Lex Fridman Podcast - #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

David Buss is an evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin. He is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His current research is on sex differences in mate selection, mate attraction, infidelity, and the emotions of jealousy, lust, and love. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Notion: https://notion.com/startups  - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod  - Roka: https://roka.com/ and use code LEX  - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit  - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex  EPISODE LINKS: David's Twitter: https://twitter.com/profdavidbuss David's Website: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/ When Men Behave Badly (book): https://amzn.to/3y3bRVM The Evolution of Desire (book): https://amzn.to/3kyBdTt Evolutionary Psychology (textbook): https://amzn.to/3LExU9e Derogation of Competitors (research paper): https://bit.ly/38G4LMa PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:04) - Sex vs Violence (14:48) - Mating strategies (26:44) - Social construct of beauty (30:38) - Evolution of mating evaluation (34:40) - Mating selection desires (39:52) - Difficulties of monogamy (46:16) - Importance of male appearance (48:52) - Importance of wealth (52:08) - Penis and breasts (55:59) - Fashion (58:58) - Body objectification (1:06:33) - Wear sunscreen (1:13:29) - Gender (1:30:39) - What motivates humans (1:32:29) - Dominance and submissiveness (1:40:33) - Johnny Depp defamation trial (1:50:24) - Jealousy (1:58:45) - Mate poaching (2:02:58) - Polyamory (2:14:13) - Female vs Male sexuality (2:23:11) - Pornography (2:29:46) - Sex and Violence continued (2:38:55) - Cancel culture (2:50:38) - Elon Musk and Twitter (2:59:02) - Serial killers (3:04:55) - Advice for young people (3:16:57) - Love (3:22:57) - Mortality (3:27:40) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with David Busch, evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin researching human sex differences in mate selection. He is considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology and has authored many exciting and challenging books, including the evolution of desire, strategies of human mating, bad men, the hidden roots of sexual deception, harassment and assault, and the murderer next door, why the mind is designed to kill. We talk a lot about sex, dating, relationships, and love. I take these at times controversial topics very seriously, but I also try to inject humor

and ridiculousness throughout this conversation, and all conversations I do. Please do not mistake my silliness for lack of seriousness and my seriousness for lack of silliness. And above all, do not mistake my suit and tie or my PhD as a sign of intelligence or wisdom. I barely know what I'm talking about on most days. I'm simply curious and hoping to understand the way a child does, what the heck is going on in this weird and wonderful civilization of ours. If I say something stupid, as I often do, I promise to learn and to improve. As Mark Twain said, I do not want my schooling to interfere with my education.

Open-minded curiosity, I think, is the best guide for proper and fun, lifelong education. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for Startups, ExpressVPN for Priv privacy, RELCA for style, Onnet for supplements, and indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but if you skipped them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

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Offer good for limited time, terms and conditions apply. Go to indeed.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with David Bus. What is more important in the history of the development of human civilization, sex or violence? So mating strategies or military strategies? Oh, well, both are important. I mean, first of all, humans are sexually reproducing species, and so everything has to go through sex. So in our mating psychology has to be very rich and complex because to succeed, for us to be here now,

all of our ancestors in an unbroken chain have had to succeed in selecting a fertile mate, attracting that mate, being mutually chosen by that mate, stay together long enough, do all the sexual things you need to do to reproduce, have the kids survive, et cetera. So everything has to go through a mating. And in that sense, I think it's, I mean, survival was really only a means to an end, if you will.

So sex has got to be important important and humans have a very rich, evolved sexual psychology and evolved mating psychology. Okay, but I wouldn't minimize the importance of violence either. There's a ton of evidence that humans evolved in the context of small groups and with a fair amount of small group warfare. So intertribal warfare where and this is a harsh realization but they're historically this is part of our bad evolutionary history. It has been advantageous from a truly reproductive standpoint to conquer a neighboring group, kill the males, and get whatever resources they have, including females and sexual resources tool, as well as course, it's typically males who do that. I mean, yes, some females are participated in warfare, but as far as I know, there's never been a single case in all of human recorded history of women forming a war tribe with

other women to attack another group of women and kill them and capture the men as husbands. But this phenomenon is common in the ethnographic record and small group studies. It's part of our common thing. So just one concrete example. Unfortunately, he's dead now. He passed away in the polling chagna. He studied the young momo for many, many years. When he first started interviewing them, he asked them, you know, why do you go to war? And they said, well, to capture women, of course, but it's the only sensible reason. And they said, you know, why do you, why does your culture go to war? However, they phrased it. And he said, well, you know, we go to war for to spread democracy and ideas and everything. They basically fell off their logs laughing at such a stupid reason. Because

why risk your life for anything other than women, of course, is more complex than that. Because complex than that because some go to war for reputational reasons. They say if we don't retaliate, because we've been attacked and they've stolen three of our women, if we don't retaliate, then we will get a reputation as exploitable, and then other groups will start to attack us as well. And so they get into these cycles of, you know, like the hap fiels and mokois of attacks, counter attacks, retribution, and part of it is reputation management. So that's between groups, and I think that's been the primary source of violence,

but not the only source. So there's also within group conflict. And so many ethnographies, many traditional societies have things some of them are ritualized, like wrestling matches or in the alamama, they have these, or used to, these chest pounding duels, where, so if we're in this match you challenge me and I have to of course chest pounding duel like this. Yeah, so it's not you're not hitting each other you're just it's

like peacocking you really oh no you're hitting each other. Oh, sorry. Yeah, they get 20 paces away and they they run up and you punch the other guy in the chest and he has to basically stand there. And then he does the same and everything. Oh wow. And then it's basically last man standing. That's why I suppose that's better than the face. That's an interesting decision with the chest. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure if you get good at that kind of thing, you could start breaking ribs. Yeah. And you can get loose about the rules of where exactly in the chest you can hit. And there's that guy who's always known for hitting not exactly in the chest. Right. I said only missing the mic Tyson that results some kind of issue.

Well, yeah, it's important to establish status hierarchies, you know, but also, and here's just another one more concrete point on that. The Yonamon, we don't have this in our language. We just have one word for kill or murder, but Yanaman Mamo have you're either an Uno, if you're a male, you're an Uno Kai or a non-Uno Kai. The non-Uno Kai are men who have not killed. If you're an Uno Kai, that means you have killed someone and The unokai among the Anamamo historically had higher status and more wives. They're a polygamous society, which has been true of something like 83 to 85% of traditional societies. Actually, I was just corrected by anthropologists.

He said, we don't want to recall them traditional societies. We call them small-scale societies. So, nothing can be called traditional. I don't know. I think it's just one of these things, the words that are deemed appropriate to use to describe things change over time. So, yeah, so words can hurt people, they can inspire people, words are funny, powerful things. You author the textbook titled Evolutionary Psychology, The New Science of Mind in its sixth edition. What is the magic ingredient that gave birth to Homo sapiens? Do you think? Because it's fire, cooking, ability to collaborate, sure ideas, ability to contemplate our mortality, all that kind of thing.

Yeah, well, I think it's hard to isolate one factor. I know I knew you've had Richard rang him on this podcast. It was a wonderful, wonderful interview and he used to be a colleague of mine when I was a professor at Michigan and I've stayed in touch with him. I don't know if he's brilliant, brilliant guy and he thinks fire and cooking has been one of the key things but I think it's hard to isolate. I would trace at least part of our uniqueness to the uniqueness of our mating system. So we have in mating, unlike chimpanzees who are closest, primate, relative, and of which Richard Rangham is a world's expert, but they have basically no long-term pair bonded mating.

Okay, they've female comes into estrus, all the mating, all the sex happens, most of the sex happens during that window. But humans have evolved long term, pair bonded mating. And it's only one mating strategy, but it's a really important one. And then you have with that male parental care. So basically again, you go back to chimps and chimps with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA, males don't do anything. So they insuminate the females, but then when the kids are born, they basically don't do much

of anything in terms of provisioning and so forth. But human males do. We invest in the modern environment, it could be decades, you know, especially with the boob-brain kids and everything, but we're not all males do, but compared to the vast majority of mammals, we are a very heavy male parental investment species. Could you, if it's okay, and I'll ask you a bunch of dumb basic questions, because those are fun. Could you define mating here? How is mating referred to the series of sexual acts

that lead to reproduction? Is it include like dating and love and camaraderie, loyalty, all those things? Yes. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yeah, when I first started studying it, yeah, I don't, it's when I first started studying it,

I looked for the right term. And obviously it's much broader than the sex. So by mating, I include things like mate selection, mate preferences, mate attraction, mate retention, mate poaching, made expulsion. Made poaching, that sounds fun. So the early, the game theoretics strategy made selection is primary, what mating, what mating is about, or do you include the long term,

once you agree that you're going to stick this out for a while and have multiple children, is that also mating? Yes, I include that as well. So it's a broad category. Right definition. And absolutely includes the emotion of love. And of course there are many different types of love, brotherly love, love parents for children. But love I think, and this is one of the shifts in the social sciences. So I was the undergraduate for example, I was taught that love is this invention by some Caucasian European poet a couple hundred years ago and And it turns out that's not the case. So you there's been the extensive cross-cultural

evidence now that That people not every person in all cultures, of course, but all some people in all cultures experience this emotion that we call love. And for the word love, are we going to in this conversation and try to stick to sort of romantic love for the meaning of the word love? Well, that's a great question, but I mean, it's pretty well established that there are these different phases of love. So there's this infatuation phase where our psychology, we get obsessional thoughts.

It's hard to focus on work when we're not with the person we're thinking about the other person constantly. So there's kind of like ideational intrusion into our psychology, but you can't sustain that. I mean, it'd be. And then, of course, there's a part in the phrase, but what I described is the fucking like bunnies phase of this intense sexuality, but people have other adaptive problems. They have to solve. And so you can't stay in that state for too long. And so that subsides over time. And and doops into at least in many cases this warm attachment. Cuddling bunnies, long term cuddling bunnies. Yes, that's the face of the relationship, but still romantic,

not like brotherly love or, you know, I talk about love a lot and for me, love is a broader experience of just experiencing the joy and the beauty of life. So like just looking out in nature. Yeah, that's a kind of love. Like whatever the chemicals that lead to a feeling that at least echoes the same kind of feeling

that you get with the romantic love, you can experience that with even inanimate objects. That sounds weird to say, but just gratitude and appreciation, not in some kind of weird Zen way, but just in a very human way. It just feels good to be alive. Kind of. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess I would, I mean, that's an interesting thought. I hadn't thought about that. I guess I would use other terms to describe that. So like the term, for example, when you see a beautiful sunset, you know, that's why I kind of started out by saying, I think there are different types of love and I'm focusing on the mating type. And we'll talk about that, but so yeah, there is a sense of beauty and there's a sense of sexual appeal. Maybe that's a good and those intersects in fascinating ways. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about all of that. But you're saying mating

strategies, not that we've kind of placed ourselves on what we mean by mating. Mating strategies is one of the cool features that made humans what they are. One of the initial inventions is the weird and wonderful ways that we mate. Yeah, and I mean, if you go to even things like how we compete for mates, and this is another kind of strange for some people, angle on it, but mating is inherently a competitive process in that desirable mates are in scarce supply relative to the numbers of people who want them. And so even post mating after that is after mate selection, mate attraction and mutual mate choice, desirable mate, that's why there's mate poaching. Mate poaching is one of the strategies that we in my lab with David Schmidt have studied. And so, okay, but one of the unique aspects of humans is that we compete using language.

And that is we have reputations. And humans devote a lot of effort to maintaining the reputations, to building the reputations to building the reputations to trying to recover reputations after a loss of reputation for various reasons. But we compete for mates using language and that includes sending signals to the person that we're trying to attract using language verbal fluency, and obviously some more recent things like poetry, but also we use language to derogate our competitors.

So one of the papers I published here earlier on was a research project on derogation of competitors, the ways in which people impune the status character and reputations of their rivals with the goal of making them less desirable to other people and humans do that and women and men both do that. So it's an interesting thing that we're male competition. We were talking about the Yanamamo earlier and some of these overt physical or what animal biologists call contest competition where there's a physical battle. Males do that and so a lot of the early attention on mate competition was focused on these sort of ostentatious overt battles in contest competition, but we compete through language.

And so there is this big overlooked domain of women, the ways in which women compete with each other using language. And one of the things that astonished me is how observant women are about the subtle imperfections in their rivals and take pains to point them out. So just as to random examples, I went to a party, this is back in my youth, but went to a party with my girlfriend at the time. And I got into this conversation with another woman

who happened to be very attractive. But then we leave the party and she said something just casually offhand. And like she said, did you notice that her thighs were heavy? And I hadn't. But next time I saw her, this other woman, I fell my attention being drawn to check out her thigh. Well, and originally it puzzles me why women would dare get other women on appearance. Well, they do it, of course, because man prioritizes appearance. But

I thought, well, the man can see the woman directly with his own eyes. Why would verbal input alter his perceptions of how attractive he was? And I think that part of it is, I think there are actually two quick answers to that. One is the attentional one. So our attentional field, when they draw attention to it, those, what could be very small deviations from perfect symmetry or whatever they are,

become magnified in our attentional field. But the other is that who we have as a mate is also a reflection of our own status. And you saw the Senate kind of overt and way in the earlier, the last presidential, not the last, the 2016 presidential election, where Donald Trump was saying, this is when he was in competition with Ted Cruz, I think, in the primary. He said, look at my wife, look at Ted Cruz's life, and what wife? And he really impugned the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife. So using language, you can alter the dynamics of the

social hierarchy, the status hierarchy, sorry. So like you can change the values subtly or if you have a large platform in big ways, you can move things around just with your words. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Right. Yeah fascinating. Yeah, because it's all socially constructed anyway. So this, I mean, the question I have is you said, there's the interesting thing about mating strategies is there's a small pool of desirable mates. And what the word desirable means is socially defined almost by purpose to make sure the pool lows they small.

I would have a couple thoughts on that. It's an interesting issue, set of issues you raise. One is that I think we have evolved adaptations part of our psychology is to detect differences and so this is why I don't know a a Martian or an alien coming down at, they might look at humans and say, boy, they all, they all look alike. I just want, just like we look at, I don't know, zebras or whatever, I think they all look

alike. But what's important in decision making, especially in the mating domain or even friendship domain or, or a coalitionitional selection domain is the differences. And so I noticed this is just a concrete example of this. I was sitting around, this is again ages ago, watching a something like a Miss America Beauty contest and people with a bunch of other people and they were saying, boy, did you see Miss North Carolina? I and people with a bunch of other people and they were saying, boy, did you see Miss North Carolina? I don't want a dog. And so, he were like a 50 contestants who were selected as the most attractive in their state,

presumably, all right, the claim is based on talent. But we noticed the differences. on, but we noticed the differences. And this is why I would push back a little bit on the term socially constructed, because I think there are many different meanings of that phrase. One meaning that some people have on a connotation is that it's arbitrary. And I don't think it's arbitrary. So this has been another shift in understanding standards of beauty where it used to be believed in the social sciences. You can't judge a book by its cover. Beauty's only skin deep. Don't judge people on the superficial characteristics. But in fact, physical appearance provides a wealth of information about the health status of someone they're in the case of males, their physical form of ability, and we have form

of ability, assessment, adaptations, and then fertility as well. So there are a very predictable set of cues to fertility that have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness and and they're not arbitrary. There are some culturally arbitrary ones. So like you go to the the Maori and New Zealand, for example, and they find tattoos on their lips to be very attractive. So there are some culturally arbitrary things, but standards of beauty like cues to youth, cues to health in women, clear skin, full lips, clear eyes,

lustrous hair, a small waist hip ratio that is circumference of the waist relative to the hips is acute to youth infertility and acute health symmetrical features. So we are bilaterally symmetrical species, but we all have deviations from perfect symmetry that are due to different things, so mutation, load, environmental insults, diseases during development, and so forth. All right, but that's kind of deeply biological. Like, there's cues that indicates something that is biologically true about a particular human.

So we'll talk about both men and women. So we're not talking about what men want in the mating strategies when they look at women. So you're saying small waste to hip ratio. Right. Is how much of that is our deep biological path on top of which we can build all kinds of different standards of beauty. So, you know, we have many things going on in our brain. Our value of other humans in selecting a mate might incorporate a lot more variables as we get it into the 21st century. So how quickly does century. So how quickly does our valuation of a mate evolve relative to the evolution of the human species? They're using evolve in the sense of culturally evolved and then relative to biologically evolved. Yeah. Well, I think that there are some things that are biologically evolved, some standards

of attractiveness. And there are some of the things that I mentioned. So in male evaluation of females, let me back up and just say, what is the underlying logic? Why would we have standards of attractiveness? So here's the interesting thing. And this gets back to your earlier question about what is unique to humans or what distinguishes us or what set us off on the path that we did, is chimpanzee males do not have any difficulty figuring out when a

female is fertile. She signals that like crazy with the bright red genital swelling, or factory cues, she goes into estrus. In humans, we have, and this was actually a third thing that I wanted to add earlier, we have concealed ovulation, relatively concealed ovulation, which is remarkable given how close we are primatologically to chimpanzees. And so there's a little bit of evidence that there are several changes that occur when women ovulate non-women normal or hormonal contraceptives.

But it's mostly concealed. But it is largely concealed. I think that's a feature of bug in like, do we evolve that? Is that a cool and a powerful invention for the human species? I think it's an adaptation in women that women have evolved concealed ovulation. And I think it's a feature not a bug. Yeah, it gives more, would it give more power for women to select a mate. There are a couple different hypotheses about it, but the one that I think is most plausible

is that, again, comparing it to chimps, thema goes into estrus. The male just has to try to monopolize her while she's in that estrus phase, and then they basically ignore the females after that. If you can't know when a woman is fertile, then you have to stick around a lot longer. And so I think long-term pair bonding co-evolved with concealed ovulation. And with that, also a very different form of sexuality, which is that we have sex throughout the ovulatory cycle. And chimps don't. There's a little bit of mating, a little bit of sex toward the edges of the ester cycle,

but very little. So that actually makes meeting a more fundamental part of interaction between humans than it does for chimps. So meaning like year round, every day constantly selecting mace in terms of biologically speaking. So what else, what else do men want? Today in the 21st century versus in the K-Made days. A wonderful question to answer it though. I have to distinguish between long-term mating and short-term mating.

And long-term mating, it gets very complicated. So as a... That's one way to put it. Yeah. Well, so I teach a course in human sexuality at University of Texas at Austin. And one of the things this is back in the days when there were chalkboards and you taught with a piece of chalk and wrote things on the board. And what I would do is I would ask the class, I would teach the large class one to 200, I would say, what do women want? Tell me what all the things women want in a long

term rate. And so I would start at one end of the blackboard, there were like five blackboards and they say, well, I want to make who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values. And I just go, I feel like five blackboards and then run out of space. And so, first, this large number of characteristics that people want. And then specific magnitudes of those characteristics or amounts. So I say, you want to make who's a generous with their resources. And they say, yes, I want to make generous with their research. So I said, you want to make who's a generous with their resources. And they say, yes, I want to make generous with the research. So I said, so like a guy who, this is a women's

mates lecture, and the guy who at the end of every month gets his paycheck and gives it to the local wineau on the drag. And I said, well, no, not that generous. Okay. Generous toward me, not indiscriminately generous. And so you want to make who's ambitious, you know, who's a hard worker. Yes, but not a work of hall, you know. And so, and so then you get to interactions among different characteristics. So there's a lot of characteristics, a lot of variables in this very complex optimization problem for women. Yes, that's right. And more so for women than for men. So when I turned to the men and I say, what do men want? And then I run out of space after about a blackboard and a half because they

can't think of anything else. So women think there's a lot of explanations for that. Besides the lack of the number of variables, it's also, you know, I mean, it's that's interesting. So what's the difference between the variables? So on the men's side, what are the variables? Well, in long term, it's function, there's a lot of overlap. Okay. So things like intelligence, good health, sense of humor, an agreeable personality, someone who's not too neurotic or moody or emotionally volatile, but there are key differences as well. And the differences stem from, it basically fall in the delimited number of domains. So for men, They've still been following the delimited number of domains. So for men, it's physical attractiveness, physical appearance, and youth are the two real

big ones. Okay, men prioritize those more than women do. And so that's why you have phenomena such as this quote, love it for sight where sometimes you're walking into a party and they see a woman across the room and you say, that I'm going to marry that woman. That's the woman for me. Women very rarely do that. I'm most men don't do that either, but men are much more inclined to fall in love at first sight. That's because they prioritize physical appearance. Why? Because physical appearance provides that this wealth of information about a woman's fertility status. And this is from an evolutionary perspective,

a purely reproductive perspective, in a business school they would call it job one. Job one is you have to select a fertile mate. So those who in our evolutionary past who selected infertile mates, so postmenopausal women, for example, did not become our ancestors. So we are all the descendants of this long

and unbroken chain of ancestors who all of whom succeeded selecting a fertile mate. But fertility cannot be observed directly. It can use some cues exactly. And there are cues that are probabilistically related to this underlying quality of fertility that we can't observe directly. And we're doing that computation in our heads.

What about men? What do men want for short term mating? Well, so for short term mating, for both sexes, physical appearance looms very large. So women are, no, physical attractiveness and appearance, they're important for women in long term mating selection. So I don't want to mislead anyone on that. They're just not as important as they are for men. And so a lot of characteristics come for women before physical appearance, physical attractiveness. So women, so if we switch to women, what do women want? They want also physical appearance for short term mating, physical

attractiveness. What else? Well, some cues that, physical attractiveness, what else? Well, some cues that represent physical attractiveness that maybe represent health. Well, here's, this is your, it's. I'm learning a lot here. Yeah, well, also, but you're also asking a very interesting question about what is controversial within the evolutionary psychology field, right, and not totally resolved. So that's why you're in the sixth edition of the book and

a lot more additions come. Yeah, I revised it every four years or so because there's four years of new interesting work and so it deserves updating, but the traditional, I should say deserves updating. But the traditional, I should say, answer to your question is that women go for good genes, cues to good genes in the short term, and cues to resources in the long term. And this has been a hypothesis that advocated, I didn't come up with this one by Steve Gangerstead, a former student of my Marti Haylooth and Randy Thornhill and some other very smart players in the field. And what they used as markers of good genes are things like symmetrical features

and masculine features. So strong jawline, high shoulder to hip ratio, other sorts of masculine features. But I started to doubt this explanation for what women want in the short term because of some other findings. So for women, a lot of short term mating is not one night stand mating. So, but rather it's a fair mating. So, if you ask the question, why do women have a fairs?

So, let's restrict the question for the moment. My colleagues would argue, well, women have a fairs because they're trying to get good genes from one guy while they're getting investment from the regular partner, the husband. Okay, but the problem is that when women have a fairs, 70 plus percent tend to fall in love with or become attached to their a fair partner. Now, is that what percentage 70? Yeah, 70. Some large majority. Yeah, 70 plus or more. In contrast to men, where it's more like 30 percent of men who have

affairs fall in love with or become attached to their a fair partner. So, but from a design perspective, an engineering perspective, if you will, that's a disastrous thing, if you're just trying to get good genes. So, you're trying to retain the investment of one guy while getting good genes surreptitiously from this guy who presumably has more falling in love with them, becoming attached. That's not a feature you want. Yeah, that, bad engineering. Yeah, exactly. It's bad engineering. I developed an alternative hypothesis that I call the mate switching hypothesis,

which is that affairs are one way in which women divest themselves of a cost-inflicting partner or partner who things aren't working out well with and it's a way to either transition back into the mating market or to or to trade up in in the mating market and and so and anyway So these are these are probably the two leading hypotheses about why why women Ferris and I am putting my money on the mate switching hypothesis. My esteemed colleagues are putting their money on the good genes hypothesis but I think the evidence for the good genes hypothesis is starting to look shakier than initially. But this is a heat of debate. I mean, mate switching sounds like a so from a game theory perspective, from an engineering

perspective seems to make a lot more sense. Unless you put a lot of value in lifelong, sort of in the long term mating, some kind of value in the lifelong singular relationship, like monogamy. Yeah. And maybe we do psychological, maybe there's a big evolution advantage to that. And we do, but we also know that divorce is, you know, and breakups are also common and occur in all cultures. So, yeah.

And we're just not very good at this thing. Well, either we're not good at the mate selection such that maybe we're not incorporating all the variables well or we're just not good at monogamy period from an evolutionary perspective. Well, I think that raises an interesting set of questions. So I think that one issue is longevity. So we didn't live to be 70, 80 years old and over 99% of human evolutionary history. And so we didn't necessarily evolve to be made in monogonously with one person for decades and decades and decades. But I also think that long term pair bonding is a critical strategy, but mate switching is also a critical strategy. So if you have a mate, for example, who becomes cost-inflicting or becomes sufficiently debilitated or who suffers an injury such that like in a hunter-gatherer societies where the mate can no longer provide resources

for their kids and the woman, this becomes a problem. I think that we have adaptations to mate switch and to divest ourselves from some partners and trade up in the mating market under certain conditions. Those conditions will differ from other women. What are some of the cues in terms of what women want? I'll go to the gym. So, a hotly contested debate. You said evolution in psychology, and this is in the bro psychology forums that I visit multiple times a day and now I'm just kidding.

What's the most important cue of appearance for guys? What muscle group is the most important to work on? To women care about biceps is what I'm asking. It turns a physical appearance, a good shoulder to hip ratio. So relatively wide shoulders, relative to hips is one, women tend to prefer men who are physically fit and well toned but not muscle bound. So, like, if you go to, I don't know, some of those early, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing the mis-Mr. or whatever it was contest. You see, the women don't find those attractive, the extremely muscle bound guys, but they like a guy who's physically fit. High shoulder

to hip ratio, they like guys who are physically taller than they are, and guys who are a bit above average in height. So if the average, so if, you know, the average is, I don't know, five, nine, five, ten and not there for humans depending on the culture, women prefer an inch or two taller than that. So, um, so shoulders, high, dad bod, what was that about? Why do you want a dad bod? Why do you, why not, how do I define, what is a dad bod? Dad bod is not muscle bound. Okay, so out of shape.

A little, no, no, just a little bit, a little bit of cushion for the pushin. I don't know what the kids call it these days, but just a little bit, a little bit of fat. So why do they not, what guys to be obsessed with their body, is that, or is that some evolutionary thing? Yeah, I think that women might interpret a guy who is so obsessed with his body that

he's, they might view that as a sign of narcissism. Yes. And that's not a good trait. What about like cultures where large sort of overweight men are valued? Is that how do you explain like how much can we override the evolutionary desires with our sort of cultural fashions of the day that may be represent other desirable aspects like wealth? Well, wealth is resources have always been important, especially to women. So is a man able to acquire resources and is he willing to dispense them to her and her kids. So that's always important in traditional cultures that boils down to hunting skills.

So I asked a colleague friend Kim Hill who's probably the world's leading expert on the Ace of Paraguay. And you ask Kim what leads to high status in the Ache in males hunting skills. That's one thing, the big variable. And that's resources. And that's resources. Now what's interesting about modern cultures, we have cash economies, but cash economies are relatively recent. And, you know, historically, there's over the vast 99% of human evolutionary history, you weren't able to stockpile resources in the way that you are today. Although there are interestingly certain ways you can do it. So, you kill a large game, and okay, you bring it back, you get some status points because you

give some to your family, you can share it more widely with the group, etc. But it's going to go bad, right? You can't just say, I'm going to keep this carcass around for the next several months. Okay, but, and I think, I think it's a Steve Panker who might have used the coin this phrase that they they store the meat in the bodies of other people. And so for example, they store it in their friends. So, you know, hunting success is, you know, it's a hit or miss kind of thing. So you might come back empty handed four times out of five. But kind of thing. So you might come back empty handed four times out of five. But when you do, you share your meat with others, and then they reciprocate by sharing their meat with you. And so you can store resources in the bodies of other people, which is I think an interesting way

to think about it. But that can only go so far. And when you have cash economies, you have both the ability to stockpile resources, but also this kind of explosion and inequality of resources. And that's evolutionarily recent. What about, now this is the difference between the Huberman, the excellent Huberman lab podcast that you did that people should listen to. He is a brilliant scientist, a sort of a rigorous analyst of what is true in the scientific community, also helps you with great advice on how to live. Now, in contrast to that, I am a terrible, almost idiotic level, journalist.

So this is what you have to deal with. Another thing that people talk about that women care about is penicise. This penicise matter for women in sexual selection. Well there's controversy about that in the evolution psychology community. Well is there papers on penicides? I wouldn't say scientific papers of speculations about in nature or in science. Yeah, yeah, nothing that I've seen there. You know, I think that there's individual variability.

So this is something that comes up again, you know, when I ask women in the class, my class is, you know, what do women want? Some will say, you know, a large penis. But I think there's variability in that preference. And it also might depend on the variability in the woman's anatomy. So, do you think there's something fundamental in terms of evolution in psychology in terms of evolution or is this a quirk of culture that's current? That's maybe somehow connected to pornography or something like that.

Yeah, my guess is it's something that's perhaps a quirk of culture or something that is evolutionarily recent. But I don't know. I mean, it's a topic that hasn't been explored. My job never done work on it. And... Well, somebody should do a PhD, sort of some archaeologist should do a PhD on the history of human civilization

and its valuation of penicize and the correlation of penicise to the value of the male. Okay, moving on. Another absurd question in terms of what men want. Again, definitely not a Hubertman lab podcast question. Why do men, let's say a large fraction of men love boobs? Well, I think that you're one of the most cited evolutionary psychologists, and this is what you sign up for. These kinds of questions. Of course, fuck this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so again, this is something I haven't studied directly, but scientifically. Yes, yes.

But yeah, there's been some work on that. And it's another cultural quirk, perhaps? No, I don't think it's a cultural quirk, because I think it's the shape that matters a lot, because shape is going to be a cute infertility. And so one of the things that humans are attracted to in the opposite sex is sexually themorphic features and breasts are sexually themorphic feature. And they morphic mean difference between difference in morphology between males and females. Got it. Dyming to morphology.

So, and women don't develop breasts until puberty or post puberty. And so, as it's actually the morphic characteristic, we tend to be attracted to that. Same is true, by the way, with the waste to hip ratio that we mentioned earlier. Prior to puberty, males and females have very similar waste to ratios, but at puberty, there's a differential hip development and fat deposition that creates a sexual demorphism with respect to waste to ratio. And so again, that's manner attracted to this waste of ratio. No man, consciously says that, they find this woman

more attractive than that woman. They don't think, oh, she has a waste of ratio of .70. That's true. That's exactly what I do. But most men, most men, yes. Yes. So, isn't that fascinating that we just build these entire industries a fashion and what we find beautiful around these kinds of ideas.

And we just, and then not just, not just fashion and then we build wefts sociological tensions about whether we should care about this kind of thing or not. There's, there's battles in that space. It's like, they seem so simple, it's just a human body. And we were close, first of all, that's a funny thing. What's the, why we weren't close? What's the shame aspect of covering up the bodies? Is that another feature? Or is that what is that? Yeah, that's an interesting question.

And I don't know. It's just like hiding an ovulation. Maybe that's another hiding. Maybe hiding is a great game theoretic thing to play with, because it can give you, it can give the powerless more power by covering it. Well, well, maybe. Well, I think there are a few things. So one is the sort of arbitrary features of fashion, and then the other is the aspects of fashion

that attempt to magnify what is inherent in our evolved standards of beauty. So for example, women tend to wear things that accentuate their waist to a ratio. So I mean, historically those, in the old days, courses, for example, cinch the woman's waist. And you wouldn't see fashion develop in a way that made a woman seem old, unhealthy, Parkmarked signs of open-sourish or lesion, there are certain domains and design spaces that

you wouldn't, that no culture would develop. But there are arbitrary features, but sometimes they're not entirely arbitrary, or they're arbitrary at one level of description, but not at another. So for example, fashion tends to be linked with status. And that's why it constantly changes. The high status people start wearing a certain type of clothing. And then when the lower status people imitate them, then they have to shift to signal their status. And so I think the fashion and clothing is important to status. So this is not you talking. This is me. I just want to make a statement, a profound statement

that I think yoga pants. Now this is broadly speaking. But yoga pants is one of the greatest inventions in human history. There's fire and yoga. And I'm just going to leave it there. I'm a fan and I have female friends that talk about how comfortable yoga pants are, which is what I'm referring to when I say it's one of the greatest inventions because comfort in fashion is really, really important to me. Let me ask about sort of the sociological aspect of this.

So I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg who, the meta, who's the CEO, founder, Facebook, and now meta, and that owns Instagram. I heard of him. Yeah. He said, yeah. He holds the American flag and likes the water. Anyway, so there's been criticisms of social networks and so on. And I just want to ask you about the broader question here that there's objectification of the human body in the media. And that creates standards for young women, for young men, perhaps, but more young women.

You mentioned to the cruelty that women can have towards each other in terms of, well, let's, you know, cruelty is already a moral judgment. Just you've made a statement about the fact that women seem to point out imperfections in other women. Um, do you think it's a problem in our modern society that we objectify each other in this way? Do you think this is a fundamental aspect of our biology that we need to suppress versus celebrate? Yeah.

Just like we might suppress our natural desire for violence if such exists in modern society. Well, a couple of thoughts on that. I think it is damaging. The fact that so many images are displayed in social media. And so what I would say is that there's what's called in the field an evolutionary mismatch. So we evolved in the context of small group living where there was make competition, but your competitors were a small number of other potential individuals. And so people do comparisons. But now what we have is this bombardment of our visual system and our sexual psychology and our mating psychology

with thousands and thousands of images that are not at all representative of who our actual competition is in the mating domain. And so I think that there's actually evidence on this that Baz Lorman actually said something like this in his sunscreen song. I don't know if you've ever heard that. But it's like a set of us. Wonderful.

Like string of advice, song about advice, but he says, oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. sorry. Yeah, so don't read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. And I think that there's truth to that. That is especially with women, they look at all these images and, you know, of course, they're photographed, they're photoshopped,

they're highly selected and not at all representative. And so women compare themselves to that. So I think this social comparison isn't evolved feature of humans. I mean, females do it, females do it, but it's exacerbated in the modern environment in wildly, evolutionarily mismatched ways. And so I think that it is destructive, it's harmful. There's evidence that it hurts a women's self-esteem. So here's just another factoid or fact, if you will,

that at least in Western cultures, males and females have roughly the same overall average levels of self-esteem. But once puberty hits, all of a sudden, women's self-esteem starts to drop. And I think it's because when they enter, make competition, then they start elevating the importance they attach to physical appearance. And then as you point out, the subjectification that it saturates social media and media in general is damaging and harmful.

I don't know how to undo it though. I don't know how to design a society that undoes that. Well, one of the ways we undo things, just like you pointed out, is we use words. When we manipulate society, when we manipulate social and status hierarchies using our words for ill, and we can do the same for good. And that's why there's a lot of clickbait articles about Instagram, you know, leading to a lot of suffering amongst teenage girls and all those kinds of things. I'm criticizing the clickbait nature and not the contents of the articles.

But you know, in those articles, hopefully, become viral in a way that makes us rethink about how we build social networks that kind of allow us to too easily misrepresent how we look when we are quote unquote influencers and what a mental effect it has on the on young people that look up to those influencers but I guess you're it's not the objectification fundamentally that's the problem it's the inaccurate it's the fake news it's the the fake misrepresentation. You still objectify the male body, the female body, but you do so while misrepresenting the actual truth.

So you're moving the average, you're moving the standard representation of what a male should look like, what a woman should look like, and the dishonesties the problem, not the objectification. Here's just one other interesting empirical finding on that, and it has to do with another dimension that I think is harmful, and that's the thinnest dimension. And so, if you, these are studies originally done by Paul Rosem, but they've been replicated, where if you ask men, what is your ideal figure in a woman?

And so they have these, say, nine figures that vary from very, very thin to average to plump. Men give it the midpoint. I say the midpoint is in a relative thinness or plumpness is what I value. And you ask women, what is your ideal body type for you? They give it, they say thinner, but then if you ask them, what do you think males ideal body type is? They put it in exactly the same spot that they put their own ideal, which is thin. And so there's actually an inaccurate perception of how thin men desire women to be. And I think that's partly exacerbated by the fashion industry where the models are

often rail thin. And, you know, the lore is that clothes hang better on thin models and on TV, they say you gain 15 pounds over what you really are or whatever. For whatever reason, women misperceive how thin men want them to be. And so you have this is another huge sex difference is eating disorders. Andorexia, for example, bulimia, binging purging, where these disorders, eating disorders, are 9 to 10 times more common in women than men. Can I just take a small tangent? Because it is such a beautiful, the sunscreen song, such a beautiful one, if I can read

some of the words from it. I really enjoy it. Yeah, that's a great song. For people, you should check it out. It's called everybody's free to wear a sunscreen. I guess it's actually a speech to a class. I don't know if that's artificial or real, but it's a speech that gives a device. And it goes, ladies and gentlemen of the class of 97, I just remember it even now, those words. Where is sunscreen? If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. A long-term benefits of sunscreen

have been proven by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. I will never mind. You will not Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. I will never mind you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they are faded, but trust me. In 20 years you look back at the photos of yourself and are calling away that you can't grasp now how much possibility you lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebraic question by chewing

bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be the things that never cost your worried mind. The kind that blinds sides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday, do one thing every day that scares you. Saying, don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with the people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements, stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22, what they wanted to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't. For me that's true for 50, 60 and 70 year olds honestly. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't, maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce a 40, maybe you'll dance, the funky chicken on your sony-fith wedding anniversary.

Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much. Or berate yourself, either. Your choices are half-chance, so are everybody else's. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance. Even if you have nowhere to do it, but in your own living room, read the directions, even if you don't follow them, do not rebutey magazines that will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. The nice deer siblings, they're your best

link to your past, and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but a precious few who should hold on. But a precious few who should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle. For as old as you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Living in New York City once, I actually took this advice, this is fascinating advice. I remember this advice well, it's broadly applied. Living in New York City once, but leave before makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before makes you soft.

Travel, accept certain and nail-eable truths. Price is will rise, politicians will flander, you too will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable. Politicians were noble and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse, but you never know when either one might run out.

Never mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85 Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it Advice is a form of nostalgia dispensing it is a way of Fishing the past from the disposal wiping it off painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than its worth But trust me on the sunscreen. So this is a thank you for allowing me to read it. It's almost sentimental for me. I don't know when I first heard it, but there's a few pieces of advice in that, you know,

similar to like the poem, If by Rajak Kipling, there's some deep truths when you step back and look at it all. And also the places where you live, because I lived for time in, I guess, Northern California with Google and so on. And one of the reasons I had to leave is I was becoming, I felt those becoming soft. This is my own personal experience. And the same is true for the cities of the east. They can if you're not careful, make you hard because everybody's super busy and rushing around and they're just buzzed to the city, which is exciting. It's empowering, but it can it can it can change you ways and so It's one of the reasons I'm here in Austin. I'm still in love with the city Yeah, it's a great move and yeah, I've lived on both coasts as well

Boston area and then Berkeley, California, so So I'm familiar with both I've ended up in Austin as a small size. Well, well, I got my undergraduate degree here and then left for 20 years and migrated around. So I went to Berkeley, you see Berkeley from my PhD, Harvard from my first job, University of Michigan. And then a job opened up at University of Texas for an evolutionary psychologist.

And so they wanted me fortunately. So I was very happy to, so I've always loved Austin. I mean, it's, yeah, the love never died. It was there. Yeah, yeah. It's a great town. I was glad that I left.

So, and experienced, well, both coasts and also the Midwest, but happy to be back in Austin. Let me ask a difficult question. Now, we did pretty good with some difficult questions already, but there are people in this world today who believe that gender is purely a social construct. You, I think, are not one of those people. Do you, what are the difference between men and women?

How much of those differences are nature and how much is nurture? I guess if we, you're asking the question morphologically or psychologically, I assume you're asking psychologically. The question is what it is, and the answer, sometimes the questions don't contain with them, the should actually take with the answer, right? So I think I was asking both, and the fact that both are a thing is an interesting thing. So you wrote a book, textbook, I should say, evolutionary psychology, right? Yes.

Both of those words are in the book title. Right. Psychology. That's the human mind. Yes. Yeah, how much of gender, how much of sex is the human mind, and how much of it is the biology? The way that I phrase it, so I don't like sort of dividing the world into two categories, things that are biological versus things that are not biological.

So the biology is actually defined as the study of life and life processes. And so at that sort of abstract level, everything we do is biological, including culture and our capacity for culture, which I think is an evolved capacity that humans have. When you get to the issue of sex and gender, I mean, one cut at your question is, are there universal psychological sex differences? And the answer to that question is, yes, there are some. So for example, well, and this is in one of your areas of specialty engineering, one of the interesting things

is that it's called the people's thing dimension. So do you want an occupation? Do you want a job that involves people, social interaction, or are you happy with a job that just involves things, mechanical objects or computer code or whatever? And this is one of the largest psychological sex differences that exists.

And it's true in every culture. So in terms of, I don't know, magnitude of effects, it's an effect size of more than a standard deviation, difference between the means on this psychological sex difference. And so one of the interesting things is, so if you go to places like Go to the Most, gender egalitarian cultures in the world, so places like Sweden or Norway,

which are explicitly gender egalitarian and are truly in many, many ways, but you allow people freedom of choice. Some of these sex differences actually get larger. The psychological sex differences and also assortment into different occupational choices. But this is not something that I study. I study mating and the sex differences, if you ask, what are the, in what domains are the sex differences the largest, it turns out they occur within the domain of mating and sexuality. So our evolved sexual psychology, our evolved mating psychology is to some degree sexually demographic. Okay, with the very important asterisk that we're talking about overlapping distributions.

So there are some things that, so if you look at human morphology, we talked about breasts earlier, women have evolved functional breasts that is functional for lactation, men don't. So there's no amount of culture or social coercion can cause men to have lactating breasts. Psychologically, we don't see dimorphism that extreme where something is literally present in one sex and totally absent in the other. So there's overlap in the distributions. So I mentioned earlier that in the mating domain, men, men, men, more than women on average prioritize physical appearance, physical attractiveness relative youth, women on average prioritize resources, resource acquisition, qualities that lead

to resource acquisition, like status ambition, industrialist and so forth. But there's overlap in the distributions. So some women place the total priority on how physically attractive the guy is and some men view that as irrelevant. And so the point that I'm making is that there are psychological sex differences that make some people uncomfortable. But you know, it's one of these things where I'm a scientist. I'm not a political advocate. And so I'm, I adhere to the empirical data on empirical data are very strong in these domains. So with respect to sex differences in the mating domain and sexuality,

and things we have, I haven't even talked about, like desire for sexual variety, and sex differences in the whole desire for short term mating, huge sex differences there. And these have been documented universally in all cultures. So, okay, now, are there, are there things that are culture specific or social, cultural overlays onto these fundamental psychological sex differences? Absolutely. But there's also an issue of levels of analysis, levels of abstraction, and how closely you look at the phenomenon. So, quick analogy, language. So you can say, well, in China they speak Chinese and Korea they speak Korean and Brazil they speak Portuguese.

They look how culturally infinitely variable languages are, which they are at that level, but do humans have a universal human innate grammar? And I think the evidence points to the answer yes to that. At least that's what Steve Pink or Paul Blum and some other others argue. So at one level of abstraction things are infinitely culturally variable or at least highly culturally variable, at another level of abstraction there's universality. So here's one example in the mating domain of this. So Margaret Mead, who is a famous anthropologist, studied the Samoan Islanders and she tried to argue basically for the infinite malleability of things like gender and gender roles and so forth. She said, look at this culture. In this culture, it's the men who paint their face. Whereas, you know, in Western cultures, it's the women who wear makeup and so forth.

Well, it turns out if you look carefully at the culture where men paint their face, they're painting a war paint on their face. They're not putting on makeup to enhance their cues to youth and cues to health. They're putting on war paint to make themselves more ferocious or to demarcate what tribe they're in, what coalition they're in. And so at sort of one level, I have a abstract, you can say, well, there's high cultural variability and application of face paint, but at another level,

there's really a fundamental functional difference in the purpose to which the paint is applied. Yeah, and then you can abstract the paint away and I mean fashion in general is magnify the characteristics that are appealing to the opposite sex because what paint is probably, you know, it is you're magnifying the characteristics that are appealing to you, the other sex. So ability to gain resources, maintain resources is status, status in the hierarchy, all those kinds of things. Well, well, that's part of it. But I think another part has to do with, in that case, male coalitions. So we were in intense, this is another unique characteristic.

I don't know if you got into this with Richard Rang, I don't remember you talking about this, but he's written a lot about male coalitionary psychology and humans cooperate to an extraordinary degree in forming coalitions for the purpose of competing with rival coalitions. And so you even see this with, well, you see it in the sports arenas with team sports, you know, where this team wears a different uniform. And that team, they have different mascot, et cetera. And so part of that is male coalitionary psychology.

Well, you, so you write again, so returning to the textbook, now people should know you wrote a lot of incredible book that is maybe more accessible than the Evolutionary Psychology textbook. But the Evolutionary Psychology textbook is very accessible. Yes, it is extremely accessible. That's not your thing. And on Amazon, you can't, you know, it's a pain. It's a textbook. It's not, you know, it's a little bit more of a pain to purchase, which I did.

I bought all your books. They're amazing. We'll talk about a bunch of them, but in terms of coalitions, in chapter 12 of your evolutionary psychology textbook, you write about status, prestige, and social dominance. So how do hierarchies of status and social dominance emerge in human society? And what's the value of status and sexual selection? We talked about cues of individual health and all that kind of stuff, but what the heck's the purpose of status? Why does it matter if I'm in the big boss?

Well, it matters because status is influences your access to resources and your ability to influence other people within your group. And so this is part of the reason why women prioritize a man's social status, how he is viewed in the eyes of others because high status men have access to more resources. It's interesting that you ask about that because I've just published this with Patrick Durkey, a former graduate student of mind. We published a couple papers on precisely this issue where we looked at what we call human status criteria. That is

what are the things that lead to increases or decreases in status and we did this in 14 different cultures. And we found some things that are universal, but also some things that are sex differentiated. And so universal things like people value So universal things like people value trustworthiness. They value intelligence, wisdom, knowledge. So even if you go across cultures, even to the small scale cultures that we alluded to earlier, there are these wise people, wise men, wise women in the culture who have people go to for advice for wisdom. And so having a wide range of knowledge is a universal status criterion.

And there's some things that are sex differentiated and they often fall into the mating domain as well. This is where mating and status are interestingly related to each other in that successful mating increases your status, but having high status also gives you access to more desirable mates. And so the game gets harder and harder, always. So wait, so are we talking about what are the characters what what's the role of power and wealth those kinds of things so you said wisdom is universal yeah what about wealth and power yeah well well I guess it depends on what you mean by power so I think of power is the ability to to influence a

large number of people yeah so and this is one of the interesting things about the fact that cash economies are so are evolutionarily very recent and that we're people are like so so I guess recently or it's about to happen that Elon Musk is going to buy a Twitter. Okay. Is it happening already? Yeah. Okay. So they say that the wealthiest or one of the wealthiest men on earth has now purchased the most influential media platform on earth. And so obviously you or I couldn't compete with Elon Musk and for the purchase of Twitter.

And so the fact that cash economies allow the stockpiling of unprecedented amounts of wealth produces these tremendous power differentials that didn't exist in over most of human evolutionary history. So their wealth is power, but you can also be, power can be attained through other ways. Yeah, but I would say that the interesting thing about wealth is that it's an infinitely fungible resource. So you can use it and translate it into So you can use it and translate it into many, many other things like buying a, buying Twitter or buying a big house or, or virtual reality sex that some people are developing. You have enough resources, you can purchase things like that. So, you can translate wealth into a variety of other tangible things in ways that you couldn't access to. That's one really powerful thing, but there is still power that's correlated,

but not intratally connected to wealth, which is like being leaders of nations, like technically, the president of the United States salary is not very high. Right. Presidents and then you look, you go outside of that and to the half of the world that's living under authoritarian regimes, you have dictators. And there's those are very powerful, usually men. And presumably there's some value there in the meeting selection aspect. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's not by chance that most of them are men. And this is

going to sound strange or and hopefully not offensive to people, but if you ask the question, why is it the case that men are in positions of power so much more so than women. Well, in part, it can be traced to women's made preferences. So it's one of the sex differences that women have over evolutionary time, preferred men who had power, status, resources, et cetera. And what that has done is it's created selection pressure on men to attach a high motivational priority to clawing their way up the status hierarchy. Studies of time allocation distribution show this where men are more willing to sacrifice

their friends, their grandmother, their kin, or whatever to claw their way up to the top of status hierarchy. Women, much less so, women, spend more effort maintaining relationships with their friends, their friends networks, and so forth. So you could say, not only are you, not only are men in positions of power more than women, now you're blaming women what they are and it's not it's not a matter of blame but i think that that what i just outlined is is an essential part of the causal process the co-evolution of women's made preferences with men's motivational priorities how much do you think these mating strategies underlie all of human civilization like what motivates us? You know, there's a

becker with denial of death. Like, why do we build castles and bridges and rockets and the internet and all of this? Is this some complex mush or is it underneath at all? Are we all just trying to get laid? Well, I wouldn't reduce it to something quite as trying to get laid. But I think mating is is certainly part of it. I wonder how big of a park. So with Ernest Becker, the idea is that we're all trying to achieve an illusion of immortality. Yeah.

So we're trying to create something that outlasts us and therefore we create bigger and bigger things in societies and bridges and architecture. Yeah. Well, I think what's missing from Becker's analysis is, you know, I mean, it's a fascinating book to read in our death. But what's missing is that I think that the reason that, and again, I think it's more men than women. I think there's a sex difference on this

that men want to build a lasting legacy because that will in turn affect their lineage. And although I do, now Woody Allen is out of favor, but I remember this quote from him. He said he said he didn't want to achieve immortality through his work. He wanted to achieve immortality by not dying. Oh boy, the funny ones are also deeply flawed often.

Staying on the topic of sex differences in a very different way, perhaps. So dominance and submissiveness, something you've also written about. What's the role of that inside relationships about this human dynamic of dominance and submissiveness. Is that a feature or a bug? So the stable state that these dynamical systems arrive at is a good to have an equality within a relationship or is it good to have differences in a relationship?

Are you talking about romantic relationships or just in human relationships? Romantic, probably, because unless it could be generalized to human relationships, perhaps it could be generalized to human relationships. I wasn't thinking that, but perhaps it could be. But let's start with romantic. I guess one on one. I'm personally in favor of equality on that dimension within romantic relationships and in the in I don't talk about my personal life but I've been in relationships and the best

ones tend to be those were where there's equality and one person does not dominate the other but I guess what I was really going to ask you is in what type of relationships, because there are some things like coalitions where hierarchy is very important to the function of the coalition. So it's like a war coalition or something in small group warfare, you can't just have equality. You have to have leaders that are determining the battle plan, so to speak. And so if you're attacking a neighboring group

or something and everyone gets an equal say, it's not gonna work that way. And so we tend to appoint as leaders those who are, which work out well, but those who are presumably wise or good effective leaders. And they even talk about, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, and I'm not an expert on this, but wartime leaders versus peacetime leaders. And so again, it depends on what the goal is of the group that you are a part of. And so I think there is functionality and utility to a lot of our evolved psychology of status and dominance and submissiveness.

So for example, and you have to look at the individual psychology, and this is actually something I'm currently studying, again with Patrick Durkey, where one advantage of the status hierarchies is that you're not always battling. So you determine, and that's why here's another sexually demorphic aspect of our psychology, formability assessment. So there's evidence that males engage in this, can I take this guy or can he take me? And it's like a spont tidy of my life. Yes, it's like a spontaneous assessment of formability. And it also, that information is critical because that means who you should not challenge or who you can challenge with the punity and punity.

And there's functionality to submitting as well, you know, because you defer to someone so that you don't get vanquished and you live to see another day. So I think we actually have a very rich psychology of status hierarchies and dominance and submissiveness. So especially sort of violent conflict. Yes, but back to relationships. So maybe phrase another way, what is masculinity, what is femininity? Is there value inside of relationship for differences? You talked about matings, mating strategies with the dating stage where you're selecting the mate, but also within, you know, mating broadly defined as the entirety of the process. Are those differences being magnified and celebrated or sort of suppressed.

I've seen enough different relationships work and I've seen enough relationships employed to say there's not one size fits all on these things. So even with respect to masculinity and femininity, some reduce psychologically to two other terms, which are agency and communion. So where agency is, you know, are you instrumental goal-oriented, get tasks done, etc. communion is, you know, more the love and forming connections with other people and so forth. And I published a study a while back on what's were called unmitigated agency and unmitigated communion. So you there are like good and bad aspects of agency and communion. So they can go. So there's toxic is they say masculinity toxic femininity.

You can just rephrase that thing. There could be toxic agency and toxic communion. Yeah. Yeah. And so some elements of masculinity, the unmitigated masculinity is, I think, terrible. I was actually walking around downtown Austin earlier today. I just give this example. And this guy was, I guess, stuck in one car ahead of him to move. And all of a sudden, he screamed out of his mouth, you have to get a fucking car. And then jumped out of his car and to a person, to me, that's toxic masculinity, if you will. We don't need that. Yeah. So, and by the way, as somebody who worked with cars quite a long time in terms of human

interaction with semi-autonomous vehicles, it's so fascinating how the car and traffic brings out like the worst in human nature, in a sense, or maybe to rephrase that, it may be challenges you to explore something that in terms of temper, in terms of anger, in terms of anxiety that you have been bottling it up. There's something that where the car is like a vessel for psychological experiment of how much stress you can take.

And some people that stress is like heating, is making the water boil. And it's fascinating to see what that results in. I think if you are the kind of person that explodes emotionally in traffic, that means there's deeper issues to confront. And it seems like the traffic and the car is a place where you get to confront the shadow. Call young shadow. It's something deep within that that we don't often fish. We're alone with ourselves and we get to see who we truly are.

Yeah, well, we can bring out road rage. And also there's this, I don't know, when you're in the vehicle, there's you have this shell around you. And so there's this feeling that you were protected from. So you could be yourself, you could be your true self in this moment. And sometimes that true self in this moment is an angry, screaming person which means you have to introspect that shadow, shine a light. Let me ask you about something that's ongoing currently. It'd be fascinating to get your opinion on. So something I've been watching, some of the world has been watching, is the world has been watching is the Deformation trial brought by Johnny Depp against Amber Heard

Have you gotten the chance to watch any of it? I haven't watched it, but I've read some reports of it What's your analysis on this particular Dynamic we talked about toxicity in the space of agency and communion. What do you make of this relationship that's presented to the world in its raw form? You know, I don't have strong opinions on it. I think in the stage in the trial, we've heard from him primarily. We have not, and we should say, for people listening in cases, it's published a little bit later. We have not heard we should say for people listening in cases, this is published a little bit later, we have not heard from Amber heard.

Right. I heard from her. We're doing that. That's going to be happening this week. I don't know. I think that I've seen, and this is another topic that I have studied, is intimate partner violence and some of the nast or stuff that goes on with

in relationships. I think that when this nasty stuff happens, sometimes it's asymmetrical, but sometimes it's symmetrical in the sense that they get into these downward spirals where one is insulting the other or even with physical violence, one starts pushing the other, showing the other, hitting the other, and then the other hits back. And so you get into these cycles. And so coming at one point in time, you know, in this case of Johnny Depp and Amber Hurt, you know, years later and trying to disentangle what actually went on in their relationship,

I don't feel qualified even to do that. Well, it's fascinating to see. So first, I mean, I have a lot of opinions, particularly because I'm just a fan of giant depth as a person and a of Johnny Depp, the actor and the kind of characters he created. The person, because maybe this is fiction, maybe this is reality, but they tend to rhyme and mirror each other, but his fascination with Hunter Estonson, in the some aspect of him taking on the Hunter Estons of personality, where there's this layers upon layers of wit and humor and it's also anxiety and darkness with the drug use and all that kind of stuff.

It's very human, very real person. And so you get to, one of the beautiful things about this trial is you get to basically have a long form podcast. And you get to reveal the complexity of this human the humor under pressure under under stress But also just the rawness of love the things that love makes you do or whatever that is what you know Whatever the things that keeps us in relationships that are toxic in that turmoil the hope

the relationships that are toxic in that turmoil. The hope, the self delusion, the push and pull of longing and fights, the ups and downs, whatever the role of cost of it. The role of cost of it, the makeup sex. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah, is it in the questions arise, whether that's the feature or bug? Like, why do we, why are we drawn to that? You mentioned in mate selection for long term, mate selection. Um, I think you said women, but I think maybe both, uh, don't want a kind of, you had scientific and eloquent worst use, but basically crazy people. You want somebody who's emotionally unstable. Yeah, so, but here it seems like maybe we're drawn to that still, like rise to the light. Right. Well, it can be addictive, but it's not good

for long-term relationships. I mean, that characteristic, and there is a stable personality characteristic. It goes under different names, anxiety, neuroticism, emotional liability, et cetera, but that's the single personality characteristic that is most predictive of breakup, send divorces. And in studies that I've done, predictive of conflicting couples, people who are emotionally unstable, they just get into a lot of conflict with their partner, they create havoc.

So, and they can be exciting, but bad for long-term happiness. They see conflict in order to attain intimacy. So conflict creates, creates attention. Yeah. And like if you take intimacy broadly, it's, it's, it's intimate. Well, you're like raw fragile. You're right there. Yeah.

Well, I mean, there's one hypothesis that was put forward by an Israeli biologist named Amit Zahavi, called the testing of a bond. And so he asked the question, why do people inflict costs on their part? He's not kissing. You're introducing, you know, it's a disease vector. You know, why do people do these weird things? Um, inflicting costs or emotional liability is a way of inflicting costs. And what he argues is it's, it's the testing of a bond. If the person's willing to tolerate

you know this level of stress this level of cost and position then that means they must be very committed to me and so and i think that's something people do in romantic relationships is they they do test the strength of the bond they they test the the commitment of the person and i think it's i think that's a feature and not a bug. In the sense that, especially in the early stages of love, romantic love, we tend to overly romanticize and I de-alize our partner. So when there's an absence of evidence,

we impute positive values. And what you, and this is one of my recommendations to people, friends that I know is, if you're really considering a good long-term commitment to this person, go on vacation with them. Ideally to, ideally to a foreign country where both of you are unfamiliar. Oh, I love it. Road trip or something like that. Yeah, so we're where you you experience unexpected things stress is Get a flat tire or whatever you counter and you see how the person

deals with stress and you see how you deal with each other under stress and I think that that's Unless you have put stress tests on relationships, you really don't know where things stand. Yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it. I'm a huge fan of that, like road trip and not just late in a relationship like day one. Yeah, road trip. Not day one, day negative one before even happens to see stress test because it makes everybody better. It creates intimacy or creates, it creates or destroys. But, you know, on the giant, so they also, they both suffered childhood abuse. The one, one of the things that I took away from the trial, for me,

it was just educational. I don't get to see inside as most of us maybe don't like toxic relationships or fights and so on. A lot of things that people maybe do inside of relationships and we don't get to see it presented in such a raw way. So one of the things I learned is that you know in terms of partner violence, a woman, too, can be violent. Yeah, absolutely. That to me, emotionally and physically violent, that I almost don't want to, I mean, there's no limit

to my dislike for that person in particular, because clearly to me, at least I stand with giant depth to me, that guy is full of love. But full of demons, because he's drawn to whatever the chaos that's created there. But also it's just an education for me that I tend to associate sort of men with violence and toxicity and destruction inside relationships, but it was interesting to see that women too can be like directly violent. Yeah. And men too, which was also surprising to me, have the capacity to stay in such a relationship,

and to not walk away. Which is what I thought is my, in terms of toxic violent relationships, I thought there's a male figure who will do emotional and physical, mostly physical violence, and then kind of manipulate the mind of the female to stay in the relationship, but that dynamic can go both ways. Yeah, it does go both ways. And I think even the emotional abuse is sometimes even worse than the physical abuse. I mean, you see that in studies of even like childhood abuse, where it's the emotional abuse that is the most damaging. What about the role of jealousy, something you also written about in a relationship? Is that a feature of bug?

You start to speak about it, but is it is a good to be a jealous of your partner inside of a relationship? How does it go wrong? How the pros and cons? So I've written a whole book on this, called The Dangerous Passion. Why jealousy is as necessary as sex and love. And I think that one cut at your question is that a moderate, so first of all, I think it's a feature

not a bug in most cases. So in the sense that you have to have an adaptation that is sensitive to threats to a valued relationship. Because, and I think I alluded to this earlier, that just because you're in a relationship and you're in a relationship with a desirable partner doesn't mean that you've finished solving the problems of mating that you need to solve

because there are threats from the outside. So mate poachers, people who try to lure your partner away for either a sexual encounter or a more committed romantic relationship. And then there's also dissatisfaction within the relationship. So your partner might become tempted to be sexually unfaithful or romantically unfaithful

or emotionally unfaithful. And so we need humans with the evolution of long-term pair bonding. We need adaptations to guard the relationship and be sensitive to threats to the relationship. I think jealousy is one of those. I think it's a key one. Now, I think that there are a variety of benefits to it, but also a variety of costs or downsides to jealousy.

Because we know that jealousy, male sexual jealousy, is the leading cause of spousal abuse and spousal violence, physical violence, probably emotional violence as well as psychological violence. And so that's what called the dangerous passion. It's a necessary emotion, but it is also a dangerous emotion. Leads to homicide. You know, leads to and I've said it also, homicidal ideation, which is intersects with this topic in that men sometimes women to a lesser degree develop homicidal ideation about people who are trying to poach their mates or who do poach their mates, successfully poach their mates. So what Jellis he does is it alerts you to a threat to the relationship and it motivates

checking out the source of the threat. How threatening is this so that people tend to increase vigilance of their partner in the modern world and includes hacking into their cell phone or computer, monitoring them, sometimes stalking them, but also can include positive things. So one trigger of jealousy is a direct threat but also can include positive things. So it might be that, so one trigger of jealousy is a direct threat to the relationship. But there's another more subtle trigger of jealousy, which is a mate value discrepancy.

So usually when people mate, they sort or pair up on overall mate value. So the, in the American 10 point scale, the eights, 10, then pair up with the eights, the six is with the sixs, the 10s with the 10s and the ones with the ones. American, is there other scales? I wonder if the miracle systems, well, there's a binary, I just want the binary, zero one. Sorry, but, yeah.

The eighth pair is with the eight, sevens. Yeah. Yeah. So in general, but there are errors in made selection, you kind of alluded to that issue earlier that sometimes people make errors, errors in made selection, which they do. So sometimes you think this person is well matched on made value, but they're not. But then things change. So a let's say, they're the same. You have two sixes and all of a sudden the woman's career takes off. All of a sudden she's, you know, getting promotion, she's acquiring wealth, she's attracting men who are of a different mate value than she previously did. Well, that triggers jealousy and the guy, even if she swears she's gonna be totally loyal

and she has no signs of leaving or no signs of infidelity, a mate value discrepancies is gonna trigger jealousy. Now, what can it do? Well, it can do, in the broad of sense, people can do two classes of things. They can do cost-inflicting things or benefit providing things.

So the man in that situation might say, okay, I need to devote more attention to my partner. I need to up my game when it comes to resource acquisition. I need to lavish more attention and gifts on her. And so there's a whole suite of benefit provisioning things that can help to reduce that mate value discrepancy. And then there's also cost-inflifting things that, and humans unfortunately, do both sets of things. Yeah, there's also this, maybe that's love. I noticed the people I especially love are of a connection to, or manically or otherwise, there's a feeling like I don't deserve you.

So, with friends was so on. Like, I mean, I tend to think that about almost everything, which is why it's a strong signal when I don't feel it that way, which is like, I can't, how lucky am I to have this. when I don't feel it that way, which is like, I can't, how lucky am I to have this. And that's a weird illusion of inflation of value or something. Like, I think that the positive effect of that is makes motivates me to be better.

I guess on this one intense scale to be higher. And you sort of kind of have to, like it's a nice feature that your mind sees others the of affection towards as higher value and it forces you to have that like I'm a person that experiences jealousy and that forces me to be better Yeah, I get my shit together. Yeah, well, and I think that the the Sometimes the best relationships are when both people feel lucky to be with the other person. Yeah, yes Exactly is balanced that way and then that's when you in terms of jobs in terms of going to the gym all those kinds of things and

Yeah, so a little bit of jealousy. I have discussion with those people. I always wonder There's people in relationships where like, no, no, there's no, they never experienced jealousy. I wonder what that's like, because they're very successful in relationships. But, and I always wonder, you know, I'm currently single, so I'm always doubt that I know what the hell I'm doing at all. But I'm definitely somebody that experiences jealousy

and kind of enjoys jealousy, like a little bit of like missing. To me, that's like you're missing the other person. Yeah, well, long for the other person. And here's another interesting wrinkle that I also talk about in the book is sometimes people intentionally evoke jealousy in their partner. And I think that's also a kind of testing of a bond kind of issue. Yeah. So, and especially women, but I think both sexes interpret a total absence of jealousy as assigned as their partner is not sufficiently committed to them or sufficiently in love with them.

So if you like to say, I don't know, if you, say, if you go to a party with your partner and then you leave the room for somebody to come back and your partner is passionately kissing someone else and doesn't bother you at all, that might be a cue to the partner that maybe you're not very in love with that person or not very committed to them. And so it's. So it's a good way to, it's a good way to test. That said, I mean, I love the term meat poaching, by the way. I believe here in Texas, meat poaching is official legal. So, one of my favorite songs by Hendrix is Hey Joe.

Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? Yeah. And yeah, I actually always wanted to play that song, but I get, I start to think about guns and so on. I think it's supposed to capture a feeling. It's not actual violence that's saying, I'm going to shoot my old lady, I caught her messing around with another man.

That's a, that's a blues type of feeling, like of anger, of, I guess, for mate poaching, for a mate switching, performed by the partner and then the frustration and the anger. That's resulting. I always wondered why the violence is directed towards the partner versus the person who did the other male. Yeah, it's the other male. It tends to be evenly split. So sometimes, and that's, I mean, men, especially when someone poachers on their mate, they have homicidal fantasies

always, which, well, equally split the mate poacher. Yeah, but, but equally split. So I think the nonlethal violence tends to be more directed toward the maid because it's and this is a horrible thing of male sexual psychology but I think part of the violence is functional in the sense that it's designed to keep a maid and prevent her from engaging in anything with other potential mate poachers. But people do. So even, I mean, it goes back to the French law where they had so-called crime of passion. So if a husband walked in and found his wife having sex with some other guy in bed and shot him, that was viewed as a crime of passion,

it's still not legal, but you get kind of get a discount for it. Whereas if he goes home, thanks about it for a while, then gets the gun and comes back, then that's pre-meditated murder. Yeah. See, to me, I guess everybody's different. To me, I have zero anger towards the partner on that situation. To me, because that's definitive proof

of this loyalty. So like, why, what's the what's the function of the anger there? To me, all of my anger is towards the guy, the poacher. Because some of it has to do probably with the status establishing. Like, what was the term you used the formability? Yeah, formability assessment. Assessment. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait,

did you just say you're more formidable than me in this situation? I wanna reestablish at least my own mind, the formability. And that seems to reestablish at least my own mind, the formability. And that seems to be, I guess, we're all different, but maybe because I roll around with guys a lot, like grapple and wrestling, all that kind of stuff. To me to establish status is competing with other males, not with the female, because that's a break of loyalty. Like why do what's the point of anger at this point? Let's just portrayal. Well, except that a lot of the mate poaching is discovered

or cues to mate poaching are discovered before the consummation of the act. So it might be just the emotional cheating leading up. Or a mile flirtation, you know, things like that. And so the violence is designed to head off the threat before it becomes real. Boy, aren't human relations, especially romantic ones complicated. So, but that's what makes them so fast-named to study.

And so, yes, exactly. From a science perspective, and to study within sort of, like Richie Rangham with the Chums, like, you know, be in it. Study from the end of one perspective. What do you make of polyamory? So, what the heck is, what do you make a marriage? What are your thoughts about marriage? What are your thoughts about lifelong monogamy?

And what's your thoughts about polyamory? Given that we've been talking about ideas of meat, switching and poaching and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think that we evolved to be, I prefer the term, a pair bonded species. So pair bonding is one of the strategies. Parabond is long term bonding is one of the strategies. Parabond is long term mating is one of the strategies, but that doesn't necessarily mean for decades and decades or life long because we often pair bond

serially. So, get into a relationship that might last a year or five years and then break up and then form another relationship. So we engage in serial mating. We engage in infidelity. We engage in some short-term mating. And so we have what I describe as a menu of mating strategies, and which particular mating strategy and individual adopts depends on a wide variety of factors. I think some are just kind of personal proclivities. Some depend on your mate value. So if you are an 8-9 or a 10, you have more options for what

mating strategy you want to pursue. If you're a 1 or a 2, you're not going to be able to be polyamorous in a likelihood. There's a lot of attention to polyamory now and it's unclear whether this, whether there's an increase in it or whether people are just talking about it more. It is the case and I know I know several people who are in polyamorous relationships and I've talked with them in detail about them. And jealousy is often a factor in that, and they describe it as kind of like an emotion that has to be somehow tamed or dealt with

in some way. And so in polyamory, there are many different types of polyamory. So in like one type, for example, is you have a primary love partner and then some others on the side that are permitted, usually within in consensual terms, within an explicit contract that the primary partners work out.

So it's OK if you, you know, I know it's one couple, it's OK if you do it outside the city limits of Los Angeles, but not within. Some say it's okay for Thursday, but I want the weekend Friday and Saturday nights to me. It's okay if there's sexual involvement, but no emotional involvement. So there are different type, different strategies that people work out, and some of them are designed to try to keep jealousy at bay. So I think it's an evolved emotion. There's a natural emotion that people experience.

Now interestingly, there's a, while we're on this topic, there's a sex difference therein. Namely, if you could trust sexual jealousy with emotional jealousy or sexual infidelity with emotional infidelity. And so we, in one set of studies, I put my participant or we used to call them subjects into this what I call the Sophie's choice of the jealousy dilemmas. I said, imagine your partner became interested in someone else, and you discover that they have had passionate sexual intercourse with this person, and they've gotten emotionally involved with them.

They've fallen in love with them, which aspect of the infidelity upsets you more? And when you, and that's why it's called the Sophie Schruff, both terrible choices. But men, much more likely to say the sexual infidelity is what upsets me. More women, it's like, why are you even asking me? It's a no-brainer, 85% of the women say the emotional infidelity to what bothers that mean more. Former student of mine, Barry Culey did a really interesting study of analysis of this reality show called Cheaters. I've actually never seen it, but where if you suspect your partner of cheating, then

detective from the TV team will follow the person. And then they'll call up and say, we've just seen, you're found your husband here in no-tall motel, do you wanna come down and talk to him? And so what he analyzed though was the verbal interrogations that people had when they confronted their partner. And women wanted to know, are you in love with her? Men wanted to know, are you in love with her? Men wanted to know, did you fuck him? Or did you have sex with him?

And so it's this sex difference in sensitivity to these different cues of infidelity. And of course there's an evolutionary logic to this sex difference. And it's been replicated, not the cheater study, but the hypothetical Sophie's choice study. It's been replicated now in Sweden and China. And it's a universal sex difference. So given that sex difference, and you mentioned another one that just returned to, which is in the engineering disciplines.

Yeah, person thing or presentation. So until I started to see writing about it in the sort of psychology literature, I observed this anecdotally a lot. And the reason I observed it is I was confused. So I care a lot about robots, I'm a robotics person. And so a lot of males in the robotics community really didn't care about what's called

the human robot interaction problem Which is like robots when they interact with humans and then a lot of females all brilliant in In the robot's community cared about the human robot interaction. They cared about the human the what the robot Communicates with the human in the picture human in the loop and I was really confused, because the difference to me in my anecdotal interactions, but the end is quite large there. Like I, I mean, the robotics community, I know a lot of people. And I was confused because for me,

I really care about human robot interaction. I see, I care about both a lot. And in the same thing here in terms of emotional cheating versus physical cheating, I care a lot about both. And I have like this oscillating brain. So I wonder what that says about my brain. So I'll often wonder this because there's specific sex differences that are represented in the data and the literature, and I seem to oscillate depending on mood. Yeah. And I wonder what that says about me.

Why do I care so much about that robot on the floor? I care not half I care about how it works, and the other half, how it makes other people feel. Yeah. What is that? Yeah. how makes other people feel. Yeah, what is that? Yeah, so I guess what I would say, this gets back to our earlier discussion of agency and communion where I actually think that it's a sign of being well balanced

to have both capacities within you. And so you get people who are unimodal or they just have one mode of operating. Let's say it's the thing mode, which engineers tend to be good at. You don't have to be good at it to be a good engineer, because things have to actually work. Yes. It's not in some dream or hypothetical state things have to actually work.

But with the agency and community, I think it's good to have a balance. And that's why I think some of the best romantic relationships are those where people are, they're high on what they used to call androgyny, where they have both the positive features of agency and communion, the positive features of masculinity and femininity within the same mix, but also with the footnote of not the unmitigated agency or unmitigated communion,

both of which can be negative. And so, I view these as capacities and some people are out of balance, some people have a good balance between the two. That sounds like you have a good balance between the two and sounds like you have a good balance between the two Well, but also the allocation. I feel like it's a very dynamic thing. It's like At least that were for me personally of the beauty between humans of the dance of the push and pull of the different moods It's like a dynamical system. It's not too static entities fully represented

and consistent through every interaction. Sometimes, you know, people might confuse the fact that I often talk about love, and I love humans that I don't have a temper, that I don't have like, I lose my shit all the time, especially like on things I really am passionate about, like people I work with and so on. Yeah, I'm all over the place.

But underneath it, there's a deep love and respect for humans, but like, I lose my shit all the time. And that chaos, that roller coaster, I think that's what makes human relations awesome. I mean, the push and pull of it, of course, it can oscillate too far, which is when it becomes a hammer type of situation,

when it turns to emotional or physical violence, when it turns to jealousy crosses a line where it's hurtful, and there's like, that it crosses that vast gray landscape of what is abuse versus what is just beautiful turmoil of human nature, right? Yes, yeah, and it's complicated. It's yeah, yeah, it's complicated and it's dynamic and I would just add to that, I thought you phrased that brilliantly, but I would just add to that. It also depends on sort of what you're trying to do. And so I think some of the oscillation can be what task,

what problem you're trying to solve. And so if you're, I don't know, trying to, you know, build a bridge or something, you need to be very thing oriented and make sure the damn thing actually works and doesn't collapse when a car goes over it. If you're trying to form a relationship and you're entirely thing oriented, it's not going to work. And you're entirely thing oriented, it's not going to work. And that's one of the things that's with, and males tend to be more on the so-called spectrum side of things where one of the hallmarks is a deficit in social mind reading. It's just to add to your point about, I guess I've already made it, that the dynamic

properties of the rollercoaster is Depending on what problem you're trying to solve you might want to toggle back and forth to one polar or the other You're at a book called why women have sex Understanding sexual motivations from adventure to revenge. That sounds fun and everything in between So why don't women have sex? Well, I co-wrote it with the female who's Cindy Maston, a wonderful friend and colleague and co-author and co-collaborator. I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to write a book called Why Women Have Sex By Myself

as a male. Did you contribute anything to this book? I'm just kidding. I did, but I have to tell you a story about the origins of this idea, which I give credit to Cindy Mestin for. And we were, she's a colleague in the psychology department with BAN. We would go out to dinner once a week or so,

and we were just talking about it. She raised this issue. And so we started a brainstorm. Originally it was why humans have sex. That's the scientific article we published was why humans because we're interested in males and females. And so I said, I would come up with, well, they have sex because of acts and then Cindy, Master of would come up, she said, oh, here are seven other reasons. And then I'd come up with one more and she'd come up with another seven. So she's in some sense, importantly, the originator or fountain of this idea. But... She's able, there's something about the way she thinks about sexuality that's able to deeply introspect about reasons for sex.

Yeah, and probably especially about female sexuality. And this is one of the interesting things. And why it's so fun for me to collaborate with, in this case, female because they do have a different sexual psychology than males. And so, and I've noticed this is why in my graduate, so as I've like had 30 or so PhD students about half of them male, half of them female, and the women say that we co-wrote it and that I did contribute to it. And especially the evolutionary insights. So, is there a good few words you can say to why women have sex? What are some primary motivations?

Well, we originally came up with a list of 237 reasons for why why humans have sex and they range from, you know, some of the obvious ones because it feels good, because I wanted to relieve stress, to relieve menstrual cramps, to get rid of a headache, to get my boyfriend off my back so I could get some work done. So things like that, two others, like there's another one, so that he'd take out the damn garbage. Yeah.

This is one. But another one, it was kind of interesting, someone, one nomination was to get closer to God. So there were some that were kind of spiritual motivations for having sex. And then some of the nastier ones like to get revenge on my partner or to get revenge on a rival.

So that's like sleeping with my, you know, rivals boyfriend, you know, so there's some nasty stuff and some good stuff in there. It's so fascinating because yeah, sex has such a powerful role in our psychology, but also in our culture. So you can make significant statements about the in the status hierarchy, about your sex, the selection of your sexual partner. It's interesting, so it's not just because you're horny. It's all those other kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, horny is just one, but there are other reasons. What about different kinds of sex?

So you know, what's, again, this is not the human-room-in-lab podcast. Rough sex versus quote-making love. What's the explanation between all of that? All the various king. Now, that's just a basic sort of split, but all the different kinks that humans establish, all the different fantasies and all those kinds of things. Yeah. Well, that's a complicated question for which I don't think we have sufficient time

to get into that in detail. And it is complicated because there are some sexual fantasies that sexual fantasies, by the way, I think are really fascinating window into our sexual psychology because in a way they're unconstrained by things like rules and norms in society and cultural presses that you're kind of free to fantasize about whatever you want to fantasize about. So I think it provides an interesting window into human sexuality. And there are some predictable ones and then there are some also individual or idiosyncratic ones. And again, there's a fundamental sex difference in this, in that when you talk about fetishes

or like shoe fetishes, leather fetishes, different types of things. Males are much more prone to those than females. shoe fetishes, you said? shoe fetishes are all fetishes. almost all fetishes. males are overrepresented. And I think it's partly because there's some evidence that they're classically conditioned.

So I think that first or early sexual experiences that people have kind of conditioned them to the cues that are present during those early ones. And so if your first sexual experience happened to be, you know, involved visual images of shoes or you're having to look at shoes when you first had sex. It's just an example or leather or zippers or whatever the case is that people develop these very individualistic sexual turn-ons based on these early sexual experiences. So it could also be, you said, have sex, but it could also be sexual feelings, early sexual feelings. Like, but it could also be sexual feelings, early sexual feelings.

Like, because it, yeah. Um, so I wonder what that is about men that they have a more when they first start experience the sexual feelings that they're more sensitive to the cues and those cues somehow have a deep psychological effect on their development of their sexuality. So if they have kinks, that means they're somehow more Q-sensitive and maybe Does it matter of society like slap someone on the wrist for it? Does that help? solidify Well, kinks. Yeah, I don't know about the

Society of slapping on the wrist, but I think what it is is this I think this is the evolutionary hypothesis anyway about why there's this sex difference. And that is that men are conditioned to anything that's going to lead to sex, because whereas women don't have to be, from male perspective, because of women's greater investment, because the Niamah pregnancy, etc. In order to reproduce women have to invest this tremendous amount, men don't. One act of sex can produce an offspring. And so for men, but not for women. And so this huge asymmetry in investment means that the payoff matrix of different sexual strategies

differs for the sexes. In that context, women become the valuable and scarce resource over which men compete. So, anything that leads to successful sex is going to be selected for it. And so, men are very sensitive to being sexually conditioned. That's what's called sexual conditioning, to whatever cues are associated with sex happening. From a woman's perspective, sex is not a scarce resource. So a woman could go out here in Austin any night, or probably any day on 6th Street and have no problem having sex with a guy within 10 minutes.

Okay. Guy would have more difficulty. He's not going to go out unless he's Johnny Depp or really, really charming. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a fascinating dimorphism or asymmetry in our made selection. What do you think is the effect on this young male brain, a female too of pornography? So one of the fascinating things

that the digital world brought us, now I grew up at a time when a magazine, like a Victoria secret magazine, was like my source of sexual inspiration. But that was before the internet. And now the internet with pornography makes it extremely accessible. All kinds of kinks, all kinds of wild variety.

I mean, variety and quantity is immense. So what do you think that has, how that affects mate selection, mating, and just the human psychology of the two sexes of the species. Yeah, great question, a big question. So, I mean, we could have a whole podcast just on that, or at least talk for a while about it. So, I'll just say a couple of things about that. One is, again, there's a sex difference.

And I feel like I'm a broken record here, hammering on this. But it is a lot of, just to actually echo the feel like I'm a broken record here hammering on this, but it is a lot of just to actually echo The thing please be a broken record because it's it's interesting the more we get to the mating The more there is sex differences represent themselves. They serve us. Yes. Yeah, that's right And then many psychological domains there are are no sex differences or the sex are very similar But pornography is consumed of about 80 differences or the sex are very similar, but pornography is consumed about 80% of the consumers are men. So it is very heavily a male consumer industry, if you will. And I think that it can have positive and negative effects depending on the circumstance.

So one potential negative effect is that men might develop unrealistic expectations about what sex will be like or should be like in real life. And so I remember actually this, I just heard about this one case of, I don't mention any names, where a man got married and he had been accustomed to seeing very large breasts in his pornography consumption and discovered that his wife had what he perceived to be very small breasts. In fact, they were actually just medium-sized, but because he had been so heavily exposed to pornography and the artificially enhanced breast size that is often depicted in pornography, that he had come to expect something that was unrealistic in this case, not leading, that's not the way to lead off to a great sex life with your wife by being disappointed in her

breast size. So I think that people can develop, in this case, men, unrealistic expectations, also about the kind of sexual acrobatics that porn stars engage in. And when they get in real life situations, can put pressure on women to become, you know, to fulfill those kinds of images. But the other thing, the other kind of detrimental effect that it has is, and this is something that is emerging culturally, is I think it has a dampening effect on men's pursuit of real life relationships, because in some sense it kind of bleeds off some of that sex drive or sexual desire, sexual energy. And so they're, and some may get addicted to it. So they're spending hours and hours and

hours a day consuming pornography. And so I think you can have a detrimental effect on even on men's ambition. Yeah, there's something really powerful about that sexual energy, not to be all like spiritual about it, but it seems like that's somehow correlated with ambition. So like one of the things that pornography can take away is like exactly as you said, is your pursuit of love out there, including women, but also love of things, meaning like building awesome epic things, things, meaning like building awesome epic things. So the love of both bridges and women, bridge building and and and relationship building. Yeah, there's something about that energy and and also, yeah, there's a sort of vicious downward spiral because it somehow staunch your development because it limits social interaction that

the push and pull of of romantic social interaction. It cuts the edge off of that and it forces you to be to spend way too much time with yourself without the development of that social interaction. I don't know, but there, so outside of the expectations on all those kinds of things, it seems to have a detrimental effect on the development of the human mind. What is that? Because some of that is echoed, and people talk about the metaverse, that some of our life will be in the digital space. And it's like, on one hand, well, if it brings you happiness,

it brings you joy, short-term and long-term, why is the metaverse not the same or better than the real world? But there is something still missing, and what is that? Something of the pleasure you feel with porn is still missing. It's really not representing some of the fundamental pleasure you feel when you interact with real people. And that could be just the growth you experience. Like real people can reject you. The challenge, the, again, the push and pull, all of that, the dance of human relations. Yeah, and the exploration of your sexuality.

So on porn, you can kind of passively explore because you can see, as you mentioned, a wide variety of things and people do that. But in terms of exploring your own sexuality, I think there's no replacement for a real human being. So you've written about violence and here we're talking about porn and sex. I don't know if you've thoughts on this but I'd love to ask your opinion on quote in cells. So here I would like to quote Wikipedia. The defined in cells as members of an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner, despite the zarring one.

They also write, now I don't know if Wikipedia is the accurate source about in cells, but here it is. They write, quote, at least eight mass murders resulting in a total of 61 deaths have been committed since 2014 by men who have either self identified as themselves or who had mentioned in self related names and writings in their private writings or internet postings. Insealed communities have been criticized by researchers and the media for being misogynistic, encouraging violence, spreading extremist views and radicalizing their members. Is there some insight that you draw from this connection

of sex and lack of sex to violence? Well, I think sex and violence are linked in various ways. It's not just in cell. So if you look at serial killers, for example, and this is another thing that I'm true crime is kind of a application. I just enjoy reading about true crime, following true crime stories. A application of hobby. A hobby. It's a side interest. Super fancy words for hobby. Application of hobby.

A hobby. It's a side interest. It's a side interest. Super fancy work for hobby. I got it. Cool. That like Ted Bundy, he was at a great charming and didn't have any trouble attracting women, but his killing spree started shortly after he was rejected by a very high status attractive woman and he

felt a rage about being rejected by her. Now, who knows? That's an end of one. We don't know if, you know, being rejected causes serial killing per se, but sex and violence are related in different ways. I argue and I haven't studied the in-sale community in detail. I actually have an incoming graduate student who's going to start in the fall who has been studying the in-sales and so he'll have a more informed picture.

But my attitude is there are ways to improve your mate value. If you're having trouble attracting a mate, there are ways to improve your mate value. Because a lot of things that women want in a mate are improvable. They women want guys who are compassionate, who are understanding, who are understanding, who are ambitious, who acquire resources, etc.

They're who are physically fit. There are things you can do to improve your mate value. And so I would say rather than, I would encourage in cells or the in-cell communities, rather than being hostile toward women or being angry at women, just do things to improve your mate value and then you will be more successful at attracting women. Yeah, I mean some of it, that's a fascinating, so just do not be studying that. There's a listen, I love the internet. The internet always wins. And there's a fascinating aspect to it, which is just humor. And I, I'm fascinated by seeing the humor, whether it's 4chan or red it, and all that kind of stuff, where people maybe will self-identify as themselves as a joke, is it kind of basically representing the fact that, you know, it's hard to get women. This, this, the struggle, the struggle, and for

women it's hard to get a mate that they, you know, they're basically jokingly representing the challenges, the difficulty of the mate selection process, that the desirable group is smaller than the entire group. That's it. And they're joking about it. But then it's interesting how quickly humor, again, the dynamical system, it can turn into anger. And that on the internet, it's so interesting to watch, like how trolling, light trolling is humor, but it can turn into aggression. And I've just seen, it's weird. It's weird how this is drawn on the internet, but you also just look at the dark aspects of the 20th century that have been reading a lot about how kind of light, harder things turn dark quickly. And it's interesting. I don't know what to make of it because it's basically sexual frustration

that all humans feel, it's dating in general, can turn into anger, can turn into sophisticated philosophical constructs like about how the world works, of who really is pulling strings. And that turns some of the worst crimes committed by the Nazis, for example, or by extremely intelligent people that constructed models of how the world works. And there's something about sexual frustration is one of the really powerful forces that could be a catalyst for constructing such models. And once you've done that, she gets a lot more serious. And it's no longer joke, it's serious.

But at the same time, when you just look from the surface, it's kind of jokes. Yeah, it's weird. That's interesting points that you're making. I think that this is one way in which evolution has built into us a feature which is really bad for our overall happiness. And that is that it's created desires that can never be fully met. And that includes in the mating domain. So even with people who are successful in attracting somewhat desirable mates, maybe they want Giso, Bunchen, or some, they desire, the women that are higher in mate value, or a larger number of partners, then they can successfully attract. And in a way, I mean, these serve as evolutions built into these

because they're motivational devices. They motivate us to try to get what we want, but it also makes us miserable or at least unhappy or dissatisfied because there are desires that can never be fulfilled. And this is, and this is, mentioned one more sex difference, this desire for sexual variety, meaning a variety of different partners,

is much, much greater in men than in women. And so that's why even like in, in pornography consumption, men will like, you know, go through multiple, multiple, multiple images and sex scenes and so forth compared to what women who consume pornography go through. But this desire for sexual variety is something that makes men miserable because it's something that they can't most men unless you're a king or a despot or have a harem, it's something that can never be fulfilled in everyday life. And so I even think that you talked to men who are walking down the city block in Austin or New York City or San Francisco or wherever, and they could pass by six women and feel a sexual attraction to six different women

in one city block, you know. Now, and so this is again, where evolution has created in this desire is that can never be fully met. And evolution, well, it's useful, right? And the hilarious thing, this always about my own mind, but just observing people. Once you get that 10 or that beautiful woman, they even lost, you take her for granted. Right. And we'll want to the next thing. There are classic cases like, I don't know if you remember this case, but the Hugh Grant was

with Elizabeth Hurley, who is a gorgeous model and he was called having sex with a prostitute, I think it was in LA or whatever, he's got Elizabeth Hurley, why are you having sex with a prostitute? But it's the male desire for sexual variety. Well, let me do a little bit of attention here and ask you about just your work in general in terms of its interaction with the scientific community and with the world at large. So many of the ideas you do research on are pretty controversial or at least the topic is controversial somehow. Maybe you can speak to that.

But what are your thoughts in the current climate of cancel culture, or maybe there's a better term for it that word is like loaded now, about you doing research in this space that is so sort of essential, so crucial to understanding human nature? What are the difficulties, what are the concerns for you to be able to freely explore? Yeah, I've been doing research on these things. So when you combine sex or sexuality with sex differences, with evolution, each of these topics are controversial by themselves, and you bring them together, the intersection becomes especially controversial.

But I guess, view myself as a scientist, and so I would rather be Scientifically correct and politically correct if you will so I don't I have no interest in I don't have an agenda I don't have a political agenda. I don't have any Agenda other than discovering human nature. That's what I've devoted my scientific career toward. And that's why I do the studies in responsive to empirical data and the best theories that we have available, the best conceptual tools. So, do some of these things upset people? Yeah, they do. As a matter of fact, even early in my career

before I started publishing on some of these things, I gave a talk in the sociology department. This was at University of Michigan, and a female professor came up to me afterwards and said, you know, you really shouldn't publish the results of your studies. And I said, well, why not? And she said that people, women have it hard enough as it is without knowing about these things. My view is that's an IE. I think suppression of scientific knowledge is a bad thing. And suppression of scientific knowledge about sex differences is a bad thing. Men and women are not psychological clans, especially when it comes to the mating

domain and sexuality domain, the only other domain that shows massive sex differences that we haven't touched on is aggression and violence. So the leading cause of violence is being a male. And the more extreme the violence, the more males have a monopoly on it. It's when you get to homicide, the warfare, males have a monopoly on it. And we need to understand human nature, and we need to understand sex differences of the RN in order to be in a position to effectively solve some of the social problems that these sex differences create. So, I've been gotten some flack, no one's tried to cancel me in my work so far.

So I'm just way, yeah. But does it hurt you personally, just as is it psychologically difficult, you know, to do this work because what is research is thinking deeply through things and Like doing studies, but also interpreting them and thinking through what is the right questions to ask What does this mean and for that you have to have a clear mind a An optimistic mind a free mind and all that. So you're just a human, so psychologically is it difficult? Does it where on you? Yeah, I would say not really, but I've been, I think fortunate. So even, say, my latest book, I published a book recently on conflict between the sexes. And it deals with very controversial topics,

including intimate partner violence, like with the Johnny Depp Amber heard thing. And I don't talk about that in the book, but, and it's been largely well received. And I think partly it's because I am careful in my publications not to endorse it. So one of the common conflations that people make is they think that it's something that you think is good, you know, that, you know, if you find a sex difference, that there should be a sex difference.

This is the Is-Aught confusion. And so I try to make it very clear that I'm studying what is not what ought to be. And a lot of things that I discover about what is the case, I would prefer them not to be. And I think you kind of alluded to this earlier by saying that we have to override some of our violent inclinations or impulses or the way I would phrase it is we have to control them, control or keep quiescent or suppress some of the nastier sides of human nature. And we've successfully done that in some domain. So you can talk about like one group that fascinates me as the Vikings and the whole era. And so you have in Sweden

Norway, for example, these have the lowest homicide rates on Earth. But you go back 400 years ago, 600 years ago, people were killing each other right and left. And so finding that, so this is, at least we need to be optimistic that we can change conditions to suppress or evolve proclivities, just like one physical example that I sometimes use is callous producing mechanisms. We have evolved callous producing mechanisms that are very valuable. We develop thickness in the areas of our skin that have experienced repeated friction, but we can in principle design environments where we don't experience repeated friction. And so we won't grow calluses.

And so you've designed an environment that basically prevents the activation of our callus producing mechanism. I think we can do the same thing with some of these other inclinations and have succeeded in reductions of homicide in even in the last couple hundred years. And some of that has to do with the myths and stories which tell ourselves like, again, it's language, because I mean, I love the Vikings of Alhalla, that idea. Yeah.

That's a myth. That's an idea that's a promise for the for the great land beyond over there beyond the mountains. It's like animal farm sure cany mountain that is promised to you if you're a great warrior. I believe Alhalla is where half the soldiers go as a reward for for great soldier, for being great warriors. And the thing I just recently have been reading quite a bit above Ahala, which is it's such a fascinating how these myths are constructed. I believe, I just think this is such an awesome setup in terms of a kind of heaven, which

is they spend the entire day fighting. So they for joy, and if they die, they're reborn the next day. So it's you're basically the passion, the thing you're passionate about without the consequences. On top of that, I think there's a pig or a boar that is, they keep eating. So it's regenerated every single day. So unlimited food and there's unlimited beer, I believe. So it's like, it's like, or meat. Meat, meat, yes, yes, yes, yes, it's meat. I don't know, that's fascinating.

We can struct these myths. And at the same time, these myths can be used to get humans to do some of the worst atrocities. So some of the violence requires us to have those myths of what is waiting for us beyond death. So beyond over there in Sugarcandy Mountain, as a crow says that in animal farm. And so, you know, I think the more and more in this modern society, the positive of not constructing so many myths is that we get to live more in the moment, and that forces us to optimize and improve the moment, and we get to face the irrational and the painful aspect. The violence, maybe we should reduce in the here and now. Yeah, the downside is we may not, if we dispose of God or these kinds of religious and spiritual ideas,

we might descend into a, you know, when Nietzsche worried about with nihilism. And it's a beautiful dance because humans seem to tie themselves together with narratives. Yes, yeah. And we'd miss and stories that we all believe. If you completely dispose of them Society, I don't know we don't know we don't know. Yeah, it's going to happen if it's going to collapse or if it's actually going to rediscover better myths Better stories more scientifically grounded ones Ones that are driven in data and all those kinds of things

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, I don't have any brilliant insights into it other than that, you know, to agree with you that people construct narratives, well, of their own lives, and sometimes the life after death. But I guess I would add, and this is maybe a more cynical view, but you mentioned atrocities, I think that leaders can sometimes exploit those under them to create forms of violence or justification for warfare.

Like in, you know, like the group that we are conquering, they are a subhuman, they are insects, they're an infectious disease that is, you know, and so these narratives can be used by leaders to exploit and motivate people under them to commit these atrocities. So it's a nastier part of our psychology, both that leaders do that, but also that people are vulnerable to narratives of that sort. Yeah, it's fascinating to look pre-internet.

You hope the internet makes us more resistant to that, which I do have probably a question on that. But if you look at just the propaganda machines during World War II, on the Nazi side and on the Soviet side, on every side, but particularly in those two, it's so fascinating both how effective a simple message can be in a leader being able to convince the small inner circle around them, convince themselves, which is fascinating, propaganda, you start to believe the propaganda you generate, and then how easily the populace is invincible. Again, you hope that the internet, the distributed nature of the internet makes it more difficult

to run a propaganda campaign, at least of the internet makes it more difficult to run a propaganda campaign, at least of the classical sort. I do have a question about this because you mentioned Elon Musk when we're talking about status hierarchies, like you and I can't buy Twitter. And we're a wealth accumulation, yeah. What do you think about Elon buying Twitter, in particular, in the state of reason that he's doing so in emphasizing free speech. That's an interesting question, but I don't really have an informed opinion about it. You know, I don't know.

It's not my area of expertise, and I don't know enough details, and I also don't know what his plans are for Twitter. What changes he plant proposes to implement? Well, the reason I bring that up is because, and you've kind of said you don't necessarily feel a tremendous amount of pressure, but in doing controversial research, in doing research and controversial topics, you're also a communicator, and Twitter is a platform which you communicate and there's going to be, if you get canceled somewhere, you get canceled on Twitter. And so there's pressure. So what does free speech look like in these public platforms? It's communicating your mind, it's exploring ideas and not fearing the mob.

The mob that pressures the platform to remove you from the platform or to ban you, shadow ban you from the platform, decrease your reach artificially on the platform. And those are really fascinating questions that we get to deal with in this new digital age And so there's a lot of ideas We said what Elon is planning to do forget Elon. How do you do this? Well, that's the question and There's sort of an absolutist you're free speech let anyone say anything and I tend to be a person that believes Everybody should have the freedom to say anything. The question with a social media platform is, well, can you force anyone to hear what you have to say? Because the viral nature of communication means that you can control who hears what you say, the virality of that, the search and discovery aspect.

And I think that's a fascinating question from the algorithmic perspective. The amount of data out there, just like papers, there's the huge amount of papers, what you want is to find the best papers, the ones you agree with, but also the ones that challenge you. And you don't want to nonstop read the papers that challenge you. You're going to be mentally exhausted. There's a bucket of attention and focus and mental energy you can allocate. The ones that really challenge you, the ideas that really challenge you are exhausting.

It's good. Just like going to the gym. It's good. But then you also want to read things that are fun for you. And that those are, you know, if you're spending your whole life in arguments that's going to be exhausting, you want to hang out, chill with your friends, watch some Netflix, have fun, whatever, easy going, and sometimes have difficult academic arguments with people, for example, with people to be disagree with, but not all the time. And You have to have a

platform. What does free speech actually looks like? It's a platform where everybody can challenge anybody, but not destroy them by doing so mentally. So you have to balance personal growth of each individual person on the platform, but definitely removing people from a platform is a terrible thing. So on top of that, it's like, how do you get measures that the platform is doing good? What I really like what Elon said, and I've talked to him about this, is pissing off everybody

equally, the extremes of every side equally. In the political spectrum, you could say the left and the right is Measuring by pissing off the extremes equally because currently there seems to be an asymmetry in that So that's one good measure that allows you to maximize as he says the area under the curve of human happiness That's one thing that the other is people representing themselves honestly, so removing the bots from the platform, it's such a weird world we live in, where you don't know who's real or not. So anonymity is an awesome thing. The awesome aspect of anonymity is it protects people's privacy.

It actually gives them freedom to think, freedom to speak, even more so. But when anonymity is weaponized, it allows you to be cruel to others without the repercussion of cruelty that you would feel in the physical world. So you want to use anonymity as a shield versus as a sword. So to protect yourself from the attacks of others, but not as a way to hurt others. And those are all really tricky things to figure out. And it's not, you know, not all of it's going to be solved with an edit button, which I believe is the most requested Twitter feature. Anyway, I think I think this is really, I think this is fascinating, not just for people

talking about politics, which is what everyone seems to care about, but also for science, for people challenging each other in the scientific domain. Because I at least have hope for scientific communication where people can start playing around with different mediums of communication, so not just academic papers, but just ideas playing with those ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you have, so evolutionist I call it, well, no, that even that can be super high turnover rate

of importance. But you know, you have with COVID, it seems like the progress of science and scientific debate is most powerful in that context, if it's done really quickly. And it feels like Twitter, like most of the best things I've learned about COVID and to stay up to date was on Twitter. It's so exciting to see science happening so, so, so quickly in all kinds of domains there. And that was great.

But then you step in with labels of what's misinformation, you have this kind of conformity-seeking labels of what is true and not, which is a very unscientific thing to me. In the name of protecting the populace, it's a weird impulse that people have, which is, well, here's an organization. Here's an institution that is a possessive of the truth and everybody else is untrue. Now, a lot of the time, maybe majority of the time, that institution is going to be correct. This consensus, consensus is the consensus because it's usually correct. But the biggest ideas are going to be against the consensus. And certainly that's true in evolutionary psychology, where it seems like, are we even, is the cake even baked yet?

It feels like there's a lot of turmoil in terms of figuring out human psychology. Well, there's a lot that we don't know. I mean, if human psychology, if it were a simple thing, and we only had, you know, three or a half a dozen psychological adaptations, we would have discovered all of them by now. It's, it's, it's so complex, multifaceted, multi-mechanism part that describes human nature, that it was a makes it exciting, but also the amount that we know is small compared to the amount that we don't know.

And so that's why you have to approach these things with a certain humility. And that's why even like in the mating and sexuality domain, which I've been studying for a number of years, I keep coming across things that I don't know questions that are unanswered, which is makes it exciting from my perspective. I mean, that's what the joy is of being being a scientist. You mentioned, I got to return real quick to Ted Bundy. You mentioned you've written about murder and violence in a long distance past, but the thread runs through your work today. Who to you is the most fascinating serial killer of the true crime? Yeah, things that you've explored. I think, well, Ted Bundy's way up there, I think Charles Manson

and is another, have you seen on Ted Bundy? Because I find him super fast. Have you seen there's a lot of movies on him, extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile. It's a retelling of his life from the perspective of his grow long term girlfriend I have not seen that one which ties together a lot of our conversation So I it's probably my favorite one a relationship. And it just one of the really powerful windows into a serial killer that I saw there is that from the perspective of the relationship, you can have just this healthy looking relationship. Yeah, there's some fights and so on. But the usual dating and all that kind of stuff was all there. So all the murders he was doing, he had a long term girlfriend throughout all of that. And also throughout all of that, I'll try not to give away in case you don't know the story. Throughout all of

that, she stood by his side. She refused to believe everything that was happening. Until until, you know, the very end, of course, it shifts in the very end and that's a fascinating shift All the the breaking of the the illusion, but it's really fascinating that you can have those two things that Yeah, well I think that part of it is we Have these stereotypes that we expect people like zero colors to be these ugly, drooling creatures that are sort of evil all the time. And so that's why even like you had, I don't know,

if this is, I'm remembering this correctly, the like Stalin who killed millions of people, apparently like love to his kids and love his family and people. So we have this part of the complication, the complexity of human nature and human psychology is we don't have just this one property that dictates how we behave in all circumstances. Yeah, the devil is going to be charismatic. That's why that's one of the things I've learned. Yeah.

I'm just looking at evil people, looking at Jeffrey Epstein, who seem to have hoodwinked quite a lot of people. Yes, yeah, that's another fascinating case. Yeah, not of a, he was in a serial killer, but a serial sexual predator. And a lot of people, I know and respect, didn't see the evil. Yeah.

And so I never met the guy, but it's like, are you guys oblivious? Like, what would there must have been something? And from everything I see is purely just charisma. It's the smoke and mirrors that he was very charming psychopath. Yeah, but I think every psychopath to be effective has to be charming. Yeah, the successful ones. Yeah, the successful ones. Yeah. The successful, successful psychopath.

Oh, yeah. And that was, I mean, Ted Bundy was one. He was a glivicking guy, intelligent, and could turn on the charm. And then had this evil. Is there something interesting to be said that I think a large percentage of the fan base, like I've seen numbers like 80% plus of the fan base for two crime shows is women? Is there some psychology behind that?

I haven't seen that. I'm not aware of, if it's a sex difference that I'm not aware of. That you should, I mean, I've heard that in a lot of places. I wonder if there's something about troop crime, maybe because it's just like sexual kinks for men to develop early on, for the cues, maybe for women, there's the cues of the threat of violence, the attentiveness to violence develops early on and therefore fascination with violence.

Well, I think that one thing is that with serial killers, specifically, I don't know if this is true of true crime in general, but serial killers, you find a lot of women fall in love with them, or even if they're jailed for serial killing. I think one of the features of it is that it parasitizes our hijacks status mechanisms in that a key cue to status is the attention structure, that is the high status people are the people to whom the most people pay the most attention. And so serial killers, a grinder, a lot of attention, and even though for evil leads, it's still attention.

So I think that that hijacking of our status allocation adaptations is partly responsible for that. Is there given the trajectory of your life, you mentioned Berkeley and the East Coast, Michigan, you got everything? Is there given the trajectory of your life in geography and in science, can you give advice to young folks today? High school college thinking about how to make

their own trajectory, how to make their own way through life that they can be proud of, be the career or just love life or life. Yeah, well, not necessarily on careers, but I can give advice on mating. And I think it's one of these things where we have requirements for the courses that students have to take in high school, for example. I think there should be a required course on relationships on mating.

So not just sex. Yeah, not just sex. Yeah, not me. Sex at all, yeah. Because I mean, most of what's taught is the future about sexual health and how not to get an STI and so forth. Yeah, my teacher put a condom on a banana. Right, right, but it's very exciting. But how to select a maid? How do you know if you're in a bad mating relationship, how to get out of a bad mating relationship?

I think that at this point in the science, even though there's a lot that we don't know, we know enough to at least provide some heuristics or general guidelines to things to watch out for. So just as a concrete example, with intimate partner violence, and this is male to female, their statistical predictors of, does he have any creed probability of beating you up? And they are things like, if he starts to insist on knowing where you are at all times, if he starts cutting off your relationships with your friends and your family. So there are these early warning signs and I think women should know about those. Or even things like that women are most in danger of being killed by an ex during the first three to six months after

they've broken up with him. You know, that sometimes they think it's, you know, the guy I'll say, meet with me one last time and then I won't bother you again. No, this is a dangerous time. So I think there's some knowledge that we do know that can be used to make informed decisions about our mating lives. And I think that should be taught. So consider that, like take that, the mating strategies, the mating life seriously. Yeah, absolutely. And because, you know, aside from a small number of people who are totally uninterested in any kind of mating or sexuality,

and there are small percentage that fall into that category, we all confront problems of mating. How do you, you know, there's that, uh, uh, uh, the mathematical model, like secretary, problem, marriage problem. I don't know if you're familiar, but basically, you have, uh, it's, it's a silly, perhaps not, perhaps not It's a formalized simplified Cuing theory type of thing where it's you have and and subjects and you get to date some number of people and then there's a stopping condition. I believe it's an overee Beyond which you pick the next partner which is better than anybody you've

dated before. So let's not overemphasize that idea, but if I were to psychologist it, I would say that some exploration is good. Some dating is good, but at a certain point you pick somebody given the set of people you've explored, you pick somebody who is pretty desirable within that group. Yeah, but I would add that what you also want to do is you want to mate with someone who is equivalent in mate value or has even what's more difficult is has a likely equivalent future mate value trajectory because nothing remains static. Yes. That's beautiful. But it's also the case that there are individual things.

We haven't talked about these with things like religious orientation, political orientation, values. These are extremely important to be compatible on. And so you do have cases of let's say a Democrat marrying a Republican and that sometimes works, but you're going to get into a lot of conflict, other things being equal, or someone who's deeply religious versus someone who is not all religious. This is going to be a problem, or someone who's of a different religious faith. And so compatibility on those things, compatibility also on personality dimensions,

I think there's some main effects like, so I would recommend avoiding that dimension when we talked about of emotional instability, because if you sign up for that, you at least should know you're gonna be in for a lot of conflict. It may be exciting at times, but there's gonna be a lot of ups and downs.

And know what you sign up for. What about how much to date? So there's a culture of speaking soon to a founder and long-time ex-CEO of Tinder. So there's that culture of visualized dating, of swipe right, swipe left. Is it positive,? How much did you date? What's the number? And also what number of sexual partners is what's optimal? I'm asking for a friend. I don't know if there's a single optimum there. I think is it is it single digits a double digits. I need answers. Well, I don't know. I get some of my wisdom from lyrics from

all songs so There's a list of evil song. I think Don Henley has said something like a there are too many lovers in one lifetime Ain't good for you or something like that. Yeah, but um, you know, But I think there is a- Take it easy as a good one too. Or basically don't get too attached. Don't take hard break too seriously. But I think internet dating and there's been some work on them. I think has its pluses and minuses.

One of the pluses is it gives you access to potential pools of mates that you could never possibly meet in real life. We're dating, dating used to be. There are people you knew or friends or friends or you go out to bars or parties. That's the good thing, gives you access to those extended pools, but also it gives people the illusion that there's always someone better out there for you, someone who's just a little more attractive, a little more compatible, a little more, and so it produces what's sometimes a decision paralysis. You have too many options and you can't choose. I think one other potential

negative which I think could be corrected by these internet dating sites is that the picture, the photographs of the face and body tend to overwhelm all other sources of information. And so especially if you're just looking for a sex partner, that's one thing. Physical appearance is fine for that to be overwhelmingly important. But if you're looking for a long-term bet, there are so many other things that are really, really

important. But people tend to be swamped by the visual input, which is natural, because that's where we're evolved to respond to visual input. We're not, we're not, we're evolved to respond to words, you know, like, oh, I'm, I like to go fishing or something like that. So if there's some way for these sites to, in long term, mating for these other characteristics to be made more salient in people's information processing, I think that would be a valuable improvement. Yeah, because even forget long term beauty, even sex appeal is like even the word appearance,

it feels like to me people that are super sexy in real life are a lot more than their picture. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's actually surprising, like they come to life in different ways. Yes. It could be either submissiveness as shyness or extravagant wit and humor or like a super confident or super, like whatever they are, the, whatever the

weirdness that they are comes through. You meet, so when people say, well, which is the case of the, of sort of day proponents of dating apps, it's like, well, when you meet somebody at a bar, you're getting the same experience as you do on a dating site, you have very little information, all you get as appearance. But I don't think appearance on the screen is the same as appearance in real life, especially with people that for some reason you find super sexy. It's like, and again, the objectification that we mentioned earlier is the, it over-optimizes

for people who are good at taking pictures of themselves. Like they're representing themselves inaccurately. They're not just even in the physical features, but in the way those physical features are used in physical reality. Like in terms of body language, in terms of flirtation, in terms of just everything, everything put together. So I just, I wonder if there's a way to close that, to close that gap. And I don't know what that is exactly. I tend to believe more information is good on dating. I don't use actually dating apps.

I just, because they don't make any sense to me, because there's not enough information. Like what this, like, to me, like whether you know dust, the S, youier not as important. And I don't mean that because you read specifically a book by dust the eskier, but there's something about have you suffered, have you thought about it deeply, have you been shaken in some way? And that's not, sometimes books can reveal that, sometimes something else can reveal that, but this kind of very shallow resume like, I like to travel. I have boobs. It's like this kind of thing is, it loses the humanity of it all. I want, because listen, as a fan of technology, I would love dating

to open up, like you said, the pool of possibilities out there, the soul made idea. Like, I believe that there's an incredible people out there for you that is an emotional connection, not just a physical connection. So that the promise of digital tech is that you can discover those people. That's not just for romantic relationships, for friendships, for business partners, for all that kind of stuff like your friend groups. But yeah, there's something seems broken about dating sites. Yeah, well, that's why I mean, when I'm asked for advice on this, I say, if you feel like you have a connection with someone, meet them in person. You meet them in real life.

And there's a road trip, like you said. Yeah, stress that. Yes. Yeah. Because there's only, I mean, so much you can learn through messaging and so forth. Amongst all of this, we didn't really, we didn't really mention love, which is hilarious. So let me ask you, in the last just a few questions, what's the role of love in all this in the human condition? So we talked about mating, we talked about mate selection, we talked about all the things we find attractive in a mate, the status, hierarchies and all that kind of stuff. What about that deep connection with the human being that's hard to explain? and all that kind of stuff. What about that deep connection with the human being

that's hard to explain? Well, we talked about it a little bit, but so we've talked about love, like romantic love. I think it's an evolved emotion that evolved in part to solidify long-term pair bonds. And is it different from the love of a parent for a child or a brotherly love or sisterly love or other friendship love?

I think these are different phenomena. But if we're talking about romantic love, I think it's an evolved emotion. Leading hypothesis is that it's a commitment device. So if I say to a potential maid, you exceed my minimum thresholds on intelligence and looks, I think we make a good couple. It's a pickup line. Yeah, it wouldn't do much emotionally, but if you say, you know, I love you, I can't stop thinking about you. It's this uncontrollable emotion that I feel toward you.

It's a sign that I'm committed to you, at least for a while, and I'm not going to abandon you when, you know, if you're in aid and when an 8.5 comes along, I'm not going to drop you and go with the 8.5. Yeah. It's, that's so interesting, but that's, you know, it's still, it's still the reality of the emotion is there. However, it evolved is still there. And it's interesting.

It's one of the more puzzling pieces here. Even broader than romantic love, but in romantic love, like, what is that? How much of that is nature? How much of it is nurture? Because even, I mean, I ask that myself all the time, like I'm deeply romantic. How much is that is nature?

How much of it is nurture? How much of the people I spent my childhood with the ideas, I mean, the Soviet Union, sort of known for the literature and the movies and so on that are very over, that are heavily romanticized. I don't want to say over romanticized. Maybe there's no such thing. But so maybe what is that? Is that my upbringing or is that somewhere in the genetics that I value that emotional connection? Yeah, well most humans have the capacity for love. You know, whether it is activated in any individual person, such as you or anyone else, is going to be adjusted or suppressed by different social and cultural and upbringing factors.

I mean, there are cultures where parents basically lock away girls, they cloister them and so they can't ever meet anyone else until the parents arrange to marry them. So they override any possibility of love. But I think it's an evolved emotion and I mean one kind of test of this, and this is just slightly circumstantial evidence, but in China, historically, there have been arranged marriages and then individual choice marriages. The arranged marriages tend to have higher break-up rates and lower child production than the ones that are sort of voluntarily chosen, you know, so-

I've heard of that. So contrasting stuff from India, I wonder, contrasting with where the arranged marriages are longer lasting. You know, it's so interesting because you said China. Yeah. I would love to see the data and the dance of that because there's a lot of other interesting factors like how the arranged marriage is arranged. Yes. Is it for the families, is the interest of the families for some kind of like in the monarchies to make agreements to trade resources or

is the interest of the family to maximize the success of the marriage. So compatibility, is it, are they looking for maximize compatibility or are they looking to maximize resources? Well, historically, it's often been an arrangement where they're trying to maximize the status and power of the alliance with this other extended family. But that also varies from culture to culture. Like there's the the T. We culture where there's you know the the the men basically bestowed the daughter their daughters on other men and they they try to gauge which men which of these young up and coming men are really going to be you know chiefs high status guys and which ones are going to be

losers. And so, you have this weird phenomenon, they have a polygamous marriage where a guy will get one daughter bestowed on him, and then other men use that as information that this guy must be rising in status. And so they give their daughters to the guy as well I have my go from like zero to seven wives and very short so we're not gonna richer. That's fascinating The game of thrones And sex is a part of that game Let me ask you about yourself your own self who mentioned Richard rang him Think about mortality. Do you think about your mortality? Are you afraid of death? Yeah, interesting. I'm not afraid of death. I agree with

Richard Rangham. I'm not eager to leave the party. I don't want to leave the party soon. I enjoy life in all of its interesting complexities. I enjoy my scientific work. I enjoy my relationships with other people. I enjoy exploring the universe. So I'm not eager to leave, but I'm not afraid of it. And I think part of that is that I was married for a while and my wife died prematurely of cancer. And so I spent basically eight months with her watching her die after she was diagnosed. And there's some, we're, it's a horrible time for me and for her, obviously, but there's some way in which it kind of made it more familiar so that it became a lot less frightening. But how did that experience change you? Just as a scientist, as a thinker about humanity, as a human yourself.

Well, I get it. So you're saying you felt like you've felt a little bit more ready for this whole end of the party? Well, yeah, it's, I mean, because we tend to be afraid of things that we're not familiar with, you know, and so if you're familiar with it, at least in my case, that caused a lessening of fear on that dimension. But I don't know. It also kind of, you know, there are these existential thoughts

that it brought about, like how ephemeral life is. And I remember this Richard Dawkins quote, he said something like, we were all going to die and we're the lucky ones. Yeah, that we got, we even got a chance. Yeah, or even you mentioned Russian writers, one of my favorite writers is Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, I don't know if he read him, but he said once that life is a chink of light between two eternities of darkness. And you're saying that's not a terrifying idea? Well, I'd prefer, I'm happy with the prior, the first eternity of darkness, I'd prefer the second, not to occur, but it's going to occur. I mean, it's we know that Elon Musk

aside, I'm skeptical that we'll be colonizing other planets in any substantive way. And so our star or our sun will burn out. And so it's going to take a few billion years or so, but it will eventually the Earth will become a cold lump of dirt floating around in the universe with no life on it. So it's not just your light, the light of your consciousness, it's the light of our human civilization that will eventually go out. Yes, everything. At least here, I do believe that there is life in intelligent life in other parts of the universe on other planets. I sometimes wonder if the second eternal darkness is the thing that makes the light possible. So in the other places out there, I wonder how successfully can you truly be

without the deadline and of death, both at a human scale and at the civilizational scale. I feel like we, in order to create anything beautiful, we have to live on the edge of destruction. That seems to be, you know, some people would say that's just the future of our past, that our future can be otherwise. But, you know, like you, I'm somebody that looks at the data. And currently the data says otherwise, but of course we're constantly changing the data because there's change.

So we'll see. We see, I wonder what the future holds for us. Speaking of which, as somebody wants a textbook on evolutionary psychology, what do you think is the meaning of the whole thing? What's the meaning of life? You're very good at describing how the human mind is the way it is, but why is it here at all? What's the purpose? Well, I can give you my answer to that, but I would actually love to hear your answer, because I know you've asked this question of dozens and dozens of people on your podcast. And what are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, my mind changes on that a lot.

And I think the process of answering the question is the fun thing, not the actual final answer. I think the question itself is the most fun thing. But for me, usually, is two things. One is love, and we can talk a long time. What I mean by that is not just romantic love, and two is to create, and hopefully to create beauty. So, and again, I can talk forever what that means. For me personally, creating beauty means engineering and creating experiences like connection with others. On the love side, it's just the actual feeling, the experience of deep appreciation of everything experience of deep appreciation of

Everything around you like the sensory experiences of everything around you Just feeling it every single moment saying I'm damn glad to be alive that light with the darkness on your side Just being appreciative like being like being in the experience of truly present and experiencing it, because it's not going to be there for long, the whole thing ends. And that to me is love. And the reason romantic love is so important is that other people are just awesome. They're fascinating black boxes that can generate awesomeness. So can other animals and objects for me, but humans in particular for some reason are just generators of awesomeness.

They surprise us. And therefore, good target of love. Well, so that's a much more eloquent answer than I could give, but I'll just say a thought or two on that. And I mean, one of the things, you know, what is the meaning of life? I mean, in some sense, But what is the meaning of life? I mean, in some sense, if you're thinking about some eternal purpose, meaning like if we look 5 billion years hence, will any of this mean anything? I think the answer to that is probably no. But, and this is, I think, where my answer would concur with yours is that I think we have a rich

evolved psychology that contains many complex adaptations and at any one moment in time most are quiescent most are not activated but for me part of the meaning of life is experiencing the activation of a lot of these complicated evolved psychological mechanisms. And they include romantic love, they include friendship, they include being part of a group or coalition,

because I think we're an intensely co-elitional species. So there's something about being a group member. So, like, just even, I don't know if you're in sports, if you're your team wins, you feel that somehow that's your part of that. But this goes for both the positive and the darker sides of things. So, for example, warfare, you see these men who have been through a war together, and where their lives have depended on each other, and they're like best friends for life, and have a bond that is stronger than most people form with a friend ever in their life because they've been through these life or death experiences

and so you know I wouldn't want to you know doesn't cause me to want to charge off and be in war but there are some types of adaptations, even like warfare adaptations, we're in principle, I would like to experience them. I would like to experience and never will, but what does it like to be in a coalition where you are in combat with another coalition, and not in modern warfare, because it's horrible,

but where your life is in danger, where your life you depend for your life on other people, and they're depending for their life on you, and there's this kind of coalition of solidarity that is unique. Now, another thing that, of course, I'll never be able to experience is murder, because I'm never going to murder anybody. But studying homicidal ideation really gave me an eye opener, as interesting as studying sexual fantasies because the if you ask what triggers

homicidal thoughts are the issue most people have had them and and I because I asked this question I've ever thought about killing someone and and I give about 91% of men say yes about 84% of women say no and even when I talk to people they say one-on-, they'll say, oh, no, I've never thought of counting someone. I'm a kind of person. You think I am. And then 10 minutes later, I say, actually, there was this one time when I got this guy humiliated me in public. And I, you know, and so, but I think thoughts about killing, homicide ideation, and they're very predictable from an evolutionary

perspective. Like we mentioned, mate poachers earlier and infidelity and there are other things, things like that being humiliated in public, status loss, you know, due trigger, homicidal thoughts. So, anyway, I don't go off too much on that, but I guess what I'm saying is answer to your question is is experiencing the rich array of complex psychology that we have within us, most of which remains unactivated, and some of which will never be experienced. Like, you know, there are some people who will never experience love, for example, because of, you know, cultural restrictions or whatever. And so, to me, that's part of the meaning of life. So, that's so beautifully put, the saying that they're kind of dormant, inactivated aspects of the psychological mechanism.

So we have the capacity to experience a bunch of stuff. It's almost like in video games, you can unlock levels and so on. So this is basically, there's all of these things that are dormant in our mind, that we have the capacity to experience. And part of the meaning is to try to experience as many of them or as many new ones novel for the particular society or maybe the entirety of human civilization, who knows psychedelic drugs, like you said, violence, experiences that might have to do with brain computer interfaces. The interaction with all of those are experiences.

And so the question is, what is the ceiling? How infinite or nearly infinite is the capacity of a human mind to experience all those things? And we'll get to discover those things. So I'm glad you never got a chance and never will get a chance to murder But I just want to put it on record that You know that's definitely something on my bucket list. Why do you think I dress like this? Anyway There is something appealing like one of my favorite movies is Leon the professional. Oh, I love that movie

What is that? Why is that so except? Listen, maybe it's in the OCD thing, like killing other bad guys. Right. No women, no children. No, no children. Also, loving that with, now the poor, now the poor, incredible actress. Also, the complex, whatever that is, the fatherly or as romantic, whatever that is the fatherly or is romantic whatever that is like Lolita type of thing I don't know what I've never like read a PhD thesis on that interpretation of that movie But that's a fast anyone violence and violence and love and sex. That's what makes Life worth living. That's what makes it fun. David, you're an incredible person, incredible scientist. It's a huge honor to share a city with you or I'm the visitor. You own this place. You run this place high? We both live here now.

Yeah. And it's been great talking. It's great honor for me. I've followed your podcast for a long, long time now and tremendously enjoy your interviews. And you have a very inquisitive, inviting style that brings out things in your guess, which I think is fantastic. Activate all those dormant, psychological mechanisms. That's what life and that's what conversations I'll about. Thank you for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Bus. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from E.B. White. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If we were merely challenging, there would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you.