there is a part of being a male that because...
01:13:03.000I mean, the thing is, most males in history are losers who didn't reproduce, right?
01:13:09.000Reproduction was not that easy to accomplish in human history.
01:13:12.000It was way easier to starve or die on a battlefield or a lot of other things.
01:13:21.000There is a way in which there's a part of the male psyche that plays very remote possibilities, right?
01:13:31.000And, you know, it's weird if you're talking about being in a city and construction workers sitting on a girder whistling at somebody walking by.
01:13:38.000If we calculate the chances that any one of them end up actually in a conversation with her, the chances are pretty low.
01:13:46.000But if you imagine that those guys are actually acting from a mind that evolved in much smaller circumstances, a small town where everybody knew everybody.
01:13:55.000And so whatever it is in their mind that causes them to have these interactions would have been much more likely there would be later interactions with the same person.
01:14:03.000And so I think that a male that is not thinking carefully about what they are doing ends up, you know, flirting with and basically building a rapport that is about some future potential that's almost certain never to be realized.
01:14:23.000But it makes sense to cultivate because, you know, if you...
01:14:29.000Cultivate a thousand tiny little potentials and almost all of them go bust but occasionally one works out.
01:16:25.000And so the point is, I think this is probably not obvious unless you're used to thinking evolutionarily, but in order for a pattern to occur where some entity releases sexual propagules on death, in order for that to evolve,
01:16:41.000it has to have worked enough times for that pattern to have accumulated.
01:16:45.000And so if autoerotic asphyxiation is...
01:16:50.000The result of people tapping into that thing and traversing a landscape near death in order to increase sexual pleasure.
01:16:59.000What that suggests is that that landscape near death has actually had a certain amount of reproduction happen in it that has resulted in this circuitry being present.
01:17:20.000People have had a lot of sex over evolutionary history.
01:17:23.000A lot of bad things have happened to people over evolutionary history.
01:17:27.000Every so often those two things intersect, right?
01:17:32.000In other words, every so often the catastrophe, the enemy spills over the wall, whatever it is.
01:17:38.000And so I don't know I don't know what the pattern would be.
01:17:45.000It may simply be that jeopardy is the key factor and actually jeopardy would be expected to happen an awful lot.
01:17:54.000So, for example, to the extent that And in fact, we see a lot of this stuff in primates where there's a question about how public the sexual interaction between two individuals amongst chimps is, for example.
01:18:09.000So when two chimps are having sex, if the male chimp is not the dominant male, he has everything to lose in being discovered.
01:18:21.000And so then the question is, is the female advertising that they are having sex by making noises that make it visible, in which case that...
01:18:28.000So there's a whole landscape of stuff that has happened in evolutionary history both with humans, with pre-humans, with apes.
01:18:41.000I've heard that argued as well about women with very loud moaning of pleasure that they're really trying to attract other males.
01:18:54.000Well, I would be super cautious about Sex at Dawn as a book.
01:18:58.000That particular finding, I think, is probably right.
01:19:02.000Why would you be cautious about Sex at Dawn as a book?
01:19:05.000Because the book is, I believe, quite cherry-picked in order to produce a particular, what I regard as a false sophistication about human sexual behavior.
01:19:19.000It makes us out to be wantonly promiscuous across time in a way that doesn't seem to actually fit with a more careful reading of what we are.
01:19:46.000Um, so the chimps hiding in the bushes, the beta chimps as it were, the males would have to hide their sexuality from the alphas because the bigger stronger males would probably take the mate from them and then their likelihood of reproducing,
01:20:29.000Now, what out of all this can we unpack about the way we're interpreting What's acceptable and not acceptable about male and female interaction in 2018?
01:20:46.000It seems to be getting redefined, right?
01:21:03.000The Me Too movement looks like an honorable thing at first because most men are not nasty human beings and don't behave towards women in a way that most women have been behaved towards by men.
01:21:23.000Almost every woman who at all fits the norms for their culture has been harassed in some way when they were young women.
01:21:38.000So imagining that most men are behaving in some kind of a toxic way, and I don't like that word, but Imagining that because most women have experienced harassment, most men are therefore harassing is an error of logic, of statistics,
01:23:07.000So Me Too went off the rails, and it had an opportunity to actually really wake a lot of good men up to how ubiquitous the experience of walking around on the streets and being catcalled and being harassed and sometimes being groped and sometimes worse than that is for a woman.
01:23:26.000And it took it to this absurd point where now most, I think, increasingly reasonable people are looking at it going, well, then if you're claiming that, what else that you're saying isn't true?
01:23:38.000And that puts the early stages of the movement at risk.
01:23:43.000Now, when you see the monsters, and they are real, right?
01:24:01.000When these monsters get exposed, First of all, it's a good thing.
01:24:07.000But second of all, don't you think that the reason why they got away with it in the first place is because they were able to victimize these people in secret and that they either had enablers or, in Cosby's case, everyone was unconscious?
01:24:56.000And we're not going to deny monsters because someone goes too far and they accuse Garrison Keillor of being a monster when we know that that's not true.
01:25:05.000So, because most people who I've talked to about the Garrison Keillor story, which he was consoling a woman and he touched her back and then she pulled back and he apologized and I didn't mean to do that and then he sent her an email apologizing and she said, no big deal, don't worry about it.
01:25:57.000It's completely unacceptable and it's the death of justice.
01:26:01.000Was that just getting caught up in the hysteria of just like trying to find, there's one, put that fire out immediately?
01:26:10.000So we have a couple of problems and one of the problems is that the folks who are advancing this movement and the other parallel, I wish they hadn't taken the term social justice because we need a replacement term for that that is not overzealous.
01:26:31.000But Those movements have engaged in a kind of naive conclusion making that makes them inevitably hijacked by bad actors.
01:26:50.000So if you are essentially looking at a situation, if you say, we must believe all victims, that's like putting out a neon sign For bad actors that wish to utilize this structure.
01:27:07.000And there will be bad actors in every population.
01:27:12.000Male is a population, female is a population.
01:27:15.000There are monstrous males who've been behaving predatorily.
01:27:18.000There will be women who will take advantage of this and accuse people without reason.
01:27:24.000I mean, I don't know whether the numbers are robust or not, but I have heard numbers that somewhere between 1% to 4% of the population are sociopathic.
01:27:34.000If you set up a system in which we are obligated to believe every victim, then those people will come out of the woodwork and they will use this to level their enemies.
01:27:46.000And so, at the very least, what that tells you is rule number one.
01:27:51.000You cannot make the rule you must believe all victims or you will have lots of people piling into the category of victim that don't deserve to be there.
01:28:02.000Not only the people who are going to be sabotaged by bad actors, but the people who have suffered the worst cases of, you know, rape.
01:28:13.000They are effectively having It's a transfer of well-being from the people who have been most harmed to people who have been less harmed or are cynically using these structures.
01:28:36.000The idea of Me Too, of the reckoning that has finally come for these really terrible guys who were getting away with all of this awful stuff, if that is close to your heart, then what you should want is a set of rules that is careful enough and robust enough that we can keep holding those kinds of people to account.
01:28:57.000What will happen if we don't do that, and I promise you this, from a game-theoretic perspective, if we decide you must believe all victims and all transgressions are equally bad, we're going to turn the thing to 11 for everything.
01:29:17.000Yeah, it is the death of nuance because if you're wielding this thing as a weapon, right, if what you want to do is turn the tables on all men, if you want to take power and say, you listen, well, this is a frightening weapon.
01:29:31.000So in order to make that weapon maximally dangerous, you...
01:29:41.000There's nothing a woman could ever do that would increase her likelihood of facing any of this.
01:29:48.000And, you know, we should cover that in a second because that's another one of these booby traps where you can very easily say the wrong thing and suddenly you're on the defensive even though what you said is very rational.
01:30:44.000Well, it really depends, you know, how I receive that depends a lot on how I feel about you otherwise.
01:30:52.000You could say exactly the same words and, you know, you could say it and someone else could say it and from that guy I might feel like, I kind of wish you hadn't said that.
01:31:00.000But that has to mean that that isn't a deep problem, that he said it because We're engaged in something we're trying to discover.
01:31:42.000One thing that is true is we are facing a landscape in which We are, I think, effectively rewriting the rules of male-female interaction in order to make sex with strangers perfectly safe.
01:32:03.000Now, sex with strangers can't be perfectly safe in a world in which you're dealing with, let's say it's 1% sociopaths.
01:32:11.000You can't make a world in which it's safe to take a sociopath home and have sex with them, right?
01:32:18.000But in order to try to make it safe, we're going to turn up all of these protections.
01:32:23.000So for example, We've got the issue of affirmative consent.
01:32:31.000Now, affirmative consent is a great fail-safe.
01:32:36.000In a circumstance where you are dealing with a stranger, it seems like it would be absolutely essential because the danger of a miscommunication is so great that you have to be perfectly explicit and there's no room for Any coyness or subtlety about it.
01:33:01.000In other words, it has to effectively be transactional.
01:33:04.000But no courtship that's going to make it into history books or literature is going to involve affirmative consent at every stage.
01:33:13.000Yeah, did you guys remember that video that they released?
01:33:16.000There was a video that, boy, I don't remember who did it, but it was essentially showing how consent can be sexy, and so it shows this millennial couple making out, and every few seconds the guy has to ask the girl if it's okay if he kisses her,
01:33:35.000is it okay if I touch you here, is it okay if I take your shirt off, and she says not yet, and then they keep going and going and going.
01:33:42.000And then the girl's asking the guy, which is hilarious, is it okay if I do this?
01:33:52.000Well, that was also an issue with, they've sort of abandoned this, but a few years ago there was this thing where if you had sex with someone and alcohol was involved, you raped them.
01:34:34.000No, I mean, and the thing is, the only thing that keeps us safe from being arrested for this is that since we've both done it, you know, it's like...
01:35:07.000You're finding someone who's done something inappropriate or finding someone who's done something that used to be appropriate but is no longer, and we're looking to establish this new parameter and this new way of existing.
01:35:18.000And it takes on this competition element, which I'm very familiar with.
01:36:41.000But anyway, the point is, now that the stuff is on the table...
01:36:45.000Right now that we know that there are monsters, we know that there are economic forces that actually protect these monsters, which frankly is a big part of this story.
01:36:55.000Is that the economic structure of something like Hollywood causes this to continue with it being effectively an open secret that these people are abusing women and then silencing them and contractually obligating them.
01:37:11.000That cancer on the social system is now open for discussion and we, all of us decent folk, know that we have to get rid of it.
01:37:23.000If you get rid of it though on false pretenses, I promise you the very same game theory that caused it to happen in the first place will cause it to re-emerge.
01:39:01.000If you look at what advertisers are using to access people, if you look at the narratives that exist in movies, people are capable of understanding the subtlety of human interactions.
01:39:13.000But they are either pretending or convincing themselves in the public space that things are way simpler than they actually are.
01:39:21.000And what I don't want to see and what, I mean, again, I don't have a dog in this fight.
01:39:33.000But I do want to see this solved in time for our children to face a landscape that makes sense.
01:39:40.000And I would like our many students who have talked to us about the confusion of trying to navigate romance in the current circumstance, I would like them to...
01:39:59.000It started actually in Japan, and they traced the whole thing of the day before Roger Stone tweeted something about Al Franken even starting to be taken down, and they traced the whole interaction of bots on Twitter doing this all for a couple weeks.
01:40:14.000But there was actual women that said he grabbed their butt.
01:40:21.000They asked him for a comment and he didn't respond yet because this was just within the last 24 hours.
01:40:27.000I don't know what we should do with the Franken story because the Franken story, it's not empty the way the Garrison Keillor story appears to be totally empty.
01:40:36.000On the other hand, and I mean, I think this is probably why...
01:40:43.000When you're talking about a senator being brought down on the basis of these Claims that are tied up in a movement which does not appear nuanced about the degree of harm done and things like that.
01:42:16.000And maybe it doesn't matter, but the entry point to that story was he took a picture, a comedic picture, pretending to fondle someone's breasts.
01:43:03.000Garrison Keillor is the only one that seems completely clean, but I can basically guarantee you statistically that there are good men who are being taken down.
01:43:13.000Well, so the last time I was on, we talked about Matt Taibbi and...
01:45:18.000There would be some sort of evidence of that.
01:45:22.000So in this case, and in Harvey Weinstein's case, and I think in Matt Lauer's case, the evidence is so overwhelming that it overrides our need as members of the public to see, to withhold judgment until due process has unfolded.
01:45:39.000But the point is, there's a place at which that stops.
01:46:04.000And so if we are to get to a state that makes sense, it has to be one in which monsters are held to account, in which there's nuance and degrees of guilt and that we don't throw everybody out.
01:46:45.000But for those of us who value liberty...
01:46:53.000A situation in which we reorganize the entire landscape to make sex with strangers as safe as it can possibly be, that is not a landscape that is good for everybody.
01:47:06.000We need to make a landscape in which people who want to do that Are free to do it, but not everybody is compelled to play that game.
01:47:30.000But what we should want is a landscape in which we generate safety for people at the level that doesn't cost us spectacularly in terms of how civilization functions.
01:47:43.000And then we need to actually say also, and this is another tough point where I'm worried that people will hear it in that monolithic way, but The following thing is true, I believe.
01:47:57.000A woman, if civilization functioned well, a woman should be able to put on the minimum clothes that the law will allow to cover herself in oil, to walk through town in the middle of the night saying things that indicate that she's hot to trot if she can find the right guy and she should be safe to do it.
01:48:20.000But a woman would have to be insane to do that.
01:48:27.000There should be legal protection for her to do it, but no sane person should choose to do it, because...
01:48:36.000No sane person would choose to flip BMX bikes on the X Games and no sane person would choose to jump out of planes, but we should allow them the right to do so for that thrill.
01:48:48.000I'm going to push back on that a little bit and say risk-taking when you're putting yourself at risk and you aren't involving someone else who is going to see your signals and maybe act on them and then Is going to have acted on signals that you shouldn't have been sending in the first place.
01:49:09.000Risk taking is more common in men than women, on average, across cultures.
01:49:14.000Not to say that a lot of women don't take risks and have fun doing it, physical risks.
01:49:20.000But absolutely is risk-taking adaptive and enjoyable and interesting.
01:49:25.000And if your risk-taking results in you dying and no one else getting hurt, go for it.
01:49:30.000How is the man getting hurt if the woman is taking these risks, walking down the street, oiled up with a bikini on, yelling out that she's randy?
01:49:37.000If there's a chance that later he is held accountable for the kid that results, or she changed her mind, or whatever it is that the claim is, especially in this current climate of Believe All Women, that is potentially a problem.
01:50:25.000But if you go to Disneyland, everything has been rendered perfectly safe, right?
01:50:31.000People have been through it with a fine tooth comb so that nothing bad can happen to you.
01:50:36.000And you can have all of this excitement on the rides, but nothing bad is going to happen to you.
01:50:39.000We cannot turn civilization into that kind of landscape.
01:50:43.000The price of turning it into a landscape in which you can be a moron and walk through life and nothing bad is going to happen to you, that price is way too high.
01:50:53.000So, I mean, this thing, this moment in time in 2018 is a natural outgrowth of things like helicopter parenting.
01:51:01.000Where you keep your children from all possible danger, all possible physical risk, and you then end up with children who find offense at and feel unsafe in all manner of situations.
01:51:14.000It is impossible to be an adult if you don't do trial and error, and it's impossible to become a sexual adult if you don't engage in some trial and error.
01:51:21.000It involves a little bit of risk, and I don't want physical risk and sexual Play, but there is going to be some experimenting.
01:51:33.000Well, there's going to be some even meeting friends.
01:51:37.000And so, I mean, I think the totally non-fraught version of this is that we took our kids and 30 undergraduates to the Amazon because it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and it's extraordinary.
01:51:49.000And for evolutionary biologists, why wouldn't you go if you could?
01:51:53.000And a lot of our friends thought, you're taking these little boys to the Amazon?
01:52:05.000So I was leading the study abroad trips earlier, and Brett said they're too young.
01:52:08.000Basically, they're too young for us to give them the shots that Western civilization has afforded us to give them to keep them safe from things like yellow fever.
01:52:17.000And too young to deal with the instructions that you need to actually remain safe.
01:52:33.000At the point we took them, we talked to them a lot in advance as we talked to our students in advance, and then we trusted them.
01:52:40.000And, you know, our younger son found a gigantic coral snake at one point and was walking ahead of us on the trail along with the guide that we happened to have with us.
01:52:48.000And he ran back and the guide ran forward and actually, you know, pinned the snake so we could see it.
01:53:00.000It would be very hard for us to live with ourselves had that gone differently.
01:53:05.000But you expose your children to risk so that they can then know what to do when risk happens to them.
01:53:10.000You expose yourself to sexual situations that aren't stranger sex so that you can know how to build courtship and romance and love and sex later on.
01:53:24.000So there's a how do we learn what we learn in order to manage the world?
01:53:30.000Our developmental environments have to give us model situations that are close enough to the situations that we run into as adults that we have the tools to navigate them.
01:53:40.000And so one of the, I think, very difficult things to accept as a parent Is that if your child is going to be able to manage risk as an adult, they cannot be made perfectly safe as a child,
01:53:56.000which means that you are running the risk that something disastrous will happen and that you'll have to live with it.
01:54:03.000If you make your child perfectly safe in childhood, they will be terrible at managing risk as adults and then something terrible is going to happen to them.
01:54:11.000So what I operate on, or maybe I'm reverse engineering the way I think I've learned how to behave, is something I call the theory of close calls, which is that you don't want to have disaster strike.
01:54:30.000And in fact, we've told our children, we've said, look, we don't want you to break your arm or your leg.
01:54:36.000But you may end up doing it and you're allowed to.
01:54:40.000Here are the things you're not allowed to do.
01:54:42.000You're not allowed to damage your skull.
01:54:44.000You're not allowed to damage your eyes.
01:54:47.000You're not allowed to damage your back, right?
01:54:50.000You protect those things at all costs.
01:54:52.000Actually, when we took the students to Ecuador, it wasn't really the only rule, but we called it the one rule, and it was really the central guiding principle of the trip.
01:55:05.000This is an 11-week trip through all these ecosystems in Ecuador.
01:56:03.000Somebody we knew in high school happened to go to the same college that I started at Penn, and we were walking down the street one day, and she stepped into the street thinking it was clear, and this car whizzed by her at 40 miles an hour.
01:56:45.000It was pure luck that saved my life right there.
01:56:48.000Therefore, I need to figure out how it is that I stepped off that curb without noticing that that car was coming.
01:56:55.000There's something wrong in my model of how to live that I could have gotten that close.
01:56:58.000So as you experience close calls, they tell you something about where your model is broken and you can fix it.
01:57:04.000And so I think what Heather's getting at is Learning how to interact with other people, especially when you're talking about high stakes stuff like romance and sex, you need to have some room to figure out how these relationships are negotiated.
01:57:21.000And if the point is these rules Are going to be negotiated by some people who are going to lay down the law and say you must seek affirmative consent every 37 seconds.
01:57:54.000One of the things that we hope is that they gain some sort of an understanding of human interaction when they're in their teen years, when they're still at home, then they're protected somewhat when they go to college, and then as they go out into the world.
01:58:10.000How much information have they accumulated?
01:58:12.000You have to let them do it and allow them to judge, for God's sake.
01:58:16.000There's this don't judge thing going on.
01:58:19.000There will be no exclusion of anyone at any time on the schoolyard, and don't judge anyone no matter what they say.
01:58:26.000Well, that's bad for the kid that gets judged, because there's some behavior that sucks, and they need to know that it's very uncomfortable for other people to be around you when you're like that, and that's how you understand social interaction.
01:58:37.000And this is a big part of how kids grow into adults.
01:58:47.000I love what you said about helicopter parenting, because I think you're totally right.
01:58:50.000I think that is part of what's going on here.
01:58:52.000I think part of what's going on here also is this newfound ability to complain and communicate.
01:58:56.000It's beautiful in the fact that you can exchange information at an incredible pace.
01:59:00.000I mean, we've never had anything remotely like this in human history.
01:59:02.000But it's terrible in the fact that it's hard to figure out what's noise.
01:59:06.000There's so much chatter going on, and if you're a dummy, you can find other dummies that think just like you, and you organize a very volatile group.
01:59:15.000Confirmation bias, you all get together, you interact on a forum.
01:59:20.000There's a few forums that are frequent that are just filled with, they're just echo chambers, and they're confusing.
01:59:26.000And like, I don't know anybody that thinks like this, but here they are, all collected, convinced that there is no biological difference in the sexes, and that a trans woman is a woman, if you don't date trans women, that you're a bigot, you know, even if you're a heterosexual male and she has a penis.
01:59:42.000There's a lot of squirrely thinking going on, and it's reinforced by others.
01:59:46.000And you start thinking you're right, and then you are the future.
01:59:50.000And all these people out there that are living in this archaic, ancient way, they're artifacts of the past, and they will soon be relegated to history.
02:00:23.000And we aren't throwbacks, you know, evolutionary psychology, in my opinion, has erred in imagining that we are simply Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering around civilization.
02:00:33.000But we are throwbacks to various places in our past, some of them recent, some of them much more remote.
02:00:39.000And what we face is an epidemic of novelty.
02:00:44.000So novelty is all of the stuff that we don't have programming on board to navigate.
02:00:52.000All of the stuff that your instincts don't tell you what to do.
02:00:55.000The foods, you know, the refined sugar, the corporation that wants to advertise the cereal to your child so that they eat more of it than they should or they eat different stuff than they would...
02:01:25.000The rate of change is so high that our evolutionary capacity to deal with novelty is outstripped.
02:01:31.000And so I do want to, you know, there is a way in which, you know, if you just listen to little sound bites from what we're getting at, you could get the wrong idea that we're very traditional.
02:01:41.000And in fact, our relationship isn't traditional at all.
02:01:46.000I asked him to carry the second baby, but he wouldn't do it.
02:02:20.000That is not an honest report of anything.
02:02:22.000What that is, is the result of competition, economic competition between porn producers to capture your attention, right?
02:02:33.000So what that means is that it pushes in the direction of all sorts of stuff that people might not be that interested in because this producer wants to take your attention away from that producer and so they make something more extreme or And it certainly triggers that second male strategy.
02:03:04.000And so what we've effectively done is accidentally, economically, we've announced to children that this is what sex looks like.
02:03:13.000And maybe they even get proficient at that kind of sex, but it's mechanical, uninteresting, and has very little to do with the most rewarding stuff.
02:03:22.000In what it is to be a human being, which has to do with deeper, long-lasting relationships.
02:03:28.000So it shouldn't surprise us at all that we've arrived at a dysfunctional moment where people are shouting at each other about what the rules have to be because what we've installed as a mechanism for learning about these things does not have our interests at heart.
02:03:47.000It is an economic entity that is not under anyone's control.
02:04:03.000If somebody wants to make sexual content with some purpose other than trying to grab your attention and take your money, I don't want to see children exposed to it willy-nilly,
02:04:31.000but my real point is You know, just as there's a distinction between the really good stuff that you sometimes see on your television screen because somebody's put together a well-thought-out series and broadcast television,
02:04:48.000which is often pretty garbagey, There's a big difference between the sort of garbagey view of sex that people are getting because the economics are driving us in that direction and some more interesting, nuanced, adventurous version that we might see if the landscape wasn't saturated with the porn version.
02:05:35.000It can't all be extreme, crazy stuff that's just designed to get your attention.
02:05:41.000I think there is, but I think it's miscategorized.
02:05:45.000First of all, I'm not really interested in porn, so I don't know what's out there.
02:05:49.000But my understanding is that actually there are many people who are producing Amateur stuff, and maybe they have an exhibitionist streak or something, but that there is, you know, human beings are naturally fascinated by human sex.
02:06:04.000Yeah, that's a big category, I believe, is couples, like amateur couples.
02:06:08.000Some people actually prefer that because it seems like real people who are attracted to each other are actually having sex.
02:06:15.000Because it might actually have some information in it, and it might be You know, frankly, might be more exciting because it has some reality to it.
02:06:22.000But my point is, you know, there's a gray area.
02:06:25.000I would say the distinction between porn and erotica is actually pretty easy to draw.
02:06:30.000It has to do with whether the motivation that caused it to be produced is economic, right?
02:06:35.000If the motivation that caused it to be produced, if it would not have been produced absent that economic motivation, it's porn and I'm suspicious of it.
02:07:00.000And I definitely agree that it's sex school for children.
02:07:05.000And there's a giant issue in that, because it is an unrealistic depiction of Actual sexual interaction for the most part like most sexual encounters are not gonna go the way they are in porn And just like setting your kid in front of a screen when he or she is really young Does not teach that kid how to interact with real human beings,
02:07:29.000If porn is your exposure to sex It's gonna create a kind of sex autism Like, you're not going to know how to engage with actual real human beings who can give you feedback.
02:07:41.000That's an interesting way to describe it.
02:07:44.000I mean, it's a little, it's a little dangerous, obviously, because, well, for various reasons.
02:07:49.000But just from the point of view that it denies you a sense of what the feedbacks would look like, because feedbacks between two people don't look like what happens when somebody writes a script.
02:08:31.000Yeah, so many of these issues, I think, you know, we need to be nuanced and very careful once we're talking about adults and when people become adults is a question.
02:08:40.000But when we're talking about clearly still kids, you know, should children be exposed to porn?
02:08:54.000Should children be given sex hormones of the sex that they are not born to, even if they might end up transitioning and becoming trans later on?
02:09:06.000Almost certainly not, because the vast number of people who end up realizing, oh, actually, I was experimenting.
02:09:17.000I was trying on something else, and now I've made it permanent by virtue of medicalizing the thing.
02:09:23.000That's another subject entirely, but I completely agree.
02:09:26.000You're essentially making a permanent decision for a child as early as, I mean, I've heard it argued three years old, which is insane.
02:09:34.000It just doesn't seem to suit, it doesn't seem to fit any logic.
02:09:40.000The only thing it seems to fit is this agenda that this is a natural normal part of our society and we should reinforce it as early as possible.
02:09:48.000Well, I want to push back on that a little bit.
02:09:51.000I think it's very clear there's so much gender confusion that sorts itself out through the natural process of development.
02:10:03.000That the idea that we should intervene medically when we have no idea who is going to Right.
02:10:27.000Then there is an argument to be made that the earlier that they transition, the more completely they are able to jump the gap.
02:10:34.000I would say the precautionary principle has to apply here.
02:10:38.000Trans is a real condition and some people have it and should be allowed to transition, but allowing children to make that decision for themselves when More often than not, they end up not transitioning.
02:10:56.000I think in the modern situation, with how little we understand about why it is that some people end up gender dysphoric for life and all of that, there's no way that we should be interfering early.
02:11:12.000You have to let children sort this stuff out.
02:11:14.000I'm just saying, in the abstract, it's not that there's no argument for doing it early.
02:11:19.000It's that the argument for doing it early doesn't come anywhere near the strength to the argument for not doing it early, which is that these things sort themselves out.
02:11:27.000If you really have been born into the wrong body, as is the phrase that is used by people, some of whom we have known, who are actually legitimately trans, The earlier the hormonal inputs came in,
02:11:43.000the more fully they would be able to transition.
02:12:20.000I think you know because the cost of being trans in a society that views trans the way ours does is so high that there is a very, it's the barrier to telling the world that this is how you feel is substantial enough to prevent people from I'm flirting with it casually.
02:12:43.000I would push back on that because there's people that get face tattoos and they do weird body modifications.
02:13:02.000I think you might be right that there are people that wear it as a fashion statement, but Who are people who have assumed traditional or semi-traditional gender roles to make that distinction?
02:13:22.000We certainly can't let parents leap to it.
02:13:26.000Heather has said a number of times, so people who don't know Heather should know that she is a dyed-in-the-wool She's a tomboy and has been for her whole life.
02:13:37.000Ever since I was destroying the frilly dresses my mother was putting me in.
02:13:41.000Destroying the frilly dresses and resenting the pink color that your room was painted.
02:13:49.000So you essentially modeled yourself after your dad.
02:13:55.000Your dad was a computer scientist, one of the early pioneers in operating system authorship.
02:14:03.000Anyway, Heather had a very strong relationship with her dad and she played like a boy.
02:14:12.000One of the things he said to me on several occasions was, I will not raise a weak girl.
02:14:16.000I will not raise a hopeless or helpless child.
02:14:19.000And so, you know, when I'd have my nose buried in a book and he'd be out back building a fence, he'd say, you're going to come out and help me dig post holes and pour the cement and put in the posts and you're going to do this.
02:14:31.000Not because I expect that you're going to go into fence building, but because you need to know how to work with your hands and do physical work in the universe and see what the ramifications are.
02:14:40.000Not that he didn't want you reading the book.
02:15:15.000And this is one of the problems with assuming traditional gender roles or assuming types of behavior and what some people like sexually other people would hate and vice-a-verse and some people I mean, some people can get away with things because women find it attractive,
02:15:33.000whereas another man could do the exact same thing, and women would think it's disgusting, and that's okay, too.
02:15:38.000Well, we have to err in the direction of keeping people safe, but we can't turn the dial on safety to 11 because we'll destroy everything else.
02:15:47.000And we can't imagine that these categories are invariant, right?
02:15:50.000That male looks one way, and this is exactly what you're saying, but it's, you know, they, many of the people who are arguing against the biology of sex and gender Say things like, gender isn't binary.
02:16:17.000And there's been some interesting pushback from these older European women, particularly French women, who are like, what the fuck are you guys doing?
02:16:29.000They have a different attitude about it, and they think that there's a certain amount of aggressive behavior from men that they enjoy, and they don't want to douse that.
02:16:39.000Well, so somehow, I'm glad we're getting to this part of the conversation.
02:16:45.000One thing to say is, I didn't finish the thing about Heather, is that Heather has vocalized that if she grew up in the modern era, she worries that somebody, her parents wouldn't have, they would have fought back, but that some people would have been thinking,
02:17:02.000We need to take care of you and we need to give you hormones and things like that because the fact that she played like a boy would have been taken as an indication that she was born in the wrong body or something.
02:17:21.000I mean, I really feel like we had already kind of gotten here, but I've talked to people who identify as trans who say things like, I'm trans because I don't fit into my father's mold of a macho man.
02:17:43.000If that is the extent of why you are calling yourself trans, I don't think that makes you trans.
02:17:49.000Isn't there an issue, and I'm not anti any of this, but isn't there an issue with saying that who you really truly are is dependent upon you getting injections of hormones that are not native to your body?
02:18:04.000Isn't that very odd that we've taken synthetic hormones and made them an integral part of who a person is?
02:18:13.000Now, again, I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do it.
02:18:16.000You certainly should be able to do it.
02:18:17.000But it's oddly almost a biologically essentialist perspective coming from people who are denying biology.
02:18:37.000Why is it assumed that if you do feel like you were born in the wrong body, the only way to change that is to inject hormones that are not native to your body, to have surgery, to alter yourself, to assume traditional gender dress and look of the opposite sex.
02:18:58.000There's a lot of people that push back against women sexualizing themselves, but celebrate trans women sexualizing themselves to look more like women because they think this is a feeling of empowerment for these women.
02:20:41.000Let me also say, rather than faking it, I would say...
02:20:46.000People who don't agree with the gender norms associated with the gender they're born to are calling themselves trans, and to me that doesn't look like trans.
02:20:55.000That's a misrepresentation of what trans is because we've also known many students who are really legitimately trans and have done surgery or hormones or both and are better off in their bodies and more at peace with themselves having done so.
02:21:16.000So I think it is very hard to appreciate, A, we are all in some sense not well by virtue of the fact that we live in a civilization that is not a good match for what we bring to the table.
02:21:33.000Even the environments we grew up in as children do not match our adult environments and so we don't intuit them well and that causes all kinds of health issues, psychological and otherwise.
02:21:44.000When people find themselves in this predicament that we are calling trans, they have access to a remedy.
02:21:54.000I mean, imagine, just put yourself in the mindset of somebody who feels like they should have been a woman.
02:22:03.000Mind you, I'm now learning that some trans people actually don't feel this way, that feeling like you're born in the wrong body is not universal.
02:22:09.000It's very commonly said, but it is not universal.
02:22:12.000But imagine that that is how you felt.
02:22:15.000You felt like you were being addressed as a man, you were being understood as a man, but that's not how you internally felt.
02:22:21.000And there was access to something, some set of things that would cause the world to finally register you as you felt you were, right?
02:22:32.000It would be very tempting to avail yourself of that stuff.
02:22:36.000And I think it's hard for those of us who feel at home enough in the bodies that we're in to appreciate what the pressure must be like if there is something available to you to go for it and to cross that gap.
02:22:50.000And I also think it's creating a problem as we're trying to discuss issues like sexual signaling and makeup and high heels and things as people have been discussing this causes a special problem for trans folks for trans women because in many cases maybe almost all cases they are using these signs that are and I don't want to get in trouble here these Makeup
02:23:20.000is well understood to amplify sexual signaling.
02:23:23.000It is not the only role it is playing.
02:24:06.000But if you're trans, you may put on that makeup in order to send a signal, I am female.
02:24:12.000So you're sending a signal that is of a very different nature.
02:24:16.000And so I think there is a way in which trans people are feeling backed against the wall by a discussion that is now very clumsily happening about these mechanisms of sexual signaling because it puts them in a particular predicament where they're feeling like they're about to be robbed of the very stuff that allows them to accentuate their femininity.
02:24:40.000Yeah, I think that's a very important distinction too, especially when you're talking about someone who's trying to self-affirm.
02:24:49.000Now, one of the things that came up real recently was this Jordan Peterson interview with Vice, which in my opinion, especially when you look at the sound clip, they were talking about women in the workplace and women wearing makeup and high heels and things in the workplace.
02:25:10.000He came off aggressive there, and I don't know why.
02:25:13.000I don't know if he's tired of it or if he's digging his heels in.
02:25:17.000It was apparently part of a two-hour interview, which he kind of felt like he was on the ropes the whole time.
02:25:21.000Yes, and he also was coming off of that big Kathy Newman interview in the UK, which was like an assault.
02:25:28.000I mean, the whole thing was just crazy.
02:25:31.000He came out ahead on that, and I think it's much easier to make the argument that he didn't come out ahead in the Vice thing, especially in the way that they framed it.
02:25:42.000But he was talking about women in the workplace, and maybe women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace, and maybe they shouldn't wear high heels or dresses.
02:26:40.000But I would say that, you know, the generous interpretation and the evolutionary interpretation of what he said was, look, the Me Too movement is arguing that there should be, that there can be no sexual signals in the workplace at all,
02:27:06.000Now the response has been, those aren't sexual signals.
02:27:09.000I wear heels and I'm not sexually signaling.
02:27:11.000And, you know, to which the evolutionary response is, What HEALS do is augment sexual signals that you were born with.
02:27:20.000Whether or not you are conscious of the fact that that is why you were doing it, that doesn't make it any less of a sexual signal.
02:27:25.000And so what Peterson was saying was, if we really are going to accept the argument that all signals of this type need to be abandoned, need to be gotten rid of from the workplace, then maybe we actually need to investigate all of the other things that are sexual signals that aren't being talked about.
02:28:24.000And then he describes, he says, let's...
02:28:30.000Let's agree that I'm going to put forward 10 things that might happen and then let's agree that none of them are going to happen.
02:28:37.000So now we can discuss the possibilities.
02:28:40.000So I don't think we know what the actual interview with Jay Kang looked like because there was two hours of it and I've seen 15 minutes.
02:28:50.000Yeah, why won't they release more of it?
02:28:52.000I think they should release the whole thing.
02:28:54.000I do think what I saw, so we don't know the context, which my guess is Peterson's pretty careful in what he says.
02:29:03.000My guess is the context would be revealing.
02:29:05.000I think based on the part that we know that he said because it is in the clips that we've seen, we know something's funny because the editing juxtaposes him seeming to contradict himself and he's actually pretty careful not to do that.
02:29:18.000But what he did actually say contains what I regard as at least one significant error.
02:29:27.000So he says, I do think that in response to the question of are women hypocrites for wearing makeup to work and then...
02:29:40.000I don't want to put words in his mouth, but something like demanding not to be harassed or something like that.
02:29:48.000So he's forgetting that many of these signals aren't conscious in doing that.
02:29:52.000Not only not conscious, but I saw somebody online discussing this.
02:29:56.000They made a very good point, one that's actually pretty hard to field.
02:29:59.000If these are signals, even unconscious ones, if they are sexual signals, why am I wearing one to go to a family reunion?
02:30:06.000Why am I wearing high heels to go to a family reunion?
02:30:09.000Am I secretly trying to get lucky at my own family reunion?
02:30:17.000What Peterson said when, you know, Peterson has done so many interviews, the fact that he says a clumsy thing here doesn't strike me one way or the other.
02:30:26.000But I don't want to be put in the position of defending that women are hypocritical for wearing makeup and high heels.
02:30:34.000There are lots of reasons that you have to wear them, including social pressure, including the fact that you are in a landscape of other people wearing them, and if you stand out as being plain in a The world of other women who are amplifying these things,
02:30:49.000it may actually have implications for your ability to earn.
02:30:52.000So there are lots of reasons that you might do it that have nothing to do with you as an individual trying to signal for sexual attention.
02:30:58.000It doesn't mean that those things didn't evolve as sexual signals, right?
02:31:02.000Sexual signals, to us evolutionary biologists, this is no news.
02:31:07.000I mean, if you're a woman and you've got breasts and you're walking around in the world, you're broadcasting a sexual signal and that one's completely unconscious and involuntary.
02:31:16.000So the idea that these signals are out there and common should become something we become comfortable with.
02:31:24.000The fact that males are involved in all kinds of signaling all the time, that the corner office, the mahogany desk, and you know, it's not that a woman can't have a corner office and a mahogany desk, but traditionally speaking, those hallmarks of Prestige and resource acquisition.
02:31:41.000Yes, those things have implication in the sexual landscape that's very powerful, as does frankly humor.
02:31:47.000The way humor is used has powerful implications in terms of sexual signaling, as does who laughs at your jokes.
02:31:57.000I mean, if the boss makes a joke, everybody laughs, whether or not it's funny.
02:32:20.000Actually, the truth of it is there are these stones that aren't really that rare, but they've been made artificially scarce.
02:32:26.000And a man will get one of these Stones and he will put it on a thing that can be put on a woman's finger and the size of the stone and the quality of the stone, even though the stone is not actually useful for very much, it is symbolically important and it is evidence of the woman's worth in some sense.
02:32:47.000In other words, the larger the stone, it indicates that the man values her at a greater level.
02:32:52.000This is an absurd set of signals and we treat it as if it's just Nothing, you know, a woman gets an engagement ring, maybe if she's traditional, her friends will, you know, look at it and say, oh, that's marvelous.
02:33:06.000I mean, so we're engaged in all of this archaic signaling anyway.
02:33:10.000And when you tune into it, it is very jarring.
02:33:14.000But it does not make sense to isolate one set of these signals and say, ah, look, they're signaling, right?
02:33:22.000Those signals are embedded in a landscape of signals that we go through our entire life not realizing that we are making.
02:33:30.000The last point I would make is that we also need to recognize that we have a mismatch between personal signaling And broadcast signaling.
02:33:39.000So it may be that a woman wears something in order to catch a particular male's attention, but the fact that she's wearing it may catch other males' attention.
02:33:53.000And that fact may confuse the landscape because men in general may take it as a sign that she's interested in something when in fact she's not interested in something, she's interested in someone who happens to be in this landscape.
02:34:07.000So what I hope is that we will recognize that the thing that we should all agree on is that it is desirable to have the freedom to engage life as you would engage it.
02:34:23.000So long as you're not harming others, you should be, you know, I do not think polyamorous folks are on the right track.
02:34:31.000I think that what they're up to I mean, I know from the ones who are serious about it and talk about it that even within the polyamorous community there's a recognition about just how difficult it is to make it work.
02:34:43.000But I don't really want to interfere with their right to do it.
02:34:45.000I would like to be able to talk about whether it's a good idea, whether it has societal implications that we should be How do you feel like they're not on the right track and isn't everyone's track?
02:34:55.000I mean if we can accept trans folk and we can accept women to subscribe to cultural norms and wearing high heels and makeup in the worst place, why can't we accept polyamorous behavior and what's so difficult?
02:35:07.000That's what I'm telling you is that though I personally would counsel somebody if you know and I have had this conversation with many students for example I would counsel them away from it because I think it actually prioritizes one thing, which is desirable,
02:35:24.000but that the cost of it is very, very high.
02:35:28.000It prioritizes not locking yourself into a single sexual relationship.
02:35:35.000And I think there's a way in which there is a terror that surrounds locking yourself into a single sexual relationship.
02:35:42.000And part of the terror goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation.
02:35:45.000If you think that beauty is maxed out at 20 and then it wanes over life, then as a woman, you're trapped in this terrible situation where you've got this power long before you know what to do with it.
02:36:05.000And it's going to evaporate so you better capitalize on it.
02:36:08.000And if you're a man, you're very frightened that you're going to get into a relationship and then you're going to watch this person that you love fall apart in front of your eyes and you're going to be caught in that situation.
02:36:22.000And I don't think this is the reality of a pair bond.
02:36:25.000I think the reality of a pair bond is way better than we fear.
02:36:29.000But that because we've got this overly simplistic mythology surrounding it, a lot of people are trying to solve that problem.
02:36:36.000How do I not get locked into that relationship that's going to trap me with somebody who's decaying in front of me?
02:36:46.000I would say people just want more variety.
02:36:48.000They're attracted to other people and they want to act on that.
02:36:51.000And if they find a partner who is also willing to do that and they stay together, I don't see what would be the issue if they wanted to do it.
02:36:58.000Well, I'm telling you specifically that.
02:37:01.000I don't want to stop them from doing it.
02:37:02.000But I do want people to think very carefully about the issues.
02:37:08.000I'm just speaking as one guy who's lived one life.
02:37:13.000The value that I get out of having as close to perfect security at home as I can have in a relationship, I mean...
02:37:25.000Heather and I have been all over the world.
02:37:28.000We've taken our kids into parts of the Amazon that are four hours by boat from the nearest road, right?
02:38:26.000And this friend has convinced me that it can be accomplished, that there's somewhere to get.
02:38:32.000But he acknowledges that it actually, in the case that he points to, took several generations, literally several generations to arrive at a stable location.
02:38:42.000Well, you guys have a wonderful relationship, though.
02:38:44.000I know many people who have terrible, terrible relationships, and for them, the notion of monogamy seems absurd.
02:38:51.000It seems like a trap that you get stuck in, you grow to resent each other, and then you get sick of each other, and then you fight in court until you figure out who gets all the money.
02:39:07.000That just a free-for-all, a sex with strangers free-for-all is different from the kind of careful approach to polyamory that this friend takes, which still looks extraordinarily difficult to pull off, given what human beings are from a jealousy perspective.
02:39:25.000But isn't monogamy extraordinarily difficult to pull off?
02:39:27.000I mean, isn't the rate of divorce in this country alone?
02:40:18.000It's very different because children are so costly to raise and because human males are wired to fear raising offspring that they themselves did not produce genetically.
02:40:31.000Now, I don't think it makes sense to actually care very much about your genes and advancing their interests.
02:40:38.000I think this is something evolution has stuck us with that is not valuable.
02:40:49.000And so what I'm expecting to happen is if you have a large-scale experiment in polyamory, what it's going to do is it is going to break down into polygyny and it's going to break down into single motherhood as men leave these relationships in order to engage in perhaps more polyamory with younger women.
02:41:12.000And it's going to be Yet one more thing that is unevenly distributed between the sexes.
02:41:21.000Well, choose your mate wisely, but we don't even realize that we are interfering with your ability to do that in ways that we don't intuit.
02:41:30.000We have a landscape in which nobody Is paying attention to the way we are interfering in the normal processes that would cause you to find a mate with whom you might have a very rewarding life.
02:43:38.000And we're being, you know, we've got an industry of, I don't know how much they make per year selling us these things because we're afraid of our own human smell, right?
02:43:47.000But there's a huge difference between the way somebody smells if they don't have good hygiene and somebody who has the luxury of daily showers and doesn't wear Sure.
02:43:59.000Frankly, I don't find somebody who is taking daily showers and isn't wearing deodorant, I don't find it that off-putting.
02:44:05.000And in Europe, it's considered much...
02:44:13.000And so, anyway, I have no idea whether if we backed our deodorant and antiperspirant stuff off, whether it would change who ended up with whom and whether or not marriages would last.
02:44:37.000And, you know, how much would it change if we actually learned that there's a difference between Hotness and beauty and we actually allowed little girls to recognize that maybe they weren't so interested in being hot because although it gets you a lot of attention,
02:44:55.000it's a kind of attention that's a dead end, right?
02:44:57.000How much would that change who ends up with whom?
02:45:00.000I mean a lot of who ends up with whom at the moment is presumably dictated by people having had their attention captured through hotness and then there's a question of whether there's anything there to back it up.
02:45:11.000So I What I want to see for my own kid's sake is I want to see a world in which the noise of the way the market influences how we interact with each other and the notions that get promoted as sophisticated,
02:45:29.000where that noise is reduced so that people can really begin to detect the patterns in their life.
02:45:45.000And all I'm saying about my own situation, yes, I'm incredibly lucky to have a relationship that's really rewarding and, you know, it's a lifelong bond.
02:45:53.000On the other hand, it may say something.
02:46:13.000We knew each other pretty well by the time we got together.
02:46:16.000And, you know, I was a dumb kid in my early 20s at the point that the relationship began.
02:46:22.000But It had an advantage that I didn't necessarily know to think about, which is Heather and I have spent all of that time adventuring together.
02:46:35.000And that means that instead of looking for the perfect partner who's exactly the right fit for you, two people who had the right starting material sort of grew together into a partnership.
02:47:41.000I think open-minded is more important than smart in this case.
02:47:45.000Being able to look at each other with compassion, this is true for any interaction.
02:47:51.000Can I look at you and see you as a human being with real emotions and feelings and reality to your experiences as well?
02:47:59.000Even if I feel like we disagree completely.
02:48:01.000Even when we're at our angriest with each other, If we can see each other's humanity through it, then you get through.
02:48:09.000Yeah, that is a lesson for every human being in all walks of life, in any situation when you disagree with someone.
02:48:18.000Not just your lover, not just a friend, but people that you don't even know.
02:48:23.000It's very easy to dehumanize someone who disagrees with you.
02:48:27.000And I think to bring this all back around, this is a part of the problem with male-female interaction today, is this dehumanization on both sides, that the men are demons, that the women are this and the men are that, and it's all this, you know,
02:48:43.000it's these rash generalizations and this extreme tribalism.
02:48:48.000Well, there is kind of a secret weapon.
02:49:24.000Sounds like, well, maybe the most important piece of information you could have is what these people are saying to each other as they're arguing.
02:49:30.000But no, that's not how human beings work.
02:49:33.000Sometimes the important information is on that vocal channel, and sometimes the vocal channel is actually almost purely noise, right?
02:49:55.000But when we do, there's also a part of us that's watching the interaction and knows that a certain pattern may have to unfold in order for us to get to the other part of it.
02:50:08.000So knowing that we're engaging in theater at some level, even though neither of us wants to be.
02:51:32.000The necessity of us being able to exchange that information is there.
02:51:37.000And the fact, you know, it's so much less charged if we both know that sort of that process has to unfold, and that is not an infinite process.
02:51:46.000And we will be on the other side of it once, you know, she's conveyed what she needs to convey, and I've let her know that I've heard it.
02:51:53.000And again, the more times you've done this, the more likely you are confident, you know what, this is going to end up okay.
02:52:00.000Like, we are fighting and this feels awful and, right, we've done this before.
02:52:04.000And actually this proves to be necessary because it resets some things that, you know, just every relationship, no matter if it's romantic or not, needs resets on a regular basis.
02:52:13.000And so this is one way that you can sort of theatrically reset some important points.
02:52:19.000This is a great lesson for reasonable people.
02:52:22.000And everybody could aspire to be reasonable people.