The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - June 09, 2022


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


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per minute

166.45

Word count

11,948

Sentence count

208

Harmful content

Toxicity

26

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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.
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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
00:07:22.360 Sports Illustrated cover and they had a rather overweight young woman quite
00:07:31.480 symmetrical and so nice facial features and so forth with a very revealing
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
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.
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,
00:15:14.960 that status and authority in a chimp troop
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,
00:15:53.700 if you give a female chimp a block of wood,
00:15:55.960 you know, of the appropriate size,
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
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
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
00:19:57.300 are characterized by and so a female chimp will carry her infant 500 miles in in the first three
00:20:05.780 years she has to carry the infant they can claim to but she has to carry the
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
00:20:52.880 Balance to optimize if women's hips were any wider which would make the pelvic hole larger
00:20:57.900 they couldn't run well so it would interfere with the running which obviously isn't so good
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
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
00:23:46.200 danger vibes that's what I'm gonna call them danger vibes that you're more
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
00:36:08.660 that have the least bright students are those also the ones that don't actually lead to jobs
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
00:36:36.840 in our culture which is what's the evidence that the feminine ethos scales to regulate families
00:36:44.660 or broader communities because we've introduced women into the broad political discussion and
00:36:49.380 we've introduced women to every level of social organization but we have no evidence that women
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
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
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
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
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
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 0.85
00:43:06.080 that's the okay so what a woman needs is someone who's disagreeable enough to keep the psychopaths
00:43:13.540 away and the criminals but agreeable enough to share and be reasonable and that's an unbelievable
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
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
00:44:10.120 thin needle for women to thread and that's basically the beauty beauty and the beast
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
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.
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
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
00:50:49.180 because feminine youth and beauty and charm
00:50:52.900 especially allied with personality and intelligence
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
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
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
00:55:36.900 Especially if they're going to produce children. This is a very very difficult thing to do successfully and so
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
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
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
00:57:02.200 not okay yeah so and then you know and i think this is pretty common for women in university to
00:57:07.680 hook up with people right it's called hookup culture there's tinder like it happens but i
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
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
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.