00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin.
00:00:09.260And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they
00:00:14.080know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.
00:00:20.420Our brilliant guest this week is one of our favorite ever guests and favorite ever human
00:00:24.100beings on the planet. She's an evolutionary psychologist, Dr. Diana Fleischman. Welcome
00:00:28.200back to Trigonometry. Hi, guys. We buttered you up with that intro. I feel so happy and warm now.
00:00:36.080But you genuinely are. I mean, if you haven't seen our first interview with Diana,
00:00:39.740go back and watch it. It is absolutely brilliant. It was quite early in the day for the show and
00:00:43.320genuinely it was a great pleasure, which is why we're delighted to have you back,
00:00:47.780which is why it pains me to ask the first question that I'm going to ask, which is
00:00:50.960I've met some people recently who I told that I do the show I hadn't seen for many years.
00:00:58.200And I mentioned that we've had some evolutionary psychologists on.
00:01:01.140And the reaction that I got was literally like I'd advocated for a resurgence of the Third Reich.
00:01:06.120So why is it that evolutionary psychology has a bad rap?
00:01:10.340Because the argument that particular person was making, it's all about reinforcing gender stereotypes.
00:01:14.960It's all about getting women back in the kitchen where they belong.
00:01:17.900Getting women back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant where they belong.
00:01:21.420So 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.
00:01:35.160So 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.
00:01:46.600And 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?
00:01:59.500And 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.
00:02:10.020And in my view, if you want something to be a certain way, you have to know how it is to begin with.
00:02:17.320And 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.
00:02:23.140I mean, there are some narratives that I think are important.
00:02:25.440Another 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.
00:02:34.520So, Steve Pinker, Jeffrey Miller, my partner, me, we're a bit louder on Twitter than other people.
00:02:41.680But there's also been some controversy about people.
00:02:44.080For example, there's a researcher called Satoshi Kanazawa.
00:02:47.700And Satoshi works at the London School of Economics.
00:02:50.620And 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.
00:03:04.520I don't think that he thought that it was going to be perceived as racist because that was not very smart on his part.
00:03:09.420So these are the evolutionary psychologists that people are more likely to hear about are those people who have very strong political views, right?
00:03:16.980And 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.
00:03:26.680There'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.
00:03:46.220Most of these people are left-leaning, but those are not the people that people commonly hear about.
00:03:50.080So 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.
00:03:59.900And finally, I just think, yeah, this evolutionary psychology kind of goes against this malleability argument, which the progressives don't like.
00:04:07.440And then it also compares people to animals and says we are very much like non-human animals, right?
00:04:12.840We do things, we, you know, eat and shit and have sex and have normal responses that others have.
00:04:20.880And we are, you know, as I'll say in this lecture I'm giving tonight, you know, we're machines.
00:04:26.160They were designed by natural selection to do very things like find mates, find food, et cetera.
00:04:33.280And people think this undermines human dignity.
00:04:36.440So the right wing also doesn't like that and the left wing doesn't like that.
00:04:39.900This idea that we are essentially machines designed by natural and sexual selection.
00:04:45.540And the focus on sex, you know, there's a lot of reasons why people have a problem with it.
00:04:49.900So 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,
00:05:01.520And 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.
00:05:23.020So 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?
00:05:32.900Yeah, 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.
00:05:47.380So 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.
00:05:58.760If 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.
00:06:10.240This even happens in relationships, right?
00:06:11.900There's actually evidence that positive delusions improve relationships.
00:06:16.140I had a huge argument with an ex-boyfriend about this, actually, where we ended up both doing a deep dive.
00:06:20.920And I said, if you're deluded about how good I am, we're actually going to have a better relationship.
00:06:24.240And he said, cool, I'm going to cultivate positive delusions about you.
00:06:27.060So there's definitely a tension here between truth and actually what could be beneficial for people.
00:06:36.920But from my view, we are getting to the point in society and in science where we actually have to understand what the baseline is.
00:06:43.000We have to understand what differences actually happen in order to understand how to make things different.
00:06:48.320And I've talked about myself as being an evolutionary psychologist and also being a transhumanist.
00:06:52.660So 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.
00:07:04.060Very 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.
00:07:13.740People 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?
00:07:21.600Would you like to be able to get by on less sleep? Would you like to be able to have better memory?
00:07:25.140People say that they would take a pill for that. People are least likely to say that they would
00:07:28.460take a pill to improve their moral views, right? But isn't that as well? Because if we have a high
00:07:33.900level of morality, that in a sense limits us and it limits our choices. Yes. So people, as I think
00:07:39.760I talked about last time, I said, why do women like bad boys? People like potentially exploitative
00:07:44.080men because it's important in a society where many people are potentially exploitative to have
00:07:49.480some of that yourself. I think also people don't want to be disadvantaged in relation to other
00:07:54.420potentially exploitative people. And so being exploitative is sort of positional in that sense.
00:07:59.420You want to be a bit more exploitative than the average person. You want to be a bit less moral
00:08:04.520or be able to exploit moral loopholes a bit better than the average person, you know, no matter how
00:08:08.800good you think you are. And we have this moral view. We think that we're more moral than other
00:08:12.320people. I definitely am. And we talked about vegans last time and you said you're very funny
00:08:16.660for a vegan. I said that actually. I didn't realize what a backhanded compliment.
00:08:22.380But in essence, people think on average that they're more moral than other people. And even
00:08:27.360if you were to ask them, you know, how moral is somebody like a vegan or Mother Teresa or somebody
00:08:32.200who never flies or whatever, depending on what your moral views are, you would be likely to say
00:08:36.920that those people are still less moral than you are, although they might be more moral than the
00:08:40.780average person. But to get back to your question, you know, this kind of progressive view about
00:08:44.200malleability. Yes, that's part of it. But part of it is also, as I will talk about, I'm giving a
00:08:49.260talk about this tonight and also in Ghent, is that people really buck against control.
00:08:55.040So Gina Rippon, who I did a sort of debate against on John Stossel's YouTube, I said,
00:09:02.040you know, she and I went back and forth. We weren't in the same room. But she wrote a really
00:09:05.700interesting book, which is called The Gendered Brain, I think. And it's interesting in that
00:09:10.400And there's a lot of sophistry in the book, unfortunately.
00:09:38.680If 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.
00:09:47.240And 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.
00:09:52.460That doesn't mean they're not different, right?
00:09:54.200It just means that our brain science or the ability to distinguish people based on brain structures isn't very good.
00:10:01.020But 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.
00:10:14.700And I think that something that is really atrophying our ability for science to actually make headway is our desire to not be controlled.
00:10:25.800So people don't want you to be able to guess anything about them based on whether or not they're male or female.
00:10:31.020So 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.
00:10:43.660I 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.
00:10:56.100Or if you could, it was because of the discrimination and the social pressures that they faced.
00:11:01.020actually. So I talk about being an evolutionary psychologist and a transhumanist because I think
00:11:07.500that the best way to equalize our society and to make some people better off than who are currently
00:11:14.160worse off is actually through technology and through biological engineering rather than through
00:11:20.460changing perceptions. There's only so far that changing perceptions about who can do what can
00:11:26.000actually do, unfortunately. And I think everybody is given a kind of genetic lottery ticket. Some
00:11:32.220people are born attractive. Some people are born smart. Some people are born with really good
00:11:35.840willpower. Some people are not. Some people are born with likability, Constantine. Some people
00:11:41.640are born with that haircut. It's a great stuff. But we were joking about it. But to me, there's
00:11:47.740a really serious side to what you're saying. And the problem that I find with progressivism is
00:11:52.460you're engaging essentially in a lie it might be a well-meaning lie but it is still a lie
00:11:57.940and if you are lying about who you are fundamentally that is a way to make yourself
00:12:02.320deeply deeply miserable i think i i get what you're saying but i don't entirely agree so i
00:12:09.560think that there are some things that we can all be deluded about that are kind of important for
00:12:14.040everybody to be deluded about right the idea that you can be anything and do anything on an
00:12:18.780individual level, this kind of what they call the growth mindset. We are incredibly limited
00:12:23.020by our genetic potential and the kind of hand that we're dealt when we're born. But if you
00:12:28.160were to think about that realistically all the time, it would be really bad, right? I don't
00:12:32.500really think that humans have free will. I think that we live in a deterministic universe. And I
00:12:36.420think that humans are part of that. But the idea that you can change your behavior, it's true that
00:12:41.800if you tell people we live in a deterministic universe, they start to think things like it's
00:12:46.400less important to act morally, or it's less important to be good to other people. So it is
00:12:51.820true that some degree of self-deception and deception, I think, is good. But I think if we
00:12:56.600are going to make headway in terms of science, that that deception can't be circulated by the
00:13:03.440people who are the experts. It can't be circulated that, for example, some ethnic disparities in
00:13:10.260health are entirely due to social stigma and discrimination. We have to understand that men
00:13:15.440and women have biological, psychological differences, and that genetics also have a
00:13:20.920very strong determining factor in our psychology, not just, you know, individually, but also
00:13:27.520potentially between populations. This is all stuff that's super important. And if we don't get that,
00:13:32.120we're going to keep trying to make interventions that don't work.
00:13:35.480Well, this is the interesting thing. Like, I watch a bit of Joe Rogan's podcast every now
00:13:39.560and again. This is one of the things. She's someone who's definitely advocating for people
00:13:43.240to have a growth mindset on the one hand.
00:13:45.800But on the other hand, there are times when that ideology clashes with reality.
00:13:50.780So, for example, a guy who's never fought in the Ultimate Fighting Championship,
00:13:54.540the UFC, like CM Punk, suddenly decides that he can do it.
00:13:58.460And he goes in and gets his ass kicked because there's a limitation to that mindset.
00:14:03.360But equally, it's useful to have it on an individual level.
00:14:06.360Anyway, let's move on to talk about your upcoming book,
00:14:09.500which is called How to Train Your Boyfriend.
00:14:11.560My girlfriend is never getting that book.
00:14:28.280I think it's something that, you know, you've gendered it for reasons that we'll get into.
00:14:32.520But 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?
00:14:40.380There's lots of stuff that we all want, you know.
00:14:42.720So 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?
00:14:53.040You know, what would be the best way to achieve that?
00:14:55.760So I've been reading a ton of B.F. Skinner, who is a very famous, well, the most famous behaviorist, basically.
00:15:02.540And he was probably the most famous psychologist for some period of time, you know, behind Freud.
00:15:07.900And he just had really, you know, fascinating ideas.
00:15:10.140a lot of these ideas that I've just told you about control, for example, that people really
00:15:15.640buck against control, and that's part of what's addling the science of psychology, come from
00:15:19.920Skinner. But to how to train your boyfriend. So the basic idea is that we all have evolved
00:15:25.340abilities to try and control other people. We all have evolved the ability to use reinforcement and
00:15:31.100punishment to try to control other people. And because we lived in an environment, you know,
00:15:36.820that was, we had very little attention to break off. We had lots of other things that were taking
00:15:40.980our attention. We had limited amounts of time. We were trying often to use the quickest, dirtiest
00:15:45.260way to control other people. And that is often punishment. So one of the main ideas is that
00:15:50.220people overuse punishment and they underuse reward when they're interacting with other people.
00:15:55.960And there's this very common idea that punishment doesn't work. It absolutely doesn't work.
00:16:00.900Right? Otherwise we wouldn't, one reason, this is a tautology, but one reason is that we actually
00:16:04.980wouldn't be so inclined to punish other people. So how to turn your boyfriend is essentially trying
00:16:09.820to appeal to women's self-interests about how to try and get what they want. But also, it's a way
00:16:16.180of trying to limit something that I call the alpha, which is the part of your mind that is
00:16:21.620actually very intent on controlling the behavior of other people. And controlling the behavior of
00:16:25.520other people has been very important throughout our evolutionary history. And we're not very good
00:16:30.220at it in part because we actually can't really be cognizant. We're not consciously controlling
00:16:35.420other people. The more you consciously control other people, the more other people are going
00:16:39.900to resist your control. So if I tell you, Constantine, you really need to go on a vacation
00:16:43.660or a holiday, you might be like, oh, that's a great idea. And I'm like, let me tell you my
00:16:50.860package to Cancun, right? You're going to be more cynical or skeptical of me if I have some
00:16:56.960self-interest. And so if we're not aware, if we're self-deceived about our self-interest and
00:17:01.100controlling other people, then we're going to be much better at it. But another aspect of this
00:17:05.520idea about control is that the best punishments and reinforcements happen very soon after a
00:17:12.480behavior, within milliseconds, if not under a second of that behavior. And so if you are
00:17:19.980hyper-aware, this is the same kind of thing as the take your hand off the stove principle,
00:17:24.860If you think this stove is hot, I should remove my hand.
00:17:28.700By the time you've thought all of that, your hand is completely burned.
00:17:32.120In 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.
00:17:44.720And 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.
00:17:54.160And 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?
00:18:05.040I 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.
00:18:41.460You are really in this very austere environment.
00:18:44.920And what is it that you're thinking about all the time when you're in this austere environment?
00:18:48.840Well, I mean, I asked a bunch of the women that I was on meditation retreat with,
00:18:52.100and they often think about conflicts they had with other people.
00:18:55.080They think about conversations, things that they should have said or should not have said,
00:18:58.840ways that they should have engaged with other people, people that they should have forgiven or not.
00:19:02.280And to me, what's happening in your brain when it's devoid of stimulation a lot
00:19:07.260is thinking about how you could better or your regrets about social control.
00:19:13.400But one thing I found really interesting about, well, there were many things,
00:19:16.300But 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.
00:19:24.860Yes. 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.
00:19:40.840because those kinds of women who didn't care about those things,
00:19:44.880they didn't actually try and control the behavior of their partner,
00:19:47.740would have more likely been evolutionary dead ends.
00:19:51.540So we talk about this a lot in evolutionary psychology,
00:19:55.080even though it's a difficult thing to actually prove,
00:19:58.460which is something called the mismatch hypothesis.
00:20:00.540And the idea is that our modern environment differs in many fundamental ways
00:20:39.080And 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.
00:20:50.800Because 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.
00:21:05.120That's a very strange mismatch as well.
00:21:06.760But if you don't see a man engaging competently with your needs, then that's going to be something
00:21:12.820that's going to be upsetting, even though it's no longer a life or death situation.
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00:23:18.060But 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.
00:31:08.380And he says, you know, most of what happens with children and their educational attainment and stuff is actually just genetic.
00:31:15.260So 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.
00:31:22.540But 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.
00:31:29.760I think some of it has to do with like attachment parenting.
00:31:32.840You know, you don't want to be pushing your kid away in a carriage.
00:31:35.080You want to be wearing them all the time, this kind of thing.
00:31:37.420And I recently read an amazing essay from B.F. Skinner about something he designed for his second daughter, which is called an air crib.
00:31:45.400And he says that he got down taking care of a baby down to only an hour and a half a day.
00:31:53.120But, you know, we don't count laundry.
00:31:55.380So essentially he designed this air crib and it's got a plastic sheet in it.
00:31:59.280And the air quality inside is regulated for a newborn at 86 degrees.
00:32:03.560I'm going to build one of these things.
00:32:04.660It's regulated at 86 degrees, and then the air quality is filtered through, right?
00:32:09.340And then the baby only has to wear a diaper, doesn't have to wear any clothes.
00:32:12.880Because if you look at parents dealing with children, they're like taking on tiny cardigans,
00:32:17.060pulling off tiny cardigans, putting on their tiny shoes, taking off their tiny shoes.
00:32:20.640They're always dressing them up and doing things.
00:32:22.680Skinner basically says you just keep them in a temperature-controlled environment with the air filtered,
00:32:27.680and they can wiggle, waggle any way they want.
00:32:31.100Newborns want to always be moving around.
00:32:33.020Not newborns, but babies want to always be moving around.
00:32:35.760And 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.
00:32:48.480And 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?
00:32:59.720And when it wasn't necessary for their well-being, they just cut it out.
00:33:03.020right? And the kid ended up totally fine. So what I think people are doing when they like really
00:33:08.380hothouse their kids in this way, of course, total disclaimer, I have no kids yet. I'm, you know,
00:33:13.720you're going to see me in a couple of years potentially. And I'm going to be like one of
00:33:17.020these, you know, baby wearing women who just, you know, like my boob is constantly in my kid's mouth
00:33:21.700until they're like 10 years old. I have no idea like what kind of, that's the scary thing about
00:33:26.920motherhood actually. Like that crazy woman from Game of Thrones. That's going to be you. You're
00:33:33.000through the moon door incredibly scary thing about motherhood is that i have no idea how fundamental
00:33:38.080my personality change is going to be so scary but and that leads us really nicely on because
00:33:43.380you would you we touched on it earlier about how we are machines who are designed to pass on our
00:33:49.380code yeah so really are we just a slave to our hormones when you and you said yourself about
00:33:54.880motherhood that you don't know how you're going to behave yeah exactly that's that's the really
00:33:58.640scary thing about it. I don't know if slave is the right word, but I would say that we are
00:34:03.480determined. And luckily, we can change our environments. I have some decision about who
00:34:12.680I spend time with. Other environments and influences have on me. But in some sense,
00:34:17.200I have no control over that because that's a process that's going to happen. And I'm going to
00:34:22.800be beholden to my hormones. I mean, you even find this in day-to-day life that you can feel anxious
00:34:28.140or depressed, and you don't know how to hack yourself. You don't actually know how to change
00:34:33.480how you feel. And there's a lot of really great stuff about this. There's a really good book out
00:34:38.960by Randy Nessie called Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. And he talks about mental health
00:34:43.840and mental illness from this Darwinian and evolutionary perspective. And I just think
00:34:48.220it's incredibly important to think about yourself in this way. If you think about yourself as a
00:34:53.480machine that's designed to perpetuate your code, or that's designed to perpetuate your code, not
00:34:57.560just through direct reproduction, but also potentially for caring for family, caring for
00:35:02.280friends, building a good reputation, all these kinds of things, then you will have a much better
00:35:07.340understanding of why you feel bad, why you feel good, what's working for you and what isn't.
00:35:12.780And I think a Darwinian perspective does have an incredible promise for improving individual lives
00:35:18.220if we understand it well enough. Well, one of the interesting tidbits of information you
00:35:22.900mentioned in the book is that uh the strongest predictor of a of an argument between uh in a
00:35:29.300relationship is blood sugar levels that's right yeah so people are essentially arguing because
00:35:35.200they haven't eaten basically yeah exactly um yeah the low blood sugar is yeah so this is an
00:35:40.840interesting feature of punishment so as i said uh if you want to get somebody like if you want
00:35:47.520francis to stop frowning yes i do you've got my full undivided attention you could like put a
00:35:56.260shock collar on him and you could shock him every time he frowns can we get one of those next time
00:36:00.780let's get one for tomorrow man that actually needs to be a really quick easy way of doing it
00:36:03.700if 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
00:36:09.200way to get somebody to do something you want is to shape their behavior otherwise right so if you
00:36:13.480want to get a dog to sit, first you reward them for looking at you, then you reward them for their
00:36:18.200bottom moving slightly towards the ground, and then that's an iterative process. That's actually
00:36:22.480much more complicated than just punishing somebody is. So what you see in non-human animals is that
00:36:29.980punishment is often the first course of action. So if you feel bad, there's some chance that
00:36:35.360somebody around you made that happen, right? And so you automatically punish them. You see this in
00:36:39.880non-human animals. So there's this kind of sadistic experiment they did where they put
00:36:43.680two rats in a cage, one's tied up, one's not, and they electrified the floor. And what happens
00:36:49.200when you electrify the floor? The one rat attacks the other rat. The free rat attacks the tied up
00:36:54.640rat. Yes, that's right. The free rat attacks the tied up rat just in case it's a tied up rat's
00:36:59.000fault, right? And you see this, you think, oh, we're smarter than rats. No, we're not smarter
00:37:03.640than rats because if I'm hungry, I'm going to be bitchy to whoever's around because it might be
00:37:08.680their fault that i haven't been fed yeah well we're taking you out for lunch after this so it's
00:37:12.600all good it's all good we're definitely gonna feed you so uh so this is the one you know one
00:37:17.500thing that happened then you also see this like um it's very funny this there's a kind of meta
00:37:22.160punishment that happens so um this this guy that i was friends with we were out to dinner and then
00:37:28.940his wife calls him up and she said where are the towels and he said um i put them in the dryer and
00:37:33.540she hangs up really abruptly so it was funny because she wanted him to have done something
00:37:37.840wrong. She wanted him to have left them out wet so that she could yell at him. And then when she
00:37:42.200couldn't yell at him, she was upset. So we also get reinforced for engaging in punishment and we
00:37:47.340can actually punish people for not doing something that would let us punish them. Does that make
00:37:51.620sense? Yeah, absolutely. So there's this stuff that, these cycles that happen. And I think that
00:37:57.420understanding your impetus to punish, especially when you're hungry. So one thing that there was
00:38:03.060a weird explosion on Twitter recently about was fasting. I think fasting is really good. I think
00:38:08.080it's really good for health. And I do like a week long fast or a 10 day fast twice a year.
00:38:13.440I think it's really good for you. There were lots of people speculating that I have an eating
00:38:17.240disorder. I love food just fine. But you're not starving if you have food, if you mean you have
00:38:22.660food on you. Right. So what happens is you definitely don't want to be around your romantic
00:38:29.540partner like the first two days potentially you can be but you have to just decide that you're
00:38:34.400not going to talk to each other very much um because you will be incredibly difficult to be
00:38:39.780around you will be very very irritable and part of that ability is to punish kind of whoever's
00:38:44.220around no matter whether they've done anything wrong or not and it's part of that like let's
00:38:49.900say in a woman's case is it like well this guy hasn't brought on brought home a hunk of meat
00:38:54.460recently is that it when we're when we're being really like crude you know whatever clan of the
00:38:59.900beer whatever that stupid movie is when yeah jeffrey and i do joke about that he's like i'm
00:39:04.460sorry i didn't bring you a kill like i'm hungry um yeah so this is an interesting thing about yeah
00:39:10.340about punishment um but another interesting thing about punishment and women is that women really
00:39:15.200want men to do stuff for them because they want to right so i have an interesting story about this
00:39:20.600I had a boyfriend who, lovely, lovely guy, actually.
00:39:25.620But on my first ever birthday, he came from a family where they didn't exchange cards,
00:40:18.860But 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.
00:40:29.480Picking out my gift and picking out my card had brought him no pleasure because he was doing those things to avoid my punishment.
00:40:36.160He 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.
00:40:43.340And you see this with dogs and other animals, too.
00:40:45.520If you punish them for not doing a behavior, like if you punish a dog for not coming quickly enough, they will come fairly quickly.
00:40:53.000But you'll see the ambivalence about what they're going to do because they're approaching the person who punished them.
00:40:58.840Whereas if you give them a treat every time they come quickly, they'll bound over.
00:41:02.220There's no ambivalence about it at all.
00:41:03.840And the same thing happens in human relationships where if you get what you want through punishment.
00:41:09.120You 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.
00:41:16.180I 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.
00:41:25.540You'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.
00:41:32.000I was attending a lecture by an education expert
00:41:36.760who was talking about reward and punishment
00:41:39.640and essentially getting children to behave.
00:41:41.820And he was saying that it's been proven
00:41:44.280that it's not how severe the punishment is,
00:42:27.520there's two guys and they're talking about how
00:42:29.480So 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.
00:42:38.420So 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.
00:42:47.820And 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?
00:45:12.280don't have any relationships with anybody that is by far the if you don't want any drama or
00:45:17.940complications the easiest use of your time but yeah I have met some really amazing people who
00:45:23.260are asexual and I have wished at times that there was some kind of ability to change myself so I
00:45:31.100could be asexual for some period of time apparently you know some parts of child rearing are like that
00:45:37.800anyways. Another thing for you to look forward to, Jeffrey. It's like another Game of Thrones
00:45:49.200reference, Lord Varys, the one who's a eunuch. He gets all the shit done in that. Probably a great
00:45:54.820singing voice as well. Exactly. But I was going to ask you, you talk about this urge to avoid
00:46:02.520control. What is the evolutionary stimulus, the evolutionary rationale for avoiding other people
00:46:08.540controlling your actions? Okay. That's a really good question. That's always what people say when
00:46:13.220they want to delay answering a question. Great question. So each of us has adaptive strategies,
00:46:20.360right? My adaptive strategy might be to increase my status, to improve my reputation, for other
00:46:27.200people to think I'm moral, et cetera, right? And then I might have a person in my life who has
00:46:33.460different strategy. So let's say I have a partner and my adaptive strategy is to monopolize his
00:46:39.100resources and his attention completely. And his adaptive strategy is to give me just enough
00:46:44.160resources and attention to keep me around, but also to see many other women on the side, right?
00:46:49.060What he might do is try to control how much I demand of his attention. And what I might want
00:46:53.880to do is punish him every time he doesn't give me enough attention. So that's one very familiar
00:46:59.180kind of dynamic that people have. If somebody is able to control you, then that necessarily means
00:47:05.800that they will be able to get what they want from an adaptive strategy perspective. They'll be able
00:47:11.220to say that they have better status than you or have a better reputation than you or that they're
00:47:15.820more moral than you. So they'll be able to get over on you potentially. And that's why we're so
00:47:20.780resistant to control. And you also see this in families, right? Children tend to be pretty
00:47:26.300credulous about their parents up until a point, and then they get very rebellious as teenagers.
00:47:31.940And why do teenagers get rebellious? Well, you start to buck against what your parents want.
00:47:36.600Your parents' values and your parents' desires for you are going to be in their best self-interest,
00:47:41.600but your self-interest as a newly reproductively viable person, as somebody who can choose your
00:47:49.080own mates and things is going to be different than theirs. So in every relationship, there is
00:47:54.780conflict. You even see this in pregnancy, right? A fetus actually causes gestational diabetes
00:48:01.580because the fetus wants sugar to be in the bloodstream for as long as possible so that they
00:48:05.600can get as big as possible because the fetus has only one chance to get big and strong. Whereas
00:48:09.860the mother doesn't want to have gestational diabetes. She wants her body to be able to use
00:48:14.560to have further offspring. So in every relationship, no matter how beautiful, and people talk about
00:48:20.280pregnancy that way a lot, the reason that pregnancy isn't entirely delightful is because there is
00:48:24.880conflict between mother and fetus. And there is conflict in terms of the end goals in every
00:48:30.740relationship. And that's part of why, you know, monogamy and pair bonds make sense because it
00:48:36.360aligns people's strategies. You see this in non-human animals as well, that in a species where
00:48:42.360the males have multiple females, that they're less invested, necessarily, in each one of them.
00:48:49.500When I was reading your book, it was fascinating all the way through. There were certain moments
00:48:54.220that particularly piqued my interest, in particular when you touched on BPD,
00:48:57.820borderline personality disorder. Would you like to go and talk about that a little bit more?
00:49:05.300Yeah, so borderline personality disorder, there is this idealization and devaluation.
00:49:12.360That'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.
00:49:23.960There are funny stories to tell about her that maybe I'll leave.
00:49:28.940They're funny now in retrospect. At the time, they were not very funny.
00:49:32.040Just for anyone who doesn't know at all what borderline personality disorder is, just start from the very beginning.
00:49:37.780So 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?
00:49:47.460They weren't clear about where it actually fell.
00:49:50.220So it's not at all like dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities.
00:49:53.880It's actually a disorder where you have very volatile relationships.
00:49:57.720These people often have problems with drugs and alcohol.
00:50:00.060They have problems keeping any kind of romantic relationship.
00:50:02.580And they also vacillate very quickly between idealizing and devaluing their partners.
00:50:09.120This 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.
00:51:15.020But I took her to a party once, right?
00:51:17.360It was like a Halloween party around this time of year, many years ago.
00:51:21.080And she was just wearing like a coat and lingerie.
00:51:23.560And I literally talked to somebody else for five minutes.
00:51:26.160And 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.
00:51:41.320And 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.
00:51:52.900So what I talk about in the book is basically that this is like training in overdrive.
00:52:00.820These women can be—they're really good at remembering your preferences.
00:52:04.140They know what's uniquely reinforcing to you.
00:52:06.800Sex is something that's uniquely reinforcing to men.
00:57:17.020And the second part of my question was about,
00:57:19.040So 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?
00:57:34.120So it's a little bit more complicated.
00:57:36.180Most of the time, men want to influence women to influence them less, if that makes sense.
00:57:42.060So 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.
00:57:54.080Whereas women more often are interested in actually trying to get their partner to be more attentive and interested in responsible, things like that.
00:58:05.100And 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.
00:58:20.380So 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.
00:58:33.600And 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.
00:58:40.440And I'm like, you better not give me what I want right now because I don't want you to reinforce me for this.