The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships by Nathan H. Lents

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships by Nathan H. Lents Amazon.com Evolutionary biologist Nathan H. Lents knows what makes humans unique—and it’s most definitely not our sexual diversity. A professor at John Jay College, Lents has spent his career studying what makes us, well, us, and contrary to what the culture warriors want people to believe—diverse sexual behavior is not a new development, or even a human one. It didn’t just emerge from a progressive culture; it’s the product of billions of years of evolutionary experimentation throughout the animal kingdom. It’s not a modern story, a Florida story, or even a human story. It’s a biological story. In The Sexual Evolution, Lents takes readers on a journey through the animal world, from insects to apes, revealing what the incredible array of sexual diversity can teach us about our own diverse beauty. Nature, it turns out, has made a lot of space for diverse genders and sexual behaviors. And why? Because when it comes to evolution—diversity wins. This is not just a political or social message, instead it’s rooted in science and cultivated from understanding the full breadth of sexuality that exists throughout the world. With shades of both Frans de Waal and Esther Perel, Lents’s storytelling is as fascinating as it is topical, offering eye-opening stories about the diversity of animal life, while relating it to our own sexual journey as a species. At once a forceful rebuttal to bigotry and a captivating dive into the secret sex lives of animals, The Sexual Evolution is the rare book of pop science that leans into the controversy. Sex, the reactionaries say, should only be for procreation between a man and a woman, anything else goes against nature. Well, nature would like a word with them.About the author Nathan H. Lents is Professor of Biology at John Jay College and author of two recent books: Not So Different and Human Errors. With degrees in molecular biology and human physiology, and a postdoctoral fellowship in computational genomics, Lents tackles the evolution of human biology from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to his research and teaching, he can be found defending sound evolutionary science in the pages of Science, Skeptic Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and others.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. As always, the Chris Foss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you, but we don't loan you money.

So today we have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking about his insights in his new book that's coming out February 4th, 2025. My gosh, I'm going to have to get used to saying this book comes out in 2025 now. I'm still back in 2024. I think I'm still back in 2024. I haven't... I think I'm actually stuck in 2023. So I'm dragging and clawing all the way. His newest book is called The Sexual Evolution.

How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships. Nathan H. Lentz joins us on the show today. He is a professor of biology at John Jay College and author of the two recent books, Not So Different and Human Errors, which explains my first 10 marriages. With degrees in, no it doesn't, with degrees in molecular biology and human psychology, physiology, and a postdoctoral fellowship in computational genomics. Lentz tackles the evolution of human biology from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to his research and teaching, he found defending evolutionary science in the pages of Science Skeptic Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and others. Welcome to the show.

How are you, Nathan? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing great as well. Thanks for coming on the show. We appreciate it. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Well, luckily, if you just Google Nathan Lentz, you'll usually get to my profiles. I'm on Twitter and Blue Sky and Instagram under

those handles, Nathan Lentz or NathanLentz15 for all of those handles. So, Nathan, give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book. Well, my book is a look at the natural history of sex, gender, sexuality, sexual relationships in our ancestors and other apes and other mammals, even in birds and other kinds of creatures. Because I think that we have a lot to learn by seeing how other animals approach things like gender and sex and sexuality. Because we're living in a weird time where there's a lot of arguing about, you know, what humans are made for and how we're supposed to be and how many genders there are and what's the difference between sex and gender and all these kinds of things are very, very big right now in the public debates and public consciousness. But, you know, one thing I think is missing a lot is the biology of all this, you know,

and these are really biological things. These are biological phenomena. So I wrote this book in an attempt to sort of muscle my way into the public conversation to bring it back to biology. You know, I think we really are, we're animals, we're social animals, we're mammals, we're primates, we're apes. And that history really is with us when we enter into these kinds of relationships. And so while I'm not saying we should just do what animals do and that's the ultimate way to find out what's right and wrong, I do think that it helps demystify a little bit of why we act the way we do when we consider the history of these behaviors.

Yeah. 500 million years of sex. Well, that explains my 20s. I don't know what that means, but I was alone the whole time anyway well there's a section on that too there you do you covered me okay well great I mean the history books you know you you bring up some interesting points because my understanding of biology and I'm and I'm no scholar i i skipped college to start my first companies at 18 and i'm good at business but science not so much but i'm getting better

because i have great professors and stuff like you on the show so you know to my understanding biology in in human behavior human nature doesn't change on a dime. There seems to be that this, there's an experiment that's been going on since the late 60s that somehow we can flip biology on its head. We can make, men can be women, women can be men. It seems to have been grossly acerbated in recent years where they've actually decided that it's possible. And, you know you i don't know you spin a card and pick your gender or something nowadays is it what do you what are your thoughts on that or do you cover i wouldn't put it that way at all first of all i'm just

joking around well what i it's interesting that we talk about sex and gender in the ways that we do because sex is really um you know a physical property of a body right so a body has a sex to it and that has to do with organs that has to do with genes uh even has to do with metabolism there's all kinds of things throughout your body that have the imprint of your sex on it and that can be a lot more complicated than just a simple binary and so we can come back to that but that's sex you know sex has do with bodies. Gender is about behavior. Gender is a psychosocial phenomenon. It's how you interact with other people. It's how you express your sexuality and your sexed body and how that comes out as an expression.

And so sex and gender are really different. Of course, gender flows from sex and they often kind of go together. But what I explain in the book in the first couple of chapters is that it's a lot more complicated than just male, female, and everyone's one of those buckets. And I use animals to build up this argument before I even get to humans. There are animals that play around with sex and gender and that exist sort of in the middle and that experiment with different ways of being a male and different ways of being a female. And part of that is physical, you know, just in how they present and how they look. And sometimes being different than what everybody else is doing is an advantage. You know, it helps you get a leg up on that competition. And then sometimes it's just behavior. Sometimes it's just a reproductive strategy. Sometimes it's, you know, even developmental timing. Some of these things can vary a lot more than most people realize. It's

not just, you know, two buckets out there and everyone, you know, is in one of them. And then after I do that a little bit with animals, I bring it to humans and I give examples of humans who have been outside of the two bucket system. And we've been doing this for a long time and other cultures, you know, prior to farming and industrialization, you know, we're much more tolerant of that. And so, you know, people are now, you know, sort of rediscovering a more diverse expression of their gender. And it kind of freaks people out because we're so used to this. Well, listen, it's check a box, one or the other. But remember that these boxes, these categories, these labels, these are human

constructions. These are words that we've created to fit everybody into one bucket or the other. But if we just let people be who they are, exist as they are, we'll see that it's much more of a spectrum than just the two buckets. And people will be in the middle. Even with physical measures, people are in the middle of some of these things. And so, you know, it frustrates our desire to have a nice, simple binary, but that's really, that's really our problem. That's not, that's not a problem with, with nature, with biology, experimentation, creativity, flexibility is an inherent part of nature, including, and especially with sex and gender. So we're not really changing anything. We or trying or attempting to flip biology, at least up until we know it.

We're figuring out a better way to express our sexuality and biology. Yeah, I would say so. Are you talking about like the scientists or are you talking about just how people are living? I'm not sure because you're the pro on this. I'm just trying to make sure I follow along and clarify what you're saying. Well, let me talk about how the science is done and always was done first. So, you know, I would say, you know, studying animals, you know, that biology goes back to around the mid-19th century, you know, the Victorian era. You know, if you picture the naturalists from that time period.

Well, science, you know, brings a personal bias to it as well. So when you look out at the animal world and you look at an animal behavior, you have to interpret that behavior. You have to record it. You have to write it down. And so a lot of the knowledge that was created during that time reflected the biases of Victorian naturalists. And, you know, and then through the 20th century, you know, when you saw two birds pairing up, we saw little families, little human families. And so, oh, well, they must be monogamous. They must be faithful.

They must be lifelong in these relationships. And of course, now we know as we've looked more carefully and sort of stripped out the bias that that's not always true. And in fact, a lot of times it's not. You know, sexual monogamy does not really accompany social monogamy very often. In fact, there's only something like eight or nine mammal species that have ever been found to be sexually monogamous. But a lot of them are socially monogamous.

I mean, they do pair up, you know, they share resources, they build a territory and defend it. You know, that kind of partnership, of course, is natural and normal, but sexual exclusivity really isn't part of that in the animal world, at least not very often. So that's just an example of how bias really, really altered us and how it altered the way the work was done. And birds are a great example of this because bird pairs, even those you've heard of, like some birds that mate for life. Right. This is especially common in migratory birds.

Something like 90 percent of migratory birds mate for at least a breeding season. About half of those are stable longer than that. Well, we always just assumed that they were faithful, that they were sexually monogamous. It wasn't until the 80s, 1980s, let's think about how recent that is, that we did genetic testing and we found, oh, wow, in this nest, not all these eggs are from the male of this pair. In fact, almost every nest will have at least one egg that's not the result of one or both parents. In fact, yeah, yeah. So these birds and then every species that they went and tested this in, that's what

they found is that it's actually a diversity and that there's good reasons why the birds do that, right? Because they want to diversify their clutch. They want to have diverse genetics in there. And so we had to revisit what we what we called monogamy you know the birds do pair up they do build the nest and defend it and protect the the offspring but they're also having sex with other people with other birds so birds are swingers this is what we learned on the chris vash show no but it makes sense makes sense because I've heard different things said

about how having a varied gene pool and various partners and children from different partners, some people are taking it probably too far that I see on TikTok. But it does help diversify, I guess, the DNA and the chance of survival. And certainly maybe if you mix up the paint a little bit, you know, maybe there's a better way out of there. I'm sure AI will probably figure it out. Yeah, in fact, that's the whole reason why sexual reproduction is more dominant than asexual reproduction in all of the more sort of advanced lineages. If you think about animals, plants, fungi, even most of the protists, they have opted for sexual reproduction instead of asexual for

precisely that reason. Because actually, asexual reproduction is faster, cheaper, more efficient, more prolific and productive. I mean, bacteria really haven't figured it out when it comes to reproduction. But asexual reproduction produces clones, and that's not good long term. So the sexual reproduction requires two individuals or at least two genomes to mix up. And what that does is it unlinks all the individual traits so that nature can select for each trait on its own. So that way, you know, different traits are not locked up in the same individual, but they're, they're shuffled. It's like a deck of cards and you shuffle it. So what trait is connected to what other trait gets mixed up every time. So what I think is interesting

is that we've always known that diversity is good and that every living thing really tends to favor it if it can, that diversity, but we haven't really looked at the diversity of sex until recently. You know, we've known that diversity is good in all these other ways. But when it comes to sex and gender, we love our binaries, we love our everybody's this or that. But actually, nature does not traffic in binaries very often, it's much more about spectra, it's much more about variance and variability and, you know, defermentation because it's like your stock portfolio. You know, you don't invest everything you have in one company or even one industry, right? Because if it tanks, you're screwed. So what you do is you do a diverse portfolio so that whatever's around the corner,

you have an insurance policy. And that genetic diversity works the same way. You don't know what the environment will be 100 years from now, 200 years from now. So the best way to ensure the long-term survival of your offspring, your genetic legacy, is to mix it up as much as possible, hoping that someone will have the right combination of traits to survive whatever the next challenge is. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to me. I've often wondered about this, that, you know, you see people flip out of divorces fairly regularly now. And we've kind of reached a, it used to be, I think, in our society, you had to stay married

to stay alive. It was a survivor sort of thing. And, you know, that kind of seemed to be disconnected in the 60s. And you've seen marriage downfall and people getting divorced more. And I almost wonder if, you know, there'sfall and people getting divorced more. And I almost wonder if, you know, there's all these people with relationships like, well, if you do this, then you maybe won't get divorced. But I almost have kind of wondered if there isn't a thing where, you know,

it's kind of like there's an underlying current of our hindbrain or our biology that's trying to do that, that's trying to mix the paint, as it were, I'm going to call it, that basically they, you know, it's not really so much we're divorcing because you didn't put the toilet seat down often enough. We're divorcing maybe because in our hind brain, we're actually searching to mix up that gene pool. I don't know. It's certainly possible. I think you said something really prescient a minute ago. You said it used to be that if you weren't married, you didn't survive. And what that, what you're describing there is social pressure, right? Social pressure and selection. And in order to be successful, we adapted right into that social environment. And now the social environment has changes. And people are adapting they're trying to see where they fit in now you know we talk about divorce rates rising you know marriage rates are are falling but divorce rates are falling too right so they really peaked at the

end of the 20th century really since the late 90s to now divorce rates have actually been going down because i think people are entering into marriage more intentionally you know after a longer period of dating or whatever and they're establishing themselves, you know, before they decide to get married. Once again, our practice sort of reflects the pressures that were, you know, the social pressures of the time. And I think that it's normal that younger, the younger generation is sort of throwing away all these categories and labels and approaching these things, you know, from a, from a free-all point of view. It doesn't mean that I think that's good, that I want that to happen for my own kids or whatever. But what I do think is it's reflecting a relieval of the pressures to

do any specific thing. And what that allows us to all do what we think is best for ourselves. And, you know, divorce rates are not the ultimate measure of whether a society is healthy, right? It's the thriving of each one of us as individuals. And sometimes that means staying together, you know, the rest of your life. And sometimes it means reevaluating and, you know, whether or not you want to continue that. And you know what, birds do the same thing. A lot of them have that seasonal monogamy where at the end of the year, they kind of reestablish, you know, do I want to keep going with this partner or do I want to see if I can trade up? And you would call that like serial monogamy is kind of what a lot of humans are doing with that

now. Whether that's good or bad, listen, I'm a biologist. I'm not in the business of making moral statements, right? I'm just describing the world the best I can. But I think that it's not so scary when you think about the conventions that we have around marriage and monogamy and all this are very recent. It's really much more modern than most people realize. If you go back to the ancients and certainly before the ancients, marriage and monogamy and relationships does not look anything like what we have now. Yeah. My understanding, someone said on the show, that if you take this marriage experiment that we've had where you're supposed to stay monogamous to one person for your whole bloody life, is like a hair on the timeline of human existence.

You know, the size of a hair. And maybe that's why it's not working out so great for everybody because everyone seems to be miserable Well, it does seem to be it does seem to be somewhat recent But I would push back against that as being the cause of anything. I think it's more of the effect You see like I think that people are putting way too much pressure on marriage as an institution to be Responsible for all of our happiness, which is sort of my point is that, you know, it reflects, you know, rather than causes a lot of these social changes. That's what I would say. And it is a fairly recent construction, this idea of permanent, exclusive marriage as the primary way that individuals make a family. But if you look at, for example, hunter-gatherer tribes, that's

our best model of how humans lived before farming. Farming really changed everything, right? Agriculture changed the way we live into sedentary life. But if you look at the foraging groups now, they have a whole variety of systems. It's not any one system that they all have. They're all kind of do it differently because literally because in the environment they're in different different systems would make sense. And so they kind of fall into a particular mating system, as we call it, based on what their local ecology is. Because you got to remember, humans live in the rainforest. We live on the coasts. We live in the desert. We live in the tundra. We live in temperate forests and grasslands. There's all kinds of different environments which have different both living and nonliving pressures.

And so the family structure that sort of makes the most sense for the local environment is what will emerge. And when I say local environment, it's also social environment, right? We are a product of social evolution as well. And that's, you know, when we talk about changing family structures and marriage and all this, our genetics isn't changing with all of that, right? We're just kind of living differently. But what that is, is gets passed on to future generations with modification. Yeah. Do, do, I mean, isn't there, is there a limit to like, I mean, I, I, I'm, you know i i'm you know hey if you want to call yourself whatever is you identify with knock yourself out i'm trying to identify as a plant so i can get out paying taxes don't do that folks but you know i mean is there is there like a limit to you know

stupid shit we can come up with or is it all just hey if you if you want to be free and express yourself it's better express yourself you know is there a limit because i've seen some weird shit on tiktok maybe you have too well i mean the extremes of anything to grab our attention right is there a limit well biologically i don't know what what that would mean what that would look like there's no limit socially there's absolutely a limit right because you have to fit into the world that you live in and you have to be tolerated reasonably well by your neighbors and you know in order to thrive you can't you you can only go against the grain right and i'm again i'm not that's not a moral statement on my part i'm not judging any of that i'm just kind of kind of saying there's just being against

the mainstream has costs, right? And so as the mainstream is changing a little bit, more freedom is coming along with it. The example I always give is, you know, left-handedness was below 1% of the population until about 1930s, right? And then all of a sudden left-handedness really grew and then it settled into around 8% of the population, something like that. Well, what changed? Certainly not genetics. What changed is we stopped punishing left handed people and forcing them into right handed situations. And all we did, we came up with scissors, right, left handed scissors and left handed desks. And then the natural prevalence of left-handedness emerged and settled in where it naturally is. And so some of that is going on with gender

expression as well. I don't think you're ever going to see the vast majority of people identifying as transgender, but there is a certain amount of the population that does identify as transgender and will always, and has always, that's always been there. We don't know what the natural prevalence is. I know that people are freaking out because there's more and more and more transgender people. But only recently has there not been a huge social cost against it, right? A huge repressive force against transgender people. So now that that's being relieved, at least a little bit, remember, it's not being relieved that much. You still, it's the best way to get beat up on the

playground and kicked out of your family and shunned by your church, right? So we've relieved it a little bit. And we're seeing something like the natural prevalence of transgender in the population. We don't know what it's going to be but but the only reason it seems like it's going up is that people are able to express that and live somewhat free more recently you know well that makes sense then because i've often wondered like you know there well i mean some people are like well there's you know there's more gay people coming out now and you're like no i think that like the the catholic church usually hit a lot of gay people. It was kind of the place to safe place to, I think, be for thousands of years or something.

Because if you weren't, then, you know, you'd have some, you'd have some issues with some of the different governments and whatever. Well, that's a perfect parallel that sexual orientation actually, right? Because, you know, once we started to make it okay for people to come out more and more people did, but it's not like everybody's now gay, right? It's settled into this kind of eight to 10%. And I don't know if you know this, but it's been pretty stable for about 20 years, 25 years. The number of people who identify as gay has been fairly stable. So we've removed the extreme negative pressure to stay in

the closet and has sort of settled into this minority population. I don't think anyone would ever say that we'll all be gay if we have the right social environment. I don't think anyone's going to say that, but nobody's serious. I was glad you qualified that. But what many of us will say is that there's a lot of flexibility we all have a certain adaptability and flexibility that's that's we're born with or that that we're formed with and then it takes shape in the environment now if you had been raised differently your attractions would be different you know how i know that is standards of beauty and attractiveness change in different cultures at different times there There's clearly some effect of the culture that you're in. So, you know, you'd like to think, well, you're you,

no matter when and where you were born, you'd still be you. No, if you were born at a different time in a different place, you would not be you, you would be a very different person, and including your sexual orientation could be different. You know, you might not flip all the way to some other extreme, but you would have gravitated towards a different sort of set point. You would have done more experimenting in college basically. Yeah, exactly. It would

have been okay to experiment and you might have landed somewhere a little different than you did. And remember, people change over time too. It's flexible. Yeah. I mean, weren't the Romans bisexual pretty much with their baths and stuff they'd do? people change over time too it's it's flexible yeah i mean weren't the romans like bisexual pretty much with their baths and stuff they do that they were yeah but the ancients when you're talking about greece or or rome or or you know babble you know babylonians they all had much

more flexibility with that and in fact it would have been it would have been unusual to not experiment a little bit because there was really no taboo against that if you were doing it with the right person you know there were certain people people who you were not supposed to do it with. A Roman citizen was not supposed to penetrate another Roman citizen if they're men, for example. But short of that, there were a lot of experimentations. And in fact, there was a Roman emperor, I can't remember which one, Claudius or something, I think it was Claudius, who was actually somewhat unusual in that he had no taste for men whatsoever, sexually.

He never did anything with men. And that was so unusual that it was written about, you know, that it was noted by some people that, yeah, he's kind of odd. Even the best looking, you know, ass doesn't catch his eye. So, you know, he clearly was a very heterosexual man, you know, and no tea, no shade. Some people are. that's fine but the point is that you know we don't really know what we our culture would be like without all these pressures and we're getting a little closer to it because in some corners of the world there's a little bit more freedom now but i think that the pushback is a little premature yeah and i i can see that there

were a lot of cultures that was seen as a as a bad thing if your son or daughter was lgbtq and and only until recently like you said it's become safe to come out of the closet and and do stuff and and people were always lgbtq i think all these hundreds thousands of years whatever it just kind of you know because of culture and society they had to hide um it's kind of weird and thanks religion to probably thanks for thanks religion. You guys do great over there Yeah, which was very big on social control right and and sexuality is is one of the things that they wanted to control And I do want to say though. It wasn't just LGBTQ folks that that Religion and other structures wanted to control it was all forms of sexuality, right?

So you can only do it if you are married. And there was even certain sex acts that were allowed and not allowed, right? So if you had a particular sexual taste that wasn't on the approved list, you too could be persecuted. They're still doing that at BYU in Utah. There's lots of repression out there. Although what's interesting to me is if you look at different cultures around the world and what porn they watch, it's generally reflective of the taboos in that culture in a broad sense. And so taboos are a great way to create a titillating sexual experience. You should come out and write a book on on the ways they get

in in the in byu they they have to deal with you're not supposed to have sex before you get married basically and so they have come up with volumes of ways to get around having sex but not having sex and it's quite comedic really do you mean like like nothing everything but intercourse kind of thing yeah they're like well our armpits they have a thing called soaking where you can have full penetration but as long as no one gyrates or moves I guess it's oh you can still pull it out of penetration okay yeah and then you hire you get a friend to get under the bed and shake the bed so that you it's really stupid

So anyway, this is kind of one of those The sexual revolution of you are you part two could be your next book and just suggesting that what have we covered that you want to tease out to Listeners on what they're gonna find in the book Well, I think what you're going to find in my book is, is a lot of, of animals doing things you didn't expect. So there's a creative approach to sex.

There's, there's animals with multiple male genders and females as well. There's, there's animals that approach this in a whole variety of ways. And you're going to find surprising animal stories that you're going to want to tell people because you, it sounds so weird. But why am I telling you this?

It's not that I think any of these should be emulated, right? That's called the naturalistic fallacy where you say, well, if it happens in nature, it must be fine. Because there's a lot of horrible, violent things that happen in nature. And I'm not going to suppose that just because animals do it, it's fine for us to do. But what I think it does help reveal is why humans have this diversity that's scaring so many people right now. It's the diversity in and of itself is not unnatural. It's not unusual. In fact, it would be unusual if humans were the only social animals that had this really narrow approach to sex. So what we do with that is a different question. That's not really a biological question, because there are some natural things, you know, humans have a natural

instinct to murder and steal and everything else. So, you know, we're allowed to prohibit that which we think is bad for society. My point, though, is you can't say it's unnatural to have a diverse approach to gender, you cannot, you cannot say it's unnatural to have diverse sexualities. You cannot say it's unnatural that people have a desire for multiple sexual partners or even multiple relationships at the same time. It's not unnatural. What we do, it might not be good. It might not be desirable. There might be reasons you want to talk them out of it. But if your neighbors are approaching their gender and sexuality differently than you are, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with them. They're just different. And differences are what makes a species more robust, right? It makes it more interesting life. And so the only

political message in my book is, hey, it's all it's all natural. It's all out there. You know, let's let's put the fear mongering away. And, you know, you know, we're not going to have to see the collapse of civilization just because people are approaching these things differently than we have in the past. If anything, it's a rediscovery of a more free existence that we used to have. So if you're a freedom-loving American, you might find yourself on the wrong side of some of these debates. So take a look at the book, read what animals do, and then read how I apply it to the human condition

And see what you think because I'm hoping that we can all just sort of you know Live better and in better harmony with all the different ways that we all choose to make our families Yeah, it's it's it's interesting to think about the one thing man can learn from his history Is what I would say is that man never learns from his history. And so, there we go round and round. You might be right. You might be right. In fact, actually, my last book, the final chapter, is pretty pessimistic because, you know, evolution never really rewards long-term thinking, right?

It prioritizes short-term profits, pretty much. So, we're kind of seeing the effects of that now, I think. Yeah. You know, and between religion, which used to be government and political, really, when it came down to it, because they used to be their own governments, like the Catholic Church. And, of course, politicians now, they've always persecuted the other person, the person who's different, whether it's the immigrant or sexuality or whatever. They've always persecuted them as the, well, that person's different. it's the immigrant or sexuality or whatever they've always persecuted him as the well that person is different clearly they're the problem you know and they became a was it red herring is that the term i'm looking for they become you know a whipping

post for for why social ills are that and it's it's usually a diversion that a politician plays to well said to i think it's red herring is the word i'm like term i'm looking for but where are they distraction right distraction yeah or uh and scapegoating scapegoating yeah scapegoating and stuff so yeah it's interesting to think about and yeah i mean if people want to you know i'm all for if you want to call yourself something i mean knock yourself out don't don't try and force on everybody else especially if they're underage but you know the if you want to do your thing it's kind of like i have the same policy towards religion you want to believe in

your religion that's fine just keep it away from me man it's kind of but it's interesting that you think it's fine you didn't mention keeping it away from young people when it came to religion i would believe that too. Sorry, I should have made that clarification. I do believe that it should be illegal for children to be indoctrinated until they're of 18. Okay. So that puts you pretty far outside the mainstream. I'm not saying I disagree.

I'm weird that way. But it is funny how we do want to sort of protect children from indoctrination in lots of other ways, except for that one, because, you know, we call children Christian children or Muslim children from the day they're born. You know, we're speaking for them, you know, right, right off the bat. Again, I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I do find it peculiar, though, because we wouldn't say, you know, that he is a Republican child or a Democratic child. You know, we wouldn't say that because that's a view that you have to form on your own. But anyway. You never know.

That may be what we're doing with the new administration. So we'll see how that goes. I'll see you in the camps. He should be there for different reasons. Probably. I don't know. I mean, do they need a reason at this point? Anyway.

But yeah, you didn't vote for me in the camp. Yeah, it's interesting to reason at this point? Anyway. But yeah, the... You didn't vote for me. In the camp. Yeah, it's interesting to me how we approach all that. I have some weird ideas, and of course I realize they're not in the mainstream, which is probably the reason I'm not in power. But, you know, I believe that we should have a thing where we basically make it so that people don't breed with the water or something. And if you want to have kids, you want to have a family,

you got to go spend two years in college, learn how to be a good human fucking being, how to have a relationship, fix your traumas and all your shit and quit dragging it into relationships. But you know, that's a panacea of a world that's never going to happen. Cause that would just make sense and we're human so fuck me one could dream man i'm a dreamer baby i mean it is it is definitely true that there's no lifeguard in the gene pool right right there's almost essentially no restrictions on who's allowed to reproduce one of the most important things we could ever do there's no restrictions on it i'm not saying we should but i think we're seeing the product of that. I'm going to get a coffee cup or a shirt to wear that says I'm living proof. There's no, I think that would make you a great shirt.

Anyway. So give us your final thoughts. We go out your.com is where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Yeah. Nathan Lentz on, twitter blue sky all the rest i i tend not to be that active on social media i i but if you follow me that that would be the way that you might catch me you know speaking in it in a city near you or or you know i have some articles coming out about the book you know keep your eyes open keep your mind open the idea being is that most of us are just we're just trying to find our way we're trying to express ourselves. We're trying to find, you know, our match. And, you know, live and let live is is a is a trite phrase.

But I think I think a lot of the people who are who want there to be more freedom and autonomy in the world, I'd like them to extend that into the area of gender and sexuality. And if, if, if my book helps them do that, then I, I think that, you know, even if just a few minds are open, it would have been worth it.

Hmm. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, Nathan. It's been very insightful and we're learning new things. And of course,

hopefully I'm learning old things because, you know, one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Thank you for coming to the show, Nathan. All right. It's my pleasure. Thank you. And thank you to our audience for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Crispus, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Crispus, all those crazy places. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.