Bill Cosby was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual assault and sexual abuse of a minor. This is the latest in a long line of cases involving a man who was convicted of sexual assault, but not for the crimes he allegedly committed, Bill Cosby was given a much longer sentence than other men who were convicted of the same crimes, but were given much longer sentences. This episode is dedicated to Bill Cosby and his victims, and to the people who stood up for Bill Cosby. This episode was produced by Joe and Sarah, and features music by Zapsplat. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other companies. We are not experts in any of the matters discussed in this episode, and we do not claim to have any knowledge or expertise in these matters. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us at joseph.crane@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get them on the show. Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. Cheers, Joe, Sarah, Sarah and the rest of the crew at Whatiwoo! -Your support is greatly appreciated and much appreciated. -Jon and Sarah - Thank you, Jon and Sarah. Joe, Sarah, and the team at . Thanks, Jon & Sarah, Thank you so much for all your support and support and love and support, thank you for all the support and your support, we appreciate it greatly. -Jon & Sarah and Sarah! -J. . . . - Sarah, J.V. & Sarah & the support us. Mike, -Sue, .J.J. & the gang at the podcast - - J. & J.A. & R.B. , J.E. ( ) (A.M. & D. ( ) - E. ( ) -A. (J. (R. (M.C. & M. (P. ) ) - A. (C. (S.R. & A. ) . ) & K. (B. ) . . B. (E. (AJ. ) ( ) & AY. (D. (T. (L. (V. & B.A.) ) )
00:00:36.000Didn't they do that with that guy who was Speaker, Hassert, who was Speaker of the House, who was convicted for molesting a large number of boys when he was a wrestling coach?
00:01:01.000Well, there's no way if he was a 25-year-old able-bodied man who had done the exact same thing, he would have gone to jail for 15 months for admitting to molest a large number of kids who were under his care when he was a wrestling coach,
00:01:39.000One of them, the main guy, the movie, the two brothers, Dave and Mark Schultz, fantastic wrestlers who were completely misrepresented in the movie.
00:01:52.000They made out to be involved in this weird gay relationship with him and doing cocaine.
00:01:57.000They added all sorts of shit to that movie.
00:02:09.000It says the judge said it would have been higher, he would have gotten more if the statutes didn't run out.
00:02:15.000The limitation for accidents in the 1960s and 70s ran out, so the judge noted the punishment for such a conviction would have been far worse.
00:02:22.000I think he actually got convicted for bank transactions keeping stuff secret.
00:02:32.000So we were talking about Bill Cosby, that psychology professors and experts were obviously stating that he had some sort of problem.
00:02:45.000I mean, it's weird because the media will have a certain narrative they want to promote and they'll sort of find the psychologist who will say the thing that fits that.
00:02:53.000So I think most clinical psychologists would say, I've never talked to the guy.
00:02:58.000I'm not going to try to diagnose him from a distance.
00:03:00.000I have no idea what his condition is or what his issue is.
00:03:04.000But then there's a handful who are willing to kind of stick their necks out and say something.
00:03:09.000And, man, it's embarrassing to be a psych professor for that reason because you're always kind of being represented publicly by the people who are kind of being least professional about those kind of diagnoses.
00:03:21.000That is a real problem today, isn't it?
00:03:24.000Like, in terms of identity politics and this...
00:03:29.000There's inclination to draw conclusions and to lean towards one side or the other instead of just looking at the actual situation objectively.
00:03:37.000And if you're not talking to him, I mean, I'm assuming Bill Cosby's a terrible piece of shit as a human being.
00:03:43.000That's what I'm assuming by looking at all this.
00:03:59.000Well, he's got a deep dark streak, that's for sure.
00:04:04.000I mean, the weird thing is, though, a lot of people who are successful have a little bit of that dark streak.
00:04:09.000They have a little bit of that sociopathy.
00:04:11.000They can kind of step back from normal human relations and they can...
00:04:15.000Either turn it into, you know, abuse and exploitation like Cosby did, or they can kind of civilize themselves, right?
00:04:23.000And they can harness that to do something that's good and where they're kind of using their ability to take a different viewpoint on things.
00:04:35.000Analyze human behavior or invent things or, you know, propose new policies or whatever.
00:04:41.000And so I think that kind of dark streak, you know, if you have it, you have to recognize it and kind of tame it and work with it.
00:04:54.000And the people who do, I think, can often do great things for society.
00:04:58.000And the people who don't end up in jail.
00:05:01.000Well, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this up to you as an evolutionary psych professor, looking at the human mind and looking at behavior patterns and what's clearly some sort of, I hesitate to call crime an addiction,
00:05:16.000but it seems like an addictive pattern that he has, that there's a compulsion.
00:05:32.000I think there's some getting away with it thing.
00:05:34.000There's got to be some he's better than everyone thing because he's royalty in terms of Hollywood, in terms of show business, in terms of stand-up comedy.
00:05:50.000Essentially criticize anyone who wants.
00:05:53.000Rarely is there a rebuttal to the things that he says.
00:05:57.000And, you know, he's been criticizing the black community for its use of bad words and for its use of sexually explicit language and depictions.
00:06:07.000And meanwhile, the entire time he's raping people.
00:06:13.000I think one thing that might happen is if you've got this public image as being like squeaky clean family values and you've got the burden of kind of being a moral exemplar like that, you know?
00:06:41.000And I think that kind of hypocrisy is why we should be really careful about kind of idolizing anybody to that degree kind of morally and putting that burden on them.
00:06:53.000Yeah, I mean, I could only imagine, like, being an evangelist, being someone who preached about the Word of God, but meanwhile having this weird hooker thing.
00:07:04.000Like, do you remember, what was his name, Ted?
00:07:08.000He ran a giant church in, I believe it was Colorado, and the entire time, I used to have a bit about him, the entire time he was smoking meth and having sex with gay prostitutes.
00:07:21.000And all the while he was going on about...
00:07:23.000It's always the guys who go on about how awful gay people are that are secretly gay.
00:08:33.000The conflicted thoughts of the human being who has this ideal of who they'd like to project and what they'd like people to think they are, who meanwhile has this thing below the surface that is literally everything they despise and everything they rally against, and that is their true nature.
00:08:49.000God, it's got to be the awfulest feeling.
00:08:52.000I mean, I've known several guys who are closeted gay men, and it's an awful existence.
00:09:00.000They just live in this perpetual state of just angst and unease.
00:09:18.000And the people that do give a shit, they're the real problem.
00:09:21.000You know, the people who are not gay, who really care if someone's gay, unless they're trying to do a Cosby on you, like, why do you care?
00:09:31.000Look, if somebody wants to be in the closet about their sexuality, like they want to be discreet for professional reasons or because investors would panic or whatever, like that's totally cool.
00:09:41.000But I think it is so hard to be authentic to yourself.
00:09:46.000Like it's okay to sort of acknowledge I have this sexuality or these predilections and it's up to me to kind of harness them and deal with them and manage them.
00:09:56.000And if you want to do that privately, that's cool.
00:10:00.000But if you don't work out those little demons and if you can't acknowledge what's authentic, I think that's where you get these problems like the Cosby case.
00:10:09.000Yeah, and I believe there's a difference between discretion, not wanting to discuss your sexuality, and out-and-out hypocrisy.
00:10:17.000These are completely different things.
00:10:19.000It's one thing, like you said, like say if a guy's a CEO of some major corporation and he happens to be gay and he's just not interested in all the political nonsense and all the social nonsense that goes along with discussing that.
00:10:29.000He's like, I'm just going to keep it discreet.
00:11:22.000Like, I don't do research on whatever, the psychology of porn, but I know people who do.
00:11:27.000And the fact that you can study it and everyone watches it, but you can't even show clips at a scientific conference of what people are watching is kind of bizarre.
00:11:40.000A second thing that's bizarre is if you'd asked people, 70 years ago, you know, in the 50s or whatever.
00:11:48.000What do you think will happen if there's unlimited free online pornography that is every possible genre of humans of all sexes interacting with each other, including cartoon dragons and whatever?
00:12:01.000They would go, civilization will have fallen.
00:12:32.000Our ability to adjust to the times is kind of awe-inspiring, too.
00:12:36.000I've often talked about, when I was in high school, I was in high school in 1981, my freshman year of high school, and that was literally around the time the VH1 tape was introduced into modern America.
00:12:51.000What was the exact year VH1 tapes were invented?
00:12:55.000We got them in my house, I think, in 82. Maybe I was a sophomore.
00:12:59.000Which is right when you're about the horniest.
00:13:02.000And that's when porn made it into people's houses.
00:13:05.000And you had to go through those beads in the video store to get to the porn section.
00:13:10.000And everybody was like, everybody had blinders on and nobody looked at anybody else.
00:14:04.000If you had to anticipate what it would be like in 2038, you'd be like, oh, God.
00:14:09.000You know, all of Elon Musk's inventions have come to fruition.
00:14:12.000We'll be living in tunnels underground, and the surface of the Earth would be 190 degrees, and there'll be no more water, and...
00:14:21.000Yeah, people always overestimate how much is going to change in the next 20 years compared to the last 20. Yeah.
00:14:27.000But, you know, if you'd asked a bunch of, let's say, psychology researchers who study, like, marriages and long-term relationships, ask them in 1980, what's going to happen when you have unlimited VHS porn?
00:14:41.000Some of them might have said, that'll save American marriages.
00:14:45.000How many do you think would go with that?
00:15:43.000What is it about the mind that makes one obsessed, whether it's with gambling or whatever the vice, whatever the thing that makes you addicted?
00:15:55.000Well, I mean, one issue is people differ in their conscientiousness, right?
00:16:00.000Their degree of self-control and their ability to kind of resist temptations and keep their eyes on the target, like career, family, kids, you know, do the right stuff.
00:16:11.000Other people, like, I just can't control myself in any domain of life, whatever it is.
00:16:17.000Video games, porn, doing my homework, whatever.
00:16:22.000But I think we also have to cut people some slack, because remember, If you're a teenager and you're really into video games, Call of Duty, whatever it is, there are literally thousands of people designing that game to be as addictive as possible and beta testing it and refining it and doing the level design so it gives you just the right reinforcers at the right pace.
00:16:47.000And of course we're not going to be very good at resisting that because the power of Capitalism and tech and innovation to kind of exploit our brains is pretty awesome.
00:17:21.000Okay, let's just say Unreal Tournament.
00:17:23.000I want to get him fucked up on Unreal Tournament and get him completely addicted to this.
00:17:28.000They're just maximizing sales and profit.
00:17:30.000But are they doing it consciously or are they just trying to make the best possible game that's so entertaining and then it just, as a side effect, it becomes addictive?
00:18:02.000We have to make people excited about the next version and the add-ons.
00:18:10.000So I think there's kind of like a super ego and id issue going on even within companies where the designers just want it to be cool and management just wants a viable commercial product.
00:18:26.000But doesn't that just come with something that's cool?
00:18:29.000I mean, I'm just playing devil's advocate here because I'm not exactly sure.
00:18:32.000I'm friends with a few guys who make video games.
00:18:36.000Cliffy B, who worked for Epic Games, he showed us Unreal way back in the day, even before Jamie worked here.
00:18:43.000We got to see them making Unreal Tournament as it was being made.
00:18:48.000I went to the aid offices when they were working on Quake 3, which were just these amazing games.
00:18:54.000And it seemed to me, and again, I could be naive, but it seemed to me that all they were doing was just trying to make awesome shit that they like.
00:19:00.000And then it became addictive just because it was so good.
00:20:49.000My kid's awesome, and I don't know why all kids aren't like her.
00:20:54.000But I think screenwriters get lazy about this stuff.
00:20:59.000They think, well, if there's a family, you need marital conflict, and you need parent-offspring conflict, and you need...
00:21:06.000Secrets and lies and and but I think the way they're handling it is amazing because the kid doesn't have that kind of conflict the kid has like in my opinion a typical sort of Relationship with his father where he admires his father and his father's abilities And you know and he seems to be it's I just think that shows fucking great It's just so well read written rather.
00:22:47.000Well, starting in like the golden age of cinema in the 70s, the counterculture cinema, you sometimes got those really profound surprise endings.
00:23:09.000But, I mean, one thing that makes me optimistic about America is that the same adults who are being completely insane to each other about politics on Twitter, whatever, are watching this really sophisticated, emotionally insightful Netflix stuff.
00:23:32.000It's like when people aren't talking about certain issues, they're capable of Really appreciating, really insightful drama that's about the subtleties of human relationships and morally ambiguous situations.
00:23:46.000And then they go into the voting booth or get on Twitter and it's like there's black and there's white and that's it.
00:23:53.000And I hate those people and I love these people.
00:23:56.000And I can't connect the dots between the entertainment media that we appreciate versus the kind of ideologies that we...
00:24:10.000Yeah, I think Twitter and I think, well, Twitter in particular, but blogs as well, I think it is a horrible way to communicate when you are saying something that's in dispute.
00:24:26.000And I think there's also, whether it's 140 characters or 280 characters, I just think this limited way of writing in text without talking to someone, without being in front of them and communicating with them and the subtleties of human interaction and social cues and recognizing people's feelings.
00:24:44.000It's a piss-poor way of getting your thoughts out, and it's very non-human.
00:25:08.000There's something about that that I just think is alien to the human condition and I think it's having a real effect On our civilization and our culture and how we communicate with each other and I think it's galvanizing the polar opposites and it's making people go towards these extreme lefts and extreme rights,
00:25:27.000especially people that are easily led or maybe not so thoughtful about the objective way that they're interpreting these events and not Not being introspective, not looking at themselves with a critical eye, and just engaging in this sort of back-and-forth tribal shit with people that I just think is so strange to watch.
00:25:51.000And particularly when you read something and it's really well-written.
00:25:56.000Like you could tell this is an intelligent person that's written a bunch of nonsense and called people alt-right and Nazis and what's the most recent one?
00:26:26.000People do have a hunger for this more primal, engaged, kind of long-form discussion, which is why podcasts like this are really popular and why people are willing to listen to two reasonably smart people talking for an hour or three about cool topics.
00:26:47.000You know, imagine our ancestors 100,000 years ago around the campfire having a discussion about some fraught issue.
00:26:54.000Well, they would talk it through until it was more or less resolved or unless they at least identified, here's the things we can agree on and here's the things we can agree to disagree on.
00:27:04.000But with Twitter, it's just the exact opposite.
00:27:35.000Well, I think, you know, the human social psychology is it's very hard to reach any agreement without a certain amount of back and forth, preferably face to face, in person, with as much time as you need.
00:28:33.000And what my opponent wants is something terrible for America.
00:28:38.000And God, we've seen this hustle so many times.
00:28:41.000And yet it's the same hustle every four years.
00:28:44.000Yeah, I hope we get to a future where people are allowed to be epistemically humble, like, here's what I don't know, and I don't know a lot about most things.
00:28:54.000And even if politicians or scientists or media figures were able to take that attitude.
00:29:00.000And just, it kind of gets back to the hypocrisy point, right?
00:29:59.000The average person has a very intensive job.
00:30:03.000Say if you're involved in something, computer coding, electronics, something that's 10, 12 hours a day, you're engrossed.
00:30:11.000You don't have a lot of time to focus on other areas.
00:30:14.000You don't really have a lot of time to expand your understanding of whether it's biology, mathematics, whatever it is that doesn't apply to what you do for a living.
00:31:37.000One of the most beautiful things about podcasts that was completely unexpected for me is that it gives me this very unusual opportunity to sit down and talk to somebody without any interruptions for three hours.
00:31:46.000Which I could never ask someone to do in real life.
00:31:50.000Like, if I have dinner, if you and I went out to dinner, we'd be talking, you know, maybe someone else would be with us, different conversations, you'd be eating.
00:32:01.000It's like little simple conversations.
00:32:03.000It's fun and everything, but it's not completely locked in like this with the headphones on, Through a microphone, the knowledge that other people are listening, and that these subjects that you're discussing, you're allowing these ideas to play themselves out,
00:32:19.000and you're sort of moving them around, and asking questions, and looking at them from different angles.
00:32:24.000And to have that liberty and freedom to do that is a very rare thing, and for people that get to listen, and I enjoy Sam Harris's podcast in particular, Radio Lab's one of my favorites, but one of the There's so many good ones out there, but what's really good about them is that you get a chance to listen to discourse uninterrupted,
00:32:50.000And this is something that I think is sorely missing from the rest of our culture, and it's one of the reasons why these things have caught on so well.
00:32:58.000I mean, if you respect the ideas that you're talking about, you should be willing to give time and attention and let them kind of breathe, like opening a bottle of wine and just letting it do the aeration thing before you pour it.
00:33:14.000It's funny how much of a thirst there is for that.
00:33:17.000I mean, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, would anybody ever spend three hours listening to a podcast, I would have said, no, there's just this one-way acceleration of culture that's going to be faster and faster.
00:33:29.000Nobody will watch more than a 90-second clip on YouTube.
00:34:11.000Where someone will go over all the different details of a phone and let you know, like, here's what's new about the Galaxy Note 9. And they get fucking hundreds of thousands of views.
00:35:33.000This is what my anthropologist colleagues tell me is, you know, your status, if you're in a tribal society, a small-scale society, is heavily dependent on not just how good a hunter you are, how many kids you have, it's how entertaining are you in the evenings.
00:36:00.000Like, when you're around someone who's really hilarious, who's telling great stories, you're like, everyone around them is like, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
00:36:17.000And I think that all the chaos that we're going through right now, politically and socially in particular, I feel like this is just an adolescent period of communication.
00:36:28.000That we are experiencing this open flood, like we've opened up the barriers for communication.
00:36:37.000And it's going to take a while before The discourse levels out and you've got a lot of loud noises on all sides and there's a lot of people fighting for power and fighting for virtue,
00:36:53.000fighting for whatever social brownie points they get by Pointing out their position being correct and your position being foolish and silly and this is the future and this is done.
00:37:05.000And there's this cruel aspect to it which is interesting.
00:37:08.000Like if someone missteps and someone says something that they regret and then they delete it, there's this cancel culture.
00:37:39.000One of my favorite books about social history is called The Bourgeois Virtues by Deidre McCloskey, an economic historian.
00:37:47.000She points out when you switch from the Middle Ages, where everyone's a peasant, to this urbanized commercial culture where people are mostly...
00:37:56.000Traders and they have little shops and whatever.
00:37:59.000They needed to learn how to interact with strangers to provide value for money.
00:38:04.000And they needed a whole new set of virtues that had to do with reliability and thinking, what am I making or what goods or services am I providing that actually are useful?
00:38:16.000And it took a couple generations For people to enter that kind of capitalist mode of what can I do that's helpful to others that can support my family?
00:38:29.000And I think now we have a cultural shift where we realize, given social media, how do we cope with the fact that everybody virtue signals, everybody sometimes says things that are mean and stupid, and everyone's fallible, and anything you say will be on a permanent record,
00:39:12.000And I would say that the inclination towards kindness and communication and understanding should be rewarded.
00:39:22.000And that we need to reward that and, I don't want to say ostracize people that are inclined to go towards this cancel culture idea, but we need to let people be aware of it.
00:39:34.000You know, we were talking before the podcast that I have like All these emails that I can't catch up on because I was gone.
00:39:40.000I was in the mountains for six days with no cell phone service at all.
00:39:48.000I feel like there's a certain amount of anxiety that comes with being connected to all these people all the time and constantly checking your mentions and constantly looking at Google News to find out what chaos is coming our way.
00:40:02.000I just don't think that that's healthy.
00:40:05.000I think I do my very best to mitigate the negative effects of it, but my very best is not good.
00:40:13.000I don't think I'm doing a great job, because when it's taken away from me, and I've had this happen twice over the last few months.
00:40:20.000I was in Lanai, the small island off of Hawaii, one of the Hawaiian islands, and I broke my phone, and it took a few days for them to send me a new one, and I was like, God, why do I feel so good?
00:40:30.000I feel so present and I feel so healthy.
00:40:34.000And then this past week, the same thing.
00:40:37.000No cell phone service for all these days.
00:40:42.000I think there's a funny thing even that happened with Burning Man culture where like when it got started in the early 90s, it was, let's all come together and have this excitement of interacting more.
00:40:52.000And now, since Burning Man is one of the few places where you don't get cell phone service and you can't really be online, It's like, oh man, this is such a relief because we literally can't stay connected.
00:41:04.000And the community we're in is only 70,000 people instead of 330 million.
00:42:07.000We'll get together through these days and let's just fucking dance and we'll have glow sticks and wear pasties and get fucking crazy and do ecstasy.
00:42:16.000And a lot of people are like, fuck yeah, let's do it.
00:42:44.000Well, there is kind of behind the scenes leadership, of course.
00:42:49.000I mean, that's another fascinating thing, is depending on the political lenses that you wear when you go there, it's either like a libertarian paradise, or it's a communist paradise, or it's spontaneous self-organization of some sort.
00:43:07.000But there certainly are people who are kind of coordinating it.
00:44:30.000Yeah, someone blew up a trailer because they got their mixture wrong.
00:44:35.000But yeah, it's fascinating in terms of...
00:44:40.000How quickly it went from not being a thing at all to being its own subculture with its own moral norms and dress styles and systems of virtue signaling and sort of political expectations about what beliefs are the right ones to have even though it didn't start out political at all.
00:45:05.000Well, whenever you get freaky, you go left wing.
00:45:08.000Like, if you get freedom and freaky and drugs, it's left wing.
00:45:20.000Yeah, you don't typically hear people like, well, I went to Burning Man and I dropped acid and I realized, like, Mormon monogamy is really the proper way to live.
00:46:01.000I think Joseph Smith was a little con man in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus and only he could read them because he had a magic rock and all that crazy shit.
00:46:19.000Once they got rid of all that polygamy shit, once they got rid of the 90 wives and dressing up like a pilgrim, they became a really nice community of people.
00:46:33.000So my granddad, who was a business school professor, back in the 40s he moved his little family to Salt Lake City and they lived there for a while.
00:46:41.000And he was really inspired by the kind of family values.
00:46:44.000And I think that's one reason he sort of went on to have 12 kids of his own.
00:46:48.000And not that he turned Mormon, but he thought they're on to something in terms of how seriously they take the future, both on Earth and in the afterlife they believe in.
00:47:02.000Well, in the afterlife, don't they get a planet of their own when they die?
00:47:35.000And I thought, of course, of course, it's going to be a religion that has a farsighted approach and that's kind of pronatalist and that's all about family values and...
00:47:47.000Like, increasing their numbers, and yeah, of course it's going to be them, not...
00:48:31.000I mean, it's strange the blinders that people go on, that people put on, and that they would put those blinders on.
00:48:38.000Like, it's almost like if you just can go, hey, look, let's just all admit Joseph Smith was full of shit.
00:48:45.000But we got a good thing going on here, folks.
00:48:48.000We're all real nice to each other and there seems to be some real positive energy involved in believing in this higher power and this greater good and this overwhelming sense of community that we all have.
00:48:58.000And they have a sense of humor about it.
00:48:59.000Like the way they reacted to the South Park guys doing Book of Mormon.
00:49:31.000I think having that humility and that sense of humor about what you're doing, I wish we saw more of that in academia, because there's a lot of fields that are very bad and don't do good work,
00:49:47.000but that are terribly, terribly serious about it.
00:52:30.000But what is it about it that leans itself towards foolishness?
00:52:40.000I think it's very hard to do good work in a field where you have to every day systematically deny common sense and deny the evidence of your own eyes and ears about what's right in front of you,
00:52:59.000I think that creates a habit of interacting with the world in a way that says, what I study is going to be completely divorced from every aspect of day-to-day life and everybody else I encounter who's not in my field.
00:53:16.000Because if you allow any crosstalk between You sort of blank slate gender ideology and the real world, the ideology crumbles.
00:53:30.000So you can only maintain it behind this wall of insulation.
00:53:37.000And that's a terrible position to be in.
00:53:39.000I don't envy the people who live their lives that way.
00:53:42.000And it all grows inside the walled gardens of academia.
00:53:47.000And outside of that, it's these, you know, you get internet groups from people that sort of were indoctrinated into these ideas in college.
00:53:56.000And it's also, I think in some ways, there's a leveling of the playing field that a lot of these ideologies present to some people.
00:54:52.000That is exactly what's going on if you're morbidly obese and for you to pretend any differently and to just go on about this fat acceptance movement and you know the big beautiful this and that and like no you're obese you've eaten too much food if you see a fat guy how come he doesn't get the same sort of treatment if you see a morbidly obese man in his underwear no one's saying he's beautiful Because he's disgusting and he's fat and he's lazy and he's addicted to food.
00:55:35.000We treat them as if they're incapable of recognizing the absolute reality of their physical being.
00:55:45.000I think it's important, you know, to address both the kind of individual choice level and also the kind of systemic level like the food industry and what is being promoted and what the federal government promoted for ages.
00:56:04.000It was this terrible situation where you could have followed exactly what the FDA recommended and it would have been bad for you for decades.
00:56:13.000And because of lobbying and because of the powers that be and influence and I think that's the level to criticize, right?
00:56:24.000If you have a systemic problem like promotion of tobacco products and you want a safer alternative, then yeah, you've got to address the tobacco industry.
00:56:37.000We have this bizarre situation, for example, where like a lot of people in my department work on alcoholism treatment research.
00:56:48.000Or they work on how do you get people to stop taking opiates?
00:56:52.000How do you deal with opiate addiction?
00:56:54.000And if you make a suggestion like, oh, here's some awesome new research showing that if people switch from opiates to cannabis, it dramatically lowers their risk of death.
00:57:05.000Or if they switch from alcohol to cannabis, it has all these health benefits relatively to being an alcoholic.
00:57:15.000But it's kind of considered taboo to raise that.
00:57:54.000The evidence shows that's not the way to treat any of these physical addictions.
00:58:03.000Something like cannabis as an alternative is, it's totally marginalized in academia.
00:58:10.000Like you really can't talk about it as a valid alternative where people could come home and they can drink or they could come home and they could get high and maybe getting high for a lot of people might be better.
00:58:49.000Who gives you the research funding to look into this, right?
00:58:53.000National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism or National Institute of Drug Abuse.
00:58:58.000If you do a grant proposal that says, here's an alternative that might work.
00:59:05.000They will shut it down because the federal government does not – those agencies don't want the blowback of some senator saying, how dare you fund this research that says this is a valid alternative.
00:59:18.000So everyone who works in these areas is kind of locked into a system of grant funding that's subject to kind of political censorship.
00:59:31.000Do you remember those talking dog commercials of about 10 years ago, where there was a girl, she comes home from school, and the dog's like, Lindsay?
01:00:29.000This is just insanity that this is allowed to take place.
01:00:34.000Is that drugs that kill enormous numbers of people are allowed to demonize drugs that kill no one ever in the history of use.
01:00:45.000If you looked at that rationally, if you were something from some other planet that was studying the human race and you saw the way we program people and the way we spend enormous sums of money to project a certain idea and get it into people's heads through these very influential short memorable videos you'd be like this is a culture and a civilization an organ an organism that is
01:01:15.000mad this is madness Yeah, I often ask myself, how is this going to look in 50 or 100 years to whatever my great grandkids or future people who stumble upon my books or this podcast or whatever?
01:01:31.000And I think if this would make zero sense and would be totally embarrassing both Intellectually and ethically, then don't take it seriously.
01:01:43.000And this particular issue, I think it's really important for citizens to understand how much of science is constrained by what can be funded by the federal government.
01:01:54.000And that we are not actually supported to do certain kinds of research that might be really helpful to people.
01:02:02.000It's the same thing with sex research, right?
01:02:04.000It is virtually impossible to get federal funding to do any kind of sex research in America these days.
01:02:12.000You write a grant to do something else and then you kind of do the sex research on the side using like some of the resources.
01:02:21.000I don't do this, but everybody I know who does sex research does it.
01:02:24.000Is it because they're concerned that the image of Funding sex research versus funding, whether it's obesity or hunger, poverty, whatever it is.
01:02:40.000There's not enough resources to go around.
01:02:42.000Why would you spend any money studying this?
01:03:26.000Like, if you want to research how do you make a monogamous relationship less full of stress and argument, you can get some money to do that.
01:03:35.000But even there, the kind of suggestions you could make are quite restrictive in terms of what What kind of therapy you're allowed to research or talk about.
01:03:50.000So, yeah, I wish citizens understood this because their tax dollars are not being allocated in the best way to deliver the benefits in their real lives to their families and their relationships that they could do.
01:04:06.000So to bring it all back to obesity, What I would like, and I bet I could say the same about you, is we'd like to take some of these sort of influential videos that we've seen done that demonize innocuous drugs like marijuana and put those on sugar.
01:04:29.000People are addicted to so many things that are causing obesity, so many things that are causing us to have this epidemic of I mean, if you go to Disneyland, it's one of the saddest things in the world.
01:04:40.000You see how many people are on scooters because they've eaten themselves out of their ability to be mobile on their own.
01:04:45.000They're just overflowing off the side of these scooters.
01:05:27.000And, you know, if you want to do something alternative, like, I've been involved in the paleo movement for a few years, and, like, my girlfriend's vegan, and if you want to find good paleo or vegan food, it's, like, getting a little easier, but it's not mainstream enough that there's,
01:05:44.000like, a whole aisle in Walmart devoted to it.
01:05:54.000The food system is a pretty hard nut to crack because there's an awful lot of money at stake, and the profit margins on junk food are very, very high.
01:06:04.000And it's also very difficult to keep things on the shelf.
01:06:07.000I mean, if you have real fresh food, it goes bad very quickly.
01:06:46.000It's going to be strange to see headless meat slabs with no central nervous system and trying to figure out how do they get it to have, like, a muscle consistency, like a...
01:07:01.000I mean, you've got to realize an animal, like different cuts of meat have a different texture to them because there's a different muscle density because the animals use their body.
01:07:11.000I think you have to electrically stimulate the muscle tissue.
01:11:16.000Well, you all should read the essay my girlfriend, Diana Fleischman, wrote about sex bots, which got her a little bit of notoriety a few months ago.
01:12:45.000Boy, that would be a weird sort of experiment.
01:12:51.000But the thing about robots and sex is they're gonna get so good.
01:13:01.000That it's gonna be like a person and then we're gonna be in this weird ex machina sort of situation where How would you feel like what if you were dancing around that really hot Japanese girl and ex machina She starts taking off your clothes like what do we do here?
01:13:53.000Well, when it comes to gender studies, we circle back to this, this denial of reality.
01:13:59.000And we know that there's this sort of really broad spectrum of sexuality in terms of male-female, in terms of the obvious, you know, the rock on one side and Kate Upton on the other,
01:14:42.000And then there's women that don't feel represented by these standard views of female sexuality as well.
01:14:50.000But this just speaks to the variability of the human genome, just DNA in general.
01:14:55.000There's different people that breed with different people and different shapes come out.
01:14:59.000Until we figure out how to manipulate those shapes, which seems to be...
01:15:03.000Right around the corner with the robot fuck dolls.
01:15:05.000It seems like they're both going to arrive probably at the same time, where you're going to be able to choose from having sex with a robot or having sex with the Hulk.
01:15:13.000There's going to be real possibilities that everyone's going to look like Thor.
01:15:17.000This seems like it's not too far away.
01:15:20.000One, two, three generations, maybe possibly inside of our lifetime, will have mastered the human form to the point where the world's going to be preposterous.
01:15:29.000It's going to be like the Star Wars cantina scene everywhere you go.
01:15:33.000Well, this is what happens whenever you have a biological innovation that opens up new possibilities in terms of the evolution of bodies or behaviors as you get this adaptive radiation, this explosion of possibilities, like the Cambrian explosion, right,
01:15:50.000Animals finally figured out how do you program a multicellular body with a nervous system.
01:15:57.000And as soon as they got that, boom, you've got all these bizarre new forms and then you get, you know, dinosaurs and mammals and us.
01:16:07.000I think once we can program the human genome, And you have parents who are like, I want to select for kids who are really tall and really religious.
01:16:22.000And other parents are like, I want cute little hobbit babies who are hardcore atheists.
01:16:30.000Imagine if your parents decided to make you a hobbit.
01:16:33.000They could have done anything they want.
01:16:35.000Remember the first early adopters I imagine it's gonna be about fetal transformation about taking something that's in the womb and Manipulating it and then as it emerges and then evolving and grows then you're gonna see what it is if your fucking parents were just gigantic J.R. Tolkien fans and And you have her furry feet and you're two feet tall.
01:17:52.000It can have better memory for all your preferences and your desires.
01:17:58.000It'll also be more trainable in terms of...
01:18:00.000It'll kind of register, oh, the last time I asked this question, you didn't respond much, but this other question, you talked for five minutes, so I'll ask more of that.
01:18:27.000Instead of expecting this fucking robot to just take care of your dick and balls and just be nice to you all the time and remember all the stuff you like.
01:18:50.000Like if there's a woman I'm interested in, let's say, and she has access to a male sex bot who's like really funny because it's like its little neural network has learned like all of your stand-up routines or how to riff on today's news.
01:19:08.000And it's a great listener and it remembers everything about her back story.
01:19:15.000I can either be like, I can't compete with that.
01:20:51.000Yeah, so, I mean, people do, like, celebrity deepfake sex bots, and there will be people wandering around with their Jordan Peterson sex bot on a leash in the store.
01:21:00.000Well, have you seen the porn where they do face swaps?
01:21:06.000This is another social revolution we're going to have to brace for, is an era when you can do a credible porn fake of any celebrity or any citizen.
01:21:22.000Hilarious stand-up comedian who has the funniest Instagram page of all time and his Instagram page is about 80% of him doing face swap videos of the Kardashians and President Trump and Kanye West and they're just so fucking ridiculous because you know that they're fake because it's real obvious they're fake but it's essentially like a new art form if you think of like sketch comedy and here play one for him see what we got here this is a good one I haven't seen this one Yeah,
01:22:40.000I was just trying to open up this champagne bottle to celebrate my return to comedy!
01:22:51.000So this kind of stuff, but see, what I love about this is it's so obvious.
01:22:56.000You know, this is essentially, I mean, he has a lot of the little sketches that he does on his Instagram page, but most of his stuff is this face swap thing, which is, I mean, relatively new technology.
01:23:15.000And it's become this new form of comedy, of sketch comedy.
01:23:20.000And with a guy like him, who's such a good impressionist, But this is crude and obvious.
01:23:29.000How long is it going to be before someone can actually...
01:23:32.000I mean, they already have that machine, the technology that allows you to take, especially someone like me, who's talked for countless hours, you take your voice, you take all of the recordings that I've ever done, more than a thousand podcasts, you throw them into this machine,
01:23:48.000and you basically have all my various inflections, Anger, sadness, laughter, giddiness, perplexed, all the different words that I have in my vernacular, and you put them all into this thing, and you can kind of morph it around.
01:25:06.000So someone like Kyle Dunnigan, but an evil version, could take David Attenborough and, you know, you could do whatever you want.
01:25:17.000Almost like what we're saying about communication, that this open floodgate of communication, we're learning how to manage all the implications of this.
01:25:28.000And I think with human relationships, you know, we'll have to figure out kind of ethically once, let's say, once somebody can make like a deep fake video porn of their ex-lover.
01:26:29.000This is something my friend David Lay points out in his book, Ethical Porn for Dicks, which is about responsible porn viewership for men.
01:26:39.000That if you're in a relationship with a woman and you're a straight guy, you need to have the talk about what does your girlfriend consider cheating in terms of porn watching.
01:26:52.000Most guys don't have the guts to have that conversation.
01:27:29.000You've got to go there all day sometimes.
01:27:31.000Yeah, so people have to talk about this stuff like grown-ups.
01:27:35.000And as the technology keeps advancing, right, and becomes more and more, you know, the line between, like, Porn and real life gets fuzzier and fuzzier.
01:28:40.000That this, in combination, like some sort of real 4K HD virtual reality in combination with a sex robot is probably where people are going to go.
01:28:53.000And then the other question is like, What happens with that technology in terms of education and college and how people acquire skills and knowledge and insight?
01:29:05.000It's really, really hard to imagine that people still think in 15 years, okay, going to a physical classroom and sitting, listening to the average community college adjunct professor talking about Human sexuality or gender feminism or political science.
01:29:26.000That they'll think that's the state of the art.
01:29:50.000I wouldn't be that surprised if half the universities in America go bankrupt within 15, 20 years.
01:29:56.000So do you think that people are going to be getting their education in some sort of an online form, some sort of virtual classroom form, or some maybe new, not yet created version?
01:30:07.000Some new virtual reality form that's a lot more interactive.
01:30:11.000I don't think it'll be just watching videos and then taking quizzes.
01:30:15.000Have you paid attention to what Elon Musk has been saying about his neural link?
01:30:32.000If you could explain it to people that don't know what we're talking about.
01:30:36.000If I understand correctly, having watched, like, you interview Elon, etc., he's just concerned that the bandwidth that connects the brain to the world or the brain to the internet is quite narrow.
01:30:49.000Like, you can get a lot of information quickly through your eyes and ears, but your speed of, like, typing and controlling things or speaking is kind of limited.
01:31:02.000There's a push to kind of open up that bandwidth and the speed of communication between the human brain and digital reality and other people.
01:31:13.000If they figure out a way to do that it's a total game changer in terms of how people Interact with, not just social media, but in general with each other.
01:31:26.000I mean, it means basically you have a global telepathy system, if you want.
01:31:36.000Because it means the ease with which one part of my brain communicates with another part isn't that much higher than the ease with which that part communicates with somebody else's other brain part.
01:31:52.000What I've been thinking about is some sort of universal language and that if they bridge the gap between cultures and civilizations and the way people communicate and doing so do it through some sort of a digital interface and instead of like very simple characters that equal words that you put into your linguistic dictionary and you have an understanding of what this person's talking about instead of that you get like real clear concepts maybe even like An emoji form or hieroglyphic
01:32:22.000form or some sort of form where we figure out over X amount of years how to communicate through Agreed-upon imagery or agreed upon data in some sort of a way that lets people express emotions and and perhaps even more Engrossing and more complicated than the actual language that we're enjoying right now.
01:32:49.000I mean, the evolutionary backstory to this, right, is you basically have the whole history of life on Earth, you know, before humans invent language, where animal communication is pretty primitive.
01:33:03.000Like, all you really have at the most complicated is like nightingales producing complicated bird song to attract mates.
01:33:12.000What about like chimps that have certain sounds for tigers and other sounds for eagles?
01:33:16.000They have like a maximum of maybe a dozen different sounds.
01:33:20.000But with human language, compared to that, it really is suddenly like having telepathy, where you can communicate so much, so quickly, so efficiently.
01:33:31.000And yet, you know, if Neuralink works, it would be as far in advance of language as languages of kind of animal signaling.
01:33:44.000And it's hard to imagine what that world looks like because, you know, imagine a form of Twitter where it's not just through your, you know, your thumbs on a keypad,
01:34:04.000And then when people, it's not just saying something mean or stupid, it's even thinking something mean or stupid that could immediately get posted.
01:34:16.000And once you kind of start sharing your whole subconscious with people through Neuralink, then we'll have to level up with some new social norms about what that means and sort of how much radical honesty we can take from each other.
01:34:38.000That seems to be where the future is, the complete dissolving of all boundaries between people and information, people and their lives, and that some sort of a way of recording your actual experiences Or letting people share them in real time.
01:35:00.000Like, imagine if people decided to let people, through some virtual reality scenario, put on headsets and experience you having sex with your girlfriend.
01:35:09.000You say, hey, we're gonna fuck on Periscope.
01:35:14.000And everybody just puts on their Neuralink and their augmented reality headset and they put on their haptic feedback suit which is you know now and you know like iPhone 10 level you know you go back to iPhone once piece of shit haptic feedback 10 it's gonna be incredible it's gonna be silky smooth it's gonna feel like real touch and they're gonna be able to have sex along with you you can have a digital orgy Yeah,
01:35:42.000I think that's coming within 50 years, maybe earlier.
01:35:47.000That's a very conservative guess, yeah.
01:36:26.000Because everybody thinks, oh, well, I saw it on Black Mirror, but I know that it's not even my, like, so I don't have to worry about it in my generation yet, because it's only science fiction.
01:37:48.000Well, you got to play the odds, right?
01:37:50.000I mean, we could be exterminated by a gamma ray burst from like a supernova at any time with no warning.
01:37:59.000But it's pretty unlikely and it hasn't happened.
01:38:03.000Before in the history of life on Earth.
01:38:05.000Right, but it happens constantly all throughout the universe.
01:38:09.000There was a documentary I watched once that freaked me the fuck out.
01:38:13.000It was all about hypernovas and they were talking about when they first started discovering them that they were really actually concerned that there was a war going on in space.
01:38:24.000And then they recognized that all these explosions were happening all day long, and they thought there was a war going on in the cosmos.
01:38:32.000Which is really fascinating, because I think this is like...
01:38:34.000I want to say it was the 60s when they discovered this.
01:38:46.000I mean, when I wrote my piece about the Fermi paradox, which is why don't we have evidence of aliens already, my solution was basically, well, most species that are intelligent that invent technology get wrapped up in video games and virtual reality and sex technology,
01:39:04.000and it just distracts them, and they kind of drop the ball on...
01:40:02.000The desire is always towards every, you know, fill in the time period, we want a new version, a better version with improvements, and we keep getting those.
01:40:11.000And this is what fuels, in many ways, it fuels our desire for materialism.
01:40:18.000Materialism is embodied by technological innovation.
01:40:22.000I mean, what you're always wanting, when you get past jewels, you always want the newest, greatest innovations.
01:40:30.000I think at a certain point, humanity is going to have to bite the bullet and say, we should plan which innovations come first, what happens next.
01:40:40.000And we might even have to have regulation or social taboos that say, we really shouldn't go down that path until we do this other thing first that makes us ready to do that thing in a safer, more rational,
01:41:01.000And competition, especially when it's dealing with different countries that have different human rights laws and standards of behavior and thinking.
01:41:10.000Well, this is a problem with regulating artificial intelligence.
01:41:52.000To the Chinese government, communist dictatorship.
01:41:55.000And of course, it's a lovely system if Huawei phones have backdoors that allow the Chinese to learn a lot about Americans and our culture and our communication.
01:42:10.000That's actually more of a concern to me than like military spying in the strict sense.
01:42:18.000Because I think China has so many people working on cyber warfare that we probably don't even have any idea what their capabilities are.
01:42:28.000But I think if they have insight into like, here's the American psyche and here's how their political thinking works, it will be quite a bit easier to kind of manipulate...
01:42:44.000Because we don't have anything analogous, I think, where, like, is the Pentagon trying to figure out how could we nudge Chinese social media use?
01:42:57.000I'd be surprised if they're doing it well.
01:43:00.000Well, what's fascinating is Google's take on China is that they're willing to censor video or internet searches because they feel like if they don't, China's just going to copy their technology and do it anyway.
01:43:13.000And so this way, at least they're in there.
01:43:16.000I'm like, boy, that's a sketchy way of sort of...
01:43:21.000Absolving yourself of any bad feelings about censorship.
01:43:29.000Because you want to control the market.
01:43:31.000And we're going, oh yeah, well, you know, you can't Google Tiananmen Square.
01:43:35.000You literally can't Google Tiananmen Square.
01:43:43.000It seems like there's a huge difference between China's authoritarian regime and the American political system.
01:43:49.000But I think they're not quite as different as a lot of folks think.
01:43:54.000If you talk to Chinese academics about what can you research and what can you not research, they have different constraints than Americans do.
01:44:04.000But at the pragmatic level, I don't know.
01:44:29.000Is it allowed to or what you can get grants and approval for?
01:44:34.000And is that the same thing as allowed to?
01:44:47.000And in fact, like if I was starting my career again at this point, I wouldn't go into academia.
01:44:52.000If I wanted to understand human behavior, I would go work for Facebook or Google because they have much more data about human behavior than I could ever get as a scientist.
01:46:20.000I think that we're looking at, in terms of Google and Facebook and Twitter and even YouTube, we're looking at these enormous organizations that I don't think they had any idea what they were going to be.
01:46:38.000And I really particularly feel that way about Twitter.
01:46:42.000When Twitter first started out, do you remember how it used to be?
01:46:46.000Like, you would use your at, like, at Jeffrey Miller is enjoying a cup of coffee.
01:47:18.000They opened it so that more people could follow if you wanted to and then celebrities jumped on and then it ran and they started adding the ability.
01:47:26.000People just started doing at Joe Rogan.
01:47:28.000So they added the ability to click that and share it and tag it.
01:48:15.000If anybody ever is like having a breakup or divorce on Facebook, you're like, oh man, now I'm gonna have to listen to stuff for a few months.
01:48:43.000I mean, it is very kind of funny and interesting that nobody predicted 15 years ago exactly how humans would make use of this new technology.
01:48:55.000Nobody in psychology was talking about Twitter is going to radically transform the way that science operates.
01:49:04.000For example, news of failed replications will be spread within three days to everybody in a field.
01:49:13.000And anybody who does scientific misconduct will be...
01:49:19.000Suddenly, like, pushed out within a week.
01:49:22.000Or a new result will be shared globally within 24 hours.
01:51:32.000And the legal issues, the privacy issues, the impact on relationships is...
01:51:39.000Okay, so like we train a lot of PhDs in clinical psychology in my department.
01:51:46.000And a lot of them are going to deal with people and their relationships and their marriages and their conflicts and arguments and whatever.
01:51:52.000Are we training them for a future world where they're going to have to deal with sex bots and virtual reality and...
01:52:00.000New forms of social media and new kinds of basically telepathy that are far in advance of human language.
01:52:17.000I mean, Jamie, you could speak to this.
01:52:18.000You were trained as an audio engineer.
01:52:21.000And now everything's like all the software that was available when you were learning is just useless now.
01:52:28.000Honestly, there wasn't even YouTube when I went to school, so a lot of the, if anyone has questions now, you can learn almost everything I learned in the year program I had in a week, if you needed to.
01:52:43.000You just don't get the hands-on application touching the stuff, but yeah.
01:52:46.000But people that went to school for video editing and all these different systems.
01:53:08.000I mean the amount of financial strain that getting into traditional education puts on people and they get out of school and they're saddled with this debt that is also you can't even absolve it if you declare bankruptcy which is kind of hilarious when you think of the dirty shit that banks do and Wall Street does and all the risks they take and all the chaos that they have created from their shitty decisions that have affected the entire economy and they're absolved but yet some kid Who wanted to get a gender studies degree
01:53:38.000and now owes a quarter million dollars to some fucking half-assed Michigan University.
01:53:49.000I mean, I feel really morally conflicted about working in an industry that I think is pretty exploitative in a lot of ways.
01:53:58.000Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.
01:53:59.000Like, what's the stance that you take?
01:54:02.000I mean, if a kid comes to you and says, you know, I don't know what to do here.
01:54:10.000I mean generally the stance I take, so in a way I'm lucky because I work at a large state public university and tuition is really pretty cheap.
01:54:21.000Do you want to say which one it is so people can take your class?
01:55:02.000The only real advice I can give is take stuff that's going to be useful in your life, your personal life, no matter what career you do.
01:55:11.000So you should take my human sexuality class because you'll probably be a sexual being for the rest of your life and you'll be in relationships of some sort or another.
01:55:23.000You should learn about the history of civilization.
01:55:25.000You should learn about animal behavior and biology.
01:55:29.000and all that stuff but don't expect that like you can major in pharmacy and then get a job as a pharmacist that makes a hundred K out of the gate because that might be automated don't assume you can go to law school and you'll make bank like your dad did because a lot of that like document discovery is being automated Don't assume you're going to be a surgeon because that
01:56:01.000So I just say you should try to get a classical liberal arts education that equips you as a citizen and as a person and as an ethical being.
01:56:14.000And that's the future-proof way to do it.
01:56:19.000And even then, there's a distinct possibility that this education or a superior version of it will be available through some new, unfound, or soon-to-be-discovered form.
01:56:32.000And just expect that you will, if you stay curious throughout your life, you'll be able to learn about as much in every four to six years going forward as you learned in this four to six years of college.
01:56:47.000That's what's interesting is that no one really thinks of university education as being something that equips you for life.
01:56:54.000That you're learning so that you can just, you're just educating yourself and to sort of make your mind more available of possibilities and options and causes and effects and just for your own edification.
01:58:04.000Well, I'd also imagine they're not as filled with angst as an 18-year-old first escape from the family nest and not understanding what to do with their freedom and so many distractions.
01:58:18.000They're there just to educate themselves.
01:59:02.000Okay, so there was a book back in 99 called, I think, The Technology of Orgasm that made the claim that vibrators were first invented in the Victorian era, the late 1800s,
01:59:18.000to help doctors bring their female patients to orgasm to cure, quote, hysteria.
01:59:46.000They didn't really, doctors didn't finger bang their patients?
01:59:48.000There's no evidence at all that that was going on.
01:59:52.000Yeah, because I would think that that would be a thing that gals wouldn't want to let go.
01:59:55.000If there was a place where you could go or the doctor definitely knew how to work it, he'd give you an orgasm, there'd be a line around the block.
02:00:44.000Yeah, I think that's a chapter of the book, maybe.
02:00:48.000So, is this sort of like that killer sperm theory that people still to this day recite, even though there's no evidence whatsoever that sperm has any other...
02:00:58.000Function other than impregnating an egg.
02:01:01.000Yeah, there's a lot of kind of urban myths.
02:02:42.000I think They slightly oversold it, but they did have some proper journal paper publications that were peer-reviewed and that made sense at the time.
02:02:53.000I used to teach that stuff because I believed it.
02:02:57.000What was the conventional way of describing this?
02:03:04.000The conventional story was people think we evolved to be in monogamous long-term pair bonds.
02:03:13.000But here's some evidence that humans do extra pair copulations that they sometimes go outside the relationship.
02:03:23.000If that happens, then there's occasional sperm competition where a woman mates with more than one guy during one ovulatory cycle.
02:03:36.000Ejaculates from two different guys could be in a reproductive tract competing to fertilize the same egg.
02:03:43.000If that happens, the sperm would be under selection to be good at Being fast, fighting off the other sperm, making the reproductive tract more hostile to any guy who comes after you,
02:04:00.000So it's kind of like a way of challenging the assumption of monogamous mating and pointing out women have this sexual freedom and agency that was not fully recognized, and the result is men have to compete more Not just physically,
02:04:18.000and not just for status, but even at this kind of biochemical level.
02:04:26.000We could have been that species, but as it turned out, the rates of extra pair copulation or infidelity are actually pretty low in a lot of societies.
02:04:40.000Like, it's not like 20% of kids are sired by some guy other than their dad.
02:04:53.000In comparison to when all this stuff evolved, we could be talking about humans of 50,000, 60,000 years ago, which is a totally different ballgame.
02:05:47.000So there's a lot of these little things in psychology, these little urban myths that get, you know, learned by professors in grad school and never really tested and then passed on.
02:05:59.000And now that whole house of cards has been tumbling down the last couple of years where, like, almost everything that was taught in a social psychology course now turns out to be kind of bullshit and not...
02:06:18.000The idea that you can use an implicit association test or IAT to sort of register how sexist or racist somebody is, right?
02:06:28.000That was a big exciting thing that social psychologists thought that they had discovered that you can give someone this kind of computer test that measures word associations and that kind of determine, like, how secretly sexist are you?
02:06:45.000And that turned into a whole industry Of giving these tests to everybody in corporations to sort of assess, are you secretly sexist?
02:06:55.000And to sort of wag fingers at them and say, see, you scored positive on this test.
02:07:00.000That means you really are secretly sexist and therefore you need training.
02:07:09.000And this is what happened with Starbucks, right, a few months ago, when they had that issue with the black guys in the Starbucks, and Starbucks didn't handle that well.
02:07:20.000And then there was public blowback, and Starbucks went, okay, we're going to do implicit association training for all of our staff nationwide.
02:07:30.000And all of us in psychology were like, wait, but you guys know that that was all debunked a couple years ago.
02:08:09.000Like, say if you ran a corporation, and like, hey, everybody, Jeffrey's going to come in and teach us how not to be racist.
02:08:16.000You might be racist and not even know it, and Jeffrey's going to show you how.
02:08:21.000I don't really know what they do in implicit bias training.
02:08:23.000I know that they typically will give everybody one of these implicit association tests that purports to show that you have issues and you do have hidden bias.
02:08:34.000Like what would be like a question on one of these tests?
02:08:40.000It's basically, are you faster to associate this stigmatized group with this negative word than you are to associate them with a positive word?
02:08:53.000So you have like a lever in your hand, a button?
02:08:57.000You're pushing, you're seeing words flash on screens and you're pushing buttons and the subtle differences in reaction speed to like the good versus the bad associations are supposed to map like your attitude towards the group in question.
02:10:08.000Is that more of the indoctrination of the walled garden of academia?
02:10:13.000I think it's partly that, but I think it's also like there is pretty overt hostility to centrists, conservatives, libertarians, where you just kind of get these signals, like if you start grad school,
02:11:08.000If you're going to do real social experimental work, if you're really going to try to understand human behavior, it's really got to be done objectively.
02:11:19.000To really get the actual raw data, to really be able to do scientific work where you're explaining things and trying to gauge cause and effect and origins of thought and behavior patterns, you'd have to do it really objectively.
02:11:35.000The same way you would do mathematics.
02:11:37.000You'd have to really look at it cautiously and get your data points in order.
02:11:43.000And if you're doing real good work, you would think that there would be more of an inclination to do good work than it would be to appease whatever tribe you belong to.
02:11:57.000You would hope so, but take political psychology, for example, where the whole point is to understand how people think about politics and moral issues.
02:12:07.000There's a huge liberal bias in political psychology, and you would think they would have corrected that and said, You know what?
02:12:14.000Maybe we're missing something by not, like, we have a conference of 500 people and there's not a single libertarian here, or whatever.
02:12:22.000And they never self-corrected like that.
02:12:25.000They just assumed, well, we're all well-intentioned and we're all smart, so we're going to be able to check our own biases.
02:12:35.000And they completely failed to do that.
02:12:40.000You have all these measures of like political attitudes invented by leftists that kind of demonize conservatives or centrists as basically being mentally ill or stupid or whatever.
02:12:57.000Where do you fit on the political spectrum?
02:13:00.000I'm kind of a centrist libertarian with like a complicated patchwork of views.
02:13:06.000Like I'd be considered extremely far left on certain things and pretty far right on other things.
02:13:31.000I don't want a big expensive state that has high tax burdens.
02:13:41.000I'm in complicated ways kind of pro-family values and pro-natalist and like I think long-term relationships are good, not necessarily conventional ones, but I'm pretty concerned about society figuring out a way to make it possible for ordinary folks to have long-term relationships and raise families.
02:14:04.000Isn't it fascinating that that's a right-wing thing?
02:14:09.000Wouldn't you think that something that would encourage families would be universal?
02:14:16.000I mean, you would think that something that would encourage long-term relationships and monogamous pair bonding and people getting together and working out long-term solutions to keep a family together?
02:14:42.000But they're not that concerned about kind of what you call civilizational sustainability or family sustainability.
02:14:50.000And I don't totally understand why, but you tend to get the right thinking, how is this going to affect my great-grandkids or allow me to have any?
02:15:02.000And the left is more like, how is this going to affect harp seals and polar bears in 100 years?
02:15:10.000And one should sort of imply the other, but...
02:15:29.000When you try to reach a conclusion about a particular political issue based on what you think of the facts and the evidence and the good arguments, and then you do that for each issue, Separately,
02:15:44.000rather than doing kind of tribal affiliation signaling.
02:16:01.000Open to polyamory if you're also concerned about long-term family stability or whatever.
02:16:10.000It's like that's just because the issues I looked into that's the end I ended up supporting.
02:16:19.000Does this go back to what we were talking about earlier that most people really don't have the time to form these opinions or become informed on these opinions and instead they just sort of adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior That seems to be the tribe that they most affiliate with.
02:16:35.000So this way, there's a conglomeration of opinions.
02:17:26.000And then they go, well, I guess it makes sense that if you believe the left about issue A, you should also believe the left about issues B, C through Z. Yeah.
02:17:36.000If you deviate, you get punished for it.
02:17:59.000I mean, it's weird because if you're in a literal tribe, you have your territory and your resources and your mates that you're defending.
02:18:08.000And the other tribe on the other side of the hill has their territory, resources, mates, and kids.
02:18:13.000And you actually, there is a little bit of a zero-sum conflict.
02:18:18.000But if you're all in the same effing country together...
02:18:22.000And you're all paying taxes to the same authority, and you're all partaking in the same economy, and you're all wrestling in the same public sphere of the Netflix that you watch and the Twitter you're engaged with.
02:18:39.000It should be more positive sum than that.
02:18:43.000Well, this is why I wanted to ask you this as an evolutionary psychologist.
02:18:48.000You're obviously far more aware of this than the average person.
02:18:51.000Does this just go back to the way the human brain developed when we were living in small tribes and that there's this inherent need for an us-versus-them mentality that keeps us moving?
02:19:44.000We should try to reduce the risk of nuclear war, right?
02:19:48.000So on some really big issues, we have succeeded pretty well in kind of setting aside the tribalism.
02:19:57.000I think the problem now is there's just so many issues that are coming at us so fast that we don't have time to reach that Social equilibrium on on enough of them quickly enough.
02:20:10.000Well, this is what fascinates me by augmented reality and things like neural link something that's gonna Accentuate the the ability and the power of the human mind where we're gonna be able to take into consideration all of these things In a much like with Elon's term will have more bandwidth to work on them Yeah,
02:20:30.000that just I think the more I think about it.
02:20:33.000I think that this Just quagmire of civilization.
02:20:38.000There's so many different things that we're conflicted about that really a lot of it boils down to a lack of time.
02:20:45.000A lack of time and a lack of also training in how to think.
02:20:50.000One of the things that's most disturbing about education, particularly lower education, is that no one ever tells you how to think.
02:20:58.000They give you information, but they don't tell you, now here's the tricks your brain is playing on you.
02:21:44.000And I wouldn't take that long to learn sort of the top dozen rationality hacks that like the rationalist community or the effective altruism community are very, very good at using and teaching.
02:21:55.000Like just the idea of steel manning an argument where you develop the ability to state the strongest possible version of your opponent's argument in a way that they would go...
02:22:07.000You've said that even better than I could say.
02:22:18.000And if we just taught, you know, kids in high school how to do that, I think that would go a long way towards being able to have these tribal dialogues.
02:22:31.000Or just being able to think quantitatively about political and policy issues.
02:23:17.000So ideally you'd have like a virtual reality system where a kid could go into it and argue about some issue like gun rights or abortion or immigration.
02:23:26.000And some AI would sort of argue against them or pick up out their arguments or go convince me of your position.
02:23:52.000That is a one of the big issues with learning things is making things fun making things somehow or another enthralling and captivating something something that you actually want to absorb and it's one of the great arguments about video games and One of the more interesting things about the previous generation's sort of dismissal of video games is that the dismissal
02:24:22.000was at one point in time, oh, you're just wasting your time.
02:24:24.000And now that dismissal doesn't necessarily hold water because just like professional golfers, professional video game players now make enormous sums of money.
02:24:35.000So it's gotten to this place where, oh, no, this is a viable career, and perhaps you should even be taking your kid to coaching and learning strategy and learning all these various applications that allow you to get better at these things.
02:24:49.000Because there's a real career in this.
02:25:16.000Well, my cohort, a lot of other academics I've talked to, like, hey, did you play Sid Meier's Civilization game a lot in grad school or postdoc?
02:25:26.000And we all go, most of our understanding about the history of technology and, like, world affairs and economics comes from playing that game.
02:26:30.000You go through it, and for this mode, they kind of take all the shooting, not shooting, but stabbing and killing the people, and just walk you through Ancient Egypt, Cairo.
02:28:37.000Education is the kind of tech that we use is several steps behind the state of the art in Hollywood special effects or documentaries or this kind of game.
02:28:51.000So students are kind of disappointed when they come to class.
02:30:06.000That seems almost insurmountable without a complete overhaul of the system.
02:30:10.000I think you need a totally different kind of university and credential that's backed by a significant amount of capital and that's technologically innovative and that's very un-PC in terms of what it teaches and how it teaches.
02:30:28.000Do you think it's possible that that would come along and compete with the standard Yes.
02:31:01.000But he's not doing it through a virtual thing.
02:31:03.000He's doing it through video lectures and then physical lectures.
02:31:08.000It's really fascinating to see the reaction to him and now to Sam Harris who's doing this as well.
02:31:13.000Not the videos, but he's definitely doing the live sort of performances.
02:31:19.000And who would have ever thought that there would be a place where public intellectuals would go and 5,000 people would sell out like that and go to see them like they would go to see fucking Kevin Hart or something.
02:31:34.000Well, you know, when Alfred Kinsey first started doing his sex surveys, and he would go around the country giving lectures, like, he filled up a 4,000-person stadium in UC Berkeley just presenting the first real data on human sexuality back in late 40s,
02:32:57.000He's a funny guy, but that makes it more palatable.
02:33:02.000Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
02:33:04.000You know, this fascinating technology in terms of video games is going to help you absorb information about ancient Egypt, and humor is going to help just make the time go by better and make the whole experience less flat.
02:33:21.000And I think within 10 years, a lot of young people are just going to realize, if I can actually learn more from some alternative system, some franchise of really good gamified instruction,
02:33:37.000plus great presenters who have a sense of humor and are smart and and kind of like heterodox and edgy they're gonna flock to that.
02:33:48.000The main thing is that Business, that franchise would have to provide a credential that actually separates them from people who don't have it and that predicts performance in companies or in the future,
02:34:06.000Because that's the main function of the university right now is it's this credential signaling system.
02:34:13.000And if somebody figures out a way to Make it so that if you've got a degree from this, whatever, Sam Harris University, that that is really a better predictor of doing well in a job or a marriage than a Yale degree.
02:34:35.000Then suddenly the whole business model changes for universities.
02:34:39.000Well, what's really fascinating when you think about the history of education is that our ideas about these gigantic institutions, whether it's Yale or Harvard, is that they've been long established and long proven.
02:34:54.000In terms of people being alive, that ain't shit.
02:34:57.000You know, you go back before that, you only have a certain amount of years where these things were even a real thing.
02:35:05.000Yeah, and I mean the idea that you have a teaching institution that's also a major research institution really only goes back to post-World War II. Like before World War II, Harvard was basically an elite finishing school.
02:35:39.000Well, it's almost like they're setting themselves up.
02:35:41.000I mean, with some of the more ridiculous and preposterous protests that go on, where they're...
02:35:48.000are just trying to silence discussion and even with people like Christina Hoff Summers who's very reasonable and calls herself a factual feminist and they want to call her a Nazi it's like there's no there's no wiggle room you are a one or a zero you are black or white you are evil or good and that's it and this inclination towards silencing people de-platforming screaming them down Halting them and getting them out.
02:36:19.000Well, the only way for people to get an accurate assessment of who's giving the right information is to have a debate, but to have a real debate, like a real debate where people are allowed to express themselves without people in the audience shaking jars of coins and bullhorns and all the nonsense and setting off fire alarms and all these things that these children,
02:36:39.000and I call them children because they're behaving like children, are celebrating.
02:36:42.000You know, I'm sure you're aware of what happened at Evergreen and now Evergreen State University where Brett Weinstein had, you know, his horrible experience with, if you don't know the story, I'll give you the brief synopsis.
02:36:57.000They had a day of absence where it used to be that people of color would stay home so that you would miss them.
02:37:02.000And then he decided to turn around and make white people stay home.
02:37:14.000He won a half a million dollars in a lawsuit, and now the school's most recent enrollment from the freshman class was only 300 people, which is crazy.
02:37:51.000University's acting stupid about that and...
02:37:58.000Denying free speech and denying real debate, that's the existential threat to them.
02:38:03.000That's what's going to blindside them.
02:38:04.000That's what's going to kill their tuition.
02:38:07.000It's stunning how little resistance there is to it.
02:38:12.000Everyone knows that the only way to find out whose ideas are more More well thought out, more valid, more factual.
02:38:23.000The only way to find that out is to have people discuss things together.
02:38:27.000And for you to be able to make an assessment based on the facts, do it in real time, and based on who forms a more compelling argument, who's more reasonable, who's addressing all the flaws and the problems with both sides of this and coming up with a reasonable conclusion.
02:39:16.000I mean, the way I think of it is like, Stand-up comedy, I love, and, you know, you do, and the stuff you can say when you're on stage doing stand-up comedy, university should be at least that open.
02:39:32.000Like, I should be able to lecture in a way that goes even a little bit edgier than most stand-up comedy could go.
02:40:00.000I know a few academics who actually are like amateur stand-up comedians and it's so liberating to them to be able to get up on a stage and say what they really think.
02:40:37.000You know, in physics, it doesn't matter that much because it's not like there's any aspects of quantum mechanics that are that intellectually edgy.
02:40:47.000But, man, in psychology, in the social sciences, in behavioral sciences, in political science, it's really important to be able to be provocative and authentic.
02:41:01.000And we can't in America at the moment.
02:41:06.000Well, which is really what's gonna set up whatever's coming next.
02:41:11.000It's gonna offer some sort of a new New pathway, new avenue that's not restricted.
02:41:17.000Much like what you're seeing with podcasts and blogs in comparison to, or YouTube videos in comparison to what you're getting on regular network television.
02:41:27.000I mean, it was network television, and then cable was the more edgy alternative.
02:41:31.000And then there was pay cable, like HBO. Like, oh my god, I saw Breast.
02:41:35.000And then that got nuttier and nuttier.
02:41:37.000But then it became Netflix, which is a total nutter level.
02:41:41.000And then the internet's the Wild West.
02:41:44.000And they want you to go back to NBC in the 1970s, and you're like, uh, no.
02:42:28.000Whatever form it is, what their career is, is they're an educator.
02:42:32.000Just like Kyle Dunnigan is a comedian, he takes on a new form with this new technology and he becomes a comedian using face-swapping technology.
02:42:40.000These educators are going to recognize that the landscape has changed and there's got to be some sort of a new way of distributing information.
02:42:51.000Yeah, good academics are like just ordinary humans with their curiosity turned up to 11 and who have a passion for discovering new ideas and then sharing them with people.
02:43:02.000And we don't really care how we do that.
02:43:05.000We will do it through lectures or writing books or writing articles or podcasts, whatever, whatever works the best.
02:43:12.000Have you thought about starting a podcast?
02:43:15.000Well, you know, I did a podcast with Tucker Max a couple years ago, The Mating Grounds, where it was sort of related to our mate book that was dating advice for young single guys.
02:43:27.000Well, it was figure out what women authentically actually want and then try to transform yourself in that direction so you're a better boyfriend.
02:43:39.000Women want guys who are Well-informed and know about the world and ambitious and capable.
02:43:48.000Capability is the main thing, like competency, just in as many domains as possible.
02:43:54.000They want guys who are in, like, reasonably good physical shape and good mental health and who can strike the right balance between being kind of nice and agreeable and kind but also being dominant and assertive High status.
02:44:14.000And if that's too much to ask, you become a male feminist.
02:44:27.000You know, when I teach human sexuality, I kind of emphasize this to students, that there's a lot you can do to make yourself more attractive to whoever you want to attract.
02:44:37.000It's not all limited by what traits you're born with.
02:44:41.000What's fascinating is the difference in what a man is attracted to versus what a woman is attracted to.
02:44:46.000And this is something that we just don't like to admit.
02:44:50.000There's a great deal of difference, when it comes to heterosexuals at least.
02:44:56.000I mean, there's a lot of difference when it comes to short-term mating, like what men want if it's a one-night stand versus what women want.
02:45:03.000But if you look at long-term mating, like who people choose for marriage, there's actually quite a bit of convergence there.
02:46:07.000If you fall in love with someone, you want to be a better person for them.
02:46:11.000But it's fascinating that there are these two choices, and I never really thought about it until you brought it up, but they're essentially ways to distribute your DNA. There's pathways.
02:46:22.000One of them is through long-term bonding, and you want a stable, reliable woman who has a lot of self-respect, who chooses you, makes you feel good, she chooses you, and the other one's a freak.
02:46:36.000But the fact that all different kinds of people exist with all different mating strategies shows that each of those strategies historically and evolutionarily has worked.
02:46:58.000There also wouldn't be long-term pair-bonded like You know, family, people, if that hadn't worked.
02:47:05.000So I think it's silly when people are sort of dissing each other's mating strategies as if, well, there's one proper way and then all the other ways are sort of degenerate or reactionary or whatever.
02:47:18.000Well, the other mating strategies produce fucked up kids.
02:47:21.000I mean, you know, the hot one, when you're not going to see the kid, you're going to develop a mess of a child.
02:47:27.000And those are the ones they use to sell cars.
02:47:49.000Well, of course, you get a little bit of circular logic, for example, where you say, This mating strategy, for example, it's a high degree of promiscuity.
02:48:15.000Or is it just a longing for both a father and a mother and a loneliness and a vulnerability that seems to come with being the offspring of a single mother?
02:48:28.000Most people agree that that's not the ideal situation.
02:48:31.000But it does produce unique people, which is really interesting.
02:48:34.000Almost all of my really cool friends came from a fucked up, broken childhood.
02:48:41.000Which, I don't know what to think about that.
02:48:45.000I want my children to be comforted and healthy and never worried about the future.
02:48:52.000But all my friends that grew up in chaotic environments where everyone was poor and fucked up and there's crime and violence and nonsense and chaos, those are the interesting ones.
02:49:10.000Yeah, I mean, so like as a scientist, you got to look at, you know, the whole spectrum of mating and parenting behavior and go, particularly as an evolutionary psychologist, you can say, I might have a moralistic reaction to that.
02:49:30.000If what we consider bad is actually the way most of the other 4,000 species of mammals do it, then Who are really the weird families anyway, right?
02:49:42.000Most mammal families, the dads aren't involved.
02:49:46.000It's single moms raising offspring by themselves under harsh conditions.
02:49:52.000And they're not doing parabons, right?
02:49:55.000Hardly any mammals do parabons apart from like gibbons and a few prosimians, like really small primates.
02:50:05.000I'm just very hesitant to kind of moralize it.
02:50:08.000Right, but is it really fair or even accurate to compare ourselves to things that only live to be like 10?
02:50:15.000I mean, we're talking about enormously complicated emotions, far more so because of communication and societal norms and, you know, comparison.
02:50:27.000There's so much more involved with being a person.
02:50:31.000It's just like if you look back historically, right?
02:50:37.000Premarital sex used to be demonized, right?
02:50:39.000And folks used to say, well, oh my god, you had one or two lovers before you settled down with your husband?
02:50:47.000And you could produce statistical correlations to say, oh, look, premarital sex is correlated with being lower class or criminal or drug use or whatever.
02:51:26.000Yeah, so the technology of contraception made a big difference.
02:51:31.000It used to be thought, okay, if you're gay or lesbian, that is morally degenerate and terrible and invalid and you can't possibly have a long-term relationship or a family or whatever.
02:51:43.000And then we kind of changed that pretty dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years.
02:51:50.000So I just, you know, as a sex researcher, I want people to Be quite cautious about saying that lifestyle is wrong and degenerate and unhealthy and this other lifestyle is better.
02:52:06.000Because in the era of sexbots, right, in virtual reality, deepfakes and whatever, who knows what's going to happen?
02:53:05.000I mean, the number of people who are in open relationships or poly relationships is larger than the number of people who are gay or lesbian, certainly.
02:53:38.000And is this just an acceptance of the instincts that people have to be non-monogamous?
02:53:44.000The acceptance that jealousy is holding people back from experiencing different things?
02:53:52.000Yeah, I think it's only in the 90s that you got a coherent subculture that said, if you're not going to be monogamous, here's the honest, ethical, open way to do it.
02:54:05.000And it kind of developed a bunch of social norms about how you manage these relationships.
02:54:11.000In a way that's different from cheating or different from swingers or different from hippie love communes or prostitutes.
02:54:21.000I mean this is a longer discussion than we have time for probably today.
02:54:25.000But as a researcher, it's a fascinating culture because it's people who are trying to find ways to kind of hack their jealousy and manage it better.
02:54:37.000And it's also a new method of social networking, right?
02:54:41.000Where you're not drawing a sharp line between who you're sexually connected to and who you're socially connected to.
02:54:50.000So people who are into poly tend to have sort of sexual friendship professional networks that are much broader than a lot of people tend to have.
02:55:02.000I think that's actually a little bit more similar to what Christopher Ryan was talking about with Sex at Dawn.
02:55:12.000I think in most prehistoric tribes, anybody who wasn't a close relative, who was sort of mating age, you probably would have had sex with sooner or later, at least once.
02:55:24.000Even if you both had a sort of stable pair bond.
02:55:31.000And this is probably an incredibly controversial subject at the academic level.
02:55:38.000Well, when I taught my course on polyamory and open sexuality last year, it got a little bit of controversy.
02:56:31.000This stuff is really hard to do for this and this and this reason and people really only succeed at it if they have certain kinds of traits and abilities and communication skills and If they don't, they crash and burn and it doesn't work.
02:56:50.000It was also like, here's the pros and cons, but also, as a social trend, this is a big deal.
02:56:59.000And if you're going into one of the caring professions, like medicine, nursing, social work, clinical psych, you damn well better know about this because a lot of people do it.
02:57:10.000And if you're giving advice to a couple, It's also sort of,
02:57:31.000In terms of how people bond with each other, how people form communities.
02:57:39.000And this is, in particular, in today's climate, in today's society, with the ability to distribute this information and discuss these things in groups.
02:57:51.000It's a different world in terms of just collecting data and comparing experiences.
02:58:01.000I mean, I think nobody who's polyamorous or in an open relationship can pretend that, yeah, we really know how to make this work very well, and here's the best practices, and here's all the hacks, and anybody can do it.
02:58:18.000No, we're absolutely not at that point.
02:58:20.000It's also brave to talk about because it immediately puts you into this potential pervert place.
02:58:57.000But I think we have a professional responsibility, you know, if you're a behavioral scientist, to understand what are people doing out there, what is working and what isn't, and how do you make it work better?
02:59:16.000And the people who ignore it, I think it's kind of like if you were like a psychologist in the early 70s, right, when the gay and lesbian rights movement was starting.
02:59:26.000If you'd sort of said, oh, God, I hope that'll blow over.
02:59:32.000We should keep it as a mental disorder in, you know, the DSM, right?
02:59:39.000I feel like poly is sort of at the same place where...
02:59:44.000Yeah, there are reactionaries who go, that's just gross and disgusting, just like people in the early 70s would have said homosexuality is gross and disgusting.
02:59:56.000Well, it's brave to discuss right now.
03:00:00.000I mean, it may very well be like, you know, when you're talking about the gay and lesbian revolution of the 1970s.
03:00:06.000It may be 40 years from now, it's just like that.
03:00:22.000Somebody's got to research it and talk about it.
03:00:26.000And I think people should read Sacks of Dawn by Christopher Ryan, but that shouldn't be the final word about human evolution and polyamory.
03:01:25.000But I don't think there's a good book yet that's actually savvy about evolutionary psychology and human sexuality and polyamory and how it's all going to play out in the next 10 years or so.
03:01:39.000And this is why you're contemplating writing it yourself.