The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

00:00:08.000 Boom! 0.99

00:00:08.000 And we're live, ladies and gentlemen. 0.99

00:00:10.000 Heather Hying.

00:00:12.000 Brett Weinstein.

00:00:13.000 I didn't screw it up this time.

00:00:15.000 Nope, you got it right.

00:00:15.000 Got to get that Steen-Stein thing messed up with you.

00:00:18.000 Got to get it right.

00:00:19.000 I apologize.

00:00:19.000 It's a bad time to get those messed up.

00:00:21.000 It is.

00:00:21.000 Thanks for having us.

00:00:22.000 Thank you for being here, both of you.

00:00:24.000 I'm very excited about this conversation.

00:00:25.000 Really excited about it, too.

00:00:27.000 A little bit nervous in one way, but pretty jazzed.

00:00:30.000 Well, I think it's good to be nervous about it.

00:00:32.000 What we're talking about, folks, what we would like to talk about is...

00:00:36.000 Why don't you explain it?

00:00:38.000 Well, I think Heather and I have been on an interesting adventure.

00:00:43.000 We are evolutionary biologists.

00:00:45.000 We trained with some of the finest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, and we have been teaching.

00:00:52.000 Heather taught for 15 years.

00:00:54.000 I taught for 14 years at Evergreen, and we spent a lot of time Dealing with students and trying to help them see how clarifying an evolutionary viewpoint is with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we function and how we interact and that was very Enjoyable to us and it was very empowering to students to discover that there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a person and we're now watching the conversation

00:01:25.000 out in civilization about sex and gender devolve into an absurdity and on the one hand that's kind of frightening.

00:01:33.000 I mean for us it's not directly an issue.

00:01:37.000 We're happily married and so Well, we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days, and our kids are too young to be navigating it yet.

00:01:47.000 Maybe this will all be clarified by the time they're involved in dating, but we also have a tremendous number of millennial friends, former students, who are trying to navigate this stuff and finding it difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that Frankly,

00:02:05.000 there's a much better alternative if one can stand to think in evolutionary terms, if we can really look at ourselves as we are, as we came to be through evolutionary forces, then actually we can improve the landscape for romance and dating a great deal.

00:02:26.000 But we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms that actually aren't right.

00:02:33.000 What is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now?

00:02:38.000 Well, I think we'd love to see a third way.

00:02:42.000 So they're the pre-moderns, as it were, who have a very traditionalist conservative approach. 0.98

00:02:48.000 Trying to get this sucker up close to you. 1.00

00:02:49.000 Sorry. 0.98

00:02:50.000 Sorry about that.

00:02:51.000 No worries.

00:02:51.000 Yeah, perfect.

00:02:52.000 The pre-moderns who have a very traditional conservative approach to gender roles, to sex, to relationship.

00:02:58.000 And there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject a lot of that.

00:03:03.000 And then there are the postmoderns who want to throw out everything, want to throw out everything that evolution handed us, and in the meantime, pretend that it didn't happen, right?

00:03:13.000 Pretend that it's not even based on reality.

00:03:14.000 And there's a third way, and maybe we need to call it modern as opposed to pre- or post-modern, but there's a third way to navigate what evolution has given us, what we can change, what we can't change, and how to actually recover some of...

00:03:31.000 You know the sexiness and sex and the love and love and the romance and romance and you know understand that human beings are what we are from Not just a hundred years back, but a thousand and ten thousand a hundred million years back.

00:03:45.000 We've had sex Since you both taught at a university level you you've been around these students and you've seen this sort of post-modernist movement Gain steam.

00:03:59.000 What do you think is the cause of it?

00:04:01.000 Like, what is the reason why people are projecting this sort of distorted idea that there's no differences between men and women and that all the differences in the genders are all, it's all propaganda or cultural or...

00:04:15.000 So I think it actually arises from a relatively simple cause, that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught.

00:04:26.000 We detect there's something not right about the way civilization is structured.

00:04:30.000 We can tell that there's nobody really at the helm.

00:04:34.000 And you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that to them is incredibly glaring, something that just absolutely needs to be solved.

00:04:43.000 And so what they do is they look at that issue and they say, what would we have to say in order for that issue to be fully addressed?

00:04:52.000 And the problem is that we're dealing with a complex system.

00:04:55.000 And if you optimize for any one solution, you cause a catastrophe across all of the other things that it's connected to.

00:05:03.000 And if you're not focused on those unintended consequences, you tend not to understand why people are resistant to your solution.

00:05:11.000 So, for example, let's deal with the transgender issue.

00:05:15.000 For the transgender community, and I don't, you know, this is not a monolithic community.

00:05:20.000 I actually know quite a number of people within it who have a heterodox position.

00:05:24.000 But in general, there's a sense that it is disrespectful not to simply recognize anybody who has decided to transition as a full-fledged member of the sex to which they have moved.

00:05:38.000 That seems right.

00:05:40.000 And if you are focused on the humanitarian side of the question, Maybe it even is right.

00:05:47.000 But the problem is, if you say a person who identifies as a particular sex is that sex, suddenly you've actually caused a whole bunch of consequences that you weren't thinking of over in a biology class,

00:06:02.000 over in the prison system.

00:06:05.000 I mean, is it true that somebody who says that they are female gets to go to a women's prison? 1.00

00:06:11.000 Do we want to put Violent sex offenders in a women's prison because they declare themselves to be female. 1.00

00:06:19.000 So not tracking the consequences that were not in your view when you decided on a particular solution is the reason that so many people have signed up for these really absurd notions.

00:06:33.000 And part of what I hope we will get to today is that There is a principle at the core of understanding all complex adaptive systems, and it is diminishing returns.

00:06:46.000 And diminishing returns sounds kind of arcane.

00:06:49.000 It has too close an association with economics where it was first outlined.

00:06:54.000 But the message of diminishing returns is that you can very often get 90% of a solution that you want and not disrupt other things unduly.

00:07:06.000 But if you say, I want 100% of the solution to this problem, you'll cause a catastrophe.

00:07:11.000 So getting people to realize, don't shoot for the utopia in which the problem you're talking about is 100% solved.

00:07:18.000 If you can accept a 90% solution, then you can have a whole bunch of other things that you don't even realize you're using.

00:07:24.000 In defense of people that would try to go for 100%, though, isn't it one of those things where, like, if you would negotiate, if you want $100, you ask for $150?

00:07:36.000 Unfortunately, I mean, I think you're identifying something correct, that in part, the positions that we hear being deployed are not an honest reflection of the beliefs of many of the people who are espousing them.

00:07:49.000 They are a negotiating tactic.

00:07:51.000 But we can't do that with biology.

00:07:55.000 You can't negotiate with biology.

00:07:57.000 Biology is what it is and then we can talk about which parts of it are amenable to being changed.

00:08:02.000 And as Heather pointed out, we're not advocating for a return to some traditional way of interacting between the sexes.

00:08:10.000 We're advocating for an enlightened way that takes advantage of the freedoms we have that our ancestors didn't and Tries to navigate the hazards that we're stuck with.

00:08:21.000 So you can't negotiate with biology.

00:08:25.000 You really ought to listen to what it is that nature is telling you and then say, all right, what does that leave open?

00:08:32.000 Where can we shift things?

00:08:35.000 But if you're going to require that we lie about what's true biologically in order to navigate to a solution, I guarantee you it will be unstable in the end.

00:08:43.000 Yeah, the zeitgeist has begun to include such nonsense as chromosomes exist on a continuum.

00:08:50.000 You know, there are X chromosomes and there are Y chromosomes.

00:08:52.000 I haven't heard that one.

00:08:53.000 One of our children just heard that at his school.

00:08:56.000 What did they mean by on a continuum?

00:08:59.000 Who even knows?

00:09:00.000 I don't think they meant anything.

00:09:02.000 I think what they intended to do was carve out freedom from a biological truth.

00:09:07.000 And so if you say chromosomes are on a continuum, then it's very hard to disagree with that because it doesn't mean anything that we can unpack.

00:09:14.000 Well, I would say it's actually really easy to disagree with it and say no.

00:09:17.000 You know, gametes aren't on a continuum.

00:09:19.000 Sperm is sperm and eggs are eggs.

00:09:20.000 Sorry.

00:09:21.000 Discreet.

00:09:22.000 Two of them, right?

00:09:23.000 Chromosomes also not on a continuum, at least in mammals.

00:09:27.000 Sex, yeah, a continuum.

00:09:29.000 Intersex is real, but it's strongly bimodal. 0.98

00:09:32.000 There are males and there are females and there are a few people.

00:09:36.000 It's rare but real that there are intermediate phenotypes.

00:09:40.000 And gender is even more of a continuum, but still strongly bimodal. 0.52

00:09:45.000 Have you folks heard about that new crayfish that they're battling in Europe?

00:09:48.000 There's a giant crayfish in Europe that's female only and essentially is a clone.

00:09:55.000 They reproduce by cloning.

00:09:57.000 So they don't need a male partner and they're going crazy. 0.84

00:10:01.000 And there's a lot of them.

00:10:02.000 For your first two sentences there, it sounded like there was a giant crayfish descending on europe it was a female and she's mad she's tired all these lobster dinners and that's going to work for a while right and like asexuality has actually evolved in a few lineages a few vertebrate lineages there's some lizards that are asexual and it's all females and it goes great until the environment changes because if you're cloning yourself you your children are going to experience exactly

00:10:32.000 are going to be exactly the same thing that you were so If you were a good fit for your environment, the next environment better be the same or else your kids aren't going to be a good fit.

00:10:40.000 So my feeling is that crayfish, I haven't followed the story a lot, but that crayfish is going to do terrifically moving into exactly the landscapes that it first mutated into existence in.

00:10:51.000 And if you change the landscape a bit, it's going to stop doing so well.

00:10:54.000 I think they just farm it for food if it's tasty.

00:10:57.000 We don't have to worry about them breeding.

00:10:59.000 Just get a ton of them together.

00:11:00.000 Crayfish are delicious.

00:11:01.000 They are delicious.

00:11:02.000 I hope this is a good tasting variety.

00:11:04.000 It's free food!

00:11:06.000 It's kind of crazy.

00:11:08.000 Heather and I were talking before the podcast started about, I think, a very important point when it comes to a lot of these either progressive or right-wing issues is that people tend to be extremely tribal and what they're really concerned with is winning.

00:11:23.000 It becomes a competition of us versus them.

00:11:26.000 It becomes our side versus their side and they tend to exploit weaknesses and then attack to score points and all ideas of being honest intellectually or looking at things objectively kind of go out the window.

00:11:42.000 You ignore facts that diminish your position or your team's position and highlight things even if they're not real that would diminish the other side's position.

00:11:53.000 This is a real problem that humans have with arguments, with being tribal, with being on different sides.

00:12:00.000 Forget about tribes.

00:12:01.000 We see it with people, where when there's a certain time when you see people arguing, there's a certain point where the argument has deteriorated to a competition.

00:12:11.000 And it's no longer about what you're actually discussing.

00:12:13.000 It's about who can win.

00:12:14.000 This is what science is for.

00:12:17.000 Science ought to be indifferent.

00:12:19.000 When it's done well, it is indifferent to who's the stronger team.

00:12:23.000 It should really just tell you what's true.

00:12:24.000 And in fact, the reason to use science is to correct for biases.

00:12:31.000 So Eric and Heather and I have a phrase that is just shorthand for something, which is, bad faith changes everything.

00:12:41.000 I think.

00:13:06.000 With respect to values that we all share or something like that.

00:13:09.000 So what you're describing is a very common state.

00:13:13.000 It is a lower, less capable state than a good faith environment where people who may disagree intensely agree on the basic rules and the desirability of figuring out what's true.

00:13:25.000 And so maybe that's part of...

00:13:26.000 What we can do here is try to point to where the good faith conversation can get to that the bad faith conversation is incapable of getting to.

00:13:36.000 The value, really.

00:13:38.000 Yeah, I think that's a giant point.

00:13:40.000 It really is.

00:13:41.000 And it's really something that I would hope more people would adopt going into the future.

00:13:46.000 Stop connecting yourself to these ideas and just let these ideas exist on their own and examine them objectively and rely on science.

00:13:56.000 Rely on actual science to formulate your, when you're talking about biological issues.

00:14:02.000 When I say science is the answer to this, it's not necessarily that we should accept, no one should accept the findings of science just at face value, but a scientific approach is, I've got this idea.

00:14:15.000 What would have to be true if that were true?

00:14:18.000 And how can I possibly prove it wrong?

00:14:20.000 And you work harder and harder and harder to prove it wrong.

00:14:23.000 And if you can't, then you have greater and greater and greater confidence that maybe it's right.

00:14:27.000 And so this is what we don't see in bad faith arguments, is no one is trying to prove themselves wrong.

00:14:33.000 And that sounds backwards the first time you hear it, but...

00:14:37.000 If you try to actually demonstrate that your own cherished beliefs are wrong and you can't do it, you have pretty good confidence at the end of that, and there is no actual end, but the longer you've gone, you have pretty good confidence that actually, I'm probably seeing something real here.

00:14:51.000 I've asked myself, I've asked my friends, I've asked my enemies, is this thing right?

00:14:55.000 And you know, in an actual formal scientific setting, you do an experiment, you run the data, you do the analysis, but Is it right or is it not?

00:15:04.000 Let's see if I can prove it's not, even though I really think it is.

00:15:08.000 It's a really good test.

00:15:09.000 So you also get something, there's a bonus that comes with it, which is, I don't know what else to say.

00:15:15.000 It's super awesome.

00:15:16.000 Which is, if you've tried to take your cherished idea, some hypothesis that you've come up with, and you've tried 16 different ways to show that it's wrong, and you keep failing, Well, every one of those things you did to see whether what you thought was true is actually false now prepares you when somebody now challenges you and they say,

00:15:35.000 oh, but you haven't thought of this.

00:15:37.000 Well, you have.

00:15:38.000 You've been through it 16 different ways and that gives you the ability to navigate almost anything that's thrown at you because you have taken on the role of being your own harshest critic in order to make sure that what's left at the end of that process is really robust.

00:15:55.000 The other thing that I want to insert here is that I think, A, I don't want to be put in the position of defending everything that's been published in the scientific literature as true because it looks like science.

00:16:08.000 A lot of it isn't.

00:16:09.000 A lot of what's published in the scientific literature is not valid.

00:16:13.000 The methodology does not establish what people claim it does.

00:16:15.000 And that's a big hazard for people like Heather and myself because you have to sort the wheat from the chaff in order to figure out what to defend and what to be agnostic about.

00:16:25.000 But I do think those of us who more or less get the story of what, let's say, human sexuality is about at a scientific level, and there's still a lot of mystery, but there's an awful lot that those of us who have studied it are in agreement about, and civilization is not yet on the same page with those of us who have looked at it scientifically.

00:16:45.000 One thing we have failed to do, I think, is to articulate what you will get in exchange for signing up for a scientific worldview on this topic.

00:16:57.000 People do not realize that a scientific worldview is actually the thing that empowers you to navigate your own love life in an intelligent way.

00:17:08.000 It will let you...

00:17:09.000 It's a lot more fun than it sounds when you say it that way.

00:17:11.000 Yeah, it's, well, you know, there are all of these famous arguments about unweaving the rainbow or, you know, somebody challenged Feynman that he was the kind of guy who would take apart a flower and destroy its beauty in order to figure out how it worked.

00:17:27.000 This is the trope.

00:17:28.000 Science will destroy beauty.

00:17:29.000 Right.

00:17:29.000 And it's not true.

00:17:30.000 No.

00:17:31.000 It's not true.

00:17:31.000 You will get a lot of value.

00:17:33.000 You will waste less of your time on people that you shouldn't be interested in if you understand what game they're playing, even if they don't understand it.

00:17:41.000 Where do you think that argument is coming from?

00:17:43.000 The argument that science would disturb beauty?

00:17:45.000 Well, I think there's a way in which the...

00:17:49.000 I hate to borrow a chemical analogy here, but there's something called the activation energy of a chemical reaction, which is the energy necessary to get it to happen.

00:17:59.000 And the activation energy for understanding Your own self, your sexual self even, as a product of evolution that is wired in a particular way for particular objectives that may or not be relevant to your conscious person's objective,

00:18:18.000 that that takes a little bit.

00:18:22.000 It doesn't take forever.

00:18:23.000 But you know, if we were teaching a class, it might take Three or four weeks full-time with one set of students before people who had walked through the door not thinking in those terms at all about their own love life could begin to spot how this actually maps onto what they have experienced and what it suggests they might.

00:18:45.000 Do differently.

00:18:46.000 So I think the answer to your question is, it's not cheap to get through the door.

00:18:51.000 In the end, it's an absolute bargain.

00:18:54.000 What it buys you is so valuable compared to what it costs you to learn it.

00:18:59.000 But it doesn't come immediately.

00:19:01.000 It's not like, you know, an aphorism that you can adopt and suddenly your life functions.

00:19:08.000 What it begins to do as people start to realize the power of an evolutionary take on sex and gender or whatever it is we're talking about is it opens up doors to inquiry and it makes it allows people to make sense of their lives and then it becomes more beautiful and more powerful and once people have seen how you can use these evolutionary tools and and the knowledge that evolution the study of evolution has given us like Male and female are universals.

00:19:36.000 Like, male and female have existed for over 100 million years.

00:19:40.000 And everywhere it shows up, it looks really similar.

00:19:44.000 And yes, there are exceptions all over the place.

00:19:47.000 There's amazing ways that, you know, like this crayfish, that you have, you know, a sexually reproducing ancestor that's gone asexual, or you have sexual reversal in some species.

00:19:57.000 You have hyenas, which have a very strange system going on.

00:20:00.000 Lots and lots of these exceptions, but the truth underlying them is always the same.

00:20:05.000 And that's freeing.

00:20:06.000 To me, that's beautiful.

00:20:08.000 Can we try it with the crayfish here?

00:20:09.000 Sure.

00:20:10.000 So, looking at this system, you've got a creature that is capable of going asexual and then spreading very rapidly. 0.89

00:20:18.000 We have lots of examples of creatures that do that, right?

00:20:21.000 So for example, dandelions.

00:20:23.000 Dandelions look like a regular old flower, but they're not.

00:20:27.000 Dandelions are what's called apomyctic.

00:20:28.000 And apomyctic means that they go through mitosis instead of meiosis, and they produce a seed that isn't the product of sex.

00:20:38.000 And that seed disperses as if it was the product of sex.

00:20:41.000 And so this does something for dandelions.

00:20:43.000 It allows them To take over a landscape from one individual because it can just spread and spread and spread without having to find mates.

00:20:51.000 It's very effective.

00:20:52.000 But what we see in systems like, Heather mentioned, whiptail lizards.

00:20:57.000 Whiptail lizards, some populations, are asexual.

00:21:01.000 And it's a really cool system, actually.

00:21:04.000 I don't know if Jamie wants to bring up a picture of...

00:21:07.000 Whiptail lizards.

00:21:07.000 But in the asexual populations, females can, I believe they clone themselves, right?

00:21:13.000 It's more or less, yeah.

00:21:15.000 So the reason we're talking about that is there are two different ways they could go about it.

00:21:20.000 They could make two gametes and fuse them, or they can clone themselves.

00:21:23.000 They're effectively clonal.

00:21:26.000 You look at that system and you say, well, how can a population abandon sex and be able to tolerate change?

00:21:34.000 Well, it has to do one thing, which is it has to have some place to borrow genetic variation from.

00:21:40.000 So we see some very curious behaviors in these whiptails.

00:21:43.000 Females mount each other. 1.00

00:21:45.000 So basically you have... 0.76

00:21:49.000 You have females who stimulate each other to produce eggs that are not the product of sex, right? 1.00

00:21:57.000 So they retain sexual behavior.

00:22:00.000 So they do the pseudocopulation, and whether they're playing the female role or the male role in the pseudocopulation depends on their status in the ovulatory cycle.

00:22:08.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:22:09.000 But the kicker is, and you know, Heather and I were actually teaching from this and trying to figure out how the system could possibly be stable long term, and what we predicted actually was that they had to be borrowing genetic variation periodically,

00:22:25.000 and it turns out that this is true.

00:22:27.000 How do they borrow genetic variation?

00:22:29.000 Well, the populations at the edge of these clonal populations are sexual.

00:22:33.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:22:36.000 Wow!

00:22:37.000 That's us in the future.

00:22:38.000 That's what everyone's hoping for.

00:22:39.000 Some people are hoping for that.

00:22:41.000 I'm not hoping for it.

00:22:42.000 Okay, so that's one way.

00:22:44.000 But then we've got another one.

00:22:46.000 I mean, I'm sure your audience isn't thrilled to be talking about lizards necessarily, but okay, aphids.

00:22:53.000 Aphids are asexual. 1.00

00:22:55.000 Well, how do they get away with being asexual? 0.94

00:22:56.000 That seems like everything we know about sex being so valuable because of its role in producing genetic variation.

00:23:03.000 What are the aphids doing?

00:23:05.000 Oh, the aphids are sexual once a season, right?

00:23:09.000 So they're asexual within the season and at the end of the season they breed sexually.

00:23:13.000 And so the point is all of these exceptions Are exceptions that prove the rule.

00:23:18.000 The universality of sex in complex animals is broken in certain cases, but each case that it's broken has a way of recovering the value of sex.

00:23:31.000 Can I go back to lizards briefly?

00:23:33.000 One more lizard example.

00:23:34.000 Komodo dragons, which are the biggest monitor lizards.

00:23:37.000 There's evidence from, I think it's just zoos, that occasionally there's virgin birth, right?

00:23:43.000 Occasionally females can produce young without sex.

00:23:46.000 So occasionally individuals will go asexual, which, right?

00:23:50.000 Wow, it's not something that big.

00:23:52.000 That's crazy.

00:23:53.000 It's very rare in vertebrates at all, and where it does happen, it tends to be lizards, and it's still pretty rare as far as we know, but really, you know, for the most part, it would only be in zoos that we would know for the most part.

00:24:03.000 But the hypothesis is that this is an adaptation for, and these are big swimming lizards that are living on these islands, they're relatively close together, they can swim between these islands, that having arrived at an island where there's none else that looks like you,

00:24:23.000 It probably makes sense to clone yourself at that point.

00:24:25.000 And actually, I think they're not clonal, they're parthenogenetic, but it doesn't matter.

00:24:29.000 If it requires two individuals to make that swim successfully in order to populate a new island, the chances are much lower than if it just takes one.

00:24:38.000 And so you can get sex switched on and off, even in Komodo dragons.

00:24:43.000 That's crazy.

00:24:44.000 Well, but it isn't.

00:24:46.000 Think about how many times one of these animals must have crossed one of these water barriers and been alone, and where it had an island that it was perfectly ecologically capable of exploiting, it had no way of making offspring, right?

00:25:00.000 That's a terrible price to pay in Darwinian terms if the solution is, well, let's suspend the requirement of sex for a generation, produce some offspring, and then we can reinstate it.

00:25:10.000 So, really...

00:25:12.000 More than likely, this happens a lot more than we think.

00:25:15.000 And because we assume that sex is the explanation for vertebrates when we see them, when we encounter them in the wild, we don't think, is this individual the result of a clonal event?

00:25:24.000 Or is this individual the result of sex?

00:25:26.000 We assume sex. 0.87

00:25:27.000 And it's only when somebody puts them in a zoo in isolation that we can be 100% certain there is no way this animal got fertilized by another animal.

00:25:38.000 And that's when we start asking the question.

00:25:39.000 But now that we've started to spot these things, we're going to see them more and more frequently because so many animals over evolutionary history have been caught in a situation that was paradise except for the fact that there wasn't a second one.

00:25:52.000 That is incredibly fascinating, though, that they can just switch on and off like that.

00:25:57.000 Well, and if you think about it, I mean, monitor lizards are interesting because they are the...

00:26:05.000 People say they are the most mammal-like of lizards.

00:26:09.000 Yeah, people report, people who work on monitor lizards say you can look into their eyes, and it's a little bit like looking into a dog's eyes.

00:26:14.000 They've been paying attention too much to lizards. 0.70

00:26:16.000 They're crazy.

00:26:17.000 Could be. 0.99

00:26:18.000 Those things have dead eyes. 0.95

00:26:19.000 Well, most lizards do, but these animals give you a different impression.

00:26:23.000 But here's the thing.

00:26:24.000 Yeah, but the point is, more than geckos, more than whiptails, more than other lizards.

00:26:27.000 Right, right.

00:26:28.000 Maybe they're just bigger.

00:26:29.000 Well, they're big and long-lived.

00:26:31.000 They're giving you more information out of that big eyeball.

00:26:34.000 Well, there's some little monitor lizards, though, and people say the same thing about the little ones.

00:26:38.000 But, if you think about it, what ought to trigger this switch?

00:26:45.000 Profound loneliness, right?

00:26:48.000 Profound loneliness would cause it.

00:26:50.000 So it's impossible to say whether any lizards, including monitors, have something like loneliness.

00:26:57.000 Although in other cases, when we look at elephants, we see clear evidence of grief.

00:27:03.000 And we know that elephants didn't get grief from a shared ancestor with us that had grief.

00:27:07.000 They separately evolved grief because they're So it's not impossible that loneliness might not feel exactly the same to a monitor lizard, but if it had a value to detect how lonely you were and then to trigger a physiological response that kick-started the ability to be evolutionarily successful,

00:27:30.000 that we would see that kind of thing.

00:27:32.000 So I would love to see somebody try to figure out whether there was a cognitive trigger that looked like loneliness in monitor lizards.

00:27:40.000 That actually caused the switch and if you could then maybe trigger it.

00:27:44.000 Wow.

00:27:45.000 So like something that you could actually map in an fMRI or something on the brain?

00:27:50.000 Like you could look at their little brain and see loneliness?

00:27:53.000 Sure.

00:27:54.000 I mean...

00:27:54.000 It hits a certain frequency and then an egg just...

00:27:58.000 Starts forming?

00:27:58.000 Something like, I mean, you know, there would be some cascade, but yeah, there'd be some perception that I haven't seen another one like me in a very long time, and then it would cause some sort of a shift in behavior.

00:28:08.000 Maybe it would cause searching behavior, and searching wouldn't net any evidence.

00:28:12.000 There's no evidence.

00:28:13.000 You know, you don't necessarily have to see another individual to know that they're around.

00:28:17.000 But anyway, there'd be some cascade of things, and then maybe some neurotransmitter would trigger the release of a hormone that would cause...

00:28:26.000 But it would clearly be limited to females.

00:28:28.000 In general, although I don't...

00:28:30.000 Go ahead.

00:28:31.000 Because the egg has all the cytoplasmic material necessary to make another cell, and sperm doesn't.

00:28:38.000 Right.

00:28:38.000 So, you know, sperm and egg are just different.

00:28:41.000 And eggs can't move, and so they're stuck where they are.

00:28:44.000 They have to be found.

00:28:47.000 But they have all the cytoplasm and sperm really fast, but doesn't have any of the material necessary to make a cell.

00:28:54.000 A sperm can't mature into a zygote, unfertilized, because it doesn't have mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum and all the other stuff of a cell.

00:29:01.000 So they're doing different things, just like male and female are different strategies, egg and sperm are different strategies. 0.98

00:29:06.000 But there are certain animals, certain things that can switch sexes.

00:29:12.000 Yes.

00:29:13.000 Absolutely.

00:29:13.000 Which organisms can do that?

00:29:16.000 Well, there's lots of reef fish would be the big cluster of them. 0.77

00:29:20.000 I've heard about ocean fish.

00:29:21.000 Are there land creatures that do that?

00:29:24.000 There's one frog where there's a little bit of evidence, but it seems it may be an artifact of a zoo setting, effectively, which might mean that it can happen in the wild and we just haven't seen it, but it's well known in reef fish.

00:29:35.000 There are a lot of species of reef fish, and it goes both ways.

00:29:40.000 It's called sequential hermaphroditism, where in some species everyone's born female, and then some transition into males.

00:29:48.000 And in some it's the other way around.

00:29:50.000 You transition from male to female.

00:29:51.000 There's some species where you can go both ways.

00:29:52.000 And it depends on the sex ratio around you and sort of what strategies there aren't enough of.

00:29:57.000 So male and female are strategies. 0.99

00:30:00.000 And if you are the most dominant female in a landscape and the male just died, it makes sense to turn into a male so that you can now fertilize all those females.

00:30:11.000 So that's the sequential, you know, where one individual will transition between sexes.

00:30:17.000 But there are also cases like turtles, where there's no chromosomal sex determination, and the sex is effectively chosen by the environmental conditions, by temperature in the nest.

00:30:30.000 And so one individual lives its entire life within a sex, but that sex was not dictated when the egg was laid.

00:30:35.000 It was dictated by the environment the egg created.

00:30:39.000 Isn't that the case with crocodiles as well?

00:30:41.000 Crocodiles and in fact most every vertebrate that we know except for mammals and birds.

00:30:46.000 And in mammals and birds it's a different evolution of genetic sex determination.

00:30:49.000 So most lizards, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, turtles, teleost fish have some kind of environmental sex determination.

00:30:58.000 And actually, as long as we're going down this road, I promise you there's some place cool to go with humans here.

00:31:02.000 This is cool already.

00:31:03.000 Okay, good.

00:31:04.000 I never know.

00:31:05.000 I never know how interested people are on the animal side of things.

00:31:08.000 So, in human beings, in mammals, and not all mammals, the monotremes are exceptional in this regard.

00:31:18.000 Those are what kid does in platypus.

00:31:20.000 Yeah, there are only three species left on Earth.

00:31:22.000 That's a remnant of an early branch on the mammal tree.

00:31:25.000 But in most mammals, like us, we have chromosomal sex determination, and males are XY, and females are XX. In birds, the situation is exactly reversed, as it is in butterflies.

00:31:41.000 So what that tells you is that to the extent that...

00:31:43.000 So by reversed, what brett means is, and we just use different letters just so as not to be confused, Males are so-called homogametic, or WW, whereas in mammals, females are homogametic, XX, and in birds, males are homogametic, WW, and females are WZ,

00:31:58.000 which means that female birds can't clone themselves as the way that, say, a Komodo dragon could. 0.89

00:32:06.000 But the reason I raise it is because we have a sense of male and female that, I think it's just wrong, that male and female are actually akin to a niche, that these are roles that the universe discovers periodically because they make sense,

00:32:27.000 right?

00:32:31.000 It's a convergence on a set of behaviors that fit well together.

00:32:36.000 Once you have a small mobile gamete, you tend to acquire the traits that go along with maleness.

00:32:43.000 And this is true when an animal switches sex in the middle of its life, the behavior switches Along with the gametes.

00:32:51.000 This is true between birds and mammals.

00:32:54.000 So which one has two different sex chromosomes does not predict the behavior, but which one lays the egg does predict the behavior.

00:33:02.000 And it gets even weirder than that.

00:33:04.000 So, Jamie, do you have that image of the flower?

00:33:10.000 The image of the flower.

00:33:11.000 For those of you listening, you can look at this flower on the YouTube version.

00:33:17.000 What kind of flower is it?

00:33:18.000 It's actually just a diagram of a flower, just standard flower. 0.98

00:33:24.000 Who's that woman who makes those flower paintings that all look like her vaginas? 1.00

00:33:28.000 Georgia O'Keefe. 0.99

00:33:29.000 Yes, that's Georgia O'Keefe. 0.99

00:33:31.000 So this is not her work.

00:33:32.000 She seems a little obsessed.

00:33:34.000 I'd like to talk to her.

00:33:35.000 No doubt.

00:33:36.000 It's going to be tough at this point.

00:33:38.000 Hey lady, do you paint other stuff? 0.95

00:33:41.000 So here's what I want to show you about this.

00:33:43.000 And I must say I love this point, even though I'm less jazzed about plants than I am about animals.

00:33:49.000 If you look at the thing there that's labeled stigma, right?

00:33:52.000 The stigma is connected to the style which leads to the ovules.

00:33:56.000 So the ovules are the eggs, essentially.

00:33:59.000 And the anthers are the place that produces pollen. 0.82

00:34:03.000 So this flower is a hermaphrodite.

00:34:05.000 It has both male and female parts. 0.98

00:34:08.000 But here's the really interesting thing.

00:34:11.000 The female parts are kind of reluctant about sex with strangers. 1.00

00:34:16.000 The male parts are really enthusiastic about it, right?

00:34:20.000 Really?

00:34:20.000 Yes.

00:34:21.000 So those pollen grains will try to fertilize anything they land on. 0.96

00:34:26.000 But that long style is basically a test that the female part of the plant exposes any pollen grain to. 1.00

00:34:34.000 The pollen grain has to grow a pollen tube Down that long stile in order to get to the eggs. 0.96

00:34:40.000 In other words, that flower, the female parts are coy and the male parts are a bit randy.

00:34:48.000 Now, this is one plant.

00:34:51.000 This is one flower that does not agree with itself about how enthusiastic to be about sex with strangers.

00:34:57.000 Well, you can predict this just on the numbers too, right?

00:34:59.000 It's going to produce I don't know what orders of magnitude more pollen than it has ovules to be fertilized.

00:35:07.000 So it's only got a few chances at picking the right pollen to be fertilized but the pollen can be broadcast and go anywhere and if it's successful and it's not that successful it's still okay.

00:35:17.000 It's still kind of a win.

00:35:18.000 So the payoff for putting up with talking about plants here is that you realize there's something in the universe that even when it's building a plant which is really not like an animal Even when it's building a plant and we look at it and we say, ah, these are the boy parts and those are the girl parts.

00:35:35.000 They actually have some analogy to males and females amongst animals where we can spot the behavior easily and that that is mind-blowing because, you correct me if I'm wrong here, but the common ancestor between these plants,

00:35:52.000 these land plants that have pollen and ovules like this, And animals that have eggs and sperm.

00:36:00.000 The common ancestor is a single-celled photosynthetic ocean creature.

00:36:08.000 A single-celled creature.

00:36:09.000 It's not a complex creature.

00:36:15.000 So what that means is that two totally different clades that are built around totally different rules.

00:36:21.000 At the point they get around to spitting out something that looks like two sexes, It recovers some of the things that we as human beings are familiar with from Shakespeare, right? 1.00

00:36:32.000 The point about male and female is so general that it even covers plants.

00:36:38.000 And then, okay, that's true.

00:36:40.000 And then we have fungi, which break every single rule.

00:36:45.000 I don't know.

00:37:06.000 So that's very powerful when we're reaching into biology and we're saying male and female are patterns of behavior that tend to be associated with certain types of gametes.

00:37:18.000 When you have two gamete types, something called anisogamy, you will have two sexes. 1.00

00:37:23.000 And those sexes will follow rules that we see over and over and over again, repeated. 0.99

00:37:28.000 Plants, animals.

00:37:30.000 One of the things that we discussed in the green room before the show started was that what we are is some weird animal that can communicate in very, very complex ways.

00:37:40.000 And one of the things that we do when we can communicate in such complex ways is explain all these things that we've learned about science.

00:37:48.000 But another thing that we do is we distort reality to fit what we would desire it to be rather than what it is.

00:37:55.000 How much of that is what's going on today?

00:37:59.000 A huge amount.

00:38:01.000 And unpacking that, learning not to impose your expectations on nature is key to understanding it.

00:38:12.000 And it really is a skill you have to learn.

00:38:15.000 And that way, when nature does tell you something about what males and females are like, and you know that you're not talking about something that you've learned by being human, you're talking about something you've learned by looking at other creatures, Then there's a lot of power in understanding what those patterns are,

00:38:32.000 especially when you get to humans, because of all the creatures, I think this is fair to say, of all the creatures that I've spent any time thinking about, humans are maybe sexually the weirdest.

00:38:47.000 Weirder than ducks? 0.84

00:38:48.000 Oh, yeah.

00:38:50.000 Nicer than ducks, too.

00:38:51.000 For the most part.

00:38:53.000 On average.

00:38:55.000 On average.

00:38:55.000 But human beings are partially sex role reversed.

00:39:02.000 Okay.

00:39:03.000 Sex role reversal is not unheard of in animals.

00:39:07.000 It happens.

00:39:08.000 But our sex role reversal is so weird.

00:39:12.000 And it is not complete.

00:39:16.000 So there's stuff going on in human beings that is absolutely novel.

00:39:20.000 I mean, in fact, here's a mind-blowing fact that really you could start here and just follow back to the implications of this.

00:39:28.000 How many species of mammals do you think there are?

00:39:37.000 Half a million?

00:39:38.000 No, no, no, no.

00:39:39.000 You're right off.

00:39:39.000 30. There are 30 and then a few more.

00:39:43.000 There are about 4,000.

00:39:46.000 That's it?

00:39:46.000 5,000 now, we think.

00:39:47.000 Really?

00:39:48.000 Well, I still think it's 4,000.

00:39:50.000 Wow.

00:39:51.000 Okay, well, this is going to mess me up because I don't know how to work back from 5,000.

00:39:54.000 I don't know which clade has grown.

00:39:56.000 But, yeah, we've got about 5,000 species of mammals.

00:39:58.000 The ratios are pretty consistent still.

00:40:00.000 They're pretty consistent.

00:40:01.000 Half of them are rodents.

00:40:03.000 A quarter of them are bats.

00:40:05.000 I studied bats in graduate school.

00:40:07.000 That was my thing.

00:40:08.000 People never expect that a quarter of all mammal species are bats.

00:40:11.000 That's pretty crazy.

00:40:12.000 They've never been to Austin.

00:40:14.000 Four to five thousand species of these things.

00:40:17.000 Human beings are the only one of those mammal species in which breasts remain enlarged when not lactating. 0.71

00:40:28.000 I find that fact absolutely remarkable.

00:40:30.000 You have four to five thousand species of lactating animals and in human beings breasts have been made persistent when not lactating and in sexual interactions they've obviously become a signal and we know more or less what they are a signal of.

00:40:51.000 They are a signal of Having the resources to produce a baby, which doesn't register with us as important as it should.

00:41:03.000 It's much more important to our ancestors.

00:41:06.000 It was a vital characteristic because most of the time, females were either pregnant, they were feeding a baby and therefore not fertile. 0.99

00:41:15.000 They were starving and therefore not fertile.

00:41:19.000 And so a fertile female who is essentially advertising that she has the resources to produce a viable offspring is a rare commodity.

00:41:31.000 I mean, I hate to talk in those terms.

00:41:33.000 I mean nothing normative by it.

00:41:35.000 I'm just simply describing it in sort of as if I was an alien looking down on people in their evolutionary history.

00:41:42.000 But the fact that that signal Finds itself utilized in the way that it does on the internet tells us where we are.

00:41:53.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:41:54.000 So one of the other things that is unique about humans, at least with regard to our most recent ancestors, the other primates, is that we have concealed ovulation.

00:42:04.000 So you can't tell when a woman is fertile. 0.97

00:42:08.000 Whereas you can tell when a baboon is fertile, or a vervet monkey, or a chimp. 0.91

00:42:12.000 You've got sexual swellings and other indicators of fertility. 0.98

00:42:15.000 How do those lizards find out? 0.72

00:42:18.000 Because if they determine which female plays the stimulation role in the ovulation cycle... 0.99

00:42:25.000 It's probably going to be chemical, so some kind of smell, pheromone, scent thing.

00:42:29.000 So you see reptiles putting out their tongue.

00:42:35.000 What they're doing is they're picking up large molecules that don't volatilize, and then they are touching an organ that they have that's connected to their brains to detect a kind of chemical signal That weirdly enough, I don't know how true this story is going to end up being.

00:42:50.000 Probably true, but I have a little trepidation about it.

00:42:53.000 There's an organ that detects these large molecules, the vomeronasal organ, and it's like having another sense of smell that we just don't, we can't intuit what it would be like because we don't have it.

00:43:05.000 But we actually do have remnants of the organ, it's just not plugged in.

00:43:09.000 Yeah, the story is humans have it, but it's not connected up.

00:43:12.000 Yeah, I will not be surprised.

00:43:14.000 How not connected up it is is something that we're not totally confident of.

00:43:17.000 I won't be surprised if it turns out to be important in some way we didn't know, the way tonsils or the appendix have turned out to have values that we should have guessed.

00:43:25.000 But but so humans have these you know persistent constant sexual signals in the form of breasts among other things and then also have obscured when we are and are not fertile and so more than any other primates humans have basically constant sexual availability constant sexual interest and yes they're ebbs and flows and such but but female humans more than female chimps or baboons or any other primates are interested in sex more reliably across their ovulatory cycle than than any

00:43:55.000 of these other primates.

00:43:56.000 Yes, let's unpack that a little bit.

00:43:58.000 So, in human beings, ovulation is concealed so that it is not clear when a female is fertile.

00:44:07.000 It is concealed from the female herself. 0.98

00:44:09.000 Now, that always gets pushed back if you say that in a room full of students because...

00:44:13.000 People always say, I know...

00:44:14.000 I know.

00:44:15.000 But the truth is, women do not know reliably. 1.00

00:44:18.000 You can do things like monitor temperature and you can get a much better sense.

00:44:22.000 With novel tools, right, that no one had until 50 years ago at the most.

00:44:26.000 Can any woman feel it in her body? 1.00

00:44:28.000 Or is that...

00:44:30.000 Maybe, but...

00:44:31.000 Some women claim to be able to, and there may be some self-knowledge possible there. 1.00

00:44:35.000 Some people also claim to be able to pick lottery tickets.

00:44:38.000 I can pick them, just not winning ones.

00:44:41.000 I'm not prepared to say that that never happens.

00:44:44.000 Right, but the interesting fact is that this...

00:44:49.000 When a woman is fertile, it does not have to be obscure to the woman at all.

00:44:53.000 Evolution appears to have taken that piece of information away.

00:44:56.000 A baboon would know when it was fertile and it would alter its behavior. 0.85

00:45:00.000 But so would all the baboon boys know when she was fertile. 1.00

00:45:03.000 Do you think that's because over time people have discerned, I mean over the course of evolution, people have discerned that having a child also is partially a burden and so maybe more intelligent creatures as humans got more and more intelligent this seems like a little inconvenient to have a child whereas a baboon would not think that way and not contemplate the future so there was some sort of evolutionary advantage for it to be concealed

00:45:33.000 in humans and for outright displays of sexuality to be prominent Throughout their entire life?

00:45:40.000 I suspect the answer is a whole lot more horrible than that.

00:45:43.000 Really?

00:45:43.000 Yeah.

00:45:44.000 Horrible?

00:45:45.000 Yeah.

00:45:46.000 Absolutely horrible.

00:45:46.000 Which is that, to the extent that a woman knows when she is fertile, she actually may be vulnerable.

00:45:58.000 In other words, to the extent that sexual...

00:46:01.000 Vulnerable to coercive sex.

00:46:02.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:46:02.000 Oh, so vulnerable to rape. 1.00

00:46:04.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:46:04.000 So that if a woman was outright signaling that she was ovulating, that she would be more likely to be raped by other humans. 0.99

00:46:12.000 Oh, I think there's no question about that.

00:46:15.000 So in a sense...

00:46:19.000 Hiding this information from everybody appears to be an evolutionary solution to a problem.

00:46:25.000 I don't think we can name it exactly because so much is obscure about our recent ancestors.

00:46:31.000 You know, we only have bones.

00:46:33.000 Nothing else fossilizes and that doesn't, you know, the behavior doesn't fossilize.

00:46:36.000 So there's a lot we can't say.

00:46:38.000 But it is interesting, arriving at the present, we have modern women and we can say it is interesting that evolution has robbed women themselves of a piece of information That one would initially think would be so valuable that it would be prominent.

00:46:54.000 For it to be obscure at all is fascinating.

00:46:58.000 So the other thing that Heather mentioned, which I think belongs front and center in this conversation, is Having sex for pleasure rather than reproductive purposes.

00:47:10.000 And we're not the only ones to do that.

00:47:11.000 Lobos, dolphins, others.

00:47:14.000 But it's rare.

00:47:15.000 It's very rare.

00:47:16.000 There are a few other species that appear to do this, and they don't appear to do it the way humans do.

00:47:23.000 Is it a dolphin example?

00:47:24.000 Is it year-round?

00:47:26.000 Do you know?

00:47:27.000 I don't remember.

00:47:27.000 So anyway, the idea that sex in human beings has taken on these other important roles in pair bonding, for example, is very special.

00:47:41.000 And the fact that it continues after menopause.

00:47:43.000 I mean, menopause itself is special.

00:47:45.000 Menopause, the idea that that's not your reproductive apparatus Failing due to age. 0.99

00:47:52.000 That is your reproductive apparatus deciding to shut down because you've moved into a new phase. 1.00

00:47:57.000 Basically, you've moved into the grandma phase.

00:47:59.000 And the grandma phase is essential in humans where it is not essential in almost any other creature.

00:48:06.000 Elephants occasionally.

00:48:08.000 And orcas.

00:48:08.000 I believe orcas also have that pattern.

00:48:11.000 But anyway, all of these things are so different about humans and they have so much to do with sex that having a mind-numbing conversation about sexual signals in modern times is actually just kind of painful to listen to it because you want all of these pieces of information on the table so that at the point we get to the discussion about what do we do about modernity that we are not,

00:48:35.000 you know, playing with toys.

00:48:37.000 We're actually talking about the real stuff.

00:48:44.000 This modernity, the way human beings represent sexuality or the way sexuality is represented, what's wrong with it?

00:48:53.000 What are the key things that stand out as an evolutionary biologist?

00:48:58.000 Let me try an experiment with you.

00:49:02.000 I'm concerned this isn't going to work, but I hope it does.

00:49:04.000 Even if it doesn't work, it'll work.

00:49:05.000 Okay.

00:49:06.000 I would like to try and experiment with you as a red-blooded male. 0.56

00:49:11.000 Okay.

00:49:12.000 I would like you to conjure the image in your mind of a woman who is not beautiful but is hot. 1.00

00:49:24.000 Okay.

00:49:25.000 Can you do it?

00:49:25.000 Sure.

00:49:26.000 Okay.

00:49:27.000 Can you conjure the image of a woman who is beautiful but not hot? 0.97

00:49:32.000 Yes.

00:49:33.000 No problem.

00:49:34.000 No problem.

00:49:35.000 Me either.

00:49:37.000 This I think actually is a window into much that is wrong with what we think about human sexuality.

00:49:45.000 I think most people, if you ask them, without doing that little experiment, to conjure or to define what it is for somebody to be hot, you would get answers and people would tell you that hot was sort of like the height of beauty,

00:50:03.000 right?

00:50:04.000 Which is very frightening, if that's true, because hotness wanes with age.

00:50:08.000 It deteriorates.

00:50:10.000 Just can't help it.

00:50:12.000 The discovery that beauty actually is a different parameter tells a whole different story about what's going on with us people, with men and with women.

00:50:24.000 And I think both men and women are confused by this.

00:50:28.000 So, if it is true, and I mean I know it is true, I can look inside my own mind and I can say that at least for some men it is true that beauty and hotness are almost uncorrelated.

00:50:38.000 There are people who have both traits, but I have no trouble seeing that image of a woman who is hot but not the least bit beautiful. 0.99

00:50:47.000 And I know lots of women who are beautiful and not hot. 1.00

00:50:51.000 And I also, if I take the category of women who are beautiful but not hot, There are a lot of older women in it. 1.00

00:51:01.000 I know women in their 60s and 70s who have poise, have aged gracefully.

00:51:09.000 They're gray as can be.

00:51:11.000 They may be wrinkled.

00:51:12.000 But if you talk to them, one does have the sense, I'm talking to a beautiful person.

00:51:17.000 And I'm not being maudlin here.

00:51:19.000 If it was just a simple fact that both beauty and hotness waned with age, I would say so.

00:51:24.000 But it is not the case.

00:51:26.000 So what's going on?

00:51:28.000 Why do we have these two categories?

00:51:29.000 And why do we assume, I mean, if you look at advertising, you will get the message that hotness is where it's at, right?

00:51:39.000 Hotness is the thing.

00:51:40.000 It's the only standard possible.

00:51:42.000 It's the only standard.

00:51:44.000 And so women are aspiring to it, and then they're fighting it as it wanes and all of this. 1.00

00:51:49.000 And here's what I suspect is up.

00:51:54.000 Because males are males, they have I want to say they have two reproductive strategies. 0.88

00:52:01.000 Really, they have three reproductive strategies, and one of them is so awful that it's really just unpleasant to even enter it into the discussion.

00:52:10.000 You're talking about rape?

00:52:11.000 Yep.

00:52:12.000 So the first reproductive strategy that men have, the one that would generally have succeeded, and by the way, we can talk about monogamy versus polyamory and all of that at some point, but I'm not saying anything that is inherent.

00:52:26.000 It's not inherently about monogamy.

00:52:29.000 The way males have typically reproduced is they have invested in their offspring and the mothers of their offspring.

00:52:37.000 That's the go-to mechanism for reproducing as a human.

00:52:41.000 Why?

00:52:41.000 Because human babies are so needy that one person trying to raise them on their own is hobbled by just the sheer difficulty of trying to manage an infant and a toddler while trying to accomplish the other things of being a person.

00:52:56.000 So let me just add here that the idea that monogamy has been ubiquitous throughout human history is not completely accepted, but that there is good evidence for it on a lot of fronts.

00:53:06.000 And one of the points against it is that we remain somewhat sexually dimorphic, that men are on average a bit taller, much more muscular, but that we are so much less sexually dimorphic than even our ancestors,

00:53:22.000 you know, I think you said something that was unclear at the beginning.

00:53:35.000 There has been a lot of polygyny where one male has multiple females in human history.

00:53:41.000 Probably the majority of human cultures have been polygynous.

00:53:45.000 Yes.

00:53:45.000 The majority of people on Earth today belong to cultures that are at least nominally monogamous.

00:53:50.000 And we should talk about what that shift is and what it means to us and what's desirable and all of that.

00:53:55.000 But the basic point that human babies are so expensive and difficult to raise that you need a team to do it.

00:54:05.000 And, you know, in part, this is a chicken and egg question.

00:54:09.000 It's not a good term because it's quite clear which came first.

00:54:12.000 But the I think?

00:54:36.000 But, a male who is investing in their offspring, should they happen on an opportunity in which a female who is fertile and capable of producing an offspring does not require commitment from them in order to have sex, that's an evolutionary bargain.

00:54:52.000 A male who can either convince a female or finds a female who's willing to produce a baby but not expect any support in return, that's such a power, it's like winning the lottery evolutionarily.

00:55:03.000 So it would have almost never happened in history because women, because babies are so expensive, are wired to avoid this like the plague. 1.00

00:55:11.000 You don't want to get stuck raising a baby on your own if you could through Males, in general, 1.00

00:55:27.000 have succeeded reproductively by investing in their offspring and their offspring's mothers.

00:55:34.000 When they have the opportunity to produce offspring with no commitment, they have a hard time resisting that opportunity because it's such an evolutionary win.

00:55:43.000 But that doesn't mean it would have been very common in history because females would avoid it.

00:55:47.000 So can't look away from hot is about that second strategy.

00:55:51.000 Right.

00:55:52.000 So hot is this channel that men They are wired in such a way that they actually, we've been robbed of every useful term, they are triggered by the sight of a woman who is broadcasting hotness, 0.96

00:56:10.000 right?

00:56:11.000 And so anyway, the...

00:56:16.000 The thing that I think is most important about this is we now live in a culture where we have advertisers essentially creating a kind of insecurity because insecurity causes people to spend money they otherwise wouldn't.

00:56:30.000 That insecurity has women trying to capture male attention by broadcasting hotness, which of course works because men have a hard time ignoring hotness. 1.00

00:56:40.000 But what I think women often don't understand is that Getting a man's attention by broadcasting hotness has him in the frame of mind of the second reproductive strategy and it is actually counterproductive to getting his attention for the first reproductive strategy because men have historically... 0.63

00:57:02.000 This is, by the way, this is where I'm going to get in huge trouble with people because this is going to sound like an accusation.

00:57:07.000 Really, I'm just trying to describe what has been and then we can talk about what we should do about it.

00:57:14.000 A woman who values herself highly in reproductive terms will not leap on a sexual opportunity just because it's available, because what's at stake is so great historically for women.

00:57:29.000 This is not true anymore because of birth control, but historically it would be true that a sexual interaction is basically baby roulette, and baby roulette is a dangerous game to play.

00:57:42.000 And so we get at some of what's true underneath the stereotype of the Madonna whore dichotomy.

00:57:51.000 That neither of those words is quite right because no one wants a Madonna, no one wants a virgin as a life partner. 0.92

00:57:58.000 You want to have a vibrant sexual relationship with your life partner, but the, are you triggering the hotness, can I get a baby out of you and never see it, strategy in men? 0.83

00:58:12.000 Or are you triggering the, oh my god, you're gorgeous and I feel like we could do this together?

00:58:18.000 I hate to interrupt you, but you gotta pull this thing close to you.

00:58:20.000 I'm sorry. 0.70

00:58:21.000 Just move that sucker around so it's comfortable where you're sitting. 0.96

00:58:24.000 How about that? 0.98

00:58:24.000 It's very different. 0.98

00:58:26.000 It sounds okay in our ears, but it's very different in the audio.

00:58:29.000 Sorry.

00:58:32.000 So anyway, the Madonna horror complex, which is this famous thing, isn't the paradox that we are led to believe.

00:58:40.000 Men are interested in, you know, as Heather points out, Madonna and horror are the wrong terms. 0.81

00:58:46.000 They're very charged.

00:58:47.000 But men are interested in both of these reproductive strategies, but they are not interested.

00:58:54.000 They are not paradoxically searching for them in the same individual.

00:58:58.000 Well, isn't there an issue also that today, human beings, males in particular, are not looking at women purely in terms of someone to reproduce with.

00:59:08.000 They're looking in terms of what is sexually pleasurable.

00:59:11.000 What do they find attractive?

00:59:13.000 And when they see a person, it's very rare that they look at a woman and say, this is a woman who I would like to breed with.

00:59:23.000 They say, I would like to practice breeding with her. 0.84

00:59:26.000 But here's where our language gets in the way, right?

00:59:28.000 Like, we're telling ourselves stories based on, I mean, yeah, birth control changed everything, actually.

00:59:35.000 But it's so new.

00:59:36.000 Exactly right.

00:59:37.000 It's so new.

00:59:38.000 I mean, there are not very reliable forms of birth control in lots of cultures around the world, but actually fully reliable birth control is decades old.

00:59:48.000 So we shouldn't expect the stories we tell ourselves about what we're looking for to be a match for what we're actually looking for yet.

00:59:55.000 Because we haven't had time to update our software even.

00:59:59.000 Right, so the software is still wired the same way to look at a woman who you believe would be a good carrier of babies, someone who would be very maternal, someone who's attractive, 0.78

01:00:15.000 they have good features, this would be someone who you'd want to breed with, whereas the second option would be someone who you could sneak it in on.

01:00:23.000 Well, I would say with regard to the first strategy, it's more than that.

01:00:27.000 More than that.

01:00:27.000 So that the first strategy, as you just described it, sounds very traditional female role, right?

01:00:33.000 And mostly, especially when populations were moving across frontiers and actually like expanding the scope of where humans were, what you needed in a partner, both male and female, was someone with whom you could share all of life's challenges.

01:00:47.000 It wasn't just about taking care of baby, because dad was also doing parental care, but mothers and fathers were in it together.

01:00:56.000 And it was their division of labor?

01:00:57.000 Of course.

01:00:58.000 And was there specialization?

01:00:59.000 Of course.

01:01:00.000 Did that specialization always look the same?

01:01:02.000 No, it didn't.

01:01:03.000 In fact, cross-culturally, it's fascinating.

01:01:05.000 Some tasks end up highly gendered across cultures, but which gender does it is different.

01:01:10.000 Like weaving turns out to be a pretty highly gendered task in different cultures, but sometimes it's only women who do it, and sometimes it's only men. 0.99

01:01:17.000 And, you know, there are some things that really only men do in most cultures.

01:01:22.000 And this is a great review, an anthropology paper from the early 70s.

01:01:26.000 So this is mostly pre-industrial cultures they're looking at.

01:01:29.000 But the jobs that, across cultures where it happens, only men do include the hunting of large marine mammals and iron smelting.

01:01:40.000 Those two things.

01:01:41.000 And there's a few others, but those are the top of the list.

01:01:44.000 Large marine mammals.

01:01:44.000 You should never do them at the same time.

01:01:46.000 It's whale hunting and smelting of ores.

01:01:49.000 Wow.

01:01:50.000 Yeah, definitely don't do too. 0.91

01:01:52.000 Burn a hole through your boat.

01:01:53.000 You keep quenching the thing by accident.

01:01:57.000 Yeah, so I think the answer to the question you asked is that the whole system has been hijacked by the novelty of our current circumstances.

01:02:09.000 And what I was trying to get at before is that the...

01:02:15.000 The size of the win of an ancestral male who reproduced with a female that didn't require investment from them.

01:02:22.000 The size of that win is so great that it causes men to default to thinking about that when it appears to be available.

01:02:31.000 And so in a world where there's birth control and therefore the stakes for women for having sex have been greatly reduced and therefore more women are interested in having sex without commitment, The problem is men don't really know what they're looking for because there is this level of triggering that they cannot overcome.

01:02:54.000 And so the other point I want to make on this front is, yes, men are interested in sexual pleasure, as are women.

01:03:02.000 Men and women are overlapping, but distinct in what that means.

01:03:07.000 But I think if we were to say, hey, sexual pleasure is awesome, and you should live your life so as to maybe not maximize it, but come close to maximizing it, that sexual pleasure is so desirable that you should live your life in a way that you get as much of that thing as you can.

01:03:28.000 That would not necessarily say that the way to do it was to go around banging strangers, right?

01:03:33.000 Because this is a multifaceted phenomenon.

01:03:38.000 And there is one thing that gets left out of this discussion almost every time I hear people talk about it, which is that the sex that one has when the stakes are really high, right?

01:03:51.000 When you're really into somebody, that's...

01:03:55.000 That's a very pleasurable kind of sex that is not reproduced by low-stakes situation.

01:04:00.000 And so we are comparing things, and it sounds like, well, if sexual pleasure is what you're after, then more sex is certainly the way to get there.

01:04:09.000 But, you know...

01:04:11.000 And that tends to look like, the argument tends to be more sex with more people.

01:04:14.000 More varied sex partners is the obvious way to optimize sexual pleasure.

01:04:20.000 And actually, that assumption hasn't been investigated.

01:04:24.000 Wasn't it difficult to accomplish?

01:04:26.000 What?

01:04:26.000 Isn't that why it hasn't really been investigated?

01:04:29.000 I mean, how many people are having sex with multiple partners and taking notes and being studied?

01:04:34.000 Well, I don't know.

01:04:35.000 I mean, college students, you know, tell you anything for 50 bucks.

01:04:39.000 So there are lots of these studies that do involve asking a lot of college students, which is not a very broad sample.

01:04:45.000 But again, this is a fairly new phenomenon in the last five, six decades where you could do it and not worry about reproducing.

01:04:52.000 Well, so the question really is, if we step back from our own lives and we say, what would the rules be?

01:05:01.000 If I wanted to maximize this set of things, if I wanted to get these values out of my life, how would I alter my behavior?

01:05:11.000 I don't think you would come up with, hey, sex with strangers is the answer to all of this.

01:05:17.000 In fact, I think sex with strangers is, it's pretty low grade in terms of what it delivers.

01:05:26.000 So there are some cultures that encourage a lot of early fooling around between individuals and it's considered low stakes and it stops at some point and that's one thing that what's going on in modern American culture is there's no end point.

01:05:45.000 It's just considered a good that more sex with more strangers is inherently going to result in more pleasure and therefore if we're actually interested in sexual pleasure that's what we should be doing.

01:05:55.000 And if you look at cultures that have taken sexual pleasure seriously, if you look at like tantric sex, right? 0.68

01:06:02.000 It isn't about sex with strangers.

01:06:05.000 It's about cultivating a sexual relationship that increases sexual pleasure to an extreme height that you won't reach if you aren't careful in architecting it.

01:06:16.000 So in other words, it's about delayed gratification.

01:06:18.000 I mean, really, that's the missing idea here is that delayed gratification is actually a strong Contributor to sexual pleasure.

01:06:26.000 Isn't this sex with strangers thing attractive because it's difficult to accomplish?

01:06:31.000 Is that part of it?

01:06:34.000 It's difficult to accomplish for men, but not very difficult to accomplish for women.

01:06:38.000 Right.

01:06:38.000 And not that attractive to women.

01:06:40.000 Not nearly as attractive to women as it is to men. 0.99

01:06:43.000 Women are being told that it should be attractive to us. 0.99

01:06:46.000 Sex in the city. 0.88

01:06:47.000 Very much so.

01:06:48.000 And it's because it's imagined that symmetry is equality.

01:06:55.000 I think that's maybe one of the main things we're pushing back against here, is that we are not making the claim that one sex is better than the other, but the idea that we are identical is absurd on its face.

01:07:06.000 Well, in our culture today, one of the things that is a big standout as being very novel is social media.

01:07:14.000 This is a completely new thing.

01:07:15.000 And this social media also being used to attract sex partners is a very new thing.

01:07:22.000 I mean, I had a whole bit in my last act, my last Netflix special, about some girl who lives in Florida who has nine...

01:07:31.000 Billion people on her Instagram now. 1.00

01:07:33.000 She had 9 million followers, and all she does is take pictures of her ass. 1.00

01:07:38.000 And I was saying, science needs to study her, because this is a new type of human being. 1.00

01:07:43.000 We don't know anything about her.

01:07:45.000 It has nothing to do with what she says.

01:07:48.000 It has nothing to do with what she's accomplished in life. 1.00

01:07:51.000 It literally is about people focusing on her ass. 1.00

01:07:55.000 This is fascinating. 1.00

01:07:56.000 Why is she doing it? 0.99

01:07:57.000 She's getting attention.

01:07:58.000 She's getting attention.

01:07:59.000 I'm sure there's an economic benefit to it too, but that came later.

01:08:03.000 The attention came first.

01:08:04.000 She didn't embark on this journey like going, I know what I'll do. 1.00

01:08:08.000 I'm going to figure out how to make money off my ass. 1.00

01:08:11.000 She decided... 1.00

01:08:12.000 Because every girl comes of age and discovers that that's an asset. 0.56

01:08:15.000 Whether you want it to be or not.

01:08:17.000 But now I'm being looked at.

01:08:19.000 How am I going to play it?

01:08:20.000 And some number of people play it.

01:08:23.000 Well, but again, so...

01:08:27.000 There is what I would call a two-way failure of empathy.

01:08:31.000 So if you'll give me a little leash here.

01:08:35.000 We empathize with another individual by using our own minds and whatever it is that we have as the content of our minds and then we run the data of somebody else's situation through our minds and we say, how would I feel in that situation?

01:08:50.000 And in general, this works really well if you share circuitry with somebody.

01:08:55.000 And it works not so well where your circuitry is different.

01:08:58.000 So there are lots of places where males and females who grew up...

01:09:03.000 Heather and I both grew up in LA. There's a certain amount of stuff that we can intuit about what the other would think about something just based on the fact that we grew up in the same period in the same place.

01:09:14.000 But males and females, there's a place where we top out and we can't understand what the other is experiencing because it is very unlike what we would experience.

01:09:26.000 So, for example, if you were walking down the street, let's say before you were a well-known guy, you're an anonymous guy walking down the street and imagine that there's a group of women talking somewhere and you walk by and they're like...

01:09:43.000 Look at that.

01:09:45.000 That's one fine hunk of man.

01:09:48.000 How do you feel?

01:09:50.000 Uh...

01:09:51.000 Yeah.

01:09:52.000 Woo! 0.99

01:09:53.000 You feel pretty good?

01:09:54.000 Well, I don't feel threatened.

01:09:55.000 That's the difference.

01:09:55.000 You certainly don't feel...

01:09:56.000 The difference between a man experiencing that with women is I'm not going to get gang raped.

01:10:00.000 Yeah, but do you feel good? 0.79

01:10:02.000 Yeah.

01:10:03.000 Sure.

01:10:03.000 Of course you would, right?

01:10:04.000 Of course.

01:10:04.000 You feel complimented.

01:10:05.000 Right, but it's very different with the opposite sex because there's no threat. 1.00

01:10:10.000 It's very different with the opposite sex, not only because... 1.00

01:10:13.000 Let's neutralize the threat part of it.

01:10:15.000 Which is, I mean, it's huge, for sure, but there's other stuff going on, too.

01:10:19.000 But here's the part that I think men don't intuit until somebody points it out to them.

01:10:24.000 Because men have two different reproductive strategies, and one of them is about long-term investment, and the other one is about have sex with them, impregnate them, and never see them again.

01:10:35.000 When a man whistles at a woman, right, and he compliments essentially how hot she looks, he is essentially offering to stick her with a child that will then be her responsibility for the better part of two decades.

01:10:52.000 That's not a very nice compliment, right?

01:10:55.000 Well, that's a weird way of looking at it.

01:10:56.000 I agree with you.

01:10:58.000 I see exactly where you're going with that, but man, I never thought about it that way before, and I don't think most people have either.

01:11:02.000 Well, this is my point, though.

01:11:04.000 It's right in front of us.

01:11:07.000 There's another thing, too.

01:11:08.000 So you've just identified a single guy catcalling, maybe, right?

01:11:12.000 But a woman walking past a construction site and getting five, six, seven guys whistling.

01:11:19.000 Who are those calls for?

01:11:22.000 Not necessarily for her.

01:11:23.000 It's communication between the men.

01:11:25.000 Yeah.

01:11:26.000 They're signaling that they're not gay. 0.98

01:11:28.000 They're signaling to each other, hey, did you see that?

01:11:30.000 I saw that.

01:11:31.000 I'm into that.

01:11:32.000 Yes, it's a total objectification and it renders the woman involved who was receiving this thing as almost a non-entity, but it feels totally personal and yet it's not necessarily about the woman. 0.98

01:11:43.000 And so, you know, all the discussion of, oh my god, these catcalls are awful, and it's a pain in the ass to walk down the street and have to deal with it for a young woman. 0.96

01:11:52.000 It's true, but it's also ignoring the fact of it being communication between men. 0.98

01:11:57.000 And, you know, should they stop?

01:11:59.000 Probably.

01:11:59.000 But it's not just about male-female communication.

01:12:03.000 It's male-male competition as well.

01:12:05.000 That type of communication, though, only occurs if you've been raised poorly, you don't have any sisters, or you don't have any daughters. 0.96

01:12:14.000 And if you have all those things, you're some kind of a monster.

01:12:19.000 Like, if you have a mother that you love, and a sister that you love, and if you have daughters, and you still catcall at some woman walking down the street, there's something really wrong with you.

01:12:30.000 Oh, but, so, um...

01:12:33.000 In this day.

01:12:34.000 I think it's very, very wrong.

01:12:37.000 It doesn't work.

01:12:38.000 It is also so common, though.

01:12:41.000 It can't work.

01:12:42.000 It must work occasionally.

01:12:43.000 No, it works to let the other guys know you're not gay.

01:12:45.000 Right, so that's part of why I say...

01:12:46.000 It doesn't even do that.

01:12:48.000 I mean, this is interesting because I think this is something actually Heather probably won't intuit either, but I'm wondering if you'll spot it when I mention it.

01:12:57.000 Which is, there is a part of being a male that because...

01:13:03.000 I mean, the thing is, most males in history are losers who didn't reproduce, right?

01:13:09.000 Reproduction was not that easy to accomplish in human history. 0.69

01:13:12.000 It was way easier to starve or die on a battlefield or a lot of other things.

01:13:17.000 So the...

01:13:21.000 There is a way in which there's a part of the male psyche that plays very remote possibilities, right?

01:13:31.000 And, you know, it's weird if you're talking about being in a city and construction workers sitting on a girder whistling at somebody walking by.

01:13:38.000 If we calculate the chances that any one of them end up actually in a conversation with her, the chances are pretty low.

01:13:46.000 But if you imagine that those guys are actually acting from a mind that evolved in much smaller circumstances, a small town where everybody knew everybody.

01:13:55.000 And so whatever it is in their mind that causes them to have these interactions would have been much more likely there would be later interactions with the same person.

01:14:03.000 And so I think that a male that is not thinking carefully about what they are doing ends up, you know, flirting with and basically building a rapport that is about some future potential that's almost certain never to be realized.

01:14:23.000 But it makes sense to cultivate because, you know, if you...

01:14:29.000 Cultivate a thousand tiny little potentials and almost all of them go bust but occasionally one works out.

01:14:36.000 That's a win.

01:14:37.000 So the point is the cost is small and you never know.

01:14:41.000 The woman who gets catcalled might – I can't even imagine the circumstance. 0.94

01:14:48.000 That whole you never know is like just dig a hole in the middle of the street.

01:14:52.000 You might find gold.

01:14:54.000 It seems like a Hail Mary, but sometimes Hail Marys work.

01:14:57.000 Yeah, it must have happened sometime in history.

01:15:01.000 But if you had to look at the numbers, it'd probably be pretty staggering.

01:15:04.000 Yeah, but okay.

01:15:05.000 So, I mean, as long as we're in this territory, yes, it must have happened in history.

01:15:10.000 But so many things that were very remote contingencies in history have apparently produced offspring.

01:15:18.000 You know, the apparent tendency of people being hung to orgasm, right?

01:15:25.000 What is that?

01:15:27.000 That is likely to be the body taking one last shot.

01:15:32.000 There's no point.

01:15:33.000 There's no way.

01:15:34.000 This is a new one on me.

01:15:35.000 You're talking about autoerotic asphyxiation?

01:15:38.000 Is that what you're talking about?

01:15:39.000 Well, actually, I wasn't talking about that, but it's a better example.

01:15:41.000 It shows you that there's some part...

01:15:44.000 Being hung?

01:15:44.000 What do you mean, then?

01:15:45.000 I mean...

01:15:46.000 He's talking about actual execution.

01:15:47.000 I think, grammatically, I mean being hanged. 0.87

01:15:49.000 Right, being hanged.

01:15:50.000 Yeah, I'm so confused. 0.98

01:15:52.000 So they get orgasms? 0.95

01:15:54.000 When they die? 0.99

01:15:56.000 I'm working from anecdote here.

01:15:57.000 I have read that, but I don't know of any...

01:15:59.000 How many people are checking the underwear?

01:16:00.000 People just got hung.

01:16:01.000 But my point would be, what has to be true in order for such a pattern to evolve?

01:16:08.000 So let's take autoerotic asphyxiation as...

01:16:11.000 It's dandelion strategy, I mean, is what you're arguing, basically.

01:16:13.000 This is, you know, dandelions who go to seed after you pick them and spread their seeds, right?

01:16:21.000 Like, is that going to work?

01:16:22.000 Last-ditch efforts at reproduction.

01:16:24.000 Last-ditch efforts at reproduction.

01:16:25.000 Hail Mary.

01:16:25.000 And so the point is, I think this is probably not obvious unless you're used to thinking evolutionarily, but in order for a pattern to occur where some entity releases sexual propagules on death, in order for that to evolve,

01:16:41.000 it has to have worked enough times for that pattern to have accumulated.

01:16:45.000 And so if autoerotic asphyxiation is...

01:16:50.000 The result of people tapping into that thing and traversing a landscape near death in order to increase sexual pleasure.

01:16:59.000 What that suggests is that that landscape near death has actually had a certain amount of reproduction happen in it that has resulted in this circuitry being present.

01:17:08.000 Can you imagine a scenario?

01:17:10.000 And can you imagine a scenario where that trait would be passed down to the offspring?

01:17:14.000 I can imagine that...

01:17:16.000 I mean, let's do it the other way.

01:17:20.000 People have had a lot of sex over evolutionary history.

01:17:23.000 A lot of bad things have happened to people over evolutionary history.

01:17:27.000 Every so often those two things intersect, right?

01:17:32.000 In other words, every so often the catastrophe, the enemy spills over the wall, whatever it is.

01:17:38.000 And so I don't know I don't know what the pattern would be.

01:17:45.000 It may simply be that jeopardy is the key factor and actually jeopardy would be expected to happen an awful lot.

01:17:54.000 So, for example, to the extent that And in fact, we see a lot of this stuff in primates where there's a question about how public the sexual interaction between two individuals amongst chimps is, for example.

01:18:09.000 So when two chimps are having sex, if the male chimp is not the dominant male, he has everything to lose in being discovered. 0.85

01:18:19.000 They hide in the bushes.

01:18:20.000 Right.

01:18:20.000 They hide.

01:18:21.000 And so then the question is, is the female advertising that they are having sex by making noises that make it visible, in which case that... 1.00

01:18:28.000 So there's a whole landscape of stuff that has happened in evolutionary history both with humans, with pre-humans, with apes.

01:18:41.000 I've heard that argued as well about women with very loud moaning of pleasure that they're really trying to attract other males.

01:18:50.000 I think that...

01:18:52.000 That was in Sex at Dawn?

01:18:54.000 Well, I would be super cautious about Sex at Dawn as a book.

01:18:58.000 That particular finding, I think, is probably right.

01:19:02.000 Why would you be cautious about Sex at Dawn as a book?

01:19:05.000 Because the book is, I believe, quite cherry-picked in order to produce a particular, what I regard as a false sophistication about human sexual behavior.

01:19:19.000 It makes us out to be wantonly promiscuous across time in a way that doesn't seem to actually fit with a more careful reading of what we are.

01:19:28.000 How dare you, Chris Ryan?

01:19:30.000 How dare you?

01:19:32.000 I don't know.

01:19:33.000 I don't know who's right.

01:19:35.000 Let's put it this way.

01:19:36.000 That book is a pretty good strategy for getting people to go to bed with you and feel sophisticated about it.

01:19:42.000 Ooh! 0.96

01:19:43.000 Hmm.

01:19:44.000 We'll leave that there.

01:19:46.000 Um, so the chimps hiding in the bushes, the beta chimps as it were, the males would have to hide their sexuality from the alphas because the bigger stronger males would probably take the mate from them and then their likelihood of reproducing,

01:20:03.000 whoops, would be greatly diminished.

01:20:05.000 Oh yeah, they would be punished for it.

01:20:07.000 And they're gonna get cuffed too.

01:20:08.000 They're gonna get cuffed or more.

01:20:09.000 Cuffed!

01:20:10.000 That's an interesting...

01:20:11.000 What is cuffed?

01:20:12.000 A hit?

01:20:13.000 Yeah.

01:20:14.000 That's a funny way of describing it.

01:20:17.000 Cuffed.

01:20:21.000 Well, there we are.

01:20:22.000 Yeah, we got stuck there.

01:20:23.000 We got stuck and cuffed.

01:20:24.000 Sorry.

01:20:25.000 My apologies.

01:20:26.000 I mean, I should know what that means.

01:20:27.000 I've heard it before.

01:20:29.000 Now, what out of all this can we unpack about the way we're interpreting What's acceptable and not acceptable about male and female interaction in 2018?

01:20:46.000 It seems to be getting redefined, right?

01:20:51.000 Yeah, and it's a hot mess.

01:20:52.000 What's wrong with it as a biologist, as a person who understands humans?

01:21:01.000 Let's go to Me Too.

01:21:03.000 The Me Too movement looks like an honorable thing at first because most men are not nasty human beings and don't behave towards women in a way that most women have been behaved towards by men.

01:21:23.000 Almost every woman who at all fits the norms for their culture has been harassed in some way when they were young women.

01:21:33.000 That is true.

01:21:35.000 Most men don't do that.

01:21:37.000 That's also true.

01:21:38.000 So imagining that most men are behaving in some kind of a toxic way, and I don't like that word, but Imagining that because most women have experienced harassment, most men are therefore harassing is an error of logic, of statistics,

01:21:53.000 of humanity.

01:21:54.000 So we go from this place of, wow, are there some monsters out there?

01:22:00.000 Wow, was it a good moment to reveal some of the monstrosity that was happening.

01:22:05.000 And are there some bright lines?

01:22:08.000 Like, I'm prepared to draw a couple of bright lines.

01:22:10.000 Everyone deserves not to be touched if they don't want to be touched.

01:22:14.000 And everyone deserves to exist in a situation where there are no quid pro quos, for instance, of their employment.

01:22:21.000 If you want to stay employed or if you want to be advanced in your employment, then you're going to need to do this sexual thing with me.

01:22:28.000 Quid pro quos, don't be touched when you don't want to be touched.

01:22:32.000 Those things seem honorable and true, and for God's sake, can't we all agree to those?

01:22:38.000 But then it went too far.

01:22:40.000 And women are arguing, some, some women are arguing, that it doesn't matter if innocent men go.

01:22:48.000 And because many women have experienced this, it must be all men. 0.99

01:22:53.000 I mean, we're actually hearing from people that any boy that you are raising is potentially a rapist.

01:23:00.000 No. 0.60

01:23:01.000 Sorry.

01:23:02.000 Most men I know couldn't rape, actually.

01:23:04.000 It's just not what men are.

01:23:07.000 So Me Too went off the rails, and it had an opportunity to actually really wake a lot of good men up to how ubiquitous the experience of walking around on the streets and being catcalled and being harassed and sometimes being groped and sometimes worse than that is for a woman.

01:23:26.000 And it took it to this absurd point where now most, I think, increasingly reasonable people are looking at it going, well, then if you're claiming that, what else that you're saying isn't true?

01:23:38.000 And that puts the early stages of the movement at risk.

01:23:43.000 Now, when you see the monsters, and they are real, right? 0.88

01:23:48.000 The male monsters.

01:23:48.000 Yeah, the male monsters are real.

01:23:50.000 And you see that now, when they're getting exposed, like Harvey Weinstein is a perfect example.

01:23:58.000 He's the classic example, right?

01:24:00.000 Or Bill Cosby.

01:24:01.000 When these monsters get exposed, First of all, it's a good thing.

01:24:07.000 But second of all, don't you think that the reason why they got away with it in the first place is because they were able to victimize these people in secret and that they either had enablers or, in Cosby's case, everyone was unconscious?

01:24:21.000 I mean...

01:24:23.000 There's some great good to exposing these things.

01:24:27.000 But in doing so, the overzealous approach of accusing all men of being potential rapists, isn't it just an overreaction?

01:24:37.000 And won't it balance itself out?

01:24:40.000 Or do you think that it's more complicated than that?

01:24:43.000 It's going to backfire.

01:24:44.000 Yeah, it looks like a power grab.

01:24:46.000 But won't the backfiring balance itself out?

01:24:48.000 I mean, reasonable people like you or myself, we're always going to recognize the difference.

01:24:53.000 Thank you.

01:24:54.000 That there are monsters.

01:24:55.000 Yes.

01:24:55.000 Right?

01:24:56.000 And we're not going to deny monsters because someone goes too far and they accuse Garrison Keillor of being a monster when we know that that's not true.

01:25:03.000 It doesn't make sense.

01:25:04.000 The story doesn't make sense.

01:25:05.000 So, because most people who I've talked to about the Garrison Keillor story, which he was consoling a woman and he touched her back and then she pulled back and he apologized and I didn't mean to do that and then he sent her an email apologizing and she said, no big deal, don't worry about it.

01:25:21.000 They were good for a while.

01:25:22.000 And then years later, When all this Me Too thing, she just decides, I remember something that was wrong, and let's take this guy down.

01:25:31.000 Which didn't make any sense that, first of all, well, let's leave it alone.

01:25:36.000 It didn't make any sense, but where's Garrison Keillor now?

01:25:38.000 Right.

01:25:39.000 Yeah, he hasn't been resurrected.

01:25:40.000 He hasn't been resurrected.

01:25:41.000 They took his shows off the air.

01:25:43.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:25:44.000 Put aside whether or not you like him as an artist or a creator.

01:25:47.000 They actually destroyed not just him, but his legacy.

01:25:50.000 For a hug.

01:25:50.000 For something that at the time both parties agreed was no big deal.

01:25:56.000 I just don't understand it.

01:25:57.000 It's completely unacceptable and it's the death of justice.

01:26:01.000 Was that just getting caught up in the hysteria of just like trying to find, there's one, put that fire out immediately?

01:26:10.000 So we have a couple of problems and one of the problems is that the folks who are advancing this movement and the other parallel, I wish they hadn't taken the term social justice because we need a replacement term for that that is not overzealous.

01:26:31.000 But Those movements have engaged in a kind of naive conclusion making that makes them inevitably hijacked by bad actors.

01:26:50.000 So if you are essentially looking at a situation, if you say, we must believe all victims, that's like putting out a neon sign For bad actors that wish to utilize this structure.

01:27:07.000 And there will be bad actors in every population.

01:27:12.000 Male is a population, female is a population. 0.98

01:27:15.000 There are monstrous males who've been behaving predatorily.

01:27:18.000 There will be women who will take advantage of this and accuse people without reason. 1.00

01:27:24.000 I mean, I don't know whether the numbers are robust or not, but I have heard numbers that somewhere between 1% to 4% of the population are sociopathic.

01:27:34.000 If you set up a system in which we are obligated to believe every victim, then those people will come out of the woodwork and they will use this to level their enemies.

01:27:46.000 And so, at the very least, what that tells you is rule number one.

01:27:51.000 You cannot make the rule you must believe all victims or you will have lots of people piling into the category of victim that don't deserve to be there.

01:28:00.000 And who is hurt most by that?

01:28:02.000 Not only the people who are going to be sabotaged by bad actors, but the people who have suffered the worst cases of, you know, rape.

01:28:13.000 They are effectively having It's a transfer of well-being from the people who have been most harmed to people who have been less harmed or are cynically using these structures.

01:28:35.000 So if...

01:28:36.000 The idea of Me Too, of the reckoning that has finally come for these really terrible guys who were getting away with all of this awful stuff, if that is close to your heart, then what you should want is a set of rules that is careful enough and robust enough that we can keep holding those kinds of people to account.

01:28:57.000 What will happen if we don't do that, and I promise you this, from a game-theoretic perspective, if we decide you must believe all victims and all transgressions are equally bad, we're going to turn the thing to 11 for everything.

01:29:11.000 How did that happen?

01:29:12.000 I agree with you, but how did that happen?

01:29:14.000 If you're cynical...

01:29:15.000 It's the death of nuance, in part.

01:29:17.000 Yeah, it is the death of nuance because if you're wielding this thing as a weapon, right, if what you want to do is turn the tables on all men, if you want to take power and say, you listen, well, this is a frightening weapon.

01:29:31.000 So in order to make that weapon maximally dangerous, you...

01:29:36.000 You equate rape with catcall.

01:29:39.000 Yeah, you say it's all one.

01:29:41.000 There's nothing a woman could ever do that would increase her likelihood of facing any of this.

01:29:48.000 And, you know, we should cover that in a second because that's another one of these booby traps where you can very easily say the wrong thing and suddenly you're on the defensive even though what you said is very rational.

01:30:01.000 Yeah.

01:30:02.000 But also, it denies the reality of what male-female relationships look like when they're at all healthy. 0.61

01:30:08.000 There's going to be risk.

01:30:10.000 There is risk as you get to know people.

01:30:13.000 And, you know, we're just meeting, say, instead of having met in high school so many years ago.

01:30:20.000 I don't know if I like you yet.

01:30:21.000 You don't know if you like me yet.

01:30:23.000 We're going to take some chances.

01:30:24.000 And maybe you're going to say something wrong, and I'm not going to be thrilled with it.

01:30:29.000 Are you at fault?

01:30:31.000 Do I blame you?

01:30:32.000 Do I cry harassment because you said something that didn't quite fall right on my ears?

01:30:37.000 Or did it sound right and I kind of like you anyway and so I go like, it's fine.

01:30:43.000 You know, we're good.

01:30:44.000 Well, it really depends, you know, how I receive that depends a lot on how I feel about you otherwise.

01:30:52.000 You could say exactly the same words and, you know, you could say it and someone else could say it and from that guy I might feel like, I kind of wish you hadn't said that.

01:31:00.000 But that has to mean that that isn't a deep problem, that he said it because We're engaged in something we're trying to discover.

01:31:07.000 Do we like each other?

01:31:08.000 Are we into each other?

01:31:09.000 Like, what's going on here?

01:31:10.000 So the process of discovery is going to involve mistake and risk and even some sort of, it's game playing.

01:31:18.000 You know, you're involved in the social game in which you're trying to figure out who each other are.

01:31:22.000 And after the fact saying, that guy's kind of gross, so the thing that he said was harassment, sorry, no.

01:31:31.000 Not acceptable.

01:31:32.000 It's changing the rules of the game based on whether or not you like the particular individual, and that's not a legit move.

01:31:38.000 So we've got to be super careful here.

01:31:41.000 Yeah.

01:31:42.000 One thing that is true is we are facing a landscape in which We are, I think, effectively rewriting the rules of male-female interaction in order to make sex with strangers perfectly safe. 0.93

01:32:03.000 Now, sex with strangers can't be perfectly safe in a world in which you're dealing with, let's say it's 1% sociopaths. 0.98

01:32:11.000 You can't make a world in which it's safe to take a sociopath home and have sex with them, right? 0.98

01:32:16.000 That's not going to happen.

01:32:18.000 But in order to try to make it safe, we're going to turn up all of these protections.

01:32:23.000 So for example, We've got the issue of affirmative consent.

01:32:31.000 Now, affirmative consent is a great fail-safe.

01:32:36.000 In a circumstance where you are dealing with a stranger, it seems like it would be absolutely essential because the danger of a miscommunication is so great that you have to be perfectly explicit and there's no room for Any coyness or subtlety about it.

01:33:01.000 In other words, it has to effectively be transactional.

01:33:04.000 But no courtship that's going to make it into history books or literature is going to involve affirmative consent at every stage.

01:33:11.000 You into it?

01:33:12.000 Yes.

01:33:13.000 How about now?

01:33:13.000 Yeah, did you guys remember that video that they released?

01:33:16.000 There was a video that, boy, I don't remember who did it, but it was essentially showing how consent can be sexy, and so it shows this millennial couple making out, and every few seconds the guy has to ask the girl if it's okay if he kisses her,

01:33:35.000 is it okay if I touch you here, is it okay if I take your shirt off, and she says not yet, and then they keep going and going and going.

01:33:42.000 And then the girl's asking the guy, which is hilarious, is it okay if I do this?

01:33:47.000 Because it's imagined symmetry, right?

01:33:49.000 Exactly.

01:33:49.000 It's not symmetrical.

01:33:51.000 Which is preposterous, right. 0.97

01:33:52.000 Well, that was also an issue with, they've sort of abandoned this, but a few years ago there was this thing where if you had sex with someone and alcohol was involved, you raped them. 0.95

01:34:03.000 Because they could not consent. 0.92

01:34:05.000 But I'm like, well, that means I've been raped a lot of times. 0.99

01:34:08.000 Because that's ridiculous. 0.91

01:34:09.000 But it never worked that way. 0.98

01:34:11.000 If you want symmetry, you would have to say that if the man has consumed alcohol and the woman hasn't, then the woman is raping the man. 0.60

01:34:18.000 Well, I don't want to freak you out, but Heather and I have been assuming each other's consent for 30 years.

01:34:26.000 I mean, we have inferred it from cues that were not verbal.

01:34:29.000 You guys didn't discuss?

01:34:31.000 What about writing things down?

01:34:33.000 Do you have a chalkboard at home?

01:34:34.000 No, I mean, and the thing is, the only thing that keeps us safe from being arrested for this is that since we've both done it, you know, it's like...

01:34:41.000 Equally culpable.

01:34:42.000 Right, you're both criminals.

01:34:44.000 Right, exactly.

01:34:45.000 Yeah, but these changing...

01:34:48.000 This shifting of the rules, it seems like it's almost like you were talking about game theory.

01:34:53.000 It really does seem like a type of game.

01:34:57.000 It is life, but it is a thing where people are looking to call people out.

01:35:03.000 You're looking to score.

01:35:07.000 You're finding someone who's done something inappropriate or finding someone who's done something that used to be appropriate but is no longer, and we're looking to establish this new parameter and this new way of existing.

01:35:18.000 And it takes on this competition element, which I'm very familiar with.

01:35:22.000 I understand competition.

01:35:23.000 So when I see it clearly, and I see team behavior, I'm like, well, I see what's going on here.

01:35:29.000 This is not rational thinking.

01:35:30.000 This is someone who's trying to score points.

01:35:33.000 You're trying to get one on the board.

01:35:35.000 Yes, it's absolutely competitive, and it's mostly competitive at the moment.

01:35:38.000 It looks like sort of within women, and it's going to destroy. 1.00

01:35:42.000 It's actively making male-female relationships impossible to navigate. 1.00

01:35:46.000 But I understand it.

01:35:47.000 As a man, I get the motivation.

01:35:49.000 I think that women... 1.00

01:35:52.000 Overwhelmingly have been victimized, as opposed to men being victimized by women in that regard, in terms of being sexually harassed.

01:35:58.000 It's not even close.

01:35:59.000 I mean, it's one of the most unbalanced things in our culture ever.

01:36:02.000 Completely.

01:36:03.000 And it's older than our culture.

01:36:05.000 And this is what we're talking about.

01:36:07.000 What do we want out of this?

01:36:09.000 Safety.

01:36:10.000 But do you want 100% safety?

01:36:13.000 Right.

01:36:13.000 Do you want to maximize safety at the cost of...

01:36:16.000 Well, we have to kill sociopaths if we want to do that. 1.00

01:36:18.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:36:19.000 The point is, if you want absolute safety...

01:36:22.000 I mean, we're getting to the point where this is just robbing...

01:36:24.000 Okay, if the point of this is to make sex safe because it's pleasurable, this is going to rob all of the pleasure from sex.

01:36:34.000 I mean, it's getting to the point where you'd be crazy to have sex without witnesses.

01:36:39.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:36:41.000 But anyway, the point is, now that the stuff is on the table...

01:36:45.000 Right now that we know that there are monsters, we know that there are economic forces that actually protect these monsters, which frankly is a big part of this story.

01:36:54.000 Right?

01:36:55.000 Is that the economic structure of something like Hollywood causes this to continue with it being effectively an open secret that these people are abusing women and then silencing them and contractually obligating them. 0.99

01:37:09.000 Not to do anything about it.

01:37:11.000 That cancer on the social system is now open for discussion and we, all of us decent folk, know that we have to get rid of it.

01:37:23.000 If you get rid of it though on false pretenses, I promise you the very same game theory that caused it to happen in the first place will cause it to re-emerge.

01:37:32.000 The only, the reason it exists...

01:37:34.000 And it will be harder to address the next time.

01:37:36.000 Don't you think that the overreaction, though, has pretty much calmed down, post Garrison Keillor and Al Franken?

01:37:43.000 And with Al Franken, obviously, there's some pretty obvious political ramifications to it.

01:37:49.000 I don't know what state it's in.

01:37:53.000 I haven't seen the nuanced conversation I haven't seen the description of what the...

01:38:01.000 I mean, so let me back up a second.

01:38:03.000 And what we have seen is a doubling down on there are no differences between men and women.

01:38:08.000 It's all a social construct.

01:38:09.000 Who's doubling down?

01:38:10.000 But where is this happening?

01:38:11.000 In the universities?

01:38:12.000 In the universities, and it's spreading.

01:38:14.000 I mean, this is what the replies to the Google memo were about.

01:38:19.000 I mean, this is...

01:38:21.000 But isn't Google, in a sense, an extension of the universities in that regard?

01:38:24.000 It is, and it's everywhere.

01:38:27.000 Right.

01:38:45.000 Are they peers that believe some false story about what human beings are?

01:38:51.000 Or are these people who are going to be able to hear a story that has some nuance and some gray area in it and take it in?

01:39:00.000 And the fact is people...

01:39:01.000 If you look at what advertisers are using to access people, if you look at the narratives that exist in movies, people are capable of understanding the subtlety of human interactions.

01:39:13.000 But they are either pretending or convincing themselves in the public space that things are way simpler than they actually are.

01:39:21.000 And what I don't want to see and what, I mean, again, I don't have a dog in this fight.

01:39:27.000 I'm happily married.

01:39:28.000 I'm not looking for anything else.

01:39:30.000 That's good to know.

01:39:33.000 But I do want to see this solved in time for our children to face a landscape that makes sense.

01:39:40.000 And I would like our many students who have talked to us about the confusion of trying to navigate romance in the current circumstance, I would like them to...

01:39:49.000 What's going on, Jamie?

01:39:51.000 It came out yesterday.

01:39:51.000 Since you guys are talking about it, I don't know how it affects what you're talking about currently, but...

01:39:55.000 How an alt-right bot network took down Al Franken?

01:39:58.000 Yeah, this is on Newsweek.

01:39:59.000 It started actually in Japan, and they traced the whole thing of the day before Roger Stone tweeted something about Al Franken even starting to be taken down, and they traced the whole interaction of bots on Twitter doing this all for a couple weeks. 0.93

01:40:14.000 But there was actual women that said he grabbed their butt. 1.00

01:40:20.000 Maybe. 0.97

01:40:21.000 They asked him for a comment and he didn't respond yet because this was just within the last 24 hours.

01:40:27.000 I don't know what we should do with the Franken story because the Franken story, it's not empty the way the Garrison Keillor story appears to be totally empty.

01:40:36.000 On the other hand, and I mean, I think this is probably why...

01:40:39.000 Jamie put it up.

01:40:41.000 We have to think carefully.

01:40:43.000 When you're talking about a senator being brought down on the basis of these Claims that are tied up in a movement which does not appear nuanced about the degree of harm done and things like that.

01:41:03.000 There's something at stake.

01:41:04.000 Just, you know, when there's an assassination, you have to ask yourself, who benefits from the absence of this person?

01:41:12.000 The political assassination is not a normal murder.

01:41:15.000 It is a political act.

01:41:17.000 It shifts the balance of something.

01:41:19.000 This is not an assassination, but it functions like one.

01:41:22.000 It takes a political actor who stood for certain things and against other things and represented certain constituencies and fought others.

01:41:29.000 It takes them off the map.

01:41:31.000 And so when that happens, it's really, it's actually an extension of what we were talking about, the bad actor problem.

01:41:37.000 A bad actor can be a sociopath that wants to advance their own cause or take out an enemy or something like that.

01:41:45.000 It can also be a political apparatus or a corporate entity that wishes to shift the balance in a political body like the US Senate.

01:41:56.000 So we have to be mindful.

01:41:58.000 It is yet another reason that we can't build naively.

01:42:02.000 Right.

01:42:03.000 Yeah, this is a very good point, because we don't know the motivation of the people who came out.

01:42:06.000 We don't know if it's accurate.

01:42:07.000 He says it's not accurate.

01:42:08.000 We don't know.

01:42:09.000 We have no idea.

01:42:10.000 And what's the price point for a botnet that can cause the internet to turn on you?

01:42:15.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:42:16.000 And maybe it doesn't matter, but the entry point to that story was he took a picture, a comedic picture, pretending to fondle someone's breasts. 0.97

01:42:23.000 Right. 0.93

01:42:24.000 Pretending.

01:42:25.000 Yeah.

01:42:25.000 You know, was it in good taste?

01:42:26.000 No.

01:42:27.000 Was it criminal?

01:42:28.000 No.

01:42:28.000 No, but there was a little more to that.

01:42:30.000 She actually said that he kissed her.

01:42:33.000 Like they were doing some sort of a sketch together and he insisted on kissing her.

01:42:37.000 Before that picture.

01:42:38.000 Yeah.

01:42:38.000 And he wanted to practice the kiss, which she found inappropriate.

01:42:43.000 Yeah.

01:42:43.000 That's why, you know, I don't love the Franken story as an example here because it's murky.

01:42:51.000 Yes, I agree.

01:42:52.000 It's not Garrison Keillor.

01:42:53.000 But here we are being very, very careful.

01:42:55.000 To make sure not to accept... 0.98

01:43:00.000 You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. 0.99

01:43:02.000 You really are. 0.98

01:43:03.000 Garrison Keillor is the only one that seems completely clean, but I can basically guarantee you statistically that there are good men who are being taken down.

01:43:13.000 Well, so the last time I was on, we talked about Matt Taibbi and...

01:43:19.000 Yes.

01:43:19.000 I don't know one way or the other.

01:43:21.000 I don't know Matt Taibbi.

01:43:22.000 But that story also looked to me like one in which the portrayal was manufactured.

01:43:28.000 And he has now just won a settlement from the nation on the basis of this.

01:43:34.000 So anyway, that one appears to have gone in what I imagine is the right direction.

01:43:41.000 So that's positive.

01:43:43.000 But I want to return to an earlier point.

01:43:47.000 We are talking about what the rules of interaction should be.

01:43:51.000 It is good that we are talking about it, and it is good that we are finally addressing the issue of monsters.

01:43:56.000 Why this didn't get set loose by Bill Cosby, I don't know, because that one appeared crystal clear.

01:44:05.000 That one built.

01:44:07.000 That one, it started off, you know, I can say as a person who worked as an actor for a while, I heard about that story in the 90s.

01:44:16.000 But it was one of those weird ones where you didn't know if it was like the Richard Gere gerbil story.

01:44:20.000 Is that real?

01:44:22.000 You know what I mean?

01:44:23.000 It's like, I had heard that Bill Cosby does this to women. 0.53

01:44:26.000 Like, hmm, okay.

01:44:27.000 I don't know.

01:44:27.000 It's so beyond the pale that it feels like, hmm.

01:44:30.000 And you don't, and then, but then, you know, when it's 50 women that come out and say drug them, you go, okay.

01:44:35.000 Something's going on.

01:44:36.000 It becomes clear.

01:44:36.000 And the problem is it becomes, in a case like that, What would have to be true for the stories to be false is pretty extreme.

01:44:46.000 Well, it's also him.

01:44:48.000 There's evidence of him mocking drugging people.

01:44:51.000 I mean, he did an episode of The Cosby Show where he drugged people.

01:44:55.000 He would talk about it on talk shows about drugging girls.

01:44:58.000 I mean, he...

01:45:00.000 Most likely was guilty.

01:45:02.000 Oh, I think there's no question.

01:45:04.000 And you don't need the due process in this case.

01:45:07.000 It would be crazy if it was the most complicated conspiracy of all time.

01:45:11.000 If all these gals got together and said, I know what we should do to make some money and make some noise. 1.00

01:45:15.000 Let's all make up the same story.

01:45:17.000 Starting decades ago.

01:45:18.000 Right.

01:45:18.000 There would be some sort of evidence of that.

01:45:22.000 So in this case, and in Harvey Weinstein's case, and I think in Matt Lauer's case, the evidence is so overwhelming that it overrides our need as members of the public to see, to withhold judgment until due process has unfolded.

01:45:39.000 But the point is, there's a place at which that stops.

01:45:42.000 Right?

01:45:43.000 At which things are murky enough that you have to wait for due process.

01:45:46.000 And the idea that this movement is actually not really interested in due process.

01:45:50.000 And in fact, it challenges due process and says you have to believe victims.

01:45:55.000 Right?

01:45:56.000 Asking for evidence is augmenting the problem, is victim blaming or whatever.

01:45:59.000 Right?

01:46:01.000 This is a terrible error.

01:46:04.000 And so if we are to get to a state that makes sense, it has to be one in which monsters are held to account, in which there's nuance and degrees of guilt and that we don't throw everybody out.

01:46:19.000 Some people can't.

01:46:20.000 I can't imagine that Bill Cosby can be rehabilitated.

01:46:23.000 But could Al Franken be rehabilitated?

01:46:26.000 If that's the story, maybe he could be.

01:46:28.000 Yeah, there's a thing where we get to a certain age where we no longer think people can grow.

01:46:33.000 Right.

01:46:34.000 Right? 0.99

01:46:34.000 Like if he was 20, if Al Franken took that picture when he was 20, we'd be like, that silly kid. 0.99

01:46:40.000 What is he doing? 0.98

01:46:41.000 That's not something that's appropriate.

01:46:42.000 What if that was your mom?

01:46:43.000 I'm sorry.

01:46:44.000 And then you learn and you grow.

01:46:45.000 But for those of us who value liberty...

01:46:53.000 A situation in which we reorganize the entire landscape to make sex with strangers as safe as it can possibly be, that is not a landscape that is good for everybody.

01:47:06.000 We need to make a landscape in which people who want to do that Are free to do it, but not everybody is compelled to play that game.

01:47:27.000 That won't be perfectly safe either.

01:47:30.000 But what we should want is a landscape in which we generate safety for people at the level that doesn't cost us spectacularly in terms of how civilization functions.

01:47:43.000 And then we need to actually say also, and this is another tough point where I'm worried that people will hear it in that monolithic way, but The following thing is true, I believe.

01:47:57.000 A woman, if civilization functioned well, a woman should be able to put on the minimum clothes that the law will allow to cover herself in oil, to walk through town in the middle of the night saying things that indicate that she's hot to trot if she can find the right guy and she should be safe to do it. 1.00

01:48:20.000 But a woman would have to be insane to do that. 1.00

01:48:24.000 It's not a good thing to do.

01:48:25.000 So we should want a civilization...

01:48:27.000 There should be legal protection for her to do it, but no sane person should choose to do it, because...

01:48:36.000 No sane person would choose to flip BMX bikes on the X Games and no sane person would choose to jump out of planes, but we should allow them the right to do so for that thrill.

01:48:48.000 I'm going to push back on that a little bit and say risk-taking when you're putting yourself at risk and you aren't involving someone else who is going to see your signals and maybe act on them and then Is going to have acted on signals that you shouldn't have been sending in the first place.

01:49:05.000 It's different.

01:49:06.000 So, BMX bike, jumping out of a plane.

01:49:09.000 Risk taking is more common in men than women, on average, across cultures.

01:49:14.000 Not to say that a lot of women don't take risks and have fun doing it, physical risks. 1.00

01:49:20.000 But absolutely is risk-taking adaptive and enjoyable and interesting.

01:49:25.000 And if your risk-taking results in you dying and no one else getting hurt, go for it.

01:49:30.000 How is the man getting hurt if the woman is taking these risks, walking down the street, oiled up with a bikini on, yelling out that she's randy? 0.75

01:49:37.000 If there's a chance that later he is held accountable for the kid that results, or she changed her mind, or whatever it is that the claim is, especially in this current climate of Believe All Women, that is potentially a problem.

01:49:53.000 I see what you're saying.

01:49:54.000 I see where it would be more complicated than just jumping out of a plane and parachuting, but it's still voluntary risk-taking.

01:50:01.000 You are involving another person who's also voluntarily getting involved in that.

01:50:07.000 Well, unfortunately, there's no There is going to be no set rule that we can establish that neutralizes these things.

01:50:19.000 You know, you go to Disneyland.

01:50:20.000 I haven't been to Disneyland in decades.

01:50:22.000 You should go.

01:50:24.000 It's nice.

01:50:24.000 Right now?

01:50:25.000 It's a fun place.

01:50:25.000 But if you go to Disneyland, everything has been rendered perfectly safe, right?

01:50:31.000 People have been through it with a fine tooth comb so that nothing bad can happen to you.

01:50:36.000 And you can have all of this excitement on the rides, but nothing bad is going to happen to you.

01:50:39.000 We cannot turn civilization into that kind of landscape. 0.99

01:50:43.000 The price of turning it into a landscape in which you can be a moron and walk through life and nothing bad is going to happen to you, that price is way too high. 0.99

01:50:52.000 This is it, actually. 0.98

01:50:53.000 So, I mean, this thing, this moment in time in 2018 is a natural outgrowth of things like helicopter parenting.

01:51:01.000 Where you keep your children from all possible danger, all possible physical risk, and you then end up with children who find offense at and feel unsafe in all manner of situations.

01:51:14.000 It is impossible to be an adult if you don't do trial and error, and it's impossible to become a sexual adult if you don't engage in some trial and error.

01:51:21.000 It involves a little bit of risk, and I don't want physical risk and sexual Play, but there is going to be some experimenting.

01:51:33.000 Well, there's going to be some even meeting friends.

01:51:36.000 Exactly.

01:51:37.000 Exactly.

01:51:37.000 And so, I mean, I think the totally non-fraught version of this is that we took our kids and 30 undergraduates to the Amazon because it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and it's extraordinary.

01:51:49.000 And for evolutionary biologists, why wouldn't you go if you could?

01:51:53.000 And a lot of our friends thought, you're taking these little boys to the Amazon?

01:51:58.000 How old were they?

01:51:58.000 The first time we took them, they were 10 and 8. Jesus.

01:52:02.000 And we waited.

01:52:03.000 I wanted to take them sooner.

01:52:05.000 So I was leading the study abroad trips earlier, and Brett said they're too young.

01:52:08.000 Basically, they're too young for us to give them the shots that Western civilization has afforded us to give them to keep them safe from things like yellow fever.

01:52:17.000 And too young to deal with the instructions that you need to actually remain safe.

01:52:24.000 From jaguars.

01:52:25.000 Jaguars are not the issue.

01:52:27.000 It's more like tree falls.

01:52:28.000 It's trees falling on you.

01:52:30.000 It's water that rises quickly.

01:52:31.000 But this is exactly the point.

01:52:33.000 At the point we took them, we talked to them a lot in advance as we talked to our students in advance, and then we trusted them.

01:52:40.000 And, you know, our younger son found a gigantic coral snake at one point and was walking ahead of us on the trail along with the guide that we happened to have with us.

01:52:48.000 And he ran back and the guide ran forward and actually, you know, pinned the snake so we could see it.

01:52:55.000 That was a danger.

01:52:58.000 God forbid something had happened.

01:53:00.000 It would be very hard for us to live with ourselves had that gone differently.

01:53:05.000 But you expose your children to risk so that they can then know what to do when risk happens to them.

01:53:10.000 You expose yourself to sexual situations that aren't stranger sex so that you can know how to build courtship and romance and love and sex later on.

01:53:21.000 Much like Friends.

01:53:22.000 It's a trial and error.

01:53:23.000 Exactly like Friends.

01:53:24.000 Yeah.

01:53:24.000 So there's a how do we learn what we learn in order to manage the world?

01:53:30.000 Our developmental environments have to give us model situations that are close enough to the situations that we run into as adults that we have the tools to navigate them.

01:53:40.000 And so one of the, I think, very difficult things to accept as a parent Is that if your child is going to be able to manage risk as an adult, they cannot be made perfectly safe as a child,

01:53:56.000 which means that you are running the risk that something disastrous will happen and that you'll have to live with it.

01:54:03.000 If you make your child perfectly safe in childhood, they will be terrible at managing risk as adults and then something terrible is going to happen to them.

01:54:11.000 So what I operate on, or maybe I'm reverse engineering the way I think I've learned how to behave, is something I call the theory of close calls, which is that you don't want to have disaster strike.

01:54:30.000 And in fact, we've told our children, we've said, look, we don't want you to break your arm or your leg.

01:54:36.000 But you may end up doing it and you're allowed to.

01:54:40.000 Here are the things you're not allowed to do.

01:54:42.000 You're not allowed to damage your skull.

01:54:44.000 You're not allowed to damage your eyes.

01:54:47.000 You're not allowed to damage your back, right?

01:54:49.000 You protect those things.

01:54:50.000 You protect those things at all costs.

01:54:52.000 Actually, when we took the students to Ecuador, it wasn't really the only rule, but we called it the one rule, and it was really the central guiding principle of the trip.

01:55:05.000 This is an 11-week trip through all these ecosystems in Ecuador.

01:55:07.000 It's a really long, extended trip.

01:55:09.000 With students that we knew well.

01:55:10.000 We had been with them all year, and we had cultivated communities, so we knew them well.

01:55:15.000 And what we said is, look, lots of things are going to happen.

01:55:19.000 You're going to have to navigate on the fly.

01:55:22.000 Nobody comes home in a box.

01:55:36.000 Welcome to my show!

01:55:44.000 You can't learn how not to get run over by a car by getting somewhat run over by a car, right?

01:55:52.000 But you can learn from your close call.

01:55:55.000 So I had a good friend, actually, somebody that...

01:55:59.000 So Heather and I were not dating in high school, but we were friends.

01:56:02.000 We went to the same high school.

01:56:03.000 Somebody we knew in high school happened to go to the same college that I started at Penn, and we were walking down the street one day, and she stepped into the street thinking it was clear, and this car whizzed by her at 40 miles an hour.

01:56:19.000 Didn't touch her.

01:56:21.000 And so the question is, what do you think about something like that?

01:56:25.000 She was unscratched.

01:56:27.000 But had she been one second ahead of where she was, she would have probably been dead.

01:56:33.000 And so you could think, well, I must be doing something right because I got away with it.

01:56:38.000 Or you could be thinking the difference between my death and not being scratched in this case wasn't something that I did.

01:56:44.000 With any sort of intent.

01:56:45.000 It was pure luck that saved my life right there.

01:56:48.000 Therefore, I need to figure out how it is that I stepped off that curb without noticing that that car was coming.

01:56:55.000 There's something wrong in my model of how to live that I could have gotten that close.

01:56:58.000 So as you experience close calls, they tell you something about where your model is broken and you can fix it.

01:57:04.000 And so I think what Heather's getting at is Learning how to interact with other people, especially when you're talking about high stakes stuff like romance and sex, you need to have some room to figure out how these relationships are negotiated. 0.58

01:57:21.000 And if the point is these rules Are going to be negotiated by some people who are going to lay down the law and say you must seek affirmative consent every 37 seconds.

01:57:31.000 That's not going to work.

01:57:32.000 It's not going to teach anybody how you actually manage with another human being.

01:57:39.000 Makes sense.

01:57:40.000 And I don't know How do you teach that to a child to manage risk versus reward in relationships?

01:57:50.000 How do you know?

01:57:54.000 One of the things that we hope is that they gain some sort of an understanding of human interaction when they're in their teen years, when they're still at home, then they're protected somewhat when they go to college, and then as they go out into the world.

01:58:09.000 Yeah, it's tough.

01:58:10.000 How much information have they accumulated?

01:58:12.000 You have to let them do it and allow them to judge, for God's sake.

01:58:16.000 There's this don't judge thing going on.

01:58:19.000 There will be no exclusion of anyone at any time on the schoolyard, and don't judge anyone no matter what they say.

01:58:26.000 Well, that's bad for the kid that gets judged, because there's some behavior that sucks, and they need to know that it's very uncomfortable for other people to be around you when you're like that, and that's how you understand social interaction.

01:58:37.000 And this is a big part of how kids grow into adults.

01:58:40.000 This is how humans become humans.

01:58:41.000 It's not just top-down from parents and from teachers.

01:58:45.000 It's largely from peers.

01:58:47.000 I love what you said about helicopter parenting, because I think you're totally right.

01:58:50.000 I think that is part of what's going on here.

01:58:52.000 I think part of what's going on here also is this newfound ability to complain and communicate.

01:58:56.000 It's beautiful in the fact that you can exchange information at an incredible pace.

01:59:00.000 I mean, we've never had anything remotely like this in human history.

01:59:02.000 But it's terrible in the fact that it's hard to figure out what's noise.

01:59:06.000 There's so much chatter going on, and if you're a dummy, you can find other dummies that think just like you, and you organize a very volatile group.

01:59:13.000 And you reinforce those wrong ideas. 0.95

01:59:15.000 Confirmation bias, you all get together, you interact on a forum.

01:59:20.000 There's a few forums that are frequent that are just filled with, they're just echo chambers, and they're confusing. 0.98

01:59:26.000 And like, I don't know anybody that thinks like this, but here they are, all collected, convinced that there is no biological difference in the sexes, and that a trans woman is a woman, if you don't date trans women, that you're a bigot, you know, even if you're a heterosexual male and she has a penis. 0.93

01:59:42.000 There's a lot of squirrely thinking going on, and it's reinforced by others.

01:59:46.000 And you start thinking you're right, and then you are the future.

01:59:50.000 And all these people out there that are living in this archaic, ancient way, they're artifacts of the past, and they will soon be relegated to history.

01:59:59.000 It was a great summary.

02:00:00.000 It was a good summary.

02:00:02.000 There is a property of our current lives that people just need to be more aware of.

02:00:10.000 We arrive at the present.

02:00:12.000 We are partially updated by Various features like school for modern circumstances.

02:00:20.000 But we are also partially throwbacks.

02:00:23.000 And we aren't throwbacks, you know, evolutionary psychology, in my opinion, has erred in imagining that we are simply Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering around civilization.

02:00:33.000 But we are throwbacks to various places in our past, some of them recent, some of them much more remote.

02:00:39.000 And what we face is an epidemic of novelty.

02:00:44.000 So novelty is all of the stuff that we don't have programming on board to navigate.

02:00:52.000 All of the stuff that your instincts don't tell you what to do.

02:00:55.000 The foods, you know, the refined sugar, the corporation that wants to advertise the cereal to your child so that they eat more of it than they should or they eat different stuff than they would...

02:01:09.000 Novelty makes us sick.

02:01:11.000 And novelty can make you physically sick.

02:01:13.000 It can make you psychologically sick.

02:01:15.000 It can make you socially sick.

02:01:18.000 And that can also be the source of great change.

02:01:21.000 Evolution can deal with novelty, but not at the rate of change that is happening now.

02:01:25.000 Right.

02:01:25.000 The rate of change is so high that our evolutionary capacity to deal with novelty is outstripped.

02:01:31.000 And so I do want to, you know, there is a way in which, you know, if you just listen to little sound bites from what we're getting at, you could get the wrong idea that we're very traditional.

02:01:41.000 And in fact, our relationship isn't traditional at all.

02:01:46.000 I asked him to carry the second baby, but he wouldn't do it. 0.97

02:01:49.000 I would after he was born.

02:01:51.000 Yes, you found out quite a lot.

02:01:55.000 We have not thought carefully about the fact that porn is effectively functioning like sexuality school for kids, right?

02:02:08.000 You don't learn about sex in school.

02:02:10.000 Sex ed is kind of a joke.

02:02:12.000 People don't take it seriously.

02:02:13.000 But where do they learn about sex? 0.95

02:02:15.000 Well, they learn about it from what they encounter on the internet.

02:02:18.000 And here's the problem with that.

02:02:20.000 That is not an honest report of anything.

02:02:22.000 What that is, is the result of competition, economic competition between porn producers to capture your attention, right?

02:02:33.000 So what that means is that it pushes in the direction of all sorts of stuff that people might not be that interested in because this producer wants to take your attention away from that producer and so they make something more extreme or And it certainly triggers that second male strategy.

02:02:48.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

02:02:49.000 It's the second male strategy of the no-strings-attached person who you could just hook up with on a whim.

02:02:57.000 You're delivering a pizza and she grabs you by your shirt and pulls you in. 0.99

02:03:00.000 It's like, what?

02:03:01.000 Huh?

02:03:01.000 That's the norm.

02:03:02.000 Win-win-win.

02:03:03.000 Yeah.

02:03:04.000 Bingo.

02:03:04.000 And so what we've effectively done is accidentally, economically, we've announced to children that this is what sex looks like.

02:03:13.000 And maybe they even get proficient at that kind of sex, but it's mechanical, uninteresting, and has very little to do with the most rewarding stuff.

02:03:22.000 In what it is to be a human being, which has to do with deeper, long-lasting relationships.

02:03:28.000 So it shouldn't surprise us at all that we've arrived at a dysfunctional moment where people are shouting at each other about what the rules have to be because what we've installed as a mechanism for learning about these things does not have our interests at heart.

02:03:47.000 It is an economic entity that is not under anyone's control.

02:03:51.000 And it's quite dangerous.

02:03:52.000 Now, before the inevitable backlash, oh my god, he said porn was bad. 0.86

02:03:58.000 I really do think porn is bad.

02:04:00.000 I don't think erotica is bad.

02:04:03.000 If somebody wants to make sexual content with some purpose other than trying to grab your attention and take your money, I don't want to see children exposed to it willy-nilly,

02:04:31.000 but my real point is You know, just as there's a distinction between the really good stuff that you sometimes see on your television screen because somebody's put together a well-thought-out series and broadcast television,

02:04:48.000 which is often pretty garbagey, There's a big difference between the sort of garbagey view of sex that people are getting because the economics are driving us in that direction and some more interesting, nuanced, adventurous version that we might see if the landscape wasn't saturated with the porn version.

02:05:14.000 Defend porn. 0.95

02:05:15.000 I think there's got to be a spectrum of porn.

02:05:17.000 I'm not a porn investigator, but I would imagine that there's some romantic couple porn that makes sense. 0.99

02:05:23.000 Where it is a husband and wife or a boyfriend and girlfriend in the video or boy and boy or whatever the fuck you want. 0.96

02:05:30.000 But what it is, is natural and healthy. 0.94

02:05:33.000 There's got to be a market for that.

02:05:35.000 It can't all be extreme, crazy stuff that's just designed to get your attention.

02:05:41.000 I think there is, but I think it's miscategorized.

02:05:45.000 First of all, I'm not really interested in porn, so I don't know what's out there.

02:05:49.000 But my understanding is that actually there are many people who are producing Amateur stuff, and maybe they have an exhibitionist streak or something, but that there is, you know, human beings are naturally fascinated by human sex.

02:06:04.000 Yeah, that's a big category, I believe, is couples, like amateur couples.

02:06:08.000 Some people actually prefer that because it seems like real people who are attracted to each other are actually having sex.

02:06:15.000 Because it might actually have some information in it, and it might be You know, frankly, might be more exciting because it has some reality to it.

02:06:22.000 But my point is, you know, there's a gray area.

02:06:25.000 I would say the distinction between porn and erotica is actually pretty easy to draw.

02:06:30.000 It has to do with whether the motivation that caused it to be produced is economic, right?

02:06:35.000 If the motivation that caused it to be produced, if it would not have been produced absent that economic motivation, it's porn and I'm suspicious of it.

02:06:42.000 So Fifty Shades of Grey is porn then?

02:06:44.000 I haven't seen it.

02:06:46.000 Good for you.

02:06:47.000 Neither have I. Neither have I. It's erotic.

02:06:52.000 Well, if none of us have seen it, let's talk about it.

02:06:54.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:06:55.000 Yeah, let's definitely cast judgment.

02:06:57.000 Yeah.

02:06:58.000 I see what you're saying.

02:07:00.000 And I definitely agree that it's sex school for children. 0.89

02:07:05.000 And there's a giant issue in that, because it is an unrealistic depiction of Actual sexual interaction for the most part like most sexual encounters are not gonna go the way they are in porn And just like setting your kid in front of a screen when he or she is really young Does not teach that kid how to interact with real human beings,

02:07:28.000 right?

02:07:29.000 If porn is your exposure to sex It's gonna create a kind of sex autism Like, you're not going to know how to engage with actual real human beings who can give you feedback.

02:07:41.000 That's an interesting way to describe it.

02:07:43.000 Yeah, I like that.

02:07:44.000 I mean, it's a little, it's a little dangerous, obviously, because, well, for various reasons.

02:07:49.000 But just from the point of view that it denies you a sense of what the feedbacks would look like, because feedbacks between two people don't look like what happens when somebody writes a script.

02:08:00.000 It's not universal.

02:08:01.000 It's not generalizable.

02:08:02.000 You know, the very nature of human interaction is that it's one-off.

02:08:05.000 Do you think it's something along the lines...

02:08:07.000 I mean, obviously...

02:08:08.000 See, here's a problem with porn.

02:08:09.000 One of the problems with porn is because the accessibility is so high, it's not like X-rated violent movies.

02:08:17.000 There used to be some movies were X-rated for violence.

02:08:20.000 Remember that?

02:08:21.000 Or NC-17, right?

02:08:23.000 But you could be 13 with a cell phone and you have access to all the porn in the world.

02:08:29.000 And I just think...

02:08:31.000 Yeah, so many of these issues, I think, you know, we need to be nuanced and very careful once we're talking about adults and when people become adults is a question.

02:08:40.000 But when we're talking about clearly still kids, you know, should children be exposed to porn?

02:08:48.000 No, they are still developing.

02:08:50.000 They're still figuring out how to be adults.

02:08:53.000 Should...

02:08:54.000 Should children be given sex hormones of the sex that they are not born to, even if they might end up transitioning and becoming trans later on? 0.52

02:09:06.000 Almost certainly not, because the vast number of people who end up realizing, oh, actually, I was experimenting.

02:09:14.000 This is what childhood is.

02:09:17.000 I was trying on something else, and now I've made it permanent by virtue of medicalizing the thing.

02:09:23.000 That's another subject entirely, but I completely agree.

02:09:26.000 You're essentially making a permanent decision for a child as early as, I mean, I've heard it argued three years old, which is insane.

02:09:34.000 It just doesn't seem to suit, it doesn't seem to fit any logic.

02:09:40.000 The only thing it seems to fit is this agenda that this is a natural normal part of our society and we should reinforce it as early as possible.

02:09:48.000 Well, I want to push back on that a little bit.

02:09:51.000 I think it's very clear there's so much gender confusion that sorts itself out through the natural process of development.

02:10:03.000 That the idea that we should intervene medically when we have no idea who is going to Right.

02:10:27.000 Then there is an argument to be made that the earlier that they transition, the more completely they are able to jump the gap.

02:10:34.000 I would say the precautionary principle has to apply here.

02:10:38.000 Trans is a real condition and some people have it and should be allowed to transition, but allowing children to make that decision for themselves when More often than not, they end up not transitioning.

02:10:54.000 Frankly, it looks criminal to me.

02:10:56.000 I think in the modern situation, with how little we understand about why it is that some people end up gender dysphoric for life and all of that, there's no way that we should be interfering early.

02:11:12.000 You have to let children sort this stuff out.

02:11:14.000 I'm just saying, in the abstract, it's not that there's no argument for doing it early.

02:11:19.000 It's that the argument for doing it early doesn't come anywhere near the strength to the argument for not doing it early, which is that these things sort themselves out.

02:11:27.000 If you really have been born into the wrong body, as is the phrase that is used by people, some of whom we have known, who are actually legitimately trans, The earlier the hormonal inputs came in,

02:11:43.000 the more fully they would be able to transition.

02:11:46.000 But the risk is too high.

02:11:48.000 It's unconscionable now.

02:11:53.000 We're into some strange, blind territory when you start saying legitimately trans.

02:11:59.000 Like, who's illegitimately trans?

02:12:01.000 If you decide to be trans, you're legitimately trans. 0.95

02:12:04.000 There are a lot of people who are wearing it as a fashion statement.

02:12:08.000 How can anyone make that distinction if they're not that person?

02:12:12.000 I don't know if that's true.

02:12:16.000 I bet you're right.

02:12:17.000 I'm not disagreeing with you.

02:12:19.000 But how would we know?

02:12:20.000 I think you know because the cost of being trans in a society that views trans the way ours does is so high that there is a very, it's the barrier to telling the world that this is how you feel is substantial enough to prevent people from I'm flirting with it casually.

02:12:43.000 I would push back on that because there's people that get face tattoos and they do weird body modifications.

02:12:49.000 It's looked down upon constantly.

02:12:52.000 People do a lot of things for self-hate purposes.

02:12:54.000 They do a lot of things to shock people.

02:12:56.000 They do a lot of things because they just want to get a reaction out of people.

02:13:00.000 I don't necessarily agree with that.

02:13:02.000 I think you might be right that there are people that wear it as a fashion statement, but Who are people who have assumed traditional or semi-traditional gender roles to make that distinction?

02:13:16.000 If we believe in real freedom.

02:13:18.000 I think we have to let people choose.

02:13:20.000 I think we can't let children choose.

02:13:22.000 We certainly can't let parents leap to it.

02:13:26.000 Heather has said a number of times, so people who don't know Heather should know that she is a dyed-in-the-wool She's a tomboy and has been for her whole life. 0.98

02:13:37.000 Ever since I was destroying the frilly dresses my mother was putting me in.

02:13:41.000 Destroying the frilly dresses and resenting the pink color that your room was painted.

02:13:49.000 So you essentially modeled yourself after your dad.

02:13:55.000 Your dad was a computer scientist, one of the early pioneers in operating system authorship.

02:14:03.000 Anyway, Heather had a very strong relationship with her dad and she played like a boy.

02:14:11.000 Heather has asked.

02:14:12.000 One of the things he said to me on several occasions was, I will not raise a weak girl.

02:14:16.000 I will not raise a hopeless or helpless child.

02:14:19.000 And so, you know, when I'd have my nose buried in a book and he'd be out back building a fence, he'd say, you're going to come out and help me dig post holes and pour the cement and put in the posts and you're going to do this.

02:14:31.000 Not because I expect that you're going to go into fence building, but because you need to know how to work with your hands and do physical work in the universe and see what the ramifications are.

02:14:40.000 Not that he didn't want you reading the book.

02:14:42.000 Oh, of course not.

02:14:43.000 On other weekends, he was taking me to math competitions.

02:14:47.000 So there's a lot of abstraction and play with numbers and science as well in sport.

02:14:53.000 But it was specifically about not assuming what I was going to be capable of because I was born a girl.

02:15:00.000 That's a giant problem with this category of men and women. 1.00

02:15:05.000 Obviously, there's this giant spectrum inside each category and that should be okay.

02:15:11.000 It should be alright.

02:15:13.000 It has to be okay.

02:15:14.000 It has to be.

02:15:15.000 It has to be.

02:15:15.000 And this is one of the problems with assuming traditional gender roles or assuming types of behavior and what some people like sexually other people would hate and vice-a-verse and some people I mean, some people can get away with things because women find it attractive,

02:15:33.000 whereas another man could do the exact same thing, and women would think it's disgusting, and that's okay, too.

02:15:38.000 Well, we have to err in the direction of keeping people safe, but we can't turn the dial on safety to 11 because we'll destroy everything else.

02:15:46.000 Right, we'll kill all the fun. 1.00

02:15:47.000 And we can't imagine that these categories are invariant, right?

02:15:50.000 That male looks one way, and this is exactly what you're saying, but it's, you know, they, many of the people who are arguing against the biology of sex and gender Say things like, gender isn't binary.

02:16:01.000 And they're right.

02:16:02.000 It's not, but it's bimodal.

02:16:05.000 These are population distributions with a lot of variation in them, and they are widely overlapping.

02:16:10.000 But that doesn't mean they're the same.

02:16:12.000 They're not identical, but they are broadly overlapping.

02:16:15.000 They certainly do, right? 0.99

02:16:17.000 And there's been some interesting pushback from these older European women, particularly French women, who are like, what the fuck are you guys doing? 1.00

02:16:25.000 You're ruining sex. 0.99

02:16:27.000 You're ruining romance and courtship.

02:16:29.000 Exactly.

02:16:29.000 They have a different attitude about it, and they think that there's a certain amount of aggressive behavior from men that they enjoy, and they don't want to douse that.

02:16:39.000 Well, so somehow, I'm glad we're getting to this part of the conversation.

02:16:45.000 One thing to say is, I didn't finish the thing about Heather, is that Heather has vocalized that if she grew up in the modern era, she worries that somebody, her parents wouldn't have, they would have fought back, but that some people would have been thinking,

02:17:00.000 oh, you're trans. 0.61

02:17:02.000 We need to take care of you and we need to give you hormones and things like that because the fact that she played like a boy would have been taken as an indication that she was born in the wrong body or something. 1.00

02:17:13.000 That can't happen.

02:17:15.000 We have to protect people so that they can sort out their own stuff.

02:17:18.000 So, I mean, we have to expand.

02:17:21.000 I mean, I really feel like we had already kind of gotten here, but I've talked to people who identify as trans who say things like, I'm trans because I don't fit into my father's mold of a macho man.

02:17:35.000 And I prefer to read poetry.

02:17:37.000 And to which I say, that's terrific.

02:17:40.000 You're Okay, be that man then.

02:17:43.000 If that is the extent of why you are calling yourself trans, I don't think that makes you trans.

02:17:49.000 Isn't there an issue, and I'm not anti any of this, but isn't there an issue with saying that who you really truly are is dependent upon you getting injections of hormones that are not native to your body?

02:18:04.000 Isn't that very odd that we've taken synthetic hormones and made them an integral part of who a person is?

02:18:13.000 Now, again, I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do it.

02:18:16.000 You certainly should be able to do it.

02:18:17.000 But it's oddly almost a biologically essentialist perspective coming from people who are denying biology.

02:18:22.000 But here's the thing I'm saying.

02:18:24.000 If you are who you...

02:18:26.000 Why is no one willing to accept who they are?

02:18:33.000 I shouldn't say no one.

02:18:35.000 It's a bad way of phrasing it.

02:18:37.000 Why is it assumed that if you do feel like you were born in the wrong body, the only way to change that is to inject hormones that are not native to your body, to have surgery, to alter yourself, to assume traditional gender dress and look of the opposite sex.

02:18:57.000 Like, there's all...

02:18:58.000 There's a lot of people that push back against women sexualizing themselves, but celebrate trans women sexualizing themselves to look more like women because they think this is a feeling of empowerment for these women.

02:19:13.000 Look how beautiful they are.

02:19:14.000 You go, girl.

02:19:15.000 Look at those legs. 1.00

02:19:16.000 There's this thing about it where it's like it's celebrated as this emerging of the true self.

02:19:25.000 This is one of these places where I believe we have at least a one-way failure and maybe a two-way failure of empathy.

02:19:34.000 We have lots of history with trans students who, at first, I must say, there's a lot of trans folks at Evergreen.

02:19:45.000 And at first, when we first arrived, it was odd to me.

02:19:48.000 Like what percentage?

02:19:50.000 Well, that is a hard question because when you ask people to self-report, the number is absurdly high.

02:19:56.000 Absurdly high?

02:19:58.000 It's so high that it's clearly wrong.

02:20:01.000 LGBTQ is reported as 40% at Evergreen, which doesn't really make any sense.

02:20:07.000 48?

02:20:08.000 4-0.

02:20:09.000 40%.

02:20:09.000 Which really can't be the case, which is part of why I say some people are trying it on.

02:20:15.000 Trying it on as an identity as opposed to, you know, that includes LGB, but it's too high.

02:20:22.000 Wouldn't they gravitate, though, towards a school like that?

02:20:25.000 That's so open-minded?

02:20:26.000 They would.

02:20:26.000 But, you know, we have an intuitive sense by, you know, just the population.

02:20:30.000 You know when people are faking it?

02:20:31.000 Well, no, I'm not saying that at all.

02:20:33.000 But I'm saying that there's like a desire to affirm folks in this category.

02:20:39.000 And so placing yourself...

02:20:41.000 Let me also say, rather than faking it, I would say...

02:20:46.000 People who don't agree with the gender norms associated with the gender they're born to are calling themselves trans, and to me that doesn't look like trans.

02:20:55.000 That's a misrepresentation of what trans is because we've also known many students who are really legitimately trans and have done surgery or hormones or both and are better off in their bodies and more at peace with themselves having done so.

02:21:16.000 So I think it is very hard to appreciate, A, we are all in some sense not well by virtue of the fact that we live in a civilization that is not a good match for what we bring to the table.

02:21:33.000 Even the environments we grew up in as children do not match our adult environments and so we don't intuit them well and that causes all kinds of health issues, psychological and otherwise.

02:21:44.000 When people find themselves in this predicament that we are calling trans, they have access to a remedy. 0.99

02:21:54.000 I mean, imagine, just put yourself in the mindset of somebody who feels like they should have been a woman.

02:22:03.000 Mind you, I'm now learning that some trans people actually don't feel this way, that feeling like you're born in the wrong body is not universal.

02:22:09.000 It's very commonly said, but it is not universal.

02:22:12.000 But imagine that that is how you felt.

02:22:15.000 You felt like you were being addressed as a man, you were being understood as a man, but that's not how you internally felt.

02:22:21.000 And there was access to something, some set of things that would cause the world to finally register you as you felt you were, right?

02:22:32.000 It would be very tempting to avail yourself of that stuff.

02:22:36.000 And I think it's hard for those of us who feel at home enough in the bodies that we're in to appreciate what the pressure must be like if there is something available to you to go for it and to cross that gap.

02:22:50.000 And I also think it's creating a problem as we're trying to discuss issues like sexual signaling and makeup and high heels and things as people have been discussing this causes a special problem for trans folks for trans women because in many cases maybe almost all cases they are using these signs that are and I don't want to get in trouble here these Makeup

02:23:20.000 is well understood to amplify sexual signaling.

02:23:23.000 It is not the only role it is playing.

02:23:25.000 It is not inherently conscious.

02:23:27.000 It is not inherently intended to be triggering everybody broadly.

02:23:31.000 But nonetheless, makeup, high heels, these...

02:23:36.000 Mechanisms for amplifying a certain set of signals are being used by trans folks as a mechanism for amplifying their sex. 0.85

02:23:51.000 A whole bunch of makeup in order to send a signal that they are looking for a mate, let's say. 1.00

02:23:58.000 I'm not saying everybody who puts on makeup is doing that, but somebody might put on makeup in order to attract male attention. 0.99

02:24:05.000 That's one kind of signal.

02:24:06.000 But if you're trans, you may put on that makeup in order to send a signal, I am female. 1.00

02:24:12.000 So you're sending a signal that is of a very different nature.

02:24:16.000 And so I think there is a way in which trans people are feeling backed against the wall by a discussion that is now very clumsily happening about these mechanisms of sexual signaling because it puts them in a particular predicament where they're feeling like they're about to be robbed of the very stuff that allows them to accentuate their femininity.

02:24:39.000 That's very well put.

02:24:40.000 Yeah, I think that's a very important distinction too, especially when you're talking about someone who's trying to self-affirm.

02:24:49.000 Now, one of the things that came up real recently was this Jordan Peterson interview with Vice, which in my opinion, especially when you look at the sound clip, they were talking about women in the workplace and women wearing makeup and high heels and things in the workplace.

02:25:07.000 I know Jordan very well.

02:25:08.000 I love him.

02:25:09.000 He's a great guy.

02:25:10.000 He came off aggressive there, and I don't know why.

02:25:13.000 I don't know if he's tired of it or if he's digging his heels in.

02:25:17.000 It was apparently part of a two-hour interview, which he kind of felt like he was on the ropes the whole time.

02:25:21.000 Yes, and he also was coming off of that big Kathy Newman interview in the UK, which was like an assault.

02:25:28.000 I mean, the whole thing was just crazy.

02:25:31.000 He came out ahead on that, and I think it's much easier to make the argument that he didn't come out ahead in the Vice thing, especially in the way that they framed it.

02:25:42.000 But he was talking about women in the workplace, and maybe women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace, and maybe they shouldn't wear high heels or dresses. 1.00

02:25:53.000 So he did say, maybe.

02:25:55.000 Maybe, yes.

02:25:56.000 And he didn't say, women shouldn't do this.

02:25:59.000 The interviewer, I can't remember his name.

02:26:01.000 Kang. 0.94

02:26:02.000 Jay Kang, maybe, said, so do you think women shouldn't wear makeup and high heels then? 0.65

02:26:07.000 And he said...

02:26:08.000 Maybe.

02:26:09.000 And it was, you know, he's thinking.

02:26:12.000 He's considering options here.

02:26:14.000 He's not prepared upon first being asked a question to say, yes, absolutely or no, absolutely.

02:26:20.000 This is, you know, this is a sign of a nuanced thinking person's brain in action in real time.

02:26:27.000 The problem with the reaction is the exact problem that you're trying to avoid here, though.

02:26:30.000 We're saying, I don't want to get in trouble here.

02:26:32.000 You preface that and then you slowly move forward.

02:26:35.000 Whereas Jordan was like, maybe. 0.66

02:26:37.000 Why are they wearing makeup?

02:26:39.000 What are they doing?

02:26:40.000 But I would say that, you know, the generous interpretation and the evolutionary interpretation of what he said was, look, the Me Too movement is arguing that there should be, that there can be no sexual signals in the workplace at all,

02:26:56.000 full stop.

02:26:58.000 That's not going to be possible.

02:27:00.000 Because look at how many other sexual signals there are.

02:27:04.000 Right.

02:27:05.000 Makeup, heels.

02:27:06.000 Now the response has been, those aren't sexual signals.

02:27:09.000 I wear heels and I'm not sexually signaling.

02:27:11.000 And, you know, to which the evolutionary response is, What HEALS do is augment sexual signals that you were born with.

02:27:20.000 Whether or not you are conscious of the fact that that is why you were doing it, that doesn't make it any less of a sexual signal.

02:27:25.000 And so what Peterson was saying was, if we really are going to accept the argument that all signals of this type need to be abandoned, need to be gotten rid of from the workplace, then maybe we actually need to investigate all of the other things that are sexual signals that aren't being talked about.

02:27:45.000 So, there are a couple things.

02:27:47.000 First of all, have you seen the clip filmed from the audience of him talking about what happened with that Vice interview?

02:27:55.000 No.

02:27:55.000 It's well worth your time.

02:27:56.000 I think it's seven or eight minutes of him talking about what happened.

02:28:00.000 I do think Peterson, who I also know...

02:28:04.000 Can you give us the cliff notes of what?

02:28:05.000 Yeah.

02:28:05.000 I mean, the cliff notes are...

02:28:07.000 He said, look, this is how one engages in thought.

02:28:12.000 One advances an idea.

02:28:14.000 It doesn't mean something's going to happen.

02:28:17.000 I think he literally says, I didn't say women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace.

02:28:21.000 I said, maybe.

02:28:23.000 And this is what we do.

02:28:24.000 And then he describes, he says, let's...

02:28:30.000 Let's agree that I'm going to put forward 10 things that might happen and then let's agree that none of them are going to happen.

02:28:37.000 So now we can discuss the possibilities.

02:28:40.000 So I don't think we know what the actual interview with Jay Kang looked like because there was two hours of it and I've seen 15 minutes.

02:28:50.000 Yeah, why won't they release more of it?

02:28:52.000 I think they should release the whole thing.

02:28:54.000 I do think what I saw, so we don't know the context, which my guess is Peterson's pretty careful in what he says.

02:29:03.000 My guess is the context would be revealing.

02:29:05.000 I think based on the part that we know that he said because it is in the clips that we've seen, we know something's funny because the editing juxtaposes him seeming to contradict himself and he's actually pretty careful not to do that.

02:29:18.000 But what he did actually say contains what I regard as at least one significant error.

02:29:27.000 So he says, I do think that in response to the question of are women hypocrites for wearing makeup to work and then... 0.97

02:29:40.000 I don't want to put words in his mouth, but something like demanding not to be harassed or something like that.

02:29:48.000 So he's forgetting that many of these signals aren't conscious in doing that.

02:29:52.000 Not only not conscious, but I saw somebody online discussing this.

02:29:56.000 They made a very good point, one that's actually pretty hard to field.

02:29:59.000 If these are signals, even unconscious ones, if they are sexual signals, why am I wearing one to go to a family reunion?

02:30:06.000 Why am I wearing high heels to go to a family reunion?

02:30:09.000 Am I secretly trying to get lucky at my own family reunion?

02:30:13.000 And the answer is no.

02:30:15.000 This is not a matter.

02:30:17.000 What Peterson said when, you know, Peterson has done so many interviews, the fact that he says a clumsy thing here doesn't strike me one way or the other.

02:30:26.000 But I don't want to be put in the position of defending that women are hypocritical for wearing makeup and high heels.

02:30:34.000 There are lots of reasons that you have to wear them, including social pressure, including the fact that you are in a landscape of other people wearing them, and if you stand out as being plain in a The world of other women who are amplifying these things,

02:30:49.000 it may actually have implications for your ability to earn.

02:30:52.000 So there are lots of reasons that you might do it that have nothing to do with you as an individual trying to signal for sexual attention.

02:30:58.000 It doesn't mean that those things didn't evolve as sexual signals, right?

02:31:02.000 Sexual signals, to us evolutionary biologists, this is no news.

02:31:07.000 I mean, if you're a woman and you've got breasts and you're walking around in the world, you're broadcasting a sexual signal and that one's completely unconscious and involuntary. 0.93

02:31:15.000 It's physiological.

02:31:16.000 So the idea that these signals are out there and common should become something we become comfortable with.

02:31:24.000 The fact that males are involved in all kinds of signaling all the time, that the corner office, the mahogany desk, and you know, it's not that a woman can't have a corner office and a mahogany desk, but traditionally speaking, those hallmarks of Prestige and resource acquisition.

02:31:41.000 Yes, those things have implication in the sexual landscape that's very powerful, as does frankly humor.

02:31:47.000 The way humor is used has powerful implications in terms of sexual signaling, as does who laughs at your jokes.

02:31:57.000 I mean, if the boss makes a joke, everybody laughs, whether or not it's funny.

02:32:01.000 Why is that?

02:32:02.000 He's got power.

02:32:03.000 They're trying to get ahead.

02:32:05.000 So we can't get rid of all of this.

02:32:07.000 We can't get rid of all of this.

02:32:08.000 And if we look at something like an engagement ring, right?

02:32:13.000 If you were to analyze an engagement ring anthropologically, right?

02:32:18.000 So there are these stones.

02:32:20.000 Actually, the truth of it is there are these stones that aren't really that rare, but they've been made artificially scarce.

02:32:26.000 And a man will get one of these Stones and he will put it on a thing that can be put on a woman's finger and the size of the stone and the quality of the stone, even though the stone is not actually useful for very much, it is symbolically important and it is evidence of the woman's worth in some sense.

02:32:47.000 In other words, the larger the stone, it indicates that the man values her at a greater level.

02:32:52.000 This is an absurd set of signals and we treat it as if it's just Nothing, you know, a woman gets an engagement ring, maybe if she's traditional, her friends will, you know, look at it and say, oh, that's marvelous. 0.60

02:33:06.000 I mean, so we're engaged in all of this archaic signaling anyway.

02:33:10.000 And when you tune into it, it is very jarring.

02:33:14.000 But it does not make sense to isolate one set of these signals and say, ah, look, they're signaling, right?

02:33:22.000 Those signals are embedded in a landscape of signals that we go through our entire life not realizing that we are making.

02:33:30.000 The last point I would make is that we also need to recognize that we have a mismatch between personal signaling And broadcast signaling.

02:33:39.000 So it may be that a woman wears something in order to catch a particular male's attention, but the fact that she's wearing it may catch other males' attention.

02:33:53.000 And that fact may confuse the landscape because men in general may take it as a sign that she's interested in something when in fact she's not interested in something, she's interested in someone who happens to be in this landscape.

02:34:07.000 So what I hope is that we will recognize that the thing that we should all agree on is that it is desirable to have the freedom to engage life as you would engage it.

02:34:23.000 So long as you're not harming others, you should be, you know, I do not think polyamorous folks are on the right track.

02:34:31.000 I think that what they're up to I mean, I know from the ones who are serious about it and talk about it that even within the polyamorous community there's a recognition about just how difficult it is to make it work.

02:34:43.000 But I don't really want to interfere with their right to do it.

02:34:45.000 I would like to be able to talk about whether it's a good idea, whether it has societal implications that we should be How do you feel like they're not on the right track and isn't everyone's track?

02:34:55.000 I mean if we can accept trans folk and we can accept women to subscribe to cultural norms and wearing high heels and makeup in the worst place, why can't we accept polyamorous behavior and what's so difficult? 0.96

02:35:07.000 That's what I'm telling you is that though I personally would counsel somebody if you know and I have had this conversation with many students for example I would counsel them away from it because I think it actually prioritizes one thing, which is desirable,

02:35:24.000 but that the cost of it is very, very high.

02:35:27.000 What does it prioritize?

02:35:28.000 It prioritizes not locking yourself into a single sexual relationship.

02:35:35.000 And I think there's a way in which there is a terror that surrounds locking yourself into a single sexual relationship.

02:35:42.000 And part of the terror goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation.

02:35:45.000 If you think that beauty is maxed out at 20 and then it wanes over life, then as a woman, you're trapped in this terrible situation where you've got this power long before you know what to do with it.

02:36:05.000 And it's going to evaporate so you better capitalize on it.

02:36:08.000 And if you're a man, you're very frightened that you're going to get into a relationship and then you're going to watch this person that you love fall apart in front of your eyes and you're going to be caught in that situation.

02:36:22.000 And I don't think this is the reality of a pair bond.

02:36:25.000 I think the reality of a pair bond is way better than we fear.

02:36:29.000 But that because we've got this overly simplistic mythology surrounding it, a lot of people are trying to solve that problem.

02:36:36.000 How do I not get locked into that relationship that's going to trap me with somebody who's decaying in front of me?

02:36:42.000 Right.

02:36:43.000 Yeah, I don't think it's a decaying thing.

02:36:45.000 I would push back against that.

02:36:46.000 I would say people just want more variety.

02:36:48.000 They're attracted to other people and they want to act on that.

02:36:51.000 And if they find a partner who is also willing to do that and they stay together, I don't see what would be the issue if they wanted to do it.

02:36:58.000 Well, I'm telling you specifically that.

02:37:01.000 I don't want to stop them from doing it.

02:37:02.000 But I do want people to think very carefully about the issues.

02:37:08.000 I'm just speaking as one guy who's lived one life.

02:37:13.000 The value that I get out of having as close to perfect security at home as I can have in a relationship, I mean...

02:37:25.000 Heather and I have been all over the world.

02:37:28.000 We've taken our kids into parts of the Amazon that are four hours by boat from the nearest road, right?

02:37:36.000 This is not a boring relationship.

02:37:37.000 This relationship has been a nonstop adventure.

02:37:41.000 Right, but no one's trying to push polyamory on you.

02:37:43.000 Right.

02:37:43.000 Well, A, I wouldn't say that that's true.

02:37:46.000 I would say that the...

02:37:48.000 Not as an individual.

02:37:49.000 But what I would say is they are promoting an idea that this is the sophisticated way to live.

02:37:57.000 It's the wave of the future.

02:37:58.000 Really?

02:37:58.000 Yeah.

02:37:59.000 How common is this?

02:38:00.000 Well, I mean, you mentioned sex at dawn yourself.

02:38:03.000 And so the idea is... 0.98

02:38:05.000 Yeah, but Chris is my friend and he's crazy.

02:38:08.000 There you go.

02:38:08.000 But what I would say— But he believes it.

02:38:10.000 He might be right.

02:38:11.000 He does believe it.

02:38:13.000 For him, it is right.

02:38:14.000 I have been convinced by a friend who I had a longstanding argument with on this topic.

02:38:22.000 And what he convinced me is that— A friend who is polyamorous.

02:38:25.000 Yes, a friend who is polyamorous.

02:38:26.000 And this friend has convinced me that it can be accomplished, that there's somewhere to get.

02:38:32.000 But he acknowledges that it actually, in the case that he points to, took several generations, literally several generations to arrive at a stable location.

02:38:42.000 Well, you guys have a wonderful relationship, though.

02:38:44.000 I know many people who have terrible, terrible relationships, and for them, the notion of monogamy seems absurd.

02:38:51.000 It seems like a trap that you get stuck in, you grow to resent each other, and then you get sick of each other, and then you fight in court until you figure out who gets all the money.

02:38:59.000 Totally.

02:38:59.000 I would say those people shouldn't be together.

02:39:01.000 I think you're right, yeah.

02:39:03.000 But then there's a conflation between polyamory and promiscuity.

02:39:06.000 Right.

02:39:07.000 That just a free-for-all, a sex with strangers free-for-all is different from the kind of careful approach to polyamory that this friend takes, which still looks extraordinarily difficult to pull off, given what human beings are from a jealousy perspective.

02:39:25.000 But isn't monogamy extraordinarily difficult to pull off?

02:39:27.000 I mean, isn't the rate of divorce in this country alone?

02:39:30.000 It's somewhere around 50%.

02:39:32.000 And Chris Rock famously said, that's just 50% who had the courage to leave.

02:39:37.000 How many cowards stay?

02:39:38.000 But this is part of the point about novelty.

02:39:43.000 We are living in a situation where our narratives sell us a false picture of our opportunities.

02:39:49.000 Our narratives are partially driven by an economy that wants us to be insecure enough to spend money like crazy.

02:39:57.000 And so I'm not telling people that they should live one way or the other.

02:40:03.000 I'm telling them that they should understand what their real options are.

02:40:08.000 And polyamory as an experiment is all well and good.

02:40:11.000 But what happens when you introduce children into the mix?

02:40:17.000 Right, that's very, very different.

02:40:18.000 It's very different because children are so costly to raise and because human males are wired to fear raising offspring that they themselves did not produce genetically.

02:40:31.000 Now, I don't think it makes sense to actually care very much about your genes and advancing their interests.

02:40:38.000 I think this is something evolution has stuck us with that is not valuable.

02:40:43.000 It's actually destructive.

02:40:44.000 It's something we can potentially move past.

02:40:46.000 But we are wired for it.

02:40:49.000 And so what I'm expecting to happen is if you have a large-scale experiment in polyamory, what it's going to do is it is going to break down into polygyny and it's going to break down into single motherhood as men leave these relationships in order to engage in perhaps more polyamory with younger women.

02:41:12.000 And it's going to be Yet one more thing that is unevenly distributed between the sexes.

02:41:19.000 So choose your mate wisely.

02:41:21.000 Well, choose your mate wisely, but we don't even realize that we are interfering with your ability to do that in ways that we don't intuit.

02:41:30.000 We have a landscape in which nobody Is paying attention to the way we are interfering in the normal processes that would cause you to find a mate with whom you might have a very rewarding life.

02:41:43.000 What processes are you referring to?

02:41:45.000 Well, let me take an absurd one.

02:41:46.000 Okay.

02:41:47.000 We have no idea what effect deodorant is having on...

02:41:53.000 Us choosing the right mate.

02:41:54.000 We do know that in studies that there are molecules that you can't consciously tell you're detecting that do affect mate choice.

02:42:02.000 And we know that we're interfering with that stuff.

02:42:04.000 Well, we know that birth control affects that as well.

02:42:07.000 Women's ability to smell. 1.00

02:42:09.000 Yeah.

02:42:10.000 A woman's ability to smell whether or not she's even genetically compatible with a man. 0.99

02:42:14.000 Absolutely.

02:42:15.000 Which is really freaky.

02:42:16.000 It's like those lizards.

02:42:17.000 How do they know?

02:42:18.000 They just know.

02:42:19.000 Rub it up against each other.

02:42:21.000 Get a sense.

02:42:22.000 So I think what...

02:42:25.000 Do you wear deodorant?

02:42:26.000 I try not to.

02:42:28.000 At the moment I'm wearing it because sweat stains would be socially costly.

02:42:33.000 Oh, you're wearing antiperspirant.

02:42:35.000 It's different.

02:42:36.000 There's an important distinction there.

02:42:37.000 Yeah, that's dangerous.

02:42:39.000 Clogging up your pores.

02:42:40.000 This is a great example because I actually did spend, I don't know if it was a year as an experiment not wearing deodorant.

02:42:48.000 How'd that go?

02:42:50.000 He was already married.

02:42:53.000 So a couple interesting facts.

02:42:57.000 One, it did drive some people crazy.

02:43:00.000 I'm sure.

02:43:01.000 Not me though.

02:43:02.000 Not you.

02:43:03.000 Didn't bother you at all?

02:43:06.000 We've all been around people we love who at some point are like, dude, take a shower.

02:43:10.000 But as long as you took a shower.

02:43:13.000 Is it a shave the armpits thing?

02:43:16.000 Like if you shave your armpits, it's the one spot, right?

02:43:19.000 We're not putting deodorant anywhere else on our body.

02:43:21.000 We're just putting it on the armpits.

02:43:23.000 Is it a shaving thing?

02:43:25.000 Like if you shave your armpits?

02:43:26.000 If you shave your armpits, you decrease the rate at which it diffuses into the environment.

02:43:31.000 So you should make a judgment call.

02:43:33.000 Well, but in some sense, look, I don't know which it is.

02:43:36.000 Maybe we're being wusses, right?

02:43:38.000 And we're being, you know, we've got an industry of, I don't know how much they make per year selling us these things because we're afraid of our own human smell, right?

02:43:47.000 But there's a huge difference between the way somebody smells if they don't have good hygiene and somebody who has the luxury of daily showers and doesn't wear Sure.

02:43:59.000 Frankly, I don't find somebody who is taking daily showers and isn't wearing deodorant, I don't find it that off-putting.

02:44:05.000 And in Europe, it's considered much...

02:44:07.000 It's just a different smell.

02:44:08.000 You smell them.

02:44:09.000 Right.

02:44:09.000 As opposed to smelling right guard or whatever it is.

02:44:12.000 Exactly.

02:44:13.000 And so, anyway, I have no idea whether if we backed our deodorant and antiperspirant stuff off, whether it would change who ended up with whom and whether or not marriages would last.

02:44:25.000 Might have a small degree of...

02:44:27.000 Right, but how many other things are there on the list that we wouldn't think to name?

02:44:30.000 What about makeup?

02:44:31.000 What if women stopped wearing makeup? 1.00

02:44:33.000 How much would that change?

02:44:34.000 Who hooks up with who?

02:44:36.000 How much would it?

02:44:37.000 And, you know, how much would it change if we actually learned that there's a difference between Hotness and beauty and we actually allowed little girls to recognize that maybe they weren't so interested in being hot because although it gets you a lot of attention, 0.80

02:44:55.000 it's a kind of attention that's a dead end, right?

02:44:57.000 How much would that change who ends up with whom?

02:45:00.000 I mean a lot of who ends up with whom at the moment is presumably dictated by people having had their attention captured through hotness and then there's a question of whether there's anything there to back it up.

02:45:11.000 So I What I want to see for my own kid's sake is I want to see a world in which the noise of the way the market influences how we interact with each other and the notions that get promoted as sophisticated,

02:45:29.000 where that noise is reduced so that people can really begin to detect the patterns in their life.

02:45:35.000 Actually, this worked for me.

02:45:37.000 I dated in this way and this worked for me.

02:45:40.000 I dated in that way and it didn't work for me.

02:45:42.000 It wasn't rewarding.

02:45:43.000 That begins to tell you something.

02:45:45.000 And all I'm saying about my own situation, yes, I'm incredibly lucky to have a relationship that's really rewarding and, you know, it's a lifelong bond.

02:45:53.000 On the other hand, it may say something.

02:45:56.000 We got together together.

02:45:57.000 Early.

02:45:58.000 I felt weird about that for a long time.

02:46:00.000 I felt like it suggested something.

02:46:03.000 You know, you hear about people getting together in high school.

02:46:06.000 It's like, oh, that's cute.

02:46:07.000 But, you know, how well could you have chosen in high school?

02:46:10.000 Right?

02:46:11.000 Well, I met Heather in high school.

02:46:12.000 We were friends.

02:46:13.000 We knew each other pretty well by the time we got together. 0.69

02:46:16.000 And, you know, I was a dumb kid in my early 20s at the point that the relationship began.

02:46:22.000 But It had an advantage that I didn't necessarily know to think about, which is Heather and I have spent all of that time adventuring together.

02:46:35.000 And that means that instead of looking for the perfect partner who's exactly the right fit for you, two people who had the right starting material sort of grew together into a partnership.

02:46:45.000 The growing together part.

02:46:46.000 We grew up together.

02:46:47.000 Yeah, that's a big part.

02:46:49.000 And there's a lot of people that don't spend a lot of time with their mates, you know, and You know, people grow apart, too.

02:46:55.000 You guys get lucky.

02:46:56.000 Yeah, that's true.

02:46:57.000 I have a lot of friends living in hell.

02:47:00.000 Yeah, that's terrible.

02:47:02.000 It's unfortunately really common.

02:47:04.000 It's more common than not.

02:47:06.000 You guys are the outliers.

02:47:08.000 A couple of scientists taking your kids to the jungle.

02:47:13.000 But, okay, here's the thing.

02:47:15.000 I don't know because I've only lived one life.

02:47:17.000 But I think there is a lesson.

02:47:19.000 Because I think that what we did actually was fairly simple, which was we played it by ear.

02:47:26.000 And the stuff that didn't work, we chucked it.

02:47:28.000 And the stuff that did work, we augmented it.

02:47:31.000 There were no hard and fast rules.

02:47:33.000 You're also exceptional people.

02:47:35.000 You're both very unusually smart and open-minded.

02:47:39.000 We found each other.

02:47:41.000 I think open-minded is more important than smart in this case.

02:47:45.000 Being able to look at each other with compassion, this is true for any interaction.

02:47:51.000 Can I look at you and see you as a human being with real emotions and feelings and reality to your experiences as well?

02:47:59.000 Even if I feel like we disagree completely.

02:48:01.000 Even when we're at our angriest with each other, If we can see each other's humanity through it, then you get through.

02:48:09.000 Yeah, that is a lesson for every human being in all walks of life, in any situation when you disagree with someone.

02:48:18.000 Not just your lover, not just a friend, but people that you don't even know.

02:48:23.000 It's very easy to dehumanize someone who disagrees with you.

02:48:27.000 And I think to bring this all back around, this is a part of the problem with male-female interaction today, is this dehumanization on both sides, that the men are demons, that the women are this and the men are that, and it's all this, you know,

02:48:43.000 it's these rash generalizations and this extreme tribalism.

02:48:48.000 Well, there is kind of a secret weapon.

02:48:55.000 Let the secret out.

02:48:57.000 Heather and I have a whole second channel on which to navigate, which is that we both know the same evolutionary story.

02:49:07.000 So there's a way, you know, here's an idea that's important.

02:49:11.000 You can very often understand more about a given human interaction, especially a contentious one, if you turn down the sound, right?

02:49:20.000 So you can't hear what's being said.

02:49:22.000 And that sounds wrong, right?

02:49:24.000 Sounds like, well, maybe the most important piece of information you could have is what these people are saying to each other as they're arguing.

02:49:30.000 But no, that's not how human beings work.

02:49:33.000 Sometimes the important information is on that vocal channel, and sometimes the vocal channel is actually almost purely noise, right?

02:49:43.000 Both literally and metaphorically.

02:49:45.000 Yeah, but if Heather and I both know that, Then there's a part of us that's sort of always outside.

02:49:52.000 I mean, we don't fight that much.

02:49:54.000 It's really pretty rare.

02:49:55.000 But when we do, there's also a part of us that's watching the interaction and knows that a certain pattern may have to unfold in order for us to get to the other part of it.

02:50:08.000 So knowing that we're engaging in theater at some level, even though neither of us wants to be.

02:50:12.000 That's a great way to put it.

02:50:14.000 Engaging in couples theater.

02:50:16.000 It is.

02:50:17.000 It is.

02:50:18.000 Yeah, it totally is.

02:50:19.000 It's actually the perfect example of this thing.

02:50:21.000 Like, you know, you're talking about Peterson and going to work and wearing makeup and you think, am I sending sexual signals?

02:50:27.000 Well, gosh, we're all involved in weird stuff.

02:50:30.000 Sure.

02:50:30.000 Right?

02:50:31.000 And the idea that you and your mate could both be aware that your argument is in some...

02:50:36.000 In some way, theater, and that even, you know, you might think, well, if it's theater, we can just skip it.

02:50:41.000 No, you can't.

02:50:42.000 No, there are things that have to happen in order for you to get to the next act.

02:50:47.000 And so, you know, I hope I'm not...

02:50:51.000 Saying something I shouldn't.

02:50:52.000 But there's a thing.

02:50:54.000 I'm not the easiest guy to live with.

02:50:56.000 I think I'm a very decent person.

02:50:59.000 So far you're doing fine.

02:51:00.000 Thank you.

02:51:02.000 But there's a part of me that's not good at certain stuff that makes Heather's life hard, right?

02:51:08.000 And that stuff, she's good at putting up with it to a certain extent.

02:51:12.000 And then there are things that will cause it to get even, to get bad.

02:51:16.000 I need to know that that's happened in order for us to get past it.

02:51:21.000 And she needs to tell me, hey, this isn't the normal level of, you know...

02:51:26.000 I'm not really frustrated.

02:51:28.000 I'm considering exploding.

02:51:30.000 Right, right.

02:51:31.000 And it doesn't sound that calm.

02:51:32.000 The necessity of us being able to exchange that information is there.

02:51:37.000 And the fact, you know, it's so much less charged if we both know that sort of that process has to unfold, and that is not an infinite process.

02:51:46.000 And we will be on the other side of it once, you know, she's conveyed what she needs to convey, and I've let her know that I've heard it.

02:51:53.000 And again, the more times you've done this, the more likely you are confident, you know what, this is going to end up okay.

02:51:58.000 This feels awful right now.

02:52:00.000 Like, we are fighting and this feels awful and, right, we've done this before.

02:52:04.000 And actually this proves to be necessary because it resets some things that, you know, just every relationship, no matter if it's romantic or not, needs resets on a regular basis.

02:52:13.000 And so this is one way that you can sort of theatrically reset some important points.

02:52:19.000 This is a great lesson for reasonable people.

02:52:22.000 And everybody could aspire to be reasonable people.

02:52:25.000 And let's end it at that.

02:52:26.000 All right.

02:52:27.000 We just did three hours.

02:52:28.000 That just flew right by, right?

02:52:29.000 Wow.

02:52:30.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:52:30.000 Yeah, it is crazy.

02:52:31.000 Thank you both.

02:52:32.000 It was really fun.

02:52:32.000 Thank you.

02:52:33.000 This was fun.

02:52:37.000 That was three hours, huh?

02:52:38.000 That was crazy, right?

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 20, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

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