Geoffrey Miller

00:00for four three two one Jeffrey hey hey show that you doing here man appreciate it it's my pleasure and honor and on the day where Bill Cosby goes to the pokey crazy sad story that sad for some people happy for others sad that he's only going away for I wonder if that's a death sentence for a man at his age essentially it is right he's like 81 or something like that it'd be weird if justice took into account like your health status and a warden right I think they have done that though didn't they do that with that guy who was speaker Hastert who was Speaker of the House who is convicted for molesting a large number of boys when he was a wrestling coach oh yeah remember that man yeah yeah 15 months 15 months imagine I mean that's that's pure insanity he's in a wheelchair anyway yeah I could have been bull lizard there's no way if he was a 25 year old able-bodied man who had done the exact

01:06same thing he would have gone to jail for 15 months for admitting to molest a large number of kids who are under his care when he was he was a wrestling coach right yeah yeah oh he was the guy that movie was made of no no different guy now is that that was DuPont okay DuPont was not a child molester he was just a psychopath who hired wrestlers to come live with him and wrestle with him yeah remember that yeah yeah I know one of them the one of them the main guy the movie they the the two brothers Dave and Mark Schultz fantastic wrestlers who were completely misrepresented in the movie they made out to be like involved this weird gay relationship with him and doing cocaine they added all sorts of to that movie very weird how they do that screenwriters you gotta dramatize it I guess his sentence wasn't for child abuse why that's why it wasn't that it said this says the judge said it

02:11would have been higher he would have gotten more if the statutes didn't run out the limitation for accident in 1960s and 70s ran out so the judge noted the punishment for such a conviction would have been far worse I think he actually got convicted for bank transactions keeping stuff secret oh wow yeah I had to pay fines statutes of limitations mmm so we were talking about Bill Cosby that uh psychology professors and experts were obviously stating that he had some sort of problem I mean it's weird cuz the media will have a certain narrative they want to promote and they'll sort of find the psychologists will say the thing that fits that yeah so I think most clinical psychologists would say I've never talked to the guy I'm not going to try to diagnose him from a distance right I I have no idea what his condition is or what his issue is but then there's a handful who are willing

03:06to kind of stick their necks out and say something and and it's embarrassing to be a psych professor for that reason because you're you're always kind of being represented publicly by the people who are kind of being least professional yeah about those kind of diagnosis that is a real problem today isn't it like in in terms of identity politics and this this inclination to draw conclusions and to lean towards one side of the other instead of just looking at the actual situation objectively and if you're not talking to him I mean I'm assuming Bill Cosby's a terrible piece of as a human being that's what I'm assuming but look at all this but I've never talked to the man I don't know what kind of crazy he's got going on in his head but if all these women are telling the truth and seems super unlikely that they're all lying yeah I mean Wizard know like it's over fifty of them right

03:57with the same story yeah well he's got a deep dark streak that's for sure I mean the weird thing is so a lot of people who are successful have a little bit of that dark streak to have a little bit of that sociopathy like you know they can kind of step back from normal human relations and they can either turn it into you know abuse and exploitation like Cosby did or they can kind of civilize themselves right and they can harness that to do something that's good and and where they're kind of using your ability to take a different viewpoint on things you know to analyze human behavior or invent things or you know propose new policies or whatever and so I think that kind of dark streak you know if you have it you have to recognize it and kind of tame it and work with it and the people who do I think can often do great things for society and the people who don't end up

05:00in jail well this is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this up to you as an evolutionary psych professor looking at the human mind and looking at behavior patterns and what's clearly some sort of I hesitate to call crime and addiction but it seems like an addictive pattern that he has that there's a compulsion to doing this to people it's not as simple as he wants women to have sex with him they don't want to have sex with him so he drugs them I don't think it's that simple I think there's some getting away with it thing there's got to be some he's better than everyone thing because he's you know he's royalty in the in terms of like Hollywood in terms of show business in terms of stand-up comedy he's always been treated as royalty I mean he's been allowed to essentially criticize anyone who wants he's rarely is there a rebuttal to the things that he says and

05:57you know he's been criticizing the black community for its use of bad words and for its use of sexually explicit language and in depictions and meanwhile the entire time he's raping people I mean it's amazing I think one thing that might happen is if you've got this public image as being like squeaky-clean family values and you've got the burden of kind of being a moral exemplar like that you know just like um televangelists right or anybody who has a big religious following like the pressure to be good all the time I think can kind of tip people and divide the thrill of transgression I imagine could be I quite kind of a dick and I think that's a real danger and I think that's that kind of hypocrisy is why we should be really careful about kind of idolizing anybody yeah to that degree kind of morally and putting that burden on them yeah I mean I could only

06:55imagine like being an evangelist being someone who preached about the word of God but meanwhile having this weird hooker thing like do you member was his name Ted he ran a giant Church and I believe it was Colorado and the entire time I just have a bit about him the entire time we smoking math and having sex with gay prostitutes and all the while is going on about it's always the guys who go on about how awful gay people are they're secretly gay it's so common there's a little research on that I mean it's not definitive but it looks like a lot of Ted Haggerty right yeah Haggard there's a lot of people a lot of guys who are pretty like outspokenly homophobic and like you put them in a sex research situation and see what actually arouses them and show them straight or gay porn right and you have a plethora graph and you you sense what's the graph what is it is my ground

07:55what is that sense it's blood flow and penis oh boy I need one of those anyone let's just have it in the background of every podcast but when you come to the podcast you got to put these electrodes on your penis and then we were just going to talk about Japanese vomit porn and tentacles well drops don't lie not the heart the heart lies not those with his McGrath's so yeah the people who are often you know most hostile to something you have some some little issue inside that Brian's creating some conflict yeah I mean no only makes sense the conflicted thoughts of the human being who has this ideal of who they'd like to project and what they'd like people to think they are I mean while how's this thing below the surface that is literally everything they despise and everything they rally against and that is their their true nature yeah oh god it's got to be the awful feeling

08:52I mean I've known several guys who are closeted gay men and it's it's a awful existence they just live in this perpetual state of just angst and unease and I mean while god I just think for the most part especially if you live in an urban environment most of our people don't give a anymore this is almost a self-imposed prison and the people that do give a they're the real problem you know the the the people who are not gay who really care if someone's gay unless they're trying to do a Cosby on you like why do you care yeah I look if somebody wants to be in the closet about their their sexuality like they want to be discreet for professional reasons or because investors would panic or whatever mmm like that's totally cool but I think it's so hard to be authentic to yourself like it's okay to sort of acknowledge I have this sexuality or these predilections and and it's up to

09:52me to kind of harness them and deal with them and manage them and if you want to do that privately that's that's cool we should have that freedom yes but if you don't work out those little demons and if you can't acknowledge what's authentic I think that's where you get these problems like The Cosby case yeah and I believe there's a difference between discretion not wanting to discuss your sexuality and out not hypocrisy yeah these are completely different thing it's one thing like you said like say if a guy's a CEO some major corporation happens to be gay he's just not interested in all the political nonsense and all the social nonsense that goes along with discussing that yeah he's like I'm just gonna keep it discreet that makes sense like why should he have to but if he lies to his friends you know like or if he goes on the attack in media that is yes

10:40damnation hail fire yeah we are so strange as a race and I have talked many times about how bizarre it is that we've become really comfortable with seeing people have sex like on phones and and you know iPads and laptops I mean it is such a massive part of internet consumption yeah but yet so dirty and so forbidden if someone comes in the room you're watching you slam the laptop shut in and disgust total embarrassment its we're really weird yeah well it's weird on so many levels like I don't do research on whatever the psychology of porn but I know people who do and the fact that you can study it and everyone watches it but you can't even show clips at a scientific conference Wow of what people are watching is kind of bizarre a second thing that's bizarre is if you'd asked people seven years ago you know in the 50s or whatever what do you think will

11:49happen if there's unlimited free online pornography that is every possible genre of humans of all sexes interacting with each other including cartoon dragons and whatever they would go civilization will have fallen like it would be chaos it that sounds post-apocalyptic and and yet we're living in that era and people are still driving their kids to school and is he fine like morally judgmental about politics and our ability to compartmentalize is kind of awe-inspiring actually yeah it really is but it's also our ability to adjust to the times it's kind of inspiring to think about the difference like I've often talked about when I was in high school is I was in high school in 1981 was my freshman year of high school and that was literally around the time that vh1 tape was introduced into modern America so it was the what was the exact year vh1 tapes were invented

12:55we got him in my house I didn't get an 82 like maybe I was a sophomore which is right when you're about the horniest and that's that's when poor and made it into people's houses and you had to go through those beads in the video store to get into the porn section and everybody was like everybody but had blinders on and nobody looked at anybody else it was just terrifying and you know you're there fees like should I bring it back today I'll wait I'll just keep it as TV bucks another three bucks if you just stole it to cost 30 yeah steal it just so you don't have to look look the guy in the face 77 DS really and her home you seen the 70s on the wiki it says yeah probably 70s in early eighties okay well maybe it was late seventies or something like that my house we got it around 1980 yeah I want to say 82 ish but it changed the world and it changed it in a real

13:45sneaky way where nobody saw it coming but the difference between the access to sex to looking at sex from 1960 to 1980 20 years which is you know in terms of historically is a very short period of time at any other time other than today today it's a massive change if you had a anticipate what it would be like in 2038 you'd be like oh god you know all of the on mucks inventions who have come to fruition will be living in tunnels underground and the surface of the earth would be 190 degrees and there'll be no more water and yeah people always overestimate how much it's going to change in the next 20 years compared to the last 20 yeah but you know if you'd asked a bunch of let's say psychology researchers who study like marriages and long-term relationships asked them in 1980 what's going to happen when you have unlimited VHS porn some of them might have said that'll save American

14:45marriages how many do you think would go with that all the hippies I think a lot of folks would have said well that's a way you can get your sexual variety needs Matt in a kind of virtual fake way and so that will reduce the pressure for like infidelities and other folks would have said oh my god it'll remind people what they're missing and so little little nuke marriages the divorce rate will go to 80 percent but then there's the third option which is the sort of the Cosby asked thing is that the addiction that there's there's and maybe I can ask you about this like what is it about things whether it is gambling or you know whatever video games there are things that people get obsessed with and those things become almost a part of who they are it takes over their minds so much like if you had a pie chart of the human brain with some folks there's a giant chunk this just porn it's like

15:3940% of the brain just porn yeah like what happens what is what is it about the mind that makes one obsessed whether it's with gambling or whatever whatever the vice whatever the thing that makes you addicted well I mean one that one issue is people differ in their their conscientiousness right their degree of self-control and their ability to kind of resist temptations and keep their their eyes on the target like career family kids you know do the right stuff other people like I just can't control myself in any domain of life whatever it is video games porn doing my homework whatever but I think we also have to cut people some slack because remember now if you're a teenager and you're really into video games Call of Duty whatever it is there are literally thousands of people designing that game to be as addictive as possible and beta testing it and refining it and and you know doing the

16:42level design so it gives you just the right reinforcers at the right pace and of course we're not going to be very good at resisting that because the power of capitalism in tech and innovation to kind of exploit our brains is is pretty awesome am I being naive or are they just trying to be entertaining I mean they're just trying to make an amazing game that's totally immersive and sucks you in or are they really thinking hey this Jeffrey Miller guy I want to get him up on Battlefield Earth no that was the John Travolta movie right yeah okay let's just say Unreal Tournament I want to get him up on Unreal Tournament and get him completely addicted to this they're just maximizing sales and profit and but are they doing it consciously or they just trying to make the best possible game that's so entertaining and then it just as a side effect it becomes addictive I think it's as well

17:43okay if you're running a videogame company the folks actually doing the programming right character design level design whatever they want it to be awesome they want it to just you know the best game ever that is just so fun to play but the management knows we have to sell it we have to make it compelling we have to make people excited about the next version and and you know the add-ons so I think that there's kind of like a super-ego in it issue going on even within companies rather the designers just want it to be cool right and management just wants a viable commercial product but doesn't that just come something that's cool I mean I'm just playing devil's advocate here because I'm not exactly sure how I'm friends with a few guys who make video games cliffy B who worked for Epic Games who makes a he showed us unreal way back in the day even before Jamie worked here

18:42we got to see them making Unreal Tournament like as was being made and I went to the aid offices when they were working on quake three which were just these amazing games it seemed to me and again I could be naive but it seemed to me that all they were doing was just trying to make awesome that they liked yeah and then it became addictive just cuz it was so good I think that's most of it um yeah I mean this summer like my girlfriend and I were each doing working on our next book proposals and we each got a little bit addicted to Age of Empires HD it was like back in the day 20 years ago and it's really fun because we learned a lot about each other just watching each other play like we had such different strategies and in terms of like what you build what you prioritize how you deal with enemies like it's an amazing kind of personality test zone right and we each got a little

19:37bit addicted temporarily in our own way and I don't think that's an intention of the designers it's just if you make anything awesome whether it's music whether it's stand-up comedy or sex whether it's sex whether it's long-form TV drama like yeah and people want that you know it works it's it's brain candy yeah I saw you quote you you posted about Ozark after I posted about how amazing it is I'm completely wrapped up in this second season it's so incredible but you were saying how they always make the kids bratty yeah you don't have kids do you know I have a daughter you do 22 okay I didn't think she was bratty at all I think she kept it remarkably together for a teenager whose parents are murderers and drug dealers spoil alert I thought it was I think she's Jimmy and she needs some time alone where they need to talk to her I mean you can't just let her go through life hanging out

20:34with some kid who lives in a trailer smoking weed and stealing books and you go yeah it I kind of warmed up to it after like I'd watch the first couple episodes and she seemed kind of bratty the daughter and really in that and then and then you must be amazing my kids awesome and and I don't know why all kids aren't like her so but I think screenwriters get lazy about this stuff they think well if there's a family you need marital conflict and great paradox bring conflict and you need secrets and lies and ends but I think the way they're handling it is amazing because the kid doesn't have that kind of conflict the kid has like in my opinion a typical sort of relationship with his father where he admires his father and his father's abilities and you know and he seems to be it's I just think that shows great it's just so well read written rather it's just so it's so

21:31twisted there's so much going on so many different levels yeah it's like I get anxiety I start sweating you know I feel like I'm burying bodies well I love that you don't really know what's gonna happen yeah and legitimate like it's you know Game of Thrones you had that thing where any character could die at any time yeah and that's what that was one of the major things that yeah people watching and I think was really good TV drama you get that kind of engagement where it's it's like real life like you know the series will continue but you don't know any particular character what but we didn't have that for most of culture that's what's really interesting it was through most of mass media fiction that you saw on television in the movies the good guy won yeah you know and it was real predictable and there was always like a little bit of drama like he might lose he might lose Oh he wins

22:30occasionally he had something crazy like Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff whoa whoa there's off themselves that's the end of the movie you leave the movie theater like holy what a gangster move you know there was a few movies like that but for the most part yeah well starting in like the Golden Age of cinema in the 70s the counterculture cinema you sometimes got those really profound surprise endings but one thing they made example The Hustler vanishing point okay that was the one with the Challenger the guy had the challenge right yeah yeah it's like I remember the car awesome car but I mean one thing that makes me optimistic about America is that the same adults who are being completely insane to each other about politics on Twitter whatever you know are watching this really sophisticated you know emotionally insightful Netflix stuff yeah and I can't connect those those two

23:32things it's like when people aren't talking about certain issues they're capable of you know really an appreciating really insightful drama that's about the subtleties of human relationships and morally ambiguous situations and then they go into the voting booth or get on Twitter and and it's like there's black and there's white and and that's it and and then I hate those people and I love these people and I can't connect the dots between you know the entertainment media that we appreciate versus the kind of ideologies that that we oversimplify yeah I think Twitter and I think well Twitter in particular but blogs as well I think it is a horrible way to communicate when you are saying something that's in dispute you know because you're not challenged and I think there's also whether it's 140 characters or 280 characters I just think this limited way of writing in

24:34text without talking to someone without being in front of them and communicating with them and the subtleties of human interaction and social cues and recognizing people's feelings and it just it's a piss-poor way of getting your thoughts out and it's very non human you know it's it's very it's it tends to gravitate towards cruelty because there's no consequences for saying cruel things it's almost like you're you're throwing a bomb over a wall and you don't know who's over there you know like you don't you're not there seeing you're not there's something about that that I just think is alien to the human condition and I think it's it's having a real effect on our civilization in our culture and how we communicate each other and I think it's galvanizing the the polar opposites and it's making people go towards these extreme left's and extreme rights

25:27especially people that are easily led or maybe not so thoughtful about you know the objective way that they're interpreting these events and not not being introspective not looking at themselves with a critical eye and just engaging in this sort of back-and-forth tribal with people that I just think is uh it's so strange to watch and particularly with when you read something and it's really well-written like you could tell this is an intelligent person that's written a bunch of nonsense and called people all right and Nazis and what's the most recent one but bonks Fox yeah about the with it radical what is it this is a new the radical right the reactionary right oh yes the reactionary right this is the new one we have a new one now it's new it's only what a couple weeks old the reactionary right it's baby yeah it's that time too I mean the weird thing is

26:26people do have a hunger for this more primal engaged kind of long-form discussion which is why podcast like this are really popular my people are willing to listen - you know - reasonably smart people talking for an hour he about cool topics because that's the natural condition you know imagine our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago around the campfire having a discussion about some fraud issue well they would talk it through until it was more or less resolved or unless they at least identified here's the things we can agree on and here's the things we can agree to disagree on but with Twitter it's it's just the exact opposite it's not sitting around the campfire right it's it's lobbying these hand grenades over them and it's an infinite number of hand grenades like say if you have thirty thousand followers or something god that's thirty thousand people that

27:19might be lobbing hand grenades and then they might retweet to a bunch of other people and oh Jesus then here comes some you know especially if it's on some hot button topic that they would like to chime in on you know oh it's just it's strange yeah well I think you know the human social psychology is it's very hard to reach any agreement without a certain amount of back-and-forth preferably face to face in person with as much time as you need yeah and this is why things like these sort of time limited presidential debates drive me nuts I would love to just have 50 60 hours of candidates sure talking it through and people can tune in and just hear okay here's six hours about foreign policy let's see what they really and then voters could have an informed choice imagine candidates actually learning something from each other right and being open and honest about that instead

28:22they have to pretend that their their ideas are rock-solid and completely well-thought-out and rigid and impossible to evolve that this is it they've got it and you're wrong and what my opponent wants is some something terrible for America and god we've we seen this hustle so many times and yet it's the same hustle every four years yeah I hope we get to a future where people are allowed to be epistemic ly humble like here's what I don't know and I don't know a lot about most things and even if politicians or scientists or media figures were able to take that attitude yeah and just it kind of gets back to the hypocrisy point right everybody intimately knows about most topics I know virtually nothing or I've heard a few things third hand that I can kind of regurgitate at a party but we're all kind of expected to have an informed view about everything and this is

29:23something I try to model for my students like if they ask a question and I really don't know the answer I try to make a point of saying I don't know let's look it up that's awesome that's so important the idea that you should know everything about everything is preposterous yeah and you know if your 20 year old undergrad you don't know what the typical 50 year old knows you might think oh they've probably mastered most of the wisdom in the world already or you might think no there's like gigabytes of stuff and they can't possibly know at all well there's such a spectrum to the average person then has a like a very intensive job like say if you're involved in something computer coding electronics something that's 1012 hours a day you're engrossed you don't have a lot of time to focus on other areas you don't really have a lot of time to expand your understanding of whether it's biology

30:20mathematics whatever it is it doesn't apply to what you do for a living really a very little time so this this notion that you like people are embarrassed about things they don't know and I think that's really unfortunate it's it's it's one of the main stumbling points when it comes to like open and honest discourse so you're not dumb if you don't know some things you know you just don't know some things and you there's no way you know everything yeah I I think it's a great point a lot of people have these cognitively demanding jobs and that's not just white collar workers I mean a lot of manual trades you've got to think about what you're doing and it hard mental labor and then you get home and you have dinner and you have the kids and their homework and your family life and what are you going to do by the time you finally have some alone time at whatever 9:00 p.m. are you gonna you

31:16know turn on the nature Channel and watch a really hardcore David Attenborough it's an animal behavior document right right or are you gonna be like I'll just watch you know unbreakable kimmy schmitt or whatever yeah yeah I mean people want escape at that point yeah it's there's not enough time in the day one of the most beautiful things about podcasts that was completely unexpected for me is that it gives me this very unusual opportunity to sit down and talk to somebody without any interruptions for three hours which I could never ask someone to do in real life and it never came up before like if I have dinner if you and I went out to dinner we'd be talking you know maybe someone else would be with us different conversations to be eating all this amazing did you try that oh that's good yeah what do you up to ba ba ba there's like little simple conversations it's

32:03fun and everything but it's not completely locked in like this with the headphones on through a microphone the knowledge that other people are listening and that these these subjects that you're discussing you're allowing these ideas to play themselves out and you're you're sort of moving them around and asking questions and looking at them from different angles and and to have that liberty and freedom to do that is a very rare thing and for people that get to listen and I enjoy Sam Harris's podcast in particular radio labs one of my favorite but one of the there's so many good ones out there but what's really good about them is that you get a chance to listen to discourse uninterrupted on uncensored undirected and this is something that I think is sorely missing from the rest of our culture and it's one of the reasons why these things have caught on so well yeah

32:59I mean if you respect the ideas that you're talking about you should be willing to give time yes and attention yeah and let them kind of breathe like opening a bottle of wine and just letting it do the aeration thing before you pour it and it's funny how much of a thirst there is for that I mean if it asked me 10 years ago would anybody ever spend three hours listening to a podcast I would have said no there's just this there's one way out acceleration of culture that's going to be faster and faster nobody will watch more than a 90 second clip on YouTube that'll be it yeah and it said it's the opposite way I think people have a yearning for a more relaxed pace of dialogue that is actually a break from the the frenetic pace of their work life right yeah I think even like leaning towards things that are like tech reviews things along those lines those are getting longer and longer when

34:00people are just I mean there was never a television show where someone would discuss cellphones in depth with no interruption for over an hour that's very common now where where someone will go over all the different details of a phone and let you know like here's here's what's new about the Galaxy Note 9 and and if you get hundreds of thousands of views like clearly someone's missed something yeah I mean even on YouTube like you can get 25 minute reviews of like an ar-15 accessory yet not just like the rifle but like the red dot scope or whatever and or I'm sure they're long but wanting reviews or whatever oh yeah there's a lot yeah I've seen them all and I mean I think that's just a more natural pace of human human discourse because no bear in mind like hundred thousand years ago sitting around the fire with a bunch of people no smartphones no video no TV no

35:01movies no recorded music the entertainment is each other and it's not rushed it's like the Sun the Sun went down none of us are going to sleep for four hours what do we do try to entertain each other with jokes no I mean break out the ukulele they wouldn't have done stand-up comedy but it would have done sit-down comedy well somebody probably stood up yeah you know held court told some good stories you know I mean a good story is always valued a good storyteller this is what my anthropologist colleagues tell me is you know your status if you're in a tribal society of small-scale society is heavily dependent on not just how good a hunter you are or how many kids you have it's how entertaining are you in the evenings sure and the people who are just break the monotony are just gold they're their treasured yeah they give you fuel to give you energy like when

36:00you're around someone who's really hilarious so telling great stories you like everyone around was like hahaha yeah you get fired up by it yeah yeah um it's I don't I mean I I have a rosy view of the future I'm very optimistic and I think that all the chaos that we're going through right now politically and socially in particular this is I feel like this is just an adolescent period of communication that we are experiencing this this open flood like we've opened up the the barriers for communication anybody can communicate now and it's just K and it's gonna take a while before the discourse levels out and you've got a lot of loud noises on all sides and there's a lot of people fighting for power and fighting fighting for virtue fighting for you know whatever social brownie points they get by pointing out their position being correct in your position being foolish

37:02and silly and this is the future and this is done and and it's there's a there's this cruel aspect to it which is interesting like when if someone missteps and someone says something that they regret and they delete it there's this cancel culture get rid of them off with his head because people realize the immediacy of all this and they're terrified of it happening to them so it's like they're just throwing rocks at whoever might be the accused it's fascinating to watch yeah you know I mean we're gonna need a whole new set of social norms or people just calm the down about this and I think it's kind of analogous like one of my favorite books about kind of social history is called dog the bourgeois virtues by Dedra McCloskey an economic historian and she points out when you switched from like the Middle Ages where everyone's a peasant to this urbanized commercial

37:54culture where people are mostly traders and they have little shops and whatever they needed to learn how to interact with strangers to provide value for money and they needed a whole new set of virtues that had to do with reliability and thinking what am I making or what goods or services am i providing that actually are useful and it took you know a couple generations for people to enter that kind of capitalist mode of what can I do that's helpful to others they can support my family and I think now we have a cultural shift where we realize given social media how do we cope with the fact that everybody virtually signals everybody sometimes says things that are that are mean and stupid and everyone's fallible and anything you say will be on a permanent record basically how do we cope with that you know we're used to a sort of public culture where everything is very polished and edited

38:57and curated and and that time is gone so we need a new set of kind of social and moral norms that cut each other a lot more slack I think yeah I would agree with you and I would say that the inclination towards kindness and communication and understanding should be rewarded and that we we need to reward that and I want to say ostracize people that are inclined to go towards this cancel culture idea but we need to let people be aware of it you know we were talking before the podcast that I have like all these emails that I can't catch up on because I was gone I was in the mountains for six days with no cell phone service at all I felt better when I was there just dead I feel like there's a certain amount of anxiety that comes with being connected to all these people all the time and can't only checking your mentions and constantly looking at Google News to

39:58find out what chaos is coming our way and just I I just don't think that that's healthy and I don't think me I think I do my very best to mitigate the negative effects of it but my very best is not good I think I'm doing a great job because when it's taken away from me and I've had this happen twice over the last few months I was in lanai the small island off of Hawaii one of the Hawaiian Islands and I broke my phone and it took a few days for them to send me a new one and I was like God why do I feel so good I feel so present and I feel so healthy and then this past week the same thing no cell phone service for all these days and so I just felt better I think there's a funny thing even that happened with Burning Man culture were like when it got started in the early 90s it was let's all come together and have this excitement of interacting more and now

40:53since Burning Man is one of the few places where you don't get cell phone service and you can't really be online it's like oh man this is such a relief because we literally can't stay connected and the community we're in is only 70,000 people yeah instead of 330 million which is almost Boulder that's almost Boulder Colorado I think boulders a little bit over 100 mm so 70,000 is that's a big city the freaks it's a big city but it feels intimate compared to Twitter right yeah for sure yeah I I'm fascinated by Burning Man I can't go because hippies will drive me crazy and there's too much dust yeah but I love the idea and I'm fully supportive there was like a fund that you could write a check like to support Burning Man I supported it as a project as an idea I don't necessarily want to go there until they got really polished and worked out but I think what

41:52the idea behind it is fascinating to people saying I don't like this I don't like where this is going I think there's a lot of people that would like to do something different let's just try it out for a week let's just everybody let's agree we'll get together through these days and let's let's just dance and we'll have glow sticks and wear pasties and get crazy and do ecstasy and a lot of people like yeah let's do it and then this thing happens and this thing is only a few years old I mean it really is what a decade in half how many years have they been doing it I mean the first Burning Man was like the late 80s but it was still a couple dozen people and I just it gradually grew and it really became a pretty solidified subculture by probably the late 90s and no leadership well there is guy behind the there's behind the scenes leadership of course and I mean that's another fascinating

42:51thing is depending on the the political lenses that you wear when you go there it's either like a libertarian paradise or it's a communist paradise mm-hmm or it's spontaneous self-organization of some sort but there's there certainly are people who are kind of coordinating it it's just they're not well there's tickets now yeah I think it's just it's hard to get it's hard to get tickets it's even hard to get a parking pass but this is my point like why would they want to limit this thing like who who's like a Bitcoin thing like you're arbitrarily limiting the amount of Bitcoin or deciding there's only a certain number and they're doing this with humans or just saying well yeah I can't really go over 70,000 it's just it's not gonna work but what if they did what if they just open up the floodgates and said anybody who wants to come to Burning Man and and and get it get

43:42crazy just come on down how many think how many think would come um half a million boy but it would be chaos right because it would like who supplies the porta-potties and right and the emergency medical services and the Arabists for people having bad trips and like you need some infrastructure and then you know Nevada State Police have to kind of make sure there's not like murders and stuff do they come around oh yeah they wander and they they police how fast you drive and they must be so annoyed like what have they been dealing with up until Burning Man nothing no just a little bit here and there how got loose yeah someone blew up a trailer they got their mixture wrong mm-hmm but yeah it's it's fascinating in terms of how quickly it went from not being a thing at all to being its own subculture with its own huge still immoral norms and dress styles and

44:49systems of virtue signalling and sort of political expectations about what beliefs are the right ones to have even though it didn't start out political at all well whenever you get freaky you go left-wing like if you get freedom and freaky and drugs that's left-wing period right I mean there's no real I mean let's just some eyes wide shut type we were wearing masks and everybody's got a right eye yeah you don't typically hear people like well I went to Burning Man I dropped acid and and I realized like Mormon monogamy is really the proper way to live yeah they're nice people though they might be right yeah Mormons are the nicest cult of all time there they are some of the nicest folks I know if I had to say if like there's one religion where I to say like what are what are the what are your expectations of friendliness and niceness like why where is where's the highest expectation for

45:57me its Mormons mmm that's one religion like I think it's nonsense I think Joseph Smith was a little conman in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus and only he could read him because he had a magic rock and all that crazy it is absolutely ridiculous but the end result is a bunch of really nice folks like they have a wonderful community they're really nice to each other once they got rid all that polygamy you know once they got rid of the 90 wives and you know dressing up like a pilgrim they they became like a really nice community of people they're like generally friendly so my granddad who is a Business School professor back in the 40s he moved his his little family to Salt Lake City and they lived there for a while and he was really inspired by the kind of family values and I think that's one reason he sort of went on to

46:46have twelve kids of his own and not that he turned Mormon but he thought they're onto something in terms of how seriously they take the future both on earth and in afterlife they believe in well in the afterlife don't they get a plan out of the wrong when they die right well this is something I loved about the TV series the expanse I don't know if you've seen I keep hearing about it and I haven't gotten into it yet it's just too many damn shows that are awesome to watch these days but as soon as I'm done with Ozark I'm gonna jump in what I loved about it is it set maybe a couple hundred years in the future and so we've colonized Mars and asteroid belt and there's one group of people who were building the first ship to colonize a distant star system and who's doing it the mormons of course and i thought of course of course it's going to be a religion that has a farsighted approach

47:41and that's kind of pronatalist and that's all about family values and like increasing their numbers and and yeah of course it's going to be them not what so social justice warriors putting together a starship yeah did you ever see the the Osmond family photograph from one of their albums their early albums where they all got their own planet because they think that when you die you get your own planet and so the album was based on that concept and like if you open up the album it's like oh here's planet Donny he's gonna run the last road belt yeah third they're totally locked and loaded to do the interstellar colonization it's strange though I mean it's true it strange the blinders that people go on that people put on and that they would put those blinders on like it's almost like if he just can go hey look let's just all admit Joseph Smith was full of but we got

48:46good thing going on here folks we're all real nice to each other and seems to be some real positive energy involved in believing in this higher power and this greater good and this overwhelming sense of community that we all have and they have a sense of humor about it like the way they reacted to the South Park guys doing Book of Mormon it's fantastic what's like fair enough they took a hilarious H ad in the playbook I mean that though and that is a brutal musical in terms of like the way they're depicted buffoons believing in nonsense trying to recruit these indigenous people it's kind of I mean it's ruthless and hilarious at the same time and they're like wonderful if you want to find out more about being a Mormon here come come to our website come check it out thank you I think having that that humility in that sense of humor about what you're doing I wish we saw more of that in like

49:39academia because there's a lot of fields that are very bad and and don't do good work but that are terribly terribly serious about it like what gender studies or are you social psychology gender studies I hosted something on Instagram yesterday I was at a bookstore and there is a feminist baby book it says feminist baby finds her voice and it's a baby screaming into a bullhorn look at this picture baby screaming into a bullhorn and and I said that the lines between parody and reality have never been blurrier and some people laughed but a lot of people call me a piece of and is is one of the rare times I dove into the comics just to take a little look-see into the gates of Hell but look that's parody folks why is the baby screaming into a bullhorn what voice does she have did what what oppression is she rallying against at three months old is she screaming about

50:45the patriarchy when she can't even talk yet and here's more parody why she fat and ugly what kind of baby is that that baby looks like a thumb she doesn't even have a chin this is chaos it's not even a real baby it's like an M&M with legs it's crazy look she's got up hair and they've already gendered her they put a bow on her which is really up to do to a baby you've decided that she's a girl how dare you you piece of you transphobic and the rouges is a little bit she's hurt got makeup on she dressed up like a clown already as a baby up here this big nutty eyes it's crazy finds her voice she found her voice fantastic she can't talk yet that's a baby what we should all listen to the baby give the baby a bullhorn let's all gather round I got poop what is the baby this is baby saying she finds her voice like it's parody even if the book is wonderful I don't know that it's not

51:48maybe it's a great book maybe it's fun maybe it's a silly book that's parody that it that would be a goddamn character on South Park a baby feminist with a bow that screams at the top of her lungs what is this free the nipple mmm Oh like right now I'm hungry I get it yeah oh is that from the book that's from the book I guess feminist baby maybe it's a great book I think it's satire but it's what I do I mean here's the thing like if you're in a field where you can't tell whether something is from it or its satirical right then you need to lighten up about your field yes and just gender studies you say you in particular well yeah and yeah in particular but but what is it about it that leans itself towards foolishness I think it's very hard to do good work in a field where you have to every day systematically deny common sense and and deny the evidence of your

52:53own eyes and ears about what's right in front of you like how sex differences work I think that creates a habit of interacting with the world in a way that says what I study is going to beat completely divorced from every aspect of day to day life and everybody else I encounter who's not in my field because if if you allow any crosstalk between like you've sort of blank slate gender ideology and the real world the ideology crumbles so you can only maintain it behind this wall of insulation and and that's a terrible position to be in I don't envy the people who live their lives that way and it it all grows inside the walled gardens of academia and outside of that it's these you know you get internet groups from people that sort of were indoctrinated into these ideas in in college or and it's also I think in some ways there's a leveling of the playing field that a lot of these ideologies

54:03present some people where they they go no you're not a freak you're okay you know this there was some silly article on fat acceptance the other day and it was talking and then they got papaya which is fine I accept people who drink accept accept all kinds of unhealthy choices but listen don't lie to me just don't lie about the physical reality of what you've done to your body if you reach four hundred pounds that's not that's not healthy you're saying it's healthy you're saying it's okay no you're just not dead yet if you lost 200 pounds you would feel wonderful that would be healthier like if you smoke every day and you're like look no cancer smoking is healthy no no you're just you're just but your body is dealing with it your body's processing it it won't be able to forever that is exactly what's going on if you're morbidly obese and for you to pretend any differently and

54:57to just go on about this fat acceptance movement and you know and the big beautiful this and that and like no you're obese you've eaten too much food if you see a fat guy how come he doesn't get the same sort of treatment if you see a morbidly obese man in his underwear no one's saying he's beautiful because he's disgusting and he's fat and he's lazy and he's he's addicted to food we all know it but if it's a woman we're so inclined to like exact just okay let her go she's fine you're wonderful you're beautiful you're amazing like give her her space we treat them as if they're incapable of recognizing the absolute reality of their physical being I think it's important you know to address both the kind of individual choice level and also the kind of systemic level like the food industry and what is being promoted and what were federal government promoted for ages and it was this terrible

56:05situation where you could have followed exactly what the FDA recommended and it would have been bad for you for decades and because the lobbying and because of the powers that be and and influence and and I think that's the level to criticize right if you have a systemic problem like promotion of tobacco products and you want to say for alternative then yeah you got to address the tobacco industry we have this bizarre situation for example where like a lot of people in my department work on alcoholism treatment research how do you get people to drink less or they work on how do you get people to stop taking opiates how do you deal with opiate addiction and if you make a suggestion like oh here's some awesome new research showing that if people switch from opiates to cannabis it like dramatically lowers the risk of death or if they switch from alcohol to cannabis

57:08it it has all these health benefits relatively to like being an alcoholic but it's kind of considered taboo to raise that mmm and a lot of medicine and psychology houses well it's like oh you're you giving in to people being self-indulgent if you say they said they should switch from one thing to another in a kind of harm reduction mode almost like a methadone type solution yeah and a lot of them come out of a kind of 12-step program mentality where it's like you have a disease if you ever do anything that is bad for you then you've relapsed and and that's feeding your disease mm-hmm I think that's idiotic yeah it's not the evidence shows that's not the way to treat any of these physical addictions but something like cannabis as an alternative is it's totally marginalized and I could email like you really can't talk about it as a valid alternative where people could

58:17come home and they can drink or they could come home and they could get high and maybe getting high for a lot of people might be better it's is that changing though I haven't seen any evidence that it's changing at least within academia really I would think that that would be one of the first places where it does change because the influence of the pharmaceutical industry isn't so deeply entwined in the system itself it's not like pharmaceutical industry people are dropping off pamphlets on talking points when you're giving lectures well here's the problem who gives you the research funding to look into this right National Institute of alcohol and alcoholism or National Institute of drug abuse if you do a grant proposal that says here's an alternative that might work they will shut it down because the federal government does not those agencies don't want to blow back of some senators

59:12saying how dare you fund this research that says this is a valid alternative you know so everyone who works in these areas has kind of walked into a system of of grant funding that's subject to kind of political censorship mmm by the funding agencies do you remember those talking dog commercials of about ten years ago where there was a girl she comes home from school the dogs like Lindsay I really wish you wouldn't smoke pot you're not the same when you do and I miss my friend and the girls sitting there stoned out of her mind her dogs talking to her dog runs away it turns out that the organization that funded those commercials was funded by tobacco alcohol and pharmaceutical companies yeah like they're drug dealers who are against drugs it's literally like hookers doing a commercial again strippers that's literally what it's like and we just accepted this was all over

60:16television it was everywhere you look it became parody I mean it ain't preposterous it was like this is your brain on drugs remember the eggs mmm everybody's like I'm hungry I mean I'm eat million comedians had jokes on that yeah you've given me the munchies man this is just insanity that this is allowed to take place is that drugs that kill enormous numbers of people are allowed to demonize drugs that kill no one ever in the history of use if you looked at that rationally if you were something from some other planet that was studying the human race and you saw the way we program people and the way we spend enormous sums of money to project a certain idea and get it into people's heads through these very influential short memorable videos you'd be like this is a culture and a civilization an organ organism that is mad this is madness yeah I often asked like myself

61:21how is this gonna look in 50 or hundred years to whatever my my great grandkids or future people who stumble upon my books or this podcast or whatever and I think if this would make zero sense and would be totally embarrassing both intellectually and ethically then don't take it seriously and this particular issue I think it's really important for citizens to understand how much of science is constrained by what can be funded by the federal government and that we are not actually supported to do certain kinds of research that might be really helpful to people it's the same thing with sex research right it is virtually impossible to get federal funding to do any kind of sex research in America these days so what do you do you write a grant to do something else and then you kind of do the sex research on the side using like some of the resources I don't do this but everybody

62:22I know who does sex research does it is it because they're concerned that the image of funding sex research versus funding whether it's obesity or hunger poverty whatever it is like these are there's not enough resources to go around why would you spend any money studying this you must be a pervert it's partly that but it's it's partly you know the individuals in Washington who administer these grants don't want the political flack if some politician discovers oh you're doing funding on own like how women can have more orgasms outrageous right and it's like that sounds like one of the most cost effective ways to increase human happiness I've ever heard of right right but people are embarrassed of or embarrassed about it and embarrass of all sexes yeah marital therapy research you can do like if you want to research how do you make a monogamous relationship less full of stress and

63:32argument you can get some money to do that but even there like the kind of suggestions you could make are quite restrictive in terms of what what kind of therapy you're allowed to to research or talk about so I yeah I wish citizens understood this because their tax dollars are not being allocated in the best way to deliver the benefits in their real lives to their families and their relationships that they that they could do so to bring it all back to obesity what what I would like and I bet I could say the same about you is you would like to take some of these sort of influential videos that we've seen done that demonize innocuous drugs like marijuana and put those on sugar put those on how people are addicted to sugar people are addicted to so many things that are causing obesity so many things that are causing us to have this epidemic of you know I mean if

64:37you go to Disneyland it's one of the saddest things in the world you see how many people are on scooters because they've eaten themselves out of their ability to be mobile on their own they're just overflowing or the office side of these scooters it's it's very depressing and then you see them what they eat their drinking slushies and you know eating nonsense and this this is a and again it's another addiction and then the availability of it is so I mean imagine if you were heroin addict and everywhere you went has heroin that's what it's like to be a sugar addict if you're sugar addict every store you go into is filled with your drug every 7-eleven right when you go to pay for your gas or whatever you're doing it's filled with your drug right there in front of you your drugs everywhere and you know if if you want to do something alternative like I've been involved in the paleo

65:31movement for a few years and like my girlfriend's vegan and if you want to find good paleo or vegan food it's like getting a little easier but it's not mainstream enough that there's like a whole aisle and Walmart devoted to it and there's a shitty aisle yeah so I don't know the the food system is a pretty hard nut to crack because there's an awful lot of money at stake and the profit margins on junk food are very very high and it's also it's very difficult to keep things on the Shelf things go I mean if you have real fresh food it goes bad very quickly yeah that's natural that's what it's supposed to do and good luck keeping a supermarket open if you can only keep your vegetables for a couple of days now if there was like long life KL I'd be pretty sad about that yeah but that would be sad um like some sort of a artificial turf type of kale that stuff goes bad quick you know it

66:33gets funky yeah but I'm kind of excited about new developments like clean meat me I am too because I think like ethically that'll be awesome I'm gonna see what kind of monsters they make out of that yeah it's gonna be strange to see headless meat slabs you know central nervous system just grow and trying to figure out how do they get it to have like a muscle consistency like a filet mignon or something I mean that you gotta realize an animal like different cuts of meat have a different texture to them because there's different muscle density because the animals use their body I think you have to electrically stimulate the muscle allows you so it kind of has to twitch and yeah it's weird but and people go would it have nerves that's disgusting people would make the argument then that it could feel somehow or another and some neighboring dimension it'll have like

67:29fake fake nerves I mean what I'm excited about is you could potentially add meat that's not just from like the top three species you know you could eat meat from people pigs and chicken well you need people Jesse well one of my edgy or tweeze was like celebrities will start selling pieces of themselves that can turn into like a Brian Gosling steak you don't want to encourage that bro trust me Brian don't go down that road you're too delicious yeah man I don't know about all that I don't think we should encourage kids what if people are delicious that could be a real problem I think the lab-grown people will always be cheaper than like I don't know about that yeah I bet you could buy some one real cheap in some sort of third-world country yeah for food you know there was a terrible not terrible in a bad way but in terms of its revelations there's a documentary piece from vice unlike

68:28birria and one of the things about it was that they were selling human meat and that this guy recognized it because he had eaten humans before and so when there was a stand that was selling meat on the side of the road and he turned them in for selling human meat and the reason why he knew is cuz he had eaten people I'm like okay when's the next flight out of here what the Cuba match I mean if you gave me a piece of lamb and you didn't tell me what it was I'd be like hmm not sure do you how many people you have to eat before you absolutely know that something's people like man so I got a lot of lamb chops and would not bet 100% on my ability to distinguish a lamb chop from say of a veal chop or a venison chop but all this stuff is gonna create some real moral quandaries like there will be this uh what Jonathan Hite calls moral dumbfounding reow yuck that is

69:29disgusting yeah why I don't know it just is yeah like I can't give you a reason well robot brothels this is one of the more recent discussions the ethical implications of robot brothels yeah and there's a robot brothel that's scheduled to be open where's that in Germany so where does it believe I believe it is and there's always people are up and up versus Texas holla powerful Texas Texas you could probably it tiger if you got enough money country's first robot sex brothel set to open in Texas prompts backlash see I wonder if that's real or one if they just like hey put out a press conference tell them we're gonna open up a robot brothel let's let him go crazy is Ron white he did it Ron way Ron White from his from his up from the desk of Ron white in Austin Texas he said this email 60 bucks for half hour oh that's cheap how long does it take to get off with a robot what if you lose

70:26your concentration set locations by a 2020 desert snooze button 20 20 so 18 months yeah but see what you don't want to show up late right you want to be there at the end of the day a bunch of unmotivated people cleaning out those holes well Texas was actually at the forefront of the lap dance club revolution in the late eighties the revolution there's a revolution well yeah from from old stripper style clubs to lap dancer oh where they actually touched you and that actually started in the in Texas see this is a showroom where customers can test and rent dolls before deciding to purchase one you imagine you know how like they have certain cars that have been on you know on the lot for a while and like you thinking about buying an m4 Mike come on take this sucker for a spin well you all should read the essay my girlfriend Diana Fleischman wrote about sex BOTS which

71:21got her a little bit of notoriety a few months ago what was her take on it that it would be really good on balance because there's a lot of guys who need like a sexual release and if it kind of takes them away from doing some like exploitative Bill Cosby style behavior into just doing something like this which is kind of weird and gross but innocuous like it's not hurting anybody right that that would be a net win do you make that connection because that's a that's a tricky connection right because most people who think of rape they don't think of it as an act of arousal or sex or you know intimacy rather it's a thing of power it's some sort of a creepy sociopathic psychopathic behavior trait I know that's the standard view and gender feminism yeah I don't think it's well supported by the evidence for example there's a big problem with rape in India right mm-hmm and porn

72:25as far as I understand is illegal in India now accessible though or is it I don't I don't think it's even like I think it's pretty hard to access porn websites from India but I think if you legalize porn there I predict the rate of sexual abuse would drop really yeah I really do boy that would be a weird sort of experiment but the thing about robots and sex is they're gonna get so good that it's gonna be like a person and then we're going to be in this weird ex machina sort of situation where how would you feel like what if you were dancing around with that really hot Japanese girl in ex machina she starts taking off your clothes like what do we do here like she feels warm she's beautiful she smells good like this my all my senses are telling me this is a person and she's a good listener yeah she's been she doesn't nag you she doesn't give it a little nagging you met you mansplaining

73:28know oh yeah that's my favorite if you're correct and you have a penis you're a man's planer gotta be real careful about your information the way you distribute it to the ladies these days I used to be a hostess words being patronizing and yes well it also could be called being correct yeah if sounds you're correct it just happened to be explaining explaining true things mmm there's a crime well when it comes to gender studies we circle back to this this denial of reality and we know that there's there's a this sort of really broad spectrum of sexuality in terms of male-female in terms you know in terms of the obvious you know the rock on one side and Kate Upton on the other right you know these super uber female uber males and then there's all these like who's the guy was in the hobbit illogical it's that guy he started in this sort of weird space and between the

74:30two of those people right androgynous ha yeah well he's not really androgynous but in terms of like you compare him to you know fill in the blank Herschel Walker he's not that manly you know and then there's there's women that don't feel represented by these standard views of female sexuality as well but this just speaks to the variability of the human genome and just that just DNA in general there's different people that breed with different people and different shapes come out until we figure out how to manipulate those shapes which seems to be right around the corner with the robot dolls it seems like they're both gonna arrive probably at the same time where you're gonna be able to choose from you know having sex with a robot or having sex with the Hulk like there's gonna be real possibilities that everyone's going to look like Thor I mean this seems like

75:18this is not too far away 1 2 3 generations maybe possibly inside of our life we'll have mastered the human form to the point where we're the world's gonna be preposterous I mean it's gonna be like the Star Wars Cantina scene everywhere you go oh yeah well this is what happens whenever you have a biological innovation that opens up new possibilities in terms of the evolution of bodies or behaviors as you get this adaptive radiation this explosion of possibilities like the Cambrian explosion mmm right 530 million years ago animals finally figured out how do you program a multicellular body with a nervous system and as soon as they got that boom you've got all this these bizarre new forms and then you get you know dinosaurs and mammals at us I think once we can program the human genome and you have parents who are like I won I want to select four kids who are

76:16like really tall and really religious right and other parents are like I want cute little Hobbit babies who are like hardcore atheists the furry feet and then you'll you'll get a divergence imagine if your parents decided to make you a hobbit like they could have done anything they want remember like the first early adopters I imagine it's going to be about fetal transformation about taking something that's in the womb and manipulating it and then as it emerges and then it grows then you're gonna see what it is if you parents were just gigantic junior Tolkien fans and you have her furry feet two feet tall you're like what the mom like you I just wanted Hobbit I didn't want a baby like it was either a hobbit or a cave troll so you should kill your boss yeah that's entirely possible I think that I think the sex spots will come a lot quicker yeah I think we'll wait what

77:16do we look like what do we look like right now in terms of sex BOTS what are we looking at let's say state-of-the-art type Google state-of-the-art sex robot start talking let's see what they have there Texas I think they look pretty good but they're not they're not that good at like language or conversation my contact or hand movement or whatever but I think there will be this tipping point where they can do conversation that's good enough right it doesn't have to be quite as smart as an actual lover but it can be a hell of a lot nicer than an actual lover it can have better memory for all your preferences mmm and your desires and your and like it'll also be more trainable in terms of it'll kind of register over the last time I asked this question like you didn't respond much but this other question you talked for five minutes I'll ask more of that right

78:12this is all very problematic behavior guessing here Jeffrey well like your tone trainable well my girlfriend's nicer and sometimes people are nice when you're nice to them Jeffrey how about you be nice first instead of expecting this robot to just take care of your dick and balls and be nice to you all the time and remember all the stuff you like what about it you we would develop into total narcissists sociopaths with robots that we could just get to do whatever we won we'd bring them to the mall on a leash well so there are two different ways I could go right right on the one hand like if there's a woman I'm interested in let's say and she has access to a male sex bot he's like really funny because it's like it's little neural network has learned like all of your stand-up routines or how to how to riff on today's news and and it's a great listener and it remembers everything

79:12about her backstory I can either be like like I can't compete with that I'll have to disallow DES see him anymore mm-hmm or I'll have to level up and be better yes like like humans and I hope people will level up some well yeah and we'll get to see we'll learn from the people who don't level up like how they fall apart I'll present you with an even more disturbing scenario some people will be like you know that Jeffrey Miller is a handsome I like to them all the time and they're gonna make a version of you and bring it around the mall with a leash on and you're gonna be going to the Apple store and a version of you is gonna be caked and come with a dog collar on standing right next to you while you're buying a new MacBook you like 1000 total II legit cuz you don't look it oh whoa that's what it look like swappable face what let me see what it looks like

80:17though this is just this is this is like when you're looking at one of them digital renderings of a house they haven't built yet let's see what we got here are they warm whoa there all these close-ups are creeping me out come on get AI it's Howard Stern hey leave this oh that's creepy they haven't passed the uncanny valley clear though that yeah hairy chest what the oh it's a guy for a video a long video yeah so I mean people do like celebrity deep fake sex BOTS and their people wandering around with their Jordan Peterson sexpot on a leash in the store well have you seen the porn where they do face swaps that's that's getting really good they're really good at that now this is another social revolution we're gonna have to brace for is an era when you can do a credible porn fake of any celebrity or any citizen yeah just based on like sampling and Facebook

81:19photos or do you know Kyle Dunnigan is mmm hilarious stand-up comedian who has the funniest Instagram page of all time and his Instagram page is about 80% of him doing Face Swap videos of the Kardashians and president Trump and Kanye West and they're just so ridiculous because you know that they're fake because it's real obvious they're fake but it's essentially like a new art form if you think of like sketch comedy and here play one for him see what we got here this is a good one I was you know when I was at your tiny white house I put a recorder in the chest yeah yeah yeah yeah oh another came right down the hall sweetheart oh my god she's got the weirdest ass but also sort of terrific terrific I'm gonna go smell her chair some information here okay a bowel movement about an hour and a half ago not so terrific but natural totally natural thought she's on her period

82:28light flow day maybe day three check out my buddy Lily he's been listing the whole time this champagne bottle to celebrate my return to comedy so this kind of stuff but see what I love about this is it's so obvious you know it's it's this is essentially I mean most he has some other little sketches that he does on his Instagram page but most of his stuff is this Face Swap thing which is I mean relatively new technology when one was faced whap invented less than a decade ago or on your phone yeah that good pretty soon just a few years and it's become this new form of comedy of sketch comedy you know and and with a guy like him who's such a good impressionist you know but this is crude and obvious and how long is it going to be before someone can actually I mean they they already have that machine that the technology that allows you to take especially someone like me who's talked

83:39for countless hours you take your voice you take all of the recordings that I've ever done just more than a thousand podcasts you throw them into this machine and you basically have all my various inflections anger sadness laughter giddiness perplexed all the different words that I have in my vernacular and you put them all into this thing and you can kind of morph it around it's Photoshop for voice so you have the video or you can face swap and manipulate people's images and it's getting better and better all time then you have Photoshop for voice you could essentially make movies with people where they just do whatever you want them to do yeah it'll be pretty soon totally impossible to tell a fake audio recording from real and yeah and then fake video for real and what do we do then it means we can't really trust digital records of people in the same

84:37way it also means you can I don't might be good I mean it means you can digitally sample anybody who's a good communicator right I can do an unlimited number of I mean you could have David Attenborough you know natural history videos forever even after he's dead right but he could also be doing Nazi propaganda videos as well yeah that's what's really weird you could essentially it would be up to the user yes so someone like Kyle Dunnigan but an evil version could take David Attenborough and you know yeah you can do whatever you want almost like what we're saying about communication that you this open floodgate of communication we're learning how to manage all the implications of this it's a really recent yeah and I think with human relationships you know we'll have to figure out kind of ethically once let's say once somebody can make like a deep fake video porn of their ex-lover mm-hmm

85:44right right and then the wife wife catches them watching it right okay or you know the wife buys a sexbot and it's like keeps it at work okay like is that cheating she comes home from work exhausted all busted up yeah and like I just want to watch it those are yes I don't want to hear any even talk to you one of her shoes broken yeah is that cheating yeah some people think that I mean some people think looking at porn is cheating there's that argument I mean there's people have standards very varying levels of standards and they don't negotiate it they don't talk about it mmm this is something my friend David ley points out in his post gum ethical porn for dicks which is about responsible porn viewership for men hmm that if you're in a relationship with a woman and you're straight guy you need to have the talk about what is your girlfriend consider cheating in

86:49terms of porn watching most guys don't have the guts to have that conversation most women don't either and then there is it the gut so you don't want to open up that door it's just keep it on the sneak tip she can't complain and then no one knows nothing yes my own you go to the movies in your hold hands Geoffrey and everything's fine keep secret down to the grave sit down and while you're watching that rom-com you're thinking of someone with a ball gag tied up in a basement covered in baby oil right yeah some peas going to a happy place I don't have to go there good go there all day sometimes yeah so people have to talk about this stuff like I don't know like grown-ups and and as the technology keeps advancing right and becomes more and more you know the line between like porn and real life gets fuzzier and fuzzier right with robots and virtual reality is

87:57gonna be very strange I think that probably what's going to happen is there's going to be some sort of a merger between virtual reality and robots like that would be like the the real ultimate brothel so you wouldn't be as confused by the uncanny valley because there's so much closer in a visual sense of replicating that I'm sure you've seen like some of the more recent video games like God of War and a bunch of these like really high-end games the graphics are so intense especially in the you know the little scenes that they do whether they're there have promo clips and stuff you look at it like is this real in game video that I'm looking at because this is insane it looks like I'm watching a movie that this in combination like some sort of real 4k HD virtual reality in combination with a sex robot it's probably where people are gonna go yeah I think so and then the other question

88:54is like what happens with that technology in terms of Education and college and how people acquire skills and knowledge and insight it's really really hard to imagine that people still think in 15 years okay going to a physical classroom and sitting you know listening to the average Community College like adjunct professor mm-hmm you know talking about human sexuality or gender feminism or political science that they'll think that's the state of the art that's the way we should do that and and then what happens I mean it seems kind of unlikely that universities as we know them will keep existing in anything close to their current form and yet no one's talking about this hmm like I wouldn't be that surprised at half the universities in America go bankrupt within 15-20 years so do you think that people are going to be getting their education in some sort of an online form

90:00some sort of virtual classroom form or some may be new not yet created version some new virtual reality form that's a lot more interactive I don't think it'll be just watching videos and then taking quizzes have you paid attention to what Elon Musk has been saying about his neural link a bit yeah yeah yeah what do you think about what you've heard so far I think it'll be very very hard technically to do that but what if what do you know about it um if you can explain to people they don't know what we're talking about if I understand correctly having watched like you interviewee lon etc he's just concerned that the bandwidth that connects the brain to the world or the brain to the Internet is quite narrow like you can get a lot of information quickly through your eyes and ears but your speed of like typing and controlling things is or speaking is kind of limited so I think there's a

91:02push to kind of open up that that bandwidth and the speed of communication between human brain and digital reality and other people if they figure out a way to do that it's a total game changer in terms of how people interact with not just social media but in general with each other I mean it means basically you have a global telepathy system if you want and then everything changes because it means the ease with which one part of my brain communicates with another part isn't that much higher than these with which that part communicates with somebody else's other brain part what I've been thinking about is some sort of universal language and that if that's if they bridge the gap between cultures and civilizations and the way people communicate and doing so do it through some sort of a digital interface and instead of like very simple characters that equal words that you put into your

92:11linguistic dictionary and you have an understanding of what this person's talking about instead of that you get like real clear concepts maybe even like in emoji form a hieroglyphic form or some sort of form where we figure out over X amount of years how to communicate through agreed-upon imagery or agreed-upon data in some sort of a way that lets people express emotions and and perhaps even more engrossing and more complicated than the actual language that we're enjoying right now yeah it'll be amazing I mean the evolutionary backstory to this right as you basically have the whole history of life on Earth you know before humans invent language where animal communication is pretty primitive like all you really have at the most complicated is like Nightingale's producing complicated birdsong to attract mates that's about as much as you get what about like chimps that have certain

93:14sounds for Tigers and other sounds for Eagles they have like a maximum of maybe a dozen different sounds but with human language it compared to that it really is suddenly like having telepathy where you can communicate so much so quickly so efficiently and yet you know if neural link works it would be as far in advance of language as languages of kind of animal signaling whoa and it's hard it's hard to imagine what that world looks like because you know imagine a form of Twitter where it's not just through your you know your thumbs on a keypad but it's a direct brain interface and then when people it's not just saying something mean or stupid it's even thinking something mean or stupid that could immediately get posted hmm and once you kind of start sharing your whole subconscious with people through neural link then you know we'll have to level up with some new social norms

94:30about what what that means and sort of how much radical honesty we can take from each other that seems to be where the future is the complete the dissolving of all boundaries between people and information people and their lives and that some sort of a way of recording your actual experiences or letting people share them in real time like imagine if pee we'll decided to let people through some virtual reality scenario put on headsets and experience you having sex with your girlfriend they say hey we're gonna on periscope come on join in and everybody just puts on their neural link and they're augmented reality headset and they put on their haptic feedback suit which is you know now and you know like iPhone 10 level you know you go back to iPhone once piece of haptic feedback 10 it's gonna be incredible it's gonna be silky smooth it's gonna feel like real touch and they're gonna

95:37be able to have sex along with you you can have a digital orgy yeah I think that's coming within 50 years maybe earlier that's a very conservative guess yeah 100 percents coming up there it is Jesus Christ Jamie hey there's a haptic feedback system looking around in there what is this oh this couple sexiest to take your clothes off folks why you wearing these goofy outfits pretending superheroes what what do you what are these things for climate control systems biometric systems motion capture and Avatar system boy we're Geoffrey it's for VR AR and Mr C this is all happening while we're chit-chatting about it these people have already engineered it I know and and society is gonna be totally blindsided by this yeah because everybody thinks oh well I saw it on black mirror but I know that's not even my like so I don't have to worry about it Brian eration yet because it's only

96:35science fiction like you said something on sam Harris show that gave me a little bit of hope that turned out to not be true okay you said something you were talking about asteroids about our ability to recognize asteroids and stop the impact nope according to Neil deGrasse Tyson we need at least 10 years we need to know that they're 10 years they're gonna hit in ten years and then maybe we could do something that's not easy well okay here's the thing it would be really good to invest at least a few tens of billions of dollars in doing that for sure as insurance but like the probability of a significant asteroid impact within the next century is pretty low if I understand it correctly I think it's just guesswork those just squeeze by all the time it's the probability of us getting hit eventually is a hundred percent yeah it'll happen probably in a few million years but but

97:38why do you say that is that to make yourself feel better I'll be long gone it'll be migrate quick take good good good good quick quick quick quick great-great-great-grandchildren have to worry about that well you got to play the odds right I mean we can we we we could be exterminated by a gamma-ray burst from a like a supernova oh yeah at any time with no warning but it's pretty unlikely that it hasn't happened before in the history of life on Earth right but it happens constantly all throughout the universe there was a documentary I watch once that freaked me the out it was all about hyper Nova's and they were talking about when they first started discovering them that they were really actually concerned that there was a war going on in space and then they recognized that all these explosions were happening all day long and they thought there was a war going on in the

98:30cosmos which is really fascinating because I think this is like when they just got once it is the 60s and they discovered this does that make sense in a way it's kind of surprising that we haven't seen evidence of that happening already right I mean when when I wrote my piece about the Fermi paradox which is why don't we have evidence of aliens already my solution is basically well most species that are intelligent that invent technology get wrapped up in video games and virtual reality and sex technology and it just distracts them and they kind of dropped the ball on staying alive and exploring anything and I think it's still quite likely that that happens to most intelligent species that they just kind of disappear up their own bottle yeah or they create some sort of an artificial life-form that's far more advanced than anything that's biological and has no desire need or no instincts

99:30to reproduce now if you if we have said this too many times that I think that we are essentially some sort of a some sort of a electronic caterpillar that gives birth to a technological butterfly and we're making you cocoon right now we don't know what we're doing and we're about to create artificial life and then we're doing it through our intense desire for innovation constantly want newer better things whether it's televisions and cars or phones we're never like that this one's perfect let's just stop here never the desire is always towards every you know fill in the time period we want a new version a better version with improvements and we keep getting those and this is what fuels in many ways it fuels our desire for materialism materialism embodies is embodied by technological innovation I mean what you're always wanting but when you get past Jules you always want the newest

100:27greatest innovations yeah I think at a certain point humanity's gonna have to bite the bullet and say we should plan which innovations come first what happens next hmm and we might even have to have like regulation or social taboos that say we really shouldn't go down that path until we do this other thing first it makes us ready to do that thing in a safer more rational more ethical yeah but that's the big word right rational like we're not really rational and competition especially when it's dealing with different countries that have different human rights laws and standards of behavior and thinking well this is a problem with regulating like artificial intelligence mmm is how do you get China to play ball I think I was gonna say China I didn't want to seem racist well they're gonna do it in Russia to remember already doing it China is a threat because they are smart

101:25and organized and future-oriented and they can do long-term planning and technologically they're incredibly advanced I mean so so far advanced a word or this government rather is trying to keep the best phones from China from getting to America yeah I mean hallway probably has some pretty close links to the Chinese military does right yeah it does to the Chinese government Carlos dictatorship and of course it's it's a lovely system if Huawei phones have back doors that allow the Chinese to learn a lot about Americans and our culture and our communication and mmm that's the concern it's that's actually more of a concern to me than like military spying in the strict sense because I think China has so many people working on cyber warfare that we probably don't even have any idea what their capabilities are but I think if they have insight into like here's an

102:31American psyche and here's how their political thinking works it will be quite a bit easier to kind of manipulate in terms of our geopolitics because we don't have anything analogous I think we're like is the Pentagon trying to figure out how could we not Chinese social media use you don't think that our interests I'd be surprised if they're doing it well but what's fascinating is Google's take on China is that they're willing to censor video or internet searches because they feel like if they don't China's just going to copy their technology and do it anyway and so this way at least they're in there I'm like boy that's a sketchy way of sort of absolving yourself yeah of any bad feelings about censorship you're contributing to censorship government issued censorship because you want to control the market and we're going oh yeah well you know I can't Google

103:34Tiananmen Square you literally can't Google Tiananmen Square it seems like there's a huge difference between China's authoritarian regime and the American political system but I think they're not quite as different as a lot of folks think like if you talk to Chinese academics about like what can you research and what can you not research like they have different constraints and Americans do but on at the pragmatic level there are certain topics that they can address that we can't and vice versa hmm so it's not like there's just one dimension of freedom and we're better than them on on every aspect of it and I again I think American citizens have no idea how restricted American scientists are and kind of what we're allowed to study allowed to or what you can get grants and approval for and is that the same thing as allowed to effectively it's the same thing because you if you

104:38don't have any funding you're not gonna be there's nobody you can't do science without money right and in fact like if I was starting my career again at this point I wouldn't go into academia if I wanted to understand human behavior I would go work for Facebook or Google because they have much more data about human behavior hmm then I could ever get as a scientist are they doing that I'm sure they're doing it but we don't know what they're finding because they don't publish journal papers it's all it's all commercial secrets so what I'm sure that like Facebook understands a lot more about social psychology than social psychology does at this point really yeah how could they not they have like 1.2 billion people interacting socially regularly and they data mined the hell out of that for commercial purposes right but are they publishing things are they sharing this information

105:42don't turn all I'm sure it's all internal but internally do you think they're publishing things I don't know that's the thing yeah it's just a little bit alarming when this state-of-the-art and understanding behavior isn't public that is alarming and then Mark Zuckerberg might be a robot too right everybody's worried about that might be a sexpot we've we played many times a video of him drinking water I don't know a Jew to drinks water like that crazy little it's uh just kidding mark don't believe my account I think that we're looking at in terms of like Google and Facebook and Twitter and even YouTube we're looking at these enormous organizations that I don't think they had any idea what they were going to be you know and I really particularly feel that way about Twitter when Twitter first started out do you remember how it used to be like you would use like you're at like at jeffrey

106:49miller is enjoying a cup of coffee yeah you you would talk about yourself in the third person it was really weird you know at Jamie Vernon is going to the movies and that's how people talked the early days of Twitter and then people realize what the am i doing you had that's sort of the reason it developed is because there was no group texting back then in 2007 or six when this started so it was developed for group texting so you could share what you were doing with a group of your friends mm-hmm was that what it was for they opened it so that more people could follow if you wanted to and then celebrities jumped on and then it ran and they like they started adding the ability people just started doing at Joe Rogan yeah so they'd like added the ability that to click that and share it and tag it yeah so weird and then you think about it now now it's a vehicle

107:37for the president to threaten other countries and it is the it's the global public forum and particularly in America it is that the public square where everyone shares ideas and well it's a less verbose version of Facebook probably Facebook is you just can write too much I can't keep up with you bro and I like that the really really ridiculous people who just paragraph after paragraph of run-on sentences with no no editing at all like Oh yeah it's a lot about here's a very long story about my most recent emotional trauma or it I don't know if anybody ever is like having a breakup or divorce on Facebook oh man now I'm gonna have to listen to stuff for a few months yeah and then they reach out hoping some people say it's gonna be okay mark everything's fine life moves on you're gonna forget about her eventually it's just and people keep going back to who's left to comment you know yeah

108:39maybe she liked it maybe she's changed her mind but I mean it is very kind of funny and interesting that nobody predicted 15 years ago exactly how humans would make use of this new technology yeah like nobody in psychology was talking about oh twitter is going to radically transform the way that science operates for example news of like failed replications will be spread within three days to everybody in a field and anybody who does scientific misconduct will be suddenly like pushed out within a week or a new result will be shared globally within 24 hours nobody was thinking about that hmm so there's like science Twitter politics Twitter entertainment Twitter and they've all kind of changed the game in their respective fields and we didn't understand human nature well enough to predict how people would actually used this stuff yeah we did just didn't see

109:52it coming either I mean no one ever would I remember when Ashton Kutcher was in some sort of a race with someone else I want to say to get to a million followers wasn't it like a million yeah and everybody thought that's crazy he's gonna have a million followers I don't even think he's on Twitter anymore he's not but his account is there's a second production company now or something yeah he gave it his assistant I'm too dangerous for this and now what Katy Perry has like 120 mmmm yeah something insane probably more and then you got to go to her Instagram which is probably even bigger than that was erasing CNN and Britney Spears oh wow for a million look at that Twitter raise to a million what yours at 2009 Wow Twitter raise to a million followers can Kutcher beat CNN and Spears that's hilarious nobody even knew what it meant back then so I mean with the

110:52virtual reality work or the neuro-link right we're gonna have those things we'll probably have a bigger impact on culture on society even than Twitter did yeah and still people are kind of just sleepwalking into that in that world sleepwalking with a few hesitant observers on the outside warning like almost like standing back like watching someone play with fireworks like okay hey um do you know what's gonna happen when you light that garbage can on fire it's filled with dynamite and the legal issues the privacy issues the the impact on relationships yeah is okay so like we train a lot of PhDs in clinical psychology in my department and a lot of them are going to deal with people and their relationships and their marriages and the conflicts and arguments and whatever are we training them for a future world where they're going to have to deal with sexbots and virtual reality

111:58and new forms of social media and new kinds of basically telepathy that are far in advance of human language no we're not but that's that's the world that they're going to spend their professional lives in isn't it similar in some ways I mean Jamie you could speak to this you were trained as an audio engineer and now everything's like all the software that was available when you were learning it's just useless now honestly there wasn't even YouTube when I went school so a lot of the if anyone has questions now you can learn almost everything I learned in the year program I had in a week if you needed to I just don't get the hands-on application right I've seen the stuff but yeah but people that went to school for video editing and all these different systems detailed detailed from anyone you want to watch now almost because they even had like the master class you could learn

112:57screenwriting from Aaron Sorkin right I'm directing from who yeah Ron Howard or whatever it is you didn't have that ten years ago yeah and then in terms of financial I mean the amount of financial strain that getting into traditional education puts on people and they get out of school and they're saddled with this debt that is also you can't even absolve it if you declare bankruptcy which is kind of hilarious if you think of the dirty that banks dude Wall Street does and all the risk they take and all the chaos that they have created from their shitty decisions that have affected the entire economy and they're absolved but yet some kid who wanted to get a Gender Studies degree and now all is a quarter-million dollars some half-assed Michigan University I think it's unconscionable yeah it's terrible I mean I feel really morally conflicted about working in an industry that I

113:54think is pretty exploitative in a lot of ways I was gonna ask you about that like what what's the stance that you take I mean if a kid comes to you and says you know I don't know what to do here we generally the stance I take so in in a way I'm I'm lucky because I work at a large state public university and tuition is really pretty do you want to say which one is the University of New Mexico and it's great we serve forty thousand students and we charge very very little tuition money compared to most places because it's state subsidized and if you keep up a certain grade point average it's about as close to free as you can you can get in America so I don't feel like we're as economically exploitative as if I was like teaching at Middlebury College or Yale or whatever mm-hmm but still you know if undergrads come to me and they go what what should I learn what should i major in what classes

115:01should I take the only real advice I can give is like take stuff that's going to be useful in your life your personal life no matter what career you do mmm so you should take my human sexuality class because you'll probably be a sexual being for the rest of your life and you'll be in relationships of some sort or another you should learn about politics you should learn about the history of civilization you should learn about animal behavior in biology and and all that stuff but don't expect that like you can major in pharmacy and then get a job as a pharmacist that makes 100k out of the gate because that might be automated don't assume you can go to law school and you'll make Bank like your dad did because a lot of that like document discoveries being automated don't assume you're going to be a surgeon because that might be a robot sized so I just say you should try to

116:03get a classical liberal arts education that equips you as a citizen and as a person and as a an ethical being and that's the future-proof way to do it and even then there's a distinct possibility that this education or a superior version of it will be available through some new unfound or soon to be discovered form yeah and just expect that you will if you stay curious throughout your life you'll be able to learn about as much you know in every four to six years going forward as you learned in this four to six years of college that's what's interesting is that no one really thinks of university education as being something that equips you for life that you're you're learning so that you can just you're just educating yourself and to sort of make your mind more available of possibilities and options and causes and effects and just just for your own edification that that's this is not a

117:13consideration people think I need a career I'm gonna go to college for four years when I get out I want a kick-ass job because I want to buy a Lexus or whatever it is my favorite students honestly are the mature students it's the vets got a couple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan and come back to college and they have life experience and they're like here because they really want to learn not because their parents think it's the right thing to do or even in my human sexuality class I get grandparents in their 60s and 70s sometimes really yeah grandpa they're great because they've actually had like 50 or marriages so they know a little something about you know psychology and it's not for their career it's not for the status it's because they really want to be there and they want to learn well I would also imagine they're not as filled with angst as a 18 year old first

118:09escape from the family nest and they're not understanding what to do with their freedom and so many distractions they're there just to educate educate themselves yeah they're they're less neurotic they're more confident they called me out on my sometimes do they oh yeah like what um well the horrifying thing now of if you're teaching a class is you can make a factual claim and any student can check it on on Wikipedia why honey while you're talking yeah and of course the 20 year olds won't raise their hand and go that's wrong but the grandmas will the grandmas well yeah larious so yeah you have to would even call that on okay so there was a book back in 99 called I think the technology of orgasm that made the claim that vibrators were first invented in the Victorian era the late 1800s to help doctors bring their female patients to orgasm to cure quote

119:23hysteria right and for 20 years that was sort of accepted as oh yeah that's a good historical analysis of that situation and then that got totally debunked in the last few months by other historians look at the last few months yeah really I've been telling people that forever I know I caught that too and what's the reality they didn't really docket it and there's no evidence at all that that was going on yeah because I would think that that would be a thing that gals wouldn't want to let go if there was a place we can go where the doctor definitely knew how to work it and give you an orgasm there'd be a line around the block frustrated ladies you would you would have you would think it would have left an imprint I would have not just that why would it stop why would the doctor say you know what this business is just too goddamn lucrative my hands are tired closing up shop carpal tunnel

120:16I can't even type anymore yeah and the women are like yeah go away so there's no evidence so who invented that I can't remember the the name of the author of that it even got made into a movie history oh right the job nobody wanted is that a book oh yeah there we go all about it from the New York Times based off the book or this might actually be from the book and what year is this I don't this might be the book I don't know huh yeah I think that's so is this like sort of like that killer sperm theory that people still to this day recite even though there's no evidence whatsoever that sperm has any other function other than impregnating an egg yeah there's a lot of kind of urban myths that's a big one though there was a whole well written about about different kinds of sperm yes 'burn Moore's attack sperm yeah that would kill other sperm Baker and Bellis

121:12back in the early 90s and those guys are it was a beautiful theory but like nobody could replicate it and it just didn't work I thought it was a little Pacman sperm out there attacking another sperm right they called it what kamikaze sperm is that what they called it yeah the sperm that allegedly were specialized - yeah I remember someone brought that up to me and I I read it I went koi I don't know about that um how small her sperm there's not a lot of room in there for other functions like how are they even getting those other sperm and killing them like what's what are they using they have acid like the alien what are they doing they've rotten little IEDs yeah what are they doing they have an acrosome reaction like there is a tiny little warhead that like help get into the egg a warhead well it's some enzymes that are pretty good at that yeah digesting their way in but

122:13yeah that's an example of urban myth published urban myth published I mean at the time it was plausible but it kind of got debunked fairly quickly so just was this sort of just a sensational sort of an article that someone wrote the book that they did they just say hey let's just fake this in order to sell a lot of books and get people excited about our work I don't think they faked it I think they may they slightly oversold it but they like they did have some proper Journal paper publications that were peer-reviewed and that made sense at the time and like I used to teach that stuff because oh yeah how'd you teach it like what what was the was the conventional way of describing this conventional story was people think we evolved to be in monogamous long term pair bonds but here are some evidence that humans do extra pair copulations that they sometimes go outside their relationship

123:23if that happens then there's occasional sperm competition or a woman mates with more than one guy during one ovulatory cycle so that potentially ejaculates from two different guys could be in a reproductive tract competing to fertilize same egg if that happens the sperm would be under selection to be good at being fast fighting off the other sperm making the reproductive tract more hostile to any guy who comes after you etc etc so it's kind of like a way of challenging the assumption of monogamous mating and pointing out women have this sexual freedom and agency that was not fully recognized and the result is men have to compete more like not just physically and not just for state of speed even even at this kind of biochemical level and it all made sense right we we could have been that species but as it turned out the rates of extra pair copulation or infidelity are

124:36actually pretty low in a lot of societies like it's not like twenty percent of kids or sard by some guy other than their dad it's like mostly well under two or three percent right but we're talking about now yeah but in comparison to when all this stuff volved we could be talking about humans of fifty sixty thousand years ago yeah which is a totally different ballgame it is different and if if we been a species with like a lot of sperm competition then our testicles would be as big as chimp testicles right that's what's interesting right yeah that when it comes a direct correlation between the number of promiscuous females and the size of the testicles of the male yeah which is why gorillas have a little tiny dicks yeah cuz they're just dominating yeah well I'm on I wouldn't I wouldn't try to us to do some other alpha bad yeah I mean crazy that something grew to be so

125:38strong so powerful with giant fangs and it only needs like stalks of grass and broccoli and yeah so there's a there's a lot of these little things in psychology these little urban myths that get you know learned by professors in grad school and never really tested and then passed on and now that whole house of cards has been tumbling down in the last couple of years where like almost everything that was taught in a social psychology course now turns out to be kind of and not like what other examples the idea that you can use a implicit association test or IAT to sort of register how sexist or racist somebody is right that was a big exciting thing that social psychologists thought that they discovered that you can give someone this kind of computer test that measures word associations and that kind of determine like how secretly sexist are you and that turned into

126:46whole industry of giving these tests everybody in corporations to sort of assess you know are you secretly sexist and and to sort of wag fingers at them and say see you scored positive on this test that means you really are secretly sexist and therefore you need training mmm and that's the industry and this is what happened with Starbucks right a few months ago when they had that issue with the black guys and in the Starbucks and Starbucks didn't handle that well and then there was public blowback and Starbucks went okay we're gonna do implicit Association training for all of our staff nationwide and all of us in psychology were like wait but you you guys know that that was all debunked like a couple years ago it's it's all nonsense now they're just concerned about the optics in order their stock go up right oh yeah yeah so it's it's a PR move but but it's not science-based

127:48it's not science based on and anybody who's a savvy consumer will be able to like google this stuff and see oh it's it's nonsense but implicit bias training is still being used right and some glasses and it's all horseshit yeah yeah so what is the method like say if you ran a corporation and like hey everybody Geoffrey's gonna come in and teach us how not to be racist you might be racist to not even know it and Geoffrey's gonna show you how I don't really know what they do and implicit bias training I know that they typically will give everybody one of these implicit association test that purports to show that you you have issues and you do have hidden bias like what would be like a question on one of these tests it's like associations it's basically do are you faster to associate this stigmatized group with this negative word than you are to associate them with a positive word and

128:50you can measure reaction time oh boy so so you have like it's lever in your hand or by pressing you're pushing you're seeing words flash on screens and you're pushing buttons and the the subtle differences in reaction speed to like the good versus the bad associations are supposed to map like your attitude towards the group in question and it's a it's a reliable effect the problem is it doesn't actually predict real sexist behavior in real life or racist behavior so so how did it get past the initial stages to the point was implemented um social psychology is just very politically correct mmm virtually everybody in it is pretty far left and if you're conservative or centrist you pretty quickly get driven out of it really oh yeah so centrist even well we have pretty good data now unlike political affiliations of people in different fields and in psychology it's

130:02at least like ten or fifteen to one liberal to conservative why do you think that is is that more of the indoctrination of the walled garden of academia I think it's partly that but I think it's also like there is pretty overt hostility to centrist conservatives libertarians where you just kind of get these signals like if you start grad school that whatever if you ask though there's other students hey do you want to go to the shooting range or do you want to go hunting or let's talk about politics and if you're on the wrong side of what's considered normal then you're made to feel pretty uncomfortable and you'll probably just you know leave grad school and go oh the hell with that I'm gonna be a lawyer entrepreneur whatever so just the hostility forces people out it's a tribal environment yeah what was this source of that I mean it seems like if you're gonna do real social experimental

131:14work if you're really gonna try to understand human behavior it's really got to be done objectively to really get the actual raw data to to really be able to do scientific work where you're explaining things and trying to gauge cause-and-effect and origins of thought and behavior patterns you'd have to do it really objectively the same way you would do mathematics you'd have to really look at it cautiously and get your data points in order and and and if you're doing real good work you would think that there would be more of an inclination to do good work than it would be to appease whatever tribe you belong to you would hope so but take political psychology for example where the whole point is to understand how people think about politics morale issues there's a huge liberal bias and political psychology and you would think they would have corrected that and said you know what it's not

132:14maybe we're missing something by not like we have a conference of 500 people in there's not a single libertarian here or whatever and they never self-corrected like that they just assumed well we're all well-intentioned and we're all smart so we're going to be able to to check our own biases and they'd completely failed to do that so you have all these measures of like political attitudes invented by leftists that kind of demonize conservatives or centrists as basically being mentally ill or stupid or whatever where do you fit on the political spectrum I'm kind of a centrist libertarian with like a complicated patchwork of views like I I'd be considered extremely far left on certain things and pretty far right on on other things like what far right on what I'm pro-gun rights I'm pretty cautious about immigration I'm Pro economic freedom I don't want a big

133:32expensive state that has high tax burdens and I'm in complicated ways kind of pro-family values and pronatalist and like I think long-term relationships are good not necessarily conventional ones but I I'm pretty concerned about society figuring out a way to make it possible for ordinary folks to have long term relationships and raise families isn't it fascinating that that's a right-wing thing wouldn't you think that something that would encourage families like be universal wouldn't be tribal I mean you would think that something that would encourage long-term relationships and monogamous pair bonding and people getting together and working out long-term solutions to keep a family together that would be uh I'd be good for everybody you would you think I mean that seems like a left-wing thing to so the left is very concerned about environmental sustainability right

134:42right but they're not that concerned about kind of what you call civilizational sustainability or family sustainability and I don't totally understand why but you tend to get the right thinking how is this going to affect my great grandkids or allow me to have any and the left is more like how's this gonna affect harp seals and polar bear bears in on the rest and one should sort of imply the other but hence being a centrist hence being yeah hence being a centrist unlike it's a weird thing like when you try to reach a conclusion about a particular political issue based on what you think is think of the facts and the evidence and the good arguments and then you do that for each issue separately right rather than doing kind of tribal affiliation signaling it's very very confusing to people right because they're like how can you be like pro cannabis legalization if you're also

135:57pro guns or how can you be like open to polyamory if you're also concerned about long-term family stability or whatever it's like that's just because of the issues I looked into that's the end ice I ended up supporting does this go back to what we're talking about earlier the most P really don't have the time to form these opinions or become informed on these opinions and instead they just sort of adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior that seems to be the tribe that they most affiliate with so this this way are there's a conglomeration of opinions I'm just gonna accept these opinions yeah absolutely it's so strange that we have two very clear sides this left-right I mean we even have it represented by blue and red I mean this goes back to the Korean version of the yin-yang you know in the Korean flag they have that yin-yang but it's instead of white and black it's red and blue I

137:06mean that that is what it is it's these these opposites that work together in harmony it's our society it's what I mean we it seems to be some sort of a natural system that we gravitate towards yeah and people police say it's not like everyone just sort of chooses one side or the other and right and then they go well I guess it makes sense that if you believe the left about issue a you should also believe the left about issues BC through Z yeah if you deviate you get punished for it well people use the term we too like we've got to win the house I've heard that you know we've got to win the Senate what who's we yeah are we running Bob like what are we doing but people it's it's basically like the Raiders I mean it is very tribal but I mean it's weird because when if you're in a literal tribe you have your territory and your resources and your your mates

138:07that you're defending and the other tribe on the other side of the hill has their territory resources mates and kids and you actually there is a little bit of a zero-sum conflict but if you're all in the same effing country together yeah and you're all paying taxes to the same Authority and you're all partaking in the same economy and you're all wrestling in the same public sphere of the Netflix that you watch and the Twitter you're engaged with it's it should be more positive some than that well this is why I wanted to ask you this as an evolutionary psychologist does this and you know you're you're obviously far more aware of this than the average person does this just go back to the way the human brain developed when we were living in small tribes and that there's this inherent need for an us-versus-them mentality that keeps us moving yeah I think so you

139:07know the people who have thought the most deeply about this like I'm a big fan of Jonathan heights work and the righteous mind and and the way he kind of analyzes this stuff I think it'll be quite hard to escape the tribal thinking but we have we have escaped it with respect to a lot of issues right where we really did did reach a moral common ground like we all kind of said oh slavery was bad women should be able to vote we should try to reduce the risk of nuclear war right so on some really big issues we have succeeded pretty well in kind of setting aside the the tribalism I think the problem now is there's just so many issues that are coming at us so fast that we don't have time to reach that social equilibrium on on enough of them quickly enough well this is what fascinates me by augmented reality and things like neural link something that's going to accentuate the the ability and

140:18the power of the human mind where we're going to be able to take any consideration all of these things in a much like with eelain's term we'll have more bandwidth to work on them yeah that just I think the more I think about it I think that this just quagmire of civilization there's so many different things that we're conflicted about that really a lot of it boils down to a lack of time a lack of time and a lack of also training and how to think one of the things that's most disturbing about education particularly lower education is that no one ever tells you how to think they give you information but they don't tell you now here's the tricks your brain is playing on you like this is why you think certain ways this is if you're lucky if you're really lucky someone teaches you about discipline they teach you about resistance and about apathy and about about

141:18procrastination and all these different games that you might have plan you and just that alone will give you the ability to work through things and get more stuff done but very rarely does that even get discussed so most the time you're just getting boring information stuffed into your face and you barely pay attention to it enough to pass the test and as soon as the test is over you forget everything you learned because you really learn it just memorize it and I wouldn't take that long to learn sort of the top dozen rationality hacks that like the rationalist community or the effective altruism community are very very good at using and teaching like just the idea of Steele Manning an argument where you develop the ability to state the strongest possible version of your opponent's argument in a way that they would go you've said that even better than I could say awesome that means you

142:11really understand me even if you disagree with it that's a good term to steel man as opposed to straw man yeah and if we just taught you know kids in high school how to do that I think that would go a long way towards being able to have these these tribal dialogues or just being able to think quantitatively about political and policy issues like how many people are affected how are they affected how much would it cost to fix how do we know what the best way to do it is rather than just diving straight for the emotional argument I think that would help a lot but is it really in anyone's vested interest to teach that and do the current stock of members of the public school teachers unions really have the ability or interest to teach that well it almost seems like something they're gonna have to learn online and to augment their traditional education yeah so ideally

143:18you'd have like a virtual reality system where a kid could go into it and argue about some issue like gun rights or abortion or immigration and some a I would sort of argue against them or picking out their arguments or go convince me of your position right and somehow another make it interesting yeah yeah yeah make it fun like they whatever make it a you know make it you're arguing with Rick or Morty right that is a one of the big issues with learning things is making things fun making things somehow or another enthralling and captivating something something that you actually want to absorb and it's one of the great arguments about video games and one of the more interesting things about the previous generations sort of dismissal of video games is that the dismissal was at one point in time oh you're just wasting your time and now that that dismissal doesn't

144:27necessarily hold water because just like professional golfers professional video game players now make enormous sums of money so it's gotten to this place where oh no this is a viable career and perhaps you should even be taking your kid to coaching and and learning strategy and learning all these you know various applications that allow you to get better at these things because there's a real career in this and I mean try telling that to your grandpa hey I'm gonna play what's the what's the game they play for the most money today for tonight probably for tonight right yes the big one that you're gonna want to be a professional for tonight player they would say get the out of here but yeah I'm gonna be a professional golfer how good are you Johnny you know my under par yeah yeah I want to be the next Tiger Woods huh well my cohort a lot of other academics I've

145:18talked to like hey did you play Sid Meier's Civilization game a lot in grad school or post talking yeah and we all go most of our understanding about the history of Technology unlike World Affairs and economics comes from playing that game really yeah I never played it how's it work is it a one of those role-playing games you start out and like the dark ages and you've progressed through like Bronze Age Iron Age you invent railroads and then eventually like colonize Alpha Centauri are you playing against the computer or other humans turn-based strategy game against the computer but you kind of learn the whole technology tree and what everything is called and what followed what and god I hope Sid Meier got it right more or less but it was a much more compelling way to learn all that than like taking whatever your opinion story AP right I would imagine

146:14that's incredibly immersive like how how could they do something like that oh the new discovery mode turns on Assassin's Creed origins is doing interactive history lessons like ancient Egypt I believe is what they do here and it's like deep detail creation of it you go through it and it take for this mode they kind of take all the shoot and that's shooting but stabbing and killing the people and just walk you through age in Egypt Cairo you get to see people die not in this mode maybe they did they might show some stuff of did whatnot but so you could either have a graphic or non graphic is that the idea yeah then they could show you through the map take you to play of a video this can I watch this I need to see this okay yeah I mean that would be the best way to teach people things to make some sort of interactive environment especially virtual where you could go there and

147:08experience it and I mean I don't know if you've messed around with any of the HTC vive things oh is this here yeah it's like go fullscreen with this whoa-ho this is this is part of the game but this is not the actual game this is like a mode they did to teach kids because they had all of this technology available so they said you know what just get a narrator add some audio clips make it a mode and they even have it the way it was originally built the Great Pyramid with the limestone still attached for the most part this is a 20-minute video so this is like this is real deep detail man just like the best Graham Hancock you know explanation you could get but you're the guy there and you're in a third-person position you probably could go first person to I'm sure and wow this is just this particular part they're going to keep doing this as you know this Assassin's

148:07Creed has gone through all sorts of different modes of history through there like Renaissance Rome Spain all sorts of different areas and now that they sort of turn this on it's gonna well that to me seems like a really good idea in terms of getting kids excited about learning things having some sort of an interactive game yeah just game up game if I every topic yeah every in a really high-quality way yeah and I think the tricky thing with you know education is the kind of tech that we use is several steps behind this state of the art in Hollywood special-effects or documentaries or this this kind of game so students are kind of disappointed when they come to class right and it's like college is really expensive and it's really retrograde in terms of the tech quality so why why are we here we should be on the forefront right it should be possible to go to your state

149:15university and see awesome gamified interactive stuff so you don't have access to at home but everything is changing so fast and in order for the curriculum to keep up with modern technology you would have to revamp every year well I mean a lot of the content we teach is pretty old actually mmm like the key idea is in evolutionary biology many of them go back 50 100 years key ideas in animal behavior or paleontology or anthropology it's not like those get updated that fast it's just what the way you can present them technically we're not competitive and that's embarrassing a certain way to change that or is that that seems almost insurmountable without a complete overhaul of the system I think you need a totally different kind of university and credential that's backed by a significant amount of capital and that's tight not technologically innovative and it's very

150:31uninteresting yes yeah I think it's inevitable that that'll happen and that's probably gonna be what bankrupts and I think it's gonna eat our lunch yeah what do you how do you feel about that though as a person who makes their living do I mean I'll see you write books and I'd be happy to jump ship and go do that would you oh yeah good for you if I could like teach hundreds of thousands or millions of people rather than write 200 at a time well that's essentially what Jordan Peterson is doing yeah exactly but he's not doing it through a virtual thing he's doing it through video lectures and then physical lectures it's really fascinating to see the reaction to him and now to sam harris is doing this as well and not the videos but he's definitely doing the the live sort of performances and know who would have ever thought there would be a place where public intellectuals would

151:24go and 5,000 people would sell out like that and go to see them like they would go to see Kevin Hart or something it's crazy yeah well you know when Alfred Kinsey first started doing a sex surveys and he would go around the country giving lectures like he filled up a four thousand person Stadium and UC Berkeley just presenting the first real data on human sexuality back in late 40s Wow and so there was why because there's a real hunger for that because it was something students couldn't get anywhere else and the same was true back in the eighteen hundreds when you had famous authors touring America like Mark Twain mm-hmm many people think is the founder of stand-up comedy yeah yeah right and they would use humor like Jordan Peterson Sam Harris you and they would speak in the register of the people not pretentious academic jargon Sam is surprisingly funny I was told that we had dinner

152:30recently and we were talking and I said dude you're really funny like those those little side notes and asides you throw out little funny quips like this is like stand-up comedy type stuff when someone will say something like like even with you though you guys were talking about polyamory I mean and there was he through some sort of a Java how's that working out ya know it's a very dry humor which I love yeah so funny guy but that makes it more palatable spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down you know this fascinating technology in terms of video games is going to help you absorb information about ancient Egypt and humor is gonna help just make the time go by better and make the whole experience less flat yeah so I think I think that's a future and I think within 10 years a lot of young people are just gonna realize if I can actually learn more from some alternative system some

153:33franchise of really good gamified instruction plus great presenters you have a sense of humor and are smart and and kind of like heterodox and and edgy they're gonna flock to that the main thing is that business that franchise would have to provide a credential that actually separates them from people who don't have it and that it's performance in companies or in the future right mm because that's the main function of the university right now is it it's this credential signaling system and if somebody figures out a way to make it so that like if you've got a degree from this whatever st. marys university that that is really a better predictor of doing well in a job or marriage right than a Yale degree then suddenly the whole business model changes for universities well it's really fascinating when you think about the history of education is that our

154:43ideas about these gigantic institutions whether it's Yale or Harvard is that they've been long established and long proven and but no I mean a few hundred years in terms of people being alive that ain't you know you go back before that you're just really you only have a certain amount of years where these things were even a real thing yeah and that I mean the idea that you have a teaching institution that's also a major research institution really only goes back to post-world War two like before World War two Harvard was basically an elite finishing school it wasn't a research power so that whole system that we think of as being ancient is actually just less than several decades yeah Wow yeah I think you're probably right I think the new thing's gonna eat the lunch yeah well that's it's almost like they're setting themselves up I mean with some of the more ridiculous and

155:43preposterous protests that go on where they're they are just trying to silence discussion and even with people like Christina Hoff Sommers who's very reasonable and calls herself a factual feminist and they want to call her a Nazi it's like there's no there's no wiggle room you are a 1 or a 0 you are black or white you are evil or good and that's it and this inclination towards silencing people deep platforming screaming them down halting them and getting them out in and who decides who decides who's correct and wrong well the only way for people to get an accurate assessment of who's giving the right information is to have a debate but have a real debate like a real debate where people allowed to express themselves without people in the audience shaking jars of coins and bull horns and all the nonsense and setting off fire alarms and all these things that these

156:38children and I call them children because they're behaving like children are celebrating you know I'm sure you're aware of what happened at Evergreen and now evergreens Evergreen State University where Brett Weinstein had you know his horrible experience with if you don't know the story I'll give you the brief synopsis that they had a day of absence where it used to be that people of color would stay home so that you would miss them and then they decided to turn around and make white people stay home make them force them if you didn't do it you're a racist he said that's crazy like you guys are being racist and they shouted them down and they shut the school down and he won half a million dollars in a lawsuit and now the school's most recent enrollment from the freshman class was only 300 people which is crazy yes the parents noticed the students notice and universities are so

157:31complacent they think oh we can we can do any amount of this yeah and the customers will still come and they're they're wrong as soon as there's a viable alternative where somebody can get a credential that means something and it's cheaper and better and they learn more and it's more engaging that whole it University's acting stupid about that and and you know denying free speech and denying real debate that's the existential threat to them that's what's gonna blindside them that's what's gonna kill their tuition it's stunning how little resistance there is to it yeah that you the everyone knows that the only way to find out whose ideas are more more well thought out more valid more factual the only way to find that out is to have people discuss things together yeah and for you to be able to make an assessment based on the facts do it in real-time and based on

158:33who was who forms a more compelling argument who's more reasonable who's who's taught who's addressing all the flaws and the problems with both sides of this and coming up with a reasonable conclusion the only way to do that is discourse we all know that we've known that forever but but somehow or another in higher universities and higher education centers this is where they're shutting this stuff down and they wanna you know whatever whether it's Ben Shapiro is speaking or whoever it is it's speaking they want to scream at them they want to yell they want to break windows they want to cut you know call them racists or whatever they want to call them stunning I mean the way I think of it is like stand-up comedy I love and and you know you do and the stuff you can say when you're on stage doing stand-up comedy University should be at least that open like I should be

159:33able to lecture in a way that goes even a little bit edgier than most stand-up comedy could go politically intellectually ideologically challenged their thoughts challenge their thoughts so universities should be like the inner sanctum of intellectual freedom compared to which everything else is more restrained and we're kind of the opposite like I know a few academics who actually are like amateur stand-up comedians and it's so liberating to them to be able to get up on a stage and say what they really think they have to use fake names someone no but they're kind of protected by like the social norms of comedy mmm right like you know you're not supposed to really take it very seriously but we're so far from that and you know in physics it doesn't matter that much because it's not like there's any aspects of quantum mechanics that are that intellectually edgy but

160:47man in psychology and the social sciences and behavioral sciences in in political science it's really important to be able to be provocative and authentic and and we can't in America at the moment well which is really what's gonna set up whatever is coming next it's gonna offer some sort of a new new pathway new avenue that's not restricted yeah much like what what you're seeing with podcasts and blogs and all in in comparison to or YouTube videos in comparison to what you're getting on regular Network television I mean it was network television then cable was the more edgy alternative and then there was pay cable like HBO out I saw breast you know and then that got nutty or nutty or in it but then it became Netflix which is a total another level and then in the Internet's the Wild West and they want you to go back to NBC in the 1970s and you're like ah no I'm not gonna do it

161:51not gonna pretend but universities seem to be stuck yeah I think universities are like NBC circa 1975 right where they're like oh this cable stuff that's not really gonna matter and then over this internet and not but the Netflix of Education is coming and it's it's going to be incredibly disruptive and I hope that the academic friends and colleagues I have who are good and an open-minded are ready to jump ship because ultimately they're educators whatever form it is that what their career is is there an educator just like Kyle Dunnigan is a comedian he takes on a new form with this new technology and it becomes a comedian using face swapping technology that these educators are going to recognize that the the the landscape has changed and there's got to be some sort of an way of distributing information yeah I could good academics are like just ordinary humans with her curiosity

162:55turned up to 11 and who have a passion for discovering new ideas and then sharing them them with people and we don't really care how we do that we will do it through lectures or writing books or writing articles or podcasts whatever whatever works the best have you thought about starting a podcast well you know I did a podcast with Tucker max a couple years ago the mating grounds where it was sort of related to our mate book that was dating advice for young single guys but it was the advice it wasn't really in well it was figure out what women authentically actually want and then try to transform yourself in that direction so you're a better boyfriend hmm what do they want women want guys who are well informed and know about the world and ambitious and capable capability is the main thing like competency just in as many domains as possible they want guys who were in like

163:58reasonably good physical shape and good mental health and who can strike the right balance between being kind of nice and agreeable and kind but also being dominant and assertive and kind of high status and if that's too much to ask you become a male feminist just grovel just bend the knee bend the knee so yeah and you know when I teach human sexuality I kind of emphasize this to students that there's a lot you can do to make yourself more attractive to whoever you want to attract it you know you don't it's not all limited by what traits you're born with well what's fascinating is the difference in what a man is attracted to versus what's a woman's attracted to and this is something that we just don't like to admit yeah there's a great deal of difference when it comes to heterosexuals at least yeah I mean there's a lot of difference when it comes to short-term mating like what men

165:00want if it's a one-night sin is what women want yeah you look at long-term mating like who people choose for marriage there's actually quite a bit of convergence there like everybody wants someone who's mentally healthy and reliable and smart and kind and would make like would pick the kids up on time from school etc yeah and funny funny is really important Brett Weinstein talked about the difference between a woman who is beautiful versus a woman who's hot and what hot does is gives you the opportunity to spread your genes with very little responsibility so a one-night-stand from a girl who's hot you don't have to mate you don't have to like court her get her to love you show your virtue earn her respect no you just bang her in the park like that that's hot versus someone who's beautiful who you really go out of your way to maybe even be a better person so

166:04that you could attract that person yeah yeah if you fall in love with someone you want to be a better person for them but it's fascinating there are these two choices and I never really thought about it until he brought it up but but they're essentially ways to distribute your DNA that there's pathways one of them is through long-term bonding and you want a stable reliable woman who has a lot of self-respect who chooses you makes you feel good she choose you and the other ones a freak yeah but the fact that all different kinds of people exist with all different mating strategies shows that each of those strategies historically and evolutionarily has worked like it's been a valid strategy yeah because there wouldn't be like promiscuous men or women if that hadn't been something that worked sure right there also wouldn't be long term pair-bonded like you know family

167:03people if that hadn't worked so I think it's silly when people are sort of dissing each other's mating strategies as if well there's one proper way and then all the other a sort of degenerate or reactionary or whatever well the other mating strategies produce up kids I mean you know the hot one when you're not gonna see the kid you're gonna develop a mess of a child and those are the ones they use to sell cars what I mean but each up by what standards though well there's no signal the father around you know the daddy issues I think a lot of that is just a way of kind of shaming these these other mating strategies because you mean well of course you get a little bit of circular logic for example where you say this mating strategy for example let's say a high degree of promiscuity you say that's bad why because it leads to offspring who in turn act from rescue us and then you

168:09call it the cycle of abuse or daddy issues or whatever but is that a promiscuous thing or is it just a longing for both a father and a mother and a loneliness and vulnerability that seems to come with being the offspring of a single mother most people who agree that that's not the ideal situation but it does produce unique people which is really interesting look almost all of my really cool friends came from a up broken childhood which I don't know what to think about that because I want my children to be comforted and healthy and never worried about the future but all my friends who grew up in chaotic environments where everyone was poor and up and there's crime and violence and nonsense and chaos those are the interesting ones their parents are drug addicts those the cool ones so it's it's such a conundrum as a parent yeah I mean so like as a scientist you got a look at

169:13you know the whole spectrum of mating and parenting behavior and go particularly as an evolutionary psychologist you can say I might have a moralistic reaction to that I might go that's bad but you know what if it action if what we consider bad is actually the way most of the other 4,000 species of mammals do it then who who were really the weird families anyway right most mammal families the dads aren't involved it's single moms raising offspring by themselves under harsh conditions and they're not doing para bonds right hardly any mammals do para bonds apart from like Gibbons and a few prosimians like really small primates I'm just very hesitant to kind of moralize it and right but is it really fair or even accurate to compare ourselves to things that only live to be like 10 I mean we're talking about enormous II complicated emotions far more so because of communication and

170:22societal norms and you know comparison yeah there's so much more involved being a person it's just like if you look back historically right their premarital sex used to be demonized right and folks used to say well oh my god you had you had 1 or 2 lovers before you you settled on with your husband that's terrible and you could produce statistical correlations to say oh look premarital sex is correlated with being lower-class or criminal or drug use or whatever like that's all true but then society moved in a direction that said premarital sex is okay but wasn't that really because of birth control because a woman's once once a woman had an ability to control her reproductive system and say you know I can it just have sex for pleasure and enjoyment yeah because before it was the consequences are so grave especially in poverty yeah like now I there's another mouth to feed and now I

171:23can't work cuz I have to take care of the babies oh yeah so the technology of contraception made a big difference it used to be thought okay if you're if you're gay or lesbian that is morally degenerate and terrible and invalid and you can't possibly have a long-term relationship or a family or whatever and then we kind of changed that pretty dramatically in the last 20 30 years so I just you know as a sex researcher I want people to be quite cautious about saying that lifestyle is wrong and degenerate and unhealthy and this other lifestyle is better because in the era of sex pots right in virtual reality deep fakes and whatever who knows what's gonna happen well if you read sex at dawn yeah did you like it I had very mixed feelings about it what was the negative I don't think it's an accurate description of prehistory prehistoric mating I think parabens run

172:32really deep in human evolution but I think as the sort of ethical ideal polyamory is is okay and it works for some people some of the time and just something you've discussed a lot polyamory um I really only kind of came out publicly as being interested in it on the Sam Harris show a few months ago but I'm thinking about writing a book on it next and um it's a very popular thing I mean the number of people who are into open relationships or poly relationships is larger than the number of people who are gay or lesbian sir really oh for sure yeah what's the number of people in gay and lesbian relationships number of people who are gay or lesbian at the population level is like 2 to 5 percent depending on the surveys in polyamorous relationships um probably 5 to 15 percent at the moment and it's even higher among you know people under 35 or so yeah so this is a new thing it's

173:37relatively new and is this just an acceptance of the instincts that people have to be non-monogamous the acceptance of the jealousy is holding people back from experiencing different things like yeah I think it's only in the 90s that you you got a coherent subculture that said if you're not going to be monogamous here's the honest ethical open way to do it and it kind of developed a bunch of social norms about how you manage these relationships in a way that's different from cheating or different from swingers or different from prostitute appeal of communes are or prostitutes and I mean this is a longer discussion than we have time for probably today but as a researcher it's a fascinating culture because it's people who are trying to find ways to kind of hack their jealousy mhmmm and manage it better you know and it's also a new method of social networking right

174:41where you're not drawing a sharp line between who you're sexually connected to and who you're socially connected to so people who were into poly tend to have sort of sexual friendship professional networks that are much broader than done a lot of people tend to have and that I I think that's actually a little bit more similar to what Christopher Ryan was talking about with sex at dawn mm-hmm like I think in most prehistoric tribes anybody who wasn't a close relative it was sort of mating age you you probably would have had sex with like sooner or later at least once even if you both had a sort of stable paramount and this is probably an incredibly controversial subject at the academic level well when I taught my course on polyamory and open sexuality last year it got a little bit of controversy you say that was smile and in the department well there was concern

175:51about what happens if you know you get complaints from legislators yeah there goes again funding yeah money by there's a lot of cool research on it there's a lot of interesting psychological issues that it plus if you're a student it's probably a good way to find the freaks it was they were wonderful wonderful freaks I mean this gallery nothing robbery in a freak great students and open-minded and you know we talked about the pros and the cons it's like this stuff is really hard to do for this and this and this reason and people will really only succeed at it if they have certain kinds of traits and abilities and communication skills and if they don't they crash and burn and doesn't work so it wasn't just an advocacy class it was also like here's the pros and cons but also as a social trend this is a big deal and if you're going into one of the caring professions

177:02like medicine nursing Social Work clinical psych you damn well better know about this because a lot of people do it and if you're giving advice to a couple and they're in an open relationship and you don't even understand what that means or how it works you're going to give bad advice and that's to me kind of professional malpractice hmm it's also sort of in some ways an ongoing experiment in terms of how you know how people bond with each other how people form communities yeah and this is in particular with in today's climate and today's society with the you know the ability to distribute this information and discuss these things and groups and yeah it's a different world in terms of just collecting data and in comparing experiences yeah it's a work in progress I mean I think nobody who's polyamorous or in an open relationship can pretend that yeah we really know how to make

178:10this work very well and here's the best practices and here's all the the hacks and and anybody can do it you know we're apps not at that point it's also brave to talk about because it immediately puts you into this potential pervert place yeah like you know you talk about sex with more than more than one person what are you doing what are you doing Jeffrey yeah what are you doing I know you're wrecking your reputation what are you doing after having sex I know it's super stigmatized yeah but like compared to what compared to being a evolutionary psychologist in the first place who does intelligence research or compared to teaching human sexuality or compared to doing just as a human and civilization showing a book with Tucker max I mean it's all that's tricky right yeah but I think we we have a professional responsibility you know if you're a behavioral scientists to understand what

179:04are people doing out there what is working and what isn't and how do you make it work better and the people who ignore it I think it's kind of like if you were like a psychologist in the early 70s right when the gay and lesbian rights movement was starting if you'd sort of said oh god I hope that'll blow over like that that doesn't deserve research we we should keep it as a mental disorder and you know the DSM right I feel like Polly's sort of at the same place where yeah there are reactionaries who go that that's just gross and disgusting just like people and you know the early 70s would have said homosexuality is gross and disgusting well it's still it's a it's brave to discuss right now I mean it may very well be like you know what you're talking about the gay and lesbian revolution of the 1970s it may be 40 years from now it's just like that yeah

180:09like oh there this this is that normal no who cares but in today's day and age it's a tread carefully right well somebody's got a research it and talk about it yeah and I think like people should read sex at dawn by Christopher Ryan but that shouldn't be the final word about you know human evolution and polyamory what's another good book on I mean the ethical slot is a good kind of that sounds like a restaurant I mean it's kind of the Pali Bible is it really the ethical I love it it's a throw that dossie eat what's her name eaten I think I can't remember she's got a co-author it's been renamed so I know it's a poly Bible for everybody buys that book just just to have it on your shelf I hope that book sells a billion copies it's done pretty well there it is the ethical yeah dossie Easton and Janet Hardy what a great name for a book I'm sad that I never came up with that it's a it's a

181:23good title but I don't think there's a good book yet that's actually savvy about evolutionary psychology and human sexuality and polyamory and how it's all gonna play out in the next 10 years or so and this is why you're contemplating writing it yourself yeah you know yeah I hope you do man thanks and thanks for coming here it's a lot of fun it's better pleasure we had we talked for three hours you believe that oh my god yeah we did Time Warp in this room time flew Thank You Jeffery really appreciate it welcome tell people how to find you on Twitter I'm primal Poli PRI mal vol Y and I'm sorry Jeffrey Miller and primal Polycom okay thank you sir