Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

00:07boom and we're live ladies and gentlemen Heather huiying Bret Weinstein I didn't screw it up this time nope you got it right gotta get that Steen Stein thing messed up with you gotta get every haulage eyes it's a bad time to get those messed up it is oh thanks thank you for being here both of you I'm very excited about this conversation really excited about it too a little bit nervous in one way but but pretty pretty - well I think it's good to be nervous about it you know I mean what we're talking about folks what we would like to talk about is once you explain it well I think Heather and I have been on an interesting adventure we are evolutionary biologists we trained with some of the the finest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and we have been teaching we taught for habitats for 15 years I taught for 14 years at Evergreen and we spent a lot of

00:56time dealing with students and trying to help them see how clarifying an evolutionary viewpoint is with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we function in how we interact and that was very enjoyable to us and it was very empowering to students to discover that there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a person and we're now watching the conversation out in civilization about sex and gender devolved into an absurdity and on the one hand that's kind of frightening I mean for for for us it's not directly and if you were happily married and so what we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days and our kids are too young to be navigating it yet maybe this will all be clarified by the time they're involved in dating but we also have a tremendous number of millennial friends former students who are trying

01:58to navigate this stuff and finding it difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that frankly there's a much better alternative if one can stand to think in evolutionary terms if we can really look at our elves as we are as we came to be through evolutionary forces then actually we can improve the landscape for romance and dating a great deal but we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms that actually aren't right what is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now well I think we'd love to see a third way so they're the pre-modern as it were of a very traditionalist concern up close to you sorry no worries yeah perfect the the pre-modern to have a very traditional conservative approach to gender roles to sex to relationship and there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject a lot of that and then there are the postmoderns

03:05who want to throw out everything I want to throw out everything that evolution handed us and in the meantime pretend that it didn't happen right pretend that it's not even based on reality and there's a there's a third way and you know maybe we need to call it modern as opposed to pre or post modern but there's there's a third way to navigate what evolutionary is what evolution has given us what we can change what we can't change and how to actually recover some of you know the sexiness and sex and the love and love and the romance and romance and you know understand that human beings are what we are from not just a hundred years back but a thousand and ten thousand a hundred million years back we've had sex since you both taught at a university level you you've been around these students and you've seen this sort of post modernist movement gained steam what what do you think is

04:01the cause of it like what what is the reason why people are projecting this sort of distorted idea that there's no differences between men and women and that all the differences in the genders are all it's all propaganda or cultural or so I think it actually arises from a relatively simple cause that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught we detect there's something not right about the way civilization is structured we can tell that there's nobody really at the helm and you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that to them is incredibly glaring something that just absolutely needs to be solved and so what they do is they look at that issue and they say what would we have - what would we have to say in order for that issue to be fully addressed and the problem is that we're dealing with a complex system and if you optimized for

04:57any one solution you cause a catastrophe across all of the other things that it's connected to and if you're not focused on those unintended consequences you tend not to understand why people are resistant to your solution so for example let's deal with the transgender issue for the transgender community and I don't you know this is not a model if the community I actually know quite a number of people within it who have a heterodox position but in general there's a sense that it is disrespectful not to simply recognize anybody who has decided to transition as a full-fledged member of the sex to which they have moved that seems right and if you are focused on the humanitarian side of the question maybe it even is right but the problem is if you say a person who identifies as a particular sex is that sex suddenly you've actually caused a whole bunch of consequences that you

05:59weren't thinking of over in a biology class over in the prison system I mean is it true that somebody who says that they are female gets to go to a women's prison do we want to put violent sex offenders in a women's prison because they declare themselves to be female so not tracking the consequences that were not in your view when you decided on a particular solution is the reason that so many people have signed up for these really absurd notions and part of what I hope we will get to today is that there is a principal at the core of understanding all complex adaptive systems and it is diminishing returns and diminishing returns sounds kind of arcane it has to close an association with economics where it was first outlined but the message of diminishing returns is that you can very often get 90% of a solution that you want and not disrupt other things unduly but if you say I want a

07:07hundred percent of the solution to this problem you'll cause a catastrophe so getting people to realize don't shoot for the Utopia in which the problem you're talking about is 100 percent solved if you can accept a 90 percent solution then you can have a whole bunch of other things that you don't even realize you're using in defense of people that would try to go for a hundred percent though isn't it one of those things where like you if you would negotiate you would if you want a hundred dollars you ask for a hundred and fifty unfortunately I mean I think you're identifying something correct that in part the positions that we hear being deployed are not an honest reflection of the beliefs of many of the people who are espousing them they're a negotiating tactic but we can't do that with biology you can't go she ate with biology biology is what it is and then we can

07:58talk about which parts of it are amenable to being changed and as Heather pointed out we're not advocating for a return to some traditional way of interacting between the sexes we're advocating for an enlightened way that takes advantage of the freedoms we have that our ancestors didn't and tries to navigate the hazards that were stuck with so you can't you can't negotiate with biology you're really ought to listen to what it is that nature is telling you and then say alright what does that leave open where can we shift things but if you're going to require that we lie about what's true biologically in order to navigate to a solution I guarantee you it will be unstable in the end the zeitgeist has begun to include such nonsense as chromosomes exist on a continuum you know they're X chromosomes and they're like Roman town one um one of our children just heard that at his

08:55school what did they mean by on a continuum who even knows I know I don't think they meant anything I think what they had intended to do was carve out freedom from a biological truth and so if you say your zones are on a continuum then it's very hard to disagree with that because it doesn't mean anything that we can write I would say it's actually really easy to disagree with it and say you know you know gametes aren't on a continuum sperm is sperm and eggs are eggs sorry discrete two of them right chromosomes also not on a continuum at least in mammals sex yeah a continuum they're intersex is real but it's strongly bimodal right there's there are males and there are females and there are a few people it's rare but real that there are intermediate phenotypes and gender is even more of a continuum but still strongly bimodal have you folks heard about that new crayfish that they're

09:47battling in Europe there's a giant crayfish in Europe that's female and female only and essentially is a clone they they reproduce by cloning so they don't need a male partner and they're going crazy and there's a lot of us create first two sentences there it sounded like there was a and that's gonna work for awhile right in my own asexuality is actually evolved in a few lineages a few vertebrate languages there are some lizards that are asexual and it's all females and it goes great until the environment changes because if you're cloning yourself you your children are gonna experience exactly are gonna be exactly the same thing that you are so if you were a good fit for your environment the next environment better be the same or else your kids aren't gonna be a good fit so my feeling is that crayfish I haven't followed the story a lot but that crayfish is going

10:45to do terrifically moving into exactly the landscapes that it first mutated into existence and and if you change the landscape a bit it's gonna stop doing so I think they just farm it for food if it's tasty yeah don't worry about them breeding just get a tough time together crayfish or delicious this is a good-tasting variety it's free food yeah you know I mean it's kind of crazy so Heather and I were talking before the podcast started about I think a very important point when it comes to a lot of these either progressive or right-wing issues is that people tend to be extremely tribal and what they're really concerned with is winning it becomes a competition of us versus them it becomes our side versus their side and they tend to exploit weaknesses and then attack to score points and all ideas of being honest intellectually or looking at things objectively kind of go

11:41out the window you ignore facts that diminish your position or your team's position and highlight things even if they're not real that would diminish the other side's position this is a real problem that humans have with arguments with with with being tribal with being on different sides I mean we see it we forget about tribes we see with people where when there's a certain time when you see people arguing there's a certain point where the argument has deteriorated to a competition and it's no longer about what you're actually discussing it's about who can win yes yeah well this is science ought to be indifferent when it's done well it is indifferent to who's the stronger team it should really just tell you what's true and in fact the reason to use Sciences to correct for biases but so Erik and Heather and I have a phrase that it's just shorthand for something

12:37which is bad faith changes everything there's a lot you can do in discussion with people with whom you disagree as long as you are on the same page to a large extent yes and what you're describing is what happens when that system breaks down and people perceive themselves as needing to win against the enemy rather than on a team that is trying to navigate to what is true or what is the most desirable outcome with respect to values that we all share or something like that so what you're describing is a very common State it is a lower less capable state than a good-faith environment where people who may disagree intensely agree on the basic rules and the desirability of figuring out what's true and so maybe that's part of what we can do here is try to point to where the good-faith conversation can get to that the bad faith conversation is incapable of

13:36getting to the value really yeah I think that's that's a giant point it really is and it's a I mean if it's really something that I would hope more people would adopt going into the future stop connecting yourself to these ideas and just let these ideas exist on their own and examine them objectively and rely on science rely on actual science to formulate your when you're talking about biological issues when I say science is the answer to this it's not necessarily that we should accept no one should accept the findings of science just at face value but a scientific approach is I've got this idea what would have to be true if that were true and how can I possibly prove it wrong and you work harder and harder and harder to prove it wrong and if you can't then you have greater and greater and greater confidence that maybe it's right and so this this is what we don't see in bad

14:30faith arguments as no one is trying to prove themselves wrong and that's I mean that sounds backwards the first time you hear it but if you try to actually demonstrate that your own cherished beliefs are wrong and you can't do it you have pretty good confidence at the end of that and there is no actual end but the longer you've gone you have pretty good confidence that actually I'm probably seeing something real here I've asked myself I've asked my friends have asked my enemies is this thing right and you know in an actual formal scientific setting you do an experiment you run the data and you do the analysis but is it right or is it not let's see if I can prove it's not even though I really think it is so you also get tests you get something there's a bonus that comes with it which is I don't know what else to say it's super awesome which is if you've tried to take your cherished idea

15:20some hypothesis that you've come up with and you've tried 16 different ways to show that it's wrong and you keep failing well every one of those things you did to see whether what you thought was true is actually false now prepares you when somebody now challenges you and they say oh but you haven't thought of this well you have you've been through it 16 different ways and that gives you the ability to navigate almost anything that's thrown at you because you have taken on the role of being your own harshest critic in order to make sure that what's left at the end of that process is really robust the other thing that I want to insert here is that I think hey I don't want to be put in the position of defending everything that's been published in the scientific literature as true because it looks like science a lot of it isn't a lot of what's published in the scientific

16:11literature is not valid the methodology does not establish what people claim it does and that's a big hazard for for people like Heather and myself because you have to sort the wheat from the chaff in order to figure out what to defend and what to be agnostic about but I do think those of us who more or less get the story of what let's say human sexuality is about at a scientific level and there's still a lot of mystery but there's an awful lot that those of us who have studied that are in agreement about and civilization is not yet on the same page with those of us who have looked at it scientifically one thing we have failed to do I think is to articulate what you will get in exchange for signing up for a scientific worldview on this topic people do not realize that a scientific worldview is actually the thing that empowers you to navigate your own love life in an

17:06intelligent way it will let you that's a lot more fun than it sounds when you say it that way yeah it's well then you know they're all of these famous arguments about unweaving the rainbow or you know somebody challenged Fineman that he was the kind of guy who would take apart a flower and destroy its beauty in order to figure out how it worked and this is the trope science will destroy beauty right and it's not true no it's not true you will get a lot of value you will waste less of your time on people that you shouldn't be interested in if you understand what game they're playing even if they don't understand where do you think that arguments coming from the argument that science would destroy beauty well I think there's a way in which the hate to borrow a chemical analogy here but there's something called the activation energy of a chemical reaction which is the

17:56energy necessary to get it to happen and the activation energy for understanding your own self your sexual self even as a product of evolution that is wired in a particular way for particular objectives that may not be relevant to your conscious person's objective that that takes a little bit it doesn't take forever but you know if we were teaching a class it might take three or four weeks full-time with one set of students before people who had walked through the door not thinking in those terms at all about their own love life could begin to spot how this actually maps on to what they have experienced and what it suggests they might do differently so I think the answer to your question is it's not cheap to get through the door in the end it's an absolute bargain what it buys you is so valuable compared to what it costs you to to learn it but it doesn't come immediately it's not like

19:02you know an aphorism that you can adopt and suddenly your life functions so good but it begins to do as people start to realize the power of an evolutionary take on sex and gender or whatever it is we're talking about is it opens up doors to inquiry and it makes it allows people to make sense of their lives and then it becomes more beautiful and more powerful and once people have seen how you can use these evolutionary tools and and the knowledge that evolution the state of evolution has given us like male and female our universals like male and female have existed for over a hundred million years and everywhere it shows up it looks really similar and yes there are exceptions all over the place there's amazing ways that you know like this crayfish that you have you know a sexually reproducing ancestor that's gun's asexual or you have six role reversal in some

19:56species you have hyenas which have a you know a very strange system going on lots and lots of these exceptions but the the truth underlying them is always the same and that's freeing so actually that's beautiful can we try it with the crayfish here sure um so looking at this system you've got a creature that is capable of going asexual and then spreading very rapidly we have lots of examples of creatures that do that all right like so for example dandelions dandelions look like a regular old flower but they're not dandelions are what's called a poem if Nick a NAPA Mick dick means that they go through mitosis instead of meiosis and they produce a seed that isn't the product of sex and that seed disperses as if it was the product of sex and so this does something for dandelions it allows them to take over a landscape from one individual because it can just

20:48spread and spread and spread without having to find mates it's very effective but what we see in systems like Heather mentioned whiptail lizards whiptail lizards some populations are asexual and it's it's a really cool system actually I don't know if Jamie wants to bring up a picture of whiptail lizards but in the asexual populations females can I believe they clone themselves right it's it's more or less yeah so they so the reason we're talking about that is they're two different ways they could go about it they could make two gametes and fuse them or they can clone themselves they're effectively common but the you look at that system and you say well how can a population abandon sex and be able to tolerate change well it has to do one thing which is it has to have some place to borrow genetic variation from so we see some very curious behaviors in these whiptail's

21:43females mount each other so that basically you have you have females who stimulate each other to produce eggs that are not the product of sex right so they retain sexual behavior as advanced pseudo copulation and whether they're playing the female role or the male role in the pseudo copulation depends on their stem us in the avila Tory cycle whoa but the kicker is and you know Heather and I were actually teaching from this and trying to figure out how the system could possibly be stable long term and what we predicted actually was that they had to be borrowing genetic variation periodically and they it turns out that this is true they how do they borrow genetic variation well the populations at the edge of these clonal populations are sexual and so whoa yes so and us in the future that's what everyone's hoping for okay that's one way but then we've got another one I mean I'm sure your

22:47audience isn't thrilled to be talking about lizards necessarily but okay a fits a fits are asexual well how do they get away with being asexual that seems like it would everything we know about sex being so valuable because of its role in producing genetic variation what are the aphids doing well the aphids are sexual once a season right so they're asexual within the season and at the end of the season they breed sexually and so the point is all of these exceptions are exceptions that prove the rule that the the universality of sex in complex animals is broken in certain cases but each case that it's broken has a way of recovering the value of sex can I go back to lizards yeah one more lizard example Komodo dragons which are the biggest monitor lizards there is evidence from I think it's just Suze that occasionally there's virgin birth right occasionally females can produce

23:45young without sex so occasionally individuals will go asexual which were right Wow something that big that's crazy that is it's it's very rare in vertebrates at all and where it does happen it tends to be lizards and it's still pretty rare as far as we know but really you know for the most part it would only be in zoos that we would know for the most part but the hypothesis is that this is an adaptation for then these so these are big swimming lizards that are living on these islands they're relatively close together they can swim between these islands that having arrived at an island or there's none of none else that looks like you it probably makes sense to clone yourself at that point and actually think they're not clonal they're parthenogenetic but it doesn't matter they don't if if it requires two individuals to make that swim successfully in order to populate a

24:35new Island the chances are much lower than if it just takes one and so you can get sex switched on and off even in Komodo dragons that's crazy well but it isn't think about how many times one of these animals must have crossed one of these water barriers and been alone and where it had an island that it was perfectly ecologically capable of exploiting it had no way of making offspring right that's a terrible price to pay in Darwinian terms if the solution is well let's suspend the requirement of sex for a generation produce some offspring and then we can reinstate it so really more than likely this happens a lot more than we think and because we assume that sex is the explanation for vertebrates when we see them when we encounter them in the wild we don't think is this individual the result of a clonal event or is this individual the result of sex we assume

25:26sex and it's only when somebody puts them in a zoo in isolation that we can be 100% certain there is no way this animal got fertilized by another animal and that's when we start asking the question but now that we've started to spot these things we're gonna see them more and more frequently because so many animals over evolutionary history have been caught in a situation that was paradise except for the fact that there wasn't a second one that is incredibly fascinating though they can just switch on and off like that well and if you think about it I mean monitor lizards are interesting because they are the the people say they are moat they are the most mammal like lizard people report people who work on monitor lizards say you can look into their eyes and it's a little bit like looking into a dog's eyes so they've been paying attention to much the lizards but the animals give

26:22you a different impression but but here's the thing but it's more than geckos more than whiptail's right Brian maybe that's bigger well they yeah and their brother big and long live more information of that big eyeball they press there's a little monitor lizzard some people say the same thing about the little ones but if you think about it what ought to triggered this switch profound loneliness right profound loneliness what would cause it so I don't you know it's impossible to say whether any lizards including monitors have something like loneliness although in other cases you know when we look at elephants we see clear evidence of grief and we know that elephants didn't get grief from a shared ancestor with us that had grief they separately evolved grief because their complex social structures required for the same reason that ours do so it's not impossible that loneliness might not

27:19feel exactly the same to a monitor lizard but if it had a value to detect how lonely you were and then to trigger a physiological response that there then kick-started the ability to be evolutionarily successful that we would see we would see that kind of thing so I I would love to see somebody try to figure out whether there was a cognitive trigger that looked like loneliness in in monitor lizards that actually caused the switch and if you could then maybe trigger it wow so like some something that you could actually map in an fMRI or something on the brain like you could look at their little brain and see loneliness sure I mean you know it's a certain frequency and then the eggs starts forming something like I mean you know you there there would be some grass Kade but yeah there'd be some perception that I haven't seen another one like me in a very long time and then it would

28:06cause some sort of a shift in behavior maybe it would cause searching behavior and searching wouldn't net any evidence there's no evidence you know you don't necessarily have to see another individual to know that they're around but anyway there would be some cascade of things and then maybe some neurotransmitter would trigger the release of a hormone that would cause it would clearly be limited to females in general although I don't go ahead because the egg can has all the cytoplasmic material and necessary to make another cell and sperm doesn't right so you know sperm sperm and egg are just different and eggs can't move and so they're stuck where they are they have to be and but they have all the cytoplasm and sperm really fast but doesn't have any of the material necessary to make a cell so a sperm can't mature into a zygote unfertilized because it doesn't have

28:58mitochondria and in replies to a particular man all the other stuff of a cell so just they're doing different things just like male and female are different strategies against sperm are different strategies but there are certain animals certain things that can switch sexes yes absolutely which also which organisms can do that well there's lots of reef fish would be that it's a big cluster of them I've heard about ocean fish or their land creatures that do that there's one frog where there's a little bit of evidence but it seems it may be an artifact of a zoo setting effectively which might mean that it can happen in the while and we just haven't seen it but it's well known in reef fish like there are a lot of species of reef fish that and it goes both ways so this it's called sequential hermaphrodite ISM where in some species there everyone's born female and then

29:47some transition into males and it's so much the other way around you transition from male to female there's some species where you can go both ways and it depends on the sex ratio around you and what strategies there aren't enough of so male and female are strategies and if you are the most dominant female in a landscape and the male just died it makes sense to turn to a male so that you can now fertilize all those females yeah but they're also so that's the sequential you know where one individual will transition between sexes but there are also cases like Turtles where there's no chromosomal sex determination and the sex is effectively chosen by the environmental conditions by temperature in the nest and so one individual lives its entire life within a sex but that sex was not dictated when the egg was laid it was dictated by the environment the egg matured in this is the case with

30:40crocodiles as well crocodiles and in fact most most every vertebrate that we know except for mammals and birds and the mammals and birds is a different evolution of genetic sex determination so most lizards snakes frogs crocodiles Turtles teleost fish have some kind of environmental sex determination and actually as long as we're going down this road I promise you there's someplace cool to go with you school already okay good I never know I never know how interested people are in the animal psychology but so in human beings in mammals and not all mammals the monotremes are exceptional in this regard but it's right kid dozen platypus yeah there are at least three species left on earth it's a remnant of an early early branch on the mammal tree but in in most mammals like us we have chromosomal sex determination in males our XY and females are xx in birds the situation is

31:36exactly reversed as it is in butterflies so what that tells you is that to the extent by reverse what Bret means is and we just use different letters just so it's not to be confused males are so-called homo comedic or ww-where as in mammals females are Homo comedic XX and in birds males are how much community males are wz which means that female birds can't clone themselves as the way that say a komodo dragon could hmm but the reason I raise it is because we have a sense of male and female that I think it's just wrong that male and female are actually akin to a niche that these are roles that the universe discovers periodically because they make sense right so it's a convergence on a set of behaviors that fit well together once you have a small mobile gamete you tend to acquire the traits that go along with maleness and this is true when an animal switches sexes in the middle of its life

32:46the behavior switches along with the gametes this is true between birds and mammals so the which one has two different sex chromosomes does not predict the behavior but which one lays the egg does predict the behavior and it gets even weirder than that so Jamie do you have that image of the flower for those of you listen ever seen a phone look at this flower on the youtube version well what kind of flower is it it's actually just a diagram of a flower at just standard flower was that woman who makes those flower paintings at all the core vaginas George oh yes that's our joke yeah so this is not her work she's a little obsessed this let's talk to her no doubt it'll be tough it does hey lady do you paint other stuff so here's what I want to show you about this and I must say I love this point even though I'm less jazzed about plants than I am about animals if you look at

33:50the thing there is labeled stigma right the stigma is connected to the style which leads to the ovules so the ovules are the eggs essentially and the anthers are the place that produces pollen so this flower is a hermaphrodite it has both male and female parts but here's the really interesting thing the female parts are kind of reluctant about sex with strangers the male parts are really enthusiastic about it right really yes so those pollen grains will try to fertilize anything they land on but that long style is basically a test that the female part of the plant exposes any pollen grain to the pollen grain has to grow a pollen tube down that long style in order to get to the eggs in other words that flower the female parts are koi and the male parts are a bit Randy now this is one point this is one flower that does not agree with itself about how enthusiastic it to be about sex with

34:56strangers well you can predict this just on the numbers - right it's going to produce I don't know what orders of magnitude more pollen than it has a view to be fertilized right so it's only got a few chances at picking the right pollen to be fertilized but the pollen can be broadcast and go anywhere and if it's successful and it's not that successful it's still okay it's still kind of a win so the payoff for putting up with talking about plants you if you realize there's something in the universe that even when it's building a plant which is really not like an animal even when it's building a plant and we look at it we say ah these are the boy parts and those are the girl parts they actually have some analogy to males and females amongst animals where we can spot the behavior easily and that that is mind-blowing because you correct me if I'm wrong here but the common

35:49ancestor between these plants these land plants that have pollen and ovules like this and animals that have eggs and sperm the common ancestor is a single-celled photosynthetic ocean creature a single-cell creature it's not that's how it's not a common it's not it's not a complex creature so what that means is that two totally different clades that are built around totally different rules at the point they get around to spitting out something that looks like two sexes it recovers some of the things that we as human beings are familiar with from Shakespeare right the the point about male and female is so general that it even covers plants and then okay that's true and then we have fun G which break every single rule they don't look anything like this they do have stuff that we would regard as different sexes but they can have like 50 I think they're even hundreds of

36:52mating types in some species of funky so it's not that the universe says this is the only way to organize a creature but it does say this is the way a creature will be organized if certain things are true like there's something I'd like and something sperm like so that's very powerful when we're reaching into biology and we're saying male and female are patterns of behavior that tend to be associated with certain types of gametes when you have two gamete types something called an I saw a me you will have two sexes and those sexes will follow rules that we see over and over and over again repeated plants animals one of the things that we discussed in the green room before the show started was that what we are as some weird animal that can communicate in very very complex ways and one of the things that we do when we can communicate in such complex ways is explain all these things that

37:46we've learned about science but another thing that we do is we distort reality to fit what we would desire it to be rather than what it is how much of that is what's going on today a huge amount and unpacking that learning not to impose your expectations on nature is key to understanding it and it really is a skill you have to learn and you know that way when nature does tell you something about what males and females are like and you know that you're not talking about something that you've learned by being human you're talking about something you've learned by looking at other creatures then there's a lot of power in understanding what those patterns are especially when you get to humans because of all the creatures I think this is fair to say of all the creatures that I've spent any time thinking about humans are maybe sexually the weirdest are slippery ducks

38:48oh yeah on average on average but human beings are partially sex role reversed okay that's sexual reversal is not unheard of in in animals it happens but our sex role reversal is so weird and it is not complete so there's stuff going on in human beings that is absolutely novel I mean in in fact here's a mind-blowing fact that really you could start here and just follow back to the implications of this there are how many species of mammals do you think there are half a million no no no no you're off 30 there are 30 in a few months there are they're about 4,000 life well I still think it's worth awesome oh okay well this is gonna mess me up because I don't know how to work back from 5,000 I don't know which clade has grown but yeah we've got about 5,000 species a vicious the researchers are pretty consistent still pretty good only half of them are rodents a quarter of them are bats that

40:05one I studied bats in graduate school that was my thing people never expected a quarter of all mammal species are bats that's pretty crazy anyway we got an urban Austin for four to five thousand species of these things human beings are the only one of those mammal species in which breasts remain enlarged when not lactating I find that fact absolutely remarkable you hang you have four to five thousand species of lactating animals and in human beings breasts have been made persistent when not lactating and in sexual interactions they've obviously become a signal and we know more or less what they are a signal of they're a signal of having the resources to produce a baby which doesn't it doesn't register with us as important as it it should it's much more important to our ancestors it was a vital characteristic because most of the time females were either pregnant they

41:12were feeding a baby and therefore not fertile they were starving and therefore not fertile and so a fertile female who is essentially advertising that she has the resources to produce a viable offspring is a a rare commodity I mean I hate to talk in those terms I mean nothing normative by it I'm just simply describing it in sort of as if I was an alien I'm looking down on people in in their evolutionary history but the fact that that signal finds itself utilized in the way that it does on the internet tells us where we are we you know what I'm saying so one of the other things that is unique about humans at least with regard to our most recent ancestor to other primates is that we have concealed ovulation so you can't tell when a woman is fertile whereas you can tell when a baboon is fertile on a monkey or a chimp you've got sexual swellings and other indicators of fertility

42:15how do those lizards find out I toes if they determine like which female places the stimulation role in the ovulation cycle it's probably gonna be chemical so some kind of smell pheromone and scent thing vomeronasal some large so you see reptiles putting out their tongue what they're doing is they're picking up large molecules that don't volatilize and then they are touching an organ that they have that's connected to their brains to detect a kind of chemical signal that weirdly enough I don't know how true this story is going to end up being probably true but I have a little trepidation about it there's a an organ that detects these large molecules the foam ro nasal organ and it's like having another sense of smell that we just don't we can't intuit what it would be like because we don't have it but we actually do have remnants of the organ it's just not plugged in

43:09yeah the story as humans have it but it's not it's not connected up yeah I will not feel picked it up it is something that we're not damn confident of I won't be surprised if it turns out to be important in some way we didn't know the way tonsils or the appendix have turned out to have values that we should have guessed but but so humans have these persistent constant sexual signals in the form of breasts among other things and then also have obscured when we are and are not fertile and so more than any other primates humans have basically constant sexual availability constant sexual interest and yes there are herbs and flows and such but but female humans more than female chimps or baboons or any other primates are interested in sex more reliably across their auditory cycle than than any of these other primates yes let's unpack that a little bit in human beings ovulation is concealed

44:03so that it is not clear when a female is fertile it is concealed from the female herself now that always gets pushed back if you say that in a room full of students because they say I know I know but the truth is women do not know reliably you can do things like monitor temperature and you can get a much better sense but it is novel tools right that no one had until 50 years ago with the most to many woman feel it in our body or is that maybe but some women claim to be able to and and there may be some self knowledge possible some people also claim to be able to pick a lottery ticket winning ones I'm not prepared to say that that never happens right but the the interesting fact is that this when a woman is fertile does not have to be obscured to the woman at all evolution appears to have taken that piece of information away a baboon would know when it was fertile and it would

44:58alter its behavior a female it's wet all the baboon boys right and she was fertile do you think that's because over time people have discerned I mean over the course of evolution people have discerned that having a child also is partially a burden and so maybe more intelligent creatures as humans got more and more intelligent they said well it seems like a little inconvenient to have a child whereas a baboon would not think that way and not contemplate the future so there was some sort of an evolutionary advantage for it to be concealed in humans and for outright displays of sexuality to be prominent I route their entire life I suspect the answer is a whole lot more horrible than that really yeah I suspect yeah absolutely horrible which is that to the extent that a woman knows when she is fertile she actually may be vulnerable in other words to the extent that

46:00servile to coercive sex yep oh so vulnerable to rape yeah so that if a woman was outright signaling that she was ovulating that she would be more likely to be raped by other humans oh I think there's no question about that so in in a sense hiding this information from everybody appears to be an evolutionary solution to a problem I don't think we can name it exactly because so much is obscure about our recent ancestors you know we only have bones nothing else fossil Isis and that doesn't you know the behavior doesn't fossilize so there's a lot we can't say but it is interesting arriving at the present we have modern women and we can say it is interesting that evolution has robbed women themselves of a piece of information that one would initially think would be so valuable that it would be prominent for it to be obscure at all is fascinating so the other thing that

46:59Heather mentioned which I think belongs front and center in this conversation is having sex for pleasure rather than reproductive purposes so we're not the only ones to do that there are elbows dolphins others there are a few minutes rare it's very rare there are a few other species that appear to do this and they don't appear to do it the way humans done it's a dolphin example is it year round do you know I don't remember so anyway the idea that sex in human beings has taken on these other important roles in pair-bonding for example is very special and the fact that it continues after menopause I mean menopause itself is special menopause the idea that that's not your reproductive apparatus failing due to age that is your reproductive apparatus deciding to shut down because you've moved into a new phase basically you've moved into the grandma phase and the

47:59grandma phase is essential in humans where it is not essential in almost any other creature I think elephants occasionally and orcas I believe orcas also have that pattern but but anyway all of these things are so different about humans and they have so much to do with sex that having a mind-numbing conversation about sexual signals in modern times is it's actually just kind of painful to listen to it because you want all of these pieces of information on the table so that at the point we get to the discussion about what what do we do about modernity that we are not you know playing with toys we're actually talking about the real stuff mmm this modernity I mean the way human beings represent sexuality or the way sexuality is represented what's wrong with it like what what are the what are the key things that stand out as an evolutionary biologist well let me try an experiment

49:00with you this so this is a I'm concerned this isn't gonna work but I hope I hope it does even if it doesn't work it'll work okay I would like to try an experiment with you as a a red-blooded male okay I would like you to conjure the image in your mind of a woman who is not beautiful but is hot hmm okay can you do it sure okay can you conjure the image of a woman who is beautiful but not hot yes no problem no problem me either this I think actually is a window into much that is wrong with what we think about human sexuality I think most people if you asked them without doing that little experiment to conjure or to define what what it is for somebody to be hot you would get answers and people would tell you that hot was sort of like the height of beauty right which is very frightening if that's true because hotness wanes with age it deteriorates just can't help it the

50:12discovery that beauty actually is a different parameter tells a whole different story about what's going on with us people with men and with women and I think both men and women are confused by this so if it is true and I I mean I know it is true I can look inside my own mind and I can say that at least for some and it is true the beauty and hotness are almost on or elated there are people who have both traits but I I have no trouble seeing that image of a woman who is hot but not the least bit beautiful and I know lots of women who are beautiful and not hot and I also if I take the category of women who are beautiful but not hot there are a lot of older women in it right I know women in their 60s and 70s who have poise have aged gracefully their gray as can be they may be wrinkled but if you talk to them one does have the sense I'm talking to a beautiful person right and I'm not I'm

51:18not being maudlin here if it was just a simple fact that both beauty and hotness waned with age I would say so but it is not the case so what's going on why do we have these two categories and why do we assume I mean if you look at advertising you will get the message that hotness is where it's at right huh this is the thing it's the only standard possible it's the only standard and so women are aspiring to it and then they're fighting it as it wanes and all of this and here's what I suspect is up because males are males they have I want to say they have two reproductive strategies really they have three reproductive strategies and one of them is so awful that it's really just unpleasant to even enter it into the discussion but YouTube yep yeah so the first reproductive strategy that men have the one that would generally have succeeded and that by the way we can

52:19talk about monogamy versus polyamory and all of that at some point but I'm not saying anything that is inherent it's not inherently about monogamy the way males have typically reproduced is they have invested in their offspring and the mothers of their offspring that's the go-to mechanism for reproducing as a human why because human babies are so needy that one person trying to raise them on their own is hobbled by just the sheer difficulty of trying to an infant and a toddler while trying to accomplish the other things of being a person so let me just add here that the idea that monogamy has been ubiquitous throughout human history is not completely accepted but that there is good evidence for it on a lot of fronts and one of the points against it is that we remain somewhat sexually dimorphic that men are on average a bit taller a bit more muscle you know much more

53:15muscular but that we are so much less sexually dimorphic than even our ancestors beef you know in more recent times than when we were more recent common ancestor with chimps that we are moving towards a more monogamous situation so just I think I think you said something that was unclear at the beginning there has been a lot of polygamy where one male has multiple females in human history probably the majority of human cultures have been polygynous yes the majority of people on earth today belong to cultures that are at least nominally monogamous and we should talk about what that shift is and what it means to us and what's desirable and all of that but the basic point that human babies are so expensive and difficult to raise that you need a team to do it and you know in part this is a chicken and egg question it's not a good term because it's quite clear which came

54:12first but the this is a situation where the when you have a team you can also afford to have a baby that's more needy and there are there's nothing good about a needy baby but there is something good about what you can get if you can tolerate a needy baby you can get a baby that's a lot more nuanced when it grows up so males have traditionally invested in offspring but a male who is investing in their offspring should they happen on an opportunity in which a female who is fertile and capable of producing an offspring does not require commitment from them in order to have sex that's an evolutionary bargain a male who can either convince a female or finds a female who's willing to produce a baby but not expect any support in return that's such a power it's like winning the lottery evolutionarily so it would have almost never have in history because women because babies

55:08are so expensive are wired to avoid this like the plague you don't want to get stuck raising a baby on your own if you could through committing to somebody get a partner in raising an offspring so how does birth control factor into that well we'll get there in a second but let's just get the two strategies on the table males in general have succeeded reproductively by investing in their offspring and their offsprings mothers when they have the opportunity to produce offspring with no commitment they have a hard time resisting that opportunity because it's such an evolutionary win but that doesn't mean it would have been very common in history because females would avoid it so why can't look away from hot it is about that second strategy run so hot is this channel that men can they they are wired in such a way that they actually have been robbed of every useful time

56:03they are triggered by the sight of a woman who is broadcasting hotness all right and so anyway the the thing that I think is most important about this is we now live in a culture where we have advertisers essentially creating a kind of insecurity because insecurity causes people to spend money they otherwise wouldn't that insecurity has women trying to capture male attention by broadcasting hotness which of course works because men have a hard time ignoring hotness but what I think women often don't understand is that getting a man's attention by broadcasting hotness has him in the frame of mind of the second reproductive strategy and it is actually counterproductive to getting his attention for the first reproductive strategy because men have historically this is by the way this is where I'm gonna get in huge trouble with people because this is gonna sound like an

57:07accusation really I'm just trying to describe what has been and then we can talk about what we should do about it but a woman who values herself highly in reproductive terms will not leap on a sexual opportunity just because it's available because what's at stake is so great historically for women this is not true anymore because of birth control but historically it would be true that a sexual interaction is basically baby roulette and baby roulette is a dangerous game to play so and so we get at some of what's true underneath the stereotype of the Madonna dichotomy mmm that neither of those words is quite right because no one wants a madonna no one wants a virgin is a life partner all right you want to have a vibrant sexual relationship with your life partner but the are you triggering the hotness can I get a baby out of you and never see it strategy and

58:11Men or are you triggering the oh my god you're gorgeous and I feel like we could do this together I hate to interrupt you but you got to pull this thing close to me so sorry just just move that sucker around so it's so it's comfortable where you're sitting how about that it's very different it sounds okay in our ears but it's very different that's the audio sorry perfect so um so so anyway the Madonna complex which is this famous thing isn't the paradox that we are led to believe men are interested in you know as Heather points out Madonna and are the wrong terms they're very charged but right men are interested in both of these reproductive strategies but they are not interested they are not paradoxically searching for them in the same individual well isn't there an issue also that today human beings males in particular are not looking at women purely in terms of someone to reproduce

59:08with they're looking in terms of what is sexually pleasurable what do they find attractive and when they see a person it is almost it's very rare that they look at a woman and say this is a woman who I would like to breed with they say I would like to practice breeding with her but but here's where our language gets in the way right like we're telling ourselves store is based on I mean yeah birth control changed everything yeah actually and realities so knew exactly right it's so new I mean there's there are not very reliable forms of birth control and lots of cultures around the world but actually fully reliable birth control is decades old so we shouldn't expect the stories we tell ourselves about what we're looking for to be a match for what we're actually looking for yet because we just we haven't had time to update our software even right so the software is

60:01still wired the same way to look at a woman who you believe would be a good carrier of babies someone who would be very maternal someone who's attractive they have good features this would be someone who'd want to breed with whereas the second option would be someone who you could sneak it in on well I would say with regard to the first strategy it's it's more than that more it's so that the first strategy as you just described it sounds very traditional female role right and mostly especially when populations were moving across frontiers and actually like expanding the scope of where humans were what you needed in a partner both male and female was someone with whom you could share all of life's challenges right it wasn't just about taking care of baby because you know dad was a also doing parental care but mothers and fathers were in it together and it was their division of labor of

60:57course and was their specialization of course that that specialization always looked the same no it didn't and in fact cross culturally this is it's fascinating like some tasks end up highly gendered across cultures but which gender does it is different like weaving turns out to be a pretty highly gendered task in different cultures but sometimes it's only women who do it and sometimes it's only men and that you know there are some things that really only men do in most cultures so this is this is great review an anthropology paper from the early 70s so this is mostly pre-industrial cultures they're looking at but the jobs that cross cultures where it happens only men do include the hunting of large marine mammals and iron smelting those two things this dude and there's a few others but those at the top Bart and read mammals I hear them at the same time it's whale hunting and

61:48smelting of ores Wow yeah keep quenching it a thing by accident yeah so I think you know the answer to the question you asked is that the whole system has been hijacked by the novelty of our current circumstances and mmm what I was trying to get at before is that the size of the wind of an ancestral male who reproduced with a female that didn't require investment from them the size of that win is so great that it causes men to default to thinking about that when it appears to be available and so in a world where there's birth control and therefore the stakes for women for having sex have been greatly reduced and therefore more women are interested in having sex without commitment the problem is men don't really know what they're looking for because there is this this level of triggering that they cannot overcome and so the other point I want to make on this front is

62:57yes men are interested in sexual pleasure as are women men and women are overlapping but distinct in what that means but I think if we were to say hey sexual pleasure is awesome and you should live your life so as to maybe not maximize it but come close to maximizing it that sexual pleasure is so desirable that you should live your life in a way that you get as much of that thing as you can that would not necessarily say that the way to do it was to go around bangin strangers right because there this is a multi-faceted phenomenon and there is one thing that gets left out of this discussion almost every time I hear people talk about it which is that the sex that one has when the stakes are really high right when you're really into somebody that's that's a very pleasurable kind of sex that is not reproduced by low-stakes situation and so we are comparing things

64:03and it sounds like well sexual pleasure is what you're after then more sex is certainly the way to get there but you know that tends to look like the argument tends to be more sex with more people more varied sex partners is the obvious way to optimize sexual pleasure and actually that assumption hasn't been investigated and wasn't it difficult to accomplish what is that why it's not it's hasn't really been investigated I mean how many people are having sex with multiple partners and taking notes and being studied well I don't know I mean college students you know right but tell you anything for 50 bucks so there are lots of these studies that you know do involve asking a lot of a college student which is not you know it's not a very broad sample but but again this is a fairly new phenomenon in the last you know five six decades where you could do it and not worry about reproducing well

64:52yeah so the question really is if we step back from our own lives and we say what what would the rules be if I wanted to maximize this set of things if I wanted to get these values out of my life how would I alter my behavior I don't think you would come up with a sex with strangers is the answer to all of this in fact I think sex with strangers is it's pretty low-grade in terms of what it delivers so so there are some cultures that encourage a lot of early fooling around between between individuals and it's considered low stakes and it stops at some point and that's that's one thing that what's going on in modern American culture is there's no endpoint it's just considered a good that more sex with more strangers is inherently going to result in more pleasure and therefore if we're actually interested in sexual pleasure that's what we should be doing and if you if

65:55you look at cultures that have taken sexual pleasure seriously if you look at like tantric sex right it isn't about sex with strangers it's about cultivating a sec a relationship that increases sexual pleasure to an extreme height that you won't reach if you aren't careful in architecting it so in other words it's about delayed gratification I mean really that's the missing idea here is that delayed gratification is actually a strong contributor to sexual pleasure isn't this sex with strangers thing attractive because it's difficult to accomplish is that part of it well I said it's for men but not very difficult to accomplish for women right not that attractive to women not nearly as attractive to women as it is to men that it should be attractive to I states in the city very much so yeah and it's because it's imagined that symmetry is equality okay right and that's and that's I mean I

66:55think that's maybe one of the main things we're pushing back against here is that we are not making the claim that one sex is better than the other but the idea that we are identical is absurd on its face well in our culture today one of the things that is a big stand out as being very novel is social media this is a completely new thing and this social media also being used to attract sex partners is a very new thing I mean I had a whole bit in my last act my mum the last Netflix special about some girl who lives in Florida who has not she probably has 9 billion people on her Instagram now she had 9 million followers and all she does is take pictures of her ass and I was saying science needs to study her because this is a new type of human being we don't know anything about her what she it has nothing to do what she says it has nothing to do with what she's

67:50accomplished in life it literally is about people focusing on her ass so this why why is she doing it there's an attention but she's getting attention I'm sure there's an economic benefit to it too but that came later the attention came first she didn't embark on this journey like going I know what I'll do I'm gonna figure out how to make money off my ass she decided every girl comes of age and discovers that that's an asset we want it to be or not right now I'm being looked at how am I gonna play it right but some number of people play it well and but but again I so there is what I would call a 2-way failure of empathy so you'll give me a little a little leash here we empathize with another individual by using our own minds and whatever it is that we have as the content of our minds and then we run the data of somebody else's situation through our minds and we say how would I

68:48feel in that situation and in general this works really well if you share circuitry with somebody and it works not so well where your circuitry is different so there are lots of places where males and females who grew up Heather and I both grew up in LA there's a certain amount of stuff that we can intuit about what the other would think about something just based on the fact that we grew up in the same period in the same place but males and females there there's a place where we top out and we can't understand what the other is is experiencing because it is very unlike what we would experience so for example if if you were walking down the street let's say before you were a well-known guy okay you're an anonymous guy walking down the street and imagine that there's a group of women talking somewhere and you walk by and they're like look at that that's one fine hunk of man how do

69:48you feel uh yeah whew you feel pretty good I don't feel threatened does the certainly don't feel there's a difference between a man experiencing that with women is I'm not gonna get gang-raped yeah but do you feel good yeah yeah sure of course you would right you feel to implement it right but the it's very different with the opposite sex because there's no threat it's very different for the with the opposite sex not only because it lets neutralize the threat part of it which is I mean it's it's you it's for sure but there's other stuff going on too but here's the part that I think men don't into it until somebody points it out to them because men have two different reproductive strategies and one of them is about long-term investment and the other one is about have sex with them pregnant them and never see them again when a man whistles at a woman right and

70:39he compliments essentially how hot she looks he is essentially offering to stick her with a child that will then be her responsibility for the better part of two decades that's not a very nice compliment right well that's a weird way of looking at it I agree with you but I see exactly where you're going with that but man I never thought about it that way before and I don't think most people have either well that this is my point though it's right in front of us mmm there's another thing too so you've just identified you know a single guy kept calling maybe right but a woman walking past a construction site and getting five six seven guys whistling who are those calls for not necessarily for her it's communication between the men yeah it's they're signaling they're not gay there's no signal to each other hey did you see that I saw that I'm into that

71:31and yeah I mean that's it's a yes it's a total objectification and it renders the woman involved who was you know receiving this thing is almost a nonentity but it feels totally personal and yet it's not necessarily about the woman and so you know all the discussion of oh my god these catcalls are awful and it's just it's a pain in the ass to walk down the street and have to deal with it for a young woman it's true but it's also ignoring the fact of it being communication between men and you know should they stop probably but but it's not just about male/female communication it's male-male competition as well well the type of communication though only occurs if you've been raised poorly you don't have any sisters or you don't have any daughters and if you if you have all those things you're some kind of a monster like if you have a mother that you love and a sister that you love and

72:23if you have daughters and you still catcall at some woman walking down the street there's something really wrong with you oh but so when I stay oh I think it's it's very very wrong but it doesn't work it is also so common yeah I mean it must can't or must work okay it works to let the other guys know you're not gay right so that's know that's part of I even do that now let's mean this is interesting because I think this is something actually Heather probably won't into it either but I'm wondering if you'll spot it when I when I mention it which is there is a part of being a male that because I mean the thing is most males in history are losers who didn't reproduce right reproduction was not that easy to accomplish in human history it was way easier to starve or die on a battlefield or a lot of other things so the there is a way in which there's a part of the male psyche that

73:26plays very remote possibilities right and you know it's weird if you're talking about being in a city and construction workers sitting on a girder whistling at somebody walking by if we calculate the chances that any one of them end up actually in a conversation with her the chances are pretty low but if you imagine that those guys are actually acting from a mind that evolved in much smaller circumstances a small town where everybody knew everybody and so whatever it is in their mind that causes them to have these interactions would have been much more likely there would be later interactions with the same person and so I think that a male that is not thinking carefully about what they are doing ends up you know flirting with and basically building a rapport that is about some future potential that's almost certain never to be realized but it makes sense to

74:26cultivate because you know if you cultivate a thousand tiny little potentials and almost all of them go bust but occasionally one works out that's a win so the point is the cost is small and you know you never know the woman who gets catcalled might I can't even imagine the circumstance that whole you never know it's like just dig a hole in the middle of this tree you might find gold I mean it seems like a Hail Mary but yes sometimes Hail Marys work yeah happening sometime in history but if you had to look at the numbers they're probably pretty staggering yeah well okay so I mean as long as we're in this territory yes it must have happened in history but so many things that were very remote contingencies in history have apparently produced offspring like you know the apparent tendency of people being hung to orgasm right what is that that is likely to be the body taken one

75:31last shot there's no point there's no this way no one on me you usually talk about fixation so were you talking about well actually I wasn't talking about that but it's a better example it shows you that there's some part um what do you mean then I mean think about actually secure I think grammatically I mean being hanged right being hanged yeah I'm so confused I one day done I'm working from anecdote here I have read that I but I don't know how many's people checking the underwear people just got hung but my point would be what has to be true in order for such a pattern to evolve so let's take our erotic fixation de Lyonne strategy I mean is what you're arguing basically this is you know dandelions who go to seed as after you pick them and spread their seeds right like is that gonna work last ditch effort last Hail Marys and so the point is I think this is

76:28probably not obvious unless you're used to thinking evolutionarily but in order for a pattern to occur where some entity releases sexual propagules on death in order for that to evolve it has to have worked enough times for that pattern to have accumulated and so if auto-erotic asphyxiation is the result of people tapping into that thing and you know traversing a landscape near death in order to increase sexual pleasure what that suggests is that that landscape near death has actually had a certain amount of reproduction happen in it that has resulted in this circuitry being present can you imagine a scenario and can you imagine a scenario where that trait would be passed down to the offspring I can imagine that I mean let's just do it the other way people have had a lot of sex over evolutionary history a lot of bad things have happened to people over evolutionary history every so often

77:27those two things intersect right in other words every so often the catastrophe the enemy spills over the wall whatever it is and so I I don't know I don't know what the pattern would be it may simply be that jeopardy is the key factor and actually jeopardy would be expected to happen an awful lot so for example to the extent that and in fact we see a lot of the stuff in primates where there's a question about how public the sexual interaction between two individuals amongst chimps is for example so when two chimps are having sex if the male chimp is not the dominant male he has everything to lose in being discovered as malicious right they hide and so then the question is is the female advertising that they are having sex by making noises that make it visible in which case that creates jeopardy so there's a whole landscape of stuff that has happened in evolutionary

78:33history both with humans with pre humans with apes I've heard that argued as well about women with very loud moaning of pleasure that they're really trying to attract other males I think that that was in sex at dawn well I was ruined I would be super cautious about sex at dawn as a book that particular finding I think is probably right why would you be cautious about sex at dawn as a book because the book is I believe quite cherry-picked in order to produce a particular what I regard is a false sophistication about human sexual behavior it makes us out to be wantonly promiscuous across time in a way that doesn't seem to actually fit with a more careful reading of what we are how dare you Chris Ryan how dare you well I don't know I don't know I don't know who's right let's put it this way that book is a pretty good strategy for getting people to go to bed with you

79:40and feel sophisticated about ooh hmm we'll leave that there so the chimps hiding in the bushes the beta chimp says or the males would have to hide their sexuality from the alphas because the bigger stronger males would probably take the mate from them and then their likelihood of reproducing whoops would be greatly diminished oh yeah I would be punished and they're gonna get cuffed - yeah I'm gonna get cuffed or more cuffed that's not interesting but it's cuffed it yeah that's a funny way of describing it cuffed well there we are yeah we you're stuck there yeah it's Tom cuffed sorry sorry my apologies I mean I should know what that means I've heard it before but it's now what out of all this can we unpack about the way we're interpreting what's acceptable and not acceptable about male and female interaction in 2018 yeah well it seems to be getting redefined right yeah and

80:51it's a hot mess yeah what's wrong with that as a like as a biologist there's a person who understands humans yeah let's let's go to me - all right the me - movement looks looks like an honorable thing at first because most men are not nasty human beings and don't behave towards women in a way that most women have been behaved towards by men almost every woman who at all fits their the norms for their culture has been harassed in some way when they were a young woman that is just that is true most men don't do that that's also true so imagining that most men are behaving in some kind of a toxic way and I just don't like that word but imagining that because most women have experienced harassment most men are therefore harassing is an error of logic of Statistics of humanity so we go from this place of where were there some monsters out there Wow was it a good

82:01moment to reveal some of the monstrosity that was happening and are there some bright lines like I'm prepared to draw a couple of bright lines everyone deserves not to be touched if they don't want to be touched and everyone deserves to exist in a situation where there are no quid pro quos for instance of their employment if you want to stay employed or if you want to be advanced in your employment than you need going to need to do this sexual thing with me quid pro quos don't don't be touched when you don't to be touched those things seem honorable and true and for God's sake can't we all agree to those but then it went too far and women are arguing some some women are arguing that it doesn't matter if innocent men go down and because many women have experienced this it must be all men I mean we're actually hearing from people that any boy that you are raising is potentially a rapist

82:59no sorry most men I know couldn't rape actually it's just it's not what men are so me too went off the rails and it had an opportunity to actually really wake a lot of good men up to how ubiquitous the experience of walking around on the streets and being catcalled of being harassed and sometimes being groped and sometimes worse than that is for a woman and it took it to this this absurd point where now most I think increasingly reasonable people are looking at it going well then if you're claiming that what else that you're saying isn't true and that puts the you know that puts the early stages of the movement at risk now when you see the monsters and they are real right the male monsters yeah the male monsters are real and you you see that now when they're getting exposed like Harvey Weinstein is a he's the classic example right when a guy or Bill Cosby

84:01when these monsters get exposed first of all it's a good thing but second of all don't you think that the reason why they got away with it in the first place is because they were able to victimize these people in secret and that they they either had enablers or in Cosby's case everyone was unconscious I mean there's there's some great good to exposing these things but in doing so the overzealous approach of accusing all men of being potential rapists isn't it just just an overreaction and won't it balance itself out do you or do you think that it's more complicated than that it's gonna it's gonna backfire yes looks like a power grab but won't the backfiring balance itself out I mean people reasonable people like you or myself or we're always gonna recognize the difference that there are monsters yes right and we're not gonna deny monsters because someone goes too far in

84:59the accused Garrison Keillor of being a monster when we know that that's not true it doesn't make sense the story doesn't make sense so because most people who I've talked to about the Garrison Keillor story which he was consoling a woman and he touched her back and then she pulled back and he apologized and I didn't mean to do that and then he sent her an email apologized she said no big deal don't worry about it they were good for a while and then years later when all this meat to things she's just decides I remember something that was wrong and let's let's take this guy down like what just didn't make any sense that first of all well let's leave it alone didn't make any sense but where's Garrison Keillor now right we're like yeah he hasn't been resurrected he hasn't been resurrected they took his shows off the air it doesn't make what decide you know whether or not you liked

85:45him as an artist or crater just like they actually destroyed not just him but his legacy for a hug for something that at the time both parties agreed was no big deal yeah I just saw understand it I guess it's completely unacceptable and it's the death of justice well was that just getting caught up in the history area of just like trying to find tar there's one put that fire out immediately so we have a couple of problems and one of the problems is that the folks who are advancing this movement and the other parallel I wish they hadn't taken the term of social justice because we need a replacement term for that that is not overzealous but those movements have engaged in a kind of naive conclusion making that makes them inevitably hijack they get inevitably hijacked by bad actors so if you you are essentially looking at a situation if you say we must believe all victims that's like

87:00putting out a neon sign for bad actors that wish to utilize this structure right so and there will be bad actors yes every population male is a population female as a population they're monstrous males who have been behaving predatory there will be women who will take advantage of this and accuse people without reason I mean we I don't know whether the numbers are robust or not but I have heard numbers that somewhere between 1% to 4% of the population are sociopathic if you set up a system in which we are obligated to believe every victim then those people will come out of the woodwork and they will use this to level their enemies and so at the very least what that tells you is rule number one you cannot make the rule you must believe all victims or you will have lots of people piling into the category of victim that don't deserve to be there and who is hurt most by that

88:01not only the people who are going to be sabotaged by bad actors but the people who have suffered the worst cases of you know rape they are effectively having the terrible things that have happened to them deluded by stories that are either fictional or minor that are being lumped in so it's further victimization of them it is it's a transfer of well-being from the people who have been most harmed to people who have been less harmed or are cynically using these structures so if the idea of me - of the reckoning that has finally come for these really terrible guys who were getting away with all of this awful stuff if that is close to your heart then what you should want is a set of rules that is careful enough and robust enough that we can keep holding those kinds of people to account what will happen if we don't do that and I promise you this from a game theoretic

89:01perspective if we decide you must believe all victims and all transgressions are equally bad we're gonna turn the thing to 11 for everything now that happened with you but how did that happen if you're if you're cynical it's the type of nuance in part yeah it is it is a the death of nuance because if you're wielding this thing as a weapon right if you what you want to do is turn the tables on all men if you want to take power and say you listen well this is a frightening weapon so in order to make that weapon maximally dangerous you you acquit you were with catcall yeah you say it's all one there's nothing a woman could ever do that would increase her likelihood of facing any of this and you know we should cover that in a second because that's one of these it's another one of these booby traps where you can very easily say the wrong thing and suddenly

89:57you're on the defensive even though what you've said is very rational but also it denies the reality of what male-female relationships look like when they're at all healthy there's going to be risk there is risk as you get to know people and I don't you know we're just meeting say instead of having met in high school so many years ago I don't know if I like you yet you don't know if you like me yet we're going to take some chances and maybe you're going to say something wrong and I'm not going to be thrilled with it are you at fault do I do I blame you do I cry harassment because you said something that didn't quite fall right on my ears or did it sound right and I kind of like you anyway and so I got stands fine you know we're good well it really depends you know how how I receive that depends a lot on how I feel about you otherwise you could say exactly the same words and you know you

90:55could say it and someone else could say it and from that guy I might feel like I kind of wish he hadn't said that but that has to mean that that isn't big deep problem that he said it because we're engaged something we're trying to discover do we like each other are we into each other like what's going on here so the process of discovery is going to involve mistake and risk and and even some to do it's it's game playing you know you're involved in the social game and what you're trying to figure out who each other are and after-the-fact saying that guys kind of gross so the thing that he said was harassment sorry no not not acceptable it's changing the rules of the game based on whether or not you like the particular individual and that's not a legit move so we've got to be super careful here yeah one thing that is true is we are facing a landscape in which we

91:50are I think effectively rewriting the rules of male-female interaction in order to make sex with strangers perfectly safe now sex with strangers can't be perfectly safe in a world in which you're dealing with let's say it's 1 percent sociopaths you can't make a world in which it's safe to take a sociopath home and have sex with them all right that that's not going to happen but in order to try to make it safe we're going to turn up all of these protections so for example we've got the issue of affirmative consent now affirmative consent is a great failsafe in a circumstance where you are dealing with a stranger it seems like it would be absolutely essential because the danger of a miscommunication is so great that you have to be perfectly explicit and there can be there's no room for any coyness or subtlety about it in other words it has to effectively be

93:03transactional but no courtship that's going to make it into history books or literature it's going to involve affirmative consent at every stage you undo it yes how about now yeah did you remember that video that they released there was a video that boy I don't remember who did it but is essentially showing how consent could be sexy and so it shows this millennial couple making out and like every few seconds the guy has to ask the girl if it's okay if he kisses her if it's is it okay if I touch you here is it okay if I take your shirt off and she says not yet and then they keep going and going and going and then the girls asking the guy which is hilarious is it okay if I do this like what because this is imaginary exactly exactly it's not symmetric just the Posterous right well that was also an issue with they've sort of abandon this but a few years ago there was this

93:58thing where if you had sex with someone and alcohol was involved you raped them because they could not consent but I'm like well that means I've been raped a lot of times that's ridiculous like it did but it never worked that way it does if you want symmetry you would have to say that if the man has consumed alcohol and the woman hasn't then the woman is raping the man well I don't want to freak you out but Heather and I have been assuming each other's consent for 30 years I mean we have inferred it from cues that were not verbal you guys didn't discuss but already writing things down you have a chalk border no I mean and the thing is the only thing that keeps me safe from being arrested for this release we've both done it no it's like right you're both criminals right yeah but that's this these changing these shifting of the rules it so it seems like it's almost like you were

94:52talking about game theory it does it really does seem like a type of game it is life but it is a thing where people are looking to call people out you're you're looking to score you're looking to like score you're finding someone who's done something inappropriate or finding someone who has done something that used to be appropriate but it's no longer and we're looking to establish this new parameter and this new way of existing and that there's this it takes on this competition element which I'm very familiar with I understand competition so I when I see it clearly and I see like team behavior I'm like well I see what's going on here this is not rational thinking this is someone who is trying to score points you're trying to get one on the board yes it's absolutely competitive and it's really competitive at the moment it looks like sort of within women and it's going to

95:41destroy it's actively making male-female relationships impossible to navigate but I don't understand it it's for as a man I get the motivation I think that women overwhelmingly have been victimized as opposed to like men being victimized by women in that regard in terms of being sexually harassed it's not even close I mean is is one of the most unbalanced things in our culture ever completely right but in our culture Ryan this is what we're talking right what do we want out of this now safety now that it's but right do you want a hundred percent safety right do you want to maximize safety at the cost of well we have to kill sociopaths so I wanna do that yeah the point is if you want if you want absolute safety I mean we're getting to the point where this is just robbing okay if the point of this is to make sex safe because it's pleasurable this is gonna Rob all of the pleasure

96:33from sex I mean it's getting to the point where you'd be crazy to have sex without witnesses you know what I'm saying yeah but but anyway the point is now that the stuff is on the table right now that we've we know that there are monsters we know that there are economic forces that actually protect these monsters which frankly is a big part of this story hmm right is that the economic structure of something like Hollywood causes this to continue with it effectively an open secret that these people are abusing women and then silencing them and contractually obligated them not to do anything about it that that that cancer on the social system is now open for discussion and we all of us decent folk know that we have to get rid of it if you get rid of it though on false pretenses I promise you the very same game theory that caused it to happen in the first place

97:31will cause it to re-emerge the only the reason it will be it's harder to address the next time don't you think that this the overreaction though has pretty much calmed down post Garrison Keillor and Al Franken it's like and with Al Franken obviously there's some pretty obvious political ramifications to it I don't think I don't know what state it's in I haven't seen the nuanced conversation break out I haven't seen the description of what the I mean so what we have seen is a doubling down on there are no differences between men and women it's all a social construct whose doubling down but where is this happening in the universities like where the universities and it's spreading I mean this is this is what the replies to the Google memo were about I mean this is this is it isn't Google in a sense extension of the universities in that regard it is and

98:25it's everywhere well but it's also a de facto governance structure right so it's very frightening and you know what happens I'm just thinking this morning about how a curie of your peers that phrase is now increasingly Erie which peers are they appears that it believes some false some false story about what human beings are or are these people who are going to be able to hear a story that has some nuance and some gray area in it and and take it in and the fact is people if you look at what advertisers are using to access people if you look at the narratives that exist in movies people are capable of understanding the subtlety of human interactions but they are by the pretending or convincing themselves in the public space that things are way simpler than they actually are and what I don't want to see and what I mean again I don't have a dog in this fight I'm happily married I'm not

99:28looking for anything else that's good enough but I do want to see this solved in time for our children to face a landscape that makes sense and I would like our many students who have talked to us about the confusion of trying to navigate romance in the current circumstance I would like them to what's going on Jamie came out yesterday said you guys are talking about it I don't know how it affects what you're talking about currently but how an alt right bot Network took down Al Franken this is on Newsweek they found it started actually in Japan and they traced the whole thing of like the day before Roger stone tweeted something about Al Franken even starting to be taken down and they traced the whole interaction of bots on Twitter doing doing this all for a couple weeks well but it was actual women that said he grabbed there but maybe that's not this day I know it's not it and he

100:23didn't respond yet because this was just within the last 24 hours I don't know I don't know what we should do with the Franken story because the Franken story it's not empty the way the garrison keillor story appears to be totally empty on the other hand and I mean I think this is probably why Jamie put it up we have to think carefully when you're talking about a senator being brought down on the basis of these claims that are tied up in a movement which does not appear nuanced about the degree of harm done and things like that there is something at stake just you know when there's an assassination you have to ask yourself who benefits from the absence of this person right that the political assassination is not a normal murder it is a political act it shifts the balance of something this is not an assassination but it functions like one it takes a political actor who

101:24stood for certain things and against other things and represented certain constituent these and fought others it takes them off the map and so when that happens it's really it's actually an extension of what we were talking about the bad actor problem before a bad actor can be a sociopath that wants to advance their own cause or take out an enemy or something like that it can also be a a political apparatus or a corporate entity that wishes to shift the balance in a political body like the US Senate so we have to be mindful and it is yet another reason that we can't build naively but right yeah this is a very good point cuz we don't know the motivation the people who came out we don't know if it's accurate he says it's not accurate we don't know we have no idea and what's the price point for a Barnett that can cause the Internet to turn on you yeah and maybe it doesn't

102:16matter but the entry point to that story was he took a picture a comedic picture for doing the final someone's breasts right pretending yeah yeah was it in good taste now was it groinal no no but there was a little more to that she actually said that he kissed her like they were doing some sort of a sketch together and he insisted on kissing sure yeah yeah and he wanted to he wanted to practice the kiss yeah you sound inappropriate yeah yeah that's why I you know I I don't I don't love the Franken story as an example here right because it's it's murky yes I agree he's very very careful to make sure not to accept you're damned if you do and damned if you don't yeah really are like Garrison Keillor is the only one that seems completely clean but I can basically guarantee you statistically that there are good men who are being taken down well so the last time I was

103:15on we talked about Matt Taibbi and yes yeah I don't know one way or the other I don't know Matt Taibbi but that story also looked to me like one in which the portrayal was manufactured and he has now just won a settlement from the nation on the basis of this so anyway that one appears to have gone in what I imagine is the right direction so that that's positive but I want to return to an earlier point we are talking about what the rules of interaction should be it is good that we are talking about it and it is good that we are finally addressing the issue of monsters why this didn't get set loose by Bill Cosby I don't know because that one appeared crystal clear - that one built that one it started off but you know I can say as a person who worked as an actor for a while I heard about that story in the 90s but it was one of those weird ones where you didn't know if it was like the

104:19Richard Gere gerbil story yeah was that real it's like I had heard that Cosby does this to women like okay I don't know it's so beyond the pale that it's like and you don't and then but then you know when it's 50 women that come out and say you drugged them okay because something's going it becomes clear and the problem is it becomes in a case like that what would have to be true for the stories to be false is pretty extreme good yep so well it's also him there's evidence of him mocking drugging people I mean he did an episode of The Cosby Show where he drugged people right he did he would talk about it on talk shows about drugging girls I mean he most likely was guilty oh I think there's my question well you don't need to you don't need the due process and he's crazy if it was the most complicated conspiracy of all time if all these gals got together and

105:13said I know we should do make some money and make some noise right let's all make up the same story three decades ago right that there was there would be some sort of evidence of it so so in this case and in Harvey Weinstein's case and I think in Matt Lauer's case their evidence is so overwhelming that it overrides our need as members of the public to see to withhold judgment until due process has unfolded but the point is there's a place at which that stops right at which things are murky enough that you have to wait for due process and the idea that this movement is actually not really interested in due process and in fact it challenges due process and says you have to believe Vic right asking for evidence is augmenting the problem is victim blaming or whatever this is a terrible error and so if we are to get to a state that makes sense it has to be one in which monsters are

106:11held to account in which there's nuance and degrees of guilt and that we don't throw everybody out peace some people can't I can't imagine that Bill Cosby can be rehabilitated but could Al Franken be rehabilitated if that's the story maybe he could be yeah there's a thing where we get to a certain age where we no longer think people can grow right right like if he was 20 if Al Franken took that picture when he was 20 we'd be like that's silly kid what is he doing that's not something that's appropriate what if that was your mom I'm sorry and then you learn you grow but for those of us who value Liberty a situation in which we re organized the entire landscape to make sex with strangers as safe as it can possibly be that is not a landscape that is good for everybody we need to make a landscape in which people who want to do that are free to do it but not everybody is

107:11compelled to play that game in other words people who want to engage in some kind of courtship that is more nuanced and frankly fun and deeper and more subtle are free to engage in it and that won't be perfectly safe either but what we should want is a landscape in which we generate safety for people at the level that doesn't cost us spectacularly in terms of how civilization functions and then we need to actually say also and this isn't this is another tough point where I'm worried that people will hear it in that monolithic way but the following thing is true I believe a woman if civilization functioned well a woman should be able to put on the minimum clothes that the law will allow to cover herself in oil to walk through town in the middle of the night saying things that indicate that she's hot to trot if she can find the right guy and she should be safe to do it but a woman

108:21would have to be insane to do that it's not a good thing to do so we should want a civilization it should be legal protection for her to do it right no sane person should choose to do it because because people because it no sane person would choose to flip BMX bikes on the X Games no sane person would choose to jump out of planes but we shall show them the right to do so before that thrill I'm gonna push back on that a little bit and say risk-taking when you're putting yourself at risk and you aren't involving someone else who is going to see your signals and maybe act on them and then is going to have acted on signals that you shouldn't have been sending in the first place it's different so BMX bike jumping out of a plane risk-taking is more common in men than women on average across cultures not to say that a lot of women don't take risks and have fun doing it physical risks but

109:20absolutely as risk-taking adaptive and enjoyable and interesting and if you're risk-taking results in you dying and no one else getting hurt go for it how is the man getting hurt if the woman is taking these risks walking down this tree oiled up with the bikini on yelling out that she's Randy if there's a chance that later he is held accountable for the kid that results or she changed her mind or whatever it is that the claim is especially in this current climate of believe all women that is potentially a problem I see what you're saying I see where it would be more complicated than just jumping out of a plane and parachuting but it's still voluntary risk-taking you know you you are involved involving another person who's also voluntarily getting involved in that well unfortunately there's no there is going to be no set rule that we can establish that neutralizes these things

110:18you know you go to Disneyland we've been to Disneyland in decades but you should go okay it's nice right now it's fun place but if you go to Disneyland everything has been rendered perfectly safe right people have been through it with a fine-tooth comb so that nothing bad can happen to you and you can have all of this excitement on the rides but nothing bad is going to happen to you we cannot turn civilization into that kind of landscape the price of turning it into a landscape in which you can be a and walk through life and nothing bad is going to happen to you that price is way too high this is it actually so I mean this this thing this moment in time in 2018 is a natural outgrowth of things like helicopter parenting where you you keep your children from all possible danger all possible physical risk and you then end up with children who find a fence at and feel unsafe in all manner of

111:13situations it is impossible to be an adult if you don't do trial and error and it's impossible to become a sexual adult if you don't engage in some trial and error that involves a little bit of risk I don't you know I don't want physical risk and sexual play but there is going to be some experimenting well there's gonna be some even meeting friends exactly exactly and so I mean I think the the totally non fraught version of this is so we took our kids and 30 undergraduates to the Amazon because that's it's one of the most biodiverse places on earth and it's extraordinary and for evolutionary biologists why wouldn't you go if you could and a lot of our friends thought you're taking these little boys probably was on the first time we took them they were ten and eight Jesus and you know we waited I wanted I wanted to take them sooner so I was leading the study abroad trips

112:07earlier and Brett said they're too young but you know basically they're too young for us to give them the shots that Western civilization has afforded us to give them to to keep them safe for things like yellow fever and to too young to deal with the instructions that you need right to actually remain safe safe from Jaguars Jaguars are not the issue it's it's trees falling on you it's water that rises quickly lakes at the point we took them right you know we talked to them a lot in advance as we talked to her students in advance and then we trusted them and you know our younger son found a gigantic coral snake at one point we were walking ahead of us on the trail along with the guide that we happen to have with us and he ran back and the guide ran forward and actually you know pinned the snake so he could see it this you know that was a danger that that was

112:57and God forbid something had happened it would be very hard for us to live with ourselves had that gone differently well but you expose your children to risk so that they can then know what to do when risk happens to them you expose yourself to sexual situations that aren't stranger sex so that you can know how to build courtship and romance and love and sex later on much like friends is a trial so there's a how do we learn what we learn in order to manage the world our developmental environments have to give us model situations that are close enough to the situations that we run into as adults that we have the tools to navigate them and so one of the I think very difficult things to accept as a parent is that if your child is going to be able to manage risk as an adult they cannot be made perfectly safe as a child which means that you are running the risk that something disastrous will

113:59happen and that you'll have to live with it if you make your child perfectly safe in childhood they will be terrible at managing risk as adults and then something terrible is going to happen to them so what what I operate on or maybe I'm reverse engineering what of the way I think I've learned how to behave is something I call the theory of close calls which is that you don't want to have disaster strike and in fact we've told our children we've said look we don't want you to break your arm or your leg but that you man too you may end up doing it and you're allowed to here are the things you're not allowed to do you're not allowed to damage your skull you're not allowed to damage your eyes not allowed to damage your back right you protect those things you protect those things at all costs and actually when we took these students to to Ecuador we had it wasn't really the only

114:59rule but we called it the one rule and it was really the central guiding principle of the trip this is an 11 week trip through all these ecosystems in Ecuador it's a pretty long extended trip with students that we knew well we we had been with them all year and we had cultivated community so we knew him well and what we said is look lots of things are gonna happen you're gonna have to navigate on the fly nobody comes home in a box nobody comes home in a box and we actually had three close calls on this trip and people told us actually that when they experienced serious danger this thing actually occurred to them nobody comes home in a box and it was like it sobered them up but to go back to the theory of close calls you can't learn how not to get run over by a car by getting somewhat run over by a car right look you can learn from your close call so I had a good friend actually

115:57somebody that so Heather and I were not dating in high school but we were friends we went to the same high school somebody we knew in high school happened to go to the same college that I started out at Penn and we were walking down the street one day and she stepped into the street thinking it was clear and this car whizzed by her at 40 miles an hour didn't touch her and so the question is what do you think about something like that she was unscratched but had she been one second ahead of where she was she would have probably been dead and so you could think well I must be doing something right because I got away with it or you could be thinking the difference between my death and not being scratched in this case wasn't something that I did with any sort of intent it was pure luck that saved my life right there therefore I need to figure out how it is that I

116:51stepped off that curb without noticing that that car was coming there's something wrong in my model of how to live that that I could have gotten that close so as you experience close call they tell you something about where your model is broken and you can fix it and so I think what Heather is getting at is learning how to interact with other people especially when you're talking about high-stakes stuff like romance and sex you need to have some room to figure out how these relationships are negotiated and if the point is these rules are going to be negotiated by some people who are going to lay down the law and say you must seek affirmative consent every 37 seconds that's not going to work it's not going to teach anybody how you actually manage with another human being makes sense and I don't know how you teach that to a child to manage risk versus reward in

117:49relationships I mean how do you how do you know I mean one of the things that we hope is that they gain some sort of an understanding of human interaction when they're in their teen years when they're still at home then they're protected somewhat when they go to college and then as they go out into the world yeah it's tough how much information that they accumulated you have to let them let them do it and you know allow them to judge for God's sake where's this don't judge thing going on you know they will be you know no exclusion of anyone at any time on the schoolyard and don't judge anyone no matter what they say well that's bad for the kid that gets judged that's because there's some behavior that sucks and they need to know that it's very uncomfortable for other people to be around you when you like that and that's how you understand social interaction

118:37and this is a big part of how kids grow into adults this is how humans become humans it's not just top down from parents and from teachers it's largely from peers I love what you said about helicopter parenting because I think you're totally right I think that is part of what's going on here I think part of what's going on here also is this newfound ability to complain and communicate it's beautiful in the fact that you could exchange information at an incredible pace I mean I never had anything remotely like this in human history but it's terrible in the fact that it's hard to figure out what's noise there's so much chatter going on and if you're a dummy you can find other dummies that think just like you and you organize a very volatile group and reinforce yes--that's reassure consolation bias you all get together you interact on a forum there's a few

119:20forms that are frequent that are just filled with they're just echo chambers and they're they're confusing and like I don't know anybody that thinks like this but they're here they are all collected convinced that there is no biological difference in the sexes and that a trans woman is a woman if you don't date trans women that you're a bigot you know even if you're a heterosexual male and she has a penis it's there's a lot of squirrelly thinking going on and it's reinforced by others and you start thinking you're right and then you are the future and all these people out there that are living in this archaic ancient way they there are their artifacts of the past and they will soon be relegated to history well there's a summary was it good yeah there there is a a property of our current lives that people just need to be more aware of we arrived at the present we are partially

120:13updated by various features like school for modern circumstances but we are also partially throwbacks and we aren't throwbacks you know evolutionary psychology in my opinion has erred in imagining that we are simply Stone Age hunter gatherers wandering around civilization but we are throw backs to various places in our past some of the reasons some of them much more remote and what we face is an epidemic of novelty so novelty is all of the stuff that we don't have programming on board to navigate all of the stuff that your instincts don't tell you what to do the foods you know the refined sugar the corporation that wants to advertise the cereal to your child so that they eat more of it than they should or they different stuff than they would we novelty makes us sick and novelty can make you physically sick it can make you psychologically sick it can make you

121:16socially sick and we can also be the source of great change evolution can deal with novelty but not at the rate of change that is happening now right the rate of change is so high that our evolutionary capacity a deal with novelty is outstripped and so I do want to you know I there is a way in which you know if you just listen to little sound bites from what we're getting at you could get the wrong idea that we're very traditional and in fact our relationship isn't traditional at all but I asked him to carry the second baby but he wouldn't do it I would after it was born that's quite a lot but we have not thought carefully about the fact that porn is effectively functioning like sexuality school for kids right you don't learn about sex in school sex that is kind of a joke people don't take it seriously but where do they learn about sex well they learn

122:15about it from what they encounter on the Internet and here's the problem with that that is not an honest report of anything what that is is the result of competition economic competition between porn producers to capture your attention right so what that means is that it pushes in the direction of all sorts of stuff that people might not be that interested in because this producer wants to take your attention away from that producer and so they make something more extreme or it certainly triggers that second male strategy yeah that's I was gonna say it's the second male strategy of the no-strings-attached person who you could just hook up with out on a whim you're delivering a pizza and she grabs you by your shirt and pulls you in it's like what huh that's the norm there yeah being going so what we've effectively done is accidentally economically we've announced to children

123:11that this is what sex looks like and maybe they even get proficient at that kind of sex but it's mechanical uninteresting and has very little to do with the most rewarding stuff in in what it is to be a human being which has to do with deeper long-lasting relationships so it shouldn't surprise us at all that we've arrived at a dysfunctional moment where people are shouting at each other about what the rules have to be because what we've installed as a mechanism for learning about these things is not it does not have our interests at heart it is an economic entity that is not under anyone's control and it's quite dangerous now before the inevitable backlash oh my god he said porn was bad I really do think porn is bad right I don't think erotica is bad if somebody wants to make sexual content with some purpose other than trying to grab your attention and take your money then

124:11that's valid and it doesn't mean everybody's got to be interested in it and it doesn't mean that everybody's got to produce it but I don't want to see us prevent people from making valid sexual statements that are interesting in whatever form they take I don't necessarily want to see children exposed to it willy-nilly but my real point is you know just as there's a distinction between the really good stuff that you sometimes see on your television screen because somebody's put together you know a well thought-out series and broadcast television which is often pretty garbagey there's a big difference between the sort of garbagey view of sex that people are getting because the economics are driving us in that direction and some more interesting nuanced adventurous version that we might see if the landscape wasn't saturated with the the porn version well I'm it's just just to defend porn I

125:15think there's got to be a spectrum of porn I'm not a porn investigator but I would imagine that there's some romantic couple porn that makes sense where it is a husband and wife or a boyfriend and girlfriend in the video or boy and boy or whatever your you want but what what it is is natural and healthy there's got to be a market for that I can't all be extreme crazy stuff that's just designed to get your attention I mean it must I think there is but I think it's not I think it's miscategorized so I mean first of all I'm not really interested in porn so I don't know what's out there but my understanding is that actually there are many people who are producing amateur stuff and maybe they got an exhibitionist streak or something but that there is you know human beings are naturally fascinated by human human sex yeah that's a big category I believe is

126:06couples like amateur couples some people actually prefer that because it seems like real people who are attracted to each other actually having sex because it might actually have some information in it and it might be you know frankly it might might be more exciting because yes it has some reality to it right but my point is you know there's a gray area I would say the distinction between porn and erotic is actually pretty easy to draw and it has to do with whether the motivation that caused it to be produced is economic right if the motivation that caused it to be produced if it would not have been produced absent that economic motivation its porn and I'm suspicious of it so 50 shades of grey is porn that I haven't seen it good for you either of I all right it's just it's erotic you know let's talk about yeah yeah let's definitely cast judgment yeah yeah I see what

126:59you're saying and I definitely agree that it's school set it's sex school for children and there's a giant issue in that because it is an unrealistic depiction of actual sexual interaction for the most part like most sexual intercourse are not going to go the way they are in porn and just like setting your kid in front of a screen when he or she is really young mm-hmm does not teach that kid how to interact with real human beings right if porn is your exposure to sex it's gonna create the kind of sex autism like you're not gonna know how to engage with actual real human beings who can give you feedback that's an interesting way to describe it yeah I like that I mean it's a little it's a little dangerous obviously because well for various reasons yeah but but just from the point of view that it denies you a sense of what the feedbacks would look like because

127:56feedbacks between two people don't look like what happens when somebody writes a script it's not Universal it's not generalizable you know the very nature of human interaction is that it's one-off do you think it's something along the lines mean obviously you see here's a problem with poram one of the problems of porn is because the accessibility is so high it's not like x-rated violent movies or it used to be it needs to be some movies were x-rated for violence remember that or nc-17 right but you you could be 13 with a cell phone and you have access to all the porn in the world yeah and I just think yes so many of these issues I think you know we need to be nuanced and and very careful once we're talking about adults mm-hmm we'll become adults as a question but when we're talking about clearly still kids you know should children be exposed to porn no they are still developing

128:50they're still figuring out how to be adults yeah should should children be given sex hormones of the sex that they are not born to even if they might end up transitioning and becoming translator on almost certainly not because the vast number of people who end up realizing oh actually I was experimenting this is what this is what childhood is I was trying on something else and now I've made it permanent by virtue of medicalizing the thing yeah well you're that's another subject entirely but I completely agree you're you're essentially making a permanent decision for a child as early as I mean I've heard it argued three years old which is insane yeah it just doesn't seem to it doesn't seem to suit it doesn't seem to fit any logic the only thing it seems to fit is this agenda that this is a natural normal part of our society in which should reinforce it as early as

129:47possible well I want to push back on that a little bit I think it's very clear there's so much gender confusion that sorts itself out through the natural process of development that the idea that we should intervene medically when we have no idea who is going to grow out of it and where it's going to transition if and I don't think we will ever be there because of the nature of human development but if it were possible to know who actually was committed to this road and going to transition then there is an argument to be made that the earlier that they transition the more completely they are able to jump the gap and say the precautionary principle has to apply here you know trans trans is a real condition and some people have it and should be allowed to transition but allowing children to make that decision for themselves when more than more often than not they end up not transitioning

130:53is frankly it looks criminal oh I think in the in the modern situation with how little we understand about why it is that some people end up gender dysphoria for life and all that there is no way that we should be interfering early you have to let children sort this stuff out I'm just saying in the abstract it's not that there's no argument for doing it early it's that the argument for doing it early doesn't come anywhere near the strength to the argument for not doing it early which is that these things sort themselves out and actually if you really have been born into the wrong body you know as is the phrase that is used by by people some of them we have known who are actually legitimately trans the earlier the hormonal inputs came in the more fully they would be able to transition yeah the more they like the risk is too high if there is it's unconscionable now isn't that it

131:51it's so we're we're into some strange blind territory when you start saying legitimately trans like whose illegitimately trans if you decide to be trans you're legitimately trans like whatever there are people who are wearing it as a fashion statement how could you discuss how can anyone make that distinction if they're not that person I don't I don't know if that's aI don't know if that's true um I would I bet you're right I'm not disagreeing with you but how would we know I think you know because the cost of being trans in a society that views trans the way ours does is so high that there is a very its the barrier to telling the world that this is how you feel is substantial enough to prevent people from flirting with it casually I would push back on that because there's people that get face tattoos and they do weird body modifications it's looked down upon

132:51constantly people do a lot of things for self hate purposes they do a lot of things to shock people they do a lot of things because they just want to get a reaction other people I don't necessarily agree with that I think you might you might be right that there are people that wear it as a fashion statement but who are people who have assumed traditional or the semi traditional gender roles to make that distinction well if we believe in real freedom I think we have to let people choose I think we can for sure children choose I can really can't let we certainly can't let parents leap to it right heather has said a number of times so people don't know how they should know that she is a dyed-in-the-wool tomboy and has been for her whole life she ever since I was destroying the frilly dresses my mother was putting me destroying the frilly dresses and resenting the paint color that your room

133:46was painted but so you essentially modeled yourself after your dad your dad was a computer scientist one of the early pioneers in operating system authorship and anyway Heather there had a very strong relationship with her dad and she played like a boy and had their hazards of things he said to me on several occasions was I will not raise a weak girl I will not raise a hopeless or helpless child and so you know when I when I'd have my nose buried in a book and he'd be out back building a fence so you're gonna come out and help me dig postholes and pour the cement and put put in the posts and you're gonna do this not because I expect that you're gonna go into fence building but because you need to know how to work with your hands and do physical work in the universe and see what the ramifications are not that he didn't want you reading the book oh of course not yeah and you know

134:44on other weekends he was taking me to math competitions so you know there's a lot of abstraction and and play with numbers and science as well and sport but it was specifically about not assuming what I was going to be capable of because I was born a girl that's a giant problem with this category of men and women obviously there's this giant spectrum inside each category and that should be okay it should be alright it has to be okay it has to be it has yeah and this is one of the problems with assuming traditional gender roles or assuming types of behavior and what some people like sexually other people would hate and advice a verse and some people I mean some people can get away with things cuz women find it attractive whereas another man could do the exact same thing and women would think it's disgusting and that's okay too well we have to err in the direction of keeping

135:40people safe but we can't turn the dial on safety to 11 because we'll destroy everything else right we'll kill all the fun yeah we can't imagine that these categories are invariant right that male looks one way and this is exactly what you were saying but it's it's you know they they many of the people who are arguing against the biology of sex and gender say things like gender isn't binary and they're right it's not but it's it's bimodal these are these are population distributions with a lot of variation in them and they are widely overlapping but that doesn't mean they're the same right not identical but they are broadly overlapping they certainly do right and there's been some interesting pushback from these older European women particularly French women oh yeah like what the are you guys doing you're ruining sex that's a courtship and exactly they have a

136:30different attitude about it and they think that there's a certain amount of aggressive behavior from men that they enjoy and they don't want to douse that well so somehow this I'm glad we're getting to this part of the conversation one thing to say is I didn't finish the thing about Heather is that Heather has vocalized that if she grew up in the modern era she worries that somebody her parents would have they would have fought back but that some people would have been thinking oh you're trans we need to we need to take care of you and we need to give you hormones and things like that because the fact that she played like a boy would have been taken as an indication that she was born in the wrong body or something and so that can't happen we have to protect people so that they can sort out their own stuff in it so I mean we have to expand and I mean I really feel like we had

137:22already kind of gotten here but I've talked to people who identify as trans who say things like I'm trans because I don't fit into my father's mold of a macho man mmm and I prefer to read poetry and to which I say that's terrific yeah okay be that man then that that if that is the extent of why you are calling yourself trans I don't think that makes you trans isn't there an issue and this is not I'm not anti any of this but isn't there an issue with saying that who you really truly are is dependent upon you getting injections of hormones that are not native to your body isn't that very odd that we've taken synthetic hormones and made them an integral part of who a person is now again I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do it you certainly should be able to do it but it's oddly almost a biologically essentialist push perspective coming from people who are

138:21denying biology but here's the thing I'm saying if you are who you okay why is no one willing to accept who they are in this situation and instead once - I'm not I shouldn't say no one it's a bad way of phrasing it why is it assumed that if you do feel like you were born in the wrong body the only way to change that is to inject hormones that are not native to your body to have surgery to alter yourself to assume traditional gender dress and look of the opposite sex like there's all like there's a lot of people that push back against women sexualizing themselves but celebrate trans women sexualizing themselves to look more like women because they think this is a fee of empowerment for these women they look how beautiful they are you go girl look at those legs like there's this thing about it where it's like it's celebrated as this merging of the true self this

139:24this is one of these places where I believe we have at least a one-way failure and maybe a two-way failure of empathy hmm right so I've spent you know we we have lots of history with trans students who you know at first you know I must say there's a lot of trans folks at Evergreen and at first when we first arrived it was odd to me like what percentage well that is a hard question because when you ask people to self-report the number is absurdly high but I don't serve Lehigh like it's is reported as 40% at Evergreen which which doesn't really make it forty eight four zero four zero forty so that but you can't really can't be in the case which is part of why I say some people are trying it on trying it on as an identity as opposed to and you know that includes LGB but it's it's too high wouldn't they gravitate though towards a school like that that's oh they were minded they

140:26would but you know we have an intuitive sense by the you know just the popular you know when people are faking it well no I I'm not saying that at all but I'm saying that there's like a desire to affirm folks in this category and so placing that versus also say like I rather than faking it I would say people who don't agree with the gender norms associated with that the gender they're born - we're calling themselves trans and to me that doesn't look like trans that's that's a that's a misrepresentation of what trans is because we've also known many students who are really legitimately trans and have done surgery or hormones or both and are and are better off in their bodies and Mort Mort peace with themselves having done so so I think it is very hard to appreciate a we are all in some sense not well by virtue of the fact that we live in a civilization that is not a good match

141:29for for what we bring to the table even our the environments we grew up in as children do not match our adult environments and so we don't Intuit them well and that causes all kinds of health issues psychological and otherwise when people find themselves in this predicament that we are calling trance they have access to a remedy I mean imagine it's just put yourself in the mindset of somebody who feels like they should have been a woman and you know mind you I'm now learning that some trans people actually don't feel this way that feeling like you were born in the wrong body it's not a universal it's very commonly said but it is not universal but imagine that they that is how you felt you felt like you were being addressed as a man you were being understood as a man but that's not how you internally felt and there was access to something some set of things that

142:25would cause the world to finally register you as you felt you were right it would be very tempting to avail yourself of that stuff and I think it's hard for those of us who feel at home enough in the bodies that were in to appreciate what the pressure must be like if there is something available to you to to go for it and to cross that gap and I also think it's creating a problem as we're trying to discuss issues like sexual signaling and makeup and high heels and things as people have been discussing this causes a special problem for trans folks for trans women because in many cases maybe almost all cases they are using these signs that are and I don't want to get in trouble here these makeup is well understood to amplify sexual signaling and it's not the only role it is playing it is not inherently conscious it is not inherently intended to be triggering

143:30everybody broadly but nonetheless makeup high heels these mechanisms for amplifying a certain set of signals are being used by trans folks as a mechanism for amplifying their sex in other words if somebody puts on a whole bunch of makeup in order to send a signal that they are looking for a mate let's say I'm not saying everybody who puts on makeup is doing that but somebody might put on makeup in order to attract male attention that's one kind of signal but if you're trans you may put on that makeup in order to send a signal I am female right so you're sending a signal that is of a very different nature and so I think there is a way in which trans people are feeling backed against the wall by a discussion that is now very clumsily happening about these mechanisms of sexual signaling because it puts them in a particular predicament where they're feeling like they're about to be robbed

144:31of the very stuff that allows them to to accentuate their femininity that's very well put yeah I think that's a very important distinction too especially in talking about someone who's trying to sell firm yeah now one of the things that came up real recently was this Jordan Peterson interview with vice which in my opinion especially when you look at the sound clip they were talking about women in the workplace and women wearing makeup and high heels and things in the workplace and I know Jordan very well I love him he's a great guy he came off aggressive there and I don't know why I don't think I don't know if he's tired of it or if he's digging his heels in I mean he's apparently part of a two-hour interview yeah she kind of felt like he was on the ropes the whole time yes and he also was coming off of that big Kathy Newman interview in the UK which was like a assault I mean the

145:29whole thing was just crazy but he came out ahead on that and I think there's there's it's much easier to make the argument that he didn't come out ahead and the Vice thing especially in the way that they were they framed it but he was talking about women in the workplace and maybe women shouldn't wear Mei kept in the workplace and maybe they shouldn't wear high heels or dresses so he did say maybe maybe yes he did he didn't say women shouldn't do this the interviewer camera bruised named Kang Kang Jay King maybe said so do you think women shouldn't wear makeup in high heels then and he said maybe yeah and it was you know he's he's thinking he's he's considering options here he's not prepared upon first being asked a question to say yes absolutely or no absolutely this is you know this is a sign of a nuanced thinking person yes brain in action in real-time the problem

146:27with the reaction is the exact problem you're trying to avoid here though we're saying I don't wanna get in trouble here you you preface that and then you slowly move forward whereas Jordan was like maybe well why are they wearing makeup but what are they doing but I would say that you know the generous interpretation and the evolutionary interpretation of what he said was look the me2 movement is arguing that there should be that there can be no sexual signals in the workplace at all . that's not going to be possible because look at how many other sexual signals there are bright makeup heels now the response has been those aren't sexual signals i wear heels and I'm not sexually signaling and you know to which the evolutionary response is what heels do is augment sexual signals that you were born with whether or not you are conscious of the fact that that is why you were doing it that

147:23doesn't make it any less of a sexual signal right and so what Peterson was saying was if we really are going to accept the argument that all signals of this type need to be abandoned from you need to be gotten rid of from the workplace then maybe we actually need to investigate all of the other things that are sexual signals that aren't being talked about right now so there are a couple things first of all have you seen the clip filmed from the audience of him talking about what happened with that vice interview no it's well worth your time I think it's seven or eight minutes of him talking about what happened I do think Peterson who I also know I don't think any give us a cliff notes of what yeah I mean the cliff notes are he said look this is how one engages in thought one advances an idea it doesn't mean something's going to happen right I think he literally says I didn't say

148:19women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace I said maybe and this is what we do and then he describes he says let's let's agree that I'm gonna put forward ten things that might happen and then let's agree that none of them are going to happen so now we can discuss the possibilities so I don't think we know what the actual interview with with Jay King looked like because there was two hours of it and I've seen 15 minutes yeah why won't they release more of it I think they should release the whole thing I do think what I saw so we don't know the context threat which my guess is Peterson's pretty careful in what he says my guess is the context would be revealing I think based on the part that we know that he said because it is in the clips that we've seen we know something's funny because the editing juxtaposes him seeming to contradict himself and he's actually pretty careful not to

149:17do that but what he did actually say contains what I regard as at least one significant error so he says I do think that in response to the question of our women hypocrites for wearing makeup to work and then I don't want to put words in his mouth but something like demanding not to be harassed harassed or something like that so he's forgetting that many of these signals aren't conscious in not only doing that not conscious but you know I saw somebody online discussing this they made a very good point one that's actually pretty hard to field if these are signals even unconscious ones if they're sexual signals why am i wearing one to go to a family reunion why am i wearing high heels to go family reunion am i secretly trying to get lucky at my own family reunion and the answer is no this is not a matter what what peterson said when you know peterson has done so many interviews the

150:21fact that he says a clumsy thing here doesn't strike me one way or the other but i don't want to be put in the position of defending that women are hypocritical for wearing makeup and high heels there are lots of reasons that you have to wear them including social pressure including the fact that you are in a landscape of other people wearing them and if you stand out as being plain in a world of other women who are amplifying these things it may actually have implications for your ability to earn so there are lots of reasons that you might do it that have nothing to do with you as an individual trying to signal for sexual attention it doesn't mean that those things didn't evolve as sexual signals right sexual signals to us evolutionary biologists this is no news i mean if you're a woman and you've got breasts and you're walking around in the world you're broadcasting a sexual

151:12signal and that one's completely unconscious and involuntary it's physiological right so the idea that these signals are out there and common should be should become something we become comfortable with the fact that males are involved in all kinds of signaling all the time then you know that the corner office the mahogany desk and you know it's not that a woman can't have a corner office and a mahogany desk but traditionally speaking those hallmarks of position yes those things have implication in the sexual landscape that's very powerful as does frankly humor the way humor is used has powerful implications in terms of sexual signaling as does who laughs at your jokes I mean if the boss makes a joke everybody laughs whether or not it's funny why is that he's got power they're trying to get ahead so we can't get rid of all of this we can't get if we look at something like an engagement

152:11ring right if you were to analyze an engagement ring anthropologically right so there are these stones actually the truth of it is they're these stone that aren't really that rare but they've been made artificially scarce and a man will get one of these stones and he will put it on a thing that can be put on a woman's finger and the size of the stone and the quality of the stone even though the stone is not actually useful for very much it is symbolically important and it is evidence of the woman's worth in some sense in other words the larger the stone it indicates that the man values her at a greater level this is an absurd an absurd set of signals and we treat it as if it's just nothing you know women gets an engagement ring maybe if she's traditional her friends will you know look at it and say oh that's marvelous I mean so we're engaged in all of this archaic signalling anyway and

153:10when you tune into it it is very jarring but it does not make sense to isolate one set of these signals and say ah look they're signalling right because those signals are embedded in a landscape of signals that we go through our entire life not realizing that we are making the last point I would make is that we also need to recognize that we have a mismatch between personal signaling and broadcast signaling so it may be that a woman wears something in order to catch a particular males attention but the fact that she's wearing it may catch other males attention and that fact may confuse the landscape because men in general may take it as a sign that she's interested in something when in fact she's not interested in something she's interested in someone who happens to be in this landscape so what I hope is that we will recognize that the thing that we should all agree on is that it is

154:16desirable to have the freedom to engage life as you would engage it as so long as you're not harming others you should be you know I do not think polyamorous folks are on the right track I think that what they're up to is I mean I know from the ones who are serious about it and talked about it that even within the polyamorous community there's a recognition about just how difficult it is to make it work but I don't really want to interfere with their right to do it I would like to be able to talk about whether it's a good idea whether it has societal implications that we should be aware of but body I feel like they're not on the right track and isn't everyone's track I mean if we can accept trans folk and we can accept women to subscribe to cultural norms and wearing high heels and makeup in the worst place why can't we accept polyamorous behavior and what

155:06so that's what I'm telling you is the ethical though I personally would counsel somebody if you know and I have had this conversation with many students for example I would counsel them away from it because I think it actually prioritizes one thing which is desirable but that the cost of it is very very high what does it prioritize it prioritizes not locking yourself into a single sexual relationship and I think there's a way in which there is a terror that surrounds locking yourself into a single sexual relationship and part of the terror goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation if you think that beauty max is maxed out at 20 and then it wanes over life then as a woman you're trapped in this terrible situation where you've got this power long before you know what to do with it and it's going to evaporate so you better capitalize that

156:08and if you're a man you're very frightened that you're gonna get into a relationship and then you're gonna watch this person that you love fall apart in front of your eyes and you're gonna be you know you're gonna be caught in that situation and I don't think this is the reality of a pair bond I think the reality of a pair bond is way better than we fear but that because we've got this overly simplistic mythology surrounding it a lot of people are trying to solve that problem how do I not get locked into that relationship that's going to trap me with somebody who's how do I not get bored and decaying in front of me right yeah I don't think it's a decaying thing I would push back against that I would say people just want variety they just want they're attracted to other people they want to act on that and if they find a partner who was also willing to do that and they stay

156:54together I don't see what would be the issue if they wanted to do it well I'm I'm telling you specifically that I don't want to stop them from doing it but I do want people to think very carefully about the issues I mean I'm just speaking as one guy who's lived one life the value that I get out of having as close to perfect security at home as I can have in a relationship I mean Heather and I have been all over the world we've taken our kids into parts of the Amazon that are four hours by boat from the nearest road right this is not a boring relationship this relationship has been and non-stop adventure right but no one's trying to push polyamory on you right well a I wouldn't say that that's true I would say the D bar not as an individual but what I would say is they are promoting an idea that this is the sophisticated way to live it's the wave of the future if yeah and that a

157:59common is this is this well I mean you mentioned sex at dawn yourself and so the idea is yeah but Chris is my friend and he's crazy there you go but what I would say believes it he might be right he does believe it and I you know I'm it is right I have been convinced by a friend you know who I had a long-standing argument with on this topic and what he convinced me is that a friend who is polyamorous yes a friend who is polyamorous and this friend has convinced me that it can be accomplished that there's somewhere to get but he acknowledges that it actually in the case that he points to took several generations literally several generations to arrive at a stable situation well you guys have a wonderful relationship though I know many people who have terrible terrible relationships and for them the the notion of monogamy seems absurd it seems like a trap that

158:52you get stuck in you grow to resent each other and then then you get sick of each other and then you fight in court until you figure out who gets all the money so I would say you know those people shouldn't be together I think you're right yeah but then there's a conflation between polyamory and promiscuity right that just a free-for-all a sex with strangers free-for-all is different from the kind of careful approach to polyamory that this friend takes which still looks extraordinarily difficult to pull off given what human beings are from a jealousy respect that isn't monogamy externally difficult to pull off meaning isn't the rate of divorce in this country alone it's somewhere around 50% and Chris Rock famously said that's just 50% who had the courage to leave how many cowards still but here that this is this is part of the point about novelty we are living in a situation

159:44where our narratives sell us a false picture of our opportunities our narratives are partially driven by an economy that wants us to be insecure enough to spend money like crazy and so I'm not telling people that they should live one way or the other I'm telling them that they should understand what their real options are and polyamory as an experiment is all well and good but what happens when you introduce children into the mix right that's very very different it's very different because children are so costly to raise and because human males are wired to fear raising offspring that they themselves did not produce genetically now I don't think it makes sense to actually care very much about your genes and advancing their interests I think this is something evolution has stuck us with that is not valuable it's actually destructive potentially move past but we

160:47are wired for it and so what I'm expecting to happen is if you have a large-scale experiment in polyamory what it's going to do is it is going to break down into polygyny and it's going to break down into single motherhood as men leave these relationships in order to engage in perhaps more polyamory with younger women and it's going to be yet one more thing that is unevenly distributed between the sexes so choose your mate wisely well choose your mate wisely but we don't even realize that we are interfering with your ability to do that in ways that we don't we don't into it we have a landscape in which nobody is paying attention to the way we are interfering in the normal processes that would cause you to find a mate with whom you might have a very rewarding what life law processes are you referring to well let me take an absurd one okay we have no idea what effect deodorant is

161:51having us choosing the right mate we do know that there are studies that there are molecules that you can't consciously tell you're detecting that do effect mate choice and we know that we're interfering with that stuff well we know that birth control affects that as well as well yeah specifically a woman's ability to smell whether or not she's even genetically compatible with a man absolutely and which is really freaky it's like those lizards how do they know right well no rubbing up against each other in a sense so I think I think what do you wear deodorant I try not to at the moment I'm wearing it because sweat stains would be socially oh you're wearing anti purse I guess I am yeah distinction is dangerous well but here this logging up your pores this is a great this is a great example because I actually did spend I don't know if was a year as an experiment not wearing

162:47deodorant how'd that go well it was already married so a couple interesting facts one it did drive some people crazy I'm sure um not me though not you didn't Rob you didn't bother you at all I'm gonna we've all been around people we love who at some point we're like dude take a shower right but yeah yeah no but as long as you took a shower well actually shave the armpits thing like if you shave your armpits dude I mean see it's the one spot right we're not putting deodorant anywhere else on our body we're just putting it on the armpits like is it a shaving thing I'll give you shave your armpits if you shave your armpits you decrease their really diffuses in had the environment so should make a judgment call well but in some sense look I don't know which it is maybe we're being wusses right and we're being you know we've got an industry of I don't know how much

163:41they make per year selling us these things because we're afraid of our own human smell right right but there's a huge difference between the way somebody smells if they don't have good hygiene and somebody who has the luxury of daily showers and doesn't wear shorter and frankly I don't find somebody who is taking daily showers and isn't wearing deodorant I don't find it that off-putting and in Europe it's considered just a different smell you smell them as opposed to smelling right guard or whatever this exactly and so anyway I have no idea whether if we backed our deodorant and antiperspirant stuff off whether it would change who ended up with whom and whether or not marriages might have a small degree of change right but how many other things are there on the list that we wouldn't think to name what about makeup what if women stopped wearing makeup how

164:33much would that change who hooks up with who how much would it and you know if we how much would it change if we actually learned that there's a difference between hotness and beauty and we actually allowed little girls to recognize that maybe they weren't so interested in being hot because although it gets you a lot of attention it's the kind of attention that's a dead end right how much would that change who ends up with whom I mean a lot of who ends up with whom at the moment is presumably dictated by people having had their attention captured through hotness and then there's a question of whether there's anything there to back it up so I what I want to see for my own kids sake is I want to see a world in which the noise of the way the market influences how we interact with each other and the notions that get promoted as sophisticated where that noise is

165:30reduced so that people can really begin to detect the patterns in their life actually this worked I dated in this way and this worked for me I dated in that way and it didn't work for me it wasn't rewarding that begins to tell you something and all I'm saying about my own situation yes I'm incredibly lucky to have a relationship that's really rewarding and you know it's a lifelong bond on the other hand it may say something we got together early I felt weird about that for a long time I felt like it suggested something you know you don't you hear about people getting together in high school as i call thats cute but you know how well could you have chosen in high school right well I met Heather in high school we were friends we knew each other pretty well by the time we got together and you know I was a dumb kid in my early 20s at the point that the relationship began but it had an

166:24advantage that I didn't necessarily know to think about which is Heather and I have spent all of that time adventuring together and that means that instead of looking for the perfect partner who's exactly the right fit for you two people who had the right starting material sort of grew together into a partnership the growing together up together yeah that's a that's a big part and there's a lot of people that don't spend a lot of time with their mates you know and you know people grow apart too you guys get lucky yeah that's true yeah I've got a lot of friends living in hell yeah that's terrible yeah it's unfortunately a really common it is more common than not you guys are the outliers right what scientists taking your kids to the jungle well but but okay here's the thing I don't know because I've only lived one life but I I think there is a lesson because I think

167:20that what we did actually was fairly simple which was we played it by ear and the stuff that didn't work we chucked it and the stuff that did work we augmented it and so there were no hard and fast rules yeah you're also exceptional people you're both very unusually smart and open-minded well thank each other we found each other and I think I think open-minded is more important than smart in this case all right like being able to look at each other with compassion you know this is true for any indirect right let's I look at you and see you as a human being with real emotions and feelings and reality to your experiences as well even if I feel like we disagree completely so even you know even when we're at our angriest with each other if we can see each other's humanity through it and you get through you know that that is a lesson for every human being in all walks of life in any situation

168:16when you disagree with someone not just your lover not just a friend but people that you don't even know it's it's very easy to dehumanize someone who disagrees with you and I think to bring this all back around this is a part of the problem with male-female interaction today is this dehumanization on both sides that the men are demons that the women are this and the men of that and it saw this you know it's these rash generalizations in this extreme tribalism well there is kind of a secret weapon and I it's not let us check it out the secret is Heather and I have a whole second channel on which to navigate which is that we both know the same evolutionary story yeah so there's a way you know there's an idea that's important you can very often understand more about a given human interaction especially a contentious one if you turn down the sound alright so you can't hear

169:21what's being said and that sounds wrong right it sounds like well I mean the most important piece of information you could have is what these people are saying to each other as they're arguing but no that's not how human beings work sometimes the important information is on that vocal channel and sometimes the vocal channel is actually almost purely noise right and so if both literally and metaphorically yeah but if Heather and I both know that then there's a part of us that sort of always outside if we I mean we don't fight that much it's really pretty rare but when we do there's also a part of us that's watching the interaction and knows that a certain pattern may have to unfold in order for us to get to the other part of it you know sometimes knowing that we're engaging in theater at some level even though neither of us wants to be that's a great way to put it

170:13engaging in couples theater it's actually it's the perfect example of this thing like you know you're talking about Peterson and going to work and wearing makeup and you think am i sending sexual signals well gosh we're all involved in weird stuff sure right yeah the idea that you and your mate could both be aware that your argument is in some in some way theater and that even you know you might think well if it's theatre we can just skip it now you can't know there are things that have to happen in order for you to get to the next act and so you know it they're like I hope I'm not saying something I shouldn't but there's a there's a thing I'm not the easiest guy to live with I think I'm a very decent person but there's a part of me that's not good at certain stuff that makes Heather's life hard right and that stuff she's good at putting up with it to a

171:11certain extent and then there's things that will cause it to get even to get bad I need to know that that's happened in order for us to get past it and she needs to tell me hey this isn't the normal level of you know I'm not really frustrated considering exploding right right so but doesn't sound that call the the necessity of us being able to exchange that information is there and the fact you know it's it's so much less charged if we both know that sort of that process has to unfold and that is not an infinite process and we will be on the other side of it once you know I she's conveyed what she needs to convey and I've let her know that I've heard it and again the more times you've done this the more likely you are confident you know what this is gonna end up okay this feels awful right now like really are fighting and this feels awful and right we've done this before and

172:04actually this proves to be necessary because it resets some things that you know just every relationship no matter if it's romantic or not needs resets on their basis and so this is this is one way that you can sort of theatrically reset some important points this is a great lesson for reasonable people and everybody should aspire to be reasonable people is intended at that all right I just did three hours I just flew right by right Wow awesome crazy yeah it was really fun