The Joe Rogan Experience - #1081 - Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are former professors of Evolutionary Biology at Evergreen State College. Watch more of Bret’s work at http://patreon.com/bretweinstein and read Heather’s writing at http://heatherheying.com.

Boom and we're live ladies and gentlemen Heather Hying, Brett Weinstein. I didn't screw it up this time. Nope you got it right. Gotta get that Steen Stein thing messed up with you. I apologize it's a bad time to get those messed up. It is. So thanks for having us. Thank you for being here both of you I'm very excited about this conversation. Really excited about it, too. A little bit nervous in one way, but pretty jazzed. Well, I think it's good to be nervous about it.

What we're talking about, folks, what we would like to talk about is... Why don't you explain it? Well, I think Heather and I have been on an interesting adventure. We are evolutionary biologists. We trained with some of the finest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. And we have been teaching. We taught for, Heather taught for 15 years. I taught for 14 years at Evergreen. And we spent a lot of time dealing with students and trying to help them see how clarifying an evolutionary viewpoint is

with respect to understanding what a human being is and how we function and how we interact. And that was very enjoyable to us, and it was very empowering to students to discover that there was actually a way of removing a lot of the confusion of being a person. And we're now watching the conversation out in civilization about sex and gender devolve into an absurdity. And on the one hand, that's kind of frightening. I mean, for us, it's not directly an issue. We're happily married. And so we're not having to navigate romance out in the world these days. And our kids are too young to be navigating it yet. Maybe this will all be clarified by the time they're involved in dating.

But we also have a tremendous number of millennial friends, former students, who are trying to navigate this stuff and finding it difficult and bewildering to hear a conversation that, frankly, there's a much better alternative. If one can stand to think in evolutionary terms, if we can really look at ourselves as we are, as we came to be through evolutionary forces, then actually we can improve the landscape for romance and dating a great deal. But we can't do it if we're committed to very simple truisms that actually aren't right. What is disturbing both of you most about what's going on right now? Well, I think we'd love to see a third way. So they're the pre-moderns, as it were, who have a very traditionalist, conservative approach.

I'm trying to get this sucker up close to you. Sorry. Sorry about that. No worries. Yeah, perfect. The pre-moderns who have a very traditional, conservative approach to gender roles, to sex, to relationship. And there are a lot of us in the modern world who would reject a lot of that. in the modern world who would reject a lot of that. And then there are the postmoderns who want to throw out everything, want to throw out everything that evolution handed us and in the meantime pretend that it didn't happen, right? Pretend that it's not even based on reality. And there's a third

way and you know maybe we need to call it modern as opposed to pre or post modern, but there's a third way to navigate what evolution has given us, what we can change, what we can't change, and how to actually recover some of the sexiness and sex and the love and love and the romance and romance and understand that human beings are what we are from not just 100 years back, but 1,000 and 10,000 thousand a hundred million years back we've had sex since you both taught at a university level you you've been around these students and you've seen this sort of postmodernist movement gain steam what what do you think is the cause of it like what what is the reason why people are projecting this sort of distorted idea that there's no differences between men and women and that all the differences in the genders are all propaganda or cultural? So I think it actually arises from a relatively simple cause, that we all detect there's something not right about what we've been taught. We detect there's something not right about the way civilization is structured.

We can tell that there's nobody really at the helm. And you have a lot of people who are faced with some issue that to them is incredibly glaring, something that just absolutely needs to be solved. And so what they do is they look at that issue and they say, what would we have to say in order for that issue to be fully addressed? And the problem is that we're dealing with a complex system. And if you optimize for any one solution, you cause a catastrophe across all of the other things that it's connected to. And if you're not focused on those unintended consequences, you tend not to understand why people are resistant to your solution. So for example, let's deal with the transgender issue. For the transgender community,

and I don't, you know, this is not a monolithic community. I actually know quite a number of people within it who have a heterodox position. But in general, there's a sense that it is disrespectful not to simply recognize anybody who has decided to transition as a full-fledged member of the sex to which they have moved. That seems right. And if you are focused on the humanitarian side of the question, maybe it even is right. But the problem is, if you say a person who identifies as a particular sex is that sex, suddenly you've actually caused a whole bunch of consequences that you weren't thinking of over in a biology class, over in the prison system. I mean, is it true that somebody who says that they are female gets to go to a women's prison? Do we want to put violent sex

offenders in a women's prison because they declare themselves to be female? So not tracking the consequences that were not in your view when you decided on a particular solution is the reason that so many people have signed up for these really absurd notions. And part of what I hope we will get to today is that there is a principle at the core of understanding all complex adaptive systems, and it is diminishing returns. And diminishing returns sounds kind of arcane. It has too close an association with economics where it was first outlined. But the message of diminishing returns is that you can very often get 90% of a solution that you want and not disrupt other things unduly. But if you say,

I want 100% of the solution to this problem, you'll cause a catastrophe. So getting people to realize, don't shoot for the utopia in which the problem you're talking about is 100% solved. If you can accept a 90% solution, then you can have a whole bunch of other things that you don't even realize you're using. In defense of people that would try to go for 100%, though, isn't it one of those things where like you if you would negotiate, you would if you want $100, you ask for 150? Unfortunately, I mean, I think you're identifying something correct that in part the positions that we hear being deployed are not an honest reflection of the beliefs of many of the people who are espousing them. They are a negotiating tactic.

But we can't do that with biology. You can't negotiate with biology. Biology is what it is. And then we can talk about which parts of it are amenable to being changed. And as Heather pointed out, we're not advocating for a return to some traditional way of interacting between the sexes. We're advocating for an enlightened way that takes advantage of the freedoms we have

that our ancestors didn't and tries to navigate the hazards that we're stuck with. So you can't negotiate with biology. You really ought to listen to what it is that nature is telling you and then say, all right, what does that leave open? Where can we shift things? But if you're going to require that we lie about what's true biologically in order to navigate to a solution, I guarantee you it will be unstable in the end. Yeah, the zeitgeist has begun to include such nonsense as chromosomes exist on a continuum. You know, there are X chromosomes and there are Y chromosomes.

I haven't heard that one. One of our children just heard that at his school. What did they mean by on a continuum? Who even knows? I don't think they meant anything. I think what they intended to do was carve out freedom from a biological truth. And so if you say chromosomes are on a continuum, then it's very hard to disagree with that because it doesn't mean anything that we can unpack. I would say it's actually really easy to disagree with it and say no.

You know, gametes aren't on a continuum. Sperm is sperm and eggs are eggs. Sorry. Discrete. Two of them. Right? Chromosomes also not on a continuum, at least in mammals. Sex, discrete, two of them, right? Chromosomes also not on a continuum, at least in mammals. Sex, yeah, a continuum. Their intersex is real, but it's strongly bimodal, right? There are males and there are females and there are a few people. It's rare but real that there are intermediate phenotypes. And gender is even more of a continuum, but still strongly bimodal.

Have you folks heard about that new crayfish that they're battling in Europe? There's a giant crayfish in Europe that's female, female only, and essentially is a clone. They reproduce by cloning. So they don't need a male partner. And they're going crazy. And there's a lot of them. For your first two sentences there, it sounded like there was a giant crayfish descending on Europe. It was a female and she's mad. She's pissed. She's tired of all these lobster dinners. And that's going to work for a while, right?

And like asexuality has actually evolved in a few lineages, a few vertebrate lineages. There's some lizards that are asexual, and it's all females, and it goes great until the environment changes. Because if you're cloning yourself, your children are going to experience exactly, are going to be exactly the same thing that you were. So if you were a good fit for your environment, the next environment better be the same, or else your kids aren't going to be a good fit. So my feeling is that crayfish, I haven't followed the story a lot, but that crayfish is going to do terrifically moving into exactly the landscapes that it first mutated into existence in. And if you change the landscape a bit, it's going to stop doing so.

I think they just farm it for food if it's tasty. Yeah, no doubt. We don't have to worry about them breeding. Just get a ton of them together. Crayfish are delicious. They are delicious. I hope this is a good tasting variety. It's free food. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's kind of delicious. They are delicious. I hope this is a good tasting variety. It's free food.

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's kind of crazy. That's right. So Heather and I were talking before the podcast started about, I think, a very important point when it comes to a lot of these either progressive or right wing issues is that people tend to be extremely tribal. And what they're really concerned with is winning. It becomes a competition of us versus them. It becomes our side versus their side, and they tend to exploit weaknesses and then attack to score points.

And all ideas of being honest intellectually or looking at things objectively kind of go out the window. You ignore facts that diminish your position or your team's position and highlight things, even if they're not real, that would diminish the other side's position. This is a real problem that humans have with arguments, with being tribal, with being on different sides. I mean, we see it, we forget about tribes, we see it with people, where when there's a certain time when you see people arguing, there's a certain point where the argument has deteriorated to a competition, and it's no longer about

what you're actually discussing, it's about who can win. This is what science is for. Yes, yeah. Science ought to be indifferent. When it's done well, it is indifferent to who's the stronger team. It should really just tell you what's true. And in fact, the reason to use science is to correct for biases. But so Eric and Heather and I have a phrase that is just shorthand for something, which is bad faith changes everything. There's a lot you can do in discussion with people with whom you disagree, as long as you are on the same page to a large extent. And what you're describing is what

happens when that system breaks down and people perceive themselves as needing to win against the enemy rather than on a team that is trying to navigate to what is true or what is the most desirable outcome with respect to values that we all share or something like that. So what you're describing is a very common state. It is a lower, less capable state than a good faith environment where people who may disagree intensely agree on the basic rules and the desirability of figuring out what's true. And so maybe that's part of what we can do here is try to point to where the good faith conversation can get to that the bad faith conversation is incapable of getting to.

The value, really. Yeah, I think that's a giant point. It really is. And it's a, I mean, it's really something that I would hope more people would adopt going into the future. Stop connecting yourself to these ideas and just let these ideas exist on their own and examine them objectively and rely on science, rely on actual science to formulate your, when you're talking about biological issues. When I say science is the answer to this, it's not necessarily that we should accept, no one should accept the findings of science just at face value.

But a scientific approach is, I've got this idea. What would have to be true if that were true? And how can I possibly prove it wrong? And you work harder and harder and harder to prove it wrong. And if you can't, then you have greater and greater and greater confidence that maybe it's right and so this this is what we don't see in bad faith arguments is no one is trying to prove themselves wrong and that's I mean that sounds backwards the first time you hear it but if you try to actually demonstrate that your own

cherished beliefs are wrong and you can't do it you have pretty good confidence at the end of that. And there is no actual end. But the longer you've gone, you have pretty good confidence that actually, I'm probably seeing something real here. I've asked myself, I've asked my friends, I've asked my enemies, is this thing right? And, you know, in an actual formal scientific setting, you do an experiment, you run the data and you do the analysis.

But is it right or is it not? Let's see if I can prove it's not, even though I really think it is. So you also get, you get something, uh, there's a bonus that comes with it, which is, I don't know what else to say. It's super awesome. Which is if you've tried to take your cherished idea, some hypothesis that you've come up with, and you've tried 16 different ways to show that it's wrong and you keep failing. Well, every one of those things you did to see whether what you thought was true is actually false now prepares you when somebody now challenges you, and they say, oh, but you haven't thought of this. Well, you have. You've been through it 16 different ways,

and that gives you the ability to navigate almost anything that's thrown at you, because you have taken on the role of being your own harshest critic in order to make sure that what's left at the end of that process is really robust. The other thing that I want to insert here is that I think, A, I don't want to be put in the position of defending everything that's been published in the scientific literature as true because it looks like science. A lot of it isn't. A lot of what's published in the scientific literature is not valid. The methodology does not establish what people claim it does.

And that's a big hazard for people like Heather and myself because you have to sort the wheat from the chaff in order to figure out what to defend and what to be agnostic about. the wheat from the chaff in order to figure out what to defend and what to be agnostic about. But I do think those of us who more or less get the story of what, let's say, human sexuality is about at a scientific level, and there's still a lot of mystery, but there's an awful lot that those of us who have studied it are in agreement about, and civilization is not yet on the same page with those of us who have looked at it scientifically. One thing we have failed to do, I think, is to articulate what you will get in exchange for signing up for a scientific worldview on this topic. People do not realize that a scientific worldview is actually the thing that empowers you to navigate your own love life in an intelligent way. It will let you... And it's a lot more fun than it sounds when you say it that way. Yeah, it's, well, you know, there are all of these famous arguments about unweaving the rainbow or,

you know, somebody challenged Feynman that he was the kind of guy who would take apart a flower and destroy its beauty in order to figure out how it worked. This is the trope. Science will destroy beauty. Right. And it's not true. No. It's not true.

You will get a lot of value. You will waste less of your time on people that you shouldn't be interested in if you understand what game they're playing, even if they don't understand. Where do you think that argument is coming from, the argument that science would destroy beauty? playing, even if they don't understand. Where do you think that argument is coming from? The argument that science would destroy beauty? Well, I think there's a way in which the, I hate to borrow a chemical analogy here, but there's something called the activation energy of a chemical reaction, which is the energy necessary to get it to happen.

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

aphorism that you can adopt and suddenly your life functions. Sorry, go ahead. What it begins to do as people start to realize the power of an evolutionary take on sex and gender or whatever it is we're talking about is it opens up doors to inquiry. And it allows people to make sense of their lives. And then it becomes more beautiful and more powerful. And once people have seen how you can use these evolutionary tools and the knowledge that evolution, the study of evolution has given us,

like male and female are universals. Like male and female have existed for over a hundred million years. And everywhere it shows up, it looks really similar. And yes, there are exceptions all over the place. There's amazing ways that, you know, like this crayfish that you have, you know, a sexually reproducing ancestor that's gone asexual, or you have sexual reversal in some species. You have hyenas, which have a, you know, a very strange system going on. Lots and lots of

these exceptions, but the truth underlying them is always the same, and that's freeing. To me, that's beautiful. Can we try it with the crayfish here? Sure. So looking at this system, you've got a creature that is capable of going asexual and then spreading very rapidly. We have lots of examples of creatures that do that, right? So for example, dandelions. Dandelions look like a regular old flower, but they're not. Dandelions are what's called apomyctic. And apomyctic means that they go through mitosis instead of meiosis, and they produce a seed that isn't the product of sex. And that seed disperses as if it was the product of sex. And so this does something for dandelions.

It allows them to take over a landscape from one individual because it can just spread and spread and spread without having to find mates. It's very effective. But what we see in systems like, well, Heather mentioned whiptail lizards. Whiptail lizards, some populations are asexual. And it's a really cool system, actually. I don't know if Jamie wants to bring up a picture of whiptail lizards. But in the asexual populations, females can, I believe, they clone themselves, right?

It's more or less, yeah. So the reason we're talking about that is there are two different ways they could go about it. They could make two gametes infuse them or they can clone themselves. They're effectively clonal. But you look at that system and you say, well, how can a population abandon sex and be able

to tolerate change? Well, it has to do one thing, which is it has to have some place to borrow genetic variation from. So we see some very curious behaviors in these whiptails. from. So we see some very curious behaviors in these whiptails. Females mount each other. So basically you have females who stimulate each other to produce eggs that are not the product of sex, right? So they retain sexual behavior. So they do the pseudocopulation and whether they're playing the female role or the male role in the pseudocopulation depends on their status in the ovulatory cycle. Whoa. But the kicker is, and you know, Heather and I were actually teaching from this and trying to figure out how the system could possibly be stable long term. And what we predicted actually was that they had to be borrowing genetic variation periodically.

And it turns out that this is true. How do they borrow genetic variation? Well, the populations at the edge of these clonal populations are sexual. Whoa. Yes. Wow. That's us in the future. That's what everyone's hoping for.

Some people are hoping for that. I'm not hoping for it. Okay. So that's one way. But then we've got another one. I mean, I'm sure your audience isn't thrilled to be talking about lizards necessarily. But, okay, aphids. Aphids are asexual.

Well, how do they get away with being asexual? That seems like everything we know about sex being so valuable because of its role in producing genetic variation. What are the aphids doing? Oh, the aphids are sexual once a season, right? So they're asexual within the season, and at the end of the season, they breed sexually. And so the point is all of these exceptions are exceptions that prove the rule, that the universality of sex in complex animals is broken in certain cases, but each case that it's broken has a way of recovering the value of sex. Can I go back to lizards briefly? One more lizard example,

Komodo dragons, which are the biggest monitor lizards. There is evidence from, I think it's just zoos, that occasionally there's virgin birth, right? Occasionally females can produce young without sex. So occasionally individuals will go asexual, which, right? Wow, something that big, that's crazy. That is, it's very rare in vertebrates at all. And where it does happen, it tends to be lizards. And it's still pretty rare as far as we know, but really, you know, for the most part,

it would only be in zoos that we would know for the most part. But the hypothesis is that this is an adaptation for, and these are big swimming lizards that are living on these islands. They're relatively close together. They can swim between these islands. That having arrived at an island where there's none else that looks like you, it probably makes sense to clone yourself at that point. And actually, I think they're not clonal, they're parthenogenetic, but it doesn't matter. If it requires two individuals to make that swim successfully

in order to populate a new island, the chances are much lower than if it just takes one. And so you can get sex switched on and off, even in Komodo dragons. That's crazy. Well, but it isn't. Think about how many times one of these animals

must have crossed one of these water barriers and been alone and where it had an island that was perfectly ecologically capable of exploiting. It had no way

of making offspring. Right? That's a terrible price to pay in Darwinian terms if the solution is, well, let's suspend the requirement of sex for a generation, produce some offspring, and then we can reinstate it. So really, more than likely, this happens a lot more than we think. And because we assume that sex is the explanation for vertebrates when we see them, when we encounter them in the wild, we don't think, is this individual the result of a clonal event?

Or is this individual the result of sex? We assume sex. And it's only when somebody puts them in a zoo in isolation that we can be 100% certain there is no way this animal got fertilized by another animal. And that's when we start asking the question. But now that we've started to spot these things, we're going to see them more and more frequently because so many animals over evolutionary history have been caught in a situation that was paradise except for the fact that there wasn't a second one. That is incredibly fascinating, though, that they can just switch on and off like that. Well, and if you think about it, I mean, monitor lizards are interesting because they are the – people say they are the most mammal-like of lizards. People who work on monitor lizards say you can look into their eyes, and it's a little bit like looking into a dog's eyes. They've been paying attention too much to lizards.

They're crazy. Could be. Those things have dead eyes. Well, most lizards do, but these animals give you a different impression. But here's the thing. It's more than geckos, more than whiptails, more than lizard. Maybe they're just bigger. Yeah, well, they're big and long-lived.

Giving you more information out of that big eyeball. There's a little monitor lizards, though, and people say the same thing about the little ones. But if you think about it, what ought to trigger this switch? Profound loneliness, right? Profound loneliness would cause it. So I don't, you know, it's impossible to say whether any lizards, including monitors, have something like loneliness. Although in other cases, you know, when we look at elephants, we see clear evidence of grief. And we know that elephants didn't get grief from a

shared ancestor with us that had grief. They separately evolved grief because their complex social structures require it for the same reason that ours do. So it's not impossible that loneliness might not feel exactly the same to a monitor lizard. But if it had a value to detect how lonely you were, and then to trigger a physiological response that then kick-started the ability to be evolutionarily successful, that we would see that kind of thing. So I would love to see somebody try to figure out whether there was a cognitive trigger that looked like loneliness in monitor lizards that actually caused the switch, and if you could then maybe trigger it.

Wow. lizards that actually caused the switch and if you could then maybe trigger it wow so like some something that you could actually map in an fmri or something on the brain like you could look at their little brain and see loneliness sure i mean it hits a certain frequency and then the egg just starts forming something like i mean you know there would be some cascade but yeah there'd be some perception that i haven't seen another one like me in a very long time. And then it would cause some sort of a shift in behavior. Maybe it would cause searching behavior. And searching wouldn't net any evidence.

There's no evidence. You know, you don't necessarily have to see another individual to know that they're around. But anyway, there'd be some cascade of things. And then maybe some neurotransmitter would trigger the release of a hormone that would cause... But it would clearly be limited to females. In general, although I don't... Go ahead. Because the egg has all the cytoplasmic material necessary to make another cell, and sperm doesn't.

Right. So sperm and egg are just different. And eggs can't move, and so they're stuck where they are. They have to be found. And but they have all the cytoplasm and sperm really fast, but doesn't have any of the material necessary to make a cell. So a sperm can't mature into a zygote unfertilized because it doesn't have mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum and all the other stuff of a cell. So just they're doing different things, just like male and female are different strategies, egg and sperm are different strategies.

But there are certain animals, certain things that can switch sexes. Yes. Absolutely. Which organisms can do that? Well, there's lots of reef fish would be the big cluster of them. I've heard about ocean fish. Are there land creatures that do that?

There's one frog where there's a little bit of evidence, but it may be an artifact of a zoo setting, effectively, which might mean that it can happen in the wild and we just haven't seen it. But it's well known in reef fish. There are a lot of species of reef fish, and it goes both ways. It's called sequential hermaphroditism, where in some species, everyone's born female, and then some transition into males, and in some it's the other way around. You transition from male to female. There's some species where you can go both ways, and it depends on the sex ratio around you and sort of what strategies there aren't enough of. So male and female are strategies, and if you are the most dominant female in a landscape and the male just died, it makes sense to turn into a male so that you can now fertilize all those females.

But they're also, so that's the sequential, you know, where one individual no chromosomal sex determination, and the sex is effectively chosen by the environmental conditions, by temperature in the nest. And so one individual lives its entire life within a sex, but that sex was not dictated when the egg was laid, it was dictated by the environment the egg matured in. Isn't that the case with crocodiles as well? Crocodiles, and in fact, most every vertebrate that we know except for mammals and birds. And the mammals and birds is a different evolution of genetic sex determination.

So most lizards, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, turtles, teleost fish have some kind of environmental sex determination. And actually, as long as we're going down this road, I promise you there's someplace cool to go with humans. This is cool already. Okay, good. I never know. I never know how interested people are in the animal side of things. But so in human beings and mammals and not all mammals, the monotremes are exceptional in this

regard. Those are echidnas and platypus. Yeah, there are only three species left on earth. That's a remnant of an early branch on the mammal tree. But in most mammals, like us, we have chromosomal sex determination, and males are XY and females are XX. In birds, the situation is exactly reversed, as it is in butterflies. So what that tells you is that to the extent that— So by reversed, what Brett means is, and we just use different letters just so as not to be confused, males are so-called homogametic or WW, whereas in mammals, females are homogametic XX. And in birds,

males are homogametic WW, and females are WZ, which means that female birds can't clone themselves as the way that, say, a Komodo dragon could. But the reason I raise it is because we have a sense of male and female that I think is just wrong. That male and female are actually akin to a niche. That these are roles that the universe discovers periodically because they make sense, right? So it's a convergence on a set of behaviors that fit well together. Once you have a small mobile gamete, you tend to acquire the traits that go along with maleness. And this is true when an animal switches sex in the middle of its life. The behavior switches along with the gametes.

This is true between birds and mammals. So which one has two different sex chromosomes does not predict the behavior, but which one lays the egg does predict the behavior. And it gets even weirder than that. So, Jamie, do you have that image of the flower? The image? The image.

For those of you listening, you can look at this flower on the YouTube version. What kind of flower is it? It's actually just a diagram of a flower. A just standard flower. Who's that woman who makes those flower paintings that all look like vaginas?

Georgia O'Keeffe. Yes, that's Georgia O'Keeffe. So this is not her work. She seems a little obsessed. I'd like to talk to her. No doubt. It's going to be tough at this point. Hey lady, do you paint other stuff?

So here's what I want to show you about this. And I must say I love this point, even though I'm less jazzed about plants than I am about animals. If you look at the thing there, it's labeled stigma, right? The stigma is connected to the style, which leads to the ovules. So the ovules are the eggs, essentially. And the anthers are the place that produces pollen. So this flower is a hermaphrodite. It has both male and female parts. But here's the really interesting thing. The female parts are kind

of reluctant about sex with strangers. The male parts are really enthusiastic about it, right? Really? Yes. So those pollen grains will try to fertilize anything they land on. But that long style is basically a test that the female part of the plant exposes any pollen grain to. The pollen grain has to grow a pollen tube down that long style in order to get to the eggs. In other words, that flower, the female parts are coy and the male parts are a bit randy. Now, this is one plant. This is one flower that does not agree with itself about how enthusiastic to be about sex with strangers. Well, you can predict this just on the numbers too, right?

It's going to produce, I don't know what, orders of magnitude more pollen than it has ovules to be fertilized. Right. So it's only got a few chances at picking the right pollen to be fertilized, but the pollen can be broadcast and go anywhere. And if it's successful and it's not that successful, it's still okay. It's still kind of a win. So the payoff for putting up with talking about plants here is that you realize there's something in the universe that even when it's building a plant which is really not like an animal even when it's building a plant and we look at it we say ah these are the boy parts and those are the girl parts they actually have some analogy to males and females amongst animals where we can spot the

behavior easily and that that is mind-blowing, because, you correct me if I'm wrong here, but the common ancestor between these plants, these land plants that have pollen and ovules like this, and animals that have eggs and sperm, the common ancestor is a single-celled photosynthetic ocean creature, a single-celled creature. It's not a complex creature. So what that means is that two totally different clades that are built around totally different rules, at the point they get around to spitting out something that looks like two sexes, it recovers some of the things that we as human beings are familiar with from Shakespeare, right? The point about male and female is so general that it even covers

plants. And then, okay, that's true. And then we have fungi, which break every single rule. They don't look anything like this. They do have stuff that we would regard as different sexes, but they can have like 50, I think there are even hundreds of mating types in some species of fungi. So it's not that the universe says this is the only way to organize a creature, but it does say this is the way a creature will be organized if certain things are true, like there's something egg-like and something sperm-like. So that's very powerful when we're reaching into biology and we're saying male and female are patterns of behavior that tend to be associated with certain types of gametes. When you have two gamete types, something called anisogamy, you will have two sexes,

and those sexes will follow rules that we see over and over and over again, repeated, plants, animals. One of the things that we discussed in the green room before the show started was that what we are is some weird animal that can communicate in very, very complex ways. And one of the things that we do when we can communicate in such complex ways is explain all these things that we've learned about science. But another thing that we do is we distort reality to fit what we would desire it to be rather than what it is.

How much of that is what's going on today? A huge amount. Huge amount. And unpacking that, learning not to impose your expectations on nature is key to understanding it. And it really is a skill you have to learn. And, you know, that way, when nature does tell you something about what males and females are like, and you know that you're not talking about something that you've learned by being human. You're talking about something you've learned by looking at other creatures. Then there's a lot of power

in understanding what those patterns are, especially when you get to humans, because of all the creatures, I think this is fair to say, of all the creatures that I've spent any time thinking about, humans are maybe sexually the weirdest. Weirder than ducks?

Oh, yeah. Nicer than ducks, too. For the most part. On average. On average. But human beings are partially sex role reversed. Okay. Sex role reversal is not unheard of in,

in animals. It happens, but our sex role reversal is so weird and it is not complete. So there's stuff going on in human beings that is absolutely novel. I mean, in fact, here's a mind blowing fact that really you could start here and just follow back to the implications of this. There are, how many species of mammals do you think there are? Whew. Half a million? No, no, no, no. You're way off. 30. There are 30 and then a few more. There are about 4,000. That's it? 5,000 now we think. Really? Well, I. There are about 4,000.

That's it? 5,000 now, we think. Really? Well, I still think it's 4,000. Okay, well, this is going to mess me up because I don't know how to work back from 5,000. I don't know which clade has grown. But, yeah, we've got about 5,000 species of mammals. The ratios are pretty consistent still.

They're pretty consistent. So half of them are rodents. A quarter of them are bats. I studied bats in graduate school. That was my thing. People never expected a quarter of all mammal species are bats. That's pretty crazy. Anyway, we got...

They've never been to Austin. Four to 5,000 species of these things. Human beings are the only one of those mammal species in which breasts remain enlarged when not lactating. I find that fact absolutely remarkable. You have 4,000 to 5,000 species of lactating animals. And in human beings, breasts have been made persistent when not lactating. And in sexual interactions, they've obviously become a signal. And we know

more or less what they are a signal of. They are a signal of having the resources to produce a baby, which doesn't register with us as important as it should. It's much more important to our ancestors. It was a vital characteristic because most of the time females were either pregnant, they were feeding a baby and therefore not fertile, they were starving and therefore not fertile. And so a fertile female who is essentially advertising that she has the resources to produce a viable offspring is a a rare commodity i mean i hate to talk in those terms i i mean nothing normative by it i'm just simply describing it in sort of as if i was an alien looking down on people in their evolutionary history. But the fact that that signal finds itself utilized in the way that it does on the internet tells us where we are. You know what I'm saying?

So one of the other things that is unique about humans, at least with regard to our most recent ancestors, the other primates, is that we have concealed ovulation. So you can't tell when a woman is fertile, whereas you can tell when a baboon is fertile or a vervet monkey or a chimp. You've got sexual swellings and other indicators of fertility. How do those lizards find out? I don't know. Because if they determine, like, which female plays the stimulation role in the ovulation cycle. It's probably going to be chemical, so some kind of smell, pheromone, scent thing.

Vomeronasal, some large. So you see reptiles putting out their tongue. What they're doing is they're picking up large molecules that don't volatilize, and then they are touching an organ that they have that's connected to their brains to detect a kind of chemical signal that, weirdly enough, I don't know how true this story is going to end up being. Probably true, but I have a little trepidation about it. There's an organ that detects these large molecules, the vomeronasal organ. And it's like having another sense of smell that we just don't,

we can't intuit what it would be like because we don't have it. But we actually do have remnants of the organ. It's just not plugged in. Yeah, the story is humans have it, but it's not connected up. Yeah, I will not be surprised. How not connected up it is is something that we're not totally confident of. I won't be surprised if it turns out to be important in some way we didn't know. The way tonsils or the appendix have turned out to have values that we should have guessed.

But so humans have these persistent, constant sexual signals in the form of breasts, among other things, and then also have obscured when we are and are not fertile. And so more than any other primates, humans have basically constant sexual availability, constant sexual interest. And yes, there are ebbs and flows and such. But female humans, more than female chimps or baboons or any other primates, are interested in sex more reliably across their ovulatory cycle than any of these other primates. Yes, let's unpack that a little bit. So in human beings, ovulation is concealed so that it is not clear when a female is fertile. It is concealed

from the female herself. Now that always gets pushed back if you say that in a room full of students because- People always say, I know. I know. But the truth is women do not know reliably. You can do things like monitor temperature and you can get a much better sense. But it is- With novel tools, right? That no one had until 50 years ago at the most. Can any woman feel it in her body? Or is that? Maybe, but. Some women claim to be able to.

And there may be some self-knowledge possible there. Some people also claim to be able to pick lottery tickets. I can pick them, just not winning ones. I'm not prepared to say that that never happens. Okay. Right. not winning ones. I'm not prepared to say that that never happens.

Okay. Right. But the interesting fact is that this, when a woman is fertile, does not have to be obscure to the woman at all. Evolution appears to have taken that piece of information away. A baboon would know when it was fertile and it would alter its behavior. A female. But so would all the baboon boys know when she was fertile. Do you think that's because over time people have discerned i mean over the course of evolution people have discerned that

having a child also is partially a burden and so maybe more intelligent creatures as humans got more and more intelligent they said well it seems like a little inconvenient to have a child, whereas a baboon would not think that way and not contemplate the future. So there was some sort of evolutionary advantage for it to be concealed in humans and for outright displays of sexuality to be prominent throughout their entire life. I suspect the answer is a whole lot more horrible than that. Really? Yeah. Horrible?

Yeah, absolutely horrible. Which is that to the extent that a woman knows when she is fertile, she actually may be vulnerable. In other words, to the extent that sexual— Vulnerable to coercive sex. Yeah. Oh, so vulnerable to rape. Yeah. Oh, so vulnerable to rape. Yeah. So that if a woman was outright signaling that she was ovulating, that she would be more likely to be raped by other humans. Oh, I think there's no question about that.

So in a sense, hiding this information from everybody appears to be an evolutionary solution to a problem. I don't think we can name it exactly because so much is obscure about our recent ancestors. You know, we only have bones. Nothing else fossilizes. And that doesn't, you know, the behavior doesn't fossilize. So there's a lot we can't say. But it is interesting arriving at the present, we have modern women and we can say it is interesting that evolution has robbed women themselves of a piece of information that one would initially think would be so valuable that it would be prominent. For it to be obscure at all is

fascinating. So the other thing that Heather mentioned, which I think belongs front and center in this conversation, is having sex for pleasure rather than reproductive purposes. So we're not the only ones to do that. There are oboes, dolphins, others. There are a few. But it's rare. It's very rare. There are a few other species that appear to do this and they don't appear to do it the way humans do.

Is the dolphin example, is it year-round? Do you know? I don't remember. So anyway, the idea that sex in human beings has taken on these other important roles in pair bonding, for example, is very special. And the fact that it continues after menopause, I mean, menopause itself is special. Menopause, the idea that that's not your reproductive apparatus failing due to age, that is your reproductive apparatus deciding to shut down because you've moved into a new phase. Basically, you've moved into the grandma phase. And the grandma phase is essential in humans, where it is not essential in almost any other creature.

I think elephants occasionally and orcas, I believe orcas also have that pattern. But anyway, all of these things are so different about humans and they have so much to do with sex that having a mind numbing conversation about sexual signals in modern times is, it's actually just kind of painful to listen to it because you want all of these pieces of information on the table so that at the point we get to the discussion about what what do we do about modernity that we are not you know playing with toys we're actually talking about the real stuff this modernity i mean the way human beings represent sexuality or the way sexuality is represented um what's wrong with it like what what are the what are the key things that stand

out as an evolutionary biologist um well let me try an experiment with you this is this is uh i'm concerned this isn't going to work but i hope hope, I hope it does. Even if it doesn't work, it'll work. Okay. I would like to try and experiment with you as a, a red blooded male. Okay. I would like you to conjure the image in your mind of a woman who is not beautiful,

but is hot. Okay. Can you do it? Hmm. Okay. Can you do it? Sure. Okay. Can you conjure the image of a woman who is beautiful but not hot? Yes. No problem. No problem.

Me either. This, I think, actually is a window into much that is wrong with what we think about human sexuality. I think most people, if you ask them, without doing that little experiment, to conjure or to define what it is for somebody to be hot, you would get answers and people would tell you that hot was sort of like the height of beauty. Which is very frightening, if that's true, because hotness wanes with age. It deteriorates. It just can't help it. The discovery that beauty actually is a different parameter tells a whole different story about what's going on with us people, with men and with women. And I think both men and women are confused by this. So if it is true, and I mean, I know it is true, I can look inside

my own mind and I can say that at least for some men, it is true that beauty and hotness are almost uncorrelated. There are people who have both traits, but I have no trouble seeing that image of a woman who is hot, but not the least bit beautiful. And I have no trouble seeing that image of a woman who is hot but not the least bit beautiful. And I know lots of women who are beautiful and not hot. And I also, if I take the category of women who are beautiful but not hot, there are a lot of older women in it. a lot of older women in it, right? I know women in their 60s and 70s who have poise, have aged gracefully, they're gray as can be, they may be wrinkled. But if you talk to them, one does have the sense. I'm talking to a beautiful person, right? And I'm not being maudlin here. If it was just a simple fact that both beauty and hotness waned with age, I would say so. But it is not the case.

So what's going on? Why do we have these two categories? And why do we assume, I mean, if you look at advertising, you will get the message that hotness is where it's at, right? Hotness is the thing. It's the only standard possible. It's the only standard. And so women are aspiring to it, and then they're fighting it as it wanes and all of this. And here's what I suspect is up.

Because males are males, they have, I want to say they have two reproductive strategies. Really, they have three reproductive strategies, and one of them is so awful that it's really just unpleasant to even enter it into the discussion. You're talking about rape? Yep. So the first reproductive strategy that men have, the one that would generally have succeeded, and by the way, we can talk about monogamy versus polyamory and all of that at some point, but I'm not saying anything that is inherent. It's not inherently about monogamy versus polyamory and all of that at some point. But I'm not saying anything that is inherent. It's not inherently about monogamy. The way males have typically reproduced is they have invested in their offspring

and the mothers of their offspring. That's the go-to mechanism for reproducing as a human. Why? Because human babies are so needy that one person trying to raise them on their own is hobbled by just the sheer difficulty of trying to manage an infant and a toddler while trying to accomplish the other things of being a person. So let me just add here that the idea that monogamy

has been ubiquitous throughout human history is not completely accepted, but that there is good evidence for it on a lot of fronts. And one of the points against it is that we remain somewhat sexually dimorphic, that men are on average a bit taller, a bit more muscular, much more muscular, but that we are so much less sexually dimorphic than even our ancestors in more recent times than when we were sharing more recent common ancestors with chimps, that we are moving towards a more monogamous situation.

So just I think you said something that was unclear at the beginning. There has been a lot of polygyny where one male has multiple females in human history. Probably the majority of human cultures have been polygynous. The majority of people on earth today belong to cultures that are at least nominally monogamous. And we should talk about what that shift is and what it means to us and what's desirable and all of that. But the basic point that human babies are so expensive and difficult to raise that you need a team to do it. And, you know, in part, this is a chicken and egg question.

It's not a good term because it's quite clear which came first. But this is a situation where when you have a team, you can also afford to have a baby that's more needy. And there's nothing good about a needy baby, but there is something good about what you can get if you can tolerate a needy baby. You can get a baby that's a lot more nuanced when it grows up. So males have traditionally invested in offspring. But a male who is investing in their offspring, should they happen on an opportunity in which a female who is fertile and capable of producing

an offspring does not require commitment from them in order to have sex, that's an evolutionary bargain. A male who can either convince a female or finds a female who's willing to produce a baby but not expect any support in return, that's such a power. It's like winning the lottery evolutionarily. So it would have almost never happened in history because women, because babies are so expensive, are wired to avoid this like the plague. You don't want to get stuck raising a baby on your own if you could, through committing to somebody, get a partner in raising an offspring. So how does birth control factor into that? Well, we'll get there in a second, but let's just get the two strategies on the table. Males, in general, have succeeded reproductively by investing in their offspring and their offspring's mothers.

When they have the opportunity to produce offspring with no commitment, they have a hard time resisting that opportunity because it's such an evolutionary win. But that doesn't mean it would have been very common in history because females would avoid it. So can't look away from hot is about that second strategy. Right. So hot is this channel that men can, they are wired in such a way that they actually, we've been robbed of every useful term, they are triggered by the sight of a woman who is broadcasting hotness, right? where we have advertisers essentially creating a kind of insecurity because insecurity causes people to spend money they otherwise wouldn't. That insecurity has women trying to capture male attention by broadcasting hotness,

which of course works because men have a hard time ignoring hotness. But what I think women often don't understand is that getting a man's attention by broadcasting hotness has him in the frame of mind of the second reproductive strategy. And it is actually counterproductive to getting his attention for the first reproductive strategy. Because men have historically, this is by the way, this is where I'm going to get in huge trouble with people because this is going to sound like an accusation. Really, I'm just trying to describe what has been and then we can talk about what we should do about it. productive terms will not leap on a sexual opportunity just because it's available, because what's at stake is so great historically for women. This is not true anymore because of birth control. But historically, it would be true that a sexual interaction is basically baby roulette. And baby roulette is a dangerous game to play. And so we get at some of what's true underneath the stereotype of the

Madonna whore dichotomy, that neither of those words is quite right because no one wants a Madonna. No one wants a virgin as a life partner, right? You want to have a vibrant sexual relationship with your life partner, but the, are you triggering the hotness, can I get a baby out of you and never see it strategy in men? Or are you triggering the, oh my god, you're gorgeous, and

I feel like we could do this together. I hate to interrupt you, but you've got to pull this thing close to you. I'm sorry. Just move that sucker around so it's comfortable where you're sitting. How about that? It's very different. It sounds okay in our ears, but it's very different than the audio. Sorry. Perfect.

No good. So, um, so, so anyway, the, the Madonna horror complex, which is this famous thing, isn't the paradox that we are led to believe men are interested in, you know, as Heather points out, Madonna and horror are the wrong terms. They're very charged. But men are interested in both of these reproductive strategies, but they are not interested. They are not paradoxically searching for them in the same individual. Well, isn't there an issue also that today, human beings, males in particular, are not looking at women purely in terms of

someone to reproduce with. They're looking in terms of what is sexually pleasurable. What do they find attractive? And when they see a person, it is almost, it's very rare that they look at a woman and say, this is a woman who I would like to breed with. They say, I would like to practice breeding with her. But here's where our language gets in the way, right? Like we're telling ourselves stories based on, I mean, yeah, birth control changed everything, actually.

But it's so new. Exactly right. It's so new. I mean, there are not very reliable forms of birth control in lots of cultures around the world. But actually fully reliable birth control is decades old. So we shouldn't expect the stories we tell ourselves about what we're looking for to be a match for what we're actually looking for yet. Because we haven't had time to update our software even. Right.

Right. So the software is still wired the same way to look at a woman who you believe would be a good carrier of babies, someone who would be very maternal, someone who's attractive, they have good features. This would be someone who you'd want to breed with, whereas the second option would be someone who you could sneak it in on. Well, I would say with regard to the first strategy, it's more than that. More than that. So that the first strategy, as you just described it, sounds very traditional female role. Right. And mostly, especially when populations were moving across frontiers and actually like expanding the scope of where humans were, what you needed in a partner, both male and

female, was someone with whom you could share all of life's challenges, right? It wasn't just about taking care of baby because, you know, dad was, A, also doing parental care, but mothers and fathers were in it together. And it was their division of labor, of course. And was their specialization, of course. Did that specialization always look the same? No, it didn't. And in fact, cross-culturally, this is, it's fascinating. Like some tasks end up highly gendered across cultures, but which gender does it is different. Weaving turns out to be a pretty highly gendered task in different cultures, but sometimes it's only women who do it, and sometimes it's only men. really only men do in most cultures. And this is a great review, an anthropology paper from the early 70s.

So this is mostly pre-industrial cultures they're looking at. But the jobs that across cultures where it happens, only men do, include the hunting of large marine mammals and iron smelting. Those two things. And there's a few others, but those are the top. Large marine mammals. You should never do them at the same time. It's whale hunting and smelting of oars. Wow.

Yeah, definitely don't do that. Yeah, no. It doesn't work. Burn a hole through your boat. You keep quenching the thing by accident. Yeah, so I think, you know, the answer to the question you asked is that the whole system has been hijacked by the novelty of our current circumstances. And what I was trying to get at before is that the size of the win of an ancestral male who reproduced with a female that didn't require investment from them, investment from them. The size of that win is so great that it causes men to default to thinking about that when it appears to be available. And so in a world where there's birth control,

and therefore the stakes for women for having sex have been greatly reduced, and therefore more women are interested in having sex without commitment. The problem is men don't really know what they're looking for because there is this level of triggering that they cannot overcome. And so the other point I want to make on this front is, yes, men are interested in sexual pleasure, as are women. Men and women are overlapping but distinct in what that means. But I think if we were to say, hey sexual pleasure is awesome and you should live your life so as to maybe not maximize it but come close to maximizing it, that sexual pleasure is so desirable that you should live your life in a way that you get as much of that thing as you can.

That would not necessarily say that the way to do it was to go around banging strangers, right? Because this is a multifaceted phenomenon. And there is one thing that gets left out of this discussion almost every time I hear people talk about it, which is that the sex that one has when the stakes are really high, right, when you're really into somebody, that's a very pleasurable kind of sex that is not reproduced by low stakes situation. And so we are comparing things and it sounds like, well, if sexual pleasure is what you're after, then more sex is certainly the way to get there. But, you know.

And that tends to look like the argument tends to be more sex with more people. More varied sex partners is the obvious way to optimize sexual pleasure. And actually that assumption hasn't been investigated. Wasn't it difficult to accomplish? What? Isn't that why it's not, it hasn hasn't been investigated. Wasn't it difficult to accomplish? What? Isn't that why it hasn't really been investigated? I mean, how many people are having sex with multiple partners and taking notes and being studied? Well, I don't know.

I mean, college students, you know, tell you anything for 50 bucks. So there are lots of these studies that, you know, do involve asking a lot of college students, which is not a very broad sample. that do involve asking a lot of college students, which is not a very broad sample. But again, this is a fairly new phenomenon in the last five, six decades where you could do it and not worry about reproducing. Well, so the question really is if we step back from our own lives

and we say, what would the rules be if I wanted to maximize this set of things? If I wanted to get these values out of my life, how would I alter my behavior? I don't think you would come up with, hey, sex with strangers is the answer to all of this. In fact, I think sex with strangers is pretty low grade in terms of what it delivers. it's pretty low grade in terms of what it delivers. So there are some cultures that encourage a lot of early fooling around between individuals. And it's considered low stakes, and it stops at some point.

And that's one thing that what's going on in modern American culture is there's no end point. It's just considered a good that more sex with more strangers is inherently going to result in more pleasure. And therefore, if we're actually interested in sexual pleasure, that's what we should be doing. And if you look at cultures that have taken sexual pleasure seriously, if you look at like tantric sex, right, it isn't about sex with strangers. It's about cultivating a sexual relationship that increases sexual pleasure to an extreme height that you won't reach if you aren't careful in architecting it. So in other words, it's about delayed gratification. I mean, really, that's the missing idea here is that delayed gratification is actually a strong contributor to sexual pleasure.

Isn't this sex with strangers thing attractive because it's difficult to accomplish? Is that part of it? Well, I mean, first of all, it's difficult to accomplish for men, but not very difficult to accomplish for women. Right. And not that attractive to women. Not nearly as attractive to women as it is to men. Women are being told that it should be attractive to us, right?

Sex and the city. Yeah, very much so. And it's because it's imagined that symmetry is equality. Okay, right. And that's, I mean, I think that's maybe one of the main things we're pushing back against here is that we are not making the claim that one sex is better than the other, but the idea that we are identical is absurd on its face. Well, in our culture today, one of the things that is a big standout as being very

novel is social media. This is a completely new thing. And this social media also being used to attract sex partners is a very new thing. I mean, I had a whole bit in my last act, my last Netflix special, about some girl who lives in Florida who has not – she probably has 9 billion people on her Instagram now. She had 9 million followers, and all she does is take pictures of her ass. And I was saying, science needs to study her

because this is a new type of human being. We don't know anything about her what she she it has nothing to do what she says it has nothing to do with what she's accomplished in life it literally is about people focusing on her ass so this is why why is she doing it there's an attention but she's getting attention i'm sure there's an economic benefit to it too but that came later the attention came first. She didn't embark on this journey like going, I know what I'll do. I'm going to figure out how to make money off my ass.

Because every girl comes of age and discovers that that's an asset, whether you want it to be or not, that now I'm being looked at. How am I going to play it? And some number of people play it right and some number of people play it well and but but again i so there is what i would call a two-way failure of empathy so you'll give me a little a little leash here we empathize with another individual by using our own minds and whatever it is that we have as the content of our minds and then we run the data of somebody else's situation through our minds and whatever it is that we have as the content of our minds. And then we run the data of somebody else's situation through our minds. And we say, how would I feel in that situation? And in general, this works really well if you share circuitry with somebody and it works not

so well where your circuitry is different. So there are lots of places where males and females who grew up, Heather and I both grew up in L.A., there's a certain amount of stuff that we can intuit about what the other would think about something just based on the fact that we grew up in the same period in the same place. But males and females, there's a place where we top out, and we can't understand what the other is experiencing because it is very unlike what we would experience. So for example, if you were walking down the street, let's say before you were a well-known guy, okay? You're an anonymous guy walking down the street and imagine that there's a group of

women talking somewhere and you walk by and they're like, look at that. That's one fine hunk of man. How do you feel? Yeah. Woo. You feel pretty good? Well, I don't feel threatened. That's the difference. You certainly don't feel.

The difference between a man experiencing that with women is I'm not going to get gang raped. Yeah, but do you feel good? Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Of course you would, right? You feel complimented. Right, but it's very different with the opposite sex because there's no threat. It's very different with the opposite sex, not only because, let's neutralize the threat

part of it. Which is, I mean, it's huge for sure, but there's other stuff going on too. But here's the part that I think men don't intuit until somebody points it out to them. Because men have two different reproductive strategies, and one of them is about long-term investment, and the other one is about have sex with them, impregnate them, and never see them again. When a man whistles at a woman, right, and he compliments essentially how hot she looks. He is essentially offering to stick her with a child that will then be her responsibility for the better part of two decades. That's not a very nice compliment, right? That's a weird way of looking at it. I agree with you.

But I see exactly where you're going with that. But, man, I never thought about it that way before. And I don't think most people have either. Well, this is my point, though. It's right in front of us. Why should it? There's another thing, too. So you've just identified a single guy catcalling, maybe, right?

But a woman walking past a construction site and getting five, six, seven guys whistling. Who are those calls for? Not necessarily for her. It's communication between the men. Yeah. They're signaling that they're not gay. Yeah, they're signaling to each other, hey, did you see that?

I saw that. I'm into that. And, I mean, yes, it's a total objectification, and it renders the woman involved who is, you know, receiving this thing as almost a non-entity, but it feels totally personal, and yet it's not necessarily about the woman. And so, you know, all the discussion of, oh, my God, these catcalls are awful, and it's a necessarily about the woman and so you know all the discussion

of oh my god these catcalls are are awful and it's just it's a pain in the ass to walk down the street and have to deal with it for a young woman it's true but it's also ignoring the fact of it being communication between men and you know should they stop probably but um but it's not just about male female communication it's male male competition male-female communication. It's male-male competition as well. That type of communication, though, only occurs if you've been raised poorly, you don't have any sisters, or you don't have any daughters. And if you have all those things, you're some kind of a monster. Like if you have a mother that you love and a sister that you love,

and if you have daughters and you still cat call it some woman walking down the street there's something really wrong with you oh but so um in this day oh i i think it's it's very very wrong but it doesn't work it is also so common yeah i don't i mean it must can't work it must work occasionally no it works to let the other guys know you're not gay. Right, so that's it. I mean, that's part of why I say. And it probably doesn't even do that.

No, actually, let's, I mean, this is interesting because I think this is something actually Heather probably won't intuit either. But I'm wondering if you'll spot it when I mention it. Which is, there is a part of being a male that because, I mean, the thing is most males in history are losers who didn't reproduce, right? Reproduction was not that easy to accomplish in human history. It was way easier to starve or die on a battlefield or a lot of other things. So there is a way in which there is a part of the male psyche that plays very remote possibilities, right? And, you know, it's weird if you're talking about being in a city and construction workers sitting on a girder whistling at somebody walking by, if we calculate the chances that any one of them end up actually in a conversation with her, the chances are pretty low. But if you imagine that those guys are actually acting from a mind that evolved in

much smaller circumstances, a small town where everybody knew everybody. And so whatever it is in their mind that causes them to have these interactions would have been much more likely there would be later interactions with the same person. And so I think that a male that is not thinking carefully about what they are doing ends up, you know, flirting with and basically building a rapport that is about some future potential that's almost certain never to be realized. But it makes sense to cultivate because, you know, if you cultivate a thousand tiny little potentials and almost all of them go bust, but occasionally one works out, that's a win. So the point is the cost is small. And, you know, you never know. The woman who gets catcalled might, I can't even imagine the circumstance. That hole you never know is like just dig a hole in the middle of the street.

You might find gold. It seems like a Hail Mary, but sometimes Hail Marys work. Yeah, it must have happened sometime in history. But if you had to look at the numbers, it would probably be pretty staggering. Yeah, but okay so i mean as long as we're in this territory yes it must have happened in history but so many things that were very remote uh contingencies in history have apparently produced offspring like um you know the uh apparent tendency of people being hung to orgasm, right? What is that?

That is likely to be the body taking one last shot. There's no point. There's no way. This is a new one on me. You think that ever resulted? You're talking about autoerotic asphyxiation? Is that what you're talking about? Well, actually, I wasn't talking about that, but it's a better example.

It shows you that there's some part. Being hung? What do you mean then? I mean. He's talking about actual execution. I think grammatically I mean being hanged. Right. Being hanged.

Yeah. I'm so confused. So they get orgasms? When they die? I'm working from anecdote here. I have read that, but I don't know of any. How many people are checking the underwear? People just got hung.

But my point would be, what has to be true in order for such a pattern to evolve so let's take auto erotic asphyxiation it's dandelion strategy i mean is what you're arguing basically this is um you know dandelions who go to seed as after you pick them and spread their seeds right like is that going to work? Last-ditch efforts at reproduction. Last-ditch efforts at reproduction. Hail Marys. And so the point is, I think this is probably not obvious unless you're used to thinking evolutionarily, but in order for a pattern to occur

where some entity releases sexual propagules on death, in order for that to evolve, it has to have worked enough times for that pattern to have accumulated. And so if autoerotic asphyxiation is the result of people tapping into that thing and traversing a landscape near death in order to increase sexual pleasure, what that suggests is that that landscape near death has actually had a certain amount of reproduction happen in it that has resulted in this circuitry being present.

Can you imagine a scenario? And can you imagine a scenario where that trait would be passed down to the offspring? I can imagine that. I mean, let's do it the other way. People have had a lot of sex over evolutionary history. A lot of bad things have happened to people over evolutionary history. Every so often those two things intersect, right? In other words, every so often the catastrophe, the enemy spills over the wall, whatever it is.

And so I don't know what the pattern would be. It may simply be that jeopardy is the key factor. And actually jeopardy would be expected to happen an awful lot. So, for example, to the extent that – and in fact we see a lot of this stuff in primates where there's a question about how public the sexual interaction between two individuals amongst chimps is, for example. So when two chimps are having sex, if the male chimp is not the dominant male, he has everything to lose in being discovered. They hide in the bushes. Right. They hide.

And so then the question is, is the female advertising that they are having sex by making noises that make it visible, in which case that creates jeopardy. So there's a whole landscape of stuff that has happened in evolutionary history, both with humans, with pre-humans, with apes. Other non-human animals. I've heard that argued as well about women with very loud moaning of pleasure that they're really trying to attract other males. I think that – That was in Sex at Dawn. Well, I would be super cautious about Sex at Dawn as a book. That particular finding I think is probably right.

Why would you be cautious about Sex, It, Dawn as a book? Because the book is, I believe, quite cherry-picked in order to produce a particular, what I regard as a false sophistication about human sexual behavior. It makes us have to be wantonly promiscuous across time in a way that doesn't seem to actually fit with a more careful reading of what we are how dare you chris ryan how dare you well i don't know i don't know

i don't know who's right let's put it this way that book is a pretty good strategy for getting people to go to bed with you and feel sophisticated about. Ooh. Hmm. We'll leave that there. So the chimps hiding in the bushes, the beta chimps, as it were, the males would have to hide their sexuality from the alphas because the bigger, stronger males would probably take the mate from them, and then their likelihood of reproducing whoops would be greatly diminished oh yeah they would be punished for it and they're going to get cuffed too yeah they're going to get cuffed or more cuffed that's an interesting what is cuffed yeah that's a funny way of describing it well there we are yeah we get stuck there yeah sorry sorry my apologies i mean i should know

what that means i've heard it before but it's now um what out of all this can we unpack um about the way we're interpreting what's acceptable and not acceptable about male and female interaction in 2018? Yeah. Well, I mean, we're. Because it seems to be getting redefined, right? Yeah. And it's a hot mess. Yeah.

What's wrong with it as a biologist, as a person who understands humans? Yeah. Let's go to Me Too. All right. Let's go to Me Too. The Me Too movement looks like an honorable thing at first because most men are not nasty human beings and don't behave towards women in a way that most women have been behaved towards by men. Almost every woman who at all fits their the norms for their culture has been harassed in some way when they were a young woman. That is just that is true. Most men don't do that. That's also true. So imagining

that most men are behaving in some kind of a toxic way and I just I don't like that word but imagining that because most women have experienced harassment most men are therefore harassing is an error of logic of statistics of humanity so we go from this place of where were there some monsters out there Wow was it a good moment to reveal some of the monstrosity that was happening? And are there some bright lines? Like, I'm prepared to draw a couple of bright lines. Everyone deserves not to be touched if they don't want to be touched. And everyone deserves to exist in a situation where there are no quid pro quos,

for instance, of their employment. If you want to stay employed or if you want to be advanced in your employment, then you're going to need to do this sexual thing with me. Quid pro quos, don't be touched when you don't want to be touched, those things seem honorable and true, and for God's sake, can't we all agree to those? But then it went too far. And women are arguing, some, some women are arguing, that it doesn't matter if innocent men go down and because many women have experienced this it must be

all men I mean we were actually hearing from people that any boy that you are raising is potentially a rapist no sorry most men I know couldn't rape, actually. It's just, it's not what men are. So Me Too went off the rails, and it had an opportunity to actually really wake a lot of good men up to how ubiquitous the experience of walking around on the streets and being catcalled and being harassed and sometimes being groped and sometimes worse than that is for a woman. And it took it to this absurd point where now most, I think, increasingly reasonable people are looking at it going, well, then if you're claiming that, what else that you're saying isn't true? And that puts the early stages of the movement at risk. Now, when you see the monsters, and they are real. The male monsters. Yeah, the male monsters are real. And you see that now when they're getting exposed, like Harvey Weinstein is a perfect example.

The easiest one. He's the classic example, right? Or Bill Cosby. When these monsters get exposed, first of all, it's a good thing, but second of all, don't you think that the reason why they got away with it in the first place is because they were able to victimize these people in secret and that they either had enablers or, in Cosby's case, everyone was unconscious? I mean, there's some great good to exposing these things.

But in doing so, the overzealous approach of accusing all men of being potential rapists, isn't it just an overreaction and won't it balance itself out? Or do you think that it's more complicated than that? It's going to backfire. Yeah, it looks like a power grab. But won't the backfiring bounce itself out? I mean, reasonable people like you or myself, we're always going to recognize the difference that there are monsters. Yes.

And we're not going to deny monsters because someone goes too far and they accuse Garrison Keillor of being a monster when we know that that's not true. It doesn't make sense. The story doesn't make sense. So because most people who I've talked to about the Garrison Keillor story, which he was consoling a woman and he touched her back and then she pulled back and he apologized and I didn't mean to do that. And then he sent her an email apologizing. She said, no big deal. Don't worry about it. They were good for a while.

And then years later, when all this Me Too thing, she just decides, I remember something that was wrong, and let's take this guy down, which didn't make any sense that, first of all, well, let's leave it alone. It didn't make any sense, but where's Garrison Keillor now? Right. Yeah, he hasn't been resurrected.

He hasn't been resurrected. They took his shows off the air. It doesn't make any sense. Put aside whether or not you like him as an artist or a creator. They actually destroyed not just him, but his legacy. For a hug. For something that at the time both parties agreed was no big deal. Yeah.

I just don't understand it. It's completely unacceptable, and it's the death of justice. Was that just getting caught up in the hysteria of just like trying to find, there's one, put that fire out immediately? So we have a couple of problems. And one of the problems is that the folks who are advancing this movement and the other parallel, I wish they hadn't taken the term social justice because we need a replacement term for that that is not overzealous. But those movements have engaged in

a kind of naive conclusion making that makes them inevitably hijacked. They get inevitably hijacked by bad actors. So if you are essentially looking at a situation, if you say, we must believe all victims, that's like putting out a neon sign for bad actors that wish to utilize this structure. And there will be bad actors in every population. Male as a population, female as a population. There are monstrous males who've been behaving predatorily. There will be women who will take advantage of this and accuse people without reason? I mean, I don't know whether the numbers are robust or not, but I have heard numbers that somewhere between 1% to 4% of the population

are sociopathic. If you set up a system in which we are obligated to believe every victim, then those people will come out of the woodwork and they will use this to level their enemies. And so at the very least, what that tells you is rule number one, you cannot make the rule you must believe all victims or you will have lots of people piling into the category of victim that don't deserve to be there. And who is hurt most by that. Not only the people who are going to be sabotaged by bad actors, but the people who have suffered the worst cases of, you know, rape, they are effectively having the terrible things that have happened to them diluted by stories that are either fictional or minor that are being lumped in. It's further victimization of them.

It is. It's a transfer of well-being from the people who have been most harmed to people who have been less harmed or are cynically using these structures. So if the idea of Me Too, of the reckoning that has finally come for these really terrible guys who were getting away with all of this awful stuff, if that is close to your heart, then what you should want is a set of rules that is careful enough and robust enough that we can keep holding those kinds of people to account.

What will happen if we don't do that, and I promise you this, from a game theoretic perspective, if we decide you must believe all victims and all transgressions are equally bad, we're going to turn the thing to 11 for everything. How did that happen? I agree with you, but how did that happen? If you're cynical. It's the death of nuance in part.

Yeah, it is the death of nuance because if you're wielding this thing as a weapon, right, if what you want to do is turn the tables on all men, if you want to take power and say, you listen, well, this is a frightening weapon. So in order to make that weapon maximally dangerous, you- You equate rape with catcall. Yeah. You say it's all one. There's nothing a woman could ever do that would increase her likelihood of facing any of this. And, you know, we should cover that in a second because that's one of the it's another one of these booby traps where you can very easily say the wrong thing. And suddenly you're on the defensive, even though what you said is very rational. But also it denies the reality of what male-female relationships look like

when they're at all healthy. There's going to be risk. There is risk as you get to know people. And we're just meeting, say, instead of having met in high school so many years ago. I don't know if I like you yet. You don't know if you like me yet. We're going to take some chances.

And maybe you're going to say something wrong, and I'm not going to be thrilled with it. Are you at fault? Do I blame you? Do I cry harassment because you said something that didn't quite fall right on my ears? Or did it sound right, and I kind of like you anyway, and so I go like, it's fine. You know, we're good. right and I kind of like you anyway and so I go like it's fine you know we're good well it really depends on you know how it how I receive that depends a lot on how I feel about you otherwise you could say exactly the same words and you know you could say it and someone else could say it and from that guy I might

feel like I kind of wish you hadn't said that but that has to mean that that isn't a deep problem that he said it because we're engaged in something where we're trying to discover. Do we like each other? Are we into each other? Like, what's going on here? So the process of discovery is going to involve mistake and risk and even some sort of, it's game playing. You know, you're involved in the social game in which you're trying to figure out who each other are. And after the fact saying, that guy's kind of gross. So the thing that he said was harassment. Sorry, no, not not acceptable. It's changing the rules of the game based on whether or not you like the particular individual.

And that's not a legit move. So we got to be super careful here. Yeah. One thing that is true is we are facing a landscape in which we are, I think, effectively rewriting the rules of male-female interaction in order to make sex with strangers perfectly safe. Now, sex with strangers can't be perfectly safe in a world in which you're dealing with, let's say it's 1% sociopaths. You can't make a world in which it's safe to take a sociopath home and have sex with them, right? That's not going to happen. But in order to try to make it safe, we're going to turn up all of these protections. So for example, it safe. We're going to turn up all of these protections. So for example, we've got the issue of affirmative consent. Now, affirmative consent is a great failsafe. In a circumstance where you are dealing with a stranger, it seems like it

would be absolutely essential because the danger of a miscommunication is so great that you have to be perfectly explicit. And there can be, there's no room for any coyness or subtlety about it. In other words, it has to effectively be transactional. But no courtship that's going to make it into history books or literature is going to involve affirmative consent at every stage. You into it? Yes. How about now? Yeah. Do you guys remember that video that they released? There was a video that, boy, I don't remember who did it, but it was essentially showing how consent can be sexy. it but is essentially showing how consent could be sexy and so uh it shows this millennial couple making out and uh like every few seconds the guy has to ask the girl if it's okay if he kisses her

if it's is it okay if i touch you here is it okay if i take your shirt off and she says not yet and then they keep going and going and going and then the girl's asking the guy which is hilarious is it okay if i do this like what because it's just imagine symmetry exactly exactly it's not symmetrical which is preposterous right well that was also an issue with um they've sort of abandoned this but a few years ago there was this thing where if you had sex with someone and alcohol was involved you raped them because they could not consent. But I'm like, well, that means I've been raped a lot of times because that's ridiculous. Like it did, but it never worked that way. It does.

If you want symmetry, you would have to say that if the man has consumed alcohol and the woman hasn't, then the woman is raping the man. Well, I don't want to freak you out, but Heather and I have been assuming each other's consent for 30 years. I mean, we have inferred it from cues that were not verbal. You guys didn't discuss? What about writing things down? Do you have a chalkboard at home?

No, I mean, the thing is, the only thing that keeps us safe from being arrested for this is that since we've both done it, it's like a standoff. Right, you're both criminals. it right now it's like you're both criminals yeah but that's this these changing these shifting of the rules it's all it seems like it's almost like you were talking about game theory it does it really does seem like a type of game it is life but it is a thing where people are looking to call people out you're looking to score you're looking to call people out. You're looking to score. You're looking to score. You're finding someone who's done something inappropriate or finding someone who's done something that used to be appropriate

but is no longer, and we're looking to establish this new parameter and this new way of existing. And it takes on this competition element, which I'm very familiar with. I understand competition. So when I see it clearly and I see team behavior, I'm like, well, I see what's going on here. This is not rational thinking. This is someone who's trying to score points. You're trying to get one on the board. Yes, it's absolutely competitive. And it's mostly competitive at the moment, it looks like

within women, and it's going to destroy.'s actively making male female relationships impossible to navigate but i understand it uh it's for as a man i get the motivation i think that women overwhelmingly have been victimized as opposed to like men being victimized by women in that regard in terms of being sexually harassed it's not even close i mean it is one of the most unbalanced things in our culture ever completely right And it's older than our culture. Right. And this is what we're talking about. What do we want out of this?

Safety. Now that it's, but do you want 100% safety? Right. Do you want to maximize safety at the cost of? Well, we have to kill sociopaths if we want to do that. Yeah. The point is, if you want absolute safety, I mean, we're getting to the point where this is just robbing. If you want absolute safety, I mean, we're getting to the point where this is just robbing.

Okay, if the point of this is to make sex safe because it's pleasurable, this is going to rob all of the pleasure from sex. I mean, it's getting to the point where you'd be crazy to have sex without witnesses. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But anyway, the point is, now that the stuff is on the table, right, now that we know that there are monsters, we know that there are economic forces that actually protect these monsters, which frankly is a big part of this story, right, this to continue with it being effectively an open secret that these people are abusing women and then silencing them and contractually obligating them not to do anything about it. That cancer on the social system is now open for discussion. And we, all of us decent folk, know that we have to get rid of it. If you get rid of it, though, on false pretenses, I promise you, the very same game theory that caused it to happen in the first place will cause it to reemerge.

The only, the reason it exists. And it will be harder to address the next time. Don't you think that this, the overreaction, though, has pretty much calmed down? Post Garrison Keillor and Al Franken. It's like, and with Al Franken, obviously there's some pretty obvious political ramifications to it. I don't think, I don't know what state it's in. I haven't seen the nuanced conversation break out.

I haven't seen the description of what the, I mean, so let me back up a second. And what we have seen is a doubling down on, there are no differences between men and women. It's all a social construct. Who's doubling down? But where is this happening? In the universities? Like where?

In the universities, and it's spreading. I mean, this is what the replies to the Google memo were about. I mean, this is. But isn't Google, in a sense, an extension of the universities in that regard? It is, and it's everywhere. Well, but it's in a sense, an extension of the universities in that regard? It is. And it's everywhere. Well, but it's also a de facto governance structure. Right.

So it's very frightening. And, you know, what happens? I was thinking this morning about how a jury of your peers. That phrase is now increasingly eerie. Which peers? That phrase is now increasingly eerie. Which peers? Are they peers that believe some false story about what human beings are?

Or are these people who are going to be able to hear a story if you look at the narratives that exist in movies, people are capable of understanding the subtlety of human interactions. But they are either pretending or convincing themselves in the public space that things are way simpler than they actually are. And what I don't want to see and what I mean, again, I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm happily married. I'm not looking for anything else. That's good to know. But I do want to see this solved in time for our children to face a landscape that makes sense. And I would like our many students who have talked to us about the confusion of trying to navigate romance in the current circumstance. I would like them to. What's going on, Jamie? It came out yesterday.

Since you guys are talking about it, I don't know how it affects what you're talking about currently. How an alt-right bot network took down Al Franken? This is on Newsweek. They found it started actually in Japan. And they traced the whole thing of like the day before Roger Stone tweeted something about Al Franken even starting to be taken down. And they traced the whole interaction of bots on Twitter doing this all for a couple weeks. But there was actual women that said he grabbed their butt. Maybe.

They asked him for comment, and he didn't respond yet because this was just within the last 24 hours. I don't know what we should do with the Franken story because the Franken story, it's not empty the way the Garrison Keillor story appears to be totally empty. Jamie put it up. We have to think carefully. When you're talking about a senator being brought down on the basis of these claims that are tied up in a movement which does not appear nuanced about the degree of harm done and things like that, there is something at stake. Just, you know, when there is an assassination, you have to ask yourself, who benefits from the absence of this person, right? The political assassination is not a normal murder. It is a political act.

It shifts the balance of something. This is not an assassination, but it functions like one. It takes a political actor who stood for certain things and against other things and represented certain constituencies and fought others, it takes them off the map. And so when that happens, it's really, it's actually an extension of what we were talking about the bad actor problem before. A bad actor can be a sociopath that wants to advance their own cause or take out an enemy or something like that. It can also be a political apparatus or a corporate entity that wishes to shift the balance in a political body like the U.S. Senate. So we have to be mindful.

It is yet another reason that we can't build naively. Right. Yeah, that's a very good point because we don't know the motivation of the people who came out we don't know if it's accurate he says it's not accurate we don't know we have no idea and what's the price point for a botnet that can cause the internet to turn on you yeah and maybe it doesn't matter but the entry point to that story was he took a picture a comedic picture pretending to fondle someone's breasts. Right. Pretending. Yeah.

You know, was it in good taste? No. Was it criminal? No. No, but there was a little more to that. She actually said that he kissed her. Like, they were doing some sort of a sketch together, and he insisted on kissing her. Before that picture. Yeah.

And he insisted. He wanted to practice the kiss, which she found inappropriate. Yeah. He wanted to practice the kiss, which he found inappropriate. That's why I don't love the Franken story as an example here because it's murky. Yes, I agree. It's not Garrison Keillor. He's very, very careful to make sure not to accept. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

You really are. Garrison Keillor is the only one that seems completely clean, but I can basically guarantee you statistically that there are good men who are being taken down. Well, so the last time I was on, we talked about Matt Taibbi. Yes. I don't know one way or the other. I don't know Matt Taibbi, but that story also looked to me like one in which the portrayal was manufactured. And he has now just won a settlement from the nation on the basis of this.

So anyway, that one appears to have gone in what I imagine is the right direction. So that's positive. But I want to return to an earlier point. We are talking about what the rules of interaction should be. It is good that we are talking about it and it is good that we are finally addressing the issue of monsters. Why this didn't get, uh, set loose, um, by Bill Cosby. I don't know because that one appeared crystal clear too that one built that

one it started off well you know i can say as a person who worked as an actor for a while i heard about that story in the 90s but it was one of those weird ones where you didn't know if it was like the richard gear gerbil story yeah is that real you know you know what i mean it's like i had heard that bill cosby does this to women like okay i don't know it's so beyond the pale that it feels like and you don't and then but then you know when it's 50 women that come out and say drug them you go okay something's going on it becomes clear and the problem is it becomes in a case like that what would have to be true for the stories to be false is pretty extreme.

Yep. That's right. Well, it's also him. There's evidence of him mocking drugging people. I mean, he did an episode of The Cosby Show where he drugged people. Right. He would talk about it on talk shows about drugging girls. I mean, he most likely was guilty.

Oh, I think there's no question. And you don't need the due process in this case. It would be crazy if it was the most complicated conspiracy of all time, if all these gals got together and said, I know what we should do to make some money and make some noise. Let's all make up the same story. Starting decades ago. Right.

There would be some sort of evidence of that. So in this case and in Harvey Weinstein's case, and I think in Matt Lauer's case, the evidence is so overwhelming that it overrides our need as members of the public to withhold judgment until due process has unfolded. But the point is, there's a place at which that stops, right? At which things are murky enough that you have to wait for due process. And the idea that this movement is actually not really interested in due process. And in fact, it challenges due process and says you have to believe victims, right? Asking for evidence is augmenting the problem as victim blaming or whatever.

This is a terrible error. And so if we are to get to a state that makes sense, it has to be one in which monsters are held to account, in which there's nuance and degrees of guilt and that we don't throw everybody out. Some people can't, I can't imagine that Bill Cosby can be rehabilitated, but could Al Franken be rehabilitated? If that's the story, maybe he could be. Yeah, there's a thing where we get to a certain age where we no longer think people can grow.

Right. Like if he was 20, if Al Franken took that picture when he was 20, we'd be like, that's silly, kid. What is he doing? That's not something that's appropriate. What if that was your mom? I'm sorry. And then you learn and you grow. But for those of us who value liberty, a situation in which we reorganize the entire landscape to make sex with strangers as safe as

it can possibly be, that is not a landscape that is good for everybody. We need to make a landscape in which people who want to do that are free to do it, but not everybody is compelled to play that game. In other words, people who want to engage in some kind of courtship that is more nuanced and frankly fun and deeper and more subtle are free to engage in that. And that won't be perfectly safe either. But what we should want is a landscape in which we generate safety for people at the level that doesn't cost us spectacularly in terms of how civilization functions. And then we need to actually say also,

and this is another tough point where I'm worried that people will hear it in that monolithic way, but the following thing is true, I believe. A woman, if civilization functioned well, a woman should be able to put on the minimum clothes that the law will allow to cover herself in oil, to walk through town in the middle of the night saying things that indicate that she's hot to trot if she can find the right guy, and she should be safe to do it. But a woman would have to be insane to do that. It's not a good thing to do. So we should want a civilization in which-

There should be legal protection for her to do it. Right. But no sane person should choose to do it because people- But no sane person would choose to flip BMX bikes on the X Games. No sane person would choose to jump out of planes. But we should allow them the right to do so for that thrill. I'm going to push back on that a little bit and say risk-taking, when you're putting yourself at risk and you aren't involving someone else who is going to see your signals and maybe act on them and then is going to have acted on signals that you shouldn't have been sending in the first place. It's different. So BMX bike, jumping out of a plane.

Risk-taking is more common in men than women, on average, across cultures. Not to say that a lot of women don't take risks and have fun doing it, physical risks. But absolutely is risk-taking adaptive and enjoyable and interesting. And if your risk-taking results in you dying and no one else getting hurt, go for it. How is the man getting hurt if the woman is taking these risks, walking down the street, oiled up with a bikini on, yelling out that she's Randy? If there's a chance that later he is held accountable for the kid that results, or she changed her mind or whatever it is that the claim is, especially in this current climate of believe all women, that is potentially

a problem. I see what you're saying. I see where it would be more complicated than just jumping out of a plane and parachuting, but it's still voluntary risk-taking. You are involving another person who's also voluntarily getting involved in that. Well, unfortunately, there's no – there is going to be no set rule that we can establish that neutralizes these things.

You go to Disneyland. I haven't been to Disneyland in decades. You should go. Should I? It's nice. Right now? It's a fun place. But if't been to Disneyland in decades. You should go. Should I? It's nice. Right now? It's a fun place. But if you go to Disneyland, everything has been rendered perfectly safe, right? People have been

through it with a fine-tooth comb so that nothing bad can happen to you and you can have all of this excitement on the rides, but nothing bad is going to happen to you. We cannot turn civilization into that kind of landscape. The price of turning it into a landscape in which you can be a moron and walk through life and nothing bad is going to happen to you, that price is way too high. This is it actually. So, I mean, this thing, this moment in time in 2018 is a natural outgrowth of things like helicopter parenting, where you keep your children from all possible danger, all possible physical risk, and you then end up with children who find offense at and feel unsafe in all

manner of situations. It is impossible to be an adult if you don't do trial and error, and it's impossible to become a sexual adult if you don't engage in some trial and error. It involves a little bit of risk. And I don't want physical risk and sexual play, but there is going to be some experimenting. Well, there's going to be some even meeting friends. Exactly, exactly. And so I think the totally non-fraught version of this is

that we took our kids and 30 undergraduates to the Amazon because it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth fraught version of this is. So we took our kids and 30 undergraduates to the Amazon because it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, and it's extraordinary. And for evolutionary biologists, why wouldn't you go if you could? And a lot of our friends thought, you're taking these little boys? How old were they? The first time we took them, they were 10 and 8.

Jesus. And we waited. I wanted to take them sooner. So I was leading these study abroad trips earlier and Brett said they're too young. You know, basically they're too young for us to give them the shots that Western civilization has afforded us to give them to keep them safe from things like yellow fever. And too young to deal with the instructions that you need to actually remain safe. From jaguars?

Jaguars are not the issue. It's more like tree falls. It's trees falling on you. It's water that rises quickly. But this is exactly the point. At the point we took them, we talked to them a lot in advance as we talked to our students in advance. And then we trusted them.

And our younger son found a gigantic coral snake at one point. And he was walking ahead of us on the trail along with the guide that we happen to have with us and he ran back and the guide ran forward and actually you know pinned the snake so we could see it this you know that was a danger that that was and god forbid something had happened it would be very hard for us to live with ourselves had that gone differently. But you expose your children to risk so that they can then know what to do when risk happens to them.

You expose yourself to sexual situations that aren't stranger sex so that you can know how to build courtship and romance and love and sex later on. Much like Friends. It's a trial and error. Exactly like Friends. So there's a, how do we learn what we learn in order to manage the world? Our developmental environments have to give us model situations that are close enough to the situations that we run into as adults, that we have the tools to navigate them. And so one of the, I think, very difficult things to accept as a parent is that if your child is going to be able to manage risk as an adult, they cannot be made perfectly safe as a child, which means that you are running the risk that something disastrous will happen and that you'll have to live with it. happen and that you'll have to live with it. If you make your child perfectly safe in childhood,

they will be terrible at managing risk as adults, and then something terrible is going to happen to them. So what I operate on, or maybe I'm reverse engineering the way I think I've learned how to behave is something I call the theory of close calls, which is that you don't want to have disaster strike. And in fact, we've told our children, we've said, look, we don't want you to break your arm or your leg, but you may end up doing it and you're allowed to. Here are the things you're not allowed to do. You're not allowed to damage your skull. You're not allowed to damage your eyes. You're not allowed to damage your back, right? You protect those things. You protect those things at all costs. And actually, when we took the students to Ecuador,

we had, it wasn't really the only rule, but we called it the one rule. And it was really the central guiding principle of the trip. This is an 11-week trip through all these ecosystems in Ecuador. It's a really long extended trip. With students that we knew well. We had been with them all year and we had cultivated communities. We knew them well and what we said is, look, lots of things are going to happen. You're going to have to navigate on the fly. Nobody comes home in a box. Nobody comes home in a box. Nobody comes home in a box. And we actually had three close calls on this trip. And people told us actually that when they

experienced serious danger, this thing actually occurred to them. Nobody comes home in a box. And it was like it sobered them up. But to go back to the theory of close calls, It sobered them up. But to go back to the theory of close calls, you can't learn how not to get run over by a car by getting somewhat run over by a car. Right. Right. But you can learn from your close calls. So I had a good friend, actually, somebody that – so Heather and I were not dating in high school, but we were friends. We went to the same high school.

Somebody we knew in high school happened to go to the same college that I started at at Penn. And we were walking down the street one day, and she stepped into the street thinking it was clear. And this car whizzed by her at 40 miles an hour. Didn't touch her. And so the question is, what do you think about something like that? She was unscratched, but had she been one second ahead of where she was, she would have probably been dead. And so you could think, well, I must be doing something right because I got away with it. Or you could be thinking the difference between my death and not being scratched in this case wasn't

something that I did with any sort of intent. It was pure luck that saved my life right there. Therefore, I need to figure out how it is that I stepped off that curb without noticing that that car was coming. There's something wrong in my model of how to live that I could have gotten that close. So as you experience close calls, they tell you something about where your model is broken and you can fix it. close calls, they tell you something about where your model is broken and you can fix it. And so I think what Heather's getting at is learning how to interact with other people, especially when you're talking about high stakes stuff like romance and sex, you need to have some room to figure out how these relationships are negotiated. And if the point is these rules are going to be negotiated by some people who

are going to lay down the law and say you must seek affirmative consent every 37 seconds, that's not going to work. It's not going to teach anybody how you actually manage with another human being. Makes sense. And I don't know how you teach that to a child to manage risk versus reward in relationships. I mean, how do you know? I mean, one of the things that we hope is that they gain some sort of an understanding of human interaction when they're in their teen years, when they're still at home, then they're protected somewhat when they go to college. And then as they go out into the world.

Yeah, it's tough. How much information have they accumulated? You have to let them do it and allow them to judge, for God's sake. There's this don't judge thing going on. There will be no exclusion of anyone at any time on the schoolyard. And don't judge anyone no matter what they say. Well, that's bad for the kid that gets judged. That's because there's some behavior that sucks. And they need to know that it's very uncomfortable for other people to be around you

when you're like that. And that's how you understand social interaction. And this is a big part of how kids grow into adults. This is how humans become humans. It's not just top down from parents, and from teachers. It's largely from peers. I love what you said about helicopter parenting, because I think you're totally right. I think that is part of what's going on here. I think part of what's going on here also is this newfound ability to complain and communicate. It's beautiful in the fact that you can exchange information at an incredible pace. I mean, we've never had anything remotely like this in human history. But it's terrible in the fact that it's hard to figure out what's noise. There's so much chatter going on. And if

you're a dummy, you can find other dummies that think just like you and you organize a very volatile group. And you reinforce those wrong ideas. Confirmation bias, you all get together, you interact on a forum. There's a few forums that are frequent that are just filled with, they're just echo chambers and they're confusing. And like I don't know anybody that thinks like this, but here they are all collected, convinced that there is no biological difference in the sexes and that a trans woman is a woman. If you don't date trans women, that you're a bigot, even if you're a heterosexual male and she has a penis.

There's a lot of squirrely thinking going on and it's reinforced by others and you start thinking you're right and then you are the future and all these people out there that are living in this archaic ancient way they they're they're artifacts of the past and they will soon be relegated to history well there's a great summary it It was a good summary. There is a property of our current lives that people just need to be more aware of. We arrive at the present. We are partially updated by various features like school for modern circumstances, but we are also partially throwbacks. And we aren't throwbacks. You know, evolutionary psychology, in my opinion, has erred in imagining that we are simply Stone Age hunter-gatherers wandering around civilization. But we are throwbacks to various places in our past, some of them recent, some of them much more remote.

And what we face is an epidemic of novelty. And what we face is an epidemic of novelty. So novelty is all of the stuff that we don't have programming on board to navigate. All of the stuff that your instincts don't tell you what to do. The foods, you know, the refined sugar, the corporation that wants to advertise the cereal to your child so that they eat more of it than they should, or they eat different stuff than they would. Novelty makes us sick. And novelty can make you physically sick. It can make you psychologically sick. It can make you socially sick. And we can also be the source of great change. Evolution can deal with novelty, but not at the rate of change that is happening

now. Right. The rate of change is so high that our evolutionary capacity to deal with novelty is outstripped. And so I do want to, you know, there is a way in which, you know, if you just listen to little sound bites from what we're getting at, you could get the wrong idea that we're very traditional. And in fact, our relationship isn't traditional at all. but I asked him to carry the second baby but he wouldn't do it I would after it was born that's quite a lot but we have not thought carefully about the fact that porn is effectively functioning like sexuality school for kids, right? You don't learn about sex in school. Sex ed is kind of a joke.

People don't take it seriously. But where do they learn about sex? Well, they learn about it from what they encounter on the Internet. And here's the problem with that. That is not an honest report of anything. What that is is the result of competition, economic competition between porn producers to capture your attention. Right. So what that means is that it pushes in the direction of all sorts of stuff that people might not be that interested in because this producer wants to take your attention away from that producer. And so they make something more extreme.

And it certainly triggers that second male strategy. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's the second male strategy of the no-strings-attached person who you could just hook up with on a whim. You're delivering a pizza, and she grabs you by your shirt and pulls you in. It's like, what? Huh? That's the norm. Win-win-win.

Yeah. Bingo. And it's like, what? Huh? That's the norm. Win-win-win. Yeah. Bingo.

And so what we've effectively done is accidentally, economically, we've announced to children that this is what sex looks like. And maybe they even get proficient at that kind of sex. But it's mechanical, uninteresting, and has very little to do with the most rewarding stuff in what it is to be a human being, which has to do with deeper, long-lasting relationships. So it shouldn't surprise us at all that we've arrived at a dysfunctional moment where people are shouting at each other about what the rules have to be, because what we've installed as a mechanism for learning about these things is not, it does not have our interests at heart. It is an economic entity that is not under anyone's control. And it's quite dangerous. Now, before the inevitable backlash, oh my God, he said porn was bad. I really do think porn is bad. Right? I don't think erotica is bad. If somebody wants to make sexual content with some purpose other than trying to grab your attention and take your money, then that's valid. And it doesn't mean everybody's got to be interested in it, and it doesn't mean that everybody's got to produce it. us prevent people from making valid sexual statements that are interesting in whatever

form they take. I don't necessarily want to see children exposed to it willy-nilly, but my real point is, you know, just as there's a distinction between the really good stuff that you sometimes see on your television screen because somebody's put together a, you know, see on your television screen because somebody's put together a well-thought-out series and broadcast television, which is often pretty garbagey, there's a big difference between the sort of garbagey view of sex that people are getting because the economics are driving us in that direction and some more interesting, nuanced, adventurous version that we might see if the landscape wasn't saturated with the um the uh the porn version well and just just to defend porn i think there's got to be a spectrum of porn i'm not a porn investigator but i would imagine that there's some romantic

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

Some people actually prefer that because it seems like real people who are attracted to each other are actually having sex. Because it might actually have some information in it. And it might be, you know, frankly, it might be more exciting because it has some reality to it. Right. But my point is, you know, there's a gray area. I would say the distinction between porn and erotic

is actually pretty easy to draw, and it has to do with whether the motivation that caused it to be produced is economic. If the motivation that caused it to be produced, if it would not have been produced absent that economic motivation, it's porn, and I'm suspicious of it. So Fifty Shades of Grey is porn, then? I haven't seen it

good for you neither have i neither have i all right it's just it's erotic well if none of us have seen it let's let's talk about it yeah let's definitely cast judgment yeah yeah i see what you're saying um and i i definitely agree that it's school set it's sex school for children. And there's a giant issue in that because it is an unrealistic depiction of actual sexual interaction for the most part. Like most sexual encounters are not going to go the way they are in porn. And just like setting your kid in front of a screen when he or she is really young does not teach that kid how to interact with real human beings. Right. If porn is your exposure to sex, it's going to create a kind of sex autism.

Like you're not going to know how to engage with actual real human beings who can give you feedback. That's an interesting way to describe it. Yeah, I like that. I mean, it's a little dangerous, obviously, because, well, for various reasons. But just from the point of view that it denies you a sense of what the feedbacks would look like because feedbacks between two people

don't look like what happens when somebody writes a script. It's not universal. It's not generalizable. The very nature of human interaction is that it's one-off. Do you think it's something along the lines, I mean, obviously, see, here's a script. It's not universal. It's not generalizable. The very nature of human interaction is that it's one-off. Do you think it's something along the lines? I mean, obviously, see, here's a problem with porn. One of the problems with porn is because the accessibility is so high, it's not like X-rated violent movies. There used to be some movies were X-rated for violence. Remember that?

Or NC-17, right? But you could be 13 with a cell phone and you have access to all the porn in the world. And I just think... Yeah, so many of these issues, I think, you know, we need to be nuanced and very careful once we're talking about adults and when people become adults is a question. But when we're talking about clearly still kids, you know, should children be exposed to porn? No, they are still developing. They're still figuring out how to be adults. Should children be given sex hormones of the sex that they are not born to, even if they might end up transitioning and becoming trans

later on? Almost certainly not. Because the vast number of people who end up realizing, oh, actually, I was experimenting. This is what childhood is. I was trying on something else. And now I've made it permanent by virtue of medicalizing the thing. Yeah, well, that's another subject entirely, but I completely agree. You're essentially making a permanent decision for a child as early as, I mean, I've heard it argued three years old, which is insane. It just doesn't seem to suit. It doesn't seem to fit any logic.

The only thing that seems to fit is this agenda that this is a natural normal part of our society and we should reinforce it as early as possible. Well, I want to push back on that a little bit. I think it's very clear there's so much gender confusion that sorts itself out through the natural process of development, that the idea that we should intervene medically when we have no idea who is going to grow out of it and who is going to transition. If, and I don't think we will ever be there because of the nature of human development,

but if it were possible to know who actually was committed to this road and going to transition, then there is an argument to be made that the earlier that they transition, the more completely they are able to jump the gap. And I would say the precautionary principle has to apply here. That trans is a real condition, and some people have it and should be allowed to transition. condition, and some people have it and should be allowed to transition, but allowing children to make that decision for themselves when more often than not, they end up not transitioning, is, frankly, it looks criminal to me. Oh, I think in the modern situation,

with how little we understand about why it is that some people end up gender dysphoric for life and all that, there's no way that we should be interfering early. You have to let children sort this stuff out. I'm just saying in the abstract, it's not that there's no argument for doing it early. It's that the argument for doing it early doesn't come anywhere near the strength to the argument for not doing it early, which is that these things sort themselves out. And actually... If you really have been born into the wrong body, as is the phrase that is used by people, some of whom we have known, who are actually legitimately trans, the earlier the hormonal inputs came in, the more fully they would be able to transition.

Yeah, the more they change development. But the risk is too high. It's unconscionable now. Isn't that... It's so... We're into some strange, blind territory when you start saying legitimately trans. Like, who's illegitimately trans?

If you decide to be trans, you're legitimately trans. There are a lot of people who are wearing it as a fashion statement. How can anyone make that distinction if they're not that person? I don't know if that's true. I bet you're right. I'm not disagreeing with you. But how would we know? I think, you know, because the cost of being trans in a society that views trans

the way ours does is so high that there is a very, it's the barrier to telling the world that this is how you feel is substantial enough to prevent people from flirting with it casually. I would push back on that because there's people that get face tattoos and they do weird body modifications that's looked down upon constantly. People do a lot of things for self-hate purposes. They do a lot of things to

shock people. They do a lot of things because they just want to get a reaction out of people. I don't necessarily agree with that. I think you might be right that there are people that wear it as a fashion statement but who are people who have assumed traditional or semi-traditional gender roles to make that distinction well if we believe in real freedom i think we have to let people choose i think we can't for sure children choose i agree we can't

let we certainly can't let parents leap to it. Right. And so Heather has said a number of times, so people who don't know Heather should know that she is a dyed-in-the-wool tomboy and has been for her whole life. Ever since I was destroying the frilly dresses my mother was putting me in. Destroying the frilly dresses and resenting the pink color that your room was painted. My mother was putting me in. system authorship and anyway Heather and they're at a very strong relationship with her dad and she played like a boy and Heather has asked the things he said to me on several occasions was I will not raise a weak girl I will not raise a hopeless or helpless child and so you know when I when I'd have my nose buried

in the book and he'd be out back building a fence, he'd say, you're going to come out and help me dig post holes and pour the cement and put in the posts and you're going to do this. Not because I expect that you're going to go into fence building, but because you need to know how to work with your hands and do physical work in the universe and see what the ramifications are. Not that he didn't want you reading the book. Oh, of course not. Yeah. I mean, you know, he, on other weekends, he was taking me to math competitions. So, you know, there was a lot of abstraction and, and play with numbers and science as well and sport, but it was specifically about not assuming what I was going to be capable of because I was born a

girl. That's a giant problem with this category of men and women obviously there's this giant spectrum inside each category and that should be okay it should be all right it has to be okay it has to be it has to be yeah and this is one of the problems with assuming traditional gender roles or assuming types of behavior and what some people like sexually other people would hate and vice averse and some people i mean some people can get away with things because women find it attractive whereas another man could do the exact same thing and women would think it's disgusting and that's okay too well we have to err in the direction of keeping people safe but we can't turn the dial on safety to 11 because we'll destroy

everything else. Right. We'll kill all the fun. Yeah. And we can't imagine that these categories are invariant, right? That male looks one way and female, I mean, this is exactly what you're saying, but it's, you know, they, many of the people who are arguing against the biology of sex and gender say things like gender isn't binary.

And they're right. It's not, but it's But it's bimodal. These are population distributions with a lot of variation in them. And they are widely overlapping. But that doesn't mean they're the same. They're not identical, but they are broadly overlapping. They certainly do, right? And there's been some interesting pushback from these older European women,

particularly French women, who are like, what the fuck are you guys doing? You're ruining sex. You're ruining romance and courtship. Exactly. They have a different attitude about it, and they think that there's a certain amount of aggressive behavior from men that they enjoy, and they don't want to douse that. Well, so somehow this,

I'm glad we're getting to this part of the conversation. So somehow this, I'm glad we're getting to this part of the conversation. One thing to say is, I didn't finish the thing about Heather, is that Heather has vocalized that if she grew up in the modern era, she worries that somebody, her parents wouldn't have, they would have fought back. But that some people would have been thinking, oh, you're trans. We need to take care of you, and we need to give you hormones and things like that because the fact that she played like a boy would have been taken as an indication that she was born in the wrong body or something. And so that can't happen.

We have to protect people so that they can sort out their own stuff. So, I mean, we have to expand. I mean, I really feel like we had already kind of gotten here, but I've talked to people who identify as trans who say things like, I'm trans because I don't fit into my father's mold of a macho man, and I prefer to read poetry. And to which I say, that's terrific. Okay, be that man then. That, if that is the extent of why you are calling

yourself trans i don't think that makes you trans isn't there an issue and this is not i'm not anti any of this but isn't there an issue with saying that who you really truly are is dependent upon you getting injections of hormones that are not native to your body. Isn't that very odd that we've taken synthetic hormones and made them an integral part of who a person is? Now, again, I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do it. You certainly should be able to do it. But it's oddly almost a biologically essentialist perspective coming from people who are denying biology. perspective coming from people who are denying biology and but here's the thing i'm saying if you are who you why is no one willing to accept who they are in this situation and instead wants to not i shouldn't say no one it's a bad way of phrasing it why is it assumed that if you

do feel like you were born in the wrong body, the only way to change that is to inject hormones that are not native to your body, to have surgery, to alter yourself, to assume traditional gender dress and look of the opposite sex. There's a lot of people that push back against women sexualizing themselves but celebrate trans women sexualizing themselves to look more like women because they think this is a feeling of empowerment for these women look how beautiful they are you go girl look at those legs like there's this thing about it where it's like it's celebrated as um this uh emerging of the your the true self? This is one of these places where I believe we have at least a one-way failure and maybe a two-way failure of empathy. Right? So I've spent, you know, we have lots of history with trans students

who, you know, at first, you know, I must say there's a lot of trans folks at evergreen and at first when we first arrived it was odd to me like what percentage well that is a hard question because when you ask people to self report the number is absurdly high but I don't certainly high like it's so high that it's is reported as 40% at Evergreen, which doesn't really make any sense. 48? 4-0. 4-0, 40%. Which really can't be the case, which is part of why I say some people are trying it on.

Trying it on as an identity as opposed to, you know, that includes LGB, but it's too high. Wouldn't they gravitate, though, towards a school like that that's so open-minded? They would. But, you know, we have an intuitive sense by, you know, just the population. You know when people are faking it? Well, no, I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying that there's like a desire to affirm folks in this category. And so placing yourself— Let me also say, rather than faking it, I would say people who don't agree with the gender norms associated with the gender they're born to are calling themselves trans.

And to me, that doesn't look like trans. students who are really legitimately trans and have done surgery or hormones or both and are and are better off in their bodies and more more at peace with themselves having done so um so i think it is very hard to appreciate a we are all in some sense not well by virtue of the fact that we live in a civilization that is not a good match for what we bring to the table. Even the environments we grew up in as children do not match our adult environments. And so we don't intuit them well. And that causes all kinds of health issues, psychological and otherwise. causes all kinds of health issues, psychological and otherwise. When people find themselves in this predicament that we are calling trans, they have access to a remedy. I mean, imagine, it's just put yourself in the mindset of somebody who feels like they should have been a woman. And,

you know, mind you, I'm now learning that some trans people actually don't feel this way, that feeling like you were born in the wrong body is not a universal. It's very commonly said, but it is not universal. But imagine that that is how you felt. You felt like you were being addressed as a man, you were being understood as a man, but that's not how you internally felt.

And there was access to something, some set of things that would cause the world to finally register you as you felt you were, right? It would be very tempting to avail yourself of that stuff. And I think it's hard for those of us who feel at home enough in the bodies that we're in to appreciate what the pressure must be like if there is something available to you to go for it and to cross that gap. And I also think it's creating a problem as we're trying to discuss issues like sexual signaling and makeup and high heels and things as people have been discussing, this causes a special problem for trans folks,

for trans women, because in many cases, maybe almost all cases, they are using these signs that are, and I don't want to get in trouble here, these makeup is well understood to amplify sexual signaling. It is not the only role it is playing. It is not inherently conscious. It is not inherently intended to be triggering everybody broadly. But nonetheless, makeup, high heels, these mechanisms for amplifying a certain set of signals are being used by trans folks as a mechanism for amplifying their sex. In other words, if somebody puts on a whole bunch of makeup in order to send a signal that they are looking for a mate, let's say.

I'm not saying everybody who puts on makeup is doing that, but somebody might put on makeup in order to attract male attention. That's one kind of signal. But if you're trans, you may put on that makeup in order to send a signal, I am female, right? So you're sending a signal that is of a very different nature. And so I think there is a way in which trans people are feeling backed against the wall by a discussion that is now very clumsily happening about these mechanisms of sexual signaling because it puts them in a particular predicament where they're feeling like they're about to be robbed of the very stuff that allows them to accentuate their femininity.

That's very well put. Yeah, I think that's a very important distinction too, especially when you're talking about someone who's trying to self-affirm. Yeah. Right. Now, one of the things that came up real recently was this Jordan Peterson interview with Vice, which in my opinion, especially when you look at the sound clip, they were talking about women in the workplace and women wearing makeup and high heels and things in the workplace. And I know Jordan very well. I love him. He's a great guy. He came off aggressive there. And I don't know why. I don't think I don't know if he's tired of it or if he's digging his heels in. I mean, he's apparently part of a two hour interview. Yeah, kind of felt like he was on the ropes the whole time. Yes. And he also was coming off of that big

Kathy Newman interview in the UK, which was like an assault. I mean, the whole thing was just crazy. But he came out ahead on that. And I think it's much easier to make the argument that he didn't come out ahead in the Vice thing, especially in the way that they framed it. But he was talking about women in the workplace and maybe women shouldn't wear makeup in the way that they they framed it but he was talking about women in the workplace and maybe women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace and maybe they shouldn't wear high

heels or dresses um so he did say maybe maybe yes he didn't he didn't say women shouldn't do this the interviewer i can't remember his name kang kang j Kang. Jay Kang, maybe. Said, so do you think women shouldn't wear makeup and high heels then? And he said, maybe. Yeah. And it was, you know, he's thinking. Right. He's considering options here. He's not prepared upon first being asked a question to say yes, absolutely, or no, absolutely.

This is, you know, this is a sign of a nuanced thinking person. Yes. Brain in action in real time. The problem with the reaction is the exact problem that you're trying to avoid here, though. When you're saying, I don't want to get in trouble here, you preface that and then you slowly move forward. Whereas Jordan was like, maybe. Why are they wearing makeup? What are they doing? But I would say that, you know, the generous interpretation and the evolutionary interpretation of what he said was, look, the Me Too movement is arguing that there should be, that there can be no sexual signals in the workplace at all, full stop.

That's not going to be possible because look at how many other sexual signals there are. Right. Makeup, heels. Now, the response response has been those aren't sexual signals i wear heels and i'm not sexually signaling and you know to which the evolutionary response is what heels do is augment sexual signals that you were born with whether or not you are conscious of the fact that that is why you were doing it that doesn't make it any less of a sexual signal. And so what Peterson was saying was, if we really are going to accept the argument that all signals of this type need to be abandoned,

need to be gotten rid of from the workplace, then maybe we actually need to investigate all of the other things that are sexual signals that aren't being talked about right now. So there are a couple of things. First of all, have you seen the clip filmed from the audience of him talking about what happened with that vice interview? No. It's well worth your time. I think it's seven or eight minutes of him talking about what happened. I do think Peterson, who I also know, I don't think I know. Can you give us the cliff notes of what? Yeah. I mean, the cliff notes are, he said, look, this is how one engages in thought. One advances an idea. It doesn't mean something's going to happen. Right. I think he

literally says, I didn't say women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace. I said, maybe, Women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace. I said, maybe. And this is what we do. And then he describes, he says, let's agree that I'm going to put forward 10 things that might happen. And then let's agree that none of them are going to happen. So now we can discuss the possibilities. So I don't think we know what the actual interview with J. Kang looked like because there was two hours of it and I've seen 15 minutes. Yeah, why won't they release more of it?

I think they should release the whole thing. I do think what I saw, so we don't know the context. Right. Which my guess is Peterson's pretty careful in what he says. My guess is the context would be revealing. Peterson's pretty careful in what he says. My guess is the context would be revealing. I think based on the part that we know that he said because it is in the clips that we've seen, we know something's funny because the editing juxtaposes him seeming to contradict himself.

And he's actually pretty careful not to do that. But what he did actually say contains what I regard as at least one significant error. So he says, I do think that in response to the question of are women hypocrites for wearing makeup to work and then, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but something like demanding not to be harassed or something like that. So he's forgetting that many of these signals aren't conscious in doing that. Not conscious, but I saw somebody online discussing this. They made a very good point, one that's actually pretty hard to field.

If these are signals, even unconscious ones, if they are sexual signals. Why am I wearing one to go to a family reunion? Why am I wearing high heels to go to a family reunion? Am I secretly trying to get lucky at my own family reunion? And the answer is no. This is not a matter. What Peterson said, and, you know, Peterson has done so many interviews, the fact that he says a clumsy thing here doesn't strike me one way or the other. But I don't want to be put in the position of defending that women are hypocritical for wearing makeup and high heels. There are lots of reasons that you have to wear them, including

social pressure, including the fact that you are in a landscape of other people wearing them. And if you stand out as being plain in a world of other women who are amplifying these things, it may actually have implications for your ability to earn. So there are lots of reasons that you might do it that have nothing to do with you as an individual trying to signal for sexual attention. It doesn't mean that those things didn't evolve as sexual signals, right? Sexual signals, to us evolutionary biologists, this is no news. I mean, if you're a woman and you've got breasts and you're walking around in the world, you're broadcasting a sexual signal. And that one's completely unconscious and involuntary.

It's physiological, right? So the idea that these signals are out there and common should become something we become comfortable with. The fact that males are involved in all kinds of signaling all the time, that the corner office, the mahogany desk, and it's not that a woman can't have a corner office and a mahogany desk, but traditionally speaking, those hallmarks of... Prestige and research acquisition. Yes, those things have implication in the sexual landscape that's very powerful, as does, frankly, humor. The way humor is used has powerful implications in terms of sexual signaling, as does who laughs at your jokes.

I mean, if the boss makes a joke, everybody laughs, whether or not it's funny. Why is that? He's got power. They're trying to get ahead. So we can't get rid of all of this. We can't get rid of all of this we can't get rid of all if we look at something like an engagement ring right if you were to analyze an engagement ring anthropologically right so there are these stones actually the truth of it is there these stones that aren't really that rare, but they've been made artificially scarce. And a man will get one of these stones and he will put it on a thing that can be put on a woman's finger.

And the size of the stone and the quality of the stone, even though the stone is not actually useful for very much, it is symbolically important. And it is evidence of the woman's worth in some sense. In other words, the larger the stone, it indicates that the man values her at a greater level. I mean, this is an absurd, an absurd set of signals. And we treat it as if it's just nothing, you know, a woman gets an engagement ring, maybe if she's traditional, her friends will, you know, look at it and say, oh, that's marvelous. I mean, so we're engaged in all of this archaic signaling anyway. And when you tune into it, it is very jarring. But it does not make sense to isolate one set of these signals and say, ah, look, they're signaling, right? Because those signals are embedded in a landscape of signals that we go through our entire life not realizing that we are making.

And the last point I would make is that we also need to recognize that we have a mismatch between personal signaling and broadcast signaling. So it may be that a woman wears something in order to catch a particular male's attention. But the fact that she's wearing it may catch other males' attention. And that fact may confuse the landscape because men in general may take it as a sign that she's interested in something when in fact she's not interested in something. She's interested in someone who happens to be in this landscape. So what I hope is that we will recognize that the thing that we should all agree on is that it is desirable to have the freedom to engage life as you would engage it. So long as you're not harming others, you should be, you know, I do not think polyamorous folks are on the right track. I think that what they're up to is, I mean, I know from the ones who are serious about it and talk about it, that even

within the polyamorous community, there's a recognition about just how difficult it is to make it work. But I don't really want to interfere with their right to do it. I would like to be able to talk about whether it's a good idea, whether it has societal implications that we should be aware of. But by and large- How do you feel like they're not on the right track and isn't everyone's track? I mean, if we can accept trans folk and we can accept women to subscribe to cultural norms and wearing high heels and makeup in the worst place, why can't we accept polyamorous behavior and what's so difficult? That's what I'm telling you is that though I personally would counsel somebody if, you know, and I have had this conversation with many students, for example, I would counsel them

away from it because I think it actually prioritizes one thing, which is desirable, but that the cost of it is very, very high. What does it prioritize? It prioritizes not locking yourself into a single sexual relationship. And I think there's a way in which there is a terror that surrounds locking yourself into a single sexual relationship. And part of the terror goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation. If you think that beauty is maxed out at 20 and then it wanes over life,

then as a woman, you're trapped in this terrible situation where you've got this power long before you know what to do with it and it's going to evaporate so you better capitalize on it and if you're a man you're very frightened that you're going to get into a relationship and then you're going to watch this person that you love fall apart in front of your eyes and you're going to be you know you're going to be caught in that situation and i don't think this is the reality of a pair bond. I think the reality of a pair bond is way better than we fear. But that because we've got this overly simplistic mythology surrounding it, a lot of people are trying to solve that problem.

How do I not get locked into that relationship that's going to trap me with somebody who's decaying in front of me? Yeah, I don't think it's a decaying thing. I would push back against that. I would say people just want more variety. They're attracted to other people, and they want to act on that. And if they find a partner who's also willing to do that, and they stay together, I don't see what would be the issue if they wanted to do it.

Well, I'm telling you specifically that. I don't want to stop them from doing it, but I do want people to think very carefully about the issues. I mean, I'm just speaking as one guy who's lived one life. The value that I get out of having as close to perfect security at home as I can have in a relationship. I mean, Heather and I have been all over the world. We've taken our kids into parts of the Amazon that are four hours by boat from the nearest road. Right? This is not a boring relationship. This relationship has been a nonstop adventure. But no one's trying to push polyamory on you.

Right. Well, A, I wouldn't say that that's true. I would say that the— People are? Not as an individual. But what I would say is they are promoting an idea that this is the sophisticated way to live. It's the wave of the future. Really?

Yeah. How common is this? Is this— Well, I mean, you mentioned sex at dawn yourself. And so the idea is – Yeah, but Chris is my friend and he's crazy. There you go. But what I would say –

But he believes it. He might be right. He does believe it. And I – For him, it is right. I have been convinced by a friend who I had a longstanding argument with on this topic. And what he convinced me is that – A friend who is polyamorous. Yes... A friend who is polyamorous.

Yes, a friend who is polyamorous. And this friend has convinced me that it can be accomplished, that there's somewhere to get. But he acknowledges that it actually, in the case that he points to, took several generations, literally several generations to arrive at a stable situation. Well, you guys have a wonderful relationship, though. I know many people who have terrible, terrible relationships, and for them, the notion of monogamy seems absurd. It seems like a trap that you get stuck in, you grow to resent each other, and then you get sick of each other, and then you fight in court until you figure out who gets all the money.

Totally. I would say those people shouldn't be together, obviously. I think you're right, yeah. But then there's a conflation between polyamory and promiscuity. Right. That just a free-for-all, a sex with strangers free-for-all, is different from the kind of careful approach to polyamory that this friend takes, which still looks extraordinarily difficult to pull off, given what human beings are from a jealousy perspective.

But isn't monogamy extraordinarily difficult to pull off? I mean, isn't the rate of divorce in this country alone? It's somewhere around 50%. And Chris Rock famously said, that's just 50% who had the courage to leave. How many cowards stay? But this is part of the point about novelty. We are living in a situation where our narratives sell us a false picture of our opportunities. Our narratives are partially driven by an economy that wants us to be insecure enough to spend money like crazy.

And so I'm not telling people that they should live one way or the other. I'm telling them that they should understand what their real options are. And polyamory as an experiment is all well and good. But what happens when you introduce children into the mix? Right. That's very, very different. It's very different because children are so costly to raise and because human males are wired to fear raising offspring that they themselves did not produce genetically. Now, I don't think it makes sense to actually care very much about your genes and advancing their interests. I think this is something evolution has stuck us with that is not valuable. It's actually destructive.

It's something we can potentially move past. But we are wired for it. And so what I'm expecting to happen is if you have a large scale experiment in polyamory, what it's going to do is it is going to break down into polygyny and it's going to break down into single motherhood as men leave these relationships in order to engage in perhaps more polyamory with younger women. And it's going to be yet one more thing that is unevenly distributed between the sexes. So choose your mate wisely. Well, choose your mate wisely, but we don't even realize that we are interfering with your ability to do that in ways that we don't intuit. We have a landscape in which nobody is paying attention to the way we are interfering in the normal processes that would cause you to find a mate with whom you might have a very rewarding life longer.

What processes are you referring to? Well, let me take an absurd one. Okay. We have no idea what effect deodorant is having on us choosing the right mate. We do know that in studies that there are molecules that you can't consciously tell you're detecting that do affect mate choice. And we know that we're interfering with that stuff. Well, we know that birth control affects that as well as well women's ability to smell yeah specifically woman's ability to smell whether or not she's even genetically compatible with the man absolutely

and which is really freaky it's like those lizards how do they know right they just know rubbing up against each other so sense a sense. So I think what – Do you wear deodorant? I try not to. At the moment, I'm wearing it because sweat stains would be socially costly. You're wearing anti-perspirant. I guess I am. It's different.

There's an important distinction there. Yeah, that's dangerous. Well, but here – Clogging up your pores. This is a great example because I actually did spend – I don't know if it was a year as an experiment not wearing deodorant. How'd that go? Well. He was already married.

So a couple interesting facts. One, it did drive some people crazy. I'm sure. Not me though. Not you. Didn't bother you at all? I'm sure. Not me, though.

Not you. Didn't bother you at all? We've all been around people we love who at some point are like, dude, take a shower. Right. But, you know, no. But as long as you took a shower. Well, actually, the thing, though, is I— Is it a shave the armpits thing? Like, if you shave your armpits, do you—I mean, it's the one spot, right?

We're not putting deodorant anywhere else on our body. We're just putting it on the armpits. Like, is it a shaving thing? Like, have you shaved your armpits? If you shave your armpits if you shave your armpits you decrease the rate of smelly diffuses into the environment so you should make a judgment call well but in some sense look i don't know which it is maybe we're being wusses right and we're being you know we've got an industry of i don't know how much they make per year selling us these things because we're afraid of our own human smell. Right. Right. But there's a huge difference between the way somebody smells if they don't have good hygiene and somebody who has the luxury of daily showers and doesn't wear

deodorant. Frankly, I don't find somebody who is taking daily showers and isn't wearing deodorant, I don't find it that off-putting. And in Europe, it's considered much – It's just a different smell. You smell them as opposed to smelling Right Guard or whatever it is. Exactly. And so anyway, I have no idea whether if we backed our deodorant and antiperspirant stuff off, whether it would change who ended up with whom and whether or not marriages might have a small degree of change right but how many other things are there on the list that we wouldn't

think to name what about makeup what if women stopped wearing makeup how much would that change who hooks up with who how much would it and you know if we how much would it change if we actually learned that there's a difference between hotness and beauty and we actually allowed little girls to recognize that maybe they weren't so interested in being hot because although it gets you a lot of attention, it's the kind of attention that's a dead end, right? How much would that change who ends up with whom? I mean, a lot of who ends up with whom at the moment is presumably dictated by people having had their attention captured through hotness.

And then there's a question of whether there's anything there to back it up. So what I want to see for my own kid's sake is I want to see a world in which the noise of the way the market influences how we interact with each other and the notions that get promoted as sophisticated, where that noise is reduced so that people can really begin to detect the patterns in their life. Actually, this worked for me. I dated in this way and this worked for me. I dated in that way and it didn't work for me. It wasn't rewarding. That begins to tell you something. And all I'm saying about my own situation, yes, I'm incredibly lucky to have a relationship that's really rewarding and, you know, it's a lifelong bond.

On the other hand, it may say something. We got together early. I felt weird about that for a long time. I felt like it suggested something. You know, you hear about people getting together in high school. It's like, oh, that's cute. But, you know, how well could you have chosen in high school? Right? Well, I met Heather in high school. We were friends. We knew each other pretty well by the time we got together. And, you know, I was a dumb kid in my early 20s at the point that the relationship began, but it had an advantage that I didn't necessarily know to think about,

which is Heather and I have spent all of that time adventuring together. And that means that instead of looking for the perfect partner who's exactly the right fit for you, two people who had the right starting material sort of grew together into a partnership. The growing together part. We grew up together. Yeah, that's a big part. two people who had the right starting material sort of grew together into a partnership. The growing together part. We grew up together. Yeah.

That's a big part. And there's a lot of people that don't spend a lot of time with their mates. And people grow apart too. You guys get lucky. Yeah, that's true. I have a lot of friends living in hell. Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah.

It's unfortunately really common. It's more common than not. You guys are the outliers a couple of scientists taking your kids to the jungle well it's not the most common thing but but okay here's the thing i don't know because i've only lived one life but i think there is a lesson because i think that what we did actually was um fairly simple which was we played it by ear and the stuff that didn't work we chucked it and the stuff that did work we augmented it and so there were no hard and fast rules yeah you're also exceptional people you're both very unusually smart and open-minded well they found each other we found each other and i think i think open-minded is more important than smart in this case right like being able to look at each other with We found each other. And I think open-minded is more important than smart in this case.

Like being able to look at each other with compassion. You know, this is true for any interaction, right? Let's look at you and see you as a human being with real emotions and feelings and reality to your experiences as well. Even if I feel like we disagree completely. So even when we're at our angriest with each other, if we can see each other's humanity through it, then you get through. Yeah, that is a lesson for every human being in all walks of life,

in any situation when you disagree with someone, not just your lover, not just a friend, but people that you don't even know. It's very easy to dehumanize someone who disagrees with you. And I think to bring this all back around, this is a part of the problem with male-female interaction today, is this dehumanization on both sides, that the men are demons, that the women are this and the men are that,

and it's all these rash generalizations in this extreme tribalism well yes there is kind of a secret weapon and I it's not that's a secret out the secret is Heather and I have a whole second channel on which to navigate, which is that we both know the same evolutionary story. And so there's a way, you know, here's an idea that's important. You can very often understand more about a given human interaction, especially a contentious one, if you turn down the sound, right? So you can't hear what's being said. And that sounds wrong, right? Sounds like, well, the most important piece of information you could have is what these people are saying to each other as they're arguing. But no, that's not how human beings work. Sometimes the important information is on that vocal channel. And sometimes the vocal channel is actually almost purely noise. Right. And so if- Both literally and metaphorically. Yeah.

But if Heather and I both know that, then there's a part of us that's sort of always outside. I mean, we don't fight that much. It's really pretty rare. But when we do, there's also a part of us that's watching the interaction and knows that a certain pattern may have to unfold in order for us to get to the other part of it. You know, sometimes Heather needs me.

So knowing that we're engaging in theater at some level, even though neither of us wants to be. That's a great way to put it. Engaging in couples theater. It is. It is. It is. It totally is. It's actually, it's the perfect example of this thing.

Like, you know, you're talking about Peterson and going to work and wearing makeup and you think, am I sending sexual signals? Well, gosh, we're all involved in weird stuff. Sure. Right? Yeah. And the idea that you and your mate could both be aware that your argument is in some way theater and that even, you know, you might think, well, if it's theater, we can just skip it. No, you can't. No.

There are things that have to happen in order for you to get to the next act right and so you know they're like i hope i'm not saying something i shouldn't but there's a there's a thing i'm not the easiest guy to live with i think i'm a very decent person but i'm also fine oh thank you um but uh there's a part of me that's not good at certain stuff that makes Heather's life hard, right? And that stuff, she's good at putting up with it to a certain extent. And then there are things that will cause it to get even, to get bad. I need to know that that's happened in order for us to get past it. And she needs to tell me, hey, this isn't the normal level of, you know. I'm not really frustrated.

I'm considering exploding. Right, right. So, but anyway. And it doesn't sound that calm. The necessity of us being able to exchange that information is there. And the fact, you know, it's so much less charged if we both know that sort of that process has to unfold.

And that is not an infinite process. And we will be on the other side of it once, you know, she's conveyed what she needs to convey. And I've let her know that I've heard it. And again, the more times you've done this, the more likely you are confident, you know what, this is going to end up okay. This feels awful right now. Like we are fighting and this feels awful. And, right, we've done this before. now. Like we are fighting and this feels awful. And right, we've done this before. And actually, this proves to be necessary because it resets some things that, you know, just every relationship, no matter if it's romantic or not, needs resets on a regular basis. And so this is one way that

you can sort of theatrically reset some important points. This is a great lesson for reasonable people. And everybody should aspire to be reasonable people and let's end it at that all right we just did three hours that just flew right by right wow awesome crazy yeah thank you both it was really fun thank you this was fun that was three hours huh