The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - June 09, 2022


150. Wokeism, Advice to Teens and the Dangers of Casual Relationships ｜ Jordan Peterson EP. 150

Topics
rabbit air filter casual sexual relationships alcohol dangers
Hosted by
Mikhaila Peterson
Guests
Jordan Peterson EP. 150
Mentioned
Scarlett Freud Michaela Peterson Dostoevsky Jung Intellectually Interferes Aristotle Robidair George Arthur Tammy Plato Mary Kant
149. Modern Doctor Shares The Fastest Ways To Treat Depression, Low Testosterone, & PTSD ｜ Dr. Mike Hart 151. Alt-Right Conspiracy or Immigration Disaster？ ｜ Lauren Southern

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per minute

166.45

Word count

11,948

Sentence count

222

Harmful content

Misogyny

39

sentences flagged

Toxicity

26

sentences flagged

Hate speech

43

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 a couple weeks ago you tweeted something out that yeah i'm bringing it up okay that got a
00:00:06.620 crazy amount of attention which
00:00:09.800 did it sports illustrated swimsuit edition i believe you're referring to
00:00:15.960 yes i tweeted out sorry not beautiful
00:00:21.280 hello and welcome to episode 150 of my podcast i'm michaela peterson like i said this is my
00:00:32.080 150th episode and i had the pleasure of having my dad on to discuss all sorts of fun things
00:00:38.280 the first time in over a year he's been on my podcast we discussed the twitter drama over his
00:00:43.780 comments on the sports illustrated swimsuit cover connections between personality types
00:00:48.940 and gender and romantic relationships,
00:00:51.520 we covered a lot that would make some people angry.
00:00:54.560 I really hope you enjoy this episode.
00:00:56.240 I certainly did.
00:00:57.540 Thank you to all who've supported me
00:00:59.140 on the way to recording 150 of these.
00:01:02.240 It's just insane.
00:01:03.360 Wouldn't have been possible without you guys.
00:01:05.580 This episode was brought to you by Rabbit Air.
00:01:08.160 I am relocating from Nashville.
00:01:10.660 I'm moving to Miami.
00:01:12.060 I'm doing it.
00:01:12.900 The tree allergies are too awful here.
00:01:14.500 I tried moving from Franklin to Nashville.
00:01:17.400 That didn't help enough.
00:01:18.940 So I just have to escape Tennessee.
00:01:21.000 It might sound like I'm being crazy, but I'm not.
00:01:23.760 The tree allergies here are insane.
00:01:25.680 And Scarlett has them too, and she's not sleeping well.
00:01:28.640 So that brings me to rabbit air.
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00:01:45.460 I have one of these in the office, as you can see.
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00:01:58.560 bedroom too i do think you'll love rapid air's award-winning purifiers i had this horrifying
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00:03:04.320 you look.
00:03:05.340 Thank you so much for watching.
00:03:06.920 I hope you enjoy this episode.
00:03:11.560 Welcome to my podcast, Dad.
00:03:13.100 hi mick i haven't done a podcast with you in a very long time how long do you know
00:03:19.920 year yeah i over a year over a year still in toronto yeah in my podcast studio and now i
00:03:28.380 just have a studio in a different hotel all the time right yeah hopefully one day that will be
00:03:33.180 more organized um i'm nearing my 150th episode oh are we going to do this for your 150th episode
00:03:41.100 Oh, I guess we have to now.
00:03:42.640 I guess you put your foot in it there.
00:03:47.080 Before we get started, how have you been?
00:03:51.620 Much better.
00:03:52.740 Yeah?
00:03:53.720 Yeah.
00:03:54.360 I'm doing better than I have been for five years, probably.
00:03:58.960 Five years.
00:03:59.800 That's good.
00:04:00.380 At least.
00:04:00.880 I think the last time we did a podcast, it was, yeah, it was pretty rough.
00:04:05.880 It was pretty rough.
00:04:07.400 But we're out of it.
00:04:08.700 We seem to be out of it.
00:04:09.800 We'll see.
00:04:10.420 you're looking pretty sharp at the moment good thank you yeah i don't think i've seen this suit
00:04:14.620 before not on your podcast never on my podcast it looks good it's definitely been a tour suit
00:04:20.300 yeah it's very non-wrinkly so it's a good travel suit you can stuff it anywhere and it works that's
00:04:25.660 this is exactly it stuffable yes i was on the beach with it this morning for a photo shoot
00:04:30.900 all the absurd things with it hiked up to my knees in the water my three-piece suit that's
00:04:36.860 that's hilarious yeah joe model okay you say that but we went to we were at a black tie event i think
00:04:46.040 and i was just standing there and you're like no you got to put your foot forward
00:04:49.000 so don't act like you don't know how to pose because you are very good at posing oh thank you
00:04:53.720 yeah my whole life is the pose or so my enemies say what's he doing what's his game what role is
00:05:01.320 he playing it's like saying what i think that's a role yeah it's like that's what you think
00:05:08.400 saying what you think and modeling three-piece suits in the ocean yeah exactly exactly that
00:05:15.500 was the destiny i always presumed would would make itself manifest that's great okay so i thought
00:05:24.260 what people might find useful for this episode i'm going to ask you for advice on a number of
00:05:29.800 topics i think people will find helpful yeah and maybe delve a little bit into gender differences
00:05:35.900 just to keep things spicy keep some people out there angry yeah yeah because i don't think i've
00:05:41.000 irritated like a million people for at least a week exactly so it's definitely time to say
00:05:45.980 something you know outrageous or slash true outrageous slash true yeah how did you feel
00:05:56.220 let's start with this actually a couple weeks ago you tweeted something out that yeah i'm bring it
00:06:02.540 up okay that got a crazy amount of attention which did it sports illustrated swimsuit edition i
00:06:12.480 believe you're referring to yes i tweeted out sorry not beautiful yeah people were very happy
00:06:20.860 with that and then everyone got upset yes they did and then i left twitter again more or less
00:06:26.080 right after that and everyone assumed that that was why and it actually it wasn't now it was it
00:06:33.400 was i suppose in some sense it was because what happened was an indication of the problem with
00:06:39.580 twitter but i had been not reading twitter comments for about three weeks although i had been
00:06:46.240 tweeting through an intermediary one of my staff members so i'd email him a tweet
00:06:51.760 but not reading comments because i found that quite um irksome yeah you're associating with the
00:06:58.460 devil sure yeah exactly exactly it was like sort of like standing in a public park where anybody
00:07:06.120 no matter who they were could come up and yell at you to any size audience about anything they
00:07:11.020 wanted day or night and so uh i've been thinking that through i'm going to write an article about
00:07:17.200 what's wrong with Twitter and social media in general but no I looked at the 1.00
00:07:22.360 Sports Illustrated cover and they had a rather overweight young woman quite 1.00
00:07:31.480 symmetrical and so nice facial features and so forth with a very revealing 0.99
00:07:38.080 swimsuit on the cover and I thought no yeah like and not not in a personal way
00:07:45.100 but
00:07:46.160 It's unbelievably manipulative for about three different reasons. The first is it's a very tawdry attempt to capitalize on
00:07:55.220 cheap sales
00:07:56.720 That's and I mean cheap in a specific way
00:07:59.600 Sports Illustrated hit the goldmine with their swimsuit cover
00:08:03.120 I suppose 20 years ago whenever they established that because it was that obviously it's a sports magazine
00:08:08.820 So it's about athletics. It's about athletic people. It's about that athletic bodies and they had a swimsuit
00:08:14.400 issue and it really was a big hit and then it became kind of a cultural icon and it's a very
00:08:19.380 specific kind of cultural icon because it focuses on a very exceptional kind of high-end beauty
00:08:26.320 and so that beauty would involve symmetry and signals of youth because that's part of
00:08:33.060 beauty sexual beauty physical beauty waist-to-hip ratio for women but with sports illustrated it's 0.89
00:08:42.000 also highlighting a kind of athleticism in body type and that's a very specific form of beauty
00:08:48.880 you have to be young you have to be female generally you have to be extremely athletic
00:08:54.340 you have to be shapely in a very particular way and that would be with a waist to hip ratio of
00:08:59.360 0.68 because that's what's being established cross-culturally as ideal from the perspective
00:09:04.260 of male sexual interest let's say but that's also associated with fertility and so it's a
00:09:11.920 marker that has a biological basis and so even if you're a very beautiful woman you're you're
00:09:19.020 hard-pressed to be beautiful enough to be on the cover of sports illustrated for the swimsuit
00:09:23.940 issue and so it's a very it's a pinnacle achievement of sorts and it's focused on a very
00:09:30.100 idealized and specific form of beauty and that's obviously exclusionary it's obviously exclusionary
00:09:37.420 it excludes everyone right and and it does that to highlight a kind of ideal and that's
00:09:45.060 a particular ideal of beauty and there are some cultural boundaries around that so you could say
00:09:50.160 well it's a westernized form of beauty it's like yeah and you can point to rubens paintings of
00:09:55.500 more plump women and say well there's an exception it's like great you think you're a genius for
00:10:00.920 finding that exception good for you you know the rubens painting like more power to you but that
00:10:06.400 doesn't mean anything at all about the universality of images of beauty. And so
00:10:11.320 the cover bothered me a lot because it was a cheap manipulation of
00:10:15.400 something that had been working very well for Sports Illustrated. It was also
00:10:19.720 an insistence that all of a sudden this non-athletic body type is as beautiful
00:10:27.340 as the standard swimsuit model for Sports Illustrated. And it's not. It's not as
00:10:34.640 athletic and it's not as healthy and that's that and it's also not arbitrary and so the whole thing
00:10:40.740 is a lie and then it's a lie that's a manipulation of that young woman now she partakes in that
00:10:47.820 because she participates in it but it's still they're not on her side they're exploiting her
00:10:53.380 as far as i'm concerned and she may be participating in that exploitation but they're still exploiting
00:10:58.860 her so don't pull any moral stunts on me because you're irritated about my opinion about the sports
00:11:05.180 illustrated cover when it's bloody clear to anybody with eyes that that was manipulative in
00:11:09.220 20 different ways and so and i'm also not willing to sacrifice these ideals for inclusiveness it's
00:11:17.820 like no not everyone's a genius no not everyone's picasso no not everyone's young and healthy and 0.99
00:11:25.380 no not everyone is a sports illustrated swimsuit model period and fuck you if you don't like it 0.98
00:11:33.880 so that's basically what i thought about that i certainly didn't think it would cause as much 0.98
00:11:40.100 trouble as it did you know when people were on my case for being mean it's like yeah i know i'm
00:11:44.420 always mean because you know that's well also like life is hard and like life is mean right
00:11:51.660 and it's hard for people first first of all i have great sympathy for anybody overweight because of
00:11:56.300 the health struggles i went through and you lost a whole bunch of weight it's not like being
00:12:00.640 overweight's fun right no that's a whole other problem to get into with um i think people have
00:12:06.680 such an issue losing weight yeah that society has said you know what it's fine because you've
00:12:12.860 had so much trouble it's probably your genetics so well there's truth in that like when i look at
00:12:18.180 someone who's obese on the street i think oh that's too bad like that's too bad i i don't think 0.97
00:12:23.980 you know obese pig eats too much has no self-control i don't think that i think 0.50
00:12:29.180 uh bad mismatch between genetic proclivity and appalling diet and the appalling diet is 0.80
00:12:36.540 basically we're not going to get into this but basically carbohydrate heavy and sugar loaded
00:12:41.040 and fair enough you know we try to hard the whole world to make calories cheap and we did that we
00:12:47.020 No one's starving and great, but now we have an obesity problem and it's a major problem. And I'm not going to pretend that it's okay. It's not okay. That doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for it. And I'm not willing to sacrifice any ideals for this idiot inclusiveness. I'm done with that. And so should everyone else be. And most, I think most people are.
00:13:07.880 and they look at that cover and they know it's manipulative and and a lie in a deep sense
00:13:14.400 but then if you point that out and this is where we're at in the culture there's all sorts of
00:13:18.420 things now if you point to it and you say you know that's a lie people get upset it's like no
00:13:23.780 that's a lie you're just that's not a lie you're just being mean we're just being nice it's like
00:13:27.320 1984 yeah yeah yeah no it's a lie yeah it's like here's another lie every 10 year old knows what
00:13:34.600 gender they are and that's so fixed that surgical intervention may well be necessary and it's
00:13:41.880 illegal for you to suggest otherwise however your gender identity is so fluid that you can change
00:13:48.740 it every hour if you want and it's not fixed at all and it's and it's infinitely variable at
00:13:55.240 your whim okay i'm supposed to accept all of that am i every single bit of that set of propositions
00:14:02.960 even though they're entirely internally contradictory which means it's actually
00:14:08.520 impossible for me to accept all of those propositions and to stay sane well yeah but
00:14:15.080 if you don't you're mean it's like you're a predator well that brings something else I want
00:14:19.180 to talk to you about I've been thinking about this a fair bit I talked to Franz de Waal
00:14:22.920 primatologist genius primatologist in my estimation yeah and I don't know if there's a
00:14:27.560 Nobel Prize that would be specifically appropriate for Franz De Waal, but he, if there was a Nobel
00:14:33.400 Prize for the sort of science he's doing, he would deserve it because he's discovered things that
00:14:39.140 are really, they're unbelievably fundamental. For example, he's discovered that sometimes in
00:14:44.940 chimp troops, the smallest male is the alpha. Really? Yeah, that it's not dependent on power.
00:14:51.480 A smaller chimp can be alpha, for example, if he has the support of one of the older females who has strong kin connections within the troop, but also is a sophisticated social actor. 0.54
00:15:07.020 And I don't mean manipulator, and I don't mean dominator, because DeWall has established very, very clearly, and this is signally important work, 0.81
00:15:14.960 that status and authority in a chimp troop 0.67
00:15:19.680 and that is associated with reproductive success
00:15:22.060 is much more dependent on the ability to reconcile
00:15:26.020 and the ability to maintain reciprocal positive relationships
00:15:31.400 with multiple individuals
00:15:32.880 far more dependent on that
00:15:34.600 than on the expression of physical power
00:15:36.740 so this is crucially important
00:15:38.920 and DeWall just wrote a new book
00:15:40.620 I think it's called Differences
00:15:41.700 where he outlined sex differences in toy preference,
00:15:47.140 behavioral preference,
00:15:48.440 differences between male and female chimps,
00:15:51.000 especially juveniles.
00:15:52.440 So the females, for example, 0.99
00:15:53.700 if you give a female chimp a block of wood, 1.00
00:15:55.960 you know, of the appropriate size, 1.00
00:15:58.520 she will carry it around like an infant.
00:16:01.640 So she makes a block of wood into a doll.
00:16:04.080 If you give her a doll, a teddy bear or something like that,
00:16:06.820 that's definitely instantly an infant,
00:16:08.960 and she will take care of it.
00:16:10.100 and she'll share it with the other chimps that she trusts and she'll get hyper upset if they
00:16:14.980 do anything to it that you wouldn't do to an infant whereas if you give a doll to a male
00:16:19.980 juvenile or a group of males yeah you make a face they tear it apart see what's inside of it
00:16:24.780 yeah and that's and that's funny because that's that you know that that's kind of the stereotype
00:16:30.400 for what a young boy might do so let's take this apart and see what's inside of it it's like well
00:16:35.080 there's a hunting devouring element of that but there's also a gadget like curiosity and there's
00:16:41.540 good work on chimps showing that oddly enough the male juveniles if you give them cars or like toy
00:16:48.600 cars or dolls they'll take the cars which is pretty damn weird because it's not like chimps
00:16:52.960 have cars they have infants but they don't have cars i guess they roll well it's more fun well 0.81
00:16:58.500 it probably has something to do with tool use preference is that they're more gadget oriented
00:17:03.580 even chimps because they do use tools to some degree um or maybe it's just that they're not
00:17:09.300 maternal yeah right so it's just the other thing it's yeah it might be that and i don't think the
00:17:14.620 work on on that preference is developed enough to be sure but we do know that likewise in human
00:17:21.960 beings the biggest difference that we know of between men and women um is their interest in
00:17:27.880 people versus things and so but i was really struck by the the carrying around of the wood
00:17:34.100 block the infantilization of the wood block and it made me think because i had been reading
00:17:38.860 putting two weird ideas together i'd been reading this guide to a faculty retreat that mount royal
00:17:45.100 university in calgary had published and i had read and it was just it was such an appalling
00:17:50.860 document so there's very few things in life that are less dangerous than going to a faculty retreat
00:17:56.880 at a college like the the faculty don't bring axes and pitchforks and they're not Vikings and
00:18:02.500 they're not cannibals and they don't devour each other and the probability of getting in a fist
00:18:06.260 fight is like zero or lower and they're just not dangerous in any they're no they're as safe as any
00:18:13.820 social event could possibly be made with like 250,000 years of civilized effort and yet the
00:18:21.520 guide that the college published indicated quite clearly that trained counselors would be on hand
00:18:27.600 just in case just in case the discussion got too intense and i thought this is written by
00:18:34.160 oedipal mothers for kindergartners and i was thinking about that in relation to
00:18:39.080 dewall's work and and into the broader culture war that were knee deep in neck deep in
00:18:45.060 uh forehead deep in maybe um so here's a hypothesis imagine that there's a default ethos
00:18:55.320 that governs what constitutes the basis for an appropriate social relationship whether it's an
00:19:04.460 intimate relationship a friendship a relationship with your family members or relationship with
00:19:09.160 people in the broader community imagine that there's an ethos a way of interacting that 0.59
00:19:13.260 would characterize optimality across all those domains simultaneously one female default is
00:19:20.580 you're either an infant or you're a caregiver or you're a predator
00:19:27.220 and i think a lot of that's playing out in the world now now but what where does that come from
00:19:33.740 well i think it comes from the the fundamental ethos that governs mother infant bonding i mean
00:19:39.700 look one of the one of the issues that women and female chimps for that matter struggle with
00:19:49.100 terribly is the lengthy period of dependency that highly intelligent primate infants 0.93
00:19:57.300 are characterized by and so a female chimp will carry her infant 500 miles in in the first three 1.00
00:20:05.780 years she has to carry the infant they can claim to but she has to carry the 0.97
00:20:09.720 infant everywhere it's an unbelievable burden it's an unbelievable burden and
00:20:14.300 so and it's partly because it's worse even in human in humans because human
00:20:20.300 infants are born even less able than chimpanzee infants and there's a reason
00:20:25.640 for that it's like a noodle yeah well hey they're like a fetus they're actually
00:20:30.380 They're actually fetal in in a very real sense. So the human cortex is so large that
00:20:38.820 There's an arms race between the size of the infant's head and the the the width of the pelvic opening through which birth must take place and
00:20:50.140 It's an it's a very difficult 0.99
00:20:52.880 Balance to optimize if women's hips were any wider which would make the pelvic hole larger 1.00
00:20:57.900 they couldn't run well so it would interfere with the running which obviously isn't so good 1.00
00:21:01.760 if you're running away from a predator if it was smaller then the baby would have to be born with
00:21:05.820 a smaller brain or more immature the the gestation period for a mammal of our size
00:21:13.820 should be if you compared us to other animals be two years yeah so our infants are born a year and
00:21:22.440 three months premature and so they're they're just absolutely 100 helpless and so then there's
00:21:29.620 an ethos that has to govern your interaction with the infant let's say up till about nine months
00:21:34.060 when they start to become somewhat ambulatory so pre-ambulatory infant is a different creature
00:21:39.800 than an infant who has the capacity to move around in the world by the way the fear circuitry in an
00:21:45.180 infant doesn't really kick in until they're ambulatory so they're quite different from a
00:21:48.860 motivational perspective too before they're uh before they can move well why be afraid if you
00:21:53.560 can't move fear freezes you if you can't move you don't need fear because you can't move yeah okay
00:22:00.760 yeah so that's also yeah that's also when they first show the signs of stranger aversion and
00:22:06.400 some beginning fear of the dark although they do freak out if they're little and you put them in
00:22:11.120 somebody else's arms yeah but but it doesn't look like it's fear often that's pain a pain-like
00:22:16.560 response or anger it's commonly anger it does look like anger well if they turn red it's like
00:22:23.300 when you watch someone who cries in an argument it's like i'm hurt it's like no you're red you're
00:22:28.160 mad you're using you just say you're hurt because that's a guilt weapon that angry people use that
00:22:34.100 doesn't happen all the time no it doesn't i think that women also get blamed for that sometimes when
00:22:39.020 it doesn't happen it's like especially by men because they don't understand it which is why
00:22:42.680 are you crying and are you trying to manipulate me yeah and what I learned about was women's tears
00:22:48.180 actually um the smell of women's tears give off a pain response in men oh you know that no yeah
00:22:56.680 yeah there's a chemical in women's tears that give off a pain see that's just how manipulative
00:23:00.540 it is not it's very sometimes I think I'll show you here's some pain I think sometimes when I so 0.96
00:23:07.300 I know this I don't cry very easily but if I'm stressed already and then I get into an argument
00:23:12.380 sometimes it'll happen i have to be pretty stressed and i know some people who will cry
00:23:17.940 a lot easier they'll just cry like me a lot of that had to do with being ill yeah a lot of that
00:23:25.120 did have to do it and i cry easier when i'm ill too so that's understandable but um i think women
00:23:31.060 get blamed a lot of the time i don't think it's always manipulative no i don't think it's always
00:23:36.060 manipulative either not like it might be a evolutionary response to to when
00:23:42.720 things get to a certain point and you're getting some danger vibes as a woman 1.00
00:23:46.200 danger vibes that's what I'm gonna call them danger vibes that you're more 1.00
00:23:49.260 likely to yeah we'll cry so that it's like don't hurt me kind of thing yes
00:23:53.340 it's an appeal to that's right it's an appeal to the latent maternal instinct
00:23:57.900 within whoever you might be interacting with but also that crying is also it's a
00:24:03.660 signal that the situation has gone beyond your control yeah well that's
00:24:07.900 what children do they cry well why because the cry attracts attention yeah
00:24:11.640 a child's cry we had a cat at one point when I was a college student and my
00:24:17.660 roommate used to bring his little niece over now and then and if she cried the
00:24:23.700 cat who was a female cat would immediately come running over and
00:24:26.420 investigating so that that cry is a mammalian constant and it means
00:24:31.160 something well it means something like there may be a predator in the environment sounds like an
00:24:36.280 alarm especially when they're really little yeah definitely yeah definitely so okay so back to the 0.60
00:24:41.400 female ethos well i think that women i think women's temperaments are optimized at least in
00:24:52.300 part for the mother dependent infant dyad and the reason i think that is because boys and girls don't
00:24:59.560 seem to be different in trait neuroticism and they're little boys and girls right before puberty
00:25:05.400 the difference kicks in at puberty and so and so then women are more sensitive to negative emotion
00:25:11.580 and they stay that way permanently and it's quite a difference half a standard deviation which is
00:25:17.320 quite a large difference it's it's enough so that if you drew two random people from the population
00:25:22.680 one man man and one woman and you had to guess who experienced more negative emotion on average if
00:25:28.580 you guessed the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time. So it's not a huge difference, but it's not
00:25:33.320 nothing. And it does kick in at puberty. And so then the question would be, well, why at puberty?
00:25:37.860 And some answers are, well, males and females become dimorphic at puberty. The boys get bigger
00:25:45.720 and stronger, especially in terms of upper body strength, so they can start to win physical
00:25:50.340 combats, physical combat. Not in 2022 though. Well, but generally it doesn't take much of a
00:25:58.020 advantage to prevail in a physical fight and so so that means physical fighting starts to become 0.85
00:26:04.000 more dangerous for women when they hit puberty especially in relationship to men but then they
00:26:08.740 also become sexually vulnerable which is a huge risk and so why wouldn't you be more threat
00:26:14.560 sensitive because of that and then also well who says it's about you why isn't it about you and
00:26:21.340 your infant and so you're imagine your nervous system is tuned for the average level of danger
00:26:28.840 you face if you have a dependent infant and that kind of sucks for you because you're more nervous
00:26:35.560 and sensitive to pain and grief and all of that and frustration then would be optimal for you as
00:26:42.840 an adult but you know it's not all about you that changed for me too when i had scarlet i mean i was
00:26:49.720 also quite ill at the time so that's but there were the hormones involved I think I was pretty
00:26:54.820 stress intolerant especially in regards to Scarlett um until she started to be less needy
00:27:01.160 right right for the first year it was any sound she made well that's it like elicited a pain 1.00
00:27:06.140 response to me it was horrible she'd go like like oh yeah your mom was your mom was like that when
00:27:11.780 when you were an infant we had built a I built a bunk bed out of wood in this small room I had
00:27:19.480 in Montreal we had and we built a crib for you right under the bed and so the room was only about
00:27:25.960 I don't know eight by ten it was a very small room so we built this bunk bed we only had about
00:27:30.300 three feet between the top of it and the ceiling and then we built a crib for you underneath and
00:27:34.380 a change table it was quite nice and it was very solid earthquake wouldn't have taken it that was
00:27:38.460 all built out of two by fours and we built a wall it was in what was the dining room we built a half
00:27:43.200 wall and then built this underneath and how big was that apartment they called it a four and a
00:27:49.320 half in in montreal and it had a okay two bedrooms um really one bedroom it
00:27:55.940 it was a small two bedroom is maybe if you pushed it that's what it would be it had a tiny
00:28:02.900 living room maybe 10 by 10 another room adjoining the living room that was maybe 10 by 10
00:28:07.640 then this dining room that was maybe eight by ten and then a kitchen that was somewhat bigger
00:28:13.480 l-shaped and that was the apartment and it was a long kind of train car like apartment
00:28:19.360 in a poor area in montreal and anyways that's where you were you were uh that's where we lived
00:28:26.520 when you were born and i'd be sleeping up on top and you would just go you just make a tiny peep
00:28:32.560 And Tammy would be up instantly down the ladder instantly and then she would feed you or rock you to sleep
00:28:39.260 And she was unbelievably good at that unbelievably responsive and as a consequence of her instantaneous
00:28:45.200 Responses you almost never got upset enough at night when you woke up to actually wake up
00:28:51.580 And so she was amazingly responsive to those tiny signs of distress and so
00:28:57.420 okay so and and to flesh this out so imagine that that's a that's a pretty cardinal set of wiring
00:29:04.320 yeah because everyone's survival depends on it um because infants are so dependent in the first
00:29:10.380 six months and so then you think well what does the world look like if the safety of a dependent
00:29:16.180 infant is your primary concern and the answer to that is well your nervous system is attuned
00:29:21.280 to optimize that relationship because survival itself depends on it and so then 0.87
00:29:27.760 well is everything an infant so i think the world is divided for women whose maternal instinct is
00:29:35.680 hyper dominant the world is divided into three categories infants caretakers of infants and 0.87
00:29:44.740 Predators and that's it and God help you if you're a predator because there is if you are a
00:29:51.820 mother of an infant
00:29:54.000 There is nothing about a predator that doesn't deserve to be destroyed and you forget about presumption of innocence
00:30:00.880 because the the
00:30:02.980 the hypothesis is going to be
00:30:05.860 Prove to me. You're not a predator and you know fair enough
00:30:10.380 But it isn't obvious at all that that ethos scales
00:30:15.620 It's not a good rule of thumb. It's not a good heuristic for picking a husband
00:30:21.160 Although no predators fair enough, you know, but it's not a good heuristic for picking a husband. It is not a good
00:30:28.700 heuristic for
00:30:30.540 establishing social communities because
00:30:33.560 everyone isn't an infant
00:30:35.280 Everyone isn't a caregiver and those that are neither of those aren't all predators and
00:30:39.740 And so when I looked at this Mount Royal College thing, and I was talking to DeWall, I thought, oh, well, we can just see this.
00:30:45.800 It's like, all these faculty members are infants, except for those of them who are predators, and they all need to be nurtured.
00:30:53.120 It's like, well, that's Freud. That's Freud's edible mother. That's the devouring mother.
00:30:57.380 It's like, infants should be treated like infants.
00:31:03.460 But people who aren't infants are not infants.
00:31:07.560 and that doesn't mean they're predators and they shouldn't all be treated like they're infants
00:31:12.540 it's not helpful and it is and the thing about it that bothers me in particular i would say or
00:31:18.080 the danger in it in particular is that there's an intense moralizing that goes with it because
00:31:24.040 well there's nothing more important than taking care of an infant fair enough there's no job more
00:31:31.140 admirable than being a caretaker of an infant well that's a bit trickier claim because there's
00:31:37.320 lots of ways of taking care of people and even if you're taking care of an infant well that
00:31:42.540 requires the provision of food for example the provision of shelter and all sorts of other
00:31:47.220 activities that aren't so hyper focused on the infant but that are equally necessary especially
00:31:53.460 in complex social environments and then well everyone who isn't one of those two things is
00:32:02.920 a predator that's a just blood that's just a bloody disaster and so how do we know that this
00:32:08.380 isn't okay so this is my experience being being female and i think we've had discussions about
00:32:13.880 this before because i've got um i've got a lot of masculine personality traits that just skew
00:32:20.460 towards and there are other women like me right yeah but we're talking about the average female
00:32:25.180 here so i've had a hard time understanding we're actually talking about the feminine temperament
00:32:29.640 okay feminine temperament that makes sense um even more than the average female it's more like
00:32:35.360 it's like the typical feminine temperament okay okay okay i can because men can have this men can
00:32:41.220 have this this this tilt to their thinking as well it's less common because the combination
00:32:47.240 of personality traits that would produce that ethos which is likely high neuroticism and high
00:32:52.720 agreeableness is less common in men okay so do you think it's not absent do you think it's just
00:32:57.400 those really high agreeableness and high neuroticism um i think low intelligence helps
00:33:03.180 when and i think this for a reason as well or no no specifically my graduate student christine
00:33:11.660 brophy and i studied political correctness and political correctness i think is an outgrowth
00:33:16.800 in part of this hyper um feminine ethos and i think that well we first of all we tried to find 0.99
00:33:27.160 out if there was a set of beliefs that
00:33:29.200 cohered as politically correct
00:33:31.260 or woke. Because that's the first question.
00:33:33.680 Is this just something that
00:33:35.300 right-wing conservatives
00:33:37.160 are hypothesizing?
00:33:39.720 It's like, well, you can test that
00:33:41.080 statistically. You can see if you have
00:33:43.240 one belief, if you're more likely to have another.
00:33:45.500 And then you can see which sets of
00:33:47.360 beliefs are likely to associate
00:33:49.120 with one another. We found clear evidence for
00:33:51.040 the existence of what was
00:33:53.300 obviously identifiable as a politically
00:33:55.160 Correct set of beliefs and what we did was take a very broad set of beliefs and
00:33:59.400 Ask people about that and then use statistics to group those beliefs. We found a group that I
00:34:07.040 Believe anyone in our current culture would regard as politically correct
00:34:11.080 Then we looked at what predicted it well being female predicted it over and above agreeableness and neuroticism 0.91
00:34:18.040 Which was very interesting because we found very few
00:34:21.400 phenomena in our studies that
00:34:23.400 that where you couldn't eradicate the sex difference
00:34:27.220 by controlling for personality.
00:34:28.900 That's weird.
00:34:29.580 Yeah, so agreeableness, being female, 1.00
00:34:32.720 but the biggest predictor was low verbal IQ.
00:34:36.160 And so you imagine that- 1.00
00:34:37.160 So you're saying woke people are stupid. 1.00
00:34:39.660 No, I'm saying that people who are less verbally sophisticated 1.00
00:34:42.760 are more likely to gravitate towards all-encompassing simple theories
00:34:47.400 because of course they are.
00:34:48.960 So kind of like woke people maybe aren't as bright.
00:34:52.540 Well, I think you might be able to say the same thing about people who hold a very low-resolution, schematically conservative viewpoint, you know, where they don't deviate from tradition at all.
00:35:04.300 Yeah.
00:35:04.580 And where they're not particularly sophisticated in defending their beliefs.
00:35:09.220 That's not associated with openness?
00:35:11.500 That's mostly low.
00:35:12.660 We didn't.
00:35:13.780 That's a complicated question because openness is associated with verbal IQ.
00:35:19.920 Yeah.
00:35:20.040 So if you have a low verbal IQ, you're likely to be lower in openness.
00:35:22.540 But it was complicated because, generally speaking, openness predicts liberal viewpoint.
00:35:28.440 But political correctness is not exactly merely an extension of liberal belief.
00:35:35.080 But the correlation between politically correct belief and verbal IQ was negative 0.45,
00:35:41.900 which is a walloping correlation.
00:35:45.460 It was one of the biggest correlations we ever saw in any study.
00:35:48.040 It's higher than the correlation between IQ and grades,
00:35:50.940 which is really something because those measures are kind of the same thing yeah it was yeah so
00:35:56.900 wow so and you know there is evidence in the university setting too that the most politically
00:36:02.920 correct disciplines are those who are simultaneously most dominated by females and 0.93
00:36:08.660 that have the least bright students are those also the ones that don't actually lead to jobs 0.98
00:36:13.140 they just well they lead to jobs now oh yeah they've created this entire ecosystem so that
00:36:18.820 your humanities degree matters yeah well your your your women's studies degree let's say or
00:36:24.700 yeah sorry yeah well lumping all the humanities together no you don't want to do that you don't
00:36:29.700 want to do that but um and so you know this is part of a broader discussion that we can't have 0.98
00:36:36.840 in our culture which is what's the evidence that the feminine ethos scales to regulate families 1.00
00:36:44.660 or broader communities because we've introduced women into the broad political discussion and 1.00
00:36:49.380 we've introduced women to every level of social organization but we have no evidence that women 0.98
00:36:55.460 can produce those sorts of organizations now maybe they can and maybe it's also a great positive that
00:37:02.160 they are and i think there's lots of evidence for that i mean so for example it's clearly the case
00:37:07.600 that countries where women are more educated and when where women are granted more rights
00:37:12.980 seem to do far better economically now whether that's because the women are free which might
00:37:19.500 be the reason or because the cultures that tend to be more open to female participation 0.99
00:37:24.340 are also more open to innovative ideas of all sorts right because it's very difficult to
00:37:30.120 distinguish between those two we don't know but we also know that if you educate women
00:37:35.120 their children are more motivated to pursue higher levels of education which isn't doesn't
00:37:41.460 seem to be the case. So if you try to predict how far a child will go in terms of their education,
00:37:46.340 you can use mother IQ, father IQ, child IQ, and then you can use mother education and father
00:37:52.420 education. And the IQ measures are relevant and mother's education is relevant, but father's
00:37:58.260 education isn't. So, and it isn't obvious why that is. Maybe women are pushy on behalf of their
00:38:05.680 children, right? So like, oh, I got an education. You need an education more than a dad. It may be 1.00
00:38:11.000 that women who are educated are better at acting out the implicit valuation of education in it like
00:38:18.820 at very early ages maybe they read more to their children we don't know but but so but what i'm
00:38:25.400 saying is that i'm not making a blanket case that the introduction of women into more sophisticated
00:38:31.460 forms of social no larger scale forms of social organization was like a non-starter and hopefully 1.00
00:38:38.760 it isn't because half the brain power in the world is in the hands of women we don't want to 1.00
00:38:43.860 just leave that lying on the table that would be a mistake for everyone but we also don't we have 0.95
00:38:49.020 no evidence whatsoever that the maternal ethos scales and i think i don't think it does i think
00:38:57.180 that large-scale organizations have to run on on conscientiousness not on agreeableness like and
00:39:04.700 There's evidence for that, too. So it might actually be negatively correlated with agreeableness. Well, right, we've looked at what predicts success in
00:39:12.800 complex
00:39:14.060 functional
00:39:15.020 organizations and the two biggest predictors are IQ because
00:39:19.700 IQ is general cognitive ability and that's just how fast and well you can solve any problem that requires
00:39:26.960 abstraction and solving it faster is obviously better if it's an important problem because it's more efficient the other predictor is
00:39:33.280 conscientiousness, not agreeableness. In fact, in the managerial domain, there's some evidence that
00:39:39.500 agreeableness is negatively correlated with success. And I think that's because agreeable
00:39:44.180 managers get taken advantage of, they can't discipline their employees properly, and they
00:39:48.980 get resentful. They feel bad, right? Like what happens if you have to fire somebody who is having
00:39:54.300 a really hard time, right? And then it's like, oh, I'll let them stay in the company and then let
00:39:58.460 your company fail. Well, worse than that, even I think they're prone, and I think this is the
00:40:01.860 fundamental problem with agreeableness in in in some regard as an ethos is you're completely susceptible to
00:40:09.600 manipulation by narcissists and psychopaths and we know this technically we know this biologically so imagine that you set up a game a simulation where
00:40:19.200 Everyone is cooperating you could cheat but everyone cooperates. Well, you can set up a pretty stable game
00:40:25.100 That's composed of nothing but cooperators
00:40:28.120 But if you introduce one cheater one shark the cheater takes everything
00:40:33.840 And so that and this is this is a chronic problem for societies is like as soon as you set up cooperation as the norm
00:40:41.280 The desirable norm the iterable norm the sustainable norm the productive norm that means those who mimic
00:40:50.400 cooperation
00:40:51.500 so narcissists
00:40:53.500 Machiavellians psychopaths who pretend to be cooperative and competent can steal and then you're faced with the problem of
00:41:01.620 Okay, what do you do with the free riders and the crooks and the answer is well you change society so that they're not
00:41:08.800 Victimized it's like you are naive beyond belief. You know, it's like I think it was the mayor of Seattle when Antifa
00:41:16.540 established its, you know zone of
00:41:19.240 little utopia downtown it's like well it'll be just like the summer of love which by the way
00:41:26.000 ended very badly and that was fine till the lights went off at night and the criminals came to play
00:41:32.600 and you think well they're just victims of an oppressive social organization it's like that'll
00:41:37.500 be a real good thing to tell them when they break into your house and so that sort of naivety which
00:41:44.160 is an outgrowth of a kind of immature agreeableness is seriously not helpful when it comes to solving
00:41:50.740 complex social problems well and one of I suppose is the regulation of the relationship between men
00:41:58.340 and women because women actually don't like agreeable men that much now it's tough for women
00:42:05.300 because if you have a disagreeable man he's blunt he's not very compassionate he's not very polite
00:42:13.180 he's competitive and so and that can degenerate into a kind of selfish meanness and so the best
00:42:21.020 personality predictor of criminal behavior is low agreeableness so and low consciousness if you add
00:42:28.320 those two together you get something approximating psychopathy so that's someone he doesn't care
00:42:32.980 about you at all plus he follows zero rules so like stay away from that guy and it isn't just
00:42:40.920 that he's misunderstood he's a guy to stay away from and you could add extraversion to that then
00:42:46.880 you'd get a narcissistic psychopath and then maybe you could add emotional stability to that and then
00:42:52.580 you get a fearless narcissistic self-centered psychopath and then then you have that's a movie 0.93
00:42:59.340 psychopath yeah but if you up the conscientiousness then you get a ceo well well yeah well that's 0.99
00:43:06.080 that's the okay so what a woman needs is someone who's disagreeable enough to keep the psychopaths 0.94
00:43:13.540 away and the criminals but agreeable enough to share and be reasonable and that's an unbelievable 0.90
00:43:19.880 that's a knife edge right or do they have to be agreeable enough though or could they just be
00:43:24.420 conscientious well like okay this is fair like i can't think that's a matter of degree our
00:43:30.200 relationship no i've seen disagreeable conscientious men try to have relationships
00:43:37.920 with agreeable women yeah and it's very difficult for them to bridge the gap because the guy is so
00:43:45.100 masculine and the woman is so feminine that they don't really exist in the same worlds
00:43:50.460 and so it's you want that you know you don't you want a man who 0.87
00:43:57.460 it's tough it also depends to some degree on the dangerousness of the environment right so
00:44:04.280 the more dangerous the environment yeah maybe the more disagreeable a man you need so it's a really 0.76
00:44:10.120 thin needle for women to thread and that's basically the beauty beauty and the beast 0.97
00:44:15.260 mythology right because the woman beauty in in that story wants a beast but why to keep the real
00:44:24.200 beasts at bay and who are the real beasts guest on well and what is he he's a narcissist right 0.98
00:44:29.420 he's a narcissistic he borders on psychopathy very dangerous yeah very dangerous arrogant 0.98
00:44:35.140 egotistical self-centered and he's a he's a parody of masculinity in some sense and so 0.99
00:44:42.560 beauty wants the beast because he's a beast and he can keep gaston at bay but he's tameable and 0.63
00:44:50.500 her job and and this is i i think part of the central female myth of adaptation like the hero
00:44:57.860 myth is for men the hero myth is also relevant for women but it's it's a it's an admixture for
00:45:03.980 women because they have the beauty and the beast thing that has to be done which i think is primary
00:45:08.920 But the hero myth which is go confront that which frightens you and stands in your way and thereby prevail
00:45:15.800 That's sort of like Mary with her foot on the serpent, right?
00:45:19.180 That's that's very much like st. George and the dragon. So there's that element of predator defense
00:45:24.320 that's definitely part of women's makeup and the desire to explore and
00:45:29.720 Intellectually and and the desire and to and the the ethos of courage and voluntary exposure. That's all relevant
00:45:38.160 that's partly why christ in christianity is regarded as a universal savior he's an archetypal
00:45:43.280 hero so he's sort of like saint george and the dragon magnified up into a whole another dimension
00:45:48.980 of significance but he's regarded as a figure that's redemptive both for men and women but then
00:45:54.760 you have the figure of mary it's like well is christ redemptive or is mary and the answer for
00:45:59.400 women is well for the answer for both sexes is both but christ is regarded still as primary for
00:46:05.900 both sexes, which is quite interesting. But the female situation is more complex. And so it's
00:46:11.720 beauty and beast. You want to find a guy that's tough and brave. And there's problems associated
00:46:18.000 with that. He's going to be somewhat uncivilized and wild. And then you bring him into a
00:46:24.640 relationship and tame him. And like this is the Google engineers who make great social
00:46:30.400 scientists when they're sort of let loose on the data did a wonderful analysis in a book called
00:46:34.880 A Billion Wicked Thoughts
00:46:35.940 where they looked at 0.99
00:46:36.620 female pornographic fantasies. 0.86
00:46:39.240 And so men look at pornography 0.96
00:46:41.300 and women read pornography,
00:46:43.460 which is quite interesting. 0.99
00:46:45.940 Yeah, that is interesting.
00:46:47.460 Yeah, well, it also ties back
00:46:48.580 to the swimsuit
00:46:49.420 or the Sports Illustrated issue idea.
00:46:51.840 Yeah, men are very visual
00:46:53.520 in their sexual preference,
00:46:55.520 extraordinarily so.
00:46:56.540 But I mean, you'd have to be visual,
00:46:57.940 but you'd be getting it
00:46:59.140 through a different medium, right?
00:47:00.740 Like for a book,
00:47:01.740 it's not like they just read it.
00:47:02.740 They read it and visualize it.
00:47:04.060 but they're visualizing different things men are visualizing physical features associated
00:47:08.320 fundamentally with fecundity and health yeah youth fecundity and health and that would be clear skin
00:47:13.180 plump lips uh reddish huge skin because that's also youthfully toned lack of wrinkles uh 0.68
00:47:20.300 waist to hip ratio um uh clear eyes there's a variety of other uh cardinal attributes symmetry
00:47:28.700 is an interesting one i read that butterflies can detect departures from symmetry of one part in a
00:47:34.860 million in potential mates butterflies well but you look at a butterfly and you think man
00:47:39.380 that's pretty beautiful it's like yeah that's sexual selection boys and girls pretty good for
00:47:45.380 the butterflies they have that level of aesthetic capability and they're insects right one part in
00:47:51.940 a million symmetry really matters so on the pornographic front women it was very comical
00:48:00.020 to read this because and I had read a fair number of uh harlequin romances when I was a kid my mom
00:48:06.020 used to take them camping so I read like 200 of them because they were always lying around I just
00:48:09.240 pick one up and read it and then I had a client whose sister read the more pornographic versions
00:48:16.100 of harlequin romances because they have a more spicy line so I read like 10 of those because
00:48:20.460 I was curious. And then I, um, uh, at least that was my excuse. And then, uh, cause I was dreaming
00:48:28.100 about pirates and surgeons and vampires. Yeah. Anyways, the Google guys showed quite clearly
00:48:33.060 the pattern of female pornographic fantasy preference. And it was basically beauty and
00:48:37.540 the beast. It was like tough surgeon, pirate, vampire, billionaire. There was one other category.
00:48:44.040 I can't remember. Uh, maybe it was corporate. It wasn't CEO. It wasn't CEO. No billionaires.
00:48:48.740 that covers that but like hyper successful male tromping around you know arrogant kind of guy
00:48:54.520 but also someone ideally who will take care of you even when you're feeling sorry for something
00:48:59.500 you shouldn't feel sorry for yeah well the the fantasy mounts they have a couple of interactions
00:49:05.580 there's a fair bit of rejection there's some underlying sexual tension he realizes how beautiful
00:49:10.160 she is she kind of entices him into establishing a relationship with him and tames her and then 0.99
00:49:15.500 you know there's some fiery sex that goes along with that and yeah and then so she's got herself
00:49:20.040 she's got herself her own monster and then he serves her purposes in some sense defense and
00:49:25.840 then generosity and and competence and production and so and that's all unbelievably deeply embedded
00:49:33.260 and it's rude to talk about it but like how about 50 shades of gray folks you know that was i think
00:49:40.160 Did you read that?
00:49:41.260 I read some of it.
00:49:42.480 I didn't read much of it because once I...
00:49:44.940 It was painful.
00:49:45.960 Yeah, well...
00:49:46.480 And everybody read it.
00:49:48.160 Yeah.
00:49:48.500 I had like everyone I knew read it secretly.
00:49:50.840 Yeah.
00:49:51.000 Or not so secretly.
00:49:52.260 Yeah.
00:49:52.480 Well, it was a funny thing to see happen because it was happening, if I remember correctly,
00:49:56.340 right at the same time as the Me Too movement.
00:49:59.000 It's like...
00:49:59.660 And that's very...
00:50:01.080 That makes perfect sense psychologically because if you get a reaction that's too far in one direction,
00:50:06.040 then it calls for a fantasy in the other direction.
00:50:08.560 it's like well sex only can take place between people of equal power whatever the hell that
00:50:13.680 means well that's that's that sounds like a fun sexual experience well that's part of the reason
00:50:18.460 why you know relationships between say undergraduates and graduate students or
00:50:23.260 undergraduates and professors in universities are hypothetically verboten which i think by the way
00:50:28.040 is a mistake because are you an adult or not now that doesn't mean it can't be manipulated and
00:50:32.800 It doesn't mean that there are reasons to step forward with propriety
00:50:38.740 and I'm not a fan of promiscuity or one-night stands
00:50:41.480 or any casual sexual relationships for that matter
00:50:44.020 but it isn't obvious to me at all
00:50:46.980 who has the upper hand in those sorts of relationships 1.00
00:50:49.180 because feminine youth and beauty and charm 1.00
00:50:52.900 especially allied with personality and intelligence 1.00
00:50:57.760 is a vicious and deadly combination
00:51:00.680 There's not that's not nothing by any stretch of the imagination. It might be the highest status
00:51:09.340 What would you say set of manifestations that there is because I would say generally speaking cultures 0.99
00:51:16.760 value young women
00:51:19.980 Like ideal young women more than they value anyone else. They certainly value the more than they value
00:51:25.780 you well certainly the typical young man but maybe even the atypical young man what exactly is the
00:51:32.740 problem with casual relationships and how are you supposed to find the person you need to be with
00:51:37.540 without having them well i think how about abortion that's a problem and so it's a minefield
00:51:52.020 obviously any discussion of abortion but one thing I can say about abortion that
00:51:56.940 I think would generate no objection is you wouldn't give one to your sister for
00:52:03.000 a present right so whatever it is it's not desirable and how not desirable it
00:52:12.600 is is at minimum open to question so I don't think there's any such thing as a
00:52:20.080 casual sexual relationship i don't believe that i've never seen any evidence that that's the case
00:52:27.000 i think that there are people rationalize that constantly because they want to believe
00:52:34.440 while they want to believe that short-term hedonistic gratification is ethically acceptable
00:52:40.120 and i don't think it is i think that it trains you to treat yourself and other people as
00:52:50.080 instrumental objects of short-term pleasure obviously well is that is that how you want
00:52:57.160 train yourself how's that going to work in your you're going to have a long-term relationship at
00:53:02.700 some point how are you going to train yourself for that okay so having said that and then you
00:53:08.720 know how carefully how carefully should we conduct ourselves in sexual matters i would say well
00:53:13.140 as carefully as you conduct yourself in any matter of importance and that might be
00:53:19.120 That stretches all the way up to the top
00:53:22.580 Whatever the top is
00:53:24.580 You know
00:53:26.260 You're going to treat the other person as if they're a divine locus of consciousness
00:53:30.020 Or a disposable pornographic entity
00:53:33.540 Well, you know
00:53:35.500 Those are the
00:53:36.220 Borders 0.78
00:53:40.080 Okay, but then you say
00:53:42.360 Well, you have to practice
00:53:43.540 And there's truth in that
00:53:46.220 And how do you practice?
00:53:49.120 and the answer is well that's one of the central complications of life right to to get the balance
00:53:56.800 between individual action and the whole domain of sexuality and reproduction right is perhaps
00:54:06.420 there's no more difficult question especially once you've solved the question of do you have
00:54:11.120 enough to eat tomorrow that would be the next one that pops up but i don't think there's cat i don't 0.98
00:54:18.020 think there is such a thing as casual sex i think that's indistinguishable from masturbation which 0.96
00:54:24.240 i also don't regard as a particularly heroic act and so well t-shirts masturbation not a 0.64
00:54:31.040 particularly well yeah right right right and and i think people have that sense and i don't think
00:54:36.420 that that's culturally instantiated because in some sense we've done everything we can
00:54:40.400 to eradicate every last vestige of sexual shame which i think in the final analysis is impossible
00:54:46.720 Because there are all sorts of reasons for the persistence of sexual shame that have nothing to do with
00:54:53.260 cultural context and
00:54:56.100 Still, you know, it's an
00:54:58.100 A furtive and underground activity and the reason for that is because it's suboptimal for all sorts of reasons
00:55:04.100 well
00:55:05.440 How much motivation does a young man need to overcome his fear of rejection and establish a relationship with a woman and the answer to that is
00:55:15.600 We don't know but sexual deprivation could easily easily be part of it
00:55:21.780 Because you to do something difficult. You need a lot of motivation
00:55:26.160 You need frustration working for you. You need fear working for you. You need
00:55:31.240 Lust working for you. You need loneliness working for you to bind a man and woman together 1.00
00:55:36.900 Especially if they're going to produce children. This is a very very difficult thing to do successfully and so 0.99
00:55:42.940 anything that
00:55:44.520 Interferes with that is to be viewed with extreme skepticism and that's undoubtedly part of the reason that
00:55:51.120 shame around
00:55:53.120 hedonistic sexual activities
00:55:55.400 Remains a constant despite our best attempts to eradicate it. I think I would also say
00:56:02.360 Just from my experience growing up, especially in university
00:56:08.340 It's not like it's seen on the outside having casual sexual relationships as this fun thing 0.82
00:56:14.520 it's not fun no and nobody thinks it's fun especially women so if you're around other
00:56:21.840 girls and they're like oh yeah i hooked up with this guy none of you guys are actually enjoying
00:56:26.740 that yeah right and i think that's a lie that women tell each other um why i think because
00:56:35.160 they think other people don't care and because if you do it it makes you feel bad enough that 0.51
00:56:39.820 you're like well i don't want to look at that whatever's going on there like maybe me feeling
00:56:45.040 bad is not healthy right i'm not and it means there's something wrong with you yeah or there's
00:56:50.200 something wrong with you right and so it's like and it's unpleasant enough that you're like well
00:56:54.280 i'll just you know keep going it's already happened there's nothing i can do about it so
00:56:58.080 it might as well be okay because what am i going to do about what am i going to do about it if it's 0.98
00:57:02.200 not okay yeah so and then you know and i think this is pretty common for women in university to 0.99
00:57:07.680 hook up with people right it's called hookup culture there's tinder like it happens but i 0.99
00:57:12.620 like for anybody out there who's who's thinking maybe i don't want to do that it's not fun it
00:57:19.120 doesn't make you feel good it's really makes you really lonely right it's not a good idea it makes
00:57:23.960 you lonely i think because what you're looking for what you're looking for is connection with
00:57:29.100 somebody and you're getting this physical connection and you're not getting any emotional
00:57:33.860 connection and it's right and then there's the contradiction oh it's a terrible contradiction
00:57:39.560 yeah and it's well here's here's an interesting thing i used to tell my clients is don't do
00:57:46.280 anything with anyone sexually that you wouldn't talk to them about
00:57:50.440 seems like well i wouldn't talk to anybody about that it's like but you'll act it out yeah yeah so
00:57:57.180 that's worth thinking about it's you're not intimate enough with them to have a conscious 0.77
00:58:02.500 discussion but you're perfectly willing to blunder stupidly into it and then and then risk the
00:58:09.320 aftermath a lot of that's fueled by alcohol too yeah a lot of it is like all of it you're not 0.98
00:58:15.220 going to do that if we ever wanted to have a serious conversation about sexual impropriety
00:58:20.720 on campuses for example the first thing we'd focus on is alcohol but we don't want to have
00:58:26.160 a serious conversation about that because you know we don't want to have well we don't want
00:58:31.180 have chaperoned parties like there were in the 1950s you know it's like well you know
00:58:35.960 having some older people around to keep the or the drunken orgy under control
00:58:42.800 actually turns out not to be such a bad idea especially people who um are non-biased right
00:58:49.260 are unbiased we're just there saying well this doesn't look like it's going well maybe i'll help
00:58:54.600 this person yeah well instead of a group of friends they're like no do it like yeah right
00:58:58.500 A bunch of doorknobs running into each other.
00:59:00.980 Well, that's what you get with alcohol, too.
00:59:03.500 Yeah.
00:59:03.680 Alcohol is a drug that really radically decreases people's medium to long-term orientation.
00:59:15.800 It really focuses you on the present, which makes it, if it's a good drug for you,
00:59:19.940 it makes it unbelievably fun because it decreases anxiety
00:59:23.540 and it increases likely opiate bonding and dopamine mediated extroversion and so like
00:59:31.340 it's cocaine heroin and a benzodiazepine rolled into one and so it makes you not care and for
00:59:39.900 for pure hedonism there's nothing better than not caring but alcohol is a catastrophe on many
00:59:46.840 fronts because of that and a huge proportion of violent crimes exploitative crimes rapes
00:59:52.580 a huge proportion of those are conducted between drunk people and so but i don't i don't believe
01:00:02.160 that i don't believe that there is moral casual sex because i don't think sex is casual i don't
01:00:08.520 think anything about it is casual i don't think well that that's what i think yeah fair okay so
01:00:14.520 kind of on that note uh given that people just graduated do you have advice for recent high
01:00:20.920 school grads I think it's very it's hard to overstate the importance when you're at a point
01:00:34.460 of transition like that so you've you've you're done being someone that you were a school kid
01:00:42.960 you're done with that and so that's an achievement but it's also the end of something it's the end
01:00:49.000 of an identity and it's a new beginning so now you have a new beginning you have a new beginning
01:00:53.640 you don't get that many of those in your life if you move if you switch jobs if you make a radical
01:00:58.340 life transformation you may have that sometimes that's accidental it's thrust upon you that's
01:01:03.240 that's different that's harder sometimes it's because of opportunity but maybe you get four
01:01:08.880 or five opportunities like that in your life so they're rare you get to be someone new who
01:01:16.280 who have a vision so when i started to puzzle this out it was often because of talking to
01:01:25.200 clients or students who didn't know what to do what should i do with my life i don't know what
01:01:29.160 to do with my life fair enough and that's not a very good question all right what do i do with
01:01:33.600 my life it's like what's the answer to everything it's not a good question right it's too vague so
01:01:39.840 i suppose i answered this to some degree at least initially like a conservative person i say well
01:01:47.280 what other people do well they have an intimate relationship they have a family so that could be
01:01:54.700 your birth family so you can fix that up or it could be you know your new family your kids your
01:01:59.800 wife they have friends they have a social community that might involve civic responsibility
01:02:06.960 which is something we're direly lacking at the moment you need a job you need to take care of
01:02:15.120 yourself mentally and physically you need to educate yourself you need to regulate your
01:02:21.040 reaction to temptation there's eight things okay so now you get to be whoever you want
01:02:26.060 but you have to want it and you have to aim at it and so to do that you have to have a vision
01:02:32.980 part of the utility of literature is the provision of such visions negative you know in the case of
01:02:39.040 anti-heroes positive in the case of protagonists who could you be part of the advantage of being
01:02:44.360 educated in the humanities is that you can draw your models from the best history has to offer
01:02:50.520 and that's really what an education in humanity should present you with it's like here are the
01:02:55.060 great people of history and that's you in potential and so that means you can
01:03:01.380 establish a new peer group you know in some sense my peer group has always been
01:03:08.060 the people whose books I most admired you know and that's a reach right because
01:03:12.920 who wants who dares to compare himself herself to the truly great people of the
01:03:18.900 past Nietzsche for me Dostoevsky Jung oh and then the classic philosophers like
01:03:24.760 Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hume, all these stunning people that were brilliant beyond
01:03:32.300 conception. You know, I mean, that's a high reach and presumptuous in some sense. But the point of
01:03:38.200 a humanities education is in large part to surround yourself with peers of the highest quality. And so
01:03:45.380 you do that in the world of abstraction, which is, and the teachers are there to guide you through
01:03:49.320 that if they only knew that and then you also want to do that with your peers so one of the
01:03:55.140 things you want to ask yourself if you're graduating from high school is well now I'm
01:03:58.820 off to do something else might be a job might be college it might be trade school it's like
01:04:04.240 I'm gonna make new friends what's a friend what do I want I want someone to tell good news to
01:04:12.500 who will celebrate with me i want someone to tell bad news to who'll be upset that something bad
01:04:19.740 happened to me and not secretly happy i want someone who's aiming up for me and for them
01:04:24.660 or not or do you not want that it's like what do you want if you're taking care of yourself
01:04:30.200 what would you want in a relationship you need a vision for this and we do a staggeringly appalling
01:04:36.320 job of helping young people even understand that that's necessary and i know partly why
01:04:44.000 i was very curious about this because i spent a lot of time with this future authoring program
01:04:49.140 self-authoring part of the self-authoring suite because we built a program to help people make a
01:04:55.320 plan and once we built the program one of the things we found for example was that if you gave
01:04:59.920 it to young men who were entering college the few months before they went to college they were 50
01:05:06.640 less likely to drop out in the first year and that it's crazy for a 90 minute exercise it's like
01:05:12.780 that's just if the world had any sense every single college would have immediately
01:05:17.920 used that upon publication of our paper but none of them did and that says something is that mainly
01:05:25.540 just goal setting like what do you want envision that and then i think goal setting is the wrong
01:05:30.280 way to think about it i think it's too narrow a conceptualization i think that you need literally
01:05:36.840 to imagine it it's like you get to be who you want well you need to run the story like in detail and
01:05:44.860 if you're trying to predict whether someone's going to commit suicide you ask them well you
01:05:50.460 know have you ever thought about harming yourself well you know sometimes have you ever thought about
01:05:55.100 killing yourself well you know the thoughts crossed my mind do you have a plan yeah I have
01:06:03.000 a plan well can you tell me about the plan well you know my dad has a 45 in the top shelf of his 0.98
01:06:12.160 desk I've seen it in there several times the bullets are in the drawer next door I thought
01:06:18.260 you know I could probably put that in my mouth in the bathroom so I didn't make too much of a mess
01:06:24.040 and probably probably do that in the morning that's like that's not good yeah right that
01:06:30.260 person's in danger yeah because they've the dream has entered their mind they've visualized it
01:06:36.020 and so i don't it's not goal setting it's it's more like it's much more like casting yourself in a
01:06:42.880 fully fleshed out literary representation it's like what is your future who are you
01:06:49.800 and what you want to do is negotiate with yourself it's like just imagine this is a gospel idea right
01:06:57.400 that if you knock the door will open if you ask you will receive if you seek you will find and no
01:07:03.020 one believes that but i believe it's true yeah but it depends on what you mean by knock ask and seek
01:07:10.440 because it means if you mean it yeah if your life depends on it yeah that's right that's right you're
01:07:16.200 all in on it it's like you want this what do you mean you don't kind of want no that's right i want
01:07:20.260 for like two minutes a day and then you get bored right right and your right hand wants it your left
01:07:24.620 hand doesn't and no no it doesn't mean that at all it means you're going to make the sacrifices
01:07:29.080 necessary and you're all in on it okay so then the question becomes well what's worth going all
01:07:35.800 in on and the answer to that is ask yourself you know because we know that life has an unbearable
01:07:42.880 element to it and so facing that forthrightly say life's suffering man
01:07:49.780 and plenty of it and so what might make that worthwhile well what if I had
01:07:55.720 someone I really loved who I was really attracted to that I was really in love
01:07:59.740 with that I was sexually entranced by or what if I was that person for someone
01:08:06.020 else because that's actually a better plan you know what would I have to do
01:08:10.720 To myself to hypothetically be someone like that for someone else, which is a much better way of thinking about it
01:08:16.020 What if I had kids that I loved?
01:08:18.500 What if I had?
01:08:21.320 Friends like King Arthur had friends
01:08:24.680 You know, what if I was part of a?
01:08:29.240 Enterprise that was fundamentally changing the world for the better. It's like would that justify it?
01:08:35.420 Well, you have to ask yourself and if it isn't everything you need it to be
01:08:40.720 then it's not a good vision and you're in an impossible situation anyways so why not try to
01:08:49.200 do something impossible it's not going to be in some sense it's not going to be any more difficult
01:08:53.640 in any real sense although it's going to require more dedication it's not going to be any more
01:08:58.420 difficult than just slumping along to the grave yeah not any less painful well yeah you have to 0.99
01:09:07.400 forego stupid short-term hedonistic pleasure which is god anyone with any sense no like cocaine 0.98
01:09:17.360 it's like great for a week you're like 15 minutes yeah not so good iterated over 20 years 0.99
01:09:25.340 alcohol is the same way casual sex is the same way any of those we all know this there isn't
01:09:32.420 Anyone who doesn't know these things people pretend. Oh sex can just be for fun. It's like yeah, right
01:09:39.460 What is just for fun?
01:09:42.440 name one thing
01:09:44.660 Let alone something as complicated and is entangling as sex and you also see the job's public culture
01:09:50.500 It's like because in the universities we have two things going same thing violation of the principle of non-contradiction any
01:09:57.140 sexual orientation of any sort or any practice
01:10:00.300 What so ever is to be encouraged in every possible way with no holds barred and no limitations whatsoever and 0.82
01:10:11.640 Every single sexual interaction between a young man and a young woman is so dangerous
01:10:16.180 That you need a written contract before proceeding maybe because everyone's being encouraged to do anything. Well 0.98
01:10:22.620 You get one of those. Yeah, but not both
01:10:26.820 Because both of them can't exist simultaneously
01:10:30.300 And so, and I'm much more prone to give credence to the danger side of it.
01:10:38.100 It's like, this is no joke.
01:10:40.540 This is your life you're messing around with.
01:10:42.720 Or someone else's life.
01:10:44.540 The person you're with.
01:10:45.840 The baby that you produce.
01:10:48.220 This is no joke.
01:10:50.600 So, you think that anything goes.
01:10:54.520 It's like, anything doesn't go in a relationship.
01:10:58.220 Anything doesn't go in a friendship.
01:10:59.840 anything doesn't go in a business anything doesn't go when you're alone in the woods trying to
01:11:04.680 survive there's nowhere that anything goes and that to to desire that is so narcissistic and
01:11:11.540 so infantile that it's almost unexpressible and that's our culture yeah okay so what are you
01:11:20.520 looking forward to in the future this is the last question that i'm letting you go what are you
01:11:24.620 looking forward to help being healthy yeah not being on fire I'll settle for
01:11:32.360 that any day I'm not on fire that's a pretty good day so today a pretty good
01:11:41.840 day? Today's just fine. Good. Thank you very much for joining me.