TRIGGERnometry - April 26, 2020


＂We Evolved to Manipulate＂ - Diana Fleischman

Topics
hair loss treatment testing the bond polygyny threshold model motherhood and evolution of personality punishment and behavior motivation polyamory rebellion against control
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Diana Fleischman
Mentioned
Jeffrey Miller Follow Diana Fleischman B.F. Skinner Khan Constantine Palacio Orgasmo Mother Teresa Steven Pinker John Stossel Brian Kaplan Randy Nesse Gina Rippon John Tabor Joe Rogan Odysseus Satoshi Barnett Cancun Freud
Will We Have a Rapid Recovery？ ＂Trans Issues Affect EVERYBODY＂ - Arielle Scarcella

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per minute

192.24

Word count

12,090

Sentence count

689

Harmful content

Misogyny

41

sentences flagged

Toxicity

36

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman joins us to talk about why evolutionary psychology has a bad rap, why it's not just about getting women back in the kitchen where they belong, and why we shouldn't care about evolutionary psychology at all.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin.
00:00:09.260 And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they
00:00:14.080 know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.
00:00:20.420 Our brilliant guest this week is one of our favorite ever guests and favorite ever human
00:00:24.100 beings on the planet. She's an evolutionary psychologist, Dr. Diana Fleischman. Welcome
00:00:28.200 back to Trigonometry. Hi, guys. We buttered you up with that intro. I feel so happy and warm now.
00:00:36.080 But you genuinely are. I mean, if you haven't seen our first interview with Diana,
00:00:39.740 go back and watch it. It is absolutely brilliant. It was quite early in the day for the show and
00:00:43.320 genuinely it was a great pleasure, which is why we're delighted to have you back,
00:00:47.780 which is why it pains me to ask the first question that I'm going to ask, which is
00:00:50.960 I've met some people recently who I told that I do the show I hadn't seen for many years.
00:00:58.200 And I mentioned that we've had some evolutionary psychologists on.
00:01:01.140 And the reaction that I got was literally like I'd advocated for a resurgence of the Third Reich. 0.76
00:01:06.120 So why is it that evolutionary psychology has a bad rap?
00:01:10.340 Because the argument that particular person was making, it's all about reinforcing gender stereotypes.
00:01:14.960 It's all about getting women back in the kitchen where they belong. 1.00
00:01:17.900 Getting women back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant where they belong. 1.00
00:01:21.420 So I do think that people have this impression that evolutionary psychology is reactionary because it says that many of the gender roles and the patterns that you see cross-culturally, especially between men and women, are a natural state of affairs.
00:01:35.160 So they would say potentially that some sex roles, like things that women are more nurturing and that men seek status, things that I talked about also in the first interview, are less malleable than one might think.
00:01:46.600 And if you advocate that something is less malleable than, say, more progressive people or social psychologists might say, then the implication is that that's how you wish it to be, right?
00:01:59.500 And I'm just saying that these sex roles and gender roles that you see cross-culturally, they are the way they are, and they are fairly universal.
00:02:06.760 And that's not how I want it to be.
00:02:08.820 That is how I think it is.
00:02:10.020 And in my view, if you want something to be a certain way, you have to know how it is to begin with.
00:02:17.320 And so I think all the wishful thinking in the world about what men and women are like is actually not going to change what men and women are like.
00:02:23.140 I mean, there are some narratives that I think are important.
00:02:25.440 Another reason that I think people don't like evolutionary psychology is because that there are some very popular evolutionary psychologists who are well-known like in the social sphere.
00:02:34.520 So, Steve Pinker, Jeffrey Miller, my partner, me, we're a bit louder on Twitter than other people.
00:02:41.680 But there's also been some controversy about people.
00:02:44.080 For example, there's a researcher called Satoshi Kanazawa.
00:02:47.700 And Satoshi works at the London School of Economics.
00:02:50.620 And he wrote a paper that said something to the effect of black women are less attractive because they have higher testosterone, something to that effect.
00:02:59.500 And it was a very odd thing to say.
00:03:03.080 It was an odd blog.
00:03:04.520 I don't think that he thought that it was going to be perceived as racist because that was not very smart on his part.
00:03:09.420 So these are the evolutionary psychologists that people are more likely to hear about are those people who have very strong political views, right?
00:03:16.980 And the people who are just getting on with their work and doing stuff that is, you know, some really amazing work that people are doing, oftentimes in the service of very progressive causes.
00:03:26.680 There's even, you know, a survey from about 12 years ago done by Josh Tiber, another evolutionary psychologist who works on Disgust, and Jeffrey Miller, showing that on average people who take adaptationist views of evolutionary, of psychology, like evolutionary psychologists, tend to be left-leaning.
00:03:46.220 Most of these people are left-leaning, but those are not the people that people commonly hear about.
00:03:50.080 So they think about evolutionary psychology and they think about some very controversial stuff, even though that's not what the mainstay of evolutionary psychology is.
00:03:59.900 And finally, I just think, yeah, this evolutionary psychology kind of goes against this malleability argument, which the progressives don't like.
00:04:07.440 And then it also compares people to animals and says we are very much like non-human animals, right? 0.89
00:04:12.840 We do things, we, you know, eat and shit and have sex and have normal responses that others have. 0.93
00:04:20.880 And we are, you know, as I'll say in this lecture I'm giving tonight, you know, we're machines. 0.99
00:04:26.160 They were designed by natural selection to do very things like find mates, find food, et cetera.
00:04:33.280 And people think this undermines human dignity.
00:04:36.440 So the right wing also doesn't like that and the left wing doesn't like that.
00:04:39.900 This idea that we are essentially machines designed by natural and sexual selection.
00:04:45.540 And the focus on sex, you know, there's a lot of reasons why people have a problem with it.
00:04:49.900 So I think that if people really understood that evolutionary psychology is really just using the lens of evolution to come up with hypotheses about human behavior and human nature,
00:05:01.520 And if they just thought, okay, these people, they come up with hypotheses, these things can get falsified, etc., then there wouldn't be such a rabble about it as there is now about evolutionary psychology, either being evil and reactionary or a pseudoscience if people knew more about what the mainstream was like.
00:05:23.020 So do you think part of the problem with the way the progressives perceive evolutionary psychology is simply because you're denying their reality, that we're all the same, there are no differences between us?
00:05:32.900 Yeah, I am denying the reality. So the idea that the progressives have, which I really have a lot of empathy for, the idea that if you actually make a narrative that people will stick to it.
00:05:47.380 So if there's a narrative that we are all the same, it's actually going to make it more likely to be real because as humans, narratives actually form part of how we perceive the world and actually how we act in the world.
00:05:58.760 If you have a teacher who thinks that you're especially gifted, even if you have an IQ of 80, right, then you're going to do much better than if you have a teacher who has more realistic expectations of you, shall we say.
00:06:10.240 This even happens in relationships, right?
00:06:11.900 There's actually evidence that positive delusions improve relationships.
00:06:16.140 I had a huge argument with an ex-boyfriend about this, actually, where we ended up both doing a deep dive.
00:06:20.920 And I said, if you're deluded about how good I am, we're actually going to have a better relationship.
00:06:24.240 And he said, cool, I'm going to cultivate positive delusions about you.
00:06:27.060 So there's definitely a tension here between truth and actually what could be beneficial for people.
00:06:36.920 But from my view, we are getting to the point in society and in science where we actually have to understand what the baseline is.
00:06:43.000 We have to understand what differences actually happen in order to understand how to make things different.
00:06:48.320 And I've talked about myself as being an evolutionary psychologist and also being a transhumanist.
00:06:52.660 So transhumanism is the idea that we can use technology to improve ourselves, right, that we can use technology to augment our cognition, to improve our morality even.
00:07:04.060 Very interesting paper that I talk about where people say that they would actually rather improve their language ability or improve their memory than they would be likely to want to improve their morality.
00:07:13.740 People are – it's very weird actually if you said, would you like to take a pill to improve the number of hours of sleep that you get per night?
00:07:21.600 Would you like to be able to get by on less sleep? Would you like to be able to have better memory?
00:07:25.140 People say that they would take a pill for that. People are least likely to say that they would
00:07:28.460 take a pill to improve their moral views, right? But isn't that as well? Because if we have a high
00:07:33.900 level of morality, that in a sense limits us and it limits our choices. Yes. So people, as I think
00:07:39.760 I talked about last time, I said, why do women like bad boys? People like potentially exploitative 0.99
00:07:44.080 men because it's important in a society where many people are potentially exploitative to have
00:07:49.480 some of that yourself. I think also people don't want to be disadvantaged in relation to other
00:07:54.420 potentially exploitative people. And so being exploitative is sort of positional in that sense.
00:07:59.420 You want to be a bit more exploitative than the average person. You want to be a bit less moral
00:08:04.520 or be able to exploit moral loopholes a bit better than the average person, you know, no matter how
00:08:08.800 good you think you are. And we have this moral view. We think that we're more moral than other
00:08:12.320 people. I definitely am. And we talked about vegans last time and you said you're very funny
00:08:16.660 for a vegan. I said that actually. I didn't realize what a backhanded compliment.
00:08:22.380 But in essence, people think on average that they're more moral than other people. And even
00:08:27.360 if you were to ask them, you know, how moral is somebody like a vegan or Mother Teresa or somebody
00:08:32.200 who never flies or whatever, depending on what your moral views are, you would be likely to say
00:08:36.920 that those people are still less moral than you are, although they might be more moral than the
00:08:40.780 average person. But to get back to your question, you know, this kind of progressive view about
00:08:44.200 malleability. Yes, that's part of it. But part of it is also, as I will talk about, I'm giving a
00:08:49.260 talk about this tonight and also in Ghent, is that people really buck against control.
00:08:55.040 So Gina Rippon, who I did a sort of debate against on John Stossel's YouTube, I said,
00:09:02.040 you know, she and I went back and forth. We weren't in the same room. But she wrote a really
00:09:05.700 interesting book, which is called The Gendered Brain, I think. And it's interesting in that
00:09:10.400 And there's a lot of sophistry in the book, unfortunately.
00:09:13.460 She's a very nice woman.
00:09:14.460 I think that she has really great aspirations.
00:09:17.120 But her book is terrible.
00:09:18.800 I didn't get through the whole thing.
00:09:20.240 I got through about half of it.
00:09:22.080 Yeah, she's just like, she's really critical of some fields.
00:09:25.460 And then she's not at all critical of something like stereotype threat, which has not been replicated at all.
00:09:30.400 But in any case, so she says something to the effect of there's no structure or pattern that distinguishes male brains from female brains.
00:09:37.960 And that's not true.
00:09:38.680 If you look at a bunch of different structures in the brain, you can actually distinguish a male brain from a female brain with about 80% accuracy.
00:09:47.240 And it doesn't even matter that much because you wouldn't be able to distinguish a physics professor from a murderer of looking at their brains.
00:09:52.460 That doesn't mean they're not different, right?
00:09:54.200 It just means that our brain science or the ability to distinguish people based on brain structures isn't very good.
00:10:01.020 But I think that what people are really bucking against as a society is this progressive idea that there are people in power and that there's a hierarchy and they're trying to take advantage of other people.
00:10:12.260 It's all about power in this sense.
00:10:14.700 And I think that something that is really atrophying our ability for science to actually make headway is our desire to not be controlled.
00:10:25.800 So people don't want you to be able to guess anything about them based on whether or not they're male or female.
00:10:31.020 So now people are saying that they're non-binary or that they have these other very complex gender attributes because they don't want you to be able to say, okay, I'm going to have a very good idea of what your attributes are like.
00:10:43.660 I was even in arguments on Twitter and other social media lately where they said you couldn't actually tell above chance whether or not somebody was likely to have some medical conditions more or less based on their ethnicity.
00:10:56.100 Or if you could, it was because of the discrimination and the social pressures that they faced.
00:11:01.020 actually. So I talk about being an evolutionary psychologist and a transhumanist because I think
00:11:07.500 that the best way to equalize our society and to make some people better off than who are currently
00:11:14.160 worse off is actually through technology and through biological engineering rather than through
00:11:20.460 changing perceptions. There's only so far that changing perceptions about who can do what can
00:11:26.000 actually do, unfortunately. And I think everybody is given a kind of genetic lottery ticket. Some
00:11:32.220 people are born attractive. Some people are born smart. Some people are born with really good
00:11:35.840 willpower. Some people are not. Some people are born with likability, Constantine. Some people
00:11:41.640 are born with that haircut. It's a great stuff. But we were joking about it. But to me, there's
00:11:47.740 a really serious side to what you're saying. And the problem that I find with progressivism is
00:11:52.460 you're engaging essentially in a lie it might be a well-meaning lie but it is still a lie
00:11:57.940 and if you are lying about who you are fundamentally that is a way to make yourself
00:12:02.320 deeply deeply miserable i think i i get what you're saying but i don't entirely agree so i
00:12:09.560 think that there are some things that we can all be deluded about that are kind of important for
00:12:14.040 everybody to be deluded about right the idea that you can be anything and do anything on an
00:12:18.780 individual level, this kind of what they call the growth mindset. We are incredibly limited
00:12:23.020 by our genetic potential and the kind of hand that we're dealt when we're born. But if you
00:12:28.160 were to think about that realistically all the time, it would be really bad, right? I don't
00:12:32.500 really think that humans have free will. I think that we live in a deterministic universe. And I
00:12:36.420 think that humans are part of that. But the idea that you can change your behavior, it's true that
00:12:41.800 if you tell people we live in a deterministic universe, they start to think things like it's
00:12:46.400 less important to act morally, or it's less important to be good to other people. So it is
00:12:51.820 true that some degree of self-deception and deception, I think, is good. But I think if we
00:12:56.600 are going to make headway in terms of science, that that deception can't be circulated by the
00:13:03.440 people who are the experts. It can't be circulated that, for example, some ethnic disparities in
00:13:10.260 health are entirely due to social stigma and discrimination. We have to understand that men
00:13:15.440 and women have biological, psychological differences, and that genetics also have a 1.00
00:13:20.920 very strong determining factor in our psychology, not just, you know, individually, but also
00:13:27.520 potentially between populations. This is all stuff that's super important. And if we don't get that,
00:13:32.120 we're going to keep trying to make interventions that don't work.
00:13:35.480 Well, this is the interesting thing. Like, I watch a bit of Joe Rogan's podcast every now
00:13:39.560 and again. This is one of the things. She's someone who's definitely advocating for people
00:13:43.240 to have a growth mindset on the one hand.
00:13:45.800 But on the other hand, there are times when that ideology clashes with reality.
00:13:50.780 So, for example, a guy who's never fought in the Ultimate Fighting Championship,
00:13:54.540 the UFC, like CM Punk, suddenly decides that he can do it. 0.99
00:13:58.460 And he goes in and gets his ass kicked because there's a limitation to that mindset. 0.96
00:14:03.360 But equally, it's useful to have it on an individual level. 0.99
00:14:06.360 Anyway, let's move on to talk about your upcoming book,
00:14:09.500 which is called How to Train Your Boyfriend.
00:14:11.560 My girlfriend is never getting that book. 1.00
00:14:13.240 She's never been made aware of it.
00:14:15.580 Sorry, carry on.
00:14:16.320 No, no.
00:14:17.400 I'm sending it to her directly.
00:14:20.280 She'll be in the post, Ellie.
00:14:21.860 Anyway, we got a chance to listen to you talk about it.
00:14:26.000 You sent us an advance copy.
00:14:27.240 It's fascinating stuff.
00:14:28.280 I think it's something that, you know, you've gendered it for reasons that we'll get into.
00:14:32.520 But generally speaking, I think every human being in the world is interested in essentially getting other people to do what they want, if you put it crudely like that, right?
00:14:39.980 That's right, yeah.
00:14:40.380 There's lots of stuff that we all want, you know.
00:14:42.720 So tell us a little bit about of, you know, what the angle is and some of the kind of maybe practical applications, like how do you get your podcast pardon to stop frowning during interviews?
00:14:53.040 You know, what would be the best way to achieve that?
00:14:55.760 So I've been reading a ton of B.F. Skinner, who is a very famous, well, the most famous behaviorist, basically.
00:15:02.540 And he was probably the most famous psychologist for some period of time, you know, behind Freud.
00:15:07.900 And he just had really, you know, fascinating ideas.
00:15:10.140 a lot of these ideas that I've just told you about control, for example, that people really
00:15:15.640 buck against control, and that's part of what's addling the science of psychology, come from
00:15:19.920 Skinner. But to how to train your boyfriend. So the basic idea is that we all have evolved
00:15:25.340 abilities to try and control other people. We all have evolved the ability to use reinforcement and
00:15:31.100 punishment to try to control other people. And because we lived in an environment, you know,
00:15:36.820 that was, we had very little attention to break off. We had lots of other things that were taking
00:15:40.980 our attention. We had limited amounts of time. We were trying often to use the quickest, dirtiest
00:15:45.260 way to control other people. And that is often punishment. So one of the main ideas is that
00:15:50.220 people overuse punishment and they underuse reward when they're interacting with other people.
00:15:55.960 And there's this very common idea that punishment doesn't work. It absolutely doesn't work.
00:16:00.900 Right? Otherwise we wouldn't, one reason, this is a tautology, but one reason is that we actually
00:16:04.980 wouldn't be so inclined to punish other people. So how to turn your boyfriend is essentially trying
00:16:09.820 to appeal to women's self-interests about how to try and get what they want. But also, it's a way 1.00
00:16:16.180 of trying to limit something that I call the alpha, which is the part of your mind that is
00:16:21.620 actually very intent on controlling the behavior of other people. And controlling the behavior of
00:16:25.520 other people has been very important throughout our evolutionary history. And we're not very good
00:16:30.220 at it in part because we actually can't really be cognizant. We're not consciously controlling
00:16:35.420 other people. The more you consciously control other people, the more other people are going
00:16:39.900 to resist your control. So if I tell you, Constantine, you really need to go on a vacation
00:16:43.660 or a holiday, you might be like, oh, that's a great idea. And I'm like, let me tell you my
00:16:50.860 package to Cancun, right? You're going to be more cynical or skeptical of me if I have some
00:16:56.960 self-interest. And so if we're not aware, if we're self-deceived about our self-interest and
00:17:01.100 controlling other people, then we're going to be much better at it. But another aspect of this
00:17:05.520 idea about control is that the best punishments and reinforcements happen very soon after a
00:17:12.480 behavior, within milliseconds, if not under a second of that behavior. And so if you are
00:17:19.980 hyper-aware, this is the same kind of thing as the take your hand off the stove principle,
00:17:24.860 If you think this stove is hot, I should remove my hand.
00:17:28.700 By the time you've thought all of that, your hand is completely burned.
00:17:32.120 In the same way as if you do a behavior that I like or I don't like, if I deliberate about whether or not it's a good behavior for me or not, rather than that, I would just have an emotion and instantly punish you or reinforce you.
00:17:44.720 And I do think that this is a lot of the way humans behave to one another, especially in romantic relationships, because those were such high-stakes situations, especially for women.
00:17:54.160 And so men, as I talk about, is that men have always had an ability to control other people in a very simple way, and that is either through force or threat of force, right?
00:18:05.040 I mean, big men especially have this ability, whereas women have not really had this capacity as much, and so they had to develop more sophisticated methods. 0.75
00:18:13.720 So women are better at it. 1.00
00:18:15.220 I mean, my view is that women are better at it, and they spend more time considering it. 0.96
00:18:19.980 And, you know, certainly I went on a 10-day meditation retreat in Hertfordshire.
00:18:28.140 I really recommend meditation retreats because you get an idea if you're on what they call a dopamine fast.
00:18:33.400 You have like – you're very, very significantly bored a lot of the time.
00:18:36.800 You've got nothing to keep your attention.
00:18:38.060 You've got no YouTube.
00:18:38.860 You've got no phone.
00:18:39.540 You've got no books.
00:18:40.160 You have no conversation.
00:18:41.460 You are really in this very austere environment.
00:18:44.920 And what is it that you're thinking about all the time when you're in this austere environment?
00:18:48.840 Well, I mean, I asked a bunch of the women that I was on meditation retreat with, 0.65
00:18:52.100 and they often think about conflicts they had with other people.
00:18:55.080 They think about conversations, things that they should have said or should not have said,
00:18:58.840 ways that they should have engaged with other people, people that they should have forgiven or not.
00:19:02.280 And to me, what's happening in your brain when it's devoid of stimulation a lot
00:19:07.260 is thinking about how you could better or your regrets about social control.
00:19:13.400 But one thing I found really interesting about, well, there were many things,
00:19:16.300 But one thing in particular was these women who had a highly developed sensor alpha and were very good at it were far more likely to pass on their genes than women who weren't. 0.85
00:19:24.860 Yes. So the main idea that I have here is that it's definitely an evolutionary psychology kind of argument is that that women are not built in a way that's like easy to easy to please and unlikely to care about the behavior of their partner. 1.00
00:19:40.840 because those kinds of women who didn't care about those things, 1.00
00:19:44.880 they didn't actually try and control the behavior of their partner,
00:19:47.740 would have more likely been evolutionary dead ends.
00:19:51.540 So we talk about this a lot in evolutionary psychology,
00:19:55.080 even though it's a difficult thing to actually prove,
00:19:58.460 which is something called the mismatch hypothesis.
00:20:00.540 And the idea is that our modern environment differs in many fundamental ways
00:20:04.800 from our ancestral environment.
00:20:06.780 And the ancestral environment is not just whatever cavemen
00:20:10.300 or whatever movie you want to think about it, right?
00:20:13.080 It's also the whole history of mammalian evolution.
00:20:17.060 It's also all of the hominids that led up to us, right? 1.00
00:20:22.020 So that's our environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
00:20:24.700 And one of the main differences in those environments
00:20:28.160 is that those environments were much more dangerous.
00:20:30.780 They were much more stressful.
00:20:32.440 And the stakes of whether or not you were going to be able to have living children
00:20:37.860 were much higher.
00:20:39.080 And so in my view, the way we engage in relationships, especially the way that women engage with men, is often as if whether or not you took out the rubbish is a life or death situation. 0.93
00:20:50.800 Because if you are with a man who actually doesn't consider your needs or who is neglectful, another weird mismatch is to not see somebody all day every day or not see anybody interacting with other people.
00:21:05.120 That's a very strange mismatch as well.
00:21:06.760 But if you don't see a man engaging competently with your needs, then that's going to be something
00:21:12.820 that's going to be upsetting, even though it's no longer a life or death situation.
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00:22:45.320 That's right, your first month for £10
00:22:47.460 and you'll get hair like this
00:22:49.440 and not like my lovely co-host who is desperately thinning on top.
00:22:55.840 I didn't actually have to say that.
00:22:57.640 I just thought I'd hammer it home.
00:23:01.360 Something I want just popped into my mind.
00:23:04.760 One of the things that I've been thinking about as well,
00:23:08.380 there's this in relationships between men and women,
00:23:10.880 there is this sense that on the one hand,
00:23:13.460 the woman would like to be able to influence the man 1.00
00:23:16.260 to do essentially whatever she wants.
00:23:18.060 But on the other hand, I have some personal experience of the fact that if a man kind of stands up for himself, so to speak, and pushes back against that, that can be actually quite perceived as quite high value by their female partner.
00:23:32.100 Yeah.
00:23:32.540 What's that all about?
00:23:33.840 So there's a thing called chit testing in the red pill community.
00:23:37.160 You can call it testing the bond.
00:23:38.580 There's a lot of different ways that you can talk about it.
00:23:41.260 But let's say I have a partner, and I do, and I say, you know, tell me you love me, tell me you care about me.
00:23:47.320 He can do that all day long. That's very cheap talk, right? But if I make a scenario incredibly
00:23:53.180 unpleasant for him, I act unreasonable beyond belief. And then I see, okay, where does his
00:23:59.300 patience break, right? Is it 15 minutes? Is it 20 minutes? Is it two hours? I have a very patient
00:24:05.320 partner. He's very patient with me. So I try not to do this, but I do understand that I am in this
00:24:13.160 kind of scenario. So on the one hand, if he's incredibly patient with me, I think this person
00:24:19.200 is very committed and heavily invested in me. But a man who is high status is necessarily not
00:24:24.180 going to put up with as much bullshit as a man who isn't, right? And so when you test somebody 0.99
00:24:30.860 in this way, when you ask them not to just tell you how they feel, but you actually say,
00:24:36.240 I'm going to engineer a scenario, this is obviously stuff that totally doesn't occur
00:24:39.860 consciously, and I'll tell you about when I'm most likely to do it, then you actually see,
00:24:45.760 okay, there's a certain threshold at which he's no longer going to put up with where I'm at
00:24:49.260 or what I'm imposing on him. And at that point, you think, okay, this man has got
00:24:54.440 either other options or is high status. There's this thing called the polygyny threshold model.
00:24:59.480 So the idea is that women either had a choice of having a monogamous relationship with a somewhat 1.00
00:25:05.600 lower status man because 80% of societies throughout evolutionary history of human
00:25:10.280 societies have been somewhat polygynous. That means very high status men occasionally had more
00:25:15.260 than one partner, whereas low status men generally had one partner. And there were some men who were
00:25:19.760 out of the game entirely. We call them the Genghis Khan model. That's right, the Genghis Khan model. 0.92
00:25:24.700 Or the Premier League football model. Genghis Khan doesn't have like half of 1% of the world
00:25:30.900 as his descendants because he mastered the art of sensual massage. 0.99
00:25:34.720 It's because he killed thousands of men, had sex with thousands of women, 0.98
00:25:39.360 and often these were the women that no longer had men to protect them. 1.00
00:25:43.700 Where was I at?
00:25:45.400 Sorry, I shouldn't have jumped in like that.
00:25:48.060 But you were essentially talking about the fact that over 80% of society is in history.
00:25:53.320 Oh, yeah, it's religious, yeah.
00:25:55.500 So this is one thing that happens is that a woman who is with a very high status man
00:26:00.820 is sharing that man oftentimes with other women
00:26:03.140 throughout evolutionary history,
00:26:05.100 even now to some extent, right?
00:26:07.280 And so he has other options,
00:26:09.720 so he's not going to put up with as much.
00:26:11.140 It's just a very simple market forces kind of model.
00:26:13.620 It's very, very simple.
00:26:14.960 And so if he's not going to put up with as much,
00:26:16.620 she thinks, okay, he's got other possible options.
00:26:20.240 And therefore, it's a circular thing,
00:26:23.240 but if he's putting up with less stuff,
00:26:24.800 that means that he has other options.
00:26:25.900 When he has other options, he puts up with less stuff.
00:26:27.800 and i'm taking some of the red pill stuff that that people really rail against and i'm saying
00:26:33.920 how can women use this in a way to understand better themselves and their relationships with 1.00
00:26:40.780 men and what's the answer to that question well you'll have to read my book which will come out
00:26:45.640 at some point and now there's a counter argument to that and i can imagine the progressives probably
00:26:50.820 somebody with a an indecently short you feel really bad about the progressives today don't
00:26:54.840 with three colors in their hair of indiscriminate gender who'd be saying he hasn't had his breakfast 1.00
00:27:00.520 sorry about this guys yeah i haven't had my requisite carbohydrate or nicotine but who
00:27:05.760 was saying hang on are you just teaching people especially women to be manipulative
00:27:09.640 yeah manipulative is a dirty word but we're all manipulative so so i talk about babies uh babies
00:27:17.180 cry when they don't get what they want you know there's a reason why babies like to be held and
00:27:21.920 bobbed up and down. It's because if you're holding a baby and you're bobbing them up and down,
00:27:26.080 there's nothing else that you could possibly be doing that's useful, right? A baby knows that
00:27:30.560 they have all of your attention when you're doing that. And do people call babies manipulative?
00:27:35.980 I don't think they do because babies are unaware of what they're actually doing.
00:27:39.700 So the idea is that you're not manipulative unless you actually are aware of what you're doing.
00:27:45.620 And if you shame people for being aware of how they're being manipulative, then they're just
00:27:49.820 more. They're running more automatically. Yeah. I was going to say, the kind of automatic
00:27:58.540 pilot manipulation that people tend to do is actually much worse than any kind of conscious
00:28:03.960 manipulation that you could engage in. And the problem people have with conscious manipulation
00:28:07.860 is because it's a characteristic of sociopaths and psychopaths, right? Psychopaths and sociopaths
00:28:13.040 are very aware of how they're manipulating other people. But a lot of what we're doing
00:28:17.640 in relationships with other people is manipulation. And my view is that if we're cynical about our
00:28:22.180 own behavior, then we can actually figure out what's the best way of getting what I want
00:28:26.780 as opposed to what's the automatic way that I'm trying to get what I want.
00:28:31.260 So interesting thing that happens. So I was in a long-distance relationship for a long time,
00:28:35.240 and now I've moved in with my partner. We're getting married in a month's time, actually.
00:28:40.480 And so one thing that I noticed is that when we reconnected again after we've been apart for
00:28:46.940 several months, I was really angry with him in some sense. Like I would go see him or he,
00:28:52.220 especially if I was in one place and he was leaving, I would feel a desire to be punitive
00:28:56.840 towards him about small things before he left. And what's happening basically is that my evolved
00:29:02.560 psychology doesn't know that he's not leaving because he wants to go off with somebody else
00:29:08.420 or that he's not leaving because he's leaving me and abandoning me. It's because he's got to work
00:29:14.080 somewhere else or I have to leave, right? And so when I would see him again, none of the romantic
00:29:19.120 stuff that he had done, none of the phone conversations we had were really mapping onto
00:29:22.840 him in person. Jeffrey, you're a saint, man. Right? None of that. It's like a cat hissing
00:29:30.280 at its reflection in the mirror. Like I understand consciously what's going on. It's like when you
00:29:34.820 see an optical illusion, you can understand consciously what's going on, but you still see
00:29:39.200 it. And so even though I know consciously what's going on, I know that I'm going to do a lot more
00:29:43.920 kind of testing the bond if I haven't seen my partner in a month's time because in some sense
00:29:49.700 I'm going to be saying, I want to test you. Are you still invested in me? What's your status like
00:29:55.440 right now, right? I want to test all those things because what he says, what people say is cheap
00:30:00.940 talk. People can say whatever they want. And so I think humans have evolved to test one another in
00:30:06.180 this way. And you see this. It's funny when people say that this doesn't happen with adults
00:30:10.160 because it happens with children all the time.
00:30:12.380 The idea is that we kind of grow out of it.
00:30:14.540 But when a toddler throws a tantrum or a baby cries or any, you know,
00:30:18.960 you see if you go anywhere where people are taking care of children,
00:30:22.300 you see children just completely manipulating adults.
00:30:26.960 And in some sense, actually not in some sense, in almost every sense,
00:30:32.320 adults really cultivate that.
00:30:33.860 They really cultivate their child's ability to manipulate them.
00:30:36.920 Oh, absolutely.
00:30:37.480 As a former teacher, I used to see it all the time.
00:30:40.160 My favorite question that a parent used to ask me was,
00:30:43.760 how do I stop my child from using the iPad?
00:30:49.040 And I would get that at least twice every parent's evening.
00:30:52.300 And I would say, well, it's very simple.
00:30:54.480 You just take it off them.
00:30:56.060 And they went, but I can't do that because they'll get upset.
00:30:59.000 This is interesting.
00:31:00.180 There's a really great Brian Kaplan book called
00:31:02.080 Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids where he talks about,
00:31:04.340 there's actually a book I think he wrote to try to get his wife
00:31:06.420 to have two more kids.
00:31:07.980 Yeah.
00:31:08.380 And he says, you know, most of what happens with children and their educational attainment and stuff is actually just genetic.
00:31:15.260 So if you just give them like a nice nurturing environment, you don't neglect them and you don't abuse them, then they'll generally turn out fine.
00:31:22.540 But because of this progressive idea that the environment matters so much, there's become a signaling about how much you're willing to invest in your kid.
00:31:29.760 I think some of it has to do with like attachment parenting.
00:31:32.840 You know, you don't want to be pushing your kid away in a carriage.
00:31:35.080 You want to be wearing them all the time, this kind of thing.
00:31:37.420 And I recently read an amazing essay from B.F. Skinner about something he designed for his second daughter, which is called an air crib.
00:31:45.400 And he says that he got down taking care of a baby down to only an hour and a half a day.
00:31:53.120 But, you know, we don't count laundry.
00:31:55.380 So essentially he designed this air crib and it's got a plastic sheet in it.
00:31:59.280 And the air quality inside is regulated for a newborn at 86 degrees.
00:32:03.560 I'm going to build one of these things.
00:32:04.660 It's regulated at 86 degrees, and then the air quality is filtered through, right?
00:32:09.340 And then the baby only has to wear a diaper, doesn't have to wear any clothes.
00:32:12.880 Because if you look at parents dealing with children, they're like taking on tiny cardigans,
00:32:17.060 pulling off tiny cardigans, putting on their tiny shoes, taking off their tiny shoes.
00:32:20.640 They're always dressing them up and doing things.
00:32:22.680 Skinner basically says you just keep them in a temperature-controlled environment with the air filtered,
00:32:27.680 and they can wiggle, waggle any way they want.
00:32:31.100 Newborns want to always be moving around. 1.00
00:32:33.020 Not newborns, but babies want to always be moving around.
00:32:35.760 And there was this incredible rumor, like total urban legend, that his daughter was miserable and that she tried to kill herself because she lived in this crib most of the time until she was about two years old.
00:32:48.480 And what Skinner is saying is that they looked at all of the stuff that parents do for children and they said, what is necessary for the child's psychological and physical well-being and what isn't?
00:32:59.720 And when it wasn't necessary for their well-being, they just cut it out.
00:33:03.020 right? And the kid ended up totally fine. So what I think people are doing when they like really
00:33:08.380 hothouse their kids in this way, of course, total disclaimer, I have no kids yet. I'm, you know,
00:33:13.720 you're going to see me in a couple of years potentially. And I'm going to be like one of
00:33:17.020 these, you know, baby wearing women who just, you know, like my boob is constantly in my kid's mouth 1.00
00:33:21.700 until they're like 10 years old. I have no idea like what kind of, that's the scary thing about
00:33:26.920 motherhood actually. Like that crazy woman from Game of Thrones. That's going to be you. You're 0.97
00:33:33.000 through the moon door incredibly scary thing about motherhood is that i have no idea how fundamental
00:33:38.080 my personality change is going to be so scary but and that leads us really nicely on because
00:33:43.380 you would you we touched on it earlier about how we are machines who are designed to pass on our
00:33:49.380 code yeah so really are we just a slave to our hormones when you and you said yourself about
00:33:54.880 motherhood that you don't know how you're going to behave yeah exactly that's that's the really
00:33:58.640 scary thing about it. I don't know if slave is the right word, but I would say that we are
00:34:03.480 determined. And luckily, we can change our environments. I have some decision about who
00:34:12.680 I spend time with. Other environments and influences have on me. But in some sense,
00:34:17.200 I have no control over that because that's a process that's going to happen. And I'm going to
00:34:22.800 be beholden to my hormones. I mean, you even find this in day-to-day life that you can feel anxious
00:34:28.140 or depressed, and you don't know how to hack yourself. You don't actually know how to change
00:34:33.480 how you feel. And there's a lot of really great stuff about this. There's a really good book out
00:34:38.960 by Randy Nessie called Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. And he talks about mental health
00:34:43.840 and mental illness from this Darwinian and evolutionary perspective. And I just think
00:34:48.220 it's incredibly important to think about yourself in this way. If you think about yourself as a
00:34:53.480 machine that's designed to perpetuate your code, or that's designed to perpetuate your code, not
00:34:57.560 just through direct reproduction, but also potentially for caring for family, caring for
00:35:02.280 friends, building a good reputation, all these kinds of things, then you will have a much better
00:35:07.340 understanding of why you feel bad, why you feel good, what's working for you and what isn't.
00:35:12.780 And I think a Darwinian perspective does have an incredible promise for improving individual lives
00:35:18.220 if we understand it well enough. Well, one of the interesting tidbits of information you
00:35:22.900 mentioned in the book is that uh the strongest predictor of a of an argument between uh in a
00:35:29.300 relationship is blood sugar levels that's right yeah so people are essentially arguing because
00:35:35.200 they haven't eaten basically yeah exactly um yeah the low blood sugar is yeah so this is an
00:35:40.840 interesting feature of punishment so as i said uh if you want to get somebody like if you want
00:35:47.520 francis to stop frowning yes i do you've got my full undivided attention you could like put a
00:35:56.260 shock collar on him and you could shock him every time he frowns can we get one of those next time
00:36:00.780 let's get one for tomorrow man that actually needs to be a really quick easy way of doing it
00:36:03.700 if you want him to stop i'm fine there let's find that i'm sold i don't need to go on but another
00:36:09.200 way to get somebody to do something you want is to shape their behavior otherwise right so if you
00:36:13.480 want to get a dog to sit, first you reward them for looking at you, then you reward them for their
00:36:18.200 bottom moving slightly towards the ground, and then that's an iterative process. That's actually
00:36:22.480 much more complicated than just punishing somebody is. So what you see in non-human animals is that 0.92
00:36:29.980 punishment is often the first course of action. So if you feel bad, there's some chance that
00:36:35.360 somebody around you made that happen, right? And so you automatically punish them. You see this in
00:36:39.880 non-human animals. So there's this kind of sadistic experiment they did where they put
00:36:43.680 two rats in a cage, one's tied up, one's not, and they electrified the floor. And what happens
00:36:49.200 when you electrify the floor? The one rat attacks the other rat. The free rat attacks the tied up
00:36:54.640 rat. Yes, that's right. The free rat attacks the tied up rat just in case it's a tied up rat's
00:36:59.000 fault, right? And you see this, you think, oh, we're smarter than rats. No, we're not smarter
00:37:03.640 than rats because if I'm hungry, I'm going to be bitchy to whoever's around because it might be 0.94
00:37:08.680 their fault that i haven't been fed yeah well we're taking you out for lunch after this so it's
00:37:12.600 all good it's all good we're definitely gonna feed you so uh so this is the one you know one
00:37:17.500 thing that happened then you also see this like um it's very funny this there's a kind of meta
00:37:22.160 punishment that happens so um this this guy that i was friends with we were out to dinner and then
00:37:28.940 his wife calls him up and she said where are the towels and he said um i put them in the dryer and
00:37:33.540 she hangs up really abruptly so it was funny because she wanted him to have done something
00:37:37.840 wrong. She wanted him to have left them out wet so that she could yell at him. And then when she
00:37:42.200 couldn't yell at him, she was upset. So we also get reinforced for engaging in punishment and we
00:37:47.340 can actually punish people for not doing something that would let us punish them. Does that make
00:37:51.620 sense? Yeah, absolutely. So there's this stuff that, these cycles that happen. And I think that
00:37:57.420 understanding your impetus to punish, especially when you're hungry. So one thing that there was
00:38:03.060 a weird explosion on Twitter recently about was fasting. I think fasting is really good. I think
00:38:08.080 it's really good for health. And I do like a week long fast or a 10 day fast twice a year.
00:38:13.440 I think it's really good for you. There were lots of people speculating that I have an eating
00:38:17.240 disorder. I love food just fine. But you're not starving if you have food, if you mean you have
00:38:22.660 food on you. Right. So what happens is you definitely don't want to be around your romantic
00:38:29.540 partner like the first two days potentially you can be but you have to just decide that you're
00:38:34.400 not going to talk to each other very much um because you will be incredibly difficult to be
00:38:39.780 around you will be very very irritable and part of that ability is to punish kind of whoever's
00:38:44.220 around no matter whether they've done anything wrong or not and it's part of that like let's
00:38:49.900 say in a woman's case is it like well this guy hasn't brought on brought home a hunk of meat
00:38:54.460 recently is that it when we're when we're being really like crude you know whatever clan of the 0.95
00:38:59.900 beer whatever that stupid movie is when yeah jeffrey and i do joke about that he's like i'm 0.84
00:39:04.460 sorry i didn't bring you a kill like i'm hungry um yeah so this is an interesting thing about yeah 0.98
00:39:10.340 about punishment um but another interesting thing about punishment and women is that women really 0.99
00:39:15.200 want men to do stuff for them because they want to right so i have an interesting story about this
00:39:20.600 I had a boyfriend who, lovely, lovely guy, actually.
00:39:25.620 But on my first ever birthday, he came from a family where they didn't exchange cards,
00:39:29.640 they didn't exchange gifts.
00:39:30.800 So for my first birthday that we were together, he bought me a Kindle book and no card.
00:39:36.140 And I tore into him.
00:39:38.920 I didn't want to.
00:39:40.240 It was like I just couldn't help it.
00:39:41.520 I'm very punitive by nature.
00:39:44.940 That's the Latin American side.
00:39:47.460 Jeffrey, you have sincere condolences, mate.
00:39:50.600 I was very punitive by nature.
00:39:52.240 This is partly me trying to control it.
00:39:54.100 So I realized what I had done.
00:39:55.720 I felt bad about it.
00:39:56.700 But he got me, you know, that year, he bought me a card, like, the next day.
00:40:00.880 And then the next year, it was my birthday again. 0.99
00:40:04.520 And, like, I had almost completely forgotten about the total, like, shit show. 0.99
00:40:10.100 The total shit fit I had thrown the year before. 0.99
00:40:12.480 And then I found out he bought me, like, a very nice set of earrings and a necklace. 0.99
00:40:16.200 And he got me a card.
00:40:18.020 And I was very pleased.
00:40:18.860 But then I realized he told me that he had gone to the jewelry shop three separate times, that he had spent I don't know how long picking out a card for me, and that he was incredibly anxious giving me the gift.
00:40:29.480 Picking out my gift and picking out my card had brought him no pleasure because he was doing those things to avoid my punishment.
00:40:36.160 He wasn't doing those things because I had been so delighted when he had given me a card or that I had shaped his behavior in any way.
00:40:43.340 And you see this with dogs and other animals, too.
00:40:45.520 If you punish them for not doing a behavior, like if you punish a dog for not coming quickly enough, they will come fairly quickly.
00:40:53.000 But you'll see the ambivalence about what they're going to do because they're approaching the person who punished them.
00:40:58.840 Whereas if you give them a treat every time they come quickly, they'll bound over.
00:41:02.220 There's no ambivalence about it at all.
00:41:03.840 And the same thing happens in human relationships where if you get what you want through punishment.
00:41:09.120 You know, if I don't want my partner to be on his phone when he's at dinner with me and I punish him for doing that, I don't care why he's not on his phone.
00:41:16.180 I just care that he's not on his phone. Right. But if I want somebody to give me a gift because they love me, then if you punish them for not giving you a gift, you're going to get Stockholm syndrome.
00:41:25.540 You're not going to get, you know, which is a certain kind of, but you're not going to get the kind of motivation that you want.
00:41:32.000 I was attending a lecture by an education expert
00:41:36.760 who was talking about reward and punishment
00:41:39.640 and essentially getting children to behave.
00:41:41.820 And he was saying that it's been proven
00:41:44.280 that it's not how severe the punishment is,
00:41:47.980 it's how regular the punishment is.
00:41:50.940 So children don't behave,
00:41:53.560 and essentially adults as well,
00:41:54.780 by how punitive something is,
00:41:56.680 it's if they know something is going to happen.
00:41:58.940 Like if they know,
00:41:59.740 if they come back from the pub 15 minutes
00:42:01.720 late, they're going to get the cold shoulder
00:42:03.880 than if 0.68
00:42:05.680 you go absolutely nuts 0.78
00:42:07.540 once every six times. 0.82
00:42:09.720 Yeah. What do you mean they go
00:42:11.720 absolutely nuts every six times? They just lose
00:42:13.800 their temper. Oh, okay.
00:42:15.280 He's back on to men and women, I think. 0.89
00:42:17.100 We're talking about coming back from the pub.
00:42:19.440 These five-year-olds are coming back
00:42:21.740 from the pub 15 minutes late.
00:42:24.100 There's a funny joke about that
00:42:25.660 where a guy,
00:42:27.520 there's two guys and they're talking about how
00:42:29.480 So they came home last night to their wives, and one guy says, well, I got so drunk last night, I went out to the pub, and I knew that I was going to catch hell.
00:42:38.420 So I came home, I put the car in neutral, I turned the lights off, I snuck up the stairs, I was as quiet as a mouse, and my wife still woke up and gave me total hell. 1.00
00:42:47.820 And his mate says, well, that's funny, because I came home, I raced into the driveway, I screeched the brakes, I left the lights on, I slammed the door, I came up the stairs, I slapped my wife on the ass, and I said, how about it? 0.99
00:42:59.340 And she was still sound asleep. 0.99
00:43:04.240 So I think that what you're talking about is like if you catch hell every six times, consistent punishment can be really good.
00:43:11.720 I think even just random punishment can be more frightening.
00:43:15.480 Generally, people are – if they really want to do a behavior, they're trying to get in through loopholes.
00:43:19.680 And I found this myself, right?
00:43:21.160 I'm trying to make a Skinner box for myself to write this book.
00:43:24.240 I'm trying to engineer things where I'm actually rewarding people for punishing me for not getting
00:43:30.100 my word count done for the day. I'm actually trying to build in accountability procedures.
00:43:34.980 And it's amazing to me that we don't have more kind of these kinds of protocols in place. Like
00:43:44.520 there's no way that you can at work sit in a Skinner box with like a panopticon where like
00:43:49.720 somebody is watching what you're doing. Because in some sense, we all want to avoid control.
00:43:54.960 That's part of the reason why we buck against categories that actually can accurately
00:43:58.380 describe our behavior. That's part of why we don't want to be genetically tested. That's part of why
00:44:03.860 we don't believe in determinism. It's actually because we want to believe that we have free
00:44:07.980 will and we believe that other people can't control us. But to me, it's really weird that
00:44:11.960 we don't have better systems to make people productive. If you actually had like a Skinner
00:44:16.140 box for me to live in, right, where you could regulate my access to social media, if you could
00:44:21.820 control every aspect of my behavior, so I could get what my goals are done in a more effective way
00:44:28.740 and have more free time, I would absolutely sign up. Actually, having said this, I thought probably
00:44:33.960 the most productive people on the planet, and this is just a theory, and maybe this is something for
00:44:37.740 people to explore, asexuals. Imagine how much more you could get done if you didn't feel the urge 1.00
00:44:43.280 every 15 minutes.
00:44:45.100 Yeah, this actually gets us
00:44:46.000 under poly.
00:44:46.560 So people are always like,
00:44:47.420 oh, polyamory, you know,
00:44:49.020 because Jeffrey's talking
00:44:50.180 about being polyamorous
00:44:50.920 and I've talked about
00:44:51.580 being polyamorous.
00:44:52.560 It's very funny
00:44:53.080 because people always think
00:44:53.760 he convinced me.
00:44:55.300 Like, he definitely has power.
00:44:57.820 Haven't spoken to you,
00:44:59.020 I'm not so sure.
00:45:00.260 So people are like,
00:45:01.160 oh my gosh, polyamory
00:45:02.120 must be like so, so complicated.
00:45:04.240 And I was like, yeah,
00:45:05.360 monogamy is also complicated.
00:45:06.640 If you want the least
00:45:07.400 complicated thing,
00:45:08.440 just be celibate.
00:45:09.660 Like that's,
00:45:10.440 if simplicity is what you're after,
00:45:12.280 don't have any relationships with anybody that is by far the if you don't want any drama or
00:45:17.940 complications the easiest use of your time but yeah I have met some really amazing people who
00:45:23.260 are asexual and I have wished at times that there was some kind of ability to change myself so I
00:45:31.100 could be asexual for some period of time apparently you know some parts of child rearing are like that
00:45:37.800 anyways. Another thing for you to look forward to, Jeffrey. It's like another Game of Thrones
00:45:49.200 reference, Lord Varys, the one who's a eunuch. He gets all the shit done in that. Probably a great 0.98
00:45:54.820 singing voice as well. Exactly. But I was going to ask you, you talk about this urge to avoid
00:46:02.520 control. What is the evolutionary stimulus, the evolutionary rationale for avoiding other people
00:46:08.540 controlling your actions? Okay. That's a really good question. That's always what people say when
00:46:13.220 they want to delay answering a question. Great question. So each of us has adaptive strategies,
00:46:20.360 right? My adaptive strategy might be to increase my status, to improve my reputation, for other
00:46:27.200 people to think I'm moral, et cetera, right? And then I might have a person in my life who has
00:46:33.460 different strategy. So let's say I have a partner and my adaptive strategy is to monopolize his
00:46:39.100 resources and his attention completely. And his adaptive strategy is to give me just enough
00:46:44.160 resources and attention to keep me around, but also to see many other women on the side, right? 1.00
00:46:49.060 What he might do is try to control how much I demand of his attention. And what I might want
00:46:53.880 to do is punish him every time he doesn't give me enough attention. So that's one very familiar
00:46:59.180 kind of dynamic that people have. If somebody is able to control you, then that necessarily means
00:47:05.800 that they will be able to get what they want from an adaptive strategy perspective. They'll be able
00:47:11.220 to say that they have better status than you or have a better reputation than you or that they're
00:47:15.820 more moral than you. So they'll be able to get over on you potentially. And that's why we're so
00:47:20.780 resistant to control. And you also see this in families, right? Children tend to be pretty
00:47:26.300 credulous about their parents up until a point, and then they get very rebellious as teenagers.
00:47:31.940 And why do teenagers get rebellious? Well, you start to buck against what your parents want.
00:47:36.600 Your parents' values and your parents' desires for you are going to be in their best self-interest,
00:47:41.600 but your self-interest as a newly reproductively viable person, as somebody who can choose your
00:47:49.080 own mates and things is going to be different than theirs. So in every relationship, there is
00:47:54.780 conflict. You even see this in pregnancy, right? A fetus actually causes gestational diabetes
00:48:01.580 because the fetus wants sugar to be in the bloodstream for as long as possible so that they 0.93
00:48:05.600 can get as big as possible because the fetus has only one chance to get big and strong. Whereas
00:48:09.860 the mother doesn't want to have gestational diabetes. She wants her body to be able to use 1.00
00:48:14.560 to have further offspring. So in every relationship, no matter how beautiful, and people talk about
00:48:20.280 pregnancy that way a lot, the reason that pregnancy isn't entirely delightful is because there is
00:48:24.880 conflict between mother and fetus. And there is conflict in terms of the end goals in every
00:48:30.740 relationship. And that's part of why, you know, monogamy and pair bonds make sense because it
00:48:36.360 aligns people's strategies. You see this in non-human animals as well, that in a species where
00:48:42.360 the males have multiple females, that they're less invested, necessarily, in each one of them.
00:48:49.500 When I was reading your book, it was fascinating all the way through. There were certain moments
00:48:54.220 that particularly piqued my interest, in particular when you touched on BPD,
00:48:57.820 borderline personality disorder. Would you like to go and talk about that a little bit more?
00:49:05.300 Yeah, so borderline personality disorder, there is this idealization and devaluation.
00:49:12.360 That's one that's one major component of it. And I'm familiar with BPD because I've made I had a couple of close friends with BPD and I have a very, very close family member who has BPD.
00:49:23.960 There are funny stories to tell about her that maybe I'll leave.
00:49:28.940 They're funny now in retrospect. At the time, they were not very funny.
00:49:32.040 Just for anyone who doesn't know at all what borderline personality disorder is, just start from the very beginning.
00:49:37.780 So borderline personality disorder is called borderline personality disorder actually because it was unclear if it was a personality disorder or a more significant disorder, right?
00:49:47.460 They weren't clear about where it actually fell.
00:49:50.220 So it's not at all like dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities.
00:49:53.880 It's actually a disorder where you have very volatile relationships.
00:49:57.720 These people often have problems with drugs and alcohol.
00:50:00.060 They have problems keeping any kind of romantic relationship.
00:50:02.580 And they also vacillate very quickly between idealizing and devaluing their partners.
00:50:09.120 This is someone who looks up to you like you're God one minute and then just thinks you're the worst person in the world the next day.
00:50:15.720 Yes.
00:50:16.180 I wonder why those people struggle to keep relationships. 0.99
00:50:19.100 Yeah.
00:50:19.660 So a big part of it is volatility.
00:50:23.020 But if you define borderline personality disorder, some people would argue with me and say it's not more common in women than men.
00:50:29.600 I think it's much more common in women than men. 1.00
00:50:33.020 If you want to say that men have an equal rate of it, you have to define it, I think, quite differently.
00:50:37.920 So I'll just talk about women's borderline personality disorder. 0.99
00:50:40.600 But I think all women have a touch of this, and I think it's kind of like hyper-training. 1.00
00:50:44.820 So you can be incredibly reinforcing to somebody one minute.
00:50:48.580 These women escalate romantic involvement often very, very quickly. 1.00
00:50:52.100 And, like, I dated a woman who had borderline personality disorder, and there was just so many amazing things about her.
00:50:59.180 Like she knew everything about me.
00:51:01.840 She had so many pictures of me in her room.
00:51:03.800 We were at university together.
00:51:05.160 The people knew who I was kept pictures of me.
00:51:07.260 She knew all my preferences, all my favorite things.
00:51:09.820 If I told her a story once, she would remember it forever, right?
00:51:12.680 She had an amazing social memory.
00:51:15.020 But I took her to a party once, right?
00:51:17.360 It was like a Halloween party around this time of year, many years ago.
00:51:21.080 And she was just wearing like a coat and lingerie.
00:51:23.560 And I literally talked to somebody else for five minutes.
00:51:26.160 And she left and started walking down a not dangerous part of Texas, but a dark part of Texas in the middle of the night in just lingerie and a coat in order to punish me basically for talking to somebody else, for diverting my attention for five minutes. 0.53
00:51:41.320 And women who have borderline personality disorder also more likely to do what's called parasuicide to say that they are going to attempt suicide or threaten to attempt suicide.
00:51:52.900 So what I talk about in the book is basically that this is like training in overdrive.
00:52:00.820 These women can be—they're really good at remembering your preferences. 1.00
00:52:04.140 They know what's uniquely reinforcing to you.
00:52:06.800 Sex is something that's uniquely reinforcing to men.
00:52:08.840 They know how to use that.
00:52:09.960 They know how to use their attractiveness.
00:52:11.460 They're incredibly compelling in many ways, but they can also be incredibly punitive.
00:52:16.320 and the family member that I have is amazing, amazing at figuring out where the jugular is of
00:52:24.200 somebody. What is like the worst thing that you could say to somebody that they're going to be
00:52:27.280 thinking about for months or years? And this is something else that they're really, really good
00:52:30.940 at. And it's an incredible, it's kind of a superpower. But in the sense that, you know,
00:52:36.060 in X-Men or any of these other movies, you see some people who have superpowers use them for good
00:52:40.100 and some people use them for evil. I do think that women have this ability. And if you know 1.00
00:52:45.580 about what you're trying to do with it you can use it to really strengthen and improve your
00:52:49.580 relationships rather than make somebody else miserable and control them completely but it
00:52:53.700 sounds as if there's traits of narcissism there as well in that there's similarities between the
00:52:59.940 two have i got that completely wrong is a no i've learned to read it narcissism there's there's
00:53:06.740 often a commonality with narcissism i think narcissism gets defined so broadly now that i
00:53:12.340 actually don't know you know there's all these videos on youtube and things about like how to
00:53:16.920 deal with a narcissist and narcissists is kind of just code now psychology code for like shitty
00:53:21.600 person yeah so narcissism yeah there is some some degree of it and then there's this thing called
00:53:28.240 fragile narcissism which even expands the definition further where you're like okay well
00:53:33.240 somebody who thinks really highly of themselves but sometimes also doesn't think highly of
00:53:36.780 themselves that's kind of everybody so there is an aspect of it there in that they think that
00:53:42.160 they're so important that somebody else should give over all their attention and energy and
00:53:46.160 resources to them. So I would say that is actually accurate. Yeah. And one thing I wanted to deal
00:53:50.860 with before we wrap up the interview, you talked about the differences between men and women in
00:53:54.680 some of these areas and manipulating other people or that's a negative word, but influence on other
00:54:00.640 people, let's say. One of the experiments you talk about is that a four-year study, I think,
00:54:05.680 of couples found that if the woman was less forgiving at the end of that four-year period,
00:54:10.720 the man was essentially better trained, let's say. But it wasn't replicated on the other side.
00:54:16.180 If the man was less forgiving and used punishment and whatever, the woman didn't tend to change. 0.91
00:54:21.960 Yeah. So what what is that all about? And maybe, you know, since since the book is gendered
00:54:26.720 towards women, what are some tips for men for how to behave with their romantic partner if she is
00:54:32.380 female okay so forgiveness is just the suspension of of punishment so anger 0.86
00:54:38.220 forgiveness is just when you stop being angry and it's a form of reinforcement in that in the same
00:54:45.440 way as if i was just hitting you over the head i don't know i keep looking just hitting you over
00:54:49.400 head and then i stopped it would be reinforcing even though me not hitting you over head right
00:54:53.820 now is not reinforcing i know why you keep looking at him because uh out of the two of us in your
00:54:59.300 mind he's the only potential available romantic partner because you think i'm gay for some reason
00:55:04.100 diana so let's go we'll go back to this i thought that constant when in the last interview i kept
00:55:08.960 saying like well you don't have to worry about this constant yeah i was like and i remember at
00:55:13.300 the time i was like a gay jewish russian can you tell me about how you sought asylum
00:55:17.400 you poor poor thing and you see this is the way of going for the juggler and i was thinking for
00:55:24.100 like a month after that what are the vibes that i'm sending off here well you said my partner
00:55:28.140 Francis. And then I met Francis. You guys should do something for the female gays right now. 1.00
00:55:37.340 But anyway, yes, I did totally think Constantine was gay. And then the partner thing is super weird. 0.97
00:55:45.000 So hitting somebody over the head, forgiveness. So in this long term study, they found that
00:55:49.620 a woman whose forgiveness increased over time had a partner whose conscientiousness increased
00:55:55.700 over time. That's a very, very fancy way of saying that essentially women were using punishment to 1.00
00:56:02.140 change their partner's personalities. And conscientiousness is a major personality
00:56:06.340 characteristic that you would want in a husband. Conscientiousness means that he's going to do
00:56:10.480 things that he said he was going to do. He's going to feel bad when he didn't do the things
00:56:13.500 that he said he was going to do. And he's also going to be attentive to your needs.
00:56:17.100 Those are all conscientiousness things. And so even though it's unclear how much environment
00:56:22.540 can change personality, it is interesting that there's actually not more studies about how much
00:56:28.140 wives and husbands can change one another's personalities. So in this study, they actually
00:56:32.700 found that women were changing men's personalities, their husbands' personalities, more than vice 0.98
00:56:38.100 versa, and that men's forgiveness had no influence on women's conscientiousness. Now, this could be
00:56:44.580 a novel, modern thing. You know, it could be that men had more control over their wives in the past
00:56:50.560 and that dynamic has flipped.
00:56:52.900 Or it could be that women are using these more sophisticated methods 1.00
00:56:56.420 in order to change personality
00:56:58.080 and that the method that a man would have had at his disposal,
00:57:02.300 which is threats, has become morally frowned upon, right,
00:57:05.880 to put it lightly.
00:57:08.000 And so that could be it.
00:57:09.080 I'm not really sure why,
00:57:10.560 but it does seem that women are better at this particular skill, 0.99
00:57:15.480 in my view, than men are.
00:57:17.020 And the second part of my question was about,
00:57:19.040 So if that way of influencing doesn't work for men as well as it does for women, what are some of the kind of tips you might have for a man in that kind of relationship where they also want to, you know, influence their partner for the better?
00:57:33.760 Yeah.
00:57:34.120 So it's a little bit more complicated.
00:57:36.180 Most of the time, men want to influence women to influence them less, if that makes sense.
00:57:42.060 So mostly men's complaints about women in relationships is like, I wish that she would be trying to control me less or that she would be less interested in the minutiae of my behavior, et cetera.
00:57:54.080 Whereas women more often are interested in actually trying to get their partner to be more attentive and interested in responsible, things like that. 1.00
00:58:05.100 And so if a man wants to train a woman to train him less, then he has to show her that if she engages in positive reinforcement, if she is reinforcing instead of punishing, she's more likely to get what she wants.
00:58:20.380 So there's a kind of meta-training that can happen where if a man engages with a woman, if a woman is punitive and he just caves immediately, and this is something that I've actually trained Jeffrey to do.
00:58:32.040 I want to be less punitive.
00:58:33.600 And so it's a little bit like being strapped to the mast like Odysseus, right, where, like, I'll be in the middle of a, like, I'll be really angry with him.
00:58:40.440 And I'm like, you better not give me what I want right now because I don't want you to reinforce me for this. 0.96
00:58:44.440 This is shitty. 0.94
00:58:45.260 It feels bad. 0.89
00:58:46.420 I do not want to get what I want in this context.
00:58:49.700 And, you know, similar thing when we first started dating.
00:58:53.120 He was dating other women.
00:58:55.120 We date other people.
00:58:56.260 And I didn't want him to give in to other women as quickly either. 0.98
00:58:59.200 That's an interesting thing about polyamory.
00:59:00.660 So I was like, can you empty out this drawer?
00:59:03.180 It was like midnight.
00:59:04.100 He's like, can you empty out this drawer for me?
00:59:05.360 And he's like, okay.
00:59:05.840 I was like, no, this is an unrealistic expectation.
00:59:09.180 This is an irrational demand.
00:59:11.220 You will not empty this drawer at midnight.
00:59:13.080 It doesn't make any sense.
00:59:14.080 He's like, okay, this is fine.
00:59:15.740 So basically I've tried to train my partners to get me to be less punitive and more reinforcing
00:59:24.900 and also just less interested in minutia.
00:59:28.300 I had this boyfriend who always would joke around.
00:59:30.300 I could be like, oh, you didn't empty out the dishwasher.
00:59:32.300 Do you even love me?
00:59:33.700 You didn't, you know, lock the door.
00:59:35.940 Do you even love me?
00:59:37.040 And the idea there is that women are using these subtle signals of whether or not you 1.00
00:59:42.260 remember to do minute things as signals of responsibility and care and attention.
00:59:47.820 And oftentimes, people can just become forgetful.
00:59:51.680 And so it doesn't really make sense.
00:59:53.580 I'll just give one last example is that, you know, Jeffrey is quite forgetful sometimes,
00:59:57.820 especially about stuff that happened in you know when we went on holiday together or social events
01:00:03.000 that we went to together and it doesn't help at all my first instinct if he doesn't remember
01:00:08.500 something is to actually and like that's not going to help him remember anything and i have
01:00:13.420 developed tactics actually to help him remember things better but i have to read about them well
01:00:18.640 this is a great thing about it comes very much back to your question earlier which is about
01:00:23.140 manipulation versus persuasion or influence or whatever what you're really talking about
01:00:27.700 what I hear in that is an evolved relationship where you're trying to take control of the shitty 0.97
01:00:32.940 parts of your brain, as we all ought to, and manage them better. So you become a better partner 0.96
01:00:38.720 to your partner. Yeah. And I think that's a very healthy thing. And I think we can get caught up
01:00:43.520 too much in this idea that we're all evil running around trying to manipulate people in this
01:00:48.660 conniving evil way. Actually, I think if you if you want to have a better, healthier relationship,
01:00:53.720 what you're talking about is pretty much the only way to get there actually yeah and on that note
01:00:59.220 um we need to wrap up because i'm hungry and i'm gonna start smashing shit up fantastic well in 0.79
01:01:03.980 that case we've got one final question for it as always and as always the last question is what's 0.56
01:01:09.200 the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be talking about
01:01:13.520 i think i've been talking about it yeah i think that this are inclined inclination to manipulate
01:01:18.620 other people about how that it isn't necessarily bad and about how a cynical view of our own
01:01:23.480 evolved psychology is actually the best way forward in order to treat each other better
01:01:27.660 and have better relationships.
01:01:29.340 Well, fantastic, Diana.
01:01:30.180 Thanks for coming on the show, coming again on the show.
01:01:33.340 When is the book out?
01:01:34.680 The book has not got an out date.
01:01:36.560 It's not got an out date, but we'll be plugging it once it comes out.
01:01:39.940 Absolutely.
01:01:40.900 Follow Diana Fleischman.
01:01:42.100 Remind us your Twitter.
01:01:43.180 My Twitter handle is at sentientist, S-E-N-T-I-E-N-T-I-S-T.
01:01:47.980 And you also now have a YouTube account.
01:01:50.000 I have a YouTube account.
01:01:51.260 I've only put a couple of things up.
01:01:52.400 More things will come up.
01:01:53.480 I also have a blog called Dianaverse.
01:01:56.660 That's the only thing that could capture 0.97
01:01:57.920 all of the weird shit I'm into. 0.97
01:01:59.380 So it's Dianaverse. 0.99
01:02:00.660 Yeah.
01:02:00.840 Well, we'll put all those links in the description.
01:02:03.720 Thanks very much for tuning in this week
01:02:04.960 and we'll see you in a week's time
01:02:06.300 with another brilliant episode.
01:02:07.640 Take care.
01:02:08.180 See you next week, guys.
01:02:23.480 Thank you.