The Joe Rogan Experience - #1173 - Geoffrey Miller

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, serving as an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and known for his expertise in sexual selection in human evolution.

four three two one jeffrey hey hey joe thanks for being here man appreciate it it's my pleasure and honor and uh on the day where bill cosby goes to the pokey crazy sad story that uh sad for some people happy for others sad that he's only going for... I wonder if that's a death sentence for a man at his age. Essentially it is, right? He's like 81 or something like that. It'd be weird if justice took into account like your health status and awarding sentences. Right. I think they have done that though.

Didn't they do that with that guy who was Speaker Hassert, who was Speaker of the House, who was convicted for molesting a large number of boys when he was a wrestling coach. Oh, yeah. Do you remember that man? Yeah. Yeah. 15 months.

15 months. Imagine. I mean, that's pure insanity. He was in a wheelchair when he was caught. Yeah. It could have been. Well, there's no way if he was a 25-year year old able-bodied man who had done the exact same thing He would have gone to jail for 15 months for

Admitting to molest a large number of kids Who are under his care when he was a he was a wrestling coach, right? Yeah, yeah, oh, he was the guy the movie was made of no no different guy now is that that was DuPont Okay, DuPont was not a child made of. No, that was a different guy. No, that was DuPont. Okay. DuPont was not a child molester. He was just a psychopath who hired wrestlers to come live with him and wrestle with him. Yeah.

Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. I know one of them. The main guy guy the movie they uh the the the two brothers uh dave and mark schultz fantastic uh wrestlers who were completely misrepresented in the movie they made him out to be like involved in this weird gay relationship with him and doing cocaine and all they added all sorts of shit to that movie very weird how they do that screenwriters you gotta dramatize it i guess his sentence wasn't for child abuse.

What? That's why it wasn't that. It says the judge said it would have been higher. He would have gotten more if the statutes didn't run out. The limitation for accidents in the 1960s and 70s ran out, so the judge noted the punishment for such a conviction would have been far worse. I think he actually got convicted for bank transactions, keeping stuff secret. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Had to pay fines. Statutes of limitations. Yeah. So we were talking about Bill Cosby, that psychology professors and experts were obviously stating that he had some sort of problem. obviously stating that he had some sort of problem. I mean, it's weird because the media will have a certain narrative they want to promote, and they'll sort of find the psychologists who will say the thing that fits that. So I think most clinical psychologists would say,

I've never talked to the guy. I'm not going to try to diagnose him from a distance. I have no idea what his condition is or what his issue is. But then there's the handful who are willing to kind of stick their necks out and say something. And man, it's embarrassing to be a psych professor for that reason because you're always kind of being represented publicly by the people who are kind of being least professional about those kind of diagnoses. That is a real problem today, isn't it? Like in terms of identity politics and this, this inclination to draw conclusions and to lean towards one side or

the other, instead of just looking at the actual situation objectively. And if you're not talking to him, I mean, I'm assuming Bill Cosby's a terrible piece of shit as a human being. That's what I'm assuming by looking at all this, but I've never talked to the man. I don't know what kind of crazy shit he's got going on in his head, but if all these women are telling the truth and seems super unlikely that they're all lying. I mean,

was there like over 50 of them, right? With the same story. Yeah. Well, he's got a deep dark streak. That's for sure. Um,

I mean, the weird thing is though, a lot of people who are successful have a little bit of that dark streak. They have a little bit of that sociopathy. They can kind of step back from normal human relations and they can either turn it into abuse and exploitation like Cosby did, or they can kind of civilize themselves, right? And they can harness that to do something that's good and where they're kind of using their ability to take a different viewpoint on things. Yeah. To analyze human behavior or invent things or, you know, propose new policies or whatever. policies or whatever. And so I think that kind of dark streak, you know, if you have it, you have to recognize it and kind of tame it and work with it. And the people who do, I think, can often do great things for society and the people who don't end up in jail. Well, this is one of the reasons

why I wanted to bring this up to you as an evolutionary psych professor, looking at the human mind and looking at behavior patterns and what's clearly some sort of, I hesitate to call crime an addiction, but it seems like an addictive pattern that he has, that there's a compulsion to doing this to people. It's not as simple as he wants women to have sex with him. They don't want to have sex with him, so he drugs them. I don't think it's that simple. I think there's some getting away with it thing. There's got to be some he's better than everyone thing because he's, you know, he's royalty

in terms of like Hollywood, in terms of show business in terms of stand-up comedy he's always been treated as royalty I mean he's been allowed to essentially criticize anyone he wants it's rarely is there a rebuttal to the the things that he says and you know he's been criticizing the black community for its use of bad words and for its use of sexually explicit for its use of bad words and for its use of sexually explicit language and depictions. And meanwhile, the entire time he's raping people. I mean, it's fucking amazing. I think one thing that might happen is if you've got this public image as being like squeaky clean family values and you've got the burden of kind of being a moral exemplar like that, you know,

just like televangelists, right? Or anybody who has a big religious following. Like the pressure to be good all the time, I think, can kind of tip people into this. Right. The thrill of transgression, I imagine, could be quite kind of addictive. And I think that's a real danger.

And I think that kind of hypocrisy is why we should be really careful about kind of idolizing anybody to that degree, kind of morally and putting that burden on them. who preached about the word of God, but meanwhile having this weird hooker thing. Like, uh, do you remember, what was his name? Ted?

He ran a giant church in, I believe it was Colorado. And the entire time I used to have a bit about him the entire time he was smoking meth and having sex with gay prostitutes. And all the while he was going on about, it's always the guys who go on about how awful gay people are that are secretly gay it's so common there's a little research on that i mean it's not definitive but it looks like a lot of ted hagerty like boom haggard haggard there's a

lot of people a lot of guys who are pretty like outspokenly homophobic. Yeah. You put them in a sex research situation and see what actually rouses them. If you show them straight or gay porn, right, and you have a plethysmograph, and you sense what... A what-stograph? What is it? Plethysmograph.

What is that? It senses blood flow in the penis. Oh, boy. I need one of those. I need one that'll just have it in the background of every podcast. When you come to do the podcast, you got to put these electrodes on your penis.

And then we were just going to talk about Japanese vomit porn and tentacles. Well, the plethysmographs don't lie. Plethysmographs don't lie. Not the heart. The heart lies. Not those plethysmographs. So, yeah, the people who are often you know most hostile to something yeah have some some little issue inside that right is creating some conflict yeah i mean it only makes sense

the the conflicted thoughts of the human being who has this ideal of who they'd like to project and what they'd like people to think they are meanwhile has this thing below the surface that is literally everything they despise and everything thing below the surface that is literally everything they despise and everything they rally against. And that is their, their true nature. Yeah. God, it's gotta be the awfulest feeling. I mean, I've known several guys who are closeted gay men and it's, it's a awful existence. They just live in this perpetual state of just angst and unease and meanwhile god i just think for the most part especially if you live in an urban environment most part people don't give a shit anymore you're it's almost a self-imposed prison and the people

that do give a shit they're the real problem you know the the people who are not gay who really care if someone's gay unless they're trying to do a cause beyond you, like, why do you care? Yeah, look, if somebody wants to be in the closet about their sexuality, like they want to be discreet for professional reasons or because investors would panic or whatever, like that's totally cool.

But I think it is so hard to be authentic to yourself. Like it's okay to sort of acknowledge I have this sexuality or these predilections and it's up to me to kind of harness them and deal with them and manage them. And if you want to do that privately, that's cool. We should have that freedom. Yes. But if you don't work out those little demons and if you can't acknowledge what's authentic, I think that's where you get these problems like the Cosby case. Yeah. And I believe there's a difference between discretion, not wanting to discuss your sexuality and out and out hypocrisy.

These are completely different things. It's one thing, like you said, like say if a guy's a CEO of some major corporation and he happens to be gay and he's just not interested in all the political nonsense and all the social nonsense that goes along with discussing that yeah he's like i'm just gonna keep it discreet that makes sense like why should he have to but if he lies to his friends you know like or if he goes on the attack Yes. Damnation. Hellfire. Yeah. We are so strange as a race. And I have talked many times about how bizarre it is that we've become really comfortable with seeing people have sex, like on phones and iPads and laptops. I mean, it is such a massive part of internet consumption, but yet so dirty and so forbidden. If someone comes in the room and you're watching you slam the laptop shut and discussed total embarrassment, it's really weird. Yeah. Well, it's weird on so many levels. Like I don't

do research on whatever the psychology of porn, but I know people who do. And the fact that you can study it and everyone watches it, but you can't even show clips at a scientific conference of what people are watching is kind of bizarre. A second thing that's bizarre is if you'd asked people 70 years ago, you know, in the 50s or whatever, what do you think will happen if there's unlimited free online pornography that is every possible genre of humans of all sexes interacting with each other, including cartoon dragons and whatever? They would go, civilization will have fallen. Like, it would be chaos. That sounds post-apocalyptic. And yet, we're living in that era, and people are still driving their kids to school

and being morally judgmental about politics. And our ability to compartmentalize is kind of awe-inspiring, actually. Yeah, it really is. But it's also our ability to adjust to the times is kind of awe-inspiring, too. Yeah. When you think about the difference. Like I've often talked about when I was in high school,

I was in high school in 1981. It was my freshman year of high school is I was in high school in 1981 was my freshman year of high school and that was literally around the time the VH1 tape was introduced into modern America because that was the what was the exact year VH1 tapes were invented we got them in my house I think in 82 like maybe I was a sophomore which is right when you're about the horniest and that's that's when porn made it into people's houses. And you had to go through those beads in the video store to get to the porn section. And everybody was like, everybody had blinders on and nobody looked at anybody else.

And it was just terrifying. And, you know, you saw your neighbor there. It'd be like rental late fees. Like, should I bring it back today? Oh, man, it's late. I'll just keep it. Just keep it. Another three bucks.

If you just stole it, it'd cost 30. Steal it just so you don't have to look the guy in the face. And in the 70s. 70s? Yeah. Really? It's an inner home use in the 70s on the wiki, it says. 70s and early 80s.

Okay. Well, maybe it was late 70s or something like that. My house, we got it around 1982. I want to say 82-ish. But it changed the world, and it changed it in a real sneaky way, where nobody saw it coming, but the difference between the access to sex, the looking at sex from 1960 to 1980, 20 years, which is, you know, in terms of historically,

is a very short period of time at any other time other than today. Today, it's a massive change. If you had to anticipate what it would be like in 2038, you'd be like, oh, God. You know, all of Elon Musk's inventions will have come to fruition. We'll be living in tunnels underground. And the surface of the Earth would be 190 degrees. And there'll be no more water. Yeah, people always overestimate how much is going to change in the next 20 years compared to the last 20.

Yeah. But, you know, if you'd asked a bunch of, let's say, psychology researchers who study, like, marriages and long-term relationships, ask them in 1980, what's going to happen when you have unlimited VHS porn? Some of them might have said, that'll save American marriages. How many do you think would go with that? All the hippies? I think a lot of folks would have said, well, that's a way you can get your sexual variety needs met in a kind of virtual fake way. And so that'll reduce the pressure for infidelities. And other folks would have said, oh my God, it'll remind people what they're missing.

And so it'll nuke marriages. The divorce rate will go to 80%. But then there's the third option, which is the sort of the Cosby-esque thing is that the addiction that there's, there's, and maybe I can ask you about this. Like, what is it about things, whether it is gambling or, you know, whatever video games, there are things that people get obsessed with, and those things become almost a part of who they are. It takes over their mind so much. Like if you had a pie chart of the human brain, with some folks, there's a giant chunk that's just porn.

It's like 40% of the brain, just porn. Like what happens? What is it about the mind that makes one obsessed, whether it's with gambling or whatever the vice, whatever the thing that makes you addicted? Well, I mean one issue is people differ in their conscientiousness, right? us, right? Their degree of self-control and their ability to kind of resist temptations and keep their eyes on the target, like career, family, kids, you know, do the right stuff. Other people like, I just can't control myself in any domain of life, whatever it is, video games, porn, doing my homework, whatever. But I think we also have to cut people some slack because remember, you know, if you're a teenager and you're really into video games, Call of Duty, whatever it is,

there are literally thousands of people designing that game to be as addictive as possible and beta testing it and refining it and, you know, doing the level design so it gives you just the right reinforcers at the right pace. And of course, we're not going to be very good at resisting that because the power of capitalism and tech and innovation to kind of exploit our brains is pretty awesome. Am I being naive or are they just trying to be entertaining? I mean, are they just trying to make an amazing game that's totally immersive and sucks you in?

Or are they really thinking, hey, this Jeffrey Miller guy, I want to get him fucked up on Battlefield Earth. No, that was the John Travolta movie, right? Yeah, that did not succeed. Okay, let's just say Unreal Tournament. I want to get him fucked up on Unreal Tournament and get him completely addicted to this. They're just maximizing sales and profit. But are they doing it consciously or are they just trying to make the best possible game that's so entertaining?

And then it just, as a side effect, it becomes addictive. I think it's a, well, okay, if you're running a video game company, the folks actually doing the programming, right, character design, level design, whatever, they want it to be awesome. They want it to just be the best game ever that is just so fun to play. But the management knows we have to sell it. We have to make it compelling. We have to make people excited about the next version and the add-ons. So I think there's kind of like a super ego and id issue going on even within companies. The designers just want it to be cool.

Right. And management just wants a viable commercial product but doesn't that just come with something that's cool i mean i'm just playing devil's advocate here because i'm not exactly sure how i'm friends with a few guys who make video games uh cliffy b who uh worked for epic games who makes uh he showed us unreal way back in the day even before jamie worked here we got to see them making unreal tournament like as it was being made and uh i went to the aid offices when they were working on quake three which were just these amazing games and it seemed to me and again i could be naive but it

seemed to me that all they were doing was just trying to make awesome shit that they like yeah and then it became addictive just because it was so good i think that's most of it um yeah i mean this summer like my girlfriend and i were each doing working on our next book proposals and we each got a little bit addicted to age of empires hd which is like back in the day 20 years ago and it's really fun because we learned a lot about each other just watching each other play like we had such different strategies and in terms of like what you build, what you prioritize, how you deal with enemies. Like it's an amazing kind of personality test in its own right. And we each got a little bit addicted temporarily in our own way.

And I don't think that's an intention of the designers. It's just, if you make anything awesome, whether it's music, whether it's standup comedy or sex, whether it's sex, whether it's long form TV drama, um, like Ozark, then people want that, you know, it works. It's, it's brain candy. Yeah. I saw you quote you you posted about ozark after i posted about how amazing it is i'm completely wrapped up in this second season so incredible but you were saying how they always make the kids bratty yeah you don't have kids do you i have a daughter you do 22 oh okay i i didn't think she was bratty at all i think she kept it

remarkably together for a teenager whose parents are murderers and drug dealers. Spoiler alert. I thought it was, I think she's, I mean, she needs some time alone where they need to talk to her. I mean, you can't just let her go through life, hanging out with some kid who lives in a trailer, smoking weed and stealing books. Yeah. I kind of warmed up to it after like, I'd watched the first couple episodes and she seemed kind of bratty, the daughter. Really? In that. Your kid must be amazing.

My kid's awesome. And I don't know why all kids aren't like her. So, but I think screenwriters get lazy about this stuff. They think, well, if there's a family, you need marital conflict and you need parent offspring conflict and you need secrets and lies and and but i think the way they're handling it is amazing because the kid doesn't have that kind of conflict the kid has like in my opinion a typical sort of relationship with his father where he admires his father and his father's abilities and you know and he seems to be it's i just think that show's fucking great it's just so well read uh written rather it's just

so it's so twisted there's so much going on so many different levels yeah it's like i get anxiety i start sweating and i feel like i'm burning bodies well i love that you you don't really know what's going to happen. Legitimately. Like, it's, you know, Game of Thrones, you had that thing where any character could die at any time. Yeah. And that's what, that was one of the major things that kept people watching. And I think with really good TV drama, you get that kind of engagement where it's like real life. Like, you know the series will continue,

but you don't know any particular character will. But we didn't have that for most of culture. That's what's really interesting. It was through most of mass media fiction that you saw on television, the movies, the good guy won. Yeah. And it was real predictable. And there was always like a little bit of drama, like he might lose.

He might lose. Oh, he wins. Occasionally you had something crazy like Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff and you're like, whoa, whoa, they're just off themselves. That's the end of the movie. And you leave the movie theater like, holy shit, what a gangster move. You know, there was a few movies like that but for the most part yeah well starting in like the golden age of cinema in the 70s the counterculture cinema

you sometimes got those really profound surprise endings but one thing like an example the hustler vanishing point okay that was the one with the challenger. The guy had the challenger. Yeah. Yeah. It's like suicide by car. I remember the car. Awesome car. But I mean, one thing that makes me optimistic about America is that the same adults who are being completely insane to each other about politics on Twitter, whatever, are watching this really sophisticated, emotionally insightful Netflix stuff. And I can't connect those two things. It's like when people aren't talking about certain issues, they're capable of appreciating really insightful drama that's about the subtleties of human relationships and morally ambiguous situations. And then they go into the voting booth or get on Twitter and it's like there's black and

there's white and that's it. And I hate those people and I love these people. And I can't connect the dots between the entertainment media that we appreciate versus the kind of ideologies that we oversimplify. Yeah, I think Twitter, and I think, well, Twitter in particular, but blogs as well, I think it is a horrible way to communicate when you are saying something that's in dispute, you know, because you're not challenged. And I think there's also, whether it's 140 characters or 280 characters, I just think this limited way of writing in text without talking to someone, without being in front of them and communicating with them and the subtleties of human interaction and social cues and recognizing

people's feelings. And it just, it's a piss poor way of getting your thoughts out. And it's very non-human. You know, it's very, it tends to gravitate towards cruelty because there's no consequences for saying cruel things. It's almost like you're throwing a bomb over a wall and you don't know who's over there. You know, like you don't, you're not there seeing it. You're not, there's something about that, that I just think is alien to the human condition. And I think it's having a real effect on our civilization and our culture and how we communicate with each other. And I think it's

galvanizing the polar opposites and it's making people go towards these extreme lefts and extreme rights, especially people that are easily led or maybe not so thoughtful about, you know, the objective way that they're interpreting these events and not being introspective, not looking at themselves with a critical eye and just engaging in this sort of back-and-forth tribal shit with people that I just think is it's so strange to watch and particularly with when you read something and it's really well written like you could tell this is an intelligent person that's written a bunch of nonsense and called people alt-right and Nazis. And what's the most recent one? That Vox piece about the- Was it radical? What is it? There's a new-

The radical right? The reactionary right? Oh, yes. That's it. The reactionary right. This is the new one. We have a new one now. It's new.

It's only a couple weeks old, the reactionary right. It's baby. Yeah. Isn't that time to- right it's baby yeah it's not time to i mean the weird thing is people do have a hunger for this more primal engaged kind of long-form discussion which is why podcasts like this are really popular and why people are willing to listen to you know two reasonably smart people talking for an hour or three about cool topics because that's the natural condition. You know, imagine our ancestors 100,000 years ago around the campfire having a discussion

about some fraught issue. Well, they would talk it through until it was more or less resolved or unless they at least identified, here's the things we can agree on and here's the things we can agree to disagree on. But with Twitter, it's just the exact opposite it's not sitting around the campfire right it's it's lobbing these hand grenades over the and it's an infinite number of hand grenades like say if you have 30 000 followers or something god that's 30 000 people that might be lobbing hand grenades and then they might retweet to a

bunch of other people and oh jesus then here comes some you know especially if it's on some hot button topic that they would like to chime in on you know it's just it's strange yeah well i think you know the human social psychology is it's very hard to reach any agreement without a certain amount of back and forth, preferably face-to-face, in person, with as much time as you need. And this is why things like these sort of time-limited presidential debates drive me nuts. I would love to just have 50, 60 hours of candidates talking it through. 50, 60 hours of candidates talking it through and people can tune in and just hear, okay, here's six hours about foreign policy. Let's see what they really, and then voters could have an informed choice. Imagine candidates actually learning something from each other.

Right. And being open and honest about that. Instead, they have to pretend that their ideas are rock solid and completely well thought out and rigid and impossible to evolve. That this is it. They've got it. And you're wrong. And what my opponent wants is something terrible for America. And God, we've seen this hustle so many times. And yet it's the same hustle every four years. so many times and yet it's the same hustle every four years yeah i i hope we get to a future where people are allowed to be epistemically humble like here's what i don't know and i don't know a lot about most things and even if politicians or scientists or media figures were able to take that attitude yeah and just it kind of gets back to the hypocrisy point. Right. Everybody inwardly knows about most topics. I know virtually nothing or I've heard a few things third hand that I can kind of regurgitate at a party. you about everything. And this is something I try to model for my students. Like if they ask a question and I really don't know the answer, I try to make a point of saying, I don't know, let's look it up. That's awesome. That's so important. The idea that you should know

everything about everything is preposterous. Yeah. And you know, if you're a 20 year old undergrad, you don't know what the typical 50-year-old knows. You might think, oh, they've probably mastered most of the wisdom in the world already. Or you might think, you know, there's like gigabytes of stuff and they can't possibly know it all. Well, there's such a spectrum too. The average person has like a very intensive job. Say if you're involved in something, computer coding, electronics, something that's 10, 12 hours a day, you're engrossed. You don't have a lot of time to focus on other areas. You don't really have a lot of time to expand your understanding of whether it's biology, mathematics, whatever it is that doesn't apply to what you do for a living.

You really have very little time. biology, mathematics, whatever it is, it doesn't apply to what you do for a living. You really have very little time. So this notion that you, like people are embarrassed about things they don't know. And I think that's really unfortunate. It's one of the main stumbling points when it comes to like open and honest discourse. You're not dumb if you don't know some things, you know? You just don't know some things, and there's no way you know everything. Yeah, I think it's a great point. A lot of people have

these cognitively demanding jobs, and that's not just white-collar workers. I mean, a lot of manual trades, you've got to think about what you're doing, it it's hard mental labor and then you get home and you have dinner and you have the kids and their homework and your family life and what are you going to do by the time you finally have some alone time at whatever 9 p.m are you going to you know turn on the nature channel and watch a really hardcore david attenborough you know animal behavior documentary right right or are you going be like, I'll just re-watch you know Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean people want to escape at that point. Yeah. There's not enough time in the day. One of the most beautiful things about podcasts that was completely unexpected for me is that it gives me this very unusual opportunity to sit down and talk to somebody without any interruptions for three hours, which I could never ask someone to do in real

life. And it never came up before. Like if I have dinner, if you and I went out to dinner, we'd be talking, you know, maybe someone else would be with us, different conversations to be eating. Oh, this is amazing. Did you try that? Oh, this is good. Yeah.

What are you up to? Blah, blah, blah. This is like little simple conversations. It's fun and everything, but it's not completely locked in like this with the headphones on, through a microphone, the knowledge that other people are listening. And that these subjects that you're discussing, you're allowing these ideas to play themselves out. And you're sort of moving them around and asking questions and looking at them from different angles. And to have that liberty and freedom to do that is a very rare thing for people that get to listen. And I enjoy Sam Harris's podcast in particular.

Radio Lab is one of my favorites. There's so many good ones out there. is that you get a chance to listen to discourse uninterrupted, uncensored, undirected. And this is something that I think is sorely missing from the rest of our culture. And it's one of the reasons why these things have caught on so well. Yeah, I mean, if you respect the ideas that you're talking about, you should be willing to give time and attention and let them kind of breathe, like opening a bottle of wine and just letting it do the aeration thing before you pour it. And it's funny how much of a thirst there is for that. I mean, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, would anybody ever spend three hours listening to a podcast? I would have said,

no, there's just this one way acceleration of culture that's going to be faster and faster. Nobody will watch more than a 90 second clip on YouTube. That'll be it. Yeah. And instead it's the opposite way. I think people have a yearning for a more relaxed pace of dialogue that is actually a break from the frenetic pace of their work life. Right. Yeah. I think even like leaning towards things that are like tech reviews, things along those lines, those are getting longer and longer when people are just, I mean, there was never a television show where someone would discuss cell phones in depth with no interruption for over an hour.

That's very common now where someone will go over all the different details of a phone and let you know, like, here's what's new about the Galaxy Note 9. And they get fucking hundreds of thousands of views. Like, clearly someone's missed something. And they get fucking hundreds of thousands of views. Like, clearly someone's missed something. Yeah, I mean, even on YouTube, like, you can get 25-minute reviews of, like, an AR-15 accessory. Yeah. Not just, like, the rifle, but, like, the red dot scope or whatever. Or I'm sure there are long bow-hunting reviews or whatever.

Oh, yeah. There's a lot. Yeah. I've seen them all. I mean, I think that's just a more natural pace of human discourse. Because, you know, bear in mind like 100,000 years ago, sitting around the fire with a bunch of people. No smartphones, no video, no TV, no movies, no recorded music.

The entertainment is each other. And it's not rushed. It's like the sun went down. None of us are going to sleep for four hours. What do we do? Entertain each other with jokes. Yeah. I mean.

Break out the ukulele. They wouldn't have done stand-up comedy, but they would have done sit-down comedy. Well, somebody probably stood up. held court, told some good stories. I mean, a good story is always valued. A good storyteller. This is what my anthropologist colleagues tell me is your status, if you're in a tribal society, a small-scale society,

is heavily dependent on not just how good a hunter you are, how many kids you have, it's how entertaining are you in the evenings. Sure. And the people who just break the monotony are just gold. They're treasured. Yeah. They give you fuel. They give you energy.

Like when you're around someone who's really hilarious, who's telling great stories, everyone around them is like, ha, ha, ha, ha. You get fired up by it. Yeah. I don't – I mean, I have a rosy view of the future. I'm very optimistic. going through right now politically and socially in particular this is i feel like this is just an adolescent period of communication that we are experiencing this this open flood like we've

opened up the the barriers for communication anybody can communicate now and it's just k and it's going to take a while before the discourse levels out and you've got a lot of loud noises on all sides. And there's a lot of people fighting for power and fighting for virtue, fighting for whatever social brownie points they get by pointing out their position being correct and your position being foolish and silly, and this is the future and this is done. And there's this cruel aspect to it which is interesting like when if someone

missteps and someone says something that they regret then they delete it there's this cancel culture get rid of him off with his head because people realize the immediacy of all this and they're terrified of it happening to them so So it's like they're just throwing rocks at whoever might be the accused. It's fascinating to watch. I mean, we're going to need a whole new set of social norms where people just calm the fuck down about this stuff. And I think it's kind of analogous.

Like one of my favorite books about kind of social history is called The Bourgeois Virtues by Deidre McCloskey, an economic historian. She points out when you switch from like the Middle Ages where everyone's a peasant to this urbanized commercial culture where people are mostly traders and they have little shops and whatever, they needed to learn how to interact with strangers to provide value for money. to learn how to interact with strangers to provide value for money. And they needed a whole new set of virtues that had to do with reliability and thinking, what am I making or what goods or services am I providing that actually are useful? And it took a couple generations for people to enter that kind of capitalist mode of, what can I do that's helpful to others that can support my family? And I think now we have a cultural shift where we realize, given social media, how do we cope with the fact that everybody virtue signals? Everybody sometimes says things that are mean and stupid.

And everyone's fallible. And anything you say will be on a permanent record, basically. How do we cope with that? We're used to a sort of public culture where everything is very polished and edited and curated. And that time is gone. So we need a new set of kind of social and moral norms that cut each other a lot more slack, I think. understanding should be rewarded and that we we need to reward that and i don't want to say ostracize people that are inclined to go towards this cancel culture idea but we need to let people be aware of it you know we were talking before the podcast that i have like all these emails that i can't catch up on because i was gone i was in the mountains for six days with no cell phone service at all. I felt better when I was there. I just did. I feel like there's a certain amount of anxiety

that comes with being connected to all these people all the time and constantly checking your mentions and constantly looking at Google News to find out what chaos is coming our way. I just don't think that that's healthy. And I don't think, I think I do my very best to mitigate the negative effects of it, but my very best is not good. I don't think I'm doing a great job because when it's taken away from me, and I've had this happen twice over the last few months.

I was in Lanai, the small island off of Hawaii, one of the Hawaiian islands, and I broke my phone. And it took a few days for them to send me a new one. And I was like, God, why do I feel so good? I feel so present and I feel so healthy. And then this past week, the same thing, no cell phone service for all these days. And so I just felt better. I think there's a funny thing even that happened with Burning Man culture where like when it got started in the early 90s, it was let's all come together and have this excitement of interacting more.

And now since Burning Man is one of the few places where you don't get cell phone service and you can't really be online, it's like, oh, man, this is such a relief because we literally can't stay connected. man, this is such a relief because we literally can't stay connected. And the community we're in is only 70,000 people instead of 330 million. Which is almost Boulder. That's almost Boulder, Colorado. I think Boulder is a little bit over 100. So 70,000, that's a fucking big city of freaks. It's a big city, but it feels intimate compared to Twitter. Ooh.

Right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'm fascinated by Burning Man. I can't go because hippies will drive me crazy and there's too much dust. Yeah. But I love the idea and I fully support it. If there was a fund that you could write a check to support Burning Burning Man I support it as a project as an idea I don't necessarily want to go there until they

got really polished and worked out but I think what the idea behind it is fascinating to people saying I don't like this I don't like where this is going I think there's a lot of people that would like to do something different let's just try it out for a week. Everybody, let's agree. We'll get together through these days, and let's just fucking dance, and we'll have glow sticks, and wear pasties, and get fucking crazy and do ecstasy. And a lot of people are like, fuck, yeah, let's do it. And then this thing happens. And this thing is only a few years old.

I mean, it really is what, a decade and a half? How many years have they been doing it? The 90s? The first Burning Man was like the late 80s, but it was just like a couple dozen people. And then it just, it gradually grew and it really became a pretty solidified subculture by probably the late 90s. And no leadership. Well, there is kind of behind the, kind of behind the scenes leadership, of course. I mean, that's another fascinating thing is depending on the political lenses that you

wear when you go there, it's either like a libertarian paradise or it's a communist paradise or it's spontaneous self-organization of some sort. But there certainly are people who are kind of coordinating it. It's just they're not. Well, there's tickets now? You have to get tickets? It's hard to get. It's hard to get tickets.

It's even hard to get a parking pass. But this is my point. Like, why would they want to limit this thing? Like, who is like a Bitcoin thing. You're arbitrarily limiting the amount of Bitcoin or deciding there's only a certain number, and they're doing this with humans. They're just saying, well, I can't really go over 70,000. It's just not going to work.

But what if they did? What if they just opened up the floodgates and said, anybody who wants to come to Burning Man and get fucking crazy, just come on down. How many do you think would come? Half a million. Ooh, boy. But it would be chaos, right? Because it would, like, who supplies the porta-potties

and the emergency medical services and the therapists for people having bad trips. Like, you need some infrastructure and then you know nevada state police have to kind of make sure there's not like murders and stuff do they come around oh yeah they wander around they they police how fast you drive and they must be so annoyed like what have they been dealing with up until burning man fucking nothing no just a little bit of math here and there cow got loose yeah someone blew up a trailer because they got their mixture wrong but yeah it's it's fascinating in terms of um how quickly it went from not being a thing at all to being its own subculture with its own moral norms and dress styles and systems of virtue signaling and sort of political expectations about what beliefs are the right ones to have even though it didn't start out political at all. Well, whenever you get freaky, you go left wing.

Like if you get freedom and freaky and drugs, it's left wing. Period. Right. I mean, there's no real. I mean, unless it's some eyes wide shut type shit where you're wearing masks and everybody's got a. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You don't typically hear people like, well, I went to Burning Man and I dropped acid and I realized like Mormon monogamy is really the proper way to live.

Yeah. They're nice people, though. They might be right. Yeah. Yeah. Mormons are the nicest cult of all time. They are some of the nicest folks. I know, if I had to say, if like there's one religion where I had to say like, what are your expectations of friendliness and niceness? Like, where's the highest expectation? For me, it's Mormons.

That's one religion. Like, I think it's nonsense. I think Joseph Smith was a little con man in 1820 when he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus. And only he could read them because he had a magic rock and all that crazy shit. It is absolutely ridiculous. But the end result is a bunch of really nice folks. Like, they have a wonderful community.

They're really nice to each other. Once they got rid of all that polygamy shit, you know, once they got rid of the 90 wives and, you know, dressing up like a pilgrim, they became like a really nice community of people. They're like generally really friendly. So my granddad, who was a business school professor, back in the 40s, he moved his little family to Salt Lake City and they lived there for a while. And he was really inspired by the kind of family values. Salt Lake City, and they lived there for a while. And he was really inspired by the kind of family values. And I think that's one reason he sort of went on to have 12 kids of his own.

And not that he turned Mormon, but he thought they're on to something in terms of how seriously they take the future, both on Earth and in the afterlife they believe in. Well, in the afterlife, don't they get a planet of their own when they die? Right. Well, this is something I loved about the get a planet of their own when they die? Right. Well, this is something I loved about the TV series The Expanse. I don't know if you've seen it. I keep hearing about it, and I haven't gotten into it yet. It's just too many damn shows that are awesome to watch these days. But as soon as I'm done with Ozark, I'm going to jump in. What I loved about it is it's set maybe a couple hundred years in the future,

and so we've colonized Mars and Asteroid Belt. And there's one group of people who are building the first ship to colonize a distant star system and who's doing it the Mormons of course and I thought of course of course it's going to be a religion that has a farsighted approach and that's kind of pronatalist and that's all about family values and like increasing their numbers. And yeah, of course it's going to be them, not what social justice warriors putting together a starship. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever see the Osmond family photograph from one of their albums, their early albums, where they all got their own planet?

Because they think that when you die, you get your own planet. And so the album was based on that concept. And if you open up the album, it's like, oh, here's planet Donnie. Marie's got her own little asteroid belt. Yeah, they're totally locked and loaded to do the uh the interstellar colonization it's strange though i mean it's it's strange the blinders that people go on that people put on and that they would put those blinders on like it's almost like if you just can go hey look let's just all admit joseph smith was full of shit but we got a good thing going on here folks we're all real nice to each other and there seems to be

some real positive energy involved in believing in this higher power and this greater good and this overwhelming sense of community that we all have and they have a sense of humor about it like the way they reacted to the south park guys doing Book of Mormon. It's fantastic. It was like, fair enough. They took out a full page ad in the playbook. I mean, that is a brutal musical in terms of like the way they're depicted. Buffoons, believing in nonsense, trying to recruit these indigenous people. It's kind of, I mean, it's ruthless and hilarious at the same time. And they're like, wonderful.

If you want to find out more about being a Mormon here, come, come to our website, come check it out. Thank you. I think having that, that humility and that sense of humor about what you're doing. I wish we saw more of that in like academia, because there's a lot of fields that are very bad and, and don't do good work, but that are terribly, terribly serious about it. Like what? Gender studies. How dare you?

Social psychology. Gender studies. I posted something on Instagram yesterday. I was at a bookstore and there is a feminist baby book. It says feminist baby finds her voice, and it's a baby screaming into a bullhorn. Look at this picture. Baby screaming into a bullhorn. And I said that the lines between parody and reality have never been blurrier.

And some people laughed, but a lot of people call me a piece of shit. And I, this is one of the rare times I dove into the comments just to take a little look-see into the gates of hell. But look, that's fucking parody folks. Why is the baby screaming into a bullhorn? What voice does she have?

What, what oppression is she rallying against at three months old? Is she screaming about the patriarchy when she can't even fucking talk yet? And here's more parody. Why is she fat and ugly? What kind of baby is that? That baby looks like a thumb. She doesn't even have a chin.

This is chaos. It's not even a real baby. It's like an M&M with legs. It's crazy. Look, she's got fucked up hair, and they've already gendered her. They put a bow on her, which is really fucked up to do to a baby. You've decided that she's got fucked up hair and they've already gendered her they put a bow on her Which is really fucked up to do to a baby. You've decided that she's a girl. How dare you you piece of shit? you transphobic asshole and

The ruches is a little bit of she's got whore makeup on She dressed up like a fuck clown already as a baby fucked up hair big nutty eyes. It's crazy. Finds her voice. She found her voice. Fantastic.

She can't talk yet. That's a baby. We should all listen to the baby. Give the baby a bullhorn. Let's all gather around. I got poop. What is the baby saying? She finds her voice.

Look, it's parody. Even if the book is wonderful, I don't know that it's not. Maybe it's a great book. Maybe it's fun. Maybe it's a silly book. That's parody. That would be a goddamn character on South Park, a baby feminist with a bow that screams at the top of her lungs.

What is this? Free the nipple? Oh, like right now I'm hungry. I get it. Yeah. Oh, is that from the book? That's from the book, I guess. Feminist Baby.

Maybe it's a great book. I think it's satire. I don't think so. I mean, here's the thing. Like, if you're in a field where you can't tell whether something is from it or it's satirical,

then you need to lighten up about your field. Yes. Gender studies, you're saying. In particular well yeah yeah in particular but um but what is it about it that leans itself towards foolishness i think it's very hard to do good work in a field where you have to every day systematically deny common sense and deny the evidence of your own eyes and ears about what's right in front of you, like how sex differences work. think that creates a habit of interacting with the world in a way that says what I study is going to be completely divorced from every aspect of day-to-day life and everybody else I encounter who's not in my field because if if you allow any crosstalk between like Between like your sort of blank slate gender ideology and the real world, the ideology crumbles.

So you can only maintain it behind this wall of insulation. And that's a terrible position to be in. I don't envy the people who live their lives that way. And it all grows inside the walled gardens of academia. And outside of that, it's these, you know, you get Internet groups from people that sort of were indoctrinated into these ideas in college. And it's also, I think in some ways, there's a leveling of the playing field that a lot of these ideologies present to some people where they,

they go, no, you're not a freak. You're okay. You know, there's, there was some silly article on fat acceptance the other day and it was talking and then they got, which is fine.

I accept people who drink, I accept, I've accepted all kinds of unhealthy choices, but let's don't lie to me. who drink. I accept all kinds of unhealthy choices. But listen, don't lie to me. Just don't lie about the physical reality of what you've done to your body if you reach 400 pounds. That's not healthy. You're saying it's healthy. You're saying it's okay. No, you're just not dead yet. If you lost 200 pounds, you would feel wonderful. That would be healthier. Like if you smoke every day and you're like, look, no cancer, smoking's healthy. No,

no, you're just, you're just, your body is dealing with it. Your body's processing it. It won't be able to forever. That is exactly what's going on if you're morbidly obese. And for you to pretend any differently and to just go on about this fat acceptance movement and, you know, the big, beautiful this and that and like no you're obese you've eaten too much food if you see a fat guy how come he doesn't get the same sort of treatment if you see a morbidly obese man in his underwear no one's saying he's beautiful because he's disgusting and he's fat and he's lazy and he's he's addicted to food we all it. But if it's a woman, we're so inclined to like, just let her go.

She's fine. You're wonderful. You're beautiful. You're amazing. Like give her her space. We treat them as if they're incapable of recognizing the absolute reality of their physical being. I think it's important, you know, to address both the kind of individual choice level and

also the kind of systemic level, like the food industry and what is being promoted and what the federal government promoted for ages. And it was this terrible situation where you could have followed exactly what the FDA recommended and it would have been bad for you for decades. And because of lobbying and because of the powers that be and influence. And I think that's the level to criticize, right? If you have a systemic problem like promotion of tobacco products and you want a safer alternative, then, yeah, you've got to address the tobacco industry. We have this bizarre situation, for example, where like a lot of people in my department work on alcoholism treatment research. How do you get people to drink less? Or they work on how do you get people to stop taking opiates?

How do you deal with opiate addiction? And if you make a suggestion like, oh, here's some awesome new research showing that if people switch from opiates to cannabis, it like dramatically lowers the risk of death. Or if they switch from alcohol to cannabis, it has all these health benefits relatively to like being an alcoholic. But it's kind of considered taboo to raise that in a lot of medicine and psychology and so forth. of medicine and psychology and so forth. Well, it's like, oh, you're giving in to people being self-indulgent if you say they should switch from one thing to another in a kind of harm reduction mode. Almost like a methadone type solution. Yeah.

And a lot of them come out of a kind of 12-step program mentality where it's like you have a disease. If you ever do anything that is bad for you, then you've relapsed. And that's feeding your disease. And I think that's idiotic. And that's not – the evidence shows that's not the way to treat any of these physical addictions. But something like cannabis as an alternative is totally marginalized in academia. You really can't talk about it as a valid alternative where people could come home and they can drink or they could come home and they could get high. And maybe getting high for a lot of people might be better.

Is that changing, though? I haven't seen any evidence that it's changing, at least within academia. Really? I would think that that would be one of the first places where it does change, because the influence of the pharmaceutical industry isn't so deeply entwined in the system itself. It's not like pharmaceutical industry people are dropping off pamphlets on talking points when you're giving lectures. Well, here's the problem. Who gives you the research funding to look into this, right? National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism or National Institute of Drug Abuse. If you do a grant proposal that says,

here's an alternative that might work, they will shut it down because the federal government does not, those agencies don't want the blowback of some senator saying, how dare you fund this research that says this is a valid alternative. Yeah. So everyone who works in these areas is kind of locked into a system of grant funding that's subject to kind of political censorship by the funding agencies. Do you remember those talking dog commercials of about 10 years ago where there was a girl,

she comes home from school, and the dog's like, Lindsay, I really wish you wouldn't smoke pot. You're not the same when you do, and I miss my friend. And the girl's sitting there stoned out of her mind. Her dog's talking to her. Her dog runs away. It turns out that the organization that funded those commercials was funded by tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical companies. Yeah.

Like, they're drug dealers who are against drugs. It's literally like hookers doing a commercial against strippers. That's literally what it's like. And we just accepted this. It was all over television. It was everywhere you look. It became parody. I mean, it became preposterous.

It was like, this is your brain on drugs. You remember the eggs? And everybody's like, I'm hungry. I mean, a million comedians had jokes on that. You're giving me the munchies, man. This is just insanity that this is allowed to take place, is that drugs that kill enormous numbers of people are allowed to demonize drugs that kill no one ever in the history of use. If you looked at that rationally, if you were something from some other planet that was studying the human race, and you saw the way we program people, and the way we spend enormous sums of money to project a certain idea and get it into people's heads through these very influential, short, memorable

videos, you'd be like, this is a culture and a civilization, an organism that is mad. This is madness. Yeah. I often ask myself, how is this going to look in 50 or 100 years to whatever my great grandkids or future people who stumble upon my books or this podcast or whatever? And I think if this would make zero sense and would be totally embarrassing both intellectually and ethically, then don't take it seriously. then don't take it seriously. And this particular issue, I think it's really important for citizens to understand how much of science is constrained by what can be funded by the federal government and that we are not actually supported to do certain kinds of research

that might be really helpful to people. It's the same thing with sex research, right? It is virtually impossible to get federal funding to do any kind of sex research in America these days. So what do you do? You write a grant to do something else, and then you kind of do the sex research on the side using like some of the resources. I don't do this, but everybody I know who does sex research does it. Is it because they're concerned that the image of funding sex research versus funding, whether it's obesity or hunger, poverty, whatever it is, like these are there's not enough resources to go around. Why would you spend any money studying this? You must be a pervert.

It's partly that, but it's partly, you know, the individuals in Washington who administer these grants don't want the political flack if some politician discovers, oh, you're doing funding on, like, how women can have more orgasms. Outrageous. And it's like, that sounds like one of the most cost-effective ways to increase human happiness I've ever heard of, right? Right, but people are embarrassed of orgasms. People are embarrassed about it. They're embarrassed of all sex. Yeah. Marital therapy research you can do. Like if you want to research

how do you make a monogamous relationship less full of stress and argument, you can get some money to do that. But even there, like the kind of suggestions you could make are quite restrictive in terms of what kind of therapy you're allowed to research or talk about. So, yeah, I wish citizens understood this because their tax dollars are not being allocated in the

best way to deliver the benefits in their real lives to their families and their relationships that they could do. So to bring it all back to obesity, what I would like, and I bet I could say the same about you, is we'd like to take some of these sort of influential videos that we've seen done that demonize innocuous drugs like marijuana and put those on sugar. Put those on how people are addicted to sugar. People are addicted to so many things that are causing obesity, so many things that are causing us to have this epidemic of,

I mean, if you go to Disneyland, it's one of the saddest things in the world. You see how many people are on scooters because they've eaten themselves out of their ability to be mobile on their own They're just overflowing all the off the side of these scooters It's it's very depressing and then you see them what they're eating. They're drinking slushies and you know eating fucking nonsense and this this is a and again, it's another addiction and in the availability of it is, I mean, imagine if you were a heroin addict and everywhere you went has heroin.

That's what it's like to be a sugar addict. If you're a sugar addict, every store you go into is filled with your drug. Every 7-Eleven, right when you go to pay for your gas or whatever you're doing, it's filled with your drug right there in front of you. Your drug drugs everywhere. And you know, if, if you want to do something alternative, like I've been involved in the paleo movement for a few years and like my

girlfriend's vegan. And if you want to find good paleo or vegan food, it's like getting a little easier, but it's not mainstream enough that there's like a whole aisle in Walmart devoted to it. This is a shitty aisle. Yeah. So, I don't know. The food system is a pretty hard nut to crack because there's an awful lot of money at stake.

And the profit margins on junk food are very, very high. And it's also it's very difficult to keep things on the shelf things go i mean if you have real fresh food it goes bad very quickly that's natural that's what it's supposed to do and good luck keeping a supermarket open if you can only keep your vegetables for a couple of days now if there was like long life kale i'd be pretty sad about that. Yeah, that would be sad. Like some sort of artificial turf-type kale. That stuff goes bad quick.

It gets funky. Yeah. But I'm kind of excited about new developments like clean meat, lab-grown meat. I am too. Because I think ethically that'll be awesome. I want to see what kind of monsters they make out of that. Yeah. It's going to be strange to see headless meat slabs with no central nervous system just growing and trying to figure out how do they get it to have like a muscle consistency like a filet mignon or something. I mean, you've got to realize an animal, like different cuts of meat have a different texture to them because there's different muscle density.

Because the animals use their body. I think you have to electrically stimulate the muscles tissue. So it kind of has to twitch. Yeah. It's weird. You have to. But, and people go, oh, God. Would it have nerves then?

That's disgusting. People would make the argument then that it could feel somehow or another in some neighboring dimension. It'll have like fake nerves. What I'm excited about is you could potentially have meat that's not just from like the top three species. You could eat meat from people? Cows, pigs, and chicken. You want to eat people? Jeffrey, is that what you're saying?

Well, one of my edgier tweets was like, celebrities will start selling themselves that can turn into like a Ryan Gosling steak. You don't want to encourage that, bro. Trust me, Ryan. Don't go down that road. You're too delicious. Yeah, man, I don't know about all that. I don't think we should encourage,

because what if people are delicious? That could be a real problem. I think the lab-grown people will always be cheaper than like – I don't know about that. Yeah. I bet you could buy someone real cheap in some sort of third-world country for food. You know, there's a terrible – not terrible in a bad way, but in terms of its revelations, there's a documentary piece from Vice on Liberia.

And one of the things about it was that they were selling human meat and that this guy recognized it because he had eaten humans before. And so when there was a stand that was selling meat on the side of the road and he turned them in for selling human meat. And the reason why he knew is because he had eaten people. I'm like, okay, when's the next flight out of here? What the fuck? Can you imagine?

I mean, if you gave me a piece of lamb, and you didn't tell me what it was, I'd be like, hmm, not sure. Do you know how many people you have to eat before you absolutely know that something's people? I'm like, fuck, man. I've got a lot of lamb chops i would not bet 100 on my ability to distinguish a lamb chop from say a veal chop or a

venison chop all this stuff is going to create some real moral quandaries like Like there will be this what Jonathan Haidt calls moral dumbfounding where you go, yuck, that is disgusting. Why? I don't know. It just is. I can't give you a reason. Well, robot brothels. This is one of the more recent

discussions, the ethical implications of robot brothels. And there's a robot brothel that's scheduled to be open. Where is that? In Germany? Is that where it is, I believe? I believe it is. And all these people are up and Texas! Powerful Texas.

Of course it's Texas. Texas, you could probably fuck a tiger if you got enough money. Country's first robot sex brothel set to open in Texas prompts backlash. See, I wonder if that's real. I wonder if they're just like, hey, put out a fucking press conference. Tell them we're going to open up a robot brothel.

Let's let them go crazy. It's Ron White. He did it. Ron White from the desk of Ron White in Austin, Texas. He sent this email. $60 for a half hour. Oh, that's cheap. How long does it take to get off with a

robot? What if you lose your concentration? 10 locations by 2020. Is there a snooze button? 2020. So 18 months. Yeah, but see, you don't want to show up late, right? You don't want to be there at the end of the day. A bunch of unmotivated people cleaning out those fuck

holes. Well, Texas was actually at the forefront of the lap dance club revolution in the late 80s. The revolution? There was a revolution? Well, yeah, from old stripper-style clubs to lap dancing. Oh, where they actually touched you. And that actually started in Texas. Look at this.

There's a showroom where customers can test and rent dolls before deciding to purchase one. Can you imagine? You know how like they have certain cars that have been on the lot for a while and like, are you thinking about buying an M4, Mike? Come on, take this sucker for a spin. Well, you all should read the essay my girlfriend Diana Fleischman wrote about sex bots, which got her a little bit of notoriety a few months ago. What was her take on

it that it would be really good on balance because there's a lot of guys who um need like a sexual release and if it kind of takes them away from doing some like exploitative bill cosby style behavior into just doing something like this, which is kind of weird and gross but innocuous, like it's not hurting anybody. That that would be a net win. Do you make that connection? Because that's a tricky connection, right? Because most people who think of rape, they don't think of it as an act of arousal or sex or, you know, intimacy.

Rather, it's a thing of power. It's some sort of a creepy sociopathic, psychopathic behavior trait. I know that's the standard view in gender feminism. Yeah. But I don't think it's well supported by the evidence. For example, there's a big problem with rape in India, right? And porn, as far as I understand, is illegal in India. Is it accessible though? I don't think it's even, like, I think it's pretty hard to access porn websites from India. But I think if you legalized porn there,

I predict the rate of sexual abuse would drop. Really? Yeah, I really do. Boy, that would be a weird sort of experiment. But the thing about robots and sex is they're going to get so good that it's going to be like a person. And then we're going to be in this weird ex machina sort of situation where how would you feel? Like if you were dancing around with that really hot Japanese girl in ex machina, she starts taking off your clothes, like what do we do here?

Like she feels warm. She's beautiful. She smells good. Like all my senses are telling me this is a person. And she's a good listener. Yeah, she's great. And she doesn't nag you. She doesn't give you, oh, nag you.

Are you mansplaining? No, not yet. That's my favorite. If you're correct and you have a penis, you're a mansplainer. Got to be real careful about your information, the way you distribute it to the ladies these days. It used to be called just being patronizing. Yes. Well, it also could be called being correct.

Yeah. Sometimes you're correct. It just happened to be a man. Explaining true things is a crime. Well, when it comes to gender studies, we circle back to this's this sort of really broad spectrum of sexuality in terms of male-female, in terms of the obvious, you know, the rock on one side and Kate Upton on the other, right? You know, these super uber-female, uber-males. And then there's all these, like, who's the guy who was in The Hobbit? Elijah Woods.

That guy. He's sort of in this sort of weird space in between the two of those people, right? Androgynous Hobbit. Yeah. Well, he's not really androgynous, but in terms of, like, you compare him to, you know, fill in the blank, Herschel Walker. He's not that manly, you know? And then there's women that don't feel represented by these standard views of female sexuality as well.

But this just speaks to the variability of the human genome and just DNA in general. There's different people that breed with different people and different shapes come out. Until we figure out how to manipulate those shapes, which seems to be right around the corner with the robot fuck dolls. It seems like they're both going to arrive probably at the same time, where you're going to be able to choose from having sex with a robot or having sex with the Hulk. There's going to be real possibilities that everyone's going to look like Thor. I mean, this seems like it's not too far away. One, two, three generations, maybe possibly inside of our lifetime, we'll have mastered

the human form to the point where the world's going to be preposterous. I mean, it's going to be like the Star Wars cantina scene everywhere you go. Oh, yeah. Well, this is what happens whenever you have a biological innovation that opens up new possibilities in terms of the evolution of bodies or behaviors as you get this adaptive radiation, this explosion of possibilities, like the Cambrian explosion, right? 530 million years ago, animals finally figured out how do you program a multicellular body

with a nervous system? And as soon as they got that, boom, you've got all these bizarre new forms. And then you get dinosaurs and mammals and us. I think once we can program the human genome and you have parents who are like, I want to select for kids who are like really tall and really religious. And other parents are like, I want cute little hobbit babies who are like hardcore atheists furry feet and then you'll you'll get a divergence imagine if your parents decided to make you a hobbit like they could have done anything they want remember like the first early adopters i imagine it's going to be about fetal transformation about taking something that's

in the womb and manipulating it, and then as it emerges and grows, then you're going to see what it is. If your fucking parents were just gigantic J.R. Tolkien fans, and you have furry feet and you're two feet tall, you're like, what the fuck, mom? Like, you asshole. I just wanted a hobbit. I didn't want a baby.

It was either a hobbit or a cave troll, so you should count your blessings. Yeah. That's entirely possible. I think the sex bots will come a lot earlier. Quicker? Yeah. How close are we? What do we look like?

What do we look like right now in terms of sex bots? What are we looking at? Let's see. State of the art. Type Google state of the art sex robot. I started looking. Let's see what they have there in Texas. I state of the art sex robot. I started looking. Let's see what they have there in Texas. I think they look pretty good, but they're not that good at like language or conversation or eye contact or movement or whatever.

But I think there will be this tipping point where they can do conversation that's good enough. Right. Or they can do conversation that's good enough, right? It doesn't have to be quite as smart as an actual lover, but it can be a hell of a lot nicer. Than an actual lover? It can have better memory for all your preferences and your desires. And, like, it'll also be more trainable in terms of it'll kind of register, oh, the last time I asked i asked this question like you didn't respond much but this other question you talked for five minutes i'll ask more of that right this is all very problematic behavior you're discussing here jeffrey well like your tone

trainable well my girlfriend's nicer sometimes people are nice when you're nice to them, Jeffrey. How about you be nice first instead of expecting this fucking robot to just take care of your dick and balls and just be nice to you all the time and remember all the stuff you like? What about it? We would develop into total narcissist sociopaths with robots that we could just get to do whatever we want. We'd bring them to the mall on a leash. Well, so there are two different ways that could go right right on the one hand like if there's a woman i'm interested in let's say and she has access to a male sex bot who's like really funny because it's like it's a little neural network has learned like all of your standup routines or, um, how to, how to riff on today's news. And, and it's a great listener and it remembers everything about

her backstory. I can either be like, like, I can't compete with that. I'll have to diss it. I'll have to say you, you're allowed to see him anymore. Or I'll have to level up and be better. Yes. Like humans. And I hope people will level up. Some will. Yeah. And we'll get to see, we'll learn from the people who don't level up.

Like how they fall apart. I'll present you with an even more disturbing scenario. Some people will be like, you know that Jeffrey Miller is a handsome guy. I like to fuck him all the time. And they're going to make a version of you and bring it around the mall with a leash on. And you're going to be going to the Apple store. And a version of you is going to be caked and come with a dog collar on. Standing right next to you while you're buying a new MacBook.

And you're like, what the fuck? And it's going to be totally legit. Because you don't, look at, oh, whoa. That's what they look like? Swappable face. What? Let me see what it looks like, though. This is like when you're looking at one of them digital renderings of a house they haven't built yet.

Let's see what we got here. Bounce. Pow, pow. Are they warm? Whoa. All these close-ups are creeping me out. Come on. It's got AI in it.

It's got AI. It's Howard Stern. Hey, look at this. Oh, that's creepy. They haven't passed the uncanny valley, clearly. No. That. Yeah. What is it? Hairy chest? What the fuck? Oh, it's a guy robot. It, that's creepy. They haven't passed the uncanny valley, clearly. No. Yeah.

What is it, hairy chest? What the fuck? Oh, it's a guy robot. It's a long video. A long video. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, people do, like, celebrity deep fake sex bots, and there will be people wandering around with their Jordan Peterson sex bot on a leash in the store.

Well, have you seen the porn where they do face swaps? That's getting really good they're really good at that now this is another social revolution we're gonna have to brace for is an era when you can do a credible porn fake of any celebrity or any citizen yeah just based on like sampling their facebook photos or do you know who kyle is? Hilarious stand-up comedian who has the funniest Instagram page of all time. And his Instagram page is about 80% of him doing face swap videos of the Kardashians and President Trump and Kanye West. And they're just so fucking ridiculous because you know that they're fake because it's real obvious that they're fake. But it's essentially like a new art form.

If you think of like sketch comedy and – here, play one for them. See what we got here. Is this a good one? I haven't seen this one. Yeah, big job. What did I do now? When I was at your tiny white house, I put a recorder in the chair. Yeah, yeah.

She recorded. Yeah, yeah. Holy shit, another tape. Yeah. Yeah. So bad. So bad. So bad.

Where's the bathroom? Right down the hall, sweetheart. Oh, my God. She's got the weirdest ass. But also sort of terrific. So terrific. I'm gonna go

smell her chair. Ew. Whoa. Getting some information here. Okay, she had a bowel movement about an hour and a half ago. Not so terrific, but natural. Totally natural.

Thought she was on her period. Light flow day. Maybe day three. We got you now. Yeah, that's nothing. Check out my buddy Louie. He's been listening the whole time. Oh, no. I was just trying to open up this

champagne bottle to celebrate my return to comedy. So this kind of stuff. But see, what I love about this is it's so obvious. You know, this is essentially, I mean, most of him, he has them all, the little sketches that he does on his Instagram page. But most of his stuff is this face swap thing, which is, I mean, relatively new technology. When was face swap invented? Less than a decade ago or so?

Yeah, I mean, on your phone. Yeah. That good. Pretty, just a few years. And it's become this new form of comedy, of sketch comedy, you know, and with a guy like him, who's such a good impressionist, but this is crude and obvious. How long is it going to be before someone can actually – I mean, they already have that machine, the technology that allows you to take – especially someone like me, who's talked for countless hours. You take your voice.

You take all of the recordings that I've ever done, just more than a thousand podcasts, you throw them into this machine and you basically have all my various inflections, anger, sadness, laughter, giddiness, perplexed, all the different words that I have in my vernacular, and you put them all into this thing, and you can kind of morph it around. It's Photoshop for voice. So you have the video where you can face swap and manipulate people's images, and it's getting better and better all the time. Then you have Photoshop for voice. You can essentially make movies with people where they just do whatever you want them to do. Yeah, it'll be pretty soon totally impossible to tell a fake audio recording from real and then fake video from real. And what do we do then?

It means we can't really trust digital records of people in the same way. It also means you can, I don't know, it might be good. I mean, it means you can digitally sample anybody who's a good communicator. Right. And they can do an unlimited number of, I mean, you could have David Attenborough, you know, natural history videos forever, even after he's dead. Right. But he could also be doing Nazi propaganda videos as well. Yeah. That's what's really weird.

You could, essentially essentially it would be up to the user yeah so someone like kyle dunnigan but an evil version could take david attenborough and you know yeah you can do whatever you want almost like what we're saying about communication that you this open floodgate of communication we're learning how to manage all the implications of this. It's really recent. Yeah. And I think with human relationships, we'll have to figure out kind of ethically once, let's say, once somebody can make like a deep fake video porn of their ex-lover. Right. Right. And then their their ex-lover. Right.

Right. And then their wife catches them watching it. Right. Okay. Or, you know, the wife buys a sex bot and like keeps it at work. Oh, at work. Like, is that cheating? She comes home from work exhausted, all busted up.

Yeah. And like, I just want to watch Ozark. I don't want to even talk to you. One of her shoes broken. What the fuck happened? Yeah, is that cheating? Yeah. Some people think that, I mean, some people think looking at porn is cheating. There's that argument.

I mean, people have standards, varying levels of standards and they don't negotiate it they don't talk about it this is something my friend david lay points out in his book um ethical porn for dicks which is about responsible porn viewership for men that if you're in a relationship with a woman and you're a straight guy, you need to have the talk about what does your girlfriend consider cheating in terms of porn watching. Most guys don't have the guts to have that conversation. Most women don't either. And then there's... Is it the guts or you don't want to open up that door?

Just keep it on the sneak tip. She can't complain. And then no one knows nothing. And then we're all good. But everybody finds out. You smile, and you go to the movies, and you hold hands, Jeffrey, and everything's fine. And you keep your dark secrets to the grave while you're watching that rom-com. You're thinking of someone with a ball gag tied up in a basement, covered in baby oil.

Right? Yeah, some people. I just went to a a happy place i have to go there you gotta go there all day sometimes yeah so people have to talk about this stuff like like grown-ups and and as the technology keeps advancing right and becomes more and more, you know, the line between like porn and real life gets fuzzier and fuzzier. Right. With robots and virtual reality is going to be very strange. I think that probably what's going to happen is there's going to be some sort of a merger between virtual reality and robots like that would be like the the real ultimate brothel so you wouldn't be as confused by the uncanny valley because they're so much closer in a visual sense of replicating that i'm sure you've seen like some of the more recent video games like god of war and a bunch of these like really high-end games the graphics are so intense especially in the um you know the little

scenes that they do or they're they're have promo clips and stuff you look at it like is this real in-game video that i'm looking at because this is insane it looks like i'm watching a movie that this in combination like some sort of real 4k hd virtual reality in combination with a sex robot is probably where people are going to go yeah i think so um and then the other question is like what happens with that technology in terms of education and college and how people acquire skills and knowledge and insight. It's really, really hard to imagine that people still think in 15 years, okay, going to a physical classroom and sitting, you know, listening to the average community college, like adjunct professor, you know, talking about human sexuality or gender feminism or political science,

that they'll think that's the state of the art. That's the way we should do that. And then what happens? I mean, it seems kind of unlikely that universities as we know them will keep existing in anything close to their current form. And yet no one's talking about this. Like, I wouldn't be that surprised if half the universities in America go bankrupt within 15, 20 years.

So do you think that people are going to be getting their education in some sort of an online form, some sort of virtual classroom form, or some maybe new, not yet created version? Some new virtual reality form that's a lot more interactive. I don't think it'll be just watching videos and then taking quizzes. Have you paid attention to what Elon Musk has been saying about his neural link? A bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about what you've heard so far? A bit, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about what you've heard so far? I think it'll be very, very hard technically to do that. What do you know about it? If you could explain it to people that don't know what we're talking about. If I understand correctly, having watched like you interview Elon, et cetera, he's just concerned that the bandwidth that connects the brain to the world or the brain to the internet is quite narrow.

Like you can get a lot of information quickly through your eyes and ears, but your speed of like typing and controlling things is, or speaking is kind of limited. So I think there's a push to kind of open up that bandwidth and the speed of communication between the human brain and digital reality and other people. If they figure out a way to do that, it's a total game changer in terms of how people interact with not just social media, but in general with each other. I mean, it means basically you have a global telepathy system if you want. And then everything changes because it means the ease with which one part of my brain communicates with another part isn't that much higher than the ease with which that part communicates with somebody else's other brain part. What I've been thinking about is some sort of universal language and that if that's,

if they bridge the gap between cultures and civilizations and the way people communicate and doing so, do it through some sort of a digital interface and instead of like very simple characters that equal words that you put into your linguistic dictionary and you have an understanding of what this person's talking about instead of that you get like real clear concepts maybe even like in emoji form or hieroglyphic form or some sort of form where we figure out over X amount of years how to communicate through agreed upon imagery or agreed upon data in some sort of a way that lets people express emotions and perhaps even more engrossing and more complicated than the actual language that we're enjoying right now. Yeah, it'll be amazing. I mean, the evolutionary backstory to this, right,

is you basically have the whole history of life on Earth, you know, before humans invent language, where animal communication is pretty primitive. Like, all you really have at the most complicated is, like, nightingales producing complicated bird song to attract mates. That's about as much as you get. What about, like, chimps that have certain sounds for tigers and other sounds for eagles?

They have, like, a maximum of maybe a dozen different sounds. But with human language, compared to that, it really is suddenly like having telepathy where you can communicate so much, so quickly, so efficiently. And yet, you know, if Neuralink works, it would be as far in advance of language as languages of kind of animal signaling. Whoa. And it's hard to imagine what that world looks like because, you know, imagine a form of Twitter where it's not just through your, you know,

your thumbs on a keypad, but it's a direct brain interface. And then when people, it's not just saying something mean or stupid it's even thinking something mean or stupid that could immediately get posted and once you kind of start sharing your whole subconscious with people through Neuralink, then, you know, we'll have to level up with some new social norms about what that means and sort of how much radical honesty we can take from each other. That seems to be where the future is.

The complete dissolving of all boundaries between people and information, people and their lives, and that some sort of a way of recording your actual experiences or letting people share them in real time. Like imagine if people decided to let people through some virtual reality scenario put on headsets and experience you having sex with your girlfriend. You say, hey, we're going to fuck on Periscope. Come on, join in. And everybody just puts on their neural link and their augmented reality headset and they put on their haptic feedback suit, which is now like iPhone 10 level. You go back to iPhone once, piece of shit. Haptic feedback 10, it's going to be incredible. It's going to be silky smooth.

It's going to feel like real touch. They're going to be able to have sex along with you. You're going to have a digital orgy. Yeah, I think that's coming within 50 years, maybe earlier. That's a very conservative guess, yeah. 100% it's coming. Oh, there it is. Jesus Christ, Jamie.

There's a haptic feedback system. Just looking around in there. What is this? Oh, this couple's sexy as fuck, too. Take your clothes off, folks. Why are you wearing these goofy outfits? Pretend you're superheroes. What are these things for? Climate control systems, biometric systems, motion capture and avatar system.

Boy, we're fucked, Jeffrey. It's for VR, AR, and MR. See, this is all happening while we're chit-chatting about it. These people have already engineered it. And society is going to be totally blindsided by this. Yeah. Because everybody thinks, oh, well, I saw it on Black Mirror, but I know that it's not even my, like, so I don't have to worry about it in my generation yet because it's only science fiction. You said something on Sam Harris' show that gave me a little bit of hope that turned out to not be true.

Okay. You said something. You were talking about asteroids, about our ability to recognize asteroids and stop the impact. Nope. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, we need at least 10 years. We need to know that there are 10 years they're going to hit in 10 years and then maybe we could do something. That's not comforting, is it?

Well, okay, here's the thing. It would be really good to invest at least a few tens of billions of dollars in doing that. For sure. As insurance. But the probability of a significant asteroid impact within the next century is pretty low, if I understand it correctly. I think it's just guesswork. Those motherfuckers just swizz by all the time yeah but the probability of us getting hit eventually is a hundred percent yeah it'll happen

probably in a few million years but but why do you say that is that to make yourself feel better i'll be long gone it'll be my great great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren have to worry about that well you got to play the odds right i mean we could we could we we could be exterminated by a gamma ray burst from a like a supernova oh yeah at any time with zero with no warning but it's pretty unlikely and it hasn't happened before in the history of life on Earth. Right. But it happens constantly all throughout the universe.

There was a documentary I watched once that freaked me the fuck out. It was all about hypernovas. And they were talking about when they first started discovering them that they were really actually concerned that there was a war going on in space. And then they recognized that all these explosions were happening all day long, and they thought there was a war going on in the cosmos, which is really fascinating, because I think this is like, I want to say it was the 60s when they discovered this. Does that make sense? In a way, it's kind of surprising that we haven't seen evidence of that happening already.

Right. I mean, when I wrote my piece about the Fermi paradox, which is why don't we have evidence of aliens already? My solution was basically, well, most species that are intelligent that invent technology get wrapped up in video games and virtual reality and sex technology and it just distracts them and they kind of drop the ball on staying alive and exploring anything and i think it's still quite likely that that happens to most intelligent species that they just kind of disappear up their own buttholes yeah or they create some sort of an artificial life form that's far more advanced than anything that's biological and it has no desire need or uh no instincts to reproduce you know if you if we i mean i've said this too many times that i think that we are essentially some sort of a

some sort of a electronic caterpillar that gives birth to a technological butterfly. And we're making a cocoon right now. We don't know what we're doing. And we're about to create artificial life. And then we're doing it through our intense desire for innovation, constantly want newer, better things, whether it's televisions or cars or phones. We're never like, ah, this one's perfect. Let's just stop here.

Never. The desire is always towards every, you know, fill in the time period. We want a new version, a better version with improvements. And we keep getting those. And this is what fuels, in many ways, it fuels our desire for materialism. Materialism is embodied by technological innovation. I mean, what you're always wanting, when you get past jewels, you always want the newest, greatest innovations. Yeah.

I think at a certain point, humanity is going to have to bite the bullet and say, we should plan which innovations come first, what happens next. And we might even have to have like regulation or social taboos that say, we really shouldn't go down that path until we do this other thing first that makes us ready to do that thing in a safer, more rational, more ethical way. Yeah, but that's the big word, right? Rational.

Like we're not really rational. And competition, especially when it's dealing with different countries that have different human rights laws and standards of behavior and competition, especially when it's dealing with different countries that have different human rights laws and standards of behavior and thinking. Well, this is a problem with regulating like artificial intelligence is how do you get China to play ball? I was going to say China. I didn't want to seem racist. Well, they're going to do it in Russia too. I mean, I'm already doing it.

China is a threat because they are smart and organized and future oriented and they can do long term planning. And technologically, they're incredibly advanced. I mean, so so far advanced word or this government rather is trying to keep the best phones from China from getting to America. yeah i mean huawei probably has some pretty close links to the chinese military does right yeah it does to the chinese government communist dictatorship and of course it's it's a lovely system if huawei phones have back doors that allow the chinese to learn a lot about americans and our culture and our communication and that's the Chinese to learn a lot about Americans and our culture and our communication. That's the concern. That's actually more of a concern to me

than like military spying in the strict sense. Because I think China has so many people working on cyber warfare that we probably don't even have any idea what their capabilities are. But I think if they have insight into like, here's the American psyche and here's how their political thinking works, it will be quite a bit easier to kind of manipulate in terms of our geopolitics. in terms of our geopolitics. Because we don't have anything analogous, I think, where, like, is the Pentagon trying to figure out how could we nudge Chinese social media use in our interests?

I'd be surprised if they're doing it well. Well, what's fascinating is Google's take on China is that they're willing to censor video or internet searches because they feel like if they don't, China's just going to copy their technology and do it anyway. And so this way, at least they're in there. I'm like, boy, that's a sketchy way of sort of absolving yourself of any bad feelings about censorship. You're contributing to censorship, government-issued censorship, because you want to control the market.

And we're going, oh, yeah, well, you can't Google Tiananmen Square. You literally can't Google Tiananmen Square. It seems like there's a huge difference between China's authoritarian regime and the American political system. But I think they're not quite as different as a lot of folks think. Like if you talk to Chinese academics about like what can you research and what can you not research? Like they have different constraints than Americans do. research. Like they have different constraints than Americans do, but at the pragmatic level, there are certain topics that they can address that we can't and vice versa.

So it's not like there's just one dimension of freedom and we're better than them on every aspect of it. And again, I think American citizens have no idea how restricted American scientists are in kind of what we're allowed to study or what we're allowed to talk about. Is it allowed to or what you can get grants and approval for? And is that the same thing as allowed to? Effectively, it's the same thing. Because if you don't have any funding, you're not going to – there's no study. You can't do science without money. Right. I mean, there's no study.

You can't do science without money. Right. And in fact, like if I was starting my career again at this point, I wouldn't go into academia. If I wanted to understand human behavior, I would go work for Facebook or Google because they have much more data about human behavior than I could ever get as a scientist. Are they doing that? I'm sure they're doing it, but we don't know what they're finding because they don't publish journal papers. It's all commercial secrets. So I'm sure that Facebook understands a lot more about social psychology

than social psychology does at this point. Really? Yeah. How could they not? They have like 1.2 billion people interacting socially regularly. And they data mine the hell out of that for commercial purposes. Right. But are they publishing things?

Are they sharing this information internally? I'm sure it's all internal. But internally, do you think they're publishing things? Are they sharing this information internally? I'm sure it's all internal. But internally, do you think they're publishing things? I don't know. That's the thing. Yeah. It's just a little bit alarming when this state of the art and understanding behavior isn't public. That is alarming.

And then Mark Zuckerberg might be a robot too, right? Everybody's worried about that. He might be a sex bot. We've played many times a video of him drinking water. I don't know how a dude drinks water like that. Creepy little fuck. It's a... I'm just kidding, Mark.

Don't delete my account. I think that we're looking at, in terms of Google and Facebook and Twitter and even YouTube, we're looking at these enormous organizations that I don't think they had any idea what they were going to be. And I really particularly feel that way about Twitter. that way about Twitter when Twitter first started out do you remember how it used to be like you would use like your at like at Jeffrey Miller is enjoying a cup of coffee yeah you would talk about yourself in the third person it was really weird you know at Jamie Vernon is going to the movies and that's how people talked the early days of Twitter and then people realize what the fuck am

I doing? That's sort of the reason it developed. It's because there was no group texting back then in 2007 or 2006 when this started. So it was developed for group texting. So you could share what you were doing with a group of your friends. Was that what it was for? They opened it so that more people could follow if you wanted to. And then celebrities jumped on.

And then it ran. And they started adding the ability. People just started doing at Joe Rogan. So they added the ability to click that and share it and tag it. So weird. And then you think about it now. Now it's a vehicle for the president to threaten other countries. And it's the global public forum, and particularly in America, it is the public square where everyone shares ideas.

And well, it's a less verbose version of Facebook. The problem with Facebook is you just can write too much. I can't keep up with you, bro. And I like the, the really, really ridiculous people who just paragraph after paragraph of run on sentences with no,

no editing at all. Like, yeah, it's a lot about, here's a very long story about my most recent emotional trauma or it, I don't know if anybody ever is like having a breakup or divorce on Facebook, you're like, Oh man, now I'm going to have to listen to stuff for a few months. Yeah. And then they reach out hoping some people say, it's going to be okay, Mark. Everything's fine. Life moves on.

You're going to forget about her eventually. It's just, and people keep going back to who's left to comment. You know? Yeah. Maybe she liked it. Maybe she's changed her mind. she liked it maybe she's changed her mind like oh but it i mean it is very kind of funny and interesting that nobody predicted 15 years ago exactly how humans would make use of this new technology yeah like nobody in psychology was talking about oh twitter is going to radically transform the way that science operates. For example, news of like failed replications will

be spread within three days to everybody in a field. And anybody who does scientific misconduct will be suddenly like pushed out within a week or a new result will be shared globally within 24 hours nobody was thinking about that so there's like science twitter politics twitter entertainment twitter and they've all kind of changed the game in their respective fields um and we didn't understand human nature well enough to predict how people would actually use this stuff yeah we just didn't see it coming either i mean no one ever would i remember when ashton kutcher was in some sort of a race with someone else i want to say to get to a million followers. Wasn't it like a million? Yeah.

And everybody thought, that's crazy. He's going to have a million followers? I don't even think he's on Twitter anymore. He's not, but his account is hilarious. It's like a production company now or something. Yeah, he gave it to his assistant. I'm fucking too dangerous for this.

And now, what, Katy Perry has like 120 million or something. Yeah, something insane. Probably more. And then you got to go to her Instagram, which is probably even bigger than that. She was racing CNN and Britney Spears. Oh, wow. Yeah, here's the article.

For a million. Look at that. Twitter raced to a million. What year is that? 2009. Wow. Twitter raced to a million followers. Can Kutcher beat CNN and Spears?

That's hilarious. No one even knew what it meant back then. So, I mean, with the virtual reality or the Neuralink, right, we're going to have – those things will probably have a bigger impact on culture and society even than Twitter did. Yeah. And still people are kind of just sleepwalking into that world. Sleepwalking with a few hesitant observers on the outside warning. Like almost like standing back, like watching someone play with fireworks.

Like, okay, hey, do you know what's going to happen when you light that garbage can on fire it's filled with dynamite and the legal issues the privacy issues the impact on relationships yeah um is okay so like we train a lot of phds in clinical psychology in my department. And a lot of them are going to deal with people and their relationships and their marriages and the conflicts and arguments and whatever. Are we training them for a future world where they're going to have to deal with sex bots and virtual reality and new forms of social media and new kinds of basically telepathy that are far in advance of human language. No, we're not. But that's the world that they're going to spend their professional lives in. Isn't it similar in some ways? I mean, Jamie, you could speak to this. You were trained as an audio engineer and now everything's like all the software that was available when you were learning is just useless now honestly there wasn't even youtube when i went to school so

a lot of the uh if anyone has questions now you can learn almost everything i learned in the year program i had in a week if you needed to you just don't get the hands-on application right touching the stuff but yeah but people that went to school for video editing and all the systems detailed detailed from anyone you want to watch now almost because they even have like the master class you could learn screenwriting from Aaron Sorkin right and directing from yeah Ron Howard or whatever it is you didn't have that ten years ago. Yeah. And then in terms of financial, I mean, the amount of financial strain that getting into traditional education puts on people and they get out of school and they're saddled with this debt that is also, you can't even absolve it if you declare bankruptcy,

which is kind of hilarious. declare bankruptcy, which is kind of hilarious. You think of the dirty shit that banks do and Wall Street does and all the risks they take and all the chaos that they have created from their shitty decisions that have affected the entire economy and they're absolved. But yet some kid who wanted to get a gender studies degree and now owes a quarter million dollars, some fucking half-assed Michigan University. I think it's unconscionable. It's terrible.

I mean, I feel really morally conflicted about working in an industry that I think is pretty exploitative in a lot of ways. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Like, what's the stance that you take? What, what's the stance that you take? I mean, if, if a kid comes to you and says, you know, I don't know what to do here. I mean, generally the stance I take. So in, in a way I'm, I'm lucky cause I work at a large state public university and tuition is really pretty cheap. Do you want to say which one it is? University of New Mexico. Oh.

And it's great. We serve 40,000 students and we charge very, very little tuition money compared to most places because it's state subsidized. And if you keep up a certain grade point average, it's about as close to free as you can get in America. So I don't feel like we're as economically exploitative

as if I was teaching at Middlebury College or Yale or whatever. But still, if undergrads come to me and they go, what should I learn? What should I major in? What classes should I take? The only real advice I can give is like take stuff that's going to be useful in your life, your personal life, no matter what career you do. So you should take my human sexuality class because you'll probably be a sexual being for the rest of your

life and you'll be in relationships of some sort or another. You should learn about politics. You should learn about the history of civilization. You should learn about politics. You should learn about the history of civilization. You should learn about animal behavior and biology and all that stuff. But don't expect that you can major in pharmacy and then get a job as a pharmacist that makes $100,000 out of the gate because that might be automated. Don't assume you can go to law school and you'll make bank like your dad did because a lot of that document discovery is being automated. Don't assume you're going to be a surgeon because that might be roboticized. So I just say you should try to get a classical liberal arts education that equips you as a citizen and as a person and as an ethical being.

And that's the future proof way to do it. And even then, there's a distinct possibility that this education or a superior version of it will be available through some new, unfound, or soon-to-be-discovered form. Yeah. And just expect that you will, if you stay curious throughout your life, you'll be able to learn about as much in every four to six years going forward as you learned in this four to six years of college. That's what's interesting is that no one really thinks of university education as being something that equips you for life, that you're learning so that you can just, you're just educating yourself and to sort of make your mind more available of possibilities and options and

causes and effects and just for your own edification. This is not a consideration. People think, I need a career. I'm going to go to college for four years. When I get out, I want a kick-ass job because I want to buy a Lexus or whatever it is. My favorite students, honestly, are the mature students. It's the vets who've had a couple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan and come back to college. And they have life experience. And they're like here because they really want to learn, not because their parents think it's the right thing to do. Or even in my human sexuality class, I get grandparents in their 60s and 70s sometimes.

Really? Yeah. Grandparents? And they're great because they've actually had like 50-year marriages. So they know a little something about psychology. And it's not for their career. It's not for the status. It's because they really want to be there and they want to learn.

their career it's not for the status it's because they really want to be there and they want to learn well i'd also imagine they're not as filled with angst as an 18 year old first escape from the family nest and it's not understanding what to do with their freedom and so many distractions they're there just to educate educate themselves yeah they're're, they're less neurotic. They're more confident. Um, they call me out on my bullshit sometimes. Do they? Oh yeah. Like what bullshit? Um, well, the horrifying thing now of, if you're teaching a class is you can make a factual claim and any student can check it on, on Wikipedia while you're talking. While you're talking. Yeah. And of course, the 20-year-olds won't raise their hand and go, that's wrong. But the grandmas will.

The grandmas will. Yeah. Hilarious. So you have to... What do you even call that on? Okay, so... There was a book back in 99 called I think The Technology of Orgasm that made the claim that vibrators were first invented in the Victorian era, the late 1800s, to help doctors bring their female patients to orgasm to cure, quote, hysteria. Right. And for 20 years, that was sort of accepted as, oh, yeah, that's a good historical analysis of that situation.

And then that got totally debunked in the last few months by other historians. The last few months? Yeah. Really? I've been telling people that forever. I know. Confidently. I had to.

What's the reality? They didn't really, doctors didn't finger bang their patients? There's no evidence at all that that was going on, apparently. Yeah, because I would think that that would be a thing that gals wouldn't want to let go. If there was a place where you could go or the doctor definitely knew how to work it, he'd give you an orgasm, there'd be a line around the block. Frustrated ladies.

You would think it would have left a bigger imprint. Not just that. Why would it stop? Why would the doctor say, you know what? This business is just too goddamn lucrative. My hands are tired. Closing up shop. I got carpal tunnel.

I can't even type anymore. Yeah, and the women are like. Yeah, how would that go away? So there's no evidence. So who invented that? I can't remember the name of the author of that. It even got made into a movie, Hysteria, right? The Job Nobody Wanted?

Is that a book? Oh, yeah, there we go. That's it. An article about it from the New York Times based off the book. This might actually be from the book. And what year is this? I don't... This might be the book.

I don't know. Yeah, I think that's... That is the book is a chapter of the book maybe yeah so is this like sort of like that killer sperm theory that people still to this day recite even though there's no evidence whatsoever that sperm has any other function other than impregnating an egg yeah there's a lot of kind of urban myths that's a big one though there was a whole book written about different kinds of sperm. Yeah, sperm wars. Attack sperm that would kill other sperm. Baker and Bellis

back in the early 90s. Those guys are assholes. It was a beautiful theory, but nobody could replicate it, and it just didn't work. Oh, I thought it was a little Pac-Man sperm out there attacking another sperm right they called it what kamikaze sperm is that what they called it yeah

the sperm that allegedly were specialized to yeah i remember someone brought that up to me and i i uh i read it and i went boy i don't know about that how small are sperm there's not a lot of room in there for other functions like How are they even getting those other sperm and killing them? What are they using? They have acid? Like the alien? What are they doing? They've rotten... Little IEDs? Yeah, what are they doing? They have an

acrosome reaction. There is a tiny little warhead that helps them get into the egg. A warhead? Well, it's some enzymes that are pretty good at kind of – Penetrating? Yeah, digesting their way in. But yeah, that's an example of urban myth.

Published urban myth? Published. I mean, at the time, it was plausible, but it kind of got debunked fairly quickly so was this sort of just a sensational sort of an article that someone wrote or the book did they just say hey let's just fake this in order to sell a lot of books and get people excited about our work i don't think they faked it. I think they slightly oversold it, but they did have some proper journal paper publications that were peer reviewed and that made sense at the time. And I used to teach that stuff because I believed it. Did you? Oh, yeah.

How did you teach it? What was the conventional way of describing this? conventional way of describing this? The conventional story was people think we evolved to be in monogamous long-term pair bonds, but here's some evidence that humans do extra pair copulations, that they sometimes go outside the relationship. If that happens, then there's occasional sperm competition where a woman mates with more than one guy during one ovulatory cycle so that potentially ejaculates from two different guys could be in a reproductive tract competing to fertilize the same egg.

competing to fertilize the same egg. If that happens, the sperm would be under selection to be good at being fast, fighting off the other sperm, making the reproductive tract more hostile to any guy who comes after you, et cetera, et cetera. So it's kind of like a way of challenging the assumption of monogamous mating and pointing out women have this sexual freedom and agency that was not fully recognized. And the result is men have to compete more, like not just physically and not just for status, but even at this kind of biochemical level. And it all made sense, right? We could have been that species. But as it turned out,

the rates of extra pair copulation or infidelity are actually pretty low in a lot of societies. Like, it's not like 20% of kids are sired by some guy other than their dad. It's like mostly well under 2% or 3%. Right. But we're talking about now. Yeah.

But in comparison to when all of this stuff evolved, we could be talking about humans of 50,000, 60,000 years ago. Yeah. Which is a totally different ballgame. It is different. And if we'd been a species with a lot of sperm competition, then our testicles would be as big as chimp testicles. Right. That's what's interesting, right? Yeah.

That when it comes, there's a direct correlation between the number of promiscuous females and the size of the testicles of the male. Yeah. Which is why gorillas have little tiny dicks. Yeah. Because they're just dominating. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't try to seduce some other alpha gorillas.

Bad idea. I mean, crazy that something grew to be so strong, so powerful with giant fangs, and it only eats stalks of grass and broccoli and shit. So there's a lot of these little things in psychology and it only eats like stalks of grass and broccoli and shit. Yeah. So there's a lot of these little things in psychology, these little urban myths that get learned by professors in grad school and never really tested and then passed on.

And now that whole house of cards has been tumbling down the last couple of years where like almost everything that was taught in a social psychology course now turns out to be kind of bullshit and not. Like what other examples? The idea that you can use an implicit association test or IAT to sort of register how sexist or racist somebody is, right? That was a big, exciting thing that social psychologists thought that they'd discovered that you can give someone this kind of computer test that measures word associations. And that kind of determined, like, how secretly sexist are you and that turned into whole industry of giving these tests everybody in corporations to sort of assess you know are you secretly

sexist and and to sort of wag fingers at them and say see you scored positive on this test that means you really are secretly sexist and therefore you need training. And that's the industry. And this is what happened with Starbucks, right? A few months ago when they had that issue with the black guys and the Starbucks and Starbucks didn't handle that well. And then there was public blowback and Starbucks went, okay, we're going to do implicit association training for all of our staff nationwide. And all of us in psychology were like, wait, but you guys know that that was all debunked like a couple years ago. It's all nonsense.

But they're just concerned about the optics in order to make their stock go up, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's a pr move but but it's not science-based it's not science-based and and anybody who's a savvy consumer will be able to like google this stuff and see oh it's it's nonsense but implicit bias training is still being used right in some places and places. And it's all horseshit. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the method? Like, say if you ran a corporation and like, hey, everybody,

Jeffrey's going to come in and teach us how not to be racist. You might be racist, not even know it. And Jeffrey's going to show you how. I don't really know what they do in implicit bias training. I know that they typically will give everybody one of these implicit association tests that purports to show that you have issues and you do have hidden bias. Like what would be like a question on one of these tests? It's like... Associations? It's basically, are you faster to associate this stigmatized group with this negative word than you are to associate them with a positive word? And you can measure reaction time.

Oh, boy. So you have like a lever in your hand, a button? You're seeing words flash on screens and you're pushing buttons. and you're pushing buttons and the subtle differences in reaction speed to like the good versus the bad associations are supposed to map like your attitude towards the group in question. And it's a reliable effect. The problem is it doesn't actually predict real sexist behavior in real life or racist behavior. So how did it get past the initial stages to the point it was implemented? Social psychology is just very politically correct.

Virtually everybody in it is pretty far left. And if you're conservative or centrist, you pretty quickly get driven out of it. Really? Oh, yeah. Centrist even? Well, we have pretty good data now on political affiliations of people in different fields. And in psychology, it's at least 10 or 15 to 1 liberal to conservative. Why do you think that is?

Is that more of the indoctrination of the walled garden of academia? I think it's partly that, but I think it's also like there is pretty overt hostility to centrists, conservatives, libertarians, where you just kind of get these signals, like if you start grad school, that whatever. If you ask other students, hey, do you want to go to the shooting range? Or do you want to go hunting?

Or let's talk about politics. And if you're on the wrong side of what's considered normal, then you're made to feel pretty uncomfortable. And you'll probably just leave grad school and go, the hell with that. I'm going to be a lawyer, entrepreneur, whatever. So just the hostility forces people out. It's a tribal environment. Yeah. What was the source of that?

I mean, it seems like if you're going to do real social experimental work, if you're really going to try to understand human behavior, it's really got to be done objectively to really get the actual raw data, to really be able to do scientific work where you're explaining things and trying to gauge cause and effect and origins of thought and behavior patterns. You'd have to do it really objectively, the same way you would do mathematics. You'd have to really look at it cautiously and get your data points in order. and get your data points in order.

And if you're doing real good work, you would think that there would be more of an inclination to do good work than it would be to appease whatever tribe you belong to. You would hope so, but take political psychology, for example, where the whole point is to understand how people think about politics and moral issues. There's a huge liberal bias in political psychology. And you would think they would have corrected that and said, you know what, maybe we're missing something by not, like, we have a conference of 500 people and there's not a single libertarian here or whatever.

And they never self-corrected like that. people and there's not a single libertarian here or whatever and they never self-corrected like that um they just assumed well we're all well-intentioned and we're all smart so we're going to be able to to check um our own biases and they completely failed to do that so you have all these measures of like political attitudes invented by leftists that kind of demonize conservatives or centrists as basically being mentally ill or stupid or whatever. Where do you fit on the political spectrum? I'm kind of a centrist libertarian with a complicated patchwork of views. I'd be considered extremely far left on certain things and pretty far right on other things. Like what far right? On what?

I'm pro-gun rights. I'm pretty cautious about immigration. I'm pro-economic freedom. I don't want a big, expensive state that has high tax burdens. Um, I'm in, in complicated ways, kind of pro family values and pro natalist. And like, I think long-term relationships are good, not necessarily conventional ones, but I, I'm pretty concerned about society figuring out a way to make it possible for ordinary folks to have long-term relationships and raise families. Isn't it fascinating that that's a right-wing thing? Wouldn't you think that something that would encourage families would be universal? It wouldn't be tribal. I mean, you would think that something that would encourage long-term relationships and

monogamous pair bonding and people getting together and working out long-term solutions to keep a family together, that would be good for everybody. You would think. I mean, that seems like a left-wing thing too. So the left is very concerned about environmental sustainability. Right. But they're not that concerned about kind of what you could call

civilizational sustainability or family sustainability. Right. But they're not that concerned about kind of what you could call civilizational sustainability or family sustainability. And I don't totally understand why, but you tend to get the right thinking, how is this going to affect my great-grandkids or allow me to have any? And the left is more like, how is this going to affect

harp seals and polar bear bears in 100 years and one should sort of imply the other but hence being a centrist hence being yeah hence being a centrist and like Hence being a centrist. Yeah, hence being a centrist. It's a weird thing. When you try to reach a conclusion about a particular political issue based on what you think are the facts and the evidence and the good arguments, and then you do that for each issue separately, right? Rather than doing kind of tribal affiliation signaling.

It's very, very confusing to people, right? Because they're like, how can you be like pro-cannabis legalization if you're also pro-guns? Or how can you be like open to polyamory if you're also concerned about long-term family stability or whatever. It's like that's just because the issues I looked into, that's the end I ended up supporting. Does this go back to what we were talking about earlier that most people really don't have the time to form these opinions or become informed on these opinions and instead they just sort of adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior that seems to be the tribe that they most affiliate with so this this way are there's a conglomeration of opinions i'm just going to accept these opinions yeah absolutely it's so strange that we have two very clear sides this left right i mean we even have it represented by blue and red i mean this goes back to uh the korean version

of the yin yang you know in um the korean flag they have that yin yang but it's instead of white and black it's red and blue i mean that that is what it is it's these these opposites that work together in harmony it's our society it's well i mean we it seems to be some sort of a natural system that we gravitate towards yeah and people police it it's not like everyone just sort of chooses one side or the other. And then they go, well, I guess it makes sense that if you believe the left about issue A, you should also believe the left about issues B, C through Z. Yeah. If you deviate, you get punished for it. Well, people use the term we too. Like we've got to win the House. I've heard that. You know, we've got to win the Senate.

What? Who's we? Yeah. Are we running, Bob? Like, what've got to win the House. I've heard that. You know, we've got to win the Senate. What? Who's we? Yeah. Are we running, Bob? Like, what are we doing? But people, it's basically like the Raiders. We've got to get to the Super Bowl. I mean, it is very tribal, but I mean, it's weird because if you're in a literal tribe, you have your territory and your resources and your mates that you're defending.

And the other tribe on the other side of the hill has their territory, resources, mates, and kids. And you actually, there is a little bit of a zero-sum conflict. But if you're all in the same effing country together. Yeah. And you're all paying taxes to the same authority. And you're all paying taxes to the same authority and you're all partaking in the same economy and you're all wrestling in the same public sphere of the Netflix that you watch and the Twitter you're engaged with. It should be more positive some than that. Well, this is why I wanted to ask you this as an evolutionary psychologist.

Does this, you know, you're obviously far more aware of this than the average person. Does this just go back to the way the human brain developed when we were living in small tribes and that there's this inherent need for an us versus them mentality that keeps us moving? Yeah, I think so. for an us versus them mentality that keeps us moving? Yeah, I think so. You know, the people who have thought the most deeply about this, like I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt's work in The Righteous Mind and the way he kind of analyzes this stuff.

I think it'll be quite hard to escape the tribal thinking, but we have escaped it with respect to a lot of issues, right? Where we really did reach a moral common ground. Like we all kind of said, oh, shit, slavery was bad. Women should be able to vote. We should try to reduce the risk of nuclear war, right? So on some really big issues, we have succeeded pretty well in kind of setting aside the tribalism. So many issues that are coming at us so fast that we don't have time to reach that social equilibrium on enough of them quickly enough. Well, this is what fascinates me by augmented reality and things like Neuralink, something that's going to accentuate the ability and the power of the human mind, where we're going to be able to take into consideration all of these things in a much, like with Elon's term, we'll have more bandwidth to work on them.

Yeah. Just I think the more I think about it, I think that this just quagmire of civilization, there's so many different things that we're conflicted about that really a lot of it boils down to a lack of time, conflicted about, that really a lot of it boils down to a lack of time, a lack of time and a lack of also training in how to think. One of the things that's most disturbing about education, particularly lower education, is that no one ever tells you how to think. They give you information, but they don't tell you, now here's the tricks your brain is playing on you.

Like, this is why you think certain ways. If you're lucky, if you're really lucky, someone teaches you about discipline. They teach you about resistance and about apathy and about procrastination and all these different games that your mind will play on you. And just that alone will give you the ability to work through things and get more stuff done. But very rarely does that even get discussed. So most of the time, you're just getting boring information stuffed into your fucking face and you barely pay attention to it enough to pass the test. And as soon as the test is over, you forget everything you learned.

Because you really didn't learn it. You just memorized it. And it wouldn't take that long to learn sort of the top dozen rationality hacks that like the rationalist community or the effective altruism community are very, very good at using and teaching. Like just the idea of steel manning an argument

where you develop the ability to state the strongest possible version of your opponent's argument in a way that they would go, you've said that even better than I could say. Awesome. That means you really understand me, even if you disagree with it. That's a good term too, steel man as opposed to straw man.

Yeah. And if we just taught kids in high school how to do that, I think that would go a long way towards being able to have these tribal dialogues. Or just being able to think quantitatively about political and policy issues. Like how many people are affected? How are they affected?

How much would it cost to fix? How do we know what the best way to do it is? Rather than just diving straight for the emotional or interest to teach that. Right. It almost seems like something they're going to have to learn online to augment their traditional education. Yeah. So ideally you'd have like a virtual reality system where a kid could go into it and argue about some issue like gun rights or abortion or immigration. And some AI would sort of argue against them or pick up their arguments or go convince me of your position. Right. And somehow or another make it interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Make it fun. Like they, whatever, make it a, you know, make it you're arguing with Rick or Morty. Right. That is one of the big issues with learning things is making things fun, making things somehow or another enthralling and captivating, something that you actually want to absorb and it's one of the great arguments about video games and um one of the uh more interesting things about the previous generation's sort of uh dismissal of video games is that the dismissal

was at one point in time oh you're just wasting your time. And now that dismissal doesn't necessarily hold water because just like professional golfers, professional video game players now make enormous sums of money. So it's gotten to this place where, oh, no, this is a viable career and perhaps you should even be taking your kid to coaching and learning strategy and learning all these various applications that allow you to get better at these things. Because there's a real career in this. And try telling that to your grandpa. Hey, I'm going to play, what's the game they play for the most money today?

Fortnite, probably. Fortnite, right? Yeah, it's the big one. I'm going to be a professional Fortnite player. They're going to say, get the fuck out of here. I'm going to be a professional golfer. How good are Fortnite, right? Yeah, it's the big one. I want to be a professional Fortnite player. They would say, get the fuck out of here. I'm going to be a professional golfer. How good are you, Johnny? You know, I'm under par.

I want to be the next Tiger Woods. Well, in my cohort, a lot of other academics I've talked to, like, hey, did you play Sid Meier's Civilization game a lot in grad school or postdoc? And yeah. And we all go, most of our understanding about the history of technology and like world affairs and economics comes from playing that game. Really? Yeah. I never played it. How does it work?

Is it one of those role playing games? You start out in like the Dark Ages and you progress through like Bronze Age, Iron Age, you invent railroads, and then eventually you like colonize Alpha Centauri. And you're playing against the computer or other humans? It's a turn-based strategy game against the computer. But you kind of learn the whole technology tree and what everything's called and what followed what. And God, I hope Sid Meier got it right, more or less. But it was a much more compelling way to learn all that than like taking whatever European history AP, right? I would imagine that's incredibly immersive. Like how could they do something like that?

Oh, the new discovery mode turns on Assassin's Creed Origins into an interactive history lesson. It's like ancient Egypt, I believe, is what they do here. And it's like deep detail. Really? Recreation of it. You go through it and they take, for this mode, they kind of take all the shooting, not shooting, but stabbing and killing the people

and just walk you through ancient Egypt, Cairo. And you get to see people die? Not in this mode. Maybe they do. They might show some stuff of torture and whatnot. So you could either have it graphic or non-graphic. Is that the idea? Yeah, and then they could show you through the map, take you to places. Do we have a video of this?

Can I watch this? Yeah, I think so. I need to see this. I'll look it up. Wait. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that would be the best way to teach people things, to make some sort of interactive environment,

especially virtual, where you could go there and experience it and i mean i don't know if you've messed around with any of the htc vive things oh is this here so yeah this is like a tour of the full screen with this whoa this is this is part of the game but this is not the actual game This is like a mode they did to teach kids because they had all of this Technology available so they said you know what just get a narrator add some audio clips Make it a mode And they even have it the way it was originally built the Great Pyramid with the limestone still attached for the most part This is a 20 minute video so this is like this is real deep detail man wow this is like the best graham hancock you know

explanation you could get but you're the guy there and you're in a third person position you probably could go first person too i'm sure wow this is just this particular part they're going to keep doing this this Assassin's Creed has gone through all sorts of different modes of history through the Renaissance Rome, Spain all sorts of different areas

and now that they've turned this on it's going to ramp up probably well that to me seems like a really good idea in terms of getting kids excited about learning things. Have it in some sort of an interactive game. Yeah.

Just gamify every topic. Yeah, everything. In a really high-quality way. Yeah. that we use is several steps behind the state of the art in Hollywood special effects or documentaries or this kind of game. So students are kind of disappointed when they come to class. Right.

And it's like, college is really expensive and it's really retrograde in terms of the tech quality. So why? Why are we here? We should be on the forefront, right? It should be possible to go to your state university and see awesome, gamified, interactive stuff that you don't have access to at home.

But everything is changing so fast. In order for the curriculum to keep up with modern technology, it would have to revamp every year. Well, I mean, a lot of the content we teach is pretty old, actually. Like the key ideas in evolutionary biology, many of them go back 50 or 100 years. Key ideas in animal behavior or paleontology or anthropology, it's not like those get updated that fast.

It's just the way you can present them technically. We're not competitive. And that's embarrassing. Is there a way to change that? That seems almost insurmountable without a complete overhaul of the system. I think you need a totally different kind of university and credential that's backed by a significant amount of capital and that's technologically innovative

and that's very un-PC in terms of what it teaches and how it teaches. Do you think that's possible that would come along and compete with the standard? Yes. Yeah. I think it's inevitable that that'll happen. And that that's probably going to be what bankrupts. And I think it's going to eat our lunch. Yeah. How do you feel about that though as a person who makes their living do i mean also you write books and i'd be happy to jump ship and go do that would you oh yeah good for you if i could like teach hundreds of thousands or millions of people rather than right 200 at a time well that's essentially what jordan peterson is doing yeah exactly but he's not doing it through a

virtual thing he's doing it through video lectures and then physical lectures. It's really fascinating to see the reaction to him and now to Sam Harris is doing this as well. And not the videos, but he's definitely doing the, the live sort of performances. And no, who would have ever thought that there would be a place where public intellectuals would go and 5,000 people would sell out like that and go to see them like they would go to see fucking Kevin Hart or something. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, you know, when Alfred Kinsey first started doing his sex surveys and he would go around the country giving lectures, like he filled up a 4,000 person stadium in UC Berkeley, just presenting the first real data on human sexuality back in late forties, I think. And so there was, why? Because

there's a real hunger for that because it was something that students couldn't get anywhere else. And the same was true back in the 1800s when you had famous authors touring America, And the same was true back in the 1800s when you had famous authors touring America, like Mark Twain or... Many people think he's the founder of stand-up comedy. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And they would use humor, like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, you. And they would speak in the register of the people, not pretentious academic jargon.

Sam is surprisingly funny. I was told that we had dinner recently and we're talking and I said, dude, you're really funny. Like those little side notes and asides you throw out, little funny quips. Like this is like stand-up comedy type stuff. When someone will say something like, even with you, you guys were talking about polyamory. And he threw some sort of a joke like, how's that working out?

No, it's a very dry humor, which I love. He's a funny guy. But that makes it more palatable. Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. You know, this fascinating technology in terms of video games is going to help you absorb information about ancient Egypt. And humor is going to help just make the time go by better and make the whole experience less flat. Yeah.

So I think that's the future, and I think within 10 years, a lot of young people are just going to realize, if I can actually learn more from some alternative system, some franchise of really good gamified instruction, plus great presenters who have a sense of humor and are smart and kind of like heterodox and edgy, they're going to flock to that. The main thing is that business, that franchise would have to provide a credential that actually separates them from people who don't have it and that predicts performance in companies or in the future, right? Because that's the main function of the university right now

is it's this credential signaling system. And if somebody figures out a way to make it so that, like, if you've got a degree from this whatever sam harris university that that is really a better predictor of doing well in a job or a marriage right than a yale degree then suddenly the whole business model changes for universities well what's really fascinating when you think about the history of education is that our ideas about these gigantic institutions, whether it's Yale or Harvard, is that they've been long established and long proven and, but no, I mean, a few hundred years in terms of people being alive, that ain't shit. You know, you go back before that, you're just really, you only have a certain amount of

years where these things were even a real thing. Yeah. And I mean, the idea that only have a certain amount of years where these things were even a real thing. Yeah. And I mean, the idea that you have a teaching institution that's also a major research institution really only goes back to post-World War II. Like before World War II, Harvard was basically an elite finishing school. It wasn't a research power. So that whole system that we think of as being ancient is actually just less than a hundred several decades yeah wow yeah um i think you're probably right i think the new thing is gonna eat the lunch yeah well it's it's almost like they're setting themselves up i mean with some of the more ridiculous and preposterous protests that go on, where they're, they are just trying to silence discussion. And even with people

like Christina Hoff Summers, who's very reasonable and calls herself a factual feminist, and they want to call her a Nazi. It's like, there's no, there's no wiggle room. You are a one or a zero. You are black or white. You are evil or good. And that's it. And this inclination towards silencing people, deplatforming, screaming them down, halting them and getting them out. And who decides? Who decides who's correct and wrong? Well, the only way for people to get an accurate assessment of who's giving the right information is to have a debate, but to have a real debate, like a real debate where people are allowed to express themselves without people in the audience shaking jars of coins and bullhorns and all the nonsense

and setting off fire alarms and all these things that these children, and I call them children because they're behaving like children, are celebrating. You know, I'm sure you're aware of what happened at Evergreen. And now Evergreen State University, where Brett Weinstein had, you know, his horrible experience with, if you don't know the story, I'll give you the brief synopsis. They had a day of absence where it used to be that people of color would stay home so that you would miss them. And then they decided to turn around and make white people stay home. Make force them if you didn't do it you're a racist he said that's crazy like you guys are being racist and they shouted him down and they shut the school down and he won a half a million dollars in a lawsuit uh and now the school's most recent enrollment from

the freshman class was only 300 people, which is crazy. Yeah. It's dying on the line. The parents notice, the students notice, and universities are so complacent. They think, oh, we can do any amount of this and the customers will still come. And they're wrong. As soon as there's a viable alternative where somebody can get a credential that means something and it's cheaper and better and they learn more and it's more engaging that whole it

universities acting stupid about that and and you know denying free speech and denying real debate that's the existential threat to them that's what's gonna blindside them that's what's threat to them. That's what's going to blindside them. That's what's going to kill their tuition. It's stunning how little resistance there is to it. Yeah. That everyone knows that the only way to find out whose ideas are more well thought out, more valid, more factual, the only way to find that out is to have people discuss things together and for you to be able to make an assessment based on the facts, do it in real time, and based on who forms

a more compelling argument, who's more reasonable, who's addressing all the flaws and the problems with both sides of this and coming up with a reasonable conclusion. The only way to do that is discourse. We all know that. We've known that forever. But somehow or another, in higher universities, in higher education centers, this is where they're shutting this stuff down. And they want to, whether it's Ben Shapiro speaking or whoever it is that's speaking, they want to scream at them. They want to yell. They want to, you know, whether it's Ben Shapiro speaking or whoever it is that's speaking, they want to scream at them. They want to yell. They want to break windows.

They want to, you know, call them racists or whatever they want to call them. Stunning. I mean, the way I think of it is like stand-up comedy I love and, know you do and the stuff you can say when you're on stage doing stand-up comedy university should be at least that open like I should be able to lecture in a way that goes even a little bit edgier than most stand-up comedy could go politically intellectually ideologically challenge their thoughts challenge their. So universities should be like the inner sanctum of intellectual freedom compared to which everything else is more restrained. And we're kind of the opposite. Like I know a few academics who go, who actually are like amateur stand-up comedians. And it's so liberating to them to be able to get up on a stage and say what they really think.

Do they have to use fake names? Some of them? No. But they're kind of protected by like the social norms of comedy. Right. Like, you know, you're not supposed to really take it very seriously. But we're so far from that. And, you know, in physics, it doesn't matter that much

because it's not like there's any aspects of quantum mechanics that are that intellectually edgy. But, man, in psychology and the social sciences and behavioral sciences and political science, it's really important to be able to be provocative and authentic. And we can't in America at the moment. and we can't in America at the moment. Well, which is really what's going to set up whatever's coming next. It's going to offer some sort of a new pathway, new avenue that's not restricted. Much like what you're seeing with podcasts and blogs in comparison to, or YouTube videos in comparison to what you're getting on regular network television.

I mean it was network television and then cable was the more edgy alternative. And then there was pay cable like HBO. Like, oh, my God, I saw Breast. And then that got nuttier and nuttier. But then it became Netflix, which is a total another level. And then the internet is the Wild West. And they want you to go back to nbc in the 1970s and you're like uh no i'm not gonna do it not not gonna pretend but universities seem to be

stuck yeah i think universities are like nbc circa 1975 right where they're like, oh, this cable stuff, that's not really going to matter. And then, oh, this internet. But the Netflix of education is coming. And it's going to be incredibly disruptive. And I hope that the academic friends and colleagues I have who are good and open-minded

are ready to jump ship. Because ultimately they're educators. Whatever form it is, what their career is, is they're an educator. Just like Kyle Dunnigan is a comedian. He takes on a new form with this new technology and he becomes a comedian using face-swapping technology. These educators are going to recognize that the landscape has changed and there's got to be some sort of a new way of distributing information. Yeah, good academics are like just ordinary humans with their curiosity turned up to 11

and who have a passion for discovering new ideas and then sharing them with people. And we don't really care how we do that. Discovering new ideas and then sharing them with people. And we don't really care how we do that. We will do it through lectures or writing books or writing articles or podcasts, whatever. Whatever works the best. Have you thought about starting a podcast? Well, you know, I did a podcast with Tucker Max a couple years ago, The Mating Grounds, where it was sort of related to our mate book that was dating advice for young single guys.

What was the advice? It wasn't really, well, it was figure out what women authentically actually want and then try to transform yourself in that direction so you're a better boyfriend. What do they want? Women want guys who are well-informed and know about the world and ambitious and capable. Capability is the main thing, like competency, just in as many domains as possible. They want guys who are in like reasonably good physical shape and good mental health and who can strike the right balance between being kind of nice and agreeable and kind, but also being dominant and assertive and kind of high status.

And if that's too much to ask, you become a male feminist. Just grovel. Just bend the knee. Bend the knee. Bravo. Just bend the knee. Bend the knee. So, yeah, and, you know, when I teach human sexuality, I kind of emphasize this to students, that there's a lot you can do to make yourself more attractive to whoever you want to attract. It's not all limited by what traits you're born with. Well, what's fascinating is the difference in what a man is attracted to versus what a woman

is attracted to. And this is something that we just don't like to admit. Yeah. That there's a great deal of difference when it comes to heterosexuals at least. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of difference when it comes to short-term mating, like what men want if it's a one-night stand versus what women want. But if you look at long-term mating, like who people choose for marriage,

there's actually quite a bit of convergence there. Like everybody wants someone who's mentally healthy and reliable and smart and kind and would pick the kids up on time from school, et cetera. And funny. Funny is really important. pick the kids up on time from school, et cetera. Yeah. And funny.

Funny is really important. Brett Weinstein talked about the difference between a woman who is beautiful versus a woman who's hot. And what hot does is it gives you the opportunity to spread your genes with very little responsibility. So a one night stand from a girl who's hot, you don't have to mate and you don't have to like court her get her to love you show your virtue earn her respect no you just bang her in the park like that that's hot versus someone who's beautiful who you really go out of your way to maybe even be a better person so that you could attract that person. Yeah. Yeah. If you fall in love with someone, you want to be a better person for them.

But it's fascinating that there are these two choices and I never really thought about it until he brought it up, but they're essentially ways to distribute your DNA. There's pathways. One of them is through long-term bonding, and you want a stable, reliable woman who has a lot of self-respect, who chooses you, makes you feel good she chooses you, and the other one's a freak. Yeah. But the fact that all different kinds of people exist with all different mating strategies shows that each of those strategies historically

and evolutionarily has worked. Like it's been a valid strategy. Yeah. Because there wouldn't be like promiscuous men or women if that hadn't been something that worked. Sure. Right. There also wouldn't be long-term pair bonded, like, you know, family people if that hadn't worked so i think it's silly when people

are sort of dissing each other's mating strategies as if well there's one proper way and then all the other ways are sort of degenerate or reactionary or whatever well the other mating strategies produce fucked up kids i mean you know the the hot, when you're not going to see the kid, you're going to develop a mess of a child. And those are the ones they use to sell cars. Well, I mean, but each fucked up by what standards, though? Well, there's no father around, you know, the daddy issues. I think a lot of that is just a way of kind of shaming these other mating strategies. What do you mean? Well, of course,

you get a little bit of circular logic, for example, where you say this mating strategy, for example, let's say a high degree of promiscuity. You say that's bad. Why? Because it leads to offspring who in turn act promiscuous. And then you call it the cycle of abuse or daddy issues or whatever. But is that a promiscuous thing? Or is it just a longing for both a father and a mother and a loneliness and a vulnerability that seems to come with being the offspring of a single mother. Most people agree that that's not the ideal situation. But it does produce unique people, which is really interesting.

Almost all of my really cool friends came from a fucked up, broken childhood. Which I don't know what to think about that. broken childhood, which I don't know what to think about that because I want my children to be comforted and healthy and never worried about the future. But all my friends that grew up in chaotic environments where everyone was poor and fucked up and there's crime and violence and nonsense and chaos, those are the interesting ones. Their parents are drug addicts. Those are the cool ones. It's such a conundrum as a parent. Yeah. I mean, so like as a scientist, you got to look at, you know, the whole spectrum of mating and parenting behavior and go, particularly as an evolutionary psychologist, you can say, I might have a moralistic reaction to that. I might go, that's

bad. But you know what? If what we consider bad is actually the way most of the other 4,000 species of mammals do it, then who are really the weird families anyway, right? Most mammal families, the dads aren't involved. It's single moms raising offspring by themselves under harsh conditions. And they're not doing parabons, right? Hardly any mammals do parabons apart from like gibbons and a few prosimians, like really small primates. I'm just very hesitant to kind of moralize it. Right, but is it really fair or even accurate to compare ourselves to things that only live

to be like 10? I mean, we're talking about enormously complicated emotions, far more so because of communication and societal norms and comparison. There's so much more involved with being a person. It's just like if you look back historically, right? Premarital sex used to be demonized, right? And folks used to say, well, oh my God, you had one or two lovers before you settled on with your husband? That's terrible.

And you could produce statistical correlations to say, oh, look, premarital sex is correlated with being lower class or criminal or drug use or whatever. Like, that's all true. But then society moved in a direction that said premarital sex is okay. But wasn't that really because of birth control? Because once a woman had an ability to control her reproductive system and say, I can just have sex for pleasure and enjoyment. Yeah. Because before, the consequences were so grave, especially in poverty.

Like now there's another mouth to feed, and now I can't work because I have to take care of the babies. Oh. Right. Yeah. So the technology of contraception made a big difference. It used to be thought, okay, if you're, if you're gay or lesbian, that is morally degenerate and terrible and invalid and you can't possibly have a long-term relationship or a family or whatever. And then we kind of changed that pretty dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years. So I just, you know, as a sex researcher, I want people to be quite cautious about saying that lifestyle is wrong and degenerate and unhealthy and this other lifestyle is better. Because in the era of sex bots, right, and virtual reality deep fakes and whatever, who knows what's going to happen?

Well, have you read Sex at Dawn? Yeah. Did you like it? I had very mixed feelings about it. What was the negative? I don't think it's an accurate description of prehistory, prehistoric mating. I think parabons run really deep in human evolution. But I think as a sort of ethical ideal, polyamory is okay and it works for some people some of the time.

And this is something you've discussed a lot polyamory um i really only kind of came out publicly as being interested in it on the sam harris show a few months ago but i'm thinking about writing a book on it next and um it's a very popular thing. I mean, the number of people who are in open relationships or poly relationships is larger than the number of people who are gay or lesbian. Really? Oh, for sure. Yeah. What's the number of people in gay or lesbian relationships?

Number of people who are gay or lesbian at the population level is like two to five percent, depending on the surveys. And polyamorous relationships um probably 5 to 15 percent at the moment and it's even higher among you know people under 35 or so so this is a new thing it's relatively new and is this just an acceptance of the instincts that people have to be non-monogamous, the acceptance that jealousy is holding people back from experiencing different things? Yeah, I think it's only in the 90s that you got a coherent subculture that said,

if you're not going to be monogamous, here's the honest, ethical, open way to do it. and it kind of developed a bunch of social norms about how you manage these relationships in a way that's different from cheating or different from swingers or different from prostitutes hippie love communes or or prostitutes and i mean this is a longer discussion than we have time for probably today. But as a researcher, it's a fascinating culture because it's people who are trying to find ways to kind of hack their jealousy and manage it better. And it's also a new method of social networking, right? Where you're not drawing a sharp line between who you're sexually connected to

and who you're socially connected to. So people who are into poly tend to have sort of sexual friendship professional networks that are much broader than a lot of people tend to have. And I think that's actually a little bit more similar to what Christopher Ryan was talking about with sex at dawn mmm like I think in most prehistoric tribes anybody who wasn't a close relative who was sort of mating age you you probably would have had sex with sooner or later, at least once, even if you both had a sort of stable pair bond.

And this is probably an incredibly controversial subject at the academic level. Well, when I taught my course on polyamory and open sexuality last year, it got a little bit of controversy you say that with smile in in the department um well there was concern about what happens if you know you get complaints from legislators yeah there it goes again funding yeah money but um there's a lot of cool research on it there's a lot of interesting psychological issues that plus if you're a student it's probably a good way to find the freaks it was they were wonderful wonderful freaks i mean there's yeah nothing wrong being a freak great students and open-minded.

And, you know, we talked about the pros and the cons. It's like this stuff is really hard to do for this and this and this reason. And people really only succeed at it if they have certain kinds of traits and abilities and communication skills. And if they don't, they crash and burn and it doesn't work. So it wasn't just an advocacy class. It was also like, here's the pros and cons, but also as a social trend, this is a big deal. And if you're going into one of the caring professions like medicine, nursing, social work, clinical psych, you damn well better know about this because a lot of people do it. And if you're giving advice to a couple and they're in an open relationship and you don't even understand what that means or how it works, you're going to give bad advice.

And that's, to me, kind of professional malpractice. going to give bad advice and that's to me kind of professional malpractice it's also sort of in some ways an ongoing experiment in terms of how you know how people bond with each other how people form communities yeah and this is in particular with in today's climate, in today's society, with the ability to distribute this information and discuss these things in groups. It's a different world in terms of just collecting data and comparing experiences. Yeah, it's a work in progress. in progress. I mean, I think nobody who's polyamorous or in an open relationship can pretend that, yeah, we really know how to make this work very well. And here's the best practices and here's the, all the, the hacks and, and anybody can do it. No, we're absolutely not at that point. It's also brave to talk about because it immediately puts you into this potential pervert place.

Yeah. Like, you know, you talk about sex with more than one person. What are you doing? What are you doing, Jeffrey? Yeah. What are you doing? I know. You're wrecking your reputation.

What are you doing? You have to have sex? I know it's super stigmatized. Yeah. But like compared to what? Compared to being an evolutionary psychologist in the first place who does intelligence research? Or compared to teaching human sexuality? Or compared to doing –

Just as a human in civilization. To doing a book with Tucker Max. I mean it's all – That's tricky. Right. Yeah. But I think we have a professional responsibility, you know, if you're a behavioral scientist, to understand what are people doing out

there, what is working and what isn't, and how do you make it work better? And the people who ignore it, I think it's kind of like if you were like a psychologist in the early 70s, right, when the gay and lesbian rights movement was starting, if you'd sort of said, oh, God, I hope that'll blow over. Like that, that doesn't deserve research. We, we, we should keep it as a mental disorder. And you know, the DSM, right? I feel like poly is sort of at the same place where, yeah, there are reactionaries who go, that's just gross and disgusting, just like people in the early 70s would have said homosexuality is gross and disgusting.

Well, it's still, it's brave to discuss right now. I mean, it may very well be like, you know, when you're talking about the gay and lesbian revolution of the 1970s, it may be 40 years from now, it's very well be like, you know, when you're talking about the gay and lesbian revolution of the 1970s. It may be 40 years from now. It's just like that. Yeah. Like, oh, they're this. This is that.

Normal. No, who cares? But in today's day and age, it's tread carefully, right? Well, somebody's got to research it and talk about it. Yeah. And I think people should read Sex and Dawn by Christopher Ryan, but that shouldn't be the final word about human evolution and polyamory. What's another good book on it? I mean, The Ethical Slut is a good kind of –

That sounds like a restaurant. I mean, it's kind of the polybible. Is it really, The Ethical Slut? I love it. Who wrote that? Dossie Eaton, I think. I can't remember. She's got a co-author.

The Ethical Slut? What a great name. I know it's a polybible for 20 years. I hope everybody buys that book just to have it on your shelf. I hope that book sells a billion copies. It's done pretty well, I think. There it is. The Ethical Slut.

Yeah. Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. What a great name for a book. I'm sad that I never came up with that. It's a good title. I'm sad that I never came up with that. It's a good title. But I don't think there's a good book yet that's actually savvy about evolutionary psychology and human sexuality and polyamory and how it's all going to play out in the next 10 years or so.

And this is why you're contemplating writing it yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope you do, man. Thanks. And thanks for coming here. It's a lot of fun. It's been a pleasure.

We talked for three hours. Can you believe that? Oh my God. Yeah, we did. Time warp in this room. Time flew. Thank you, Jeffrey. Really appreciate it.

You're welcome. Tell people how to find you on Twitter. I'm PrimalPolly, P-R-I-M-A-L-P-O-L-Y. And website? Jeffrey Miller and primalpoly.com. Okay. Thank you, sir. Thanks. Thanks.

Thanks. Thanks.