The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 403. Attraction, Beauty, Growth, and Sex

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.820 Today I'm speaking with researcher, professor, and author, Dr. Sarah Hill.

00:01:17.380 We discuss her new landmark book, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control.

00:01:22.400 The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences.

00:01:30.040 We break down and analyze sex-based differences in regret, competition, and academic striving.

00:01:38.020 The balance between life exposure and safeguarding when raising a child.

00:01:42.400 The practice of mate choice copying among women and why our hormones are a foundational part, not just of our physical makeup, but of who we are most deeply and who we have the potential to become.

00:01:56.420 So, Sarah, I thought for years that the 20th century would basically be remembered for three things.

00:02:05.380 The hydrogen bomb, the transistor, the microchip, and the pill.

00:02:11.020 And that the pill was perhaps the most revolutionary of the three.

00:02:17.120 And that it was also equivalent to a speciation mutation.

00:02:24.500 That that's how profound it is.

00:02:26.680 Now, the first chapter of your book, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, is what is a woman?

00:02:31.940 And that's become a trope and a satirical, and what would, a satirical cliche.

00:02:37.840 And people laugh at the fact that it's even being posed, but I actually don't think it's that funny, because I think that with the advent of hypothetically 100% reliable birth control, the question of what is a woman actually becomes a real question.

00:02:56.020 Because a woman who has voluntary control over her reproductive function is not the same creature as a woman who doesn't, and not even a little bit.

00:03:06.020 And so then the question, so imagine this, and then we can talk through the book.

00:03:14.580 If sex is no longer tied to reproduction, then in principle, women's sexual behavior can become equivalent to men's sexual behavior, because the risk is now the same.

00:03:26.140 If women are acting like men sexually, then why aren't they men?

00:03:30.400 Like, how are they different?

00:03:31.580 And then if women, if sex is no longer tied to reproduction tightly, and women are free from involuntary child rearing and bearing, then how are they different from men in the broader labor market and with regards to general productivity?

00:03:50.540 And the answer is, we have absolutely no idea.

00:03:53.780 And that's why the question comes up.

00:03:55.700 So I'd like to know, why did you start the book with this question, what is a woman, what, the way you open something is obviously to some degree the way you frame it.

00:04:05.780 So why, why did that phrase, why did that phrase jump out at you?

00:04:09.980 Well, for me, it was really important because, so my background is in evolutionary biology.

00:04:14.800 And so I spent most of my career trying to understand behavior using the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution by selection.

00:04:24.140 And one of the big, you know, sort of paramounts of that theory and something that's really a cornerstone to it is the differences between the sexes, right?

00:04:35.480 And that you have biological males and biological females, and how do we define them?

00:04:39.320 You know, how do we define what is a male, what is a female?

00:04:41.940 And what a male is, is the, it's the sex that has the smaller mobile gametes that has less investment in offspring.

00:04:49.360 And females have the metabolically expensive immobile gametes, and they have a relatively large minimum investment.

00:04:57.460 And so one of the big ways and sort of the foundation of all reliably occurring sex differences in all sexually reproducing species are these small differences.

00:05:08.800 And this doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal, like, wow, like your sex cells are smaller than my sex cells, like, who cares?

00:05:15.060 But that actually turns out to be completely foundational in terms of setting the stage for different minimum levels of investment in offspring, which then sets the stage for the evolution of sex differences.

00:05:26.140 Okay, okay, so let's dive into that a little bit, because people are, people need to understand exactly what this means.

00:05:31.660 So you relate sex differences when you're trying to define a woman to the difference in size between the sperm and the egg.

00:05:39.360 And an egg is pretty small, and it doesn't look like much of an investment, but a sperm is way smaller.

00:05:44.420 But the thing that's so interesting about that is that that, you could say that that difference is fractal in nature,

00:05:51.700 is that it's echoed at every single biological level all the way up the chain to overt behavior, right?

00:05:57.580 And so the definition of a woman, the definition of female, maybe even more broadly, female is the sex that invests more, is compelled to invest more in sex and reproduction.

00:06:12.120 And reproduction wouldn't be just sex.

00:06:14.140 This is another thing that the narrower evolutionary biologists get wrong.

00:06:18.820 I think it's one of the flaws in Dawkins' thinking, for example, is that you can reduce reproduction to sex, but that's foolish,

00:06:26.840 because human beings have a high investment strategy in relationship to the propagation of their children.

00:06:35.960 And so reproduction for human beings doesn't end with sex.

00:06:39.920 For mosquitoes, it ends with sex.

00:06:41.780 Right.

00:06:42.120 For human beings, it just starts with sex.

00:06:44.380 Right.

00:06:44.580 And we have an 18-year investment, and at least the first three years of that falls, I would say, by necessity more heavily on women, and really heavily on women.

00:06:56.020 Right.

00:06:56.140 I think they say among chimpanzee females, the chimpanzee mother carries its infant something like 500 miles clasped to its chest in the first year.

00:07:07.840 And so a woman, another issue maybe, too, is that is a woman a single organism, or is a woman a part of the mother-infant dyad?

00:07:22.140 Right, right.

00:07:22.860 So that's a can of worms that we can open.

00:07:27.580 I mean, there's this whole theory.

00:07:29.480 It's Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, which is just this idea that your own fitness, just in terms of what your genetic representation in future generations is likely to be,

00:07:40.000 is something that depends both on your own genes, but then also the genes of your relatives.

00:07:44.700 Right, right, right.

00:08:14.700 That this is their child.

00:08:16.700 You have mother's reproductive value, meaning the possibility that she could translate her energy into additional reproduction.

00:08:23.500 That is decreasing, while that of her infant is increasing.

00:08:27.240 And so it's essentially like passing the evolutionary baton from one generation to the next between these two individuals who have the highest levels of relatedness that's possible in nature outside of identical twins.

00:08:38.280 So I've wondered about this with regard to the transformation at puberty in female emotional response.

00:08:48.080 So the personality data indicates that boys and girls are approximately equivalent in terms of their sensitivity to negative emotion.

00:08:56.500 But that changes at puberty.

00:08:58.500 And so and so and the change seems permanent and it seems like it's hormonally mediated.

00:09:05.500 And so I've been trying to understand so and so what happens at puberty is that women become more sensitive to the entire panoply of negative emotions because they clump together.

00:09:15.040 And so and you might say, well, that's cultural, but it's not because if you look at the societies that have advanced the farthest in terms of gender equality at the social and economic levels, the differences in trait neuroticism.

00:09:31.380 So that's that sensitivity to negative emotion between men and women are larger than they are in less egalitarian, in less egalitarian societies.

00:09:41.140 So when the society becomes egalitarian, the genetic differences maximized rather than minimizing.

00:09:46.400 OK, so then the question is, well, why would women be more sensitive to negative emotion?

00:09:51.260 Because that comes at a cost and the cost is at minimum higher levels of depression and anxiety, but also higher general levels of unhappiness.

00:09:59.600 So then you think, OK, they're more sensitive to threat.

00:10:03.660 Why is that useful?

00:10:05.540 Well, they're smaller than men at puberty, and so they should be more sensitive to physical combat threat.

00:10:12.640 But they're sexually vulnerable, and that's a huge deal and not to be underestimated.

00:10:19.340 And I mean, in most societies, for most of human history, an unaccompanied woman was a target of attack.

00:10:26.760 Right, right.

00:10:27.480 So, but then the third thing that's most important, I think, I want to know what you think about this, is that, well, women are more attuned to threat because they're proxies for the vulnerability of their infant.

00:10:40.200 And so women may pay a psychological cost for being more sensitive to threat, which is that they're more unhappy and that they're more anxious.

00:10:47.980 But the benefit of that is that they're more alert to any signs of danger or predation or threat in the environment.

00:10:56.000 And they can alert, well, they're going to alert their husband, generally speaking, or the rest of the community to that.

00:11:01.060 Now, that also means they're going to be more susceptible to false positives, right?

00:11:05.440 They're going to respond to threat when there's none there.

00:11:07.620 But if you're taking care of a dependent infant and you're over-responsive to threat, that's probably the right place to tune your errors.

00:11:15.340 So, and that seems to me also a reflection of this increased investment by women.

00:11:22.500 So they have an increased emotional investment in their offspring, as well as an increased physiological investment.

00:11:28.760 Right, so I'll start with the woman piece, but there's also some interesting things that happen with testosterone during puberty to men that turn that off.

00:11:39.340 And so I want to be able to return to that as well.

00:11:42.520 But with women, I mean, absolutely.

00:11:44.500 The thing that we need to remember is that the process of evolution by selection didn't wire us to be happy or satisfied or any, it's like it has designed us to survive and to reproduce.

00:11:56.200 And part of that means that we're going to feel kind of terrible some of the time.

00:12:01.120 And part of women's design, you know, sort of the design of our psychology is such that it does, it's like a smoke detector.

00:12:07.420 It's tuned to picking up on even subtle cues of possible danger just because the potential costs associated with what would happen if that danger is real is much greater for women for a lot of different reasons, some of which you've touched upon.

00:12:22.160 I mean, there's one is that women are mothers.

00:12:24.800 So it's like, you know, it's like you're like you're eating for two, you're feeling danger for two, you know, you're having to protect yourself and your offspring.

00:12:31.940 You're more physically vulnerable because, of course, you're physically, you know, women are smaller and have less upper body strength, sexual vulnerability for the reasons you talked about.

00:12:40.880 I mean, unfortunately, sexual violence has been something that's been present as long as we've been around.

00:12:46.440 And it certainly is something we see in all species with choosy females.

00:12:50.000 You'll have males who want to override that choice.

00:12:53.600 And so there's a lot of reasons that women need.

00:12:55.880 Manipulation, too.

00:12:56.720 It's not merely that women are overpowered physically.

00:12:59.160 It's that they're also susceptible to very devious manipulation on the part of Machiavellian and psychopathic men.

00:13:07.540 And they need to be alert to that form of deception as a threat as well.

00:13:13.660 Right.

00:13:14.020 Yes.

00:13:14.780 And even also with other females.

00:13:17.620 And the reason for this is that, you know, when you think about the cost for a woman, if she's duped.

00:13:24.180 So let's just talk about sexual deception, right?

00:13:26.860 If a woman is duped, she could end up pregnant.

00:13:29.820 There's a nine-month investment there, right?

00:13:32.180 And if you look especially at historical, you know, types of populations like modern hunter-gatherer groups, if you have a woman who doesn't have a father investing in the child, the risk of infant mortality is like 80%.

00:13:43.920 Right.

00:13:44.400 I mean, it's very high.

00:13:45.880 And the risk of death during childbirth even is very high.

00:13:49.520 So women are putting their lives at risk every time they get pregnant.

00:13:52.300 And then to get pregnant and have a really high-risk infant that's not getting invested in, she's not getting—

00:13:57.520 And their reputation, too.

00:13:58.760 Yeah, and their reputation.

00:13:59.660 I mean, there's so many costs to that.

00:14:01.820 And the costs just aren't that—you know, it's not symmetrical for men.

00:14:05.480 Right.

00:14:05.660 The costs of those things aren't the same.

00:14:07.520 And so our brains are wired to be differently sensitive to those kinds of cues because the consequences are so much more dire if you have a female body compared to if you have a male body.

00:14:16.560 Do you know it—is there a literature on—okay, tell me if I've got this wrong.

00:14:24.600 Okay.

00:14:25.040 All right.

00:14:25.420 So we talked about the different reproductive strategies, say, of mosquitoes and human beings.

00:14:31.980 Mosquitoes have like a zero-investment strategy.

00:14:34.960 You have a million offspring.

00:14:36.220 All of them die, but like one.

00:14:38.120 But that's okay because that's replacement.

00:14:39.800 Whereas human beings, it's unbelievably heavy investment.

00:14:42.640 And then you look within human beings, women invest more than men.

00:14:46.880 And then you could look within men and you could say there are men who invest less and men who invest more.

00:14:51.200 Okay.

00:14:51.440 So the men who invest less, they're the short-term maiter types.

00:14:55.140 Now, I've been looking into the personality predictors of short-term mating strategies, and they're not that positive.

00:15:00.620 So the personality theorists who've been investigating the so-called dark tetrad, which is a group of, you might say, undesirable descriptors, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, which is manipulativeness, and sadism, because they had to add that to it.

00:15:17.060 And those traits are much more pronounced among men and women, but particularly among men who adopt a short-term mating strategy.

00:15:29.460 Right.

00:15:29.580 And so, now, so one of the things I'm wondering about is, it's related to that, so that men who adopt that short-term mating strategy, they love them and leave them, right?

00:15:40.420 There's no, let's say, there's little post-coital regret.

00:15:43.260 There's no guilt or shame associated with short-term mating opportunities.

00:15:47.780 Do you know if there's a literature detailing the difference in response to short-term mating episodes between men and women?

00:15:57.160 Are women more likely to evince regret in the aftermath of short-term mating episodes, one-night stands?

00:16:04.260 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:16:05.260 There's a rich literature in sexual regret, and exactly as you would expect.

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00:17:47.940 When you look at what people regret sexually, women regret more these short-term mating opportunities that they participated in.

00:17:58.020 Men more often regret those that they didn't participate in.

00:18:02.200 Missed opportunities.

00:18:03.540 Yes, missed opportunities.

00:18:04.800 So men's sexual regret tends to sort of cluster around things that they wish they would have taken advantage of and they did not.

00:18:10.340 Whereas women's tends to cluster more, and I really wish I wouldn't have had sex with that idiot.

00:18:15.240 Right, right.

00:18:16.080 Now, do you know, is there a personality literature that's looked at individual differences in post-short-term sex regret?

00:18:25.840 So, like, are the women less likely to show regret also more likely to have dark tetrad personality traits?

00:18:32.620 Like, there's got to be predictors of regret, right?

00:18:35.340 Now, you'd expect neuroticism would be one.

00:18:37.680 Right, right.

00:18:38.080 Because that would just predict negative emotion in general.

00:18:40.260 So, I suspect agreeableness is another predictor, is that the women who are more agreeable, compassionate, polite, more inclined to caretake and bond, so I would suspect that it's the more feminine women who are more likely to show post-coital regret.

00:18:57.060 I suspect the same thing would be true of men.

00:18:59.440 I bet you the more feminine men are also more likely to manifest that pattern of regret.

00:19:05.460 Yeah, that's really interesting.

00:19:07.360 Yeah, so I think with women, a lot of it, so in the personality literature, and I'm aware of that, because I'd only known that there was a dark triad.

00:19:15.300 Yeah, I know, it's expanded.

00:19:16.460 It's adding sadism.

00:19:17.160 It had to add sadism.

00:19:19.500 That's real fun, eh?

00:19:20.740 Yeah, I know.

00:19:21.820 Positive delight in the suffering of others.

00:19:23.920 Yeah, wow, wow.

00:19:25.380 I wonder if he's got a brother.

00:19:27.740 That's just a terrible, that's a terrible quality.

00:19:29.740 That's for sure.

00:19:30.860 So, no, so I'm not, I'm not terrible.

00:19:33.160 I'm familiar with that, but when I think about things, I tend to think about, just because personality isn't really my area, it's more of the evolutionary area, I tend to think about the, like, you know, my prediction would be, from an evolutionary perspective, would be that we would see women experiencing more sexual regret when the costs are higher, right?

00:19:52.460 So, like, what are the costs associated with having made that decision that you made, right?

00:19:56.600 So, whether it's reputational costs.

00:19:58.120 So, for example, a woman who has more to lose reputationally from having capitalized on that short-term mating strategy, I think that she would experience stronger sexual regret.

00:20:06.940 I bet you could predict that by looking at the relative, so imagine there's a continuum of men with regards to the socioeconomic status markers of their potential as providers.

00:20:20.120 I suspect that, this might seem obvious, but it would be nice to see it demonstrated, that the larger the gap between the woman and the man in terms of status, the more regret.

00:20:35.060 Yes, no, I would think so, absolutely.

00:20:36.360 Because she sold herself short, and the risk of that is too high.

00:20:39.820 Right, yes, no, absolutely, absolutely.

00:20:41.760 And also, I mean, you know, even the things that would influence her biological costs, right?

00:20:47.260 So, for example, if we're talking about short, like, immediate regret, a woman who's near high fertility in her cycle, where pregnancy is possible, I'm assuming that her hormonal thing would be predicting, would be telling her, like, oh, shit.

00:21:01.920 Like, that was terrible.

00:21:02.920 Like, why did you do that?

00:21:04.260 Or, and I would also expect you'd see more sexual regret at peak fertility across the lifespan.

00:21:08.920 See, now we have a perfect study design.

00:21:11.020 Yeah, I know.

00:21:11.440 We could look at personality, dark tetrad traits, and number of days deviation from maximum fertility as predictors of short-term coital regret.

00:21:23.260 Yes, and across a lifetime, too.

00:21:25.160 And we could spend three years getting that through an ethics committee and not do the study.

00:21:29.420 And then another three years trying to get it published.

00:21:31.000 Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

00:21:33.880 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:35.520 Yeah, so, all right, so back to what is a woman.

00:21:39.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:39.960 Okay, so what we've talked about so far is that what is the definition of female.

00:21:45.020 Mm-hmm.

00:21:45.540 Okay, and the female is the member of a sexually reproducing species who invests more at least at, see, that's the issue, at least at the level of the gamete.

00:21:58.440 Do you want to explain to everybody what a gamete is just so they know?

00:22:01.720 Yeah, so, hey, so a gamete is a sex cell, and it's your egg or it's your sperm.

00:22:07.500 So it's like 50%, it has 50% of your genetic material in it, and it is fused with a gamete of the other kind.

00:22:15.020 So if you make eggs, it fuses with sperm, and that is how we produce life.

00:22:18.920 And, yes, you know, the initial greater investment that women make is just the starting point of, as you said, it's like fractal.

00:22:28.900 Yeah, yeah.

00:22:29.380 It's exponential increased investment because a selection continues to reinforce greater investment because of that large initial investment.

00:22:39.400 It's like a hand of poker, right?

00:22:41.240 It's like a seed crystal that makes a diamond around it.

00:22:44.360 Right, exactly.

00:22:44.960 So if you put in $500 in the first round of betting and we're playing poker and I put in a buck, you have more to lose if that hand goes sideways than I do.

00:22:52.520 Right, and that echoes all the way up the chain.

00:22:54.120 All the way up the chain.

00:22:54.840 Okay, so that's very interesting, too, because the people who claim that sexual identity is merely culturally constructed fail to take into account the fact that that difference in investment echoes at every single level of the biological ladder, right?

00:23:09.840 Yes.

00:23:10.060 It's not merely something, it's certainly not something that's reducible to chromosomal difference, which is another way of defining the difference between men and women.

00:23:18.020 Right.

00:23:18.200 You didn't pick that.

00:23:19.240 You picked investment.

00:23:20.680 Yes.

00:23:20.960 Okay, so why did you pick, and it's not just you, I know that that tends to be the biological stance, but would you say that the chromosomal difference, XX versus XY, is of lesser significance than the investment issue, or does it matter because they're so tightly linked?

00:23:38.180 Well, they are so tightly linked, but I mean, honestly, if evolution by selection doesn't see it, it doesn't matter.

00:23:44.940 Like, in a lot of ways, the gears and sprockets that create us, those pieces, like if you're trying to make predictions about behavior and sort of like the, you know, what types of things have been reinforced by this process of inheriting traits that work, meaning that they promote survival and reproduction and those that don't, it's only what selection sees that matters.

00:24:06.020 And it never sees our chromosomes, what it sees is investment, right?

00:24:09.800 And those individuals who have this really large, you know, minimum investment, and they're only able to produce X number of offspring instead of X prime number of offspring, that those individuals, the best way that they can increase the probability of continuing their genetic lineage is through a heavy investment strategy.

00:24:31.500 And that's less true for this other sex, and so sex, you know, biological sex, and again, you know, it starts off with these small differences in the size of our sex cells, but then sort of recapitulates at every, all these different levels of investment.

00:24:45.180 Well, we could even imagine, just for the sake of argument, how that would recapitulate even cognitively.

00:24:51.580 Yes.

00:24:51.900 Right now, men, for example, men understand that there's a relationship between how successful they are and how attractive they are to women.

00:25:00.120 Like, and part of what they motivates them is the game of that competition.

00:25:06.720 So I worked with high-end lawyers for about 15 years, both men and women, and found some very interesting differences in that.

00:25:14.760 But the men even regarded the money they made in bonuses at the end of the year for outstanding performance.

00:25:22.220 They weren't so interested in the money.

00:25:23.780 They were interested in the money as a means of keeping score.

00:25:27.080 It was a means of winning the competition.

00:25:28.940 And you might say, well, competition for what?

00:25:31.820 And the answer to that is, well, let's call it competition, not for status exactly, but for reputation.

00:25:37.940 But the consequence of a stellar reputation is that, and men who have that are much more attractive to women.

00:25:44.440 And you might say, well, women go after wealth, but I think that's nonsense.

00:25:48.120 And I think that's also belied by the relevant evolutionary biology theory, because what it shows, and tell me if I've got this wrong, is that women use wealth as a marker for attractiveness because they use wealth as a marker for competence.

00:26:02.300 And what they're after is the ability to generate wealth, and to share it, and to be generous with it.

00:26:09.820 It has to be both, productivity and generosity.

00:26:12.200 And a decent marker for the capacity to generate wealth is wealth, although it's not the only criteria.

00:26:18.960 So women are looking for competence, and men, it's a very strange thing about men, you know, they compete among themselves for competence-based reputation.

00:26:29.540 And now, I've been trying to figure out why, because you can imagine, like, a movie scenario where, you know, the quarterback of the football team wins a major championship, and all the other men put him on his shoulders and, you know, bring him out of the stadium, and he sleeps with the cheerleader that night.

00:26:46.560 And you might ask yourself, well, why in the world would the men group together to elevate a given man to that sort of status if it means that he's going to be the one that successfully reproduces?

00:26:56.560 And my suspicion is that men learned to value competence, probably as a consequence of hunting.

00:27:07.040 So any given hunter, no matter how good he is at hunting, is going to fail in most hunts.

00:27:14.120 So now, if men band together to hunt, then the collective success is much larger.

00:27:19.800 And so what that means is that if you're going to be a hunter that provides across hunting bouts, your skill as a hunter is one determinant, but your interpersonal skill in negotiating and establishing relationships with the rest of the hunters is even more important.

00:27:36.920 So among hunter-gatherers, for example, if you're the one who brings down the animal, it's incumbent on you to downplay your contribution and to distribute the best parts of the animal to other people.

00:27:50.280 And you're doing that to foster your reputation as a generous person, and you're doing that in part to ensure that there's reciprocity in food distribution across multiple hunts.

00:28:00.080 Now, the men are going to be willing to elevate the highest hunter to the highest position because I think it's in their collective interest, it's in their collective interest and in their individual interest to be the followers of the best man.

00:28:18.020 And I think that's so important in terms of their own reproductive fitness, which would be tied to the provision of food across hunts, that they're willing to take the reproductive hit that's, what would you say, implicit in elevating any given man among all other men.

00:28:34.820 You could think about that in terms of hunting, and you could think about that in terms of combat, too.

00:28:39.480 You know, if you put the most heroic warrior on your shoulders, you give him an evolutionary edge.

00:28:45.180 But if you're in his group, well, then you've got the benefits of being with the greatest warrior and the greatest hunter.

00:28:53.720 And so I don't know if the evolutionary biologists have been able to calculate out the relationship between establishing a reciprocal relationship with a great hunter or a great warrior versus the costs of men competing to elevate a given man to the highest possible position.

00:29:09.820 It's a very weird thing that men do.

00:29:11.700 No, I think you hit the nail on the head, though.

00:29:14.360 I mean, I think that the benefits of aligning yourself with somebody who's very powerful, that, I mean, think about it.

00:29:19.780 If there's somebody, and like, let's say that he's, you know, 1.0 and you're sort of 1.1, and so there's somebody who's a better performer than you, you could get your ass kicked if you keep trying to have to, you know, fight with this guy.

00:29:33.080 So there's a big cost to you to try and to overturn this person.

00:29:36.900 And there's a lot of benefits of aligning with the person who's also really competent.

00:29:41.620 That's especially true if it's a Pareto distribution in terms of competence, right?

00:29:45.500 Because the really competent person might be like 100 times more competent.

00:29:49.420 Well, right, exactly.

00:29:50.400 And so it's like, I think that there's a lot of benefits that come, especially to men, because of the hunting context of aligning with another man in that context.

00:29:58.980 And there's also this tendency in other—so this has been very well studied in non-human animals, but we see a very similar version of this in humans.

00:30:08.160 But have you ever heard of lekking, lekking behavior?

00:30:11.600 So a lek is a place where males within a species will gather to attract mates.

00:30:17.640 It's almost like a club.

00:30:18.980 It's like the frogs.

00:30:20.300 Like frogs, for example, are a lekking species.

00:30:22.480 And the males will all go to this display area, and they croak, right?

00:30:26.280 And this is what attracts the females.

00:30:28.400 And so the females will go toward where they hear the loudest, most impressive croak,

00:30:32.780 because that male generally is larger in body size and has higher levels of testosterone and will have—

00:30:38.000 So the louder male attracts all the females.

00:30:39.940 All the females.

00:30:40.560 And so the males all want to hang out with this guy because he's attracting all the women.

00:30:45.560 And it's the same is true if men align themselves with somebody who's really high-performing.

00:30:52.220 I mean, if you go out for drinks with Tom Brady, it's not too bad to be Tom Brady 2.0.

00:30:57.480 Right, right, right, right.

00:30:58.920 You're going to be able to—

00:30:59.520 To bask in the reflected glory.

00:31:01.100 Yeah, bask in the reflected glory.

00:31:02.360 Well, and then women would also assume that if the extraordinarily high-status male

00:31:07.840 is hanging around with some character who looks like a dweeb on the surface,

00:31:11.620 that there might be hidden depths and utility to his character

00:31:15.280 or advantages in the mere fact that he's proximal.

00:31:19.380 Absolutely.

00:31:20.180 So women use that a lot.

00:31:21.440 And in fact, some of my very early research—this is going deep.

00:31:25.700 This is when I was in graduate school.

00:31:27.300 I studied this phenomenon in humans, mate-choice copying,

00:31:30.160 because this is another thing that you see in females of other species, but you also see it in us.

00:31:35.340 And this is—males tend to be a somewhat ambiguous stimulus package,

00:31:39.280 because most males, a lot of the qualities that women are looking for

00:31:42.400 aren't immediately available just based on physical appearance.

00:31:45.260 Right, right.

00:31:45.680 Right, so women have to kind of suss out, like, what is there about this guy?

00:31:49.220 And so when women see a beautiful woman with kind of an average-looking guy,

00:31:53.720 the first thing they think is what?

00:31:55.500 Right, right.

00:31:55.900 He must be rich, or he must have some really amazing personality, or he must be really high in status.

00:32:02.420 Right, right.

00:32:02.760 I wonder, is that magnified if he's unattractive?

00:32:05.360 Because one of the things you might suspect is that if a very beautiful woman is with a man who's very nondescript,

00:32:12.220 that there must be something about him that's absolutely stellar.

00:32:15.840 Absolutely stellar, yes.

00:32:17.300 And so the magnitude of the gap between the woman, how beautiful the woman is,

00:32:21.820 and then the appearance of the man sort of is linked with the degree to which women perceive

00:32:27.020 that he has these amazing hidden qualities that make him a desirable partner.

00:32:31.860 The bigger the gap, the more amazing the qualities.

00:32:34.380 The smaller the gap, the less amazing the qualities.

00:32:36.840 Oh, that's very funny.

00:32:37.800 So the proper mating strategy is if you're a spectacularly under-endowed male,

00:32:43.960 is to hire a beautiful woman to go to clubs with you.

00:32:46.840 Absolutely.

00:32:47.540 Right, right, right.

00:32:47.940 Absolutely.

00:32:48.380 And you would actually probably do better than a more attractive man with the same woman,

00:32:53.200 because people would think that you must really have something going on to have attracted her and look like that.

00:33:00.000 Right, right.

00:33:00.700 Yeah.

00:33:00.880 Oh, that's insanely complicated.

00:33:02.560 That's insanely comical.

00:33:05.400 That's insanely comical.

00:33:06.540 Yeah.

00:33:06.700 All right, all right.

00:33:07.680 So, okay, so what is a woman?

00:33:09.540 So we've defined that as the sex that invests more,

00:33:16.000 and we pointed out that across all the way, echoing all the way up the biological ladder

00:33:23.100 from the cellular to the cognitive, women, females are the sex that invests more.

00:33:29.940 Oh, yeah.

00:33:30.220 The other thing about that was that, well, women are going to invest more too because,

00:33:36.180 and you already pointed this out, but it's worth making it clearer because they have to.

00:33:40.260 So, I think I looked at one point, I looked up the world's record for most children a woman ever had,

00:33:48.060 and I think it was in the hundreds, actually.

00:33:50.220 Maybe not.

00:33:51.120 Maybe I've got that wrong.

00:33:53.120 Maybe I've got that wrong.

00:33:54.560 It doesn't matter exactly because you could imagine if a woman had, you know, a set of triplets every year for 10 years,

00:34:04.880 then that would give her 30 infants.

00:34:07.520 So, we could say the upper bound on female fertility with regards specifically to her children is going to be no more than 50.

00:34:15.480 Right.

00:34:15.780 And that's a generous estimate.

00:34:17.480 Whereas with men, it's like 10,000, 100,000.

00:34:21.040 There's no limit.

00:34:21.960 There's none.

00:34:22.560 Right.

00:34:22.800 So, women are going to invest more in their children too because every child, and you already pointed this out, is comparatively more valuable.

00:34:30.660 And then you also said something interesting, which is that as a woman ages, her children actually become comparatively more valuable than she did.

00:34:39.920 So, does this mean, this is a strange thing though.

00:34:43.260 So, is there evidence that women's love for their children increases as their children age?

00:34:50.380 I mean, because women are so invested in infants.

00:34:52.660 It's hard to, maybe it's like this.

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00:36:00.100 I don't, so I've not seen anything specifically that has addressed that very question, but they have done studies where they look at the difference between, for example, older mothers and younger mothers.

00:36:13.940 It's a world of difference.

00:36:15.680 I mean, when you look at the amount of investment that goes on, like if you're an older mother compared to a younger mother, older mothers invest more.

00:36:22.240 They spend more time investing.

00:36:24.120 And all of these things that you would expect, given that their reproductive window is closing.

00:36:29.040 Right.

00:36:29.140 So it's like the opportunity costs of investing in that child are less than it would be if you're a 20-year-old woman.

00:36:36.020 So if you're a 20-year-old woman and investing in an existing child, there's an opportunity cost that comes to you for not using that energy to have another child.

00:36:43.980 Right.

00:36:44.460 Right.

00:36:44.820 And so you're not making that trade-off when you're an older mother.

00:36:48.920 And so—

00:36:49.140 Do you think there's an optimum there that we don't know?

00:36:52.840 Because, you know, Jonathan Haidt wrote The Coddling of the American Mind.

00:36:57.980 Okay, and I've been very interested in this rise of what I like to think of as the devouring mother, is the over-invested parent.

00:37:05.300 Yes.

00:37:05.600 Okay, so instead of putting that on the shoulders of the given parent, I've been trying to understand the cultural context that might make over-investment more likely.

00:37:16.460 So you can imagine, well, fewer children.

00:37:19.760 Yes.

00:37:20.260 So if you have 10 children, you're obviously not going to invest in—you're not going to attend to each of them as much.

00:37:26.220 Right.

00:37:26.360 They're going to attend to each other more.

00:37:27.640 So more one-child families.

00:37:30.980 Okay, older parents.

00:37:32.440 Yes.

00:37:33.100 Right?

00:37:33.380 So they're going to be more conservative to begin with because you get more conservative as you get older, but they're also going to invest more in their children.

00:37:39.720 Right?

00:37:40.100 And so older and then also richer parents, because if you're older, you're richer.

00:37:47.020 And so part of the reason that children are coddled, as far as I can tell, to the degree that they are, and overprotected is because mothers are now old enough to be grandmothers.

00:37:56.200 They're rich, and they only have one child.

00:37:59.180 Right, and too much time on their hands.

00:38:01.620 Too much time on their hands also.

00:38:03.040 Because it's like, historically, women would have been out gathering food all the time, and now if you have women—and there's plenty of women who work and are still, you know, overindulging in their children.

00:38:13.860 But a lot of times when you see this, it tends to happen more frequently and more sort of exaggeratedly in homes where women aren't working outside.

00:38:23.140 Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I've talked to my daughter and my daughter-in-law about when they're trying to figure out how to optimally care for their young children is how they—and I talk to a lot of my clients, too, because they face the same problem—is how do you balance, as a woman, how do you balance the need of your children, especially under the age of three, for continuous, intense maternal presence with the pursuit of your own interests?

00:38:50.800 And my sense is that there's an optimized balance there, because one of the things that children should see is that adults, including women, have good things to do with their adult time.

00:39:04.660 And so that's a good thing to model.

00:39:07.060 Absolutely.

00:39:07.420 But then also, if you have your own pursuits as a woman, then you're not going to interfere too much in your child's life, because you actually have a life.

00:39:17.040 And one of the things, I think, that protects children against that proclivity of maybe excessively neurotic women to overinvest is that they have their own things to do that are important.

00:39:30.700 Yeah, I mean, having nothing else to do but just shine love on your child and overinvest them and make sure they never fall down, this is historically unprecedented.

00:39:43.860 You know, through most of human history—

00:39:45.040 No one was that rich.

00:39:46.780 No, I mean, yeah, women never—I mean, it was like we always played a role in subsistence.

00:39:50.980 You know, even though women were also mothering, they were also finding food, and they were also, you know, tending to whatever the dwelling was, and having to maintain relationships, and having to go and get water, and the children were having to go to work and help with these things.

00:40:05.080 And so it was a very different situation where now nobody is actually having to do anything to run the household, because there's staff.

00:40:12.260 And you have children that aren't, you know, you have parents who don't have anything, you know, or mothers in particular who don't have something else that's sort of pulling their time away from just spending all their time thinking about, you know, Johnny and his mandarin lessons.

00:40:29.500 But it's also not diluting their insanity.

00:40:32.460 You know, if you're in a tribal group—I mean, one of the advantages to having two parents is that the average of two parents is, on average, more sane than either of the individuals.

00:40:43.180 I think that's absolutely correct.

00:40:45.000 Right, right, right.

00:40:46.040 And, well, and partly what you do in a marriage is you keep each other sane.

00:40:51.160 You see where your partner has a tendency towards excess, and you rein that in, right?

00:40:57.140 And you do that for each other, and hopefully you do that with each other's best interests and the relationship of—and the quality of the relationship firmly in mind.

00:41:06.740 And you do that for the children as well.

00:41:08.360 Well, in a more communal, child-rearing environment, a child is going to have, in some real way, multiple mothers, like aunts, for sure.

00:41:19.620 And in a tribal group, most people are kin anyways.

00:41:22.400 And so the role of mother is going to be distributed enough so that even if any given mother is a bit addled in her preoccupations, there's going to be other people to whom the child can turn.

00:41:35.580 In a narrow nuclear family, where there's an overindulgent mother, let's say, who has far too much time on her hands, the child can be shielded from all other potential influences, which is also something that the more narcissistically overindulgent mother is likely to arrange.

00:41:54.140 So that it's interesting, because what it suggests is that even though human beings are a high-investment species, and even though women are the higher-investment sex within that confine, there is a point where investment becomes a burden rather than an advantage.

00:42:18.720 Right. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you can't, if you don't teach, if your children don't have to have the opportunity to learn how to navigate the environment on their own, they have no navigation skills.

00:42:30.880 And I think that that's essentially what we're seeing.

00:42:33.520 Why did you use the word navigation there?

00:42:35.580 I used the word navigation because life is a journey, right? I mean, we have to navigate our environment, and that means that we have to learn how to acquire resources.

00:42:43.300 We have to learn how to manage other people. We have to learn how to get along with other people that we don't like.

00:42:49.100 We have to, I mean, there's a lot of things that we...

00:42:50.340 We have to navigate through storms.

00:42:52.220 Yes.

00:42:52.640 And so if your response to your child is, there'll be no storms in your life.

00:42:56.480 Right, or I'll clear all of your storms, don't worry.

00:42:58.900 And then all of a sudden you put children out in the world and they have no coping skills.

00:43:01.300 Where there are storms.

00:43:02.800 Yeah, they don't have any coping skills. And we see this a lot, you know, as a college professor, I see a lot of this.

00:43:08.740 And at a private school with a very high price tag, where we'll have students who come in, and it's really a wake-up call about what life is like.

00:43:19.100 Because they've had, you know, parents who are very well-meaning.

00:43:22.260 You know, I think that the parents who do this, they have the...

00:43:25.100 God deserves us from well-meaning.

00:43:27.380 Yeah, I know. I think that they think they're doing the right thing, but it's not, you know, if you carry somebody too long, their muscles atrophy.

00:43:34.120 Yeah.

00:43:34.800 And you can't do that.

00:43:37.040 I heard a good rule from a, I think it was my brother-in-law who told me this, and he had spent a lot of time caring for very elderly people.

00:43:45.160 And he said that the appropriate rule of thumb for elder care is never do anything for your client that they can do themselves.

00:43:53.700 And the reason for that is that you facilitate, you devour their independence.

00:43:59.200 Yeah.

00:43:59.380 Right, and so then, so there's an interesting paradox here with regards to love, right?

00:44:05.040 Because there's the love that eradicates emotional distress in the moment, okay?

00:44:12.500 And then there's the love that is devoted to fostering adaptive behavior over the medium to long run, right?

00:44:21.200 And that's a love that's much more allied with judgment.

00:44:23.580 So, for example, if you call your child out on their misbehavior, you cause them short-term emotional distress.

00:44:30.820 But the long-term benefit of that is that if they integrate the impulses that are making them, let's say, unduly aggressive or reactive, then they're going to be more acceptable to their peers and to the broader social community.

00:44:44.740 So, you'll allow them to be hurt in the short-term for a long-term gain.

00:44:49.020 Now, do you know if there are sex differences in that temporal focus?

00:44:57.060 Because, see, here's the paradox as far as I'm concerned, and I watch women try to negotiate this with their children at about 12 months of age.

00:45:04.200 The thing about infants, because they're so dependent, is that the proper response of a mother to the distress of an infant nine months and younger is fix that now, regardless, right?

00:45:17.440 So, you could say, in a sense, that the emotional distress of an infant is an omniscient signal that care has to be administered.

00:45:26.740 But once the child starts to become somewhat autonomous, and that starts to occur when they can start to crawl, then the mother has to make a transition from immediate reaction to emotional distress to allowing the child to dwell in that emotional distress or even sometimes causing it herself.

00:45:45.180 And that's a very tricky transformation, because the woman has become so attuned to the infant and so bonded to that infant and so responsive to its signals of distress that to pull back from—I think most of the way women pulled back from that historically was they just had another child.

00:46:04.620 I was just about to say that exact thing. I think that our inter-birth ratios and, like, sort of lengthening the spacing between children has probably made that conflict, and we call it weaning conflict in the evolutionary sciences, has made that more difficult.

00:46:18.160 Exacerbated it. Yeah, because one of the things—

00:46:19.740 Yeah, because I think you didn't have a choice, you know.

00:46:20.800 Well, also, if you have a 13-month-old and no other children around, the 13-month-old is an infant.

00:46:27.900 But if you have a 13-month-old and then you have an infant, the 13-month-old is now a child, clearly.

00:46:34.620 Right. And so, yeah, well, I saw this when we had our second child, Julian.

00:46:40.440 Michaela was 18 months old. I think that's about right.

00:46:44.360 And, you know, she's still pretty little, but compared to a newborn, she was an adult, right?

00:46:49.560 Right, yeah.

00:46:50.100 And that was also the point where she turned more to me.

00:46:54.240 And, you know, there seems to be something that's—apart from the inter-birth interval, let's say—there seems to be something that's crucial about the role that men play

00:47:03.600 in the facilitation of that longer-term orientation, because men are less susceptible to the emotional distress of both infants and toddlers.

00:47:14.380 And along with that, I think it gives men the opportunity to be less affected by the emotional distress of children

00:47:22.500 and, therefore, to prioritize medium- to long-term adaptive strategies over short-term gratification of emotional demand.

00:47:31.020 And I think that's part of the cardinal role that men play is—well, they are agents of the patriarchy, right?

00:47:36.640 They're going to be socializing agents.

00:47:38.280 Well, but seriously, they're going to be—they seem to me to be—

00:47:41.700 The women are oriented very strongly towards the primary care of infantile emotional distress,

00:47:51.560 but that's not a good long-term strategy.

00:47:53.440 Okay, so I have a vicious question to ask about.

00:47:55.300 Okay, all right.

00:47:56.080 All right, we talked a little bit before we started this podcast about the corruption of the universities.

00:48:03.000 Yes.

00:48:03.320 Okay, now you write in your book a fair bit about what's been the interpersonal and social consequences of women moving en masse into the workforce.

00:48:13.700 So I have a proposition for you.

00:48:15.760 All right, let's hear this.

00:48:16.460 The default moral ethos of women does not scale.

00:48:24.140 It doesn't scale beyond the family.

00:48:26.340 So if you—now, I'm perfectly willing to debate this because I'm horrified by the fact that it might be true.

00:48:32.200 I've watched the universities transform themselves into holding pens for infants.

00:48:38.720 Yeah, no, that's a fact.

00:48:40.720 Okay, and I've watched them transform themselves into holding pens for infants as they become dominated by women who don't have children.

00:48:49.900 So let me say this, because I was actually just having this very similar conversation with a colleague of mine.

00:48:56.480 And actually, here's what I've noticed.

00:48:58.400 And so now here's the part where I'm going to say something that's a little bit awful.

00:49:01.460 Okay, okay.

00:49:04.080 Steal yourself.

00:49:04.820 I'm like, well, no, I'm just thinking like, oh, Lord, I'm going to get myself in trouble with this.

00:49:09.060 Okay.

00:49:09.940 If you are—

00:49:10.700 That's how you know it's probably true.

00:49:12.100 Yeah, I know, I know.

00:49:13.360 So what I am seeing at universities is that there is a real bifurcation in the performers and the not performers.

00:49:20.300 And the people who are the performers are the women, and the people who aren't the performers are men.

00:49:24.680 And I'm going to tell you why.

00:49:26.300 If you are a man who wants all the things that men want, status and power, and you're achievement-oriented, and you're bright, and you're a go-getter, are you going to go into a job where you go to Oxford and make $60,000 a year?

00:49:39.820 Yeah, no, definitely not.

00:49:40.400 No, you're not.

00:49:41.100 What types of men do you think are attracted to university jobs?

00:49:45.260 You mean now?

00:49:46.120 I mean ever.

00:49:48.720 I think it's changed.

00:49:49.940 You're making $60,000 a year.

00:49:51.260 Yeah, but I think it's changed.

00:49:52.920 And so women who go into university jobs are generally women, and this isn't en masse true, but it's, in my experience, more true than it's not, are people who are very competent, driven, motivated, but also want flexibility because they have children.

00:50:10.420 I work 60 to 70 hours a week, and I get to pick the 60 and 70 hours a week I work.

00:50:15.460 Right, right.

00:50:15.960 I love my job.

00:50:17.080 I have two kids.

00:50:18.260 I spend a lot of time doing things with them, and I like the flexibility, and most of the really competent academics that I know who are just kicking ass and doing a really, you know, good job in terms of, like, discovery are women.

00:50:33.560 Okay, okay.

00:50:34.240 And so I think the university is, like, falling apart because there's a lot of people who are mediocre, and they're generally old men, who are trying to maintain the system that rewards mediocrity.

00:50:48.260 And then you have performers coming in, and there's a lot of fission that's being created.

00:50:53.400 Okay, okay.

00:50:53.900 So there's two elements at play there.

00:50:57.080 There's an element of sex, and there's an element of performance.

00:51:00.060 Okay, so let's take this apart a bit and see if we can get to the bottom of it.

00:51:04.060 Well, first of all, you can't pathologize the behavior of one sex without pathologizing the behavior of both.

00:51:10.000 Right, right.

00:51:10.760 Okay, so we'll use that as an axiom.

00:51:12.660 Yeah.

00:51:12.800 And then you asked me what sort of men were attracted to university jobs.

00:51:16.740 When I started my career, the answer to that was men in the universities that were really working.

00:51:25.180 I think my supervisor was a good example of that.

00:51:27.660 He was a football player.

00:51:28.760 He's a tough guy.

00:51:29.800 He was extremely, extremely curious.

00:51:33.080 Yeah.

00:51:33.320 Right?

00:51:33.540 So he went into a university position because he wanted to do research.

00:51:38.340 And I was fortunate when I did my graduate training at McGill.

00:51:42.320 I was surrounded mostly by professors who actually were oriented towards discovering the truth in the course of their research.

00:51:49.360 But I saw that over time deteriorate in favor of careerists.

00:51:54.740 Yes.

00:51:54.960 And I would put most university administrators in the bin of careerists.

00:52:01.060 And careerists are interested in the secondary benefits of their career.

00:52:05.780 Maybe that's security and maybe it's status.

00:52:08.180 And not interested in the pursuit.

00:52:09.920 The only people I saw who pursued a university career who had justification for it, who were men, their justification was,

00:52:20.000 I'm so interested in pursuing, let's say, scientific truth and the expansion of knowledge that I can find my status, my interest there.

00:52:27.360 And if I have enough money to allow that to occur, that will be fine.

00:52:31.320 And I thought that was a perfectly reasonable game.

00:52:33.900 Now, you brought up a couple of things there.

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00:53:51.700 And let me say that there's a lot of people who go into science.

00:53:56.860 I went into science because I love research and I love discovery and I'm creative.

00:54:01.800 And it's a perfect venue for a creative person to just think about things and then go test them.

00:54:06.480 It's so fun.

00:54:07.260 And I don't think that what I was saying is characterizing all people in all the motivational states.

00:54:13.520 I was saying on the whole, it seems like when we look at who are these career risks that go into this field and, you know, and essentially because it's low risk and, you know, and you have this stability.

00:54:27.040 When you have men who are making that choice, it's a very different, it's a very different phenotype than a woman making that choice.

00:54:34.920 Okay, so maybe we have a feedback loop.

00:54:37.280 Okay, so imagine this.

00:54:38.460 Imagine that as the universities become comparatively lower paying and more maternal in their orientation towards the students,

00:54:46.840 they attract a larger and larger proportion of relatively dependent men who aren't adventurous enough to make it outside of that sheltered environment.

00:54:59.020 And what that does in turn, because the men act out that pattern of dependency, is it reinforces the idea that the inappropriately maternally oriented women have, what would you say, insufficient charges that they need to take care of.

00:55:14.400 You know, like things that, things really do tend to spiral out of control when a positive feedback loop emerges.

00:55:20.260 Right, right.

00:55:20.780 So if you want to become alcoholic, the best way to do that is start to drink to cure your hangover.

00:55:26.120 Right.

00:55:26.500 Because it works.

00:55:27.400 Right.

00:55:27.880 But it produces a worse hangover.

00:55:29.560 Right.

00:55:29.840 And if you want to develop agoraphobia, have a panic attack and then avoid.

00:55:36.340 Right.

00:55:36.820 Right, right.

00:55:37.380 So most forms of serious psychopathology, if you want to become depressed, get sad, and then isolate.

00:55:45.080 Right.

00:55:45.400 So many forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops.

00:55:48.780 So we can imagine that when a social institution starts to spiral, that there's multiple causal forces at work that are reinforcing each other.

00:55:57.440 Because that would also produce a rapid transformation.

00:55:59.520 But, okay, so you countered my proposition that the universities are deteriorating because they're being invaded by inappropriately maternally oriented women by saying, yes, but they're also inhabited by, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, by men who are looking for a dependent and less competitive niche.

00:56:26.520 Yes.

00:56:26.860 Is that a fair summary?

00:56:28.340 Yes.

00:56:28.800 Do you think that's in keeping with what you're observing?

00:56:31.000 Um, I, yes, maybe the, the, um, the, um, the maternal side of it thing, I don't see, but I'm, you know, I'm a woman.

00:56:40.760 And so it might be harder for me to, like, I don't, I don't see that.

00:56:43.680 I see it in the concern with microaggressions, with the concern with, with equity, with, like, the, the, all these, okay.

00:56:51.520 But, but I, and look, we, we have that.

00:56:54.160 I mean, we have so much of that.

00:56:55.740 And I, I was just telling one of my colleagues for the very first time in my entire life, and I've been teaching for 15 years, this semester was the first time I didn't just have, like, unfettered enjoyment teaching my evolutionary psychology class.

00:57:09.580 And it's because I'm terrified every day I go into my class.

00:57:13.280 Yeah, yeah, I started to notice that in 2016 when I was teaching.

00:57:15.740 Yeah, that I go into my class feeling terrified.

00:57:17.940 Like, I'm talking about biological sex, and I have to spend a lot of time, you know, talking about what biological sex is, what gender is, and, and talking about, because the, the two things play into each, in, in, in really interesting ways, actually.

00:57:29.340 And, and, and so I, I spend time talking about that, but I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to get totally destroyed in my, because everything, you know, ultimately in evolutionary biology comes down to sex.

00:57:41.740 And the reason I started my book off with a chapter, What is a Woman?, is that it's so foundational, this idea that as a biological female, that you invest more in offspring.

00:57:52.940 And what this means for you as a woman is it means that the costs of sex are higher, right?

00:57:58.480 And this creates a completely, like a mating market, where women essentially get to call the shots with sex, right?

00:58:05.700 And men sort of do the things that they need to do in order to get chosen.

00:58:09.320 But then what happens when there's no consequences for women's sexual behavior?

00:58:15.580 I mean, you know, because the fact that women have consequential sexual behavior has set the stage for things like women being choosier about sex, men being more competitive to be able to get access to the things that women want in partners.

00:58:28.600 And when all of a sudden we make sex non-costly for women, which has been a huge achievement for women, but it has these huge consequences on everything.

00:58:38.880 Because so much of who we are and our social behaviors and the types of things that motivate us are sort of built around the system of sex being costly for women.

00:58:48.840 Do you think has, okay, obviously the consequences of sex are extremely high for women and then secondarily for men, clearly.

00:59:07.300 And it is because we're a high investment species and our children have an incredibly lengthy and costly dependency period.

00:59:14.040 Yes.

00:59:14.560 Okay, okay.

00:59:15.200 So we're not going to eradicate that.

00:59:16.560 Now, you could say, because, you know, you entitled your book, interestingly, the subtitle, we should just point this out, is that this is your brain of birth control, the surprising science of women hormones and the law of unintended consequences.

00:59:32.520 Okay, let's concentrate on that last part a bit, that law of unintended consequences.

00:59:36.420 Because it isn't obvious to me, and I think this is implicit in your book, if the birth control pill is a biological mutation that exceeds the development of the hydrogen bomb in terms of its explosive consequences, it could easily be that the unintended consequences will swamp the benefits.

00:59:56.200 Now, the benefit, let's investigate this as thoroughly as we can, the benefit is that women are no longer prey to the terrifying consequences of sexual interaction.

01:00:13.460 Right.

01:00:14.000 Okay.

01:00:14.980 But also more, so, and that sounds small, right?

01:00:19.120 Now, and in some ways, it doesn't sound small, because the idea of, you know, women not being prey to, you know, sexual behavior is obviously a big problem, and that that's great that women don't have to worry about that.

01:00:32.480 But more than anything, in my view, the thing that's been most important and sort of groundbreaking about the birth control pill and having reliable contraception is that it's allowed women to plan.

01:00:43.580 Well, okay, that, okay, so let me, let me ask you about that, because I'm not so sure about that.

01:00:49.700 Okay.

01:00:49.940 So, well, it's not something I want to toss away, because obviously the problem of birth control is a walloping problem.

01:00:59.440 Yes.

01:00:59.840 Okay, so, so we're not going to underestimate the complexity of that problem.

01:01:03.960 It's the complexity of reproduction.

01:01:06.820 And so, but, so here's a statistic.

01:01:09.960 Okay.

01:01:10.180 Now, half of all 30-year-old women in the West are without children.

01:01:16.100 Okay.

01:01:16.680 Half of them will never have a child.

01:01:18.600 So that's 25% of women.

01:01:21.140 90% of them will regret it.

01:01:23.760 So now we have a situation now, imagine this propagating across the decades.

01:01:28.620 We have a situation now where one in five women will be involuntarily childless.

01:01:33.520 Right.

01:01:34.000 And that means, that means from the time, from 30 onward, for 60 years,

01:01:41.120 alone.

01:01:42.320 Right.

01:01:42.880 Right.

01:01:43.380 Okay.

01:01:43.700 Now, that's a walloping cost for 20% of women.

01:01:47.640 And they're just the women who have it the worst.

01:01:50.100 Now, now, now we can, we can set that against the fact that women are much more educated and

01:01:56.840 they're much more autonomous.

01:01:57.780 And the whole human race has now access to the intellectual capacity of women in a way

01:02:03.560 that just wasn't possible, say, before the 1960s.

01:02:07.080 We know that women's educational attainment is the best predictor of their children's educational

01:02:11.680 attainment.

01:02:12.180 After you factor in IQ, we know that the countries that prioritize women's rights are the countries

01:02:19.160 that are most likely to develop economically.

01:02:21.380 So there seems to be a huge benefit in the general emancipation of women.

01:02:25.480 But the costs are overwhelming.

01:02:28.100 And it looks to me like they're mounting, you know, because you also see, I think it's

01:02:33.140 now 30% of Japanese people under the age of 30 are virginal.

01:02:37.920 And the amount of sex that young people in the West are having, at least actual sex, is

01:02:44.620 plummeting.

01:02:45.420 And it's harder and harder for women to find a long-term relationship.

01:02:49.020 And so, so what, do you believe that, why do you believe overall that, or do you even

01:02:56.360 believe that the benefits of the pill have outweighed the costs?

01:02:59.800 I don't know that I believe that.

01:03:01.380 I don't, I mean, honestly, I think that this is one of those things where we can't make,

01:03:05.380 I don't think that I can make a blanket statement about that for everyone.

01:03:08.800 Do you know what I mean?

01:03:09.500 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:09.700 Like, to me, that's a blank, that's an individual level decision.

01:03:14.280 Yes, exactly.

01:03:15.060 So for me, right, using birth control for the number of years that I did, absolutely,

01:03:21.320 the benefits outweighed the costs because of how I played things.

01:03:24.780 I mean, it allowed me to get my degrees and, you know, start my research lab.

01:03:28.760 And I had my kids when I wanted to.

01:03:29.860 How many kids do you have?

01:03:30.780 I have two.

01:03:31.620 I have a daughter.

01:03:32.560 Was that enough?

01:03:33.220 And a son.

01:03:34.080 Yeah, I was, I was done.

01:03:35.380 Okay, okay, okay.

01:03:36.440 So that was good for you.

01:03:37.500 I was comfortable with that.

01:03:38.480 I felt good about that.

01:03:40.460 Right, so you managed all that.

01:03:41.940 I did.

01:03:42.480 And I think that there are many women who do.

01:03:44.980 There are some women who don't.

01:03:46.260 And so I think that the question of whether or not the costs outweigh the benefits,

01:03:50.020 something that's best answered at the individual basis,

01:03:52.400 which is why I think the best thing that we can do for people

01:03:54.980 is to educate them about what the trade-offs are that you're making

01:03:58.560 and what the risks and benefits are.

01:04:00.380 Because like you said, I mean, I think that there is, you know, women are taught almost nothing about their fertility.

01:04:07.140 Like, nothing.

01:04:08.020 Well, they're taught lies.

01:04:09.320 Well, yeah.

01:04:09.860 I mean, I have women coming into my class talking about how so-and-so had a baby at 40.

01:04:14.160 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:14.580 I'm saying, like, no, like, here's the fertility curve.

01:04:19.940 Tell me, describe the fertility.

01:04:21.800 The fertility curve peaks at 25, and then it begins to decline.

01:04:26.660 So women are at their most fertile at 25 years of age, and then it begins to decline.

01:04:31.460 It declines very precipitously after 35.

01:04:33.940 And the probability of getting pregnant from a general act of sex is much, much lower than it is when you're in your 20s.

01:04:42.860 And this is a really hard thing for women to have a wrestle with.

01:04:45.760 That's for sure.

01:04:46.780 I mean, you know, I look at myself, and I had to, you know, I was in graduate school when I had my first child.

01:04:51.760 And I had to make the decision, am I going to, you know, incur the cost to my career to go ahead and try to have a baby now when I know that it'll be relatively easy for me in biology?

01:05:04.980 28.

01:05:06.440 Right, right.

01:05:07.060 So you were already, by historical standards, old.

01:05:09.680 Old, yeah.

01:05:10.600 Definitely.

01:05:11.080 But I wanted to go ahead and get—

01:05:12.740 Why did you take the risk?

01:05:13.960 I took the risk because I study women's fertility.

01:05:16.320 Okay, so you knew.

01:05:17.340 And it's like, so I know, I know exactly what's going to happen if I wait.

01:05:22.760 And I wasn't, that wasn't a chance that I wanted to take.

01:05:25.240 And I think that if we do things like educate women on what the costs are that they're, you know, sort of facing if they choose to restrict their fertility for all of these years, like, what is the outcome of that?

01:05:36.120 Okay, so first of all, they should at least know what the facts are.

01:05:39.160 Yeah, I don't think that they, I don't think that we're educating women about these things.

01:05:41.980 No, we like, we, there's no one who's lied to more than 19-year-old women.

01:05:47.340 They're lied to in all sorts of ways.

01:05:49.320 The first lie is, there'll be nothing more important to you in your life than your career.

01:05:53.440 Is that, I think that's a lie because I know almost no one for whom that is true, whether they're male or female.

01:06:00.040 Like, I think on average, for men, career is more important than it is on average for women.

01:06:07.400 But having said that, men who have a successful family and a successful career are much more likely to value their family over their career.

01:06:17.080 So, so, and I think that's even more true for women.

01:06:20.560 And part of the reason I think that, you can tell me what you think about this, these lawyers I worked with as part of my clinical practice.

01:06:27.840 So, I worked with partners of law firms in big law firms in Toronto.

01:06:32.640 And so, we have Bay Street in Toronto, which is kind of the equivalent of Wall Street on a Canadian scale.

01:06:38.220 And there are large law firms there that are internationally competitive, especially in the world of finance.

01:06:43.700 Because Canada, that's above its weight on the financial side, partly because of our banks.

01:06:50.000 So, I worked with these.

01:06:51.080 So, the deal we put forward to the law firms, this little company I was working with, was, you send us your best people.

01:06:58.640 And we will endeavor to make them even more productive than they are.

01:07:02.980 Now, in any law firm, there's a small proportion of lawyers who are hyper-competent at law, but also hyper-competent at generating business.

01:07:11.880 And they're unbelievably valuable because they feed all the lawyers in the law firm who can do law but can't generate business.

01:07:19.760 Now, some of them are men and some of them are women.

01:07:22.800 And the law firms are hyper-motivated to keep those women.

01:07:26.380 And they can't.

01:07:28.140 All the women.

01:07:29.160 All the women quit.

01:07:30.680 You bet between 28 and 32.

01:07:32.620 So, what happens is they're hyper-conscientious and brilliant.

01:07:36.020 They're usually attractive as well.

01:07:37.780 And so, they do extremely well in high school.

01:07:41.040 They do extremely well in college and university.

01:07:43.960 They do extremely well in law school.

01:07:45.560 Like, they're on a track, high-achieving track.

01:07:48.380 They climb all the way up this track until they're senior partners and they're working like 70 hours a week.

01:07:53.180 And often by this time, but not always, they're married and usually to someone who has a high income.

01:07:58.040 And they look around, having hit the pinnacle, and they're 30, and they think, why the hell am I working 70 hours a week?

01:08:05.300 Now, the male answer to that is to win the contest.

01:08:09.120 And we know that winning the contest makes men sexually attractive.

01:08:12.740 But that isn't the case at all for women.

01:08:15.000 And so, what the women do, invariably, is bail out and take a job that gives them more flexibility in shorter hours.

01:08:22.260 And partly it's because they want to have a family.

01:08:24.320 Right.

01:08:24.580 Well, no, absolutely.

01:08:25.240 I mean, this is something that's – and people don't talk about it very frequently.

01:08:30.120 But, I mean, you hit the nail on the head.

01:08:31.460 That's exactly what happens.

01:08:32.880 I mean, women generally want to have more work-life balance than men do.

01:08:37.140 And it's just because the reward structure is very different for male and female brain of winning the contest, as you say.

01:08:44.060 And for men, there's a real reward that comes from that, and historically, evolutionarily.

01:08:48.640 You know, there isn't anything more important than winning the contest.

01:08:50.700 And for women, it's about when, you know, it's like we like to win the competition, but we also value investing in our family and in our relationships and that sort of thing to a greater extent than men.

01:09:00.860 And most women that I know, even women who are really high achievers and have, you know, high-performing jobs, also value their family time.

01:09:10.420 And a lot of them aren't willing to make those costs.

01:09:12.820 I know more people that are women who've foregone, you know, really big promotions and opportunities to sit on this board or that board and saying no to it, even though it's an amazing opportunity, just because they don't want to compromise their time with their children and their families.

01:09:29.900 And this is – yeah, it's a real thing for women.

01:09:33.680 It's a real thing for women.

01:09:34.900 Okay, so let me ask you a question about that, too.

01:09:37.620 Tell me what you think about this.

01:09:38.820 So, my observation of people who practice as scientists is that one in a hundred is an actual scientist.

01:09:48.300 Right, I agree with that.

01:09:49.420 Okay, okay.

01:09:50.100 So, then, if one in a hundred is an actual scientist and all the scientific progress depends on that one in a hundred, which is also what you'd conclude if you looked at both publication rates and impact of publications, same Pareto distribution problem.

01:10:06.580 So, and men are more likely to hyper-focus on their careers.

01:10:12.460 What happens if we take the men out of those positions and we substitute in women?

01:10:17.780 Because are we going to attenuate the productivity of the highest performers at the highest level of performance?

01:10:24.780 Well, so, I don't think that – you know, I think that when you look at the distributions of, like, let's just say, like, super geniuses.

01:10:32.780 Let's assume that scientists are super geniuses, okay?

01:10:36.260 And when we look at things like IQ and we look at the, you know, the distribution of IQ between men and women, we know that women have a more clustered around the mean type of a distribution.

01:10:48.860 There's less variability.

01:10:50.400 And for men, there's more variability, which means that with men's IQ distribution, you have fatter tails, meaning you have more men.

01:10:56.960 And you're terrified about getting into trouble.

01:10:58.640 That's pretty much what killed Larry Summers.

01:11:00.120 Well, I know, I know.

01:11:01.300 And I talk about this in my class.

01:11:02.860 And this is something that – nobody has problems with the fact that, you know, if you go to an institution, like an institution for people who are profoundly cognitively, you know, challenged, that you – the sex ratio there is like two to one male, three to one male.

01:11:16.400 And we know that more males have profound cognitive disabilities relative to women.

01:11:22.500 But on the side of super geniuses, it's the same thing.

01:11:25.460 And we see more male super geniuses than we do female super geniuses.

01:11:29.160 But I think with that, sometimes where things get, you know, everybody gets upset about that, which I don't think is necessary, is that it's not saying that there's not female super geniuses.

01:11:40.880 And it doesn't make predictions about any individual one case because patterns aren't good at making predictions about what happens with you or with you or with you.

01:11:51.000 And, yeah, so we know that that's – we know that that is a – that that's true.

01:11:54.760 There's a gazillion publications that have been published to that effect.

01:11:58.420 Whether we want it to be true or not, it is.

01:12:00.860 And what this means is that when you get to the upper echelons of any type of a career that requires a lot of G or a lot of intellectual power, you do tend to see that there is a little bit of a sex ratio with men to women.

01:12:14.680 This being said, there's a lot of, like, really valuable jobs that don't require as much G that play to some of women's intellectual strengths.

01:12:23.320 So, for example, things like science and medicine are becoming more female, and that's because those are things that women are really good at.

01:12:29.300 Yeah. Well, at those – well, okay, so at those very high levels of achievement, you're going to require the intersection of rare traits.

01:12:37.780 So, imagine in engineering. Okay, so first of all, you have to be more interested in things than people.

01:12:43.140 Yes.

01:12:43.480 Okay, so that's going to skew at male right away.

01:12:45.540 Yeah. Then you have to be super bright.

01:12:47.920 Yeah.

01:12:48.180 Okay, now, at the highest echelons, there's also going to be a bit of a male skew there.

01:12:53.100 Right.

01:12:53.260 And then you might also hypothesize that you also have to be either hyper-dedicated, so that would be conscientious, or hyper-competitive, or both.

01:13:02.160 Right.

01:13:02.860 So, we could be in a perverse situation where – well, let's play out the extreme case.

01:13:11.100 On average, women will make better scientists than men, but the best scientists will be men.

01:13:16.360 We could be in a situation where we'd have to balance those probabilities.

01:13:21.180 So, I wouldn't say the best scientists are men, because to me, that's like making predictions about individual cases based on a pattern.

01:13:27.260 Well, okay, okay.

01:13:27.820 So, I will say, on average, right, we should expect to see that in the pool of best scientists that is a male-biased sex ratio, I would agree with that statement.

01:13:37.200 Okay. Okay, so let's clarify that a little bit.

01:13:39.600 The absolute best scientist could actually be a woman, and that wouldn't violate the patterns of – and I'm not saying that –

01:13:44.960 Yeah, okay, so you said it more precisely.

01:13:47.020 But, yes, no, which is – but I think that that matters when you're talking about something like this.

01:13:51.580 It does. It does matter. It matters a lot.

01:13:53.900 Yeah, exactly. And so, I think that we – yeah, so precision support.

01:14:00.420 Yeah, yeah. Now, okay. So, let's – all right. So, let's move on to another issue.

01:14:04.880 We talked about what is a woman, and that took a long time, and you wouldn't think so, because you would think that would be obvious, and it is, because people can perceive the difference between male and female at a second.

01:14:15.800 You are your hormones, and you in the time of fertility, those are the two of the first three chapters.

01:14:20.660 So, what do you mean, you are your hormones?

01:14:22.360 What I mean is, a lot of times, especially culturally in the U.S., and I don't know whether or not this is true elsewhere.

01:14:29.220 I just know my experience is here. We have a tendency to talk about our hormones like there's something external to us.

01:14:35.660 Like, there's us, our sort of hormone-free, rational self, and then there's us under the control of hormones.

01:14:42.520 And that's just simply not the way that it works.

01:14:45.020 Our hormones are part of the signaling machinery that our brain uses to create the experience of being the person we are.

01:14:51.820 Right, so they're like neurotransmitters or anything else.

01:14:54.620 When we consider the fact that there's a bunch of gears and sprockets that all work together to make us the sort of person that we are with our restaurant preferences and personalities and, you know, likes and dislikes, our hormones play a role in that.

01:15:07.820 That's like part of the machinery.

01:15:09.240 Right, so that shouldn't be segregated off.

01:15:11.440 Right, exactly.

01:15:12.780 Right, as this thing that happens to us.

01:15:14.720 Right, yeah.

01:15:15.300 Yeah, and so I think that this is something that, on the one hand, is really obvious because it's like, I don't think if you tell that to somebody, they would say, well, of course it is.

01:15:23.120 But then what happens when we change people's hormones?

01:15:27.180 Yeah, right.

01:15:27.760 Well, testosterone is another great test case where, you know, here we have a testosterone clinic on every corner these days.

01:15:35.160 And so people are changing their hormonal profile, thinking about what it's going to do to this thing or that thing.

01:15:40.540 So, for example, if a man is taking testosterone thinking like, oh, I'll get my upper body strength back or maybe it'll improve my libido.

01:15:47.520 Or women go on birth control pills thinking, oh, I won't have to get my, you know, I won't ovulate and I won't get pregnant.

01:15:54.160 Without thinking about the fact that you're actually shutting down your body's ability to produce its own hormones, you're taking a daily dose of this synthetic hormone.

01:16:02.740 And when you change hormones, because hormones are literally a part of what your brain uses to create you, it changes you.

01:16:11.360 And so that whole chapter is just really trying to orient people.

01:16:14.320 Okay, so you're trying to bring people back into their body in some ways.

01:16:17.180 Bring them back into their body.

01:16:17.740 Yeah, well, you can understand why people have a problem with this.

01:16:20.220 Because imagine you get angry, you know, and then later you regret it.

01:16:24.320 You're going to feel like the anger overtook you, like it was an alien force in some ways, you know.

01:16:29.840 And it seems to me that the part of us that we identify with is something like the integrated self, right?

01:16:37.620 And then that integrated self can fall under the sway of impulses that are more neurologically primordial.

01:16:45.280 And we do feel that as a defeat.

01:16:47.640 We do feel that as a subordination or even as a possession.

01:16:50.860 And so you can see why people have that hesitancy to identify with their hormone-driven impulses, right?

01:16:58.300 But by the same token, those elements of you that might be excessive when isolated are a part of you and have to be integrated.

01:17:09.020 And they also have benefits that in all likelihood far outweigh their costs.

01:17:15.100 Okay, so what do you think the costs are?

01:17:16.740 Now, you talked about hormonal substitution in women with the birth control pill.

01:17:21.440 Now, maybe there's two aspects to that.

01:17:23.160 One is that the consequence of the suppression per se, and we definitely need to talk about that.

01:17:30.000 And then there's also the fact that what the normal hormonal regimen is being, what the substitution for that is, isn't the same hormonal profile, right?

01:17:41.980 Because it's not the same chemical.

01:17:43.480 Okay, so let's start with the consequences of the hormonal transformation.

01:17:47.600 What has that done to women?

01:17:49.140 And what does it do to the relationship between men and women?

01:17:51.700 Yeah, no, really great questions.

01:17:53.560 I mean, our hormones, we have them for a reason.

01:17:56.940 Like, evolution by selection doesn't select for costly traits.

01:18:00.840 And hormones are expensive.

01:18:02.240 You know, they're metabolically expensive.

01:18:03.760 They make our brain reorganize themselves every month.

01:18:07.280 None of that stuff would go on if it wasn't doing something to promote survival or reproduction.

01:18:12.560 And so, by eliminating that, by decreasing or, you know, sort of minimizing women's exposure to, you know, cyclicity in their hormonal profiles, you're essentially changing a lot of the things that are fundamental to being a woman.

01:18:27.960 So, just to give some examples of this, you know, for a naturally cycling woman, which is what we'll call a woman who's not on the pill, right?

01:18:35.140 Because she's naturally cycling between her two hormones.

01:18:38.400 Hormones go through two different states across the state of a cycle.

01:18:42.240 It starts off with hormone levels are really low when a woman gets her period, which is the first day of her cycle.

01:18:48.640 And then estrogen levels begin to increase as her egg follicles are being stimulated.

01:18:53.640 And as they're beginning to mature, that releases high levels of estrogen.

01:18:57.320 And when estrogen increases, because it's nearing the time when women are able to conceive in the cycle, it tends, like, it causes a lot of biological, physiological, and psychological changes that make women primed for sex.

01:19:12.360 So, it makes women smell better to men.

01:19:14.640 It makes women look more attractive to men because their skin becomes more vascularized.

01:19:18.980 Their cheeks become rosier.

01:19:20.480 They just look more, they just look sexier.

01:19:23.580 They smell sexier.

01:19:24.560 They move sexier.

01:19:25.420 Their voices are sexier.

01:19:26.700 Or, there's all of this research that's been showing that when estrogen levels are rising in the cycle that it's associated with...

01:19:33.140 Strippers get more tips.

01:19:34.460 Strippers get more tips.

01:19:36.000 Yeah, they earn more tip money.

01:19:37.540 I mean, it's a real phenomenon.

01:19:39.840 And this, you know, this happens, right, as women are entering...

01:19:42.900 So, why not flatten that?

01:19:44.200 Why isn't that just annoying for women?

01:19:46.700 So, they can replace that with a more regulated emotional life and one that's less unpredictable.

01:19:53.040 Right.

01:19:53.560 But, yeah, but that's like equating normal and predictable with the male pattern.

01:19:59.220 Yeah, right.

01:19:59.720 It's very much like that.

01:20:01.040 And that's not true.

01:20:02.460 It's like that's normal for males and predictable for males.

01:20:06.160 But that's not true for women.

01:20:07.700 That's not predictable for women.

01:20:09.480 We're different entities.

01:20:10.880 And I think that we've been in this cultural paradigm that equates normal with male for so long that we're even afraid to ask the question of, what if both of our hormonal states matter?

01:20:23.300 Like, what if there's two halves to a woman's whole?

01:20:25.400 Don't you think it's...

01:20:26.380 Okay, it seems to me that, and maybe this is unfair, but it seems to me remarkably perverse that at least some of this can be laid at the feet of the feminists.

01:20:36.560 Well, let's look at a couple of the strange things that we have as a consequence of the feminist world.

01:20:43.100 We have the insistence that career is going to be the most important part of a woman's life.

01:20:47.540 Now, the leftist feminists, and they're generally leftist, are anti-corporate, but they're pro-career.

01:20:54.360 Okay, so that's very weird.

01:20:56.480 A career is...

01:20:58.140 To have a career is to be embedded in what the feminists object to as the patriarchy.

01:21:03.120 Right.

01:21:03.440 To subordinate your cyclicity to the hormonal rhythms of a man, you can't imagine something that would be more like subordination to the demands of the oppressive patriarchy, right?

01:21:14.180 That kind of like sums it up.

01:21:15.500 You're going to suppress the biological manifestations of femininity in favor of a persona that makes you optimally functional in the corporate patriarchy.

01:21:27.140 Right.

01:21:27.440 So all of that, I mean, there's so many contradictions at the heart of that, right?

01:21:31.780 Because another one is, you know, we need to hire women in equal numbers as men because of the diversity that they bring to the workforce, but women are just like men.

01:21:40.280 Right, right.

01:21:40.840 And we do everything we can to suppress their hormonal variation that would, in fact, make them different.

01:21:46.100 Yeah, no, yeah, no.

01:21:48.080 And you're right.

01:21:48.800 I mean, a lot of the people who really get nervous about talking about cyclicity and talking about hormonal changes are sort of the old guard feminists.

01:21:58.160 And, you know, I understand where all of that originated.

01:22:04.880 I mean, women, we've had a very bad history of being treated pretty poorly because of the fact that our hormones change.

01:22:11.620 But it's like, I think that it's time that we need to move past that and say, you know, all of this, this idea that there's something problematic about cycling hormones is assuming that there's only one way to be that's correct.

01:22:24.520 And that way is male.

01:22:25.780 And that's wrong.

01:22:27.200 I mean, to me, it's like I reject that.

01:22:29.360 And, yes, our hormones change.

01:22:33.200 And you can say that they make us unpredictable, but it's actually incredibly predictable.

01:22:37.440 Like, if you would throw, give me any woman, you bring her in off the street and put her here, and I ask her how old she is and when was the first day of her last menstrual cycle, I can tell you with pretty good certainty what her hormones are doing at that moment.

01:22:50.460 Right, if I bring a man in off the street, I have absolutely no idea what his primary sex hormone is doing because testosterone is reactive.

01:22:58.860 It increases when there's a beautiful woman around.

01:23:01.100 It decreases if your sports team loses.

01:23:03.100 It increases if your sports team wins.

01:23:05.600 Your political candidate loses.

01:23:06.980 It decreases.

01:23:08.100 So testosterone is incredibly reactive.

01:23:09.720 So that's also relevant to why the men would be hanging around the high-status men because if your sports team wins, then your testosterone levels—

01:23:16.880 Yeah, if you increase your testosterone, then you can go and keep being more.

01:23:18.640 Right, right, right, right.

01:23:19.040 Yeah, no, so I mean, a lot of these ideas that people have been using to reject the idea or object to the fact that women have cycles and that there's something problematic about that are all very much steeped in the idea that the male way of being is optimal, normal, and correct, and that the women, you know, the female way of being is problematic.

01:23:42.180 And I absolutely reject that.

01:23:43.700 And so when we take the birth control pill, what it does is instead of allowing you to cycle between these two hormones, because you start with this big increase in estrogen, which is coordinating all the activities related to sex and conception, because this is the period in the cycle in which sex can lead to conception.

01:24:02.200 How long a period is that?

01:24:03.300 It's about four—so that period of time is about five to seven days, so about five days prior to ovulation, and then within 24 hours of ovulation during that window, which we call the fertile window, sex can lead to conception.

01:24:16.240 And that's how many days a month?

01:24:17.420 It's about five to seven.

01:24:18.960 Yeah, right, okay.

01:24:19.600 So, and then after ovulation, a little temporary endocrine structure forms from the empty egg follicle, and it begins releasing women's other primary sex hormone, which is progesterone.

01:24:30.040 And when that hormone is being released, it tends to make us sleepier, it makes us hungrier, it lowers our testosterone levels, it does a bunch of things physiologically that are helping prepare women's bodies for pregnancy, right, and prepare ourselves for the possibility that an egg might implant.

01:24:47.320 And so women generally are less likely to be going out and doing risky things, and more likely to avoid contaminants.

01:24:54.280 So women's disgust sensitivity increases.

01:24:56.760 There's all of these things that go on that are essentially preparing our body for this.

01:24:59.780 That's when they have maximal post-cortical regret that.

01:25:03.140 I bet that you're—yeah, that's so funny.

01:25:05.140 And so you get this waxing and waning between these two hormones that are organizing our bodies for two different activities, implantation and conception—or, pardon me, sex and conception, and then implantation and pregnancy.

01:25:16.620 And we go in between these two states, and each of these hormonal states is associated with different types of psychological patterns and physiological patterns.

01:25:25.260 I mean, even they've done studies where they scan women's brains every day across the cycle and take hormone measures, and it's like you see things like white matter density increasing when estrogen is high.

01:25:36.940 Like spinal—you get new dendritic spines in the hippocampus when estrogen is present.

01:25:43.220 And then these things retreat when you're under the control of progesterone.

01:25:46.960 And so we experience all these changes.

01:25:48.740 Right, right.

01:25:48.820 And that's a very normal part of being a woman, and when you take the birth control pill, what it does is you get a daily dose of a relatively low level of synthetic estradiol, so estrogen, and a relatively high level of synthetic progesterone, which is called a progestin because it's not biologically identical.

01:26:07.780 And this mimics the state that a woman's body is in during that second half of the menstrual cycle when conception isn't possible.

01:26:16.300 And what this does is it sends a signal to the hypothalamus not to stimulate the ovaries to produce a new egg because it's essentially waiting to see what happens with the one that was just ovulated.

01:26:26.140 And so when you're taking the pill, you get the same daily dose every day of this synthetic hormonal state that's kind of keeping you in—

01:26:34.440 So in principle, in principle, the body's reacting as if the woman has been sexually satiated in the most fundamental way.

01:26:41.260 She might be pregnant.

01:26:42.180 Yes, she might be pregnant, essentially, is what that is saying.

01:26:44.860 And so one of the logical consequences of that would—correct me if I'm wrong—she should be less interested in sex.

01:26:51.080 Bingo.

01:26:51.320 But then this also ties into the change in her preference for men.

01:26:57.500 Yes.

01:26:57.800 So let's talk about that a little bit.

01:26:58.960 Okay, sure.

01:26:59.740 Because one of the things that really shocked me when I came across this probably 10, 15 years ago was that there was pronounced variability in the faces that women found attractive across the menstrual cycle.

01:27:12.760 And so if you take photographs of the same man and you widen or narrow the jaw, widened jaws is a sign of more classically dominant—it's the wrong way of thinking about it—competent, confident, masculine faces.

01:27:27.780 You can do it with the same man.

01:27:29.400 And the women who are in their most fertile periods prefer the wider-jawed men.

01:27:34.340 Yes.

01:27:34.600 And so, okay, so then I thought, uh-oh, this is a problem because it means that women who are on the pill prefer feminine men.

01:27:41.560 Then I thought, that's a real problem because it might be that women on the pill really don't like masculine men.

01:27:47.980 Uh-oh, that's probably a problem because we have a lot of tension between women and men in our society.

01:27:52.180 And we have no idea how much that's driven by the fact that the pill is transforming the manner in which females perceive the most masculine men.

01:28:01.980 I mean, it's terrifying if that's the case.

01:28:04.940 Right.

01:28:05.160 No, I mean, it's very provocative.

01:28:07.600 Right?

01:28:07.820 That's the word I would use.

01:28:08.740 Yeah.

01:28:09.020 It's incredibly provocative because research has been showing now for about 20 years that when women are in the point in the cycle when estrogen is high,

01:28:17.780 that that's associated with an increased preference for testosterone cues.

01:28:22.080 Like you said, vocal, facial, and behavioral masculinity are things that women are really zeroing in on right near high fertility in the cycle.

01:28:32.780 And this, of course, begs the question, well, then what happens if a woman is on hormonal birth control and is never in the estrogen-dominant phase of her cycle?

01:28:41.560 Then what happens, and researchers have since asked that question, and what they tend to find is that women who are on hormonal birth control desire a somewhat less masculine male face and male voice.

01:28:53.420 And there's been some research even showing that if women chose their partners when they're on hormonal birth control and then discontinue it,

01:29:00.860 that this can lead to changes in how they perceive and how attracted they are to their partner.

01:29:05.060 Yeah, I read that, tell me if this is right, that if they picked an attractive partner, when they're off the pill, they find them even more attractive.

01:29:13.940 But if they picked a less desirable partner, when they're off the pill, they find them even less desirable.

01:29:19.420 Bingo.

01:29:19.700 So it seems to, okay, so that's right.

01:29:21.300 It magnifies the consequence of their choices.

01:29:23.660 Yeah, it's like all of a sudden the blinders were off.

01:29:25.580 And so now they can, if they chose somebody who, that they found attractive and because they weren't really paying that much attention to that or weren't prioritizing that when they were on the pill,

01:29:35.520 all of a sudden the blinders are off, they see it, they love it, they're attracted to it, their relationship satisfaction goes up, their sexual desire in the relationship goes up.

01:29:43.660 And if the opposite happens, it's the opposite.

01:29:46.400 And we just-

01:29:46.900 So do women on the pill pick friends as mates?

01:29:49.540 Oh, interesting.

01:29:50.320 I've never seen a study looking at that, but I mean, it wouldn't be a far stretch to make that prediction.

01:29:55.180 Just because it does seem like women who are choosing their partners on the pill, if there's a pattern that's found, the pattern is that women are generally zeroing in on qualities that have less to do with sexiness and sexual desire and masculinity and more zeroing in on things like safety and is this like-

01:30:13.060 Nurturance, companionship.

01:30:14.580 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:30:15.560 Yeah, well, you can see that women have a very, very difficult choice to make, right?

01:30:20.940 Because they want to pick a guy who can win a competition with other guys.

01:30:25.480 They want to pick a guy who can keep the psychopaths at bay.

01:30:28.960 They want to pick a guy who's productive, but they also need to pick someone who's generous and capable of forming responsible relationships.

01:30:36.320 Well, you know, talk about a play of opposites.

01:30:39.860 And you can imagine that any shift in hormonal balance is going to skew that in one direction or another.

01:30:45.960 Right.

01:30:46.200 Yeah, I mean, for partner choice, I always tell my women in my class and also the men, the few men that are in my class, because it's a university and it's all women now.

01:30:55.320 But what I tell them is it's all about making trade-offs and sort of which side of the table you're stacking your coins.

01:31:04.500 Are you stacking your coins more on the sort of sexiness, keeping the psychopaths at bay, kind of masculinity types of qualities?

01:31:12.400 Are you stacking your chips all the way over here of good caregiver, provider going to help with the children?

01:31:18.600 Are you putting them more toward the middle?

01:31:19.900 Well, everybody makes a trade-off and essentially what we do, what our hormones do, is they kind of nudge where we put our stack.

01:31:26.880 Yeah.

01:31:27.140 You know, and what we can see when this happens en masse, as you can see, en masse changes in partner preferences potentially, which is, as noted, pretty provocative.

01:31:36.680 Well, we have no idea what the political consequences of that are.

01:31:39.560 Right.

01:31:39.960 Because you could also imagine, this is like the worst case scenario, imagine that there's a distribution of women who are affected by hormonal transformation.

01:31:48.140 And some women are relatively unaffected, and some women are tremendously affected.

01:31:52.920 Right.

01:31:53.160 Well, you could imagine that the tremendously affected women would have more impetus to engage politically.

01:31:59.280 Mm-hmm.

01:31:59.880 Right.

01:32:00.280 So the ones, right.

01:32:01.680 So imagine that there's a subset of women for whom the birth control pill makes masculine men particularly undesirable.

01:32:08.320 Right.

01:32:08.760 Right.

01:32:09.200 Now, imagine that that transforms itself into political motivation, because it might.

01:32:13.280 I'm not saying we know this, we don't know it, because we don't know anything about the relationship between hormonal transformation and political activism.

01:32:21.700 Right.

01:32:21.900 But the probability that there's no relationship is zero.

01:32:24.920 Right.

01:32:25.260 Right.

01:32:25.440 So we've thrown this new monkey wrench into the works in 1960 that's transformed the relationship between men and women, and we have no idea, we really have no idea what the consequences of that are.

01:32:36.140 No, you know, I was just talking to my class about this, because I think it's really fascinating, because I think culturally, we're, I mean, we've been feeling the tensions that are created by this for a very long time now.

01:32:47.240 And again, you know, I'm somebody, I feel very much like I benefited from the pill.

01:32:52.280 I was on it for a decade.

01:32:53.380 It was a great time in my life to be on it.

01:32:57.220 You know, it didn't cause me any problems that I'm aware of.

01:33:00.880 I got to have my kids, and I wanted to, I got to invest, and so on and so forth.

01:33:04.460 But at the same time, you know, having this, having women have the opportunity to invest really heavily in their careers essentially sets up these expectations where women are supposed to be both women and men.

01:33:17.680 Yeah, right.

01:33:18.360 And so women now, it's like, because it's not either or.

01:33:21.360 You know, it's not like, oh, are you going to go to work, or are you going to stay home and take care of your kids?

01:33:25.860 It's like, no, I'm doing both things.

01:33:27.800 Yeah.

01:33:28.200 And so we've set up this expectation where women are supposed to be women and men, and I think women's mental health is suffering hugely as a consequence of this.

01:33:36.600 I think it's been very hard for women trying to balance everything with the expectation that they're supposed to be doing all of it.

01:33:42.680 Yeah.

01:33:43.240 It also begs the question of what's left over for the men.

01:33:46.220 Well, and this is what I think is really interesting.

01:33:48.200 So this was the revelation I just had a couple days ago.

01:33:50.780 I actually had it when I was teaching, and I told my students about it, and I'm like, I think I'm onto something with this.

01:33:55.260 But, you know, testosterone levels are an absolute nadir right now.

01:33:59.520 I mean, they're at an all-time low, and there's a lot of reasons.

01:34:02.980 Could that be a consequence of excess masturbation, just out of curiosity?

01:34:06.760 I don't think so, no.

01:34:07.680 You don't?

01:34:08.000 No, no, no.

01:34:08.360 Okay, why not?

01:34:09.140 Because I thought it matches the increase in pornography, you say.

01:34:13.920 Yeah, no, I completely, yes.

01:34:15.940 And that goes on concurrently.

01:34:18.080 But no, you don't think so?

01:34:19.480 No, because usually when men are seeing a lot of attractive women, it makes their testosterone increase.

01:34:24.060 And then that's not something that, like, takes a major hit after masturbation.

01:34:28.000 So you think that's been put to rest.

01:34:29.420 All right, so testosterone levels are the low.

01:34:31.300 So testosterone levels are super low, and, you know, there's a lot of reasons for this.

01:34:34.500 You know, we know there's a lot of xenoestrogens in the, you know, in the water, and that might be messing with their hormones.

01:34:40.880 And men are heavier than they used to be, and fat aromatizes testosterone and makes it, turns it into estrogen, which also lowers men's testosterone levels.

01:34:49.980 Another advantage of an all-carb diet.

01:34:52.020 Yeah, but so here's another interesting thing, and I don't know if you know about this research, but it's really fascinating.

01:34:58.880 So, you know, culturally, we tend to think about testosterone as being this thing that, like, is always good to have super high, right?

01:35:05.160 We think it's masculinity and virility and protection.

01:35:07.320 And, but testosterone is, among other things, it's a hormone of mating effort, right?

01:35:12.600 It's like effort that you're directing toward winning and doing things that are going to attract partners.

01:35:16.780 It also, it's linked with men's interest in extra pair partners and all these other types of sort of counterproductive behaviors within the context of a long-term pair bond.

01:35:25.520 And so what research finds is that when men get married or are in a long-term committed relationship, their testosterone levels decrease a little bit.

01:35:33.940 And this happens absolutely functionally because it's essentially taking, easing the foot off the gas pedal because it's keeping men from doing counterproductive things within the context of a pair bond.

01:35:44.620 When men have young children.

01:35:45.740 So it tilts the more to the, oh, okay, go ahead.

01:35:48.020 Men have children.

01:35:48.800 Their testosterone levels decrease again.

01:35:50.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:35:50.960 Okay?

01:35:51.540 And the more caregiving that men do, the more their testosterone lowers.

01:35:55.040 And this isn't permanent, right?

01:35:56.540 This is a shift that men's bodies make in response to the environmental cues that's very adaptive and makes a whole lot of sense with our hunter-gatherer history.

01:36:04.500 Yeah, well, they shouldn't be sexually attracted to the children, for example.

01:36:08.200 Yeah, well, exactly.

01:36:09.020 They shouldn't be attracted to the children.

01:36:10.280 And they also, like, if you've got young children at home whose survival is dependent on you, you need to keep your eye on the ball and not on the next-door neighbor.

01:36:17.120 Right, right.

01:36:17.880 And be raising your children.

01:36:19.920 And so I started to think about this, and I was thinking about this idea that, you know, women are being expected to be both women and men.

01:36:27.520 Men are being expected to be both men and women.

01:36:30.460 Yeah.

01:36:30.580 Because men are now doing more household work and more child care than they ever have before.

01:36:35.880 Which women also tend to find no non-attractive.

01:36:38.760 Well, no, they do.

01:36:39.660 Like, I mean, it creates problems within the relationship because, yeah, women lose sexual attraction in that context.

01:36:44.600 But then men's testosterone levels could be decreasing in response to that, and that could be one of the factors that's contributing to men's low testosterone currently, is that we've created this case where men are having to be women and men, and men are having to be men and women.

01:37:00.140 Right, and so what it does perversely for the men is that the men who are adopting the caregiver role more explicitly also put themselves in the terrible position where they're less sexually desirable.

01:37:11.680 Right.

01:37:11.880 I saw a very funny study at one point.

01:37:13.660 It might have been David Buss, because he does funny studies all the time, because he's still allowed to.

01:37:18.360 Yeah.

01:37:18.480 I think what they showed, they showed university-age women, the same men, engaging in male-stereotyped activities and female-stereotyped activities, like vacuuming, for example.

01:37:28.700 Right.

01:37:28.920 God only knows why that's female stereotype, but it has something to do with nesting, I suppose.

01:37:33.640 And reliably, the women rated the men who were engaged in the more feminine activities as less sexually attractive.

01:37:40.440 Right.

01:37:40.660 Yeah, no, absolutely.

01:37:42.400 I mean, that is such a, it creates this cruel bind.

01:37:45.520 But I also think, you know, it's funny, I was having, I teach a class called Evolution, Sex, and the Brain.

01:37:51.700 And we ask big questions.

01:37:53.260 So this is a class I really enjoy teaching, because they encourage us to ask difficult questions that nobody really knows the answers to.

01:37:59.380 Mm-hmm.

01:38:00.840 And one of the things I always ask them is about seduction.

01:38:02.880 Because seduction is such an important part of women's sexuality.

01:38:06.840 The idea of a man who has some sort of status and dominance, sort of, like, you know, being masculine.

01:38:14.800 And women find that attractive, and they find that sexual, you know, like, that's sexually arousing.

01:38:19.500 And there's this whole literature about the idea of, like, one of the things that men do is sort of awaken women's sexuality.

01:38:25.200 Right.

01:38:25.360 And that's the kiss of the prince.

01:38:27.520 Well, yeah.

01:38:28.060 And so then the idea that now we're in this environment where we say that we can't do that.

01:38:34.400 Yeah, right.

01:38:35.260 And, but it's, like, also at the same time, you know, it is important that women have exercise choice, right?

01:38:41.600 And obviously, like, we don't want women getting sexually assaulted.

01:38:44.440 Right, yeah.

01:38:44.720 And so it's, like, how do we create a space, like, culturally?

01:38:48.360 Like, what is the conversation that we need to be having where it's, like, seduction is okay, except that it's not?

01:38:53.700 Yeah.

01:38:54.120 You know, I mean, it's really tricky.

01:38:55.340 You're definitely going to get fired.

01:38:56.800 You're absolutely 100% going to.

01:38:58.840 Well, I see one of the things that's so perverse about the modern university campus is, on the one hand, there's this absolute insistence that every possible form of sexual behavior is not only to be tolerated, but celebrated or even worshipped.

01:39:14.020 And on the other hand, every single interaction between a young man and a young woman is so rife with danger that it has to be formulated into a contract before it can be undertaken.

01:39:24.340 Right.

01:39:24.600 Well, you get, with that sort of absolute licentiousness, you're going to get a call for, like, tyrannical regulation of sexual behavior because you can't have that much looseness without a demand for tightness.

01:39:36.360 But it does beg the question that you're putting forward.

01:39:39.780 And, well, one of the answers to that, I would say, this is sort of a sideways answer, is that alcohol is a very bad thing to pour into the mix.

01:39:48.780 Right, yes.

01:39:49.300 Because it's the case that almost all sexual assault, especially the date rape types, but even the more violent types, almost all spousal abuse, all of that would disappear if alcohol disappeared.

01:40:01.580 This is a conversation nobody will have about campuses because part of the problem on campuses is that young men and young women who don't have that much experience with each other and who are also anxious as a consequence generally meet each other in alcohol-fueled bouts.

01:40:14.940 And that's, like, you would, you can't say that alcohol causes violent crime, but you can damn near say it.

01:40:24.460 You know, 50% of people who are murdered are drunk.

01:40:27.320 50% of the murderers are drunk.

01:40:29.340 The stats are even worse with regards to sexual assault.

01:40:32.580 If without alcohol, yeah, yeah, without alcohol, it would almost never happen.

01:40:35.840 So that's something that could be started as a topic of reasonable discussion on university campuses.

01:40:41.880 Like, are there places where young men and young women can congregate and meet that aren't fueled by alcohol-induced stupidity and recklessness?

01:40:52.220 Right.

01:40:52.340 Now, it's complicated because part of the reason that people drink is so that they can engage in alcohol-fueled stupidity.

01:40:58.660 Right.

01:40:58.860 Because it's fun.

01:41:00.140 And one of the problems with the pill is that it actually allows that to occur without it being utterly catastrophic.

01:41:08.480 Now, it's catastrophic in that the rate of sexual assault skyrockets, and that's, you know, not trivial.

01:41:13.660 Right.

01:41:14.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:41:16.220 Okay, so you wrote a letter to your daughter at the end of your book, eh?

01:41:20.240 I did.

01:41:20.800 Yeah.

01:41:21.280 And so, oh, I want to ask you about a couple of other things here.

01:41:24.640 The Curious Case of the Missing Cortisol.

01:41:26.360 Let's do two things.

01:41:27.120 It's the Curious Case of the Missing Cortisol.

01:41:29.220 Yes.

01:41:29.380 That's very interesting.

01:41:30.380 And also, a letter to my daughter.

01:41:33.300 Sure.

01:41:33.800 Okay.

01:41:34.260 So, cortisol.

01:41:35.300 Yeah.

01:41:35.640 This actually is the reason I wrote the book.

01:41:37.740 And I'll say that it's the reason I wrote the book because I was sitting in a research talk about the effects of early life trauma on the stress response in adulthood.

01:41:46.120 And I'm sure you're very familiar with all of this work because one of the things that I do research on is early life adversity and how that affects developmental outcomes.

01:41:54.900 And I was in a research talk on that.

01:41:57.580 And the researcher was just, like, mentioning, you know, oh, we collected data on X number of men and women.

01:42:03.580 We only analyzed the data of the men in our sample because the majority of the women in our sample happened to be on hormonal birth control.

01:42:13.040 And everybody knows that women on hormonal birth control don't have a cortisol response to stress.

01:42:18.820 And then, yeah, that was me.

01:42:21.220 I was like, wait, who knows that?

01:42:23.620 Like, everybody knows that?

01:42:24.940 And so, I went up and I didn't hear anything else because it was just, like, I was just absolutely stunned.

01:42:30.540 Because that's, like, what you see with PTSD and that's what you see with people who've experienced severe trauma is no cortisol response to stress.

01:42:36.580 It's not good.

01:42:38.040 And so, I waited until after the talk and I went and talked to my mom.

01:42:40.660 You see that in depression, too, if it's long-term.

01:42:42.400 Yeah, I know.

01:42:43.000 I mean, it's really, really bad.

01:42:44.740 And so, it's bad.

01:42:45.960 It means no play in response to stress.

01:42:48.200 No, no.

01:42:48.560 No adaptation in response to stress.

01:42:50.500 No, I know.

01:42:50.840 And it's funny because everybody always thinks that, like, cortisol is this bad guy.

01:42:54.380 And, like, whoa, it's got to be great.

01:42:55.680 And it's like, no, like, stress is the bad guy.

01:42:59.040 Cortisol helps you adapt to stress.

01:43:00.820 Like, cortisol is a good guy who comes in to help sort of restore homeostasis after your body's gotten all screwed up from whatever's stressing it out.

01:43:08.880 And so, I went and I talked to my colleague afterward, and I said, did you say that women on hormonal birth control don't have a stress response?

01:43:16.080 And he's like, yeah, they don't.

01:43:17.560 I was really surprised by it, too.

01:43:19.180 But then I went to the literature.

01:43:20.320 They don't have an adaptive stress response.

01:43:22.300 Yes.

01:43:22.640 Yeah, they don't.

01:43:23.340 Because they report experiencing stress.

01:43:25.880 Right.

01:43:26.300 And their sympathetic stress response is still going off.

01:43:30.020 Yeah.

01:43:30.400 But they don't have any cortisol release.

01:43:32.380 And so, I went to the literature, and he was right.

01:43:34.760 People had been publishing on this since the 90s.

01:43:37.040 And I had never heard anything about it.

01:43:39.480 And I was on the pill, and I'm a woman, and I study women's hormones.

01:43:42.640 And anyway, after that, I was like, what else don't I know about hormonal birth control?

01:43:47.640 And that was what led me in the rabbit hole that essentially led me to write the book.

01:43:51.500 Because there were so many things that the pill does in terms of, you know, neurobiologically, like, what it does in terms of the brain.

01:43:58.380 And then psychologically, proximally, like, in terms of mood, sexual desire, partner choice, which we talked about in attraction.

01:44:07.040 And so, what's the consequence of the intent?

01:44:10.440 Okay.

01:44:10.780 So, women get stressed.

01:44:12.020 So, women get stressed.

01:44:12.440 But they don't have a cortisol response.

01:44:13.280 They don't have a cortisol response to stress.

01:44:13.840 Okay.

01:44:14.100 So, what's the consequence of that?

01:44:15.740 So, here's the really great answer.

01:44:19.020 Nobody knows.

01:44:20.540 I'll tell you what we know from research that hasn't directly linked the things together.

01:44:25.440 We just did a study where we found that you get changes in the inflammatory response to stress in hormonal birth control pill users in ways that's consistent with the type of inflammatory response that tends to lead to things like autoimmunity, which we know women are at a much greater risk for than men.

01:44:42.620 Does it lead to depression?

01:44:43.900 Because there's lots of evidence that depression is an inflammatory condition.

01:44:47.700 Yes, depression and anxiety are also some things that we know that being on hormonal birth control puts you at a significant greater risk for.

01:44:55.880 And all of these things are what you would expect in the case when you have a blunted cortisol response to stress.

01:45:03.360 So, what does the normal cortisol response do if you're stressed?

01:45:07.620 Right. So, normally, if you and I are, you know, if I'm being filmed, let's say, to be on a podcast that a lot of people listen to, what would generally start happening about five minutes after I arrived here is my cortisol would start to increase.

01:45:21.100 And it's doing this because it knows that I am in a high-pressure situation, right?

01:45:26.160 It could be high-pressure good or high-pressure bad because stress is something that we get when we're being chased by a pack of hungry wolverines.

01:45:32.980 But it's also something that we get on, like, our wedding day or Christmas morning for children is a time when cortisol is really high.

01:45:39.260 Opportunity and threat.

01:45:40.200 Opportunity and threat.

01:45:41.240 So, it's essentially flagging your brain.

01:45:43.060 Something important is happening.

01:45:44.520 So, it should heighten attention.

01:45:45.800 Heighten attention.

01:45:46.480 So, our brain is aware.

01:45:48.040 It's on its game.

01:45:49.040 We start creating new neurons in our hippocampus are being birthed in response to cortisol.

01:45:53.840 That's because you should learn when there is maximum opportunity and maximum threat.

01:46:00.160 Absolutely.

01:46:00.600 The hippocampus is crucial for that.

01:46:02.220 Absolutely.

01:46:02.660 And that's exactly what's going on.

01:46:04.060 So, that's an important thing that our bodies do is it's grabbing on.

01:46:07.180 It's helping us absorb these important experiences so that way we can have them for later.

01:46:12.040 Right, right.

01:46:12.640 It dumps fat and sugar.

01:46:13.700 To change.

01:46:13.980 To change.

01:46:14.560 Yeah, to change.

01:46:15.360 It dumps fat and sugar into our bloodstream so that way our brain has access to glucose, but also so our muscles do so we can make a quick getaway if we need to get away quickly.

01:46:24.860 If we're being chased.

01:46:25.820 So, it should mean that blunted cortisol response should mean that women on birth control don't update their navigational maps as effectively because the hippocampus is also the fundamental place of the origin of hippocampal maps.

01:46:39.180 Yeah, for hippocampal maps.

01:46:40.240 Of navigational maps.

01:46:41.560 Yeah, and I've never seen any research on that in particular, but I have seen it with emotional memories.

01:46:45.900 And what they find is that women who are on hormonal birth control have a harder time encoding emotionally valence events when you stress them out, which is exactly what you would expect when you don't have cortisol response.

01:46:56.640 Right, that means you're not adapting to the…

01:46:58.380 Right, and I've heard…

01:46:59.760 That's really not good.

01:47:01.100 No, it's not.

01:47:01.720 And I've actually heard from a woman who was a practicing therapist because I had gotten several emails and finally somebody called me and I answered the phone, which I don't usually do and I don't know the number, but it was one of these therapists asking about PTSD and therapy.

01:47:15.140 When women are on hormonal birth control, because they all had the same theory that women don't respond as well to therapy for PTSD.

01:47:22.480 To exposure.

01:47:23.480 Yeah, when they're on the pill.

01:47:24.500 Oh my God, that's also…

01:47:25.980 That's terrible because there's no difference between exposure therapy and learning.

01:47:31.140 Right, yeah.

01:47:31.800 Exposure therapy is just the technical use of the learning situation in the therapy context.

01:47:37.080 Right, exactly.

01:47:37.900 Yeah, and she said we don't get the kinds of outcomes that we need when we have women who are on the pill.

01:47:42.980 Okay, so what that implies is women on the pill can't update as well.

01:47:46.840 Yeah, exactly.

01:47:47.300 Jesus, that's brutal.

01:47:48.600 Yeah, and so this is, I mean, obviously, and here's the thing that we're taking just not to ovulate.

01:47:53.140 And in some cases, women are being put on this, teenagers, for their skin.

01:47:57.700 Yeah.

01:47:57.860 And it's like we know nothing about the long-term consequences of brain development, of blunting a woman's hormonal, own hormone production, and then replacing it with these synthetics.

01:48:08.540 Yeah, so talk about that.

01:48:10.400 There's no way it doesn't affect brain development.

01:48:12.780 I mean, it's like post-pubertal brain development is coordinated by our sex hormones.

01:48:17.680 Right.

01:48:18.040 And if you blunt that, you know, for a naturally cycling woman, you go through this period of estrogen and then progesterone and estrogen and progesterone.

01:48:27.220 And when you shut that down and then just put in this daily synthetic dose, the idea that that's going to lead to the same brain development outcomes is getting in cycling.

01:48:35.720 Is that an extension of pre-pubertal hormonal balance?

01:48:39.320 Yeah, I mean, yeah, pre-pubertal hormones are such a disaster because women's HPG axes are still regulating themselves.

01:48:47.200 I mean, their brains and ovaries are still learning how to communicate everything.

01:48:50.800 And so women's cycles tend to be messed up a little bit, you know, screwy at that time because everything is learning itself.

01:48:56.460 So does putting women on the pill when they're very young interfere with the full manifestation of puberty?

01:49:03.880 That's a really great question, and it's not one that anybody knows the answer to.

01:49:07.140 No, it seems like a logical conclusion for what you've described.

01:49:10.600 Well, exactly.

01:49:11.320 I mean, it's not something that I know.

01:49:12.940 And the thing is, is we've been putting women on these drugs forever.

01:49:16.840 I've only seen three studies that have looked at long-term consequences of hormonal birth control use during adolescence.

01:49:23.200 And?

01:49:23.600 On development.

01:49:24.120 What?

01:49:25.860 The research is pointing in the direction of the fact that using hormonal birth control during adolescence puts you at a greater risk of developing major depressive disorder over the course of your lifetime,

01:49:36.140 even after you've discontinued it.

01:49:39.220 Not good stuff.

01:49:40.900 Not something that you want your daughter to be suffering so that way she doesn't have acne.

01:49:45.300 And I don't think that this is being very well communicated to the parents of girls.

01:49:49.840 And I think it's a travesty.

01:49:51.680 I really do.

01:49:52.320 Hmm.

01:49:53.100 Hmm.

01:49:53.720 Okay.

01:49:54.160 Two more things.

01:49:55.940 These, the hormones that women are put on aren't the bioidentical hormone.

01:49:59.520 Okay.

01:49:59.900 So let's talk about that.

01:50:01.140 And then let's talk about your, your, my daughter.

01:50:02.740 Okay.

01:50:03.720 So the, the, the, the synthetic hormones that are in hormonal birth control, you'd think that they would be sort of biologically identical to our body's hormones.

01:50:12.120 And for the most part, the synthetic estrogen that is in hormonal birth control is, it, it, it, it has nice binding affinity and nice binding specificity to estrogen receptors.

01:50:22.740 Um, the synthetic progesterone or the progesterone or the progesterone that are in hormonal birth control are not, um, and most of them aren't even synthesized from progesterone.

01:50:33.500 They're actually synthesized from most of them from testosterone.

01:50:36.520 And so chemists modify testosterone molecules in ways that make them able to stimulate progesterone receptors.

01:50:45.280 Um, but they don't always have perfect binding specificity, meaning that they also bind to other receptors for other hormones and they don't necessarily have messy.

01:50:54.460 They're messy and they don't have good binding affinity where they'll stimulate the receptor and then fall off.

01:50:58.600 And then what that means is you need higher dose of, yeah, is you need to take higher doses to make sure that you're getting enough, um, progesterone.

01:51:06.100 Which increases the degree to which they're activating things they shouldn't be activating.

01:51:09.920 Be activating, yeah.

01:51:11.100 And that's, and that's actually reason to be, um, the explanation for why women experience the blunted cortisol response, uh, in response to, uh, stress is that the progestins in hormonal birth control,

01:51:23.540 some of them will stimulate glucocorticoid receptors, essentially making women's bodies believe that they're in a straight state of chronic stress.

01:51:31.980 And so women's bodies are then shutting down the stress response.

01:51:35.840 Well, yeah.

01:51:36.460 Depression is a consequence of being in constant stress.

01:51:38.840 Well, uh, absolutely.

01:51:39.980 And when you look at the patterns, I mean, the thing about this is that when you look at the, it's all pointing in this direction where, um, when you look at the risk of depression and even the suicide risk for women who are on hormonal birth control,

01:51:52.980 especially in adolescents, so 19 and younger, is really high during the first three months of use.

01:52:00.060 And think about it.

01:52:00.760 This is when their, their glucocorticoid receptors are probably just being flooded with these nonspecific progestins that are stimulating those, making their body think that it's World War II, you know, and, and.

01:52:13.140 Oh, that's just what you need at puberty.

01:52:14.720 Well, I know.

01:52:15.440 And so.

01:52:15.780 Because it's already World War II.

01:52:17.320 Yeah, I know.

01:52:17.660 And so, so they're feeling terrible until their body, it finally shuts down the stress response.

01:52:23.060 And then you don't get any stress response to stress.

01:52:25.800 Um, but women actually end up feeling a little bit better because they're no longer, you know, sort of psychologically being put into this state of trauma, like constant trauma.

01:52:34.100 Um, I think that, uh, it's, it's crazy to me that this is the best we can do.

01:52:41.820 You know, I feel like, I think about how important.

01:52:43.780 Why aren't we doing better than this?

01:52:45.180 You know, I think that the reason that we, that is because.

01:52:48.640 Because it's like, there's nothing more important than this.

01:52:50.660 No, fertility regulation is so important for women in terms of being able to meet their goals that most women are willing to put up with all the bullshit that goes along with it because they don't feel like they have any other choices.

01:53:01.160 Well, they also don't know.

01:53:02.620 Well, right.

01:53:03.060 And they don't know.

01:53:03.800 And then the drug companies are like, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

01:53:08.280 Yeah.

01:53:08.500 And so it's like, well, the women are taking it, you know, so who cares?

01:53:12.820 And, and, and women are like, you know, we're just having to deal with it.

01:53:17.360 Um, but, but we need to do.

01:53:18.560 Yeah, men too.

01:53:19.120 I know.

01:53:19.600 We need to do better.

01:53:20.380 I mean, and I look at what they're doing now, you know, they're investing in male birth control, but all that they're doing is shifting the problem that we have for women and shifting it onto men.

01:53:30.200 So currently what they're looking at, and you tell me how many men, you know, that would take this, they're looking at a gel that men rub on themselves that will lower their testosterone to such a degree that they'll no longer produce sperm.

01:53:42.380 Oh, yeah.

01:53:42.880 I mean, don't you think that's going to take off like gangbusters?

01:53:45.440 Yeah, sure.

01:53:45.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:46.840 And testosterone, that's going to be real popular.

01:53:48.800 I was going to say, there's a bunch of guys in the room here lined up to take it.

01:53:51.500 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:52.080 I mean, and it's like, nobody's going to, it's just a dumb idea and all it's going to, and it causes the same side effects in men that our hormonal birth control does in women because it's shutting down their sex hormones.

01:54:02.980 And, um, and, and, and the men that they, that they try it on are like, these side effects are terrible.

01:54:07.760 I'm not taking this.

01:54:09.100 Um, and these are the side effects that we put up with because we don't have another choice because we're the ones who have the baby if, if we end up with a slip up.

01:54:16.780 And so I, you know, I really, um, my, my whole push with, with all of this is not that, you know, the birth control pill is terrible and that it's, you know, done all these awful things.

01:54:25.820 I mean, it's, it's a trade-off and it's definitely going to have societal consequences that we haven't even begun to begin to put our fingers on.

01:54:32.620 Um, but it's all about like educating yourself.

01:54:35.000 What are the trade-offs that are being made when you go on hormonal birth control?

01:54:38.520 And then also putting pressure on, you know, people like drug makers and policy makers who are investing in companies and invest in drug companies and other types of technology to do something better.

01:54:49.560 Because we need to be able to do better.

01:54:51.980 Um, we need to be able to do better for women.

01:54:53.060 You need to go to Washington and talk to the Republican Study Committee.

01:54:56.220 I mean, seriously.

01:54:57.320 Seriously, yes.

01:54:58.320 Yeah.

01:54:58.560 You need to do that.

01:54:59.440 Yeah.

01:54:59.960 Seriously.

01:55:00.660 Yeah.

01:55:00.840 I mean, we can do better for women.

01:55:02.340 We can do better for men.

01:55:03.340 We can do better for the people that love them.

01:55:04.660 And so my last chapter in my book, The Letter to My Daughter, I wrote, because I have a daughter, I have a 16-year-old daughter.

01:55:11.840 And, you know, one of the things that I've thought about just as soon as I was writing this book was, what does this mean for her?

01:55:19.640 You know, do I, would I recommend for her if she's sexually active when she's especially a teenager, would I recommend for her to go on hormonal birth control, which I know works, right?

01:55:29.280 And it's effective, and it's easy to use, and it's easy for a teenager to use, or would I tell her to use something else?

01:55:36.120 And, you know, ultimately, my conclusion to that is that the answer to that question is going to be unique to every single woman.

01:55:42.640 And so I included that chapter in the book because I wanted all women to hear what I will say to my daughter when we're having to make that decision in terms of what are some of the things that you need to think about.

01:55:51.920 So that's how you made it personal.

01:55:52.940 Right, yeah, because, I mean, this is a personal choice, and I think that it's really important that we think about, like, so, for example, how old are you, right?

01:56:02.780 So we've been talking about brain development.

01:56:04.900 You know, if my daughter wanted to start hormonal birth control before the age of 19, I would want her not to be on it if there's any other thing that we can do that I know would prevent her from getting pregnant if she was sexually active.

01:56:16.920 Just because of what I know about brain development, after 19, the effects seem to be more or less reversible.

01:56:24.360 Like, I mean, so even if you go on it and something bad happens, if you discontinue it, no harm, no foul, right?

01:56:30.000 But before that time—

01:56:30.960 So the earlier the onset—

01:56:32.060 The earlier the onset—

01:56:33.340 Yeah, well, you know, that's also the case with sexual behavior.

01:56:35.900 So the biggest correlate—one of the biggest correlates of early sexual behavior is antisocial personality.

01:56:41.920 So when it goes back to that dark tetra issue—

01:56:43.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can totally see that.

01:56:45.160 Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

01:56:47.480 And so, you know, thinking about that and then thinking about what are your life goals?

01:56:52.340 Why do you want to be on it?

01:56:53.720 You know, because some things, you know, preventing pregnancy when you're—especially if you're like a teen girl, for example.

01:56:59.620 I mean, what an important—that's like the most important thing you can do, really, because, you know, there's no bigger predictor of poverty for women than single motherhood.

01:57:07.740 Nothing.

01:57:08.360 Right, right, right.

01:57:09.120 When you're a young, single mother that's just, like, putting you on the wrong path in terms of, like, what your aspirational hopes are.

01:57:15.580 And so, you know, it's like considering where you are in your life, considering age, considering the product that you're on, and then sort of going through the different types of things that are out there.

01:57:24.660 Considering non-hormonal options and, like, what the costs and benefits of those things are.

01:57:28.760 Well, we need to be mature enough as a society to actually have a serious conversation with young people about sexual behavior as such.

01:57:36.520 Because one of the things, you know, one of your chapters—I can't remember exactly the title—is Why Didn't I Know This?

01:57:43.180 Yeah.

01:57:43.560 Right?

01:57:43.820 Well, we're not very good in our sex education at schools of walking people through the dangers of short-term sexual mating strategies either.

01:57:51.920 Because you might say, well, I want to be on the pill, I'm 16, because I want to have casual sex, because that's really the issue.

01:57:59.400 It's like, well, do you really want to have casual sex?

01:58:02.880 It's like, what does that mean exactly?

01:58:06.160 Right.

01:58:06.480 What are you sacrificing of yourself?

01:58:08.400 Who is that going to make you attracted to?

01:58:10.060 Who are the males that are most likely to accept that invitation?

01:58:13.900 Like, because we had this idea, and the pill produced this in large part, that we could divorce sex from its broader context, its broader relational context, let's say, its political and social context.

01:58:24.920 And I don't think any of that's true.

01:58:26.680 Right.

01:58:26.820 And so, for a comprehensive sex education, not only would people have to be educated in relationship to the sort of biological realities that you're describing, they'd also have to be educated in relationship to the psychological realities, the difference between short-term and long-term mating strategies, how that's associated with personality.

01:58:45.660 It's very, very complicated.

01:58:46.600 Yeah, and I think that there's a lot of, especially in, because we tend to think about high school students or college students and short-term sexual behavior, but a lot of the people seeking birth control are people who are in long-term relationships that are just trying to not get pregnant in the context of their long-term committed relationship.

01:59:05.840 And even just having honest, yes, I love the idea of having honest conversations about, you know, sex, sexual development and sexual relationships.

01:59:16.920 Those long-term relationships, tell me what you think about this.

01:59:19.540 You know, my sense is that you get to try out about four people in your life, and that's it, right?

01:59:28.360 Well, because if you think that fertility window, let's say it's in trouble by the age of 30.

01:59:33.240 So you've really got, by the time you have a bit of a brain, so let's say 19, you've got 11 years.

01:59:39.360 Right.

01:59:39.860 Okay, so how many people can you get to know to evaluate for long-term mating suitability in 11 years?

01:59:47.160 Well, five's a lot, I would say.

01:59:49.860 Right, right, so.

01:59:50.800 Yeah, no, I think that's funny.

01:59:51.740 I love that you landed on four.

01:59:52.980 I mean, it seems reasonable, right?

01:59:55.140 Like, I don't know.

01:59:55.540 Yeah, well, but the thing is, it's reasonable.

01:59:57.640 It's very finite.

01:59:59.280 Yeah.

01:59:59.520 And so that means the importance of your choice of a committed dating partner is likely far more important than you think, right?

02:00:09.240 Because maybe when you're 17, you think, I have lots of time.

02:00:11.780 It's like, well, you're 17, and you've only been alive for 17 years, and 10 years might seem like a long time, but it's not.

02:00:18.740 Right.

02:00:19.080 Right, especially when you have to push leaving home, adopting the responsibilities of an adult, becoming educated, establishing a career, finding a long-term partner.

02:00:30.540 You've got 10 years to do that.

02:00:32.020 You're going to be running, especially if you're female.

02:00:34.560 Right.

02:00:35.020 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:00:36.260 Yeah, interesting.

02:00:38.500 All right, well, any parting words for the young women who are, how has this changed your, let's close with this.

02:00:47.740 Yeah.

02:00:47.880 What has learning all this done to your views on birth control?

02:00:56.900 Yeah, that's good enough.

02:00:57.880 Okay, okay.

02:00:58.900 Let me think about this for a moment.

02:01:01.520 Well, I mean, to me, I had the same blind spot everybody else had.

02:01:05.620 I was on hormonal birth control for more than a decade of my life.

02:01:09.520 All the while, I was studying the effects of women's hormones on the brain.

02:01:13.940 I was studying psychology and behavior and the way that women's motivational shifts change in response to hormones.

02:01:19.440 And I never spent one second thinking about what the hormones in my birth control were doing to me psychologically.

02:01:26.700 Like, I have that.

02:01:27.340 Right, so it's all benefit, no cost.

02:01:28.200 No cost.

02:01:28.920 Yes, I had an absolute blind spot.

02:01:30.840 And so for me, this whole process really removed that blind spot.

02:01:35.340 And I mean, it was embarrassing.

02:01:36.700 It was really embarrassing to be a psychologist, and I like to think I'm a pretty good one, and that I know a lot about a lot, and never have to make that connection really felt like I was like, this is the most embarrassing thing ever.

02:01:50.460 Right, right.

02:02:20.460 On the way that we treat these two things.

02:02:22.960 Well, we've only had three or four generations to adapt to the biggest biological transformation in our species history.

02:02:30.380 Yeah, no, I agree.

02:02:31.440 I agree.

02:02:32.020 We're in the early days of this, but it is insanely complicated and rife with unintended consequences, which you're doing a stellar job of pointing out.

02:02:40.540 And hopefully that will help spark a conversation that's a bit more productive, mature, and focused on the fact that everything has a price.

02:02:52.740 Everything has a price.

02:02:53.880 Right.

02:02:54.380 Thank you.

02:02:55.000 You bet.

02:02:56.160 Right.

02:02:56.540 Right.

02:02:56.940 To everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your attention to the Daily Wire people, plus people for facilitating this live conversation, which we're going to be doing a bunch of in the next couple of months.

02:03:07.320 Thank you for the time and effort expended on that.

02:03:10.160 I'm going to talk to Dr. Hill for another half an hour behind the Daily Wire Plus platform, and that's usually where I delve into more autobiographical issues.

02:03:17.900 Very interested in how people's interests, how their calling makes itself manifest in their life, often from an early age.

02:03:23.960 So we're going to find that out.

02:03:25.420 These are very useful conversations to attend to if you're interested in, well, hearing from people who've had a stellar career and often done a good job of balancing that with their life, how they managed it, you know.

02:03:36.580 And you can't hear too much about that as far as I'm concerned.

02:03:39.360 So thank you, everyone, for your attention.

02:03:42.720 Talk to you soon.

02:03:43.420 We'll see you soon.

02:04:13.420 We'll see you soon.

02:04:43.420 Get your 10 and help us win.

02:04:45.400 Remember, it costs nothing, takes just a few minutes, and you can play a crucial role in Pennsylvania's future.

02:04:50.840 Head over to 10xvotes.com today.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 07, 2023

403. Attraction, Beauty, Growth, and Sex ｜ Dr. Sarah Hill

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