00:01:12.940And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:18.900It does not get any more fascinating than the two brilliant guests, returning guests to the show that we have for you today.
00:01:25.820They are, of course, evolutionary biologists, Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein, who are here with us to talk about their brilliant, fantastic book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
00:02:26.600Of course, in the book, you talk about evolution, some of the adaptations, both physically and genetically and culturally, that we've seen.
00:02:33.920And you talk about how that is compatible or not quite compatible with the modern world.
00:02:39.600But I think before we get into some of that detail, the underlying theme of the book that I kept having in the back of my head as I was reading it was that Facebook slogan of move fast and break things.
00:02:51.140And my sense was what you're really saying is, as a Western industrial civilization, we've moved so fast and broken so many things that many of the things you talk about in the book, whether it's advice on food, advice on sleep, advice on parenting, advice on dating.
00:03:05.620In all of those areas, we're no longer living in ways that are actually healthy for us.
00:03:12.060Well, move fast and break things might make sense if you did it well.
00:03:15.880Unfortunately, the way we have done it has caused us not to stop doing the things that are broken rather than to learn from them and prototype our way to a better future.
00:03:24.240And so, yes, that is one of the themes of the book is that we are now living in uncharted territory that is so different from what we are evolved to deal with that we are simply incapable of adapting fast enough to keep up.
00:03:37.340Yeah. And the idea that move fast and break things is the rule you should abide by or the rule you shouldn't abide by is part of the problem.
00:03:44.500Right. Move fast and break and be willing to break your arm, perhaps as a way to know how to navigate risk in the world.
00:03:51.020Okay. Move fast and be willing to break your head. No, like don't do that. That's not a good choice for a human being. It's not going to end well for you.
00:03:59.660So part of I think you're right. I think that is one of the themes of the book. And part of it, too, is tradeoffs in everything. Right.
00:04:07.040It is there are there will be no or almost no static rules with which we can live our lives.
00:04:12.500We need to understand that we are evolving, changing complex beings and so need strategies that adapt with the times and with us.
00:04:21.020And one of the rules you talked about in the book, and it's something that I think we're seeing more and more in our society, is avoiding simple solutions to incredibly complex problems.
00:04:33.360Well, in some sense, you want solutions to be as simple as possible, but the idea that you should kid yourself that the solution will be simple.
00:04:43.720You're not entitled to a simple solution to a complex problem, especially if you haven't even really understood what the problem is.
00:04:49.860So very frequently, what we'll do is we'll identify a symptom as if it was a problem, and then we'll try to treat that symptom and we'll create a proliferation of even further symptoms rather than looking for the root cause and figuring out how to solve it once and for all.
00:05:08.160One of the other themes, which is exactly what you, Francis, are alluding to here with the question, is the problem of reductionism.
00:05:16.560That sometimes simple solutions are the right ones, but far too often, as Brett points out and as we do repeatedly throughout the book, as soon as you have something that you've measured, you mistake that for the thing that needed to be measured and the only thing that needed to be measured.
00:05:30.460And so now we've got a number, we've got a thing to point to that may or may not be the key symptom of the broken system in question, but we lose our motivation to keep looking for more things when we have a number in hand.
00:05:45.460And so sometimes a simple solution will be the right one, but very often it's not.
00:05:50.820And we need to keep our brains alive and our eyes open to continue to look for the deeper truths.
00:05:57.580And Heather, very much to your point, that's actually what I was going to ask you about.
00:06:02.240It might sound to someone who hasn't yet read the book that we're talking in abstract here very much.
00:06:07.200So can you put some flesh on those bones for people?
00:06:09.960What are some of the examples of the reductionism, the scientism that you all should talk about in the book that I think you're alluding to there?
00:06:18.080Well, one example is the idea that the appendix is a vestigial organ.
00:06:24.080And, you know, almost everyone who lives in the weird, you know, that acronym, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic world, knows someone who has had a run-in with appendicitis.
00:06:36.720And in some cases it's been, you know, close to deadly.
00:06:39.460Usually people don't die anymore, but only if you live close to a medical facility.
00:06:44.260And so the story that we've been handed for decades now is this organ has no function for us, is all cost, and so it is incumbent upon us to surgically remove it at first sign of disease.
00:06:56.740Well, that story doesn't hold up from an evolutionary perspective because we've only been living in this post-industrial world for 150 years, call it, and the idea that this organ has been just killing people off for all of this time, for, you know, for however long it is that people imagine it to have been vestigial, forgets the power of selection.
00:07:20.220So selection would have begun to produce this organ had it been entirely non-functional.
00:07:27.400As it turns out, the fact of the disease in the appendix is a result of our modern lifestyles.
00:07:34.660And we know that because when we look at non-weird cultures, non-weird peoples, the rate of appendicitis is almost zero.
00:07:45.700But what you do have is an emerging story about what the value is, that in those cultures where the food is not quite so sterile, not quite so clean for our guts, and for those people who have more frequent bouts of GI distress and GI illness, the appendix effectively acts as a repository for good bacteria with which it repopulates the gut after such bouts.
00:08:09.580So in the weird world where our appendix doesn't get used much because our food is so clean and, you know, probably too clean, the appendix becomes inflamed because it's not used.
00:08:20.940So it is becoming, in our very, very modern circumstances, a hazard, but it is still not a hazard in most of the world where people don't live like we do.
00:08:30.720The error in thinking was that looking at this, and because we couldn't identify the value of the appendix, assuming it didn't have one, rather than saying, we can see that it obviously must have one.
00:08:42.660Not only does the organ itself have some expense in building it, but the cost of the risk that comes from having one is substantial enough that the pressure to eliminate it would have been overwhelming.
00:08:52.740It's also true that phylogenetically, it makes sense that it would be an organ in the process of disappearing because our relatives that would have to have it in order for that story to be true, do not.
00:09:04.120So it was, I spotted, in fact, in college, the idea that the appendix had to have a purpose that we hadn't identified, that the vestigial story was simply wrong.
00:09:13.520But it was decades before anybody figured out a story that was satisfying as to what it did, and we have to get comfortable with that.
00:09:21.120We are new to biology in a way that we are not to physics and chemistry, and that means that very frequently, although we can say something about how a system works, we don't understand it well enough to be authoritative, and we have to be patient to figure out what all of the details are in order to see the full story.
00:09:39.140Let me just add one more thing to that, which is we invoke in the book the concept introduced by G.K. Chesterton of Chesterton's Fence, right, in which two people walking down a road run into a fence and it's in their way, and one of them says, let's get rid of it.
00:09:53.660And the second one, the more wise one, says, there's no way that we should get rid of it until and unless we can identify what its function is supposed to be, at which point then we can talk about it.
00:10:03.420But until you know what its function is or was supposed to be, there's no way that you should just get rid of it.
00:10:08.960And so we raise that early in the book, this parable of Chesterton's, which has come to be known as Chesterton's Fence, and we basically say, look for other things in the world like this.
00:10:26.640There are many things that we moderns are foregoing because it feels to us like we're done with that, we've evolved beyond it, we are moderns, we don't need that thing anymore.
00:10:37.900And too often we get rid of things that still have function or are tied to things with function, and we do so because we haven't actually stopped to try to figure out what the function might be.
00:10:47.340Don't you think, Heather, that actually shows that we're arrogant as a culture, we're arrogant as a society, that we look at things, and because we can't understand them or we don't find a purpose for them, therefore we dismiss them?
00:11:03.180And I think people in many cultures have an arrogance to them, but it is symptomatic of too many of the systems that have the power to drive narrative in weird cultures.
00:11:16.520The arrogance is lauded rather than skepticism being lauded too often.
00:11:21.440And we see this in evolutionary biology in particular, where there has been incredible resistance to the idea that religious traditions are in some way meaningful and important, right?
00:11:32.960They've been dismissed as mind viruses, which they obviously aren't, right?
00:11:36.920They're just as adaptive as a wing or an eye or any other structure.
00:11:40.760And the reason that we've done that is because, in some sense, they are not literally true.
00:11:48.300But the fact that they are not literally true shouldn't persuade us of anything one way or the other.
00:11:52.040What they ought to be is, just like a wing or an eye, they ought to be functional, right?
00:11:55.980Functional belief systems are ones that give you an advantage, and that doesn't necessarily come from them being literal and analytic.
00:12:02.760So, yes, there is an arrogance, and it is something we will think more clearly when we get past it and we realize just how early we are in the study of adaptive complex systems.
00:12:16.080Well, you've both preempted my question there, which is kind of the spiritual appendix of religion.
00:12:21.000As you were talking about the appendix, I was thinking about this.
00:12:24.140So, is it like the appendix in that, in a weird culture, we don't actually need it, and it's actually potentially a source of inflammation and harm?
00:12:34.500Or is it that we've just taken away something out of our societies without really fully appreciating the value that it still has for us?
00:12:42.620It is both to the 10th power, and that's the problem.
00:12:46.480Because what we have is a compendium of wisdom matched to past environments.
00:12:52.880And it's Chesterton's fence after Chesterton's fence.
00:12:56.280There are structures in there that are still serving their original purpose and are vitally important.
00:13:01.200There are other structures in there that may not only be useless, they can actually be harmful in our current environment.
00:13:07.220And the process of sorting which is wheat and which is chaff is going to be a very difficult one.
00:13:13.080But what we can say for sure is that it starts with the recognition that those belief systems were adaptive.
00:13:19.980That doesn't necessarily mean they were good.
00:13:22.200There were lots of things that urged people to war, things we mustn't do again, that were adaptive.
00:13:29.140So, what does adaptive mean for people who are not evolutionary biologists?
00:13:32.760What adaptive means is that they are the product of selection, and they enhance the chances that the creature that has these traits will have their genes lodged in the future.
00:13:44.940To say that something is adaptive does not mean that you are saying that it is good, either for you, the individual, or the population in which that adaptive trait may be spreading.
00:13:58.520And we say early in the book, as we always did in our classrooms as well, that we will not fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, the is-ought fallacy.
00:14:08.580There are sort of a cluster of similar fallacies that philosophers recognize.
00:14:12.540But to recognize that something is natural, which is itself a complicated term, but to recognize that something is evolutionary is not the same thing as recognizing, as claiming that it is what should be.
00:14:27.280And, you know, that, in fact, is the error that people who have abused evolutionary thinking have made, people like social Darwinists and eugenicists and such have made exactly that error.
00:14:37.340They have seen some measure of success and have decided that that thing that has succeeded in the way that they have claimed it is, therefore, who should be winning.
00:14:46.020And there is nothing in evolutionary thinking, actually, that suggests that.
00:14:50.140It's also important for people who are bootstrapping a model for thinking about evolution to realize that you have competing strategies in which both versions or the multiplicity of versions are all products of selection.
00:15:03.820So ruthlessness is certainly a product of selection, as is compassion.
00:15:08.440Rape is a product of selection, as are laws that punish people who rape, right?
00:15:15.420And what that, in part, does is it puts the onus on us to figure out which parts of what is evolutionary we wish to retain and augment and which ones we wish to banish.
00:15:43.240Brett, before I interrupted you to ask you to explain adaptive to us and our audience, you were talking about religion being an adaptive thing.
00:15:57.760One, as long as scientific folks keep wagging their finger at religious folks and saying you're suffering from a delusion, we're never going to get anywhere.
00:16:06.880Because religious folks know that they're not suffering from a delusion, which doesn't mean that what they believe in is literal or even still relevant, right?
00:16:15.540We have to get to a conversation in which the scientific folks acknowledge what religion has been and why it has characterized every important society.
00:16:24.540And the religious folks recognize that their book of wisdom may in fact be so out of date that it needs a rethinking beyond the style of rethinking that has typically characterized religion, right?
00:16:39.780We could, it would annoy many people, but we could draw a phylogeny of religions and you could see that, you know, Christianity is a version of Judaism and that Protestantism is a version of Christianity.
00:16:51.580And we could, you know, we could, you know, increasingly divide these things.
00:16:54.540Those are competing programs for exploiting habitats.
00:16:59.020Some of them are adapted to different places and times.
00:17:03.200And, you know, it works in an evolutionary fashion for a reason.
00:17:06.720Sectarian difference is effectively like variation in a population of creatures in which those variants that more efficiently exploit the landscape and frustrate competition between members of the same lineage prosper.
00:17:20.100And those that fail to do those things go extinct.
00:17:22.740That's how these things got shaped by selection.
00:17:25.380And it's why we have these remarkable narratives in the present.
00:17:29.740But to recognize that these are products of evolution is to say that we know that they are adapted to the environments from which they came and not the environments that we find them in.
00:17:39.480And that puts the onus on us to figure out which portion of these things is still relevant and which portion needs an update or replacement.
00:17:45.900The part of the book that I found really interesting was where you tackled astrology, because now we're very dismissive of people who enjoy astrology.
00:17:57.160But you in fact said, look, hang on, there is merit behind this way of thinking.
00:18:03.680Yeah, which will sound astounding with just that introduction.
00:18:09.100Indeed, it did to us when we first began thinking about this.
00:18:15.040The fact is that modern astrology is generally bunk, because it asks only what day you were born, and then imagines that it can tell you a whole lot of things about your adult personality as a result, I think.
00:18:29.600If my understanding of postmodern astrology is right.
00:18:31.860But we cite in the book a study that looks at birth month at, gosh, I think it's maybe even over a million records from a hospital in the New York area over 80 or 90 years.
00:18:51.120It separates these births, separates these births by month, and then does this longitudinal analysis of tens, dozens, maybe over a hundred different maladies that afflict human beings, and asks the question before doing the analysis, do maladies that people have in adulthood, are they predicted by the month in which they were born?
00:19:12.540The thinking behind this being, by the month in which they were born, but remember that the difference here between this and most modern astrology is that the control is the place.
00:19:24.540All of these people were born in the same place.
00:19:27.200And so if you were born in New York in December, are you not likely to be exposed to different pathogens and different early experiences than if you're born in New York in June?
00:19:38.260That is the reason that we can begin to expect, and that these researchers predicted, and that they indeed found, that there are indeed disease differences by birth month, if and only if you keep track of where you were born.
00:19:53.800So most modern astrology doesn't do that, and there's no reason to think that it has any predictive power at all, really completely not.
00:20:00.500But if you include place and birth month, more or less, and we have evidence that disease, physical disease varies by birth month when you control for place, well, behavior might as well.
00:20:15.900Because just as you might have more access to the outside and to exploring if you're born in one month versus another and thus get different exposures to disease, you might also have different tendencies to be socializing or to be inward focused versus extroverted.
00:20:38.300So I want to clear this up a little bit because I can almost hear our haters cracking the champagne open and pouring glass out of glass.
00:20:48.020The point is an ancestral version of astrology in which a person that was resident in a location was analyzing other people resident in those same locations and noticing that the moment in the year at which you were born might have impacts on your temperament or other parameters of your life.
00:21:07.520That person might have had predictive power having nothing to do with the content of the stories they would tell about why you were that way, but just the simple fact that somebody born in October meets a certain sequence in their nutrition, in the pathogens that they encounter, et cetera.
00:21:24.480So modern astrology, because it doesn't pay attention to where you were born, is bunk.
00:21:49.320One thing you just said, I think, gives even more reason to imagine that ancestral astrology would have been more predictive than modern astrology, even if you do control for where you're born, which is that, at least in the weird world, our diet doesn't tend to differ much over the year.
00:22:04.880Even those of us who buy at farmers markets and try to eat seasonal produce, we all have plenty of food to eat throughout the year, pretty much.
00:22:13.160And so the pattern pre-industrially and certainly pre-agriculturally of boom and bust cycles in just simply available of food and also available of particular macronutrients might have specifically exaggerated predictions, exaggerated the patterns around which you could have predicted differences that would have come from when you were born.
00:22:34.900I also think, you know, it bears analogy to the relationship between, why am I blanking on the term, alchemy and chemistry, right?
00:22:46.820A lot of modern chemistry emerges from the wrong-headed attempt to create gold out of other things, right?
00:22:53.320A problem that is fundamentally nuclear and therefore not within the realm of chemistry, which is about electric charge primarily.
00:23:00.760But the point is, the study was productive, just as somebody who didn't have the tools to look into your pathogens because they existed before the germ theory of disease and didn't have tools that could even find such things, might have noticed patterns.
00:23:15.660You know, the stories that the stories that they told about it may have been useful and our modern understanding of, oh, you know, we have a cyclic pattern of disease through the year and it may have impacts on development.
00:23:30.940You know, there's now a legitimate scientific study of this, which has more or less displaced the prior version.
00:23:35.960But anyway, and, you know, many things are like this.
00:23:39.220You don't necessarily know what you're looking for when you set about study and you may tell yourself wrong stories.
00:23:45.060It may be that acupuncture works for reasons we don't yet know, but chi is a myth, you know, very likely that it is.
00:23:54.320But the thing that you also talked about in the book is how important myths are in a way that we don't understand and in a way how it bound us together in our societies.
00:24:07.460Well, not only are they important, I mean, you know, we sometimes drive our colleagues crazy because our scientific colleagues love to imagine that they have no faith and that they are trafficking in facts, not myth.
00:24:22.380But this is not how science progresses.
00:24:25.120A, you need to have at least a little bit of faith in order to do science, right?
00:24:29.360The idea is to minimize the amount, but it can't be zero, right?
00:24:32.460Because you don't even know for sure that you exist, that you're not in someone else's experiment being fed data in order to see what your mind will do with it, right?
00:24:40.200You can't prove that you're not there.
00:24:49.040You can either spend your entire life on that one puzzle and never get anywhere, or you can say, I'm going to just take that one on faith and I'm going to work on things that might matter and go forward.
00:24:56.940But as we build a model of the universe scientifically, there are zones that we understand really well and then there are giant gaps we can't fill in yet.
00:25:07.380And very often as you get from a zone you know well towards a gap you don't know anything about at all, you become increasingly metaphorical in the way you describe things.
00:25:17.420So, you know, atoms as billiard balls, right?
00:25:20.920We know that atoms are not billiard ball like now, but we didn't.
00:25:24.480And thinking that they were billiard ball like was good enough for a while.
00:25:28.680It allowed us to do certain things and not others.
00:25:30.560So, the basic point is any system of comprehension involves a whole lot of myth and yes, there is value in trying to minimize the amount that's dependent on myth because those myths can steer you wrong, right?
00:25:44.120You don't necessarily know what's contingent on what when it's told in some narrative form.
00:25:54.860We're nowhere near doing that fully yet and we ought to just accept it that, you know, it's not like there are the myth people and the fact people.
00:26:02.540We all have a good deal of myth in our models.
00:26:05.420I guess it's also true though that even those of us who are highly analytical also take in information through narrative.
00:26:13.300And many people vastly prefer the narrative route for taking in information, whether or not they recognize that.
00:26:21.700And since we are a narrative species, using myth to reveal truths, even if they come via stories that are, as we say, literally false, but metaphorically true, is likely to be a better way to encapsulate those so that we retain them and we can use them going forward.
00:26:42.680Most people will remember a story better than a graph.
00:26:47.480It's very, yeah, it's a very powerful way of putting it.
00:26:53.980The part of the book that I found very, very interesting is where, if I say so myself, you flirted a little bit with social conservatism when talking about sex and reproduction.
00:27:06.580Yeah, well, it's not really social conservatism.
00:27:12.020I would say that there are elements of social conservatism which are actually correct and that the idea, you know, a libertarian view of sex does not appear to be making people happy.
00:27:22.840It does not appear to be making civilization more functional.
00:27:26.040It appears to be isolating people from each other, causing people to be taken advantage of, increasing sexual violence and normalizing it.
00:27:34.000So, yeah, there's a lot wrong with the way people are engaging.
00:27:38.380But what I think is maybe a little bit subtle is that this is a sex-positive position.
00:27:46.540It is not sex-positive as that term is typically used.
00:27:49.500But the idea is if you recognize what an important and valuable gift sex is, and it's an evolutionary gift, right?
00:27:56.940Evolution actually turned us into one of very few species that has sex for pleasure, right?
00:29:45.000Well, we're just getting more dissatisfied and more and more and more.
00:29:48.640So, you know, there is also a problem with imagining that it is, I mean, of all things, to imagine that this should be a matter of personal, individual agency, sex seems like a particularly strange choice.
00:30:03.400You know, we know it was an error to go towards junk food over in food space, but at least you're only poisoning your own body.
00:30:09.040To go towards junk sex when sex is explicitly relational, when it's explicitly about two people, about two people coming together and exploring each other in a more deep and intimate way than, you know, than any other way that we know.
00:30:23.580To imagine that that can be driven by the market effectively and that what's in my head, because I saw pictures and some video of someone doing something over here to someone not related to you, I'm going to bring that into my bedroom with you and it's going to be good.
00:30:39.900That there's no relationship to anything that is rewarding or satisfying.
00:30:45.120You know, is it physically titillating?
00:30:51.460Just like junk food, the pleasure is very quick and ends quickly and then you're left with an abyss afterwards, right?
00:30:59.860You don't end up with the reward that lasts a long time, whereas you do with non-junk food and with non-junk sex and with non-junk music and non-junk everything, right?
00:31:10.820We can reward ourselves by training ourselves, just as those who have weaned themselves off fast food into enjoying a delicious and nutritious diet, into being rewarded by, you know, sexual pleasure that is wildly sex positive, but that isn't about having your head turned and, you know, chasing down every hot thing that you see.
00:31:33.540So, I just want to add to this, I think it is important, people who've read the book will know that we argue that men have two reproductive strategies and women have one.
00:31:43.460The two, I mean, we divide it into three because, you know, rape is a strategy that works.
00:31:49.460It's one that hopefully we can drive to something like zero.
00:31:52.280But there's, generally speaking, a no-investment strategy where a male behaves in a way that in the past would have impregnated a female and walks away, so-and-go, as one of my students called it.
00:32:07.420And then there's a strategy in which males invest in a partner and that partner's offspring, right?
00:32:14.200And when men are in that mindset, they are not the same as women, they have different values, but they are similar to women in their level of choosiness and discernment.
00:32:25.760And so what we effectively have is a modern culture in which we are getting men to default to their worst mode, their non-investment mode, and then getting women to mirror that behavior.
00:32:38.160And it's not making men or women happy.
00:32:41.200That's the problem, is that we have a better mode, and we are defaulting away from it.
00:32:45.860There were certainly some problems with first- and second-wave feminism.
00:32:50.940I always called myself a feminist, even though I came of age really as third-wave feminism was happening.
00:32:58.140And it didn't look like it could possibly become ascendant the way it did.
00:33:01.780So I, you know, in my younger years, would call the third wave, who hadn't yet identified themselves as third-wave feminists, the faux feminists, the fake feminists, because it looks illiberal.
00:33:11.540It looks, you know, it looks, frankly, kind of misogynistic and regressive, and it's going to send not just women but all of us backwards.
00:33:18.420So this feels consistent with an actually liberal perspective on bringing equality of opportunity to men and women equally, but not pretending that we're the same, because we're not.
00:33:32.980And one of the parts of the book that I found really interesting in this chapter was talking about how a society where there was less relationships, where we were less monogamous, encourages male violence.
00:33:46.080Yeah, it directly does, because for reasons we don't have to go into, sex ratios tend to be about even at birth.
00:33:57.120And so what happens is, if you have a system in which some men-
00:34:00.640Sorry, which just means that there are an equal number of boys and girls born absent other considerations.
00:34:04.860So any system that causes some men to have more than one wife leaves other men sidelined, and one doesn't have to extrapolate very far to see that a bunch of sexually frustrated men either becomes a problem internal to a society,
00:34:21.800or it becomes a global problem when the elites who have more than one wife take all of those sexually frustrated young men, arm them, and point them over a border at some enemy that maybe doesn't see it coming.
00:34:35.260And, you know, that's a pattern of history, and if we don't want to see that, if we don't want to see war-like nations, and if we don't want to see violence within our own culture, monogamy is clearly the way to go.
00:34:47.120It also has other really important benefits.
00:34:50.000It increases the tendency towards cooperation.
00:34:53.760In other words, full siblings have twice the reason to cooperate, as half siblings do.
00:34:58.000It causes males to all be brought into productive activities, and frankly, the coherent system of motivation that arises out of a circumstance where all men have the prospect of finding a mate but need to be worthy in order to impress someone to get them to accept them as a mate,
00:35:23.360that that that system actually results in a tremendous amount of innovation and productivity in our society.
00:35:30.160So, yeah, the benefits are many, and unfortunately, the sophistications of the moment are self-obsessed, and they are, frankly, delusional, right?
00:35:42.280We hear stories about polyamory being a better system for child-rearing because, basically, nobody knows whose child is whose, and so everybody participates in raising them, and it'll all be glorious, and that's nonsense.
00:35:56.640Men are wired to need a high certainty of paternity before they're likely to invest.
00:36:01.860Well, but I think it's true, to give them their due, that in a situation in which no man knows whose child he has fathered, that all men will contribute to parenting equally, which is to say, none at all.
00:36:17.220I should say, again, I hear our detractors opening yet more champagne because they will have heard us say something that argues that adoption doesn't exist, and adoption definitely does exist.
00:36:28.000But the point is, there's a difference between the eyes-wide-open version that actually functions for good reasons, there are reasons that people want to adopt, and there are honorable reasons, and the idea that people who just don't know whose children are whose are going to invest in them all at some high level, which is not going to happen.
00:36:46.360Heather, could I take you back to when you were talking about men and women and equal but not the same?
00:36:52.580Is that really the core of the problem here?
00:36:56.960Because I know from my own experience with my wife how empowering and liberating it is for us both to be able to say, you know, if my wife says, why can't you be more like this?
00:37:07.500For me to be able to say, it's because I'm a man, or vice versa, for her to be able to say, well, I'm behaving in this way because I'm a woman.
00:37:14.760It's the most freeing thing for us as a couple.
00:37:17.600But to say that out loud in public is sexist, is misogynistic, to say, well, she's like that because she's a woman, or he's like that because he's a guy.
00:37:27.520We're not allowed to do that anymore, it feels like, sometimes.
00:37:38.100Well, but I think we don't because it seems, I know what you mean, and there's absolute truth in what you're saying, but there's also the risk of a conflation between the individual and the population.
00:37:51.900So to recognize that men and women are different on, you know, across many domains, it's not just height and muscle mass and hip width.
00:38:00.160It's also variance in many things and interests and the interest, the difference in interests, like for, you know, things versus people hold for neonates, for babies and across cultures.
00:38:12.980You know, this is not some, this is not the Western patriarchy informing us of how we should behave.
00:38:19.280But we are, we are, we have overlapping distributions.
00:38:22.740And so, you know, if I had a chalkboard here, I draw two, two bell curves that are largely overlapping.
00:38:28.160And, you know, that's not, that's not exactly the right description for something like, for instance, intelligence.
00:38:35.700Like intelligence, it seems that men and women have the same average intelligence, but men have much wider variance, much greater variance.
00:38:44.700And so there's more male geniuses and more male idiots than there are women.
00:38:48.740And on average, you know, we have about, you know, the same intelligence.
00:38:53.420So that's, that's interesting in and of itself.
00:38:56.140That said, there are female geniuses and perhaps the smartest woman, however you might want to measure it on earth today, the smartest person on earth today might be female.
00:39:04.680There is nothing in the truth of greater variance in male intelligence than in female intelligence, suggesting that there couldn't be women who were smarter than, than the smartest men, right?
00:39:17.940So the population level truth is absolutely true.
00:39:26.380It's getting in the way of a tremendous amount of not just progress at the societal level, but progress for individuals who are pretending that these differences don't exist.
00:39:36.240But that doesn't mean that any individual cannot achieve something because the, because of the sex they were born to, with a few exceptions, of course.
00:39:46.760Things like gestation and lactation are simply, you know, are simply getting problematic here.
00:39:51.380Well, I actually would love to have a conversation where I could say, you know, I'm this way because I'm a man, but she won't put up with it.
00:40:10.700But the book was fascinating right the way through.
00:40:14.240I just want to touch on pornography very, very quickly, because it seems to me that, and this is coming from a former teacher, that this is a ticking time bomb.
00:40:24.300And that what people don't seem to understand is, especially online pornography, has found a way to hack our lizard brains and essentially just get addicted to dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit.
00:40:43.940I think ticking time bomb is a weird analogy because it seems to have already gone off.
00:40:48.900I mean, it's distorting the way people are interacting, and it is making them much, much worse.
00:40:56.160But the number of things that are wrong with it and the reasons are pretty obvious, right?
00:41:00.460So for one thing, if we define pornography as erotic content that's generated for profit, which I really think is the best way to define it.
00:41:08.980And the point is, well, we know what an entity trying to make profit off of sex is, you know, we know what puzzle they're trying to solve, which is they need to gain attention in, you know, and they need to displace competitors who are trying to gain attention with the very same ancient good.
00:41:25.420Right. They're they need to gain attention by with images of people having sex.
00:41:31.980Well, you're going to move in the direction of the extreme, in the direction of taboo, in the direction of things that aren't good, like sexual violence.
00:41:39.740And the problem is that human beings are not we don't arrive in the world knowing how sex works.
00:41:48.380Right. It's something we have to learn. It's something, in fact, you're supposed to learn with a partner, which is an amazing activity to to be engaged in.
00:41:57.300But the first kind of information that humans tend to have, at least in an ancestral environment, is, you know, people sleeping in the same hut.
00:42:05.920The parents may have sex. The children may be pretending to be asleep.
00:42:09.040They get some sense of what sex actually looks like. Right.
00:42:11.720Right. Well, if that part of your mind that's looking to figure out what sex is, is seeing pornography in which people are choking each other or whatever else.
00:42:19.540Right. It begins to think that that is normal.
00:42:22.400And so now we have this situation where somehow men and women are supposed to work side by side, treat each other as equals and then go into the bedroom and choke each other.
00:42:31.440That that that's not going to work. So then we get into this situation where, you know, consent is something that has to be sought every two minutes or I don't know what people are doing.
00:42:43.120Right. No, that you know, that that seeking of consent thing, it's actually pretty unsexy.
00:42:49.700Right. The moaning is supposed to be the indicator of consent.
00:42:54.140Right. At some level, there's an ancient system there that we've displaced in favor of some modern thing that's so market driven that it can't help but distort our view.
00:43:04.620Well, and in this, as in so many things and many of the systems we talk about in the book, part of the problem is that we've cleaned up the childhood environment so much that the first exposure that children will have to sex is, my God, from porn.
00:43:19.240Right. From complete strangers doing things for a market, as opposed to, you know, maybe, you know, maybe stumbling across adults or playing, you know, playing doctor or whatever the hunter gatherer version of that was.
00:43:34.740You know, exploring sexually as children in interesting, reasonable ways and thus coming of age already with some sense of what bodies are, what their bodies can do, what feels good, what doesn't, as opposed to, nope, childhood is a time for none of that.
00:43:55.680That's not what's supposed to happen during childhood at all. And therefore, we're going to let the screens do it for you. Like, that's an insane way to teach children about sex. And that's exactly what we're doing.
00:44:07.740So, yeah, ticking time bomb. Absolutely. How can we allow children to actually be children and to play in schoolyards and skin their knees and to look at each other across a classroom and make eye contact and do a little flirting at, you know, at younger ages than we are currently imagining is possible?
00:44:32.640And say, okay, as long as long as no one is crying foul, as long as no one is actually getting hurt in a real way, this is actually how we learn to be adults.
00:44:43.260And instead, we cocoon them. You know, we put the children in little boxes and we keep them from all risk and we drug them and we give them screens and, you know, we do the other things as well.
00:44:54.720But the helicopter parenting and the schools that do the same thing, that keep, you know, that keep referees in all sports and free play isn't possible means that, of course, people arrive at the cusp of adulthood with the bodies of adults, but the brains of children.
00:45:10.620And just coming back to porn for a second, and let's keep the kids being exposed to a side, although we don't seem to be able to do that in our society.
00:45:20.540But for the sake of this argument, let's try and separate the two. Isn't there some evidence that societies which do have pornography, A, have less sexual violence and also that you might also describe the existence of pornography as adaptive?
00:45:34.200I mean, I remember visiting Greece and they have these like 5,000 year old little clay models of pornography on them and stuff like that.
00:45:42.680So, no? You're shaking your head, Brett?
00:45:46.360Maybe they were painted in 1974, but you know what I mean.
00:45:49.660No, I know what you mean. I just disagree with your terminology. That was not porn, okay?
00:45:54.980That was erotica. And we draw this distinction quite clearly. There's nothing wrong with erotica, right?
00:46:01.200It's not all good. But the point is, if somebody has something to say sexually, that's completely valid. It's a very ancient process.
00:46:09.960It is the market that is distorting this. It is the idea that you want to see something sexual and then somebody wants to meet that need and they have some competitor that they have to overwhelm.
00:46:21.980And that is going to result in, you know, incest being the subject, right? Incest is bad for a biological reason we now well understand, but didn't, right?
00:46:31.940We knew it was bad, but we didn't understand the problem of deleterious recessive genes coming together when siblings mate, for example.
00:46:39.500So it was taboo because selection caused us to view it that way correctly.
00:46:45.580And now it is being explored in porn because it's a way to differentiate some porn from others.
00:46:51.840So there's nothing wrong with the erotica. It is ancient. Yes, you'll find sexuality represented in virtually every culture,
00:46:59.700but it is the immediate gratification that comes from the market's desire to get you to spend money you would not spend that is so destructive.
00:47:09.800It is also incredibly destructive to have it so easily available that it replaces your mind's sexual creativity, right?
00:47:19.760You become a consumer of sexual narrative rather than a generator.
00:47:23.720And this is kind of, you know, uncomfortable stuff to talk about, but there's a reason that human minds are obsessed with sex in the way they are.
00:47:32.500And men are different in this regard. They are differently obsessed, but they are obsessed with sexual content.
00:47:37.500And the point is you are supposed to obsess over details. You are supposed to obsess over real people.
00:47:45.700It actually affects how you move through the world, what you want and what you'll do when you get in range, right?
00:47:53.420You're supposed to be generating scenarios that have relevance to the real world, not fantasizing about the hunky pizza guy, right?
00:48:02.140Right. So the point is we are denying kids that landscape and we are turning them into sexual consumers rather than people who will participate in some relationship
00:48:12.140that will be likely the most important one in their lives with some toolkit that's ready to handle it.
00:48:18.340I know we've had what seems like a fairly negative conversation, but actually the book is full of recommendations and ways that advise you in terms of food,
00:48:34.120which is something, and sleep, which is things we haven't really talked about.
00:48:37.060And maybe this is a good chunk as we get towards the end of the interview part to talk about that.
00:48:42.740Talk to us about some of the new adaptations that we can make at the individual level and also the societal level
00:48:49.380to start to address some of the problems that we've created for ourselves.
00:48:54.660Well, I mean, you know, to pick up on the conversation we've been having, we have some new tools at our disposal.
00:49:02.680Birth control, for example, allows women to choose if and when to reproduce and how much.
00:49:08.680That means that we have a whole new set of opportunities with respect to careers that women can enter and participate in in different ways.
00:49:18.920So we have all of these opportunities that are the result of a technology, but that technology has downsides as well.
00:49:25.540It is causing people to treat sex in a frivolous way that is causing them to be less kind to each other,
00:49:32.300to prioritize the building of meaningful permanent relationships at a much lower level.
00:49:37.660And so the question is, with all of these things, is how do we take the advantages that come from novel technology
00:49:45.660and separate them from the costs that happen when we deploy those technologies arbitrarily?